Politics
c. 1280 to c. 1337, Mali Empire (West Africa)
Gold, pilgrimage, and the making of a legend - the political economy and Islamic kingship of Mali’s most famous emperor, known to us entirely through the eyes of others.
Start learning Mansa →In 1324 Mansa Musa crossed the Sahara to Mecca with a caravan so vast, and gave away so much gold in Cairo, that he drove down the value of gold in Egypt for years - and, almost as a by-product, fixed the Mali empire on…
The political economy behind the legend: the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure, the trans-Saharan trade in which gold moved north and salt moved south at nearly equal value, and how control of that flow - not a hoard of tre…
How Musa held his authority together from two sources at once: the legitimacy of a devout Muslim king, recognized across the Islamic world, and the older Mande tradition of sacred kingship, with its griots, its ceremony…
How Musa’s patronage helped turn caravan towns like Timbuktu and Gao into centres not only of trade but of Islamic learning - importing scholars, books, and law - and how the manuscript culture that resulted becam…
How a West African emperor who left no writings became Europe’s emblem of fabulous wealth - through al-Umari, Ibn Khaldun, and the Catalan Atlas - and how the honest historian sifts an entirely external, often sec…
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