Bambouk

In that time, he does not rest on the laurels of his founding triumph.

He continues to expand Mali's borders, absorbing neighboring polities, extending Mali's reach toward the gold-producing regions of Bambuk and Burr, regions whose mineral wealth would, in the century to come, make Mali's rulers the wealthiest individuals the medieval world had ever known.

He negotiates when negotiation serves him better than warfare, forming alliances with neighboring peoples that would later be woven into the tapestry of the empire through marriage, through shared religious practice, through the careful, patient work of statecraft that rarely receives the same dramatic attention as a battlefield victory, but which in the long run, does more to determine whether an empire survives or crumbles.

There is also, in this founding period, the quieter but no less significant matter of religion.

The compound where Musa grows is not silent or isolated.

It sits astride or very near one of the great commercial arteries of the medieval world, and even a small child cannot help but absorb the texture of that commerce.

The caravans arriving dusty and depleted from the long crossing of the Sahara, laden with salt slabs cut from the mines at Taghaza far to the north, and departing weeks later laden instead with gold dust and gold nuggets drawn from the alluvial deposits and mines of Bambuk and Bure, regions whose exact locations the Mali rulers guarded as carefully as any treasury.

Musa would have seen from his earliest years the Wangara traders, the Soninke and Malinke merchants whose networks stretched from the forest edges in the south to the desert's edge in the north, men who spoke of Djenné and Timbuktu, of Oualata and Sijilmasa, place names that mapped a world far larger than the compound of his birth.