Mali, Songhai & Mansa Musa

In 1235, a man named The founder of the Mali Empire and its first mansa (king of kings). A prince of the Mandinka people, Sundiata led a coalition of West African chieftains to defeat the Sosso ruler Sumanguru Kante at the Battle of Kirina. He is remembered in West African oral tradition as the "Lion King" — a warrior, healer, and state-builder who unified the Mande-speaking peoples into a powerful empire. His story has been preserved for centuries by griots (professional oral historians). led a coalition of West African chieftains against a ruler named Sumanguru Kante, who controlled the Sosso Kingdom and had been squeezing the Mandinka people for years. At the Battle of Kirina, Sundiata won. Within a decade, he had built the A large West African empire centered in the upper Niger River valley, flourishing from the 13th through 15th centuries CE. Founded by Sundiata Keita around 1235, Mali controlled the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade routes, making it one of the wealthiest states in the medieval world. At its height, the empire stretched from the Atlantic coast to the Niger Bend, encompassing much of modern Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, and southern Mauritania., one of the largest states in the medieval world.

The story of Sundiata exists primarily in oral tradition, preserved by generations of griots — professional storytellers who were also historians, musicians, and living archives. The Epic of Sundiata has been recited and varied for eight centuries. It deserves to stand alongside Homer. But historians have a secondary reason to trust its core outline: the Arabic-language accounts from Muslim traders and geographers who traveled through Mali in the 13th and 14th centuries largely corroborate the broad strokes of what the griots say. Sundiata was real. The Battle of Kirina happened. What followed was extraordinary.

Mali's wealth was not complicated to explain, even if its management was. The empire sat astride the most lucrative trade corridor in the medieval world: the trans-Saharan routes connecting the gold fields of West Africa to the markets of North Africa and, from there, to the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and beyond.