Why was Timbuktu important?
Timbuktu was important as a major trading hub at the southern edge of the trans-Saharan trade routes and as one of the medieval world's great centers of Islamic learning. Under the Mali and Songhai empires, its University of Sankore attracted scholars from across the Muslim world, and its libraries held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.
Timbuktu's importance rested on two pillars: commerce and scholarship. Located near the Niger River at the southern edge of the Sahara, the city occupied a strategic position where the trans-Saharan caravan routes met the river trade networks of West Africa. This made it one of the most important commercial crossroads in the medieval world.
As a trading center, Timbuktu was where gold from the south met salt from the north. Merchants from across the Islamic world gathered there to exchange goods that included textiles, books, horses, copper, and slaves alongside the staple commodities of gold and salt. The wealth generated by this trade funded the city's second great distinction: its role as a center of learning.
Under the Mali Empire and particularly the Songhai Empire, Timbuktu became one of the preeminent centers of Islamic scholarship in the world. The University of Sankore — actually a complex of mosques and madrasas — attracted thousands of students and scholars from across Africa and the broader Islamic world. They studied theology, law, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Private libraries in Timbuktu held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts — a literary heritage that scholars are still working to catalog and preserve.
Timbuktu's reputation was so extraordinary that it entered European consciousness as a byword for fabulous, unreachable wealth. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 depicted Mansa Musa near the city, holding a gold nugget. For centuries, European explorers sought to reach Timbuktu, imagining a city of gold. The reality was more subtle but no less impressive — a city of books, learning, and the free exchange of ideas.