Welcome back to A Little Wiser. We hope you had a great weekend. Today's wisdom explores:

✦
Mansa Musa
✦
The Friend Who Refused to Burn Kafka
✦
Why QWERTY Exists
✦

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

Try to name the wealthiest person in history, and the mind reaches for modern titans like Rockefeller, Bezos, or Musk. The real answer is a West African king who died nearly 700 years ago, and whose fortune was so vast that no one has ever managed to put a credible number on it. His name was Mansa Musa, and he ruled the Mali Empire from about 1312 to 1337. The title "Mansa" meant something close to emperor, and his realm sprawled across a huge swath of West Africa, sitting directly atop some of the richest gold mines on the planet. In an age when gold was the foundation of the world's economy, Mali is thought to have supplied a large share of all the gold circulating through North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

In 1324, as a devout Muslim, Musa set out on the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca. The caravan that wound its way across the Sahara was the size of a small city, numbering by some accounts 60,000 people, among them soldiers, officials, and enslaved attendants. Heralds rode in silk, and a long train of camels carried something like 18 metric tons of gold. Musa handed that gold out at every stop with almost careless generosity, giving it to the poor he met on the road, to the officials who hosted him, and to the cities he passed through. It was partly piety and partly politics, a dazzling advertisement to the Islamic world of just how rich Mali was. In Cairo, it also had a side effect nobody had planned.

Musa stayed in Cairo for three months and spent so freely that the price of gold itself began to fall. The scholar al-Umari, writing in the city about a dozen years later, recorded that a mithqal of gold had fetched 25 silver dirhams before the king arrived, and had not climbed back above 22 since. Some modern historians suspect that dip sat within the market's ordinary swings, but the legend of the king who crashed the price of gold proved impossible to kill. Musa returned home to build great mosques and help turn Timbuktu into a center of learning. Within fifty years the Catalan Atlas of 1375 showed him enthroned in the Sahara, crowned and holding a gold nugget aloft. By some accounts he ran short on the journey home and had to borrow from Cairo's merchants at steep interest, and not all of them were ever repaid.

Some of the most important literature of the twentieth century very nearly went up in flames, on the explicit orders of the man who wrote it. Franz Kafka, the Prague writer whose name gave us the word "Kafkaesque," published only a handful of short stories in his lifetime and died of tuberculosis in 1924. He was just 40, barely known outside literary circles. A tormented perfectionist, forever doubting the worth of his own work, Kafka left behind a trunk crammed with unpublished manuscripts. This included three unfinished novels that would one day be hailed as masterpieces. He told his closest friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to burn everything unread, every diary, letter, and manuscript, so that no trace of it would survive him.

Brod faced an agonizing choice between his dead friend's dying wish and literature itself, and he chose literature. He had an answer ready for anyone who accused him of betrayal. Years earlier, when Kafka first raised the idea aloud, Brod had told him to his face that he would never do it. Kafka knew this, Brod reasoned, and could easily have named a more obedient executor if he had truly wanted the work gone. Whether that was genuine insight or a convenient excuse, no one can say. Either way, Brod did not light the match. He spent the rest of his life saving the manuscripts instead, piecing Kafka's chaotic drafts into publishable books and bringing out the three great novels one by one: The Trial in 1925, The Castle in 1926, and Amerika in 1927.

The effort turned a forgotten man into one of the most widely read writers of the century. The manuscripts themselves had a stranger fate. Brod fled the Nazis in 1939 with a suitcase of the papers, and after his death in 1968 they became the prize in a court battle spanning Israel, Germany, and Switzerland that was not settled until 2016. He had left them to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, who sold the handwritten manuscript of The Trial at Sotheby's in 1988 for nearly two million dollars. In 2016 Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the rest belonged to the National Library of Israel, and the final pages arrived in Jerusalem from Zurich bank vaults in 2019. There is one last twist. The person who actually obeyed Kafka was his final partner, Dora Diamant, who burned some of his papers at his request in his last winter. She secretly kept around twenty notebooks, until the Gestapo seized them from her Berlin apartment in 1933. They have never been found.