History Summarized: Timbuktu

Africa's geography is as vibrant as it is varied, ranging from lush rainforests to snow-capped mountains, winding rivers to sprawling deserts, and plenty else in between. But among so many different climate regions, the most uniquely intriguing might be the Sahel, a band bridging the space between the sweltering Sahara Desert and the grassland savannah. This arid transition zone between the biome shifts north and south with the seasons and lies just at the edge of permanent habitability before the ocean-like expanse of the desert begins. As pure geography, it's plenty neat, but this curious stretch of land happens to hold one of the remarkable surprises of African history, the great city of Timbuktu, a city that defies all logical city placement yet thrived in medieval Africa, not in spite of the Sahel, but because of it. To see how, let's do some history. To best understand why Timbuktu was such a spectacular accomplishment of a city, we need to understand the broader history of the region and why Timbuktu was perfect for it. As such, our tale begins in West Africa along the banks of the Niger River, a water feature running a crescent between Guinea and the Nigerian coast and brushing right up against the bottom of the Sahel, crossing through so many different cultures that it has unique local names in several different languages, such as Joliba, Issa, Kwada, and plenty others that I also wouldn't pronounce very well. The name Niger may derive from Ger and Ger in Amazigh, meaning River of Rivers, which, of course, means that the Niger River is actually the River of Rivers River. Linguistics is fun, and etymologies have never caused me pain or distress, at least none that I haven't repressed. In any case, it's a long freaking river, and it served as a crucial waterway for the major West African empires, Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. These three were far from the only players in the region, as the African savanna was bustling with people and cultures aplenty, but they were certainly the biggest boys across their combined millennium and a half runtime. Reaching back farthest in time was the Ghana Empire, arising between the Niger and Senegal rivers sometime in the first few centuries AD. In their reign, they took advantage of two major developments in African history. First was the widespread use of camels for long-distance transit starting in the fourth century, an animal perfectly suited for the region. These so-called ships of the Sahara could make the desert crossing far quicker and more reliably than horses or donkeys, and with multiple times the cargo. The second was the advent of Islam across the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. For the mid-600s onwards, Ghana had a spectacularly rich trading partner just across the Sahara. Well, I say just, it's a desert, but you know what I mean. Taken together, this meant the Sahel controlled the flow of resources between the savanna in the south and the camel caravans across the desert to the bustling cosmopolitan Mediterranean up north. And that's some big business. Gold, ivory, rock salt, food, and slaves. Terrible, as that obviously is, this was part and parcel for the classical world, and even if leagues below the industrialized scale and brutality of the triangle trade, this is still icky as hell. In time, however, the region's most notable export would eventually become books. Much better. Now stick with me for a minute and I'll show you how. Sometime in the 1100s, at a spot where the northernmost bend of the Niger river meets the Sahel, a seasonal outpost of Tuareg nomads coming down from the Sahara became a permanent settlement. One legend holds that the nomads would leave the camp in care of a woman named Buktu, and naturally called it Buktu's Place, or in Tuareg, Timbuktu. Ta-da! Now this is cute, but abundantly made up. The actual etymology is contested at least four ways, and I refuse to hurt myself like that twice in one video. But one way or another, Timbuktu was perfectly situated to take advantage of the desert caravan routes to the Med and east-west river transport to the Savannah, commanding access to everything south of them and serving as a gateway to the north. Being a city in the Sahel of all places is a tricky proposition, but Timbuktu worked perfectly. Around this time, the power of the Ghana Empire began to wane, and while the exact causes aren't quite clear, the effects and outcome are obvious enough. As local players asserted themselves and chipped away at central authority, culminating in This is so big of a deal that the subsequent epic of Sunjata is possibly the most renowned piece of African literature ever, having been transmitted orally by griot storytellers for centuries before formal codifications in the 1900s. This is, frankly, entirely too cool to relegate to a tangent, yet way too important to just skip over. So ah, witness the historian's plight. Ultimately, the Mali Empire grew beyond the bounds of its predecessor to reach from the Niger River all the way to the western coast, and the empire's rise in the region corresponded with the growing prominence of Islam. As mentioned earlier, Muslim merchants crossed the Sahara starting in the 6 and 700s, but it took a while before Islam made its big splash. Ghana allowed Islam, but sources differ on quite how much and how enthusiastically. By the Mali Empire, however, the second Mansa, or king, converted to Islam and went on a pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1260s or 70s. That's a long stretch between first contact and conversion, and this slower process meant that traditional African religions had time to partially syncretize with Islam for a distinctly West African blend. To the shock of travelers like Ibn Battuta, who had no idea what to make of Malian Islamic dietary practice and standards of dress retaining so much local flavor. Granted, he was very impressed with the Malian's commitment to a more orderly and just society than he'd seen anywhere else, so credit there. Bottom line is that by the 1300s, West African Islam was plenty devout but still plenty distinct. Then finally, all these plot threads with the empires, the religion, and the city come together in 1325, as Timbuktu's place in the world transformed entirely when Musa, the ruling Mansa of the Mali Empire and possible richest man in world history, returned from his hajj. In taking the holy pilgrimage, he brought with him tens of thousands of pounds of gold that he happily distributed as he went, casually giving some towns a formative experience with hyperinflation and searing West Africa's new reputation for splendor into the popular conscience. Mansa Musa brought back scholars, artisans, and architects from across the Muslim world, and on his return home, he peacefully annexed Timbuktu into the Mali Empire and filled it with all of his new smart boys. Since its founding, Timbuktu had grown wealthy from trade, but this moment transformed it into the scholarly capital of West Africa. A local proverb says that salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu. So how did this transformation come about? First of course was the influx of smarty-pantses, but second was new city infrastructure to facilitate the great and smartening. Upon Musa's annexation, the city's Sankore Mosque was expanded to a madrasa, a university-esque institution for Islamic study. Like elsewhere in the Muslim world, this included theology, mathematics, literature and poetry, medicine, law, and philosophy. The Jengereber Mosque and Madrasa sprang up two years later, in 1327, as another major hub for scholarship in the city. Beyond these main pillars, learning happened all across town, in over 150 primary schools and in the home libraries of private teachers. By the 1400s, Timbuktu had a population of 100,000, with up to a quarter of that being students from near and far. That century also welcomed the third madrasa, as Sidi Yahya was completed in 1440. All three were originally designed in traditional West African style, being made of limestone or earthen bricks covered in layers of wet soil called banko, which brings a very naturalistic appearance as if the structure is a seamless extension of the ground beneath it. This serves a theological point, as it draws a connection to living and dead ancestors that's characteristic of West Africa's distinct Islamic practice, but it also creates that stylistic cohesion I'm just powerless against. Granted, over time, the material erodes, so it needs yearly re-applications of banko after the rainy seasons, which is why the minarets are dotted with wooden beams called torans. It's a form of scaffolding that lets people climb all around it when replastering. This also gives each year's volunteers an active and continuous role in the preservation of their heritage, which is way cool. The rigid mosque gains a garden-like quality that's thematically beautiful to contemplate. Compared to elsewhere, these mosques are very humble, but the raw meaning layered into their construction and the scholarly purpose they so excellently served make them something truly emblematic of West Africa's history. But there was one final gem in Timbuktu's crown, and that is its books. The combined wisdom of the city took physical shape in over 700,000 manuscripts, most written fully in Arabic, but many are in Ajami, several local West African languages transliterated with Arabic script. Over in Baghdad, the game was get everything into Arabic as the imperial standard, but here, the far more locally rooted style of Islam celebrated and elevated the native languages. By the 1500s, Timbuktu was Sub-Saharan Africa's house of wisdom, having passed from Mali sovereignty into the Songhai Empire, yet rising to even greater splendor and prestige. In an account by the Andalusian traveler Leo Africanus, the city abounded with scholars, doctors, and judges, and the city's most prized and lucrative export was books. Now that's a culture victory in real life if I've ever seen one. Despite never serving as an imperial capital, Timbuktu had a Babylon quality of civilizational importance transcending mere states. It was a big-ass deal. However, the world around Timbuktu was changing rapidly in the 1500s, as Portuguese sailors bypassed the camel caravans by sailing around the coast and severed the city's economic power. Then, in 1591, a Moroccan army sacked the city, punished scholars, and confiscated books. From the 1600s onwards, it was just a city on a river at the edge of the desert. But the people of Timbuktu were one thing above all else. Clever. And in the face of outsiders who would destroy or plunder their books—cough-cough French colonization in 1893—they hid them. Down the generations. In cellars, underground, in the desert, in caves, anywhere. And there's currently an international effort to find and catalog these hidden treasures of paper and ink. There's so much about the history of Timbuktu that I find so fascinatingly plural. It's part of such wide-ranging histories, yet so vibrantly particular to its local context. It's at the geographic edge of impossibility, yet characterized by the presence of so many people from the region and beyond. It's comprised of and representative of so many things, people, and ideas, yet it remains so unwaveringly, inimitably itself. Timbuktu is as varied as it is vibrant. Boom! Full circle! Let's go! Thank you so much for watching. This video was a joy and a surprise to research on like anything I've done in a good long while. Like, I've got a new Top 10 City in World History right here. If you have a friend who may enjoy this, please consider sharing it with them and spreading the history. Thanks, as always, to our community of patrons, and I will see you all in the next video.