Founded by Sundiata Keita around 1235, the Mali Empire dominated the West African gold and salt trade carried by camel caravan across the Sahara, growing fabulously wealthy on transit tolls and gold from the Bambuk and Bure fields. The reign of Mansa Musa in the early fourteenth century, and his lavish pilgrimage to Mecca, advertised that wealth across the Islamic world. Trading and scholarly cities such as Timbuktu and Djenné flourished as centres of commerce, Islamic learning and manuscript culture, surviving as a polity into the seventeenth century. Their builders worked in sun-dried mud brick, producing the distinctive adobe mosque architecture of the Sahel.
Trans-Saharan commerce financed the rise of major West African trading and scholarly cities and integrated the region into wider Islamic economic and intellectual networks. It left a distinctive mud-brick monumental architecture that still defines cities like Djenné and Timbuktu.