Mansa Musa, the richest man of all time

The richest of all time? No Chinese or American "Scrooge". Probably the highest step of the podium belongs to Mansa (term meaning "king") Musa I, ruler of the empire of Mali between 1312 and 1337. According to calculations, his assets, updated to the present day, reached 400 billion euros.

Mansa Musa's fortune was to rule over a territory rich in natural resources and placed at the crossroads of the caravan routes that connected Mediterranean Africa to sub-Saharan Africa . In the markets controlled by the king, enormous quantities of ivory, copper, savannah animal furs flowed, but it was the gold, coming from the immense deposits along the Senegal river, that made Mansa Musa the king of kings, the most powerful and prestigious sovereign of Africa. When he gave audiences, according to the 14th-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, the ruler of Mali "wielded a golden scepter and javelin and wore silk robes, just as the large parasol was made of silk, surmounted by a golden bird, which it protected him from the sun.” At the height of his power Mansa Musa came to control as many as 400 cities and his kingdom was prosperous and at peace. So in 1324, as a good Muslim, he decided to comply with one of the precepts established by the Islamic religion: the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was an event whose echo even reached the Europe of the time.

An extraordinary event to which the anthropologist Marco Aime dedicated his latest essay " The caravan of the sultan" (Einaudi, 2023, pp. 304).

But what happened during that legendary journey? The ruler of Mali wanted to take advantage of the 4500 kilometers of the journey and the many cities to cross to show off his wealth and his prodigality to the world. He then set off with a huge procession, made up of tens of thousands of people. To swell the ranks there was also the empress with her retinue of slaves and handmaids and many warriors to protect the sovereign. Mansa Musa advanced on horseback in the company of his personal guard formed by twelve thousand slaves dressed in tunics of brocade and silk from Yemen and eighty camels each of which carried, in addition to the royal clothes, eighty loads of gold dust weighing three each quintals. To complete the parade there were five hundred porters, each of whom carried an ingot of about three kilos in weight as well as hundreds and hundreds of horses, camels, cattle and goats with household goods and food. In every inhabited center encountered along the year's journey towards Mecca Mansa Musa distributed large quantities of gold in alms and purchases of "souvenirs" of various kinds. In addition, every Friday, he financed the construction of a new mosque at his own expense on the spot where he was at the time. It was a veritable shower of gold dust, or rather a veritable downpour, which intensified during the weeks spent in Cairo where Mansa Musa did everything he could to impress even the local sultan. Mansa Musa had achieved his goal: throughout North Africa and on the caravan routes to Mecca singers and poets celebrated his power and wealth. But it wasn't just fame that pushed Mansa Musa to travel, as evidenced by the volume of Aime.

As the author writes: «To understand the extent and success of that pilgrimage, it was necessary to place it in a historical-geographical context, that is the Sultanate of Mali, formed about a century before Mansa Musa and which became one of the most important empires of the African Middle Ages. Its political, administrative and commercial organization and its religious dimension show traits of unexpected modernity . Gradually, however, the borders of Mali had become narrower, and to fully understand the extent of those events it was necessary to broaden the view, to follow the innumerable land and sea routes that connected it to the Mediterranean world, to the Middle East and, indirectly, to Asia, giving life to a sort of economic, cultural and religious globalization ante litteram».

From this point of view, the narration of Mansa Musa's journey takes on a value that goes beyond the mere religious and legendary aspect. Marco Aime, in fact, reconstructs that path, placing it in the historical and cultural context of the time, revealing its political and strategic aspects as well as its religious and economic ones. The journey of the sultan's caravan thus becomes a sort of metaphor, useful for explaining the dense network of ties and exchanges which enveloped the Mediterranean, uniting Africa to Europe.

Thus a new and multicentric reading of medieval historical events emerges, in which Africa is an important protagonist and not an isolated and mysterious land , a "black continent" outside history.