Leo Africanus and the Description of Africa (1526)

Leo Africanus was the European name of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, a Muslim scholar and diplomat from Granada and Fez who wrote a detailed account of Africa while living in Rome. Completed in 1526 and printed in 1550, his Description of Africa became the main European source on North Africa, the Sahara and the West African Sahel, including the famous city of Timbuktu, for some two hundred years. His life, spent between the Muslim and Christian worlds, has fascinated historians and novelists ever since.

Early life in Granada and Fez

Al-Hasan al-Wazzan was born in Granada, in southern Spain, probably between about 1486 and 1494; sources differ. Soon after the fall of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, his family, like many Muslims, moved to Fez in Morocco.

Fez was then the capital of the Wattasid sultans and a major centre of Islamic learning. Al-Hasan studied there, probably at the Qarawiyyin mosque-university, and served as a notary in a hospital. His family had connections at court, and as a young man he began to travel on diplomatic and commercial missions for the sultan.

Travels across Africa

By his own account, al-Hasan travelled widely. Around 1510, while still a teenager, he accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission across the Sahara to the Songhay Empire, then ruled by Askia Muhammad. He visited Timbuktu and probably Gao, and may have returned to the region a few years later.

He also travelled throughout Morocco and the Maghrib, crossed into Egypt and visited Cairo, and probably made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Some of the places he describes, such as the Hausa cities and Bornu, he may have known only from the reports of merchants, and historians debate how far he travelled in person.

Capture and life in Rome

In 1518, while returning from a mission in the eastern Mediterranean, al-Hasan was captured at sea by a Spanish corsair, Pedro de Cabrera y Bobadilla. Recognising that his prisoner was an educated man, the corsair presented him to Pope Leo X in Rome.

After about a year in custody in the Castel Sant’Angelo, al-Hasan was baptised by the pope himself on 6 January 1520 in St Peter’s Basilica. He took the name Johannes Leo de Medicis, after his godfather, the Medici pope. In Arabic he signed himself Yuhanna al-Asad, John the Lion.

In Italy he taught Arabic, worked on translations and wrote several books. These included an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin vocabulary prepared with the Jewish physician Jacob Mantino, and a short collection of biographies of Muslim and Jewish scholars. His most important work, however, was his account of Africa.

The Description of Africa

The manuscript, written in Italian and known from its surviving copy as the Cosmographia dell’Africa, was finished on 10 March 1526. It is divided into nine parts. The first gives a general survey of Africa’s geography, peoples, customs and religions. The following parts describe in turn the kingdoms of Marrakesh and Fez, Tlemcen, Tunis and Libya, the Sahara, the “land of the Blacks” in the Sahel, and Egypt, followed by a section on rivers, animals, plants and minerals.

The book is rich in practical detail: distances between towns, markets and goods, systems of government, dress, food and local customs. Al-Hasan wrote as an insider of the Islamic world explaining it to Italian readers, and his tone is generally careful and observant, though at times shaped by the prejudices of a Fez city-dweller towards rural and nomadic peoples.

His description of Fez, the city he knew best, is the longest and most detailed part of the book. He listed its mosques, schools, hospitals, markets, baths and guilds, and described daily life from weddings and funerals to the work of craftsmen, making it one of the fullest portraits of a North African city of the period.

His account of Timbuktu became especially famous. He described a city with a rich and powerful king, a royal court using gold, and many judges, scholars and religious men supported by the ruler. He noted that manuscripts brought from North Africa were sold in Timbuktu at a higher profit than any other merchandise, an image that helped build the city’s reputation as a place of learning. He also described Gao, the Songhay capital, as a busy trading town where merchants from many lands exchanged goods, and recorded the power of the Songhay ruler over a wide region of the Niger valley.

Printing and translations

The Description remained unpublished for more than twenty years. In 1550 the Venetian editor Giovanni Battista Ramusio printed it in the first volume of his great collection of travel writing, Navigationi et Viaggi. Ramusio smoothed the language and made changes to the text, so his version differs in places from the surviving manuscript, which was identified in Rome in the 20th century.

Translations followed quickly: Latin and French in 1556, and English in 1600, when John Pory published A Geographical Historie of Africa. For the next two centuries the book was copied and quoted by geographers, mapmakers and travel writers, and it remained a leading source on the interior of North and West Africa until European explorers of the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Later life and legacy

Al-Hasan’s later life is obscure. He seems to have left Rome around the time of the Sack of Rome in 1527 and returned to North Africa, possibly settling in Tunis. Whether he returned to Islam is unknown, though many historians think it likely. After the early 1530s there is no reliable record of him.

His story has inspired modern writers. The Lebanese-French novelist Amin Maalouf published a novel, Leo Africanus, in 1986, and the historian Natalie Zemon Davis studied his life in Trickster Travels (2006), presenting him as a man skilled at moving between cultures. Some scholars have suggested that Pory’s translation was known to English dramatists of the time, including Shakespeare, though this remains uncertain.

Myths and facts

• Myth: a famous portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo shows Leo Africanus. Fact: some writers have proposed this, but there is no secure evidence; no reliable portrait of him is known.
• Myth: his Timbuktu was a city of golden palaces. Fact: he described a wealthy royal court, but also a town of mostly modest houses, and stressed its trade and scholarship rather than grand buildings.

Timeline

• c. 1486–1494: Al-Hasan al-Wazzan is born in Granada.
• 1492: Granada falls to Castile and Aragon; his family later moves to Fez.
• c. 1510: He travels to the Songhay Empire and visits Timbuktu.
• 1518: He is captured at sea by Spanish corsairs and taken to Pope Leo X.
• 1520, 6 January: He is baptised in Rome as Johannes Leo.
• 1526, 10 March: He completes the Description of Africa.
• c. 1527: He leaves Rome, probably for North Africa.
• 1550: Ramusio prints the Description in Venice.
• 1600: John Pory publishes the English translation.

Why it matters

Leo Africanus gave Europe its most detailed picture of North and West Africa for two centuries, written by someone who knew it from the inside. His book shaped maps, travel writing and European ideas about Timbuktu and the Sahel, while his own life shows how people crossed the religious and political borders of the Mediterranean in the age of the Renaissance.