Mali Empire

The Mali Empire was a West African state that dominated the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, at its height controlling territory across the modern nations of Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Mauritania and Niger. Founded by Sundiata Keita around 1235 after he united several Mandinka chiefdoms and defeated the rival kingdom of Sosso, Mali grew wealthy by controlling access to the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure and the salt trade of the Sahara, taxing the caravan routes that carried both commodities north to the Mediterranean world. The empire reached its greatest extent and fame under Mansa Musa in the early fourteenth century, whose pilgrimage to Mecca advertised Mali's wealth across the Islamic world and brought Islamic scholars and architects to its cities, most famously Timbuktu, which grew into a major center of Islamic learning with a scholarly community and manuscript culture that endured for centuries. Mali's power declined from the fifteenth century onward under pressure from internal succession disputes and the rising Songhai Empire, which absorbed most of its former territory, though smaller Mali successor states persisted into the seventeenth century.