Portuguese reached Benin City around 1485
Capital of Nigeria's Edo State and the country's fourth-largest city by some counts, Benin City grew wealthy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on southern Nigerian trade. European visitors compared its scale to their own capitals—before later writers noted decay of the famous walls.
Benin City heads Edo State in southern Nigeria. Portuguese contact around 1485 opened sustained Atlantic-era exchange. Through the 1500s and 1600s the city flourished on regional commerce, impressing European chroniclers who measured its avenues and earthworks against home cities.
Pepper and ivory drove the trade with Europeans, and early in the sixteenth century the Oba sent an ambassador to Lisbon while Portugal dispatched missionaries. Around 1701 or 1702 the Dutch merchant David van Nyendael called the city a mere village, though he admired the king's palace with its turreted roofs and brass snakes. In 1820 the British naval lieutenant John King found the walls largely destroyed and the inhabited area no more than two or three miles round after a civil war. On 17 February 1897 a 1,200-strong British force under Admiral Sir Harry Rawson captured, sacked and burned the city after an earlier delegation was ambushed.
The British let the monarchy return in 1914 while keeping real power. After independence the city became capital of the Mid-Western Region in 1963, then of Bendel State, and finally of Edo State. Tradition traces the Edo kingdom to the Ogiso, kings of the sky, who called the land Igodomigodo, and dates Benin's expansion to Oba Ewedo in the late thirteenth century. Today it is the centre of Nigeria's rubber industry and home to the Nigerian Institute for Oil Palm Research and the University of Benin, though it suffers repeated floods, including a June 2020 disaster that left many homeless.
Source: Benin City
