Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
Around 1235 A.D, on the banks of the Niger River, a great battle was fought between two
successor states of the fallen Ghanan Empire. And victory in that battle would give rise
to an empire that would last 400 years. One of the wealthiest empires in history,
would eventually at its height, cover 500,000 square miles and include tens of millions
of people. And yet because this occurred in pre-colonial Africa we have very little record,
just oral history, that thin reed that connects us to a nearly forgotten past and tells us
of a great battle that spawned a magnificent empire. History that deserves to be remembered.
While there are some scattered records of the Malian empire, the story of the battle that
birthed the empire exists only in a poem told by the Griot, the storytellers of West Africa,
the african versions of Homer. in the great epic poem the Sundiata Keita. According to
the poem the King, Maghan the Handsome was visited by a soothsayer who told him, that
if he would marry an ugly woman, that she would bear him a son who would one day be a great king.
When two hunters offer Maghan a woman so ugly that they call her the Buffalo Woman, because
of the hunch in her back, the king remembers the soothsayer and takes her as his second wife,
and she bears him a son Sundiata. But when the king dies it is the son from his first
wife that becomes king, and he is so jealous of Sundiata that he mistreats Sundiata and
his family and Sundiata his mother and sisters are forced to go into exile.
But in exile Sundiata grows to be a great hunter and strong as a lion. But the king of another
kingdom, Soumaoro of the Sosso, described as an evil sorcerer, attacks his brother's
kingdom and drives his brother into exile. And the people cry for the return of the exiled prince
Sundiata. Sundiata manages to gather together the armies of several smaller tribes and confronts
Soumaoro in battle, and in the battle defeats Soumaoro with a poisoned arrow. He then goes
and conquers Sosso and founds a great empire being given the title, Mansa or King of Kings.
Now the poem is full of symbolism, but what we can divine from the poem and what we know from other
histories, is that in the wake of the collapse of the Ghana Empire, sometime around the middle of
the 12th century, a kingdom called Sosso started expanding. And in 1205, a king named Soumaoro came
to power in Sossa and started raiding throughout West Africa. Now in 1234 an exiled prince from a
much smaller kingdom, called the Kaniaga, led a coalition of city-states to retake his kingdom,
and then in 1235 to lead the combined armies in a battle against Soumaoro called the
Battle of Kirina. Soumaoro is defeated and he disappears, possibly killed in the battle. But
Sundiata continues on to defeat Sossa and found the Great Empire of Mali.
It is difficult to overstate how extraordinary this new empire was. Governed as a confederation
of kingdoms where multiple kingdoms got to select their representatives to the high kings court.
It would eventually cover more than a half million square miles, all of West Africa
from south of the Sahara desert to the rainforest, including the great highway of commerce the River
Niger. East to west it went from the coast to the great bend in the river. So large that it said
that if you started walking from the coast, you would walk eight months before leaving the empire.
In its day it was only exceeded in size by the great Mongol Empire. And it was unbelievably rich,
it had copper mines, it was the end of the salt caravan trade. But it had gold mines so rich,
that nearly half of the gold in the Old World came from those Malian gold mines. When the King
of Mali went on the Hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he spent so much gold that he
devalued currency throughout the continent, he was by some calculations the wealthiest
person in all of history. And among all of its other things, the great kingdom included
the huge city of learning and trade called Timbuktu, larger than London in its day.
Perhaps the most extraordinary tale of the Mali Empire was the King Abu Bakr II, who in 1310
was so curious about what was on the other side of his western shore that he gave up his throne
and took a fleet of 4,000 ships to try to cross the ocean and see what was on the other side.
Nearly 200 years ahead of Columbus, and there is some circumstantial evidence that he might have
made it to the Americas, although historians are skeptical on the subject. The Great Malian Empire
was the first of the west african empires to draw the attention of both Europe and
the Islamic world, and through its extensive trade it impacted not just the whole african continent,
but all of the known world with its art, and its architecture and its amazing wealth. And while
the empire would start to decline by the end of the 14th century, the empire would still be
around clear till the middle of the 1600s. And yet because this empire came in the pre-colonial era
we don't know much about it. Records were only kept as oral histories. And pre-colonial Africa
is both understudied and much of its history was destroyed by the impacts of colonialism.
And that is too bad, because the story of the Great Battle of Kirina, fought by the Lion King
Sundiata to found the amazing Malian Empire is history that deserves to be remembered.
I'm the History Guy, i hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes long, and if you did enjoy it then please
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