MORABITE CONQUEST OF SOUDAN 109 again returned to the north. By a friendly partition agreed to in 1062, the northern provinces to the Mediterranean were ceded to Yusuf, while Abou Bekr retained for himself the old regions of the desert in the south.

He retained also the old licence to extend these regions as far as force of arms could carry them.

We first hear of him as leading the armies of his followers on a victorious march across the southern borders of the desert, fighting with the pagan nations of the Soudan for a distance of ninety days east of the most easterly frontier of the Desert Kingdom. In these territories, as he conquered them, he assigned areas for the habitation of the principal tribes who had united beneath his banners. But these territories were not in the Soudan proper, as we know it. They were north of the Great River, and Ibn Khaldun, describing the position occupied by their descendants who were still all " Wearers of the Veil " 300 years later, especially tells us that they had never territorially occupied the Soudan, but remained in the desert, changing nothing in their ways. ** Always divided and disunited by the diversity of their habits and their interests, they formed," he says, " a cordon of desert nations upon the northern frontier of the Soudan, separating its territory from the sandy regions that lie between it and the States of North Africa and Morocco."

By the end of the fourteenth century, when Ibn Khaldun wrote, this cordon of desert nations stretched from the Atlantic to the Nile ; but by that date the people comprising it were subject to the black kings of the Soudan, paid them tribute, and furnished contingents for their armies.

Under Abou Bekr, at the end of the eleventh century the united tribes marched as conquerors, and their campaign did not abandon its character as a Holy War. If they made no territorial confiscations, they claimed tribute from the vanquished peoples, and they imposed the Moslem faith upon all infidels who submitted to their arms. In some cases the necessity of accepting the faith was com-