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The Mali Empire
The West African gold empire of Sundiata and Mansa Musa, centered on the upper Niger
In 1324 Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, crossed the Sahara on pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan so laden with gold that, according to Arab chroniclers, his spending in Cairo depressed the value of gold there for years. The journey put Mali on European maps: the Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows its king enthroned and holding a gold nugget. At its height in the fourteenth century the empire controlled the gold fields of the West African savanna and much of the trans-Saharan trade, and its cities of Timbuktu and Djenné grew into centers of Islamic scholarship. The epic of its founder, Sundiata, is still performed by griots across West Africa, and the modern Republic of Mali took its name.
The empire grew from the Manding heartland on the upper Niger River, near today's border between Guinea and Mali, and followed the river northeast through its inland delta to the Niger bend at Timbuktu and Gao. It spread across the Sahel and the Sudanian savanna, a belt of grassland and open woodland between the Sahara to the north and the forests of the Guinea coast to the south, and west to the Atlantic along the Senegal and Gambia rivers. The goldfields of Bambuk and Bure supplied its wealth, and salt came south from Saharan mines such as Taghaza. At its height around 1350 it covered roughly 1.1 to 1.3 million square kilometers. Its lands now lie in Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, southern Mauritania, western Niger, northern Burkina Faso and northern Côte d'Ivoire.
According to the epic of Sundiata, preserved by griots, the Mandinka prince Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso king Sumanguru at the Battle of Kirina around 1235, and an assembly at Kurukan Fuga set out rules for the new state, a charter now on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage. Mali absorbed the remnants of the older Ghana Empire. Mansa Musa, who reigned in the early fourteenth century, sponsored mosques and scholarship, and the traveler Ibn Battuta visited the court of his successor Suleyman in 1352 and 1353. Succession disputes weakened the state after 1360. Tuareg forces took Timbuktu in 1433, and the rising Songhai Empire seized it in 1468 and pushed Mali back toward its Manding core. A defeat at Djenné in 1599 ended its regional power, and by around 1610 it had broken into smaller chiefdoms.