udan was especially dependent upon salt. In 1545 Morocco
claimed the principal salt mines at Tegazza, but the reigning Askia
refused to recognize the claim.

When the Sultan Elmansour came to the throne of Morocco, he increased the
efficiency of his army by supplying it with fire arms and cannon.
Elmansour determined to attack the Sudan and sent four hundred men under
Pasha Djouder, who left Morocco in 1590. The Songhay, with their bows and
arrows, were helpless against powder and shot, and they were defeated at
Tenkadibou April 12, 1591. Askia Ishak, the king, offered terms, and
Djouder Pasha referred them to Morocco. The sultan, angry with his
general's delay, deposed him and sent another, who crushed and
treacherously murdered the king and set up a puppet. Thereafter there were
two Askias, one under the Moors at Timbuktu and one who maintained himself
in the Hausa states, which the Moors could not subdue. Anarchy reigned in
Songhay. The Moors tried to put down disorder with a high hand, drove out
and murdered the distinguished men of Timbuktu, and as a result let loose
a riot of robbery and decadence throughout the Sudan. Pasha now succeeded
pasha with revolt and misrule until in 1612 the soldiers elected their own
pasha and deliberately shut themselves up in the Sudan by cutting off
approach from the north.

Hausaland and Bornu were still open to Turkish and Mohammedan influence
from the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the slave trade from the south,
but the face of the finest Negro civilization the modern world had ever
produced was veiled from Europe and given to the defilement of wild
Moorish soldiers. In 1623 it is written "excesses of every kind are now
committed unchecked by the soldiery," and "the country is profoundly
convulsed and oppressed."[21] The Tuaregs marched down from the desert and
deprived the Moors of many of the principal towns. The rest of the empire
of the Songhay was by the end of the eighteenth century divided among
separate Moorish chiefs, who bought supplies from the Negro peasantry and
were "at once the vainest, proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted,
ferocious, and intolerant of all the nations of the south."[22] They lived
a nomadic life, plundering the Negroes. To such depths did the mighty
Songhay fall.

As the Songhay declined a new power arose in the nineteenth century, the
Fula. The Fula, who vary in race from Berber mulattoes to full-blooded
Negroes, may be the result of a westw