BORNU 281 ing a tributary sort of allegiance. North, south, east, and west he carried his conquering arms. To give a list of the many tribes that he subdued could only weary the reader, but amongst many unfamiliar names that of Katagum, which is of sufficient importance to form now one of seventeen provinces of Northern Nigeria, may be selected for mention as having at this time made its submission to Bornu.

The result of twelve years of fighting is all that the reader can be asked to carry in his mind. This was to weld the Empire of Bornu into one victorious and formidable whole, of which the troops, armed with a weapon superior to any then known in the Soudan, had acquired a military reputation of being practically irresistible as early as the year 1583, that is, eight years before the coming of the Moors. Had Songhay under the later Askias kept pace with her neighbour of Bornu, and introduced as she might have done the musket into the armament of her troops, it is possible that the whole subsequent fate of the Soudan might have been changed. It was the possession of muskets by the Moors which, as will presently be seen, enabled them to make an easy conquest of a once famous empire, while it is probable that the possession of the same weapons by Bornu was among the causes which operated to check the Moorish invasion at the limits which it actually attained.

Edris Alawoma himself was killed in battle in the year 1603 by the rudest of pagan weapons, a hand-bill or hoe, thrown at him by an adversary concealed in a tree, when he was reducing one of the tribes of Southern Bornu to obedience. But at the moment of the Moorish conquest of Songhay he was still upon the throne, and the thirty-three years of his prosperous and enlightened reign had placed Bornu in a strong position to contest the suzerainty of Haussaland with the new-comers.