History's legendary gold spender had to borrow money to get home
Mansa Musa of Mali showered so much gold on Cairo during his 1324 pilgrimage that it reportedly shifted the metal's value in Egypt. Yet on the return trip from Mecca his party ran short, lost supplies to cold, hunger and bandits, and he ended up in debt to merchants, reselling goods bought on the outward leg.
His riches were real, even if the numbers were not. Mali, probably the world's largest gold producer at the time, taxed salt coming from the north and drew gold from the southern fields of Bambuk and Bure, where it was both panned and dug. West Africa supplied perhaps two thirds of the gold moving around the medieval Mediterranean, and Malians devised their own refining method using melted glass. Arab chroniclers later gave dazzling counts for the caravan, thousands of silk-clad attendants and camels loaded with gold dust, but modern historians read these as rhetoric, not audits.
Cairo made the strongest impression. Musa camped three days beside the Pyramids of Giza before entering the city on 19 July 1324. The Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad expected him to prostrate himself; Musa balked, and when he finally bowed he declared it was for God alone. The two still got on, trading gifts, and Musa stayed three months. A friendship with the local governor, Ibn Amir Hajib, fed the accounts later written by al-Umari, the source of most of what we know.
How Musa came to power is murky. His own story held that his predecessor sailed into the Atlantic with a fleet of 2,000 ships, leaving Musa as deputy, and never returned. Some historians suspect a cover for a seizure of power, though others take the voyage seriously. His wealth also had a darker side: his retinue included many enslaved people, likely taken in raids on neighbouring lands.
Musa, whose name is the Islamic form of Moses, ruled from the early 1300s until about 1337, a period often seen as Mali's height. He absorbed Gao and Timbuktu, persuaded Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, a poet from al-Andalus, to come home with him, and helped turn Timbuktu into a centre of Islamic learning, building part of its Djinguereber Mosque.
Source: Mansa Musa
