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Mansa Musa holds up a lump of gold about the size of an apple. The mapmaker had never seen him, and drew him from stories that came north with the caravans.

In 1324 the ruler of Mali went on pilgrimage to Mecca and broke the Egyptian economy on the way. Mansa Musa travelled with a caravan that Arab chroniclers numbered in the thousands. In Cairo he gave gold away in alms, in gifts, and in purchases at whatever price was asked. The price of gold in the city fell, and by one Arab account it did not recover for at least 12 years. Mali sat on the goldfields of the upper Niger and on the desert trade in salt, gold and slaves. Musa spent the proceeds on the pilgrimage, on scholars he brought home from Cairo, and on building, including part of the Djinguereber mosque at Timbuktu. Timbuktu ended up holding one of the great manuscript libraries of the world. Word of that caravan travelled north across the desert with the merchants and reached the workshops of Mallorca, where a Jewish cartographer named Cresques Abraham was making the most ambitious map of the age. The Catalan Atlas of about 1375 covers the known world from the Atlantic to China on six leaves. It has the ruled bearing lines of a working sea chart, and the first compass rose anyone has found on one. Inland it has whatever the mapmaker had been told. Here, in the western Sahara, he drew a crowned king on a throne, holding out a lump of gold the size of an apple. Beside him he wrote that this black lord is called Musse Melly, lord of the black people of Guinea. The gold of his country, he wrote, makes him the richest and most noble king in all the land. Almost everything around him is guesswork or hearsay: walled towns drawn from nothing, a blue river where the Niger should be, and place names written down the way a trader had said them. What the map gets right is a fact of the fourteenth-century economy that European schoolbooks later mislaid. Much of the gold in Christian Europe's coins had come across the Sahara, and everyone in the trade knew whose it had been. The atlas went into the French royal library and is in Paris now. Mansa Musa had been dead close to 40 years when it was drawn, and his empire had another century to run.