Mansa Musa's Gold
What the Medieval Sources Say About His Pilgrimage to Mecca

In 1324 Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, passed through Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca, and people there were still talking about his gold years later. Today he is sometimes said to have been the richest person who ever lived. The medieval writers who describe the journey do record enormous gifts of gold. They also disagree about the numbers, pass most of them on second-hand, and record that he ran out of money.

Who told the story

The main accounts were written by people who questioned others who had met him.

• al-Umari wrote his Masalik al-absar in 1337, according to UNESCO’s General History of Africa. He had not seen the king himself: “From the beginning of my coming to stay in Egypt I heard talk of the arrival of this sultan Musa on his Pilgrimage”, he writes, and he questioned the official who had received him and Ibn Amir Hajib, who was governor of Cairo at the time of the visit.
• Ibn Khaldun, the North African historian, heard from two informants: a man who joined the king’s party on its way home, and the interpreter of Musa’s people in Cairo.
• al-Maqrizi, writing later, gives more figures, but his French translator notes that he seems to have drawn on al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun, “mais il a puisé aussi à d’autres sources” (but he also drew on other sources).
• Ibn Battuta stayed in Mali’s capital in 1352–53 and heard stories about the king on his travels there.
• al-Sa’di’s Tarikh es-Soudan, a chronicle of the western Sudan, is dated by UNESCO’s General History to 1656, more than three centuries after the journey.

How much gold did he bring?

Partly true He brought a great deal of gold. The sources do not agree how much, and none gives a weight we can convert.

• Ibn Khaldun’s Cairo informant, the interpreter al-Hajj Yunus, said the king arrived “avec quatre-vingts charges de poudre d’or, pesant chacune trois quintaux (kintar)”: with eighty loads of gold dust, each weighing three qintars (our translation).
• Ibn Amir Hajib told al-Umari a different number: the king left his country “avec cent charges d’or”, with a hundred loads of gold, and spent them on the journey.
• Ibn Khaldun gives the hundred too, in a second passage introduced with “On rapporte” (it is reported): a hundred loads of gold dust, each of three qintars. al-Umari’s informant gives no weight for a load, and no source here says what a qintar weighed, so none of these figures can be turned into kilograms.

In Cairo, the official who received him told al-Umari that Musa “forwarded to the royal treasury many loads of unworked native gold and other valuables”, and that “He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold.” al-Maqrizi says the king had “environ cinquante mille dinars”, about fifty thousand dinars, presented to the sultan before meeting him.

Did 60,000 people travel with him?

Partly true He travelled with thousands of people. The famous 60,000 comes from the latest source.

• al-Maqrizi: “plus de dix mille de ses sujets”, more than ten thousand of his subjects.
• Ibn Khaldun’s informant who travelled with the party: “Douze mille jeunes esclaves”, twelve thousand young slaves in brocade and Yemeni silk, carried the king’s belongings.
• al-Maqrizi again, introducing it with “On dit” (it is said): fourteen thousand young slave women for the king’s personal service.
• al-Sa’di: “soixante mille”, sixty thousand men, with five hundred slaves in front of the king, “chacun d’eux tenant à la main une baguette d’or”, each holding a gold staff.

al-Sa’di’s chronicle also puts the pilgrimage “dans les premières années du neuvième siècle de l’hégire”, the first years of the ninth Islamic century, which began more than seventy Islamic years after 724, the year Ibn Khaldun gives. Its French translator, O. Houdas, corrected it in a note: “elle est de 724 (1324) d’après Ibn-Khaldoun”. UNESCO’s General History adds its own caution: “the figures given by the Arab writers are probably exaggerated”.

Did he crash the price of gold in Egypt?

Partly true The price fell. The only credible figures for how far, and for how long, come from one writer.

The official who received the king told al-Umari that the Cairenes “exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall.” al-Umari then gives his own figures. Before the visit, “The mithqal did not go below 25 dirhams and was generally above”. Afterwards: “The mithqal does not exceed 22 dirhams or less. This has been the state of affairs for about twelve years until this day”.

By our arithmetic, a fall from at least 25 to at most 22 is a fall of at least 12 percent, lasting about twelve years on al-Umari’s account.

al-Maqrizi gives a far bigger figure: “Le dinär descendit jusqu’à six dirhems”, the dinar fell to six dirhams. His French translator, Gaudefroy-Demombynes, calls this “invraisemblable et contraire à l’indication donnée par le masälik”: implausible, and contrary to al-Umari. We follow al-Umari, who lived in Egypt within a generation of the visit and gives a price for before and after. On his figures it was a real fall. It was not a collapse.

He ran out of money

The same informant who described the hundred loads told al-Umari what happened to them. Having no money left when he came back to Cairo, “il dut emprunter aux marchands sous sa Caution”: he had to borrow from the merchants on his own guarantee (our translation). The merchants did well: “pour trois cents dinars ils eurent sept cents dinars de gain”, for three hundred dinars they made seven hundred in profit. And “Il leur en envoya plus tard le montant avec large poids”: he later sent them what he owed, and generously.

Ibn Battuta heard a similar story on his travels in Mali, about a merchant from Alexandria, Siraj al-Din: “Mensa Moûça eut besoin d’argent, et il en emprunta à Siràdj eddîn” (Mansa Musa needed money, and borrowed it from Siraj al-Din). The merchant died on his way to collect, but his son went on to Mali, where “il reçut son argent” (he received his money).

Ibn Khaldun tells the story of the same lenders differently. In his Kitab al-‘Ibar, the Banu al-Kuwayk lent the king 50,000 dinars, the agents sent to Mali to collect died there, and “Mansa Müsä mourut avant d’avoir payé et ils ne réussirent donc à rien tirer de lui”: Mansa Musa died before paying, and they got nothing from him. The two accounts do not agree about how that debt ended. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, who translated both al-Umari and this passage, thought Ibn Khaldun’s story probably accurate but incomplete, and that the king had repaid “une partie au moins de ses dettes”, at least part of his debts.

Was he the richest person who ever lived?

Unverified No surviving record could settle it, and the medieval claim was narrower than the modern one.

The Catalan Atlas, made around 1375 and now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows him holding “a round gold object, perhaps an orb, coin or nugget of gold”. Its caption, in the British Library’s translation, calls him “the richest and noblest ruler of this whole region because of the abundance of gold that is found in his lands”. Of his region, not of the world. The library attributes the atlas to Abraham Cresques; the BnF’s catalogue says it was made “sinon par lui, du moins dans son entourage proche”, if not by him, then by his close circle.

Against any modern ranking:

• Nearly every figure was reported to the writers second-hand, and some are marked “it is said”.
• The sources disagree, on the gold and on the people.
• No source says what a qintar weighed.
• He borrowed money on the way home.
• al-Umari doubted the king’s own account of his kingdom. Musa had said it took about a year to cross; al-Umari preferred another informant’s four months, “car Müsa Mansa peut bien avoir grossi l’importance de son royaume”, because Musa may well have exaggerated the size of his kingdom.

And the gold a king gives away on a state journey is not the same thing as a private fortune.

Our reading

Mansa Musa’s journey was real and extraordinary, and Cairo remembered it for years. But the version often told today — sixty thousand people, a crashed economy, the richest person in history — takes the biggest number from each source, including one written three centuries later, and leaves out the loans.

Sources

• al-Umari, Masalik al-absar, excerpt in N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), via World History Commons.
• al-Umari, Masālik el absār fi mamālik el amsār, I: L’Afrique, moins l’Égypte, trans. Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paul Geuthner, 1927), including his appendix translating passages of al-Maqrizi.
• Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale, trans. Baron de Slane, vol. 2 (Algiers, 1854).
• Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-‘Ibar, Cairo ed., vol. V, p. 434, passage translated in Gaudefroy-Demombynes 1927 (additions to p. 93, note 1).
• Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, trans. C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, vol. 4 (Société asiatique, 1858).
• al-Sa’di, Tarikh es-Soudan, trans. O. Houdas (Ernest Leroux, 1900).
• D. T. Niane (ed.), General History of Africa IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century (UNESCO, 1984).
• Eleanor Jackson, “African kings on medieval and Renaissance maps”, British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog (14 July 2022).
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogue record for Espagnol 30 (Atlas catalan).

All translations from the French are ours.

Checked September 2026.

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