Benin

Benin City was the capital of the Edo kingdom of Benin, a walled royal town in the forest of southern Nigeria. Oba Ewuare, who came to power in 1440, turned the old fortress of the Ogiso into a capital. He raised an earthen rampart eleven kilometres long, girded by a moat six metres deep, laid out broad thoroughfares and built nine fortified gateways. Tradition adds that around 1470 the city was renamed Edo after a royal slave who had saved his life.

The Portuguese reached Benin about 1485 and found a kingdom rich in pepper and ivory. In the early sixteenth century the Oba sent an ambassador to Lisbon and the king of Portugal sent missionaries in return. Brass plaques made for the palace showed Portuguese merchants among the court's figures. In 1691 the Portuguese captain Lourenço Pinto wrote that Benin was larger than Lisbon, with streets straight as far as the eye could see, a richly decorated royal house, and so little theft that the houses had no doors.

Then a civil war between the Oba and his chiefs, lasting roughly ten years around the end of the century, sacked the city. By 1701–02 the Dutch merchant David van Nyendael called Benin a mere village, though he praised the palace with its turreted roofs decorated with brass snakes, and he saw many half-ruined houses. In 1820 a British officer found the walls largely destroyed and the inhabited area no more than two or three miles around.