Funj Sultanate: An Incredible African Empire, 19th to 18th Centuries

History Of The Funj Sultanate

Funj Sultanate: From around 1500 to 1821, the Sinnar sultanate ruled over part of Sudan’s northern Nile Valley, the last in a long line of precolonial kingdoms that form one of the world’s most ancient and persistent civilized statecraft traditions. The sultanate’s largest area stretched from the Ottoman Egyptian border at the Third Cataract southward to the Ethiopian highlands and the Sobat River, and from the Red Sea westward across the Nile to cover the Nuba Mountains and Kordofan. 

The sultanate emerged from the ashes of the medieval Nubian kingdoms of Makuria and Alodia, during which Egyptian conquerors introduced Islam and Arabic. RED Major trade routes. Selima Oasis DARFUR Kobbai BERBERISTAN Second cataract Third cataract. Old Dongola BEJA Fourth cataract FUNJ SULTANATE, 6th cataract Qarri SEA, 5th cataract Shendi Arbaji El-Obeid 0 0 100 miles, 200 kilometers TAQALI Sennar Funj sultanate, 16th–17th centuries. Funj sultanate, 16th–17th centuries. 

Suakin ETHIOPIA addressed the Nubian world, and as a result, the kings of Sinnar accepted Islam as the state religion and Arabic as the administrative language, reestablishing their realm on traditional African foundations. In addition to having a northern and central core of Nubian speakers, the sultanate expanded to include extensive eastern, western, and southern borders of ethnically diverse subject peoples. The Funj, Sinnar’s hereditary ruling class, descended from a remote mythical ancestor’s female line. A royal court of titled high officials chose the king among the sons of Funj noblewomen by previous rulers. 

Unless a noble man acquired the hand of a princess, his position perished with him; hence, the pursuit and bestowal of noble Funj spouses served as a key element of statecraft. A hierarchy of noble status and governmental positions emerged, with each successful lord owing political responsibilities to the superior from whom he got a Funj wife, as well as his title and office, while staying socially subservient to his maternal uncle indefinitely. 

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For example, if the royal court rejected and removed the monarch, his maternal uncle would be responsible for his execution. Subordinate lords, in turn, gave their superiors female relatives of Funj lineage as wives; thus, the monarch had approximately 600 noble wives, a senior nobleman about 200, and a lesser lord about 30. Sinnar was primarily an agricultural civilization, where the king, theoretically, derived the majority of its income from land.

The Funj nobility’s kinship pyramid also helped to organize the realm’s territorial division into major provinces and subordinate district governates. The monarch, after reserving some estates as personal demesnes, assigned the majority of the realm to a number of his kinsmen as provincial governates; they, in turn, reserved demesnes and split their provinces as district governates among their kinsmen. 

Lesser lords not only obeyed and served their superiors politically but also paid homage to them with high-quality commodities from their estates, such as cloth, tobacco, gold, ivory, horses, medicines, spices, and perfumes. Superior noblemen redistributed exotic types of wealth acquired through activities monopolized by the central government, most notably slaves abducted by legal procedure or combat, as well as foreign luxury commodities imported from overseas by royal trading expeditions. 

Legally, subjects supported their lord’s estate by paying substantial levies on grain production and animal husbandry, along with a wide range of fees and responsibilities, either in kind or through labor services. Strict sumptuary rules maintained a social distance between noblemen and subjects, and serious kinds of transgression, such as leaving one’s estate without permission or bearing the progeny of an illicit mixed union, were punishable by servitude. 

The Sinnar sultanate had peaceful ties with its neighbors for the majority of its existence, but a record of significant events must necessarily highlight the outliers. Sinnar tried to restrict the Ottoman Empire’s advances in the sixteenth century, both along the Nile in the north and, with imperial Ethiopia’s help, on the Red Sea coast. 

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As the Funj pushed southward up the Blue Nile to conquer the gold-producing area of Fazughli in the seventeenth century, their ties with Ethiopia deteriorated; significant Ethiopian expeditions faced significant setbacks in 1618–1619 and 1744. During the eighteenth century, Sinnar and her fur-speaking western neighbors engaged in an increasingly fierce war over the huge gold-producing territory of Kordofan, which lay between the two kingdoms’ heartlands.

The Musabba’at, a defeated and exiled section of the Dar Fur royal line, first established itself in Kordofan and used it as a base for an attempt to re-conquer their homeland; after 1785, the Dar Fur sultans struck eastward to impose their rule at the expense of both Funj Sultanate and Musabba’at. Sinnar was demonstrating signs of internal weakness in the early nineteenth century, which drew increased acquisitive attention from Egypt’s Turkish rulers. 

The Funj Sultanate kingdom reached its pinnacle during the reigns of the powerful seventeenth-century monarchs Rubat I, Badi II, and Unsa II, who established diplomatic and commercial relations with the Islamic heartlands, established Sinnar as the first fixed urban capital for their previously agrarian realm, and transformed this new city into a large and cosmopolitan metropolis by dispatching royal caravans to attract foreigners with valuable goods and skills. 

However, these more personal contacts with the outside world could not fail to reveal aspects of Funj Sultanate culture, particularly noble Matrilin earity and royal rule over foreign business, that would undoubtedly be controversial from a Middle Eastern cultural standpoint. As the eighteenth century progressed, invasive alien ideals found ever-larger native constituencies: demographically insignificant male Funj princes, persons aspiring to Islamic piety and erudition, governors barred from royal trade, and would-be merchants themselves. 

Cultural dissidence manifested itself in the rise of towns, which increased from one in 1700 to about thirty by 1821, as well as escalating political chaos; royal matrilinearity was abolished in 1719, a military strongman reduced the king to a puppet in 1762, and by 1800, the urbanized fragments of the old agrarian realm had devolved into an indefinite civil war. 

Many dissidents cheered on the Turkish invaders from Egypt who took over the kingdom in 1820–1821, leaving the last defenders of the old order easily defeated.

Also Read: Fatimid Caliphate: The Incredible Empire in Maghrib, 910–1057