Origins
The Mali Empire rose from the Mande-speaking heartland on the upper Niger, out of the wreckage of the older kingdom of Ghana and the brief overlordship of the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté. Tradition — preserved in the orally transmitted Epic of Sundiata, one of Africa’s great literary monuments — tells how Sundiata Keita, a crippled prince in exile, returned to defeat Soumaoro at the Battle of Kirina around 1235 and bound the Mande chiefdoms into an empire, taking the title mansa.
The empire of gold
Mali’s power rested on geography: it controlled the routes between the gold fields of Bambuk and Buré in the south and the salt mines of the deep Sahara to the north, taxing everything that moved between them. West African gold carried by trans-Saharan caravan supplied a large share of the bullion circulating in the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East. At its height the empire stretched from the Atlantic coast to beyond the Niger bend, incorporating the trading cities of Timbuktu and Djenné.
Its rulers were Muslims presiding over a religiously mixed population, and the empire became a conduit for Islamic learning into West Africa — a role made world-famous by Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, whose spending depressed the value of gold in Cairo and put Mali on European maps, crowned and holding a nugget, within two generations.
Government and decline
The mansa ruled through provincial governors, garrisons on the trade routes, and a court whose protocol amazed the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited in 1352-53 and noted both its ceremony and the safety of its roads. From the early 15th century succession disputes, raids from the desert, and the rise of subject peoples wore the empire down; the city of Gao’s Songhai rulers built the successor empire on the same trade, and Mali contracted back toward its Mande heartland, surviving as a rump kingdom into the 17th century.
The modern Republic of Mali, independent since 1960, took its name from the empire — whose griots still sing Sundiata’s epic.