The ancient kingdom of Ghana, not to be confused with the modern-day nation-state, ruled over the area located in present-day western Mali and southeastern Mauritania during the ninth through 13th centuries.
Oral tradition describes the rise and fall of an ancient kingdom in the Sahel (see Sahara) known as Wagadu. Founded by the Soninke, the most northern of the Mande peoples, Wagadu’s rulers, the Magha, lived in the capital city of Kumbi. The basis of Wagadu’s wealth was GOLD, replenished each year by the kingdom’s guardian. This guardian, a powerful snake, demanded the annual sacrifice of a virgin to ensure the continued success of the kingdom. Catastrophe came to the kingdom when the lover of one virgin destined for sacrifice killed the snake, which cursed the kingdom with desiccation of its lands and cessation of the flow of gold. Unable to survive in the desert, the people of Wagadu dispersed to new lands.
Contemporary historical evidence and modern archaeological findings show that the legends of Wagadu closely correlate to the history of the ancient kingdom of Ghana. Although the snake does not play into the historical and archaeological records on Ghana, the role of gold in the formation and success of the kingdom and the location and name of the capital provide evidence that Wagadu and Ghana were the same.
Late eighth-century Arab historical sources show that Ghana, which was the name of both the kingdom and the rulers, emerged out of the growth of the trans-Saharan trade routes that transported slaves (see SLAVE trade), ivory, cloth, food products such as salt, and, most important, gold across the Sahara among North, West and East Africa. Ghana’s merchants served as middlemen between the Berber and Arab traders of Northern Africa and the producers of gold and ivory in the south. Taking advantage of this central position, the kings of Ghana attained control over the highly lucrative gold trade by the end of the eighth century, inspiring the Baghdad (Iraq) chronicler Al-Farazi to describe the kingdom as the “land of gold.” By the 11th century the tales of the riches of Ghana had reached Spain, where the Muslim historian al-Bakri, who never visited Ghana, took his information from traders and explorers who described the kingdom as one in which dogs wore collars of gold and the kings were called “lords of the gold.” In fact, Ghana’s kings served two functions and held the title of both “lord of the gold” (kaya maghan) as well as war chief (ghana).
Al-Bakri’s descriptions of Ghana remain the best sources of information on the kingdom. In his histories he described Ghana’s royal court, its army, and its economic and trading systems. Al-Bakri also described the royal city, built of stone, and its twin commercial city located approximately six miles distant, both named Koumbi-Saleh. In one of these cities lived the traditional kings of the empire, who adhered to their traditional pagan religion. The other city housed a wealthy merchant trader class, which was predominantly Muslim. These traders, buoyed by their success as middlemen in the trans-Saharan trade, imported luxury goods from Spain and Morocco. Koumbi Saleh was a type of “port city” (if the Sahara is taken as a “sea” of sand, the Sahel, in which the city was located, as its shore, and the camel its ships) and as such stimulated high levels of political organization and state formation.
At its height the kingdom of Ghana reached the Senegal River in the west, and its southern border was the confluence of the Senegal and Faleme Rivers. It controlled the rich Bambuk gold fields as well as the gold deposits at Wangara, between the upper Niger River and the Senegal River. By its apex in the ninth century, Ghana began trading slaves for salt from Teghaza in the Sahara and cloth from North Africa, further expanding its trading and political influence, but decline set in when the empire had to defend its control of the gold trade from competitors. By 1076 Ghana had weakened, leaving it open to attack from the north. In that year the Muslim Almoravids of the Maghreb attacked and destroyed the capital. The Almoravids, led by Abu Bakr, waged a jihad (Islamic holy war) against the pagan Ghana kingdom, converting many to Islam. After a short occupation by the Almoravids, Ghana recovered, but in 1203 Sumanguru, a leader of the Takrur people to the west, defeated Ghana again. His reign, known as the Sosso kingdom, was also short-lived because the Mande people of Mali under the leadership of Sundiata Keita defeated him in a mythical battle. By the end of the 13th century, Ghana was subsumed into the more powerful Mali Empire.
Further reading: Basil Davidson, “Pioneers in Ancient Ghana,” in West Africa before the Colonial Era: A History to 1800 (London: Longman, 1998), 23-34; Nehemia Levtzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” in History of West Africa, vol. 1, 3rd ed., ed. J. F. Ade Ajiya and Michael Crowder (London: Longman, 1985), 129-166; Mark O’Malley, “Ghana,” and Elizabeth Heath, “Ghana, Early Kingdom of,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, eds. Kwame
Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 828-835; Thurstan Shaw, “The Prehistory of West Africa,” in History of West Africa, vol. 1, 3rd ed., eds. J. F. Ade Ajiya and Michael Crowder (London: Longman, 1985), 48-86.
—Lisa M. Brady
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey (1539?-1583) explorer of Canada, colonist
Among the most influential promoters of the English colonization of North America, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was among the elite whom Queen Elizabeth I sent to Ireland to secure her rule there, an assignment that Gilbert carried out with as much zeal as his long-term efforts to find the Northwest Passage.
Born near the end of the 1530s, Gilbert would have been in his 20s when he joined the mission of Sir Henry Sidney to Ireland in June 1566. That mission was part of a larger military campaign known to scholars as the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, a campaign characterized by the bloody tactics English officers devised in an attempt to get native Catholic Irish men and women to accept the rule of the Protestant queen. Thomas Churchyard, an observer of English actions (and an Englishman himself), described the ways Gilbert hoped to subdue the Irish. According to Churchyard, Gilbert ordered “that the hed-des of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte of from their bodies and brought to the place where he incamped at night, and should there bee landed on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his own tense so that none could come into his tense for any cause but commonly he muste pass through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem, the dedde feelyng nothyng the more paines thereby: and yet did it bring grease terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke and freinds, lye on the grounde before their faces, as thei came to speak with the said collonell.” After the campaign Gilbert returned to Ireland in 1570, and two years later he once again served with the queen’s military forces when he led 1,100 men against Spanish troops in several inconsequential skirmishes.
Gilbert’s service in Ireland and the Netherlands pleased the queen, who granted him a patent enabling him to control much of northeastern North America if he could establish settlements there. Because he was a half brother of Sir Walter Ralegh, Gilbert seemed ideally situated for the task. By the time he set out on his first venture to the Western Hemisphere in 1578, he had already written A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia, published in London in 1576, which examined evidence for the existence of a water route to East Asia. With knowledge that he gathered from Richard Hakluyt THE Elder and others about the bountiful fisheries off Newfoundland, Gilbert hoped to create a colony between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude. Although his first effort failed in 1579, Gilbert arranged for a more substantial effort upon his return in 1583. Among his associates was the young Hungarian poet-adventurer, Stephen Parmenius, a close friend of Richard Hakluyt the Younger. Once in Newfoundland, Parmenius and many of Gilbert’s men realized that the territory was less pleasing and promising than they had been led to believe by their leader. With discontent on the rise and supplies running short, Gilbert decided that the time had come to return to England, but Gilbert’s small squadron of ships ran into foul weather in September 1583. Parmenius went down on the Delight, and Gilbert himself died when a smaller ship, the Squirrel, sank.
Gilbert made extensive plans about how he would run his colony. Like other Elizabethans, he was convinced that settlements in North America would become profitable. He believed that many English people would choose to migrate there and those who did so would enjoy a better life than they had left behind in Europe. In the end, of course, his dreams died with him, but not before he had laid out his plans to his associates and in various reports. Little could he have known that the territory he desperately wanted to bring into the English realm would eventually become part of New France.
Gilbert’s loss at sea had a dramatic impact on the younger Hakluyt and other promoters of English colonization. Gilbert had seemed to them a powerful man whose triumph in Ireland had advanced the cause of Elizabeth I. To succumb to a storm at sea served as a reminder that no human was superior to the power of the ocean. In the years after his death Hakluyt and others noted that Gilbert had been “devoured” by the Atlantic. For those who read of his loss, it was a reminder that those who survived a long-distance trip had accomplished something of great value and that no amount of military authority was sufficient to halt the forces of nature. In the latter decades of the 16th century, when the English were in the midst of organizing their ventures to Roanoke, that lesson no doubt tempered the enthusiasm some might have felt for their task.
Further reading: Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30 (1973), 575-598; David B. Quinn and Neil M. Cheshire, The New Found Land of Stephen Parmenius: The life and writings of a Hungarian poet, drowned on a voyage from Newfoundland, 1583 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); David Beers Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols., Works Issued by the Hakuyt Society, 2nd Ser., LXXXIII-LXXXIV (London: 1940).
Gold
This precious commodity drove rulers of kingdoms to sponsor colonizing expeditions so they could enrich themselves by gaining what was arguably the most universally recognized symbol of wealth in the early modern world.
Gold, found on every continent in the world, has had a timeless appeal to human beings. Whether used to make coins, jewelry, or paint for statues or mosaics, early modern peoples all appreciated and wanted gold. They recognized that gold was rare and that it was durable. As one modern commentator has observed, “almost all the gold ever mined is still around, much of it now in museums bedecking statues of the ancient gods and their furniture or in numismatic displays, some on the pages of illuminated manuscripts, some in gleaming bars buried in the dark cellars of central banks, a lot of it on fingers, ears, and teeth.” If the entire known quantity of gold could be combined into one mass, it would weigh about 125,000 tons and fit on a single oil tanker.
The search for gold played an enormous role in the history of the world from the mid-15th century to the 17th century. Gold had, of course, a much longer pedigree, even in Europe: In 1257 the English king Henry III authorized the first use of gold in coins in his realm, and subsequent monarchs followed suit. (There were, in all, 14 different kinds of coin made from gold in England from 1257 to 1717.) The finest artisans on the continent used gold leaf to adorn priceless manuscripts and to make mosaics in churches shine, as they still do in glorious monumental displays in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice.
Although Europeans knew about gold, they had less access to it than other peoples, especially Africans. Gold had benefited empire-builders in Ghana and Mali, among others, as well as traders in Timbuktu, Ualata, Tarudant, Sijilmesa, and Mesa. By the early 14th century Portuguese explorers began to find supplies of gold in North Africa; by mid-century, when some Portuguese had traveled to Senegal, Guinea, and Gambia, traders working through Morocco had begun to acquire gold along with slaves (see slavery), indigo, and sugar. In 1471 Fernao Gomes began to acquire so much gold from Sierra Leone that the coat of arms he later received depicted three Africans wearing golden pendants. Soon the Portuguese built fortresses along the west African Gold Coast to protect their investments, including an outpost at Sao Jorge da Mina that grew into a city.
Once Europeans set their sites on the Western Hemisphere, they hoped to find gold there also. Christopher
Native Americans melting gold to pour into doll-shaped molds, engraved by Theodor de Bry, 1599 (Hulton/Archive)
CoLUMBUS was only the first of many Spanish CONQUISTA-DORes who hoped to find gold in the Americas. Fortunately for Columbus and those who supported his ventures, the Spanish did find gold in the West Indies. They began to process it in Hispaniola as early as 1494. Between 1503 and 1510, according to records in the CASA DE CONTRATACION in Seville, the Spanish imported almost 5,000 kilograms of gold. From 1511 to 1520 the amount increased to more than 9,000 kilograms, although during the 1520s the total hauled into Spain dropped to slightly less than 5,000 kilograms, but the decline was temporary. By the mid-1530s the Spanish had found other supplies of gold, and their imports in the 1550s totalled 42,500 kilograms. Much of this gold, of course, came not from mines but from the AzTECS and other indigenous peoples whom the Spanish plundered. Conquistadores were after gold above all else, observers recognized, and they felt little apparent unease when they melted down religious icons that had had enormous meaning before 1492. Outright theft of gold made sense to conquistadores such as FRANCISCO
PiZARRO who, after all, had killed the iNCA king Atahualpa despite the fact that he received an enormous ransom of gold and SILVER.
Over time silver became a more important commodity for Europeans in the Americas, although the lure of gold persisted well beyond the colonial period. Perhaps the European desire for gold was most evident in the constant search for El Dorado, a place that was, according to legend, made of gold and jewels. The dream of finding that city had enthralled many conquistadores, including FRANCISCO CoRONADO, whose men searched for a golden civilization on the plains of the modern-day United States. They never found El Dorado, of course, but their quest signified the long-standing desire to find the most precious metal in the world.
Further reading: Peter Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New York: Wiley, 2000); Roy W. Jastram, The Golden Constant: The English and American
E:xperience, 1560-1976 (New York: Wiley, 1977); Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920 (London: NLB, 1976).
World History
