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48 Chapter 2
Chapter 2 The Teachers
1 Captives and Converts
Armed conflict between Christians and Muslims in the sixteenth century did not only provide some European scholars with an arbitrary selection of Arabic and Turkish manuscripts, when Christian forces were successful; the reconquest of fortified towns on the Hungarian plain and acts of piracy in the Mediterranean resulted in the capture of a number of Arabic-speaking North Africans and Quranic-educated Turks, whose varying abilities as scribes or even scholars commended them to their captors for referral to higher authorities. At a time when the opportunities for meeting anyone with a knowledge of Arabic were extremely limited, and the chance of being able to employ some- one who could make a reliable copy of an important Arabic text was even more remote, news of the arrival of a Muslim captive at a European court was the cause of excitement among Arabists. Not only was there the possibility of learning some Arabic from the captive but he might also be able to offer the services of a scribe. Moreover, if he were persuaded or forced to renounce his faith and be baptised, he could reach a much wider European audience as a Christian than he could as a Muslim, since his knowledge and ideas could then be published.
The most famous and exceptional of these Muslim-educated hostages was al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī (or al-Fāsī), who was born at Granada, whence his family fled to Fes and its court circle after the recon- quest by Ferdinand and Isabella. Educated at Fes, Ḥasan gained a remarkable knowledge of North African culture and geography during his travels in the service of the sultan of Fes, Muḥammad al-Burtuqālī. But around 1518, while returning to Fes from a visit to Cairo, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and possibly a mission to Istanbul, he was captured by Sicilian pirates in the western Medi- terranean, probably at the island of Djerba off the Tunisian coast. Someone must have recognised the value of Ḥasan’s alien knowledge and abilities, for he was brought to Rome, presented to Pope Leo X, and – supplied with Arabic
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The Teachers 49
manuscripts from the Vatican Library that display his annotations – held cap- tive for a year at the Castel Sant’Angelo until his conversion and release on 6 January 1520. Baptised Johannis Leo de Medicis, in honour of his papal patron – it is as Leo Africanus that he became particulary well-known throughout Europe in the sixteenth century and beyond, thanks to the many editions and transla- tions of his Description of Africa, a cultural, historical and geographical com- pendium which he had originally jotted down as notes in Arabic, and which Giovanni Battista Ramusio used for his editio princeps in Italian, published at Venice in 1550.1 Leo wrote on a number of other subjects, but little has been discovered: the Arabic notes for the Description are lost, as are his grammar of Arabic, an epitome of Islamic chronicles, a compendium of Malikite law, a col- lection of epitaphs from burial-grounds around Fes, and his poetry – all of which he refers to in his Description.2 One work which can positively be identified and located is the Arabic sec- tion of an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin vocabulary, which is now housed in the Esco- rial Library, and which he compiled at Bologna in 1524 for a Jewish doctor, Jacob Mantino, who also owned his grammar book.3 Another of his works to survive was the tract on the art of metrics.4 Whether Leo’s ‘Lives of the Arab Philosophers’, as he called it in his Description, is the same as the De viribus il- lustribus apud Arabes published by J. H. Hottinger in 1664 and by J. A. Fabricius in 1726 has been disputed, though Levi della Vida believed that it was (as did Épaulard) and that it provided an indication of the synoptic nature of Leo’s writing, so typical of his period.5 At Rome, two humanist orientalists benefit- ted from meeting Leo: Count Alberto Pio di Carpi, who commisioned him to
1 For biographical information on Leo Africanus, see the preface to Louis Massignon, Le Maroc dans les premières années du XVIe siècle... d’après Léon l’Africain, Algiers, 1906. Angela Codazzi, ‘Leone Africano’ in Enciclopedia italiana vol. 20 (Rome, 1933), p. 899. Both are referred to by Levi della Vida, Ricerche, p. 100, and by A. Épaulard in the preface to his modern French ver- sion, Description de l’Afrique (Paris, 1956 and 1981). See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels. A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between World (New York, 2006), pp. 15–272, 278–373; Bernard Rosenberger, ‘Une carrière politique au service du sultan de Fès’ in François Pouillon, ed., Léon l’Africain (Paris, 2009), pp. 31–65. 2 The editors’ article ‘Leo Africanus’ in EI2, vol. 5, pp. 723–724. 3 Levi della Vida, Ricerche, p. 102, n. 1; the manuscript is now located at the Escorial Library, MS 598. 4 A. Codazzi, ‘Il trattato dell’arte metrica di Giovanni Leone Africano’ in Studi orientalistici in onore di Giorgio Levi della Vida (Rome, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 180–198. 5 Levi della Vida, Ricerche, p. 100, n. 3: Épaulard, p. 226, n. 265.