The Man Who Gave Too Much

Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire at its peak — a domain stretching across West Africa that may have produced nearly two-thirds of the world's gold supply. By any modern estimate, he was the wealthiest human being who has ever lived.

In 1324, he set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca and accidentally broke Egypt.

His entourage numbered in the tens of thousands. Five hundred slaves walked ahead of him, each carrying a gold staff weighing six pounds. One hundred camels followed, each loaded with three hundred pounds of gold. When the procession reached Cairo, Musa gave gold to everyone he met — court officials, merchants, beggars, anyone. He left no emir or officeholder without a gift. The Cairenes, naturally, were delighted.

Then the gold market collapsed. So much of the metal had flooded Cairo that its value dropped by as much as twenty-five percent. Twelve years later, the economy still hadn't fully recovered. Al-Umari, visiting Cairo a decade on, found the residents still talking about it.

The man who had crashed their economy by being too generous had, by that point, run out of money entirely. Somewhere on the return journey, the richest person in human history was forced to borrow from Egyptian merchants at steep interest rates just to get home.

There is no record that he ever paid them back.