Mali Empire: A Visual History

The Mali Empire was founded around 1235 when Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso king Sumanguru at Kirina and united the Mande peoples of the upper Niger. Controlling the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure and the trans-Saharan trade, it grew to rule from the Atlantic to Gao. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324-1325 spread its fame across the Islamic world and Europe; Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of learning. Succession disputes, Tuareg raids and the rise of Songhai reduced it from the fifteenth century, and Morocco's and the Bamana's attacks finished it by 1670.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Mali Empire. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Mali territory

Timeline of the Mali Empire

1. 1235
   Battle of KirinaSundiata founds the empire.
2. 1255
   Sundiata dies
3. 1312
   Mansa Musa
4. 1324
   Musa's pilgrimage
5. 1352
   Ibn Battuta visits
6. 1433
   Tuareg take Timbuktu
7. 1468
   Songhai take Timbuktu
8. 1670
   Mali reduced to Kangaba

Sundiata

The Epic of Sundiata, told by griots, recounts how a crippled prince of the small Mande kingdom of Kangaba grew up in exile, gathered an army and destroyed the sorcerer-king Sumanguru of Sosso at Kirina around 1235. Sundiata took the title mansa and, tradition says, issued the Kurukan Fuga charter setting out the rights of the clans. He absorbed the remains of ancient Ghana.

Mansa Musa

Musa (about 1312-1337) ruled at the peak: Gao and Timbuktu were annexed, the gold trade to North Africa boomed. His hajj in 1324 with thousands of followers and reportedly 12 tonnes of gold caused inflation in Cairo for a decade and put Mali on European maps, notably the 1375 Catalan Atlas showing him holding a gold nugget. He brought back the architect al-Sahili, who built the Djinguereber mosque at Timbuktu, and scholars who made the city a centre of Islamic learning.

Decline

Ibn Battuta visited in 1352 and found order and safety on the roads. But later mansas were weak; the Tuareg took Timbuktu in 1433 and the Songhai under Sunni Ali took it in 1468 and destroyed Mali's eastern power. Portuguese envoys reached the shrinking empire in the 1530s. Songhai's fall to Morocco in 1591 did not help; Bamana and Fulani attacks reduced Mali to the old Kangaba heartland by about 1670.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Songhai Empire (1464 to 1591)
• Almoravid dynasty (1040 to 1147)
• Mamluk Sultanate (1250 to 1517)
• First Portuguese Empire (1415 to 1663)
• Kanem-Bornu Empire (1380 to 1893)
• Oyo Empire (1300 to 1836)

8 surprising things about the Mali Empire

1. Mansa Musa is often called the richest person in history, though the estimates are guesswork.
2. His gifts and spending in Cairo depressed the price of gold there for over a decade, according to al-Umari.
3. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows Musa enthroned with a gold crown and nugget, labelled 'the richest and noblest king in all the land'.
4. Timbuktu's manuscripts, hundreds of thousands of them, survive in private family libraries; many were smuggled out when jihadists occupied the city in 2012.
5. Ibn Battuta was shocked that Malian women went unveiled and had male friends, but praised the empire's justice.
6. Musa's predecessor Abu Bakr II reportedly sailed west into the Atlantic with 2,000 ships and never returned.
7. The Epic of Sundiata is still performed by griots and was the model for parts of The Lion King's story.
8. The Kurukan Fuga charter attributed to Sundiata is inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

Sources

• Mali (historical empire, Africa) Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Mali Empire Wikipedia
• Mali Empire World History Encyclopedia
• Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973) Methuen

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