Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline

[Planet of Hats]

Does an earlier plague still affect European bathhouse culture? Before the Black Plague, bathhouses were still common and going to them was considered healthy and normal. After and during the Black Plague, they were shut down as vectors of disease, which they were.

To some degree. Bathhouses still tend to get the wagging finger of shame from certain clergy even before the Plague, but mostly because men and women can see each other's junk there. The Plague just convinces people that the bathhouses spread disease as well as bad morals.

It doesn't quite kill public bathing yet but only because faith in the Church is fairly low due to both the Teutonic Schism and the fall of Constantinople.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Artistic and Economic Impacts of the Great Plague on Late Middle Polity Formation - Wu Xizian, Academy of Outlying Studies, AD 2015


In terms of its significance, the Great Plague was an era-defining event. Its mark on the culture of both Christian and Islamic societies - leaving aside for now its effects in the East - was deep and consequential. The influence can be seen deeply by simply looking at art from the period.

Contemporary Christian art from the Great Plague period is heavy on figures - the famous Carnival of Death motif dates from this period, featuring festively-dressed skeletons celebrating together with skeletons in peasant garb as they march in a grand parade. The motif grimly hails the universality of death, claiming the commoner and the nobleman alike.

These depictions were generally absent in contemporary Islamic art, which tended to eschew the depiction of figures. Where humans were depicted, they were usually done so in miniatures, tiny paintings done on paper and typically tucked away in a muraqqa for private viewing, where the theological rules on depicting figures was relaxed; public display of figures was rarely seen. The art form had existed since roughly 1000 AD but had begun to gain in popularity in the decades before 1200.

Prior to the plague, the most well-known collection of miniature illuminations is likely the late-12th-century album The Giver of Sheresh, its most well-known page depicting an elder giving raisins freely to the poor. Other illuminations tended to accompany booklets of poetry, common motifs including oud-players and fantastic animals.

The tone of miniatures changed drastically during and after the Plague. A famous illumination from al-Andalus, put out just after the worst of the Plague passes, comes from a collection of introspective poetry; the art depicts a sad healer tending to an ill young woman who appears to show the buboes diagnostic of Justinian's Disease, surrounded by her family in prayer. The motifs of the Christian Carnival of Death never appear in Islamic art from the period, though miniatures from al-Andalus tend to be more common and more bleak than those from Mesopotamia.

Beyond the visual, however, poetry itself experienced a significant shift in tonality. The pre-plague Saqlabid period was a golden age for Andalusian love poems and music, which went on to influence Christian culture by way of Aquitaine, Santiago and Narbonne - enough so that it's sometimes said that "Muslims invented love."[1] However, poetry from the Plague period onward tends to take on a much darker cast: Themes emerge of mourning lost loves, of enduring cruel fate and particularly of loneliness and intense loss. While the Plague was viewed theologically as something sent by God to be endured by the Muslim faithful, even to the point of martyrdom, poems from the period often lay bare the emotional hardship the survivors experienced as they watched loved ones and neighbours dying around them.

These themes held true in Andalusian society for decades following the actual outbreak. The Plague seems to have been as much of a shock to the mindsets of Muslims as it was to Christians, rattling society and creating a lasting sense of dread. The high-minded optimism in Andalusian poetry is deeply tempered from 1199 onward by a pervasive undercurrent of cynicism, fatalism and cold realism, which creeps into other art forms as well. Even architecture from the Plague period onward became more utilitarian, lacking many of the elegant flourishes endemic of Andalusian building practices in the 11th and 12th centuries.

+​

Beyond death, the Plague's deepest impact was economic.

The state of the climate going into the Plague - the world was in the midst of the Middle Warming[2] - created enormous food surpluses, leading to significant population growth across much of the world. The result of these trends was to make labour easy to come by just about everywhere. As the population of al-Andalus grew, conditions for common workers lessened. Labour could be purchased more cheaply, driving down the wages earned by common workers - mostly Muladies working on farms. The merchant class prospered disproportionately.

The Plague disrupted that economic model in several important ways. While Genoese duties on wheat being traded from Egypt through Sicily and into al-Andalus had prompted many Andalusi farmers to lower prices by engaging in staple farming in the newer communities around Beja and Mansura, a large chunk of the economy continued to rely on the production of cash crops. The disruption of trade routes caused by the Plague resulted in that sector of the economy experiencing a recession as markets went into turmoil and customers either died or spent money elsewhere. Depopulation resulted in some good farmland in the south being effectively abandoned as a solid third of the workforce perished, resulting in native trees beginning to grow again.

By contrast, staple farmers in the west and central parts of al-Andalus fared better. In 1200, Sa'd al-Din issued a series of edicts intended to make up the food shortfall caused by the disruption in the wheat trade from Egypt. These edicts controlled the price of grain and prohibited the export of foodstuffs. In practice this was poorly-enforced, but with imports in turmoil and labour at a premium, domestic farmers able to find workers and survive the prospect of crop failures found eager markets for basic crops like the grain grown around Beja.

Sa'd al-Din's efforts to institute wage controls were similarly abortive. Employers simply found labour too hard to come by without paying a premium for it. Between 1200 and 1250, wages for Andalusi labourers would grow by 60% to 70% in the urban centres. With urban employers desperate to hire, mobility from the countryside to the city increased once the worst of the Plague passed and movement became regular again.

A shortage of labour saw al-Andalus turn to two sources to find workers. Among the Saqaliba, it became fashionable to buy labourers in the form of slaves, mostly from the Sahel - an area the Plague did not reach. At the time, with the Riverine statelets[3] still gripped by the campaign of Sansama Konaté[4] and his alliance of Mandinka kingdoms against the remnants of Wagadou, pagan prisoners were easy to come by - and with the Plague evidently not able to penetrate south into the Sahara, slaves continued to travel northward in some numbers. Many of these black slaves became palace servants and labourers in the service of the elites, but proved as vulnerable to Justinian's Disease as anyone else.

The number of slaves from the Sahel, however, was relatively small, and of less political importance than the second source: Muladies.

As the population of al-Andalus fell, so did the price of land - and inversely, the price of labour spiked. The physical infrastructure of southern Iberia's economy didn't go anywhere, leaving behind a network of irrigation canals and waterwheels in need of people to work them. Farmers found themselves unable to hire many for little, and workers found themselves able to demand more money for their time. As land freed up, Muladies were increasingly able to claim it, initially as pastureland and then as farms of their own, most of them growing staple crops as farmers took on a mindset of attending to basic needs first and cash crops second. While the summer raids diminished during this period, those that did happen increasingly became filled with Muladi soldiers as Saqaliba became harder to come by and Berbers preferred to stay home rather than defy their jurists by going to a plague-filled area.

The Great Plague ultimately served to do more for the cause of shu'ubiyya in al-Andalus than a million poems or a hundred thousand generous Saqaliba ever could. The deaths of so many workers resulted in the surviving workers earning more, gaining the ability to buy land and increasingly holding roles in the military. It decisively established a Muladi landed class which would go on to gain political clout it had never experienced before. It empowered native Iberian conversos financially and increased their standing relative to the outside military classes which had governed Iberia since the arrival of Tariq ibn Ziyad. Essentially the Plague delivered the outcome the Umayyads had feared for centuries: An empowered native majority.

The Plague also finalized the shift al-Andalus had needed for decades, one which had proceeded mainly in fits and starts. As Muladies came to own land left vacant by depopulation, they utilized it first as pastureland, leading to increasing availability of meat, milk and butter, then to grow staple crops. Cash crops would remain part of the economy, but as Muladies reclaimed land, they would increasingly grow things they needed at home, planning for disaster rather than luxury. The economy that would claw its way out of the Plague recession would be more self-sufficient, in many ways quite unlike the traditional economic model many Islamic frontier states preferred.

With the Middle Warming still going on, reclaiming these growing lands would be rewarded: The years following the Plague were years of good harvest for those who survived. The workers who lived through the death toll would come out better fed, better paid and with more opportunity, including for technological innovation.

Those opportunities would sow the seeds for the most consequential political changes in the region - changes which would come to have world-defining importance.


[1] https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-andalus-timeline.396342/page-8#post-13815547
[2] The Medieval Climate Anomaly
[3] Those along the Niger.
[4] The Elephant King of Bambuk! Mr. Konaté here owns the Bambuk gold mines and has a large alliance of Mandinka speakers around him, fighting to unify them and throw off the yoke of tribute held over them by the Soninke - and since the Mandinka control most of the gold, this is probably a gimme. While both sides are theoretically Muslim at the leadership level, a lot of the regular fighters are pagans.

 

[haider najib]

So the army and landed class have finally been been diluted by the natives how much of the army and landed rulers are muladies percentage wise. Trained soldiers, landed gentry all that is left it a reason to fight the slave emirate.
Btw this isn't importanr but could you do a scene when the umayyads finally fall, the abbasids send a message or something asking that andalusia recorgnise them as caliphs and abandon their theological ideas and adopt the the more middle eastern islam and then have the rulers reject it and give the abbasids the middle finger or something or do a cool speech.

 

[Nivek]

Those opportunities would sow the seeds for the most consequential political changes in the region - changes which would come to have world-defining importance.

An internal reformation or war? or some neighboor might try conquest Andalus?

 

[LunazimHawk]

Great post as usual Planet. Now that the Saqaliba have lost their place in the social caste to conversos, I wonder what other group are going to come in.
@Planet of Hats, earlier on in the thread, a couple people and I theorized about possible animal implementation's into Iberia. My guess were African Elephants brought over during the slave trade, and Barbary Lion brought over from parts of Asia and the Middle East. What's your thought on this?

 

[B_Munro]

This is coming along very nicely. So will "western Islam" in the future include parts of north and west Africa or will it be mainly Iberia and whatever new world colonies they establish?

So if this is the "middle" warming period, the anthropocene is the "late" warming? Good to know people in this TL aren't in denial.

A minor quibble:

Particulary in the colder parts of Europe, food shortages were more common, in part due to heavier soil and colder climatic conditions.

The heavier soils of northern Europe are more fertile than those of the south, you just need to have the tech to plow it, and the iron plow is adopted in Europe from 900 to 1300 AD OTL. That population boom? A lot of it is due to bringing huge new areas of hard-to-handle soil under the plow. Now I dunno how universal the adoption of the heavy iron plow was by 1200, and there may be other factors that make Andalucian farming more productive aside from climate, but since the author is writing in the "modern day" he should know "heavy soils" are becoming a blessing, not an impediment, by this point.

It's said that Sa'd al-Din, who remained hajib in al-Andalus in this period, warded off the plague by sitting surrounded by a ring of incense and praying constantly.

Was it a Pope that OTL supposedly avoided the plague by sitting in a circle of fires (and, of course, praying )?

 

[Planet of Hats]

Was it a Pope that OTL supposedly avoided the plague by sitting in a circle of fires (and, of course, praying )?

It was Clement VI.

The western group of Islam tends to hit "the bunch west of Egypt" - Iberia, North Africa, and increasingly the Sahel.

As for soils, the author's very smart and knows his stuff. It's the TL writer who's stupid.

 

[B_Munro]

It was Clement VI.

The western group of Islam tends to hit "the bunch west of Egypt" - Iberia, North Africa, and increasingly the Sahel.

As for soils, the author's very smart and knows his stuff. It's the TL writer who's stupid.

Oh, come now, don't knock yourself. One can't be well informed about everything. (Unless one is Batman, and he's too busy to be writing AH. )

 

[Exploding_Hippo]

Possible alt Al Hambra mosque? (or something like it)

 

[LunazimHawk]

Possible alt Al Hambra mosque? (or something like it)

I'd like to imagine the Andalusian building an ever larger Cordoba Mosque in one of the sparsely populated area, so as to promote work and immigration. The Turks often hired or used artisans from other parts of Europe and the Middle East for their mosques, I can see the Andalusian doing it too.

 

[LunazimHawk]

Now that I think about a Muslim Spain will have much larger implication in the world than thought before. This new Andalusi Spain will be populated by a Native Hispanic Muslim population, as well population of Arabs, Berbers, and other groups. This might lead others to have a different view on Muslims or Iberia as a whole. Although, there will probably be problem with the Northern Spaniard people for generations.

 

[haider najib]

Whats life like for jews in this new andalusia? With this islam it seems most jews will be safe within Andalusia and with the class changes they could benefit from this.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Possible alt Al Hambra mosque? (or something like it)

There are absolutely new alcazars, kasbahs and mosques acros Iberia.

Whats life like for jews in this new andalusia? With this islam it seems most jews will be safe within Andalusia and with the class changes they could benefit from this.

Jews are far safer in most of the Muslim world than in the Christian one, even during the Plague. There really aren't organized persecutions of Jews, though they have to pay the jizya and are technically still a subject class. But at least nobody's blaming them for the disease. Well. Almost nobody. There are still isolated persecutions and the occasional arbitrary confiscation, unfortunately, but not outright pogroms.

There are quite a few Jews at court, and they tend to cluster in cities along the southern coast. The open age of Jewish thought that kicked off in the 900s has largely continued, and a lot of important thinkers in Andalusian history are either Jewish or in some ways influenced by Jewish thought. There are no real guild restrictions on which careers you may undertake if you're Jewish in the Muslim part of the peninsula.

One area where Jews tend to be really active is the study of the classics, both philosophy and more practical learning. A lot of translation from Greek to Arabic and Hebrew has been done by Jewish scholars.



Really, what's preserved this is the fact that the wackier religious sects, like the al-Mutahirin, didn't make it across the Mediterranean.

 

[Exploding_Hippo]

There are absolutely new alcazars, kasbahs and mosques acros Iberia.


Jews are far safer in most of the Muslim world than in the Christian one, even during the Plague. There really aren't organized persecutions of Jews, though they have to pay the jizya and are technically still a subject class. But at least nobody's blaming them for the disease. Well. Almost nobody. There are still isolated persecutions and the occasional arbitrary confiscation, unfortunately, but not outright pogroms.

There are quite a few Jews at court, and they tend to cluster in cities along the southern coast. The open age of Jewish thought that kicked off in the 900s has largely continued, and a lot of important thinkers in Andalusian history are either Jewish or in some ways influenced by Jewish thought. There are no real guild restrictions on which careers you may undertake if you're Jewish in the Muslim part of the peninsula.

One area where Jews tend to be really active is the study of the classics, both philosophy and more practical learning. A lot of translation from Greek to Arabic and Hebrew has been done by Jewish scholars.



Really, what's preserved this is the fact that the wackier religious sects, like the al-Mutahirin, didn't make it across the Mediterranean.

I just like the quasi baroque/geometrial patterns, gardens, and roof of al hambra. And its good to see something similar will be built.

 

[Planet of Hats]

"Listen to the story of the son of the Gazelle Woman, the great golden Elephant King from the deepest heart of Bambouk, the great lord of the Mande. I am going to tell you the story of Sanji Sama, of Kanadia Sansama, of the man with many names, who walked upon the waves of the great waters and brought with him the blessings of God."

- Excerpt from the Epic of Sansama Konaté, as told by jeli Boubacar Soumano, 1994​

+​

Excerpt: Discovering Subsaharan History - Mamadou Diarisso, Riverland Books, AD 1994


The Great Plague marked a season of turmoil for virtually every polity and economy north of the Sahara Desert. The arrival of the disease cut much of the northern world's developed economies off at what demographers theorize was likely to be a continuation of a major population boom, one which was beginning to bring these economies to capacity - threatening famine and recession. While the survivors of the Plague would see increased economic opportunity, its onset nevertheless marked a period of mass death and economic recession, rattling trade routes and throwing peoples into turmoil.

But the Plague never truly traveled south of the desert. Analysts of the Plague attribute this to its vector: The black rat. This rat, typically carried in the bilges of the ships which plied the Mediterranean, does not typically occur in the Sahara Desert, and as of 1200 it had not truly penetrated south of the sea of sand. Further, the arrival of watercraft from Europe was years upon years away: Andalusian sailors would not venture past the Juzur al-Kaledat for decades, and there were no true ports with the capacity to receive them at this point in time.

This lack of naval infrastructure through which the black rat could travel ultimately restricted the spread of Justinian's Disease to Egypt, Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. The rat also failed to penetrate significantly into the south of the Arabian Peninsula and did not penetrate deeply into Nubia; the Lala[1] of Al-Gezira[2] and the states in Abyssinia and As-Sumal were spared its ravages, and trade through the Warsheikh Sultanate continued on without let.

The case was much the same for the peoples in the vicinity of the Jeliba[3] and Dahab Rivers.[4] While the Plague rocked the world north of the desert, south of it, formative events were taking place in the Riverlands which would put the Western Sudan on the road to global relevance.

+​

Traditionally, there are two ways to view the story of Sansama Konaté and the rise of the Manden Empire.

This is a difficult task which owes its challenge largely to the tendency of the people of the Riverlands to record their histories orally. No indigenous written records from this period survive, with any extant writings usually penned by visitors from abroad. Typically, history was conveyed through the jeli social group.[5] In Mande society, the jeli served various noble families in diverse roles: Advisor, praise singer, arbitrator. But they were also the keepers of history - essentially, the jeli was (and continues to be) a human history book, passing down the traditions of the people through the generations.

As such, the traditional approach to understanding Sansama Konaté is to put full stock in the oral tradition common in this region of the world.

By this telling, the story begins with three hunters coming to the Mandinka statelet of Niani. There, they sat down with the local king, Kanadia Konaté, speaking of a beautiful woman seen running among the kéwel,[6] but always fleeing when men would come close. Kanadia's jeli, Aboubakari Diabaté, interpreted the news as a sign from God. Inspired, Kanadia went out on the hunt. There, he encountered a woman among a herd of kéwel and pursued her for seven days, ultimately capturing her. The woman gave her name as Sanji Awa and said that, for catching her, Kanadia's bloodline would sire the greatest bloodline in the land.

Kanadia, ever the lusty sort, took the Gazelle Woman as a lover, and by her sired a bastard son, Sama - the to-be-legendary Sansama Konate. Despised by his brothers and dismissed as an illegitimate child and a disgrace upon his house, Sama and his mother were treated as outcasts, but upon fleeing for a time into the wilds of Bambuk and taking shelter by a river, the two received guidance from the river spirits. Sama returned to Niani some time later as a skilled hunter and won the hearts of many at court, as well as his allies in Bambuk itself.

To summarize much of the story, Kanadia eventually perished, and Sama - then a boy of eighteen - defeated an alliance of his three legitimate but hard-hearted brothers, winning the support of most of the kingdom for his piety and bravery. He earned his moniker, "the Elephant-King from Bambuk," by riding into Niani on the back of a great golden elephant.

The rest of the story of Sansama concerns his campaign against the evil sorcerer Boumou Cisse, who ruled over the land from Koumbi Saleh, oppressing the Mandinka by taking their gold and their firstborn daughters as tribute. Boumou is said to have offended Sansama by demanding his firstborn child - a girl - almost immediately, a demand which Sansama defied. The story tells of how Sansama, guided by God and with sorcery drawn from the mother-spirit of the waters, walked back and forth across the Jeliba without the aid of a boat to enlist the aid of the Mandinka rulers, his miraculous feat demonstrating his blessedness by God.

Ultimately the story ends as expected. Sansama, now with a Wolof princess to wife, defeats Boumou and his three sons in a dramatic battle involving golden elephants and lightning from heaven, then is crowned Mansa by God and rules over his empire for eternity.[7]

+​

The second way to parse Sansama Konaté is to reassemble him through the historical record. And while written records produced within Mali are not present, we can glean a big-picture outline of the rise of the Manden Empire through archaeological records and the writings of foreigners - the most important being Abu'l-Barakat al-Kufi, an Arab from Mesopotamia, who visited the area as part of a vast circuit of Subsahara some 50 years after the rise of the empire.

Perhaps the most important sources, however, are archaeological and metallurgical. From 1000 AD, the Riverland area experienced a significant leap in ironworking technology with the arrival of the natural-draft furnace - the earliest are known from a couple centuries earlier, but the main increase in iron production in the Western Sudan began in the new millennium. The use of these furnaces occurred largely south of the Jeliba at a number of sites associated with the Mandinka. Remnants of ironworks have been discovered at Niani in particular, dating from roughly this period, perhaps 1050 or slightly before. These furnaces did not significantly penetrate north of the Jeliba or up the Dahab for some time. Essentially, the arrival of this technology in Niani and the surrounds gave the Mandinka a technological edge over the rival Soninke, who formed the nucleus of the kingdom of Wagadou.

Further archaeological evidence comes from the late 11th century, not in Niani, but on the Dahab, in the island site of Takrur. Archaeological exploration there is somewhat difficult owing to the urban status of the region,[8] but evidence has been discovered of early structures dating to the mid-to-late 1000s.

This period coincides with a poorly-documented one in the history of the Western Sahara. Apparently around this time, an alliance of Chiadma and Lamtuna Berbers gained ascendancy over the region spanning from the Anti-Atlas along the coast of the Atlas Ocean and on down to Awlil and Takrur. It is this period which begins to see the influence of Islam truly penetrate the region: While the Berbers (not just the Chiadma and Lamtuna but also the veiled Sanhaja of the open desert) pressured Wagadou, much of the influence fell heavily on Takrur. The first Islamic rulers of the region date from this time period, having evidently converted in search of relief from raids and better deals from the veiled Berber traders who dominated the Saharan crossings.

Interestingly, it would appear that Takrur embraced Islam a few decades before the Ghanas of Wagadou. By 1089, Wagadou also had a Muslim ruler, but the inland nature of Wagadou put it somewhat outside the natural field of the Chiadmas, who preferred to trade with the Serer and Wolof in the region of the Dahab.

There is some evidence - and some speculation - that trade through Wagadou diminished as Takrur and the Chiadma group formed a major connection in the salt-for-gold-and-slaves trade. More early structures seem to have been built in Takrur and Awlil through the 1100s; meanwhile, Wagadou's capital at Koumbi Saleh seems to have declined somewhat.

Takrur had some advantages in the gold trade: Traders could avoid the Ghana's duties by going through the more generous route to Takrur, typically by taking the Dahab up to Takrur to offload their cargo. While there were no ships as Europeans would understand them, the people of the Riverlands well understood the use of the pirogue. While the lucrative goldfields south of the river - Bambuk, Bure and those of the Akan region - were nominally subject to the Soninke Ghana, in practice they were controlled by kinglets of the Mandinka ethnicity, who tended to resent the duties imposed on gold and slaves by Koumbi Saleh. These Mandinka lordlets, particularly Niani (which had gained control of the Bambuk gold fields), would have seen the pirogue route as more advantageous than the land route through Koumbi Saleh. Islam seems to have spread faster in this region than north of the rivers, albeit in the syncretic, locally-influenced, Sufi-driven form typical of the Western Sudan.

It is this frame into which fits the historical Sansama Konaté. Historians tend to believe that Sansama was both an ambitious local kinglet and a military personage of middling to solid capability, who also happened to have access to the gold mines at Bambuk and the ability to produce more iron weapons than his nominal suzerain. Elements of the story support this to an extent:

* The golden elephant upon which Sansama rides into Niani, and later Djenne and Koumbi Saleh, represents the gold mines of Bambuk. The elephant is praised in much of Subsahara for its massive size, stamina, long life and exceptional intelligence; these traits, together with the fact that the elephant is gold, signify the power Sansama held because of his mastery of the gold. The Ghana had the power to tax; Sansama had the power to produce.

* The draconian tribute demanded by Boumou Cisse appears to represent the prevailing view of Wagadou at this time: As a nuisance power good mainly for taxing their fairly-produced goods.

* The recurring appearance of the water spirits is also notable, as well as the fact that Sansama repeatedly walks across the Jeliba to both travel between cities and win over skeptics. This represents the growing importance of water in the eyes of the Mandinka as pirogue-based trade gained prominence over the Koumbi Saleh route.[9]

In practice, there were two main routes across the Sahara, both ending in Sijilmasa. The first originated in Takrur; the second came up through Koumbi Saleh. The power of the Mandinka statelets derived from being the source of production for the Takrur route. The move to topple Wagadou seems to have been a simple economic play: Rather than suffer the Ghana's taxation, Sansama Konaté moved to cut out the middleman and control both southern trade outflows. Effectively power, along with demographic supremacy (the Mandinka appear to have been more numerous than the Soninke in this period) already lay in the hands of the Mandinka city-states. Rather than an example of a great man determining history, history appears to have set the state for a man to make the likeliest move.

In any case, by 1209, Wagadou had been swept away, and a Mandinka-dominated state - ruled by Sansama under the title of Mansa - spanned from Koumbi Saleh south into the gold lands, and west towards Takrur, which remained independent but tributary to the Mansas for the time being.


[1] The Arabo-Nilotic descendants of the Banu Hilal and the native peoples living between the White and Blue Nile - they are Arabized black people.
[2] The wedge between the White and Blue Nile.
[3] The Niger River - it utilizes the Mandinka name.
[4] The Senegal - to the Arabs it is eventually the Wadi al-Dahab. It is known in this time period only as the Nile of Ghana.
[5] Griots.
[6] The bushbuck of the Sahel.
[7] A lot of this is heavily inspired by, of course, the Epic of Sundiata Keita. There are key differences and the ensuing section explains a few.
[8] Apparently Takrur's current location (OTL Morfil Island) hosts some manner of modern city. Huh.
[9] The Mali of this world is a Mali more comfortable with hopping in a pirogue and heading for Takrur. While the overall story of Sansama is similar to Sundiata's in a mythological sense, developmentally this is a Mali analogue which places a little more emphasis on Senegal, largely thanks to the Chiadma Berbers being weaker than the Almoravids and ultimately forcing a Takrur which offered less draconian trade duties than the Ghana of the time.

SUMMARY:
1209: A rich Mandinka Muslim warlord named Sansama Konaté, ruler of Niani and controller of the Bambuk goldfields, completes the leading of a coalition of Mandinka statelets in a victory over the remnants of the Wagadou Empire. The Manden (Mali) Empire is formed, with Sansama as Mansa. His story becomes mythologized as the Epic of Sansama Konaté.

 

[Deleted member 67076]

Ok I really enjoyed Alt Sundiata. You managed to capture the themes of it pretty well, and for bonus points did that horrible outsider analysis that explains the situation while sucking the fun out of the oral history.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Ok I really enjoyed Alt Sundiata. You managed to capture the themes of it pretty well, and for bonus points did that horrible outsider analysis that explains the situation while sucking the fun out of the oral history.

Killing myth with tedious analysis is all part of the job. <3

 

[Exploding_Hippo]

Very good update, I am a big fan of Sundiata!

 

[Planet of Hats]

Very good update, I am a big fan of Sundiata!

Everyone loves the Lion King.

Honestly, Mali is one of those places that should get a lot more love in AH.

 

[haider najib]

@Planet of Hats how were the big cities like Baghdad and Cairo effected by the plague?

Also when colonisation happens will Andalusia begin to import jaguars and panthers from the americas as they are just big cats. Also maybe export barbery lions to the americas?

Will the american natives have any butterflies could the Mayan please make a comeback as they did cool stuff as if the Aztecs gain dominance they just do alot of human sacrifice.

Sorry random question how would native americans react to to babery lions as they are bigger than cats from the americas?