Mansa Maghan

Mansa Maghan ruled the Mali Empire for only about four years, from the death of his father Mansa Musa around 1337 until his own death in 1341, and the sources for his reign are correspondingly thin. Born about 1300 into the Keita dynasty, he inherited the throne at the height of Mali's prestige, in the generation after his father's celebrated pilgrimage had made the empire's wealth famous across the Islamic world and the Mediterranean.

What little is recorded of Maghan comes principally from Ibn Khaldun's account of the Malian king list, compiled later in the fourteenth century from informants in North Africa, and from the Timbuktu chronicles written in the seventeenth century. These sources agree on the brevity of his reign but offer few details of his government. There is some indication that Musa had intended a different succession arrangement: certain reconstructions suggest the emperor wished his brother Sulayman to follow him, and that Maghan's accession represented either a regency or a contested interlude. The evidence does not allow certainty on this point.

The chronicles associate Maghan's reign with setbacks on the empire's eastern and northern margins. The Tarikh al-Sudan reports that during this period the Mossi, raiding from the south, attacked and burned Timbuktu, an event that exposed the difficulty of defending the empire's far-flung dependencies. Some accounts also place in these years the escape of two princes of Gao, held at the Malian court, whose return home is connected in tradition with the reassertion of Songhai independence — a development that would, more than a century later, culminate in Songhai supplanting Mali as the dominant power of the region. The dating of these episodes is approximate, resting as it does on chronicles written long after the events.

Maghan died in 1341 and was succeeded not by his own son but by his uncle Sulayman, Musa's brother, whose longer reign restored a measure of stability and was witnessed firsthand by the traveler Ibn Battuta in 1352-53. Maghan's son, sometimes called Maghan II or Mari Djata II, later reached the throne in turn. In the dynastic histories Maghan figures chiefly as a transitional ruler between two of medieval Mali's most prominent reigns.