Sonni Ali seizes Timbuktu and forges the Songhai Empire
- Date
- 1468 CE
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- West Africa (Songhai)
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
In 1468 Sonni Ali, ruler of the rising state of Songhai based at Gao on the Niger bend, captured Timbuktu, then held by the Tuareg, and in 1473 took the inland port of Jenne, supplanting the declining Mali Empire as the dominant power in the western Sudan.
A formidable cavalry and naval commander, Sonni Ali built the largest empire West Africa had yet seen, controlling the great Niger trade arteries and the cities that channelled the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade. His treatment of Timbuktu's Muslim scholars was harsh and earned him a hostile reputation in the chronicles, yet his conquests laid the foundations for an imperial structure that his successor consolidated. After his death in 1492 his general Muhammad Ture defeated Sonni Ali's heir in 1493 and seized power as Askia Muhammad, founding the Askia dynasty; under Askia the Great, Songhai reached its zenith and Timbuktu flowered anew as a centre of Islamic scholarship, sustaining West Africa's last and greatest medieval empire until its fall to a Moroccan invasion in 1591.
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Empires active in 1468 CE
- Aztec Empire1428 CE – 1521 CE
- Malacca Sultanate1400 CE – 1511 CE
- Inca Empire1438 CE – 1533 CE
- Ming Dynasty1368 CE – 1644 CE
- Songhai Empire1464 CE – 1591 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
Related politics & governance events
- Founding of the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peacec. 1450 (scholarly estimate; oral tradition as early as 1142)
- Treaty of Tordesillas divides the non-European world7 June 1494
- Inca imperial expansion under Pachacuti1438 CE
- Formation of the Aztec Triple Alliance1428 CE
- Kublai Khan founds the Yuan dynasty and conquers Song China1271 CE (conquest completed 1279)
- Rise of Timur (Tamerlane) and his Central Asian empirec. 1370 CE (empire to 1405)
Further reading
The wider story
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages
Sets Kanem-Bornu within the wider medieval African world.
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