Djenné

Djenné bowed to the empires around it less readily than its neighbours. The chronicler al-Sadi claimed that Malian armies attacked it ninety-nine times without taking it, and Portuguese reports of the late 15th century knew it as a walled town rich in gold. Around 1470 Sonni Ali of Songhai besieged it for some six months, the flood of the Bani both shielding the town and letting his river fleet close it off. When its ruler died during the siege, his young son made peace and the widowed queen married Sonni Ali, and Djenné kept a privileged place in the Songhai realm.

The town outlived Songhai's fall in 1591. In 1655 al-Sadi could still call it one of the great markets of the Muslims, the reason caravans came to Timbuktu from every quarter, though the Moroccan hold had faded by 1630 and Djenné later passed to the Bambara kingdom of Segu. In 1818 the Fulani reformer Seku Amadu took the town. He thought the old Great Mosque too sumptuous and let it decay, and when René Caillié, the first European to reach Djenné, came in 1828, he found it abandoned to thousands of nesting swallows. Between 1834 and 1836 Seku Amadu raised a new mosque beside it, low and without towers.