In 1324 Mansa Musa crossed the Sahara on pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage and a quantity of gold that Egyptian writers were still discussing decades later; al-Umari, collecting accounts in Cairo, reports that the king's spending depressed the value of gold in the city for years. The journey put Mali on European maps, most famously the Catalan Atlas of 1375, which shows its ruler enthroned with a gold nugget in his hand.
Its religious consequences were institutional. Musa returned with scholars and an architect, and mosque building followed at Gao and at Timbuktu, where the Djinguereber mosque dates from this period. Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of Maliki law, Quranic commentary and Sufi teaching, and the manuscript libraries built there over the following centuries, many still in private family hands, are the largest surviving written record of West African intellectual life.
Ibn Battuta, who travelled through the empire in 1352 and 1353, gives the closest thing to an eyewitness portrait. He praises the security of the roads, the regularity of prayer, the crowding of the mosques on Fridays and the care with which children were made to memorise the Quran, and he records with disapproval the free social manner of Muslim women there and the court custom of subjects sprinkling dust on their heads before the ruler. His complaints are the clearest evidence of how the two religious orders coexisted.