Dan Snow's History Hit - Mansa Musa: History's Wealthiest Man?

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Mansa Musa's wealth is a thing of legend. It's impossible to know exactly how much he was worth, but he himself spread rumours that gold grew like a plant within the Mali Empire. When he embarked on a storied pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he gave away so much gold in Egypt that the value of the ore depreciated. But there was much more to the ninth Mansa of Mali than his great wealth - under his reign the empire prospered as a trade hub between West Africa and the Mediterranean World and a centre of Islamic culture and learning.Dan is joined by Sirio Canós-Donnay, an archaeologist specialising in the pre-colonial states of West Africa. She charts the course of the Mali Empire from its founding by the legendary warrior-king Sundiata Keita, to the zenith of its power under Mansa Musa.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. A few years ago I was lucky enough to make a flying visit into Timbuktu. It had recently been recaptured by Malian international forces from Al-Qaeda. It was still dangerous and unstable. The airport that I landed in had recently been blown up so we had to pick our way through a little terminal building that was just shattered debris. I was lucky enough to go and see the astonishing mosque there, the Jingari Bir, the Grand Mosque, and I got to see so many of the ancient manuscripts, well, the medieval and early modern manuscripts that make up this astonishing collection of literature, of poetry, of science, of history. Now, the mosque that I saw was built by one of

the most fabled people in history, Mansa Musa. He ruled over the great Malian Empire, far bigger than the current state of Mali, stretching right down to the sea, right down to the West African coast, encompassing several of today's modern nations. And Mansa Musa became famous in North African, Middle Eastern, and Western historiography as the richest man in the world. Perhaps people say the richest man who ever lived, because in the Marlin Empire, gold, well, there was so much of it, people sort of said it was like a plant, it grew on trees. Because it was so common, it was not as valuable as it was in other parts of the world. Mansa Musa travelled to Cairo, dispensing vast amounts of wealth,

then went on the Hajj, went to Mecca, went back. And we also know a lot about the Malian Empire because it was visited by one of the great travellers of the period as well. Mansa Musa appears on a mapamundia, a medieval world map. It's from, we think, the 1370s and it's in Catalan and it's described as the best medieval map ever produced. And there, in West Africa, you get a depiction of Mansa Musa, a dark-skinned figure with a golden crown, a golden orb and a scepter sitting on a mighty throne. The caption calls him the Black Lord. He's sovereign of the land of the black people.

The king is the richest and noblest of all these lands due to the abundance of gold that's extracted from his lands. In this podcast, we'll be learning all about Mansims and the Mali Empire. We have got the perfect guide, Dr. Sirio Canos-Doné. She's an archaeologist at the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council. She's been on lots of digs in modern-day Mali. She's an expert in the Sahel, the Sahelian West Africa, and in particular the Mali Empire, and its really remarkable, important relationship with Europe. So let's hear what she has to say about one of the world's great medieval empires. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Syrio, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. A pleasure. Thank you for having me. Tell me about the Mali Empire.

Well, it's the best and most important empire most people have never heard of. Yeah, exactly. So the Mali Empire is a defining feature of West African history, but also, I would argue, European history, since our histories are deeply interconnected. It starts in the 13th century, approximately, and it lasts as an empire until the 15th, 16th century, when it starts to contract and becomes a small kingdom, back to what it was before it became an empire, until sort of 17th century, when we lose track of it. It's based around the current culture of Mali, its name after it, but it was much bigger than current Mali.

It went all the way from Mali to the coast and further south to Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast north as well. So it was absolutely massive. It's famous mostly because, in European sources at least, because its association with gold. Most of the gold that was traded to Europe, that arrived to Europe at this point, was traded directly by the Malian emperor. However, gold wasn't as important locally, but we often get the outsider's perspective. And it was extremely complex, and its influence is still felt today,

culturally and politically all across the region. And so it's got gold. It also straddles this fascinating geographic divide, doesn't it, from the desert, where the camels meet the elephants. So, you know, it's Saharan Africa meets central and then into southern Africa, isn't it, from the deserts, where the camels meet the elephants. So, you know, it's Saharan Africa meets Central and then into Southern Africa, isn't it? So it acts as a bridge, does it? It does, very much contains both elephants and camels. Now Mali's landlocked, but it would have had access to the sea, would it? Yeah, so the small kingdom that gave rise to

Mali was located in what's now Southern Mali, but it conquered all the way to the coast, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau. And eventually that part became involved also in the Atlantic trade and not just the Sub-Saharan trade. Are Europeans trading directly with this empire? Would Malian merchants and sailors and travellers have been seen and known in the Mediterranean basin or is it being done through intermediaries, a bit more like, well, perhaps like the Silk Route? So during Mali's apogee, the main trade was through the Saharan desert, so it's Trans-Saharan trade. And this was done by a range of traders from the Muslim world.

Muslim is what they all shared in common. So we must think of Mali as part of that North African, Southern European, Middle Eastern cultural area that was very much connected. And the traders would have been from all of those parts. So we have evidence of people from Al-Andalus in the court of Mali. We have evidence of Malians in Europe and in the Middle East. So it was a very well-connected cultural area. So if I'm in the 13th century, I've got Edward III knocking around in England. I've got a crisis in France. If I'd travelled south and visited Mali,

how would it have been similar or different in terms of technology, in terms of the role and size of government, the armed forces? Just give me a sense of what this empire would have looked like and felt like. Okay, so in the 13th century, what happens at the very beginning is that there's actually a power void. Because the Ghana Empire, which was the polity that had control of this area from the 11th to the 13th century, has just collapsed. So there's a power gap and there's all kinds of small kingdoms that are trying to assert the power over this whole region.

The one that succeeds is Mali. Mali goes from a small kingdom, as I just explained, to a massive empire all across Sahel and West Africa, established notionally by its founder, Sunjata Keita. Sunjata Keita is a strange figure in that it's a sort of King Arthur of West Africa, in that it combines elements that have historical roots with a whole lot of magical, mystical aspects. So the Sunjata epic is an absolutely amazing story that the day Hollywood or Nollywood or Bollywood or any of them would get their hands on it, it's going to make an absolutely amazing film. Because it's the adventure of this boy that is born of a king of Mali, with Mali still as more kingdom, but of a second wife. It's a wife with strange mystical powers, but a very much a second wife. second wife. He's a wife with strange mystical powers, but a very major second wife. And Sunjat is born disabled initially, but then he learns to walk and becomes a great hunter and warrior that becomes a threat to his brothers. So he gets expelled. He has to fight, he has to flee so he

doesn't get killed, and then goes on a tour of what will become afterwards the Mali Empire, learning to fight and getting a reputation as the great warrior of the region. When his father's kingdom gets attacked by a rival kingdom called the Susu, by the right of Susu kingdom, in this period of power void that I was talking about, Sunjata gets called back, says, please save us, Sunjata. So he comes back and then notionally defeats the evil Sisu king and unites everybody to form the new empire, then sends all his warriors in all directions to conquer.

In all of this history, there's all kinds of transformations and magic, and it's a pretty, pretty wonderful story of music as well. But we know that there's historical bits in it, because a hundred years after this notionally happened, so this happened in the 13th century, the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun mentions Sunjata and mentions bits of this epic. So that's not that

far after it happened. And then we start getting the Sunjata epic as a poem, as an epic narrative. And elements of it are confirmed by other independent sources. So we don't know if everything that's attributed to Sunjata was done by a single man, but elements of it may have. So, okay, so we've got Sunjata or someone very like him

sets up this empire in terms of technology, government, religion. Would it have felt on a par or advance of european culture and civilization at the time very much so so it was well in some ways it did some ways it didn't so it was a massive empire but it actually operated more like a federation it had serious territories that had been conquered and depending on how the conquests had happened they had more or less independence so some some of them, effectively, it was just respected and they had to pay tribute once a year. In other cases, a direct ruler was appointed for each territory.

And once a year, they all gathered at the capital to pay the taxes. We know also, however, that there was, in the same way that the Roman Empire had the Romanization process, there was also a maleficification process, let's say, because you have heard about griots, the bards that sing history across this part of West Africa. Well, the distribution of griots, the current distribution of griots coincides exactly with the limits of Mal Empire.

So there's cultural elements that, and also the speaking of Malinke or Mandinka and all the different variants of it also maps quite well so even though it was a federation with different levels of central control there was a big cultural homogeneity process that followed that conquest okay so that brings us on to mansa musa first of all should we get really let's get let's talk about the myth is he the richest man in history? Well, he's technically the richest person in history. Okay, how do I put this?

Probably. I'm not an economist and I can know how to calculate it. He may not have been the richest Malian emperor, though. He's the one that showed up the day the press was all there, in modern terms, because he went to Cairo at the peak of Mamluk historiography so everybody was there to record what he was doing but we don't know if there might have been early emperors that did the same so perhaps is the cautious answer perhaps that's

very very well done as a historian that's excellent okay so he was perhaps the richest person ever let's come on to his trip to Egypt in a minute. But why were the Marlians so unbelievably rich? Well, the source of wealth was gold. And in the territory, they controlled several really, really productive gold mines that they didn't control directly. They were part of this federation I was talking about. And so the wealth came from tribute and the control over the gold mines. So they taxed everybody who wanted gold, but also obtained the gold from the southern territories. This is from where their international wealth came from. However, it is important to say that gold wasn't as valued in Mali.

Malians had so much gold that what they really valued was copper, for instance. And there's been some recent research tracing copper trade between the Kingdom of Hungary at the time and Mali because that's what the Malians wanted. Value is a relative thing. And in the case,

they valued copper because it was more scarce than gold was. So the richness in terms of prestige internally came from copper. The wealth towards the outside came from gold, but internally it was a very agrarian society where most of taxes were paid in cattle and other products of the fields. So it depends on how you look at wealth and what you consider wealth to be. That's right. We're getting into some difficult terrain here.

So gold is almost a waste product in West Africa at this time. Okay. When does Mansa Musa, how do we know about him? Whereas you say we don't know the names of some of these other king emperors from this empire. So we know of him because he decided in 1324 to the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. He wasn't the first Malay emperor to do it.

There had been several before, but we only have the names. We know nothing about the trip. And he showed up, as I said, at the peak of Mamluk historiography. So his visit to Cairo in particular, we know less about the Mecca bit, but he stopped for three months in Cairo. And everyone was absolutely astonished at the wealth of this man that they knew nothing about until then. So he showed up with a caravan of several thousand people.

And he left enough gold in Cairo that he devalued the price of gold for over a decade. So it was an exactly troubling night. You listen to Dan Snow's history and we're talking about Mansa Musa all coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So he just dumped so much gold on the city that actually there was, well, I guess there was inflation or rather the value of gold went down because it became so common. That's crazy.

there was inflation or rather the value of gold went down because it became so common. That's crazy. And was this, with the Mamluks who governed Egypt at the time, were the Marlians known or was this rather an exotic figure just turning up from out of the sands of the Sahara? They knew there were wealthy kingdoms at the south of the caravan routes, but they actually referred to him as the Emperor of the Kroor, which was a different kingdom in the area. So the knowledge of the geography and political geography of the region wasn't that great. So then it was some kind of Sudanese king. But the name Mali only became better known after he arrived. Initially, they thought he was from a slightly different place.

So there was some confusion. He left the Mali imprint quite deeply in Cairo, though. So there was some confusion. He left the Mal imprint quite deeply in Cairo though, so that changed after him. Again, I'm asking because we're just on the verge of a period in which the image of Africa and wealth and status and power is about to be completely inverted. At this point, was he seen as a powerful, impressive, sophisticated foreign king? I mean, was it something to be admired? Very much so. But this happens with most African kingdoms at the time. If you look at the correspondence between the king of Aragon and the emperor of Ethiopia at the time, they talk of each other as my brother, the emperor of Ethiopia. So throughout all this period, there was very much a perception of African kings as the equals of the European ones,

or even like higher up because in Ethiopia, there was an emperor, not a king. So the Arab world was at this time exactly that as well. It was our brothers, the emperors. There was an element of racism, which had existed already, particularly in North Africa, but quickly superseded by the amount of wealth they brought. So he goes on the Hajj to Mecca, a journey that's an enormous journey for someone to take in that period, I guess. He's traveling with, well, we're told with 80 camels with 300 pounds of gold each and enslaved people handing out gold on the route. I mean, huge. I

mean, an army really as an entourage. I mean, this is one of the more remarkable progresses across North Africa and Asia in history, I suppose. Well, we don't have exact numbers because, again, there's different reports of how many people traveled. We know there was a lot of military because several North African princes asked him for help in military campaigns. And some of the Meccan accounts, there's a couple of French historians that have recently been working on new sources. Because for a long time, we relied only on the Cairo sources,

but it turns out people in America also wrote about him. So this is relatively recent news, and they write about the amount of military he brought, and they give the number at around 15,000 people. Whether that's an exaggeration for effect, because your historical chronicle looks nicer, it has big numbers, or whether it was actually the amount of people that came with him,

we don't really know. But it was a big delegation and it involved an important military element. So he eventually goes home. And what I'm so struck by, we're so lucky, aren't we? We have the sources that refer to his journey, his progress in North Africa and the Middle East. But also we have one of the great travellers in history, this Arab scholar, Ibn Battuta, who, he travels back to Mali as well. So we get this second great

source of information about this man and his empire. Well, there's two parts. He, in Mecca, he starts recruiting people, because he wants his court to be the big cosmopolitan centre. So he recruits, for instance, al- Al Saheli, which is a guy from Granada who's a poet from a relatively posh family that's doing effectively the Al-Andalus Grand Tour at the time. And he's in Mecca and he knows his literature

and he gets hired as effectively an interior decorator for the court of Mansa Musa. So he travels back. The trip back is actually quite difficult because they almost all die of thirst going back from Mecca to Cairo. But some sources say they die of cold, which is a bit strange. And they get assaulted by Bedouins in the desert, and they just make it with no money to Cairo, where Bantamon has to borrow a lot of money, having spent all of it,

and then the debt collectors travel with him as well back to Mali to get the debt paid. So he arrives, he gets his new court decorated by the Andalusian poet, and eventually he dies. And he's doing the reign of his successor, Mansa Suleiman, who is also his brother, that Ibn Battuta, the traveler, arrives. So Ibn Battuta had decided to travel throughout Islam, which is the title of his book, and the one bit of Islam he hadn't traveled yet was Mali. So he arrives in 1352, so it's about 30 years later, with Mansa Suleiman,

the successor of Mansa Musa. And that's where we get all the information about the court. And Imbatut is a really interesting one because he did have perspective. He obviously saw the things he was witnessing from his point of view of a man of North African origin with a very specific worldview. But he can compare between all different places in the world that he visited. And he was very, very impressed by Mali in particular.

He gives us a lot of information about the court rituals. And this reception hall that the Andalusian had built for Mansa Musa, he describes all the artists covered in gold and silver and how every time there was a guest at court, the drums were beaten and then 300 slaves would enter with bows and arrows. So quite an elaborate court protocol for royal receptions. It's an Arab writer and traveller observing the Marlian court in buildings built by, well, we could say Spanish or Andalusian architects. I mean,

this is, we think of ourselves as being in a globalised world, but this is globalisation. It very much was. And in the north, in Timbuktu and in Djene, there were world-leading universities at the time. One of the most moving things that recently happened in the area was when Al-Qaeda took Djene and Timbuktu and all the librarians had to smuggle the medieval manuscripts out. And these medieval manuscripts, some of them, they were mostly 17th century, but with elements referring to earlier periods as well. So Mali at this time was as global as it gets.

In some of the trading entrepots, there's porcelain from China, as well as the gets. In some of the trading entrepots, there's porcelain from China, as well as the Hungarian copper. This was a place that knew the world and there wasn't an isolated backwater, quite the opposite. Do we get a sense through this source of how, again, how this empire works? I mean, it's said to be a place where the citizens, the subjects, had certain rights. Is there anything that he finds sort of noteworthy about the politics of the organisation of the empire? The thing with the Arab sources is that they're interested in certain things. So we've assumed that trade was far more important. It was for Mali just because we've seen it through the eyes of traders from outside. And similar things happen with Ibn Battuta.

He's interested in the Islam and how proper or improper the version of Islam is. So there's a lot of emphasis on that. And he really likes court protocol. So he tells us a lot about what each person fashioned. He tells us about the amazing novel ways in which they tied the turbans. So we have a disproportionate amount of turban information, but not very much about how ordinary people lived in the empire, sadly. With the Marlian Empire, do you think there was one,

is there one great capital city from which power emanates? Or do you think court is transitory? Is it peripatetic? Is it moving around all the time? So that's one of the great archaeological mysteries about the Mali Empire that has fascinated scholars for 100 years. There's the fact that we haven't found yet Mali's capital. We have read about it in Batuta.

We've read about the golden and silver arches and all this court paraphernalia, but we haven't found where this was. And I think the first hypothesis to where Mali's capital was started in the late 19th century, and the debate is still ongoing, despite the amount of archaeology that has been done, which is quite substantial for West Africa. But the focus has been on the big trading cities,

like Gao and Timbuktu and Djenne. I mean, none of them we have found evidence of it being the capital. So what a lot of us are suggesting is that maybe that's the problem, that we're looking for the capital. And what they had was a series of power centers that were a lot more ephemeral, without being roving or pre-pathetic, because what Imbertukh describes is very much a permanent settlement. But something that oral traditions convey quite strongly is that kingdoms are not articulated around capitals, but what they call mansadubu.

Mansadubu literally means king's town. So that means a king may have more than one town, and the power center may change with the king as well. So what we think now is that because archaeologists tend to gravitate toward the big sites, like the massive, highly stratified cities that has privileged the commercial centers, which are there regardless of state. States come and go, but the trading cities are almost eternally there in the landscape, whereas political centers are a lot more female. And as a result of that, we have a few possible candidates. I participated a few years ago in excavations in a site called Sorotomo, which has the right dates. Niani is the one that's often cited as the capital, but it has the wrong

radio cabin dates. So it may have been one of the late power centers when the empire is starting to crumble. There's a few more north of Segu. There's a few colleagues that are working. Dada Keita, who's director of the Malian Archaeological Museum, is working there. Nick Gestrick, who's at Frankfurt, is also trying to figure out. The sad bit is that Mali's situation of the current country,

not the empire, is quite difficult safety-wise. So not even the Malian archaeologists can work there. But as soon as the situation gets sorted, I hope it's soon because it's an amazing country that doesn't deserve this, there's so much archaeology to test. It's such a wonderful place. I can't wait to go back there. Can you tell me why this giant Malian empire,

why it fragmented, why it fell from power? So it's a range of circumstances that happen at the same time. As I explained, Mali was a sort of confederation. The central power was strong, everyone was very much in control. As soon as a central power weakens, people go back to being independent. So there's one element, which is Mali gets cut from the Trans-Saharan trade in the north by the rise of the new Songhai empire or kingdom. So all of the wealth that was coming through Trans-Saharan trade stops because somebody else is controlling that. There's also the loss of control over the gold mines. There's also the rise of Atlantic trade. Suddenly, there's a different source of trade. You don't have to go via the desert. You can go via the sea. And that's when

Mali's coastal province called Kabul gets really, really rich because it's the one that starts trading with all the boats that arrive to the coast and then doesn't pass on that to Mali. So each province, bit by bit, Mali starts losing all of its territories. So it goes back to being the small kingdom in central Mali, what was in the beginning. You've already mentioned a few, but this empire leaves a legacy that endures to this day enormously so the first president of independent mali the current country surname was kater which was sunjata surnames sunjata was sunjata kater so there's no coincidence that the rulers of the mali empire became also the rulers of independent mali at the level of music as i said, the griots, which are oral historians and musicians, are the defining element of Sahelian West African culture.

And still today, some of the biggest names in music all across the region, linguistically as well. And also in terms of political traditions, they're quite sturdy. There's some court protocols that we first hear about Ghana there's one about sprinkling dust on top of your head as a sign of respect for the king that then we see in Mali that then we see in 19th century Kabul the Atlantic province and some of them carry all the way to today so the cultural legacy of Mali is absolutely enormous and survived even the colonial period. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming and talking to me all about this remarkable empire and one of its very, very

wealthy rulers. Thank you very much. you