Show Notes
Captured by a Spanish pirate? A gift to Pope Leo X? Europe’s expert on Africa for nearly three centuries? Leo Africanus lived many lives. Born al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan around 1488 in Granada, Spain, he was trained in the madrasas of Fez to be a diplomat. He travelled across the Sahara Desert and North Africa, sailed the Red Sea, and called on courts from Tunis to Timbuktu, Cairo to Constantinople. Then he became a prisoner of Rome, a convert (possibly) to Christianity, and one of the most celebrated scholars of his era, writing the Cosmography and Geography of Africa in 1526 (published in 1550). Then he disappeared. In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we tell the story of how a roving ambassador from Fez ended up a prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the dungeons and luxury apartments rolled into a single fortress on the Tiber. We follow his capture at sea in 1518, his fifteen months in the papal cells, his baptism by the Medici pope who gave him his own names, and the nine years he spent in Rome as a convert, a scholar, and a curiosity. We also follow him out, because when the city was sacked by mutinous Imperial troops in May 1527, Leo Africanus used the chaos to disappear, most likely back to Tunis, where he becomes untraceable in the historical record. Become a member of the By Their Own Compass Club on Substack for research notes on Leo Africanus, extended travel tips for Fez and Rome, a full episode transcript, and an original parody song we’re not entirely sorry about. The gratitude is real.
Along the way, we talk about what it meant to be a Muslim diplomat captured in Renaissance Europe, the family history that starts with the fall of Granada in 1492, and the Venetian editor Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who published Leo’s manuscript and, in the process, smoothed over the Islam and sharpened the Christianity for his European readers. We also ask the same question we asked of Marco Polo. How much of Leo’s Africa did he actually see, and how much did he hear about in the markets of Fez and write down as if he’d been there? Our guide through the tangle is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, whose Trickster Travels is the most thorough reconstruction of who this man was. An updated edition of Cosmography and Geography of Africa is out from Penguin Classics, the first new English translation of the book in over four hundred years. Sarah and Jeremiah take you through the Rome and Fez of Leo’s life too, from the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Passetto di Borgo (the corridor the Pope fled down in 1527) through the May 6 swearing-in ceremony of the Swiss Guard, and across the Mediterranean to the medina of Fez and the Chouara tanneries, where the smell still hits you on the terrace. Share this episode with a friend who thinks Kashmir is part of Morocco simply because Robert Plant used to buy the really good drugs there back in 1973.
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