264 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY cotton, corn, yams, sweet potatoes, beans, ground nuts, bananas, papaws, wheat, onions, tobacco, indigo, as forming the ordinary crops. Katsena had also, he tells us, figs, melons, pomegranates, and limes, and, until the destruction of the vines at the period of the Fulani conquest, grapes were plentiful. In addition to these evidences of agriculture, the rich pasturage was dotted with vast herds of cattle and goats, while the park-like scenery, diversified by native woods, formed, he says, one of the finest landscapes he had ever seen in his life. Amongst the woods the shea butter tree of commerce and the tamarind tree were remarkable. The effect of the Moorish conquest on Katsena was rather to increase than to diminish its importance, for the downfall of Kagho, the Songhay capital, and the disasters which followed under its Moorish conquerors, diverted a stream of commercial activity to Katsena ; and the Habe dynasty, whose system of law and administration was so admirable as to command the respect and the still more emphatic tribute of adoption by the Fulani conquerors of the nineteenth century, was founded in Katsena in the beginning of the seventeenth century, shortly after the coming of the Moors. '* Habe," which is the name given to this dynasty by the Fulani, would seem to be only a native name for Haussa, but it applies to a special dynasty which at about this period possessed itself of power.

Katsena, like Kano, came early into conflict with Bornu, and would seem to have acknowledged its suzerainty by the payment of a tribute in slaves. No other inconvenience arose from the conquest, and for all practical purposes Katsena not only remained independent, but having come successfully out of the long wars with Kano, filled, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our era, the position of the leading city of this part of Negroland. In the latter half of the eighteenth century it was said to be at the height of its prosperity. It was important not only in commerce and