Its emperor Mansa Musa was placed on medieval European maps of Africa with description: "The king is the richest and most noble because his country abounds in gold." Under him, the empire reached its ...

In the years following the pilgrimage, European cartographers visited the Empire of Mali numerous times, hoping to produce early maps of the world. Famously, the Catalan Atlas, produced in 1375 ...

In the 1230s, a man called Sundiata Keita incorporated a series of smaller kingdoms into the Mali Empire. The empire was central to several key trading routes, and with the support of a well ...