December 27, 2010 • 24 mins
Talk about making an impression: When emperor Mansa Musa went on a pilgramage from Timbuktu to Mecca, he gave away so much gold that he crashed the gold market in Cairo. Tune in and learn more about Musa and Timbuktu in this podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delaying a chocolate boarding and
today we're going to be talking about a city of gold.
But this one existed long before anybody had heard about
(00:22):
El Dorado with its mythical streets paved in gold. There
was this city in Mali, and that's this great West
African empire that was supposedly so rich that slaves could
carry staffs that were dusted in gold, and even the
most common objects, like everyday things around your house would
(00:43):
be made out of this precious metal that was so
rare in most of the world. Yeah. But the interesting
thing is for most of the Middle Ages, Europe and
even paid much attention to Africa beyond its northern trading
cities at all. But this gold, it really changed things. Yeah,
especially when a into the British historian Dr Basil Davidson,
(01:03):
the rulers of Molly were quote rumored to have been
the wealthiest men on the face of the earth. So
I would say that would be worth checking out, even
going across the desert for perhaps, I'd say so. And
the most illustrious ruler of this empire was Mansa Musa,
and he expanded territories, developed great cities, and most famously
(01:25):
displayed his land's wealth and a procession of thousands across Africa.
And he didn't do this to fight a battle. He
did it to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. So, okay,
we're gonna be talking about this city of gold, and
we're gonna be talking about this ruler who made this
famous pilgrimage. So who was mons and Musa and where
did he come from. He came from the Sahel, which
(01:48):
is this band of land that separates the Sahara from
the forests of southern Africa. And it's always been an important,
banned important part of the world because of the trade
that crosses it. And that really started in about seven
fifty a d. And lasted until the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries when finally ships replaced overland caravans of camels. You
(02:13):
could do your trading a lot easier by boats. Yes,
And the first great kingdom of this area was that
of Ghana. And that's different from the modern nation of
Ghana that we know today. Yeah, it's not even really
in the same spot nearby, but not exactly the same.
But while this kingdom splintered apart, Islamic proselytizing converted much
(02:34):
of the region to Islam, including ruling families. Yeah, and
one of these families, the Kayita, started up a new
kingdom that replaced this empire of Ghana. That was the
Kingdom of Moli and it's first major leader, the leader
who brought the family to great power with Scindiata. And
there's kind of a fun story about the sky from
(02:56):
the oral tradition. Supposedly he was a really st long child,
but kind of clumsy on his feet. But there was
a rule kind of like a king Arthur and the
stone sort of snory. But there was a challenge. Whoever
could knock down a fruit from this special tree in
town and then swallow the pit of that fruit would
(03:17):
become king. And so this strong, that clumsy boy gave
it a shot. And most people would try to knock
down the fruit by throwing rocks or some sort of
object at it, and it wouldn't work. Cyndiata picked up
a man and threw him at the fruit, knocked it down,
swallowed the fruit hole and for good measure. He plucked
(03:37):
the tree out of the ground and replanted it in
his mother's yard so other people couldn't steal the fruit. Wow,
that's a hard story to beat about becoming king. Yeah,
I mean I would make him king. Yeah, it's worth it.
So the Empire of Molly thrived because of its placement
near the Niger River. This kingdom had a lock on
(03:58):
all the gold that traveled north. But it wasn't just gold.
There was also trade in copper, slaves, and salt. Yeah.
So imagine mostly gold and slaves coming from the south
and salt coming from the desert, and all of it
going through this kingdom where they can tax the merchants
heavily and make a big profit. Um. But we shouldn't
(04:19):
think of it as two cohesive an empire because it
had really distinct regions where different people live, they spoke
different languages. Um, it's not an empire how you might
think of an empire today. Um. And according to Timba
to the Sahara's Fabled City of Gold, which was a
book I referenced for this episode. After Cindiata's death, there
(04:42):
were there's kind of turmoil. There was a series of emperors,
one was insane and murdered by his courtiers. That's never
good um, and power is kind of juggled around until
somehow it falls on this man of the servant class
named Sakura, and power changed hands a few times again
after him, and settled on Abu Baquir the second, the
(05:02):
immediate predecessor of Manta Musa. Yeah and Montsa Musa. I mean,
we're gonna be talking about him more at length later.
But he proved to be a very able administrator. He
expanded the territory a lot, it's reputation, but he wasn't
a shoe in for becoming king, and at least the
timing of his ascension is kind of a fluke. As
(05:26):
he later told the Son of the Sultan and Cairo,
the only reason he earned his throne was because Abubakir
refused to believe that the ocean was infinite. So basically,
this guy was obsessed with what was across the Atlantic,
stare out at the ocean, just dying that there might
be lands over there that he was not the emperor
of right, So he finally launched an expedition of four
(05:50):
hundred ships into this unknown Atlantic ocean, and only one
came back, but the men spoke of a river on
the ocean, so that must have been enough for him.
He was in trigued of a river being in the ocean,
which I don't know if that's like a current or something.
Perhaps he was interested, and so he ordered two thousand
(06:10):
news ships, a thousand with men, a thousand with supplies,
and those time he led the fleet out and told
Mansa Musa here in charge until I come back. Unsurprised
and famous last words. Yeah, he never came back. And um,
if you want to compare this to some other transatlantic travel,
this is thirteen ten or thirteen twelve, So it's kind
(06:34):
of fascinating to imagine what if he did make it.
I think you have like a good comic book or
something possibility of Um. Fortunately from Mansa Musa he's a
lot more content with what he has and expanding the
territory and land, not sailing off into the great unknown ocean. Yes,
so his empire became one of the world's largest at
(06:56):
the time. A lot of people said it supposedly took
a year to travel from one end to the other,
but that was probably a bit of an exaggeration. Actually,
fourteenth century traveler ibn Batuta said that it took him
about four months to travel from northern Molly to Nani
in the south, so still a very sizeable empire um
(07:16):
And in the seventeenth year of his reign, Montsa Musa
embarked on the most famous journey of his lifetime. What
is the reason why we're talking about him today on
the podcast, Probably that's his pilgrimage to Mecca. And basically
this pilgrimage let the whole world knew how wealthy his
kingdom was and what was beyond the desert. And he
(07:39):
traveled from his capital of Nanni to Wallata, to Twat
to Cairo, and from there he went on to Mecca.
And he had a caravan of sixty thousand men, twelve
thousand slaves dressed in brocade and the finest Persian silk.
One wife. He brought his senior wife with him her
(08:00):
retinue of five hundred slaves, and then he himself rode
on horseback with five hundred gold staff slaves that we
mentioned in the beginning riding in front of him. And
his entourage's baggage was carried by eighty camels, and they
each carried three hundred pounds of gold. So I mean,
just imagine something like this passing through your tiny little
(08:21):
desert town. I know, that's a lot of baggage, would
be unbelievable, especially considering he only brought one wife. Yeah,
so along his way he gave generously, and he spent lavishly,
and his party was noted for their good behavior and
he was noted for his own piousness. In Cairo, it
took a major convincing to make mont AMusA pay a
(08:43):
formal visit to the mom Luke Sultan, since he didn't
wish to break away from his religious observances. Yeah, it
basically took someone saying, you really have to go meet
with the Sultan or you're going to be in trouble.
And according to the chronicler all Umari, he said, I
came for the pilgrimage and nothing else. I do not
wish to mix anything else with my pilgrimage. But probably
(09:04):
the most amazing detail of this pilgrimage is that twelve
years later all Umari found people still talking about the
visit in Cairo and apparently, oh that this is kind
of a disputed fact. Apparently he flooded the Cairo market
with so much gold, just giving to every official he
could find and spending buying everything he could find. He
(09:29):
infused so much gold into the market that it basically
crashed and remained deflated for years, I mean twelve years later.
That's unbelievable. That's a long time. So the pilgrimage with
all of its gold and all of these slaves and
camels and other people attending the pilgrimage with him, that's
really impressive in itself. But the truly amazing thing is
(09:51):
the impression it leaves on all of the people who
see him, and how quickly the word spreads not just
through Africa and through the Middle East, but all the
way into Southern Europe yep. And he's not just spreading
the word about himself and his wealth, but he's spreading
the word about his home to other West African rulers
had made pilgridges before, but Mansa Musa's really advertised molly
(10:15):
Muslim kingdoms in North Africa and European kingdoms. They all
wanted to see the place that this wealth was coming from,
the area that that had originated. Yeah, and Venetian and
Genoy's trading firms that were based in Alexandria of course
heard about this great king that was over in Cairo,
and they started to spread the word around southern Europe.
(10:36):
And by thirteen seventy five, which is you know, it's
a long time later, but this is still of note,
Mansa Musa had made it on to Charles the five
of France's newly commissioned atlas. And if you look up
Mansa Musa, the picture you get of him is going
to be from this atlas. He's drawn holding a ball
of gold, he's wearing a crown, and there's the caption
(10:58):
so abundant is gold which is found in his country,
that he is the richest and most noble king in
all the land, and three cities in his empire listed
on this atlas. So clearly he's made a big, big
impression on people very far away from him, and a
big name for his homeland. Even though he's a high roller,
(11:19):
his riches aren't inexhaustible, though unfortunately it would be a
better story if they were. It would be he over
spends himself, as you so often do when you're traveling.
You overspend yourself and then you have to get home
and raise some money quickly, and so during the trip home,
he had to borrow at really high rates due to
(11:41):
all that's spending in Cairo and Mecca. Fortunately, though, while
he was on his pilgrimage, one of his generals, like Mandia,
had expanded his empire's territory, so he had a lot
of new prospective sources of income. Um since he had
just incorporated two very wealthy, very prominent city states, Gal
(12:03):
and timbukto um So. Yeah, it's it's looking like all
the borrowing isn't going to be too bad, I think
looking up. So on the way home, Mansa Musa stops
by Cairo not just to borrow money, but also to
collect artisans Mason's iron workers and the poet and architect
AbuI shock Sahili all twadjen al Granada before swinging through
(12:27):
his newly claimed city states and taking a couple of
princes as hostages on the way. Yeah, make sure the
city states knew who were bought Who's boss um so
in exchange for these really extravagant payments like hundreds of
pounds of gold and slaves and food and riverland. The
architect with the very long name builds a lot of
(12:48):
great monuments to Mansa Musa. He builds a palace and
a mosque and go and a now lost palace in
Timbuctoo and one of one in Nanni. And most famously
he builds a great mosque in Timbuctoo and um again,
if you google timbuk two, this is probably the mosque
you're going to see. It's the most famous landmark, i'd say,
(13:11):
of the city. And it looks a lot like it
did in thirteen thirty. It's the UNASCO site. It's very
threatened by the desert and um just being neglected in
terms of upkeep. Um. But it's a pretty impressive structure.
And the rich building projects that Mansa Musa essentially kicks
(13:31):
off start a trend because all the wealthy merchants in
Timbuctoo wanted to sort of look like what the king
is doing. And yeah, they start bringing in their own
Egyptian workers and making their own elaborate homes, and we
have guilds of masons formed and iron workers formed, and
Timbuctoo becomes this really cosmopolitan city and their people from
(13:54):
all these different cultures. In the fourteenth century, there are
as many as fifteen thousand peep bowl which maybe it
doesn't sound like a whole lot nowadays, but let's compare
that to London's population at the same time, which was
only twenty thousands, so pretty close. It's interesting. It's a
it's a huge city with a lot going on, and
(14:15):
Timbucto kept this sort of position as a cosmopolitan city
even after Manson Musa died in thirty two, and gradually
the states of the Empire of Molly began to break
off after that, but Timbuctoo went on to become a
major cultural and religious center of the world. And you know,
it had been It had been a pretty major trading
city before Montsa Musa took it under his wing. Um
(14:40):
long long ago. It had been this little crossroads town.
And I love the story if it's naming. It was
a place where a tiregg woman named Buck two ran
a rest stop on the edge of the desert near
a Niger River tributary, and tin buck two means well
of buck too, so there you go, wow um. But
(15:01):
you know it had developed a lot since then, but
it was under Mansa Musa that it started. The great
libraries developed, the schools developed, and it became the meeting
place for some of the best poets and scholars and
artists in Africa in the Middle East, And I'd just
like to give a little rundown of some of the
(15:21):
stuff that people were working on at this time, just
because it it seems um so much earlier than that
you would think, yeah, than you would think. In the
fifteenth century, mathematicians in Timbuctu knew about the rotation of
the planets and the details of the eclipse, which were
things that Galileo and Copernicus calculated a lot later, And
(15:43):
we've talked about both of them in recent episodes, so
it's interesting to get a little pre Galileo Copernicus background
on astronomy here. Yeah, definitely. They also kind of tooled
around a bit with some ideas from India, including creating
Arabic numerals. Yeah, and their physic shans wrote about medicinal
plants and nutrition and performed early operations on the human eye,
(16:06):
which sounds kind of uncomfortable, but I guess you gotta
start somewhere. And ethesist debated polygamy and tobacco. So I mean,
just a very small slice of all of the ideas
that we're floating around in Timbuctoo and of course, a
lot of ideas on Islam too. It became a great
center of Islamic study. Um. So finally, you know, the
(16:30):
city did reach a decline at some point, even though
it was long after the Empire of Molly fell, And
that came when a Morok consultan invaded and killed the scholars,
and that ended the um educational reputation of Timbuctoo somewhat,
and its commercial success ended not too long after that,
when the ocean trade routes opened up and nobody had
(16:53):
any reason to go all the way to Timbuctoo anymore.
But luckily, none of it didn't all go away. There
are many thousands of books that were stashed away, and
they were hidden in caves and storage rooms, are buried
in trunks, and in that way they were sort of
protected from invaders, if not from the elements necessarily. And
today there's a major effort to save these ancient books,
(17:17):
which many of which were handwritten in classic Arabic on
linen based paper, inks and dyes that were from desert plants,
and they had covers that were the skins of goats
and sheep. Yeah, and Yasco has been working on protecting
a lot of these texts almost since Molly's independence in
the nineteen sixties, and there are numerous libraries that have
(17:37):
been established in timbuc To, supported by not only NASCO,
but the Ford Foundation or the professor Henry Lewis Gates Jr.
Who has promoted the libraries and the text of Timbucto.
A lot um people are really focusing on, for one thing,
finding them, rounding them up, getting them out of the
trunks they're buried in in the desert it and getting
(18:00):
the dust off of them, but also digitizing the library
so that they can be used around the world. You
don't have to go to timbuc To to look at
this important manuscript, right And I think you've mentioned that
some of them are in pretty bad shape. Yeah, a
lot of them are rotten at this point. It's um
obviously a dry climate, but Jinas isn't always good for books,
(18:22):
and there's a rainy season, so you end up with
insects and mold and mildew um, so a lot of them.
It's amazing that they're they've survived this long um. According
to Tell Tamari, who's a historian at the National Center
for Scientific Research in Paris, what's in the books is
likely going to shock the world if it's ever all compiled.
(18:46):
Um Tell Tamari was quoted as saying, these discoveries are
going to revolutionize what one thinks about West Africa. So
there's really a rush to to get this onto computers
or at least preserve before they disintegrate. Yeah, it sounds
like a really challenging effort, but a good one. If
you want to learn a little bit more about the
(19:07):
preservation effort in Timbukto, there's a really good Smithsonian article
by Joshua Hammer just on how these libraries were formed.
Um in what people are doing to try to save
all these old manuscripts. Yep. And it would be good
for them to do that too, because it's not that
easy to visit Timbuctoo anymore, isn't. No, it's not. The U. S.
(19:28):
State Department cautions against all travel in Northern Mali, including Timbucto,
because of threats from the terrorists group a q i
Am and tire unrest and banditry. Um. So yeah, unfortunately,
going from here to Timbuctoo really is like an impossibility
now unless you're seriously willing to um risk some major
(19:51):
personal danger. Um. And that's unfortunate because it seems like
there's so much they are still and of course the
city is also being threatened by the desert itself, but
I think they're trying to keep it at bay and
protect the mosques and the monuments from just being swallowed
up by the sand again. So I guess that's about
all we have to say about tim Buck two and
(20:14):
Monsa Musa today. But it was really interesting to learn
about this king who um. I mean, I never really
heard about him before. He's been suggested a few times, um,
But it's it's interesting to learn about how the whole
continent is partly opened up to another part of the world,
and about tim Buck two, which I think has almost
taken on kind of a mythical persona Tim Buck too.
(20:36):
You say it when you're talking. You want to say,
like something that's the farthest place you can imagine. It's
just a catch phrase. I think probably a lot of
people don't even realize it's a real city, let alone that. Um.
That catchphrase would have been so wrong for most of
its history, like the center of things, um. But I
don't know. It was fun, and I think that brings
(20:59):
us to snermail. We have one from Darlene, who says,
a long time ago, that's along with lots of ohs.
Back at U c l A, I took an astronomy
class with the head of the department, a brilliant and
shameless punster who had written many books, including the one
(21:21):
assigned as a textbook, Quell Surprise in parentheses. During our
study of Tico Brahy. The assigned reading included the puzzling
phrase Tico brahe did not die in Vain spelled h
b e N. This made sense when we learned that
the town and question isn't pronounced then, as in your
(21:41):
podcast is pronounced vain. I think you can figure it out.
She says, thanks as always for an enjoyable peak at
corners of history that I did indeed missing class. I
think that might be one of the best correction emails
I've ever gotten. Yeah, we I'm glad to know that
it is pronounced a ban and so what a fun
little puzzle to throw it a clever professor at astronomy enthusiast.
(22:07):
We have another one on Tico brow here, also kind
of a fun correction, and it's from Anne in New Hampshire,
and she wrote, November has a nothing to do with
celebrating the ability to grow a mustache. It started out
as an awareness campaign for prostate cancer, which affects more
men in their lifetimes than breast cancer affects women, which
gets little awareness. I believe November is an umbrella for
(22:29):
overall awareness of men's health issues. So that's my little soapbox.
Um And I was looking into November after getting a
few days emails a little bit, and I think it
started with this group of Australian men in a bar,
of course, who decided to grow mustaches. And it was
later that they decided, well, we could actually seriously raise
(22:52):
some money by our mustache growing enterprising young fellows, and
um yeah. From there it became a prostate cancer fundraiser
and um, I think depression fundraising and just general men's
health issues. So kind of a fun fact about mustache
growing and tico and um but I think that's wicked cool.
(23:14):
I want to uh celebrate November next year now that
I know what it's really all about. Good luck with that,
maybe with a false mustache. Um well, I think that
about wraps it up. We have, fortunately for you an
article on this the Hell. If you want to learn
a little bit more about the part of Africa we
were talking about. You can also email us if you
(23:35):
have suggestions for more African history topics at History podcast
at how stuff works dot com. We're on Twitter, misst
in history, and we're on Facebook. If you want to
check out that article, it's called why is this the
Hell Shifting? You can find it by searching forth the
Hell on our home page at www dot how stuff
works dot com. Or more on this and thousands of
(24:01):
other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. To learn
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Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes,
m
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delaying a chocolate boarding and
today we're going to be talking about a city of gold.
But this one existed long before anybody had heard about
(00:22):
El Dorado with its mythical streets paved in gold. There
was this city in Mali, and that's this great West
African empire that was supposedly so rich that slaves could
carry staffs that were dusted in gold, and even the
most common objects, like everyday things around your house would
(00:43):
be made out of this precious metal that was so
rare in most of the world. Yeah. But the interesting
thing is for most of the Middle Ages, Europe and
even paid much attention to Africa beyond its northern trading
cities at all. But this gold, it really changed things. Yeah,
especially when a into the British historian Dr Basil Davidson,
(01:03):
the rulers of Molly were quote rumored to have been
the wealthiest men on the face of the earth. So
I would say that would be worth checking out, even
going across the desert for perhaps, I'd say so. And
the most illustrious ruler of this empire was Mansa Musa,
and he expanded territories, developed great cities, and most famously
(01:25):
displayed his land's wealth and a procession of thousands across Africa.
And he didn't do this to fight a battle. He
did it to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. So, okay,
we're gonna be talking about this city of gold, and
we're gonna be talking about this ruler who made this
famous pilgrimage. So who was mons and Musa and where
did he come from. He came from the Sahel, which
(01:48):
is this band of land that separates the Sahara from
the forests of southern Africa. And it's always been an important,
banned important part of the world because of the trade
that crosses it. And that really started in about seven
fifty a d. And lasted until the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries when finally ships replaced overland caravans of camels. You
(02:13):
could do your trading a lot easier by boats. Yes,
And the first great kingdom of this area was that
of Ghana. And that's different from the modern nation of
Ghana that we know today. Yeah, it's not even really
in the same spot nearby, but not exactly the same.
But while this kingdom splintered apart, Islamic proselytizing converted much
(02:34):
of the region to Islam, including ruling families. Yeah, and
one of these families, the Kayita, started up a new
kingdom that replaced this empire of Ghana. That was the
Kingdom of Moli and it's first major leader, the leader
who brought the family to great power with Scindiata. And
there's kind of a fun story about the sky from
(02:56):
the oral tradition. Supposedly he was a really st long child,
but kind of clumsy on his feet. But there was
a rule kind of like a king Arthur and the
stone sort of snory. But there was a challenge. Whoever
could knock down a fruit from this special tree in
town and then swallow the pit of that fruit would
(03:17):
become king. And so this strong, that clumsy boy gave
it a shot. And most people would try to knock
down the fruit by throwing rocks or some sort of
object at it, and it wouldn't work. Cyndiata picked up
a man and threw him at the fruit, knocked it down,
swallowed the fruit hole and for good measure. He plucked
(03:37):
the tree out of the ground and replanted it in
his mother's yard so other people couldn't steal the fruit. Wow,
that's a hard story to beat about becoming king. Yeah,
I mean I would make him king. Yeah, it's worth it.
So the Empire of Molly thrived because of its placement
near the Niger River. This kingdom had a lock on
(03:58):
all the gold that traveled north. But it wasn't just gold.
There was also trade in copper, slaves, and salt. Yeah.
So imagine mostly gold and slaves coming from the south
and salt coming from the desert, and all of it
going through this kingdom where they can tax the merchants
heavily and make a big profit. Um. But we shouldn't
(04:19):
think of it as two cohesive an empire because it
had really distinct regions where different people live, they spoke
different languages. Um, it's not an empire how you might
think of an empire today. Um. And according to Timba
to the Sahara's Fabled City of Gold, which was a
book I referenced for this episode. After Cindiata's death, there
(04:42):
were there's kind of turmoil. There was a series of emperors,
one was insane and murdered by his courtiers. That's never
good um, and power is kind of juggled around until
somehow it falls on this man of the servant class
named Sakura, and power changed hands a few times again
after him, and settled on Abu Baquir the second, the
(05:02):
immediate predecessor of Manta Musa. Yeah and Montsa Musa. I mean,
we're gonna be talking about him more at length later.
But he proved to be a very able administrator. He
expanded the territory a lot, it's reputation, but he wasn't
a shoe in for becoming king, and at least the
timing of his ascension is kind of a fluke. As
(05:26):
he later told the Son of the Sultan and Cairo,
the only reason he earned his throne was because Abubakir
refused to believe that the ocean was infinite. So basically,
this guy was obsessed with what was across the Atlantic,
stare out at the ocean, just dying that there might
be lands over there that he was not the emperor
of right, So he finally launched an expedition of four
(05:50):
hundred ships into this unknown Atlantic ocean, and only one
came back, but the men spoke of a river on
the ocean, so that must have been enough for him.
He was in trigued of a river being in the ocean,
which I don't know if that's like a current or something.
Perhaps he was interested, and so he ordered two thousand
(06:10):
news ships, a thousand with men, a thousand with supplies,
and those time he led the fleet out and told
Mansa Musa here in charge until I come back. Unsurprised
and famous last words. Yeah, he never came back. And um,
if you want to compare this to some other transatlantic travel,
this is thirteen ten or thirteen twelve, So it's kind
(06:34):
of fascinating to imagine what if he did make it.
I think you have like a good comic book or
something possibility of Um. Fortunately from Mansa Musa he's a
lot more content with what he has and expanding the
territory and land, not sailing off into the great unknown ocean. Yes,
so his empire became one of the world's largest at
(06:56):
the time. A lot of people said it supposedly took
a year to travel from one end to the other,
but that was probably a bit of an exaggeration. Actually,
fourteenth century traveler ibn Batuta said that it took him
about four months to travel from northern Molly to Nani
in the south, so still a very sizeable empire um
(07:16):
And in the seventeenth year of his reign, Montsa Musa
embarked on the most famous journey of his lifetime. What
is the reason why we're talking about him today on
the podcast, Probably that's his pilgrimage to Mecca. And basically
this pilgrimage let the whole world knew how wealthy his
kingdom was and what was beyond the desert. And he
(07:39):
traveled from his capital of Nanni to Wallata, to Twat
to Cairo, and from there he went on to Mecca.
And he had a caravan of sixty thousand men, twelve
thousand slaves dressed in brocade and the finest Persian silk.
One wife. He brought his senior wife with him her
(08:00):
retinue of five hundred slaves, and then he himself rode
on horseback with five hundred gold staff slaves that we
mentioned in the beginning riding in front of him. And
his entourage's baggage was carried by eighty camels, and they
each carried three hundred pounds of gold. So I mean,
just imagine something like this passing through your tiny little
(08:21):
desert town. I know, that's a lot of baggage, would
be unbelievable, especially considering he only brought one wife. Yeah,
so along his way he gave generously, and he spent lavishly,
and his party was noted for their good behavior and
he was noted for his own piousness. In Cairo, it
took a major convincing to make mont AMusA pay a
(08:43):
formal visit to the mom Luke Sultan, since he didn't
wish to break away from his religious observances. Yeah, it
basically took someone saying, you really have to go meet
with the Sultan or you're going to be in trouble.
And according to the chronicler all Umari, he said, I
came for the pilgrimage and nothing else. I do not
wish to mix anything else with my pilgrimage. But probably
(09:04):
the most amazing detail of this pilgrimage is that twelve
years later all Umari found people still talking about the
visit in Cairo and apparently, oh that this is kind
of a disputed fact. Apparently he flooded the Cairo market
with so much gold, just giving to every official he
could find and spending buying everything he could find. He
(09:29):
infused so much gold into the market that it basically
crashed and remained deflated for years, I mean twelve years later.
That's unbelievable. That's a long time. So the pilgrimage with
all of its gold and all of these slaves and
camels and other people attending the pilgrimage with him, that's
really impressive in itself. But the truly amazing thing is
(09:51):
the impression it leaves on all of the people who
see him, and how quickly the word spreads not just
through Africa and through the Middle East, but all the
way into Southern Europe yep. And he's not just spreading
the word about himself and his wealth, but he's spreading
the word about his home to other West African rulers
had made pilgridges before, but Mansa Musa's really advertised molly
(10:15):
Muslim kingdoms in North Africa and European kingdoms. They all
wanted to see the place that this wealth was coming from,
the area that that had originated. Yeah, and Venetian and
Genoy's trading firms that were based in Alexandria of course
heard about this great king that was over in Cairo,
and they started to spread the word around southern Europe.
(10:36):
And by thirteen seventy five, which is you know, it's
a long time later, but this is still of note,
Mansa Musa had made it on to Charles the five
of France's newly commissioned atlas. And if you look up
Mansa Musa, the picture you get of him is going
to be from this atlas. He's drawn holding a ball
of gold, he's wearing a crown, and there's the caption
(10:58):
so abundant is gold which is found in his country,
that he is the richest and most noble king in
all the land, and three cities in his empire listed
on this atlas. So clearly he's made a big, big
impression on people very far away from him, and a
big name for his homeland. Even though he's a high roller,
(11:19):
his riches aren't inexhaustible, though unfortunately it would be a
better story if they were. It would be he over
spends himself, as you so often do when you're traveling.
You overspend yourself and then you have to get home
and raise some money quickly, and so during the trip home,
he had to borrow at really high rates due to
(11:41):
all that's spending in Cairo and Mecca. Fortunately, though, while
he was on his pilgrimage, one of his generals, like Mandia,
had expanded his empire's territory, so he had a lot
of new prospective sources of income. Um since he had
just incorporated two very wealthy, very prominent city states, Gal
(12:03):
and timbukto um So. Yeah, it's it's looking like all
the borrowing isn't going to be too bad, I think
looking up. So on the way home, Mansa Musa stops
by Cairo not just to borrow money, but also to
collect artisans Mason's iron workers and the poet and architect
AbuI shock Sahili all twadjen al Granada before swinging through
(12:27):
his newly claimed city states and taking a couple of
princes as hostages on the way. Yeah, make sure the
city states knew who were bought Who's boss um so
in exchange for these really extravagant payments like hundreds of
pounds of gold and slaves and food and riverland. The
architect with the very long name builds a lot of
(12:48):
great monuments to Mansa Musa. He builds a palace and
a mosque and go and a now lost palace in
Timbuctoo and one of one in Nanni. And most famously
he builds a great mosque in Timbuctoo and um again,
if you google timbuk two, this is probably the mosque
you're going to see. It's the most famous landmark, i'd say,
(13:11):
of the city. And it looks a lot like it
did in thirteen thirty. It's the UNASCO site. It's very
threatened by the desert and um just being neglected in
terms of upkeep. Um. But it's a pretty impressive structure.
And the rich building projects that Mansa Musa essentially kicks
(13:31):
off start a trend because all the wealthy merchants in
Timbuctoo wanted to sort of look like what the king
is doing. And yeah, they start bringing in their own
Egyptian workers and making their own elaborate homes, and we
have guilds of masons formed and iron workers formed, and
Timbuctoo becomes this really cosmopolitan city and their people from
(13:54):
all these different cultures. In the fourteenth century, there are
as many as fifteen thousand peep bowl which maybe it
doesn't sound like a whole lot nowadays, but let's compare
that to London's population at the same time, which was
only twenty thousands, so pretty close. It's interesting. It's a
it's a huge city with a lot going on, and
(14:15):
Timbucto kept this sort of position as a cosmopolitan city
even after Manson Musa died in thirty two, and gradually
the states of the Empire of Molly began to break
off after that, but Timbuctoo went on to become a
major cultural and religious center of the world. And you know,
it had been It had been a pretty major trading
city before Montsa Musa took it under his wing. Um
(14:40):
long long ago. It had been this little crossroads town.
And I love the story if it's naming. It was
a place where a tiregg woman named Buck two ran
a rest stop on the edge of the desert near
a Niger River tributary, and tin buck two means well
of buck too, so there you go, wow um. But
(15:01):
you know it had developed a lot since then, but
it was under Mansa Musa that it started. The great
libraries developed, the schools developed, and it became the meeting
place for some of the best poets and scholars and
artists in Africa in the Middle East, And I'd just
like to give a little rundown of some of the
(15:21):
stuff that people were working on at this time, just
because it it seems um so much earlier than that
you would think, yeah, than you would think. In the
fifteenth century, mathematicians in Timbuctu knew about the rotation of
the planets and the details of the eclipse, which were
things that Galileo and Copernicus calculated a lot later, And
(15:43):
we've talked about both of them in recent episodes, so
it's interesting to get a little pre Galileo Copernicus background
on astronomy here. Yeah, definitely. They also kind of tooled
around a bit with some ideas from India, including creating
Arabic numerals. Yeah, and their physic shans wrote about medicinal
plants and nutrition and performed early operations on the human eye,
(16:06):
which sounds kind of uncomfortable, but I guess you gotta
start somewhere. And ethesist debated polygamy and tobacco. So I mean,
just a very small slice of all of the ideas
that we're floating around in Timbuctoo and of course, a
lot of ideas on Islam too. It became a great
center of Islamic study. Um. So finally, you know, the
(16:30):
city did reach a decline at some point, even though
it was long after the Empire of Molly fell, And
that came when a Morok consultan invaded and killed the scholars,
and that ended the um educational reputation of Timbuctoo somewhat,
and its commercial success ended not too long after that,
when the ocean trade routes opened up and nobody had
(16:53):
any reason to go all the way to Timbuctoo anymore.
But luckily, none of it didn't all go away. There
are many thousands of books that were stashed away, and
they were hidden in caves and storage rooms, are buried
in trunks, and in that way they were sort of
protected from invaders, if not from the elements necessarily. And
today there's a major effort to save these ancient books,
(17:17):
which many of which were handwritten in classic Arabic on
linen based paper, inks and dyes that were from desert plants,
and they had covers that were the skins of goats
and sheep. Yeah, and Yasco has been working on protecting
a lot of these texts almost since Molly's independence in
the nineteen sixties, and there are numerous libraries that have
(17:37):
been established in timbuc To, supported by not only NASCO,
but the Ford Foundation or the professor Henry Lewis Gates Jr.
Who has promoted the libraries and the text of Timbucto.
A lot um people are really focusing on, for one thing,
finding them, rounding them up, getting them out of the
trunks they're buried in in the desert it and getting
(18:00):
the dust off of them, but also digitizing the library
so that they can be used around the world. You
don't have to go to timbuc To to look at
this important manuscript, right And I think you've mentioned that
some of them are in pretty bad shape. Yeah, a
lot of them are rotten at this point. It's um
obviously a dry climate, but Jinas isn't always good for books,
(18:22):
and there's a rainy season, so you end up with
insects and mold and mildew um, so a lot of them.
It's amazing that they're they've survived this long um. According
to Tell Tamari, who's a historian at the National Center
for Scientific Research in Paris, what's in the books is
likely going to shock the world if it's ever all compiled.
(18:46):
Um Tell Tamari was quoted as saying, these discoveries are
going to revolutionize what one thinks about West Africa. So
there's really a rush to to get this onto computers
or at least preserve before they disintegrate. Yeah, it sounds
like a really challenging effort, but a good one. If
you want to learn a little bit more about the
(19:07):
preservation effort in Timbukto, there's a really good Smithsonian article
by Joshua Hammer just on how these libraries were formed.
Um in what people are doing to try to save
all these old manuscripts. Yep. And it would be good
for them to do that too, because it's not that
easy to visit Timbuctoo anymore, isn't. No, it's not. The U. S.
(19:28):
State Department cautions against all travel in Northern Mali, including Timbucto,
because of threats from the terrorists group a q i
Am and tire unrest and banditry. Um. So yeah, unfortunately,
going from here to Timbuctoo really is like an impossibility
now unless you're seriously willing to um risk some major
(19:51):
personal danger. Um. And that's unfortunate because it seems like
there's so much they are still and of course the
city is also being threatened by the desert itself, but
I think they're trying to keep it at bay and
protect the mosques and the monuments from just being swallowed
up by the sand again. So I guess that's about
all we have to say about tim Buck two and
(20:14):
Monsa Musa today. But it was really interesting to learn
about this king who um. I mean, I never really
heard about him before. He's been suggested a few times, um,
But it's it's interesting to learn about how the whole
continent is partly opened up to another part of the world,
and about tim Buck two, which I think has almost
taken on kind of a mythical persona Tim Buck too.
(20:36):
You say it when you're talking. You want to say,
like something that's the farthest place you can imagine. It's
just a catch phrase. I think probably a lot of
people don't even realize it's a real city, let alone that. Um.
That catchphrase would have been so wrong for most of
its history, like the center of things, um. But I
don't know. It was fun, and I think that brings
(20:59):
us to snermail. We have one from Darlene, who says,
a long time ago, that's along with lots of ohs.
Back at U c l A, I took an astronomy
class with the head of the department, a brilliant and
shameless punster who had written many books, including the one
(21:21):
assigned as a textbook, Quell Surprise in parentheses. During our
study of Tico Brahy. The assigned reading included the puzzling
phrase Tico brahe did not die in Vain spelled h
b e N. This made sense when we learned that
the town and question isn't pronounced then, as in your
(21:41):
podcast is pronounced vain. I think you can figure it out.
She says, thanks as always for an enjoyable peak at
corners of history that I did indeed missing class. I
think that might be one of the best correction emails
I've ever gotten. Yeah, we I'm glad to know that
it is pronounced a ban and so what a fun
little puzzle to throw it a clever professor at astronomy enthusiast.
(22:07):
We have another one on Tico brow here, also kind
of a fun correction, and it's from Anne in New Hampshire,
and she wrote, November has a nothing to do with
celebrating the ability to grow a mustache. It started out
as an awareness campaign for prostate cancer, which affects more
men in their lifetimes than breast cancer affects women, which
gets little awareness. I believe November is an umbrella for
(22:29):
overall awareness of men's health issues. So that's my little soapbox.
Um And I was looking into November after getting a
few days emails a little bit, and I think it
started with this group of Australian men in a bar,
of course, who decided to grow mustaches. And it was
later that they decided, well, we could actually seriously raise
(22:52):
some money by our mustache growing enterprising young fellows, and
um yeah. From there it became a prostate cancer fundraiser
and um, I think depression fundraising and just general men's
health issues. So kind of a fun fact about mustache
growing and tico and um but I think that's wicked cool.
(23:14):
I want to uh celebrate November next year now that
I know what it's really all about. Good luck with that,
maybe with a false mustache. Um well, I think that
about wraps it up. We have, fortunately for you an
article on this the Hell. If you want to learn
a little bit more about the part of Africa we
were talking about. You can also email us if you
(23:35):
have suggestions for more African history topics at History podcast
at how stuff works dot com. We're on Twitter, misst
in history, and we're on Facebook. If you want to
check out that article, it's called why is this the
Hell Shifting? You can find it by searching forth the
Hell on our home page at www dot how stuff
works dot com. Or more on this and thousands of
(24:01):
other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. To learn
more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in
the upper right corner of our homepage. The how stuff
Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes,
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