Askia Muhammad I
Askia Muhammad I was the general who took the Songhai empire from Sonni Ali's son a year after the conqueror's death, and in thirty-five years made it the largest state West Africa has had, from the Atlantic Senegal to the Hausa cities and from the salt mines of Taghaza in the Sahara to the Mossi country, governed through provinces and a court of ministers, taxed through a treasury, and made Muslim, with Timbuktu's scholars restored and paid. He went to Mecca in 1496 with a thousand men and three hundred thousand pieces of gold and came back with the title of caliph of the Sudan, and was deposed by his own son when he was old and blind. He was a Soninke, Muhammad Ture, one of Sonni Ali's commanders, and when Sonni Ali drowned in 1492 and his son refused to be a Muslim, Muhammad fought and beat that son at Anfao in April 1493 and took the throne with the backing of the Muslim towns. The name Askia is said to be the daughters of the dead king saying he shall not be. He then made the state Sonni Ali had conquered into one that could be run. The empire was divided into provinces under governors, the army was a professional force of cavalry and captives rather than a levy, the towns had their own qadis, and the Niger fleet under its admiral carried the grain of the inland delta to Gao and Timbuktu. The pilgrimage of 1496 to 1498 was the second West African one Cairo remembered, after Mansa Musa's, and he came back with the sharif of Mecca's investiture and a Moroccan scholar's advice, and with the jurist al-Maghili, who told him how a Muslim king should rule and whom to fight. He fought the Mossi to the south in 1498 in a war al-Maghili sanctioned as jihad, the Tuareg of Air, the Hausa city of Katsina, and the Fulani of Macina, and took Agadez. Timbuktu under him had the university of Sankore at its height, and Leo Africanus, who saw it about 1510, wrote the description Europe knew it by. In 1528 his eldest son Musa deposed him, blind and past eighty, and put him on an island in the Niger, and after that son was killed and another reigned a third, Ismail, brought the old man back to the palace, where he died in 1538. He is buried at Gao under a pyramid of mud with wooden spikes, the oldest monument in Mali still in use.
- Lived: 1443 CE – 1538 CE
- Nationality: Songhai
- Roles: emperor, monarch
