Royal People: Mansa Musa, The World’s Richest Man?

If I told you to guess who the richest person who has ever lived was, you would probably think of a modern billionaire. Someone like Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. But what if I told you that there was an African king who lived 700 years ago whose wealth made theirs pale in comparison? Enter Mansa Musa, King of Mali, whose wealth was so incredible that it is indescribable even today.

Having started this article with so much grandeur, you may be surprised to hear that there is surprisingly (and frustratingly) little about Mansa Musa in the public sphere. There are a few contemporary Arabic writers who wrote accounts of Musa, particularly after a significant event in his reign, but there are still so many gaps in the record including when he died and the exact dates of his reign. The most concrete date we have for Mansa Musa is that he was definitely king in 1324, meaning he ruled in the first half of the fourteenth century. It was also recorded by a contemporary Arabic historian, Ibn Khaldun, that Mansa Musa ruled for 25 years, but in which direction this is taken from 1324 has been a matter of hot debate amongst historians.

Musa was born to an illustrious family in Mali. His grandfather was Abu Bakr, one of the founders of the Mali Empire and brother to the first Musa (ruler/king/emperor) of Mali. The rule of the previous few Mansas before Musa is a little difficult to trace, and it seems there were several short rulers in quick succession. Mansa Sakura, the sixth Mansa, was murdered around 1300 and succeeded by Mansa Qu, who seems to have ruled for just 5 years when he was succeeded by his son Mohammad ibn Qu, the eighth Mansa. Very little is known about Mohammad, including the dates of his reign, but Mansa Musa said that his predecessor had vanished in mysterious circumstances. Mohammad apparently wanted to explore the Atlantic Ocean, and, after an initial voyage with 200 ships, launched a huge expedition of 2,000 ships. Musa was appointed deputy for Mohammad’s voyage, but he and his ships never returned. Eventually, Musa was crowned Mansa in his own right.

The territory that Musa took control of was the biggest empire in West African history, covering around 500,000 square miles of land. This covered land in modern-day Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, the Gambia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast and Mali. The nature of the land that the empire covered lent itself to building wealth, with salt in the north and gold mines in the south creating fruitful trade opportunities. This had allowed the Mansas of Mali to build up significant wealth, the results of which were grandly shown by Musa in 1324 in an event that put Mali on the world map.

The most famous event of Musa’s reign was his Hajj to Mecca which he undertook that year. As a Muslim ruler, he needed to embark on this pilgrimage once in his life. At this period of time, many Muslim pilgrims would meet in Egypt to travel to Mecca together in huge caravans of thousands of people. As a rich and powerful ruler, though, Musa had his own caravan of people to take with him – 60,000 men and 12,000 slaves, in fact. Travelling with a group of people almost equal to the size of London at this time was no small feat, and Musa made sure he brought sufficient supplies. Thus, alongside the 72,000 people he also brought 100 elephants and 80 camels who were allegedly laden with 21,000kg of gold. If that was not enough, every person in the caravan was dressed in the finest Persian silk and gold brocade.

Mansa Musa and his travelling city eventually reached Cairo where the ruler decided the travellers needed a rest. The group stayed in the Egyptian city for 3 months, and during this time the citizens of Cairo were keen to relieve the group of their heavy gold reserves. Musa’s followers bought their food and other goods from local merchants, but Musa also gave out much of his gold. The locals were ecstatic, and a visitor to the city 12 years after Musa had visited told how the people of Cairo could not speak highly enough of Musa. His own people, however, were not quite so happy – the griots (singing historians) of Mali did not want to praise him in their tales, thinking he should not have wasted local resources outside of the empire. Whilst the merchants of Cairo had been so happy at the influx of Musa’s gold, his generosity actually crashed the local economy which affected the city for years.

Whatever his historians thought, Musa’s stay in Cairo brought Mali to the screaming attention of their known world. Despite the quietly growing wealth of the Empire over the previous decades, outside of their immediate neighbours, not many other places in Europe or Asia knew about Mali. The shimmering gold train following Musa made sure that this perception was changed, with the Mansa becoming a topic of European cartographers. Angelino Dulcert, an Italian-Majorcan cartographer, created a map covering parts of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in 1339 (according to some estimates just a few years after Mansa Musa died) depicting him as “Rex Melly”. Another map created in Spain 50 years after Musa’s Hajj shows a huge depiction of Musa sitting on a throne across West Africa, holding a nugget of gold and a golden staff clad in a gold crown and robe. At this time, Musa’s great-grandson Musa II had just become Mansa, so this map could in fact be depicting him, but the similarity in pose to Dulcert’s map is striking. This map describes the ruler thusly:

This black Lord is called Musse Melly and is the sovereign of the land of the black people of Gineva (Ghana). This king is the richest and noblest of all these lands due to the abundance of gold that is extracted from his lands.

Translated quote from Wikipedia.

The description and similarity in drawings to the earlier map certainly seems to refer to our Mansa Musa, but it may just be that Musa and his great-grandson had merged into one symbol representing their empire as a concept to Europeans.

Mansa Musa was a generous king throughout his reign to his own people as well as to strangers he met on his pilgrimage. He put his wealth to good use, building mosques and public buildings across his empire and populating them with scholars from across the Islamic world. He also hired expert architects to build these beautiful buildings. There were a couple of centres of his empire that Musa focused on, particularly Timbuktu. He built libraries, archives and educational institutions in Timbuktu and gathered thousands of texts to be held there, turning it into a centre of learning in his empire and bolstering the foundation for the Sankore University. But it wasn’t all peace on Musa’s mind, and he also expanded the territory of Mali during his reign, annexing 24 cities including Timbuktu.

So what of this wealth? Musa’s wealth even today is unquantifiable, though some have tried. In 2012, the US website Celebrity Net Worth estimated his wealth at $400 billion, around double the net worth of 2023’s most wealthy family (that of Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton). However, most historians agree that Musa’s wealth cannot be given an equivalent figure in today’s currency when the context of the time is taken into account.

Despite the success of Musa’s reign, his successors once again struggled with instability. He nominated his son, Maghan I, to become Mansa after him, but he ruled for just four years before perhaps being overthrown by his uncle, Musa’s brother, Sulayman. Sulayman ruled as a co-ruler alongside his wife Qasa, but after he replaced her with another wife Mali was thrown into civil war spurred on by Qasa. Though he managed to retain power, and reign for a significant period of time, his own son only ruled for 9 months before being ousted in another civil war led by Maghan’s son.

Mansa Musa’s reign was markedly successful and long compared to those of his recent predecessors. He brought the wealth and power of Mali to the attention of those in realms far beyond his own borders, and worked to improve the lives of his subjects through art, religion and education. He is a figure who deserves to be far more widely known and have more research dedicated to him.

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Read more:

The Age of Mansa Musa of Mali: Problems in Succession and Chronology on JSTOR
BBC Radio 4 – You’re Dead to Me – Meet the richest person who ever lived: Mansa Musa
Mansa Musa (Musa I of Mali) (nationalgeographic.org)
Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived? – BBC News
Mansa Musa I – World History Encyclopedia
This 14th-Century African Emperor Remains the Richest Person in History | HISTORY