Mansa Musa commissions the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu

1337

The Malian emperor hired the Andalusian architect al-Sahili to build a great mud-brick mosque in his Saharan trading city. The Djinguereber became the crown of Timbuktu's skyline and the nucleus of a scholarly quarter that would house one of the world's great manuscript collections for the next three centuries, attracting students from across the Islamic world.