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earth as a human being and not an animal. The discourse contains the germ of an idea
that animals can be saved (Franciscans knew all about the benefits of preaching to
birds), and this may have opened the door to later speculations in the Mediterranean
world that the hope of salvation might extend to sincere peoples of all faiths as well.
The donkey argues for the diversity of human types (by analogy the animal kingdom
is even more impressive) on the basis of laws and beliefs as the important boundaries—
not race or ethnicity. This donkey divides humanity into Jews, Christians, Turks,
Saracens, Tartars, savages, and many other types, a spectrum of varieties privileging
the Mediterranean world, down to the Tartars of the Golden Horde by now living
along the northern shores of the Black Sea, and some female Tartar slaves Turmeda
might have easily seen in northern Italy, especially if he visited Genoa or Florence.
Turmeda’s biography shows the extent to which reinventing the self involved both
stark choices about religion admitting no half-way compromises, and experiences of
hybridity rooted in more mundane acts like marriage, travel, learning languages, and
even comedy.
The next person on the list, a man usually known as Leo Africanus (1486/8–after
1532), was born in Granada with the name al-Hasan al-Wazzan. As Natalie Zemon
Davis (2006) has so well explained, Leo was an Andalusian émigré raised in Fez in
Morocco, and then he became a traveler, diplomat, and scholar, visiting before his
capture at sea in 1518 places as diverse as Timbuktu, Cairo, Mecca, and Istanbul.
Before coming to Rome as a captive, he knew a Spanish dialect, Arabic, a North
African lingua franca of some type, and maybe a little Portuguese. In Italy he learned
Latin and his Italian became good enough to write his most famous work, a 936-page
manuscript he called a cosmography and geography of Africa. Pope Leo X (born
Giovanni de Medici) baptized him in St Peter’s on January 6, 1520, when he took the
name Giovanni Leone (Yuhanna al-Asad in Arabic) in honor of the pope. After his
baptism he began writing, collaborating on a great Arabic–Hebrew–Latin dictionary
(never completed) and his masterpiece, finished in 1526 and left behind when he fled
Italy in 1527. This work, published in Italian in 1554, Latin in 1556, and French in
1556/7 became an encyclopedic source of information on the world of Islam, its
faith, laws, and notables, and the Mali Empire in sub-Saharan Africa. He can be
securely located in Tunis in 1532, having returned to Islam, but nothing is known
about him after that date.
What sort of a person was Leo? Davis (2006) addresses this problem and she sees
him primarily as a trickster, or as a person with a double identity, an amphibious per-
son. Was he performing Christianity during his seven years in Italy? Why did he wait
so long after he was freed from prison in 1520 to return home? Why did he plant
some ironic observations in his manuscript that Muslim readers would recognize and
Europeans would not? There is no end to the questions about Leo. He experienced
exile, true captivity, and at least two conversions that would have left him in the status
of renegade across one of the great divisions in the Mediterranean, between Islam and
Christianity. Davis notes the intimate liaisons of his life, the wife we know he had in
Morocco, the marriage Davis plausibly hypothesizes he may have made in Rome.
From these encounters he learned a sensibility toward identities not available in pris-
ons or schools. Though Leo was one of the great sixteenth-century travelers, and
never lived far from the shores of the Mediterranean, he was not very interested in the
sea, or even its coasts.