Judar Pasha

Judar Pasha crossed the Sahara with four thousand men and destroyed the Songhai Empire, and he was a Spaniard by birth. He was taken as a child from Las Cuevas de Almanzora in Almeria, castrated, and raised in the household of Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur in Marrakesh, rising to command; the Moroccan army of the period was full of Andalusian exiles, Morisco refugees and European renegades, and its firearms came with them. In 1590 al-Mansur sent him south with about 4,000 men, half of them arquebusiers, several thousand camels and a few light cannon, on a march of some 1,500 miles across the desert that killed a large part of the force before it saw an enemy. At Tondibi in March 1591 he met Askia Ishaq II's far larger army and broke it with volley fire, the cattle driven at his line turning back through the Songhai ranks. He took Gao and found it disappointing - he wrote to Marrakesh that the house of the Askia was worth less than the donkey-drivers' houses of Morocco - and recommended accepting the tribute Ishaq offered. Al-Mansur refused, replaced him for it, and then reinstated him. He spent years administering the conquest and fighting an insurgency he could not end, was recalled in 1599, and was killed in Marrakesh in the succession wars after al-Mansur's death. The conquest never paid for itself. Morocco held the Niger bend for a few years and then lost control of its own garrison, which settled, married locally and stopped remitting anything at all. He is one of the more striking figures of the period: a Spaniard, taken as a child and unmanned, who conquered an African empire for a Moroccan sultan and was killed by Moroccans in the end.

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