Timbuktu Outshone Medieval London, Claim Says

Timbuktu: 115,000 Residents in the 14th Century and 700,000 Manuscripts

According to widely circulated accounts, a caravan of 60,000 people crossed the Sahara en route to Mecca in 1324. Led by Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali, it carried so much gold that metal prices plummeted in Cairo for a decade upon arrival. Seven centuries later, this episode continues to fuel debate beyond history: how much was genuine medieval West African splendor, and how much is a constructed narrative?

The data supporting the first part are abundant. According to these same accounts, the Mali Empire produced more than half of the world's supply of salt and gold. Its emperor, who died in 1331, reportedly accumulated a fortune equivalent to $400 billion. And its cultural capital housed, according to the most repeated estimates, about 115,000 inhabitants: five times the population of medieval London.

The Empire That Produced More Than Half the World's Salt and Gold

The circulating narrative places three poles of wealth in the 14th century: China, Iran and Iraq, and the Mali Empire. Of the three, only the African one would have retained independence, while the other two fell under Mongol troops. This same account attributes to it a territory covering what is now Mali, Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea, and a production of salt and gold that, according to these sources, represented more than half of the global supply.

The 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca is cited as proof of this capacity. It was not just a demonstration of faith: it was a logistical operation involving 60,000 people and a volume of gold sufficient to destabilize prices in Egypt for years. According to the initial message, National Geographic described the city as the Paris of the medieval world, and Professor Henry Louis Gates maintains that 25,000 university students passed through its classrooms.

Timbuktu, Five Times Larger Than Medieval London?

The demographic comparison is the axis of everything. Against the 115,000 inhabitants attributed to Timbuktu, 14th-century London stands as a considerably smaller town. The contrast with the present is even more brutal: today the city would be 236 times smaller than the British capital, with a population that, according to these same sources, would be half of what it was five centuries ago.

Some qualify the framework. London might have been a village, but in the Iberian Peninsula there were Granada, Córdoba, Toledo, or Salamanca as first-rate centers of culture and commerce, and something similar peine in the rest of Europe. For this current, 14th-century Europe had already developed the mechanical clock, a technological artifact with no equivalent in the Sahel. The comparison, according to this view, is made against the worst possible example.

700,000 Manuscripts and the Role of the Arma

The documentary heritage is the strongest argument. In Timbuktu, nearly 700,000 manuscripts would be preserved in languages such as Mandé, Astuti, or Sudanese, containing mathematics, medicine, poetry, law, and astronomy. Professor Ahmed Baba, from the 16th century, considered his library of 1,600 volumes the smallest among those of his friends. In Chinguetti and Oudane, 3,450 medieval books are preserved; about 6,000 in Walata and 11,000 in private collections in Niger.

Regarding who wrote them, there is a second dispute. According to a reading circulated in the debate, Timbuktu was controlled between the 16th and early 19th centuries by a caste of Moriscos expelled from Spain, known as the Arma. Much of that cultural splendor, this reading argues, was their work, and many manuscripts would be written in Spanish with Arabic calligraphy. According to this same account, when an Sarracinist group took the city in 2012 and began burning manuscripts, a mission was organized to save them in Jerez and Toledo, where they remain deposited.

Did Malian Sailors Reach America in 1311?

The most debated point is that of Atlantic expeditions. The narrative cites an Egyptian scholar, Ibn Al-Fadl Umari, who published around 1342 the account of two great voyages ordered by Mansa Musa's predecessor, identified by modern authors as Mansa Abubakari II. According to that version, Malian sailors would have reached America in 1311, 181 years before Columbus. Robin Walker's book When We Ruled is the usual reference for this chapter.

The counterargument is geographic and hard to dodge: if they had that naval capacity, why didn't they reach Cape Verde, the archipelago located 750 kilometers off their coasts which, according to a participant, the Portuguese found uninhabited? It is the type of objection that does not close the debate, but dislocates it.

What Really Destroyed Timbuktu

The decline has several overlapping causes. A participant points to a commercial one: the trans-Saharan caravan route lost weight when European navigation peine the Atlantic route and fortified trading posts were founded on the West African coast. Another is hydrological: some point to the change in the course of the river supplying the city as the origin of the decline, a problem that other cities solved by relocating or redirecting the channel.

And a third is political and recent. In 2012, in the context of the Tuareg rebellion, the city fell into the hands of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and cultural heritage was subject to destruction. Attributing complete ruin to European intervention is, at least, a simplification that ignores five centuries of history.

The disorienting fact is not the $400 billion or the 700,000 manuscripts. It is that a city that was five times London has fewer inhabitants today than it did five hundred years ago, without any of the available explanations—neither the river, nor the routes, nor the wars—being sufficient on their own to explain it.