look closer

The gold held out like an offer. In Cairo in 1324 he gave away enough of it to depress the price of the metal for years.

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, and he gave gold away in Cairo at such volume, in alms and in gifts and in purchases at whatever price was asked, that the metal's value in the city fell and stayed depressed for years. Mali sat on the goldfields of the upper Niger and on the trans-Saharan trade in salt and gold and slaves, and Musa spent the proceeds on the pilgrimage, on scholars brought home from Cairo, and on building: mosques at Gao and Timbuktu, and a university city that within a century held 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 panels, with the compass roses and rhumb lines of a working sea chart and, inland, everything the mapmaker had been told. Here, in the western Sahara, he drew a crowned king seated on a throne holding out a gold nugget the size of an apple, and wrote beside him that this black lord is called Musse Melly, lord of the Blacks of Guinea, that so abundant is the gold found in his country that he is the richest and most noble king in all the land. Almost everything else on the panel is guesswork or hearsay: the Atlas mountains as a scribble, a veiled Tuareg rider on a camel approaching the throne, city names in a rough approximation. What the map records accurately is a fact of the fourteenth-century world economy that European schoolbooks later mislaid, that the gold in the coinage of Christian Europe came largely across the Sahara, and that 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 about 30 years when it was drawn, and his empire had another century to run.