Kharara

  The Rise and Fall of the Songhay Empire of West Africa - Power, Faith, Trade and Learning on the Middle Niger, c. 1000–1612 – Dr. Rahul S. Kharat Abstract The Songhay Empire (c. 1464–1591) was the largest state in the history of West Africa's Sahel and, for roughly a century, one of the most prosperous polities in the Muslim world's southern frontier. Rising from a small riverine kingdom centred on Gao, it grew under Sonni Ali (r. 1464–1492) into a formidable military power and under Askia Muhammad (r. 1493–1528) into a bureaucratic, Islamic empire that controlled the middle Niger, the great entrepôts of Timbuktu and Jenne, and the southern termini of the trans-Saharan caravan routes. This article reconstructs the empire's origins, its expansion, its institutions and its intellectual life, and then examines its collapse after the Moroccan invasion of 1591. It argues that Songhay's fall cannot be explained by a single cause. Firearms gave the Moroccan expedition a ...