The Sublime King: How Musa Became Mansa

Ibn Kathir calls him al-malik al-ashraf, the sublime king. But before he earned that name for himself, someone else first had to sail toward the horizon and never return.

The Title Ibn Kathir Gave

The name betrays the status. Ibn Kathir, the great Damascene historian and mufassir, author of al-Bidaya wan-Nihaya, does not call the Mansa of Mali simply Musa; he calls him al-malik al-ashraf Musa bin Abi Bakr, the sublime king Musa son of Abu Bakr. In a world in which Ibn Kathir also wrote about Ottoman sultans, Mamluk emirs, and Andalusian rulers, this was recognition rather than courtesy. West Africa was, at the moment Ibn Kathir picked up his pen, a place where Islamic civilization had produced a king who deserved the attention of Damascus.

The question is how that happened, how a region that in the Masalik al-absar of al-Umari ﵀ a generation earlier was still described as a distant, largely unknown corner of the Muslim ummah suddenly turns into a place that produces sublime kings. The answer lies with the man who reigned before Musa. His name was Abu Bakr II, and his life story is so strange that it would be hard to credit had Musa not told it himself.

The Story That Musa Told to the Governor of Cairo

The summer of 1324, Cairo. Mansa Musa is on his way to Mecca for his Hajj, and he is received by the governor of Cairo, Amir Ibn Amir Hajib, a Mamluk of some rank. Coffee and dates are shared and there is conversation. Ibn Amir Hajib, just as curious about this West African ruler as everyone else in Cairo, asks how he came by his throne, and Musa, without embarrassment and without concealment, tells him the following.

His predecessor, Musa says, wanted to know whether the Atlantic Ocean had an end, since the Mansa, Abu Bakr II, refused to believe that a sea could be unbounded. He equipped two hundred ships with men, and two hundred ships with gold, water, and provisions enough for years, and he gave the order: sail westward, and do not return until you have reached the end or your provisions have run out.

One ship returned. The captain stood before the Mansa and told of a river in the middle of the ocean, a powerful current within the sea, that had carried away the other ships and from which he alone had escaped by turning back against the current and fleeing away. The Mansa did not believe him, or rather, the Mansa decided to see for himself.

He equipped a second expedition of two thousand ships, appointed his nephew Musa as regent and entrusted the government to him, and then he sailed away. He never returned.

He closes his account to the governor.

Al-Umari ﵀ writes all this down in his Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar, on the basis of the eyewitness reports he gathered sixteen years later in Cairo. It is the most direct quotation of Mansa Musa himself that we possess.

What the Story Really Meant

This story can be read in three ways, and all three are worth the trouble.

First reading: literally. Then this is the earliest documented evidence of a trans-Atlantic maritime expedition from West Africa, almost two centuries before Columbus. That Abu Bakr II reached the New World cannot be excluded, and historians such as Ivan Van Sertima have built an entire research agenda on this reading, though the burden of proof remains contested.

Second reading: political. Then this is a legitimacy story. Musa was not the direct son of Abu Bakr II; he was a nephew, and in a system that knew both primogeniture and elective confirmation, his claim to the throne had vulnerable points. By telling that his predecessor had departed rather than been deposed, died, or been driven out, Musa established a narrative in which he reigned legitimately: He went voluntarily, he appointed me, and I am no usurper. This is a powerful story to tell in Cairo, where the Mamluks themselves were constantly dealing with usurpations and coups.

Third reading: theological-philosophical. Then this is a story about human ambition before the unknown in creation. Abu Bakr II wanted to scan the earth of Allah ﷻ to its limits; he wanted to know where the sea ends. It is a very Islamic impulse, the call to nazar, to the contemplation of the signs in the universe. That this quest cost him his throne was the price of curiosity rather than a punishment.

Probably all three readings were true at once. That is usually how it is with great stories.

The Maritime Culture of Mali

A brief side step, since it is relevant to how Abu Bakr II’s expedition should be understood. Mali had, contrary to what many people think, a very real maritime dimension, not via the Atlantic Ocean, which lay for the average Mande society literally at the outermost edge of their worldview, but via the Niger.

The Niger is less a normal river than a long-stretched inland sea, as some Arab geographers describe it. Ibn Battuta ﵀ would later note that the Niger is so wide that a man on one bank cannot see someone on the other bank in places where the river basin widens. The Sorko, the Bozo, and parts of the Songhai population lived from and on the water, and they had pirogues twenty to thirty meters long, propelled by tens of rowers, that could move goods and troops over long distances. This was, in its own context, a highly developed maritime culture.

The step from river vessels to ocean-going ships, however, is enormous. There is no archaeological or textual evidence that Mali possessed sea-worthy ships on the scale of Abu Bakr II, and this is one of the reasons why historians are skeptical of the literal reading of the story. To equip two hundred sea-worthy ships requires not only timber reserves and shipbuilders, which Mali could mobilize via the Wolof coast or via Portuguese-precursor contacts, but also navigation knowledge for the open sea, salt-water-tight provisions, and an understanding of oceanographic patterns; all of this is hard to imagine without a maritime tradition that we cannot document.

But as we already touched on, the expedition need not have been literally true in all its details to tell something true about Abu Bakr II’s reign. The inclination to explore, to scan boundaries, to want to know the unknown, is an authentic trait of fourteenth-century Mali, and Mansa Musa would express that inclination in another way, not by sailing into the sea, but by crossing the Sahara to Mecca. Both were ways of stretching Mali’s horizon.

The Takeover of Power in Niani

What happened in practice in Niani, the capital of Mali, between Abu Bakr II’s departure and the official coronation of Musa, we do not know in detail. What we know is that it went, in contrast to the century before, smoothly. The Gbara confirmed Musa, and the clans that under Sundiata had drawn up the Kouroukan Fouga now looked at a Mansa who came to the throne from full recognition rather than from tension or compromise.

This is important. The period of difficult succession, which had lasted almost sixty years, was over, and with Musa, Mali got for the first time since Sundiata a ruler with undisputed legitimacy and with full Islamic identity.

The combination is rare. In most early Islamic civilizations there is either a legitimate tribal ruler who Islamized moderately (such as the early Ghana rulers), or an Islamic reformer who ruled with force against tribal resistance (such as War Jabi in Takrur). Musa was both: he was clan-legitimate and Islamically saturated, the first Mansa who did not have to choose.

The State of Mali in 1312

What Musa inherited is worth pausing over, since he inherited something incredible.

He inherited an empire that stretched from the Atlantic coast at present-day Senegal to beyond the Niger bend at Gao. He inherited control over the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure, the richest gold deposits of the world at that time. He inherited the tariq al-dhahab, the gold road, which ran via Walata, Taghaza, Sijilmasa to Fez and from there to Cairo and Damascus. He inherited an army that had been tested against the Sosso, against the Tuareg, against the Wolof kingdoms in the west. He inherited a court culture in which Arab secretaries worked alongside Mande griots, in which qadis advised alongside traditional Bambara counselors.

And he inherited something that none of his predecessors had had: a stable Islamic consensus at court. The Donson Ton, the hunter brotherhood that under Sundiata had played a core role, had not disappeared, which would go too far, but had been marginalized. The center of gravity of religious authority now lay with the ulama, and that means that Musa could rule from an Islamic framework without having to constantly balance with a competing religious elite.

What this meant for an ambitious young ruler is considerable. He had gold without precedent, an empire without power vacuum, a religion that connected him with an ummah from Cordoba to Samarkand, and ample time to plan what he was going to do with it.

The Twelve Years of Preparation

Between 1312 and 1324 lie twelve years, and they should not be passed over as if they were an empty period. It was the longest strategic preparation for a state ceremony that West Africa had known until then.

Three things are done in those twelve years, in broad outline.

First, gold is gathered and brought to the treasury, not in the normal way, as regular toll income, but as specific reserve. Musa has instructed his farbas, provincial governors, to deliver more than usual to the state, not in the form of tax pressure that the population felt, but in the form of an increased share from the Wangara gold caravans and the Bambuk deliveries. The gold reserve he would carry with him in 1324 was not one harvest; it was twelve harvests saved and selected.

Second, the ulama are consulted. Musa has a procession of jurists and Quran experts come to him, some from Timbuktu, some from Walata, some from Djenné, and with them he discusses the technical prescriptions of the Hajj: when to put on the ihram, on which day he must stand at Zamzam, how he as sovereign head of a collective must perform the tawaf. This is not only personal preparation; it is the formation of a fiqh commission that can advise the entire court during the journey.

Third, diplomacy sent ahead. Envoys are dispatched to Cairo to let the Mamluk court know what was coming rather than to ask permission, since Mali asked permission of no one. The logistics alone for a caravan of tens of thousands of people required years of preparation: where camp would be made, which oases needed extra water, which interpreter changes were needed, who would coordinate the official reception in Cairo. All these details were discussed in advance.

For a court that three generations earlier could barely deal with a succession, this was an organizational leap of enormous magnitude. Musa did not only rule; he modernized the Mande state apparatus into something that could carry out an international operation.

What “Al-Malik al-Ashraf” Means

Back to the title with which this account began: al-malik al-ashraf, the sublime king. In the Mamluk tradition, al-ashraf was an honorific title for sultans of whom it was assumed that they exceptionally well embodied the Islamic ideals of just rule, piety, and generosity. Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil, who in 1291 had reconquered Acre from the Crusaders, bore this title, and Sultan Al-Ashraf Sha’ban also. And now, from Damascus, Musa was placed in the same category.

Ibn Kathir was informed. News from Cairo traveled to Damascus, and Cairo still knew, sixteen years after the Hajj, what impression Musa had left. That impression was no passing fascination with an exotic ruler but the deep conviction that Mali, under this Mansa, had become a serious Islamic power, a power with piety, justice, and generosity in abundance. This was geopolitical fact rather than flattery.

The Intellectual World That Musa Stepped Into

To understand what it meant for a West African Mansa to ascend the throne in 1312, the broader Islamic world of that moment must also be imagined, since Musa inherited more than Mali; he stepped into a network of civilization that at that moment was busy with one of its high points.

Cairo, under Al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun ﵀, was probably the largest city of the Islamic world: half a million inhabitants, Al-Azhar as intellectual center, Mamluk architecture at its finest. Damascus flourished despite the Mongol shadow that had not yet fully disappeared. Tunis under the Hafsids was a center of ulama, and Fez under the Marinids was intellectually on the rise with the new madaris that sultan Abu al-Hasan ﵀ financed. Cordoba was, it is true, since 1236 under Christian rule, but Granada still flourished under the Nasrids and the Alhambra was being largely completed in these years.

In the east the Ilkhanates ruled from Persia, and their conversion to Islam under Ghazan ﵀ in 1295 had Islamized the Mongol legacy. The Golden Horde under Özbeg Khan ﵀ had officially become Muslim shortly before Musa’s accession, while Delhi under the sultanate of Ala ud-Din Khalji had consolidated Islam in South Asia. The Sahel Muslim world that Musa stepped into was a node in a Eurasian network that ran from Cordoba to Beijing rather than an isolated region.

And Musa knew this. Ibn Kathir’s later title al-malik al-ashraf was no surprise to the Mansa; it was precisely the position he sought for himself. He wanted, alongside ruler of Mali, to be recognized as a member of the club of Islamic rulers who sat in Cairo, Damascus, Granada, and Delhi, and he wanted Mali treated as core territory rather than as frontier. And for that recognition more than gold was needed: a public, grand, theologically correct, diplomatic act that left no misunderstanding.

That was precisely what the Hajj of 1324 would become.

The Donson Ton and What Was Left Behind

A glance is also due at what fell away when Musa took office, since new order always arises at the cost of old order, and under Musa the Donson Ton, the Mande hunter brotherhood that under Sundiata had played a leading role, definitively lost its central position.

The Donson Ton was no incidental club. Under Sundiata it had been the basis of the military organization: hunters knew the forest, could travel longer without provisions, were trained in ambushes and individual combat, and they supplied the officers, the scouts, the elite troops. The associated religious world, with its rituals around Kondolon Ni Sané, the twin protectors of hunters, its initiation secrets and its dalilu (powerful amulets), formed an important layer of Mande identity.

Under Musa all this was pushed to the margin, systematically weakened rather than forbidden, since Mali was no rigid state that could erase traditions by decree. Officer posts that previously automatically went to Donson Ton members were now also given to Islamically trained cavalrymen from the Mandinka merchant families, and court rituals in which hunter rituals had previously played a role were pushed back in favor of Islamic protocols. This was a quiet revolution, but a revolution.

This had consequences that only became visible under Musa’s successors. The Donson Ton felt marginalized and partly regained its influence under weaker Mansas, and that became a source of tension within the court. But under Musa himself there was no room for it. He ruled with a clear vision, Islam, gold, diplomacy, building, and whatever fell outside that line was tolerated but never celebrated.

Twelve Years Between Throne and Caravan

Musa ascends the throne in 1312 and departs for Mecca in 1324, and between those two dates lie twelve years of preparation, of diplomatic handiwork, of bringing together a caravan that no one had ever before dared to assemble.

Mansa Musa was not the type to depart spontaneously for Mecca. Every camel, every mule, every bale of gold, every slave, every flag, every guest: everything was planned years in advance. The Hajj that he would undertake in 1324 was a state diplomatic event without parallel in the history of Islamic West Africa rather than a personal pilgrimage.

And the reason that Ibn Kathir called him al-malik al-ashraf still lay in the future when Musa in 1312 issued his first commands from Niani. That reason would unfold in Cairo, in Medina, in Mecca, and on the return journey in Timbuktu, and it would set resounding through the Islamic world not only Musa’s name but the name Mali itself.

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Sources

• Ibn Kathir ﵀, al-Bidaya wan-Nihaya: the title al-Malik al-Ashraf Musa ibn Abi Bakr and the arrival in Cairo on 25 Rajab 724, 18 July 1324, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 100, 104.
• Shihab ad-Din al-Umari ﵀, Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar: Musa’s account to the governor of Old Cairo, Abu 'l-Hasan Ali ibn Amir Hajib, of his predecessor’s Atlantic expedition and of his own appointment as deputy, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 100–101.
• Ibn Khaldun ﵀, Kitab al-ʿIbar: Musa’s twenty-five years of rule and his accession around 712/1312, as quoted in Gomez, p. 104.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 70, 84, 100–105, 107–109, 111–113, 125–126, 141, 145, 410.
  • pp. 100–101: Ibn Kathir ﵀ on al-Malik al-Ashraf Musa ibn Abi Bakr; Musa presenting himself in Cairo as the son of Manden Bukari, Sunjata’s younger brother; Ibn Amir Hajib’s question and the answer: the three hundred ships filled with men and as many with gold, water and provisions, the one ship that returned, the river with a powerful current in the open sea, the second fleet of two thousand ships, Musa’s appointment as deputy and his kingship when the ruler did not come back; al-Umari ﵀ as the recorder; the predecessor identified by Gomez as Muhammad ibn Qu.
  • pp. 101–103: the story’s absence from every other source; the river in the sea as the Canary Current; the pirogues of hollowed-out trunks, unfit for the ocean, as the ground for scepticism about the literal reading.
  • pp. 104–105, 107: the arrival in Cairo in the summer of 1324; the accession around 1312; the twelve years between coronation and Cairo, largely spent in preparation; Musa as the candidate of an internationalism tied to Islam; the years of planning, the gathering of gold and the requisitioning of camels and pack animals.
  • pp. 107–109: Mali not controlling the goldfields itself but receiving the gold as tribute; the Tarikh al-Fattash on consulting the ulama and gathering wealth and provisions from every part of the realm; the recognition of Mali as a transregional power as a motive of the Hajj.
  • pp. 111–113: the desire to be regarded as a peer of the other Islamic rulers and Europe put on notice of a powerful kingdom south of the Sahara; the Marinids of Fez and the Nasrids of Granada; the dating of the Hajj in 724/1324 by all external sources.
  • pp. 70, 84, 100, 111: Kondolon Ni Sané, the twin deities of the chase, and the donson ton as hunters’ guild; the Mande armies that initially consisted of the donson ton; the waning influence of the hunters against merchants and religious elites, and the aspirations of the donson ton that had already died with the assassination of Khalifa before Musa.
  • pp. 125–126, 141: Walata as Mali’s northern boundary and the route to Taghaza and Sijilmasa; Mali’s authority reaching towards the Atlantic and the lower Senegal valley; the Grand Council from the time of Sunjata and the scribes who composed the correspondence with North Africa and Egypt.
  • pp. 145, 410: Abu 'l-Hasan of the Marinids (1331–1351) as Musa’s contemporary; Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus (1976) as the best-known speculation about pre-Columbian West African voyages.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), p. 13 (TS ch. 4): Mali as a very large region in the far west, extending toward the Atlantic Ocean.