Sundiata's heir Mansa Musa made West African gold legendary
From about 1235 to 1610 the Mali Empire, founded by Sundiata Keita, grew into West Africa's largest realm. Mansa Musa's wealth dazzled outsiders; Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, and Leo Africanus, plus griot oral epics, remain the main windows onto its court.
It began as a Mandinka kingdom on the upper Niger as Ghana/Wagadu declined and trade shifted south. After Sundiata's death around 1255, rulers took the title mansa. In 1285 the general Sakura, once enslaved by the imperial family, seized power before Keita restoration. Fifteenth-century observers still found Gambia peoples subject to the mansa; Leo Africanus visited early in the sixteenth.
The name itself is debated. Mali, Mandé, Manden and Manding are variant pronunciations of one word, and Mali is the Fula form that Arab geographers wrote down. Medieval writers disagreed over whether it meant a town or a region: Ibn Battuta, at the capital in 1352 and 1353, called the city Mali, and the Catalan Atlas of 1375 marked a city of Melly. A suggested link to a Mandé word for hippopotamus has been rejected by local people. After Ibn Khaldun died in 1406, Arab testimony falls silent until Leo Africanus, because Songhai conquest removed the northern provinces that had tied Mali to the Arab world.
The rise came through struggle. Around 1140 the Sosso, another former vassal of Wagadou, began seizing its lands, and in 1203 their king Soumaoro Kanté reportedly overran much of Manden. Sundiata, son of Niani's ruler Nare Fa, spent years in exile with his mother and sisters before leading allied armies back. Later the mansa Muhammad is said to have sent two expeditions into the Atlantic, commanding the second in person after the first vanished. Mansa Musa's reign counts as the golden age: in 1324 he peacefully annexed Timbuktu and turned Sankore into an Islamic university. Sulayman kept that prosperity going, as Ibn Battuta saw on arriving in July 1352, but after Sulayman died in 1360 a run of brief, cruel or inept rulers followed, while the Jolof Empire rose to dominate northern Senegambia.
Source: Mali Empire
