Qasa (Arabic: قسا, romanized: Qasā; d. c. 1360) was a short-lived mansa of the Mali Empire. He succeeded his father, Sulayman, and reigned for only nine months.[1] A civil war broke out after Sulayman's death, which Sulayman's great-nephew Jata won by late 1360.[2]
Charles Monteil suggested that Qasa was the son of Sulayman's first principal wife, Qasa, due to the practice of matronymics. Nehemia Levtzion considered this unlikely, as a matronymic name would combine the name of the mother and name of the son, as in Kanku Musa, "Musa son of Kanku", rather than being the name of the mother alone, and furthermore, qasā means "queen" and was probably the title of Sulayman's wife, not her personal name.[3] Moreover, the name of Mansa Qasa is also recorded as Fanbā, Qanbā, or Qanbatā in some manuscripts,[4] and so may be unconnected with Sulayman's wife Qasa.[3] Michael Gomez suggested that Mansa Qasa was Qasa herself, ruling in her own right.[5]
References
- ^ Levtzion & Hopkins 2000, p. 335.
- ^ Levtzion & Hopkins 2000, p. 342.
- ^ a b Levtzion 1963, p. 349.
- ^ Levtzion & Hopkins 2000, p. 424.
- ^ Gomez 2018, p. 150.
Works cited
- Gomez, Michael A. (2018). African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-17742-7.
- Levtzion, Nehemia (1963), "The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century kings of Mali", Journal of African History, 4 (3): 341–353, doi:10.1017/s002185370000428x, JSTOR 180027
- Levtzion, Nehemia; Hopkins, John F. P., eds. (2000) [1981], Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West Africa, New York, NY: Marcus Weiner Press, ISBN 1-55876-241-8
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