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

in the year 1858 the german explorer heinrich bart travelled 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 then i had to reach timbuktu gow 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 sexy flies until he reached the site 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 overgrown 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 woven a rich corona of vegetation among which in the clear light of the morning i discovered date palms tamarind 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 sewag bushes which covers all the uninhabited part of the former city the mosque consisted originally of a low building flanked on the east and 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 whole his guides told him that this had been the capital of an empire known as the songhai but 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 [Music] my name's paul cooper and you're listening to the fall of civilization's 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 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 and this tilt can have some extreme effects on the climate on the planet's 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 sahara is a vast ocean of sand dunes rock plateaus and salt flats that covers an area totaling nine 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 sehil 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 savanna 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 thorns scrub land 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 jerem meaning river of rivers 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 couscous for half of the year the medieval west african chronicle known as the tariq al-fattach 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 sorco 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 dough 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 soko the hunting skills of the gao 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 [Music] 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 neighbours 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 cemum or poison wind these hot dry winds reach temperatures of up to 54 degrees centigrade or over 130 fahrenheit which is hot enough to scold the skin these samoons 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 4th 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 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 writer ibn batuta the average size of these caravans was around a thousand camels but they could grow as large as twelve thousand 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 1000 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 labourers [Music] 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 labourers 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 shared their outer layers and fizzle out but some perhaps less than one percent 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 minds 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-fakhaki 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 withdraw out of sight the local amateur gold miners would emerge and place their little nuggets and flecks 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 mansa moussa'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 ii 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 birds full of men and god 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 for absence extended over a long period of time and at last only one birth 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 2000 boats to be equipped for him and for his men and 1000 more for water and food then he departed with his men on the awesome 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 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 moosa 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 a hundred 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 mahlu fel 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 adjudged 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 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 a hundred 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 traveled with an impressive retinue that caused a sensation across the medieval world he was accompanied by a caravan consisting of sixty thousand 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 traveled with a baggage train of 80 camels each carrying 300 pounds of gold at today's market rates that would be a value of around 500 million or half a billion dollars at 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 metals 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 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 songhai [Music] 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 traveller 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 on to 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 traveler 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 griots for millennia these griots 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 advisers to the kings and rulers [Music] you're currently listening to a pair of griots 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 griots were often not written down until the 19th century between different regions today the stories of griots 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 travelled 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 tariq al-fattash and the tariqa 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 griots 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 tariq al-fattach 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 fish man 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 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 griot 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 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 entropo or entry port the terminus of a vast array of trade routes which spread out from it like a web the explorer leo africanus 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 10 ducats are sold here for 40 and sometimes 50 ducats apiece there is not european cloth so coarse as to sell for less than four ducats per cubit a cubit of the scarlet of venice or of turkish cloth is here worth 30 ducats a sword is here valued at 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 carry 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 calories 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 mali at this time had an army of a hundred thousand soldiers including ten thousand horsemen these were drawn from the aristocracy just like european knights iron working 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 swords and arrows used by the imperial army mali's soldiers wore leather helmets and sometimes iron chainmail 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 sankharani river in the south fire archers from wagadu to the north and heavy cavalry from the northern state of maima 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 ibun 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 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 store houses the site seems to have impressed him greatly then i travel 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 mansa 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 challengers and this would lead to a war if all the wars of succession and 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 asukiya 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 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 musa died in the year 1337 and the first to replace him was his son magan but musa also had a brother a man named suleiman moussa'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 mossy to the south crossed the niger river and began raiding around the city of timbuktu wracked by civil war the malians 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 jolof 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 monday 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 mandae rule suleiman the uncle who had killed mansa musa'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 moosa the second but he was king in name only he had an advisor and counselor known as marijata 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 marijata 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 mali's urban centers 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 moosa ii died in 1387 he may have still been imprisoned and he may not have died naturally either way the royal vizier marijata refused to give up power he killed moosa's brothers and ascended to the throne himself he ruled for only a year before being assassinated more provinces revolted the mosi 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 mali 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 suni 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 songhai in the year 1464 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 tarek al-fatash reserves particular condemnation for him the tyrant the cursed the oppressor the sunni 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 setsa fly and he pioneered the use of crossbreeding 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 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 jenny 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 guerilla raids instead taking on a more sustained and aggressive style of warfare the chronicle tarichel sudan recalls the remarkable success that sunni ali enjoyed ali was always victorious pillaging every land on which he fixed his choice wherever he was present his armies were never defeated from kanta to sibi redougal 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 fullbay and he seems to have reserved a particular and unexplained hatred for these people when they rebelled against their songhai conquerors sunni ali marched on them and had them executed on mass 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 arrogant one the shatter of blood the notorious evildoer the killer of so many people that only god the most high knows the number the chronicles even attribute 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 percent of people found in the upper echelons of the corporate business world exhibit signs of psychopathy compared to only one in a hundred 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 forty thousand infantry and ten thousand cavalry [Music] 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 rumors circulating about him too rumors 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 30 percent of british people believed that timbuktu was a mythical place like atlantis or el dorado timbuktu began as a seasonal settlement about 15 kilometers 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 centered around a well owned by an old slave woman called buktu and so it became known as the place of booktube tim booktu it became a permanent settlement around the year 1100 and under the mali empire it grew to house a population of well over a hundred thousand 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 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 suni 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 tariq al-fattach 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 townsfolk 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 askia 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 kilometers 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 highly militarized borders in the empire facing the extensive lands of the powerful mossy people in the south due to all of this asking 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 asking muhammad also seems to have frequently clashed with the king suni 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 tariqah 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 questions 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 suni ali employed and had the king's rage rained down on him as a consequence either way it's clear that asuka muhammad was a deadly mix for king suni ali the askia 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 chronicled tarikil fatash 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 tardi here 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 kuna 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 asking muhammad perhaps after himself being sentenced to death by sunni ali multiple times your muhammad 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 tarekhil 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 [Music] 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 suni 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 asking 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 massed around him as is dramatically rendered in the tarek al-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 of our blood would run in torrance muhammad also gathered his rebel forces and marched on the capital city of gao sunibaru marched out and met him on the battlefield at a place called anfau his army outnumbered asya mohammeds but baru must have been nervous as the army of this experienced 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 volley of arrows their cavalries 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 asking 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 asking muhammad 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 two hundred thousand 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 vii had laid siege to the french port of buloyn 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 anfar in 1493 when asking mohammed 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 asking mohammed but he had quite enough to be occupying him at home muhammad had inherited a songhai territory that had never been larger [Music] by the time he came to the throne imperial songhai comprised a broad diversity of ethnic groups including the fullbay soninke tuareg dogon bambara and bozo but it had also suffered greatly from decades of civil war and attacks by its aggressive neighbours 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 mossi 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 tarkaza a land where the salt was so numerous that people built their houses out of salt bricks muhammad 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 muhammad 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 tariq al-sudan speaks especially highly of him through iskia muhammad god the most high alleviated the muslim's 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 muhammad's ascii 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 asking 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 asking 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 fullbay which had been persecuted and massacred under sunni ali were invited along and this more than anything was the true source of asya muhammad'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 sonnenke people had conquered their neighbors and ruled over them in the mali empire it was the mandae 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 asking mohammed 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 ask muhammad 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 barashi mohammed 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 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 asking mohammed and banishing the blind old man to an island in the middle of the niger river which the chronicles describe as a place infested with the mosquitoes and toads moosa's seizure of the throne naturally enraged asya muhammad'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 ascii 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 asking muhammad one of his other sons a man named asya 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 asya 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 asciis fought and died whole generations of young men were piled into this meat grinder all to satisfy the vanity of princes askier mohammed had turned the shanghai 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 tariq 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 sangai 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 gennae 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 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 taumei and sao salvadore 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 twenty years of asking muhammad'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 songhai with the reign of a man named asya dawud 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 asking muhammad but when asya dawud 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 asking muhammad rebel factions across the country had gained power and confidence assya dawud 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 rage 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 daud 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 songhai society during asya dawud'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 fueled 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 asya dawud'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 asya dawud 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 it's 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 asya ishaq ii 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 asking muhammad the chronicles remember asya is shark burying some of his 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 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 sardi 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 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 kazaa al-kabir the portuguese believing themselves inherently superior to the arab moroccans were overconfident in battle they allowed themselves to be surrounded enveloped and utterly defeated eight thousand portuguese soldiers were killed and fifteen thousand 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 tahasa that rich salt pan where people literally built their houses out of salt but they also believed the european rumors 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 songkai's leadership and providing intelligence about them concerning their desperate circumstances their depraved natures and their in feeble power he urged the king to take the land and so morocco seized its chance they prepared an invasion force this invasion was actually led by a spaniard a man named judar pasha shudar had piercing blue eyes he was born as diego de guevara 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 africa's greatest empire was tiny judah had barely more than four thousand 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 songhai 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 match lock 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 asking mohammed's reign the first muskets were developed named after the french word musget or sparrowhawk this was a firearm capable of piercing heavy armor and it ended the age of the armored soldier on european battlefields although the spaniard judar marched with only four thousand 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 judah's expedition left marrakech 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 theater from there they marched on the songhai 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 asya ishaq likely topped over forty thousand men and some sources put it at as many as eighty thousand 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 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 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 asuka 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 kettle 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 tariq al-fattach when the cattle heard the sound of the rifles they became frantic they stampeded back to who's the soldier of the ascii 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 throng of combatants and god sold fear and dead into the ranks of the sungai army it's at this point that the songhai king is shark 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 panic 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 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 sudar 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 centers of timbuktu and jenny 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 the songhai generals deposed their useless king asya 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 jenny was systematically stripped when the spaniard judah 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 dawud it burst like a bubble from a single puncture the defeat at the battle of tondibi sent splinters running right across the empire just as it 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 ward amongst themselves they would frequently sell their captured enemies into slavery boosting the slave economy to untold heights [Music] 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 center of learning the destruction of the city was so profound but the author of one of the chronicles a man named alsa adi wrote this lament at the beginning of his work i have witnessed the ruin of learning and its utter 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 instructment 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 song guy princes their adventures their story their achievements and their wars [Music] 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 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 tarek al-fatash the chronicle of the seeker this document is 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 mohammed 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 jenning 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 go 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 griots 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 are 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 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 civilizations podcast i'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode rhee brignol jake barrett mills brian chiobi 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 to researching writing recording and editing to get the episodes out to you faster to make them longer and to bring as much life and detail to them as possible i want to thank all my subscribers so far for making this possible if you enjoyed this episode please consider heading on to patreon.com forward slash fall of civilizations underscore podcast or just google fall of civilization's patreon that's p-a-t-r-e-o-n if you can please contribute something and help keep this podcast running for now goodbye and thanks for listening you

Channel: Fall of Civilizations

Views: 456,636

Rating: 4.7690854 out of 5

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Id: GfUT6LhBBYs

Length: 136min 8sec (8168 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/bkrugby78]

I found that commentary interesting, because, in the states, at least in NY, education around Western African kingdoms is a big part of the curriculum, especially since questions on Mansa Musa always shows up on state Regents exams. I suppose this just reveals how divergent education is here in the US.

That said, teachers are different. I can recall a colleague limiting Alexander the Great to a handout, whereas I would spend at least a week on him as he's one of my favorite people who ever existed, and I even use some appropriate clips from the nominally not so good movie "Alexander." (Val Kilmer is amazing as his father, probably the only really good performance).

I'm curious though, as she mentioned she took an AP course, so is AP an international thing, I always just assumed it was a US based thing.