Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 7. The Songhai Empire - Africa's Age of Gold

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

Today, the Songhai Empire is all but forgotten by history. But this medieval kingdom was once the most powerful force in Africa.Find out how this civilization grew up on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, among some of the most extreme conditions that nature can throw at us. Discover how it grew and flourished, passing through a process known as the imperial cycle, and learn about what ultimately caused its sudden and dramatic collapse.Credits:Sound engineering by Thomas NtinasVoice Actors:Jake Barrett-MillsRhy BrignellBryan TshiobiPip WillettMusic by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100209Artist: incompetech.com/

In the year 1858, the German explorer Heinrich Baat traveled across the wide expanse of the Sahara Desert. He was determined to reach the city of Timbuktu that lay at its far edge. He spoke Arabic, along with several African languages, and made careful notes about the places he passed through. His journey all around West Africa would ultimately be a trip of nearly 20,000. kilometers. But Bart was always on the lookout for more sights to see, and on the arduous return leg of his journey, he heard rumors of something that only a handful of Europeans had ever seen before. His guides told him of the existence of an enormous ruined city lost in the African bush, a city that had once commanded the continent's greatest empire.

His guides called this city Gao. As soon as I had made out that Gao was the place which for several centuries had been the capital of a strong and mighty empire in this region, I felt a more ardent desire to visit it than I had to reach Timbuktu. Gao had been the center of a great national movement from whence powerful and successful princes spread their conquests. But gathered his things and set out, following the Niger River along with his guides, through the swampy lowlands and flat desert plains, swatting away mosquitoes and setsy flies, until he reached the sight of the former city.

But what he saw disappointed him. He found only a small collection of huts, about 300 in total, with heaps of overhauled. grown rubble where the ancient city had once stood. This once busy locality, which, according to the unanimous statements of former writers, was the most splendid city of Africa, is now the desolate abode of a small and miserable population. Just opposite my tent lay the ruined massive tower, the last remains of the principal mosque of the capital. All around the wide open area in which we were encamped was what even a rich corona of vegetation, among which, in the clear light of the morning, I discovered

eight palms, tamarin trees, sycamores and silk cottons. Not to be deterred, but explored the ruins of the ancient city and took detailed notes about what he saw. The town in its most flourishing period seems to have had a circumference of about six miles. The east quarter of the mosque is entirely girded with a thick grove of sioux-ac bushes, which covers all. the uninhabited part of the former city. The mosque consisted originally of a low building flanked on the eastern west side by a large tower, the whole courtyard being surrounded by a wall

about eight feet in height. Eastern Tower is in ruins, but the western one is still tolerably well preserved. It rises in seven terraces, which gradually decrease in diameter. The inhabitants still offer their prayers in this sacred space where their great conqueror is interred, although they have not sufficient.

energy to repair the hole. His guides told him that this had been the capital of an empire known as the Songhai. Bart soon left the ruins of Gao to the silk cottons and sycamore trees and continued on his journey home. But the site of the ruined city seems to have stuck with him, and wherever he went, he would ask the same questions. How had the empire of Songhai grown to such size in the harsh desert landscape of the southern Sahara? How had its people held such a society together and built such grand constructions? And why, after rising to such great heights, had they left it all here to crumble into the dust and shifting dunes of the desert? My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

Every episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at a society that has been all but forgotten by popular narratives of history, the Songhai people of West Africa. I want to explore how this great civilization

rose up among some of the harshest conditions our planet can throw at us, how they united two warring traditions, became a cosmopolitan and pluralistic society, as well as Africa's greatest empire. And I want to explain why, after barely more than a century of greatness, their whole society collapsed around them. This will be an episode about cycles. And our first cycle is that of the planet Earth itself. As the Earth spins through the dark void of space, it turns on its axis, giving us the cycle of night and day. But there's another planetary cycle that affects us all just as profoundly, although it is much, much slower. This is a is the wobble of the Earth, known more scientifically as its axial procession.

This wobble is caused by the gentle gravitational tug of the other planets in our solar system, and it changes the angle of the planet's tilt by about one degree every 72 years, until it tilts a full 23 degrees each way. This cycle lasts for over 25,000 years, this tilt can have some extreme effects on the climate on the planet surface. Over the last 8,000 years or so, one of these effects has been to shift the pattern of monsoon rains on the African continent, pushing them southward and creating an enormous dry zone in its northern region. This has created one of Earth's most impressive geographic features, the Sahara Desert. The Sahara, is a vast ocean of sand dunes, rock plateaus, and salt flats that covers an area totaling 9 million

square kilometers. This desert makes up around 30% of the entire African continent. But until about 5,000 years ago, these bare sand dunes were rolling green grasslands. The landscape was broken by rivers and huge lakes that supported late Stone Age human communities. Sparse forests grew here, full of oak and walnut, lime and olive trees. Rock paintings have even been discovered in the Central Sahara that date to around the year 3000 BC and depict lush vegetation and abundant animals in areas where today there's nothing but desert. But as the planet tilted, on its endless cycle, this landscape's days were numbered. The rains gradually left the region. The large plant life would have died off first until only grasses remained, and then eventually

the grass too would have died. Without plant cover to absorb the heat of the sun or roots to hold together the earth, the topsoil would have dried up and blown away in the wind. Slowly these green valleys turned into arid grasslands, then to desert, and finally to the enormous Sahara that we know today. Neolithic people fled from the steady advance of this great desert. It drove them out of the Sahara and concentrated them at its edges. Some of them fled to the northeast and settled in the fertile Nile Valley, where they would lay the foundation for the civilization of the pharaohs. But others went south and built a civilization of their own. Much of this story will take place in a landscape just to the south of the Sahara, known today as the Sahel. The word derives from

the Arabic, Sahil, which means coast or shore. That's because early people thought of the place as the coast of the great sea of sand that stretches for nearly 2,000. kilometers until it meets the Mediterranean. The Sahel is a zone of transition. It's neither the desert sand to the north nor the tropical savannah to the south. For most of its 5,000 kilometer length, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic coast, it's a landscape of semi-arid grasslands and steps, broken by thorn scrubland and patches of acacia trees. Much of the life here, relies on regular monsoon rains. During the long dry season, many trees here lose their leaves, and the annual grasses die away. Several species of gazelle and buffalo compete here with large

predators like the cheetah and lion, along with the African wild dog. But there are also spots of incredible richness in this otherwise arid landscape, and the source of this richness can be seen from outer space. From its source, in the mountainous highlands of southeastern Guinea, West Africa's longest river runs inland for over 4,000 kilometers, in a dramatic, sweeping sickle shape. This is the Niger River. Its name is thought to come from the Berber phrase, Jer Nger, meaning river of rivers. I'll put some maps of this region up on Twitter and Patreon, if you're having trouble visualizing it. The Niger River is exceptionally fertile. At its thickest point, it is nearly a kilometer across, and it floods every year across a vast

area that turns the desert green. In fact, its cultivation zone is more than five times the size of the ones surrounding Egypt's Nile River, allowing the people who live here to grow rice, millet and cuskous, for half of the year. The medieval West African Chronicle, known as the Tarich El Fatash, paints a glowing picture of the wealth and beauty of this region. Mali encompasses a region of 400 towns, and its soil is extremely rich.

Among the kingdoms of the sovereigns of the world, only the lands of Syria surpass it in its beauty. Its inhabitants are rich and live very well. According to oral tradition, The story of human settlement along the Niger River begins with a people known as the Sorko. They built settlements along the riverbank and fashioned boats from African mahogany. They were soon joined by a people known as the Gao, skilled hunters who knew how to bring down hippopotamus and even crocodiles living in the river. These were joined by the Doe people who had adapted to life-cultivating.

crops in the rich floodplains. Finally, a hardy people from the north moved into the region. They were the first to ride horses here, and they called themselves the Songhai. From the very beginning, this was a blended society that survived by unifying formerly disparate elements into a successful hole. The riverboats of the Sorko, the hunting skills of the gau, and the does farming acumen, all supercharged with the power of the horse, all combined to form the beginning of a complex and connected society that would forever use the river Niger as its lifeblood. But their journey from these humble beginnings would not be easy or straightforward. Over-recorded history, a number of great empires rose up in West Africa.

And I think we should pause for a moment and ask, what is an empire? An empire is a violent phenomenon. It occurs when one kingdom or state becomes more powerful than its neighbor. It then invades and conquers them and rules over both territories by force. The original nation, what's known as the imperial center, will usually extract resources and wealth from their conquered subject. and it may also make some attempt to impose its culture and way of life on them. Empires grow in this way, absorbing neighbors and turning them into so-called client states. They become more powerful, but they also, as is usually the case, grow more unstable.

And then, eventually the bubble bursts. Whether through poor leadership, economic collapse, or imperial overreach, the empire falters and weakens. The client states demand their freedom. The power that held the imperial center together fails, and the whole edifice cracks like an eggshell. This is often a time of great unrest. The once mighty capital city might even go down in flames. but for its most powerful client states, the lack of central authority might represent an opportunity. They might begin to expand their own territory. They might build an empire of their own.

There are many theories about how exactly empires grow and operate, but this simplified account is what has been called the imperial cycle. And I think it's useful to think about this when we look at the history of West Africa. Some empires of this region will follow this cycle exactly, while others will try with limited success to break it. The first empire to grow here was the empire of Ghana. It rose up on the fringes of the Sahara Desert around the 8th century. Its people pioneered ironworking in the region, giving them a military edge. And it's clear that by the year 1,000, Ghana, had conquered a large number of client states at its borders and begun to build a true empire.

And the secret to Ghana's success relied on one thing that would prove essential to all the empires that would follow after. And actually, it's not a thing, but an animal. Until around the year 300, horses were the main mode of transportation in West Africa. And a horse, while strong and fast on hard ground, is poorly suited to the harsh environment and shifting sands of the desert. In July and August, daytime temperatures in the Sahara can reach 50 degrees centigrade, or over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And the desert is also prone to sandstorms. The most deadly of these is known as the Simoom or poison wind. These hot, dry winds reach temperatures of up to 54 degrees centigrade, or over 130 Fahrenheit,

which is hot enough to scald the skin. These simooms are known to cause rapid onset heat stroke in desert travelers, since they can transfer more heat to the human body than it's possible to lose through the evaporation of sweat. This causes the body to quickly overheat. and major organs begin to fail. But from the fourth century onwards, a remarkable new innovation began arriving from Arabia. It was an animal with large, flat feet, and adaptations that made them perfectly adapted for survival in the heat. Among these was the distinctive hump on their back, designed for storing water. The camel had arrived in West Africa.

The introduction of camels transformed the economy of the Sahara. They could carry enormous weights of up to 150 kilograms, and this meant that large-scale trade was now possible across the desert. The West African economy at this time was already flourishing, but now it was suddenly linked up to the rich markets of the Mediterranean, and the result was the beginning of a new, era for both peoples. Trade across the Sahara relied on a system of caravans, which were vast trains of camels piled high with goods and luxuries. According to the 14th century Arab Raita Ibn Batuta,

the average size of these caravans was around a thousand camels, but they could grow as large as 12,000. They would have been an incredible sight, snaking across the red sands of the desert for miles. There were three main routes across the central Sahara through most of its history, and they zigzagged between oases in the desert. An oasis was a spot where an aquifer or an underground river, often coupled with a layer of impermeable rock below the sand, caused fresh water to appear on the surface. of the desert. Over millennia, humans settled on these oases, and in these small pockets,

they reversed the process that led the Sahara to form in the first place. They first planted groves of hardy date palms that then provided shade for smaller trees like apricots, figs, and olives. These oases formed crucial stopping points along the trade routes over the desert. They were so important that military control of these tiny settlements could often mean control over an entire trade route and all its accompanying wealth. Today, traveling at high speed in a modern car, these trade routes would represent a non-stop drive of over 70 hours. But for travellers in the Middle Ages, with their vast herds of camel, it took roughly two

months to cross the desert. These journeys were so long that about a third of the camels on the caravan were there simply to carry supplies for the journey. And in these conditions, even the camels struggled. After their journeys, the animals had to spend months recuperating. A four-month round trip would usually earn them an eight-month rest afterwards. The kingdoms of West Africa used these desert trails to transport ivory, spices, wheat and exotic animals to Europe, as well as a steady trade in slaves. The transatlantic slave trade, that we're all familiar with from history books, shipped millions of African slaves to the Americas over roughly 400 years.

It was exceptional in its scale and brutality, but it wasn't the beginning of slavery. In fact, forms of slavery have existed probably since the beginning of agricultural society. Ancient Rome, Greece and Carthage were all famously slave societies, and with the collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe and its ensuing chaos, slave-taking only increased. But with the gradual Christianization of Europe in the first millennium, the church began to introduce rules, about keeping other Christians as slaves. By the year 1,000, slavery of Christians by Christians

had more or less ended in feudal Europe, although it's worth mentioning that it was replaced by the widespread system of serfdom, where peasant workers were little better than slaves, and could still be bought and sold by feudal lords. But the keeping of non-Christian slaves was still allowed, and persisted right through the Middle Ages. When Christian kingdoms went to war with the kingdoms of the Muslim world, prisoners of war were constantly being taken as slaves by both sides. But for both Muslims and Christians, sub-Saharan Africa was the source of a seemingly infinite supply of forced laborers.

Since the first trade routes across the Sahara began, the lands of the north began extracting Africa's manpower by force. These slaves were transported across the desert under horrendous conditions and were sold in the slave markets of North Africa, in the Byzantine Empire and in Venice and Spain. They were often used as laborers and servants, but they were also forced to fight as soldiers in one medieval army or another, and while slavery is deeply unpleasant to consider, it was an unfortunate fact of life in this time, and it will be important to acknowledge its effect on the history of this region if we are to make any sense at all of what happens next.

More valuable than slave laborers, ivory or spices was the natural resource that occurred in West Africa with an abundance unparalleled around the known world. And that resource was gold. Gold has always done something strange to the human brain. Something about its warm color and reflective surface has always made us desire it. We want to wear it on our bodies and decorate our buildings with it, and we've structured entire economies around it. This rare, precious metal, more than any other, has always suggested to us a kind of divinity.

The ancient Egyptians called gold the breath of God, while the Aztecs called it the sweat of the sun. And these early ideas of gold as a metal sent from heaven are actually not that far from the truth. Like most heavy metals, gold was forged in the center of stars by the process of nuclear fusion. stars, just like empires, pass through a cycle. They grow and grow until they reach the size that we call a supergiant, thousands of times larger than our own sun. After this, it enters into a death spiral. Most stars simply shed their outer layers and fizzle out,

but some, perhaps less than 1%, achieve a mass that means they explode in a supernova, a burst of energy and light that can be equivalent for a few moments to the brightness of an entire galaxy. And it's in these explosions that gold is formed. From around 200 million years after our planet first formed, gold started raining from the sky, carried on asteroids that bombarded the Earth's surface. West Africa is remarkably rich in this rare element. In fact, until the discovery of the Americas in the 16th century, this region was the world's top producer of gold. So much gold left Africa during this time that Europeans and Arabs began to believe that it must be home to a single monumental gold mine, a mountain of gold that

was being intentionally kept a secret by African kings. This idea would later inspire myths, like the story of King Solomon's mines, but actually, the reality was quite the opposite. Gold in West Africa wasn't mined from a single source, but from countless tiny gold mines and panning stations across the land. Gold usually occurs in flecks and nuggets, found within quartz crystals. Over time, the crystals are eroded by the running water of rivers and streams,

and the flecks of gold run free. The majority of West Africa's gold wasn't dug out of a mine, but panned on the banks of the Senegal and Niger rivers. And the extremely variable climate of the region also helped this industry. That's because during the long dry season, when all plant life died and agriculture was impossible,

many farmers would hang up their farm tools and go prospecting for gold instead. The 10th century Iranian geographer Ibn Al-Faqi seems to have heard some version of this process as he relates in his geography text, The Book of Lands. In Africa, gold grows in the sand like carrots do and is picked at sunrise. These part-time prospectors would gather together their tiny amounts of gold dust and wait for the trading caravans to pass through. Due to the great variety of languages used in this part of the world, these traders would often engage in a practice known as silent barter.

They would lay out their goods on rugs, ornaments and tools, foods, spices, and most importantly salt, which is hard to come by in sub-Saharan Africa and was crucial for preserving food. The traders would then beat on large drums and blow trumpets and withdraws. out of sight. The local amateur gold miners would emerge and place their little nuggets and flax of gold in front of the goods they wanted, offering what they thought they were worth. The traders would then return, and if they accepted the price, they would take the gold. They would then travel north and exchange it with North African traders, who would give them more salt and exotic Mediterranean goods in return. Soon, a veritable river of gold flowed north across the desert, and through this

system, the early kingdoms of West Africa swelled to eye-watering wealth. To give you a sense of the kind of wealth we're talking about, it's worth looking at the example of one of Africa's most famous medieval kings. His name has gone down in history as Mansa Musa, the wealthiest man in the world. The Empire of Ghana, which had ruled much of West Africa for 500 years, went into decline at some point during the 13th century. It passed through the final stages of that imperial cycle we talked about. Its power weakened, its client states demanded independence, And finally, one of its own conquered subjects eclipsed it in power, snapping up its old dominions and seizing control of the lucrative Saharan trade routes. This was the beginning of a new empire.

Eventually, even the Ghanaian kingdom was absorbed into this rising power, and it would become known as the Empire of Mali. The Mali Empire inherited much of the wealth and power of its predecessor, but it developed the system of trans-Saharan trade to eye-watering size. Its most famous king, Mansa Musa, was a genius of public relations. He was so famous that he even appears on a medieval European map, known as the Catalan Atlas, holding a gold coin and wearing a gold crown. I'll post an image of this incredible map on Patreon for you to see. Mansa Musa's journey to become the king of Mali is probably one of the strangest stories of royal

succession in history. The year was 1312. Musa was an elite member of the Mali court, serving an eccentric old king named Abu Bakr the second. Musa was around the age of 32 when he was summoned to see the king. The king told him that Musa would be appointed as deputy and rule in the king's place while he was away. This was a common enough event, as kings who went off on campaign or pilgrimage would often appoint deputies to rule in their place. But it's where the king was going that must have raised at least a few

eyebrows. Towards the end of his reign, the old king Abu Bakr became convinced, that it would be possible to sail far enough across the Atlantic Ocean that he might reach the other side. In fact, he became obsessed with this idea. The Arab historian Shihab Alumari once spoke to Mansa Musa and recounts the king's version of what happened next. The ruler before me believed that it was possible to reach the end of the ocean that encircles the earth. So he equipped 200 boats full of men and gods water and food enough for several years. He ordered the Admiral not to return until they reached the end of the ocean.

They set out. Their absence extended over a long period of time, and at last only one boat returned. The sailors on this boat brought back a tale of a great whirlpool that had sucked the fleet down beneath the waves, leaving only their vessel afloat. Most likely the fleet was wrecked during an Atlantic storm. But this whirlpool may have also been the formidable canary current

that flows down the African continent. But the king Abu Bakr was not deterred, and he seems to have decided that if you want a job done, you should do it yourself. This time he ordered 2,000 bots to be equipped for him and for his men, and 1,000 more for water and food. Then he departed with his men on the ocean trip, never to return. This story has long fascinated historians of West Africa. Of course, Abu Bakr would be proved right by history.

Other lands really did lie beyond the ocean. And with the passage of only a few centuries, the fate of Africa would become inextricably tied to those lands. Some historians have slightly fancifully searched for evidence that Abu Bakr I.Baka II may have actually reached the new world, nearly 200 years before Columbus, but there is no real evidence for this. What's more, the only account we have of this story was the one given by the new king Mansa Musa. And as we'll find out later, kings can often be a little cagey about how exactly their predecessors met their ends. Still, the storyteller in me finds it an irresistible

anecdote to mention, and something about the pure weirdness of it does tempt me to believe it, that this immensely wealthy king, not satisfied with the things of this world, sailed out into the ocean on an impossible quest, and drowned somewhere on his way to a new one. Whatever the circumstances of his rise to power, we do know that Musa was a fearsomely effective ruler. During his reign, he expanded the Mali Empire and conquered a further 24 cities, folding them into the largest empire that Africa had ever seen. But one event would secure his place in history. It will show the talent he had for self-promotion

and would ensure that his name was on the lips of Europeans and Arabs for centuries to come, and that was his eye-wateringly expensive pilgrimage to Mecca. As is always the case, it's not just goods that flow up and down trade routes. Human cultures also travel along them too. And with the increasing traffic of trade across the Sahara, West Africa was slowly being introduced to new and exotic ways of life. chief among these foreign imports was the Arab culture, and along with it the young religion of Islam. For the early kings of Mali, converting to Islam was an entry point into the world of the Mediterranean coast. It was a way to gain acceptance and influence among these various powerful kingdoms.

The first Malian king, we can reliably say was a Muslim, was named Sundiata Keta, and he ruled in the first half of the 13th century, nearly 100 years before Musa. But religion would always form a fracture that ran the whole length of West African society, dividing the rich from the poor and city dwellers from the countryside. The people living in the farms and villages of West Africa, the people who worked the land and herded the cattle, were what we call animists. That means, loosely speaking, that they worshipped their ancestors, alongside the ancient spirits of nature and the magic that lived in the mountaintops and the forests.

The Muslim Chronicles record these kinds of beliefs with barely concealed contempt. They worship idols among trees and stones. They make sacrifices to them and pray to them for their needs. Among these people are diviners and sorcerers. But in the cities, Islam was the dominant religion, at least in name. For a West African citizen of this time, becoming a Muslim had a number of benefits. It helped you to build a rapport and trade with the foreigners who arrived from across the desert, and at times it allowed people to avoid certain taxes. And it also shielded people from the increasingly bold slave-taking raiders who came down from the Sahara. Just like in Christian Europe, under Islamic law it was illegal for a Muslim to take another

Muslim as a slave, and this prohibition was taken very seriously. The 14th century Islamic scholar Mahlouf al-Balbali was one of the first to set this law in writing. Anyone who is known to be from those lands, which are known to be the lands of Islam, and who mentions he is from those lands, should be let go and should be a judged free. This was the ruling of the jurists of Andalusia. Legal disputes would even erupt periodically over whether it was allowed to sell slaves who had converted after being captured. And for the Kingdom of Mali as a whole, converting to Islam offered similar protections. Again, similar to Christian Europe, Muslim, Muslim, Muslim The Muslim kings were only supposed to go to war when it was legally sanctioned.

A legal war of this kind was known as a jihad or holy struggle. Legal approval would rarely be given for a war against another Muslim nation. By the time Mansa Musa took the throne, Mali had been a Muslim empire for over 100 years. But Musa was a devout Muslim and would go on to forge strong and enduring links with the rest of the Muslim world. He finally made a pilgrimage to Mecca that began in the year 1324. But even on this religious duty, Musa seems to have had a keen eye for his image. He reportedly travelled with an impressive retinue that caused a sensation across the medieval world. He was accompanied by a caravan consisting of 60,000 men, including a personal retinue of 12,000 slaves,

all carrying golden staffs, and wearing brocade and Persian silk. He's also supposed to have travelled with a baggage train of 80 camels, each carrying £300 of gold. At today's market rates, that would be a value of around $500 million or half a billion dollars. At every Every city he stopped at, Mansa Musa handed out this gold to the poor in huge amounts, but his generosity had a number of inadvertent effects. All along his pilgrimage route, he left economic chaos in his wake. In the cities of Cairo, Medina and Mecca that he passed through, the sudden influx of gold caused a collapse in the metal's value for the next decade,

causing enormous inflation and devastating their economies. On his way home, perhaps a little bashful at the devastation he had caused, Musa loaned back all the gold he could find in Egypt, in an attempt to somewhat stabilize the price. It's the first and last time in history that one man has controlled the price of all the world's gold. But the Empire of Mali, while incredibly wealthy, wasn't to last. It would soon follow Ghana's footsteps along that imperial cycle, and one of its client states, which was only just beginning to flex its muscles,

would soon become the true subject of this episode, and the largest empire in African history. And that state, finally, was the kingdom of Shanghai. I think this is a good point to mention that there are essentially three groups of sources about the history of this region of West Africa, and they can often give wildly divergent versions of events. The first source is the Arab travelers and historians who occasionally crossed the Sahara and wrote about what they saw. Of these, two stand out for the length and detail of their descriptions.

One of these is the traveler Ibn Batuta. He was the Moroccan Marco Polo. Over a period of 30 years in the 14th century, he traveled all over the Middle East, north and sub-Saharan Africa, then through Afghanistan and Central Asia, India and Sri Lanka, and even onto China. And it's on one of these great journeys

that he explored the kingdoms of West Africa during the time of the Mali Empire. Nearly two centuries later, in the early 16th century, Another traveller, a Spanish moor who would become known as Leo Africanus, travelled in West Africa. Afterwards, he was captured by European pirates and taken to Rome, where he was forced to convert to Christianity,

and there he wrote down accounts of all his travels. But visitors of this kind are few and far between. Each one acts like a kind of snapshot, capturing a moment in time, and they can sometimes be frustratingly vague about the kinds of things that are interesting to a modern historian. The second source of information is the storytelling tradition of West Africa itself. This region is home to a unique tradition of folklore, presided over by a mysterious cast of mystics and holy men known as the Gryots. For millennia, these Gryots have played the roles of storyteller, historian, singer, poet and musician all together in West African society.

These griots were repositories of an oral tradition, memorizing their stories and histories and passing them on from one generation to another. They were treated as wise men and magicians, too, and often held positions as advisors to the kings and rulers. You're currently listening to a pair of Gryots from the town of Yelakela in modern Mali, still practicing this ancient tradition today. Like most of the world's folklore traditions, the stories of the Gryots were often not written down until the 19th century. Between different regions today, the stories of Gryots can differ greatly, and while they are an invaluable piece of cultural heritage, as a historian, they can often prove a frustrating source of information. To the griots, the boundary between history and

myth is very thin. Their histories include fantastical stories full of sorcerers and magic. But they are an incredible source for learning about how the people of this region perceive their own history, and studies of their folklore have been used comparatively to corroborate or strengthen other sources. The final source is a kind of mixture of these two traditions, and that's the scribes of Timbuktu. We'll talk much more about Timbuktu later, but for now I'll only say that it was a library city on the edge of the desert. It was home to a serious scholarly tradition where scribes and learned men were trained. They were connected to an international network of intellectuals, which stretched from the libraries of Baghdad and Alexandria to the mosques of Cordoba in Spain. The scribes of Timbuktu were genuinely interested in recording history. Some of them even traveled with West African kings, with the express purpose of writing down the events they saw.

Two of the most prominent works by these scribes are known as the Timbuktu chronicles. They are the Tarich al-Fatash and the Tarich al-Sudan, the Chronicle of the Seeker and the Chronicle of Africa. And you'll hear a lot more from both throughout this episode. Although many of the scholarly families of Timbuktu traced their lineage back to Arab Muslims, many of them were also West African, and they were steeped in the ancient traditions and folklore of the people around them. Although they liked to pretend that they were, they weren't immune from the influence of the Gryots, those magical storytellers, and this comes through in the histories of the Timbuktu Chronicles, which are full of prophecies and dream visions, magical stories where men can turn

into animals, and kings can talk with demons. The Tarich al-Fatash, for instance, recounts one origin story for the Songhai people. It relates how they were once ruled by a king who was half fish and half man, who every night swam up the Niger River and terrorized his subjects. Finally, a hero overthrows this fishman and becomes the Songhai's first king. But the scribe of the Chronicle relates some of these stories with a slight sense of embarrassment, and even includes this anxious disclaimer. Most of the tales we have recounted are almost certainly not true. We ask forgiveness from God the most high.

Another thing to mention is that both these chronicles were also political documents. They were written on the orders of kings, so they often massage his. history into a shape that casts these kings in the most flattering light. But if we apply their accounts cautiously, overlapping them both and placing them in conversation with other sources, they are also invaluable for learning about what happened during this time. So these are the sources we have to rely on. the fragmentary, unreliable accounts of Arab travelers in the region, the Gryot storytellers who still spin tales of the ancient times, and the scribes of Timbuktu, desperately trying to make sense of it all,

with a king breathing over their shoulder. Because of the naturally unreliable nature of all of these sources, the history of this region is filled with many gaps and blank spaces, many questions and uncertainties that I will attempt to navigate as we go forwards. The earliest written records mentioning the kingdom of Songhai appear in the 10th century. They mention a small kingdom on the banks of the Niger River, and for much of its history, that's all it was. Songhai centered around the city of Gao, a great trading terminus where the expanse of the

Sahara met the green floodplain of the Niger. Just outside of Gao, a great sand dune looms over the skyline. It's known as the rose dune, due to the reddish color it turns at sunrise. And since ancient times, it has been thought to be the home of sorcerers, who are supposed to meet there after dark to perform their rituals and spells. And despite Islam being officially adopted by the Royal Court of Songhai as early as the year 1019, the city of Gao would always retain something of that character. More than perhaps any other city in the region, it still retained a deep-seated connection

to the ancient ways of Africa. Gao was a great cosmopolitan marketplace, where African cola nuts, gold, ivory, and slavery, slaves, spices, palm oil, and precious woods were traded for Mediterranean goods, like salt, textiles, weapons, horses, and the metal copper. Gao was what's known as an entrepour or entry port, the terminus of a vast array of trade routes which spread out from it like a web. The explorer Leo Afrikanus, who visited Gao in the 16th century, writes about the rich trade he saw arriving from Europe.

It is a wonder to see the quality of merchandise that is daily brought here, and how costly and sumptuous everything is. Horses purchased in Europe for ten dukats are sold here for 40, and sometimes 50 dukets apiece. There is not European cloth so coarse as to sell for less than four dukets per cubit. A cubit of the scarlet of Venice, or of Turkish cloth, is here worth 30 dukets. A sword is here valued at a sword. three or four crowns, and likewise a spears, bridles and similar commodities, and spices are all sold at a high rate. However, of all other items, salt is the most expensive. While gold was universally used for trade, there was also another type of currency that was widespread in this region.

These were cowrie shells, the shells of a type of sea snail that occurs most commonly in the Indian ocean. These small shells served much the same purpose as gold. They were beautiful enough to be universally desired, and they were rare enough to be safe repositories of value. They acted like coins in the era before coins were minted, and today the classical Chinese symbol for money even derives from a stylized drawing of one of these shells. Whether measured in gold or in cowries. By the year 1325, the wealth of the city of Gao had swollen it to such a degree that Mansa Musa, the richest man in the world and the emperor of Mali, desired to seize it. Musa soon ordered his armies to march against Gao and absorb it into his empire.

In the preceding centuries, the wealth of Mali had turned it into a powerful military machine. If accounts are to be believed, Marley at this time had an army of 100,000 soldiers, including 10,000 horsemen. These were drawn from the aristocracy, just like European knights. Ironworking as a craft had been perfected in the Empire of Ghana, so that now whole clans of Mali's Mandinka people were given over to it, responsible for creating the spearheads sword. and arrows used by the Imperial Army. Mali's soldiers wore leather helmets and sometimes iron chain mail imported from Arabia. A certain proportion of this army were likely slave soldiers. Most would have been conscripted citizens. But many were also professional soldiers. And Mali's army also incorporated

specialist fighters from the different territories that made up the empire. Oral historians recount the use of poison bowmen from the Sankarani River in the south, fire archers from Wagadu to the north, and heavy cavalry from the northern state of Mema. Against this force, the small city-state of Gao would have had little chance. It was soon folded into the Empire of Mali, But by all accounts, Gao did quite well as a client state of this greater power. The Arab explorer Ibn Batuta visited Gao 28 years later in 1353. In his writings, he is often quite scathing about Africa. He was scandalized by many of the customs of Mali's people

and what he perceived to be the rudeness of their manners. For instance, at once, at one of the customs of the Mali's people, for instance, at one of the customs of the people, At one point in his writings, he turns up his nose at the food offered to him by a local chief. The meal was served, some pounded millet mixed with a little honey and milk. This convinced me that there was no good to be hoped for from these people, and I made up my mind to travel back to Morocco at once. So I think it's telling that when he saw the walls, the gates and the mosques of Gao, as well as the rich surplus of food kept in its storehouses, the site seems to be able to.

have impressed him greatly. Then I travelled to the town of Gao, which is a great town on the Niger, one of the finest, biggest and most fertile cities of Africa. There is much rice there, and milk and chickens and fish and the cucumber, which has no like. While for a time the empire of Mali seemed invincible, there were a number of great weaknesses hiding just beneath its surface. and all it took for those to emerge was for the great king Manza Musa to pass away. One of the greatest challenges any society faced up until very recently was that of royal succession. For most of history, countries have been ruled by kings.

But when a king died, the question over who would rule his kingdom could become a lethal matter. If the king had an heir, or named a successor, this person would have a strong claim, but he would need to command an overwhelming body of support from the lords and nobles and other stakeholders in the kingdom. But if a king died without an heir, then multiple challengers might present themselves. In the worst cases, the country would divide itself among the challenges, and this would lead to a war. If all the wars of succession in history are taken into account, we could probably find no greater waste of

resources and time, let alone human life and suffering. Civil wars routinely brought countries to their knees, destroyed their industries, and decimated their populations. In many ways, they represented a greater danger than any plague, earthquake or famine, and the people of this time lived in constant fear of them. In Europe, kings were terrified of dying without having produced a son. But in West Africa, the problem was usually not too few sons, but too many. West African kings usually had multiple wives, with four being allowed under medieval laws. So the chance of a king dying without an heir was much less than in Europe.

According to the chronicles, one Songhai king named Askiah Muhammad would have 37 sons during his reign, while the oral tradition places the number at closer to 500. And the problem wasn't only with sons fighting over the crown. Large families meant that any king usually had a great number of brothers, who may have fancied a hand at being king themselves. And with so many potential claimants to the throne, it would have been utterly essential to have clear and universally agreed upon laws about who should be king. And that's exactly what the kingdoms of West Africa didn't have.

Those laws that did exist were elaborate and needlessly complicated. So when a king died, there were often multiple interpretations of who should take the throne. and this is something we'll see happen over and over throughout this episode. In times of peace, during the long reigns of its great kings, West Africa flourished. But the death of its kings virtually always led to disaster. In Mali, the great king Mansa Moussa died in the year 1337, and the first to replace him was his son Magan. But Musa also had a brother, a man named his son,

Suleiman. Musa's son Magan ruled for only four years before his uncle struck, killing Magan and taking the throne for himself. Such an illegitimate act enraged the lords of the kingdom, and they each brought forth their contesting claims for the throne. What followed was a succession crisis that destroyed the unity of the empire. Suddenly, Mali's strong, united army, splintered into factions, and it began to fight itself. Perhaps sensing weakness in the once great empire, horsemen from the land of Mossie to the south crossed the Niger River and began raiding around the city of Timbuktu. Racked by civil war, the Marlians were unable to react, and the raids on their borders got bolder. Soon the client states of the empire took notice.

one of them was the distant coastal kingdom of Jolof, which was the first to declare independence. When Mali failed to march on Joloff and restore it to the empire, other client states who wanted independence saw their chance. Mali had always been a single ethnicity project. While it ruled over a large variety of regions and tribes, its kings and social elite, were all drawn from a people known as the Mandi. They used the empire to project their power over the other groups, and this meant at the first sign of trouble, these other groups would seek to throw off the yoke of Manday rule. Suliman, the uncle who had killed Mansamusa's son, soon died himself and passed the throne to his son. He was in turn overthrown by another, who was overthrown by another.

During this crisis, the average king ruled for barely more than a few years, and the authority of the empire collapsed. Its client states broke free in droves, and one of these states was the wealthy trade city of Gao. At this time, the king in Mali was a man named Musa II, but he was king in name only. He had an advisor and counsellor. known as Mari Jata, who appears to have been the true power in the empire. At one point, Marijata even threw the young king in a jail cell to keep him out of the way.

Because of this remarkable situation and the decades of civil war and financial mismanagement, in places like Gao, the legitimacy of the Mali Empire must have been at an all-time low. Mali's eastern provinces were now in open rebellion, and it's at this point that the city of Gao declared independence. For the royal vizier Mari Jata, the loss of this great city, more than any other of his rebellious client states, must have been a huge blow. He must have been determined to crush this rebellion. He immediately dispatched the great Malian army to restore order in the east. and the army had some success. They recaptured Takeda, an important copper mining town in the north. But when they reached Gao, the newly formed Kingdom of Songhai put up a much greater fight.

By this time, Gao had seized large territories in the east, strengthening their power. They may have also gathered together other elements of the resistance against Mali, forming a kind of rebel alliance. They relied on guerrilla warfare, raiding Marley's urban centres, often using riverboats on the Niger to deliver large amounts of troops right where they would be most effective, attacking swiftly and by surprise. These tactics allowed the Kingdom of Songhai to tie up the larger but weakened army of Mali, and a sort of stalemate seems to have set in.

But this war wouldn't end on the battlefield, but with the endless churn of royal murders that had swept the empire. The sickly king Musa II died in 1387. He may have still been imprisoned, and he may not have died naturally. Either way, the royal vizier Mari Jata refused to give up power. He killed Musa's brothers and ascended to the throne himself. He ruled for only a year before being assassinated. More provinces revolted, the mossy people attacked the Mali Empire again, and soon invasion by the nomadic Tuareg people from the

desert, meant that Mali lost access to the northern trade routes across the Sahara. This meant it could no longer import enough horses to supply its army, let alone fund its expensive wars. For the next century, Marley would be locked in a life or death struggle for its very survival. In this period of chaos, the empire completely fell apart, and the rebellious city of Gao was forgotten. The kingdom of Songhai was fully established by the 1430s. The wheel of the imperial cycle turned. Out of all this chaos, the young kingdom of Songhai saw an opportunity. to rise from the old empire's ashes. The next century saw the continuing decline of Mali and the

rise of Songhai, and as the end of the 15th century drew near, this new kingdom was poised to become one of Africa's great powers. And one man, a ruthless and fearsome military leader, was about to take full advantage of the opportunity that this chaos had created. His name, was Sunni Ali. Sunni Ali is perhaps the most controversial character in African history. We know little about his early life, who he was or where he came from. But what's clear is that he was a fierce military leader, a man of limitless energy and ambition. He took the throne of the kingdom of Shanghai in the year 1464, and his reign would mark an unethical. And his reign would mark an unprecedented expansion of this kingdom, so that it would soon extend further than the Empire of Mali

ever had. But Sunni Ali is remembered very differently by the two sides of Songhai society. In the oral tradition of the Griots, he is remembered as Ali Bear, or Ali the Great. In the stories of the Griots, he is a great and wise man who commanded the powers of magic, the first ever emperor of the Songhai. But in the chronicles written by Muslim scholars, he is remembered as a cruel and tyrannical ruler. The chronicle Tarikh al-Fatash reserves particular condemnation for him. The tyrant, the cursed, the oppressor, the Sonny Ali,

a model of shameful conduct. It's true that from virtually the moment he took power, Sunni Ali went to war. He was determined to modernize and reorganize his military. He had seen the Mali Empire collapse after its access to horses fell apart, and so he resolved to begin the large-scale breeding of horses in Africa. He built large stables to shelter these horses, from the elements and from the disease carrying Tsei fly, and he pioneered the use of cross-breeding, to generate a breed of sturdy horses, well suited to the African environment.

He also introduced the use of cavalry soldiers wearing iron breastplates beneath their tunics. These must have been difficult to wear in the African heat, but they would have greatly increased the weight and strength of his cavalry. One of his great passions was also the use of a river navy. He expanded the raiding boats that the Songhai had used, used in their rebellion, until the Songhai commanded a large fleet of 400 boats that could transport troops up and down the Niger River at rapid speeds. He named one of his generals the admiral of this fleet, with the title Master of the Water. He loved these boats so much that during one siege

of the city of Genet, lying many kilometers away from the river, Sunni Ali had a long canal dug so that his boats could continue supplying his men on the siege lines. During this time, the Songhai abandoned guerrilla raids, instead taking on a more sustained and aggressive style of warfare. The chronicle Tarik al-Suddin recalls the remarkable success that Sunni Ali enjoyed. Ali was always victorious, pledging every land on which he fixed his choice. Wherever he was present, his armies were never defeated. From Kanta to Sibiridogo, his horses ran over all these lands.

Part of the success of his campaign seems to have been his extreme ruthlessness, which we get some sense of through the Timbuktu Chronicles. From the Mongols to the Assyrians, military leaders throughout history have used terror as a weapon, and it can be an effective military tactic. If your enemy are terrified of you, they may be more likely to run away and throw down their weapons, saving you time and resources in your conquests. Ali seems to have used this tactic to great effect, but I think some of the acts attributed to him go beyond this use of tactical brutality.

One example is his treatment of a tribe known as the Fulbe, and he seems to have reserved a particular. particular and unexplained hatred for these people. When they rebelled against their Songhai conquerors, Sunni Ali marched on them and had them executed en masse, so that if the chronicles are to be believed, their remaining population could fit beneath the shade of a single tree. His mood changed rapidly. He flew in and out of rages, sometimes condemning people to death only later to change his mind and let them go free. Because of this unpredictable and at times brutal nature, Sunni Ali is described using an astonishing

array of nicknames in the great chronicles of Timbuktu. Ali the merciless, the degenerate, the accursed, the great tyrant, arrogant one, Ali the godless, the profligate, cold-hearted, the despotic one, the despotic one, the despotic one, arrogant one, the shedder of blood, the notorious evil doer. The killer of so many people that only God the most high knows the number. The Chronicles even a tribute to him a number of actions that begin to sound almost cartoonishly villainous. His heart was so hard that he once threw a baby into a mortar and forced the mother to grind it, even while the baby was still alive. The flesh was then fed to the horses.

His acts of cruelty were so numerous that it would be impossible to record them all in a single volume. It's at this point that I should introduce a note of caution about these characterizations. It's certainly possible that Ali was just as ruthless and bloodthirsty as they say. History, after all, is full of kings like this, and it's not hard to see why. recent research has found that today, up to 20% of people found in the upper echelons of the corporate business world exhibit signs of psychopathy compared to only one in 100 in the general population. And when violence was so often the key to power in the Middle Ages, there's no reason to believe that this number would be any lower among medieval kings. But to give Sunni Ali some credit,

it's worth pointing out that these chronicles were written after his death, and on the order of kings who were trying to legitimize their own line of succession. Part of the way they tried to do this was to trash Sunni Ali's reputation. We should always bear in mind that these chronicles were very much political tools, an early form of propaganda for a new regime. And at times Sunni Ali does seem to have understood the value of mercy. Conquered tribes were ordered to join his army, swelling its numbers until the Songhai Kingdom soon commanded a force of 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry.

But whatever else we can say about him, it's clear that Sunni Ali was a complicated man. Some historians have even questioned whether he suffered from a personality disorder. But I think the least we can say is that the violence of this king appears to have stemmed from a number of deep-seated insecurities. Chief among these seems to have been a hatred and distrust of scholars and their learning. It's not clear why exactly Ali felt this way. Perhaps, like some politicians today, he cultivated a kind of anti-elitist populism, which held knowledge and expertise in contempt. There were many rumours circulating about him, too. Rumours of that he was not really a Muslim, that he only paid lip service to the religion. And perhaps he saw

these scholarly communities as the source of these rumors. Perhaps, quite simply, he couldn't read, and he hated those who could. Whatever the reason, the effects were the same, and they would come to bloody fruition when Ali set his sights on perhaps the greatest prize in all of Western Africa, the great capital of scholars, the heart of learning, the eternal library city of Timbuktu. Timbuktu is an ancient city. In the European imagination, it has become a metaphor for remoteness. When we say all the way to Timbuktu, we mean a place as far away as it is possible to get. In fact, a survey conducted in 2006 found that over three times,

30% of British people believed that Timbuktu was a mythical place, like Atlantis or El Dorado. Timbuktu began as a seasonal settlement, about 15 kilometres north of the Niger River. It was a place where traders could come in from the desert and exchange salt, gold, ivory and slaves. Legend has it that this camp was centred around a well, owned by an old slavewoman called Buktu. And so it became known as the place of Buktu, Tim Buktu. It became a permanent settlement around the year 1,100. And under the Mali Empire, it grew to house a population of well over 100,000, which is double the population today and made it one of the largest cities in West Africa.

At its height, it was home to Arab, Italian and Jewish merchants, and the city taxed around a tenth of all the goods that passed through it, a vast wealth that led to an astonishing flourishing of culture, and above all, literacy. Timbuktu has the perfect climate for producing and keeping books. Books here were written on sheepskins, on tree bark, and on paper imported from Italy, and the dry desert air meant that their pages never warped. or cracked. Books were written here in countless African languages, like Songhai and Fulani,

but also in Arabic. Some were even illuminated with gold leaf. And I'll post some images of these incredible manuscripts on Patreon for you to see. Timbuktu's people saw these books as symbols of wealth and power. And so an active trade in literature began with the rest of the Islamic world, until hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were collected here over the course of centuries. The city of Gao was the administrative center of West Africa, but Timbuktu was its intellectual center. If Gao was the heart of the Sahel, then Timbuktu was its brain, and this was the city against which the ruthless Sunni Ali,

the great hater of books and learning, marched in the year 1468. Sunni Ali made no secret about his intentions for the city of Timbuktu. He sent a messenger into the city ahead of his army to deliver a chilling warning to its remaining citizens. The medieval chronicle, Tarich al-Fatash, recalls this event. The messenger arrived at midday. The drum that he had brought with him was beaten and the crowd gathered around him. Unsheathing a sword and brandishing it by the hilt, He said,

This is the sword of the king. I have been ordered to cut the throat of anyone who stays the night in this town. In the blink of an eye, all the town's inhabitants fled. Some did not even take their supper that night, while others forgot to bring blankets for sleeping. The sun had still not set before Timbuktu was completely evacuated. Most of the town's folk fled without bothering to close the doors of their houses. After the flight of its defenders, Ali succeeded in capturing Timbuktu without much resistance,

and he was not merciful with the community of scholars who lived there. Ali immediately ordered his soldiers to gather together all the books he could find in the city and burned them in great bonfires. Luckily, many of the scholars and wealthy families who fled had taken their collections with them. saving some proportion of this ancient collection. Some also managed to hide their books in secret places, but Sunni Ali executed any scholars who remained behind. This is another time when Ali's cruelty just didn't seem to have a point to it.

There was no tactical reason to victimize these scholars. It seems to have stemmed from something rooted deep, in his personality, something that we as historians can only guess at. In fact, over the remaining 24 years of his reign, Ali would embark on no fewer than five purges of the city, attacking its noble families, destroying its books and schools, and expelling its scholars. All of this, as you can imagine, led to a great amount of resentment among the population. People must have begun to cry out for some alternative to this tyrannical king. And if the chronicles are to be believed, that alternative was already gathering power. And his name was Askiah Muhammad. By anyone's

standards, Muhammad had no legitimate claim to the throne. He was a nobleman and a warrior, who held a position in the Songhai Empire known as the Tondi Fari, the lord of the mountains. He was in control of the rocky hills and red sandstone mountains to the south. This landscape is broken by an incredible 500-meter-tall cliff, known as the Bandiagara Escarpment, that runs for 150 kilometres along the modern border between Mali and Burkina Faso. This was a tough region, full of mountain bandits and hill tribes, and it was also one of the most high-harmes,

highly militarized borders in the empire, facing the extensive lands of the powerful Mosse people in the south. Due to all of this, Askiya Muhammad would have commanded a large and battle-hardened army. He was in the top level of Songhai military command. He knew how its army worked, its strengths, and also its weaknesses. And Askiya-Mohamed also seems to have frequently clashed with the king Sunni Ali. The chronicles never make clear the nature of these disagreements, but Muhammad was even imprisoned and sentenced to death on a number of occasions, as the Tarija Sudan recalls. More than once, Sunni Ali condemned him to death or imprisonment

because of his stout heart and great courage, but because he was wise and prudent, the tyrant never did him any harm. It's possible they disagreed over question. of military tactics. But everything else we know about Muhammad gives us a picture of a thoughtful man, a diplomat and a shrewd statesman, so it's possible that he may have also protested against the terror tactics that Sunni Ali employed and had the king's rage reign down on him as a consequence. Either way, it's clear that Askiah Muhammad was a deadly mix for King Sunni Ali. The Askiya was rebellious, but he also seems to have been indispensable,

and he was steadily positioning himself as a true alternative to the tyrant king. Soon enough, he would get his chance. Sunni Ali died in November 1492. How exactly this happened is a mystery. In the Timbuktu chronicle Tarihilfatash, his death is a divine intervention. He gets struck down by God as a punishment for abusing a holy man. And this explanation should immediately give us some cause for suspicion. In the other chronicle, the Tarihil Sudan, we get a slightly more realistic scenario.

In this version, Ali drowns when a flash flood of the Niger River washes into his camp near the village of Kunah. Of course, flash floods were a deadly fact of life on the medieval Niger, just as they are today, but this would have still been incredible bad luck for a king. And it's worth mentioning that if historians are correct, the village of Kuna was found within the mountainous territory of Songhai, the same region that at the time was controlled by the lord of the mountains, Askiah Muhammad. Perhaps after himself being sentenced to death by Sunni Ali, multiple times, Askiah Mohamed finally did what his opponent didn't have the courage to do,

that is, give the order to end his life. In my view, another piece of evidence for this is a single line in the Tarich al-Fatash. It's mentioned quite incidentally that Ali's soldiers buried him before anyone else had even learned of his death. If this is true, it may be that he had wounds on his body that they wanted to conceal. Ali was succeeded by his son Baru. It's not known whether he tried to continue the repressive policies of his father. Either way, half the country, sick of Sunni Ali's rule, burst out in open revolt. Some noble families who had fled Timbuktu during Sunni Ali's time on the throne marched back home with their armies, and the man they rallied around was the one who had headed

the opposition against the tyrant, Askiah Muhammad. The speed this all happened at makes many historians believe that this was a plot that had been in place for a long time, perhaps for years. And perhaps suspecting the nature of this plot, Sunni Ali's son, Baru, was determined to stamp out this upstart General Muhammad. Sunibaru's armies mass surround him, as is dramatically rendered in the Tarich El Fatash. His troops surrounded him like a mountain range. The raised storms of dust that turned day into night and they were mirrored by the great cries. All swore their blood would run in torrents. Askiah Mohamed also gathered his rebel forces. and marched on the capital city of Gao. Sunni Baru marched out and met him on the battlefield,

at a place called Anfow. His army outnumbered Askiya Mohamed's, but Baru must have been nervous as the army of this experience general gathered outside of his city. He must have tried to remember the lessons his father had taught him. First, the two armies would have exchanged a voluil of arrows, their cavalry harassing and harrying each other's lines, as well as skirmishing among themselves, before the spearmen finally drew in together to fight. When the two armies met, the experience of Askiah Muhammad won over the greater numbers of Sunni Baru. One of Baru's generals, when he saw which way the battle was going, threw himself into the river Niger and drowned. From this moment on, the Askiah Mohamed would rule the 24 tribes of the Songhai.

The death of the tyrannical king Sunni Ali in November 1492 came at a historical tipping point of immense importance. Around the world at this time, big things were underway. The Catholic monarchs of Spain had enacted a new law banishing all of Spain's Jews. as many as 200,000 Spanish Jews were forced to flee, and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent his grand fleet to escort them safely to relocate in his lands. One month before, England's Henry VIII had laid siege to the French port of Boulogne, forcing the French king to sue for peace.

And on the other side of the world, in the islands of the Caribbean, only days before Sunni Ali was swept away in that flash flood, a European explorer named Christopher Columbus first set foot on the New World. The Battle of Anfow in 1493, when Askiah Mohamed emerged victorious outside the walls of Gao, came just a few months before Columbus set out on his second voyage. And for the history of the African continent, this discovery would begin, one of its bleakest chapters. It's not recorded where the news of these developments reached the new king of Songhai, Askiya Muhammad, but he had quite enough to be occupying him at home.

Muhammad had inherited a Songhai territory that had never been larger. By the time he came to the throne, Imperial Songhai comprised a broad diversity of ethnic groups, including the Fulbe, Soninke, Tuareg, Dogon, Bambara, and Bozo. But it had also suffered greatly from decades of civil war and attacks by its aggressive neighbors. Muhammad immediately set about trying to fix these problems. In response to ongoing attacks from outside, he became determined to reform the Songhai army and secure the empire's borders.

He expanded its powerful. cavalry, and moved away from the use of slave soldiers and conscripts to become a true professional standing army. Soon after seizing power, he embarked on a series of campaigns that would have impressed even the ferocious Sunni Ali. He announced a legally sanctioned jihad against the mossy people to the south. He marched on their cities, capturing many of them and expanding the empire further. then he marched against the desert Tuareg people and seized the salt mines of Tehaza, a land where the salt was so numerous that people built their houses out of salt bricks. Askiya Mohammed spread the boundaries of the Songhai Empire until it was the largest territory

that Africa had ever seen. But while he shared something of his predecessor's military skill, in many ways Askiah Mohammed seems to have been the polar opposite of Sunni Ali. Whereas Ali had only been a conqueror, Muhammad was a diplomat and an administrator. He sought to reconcile the differences of the people in his empire, and the chronicle Tarich El Sudan speaks especially highly of him. Through Iskia Muhammad, God the Most High alleviated the Muslims' distress

and eased their tribulation. He strove to establish the community of Islam and improve people's lot. He befriended the scholars and sought counsel from them over the appointments and dismissals he made. It should be remembered that these chronicles are essentially pieces of propaganda for Mohammed's Askiah dynasty. But we do see this character in evidence in our other sources too. Muhammad's friendship with scholars is perhaps the thing that so distinctly sets him apart. from his predecessor. He made peace with the persecuted scribes and learned men of Timbuktu, bringing banished families back from exile, and even maintaining personal friendships with some scribes.

Askiah Muhammad was also pluralistic and outward-looking. While the Chronicles don't mention Sunni Ali doing a single thing outside of the empire's borders, Askiah Muhammad brought in a new age of diplomacy. He forged connections that reached right across the Muslim world, and he even made a pilgrimage to Mecca in imitation of that legendary king of Mali, Mansa Musa. And perhaps most crucially, in a symbolic act, he invited a leader from each of his empire's ethnic groups to join him on his pilgrimage. Even ethnic groups like the Fulbe, which had been persecuted and massacred under Sunni Ali, along. And this, more than anything, was the true source of Askiah Mohammed's success. In the new Songhai Empire, he began to forge a state that crossed ethnic boundaries. The empires that had come

before were only ever just that, empires. In the Ghana Empire, the Soninke people had conquered their neighbors and ruled over them. In the Mali Empire, it was the Manday people who did the same. but in Songhai a new kind of political project was being formed. It was a nation that incorporated all the different peoples that lived within its borders and which inspired loyalty in its people that rose above their original loyalties to their tribe. It was a very modern kind of state. And Muhammad also succeeded in doing what few Songhai kings had achieved before, that is, to unite the two sides of the empire, its heart in Gao and its brain in Timbuktu.

Muhammad managed to bring the Muslims of Timbuktu over to his side, but he never truly renounced the ancient magic of his ancestors. And so he fused together an empire that looked like it might truly last the test of time. During Muhammad's reign, he established standardized trade measures and regulations, and began policing trade routes to keep them safe, as well as establishing an organized tax system. He divided the empire into states and appointed a governor of each one. He also appointed ministers who took care of finance, justice, agriculture, and other areas of government. And all these developments ushered in an age of virtually unprecedented peace and prosperity in the region. But this golden age, like all golden ages, was soon to come to an end.

Towards the end of his life, Askiah Mohamed became blind. According to West African law, this would have disqualified him from ruling, since the king was expected to lead his army into battle. But Askiah Mohammed seems to have been reluctant to give the crown to any one of his sons. As his sight increasingly failed and he reached the age of 70, he began to heavily rely on his powerful royal vizier to enact policies for him. Rumors began to spread that this vizier had undue influence over the old king. But Askiah Muhammad also had 37 sons,

and as the king got older, each of these began to grow impatient for him to pass on the crown to one of them. them. Eventually, one of these sons, a man named Musa, grew tired of waiting. Musa is remembered in the Chronicles as an impudent and stupid boy, spoiled by a life of royal luxury. He moved to seize his father's crown, deposing Askiah Muhammad and banishing the blind old man to an island in the middle of the Niger River, which the Chronicles described as a place infested with mosquitoes and toads. Musa's seizure of the throne naturally enraged Askiah Mohamed's other sons, many of whom probably thought they had a better

claim. The empire soon erupted in civil war. Musa would go on to kill several of his brothers and nearly 30 of his cousins, some in battle and others in assassinations and executions, but eventually he himself was overcome in the year 1531, just two years after taking power. The Songhai Empire, like Ghana and Mali before it, had few clear laws of succession. And while the Askiah Mohammed made many legal reforms during his reign, this seems to have been something that no one had mustered the political will to change. A period of bitter usurpings and civil wars followed, but there was one ray of light to come out of all the chaos. About eight years after the toppling and banishment of Askiah Mohammed, one of his other sons,

a man named Askiah Ishmael, managed to seize the throne. He ordered for his blind father to be released from the mosquito infested island, where he had been imprisoned, and so the old king returned to his home to die one year later. But what the spoiled Prince Musa had unleashed couldn't be contained. Askiah Ishmael soon died in unknown circumstances, and the chaos of disputed succession rolled on. The next 20 years saw almost constant bloodshed as various claimants to the throne of the Askias fought and died.

Whole generations of young men were piled into this meat grinder, all to satisfy the vanity of princes. Askiah Mohammed had turned the Songhai Empire into one of the world's great powers, and as so often happens when a great society is built, men would now risk everything to take it for themselves. The chronicle Tarich al-Fatash doesn't mince words when it comes to the question of what led to Songhai's growing weakness. What caused the ruin of the state of Songai and compelled God to throw it into disorder? What brought divine punishment down upon its citizens? It was their failure to observe the laws of God, the injustice of slavery.

The most grave crimes and most disagreeable acts were committed there, as well as the pride and arrogance of the great ones. We all belong to God. It is to him that we should return. As civil wars raged, the country's wealth began to run dry. Wars caused disruption at the lucrative trade hubs of Jene, Timbuktu and Gao, damaging the land's income. West African armies also lived and died by their supply of horses,

and each rival warring prince needed a steady supply to replenish his army. These horses were usually imported across the desert from Europe, Europe at great expense. But with all the disruption and chaos, increasingly only one resource remained in abundance in West Africa that could be traded for the horses needed in these wars. And that resource was its people. During these times of crisis, the slave trade increased in volume. Defeated armies in these civil wars were frequently captured and sold, and thousands were shipped across the desert to be sold as labourers in Europe and Arabia. This was a crucial moment for the history of this continent.

The failure of political stability in its largest empire, coupled with an increase in slave-taking to pay for these constant wars, coincided in tragic form with the first European trading posts that were set up by the Portuguese at Sao Taume and Sao Salvador. as well as fortified positions all up the coast of Morocco. This was the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade that would dwarf the Saharan slave trade both in its size and its cruelty. Within 20 years of Askiyah Mohamed's death, barely 50 years after the discovery of the Americas, as many as 250,000 Africans had already been kidnapped and transported to the new world.

By the time the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century, the number would exceed 12 million, and of these nearly 2 million died on the voyage. The period of bloodletting did come to an end in the Empire of Shanghai, with the reign of a man named Asgia Dawood. He, at least, seems to have been a shrewd operator, and immediately placed his sons in strategic positions in the government. and his ability to stabilize the nation would lead to a brief return to its former flourishing state. For this reason, he is often referred to as Songhai's second greatest king, after the great Askiah Muhammad.

But when Askiy Dawood came to power, he inherited a weakened and damaged country. It's clear that during the 20 years of unrest and civil strife, following the death of Askiah Hamid, rebel factions across the country had gained power and confidence. Askiah Dawood undertook a number of campaigns to stamp down insurgencies across the country, and he sent his cavalry up into the mountains to put a stop to bandit raids there with some success. But if he had any hopes of expanding his borders further like his predecessors, that would have been put a stop to by a failed campaign against the mossy people, that killed a large number of his commanders. Daoud even embarked on several public works,

instituting the equivalent of public libraries in the kingdom. But all of this came at a cost. During his long 34-year reign, slavery greatly increased in the empire. Songhai's agriculture suffered from wars, as well as droughts and famines, and in response, it seems that the former citizen farming was replaced with slave plantations. While slavery had always been a feature of Shanghai society, during Asgia Dawood's reign, the empire became a true slave state. This would have caused social disruption across the land, as whole communities were harrowed by slave raids. And this would have in turn fuelled political disruption. There are even stories of royal slaves attaining great power and wealth in

Songhai, even going on to command significant influence in the capital after the deaths of their masters. But towards the end of Askiyad's life, things began to get worse. In the year 1582, a great plague killed many in Timbuktu, and syphilis brought back from the new world by Europeans, appears to have also ravaged the population. And with the final death of Asgir Dawood one year later in 1583, Songhai once again spiraled into civil war and chaos. The kings that followed each ruled for only a few years before being killed or deposed.

At the same time, drought descended on the region, followed by famine and inflation. A strong Songhai state at the height of its power might have been able to ride out these challenges. But with rival princes fighting over the throne, there was no energy available to help Songhai's people, and its now largely slave-based agriculture began to collapse. Songhai entered the final stages of the imperial society, and after this point, there was no turning back. the final king of Songhai was a man named Askiya Ishak the second. Little is known about this character, and what we do know isn't good.

He seems to have been a relatively competent ruler, but he was also vengeful and merciless. He seems to have channeled the energy of Sunni Ali far more than Askiah Muhammad. The chronicles, remember Askiah Ishaq, burying some of his enemies. enemies alive, wrapped in palm-frond sacks, and he had one lord beaten to death with a knotted belt, and this was also the king who would preside over the final dramatic collapse of the entire Songhai Empire. This unrest in Songhai came at an unfortunate time. That's because it coincided with the growing power of a rising star in the region, the kingdom of Morocco, situated. Situated on the North African coast, right across the Mediterranean Sea from Spain and Portugal.

Morocco had been growing in strength and confidence for many years. A new dynasty known as the Sadi had seized control of the country in 1549, and they gained huge popular support by expelling the Portuguese from the forts and trading posts they'd established along the Moroccan coast. In retaliation, Portugal invaded Morocco, and it was so confident in victory that it sent its king and virtually the entire Portuguese nobility on the campaign. They met the Moroccan sultan's army at the battle of Khazar al-Kabir. The Portuguese, believing themselves inherently superior to the Arab-Morocans, were overconfident

in battle. They allowed themselves to be surrounded, enveloped, and utterly defeated. 8,000 Portuguese soldiers were killed, and 15,000 captured. The body of the Portuguese King Sebastian was never recovered, and virtually his entire court was eradicated in one blow. Portugal was virtually beheaded in a single day, and this resulted in a succession crisis of their own that led to them becoming part of a union with Spain for the next 60 years. The Moroccans were understandably ecstatic. They had decisively defeated

their greatest rival, but the victory had all but emptied their treasury. And with their confidence at an all-time high, the Moroccans began to turn their gaze southwards, to the rich but troubled lands that lay across the great Sahara desert, the lands of salt and gold. the lands of the Songhai. One of the prizes that the Moroccans most coveted was the salt mines of Tehasa, that rich salt pan where people literally built their houses out of salt. But they also believe the European rumours

that a great gold mine must lie somewhere in Africa, and they desired this mine for themselves. It's clear that by this time, news of the internal divisions in Songhai had reached beyond its borders. One chronicle even names an escaped royal slave, who is supposed to have fled to Marrakesh, and delivered a message to the Moroccan king. Informing him of the weakness of Songhai's leadership and providing intelligence about them concerning their desperate circumstances, their depraved natures and their enfeebled power,

he urged the king to take the loud. And so Morocco seized its chance. They prepared an invasion force. This invasion was actually led by a Spaniard, a man named Judar Pasha. Judar had piercing blue eyes. He was born as Diego de Guavara, but was captured by Moroccan slave raiders as a boy and brought up in the service of the Moroccan sultan. From there, he rose through the ranks of Moroccan society and proved himself a shrewd military commander.

But he had no small task ahead of him. To invade Songhai, he and his men would have to cross the Great Sahara Desert, with all their equipment, and the impoverished Moroccan Sultan had given him scarcely any resources at all. In fact, the force they mustered to undertake the invasion of a warrens. Africa's greatest empire was tiny. Shudar had barely more than 4,000 men, including just 500 light cavalry. And they knew that if reports were correct, an army of tens of thousands guarded the borders of Songhai. But they had a secret weapon that would tip the scales dramatically in their favor, something that in all their years of civil war, the kings of Shanghai had neglected.

And that thing was gunpowder. Since its development in China in the 9th century, gunpowder had become an increasingly important feature on European battlefields. The first cannons began as siege weapons, used to knock down castle walls. But as the technology became more refined, they soon became used as a battlefield weapon too. Hand-held guns began as defensive weapons in Germany in the early 1400s. They were mounted on city walls and used to fire pellets of lead or stone down onto attacking forces.

But by 1450, they had become handheld weapons. Around 1475, the matchlock mechanism was added to firearms. It was the first mechanical firing device, meaning that guns no longer needed to be fired by lighting a fuse with a match. These were the first guns with triggers, and they transformed the way battles were fought. Around 1520, towards the end of Askiah Mohamed's reign, the first muskets were developed, named after the French word musket, or sparrowhawk. This was a firearm capable of piercing heavy armour, and it ended the age of the armoured soldier on European battlefields. Although the Spaniard Judar marched with only 4,000 men,

of these the majority were musketeers. Many of them were mercenaries from Spain, and he also brought with him a total of eight English cannons. Judada's expedition left Marrakesh in November 1590, taking advantage of the slightly cooler winter temperatures to cross the desert. But still, it was slow and arduous going. The troops lugged their heavy equipment, their eight cannons, and all their armor and supplies.

As was common for desert crossings, many must have died along the way. It took them nearly four months, twice the normal journey time, but in February they finally arrived on the banks of the Niger River, dusty and beleaguered, and only enough of them to fill a large theatre. From there, they marched on the Shanghai capital of Gao. It took them another month to cross the silty floodplain of the Niger. The ground would have been swampy and infested with mosquitoes. many would have contracted malaria or the dreaded sleeping sickness.

But soon the city walls of Gao came into view in the distance, that red sand dune on the horizon turning pink at sunrise. And in the cattle pastures outside the city, at a place called Tondibi, they also saw the vast army of the Songhai Empire marching out in all its glory to meet them. The site must have been incredible. Estimates vary, but the force gathered by the Songhai king, Askiya Ishak, likely topped over 40,000 men.

And some sources put it at as many as 80,000, enough to fill a large modern sports stadium. If you've ever been to a stadium during a big game, you can probably imagine the sound that this army would have made. The ground would have shaken with the first. force of their footfalls and the hooves of their tens of thousands of horses. They would have been accompanied by a substantial troop of drummers and other musicians, thousands of archers, and tens of thousands of spears clattering overhead as they marched. This was the last time an African empire would ever marshal a force of this size. In contrast, the Moroccan army must have looked tiny, thin and scattered. But they lined up along the low rise of a hill and readied

their muskets to fire. Despite their enormous strength in numbers, the Songhai military tactics didn't get off to a great start. They had heard rumors about the wonder weapons that the Moroccans had brought with them, and they had come up with a plan to neutralize them. But the age of the great tacticians Sunni Ali and Askiy Muhammad were gone. The beginning of the Songhai plan was to send a stampede of a thousand cattle towards the Moroccan lines. They hoped this would soak up some of the Moroccan musket fire and that it might even panic the foreigners into retreating. Then the enormous force of Songhai heavy cavalry could mow them down as they fled. But this tactic didn't quite go as planned. The cattle stampede began, but as they bore down on the enemy lines, the Moroccan soldiers

let off a volley of cannon fire, as recalled in the chronicle Tarich El Fatash. When the cattle heard the sound of the rifles, they became frantic. They stampeded back towards the soldiers of the Askiya, crashing a great number between them, the majority of whom died. Despite this setback, the Songhai infantry advanced, but they didn't fare much better than the cattle. From the high ground in the distance, Moroccan muskets let off puffs of smoke. Before the distant cracks of the weapons could even be heard,

the pellets of lead would have struck, whizzing through the air, passing right through armor and flesh, mowing hundreds down in a single volley. It would have been truly terrifying, as the Chronicle recalls. The dust and smoke engulfed the frong of combatants, and God sold fear and dread into the ranks of the Songhai army. It's at this point that the Songhai king, Ishaq, seems to have begun to panic.

He ordered his cavalry to charge in against the line of musketeers, desperate for some of his soldiers to even reach them. But the cavalry charge, would be hopelessly doomed. Their thick breastplates would have been effortlessly punctured by the whizzing musket balls, and their horses, unused to this new strange threat, panicked and fled the battle. The Songhai archers were mowed down before they could come into range, and soon these two fled the battle. Only the Songhai rearguard remained. These were the elite royal bodyguards of the king. Perhaps beginning to feel a little sorry for their enemies, or beginning to suspect that this massacre

was not the most honorable thing, the Moroccans finally advanced, drawing swords and pole arms for close combat. The elite royal bodyguards of the king, enveloped on all sides, stayed and fought to the last man. One Spanish source even records that they bent their knees to the ground, and tied them into position with their belts, so that they could maintain their spear line, even as the strength of their muscles failed. But it too was a doomed effort. The Songhai force was utterly crushed.

Its king fled along with the rest of its soldiers, and Shudar Pasha's men descended on the helpless city of Gao. They sacked it, looted its treasures and burned its buildings, before moving on to the richer trading centres of Timbuktu and Jene, where they looted and burned in a similar fashion. The chronicles recall the devastation caused with deep sorrow. It is beyond our powers to fully describe all the misery and losses that were suffered at Timbuktu when the Moroccans took the town.

The Moroccans even tore off the doors of the houses and cut down the town's trees. Horrified by the defeat, Songhai generals deposed their useless king, Askiya Ishaq, and the central power of the state collapsed. Morocco attempted to occupy the Songhai lands and build an empire of their own in West Africa. But the challenges of maintaining such an empire across the obstacle of the Sahara proved too much. Still, they looted everything they could from Songhai, carrying everything they could transport back across the desert. When they faced resistance in Timbuktu, the Moroccans even sent leading scholars to Marrakesh in chains and kept them there as hostages. The wealth of Timbuktu, Gao and

Genie were systematically stripped. When the Spaniard Judar Pasha returned to Morocco in 1599, victorious nine years after setting out across the desert with his army, his caravan included 30 camel loads of gold as payment for his services. The fall of Imperial Songhai happened completely and all at once. Its complete dissolution came only eight years after the death of what is remembered as its second greatest king, Askiya Dawood. It burst like a bubble from a single puncture. The defeat at the Battle of Tondibi sent splinters running right across the empire, just just as had happened to Ghana and Mali. Soon, where a single state had existed, now countless small kingdoms reasserted their freedoms and separate borders. Western Africa cracked like

an egg. Kingdoms splintered into smaller kingdoms, which themselves splintered into even smaller kingdoms. Now there could be no unified resistance to the spreading influence of European colonialism. As the splintering states warred amongst themselves, they would frequently sell their captured enemies into slavery, boosting the slave economy to untold heights. Predatory Europeans set up trading posts all along the African coast, profiting from the chaos, and the full horror of the transatlantic slave trade began. As the manpower of Africa was drained on an industrial scale, its hopes of ever rebuilding the glory of Ghana, Mali and Songhai would be frustrated.

In the years that followed, the economy of Timbuktu declined, and with it, its position as a centre of learning. The destruction of the city was so profound that the author of one of the chronicles, a man named Al-Sa-Adi, wrote this lament at the beginning of his work. I have witnessed the ruin of learning and its utter thing. collapse. His sorrow at the destruction that he witnessed during his life is what inspired him to write his masterpiece. He writes that he hopes his chronicle will inspire future generations to remember these days of greatness. Because learning is rich in beauty and fertile in its teaching, since instructs men about their fatherland, their ancestors, their history, the names of their

heroes and what lives they lived. I asked God's help and decided to set down all that I myself could learn on the subject of the Songhai princes, their adventures, their story, their achievements and their wars. As wars between splinter states raged on across the region, Timbuktu was repeatedly besieged and captured. Many of the city's great scholars were kidnapped and sold as slaves during this time. They were shipped to the coast and transported across the Atlantic to the new world. As the city declined, its libraries gathered dust. Over the centuries, its manuscripts became precious heirlooms, and the city's noble families hid away their cherished books in private collections, often protecting them at great personal risk against raiders and invading armies.

The dry desert air, and these dedicated caretakers, preserved their pages perfectly. And it's thanks to the efforts of these families of book lovers that the two great Timbuktu chronicles, which made up so much of this episode's story, have survived. The great capital city of Gao slowly faded and shrunk into obscurity. As its population left, sycamore trees and silk cottons put down roots into the cracks, in its walls. Its great mosque began to crumble beneath the forces of the weather, and its eastern tower collapsed. Soon, only about 300 families would live here, surrounded by the ruins of the city's former glory, now overgrown with thorns and bushes. No more would be heard of Gao on the world's

stage until the German explorer Heinrich Bart stumbled upon its ruins. in the 19th century. But the imperial cycle went on and on. The fractured states of West Africa would eventually be folded into the sea-going empires of European nations, the French, British, and Portuguese, who extracted their resources and grew rich on them. That is, until the cycle turned on, when these subjugated client states demanded their independence, and the European empires fell apart in the 1950s and 60s. If there's one thing you should have learned over the course of this podcast, it's that history is change, and nothing lasts forever. I want to end this episode with a couple of short passages from one of the documents that has informed so much of the history of this region.

The Timbuktu Chronicle, the Tarich El Fatash, the Chronicle of the Seeker. This document is a a remarkable piece of literature. It represents the unifying of the two great traditions of the Songhai. It's a perfect marriage of the scholarly Islamic traditions of Timbuktu, with the ancient beliefs of the griots and sorcerers of West Africa. And the result is a work of startling poetic value. It's a book of history, but it's also an epic piece of poetry, including dream visions, prophecies and conversations with spirits, that make it, in my view, one of the great pieces of world literature. One incredible passage recounts the great king Askiah Muhammad speaking to a wise man.

This man teaches the king to speak to spirits, and they tell him about his nation's past, but also crucially, its future. They give him a remarkably accurate account of what fate will befall his country. Unless you're inclined to believe in prophecies, of course, it's likely that this was written after these events, and therefore forms a kind of lament about the direction that the empire went, an elegy to a lost golden age. As you listen, I'd like you to think about how it must have felt to watch this complex and sophisticated society slide into chaos as the doors of the great libraries of Timbuktu closed

and the books began to gather dust on their shelves imagine what it must have felt like to watch the trees begin to grow in the walls of the great mosques of Gao and Jenny their mud walls crumbling their towers collapsing imagine watching the population leave one by one and the houses empty. The booming markets go steadily quiet, and the sounds of prayer in the mosque goes silent. As the rolling sand dunes begin to burst through the doors, rolling over hills and houses, while all the while the songs of the Gryots still sounded somewhere in the gathering dusk. The prince asked the wise man, tell me, is it possible for men to see the spirits and speak with them?"

Yes, it is entirely possible, the wise man replied. If we were alone, we could speak with them right now. The prince ordered all those who were present to go away and leave them alone, so that only the prince and the wise man remained. They stayed in seclusion for a long time, and then the king spoke. I see the earth's surface transformed into a lake of water, he said. I see the stars surging out of the water and flying towards the heavens. The birds swoop down around me and they cut each other to pieces.

Next I see seven men carrying a green throne, which they place between the two of us. So we sit for a while, only to see a great number of men appear before us, some holding books and others holding writing tablets. In their midst, I see an old man who leans upon a staff. I don't know where any of these people come from. They sit down and stare at us. The old man approaches the throne and takes his seat.

The old man spoke a prophecy. As a ruler, he said, you will be quite happy, tolerant and generous. At the end of your life, you will go blind. You will have many sons, but when you are gone, they will no longer walk the straight path. They will bring devastation to your people. kingdom. These words saddened the prince, who remained silent for a long moment. Then he let out a profound sigh, like the moaning of a father who has just lost his son. Thank you once again for listening to The Fall of Civilisations podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode,

Rie Brignall, Jake Barrett Mills, Brian Chiobe, and Pip Willett. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at Paul M.M. Cooper. And if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images and maps relevant to the episode, then you can follow the podcast at Fall of Civ Pod, with underscores separating the words. I'll also be putting a full list of works cited in this episode on Patreon for free in case you want to follow up on some of these reading suggestions. This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you also let me dedicate more time

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For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.