CONDITION OF THE SOUDAN 285 sisted in their habits. The black traders of the eleventh century, whom we hear of in the pages of El Bekri, did not differ substantially from the black traders whom Idrisi mentions in the twelfth century, and Ibn Batuta speaks of in the fourteenth century. Their trade prospered through the great period of the fifteenth century, and when, in the sixteenth century, Kano fell upon evil days, Katsena rose quickly to take her place. The agricultural population was driven off the land, but misfortune does not seem to have altered the habits of Haussa traders.

When the outposts of Songhay fought with the outposts of Bornu, Haussaland was the battlefield, but the Haussa States took no part in the war. Like a bed of rushes they have ever allowed the storms of encircling forces to beat over their heads. At times they have appeared to be laid low, but when the hurricane has passed they have raised themselves, no worse for the buffeting of fate. Their populations, which have never enjoyed any wide foreign reputation, were perhaps locally, in their modest way, the best known and the best informed of all the peoples of the Soudan. They were very numerous, and in their recognised capacity of travelling traders through all the states, their language was one of the most widely spoken in the Soudan. By the end of the sixteenth century it supplied to the eastern portion of the country a lingua franca, which to the present day remains as a means of communication with those ''great multitudes of negroes and of other people," of whom Leo Africanus confesses in the beginning of the sixteenth century, that he '* could not well note the names." Travelling as they did in small trading caravans through the entire country, they became naturally acquainted with the affairs of every neighbouring kingdom. They were themselves well known from the shores of the Atlantic to the lip of the sacred well of Zem-Zem, where they drank as pilgrims within the precincts of the temple of Mecca — and as peace was essential to their trade, they quarrelled only with next-door neighbours and rivals.