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This is a very rich historiographical commentary but a couple of thoughts that are worth taking on board:

1) I think you need to dig into Gomez' entire argument about interpreting these sources more carefully, and to take note that he published considerably after Hunwick, who died in 2015. E.g. Hunwick's analysis is not a reply to Gomez, but Gomez' arguments about how to read these sources is in many ways an argument against Hunwick's interpretations. To some extent Hunwick's response to this specific issue (the number of people in Mansa Musa's entourage and the type of people in it) rested on a sort of common-sense empiricism, which is often how modern historians react to estimates of numbers in medieval and classical sources. Gomez is very invested in seeing the Tarikh in particular but other Islamic sources as scholarly and careful rather than fabulistic or exaggerated, and in arguing that Islamic scholars of that era had a distinctive methodological commitment to a kind of historical accuracy that derived from training in how to read hadith and evaluate their legitimacy. Which among other things did create a fairly specific attention to whether something was hearsay or not, as you note in this essay.

2) Following on this point, I do think there's an interesting general debate about how to read numbers in medieval and classical sources from all over the Mediterranean, West Africa and Near Eastern world. Historians are often confronted with numerical claims that seem improbable or exaggerated, and when we trace out where those claims come from, we often find that various chroniclers are just repeating something that another chronicler said with none of them being direct eyewitnesses to the event whose numerical size is being estimated. In general, as a non-specialist in medieval and classical history, I'd say that the importance we put on direct eyewitnessing in terms of accuracy is something that almost no medieval or classical source from that vast range of regions was invested in. Even travellers' accounts like Battuta's sometimes mix in reports from other travellers *as if the author experienced that directly* and it takes careful attention to note that. (You even see this in European exploration from the 15th-19th C.,) We tend to think this makes the source less reliable, but I think we have to be careful about that assumption. When you're reading Herodotus, for example, you can't just generically regard his reports as unreliable because he was simply reproducing what he was told by other people--the complexity is that some of those reports seem closer to reality than others, as we might expect if we sat down in the company of a set of well-travelled people today and asked them to tell us about what they'd seen.

My feeling is that numbers are the same thing--sometimes they're fabulistic or get distorted by the way various medieval chroniclers (Islamic or otherwise) reproduced what they'd heard or seen in other writings, and sometimes not so much. In this case, when you look at the rich variety of sources you're discussing here, you see the Tatimmat al-muḫtaṣar as creating a specific large number when the sources written earlier declined to do so, which you take to then be the source of later exaggerations and amplifications. The problem is that the slightly earlier accounts indicate amounts that aren't necessarily in sharp contradiction to "10,000": "thousands of his soldiers" and "a large crowd" and moreover, if you look carefully, the "thousands of his soldiers" is what Mansa Musa "presents for the pilgrimmage"--it may well be precisely not the entirety of the party travelling with him from Mali. (Which might have included some people who were not Muslims who supported the pilgrimmage but were not participants; most especially perhaps people who had servile status of some kind--the duality of Mali's population and of the way its rulers had to signify power in both Muslim and non-Muslim idioms in this era is a major theme in Gomez and other recent historical scholarship.)

Some of it comes down to whether observers and then later chroniclers would have been particularly observant about or attentive to fine-grained distinctions between the types of people in Mansa Musa's entourage; or would bother to comment on the specific composition of it. It's possible to imagine his group arriving, for example, and instantly losing some portion of its size because some of them were Tuaregs who were managing the caravan but were not Mansa Musa's direct subjects, and with them might have gone some portion of people in the entourage who were not slaves or servants of Mansa Musa but who were brought by the caravan to be sold in Cairo or between Cairo and Mecca. E.g., what Mansa Musa's entourage was in terms of its composition is itself a complicated question that in turn has a lot of implications for how big it might have been, and whether even the eyewitness chroniclers were viewing all of what we might consider to have been the full group is an open question.

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Thanks alot for this comment. My main argument is that the sources Michael Gomez relies on to ground his claim that the vast majority of Musa's entourage was enslaved are non existent. He insists that both the Tarikh al-Fattash's 8,000 estimate and the al-Sudan's 60,000 are true because Musa supposedly left some of his followers along the way, he then argues that most of the entourage was enslaved even thou al-Sa'di mentions only 500 out of the 60,000 were.

Gomez also considers the west african chroniclers to be more authentic than the eastern chronicles, partly because he believes the tarikh al-fattash is a 16th century document written by a jewish emigre (a theory that was throughouly discredited by Mauro Nobili) and he might believe that they were based on reliable local informants, yet the chroniclers themselves assert that the information they relied on was limited, some was fabricated and some came from the eastern chronciles

Now, about those eastern chronicles, their own account of the event was largely based on hearsay -with the few exceptions of those who witnessed the event and consulted officials. Its clear that none of the early accounts provide a complete estimate of Musa's entourage, nor their status, and some barely even acknowledge them. Arranging them chronologically like Hadrien Collet does shows that the additional details that were inserted by later writers seem to have been based on hearsay "it is said" rather than reliable informats and they changed the status of the entourage as the saw fit,

some thought they were north africans, some thought they were male attendants, some thought they were female attendants, some thought they were an undefined mass

The best approach to examining these dissonant accounts critically isn't simply to consider them all as valid accounts and simply "find the median" so to speak, it is to understand that each version says more about the authorial intentions of its writer than about the actual event. While none were authoritative in the modern sense, the evidence weighs more heavily in favour of the earliest accounts which simply describe the entourage as west african Muslims, who were likely well armed, mostly men, likely wealthy, and numbering in the few thousands.

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Awesome, detailed response. I think you're on the right track with all of this. I hope that there will be rich debate in the future about Gomez' interpretations along these lines--for decades it was Hunwick and Levtzion and not much else. If nothing else, I really appreciate Gomez' passionate insistence that this is a rich source base that has been under-used. Part of the problem, unfortunately, is that further work requires working not just through the materials held in West Africa, which are threatened, but also in Egypt, which is presently a very difficult archival situation.

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Thank you for this, this is new wow!

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