CHAPTER XXII SONGHAY UNDER ASKIA THE GREAT AsKiA THE Great, in returning from Cairo to the Soudan in 1497, had little knowledge of the strange destiny which lay before his country. He knew, indeed, that the last stronghold of the Moslems in Western Europe had been conquered five years before by the Christian sovereigns of Spain. But the expulsion of the Arabs from the Spanish Peninsula had not yet taken place. He was probably acquainted with the authority given to Portugal to prosecute a career of exploration and conquest on the African coasts. But the coast territory interested him little. It was a matter of no great moment to him whose armies raided with his own upon the prolific populations, of whom the experience of history served to prove the slave supply to be inexhaustible. No wisdom could have enabled him to foresee that the whole current of European life would flow to the channel opened by the maritime enterprise of the Atlantic nations, that the supremacy of the East was at an end, and that his own people, isolated in the heart of Africa, were to be left untouched by the tide of a civilisation sweeping past them to fertilise the shores of continents then unknown.

To himself it must have seemed that the work which lay before him of reforming the administration of his vast empire, and raising the life of the populations committed to his care to the level which reflection and experience led him to believe to be attainable, was a labour of absorbing interest, and demanded the whole activity of his mind.

Already past the zenith of middle age, he must have 190