Mansa Musa I was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire. In late winter 1324 he led the largest pilgrim caravan in recorded history out of his capital at Niani and pointed it northeast, toward Mecca. Four months and roughly twenty-seven hundred miles later, the column came over a rise west of Giza and saw the Pyramids.

This episode covers the road. The Massufa Berber caravan-masters who took over from the Mande guides at Walata. The salt-house village of Taghaza, with its camel-skin roofs and brackish water. The Tuareg-controlled Tanezrouft, the country of thirst, where the wells were far apart and only the veiled lords of the central desert knew where they were. The takshif scout who rode alone four nights ahead of the caravan with letters in his saddlebag, paid in gold, and who sometimes died alone in dunes that Ibn Battuta called demon-haunted. The Tarikh al-Fattash's memory of a senior wife homesick for the Niger and the Farba's men who dug a vast pit at dawn and filled it from the caravan's own water-skins so she could bathe. The foot-illness at the Tuat oases that left some of the men behind in the date palms.

And then Cairo. The largest city west of China. Five hundred thousand people. The Citadel of Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, who demanded that visiting kings kiss the ground before his throne. Mansa Musa refused, until an unnamed adviser whispered a way through. He prostrated, he said, only to God who created him. He spent the next three months in the Qarafa with the Mamluk emir Ibn Amir Hajib, telling him about the Atlantic expedition his predecessor had vanished into, and giving away gold to anyone who asked. By the time he left, the gold dinar in Cairo had lost twelve percent of its value, and would not recover for twelve years. In the same city in the same year, the Mamluk authorities forced the Cairene Jewish community to pay fifty thousand gold pieces in collective fines on manufactured arson charges. Two opposite gold flows on the same streets, and the Mansa walked between them.

Sources include al-Umari (Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar, c. 1338, transmitting Ibn Amir Hajib's eyewitness testimony), Ibn Battuta's Rihla on the same desert route in 1352, Ibn Khaldun's Kitab al-Ibar, the Tarikh al-Fattash, Michael Gomez's African Dominion (2018), Levtzion's Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973), and the Levtzion and Hopkins Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Part two of a four-part Mansa Musa series.

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