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The city is situated nine miles from the Niger River, making for good agricultural land. Its position near the edge of the Sahara Desert made it a hub for trans-Saharan trade routes. Timbuktu also acts as a midpoint between the regions of North, West, and Central Africa. Because of this, Timbuktu developed into a cultural melting pot.
Ultimately, however, it was the rise of sea trade along the West Africa coast that doomed the overland routes that connected North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa. The city lost its economic base and its fine university was not enough to save Timbuktu from decline. Cut off from major trade routes, the city retained an aura of spectacular treasure.
Timbuktu was still relatively unimportant and Battuta quickly moved on to Gao. At the time both Timbuktu and Gao formed part of the Mali Empire. A century and a half later, in around 1510, Leo Africanus visited Timbuktu. He gave a description of the town in his Descrittione dell'Africa which was published in 1550. [12]
Home of the prestigious Koranic Sankore University and other madrasas, Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall Timbuktu's golden age.
The Mali Empire started in 1230 and was the largest empire in West Africa and profoundly influenced the culture of West Africa through the spread of its language, laws and customs. [15] Until the 19th century, Timbuktu remained important as an outpost at the southwestern fringe of the Muslim world and a hub of the trans-Saharan slave trade .
Mali, [c] officially the Republic of Mali, [d] is a landlocked country in West Africa.It is the eighth-largest country in Africa, with an area of over 1,240,192 square kilometres (478,841 sq mi). [9]
A map showing the route from Timbuktu to Taoudenni is included here. The article is also available from the Internet Archive. Hunwick, John O. (2003), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Leiden: Brill, ISBN 90-04-12560-4. First published in 1999 as ISBN 90-04-11207-3.
He travelled in May, the hottest month of the year when the average maximum temperature in Timbuktu soars to 43–44 °C. [4] He left Timbuktu with a caravan of 600 camels [5] transporting gold, slaves, ivory, gum arabic, ostrich-feathers and cloth. The caravan mostly travelled at night and took six days to reach Araouane, where it stopped for ...