page_title: Suakin
section_title: Medieval
hierarchical_section_title: Suakin / History / Medieval
caption_attribution_description: English: 16th century drawing of the port city of Çuaquem, made by the Portuguese nobleman Dom João de Castro as part of a work called Roteiro do Mar Roxo, a compilation of navigational, geographical and hydrographical information regarding the Arabian coasts and the Red Sea, then known as the Purple Sea. Now kept at the library of the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. Made during the military expedition of the Portuguese governor of India Estevão da Gama to the Suez, in which the city of Suakin was sacked.
context_page_description: Suakin or Sawakin is a port city in northeastern Sudan, on the west coast of the Red Sea, it was formerly the region's chief port, but is now secondary to Port Sudan, about 50 kilometres north.
  Suakin used to be considered the height of medieval luxury on the Red Sea, but the old city built of coral is now in ruins. In 1983 it had a population of 18,030 and the 2009 estimate is 43,337. Ferries run daily from Suakin to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.
context_section_description: The collapse of the Abbasids and growth of Fatimid Egypt changed this and Al-Qusayr and Aydhab became important emporia, trading with India and ferrying African pilgrims to Mecca. Suakin was first mentioned by name in the 10th century by al-Hamdani, who says it was already an ancient town. At that time, Suakin was a small Beja settlement, but it began to expand after the abandonment of the port of Badi to its south. The Crusades and Mongol invasions drove more trade into the region: there are a number of references to Venetian merchants residing at Suakin and Massawa as early as the 14th century.
  One of Suakin's rulers, Ala al-Din al-Asba'ani, angered the Mamluk sultan Baybars by seizing the goods of merchants who died at sea nearby. In 1264, the governor of Qus and his general Ikhmin Ala al-Din attacked with the support of Aydhab. Al-Asba'ani was forced to flee the city. The continuing enmity between the two towns is testified to by reports that after the destruction of Aydhab by Sultan Barsbay in 1426, the refugees who fled to Suakin instead of Dongola were all slaughtered.
  The Beja were originally Christian. Despite the town's formal submission to the Mamluks in 1317, O. G. S. Crawford believed that the city remained a center of Christianity into the 13th century. Muslim immigrants such as the Banu Kanz gradually transformed this: ibn Battuta records that in 1332 there was a Muslim "sultan" of Suakin, al-Sharif Zaid ibn-Abi Numayy ibn-'Ajlan, who was the son of a Meccan sharif. Following the region's inheritance laws, he had inherited the local leadership from his Bejan maternal uncles.
  In the fifteenth century, Suakin was briefly part of the Adal Sultanate.
caption: Drawing of Suakin in Dom_João_de_Castro_-_Roteiro_do_Mar_Roxo_1541-(Suaquem)
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "3576", "Image ImageLength": "4712", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "i2s CopiBook Scanner", "Image Model": "CopiBook", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "100", "Image YResolution": "100", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2007:10:10 12:06:20", "Image Artist": "ArquiDigit, Lda", "Image Copyright": "UCBG, 2007", "Image ExifOffset": "360", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "498", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5807", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1192", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1571"}