Mali and the trans-Saharan trade
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
A desert that worked like a sea
From about the 700s, camel caravans crossed the Sahara. They followed set routes from well to well, linking West Africa to the lands around the Mediterranean. The crossing took two to three months and needed guides. So trade gathered in a few towns at each end. Goods moved in a pattern. GOLD and ivory went north. SALT, cloth, copper, horses and books came south. Salt is the surprise. In the Sahel it was rare and needed for life. It was cut in slabs at Taghaza out in the desert, then carried south. At times it sold for close to its own weight in gold. Enslaved people were also taken north on these routes, for hundreds of years. That was a trade in human beings, not in goods. It belongs in any honest account of how this trade worked.
How Mali grew rich
Mali rose in the 1200s under a ruler called Sundiata. It held the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure, and the towns where the caravans came in. Its wealth came less from digging gold than from TAXING it as it moved. It also came from holding the market towns where the trade changed hands: Timbuktu, Gao and Djenne. Islam had spread along these same routes. Mali rulers shared it with their trading partners to the north. That gave both sides one set of laws and one way of doing business, so deals and credit could work across two thousand miles.
The hajj of 1324
Mansa Musa went on hajj to Mecca in 1324. Arab writers say his caravan ran to thousands of people. In Cairo he spent and gave away so much gold that writers there recorded the gold price falling and staying low for years. The exact figures may be too round to trust. The point of the journey is not in doubt. It told the whole Muslim world that Mali was rich. Fifty years later a mapmaker in Spain drew Mansa Musa on the Catalan Atlas, holding a lump of gold. That is how merchants in Europe learned where the gold came from.
West African gold mattered well beyond West Africa. It fed the mints of North Africa. Through them it became much of the gold coin used in medieval Europe, at a time when Europe dug up very little of its own. Timbuktu grew into a centre of learning, with libraries of manuscripts. Some of them still survive. And the interest shown by that Spanish map helped push Portuguese ships down the Atlantic coast in the 1400s. They were looking for a sea route to the same gold. That search is where European voyaging by sea begins, so this story links straight to it.