He built houses in Cairo and in Mecca to house his attendants, and as he traveled through the world, a lot of people, notably the merchants of Venice, no Thought Bubble, like actual merchants of Venice, right. They saw him in Alexandria and returned to Italy with tales of Mansa Musa's ridiculous wealth, which helped create the myth in the minds of Europeans that West Africa was a land of gold, an El Dorado, the kind of place you'd like to visit and maybe, you know, in five centuries or so, begin to pillage. Thanks, Thought Bubble. So what's so important about the story of Mansa Musa? Well, first, it tells us that there were African kingdoms ruled by fabulously wealthy African kings, which undermines one of the many stereotypes about Africa, that its people were poor and lived in tribes ruled by chiefs and witch doctors. Also, since Mansa Musa was making the Hajj, we know that he was A, Muslim, and B, relatively devout. And this tells us that Africa, or at least Western Africa, was much more connected to the parts of the world we've been talking about than we generally are led to believe.