How the Greatest Empire Fell

1. 0:06There is no document that records [music] his death, no account of a final illness, no deathbed scene, no last words set down by a scholar. He was there, the richest man in the world, the builder of mosques, the man who had
2. 0:21flooded Cairo with gold, and then he was [music] not. The world only noticed Mali when it intersected with the world. His hajj filled [music] pages of Arabic prose, his death filled none. He died around 1337, [music] 12 years after the hajj. He was perhaps
3. 0:3857 years old. The cause is unknown. His son Mansa Maghan took the throne. He was not his father. The Mali Empire had no fixed rule of succession. Any male of the Keita dynasty [music] could stake a claim. This had never mattered when the
4. 0:54Mansa was strong enough to silence all other claims. Now it mattered. Musa's brother Mansa Sulayman came next, a capable ruler who steadied the center.
5. 1:04Ibn Battuta traveled to Mali in 1352 and found a functioning empire, safe roads, honest [music] markets, courts that punished the powerful for injustice. He was impressed, >> [music] >> but even then, if you read his account
6. 1:19carefully, the empire was smaller than it had been. Already the edges were fraying. [music] From the north, Tuareg nomadic confederations grew bolder with each passing raid. From the east, the Songhai people at Gao, the city Musa
7. 1:34himself had annexed, [music] quietly reasserted their independence. From the south, the Mossi raided the heartland, cutting trade routes, burning harvests.
8. 1:44And from the far west, Portuguese ships were mapping Atlantic sea lanes that would eventually make the trans-Saharan gold routes redundant. In 1433, the Tuareg took Timbuktu.
9. 1:56What Musa [music] had built in decades came apart across generations. This is not unusual. It is the pattern. Great empires are often held together by a single extraordinary individual. Their gravity warps everything around them.
10. 2:12Remove them and the weight [music] redistributes. The Mali Empire had been Musa. After Musa, it was a structure without its keystone. [music] By 1380, it was a second-rank power. By 1430, it had lost Timbuktu. By 1500, it was a remnant kingdom in the [music]
11. 2:30original Mandé heartland. By the early 17th century, the last Mansa ruled over very little.
12. 2:37>> [music] >> Then came 1591.
13. 2:40A Moroccan army crossed the Sahara. They carried arquebuses, firearms, against an empire that fought with cavalry and iron. At the Battle of Tondibi, the Songhai Empire, Mali's [music] successor, even larger at its peak, was
14. 2:55shattered in an afternoon. The scholars of Timbuktu were arrested. Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti, [music] the most celebrated mind of his generation, was taken in chains to Marrakech. Libraries were looted.
15. 3:09[music] Manuscripts were burned or scattered, but not all of them.
16. 3:13For centuries afterward, Timbuktu families hid what they could.
17. 3:17Manuscripts sealed in [music] metal trunks, pages buried in desert sand, entire libraries concealed in basement [music] rooms, passed from generation to generation, never cataloged, barely spoken of. In 2012, [music] when jihadists occupied the city, staff
18. 3:35at the Ahmed Baba Institute loaded approximately 350,000 manuscripts into vehicles, [music] boats on the Niger, cars on desert roads, and moved them south to Bamako in the dark. [music] One of the great rescue operations in the history of
19. 3:51human knowledge. The knowledge that [music] Musa's scholars had gathered, copied, and carried across a continent did not die when the empire died. The griots kept singing. The manuscripts survived. The mosques still stand.
20. 4:06Empires fall. What they build can last longer.

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