Mansa Musa

The richest man the medieval world ever knew, and at the same time the most sparing with his own word. A single sentence, about Abu Bakr II setting out across the ocean, is virtually all we have heard him say in his own voice.

Life

Musa was born around 1280, probably in Niani, as a member of the Keita dynasty and a descendant of Sundiata. His exact lineage within the dynasty cannot be fully traced: al-Umari ﵀ writes that he was not a son but a nephew of his predecessor. Before he became Mansa he was wakil, deputy, and that detail matters, because when Abu Bakr II set out around 1311 on his expedition across the Atlantic Ocean and did not return, Musa stepped into a role that had been assigned to him as regent. According to the sources that transition took place without struggle; the Gbara confirmed him, and the empire did not tilt.

Between 1312 and 1324 lie twelve quiet years that were not quiet. Musa consolidated the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure, anchored Malian rule more firmly across the Niger Bend, and, according to al-Umari ﵀'s informants in Cairo, meticulously prepared the pilgrimage that would make his name. In July 1324 his caravan arrived in Cairo: sixty thousand men according to some sources, thousands in any case, twelve thousand slaves each carrying a gold bar, eighty camels loaded with gold dust of more than a hundred pounds per animal. The numbers vary by source; the fact of an unparalleled caravan does not vary anywhere.

He stayed three months in Cairo, where the governor, Amir Ibn Amir Hajib, received him. He at first refused to meet sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ﵀ because he would not bow before him; in the end a diplomatic formula was found. He distributed gold in the markets with a generosity that disrupted Cairene prices, and the dinar, according to al-Umari ﵀, would remain at a lower value for twelve years than it had been before. Then on to Medina and to Mecca, where he performed the tawaf in 1325, and back via Cairo with a small entourage of scholars and the Granadan-Andalusian architect Abu Ishaq as-Sahili ﵀, whose work would redraw the architecture of Mali.

On the return journey, historically documented by the Tarikh al-Sudan, a unit of his army under the command of general Sagmandir captured the city of Gao. In 1327 Musa had the Djinguereber Mosque built in Timbuktu, traditionally designed by as-Sahili, with mud bricks and reinforced wood. He died around 1337, and his son Maghan I succeeded him.

Faith and culture

Musa was unmistakably Muslim, of a different caliber than his predecessors. He steered explicitly toward a Maliki court, without the syncretic tolerance of those before him and without their balancing between dalilu and fiqh. At the same time he was too shrewd to dismantle his Mandé world: the Donson Ton, the hunters’ brotherhood that under Sundiata had been the military heart, was marginalized but not destroyed under Musa, and the griots kept singing, though they now sang alongside the qadis. The court became bilingual in a deeper sense, Mandé and Arabic, jeli and faqih.

His investment in Timbuktu was not decorative. The Sankoré school, which under his successors grew into a madrasa, the manuscript culture that took shape there, and the fact that in the century after his death Timbuktu drew an international ulama (Ibn Battuta ﵀, later the Fulbe scholars, eventually Ahmad Baba ﵀) all begin here. The seed of Sankoré was sown by Musa.

Ibn Kathir ﵀, writing from Damascus, calls him al-malik al-ashraf, the sublime king, a title generally reserved for first-rank Mamluk sultans. The honorific was no accident; it was recognition that Mali, under Musa, had become a full province of the ummah, not a distant curiosity.

Legacy

Musa has lingered in European memory as “the richest man ever”. That Western reduction boils him down to gold, while his real legacy is threefold.

First, institutional. Mali under Musa annexed Gao, consolidated the eastern Niger Bend, and extended its grip on the trans-Saharan trade routes as far as Walata and Taghaza. Around 1330 the empire spanned an area from the Atlantic coast to beyond Timbuktu, with an administrative layer of farbas who answered to Niani. This institutional framework remained, even when the dynasty later weakened, the blueprint for the Songhai that followed.

Second, architectural and intellectual. The Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu still stands, attacked by Ansar Dine in 2012 and restored since. As-Sahili’s work and the building tradition he inaugurated formed the aesthetic language of the Niger Bend, and the libraries of Timbuktu, which became world-famous as manuscript heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, find their foundation in the patronage that Musa began.

Third, cartographic. In 1375 the Majorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques drew on his Catalan Atlas a black sovereign in the middle of West Africa, gold bar in hand, with the caption: Musse Melly, seignor des negres de Guinea. For the first time in the European geographical imagination Mali took a place, and that place was the place of a wealthy, venerable sovereign, not a servile or barbaric figure. That image held until the seventeenth century, when the Atlantic slave trade would undermine it. Musa’s image on European maps was, centuries before Hegel, a counter-image to what Hegel would claim about Africa.

This yields an arithmetic correction. The world from which the trans-Atlantic deportations drew was not stateless, scriptless or impoverished; it was a world in which the Mansa of Mali was named as far as Damascus, in which his caravan disrupted the price of gold in Cairo, and in which his mosques still stand.

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Uncertainties:

• The birth year of c. 1280 is an estimate based on regnal years and may be off by five years.
• The number of followers in the Hajj caravan is given in the sources as 60,000 to 80,000, probably impressively exaggerated, though the order of magnitude is real.
• The year of death of c. 1337 rests principally on Ibn Khaldun ﵀; some modern historians place it slightly earlier.
• The authorship of the Djinguereber Mosque by as-Sahili is traditional but not beyond doubt, and more recent architectural historians qualify his role.

Sources

• Shihab ad-Din al-Umari ﵀, Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar: Musa’s own account, recorded from the mouth of the governor of Old Cairo Abu 'l-Hasan Ali ibn Amir Hajib, of his predecessor’s Atlantic expedition and his own deputyship, the price of gold that never rose above 22 dirhams after the visit and the Maliki jurists he took home, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 100–101, 107, 121.
• Ibn Khaldun ﵀, Kitab al-Ibar: Musa as the son of Manden Bukari, Sundiata’s younger brother; the reign of twenty-five years, 712 to 737 AH, 1312 to 1337, and the succession of his son Mansa Magha; the general Saghmanja as the conqueror of Gao; the plastered domed building that as-Sahili ﵀ built for him, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 99–100, 138, 145.
• Ibn Kathir ﵀, al-Bidaya wan-Nihaya: the arrival in Cairo on 25 Rajab 724, 18 July 1324, and the title al-Malik al-Ashraf Musa ibn Abi Bakr, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 100, 104.
• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh al-Sudan, chapter 3 on Kankan Musa: the sixty thousand men and five hundred slaves with golden staffs, the route through Walata and Tuwat, the submission of the Songhay, the mosque at Gao, the taking of Timbuktu and the minaret of the Great Mosque, in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 9–11.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 99–101, 104–107, 113, 116–118, 121, 123–125, 138, 145, 150, 158–159.
  • pp. 99–101, 104–105: the shift from the house of Sundiata to that of Manden Bukari and the waning influence of the hunters; Musa as a young man in 1324 and the twelve years between his accession and his arrival in Cairo, largely spent preparing the Hajj.
  • pp. 106–107, 113: the figures of the caravan, sixty thousand men and five hundred slaves from the Tarikh al-Sudan, eighty loads of gold dust in Ibn Khaldun ﵀ and a hundred in al-Umari ﵀; the price of gold in Cairo; the dating of the Hajj to 724/1324 by all external sources.
  • pp. 116–118, 121: the refusal to kiss the ground before sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, with the Maliki madhhab as its ground, and the formula found; the departure for Mecca after three months, on 28 Shawwal 724; the Hajj and the visit to the tomb of the Prophet ﷺ in Medina; the return with books of Maliki law, Maliki jurists and the Granadan poet Abu Ishaq as-Sahili ﵀.
  • pp. 123–125, 138: the incorporation of Gao on the return journey and the submission of the Songhay; the mosque with mihrab outside Gao; the building of the Djinguereber, the Great Mosque of Timbuktu, with its minaret; Walata as the northern boundary of Mali with a farba as the mansa’s deputy; the domed building of as-Sahili ﵀.
  • pp. 145, 150, 158–159: the reign of twenty-five years, the death around 737/1337 and the succession of Mansa Magha; the investment in Timbuktu and the arrival of Sudanese ulama; the Catalan Atlas of 1375, attributed to Cresques Abraham of Majorca, as the image of Mali as the land of gold.
• 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. lviii, 9–11.
  • pp. lviii, 9–11 (TS ch. 3): Kankan Musa as a pious and just ruler; the mosque outside Gao and the taking of Timbuktu; the lodging with Siraj al-Din al-Kuwayk outside Cairo and the loans; the tomb of as-Sahili ﵀ in Timbuktu, the visit of Ibn Battuta ﵀ in 754/1353 and the minaret of the Great Mosque that Kankan Musa had built; the Sankoré mosque as the principal seat of teaching in Timbuktu.
• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh es-Soudan, trans. Octave Houdas, Ernest Leroux, Paris 1900 (Arabic and French), pp. 13–16: the French text of the same chapter, with the sixty thousand men, the mosque at Gao, the lodging with Siraj al-Din and the minaret of Timbuktu.