The Richest Man in History

1. 0:06The year is 1324. [music] At the edge of the Sahara, a procession moves like a second horizon. Camels bend under gold, heralds carry staffs that flash in the morning light, attendants walk in disciplined lines, dust rises around them like incense from a kingdom
2. 0:24in motion. At the center of it all is a man the wider world is about to meet.
3. 0:29Not only a king, a pilgrim, his name was Mansa Musa. And for a brief moment in the 14th century, he ruled one of the largest, [music] wealthiest, and most sophisticated empires on Earth.
4. 0:42To understand what that meant, we have to pull back, back beyond the caravan, back beyond the desert, back to the [music] year 1312, when Musa took the throne.
5. 0:52In Europe, [music] power was fractured.
6. 0:55In Egypt, the Mamluks ruled one of the great centers of the Islamic world.
7. 0:59Cross-Asia [music] trade still tied distant empires together, and in West Africa, there stood Mali. Not a fringe, not a blank space, [music] a vast imperial world. At its height, Mali stretched roughly 2,000 miles across, larger than Western Europe,
8. 1:17bound together by rivers, caravan routes, tribute, scholarship, and force.
9. 1:22The Niger River was its highway. [music] The Sahara was not a wall, but a road.
10. 1:27To the north lay salt, to the south and west, gold. Between them, cities, markets, farms, scholars, craftsmen, and rulers built a civilization of enormous scale and confidence. This was not empty land waiting to be discovered. It was a
11. 1:43world already fully alive. Mali's power rested on geography, labor, and exchange. Gold came from regions like Bambuk and Bure. Salt came from the desert mines of Taghaza. River traffic moved goods inland, caravans carried them north. Officials taxed, [music]
12. 2:02protected, and organized the flow.
13. 2:04Wealth did not simply appear in Musa's hands.
14. 2:07>> [music] >> It passed through an empire built to move it, and above that empire stood the Mansa, king of kings, emperor. In the capital of Niani, power was staged with care. Distance, [music] screens, textiles, attendants, silence. Even now,
15. 2:24the [music] exact site of Niani is debated, but the political world it represented is [music] not. Musa ruled from the center of a sophisticated state, and yet he emerges from history only in fragments. We do not know his exact birth date. We know little for
16. 2:40certain about his childhood. Much of Mali's deepest memory lived in human voices, in griots, in oral tradition, in stories carried across [music] generations. Some of that memory survives, some of it does not. [music] What we do know is that Musa did not
17. 2:56inherit power in an ordinary way. He served as deputy to another ruler, Abu Bakr the Second, a king remembered for one of history's strangest departures.
18. 3:07Abu Bakr sent a great [music] expedition west into the Atlantic Ocean, and never returned.

Captions from YouTube. Automatic captions can mishear names and places.