“I found it to be neither as large nor as densely populated as I expected its commerce is considerably less grand than its reputation claims one doesn’t see, like at Jenné, this great rush of strangers coming from all parts of Sudan. He brought his stories back to Europe, but they were hardly the mystical wonders his compatriots were expecting. Frenchman René Caillié was the first explorer to reach Timbuktu and survive. Those who came from the west coast often died of malaria and other tropical illnesses those who traveled over the Sahara desert faced death by hunger, starvation, and marauding nomads. All the while, European explorers, their imaginations fired by Romanticism and lyrical poets (including Alfred Tennyson, who won a Cambridge poetry contest for his poem about Timbuktu), were making the dangerous trek into Africa in search of the mysterious city. Never had African Muslims seen a better time to be a scholar (or a librarian).īut when Moroccan troops seized control of the city in 1591, it began a long decline that pitted Timbuktu’s historic reputation against its increasingly depressing condition. Timbuktu was one of the world’s great centers of learning. As California State University’s Brent Singleton, wrote: “the acquisition of books is mentioned more often than any other display of wealth, including the building and refurbishment of mosques” in texts from the era. (You can browse through digital versions of some of the manuscripts here.) Visiting strangers were treated like royalty in hopes that they’d share their knowledge and books with Timbuktu’s scholars. These scholars worked as scribes, thus increasing the number of manuscripts in the city. Hundreds of scholars studied at the nearly 200 maktabs (Quranic schools). It wasn’t until the late 15th century, however, that Timbuktu experienced its “Golden Age.” But it was books, not gold bars, that brought Timbuktu its prosperity. The city was a sort of African El Dorado, hidden somewhere south of the Sahara. While Europeans struggled with a minor ice age and the bubonic plague, they dreamt of streets lined with gold in Timbuktu. Arabic explorer Ibn Battuta visited the famed city 30 years later, and his descriptions of the bustling metropolis stoked the flames of European imagination. All of the gold, claimed the stories, came straight from Timbuktu (though, in fact, Moussa brought it from mines west of the city). It’s said that, in 1324, Mali’s sultan, Mansa Moussa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca with 60,000 slaves and servants and so much gold that, during his visit to Cairo, the price of the precious metal dropped precipitously. People came from across the continent.ĭuring this period, Europe was awash in rumors of Timbuktu’s seemingly endless wealth and resources. By the early 1300s, Timbuktu belonged to the Empire of Mali and was truly prospering. Some of these travelers chose to make the location their permanent dwelling, and before long the town became a city. Travelers coming from the west brought gold to trade for salt from mines to the east. Even now, in the age of Google Maps, its name is synonymous with the unknown edges of the world: welcome to Timbuktu.įounded sometime before 1100 A.D., Timbuktu quickly grew from a seasonal camp for storing salt and other goods to a major center for caravan trade. Over the course of its history, the desert city was famed for being dense with gold, for being impenetrable, and for bearing witness to one of the great ecological calamities of the 20th century. It has passed from the hands of a famed sultan to invading northerners to European imperialists, growing from a tiny nomadic outpost to a major cultural hub. For centuries it’s been blessed-and cursed-by rumors of being a hidden paradise. Its reputation is heavy with the weight of nearly a millennium’s worth of history. On the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, north of the River Niger, a city of beige towers and dusty roads appears out of the sand.
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