In 1324, a king went on a road trip and spent so much gold along the way that he crashed the economy of a neighboring world power for over a decade. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage is one of the most thoroughly documented macroeconomic events of the Middle Ages, but it is only one chapter in the story of the Mali Empire, a West African superpower the size of France, Spain, and Germany combined that ran from roughly 1235 to 1610 and wrote its own playbook for how empires work.

This episode starts with Sundiata Keita, the exiled prince who united the Mandinka city-states at the Battle of Kirina and then governed through radical decentralization, a franchise model that turned defeated kings into invested stakeholders. It follows the predecessor who sailed a fleet into the Atlantic and never returned, the golden age that put Timbuktu on Europe's maps, and the slow unraveling that ended when poisoned arrows met Moroccan gunpowder at Jenne.

• The Twelve Doors of Mali: Sundiata's franchise-style constitution that kept a 480,000-square-mile empire from fracturing
• The king who sailed off the map: Mansa Muhammad's Atlantic obsession and the throne it left behind
• How Mansa Musa's gold-laden pilgrimage tanked Cairo's economy for more than ten years
• Why the farbas stopped paying tribute, and how firearms at Jenne in 1599 ended the comeback
• The living legacy: griots, Mande culture, the Great Mosque of Djenne, and a 700-year-old blueprint for decentralization