Mansa Musa

Who is Mansa Musa?

Mansa Musa was the tenth mansa (emperor) of the Mali Empire, who reigned from around 1312 to 1337 and became renowned across the medieval world for his extraordinary wealth. Under his rule the empire reached its greatest territorial extent, stretching from the Atlantic coast to the trading cities of the middle Niger, and grew rich from control of the region's gold and salt trade routes. Mansa Musa is best remembered for his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324-1325, when he reportedly travelled with a vast caravan of thousands of soldiers, officials, and attendants, along with a great quantity of gold, which he distributed generously along the route. His stop in Cairo was so lavish that, according to contemporary Arab chroniclers, his gold-giving depressed the metal's value in Egyptian markets for years afterward. The journey brought Mali international fame; the empire and the city of Timbuktu were subsequently marked prominently on European maps, including the 1375 Catalan Atlas, which depicts Mansa Musa enthroned holding a gold nugget. On his return, he invested heavily in Islamic scholarship and architecture, commissioning mosques including the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu and helping establish the city as a center of Quranic learning that later housed the Sankore institution of higher learning. His reign is documented largely through the accounts of Arab travelers and chroniclers such as Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun.

Sources: Ibn Battuta, Rihla (14th-century travel account) · Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-Ibar (14th century) · Catalan Atlas (1375), Bibliothèque nationale de France