Mansa Musa

• 1. The Richest Man Nobody Can Measure

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  Time magazine, trying to fix a number to the wealth of Mansa Musa, gave up and wrote: "There's really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth." He was the ninth Mansa of the Mali Empire, and his reign is often called the zenith of Mali's power and prestige. Yet he appears less in Mandinka oral tradition than the conquerors who came before him. The historian Hadrien Collet argues that Musa's wealth is simply impossible to calculate. Contemporary Arabic writers may have been reaching for something other than a figure. They were saying he had more gold than they thought the world could hold. So how does a single ruler become a legend in places he never set foot, while the singers of his own land treat him with suspicion? What did his people actually control, and what did the foreign chroniclers see when they looked at him? The answers run from a desert refinery to a debt owed to Cairo merchants, and to a confusion over who his father even was.

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• 2. Gold, Salt, And Glass

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  Two thirds of the gold circulating in the Medieval Mediterranean is estimated to have come from West Africa, accounting for almost half of the Old World's gold supply. Mali's riches did not flow from owning the mines directly. They came from the empire's control and taxing of the salt trade from northern regions and, above all, from gold panned and mined in Bambuk and Bure to the south. Over a very long stretch, Mali had built up a large reserve of the metal.

  Near the town of Tadmekka, archaeology shows that Malians invented their own way of refining gold, melting glass to draw off impurities. The empire is also thought to have dealt in ivory, slaves, spices, silks, and ceramics, though little is known today about how those trades worked. Copper tells the strangest part of the story. While gold was abundant, copper was scarce and prized across Sub-Saharan Africa, and it "was exchanged for gold at rates that would be considered unfair by present-day standards."

  At Musa's accession the empire absorbed the former Ghana Empire, by then a vassal of Mali. The realm stretched across land now part of Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, the Gambia, and the modern state of Mali, an area of 1,300,000 square kilometers. The idea of a fabulously rich West African monarch was older than Musa. Around 951 the writer Ibn Hawqal called the king of Ghana the wealthiest king on the face of the earth.

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• 3. The Question Of His Father

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  Ibn Khaldun refers to him only as Musa ibn Abu Bakr, a phrase that can mean "son of Abu Bakr" or "descendant of Abu Bakr." That ambiguity has tangled his lineage ever since. According to Djibril Tamsir Niane, Musa's father was Faga Leye, son of Abu Bakr, who was a brother of Sunjata, the first mansa. Yet too much time separates Sunjata's reign from Musa's for that Abu Bakr to be his literal father.

  Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali under Musa's brother Sulayman, recorded that Musa's grandfather was named Sariq Jata. Sariq Jata may be another name for Sunjata, who was in fact Musa's great-uncle. Weighing these threads, the historian Francois-Xavier Fauvelle proposed that Musa was the son of Abu Bakr I, a grandson of Sunjata through his daughter. That would mean the throne passed through a female line, a succession later sources may have tried to erase.

  Hostility toward Musa's branch of the Keita dynasty could explain why the jeliw, the griots, treat him so coldly. Much of what survives about him comes instead from Arabic writers after his hajj, especially Al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun, and from two 17th-century Timbuktu manuscripts, the Tarikh Ibn al-Mukhtar and the Tarikh al-Sudan. In Mandé tradition a name was often prefixed by the mother's, so Kanku Musa means "Musa, son of Kanku."

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• 4. A Throne From A Vanished Fleet

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  By Musa's own account, his predecessor did not die in battle or bed but sailed away. That predecessor, presumably Muhammad ibn Qu, launched two expeditions onto the Atlantic, 200 ships for the first and 2,000 for the second. He led the second himself and named Musa his deputy to rule until he returned. He never came back, and Musa was crowned in his place.

  The Tarikh al-fattash claims that Musa accidentally killed Kanku at some point before his pilgrimage. The date of his birth is unknown, but he appears to have been a young man in 1324, possibly in his early twenties when he became Mansa. Some modern historians doubt the story of the vanished fleet entirely. They suspect Musa may have deposed his predecessor and invented the voyage to explain his rise. Still, several historians have taken the possibility of such an Atlantic crossing seriously.

  Much of his early reign went to constant war with neighboring non-Muslim societies. The historian Michael Gomez estimates Mali may have captured over 6,000 slaves a year in this period. In 1324, while in Cairo, Musa said he had conquered 24 cities and their surrounding districts.

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• 5. The Pilgrimage That Bent A Market

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  Musa made his hajj between 1324 and 1325, a journey spanning 2,700 miles, leaving his son Muhammad to rule in his absence. To him, Islam was "an entry into the cultured world of the Eastern Mediterranean." Arabic chroniclers writing afterward give wildly different figures for the caravan, and modern historians read these as rhetoric rather than counts. The accounts speak of upwards of 12,000 slaves in brocade and Yemeni silk, each said to carry four pounds of gold bars, and of 80 camels each bearing between 50 and 300 pounds of gold dust. That very range betrays the absence of any audited tally.

  Musa and his entourage reached the outskirts of Cairo in July 1324 and camped three days by the Pyramids of Giza before crossing the Nile on the 19th of July. There he met the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, who expected him to prostrate himself. Musa at first refused, then bowed, saying he did so for God alone. The two rulers got along and exchanged gifts. Shihab al-Din al-'Umari, who visited Cairo soon after, called the procession "a lavish display of power, wealth, and unprecedented by its size and pageantry."

  Al-Umari recorded the effect on the market. Before Musa arrived a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams; afterward it fell below 22 and stayed there for at least twelve years. This has been described as having "wrecked" Egypt's economy, but the historian Warren Schultz argues it sat well within the normal swings of gold value in Mamluk Egypt. Musa stayed in the Qarafa district, befriended its governor ibn Amir Hajib, and departed for Mecca on the 18th of October.

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• 6. Catastrophe On The Return

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  By the time the returning Malians reached Suez, many had died of cold, starvation, or bandit raids, and much of their supplies was gone. In Mecca a fight had already broken out between Malian and Turkic pilgrims in the Masjid al-Haram, swords drawn, until Musa persuaded his men to back down. The party had lingered after the last day of the Hajj and traveled separately from the main caravan.

  Having run out of money, Musa borrowed from Egyptian merchants at a high rate of interest and resold much of what he had bought in Cairo before the Hajj. He went into debt to merchants such as Siraj al-Din. Al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun say the moneylenders were either never repaid or only partly repaid, though other sources disagree. Al-Nasir Muhammad answered Musa's earlier generosity with gifts of his own.

  On the road home Musa met the Andalusi poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, whose eloquence and grasp of jurisprudence impressed him, and persuaded him to come to Mali along with Maliki jurists. The Tarikh al-Sudan claims Gao and Timbuktu submitted as he passed through, though it is unlikely armed pilgrims could seize wealthy cities. One account from Ibn Khaldun credits Musa's general Saghmanja with taking Gao; another says it fell under Mansa Sakura.

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• 7. The Architect Who Wasn't

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  A tradition long repeated in nineteenth and twentieth century histories holds that Musa imported architects from Andalusia and Cairo, with the Granadan poet al-Sahili credited as the principal designer of his Timbuktu palace and the great Djinguereber Mosque. Later scholarship has cut that story down sharply. J. O. Hunwick showed the only project firmly tied to al-Sahili in the Arabic sources is a royal audience chamber at the city of Mali, for which Ibn Khaldun records a payment of 12,000 mithqals of gold, roughly 51 kilograms. His role there looks decorative and organizational, not structural.

  Labelle Prussin, an architectural historian, argued that the earthen banco architecture of the Niger bend, with its projecting toron beams, is a centuries-long synthesis of indigenous West African and Islamic design, not an import from al-Andalus or the Maghreb. Modern scholarship now treats al-Sahili as the founder of West African mosque architecture as a historiographical myth. Excavations at Djenné-Djenno by Susan and Roderick McIntosh found permanent settlement, complex craft production, and iron metallurgy already present in the Inland Niger Delta by the third century BCE.

  Musa raised mosques and madrasas in Timbuktu and Gao, and the Sankore Madrasah, the University of Sankore, was built in his reign. It was restaffed with jurists, astronomers, and mathematicians, drawing scholars from across Africa and the Middle East. Markets pulled in merchants from Hausaland and Egypt, and a university rose in Djenné and Ségou as well. News of the city of wealth crossed the Mediterranean, and traders from Venice, Granada, and Genoa added Timbuktu to their maps. In 1330 the kingdom of Mossi invaded and took Timbuktu; Musa swiftly recovered it, raised a rampart and stone fort, and posted a standing army to guard it.

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• 8. Two Names For One Man

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  The date of Mansa Musa's death is genuinely uncertain, and the sources pull in opposite directions. Counting back from the death of Mansa Suleyman in 1360 using Ibn Khaldun's reign lengths gives 1332. Yet Ibn Khaldun also reports Musa sent an envoy congratulating Abu al-Hasan Ali on his conquest of Tlemcen in May 1337, and that by the time a reply came, Musa was dead and Suleyman on the throne. Al-Umari, writing around 1337, claimed Musa meant to abdicate and return to live in Mecca but died first, hinting at an even earlier date. Nehemia Levtzion regarded 1337 as most likely, and other scholars have followed.

  In the songs of the jeliw, Musa is faulted for being unfaithful to tradition, and some hold that he wasted Mali's wealth. But pieces of him survive in a figure called Fajigi, which means "father of hope," remembered for traveling to Mecca to bring back ceremonial objects called boliw used in Mandé traditional religion. As Fajigi he is sometimes merged with Fakoli, best known as Sunjata's top general. So thoroughly did pilgrimage attach to his name that other figures remembered as pilgrims, like Fakoli, came to be called Musa as well.

  Musa himself fed the legend, spreading rumors that gold grew like a plant in his kingdom. Encyclopedia Britannica calls him "widely considered to be the wealthiest person in history," yet the Catalan Atlas of 1375 named him only "the richest man in the region." Ibn Khaldun, who never met him, left a quieter verdict: he "was an upright man and a great king, and tales of his justice are still told." In 1525 the Sicilian mapmaker Jacopo Russo drew the Mansa Musa Map in his honor, two centuries after the pilgrim king had passed into other people's imaginations.

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