Askia Muhammad the Great

Muhammad Ture was born around 1443 in the village of Gao Sané, the son of an officer of Soninke descent in the service of Sunni Ali Ber (placed in this archive). He rose to command the western armies of Songhai under Sunni Ali and held the governorship of the province of Hombori at the latter's death in 1492. In April 1493 he overthrew Sunni Ali's son Sunni Baru at the battle of Anfao and proclaimed himself Askia — a title meaning forceful one — founding the dynasty that would rule Songhai for the following century.

He performed the hajj of 1497, accompanied by a caravan of fifteen hundred men and an estimated three hundred thousand gold dinars. At Mecca he received from the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil III the title Caliph of the Western Sudan — the only sub-Saharan African ruler ever to receive that recognition. Returning by way of Cairo, he carried back with him the Andalusian and Maghribi jurists who would within a generation make the Sankoré quarter of Timbuktu the most important centre of jurisprudence in the Western Sudan.

His domestic government completed the institutionalisation of the empire that Sunni Ali had conquered. He standardised weights and measures across the imperial provinces, established a uniform Maliki legal code as the law of the empire, organised the army into permanent regional commands under appointed governors rather than tributary chiefs, and patronised the school of jurists at Sankoré centred on the family of al-Hajj Ahmad ibn Umar — whose grandson Ahmad Baba al-Massufi would in 1593 become the most celebrated scholar of the medieval Sahel.

Blinded by age, Askia Muhammad was deposed by his son Askia Musa in 1528 and exiled to an island in the Niger. He died ten years later in 1538, nearly a centenarian. The pyramidal earthen tomb at Gao that bears his name was inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage in 2004.

He is honored here as the consolidator of Songhai's golden age.