African Kings

A Captivating Guide to the Mighty Rulers of Ancient Africa and Their Enduring Legacies

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Introduction: Nine Ancient African Kings

This book tells the story of nine African kings who ruled in ancient and medieval times. They include Taharqa, King of Kush and Pharaoh of Egypt (r. 690–664 BCE). His grandfather, who was also the king of Kush, conquered Egypt, and the family ruled as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Taharqa ruled for twenty-five years and defeated the military superpower of the day, the Assyrians. The conquerors are known both as Kushites and Nubians because Kush was centered in Nubia, in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan.

Massinissa (r. 202–148 BCE) was an ally of Carthage in the Punic Wars (the three wars between Rome and Carthage). He ruled Numidia, which included much of what is today Algeria and Tunisia. Massinissa had originally been an ally of Carthage but switched to Rome’s side after Rome defeated the Carthaginian armies in Spain. Under Massinissa’s fifty-year rule, Numidia became one of Rome’s breadbaskets, and the formidable Numidian cavalrymen were valuable mercenaries in Roman conquests.

Ezana (r. c. 330s–360s CE) ruled Axum, a kingdom south of Nubia that included some of what is today Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. His rule extended across the Red Sea to include Yemen. Axum had trade relations with Byzantium, and coins from Axum—the first minted in Africa south of the Sahara—have been found as far away as Syria and India. Ezana became Christian under the influence of his tutor, Frumentius, a Roman from Syria. Ezana and Frumentius are considered the founders of the Ethiopian Christian Church, which flourishes to this day. Ezana conquered the Kingdom of Meroe, which had been ruled by the descendants of Taharqa for nearly a thousand years.

Abd al-Mu’min (r. 1130–1164 CE) was the founder of the Almohad Empire, which stretched from Andalusia in Spain to the south of Morocco and east to Algeria, Tunisia, and part of Libya. He was a Berber and originated as the designated successor to Ibn Tumart, a religious visionary who formed the theology of the puritanical Almohad movement and declared himself caliph. Mu’min inherited this religious leadership and also declared himself caliph, but he proved to be an extremely capable military leader and also a brilliant administrator. He converted the movement from being based on piety to a hereditary monarchy for his descendants.

Baybars I (r. 1260–1277) was a Mamluk sultan of Egypt. He was originally a slave soldier from the Qipchaq people north of the Black Sea. They were shattered by the Mongol invasion, and Baybars was sold as a slave several times, finally being sold in Egypt to be trained as a slave soldier. The Mamluks began as a slave army in service to the sultan but toppled the ruling dynasty and installed themselves as rulers. Baybars was a highly capable soldier, an excellent diplomat, and a murderer, twice killing sultans before taking power himself. He extended Mamluk rule into Palestine and Syria, and he fought almost annual battles against the Mongol Ilkhanids, who had founded a Mongol-ruled empire in Persia and Iraq. Unlike most commanders who fought the Mongols, Baybars won most of the engagements.

Mansa Musa (r. 1312–1337) was emperor of Mali, a large empire in West Africa that ran a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast inland to Timbuktu. The empire was largely in the savannah, the grassland that runs parallel to the southern edge of the Sahara from the coast all the way across Africa (the region is called the Sahel and also the Sudan—not to be confused with the modern nation of Sudan). Mali ruled some of the rainforest regions to the south and nominally ruled the goldfields of Bambuk, which for centuries produced about half of the world’s gold. The famous Venetian gold ducats were made of gold from Mali, and many historians consider Mansa Musa to be the richest man in all of history. He brought so much gold to Egypt when he was on his hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) that it depressed the price of gold for a decade. Mali’s military strength lay in the cavalry, which was possible in the Sahel region because of the absence of the dreaded tsetse fly.

Another emperor of a huge Sahelian empire was Askia Mohammed (r. 1493–1528) of Songhai, a general who led a coup against the emperor because the emperor preferred native religions rather than Islam. Askia founded a dynasty that lasted a century. He expanded Songhai into the largest of the medieval West African empires. He lived to a very old age and died a miserable death.

Afonso I of Kongo (r. 1506–1543) became king in 1506 at the dawn of European expansion into Africa and the Americas. Impressed with Portuguese missionaries, he and his father both became Christians in the 1490s, well before he became king. He took a Portuguese name, Afonso. He invited Portuguese missionaries and technical experts to help reform his kingdom. One of his many sons was consecrated by Pope Leo X in Rome as a bishop. During his long reign, the Atlantic slave trade started, and the Portuguese began kidnapping Afonso’s subjects. Afonso wrote letters to the Portuguese king, João III (John III), about the slave trade. The letters still exist in Lisbon and Rome; they are the best historical records of Afonso’s reign.

Ahmad Gran was a crusading emir (r. 1527–1543) of the Adal Sultanate in the Horn of Africa in what is now the Harar region of Ethiopia and Somalia. He was an imam but also a charismatic warrior king, leading a powerful force of Somali warriors. His holy war conquered almost all of Ethiopia, reducing the emperor of Ethiopia to a refugee hiding in a remote fortress. Ahmad Gran’s intent was to destroy Christianity in Ethiopia and set up an Islamic emirate with himself as ruler. Ethiopia appealed to the Portuguese, who sent a small army of musketeers and artillery to help. Gran also appealed for help from Arabia and received some Ottoman musketeers. The Ottomans had conquered Egypt and extended their power to Hijaz in Arabia and to Yemen. The Portuguese suffered horrendous casualties, but the combined army finally defeated and killed Gran, ending his quest to create a powerful Muslim kingdom in the Ethiopian Highlands.

It is important to note that the spellings of names and ancient places vary considerably from source to source. Names of places and persons in this book follow widely accepted terms. BCE means Before Common Era, which is the same as BC, and CE means Current Era, which is the same as AD, beginning with the year 1. The change from BC/AD to BCE/CE is now generally used by historians.

Chapter 1 – Taharqa, King of Kush and Pharaoh of Egypt (690–664 BCE)

The Nile is thousands of miles long, stretching from the Mediterranean to the highlands of Ethiopia. While the river is most famously connected with the fabled civilization and dynasties of Egypt, other ancient cultures were also centered on the Nile. One of these was Kush, a region south of Egypt, located in what today is southern Egypt and which included much of today’s Sudan. Kush was a kingdom in what more modern records call Black Africa. Kush was an imperial colony ruled by an Egyptian viceroy for hundreds of years. It became independent during an era of Egyptian collapse and then conquered Egypt. For almost a century, Kush ruled all of Egypt, which made the Kushite kings pharaohs. Kushite rule in Egypt has been listed as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty by Egyptologists in the king lists. Kushite rule extended somewhat into Palestine and perhaps as far as parts of Lebanon.

Taharqa (r. 690–664 BCE) is the most famous king of Kush and Kushite pharaoh. Busts and statues of him have been found all over Egypt. He was regarded as powerful, indicated by the fact that most of those busts and statues were intentionally vandalized after his rule. He was mentioned in the Bible for his military actions against the Assyrians invading Judah. Not a great deal is known about him, but it is apparent that he was thoroughly Egyptianized and that he was a competent military commander. He inflicted defeats on the greatest power of the day, the Assyrians. Incessant Assyrian attacks destroyed Kushite rule in Egypt.

A statue of Taharqa that stands in the Louvre.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taharqa,_Louvre_Museum.jpg

The kingdom is referred to both as Kush and Nubia, and Taharqa is likewise considered both a Kushite and a Nubian. Kush was a common term for many centuries, but the area was also often referred to as Nubia. The land of Kush did not include all of Nubia; rather, it overlapped with it, but confusingly, Kushites were and are often still referred to as Nubians. The kingdom included much of what is today northern Sudan. After the Kushites were thrown out of Egypt, their kingdom later morphed into the Kingdom of Meroe (named after the capital city), which lasted into the 4th century CE.

Kush was ruled by Egypt as a dependency and was administered to provide commodities as cheaply as possible—a kind of early colonialism that was not so different from later exploitations. Nubian troops were used as mercenaries in many of Egypt’s wars, and there appears to have been some intermarriage between Kushites and Egyptians.​[1]

Kushite independence was achieved about 1069 BCE when Egypt was in the throes of a political breakdown and lost control of Kush. By that point, Kush had been heavily Egyptianized in terms of culture, including religion, and the Kushites had adopted many Egyptian gods. This made Kushite rule in Egypt not so very different from previous dynasties.​[2]

It is not clear how deeply Egyptianization penetrated into Kushite society, but it is very clear that rulers and the elite were thoroughly acculturated to Egypt’s ways. Starting with Taharqa, the kings of Kush began to be buried in pyramids, although the Kushite pyramids were considerably smaller than the ones at Giza. Trade began early on and continued for a very long time. Kush exported ivory, gold, slaves, and other goods. It imported iron and various kinds of Egyptian religious and luxury goods. Kush later became noted for its ironwork. The kingdom traded with Egypt but also with other African regions and across the Red Sea with Arabia and regions to the east.

Kushite warriors appear to have been mostly sturdy infantry with a focus on archers. The Kushite archers used a large bow with a powerful draw and often used poisoned arrows. They did not use armor but likely used shields, as well as short swords and spears. Combined with Egyptian forces under Kushite command, the army would have included some chariots and masses of infantry armed with spears. The officers likely used swords. There does not appear to have been much use of cavalry. There was some fighting on the waters of the Nile, which likely consisted of soldiers on board regular river boats rather than specialized naval units.

A problem in this era was that Assyria’s forces had iron weapons, while Egypt and Kush had bronze weapons. It is probable that Kushite archers, to an extent, negated the advantage that iron weapons gave Assyrian soldiers in face-to-face combat. Kushites quickly adapted ironworking from the Assyrians. Some Nubians are described as horsemen, which might mean there were better grazing lands in Kush in classical times. Horses were too costly to maintain to be commonly used in Egypt (donkeys were more common).

The Kushite era in Egypt began with a little-known king named Kashta, who declared himself ruler of both Upper and Lower Egypt. Kashta ruled from Thebes, but how much of Egypt he actually ruled is unknown. Kashta was somehow invited to Thebes, where Nubian mercenaries defended the ruling class of priests of Amun from aggressive rulers who came from elsewhere in Egypt. Rulers in Lower Egypt (the fertile Nile Delta region in the north) threatened to expand and conquer Thebes. Kashta eliminated the threat and returned to the Kushite capital, Napata.​[3]

His son, Piye (r. 744–714 BCE), mobilized his armies and marched to conquer all of Egypt when a ruler from the Nile Delta, Tefnakht, sought to conquer all of Lower Egypt. Piye’s forces defeated the threat. Then, for unknown reasons, he returned to the Kushite capital, Napata, leaving Lower Egypt in the hands of native princes who acknowledged Kushite sovereignty. Piye took the full titles of an Egyptian pharaoh but chose to live in Kush.​[4]

Piye’s successor was Shabatka (r. 714–705 BCE). Shabatka, also spelled as Shebitku, put down a rebellion in Lower Egypt and asserted firm Kushite control over all of Egypt. Shabatka seems to have revered the Egyptian culture, rebuilding temples and having old documents recopied. It seems as if the Kushite kings did not see themselves as foreign conquerors so much as restorers of ancient Egypt’s old glory. Shabatka and his successor, Shabaka, ruled from Thebes. All of the Kushite rulers were builders of temples to the god Amun. They had old papyri recopied and saw old ceremonies reestablished.​[5]

Shabaka had his son, Haremakhet, appointed as the high priest of Amun at Thebes and appointed his sister, Amenirdis I, as God’s Wife to the god Amun at the great temple at Thebes. These religious positions were extremely important, and both held a great deal of power (Taharqa later appointed his sister, Amenirdis II, to this position, although she seems not to have taken it up). Shabaka’s actions were essentially the same as pharaohs of previous dynasties.​[6]

Egypt was part of the ancient Middle Eastern world. Centuries before the rise of the Greeks and later Romans, the dominant power in the Middle East was the Assyrians. The Assyrian Empire included all or part of what is today Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Their armies were highly efficient, and Assyrian tactics are noted for their ruthlessness, sometimes massacring all of the inhabitants of cities that resisted or rebelled. The border region between Egypt and Assyrian territory included historical Palestine and some of Syria, which had been fought over for centuries. These border regions were restive and were the cause of several wars between Assyria and Kushite Egypt, which ultimately led to the end of Kushite control of Egypt.

Sometime in the spring of 720 in Palestine, Piye’s commanders fought an Assyrian army in an indecisive battle that seems to have led to an uneasy stalemate. This obscure war shows that the Kushites commanded a formidable force, fighting to a draw with an Assyrian army. The size of the two forces is not known, but there were likely many soldiers on both sides. Kush was noted for its archers and Assyria for its infantry and chariots. The nature of the battle is unknown.​[7]

Another war broke out when Assyrian King Sargon was killed in a battle in Anatolia in 705 BCE. The death of the Assyrian king led to a period of uncertainty in the regions on the periphery of the Assyrian Empire. Shabaka was interested in enlarging his kingdom. Taking advantage of the chaos following Sargon’s death, Shabaka attempted to expand into Palestine, which included what is now Jordan. Shabaka’s interventions do not seem to have added any territory to his kingdom.

In 701, King Hezekiah of Judah stopped paying tribute to Assyria with Shabaka’s encouragement.​[8] Assyria sent an army to chastise the rebels, and Shabaka sent the Egyptian-Kushite army into what is now Israel. The two armies met in battle at a place called Eltekeh. This was another inconclusive battle, again showing that the Kushites were militarily effective simply by not being defeated. The Assyrians were commanded by their formidable king, Sennacherib, Sargon’s son. Taharqa took part in this battle, although in what capacity is unknown. In some accounts, Taharqa was only seventeen, and in others, he was some kind of commander. At any rate, it was probably Taharqa’s first taste of fighting against the Assyrians, and he apparently acquitted himself well.​[9]

There was a period of peace after the battle at Eltekeh. In 690, Taharqa inherited the throne from Shabaka, who was either his uncle or half-brother, and, with it, inherited the intermittent conflicts with Assyria. Taharqa was crowned in the Egyptian city of Thebes. He would have been around thirty by that time. He held important positions during Shabaka’s reign, so he ascended to the throne as an experienced ruler and commander.

The new king/pharaoh devoted himself to restoring some of Egypt’s faded glory. He restored temples and built sanctuaries. How native Egyptians regarded him is unknown, but the first decade or so of his reign was a period of peace and prosperity. The Kushite rulers presented themselves as restorers of Egypt’s past glory. Later in his reign, Egypt was again troubled by wars with the powerful Assyrians. One of Taharqa’s achievements was defeating the Assyrians. In their prime, the Assyrians rarely lost battles, let alone campaigns.

The years of peace ended with another Assyrian invasion in February and March of 673. Taharqa defeated the invaders in 673.

What the Kushite Empire looked like under Taharqa.

Original map: LommesAddition of Kushite heartland पाटलिपुत्र (talk) Source: National Geographic 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kushite_heartland_and_Kushite_Empire_of_the_25th_dynasty_circa_700_BCE.jpg

Taharqa has the unusual distinction for an African king of being mentioned in the Bible. In 2 Kings 19:9, the text reads, “Now Sennacherib received a report that Tirhakah [Taharqa] the Cushite king of Egypt, was marching out to meet him.” The context was the Assyrian king had attacked Judah to punish a rebellion and had taken many towns but not Jerusalem.​[10]

A few historians assert that the intervention of Taharqa probably saved Jerusalem from total destruction at the hands of the Assyrians and, therefore, helped preserve the Jewish people. All that is certain is that Jerusalem was not attacked, although many towns and cities in the various small kingdoms in the region did fall to the Assyrians. Some were plundered and destroyed.

These events are not well understood, but Taharqa’s intervention ended in his retreat to Egypt. The Assyrian king was murdered around 681, and Taharqa sent some forces into Palestine to probe whether Egypt could exploit the uncertainly following the king’s death. This apparently resulted in little, except perhaps further angering the Assyrians.

The next Assyrian invasion came in 671. An Assyrian inscription was found in which King Esarhaddon, referring explicitly to Taharqa, proclaimed, “I laid siege to Memphis, his royal city and captured it in half a day. I tore out the root of Cush from Egypt.” There is a depiction of Taharqa’s son, who was captured at Memphis, bowing to the Assyrian king, wearing a rope around his neck, which was symbolic of submission.​[11]

The Assyrians captured Memphis and part of Taharqa’s family, including his brother and his son. Taharqa retreated to Napata, which seems to have been beyond Assyria’s reach. Despite the defeat, Taharqa rallied his subjects and led his army back into Egypt, retaking Memphis in 669 and massacring the Assyrian garrisons. The Assyrians invaded again under the famed King Assurbanipal and, in a campaign that lasted from 667 to 666, conquered Memphis again and sacked Thebes, massacring the Kushite garrisons. This campaign permanently ended the Kushite control of Egypt and, for a time, added it to the Assyrian Empire. Assyria did not have the reach to push into the Kingdom of Kush proper, though.​[12]

Taharqa died in Napata about 664 BCE. He was about thirty when he ascended the throne and ruled for twenty-five years, so he was in his late fifties when he died. He was the most powerful of the Kushite rulers. Evidence of this is that most of the busts and statues of him that he had set up in many places in Egypt were disfigured after his death. The noses were broken off to ensure he could not return from the dead, and the crown-like symbol of rule on his head was defaced.​[13]

A likeness of Taharqa found in the Nubian Museum.

Bruce Allardice, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El-Kurru_King_Taharqa_XXV_Dynasty.jpg

An Egyptian army sacked Napata in 593 BCE, and the capital of Kush moved south to Meroe. The Kingdom of Kush continued to exist in various forms for a very long time. Taharqa’s descendants continued to rule for hundreds of years as Kush morphed into the Kingdom of Meroe. That was beyond the reach of Assyrian power and was not within the reach of later rulers of Egypt, including the Ptolemies, Romans, Byzantines, and Persians. Rome and Meroe had some border conflicts but agreed on border issues and maintained friendly trade for generations. The trade continued through Byzantine times and lasted until the Arab conquest of Egypt.

Most of what had been Nubia was destroyed when the huge Aswan Dam created Lake Nasser (construction ended in 1970). The lake runs 340 miles upstream from the dam and covers about 2,000 square miles. Much of historic Kush and historic Nubia lies under the surface of the lake.

Chapter 2 – Massinissa, King of Numidia and Roman Ally (202–148 BCE)

Massinissa was from Numidia, a region that included much of what is today Tunisia and Algeria. The Numidians are among the ancestors of today’s Berber people. The history of Numidia is deeply mixed with that of Carthage, which was Rome’s biggest rival for a century or so. Carthage was founded in 814 BCE by Phoenician traders from the Levant, roughly today’s Lebanon. Carthage gradually became a powerful trading empire, settling and ruling considerable portions of North Africa, some of the Mediterranean islands, and later much of southern Spain. While there were scattered Greek and other Phoenician colonial settlements dotting the coasts of the western Mediterranean, Carthage became the most prominent.

Carthage brought a sharp intensification of urbanization and trade to North Africa, and Numidia as a kingdom formed under Carthaginian tutelage. Numidians were primarily pastoral nomads, and the name is the source of our word “nomad.” As nomadic pastoralists, they were expert horsemen, similar to the later Mongols. Numidian cavalry were mercenaries in most of the Carthaginian wars.​[14]

The African warrior king Massinissa lived a long life. He lived during the Punic Wars (“Punic” was a variation on the word “Phoenician”). Carthage was by far the deadliest enemy of the Roman Republic, and the three Punic Wars were among the bloodiest of antiquity.

Massinissa was educated in Carthage, which suggests he was a hostage to ensure his father’s good behavior, a common practice. It means he knew Carthage well and probably spoke Punic, the language of Carthage.

Massinissa of Numidia.

No machine-readable author provided. Numidix assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GM_Massinissa.png

Carthage’s intervention in conflicts on the island of Sicily resulted in a series of savage and exceedingly bloody conflicts with Rome that nearly toppled Rome. These were not just altercations between ancient states. The wars involved hundreds of thousands of sailors and soldiers and were fought to the death. Three wars were fought between 264 and 146 BCE, ending in the complete destruction of Carthage. Some of the naval battles between Carthage and Rome were among the largest and bloodiest in history. The naval battle of Cape Ecnomus might have been the largest naval battle in history prior to World War II. Massinissa was involved in the Second (218–201 BCE) and Third Punic Wars (149–146 BCE).

Numidia began with nomadic tribes in North Africa to the west of Carthage (Carthage was located not far from today’s capital of Tunisia, Tunis) and across almost to Morocco. The name seems to come from a Greek word meaning “nomads.” Their history before the Carthaginian era is largely unknown. It is thought that the Numidians were loose alliances of tribal people and that they were mostly nomadic herders on horseback. They were different from the Mauritanians, another group of people to the west of Numidia that occupied what is now western Algeria and much of Morocco.

The ancient historian Strabo mentioned the Numidians, describing how they grew beards, braided their hair, and wore animal skins and a loose, unbelted tunic.​[15]

The tribes provided mercenary cavalry, which was an important factor in the Carthaginian land campaigns in Spain and Italy. There was a powerful contingent of Numidian cavalry in Italy in 216 BCE when Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca annihilated a large Roman army at Cannae, a battle still studied in military schools.

The Numidian cavalry was noted by several ancient writers, and some of the cavalry are depicted on Trajan’s Column, a remarkable bas-relief showing his efforts in the Dacian Wars (101–106 CE). The column shows a troop of Numidian cavalry the way they are characterized in some of the ancient writings: small and slender, like their horses, using small round rawhide shields and carrying javelins. They controlled their horses with woven collars, not bridles. They were famed for their superb horsemanship.

Numidian horses were smaller and considered nimbler than the mounts used by Roman cavalry. They did not use saddles or bridles, instead using a single rein attached to a woven collar fitted around the horse’s neck. The horses could graze on grass, not needing oats or other special food. The horses were never groomed, their hooves never cleaned, and the manes and tails went unbrushed.​[16]

Stirrups had not yet been invented. So, cavalry had not yet developed into the shock assault formations that characterized heavy cavalry in the days of the cataphracts in the later wars between Byzantium and Persia. Light cavalry was useful for scouting, pursuing fleeing enemy troops, and patrolling. They could decimate infantry formations caught in the flank or rear. Cavalry could inflict very heavy casualties on fleeing infantry. Not all Numidians were nomads, but the nomads were the cavalrymen. They were on horseback from early boyhood. The Numidian kings had troops other than horsemen too, such as slingers, archers, and war elephants.​[17]

Numidia was not a united kingdom before Massinissa. It was separated into two groups of tribes: the Masaesyli in the west and the Massylii in the east (the similarity of the names has confused historians for centuries). The two tribal groups were enemies at times. During the Second Punic War, the Masaesyli in the west were allied with Carthage under their king, Syphax, and the Massylii under King Gala in the east were allied with Rome. Massinissa was the son of King Gala and was born about 238 BCE. Carthage sent large forces to Spain and conquered much of the peninsula. Some of the Iberian tribes called on the Romans for help, and Rome sent help.

Carthaginian forces from Spain under the famed general Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps into Italy in 218 BCE—this was the famous crossing where Hannibal managed to march a few war elephants over mountains into Italy during the winter. For the next fifteen years, Hannibal’s army occupied various parts of Italy and inflicted several crushing defeats on Roman armies but never managed to occupy Rome itself. Hannibal’s veteran army was a mortal threat, but despite huge losses, Rome managed to continue organizing armies.

Massinissa’s cavalry was a major element in the Carthaginian armies in Spain. Massinissa had become king of the Massylii after the death of his father, King Gala, but the throne was usurped by his brother Oezalces, who soon lost it to Syphax. This seems to have been the major reason why he switched sides and joined Rome.​[18]

The wars in Spain were hard fought and involved the Scipio family, who were among Rome’s greatest commanders. Publius Scipio and his brother Gnaeus Scipio were defeated and killed (in different battles) by the Carthaginians in Spain, but the brothers had managed to block any Carthaginian reinforcements from reaching Hannibal in Italy.​[19]

Another Publius Scipio, who would come to be known as Scipio Africanus (236–183 BCE), defeated the Carthaginians in several battles and drove them from Spain. The story of how Massinissa met with Scipio and decided to change sides involves the Roman capture of Massinissa’s nephew, Massiva, who was not supposed to be involved in the fighting. Scipio had ordered the African captives to be sold into slavery. Scipio learned the story of Massiva, pardoned him, and sent him back to Massinissa. Following this, the Numidian king met secretly with Scipio and agreed to change sides. It is not clear if this was a calculated act by Scipio or a spontaneous meeting.​[20]

Massinissa returned to Numidia to find his kingdom in ruins; Syphax had conquered it and looted it thoroughly. He gathered a force to assert his claim to the throne, but Syphax defeated Massinissa, who fled to the mountains with the remnant of his troops. He became a brigand chief in the mountains and survived by raiding caravans. Syphax ruled Numidia from his capital of Siga, near modern Oran in Algeria.

The crucial incident was Syphax abandoning the Roman alliance in favor of Carthage. Some Roman troops landed in Africa, but it was some time before Scipio landed with a large army. In the intervening time, Massinissa and Roman cavalry under Laelius (Scipio’s second in command) ran Syphax to ground, capturing him at Cirta, assuring that Massinissa would become ruler over all of Numidia.​[21]

When Scipio invaded North Africa, Massinissa joined him with his hundreds of brigands, and apparently, Numidians flocked to his banner. Scipio inflicted several defeats on Carthaginian forces (the battleground was Carthaginian home territory, modern Tunisia). Ultimately, Hannibal was called home from Italy in 204 BCE, finally ending the mortal threat to Rome that had lasted for the fifteen years of Hannibal’s Italian campaign.

Scipio built up his army and prepared to attack Carthage itself. The Carthaginian army was reorganized by Hannibal. Hannibal’s name itself was probably worth thousands of troops, but the Romans were better supplied, better armed, and, for once, had a commander with military talent equal to Hannibal’s.

The crucial battle took place at Zama, the location of which has not been positively identified. Hannibal and the Romans each had about forty thousand troops. Hannibal arranged his army in three lines, with inexperienced levies in front and his Italian veterans in the third line. He had about sixty war elephants, but they were not well trained. Hannibal had some loyal Numidian cavalry on his flanks. Scipio probably had the better army overall, although Hannibal’s veterans from the Italian campaign were hardened and formidable soldiers.

Massinissa’s cavalry was an important element in Scipio’s force. His men were situated on the flank. The battle began with the Carthaginian elephants charging, but the Romans had prepared for them, opening up wide paths for them to pass through with trumpets and drums to confuse the animals. As a result, the war elephants were not a factor in the battle. Massinissa’s cavalry charged the Punic cavalry on Hannibal’s flanks and routed them, chasing them from the battlefield.​[22]

The Romans rolled up Hannibal’s first two lines, where Hannibal had placed his less trained soldiers, with his Italian campaign veterans in the third line. There was hard fighting at this point in the battle. Massinissa’s cavalry returned to the battlefield after routing Hannibal’s smaller number of Numidians, appearing in the rear of the Carthaginian army and trapping it between his charging cavalry and the advancing Roman legions. The result was a slaughter. Around 20,000 of Hannibal’s troops were killed, while the Romans suffered the loss of 1,500 men. Massinissa’s Numidians turned the battle to Rome’s favor.​[23]

The decisive defeat at Zama ended the Second Punic War. Carthage was forced to cede its territory in Spain, cede the islands it controlled, give up its fleet, and pay a huge indemnity of ten thousand silver talents over fifty years, an astronomical sum calculated to reduce Carthage to poverty. Carthage was allowed to have ten warships to fight piracy but could not make war without Rome’s permission.

Because of his total victory over Hannibal, this Roman commander is known as Scipio Africanus, a name bestowed upon him by the Roman Senate, something only granted by extraordinary achievements. He was later called Scipio Africanus the Elder to differentiate him from Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus (185–129 BCE), who commanded the Roman army that finally destroyed Carthage.

Rome recognized Massinissa as the king of a united Numidia. Because of his alliance with Rome, he was truly independent, not a puppet ruler. Rome valued a strong ally near Carthage. He ruled Numidia from 202 to 148 BCE. The most important achievement of his long rule of more than fifty years was his policy of settling nomadic Numidians and establishing agriculture as the basis of subsistence rather than nomadism with flocks and herds. Numidia gradually became, along with Egypt, one of Rome’s breadbaskets, although nomadism continued, and Numidian cavalry continued to be hired as mercenaries in the Roman forces.

Massinissa was keen on building his reputation. One propaganda coup occurred in 179 BCE when Numidia had a bumper grain crop. He sent shipments of grain to the Greek island of Delos, a sacred island (it was considered the birthplace of both Apollo and Artemis). As a result, his reputation in Greece and Rome soared.​[24]

A coin with Massinissa’s head on it.

Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MASSINISSA_-_MAA_23_-_87000716.jpg

The Numidian king could raid Carthage almost at will because of the condition imposed on the city that said it could not make war without Roman permission. The Romans were not going to give Carthage permission to war against a Roman ally. The Carthaginians declared war in 151 on Numidia, but their forces were ineffective; Massinissa led his armies at the age of ninety-two and defeated Carthage.​[25]

Massinissa was a Roman favorite, but Rome could be as cruel to its client kings as it was to its enemies. The best-known story about Massinissa involves a Carthaginian woman named Sophonisba, who came from an aristocratic family. Carthage decided to cement the alliance with Massinissa by giving her in marriage to the Numidian king, but the proposed alliance floundered when Massinissa switched sides and joined Rome. Carthage then betrothed Sophonisba to the rival king, Syphax. Syphax and Sophonisba were captured by Roman and Numidian troops at the city of Cirta.​[26]

Massinissa still wished to marry her, but Scipio insisted she be taken to Rome to show in his triumph, a sad fate for a Carthaginian aristocrat. Massinissa sent her a vial of poison, which she used to commit suicide and thus avoid the degradation of being displayed in the triumph. Scipio does not seem to have punished Massinissa for this subversive act.​[27]

An illustration of Sophonisba asking Massinissa for help.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Central_wall_depicting_Sophonisba_requesting_help_from_Massinissa_(C16).jpg

Massinissa apparently nibbled for years at the borders of what remained of Carthaginian territory, and there was little they could do about it because Rome firmly supported their ally. Besides, Rome was interested in keeping Carthage weak.

Massinissa was succeeded as king by his son, Micipsa (r. 148–118 BCE), who continued to show his loyalty to Rome and harass Carthage. Chaos ensued following Micipsa’s death in 118. He left two sons, Adherbal and Hiempsal, but a highly able but illegitimate nephew was also in his household, Jugurtha. Jugurtha usurped the throne, having Hiempsal murdered and ousting Adherbal. Adherbal had Rome’s support, and the Romans intervened. The result was the Jugurthine War (112–106 BCE). Jugurtha was an able commander, and the war was hard fought, but Rome, under Gaius Marius, another exceptional general, won. Jugurtha was taken to Rome in chains and paraded in a triumph. In 104, he was either executed or starved to death in prison; the sources are not clear which.​[28]

Massinissa’s dynasty continued with mixed success. Juba I chose the wrong side in the civil war (the one that essentially ended the Roman Republic) and was defeated in 46 BCE, committing suicide after the defeat.​[29]

Augustus, the first Roman emperor, installed Juba II (ruled as king of Numidia and Mauretania from 29 BCE to 24 CE). He was married to Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Massinissa’s dynasty vanished from history when Emperor Caligula had Juba II’s son murdered.​[30]

The Romans granted some of Numidia to Bocchus I, King of Mauretania and a Roman ally (Mauretania then included part of what is now Algeria and northern Morocco). The eastern portion was converted into a Roman province, becoming part of Africa Proconsularis. The North African provinces were later conquered by the Vandals and then by the Byzantines. They were subject to bitter religious violence among Christian sects. The region was part of the Arab conquest that exploded out of the Middle East, and it has been predominately Muslim since.

Chapter 3 – Ezana, King of Axum and a Christian Saint (320–360 CE)

Axum was a powerful kingdom founded in the 1st century CE. It flourished from the 3rd to the 6th centuries CE and lasted into the 8th century. At its maximum, Axum controlled a large area, including most of today’s Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, and Eritrea. Axum is loosely historically related to the kingdoms of Kush, Meroe, and Ethiopia.

It is thought that Axum was a hierarchical society with a king and nobility. Its agriculture included plantations run by slaves. The slaves were criminals or prisoners of war. There was a close relationship with the Sabaeans in southern Arabia, and some of the Axumites seem to have been descended from Sabaeans. The Sabaean kingdom was located in what is now Saudi Arabia and Yemen.​[31]

The city of Axum was in a strategic location, as it was not far from the entrance to the Red Sea, where Africa and Yemen are twenty miles apart. In the highlands, it was easily defensible, and its port of Adulis was dominant on the Red Sea and perhaps the most important gateway into Africa from the Indian Ocean.​[32]

Axum was deeply involved in trade, both up the Nile to the Mediterranean and across the Red Sea and as far as India. The capital, Axum, was located in the highlands at an elevation of about 6,500 feet in what is modern Tigray. The city might have had twenty thousand inhabitants, making it rather large for its time. It still exists and is rich in history and tradition.

Axum was the first sub-Saharan kingdom to mint its own coins, using Roman coins as models. The kingdom developed its own script called Ge’ez, which is still in use in Ethiopia for liturgical purposes.​[33] So far as is known, Axum combined elements derived from the old Kushite kingdom and from southern Arabia. The script used to write Ge’ez was derived from one used in Arabia.

Ezana depicted on coins.

Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AXUM._Ezanas._Circa_330-360.jpg

A wide range of goods were exported, including slaves, ivory, rhinoceros horn, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Live elephants and other exotic animals were also exported. Imports included textiles, glass, metals, wine, olive oil, and weapons. Archaeologists have found numerous traces of trade in the Axum region, including Roman and Indian coins, wine amphorae from the Mediterranean, Egyptian and Roman glassware, and textiles from the Middle East.

In their era of power, Axum’s rulers called themselves Negusa Negast, “King of Kings.” Most of the people were villagers and grew wheat, barley, millet, and a regional grain called teff. They also herded goats, sheep, and cattle. Their heartland was the Ethiopian Highlands, which were not home to the lowland tropical parasitic diseases that limited the population and use of domestic animals. Highland people used horses and donkeys, and in the lowlands, they used camels.

Details of Axum’s history are poorly known. Some kings are known only from the inscriptions on coins issued during their rule. A distinctive feature was the production of tall stone stelae, which were rather like ancient Egyptian obelisks. Some of these still exist in good condition. The inscriptions on them provide much of what history is known. These structures could be large; the largest known is 108 feet high and weighs an estimated 500 tons.​[34]

The exact dates of Ezana’s rule are not firmly established. His rule was long and significant; it is usually given as lasting from around 610 to the 660s CE. A number of inscriptions are known, written in Ge’ez, Sabaen, and Greek (Sabaen is a language from the Arabian Kingdom of Saba).

Ezana’s story is closely entwined with that of a man from Syria, Frumentius. He and another man, Aedesius, from the Syrian city of Tyre (then under Roman rule), were shipwrecked travelers from some sort of incident in the Red Sea. They might have been brothers. They were introduced to the court of King Ella Amida of Axum, but their initial position is unknown. They might have been enslaved and given to the king because of their learning (both were literate).

Ella Amida died while Ezana was a child. The queen, Satya, wanted Frumentius to be a tutor to her son, Ezana, which he agreed to. He came to be more than a tutor, though, becoming a trusted advisor when Ezana became king. Both Syrians had been officials under Ella Amida: Aedesius was the king’s cupbearer, and Frumentius was the treasurer and secretary. It is not clear what languages were used to communicate, but both Syrians (who were probably of Greek background) might have been multilingual. They seem to have also been important officials during the queen’s regency.

When Ezana assumed the throne, Aedesius left, wanting to go home to Tyre, but Frumentius seems to have convinced Ezana to become Christian. In a visit that would have immense significance, Frumentius traveled to Alexandria. There, he met with Archbishop Athanasius, who appointed him bishop of Axum.​[35]

Alexandria was one of the main centers of Christianity, with the others being Antioch, Rome, and Constantinople (the city was also called Byzantium, and the later Byzantine emperors ruled from there). Egypt was then part of the Roman Empire, which was wracked with theological struggles over the nature of Christ. Archbishop Athanasius was declared a heretic, and his followers were harshly persecuted, bringing Frumentius’s appointment into question.

Frumentius converted King Ezana, and Ezana officially spread Christianity through Axum. It is likely many of the urban residents, traders, and members of the court were genuine converts, but the people in the countryside likely continued to practice traditional religions. Traders would have already been familiar with Christianity because Egypt and some of the lands around the Red Sea were Christian.

Ezana’s earliest known inscriptions relate to pagan gods, such as Astar, and some of his early coins used an old pagan symbol, a crescent and a disk. Why Ezana converted is not known. It might have been sincere, or it might have been convenient for relationships with the Christianizing Roman world.​[36]

Frumentius lived the remainder of his life in Axum. He is regarded as a saint in Ethiopian Christianity and as one of the founders of the church. His introduction of the religion formed deep roots and remains a basic part of the identity of a large fraction of Ethiopians today, 1,800 years later.

Converting Axum to Christianity took both Frumentius and Ezana. The Axumite church was regarded as somewhat heretical because of the connection to Athanasius. In 356 CE, Emperor Constantius wrote to Ezana that the consecration of Frumentius was void because he had been ordained by a heretic. The emperor suggested that Frumentius return to Alexandria to be re-ordained by the Arian archbishop, George of Cappadocia. Frumentius did not do so.​[37]

The details are scarce, but the remains of the Nubian kingdom in Meroe attacked Axum over control of the ivory trade, which was apparently quite profitable. Ezana invaded Nubia, capturing and sacking its capital at Meroe. Following the defeat, Nubia split into several smaller kingdoms (all in today’s Sudan), never again achieving unity. Defeating Nubia allowed Axum to rise to dominance in the region and to dominate trade. Ezana’s last known inscription describes the conquest of Meroe.

Some of what we know about Ezana comes from inscriptions on the Ezana Stone, which are in three languages (Greek, Ge’ez, and Sabaean). The stele is currently in a museum in Axum. The Greek inscription praises Ezana’s conquests and his mild treatment of prisoners of war. The Sabaean inscription offers thanks to Jesus and the Trinity for Ezana’s success in battle, and the Ge’ez inscription thanks the Christian god for victory. Each inscription praises Ezana’s victory in wars.​[38]

King Ezana’s stele.

Francesco Bandarin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aksum-107526.jpg

One inscription talks about one of Ezana’s victories. It reads, “I burned their towns, those of masonry and those of straw, and my people seized their grain and their bronze and dried meat.” This sounds like a huge war, but the inscription lists 600 prisoners, 10,500 cattle, and 51,050 sheep, which is a sizable haul but not what one would expect after such a grandiose inscription.​[39]

Axum continued to be powerful for generations. An Axumite force invaded and conquered much of Yemen in 525 CE. The Yemenite king, Yusuf As’ar Yathar, had persecuted Christians, so the Yemenis appealed to Christian Axum for help. The Byzantines are thought to have aided the Axumites, but the nature of their support is unknown (by then, the Roman Empire in the west had collapsed, and the emperors based in Constantinople ruled much of what had been the eastern part of the Roman Empire). Axum ruled Yemen until 560, when an invading army from Sassanid Persia arrived and took control of Yemen. This all took place before the rise of Islam; the peoples around the Red Sea were either Christian, Jewish, or practiced traditional religions.​[40]

The kingdom remained tenuously connected to Christianity in the Mediterranean. In the 5th century, nine Syrian priests fled from the Byzantine Empire and found refuge in Axum. These priests had been in danger of their lives because their beliefs, Monophysitism, had been declared heretical by the emperor. Monophysite theology declared that Jesus had only one nature, which was divine; Orthodoxy imposed the doctrine that Jesus had two natures, both human and divine. These refugee priests had much to do with the spread of Christianity in the Axumite realm and are today considered fathers of the church.​[41]

Axum was known for its metalwork, and over a long stretch of time, this had a serious environmental impact. Large areas of woodland were cut to produce charcoal for fueling ironworking. So much was cut that rain patterns appear to have changed, impacting agriculture.​[42]

How or just when Ezana died is not known. He might have been killed while on a military campaign.

Axum waned, but the remains of the kingdom influenced places farther south, including the cities of Lalibela and Gondar. In the decades just before the Muslim conquest, Persia took over Yemen and the trade routes. The rise of Islam led to Arab expeditions that destroyed Adulis and eventually left Christianity in the highlands as a sort of island in a Muslim sea.

The Judaic group in Ethiopia known as Beta Israel seems to date back to the 1st century in Axum, and like Christianity, it was isolated in the highlands and developed unique institutions.​[43]

Chapter 4 – Ibn al-Mu’min, Almohad Caliph (1130–1163)

Al-Mu’min’s spectacular career took him from being an obscure student of Muslim law in a provincial town to creating a huge empire and declaring himself caliph, challenging the authority of the centuries-old Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. Mu’min was the inheritor of the Almohad movement, which was begun by a religious reformer named Ibn Tumart.

He did so at a time when the Maghrib—the name for North Africa west of Egypt—was politically fragmented. The Muslim part of Spain, as well as Morocco and some of Algeria, had been conquered by the Almoravids, a puritanical Muslim sect that had emerged from the south of Morocco. It was led by Abd Allah ibn Yasin, a charismatic religious reformer. His crusading army sought to impose a puritanical version of Islam on the Maghrib and succeeded in establishing an empire that lasted from 1050 to 1147 when Mu’min destroyed the remnants of it.

The Almoravids had conquered much of Spain, which had broken into a number of small Muslim kingdoms, none of which could offer much resistance. The Almoravid puritanical streak did not last long, as the rulers became softened by luxury. Their concern for retaining power had replaced their concern for the well-being of Islam. That’s what Ibn Tumart preached, and his theology powered the Almohad movement, providing the conviction that al-Mu’min harnessed to fuel his conquests.

Both the Almoravids and Almohads were movements made up mostly of Berber peoples, the native population of the Maghrib. The Berbers were a group of tribal alliances made up of many tribes. They were Muslim and mostly used Arabic for writing, although the Berbers did have their own alphabet. The Berbers spoke Berber dialects, not Arabic. Arabs had been the conquerors of most of Iberia (Spain and Portugal) centuries before, and there was a sizable population of Arab tribesmen in the Maghrib. The Berbers had offered stiff resistance to the Arab conquest of the Maghrib, which took about sixty years. By Mu’min’s time, the Berbers had been thoroughly Islamized.

Ibn al-Mu’min was born in Tagra, a town in what is now Algeria. He was the son of a potter. The family was ethnically Berber.

A statue of al-Mu’min in Algeria.

Askelaadden, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abdalmumin_ben_ali_nedroma_statue.jpg

Mu’min was a promising young man, and his father somehow managed to send him to study religious law. By one of those coincidences that can profoundly alter the trajectory of a life, he met Ibn Tumart, a Moroccan Berber who was returning from the hajj. Tumart was the son of a mosque’s lamplighter. He was born about 1080 in the mountains of Morocco.​[44]

On his return from his hajj, Tumart landed at the coastal town of Mahdia, having taken a ship from Egypt. Tumart was a religious visionary and reformer, and the experience of going on the hajj and being exposed to Muslims in Mecca radicalized him against the kind of Islam he experienced there. Tumart began preaching the need for Islam to reform and return to how the religion was practiced as it was during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. He is said to have been a spellbinding speaker. Mu’min was quickly convinced by Tumart’s teachings and became a disciple. He eventually became an important leader in the movement.​[45]

The influences on Tumart’s teaching are not clear. While on hajj, he had discussions with various religious leaders, and he might have found the Islam he encountered in Egypt and the holy cities not sufficiently pious. The rulers of Egypt controlled the region of Mecca and Medina, although local family dynasties administered the cities.

Tumart might also have been influenced by some strain of Sufism, which was emerging in the Islamic world as a reformist movement with a strong emphasis on mysticism. He might have been exposed to this on his hajj, but Sufism was brought to the Maghrib by Arab migrants, such as the Banu Hilal. The Banu Hilal was a confederation of Arab nomadic tribes that migrated to the Maghrib in the 1100s.​[46]

The Almohad version of Islam emphasized God as a single entity. In Arabic, they became known as the “al-Muwahhidun,” which translates as “unitarians.” The Arabic term was converted to “Almohads” in Spanish.

Tumart was brash, and his outspokenness could easily have had him executed as an apostate. He went to Fez, where he insulted the sister of the Almoravid emir who ruled the city for not wearing the veil. Tumart was thrown out of Fez and went to Marrakesh, where he challenged the emir and the ulama (the Muslim clergy) to a theological debate. The ulama recommended he be executed as an apostate troublemaker, but the emir simply had Tumart evicted from the city.​[47]

Tumart and his band of true believers retreated to his native village in the Atlas Mountains, where they formed the nucleus of a fundamentalist Muslim state. For a time, he lived the life of an ascetic in a cave while preaching to growing numbers of people. By 1121, he had convinced a large number of people that his views of Islam were correct. He abandoned his cave and declared himself the Mahdi (a divinely sent reformer—the claim implies he thought he was chosen by God). In 1124, the growing sect built a rabat, a defensive fortification.

Tumart gave his small kingdom a complex structure. The Council of Ten advised him; it was composed of early converts. The Council of Fifty included the emirs of the tribes within the Masmuda coalition of Berber tribes, and many advisors came from his family.​[48]

The Almoravids could not eliminate the sect because it was deep in the mountains, so they built defensive forts to guard against Almohad raids. For another eight years, the Almohads periodically raided the lowlands controlled by the Almoravids. In 1130, Tumart’s army invaded the lowlands, but after their initial success, they were almost annihilated in a battle near Marrakesh.​[49]

Ibn Tumart died in 1130 or 1133; the date is disputed. He declared himself to be the Mahdi in 1121. By doing so, Tumart was declaring his own version of Islamic law as the definitive one, which challenged the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, which had the best claim to be the legitimate interpreter of Islam. His theology and Mu’min’s exceptional military skills created the Almohad Empire, and Mu’min converted a discipleship based on piety into an imperial dynasty.

When Tumart died, Mu’min kept his death secret for a time (it is often said to be three years). He claimed the title of caliph, which meant he was the successor to the companions of Muhammad as the leader of Islam. Mu’min wanted to give himself time to consolidate control over the Almohad movement, so he took the title as successor to Mahdi Tumart. Tumart had named Mu’min his successor, but Tumart’s family disputed it.​[50]

There was something of a legitimacy problem for Mu’min because he was the first non-Arab in history to claim to be caliph.​[51] The Almohads were sensitive to their legitimacy and were alert to opportunities to add to their legitimacy. One small way was to change the coinage and issue silver dirhams that were square. They were meant to look like a page from the Quran and perhaps reminded users of the coins that the Kaaba in Mecca was square. The dirhams bore the inscription, “God is our master, Muhammad is our prophet, and the Mahdi is our imam.” The reference to the imam was to the Almohad caliph—Ibn Tumart, then al-Mu’min, and then his descendants.​[52]

Mu’min claimed that a lost Quran dating back to the third Caliph, Uthman (r. 644–656), had been rediscovered and validated Almohad teachings. It also gave more legitimacy to his own claim to be caliph, although most of the rest of the Muslim world accepted the Abbasids in Baghdad as the caliphs, seeing them, therefore, as the legitimate power in Islam.

The Almohad conquest was not an easy one despite Mu’min’s military skills and the religious motivation of his troops. The Almoravid garrisons often stubbornly resisted. This era is often seen as a time of Christian Crusaders fighting Muslims throughout the Mediterranean region, and that’s true to an extent. However, Muslims also fought Muslims, and the wars among the members of the faith were often large and bloody. The Almohads inflicted several sizable massacres of enemies, including Almoravid troops and rebel Berbers.

The composition of the Almohad armies is not certain. Most of the soldiers seem to have been Berbers. There were large numbers of infantry who were armed with large shields and spears. In a battle, they would have been part of the first line, with the lines behind them throwing javelins or shooting arrows. They had some cavalry, which used lances as their primary weapons. It’s likely that the Africans had less armor than the people in Christian Spain. Gunpowder weapons were just beginning to be used. Both the Almoravids and Almohads had a navy, which would have been composed of the galley-type warships typical of the Mediterranean. (Galleys were long and narrow ships. They were powered by ranks of oarsmen who were often slaves or condemned criminals.)

Neither the Almoravids nor the Almohads were a horde of Muslim jihadis erupting out of the Atlas and Anti-Atlas Mountains. Their forces were trained and often included Christian mercenaries. The Almoravids’ defeat was hastened by the death of their Catalan mercenary captain named Reverter in 1145.​[53]

Reverter de La Guardia is said to have been a captive of the Almoravids, who agreed to lead a Christian regiment of mercenaries and freed prisoners. Reverter was a capable and successful officer. His son converted to Islam and took a Muslim name, Abu Hasan Ali ibn Ruburtayr, and continued to serve the Almoravids and then switched to the Almohads when his employers were defeated. Stories of Muslim mercenaries serving Christian rulers and Christian mercenaries serving Muslim rulers are reminders that the actual history is much more complicated than commonly assumed.

Mu’min spent several years preparing his forces and expanded the small Almohad state to gradually include the entire mountainous region in Morocco. He moved east into what is now Algeria, crushing the Almoravid forces in 1145 and capturing the key cities of Algiers and Tetuan.

The empire was unruly. Mu’min had to put down several rebellions of the Berber tribes and had to pacify some of the Arab tribes. Several Arab groups had migrated to the Maghrib during and after the Arab conquest, which took place between 647 and 709, and some practiced a semi-nomadic culture. Also, the Almohads’ revisionist form of Islam was regarded by many Muslims as heretical, and rebellions broke out as a result.​[54]

The Almohad invasion of Spain began in 1145 when some of the Muslim emirs pleaded for help against the Christian reconquest, which the Almoravids had been unable to counter. The Almohads sent considerable forces to Spain. The campaigns there were complicated, and there were some rebellions against Almohad governors. After a time, they were able to stop the Christian attacks and secured Muslim Spain for more than a generation.

At its peak, in the last years of Mu’min’s reign, the Almohad realm was large, stretching a little under a million square miles. Its population can only be guessed at, but it was probably somewhere between five and ten million. Its African capital was Marrakesh, and its center in Spain was Seville.

The Almohad doctrine, as created by Ibn Tumart, was rigid and unforgiving. It was resisted by Almoravid Muslims and Spanish alike. Sizable numbers of both Christians and Jews migrated to the various Christian kingdoms. There’s an irony that Jews facing conversion or slavery left a Muslim kingdom for a Christian one. Almost three centuries later, Jews facing conversion or exile in Catholic Spain migrated to more tolerant Muslim societies, forming the Sephardic diaspora.

Mu’min captured Fez in 1145, and after a long siege, he took Marrakesh in 1147, where he captured and executed the last Almoravid ruler, Ishaq ibn Ali. A large number of Almoravids were massacred, perhaps as many as thirty thousand. Early on, the Almohads regarded the Almoravids as not simply enemies but heretics.​[55]

In 1151, Mu’min moved deeper into Algeria, capturing Algiers and ending the power of the Hammadid Kingdom there. Muslims in what is now Tunisia requested his help against the Normans, who had taken some coastal posts and territories. (The Norman Kingdom of Sicily, created in 1130, was briefly quite powerful.) Mu’min recruited a large army, built a substantial fleet, and moved into Tunisia. His fleet defeated the Normans, but they remained stubborn enemies. Mu’min agreed to allow them safe conduct back to Sicily if they left Tunisia, permanently ending the Normans’ interest in conquering Africa. Impressed by this success, Muslims in Tripolitania (now part of Libya) swore allegiance to Mu’min.​[56]

Al-Mu’min died in 1163. He was nearly seventy years old, a ripe age for a leader in a violent age. He was buried next to his mentor, Ibn Tumart. His reign was followed by his son Abu Ya’qub (r. 1163–1184) and his grandson, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub (r. 1184–1199). Both these successors were able administrators and capable military leaders, and the empire prospered.​[57]

Almohad rule in Spain lasted until 1212, when an alliance of the kingdoms of Aragon, Castile, Navarre, and Portugal attacked. At the crucial Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, they inflicted a disastrous defeat on Caliph Muhammad III (r. 1199–1214). The defeat caused Almohad influence in Spain to unravel. In 1227, a succession dispute caused the army to be called back to Morocco, fatally weakening what was left of the Almohads’ strength in Spain.​[58]

The Almohads did not fall to a new empire like the Almoravids had fallen to the Almohads. Over several decades, they lost bits of land to several rising competing Muslim groups, and local sheiks and emirs began to assert their independence.

As the Almohad Empire broke up, it was succeeded by smaller successor kingdoms, such as the Hafsids, who were based in Tunis and ruled Tunisia, Libya, and eastern Algeria; the Zayyanid Kingdom, which ruled western Algeria and was based in Tlemcen; and the Marinid kings in Morocco. Castile and Portugal took over most of the Almohad lands in Iberia.​[59]

Abu Idris al-Wathiq, the fourteenth caliph, was the last of the Almohads. He ruled barely more than the city of Marrakesh and the area immediately around the city. In 1269, he was killed. Some sources state he was murdered by a slave, but he also might have been captured and executed by the combined Marinid and Zayyanid forces.​[60]

Chapter 5 – Baybars, Mamluk Sultan (1260–1277)

Baybars was a Mamluk sultan who began his ascent to power as a slave soldier in the service of Egypt’s former sultan. “Mamluk” originated as a term for slave soldiers and gave the name to the dynasty that Baybars helped establish. The dynasty was not typical, as sons did not usually follow their fathers in hereditary sequence. The Mamluk succession was one soldier followed by another, frequently by murdering the previous sultan.

Understanding who the Mamluks were and how they came to power requires some explanation. Originally, the Mamluks were not Egyptian; they were slave soldiers imported from the slave markets of Crimea and Damascus. Slave soldiers had been used since the early days of Islam. Many of them were from the nomadic Turkish tribes living on the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea. After the Mongol conquests, that area became part of the Mongol Golden Horde. All of the wars brought many prisoners.

Most of the Turkish peoples had not yet converted to Islam and thus could be legally enslaved under Islamic law. Prisoners of war in that era were often sold as slaves. The Italian merchant cities were major players in trade centered in Crimea and carried slaves from the markets in Crimea to Egypt, particularly merchants from Genoa and Venice. Boys and young men from the nomadic tribes made good soldiers because they were already accustomed to life on horseback and familiar with weapons.

Before the Mongol conquests, the Muslim empire of Khwarazm in Transoxiana also captured Turkish tribesmen and used them as slave soldiers. Since they were not Muslim, they could be enslaved, and that’s why almost all of them converted to Islam because they were then freed. The Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad (750–1258 CE) controlled much of the Middle East and used slave soldiers as well, although not as systematically as the Mamluks in Egypt.

It may seem counterintuitive to arm slaves because armed slaves could rebel against their masters. However, it worked differently in many places in the Muslim world. Most of the Arab groups had tribal and clan loyalties that were more important than their ties to the ruler. Families provided security, and the rulers were often far away. Slaves usually came from outside the society they found themselves in. They often did not speak the local language, and they did not have the connections of family that regulated most people’s lives. Slave armies were used in places as far away as Morocco and central Asia. Only some slaves made good soldiers, usually boys or young men who could be trained. While slave soldiers were normally intensely loyal, there were incidents when they murdered their patron or even a ruler. The usual cause was that the soldiers were not paid or were treated poorly.

In the early and mid-1200s, Egypt was ruled by the Ayyubid dynasty, descendants of the Kurdish warlord whom the Crusaders called Saladin (Salah al-Din bin Ayyub, 1137–1193). The last powerful Ayyubid sultan in Egypt, As-Salih Ayyub (r. 1240–1249), increased the number of Mamluks and seems to have been the originator of a unique training system. New slaves lived in barracks on an island in the Nile, where they were rigorously trained. The training produced excellent soldiers, who were freed upon what might be called graduation. Each soldier was given a horse, weapons, and a uniform and joined a military formation. One of these was a young soldier of Qipchaq origin named Baybars.​[61]

Baybars was described as a tall man with a deep voice and a broad face. One of his eyes had some kind of visible defect, some kind of cyst or perhaps a cataract. The white spot in his eye sometimes disconcerted people.​[62]

A contemporary depiction of Baybars.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baybars,_Medallion_IV,_Baptist%C3%A8re_de_Saint-Louis.jpg

Baybars I would become the fourth Mamluk sultan, ruling from 1260 to 1277, and he is the most famous of all the Mamluk sultans. He systematized Mamluk rule. He set up the administration and system that allowed the Mamluks to control Egypt from about 1250 to the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 by Sultan Selim I the Grim. (The Ottoman version of slave soldiers was to require a kind of tax involving Christian boys from the Balkans, who were trained as administrators or soldiers. These were the famous Janissaries, who were probably the best troops in the world in the 1500s.)

Many details of Baybars’s life are not known. His year of birth is not known for certain. He was born about 1220 (the date is not agreed on) somewhere on the Pontic Steppe to a family of Qipchaq Turks (they were also known as Cumans in Europe and as Polovtsians in Russia). The Qipchaqs opposed the Mongol invasion, and as a result, the tribes were decimated. Many thousands were killed. Baybars’s family became refugees, fleeing to the Bulgarian kingdom. A Mongol expedition conquered Bulgaria; Baybars’s family was killed, and he was made a slave.​[63]

Other historians agree that Baybars’s family was Qipchaq and sought refuge from the Mongol onslaught, but they believe the family went to Crimea. A version of the story is that a Turkmen chief (one of the Turkish peoples) invited Qipchaq refugees to his domain, offering protection. He then attacked and killed many of them, seizing what they owned and enslaving the survivors.​[64]

It is known that Baybars was sold at least twice. He apparently was sold somewhere in Anatolia, and the second time was in Syria, where he was sold to an Egyptian, who took him back to Egypt. The owner had some sort of dispute with the sultan, and all of his property was confiscated, including Baybars. The sultan sent him to train on the island in the Nile. There’s one story that he was sold for the low price of eight hundred dirhams but was returned the next day because of the strange white spot in his eye.​[65]

The training Baybars and his fellow military slaves went through was rigorous and lengthy. The trainees lived in barracks supervised by experienced trainers (who seem to have been eunuchs). Their education had two parts. In the first part, trainees were taught about Islam, including its theology and rituals. They learned to speak Arabic and seem to have been taught writing as well.

The second part of their education was thorough training in the martial arts. It began with the horse, including handling sick or crippled animals. They underwent elaborate drills so they could fight on horseback under all conditions. Weapons training began with the lance and the bow—the main weapons. They were also trained in using swords both while mounted and on the ground. Training also included using knives, maces, and axes. Wrestling was also taught. One result of this lengthy training was that the soldiers were used carefully because such highly trained men could not easily be replaced.​[66]

The outcome was a corps of highly trained, well-disciplined cavalry that was hardy, highly mobile, and loyal. Their numbers were never particularly large, even after Salih considerably enlarged the group. There were perhaps ten thousand to twelve thousand Mamluks who were at the sultan’s command. There were also some maintained by individual emirs.

The Mamluk corps was paid a salary and given support. Their personal lives are not well understood. There was some intermarriage with native Egyptians, which became increasingly common later in the Mamluk period of rule.

The Ayyubids ruled not only Egypt but also what is now Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and large parts of Syria. The Crusaders who attacked Egypt were led by the king of France, Louis IX (he later was canonized by the Catholic Church as Saint Louis because of his crusading and Christian zeal). They came ashore in June of 1249 as part of the Seventh Crusade near Damietta in the eastern Nile Delta. Fighting was sporadic but intense.

The Seventh Crusade was large and well equipped. It was led by the French king. Most of the Crusaders were French, but there was a contingent from England and some knights from elsewhere. The size of the force is not known, but it is estimated to have been fifteen thousand to more than thirty thousand and included knights, crossbowmen, and others. They landed in Cyprus and wintered there. The French king’s intent was to conquer Egypt and then go on to recapture Jerusalem, which Muslims had captured in 1187.

The Crusaders targeted Damietta, an important regional center ten miles or so from the Mediterranean, and captured it. The Crusaders advanced with some success, but in one crucial incident, the city of Mansurah opened its gates. The Crusaders thought it was a surrender and rushed in. The gates closed behind them, and most of the impetuous Crusaders who had stormed in were wiped out. Of the 290 Knights Templar who had joined the rush through the gates, 285 were killed. Baybars distinguished himself in this battle.​[67]

Baybars seems to have devised the tactic of opening the city gates and having the French rush in and then closing the gates, trapping the Crusaders. The Crusader knights were as thoroughly trained as the Mamluks and just as formidable in battle, but in the narrow streets of the city, their battle skills on horseback were negated, leading to the slaughter of the Knights Templar.

The Crusader army advanced beyond its supply base in Damietta, and sporadic fighting occurred. Hunger and disease struck the Crusaders, and it was soon plain that the Crusade’s objectives had become impossible. The army retreated, but King Louis IX was captured, and it took a very large ransom to free him. The largely French Crusade was joined by hundreds of knights from the remaining Christian holdings in Palestine, and they suffered heavy losses. The losses seriously weakened the Crusader States’ ability to resist Mamluk attacks led by Baybars, who later conquered a number of Crusader strongholds.

Salih died during the campaign, but his capable wife and lieutenants conspired to keep his death secret. Her name was Shajar al-Durr, and she was Turkish in origin. The Mamluks seemed to have considered her almost as one of them. Shajar kept issuing orders, forging the late sultan’s signature, and the orders were obeyed as if he were still alive.

A new sultan emerged, the last of the Ayyubids, Turanshah, who came down from Syria. He was Salih’s son. Turanshah arrived and assumed command of the army. He disparaged Shajar, who remained a favorite of the Mamluks. There were other disagreements with the Mamluks, and they murdered him on May 2nd, 1250. Baybars was one of the killers.

The stories of Turanshah’s murder are inconsistent. One version is that Turanshah held a victory banquet, during which Mamluk conspirators attacked him. He was only wounded and fled to some structure described as a “tower,” which the pursuing Mamluks set on fire. The sultan dove into the Nile and waded to shore, where he met the Mamluks. He begged for his life, promising to abdicate, but Baybars waded into the river and killed him.​[68]

This version is as plausible as any of the others. What is certain is that Baybars was involved in the murder, whether he actually killed Turanshah or not.

A most unusual situation resulted after the murder. For a time, Muslim Egypt was ruled by Shajar al-Durr, whom the Mamluks chose. She took the title of Malikat al-Muslimin, “Queen of Muslims.” This was not acceptable to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Under pressure, she married the Mamluk commander Aybak, who became sultan. While a young Ayyubid prince (al-Ashraf Musa) was briefly installed as a co-sultan, real power now rested with the Mamluks, marking the start of their rule over Egypt.​[69]

In 1254, Aybak lured Faris ad-Din Aktai, the emir of the Bahriyya—the elite slave-soldier corps—and other Bahriyya Mamluks to the Citadel, a fortified complex. Aybak had Aktai assassinated and later imprisoned or exiled his followers. Baybars and about seven hundred Bahri Mamluks fled to Syria in 1254. They served as mercenaries for several Ayyubid princes there, and Baybars’s reputation as a formidable commander continued to develop

Around three years later, Aybak was himself murdered on the orders of Shajar al-Durr, his wife. Shajar was imprisoned afterward, and she was ultimately beaten to death, reportedly by Aybak’s concubines, within the prison.​[70]

Aybak was followed as sultan by Qutuz. With Aybak gone, the possibility of Baybars’s faction reconciling with the sultan arose. Meanwhile, the Mongol khan in Persia sent a letter to Qutuz, telling the Mamluks to surrender or die. Qutuz had the Mongol ambassadors cut in half and their heads displayed on pikes. Knowing that this would lead to a Mongol attack, Qutuz struck a deal with Baybars: he would get governorship of the city of Aleppo if he helped Qutuz deal with the Mongols.​[71]

The Mongols did attack, riding into what is now Israel. The Mongol force was not a full army, being somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand men commanded by General Kitbuqa. It was nonetheless formidable.

Both sides sparred in skirmishes, culminating in the Battle of Ain Jalut on September 3rd, 1260. The Mamluks, under Qutuz and Baybars, defeated the Mongols, killing a large number of them. Baybars and Qutuz used a battle tactic the Mongols should have been wary of: the feigned retreat. The tactic was commonly used by Mongol armies. It consisted of sending a detachment to attack and then feign defeat and rapidly retreat as if they had been routed. The enemy would follow and then be hit on both flanks by hidden troops. In this battle, Baybars led the attack and managed to lure the Mongols into pursuing him, with the main Mamluk army then ambushing the Mongols. Leading the attack and feigning the retreat required courage and skill.​[72]

There was hard fighting with heavy losses on both sides, but the Mamluks prevailed. They killed thousands of the Mongol troops. They also captured and executed the Mongol commander, Kitbuqa. Following the battle, Sultan Qutuz and Baybars had a disagreement, and Baybars was denied the promised governorship of Aleppo. This triggered a violent reaction from Baybars.

On the return march to Egypt, Baybars and others plotted Qutuz’s assassination. Baybars met with the sultan to request he be given a certain Mongol slave girl, and the sultan agreed. Baybars then kissed the sultan’s hand, usually a sign of deference, but this time, it was a signal for the assassination. Qutuz was killed. Baybars is said to have slashed the sultan’s neck with a sword. The Mamluk commanders conferred and decided that Baybars would be the next sultan.​[73]

The Mamluks did not immediately achieve rule over all the Ayyubid lands. There was still Ayyubid rule in several cities in Syria, and the two sides came close to war. That possibility was ended in 1260 by a Mongol invasion, which conquered the Ayyubid cities in Syria, including Damascus, ending Ayyubid rule.

The Mongol conquests were an important part of the history of the Middle East in this era, as they hovered in the background during all the years of Baybars’s reign (r. 1260–1277). The original Mongol Empire stretched from Korea to Poland, but it broke up into several successor states, each of which remained extremely formidable militarily.

Two of these successor khanates were major factors for Baybars and for Mamluk rule. One was the Golden Horde, which was established by Batu Khan in 1243. It was centered on the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea, and it stretched from the Urals to the Russian principalities and from the taiga zone to the Black Sea coast. The other was created when Hulegu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, conquered Persia in 1256.

Hulegu set up a regime that came to be called the Ilkhanate, and this group of Mongols destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258. They razed the city of Baghdad (killing perhaps 800,000 people in the process) and ended the last Ayyubid rule in Syria. The Ilkhanid Empire included Persia, Iraq, Afghanistan, much of the Caucasus, and parts of what today are Pakistan and Turkmenistan. Ilkhanid Mongols often raided into Mamluk territory, and Baybars fought Mongol raiders for years.

A peculiar dynamic was that the Mongols worshiped their traditional gods, making them pagan rulers of millions of Muslims. The Ilkhanid Mongol rulers did not convert to Islam until 1295. Until then, what remained of the Crusaders hoped for an alliance with the Mongols. The large number of Muslims under pagan rule made war against the Mongols almost a religious duty for the Mamluks.

While the Mamluk army was sizable and effective, Baybars also proved to be rather good at diplomacy. Two diplomatic campaigns stand out, one involving the Golden Horde and the other involving reestablishing the caliphate in Cairo as a purely religious authority.

Baybars established good relations with Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus, which allowed Egyptian ships to sail freely into the Black Sea. This facilitated his effort to establish friendly relations with the khanate of the Golden Horde. The Golden Horde and the Ilkhanids were rivals, and sometimes, war broke out over control of areas between the two great khanates, like Azerbaijan. Mamluk diplomacy aimed at a sort of alliance with the Golden Horde against the Ilkhanate. Friendly relations with the Golden Horde and with Byzantium also made the continuing import of Turkish slaves easier. Baybars wanted them to train as soldiers to supply his army.​[74]

He established relations with several Christian kingdoms other than the Byzantines, including sending ambassadors to Sicily, which was being contested between France and Aragon. He also sent ambassadors to Alfonso X of Castile and James I of Aragon.​[75]

Baybars accomplished one stunningly effective diplomatic coup. The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad had been the legal and religious center of the Islamic world since not long after the Prophet Muhammad’s death. The Mongols had destroyed it in 1258, but Baybars invited a relative of the murdered caliph to come to Cairo and claim the title of caliph, which would make him the titular religious head of Islam.

The caliphs thus continued on in Cairo under the Mamluks. Unlike in Baghdad, they had no political power and were only nominally heads of the faith. Baybars’s move made Cairo the center of the Muslim world and established his own legitimacy as a principal defender of the faith. The legitimacy of the Mamluk takeover of Egypt had been questionable, and Baybars came to power through murder. Baybars had the presumably grateful new caliph formally recognize his rule, although it was not a coronation or swearing-in. It, in effect, made the Mamluk seizure of power acceptable to the Muslims.

Baybars also excelled in another way. He set up a notably effective spy service, which provided him with information about the Ilkhanids and detected raids quickly. Part of this system was setting up a fast message system, Pony-Express style, between Cairo, Damascus, and other Syrian cities. The message system involved not only horsemen but also homing pigeons and signal bonfires.

Baybars brought in scholars from the four main interpretive schools of Sunni Islamic law; he did not favor any. The four schools were the Hanafi, the Maliki, the Shafi’i, and the Hanbali. Each had a different approach to the laws of the faith. One long-lasting and important result was that Cairo became the center of Islamic learning (which it still is), and all four schools continued to exist in harmony for centuries, which was a remarkable achievement.

Among the other adjustments Baybars made in Egypt was having a village support many individual Mamluks. This was not like the European fief, in which a knight was given a small domain. Unlike the fief, it was not property, and the Mamluk was not a resident. Most Mamluks lived in Cairo; some lived in barracks.

Sultan Baybars led a number of expeditions against the Crusaders, who had lost much of the area the original Crusade had conquered, but some territory, towns, and fortresses remained. In 1265, he forced the Knights Hospitallers to surrender Arsuf. The Knights Templar surrendered Safed in 1266, and Baybars also conquered the important Crusader city of Antioch.

Crusaders were natural allies of the Mongols, and Baybars was determined to eradicate the threat. He was also capricious and sometimes cruel in his actions. To get Arsuf to surrender, he promised to release the garrison but instead enslaved them. However, when Safed surrendered, he allowed the garrison safe passage to a Crusader stronghold in Acre.​[76] In 1266, when he took Jaffa, much of the population was massacred, but the garrison itself was allowed to go free. In May 1268, he stormed Antioch and massacred much of the population despite promising to let them live. However, in 1271, when the famous fortress Krak des Chevaliers surrendered, he spared the defenders’ lives.​[77]

A map of the Ninth Crusade.

PHGCOM, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EdwardICrusadeMap.jpg

Mongol raids persisted after the battle at Ain Jalut, with Mongols and Mamluks fighting at least nine battles, with Baybars winning most of them.​[78]

Baybars also expanded Egypt’s borders to the west and south. In 1272, he led the Mamluk armies into Nubia and conquered all of it, but he did not require the inhabitants to convert to Islam. After that, he attacked west into what is now Libya, subduing much of the region. At his death, the Mamluk Empire included Egypt, deep into Nubia (now Sudan), Libya, Palestine, most of Syria, the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, and some of the Red Sea coast.

Mamluk succession was not a dynasty as such, although some sultans were followed by their sons. There were two main cliques of Mamluks, and they were partly defined by where they originated. Baybars was a Qipchaq Turk, as were most of his associates. Baybars’s faction was known as the Bahri Mamluks, who were mostly Turkish from the Pontic Steppe.

The other clique was made up of Circassian Mamluks, a people native to the northwest Caucasus. This faction was also known as the Burji Mamluks. Not all members of the clique were actually Circassian, but most came from the Caucasus. The group included Georgians and Armenians.

Bahri Mamluks, including Baybars, ruled until 1382. After that point, the Burji Mamluks took control, ruling until the Ottoman conquest in 1517. These Mamluks were not strictly Turkish or Circassian; the slaves who became Mamluks included Armenians, Russians, and other nationalities caught up in the wars in the Pontic Steppe and the Caucasus.

In their prime, Mamluks had group cohesion and spoke the Turkish language. They continued their training by frequently practicing martial arts such as archery. Military campaigns were frequent in Baybars’s time: there were almost yearly attacks or raids by Mongols, and Baybars also sought to extend Mamluk control.

The bulk of the Egyptian population was rural, supported by agriculture, and included a large percentage of Coptic Christians. While the Mamluks ruled, Egypt and other areas had administrators who were mostly Arab. The language of administration was Arabic. The Mamluks continued to use Turkish, but many probably knew Arabic.

At that time, Arabs in Egypt were a separate group. Arab tribes settled in some of the frontier areas, and while they guarded the frontiers, they were fractious and resentful of central authority. Sometimes, Arab tribes rebelled.​[79]

Baybars’s last battle was in April of 1277 in Cilicia in Anatolia, part of what is now southern Turkey. Much of Anatolia was ruled by the Seljuk Turks, who had become vassals of the Ilkhanids. The Mamluks faced a Mongol army of about fifteen thousand, with their own being of a similar size. There was a Mongol tumen (a traditional formation supposed to be ten thousand men) and several thousand Georgian auxiliaries. They met at an engagement called the Battle of Elbistan, and Baybars’s force crushed the Mongols, killing six thousand or more of them.​[80]

Baybars ruled for seventeen years, one of the longest reigns among Mamluk sultans. That he was able to keep control for so many years is one measure of his ability and the respect he gained from his achievements. Baybars died in Damascus in 1277 on the way back from the battle in Cilicia from causes that are not known. One story is that he died from drinking poisoned kumiss (fermented mare’s milk, a common drink among the Turkish and Mongol peoples) that was intended for someone else. It is also possible that he died from a wound from the recent battle or that he was the victim of some disease.​[81]

He is buried under the dome of the al-Zahiriyya Library in Damascus, which he had founded years before. Baybars remains something of a folk hero in the Middle East.

Baybars was followed by two of his sons; neither of them was an effective ruler. Baybars’s associate Qalawun took power in 1279 and ruled until 1290. He was followed by his son, Khalil. Khalil ruled from 1290 to 1293 and was murdered by his own emirs. Another of Qalawun’s sons, al-Nasir, survived and eventually became sultan. He was followed by several generations of ineffective descendants, but the administrative system set up by Baybars remained effective.

Mamluks continued to have considerable power in Egypt even after the Ottoman conquest, and slave recruits continued to flow into Egypt. Ottoman rule varied in its actual degree of control, and sometimes, local emirs held the real power. The Mamluks lasted as influential elements until 1811, when the new ruler of Egypt, an Albanian adventurer named Muhammad Ali Pasha, began to modernize his troops. Muhammad Ali used his army consisting of trained native Egyptians, as well as some slave soldiers, to massacre thousands of Mamluks, ending more than five centuries of Mamluk influence. Muhammad Ali’s family ruled Egypt until the 1952 revolution.

Chapter 6 – Mansa Musa, King of Mali and the Richest Man in History (1312–1337)

Mali was one of several empires that emerged in the Sahel and Sudan regions of Africa. There are two roughly parallel regions to the south of the Sahara Desert that run from near the Atlantic all the way across Africa almost to the Nile. The Sahel is south of the Sahara and transitions from desert to Sudan, which is largely savannah. The savannah gets seasonal rain, enough to produce crops and support low numbers of domestic animals. The two zones transition between the southern edge of the Sahara and the northern edge of the rainforest to the south.

What seems to have made large empires in these huge zones possible was that the ecological regions supported the use of horses and camels, which were useless in the rainforest because of the animal-killing disease carried by the tsetse fly. The fly can infect humans with sleeping sickness and infect horses and cattle with a variety of debilitating and fatal diseases.

The empires also included some of the Niger River, a major trading route. The Niger makes a huge arc north from the rainforest, creating an immense upside-down U shape as it turns south again through the rainforest until it reaches the Atlantic. The empires had large numbers of horsemen, but they also had navies made up of canoes for battles on the river.

Mali’s capital was at Niani, but its exact location is no longer known. The most important city was Timbuktu, which was located very close to the Niger. It was sited where riverine trade and the trans-Saharan routes came together.

The Mali Empire at the time of Mansa Musa’s death.

Gabriel Moss, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mali_Empire.jpg

Mali’s strength was based on its control of trade routes that went back at least to Roman times. Gold from West Africa was traded to the Mediterranean for a variety of goods. Trade included slaves, salt, iron, cocoa, kola nuts (kola has a very mild intoxicating effect; Muslims were allowed to eat them, although alcohol was forbidden), and other items. These empires focused on controlling trade, not territory, so they were more like Venice on camelback than an empire like Rome. They were Muslim, with Islam arriving in the region along with traders, similar to the way Islam arrived in Indonesia.

The empires included Ghana (c. 830–1235), Mali (c. 1235–1600s), and Songhai (c. 1416–1591). The era of the great Sahel empires lasted for about a thousand years until French and British colonization took over. The amount of gold was quite large, and at times, gold carried across the Sahara by camel accounted for the origin of two-thirds of the gold in Europe.​[82]

By the 12th century, large armed caravans were crossing the Sahara, some of which were as large as twelve thousand camels. At the southern end of the route, a group of Mande-speaking peoples in the Upper Niger River region began to unite, forming the Mali Empire. The empire was founded with Sundiata as its first king (r. 1230–1255). At its peak, Mali was very large, much larger than today’s nation of Mali. It stretched from the Atlantic coast of today’s Gambia to the inland towns of Timbuktu and Gao.

Mali’s trade was handled by a merchant class called the Dyula, which had trade connections throughout West Africa. A major trading city for Mali was Timbuktu, which was situated a few miles north of the Niger, where caravans set out, carrying gold, slaves, and kola nuts, trading for salt and various Mediterranean goods. Not just goods and slaves traveled the caravan routes; Muslim travelers and scholars had much to do with converting the region to Islam.​[83]

The kings of Mali were called mansas, so Mansa Musa means King Musa. Mansa Musa was the ninth king of Mali and is by far the best known. He might have been the most powerful of the Mali Empire’s rulers. Mansa Musa went on hajj (the trip to Mecca, which pious Muslims are encouraged to make once in their lives), and his passage through Cairo is legendary. He spent so much gold in Cairo that the bottom dropped out of the gold market. According to one Cairene official at the time, it took more than ten years for the value of gold to recover.​[84]

An idea of what the Mali Empire was like during Mansa Musa’s time can be gained by looking at a 13th-century “document” known as the Mandan Charter or the Kurukan Fuga. This was not a written document; its provisions were preserved orally by a griot. Griots were entertainers, poets, and a kind of historian, memorizing important events and proclamations. They were able to recite lessons or stories for hours. Recitals were often to music and delivered in lines as if they were poetry. The Mandan Charter was preserved in this way.​[85]

It is something like England’s Magna Carta, which barons forced on the English king in 1215. The Mandan Charter consists of several dozen articles, and it can be described as part constitution, part commandments, part statement of principles, and part statement of responsibilities. Article 1 is basic. It divides the Mande society into several groups. There were sixteen “quiver bearers” of citizens. There were five groups of marabouts, who instructed society in matters of religion. There were four groups of the nyamakala, who were required to tell the truth to chiefs and give them counsel and advice. There was one clan for slaves.​[86]

The exact date of this charter is not known, but two accepted dates are 1222 and 1232 CE. It is thought to have originated with the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata, as one of the articles specified that his family, the Keita family, were to govern as emperor. Article 9 stated that the education of children was everyone’s concern. Article 14 says, “Never offend women, they are our mothers,” and Article 20 says, “Do not maltreat the slaves.” Article 30 allows divorce on three grounds: the husband’s impotence, one of the spouses going insane, or one’s inability to observe the responsibilities required of marriage. Article 41 says you may kill your enemy, but do not humiliate him.​[87]

Overall, the charter shows Mali to be concerned with social harmony and that people had to observe the roles that membership in one’s family, clan, and age group required. (As was common in Africa, all the people born within a defined period were considered a single age group.) Mali was patriarchal, but women were to be respected. Mali was a slave-owning society, but slaves were to be respected. The article about killing but not humiliating an enemy suggests that moderation rather than fanaticism was valued. The values set out were appropriate for a Muslim society, even though Mali had not yet converted to Islam.

Much of what is known about Mali comes from the accounts of the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta. Battuta was born in 1304 in Tangier, Morocco, and traveled all over the known world, going as far as Indonesia and China. He was welcomed as a Muslim scholar and was often given the position of judge.

His last adventure was to Mali. Ibn Battuta was curious about Mali because of the stories he had heard in Cairo about Mansa Musa’s visit. He set out for there in 1352. In Sijilmasa, a town on the fringes of the desert, he bought four camels and fodder for them for four months and joined a caravan. Battuta described how dangerous the desert was, adding that the desert was full of demons.​[88]

They reached the salt mines at Tangaza after twenty-five days and went on to the Mali town of Walata. He stayed at Walata for some weeks, some of it suffering from what sounds like food poisoning based on his description. His comments about the town were good, but he was shocked that Muslims could be matrilineal. A man’s heirs were his sister’s sons, not his own sons, and he was critical of how independent women were.

He traveled from Walata to Mali, the seat of the mansa. Mali’s king at the time of Battuta’s visit was Mansa Sulayman. On the way, he remarked on the size and age of the baobab trees and how travelers did not need to carry much in the way of supplies. Women in the villages readily supplied food in exchange for salt or glass beads.​[89]

Battuta praised Mali for its law and order. Travelers were safe from thieves and bandits, and the people were punctual in their prayers. He stated that the people “have a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people.” He described how the king held court in public in an official compound with many musicians and soldiers. Those summoned to the king’s presence or those wishing to speak changed from their usual clothes to old clothes and exchanged their turbans for old skullcaps. On their knees, they bared their backs and threw dust over their head and back “like a bather splashing himself with water.” Battuta did not approve of this ceremony.​[90]

He describes hippopotamuses, thinking at first that they were elephants. He confused the Niger with the Nile (Timbuktu is near the Great Bend in the Niger). He described how a delegation from a tribe of cannibals visited Mansa Sulayman. He gave them a female slave, probably not expecting her to be eaten.

In a much different vein, he describes waiting for a delegation to deliver the mansa’s gifts. He was expecting robes and money, as he had gotten from rulers elsewhere in his travels, but what he got in Mali was three pieces of bread, some beef cooked in oil, and a calabash of sour curds. He burst out in laughter at these gifts.​[91]

Battuta praised the Malians’ observance of prayers and how every man made sure his shirt was cleaned before attending Friday service. However, he was deeply shocked at the public nakedness of women servants, female slaves, and girls. He was also upset that women did not wear the veil.

Mansa Musa was born in the late 1200s and ruled from about 1312 to his death in about 1337. Musa came to the throne under very unusual circumstances. The previous king, Musa’s brother, Mansa Abu Bakr II (r. 1310–1312), is said to have left on a mysterious voyage into the Atlantic with a large fleet. Neither the king nor any crewman ever returned.

The story comes from a 14th-century Syrian historian who claims that the fleet consisted of two thousand ships with thousands of men aboard. This story has little to support it, but Abu Bakr II does seem to have gone on an expedition and never returned. Some historians use this story to claim that Africans got to the Americas before Christopher Columbus. The details of two thousand ships and thousands of crewmen are probably much exaggerated, but something serious occurred, and Abu Bakr II vanished forever.

Most of what is known about Mansa Musa relates to his famous hajj in 1324 when his very large entourage reached Cairo on their way to the holy city of Mecca. He was not the first Malian king to make the hajj. He appointed his son Maghan as king in his absence.

Mali was prosperous enough to support a large army. Mansa Musa commanded perhaps 100,000 men, of whom 10,000 were armored heavy cavalry. With it, Musa expanded Mali’s borders into what was the second-largest empire in the world at that time; only the Mongol Empire was larger.​[92]

What made Mali wealthy and what made Mansa Musa’s hajj so famous was gold. The gold was mined in areas only under nominal Malian rule, such as Bambuk and several other regions in West Africa in what is today eastern Senegal and western Mali. The main region was the Falémé River and its tributaries. The gold was alluvial, meaning it had accumulated over millennia by being washed down from the mountains.

Some of the gold was panned in a way that would have been familiar to the 49ers in the later California Gold Rush. Much of it was mined, but shafts were rarely more than fifty feet deep (all of the gold was alluvial in origin). The system used to mine gold revolved around the cycle of wet and dry seasons and agriculture. During the dry part of the year, there was a lessened need for agricultural labor, so farmers in the off-season mined for gold.​[93]

Mining seems to have begun around the year 1000. The gold regions were not owned in the sense of private property. One hereditary official chose areas for a season’s mining, and another was a sort of priest who mollified the spirits and made sure they would not interfere with the mining. Both of these figures were given small gifts, but they did not own the land or control the mining. There was another official, the goldfield chief, who assigned individual digging groups places to mine. This was an inherited position, and this person also did not own or control the mining.​[94]

A mining group was recruited by a person who decided to head a mine. The head of the group recruited men and women from his relatives or clan group; the group might be two men and three women, for example. Excavating was men’s work, but extracting the gold from the ore was women’s work. The system produced a large amount of gold for centuries, but what made it work was the surplus labor during the dry season. The gold is still there, but it has not been profitable to work since the early 1800s.​[95]

The methods used may seem primitive, but the amount of gold involved in the trade was very large, perhaps half the entire world’s supply. Mansa Musa and the Malians did not try to control the goldfields directly. They did try to convert the miners to Islam, with no success. Miners put down their tools, insisting on keeping their indigenous religion. Once Mansa Musa abandoned the conversion attempt, production resumed.​[96]

There were language differences, but the trade devised what has been called a “silent trade.” Traders wanting gold would set down goods at a traditional spot, usually a riverbank, and then walk back a distance. The miners would inspect the goods and then leave gold dust in the amount they were willing to pay for the goods. If the amount of gold was acceptable, the traders would take the payment and depart, leaving behind the trade items. If it was not enough, they would leave the gold and distance themselves, allowing the miners to take a second look. This process seems to have worked well for a very long time.​[97]

As mentioned, Mansa Musa is most famous for his hajj. There are extravagant claims for the size of his entourage, with sources often claiming it to have been sixty thousand people and hundreds of camels, each carrying hundreds of pounds of gold. Given the difficulty crossing the Sahara and the scarcity of water, that seems like an impossibly large number. There is no question that the entourage was impressive and that Mansa Musa took with him a great deal of gold. A smaller estimate but still very large for the great distance involved was made by the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, who put it at twelve thousand.

His caravan crossed the Sahara from Mali and then went east along the coast of what is now Algeria and Libya, bound for Cairo and the holy cities. It is not known why he didn’t take a ship for Cairo upon reaching the coast. His entourage included plenty of soldiers, so brigands, bands of robbers, and extortionate local rulers would have been no problem. The route was remarkably long, although different sources say it was three thousand miles (some even say six thousand miles) from central Mali to Mecca.

It is considered important that pious Muslims visit the holy cities once in their life. However, for a ruler, there could be several purposes for the trip, and Mansa Musa’s hajj had several elements. His legitimacy as king could be questioned. He did not descend from Sundiata, the founder of the empire, but came from one of Sundiata’s brothers, so the hajj might have been partly an exercise in legitimizing his rule. Completing the hajj brought a great deal of respect.​[98]

The hajj was also a business venture. Ordinary pilgrims might make small deals to finance their pilgrimage, such as taking along several slaves to sell. Rulers and rich pilgrims might buy souvenirs to take home and offer as gifts, a gesture that carried honor because of the length of the pilgrimage and the association of the gift with the holy cities. Mansa Musa brought back some intangibles, including the prestige of the hajj itself and, more importantly, recognition as a fellow king by the Mamluk sultan. He also brought back people and books, injecting new views and new information into Mali.

In a famous incident in Cairo, Mansa Musa was invited to visit the Mamluk sultan, Al-Malik al-Naisr. Mamluk protocol required that Musa kiss the ground and then kiss the sultan’s hand (some versions of the story say the kiss was to be placed on the sultan’s foot). Mansa Musa was a proud monarch and refused. Things were briefly tense, but Mansa Musa compromised by kissing the ground in honor of Allah. Sultan al-Nasir offered lodging to Musa and his entourage. The sultan’s hospitality was probably encouraged by Mansa Musa’s lavish spending and donations.​[99]

The elaborate stories about Mansa Musa’s vast amounts of gold come from his stay in Cairo as a guest of the Mamluk sultan. There must have been a formal parade. Perhaps after hospitality was offered, Mansa Musa’s entourage marched from the city gates to their quarters. Many servants wore gold brocades, and five hundred slaves led the march, each slave carrying a solid gold staff. The Cairenes were impressed, and apparently, Musa was lavish in his gifts.

Mansa Musa’s hajj achieved fame all across the Mediterranean. A famous map in a Catalan (Spanish) atlas by Abraham Cresques from 1375 has a detail for the interior of Africa: a large image of Mansa Musa on a golden throne in Timbuktu, wearing a gold crown and holding a gold staff with a large nugget or orb of gold in his lap. Mansa Musa’s golden pilgrimage established him as a legend for wealth.​[100]

Depiction of Mansa Musa in the Catalan Atlas.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catalan_Atlas_BNF_Sheet_6_Mansa_Musa_(cropped).jpg

One important consequence of his elaborate hajj was that Musa brought a large number of books destined for libraries in Timbuktu and Walata. He also brought back Muslim scholars and jurists. Mansa Musa endowed Muslim universities at Timbuktu and Walata. He developed friendly relationships with Muslim states in North Africa and with the Mamluk sultan in Egypt.

Another important result of Musa’s hajj concerns the caliph in Cairo, who held a powerless but prestigious religious position. The caliph appointed Mansa Musa as his subordinate for Mali, a gesture with no religious importance but which added to Musa’s growing reputation.​[101]

Among the scholars returning to Mali was an Andalusian named al-Sahili. He had been forced to leave Andalusia in Muslim Spain because of some scandal. He was an odd mixture of poet, architect, and scholar. Al-Sahili had roamed the Muslim world from Iraq to Yemen and Egypt, and he met Mansa Musa in Mecca. He was a famous man, and Mansa Musa had to lure him to Mali. The package offered was large. Mansa Musa gave him 440 pounds of gold, slaves, and some choice lands along the Niger.​[102]

Al-Sahali designed the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu, which was built in 1327 and is still standing, as well as other mosques and buildings. He is said to have brought the burnt brick construction method to the region. He lived the remainder of his life in Mali.​[103]

Mali benefited from the flow of Muslim scholars and theologians from Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East. Mali’s laws were codified and written down in Arabic. Before the use of Arabic spread widely, the griots (professional storytellers, usually described as poets) were the repositories of history and tradition.

The mansas, particularly Musa, brought an impressive range of Islamic scholars, and there were a large number of students at the Sankoré Madrash in Timbuktu, which functioned as a college. It, along with a couple of other centers of Islamic learning in the city, might have had a million books and manuscripts and as many as twenty-five thousand students. Some students were sent to Morocco and Egypt to complete their learning.​[104]

Mansa Musa planned to abdicate on his return to Mali in order to return to Mecca and spend the rest of his life there, but he died before his plan could begin. Musa was followed by his son, Musa Maghan (r. 1337–1341), and then by his brother Sulayman (r. 1341–1360). Given that Maghan’s reign was so short, Musa Sulayman might have usurped the throne from his nephew, but there is no evidence. He was a powerful ruler but was notably different from Musa. Mansa Musa was known for his generosity, and Mansa Sulayman was noted for his miserliness. After Mansa Sulayman died in 1360, a civil war broke out between the families of Musa and Sulayman. Mali began to decline in size and power.​[105]

Gold from West Africa continued to be important despite Mali losing control of the trade routes in the generation following Mansa Musa’s death. African gold remained of great importance in the trans-Saharan trade routes until the late 1400s when the Portuguese began their reconnaissance down the African coast. Gold continued to cross the desert on camels, but the Portuguese cut into the trade. Ships on the Atlantic could carry vastly more than camels, the ships of the desert, and do so much more cheaply and safely. Ultimately, the main sources of gold shifted to the Americas when the Spanish took control of Mexico and Peru.

Chapter 7 – Askia Mohammed, Songhai Emperor (1493–1528)

Songhai was ruled by Mali in the great days of Mansa Musa, but by the late 1400s, it had become independent and an empire itself. Mali continued to exist, but it lost most of its territory to Songhai. The Songhai people are thought to originally be a Nilo-Saharan group, migrating into the region centuries earlier. They became powerful by controlling river transport on much of the Niger River, particularly most of the river in the Great Bend.

The founder of the empire was Sunni Ali (r. 1464–1492). He was a gifted commander, creating an army that included armored cavalry and a canoe navy. He was not Muslim, and he used his reputation as a magician in the local religion to intimidate opponents. History has labeled him a capricious and almost evil ruler, but much of what is known of him is filtered through the lens of Muslim writers, and they were hostile toward Sunni because he was not a Muslim. Sunni Ali appears to have been a fine soldier and a highly capable leader. He was lenient with enemies who submitted and ruthless with those who resisted.​[106]

Mali had become rich by trade and from its access to the goldfields in West Africa. Songhai had access to the gold-producing areas, but things changed considerably in the 1400s. The Portuguese began exploring the African coast in the mid-1400s. They were interested in diverting the gold trade, obtaining slaves, and becoming engaged in trade in general. The Portuguese began building trading posts on the coast to try to short-circuit the gold trade. The trans-Saharan trade continued, but it became less profitable for Songhai. A Portuguese merchant ship could carry more goods than a caravan of hundreds of camels, and despite the danger of storms and corsairs, traveling by ship was considerably safer than crossing the Sahara, which had its own dangers.

The Songhai Empire at its greatest extent.

HetmanTheResearcher, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_the_Songhay_Empire.png

A contemporary description of Timbuktu and Songhai was published by Leo Africanus in 1550. His story illustrates how complicated life could be back then. He was born in Spain, and his family moved to Morocco in the wake of the Spanish conquest of Muslim Granada in 1492. He was in Egypt during the Ottoman conquest and had done the hajj to Mecca. Leo Africanus was captured by Spanish corsairs in the waters off Tunisia when returning from Egypt to Morocco. A common fate of Muslim captives was to become a galley slave, but because Leo Africanus was literate, he was presented to Pope Leo X as a slave. Pope Leo X freed him on condition he convert to Christianity, which he did.​[107]

Leo Africanus was commissioned to write an account of what he knew about Africa, which he finished in 1526. It was published in Italian in 1550 and became a best-seller. It was translated into several languages. The account was published in English with the title A Geographical Historie of Africa. (Leo Africanus’s name at birth was al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan. Pope Leo X gave him the name Giovanni Leone. His name on the book was put as “Giovan Lioni Africano,” which became Leo Africanus when the book was translated into English.)

Leo Africanus visited Timbuktu and Gao sometime around 1510 to 1513 during the reign of Askia. The account was a main source for Europeans about Africa well into the 1800s. Africanus described Timbuktu as a sizable city, with inhabitants living in houses constructed of wattle daubed with clay and thatch roofs. He describes a mosque and a palace constructed in stone. The city was prone to fires, and a large portion of the city burned down while he was visiting. Timbuktu’s inhabitants ate well and had easy access to drinkable water. Salt was in short supply and was brought in from sites in the Sahara.​[108]

He stated that the local horses were small and of poor quality, so horses were imported from North Africa by caravan. When they arrived, the king had first choice. There were many merchants and shops in the city, with some merchants coming from North Africa. Goods included cloth imported from Europe by caravan. Leo Africanus noted that the women who sold food in the streets did not wear the veil, which likely means they were not Muslim. The king did not permit Jews to live in the city. Currency was small gold nuggets, and cowrie shells were used for small transactions (cowrie shells were used as currency in a number of African societies).​[109]

It is thought that the free inhabitants of the city had a very high literacy rate because of the many teachers and religious figures who strongly emphasized being able to read the Quran. Books were in Arabic, which means many people would have known two or more languages, their own plus Arabic.

Africanus described the king’s court as “magnificent.” People wishing to speak to the king had to kneel and toss dust over themselves but apparently only if they had not done so before. In processions, the king rode a fine camel. The account noted that Songhai had three thousand horsemen in the army and a large number of infantry and archers who used poison arrows.​[110]

Songhai emperors were absolute rulers, but the throne was not secure, and the succession was prone to violence. Of the nine Songhai emperors, six were deposed or murdered by brothers or sons.​[111]

After Sunni Ali died in 1492, apparently by an accident, he was followed by his son, Sunni Baru. Baru was seen as insufficiently devoted to Islam, so he was ousted from the position of king by a rebellion of army commanders, one of whom was Askia Mohammed. The rebels and the emperor’s forces met at the Battle of Anfao in April of 1493, which the emperor lost. Sunni Baru fled to a village in the south, where he lived for the rest of his life. Askia did not have him killed, which is remarkable because the usual fate of dethroned kings was death.

Out of the chaos, the third Songhai emperor emerged. After the battle, Askia was apparently proclaimed emperor in a meeting of the rebel commanders. Askia became Emperor Askia Mohammed I, who would rule from 1492 to 1528. Askia means “king,” like the word “mansa” did in the Mali Empire. Askia Mohammed began a dynasty that lasted until 1591; it is generally called the Askia dynasty. It ended when a Moroccan invasion destroyed Songhai.​[112]

The date Askia was born is not known. Many historians put the year 1443 as his birth year. His origin is also subject to debate. It’s generally agreed that he was from the Toucouleur people and was born in Gao (the Songhai capital) to a family that migrated from what is now Senegal. There is a popular legend, which still circulates, that Askia was the son of Kasey, Sunni Ali’s sister, and a djinn.​[113]

In popular belief, a djinn is a spirit that is able to shapeshift into a human or animal form. Djinns are powerful beings, able to influence human affairs, but they are also seen as capricious and vengeful. The legend of Askia’s father being a djinn is complicated and has to do with Sunni Ali killing his sister’s newborns because of a prophecy that one would overthrow him. Sunni Ali seems to have been suspicious of plots to overthrow him, so the story about him killing his sister’s sons could be true. His sister’s sons would have inherited the throne by traditional law. It seems likely that this legend contributed to the great respect Askia’s subjects are said to have felt for him.

There’s another popular story involving djinns. While in Mecca, djinns said that Askia was the caliph and gave him a caliph’s regalia of a green turban and sword. It’s not clear why these stories were circulated; they would have been created and spoken by griots.

One of the most important things the new king did was go on the hajj to Mecca in 1496. His entourage was smaller than the famous hajj of Mansa Musa, but it was still large. It included eight hundred cavalrymen, one thousand infantry, various members of the court, and a number of ulama (Muslim clerics) who wished to see Mecca. Askia carried much less gold than Mansa Musa, but it was still plenty. Askia Mohammed set up hostels in Mecca for pilgrims from the Sahel and gave alms to the poor. He spent all 300,000 dinars he brought with him and amassed a debt of 50,000 ducats. Dinars were Middle Eastern, and ducats were European. They were roughly equivalent in value at that time; they were valued at roughly three to five grams of gold. Both ducats and dinars circulated widely in the Mediterranean world.

During his hajj, Askia distributed alms and paid expenses, but he also used a third of his gold for commercial transactions for goods to take back to Songhai. Pilgrimages were a religious ritual, but pilgrims also engaged in commerce to help defray expenses.​[114]

More importantly, Askia was given the title of “Caliph of the Sudan” by the sharif of Mecca. This was an honorary title with little actual religious function, but it was valuable for Askia since it increased his status and gave him legitimacy.​[115]

Askia was illiterate and spent some of his long reign on military campaigns, greatly enlarging Songhai. He was also concerned with conditions in the empire, particularly with trade, which was what made Songhai so wealthy. He tried to standardize weights and measures and maintained many market inspectors who checked the origin and quality of goods. They punished any trader who violated the rules. During his rule, trade greatly increased, as did the empire’s prosperity. Songhai also reached its maximum size during his reign.

Money existed in the form of cowrie shells, but sometimes gold, salt, or copper was used as money. Songhai exports included gold, slaves, ivory, kola nuts, and cotton. Imports included salt, weapons, glass, sugar, and textiles (a large portion of which originated in Europe). Salt from Saharan mines was perhaps the most commonly traded commodity. Salt was cut into rectangular blocks that weighed twenty-five to thirty kilograms, which were carried by camels or slaves.​[116]

Askia was a pious Muslim who strongly supported the clergy, and Islam took a firmer hold during his reign. At the time, Songhai was still in the process of converting to Islam, so the traditional religion was largely practiced by the common people in the countryside. The emperor made strenuous efforts to convert them, and he sometimes made war on unconverted neighboring peoples. The gods worshiped in the traditional religion included Harake Diko, the god of the Niger River, and Dongo, the thunder god.​[117]

At its peak, Songhai was the largest of the West African Sahelian empires, stretching from the Senegal River inland, including a large portion of the Niger bend territory, and from the Niger north into the Sahara. The empire extended some five hundred miles north into the Sahara to the salt mines at Taghaza and Taoudenni, which required subduing the Tuareg tribes. Askia Mohammed also extended Songhai to the east and southeast and conquered a couple of the Hausa states in what is now northern Nigeria.​[118]

The land around the Niger was farmed because of the ready availability of water, and shifting agriculture was common in the savannah. Nobles often owned large estates worked by slaves, as did the emperor. There were large numbers of slaves in Songhai. These slaves were probably more like sharecroppers than plantation slaves.

Askia’s several large estates had different requirements. In one, each family was required to produce one hundred spears and one hundred arrows each year. In another, near the Niger, each family was assigned a quantity of fish to dry and send to the emperor.​[119]

The empire was efficiently run. It was divided into provinces with governors loyal to the emperor who usually came from his large family, such as his sons, nephews, and brothers. Tax collectors gathered goods (payment was in kind rather than money), and there were some provisions for the poor. Askia created what today might be called government departments. These were for finance, justice, protocol, agriculture, forests and water, and one dealing with “whites.” “Whites” meant North Africans, the desert Tuareg tribes, and probably Arabs and others from Egypt and the Middle East. The capital, Gao, may have had 100,000 inhabitants during his reign, making it a large city for the location and era. Timbuktu might have been as large.​[120]

Askia had begun his rule as a mature man, and at the end of his reign, he was very old and blind. He had a large number of children. His son Musa deposed him in 1528. Musa exiled the old man to an island in the Niger, which legend says was full of mosquitoes and toads. Musa ruled as Askia Musa for three years (r. 1528–1531) and then was murdered by one of his brothers. Askia Mohammed’s son, Askia Ismail (r. 1537–1539), brought his father back to Gao, for which Askia Mohammed gave Ismail his green turban and caliph’s sword. Askia Mohammed died in 1538; he was around ninety-five years old.​[121]

The supposed tomb of Askia Mohammed.

Taguelmoust, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Askia.jpg

His sons followed each other on the throne until 1582. Under them, Songhai declined in power and prosperity and ceased to expand. There was one significant exception: the reign of Askia Dawud (r. 1549–1582), which reinvigorated the economy and kept the empire at peace.​[122]

Askia Mohammed has the historical reputation of being a much-loved and just ruler. A writer in the early 1700s described him as “easy to approach, kind-hearted and benevolent, greatly respectful of the religious leaders, and very fond of scholars, showing them the greatest favor.”​[123] The account praises Songhai as prosperous and secure.

The accuracy of this and similar histories is questionable because they were often self-serving. They were written by clerics or scholars who praised the king in order to receive money and sponsorships. Rulers wanted to be remembered favorably by future generations. Like the griots, writers and poets could shape a ruler’s legacy, so a ruler concerned with what today might be called public relations would be generous to them. Both accounts and the poems of the griots are valuable historical sources, but using them requires great care.

Songhai was destroyed in 1591 when al-Mansur, the sultan of Morocco, sent an army to conquer Timbuktu, Jenne, and Gao. Mansur’s expedition was commanded by a renegade Christian, Judar Pasha, and included Moroccan cavalry, Muslim musketeers, Spanish and Portuguese renegades, and slave soldiers. The Moroccan sultan wanted to control the salt mines in the Sahara and the trans-Saharan trade routes. The Songhai army numbered twenty thousand, which was far more than the Moroccans, but the Moroccans had muskets and inflicted a devastating defeat on the Songhai forces. Judar Pasha returned to Morocco with considerable loot, including thirty camels loaded with gold. Songhai dissolved, and Moroccan adventurers came to form a military caste that ruled several of the former Songhai cities until the 1830s. Morocco did not control the trade across the Sahara, though, which shifted east.​[124]

Chapter 8 – Afonso I, Catholic King of Kongo (1506–1543)

The history of the African Kingdom of Kongo and the European Kingdom of Portugal were entwined for centuries. Even today, millions of people in Angola, which includes most of the former Kongo and was a Portuguese colony until 1975, speak Portuguese and belong to the Catholic Church. To understand the life and time of Afonso I of Kongo, some backstory is helpful.

Portugal ousted the last of its Muslim rulers in 1249 (Muslim rule did not completely end in Spain until 1492). In the late 1300s, Portuguese traders began to explore the near Atlantic. They were particularly interested in finding the sources of gold that was a mainstay of the trans-Saharan trade. Half the world’s gold came from what is now Senegal and Ghana, and if the Portuguese could access it, the gold trade might be pried out of Muslim hands. The world-famous hajj of Mansa Musa in 1324 had become legendary for his extremely lavish gifts and spending of gold, and the legend contributed to Portuguese interest in West Africa.

Portugal was small. It was not very rich and had a relatively small population. However, Portugal had some far-seeing rulers and administrators who eventually turned the small country into one of the most powerful naval forces in the world. In the 1400s, both Portugal and Spain (Spain was not yet united into a single kingdom) found and began exploiting the Atlantic islands: the Canaries beginning in 1402, Madeira in 1420, and the Azores in 1427. The two countries nearly went to war but eventually came to an agreement that Spain would get the Canary Islands while Portugal would get the Azores and Madeira.

Portugal began establishing posts along the African coast starting in 1415 with Ceuta on the Moroccan coast. Portuguese navigators and traders worked their way down the coast, trading and looking for gold and slaves while staying alert for other commodities to buy or trade. They reached the Cape Verde islands by 1462 and began colonizing them. They founded the fort of Elmina on the coast of what is now Ghana in 1481 (it was then called the Gold Coast). Navigators kept pushing farther and farther south until finally rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. They then quickly developed posts along the East African coast and eventually established a maritime empire in the Indian Ocean.

The impulse to make settlements was not just fueled by the search for gold. They also wanted to reach India and shift trade to Portuguese merchant ships, which cut out the problem of the Ottoman realm blocking access to the old Middle Eastern trade route to India. It also cut out Venice and Genoa, which had previously monopolized European access to goods originating in India and China by negotiating treaties with Muslim middlemen.

Kongo fit into this intercontinental web of Portuguese influence through its willingness to trade and its willingness to accept missionaries and the Catholic Church. The Portuguese were interested in gold, silks, and slaves, but they were also interested in harvesting souls for the church.

In 1482, Captain Diogo Cão sailed south along the African coast, and his ship experienced a strong current of fresh water many miles out into the Atlantic. This told the explorer that a major river was nearby. Cão found the river, now called Congo, and erected a sort of monument, an iron cross on a stone base. The cross bore the coat of arms of his king and a plaque that included the words “the most serene, the most excellent and potent prince, King João II.” Cão erected several of these structures at various points on the coast.​[125]

The Portuguese were interested in a large river that could lead deep into the interior. The legend of Prester John was still circulating then, inspiring hope that a Christian king somewhere in Africa might join a mutual alliance to fight Islam and spread Christianity. The Prester John legend was probably originally inspired by Christian kingdoms in Ethiopia.​[126]

Cão’s investigations showed there was a strong chiefdom somewhere in the interior, a kingdom called Manikongo (which confused the title of the king with the kingdom). How the explorer managed to communicate with the Africans is not known, but some kind of translation must have been possible. Cão sent four emissaries to the Kongo king and continued his explorations. Cão expected to pick them up when the Portuguese ship sailed back up the coast, but he found they had been detained. So, he kidnapped four Africans as hostages and took them to Portugal. The four were well treated in the hope that when they returned home, they would spread positive descriptions of their experience. They were returned to the river’s mouth in 1486. A Portuguese ship tried sailing up the Congo, but about a hundred miles in, the river was blocked by rapids.​[127]

Kongo was founded in the 14th century by a group of chiefs known as the Mwissikongo, who merged several small chiefdoms. Kongo prospered, and by the time of the Portuguese arrival, it had developed into a sizable and powerful kingdom. Its king had become known as the Manikongo. The Manikongo was powerful, and his position was close to sacred, although there were some traditional limits. People who wished to approach him had to prostrate themselves and crawl to him. No one could watch him eat or drink under pain of death.​[128]

King João (John) II of Portugal wanted to set up a Christian African chiefdom of some kind under Portuguese protection, and the objective was Kongo. His choice might have been due to the Congo River promising access to the interior. In 1491, three caravels containing a dozen priests and some masons, printers, and farmers arrived at the river’s mouth. They landed at a village called Mpanda, where they were welcomed by three thousand dancing and chanting warriors naked to the waist. They carried bows and arrows and wore colorful feather headdresses. The celebrations might have been intended to impress the outsiders with the power of the Manikongo, and it was certainly noted by the explorers. The celebration lasted three days. Afterward, the Portuguese traveled to the capital, where they were welcomed by the king.​[129]

The first contact between Kongo and the Portuguese took place in 1482. In May 1491, King Nzinga a Nkuwu converted to Catholicism and took the Christian name of João I. His son, Nzinga a Mbemba, also converted and took the name Afonso. Most of the Bakongo (the name of the Kongo people) did not convert. They resented the actions of missionary priests, who destroyed idols and other symbols of the traditional religion and also banned polygamy. In 1496, the king renounced Christianity and expelled the Portuguese from Mbanza, although Afonso did not join him.​[130]

The Kingdom of Kongo was never rigidly Catholic. Portuguese priests were allowed in Kongo by permission of the king. Missionaries had to overlook the fact that elements of the traditional religion remained very alive. Missionaries could not impose a rigid orthodoxy on the population the way they could in the Americas, where they had more control.​[131]

The Kingdom of Kongo was not simply a rainforest kingdom as is commonly thought. It was large enough to include several distinct ecological zones that resulted in different settlement and crop patterns. The distinct regions included the coastal plains, savannahs, forests, and highlands. Where the tsetse fly was absent, cattle could be raised. In the interior, farmers produced yams, vegetables, palm kernels, and cattle. In some areas, villages moved every ten years or so when soil fertility lessened.

Portugal brought more than Catholicism to Kongo. Colonization of the Americas introduced the Europeans to many crops and fruits domesticated by the Indigenous peoples, and some of those crops came to be important in Africa. The crops brought to Kongo included corn (or maize), cassava, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and tobacco.​[132]

Kongo traded with other African kingdoms as well as with the Portuguese. The prominent items that were traded were salt, cattle hides, copper, ivory, and slaves. Kongo’s proximity to the coast allowed it to obtain European goods and then sell them elsewhere. By doing so, it obtained products that could be sold to the Portuguese. Trade also included items produced by craftsmen and weavers, including raffia textiles, pottery, and ironwork.​[133]

Cloth made from raffia was a major item in the Kongo economy. It comes from fibers obtained from the fronds of the raffia palm. Sometimes, imported silk was added to the raffia fibers and woven into cloth on looms, which seems to have been women’s work. The Portuguese bought some of these products to use as trade goods in other areas of Africa, trading for ivory and slaves. Kongo also produced significant amounts of copper, some of which was traded to Portuguese merchants, who then sold it in Benin. The copper traded to Benin helped produce the famed Benin Bronzes. Some of the copper was also taken to Europe, where it was used to make artillery.​[134]

The coastal plains produced salt and fresh and preserved fish. Palm oil was produced in large quantities in the Loango coastal area. Forested areas produced dyewood and game. The raffia palm was cultivated in many areas, and processed raffia fiber produced large quantities of fabric.​[135]

The Portuguese, who were used to money being coined from silver or gold, were surprised that the currency of Kongo was cowrie shells (from the species Olivancilana nana; they were called nzimbu in Kongo). These came from the island of Luanda in what is now Angola. Europe and the Middle East had used precious metals for coins for many centuries, and the tradition was followed in the Islamic African world. Using cowrie shells as currency was common in Africa, though. It was similar to the wampum belts used by Indigenous peoples in North America, which could also be made from cowrie shells.

The capital, Mbanza, was large, but there were few other towns, and most of the population was rural. Kongo society was ruled by the king and the nobility. The nobility owned farms but tended to live in Mbanza. The nobility was composed mostly of relatives of the king or descendants of past kings. Some aspects of Kongo culture puzzled the Portuguese. Land was inherited through the female line, and some of the tribal peoples were matrilineal. The kingship was elective from viable candidates. There was a royal council of twelve, which included four women who represented each of the four clans of the king’s grandparents.​[136]

The king’s principal wife had to be the sister or daughter of the governor of the province of Mbata, where the governorship was hereditary in the female line. This governor was required to marry a close relative of the king. This was typical of the varied and complicated governance of Kongo. While there was a principal wife, the kings of Kongo were polygamous, despite the disapproval of Portuguese missionaries. Afonso had three hundred grandsons and great-grandsons.​[137] The number of wives a chief had was evidence of his power, but it was more than that. Marriage was part of diplomacy, establishing family ties that enhanced alliances.

There might have been another reason for Afonso’s turn to Catholicism. Traditionally, a king’s sons by his principal wife could not inherit the throne. The Kongo tradition was matriarchal, so the natural heirs would be his sister’s sons. Under that tradition, Afonso could not have become king because he was Nzinga a Nkuwu’s son by his principal wife.​[138]

Afonso did not renounce the faith when his father did. He appears to have truly accepted Catholicism. When he assumed the throne in 1506, Afonso adopted the Portuguese dress and Portuguese etiquette, and the Kongo elite began using Portuguese titles. Many adopted the Portuguese idea of coats of arms. The capital, Mbanza, was renamed São Salvador.​[139]

King Afonso of Kongo.

Affricoll9, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manikongo.jpg

But how did Afonso become king? When the old king died, the brothers fought to determine who would follow him. Afonso defeated his half-brother Mpanzu sometime around 1505 or 1506. The fighting between the brothers was related to religion; Afonso remained Catholic, while his brother preferred the old religion. The two formed their armies and met in battle. Mpanzu had more troops, but Afonso won. His victory was attributed to a vision of Saint James in the sky, and the vision is said to have included several armored horsemen. This might have been an actual vision, or perhaps it was a useful adaptation of a Christian legend. The story of the vision appeared in a document written by a Portuguese chronicler named Paiva Manso. The half-brother died; he was possibly executed. The story was portrayed in the coat of arms created for Afonso, which was used by Kongo’s kings until 1860.​[140]

The coat of arms created for Afonso.

Samhanin, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coat_of_arms_of_Kongo.svg

Afonso was born about 1460, so he was a mature man when he took power in 1506. He had considerable experience in administering the kingdom through governing areas assigned to him by his father,

Afonso was said to have a royal guard of sixteen thousand to twenty thousand men made up of slaves. In times of war, the army was enlarged by calling up commoners in territorial units. Kongo probably reached its maximum size during Afonso’s long reign (1506–1543). He had the longest reign of all the Kongo kings in a line that lasted into the 1800s.​[141]

As mentioned previously, the king wanted to adopt aspects of Portuguese culture, not just the religion. By 1516, there were about a thousand students in royal schools, although only children of nobles were accepted. Many Kongolese learned how to read and write Portuguese, which almost certainly made Kongo the most literate state anywhere in Africa that was not Muslim. (Ethiopia had its own script, but the literacy levels were likely low.)

Afonso sent diplomats to Portugal and to the Vatican. There was a community of free Kongo Africans in Lisbon and apparently also in Brazil. One, Antonio Viera (the ambassador from Kongo), married into the Portuguese royal family.​[142]

In 1520, Afonso’s son, Henrique, was consecrated in Rome as a Catholic bishop and went to serve in Utica, an abandoned diocese in Africa. He was the head of the Catholic Church in Kongo until his death in 1531. Henrique had been trained as a priest in Europe. There were never enough Portuguese in Kongo to provide many priests, and some of the ones who did reach Kongo were corrupt and greedy. An unknown number of Kongolese became priests, and Catholicism in the kingdom was looser and more tolerant than the parent church in Portugal.​[143]

Afonso seems to have genuinely liked the Portuguese and had some of his sons and some of the sons of the aristocracy sent to Portugal to be educated. He did his best to convert the population of Kongo to Christianity but had mixed success. Kongo was large and had a diverse population, and some of the people preferred their traditions, regardless of the king’s preferences. Afonso was, in many ways, an absolute ruler, but he did not have enough power to persuade more than a fraction of his people to adopt the new religion.

There was one increasingly important and negative issue between Afonso and the Portuguese: the slave trade. The Kongo tradition was that prisoners captured in wars were enslaved and used to work in agriculture. The Portuguese were beginning to develop the Cape Verde islands, São Tomé (an island in the Gulf of Guinea), and Brazil as producers of sugar, and they needed labor. The islands were uninhabited, so there was no local population to enslave like in the Canary Islands. Few Portuguese were interested in migrating to the islands to become laborers, and there were not enough condemned criminals to be useful. The answer was slaves, and the Portuguese obtained them in several ways, including raiding coastal communities. However, buying slaves in Kongo was easier, and larger numbers were more obtainable.

A sizable number of slaves came from Kongo. Most were captives taken in war. Many of them came from Afonso’s war against the neighboring Kingdom of Ndongo. Slaves sold from Kongo to the Portuguese were sometimes sold by the Portuguese to other Africans. An estimated ten thousand slaves were sold to African traders in the Gold Coast from 1510 to 1540, where they were used in agriculture, as porters, and in other roles.​[144]

Afonso was not opposed to the slave trade. He was opposed to his own subjects being made slaves. He gained a considerable income from the slave trade, so he was active in the trade.​[145] Portuguese traders bought some slaves in Kongo legally, but not enough were available, so slaves were also gained illegally, violating Afonso’s regulations. By the 1520s, some three thousand slaves were exported from Mpinda, a post at the mouth of the Congo River, annually.

Afonso’s authority was increasingly ignored by the Portuguese. The king wrote a number of letters to the Portuguese king, João III, but he was not sympathetic. The letters deplored the slave trade and described how traders kidnapped commoners and sons of the nobility. In a letter dated 1539 (Afonso would have been close to eighty), he wrote that ten of his nephews and grandsons had been sent to Portugal for education but had vanished on their way. He believed they had probably been taken to Brazil as slaves. Later records confirmed that they had indeed been carried off to Brazil.​[146]

There was clearly a problem with Portuguese kidnapping or buying Kongolese subjects, but the letter to João II might have been purposely dramatic. Afonso created a kind of commission that investigated the conditions of anyone to be sold, intervening if the slave was a Kongo subject.​[147]

A number of Kongolese nobles had studied in Portugal, where they learned Portuguese and became literate. They also developed a taste for European luxuries, which Portuguese merchants supplied and traded for slaves. From about 1520 to 1540, four thousand to five thousand slaves were sold from Kongo every year, increasing to six thousand to seven thousand. What portion of these were actually Kongolese subjects is not known.​[148]

Kongo remained strong and prosperous for several decades after Afonso died. The kingdom was greatly weakened in 1568 when a powerful force known as the Jagas attacked. They were a mysterious group that was highly mobile, apparently ruthless, and known for their savagery and, allegedly, cannibalism. Kongo needed Portuguese aid to survive. The loss of life was heavy, and survivors sometimes sold children or relatives into slavery to be able to obtain food. In the later 1500s, disputes over succession resulted in civil wars. Kongo’s independence gradually faded, and the kingdom shrank as provinces became independent.

Kongo managed to retain considerable independence in part because few actual Portuguese were actually stationed in the kingdom and because Portugal had a vast maritime empire in Asia and growing colonies in Brazil. Kongo was a minor concern compared to the rest. Some of the more competent kings were able to stabilize their kingdom and even enlarge it. The succession of kings continued until 1914 when the Portuguese put down a rebellion, abolished the kingdom, and incorporated it into their colony of Angola.​[149]

Chapter 9 – Ahmad Gran, Imam of Adal (1527–1543)

The Horn of Africa has repeatedly been the scene of wars between Christian Ethiopia and Islam. Christianity came to the region in the 300s CE when King Ezana of Axum converted to the faith. Islam came centuries later, across the Red Sea from the Hijaz, Hadhramaut (both in Arabia), Yemen, and south from Egypt, where Islam had expanded. Muslims conquered Egypt in 641 CE and began to take root in the late 600s in Somalia.

Ethiopia inherited its Christianity from Axum. The head of the Ethiopian Church has, for many generations, been appointed by the patriarch of Alexandria, which has been under Muslim rule for more than sixteen centuries. Egypt has retained a large Coptic Christian minority population, which once was Egypt’s majority. The two religions exist in uneasy proximity to each other. However, in Egypt, Islam is dominant, and in Ethiopia, Christianity has dominated the highlands for many centuries.

Islamic peoples gradually took control of the Red Sea coast of Africa in what is now Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, including migrants from Arabia and local people who converted. Some of those lands had been part of the African kingdoms of Meroe and Axum, but Ethiopia had essentially ceded the lowlands near the sea to Islam.

Historically, the Christian kingdoms of Meroe, Axum, and Ethiopia had been involved in trade across the Red Sea, with merchants traveling as far as India. People migrated from one side of the sea to the other, and at several times, the African Christian kingdoms controlled parts of Arabia, notably Yemen. Ethiopia traded with Yemen for ivory and slaves. One Yemeni dynasty, the Najahids (1022–1158), were originally slaves from Ethiopia.​[150]

The political dynamic was not simply Ethiopia resisting constant Muslim aggression. Ethiopia was also expansionist, and while expanding to the south, it took control of several smaller Muslim emirates, such as Showa in 1285, Ifat in 1415, and Adal in 1520. Control of Adal was short-lived; the invasion of Adal toppled the reigning emir and created the chaos from which Ahmad Gran emerged as a dominant figure.​[151]

A young Ahmad Gran.

Manuel João Ramos, Isabel Boavida, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_Ahmad_Gragn.png

Ahmad Gran became imam of Adal. His intense faith drew followers, but he also proved to be a brilliant general and charismatic leader who could assemble a powerful army from the mixed clans and tribes of the Adal Sultanate. His intent was to conquer all of Ethiopia and set up a Muslim empire with himself as sultan and to establish a dynasty so his descendants could follow in his footsteps. It was ambitious, and Gran almost accomplished it, nearly destroying the Ethiopian empire and annihilating Christianity.

Gran was an imam, a Muslim religious leader. He was also a reformer, preaching abstinence and self-discipline. He wanted to reform Islam in Africa, seeing it as decayed from the Islam of the Prophet’s day. Gran never called himself a Mahdi, one specially sent by God to reform the faith, but many of his supporters saw him as one.​[152]

Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi is best known by the name Ahmad Gran, which means “Ahmad the left-handed.” The “al-Ghazi” in his name is a reference to his being a victorious Muslim warrior against the enemy—the Christian Ethiopians. He was born in the Harar area in 1506. He is claimed as a hero by Somalia, but that is disputed. It is known that he was not Arab. He possibly descended from migrants from the Arabian Peninsula.​[153]

Gran was the principal figure in the long Ethiopian-Adal War (1529–1543). Adal was a small sultanate near Harar, where a mixture of peoples lived, although most were Muslim. The war began when an Ethiopian force attacked Adal in 1528, expecting to quickly defeat their Muslim enemy. Instead, the Ethiopians were beaten back, and Ahmad Gran prepared to invade Ethiopia, which he did in 1529.

Before we dive into that, let’s back up a bit. Adal had a sultan, Muhammad ibn Azhar ad-Din (r. 1488–1518), but the real power was held by a warlord, Emir Abu Bekir ibn Mahfuz, who took the title of imam. He often raided into Ethiopian territory, capturing thousands over the years. They were often sold as slaves, with many of them being given to the sharif of Mecca and other Arab rulers.​[154]

Mahfuz was unexpectedly successful. Ethiopia had dominated the small Muslim emirates for most of the 1400s. Mahfuz used hit-and-run tactics, avoiding confrontation with the Ethiopian army. However, in 1517, he was ambushed by an Ethiopian force under Emperor Dawit II (also known as Lebna Dengel). Mahfuz was killed, and his force was wiped out. Historians have condemned the Ethiopian emperor as greedy and incompetent, but on this occasion, he lived up to the role expected of emperors. Mahfuz had been a serious problem but not a mortal threat.​[155]

Gran married Mahfuz’s daughter. This woman, Bati del Bambara, was a fervent Muslim and a real partner to her husband. She accompanied him on his invasions and was among his chief advisors.​[156]

In 1525, the sultan of Adal was killed in battle with the Somalis, and Ahmad Gran, already influential, took power much the way Mahfuz had. Gran seems to have had the intent of warring with Ethiopia from the start. He began forming an army, including hiring mercenaries.

Ahmad Gran invited Islamic scholars and other Muslim figures from Arabia to participate in his planned jihad. This included some sharifs (descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima) and sayyids (descended from members of Muhammad’s clan), which gave Gran and his cause status and respect. Islam was in an expansionist era; there were other jihads at the same time, such as the ones performed by the Ottomans in Hungary and the Safavids in the Caucasus.​[157]

Gran took advantage of the new Ottoman Turkish presence in the Red Sea. The Ottomans had conquered Egypt in 1517 and took charge of the holy cities of Medina and Mecca (the Hejaz). They also had some control in Yemen. Gran asked the Ottomans for help, which they provided by sending some of their infantry.

A new feature in the East African war was firearms and artillery, which the Ottomans were probably the world experts of at the time. Gran trained his army to use Ottoman tactics. With training, a scattering of firearms, and some Ottoman reinforcements, Ahmad Gran embarked on his invasion. It would endanger the centuries-old Ethiopian empire.​[158]

Ethiopia had undergone a period of crisis between 1478 and the coming of age of Dawit II, as the emperors came to the throne at a very young age. Regents ruled until the boys reached eighteen, if they lived that long. The nobility seriously weakened the empire by preferring an emperor who was easy to manipulate.​[159]

Dawit (the Ge’ez version of “David”) had been emperor since 1508 (r. 1508–1540), coming to the throne at the age of twelve. His mother, the empress, ruled as regent until he came of age. He was a competent enough ruler but had the misfortune to encounter one of the most formidable Muslim jihadists in African history.

The first major battle of the war was at Shimbra Kure in March of 1529. Ahmad Gran advanced into Ethiopia with an army of about twelve thousand. Emperor Dawit gathered his army together; it might have reached 100,000. The Ethiopians attacked, and the fighting was heavy. Gran’s force had a group of musketeers, and their firepower seemed to have panicked the Ethiopian troops, which broke off the battle.

An early 20th-century illustration of Ahmad Gran.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ahmad_Grann.jpg

Ahamd Gran’s army suffered thousands of killed, and Dawit’s much bigger force also had heavy casualties, but the number is not known. Despite winning the battle, Gran retreated back to Adal, probably because of the decimation of his army. It was two years before another major battle took place.

In 1531, Gran’s force of twelve thousand invaded, meeting with the Ethiopians at the Battle of Antukyah in 1531. The Ethiopian army might have numbered as many as 100,000, but it was defeated and withdrew. This might have been the first time that Ethiopian troops faced cannon fire.

On October 28th, 1531, Ahamd Gran again met the Ethiopians, this time in the Battle of Amba Sel. Gran had a sizable number of Arabian musketeers and some Ottoman reinforcements. The larger Ethiopian force crumbled against the invaders. Gran captured part of the imperial regalia. This battle gave Gran control of southern Ethiopia.​[160]

Following Amba Sel, Gran’s army overran large portions of the Ethiopian heartland. They looted the Lake Hayq monastery and the famed stone-cut churches of Lalibela. They looted and damaged the Church of Our Lady of Zion in Axum, where Ethiopian emperors had been crowned for centuries. Churches were destroyed, towns were looted, resistance often ended in massacre, and large groups of Christians were forcibly converted to Islam.​[161]

Not much is known about these events. The usual writers of these chronicles were priests and monks, who were massacred in large numbers in Ahmad Gran’s invasion. It is known that there were turncoats who converted to Islam and served as administrators of Gran’s new kingdom. He established garrisons of Muslim troops in several places. He also granted fiefs to his friends and commanders. Ahmad Gran essentially became the emperor, and for several years, it looked as if he had conquered and subdued the empire. Christians were hunted down and killed. Gran also wanted to track down the fugitive emperor.​[162]

The situation was dire. In 1535, the emperor asked for help from the Portuguese, who, like the Ottomans, had recently emerged as a major power in the Red Sea region. The Ethiopians sent a delegation whose most important member was João Bermudez, who had come to Ethiopia as a member of a previous Portuguese group but had decided to stay.

The delegation reached Lisbon, where King João III was sympathetic. He sent letters to the Portuguese authorities in Asia, ordering them to assist the Ethiopians in the war. King João had mixed motives. Portugal was still in something of a Crusader mode against Islam, and it staged periodic raids against Morocco and North Africa. João also hoped to enlarge the influence of his church in Africa and Asia. Dawit had baited the king with the promise of Ethiopia converting to Catholicism.

In the early 1500s, Portugal had emerged as a dominant power in the Indian Ocean. They established bases in what is now Mozambique and Kenya, but perhaps most importantly, they established a citadel in Goa in India, which remained a Portuguese possession until it was taken by the Indian Army in 1961. Portugal occupied crucial points like Malacca (in what is now Malaysia) and had posts in Sri Lanka, Taiwan, China, and some places in the Spice Islands (now in Indonesia). In the Indian Ocean, Portugal had several naval battles with Ottoman and Indian flotillas. Portugal was also interested in converting Asia to Catholicism and made attempts to do so as far away as Japan.

Bermudez arrived at the Portuguese stronghold of Goa in India in 1539. It took that long to reach Portugal and then sail to India. He carried the king’s letters ordering the officials in Goa to go to the aid of the emperor.​[163]

The governor at Goa assembled an expeditionary force to Ethiopia, which was commanded by Cristóvão da Gama, the son of Vasco da Gama, the famous navigator and explorer. His force consisted of about four hundred men, but they carried firearms and brought some artillery, which countered Gran’s Ottoman detachment. Cristóvão proved to be a highly capable officer. A Portuguese fleet carried da Gama and his troops from India to the port of Massawa.

By the time the Portuguese arrived, the emperor was dead. Ahmad Gran had tracked him down to a remote monastery, Dabre Damo, in Tigray. Dawit was killed in fighting on September 2nd, 1540.

The Portuguese proved their worth at the Battle of Jarte, which took place over several days in April 1542 at a place now unknown. There were about four hundred Portuguese and several hundred Ethiopian troops against perhaps fifteen thousand of Gran’s army. Gran apparently offered the Portuguese safe passage back to the coast, but da Gama refused. Da Gama formed his men into an infantry square, a contemporary European battle tactic in which the soldiers formed a square formation that could attack but resisted flank attacks by cavalry. Gran attacked, and the fighting was intense, but the Portuguese firepower broke the attack. Ahmad Gran was forced to retreat. Apparently, the unintended explosion of gunpowder spooked the horses of Gran’s cavalry. The Portuguese won but lost a hundred men in the battle.​[164]

At another battle in 1542, the Battle of the Hill of the Jews, da Gama attacked a fort occupied by some of Gran’s troops and overwhelmed it, killing all the garrison. The name came from a nearby settlement of Beta Israel (an ancient group of Jewish Ethiopians).

At the Battle of Wofla in August 1542, Gran’s army was reinforced by two thousand musketeers from Arabia and nine hundred Ottomans. Gran’s firepower far exceeded that of the Portuguese. Ahmad Gran attacked the Portuguese fortified camp and inflicted a sharp defeat, killing more than half and capturing 10, reducing the Portuguese detachment to 140. Gran offered to spare the captives if they converted to Islam. The ten refused and were beheaded, including da Gama, who might have been tortured before being executed. The remainder of the Portuguese escaped, lucky not to have been annihilated.​[165]

The Battle of Wofla seems to have made Gran overconfident. He dismissed most of his musketeers, and most of the Ottomans departed; only about two hundred of them remained. The Ottomans wanted to use the ten captured Portuguese as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Portuguese in India, but Gran insisted they convert or die.​[166]

On February 21st, 1543, the fate of Ahmad Gran and Ethiopia was decided. The remaining Portuguese, somewhere around eighty musketeers and sixty cavalry, and about nine thousand Ethiopians under the new and capable Emperor Galawdewos attacked Gran’s larger army of fifteen thousand at the Battle of Wayna Daga. It looked as if Gran would win again until a Portuguese musketeer shot and wounded him.​[167]

There is no consensus on how Gran died. The Portuguese side of the battle is relatively well known because of later written accounts, including one written by a Portuguese participant in the battle. That account claims that a Portuguese musketeer named João de Castilho was determined to avenge da Gama’s death. He took advantage of Gran’s presence at the front of the battle to get close to him and fired. Ahmad Gran was fatally wounded, and his army disintegrated. Adal’s daring attempt to conquer and convert the Ethiopian empire ended forever.

A statue of Ahmad Gran in Somalia.

Ugaas Raage, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imaam_Ahmed_Gurey.jpg

Gran’s formidable wife, Bati del Bambara, now a widow, escaped with remnants of the army back to Harar. She then married Gran’s nephew on the promise that he would avenge Gran’s death.​[168]

Emperor Galawdewos did much to restore his empire’s strength and restored most of the empire’s lands. However, Gran, in a sense, reached out of the grave because the emperor was killed in 1559 in a raid instigated by Gran’s widow. She convinced her new husband to mount a major raid, which found and killed Galawdewos. He was beheaded, so the story goes, on Bati del Bambara’s order.​[169]

Conclusion: The Fate of African Kings

The nine kings discussed in this book are among the most important in ancient and medieval African history, but there were hundreds of others. Africa is a vast continent, second in size only to Asia, and there are thousands of local cultures even today with hundreds of different languages.

African history has tended to be overlooked by Western readers, and Africa has often been seen as a victim of colonialism rather than an active force in world history. The stories of these kings belie those stereotypes.

The kings of Kush became the rulers of Egypt for a century, restoring the faded glory of past pharaohs. The Kushite pharaohs resisted the superpower of the age, Assyria, for decades before finally being defeated.

Numidia’s King Massinissa was an important ally of Rome, and his cavalrymen were a crucial element in the Battle of Zama, which eliminated the Carthaginian threat to Rome and ended the career of the famous Hannibal Barca.

King Ezana’s Axum had territories in Arabia, and merchants traded as far as Byzantium and India. He brought Christianity to the East African highlands, where it still thrives. He is a saint in the Ethiopian Church.

Abu al-Mu’min was a sultan, an ethnic Berber, and the founder of the Almohad dynasty. His empire included what is today Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, a third of Spain, and some of Libya. He threw the Normans out of Tunisia (the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which had ambitions of conquering North Africa).

Mamluk Sultan Baybars I was originally a slave soldier, a Qipchaq Turk captured in what is now southern Russia. The Mamluks originated as a corps of slave soldiers loyal to the Ayyubid sultan and then took control themselves. Baybars had the longest run of any of the Mamluks. His entrapment of Christian Crusaders at Mansurah fatally weakened the Seventh Crusade. He was co-commander at the Battle of Ain Jalut, which stopped Mongolian expansion into Palestine. His empire faced almost annual raids from the Ilkhanid Mongols, but Baybars consistently beat them.

The king of Mali, Mansa Musa, led Mali to prosperity and to its greatest extent. Mansa Musa’s hajj to Mecca had a huge entourage and carried a vast amount of gold with them. His largesse became a legend that lasted for centuries and led to European explorers seeking gold in Africa. He is considered by many historians to have been the richest man in all of history.

Askia Mohammed usurped the throne of Songhai from an emperor who preferred his traditional religion to Islam. Askia was a major factor in the spread of Islam to most of the Sahel region of Africa. His hajj was smaller than Mansa Musa’s but still distributed plenty of gold in Egypt and the holy cities.

Afonso I was the second Christian king of the Kongo. His sincere Catholicism led to the conversion of a large portion of his kingdom’s population. His descendants took Portuguese names for the next three centuries. His involvement with Europe came at the dawn of the Atlantic slave trade, and he tried to protect his subjects, although he was not opposed to slavery or to selling prisoners captured in war. He wrote a number of letters to the king in Portugal, which provide a unique perspective from an African king’s viewpoint.

Ahmad Gran, Emir of Adal, was an imam, a religious cleric, and while he did not declare himself a Mahdi, his followers believed he was. His goal was to conquer Ethiopia, eliminate Christianity, and found an empire with himself as sultan. The Ottoman Turks aided Gran, and the Portuguese assisted the Ethiopian emperor, which, in a sense, made it a proxy war between the Portuguese maritime empire and the Ottoman land empire in a struggle for control of the Red Sea.

Knowing the stories of these kings and their societies shows that Africa was not simply a victim of history; it was a participant in history that links it to Europe and the Middle East.

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