The historical setting
Mansa Musa (c. 1280 – c. 1337) was the ninth Mansa of the Mali Empire, which reached its territorial peak during his reign. Musa's reign is often regarded as the zenith of Mali's power and prestige, although he features less in Mandinka oral traditions than his predecessors. Musa was exceptionally wealthy, to an extent that contemporaries described him as inconceivably rich; Time magazine reported: "There's really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth." They cite Ferrum College history professor Richard Smith, who said Mali was likely the largest gold producer in the world at the time, but "contemporary sources describe the king's riches in terms that are impossible for the time."
It is known from local manuscripts and travellers' accounts that Mansa Musa's wealth came principally from the Mali Empire's control and taxing of the trade in salt from northern regions and especially from gold panned and mined in Bambuk and Bure to the south. Over a very long period Mali had amassed a large reserve of gold.
Historical sources
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.
Pilgrimage to Mecca
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.
Construction in Mali
According to a long-standing tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, Musa brought architects from Andalusia and Cairo to build his palace in Timbuktu and the great Djinguereber Mosque that still stands, with the Granadan poet Abū Isḥāq al-Sāḥilī commonly credited as the principal designer. Subsequent scholarship has substantially qualified this attribution. J. O. Hunwick has shown that the only project firmly attributable to al-Sāḥilī in the Arabic sources is a royal audience chamber at the city of Mali — for which Ibn Khaldun records a payment of 12,000 mithqals of gold (approximately 51 kg) — and that al-Sāḥilī's role there appears to have been decorative and organizational rather than that of a structural architect.
On the broader Sudano-Sahelian tradition, the architectural historian Labelle Prussin has argued that the earthen (banco) architecture of the Niger bend, with its projecting toron beams, represents a centuries-long synthesis of indigenous West African and Islamic design practices rather than an importation from al-Andalus or the Maghreb; modern scholarship accordingly regards the image of al-Sāḥilī as the founder of West African mosque architecture as a historiographical myth rather than an established historical fact.
Excavations at Djenné-Djenno by Susan and Roderick McIntosh have established that permanent settlement, complex craft production and iron metallurgy were already present in the Inland Niger Delta by the third century BCE — with long-distance exchange networks attested in subsequent phases of the site — demonstrating that the architectural and urban infrastructure on which Musa's building program drew was an indigenous tradition of substantial antiquity rather than an importation of his reign.