45 Fun Facts About Mansa Musa

Besides gold, Mansa Musa's empire grew rich taxing the trade in which mineral from the Sahara?

Salt was dug in thick slabs at desert mines such as Taghaza, where even the houses were built of salt blocks, and a camel-load fetched far more gold in Mali than at the desert's edge.

What does the title 'Mansa' mean in the Mandé language?

Ruler or king is the usual translation: a visitor to Mali in 1352 simply glossed mansa as 'sultan', while modern books often promote Musa to 'emperor'.

Mansa Musa's personal name is the Islamic form of which biblical prophet's name?

Moses is Musa in Arabic. His brother, who later held the same throne, was a Sulayman, the Arabic Solomon, and one visitor to Mali called him a miser beside the open-handed Musa.

In oral tradition Musa is called Kanku Musa; what does the prefix signify by Mandé custom?

It is his mother's name: Kanku Musa means 'Musa, son of Kanku'. A Timbuktu chronicle spelled it Kankan, which is why many older histories call him Kankan Musa.

Which seashells served as small change in the markets of Mansa Musa's empire?

Cowrie shells did the buying and selling in Mali's towns, a visitor noted in the 1350s, even though the money cowry is a shell of the far-off Indian Ocean.

What reportedly happened in Cairo after Mansa Musa's lavish gift-giving there?

Gold's price fell for years: he handed out so much that a writer visiting Egypt about twelve years later found the metal still cheaper than before the caravan came.

Which of these modern countries lay partly inside Mansa Musa's Mali Empire?

Senegal and the future Mali even shared a short-lived state in 1959 and 1960, the Mali Federation, named after the old empire; when Senegal walked out, its partner kept the name.

Where did Musa's entourage camp for three days before crossing the Nile into Cairo?

By the Pyramids of Giza the caravan camped three days before crossing the Nile; Musa then had to be coaxed into calling on the sultan, protesting that he had come for the pilgrimage and nothing else.

Told to kiss the ground before Cairo's sultan, Musa refused, then said his bow was meant for whom?

God, who created him, was the one he bowed to, Musa announced, and only then went forward; the sultan half rose to greet him, seated him at his side and later sent robes of honour and horses.

Which Tunis-born historian, writing decades after Musa's death, is a main source for the reigns of Mali's mansas?

Ibn Khaldun pieced together his list of mansas from informants he met in North Africa, yet one dating of Musa's death still comes from counting back through the reign lengths he wrote down.

Later Arabic accounts put how many enslaved people in Mansa Musa's pilgrimage caravan?

12,000 is the usual figure, inside a caravan put at 60,000 people in all, though the chroniclers' totals vary so widely that historians read them as rhetoric rather than a headcount.

What did each of the 500 slaves who walked ahead of Musa on his pilgrimage reportedly carry?

A gold staff apiece, by the usual telling, with Musa on horseback behind them; the parade so impressed Cairo that a visitor twelve years later found people still singing his praises.

Whom did Musa leave in charge of Mali while he was away on the hajj?

His son Muhammad is the regent one early account names; others name Maghan, the son who went on to succeed Musa and is credited with four years on the throne before an uncle followed him.

By Musa's own account, what became of the king before him, whose throne he inherited?

He sailed into the Atlantic with some 2,000 ships to find the ocean's far shore, Musa told his hosts in Cairo, and was never seen again; Musa, left behind as deputy, simply stayed on as king.

How did Cairo's merchants reportedly treat the free-spending pilgrims in Musa's caravan?

They raised their prices and, by one Cairo official's account, made incalculable profits from the caravan in buying and selling, giving and taking.

What befell Musa's party on the way back from Mecca?

They ran out of money and had to borrow from Cairo's merchants at steep interest, an odd fate for a king famed for his gold; by some accounts the lenders were never repaid in full.

The poet al-Sahili, whom Musa brought home from the pilgrimage, was a native of which city in Muslim Spain?

Granada was his birthplace. He settled in Mali and directed the building of a royal audience hall; tradition also credits him with Timbuktu's great mosque, a claim scholars now doubt.

Besides Timbuktu, which river-trading city to the east did Musa add to the Mali Empire?

Gao submitted as Musa passed through on his way home, says a Timbuktu chronicle; another account has one of his generals take it while he was away, which historians find likelier for so strong a city.

Which mosque in Timbuktu, still standing, is traditionally attributed to Mansa Musa?

Djinguereber, the Great Mosque, went up after Musa came home from Mecca and has been rebuilt many times since; in 2012 armed conflict put it, with the rest of old Timbuktu, on UNESCO's danger list.

Apart from its limestone minaret, Musa's great mosque in Timbuktu is built almost entirely from what?

Earth, straw and wood are nearly all there is to it, so the mosque survives only by constant repair: it was rebuilt and enlarged in the 1570s and has been patched many times since.

Which institution in Timbuktu was restaffed under Musa with jurists, astronomers and mathematicians?

It drew Muslim scholars from across Africa and the Middle East; his palace has vanished but the university and mosque survive.

A 1352 visitor to Mali's court described an instrument of reeds with small gourds beneath; what was he hearing?

Balafon is the answer: on feast days the mansa's interpreter took a chair before him and played it while chanting a poem in praise of his master's battles and brave deeds.

Which metal was so prized in sub-Saharan Africa that it was traded for gold?

Copper was dug at Takedda in the desert and carried south in bars to be swapped for gold, at rates a modern trader would think absurdly generous to the copper seller.

At Musa's accession, Mali consisted largely of the territory of which earlier empire, then its vassal?

Ghana, the older empire, lay in what is now Mauritania and Mali, hundreds of miles from the modern country of Ghana, which simply borrowed the famous name.

Money magazine's 2015 ranking of history's richest people put Mansa Musa first and which Roman emperor second?

Augustus was priced at about $4.6 trillion, having for a while personally owned all of Egypt, yet the magazine still ranked Musa above him as 'richer than anyone could describe'.

The Marinid sultans, with whom Musa exchanged embassies, were based in which North African land?

Morocco's Marinid sultan took the city of Tlemcen in 1337 and Musa sent envoys to congratulate him; by one account Musa had died before the reply could reach Mali.

What became of the Madugu, the palace Musa built for himself in Timbuktu?

No trace of it remains, though the mud mosque he founded in the same city still stands, kept alive by seven centuries of repairs and rebuilding.

Which famous North African traveller visited Mali in 1352, during the reign of Musa's brother Sulayman?

Ibn Battuta arrived expecting robes and money from the king; the welcome gift turned out to be three loaves of bread, a piece of fried beef and a gourd of sour curds, and he burst out laughing.

What kind of storytellers preserve the Mandé oral tradition?

Oral tradition says relatively little about Musa, and some griots regard him as having wasted Mali's wealth.

Who founded the Mali Empire around 1235, defeating the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté?

Sundiata Keita, by tradition a boy who could not walk and was driven into exile, came back to beat the Sosso and found an empire; Musa was his grandson or great-nephew.

In Timbuktu, by then a city of scholars, which imported goods were said to earn merchants the most profit?

Handwritten books, carried across the desert from North Africa, brought more profit than any other merchandise, a traveller's account of the early 1500s reports, two centuries after Musa began paying scholars to move there.

In which strategy game series can players lead Mali as Mansa Musa, swimming in gold but slow to build?

Civilization VI added Mali under Mansa Musa in its 2019 Gathering Storm expansion, turning the legend into rules: his mines yield less production but his desert cities and trade routes pour out gold.

What did the traveller who toured Mali in 1352 single out as one of its people's finest qualities?

Their safety from robbers amazed him: neither traveller nor resident had anything to fear, he wrote, and no people hated injustice more, though he grumbled that their king was a miser.

Which 1375 map, made by Cresques Abraham, famously depicts Mansa Musa holding a gold nugget?

The Catalan Atlas labels him 'Musse Melly' and calls him the richest and noblest lord of those lands because of the gold dug from his soil; it never says the richest man in the world.

Cresques Abraham, who made the celebrated 1375 world map, was a Jewish cartographer from which island?

Majorca had a celebrated school of mapmakers whose most famous members were Jewish, like Cresques; his son Jehuda worked on the great map with him and went on selling charts to the king of Aragon.

Cresques Abraham's 1375 world map sat in a foreign king's library by 1380; which country holds it now?

France has had it almost since the ink dried: a French royal library catalogue of 1380 already describes it, and it is still in Paris today, at the Bibliothèque nationale.

Cresques Abraham's 1375 world map, famed for its portrait of Musa, also bears the first known ornate example of which map feature?

A compass rose drawn as an ornament appears on it for the first time: earlier sea charts made do with bare direction lines and plain symbols, and later chart-makers set roses at the hubs.

In 2012 the website Celebrity Net Worth put Mansa Musa's fortune at how much in modern dollars?

$400 billion was the site's guess, but historians say no figure is possible: writers of his day, they argue, were conveying more gold than they could imagine, not counting it.

By a tale Musa himself reportedly spread, where did Mali's gold come from?

It grew like a plant, the story went, a yarn that made his wealth sound inexhaustible and, by one reading, kept rivals guessing about where Mali's goldfields really lay.

Timbuktu lies a few miles north of which great river?

The Niger swings up to the desert's edge near Timbuktu, so goods that had crossed the Sahara by camel met cargoes brought by boat there: a meeting of sand and water that made the town rich.

Which empire absorbed Timbuktu in 1468, after the Mali Empire's decline?

Songhai rule brought Timbuktu to the peak of its trade and scholarship, a golden age that ended when a sultan's army from north of the Sahara took the city in 1591.

Which people are credited with founding Timbuktu?

The Tuareg used the site as a seasonal camp from about 1100; in one telling they left it in the care of an old woman called Buktu, whose name stuck to the town.

One explanation derives the name Mali from a Mandé word for which animal, the emblem of its ruling clan?

Hippopotamus herds grazed Mali's riverbanks, and a traveller in the 1350s first took them for elephants. The word origin is disputed, though: one dictionary derives the name from the Malinke people instead.

What was the Kouroukan Fouga, by tradition proclaimed after the conquest of Sosso around 1235?

Mali's constitution was, by tradition, proclaimed by the founder and his assembly in the clearing of that name; handed down by word of mouth, it was listed by UNESCO in 2009 as one of the world's oldest.

Which 16th-century Andalusian traveller's book, with its rich king of Timbuktu, informed European readers for some 400 years?

Leo Africanus was captured by Christian pirates on a voyage home and given to Pope Leo X, who freed him and sponsored his baptism; his book told Europe of a king of Timbuktu with a treasure of gold ingots.