There are few people throughout history whose actions humanity is yet to eclipse. Yea, Alexander the Great conquered a lot of land, but take a look at Russia today. And sure Hannibal’s elephants were the tanks of their day, but look at today’s, well, tanks. The world keeps moving forward, and people/civilizations keep one-upping each other. There’s a reason a new Guinness Book of World Records is released every year. There is one man, however, who’s legacy has remained unsurpassed, one person who will probably never be beat in his field. That man is Mansa Musa, and his achievement is his monumental, unquantifiable, ludicrous amount of wealth.

 

Mansa Muss is the richest man to have ever lived. This much is undebatable. The thing which is slightly contested is how much he was worth; historians have come to a general agreement that Mansa Musa’s net value today would be at least 420 billion US dollars. It’s hard to internalize what that number really means though. Sure it looks like 420,000,000,000 and anyone can see that there’s a lot of zeros, but this isn’t a math website, so here are some words which should put into perspective what Mansa Musa’s wealth would equal to in today’s world.

 

#1. Portugal. Twice.

 

#2. McGregor would have to fight Mayweather fourteen thousand more times to reach Musa level cash. I don’t think his ego would survive that.

 

#3. The top five richest people in the world today are Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, and Mark Zuckerberg. Mansa Musa has more money than all of them. Combined. Which means the founders of Amazon, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Inditex, and Facebook got nothing on Mansa Musa’s salt and gold (I’ll get to that in a minute).

 

 

So with that in mind, let’s get back into the history of it all. Here’s the scene: it’s 1324. Europe is in the throes of the Dark Ages. People are dying of the Black Plague, the streets are filled with rats and human excrement, England and France are on the brink of the Hundred Years War, and peasants are, well, living like peasants. But, “if it’s this bad here, things must be terrible everywhere else” said everyone in Europe.

 

*cue rumbling on the horizon*

 

Out of the desert of the Western Sahara over the horizon marches one hundred elephants. For those unfamiliar with how many elephants constitutes a lot of elephants, I think it’s fair to say 100 is far above normal. Alongside the elephants are several hundred camels. And on the backs of each of these camels is three hundred pounds of gold. Per camel. Leading the camels are twelve thousand slaves, although you wouldn’t have guessed it because they’re all decked out in Persian silk. Alongside them are another extravagantly dressed sixty thousand people. And presiding over it all is our friend Mansa Musa, carrying the largest mass of wealth the world has ever seen and will ever see.

 

A bit of backstory before we continue with this absolutely epic display.

 

Around the year 300CE, so about one thousand years earlier, a group of people known as the Soninke set up shop in the Western Sudan. They soon became known collectively as Ghana, which was here:

​

​

​

​

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Ghana became a pretty sophisticated society, with a distinct religion and language, as well as a recognized and powerful government. But what really put Ghana on the map in terms of the greater world economic landscape was that the empire sat on what was essentially a mountain of gold.

 

A constant struggle for the people in Ghana before up until the discovery of gold was acquiring salt, which could preserve food in desert conditions and was just as valuable as gold in the desert societies at the time. And so was born the trans-Saharan trade complex. The Ghana empire or Sub-Saharan economies wanted salt and the Mediterranean economies wanted gold, and each had the other in abundance. The Ghana empire took advantage of this system and along with trading the gold they taxed the traders, so they essentially made money by trading away gold. You can see how this gets pretty lucrative pretty fast. By the eleventh century, Ghana had become the trade center of Africa and in a way the entire Mediterranean world as well. A geographer of the day named al-Bakri visited the Ghana Empire court, and reported gold-embroidered caps, golden saddles, shields and swords mounted with gold and even dog collars studded with gold and silver. But as any historian knows, the trade routes did not only carry salt and gold; the elite of Ghana converted to Islam around the 10th century.

 

But as with all empires and the overall quality of Doctor Who, there was a steep quick decline.

 

A severe drought hit the kingdom (which is pretty catastrophic in a desert), and unfortunately you can eat neither gold nor salt.

 

The traders which came to Ghana around this time also realized that they could avoid getting taxed if they just, you know, went somewhere else. So, a group of people known as the Malinke people broke away from the control of Ghana in the 13th century, the traders went to them, and eventually the Malinke came to control the entire region. Thus the Mali Empire was born, and it looked like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mali empire was significantly more Muslim than Ghana, and rulers built mosques, went to public prayer and supported preachers. But it wouldn’t be a western African Empire if there wasn’t salt and gold involved, and this was no exception. And now, the empire was bigger. Which meant more gold deposits. Which meant more trade. Which meant more money. Which meant it’s time for Mansa Musa.

 

He was born in 1280AD to the Keita Dynasty, and soon became Sultan, which means king/conqueror of the Mali. Under his rule Timbuktu became a major trading city, and he funded the construction of several universities and infrastructure projects in his empire. Now we’re all caught up. It’s 1324, and Mansa Musa with centuries of wealth behind him decides to take his pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, which is an important part of Islam. As I mentioned earlier, he does so in immense style, backed by centuries of crazy wealth.

 

On his way to Mecca his caravan passed through town after town, and as he came through he spent a camel loads of that gold. He spent so much gold, in fact, that in Alexandria, Cairo, and Medina, three major metropolitan cities of the day, the value of gold crashed for the next decade and sent a chunk of the Mediterranean world into a short recession. Because of this one dude. It’s also said that he felt bad about that, so on his way back from Mecca he went to those same towns and borrowed money from lenders at the highest interest rates possible to try and reduce the inflation. It didn’t work, but it’s the thought that counts Mansa Musa.

 

Ultimately it’s hard to say what the key lasting impact of Mansa Musa’s legacy is.

Maybe it’s his epic pilgrimage to Mecca, maybe it’s just fun to compare his wealth to things (sixteen million Kia Sorentos).

 

The thing we do know for certain, is that Mansa Musa took a part of the world which was previously isolated and brought it to the forefront of a changing world. Or maybe we need to just judge him in the context of his time; interestingly enough, the name of Mali and Timbuktu for the first time appeared on 14th century world maps.