Hello and welcome to Home School History. I'm Greg Jenner and I've spent my whole career

making history fun on the TV show Horrible Histories, and more recently on the BBC podcast

You're Dead To Me, although that one's mostly for the grownups. With everyone being cooped

up in the house, I thought I'd deliver a snappy history lesson to entertain and educate

the whole family, because who says that homeschooling can't be a bit of fun?

This week we're going back roughly 700 years to Medieval West Africa to meet Mansa Musa,

ruler of the Marley Empire. Now Mansa wasn't his name, it was his

job title, Mansa means King or ruler in the manding language, so he was just Musa to his

buddies growing up. There's still a country today called Marley, but in Musa's time Marley

was a much bigger empire, about the size of Western Europe now.

Whoa! The gigantic empire had originally been founded by Mansa Musa's great uncle,

Sunjata, about 100 years before Musa was born. Now some of Sunjata's story is legend,

and we know this because, well, apparently his mum could turn into a big spiky porcupine.

Ow! That seems, well, unlikely.

Sunjata had been a brilliant warrior who had overthrown rival armies and taken captives

and sold them into slavery, which is obviously very horrible. He'd also taken control of

very important trade routes through the Sahara Desert, and that's how the Marley Empire

became mega rich. They traded in lots of vital resources, such as salt, preserving food,

spices for making food a tastier, copper, and of course gold.

Thanks to the size of the empire, by the time Mansa Musa came to power, he wasn't just

the richest man in Marley. He was the richest man who has ever lived, including the people

who own Microsoft and Amazon right now. Yeah, some people think he was worth about

...