Mansa Musa set off on his hajj and traveled thousands of miles through deserts, and strange cities to get to Mecca. Although this was a very religious journey, was this pilgrimage really all for religious purposes? Religion may have been a large motivating factor for this trip, but Mansa Musa did not journey on his hajj just for religious purposes. There were many other motivating factors for why Mansa Musa took this journey. Some motives were to set up better trade for the future, and gain popularity for his kingdom Mali and himself. There is lots of evidence within the six documents that prove this point. First, based on the map on Document B, Mansa Musa took a route to Mecca that went out of the way to journey to cities so that …show more content…
Mansa Musa could have taken a much shorter route and gone straight to Mecca, but instead went out of his way to take a longer route which passed through cities who only got gold through trade of salt. By doing this he could make more people want to come to Mecca to receive abundant, free gold without having to trade salt. Next, in Document C it explains that "Mansa Musa's hajj made the difficult trip north to Taghaza"(Document C). This shows that the hajj of Mansa Musa took a difficult trip to a city, which as explained by Ibn Battuta as "nothing but sand with a salt mine"(Document C). If this place was so bad, and all it had was salt and more salt, why would Mansa Musa take the time to go here? Well definitely not for religious purposes. Mansa Musa took the difficult journey here strictly to trade lots of gold for salt and set up a trading bond for future trading. If the city Taghaza had so much salt and Mansa Musa had more gold than he knew what to do with and not a lot of salt, it was the perfect trade bond for Mansa Musa. This was the perfect trade bond since salt was worth its weight in gold and used for many things, and Mansa Musa had tons of