The Songhai Empire and Timbuktu's Libraries

Songhai succeeded Mali as West Africa's dominant power and became the largest state in African history, running a professional army, a fleet on the Niger, and a bureaucracy of appointed governors. Timbuktu under its rule held universities and a book trade employing scribes, binders, and dealers; private libraries there accumulated hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on law, astronomy, medicine, and poetry. In 1591 a Moroccan army crossed the Sahara with gunpowder weapons and destroyed the empire's field army — a technological gap ending a state that had stood for over a century.