The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S3E12

(2015 · Northern India, &  ~1273- ~1330 CE · Baghdad, Cairo, Baghdad, & Timbuktu) 

The Narrator finishes his game of famous Muslims unknown to most Westerners with the tale of Mansa Musa, an emperor who gave away so much gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca that he flooded the Eastern Mediterranean with the precious commodity, deflating its market value and crashing the economy of medieval Egypt.

Based on the second half of Chapter 10 of End by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks and Melissa Buttrill

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last ice age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him. Hello again, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season three, episode twelve of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy it. Okay, as I said, I'm going to do one more for this game, and then I'll move on. For the record, I did not really expect you to know Al Kerismi, or Omar Kayam, or even Rumi. I do not expect to know this next one either, but it is an interesting story, and it happened about fifty years after Rumi's death. Have you ever heard of Musa Kita? In English he is more often known as Mansa Musa.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Neither.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

He was the richest man who has ever lived, richer than any Caesar or Emperor or King of Kings you can name. He was so rich, there is no way to actually calculate his wealth. Historians and economists have played around with different models, and in the end they always throw their hands up in the air. He ruled an empire as prosperous as any kingdom or empire of its time anywhere, and then on top of that, he also had by far the richest gold mines of his era. If you want to talk about gross domestic product and the balance of trade, Mansa Musa ruled an economy wealthier than the rest of the world known to him put together.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

None of this rings a bell. I am not surprised.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

He was the Sultan of Mali, and I doubt that turns up in many American history textbooks. Without saying I know your country well, what are the chances children are taught that the richest man who has ever lived, richer than Midas or Croesus or Crassus or Caesar, or any European king or Indian Raj or Chinese emperor, was a black man? Mali was the most substantial Muslim empire south of the Sahara. The Moors and the Berbers had some connection with them, but it was not an easy place to get to even for desert peoples, and it was also that interesting economy, like China would become four centuries later, where they had things other people desperately wanted, but they were largely self sufficient in their domestic needs. Christendom and the Greek speaking Roman Empire and the Islamic world were all starving for gold, and also hungry for slaves and ivory. Mali was producing probably ninety percent of all the new gold in the world at that time, and they had as many slaves and as much ivory as anyone could possibly want. Can you think of anything the rest of the world might offer Mansa Musa in exchange for just a fraction of his wealth? The house of wisdom in Baghdad was gone, and Mansa Musa wanted to build new ones in Timbuktu and his capital in Niani, and in the great city of Gao on the Niger River, even though he had not yet conquered Gao when he conceived of his plan. It was for a long, long time. Sorry, I am skipping a lot of stuff here, but I can go back and explain that if you like.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

You do remember they cannot see you, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:20

I suppose that's true. Fair enough, I'll move on. I mentioned Chingis Khan destroyed Charisma. I should explain why the Muslim world did not rise up and fight the Mongols as one. Why did we not face them as we had faced the Romans? The Abbasid Revolution was, at its heart, about making Islam multicultural. Muhammad, peace be upon him, was an Arab. All the caliphs who followed him for hundreds of years were also Arabs, but after the Black Standard flew victorious over the fallen Umayyads, each new Abbasid Caliph had a little less secular power than his predecessor, even if he was still the prince of the faithful, in the same way the Bishop of Rome was the head of the Roman Catholic Church. No, power diversified out from under the Abbasids. Persians took over much of the civil service. Regional governors set up their own emirates that paid varying degrees of lip service to the caliph while handling all secular matters within their territory themselves. Most of these emirates soon had hereditary dynasties, and this only accelerated once the Abbasid army of Turks off the steppe and Mameluk slaves began winning privileges for wartime service that they wanted to hold on to in peacetime. All this is to say, when the Charismian Empire was insulting Chingis Khan to the east of them, they were also quarreling with the Caliph in Baghdad because they wanted to be Shahs, kings in the eyes of their subjects, rather than mere governors. When Chingis Khan came for them like a tiger pouncing onto a sheep, the caliph did not call up the Gazis of the Uma in the name of Islam to defend the rulers of the Charismians. He said he was a Shah, then it's the Shah's job to defend the Shah's empire. To be fair, if the Abbasids had ridden east to support their fellow Muslims, Chingis Khan would almost certainly have continued riding west right over them. Instead, he stopped at the borders, appointed governors over the empty cities and abandoned fields of Khorismia, and then he rode back to Mongolia, where he died without troubling Islam again. Chingis Khan's sons and grandsons were less generous, especially once a breakaway sect of Islam, yet another offshoot of those now ancient troublemakers, the outsiders, tried to assassinate several Khans. This time the outsiders really bit off more than they could chew. You do not insult Chingis Khan, and you do not try to murder his family. If you do, the Mongols will end your world. The new great Khan ordered up one out of every ten men of fighting age on the steppe, and they rode into Muslim lands to burn out the home base of the assassins, to put down a few minor Muslim emirates in their region, and as long as they were in the neighborhood, they also wanted the Abbasid Caliph to formally acknowledge Mongol rule and bend the knee to the new Khan in person back at the court in Mongolia. After that, the Mongols expected an annual tribute in both soldiers and silver in exchange for the privilege of the caliph remaining independent. The Mongols expected Islam to pay their own equivalent of jizya for the privilege of continuing to live and worship as they had lived and worshipped before their coming. The shoe was now on the other foot, and Muslims everywhere agreed it was a poor fit. The Abbasid Caliph refused, which was the right call until he learned that none of the Arab and Mameluk and Turkish ruled emirates who had paid lip service to Baghdad for generations were prepared to ride to his defense. The caliph was a pope without any Franks to call upon, and the Mongols were orders of magnitude scarier than any Lombards. I was in a monastery in northern Italy at the time. I had no interest in being within a month's ride of any Mongol army, and can you blame me? Baghdad was a city of a million people with a garrison of sixty thousand men. They lasted a mere twelve days before the horse lords were inside the walls. They say the Tigris went black with all the ink spilled into the river when the House of Wisdom and all the other libraries were destroyed. I am sure that is a flight of fancy. It was probably just ash that made the water go black. The Mongols burned everything they did not want, and they did not want much of what the dying metropolis had to offer. Baghdad was left empty after that, worse than Rome at its lowest ebb, as bad as Carthage after the Muslims finally filled in its harbors. Anyway, all of this has been a roundabout way of saying the Islamic world did not have one great center of learning anymore by the time of Mansamusa, the man I want to talk about next. Baghdad was gone. Damascus and Medina and Cairo were on equal footings at this time, in my opinion, in terms of scholarship, with none of them at the level of lost Baghdad. Jerusalem was under Christian rule or an empty ruin for much of this time because of the crusades. Even the Umayyads in Al Andalus were beginning to feel the rise in Christian pressure to reconquer Spain, and so their court felt less secure than it had in its heyday. To Mansamusa, it seemed the time was ripe to make Mali the new beating heart of Islamic thought. It would be good for his faith, good for his subjects, and good for his legacy. The problem was the Sahara. Would this generation's Al Krismi or Umar Kayam or Rumi be willing to leave their homes and cross the biggest desert in the world to live at the court of an African emperor among Africans, only the elite of whom spoke any Arabic at all? What Mansamusa needed was a big, splashy public relations campaign. He needed to do something so incredible that every scholar in the world would understand that Mali wanted them and was willing to pay whatever it cost to get them. And so Mansamusa made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and he did it in a style befitting the wealthiest man in the world who wanted to make an impression. To begin with, he crossed the Sahara with sixty thousand Muslim men, all of whom were required to pack at least one of the Sultan's gold bars among their luggage. Every Friday, whether in an oasis town or in the middle of the desert, the whole caravan would stop and build a mosque. Where there were no building materials, they just erected enormous tents that they brought with them, but more often than not, sixty thousand men tasked with building a mosque in a single day, managed to erect something of wood or stone or mud brick as a gift to the community they were passing through. The column was preceded by heralds dressed in silk robes and bearing golden staffs, who shouted to anyone who could hear them I speak on behalf of my emperor, Musakita. He makes the pilgrimage to Mecca. One of the pillars of Islam is charity to the poor. Any who are in need know that Musakita will help you. In addition to those gold bricks I mentioned, Mansamusa's caravan included eighty camels, each carrying three hundred pounds of gold dust. For two years every stranger Mansamusa spoke with left the conversation gifted with gold from his own hand. He also bought souvenirs wherever he went, paying the asking price, often ridiculous, exorbitant sums, for anything he found interesting. I was in Cairo the first time Mansamusa passed through. I sold him a slim volume of poetry from the pen of the great Amr ibn al As himself, companion of the prophet and three time conqueror of Egypt. It helped that strictly speaking I was his pen at the time, so I could make a copy from memory on steel papyrus bound in old leather to create an instant collectible. Anyway, when I was presented to the Emperor of Mali as an antiquarian bookseller, I told Mansamusa that the very city we stood in began as Amar ibn al-Ass's army camp during the siege of the Roman fortress of Babylon. Just over there, I told him, was pitched his command tent that he abandoned at the start of his march to Alexandria because a bird had nested on top of the highest pole. Cairo became the capital of Egypt instead of Alexandria, because Caliph Umar al Katab did not want his Arabs to have the Nile River between them and him. Mansamusa heard all of this with wide eyes and an eager heart, and when I was done he told me in thickly accented Arabic, Truly I walk in the footsteps of great men. Thanks be to God that I am here in the place where Sheikh Amar ibn al Ask, a companion of the Prophet himself once stood. Then he gave me a golden nugget for my book of poetry that should have made me a wealthy man. To my dismay, I discovered everyone in Cairo had also received some of Matsamusa's largesse. He went on to Mecca, and Egypt's economy crashed in his wake. In a world where everyone was rich in gold, what was gold actually worth? Every instinct told me I was holding a fortune in my purse, but if no one wanted what I was offering because they already had it too, what was it actually good for? What is a fortune in gold worth if everyone else is just as fortunate? I walked away from my business in Cairo. I did not even remember what I was doing for a living at the time. I could not sell it in the turmoil of everyone realizing wealth was worthless in a gold glut, and I sailed to Constantinople. Even there, Mansa Musa's money was starting to shake market values, but fortunately I arrived early enough that my gold was still almost as good as gold. I settled into a new life as an Orthodox Christian. Meanwhile, I heard when Mansa Musa passed back through Cairo on his return journey from Mecca, he realized the damage he had done. He took to borrowing much of the gold he had given out to people back at exorbitant interest rates, if only to give gold value again. Mark that. Once I was confident I could come out of Mali with gold that was actually worth something, I did make the trip to Timbuktu exactly once. I would not recommend it. I have ridden through deserts. Many of them. Maybe even most of them at this point. The Sahara is too vast to be called a desert, in my opinion. It is a sea of sand, with all the moods and terrors of the open ocean, except the terror of the deep. Instead there is the terror of thirst and of sun, and of the emptiness around you swallowing you up in a way that water cannot. We spent hours rising and falling over dunes, the frozen waves of a raging sea. We spent days cowering in the shade of our tents while the world outside burned. Sometimes the wind picked up, and the sand swirled with such vicious intent that to step outside was to take one's life into one's hands, and the finest silica found every loose weave in the warp and weft of our clothes, so that you were gritty and dry and uncomfortable the whole time. You could never be rid of it once it was on you, just like salt and damp coats you from ocean spray. We rode for seventy days, stopping only a few times in oasis towns that knew we hated being there. I give points to Malian hospitality when I finally got a chance to enjoy it, and Timbuktu was strangely beautiful. It was exotic in a way that I knew meant I could never bring myself to call it home. What was worse, that academic community I had found so interesting in Baghdad's House of Wisdom was wholly lacking here. I made the trip across the desert, but not enough others did. I was among the smartest in attendance, whereas I had been a mere secretary to greatness in the heydays of the House of Wisdom. There was never a critical mass of intellectuals to create anything new. Oh, we could translate and make copies, we could help further the spread of Islam, we could help the nobility debate points of law or explore existing literature and philosophy and science and history, but there was no Alcharismi or Umar Kayam there to actually push the boundaries of knowledge out through innovation and original thought. I stayed longer than I meant to only because I dreaded making the journey back, but I still only stayed less than ten years before I quit the place. Mali was not for me, but I regret to say other people, without a complete worldview, arrived at different conclusions. There would be a totally unintended consequence of Mansamusa's pilgrimage. He had hoped to lure the best Islamic scholars to his empire by displaying his wealth, but in the attempt he had also deeply impressed Christendom. For the next two centuries every European map of the world would include a picture of Mansamusa crouched down in the southwest corner of the Sahara Desert. By the time Portuguese and Spanish ships were capable of journeying down the African coastline in search of the wealth of Mali, the empire had shattered, and various rival powers were fighting for supremacy. The warlords of the petty kingdoms liked the looks of the Christians' weapons, and so they took to selling their war captives in exchange for armaments. The Europeans, meanwhile, soon discovered the slave trade was even more profitable than the gold trade they had hoped to establish. Expanding their efforts, now the African kingdoms battling among the territories of fallen Mali began launching war specifically to feed the holds of slave ships. Greed. They say there are seven deadly sins, but the one that will truly lead mankind to ruin is greed. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me fix myself another drink, and we will resume You have been listening to the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast, and there is a lot more to come. Here are a few ways you can help support this program. First, if you are enjoying it, please tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. This may be the third and final season, but I plan to leave the series up as long as people continue to take an interest in it. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix available on Amazon. If you want a copy of the story for yourselves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a typeform survey in the show notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me questions. I have already done a QA mailbag episode during the run of this series, and I probably will do another one in a little while once people have had a chance to find it and enjoy the show after the final episode airs. Fifth, while this may be the final season of the Tape Recorder trilogy podcast, I already have plans for two more shows, so please remain subscribed to this channel for updates on those when they are ready to be shared. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you who are willing to support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.