Houdas and Delafosse now had three versions of what they thought was the same chronicle, the Tarikh al-fattash, each of which had its own problems: Manuscript A was the oldest and therefore most authentic, but whole sections were truncated or missing. Manuscript B was merely a copy of A. Manuscript C, meanwhile, was complete and contained many passages that were absent from the others, but was full of major errors, partly because the modern copyist had not been entirely proficient in Arabic, and partly because the manuscript from which it was derived was so damaged that sections of it had been rendered illegible.
On close reading of the documents, the Orientalists were presented with two intriguing puzzles. The first appeared to be evidence of what Dubois had been told in Timbuktu, the suppression of the chronicle by Ahmad Lobbo, the sultan of Masina. While Manuscript A’s damaged opening pages recorded various prophecies that heralded the coming to the Sudan of the twelfth caliph, the start of Manuscript C specified that the caliph Ahmad would come to Masina at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was highly suspicious: how likely was it that a chronicle begun in the sixteenth century would so clearly identify as caliph the very nineteenth-century sultan who was alleged to have suppressed it? Houdas and Delafosse took this as conclusive evidence that this passage of C had been forged, and that Lobbo had indeed ordered all copies of the Fattash to be doctored or destroyed to serve his political interests.
The second puzzle was one of authorship. Manuscript C named the chronicler as Kati, but the narrative of the Fattash concludes in 1599, when he would have been more than 130 years old. How could he have written about events that took place after his death? The chronicle must have been finished by his descendants, collated from papers he and his children had left behind, the Orientalists surmised. The Tarikh al-fattash was thus the result of a collaboration among three generations: “The actual editor of the work was the grandson of Mahmud Kati, while the grandfather was the one who inspired it.” It was this anonymous grandson, later identified as “Ibn al-Mukhtar,” or the “son of Mukhtar,” who would have completed the work around 1665.
The Fattash’s mysteries were at best partially resolved, but the authors nevertheless felt able to synthesize a full version. They published their collated tarikh—in Arabic and translated into French—in 1913. The Fattash would soon be regarded as the most important discovery for the history of the region since the Tarikh al-sudan, a major piece in the jigsaw of understanding life during Timbuktu’s golden age.
After an opening doxology, Houdas and Delafosse’s Fattash sets out its admiration for Askiya al-hajj Muhammad. The chronicle’s hatred of his predecessor, Sunni Ali, knew few bounds: the “accursed one” was a poor Muslim who perpetrated “scandalous innovations” and “bloody cruelties” on the people and persecuted the scholars of Timbuktu. The contrast with Askiya al-hajj Muhammad could not be more marked. “It is difficult to enumerate [the first askiya’s] many virtues and qualities,” gushes the Fattash, “such as his excellent political skills, his benevolence towards his subjects and his concern for the poor. We cannot find his equal in any ruler who came before or after him.”
There seemed to be a transparent reason both chronicles heaped praise on this usurper to the Songhay throne: under his rule, Timbuktu flourished as never before. According to the Fattash, this was the result of an accommodation reached between the emperor and Timbuktu. In 1498/1499, Muhammad Aqit’s grandson Mahmud was appointed to the role of qadi for the city. He was just thirty-five, the first of Aqit’s descendants to reach this most powerful position in the town’s hierarchy, and he would remain in the role for fifty-five years.
One day, the Fattash relates, Askiya al-hajj Muhammad came to Timbuktu to remonstrate with Mahmud for not obeying his instructions. He stopped outside the city, and the qadi rode bravely out to the emperor’s camp. The askiya began the meeting with a series of pointed questions: Was Qadi Mahmud somehow better or more holy than all his great predecessors, who had obeyed previous Songhay kings? No, Qadi Mahmud replied each time. Why, then, asked the askiya, had he repeatedly driven the emperor’s messengers away without doing as he was told? The holy man responded with a rebuke:
Have you forgotten or do you merely pretend to forget the day when you came to find me at my house, the day when you grabbed at my feet and garments and said to me: “I have come to place myself under your protection and to entrust myself to you, so that you might save me from the fires of Hell. Help me and hold me by the hand so that I do not fall into Hell. I entrust myself to you.” This is the reason why I chase away your messengers and reject your orders.
Sunni Ali would doubtless have killed the qadi on the spot for his impudence, but Askiya al-hajj Muhammad was a religious man and instead he cried out: “I forgot, by God!” Since Qadi Mahmud had reminded him of his religious duty, he deserved a rich reward:
You are like a barrier set up by God to keep me from the fires of Hell! I have irritated the Almighty, but I ask pardon of Him, and I return to Him. From today, I will entrust myself to you and cling to you. Stay as you are, for God is on your side, and protect me always!
The emperor then climbed on his horse and rode away, “joyous and satisfied,” according to the Fattash.
For the next hundred years the rulers of Songhay would live under the spiritual protection of the Timbuktu holy men, while the city in turn was afforded the worldly protection of the Gao emperors. This was boom time, the period when Timbuktu would gain the reputation for being a supreme city of scholars. Under Qadi Mahmud, the city’s major buildings, including the Jingere Ber mosque, were reorganized and expanded. It was a peaceful place—so calm, according to the Fattash, that one might come across a hundred of its citizens who carried neither spear nor sword nor knife—and a large one: there were enough inhabitants to support twenty-six tailors’ workshops, each of which was supervised by a chief who had around fifty apprentices. Great numbers of scholars and students moved to Timbuktu, swelling the academic community to unprecedented size and filling between 150 and 180 Kuranic schools, each of which had tens and sometimes hundreds of students. One such school, belonging to a certain Ali Takariya, had between 173 and 345 students, according to the Fattash, which noted that there were 123 paddles on which students practiced writing in the courtyard, enough to carry the whole of the Kuran. These numbers would be used to produce estimates of around 25,000 students in Timbuktu at this time, but more levelheaded calculation put the number of elementary pupils at 4,000 to 5,000, and the town’s population no higher than 50,000. Still, this would have made it a significant world city at the start of the sixteenth century.
Literature had an unusual grip on this society, which suffered from “acute bibliophilism,” in the words of one academic. In an ascetic culture where worldly goods were frowned on, importing and copying manuscripts became one of the predominant obsessions of the elite: visitors would be courted in the hope that they might possess a new work to buy or borrow, while demand pushed up the price of books to extreme heights. The Fattash relates that Askiya Muhammad’s successor, Askiya Dawud, helped Mahmud Kati purchase a rare dictionary for eighty mithqals, or roughly 340 grams of gold, which would be worth $16,000 in today’s prices. There were cheaper books sold in Timbuktu—a single, used volume of a work titled Sharh al-ahkam sold for a little over four mithqals—and the eighty-mithqal dictionary may have been particularly well ornamented and would have consisted of multiple volumes. The Fattash tells of another Timbuktu-owned dictionary that came in twenty-eight volumes. The demand for books drove a large professional copying industry in the city and in the wider empire. Askiya Dawud employed his own scribes to copy manuscripts and often offered these to scholars as a way of buying favor and influence in Timbuktu.
Detailed information about how books were produced can be found in colophons, the short descriptions of a manuscript’s origins that were often included at the end. The colophons of six volumes of a sixteenth-century copy of Ibn Sida’s dic
tionary al-Muhkam describe a schedule of payments and deadlines, which show that a full-time copyist required twenty-three days to copy two volumes of the work, a total of 179 folios. There were nineteen lines of text per page, so the scribe was averaging 285 lines of text per day. Another scribe took nineteen further days to add vowels for proper pronunciation to these volumes, at a rate of around 300 lines of text per day. A copyist was usually paid one mithqal a month, on top of which half a mithqal would be paid to a proofreader acquainted with the subject matter, who would correct any errors. The cost of labor alone for a complete set of a large work such as al-Muhkam was around twenty-one mithqals, or ninety grams of gold, and there was also the cost of the paper to consider: it was expensive, since most was imported from North Africa and Egypt. The paper for any large volume was likely to cost five mithqals or more.
The result of Timbuktu’s bibliophilism was that large numbers of manuscripts accumulated in the city. These were not gathered in public libraries of the sort that existed in other Islamic learning centers such as Baghdad or Cairo, whose al-Azhar mosque boasted tens of thousands of manuscripts as well as an extraordinary range of reader services. In Timbuktu, the collections belonged to the scholastic families, who would loan them liberally to colleagues and students. The lack of public collections may have reflected the fact that scholars in Timbuktu came from the wealthy elite—with the notable exception of the alfas—so there was little need for common readers to have regular access to more difficult works that they would not understand. Even so, the private collections grew to enormous sizes. Ahmad Baba’s personal library, which he stated was “the smallest of any of my kin,” consisted of at least 1,600 volumes, while that of Ahmad Umar ran to almost 700 volumes at his death. The breadth of reading available in Timbuktu is also clear from citations in other works written in the city. The Timbuktu scholar Ahmad ibn And-Agh-Muhammad wrote a treatise on grammar that drew on forty other works, while Baba’s biographical dictionary cited twenty-three Maliki biographical sources.
By the second half of the sixteenth century, the marvels and splendors of Timbuktu had reached such heights that they were impossible to enumerate, according to the Fattash. It had no parallel in the Sudan:
From the province of Mali to the extreme limits of the lands of the Maghreb, no other town was better known for the solidity of its institutions, for its political liberties, for its unblemished morals, for the security of its citizens and their goods, for its clemency and compassion toward the poor and toward strangers, for its courtesy toward students and men of science, for its assistance to students and scholars.
The end, when it came, was therefore an enormous shock.
• • •
ASKIYA AL-HAJJ MUHAMMAD ruled for thirty-six years before he was deposed by his son, Musa, on August 15, 1529. After him came a succession of other askiyas: Muhammad Bonkana, Ismail, Ishaq I, Dawud, al-Hajj, Muhammad Bani, Ishaq II, Muhammad Gao, and Nuh. Though Timbuktu continued to flourish under their rule, only Dawud came close to earning the plaudits the city’s chroniclers heaped on the first askiya, and with time the empire became degenerate. The Tarikh al-sudan records that the people “exchanged God’s bounties for infidelity, and left no sin against God Most High that they did not commit openly, such as drinking fermented liquors, sodomy and fornication.” They were so given over to this last vice that one would have thought it was not forbidden, the chronicle records, and even the sons of the sultans committed incest with their sisters.
More dangerous still, the empire was falling behind its northern neighbor, Morocco. The Sadian dynasty that ruled that country had been fighting Portuguese, Spanish, and Ottoman invaders for decades, and had even made an alliance with England against Spain. The result was a militaristic society whose troops were well drilled and equipped with English cannon, and who had adopted muskets and harquebuses, employing mercenaries and “renegades”—bands of Christian prisoners and deserters who converted to Islam—to use them.
The Sadian sultan was Ahmad al-Mansur, a quiet man of immense ambition and a tendency to explode in fits of rage. He also claimed to be the twelfth caliph, and since it was the caliph’s role to restore unity to the Islamic world, the Muslim rulers of the Sudanese kingdoms would have to submit and hand over their wealth. He had already spent a fortune on the lavish “Incomparable Palace” in Marrakesh, with its gilt ceilings and marble floors, and had to fund large numbers of soldiers, spies, and agents. He began by demanding that the askiyas pay a tax on every load of salt the Songhay took out of the mines in the desert at Taghaza, which lay roughly halfway between Timbuktu and Marrakesh: it was his armies, after all, that kept sub-Saharan Africa safe from the Christians. Askiya Ishaq II responded with an insult, sending Mansur a spear and two iron shoes. Until the sultan had worn out the shoes by running, the gift implied, he would never be safe from Songhay spears. The sultan now had his casus belli, and he chose a short, blue-eyed eunuch named Jawdar to execute his plan.
Jawdar was given the most powerful force ever sent across the Sahara: it consisted of an elite and technologically advanced army of more than 4,000 soldiers, including 2,000 renegade harquebusiers, 500 mounted gunmen, seventy Christian mercenaries armed with blunderbusses, and 1,500 Moroccan cavalry. They also had mortars and cannon and carried 150 tons of gunpowder in a baggage train that was 10,000 camels long. The conquest of the Sudan would be “easy,” the sultan boasted, since the Sudanese had only spears and swords to fight with.
The Moroccans reached the Niger bend midway between Gao and Timbuktu on February 28, 1591, catching Ishaq II off guard. The askiya hurriedly assembled a large force that met the Moroccans at Tondibi, thirty miles north of Gao, a fortnight later. The Songhay drove a thousand head of cattle at the enemy, but when the animals heard gunfire, they stampeded into the Songhay lines, after which the askiya’s army broke “in the twinkling of an eye,” according to the Tarikh al-sudan. Ishaq fled, and Jawdar marched on Gao. The askiya offered peace terms: he would pledge allegiance to Mansur, hand over the rights to the salt trade, and give him 100,000 mithqals of gold and a thousand slaves. Jawdar replied that he would send the terms to the sultan for approval.
Jawdar then advanced to Timbuktu, entering the city on May 30. He went straight to the qadi, who at this time was the elderly Umar, a son of Qadi Mahmud, and told him he needed “a large place where we can build a fort where we can stay until the Sultan orders us to return to him,” according to the Fattash. Jawdar’s men then drove the residents out of the wealthy merchants’ quarter, “heaping injuries, threats and blows upon them,” before they set to work joining houses together to form the fort. The soldiers press-ganged everyone they found in the streets into the construction work, while the city’s merchants were ordered to produce a large quantity of grain.
The forced labor and requisition of food came as a shock to the holy city, which had been an object of veneration for a century. “No crueler or greater trial had ever befallen the people of Timbuktu,” wrote the authors of the Fattash:
We are unable fully to describe all the misery and losses that Timbuktu suffered when the Moroccans occupied this town. We are unable to tell the tale of all the violence and excesses that were committed within these walls.
This, however, was just the beginning.
When the sultan received Jawdar’s letter outlining the peace deal, he flew into a rage and replaced him with a man who would finish the Songhay for good. This was a volatile ex-commander of the renegades named Mahmud ibn Zargun. Pasha Mahmud reached Timbuktu on August 17, 1591, took command of the sultan’s force, and immediately set off east with Jawdar in tow, in pursuit of the remaining Songhay. During his two-year absence, Timbuktu revolted against Moroccan rule, and in the autumn of 1593, Mahmud returned with a well-worked plan to punish the men he believed had been secretly backing the insurgency all along: the city’s scholars and holy men. He ordered the arrest and execution of two leading Timbuktu sharifs, and announced that th
e people must come to the Sankore mosque in groups to renew their oaths of fidelity to the sultan. On the first day it would be the turn of the merchants from the oasis towns in the Sahara, and on the second day the turn of the people from the caravan towns in the west. On the third day, October 20, a date Ahmad Baba described as the Day of Desolation, it would be the turn of the scholars.
When the moment arrived, the Kuran and hadiths were brought out in the Sankore mosque and the cream of Timbuktu’s intellectual life filed inside. Armed men were placed at the exits and on the building’s roof, the doors were closed, and the scholars were bound before being dragged outside, one by one. Mahmud ordered that the prisoners be taken across town to his fort in two parties. Qadi Umar, too old and frail to walk, was put on a small donkey that was led through the center of the town, while a second group took an easterly route around the city. Near the Sidi Yahya mosque, one of the prisoners in this second party snatched a musketeer’s sword and attacked him with it, whereupon the sultan’s men launched into a frenzy of butchery, hacking down the prisoners all around them. Fourteen Timbuktiens were killed on the spot, including nine scholars of Sankore.
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