Mali Empire

The state that made Timbuktu a byword and whose emperor may have been the richest individual who ever lived. Mali rose in the thirteenth century under Sundiata Keita, whose story survives as an oral epic still recited by griots, and controlled the Niger bend and the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure at the southern end of the trans-Saharan routes. Gold went north and salt came south, and Mali taxed both. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 travelled with a caravan of thousands and distributed so much gold in Cairo that its price there was depressed for years afterwards - an episode recorded by Egyptian writers and the reason Mali appears on the Catalan Atlas of 1375 with its king holding a nugget. He brought back architects and scholars, and Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of Islamic learning with madrasas and manuscript libraries. Ibn Battuta visited in 1352 and described a kingdom where travel was safe. Succession disputes and Songhai expansion ended it by the sixteenth century. The empire's structure was provincial governors under a mansa. The empire lasted from about 1235 to the seventeenth century, at its height covering territory across modern Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Mauritania. Niani was an early capital. Mansa is the title, meaning king of kings. The Djenne mosque and Timbuktu are World Heritage sites. The Sundiata epic is recognised by Unesco as intangible heritage. The Kouroukan Fouga, an oral charter attributed to Sundiata, set out the empire's constitution and is claimed as an early declaration of rights.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history