text: The backbone of all of these states was not the ruling aristocrats who lived from the labor of those they ruled, or the large number of peasants who, unaffected by the splendor of these states, continued to cultivate their crops or to attend to their cattle, but the middle class of merchants and artisans. These came together in the large towns of the Sudan where the sultans had their seats. It was a prosperous class which benefited from the trade which flourished from town to town and from state to state throughout West Africa, the trade routes connecting the Mediterranean with the Sudan and the Sudan with Africa's West Coast. The towns which often had tens of thousands of inhabitants and were protected by walls and moats were the centers of commercial activities. In the organized and regularized markets local merchants as well as those from distant countries would meet the peasants of the surrounding regions. Timbuktu, Kano, and Garua are some of the hundreds of towns which were well known throughout West and North Africa, and most of them survived as important commercial centers to this very day.