Mansa Musa: I Flooded Cairo With Gold — Then Borrowed Money to Get Home

Mansa Musa was the ninth king of the Mali Empire, ruling from about 1312 to about 1337, and in 1324 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. 1 He reached Cairo that July with a caravan carrying gold, and he spent and gave it away for three months. A Cairo official, Shihab al-Din al-Umari, writing about twelve years later, recorded what happened next: before Musa arrived, a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams, and it "did not go below 25 and was generally above"; afterwards it "does not exceed 22 dirhams or less", and that had been the state of affairs "for about twelve years until this day". Al-Umari also wrote that Musa "flooded Cairo with his benefactions" and that the Cairenes "exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall." 2

The giving had a second half that the chroniclers also recorded. Several contemporary authors, including Ibn Battuta, Ibn al-Dawadari and al-Umari, say Musa ran out of money during the journey; on the return he sold back much of what he had bought in Cairo and borrowed from Egyptian merchants at a high rate of interest. Ibn al-Dawadari wrote that the pilgrims "became needy and resold what they had bought at half its value", and al-Umari recorded that at least one lender "lent them gold of good form, but none of it came back." 1

What he carried home instead was scholarship. Musa brought the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili and other Maliki jurists back to Mali, and Timbuktu became a centre of trade, culture and Islamic learning; the University of Sankore was restaffed under his reign with jurists, astronomers and mathematicians. 1 UNESCO's World Heritage listing for Timbuktu records that "the initial construction" of the Djingareyber Mosque "dates back to Sultan Kankan Moussa, returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca" — the mosque is dated to 1327, and it still stands. 3

Two cautions belong with the story. The figures in the Arabic chronicles for the size of the caravan and the gold it carried vary widely, and modern historians treat them as rhetorical rather than statistical. And the economic historian Warren Schultz has argued that the fall in the value of gold recorded by al-Umari was well within normal fluctuations in Mamluk Egypt, rather than the collapse of a national economy. 1