Mali Empire
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The Mali empire was a West African state that grew rich on the gold and salt trade between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, in what is now Mali, Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea. Its founder, Sundiata Keita, defeated the Sosso king Sumanguru at the battle of Kirina about 1235 and organised the Mandinka kingdoms into a confederation with his own lineage at its head. The empire reached its height under Mansa Musa, whose pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with a caravan carrying so much gold crashed the price of the metal in Cairo; on European maps he was drawn holding a golden nugget. He built the great mosque at Timbuktu and brought back the Andalusian scholar al-Sahili. Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of Islamic learning, with libraries of manuscripts in law, astronomy and poetry. The empire was divided into provinces ruled by governors, and its roads were patrolled and its markets taxed. After the death of Mansa Sulayman in the 1350s the authority of the centre weakened, and in the sixteenth century the Songhai empire under Askia Muhammad absorbed its provinces, though the Keita dynasty survived as a local power. The empire controlled the crossing points of the Niger and the gold fields of Bambuk.