Dictionary Of Islamic Architecture

Author:Andrew Petersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dictionary of Islamic Architecture

West Africa, showing the empire of Mali in the fourteenth century CE

Khaldun traced the careers of the next five kings until the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the kingdom had been seriously weakened by civil wars and was no longer in a position to control all its dependencies which gradually were lost to rival kingdoms. One of the most formidable of these rivals was the Songhay kingdom of Gao or Kawkaw based on the banks of the Niger east of Mali. The arrival of the Portuguese during the fifteenth century introduced another new factor into the politics of the region. The ruler of Mali sought the assistance of these newcomers to fight off African rivals but they were unable to prevent the continuing disintegration of Malian power. In the 1590s the Moroccans occupied Djenne and the rulers of Mali

were unable to retake the town. However, the greatly reduced kingdom of Mali continued to survive until 1670 when it was finally destroyed.

Despite its fame there are few architectural remains of the empire of Mali and one is forced to rely mostly on contemporary Arabic descriptions and rather complex oral traditions. At the spiritual capital of Kangaba there is little that remains from the medieval period with the exception of the giant linke (baobab) tree which marks the ancestral centre of the Mali Empire. There are several descriptions of the political capital at Niani, one of the best is that of the fourteenth-century writer al-Umari.

'[The capital] extends in length and breadth to a distance of approximately one barid (postal stage).

Mamluks

It is not surrounded by a wall and most of it is scattered.... The town is surrounded on four sides by the "Nile".... The buildings of this town are made of iwad or clay like the walls of the gardens of Damascus. This consists of building two thirds of a cubit (approximately 30 cm) in clay, then leaving it to dry, then building above it in the same way.. .and so on until it is complete. The roofs are of wood and reeds and are generally domed or conical, in the form of cupolas of camel-backs, similar to the arch-shaped openings of vaults.'

Ibn Battuta's description of 1353 is not so full although he does indicate that he reached the city by boat and that it had a separate quarter for white merchants. He then describes the king's palace in some detail, in particular the audience hall which may be the same as that built by Abu Ishaq al-Saheli a decade or two earlier. The audience hall is contained within the palace and consists of a square domed chamber with triple-arched windows in each side. The windows are filled with wooden lattice work or grilles covered in silver and gold leaf (mashrabiyya?). Ibn Khaldun probably describing the same building notes that it was 'solidly built and faced with plaster; because such buildings are unknown in his [the sultan's] country'. Obvious parallels for this building can be found in the architecture of fourteenth-century North Africa and Spain (compare for example the Salon del Trono in the Alhambra).

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