Among the Lake Chad States progress was also made in the eleventh century. The first Moslem Sultan of Bornu (Hami ibnu-l-Jalil) is recorded about 1050;[[90]] and a similar conversion happened in Kanem about the same time. This latter kingdom was then more important than now, and dominated much even of the Egyptian Sudan. Hence in the fourteenth century Islam obtained a strong footing in Darfur, as it had already in Baghirmi and Wadai.[[91]] Already in the twelfth century, Kordofan and the extreme east of the Sudan had been partially Moslemised by Arabs from Egypt, who had come south after the fall of the Fatimite Caliphs.
Along the eastern coast, in spite of the early spread of Moslem settlements from Magadoxo southward, Islam was very slow in penetrating the interior. Here the Arabs chiefly devoted themselves to maritime commerce, and for a long time their intercourse with the inland tribes was not of a kind to open up the country. Caravans with slaves and natural products came down to the coast towns, but the merchants of the latter seem to have been content with waiting and receiving. But on this side of Africa was a Christian kingdom, which was now—in Prince Henry's days—becoming more familiar to Europe: Abyssinia, the kingdom of Prester John, as the Portuguese of later time identified it. The original seat of the Priest-King, as described (chiefly from Nestorian information) by Carpini, Rubruquis, Marco Polo, and other Asiatic travellers of the thirteenth century, was in Central Asia, but the Abyssinian state offered so close a parallel, that it was naturally recognised by many as the true realm of Prester John, when the first clear accounts of it came into Mediæval Europe. The Asiatic prototype, moreover, was only temporary; it had apparently ceased to exist in the time of Polo himself, who spread its fame so widely; whereas its Abyssinian rival was both permanent and ancient enough to be noticed in pre-Crusading and even in pre-Mediæval literature. As the Renaissance movement progressed in Europe, learned men of the West gained from their reading an ever clearer realisation of this isolated Christianity of the East; and, as the trade of the later Middle Ages spread itself more widely, the Venetians seem to have made their way to the Court of the Negus, even before John II of Portugal sent Covilham and Payva (1486) to find the Prester. Probably the beginnings of this Italian intercourse with Abyssinia may be placed as far back as the lifetime of Prince Henry (c. 1450).
The Christianity of Nubia, which dated from the fourth century like that of Abyssinia itself, was still vigorous in the twelfth,[[92]] but from that time it began to fail before the incessant and determined pressure of Islam. Ibn-Batuta,[[93]] about 1330-40, found that the King of Dongola had just become a Moslem. Father Alvarez, in 1520-7, considered that the Nubian Christianity which had once extended up the Nile from the first Cataract to Sennaar had become extinct; though he would not allow that the mass of the Nubians had adopted any other religion in its place;[[94]] and himself, he tells us, had met a Christian who, in travelling through Nubia, had seen 150 churches.[[95]] But, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all Nubia embraced Islam; and even in 1534, Ahmad Gragne, King of Adel, in one of his attacks upon Abyssinia, is said to have had 15,000 Nubian allies, apparently all Mohammedans.[[96]]
In Prince Henry's day, then, we may fairly assume that the old Christianity of East Africa was practically limited to Abyssinia; but when Azurara tells us of the Infant's desire "to know if there were in those parts[[97]] any Christian Princes,"[[98]] and again more explicitly, "to have knowledge of the land of Prester John,"[[99]] it is possible that some dim acquaintance with the old tradition of an isolated African (as well as of an isolated Asiatic) Church, was at the root of his endeavour.
At the end of the twelfth century, Islam had already begun to encroach upon the coast of what is now Italian "Erythraea;" and about 1300 a.d. a Musulman army attacked the ruler of Amhara. At this time the realm of the Negus seems to have been completely cut off from the Red Sea;[[100]] but it was not till the early sixteenth century that Abyssinia was in serious danger of becoming a province of Islam, from the attacks of Ahmad Gragne (1528-1543), which, however, ended in complete failure.
To return to the North coast of Africa. Here, by the capture of Ceuta, Prince Henry gained a starting-point for his work; here he is said (probably with truth) to have gained his earliest knowledge of the interior of Africa; here especially he was brought in contact with those Sudan and Saharan caravans which, coming down to the Mediterranean coast, brought news, to those who sought it, of the Senegal and Niger, of the Negro kingdoms beyond the desert, and particularly of the Gold land of "Guinea." Here also, from a knowledge thus acquired, he was able to form a more correct judgment of the course needed for the rounding or circumnavigation of Africa, of the time, expense, and toil necessary for that task, and of the probable support or hindrance his mariners were to look for on their route.
We must, however, qualify in passing the statements of Azurara, in ch. vii, which would imply that Christianity had for ages been utterly extinct in North Africa. "As it was said that the power of the Moors in ... Africa was ... greater than commonly supposed, and that there were no Christians among them." "During the one-and-thirty years that he had warred against the Moors, he had never found a Christian King nor a lord outside this land,[[101]] who for the love of ... Christ would aid him."[[102]] The old North African Church, though constantly declining, survived the Musulman Conquest of the seventh and eighth centuries for nearly 800 years. True, its episcopate, which could still muster 30 members in the tenth century, was practically extinct by the time of Hildebrand[[103]] (Pope Gregory VII), and in 1246 the Franciscan missionary bishop of Fez and Marocco was the only Christian prelate in "Barbary"; but a number of native Christians still lingered on, though without Apostolic succession. In 1159, the Almohade conqueror, Abdu-'l Mu'min ben Ali, on subduing Tunis, compelled many of these to change their faith; but all through the next centuries, down to 1535, a certain number of Tunisians preserved their ancient religion so far that, when Charles V gained possession of the city in the above-named year (1535), he congratulated these perseverants on their steadfastness. The same fact is evidenced by the tolerant behaviour, as a rule, of the Mediæval Barbary States towards Christians, both native and European.
Thus they employ Christian soldiers, among others; grant freedom of worship to Christian merchants and settlers; and exchange letters with various Popes, especially Gregory VII, Gregory IX, Innocent III, and Innocent IV, on the subject of the due protection of native Christians.[[104]] Traces of Christianity were to be found among the Kabyles of Algeria down to the time of the capture of Granada (1492), when a fresh influx of Andalusian Moors from Spain completed the conversion of these tribes,[[105]]—a conversion which, as Leo Africanus notices, was not inconsistent with some survivals of Christian custom. Similar survivals have been alleged among the Tuâreg of the Sahara, the "Christians of the Desert" at the present day.
Two practical questions arise for our special purpose from this summary of the mediæval progress and fifteenth-century status of Islam in Africa. These questions have been partly answered already, but we may here re-state them to generalise our conclusions. 1. What information was the Infant able to gain from the "Moors" for his own plans? and 2. Was this "Moorish" information so valuable as to account, in any great degree, for the Prince's perseverance and success in his task?
To the former query it may be replied: 1. That the "Arabs and Moors" of the early fifteenth century could give the Infant detailed and correct information, not only about the Barbary states and the trade-routes of the Sahara, but also about many of the Western and Central Sudan countries, and about the general course and direction of the "Guinea coast" both to the west and south of the great African hump. Especially could they describe the kingdom of Guinea, centreing round the town of Jenné on the Upper Niger, which was the chief market of their Negro trade in slaves, gold, and ivory. This kingdom, then, reached almost to the Atlantic on the lower valley of the Senegal, where in earlier times a place called Ulil had been marked by Edrisi and other Arab geographers, as independent of Ghanah but important for traffic. Also, the Moors were acquainted with the country of Tokrur,[[106]] which may be supposed to occupy the upper valley of the Senegal, becoming perhaps, in Prince Henry's time, merely a province of Guinea. Further, they could give much information about the States of Timbuktu and Melli, to the east of Guinea, on the Middle Niger, about the gold land of Wangara, in the great bend to the south of that river, and about the Songhay, afterwards so powerful, whose capital was at Gao, at the extreme N.E. angle of the Negro Nile, or Joliba. The Arab travellers and writers seem generally to have made but one river out of the Senegal, the Niger, Joliba, or Quorra, and the Benué or "river of Haussa."