(14) In the fourteenth century the Kings of Melli built a great palace in Timbuktu, which did not disappear till the sixteenth century. (15) From the fourteenth century Timbuktu was the intellectual capital of the Sudan. This was due to the Spanish-Moorish influence. (16) The patron saint and doctor of Timbuktu, Sidi Yahia, was practically contemporary (1373-1462) with Prince Henry the Navigator. (17) The town of Kuku, Kuka or Kokia, in the W. Sudan, mentioned by mediæval Moslem travellers, was probably either a city on or near the Niger, immediately south of Gao, the Songhay capital; or else Gao itself, which is sometimes called Kuku or Gogo. Even this place was conquered by Melli, in the fourteenth century, which thus dominated part of the Central Sudan. The ruins of the great mosque at Gao still commemorate Kunkur Musa, King of Melli, who built this house of prayer on his return from the Mecca pilgrimage, about 1325. See _Tarik-es-Sudan_, composed about 1656, and giving a history of the Sudan down to that year: the fragments remaining of the _Fatassi_ of Mahmadu-Koti (1460-1554); _Nil-el-Ibtihaj bitatriz el-dibaj_, or Supplement to the Biographical Dictionary of Ibn-Ferhun by Ahmed Baba, 1556-1627.] Even earlier than this a movement seems to have been in progress from the opposite direction--first south along the west coast, and then east up the valley of the Senegal and similar inlets. The tradition preserved by John Pory[86] is approved by the most recent research--at least in its general conclusions. The Moslems "pierced into" the Sahara in, or a little after, 710, and "overthrew the Azanegue, and the people of Walata;" in "the year 973 (others say about 950) they infected the negroes and first those of Melli." During the ninth century, Islam made progress among the Sahara tribes, and the influence of this faith promoted intercourse between the desert tribes and the great commercial centres of the North African coast--a movement which was furthered by the Almoravide revival of the eleventh, and the Almohade of the twelfth, century. The former started from a reformed Moslem "community," settled on an island at the mouth of the Senegal--in other words, it shows Islam already finding centres for recovery and expansion in Negroland, exploring the Sudan from the north and west, creeping along the Atlantic Ocean, and spreading from the neighbourhood of Cape Verde into the interior of the populous land to the south of the Great Desert. [Footnote 86: In his "Summary Discourse of the Manifold Religions in Africa," printed at the end of the Hakluyt Society's Edition of Pory's (1600) Translation of _Leo Africanus_, vol. iii, especially pp. 1018-1021.]