Mansa Musa and the gold nobody could count

A journey that put Mali on the map

In 1324 the ruler of the Mali Empire left his kingdom for Mecca.[1] Mansa Musa made his pilgrimage between 1324 and 1325, a journey of about 2,700 miles.[1]

He reached the outskirts of Cairo in July 1324 and camped for three days beside the Pyramids of Giza before crossing the Nile into the city.[1] There he met the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad, who expected him to bow. Musa at first refused, and then did so, saying he was bowing for God alone.[1]

He stayed in Cairo for three months and left on 18 October with the official pilgrim caravan to Mecca.[1]

1. 1324Musa and his entourage reach Cairo in July.[1]
2. 18 Oct 1324He leaves Cairo with the official caravan for Mecca.[1]
3. 1324–25The whole pilgrimage, about 2,700 miles.[1]
4. probably 1337Death. The sources disagree: calculations from the reign lengths give 1332, and the most likely date, accepted by many scholars, is 1337.[1]

How much gold? Nobody knows

The chroniclers who wrote about the journey give very different numbers for his caravan and for the gold it carried, and modern historians treat those numbers as rhetorical rather than statistical.[1]

One later Arabic account says his procession included more than 12,000 attendants, each carrying a bar of gold, and 80 camels each carrying between 23 and 136 kilograms of gold dust.[1] That range is so wide that the article calls it a literary convention, not a measurement.[1]

This is why the claim, repeated in many online articles, that he was the richest person who ever lived is hard to defend. Historians such as Hadrien Collet argue that his wealth cannot be calculated accurately.[1] Estimates that he carried as much as 18 tons of gold, sometimes turned into billions of dollars, all come from the same chain of Arabic reports, not from independent counts. Historians regard turning them into modern money as unsound.[1]

One more thing makes the numbers shakier: Musa himself spread the rumour that gold grew like a plant in his kingdom.[1]

Where the wealth came from

Mali's wealth came principally from controlling and taxing the trade in salt from the north and in gold panned and mined in Bambuk and Bure to the south.[1] It is estimated that two thirds of the gold circulating in the medieval Mediterranean came from West Africa.[1]

The wealth came from trade and tribute rather than from direct control of the goldfields, and the gold Musa took on pilgrimage probably represented years of accumulated tribute.[1]

The idea of a fabulously rich West African king is older than Musa by more than three centuries: in 951 the geographer Ibn Hawqal wrote that the king of Ghana was the wealthiest king on earth.[1]

What happened in Cairo

The story goes that Musa's gift-giving in Cairo pushed down the price of gold. The chronicler al-Umari said that a mithqal of gold, worth 25 silver dirhams before Musa arrived, fell below 22 dirhams afterwards and stayed there for at least twelve years.[1]

Not every historian agrees that this was a crisis: Warren Schultz has argued that the fall was well within the normal swings in the price of gold in Mamluk Egypt.[1]

The return journey went badly. Many of the Malian pilgrims died of cold, hunger or bandit raids, and Musa ran out of money. He had to resell what he had bought in Cairo and borrow from merchants. Some accounts say the lenders were never fully repaid.[1]

How we know what we know

Much of what is known about Musa comes from Arabic writers, above all al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun, who wrote after the pilgrimage and learned about him from officials he had befriended in Cairo.[1] More comes from two seventeenth-century manuscripts written in Timbuktu, the Tarikh Ibn al-Mukhtar and the Tarikh al-Sudan.[1]

Mali's own oral tradition, kept by the jeliw (singular jeli), also called griots, says relatively little about him. Some of them criticise him for abandoning tradition, and some say he wasted Mali's wealth.[1]

This matters for the idea of a golden age: the perception may partly reflect that his reign is the best recorded by Arabic sources, not that he was necessarily richer or stronger than other rulers of Mali.[1]