ASKIA MOHAMMED ABOU BEKR 185 have been less than fifty years of age in 1495. He had been educated in an island of the Niger, and such portion of his life as had not been spent in attendance upon Sonni Ali at one or other of his rough courts had been spent in the hardest form of active campaigning in the tropics. It throws a remarkable light upon the vigour of his mind and the natural distinction of his character, that at this age, and having lived the life which he had lived, he was able to apply himself with the eagerness of youth to the sources of learning, and, undeterred by differences of colour, to form friendships on equal terms with men of the greatest enlightenment and highest intellectual activity which a centre of civilisation like that of Egypt could produce.

The phases of development of a despotic monarch have a wide-reaching influence, and it is hardly too much to say that the course of history in the Soudan was profoundly modified by this visit of its sovereign to the East. He accomplished the political and religious purposes for which he went. The cities of Mecca and Medina were visited, and vast sums given in charity in both towns.

In Mecca he bought a garden and established a charitable institution for the benefit of all future pilgrims from the Soudan. In Cairo he received investiture at the hands of El Motawekkel the Fourteenth, Abbasside Caliph of Egypt. The ceremony included a solemn abdication on Askia's part for three days of the Songhay throne. On the fourth day the Caliph appointed him to the position of Lieutenant of the Abbasside Sultans in the Soudan, and invested him, in sign of this authority, with a turban and cap. Thus politically, but far more intellectually, was Songhay restored to its ancient position as a child of Egypt.

It is an interesting coincidence that 1493, the year in which Askia formed the resolution to seek the religious sanction of the head of the Mohammedan Church to his occupation of the throne of the Soudan, was the year in which, in consequence of the discoveries made by Columbus