Mansa Musa (reigned c.1312–1337) was the emperor of Mali, the great West African empire, whose 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca — a caravan of 60,000 people carrying tons of gold — made him famous across the medieval world and the basis of his reputation as the richest person in history.
His spending in Cairo was so lavish that the price of gold in Egypt stayed depressed for a decade. On his return he poured wealth into Timbuktu and Gao, building mosques and madrasas that made Mali a center of Islamic scholarship — and put a crowned black king on European maps, notably the Catalan Atlas of 1375.
