Mansa Musa

Mansa Musa — Musa I of Mali — came to the throne of the Mali Empire around 1312 under unusual circumstances. His predecessor, the ruler Abu-Bakr II, had become obsessed with sailing westward to find the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, and outfitted a fleet of thousands of boats for the voyage. None of them returned. Abu-Bakr II had served as the ruler while Musa was his deputy, and when the fleet disappeared, Musa inherited the throne of one of the largest empires in the world. The Mali Empire at this time stretched from the Atlantic coast of West Africa eastward to the trading city of Gao on the Niger River, and controlled the most important gold and salt trade routes in the known world. Under Musa's reign, it would grow even larger.

The Mali Empire's wealth was not incidental. Gold from the mines of Bambuk and Bondu flowed northward through trans-Saharan trade routes that the empire controlled, reaching Egypt, North Africa, and from there the Mediterranean world. Salt, equally valuable, moved in the opposite direction. Musa taxed every ounce of gold and salt that passed through his territory, and the accumulation of that wealth over decades made the Mali Empire the largest single source of gold in the known world. Modern economists who have tried to calculate his actual wealth have arrived at figures as high as $400 billion in today's dollars, though comparisons across centuries are inherently imprecise. What is clear is that no person before or since has controlled a comparable fraction of the world's known resources at a single time.

In 1324, as a devout Muslim, Musa set out on the Hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of Islam. He did not travel quietly. His caravan was composed of approximately 60,000 people, including soldiers, servants, heralds, and attendants. He traveled with 12,000 enslaved people, each carrying four pounds of gold dust. He traveled with 80 camels, each carrying 300 pounds of raw gold. The caravan moved through what is now Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, and into North Africa. When it arrived in Cairo, it was an event that the city's chroniclers would be writing about for generations. Musa's encounter with Cairo's ruler, al-Malik al-Nasir, was complicated by a matter of protocol: Musa was unwilling to prostrate himself before another king. He eventually agreed to a compromise bow, but the tension revealed something important — he understood himself as an equal sovereign, not a supplicant.

Over the weeks he spent in and around Cairo, and continuing along the pilgrimage route, Musa gave away gold so freely and in such quantities that the price of gold in Egypt crashed. Flooded with suddenly abundant gold, the metal lost value, and the Egyptian economy took 12 years to stabilize. He gave gold to mosques, to the poor, to merchants, to dignitaries. He commissioned buildings. He paid for scholars to return with him to Timbuktu. One of those scholars, the Andalusian architect and poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, designed the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu — a structure still standing today — for which Musa reportedly paid 200 kilograms of gold. He brought back knowledge, books, and teachers that transformed Timbuktu from an important commercial city into one of the intellectual centers of the Islamic world, home to what became the University of Sankore, the oldest university in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Musa probably died around 1332 or 1337. By the time the Catalan Atlas was drawn in 1375 on the island of Majorca, he had become famous enough that the mapmakers placed him at the center of West Africa, illustrated on a throne, holding a golden orb, with text describing him as "the richest and most noble king in all the land." European cartographers were drawing him not from imagination but from firsthand accounts of what had happened in Cairo in 1324. The Mali Empire declined after his death, weakened by succession disputes, Tuareg raids, and eventually the rise of the Songhai Empire. But the scholarship and architecture he commissioned outlasted the empire itself.