Alright, let’s start at the beginning.

Timbuktu was founded around 1100, originally a small settlement. However, it was well located, on the edge of the Sahara and near the Niger river, to become a nodal point in the trans-Saharan caravan trade that primarily trafficked in gold, salt and slaves. As a result, the town grew in importance over 200 and a bit years, until it was peacefully annexed in 1325 by Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire.

Now this guy is one of the reasons Timbuktu became well known. Sometimes called the richest person in history, Mansa Musa ruled the Islamic Mali Empire at a time when it was one of the biggest gold-producing regions in the world. Mansa Musa is best known for his extravagant hajj to Mecca of 1324-25, accompanied by a massive coterie and, apparently, an absolutely stupendous amount of gold. Most notably, Mansa Musa allegedly (as I should have made clearer, thanks /u/niceworkthere! But whether true or not the stories about it were influential on the formation of the Timbuktu myth) gave away so much gold on his journey as alms that it crashed the economy in multiple places, especially Cairo, a collapse from which the city did not recover from for a decade.

Al-Umari, visiting Cairo from Syria a few years after Mansa Musa’s visit, found memories still fresh:

This man flooded Cairo with his benefactions. He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold. The Cairenes made incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and selling and giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall.” …Gold was at a high price in Egypt until they came in that year.This has been the state of affairs for about twelve years until this day by reason of the large amount of gold which they brought into Egypt and spent there.

For a long time afterwards stories about the pilgrimage circulated in the region and gradually filtered into Europe, giving rise to the idea of a vastly wealthy empire to the south of the Sahara, a tempting proposition to Europeans. In particular, these stories made their way into the rather beautiful 1375 Catalan Atlas produced by the Majorcan cartographic school, which depicts ‘Tenbuch’ [Timbuktu] at Mansa Musa’s feet, as he holds a big gold nugget. This map certainly stirred European imaginations.

Now, Timbuktu had been annexed on the way back from the hajj and thereafter grew more notable, not only because more good were now being funelled through it but also because it grew into a major centre of Islamic culture and learning in the Mali empire, with scholars flocking to its university (associated with the town’s three mosques). This was Timbuktu’s golden age, as a centre of trade and of scholarship.

The next person responsible for making Timbuktu so famous in Europe is Leo Africanus. For a very long time there was a total absence of concrete knowledge in Europe about the African interior. Into this void came Africanus: he grew up in Fes, Morocco, and accompanied his diplomat uncle on trips all around North-West Africa; in 1510 they visited Timbuktu (now part of the Songhai Empire and slightly past its prime, but still important in the region). A few years later, he was captured by Christian pirates, presented to the Pope and baptised; and because of his knowledge of Africa he was commissioned to write a book outlining its geography, the Description of Africa of 1526 (published in 1550).

This book became very influential on contemporary European scholarship simply because there were no other even quasi-academic sources about what Africa was actually like. Let’s have a look at some choice extracts about Timbuktu:

The inhabitants are very rich, especially the strangers who have settled in the country; so much so that the current king has given two of his daughters in marriage to two brothers, both businessmen, on account of their wealth…

I happened to be in this city at a time when a load of salt sold for eighty ducats. The king has a rich treasure of coins and gold ingots. One of these ingots weighs 970 pounds. … Instead of coined money, pure gold nuggets are used; and for small purchases, cowrie shells which have been carried from Persia, and of which 400 equal a ducat. Six and two-thirds of their ducats equal one Roman gold ounce. ”

In Europe, these beguiling images of large gold nuggets etc merged with the earlier stories about Mansa Musa to lead to the mythologisation of Timbuktu as a large, enigmatic, famously wealthy city. (Africanus mentioned other stuff , like how much the king hated Jews, but the Europeans focused on the money). The Africanus description was often lined up right next to the extravagant Mansa Musa story in European collections, and thus was the Timbuktu myth propagated.

So, Timbuktu, back in the 1500s, became known as an exotic place emblematic of treasures yet to be discovered because of the stories of Mansa Musa and Leo Africanus; but why did the stories persist? Well, for a long time they kept going just because there was no further information forthcoming about Timbuktu. The city began to decline as the maritime trade (particularly in slaves) supplanted the trans-Saharan one, turning Timbuktu from trade nexus to backwater. Money and scholars fled alike, but Europe continued to fantasise about Timbuktu as the land of riches, to the extent that as late as 1824 (!), a good 314 years after Leo Africanus’ visit, the Parisian Société de Géographie was offering a 9,000 franc reward for the first person to travel to Timbuktu and bring back a detailed description.

This prize was ultimately won by René Caillié; the whole story of his travels to Timbuktu could make a post in itself. But suffice it to say that after a gruelling journey throughout Africa, during which he was constantly undercover as a Muslim and wrote in his journal secretly, Caillié finally arrived at Timbuktu in 1828. I’ll let him speak for himself:

On entering this mysterious city, which is an object of curiosity and research to the civilized nations of Europe, I experienced an indescribable satisfaction. I never before felt a similar emotion and my transport was extreme... I looked around and found that the sight before me, did not answer my expec- tations. I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo. The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth.

The next day wasn’t much better:

I found it neither so large nor so populous as I had expected. Its commerce is not so considerable as fame reported

So, at last, the truth about Timbuktu had come out. Caillié’s disappointing report was confirmed by Heinrich Barth, visiting in 1853. The European reaction could be described as a muted sigh, before they shifted their attentions to capturing the Niger river, and later the whole region. Timbuktu was nothing but a let-down.

So why, then, do we still think of it as the go-to faraway place? Well, legends die harder than facts, and let’s face it, the myth of a mysterious wealthy city somewhere in unknown Africa is just far more glamorous than a trade-dependent town down on its luck. Everyone’s going to remember the former, few the latter. So all the old legends about Timbuktu just kept circulating even once the facts were out there, and so we’re left with the image of Timbuktu as the quintessential exotic destination.