he 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

 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 decisive tactical advantage, but the empire had been weakened beforehand by recurrent succession crises, the fragility of its provincial loyalties, and a dependence on a small number of commercial and fiscal arteries. The article also reflects on the sources on which our knowledge rests, notably the two Timbuktu chronicles, whose authors wrote from particular political and religious standpoints, and on the legacy of Songhay in the cultural memory of the Sahel and the wider world.

Keywords: Songhay; Sonni Ali; Askia Muhammad; Gao; Timbuktu; Jenne; trans-Saharan trade; Sahel; Morocco; Battle of Tondibi; Islamic scholarship

1. Introduction

In the sixteenth century a traveller moving south across the Sahara would, after weeks of sand and stone, reach the great bend of the River Niger and find there one of the largest states then existing anywhere in Africa. Its rulers, the Askias, governed from Gao, an old river port on the eastern arc of the bend. Their authority reached across the Niger valley to the walled commercial town of Jenne in the south-west, to the desert-edge city of Timbuktu in the north, and, in varying degrees of effectiveness, to salt mines, oases and tributary chiefdoms hundreds of kilometres beyond. Merchants brought gold from the forests and river valleys to the south, and carried away salt, cloth, copper and horses. Scholars in Timbuktu copied and debated texts of Maliki law, grammar and theology. The empire's cavalry and its fleet of river canoes were respected from the Mossi plateau to the Hausa towns.

Within the space of a single lifetime the picture changed. In March 1591 an army of roughly four thousand men sent across the Sahara by the sultan of Morocco defeated a Songhay host many times its size at Tondibi, a short distance north of Gao. The empire never recovered. Its capital was sacked, its leading scholars were arrested and deported, and its provinces fragmented into smaller states and rival camps. By the early seventeenth century what had been the Songhay Empire had become a patchwork: a Moroccan-founded garrison state in the river towns, a Songhay remnant in the south-east, and a reassertion of Tuareg, Fulani and Bambara power in the surrounding country.

The story of Songhay's rise and fall has long fascinated historians for several reasons. It is a case study in how a river-based polity of modest origins can build an empire through a combination of military innovation, administrative skill and the exploitation of long-distance trade. It illustrates the interplay between indigenous religious traditions and the Islam of literate scholars, and the uses to which rulers put religion as an instrument of legitimacy. It is also an early example, in the history of the African interior, of the encounter between horse-and-spear warfare and gunpowder, a theme that would recur in many later conquests. Finally, because Songhay sits at the junction of the Sahara, the Mediterranean and the forest zone, it forces us to treat West Africa not as an isolated space but as part of a connected world.

This article proceeds in broadly chronological order. After a discussion of sources and historiography (Section 2), it examines the geography and earliest history of the Songhay people (Section 3) and the long period during which Gao was first an independent kingdom and then a dependency of the Empire of Mali (Section 4). Sections 5 and 6 treat the two great rulers, Sonni Ali and Askia Muhammad. Section 7 analyses the empire's government, army, economy and social order, and Section 8 its intellectual life. Sections 9 to 11 trace the decline of the sixteenth century, the Moroccan invasion and its immediate consequences. Section 12 weighs competing explanations for the fall, Section 13 discusses legacy and memory, and Section 14 concludes.

2. Sources and Historiography

Any account of Songhay rests on a relatively small body of written evidence, supplemented by archaeology, oral tradition and the testimony of outsiders. Understanding the character of these sources is essential to understanding the debates that surround the empire.

2.1 The Timbuktu chronicles

The two principal narrative sources are the Ta'rikh al-Sudan (History of the Sudan) and the Ta'rikh al-fattash (Chronicle of the Seeker). The first was composed around the middle of the seventeenth century by 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di, who was born in Timbuktu in 1594, three years after the Moroccan conquest, and who served as a scholar and official in the city under the new Moroccan-descended ruling class (Hunwick 1999; Houdas 1900). Al-Sa'di's work provides a continuous narrative from the legendary origins of the Songhay kings down to the 1650s, with the sixteenth century treated in greatest detail. It is written in classical Arabic, in a tradition of Islamic chronicle writing that favours the deeds of rulers, the careers of scholars and the moral lessons that can be drawn from them.

The Ta'rikh al-fattash has a more complicated history. For many decades it was attributed to Mahmud Kati, a Timbuktu scholar born in the later fifteenth century who lived through the reign of Askia Muhammad. The French editors Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse published it in 1913 on that assumption (Houdas and Delafosse 1913). Subsequent research, above all by Nehemia Levtzion and John Hunwick, has shown that the text as we have it was substantially compiled or revised in the later seventeenth century by a member of a Kati-related family, using earlier notes but also adding interpolations that reflect the political concerns of the later period (Levtzion 1971; Hunwick 1999). This does not render it useless, but it means that its claims, for instance about the religious status of Askia Muhammad, must be read as arguments as well as reports.

Both chronicles share a perspective. Their authors were literate Muslim scholars from Timbuktu who regarded Islamic learning and Islamic rule as the measure of civilisation. They looked back on the Askia dynasty with admiration and on its predecessor, the Sonni dynasty, with considerable ambivalence. It follows that the image of Sonni Ali as an oppressor of scholars and a half-pagan sorcerer, familiar in textbooks, is in significant part the product of the point of view of the chroniclers rather than a neutral description.

2.2 Other written, archaeological and oral evidence

Arabic geographers and travellers supply earlier and complementary information. The eleventh-century Andalusian geographer al-Bakri describes a town called Kawkaw, generally identified with Gao, with a Muslim ruler and a dual urban structure, while Ibn Battuta, who travelled in the Mali Empire in the 1350s, mentions Gao as a significant commercial town (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981). For the sixteenth century the single most vivid outside witness is al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, known in Europe as Leo Africanus, a Granada-born Moroccan who visited the region around 1510 and again a few years later, and who later composed a famous description of Africa in Italy (Leo Africanus 1896). His comments on the wealth of the court, the book trade of Timbuktu and the prosperity of the merchants are among the best-known passages in the literature, though they too must be read with an awareness of his purposes and his limited stay.

Archaeology has transformed our understanding of the region's deeper past. Excavations at Gao and at the royal cemetery of Gao-Saney have shown that the town was already a significant settlement in the first millennium and that it had Muslim residents and imported goods by the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Insoll 1996, 2003). Work in the inland delta of the Niger by Susan and Roderick McIntosh has revealed the early urban tradition of Jenne-jeno and the long history of settled life on which the later empire drew (McIntosh 1998). Epigraphic studies of the tombstones of Gao-Saney, many of them carved in Spain and shipped across the Sahara, have given historians a rare view of eleventh- and twelfth-century elites (Moraes Farias 2003).

Finally, oral traditions among the Songhay and Zarma, collected most systematically by the French ethnologist Jean Rouch and later by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, preserve a different memory of the past. In them Sonni Ali often appears as a heroic and spiritually powerful figure rather than a villain (Rouch 1953; Olivier de Sardan 1984). The contrast between oral memory and written chronicle is one of the most productive tensions in Songhay studies.

2.3 Changing interpretations

Older European scholarship, such as E. W. Bovill's popular The Golden Trade of the Moors, tended to treat Songhay as an episode in a story of Islamic civilisation filtering southward from North Africa (Bovill 1958). The decolonising generation of historians, including Sékéné Mody Cissoko and others writing in the General History of Africa, emphasised instead the indigenous roots of the state and the agency of its rulers (Cissoko 1975, 1984). More recent work has become more critical of the sources, more attentive to the regional diversity of the empire, and more interested in themes such as slavery, race and the relationship between religion and political power (Hunwick 1996; Lovejoy 2012; Hall 2011; Gomez 2018). That is the tradition within which the present article stands.

3. The River, the Land and the People: Origins of Songhay

3.1 The environment of the Niger Bend

The history of Songhay is inseparable from the River Niger. Rising in the highlands near the Atlantic, the Niger flows north-east into the Sahel, where it spreads into a vast inland delta before curving eastward past Timbuktu and Gao and then turning south-east towards what is now Niger and Nigeria. This Niger Bend is a zone of striking ecological contrasts. To the north lies the Sahara, whose caravan routes converged on the river's northern edge. To the south lie savanna and cultivable land where millet, sorghum and rice could be grown. In the middle is the river itself: a highway for boats, a source of fish, and a seasonal floodplain whose annual rise and fall allowed intensive cultivation.

This setting shaped the political economy of the peoples who lived there. Whoever controlled the river could move soldiers and goods rapidly and tax the movement of others. Whoever controlled the points at which the river met the desert, such as Gao, Timbuktu and the markets of the delta, could profit from the exchange of Saharan salt and Mediterranean goods for the gold, kola, grain and captives of the south.

3.2 The Songhay people

The Songhay speak a language that linguists regard as the principal member of a distinct family, whose broader affiliations remain debated. Their society, as described in the ethnographic literature, incorporated several occupational and ritual groups. The sorko were fishers and boatmen who commanded the river and whose ritual specialists were associated with the spirits of the water. The gow were hunters. Alongside them were farmers and, in later periods, a stratum of warrior aristocrats and enslaved dependants (Rouch 1953; Olivier de Sardan 1984). The river specialists were especially important in military terms: the capacity to build and man large numbers of boats gave the Songhay rulers a mobility that their land-bound rivals could not easily match.

Religious life before and alongside Islam was centred on spirits associated with the river, with ancestors and with natural forces, mediated by priests and spirit mediums. These traditions did not disappear when Islam spread among the elite and the towns. On the contrary, throughout the period discussed in this article, ancestral religion and Islam co-existed, intermingled and sometimes competed, and the relationship between them was one of the central political issues of the empire.

3.3 Gao and the first kings

According to al-Sa'di, the earliest rulers of the Songhay were a dynasty called the Za, whose seat was at Kukiya, downriver from Gao, and whose first king came, in legend, from the Yemeni east. The fourteenth or fifteenth of these rulers, Za Kosoi, is said to have embraced Islam around the year 1009–1010 (Hunwick 1999). The legendary details need not be taken literally, but the broad claim that Islam was present at the Songhay court by the early eleventh century is consistent with al-Bakri's description and with the archaeological evidence at Gao-Saney (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981; Insoll 1996).

Gao in these centuries was a trading town of increasing importance. It lay at the end of one of the main routes across the central Sahara and at a place where goods could be transferred from camel to canoe. Its rulers drew revenue from commerce and probably from tribute collected from neighbouring communities. Islam in this period was largely the religion of merchants, court officials and some of the ruling family, while the great majority of the population followed older practices. This pattern, an Islamic crown and commercial class set within a largely non-Muslim agrarian society, would persist and would eventually frame the controversies of the Askia period.

4. Between Mali and Independence (c. 1300–1464)

4.1 Gao within the Empire of Mali

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries belonged to the Empire of Mali, the Mande-led state whose most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, made his celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324–1325. According to al-Sa'di, Gao came under Malian authority in the early fourteenth century, when a general of Mansa Musa took the city (Hunwick 1999; Levtzion 1973). The Songhay rulers were not extinguished, but they were reduced to the status of vassals, and members of the royal family were held at the Malian court as hostages.

This episode is crucial to the later story. Sa'di recounts that two brothers of the Songhay royal line, Ali Kolon and Sulayman Nar, escaped from the Malian court and returned to Songhay, where they founded what the chronicles call the Sonni dynasty, perhaps in the 1330s (Hunwick 1999). The details of the story may be embroidered, but its function is clear. It explains the origin of a ruling house whose identity was defined in opposition to Mali, and it dates the beginning of Songhay's emergence as a power in its own right.

4.2 The weakening of Mali

After the death of Mansa Sulayman in 1360, Mali was shaken by disputed successions, provincial revolts and external pressure. The Tuareg of the desert edge, long a force in the region, seized Timbuktu in the 1430s, and further north the oasis of Walata passed under shifting control. The Mossi kingdoms of the southern savanna raided the Niger valley, and Mali's own heartland on the upper Niger was increasingly distracted by rivals. The vacuum thus created offered opportunities to ambitious neighbours.

The Sonni rulers of Gao exploited those opportunities in a patient and opportunistic way. By the middle of the fifteenth century Songhay had become effectively independent, with an army and a river fleet capable of campaigning along the Niger and into the surrounding country. The final surge came with the accession of Sonni Ali, in about 1464, a ruler who would transform a regional kingdom into an empire.

5. Sonni Ali: Warrior-King and Empire-Builder (1464–1492)

5.1 The seizure of Timbuktu and Jenne

Sonni Ali, often called Ali Ber ("Ali the Great"), is among the most striking figures in West African history. The chronicles portray him as a ruler of extraordinary energy who spent most of his reign in the field, campaigning against the Tuareg, Fulani, Mossi and Dogon and against the remnants of Malian power. His principal achievements were military and logistical. He built up a cavalry arm, but more significantly he exploited the Niger itself, deploying large flotillas of boats to move troops and to surround or blockade river towns.

In 1468 Sonni Ali captured Timbuktu from the Tuareg, who had controlled the city for about three decades. The chronicles describe the event in dark terms: the Tuareg governor fled, and Sonni Ali's soldiers are said to have plundered the city and killed or driven out many of the scholars and notables, particularly those associated with the Sankore district whom he suspected of collaborating with the Tuareg (Hunwick 1999; Saad 1983). We should treat these accounts cautiously. The scholars of Timbuktu were the ancestors of the chroniclers' own families, and the memory of persecution may have been both real and politically convenient. What is clear is that Sonni Ali's relationship with the Muslim clerical elite of Timbuktu was strained and that many scholars withdrew from the city for a time.

The conquest of Jenne, the great market town on the inland delta, took longer. According to tradition the town resisted a siege of seven years, though that figure has a ritual ring and may be an exaggeration; the city fell in the early 1470s (Hunwick 1999). Jenne was of the highest value. It stood at the junction between the gold-bearing regions of the south and the caravan routes to the north, and its markets supplied Timbuktu with grain and goods. By holding both Timbuktu and Jenne, with the river joining them, Sonni Ali controlled the two principal nodes of the western Sudanese economy.

5.2 Warfare and statecraft

Beyond the two great cities Sonni Ali campaigned continuously. He pushed Songhay authority north towards Walata, repelled the Mossi who had raided the river towns, attacked the Dogon on the cliffs of Bandiagara, and fought the Fulani of the south-east. He did not attempt to impose a uniform administration on all these regions. Rather, he relied on a combination of garrisons, loyal governors, tribute demands and punitive expeditions. Historians have described the resulting structure as an empire in the sense of a multi-layered system of domination rather than a seamless territorial state (Gomez 2018).

Sonni Ali also organised the economic basis of his power. The chronicles credit him with establishing estates worked by enslaved people, which supplied grain to the army and the court, and with controlling the river trade by means of his fleet. Historians of slavery have noted that these arrangements anticipated what the Askias would later systematise, and that the use of enslaved labour on royal estates was an important feature of Songhay's political economy (Lovejoy 2012).

5.3 Religion and reputation

The portrait of Sonni Ali in the chronicles is dominated by his religious ambiguity. He is said to have publicly professed Islam, to have taken part in some Muslim observances, and yet to have continued to consult diviners, make sacrifices and rely on the spiritual specialists of the river. For the Timbuktu authors, who equated proper rule with strict observance of Islamic law, this was damning. Modern scholars read the evidence differently. Some have argued that Sonni Ali pursued a deliberate policy of balance, recognising that most of his subjects were not committed Muslims and that the clerical elite of Timbuktu could be a threat to his authority (Hunwick 1966; Kaba 1984). Others stress that the later hostility to him was amplified by the success of the Askia dynasty, which needed to justify its seizure of the throne.

In either case, Sonni Ali's reign laid the foundations of empire. He broke the power of the Tuareg in the Niger Bend, neutralised the Mossi threat, captured the great commercial towns, and created a military machine that his successor would turn to different ends. He died in 1492 on the way back from a campaign; the circumstances are variously reported. His son, Sonni Baru, succeeded him, but his reign would be extremely short.

6. Askia Muhammad and the Islamic Turn (1493–1528)

6.1 The coup of 1493

Muhammad Ture, the founder of the Askia dynasty, was one of Sonni Ali's senior commanders. The chronicles describe him as being of Soninke origin through his father and as having a Songhay mother, and as having served in the army of the old king before emerging as the leader of a movement against his son (Hunwick 1999). On 12 April 1493, at the battle of Anfao, his forces defeated those of Sonni Baru. Sonni Baru withdrew with his followers to the south-east, to the Ayorou region on the Niger, and the Sonni line was never again a serious claimant to the throne.

The title "Askia," which Muhammad adopted, has a famous etymology in the chronicles. According to one tale, Sonni Baru's sister, upon seeing Muhammad Ture seize power, exclaimed a Songhay phrase that the chroniclers rendered as an expression of denial, and this was transformed into the dynastic title (Hunwick 1999). Whatever the truth of the anecdote, the title became the label of a dynasty and, in the historiography, of an age.

Later authors presented the coup as a triumph of Islam over paganism and of learned clerics over a persecutor. This view is deeply embedded in the sources, but it should not be accepted without qualification. Lansiné Kaba has argued that the events of 1493 were a political revolution with religious language, driven by a coalition of the Muslim elite, ambitious military commanders and aggrieved provincial groups, and that the religious dimension, though real, was only one of several (Kaba 1984). Hunwick likewise emphasised that Sonni Ali's own Islamic profession should not be dismissed (Hunwick 1966, 1996).

6.2 The pilgrimage and the quest for legitimacy

A usurper needs legitimacy, and Askia Muhammad sought it in the most prestigious way open to a Muslim ruler: the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1496–1497 he travelled to the Hijaz with a large retinue, accompanied by scholars and an armed escort, and with large quantities of gold, much of which he is reported to have distributed in charity and in the foundation of an endowment or hostel for West African pilgrims (Hunwick 1999). On his journey he passed through Cairo and visited the holy cities, where, according to al-Sa'di, he was recognised by the local religious authorities and invested with the title of caliph for the lands of the Sudan.

The precise details of this investiture have been questioned by historians, and the title's practical significance was modest. But the symbolic effect was substantial. The journey connected Songhay to the Muslim heartlands in a very visible way, advertised the wealth of the new ruler, and gave him a body of scholarly contacts that he could use at home. It also confirmed that the Askias would rule as Muslim kings in a way that the Sonni rulers had not claimed.

6.3 Al-Maghili and the Replies

During the 1490s Askia Muhammad consulted the North African scholar Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Karim al-Maghili, a Maliki jurist of Tlemcen origin who had campaigned vigorously for strict Islamic practice in the oases of the Sahara and who is remembered for his hostility to Jewish communities in Tuat (Hunwick 1985b). Al-Maghili travelled in the region and, in response to the ruler's questions, composed a set of legal opinions known as the Replies (Hunwick 1985a).

These documents reveal the kind of problems that the new king wished to settle. How should a Muslim ruler deal with subjects who mixed Islam with older practices? What was the status of diviners and spirit-mediums? Which taxes were lawful? Could Muslims be enslaved? Under what conditions could war be waged against neighbouring peoples? Al-Maghili's answers were uncompromising: a ruler was bound to uphold the shari'a, to suppress practices he considered unlawful innovations, and to wage war on those who rejected Islam, and he condemned the enslavement of free Muslims while permitting the enslavement of non-Muslims in certain circumstances.

How far Askia Muhammad followed this advice is another question. Hunwick has shown that the Askia's policy was in practice more pragmatic than the Replies might suggest (Hunwick 1985a, 1996). He supported the scholars, appointed qadis (judges) and patronised mosques, but he did not attempt to eradicate older religious practices from the countryside, and the mass of the population continued to follow them. In this way the Askia state combined an Islamic idiom of rule in the towns with a pragmatic tolerance elsewhere.

6.4 Conquest and consolidation

Once established, Askia Muhammad devoted decades to enlarging and securing his dominions. The chronicles record expeditions against the Mossi, whom he treated as pagans and against whom he declared a jihad, against remnants of Malian authority to the west, against the Fulani, and against the Tuareg and Berber communities of the Sahara. About 1500 his forces took Agadez and the Aïr region, a vital node in the routes linking the Niger Bend to the Hausa states and the central Sahara. In the east he extended his influence into Hausaland, where the rulers of Katsina and Kano acknowledged his suzerainty, at least nominally, for a time (Hunwick 1985c).

This eastern expansion did not last. The kingdom of Kebbi, under its energetic ruler Kanta, broke away around 1516–1517 and defeated Songhay armies, and Songhay authority in Hausaland effectively collapsed (Hunwick 1985c). This episode is a useful reminder that the empire's reach exceeded its grasp. The Askias were able to project power across great distances, but they could not impose permanent administration on every region that submitted to them, and the periphery of the empire was always liable to reassert its independence.

6.5 The end of a long reign

Askia Muhammad ruled for thirty-five years. In his old age he became blind and frail, and in 1528 he was deposed by his own son Musa, in a coup that foreshadowed later conflicts. He lived on, in confinement and then in retirement, until 1538, when he died at an advanced age and was buried in the monumental tomb at Gao that bears his name. That tomb, a pyramidal earthen structure with projecting wooden beams, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004 (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2004).

7. Governing an Empire: Administration, Army, Economy and Society

7.1 The structure of the empire

Songhay is best understood as a layered system. At its heart lay the core territories along the Niger between Gao and Timbuktu, ruled directly from the capital. Around this core were large provinces governed by senior officials, most of them close relatives or trusted servants of the Askia. Beyond them were tributary states and chiefdoms that were obliged to send gifts, goods or soldiers but which retained their own rulers. And beyond those lay zones of raiding and influence in which the Askia's authority was intermittent (Gomez 2018; Hunwick 1985c).

The most important provincial governors were the Kurmina-fari, who administered the western provinces centred on the region of Timbuktu and the river west of Gao, and the Dendi-fari, who oversaw the south-eastern provinces. Both were typically close to the royal family and, as a consequence, often figures in succession struggles. Timbuktu itself, a city of great commercial and religious importance, had its own governor, the Timbuktu-koy, and its own senior judge and notables, who enjoyed a measure of autonomy (Saad 1983).

7.2 Offices of state

Askia Muhammad is credited by the chronicles with creating or strengthening a series of central offices. Their titles were Songhay, and their precise translations vary across the literature, but their functions are reasonably clear. The balama was a senior military commander, the principal general of the army. The hi-koy commanded the river fleet. The fari-mondyo oversaw the agricultural estates, while the wanei-farma administered royal property, and other officials looked after fisheries and waterways, the treasury, the affairs of foreign merchants and the royal household (Hunwick 1999; Cissoko 1984). Alongside these were Muslim officials: qadis, the market inspector, and the scholars who served as advisers and scribes.

Al-Sa'di also reports that Askia Muhammad standardised weights and measures and appointed inspectors to oversee the markets of the major towns (Hunwick 1999). This is consistent with the picture of an administration that treated commerce as a source of revenue and as an object of regulation, in a way that resembled contemporary Islamic states elsewhere. It would be wrong, however, to imagine a bureaucracy on the scale of a modern state. Writing was used by a small circle, and much of the work of government was conducted through personal relationships, oral instruction and the movement of the court.

7.3 The army and the river fleet

Songhay's military power rested on three elements. The first was cavalry, composed of horsemen drawn from the aristocracy and from vassal groups. Horses were expensive and had to be imported or bred in the drier zones, and the cavalry gave the empire a decisive advantage in the open country of the Sahel. The second was infantry, made up of foot soldiers armed with spears, bows and shields, who were often levied from subject communities and from the enslaved. The third was the fleet. The sorko boatmen and the hi-koy who commanded them could move forces swiftly along the river and block the enemy's use of it, which gave the empire strategic mobility that its neighbours lacked.

The army was effective against its traditional enemies, but it had limits. It was an organisation of horsemen and spearmen, and it depended on the loyalty of provincial commanders who could, in a crisis, become rivals. Firearms played only a marginal role. This fact would prove fateful in 1591.

7.4 Trade and the economy

Songhay was a commercial empire. Its prosperity rested on its position at the southern termini of the trans-Saharan routes. From the north came salt, the most valuable bulk commodity of the region, mined at Taghaza in the Sahara and carried by camel; copper from mines near Takedda; textiles; horses; and manufactured goods. From the south came gold, which was mined in regions such as Bambuk and Bure and, later, in the forest zone to the south-east, as well as kola nuts, grain and enslaved people (Austen 2010; Levtzion 1973). The Songhay did not control the goldfields, which lay outside the empire. Their wealth came from controlling the markets, the routes and the movement of goods through them, and from taxing and tolling these exchanges.

Leo Africanus, writing of Timbuktu, described a city where merchants and artisans prospered, where the king maintained a rich treasure of gold, and where the book trade was among the most profitable of its commerce (Leo Africanus 1896). His account, like most travellers' reports, is impressionistic, but it matches the picture given by the chronicles of a thriving commercial society.

Agriculture was the foundation of the food supply. Millet, sorghum, rice and other crops were grown along the river, and the floodplain was well adapted to intensive cultivation. The Askia state encouraged the creation of royal agricultural settlements, called hanga in some sources, which were worked by enslaved people and which supplied the court, the army and the officials (Lovejoy 2012). The empire thus combined a commercial economy with an agricultural one based on coerced labour.

7.5 Slavery, race and social hierarchy

Slavery was integral to Songhay society and to the trade that supported it. Captives were taken in wars and raids, particularly against non-Muslim peoples to the south, and were sold within the empire or exported across the Sahara. Enslaved persons worked on the royal estates, served in the army, laboured in households and, in some cases, rose to positions of trust (Lovejoy 2012; Hall 2011). The legal framework drew on Islamic law, which permitted the enslavement of non-Muslims but in theory prohibited the enslavement of free Muslims, though in practice the line between the categories was often disputed. Songhay's most famous scholar, Ahmad Baba, would later write a treatise on the subject, which maintained that the proper ground for enslavement was unbelief rather than race or dark skin, a position that critiqued prevailing assumptions (Hunwick 2000).

Society was also stratified by lineage, occupation and religion. At the apex stood the Askia and his family, followed by officials, military commanders, scholars and merchants. Below them were farmers, artisans and fishers, and at the bottom were the enslaved. These categories were not wholly rigid, and individuals could move between them, but they structured relations of power and obligation across the empire.

8. Timbuktu, Jenne and the Culture of Learning

8.1 The scholarly city

If Gao was the political capital of Songhay, Timbuktu was its intellectual centre. Founded as a seasonal camp by Tuareg nomads around the twelfth century, it grew into a major commercial city and then, under Mali and Songhay, into a centre of Islamic learning (Saad 1983). Its famous mosques, including the Djinguereber, whose construction is attributed to the reign of Mansa Musa, the Sankore and the Sidi Yahya, were the focal points of a scholarly community that taught law, theology, grammar, logic, astronomy and other subjects.

The word "university" is sometimes used for the scholarly system of Timbuktu, but it is misleading. There was no single institution with a fixed curriculum and formal degrees. Instead, learning was organised around individual teachers and the circles of students who gathered around them, often in private homes or in mosques, studying texts on a model common to the Islamic world. The principal legal school was the Maliki, and the foundational texts included handbooks of Maliki jurisprudence, works of Arabic grammar and rhetoric, and commentaries (Saad 1983; Hunwick and Boye 2008).

8.2 Families, books and patronage

The scholarly life of Timbuktu was dominated by a number of families, among them the Aqit, of Berber Sanhaja origin, who produced a succession of judges and teachers. Askia Muhammad cultivated these scholars, granted them gifts and stipends, and used them as advisers; his respect for them was one of the principal ways in which he distinguished his rule from that of Sonni Ali (Hunwick 1999). The judges of Timbuktu, supported by this patronage, exercised a degree of independence and, on occasion, openly criticised rulers.

Books were an essential element of this culture. Manuscripts were copied by hand, traded and carefully preserved, and private libraries were a source of status. Some books were imported from North Africa, while others were composed locally on subjects ranging from law and theology to astronomy, medicine and poetry. The persistence of manuscript collections in Timbuktu and neighbouring towns into the twenty-first century, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, though many date from later periods, testifies to this tradition (Hunwick and Boye 2008; Hammer 2016).

8.3 Ahmad Baba and the intellectual peak

The most celebrated scholar of the age was Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (1556–1627), a member of the Aqit family, who studied under leading teachers in Timbuktu and Jenne and who produced dozens of works on law, grammar, biography and ethics (Hunwick 1962). His reputation extended across the Maghrib and beyond. His fate, which we shall see in Section 11, would be bound up with the Moroccan conquest, and his career symbolises both the heights that Timbuktu's scholarly culture reached and the vulnerability of that culture to political upheaval.

8.4 Jenne and the wider network

Jenne, further up the river, was not a rival to Timbuktu but a complement. It was a city of merchants, with a distinct and impressive urban tradition, and a centre of Islamic learning in its own right. Its connections to the goldfields of the south and to the markets of the delta made it a key node in the network that supplied Timbuktu. The two cities, together with Gao, formed a triangle of commerce, administration and learning that underpinned the empire (McIntosh 1998; Saad 1983).

9. Fractures: Succession Crises and Provincial Strain (1528–1588)

9.1 A dynasty of brothers

Songhay's rulers faced a structural problem: there was no firm rule of succession. In principle the throne passed within the Askia family, but the choice among brothers, sons and nephews was often contested. In practice, the decisive factors were the support of the senior military officers, the provincial governors and the leading clerics, and the capacity to move swiftly to the capital. The result was a series of palace coups.

Askia Muhammad was deposed by his son Musa in 1528. Musa was in turn overthrown in about 1531 by his brother or cousin, Muhammad Benkan, who was himself deposed in 1537 by Isma'il, and so on. Askia Ishaq I (r. 1539–1549) was succeeded by Daud (r. 1549–1582/3), whose long reign was an interlude of relative stability, though not without internal conflicts (Hunwick 1999). The reigns of the Askias after Daud, al-Hajj II, Muhammad Bani and Ishaq II, were brief and troubled, and were characterised by civil war.

Ruler	Approximate reign	Notes
Sonni Ali	1464–1492	Builder of the empire; captured Timbuktu (1468) and Jenne (c. 1473)
Sonni Baru	1492–1493	Defeated at Anfao by Muhammad Ture
Askia Muhammad I	1493–1528	Pilgrimage 1496–97; deposed by his son
Askia Musa	1528–1531	Overthrown by a relative
Askia Muhammad II Benkan	1531–1537	Deposed
Askia Isma'il	1537–1539	Short reign
Askia Ishaq I	1539–1549	Dispute with Morocco over Taghaza begins
Askia Daud	1549–1582/3	Long and relatively stable reign
Askia al-Hajj II	1582/3–1586	Deposed
Askia Muhammad III Bani	1586–1588	Deposed in civil war
Askia Ishaq II	1588–1591	Defeated at Tondibi

 

Table 1. Principal rulers of Songhay. Dates are approximate and vary slightly between sources (after Hunwick 1999; Gomez 2018).

9.2 Why succession mattered

Each succession crisis had costs that went beyond the immediate conflict. Rival candidates drew on the support of provincial governors and military leaders, who were thus rewarded with greater autonomy. Defeated factions retreated to the provinces and became centres of opposition, or went into exile. The army's best commanders were killed or alienated. And each change of ruler provoked doubts among tributary states and subject peoples about the strength of the centre. Because the empire was held together largely by personal loyalties and the threat of force, rather than by institutions that could survive the death of a ruler, a weakening of the centre had immediate effects on the periphery.

These crises are the reason why many historians view the Songhay Empire as brittle, in spite of its impressive appearance. The reign of Askia Daud shows what was possible: he restored central authority, conducted campaigns and maintained the loyalty of the provinces. But the structural weakness remained, and when Daud died the old pattern resumed.

9.3 The civil war of the 1580s

The final decade before the Moroccan invasion was marked by deep division. After Daud's death in 1582/3 his son al-Hajj II was deposed, and the ensuing quarrels among the sons of Daud became increasingly violent. The civil war of 1588, involving the military commander known as the balama and various princes, split the nobility and left the western provinces embittered. Ishaq II, who emerged as Askia in that year, faced a country divided against itself, and some of the leading figures of the dynasty were not reconciled to his rule (Hunwick 1999; Kaba 1981). The chronicles report that factions at court sought support from outside, and that the Moroccan sultan later claimed to have received an appeal from one of Ishaq's brothers, though this claim was probably a pretext.

10. Morocco's Gambit: The Road to Tondibi

10.1 The Saadian ambition

The enemy that destroyed Songhay came from across the desert. The Saadian dynasty of Morocco, which had risen in the sixteenth century in the south of the country and had driven out the Portuguese from much of the coast, gained its greatest triumph in 1578 at the Battle of the Three Kings (Ksar el-Kebir), in which a Portuguese army was destroyed and King Sebastian was killed. The victory brought Ahmad al-Mansur to the throne and the ransoms for captured Portuguese nobles provided a large treasury. Al-Mansur was an ambitious and capable sultan with a taste for ceremony, and he adopted the epithet al-Dhahabi, "the Golden," in later tradition associated with the gold he extracted from the south (El Hamel 2013; Abitbol 1979).

His motives for turning towards the Sudan were fiscal, strategic and political. Morocco's domestic revenues, derived from taxes and from sugar production in the Sus valley, were not enough to sustain a large standing army and a lavish court. The Ottoman Empire, already established in Algiers, blocked expansion to the east. The south, by contrast, appeared to offer both gold and salt. Al-Mansur also wished to present himself as a pre-eminent Muslim sovereign, and some of his advisers and his own rhetoric claimed that the lands of the Sudan were rightfully subject to a legitimate Islamic caliph (Hunwick 1962; Kaba 1981).

10.2 The dispute over Taghaza

The immediate point of friction was Taghaza, the salt-mining centre in the desert, whose revenues the Songhay Askias had long collected. From the middle of the sixteenth century, as the Saadian sultans consolidated their authority in the south of Morocco, they began to press claims to the mines. According to al-Sa'di, when Muhammad al-Shaykh, the first Saadian sultan to press the claim, wrote to Askia Ishaq I about the matter, the Songhay ruler responded with a show of force, sending Tuareg riders to raid in the Dra' valley (Hunwick 1999). Under Daud the relationship was handled with gifts and diplomacy.

In the 1580s al-Mansur took more decisive measures. In 1583 he annexed the oases of Tuat and Gourara, extending Moroccan control deep into the desert and closer to the Niger. At the end of the decade, he sent a demand to Askia Ishaq II for a share of the revenues of Taghaza. The Askia's response was dismissive (Hunwick 1999). In 1590 al-Mansur, having consulted his officers, many of whom regarded the enterprise as dangerous, decided to send an expedition across the Sahara.

10.3 The expedition

The commander was Judar Pasha, a Spaniard by birth, born in the region of Almería and captured as a boy, who had risen through the Moroccan court to become an officer and a eunuch (Kaba 1981). The force that left Marrakesh in October 1590 is usually estimated at about four thousand men, though some accounts give somewhat different figures. It included arquebusiers, light cavalry and a small number of cannon, together with thousands of camels and horses and a large baggage train. A great many of the soldiers were renegades, converts or Andalusian Muslim exiles, trained in the use of firearms.

The march across the Sahara took roughly four months and was hazardous. Judar's men passed through the salt-mining centre of Taghaza, which was plundered and ruined in the process, and the expedition lost men and animals to thirst and exhaustion. The Songhay were aware of the approach, and counsellors reportedly urged the Askia to poison or block the wells along the route and to avoid a pitched battle. But the empire had not been prepared for an attack of this kind. The army of Ishaq II was hastily gathered and was reported to be many times larger than the invading force. The Moroccans reached the Niger at the end of February 1591 (Hunwick 1999; Kaba 1981).

11. Tondibi and the Collapse (1591–1612)

11.1 The battle

The two armies met on 12 or 13 March 1591 (the sources differ) at a place near Tondibi, about fifty kilometres north of Gao. Estimates of the size of the Songhay force vary from some twenty thousand to as many as forty thousand or more; the chronicle of al-Sa'di gives figures for both cavalry and infantry (Hunwick 1999). It was an army of horsemen and spearmen, fighting in the manner in which Songhay had won its empire. Ishaq II, reportedly hoping to use the one weapon that he could deploy against firearms, ordered a herd of cattle to be driven towards the Moroccan lines to cause disorder and conceal the advance of his troops.

The plan failed. The cattle, frightened by the noise and smoke of the Moroccan guns, turned and stampeded back into the Songhay ranks. In the confusion the Moroccan arquebusiers, firing in disciplined volleys, cut down the infantry and broke the cavalry charges. The battle is said to have lasted only a couple of hours. The Songhay army scattered. It was not the numbers that had decided the contest but the combination of firepower, discipline and shock. The Songhay had no answer to massed firearms and had not made any systematic effort to acquire them.

11.2 The occupation of the river towns

Judar Pasha advanced to Gao, which had largely been evacuated, and he found the city a disappointment. There was little treasure, and the supply situation was difficult. Askia Ishaq II offered to buy peace with gold and slaves, and to become a tributary of Morocco, but al-Mansur rejected the offer and demanded complete submission (Hunwick 1999). The Moroccans then marched on Timbuktu, which they entered in April 1591, and on Jenne, and established garrisons in the principal towns.

The conquest proved more difficult to sustain than it had been to achieve. The Moroccan force was small, far from home and unaccustomed to the climate and diseases of the Niger valley. Songhay resistance did not end with Tondibi. Ishaq II, and then his successors, rallied forces in the south-east, in the region of Dendi, and conducted a long guerrilla campaign against the invaders, aided by the river, the climate and the difficulty of supply (Kaba 1981). Ishaq II himself was killed in the Gurma region, according to al-Sa'di, by local people to whom he had turned for refuge. Judar was replaced as commander within a few years by Mahmud ibn Zarqun, who struggled to destroy the remaining Songhay forces, and the war continued, with interruptions, into the early seventeenth century. Kaba dates the effective end of organised Songhay resistance to 1612.

11.3 The fate of Timbuktu and its scholars

The Moroccan occupation was particularly severe on Timbuktu. The city's notables had initially hoped to accommodate the new rulers, and some did. But resentment grew, and in late 1593 a revolt or conspiracy in the city provided the occupiers with a pretext for a crackdown. Many of the leading scholars and merchants, among them Ahmad Baba and members of the Aqit family, were arrested, their property seized, and their libraries plundered. A large group of scholars and their dependants was then marched across the desert to Morocco (Hunwick 1962; Saad 1983). Ahmad Baba later remarked that his own library was among the smaller ones in the city, and that even so it had contained a large number of books, most of which were lost.

Ahmad Baba spent years in Marrakesh, where he taught and wrote and where he was held in high esteem by Moroccan scholars. He was allowed to return to Timbuktu only after the death of al-Mansur in 1603, probably in 1608 or 1609, and he died in 1627. The experience of the exile of Timbuktu's scholars, in Hunwick's reading, was a profound shock to the intellectual life of the city, though the tradition of scholarship did not disappear and continued, on a reduced scale, in the following centuries (Hunwick 1962; Saad 1983).

11.4 The Arma and the pashalik

The new rulers of the Niger Bend were soldiers from the Moroccan army and their descendants, known as the Arma, from the Arabic word for "those who carry the arquebus." For several decades the pasha of Timbuktu was appointed from Marrakesh, but after the death of al-Mansur Morocco itself descended into civil war and soon lost control. From about 1660 the Arma chose their own pashas, and the pashalik became an essentially autonomous military oligarchy, which married into local society, adopted local languages and ruled the river towns through a mixture of force and compromise (Abitbol 1979). The Arma continued to rule Timbuktu until the early nineteenth century, when they were displaced by the rising power of the Fulani state of Masina. Meanwhile the Tuareg, Bambara and Fulani carved out their own spheres of influence in the surrounding country, and the commercial prosperity of the earlier age was never fully regained.

Date	Event
c. 1009–1010	Za Kosoi of the Songhay is said to have embraced Islam (al-Sa'di)
c. 1325	Gao comes under the authority of Mali
1433	Tuareg seize Timbuktu
1464	Sonni Ali begins his reign
1468	Sonni Ali captures Timbuktu
c. 1473	Jenne falls to Sonni Ali
1492	Death of Sonni Ali
12 April 1493	Muhammad Ture defeats Sonni Baru at Anfao; Askia dynasty begins
1496–1497	Askia Muhammad's pilgrimage to Mecca
c. 1500	Songhay takes Agadez and Aïr
c. 1516–1517	Kebbi breaks away; Songhay authority in Hausaland collapses
1528	Askia Muhammad deposed by his son Musa
1549–1582/3	Reign of Askia Daud
1578	Battle of the Three Kings; al-Mansur becomes sultan of Morocco
1588	Civil war; Ishaq II becomes Askia
October 1590	Judar Pasha leaves Marrakesh
12/13 March 1591	Battle of Tondibi
April 1591	Moroccans enter Timbuktu
1593–1594	Scholars of Timbuktu arrested and deported to Morocco
1612	End of organised Songhay resistance (Kaba)

Table 2. Selected events in the history of Songhay. Dates are approximate where indicated (after Hunwick 1999; Kaba 1981, 1984; Gomez 2018).

12. Why Did Songhay Fall? Competing Explanations

The speed and completeness of the collapse after Tondibi has invited numerous explanations. None of them is sufficient on its own, and the best interpretations combine several.

12.1 Military technology

The most obvious explanation is technological. The Moroccans had firearms and trained men to use them; the Songhay did not. Arquebuses and light cannon could break the cavalry charges and the massed infantry on which the Songhay depended, and the stampeding cattle, the last resort of a force with no answer to guns, show how limited the options were. Firearms were not unknown in the Sudan, but they were scarce, and the Songhay lacked the means of acquiring them in quantity. In this sense Tondibi can be seen as an early episode in the "gunpowder revolution" that reshaped warfare across Eurasia, and which would later transform many African conflicts (Austen 2010; Thornton 1998).

Yet technology alone cannot explain the outcome. A small and distant army, however well armed, could not have conquered the empire if the empire had been united and secure, and the Moroccan occupation was never able to extend its authority far beyond the river towns. The firearms gave Morocco victory in battle, but they did not give it control over the country.

12.2 Political fragmentation

The second explanation, which most recent historians emphasise, is internal political weakness. Succession struggles and civil wars deprived the empire of experienced commanders, weakened the loyalty of the provinces and encouraged factions to look outside for support. At the moment of the invasion, Songhay was an empire in which important regions and leaders were estranged from the Askia. The civil war of 1588, in particular, had left the western provinces resentful and the army's leadership divided. In such conditions the defeat at Tondibi had a much more catastrophic effect than it would have had on a united state (Hunwick 1999; Kaba 1981).

12.3 Economic and commercial factors

A third line of interpretation concerns the empire's economic basis. Songhay's revenues came from the control of trade, tribute and the labour of dependants, and they were therefore vulnerable to disruption of the trading routes. There is a traditional argument that the development of Atlantic trade, following the Portuguese arrival on the Gold Coast in the 1470s, diverted the gold of the south away from the Sahara and weakened the commercial basis of the Sudanic empires. This claim has been much debated; the Sahara trade remained substantial for centuries, and the effect of Atlantic trade on the Niger Bend was gradual and uneven (Austen 2010; Thornton 1998). It is probably more accurate to say that the empire's reliance on a small number of cities and routes made it vulnerable to the effects of a shock at those points, as occurred when the Moroccans seized the towns.

It is also worth noting that the Moroccan conquest did not give al-Mansur the great wealth he had hoped for. The goldfields remained beyond his reach, the trade of the river towns declined under the pressure of occupation and war, and the shipments of gold sent to Marrakesh were smaller than the sultan had anticipated (Abitbol 1979; El Hamel 2013).

12.4 The ideological dimension

Finally, some historians have drawn attention to the ideological dimension of the conflict. Al-Mansur justified the invasion in religious terms, claiming that he was the legitimate leader of the Islamic community and that the Songhay rulers had failed to observe the law. Songhay, in turn, had built its legitimacy on a shared Islamic identity with the scholars of Timbuktu and the wider Muslim world. The fact that a Muslim kingdom was invaded by another Muslim kingdom, and that the Moroccans harshly treated the leading scholars of Timbuktu, divided opinion within the empire. Some scholars welcomed the invaders, others resisted, and many suffered (Hunwick 1962; Saad 1983).

12.5 A balanced view

Taken together, these explanations suggest that the empire fell because a series of vulnerabilities coincided: a decisive technological gap, a divided political elite, an economy dependent on a few critical points, and an opponent that was both determined and well organised. Any one of these factors might have been survivable. In combination they were fatal.

13. Legacy and Memory

13.1 The afterlife of the empire

The fall of the empire did not mean the disappearance of Songhay as a people or a culture. The Songhay language remained, and still remains, widely spoken along the Niger in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. A Songhay state continued in the Dendi region for generations after Tondibi, and communities across the region maintained their identities and their traditions (Rouch 1953; Olivier de Sardan 1984). The Arma, the descendants of the invaders, became a distinctive social group in Timbuktu and Gao. And the Islamic scholarly tradition continued to flourish, in modified form, in the towns of the Niger Bend.

13.2 Songhay in historical imagination

In the twentieth century the Songhay Empire became a symbol of African achievement. For the generation of nationalist intellectuals and historians who wrote in the era of decolonisation, it was evidence of the capacity of African peoples to build sophisticated states and cultures, and it was incorporated in school curricula and public commemorations. In the Black diaspora, it came to occupy a place in popular and scholarly accounts of the African past. These uses of Songhay have sometimes been criticised for romanticising a society that was also hierarchical, militaristic and heavily dependent on slavery. A balanced assessment must recognise both its remarkable achievements and its deep inequalities (Hall 2011; Lovejoy 2012).

13.3 Heritage in the present

The material and documentary remains of the empire have gained new significance in recent years. Timbuktu was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1988, and the Tomb of Askia in Gao in 2004. In 2012, during the occupation of northern Mali by armed groups, several of Timbuktu's historic mausoleums were destroyed, an act for which one of the perpetrators was later convicted by the International Criminal Court (International Criminal Court 2016). Thousands of manuscripts were burned in the same period, though the great majority of the city's manuscript holdings, in the hundreds of thousands, had been smuggled to safety by local librarians and families (Hammer 2016). These events show that the heritage of Songhay is not merely a matter of the past but remains contested and precious.

14. Conclusion

The Songhay Empire rose from a modest riverine kingdom in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to dominate the Niger Bend and the trade of the western Sahel. It was the achievement of two outstanding rulers: Sonni Ali, who combined military daring with an intelligent use of the river, and Askia Muhammad, who gave the empire an administrative framework and an Islamic form of legitimacy. Its prosperity rested on commerce, agriculture and the labour of enslaved people, and its capital cities became centres of learning and trade of international renown.

Yet the empire was also fragile. It lacked reliable rules of succession, relied on the loyalty of provincial commanders, and was dependent on a small number of commercial arteries. When these weaknesses coincided with the arrival of a technologically superior enemy, the empire collapsed with astonishing speed. The Moroccan victory at Tondibi was not the sole cause of the fall, but it was the occasion on which a long accumulation of internal strains was brutally exposed.

The Songhay story offers several enduring lessons. It shows that African states were deeply integrated into global networks of trade, faith and ideas long before the colonial period. It demonstrates the importance of institutions, as well as of individual rulers, in sustaining large polities. And it reminds us that historical narratives are shaped by the sources and perspectives of those who write them: the Songhay we know is the Songhay of Timbuktu's scholars, and the quest for a fuller picture, drawing on archaeology, oral tradition and the critical reading of texts, remains an unfinished task.

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