Mansa Musa of Mali was the richest person who has ever lived. When he made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he brought so much gold that he crashed the economies of every city he passed through — depressing the price of gold across North Africa and the Middle East for over a decade. A single man’s generosity destabilized the currency of three continents.

This episode traces Musa from the Mali Empire’s golden age through the legendary hajj that put West Africa on European maps, the construction of Timbuktu as a center of learning, and the wealth so vast that medieval cartographers drew him holding a gold nugget on the Catalan Atlas.

• The Mali Empire at its peak and the gold and salt trade that made it the richest state in the world
• The 1324 hajj — sixty thousand people, twelve tons of gold, and the economic chaos it caused
• The construction of Timbuktu’s mosques and university as a center of Islamic scholarship
• Why Mansa Musa’s wealth is considered the largest personal fortune in recorded history