Tadmekka

Tadmekka was a caravan town in the southern Sahara, near present-day Essouk in the Adrar des Ifoghas. It served as a market and resting place for desert caravans and entered the Mali Empire's Saharan network in the fourteenth century.

After Mali's mid-century succession crises its eastern dependencies broke away. A Malian army besieged Tadmekka without success in the 1370s or 1380s. As trade routes shifted towards Timbuktu, the town declined in the fifteenth century and was abandoned.