The Battle of Tondibi

Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco had pondered the matter for years. The salt mines of Taghaza, the gold of the Sudan, the weakness of Songhai under the successors of Askia Daoud: everything pointed in the same direction. What no Moroccan ruler before him had attempted, he would undertake.

In October 1590 he assembled his expedition at Marrakesh. Al-Sa’di ﵀ notes in the Tarikh al-Sudan the composition of that force with the precision of a man who had to count its consequences. Four thousand men. About two thousand archers and arquebusiers, fifteen hundred lancers, a thousand cameleers and servants. Eight cannon on camelback. Eight thousand camels for transport, ten thousand pack animals in all.

At its head stood Judar Pasha, a renegade of Spanish origin who had grown up in Moroccan service. His orders were simple and endless: cross the desert, take Gao and Timbuktu, bring back the gold.

The expedition moved south by way of Sijilmasa and descended into the Sahara. The route ran past the salt mines of Taghaza, then on to Arawan, and from there to the Niger. The distance was more than two thousand kilometers across terrain through which no army of this size had ever passed.

The toll was heavy. Mahmud Kati ﵀ writes in the continuation of the Tarikh al-Fattash that a great part of the force was lost on the way. Men dropped at the wells. Camels gave out under the load. The iron of the weapons grew so hot it could no longer be held.

When the expedition reached the Niger Bend in February 1591, about two thousand men remained. But they carried something no other army in the Sudan had ever carried: firearms, in number and in working order.

The report that a Moroccan army had crossed the Sahara reached Gao in the course of February 1591. Askia Ishaq II, on the throne since 1588, had earlier waved away the warnings from Taghaza. No army had ever defied the desert in this direction. His predecessors had upheld the old treaties with Morocco without ever having to fight.

Now the army truly came. Al-Sa’di ﵀ writes that in his council the askia first proposed that the force would be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Forty thousand men, so it was reckoned, he could put into the field. Cavalry. Foot. The great mass of the Songhai armed forces.

What was missing from this calculation were firearms. The Songhai cavalry carried lances and bows. Their armor was of leather and copper. Their numbers were their certainty.

The askia advanced from Gao to the north, along the bank of the Niger, in the direction of Tankondibogho near Tondibi. There the ground was open, suitable for cavalry maneuvers. There, in his judgment, the battle would fall in his favor.

On 12 March 1591 the two armies came within sight of one another. The Saadi force, exhausted but in order, pitched its camp on the northern side of the plain. The Songhai took position on the southern side, between the battlefield and Gao. Between the two armies lay an open strip a few hundred meters wide.

Mahmud Kati ﵀ writes that during that night the Songhai drums beat loudly, and that the Saadi soldiers cleaned their arquebuses in silence.

On the morning of 13 March 1591, 1 Rabi al-Akhir 1000 AH, the Songhai opened the engagement.

Their opening move was no frontal assault. It was a tactic that had proven its worth in earlier wars against Mossi cavalry. They drove, as al-Sa’di ﵀ writes, about a thousand head of cattle between the two armies. The idea was simple and, by Songhai standards, tested: the wildly stampeding cattle would break open the enemy line, and the cavalry would ride through the gap.

The oxen broke loose. Dust rose from the open ground. The earth shook beneath the hooves. The Saadi arquebusiers saw the mass coming on.

What followed was new. At the order, the arquebusiers fired in a salvo. The cannon thundered at the same moment. The thunder of the powder proved a force for which the Songhai cattle had not been trained. The oxen, instead of charging through, turned. Bewildered, in panic, they took the same direction back from which they had been driven.

They ran straight into the Songhai line.

Mahmud Kati ﵀ records that the first losses that morning were caused by the side’s own herd. The Songhai formation, drawn up in dense ranks behind the cattle, took the mass of its own tactic on top of itself. Men were trampled. Horses crumbled. The order broke before the first Saadi soldier had set foot on the open ground.

While the Songhai line was still trying to master its own cattle, Judar Pasha gave the order for the general volley.

The Saadi arquebusiers fired in ranks. The front rank fired and stepped back to reload, while the second rank stepped forward. It was a tactic built up in the Moroccan wars against the Portuguese, and one that in Europe was known by the name of countermarch. On the open plain of Tondibi, Songhai had never seen it before.

Al-Sa’di ﵀ describes the continuous fire as an unbroken sound that drove the askia’s horses to frenzy. The cannon hurled iron balls through the ranks of the Songhai foot. The archers of Morocco, drawn up behind the arquebusiers, filled the pauses with arrow volleys.

The Songhai cavalry tried to charge. Mahmud Kati ﵀ records that the askia’s first rank rode forward twice, and twice fell apart under the fire before reaching the Saadi line. The distance was too great, the fire too thick, the terrain too open.

Somewhere in this midday hour Mami Sissoko, the commander of the cavalry, fell. With him fell a great part of the Songhai officer corps. What remained was an army without command on a field without cover, facing an enemy that did not stop firing.

The askia gave the order to retreat.

The retreat became a flight. Askia Ishaq II rode south with what remained of his staff, along the Niger, toward the Dendi. The rest of the Songhai army fell apart in pieces. Some units moved west toward Timbuktu. Others sought cover in the hills above Gao. Many soldiers threw away their weapons.

The Saadi force, too weak to push through, remained on the battlefield. Judar Pasha had no reserve with which to organize a pursuit. But he had won the battle, and he knew it.

On 25 March 1591, Moroccan troops entered Gao. Al-Sa’di ﵀ records that the city fell without a fight. The askia had departed weeks earlier. What they found was a capital without a court, a palace without a treasury. Most of the gold, most of the silver, had gone south with the askia.

Judar decided, after consultation with al-Mansur by courier, that Gao could not be held. The city lay too far away, the trade routes were too unsafe, the climate too harsh for his troops. He moved west and set up his headquarters at Timbuktu.

There followed the second event that bound the name Tondibi forever to more than a battle. In 1593 the Saadi troops imprisoned a great part of the scholars of Timbuktu, accused of conspiracy. Among them was Ahmad Baba al-Tinbukti ﵀, the most learned man of his time in the Sudan. He was led in chains to Marrakesh, together with his library.

Mahmud Kati ﵀ writes that with this deportation more was lost than with the battle itself. The empire of Songhai had been broken in a single afternoon in March 1591. But the city that had connected the Sahara to the world endured, even though its learning was for a time exiled.

In the place of the askia at Gao nothing remained. In the villages of the Dendi, Askia Nuh gathered the remaining core around him, and would there be acknowledged as askia for generations more, far from the Niger Bend and without hope of recovery.

In October 1593, two years after Tondibi, a new pasha was installed in Timbuktu. Mahmud ibn Zarqun received from Marrakesh the order to put an end to the influence of the scholars on the city. The Tarikh al-Sudan describes what followed with the soberness of an eyewitness.

On a Friday, after the prayer at Sankoré, the scholars were gathered together under a pretext. When they had assembled, they were placed under arrest. Their houses were searched. Their libraries were seized. Family members were taken with them.

Among the prisoners was Ahmad Baba ﵀, the most learned of the fuqaha of his time, author of forty works in fiqh, tafsir and biographical literature, student of a long line of Sankoré scholars. With him about seventy members of the Aqit family, scholars and their households, were chained and put on transport toward Marrakesh.

The march across the Sahara, in the reverse direction of Judar’s expedition, lasted months. A part of the prisoners did not survive the desert. Ahmad Baba ﵀ arrived in Marrakesh in 1594 and remained there in effective exile until 1607. In those years he taught the scholars of Morocco, answered their fatwa questions, and wrote works that would be studied in both worlds, south and north of the Sahara.

When at last he was permitted to return to Timbuktu, the city he had left was gone. The Saadi occupiers had become entangled in an endless series of pasha upheavals. The trade routes had shifted toward the coast. The Sunni order of Sankoré still existed, but as a shadow of what it had been.

Mahmud Kati ﵀ writes that with Tondibi not only an empire fell, but also a balance. The Sahara, which for centuries had functioned as a bridge, became in these years a border. What flourished on either side of it now flourished apart.

The Saadi pashas remained in Timbuktu for generations more, but Morocco occupied itself with the city less and less. Power in the city slid slowly back into local hands. The Songhai remnant held its ground in the Dendi, but without the old means. And over the plain of Tondibi, where a thousand head of cattle had turned on a spring morning, the source falls silent.