Mansa Musa

Mansa Musa's personal name was Musa (Arabic: موسى, romanized: Mūsá), the name of Moses in Islam. Mansa, 'ruler' or 'king' in Mandé, was the title of the ruler of the Mali Empire.

In oral tradition and the Timbuktu Chronicles, Musa is further known as Kanku Musa. In Mandé tradition, it was common for one's name to be prefixed by his mother's name, so the name Kanku Musa means "Musa, son of Kanku", although it is unclear whether the genealogy implied is literal. Al-Yafii gave Musa's name as Musa ibn Abi Bakr ibn Abi al-Aswad (Arabic: موسى بن أبي بكر بن أبي الأسود, romanized: Mūsā ibn Abī Bakr ibn Abī al-Aswad), and Ibn Hajar gave Musa's name as Musa ibn Abi Bakr Salim al-Takruri (Arabic: موسى بن أبي بكر سالم التكروري, romanized: Mūsā ibn Abī Bakr Salim al-Takruri).

Musa is often given the title Hajji in oral tradition because he made the hajj. In the Songhai language, rulers of Mali such as Musa were known as the Mali-koi, koi being a title that conveyed authority over a region: in other words, the "ruler of Mali".

Much of what is known about Musa comes from Arabic sources written after his hajj, especially the writings of Al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun. While in Cairo during his hajj, Musa befriended officials such as Ibn Amir Hajib, who learned about him and his country from him and later passed that knowledge to historians such as Al-Umari. Additional information comes from two 17th-century manuscripts written in Timbuktu, the Tarikh Ibn al-Mukhtar and the Tarikh al-Sudan. Oral tradition, as performed by the jeliw (sing. jeli), also known as griots, includes relatively little information about Musa relative to some other parts of the history of Mali, with his predecessor conquerors receiving more prominence.

According to Djibril Tamsir Niane, Musa's father was named Faga Leye and his mother may have been named Kanku. Faga Leye was the son of Abu Bakr, a brother of Sunjata, the first mansa of the Mali Empire. Ibn Khaldun does not mention Faga Leye, referring to Musa as Musa ibn Abu Bakr. This can be interpreted as either "Musa son of Abu Bakr" or "Musa descendant of Abu Bakr." It is implausible that Abu Bakr was Musa's father, due to the amount of time between Sunjata's reign and Musa's.

Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali during the reign of Musa's brother Sulayman, said that Musa's grandfather was named Sariq Jata. Sariq Jata may be another name for Sunjata, who was actually Musa's great-uncle. This, along with Ibn Khaldun's use of the name 'Musa ibn Abu Bakr' prompted historian Francois-Xavier Fauvelle to propose that Musa was in fact the son of Abu Bakr I, a grandson of Sunjata through his daughter. Later attempts to erase this possibly illegitimate succession through the female line led to the confusion in the sources over Musa's parentage. Hostility towards Musa's branch of the Keita dynasty would also explain his relative absence from or scathing treatment by oral histories.

The date of Musa's birth is unknown, but he appears to have been a young man in 1324. The Tarikh al-fattash claims that Musa accidentally killed Kanku at some point prior to his hajj.

Musa ascended to power in the early 1300s under unclear circumstances. According to Musa's own account, his predecessor as Mansa of Mali, presumably Muhammad ibn Qu, launched two expeditions to explore the Atlantic Ocean (200 ships for the first exploratory mission and 2,000 ships for the second). The Mansa led the second expedition himself and appointed Musa as his deputy to rule the empire until he returned. When he did not return, Musa was crowned as mansa himself, marking a transfer of the line of succession from the descendants of Sunjata to the descendants of his brother Abu Bakr. Some modern historians have cast doubt on Musa's version of events, suggesting he may have deposed his predecessor and devised the story about the voyage to explain how he took power. Nonetheless, the possibility of such a voyage has been taken seriously by several historians.

Musa was a young man when he became Mansa, possibly in his early twenties. Given the grandeur of his subsequent hajj, Musa likely spent much of his early reign preparing for it. Among these preparations would likely have been raids to capture and enslave people from neighboring lands, as Musa's entourage would include many thousands of slaves; the historian Michael Gomez estimates that Mali may have captured over 6,000 slaves per year for this purpose. Perhaps because of this, Musa's early reign was spent in continuous military conflict with neighboring non-Muslim societies. In 1324, while in Cairo, Musa said that he had conquered 24 cities and their surrounding districts.

Musa was a Muslim, and his hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, made him well known across North Africa and the Middle East. To Musa, Islam was "an entry into the cultured world of the Eastern Mediterranean". He would have spent much time fostering the growth of the religion within his empire. When Musa departed Mali for the Hajj, he left his son Muhammad to rule in his absence.

Musa made his pilgrimage between 1324 and 1325, spanning 2700 miles. Arabic chroniclers writing after the event give widely varying figures for the size of Musa's caravan and the quantity of gold it transported, and modern historians treat these numbers as rhetorical rather than statistical. According to figures preserved in the later Arabic accounts, his procession included upwards of 12,000 slaves, all wearing brocade and Yemeni silk and each said to have carried 1.8 kg (4 lb) of gold bars, with heralds dressed in silks bearing gold staffs organizing horses and handling bags.

Musa is reported to have provided all necessities for the procession, feeding the entire company of men and animals. The same sources state that the caravan included 80 camels, each said to have carried between 23–136 kg (50–300 lb) of gold dust — a range that itself reflects the absence of any audited contemporary count and is treated by modern historians as an upper-bound literary topos rather than a measurement. Musa is said to have distributed gold to the poor along his route and to the cities he passed through on the way to Mecca, including Cairo and Medina, and reportedly to have built a mosque every Friday. Shihab al-Din al-'Umari, who visited Cairo shortly after the pilgrimage and is the proximate source for most of these accounts, described the procession as "a lavish display of power, wealth, and unprecedented by its size and pageantry".

Musa and his entourage arrived at the outskirts of Cairo in July 1324. They camped for three days by the Pyramids of Giza before crossing the Nile into Cairo on 19 July. While in Cairo, Musa met with the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, whose reign had already seen one mansa, Sakura, make the Hajj. Al-Nasir expected Musa to prostrate himself before him, which Musa initially refused to do. When Musa did finally bow he said he was doing so for God alone.

Despite this initial awkwardness, the two rulers got along well and exchanged gifts. Musa and his entourage gave and spent freely while in Cairo. Musa stayed in the Qarafa district of Cairo and befriended its governor, ibn Amir Hajib, who learned much about Mali from him. Musa stayed in Cairo for three months, departing on 18 October with the official caravan to Mecca.

Musa's generosity continued as he traveled onward to Mecca, and he gave gifts to fellow pilgrims and the people of Medina and Mecca. While in Mecca, conflict broke out between a group of Malian pilgrims and a group of Turkic pilgrims in the Masjid al-Haram. Swords were drawn, but before the situation escalated further, Musa persuaded his men to back down.

Musa and his entourage lingered in Mecca after the last day of the Hajj. Traveling separately from the main caravan, their return journey to Cairo was struck by catastrophe. By the time they reached Suez, many of the Malian pilgrims had died of cold, starvation, or bandit raids, and they had lost much of their supplies. Having run out of money, Musa and his entourage were forced to borrow money and resell much of what they had purchased while in Cairo before the Hajj, and Musa went into debt to several merchants such as Siraj al-Din. However, Al-Nasir Muhammad returned Musa's earlier show of generosity with gifts of his own.

On his return journey, Musa met the Andalusi poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, whose eloquence and knowledge of jurisprudence impressed him, and whom he convinced to travel with him to Mali. Other scholars Musa brought to Mali included Maliki jurists.

According to the Tarikh al-Sudan, the cities of Gao and Timbuktu submitted to Musa's rule as he traveled through on his return to Mali. It is unlikely, however, that a group of pilgrims, even if armed, would have been able to conquer a wealthy and powerful city. According to one account given by ibn Khaldun, Musa's general Saghmanja conquered Gao. The other account claims that Gao had been conquered during the reign of Mansa Sakura. Mali's control of Gao may have been weak, requiring powerful mansas to reassert their authority periodically, or it might simply be an error on the part of al-Sadi, author of the Tarikh.