He was an Andalusian diplomat and writer best known for his book Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa), which focused on the geology of the Maghreb and Nile Valley. He lived from 1494 to 1554. Before the contemporary exploration of Africa, the work was regarded by his academic contemporaries in Europe as the most authoritative treatise on the subject. Leo became well-known among European geographers as a result of his work. He changed his name to Johannes Leo de Medicis after converting from Islam to Christianity.
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Why is Leo Africanus so significant? Who was he?
Leo Africanus, Italian Giovanni Leone, original Arabic al-asan ibn Muammad al-Wazzn al-Zayyt or al-Fs, traveler whose writings served as one of Europe’s primary sources of information about Islam for over 400 years (born c. 1485, Granada, Kingdom of Granada; died c. 1554, Tunis).
Leo Africanus wrote his description of Africa when?
Leo Africanus was born in Spain in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The History and Description of Africa, which was published in 1550, was at least somewhat influenced by his schooling in Morocco and his travels to North and West Africa during the sixteenth century. For four centuries, Europeans regarded Leo Africanus as the premier authority on Africa and Islam and The History and Description of Africa as the important book regarding the African continent.
Timbuktu, a city in modern-day Mali in West Africa, was one of the cities Leo Africanus wrote about. From the 13th through the 16th century, Timbuktu served as the hub of the trans-Saharan commerce route and was crucial to the spread of Islam across Africa. Timbuktu was long regarded by Europeans as fantastical, someplace at the “uttermost end of the Earth,” as a result of Leo Africanus’ depiction of the city.
The historical city of Timbuktu is discussed in the extracts from Africanus’ The History and Description of Africa that are provided below.
Leo Africanus choose Timbuktu for what reason?
Timbuktu would come to be known across Europe as the most difficult city to reach, but at the time Leo went there, it was the hub of a bustling trade in both books and African goods.
How does Leo Africanus describe the culture of West Africa?
How does Leo Africanus describe West African civilisation in light of these accounts? What can you conclude about his personal perspective on this society? With the exception of those living in the Mali kingdom, he appears to think of them as being relatively primitive and shows preference for those who adhere to Muhammad’s law.
Whose name was given to Africa?
Africa is the second-largest continent in the world after Asia, both in terms of area and population. There are 54 countries and 9 territories on its landmass. Africa is home to around 1.11 billion individuals who identify as Africans. Millions of people who live on the continent now consider themselves to be primarily African, but where does the word “Africa,” which so many people associate with such strong emotions, originate?
Although there is debate over the word’s precise origins, much is known about its history. We are aware that the Romans were the first to refer to the region of the Carthaginian Empire that is now Tunisia as “Africa.” The Romans divided North Africa into many provinces when they overthrew Carthage in the second century BCE, giving them control over the majority of North Africa. Among these provinces were Africa Pronconsularis (northern Tunisia) and Africa Nova (much of present-day Algeria, also called Numidia).
Nearly 2000 years ago, all historians concur that the name “Africa” was finally given to the continent by the Romans, who used the phrase to describe regions of Tunisia and Northern Algeria. Scholars disagree on the reason why the Romans chose to designate these territories “Africa,” nevertheless. A select few theories have gained popularity over time.
One of the most widely accepted theories regarding the term’s origins is that it derives from the Roman name for a tribe that lived in Tunisia’s northernmost region and is thought to possibly be the Berber people. The Romans gave these people the names “Afri,” “Afer,” and “Ifir,” respectively. Some people think the word “Africa” is a contraction of “Africa terra,” which translates to “the land of the Afri.” However, there is no proof in the main sources that the term “Africa terra” was ever used to refer to the area, and there is also no proof that the Romans got the word “Africa” directly from the name “Afri.”
Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazan), a renowned medieval traveler and scholar who traversed much of North Africa and wrote in-depth accounts of everything he saw there, proposed that the name “Africa” was derived from the Greek word “a-phrike,” which means “without cold” or “without horror.” In a related vein, some historians have hypothesized that the Latin term for sunny or hot, aprica, may have served as the source of the moniker for the Romans. But it’s still unclear how exactly the Romans came to call Africa.
A recreation of the globe map made by Herodotus (c. 484425 BC), with Libya marked in place of North Africa. Source of the photo: www.mlahanas.de
Romans only used the word “Africa” to refer to a very small portion of North Africa, which is now known as the northern regions of Tunisia, for the majority of the continent’s history. The names “Libya,” “Aethiopia,” “Sudan,” and “Guinea” were by far the most often used names to describe the various constituent sections of the north half of Africa up to the late sixteenth century.
Nearly the entire region south of the Mediterranean Sea and west of the Nile was referred to be “Libya” by the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks also referred to the Berber inhabitants of the region by this name. The Aegean Sea served as the geographic center for the three larger “regions” of Europe, Asia, and Libya, according to the ancient Greeks. Additionally, they thought that the Nile River served as a border between Libya and Asia, dividing Egypt in half and placing the other half in Libya. Cartographers followed the Greek model for many centuries, even into the late medieval era, by designating the Nile as the boundary between the landmasses.
Early Arabic cartographers often adopted the Greeks’ usage of the term “Libya” to refer to large portions of North Africa outside of Egypt. Later Arabic cartographers adopted the term Bilad al-Sudan, or “the land of the blacks,” to refer to the region south of the Sahara, which stretches from the Senegal River to the Red Sea. This is how the modern-day country of Sudan got its name.
While Libya was still widely used, certain European cartographers, who tended to favor Latinate derivations over others, favored the Roman terminology for the area and used the word Africa to refer to the northern mainland. Christian cartographers adapted the Greek division of the world into three larger sections surrounding the Aegean Sea during the Middle Ages. However, the medieval cartographers changed this notion from one that was based on a geographical vision of the world to one that was more metaphorical. Each territory was assigned to one of Abraham’s offspring: Asia was given to Shem, Europe to Japheth, and Africa to Ham. As seen in the figure above, this three-part view of the world was depicted in exceedingly abstract and symbolic, rather than geographical, shape.
The Greek term Aethiopia, which means “land of the dark-skinned or burnt,” which was used by Greek cartographers to designate the land below Egypt and the Sahara, was revived in the fifteenth century after the Portuguese had rounded the Cape and made contact with the Christian Empire of Abyssinia, and it is now used to broadly describe the entire tropical region of the continent below the Sahara.
The Portuguese started calling all of West Africa south of the Sahara Guin, the land of the Guinness people, around the same period. In contrast to the predominantly brown population of much of North Africa, the term “guinness” was used to refer to black people generally. The territory of West Africa that is reachable from the Gulf of Guinea came to be known as the “English Guinea,” or “Guin.”
The lands south of the Sahara were commonly referred to as Guinea and Aethiopia, or Ethiopia, until the middle of the seventeenth century. North-western Africa above the Sahara was frequently referred to as Libya. Africa was used to refer to the middle and northern part of Africa, which is now primarily occupied by Tunisia, sometimes in place of Libya and sometimes alongside Libya.
Before the latter half of the sixteenth century, just a small portion of the continent’s vast landmassprimarily Tunisia and Moroccowas referred to as “Africa.” The modern-day continent of Africa has multiple names for all of its varied parts throughout most of its history, but none of them has been used to refer to the entire landmass.
Only during the European age of exploration, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, did the idea of continents as connected landmasses bounded and divided by oceans start to take shape. Cartographers started referring to entire continents by a single geographical designation as European travel helped popularize the concept of continents. By the end of the seventeenth century, “Africa” had triumphed over the opposition, surpassing names like “Guinea,” “Libya,” and “Ethiopia” to become the term for the entire continent as we know it today. Although some historians have suggested that it was because latinate terms were preferred over all other terms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is unclear why Africa prevailed over all the other, frequently more popular, names.
Although the word “Africa” has been a descriptor of the continent for millennia, it is only recently that it has come to represent the whole population of the continent.
Leo Africanus was baptized by whom?
Before the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492, Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, also known as Joannes Leo Africanus, was born there in the Muslim Kingdom of Granada. When he was a young child, his family moved from Spain to Morocco, where they quickly attained a high social standing and a close relationship with the Fez royal court. From a very young age, Hasan had the chance to travel widely, frequently in his capacity as the Wattasid Sultan Muhammad’s ambassador. His travels took him to every nation in North Africa, the Sahara desert, West Africa’s sub-Saharan nations, Egypt, Arabia, and Turkey. He spent one year in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, a fortress just outside Vatican City, and converted to Christianity; he was baptized in Saint Peter of Rome by the Pope himself; he was given his names, Joannes Leo de Medici, but he is commonly known as Leo Africanus. In 1518, he was returning from a mission to Istanbul when his ship was attacked in the Mediterranean sea by Christian pirates, who captured him and gave him to Pope Leo X. He taught Arabic in Italy and produced numerous publications, many of which have not yet been discovered1. The most well-known of these works is a geographical masterpiece about Africa. The manuscript was finished on March 10th, 1526, and the first edited edition of it appeared in print in 1550. We don’t even know if he returned to North Africa after his death or stayed in Italy for the remainder of his life.
Leo Africanus wrote for whom?
He signed his name in Arabic as Yuhanna al-Asad al-Gharnati, which is a translation of his Christian name, John-Leo, or Johannes Leo (Latin), or Giovanni Leone, in one of his surviving manuscripts, a portion of an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin medical lexicon he produced for the Jewish doctor Jacob Mantino (Italian). In honor of the family of his patron, Pope Leo X, he also received the surname Medici. Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, which was his given name, was also written in the same text. Al-Fasi is the Arabic nickname for a person from Fez, Morocco, and al-Hasan ibn Muhammad is a patronymic name that means “al-Hasan, son of Muhammad.”
Who was the first to describe Africa’s geography?
During the Middle Ages, Persians who wrote about geography or produced maps included:
- Al-Khwrizm (780850) employed Ptolemy’s Geography (Ptolemy) in The Image of the Earth (Kitab surat al-ard), although he improved upon his estimates for the Mediterranean Sea, Asia, and Africa.
- The earliest known Arabic work of its sort was written by Ibn Khurdadhbih (820912) and is titled Book of the Routes and Provinces (Kitab al-masalik wa’l-mamalik). He created the first four-sector quadratic scheme map.
- In his book Marvels of the Seven Climes to the End of Habitation, Sohrab or Sorkhab (died in 931) described and depicted a rectangular grid of latitude and longitude to create a globe map.
- The “Balkh school” of terrestrial mapping was established in Baghdad by Al-Balkhi (850934).
- Using his own experiences and literary sources, Al-Istakhri (who passed away in 957) composed the Book of the Routes of States (Kitab Masalik al-Mamalik).
- The polar equi-azimuthal equidistant projection of the celestial sphere was described by Al-Biruni (9731052).
- The spherical sine law was a subject of interest for Abu Nasr Mansur (9601036). There is no longer a copy of his Book of Azimuths.
- In his Book of Healing, Avicenna (9801037) talked about earth sciences.
- Concise Book of Lands was written by Ibn al-Faqih in the 10th century (Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan).
- The Book of Precious Records is a geographical reference work by Ibn Rustah from the 10th century.
Below are some details regarding a few of these:
Ab Zayd al-Balkh, a Persian who was born in Balkh, established the “Balkh school” of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad around the beginning of the 10th century. With little interest in the non-Muslim worlds, the geographers of this school also wrote extensively about the peoples, goods, and customs of regions in the Muslim world. A rectangular world map can be created using either the cylindrical equidistant projection or the equirectangular projection, according to Suhrb, a late 10th-century Persian geographer. Avicenna proposed theories about the geological causes of mountains in The Book of Healing around the beginning of the 11th century (1027).