Mansa Musa carried a fortune in gold to Cairo, then had to borrow

Cinematic cover: a merchant scale tipping with gold beside a caravan and the pyramids under purple and amber dusk

In July 1324, a caravan from West Africa camped for three days beside the Pyramids of Giza. Then, on 19 July, it crossed the Nile into Cairo. At its head was Musa, the mansa, or king, of Mali, on his way to Mecca for the hajj.

Cairo had seen pilgrims before. It had not seen anything like this. The Arabic writers who described the visit afterwards struggled for numbers big enough: thousands of attendants dressed in silk and brocade, camels loaded with gold dust, a king who gave gold away to officials, scholars and the poor. Modern historians treat those numbers as a way of saying "more than we could count", not as an audit. But nobody doubts the main point. Mansa Musa arrived with a great deal of gold, and he spent it as if it would never run out.

Before he was home, he was borrowing money.

The richest king in the world

Mali, at its height under Musa, reached from the Atlantic coast deep into the Sahel, across parts of what are now Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Mauritania and Mali. Its wealth came from trade and tribute: salt from the north, and gold from the fields of Bambuk and Bure to the south. West African gold was a large share of the gold that circulated in the medieval Mediterranean world.

The hajj was planned for years. Historians think the gold Musa carried was probably tribute gathered over much of his early reign. And in Cairo he did what a great king was expected to do. He met the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad, and the two exchanged gifts. He stayed about three months. He and his people bought freely in the markets.

Shihab al-Din al-Umari, who wrote about the visit about twelve years later from people in Cairo who had met the king, recorded a striking detail. Before Musa arrived, he said, a mithqal of gold was worth about 25 silver dirhams. After the visit it fell below 22, and it had not recovered in the years since.

That detail became famous. You will often read that Musa "wrecked" Egypt's economy. Historians are more careful. Warren Schultz, who studied Mamluk gold prices, has argued that a fall of that size sat within the normal ups and downs of gold in Cairo. So the honest version is smaller: Musa released so much gold, so fast, that people in Cairo remembered it as having made gold cheaper. Even his admirers saw that his abundance had lowered the price of the very thing he was rich in.

The way home

The return journey went badly. Travelling apart from the main pilgrim caravan, the Malians suffered cold, hunger and raids. By the time they reached Suez many had died and much of their supply was gone.

Back in Cairo, the king who had handed out gold now needed money. Several Arabic writers, among them al-Umari, Ibn al-Dawadari and Ibn Battuta, say Musa and his people had to sell goods and borrow from Cairo's merchants, at high rates of interest. Ibn al-Dawadari, as translated by the historian Michael Gomez, says the visitors had at first behaved as if "their money was inexhaustible", and later had to resell what they had bought at half its value.

One merchant family, the Banu al-Kuwayk, is recorded as lending him 50,000 dinars. Musa sold them a palace the sultan had given him as part payment. The lender sent agents all the way to Mali to collect the rest. According to al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun, many lenders were repaid only in part, or not at all. Other sources disagree about how it ended.

It is worth stating the paradox plainly. Mansa Musa was among the richest rulers of his age. And for a few months, far from home, he was short of cash.

What he did get right

It would be unfair to stop there. The journey made Mali famous. In 1375, about half a century later, the Catalan Atlas showed an African king on a throne holding a gold nugget, and that image of Mali shaped how the rest of the world saw West Africa for centuries. Musa came home with scholars, including the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and his reign is linked with Timbuktu's rise as a centre of learning.

But in Mali itself, memory is mixed. Lucy Duran of SOAS in London told the BBC that some griots, the hereditary historians of the Mande world, are reluctant to praise him: "they think he wasted local resources outside the empire."

Both things are true. The spending bought reputation. It also left a powerful king borrowing from strangers at high interest.

The lesson for enterprise today

I see the Mansa Musa pattern in companies all the time, and not only in big ones. It has three parts.

Wealth is not cash. Musa's gold was real, but it was back in Mali, or already given away. What mattered in Cairo was what he could spend that week. A business can have a full warehouse, a strong order book and valuable equipment, and still not be able to pay its suppliers on Friday. Stock, receivables and assets are wealth. Cash is what lets you act. Watch them separately.

Flooding the market cheapens what you bring. When you release too much of your best thing at once, you lower its price. That is true of gold in Cairo, and it is true of heavy discounting, of dumping a season's production into one market, or of giving your expertise away so freely that customers stop seeing its value. Abundance needs a release plan.

The trip abroad is where the plan breaks. Musa's trouble came far from home, on a journey that went worse than planned. Expansion works the same way: a new market, a new plant, a big contract in another country. Costs land before income does, and surprises cost more when you are away from your base. Budget the way back, not just the way out, and keep a reserve you do not touch for display.

Notice, too, what happened to the lenders. Merchants lent to a famous king on the strength of his reputation and many of them never got all their money back. Reputation is not a payment plan. Whoever you extend credit to, know how and when you will be paid.

Mansa Musa is remembered as the richest man who ever lived. He is also remembered, by some of his own people, as the king who spent Mali's gold abroad. The difference between those two memories is not how much he had. It is how he managed what he carried.

So here is my question for you this week: if your business had to pay all its bills from what it can actually spend this month, not what it owns, how long could it travel?

Sources: Wikipedia, Musa I of Mali (summarising al-Umari, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn al-Dawadari and Ibn Battuta via Levtzion & Hopkins 2000, Gomez 2018, Schultz 2006 and Collet 2019); BBC News, Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived? (2019); Warren Schultz, Mansa Mūsā's gold in Mamluk Cairo: a reappraisal of a world civilizations anecdote (2006); Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion (Princeton, 2018); Catalan Atlas (1375), BnF Espagnol 30.