Mansa Musa: Was the King of Mali the Richest Person Ever?

Originally published 2019-04-02.

Mansa Musa, who ruled the Mali Empire in the early 1300s, is the name most often given when people ask who the richest person in history was. The honest answer is that nobody can put a reliable number on his fortune. What we can say is that he controlled one of the largest gold-producing regions of the medieval world, and that his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324–25 made such an impression in Cairo that writers were still talking about it more than a decade later.

Viral lists that rank him above every modern billionaire make for a good headline, but the real story is more interesting: how a West African king became a legend in Egypt and Europe, what the medieval sources actually say, and why historians refuse to turn his gold into dollars.

Who Mansa Musa was

Musa was the ninth mansa, or king, of Mali. His birth year is unknown; around 1280 is a common estimate. Most historians date the start of his reign to about 1312, based on the 25-year reign recorded by the North African historian Ibn Khaldun, and place his death around 1337, although some reckonings point to 1332.

Under his rule the empire reached its greatest size. It stretched roughly from the Atlantic coast of present-day Senegal and The Gambia inland along the Niger River, taking in land that now belongs to Mali, Mauritania, Guinea and neighbouring states, and it included trading cities such as Timbuktu and Gao.

Images of Mansa Musa today are modern interpretations: no portrait made during his lifetime survives.

How he came to the throne

Musa himself told an unusual story about his path to power. While in Cairo he explained to an Egyptian official that his predecessor had sent a fleet of 200 ships into the Atlantic to find its far edge, and that when only one returned, the ruler set out personally with 2,000 more ships and never came back. Musa, left as deputy, was then crowned.

Two points are worth correcting in the popular version of this tale. The predecessor is often called "Abu Bakr II" and described as Musa's brother, but that name comes from a 19th-century misreading of Ibn Khaldun, who calls the ruler Muhammad ibn Qu. And the account survives only through the Syrian scholar al-Umari, who heard it secondhand. Some historians take the voyage seriously; others suspect Musa used it to justify taking power. There is no archaeological evidence that the fleet reached the Americas.

Where Mali's gold came from

Mali's wealth rested on geography. The goldfields of Bambuk and Bure, near the upper Senegal and Niger rivers, lay within or close to the empire, and West African gold had been crossing the Sahara by camel for centuries. Mali also taxed the trade in salt, copper and other goods that passed through its cities.

That gold fed the mints and markets of North Africa, Egypt and, indirectly, Europe. Rulers in the region had a reputation for riches long before Musa: in 951 the geographer Ibn Hawqal already described the king of Ghana, an earlier West African state, as the wealthiest king on earth.

It is also important to understand what "his" wealth means. In a medieval kingdom the treasury, the royal household and the ruler's person were not separate. Musa commanded the resources of a state, which is a very different thing from the personal net worth of a modern entrepreneur.

The 1324 pilgrimage that made him famous

As a Muslim ruler, Musa made the hajj to Mecca, a journey of roughly 2,700 miles. His party reached the outskirts of Cairo in July 1324, camped near the Pyramids for three days and entered the city on 19 July. In October he left with the official caravan for Mecca.

Later Arabic writers described an enormous caravan; historians read their numbers as expressions of amazement, not head counts.

The figures you will see quoted, such as 60,000 travellers, 12,000 enslaved servants each carrying gold, and dozens of camels loaded with gold dust, come from later Arabic accounts. Historians treat them as rhetorical rather than statistical. Estimates that he carried around 18 tons of gold rest on a single chain of reports by al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun, not on independent records.

What is well documented is the reaction. Musa gave lavish gifts to officials and scholars, met the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, and reportedly declined at first to prostrate himself before him, agreeing only to bow to God.

Did he really crash Egypt's economy?

Al-Umari, who visited Cairo about twelve years later, reported that the value of gold fell after Musa's visit, from 25 silver dirhams per mithqal to under 22, and that it had not recovered. This is the origin of the claim that Musa "wrecked" an economy. The historian Warren Schultz argues the drop was within normal fluctuations, so the dramatic version should be treated with caution.

A widely shared modern estimate, attributed to the financial website SmartAsset, puts the economic losses across the region at about $1.5 billion; it is a rough illustration, not a historical measurement. Several medieval writers add a twist: by the return journey Musa had run short and borrowed from Cairo merchants at high interest. Ibn Khaldun records a loan of 50,000 dinars, partly repaid by selling the lenders a palace the sultan had given him.

Mali on the map: the Catalan Atlas

The pilgrimage carried Musa's reputation far beyond Africa. European mapmakers began drawing wealthy West African rulers on their charts, and the most famous example is the Catalan Atlas of 1375, made in Majorca.

Detail from the Catalan Atlas of 1375, showing a crowned African ruler holding a gold nugget beside Timbuktu.

The atlas shows a crowned king on a throne holding a golden orb or nugget. Its label is often misquoted: it calls him the richest and noblest lord "of the region", not of the world or of all time. Even so, the image helped turn Timbuktu into a byword for distant riches, and the city kept that mythical status among European explorers well into the 19th century.

Timbuktu, scholars and the Djinguereber Mosque

Musa's legacy lies less in the gold he spent than in what he built. He returned from Mecca with scholars and craftsmen, including the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and invested in mosques and places of learning.

The Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu, completed around 1327 and built mainly of earth, straw and wood.

The Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu was completed around 1327 and is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1988. Tradition credits al-Sahili with designing it, but modern research is more cautious: the historian John Hunwick found that the only project firmly tied to al-Sahili in Arabic sources is a royal audience chamber, and that his role was decorative and organisational rather than structural. The earthen style of the Niger bend draws on a much older local tradition.

The same caution applies to the story that Musa paid al-Sahili 200 kg of gold. Ibn Khaldun records a payment of 12,000 mithqals, roughly 51 kg, for the audience chamber. That is still an extraordinary fee.

The Sankore mosque and madrasa, also dating from his era, later became the heart of a scholarly community of jurists, astronomers and mathematicians. Timbuktu's manuscript tradition, which flourished in the following centuries, grew from these foundations.

Why "richest person ever" lists don't add up

In 2012 the website Celebrity Net Worth reportedly put Musa's fortune at around $400 billion, and online rankings often place him above Augustus Caesar, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. One such list, widely circulated in 2019, read:

• Mansa Musa (Mali Empire): "incalculable"
• Augustus Caesar (Rome): about $4.6 trillion
• Zhao Xu, Emperor Shenzong of Song (China): "incalculable"
• Akbar I (Mughal India): "incalculable"
• Andrew Carnegie: about $372 billion
• John D. Rockefeller: about $341 billion
• Nicholas II of Russia: about $300 billion
• Mir Osman Ali Khan, Nizam of Hyderabad: about $230 billion
• William the Conqueror: about $229.5 billion
• Muammar Gaddafi: about $200 billion

These figures should be read as entertainment. Historians such as Hadrien Collet argue that Musa's wealth simply cannot be calculated, and converting medieval gold into today's money ignores how differently gold was valued, how scarce goods were and how state and personal wealth overlapped. Comparing an emperor's command of a whole economy with an industrialist's share portfolio is comparing different things.

A more useful takeaway is this: Musa was, by every account available, one of the most powerful and spectacularly wealthy rulers of his age, and he used that wealth in ways that left a lasting mark on West African learning and architecture.

After Musa

Musa was succeeded by his son Maghan, and later by his brother Sulayman, under whom the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited Mali in 1352–53. The empire remained a major power for some time but gradually lost territory, with the Songhay state around Gao eventually overtaking it in the 15th century. Outside West Africa, Musa's story was little known for centuries, which is partly why it now spreads online in such exaggerated form.

Sources: Wikipedia: Musa I of Mali; Wikipedia: Abu Bakr II and the Atlantic voyage account; Wikipedia: Djinguereber Mosque; BBC News (2019), the report this article first drew on. Map detail: Catalan Atlas, 1375, Bibliothèque nationale de France.