Mansa Musa

Mansa Musa was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa, whose reign brought the empire to its greatest territorial extent and made it famous across the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world for its wealth in gold. Mali controlled major trans-Saharan trade routes and the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure, and Mansa Musa is best remembered for his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, undertaken with a retinue reported by contemporary Arabic sources to number in the thousands and to include enormous quantities of gold, so much that his spending in Cairo along the way reportedly depressed the value of gold in Egypt for years afterward. The pilgrimage brought Mali to the attention of Mediterranean mapmakers, and Mansa Musa appears, seated on a throne holding a large gold nugget, on the Catalan Atlas of 1375, one of the most influential medieval maps of the world. On his return he brought architects and scholars from the Islamic world to Mali, expanding Islamic learning and architecture in cities including Timbuktu, whose Sankore mosque and the scholarly community around it date substantially from his reign and that of his immediate successors. His exact death date is not firmly established, with different sources placing it between 1332 and 1337.