Emperor and Poet: Mansa Musa, Al Saheli, and the Unlikely 1325 Friendship that Built Timbuktu and the Mali Empire

Lecture by Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. In 1325, Emperor Mansa Musa of Mali was the world’s richest man by far. He and his new court architect Al Saheli—a Granada-born poet and lawyer—built Timbuktu into an important architectural and university center at the moment of transition from the medieval world to the modern era. Free