As for Traveling Money
So, condo rent bangkok caravans would stop along the way to Mansa Musa’s empire and trade their textiles and spices for large slabs of Saharan salt. The medieval Arab writer Ibn Battuta claimed that the Saharan outpost of Teghaza was so rich with desert salt that its buildings were made of pure rock salt. Berzock says that the lucrative salt-gold trade supported a much larger trans-Saharan trade network with “entrepôts” – intermediary trade hubs – in cities like Sijilmasa in Morocco, Niamey in Niger and Tadmakka in Mali. Once in Mali, some sources say that heavy slabs of salt could be traded for their weight in gold.
The website Celebrity Net Worth says he was worth $400 billion in today’s dollars, making Mansa Musa nearly four times as rich as Jeff Bezos. Mansa Musa inherited the throne of the Mali Empire between 1307 and 1312 (Mansa means “sultan” or “emperor” in the Mandinka language) and cemented the empire’s position at the center of a vast medieval trade network that connected Asia, the Middle East and Europe via Africa by annexing 24 cities. A percentage of all the gold mined in the empire was sent as tribute to the king.
But more important than the size of Mansa Musa’s empire was the richness of his natural resources – two highly productive gold fields renowned for producing the purest and most coveted gold in the world. If the stories told about Mansa Musa are true – that he and his court were bedecked in pure gold, and that he spent so much gold on a pilgrimage to Mecca that he devalued the price of gold for decades – then he may have been the richest man to ever live.
The hunger for West African gold was so great that traders were willing to cross the Sahara Desert to get their hands on it. But the risk was worth the reward. It was even used as a currency there. West African gold was literally the “gold standard,” and kingdoms across the world wanted to mint their gold currency with the purest material. Surprisingly, the commodity that was most prized in gold-glutted Mali was salt.
