Kingdom of Makuria

Makuria was the medieval Nubian kingdom of the middle Nile, in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt, with its capital at Dongola in the fertile reach between the third and fourth cataracts. It rose after the fall of Meroe from the union of the northern Nubian lands, took Christianity in the sixth century and built a national church with its cathedral at Dongola. In 652 Arab Egypt tested the kingdom and came away with the Baqt, the long exchange of tribute and grain that recognised Makuria as the one frontier Islam could not cross. At its height the kings ruled from Aswan to the Butana, absorbed Nobadia, faced the Fatimids and held the Red Sea hills. The crusading age brought Mamluk expeditions, puppet kings and a Muslim usurper on the Dongola throne in 1317. The kingdom shrank to the Dotawo rump between the cataracts, and in the early sixteenth century the Funj and the Ottomans divided its remnant, closing a Christian millennium on the Nile.