Daily History Challenge · No. 49 · Sunday 16 August 2026 · Gauntlet
Puzzle No. 49: Gauntlet
The Sunday Gauntlet: three before or after calls, four events to order and a final When? on Oman captures Fort Jesus and seizes the Swahili coast.
Act 1: Chain, against The killing of Osama bin Laden (2011 CE)
Before The killing of Osama bin Laden
Before The killing of Osama bin Laden
Before The killing of Osama bin Laden
Act 2: Order, earliest first
Act 3: When?
After a siege lasting from March 1696 to December 1698, the army of the Yarubid sultan of Oman, Saif ibn Sultan, stormed Fort Jesus at Mombasa on 13 December 1698, ending nearly two centuries of Portuguese dominance over the East African coast. Omani forces expelled the Portuguese from Zanzibar, Pemba, Pate and Kilwa, pushing them south to Mozambique and bringing the Swahili city-states of present-day Kenya and Tanzania under Arab Omani overlordship. The conquest reoriented the Indian Ocean trade of the Swahili coast toward Muscat and the Arabian and Persian Gulf worlds, reviving commerce in ivory, gold and, increasingly, enslaved Africans drawn from the interior. Over the following century Omani influence deepened, culminating in the rise of Zanzibar as a commercial hub whose clove plantations and slave markets would make it the centre of the nineteenth-century East African slave trade. The 1698 victory thus marked a decisive shift in the balance of power on the Indian Ocean rim, replacing a declining European maritime empire with an expanding Arab one and setting the stage for the entanglement of the Swahili coast in a vast oceanic slaving system distinct from, but parallel to, the Atlantic trade.