Beschreibung:

JOHANNES LEO A Geographical Historie of Africa, Written in Arabicke and Italian... translated and collected by John Pory. London: George Bishop, 1600. Small 2° (24.7 x 17cm). Woodcut device on title, one folding engraved map. (Single wormtrack running through lower blank margins, verso of final leaf somewhat soiled.) 18th-century russia (neatly rebacked). Provenance : Charles W.G.Howard (armorial bookplate including a note of the gift of the book from Sir David Dundas of Ochtertyre, dated 1877); Wilfred Thesiger (explorer, b.1910, bookplate). First edition in English of the first great account of Mahommedan Africa from the library of the last great explorer of Mahommedan lands. Johannes Leo took his christian name from his sponsor Pope Leo X when he converted to christianity after his capture in 1520. He was born Al Hassan Ibn Mahommed Al Wezaz Al Fasi probably in Grenada in about 1494, received a great part of his education at Fez, and while still very young began to travel widely in the Barbary States. In 1512 we trace him at Morocco, Tunis, Bugia and Constantine; in 1513 we find him returning from Tunis to Morocco; and before the close of the latter year he seems to have started on his famous Sudan and Sahara journeys (1513-1515)... In 1516-1517 he travelled to Constantinople, probably visiting Egypt on the way; it is more uncertain when he visited the three Arabias, Armenia and "Tartary". His three Egyptian journeys, immediately after the Turkish conquest, all probably fell between 1517 and 1520; on one of these he ascended the Nile from Cairo to Aswan". The present work was probably first written in Arabic but the primary text now is in Italian, published in 1526.