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