1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

count.” But it soon became obvious that he could not do without Songhayan help. When the Tuareg descended on the town and intimidated him into releasing part of the governor’s traditional income from tolls on the trade of the river, Ammar cut a deal with the Sonni.He was entertaining Akil, the Tuareg chief, in January 1468, when a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon.
    “A sandstorm,” ventured the host.
    “You have wasted your eyes on books,” replied Akil. “My eyes are old, but I can see the armed horsemen approaching.” 14
    The Tuareg abandoned Timbuktu to Sonni Ali, who—so tradition asserted—likened the city to a woman “rolling her eyes in terror and sashaying her body to seduce us.” 15 The mullahs, however, did not join in the seductive performance or the submissive posture of the governor and merchant elite. They supported the Tuareg. It is hard to separate cause and effect: were the clergy repelled by Sonni Ali’s paganism? Or was his identification with the old gods part of his response to clerical hostility? In any event, his overtly contemptuous and vindictive treatment of them became obvious for the remaining years of his reign.
    It seems more convincing to see his attitude as part of the power play that balanced factions in Timbuktu than to suppose that he practiced anticlericalism out of pagan devotion or principled detestation of the mullahs. Anticlericalism and piety are not incompatible, and Ali’s religious views and sentiments seem to have been much more deeply imbued with reverence for Islam than clerical propaganda made out. Sonni Ali performed the holiday prayers of Ramadan year by year during his campaigns. “Despite his ill treatment of scholars,” reported a late but generally fair chronicler, “he acknowledged their worth and often said, ‘Without the clergy the world would no longer be sweet and good.’” 16 Muhammad Nad’s sons and grandsons, by contrast, were lax in performing Muslim rites. Yet they incurred much less clerical obloquy.
    On the other hand, evidence of Sonni Ali’s hostility toward the city patriciate of Timbuktu is ample, especially in an intense period of mutual distrust from 1468 to 1473. Muhammad Nad had been a great friend to the city’s elite, as Leo Africanus observed. “There are in Timbuktu numerous judges, teachers and priests, all properly appointed” by Muhammad Nad, who “greatly honors learning.” 17 Ali abjured this attitude, treated the city with disdain, and rarely paused there on his progresses around the kingdom.
    His conquest provoked a massive exodus of the elite. A caravan of one thousand camels took the exiles to Walata, where they could rely on Tuareg protection, while Ali killed, enslaved, or imprisoned the children of one of the chief judges of the city, And-agh-Muhammad al-Kabir. He humiliated—the chroniclers are not explicit about the details—the family of the other, al-qadi al-Hajj, and massacred a party of them who tried to flee to Walata. His policy was not solely to do with vengeance, but was also designed to contain potential opposition within Songhay, for al-Hajj was close to the family of Sonni Ali’s lieutenant and most successful general, Askia Muhammad—the only possible rival to the Sonni’s supremacy. Rebellion, massacre, and a further exodus followed in 1470 or 1471. The feud between Ali and Timbuktu was beginning to damage the kingdom. The new refugees sewed martyrdom stories among exiles and initiated the implacably hostile scholarly tradition against Ali. Worse for the Sonni’s revenues, the decline of the city disrupted trade.
    By now, however, Sonni Ali was beginning to feel secure. In 1471 (or perhaps a little later—the chronology of the sources is confused), he conquered Jenne, despite the fire ships the defenders launched against the Songhayan fleet. Jenne was the last and largest of the great river ports of the Niger, where the call from the great minaret, so it was said, echoed in seven