CHAPTER XIV THE MELLESTINE The empire of Melle and its dependencies, known to the Arabs as ** The Mellestine," which rose in the thirteenth century on the ruins of Ghana, was the first of the great black Mohammedan kingdoms of the Western Soudan to claim intercourse on equal terms with contemporary civilisation. In the days of its greatest prosperity the territories of the Mellestine extended from the coast of the Atlantic on the west to the Niger boundary of Haussaland on the east, and from the country of the cannibals on the south its protectorate extended into the desert as far as the frontier of Wargelan.

In 1353, when the fortunes of Melle were at their highest, Ibn Khaldun, who was then employed on a political mission at Biskra, met one of the notables of Tekadda, an important Berber town of the desert, which, "like all other towns of the Sahara," at that time acknowledged the sovereignty of Melle. Amongst other details of the caravan trade which Ibn Khaldun learned from this man he mentions that caravans from Egypt, consisting of 12,000 laden camels, passed every year through Tekadda on their way to Melle. The load of a camel was 300 lbs. : 12,000 camel loads amounted, therefore, to something like 1600 tons of merchandise. In the comparison which has so often been made of a caravan of the desert to a ship, it is worth while to remember that, at this date, there was probably not a ship in any of the merchant navies of the world which would carry 100 tons. At the time of the Armada, 250 years later, when English and Spanish merchant ships were scouring the Eastern 117