Caravan routes and transcontinental exchange

On an old illuminated map, a crowned king seated on a throne holds out a large gold coin. — Detail of the 1375 Catalan Atlas, attributed to Abraham Cresques: Mansa Musa, seated on a throne, holds a gold coin. attributed to Abraham Cresques, Public domain, source

In 1324, a West African king crosses Egypt on his way to Mecca. He hands out so much gold there that the price of the metal falls in Cairo.¹

The fact is attested. Its duration, however, is less well attested than is often repeated — and this is the starting point of one of the most persistent myths in popular history.

How people crossed

Before steamships and aeroplanes, linking two worlds separated by a desert, a steppe or an ocean demanded a great deal of organisation. Three great systems of routes operated for centuries.

The trans-Saharan routes, linking West Africa to the Mediterranean. They rested on an animal and on an exchange. The animal was the dromedary, introduced into North Africa in the first centuries of the Common Era: it can go several days without drinking and carries heavy loads, which no horse can do in the Sahara. The exchange was that of gold from the South for salt from the North — salt being, in hot regions, essential for preserving food and for health, and scarce south of the desert. The caravans — sometimes thousands of animals — moved from oasis to oasis, the only possible watering points, which fixed the itineraries for centuries. The crossing took forty to fifty days.²

The Silk Roads, between China and the Mediterranean, across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia. The name is misleading: it was coined in the nineteenth century by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, and it was neither a single road nor a trade limited to silk. Almost no one made the whole journey: goods passed from hand to hand, each merchant covering only one segment.³

This relay principle applies to all three networks. On the Saharan routes too, merchants from North Africa and the Sahara and those from West Africa met in the staging towns of the Sahel: that is where goods changed hands. The great trading networks of the ancient world were not journeys, but chains.⁴

The maritime routes of the Indian Ocean, the busiest of all before the modern era. They rested on a natural phenomenon: the monsoon, a wind that blows for six months in one direction and six months in the other. A ship set out with one wind and returned with the other — which made crossings predictable, but sometimes meant waiting months in a foreign port. This is how merchant communities settled far from home took shape, from East Africa to Indonesia.

It was not only goods that travelled these routes. Techniques — paper, the compass, Indian numerals — religions, scholars, books, and diseases too: the Black Death followed the same paths as silk.

One point outweighs all the rest: these circuits existed before Europe took an interest in them, and they were not waiting for anyone. The kingdom discussed here was one of their major crossroads, and that is where its gold came from.⁵

What is established

Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire from about 1312 to 1337.

His empire had access to the Bure goldfields, left to quasi-independent vassals, and controlled the trans-Saharan trade. Mali’s gold crossed the desert on camelback and fed the economy of the Mediterranean world.⁶

In 1324, Mansa Musa made his pilgrimage to Mecca. During his stop in Cairo, he and his retinue gave, bought and sold so much gold, writes a witness, that they depressed its value in Egypt.⁷

The same witness gives a figure: before Musa’s arrival, a gold coin was worth at least twenty-five silver coins; afterwards, twenty-two at most — and this low rate is said to have lasted about twelve years.⁸

This figure, however, calls for caution.

That the rate fell is well founded. That it stayed low for twelve years is much less so. Only one witness says so: al-Umari, who arrived in Cairo a decade after the events and was busy writing an encyclopaedia intended to impress.⁹

The historian Warren Schultz, a specialist in the coinage of Egypt in this period, went back over all the available exchange rates. His finding: far from being the sole cause of a fall in the value of gold, the Mansa Musa episode was but one of many short-term fluctuations recorded in the same period. He cites others — dignitaries dumping their valuables, a looted palace pouring its gold onto the market.¹⁰

Finally, he makes a methodological remark of wider relevance: these accounts all have in common that they explain a phenomenon by a single cause alone, which is very convenient for storytelling, and hardly credible for a market in which coins of different origins, fineness and ages circulated together.¹¹

The figure that survived is the one that made the best story.

What this event reveals: a private sumptuary decision capable of destabilising the financial market of a regional power.

On his return, the emperor attracted architects, poets and scholars. Timbuktu became a major intellectual centre, and Mali’s fame reached Europe: an atlas drawn in Majorca at the end of the fourteenth century depicts Mansa Musa enthroned, a golden orb in his hand.¹²

What belongs to myth

One claim comes up again and again: Mansa Musa is said to have been “the richest human being in all of history”, with a fortune estimated at 400 billion dollars in today’s money.¹³

The origin of this number is known. It was published in 2012 by a website devoted to celebrities’ fortunes, in a ranking of the greatest fortunes of all time. Picked up by the press, it has circulated everywhere since.¹⁴

A magazine figure turned into a historical fact.

Economic historians reject this quantification for three reasons:¹⁵

No common standard: No monetary conversion between the fourteenth century and today makes sense.
Nature of wealth: Mansa Musa did not own a personal fortune in the modern sense, but held sovereign control over mines, tributes and trade flows.
Incommensurability: Royal wealth was described by contemporaries as surpassing understanding, which reflected the absence of suitable measuring tools, not a precise figure.

Why this nuance is essential

The circulation of this figure reflects a legitimate aim: to correct a European historiography that long ignored the power of African empires. Recalling that a ruler of Mali surpassed the European monarchs of his time restores a historical fact.

However, the figure remains scientifically unfounded.

Principle of method: Correcting a received idea with an invented figure weakens the cause one seeks to defend. Removing this spurious figure takes nothing away from the reality of Mali’s power.

A world already interconnected before 1492

Global history often takes 1492 as the starting point of globalisation. In reality, the Afro-Eurasian continents were already trading freely:

Financial instruments: China used paper money, while the Islamic world and India had mastered the long-distance transfer of debts (suftaja / hawala).
Currencies of exchange: Cowries, shells thought to have come mainly from the Maldives, served as everyday currency as far as West Africa.
Knowledge and technologies: Arabic numerals (originating in India) and papermaking travelled these same trade routes to Europe.¹⁶

Likewise, in the early fifteenth century, the Chinese maritime expeditions of Zheng He across the Indian Ocean bear witness to the power of these pre-existing networks — although the exact size of his ships is still debated among historians.¹⁷

The break after 1492 is therefore not the invention of transcontinental exchange, but the integration of the American continent into an already existing network.

(Note: The question of the trans-Saharan slave trades and of the movement of captives along these routes is dealt with specifically in Entry 3.10).¹⁸

Note 1

Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History

Levtzion, Nehemia, Ancient Ghana and Mali, Methuen, 1973, in libraries

How people crossed

What is established

What belongs to myth

Why this nuance is essential

A world already interconnected before 1492

Notes and sources

Bibliography