Mali Empire

The Mali Empire was the greatest of the medieval West African states, a Mande-speaking empire of the western Sudan whose wealth and Islamic learning made it famous across the medieval world.

It was founded around 1235 by Sundiata Keita, who, according to the celebrated Epic of Sundiata, united the Mandinka chiefdoms and defeated Sumanguru, ruler of the Sosso kingdom, at the Battle of Kirina, building upon the trade legacy of the declining Ghana Empire. Mali was organised as a federation of provinces and tributary kingdoms under a paramount ruler titled the mansa, and its prosperity rested on control of the trans-Saharan trade and of the rich goldfields of Bambuk and Bure, which supplied much of the gold circulating in the medieval Mediterranean and Islamic economies. Islam was adopted by the ruling elite while traditional practices persisted among the wider population. The empire reached its zenith in the early fourteenth century under Mansa Musa (reigned c. 1312-1337), whose famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, during which he distributed so much gold in Cairo that he reportedly disrupted its value for years, made Mali legendary in the wider world and led to its appearance on European maps. Under Musa, the empire reached its greatest extent and the cities of Timbuktu and Djenne flourished as renowned centres of commerce, scholarship, and Islamic learning, home to mosques, libraries, and universities. From the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the empire weakened through succession disputes, the loss of the key trading cities of Timbuktu and Gao to the Tuareg and the rising Songhai Empire, and the breakaway of outlying provinces. Reduced to a smaller western kingdom and increasingly raided, Mali finally collapsed around 1670 when the Bamana (Bambara) Empire of Segu sacked its capital, Niani, leaving the Keita rulers as minor provincial chiefs.

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