Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca

Leaving his son Muhammad to rule in his absence, Musa crossed the Sahara — by a route that historians usually reconstruct through Walata and the oases of Tuat — and in July 1324 camped for three days by the pyramids of Giza before entering Cairo. The meeting with al-Nasir Muhammad began awkwardly: Musa at first refused to prostrate himself before the sultan and, when he finally bowed, said that he did so before God alone; the two rulers then exchanged gifts. After three months he left with the official pilgrim caravan on 18 October 1324. In Mecca his men almost came to blows with a group of Turkic pilgrims, and on the way back many Malians died of cold, hunger and attacks by bandits; having run out of money, Musa borrowed from merchants in Cairo, some of whom, according to al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun, were repaid only in part or not at all. He took home scholars and the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili — according to J. O. Hunwick, the only building the Arabic sources firmly attribute to al-Sahili is a royal audience hall in Mali — and the 17th-century Tarikh al-Sudan says that Gao and Timbuktu submitted to Musa on his return, a claim historians doubt.

Most of what is known comes from Arabic writers after the event, above all Shihab al-Din al-Umari, who about twelve years later gathered the recollections of Cairo officials. He wrote that a mithqal of gold, which before the visit had never fetched less than 25 dirhams, now fetched no more than 22 and had stayed that low for about twelve years; the historian Warren Schultz regards this as within the normal fluctuations of the Cairo market, and modern historians treat the huge figures for Musa’s retinue and loads of gold in later accounts as rhetorical. The capital from which Musa set out cannot be located with certainty: Niani in Guinea, shown here, is the traditional identification, which several recent historians reject. The pilgrimage made Musa’s image proverbial — European maps from Angelino Dulcert’s of 1339 to the Catalan Atlas of 1375 show the king of Mali enthroned with gold.