Siege of Dongola and the Baqt treaty

Makuria, which had by then absorbed the northern kingdom of Nobadia, bordered Egypt near the First Cataract. A first Arab raid under Uqba ibn Nafi in 641 or 642 ended in failure: the historian al-Baladhuri tells of Nubian archers so skilled that the Arabs called them “pupil-smiters”, and of 150 eyes put out in a single encounter. In 651/652 Abd Allah ibn Sa'd marched south with some 5,000 men, including heavy cavalry, and laid siege to Dongola. Archaeology shows that the city had strong walls; the stone-throwing engine, which according to the later historian al-Maqrizi the Nubians had never seen before, damaged the cathedral, but the town held out, and the siege ended in a pitched battle that was costly for the invaders.

Unable to take Dongola, Abd Allah made terms with the Makurian king, known in Arabic as Qalidurut. No copy of the treaty survives, and the earliest versions, recorded by Egyptian historians two centuries later, differ: in one only Nubia delivered slaves, in the other — probably closer to the original — Egypt sent wheat, lentils and other goods in return for 360 slaves a year. Each side undertook not to attack the other, to allow merchants and travellers safe passage and to return fugitives; Muslims were not to settle in Nubia, and the Nubians were to keep a mosque for Muslim visitors. The historian Jay Spaulding points out that such exchanges were a normal form of diplomacy in north-east Africa; some modern scholars have read the pact as a Nubian submission, others as an agreement between equals.

The baqt had no precedent in the early Islamic conquests, and it held, with interruptions, for some six centuries: in 835 the Makurian prince Georgios travelled to Baghdad and obtained the cancellation of arrears and payments only every third year, and the Fatimids relied on Nubian slaves for their army. It came to an end only in the mid-14th century, with the collapse of organised government in Nubia. Later Muslim historians turned the setback of 652 into a victory, but earlier writers, such as the 9th-century Ibn Abd al-Hakam, admit that Abd Allah made peace because he could not defeat the Nubians.