Tenth Mansa (Emperor) of the Mali Empire — whose 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca (with 60,000 people and 12,000 slaves each carrying 4 pounds of gold) literally crashed the gold market in Cairo and introduced the world to West African wealth — the wealthiest individual in history by most estimates.
Makes the Mali Empire visible to the medieval world — Mansa Musa's hajj inadvertently created the first European cartographic representation of West Africa (the Catalan Atlas, 1375) and established Timbuktu as a center of Islamic scholarship that it retained for centuries.
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