- 2 months ago
In 1324 a man walked through Cairo and accidentally destroyed its economy. Not through war. Not through conquest. Simply by being too generous. He gave away so much gold to the poor, the merchants and the officials he passed — that the value of gold in Egypt collapsed overnight. It took twelve years to recover. That man was Mansa Musa — Emperor of the Mali Empire — and the richest human being who has ever lived. Today Elon Musk is worth approximately 300 billion dollars. Historians attempted to calculate Mansa Musa's wealth in modern terms and gave up. The number is too large for our current financial vocabulary to contain.
In this video:
• How the Mali Empire became the wealthiest civilization on earth — and why Europe had no idea it existed
• The predecessor who sailed into the Atlantic with 2,000 canoes and was never seen again
• The 12 year preparation for a single pilgrimage — 60,000 people, 80 camels, 18 tons of gold
• What happened when Mansa Musa arrived in Cairo and started giving gold to strangers
• How one man's generosity crashed an entire economy for 12 years
• The University of Sankore — 25,000 students, one million manuscripts — in 14th century West Africa
• The 1375 Catalan Atlas — and how one image of Mansa Musa sitting on a golden throne directly triggered the European Age of Exploration
________________________________________
The history you were taught had a gap in it. While Europe was in darkness — there was a civilization on the other side of the Sahara so wealthy, so intellectually extraordinary, that its emperor could walk through Cairo giving gold to strangers — and still be the richest person who ever lived.
Subscribe to HISTORVA — because the most important stories are the ones that were never told to you.
________________________________________
🔔 Subscribe for weekly history 👍 Like if this changed how you see African history 💬 Comment — did you know Mansa Musa existed before this video?
In this video:
• How the Mali Empire became the wealthiest civilization on earth — and why Europe had no idea it existed
• The predecessor who sailed into the Atlantic with 2,000 canoes and was never seen again
• The 12 year preparation for a single pilgrimage — 60,000 people, 80 camels, 18 tons of gold
• What happened when Mansa Musa arrived in Cairo and started giving gold to strangers
• How one man's generosity crashed an entire economy for 12 years
• The University of Sankore — 25,000 students, one million manuscripts — in 14th century West Africa
• The 1375 Catalan Atlas — and how one image of Mansa Musa sitting on a golden throne directly triggered the European Age of Exploration
________________________________________
The history you were taught had a gap in it. While Europe was in darkness — there was a civilization on the other side of the Sahara so wealthy, so intellectually extraordinary, that its emperor could walk through Cairo giving gold to strangers — and still be the richest person who ever lived.
Subscribe to HISTORVA — because the most important stories are the ones that were never told to you.
________________________________________
🔔 Subscribe for weekly history 👍 Like if this changed how you see African history 💬 Comment — did you know Mansa Musa existed before this video?
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LearningTranscript
00:00In 1324, a man walked through Chiron accidentally destroyed its economy.
00:05Not through war, not through conquest, not through any act of hostility.
00:11By being too generous, he gave away so much gold to the poor people he passed on the street.
00:17So much gold to every official, every merchant, every beggar-o crossed his path.
00:23That the value of gold in Egypt collapsed overnight.
00:27Prices spiraled.
00:29Markets destabilized.
00:31The Egyptian economy took 12 years to recover from a single man passing through on his way to prayer.
00:38That man was Mansa Musa, emperor of the Mali Empire.
00:42Ruler of more gold than any human buying had ever controlled in the history of the world.
00:48Today, Elon Musk is worth approximately $300 billion.
00:53Time magazine tried to calculate Mansa Musa's wealth in modern terms and gave up.
00:59Their conclusion.
01:00There is no way to put an accurate number on what he had.
01:04Some estimates suggest $400 billion.
01:08Others suggest the number is so large that our current financial vocabularist plea does not have a word for it.
01:15This is his story, and it is one of the most extraordinary stores in the history of the world, hiding
01:22in plain sight for 700 years.
01:25In the 14th century, while Europe was being decimated, the Black Death, while European nations were tearing themselves apart in
01:34civil wars, while famine and plague were reducing the continental desperate survival.
01:40On the other side of the Sahara Desert, something extraordinary was happening.
01:45The Mali Empire was flourishing, stretching from the Atlantic coasting the west of the trading hub of Timbuktu in the
01:52east, covering territory that today encompasses Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and beyond.
02:01The Mali Empire was the wealthiest civilization in the face of the earth, and the reason was simple.
02:07It sat on top off the world's most productive gold fields.
02:12Three major gold fields, Bambek, Muir, and the fields Bedwine, Mali, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, were producing golden quantities that
02:21the rest of the world could barely comprehend.
02:24Every ounce of gold mined, a percentage went direct line of the emperor.
02:28Every trade routed that passed through Mali's territory, taxed.
02:33Salt from the north.
02:35Gold from the south.
02:36Ivory.
02:37Spices.
02:39Silt.
02:40Everything moving through West Africa moved through Mali, and Mali took its share.
02:44For decades, this wealth had been accumulating in a capital city called Miani, largely unknown to the outside world.
02:53Europe did not know Mali existed.
02:55The Middle East had heard rumors.
02:58North Africa had traded with it, but even they had not fully grasped at what was sitting on the other
03:03side of the desert.
03:04Then, in 1312, a man came to the throne road would change that permanently.
03:10His name was Musa.
03:11He had not expected to be emperor.
03:14His predecessor, Abu Bakr II, had become obsessed with a question that haunted him.
03:19What lay beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
03:22He assembled a fleet off 2,000 canoes and sailed west into the unknown.
03:27He was never seen again, and Musa, who had served as his deputy, inherited the greatest empyry on earth.
03:35He had no idea what he was about to do with it.
03:37Mansa Musa was a devout Muslim, and as a devout Muslim, he had one obligation that he had not yet
03:45fulfilled.
03:46The Hajj.
03:47The pilgrimage to Mecca.
03:49The journey every Muslim will has the means is required to Mecca at least once in their lifetime.
03:55For most people, the Hajj is a deeply personal journey.
03:59An act of faith.
04:00A spiritual undertaking.
04:02Mansa Musa approached this way only the richest man in the history of the world could.
04:08He spent 12 years preparing.
04:1112 years gathering resource from across the empire.
04:1412 years assembling Wat would become its single most spectacular approachance in human history.
04:20By the time he was ready to leave, his caravan numbered 60,000 people.
04:2560,000.
04:278,000 courtiers.
04:2812,000 personal servants, each one dressed in Persian silken carrying a golden staff.
04:35Soldiers, officials, physicians, poets, musicians, and 80 camels.
04:42Each one carrying between 50 and 300 pounds off pure gold dust.
04:47When the caravan stopped at night, it was, according to one Arab historian, like an entire city decamping in the
04:55desert.
04:55They carried with FEMA Mobile Mosque, assembled each.
04:59For days so, the emperor could perform his prayers in a house of worship wherever the road took him.
05:05The total gold carried on this journey, estimated by historians at 18 tons.
05:1118 tons of gold.
05:12Walking across Africa, the world had never seen anything like it.
05:18And the world was about to find out exactly what happens in that much wealth moves through Yusitian, decides to
05:25be generous.
05:25The caravan arrived at the outskirts of Cairo in July of 1324.
05:31They, camped for three days by the pyramids of Giza.
05:35A detail so cinematic it almost seems invented.
05:38Before crossing the Nile into the city proper on the 19th of July, Cairo was one of the largest cities
05:45in the world at that time.
05:47A population of approximately one million people.
05:51It had seen powerful visitors before.
05:54It had never seen anything like this.
05:57The Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Al-Nasir Muhammad, sent word inviting Moussa for a formal royal audience.
06:04Moussa declined.
06:05He was on a pilgrimage.
06:07He had not come to conduct diplomacy.
06:10He had come to pass through on his way to Allah.
06:13The Sultan's envoys persisted.
06:16Moussa resisted.
06:18Eventually, after considerable diplomatic pressure, he agreed to a meeting.
06:23But he refused to perform the traditional greeting of kissing the ground before the Sultan.
06:28To Moussa, a man bowed only before Allah.
06:32The meeting was tense.
06:33Then it settled.
06:35And then Moussa did what Moussa did everywhere he went.
06:38He gave.
06:40Every court official received a gift of gold.
06:43Every holder of a royal office.
06:45A load of gold.
06:47Every poor person he encountered in the streets of Cairo, gold.
06:51Arab historian Shihab al-Omari, who visited Cairo 12 years later, recorded what had happened in precise terms.
06:59Moussa flooded Cairo with his generosity.
07:02He left no one in the court without receiving gold.
07:05They spent gold until they depressed its value and caused its price to fall.
07:11The math is straightforward.
07:13Gold is valuable because it is scarce.
07:15When an emperor walks through your city and hands it to everyone he meets, it is no longer scarce.
07:21The value of gold in Cairo's markets dropped dramatically.
07:26Merchants who had gold reserves suddenly found those reserves worth considerably less.
07:31Contracts priced in gold became economically unstable.
07:35Prices for other goods adjusted in response, creating a cascade of disruption that moved through every level of the Egyptian
07:43economy.
07:44It took 12 years to recover.
07:4712 years from a man's three-month stay on his way to prayer.
07:51And here is the detail that makes this story almost impossible to comprehend.
07:56Moussa ran out of money before he got home.
07:59He'd given away so much gold, spent so much on goods and gifts,
08:03that on a return journey, he had to borrow from Egyptian merchants at high interest rates.
08:10The richest man in the history of the world broke, temporarily, but broke.
08:15He completed the Hajj.
08:17He prayed at the holiest site in Islam as he had always intended.
08:21And on the journey, something shifted in him.
08:24He had seen the great cities of the Islamic world.
08:28Cairo, Medina, Mecca, cities of learning, cities of architecture.
08:34Cities where scholarship and culture and faith existed together in extraordinary harmony.
08:40He wanted that from Mali.
08:41He returned home with something more valuable than the gold he had given away.
08:46He returned with architects.
08:48Specifically, he brought back a Spanish Andalusian architect named Abu Ishak Al-Sahili,
08:54who had never seen West Africa and was about to change its skyline forever.
08:59In Timbuktu, Al-Sahili designed the Jingerber Mosque, a building of such extraordinary quality
09:06that it still stands today.
09:09700 years later, a UNESCO, World Heritage Site, Moussa also commissioned the Sankar Mosque,
09:16which would become the center of the University of Sankar, one of the largest universities in the medieval world.
09:22At its peak, Timbuktu had 25,000 students, 25,000, in a city in West Africa.
09:30In the 14th century, while Europe was burning books and executing scholars,
09:36Timbuktu was accumulating a library of over one million manuscripts,
09:39medicine, mathematics, astronomy, history, philosophy, Islamic theology.
09:47The greatest intellectual repository in sub-Saharan Africa,
09:51built by a man who just wanted to pray in Mecca and brought home an architect.
09:56And the world finally noticed.
09:59In 1375, 50 years after Moussa's pilgrimage,
10:03a Spanish cartographer named Abraham Kresks completed what is now called the Catalan Atlas,
10:10one of the most important maps in the history of cartography.
10:14In the center of the African continent, sitting on a golden throne, wearing a crown,
10:19holding a golden scepter in one hand and a nugget of solid gold in the other,
10:24was Mansa Moussa, depicted not as a curiosity, but as the dominant figure of the African continent.
10:31The image spread across Europe.
10:34And Europe, exhausted, plague-ridden, economically desperate,
10:38looked at that image and felt something it had not felt in a long time.
10:44Hunger.
10:44If there was a man this wealthy south of the Sahara,
10:47then there was gold south of the Sahara.
10:50And if there was gold, there was a reason to find a way to get it.
10:54Historians have drawn a direct line between the image of Mansa Moussa in the Catalan Atlas
11:00and the European Age of Exploration that began less than a century later,
11:05the Portuguese expeditions down the African coast,
11:09the Spanish voyages across the Atlantic,
11:12the obsessive European search for the source of African gold,
11:16all of it, accelerated by a single image of a man on a throne,
11:20holding a nugget of gold in a map made in Spain in 1375.
11:25The richest man in history did not just crash Cairo's economy.
11:29His existence, his pilgrimage, his generosity,
11:33his desire to pray in Mecca changed the direction of European exploration,
11:38changed the map of the world,
11:40for better and for worse.
11:42Mansa Moussa died in approximately 1337.
11:46He left behind the largest empire in Africa,
11:49the wealthiest city of learning in the medieval world,
11:53mosques that still stand today,
11:56manuscripts that are still being translated,
11:58and the global economy he had disrupted,
12:01simply by being generous.
12:03These are no banknote.
12:05He has no national holiday in the countries that were once his empire.
12:09For most of Western history,
12:11he did not exist.
12:13He was the footnote in someone else's story.
12:15The man on the map that Europeans used to justify their expeditions.
12:20But here is what the map actually shows.
12:23While Europe was in the dark,
12:25there was a civilization on the other side of the Sahara so advanced,
12:29so wealthy,
12:31so intellectually extraordinary,
12:33that its emperor could walk through Cairo,
12:35giving away gold to strangers,
12:37and still be the richest person who ever lived.
12:40The history you were taught had a gap in it.
12:43His name was Mansa Moussa,
12:45and he deserves to be in every history book that has ever been printed.
12:50Subscribe to Historva,
12:52because the most important stories are the ones that were never told to you.
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