The incessant bickering and local feuds had driven the Tuareg of Air to come to some arrangement by which, nominally at least, they could consolidate themselves against the powers of the Sudan. They had agreed to have a Sultan, and he was installed, and not long afterwards the Amenokalate was set up in Agades, at a most eventful period in Central African history. The empire of Songhai on the Niger seemed invincible. By 1468 Timbuctoo had been overwhelmed and the governor driven out; Akil, the Tuareg, was forced to flee westwards. The city was plundered and the occupation of Western Negroland commenced. In the meanwhile the Portuguese had planted the factory of Elmina on the Guinea coast, and Alfonso V was succeeded by João II, who sent an embassy to Sunni Ali.
Sunni Ali met his death by drowning in 1492, and was followed by his son Abu Bakr Dau, and at a short interval by Muhammad ben Abu Bakr, called Muhammad Askia, the greatest of all the kings of the Sudan, and one of the greatest monarchs in the world of the fifteenth century. He appears to have ruled with great wisdom, depending on careful administration rather than on force to maintain his prestige. In addition to Melle itself and Jenne, which had already fallen, Ghana and Mosi in the far west were added to Songhai. After a pilgrimage of great pomp across Africa and through Egypt, Haj Muhammad Askia turned his attentions to the east. Katsina was occupied in 1513 as well as the whole of Gober and the rest of Hausaland. It was inevitable, to stop the Tuareg raiding down in the settled country, that Air should be added to his dominion as well.
In 1515 Askia marched against Al Adalet, or Adil, one of the twin co-Sultans of Agades, and drove out the Tuareg tribes living in the town,[423] replacing them with his own Songhai people, a colonisation from which the city has not recovered to this day. He remained in occupation a year, and was called the “Cursed.” The conquest is unfortunately not mentioned by Leo,[424] who only refers to the expedition against Kano and Katsina; and this is all the more unpardonable, for he had accompanied his uncle on an official visit to Askia himself. Leo clearly regards Agades at the time he was writing as a negro settlement. According to traditions current in the city, numbers of Tuareg were massacred by Askia’s men, but however many Songhai may have been planted there, and however many Tuareg expelled, there is no doubt that considerable numbers remained behind to mix with the southerners and form the present Emagadesi people. The town must have been in a very flourishing state at that time: “the greatest part of the citizens are forren merchants” who paid “. . . large custom to the king . . . on their merchandise out of other places.” But apart from the yearly tribute of 150,000 ducats due to the King of Gao, the conquest of Air does not seem to have affected the independence of the Tuareg, as no mention is made of a Songhai governor, while the King of Agades, already within a few years of the time of Leo’s journey, is reported to have kept a military force of his own.
The contemporaries of Askia in Kanem and Bornu were Ali, the son of another Dunama, and later, Ali’s son, Idris, both kings of such renown that their country appears on European maps as early as 1489. Not to be outdone by the Songhai kings, whose emissaries had reached Portugal, Idris sent an embassy to Tripoli in 1512. Under the son of Idris, Muhammad, who ruled from 1526 to 1545, the kingdom of Bornu reached the summit of its greatness. This remarkable century in Central Africa deserves examination in greater detail, but lack of space makes it impossible.
Agades was perhaps at the height of its prosperity before and immediately after the conquest of Muhammad Askia. The scale of life in which Air shared is shown by the description of Muhammad Askia’s pilgrimage in 1495. He was accompanied by 1000 men on foot and 500 on horseback, and in the course of which he spent 300,100 mithkal of gold. The prosperity of Agades continued until the commencement of the nineteenth century, but in a form far different from what it must have been in the sixteenth century, when it served as an advanced trading-post or entrepôt for Gao, at that time the centre of the gold trade of the Sudan and probably the most flourishing commercial city in Central Africa. The gradual desertion of Agades, almost complete by 1790, when the bulk of the population migrated to Katsina, Tasawa, Maradi and Kano, commenced in 1591, at which date Gao, the parent city from the commercial point of view, had fallen to be a province of the Moroccan empire.
The heritage of Muhammad Askia was beyond the power of his successors to maintain. Intestine wars and intrigues broke down the authority of the central government. Revolts took place in Melle, and the covetous eyes of Mulai Ahmed, the Sultan of Morocco, in 1549, were turned towards Negroland. He demanded the cession of the Tegaza salt-mines, and though this insult was avenged by an army of 2000 Tuareg invading Morocco in 1586, Tegaza was captured by the Moors soon afterwards and the deposits of Taodenit, north of Timbuctoo, were opened instead. The final blow fell three years later, when Gao was entered by Basha Jodar, the eunuch-general of Mulai Hamed, with a Moroccan army. The final struggles of Ishak Askia in 1591 were unavailing. Henceforth Moroccan governors reigned over the Western Sudan with garrisons in Jenne, Timbuctoo, Gao and elsewhere. In 1603 Mulai Hamed el Mansur of Morocco died, with the whole of Western Africa under his rule.
Power in the west thus passed once more from the negroid to the northern people, but traditions of empire persisted in the centre. In 1571 there came to the throne of Bornu, Idris Ansami, known more usually from the place of his burial as Idris Alawoma. His mother seems from her name—’Aisha-Kel Eghrarmar—to have been a Tuareg; she had the reputation of great beauty. After consolidating his empire to the east, Idris conquered Hausaland as far west as and including Kano, where he must have come into contact with the Songhai empire, just then in process of passing under the rule of Morocco. So Idris Alawoma[425] turned his attention to the north-west, and undertook three expeditions against the Tuareg, the last one of which was against Air itself, the first two presumably being against more southern tribes. The chronicle of Idris’ expeditions is not clear enough to identify the exact areas of his operations. The first one was described as a raid, and the second, an expedition against a tribe. The operations against Air started from Atrebisa and passed Ghamarama, doubtfully identified with Gamram in Northern Damergu, after which a host of Tuareg was overtaken in the open desert between the town, Tadsa, and Air, and many were slaughtered. Idris returned to Munio by way of Zibduwa and Susubaki. At an earlier date than these expeditions his vizier had fought a battle with the Tuareg, who had come with a numerous host of Tildhin (?)[426] and others to attack him at Aghalwen, which is Eghalgawen in Southern Air, on the road to the Southland.
Having broken the power of the Air Tuareg, Idris Alawoma ordered the Kel Yiti, or Kel Wati, who were living in his dominions, to raid north and north-west in order to keep the tribes in a properly chastened frame of mind, until they were obliged to sue for peace and acknowledge their allegiance to the kingdom of Bornu. Barth thinks the Kel Wati are to be identified with the Kel Eti, or Jokto, a mixed Tebu and Tuareg people in the parts near Lake Chad. This is probably the period of raids in South-eastern Air, previously referred to, which obliged the Itesan to abandon their eastern settlements and move west into the heart of the mountains. The supposition is borne out by the record of Idris’ expedition against the Tebu of Dirki and Agram, or Fashi, which was followed by a long stay at Bilma and the opening up of relations with the north. All these events fall into the first twelve years of Idris Alawoma’s reign: of the last twenty-one we know little.
In 1601 at Agades, Muhammad ben Mubarak ibn el Guddala, or Ghodala, deposed the Amenokal Yussif ben el Haj Ahmed ibn el Haj Abeshan, and reigned in his stead for four months. Yussif recaptured the power and ben Mubarak fled to Katsina and Kano, but returning to Air entered Agades with a body of men from Bornu. He went on to Assode, and then retired within a short time to Gamram in Damergu. Yussif in the meanwhile had collected men in the Southland of Kebbi and returned to the charge. Ben Mubarak again fled to Bornu, but was later captured, and died in prison. This period of hostility between Air and Bornu led Idris Alawoma’s grandson Ali ben el Haj Omar ben Idris to wage several wars against the Sultan of Agades, though he was once himself besieged in his own capital by the Tuareg and their allies. To the wars in this reign, lasting from 1645 to 1684 or 1685, belong the events which Jean has recorded incorrectly as occurring in 1300,[427] in the reign of the eighth Sultan before Lamini.[428] The latter is, of course, the famous Muhammad el Amin el Kanemi of Denham and Clapperton’s expedition, who was, in fact, the eighth Sultan before Ali ben Idris.
Tradition in Air and the Agades Chronicle at this point agree tolerably well with the Bornu Chronicle. The Bornu king laid siege to Agades, where Muhammad Mubaraki (1653-87) was reigning, and defeated the Tuareg, who, after a number of engagements in the Telwa valley, retired to the fastness of Bagezan. Their resources enabled them to hold out for three years against the Bornuwi forces, who were starving in the lowlands. The war of 1685 is called in the Agades Chronicle the War of Famine. The people of Bornu eventually withdrew eastwards over the desert, hotly pursued by the Tuareg all the way to the well of Ashegur, north of Fashi, which, as will be remembered, had previously been occupied by Idris Alawoma. Deserted by their Sultan, the Bornuwi were surprised, and left 300-400 prisoners in the hands of the Tuareg, who, from now on to the present day, have exercised a paramount influence over these oases, where they developed the salt trade with the Sudan[429] through Air. The gold trade of Songhai, at one time so important in Agades that it had its own standard weight for the metal, which long after its disappearance continued to regulate the circulating medium of exchange, was replaced by the salt traffic as an asset of much value.[430]