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

thousand places. Ali had now constructed an empire comparable in extent to Mali at its height. Consolidation rather than conquest became his main aim. From about 1477, for eight or nine years, he tried to rebuild his relationship with Timbuktu’s patricians and scholars, and reinvigorate the kingdom’s trade. He projected a canal from Niger to Walata, though he never got around to building it. To the office of chief judge of Timbuktu, he appointed a descendant of a sage whom Mansa Musa had brought to the Sahel: it was an emphatic gesture of deference to tradition. He sent women captured on campaigns against the Fulani as a present to the scholars of Timbuktu—thoughsome of the recipients treated the gift as an insult. If Ali’s intentions were good, they were too little too late. Renewed war with the Mossi interrupted his plans for reconstruction and provoked him into a new bout of repression.
    In 1485 he dismissed Muhammad Nad’s son from the governorship of Timbuktu and installed a nominee of his own. Probably in 1488, he ordered what the chroniclers call the “evacuation” of Timbuktu. 18 Other evidence does not support clerical sources’ picture of a devastated and depopulated city; so this was probably just the expulsion of suspect families. The clergy intensified their countercampaign of propaganda. Sonni Ali became a bogeyman for the godly. In Egypt his rise was reported as a calamity for Islam, comparable to the loss of al-Andalus to Christian conquerors. In 1487, mullahs in Mecca raised imprecations against him. A Maghrebi jurist later denied that Ali was a Muslim at all. 19 Meanwhile, back in the Sahel, Ali’s priority for war continued to shift power from the mullahs and merchants to warrior chiefs.
    Askia Muhammad Touray was the greatest of them. As one of Ali’s closest companions, commanders, and counselors, he evinced total loyalty, but the Sonni’s opponents naturally cast him as their potential champion, or at least as an intermediary whose favor they needed. Askia Muhammad’s popularity and success were vexing to Sonni Baro, the heir to the throne. Baro tried to arouse in his father suspicions against Muhammad by alleging that the general’s Muslim piety implied alliance with traitorous clergy.
    The charges had some credibility. Muhammad had tried to save massacre victims in Timbuktu and had used his influence to moderate Sonni Ali’s anticlerical excesses. In consequence he had a powerful constituency of admirers and partisans, especially in the city that regarded him as its protector. Sonni Baro, by contrast, was a hateful figure, identified with all his father’s most obnoxious traits—his adherence to pagan forms, his humbling of the clerics, his oppression of Timbuktu. By December 1492, when news arrived that Sonni Ali had died, many of the mullahs and merchants were ready to incite rebellion. Askia Muhammad was in Timbuktu when news of the king’s death broke there on January 1, 1493.
    One of the elite messengers, trained to spend up to ten days in the saddle and cross the entire kingdom, arrived with a breathless message:
    Ali the Great, your master and mine, king of Songhay, star of the world, shining sun of our hearts, terror of our enemies, died ten days ago…. He was on his way back to Gao from an expedition…. As he was crossing a small tributary of the Niger, a sudden swell arose and carried off our lord, his horse, his baggage, and his train in the surging waves. The army watched powerless from the shore. I was there. We could do nothing. It all happened so fast. 20
    The citizens of the town came out of their dwellings and raised the cry: “The tyrant is dead! Long live King Muhammad!” But their hero cut short a preacher who denounced the memory of “the impious and terrible tyrant, the worst oppressor ever known, the destroyer of cities, of hard and cruel heart, who killed so many men whose names are known to God alone and who treated the learned and godly with