How an Empire Slowly Loses Itself

A death is rarely enough to bring an empire down. What killed Mali was not a single blow, but a slow convergence of internal and external forces that worked through a century.

The Day Musa Died

Around 1337, somewhere in Niani, Mansa Musa dies, and the sources are unexpectedly vague about the circumstances, since there is no battle, no palace coup and no known illness to account for his passing. Presumably it was old age, since he was then around sixty, compounded by the fatigue of twenty-five years ruling an empire that stretched from the Atlantic coast to beyond the Niger Bend.

What follows is not what one would expect, since there comes no chaos, no splintering and no immediate revolt: Mali continues, at least on the outside, as it had. His son Maghan I ascends the throne, the Gbara confirms, the Djinguereber remains in use and the trade routes remain open, so that anyone looking only at the first years would think Musa’s legacy governed itself.

But beneath the surface something else is at work, something slower, tougher and inevitable. Ibn Khaldun ﵀, writing in the late fourteenth century from Tunis, had a word for it: asabiyyah, the social cohesion that holds a dynasty together. Asabiyyah is strong in the first generation, still strong in the second, weakens in the third, and runs out in the fourth, and he noted it as a pattern, almost a rhythm, which Mali would unintentionally confirm.

Maghan I and the First Hole

Maghan I reigned briefly, from 1337 to about 1341, and the sources are not kind to him. Ibn Khaldun ﵀ calls him weak and pleasure-seeking, and Ibn Battuta ﵀, who visits Mali in 1352, speaks with older courtiers who still knew Maghan and who shake their heads at his name. These four years were, it seems, enough to convert Musa’s solid succession into a bill that the next generations would have to pay.

Two things happened concretely, and both are important.

To begin with, Timbuktu was raided in 1339 or 1340 by the Mossi, which had not happened before, since the Mossi, a people from the Volta region southeast of the Niger Bend, had under Musa exerted pressure but had always been driven off. Under Maghan the city briefly fell into Mossi hands, and Tarikh al-Sudan describes how parts of Timbuktu’s wealth were taken, while the mosques remained standing but were desecrated and the Sankoré ulama fled for some time. The city was retaken, but something irreversible had broken: the myth of inviolability.

The northern garrisons also weakened, since the Tuareg and Sanhaja factions that had been loyal in Musa’s time felt that Niani’s grip was slackening, so that small raids began and by the late thirties or early forties became more frequent. It did not yet end with territorial loss, which came later, but the security guarantee that caravans enjoyed became more expensive, and the merchants began to pass that on in their prices, so that prices rising in Cairo or Fez meant that Mali’s relatively weakened position began to confirm itself.

Sulayman and the Brief Restoration

Maghan dies around 1341, and his uncle Sulayman, brother of Musa, takes over and reigns until about 1360, and this is a good reign. Sulayman is old-fashioned quality, pious, moderate, careful with his treasury and attentive to Islamic practice, and Ibn Battuta ﵀ describes him with respect, albeit with critical notes about his frugality compared with Musa.

Under Sulayman, Mali seems to recover, since Timbuktu is fortified, the Mossi are pushed back, the garrisons in Taghaza and Walata function again, the ulama return fully to Sankoré and the Djinguereber receives maintenance, so that in 1352, the year Ibn Battuta ﵀ visits the country, Mali is still, seen from outside, an Islamic great power.

But it is worth attending to what Ibn Battuta ﵀ also sees, because he sees a ruler who spends less money on scholarship and more on court comfort, he sees court ladies appearing without veil, which he as a Maliki jurist finds problematic, and he sees poets performing for the Mansa in a way he calls pre-Islamic. He sees an empire that is outwardly Islamic but where local Mande practice is again pressing itself on the edge of Islamic convention: it is no apostasy, but it is drift.

The Rihla of Ibn Battuta ﵀ is for this period our principal eyewitness source, and he is not impartial, since he is a Moroccan Maliki jurist with strict views on Islamic court culture, but his observations are concrete and not easily dismissed. Mali was less strict in 1352 than in 1324, and that is no small observation.

After Sulayman: The Spiral

Sulayman dies around 1360, and then begins the spiral we know, since his son Qasa reigns only a few months before being deposed by Mari Jata II, a grandson of Musa. Mari Jata II is a disastrous ruler, and Ibn Khaldun ﵀ describes him as a wastrel who empties the treasury, one who even sells, according to one account, a large lump of pure gold that Musa had brought from Mecca as a gift from the Mamluk sultan, selling it to an Egyptian merchant at a bargain price to fund festivals.

This would still be forgivable if Mari Jata II had then been replaced by a competent successor, but that did not happen, since his son Musa II reigned from 1374 to 1387 and was effectively a puppet of a powerful farba, a court general named Mari Diata. The real power no longer sat on the throne but at the throne’s left hand, and that is, as Ibn Khaldun ﵀ had warned, the moment when asabiyyah begins to crumble: the dynasty no longer rules, the dynasty is ruled.

The Tuareg, the Mossi, the Songhay

While at court the strings shifted, something far more visible was happening outside the court, along three pressure points.

First the Tuareg, these Berber peoples who controlled the desert zones north of the Niger and who in Musa’s time were vassals, received payments for protecting caravans and supplied troops to Mali’s army. As Niani weakened they became more independent, so that in 1433, almost a century after Musa’s death, they conquer Timbuktu itself: a city that a century earlier had been the crown jewel falls into the hands of Tuareg leaders under Akil Ag Malwal, and although the ulama of Sankoré negotiate with the conquerors and keep the mosques open, the city is no longer of Mali.

Then the Mossi, who had already appeared under Maghan and who kept coming, since in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they regularly raided Djenné, Walata and the southern flanks of Mali. They did not conquer large territory, but they exhausted the empire, because each raid cost Niani an army, a harvest or a caravan.

And then, most important in the long term, the Songhay: Gao, the city we got to know in a much earlier article as the first true city-state of the region, was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a Mali vassal, and the Songhay accepted Malinese rule without much protest. But this too changed, because over the course of the fifteenth century local Songhay leaders began to behave as independent, and in 1464 Sunni Ali Ber would ascend the throne of a Songhay that formally broke from Mali and then began to devour its former overlord. That development begins earlier, though, under rulers who already in the late fourteenth century drove the Malinese sofa garrisons out of Gao.

The Economic Decline

While the edges crumbled, something happened in the markets that undermined Mali’s core, since the Portuguese appear from 1440 on the West African coast, wanting gold and offering textiles, beads, weapons and, still cautiously, demand for slaves. The gold that until then had moved northward through the Sahara to Mali’s profit begins to find an alternative outlet: westward, via the coast, via Portuguese ships.

This is catastrophic for Mali, because the whole empire was built around the trans-Saharan trade axis, with gold from Bambuk and Bure northward, salt from Taghaza southward and tolls collected in Niani and Walata. If gold goes westward to the coast instead of northward through the desert, Niani loses its tolls, and without tolls there is no army, without an army no garrisons, without garrisons no empire.

This process unfolds slowly, since the first Portuguese ships at Elmina, which refers to the castle of the Portuguese, founded in 1482, are further south than Mali’s core zone. But from the late fifteenth century it is unmistakable that Mali’s economic logic no longer works, because the world has acquired a new trade axis and Mali is no longer central to it.

The Plague and the Sahel

One factor is often skipped over in classical Mali historiography, and that is the Black Death, the great plague epidemic of 1347-1351 that devastated Europe and the Middle East and that struck West Africa as well, although the sources on this are fragmentary.

Ibn Battuta ﵀, who in 1348-1349 traveled straight through the plague zone on his way to Mali, describes the death of his mother from the plague in Tangier, and he arrives in a Mali probably already affected by sporadic outbreaks via the trans-Saharan trade routes. Tarikh al-Sudan and other local sources are largely silent about this, which can mean either that the epidemic in West Africa was less severe than elsewhere, or simply that local chroniclers did not have the infrastructure to document such a thing.

What we do know is that Mali’s trading partners in Cairo and the Maghreb were decimated, since Cairo lost between 30 and 50 percent of its population in 1348-1349 and Fez was hard hit. Demand for gold did not fall, because gold is relatively inflation-proof, but the logistical capacity of the trans-Saharan trade was reduced, with fewer merchants, fewer caravans and fewer tolls for Niani, and this is a factor with which Maghan I and Sulayman had to deal that Musa had never experienced.

The plague is also a cautionary reminder, since not everything that shakes empires is human plan, and sometimes it is biological processes that occur across all of Eurasia and Africa simultaneously and that force every administration to absorb more conflicts with fewer resources. The timing of Mali’s first major cracks, late thirties and forties of the fourteenth century, coincides with this global catastrophe, and that is no coincidence.

The Story From Within

There is one thing to mention separately here, because European historiography often leaves it out: Mali fell not only through external pressure, but also because the Islamic consensus that Musa had established was not fully continued under his successors.

Ibn Khaldun ﵀ describes how in the second half of the fourteenth century certain Mansas returned to pre-Islamic court rituals, how Bambara hunter-brotherhoods, who had played a leading role under Sundiata, regained influence, how traditional sacrifices were brought again and how the ulama were less consulted. This is no total apostasy, since mosques remained standing, prayers were performed and Qadis dispensed justice, but it is a weakening of the Islamic framework as a state framework.

This works against Mali in two ways. First, it makes foreign Islamic merchants more cautious, because if Mali is no longer an undisputed Islamic partner, there is less reason to close gold contracts with Niani rather than with Gao or Djenné. Second, it makes the ulama themselves restless, and they were Musa’s greatest intellectual capital, so that if they no longer feel known they write less, teach less, or, and this happens from the late fifteenth century, move to Gao where Sunni Ali Ber and later Askia Muhammad take them seriously again.

The Shape of a Slow Collapse

Mali fell to no single thing. Baghdad had a Mongol horde that destroyed it in 1258, Acre a crusade that took it in 1291, Western Europe a natural disaster that halved its 14th-century population; Mali fell, slowly, to the convergence of internal weakening and external pressure, to the shifting of trade axes, to the pattern that Ibn Khaldun ﵀ had named as asabiyyah loss.

This is important because the story teaches that empires do not fall in one blow but subside, trading ground for time and time for more ground. The people who lived in Niani around 1400 did not feel that they lived in a dying empire, and they probably thought this was a difficult phase that would pass, while their grandchildren, in 1450, knew better and their great-grandchildren, in 1500, remembered Mali as something that had been, something that Gao and Timbuktu under Songhay rule passed on as inheritance.

Djenné and the Alternative Centers

While Niani and Timbuktu in different phases saw their influence wane, something happened that in some ways was even more important, since other cities took over parts of the economic and intellectual role.

Djenné, on the inland Niger Delta, was already a prosperous trading city under Mali, and under the decline of Mali’s central authority Djenné gained more autonomy, because the city was rich, relatively well defended behind the annual Niger floods, and had its own ulama tradition that was not directly dependent on Timbuktu’s Sankoré. The Great Mosque of Djenné, although the current building dates from the nineteenth century, stands on foundations that go back to this period, and Tarikh al-Sudan devotes whole chapters to Djenné as a city with its own rulers, its own trading decisions and its own religious scholars.

Walata, in the northwestern corner of Mali’s old territory, followed a similar trajectory, since Ibn Battuta ﵀ would visit this city and describe it as prosperous but at the same time somewhat uncertain under Mali’s authority, while the local Berber and Mande elite had to constantly negotiate with nearby Tuareg factions, so that when Mali withdrew, Walata became definitively Berber-dominant.

Gao, as we have already indicated, became the capital of Songhay, and within Mali’s old territory smaller centers also arose that developed their own madrasas, their own Qadis and their own trade networks, so that the ulama class that Musa had trained was no longer bound to Niani and served wherever there was still wealth and protection.

This is an important correction to the “fall of Mali” narrative, since Mali fell but Islamic West African civilization did not: it reorganized itself, it found new centers and it transferred itself to other carriers. And this is exactly why Songhay, which the next article will treat, did not have to start from zero: it inherited not only territory but also a whole literate, Islamically institutionalized landscape.

The Border Between Then and Now

The Mali Empire does not entirely disappear, since in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a smaller Mali kingdom continues to exist around Niani, under successive Mansas who still bear the title but now control only a fraction of the old territory. Tarikh al-Sudan mentions them and Tarikh al-Fattash mentions them, but they are no longer a factor in the great West African politics, because they are a memory of what was.

The real end of Mali as a political entity comes in the seventeenth century, when the last Mansas are forced to relocate their court because of Fulani and Bambara pressure, so that by 1670 there is no recognizable Mali state anymore and by 1700 the memories are scattered across various local traditions, each preserving their own piece of truth.

But then, and this is the fascinating part, Mali’s legacies survive in structures that outlived Mali itself: Timbuktu, the Djinguereber, Sankoré, the Maliki school, the wangara trading lines, the Mande-speaking communities from Senegal to Ghana, and the stories of Sundiata told around campfires and eventually recorded in the twentieth century by Djibril Tamsir Niane as the Epic of Sundiata. All these things are Mali’s legacy, and they have long outlived the empire.

This is what decline really means: not that everything disappears, but that the political structure that carried everything dissolves, and what remains must henceforth survive without state protection.

Gao Takes the Space Mali Vacates

While Niani in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries slowly subsides, something happens in Gao, since the Songhay, once vassals, become independent, become self-aware and become ambitious, and in 1464 Sunni Ali Ber will ascend the throne and form the springboard for a new West African empire that will take exactly the space Mali is vacating.

This is no tragedy but history, since empires rise and fall, and what matters is what they pass on in their fall to what comes after. Mali passed on to Songhay: Islamic legitimacy as a framework of governance, Maliki law as a legal system, Timbuktu as intellectual capital, Gao as commercial hub, the trans-Saharan trade routes as economic arteries. Songhay would reinvent all this, and more.

But that is the story of another century.

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Sources

• Ibn Khaldun ﵀, Kitab al-ʿIbar: the succession of Musa by Magha and Sulayman, Qasa, Mari Jata ibn Mansa Magha who ruined the empire and squandered its treasure, Musa II and the wazir who usurped his authority, and the sale of the gold boulder, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 145, 150–151, 419.
• Ibn Battuta ﵀, Rihla: the visit to Walata and the capital of Mali in 1352–1353, the miserliness of Mansa Sulayman, the full Friday mosques, the children learning the Qur’an and the uncovered women at court, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 95, 125, 147–148, 158, 160.
• Tarikh al-Fattash, attributed to Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀, on the later mansas of Mali; the Sundiata epic as recorded by Djibril Tamsir Niane, as quoted in Gomez, p. 390.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 65, 95, 112, 125, 145, 147–148, 150–152, 158, 160, 169, 184, 186, 218, 390, 419.
  • pp. 145, 150: Musa’s twenty-five years of rule, 1312–1337; Magha who died soon after taking office, after which the crown fell to Musa’s brother Sulayman, who ruled for twenty-four years; the death of Musa around 737/1337 and of Sulayman around 761/1360, with Magha’s reign possibly lasting four months rather than four years.
  • pp. 150–151: Qasa who ruled for nine months; Mari Jata ibn Mansa Magha, from about 1360 to 1373–1374, a most wicked ruler in Ibn Khaldun ﵀; the cyclical theory of the rise and dissolution of empires; Musa II, who died in 789/1387, whose authority was usurped by his wazir, yet another Mari Jata; Mali continuing into the seventeenth century while Songhay established mastery over the Middle Niger, and the expansion that surpassed its ability to govern.
  • pp. 147–148, 158, 160: Sulayman as a miserly king, measured against Musa’s generosity, and the Sudan who disliked him for it; the possible setback of Musa’s pro-Islamic policies under Maghan the Sorcerer; the full Friday mosque and the fettered children; the disapproval of the uncovered women at court.
  • pp. 95, 125: Ibn Battuta ﵀ in Walata in 1352–1353, the first district of the Sudan with the farba Husayn as the mansa’s deputy, on the fringe of Malian authority, with matrilineal Soninke customs.
  • pp. 184, 186: Sunni Ali who came to power in 869/1464; the waning of Malian authority over Timbuktu and the establishment of the Maghsharan Tuareg over the city in 837/1433–1434 under Akil.
  • pp. 112, 152, 218: the rise of Atlantic markets competing with those of the Sahel; the Portuguese under Henry the Navigator on the Mauritanian coast in the 1440s, drawn by reports of gold in Timbuktu; Elmina reached by 875/1471, a few years after Sunni Ali came to power.
  • pp. 65, 145, 169: the Black Death reaching Egypt toward the end of the 1340s, during Sulayman’s reign; Mali continuing in diminished form well into the seventeenth century; Kangaba as the last refuge of the Malian rulers, reduced to the small state of Minijan.
  • pp. 390, 419: Djibril Tamsir Niane as recorder of the Mande tradition; Ibn Khaldun ﵀ on the sale of a gold boulder of twenty qintars by Mari Jata, a trope already found in al-Bakri ﵀.
• 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), pp. xxxviii, 11–12, 17–19, 31.
  • pp. 11–12 (TS ch. 3): the sultan of Mossi who marched on Timbuktu with a large army during Malian rule, the Malians who fled, the sack and burning of the city and the hundred years of Malian rule that followed, dated by Hunwick to about 1343; the Maghsharan Tuareg under Akil Ag-Amalwal, the Malians who abandoned Timbuktu and Akil who ruled it for forty years.
  • pp. xxxviii, 31 (TS ch. 7): Tuareg rule over Timbuktu from 837/1433–1434 and Sunni Ali from 873/1468–1469; Akil who stayed in the desert camps and left the city to the Timbuktu-koi; Sunni Ali Ber (1464–1492) as the ruler who found old Mali ripe for the taking.
  • pp. 17–19 (TS ch. 5): Jenne as one of the great markets of the Muslims, where the salt of Taghaza and the gold of Bitu meet; the city that becomes an island in the flood from August to February; the sultan who pulled down his palace for the congregational mosque, and the present Great Mosque of 1907.