RISE OF THE FULANI 385 chapter. In 1599 Maslna opened a campaign against the Moors, and though defeated in the first instance, the reverse would only seem to have consolidated Fulani resistance to the foreign rule. In 1629, the kings of Masina refused any longer to accept investiture from the decadent government of TImbuctoo, and during the seventeenth century the Fulani fought for their independence in the eastern as well as in the western districts of the Bend of the Niger. The Moors, harried upon the north by the Tuaregs of the desert, and on the south by the Fulani, abandoned the vain attempt to maintain their supremacy in the Soudan. They were driven out of Gago, as has been already mentioned, in 1770. They continued to hold the town of TImbuctoo, but during the eighteenth century, when the Moors had fallen to the condition described by Mungo Park, the contest for the sovereignty of the Soudan would seem to have been between the Fulani and the Tuaregs. It was the Tuaregs who finally drove the Moors from TImbuctoo In the year 1800, and within a generation the Tuaregs themselves were driven out by the F'ulanl. During this whole period of tumult the Soudan was closed to Europe, and we have no accurate account of the series of local wars by which it would seem to have been distracted. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when, after an eclipse of two hundred years, its history once more emerges to our view, the situation is so far clear that the Fulani had become the dominating people, alike in the west and in the east.

In the west, where the Tuaregs were their opponents, they were a little later in attaining to supreme power than in the eastern states, but in 1813 Maslna became the seat of a powerful Fulani Empire, ruled by a Sheikh of the name of Ahmadou. Under the leadership of Ahmadou, Masina conquered TImbuctoo In 1833. On the death of Ahmadou in 1844, TImbuctoo was once more taken by the Tuaregs, but It was reconquered by the Fulani In 1855, and, with the exception of three 2 E