The History of the Renaissance World (75 page)

So Mansa Musa, cousin and deputy of the king, became king of Mali. And he cast his eyes in the opposite direction: not west, towards the unknown, but east, towards Mecca. He was, says an acquaintance, “pious and assiduous in prayer, Koran reading, and mentioning God”; it was his greatest desire to make the
hajj
.

It was twelve years before his plans were finally in place. In 1324, as Ibn Battuta was beginning his travels across the northern edge of Africa, Mansa Musa too set off for the Holy City. With a massive caravan of slaves, soldiers, officials, and his wife’s maids (five hundred of them), he journeyed along the Niger valley and then northeast towards Cairo, crossing over the trade routes and passing through Taghaza on his way.
²

Mecca still lay under the protection of the Bahri sultan, and Cairo was an obligatory stop on the path from West Africa to Arabia. There, Mansa Musa became friendly with the court official Ibn Amir Hajib, governor of Old Cairo. “Musa told him,” says the fourteenth-century Arab historian al-‘Umari, “. . . that his country was very extensive and contiguous with the Ocean. By his sword and his armies he had conquered 24 cities, each with its surrounding district with villages and estates.” From all of these conquered cities, Mansa Musa demanded tribute in gold.
³

Whatever Mansu Musa told him, the governor came away from the conversation convinced that the gold in Africa grew in the ground, on gold plants, with roots of gold, that simply needed to be pulled up and shaken. He could perhaps be forgiven for the mistake, since the Mali contingent’s behavior gave the impression that gold was as common as goat’s milk in the Niger valley. Mansa Musa had brought with him thousands and thousands of gold ingots: eighty loads weighing 120 kilograms (260 pounds) each, says Ibn Khaldun, a total of over ten tons. During his stay he distributed it so lavishly that the worth of gold in Cairo fell as much as 25 percent. “This man flooded Cairo with his benefactions,” the governor later said. “He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold.”
⁴

65.1 The Height of Mali

Either the king or his accountants lacked foresight, though; the Mali monarch spent most of his money on his initial passage through Cairo, and by the time he returned through the city after his pilgrimage to the Ka’aba, he was broke. He had to borrow from Cairo’s moneylenders to fund his trip back across the desert, to Mali, and the moneylenders charged him compound interest; he ended up paying back 233 percent on each dinar borrowed.
⁵

A
BUBAKARI
’
S ADVENTURE
to the west had brought Mansa Musa to the throne; and thanks to Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage east, Mali appeared more and more often on European maps of the world. The Catalan Atlas, an ambitious world map produced for Peter of Aragon by the Jewish cartographer Cresques Abraham, shows Mansa Musa himself seated on a golden throne, holding a golden scepter and a golden orb, wearing a crown of gold.

In the remaining years of Mansa Musa’s rule, European traders and embassies from European governments traversed the Sahara again and again, seeking gold, forging alliances; and after Musa’s death in 1337, Mali remained strong. But outside the country, the exaggerated legends of Mali’s wealth, of the riches that needed only to be plucked from the ground, continued to grow. And inside Mali, factions and political parties began to clot towards critical mass.

Mansa Musa’s son Maghan, who had served as regent during his father’s extended absence from the country, inherited his crown. But he died after a brief four-year reign, and the throne was claimed by his uncle Mansa Sulayman. “A most avaricious and worthless man,” Ibn Battuta calls him; arriving in Mali halfway through Mansa Sulayman’s reign, Ibn Battuta was told that the sultan had a gift for him, and was then presented with “three crusts of bread, with a piece of fried fish, and a dish of sour milk.” Highly offended—he had expected at least a horse and a golden robe or two—Ibn Battuta sent the sultan a piece of his mind and was rewarded with a house and provisions during the rest of his stay.
⁶

Sulayman had reason to be suspicious of new arrivals to his kingdom. In Mansa Musa’s wake, more and more outsiders had made their way to Mali, looking for the gold plants that lay on the ground, and counting on the gullibility of the Malians. The governor of Old Cairo, a generation before, had noted that the merchants of Cairo exploited Mansa Musa’s caravan with happy abandon: “Merchants . . . have told me of the profits which they made from the Africans,” the governor explained to the historian al-‘Umari, “saying that one of them might buy a shirt or cloak or robe or other garment for five dinars when it was not worth one. Such was their simplicity and trustfulness that it was possible to practice any deception on them.” And then he added, “Later, they formed the very poorest opinion of the Egyptians because of the obvious falseness of everything they said . . . and their outrageous behavior in fixing the prices.”
⁷

65.1 Mansa Musa of Mali on the Catalan Atlas
.
Credit: John Webb / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

But Sulayman had apparently concluded that Ibn Battuta was harmless, and the honors soothed the traveler’s offended pride somewhat. During the two months he remained in Mali, Ibn Battuta paid grudging respect to the safety and justice of the kingdom: “A traveller may proceed alone among them, without the least fear of a thief or robber,” he noted. He also praised their piety, noting that it was common for the men of Mali to commit the entire Koran to memory. In al-‘Umari’s words,

Their king at present is named Sulayman, brother of the sultan Musa Mansa. He controls, of the land of Sudan, that which his brother brought together by conquest and added to the domains of Islam. There he built ordinary and cathedral mosques and minarets, and established the Friday observances and prayers in congregation, and the muezzin’s call. . . . This king is the greatest of the Muslim kings of the Sudan. He rules the most extensive territory, has the most numerous army, is the bravest, the richest, the most fortunate, the most victorious over his enemies.
⁸

In Sulayman’s twenty-four years on the throne, Mali remained firmly under his authority. His subjects, Ibn Battuta says, “debase themselves . . . in the presence of their king” more than any other people, prostrating themselves and throwing dust upon their heads. Sulayman surrounded himself with the trappings of an emperor: gold arms and armor; ranks of courtiers and Turkish mamluks, warrior slaves bought from Egypt, surrounding him. They were required to keep solemn and attentive in his presence: “Whoever sneezes while the king is holding court,” al-‘Umari explains, “is severely beaten.”
⁹

But at Sulayman’s death, in 1359, the political factions that had been slowly coalescing during his reign—each one centered on a different descendant of Mansa Musa—broke the country apart.

A civil war erupted between the supporters of Sulayman’s son Fomba and one of the sons of Maghan, Mari Diata II. After a year of fighting, Fomba was killed and Mari Diata II seized the throne: “A most wicked ruler over them,” says the fourteenth-century chronicler Ibn Khaldun, “because of the tortures, tyrannies, and improprieties to which he subjected them.”
¹⁰

In the wake of the coup, a chunk of Mali between the Senegal and Gambia rivers revolted. Instead of submitting to the despotic Mari Diata, three distinct but neighboring clans—Waalo, Baol, and Kajoor, all of them Wolof-
speakers—
formed a confederation, each independent but all three united under a single king. This king was elected, much like the German rulers, by a group of high-ranking clan members who joined together to choose a ruler from one of the clans.

Tradition gives a name to the first-elected Emperor of the Wolofs: Ndiadiane N’Diaye. Little else is known about him, but legend preserves at least one telling detail. Ndiadiane was a magician; not an Islamic king, but a traditional African ruler. The kings of Mali had ruled an Islamic realm, but beneath the surface veneer of Muslim loyalty, the old practices had survived.

Chapter Sixty-Six

After the Famine

Between 1318 and 1330,
Philip V is troubled by shepherds and lepers,
and the Capetian dynasty gives way to the Valois,
while Edward II is defeated by his wife and her lover
and comes to an uncertain end

I
N
1318, for the fifth year in a row, Philip V of France promised to go on crusade.

The oath had become part of the regular rhetoric of French kings, an orthodox sign of commitment to the Christian cause. Philip had “taken the cross” for the first time in 1313, along with his father and brother; and his promise to march east and fight against the Muslims—whether Arab, Ottoman, or Mamluk—had been renewed every year.

And perhaps Philip V did intend to go on crusade, some year when France was prosperous and at peace, his officials in line, his people content and unlikely to rebel. But 1318 was not that year. Nor, as it turned out, was 1319; although Philip did call a council in Paris to discuss the possibilities. Nor was 1320.

The problem was a logistical one. The days when a pope wielded enough power to actually gather a crusade and launch it were long gone. The French lawyer Jacques d’Euse had become Pope John XXII in 1316; but he lived in Avignon, dependent on the French king, an exile from Rome, powerless over the politics of Germany and Italy. No crusade would rally around Avignon. If a crusade were to happen, one of the monarchs of Europe would have to spearhead it.
¹

And Philip V, like all the other monarchs of Europe, was perpetually preoccupied by troubles at home. His coronation had coincided with the last severe year of famine and cold; the worst had now passed, but the world that greeted the survivors of famine was still jagged and unreliable, troubled with windstorms and torrential tides, dry months and sharp unbearable cold snaps. Prices of grain and salt were seesawing wildly. England was perpetually hostile. Flanders, forced into unwilling submission in 1305, was agitating again under its new count, the young and independent-minded Robert III (“the Lion of Flanders”). And predatory shepherds were roaming the countryside; the Pastoureaux, successfully put down seventy years earlier, had reemerged.