RISE OF THE SONGHAY EMPIRE 169 buctoo, says the Tarikh, has suffered the horrors of being taken by assault. Once by the Sultan of Mossi before it passed into the safe keeping of Mansa Musa, once by Sonni Ali, and once more again when at the end of its period of prosperity it was sacked by the Moors in 1591. The author of the Tarikh, whose account of the siege we are following, was the historian of the Askias, and as such was bound to justify them at the expense of Sonni Ali. A distinct bias is observable in all that he has to say of him, and the actions of that ** tyrant and libertine," as he usually calls him, receive no merciful interpretation at his hands. Of the three assaults which Timbuctoo had to sustain, this, he says, was the worst.

Sonni Ali spared neither age nor sex, and ** seemed to take pleasure in destroying or dishonouring all that was most cultivated in Timbuctoo." It was perhaps the better classes of Timbuctoo who had inspired and organised the resistance of the town, and it was upon them that Sonni Ali determined to let his vengeance fall.

He took the town in 1468, and it is said that for three years he continued to persecute the learned. Many succeeded in leaving Timbuctoo, and all the members of the university who had remained during the siege fled to Aiwalatin. Others were not so fortunate as those who went with the first caravan. On one occasion the new Timbuctoo Koi appointed by Sonni Ali was ordered to pursue and destroy a flying caravan, and a massacre took place at Tadgit in which some of the most eminent lost their lives. The same fate overtook many of those who fled to different towns. It seemed for a time as though the conqueror had determined to extirpate learning from the Soudan. But after three years the persecution ceased, and the theory that it was intended as a punishment for a definite offence is supported by the fact, admitted even by the author of the Tarikh, that notwithstanding the persecutions which Sonni Ali caused the learned to endure, he did, nevertheless, recognise their merits. He was heard to say that ** without learn-