a brief note on Africa in 16th century global history.
the international relations and manuscripts of Kongo
The 16th century was one the most profound periods of change in Africa's international relations.
Africans had led the initiative in establishing international contact across Eurasia1, and the expansion of the Ottoman and Portuguese empires in the 16th century further accelerated Africa's engagement with the rest of the world, reshaping pre-existing patterns of regional alliances and rivalries.
In the northern Horn of Africa, the armies of the Adal sultanate defeated the Ethiopian forces in 1529 as their leader, Imam Ahmad al-Ghazi, launched a series of successful campaigns that briefly subsumed most of Ethiopia. Al-Ghazi's campaigns eventually acquired an international dimension and became increasingly enmeshed in the global conflict between the Portuguese and the Ottomans. The Turks supplied al-Ghazi with firearms and soldiers, while the Portuguese provided the same to the Ethiopian ruler Gelawdewos, who eventually won the war in 1543.
‘Futuh al-Habasa’ (Conquest of Abyssinia) written by Sihab ad-Din Ahmad bin Abd al-Qader in 1559, copy at the King Saud University.2
Around the same time, the rulers of the Swahili city-states along the East African coast who were opposed to the Portuguese presence sent envoys to the Ottoman provinces in Arabia beginning in 1542, looking for allies to aid them in expelling the Portuguese. After several more embassies in the 1550s and 60s, Ottoman corsair Ali Beg brought his forces to the East African coast in 1585 and 1589, but was eventually forced to withdraw after an army from the mainland drove his forces from the coast.3
On the other side of the continent the simultaneous expansion of the Portuguese and Ottomans into north-western Africa threatened the regional balance of power between the empires of Morocco and Bornu. After a series of diplomatic initiatives by Bornu’s envoys to Marrakech and Istanbul, the Moroccans defeated the Portuguese in 1578, just as Bornu's ruler Mai Idris Alooma was halting the Ottoman advance into Bornu’s dependancies in southern Libya.4
the 16th century fortress of Murzuq in southern Libya’s Fezzan region, associated with the Awlad dynasty, a client state of Bornu. The fezzan remained the border between Bornu and the Ottomans and it was from this region that Bornu acquired european slave soldiers and firearms from the Ottomans.
In all three regions, the globalized rivalries between the regional powers are mentioned in some of Africa's best known works of historical literature. The chronicle on Adal’s ‘Conquest of Abyssinia’ was completed in 1559, in the same decade that the chronicle of the Swahili city of Kilwa was written, and not long before the Bornu scholar Aḥmad Furṭū would complete the first chronicle of Mai Idris' reign in 1576. While all three chronicles are primarily concerned with domestic politics, they also include an international dimension regarding the diplomatic activities of their kingdoms.5
Much further south in the region of west-central Africa, another African society entered the international arena, without engaging in the global rivaries of the period. The sudden entry of the kingdom of Kongo into global politics and the emergence of its intellectual tradition was one of the most significant yet often misunderstood developments in 16th-century Africa.
The international activities of the kingdom of Kongo and its intellectual traditions are the subject of my latest Patreon article.
please subscribe to read about it here:
The ambassador Antonio Emanuele Ne Vunda of the Kingdom of Kongo and the embassy of Hasekura Tsunenaga of Japan. Painting by Agostino Taschi. ca. 1616 in the Sala dei Corazzieri, Palazzo del Quirinale., Rome
The Portuguese and the Swahili, from foes to unlikely partners: Afro-European interface in the early modern era
Studies of early Afro-European history are at times plagued by anachronistic theories used by some scholars, who begin their understanding of the era from the perspective of colonial Africa and project it backwards to the 16th and 17th centuries when first contacts were made; such as those between the Swahili and the Portuguese. They construct an image …
Morocco, Songhai, Bornu and the quest to create an African empire to rival the Ottomans.
The Sahara has for long been perceived as an impenetrable barrier separating “north africa” from “sub-saharan Africa”. The barren shifting sands of the 1,000-mile desert were thought to have constrained commerce between the two regions and restrained any political ambitions of states on either side to interact. This “desert barrier” theory was populariz…
An African-centered intellectual world; the scholarly traditions and literary production of the Bornu empire (11th-19th century)
Studies of African scholarship in general, and west African scholarship in particular, are often framed within diffusionist discourses, in which African intellectual traditions are "received” from outside and are positioned on the periphery of a greater system beyond the continent
Is Gelawdewos the same as King Tewodros?