Nubia: the Christian kingdom that paid its tribute in slaves

Christian Nubia is the one place the seventh-century conquest was stopped, and it is the least known chapter in the whole story. Three kingdoms along the Nile between Aswan and Khartoum, Christian from the sixth century, held out for seven hundred years after Egypt fell. The treaty that bought them that time required them to deliver 360 slaves a year.

652: the advance stops

Arab forces moved south from Egypt and reached Dongola, the Makurian capital, where the principal church was destroyed in the fighting. Nubian archers, whose reputation in Arab sources is for shooting at the eyes, made the campaign expensive enough that neither side wanted a second one.

What followed was the Baqt, negotiated in 651 or 652 with Abd Allah ibn Sa’d, governor of Egypt. It is one of the longest-lasting treaties in recorded history, and its terms were:

Nubia would send 360 slaves annually to Egypt, some sources saying 400.
Nubia would return slaves who escaped from Muslim territory.
Nubia would maintain a mosque at Dongola for Muslim visitors and not obstruct access to it.
Egypt would send grain, textiles and other goods in return.

It held, with interruptions, for close to seven centuries.

Read that clause again

A Christian kingdom purchased its independence from the caliphate with an annual delivery of human beings, and did so for six hundred years. The captives were taken from further south, from the peoples beyond Nubia’s own frontier, which made Christian Nubia a supplier to the very trade that would later consume it.

This is the fact that dissolves two comfortable stories at once. The one where the conquest was resisted heroically and cleanly, and the one where the medieval Islamic world’s slave trade was an incidental feature rather than a structural demand written into treaties as a line item.

The collapse, 1317 to 1504

The Baqt did not end in a battle. It ended in erosion.

Mamluk Egypt intervened repeatedly in Makurian succession disputes from the thirteenth century, installing clients. Arab tribes migrated south into the Nile valley and intermarried with the Nubian nobility, and Nubian inheritance ran through the mother’s line, so within generations the throne passed legitimately to Muslim heirs. In 1317 the cathedral at Dongola was converted into a mosque, an event recorded in an inscription still readable on the building.

The southern kingdom of Alodia lasted until roughly 1504, when it fell to the Funj. After that there was no Christian state on the Nile above Egypt, and Nubian Christianity, which had produced its own liturgy, its own script and some of the finest wall painting in medieval Africa, simply stopped existing.

Nine hundred years of Christianity in Sudan left no congregation behind.

And then the modern part

Sudan’s history since independence in 1956 is the same fault line, still live.

Two civil wars, 1955 to 1972 and 1983 to 2005, fought between the Arab-Muslim north and the African south. The second was declared a jihad by Khartoum, and it killed an estimated two million people, most of them civilians, in the deadliest conflict in Africa since the Second World War.
Slavery returned. During the second war, government-armed militias abducted Dinka and Nuer women and children into forced labour and concubinage in the north. It was documented at the time by human rights organisations and by the churches, and it produced the strange spectacle of Western activists buying captives back.
Darfur from 2003: the state and the Janjaweed against Darfur’s non-Arab Muslim population, the first genocide the United States formally named in the twenty-first century.
South Sudan seceded in 2011, splitting the country along the line the Baqt had marked in 652.

Thirteen hundred years, one frontier, and the same commodity moving north across it.

Why this page exists on a Jewish site

Because Sudan’s Jewish community is a footnote of the same process: a small community around Khartoum, gone by the 1970s. And because the argument that this history is medieval and therefore irrelevant does not survive Sudan, where the slave raiding resumed within living memory, under a government that called the war a jihad, in the same river valley, against the descendants of the people the Baqt had been paid in.