Mogadishu

The next visitors to describe the city came with guns. Vasco da Gama's fleet bombarded Mogadishu in 1499, and his crews saw houses four or five storeys high, palaces at its centre, and mosques with cylindrical minarets. Trade went on regardless: around 1517 Duarte Barbosa watched ships from Cambay and Aden unload cloth and spices and sail away with gold, ivory, and wax. In 1542 a small squadron under João de Sepúlveda fired on the town and forced the sultan into a treaty. The lasting change, though, came from inland. Abgaal and other Somali clans moved into the Shabelle valley and took the hinterland out of the city's hands, and when the Ajuran state collapsed in the 17th century, Abgaal imams settled in the Shingani quarter while the old Ajuran families held on in Hamarweyne, leaving Mogadishu divided between two rival halves.