territories to its more remote southwestern coasts, the Africa of The History
takes definition from ongoing cross-cultural commercial exchange.
One significant side effect, crucial to the marking of Africa’s cultural
identities, is that “strangers” (whom neither Africanus nor Pory distinguish as
African or European) do not appear strange here; nor do they seem unwel-
come within the territories they have come to inhabit temporarily or, in many
cases, permanently. Africanus mentions a number of places in Barbary where
“all strangers trauailing that way” tend to be “sumptuously and freely enter-
tained” (Africanus, 291 ), while Pory draws attention to Moors residing in
Negro country who are especially “courteous to strangers” (Pory, 55 ).^31 Impor-
tantly, that “courtesy” includes sexual and marital relations. The Tempest’s
Claribel is neither the last European nor, as the play’s reference to Dido un-
derscores, the first to engage herself to “an African” (Temp. 2. 1. 123 ). Indeed,
how interesting that what cues a tempest on Shakespeare’s stage in the early
seventeenth century is the union of a Milanese daughter and a Neapolitan
prince,notof a Neapolitan daughter and a Tunisian king (even though Naples
was under Spanish rule when the play came out, roughly two years after
Moors were officially banned from Spain). Africanus cites a number of in-
stances where “faire and beautifull women are so fonde of strangers that if
secret occasion be offered they will not refuse their dishonest company”
(Africanus, 299 ). He also stresses that syphilis, the “French” or “Spanish
poxe,” is one of Barbary’s most prevalent diseases (Africanus, 181 ), its name
and history testifying to widespread cultural and sexual intercourse, what Na-
talie Davis calls “sexual disorder.”^32 Africanus explains: “Not so much as the
name of this maladie was euer knowen vnto the Africans, before Ferdinand
the king of Castile expelled all Iewes out of Spaine; after the return of which
Iewes into Africa, certaine vnhappie and lewd people lay with their wiues; and
so at length the disease spread from one to another, ouer the whole region: in-
somuch that scare any one familie was free from the same” (Africanus, 181 ).^33
Though here the sexual crossings are associated with Jewish wives, “vn-
happie and lewd” Africans, and disease, in other places all sorts of intercourse
with “strangers” appear to be a more common and acceptable practice. Com-
ing at the issue from a religious angle, Davis has explained that, although “Is-
lamic law” condemned sex outside marriage or “rightful slave dominion” as
sinful, Muslim men could marry free Jewish and Christian women and could
have sex with their own Jewish and Christian slaves, while for Muslim
women—and Jews and Christians—the “sexual border was firmly closed.”^34
Hence, in Fez, a city which Africanus declares “the metropolitan not onely of
Cultural Traffic 147