Askia Ishaq II

Askia Ishaq II was the last effective ruler of the Songhai Empire and lost it in a single battle to an army that had crossed the Sahara. He came to the throne in 1588 after a civil war between branches of the Askia dynasty, at the end of a century in which Songhai had grown into the largest state West Africa had known, controlling the Niger bend, the salt of Taghaza and the gold routes north, with Timbuktu and Djenne as centres of scholarship. The threat came from Morocco, where Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur wanted the gold and the salt and had firearms. In late 1590 a force of about four thousand under Judar Pasha - mostly renegades and Andalusian Moriscos, with arquebuses and light cannon - marched across the desert; perhaps half survived the crossing. Ishaq met them at Tondibi in March 1591 with a far larger army, reportedly tens of thousands of infantry and cavalry, and a herd of cattle driven forward to break the Moroccan line. Gunfire turned the cattle back into his own men. The Songhai army had spears and bows and no answer to volley fire, and it broke. Ishaq withdrew rather than negotiate, offering tribute that al-Mansur refused, was deposed by his own commanders and killed by Fulani in the Gurma. The empire fragmented, the trans-Saharan trade never recovered its old organisation, and Timbuktu's scholars were deported to Marrakesh. Timbuktu's most famous scholar, Ahmad Baba, was deported to Marrakesh and wrote that he had lost 1,600 books. The Moroccan garrison left behind became a caste of its own, the Arma, who ruled the Niger bend for two centuries while taking orders from nobody.

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