From Gao to empire
The Songhai people had ruled the trading city of Gao on the Niger bend for centuries, latterly under Mali’s shadow. As Mali weakened in the 15th century, the ruler Sunni Ali (reigned 1464-1492) turned Gao’s river fleet and cavalry into instruments of conquest, taking Timbuktu (1468) and, after a seven-year siege, Djenné — building the empire with a ruthlessness the scholarly chroniclers of Timbuktu, whom he persecuted, repaid in their histories.
After his death, one of his commanders seized the throne as Askia Muhammad — “Askia the Great” (reigned 1493-1528) — who gave the empire its lasting form: provinces under appointed governors, a professional army and river navy, standardised weights and measures, and full patronage of Islam. His pilgrimage to Mecca consciously echoed Mansa Musa’s; under him Timbuktu’s Sankoré scholars and manuscript libraries reached their golden age, drawing students across the Islamic world.
The largest state in African history
At its peak Songhai stretched some 2,000 kilometres along the Niger and deep into the Sahara — by area, the largest empire in African history to that point — living, as Mali had, on the gold-salt trade and the river’s agriculture. The Askia dynasty, however, consumed itself: Askia Muhammad was deposed blind by his own son in 1528, opening decades of coups and succession wars.
Tondibi
The end came from across the desert. The Saadi sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, coveting the gold trade at its source, sent some 4,000 men — largely European renegade and Andalusian musketeers under the eunuch commander Judar Pasha — on a desert crossing military opinion held impossible. Half survived it; in March 1591 at Tondibi, near Gao, their volley fire broke a vastly larger Songhai army whose tactics — including cattle stampeded at the Moroccan line — had no answer to gunpowder. Timbuktu and Gao were sacked and the empire shattered; its exiled scholars (the historian Ahmad Baba most famously) were marched to Marrakesh in chains.
Morocco found the Sahel ungovernable at that distance and its pashalik soon went feral; the gold trade fragmented toward the Atlantic coast, where European ships were waiting. Tondibi is conventionally the date the age of the great Sahelian empires ended — killed, like so much else in the era, by the musket.