Askia the Great (Muhammad I Askia)

Muhammad Ture, who reigned as Askia Muhammad I and is conventionally styled Askia the Great, came to power not by inheritance but by coup. A senior commander under Sonni Ali, he was of Soninke origin according to most reconstructions, born about 1443. When Ali died in 1492 and was succeeded by his son Sonni Baru, Muhammad challenged the new ruler — the seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicles frame the conflict as a contest between committed Islam and the dynasty's accommodation of traditional religion — and defeated him at Anfao in 1493, extinguishing the Sonni line and founding the Askia dynasty.

His pilgrimage to Mecca in 1496-98 consolidated the new dynasty's legitimacy. In Cairo he is reported to have received from the Abbasid shadow caliph an appointment as deputy for the lands of Takrur, and he returned with the title al-Hajj and enhanced religious standing. The journey invited comparison with Mansa Musa's hajj of the previous century, and like Musa he distributed alms generously, though the chronicles' figures are not independently verifiable.

The reign that followed, lasting until 1528, is remembered in the Tarikh al-Sudan and Tarikh al-Fattash as an administrative golden age, with the caveat that these chronicles were composed by the Timbuktu scholarly class, which he conspicuously favored and which had suffered under Sonni Ali. He is credited with organizing the empire into provinces under appointed governors, maintaining a standing army distinct from peasant levies, regulating markets and weights, and supporting the jurists and teachers of Timbuktu, whose schools flourished under Askia patronage. Militarily he extended Songhai power toward the Hausa lands in the east and against the Mossi in the south, and contested the Saharan salt mines of Taghaza.

His later years were less fortunate. Aging and losing his sight, he was deposed in 1528 by his son Musa, the first in a series of filial coups that unsettled the dynasty. After a period of internal exile, he lived out his last years in Gao under the protection of another son, Askia Ismail, and died in 1538. His tomb in Gao, a pyramidal earthen structure, survives and is traditionally identified as his burial place. The administrative framework attributed to him endured until the Moroccan invasion destroyed the empire in 1591.