Makuria

Makuria was a Christian kingdom in Nubia, along the Nile in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt, from around the sixth century to the late fifteenth. From its capital at Old Dongola, it resisted the Arab conquest, made a treaty with Muslim Egypt that lasted centuries and became one of the great Christian states of medieval Africa.

After the fall of Kush in the fourth century, three kingdoms emerged along the middle Nile: Nobadia in the north, between the first and third cataracts, Makuria in the centre, and Alodia in the south. Byzantine missionaries converted them to Christianity in the sixth century. Makuria absorbed Nobadia, probably in the seventh century, creating a kingdom that stretched from Aswan to near the fifth cataract.

After the Arab conquest of Egypt, Arab armies invaded Nubia in 642 and again in 652, under Abdallah ibn Sa'd, who besieged Dongola with catapults, damaging its cathedral. The Nubian archers, known to the Arabs as "pupil-smiters" for their accuracy, repelled them.

The war ended with a treaty, the baqt, under which Makuria sent Egypt a fixed number of enslaved people each year, reportedly 360, and Egypt sent wheat, barley, wine, cloth and horses. Each side agreed not to attack the other and to allow free passage to traders. The treaty, unusual in early Islamic history, lasted with interruptions for about six hundred years. In 835, King Zacharias sent his son Georgios to Baghdad to negotiate with the caliph, who reduced the obligations.

Makuria reached its height between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Old Dongola had a large cathedral, churches, a royal palace, later turned into a mosque, and monasteries. The Coptic Church of Alexandria appointed its bishops. The cathedral of Faras, in the north, excavated by a Polish team in the 1960s before the Aswan High Dam flooded the area, contained over a hundred wall paintings of saints, bishops, kings and the Virgin, many now in Warsaw and Khartoum. Texts were written in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian, one of the oldest written African languages.

Makurian kings sometimes intervened in Egypt to protect the Coptic Church and its patriarch. In 747, according to Coptic sources, King Kyriakos marched on Egypt when the patriarch was imprisoned. Makuria also had good relations with the Fatimid Caliphate, whose army included many Nubian soldiers.

From the late thirteenth century, the Mamluk sultans of Egypt intervened in Makuria, supporting rival claimants and invading several times; the Mamluks sacked Dongola in 1276. Arab Bedouin tribes, such as the Banu Kanz, moved into Nubia, intermarried with the ruling family and spread Islam. In 1317 the throne room of the palace at Dongola was converted into a mosque, as an inscription records, and a Muslim king of Nubian royal descent took the throne. Plague in the mid-fourteenth century further weakened the kingdom.

Makuria broke apart in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A smaller Christian kingdom, Dotawo, survived in Lower Nubia until at least the late fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century, the Funj Sultanate of Sennar and the Ottomans controlled the region, and Islam had replaced Christianity. Archaeologists continue to excavate Old Dongola.

Our maps show Makuria on most maps from 500 to 1400. Its outline on several maps is unusual: its largest, on the 700 map at about 950,000 square kilometres, extends into today's Somalia and Ethiopia, far beyond the Nile valley, which appears to be an artefact of the basemap. The kingdom's real territory lay along the Nile in northern Sudan and southern Egypt.