Mansa Musa

Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire at its height and spent so much gold in Cairo that he depressed its value for a decade. He came to the throne around 1312, by his own account because his predecessor had sailed into the Atlantic with a fleet to find out what was on the other side and never returned. The empire he inherited controlled the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure and the salt of the Sahara, and sat astride the trans-Saharan routes that carried both north; he roughly doubled its extent, taking Timbuktu, Gao and the Songhai lands. His pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 is the event everyone knows. He travelled with a caravan the Arabic sources describe in figures nobody can verify - thousands of people, camels loaded with gold, slaves carrying staffs of it - and gave and spent so freely in Egypt that the price of gold there fell and did not recover for years, which is one of the earliest recorded instances of a currency being devalued by a single person's spending. He came back with the Andalusian architect al-Sahili and with scholars, and built or rebuilt mosques at Timbuktu and Gao, including Djinguereber, and endowed the libraries that made Timbuktu a centre of learning for two centuries. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows him enthroned with a gold nugget, holding it out towards a merchant, and that image is how medieval Europe learned that West Africa was rich. His empire began to fragment within two generations of his death. The figures in the Arabic sources are not verifiable and the effect on the Cairo gold price is attested independently, which is the useful combination. Mali's decline was slower than the story implies: it lost Timbuktu to the Tuareg in 1433 and the Songhai took Gao, but the state survived into the seventeenth century as a shrinking kingdom on the upper Niger.

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