Natalie Zemon Davis - Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

Arabic names, book titles, and technical words are transcribed without diacritical marks beyond the hamza and the letter ayn. All precise dates concerning events and persons in the Islamic world in the medieval and early modern period are given in both the Muslim form, the lunar calendar dating from the Hijra, and the Christian form, or what we now call the form of the common era: thus, 897/1492 is the date for the Christian conquest of Muslim Granada, the edict expelling the Jews from Spain, and Christopher Columbuss departure from Cdiz for the Indies. All references to centuries will follow the common-era terminology: sixteenth century.

I N 1514 King Manuel I of Portugal presented Pope Leo X with a white elephant from India. Paraded through the streets of Rome in an elaborate ceremony and named Annone, or Hanno, by welcoming Romans, the elephant represented to the pope the kings intention to bring the realms that extended from North Africa to India into the Christian fold. Hanno survived in his pen for three years, a presence at public events and festivities and a favorite of the pope and the Roman populace. He was written about by poets, mythographers, and satirists, and imaged in drawings, paintings, and woodcuts; in fountain ornament, bas-relief, and majolica platter. Raphael designed his memorial fresco.

In 1518 a Spanish pirate, fresh from successful raids against Muslim ships in the Mediterranean, presented the same pope with a captured North African traveler and diplomat from Fez named al-Hasan al-Wazzan. He would serve as a useful source of information, it was hoped, and as a symbol in the popes desired crusade against the Ottoman Turks and the religion of Islam. Had not the Turks been an increased threat to Christendom since their conquest of Constantinople in 1453? The diplomats arrival and imprisonment were noted in diaries and diplomatic correspondence. His baptism at St. Peters fifteen months later was a grand ceremony. A librarian recorded his book-borrowing. But compared to Hanno, al-Hasan al-Wazzans nine years in Italy went unrecorded by those who saw him, his presence unmemorialized by those whom he served or knew, his likeness not drawn and redrawn, his return to North Africa referred to only later and obliquely. Only a shred of his life remained in the memory of Europeans interested in Arabic letters and travel literature, to be passed on orally and reported years later.

In North Africa there are also baffling silences. During the years when al-Hasan al-Wazzan was serving as agent for the sultan of Fez in towns along Moroccos Atlantic coast, no mention of him was made by Portuguese military men and administrators in their chatty letters to King Manuel. During years when he had diplomatic duties in Cairo, no mention of him was made by a sharp-eyed observer who wrote in his journal of visitors to the court of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and the Levant.

Yet al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind in Italy several manuscripts, one of which, published in 1550, became a bestseller. Over the centuries his book attracted the curiosity of readers and scholars in many parts of the world. The mysteries about him and even his name began already with the first edition. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the editor, entitled the book La Descrittione dellAfrica (The Description of Africa), called its author by his baptismal name, Giovan Lioni Africano, and included a brief biography of him in his dedication. So he was known in the several subsequent editions of the book that were published in Venice as the first volume in Ramusios series of Navigations and Voyages . And so he was known in the European translations that soon appeared: Iean Leon, African [ sic ] in French (1556); Ioannes Leo Africanus in Latin (1556); and Iohn Leo, a More in English (1600). Through the German translation (1805) of Johann Leo der Africaner, his book continued to shape European visions of Africa, all the more strongly because it came from someone who had lived and traveled in those parts.

Meanwhile a scholar at the Escorial library in Spain, himself a Maronite Christian from Syria, came upon an Arabic manuscript on another topic by al-Wazzan. It bore both his Muslim and his Christian names, which the librarian included in his published catalogue (176070). A century later, when the Description was enshrined in the Recueil de voyages (Collection of Voyages) by the important French Orientalist Charles Schefer, an Arabic name appeared in the introduction; and in the classic Hakluyt Society series of travel literature in England, the title page proclaimed: by Al-Hassan Ibn-Mohammed Al-Wezaz Al-Fasi, a Moor, baptized as Giovanni Leone, but better known as Leo Africanus.

Still its author remained a shadowy figure. Then in the early decades of the twentieth century, a few scholars approached the book and the man in new ways. In the context of the new French colonial sciences concerning the geography, history, and ethnography of Africa, the young Louis Massignon did his Sorbonne thesis on Morocco in the early sixteenth century as it had been described by Lon lAfricain. From a close reading of the text (a technique that would flower in his later great publications on Sufi mysticism and poetry), Massignon extracted what he could not only about the geography of Morocco but also about al-Wazzans life and travels, especially about his sources and methods of observing and classifying. The frame of al-Wazzans book was very Europeanized, Massignon opined, but its core was very Arabic. Massignons study was published in 1906, an important moment in Frances steps toward establishing its protectorate of Morocco.

The historical geographer Angela Codazzi knew Massignons book well and took seriously his hope that an original manuscript of al-Wazzans book would one day be found. Close to the collections in Italys libraries, in 1933 she could announce that she had located an Italian manuscript of The Description of Africa , and it did indeed differ from the later printed edition of Ramusio. At the same time, Giorgio Levi della Vida, a remarkable scholar of Semitic languages and literatures, was making discoveries as well. Excluded from university teaching in 1931 as an antifascist, he was invited to catalogue the Arabic manuscripts at the Vatican Library. He left for the United States in 1939an act of safety for a Jewbut not before putting the finishing touches on a book about the creation of the Oriental collections at the Vatican. Among its many riches, it had much to say about the reading, writing, and signing practices of al-Hasan al-Wazzan. Back in Italy after the war, Levi della Vida helped Codazzi interpret two manuscripts on other subjects that she had found by Giovanni Leone Africano.

The last important colonial presentation of Jean-Lon lAfricain was a new French translation and commentary prepared by Alexis paulard. During years in Morocco as a physician and military officer with the French protectorate, paulard had become impressed with the exceptional value, both historical and geographical, of The Description of Africa . His book built upon the work of Massignon and Codazzi, without following their spirit. paulard used the Italian manuscript in Rome in 1939and applauded Codazzis plan to publish it one day (alas, unfulfilled)but his Description is an amalgam of translations from Ramusio, occasional translations from the manuscript, and a modernized version of the sixteenth-century French translation. He ignored the possibility that the differences between the texts could reveal larger differences in viewpoint and cultural sensibility.