It's reported that he unintentionally disrupted Eqyption economy for at least ten years. He did that by spending and giving charity in gold enroute to pilgrimage or Hajj in Mecca while staying about 3 months in Egypt. Allegedly he had hundred camels in towing, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold. Pilgrimage to Mecca is the journey that every Muslim has to make once in a lifetime if they can afford it.
[1] Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived (105 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951
[2] Mansa Musa:
>...While online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time,[91] historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to calculate accurately.
We don't know the exact wealth of Manda Musa and there really isn't a good way to compare wealth between different eras. Even in the same general timeframe, wouldn't the khanates of the mongol empire be considered more wealthy?
The linked BBC article in the HN post has the list for top 10 richest man in history with Mansa Musa at the very top but Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor who's the owner of Taj Mahal is not even in the list [1].
The 10 richest men of all time:
1) Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable
2) Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)
3) Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable
4) Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable
5) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn
6) John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
7) Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
8) Mir Osman Ali Khan (1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
9) William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
10) Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn
[1] Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived?
You rarely see modern dictators on these lists but populations and economic prosperity have exploded to the point where historic kings can’t really compete.
In the US congress controls in the funding, but in a dictatorship the guy at the top can unilaterally allocate billions and then manage how it’s spent. It’s not total control of all government assets but it is control of a significant fraction of a modern economy.
Just as a thought experiment, suppose he wanted to fund Doctors Without Borders or some other international charity. Do you really think he’d have trouble sending the equivalent of 1 billion USD in Chinese government funds to that org? How about 2 billion? Obviously at some point it wouldn’t work but where exactly that line is says a lot about the power he has.
Comparing the wealth of people who lived hundreds of years ago in entirely different societies/economic systems is quite pointless, yes.
Anyone who had multiple people in their will diluted it. Though I feel Augustus got all of Julius' will which goes against this, I imagine powerful people might have a few people they want to leave something for when they die.
That’s kind of the problem.. even if we knew the amount of gold he actually had and multiplied it by its current market price the resulting figure would be entirely pointless. The question is how much stuff he could buy for it back in the 1300s. If there wasn’t enough stuff/people to buy having a massive hoard of illiquid gold doesn’t necessarily make you extremely wealthy.
Including absolute monarchs and dictators in the list is also semi meaningless.
Also the the way you chose to measure this wealth results in massive variance. E.g. Jacob Fugger was allegedly worth $400 billion if adjusted by inflation but he’s not even here.
It is marvelous he found gold and even then he could only give it away freely
In a way it’s similar to the Spanish silver mines in the New World it resulted in a significant increase in prices and a lot of wealth shifting around.
Or someone melted down a glass and gold object and noticed the gold that floated (precipitated?) out was purer than that which went in.
Even today various artists playing with fire rediscover that while gold doesn't naturally work into or onto glass it's still possible to adhere gold to glass if the timings and tempreptures are "just right".
Also known as experimentation, which is the whole basis of the scientific process.
There isn't.
Referring to experimentation as "playing with" feels like a attempt to demean the output.
I'm curious how pure they get gold with this glass method. If it's not as pure as Cupellation then that would explain why it wasn't widely used outside of west Africa.
A whole lot of chemistry process is just X dissolves in Y but not in Z, and using that in order to separate and purify.
In this case metal oxides dissolve in glass (sand, which is a silicon oxide, mostly) but gold doesn't A) oxidize under reasonable conditions or B) dissolve in the glass. Sand or glass waste is melted, the not gold dissolves into the molten glass.
Reuters - Insight: Amazon rainforest gold mining is poisoning scores of threatened species https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/amazon-rainfore...
gregschlom•8mo ago
jihadjihad•8mo ago
There was a lot going on in medieval Africa, I wish I had some good sources, if anyone knows any I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge as well!
petepete•8mo ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kgggv
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qckbw
jorgen123•8mo ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34928286-african-dominio...
KolibriFly•8mo ago
vagrantJin•8mo ago