1.29 Africa: a.d. 1501 to 1600

Africa

Back to Africa: A.D. 1401 to 1500

Northeast africa

The horn of Africa now became the site of bitter conflict, originally a trading rivalry, but soon a long religious and political fight between Christians of Ethiopia and the Muslim coastal states. The sultan of Adal (now between Somalia and Ethiopia), Ahmad Gran, attacked into the heartland of Ethiopia in the 1520s with the help of Danakill and Somali nomads. The Christian Amhara nation dominated the Ethiopian plateau at that time and sustained a flourishing ecclesiastical art. (Ref. 8 , 270 ) The pope sent Portuguese soldiers, led by Christopher da Gama (Vasco's son), to help against this Muslim conquest in a 20 year long war. As a result of that help by Portuguese, Ethiopia came under Catholic influence for the first time, as their own Coptic Church had been declared heretical some 1,100 years previously. The Jesuits with the Portuguese tried to convert the Ethiopians, apparently without too much success, as all Catholic missions were expelled by the next century. But the old Christian empire was so exhausted by the warfare that the pagan Galla, from the south and east then invaded and settled in the country, with general anarchy resulting. (Ref. 175 , 8 , 83 ) Additional Notes

In what is now the country of Sudan, the Funj people appeared early in this century, defeated the Arabs and established a powerful kingdom around the capital Sennar, on the Blue Nile. The people, known as the "Black Sultans" of eastern Sudan eventually adopted Islam. (Ref. 83 )

In Egypt the last Mamluk sultan was Qansuh al-Ghuri, a scholarly man coming to the throne late in life. Decadence, rivalry and corruption continued in his regime. To add to the Mamluk troubles, their trading ports were now by-passed by the Portuguese trade- routes around the Cape of Good Hope and the Egyptian treasury was soon empty. The stage was set for the advance of the Ottoman Turk, Selim I, who defeated the Mamluk army in Syria and advanced to rule Egypt and Hejaz (Saudi Arabia). (Ref. 5 )

North central and northwest africa

Estimates of the population of North Africa in this century vary from 2,000,000 to 3,500,000. (Ref. 260 ) After da Gama's voyage around Africa at the end of the preceding century, the economic ascendancy of North Africa ended. Science and philosophy lost out to both Christianity and Islam and the area began to decline to the status we know today. In the early century, both Spain and Portugal gained control of some Moroccan ports, but in a great battle of Alcazarquivir in 1578, King Sebastian of Portugal was killed and the Moroccans preserved their independence for another half century, usually ruled by factions of the Sharifian Dynasty. (Ref. 175 ) That country, alone of the north African states, remained independent of the Ottomans. At the height of its power, in about 1590, Morocco invaded the Songhai Empire and set up a client state in the sudan, disrupting the economy of that entire region. (Ref. 8 ) Throughout the century local fairs were set up in connection with local saints and pilgrimages. One of the largest was among the Gouzzoula, south of the Anti-Atlas, looking out over the desert. It survived for hundreds of years. (Ref. 292 )