Crystal Q., CC Liu, Sheldon S. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly Wikipedia edit
Black Emperor (
Mansฤ) Mลซsฤ (circa 1312–1337 [a]) was the ninth [3] emperor (
mansa) of the Mali Empire, Africa, which reached its territorial peak during this king's reign.
Emperor Musa is known for his unimaginable wealth and has sometimes been called
the wealthiest person in history, far richer than Mexico's
Carlos Slim, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or
Elon Musk.
His riches came from the mining of gold and salt deposits in the Mali Empire, along with the slave and ivory trade [4, 5].
At the time of Musa's ascension to the throne, Mali in large part consisted of the territory of the former Ghana Empire, which Mali had conquered.
The Mali Empire consisted of land that is now part of Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, The Gambia, and the modern state of Mali.
Musa was so rich that when he went on a Muslim pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca in 1324, traveling with an enormous entourage and a vast supply of gold, he disrupted economies.
En route, he spent time in Cairo, Egypt, where his lavish gift-giving is said to have noticeably affected the value of gold in Egypt and garnered the attention of the wider Muslim world.
Emperor Musa expanded the borders of the Mali Empire, in particular incorporating the cities of Gao and
Timbuktu (a great
ancient center of learning and hope to possibly the oldest residential university in history, even older than the oldest known university, Buddhist
Nalanda (regarded by scholars as the world's first residential university), which Buddhist records say came after a kind of university system in Taxila or
Takkasila, Indo-Pakistan, where the Buddha as the
Bodhisatta went to school in a past life (
Jataka Tales)] into its territory.
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Emperor Musa of Mali is renowned for his wealth and generosity. Online articles in the 21st century have claimed that
Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time [89].
This claim is often sourced to an article in CelebrityNetWorth [89], which claims that Musa's wealth was the equivalent of US $400 billion [90].
CelebrityNetWorth has been criticized for the unreliability of its estimates [91].
Historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Emperor Musa's wealth is impossible to accurately calculate [89, 85].
Contemporary Arabic sources may have been trying to express that Emperor Musa had more gold than they thought possible, rather than trying to give an exact number [92].
Furthermore, it is difficult to meaningfully compare the wealth of historical figures such as Mansa Musa, due to the difficulty of separating the personal wealth of a monarch from the wealth of the state and the difficulty of comparing wealth in highly different societies [93].
Emperor Musa may have brought as much as 18 tons of gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca [94], the center of Islam, equal in value to over US $957 million in 2022 [95].
Emperor Musa himself further promoted the appearance of having vast, inexhaustible wealth by spreading rumors that gold grew like a plant in his kingdom [96].
According to some Arabic writers, Emperor Musa's gift-giving caused a depreciation in the value of gold in Egypt.
Al-Umari said that, before Emperor Musa's arrival, a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams, but that it dropped to less than 22 dirhams afterward and did not go above that number for at least 12 years [97].
Though this has been described as having "wrecked" Egypt's economy [85], the historian Warren Schultz has argued that this was well within normal fluctuations in the value of gold in Mamluk Egypt [98].
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