A town in the west of Nzwani (Anjouan) whose ruined Friday mosque is the oldest in the archipelago, dated to the eleventh or twelfth century; Wright's excavations on Nzwani trace town growth here and at Domoni from the eleventh century.
On 1 January 1200 it is a small Muslim town with a stone mosque. Its role as first capital of the Shirazi sultans of Nzwani is fifteenth century and later.
Who holds it
- Title
- Chief (fani, in later tradition)
- Since
- Not pinned
- Confidence
- low
Lord in 1200
Its own chief.
How things stand that morning
Under its own chief.
Charter
None known: Swahili towns had no written charters.
Council
A chief and the heads of the leading families.
Communities
Muslim townsmen; villagers of Bantu and Austronesian descent.
Fairs and markets
No fairs; trade follows the monsoon season (ships arrive with the north-east kaskazi from about November and leave with the south-west kusi from about April).
Militia
Not recorded.
Walls and castle
None recorded for 1200.
Trade and crafts
Trade with Madagascar, the Swahili towns and Arab and Indian merchants; farming and fishing.
Where the sources disagree
- Mosque dated twelfth century on French Wikipedia, eleventh in other accounts.
Evidence: Archaeology (Wright 1992) and tradition.
Primary sources for Comoros
Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.
- The coins of Kilwa and the early Swahili inscriptions (coins struck from about the eleventh century; dated inscriptions from 1107). The only contemporary writing from the coast around 1200.
- Mapungubwe, the Zimbabwe plateau, Toutswe and the Comoros: the archaeological record (no text; radiocarbon-dated sites). There is no written word from the interior south of the Zambezi or from the Comoros in 1200; all that is known is from excavation. Read online
- The East African Coast: Select Documents, Various (edited and translated by G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville) (the collection published 1962; second edition 1975). The standard English collection for the coast, and the one place to read together everything written about the Swahili towns near 1200: al-Masudi and Buzurg ibn Shahriyar (tenth century), al-Idrisi (1154), Yaqut (1220s), Ibn al-Mujawir (1220s), Ibn Said, the Chinese notices of Duan Chengshi and Zhao Rugua (1225), Ibn Battuta's visit of 1331, the Kilwa Chronicle in both versions, and the Portuguese.
Sources and studies
- Wikipedia (fr), Histoire des Comores
- Wright, Early Islam, oceanic trade and town development on Nzwani: the Comorian archipelago in the XIth-XVth centuries AD, Azania 27 (1992) (cited from the secondary literature)
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.