Battle of Tondibi

The Battle of Tondibi, fought on 13 March 1591 near Gao on the Niger river, in what is now Mali, decided the Moroccan invasion of the Songhai Empire. A small Moroccan army armed with arquebuses and cannon, led by Judar Pasha, routed a far larger Songhai force under Askia Ishaq II. The defeat brought down the largest state in West Africa, although Morocco never managed to rule the region it had conquered.

For more than a century the Songhai Empire had dominated the western Sahel, with an empire stretching along the Niger from the upper Senegal river to what is now Niger. It had been built up by rulers such as Askia Muhammad I, and its cities of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné grew rich on trans-Saharan trade. By the late 1580s, however, disputes over the succession had left it divided and weakened.

North of the desert, the Saadi dynasty of Morocco was at the peak of its power after crushing a Portuguese invasion at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578. The new sultan, Ahmad al-Mansur, was nonetheless short of money, and he looked south to the Songhai, whose wealth he wrongly believed came from gold mines they controlled. Some of his advisers objected that war against a fellow Muslim state was unlawful, but he overruled them.

In late 1590 al-Mansur sent an expedition across the desert under Judar Pasha, a eunuch of Spanish birth who had been captured as a child. Most of his officers were also converts from Christianity, and half the infantry were converts, the rest being refugees from the former Emirate of Granada. The army numbered about 4,000 men, 1,500 of them light cavalry and 2,500 infantry, many carrying arquebuses, and it brought cannon. It was supplied by a baggage train said to include 8,000 camels. After a crossing of about four months, Judar reached the Niger on 28 February 1591 and turned towards the Songhai capital, Gao.

The armies met at a place called Tankondibogho, near Tondibi, a short distance north of Gao. The size of the Songhai army is uncertain: one chronicle, the Tarikh al-fattash, gives 18,000 cavalry and 9,700 infantry, while other estimates run to 12,500 cavalry and 30,000 foot, or even 80,000 men in all. Either way it greatly outnumbered the invaders, but it had no firearms.

The Songhai opened by driving a herd of about 1,000 cattle at the Moroccan lines to break them and shield their own infantry. The noise of gunfire and cannon turned the animals back towards the Songhai ranks. The Songhai infantry and then the cavalry attacked, but Judar brought his arquebusiers and artillery into line and their fire broke the charges. Much of the cavalry fled, and the rearguard fought on hand to hand until it was destroyed. The whole battle lasted about two hours. The Tarikh al-Sudan, another chronicle, records that some Songhai soldiers sat down on their shields rather than flee and were killed where they sat.

Judar went on to Gao, which its people had already abandoned, and found little to plunder there. The Moroccans then moved on to the wealthier trading cities of Timbuktu and Djenné. The sack of the three cities ended the Songhai Empire as a regional power. Yet the region proved too vast, and supply lines across the Sahara too long, for Morocco to govern it firmly, and years of intermittent fighting followed. The former empire broke up into many smaller states, while the Songhai rulers withdrew downriver to the province of Dendi, where a successor kingdom survived for about two and a half centuries.

Our 1500 map shows the Songhai Empire near its height, stretching along the Niger, and the 1600 map shows the region a decade after the Moroccan invasion.