Did Mansa Musa really crash the price of gold?

He probably lowered it, but "crashed" is too strong. In 1324, Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa, stopped in Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca with an enormous caravan and a vast supply of gold. He gave and spent so freely that, according to the Arab writer al-Umari, gold lost value in Egypt: a measure of gold that had been worth 25 silver coins fell below 22, and stayed there for at least twelve years.

That's a drop of roughly an eighth, big enough to be remembered but hardly a collapse. The historian Warren Schultz argues it was within the normal ups and downs of gold's value in Egypt at the time. Another historian suggests Musa may have flooded the market on purpose, to show off Mali's power.

The story has a twist. On his way home, Musa ran out of money. According to several writers of the time, he had to sell property and borrow from Egyptian merchants at high interest, and some say those lenders were never fully repaid.

Musa is now often called the richest person who ever lived. Historians are more cautious: his wealth, built on Mali's gold and salt trade, is impossible to calculate, and the medieval figures for his caravan were meant to dazzle, not to count. What's certain is that his journey put Mali on the map, quite literally: European mapmakers soon drew a West African king holding gold.