Tenguella was a silatigi, at once a religious leader and a political chief, among the Fula of Futa Toro. Pressed by the expanding Jolof Empire, he led an emigration eastward in the 1450s and carved out a state called Futa Kingi in the lands of the Kingdom of Diarra. From there his movements grew dangerous to far larger powers. By 1490 his activity in the upper Gambia basin threatened the communication lines of the Mali Empire and the gold of the Bambuk fields. When he invaded Diarra in 1511, its rulers called on the Songhai. The next year, Amar Konjago, a brother of the great Songhai ruler Askia Mohammad I, defeated and killed Tenguella in battle and destroyed his young state.

The story might have ended there, but Tenguella had a son. Koli Tenguella had gone south to Futa Jallon to organize the Fula against Mande domination, and now he turned that force northward. He fought his way back into Futa Toro, re-established his family's rule, and made a fateful strategic choice: rather than challenge the Songhai again, he aimed his cavalry at the Jolof Empire. The campaign was devastatingly effective and helped shatter Jolof into warring fragments. Koli built a fixed capital in the Futa Toro and reconquered the eastern lands his father had held. He died in 1537, on campaign against the kingdom of Bussa, leaving behind the foundations of an empire and a dynasty that bore his clan's name, the Denianke.

Under Koli's successors the Denanke reached their height. After the Jolof Empire collapsed at the Battle of Danki in 1549, they expanded into the vacuum, and by the end of the 16th century tribute flowed to them from Jolof, Waalo, Gajaaga, Saloum, and many more, with the gold-producing Bambouk region and the routes east of the Senegal under their sway. At its apex, under the Satigi Samba Lamu, the empire controlled both the mouth of the Senegal River and many of the trans-Saharan trade roads that fed it. Yet the power was always looser than the map suggested. The ruler's authority was never absolute, and the vast holdings amassed in a few decades were already growing nominal by the mid-17th century.

The Denanke kings remained followers of the old animist traditions while their subjects became steadily more Muslim, and that gap became a fault line. A Muslim scholarly class, the Torodbe, grew in influence and pressed for reform. In the late 17th century the Char Bouba war, an Islamic uprising across the Senegal valley, sparked civil war among the Deniankes. With no fixed rule of succession, the throne changed hands amid constant struggle, while the Trarza Moors to the north and the French at Saint-Louis both pressed in, trading and meddling. By the 18th century real power had slipped away from the satigis. In 1776 Sulayman Bal led a revolution that overthrew the dynasty for good, replacing it with the Imamate of Futa Toro. Having won his holy war, Bal was killed in battle against the Moors that same year, and a new theocratic order took the place of the cavalry empire that a single migration had begun three centuries before.