Mansa Musa

Mansa Musa ascended the throne of Mali around 1312, in the third generation after Sundiata. He inherited an empire of perhaps four hundred thousand square miles and a population in the millions. He left it larger, wealthier, more learned, and more famous in the medieval imagination than any African polity before or since.

In 1324 he undertook the hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca — accompanied by a caravan that contemporary chroniclers estimate at sixty thousand persons, with twelve thousand servants each carrying a four-pound bar of gold. He distributed gold so liberally during his stay in Cairo that the price of gold on Mediterranean markets dropped by an estimated ten to twenty-five percent and did not recover for the better part of a decade. The economic disturbance is recorded in contemporary Egyptian and Italian financial documents — the only example in the historical record of a single individual's spending visibly destabilizing the medieval gold standard.

On his return from Mecca, Mansa Musa brought with him the Andalusian architect Es-Saheli, who built the great mosque of Djinguereber at Timbuktu and the audience hall at Niani. He established Timbuktu as the foremost center of Islamic learning in West Africa: the University of Sankore at his court drew scholars from across the Muslim world and held a library reported in contemporary sources to contain hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

The Catalan Atlas of 1375, the first cartographic representation of West Africa in European hands, depicts Mansa Musa enthroned, holding a gold disc — captioned: "the richest and noblest king in all the land." The valuation has not been seriously challenged. Adjusted to modern terms, scholars have placed his wealth above the highest accumulations of the modern era.

He is honored here as the wealthiest individual in the historical record, and the patron of African Islamic learning at its medieval height.