The Court of Mali

The empire of Mali, which arose in the thirteenth century in the grasslands of the western Sudan along the upper Niger, grew into the greatest of the medieval West African states and one of the wealthiest realms of its day, its riches founded on the goldfields of the south, on the trade in gold and salt and on the farming of the river lands, and its power reaching from the Atlantic to the bend of the Niger and the desert trading-cities. Its rulers, the mansas, were Muslims, and under them, especially the famous Mansa Musa whose pilgrimage to Makkah a generation before had astonished the world with its gold, Mali became a centre of Islam in the Sudan, its cities adorned with mosques and its scholars in contact with the wider Muslim world. About 1352-1353 the great Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta crossed the desert and visited the empire in the reign of Mansa Sulayman, brother and successor of Mansa Musa, and his account is one of our chief sources for it. He described the royal court with its ceremony and its gold, the king's audiences and the homage of his subjects; and he praised, as the best of the people's qualities, their constancy in prayer and their teaching of the Qur'an to their children, and above all the security and justice of the realm, the safety of the roads, so that the traveller and the stranger had nothing to fear. Yet, a scrupulous Maliki faqih, he also recorded with disapproval certain local customs that seemed to him contrary to the law, judging the country by the standard of his own learning. His account preserves a vivid picture of a powerful, orderly and Muslim African empire at its height. This scene depicts the court of Mali; in keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.