Latest / Mansa Musa: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived — Fexingo History / Mansa Musa's Timbuktu: The University That Outshone Europe
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Mansa Musa's gold, his pilgrimage, his architecture. But I want to spend today on something that's almost a cliché now, but for good reason: the university of Timbuktu. Except it's not quite the picture you might have in mind. Luna: The library and the manuscripts, right? We touched on that in episode 87. Lucas: Right, but I want to step back and look at the whole intellectual ecosystem that Mansa Musa didn't just patronize — he essentially built. Before his reign, Timbuktu was a seasonal camp for Tuareg nomads. By the time he died, it was a city of maybe 100,000 people, with a university district centered on the Sankore Madrasa that drew scholars from Cairo, Fez, and even further. It wasn't one building — it was a collection of private libraries, study circles, and lecture halls, all clustered around the mosque. Luna: So it's more like an Oxford college system than a single campus. Lucas: Exactly. The word 'madrasa' means school, but Sankore functioned as a full university. They taught law — Maliki jurisprudence — but also astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and literature. The curriculum was rigorous. A student would study under a particular scholar, often living with them, and when the scholar judged them ready, they'd issue an ijaza — a license to teach. We have surviving ijazas from Timbuktu that list the books the student had mastered. Some of these lists run to dozens of titles. Luna: That's practically a PhD defense. Lucas: It's exactly that. And these scholars were well-funded. Mansa Musa granted land endowments — awqaf — to support the madrasa and its teachers. The revenue from those lands paid salaries, bought books, and fed students. By the 16th century, Timbuktu had over 100 Quranic schools and maybe 25,000 students in the city. That's comparable to the University of Paris at its peak. Luna: Wait, 25,000 students in a city of 100,000? That's a quarter of the population studying. Lucas: And many of them were international. The Tarikh al-Sudan — a chronicle written in Timbuktu in the 1650s — lists scholars who came from as far as Arabia, Persia, and India. The language of instruction was Arabic, but the students and teachers also spoke Fulfulde, Songhay, Tuareg, and Mande languages. It was a genuinely cosmopolitan place. And the library holdings were staggering. The largest private library in Timbuktu belonged to a scholar named al-Qadi Aqib ibn Mahmud, who lived in the 16th century. He owned over 1,600 books. For comparison, the University of Cambridge had about 200 books in its library around the same time. Luna: One person owned eight times what Cambridge owned. That's incredible. Lucas: And it wasn't just rare manuscripts. These were working libraries — books on logic, rhetoric, astronomy, even medicine. We have a manuscript from Timbuktu that describes surgical procedures for cataracts. Another discusses the orbits of the planets. The scholars of Timbuktu were not just memorizing scripture; they were doing science. And they built on earlier traditions: the works of Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd — all of them were studied in Timbuktu. Luna: You know, speaking of supporting tradition — we get to do this because listeners support the show. If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, and you'd like to keep this ad-free and independent, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to keep the conversation going. Lucas: Yeah, exactly. And it's thanks to that support that we can spend time on stories like these. So, picking back up — one of the most famous Timbuktu scholars was Ahmed Baba, who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He was a jurist, a writer, a teacher — and he was taken captive by the Moroccan army that invaded Songhay in 1591. Luna: The Moroccan invasion. That's the event that really destroyed Timbuktu's golden age, right? Lucas: It's the beginning of the end. The Saadi sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, sent an army across the Sahara in 1590. They had guns; the Songhay army didn't. They defeated the Songhay forces at Tondibi in 1591 and then occupied Timbuktu. The Moroccans deported many of the city's leading scholars to Marrakech, including Ahmed Baba. He was 35 when he was captured, and he spent two years in Marrakech before being allowed to return. But the damage was done. The intellectual community never fully recovered. The libraries were looted, the endowments were seized, and many scholars fled. Luna: So the manuscripts survived, but the institution collapsed. Lucas: The manuscripts survived because families hid them. They buried them in the desert, or bricked them into walls, or carried them away. It's one of the great stories of cultural preservation. And in the 20th century, those manuscripts began to resurface. In the 1970s and 1980s, UNESCO and the Malian government started collecting them, and by the 1990s, there were maybe 100,000 manuscripts known. Then, in 2012, when jihadist groups occupied Timbuktu, there was a massive effort to smuggle the manuscripts to safety in Bamako. Over 370,000 manuscripts were moved in a secret operation. So the written legacy of Mansa Musa's intellectual project is still alive. Luna: That's amazing. And it's a direct line from Mansa Musa's patronage to what's being preserved today. Lucas: Absolutely. And it's a reminder that the wealth of Mali wasn't just gold — it was knowledge. Mansa Musa understood that a kingdom's power is ultimately built on ideas, not just bullion. And Timbuktu's university was the embodiment of that vision.