from The Catalan Atlas
Spain, Majorca 14th century.
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African
El
Dorado.
Mansa Musa
of Mali Fashions
the Legend of
West Africa Gold.
Dr. Ronald Fritze
Mansa Musa was an upright man
and a great king,
and tales of his justice
are still told.
Ibn Khaldun, c. 1393-4
Africa played a big role in the initiation of European overseas expansion during the fifteenth century. Gold mines in West Africa supplied medieval Europe and the Middle East with a large portion of their coinages. West Africa gold remained important long after new supplies of gold and silver began to arrive from the Americas during the sixteenth century.
During the 1660s, the English government began to mint a coin valued at 21 shillings (an old pound was valued at 20 shillings) and called it a Guinea because it was minted with West African gold. Guinea was a name that Europeans used for West Africa.
Legendary Wealth Built on Gold.
The wealth of West Africa attained legendary status in both Europe and the Islamic Middle East. Mansa Musa, the great African ruler of the empire of Mali, was responsible for the fame of African gold.
Mansa Musa ruled Mali from either 1307-1332 or 1312-1337 (the dates are somewhat uncertain). Musa was his name and Mansa was a title, it being a Mandingo word for king. Mansa Musa's reign marked the height of the power of the Mali Empire with its capital at Niane. Its other great cities were Gao and the fabled Timbuktu.
The mansas of Mali had been Muslims for several generations. Prior to Musa, two other kings, Uli and Sakura, had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1324 Mansa Musa decided to go on a pilgrimage of his own since it was one of the five pillars of Islam. The fact that he could contemplate going on a pilgrimage (the hajj) to Mecca clearly indicates that his realm was peaceful and stable. His pilgrimage also demonstrated the wealth of Mali.
The High Cost of Travel.
In preparation for his pilgrimage, Mansa Musa collected a special contribution from his subjects to help pay for the journey, which would take a year. The pilgrimage caravan consisted of 60,000 porters. 500 slaves each carried a gold staff weighing three kilograms. Another 80 to 100 camels each carried 300 pounds of gold dust.
It was a prodigious fortune but travel was also expensive and the Malians, particularly their king, were generous with gifts. The merchants of Cairo were also quick to take advantage of the trusting nature of the Malians and overcharged them disgracefully. As a result of all of these things, the Malians managed to exhaust their vast supply of gold, forcing Mansa Musa to borrow from the money lenders of Cairo, who took shameful advantage of the king and his people.
Cheating on a Massive Scale.
Mansa Musa's pilgrimage did not end up promoting warm relations between the Malians and the Egyptians. Eventually the good-hearted Malians came to realize that they had been cheated on a massive scale. A few years later merchants of Cairo told the cosmographer and historian Al-'Umari (1301-1349) of Damascus of their dealings with the Malians.
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"Such was their [the Malians] simplicity and trustfulness that it was possible to practice any deception on them. They greeted anything that was said to them with credulous acceptance. But later they formed the very poorest opinion of the Egyptians because of the obvious falseness of everything they said to them and their outrageous behaviour in fixing the prices of the provisions and other goods that were sold to them, so much so that were they to encounter today the most learned doctor of religious science and he were to say that he was Egyptian they would be rude to him and view him with disfavour because of the ill treatment which they had experienced at their hands."
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In fact, the Egyptians suffered for their inhospitality in a couple of ways. First, the massive influx of Malian gold depressed the value of gold in Cairo for years. Al-'Umari visited there twelve years after Mansa Musa departed and Cairo still suffered from the inflation of prices that resulted from the influx of Malian gold. Second, Egyptian merchants traveled to Mali where they were repaid by sharp dealing from the local people.
Meanwhile, Mansa Musa became a legend, the gold king of Africa. Medieval maps were commonly decorated with various images and figures, particularly to cover up areas when the mapmaker had little or no idea what was located there. Many maps started to include the image of a black king enthroned with a golden crown and an orb or a scepter of gold. Mansa Musa's image beckoned to Prince Henry the Navigator and his contemporaries as they sailed the coastline of West Africa.
PLANET CLIO is ruled by Dr. Ronald Fritze,
Professor of History at the University of Central Arkansas.
An independent entity in the CornDancer consortium of planets,
Planet Clio is dedicated to the study and exploration of history.
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