Assalaamu alaikum, Alhamdulillah, the following was culled from www.cnn.com mellinium series. Check out the website. Very interesting.

In Praise of Mansa Musa

    Malian cities like Timbuktu and Jenni were
famed throughout the Muslim world. Their mosques,
libraries and schools were gathering places for
intellectuals. Their texts were adorned with Mali's
source of wealth -- gold. 

    Gold also paid for royal magnificence -- the
court poetry and music in praise of the ruler. 
Legend of Mansa Musa's wealth became so well
known in Europe that when the king was depicted in
the most famous map of the age, the Catalan Atlas,
he was holding a gold nugget. 
    But the legends were shown to be true. During
Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca, his
extravagance inflated the economies of the towns he
visited. The passage of his caravan of gold was
remembered for years. 

   
 In Mali today, people still celebrate the great
14th century king Mansa Musa. Everything about
him, they say, exuded majesty: his stately gait, his
wives, his concubines, the way he talked to the
people only through a spokesman. 


In European maps from the 1320s onward, the
   ruler of Mali was portrayed like a black Latin
   monarch. Complete with orb and scepter, he was
   seen as a sophisticate, not a savage. 

By the mid-14th century, Mali warriors had
   established the Mansas' rule from Gambia and
   lower Senegal in the west to the Niger valley
   below Gao in the east, and from the upper Niger
   in the south to the Sahara in the north. 
             From Transworld Publishers, Ltd.

Allahumma salli wasallim alaa Nabiyyina Muhammad. Wasalaam.
Modou Mbye