278 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY have been any possibility of the continuance of trade and the spread of learning, of which the chronicles continue constantly to speak. That trade should have persisted under conditions so adverse says much for the commercial tenacity of the Haussa people. Agriculture probably suffered even more severely than trade, and the great famine with which the century ended was widespread. The famine is mentioned in the chronicles of Bornu as extending to that country, and we find the statement in the Songhay accounts of the Moorish conquest that during the campaigns of the first two years (1591-92) on the eastern side of the Niger, the Moorish soldiers were reduced by famine to eat the pack animals on which the transport of the army depended.

Nevertheless, under a king of the name of Mohammed, Bornu rose about the middle of the sixteenth century to a position of great prosperity and power, and its relations with the outer world were maintained.

The causes which operated to cut off the countries ot the Western Soudan from their old connection with Spain, and to interrupt their communication with Christian Europe, did not apply to the Mohammedan East, where the Turks were the ruling power. Embassies from Bornu to Tripoli are frequently mentioned, and before the end of the sixteenth century the armies of Bornu, more advanced than the majority of European troops, were armed in great part with muskets. The Spaniards were ahead of the rest of Europe in this respect, but it may be remembered that at the battle of Lepanto, which was fought in 1571, only the crews of the more important ships were armed with muskets. In an engagement which Drake had with the Spaniards off the American coast in 1572, the English crews were armed only with bows and arrows, and when Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1557, the principal weapons in the arsenals of England were bows and arrows. Yet, if the Kano chronicle is to be trusted, the troops of