The man whom historians know as Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa, is a celebrated but hitherto elusive figure. Al-Hasan al-Wazzan was born in Granada, and grew up on Morocco. He was captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean in 1518 and imprisoned by the Pope, then released, baptized and allowed a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone. In Trickster Travels the distinguished historian Natalie Zemon Davis offers a virtuoso study of the fragmentary, partial and often contradictory traces that al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind him.
In her characteristically accessible and engaging way, Davis describes this dramatic life in rich detail, scrutinizing the evidence of al-Wazzan`s movement between cultural worlds, the Islamic and Arab traditions and ideas available to him, and his adventures with Christians and Jews in a European community of learned men, powerful church leaders and among its ordinary street life.