Moroccan Conquest of Songhai (Battle of Tondibi)
A Moroccan expedition crossed the Sahara in 1591 and destroyed the Songhai Empire with firearms. Songhai was the last and largest of the great West African empires, controlling the Niger bend from Gao and holding Timbuktu and Djenné, cities with a genuine scholarly life — the libraries of Timbuktu, the university of Sankore, and a book trade that the sources describe as the most profitable in the city. Its wealth came from controlling the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt. The Saadi sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, having beaten the Portuguese at Ksar el-Kebir in 1578 and collected enormous ransoms, decided to take the source of the gold rather than tax its arrival. He sent some 4,000 men, many of them Andalusian and European renegades and captives, under a Spanish-born commander, with arquebuses and light cannon, across 1,500 miles of desert. Perhaps half died on the way. They met the Songhai army of tens of thousands at Tondibi in March 1591. Cavalry and infantry with spears and bows could not close with massed firearms, and the empire's army broke in a day. The conquest did not deliver what it promised. The gold came from mines far to the south that the Moroccans never controlled, the occupying force fragmented into an independent military caste, and the trade routes and the scholarship of Timbuktu were disrupted — Ahmad Baba, the city's most famous scholar, was deported to Marrakesh in chains. The Niger bend was left in fragments, and no comparable state replaced it. The manuscripts survived in private family libraries for four centuries, and tens of thousands of them were smuggled out of Timbuktu in 2012 when jihadist groups occupied the city and began burning them. Most are now in Bamako.
- Year: 1591 CE
- Category: Military
