Many of Ahmad’s advisors warn of the dangers of crossing the Sahara, but he maintains that any path that merchants can travel can surely be used by soldiers as well.

He dispatches in October 1590 a force of fifteen hundred light cavalry and twenty-five hundred infantry, many of whom are equipped with arquebuses.

The command he entrusts to the eunuch Judar, a former Christian Spaniard who had been forcibly converted to Islam after being kidnapped as a baby and castrated before puberty.

The army travels with a transport train of eight thousand camels, one thousand packhorses, one thousand stablemen, and six hundred laborers; they also transport eight English cannons.

Judar, who Ahmad I had made a pasha in advance of this expedition, has assembled eighty Christian bodyguards for his personal detail.