The Medieval African City Richer Than European Capitals || Timbuktu, Mansa Musa's Empire

In 1324, a single man's journey to Mecca brought the entire Mediterranean economy to its knees. Not through war, not through conquest, but by casually giving away so much gold that it took Egypt and the Middle East a full decade to recover from the inflation.

His name was Mansa Musa, and he ruled an empire that made medieval Europe look like a collection of mud huts.

While European peasants struggled through famine and plague, the streets of Timbuktu gleamed with wealth that defied imagination. Merchants traded gold dust like Europeans traded copper coins. Books were literally worth their weight in gold - and there were hundreds of thousands of them. The Sankore University attracted scholars from Cairo, Baghdad, and Cordoba, making it the intellectual beacon of the medieval world. But here's the part that will leave you speechless: when European "explorers" finally reached Timbuktu centuries later, they found a city in decline and declared it had never been great at all. The myth of African inferiority was born from the ashes of Africa's golden age.

Tonight, we're resurrecting the truth about the city that was once richer than Paris, London, and Rome combined.