Songhai Empire

The Songhai Empire was the last and largest of the great medieval empires of the West African Sahel, dominating the Niger River bend from its capital at Gao. Although a Songhai state had existed around Gao since the 11th century, the empire proper emerged in 1464 when Sonni Ali (r.

1464–1492) of the Sonni dynasty launched the conquests that filled the vacuum left by the declining Mali Empire, seizing Timbuktu in 1468 and Djenné around 1475. After Sonni Ali's death, the throne passed to the Askia dynasty (1493–1591), whose founder Askia Muhammad I (r. 1493–1528) instituted sweeping administrative, fiscal, and military reforms, made a celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca, and promoted Islam and the centres of learning at Timbuktu's Sankore Mosque and Djenné. At its height Songhai was one of the largest empires in African history, spanning territory across the modern states of Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Mauritania, and Senegal. Its wealth rested on control of the trans-Saharan caravan trade, exchanging gold, ivory, kola nuts, and enslaved people for North African salt, cloth, horses, and luxury goods. The empire collapsed in 1591 when a Saadi Moroccan army equipped with gunpowder firearms under Judar Pasha decisively routed the numerically superior but traditionally armed forces of Askia Ishaq II at the Battle of Tondibi.