African kings on medieval and Renaissance maps

https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2022/07/african-kings.html

by benbreen • 4 years ago

90 30 4 years ago

blogs.bl.uk

mercy_dude• 4 years ago

Love the British library and all its exhibitions. It’s always a joy whenever I am in London to walk into their exhibitions or just walk around. Both the library and British museums are wealth of information that feel local people don’t appreciate much.

elevaet• 4 years ago

I noticed that (the) Manicongo has some folkloric fame in afro-Brazilian culture, the/his name is mentioned in songs and seems to persist in the collective memory. I'd love to know if it's the Manicongo mentioned on these maps that people remember, or if it's the more general title ("king of the congo"), and if there's any story behind this persistent folk knowledge.

Wikipedia is thin on details, perhaps some Brazilian HN members can chime in here?

peanut_worm• 4 years ago

I think its just a title referring to whoever was the current king of Kongo

dougk• 4 years ago

It was the title meaning "king of Kongo". This wikipedia article has a detailed list of the Mwenekongo (Manicongo): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rulers_of_Kongo

bnralt2• 4 years ago

Interesting that the only king they can identify is Mansa Musa, and that he keeps popping up on the maps. Given how poorly documented Mansa Musa's reign was, and that the main sources are a small number of Muslim accounts of his Hajj written by people who weren't there when it happened, it seems that to Europeans he was a quasi-legendary and prototypical African king (perhaps similar to the completely legendary Prestor John).

Though I suppose Mansa Musa is held in similar regard today. He's usually the first medieval African ruler I see people bring up, and they often repeat the poorly sourced legend of him being the richest person in history as if it were fact (even this article repeats it).

md_• 4 years ago

What’s your issue with the “richest person in history” claim?

I was just reading “Fistful of Shells”, which is written by a reasonably serious historian. He repeats this claim, but sources it to this somewhat silly Time Magazine article: https://money.com/the-10-richest-people-of-all-time-2/. That article in turn puts forth a surprisingly thoughtful methodology: https://money.com/richest-people-of-all-time-methodology/.

Obviously these comparisons are of limited value, as the methodology link above bothers to point out, but I don’t think it’s crazy—insofar as even stating “wealthiest person of all time” is meaningful, Mansa Musa looks to be a credible candidate.

iso1631• 4 years ago

insofar as even stating “wealthiest person of all time” is meaningful

Quite, how can you compare Alexander to Musa to Montezuma to Rockerfeller to Bezos to Putin?

Wealth itself is pretty meaningless once you get to a certain level of course. Who's wealthier, Bezos or Musk? Does it matter?

Would you rather be Mansa Musa or someone of median wealth and income in say New Zealand in the 21st century?

bnralt2• 4 years ago

That article in turn puts forth a surprisingly thoughtful methodology: https://money.com/richest-people-of-all-time-methodology/.

Here's what this article says about Mansa Musa. First, very few reliable sources for how rich he was:

Just how rich was Musa? There’s really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth. Records are scarce, if non-existent, and contemporary sources describe the king’s riches in terms that are impossible for the time.

It then quotes a professor who uses an image from a European map of Mansa Musa created 4 decades after he was born as evidence that he was the richest person of all time.

This is the issue. We have a few second hand accounts around the time of his Hajj saying the Hajj was immensely large and luxurious, and it appears that his reign appears to have coincided with a relative high point for the Mali Empire. That's about it, and it's not nearly enough to say he was the richest person in history, or even that he was the richest leader of the Mali Empire. It's worth noting how little we actually know of the Mali Empire - historians don't even agree about what it's capital was.

I looked into it a couple of years ago, and there was no evidence I could find that he was richer than, say, Mansa Sulayman who lead the empire a few years later. Many people seem to consider the Songhai Empire at its peak richer and stronger than the Malian Empire was. Even if we restrict ourselves to medieval West African polities, it's far from clear that he was the richest.

And considering we're looking at West Africa, another problem arises. A lot of people seem to imagine this wealth as being the amount of gold that gold rich Western African polities had times the value of gold if it suddenly all appeared in the gold poor Mediterranean. But this ignores the fact that getting gold there was a difficult task involving skilled intermediaries. Likewise, salt came down from the Mediterranean to the salt poor Mali Empire, where it fetched a large amount of gold. But I don't think anyone would claim that it would make sense to calculate wealth by seeing how much salt a Mediterranean polity had, and then multiplying that by how much gold you could get to it and the end of trade lines in Mali.

dagaci2• 4 years ago

Less understood about west African history is the sheer volume of un-analysed ancient (mostly Islamic) manuscripts. They were deliberately hidden out of fear from the imperials, and even post-imperials until very recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts

Exceptions to the above, are the Tarikh Al Sudan and Tarikh Al Fattesh, they were first translated into the French 100 years ago but only recently into English (in 1999 by Professor John Hunwick). This is how Mansa Musa was introduced into American speaking world

These chronicles are 300 & 400 years old, substatial in size with many references to Mansa Musa as well as other notables and rulers of the Medieval Mali and Songhai Empire (which is basically the Mali Empire Part 3).

These cross reference whatever independant mentioning’s are found in other medieval sources, Spanish, Egyptian, other. Perhaps confirming Mansa Musa was indeed a corporeal entity!

coffeeblack3• 4 years ago

Too bad the text becomes inaccurate and political towards the end.

Veen4• 4 years ago

It's somewhat odd that the article addresses slavery without mentioning that Mansa Musa owned many thousands of slaves and that slavery was prevalent in West and Central Africa during the Medieval, pre-Colonial period.

coffeeblack3• 4 years ago

Neither it mentions the extensive slave trade with North Africa and Arabia, only the gold trade.

Also telling that my criticism in that regard was immediately downvoted.

autopilot23• 4 years ago

Slavery existed in every region of the world. This does not negate the destructive affects the Atlantic slave trade had on the continent, its kingdoms and resources. The article did not argue that "Slavery didn't exist under pre-Colonial rule".

Side point, it's always funny to me how a lot of Westerns are hesitant to admit that African societies in Pre-Colonial times had history, science, culture, etc. just as any other society, but very eager to exclaim that they had slavery. It's also as if the existence of slavery does not require a certain type of social organization to have been already developed, which then they claim Africans didn't have.

andrepd• 4 years ago

What exactly is the part that offended you? I can't see anything particularly "political".

You're probably being down voted for that, for vague shit-stirring rather than a concrete discussion.

stonlyb• 4 years ago

Related story of another African king and some of the erasure that enables the bias towards believing Africa had no pre-colonial wealth or tech. From the article: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.” https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-citi...

cuteboy19• 4 years ago

This is the second time a capital city named Edo got renamed to something else

African kings on medieval and Renaissance maps

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