Mansa Musa

Musa I, Mansa of Mali and Timbuktu. Musa is a Yinglet with dark brunette fur, a cream underbelly, pointed triangular ears, yellow eyes and a long bush ended tail. To the tips of his ears, he reaches a height of 5ft 4in, exceptionally tall for a Yinglet. He often wears a set of luxurious robes made from expensive imported fabrics, a turban of matching materials with a long train to protect his neck and shoulders, along with a simple crown of a bronze circlet adorned with a tall eagle’s feather plume. Musa spoke often in his original language Mande, but he was also well versed in Arabic. Born sometime in 1280, in his younger years he was raised by his mother Mansu Kanku, later in his late teens, his upbringing was turned over to his father Mansa Muhammad Ibn Qu, as per tradition. In his early twenties, he accompanied an expedition of twelve hundred ships across the Atlantic to Southern Africa. In 1312, Muhammad Ibn Qu died while on a second expedition, and upon returning to Mali, Musa was crowned the next Mansa. Given the grandeur of his subsequent hajj, it is likely that Musa spent much of his early reign preparing for it. Musa was a devoted Muslim, and his hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, made him well known across North Africa and the Middle East. To Musa, Islam was "an entry into the cultured world of the Eastern Mediterranean". He would have spent much time fostering the growth of the religion within his empire. When Musa departed Mali for the Hajj, he left his son Muhammad II to rule in his absence. Musa made his pilgrimage between 1324 and 1325, spanning 2700 miles. Arabic chroniclers writing after the event give widely varying figures for the size of Musa's caravan and the quantity of gold it transported, and modern historians treat these numbers as rhetorical rather than statistical. According to figures preserved in the later Arabic accounts, his procession included upwards of 12,000 servants, all wearing brocade and Yemeni silk and each said to have carried 1.8 kg (4 lb) of gold bars, with heralds dressed in silks bearing gold staffs organizing horses and handling bags. Musa is reported to have provided all necessities for the procession, feeding the entire company of men and animals. The same sources state that the caravan included 80 camels, each said to have carried between 23–136 kg (50–300 lb) of gold dust — a range that itself reflects the absence of any audited contemporary count and is treated by modern historians as an upper-bound literary topos rather than a measurement. Musa is said to have distributed gold to the poor along his route and to the cities he passed through on the way to Mecca, including Cairo and Medina, and reportedly to have built a mosque every Friday. Shihab al-Din al-'Umari, who visited Cairo shortly after the pilgrimage and is the proximate source for most of these accounts, described the procession as "a lavish display of power, wealth, and unprecedented by its size and pageantry". Musa and his entourage arrived at the outskirts of Cairo in July 1324. They camped for three days by the Pyramids of Giza before crossing the Nile into Cairo on 19 July. While in Cairo, Musa met with the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, whose reign had already seen one mansa, Sakura, make the Hajj. Al-Nasir expected Musa to prostrate himself before him, which Musa initially refused to do. When Musa did finally bow he said he was doing so for God alone. Despite this initial awkwardness, the two rulers got along well and exchanged gifts. Musa and his entourage gave and spent freely while in Cairo. Musa stayed in the Qarafa district of Cairo and befriended its governor, ibn Amir Hajib, who learned much about Mali from him. Musa stayed in Cairo for three months, departing on 18 October with the official caravan to Mecca. Musa's generosity continued as he traveled onward to Mecca, and he gave gifts to fellow pilgrims and the people of Medina and Mecca. While in Mecca, conflict broke out between a group of Malian pilgrims and a group of Turkic pilgrims in the Masjid al-Haram. Swords were drawn, but before the situation escalated further, Musa persuaded his men to back down. Musa and his entourage lingered in Mecca after the last day of the Hajj. Traveling separately from the main caravan, their return journey to Cairo was struck by catastrophe. By the time they reached Suez, many of the Malian pilgrims had died of cold, starvation, or bandit raids, and they had lost much of their supplies. Having run out of money, Musa and his entourage were forced to borrow money and resell much of what they had purchased while in Cairo before the Hajj, and Musa went into debt to several merchants such as Siraj al-Din. However, Al-Nasir Muhammad returned Musa's earlier show of generosity with gifts of his own. On his return journey, Musa met the Andalusi poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, whose eloquence and knowledge of jurisprudence impressed him, and whom he convinced to travel with him to Mali. Other scholars Musa brought to Mali included Maliki jurists. According to the Tarikh al-Sudan, the cities of Gao and Timbuktu submitted to Musa's rule as he traveled through on his return to Mali. It is unlikely, however, that a group of pilgrims, even if armed, would have been able to conquer a wealthy and powerful city. According to one account given by ibn Khaldun, Musa's general Saghmanja conquered Gao. The other account claims that Gao had been conquered during the reign of Mansa Sakura. Mali's control of Gao may have been weak, requiring powerful mansas to reassert their authority periodically, or it might simply be an error on the part of al-Sadi, author of the Tarikh. Decades before, Musa’s father strategically annexed the city and region of Timbuktu, combining its abundant gold reserves with Mali’s own, later Musa would fully integrate Timbuktu into Mali by making the city the new capital upon his return from his Hajj. Musa embarked on a large building program, raising mosques and madrasas in Timbuktu and Gao. Most notably, the ancient center of learning Sankore Madrasah or, University of Sankore, was constructed during his reign. According to a long-standing tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, Musa brought architects from Andalusia and Cairo to build his palace in Timbuktu and the great Djinguereber Mosque that still stands, with the Granadan poet Abū Isḥāq al-Sāḥilī commonly credited as the principal designer. Timbuktu soon became the center of trade, culture, and Islam; markets brought in merchants from Hausaland, Egypt, and other African kingdoms, a university was founded in the city (as well as in the Malian cities of Djenné and Ségou), and Islam was spread through the markets and university, making Timbuktu a new area for Islamic scholarship. News of the Malian empire's city of wealth even traveled across the Mediterranean to southern Europe, where traders from Venice, Granada, and Genoa soon added Timbuktu to their maps to trade manufactured goods for gold. The University of Sankore in Timbuktu was restaffed under Musa's reign with jurists, astronomers, and mathematicians. The university became a center of learning and culture, drawing Muslim scholars from around Africa and the Middle East to Timbuktu. Musa's wealth came principally from the Mali Empire's control and taxing of the trade in salt from northern regions, leading to The Mansas of Mali to be referred to as “Salt Kings”, and especially from gold panned and mined in Bambuk and Bure to the south. Over a very long period Mali had amassed a large reserve of gold. Mali is also believed to have been involved in the trade in many goods such as ivory, spices, silks, and ceramics. It is estimated that two thirds of the gold circulating in the Medieval Mediterranean came from West Africa and this accounts for almost half of the Old World's gold supply. Archeological investigations near the town of Tadmekka shows Malians invented their own process of refining gold by using melted glass and removing impurities. While gold was abundant, copper and bronze was incredibly scarce and prized in Sub-Saharan Africa and "was exchanged for gold at rates that would be considered unfair by present-day standards." At the time of Musa's ascension to the throne, Mali consisted largely of the territory of the former Ghana Empire, which had become a vassal of Mali. The Mali Empire comprised land that is now part of Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, the Gambia, and the modern state of Mali which would be an area of 1,300,000 km. Like most rulers of the region at the time, Musa had gathered a multitude of wives, possibly around ten to twenty different women from across Western Africa. Musa’s principal and most senior wife, the one who became Mansu, was Inari Kunate, she accompanied her husband while he was on his famous Hajj, taking with her over five hundred ladies-in-waiting.