How rich was Mansa Musa? (The Answer might surprise you!)

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article here.

 

[Thande]

Liking the clickbait title.

The point about Cleopatra is a very apt one. Considering there inarguably were black pharaohs from the Nubian/Kushite dynasty around the eighth century BC, but they don't count because apparently nobody has heard of or cares about them, so people had to try to claim the whole of Egyptian history for Sub-Saharan Africa. (Despite the fact that, e.g., Taharqa/Tirhakah is literally involved and mentioned by name in some of the most climactic events of the Old Testament).

 

[Hendryk]

When Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan travel writer, visited the Mali Empire under Musa's successor, one of his chief complaints is that no one just gave him gold because that's what he expected.

Incidentally, Ibn Battuta is another fascinating figure who well deserves his own article.

 

[Gary Oswald]

Liking the clickbait title.

The point about Cleopatra is a very apt one. Considering there inarguably were black pharaohs from the Nubian/Kushite dynasty around the eighth century BC, but they don't count because apparently nobody has heard of or cares about them, so people had to try to claim the whole of Egyptian history for Sub-Saharan Africa. (Despite the fact that, e.g., Taharqa/Tirhakah is literally involved and mentioned by name in some of the most climactic events of the Old Testament).

The original article was a lot longer and had a bunch of stuff about other pre colonial sub saharan Africans who are well known in certain spheres of study but never made that leap to pop history that Musa and Shaka did, with Taharqa's position in the Bible and Najashi in the Quran being mentioned as well as Brazil's legacy of slave leaders and people like Petrovich Gannibal, Anton Wilhelm Amo, and Malik Ambar.

But it was really flabby and unfocused so I cut it down to like one sentence. But yes I do think there is a path where the histiography of the ancient world is far more biblically focused and Taharqa has more of that cultural cachet.

 

[Coiler]

I thought a lot of the Roman Crassus when reading the article, another guy who's often had his still-great wealth exaggerated.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Fascinating stuff

 

[Makemakean]

Liking the clickbait title.

The point about Cleopatra is a very apt one. Considering there inarguably were black pharaohs from the Nubian/Kushite dynasty around the eighth century BC, but they don't count because apparently nobody has heard of or cares about them, so people had to try to claim the whole of Egyptian history for Sub-Saharan Africa. (Despite the fact that, e.g., Taharqa/Tirhakah is literally involved and mentioned by name in some of the most climactic events of the Old Testament).

@Redolegna and me went on an entire exhibition about them on the Louvre the other week. It was quite fun, and I continue to find it interesting how Egypt was considered such a lodestar of culture, learning, and civilization in general to the ancient Mediterraneans and Middle Easteners that even though Egypt was conquered a number of times, all those dynasties more or less immediately choose to assimilate themselves and pretend that they were just as Egyptian as Ramesses the Great.

You had something similar happen with China, in that after Kublai Khan, I don't think any of the Yuan Emperors could actually speak Mongolian, much to the anger of the other descendants of Genghis Khan.

 

[napoleon IV]

@Redolegna and me went on an entire exhibition about them on the Louvre the other week. It was quite fun, and I continue to find it interesting how Egypt was considered such a lodestar of culture, learning, and civilization in general to the ancient Mediterraneans and Middle Easteners that even though Egypt was conquered a number of times, all those dynasties more or less immediately choose to assimilate themselves and pretend that they were just as Egyptian as Ramesses the Great.

You had something similar happen with China, in that after Kublai Khan, I don't think any of the Yuan Emperors could actually speak Mongolian, much to the anger of the other descendants of Genghis Khan.

My impression is that it's part "This culture is amazing and we want to be part of it" but there's another important factor, which is that it was easier for foreign rulers to assimilate and gain legitimacy with the population and the priestly establishment than to try and be their own separate culture.

 

[Space Oddity]

@Redolegna and me went on an entire exhibition about them on the Louvre the other week. It was quite fun, and I continue to find it interesting how Egypt was considered such a lodestar of culture, learning, and civilization in general to the ancient Mediterraneans and Middle Easteners that even though Egypt was conquered a number of times, all those dynasties more or less immediately choose to assimilate themselves and pretend that they were just as Egyptian as Ramesses the Great.

You had something similar happen with China, in that after Kublai Khan, I don't think any of the Yuan Emperors could actually speak Mongolian, much to the anger of the other descendants of Genghis Khan.

The Qing Dynasty glares at you from their self-created Manchu cluarchs in most major Chinese cities of their time.

 

[Thande]

The original article was a lot longer and had a bunch of stuff about other pre colonial sub saharan Africans who are well known in certain spheres of study but never made that leap to pop history that Musa and Shaka did, with Taharqa's position in the Bible and Najashi in the Quran being mentioned as well as Brazil's legacy of slave leaders and people like Petrovich Gannibal, Anton Wilhelm Amo, and Malik Ambar.

But it was really flabby and unfocused so I cut it down to like one sentence. But yes I do think there is a path where the histiography of the ancient world is far more biblically focused and Taharqa has more of that cultural cachet.

Plenty of material left for future articles in this vein then. I obliquely allude to it in LTTW (with the whole thing about Egyptology's 19th century cultural impact largely being replaced with a Mesopotamian fascination because they never found the Rosetta Stone) but it is a bit of an unlikely coincidence in OTL that European fascination with Egypt coincided with an anti-religious fervour in some parts of academia, hence the lack of an attitude you describe above. (Zillions of pages of speculation on who the Pharaoh of the Exodus was because you can have an argument about that; sod-all about Taharqa, whose crime towards European academia was not being black, but coming from a historically and archaeologically well-attested and consistent period - i.e. not the Bronze Age Collapse but an age with records from Egypt, Assyria and the Bible too - so there aren't any Big Controversial Questions you can grandstand over).

@Redolegna and me went on an entire exhibition about them on the Louvre the other week. It was quite fun, and I continue to find it interesting how Egypt was considered such a lodestar of culture, learning, and civilization in general to the ancient Mediterraneans and Middle Easteners that even though Egypt was conquered a number of times, all those dynasties more or less immediately choose to assimilate themselves and pretend that they were just as Egyptian as Ramesses the Great.

You had something similar happen with China, in that after Kublai Khan, I don't think any of the Yuan Emperors could actually speak Mongolian, much to the anger of the other descendants of Genghis Khan.

The China-Egypt comparison is very interesting and has occurred to me before. The Islamic conquest of Egypt really feels like a historical aberration considering how many times the core of Egyptian culture had survived and assimilated so many other continents. (Of course, it's not an absolute black and white issue, as with the case of the Qing below).

The Qing Dynasty glares at you from their self-created Manchu cluarchs in most major Chinese cities of their time.

I've mentioned it before, but I've come across a few cases of European-penned accounts which saw the Qing conquest and takeover as a disaster on the same scale as the fall of the Roman Empire. I think there were even some cases later on of justifying colonialism (Opium Wars, etc.) with an attitude of "Chinese civilisation was mighty and worthy of respect - but you are mere barbarian usurpers playing Odoacer in the clothing of greater men, you deserve no mercy from us" or sentiments to that effect. I'd like to look more into it because I don't know if that was a fringe view among China experts or more widely known.

 

[Makemakean]

The China-Egypt comparison is very interesting and has occurred to me before. The Islamic conquest of Egypt really feels like a historical aberration considering how many times the core of Egyptian culture had survived and assimilated so many other continents. (Of course, it's not an absolute black and white issue, as with the case of the Qing below).

There is of course also the case with the legacy of Rome, in that the barbarians that had once raided the Roman Empire mercilessly were very keen to assume the title of Roman Emperor the moment it became available to them. Theodoric was very keen to receive recognition as the Western Emperor from Constantiople (they even made him a patrician, sent him the full imperial regalia) and he would even be referred to as Augustus, and then, both Charlemagne of the Franks and Otto of the Saxons claimed the title, was crowned by the Pope, claimed the translatio imperii, and made it a cornerstone in their claim for legitimacy.

Same with the Byzantines. No sooner had Mehmed II taken Constantinople before he declared himself Qayser-i Rûm and he would continue to insist till his dying day that the Roman Empire had never come to an end, it had merely been transferred to the Muslim Ottomans, and seeing the Roman Empire had already been passed from Italian pagans to Greek Christians, surely neither religion nor ethnicity should be a problem, and as for whether his claim to rule was illegitimate seeing it had been accomplished through military conquest of the capital, why, I'm sure Mehmed II said "kalıp atılır" at some point. And the Ottomans kept using that title to the very end.

It's remarkable to think that there are people still alive to this very day, who were alive at a time when there was a head of state of an internationally recognized nation that claimed the title of Roman Emperor.

 

[Makemakean]

I've mentioned it before, but I've come across a few cases of European-penned accounts which saw the Qing conquest and takeover as a disaster on the same scale as the fall of the Roman Empire. I think there were even some cases later on of justifying colonialism (Opium Wars, etc.) with an attitude of "Chinese civilisation was mighty and worthy of respect - but you are mere barbarian usurpers playing Odoacer in the clothing of greater men, you deserve no mercy from us" or sentiments to that effect. I'd like to look more into it because I don't know if that was a fringe view among China experts or more widely known.

I've always sort of been curious about how Chinese people look at the distinctions between the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederacy and the Ottoman Empire.

I mean, the thing is, we in the West tend to think of China as being this continuous thing stretching back to Qin Shi Huang, that has occasionally had civil wars and changes in ruling families. This in the same way that we think of the England ruled over by the Wessex and the England ruled over by the Normans as being "the same country," even though there was not just a dynastic change and a civil war, but truly earth-shattering and traumatic changes in the very nature of statescraft. My limited understanding is that while obviously the Chinese do think that there is such a thing as a permanent "Middle Kingdom" and there is such a thing as an "Emperor of All Under the Skies", the Han and the Tang and the Song and the Yuan and the Ming and the Qing were all different things in a more real way than we Europeans usually imagine it.

I should probably ask @Tom Colton.

 

[Tom Colton]

My impression is that it's part "This culture is amazing and we want to be part of it" but there's another important factor, which is that it was easier for foreign rulers to assimilate and gain legitimacy with the population and the priestly establishment than to try and be their own separate culture.

See also: how and why so many khanates converted to Islam - it's where the money wa[CANCELLED, BUT ACTUALLY THAT'S THE REASON]

 

[Hendryk]

I've mentioned it before, but I've come across a few cases of European-penned accounts which saw the Qing conquest and takeover as a disaster on the same scale as the fall of the Roman Empire. I think there were even some cases later on of justifying colonialism (Opium Wars, etc.) with an attitude of "Chinese civilisation was mighty and worthy of respect - but you are mere barbarian usurpers playing Odoacer in the clothing of greater men, you deserve no mercy from us" or sentiments to that effect. I'd like to look more into it because I don't know if that was a fringe view among China experts or more widely known.

I can't speak for Anglo-Saxon sources, but that's not an attitude I have found instances of in period French travel writing about China. Although French visitors of the time did distinguish between the Han and their Manchu (or more often "Tartare") overlords, they didn't tend to do so in a derogatory fashion towards the latter. The Ecole Spéciale des Langues Orientales, which would become the INALCO where I learned Mandarin, would teach Manchu instead of Chinese from its foundation in 1795 to 1843.

 

[Thande]

I've always sort of been curious about how Chinese people look at the distinctions between the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederacy and the Ottoman Empire.

I mean, the thing is, we in the West tend to think of China as being this continuous thing stretching back to Qin Shi Huang, that has occasionally had civil wars and changes in ruling families. This in the same way that we think of the England ruled over by the Wessex and the England ruled over by the Normans as being "the same country," even though there was not just a dynastic change and a civil war, but truly earth-shattering and traumatic changes in the very nature of statescraft. My limited understanding is that while obviously the Chinese do think that there is such a thing as a permanent "Middle Kingdom" and there is such a thing as an "Emperor of All Under the Skies", the Han and the Tang and the Song and the Yuan and the Ming and the Qing were all different things in a more real way than we Europeans usually imagine it.

I should probably ask @Tom Colton.

As I understand it, the Chinese did view the Byzantines as a continuation of the Romans, at least, though sometimes using a different geographic identifier I believe. Though of course so little accurate information passed between China and Europe at the time that sometimes it's a bit difficult to say; for example, some Chinese accounts of Byzantium still talk about the Roman Senate as though it had real power, centuries after that had ceased to be the case.

 

[Makemakean]

As I understand it, the Chinese did view the Byzantines as a continuation of the Romans, at least, though sometimes using a different geographic identifier I believe. Though of course so little accurate information passed between China and Europe at the time that sometimes it's a bit difficult to say; for example, some Chinese accounts of Byzantium still talk about the Roman Senate as though it had real power, centuries after that had ceased to be the case.

I now kind of want to write a vignette about a mirror version of Prester John, a mythical Confucian/Buddhist principality in Europe that various Chinese explorers set out to find.

 

[Thande]

I now kind of want to write a vignette about a mirror version of Prester John, a mythical Confucian/Buddhist principality in Europe that various Chinese explorers set out to find.

It was basically like that at some times (e.g. some Chinese writers thinking the Romans also had silkworms), although the Chinese didn't have the sense of urgency in finding it that Western Christians did Prester John.

 

[Ciclavex]

As I understand it, the Chinese did view the Byzantines as a continuation of the Romans, at least, though sometimes using a different geographic identifier I believe. Though of course so little accurate information passed between China and Europe at the time that sometimes it's a bit difficult to say; for example, some Chinese accounts of Byzantium still talk about the Roman Senate as though it had real power, centuries after that had ceased to be the case.

Yes, but Roman law continued to insist that it was the Senate who chose the emperor long past this being a practical power — and they did actually officially break an emperor as late as the 7th century even after most historians say it no longer had much real power. It remained the highest court of appeal in most criminal matters in the city, they still at least officially received and circulated the Emperor’s decrees after consulting over them.

Most of the ”Senate”’s power was really the power of the individual senators, for whom “Senator” was effectively just a title of dignity for men who were powerful in their own right, but the very fact that these senators continued to act as “The Senate” when they wanted to put something formally suggests that even though obviously the Senate’s power had effectively vanished as an institution, that the Romans themselves still considered it part of the constitutional structure of the Empire until a much later stage than we as historians would credit it as a real institution. If the Romans still considered it an important institution with real power (even if rarely if ever exercised in practice), why wouldn’t contemporary Chinese accounts consider it so? It’s only as historians that we say it was an effectively meaningless institution at that stage. I’m not saying that this is really wrong, of course, but we have the benefit of hindsight that contemporaries did not.

 

[Max Sinister]

The Islamic conquest of Egypt really feels like a historical aberration considering how many times the core of Egyptian culture had survived and assimilated so many other continents.

Hmm, what about their "conquest" by Coptic Christianity?

 

[Max Sinister]

Certainly some ruler among all those who were very rich and gave away a lot must've been at the top of them, even if it wasn't Musa.