Timbuktu

After Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca, the Mali court paid for the Djinguereber mosque, finished in 1327. Mali's grip loosened in the 15th century: the Tuareg held the town for a time, and when Sunni Ali's Songhai took it in the late 1460s many scholars fled to Walata. Under the Songhai, though, Timbuktu's trade and learning reached their height, and in the 1500s it may have held close to 50,000 people.

That age ended with the Moroccan army that crossed the Sahara and won at Tondibi. It entered Timbuktu in 1591 and made it the seat of a pashalik, and when the town resisted, its leading scholars, Ahmad Baba among them, were sent into exile in Marrakesh. The soldiers' descendants, the Arma, went on naming pashas until 1833, owing Morocco less and less, while the Tuareg made the town their tributary. By then Europeans knew Timbuktu mostly as a rumour of gold. Alexander Gordon Laing reached it in 1826 but was killed soon after leaving, and René Caillié, who came in disguise in 1828, was the one who returned to tell of it.