Trade · 1324–1325 CE
Mansa Musa's pilgrimage
Timbuktu (Mali)
Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire (c. 1312–1337), crossed the Sahara on pilgrimage to Mecca, reaching Cairo in July 1324 with a vast retinue; later Arabic accounts tell of thousands of attendants and camels laden with gold, numbers historians treat as rhetorical rather than measured.
The Cairo official al-Umari reported that Musa's spending lowered the value of gold there for at least twelve years. On his return Musa commissioned the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu, around 1327.
Why it mattered
Mali supplied almost half the Old World's gold in the early 14th century, and Musa's journey made West Africa's wealth famous in the Islamic world and Europe, where the Catalan Atlas of 1375 depicts him.
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