(usurper) and is best known as
Mohammed Askia. He was strictly orthodox where Ali was rather a scoffer,
and an organizer where Ali was a warrior. On his pilgrimage to Mecca in
1495 there was nothing of the barbaric splendor of Mansa Musa, but a
brilliant group of scholars and holy men with a small escort of fifteen
hundred soldiers and nine hundred thousand dollars in gold. He stopped and
consulted with scholars and politicians and studied matters of taxation,
weights and measures, trade, religious tolerance, and manners. In Cairo,
where he was invested by the reigning caliph of Egypt, he may have heard
of the struggle of Europe for the trade of the Indies, and perhaps of the
parceling of the new world between Portugal and Spain. He returned to the
Sudan in 1497, instituted a standing army of slaves, undertook a holy war
against the indomitable Mossi, and finally marched against the Hausa. He
subdued these cities and even imposed the rule of black men on the Berber
town of Agades, a rich city of merchants and artificers with stately
mansions. In fine Askia, during his reign, conquered and consolidated an
empire two thousand miles long by one thousand wide at its greatest
diameters; a territory as large as all Europe. The territory was divided
into four vice royalties, and the system of Melle, with its
semi-independent native dynasties, was carried out. His empire extended
from the Atlantic to Lake Chad and from the salt mines of Tegazza and the
town of Augila in the north to the 10th degree of north latitude toward
the south.

It was a six months' journey across the empire and, it is said, "he was
obeyed with as much docility on the farthest limits of the empire as he
was in his own palace, and there reigned everywhere great plenty and
absolute peace."[20] The University of Sankore became a center of learning
in correspondence with Egypt and North Africa and had a swarm of black
Sudanese students. Law, literature, grammar, geography and surgery were
studied. Askia the Great reigned thirty-six years, and his dynasty
continued on the throne until after the Moorish conquest in 1591.

Meanwhile, to the eastward, two powerful states appeared. They never
disputed the military supremacy of Songhay, but their industrial
development was marvelous. The Hausa states were formed by seven original
cities, of which Kano was the oldest and Katsena the most famous. Their
greatest leaders, Mohammed Rimpa and Ahmadu Kesoke, arose in the