Episode 96 - Was Mansa Musa The Richest Person Ever?
01:03:09 Share

Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How are you? I'm not too bad, how are you?

Hi, I'm alright. I'm alright. I've had a long day and I was really sleepy and I thought, oh no, I'm going to be like really low energy. And it'll be history as low energy, but I got some kind of second wind about half an hour ago and now I'm like hyped to talk about West Africa. Great. Yeah. Just got to keep the energy for like an hour and then you're good to go.

I think I'm just excited to be talking about non-atrocities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No atrocities this time, we promise. I feel like we, the last four episodes have not necessarily lived up to the title of podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yugoslavia decidedly un-sixy for the most part. There must have been sexy stuff happening. Yeah. Remembering Yugoslavia podcast has loads of sexy stuff, but ours really didn't.

It was more like history is appalling. But we're back now and we have some kind of more nice stories or at least interesting stories where no genocides happen at all. Yep. Which is good. It is good. And I'm excited to be back in West Africa. We haven't done an African episode in ages. In fact, since we did Timbuktu, I think is the last time. Yeah. Yeah.

I think you're right. Which also is a Mansa Musa related. But yeah, people should ask us more Africa-based questions. We don't get them very often. People ask us more Africa questions because it's fascinating. And I think that it is because... So I went back to the notes I made for Timbuktu to see what sources I had used and see what was in there, if there was anything that was useful. And Timbuktu

The first thing that I found in there was a quote that I found when researching that, which was from 1963 and was Hugh Trevor Roper, who was a very famous historian back in the time when like history television programs were just a man with a mustache and a pipe like talking at a screen. Yeah. Often in a studio. Yeah.

And he said to the BBC in 1963 again, which is pretty recent, perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach, but at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness. Jesus. And I do think that that is still the...

Because we don't know it and because it is very limited written cultures. There are written cultures in ancient and medieval Africa, but they have not really received much attention. And so much of African culture was and is aural, aurally transmitted, which has just been completely dismissed as history. Yeah.

still people don't think don't consider oral histories to be to be histories and you get the same thing with aboriginals and native americans they just don't consider oral traditions and oral histories to be real yeah but uh they are yeah and it isn't any it isn't really any different like often oral histories and i think in the case of marlene some of the stuff that i read like it is there's fantastical stuff in there like like it's it's it's

gods becoming men in the same way as we've talked about with Vikings episodes. There are periods of history that are the transition from myth to history. And I feel like the West is very good at pretending like we never did that. And therefore our histories are trustworthy and

or other oral histories of other cultures are not. Yeah. It's just, it's just not true. There is a strong desire to see Homer, which is just written down oral storytelling and try to find Troy. Yeah.

And to listen to the epics of West Africa and try to not consider that there could be any truth in it, that these places and people could not possibly be real. And there is, in fact, a really big oral epic which dates from the 13th century about the foundation of Mansa Musa's empire called the Mandika Epic, which took a very long time for anybody to consider that it might be anything other than

Yeah. But yeah, so I do think that that's part of the reason why I think why people don't ask questions about it is that they don't think that it's possible to know anything about Africa. But it is. Yeah.

And we're going to tell you about Mansa Musa because, oh yeah, I should say, the question this week comes from two people, Sarah Mishlakom and Jessamy Wilson-Pepper both asked for an episode on Mansa Musa and whether he was really the richest person who ever lived. Because if you Google Mansa Musa, what you get is that he was the richest person who ever lived, ever, ever, ever.

that he was, people like to make up like values, which I find really fun. Yeah, I read in today's money, it would be 400 billion US dollars, which is twice the wealth of Elon Musk.

Yes. And I cannot find where anybody has got that from or who. You will find a lot of places that say historians estimate or it has been estimated and people repeat that number. But you can't find the historians that do the original estimate? No.

I cannot. I cannot find even the origin of like the he was the richest man that ever existed. And it's so kind of... I feel like if I spent days on it, then I might be able to find it. But I couldn't even find like... Because there's so little academically written about him and there's so little written in English about the Malian Empire in general. And those that have been written tend to be about...

If they're academic, then they're about Marley in general. And Mansa is just part of that. And if they are popular, then they don't have sources. And so I find a lot of things like it's just impossible to find even a source where I can start following footnotes back, which is how I usually work. Like find a footnote. Yeah. Follow that. Find who they reference. Follow that. Find who they reference until I can eventually...

find the beginning or at least a beginning and you can't even find a footnote but so I genuinely don't know where this number has come from I don't know where how they have worked it out I think that it might just have been plucked from someone's brain at some point yeah but and I cannot even begin to imagine who it might have been plucked from but it comes from

in general, the main story that people know about Mansa Musa, which is that he went on Hajj. He's the emperor of Mali, the Mali Empire, which is an enormous empire. It is pretty much exactly the same size as the continental United States of America. Yeah, so massive, massive, massive.

Yeah, I did a little picture, which is, so if you go on the document that we use and scroll down to like page two, you can see the little picture with the, where it's overlaid over there. So that's the United States overlaid over West Africa. And with Mali in the center, we have...

Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, a bit of northern Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Benin, chunk of Niger, all the way over into Chad, and a good old chunk of Algeria is basically what Mansa Musa ruled. Yeah. So huge, huge, huge...

area huge and very diverse area of land and near enough the exact same size as the continental united states if you chop off like all that kind of the chicken leg basically like the new england bit yeah and florida which no one would miss um

Sorry, Florida. I'm sorry. I've never been there. I don't know. Maybe you'd miss it very much. I have goodwill towards Florida solely because of the hit film, perfect work of art, Barb and Star go to Visigelmar. Which I've still not seen. It's just my favorite thing in the world. I have no real feelings about Florida having never been there. It seems very warm and quite a wet, warm place.

And that puts me right off more than anything at all. A woman who was born for 13 degrees to 17 degrees and anything either side of that is uncomfortable for me. Yes. So, but that's what he rules. It's a massive, massive space, which I think is also important to be thinking about when you think about Africa because you tend to think of like, oh, an empire, an African empire in West Africa. Like how big can that possibly be? It's fucking massive. Yeah. And...

He said at various times that it would take him either four months or one year to get from one end of his empire to the other. And people have said that this shows that he might have been bragging about or exaggerating the size of his empire. But then I realized that...

He told one person this, like he told the four months on the way to Mecca and the year seems on the way back. And during that time, his brother, who was ruling the empire in his stead, had conquered quite a large chunk of land. Yeah. So possibly he was just like, oh, it's big enough. Including Timur II, right? That's when that became part of his empire, during the hard. Exactly. I feel like we should say as well, Mansa is essentially emperor or king. Yes. So that's his title and Musa is his name.

Yes. Yeah. It's a name that he's known, but he's given quite a few names, but that's the name that he is mostly called. He is the Yesmansa, which means kind of sultan or emperor of the Mali Empire, which is the second of three giant West African emperors. The first is the Ghana Empire, which is the longest lasting and lasts from about 600-ish to 1235 is considered to be the kind of cutoff date.

Then the Mali Empire rises and takes over a lot of the Ghana Empire and expands it a little bit further. And that goes from 1235, the kind of largely imaginary crossover date, to about 1430, so a 200-year period.

empire and then that declines in the Songhai Empire, raises Songhai Empire, which is another 200 years, kind of 1430s to the end of the 16th century. And that is when you get the glorious kind of golden age of Timbuktu that we talked about in whatever episode it was that we talked about.

And Musa is, there are kind of king lists, but they're developed by, they're kind of complicated because the guy who was writing them did not 100% know what he was talking about. Classic. But he is, yeah, a good few kings down. So he becomes emperor in 1312. Wow.

And the way that he becomes emperor is fantastic. In his own words. Okay, I'm also going to say what the main sources are that we have. So we know loads or we know more about Musa and his brother Suleiman than we do about almost any other Malian emperors because Musa went to Cairo, made a massive splash in Cairo and talked to loads of people in Cairo

Cairo and Mecca, who then talked to other people in the Arabic world and the Muslim world who wrote it all down. So he appears in loads of different Arabic histories and encyclopedias and memoirs of people recounting their conversations with him and also stories about him because his visit to Cairo made kind of a splash. Yeah.

And so what we mostly have is Arabic sources, one eyewitness and a couple of other close, like near enough kind of working off of secondhand information and then a few from a hundred or so years later who say,

things that Musa said to them and things that Musa did while he was travelling around. So all of the source material really comes from Arabic sources writing about Mali as a fascinating place

that is outside of their usual experience. So they are all from places like Cordoba and Granada and Syria and Egypt. And they're writing about

and the Marlian Empire as like a, huh, look at these guys. But usually they did write quite a lot, which is very helpful. Weirdly enough, the Madinka epic tells like the whole story of the foundation of the Marlian Empire and leading and like basically goes up kind of to maybe two generations before Musa and then just stops. Yeah.

Nobody's really interested. They just weren't interested after that. No one knows why.

So Musa told basically his kind of guide in Egypt, like this guy who is like charged with looking after him to a certain extent. He told him that he became emperor because his predecessor kind of conquered to the edge of the landmass of West Africa and got to the sea and wanted to keep going and wanted to find out if there was anything over the ocean. Yeah. So he, uh,

200 boats and sent them out. And a few months later, only one boat returned. 199 boats disappeared. And he claimed that they claimed that they had been stopped by a powerful current in the open sea, which devoured every ship that went into it. So they had just gone, fuck that.

And paddled for home. The king didn't believe him and was like, that's nonsense. Although one of the books that I read, which was probably my favorite book, believes that this is probably the Canary Current, which is a big current off the coast of West Africa that makes it very hard to sail out into the Atlantic from south of Cairo.

But the king, whose name was Muhammad, didn't believe him. So he then provisioned 2,000 ships, 1,000 for his men, 1,000 with food and water, which doesn't seem like the best way to do it because what if you lose one of the food and water ones? Yeah. But sure. They were not really a naval-going culture. So they didn't... This was, you know... You learn by your mistakes and they learned by their mistake because they vanished and were never seen again. Yeah.

And that he basically, the Sultan made Musa his regent, went, look after the place till I get back. I'm going to see what's on the other side of the Atlantic. Went out and never returned. I did hear a great theory from the You're Dead to Me episode, which is that he made it and that's why plantains exist in South America. Huh. I also read a claim that some of them had made it

to what is now somewhere around what is now Brazil and just see our camp there. Did they have any evidence? No, of course not. Of course they didn't. I don't know. Maybe there is evidence that somebody could write in. But as far as the people of Mali were concerned, as far as Mansa Musa was concerned, he was now the Mansa. He was now emperor and nobody ever came back. So he never had to give it up, which is quite fun, I think.

just a great way to become I feel like there's a lot of there must have been a fair amount of like sitting around being like should I yeah at what point do you call it you know like yeah yeah and because it's not like in the modern era I think you know it's like seven years or something you can have someone declared legally dead but that's when we've got

It's quite easy to get around and to find people. But this is a time where it takes like a year to walk from one end of your country to the other. So it's harder to verify. Very challenging. Very challenging. And also, it is perfectly reasonable that somebody could cross the Atlantic and not come back for a decade. Yeah. And then suddenly reappear. Judging by what...

his brother does, who's also called Muhammad, judging by what he does when he is left in charge while Musa goes on Hajj, I would guess that the deal was, or the agreement was that

Being interim Mansa is just the same as being Mansa. You don't sit around and be... You're not a placeholder and you're not considered to be... You don't have to sit there just like a regent not really doing anything. Yeah. You just act as though you are a Mansa. Or counting everything you do as something that you know is on the authority of

Yeah, you just behave as though you are this old guy. Yeah. And it seems that because when he comes back, he just takes back his throne and his brother goes, chill, okay. Yeah. And waits his turn. And yeah, it's grand.

But yeah, so that's how he becomes Mansa. Or at least that's what he tells people. But either way, it's pretty funny. And he becomes emperor of this massive, massive empire. He says that he has 24 kings under him. And each of those kings has like soldiers and lieutenants, lieutenants under him. And they kind of seem to be structured correctly.

like a sort of federal system whereby everybody kind of owes allegiance and loyalty to the person above them and the sultan the emperor the mamancer is like incredibly magnificent and has all the best stuff and has a supreme authority and also is a kind of religious figurehead but um

There's not like a micromanaging situation. Yeah, so there are kings running their own shit and he's just...

And then it kind of like, you're like justice system, tax system, it all kind of works its way up through these layers. They're not of bureaucracy, but they're like of almost federalization. And there is a huge amount of expansion as well. It's interesting that this is never written about either, that they are obviously having massive wars. I mean, he also at one point says, he describes what he calls the Sudan, but Sudan...

It's difficult because Sudan comes from the Arabic and it means just kind of land of black people. Yeah.

And so it's unclear where specifically people are talking about when they say Sudan, because generally it just means south of me. But he basically considers the people on his border, which might be modern day Sudan and might be slightly south of that, but basically considers them to be evil. And he considers himself to be waging a perpetual holy war against them. Because he and...

the Mali Empire are an Islamic empire. He is a Muslim. He's a very devout Muslim. He is devout in a really specific way, which I find really funny. There's this amazing story from... He is kind of... People keep asking him when he's in Cairo about his country, about his habits, about his behaviors. And he tells them that he had...

tradition that the kind of most beautiful daughters and the most beautiful women are given to the Mansa to have as his concubine. So basically they take the most beautiful daughter as their concubines. And the guy that he's telling this to, who is this scholar called Amir Hajib in Egypt, goes, you can't have concubines. That's not permissible. And he's like, what?

He says, no, no, no. Under no circumstances is it possible, is it legal for a devout Muslim to have concubines? And he's like, not even for kings? He says, and I replied, no, not even for kings. Ask the scholars. So he said, by God, I did not know this. I hereby leave it and abandon it entirely.

Yeah. And he was like, oh, yeah, not even... You sure that's not even for kings? Yeah. It sounds fake, but okay. I said, yes, I believe you. So, yeah, so he has that up until he comes back anyway. But...

Capital is called, it's spelt B-Y-T-Y, very often in capital letters because it is an Arabic kind of transliteration. But I'm going to pronounce BT, but I don't know how it's actually pronounced. And he has multiple palaces within that. It is a very verdant, beautiful, green area of Africa. It is foresty. It is hilly. It is farmland.

land. He boasts at one point about how many goats and cows and sheep he has. It is a trading station for caravans going north and south. And it is a kind of cool city, basically. And people talk about the size of the trees a lot. They're like, the trees were

And you could ride along the roads, which were incredibly safe. Everybody says how safe they were, like there's no bandits, basically. And you can go down all of these roads and there's always shade, even when the trees are not in bloom and they're not green. There's always shade because they're so massive.

And it's delightful. And in his palace, the king sits on a throne made of ebony, decorated with elephant tusks and golden weapons. And this is one of my favorite things I think I've ever read. Uh-huh.

They denote kind of standing or eminence within the court by how many gold kind of bracelets and necklets you have, but also by the size of your trousers. That's excellent. The biggest trousers is the biggest man.

You can't touch this. Yes. So the king has trousers. The sultan has trousers that are made of 20 pieces of cloth and are the most massive trousers that you can imagine. And the source says, this is a guy who goes there in the reign of Suleiman, says that it's not, these are not wide trousers. Do not be imagining like,

you know new metal kids from 2001 yeah soaking up all the water with their giant trousers they're tight-legged but the bum is enormous so they're like droppers on crack yes they're like those like hippie trousers that everybody you know who like went to india on their gap year yeah yeah haram pants

Yeah, but like quadruple the size of that. So it is. And basically, so you when you're moving up through the court, he gives you the cloth so that you can make your trousers more massive. And that is how you know that you are held in the king's esteem is that your trousers have become frankly unwieldy. That is aspirational. I would like large trousers.

Yeah, it delights me. He has. Yep. So the way that they're making all of their money as an empire is gold, copper, salt and ivory. And the gold is the thing that people really focus on because he had so much of it. And he quite foolishly told everybody that it literally grew on trees. Yeah.

There was a kind of belief amongst non-African people that gold grew in the ground like a plant. And that it could be... It grew on the roots of a... There was a gold plant that you could dig up and get its roots. Yeah. And he happily...

kind of stoked this myth and told people this and gave them quite a lot of detail and was like in the springtime it blooms and you can get them but there's another kind of plant that grows all year round which let people has the benefit of letting people believe that your wealth is inexhaustible because it is a natural resource that will constantly grow and you will never run out of money and that has the downside that as we will see people think you will never run out of money and will try and rip you off yeah

Which I guess is fair. If gold grows on trees, then...

Yeah, you would try. Yeah. Yeah. So basically you have all of these people. You have quite a lot of people who go to Mali both before and after Musa and they all talk about it as a pretty, like a very safe place, a place that has a huge standing army and a place that is very rich and has lots of, a lot of gold that is kind of floating around and that people are very generous with that gold. And Musa, the way I think he gets his,

reputation is that he is very very very generous mm-hmm

His brother who... So what happens after he dies is his son inherits a throne and then dies pretty much immediately. And then his brother inherits it, Suleiman. And Suleiman is like really is a miser and doesn't want to give gold to anybody and likes to hoard it. But Musa loves giving it away. Yeah. He gives it to everybody for any reason. He just absolutely takes joy in giving people enormous amounts of money, like more than they could ever spend.

to the extent that he gives Amir Hajib so much gold that he just literally can't spend it. Like when he dies, there's still loads of it just in his house and it has to go to the treasury because nobody, it's just unworked gold that he's given people like direct from the,

They pretty much direct from the mind straight to him. And yeah, so and he loves giving it away. He tells people that he has basically worked out an agreement with what he calls the pagans and what the Arabic sources call Christians, but are probably just kind of non monotheistic. Yeah. People on the border of his empire, whereby they will give him as

kind of as much gold as he needs and he will not try to convert them to Islam. And someone says to him, why do you not just conquer them? And then you can have all the gold. And he says, when I do that, they stop producing. They just like, I try, I conquered them and they just like, gold stopped coming out of those mines. And...

Like they just don't, the production level falls significantly. And I see people on the other side of that border suddenly having a lot more gold. So they just siphon it off like in other directions. Yeah. And so he was like, so we just worked out an agreement that I would not be, I wouldn't be their man. So they wouldn't have to be Muslim and they would give me as much gold as I wanted. That's a pretty good deal. Yeah.

If anyone wants to give me gold in order for me not to force religion on them, I would be up for that. You would be up for that? Yeah, I'd be happy with that. I think you maybe would have to do the forcing religion on them first in order to be... That sounds like a lot of work.

It does. And that is why you don't get to be a Mansa. Yeah. I do feel like if you kind of put things together, like someone describes his army at one point as having 100,000 people in it, including 10,000 cavalry. He talks a lot about warfare. Like underneath the stories about Mansa Musa, there is an empire that is growing by force. Yeah. And there are an enormous...

enormous amount of enslaved people in this story who are constantly turning up and are naked all the time which is something that really freaks out people in egypt and everyone who visits mali because you get a lot of islamic scholars and like just muslim writers turning up in mali and they're just like and the lady slaves are naked and i had to see some tits

And it was very disconcerting. But they cannot persuade people to not send them naked women to like serve them dinner. He's like, at one point he says like 200 naked ladies and I had to see all of their breasts. It was deeply traumatic. It was very traumatic. Guy called Ibn Battuta, who is the source of a lot of this. And yeah, he does not want to see those boobs. Yeah.

And I don't know how they felt about showing their boobs, but yeah. So that's basically what he seems to have been doing. He's ruling. He's got loads of gold. He is working out the borders and agreements on his borders. He's doing expansion. And then about 25-ish years, 22 years into his reign, he decides that he is going to go and conquer

the obligation of Hajj, which is one of the five pillars of Islam. It is the fifth pillar. So do you know what the pillars of Islam are? I do. I don't remember them off the top of my head. Prayer is one of them. Yep. And I cannot remember any of the others. Yeah. Yeah.

So it is profession of faith. So saying that you are a Muslim. Prayer is the second one. So regular prayer. The fast of Ramadan, if you are able. Mm-hmm.

So, which is an intense fast, but it's not necessary if you are not able. Charity is the fourth one and the giving of alms. So, they're a huge amount of charitable giving. And the fifth one is if you are able, both physically and financially, to go on Hajj, which is to visit Mecca and to visit the Great Mosque at Mecca and to enact rituals.

a series of rituals of supplication and cleansing during a specific month of worship in the Islamic calendar. There's a lot of walking involved. You walk around the Great Mosque and then you walk back and forth between two hills. Then there's a ritual stoning and a ritual sacrifice, but you don't have to do the sacrifice anymore. You get a voucher instead.

And prayer. And this year, in fact, 1,300 people died because it's now so hot in Saudi Arabia that it is very, very easy to die while walking backwards and forwards between two ritual hills with many thousands of other people. I think that's a crazy number of people to die. That's an insane number of people to die. It's one of the numbers of people that you're like, well, how many people are doing it? I mean, a lot of people do it. A lot of people do it.

And a lot of people do it. So the way that it works now is that you can get like a license to do it, which you pay for, you pay the Saudi government for it. And if you do that, then you get like air conditioned buses and access to water and they have tents and things and shade and

And like it's a nicer experience essentially. And they will ferry you around where you need to go. But a lot of people do it without paying the license. And there are like tour companies and stuff that will take you without paying the license fee. And then you don't get access to any of that stuff. Then you are just a kind of unprotected person walking a very long way in 50 degree heat for hours in the Saudi Arabian summertime. And that's when people collapse and die. Yeah.

But so possibly not working out as well as it should do. But yeah, this is what he decides to do. It is at this time a much bigger thing, obviously. And he decides that he is going to do it in a grand style and the style befitting an emperor. And he takes numbers kind of vary, but 60,000 seems to be is certainly one. Yeah, 60,000 is the figure that I read earlier.

Yes. There is a wild amount of people to just walk across Africa with.

Yes, it is a huge amount. And it made such a kind of big splash as he was going that all of these like myths grow up about what he's doing because he walked, basically they travel with horses and camels and they ride Arabian horses, which are ludicrously expensive. But everybody says that he has Arabian horses. This is like part of his display of wealth. But

Like, there are all of these myths that spring up, like, that he made 9,000 of the people he had enslaved build a lake, like, create an artificial lake in the middle of the desert so that his wife, Inari, and her slaves could wash themselves. Yeah.

I mean, that's pretty romantic if he did. I don't know how it would be possible, but impressive and romantic to do. So there's this source called the Tarika Fetash, which basically describes... It says even at the time, it's like, this is the kind of stories that people tell about him. Like, these are myths that arose that...

Because it was such an event that he passed through all of these towns. And there were so many people that these kind of preposterous myths kind of spread about him. The other one is that he built a mosque in every single village that he passed through, which would be a lot of mosques. A lot of mosques. He did build some mosques, but he did not build a mosque in every single village. Yeah.

There is also the Tarika Fattah also records that, and it's the only place where this exists, says that he had killed his mother and that he had gone on Hajj in order to absolve himself of his matricide. It's kind of unclear whether that is a myth, that it's presenting that as a myth or if it's presenting that as what it thinks is fact. But that is the one place where that is mentioned, which weirdly enough you don't find really in any of the modern sources. Yeah, the book

The book I read mentioned it as a possible... There'd been an accident that he was responsible for or something like that. But I don't know what that was based on. This. Well, yes. I don't know the specifics that it was an accident. Yeah. But yeah. So basically he takes an enormous retinue of people. He takes... Someone says that he...

takes like a hundred carts full of gold and he certainly gives it away and this is the famous bit this is why he is ludicrously famous is that he arrives in cairo he arrives and stays for three months one of the sources gives specific dates it says he arrives in like the 18th of july and he leaves on the 18th of october and during that time he spends so much money

Giving it to people both in terms of buying stuff and also in acts of charity. Yeah. Kind of the source that gets quoted a lot is that he flooded Cairo with his benefaction. He left no holder of office without a gift of gold. The Cairenes made so much profit and exchanged so much gold that they depressed its value in Egypt and caused the price to fall. Mm-hmm.

And so this appears in four of the sources. Oh, no, wait, sorry, three primary sources and then a fourth, which is a modern source, which shows, I think, how the myth has grown. So four sources from the time. Al-Umari is like the closest in time after Al-Bukhari. He says until the year that he arrived, a mithkal of gold, which is 4.25 grams,

So a mithkau could be bought for 25 dirhams, but it dropped below 22 dirhams up until this time of writing 12 years later. Okay. So kind of knocks 10% off of the price of gold, basically. Yeah. Ibn Kathir says he crashed the price of gold by two dirhams in each mithkau, which agrees, basically. And...

Al-Makrizi says they spent so much that the price of the gold Dinar fell by six dirhams, which is a slightly different way of measuring it, but it's basically...

the same. Yeah. So he basically knocks about 10% off of the price of gold in Cairo and in Egypt, which is pretty impressive. Yeah. And he does this by, one, buying loads of stuff for way more than it's worth, and two, by giving huge amounts of money to everyone. Yeah. Amir Hajib

who is the guy who looks after him he gave 500 mithkals of gold as a kind of retainer or as a thank you gift which is two kilograms of gold and i looked up what the current price of a kilogram of gold is and two kilograms of gold today would be worth 135 806 pounds okay so a decent chunk so a good chunk a

Good. And that is one person. He gave the Sultan 10 times that. He gave him 5,000 mithkals. And an average thing that he seems to have given away is 200 mithkals. So about 60 grand-ish, 60, 70 grand that he was giving to people just walking around, just handing that out to every random man.

Like anyone who looks at him, every single person who is in the court, and this is the Egyptian court, there is a sultan there as well, who is more powerful than he is, and he's giving

this to everybody and so that's how he managed to crash the price of gold by the modern day a book that I read that was published this year which is otherwise I have to say it's been written by journalists not historians but it's a good book by Zainab Bawadi which is an African history of Africa which I totally would recommend but she has it as he crashed the price of gold globally by 25% which is different yeah that's

It's impressive. It's an impressive thing to be able to do. It is. He didn't do it. Cashed it by 10%. But... So it has... Like, the myth of Mansa Musa has grown significantly in the modern day from the kind of constant retelling of this. Yeah.

And this is exactly how these myths of like he dug made an artificial lake just like show up. It's not enough to say he crashed the price of gold in Egypt by 10%. It's kind of been added on and expanded. As far as I'm aware, and as far as all of the sources at the time are concerned, he did nothing to the price of gold globally. Yeah. But he did do a decent chunk in Cairo.

He absolutely fucked it in Egypt. And people loved it. Like they massively took advantage. And he would talk to anybody very happily about it. He told people, as I say, that it grew in the ground and was like infinitely renewable, which gave this impression that he just had a literally inexhaustible supply of gold that he could keep spending and spending and spending forever. Is the story about him meeting the Sultan in the book that you read? Yes, but

that he didn't the thing about him bowing yeah he didn't want to bow to the Sultan so he made it clear he announced as he bowed that he was bowing to God because he didn't see himself as beneath any king exactly yeah

So he, in the court, there is like a guy who is in charge of foreign ambassadors, whose name is Abdul Abbas bin al-Haq. And he basically tries to, him and Amir Hajab, it turns out,

kind of have this kind of debate where you have to go meet the sultan and he's like, I'm kind of not going to do that. I don't want to. They're like, why don't you want to? And he kind of keeps making excuses. And eventually it comes out that he will not prostrate himself to another sultan. He considers himself to be the equal of the sultan of Egypt and who's Al-Nazir. And he will not prostrate himself to

And so they kind of make this agreement. He says, I will only prostrate myself to God. And it's kind of two versions. One is that he said, I will only prostrate myself to God. This Egyptian sultan said, OK, that's fine. And you we will meet. But you can't sit in my presence. And he was like, OK, that's fine. Other version is that he prostrated himself in the present.

of the Egyptian sultan and said he was prostrating himself to God and then they were able to kind of talk. But either way, he would not do it and he possibly was not allowed to sit. So at no point did the Egyptian sultan think that he was his equal. He thought that the emperor of Mali was his subordinate.

which he reinforced because he gave Musa a house, like a full palace to live in. I mean, he needed it. He had 60,000 people with him. He had a lot of people that he needed and he kept buying more people. Yeah.

Because he started buying like luxury people, which is a fun thing about slavery is that you can have luxury people. So people of specific races like Turkish people were considered to be very luxurious to have as slaves, like real kind of fancy show slaves, which is a real fun way to think about people. Yeah.

So he buys all of these like Turkish people to have in his like enslaved retinue. And he also gives him what's called a robe of honor, which is a thing that is exchanged in these Islamic courts, which is kind of a very beautiful outfit. And.

And to be fair, this outfit sounds great. He gives him an open fronted cloak embellished with gold thread and miniver, which is the winter coat of a red squirrel. Okay. I mean, that's sad now when red squirrels have been pushed out by grey squirrels. Yeah. I don't know if grey squirrels existed at the time. Yeah. Yeah.

but also like very fancy because one it has to be the winter coat because it's kind of white and two I don't know how indigenous they are to the Arabic world I don't know where they're importing those from Europe um

Bordered with beaver fur, which feels very fancy. It does feel... It feels like it came from far away. Yeah, because there's definitely no beavers in the Nile. So, yeah, with beaver fur, embroidered with metallic fabrics and gold fastenings, with a silk skull cap, a gold belt, a damascened sword...

neckerchief embroidered with pure gold and two horses okay that's not bad it's not bad it is as mark gomez points out basically the outfit that he would give one of his lieutenants like one of his emirs so he's kind of saying you are a representative of the egyptian court rather than a court in your own right right but still it's nice to get a fancy outfit

Yeah. Yeah. He then also gives him loads of other stuff to like support his pilgrimage. He gives him guides. He gives him God's people. He says, we've got a like Kyrene group who's going. You can go with them and they'll show you the way, which is nice. Yeah. So he seems to have quite a nice time in Egypt and he causes a hell of a stir. And like Alomari and Ibn Kathir are both like everybody wants to talk about how much money they spent. Yeah.

Like it was like years later in Cairo, people were still talking about the time that Musa came through and just flooded the place with money. Yeah. And that they ripped him off brutally. Like they'll talk about, like they'll sell him a shirt that was worth one dinar and they'll make him pay for dinars. Like they make him pay over the odds for absolutely everything. Yeah.

Well, he seems happy to do it. Yeah. People just try to rip him off like constantly to the extent that it makes the people of Mali kind of for generations afterwards really racist against Egyptians. And they've come to believe that all Egyptians are just con artists who will rip you off. And Al-Imari says like,

Even if you could introduce them to the most noted scholar, the most brilliant jurist, the most pious and good man, and as soon as he found out he was Egyptian, they'd just say no. No. Disgusting. They'd just basically become racist against all Egyptians because of their experience. So they don't seem to have massively actually enjoyed being in Cairo. No.

Like they spend a lot of money and people were just kind of not that great to them. And then they have a kind of even worse time. They get to Mecca and that is fine. They go with the Cairo contingent. It takes them a couple of months. They get there. They complete the Hajj. It seems to go without incident, except the only place that I read that anything happened was in the Badawi border.

book where she says that there was a scuffle with Ottoman soldiers inside the Great Mosque but I could not find a source for that okay so I do not know if that happened but maybe it happened that there was some kind of like fight inside the mosque but that feels like a really big deal like a fight in a mosque in the Great Mosque like the holy of holies but sure he then like

hangs out and has a great time in Mecca for a few months and like collects a load of scholars and other people who were there on Hajj like he just gives people money and is like I will give you a thousand myth calls of gold if you'll come and live in Mali with me and loads of them say yes I mean he takes poets and

And architects. He takes four random men who claim to be Quraysh, who are the Arab tribe who are responsible for looking after Mecca, controlling Mecca. And he says, I'll give you a thousand myth cards of gold if you would just come and live in my court. And they're like, sure. But everybody is just very suspicious of these guys. And it's like, we're not 100% sure that they're who they say they are. They might just be four random men that he's brought home. Yeah.

But still, he collects loads of people, which is nice. And this is kind of, there's another thing that he's doing on this, which is collecting books and collecting scholars because he wants to, he seems to really love this idea of having a scholarly center. So that all seems to go fine. He does his thing. He gets like to complete the obligation of Hajj, which is brilliant for him. I hope he had a nice time because he had a shit time on the way back. Mm-hmm.

Just a real fucking horrible time. On the return journey, somehow he gets separated. Him and his caravan get separated from the Egyptian caravan. They get very lost. And it is by now, it is like December, January time. And it's very, very cold. And he loses like 20% of his people to cold and to being kidnapped by Bedouins. Yeah.

And by the time he makes it back to Cairo, he has lost a lot of people. He's not had a very fun time. It's not a short walk from Saudi Arabia to Egypt. No. And he has spent so much money and lost so much money that he has to borrow loads of cash in Egypt and sell all of the stuff that he bought in his first journey in order to make it back to Mali. Yeah. And I'm betting he did not get the price he paid back. He did not. No. No.

And people charged him because they still thought he was mega rich. He was mega rich because they thought he was mega rich. And they were like, okay, he's told us that his money literally goes on trees. Like he's going to be good for this. They charged him like 200% interest. And it,

It says they would make, the merchants gave him money so that they would make 700 dinars for every 300 lent. Uh-huh. Which is wild. People just massively like try to rip him off again, which doesn't help. And he has to sell his stuff. He has to sell the palace that the sultan gave him in order to pay back one specific

guy called Siraj al-Din. Yeah. So he basically arrives back in Cairo having had a real bad couple of months. Yeah. Is ripped off again. And then it's just like, fuck this. I'm out of here. I'm going home. On the way home, someone tries to rip him off again. He's a guy who has just like decided to accompany him back to Mali and who was like one of the guys that he had collected. He's a kind of scholar. Mm hmm.

On their way back, they stop off in this town. In order to get this scholar to come back to Mali, Musa had given him 4,000 mithkals of gold, which is a lot of money. Yeah. That is a lot of kilograms of gold. Yeah.

And they stopped in this town and the scholar suddenly goes, like, gets really hysterical and says that his gold has been stolen. Like, that he doesn't have it. It's been stolen. What could happen? Musa is the emperor of this town. So he's like, get the governor out here. Find out who stole this gold. Like, search everybody's house. That's a lot of gold. I need it back. And also, like, this was a gift that I gave to this person. It is, like...

my honour is at stake here. They search everybody's house. They can't find anybody. Nobody has become suspiciously rich overnight. And they're kind of standing around being like, oh my God, what are we going to do? Like, how could it have possibly gone missing? Somebody must know something. And one of the servants from the scholar's household finally just goes, oh, for God's sake, it's not been stolen. He buried it. Yeah.

And he was going to, his plan was that he would say it was stolen. You'd give him another 4,000 and then he'd have 8,000. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's what you get. Yeah. So every, every stage people just trying to rip the poor guy off. He,

He is like, okay, well now you can't have the 4,000. I'm taking that back. And I'm going to like, he exiles him to what Alamari calls the land of the man eaters. And again, unclear where this is, but they seem to believe that there is a place where there are cannibals because nobody is immune to the kind of darkest Africa myth. And they sent him to the land of the cannibals and he's exiled for like four years, but he eventually comes back.

and they explain the fact that he is not eaten by the cannibals by the fact that he's too white. They say that the cannibals, the man-eaters, don't eat white people because they think that they're not ripe. LAUGHTER

Rather than... Or maybe they just don't eat people. Maybe they just don't eat people, yeah. So they have a whole thing about how they only think that black people are ripe, which is pretty funny. That is very funny. Yeah. But he manages to make it through this. God knows what else anybody did to poor man. He eventually makes it back to Mali. He's now got like a third fewer people than he left with, a bunch of scholars who were trying to take him for all he's worth, and an enormous amount of debt. But he also gets his throne back.

He now has access again to his gold mines. His son is like, hey, cool, you came home. And guess what? I conquered a lowball territory. We're now even richer. And he goes on to live for another like 12 years or so. He dies in 1337 and spends most of the time...

We don't really know what he did after he got back because most of the sources just sort of stopped talking about it. But what we do know is that he poured money into Timbuktu, which had been taken. And he built the Grand Mosque there, which is still the Great Mosque of Timbuktu, and started the library with thousands and thousands and thousands of books and relics.

All of these men that he had brought back with him and popped them all in there and was like, do some jurist stuff because they were of a particular legal school of Islam and they are really into like jurist stuff. It's Maliki Islam is their school and they're really into like jurisprudence stuff.

And so he's like, here we go, pop you in, do some jurisprudence, do some legal thought, which is my worst nightmare, I think. But if you like that kind of thing, it ended up being a great place to be to do Islamic jurisprudence or

poetry or anything that you wanted to do. Just think your thoughts and have a nice time. And have a nice time, exactly. And started what eventually became this, I say eventually, not even that long after him. His brother just doesn't give anything to anybody. So it kind of wavers a bit after him. But then when the Songhae Empire rises, it becomes really massive. Yeah.

And yeah, having his army, having his nudie ladies around, like living his best life as far as we can tell. Had his kids.

He was a grandfather when he died because his son had a son, but his son was too young to rule. So he had a wife, he had some kids, he had a grandson. When he died, the future must have looked pretty bright to him. Yeah, had a reasonably nice time, it seems like. Unless you were conquered by him, in which case 50-50, I guess. LAUGHTER

I mean, but then he builds a mosque for you. He does build you a mosque and seems to have largely given up on forcibly converting people to Islam. So, which is, you know, high five. He is, I think, if not the most rich person ever, then he has to be one of the most generous people ever. Yeah. I don't know really how one works out who the richest person ever is, largely because I think money, richness is...

I'm not going to say imaginary. It's kind of theoretical. Yeah. Like...

When you look at the lists of like the richest people in history or the richest people in the world, like none of them have a pile of money. They just have access to theoretical money. Yes. And they can, in the current system, borrow infinite money at no interest because of all the theoretical money they have access to. Yeah. And it's always fascinating when you see people's like...

net worth or like how much quote unquote money they have like drops and it's because the price of some stock that they own loads of has dropped and like the theoretical money that they had is now worthless or like the thing that they had that is worth money is now worthless so they are like they have less money and it's just all kind of very so you can't really compare like a man who had access to some of the largest gold mines

on planet earth to somebody who has sort of ownership of some stocks that are currently worth $63 each or whatever yeah

And also he is, because what he did with the gold that he had was like throw it around. Yeah, really throw it around. And doesn't really give the impression that he had essentially infinite wealth. That muddies the water even more because it's just, it's all about how he is perceived and no one is actually counting any realities there because the numbers are too big. So you just don't know. It's also, I'll say, sources vary on whether he paid back all of those debts or

Some sources say, so Ibn Battuta says that he did pay back his debts or that he paid back at least most of them. And there is this great story about this guy who kind of didn't trust him and had lent him 50,000 dinars. So he first, he sent like an agent to,

to Marley to make sure that he got his money back and that guy either died or disappeared or just decided to hang out in Marley so he then went here himself with his son and he died in Timbuktu and then everybody thought that maybe Musa had murdered him and his son had to come out and be like no he didn't everything is fine but he did get his money back but

A guy called Adewa Dari says that people lent him money in the hope that they would make back. He's the guy that says, "We lend you 300 and we'll get 700 back."

And loads of them just never got anything back. They just never saw he went to Mali, like what are they going to do? And they never saw any of that money ever again. So unclear as to whether he paid his debts or whether it was just like what you can do, you and whose army. I mean, my impression of him based on the small amount that we have is that like,

Like, he maybe just wasn't paying that much attention to how much he owed and to who. And if you stumped up and were like, hey, you owe me money, he'd probably be like, oh, yeah, here you go. Yeah. But...

who's gonna do that to the king very least if you stumped up in mali he would give you a massive present just for being there like he would just be like they give these kind of they're very big on hospitality gifts and one guy who goes in the reign of suleiman is like furious about how shit the gift is that he gets given and he's like i'll go and other people gave like

All of my friends came round and brought me, like my friend gave me a bullock and another one gave me a cow and another gave me like two sacks of foonie and everything was great. And then the sultan sent me a gift and I was really excited to get home and find out what it was. And it was just like a gourd. My head's like, well, gourds are everywhere. Just go outside and pick one up.

Yeah. And if he had gone during the reign of Musa, you get the feeling it would have got like 200 mithals of gold and 900 Arabian horses, whether he wanted them or not. And it would have been so much that it might have become a burden. But so he was definitely just an incredibly generous man. And also apparently very handsome. Yeah.

Good for him. Yeah. Yeah. I do not know how one decides whether he was the richest man ever. So I'm just not going to answer that question. I'm just going to say I think he was probably, if not the, then at least one of the most generous people. Yeah. Who took giving charity and being a good Muslim to heart and considered almsgiving and charitable giving to be a very important part of who he was and his faith. And for that, I give him double thumbs up. Yeah.

Yeah, good work. If you're going to be a billionaire, the least you can do is just shower everyone you come into contact with with gold. I think so. I think if you're going to be ludicrously rich and you're not giving away...

just preposterous amounts of money to everybody that you come across then I think you're doing it wrong yeah absolutely and I mean that about literally every single one of the billionaires including sorry my friends Taylor Swift well she does give away a lot of her money to be fair

She does. If she's still a billionaire, she's not giving away enough, but sure. Yes, I agree with that. Yeah, she does. I think it's probably the most showering gold behind her in terms of like the amount she gives to soup kitchens and stuff everywhere she performs. Good, good.

Yeah. And I'm glad to hear it. She should give more and everyone else should also be doing that. That she does more of that. Yeah. Yes. So that is Mansa Musa. Kind of a fun guy who probably came home from Hajj with some horror stories, but at least he had some new friends. Yeah. And had a nice time. Yeah. Well. Well. Some of the time. Some of the time. Some of the time people were dying. Yeah.

Okay, next time we're also doing, as far as I'm aware, non-atrocities. And this is a question from Stuart Webb, who would like to know what the difference between the Shad of Turin and the Holy Face is and what the deal with all of these cloths that have Jesus's face imprinted on them is. So we're going to be talking about face-based Christian relic.

Love a relic. I love a relic. They please me. I like the idea of magic and miracles in the world. Currently in Belfast, the relics of the nun that saw all of the visions of Mary in Lourdes are in Belfast Cathedral. I'm kind of considering going to see it just to see what it's like to see a relic. Yeah, that seems fun as hell. I mean, I have seen many relics before, but none of them have really touched me. So maybe I should...

try seeing more relics I don't know we'll see I'm just going to find the right relic for you maybe maybe I just need the right relic I think the problem for me is I grew up a Methodist and relics are all in Catholic churches and therefore they are covered in gold and all of the gold like the Methodist in me finds kind of tacky yeah I mean relics I feel like relics are definitely papist nonsense to the Protestant the Protestant in me just really feels like the relics should be allowed to stand on their own laughing

For that, we will talk about more next time. Yes. Until then, Janina, where can people find us? They can find us at history60.com, where you can listen to older episodes. You could ask us a question of your own by merch. You can support us either on Patreon or Ko-fi. You can. That's about it. That's about it. If you support us on Patreon, you get these episodes a week early.

So everybody who is not a patron is hearing this a week after everybody who is a patron, which means you're basically unfashionably uncool. Yeah.

And you also get a sticker if you're at the £3 or £5 level and bonus content when we do it. When we manage to do it. We're not doing a regularly scheduled bonus content yet. That is a stretch goal. It will exist eventually. Eventually. When we feel like it, we'll do some. And then, yeah, you can support us on Ko-fi as well. You can just buy us a coffee if you don't want to support regularly. That is also fine. And until next time, Janina. Bye.

do