Battle of Feyiase and the rise of the Asante Empire

Date

1701

Category

Politics & governance

Region

Akan forest interior (modern Ghana)

Era

Early Modern

Significance

Around 1701 a coalition of Akan states led by Osei Tutu and his priest-counsellor Okomfo Anokye defeated the powerful kingdom of Denkyira at the Battle of Feyiase, founding the Asante Empire in the forest interior of modern Ghana.

The victory freed the Asante from tribute to Denkyira and gave them direct access to the Atlantic coast and its European trade in firearms, gold and enslaved people. Unity was symbolised by the Golden Stool, the Sika Dwa, which according to tradition Okomfo Anokye conjured from the sky as the embodiment of the Asante nation's soul, with Osei Tutu installed at Kumasi as the first Asantehene. Over the eighteenth century Asante grew into one of West Africa's most formidable and centralised states, its wealth built on gold and on supplying captives, many taken in its expansionist wars, to British and Dutch forts on the Gold Coast. The empire developed sophisticated institutions of administration, law and military organisation that made it a dominant regional power for nearly two centuries until its long confrontation with the British. Feyiase thus marked both the birth of a major African empire and the consolidation of a state deeply bound to Atlantic commerce.

Empires active in 1701

• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Mughal Empire
  1526 CE – 1857 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE

Related politics & governance events

• Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years' War
  October 1648
• The Declaration of Independence
  4 July 1776
• The United States Constitution drafted and ratified
  17 September 1787
• The storming of the Bastille and the outbreak of the French Revolution
  14 July 1789
• The Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights
  1688–1689
• Louis XIV Promulgates the Code Noir
  March 1685

Further reading

The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages

The wider story

The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages

Francois-Xavier Fauvelle

Sets Kanem-Bornu within the wider medieval African world.

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