I'm working on an intro to The Lion of the Sahel:
On Februrary 13, 1591, the dehydrated and nearly starving remnenants of Judar Pasha’s army stumbled out of the desert and captured the Songhai salt mines at Taghaza. A virtual mob of desperate soldiers descended upon the mines, and town the grew up around it, plundering any supply of water they came across. Armed with arquebuses, the two thousand surviving Moroccan infantry, and two hundred cavalry men massacred the town’s resistance. For one of the few times in history, an army killed not for glory or plunder, but for a mere cup of water. Taghaza was taken more due to surprise than any great tactics. Among the trail of thousands of dead Moroccans was the body of General Pasha. The conquest was so chaotic, that hundreds of people managed to escape, including Imperial messangers.
The Moroccan supply train fared better. Trailing the army, they did not catch the brunt of the dust storm that scattered the army across the desert, before the heat of the Sahara could claim its victims. News of the fall of Taghaza reached Gao and Askia Ishaq II, the new reigning Emperor. A brief civil war and struggle for the throne prompted a nearly bankrupt Morocco to gamble its future on the campaign to conquer the Songhai. Their superior technology, namely firearms, would have tipped the balance in favor of the Moroccans, had the entire army crossed the Sahara. With only a third of their numbers surviving, as well as two remaining cannon, gunpowder would not prove as decisive an advantage in West Africa as it had for Spain in the New World.
The Emperor called forth an army of twenty thousand infantry and fourteen thousand cavalry that descended upon the capital of Gao. Two weeks after the Moroccans reached the Songhai Empire, the Songhai Army arrived on the scene. The Moroccans largely recovered from their tramatic desert ordeal by March 2, but were so outnumbered by their enemies that their fate was sealed. The Moroccan Army held out against multiple charges of Songhai cavalry at the cost of most of their own numbers. By nightfall, the surviving five hundred Moroccans surrendered to the Songhai, only to be sold into slavery. The greatest prize of the day was not the hundreds of soldier prisoners and thousands of artisans and craftsman that accompanied the Moroccan Army in a caravan of eight thousand camels. The Emperor took these workers into personal captivity, employing them in service of the state.
News slowly trickled back to Moroccan, where news of the defeat was met with shock. Immediate fear of a Songhai invasion swept across the nation. Sultan Ahmed al-Mansur found his own position weakened by such a loss. It was not so much the loss of soldiers as prestige of being defeated by what was perceived as a more primitive civilization. Emperor Askia Ishaq II did order a Songhai expedition across the desert, but it was far smaller in scope. Where the Moroccans sought to conquer, the Songhai had only punitive measures in response to the sacking of Taghaza. Aside from immediate embargo on salt to Morocco, the Songhai captured the town of Sijilmasa, a key city on the trans-Saharan trading network. The city was sacked, with its wealth and half its population shipped back to the Empire. Morocco’s position in trading across the desert declined afterwards, where Algeria’s, along with the Ottomans', commercial star began to ascend.