Portuguese Contact
Beginning in the 1450s, Portugal began sending raiding parties along the Gambian coast for exploration as well as exploitation of its natural resources (products as well as people). What is now the Gambia, then known to Mali as the Tinkuru (province) or Bati, was still firmly in imperial hands. The raiding expeditions ended in disaster for the Portuguese with many killed by poison arrows. Portugal's Diego Gomez sought more peaceable relations with the people of the coast and established contact with the Mali Empire. Other European explorers, such as the Venetian explorer Alvise Cadamosto, also recorded contact with a still-powerful Mali Empire along the coast in 1454.
| Preceded by Musa III |
Mansa of the Mali Empire 1460s |
Succeeded by Mahmud II |
Read more about this topic: Uli II (mansa)
Famous quotes containing the word contact:
“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)