Mansa Musa: The Man Who Moved Gold

“Imagine being so rich you crash entire economies just by traveling. Meet Mansa Musa,

the 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire, and possibly the richest human ever.

On his pilgrimage to Mecca, Musa rolled through North Africa with tens of thousands

of people, hundreds of camels, and literal tons of gold. He gave away so

much gold in Cairo that prices collapsed and stayed broken for over a decade. But he wasn’t just

flexing wealth, he built universities, libraries, and mosques, turning Timbuktu

into a global center of learning. Scholars, architects, and books poured

into West Africa. Medieval maps even labeled Mali as the land of gold, with Musa sitting