Who ruled Timbuktu?

Timbuktu lies on the southern edge of the Sahara in central Mali, a few kilometres north of the great bend of the Niger River. It grew where two worlds met: camel caravans crossing the desert from North Africa, carrying salt, cloth and books, and boats on the Niger bringing gold, grain and slaves from the lands to the south. That position made it, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the richest trading towns of West Africa and a famous centre of Islamic scholarship. In Europe its name later came to stand for the most remote place imaginable.

Local chronicles written in the seventeenth century say the town began around 1100 CE as a seasonal camp of Tuareg herders beside a well, and archaeology suggests it became a permanent settlement in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century. It was not yet a major town when the Mali Empire absorbed it. Tradition holds that Mansa Musa, returning from his celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 and 1325, took the town peacefully and commissioned the Djinguereber Mosque, designed by the Andalusian poet and architect Abu Ishaq al-Sahili. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta passed through in 1353.

As Mali weakened, Tuareg chiefs controlled Timbuktu from the 1430s until the Songhai ruler Sonni Ali captured it in 1468 or 1469 and punished the scholars he suspected of siding with his enemies. His successor Askia Muhammad I, who seized power in 1493, favoured the learned families, and under the Songhai Empire the town reached its height. Scholars taught law, theology, grammar and astronomy in the circles attached to the Djinguereber, Sankore and Sidi Yahya mosques, and copying and trading manuscripts became a large business. The traveller known in Europe as Leo Africanus visited around 1510 and described its many judges, doctors and scholars and its trade in books. Thousands of manuscripts from this and later periods survive in family libraries in the town.

In 1591 an army sent by the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, equipped with firearms, defeated the Songhai at Tondibi and occupied Timbuktu. Many leading scholars were deported to Marrakesh. The Moroccan soldiers' descendants, the Arma, ruled the town almost independently of Morocco after the early seventeenth century, but the town was in decline as Atlantic trade drew commerce away from the Sahara. Tuareg groups, the Massina caliphate from 1826 and later the Toucouleur state all held it for a time. European explorers competed to reach it: the Scot Alexander Gordon Laing arrived in 1826 but was killed soon after leaving, and the Frenchman René Caillié reached the town in 1828 and returned to describe it.

French forces occupied Timbuktu in 1893 and 1894, and it became part of the colony of French Sudan and later of French West Africa. It has been part of independent Mali since 1960. UNESCO listed its great mosques and cemeteries as a World Heritage Site in 1988. In 2012, during a rebellion in northern Mali, armed Islamist groups seized the town and destroyed several saints' shrines, while residents smuggled tens of thousands of manuscripts to safety in Bamako; French and Malian troops retook it in January 2013. Today Timbuktu is a small town of a few tens of thousands of people, affected by desertification and continuing insecurity in the region.