A geographical historie of Africa / written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo … ; translated and collected by Iohn Pory, lately of Goneuill and Caius College in Cambridge. 

Printed in London by George Bishop, 1600.

Lower Library: E.33.2

Published in 1600, A Geographical Historie of Africa offered English-speakers one of the first detailed glimpses into the African continent. Having originally been written in Arabic and subsequently translated into Italian by Leo Africanus (born al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī al-Fasī), it was in this English translation by Caian John Pory that the work reached an especially wide audience.

The author, Johannes Leo Africanus, was likely born around 1494 in Granada and later moved to Fez in Morocco where he served the Sultan on commercial and diplomatic missions across northern and western Africa. In his preface Pory seeks to reassure his English readers of Leo’s sophistication and credentials, including details of ‘his Parentage, Witte, Education, Learning, Emploiments, Trauels, and his conuersion to Christianitie’, pointing out that he was ‘even from his tender yeeres trained up at the Vniuersitie of Fez, in Grammar, Poetrie, Rhetorick, Philosophie, Historie, Cabala, Astronomie, and other ingenuous sciences’.

The work originally came about when Leo Africanus was captured by Christian pirates in 1517 while he was detailing the life of many remote North African kingdoms. When the pirates took him and the manuscript of his travels to Rome, it was under the protection of Pope Leo X that he converted to Christianity and undertook to translate his manuscript into Latin. Published in 1526, his Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica contained the first detailed descriptions published in Europe of the geography, culture, and history of the Barbary Coast (modern Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) as well as the gold-trading kingdoms of west-central Africa and the Nile Valley. The book went on to attract considerable attention even before Pory's translation, with Leo’s first Italian version of 1526 subsequently included by Ramusio in the numerous editions of his Primo volume delle navigationi, and was in turn translated into Latin by Joannes Florian in 1556 and into French by Jean Temporal in the same year.

John Pory (1572-1636), the translator of this edition, was a skilled linguist, traveller, politician and writer. Educated at Gonville and Caius College, he earned his bachelor's degree here in 1592 and master's in 1595. Pory’s role as a translator extended somewhat further than we might expect from our modern understanding of that role, not only writing an extensive preface to the work, but also adding numerous sections of commentary and references, as well as writing a supplementary section of over fifty pages detailing ‘A description of places undescribed by Iohn Leo’. 

As such, this work was groundbreaking in not only describing for the first time to English readers numerous regions, cities, and landscapes of Africa, but also delving into the lives and customs of its people, their kings, wars, and social structures. As imperfect as such a pioneering work upon such an enormous subject is bound to be, A Geographical Historie of Africa was nevertheless the best known and most compendious source of information about Africa for Europeans at the time, and Pory’s translation had a number of linkages with important cultural figures of his era, including John Donne, Ben Jonson and John Milton, as well as it being very likely that Shakespeare borrowed from Pory's book for his Othello. And so, it was certainly not mere hubris when in his preface to the work Pory described it as ‘a historie of special woorth and consequence’.