Tondibi and the Death Blow: The End of the First West African Era

On an afternoon in March 1591 a Songhay army of forty thousand men stood facing four thousand Moroccans with firearms. Within a few hours West Africa had changed for two hundred years.

A Date to Establish

The Battle of Tondibi, the decisive confrontation that sealed the fate of Songhay, took place on approximately 13 March 1591. The Moroccan expedition departed from Marrakesh in October 1590, crossed the Sahara in the winter of 1590-1591, and fought Tondibi in March 1591. The year 1592 under which this event is often recorded is an approximation that cannot remain unchallenged: it refers to the full occupation of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, which was consolidated over the course of 1591 and 1592. The blow itself is treated here as what it was, an event in 1591, with an aftermath that extends to 1592 and beyond.

Ahmad al-Mansur: The Golden Sultan

To understand Tondibi we must first know the man who gave the order. Ahmad al-Mansur ruled as Saadi sultan of Morocco from 1578 to 1603. He came to power at a golden moment: his nephew Abd al-Malik had just achieved a great victory at the Battle of the Three Kings (1578), in which the Portuguese king Sebastian fell along with two other kings, including Abd al-Malik himself, who died during or directly after the battle. Ahmad ascended the throne out of this confusion, received the nickname al-Mansur (the Victorious) and later also al-Dhahabi (the Golden), because of his immeasurable wealth.

But that wealth was not unlimited. Al-Mansur inherited a state that had just fought a heavy war, a luxurious court that cost money every day, an army of Turkish janissaries and Andalusian Moriscos that had to be paid, and ambitions that exceeded all his income. He wanted to found a modern Islamic empire that would compete with the Ottomans, and he had the El-Badi palace in Marrakesh built, an imperial residence whose imported marble from Italy alone cost astronomical sums. He maintained a fleet, a standing army, and an international diplomatic presence that even reached as far as England (his ambassadors met Queen Elizabeth I).

For all this he needed gold, and he knew exactly where that gold came from.

The Logic of the Invasion

Al-Mansur’s advisers warned him against the expedition to Songhay. Crossing the Sahara with an army had never been attempted at scale, the distance was triple that of any Arab campaign in early Islamic history, water was unpredictable and diseases were certain. Even if the army arrived on the other side, it would have to operate in a hostile zone of enormous size, without supply lines.

Al-Mansur listened and went ahead anyway. His calculation was cold: even if half of his army died in the desert, the other half with firearms could defeat a Songhay army, and one successful occupation would be enough to redirect the gold route from the southern caravan stations to Marrakesh itself. The investment was small, and the possible return was permanent control over West African gold production.

And there was more. Al-Mansur saw himself as Islamic reformer of the Sahel. He knew of the slow disintegration of Songhay, and he saw the internal succession wars, the complaints of Moroccan merchants about arbitrary taxation in the caravan stations, the religious accusations against the Askias as unsuitable Muslim rulers. In his eyes this was a jihad: a legitimate subjugation of a slackened empire under the authority of a true Islamic sovereign.

This was rhetoric, but not only rhetoric. Al-Mansur had legal arguments worked out by his court ulema to frame the expedition as a religious duty. That is important to note, because the later Ahmed Baba ﵀ would precisely contest this jihad justification in his writings, from his Moroccan exile, in an act of intellectual courage that has made him immortal.

Judar Pasha and His Men

The command of the expedition al-Mansur gave to Judar Pasha, a man whose biography is itself a microcosm of the Mediterranean-Islamic world of that time. Judar was born as Diego de Guevara, a Spaniard from Las Cuevas in Almería, captured as a young boy during a sea raid, converted to Islam in Morocco, castrated to serve as eunuch servant at court, and risen up to the rank of pasha. At his departure to the Sahara he was not yet thirty-five years old.

His troops were a multicolored assembly: Turkish janissaries with muskets, Andalusian Morisco arquebusiers who had been expelled from Spain after 1492 (many of them still spoke Spanish among themselves), Moroccan cavalry with sabers and lances, a small English renegade unit as artillerymen. In total about four thousand combat troops, plus thousands of servants, camel drivers, guides, smiths; together probably nearly eight thousand souls who crossed the Atlas mountains.

They carried, according to the sources: six pieces of artillery (light cannons), about two thousand arquebuses and muskets, powder and ammunition for several battles, four months of food and water supplies.

The journey began in October 1590 from Marrakesh. The route went via Tafilalt, then southward through the western Sahara, via Taghaza and Taodenni (salt mines), then via Araouane southward to Timbuktu. The total distance was about 2500 kilometers and the journey took five months, and according to most sources the expedition lost between a third and half of its troops on the way to thirst, exhaustion and Tuareg raids. When they arrived at the Niger at the end of February 1591, there were still about four thousand effective fighters left.

Those four thousand would prove enough.

Askia Ishaq II: A King in the Trap

Askia Ishaq II had not yet been one year on the throne in 1591. He had won the throne in the civil war of 1588 after the death of Askia Muhammad Bani, but his position was contested: several of his nephews continued to claim, the farmas of the coastal provinces did not pay all tributes, and the Tuareg in the north were restless.

When in February 1591 scouts reported to Ishaq II that a Moroccan army was approaching the Niger, he underestimated the threat. How could four thousand men, exhausted from a desert journey, threaten an empire of five and a half million inhabitants? He mobilized his army, according to the common sources about forty thousand men, mainly cavalry with lances and bows and a mass of footmen with swords and spears, and he marched to the northwest to intercept Judar’s army.

The confrontation took place at Tondibi, almost fifty kilometers north of Gao, on an open plain along the Niger. It was probably 13 March 1591.

The Battle

On one side stood a Songhay army in parade formation, the dendi-fari commanding the right, the balama the left, and Askia Ishaq II himself in the middle, on a white camel with a gilded saddle. Before the cavalry a row of cattle herds was placed, more than a thousand head, and the plan was to drive the cattle into the lines of the Moroccans, so that their formation fell apart, and to follow with the cavalry charge.

On the other side stood Judar Pasha’s troops in a compact square formation, three rows of arquebusiers deep, with cannons on the corners, the Moriscos in front, the Turks behind them, and Judar himself in the center with the reserve.

The battle began with the cattle charge, but cattle are not trained for noise. When the arquebuses fired their first volley, with hundreds of shots at once and clouds of black powder smoke and the dull pounding of the cannon, the cattle turned around, and they stormed not into the Moroccan lines but back into the Songhay lines, in panic, and broke up their own cavalry formation.

Before Ishaq II could regroup, Judar’s cannons rolled forward and a second arquebus volley was fired. The Songhay cavalry, which had never prepared for firearms in this density, fell apart: individual riders fled, while others tried to charge through the square formation but fell by the dozens under the concentrated salvos. The Tarikh al-Sudan reports that within hours the battlefield lay strewn with dead, mainly on the Songhay side, while the Moroccans lost according to their own report fewer than a hundred men.

Askia Ishaq II fled with his remaining troops southward, toward Dendi, where in the marshes he could find refuge. He was not captured, but his army had been knocked out as a central fighting force, and the road to Gao lay open.

The Taking of the Cities

Judar Pasha marched to Gao and took the capital without significant resistance. He was shocked by what he found: a city, certainly, with palaces and mosques, but less rich than Marrakesh, less imposing than he had expected. The gold reserves of the Askia were smaller than his reports had suggested, and he wrote a disappointed letter to al-Mansur:

Al-Mansur was not amused. He soon replaced Judar with Mahmud ibn Zarqun, a harder man, and instructed him to push through the occupation. Djenné was taken, Timbuktu was taken, and the Moroccan garrisons established themselves in the three capitals of the old Songhay.

The occupation authority would in the following decades be known as the Pashalik of Timbuktu, a Moroccan-Andalusian military colony that nominally obeyed Marrakesh but within thirty years became essentially independent. The descendants of the Morisco soldiers remained in the cities and gradually formed a new population group, the Arma (after the Arabic al-rumi or Spanish arma for weapon), which would remain a recognizable population group in Timbuktu into the nineteenth century.

The Deportation of the Scholars

This is the event that more than any other has burned the memory of 1591 into Islamic history.

In October 1593 Mahmud ibn Zarqun on al-Mansur’s orders gave instruction to put the scholars of Timbuktu in chains and deport them to Morocco. The reason was unrest in the city, possibly a coalition of scholars who preached against the occupation. About seventy prominent scholars, including Ahmed Baba ﵀ himself and his family, were arrested and put on caravan to the north.

The journey was brutal. According to Ahmed Baba’s own later testimony many died on the way, and the group arrived in Marrakesh in May 1594, after a journey that had lasted months and in which the scholars were forced to walk on foot, in chains, through the Sahara. Ahmed Baba ﵀ would later write that his books, his library of 1600 volumes that he had carefully built up, had been plundered, and that among his brothers safe in Morocco he was nevertheless the poorest of the poor:

For a scholar his books are his world, and the carrying off of Ahmed Baba’s library was as traumatic for him as any physical mistreatment; in his letters from Morocco a sorrow resounds that no other setback equals.

In Marrakesh Ahmed Baba ﵀ was initially held captive. But al-Mansur, who himself was attached to religious legitimacy, could ultimately not afford to keep the greatest West African scholar in irons. Ahmed Baba ﵀ was released, was placed under house arrest in Marrakesh, and there began a whole new phase of his productivity: he gave lectures, received pupils from the entire Maghreb, debated with the Moroccan Ulema, and wrote some of his most important works.

Mi’raj al-Su’ud: The Refusing Pen

One of those works deserves our special attention. It is called Mi’raj al-Su’ud (The Ladder of Ascent), and it is a juridical treatise on slavery, written around 1615, in Marrakesh.

The context: the Moroccan slave market in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had absorbed tens of thousands of slaves from West Africa, many of them sold under the pretense that they were “infidels” who had been captured during a jihad. This was juridically dubious, since many of these slaves were Muslims, born in Muslim communities, sold by merchants who did not concern themselves with their religious status.

Ahmed Baba ﵀, from his own experience of forced deportation from his Islamic city by an Islamic sovereign, wrote a sharp juridical advisory. He established that conversion to Islam abolishes slavery, not automatically, but juridically; that the merchants who sold Muslims as slaves were acting in conflict with the Maliki school of law; and that many West African communities, especially the Soninke, Songhay, Fulbe and Hausa, had been Muslim for generations, and their members thus could not legally be made into slaves.

Mi’raj al-Su’ud was read and cited in North Africa and the Middle East into the eighteenth century. It is one of the earliest systematic juridical objections to what a Black scholar saw as the injustice in the Islamic slave trade of his own time, and it is evidence of the intellectual tradition in which the Muslim communities of West Africa stood; Ahmed Baba ﵀ wrote against the trade that would carry off a portion of those same communities.

He died in 1627, back in Timbuktu, where he had been allowed to spend his last years after al-Mansur’s death.

What 1591 Has Broken

Tondibi and its aftermath have essentially changed West Africa, until the coming of the nineteenth-century jihad movements (Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and Sokoto, the reform of Hamdullahi under Seku Ahmadu, the Mande jihad of al-Hajj Umar Tal ﵀), from a continent of imperial Islamic state formation into a continent of local, fragmentary Islamic states.

The great trans-Saharan trading axis never broke entirely, since the salt routes continued to exist and the Islamic scholarly tradition in Timbuktu, Djenné and elsewhere lived on, though never again at the same level as under the Askias. But the great model, with its central administration, its standing army, its standardized jurisprudence, its systematic taxation and its diplomatic position in the international Islamic order, only came to life again two centuries later, in Usman dan Fodio’s Sokoto Caliphate from 1804. Between 1591 and 1804 lay a time of Pashalik fragmentation, of rising local non-Muslim states such as Segou and Kaarta, of an intensifying Atlantic slave trade, and of a slow shift of the economic center of gravity from the Sahel to the coast.

From the Niger river that fed a civilization, via Ghana and Mali and the Hajj of Mansa Musa, via Sunni Ali and Askia Muhammad to the fall at Tondibi, this is the story of the first West African Islamic era: an era in which West Africans built empires, founded libraries, drew up legislation, and sent diplomats to Cairo and Marrakesh.

The World After 1591

The centuries after 1591 form the story of a West Africa that became politically fragmented while at the same time the European demand for African labor grew exponentially: the centuries in which countless West Africans, among them Akan, Wolof, Fulbe, Mande, Igbo and Yoruba, were forced to make the Atlantic passage, to Suriname, Curaçao, Aruba, Trinidad, Jamaica and Brazil, and in which the Islamic identity that they sometimes carried with them came under extreme pressure, often disappeared, and sometimes survived in hidden forms.

That Islam in West Africa was far from extinct, the nineteenth century would prove with the great jihad movements: Usman dan Fodio ﵀ who founded the Sokoto, Al-Hajj Umar Tal ﵀ who built his own state, Samory Touré who resisted French colonization to the last, and the Mahdi in Sudan. Islam blossomed again, now in reaction to both internal and external pressure.

With Tondibi and the deportation of Ahmed Baba ﵀ as its emotional pivot, the first great West African Islamic era, from the fifth-century Sorko on the Niger to the sixteenth-century Askia on his throne, is at an end. It was a civilization in the full sense of the word, and what follows is another world, a broken world, a world in which West Africans nevertheless carried what they could carry. That is the passage into a new chapter rather than the end of the story; it is only the half.

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Sources

• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh as-Sudan, chapters 21 and 24 on the arrival of Pasha Jawdar, the battle of Tondibi and the arrest of the scholars of Timbuktu, in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 186–193, 219–221, 223–225.
• Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur, the letter to Askia Ishaq II of Safar 998/December 1589 on the kharaj on the salt of Taghaza, campaigning and jihad, in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 294–295.
• Muhammad as-Saghir al-Ifrani ﵀, Nuzhat al-hadi (shortly before 1724), the Moroccan account of the conquest, the scholars’ fatwa on the mines and the audience of Ahmad Baba ﵀ with al-Mansur, in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 310, 312, 314–316.
• The Anonymous Spaniard (Morocco, 1591), the account of Jawdar’s army, the crossing of the Sahara, the battle and the taking of Gao, in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 319–320, 323–324.
• Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀, his own testimony on the sixteen hundred volumes of his library and the reproach to al-Mansur over his plundered goods and the journey in chains, as quoted in Hunwick, pp. 315–316.
• Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀, Miʿraj al-suʿud (1024/1615), the treatise that unbelief is the sole basis for enslavement and that the people of Kano, Katsina, Bornu and Songhay, as Muslims, may not be enslaved, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 304–306, and in Hunwick, p. lxi.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. lxi, lxiii, 155, 166, 186–193, 219–221, 223–225, 294–295, 310, 312, 314–316, 319–320, 323–324, 337.
  • pp. 155, 166: ʿAbd al-Malik who died in August 1578 at the moment of his victory over the Portuguese at al-Qasr al-Kabir; the bynames al-Mansur and al-Dhahabi; the Arabic al-rumah, shooters, which as arma became the name of the Moroccan elite of Timbuktu.
  • pp. 186–189 (TS ch. 21): Jawdar as a eunuch from Cuevas del Almanzora in Almería; the spy who spent three years in Gao; the letter of December 1589 and Ishaq’s reply with a spear and two iron shoes; the three thousand musketeers with twice as many support troops, 4,070 fighting men according to the Spaniard, who set out in October or November 1590; the arrival at the Niger on 28 February 1591, passing east of Arawan; the Askia at Tondibi, forty-eight kilometres north of Gao, with twelve thousand five hundred cavalry and thirty thousand infantry.
  • pp. 190–193: the battle of 13 March 1591 in which the Songhay army broke in the twinkling of an eye and the soldiers were killed sitting on their shields; Ishaq’s flight across the river and the evacuation of Gao; the palace that disappointed Jawdar, the peace offer of a hundred thousand mithqals and a thousand slaves and the letter about the house of the head of the donkey-drivers; the entry into Timbuktu on 30 May 1591; the seizure of property and free persons after 1591 and the pagan Bambara who ravaged the land of Jenne.
  • pp. 219–221, 223–225 (TS ch. 24): the arrest of the jurists in the Sankore mosque on 19 October 1593, the fourteen killed on the spot, the plunder and the six months in the fort; al-Mansur’s earlier order to send them in shackles; the departure on 18 March 1594 and the arrival in Marrakesh on 21 May 1594; the release on 19 May 1596 and the return of Ahmad Baba ﵀ in 1608.
  • pp. 294–295, 310, 312: the letter of December 1589 on the tax on salt for campaigning and jihad; the scholars of Marrakesh who ruled that jurisdiction over mines belongs to the Imam alone; the unanimous decision of the state council and the departure from Marrakesh on 25 October 1590; the 104,000 fighting men al-Fishtali attributes to Ishaq.
  • pp. 314–316: Jawdar who lost his command through Pasha Mahmud; al-Mansur the Golden for the flood of gold; the twelve hundred slaves and forty loads of gold dust; the sixteen hundred volumes; the audience in which Ahmad Baba ﵀ reproached al-Mansur for his plundered goods, destroyed library and journey in chains; the release on condition of staying in Marrakesh, the teaching and the return under Zaydan.
  • pp. 319–320, 323–324: Jawdar as a young renegade from Las Cuevas, raised in the palace; a thousand renegade and a thousand Andalusian musketeers, five hundred spahis, fifteen hundred lancers and seventy Christian captives with blunderbusses; four small cannon and ten mortars; the crossing of forty days; the cattle the Songhay drove before them and which Jawdar let pass through his opened ranks; the Gao where no gold was found.
  • pp. lxi, lxiii, 337: the Miʿraj al-suʿud written in 1615; the death of Ahmad Baba ﵀ in 1627; Ishaq II defeated on 13 March 1591 and afterwards deposed by his brother Muhammad Gao; Nuh who led the resistance in Dendi.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 65, 304–306, 315, 332, 338, 364–365.
  • pp. 364–365: the invading army that was to a substantial degree European, principally Spanish; the departure in November 1590, the Niger on 28 February and the battle on 13 March 1591 at Tankondibogho; the wildly differing estimates of the Songhay force; Mahmud ibn Zarqun who replaced Jawdar on 17 August 1591; the battle of Zanzan on 14 October and Ishaq’s flight to Dendi; the occupation that became independent of the sultan and installed puppet askias.
  • pp. 304–306: the Miʿraj al-suʿud of 1024/1615, written after the exile of 1593 to 1608; unbelief as the sole basis for enslavement; Bornu, Kano, Songhay, Katsina, Gobir, Mali and most of the Fulbe as Muslims; the 107 Muslim tribes and the thirty-one groups of unbelievers, among them the Bambara.
  • pp. 65, 315, 332, 338: the Bambara of Segu who pushed back the Malian rulers and the infidel Bambara of the chronicles; the increase of slaving during the decline and the emerging European demand on the coast; the two hundred and fifty thousand Africans exported across the Atlantic by the middle of the sixteenth century.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, p. 78.
  • p. 78: the Moroccans who routed the Songhay at Tondibi in 1591 with firearms.