Timbuktu

(Travellers | Cities | Routes | Trade Goods | Themes)

by Caroline Stone

Timbuktu was important from c. 1000 A.D. to 1700 A.D. as one of Africa’s major trading cities. It is still has a reputation as a center of Islamic learning, and is known as "the city of 333 saints". The wealth of Timbuktu depended to a large extent on the slave trade, which was still active there as late as 1940, gold, and salt, mined at Taodeni by slaves and exported in caravans said to have numbered as many as 50 000 camels. From the 17th century, Timbuktu gradually declined, although its reputation for riches, spiritual and material, survived.

The Tarikh al-Sudan, completed in 1655, but using earlier sources, describes Timbuktu when it was no more than a seasonal camp:

"In the beginning it was there that travelers arriving by land and water met. They made it a depot for their utensils and their grain. Soon this place became a crossroads of travelers who passed back and forth through it. They entrusted their property to a slave called Timbuktu . . . "

Timbuktu’s location determined its commercial success. It lies at the point where the Niger penetrates the desert most deeply and was therefore where caravans and river trade could meet. Its rival, Walata, was entirely desert bound. Again, Timbuktu is several miles from the main channel of the river and is therefore relatively unaffected by the floods that isolate its other rival, Djenne, to the south, for much of the year. These factors enabled it to play a pivotal role in local commerce as well as long distance international trade.

In the 11th century, Islam spread into the Empire of Ghana (essentially modern Mauritania), strengthening links and trade with North Africa and from the 13th century the Muslim Mandingo Empire of Mali began to expand east. Timbuktu, suffering under the domination of the nomad Tuareg, asked Mansa Musa, the Mandingo ruler, for help. In 1330 he annexed Timbuktu and in 1336, after his famous pilgrimage to Mecca, he stopped at the city and had built the great Djinguereber Mosque.

By the following century, there were two more major mosques– the Sidi Yahya and the Sankore Mosque, the latter having an estimated 25 000 students of Islamic law and theology in the 16th century. Cultural ties with North Africa were strengthened, particularly with Fez, while scholars from as far away as Spain began to frequent the city. Some, such as Ali ibn Ziyad were fleeing the Christian Reconquest.

Under the Mali Empire, Timbuktu enjoyed a period of stability and considerable economic prosperity, but there was a decline when it reverted to the Tuareg. In 1468, the city was conquered by Sonni Ali of the Songhai. His successor, Askia the Great, worked to strengthen Islam among the people and his dominion is said to have extended to the Atlantic, across an empire some 1000 miles from east to west. Over the next 150 years Timbuktu was at its zenith, both as a commercial city and a center of Islamic learning.

In 1591, the Sultan of Morocco decided to claim the valuable salt mines, which lay closer to his lands than to Timbuktu. An army composed of Moroccans, Christian renegades and Andalusians under Djouder Pasha set out. It appears to have been the first time that firearms had been used in the region. A couple of years later Timbuktu was in Moroccan hands.

Djouder Pasha looted most of the wealth of the city and, recognizing the direction from which trouble would come, killed or exiled the scholars. Many of his soldiers, including Spanish and Portuguese, and even northerners, known as arma from their weapons, intermarried with the local Songhai woman and settled down to rule the city.

Timbuktu never recovered its economic standing. René Caillé, one of the very few Europeans to visit the city, reached it in 1828 and wrote:

"I found it neither as big nor as populated as I had expected. Commerce was much less active than it was famed to be . . . Everything was enveloped in a great sadness . . . "