Songhai Empire: A Visual History

The Songhai Empire grew from the city of Gao on the Niger bend. Sunni Ali (1464-1492) conquered Timbuktu and Djenne with a fleet of war canoes and a ruthless cavalry, and Askia Muhammad (1493-1528) extended it from Senegal to the Hausa states, made the pilgrimage to Mecca and organised a centralised Muslim state with Timbuktu's scholars at its heart. It surpassed Mali as the greatest power of the Sahel. Succession wars weakened it, and in 1591 a Moroccan force with arquebuses crossed the Sahara and destroyed the Songhai army at Tondibi.

When it existed: the era ribbon

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Songhai territory

Timeline of the Songhai Empire

1. 1464
   Sunni Ali becomes king
2. 1468
   Timbuktu taken
3. 1473
   Djenne falls
4. 1493
   Askia Muhammad seizes power
5. 1496
   Askia's pilgrimage
6. 1528
   Askia Muhammad deposed
7. 1591
   TondibiMoroccan conquest.

Sunni Ali

Gao had been a trading kingdom since the ninth century and a Mali vassal. Sunni Ali Ber threw off Mali, took Timbuktu from the Tuareg in 1468 (killing scholars who had collaborated) and Djenne after a seven-year siege. He built the empire around control of the Niger, with a fleet of 400 boats and a professional army, and was remembered by the Timbuktu chroniclers as a tyrant and magician.

Askia Muhammad

Muhammad Ture, a general, deposed Sunni Ali's son in 1493 and founded the Askia dynasty. He divided the empire into provinces with governors, standardised weights and measures, made a lavish pilgrimage in 1496-1497 and was named caliph of the Sudan by the Sharif of Mecca. He conquered the Mossi, Hausa and Tuareg borderlands and made Timbuktu's Sankore mosque and madrasas a magnet for scholars like Ahmad Baba. Leo Africanus described the wealth of Gao and Timbuktu.

Tondibi

Askia Muhammad was deposed by his son in 1528 and the dynasty fought itself for decades. The Saadi sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, coveted the salt mines of Taghaza and the gold trade; in 1590 he sent 4,000 men under the Spanish renegade Judar Pasha across the Sahara. At Tondibi in March 1591 muskets and cannon broke a Songhai army of perhaps 40,000. Timbuktu and Gao were occupied and looted; Songhai resistance continued from Dendi but the empire was gone, and the trans-Saharan trade never recovered.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Mali Empire (1226 to 1670)
• Kanem-Bornu Empire (1380 to 1893)
• Oyo Empire (1300 to 1836)
• First Portuguese Empire (1415 to 1663)
• Ottoman Empire (1299 to 1922)
• Sokoto Caliphate (1804 to 1903)

8 surprising things about the Songhai Empire

1. Sunni Ali's war fleet on the Niger was the key to his conquests; Songhai was a river empire as much as a land one.
2. Askia Muhammad reportedly took 300,000 gold coins to Mecca and gave 100,000 to charity there.
3. Timbuktu under Songhai had perhaps 25,000 students, and books were the most profitable trade item.
4. The Moroccan army that crossed 2,000 km of Sahara in 1590-1591 lost about half its men on the way and still won.
5. Judar Pasha, the Moroccan commander, was a Spanish-born eunuch.
6. The scholar Ahmad Baba was deported to Marrakesh after 1591 and complained the Moroccans had stolen 1,600 of his books.
7. The Songhai gold trade helped fuel European demand that eventually sent the Portuguese round Africa by sea.
8. The Askia's Tomb in Gao, a mud pyramid, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sources

• Songhai empire Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Songhai Empire Wikipedia
• Songhai Empire World History Encyclopedia
• John O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999) Brill

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