Jaudar’s 1591 desert march outranks even conquistador exploits in logistics

Evidence

With his firearms Jaudar had no difficulty in slicing through the proud medieval-style armies of the askiya of Gao. One might argue that such a battle between soldiers and military technologies effectively from quite distinct historical and technological ages (late sixteenth-century, i.e., early modern, vs. fourteenth-century, late medieval) ought to impress us no more than the fighting in Mark Twain’s fantasy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. That would be to ignore the terrain over which he had to operate. Jaudar’s victory was a triumph, above all, of logistics and military discipline under appalling conditions. He marched his men for some seven hundred miles across some of the worst desert in the world. The sixteenth-century exploits of the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas are remembered still because for the nations of modern Spanish America the epic stories of how they came into existence help define their national identity. Jaudar’s march, and his conquest of Gao and of Timbuktu in 1591, are almost completely forgotten nowadays because after he himself returned north in 1599, his conquests soon fell into chaos, and the pashalik he had commanded eventually faded away. Yet the determined generalship of his march might more properly be compared with Alexander the Great’s renowned expedition to the Saharan oasis of Siwa: an unsupported column striking across the North African desert and far into the distant unknown. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1603

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the conquistador-comparison literature and to failed-empire narrative patterns — also resonates with the Spanish Armada book’s themes of campaigns remembered vs. forgotten based on national founding myths.