The King Who Built Timbuktu

1. 0:06He came home carrying something more valuable than all [music] the gold he had given away. He had walked the great mosques of Cairo and Mecca. He had seen [music] what centuries of Islamic civilization looked like in stone, in
2. 0:19law, [music] in scholarship. He had a vision. Now he would build. Abu Ishaq al-Sahili came with him, a poet and architect from Granada who had left Mecca and would never return. He would spend the rest of his life in Mali. He
3. 0:33died there 20 years later. Whatever he thought he was leaving behind when he joined that caravan, [music] he cannot have known he was leaving it forever.
4. 0:43Together they built. The Djinguereber Mosque rose in Timbuktu in 1327.
5. 0:48Mud brick and wooden beams, the toron, the protruding timber ribs that gave the Sudano-Sahelian style its distinctive look, designed to hold scaffolding for the replastering [music] that every rainy season demanded. Built to last by
6. 1:03being built to be maintained, it still [music] stands. Al-Umari, describing what he heard from Egyptian officials, wrote of Musa's new [music] audience chamber at Niani, a building with a cupola and ornamental motives, a wonder
7. 1:17to behold in the world. Fired brick, a new material in this landscape.
8. 1:23Al-Sahili was paid 200 [music] kg of gold for his work. The architectural revolution spread. The Sudano-Sahelian style [music] Al-Sahili helped establish became the dominant tradition of West African sacred building. Every year the
9. 1:37community gathers to replaster the walls of these mosques, >> [music] >> an act of maintenance that became a festival, a celebration of the building and the faith it housed. At home Musa governed. [music] He appointed Islamic scholars as judges, men whose legal
10. 1:52training ran from Timbuktu to Cairo to [music] Baghdad. He standardized weights and measures for trade. He kept the gold supply [music] controlled. Ibn Battuta, who traveled to Mali 15 years after Musa's death, praised what he found. Of
11. 2:08all peoples, those who most hate [music] injustice. Travelers felt safe.
12. 2:13Merchants came from across the world, bringing goods, books, and ideas. The cities were alive. Timbuktu in the 1330s, scholars debating in mosque courtyards, [music] merchants trading gold dust for salt and manuscripts, Friday prayers drawing the
13. 2:28whole city together. The Wangara, [music] the wealthy merchant class, literate, cosmopolitan, connected, they were the human infrastructure of the empire. The empire stretched 2,000 miles [music] east to west. Shortly after returning from the Hajj, Musa annexed
14. 2:45Gao, [music] the strategic city on the eastern Niger bend, absorbing the Songhai people as subjects. The kings of Gao sent their [music] sons to Niani as hostages, the classic move of a great power at the edge of its expansion. All
15. 2:59peaks have a descent. [music] Musa could not know that. He ruled a civilization that was by any honest measure one of the great achievements of the medieval world. He built it in stone. He filled it with scholars. He put its name on the
16. 3:13map. Al Sahili, the poet from Granada who built mosques in the African desert, never saw his homeland again. He is buried in Mali. The mosques are still standing.

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