Ruler of the Mali Empire whose 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca, lavish distribution of gold in Cairo, and patronage of mosques and scholars at Timbuktu made him one of the medieval Islamic world's most famous African sovereigns — and, through his portrait on the 1375 Catalan Atlas, the figure who fixed an image of West African wealth in the European imagination for centuries.
Around 1375, a Jewish mapmaker on the island of Mallorca painted a Black king seated at the bottom of his great map of the world. The king holds a golden orb the size of an apple and wears a golden crown. A caption explains that he is the richest and noblest lord in all that region, because of the gold found in his country. The king was Mansa Musa, who had died decades earlier and a desert away. He never knew that a single journey he made to Mecca would turn him, in European eyes, into the face of Africa itself.