The Moorish invasion dealt the great Negroid Empire of the middle Niger—the Empire of the Songhay—a blow from which it never recovered. The invasion did not actually swamp the Hausa States, but its indirect consequences must have been felt throughout them in everywhere shaking established order, and in the decay of spiritual influence following upon the heels of anarchy. In the absence of any continuous written records, the history of the period following the advance of Morocco’s musketeers into the Western Sudan, appears to Western minds as a confused medley of internecine strife without defined objects of any kind. One can imagine, let us say, a Chinese historian picturing the history of England from the tenth to the fifteenth century much in the same light, if his materials for composing it were almost wholly confined to oral traditions. But a close study of the few documents at our disposal must, I think, induce the belief that, dating from the introduction of a higher spiritual influence into the country—Mohammedanism had begun to acquire a footing by the eleventh century—the land was never free from an agency which sought the uplifting of society. Before the Moorish generals carried fire and sword into the Niger Valley, holy voices were raised in protest against the “decay of faith with the increase of infidelity.” “Not one of the acts forbidden by God”—lament learned Arabic historians—“but was openly practised; wine was drunk, and adultery had become so frequent that its practice seemed to have acquired legality.” The terrible punishment which ensued was ascribed to these lapses: “It was on account of these abominations that God avenged Himself by calling in the victorious Moroccan army.” We seem to be listening to another Moses denouncing the wickedness of the people of Israel. In the midst of all these disordered turmoils, when the worship of the true God was being swept aside by a wave of recrudescent paganism, when mosques were being destroyed and desecrated and social lawlessness reigned supreme, little knots of true believers gathered, forming as it were islands in the sea of turbulence and moral abasement, to which Christian Europe added a renewed element of subversion by her demand for slaves, thus intensifying internal warfare by furnishing it with a new and deadly incentive.