This week for the interim, I decided to do something a little different, and highlight one part of the world that will vastly change as a result of some of the events so far in Rome AARisen…
January 23rd, 1190
Timbuktu
Abu Bakr Taifun sheathed his sword and sighed. Beads of sweat dripped from his brow, stinging in his eyes as the smell of death and decay surrounded him. Taifun wiped his eyes, then looked out once again on the sea of carnage. War was never a pleasant sight, and Taifun was far more used to scholarly debate and argument amongst learned men than the battlefield. Yet, here he now stood, in the central square of the fabled city of Timbuktu, surrounded by the bodies of both the Faithful and Unbelievers.
“This would not have been possible without your help.”
Taifun looked up, and smiled.
Rows of gleaming white teeth stood starkly against coal black skin, an image that might have frightened many other men. To many of the Moors who had not followed Abu Bakr south such an image was a reminder of the deadly Roman
Nubiatakoi that stood firm at Seville and looted through Fez. Not Abu Bakr. While Sulayman Kejerid was a huge black wall of a man, the Moorish Prince knew beneath that harsh, forbidding exterior there was the heart and mind of a scholar, much like himself.
“Of course,
saddiq,” Taifun bowed as much as his tired body would let him, only to have a huge black paw force him back upright. Sulayman’s laughter seemed to peel off of the adobe and mud-daub buildings of Timbuktu.
“That is not necessary,
saddiq,” Sulayman said, “get up, its unseemly for a prince to bow like that!”
“Princes bow to Sultans,” Abu Bakr retorted with a smile. He was secretly grateful – he wasn’t sure if he would’ve been able to bow properly.
“Not princes who gained the Sultan his crown,” Sulayman said simply, putting a hand on Abu Bakr’s shoulder. Taifun remembered a day only a few months before, when he and his court-in-exile had arrived in this strange land, when he was leery of even such a touch from the locals.
The destruction of Fez and the Murabatid Kingdom had not meant the end of the Taifun family line. While some, such as the Sultan’s youngest son Talil had broken
haditha and taken to the faith of the infidel and now served their new masters, Abu Bakr refused. The Prophet had stressed, again and again, to knowingly abandon the Faith meant certain death and damnation. So now, Abu Bakr, eldest son and heir to late Sultan Ishaq of the Murabatid Empire, now found himself the leader of one of many wandering bands of the Faithful, determined to find a new place, a new life, away from the hated Romans.
It had been a harrowing journey south, along one of the many trade routes that crisscrossed the vast Sahara. The Moors had come south in bands – groups of ten, twenty, and Abu Bakr’s band of loyal courtiers, twenty-six strong, was no different. Yet they had no idea the political storm they were fleeing didn’t compare to the maelstrom they were slowly trekking towards.
The Murabatids were aware of the kingdoms that lay in the Sahel, the grasslands just south of the mighty Sahara. It was from here the Moors were able to obtain gold, ivory and salt, the sinews of their trade empire that turned, ever so briefly, into a military one. Yet a hundred years before, the Moorish general Abu Bakr, at the behest of the last Almohad Caliph, had marched south across the trackless wastes and conquered the Sahelian kingdom of Ghana. Yet this tenuous trans-Saharan foothold did not last… and unbelievers – pagans who worshiped their kings and the mighty Niger River, had poured into what had been the rich lands of kings.
Eager to make a home in this hostile lands, the tiny Moorish bands slowly collected, and under Abu Bakr’s leadership, they joined forces with the lone of the petty kings who had heard the word of the Prophet and believed.
Sulayman Kejerid, the self-proclaimed Sultan of Djenne.
“You had the wisdom to make the alliance with Gao,” Abu Bakr heard himself say, watching as his bedraggled veterans, alongside Sulayman’s men, began stripping the dead of their useful belongings.
“It was your men of science and steel that stiffened by armies,” Sulayman replied. He patted Abu Bakr on the shoulder once more, before looking the Moor over. “You have much blood on you, but you are not wounded.” He smiled. “You claim to be a scholar, Abu Bakr, but you are a warrior without peer in this realm.”
The Moorish Prince couldn’t help but give a tired smile. Ten years before, in Fez, Abu Bakr had been a minor scholar, in addition to being the eldest son of the Sultan. His opinions on
haditha were gaining ground in Islamic Spain, and he’d even penned a minor treatise on astronomy. However, with the fall of the kingdom, he was forced to become what his father, and grandfather had been – warriors.
Abu Bakr’s force were a ragged bunch by Moorish standards – 3,000 men altogether. But their discipline, and more importantly their Damascus steel blades, were something the unbeliever kings from the southern forests could not match. Added to Sulayman’s political acumen, the force had, in the space of three years, become a political avalanche. City after city fell before their combined forces, in the name of the One True God and Muhammad His Prophet. Now, with the collapse of Timbuktu, the power of the Sossosso kings had been completely broken.
“There is a position, some of your men say, that Sultans from the north have in their courts,” Sulayman continued. “A position for someone that is both wise and strong, as well as trustworthy – something you’ve shown yourself to be in greater degrees than I have ever seen before. So, Abu Bakr, wanderer from afar, would you consent to be my Grand Vizier?”
Excerpt from Judith Mallory’s
Abridged History of the Sahelian Empires – Ghana to Mali..
The steady arrival of Moorish refugees from the Roman onslaughts of 1186 and 1187 truly mark a turning point in the history of West Africa. On their arrival, West Africa was a land torn by war – the collapse of the Ghana Empire had left the rich lands split amongst rival kings, the fiercest being the Sossosso invaders from the east and south. The alliance of convenience between the Moors and the one king with which they shared a common faith blossomed into something much more. Sulayman Kejerid’s triumph in 1190 A.D. unified the core of what, over the next hundred and fifty years, would become the second most powerful native African empire. The Moorish refugees brought with them the height of Murabatid science, and most importantly, the knowledge of how to manufacture superior arms and armor. Married to the brilliance and ruthlessness of Sulayman Kejerid, the two turned into an unbeatable military machine. Over the centuries the Moors married into and blended with the local populations, so by the time we read of the great
Mansa Musa’s hajj to Mecca in 1324, the new empire, long christened Mali by this point, was a realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, powerful military, and rich and expansive trade network.
The core of the reason for the expansion of this empire to its ultimate size in the 15th century lay in the solid military foundation laid by Prince Abu Bakr of the Moors and Sultan Sulayman. The Moors, despite their defeat, had learned much from their contact and warfare against the resurgent Roman Empire, and brought with them many lessons. First of which was the organization of the entire kingdom into districts, each headed by a
ton-ta-jon-ta-ni-woro, literally “slave who carries a bow and quiver.” These slaves were in fact highly placed noblemen, whose task was to place the bow and quiver, symbols of the military might of the Empire, against its enemies. As the empire grew, additional districts were added, until eventually they numbered sixteen altogether. (1)
Supplementing this force of heavy cavalry were numerous lighter cavalry units, recruited from tribal nobility. Called the
sofa, these units often were unarmored, and equipped with shortspears, bows and javelins.
With this organization, the Malian Empire was able to effectively bring its formidable resources to bear. While the Empire regularly called upon massive civilian levies, to the point chronicler Sunni Ali in 1356 said the
Mansa’s armies were as numerous as the sands of the desert (2), the true core of the army was the
Mandekalu horseman, a rider often armored in a chain hauberk and armed with lance, sword, and bow. The
Mandekalu were organized into standing units of five hundred, called a
horom, each commanded by a
farima, literally “brave man,” who functioned as a colonel of the force. At the height of Imperial power in the 1430s, Peter Dobson has estimated that the
Mansa in D’jenne could field as many as sixty of these
horom, scattered about the empire.(3)
Yet this powerful military could not be supported without a formidable trade network, and as Ghana before, the powerful Mali Caliphate could call upon European desires for gold, ivory, and other trade goods to fund its coffers. Plentiful gold fields are evidenced by Imperial edicts banning any individual from possessing any gold other than coins minted by the Imperial government. Clair Townsend argues, with considerable evidence, that this was an anti-inflationary measure, to ensure the central government held a tight rein on the plentiful gold supply.(4) Money was so plentiful that supposedly when
Mansa Musa stopped in Alexandria and was received by the Roman Emperor Andronikos II, the Malian Emperor made a gift of a solid golden sword and scepter to his Roman counterpart, seriously impressing the normally unflappable Andronikos. (5)
Yet another story is the process by which the Empire spread from the Sahel into the forests to the south…
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(1) Dr. Peter Dobson claims that there are in fact 18 districts, but his findings are highly disputed. See Dobson,
The Military Organization of Mali, 173-179.
(2) Sunni Ali,
Pilgrimage to Gao.
(3) Dobson,
The Military Organization of Mali, 155.
(4) See Townsend, Clair,
Gold, Salt and Sweat: Trans-Saharan Trade in the Age of Mali, 344.
(5) Sunni Ali,
Pilgrimage.
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The Great Mosque of D’jenne, built by Sultan Sulayman I in 1194 A.D.
So thus ends the interim on one of the most interesting aspects of the future Rome AARisen world in IN. The powerful state of Mali originally came from a need to counterbalance the successor states in the West – then a larger question of where exactly the Moors who refused to convert went? For those interested, the information I presented on this fictional Malian military is heavily based on information about the
real military of medieval Mali…
And yes… those are all fake sources. :-D
So, in light of this, I would like to take a moment and nominate crusaderknight for induction into the Tempus Society for his excellent work!
