Leo Africanus

In the spring of 1518 an Italian cardinal, Egidio da Viterbo, travelled from Rome to Spain on a Papal mission. While the official purpose of the visit was to convince King Charles V to collaborate against the Turks, the Papal legate pursued another, more covert goal. The Cardinal sought to obtain for himself a translation of the Qur’ān. The translation was prepared for the Cardinal by Juan Gabriel, a Muslim convert (Morisco) from Teruel formerly known as Ali Alayzar. Seven years later, this text was corrected by another convert of Spanish origin, the famed Leo Africanus.
This book contains both an edition and study of Egidio da Viterbo’s Qur’ān. The critical edition is based on the two existing manuscripts and is the first published work to include the full text of this Qur’ānic translation. It includes the original translation, the corrections of the text made by Leo Africanus, an appendix with Qur’ānic glosses and a case study devoted to persons involved in the translation. The study serves as an introduction to the Latin text, exploring the context in which Muslim converts to Christianity collaborated with church authorities. It enumerates and analyzes the Morisco translator’s diverse philological tools, which could have been used by the clergymen for polemical purposes. At the same time, it offers further insight into European studies of Arabic during the period.

Il saggio di ricerca storica scritto da Natalie Zemon Davis intitolato La doppia vita di Leone l’Africano e pubblicato per Laterza nel 2008 tratta della vita di al-Hasan al-Wazzan, un uomo di origini musulmane, vissuto a cavallo tra il XV e il XVI secolo, catturato da un pirata cristiano e donato come prigioniero a papa Leone X nel 1518. Paragonando gli immigrati del XIX secolo ad al-Hasan al-Wazzan, musulmano prigioniero dei cristiani in un’epoca di conflitti politici e religiosi, l’autrice è andata a ricercare i momenti di condivisione e di scambio che caratterizzavano l’epoca in cui il protagonista visse.

From Granada to Jerusalem: Leo Africanus and the Legend of the Amphibian Bird in "Birds of a Kind" by Wajdi Mouawad.

The present article examines the drama Birds of a Kind by the Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad. It analyses the allegorical character of Wazzan which is based on the historical figure Leo Africanus, a Moroccan diplomat and polymath of Granadan origin who in the early 16th century was kidnapped by christian pirates and offered to the Pope Leon X. Following his conversion from Islam to Catholicism he became the first author to present Africa to the Europeans through his works, published under the patronage of two popes from the Medici family.
Leo Africanus was introduced to Mouawad by the American scholar Natalie Zemon Davis. In her study Trickster Travels (2006) she discusses the ambiguity and the evasiveness of this enigmatic historical figure whose character she highlights through the story of the amphibian bird. It is a parable placed as the author’s paratextual notice at the beginning of The Book of Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526 [1550]), Leo Africanus’s most important scholarly work, and in spite of many possible sources, is definitely his own invention.
This article aims to demonstrate how Mouawad distanced his dramatic character from the original figure, ie. the historiographic image of a trickster, by changing the point of the aforementioned parable. The story of the amphibian bird in Birds of a Kind, told by Wazzan to a Jew who right before his death is revealed his Arabic origin, is transformed form the parable of a trickster into a legend of someone who manages to overcome the prejudice in order to find his identity. For Mouawad, Wazzan personifies the reconciliation between Judaism and Islam, transmitting at the same time an idea of the world dreamed of by the humanism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Joannes Leo Africanus, (c. 1494 – c. 1554?) (or al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, Arabic:حسن ابن محمد الوزان الفاسي) was an Andalusian Amazigh Moorish diplomat and author who is best known for his book Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa) describing the geography of North Africa.

La  portée  documentaire  du  texte  de  la  Description  de  l’Afrique  de Léon l’Africain nous a déterminé à revisiter une époque de l’histoire du  Maroc du XVIe siècle afin d’éclairer les contours d’un savoir scientifique hérité d’une tradition arabe et disséminé dans une culture européenne des  siècles durant. La Description de l’Afrique une œuvre singulière qui avait
été pensée en arabe par un auteur arabe, écrite en italien, et longuement traduite en d’autres langues européennes, française notamment.
C’est un livre de géographie riche en informations diverses et variées sur  la  vie  matérielle,  culturelle  et  scientifique  de  l’Afrique  du  Nord  au début  du  XVIe  siècle.  Cette  richesse  se  traduit  par  un  aspect lexicographique  abordant  des  thématiques  scientifiques  et  une terminologie botanique et médicinale. Les différentes traductions du texte n’ont  pas  eu  raison  du  contenu  original  permettent  à  travers  les
translittérations, de retrouver le fond d’une connaissance arabe positive et originale  sur  les  plantes,  leurs  caractéristiques,  certains  de  leurs  usages pharmacologiques.

Mots-clés :  Hassan  al-Wazzan,  Léon  l’Africain,  la  Description  de
l’Afrique,  Maroc,  la  Science  arabe  médiévale,  XVIe  siècle,  la
Renaissance, ethnobotanique, plantes, lexique.

"Cultural studies", looking for a possible political alternative to multiculturalism, has recently put the classic notion of cosmopolitanism under revision. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has underlined how a cosmopolitan attitude - as an ethical commitment - relies on narrative imagination and evaluative language. Conversations and exercises of evaluation of stories can provide a base for a critique both of absolute universalism and of positivist relativism. This approach invites us to question the contradictory versions, together with their ideological and political stakes, regarding the identity of Leo Africanus. Leo, a Muslim traveller captured by the Christians in 1518 and donated as a slave to the Pope, wrote a broad and rich "Descrittione dell'Africa" in Italian, which, through the publication by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1550), became a reference in Europe for the geographical knowledge of continental Africa. The ambiguities of his works and life have always been a matter of dispute: Leo, in fact, has become from time to time a symbol of European Renaissance humanism, the bearer of a whole Arab and Islamic tradition, a suspect, if not treacherous crosser, of religious and geographical borders, a national Moroccan hero, a pedagogic example of cultural mediation between East and West, North and South, and finally a perfect historical source of inspiration for contemporary cosmopolitanism. This long and complex history is briefly exposed here with particular attention to the recent new fortune of Leo, marked by the enduring success of Amin Maalouf's novel "Léon l'Africain" (1986) and by the publication of "Trickster Travels" (2006) by historian Natalie Zemon Davis.

The aim of this contribution is two-fold: to present, albeit briefly, the history of Latin translations of the Qur’ān, emphasising the cases in which Church officials commissioned the translations to Muslims or Muslim converts; and secondly, to observe a particular case of a Qur’anic translation, which was modified and improved by Leo Africanus (also known as Leo Granatinus or Yūhannā al-Asad, formerly al-Ḥasan al-Wazzān). The translations which, as far as we know, can be described as cases of interfaith collaborations are the first one elaborated by Robert of Ketton (1142-1143), the lost text boosted by Juan of Segovia (1456) and the interpretation commissioned by Egidio da Viterbo (1518, 1525) to which I will devote the second part of this study.

Was the Renaissance a miraculous and unique case of spontaneous combustion or was it set aflame by torch carriers arriving from elsewhere? This course will examine the traffic of ideas that flowed into Europe over the course of the Renaissance periods with a focus on influences from predominantly Muslim civilizations (but also China, India etc). Exploration of the Renaissance Intersection will provide an intercultural understanding of the light that shone after the European Dark Ages. Though interdisciplinary in scope, the course does not require any specialized knowledge. It is in a series based on the principle of alterity: to know ourselves we need to know the “other.

Lecture 1. Elephant in the Room (Ahmed ibn Majid & Vasco de Gama)

Lecture 2. Snow White’s Prince (ibn Rushd: Averroes/Averroism via SPan & Siciliy; Leo Africanus & Dante)

Lecture 3. On the Shoulders of Giants (Ziryab, ibn HAzm & Troubadours; ibn Rushd, Al Farabi: Alfarabius/Avenassar; ibn Arabi & Dante)

Lecture 4. Looking Outward (ibn al-Haitham, al Battani, Urdi, al Tusi & Copernicus, Galilieo)

Lecture 5. Looking Inward  (ibn al-Haitham, Ghiberti, Roger Bacon, Witelo; St Francis & Giotto; al Razi: Rhazes & Vesalius; Ghazali)

Lecture 6. Elephant crossing the Ocean (ibn Tufayl & John Locke; Conclusion)

En este trabajo se pretende poner de relieve cuál era la visión que del norte de África, y más concretamente de la región del Rif, tenían dos grandes autores granadinos que vivieron en los siglos XV y XVI, el musulmán al-Wazzan (n. entre 1489 y 1500), bautizado posteriormente con el nombre de León el Africano, y el cristiano Luis de Mármol. Para ello, además de las obras de estos dos autores, se utilizan otras fuentes descriptivas como fuentes árabes medievales y modernas, y cristianas, principalmente de época moderna. La vinculación de León el Africano con El Rif fue muy estrecha, pues su familia tenía posesiones en esta región y, a través de su obra, Descripción de África, sabemos que la visitó, motivo por el cual su imagen de la misma resulta de una gran fiabilidad y certeza. En cuanto a Mármol (n. entre 1520 y 1524), permaneció 22 años en África al servicio del ejército imperial, lo que le proporcionó grandes conocimientos que plasmó en su Descripción general del África, cuya edición más reciente del reino de Fez, utilizada en el presente trabajo, data del siglo XVI (Granada: Casa de René Rabut, 1573). Ambos autores ofrecieron un panorama muy singular de la zona, fuertemente aislada del exterior, empobrecida, y cuyas prácticas locales se mostraban con frecuencia alejadas de la ortodoxia islámica. Los textos que se incluyen ponen de manifiesto los evidentes paralelismos entre la obra de León el Africano y la de Luis de Mármol, y se puede sostener sin temor a dudas que la mayor parte de los pasajes de Mármol están tomados de León, al que en ocasiones copia casi al pie de la letra. En cuestión de estructura, Mármol tiende a seguir el mismo patrón que León, aunque en ocasiones cambia el orden de algunos párrafos. La atmósfera de luchas de religión que se vivió tras la caída del Reino Nazarí de Granada es la que provoca en Mármol algunos comentarios despectivos sobre la población rifeña que, si bien también aparecen en León, éste apunta más en la dirección de que la rudeza, el desaliño, fiereza y las peculiares costumbres de sus habitantes, algunas contrarias al Islam, estaban causados por la extremada pobreza en la que estaba sumida la región

One of the last works Raphael painted before he died was an allegory of Justice in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican Palace. Justice’s hand is curled around the neck of a realistic and aggressively ugly ostrich. The ostrich is the largest of birds, has wings but cannot fly, and is the only bird with two toes on each foot. These and other peculiarities made the struthio camelus (sparrow camel) a hybrid, part bird, part beast according to Renaissance scientists. In an age before Darwin, this enormous bird with its useless feathers was a living enigma. By creating a naturalistic animal that evoked hidden knowledge -- a modern hieroglyph -- Raphael exposed the tensions around the issue of how the natural world is imbued with meaning, a question that came to a crisis with the rise of the foundations of both modern art history and natural history. This is the story of a weird Raphael and therefore a weird Renaissance, one of fantastic and improbable juxtapositions, hybrid monsters, and grotesques.
Raphael’s invention is based upon a Renaissance understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The book explores the antithetical ways in which the ostrich was used in ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, Jewish scriptures, the Medieval bestiary tradition, and the fifteenth-century court of Raphael’s native Urbino. Ostriches were central to the Egyptian beliefs about the passage to the underworld, were hunted in the Coliseum and served at lavish banquets, and were objects of curiosity in menageries and study for scientists. Ostriches were both reviled as embodiments of heresy, stupidity, and gluttony and praised as exemplars of stoic endurance, a turning towards God, and justice, among other qualities. 
Raphael’s ostrich is integral to the culture of the court of his patron, Pope Leo X, which had a famous menagerie and was a center for the study of Roman and Egyptian antiquities and for European studies of Africa. Raphael and followers painted grotesques, including ostriches, which were both archaeologically correct reconstructions and modern fantasies. After Raphael artists depicted ostriches as images of Justice, but also gave the bird new meanings and depicted ostriches as curiosities. Men and women played memory games that involved ostriches, danced in ostrich costumes, collected prints of ostriches, made scientific studies of ostriches, wrote poems about ostriches, invented fantastic ostrich tableware, and painted and sculpted the flightless bird in churches, palaces, villas, pilgrimage destinations, and parade floats. Among those who saw the ostrich as a part of Raphael’s legacy was Giorgio Vasari, who while he was constructing the normative view of Raphael in his biographies, imitated this weirder Raphael by painting ostriches. During the early Counter Reformation, theologians attacked abstruse imagery. Cardinals who found the new austerity uncongenial retired to their villas, which they decorated with ostriches. Figures central to the new reforms, including Saint Carlo Borromeo and Cardinal Federico Borromeo, also patronized depictions of ostriches, which served as memorable embodiments of moral virtues, but also fascinating oddities. By the end of the century the ostrich appears in two influential compendia of knowledge and imagery, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia and Ulisse Aldrovandi’s, Ornithologiae, which mark both the culmination and the beginning of the end of the rich and strange tradition that mixed literature, religion, science, and art.
In the Renaissance, because the physical oddity of animals was inherently meaningful, ostriches were bearers of a panoply of complex and contradictory meanings and associations. Today the image of the ostrich with its head in the sand is a common trope for willful oblivion, even though scientists note that ostriches do not, in fact, do this. The distinction instituted in the late sixteenth century between science and art has become now a wide gulf, and so images of these bizarre creatures have been severed from both this marvelous verbal and visual history and from the stranger reality of the actual animals.

Africa was integral to the early modern preoccupation with being able to account for the “whole” world in seemingly scholarly fashion. The Africa that took shape in early modern geographies was not imagined in isolation: its cultural geography was linked to other regions of the world in a comparative system that helped to distinguish between the “barbarous” and those “worthy” to be called human, and between the “Southern Nations” and the “Northern People.” It contributed to the emergence of a global south, made explicit through the language of cartography, which allowed early modern readers to gain their bearings in a more complex world. I examine some early scholarly representations of Africa in English, to reflect on the role of textual structure in constructing Africa as an object of knowledge, a place of strangeness and possibility. Editorial interventions transform inherited associations between Africa and “barbarism,” I argue, and between nomadism and “beastliness,” and subject them to new evidentiary strictures. Even so, these myths appear as a watermark in the later texts’ adjudication of what it means to be human.

To understand how early modern geographers understood the ambit of their work, and the implications for Africa, I examine three texts spanning a little over a 100 years, in 50-year steps: William Prat’s Discription of the Contrey of Aphrique (1554), Pory’s edition of Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie (1600), and Richard Blome’s 1682 English-language edition of Bernadus Varenius’s Geographia Generalis, which sought to describe the discipline itself. In the account of Africa by Leo Africanus, a self-identified “African,” a more complex version of Africa entered the discourse. Scholars have presented Leo Africanus as a mediator between worlds, but his own speaking posture is complicated by the disciplinary structures shaping his narrative and the controlling presence of John Pory as partisan compiler and translator. Similarly, Blome’s framing of Varenius’s Geographia in 1682 establishes a set of equivalences across the “Southern Nations” that derive meaning in relation to their “Northern” opposites. Through the language of cardinal points and demonstrable experience, Africa in the seventeenth century emerges as knowable and inhabitable, but steeped in old stigmas.

En 1550 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, secrétaire d’état et cosmographe vénitien, publie le premier volume de ses Navigationi et viaggi, un recueil important et varié de récits de voyage assemblé avec l’intention de remplacer la géographie ptoléméenne par une mise à jour cartographique des territoires récemment découverts ou redécouverts. L’humaniste y réserve la place d’honneur à la méticuleuse description, jusque là manuscrite, de l’Afrique sub-saharienne rédigée en italien en 1526 par Léon l’Africain, alias Al-Hasan al-Wazzan, diplomate grenadin d’origine aux service des souverains maghrébins, capturé en 1518 par des pirates chrétiens et offert en don au pape Léon des Médicis, qui, après l’avoir baptisé, aurait encouragé sa précieuse contribution au savoir humanistique. Une vingtaine d’années auparavant Ramusio avait été chargé d’interroger l’aventurier David Reubeni, qui se proclamait membre d’une famille princière juive d’Arabie et qui à travers de longues pérégrinations en Afrique et en Europe poursuivait le propos messianique de réunir à nouveaux en Palestine les juifs de la diaspora. Contrairement au récit de Léon, formellement compatible avec la vision humanistique et quantitative de l’espace géographique, Ramusio en provoquant l’expulsion de David de la ville de Venise refuse tout aussi son monde et ses lieux chargés de qualités et de symboles (l’espace de localisation opposé par Foucault à l’espace de l’étendue). Si les deux personnages ont suscité la curiosité des chercheurs par l’instabilité et l’ambiguïté, voire le mystérieux de leur identité, il n’en reste pas moins que la réception de leur discours d’étrangers sur l’Afrique s’est avérée inégale et mérite par elle-même une majeure réflexion.

La description du « Pays des Noirs » par Léon l’Africain (livres I et VII) a suscité de nombreux commentaires qui ont surtout cherché à identifier les toponymes présents dans le texte, à exploiter les informations transmises par l'auteur, en particulier sur le royaume Songhay, enfin à débattre de la véracité de ses voyages dans la région. Le propos de cet article est plutôt ici de dégager les structures narratives à l’œuvre dans le texte de Léon l’Africain et de repérer les logiques géographiques et cartographiques qui nourrissent sa description du « Pays des Noirs ». Pour ce faire, sont étudiés le découpage de l’espace africain et la présentation ordonnée des royaumes sahéliens, pour montrer combien ils sont informés par la géographie arabo-musulmane, en particulier par la notion de climat (iqlim) et par la tradition idrisienne. La comparaison avec la cartographie d’al-Idrisi permet en effet de comprendre comment Léon combine cette structure cartographique avec des informations contemporaines – cours du fleuve Niger, informations sur la Guinée, remodelage politique de la zone autour de l’empire Songhay – qui viennent perturber, sans la remettre en question, sa géographie mentale.