Who was Leo Africanus
Even though this Moroccan traveler is well-known, not much is known about his life. All of the details about his life before he got to Rome come from the few autobiographical notes in his geographical work that are still around. Even when Leo Africanus was in Italy, he didn’t do much that was written down at the time. Italian reports from the Barbary Coast suggest that Leo Africanus did not exist and that his description of Africa was written by a Venetian ghostwriter.
This view is too strict, but it does have some truth to it. Leo Africanus is a bit of a mythical figure, and much of what we think we know about his life comes from what his fans have made up. He was born in the city of Granada. It’s not clear when it happened, but it happened after the city gave itself up to the Spanish in 1492. His parents, on the other hand, moved quickly to Morocco. They moved to Fez, where their son went to school and did well.
People say that Leo Africanus went to the eastern Mediterranean on the first of his great trips in 1507 and 1508. We don’t know why he went on this trip, and we don’t even know for sure that he went on it. Leo, who was sixteen years old at the time, went to Timbuktu with one of his uncles on a diplomatic mission during the winter of 1509–1510.
He is said to have gone back to Timbuktu two years later, but this time for personal reasons. From Timbuktu, he may have gone to other parts of Sudanic Africa, then to Egypt, and then back to Fez, where he lived, in 1514. After that, Leo Africanus chose to live as a wanderer. During his adventures in Morocco, he was often with a sharif who was trying to overthrow the Wattasid sultan of Fez.
This person might have been Ahmad al-Araj, the founder of the Sadid dynasty. In 1511, he took control of southern Morocco and fought against the Portuguese, which made him very popular. Leo’s travels took him from Morocco to Algeria and Tunisia. He also went to Constantinople, which may have been his second time there. In the spring of 1517, he went to Rosetta, where he saw Egypt being taken over by the Ottomans.
He then traveled to Arabia. In June 1518, Leo was on his way back to Tunis, possibly from a pilgrimage to Mecca, when he was captured by Christian corsairs near the island of Crete. People thought that Leo was caught near the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, for a long time, but new research by Dietrich Rauchenberger has shown that this is not likely. Leo was first taken to Rhodes, but he was soon sent to Rome, where he met Pope Leo X Medici (1513–1521), who was planning a crusade to northern Africa.
From the pope’s point of view, the arrival of a learned Moor who was willing to work with him and his advisors and give them accurate information about northern Africa was like a gift from heaven. He was freed and given money when he got to Rome. He also became a Christian and was baptized at St. Peter’s on January 6, 1520. His noble patron gave him the name Johannes Leo de Medicis, or Giovanni Leone in Italian, but the man preferred to call himself Yuhanna ‘l-Asad al-Gharnati in Arabic. In 1522, Leo Africanus left Rome and went to Bologna.
This probably happened because the new pope, Hadrian VI (1522–1523), who had been the imperial viceroy of Spain, was worried about a converted Morisco being at the papal court. The plague, which killed almost half of Rome’s population by the end of 1523, was likely another reason. While he was in Bologna, he put together a medical vocabulary in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. Only the Arabic part of this has been kept. This manuscript, which is now kept at the Escorial library, has Leo’s handwriting on it.
It is one of the few places where his original Arabic name, al-Hasan b. Muhammad al-Wazzan, can still be found. Early in 1526, Africanus moved back to Rome, where he lived under the protection of the new Medici Pope Clement VII (1523–1534). We know nothing for sure about his last years. Johann Albrecht von Widmanstetter, who went to Italy in 1527 to study Oriental languages, said that the man, whom he called Leo Eliberitanus, had left Rome just before the city was sacked in May of that year.
After that, he moved to Tunis, where he is thought to have died around 1550. This information can be trusted because Widmanstetter moved in circles where people remembered Leo Africanus well. But since Leo had given up on Christianity, he probably didn’t want to see the Spanish take over Tunis in 1535. With this information in mind, Raymond Mauny’s idea that Leo Africanus spent the rest of his life in Morocco makes sense. Africanus said that he finished his most important work on African geography on March 10, 1526, after he got back to Rome.
People used to think that Leo wrote his work first in Arabic and then translated it into Italian. Paul Colomiés said that Leo’s original manuscript belonged to the Italian humanist Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601), whose books make up most of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan. This idea was based on that claim. The Ambrosiana has an anonymous Arabic manuscript that describes Africa.
It was not written by Leo Africanus, though. Now, most people think that Leo wrote his work directly in a kind of messed-up Italian, though he almost certainly used Arabic notes he made while traveling. In 1931, the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome was surprised to find a handwritten Italian version of Leo’s work on geography. They bought it. The style of this manuscript, called Cosmographia & Geographia de Affrica, is very different from that of the Italian printed version.
However, the manuscript is a clear copy of Leo’s original text, which his Italian publisher later used. The manuscript hasn’t been published yet, except for the parts and pieces about the Sahara and Sudanic Africa that Rauchenberger published with German translations. Leo’s geography work, Delle descrittione dell’ Africa, was published in Venice in 1550. It was included in the first volume of Delle navigationi et viaggi, a book of travels and discoveries put together by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485–1557).
No one knows when or how Ramusio got Leo’s original manuscript. The collection was a hit right away, and many copies had to be printed again. After that, Leo’s text was translated into the main European languages, so it could be read by an ever-growing number of people. In 1556, it came out in French and Latin. In 1600, it came out in English, and in 1665, it came out in Dutch. But these translations were not very good because they were cut short without reason and had many mistakes. The most popular version, which was written in Latin, has a lot of serious mistakes in it.
More translations of Leo’s text have been made in the modern era. In 1805, a German version came out. In 1896, an updated English version based on the first translation came out, and between 1896 and 1898, an updated French version came out. In 1956, a new, scholarly, annotated French translation was released. It was based on Ramusio’s printed text and was only slightly different from the Italian manuscript version. In Morocco, an Arabic version of the 1956 French edition came out in 1982.
One reason Leo’s work was so well known was that there were not many other sources on African geography. The Portuguese had a good idea of where the coasts of Africa were, but they couldn’t get into the interior because the people there fought back and there were deadly diseases there. Also, most of the Portuguese accounts of what they found in Africa were never printed. A modern reader said that Leo Africanus “discovered” a new world for Europeans, similar to how Columbus “discovered” America.
Some people even think that Shakespeare based Othello on Leo Africanus. The Descrittione was the most important book about Africa’s geography in Europe until the early 1800s, when explorers brought more accurate information about the Niger and the areas around it. In writing about the history of western Africa, Leo’s influence lasted much longer, up until the early 1900s. Leo’s Descrittione has been rightly called the last thing that Islamic learning gave to European culture. In spite of its name, the Descrittione is not a full explanation of the geography of Africa.
The focus is on the Barbary Coast, especially Morocco, which is now Leo’s home country. It takes as much space to talk about the city of Fez as it does to talk about Tunisia and Libya together. As for the rest of the continent, Leo only knew about Sudanic Africa. He didn’t write anything about the Guinea Coast, the Congo, or Christian Ethiopia, which Europeans knew about from Portuguese reports at the time.
The part about Sudanic Africa is the shortest, and there is no evidence that it was based on the author’s own experiences. Leo could have learned everything he needed to know from Arab merchants and West African pilgrims he met while traveling in northern Africa. Leo’s view of Sudanic Africa is very Islamic, and he said that black people were barbaric savages until the Muslim Berbers of the Sahara conquered and educated them in the 12th century. He also saw Timbuktu as the center of the gold trade in West Africa.
In the hands of his later copyists in Europe, this picture became a vision of an African Zipangu. This had a big effect on the beginning of the exploration of West Africa’s interior at the end of the 18th century. Internal references show that Leo planned to add two more volumes to his Descrittione, one about Europe and the other about the Middle East. This plan didn’t work out. He also wrote, or at least planned to write, a book about the Islamic religion and one about the history of North Africa.
Neither of these two works has been found, even if he did finish them. Leo also wrote a book about the lives of Islamic and Jewish philosophers. He finished this book in Rome in 1527. In 1664, Johann Heinrich Hottinger published a Latin version of this work in Zürich with the title Libellus de viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes. In 1726, J.A. Fabricius published it in Hamburg with the title Libellus de viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes. Leo also translated the Epistles of St. Paul into Arabic, and a copy of this is now kept at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena.
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