Mansa Musa's Pilgrimage to Mecca

Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca was the hajj undertaken in 1324 and 1325 by Musa I, the ruler of the West African Mali Empire, who crossed roughly 2,700 miles from his capital to Arabia at the head of an enormous retinue reported by Arabic chroniclers to include thousands of soldiers, attendants and slaves, along with camels laden with gold. Passing through Cairo on the outbound journey, Musa distributed gold so lavishly, according to the Damascene scholar Shihab al-Din al-Umari, that he depressed its exchange value against silver in the city for years afterward, with al-Umari reporting that the price fell from about twenty-five silver dirhams per mithqal of gold to under twenty-two and stayed depressed for over a decade. The pilgrimage made Mali and its ruler famous across North Africa and the Middle East, carried word of the empire's wealth to trading cities as far away as Genoa and Venice, and is credited with placing Timbuktu on European maps for the first time, cementing Mansa Musa's later reputation as one of the wealthiest individuals in history.