Of the two great Afro-Asiatic caravan systems that were the targets of Renaissance European maritime ventures, the trans-Saharan route appeared to be both less commercially significant and more vulnerable to competition from the sea. The most important commodities that the desert route brought to the Mediterranean, gold and slaves, both derived from regions in West Africa not too far from the Atlantic Ocean. Once Europeans established direct maritime contact with the Guinea coast, it appeared that neither the Saharan caravans nor the Sudanic empires built up around the entrepôts between desert and forest would survive in anything but very attenuated form.

Many of the major developments after 1500 both within North and West Africa and in their external relations seemed to confirm just such an outcome. Gold and slaves were exported via the Atlantic in quantities that seemed to leave little over for northern trade routes. In an effort to regain control of West African gold sources at the end of the sixteenth century, the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansūr dispatched a military expedition across the desert; the only lasting result was the destruction of Songhai, the last of the great medieval Sudanic empires, leaving political chaos and economic hardship in its place. The focus of West African state building and commerce now seemed to shift to the Guinea forest around such centers as Asante, Benin, Oyo, and Dahomey, while the Sudan reasserted itself only in the apparent desperation of Islamic religious revivals.