The Mali Empire was a Mandinka state that ruled much of West Africa from about 1235, when Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso at Kirina, until about 1610, when its last effective ruler, Mahmud IV, died. At its height around 1350 it stretched from the Atlantic mouth of the Senegal River to Gao on the middle Niger, an area put at about 1.24 million km² by 1350, taking in parts of today’s Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, southern Mauritania, Ivory Coast, northern Burkina Faso, western Niger and northern Ghana. Its rulers, the mansas, grew rich by taxing gold from the Bambuk and Bure fields in the south and rock salt from Taghaza in the Sahara, and the 1324 pilgrimage of Mansa Musa made Mali known from Cairo to Catalonia. At its peak it was the largest empire in West Africa.
Before 1235: Ka-ba and the Twelve Kingdoms of Manden
The empire’s heartland was Manden, the upper Niger valley around the present border of Mali and Guinea. Mande people settled there while the Ghana Empire (Wagadou) still dominated the region, and from at least the early 11th century Mandinka kings governed Manden from the city-state of Ka-ba, today’s Kangaba in Mali’s Koulikoro Region, in the name of the Ghana rulers.
Ghana’s grip on Manden ended in the 12th century, and the province splintered into twelve small kingdoms, each under its own faama. Around 1140 another former vassal of Ghana, the Sosso kingdom (often called Kaniaga), began conquering its old overlord’s lands. In 1203 the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté, remembered in oral tradition as a sorcerer, came to power and is reported to have conquered much of Manden.
c. 1235–1255: Sundiata Keita, Kirina and the Kouroukan Fouga
Sundiata Keita was the son of Nare Fa, faama of Niani, and was driven into exile with his mother and two sisters after his father’s death. Around 1234 he returned at the head of a coalition that joined the armies of Mema, Wagadou and the Mandinka city-states against the Sosso. The two sides met at Kirina, in what is now the Koulikoro Region, in about 1235. The Sosso were routed and Sundiata was declared mansa over all twelve kingdoms. That victory is the conventional starting date of the empire and the climax of the Epic of Sundiata.
The new state was organised at an assembly that oral tradition calls the Kouroukan Fouga, a name meaning roughly “clearing on lateritic rock”. Its site is usually placed near Kangaba, though some scholars favour nearby Dakajalan. In 2009 UNESCO added the “Manden Charter, proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga” to its list of intangible cultural heritage.
Sundiata’s generals pushed the frontiers outward during his reign: west to Kaabu, north to Takrur, Oualata and Audaghost on the Saharan edge, and south to the Wangara goldfields.
1255–1312: Sakura’s Coup, Gao and the Atlantic Voyages
Sundiata died around 1255, and the succession is murky. Oral tradition and the 14th-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun agree that a son, called Yerelinkon in Mande tradition and Wali in Arabic, took the throne. Two more of Sundiata’s sons and a grandson reigned before Sakura, a former slave of the royal household who had risen to general, seized power in a military coup in 1285. Sakura conquered new territory and increased trade with North Africa. The city of Gao on the Niger, formerly an independent kingdom, was annexed either by Sakura or later by Musa; the sources do not settle which.
After Sakura’s death the Keita line returned, with Mansa Gao reigning from about 1300 to 1305. Later came Qu and then his son Muhammad, who according to Arab sources sent two expeditions into the Atlantic Ocean. When the first fleet did not come back, Muhammad led the second himself and left his cousin Kanku Musa in charge. He never returned, and around 1312 Musa was recognised as mansa.
1312–1337: Mansa Musa, Cairo and Timbuktu
Musa’s reign is treated as Mali’s golden age, and the empire reached its greatest extent under his lineage. Its wealth rested on two goods moving in opposite directions. Gold was panned and mined in Bambuk, between the Senegal and Falémé rivers, and in Bure on the upper Niger; by the start of the 14th century Mali was the source of almost half the gold exported in the Old World. Salt, scarce in the savanna, came south from the Saharan pan at Taghaza, which Musa brought under his control.
In 1324 Musa set out on the hajj to Mecca, returning in 1326. In Cairo his alms and purchases were so lavish that the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi recorded the gold dinar falling by six dirhams. Al-Umari wrote that a mithqal of gold, worth 25 silver dirhams before Musa arrived, dropped below 22 and stayed there for at least twelve years.
That same year, 1324, Timbuktu was peaceably annexed. Musa brought scholars back from his pilgrimage, among them the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and built mosques and palaces in Timbuktu and Gao. The Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu, built in 1327 and attributed to Musa, survives as a mud-brick building with three inner courts and space for 2,000 worshippers. Tradition credits al-Sahili with its design, but historians now trace its Sudano-Sahelian style to Saharan and local building traditions.
Al-Umari, writing in Egypt around 1340, described the realm as square, an eight-month journey across from its coast at Tura, at the mouth of the Senegal River, to its far side. He listed fourteen provinces, including Ghana, Diafunu, Takrur, the Bambuk gold region, Gao and the capital province of Mali, and reported Malian garrisons at Oualata, Timbuktu, Koumbi and Gao, with a military commander responsible for the Sahara and its Berber tribes. Musa’s fame reached Europe: the Catalan Atlas, conventionally dated 1375, shows him enthroned with a gold nugget and calls him the richest king in the region. That regional claim is often misquoted today as “richest person in history”.
1341–1360: Mansa Suleyman and Ibn Battuta’s Road from Sijilmasa
Musa’s son Maghan I succeeded him around 1337 but was deposed by his uncle Suleyman in 1341. Suleyman’s 19-year reign kept the golden age going: he made his own hajj and corresponded with Morocco and Egypt.
The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, author of the first eyewitness account of imperial Mali, left Fez in autumn 1351 and spent four months in Sijilmasa, on the northern edge of the Sahara, before joining a caravan in February 1352. After 25 days it reached Taghaza, a salt pan whose buildings were made of salt slabs cut by enslaved workers of the Masufa, a Berber group. After ten days there and a three-day halt at the oasis of Tasarahla, the caravan reached Oualata, the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan route and a recent addition to Mali. The crossing of about 1,600 km had taken two months.
From Oualata he travelled to the capital and met Suleyman there. Leaving the capital in February 1353, he went to Timbuktu, which he found a small and relatively unimportant town, then down the Niger by dugout canoe to Gao, an important commercial centre, where he stayed a month before moving on to Takedda, which he left for home in September 1353.
Where exactly that capital stood is disputed. Maurice Delafosse and later Niane placed it at Niani, on today’s Guinea–Mali border, and that view became widely accepted. Excavations, however, show Niani was a busy trade and craft centre in the 15th century but have found no firm evidence of a royal residence, and several recent historians reject it.
1360–1468: Tuareg, Mossi and Songhai Take the North
Suleyman’s death in 1360 ended the golden age. A run of short, often violent reigns followed, with palace officials increasingly acting as the power behind the throne. The Jolof Empire formed and soon controlled northern Senegambia. In the 1370s a war with Tuareg forces from Takedda devastated Gao, and the area around it slipped out of Malian control. Even so, when Musa II died in 1387 the treasury was solvent and Mali still held all its earlier conquests except Gao and Jolof; about forty years after Mansa Musa it still covered around 1.1 million km².
The northern provinces went next. In 1433–1434 Tuareg forces led by Akil Ag-Amalwal took Timbuktu, and Oualata fell to them three years later. The rising Songhai Empire, based at Gao, conquered Mema, one of Mali’s oldest possessions, in 1465 and seized Timbuktu from the Tuareg in 1468 under Sunni Ali. In 1477 the Mossi ruler Naba Nasséré captured Macina and the old Ghana province.
1487–1610: Portuguese Envoys, Defeat at Djenne and the Retreat to Kangaba
The empire’s centre of gravity moved south and west, towards the Gambia and the Atlantic coast where Portuguese ships now traded. Mansa Mahmud II received the Portuguese envoys Pêro d’Évora and Gonçalo Enes in 1487 and in 1493 proposed an alliance against the threat from Tenguella, which came to nothing. Songhai forces under Askia Muhammad I defeated the Malian general Fati Quali Keita in 1502 and took Diafunu. From 1507 Diarra, Great Fulo, Yatenga and Songhai cut away at its borders.
In 1544 or 1545 a Songhai army under the future Askia Dawud sacked the Malian capital, though Songhai did not hold it. Mali then recovered somewhat, attacking Bighu around 1550 to regain access to gold and reasserting authority over Wuli, on the north bank of the Gambia, by 1576.
The decisive turn came from Morocco. In 1591 the Saadi army of Judar Pasha defeated Songhai at Tondibi, and Mansa Mahmud IV tried to exploit the collapse by taking Djenne. Bukar, governor of Kala, secretly changed sides. On 26 April 1599, the last day of Ramadan, the Moroccans and their firearms beat the Malian army outside Djenne, though Mahmud escaped. He died around 1610, his three sons fought over what remained of Manden, and no Keita ever ruled it as a whole again. The Keitas withdrew to Kangaba as provincial chiefs.
Kangaba keeps that memory. Its Kamablon, a round mud-brick sacred house with a conical roof built in 1653, is re-roofed every seven years in a ceremony where griots recite the region’s history; UNESCO listed the ceremony in 2009. When the former French Sudan became independent in 1960 it took the empire’s name; the country is profiled in our Mali country guide.
The empire’s geography explains its arc. It rose by joining the gold of the southern savanna to the salt and camel caravans of the desert, along the routes traced in our guide to the trans-Saharan trade, and it shrank as rivals took those northern termini one by one. The scholarship Musa planted survives in the mosques described in our post on Timbuktu’s World Heritage sites, and the state that inherited Mali’s northern half is covered in our history of the Songhai Empire and its cities along the Niger.