BORNU 269 speak of its power as extending to the borders of the Songhay Empire. It has been seen in the history of the Haussa provinces that they were, at different periods of their history, content to pay tribute alternately to Songhay and to Bornu. In the north the authority of Kanem extended to the Fezzan, and its limits must have approached very nearly in its northern, as well as in its western extension, to those of Songhay. The historians of Songhay describe the extent of Songhay as offering a six months' march from frontier to frontier ; Macrizi says of Kanem in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century that the breadth of its dominions was a three months' march. It is under the name of Kanem that we get our earliest information about the country, and under that name, though El Bekri speaks of it in the middle of the eleventh century as a land of idolaters, very difficult of access, it seems to have entered at an early period into relations with Europe and North Africa. A pagan dynasty of Dugu, or Duguwa, reigned from about the middle of the ninth century until the end of the eleventh century, and, according to the information of El Bekri in 1067, this dominion extended on the west to the eastern bank of the Niger — that is, over the whole of Haussaland. Whether his information was accurate or not in detail, it tends to show that the kings of the name of Du, to whom he makes allusion, were at the time of more importance than any other rulers in that eastern territory. In the end of the eleventh century a new dynasty of Mohammedan kings was founded, but though Islam was brought to Kanem at about the same period as to the rest of the Soudan, it did not come through the same Morabite agency ; it came direct from Egypt.

Under its Moslem kings, Kanem rose rapidly to the rank of one of the first powers of the Soudan. It entered into close relations with Egypt and the Barbary States. We have seen a black poet from Kanem at the court of El Mansour, one of the Almohade sovereigns