• circulations
• cosmography
• Description of Africa
• interculturality
• Leo the African
• reception

At the beginning of the 16th century, an erudite traveller born in Granada, geographer and diplomat to the Sultan of Fez, arrived in Rome after being captured by Christian corsairs, who offered him to Pope Leo X.
His real name was Hassan al-Wazzân, and he was baptised in 1520 and adopted by the Pope, who gave him his own name, Jean Léon de Médicis. A member of the humanist circles of 16th-century Italy, he became known throughout Europe as Leo the African, thanks to the success of his cosmography, the Descriptione of Africa, which is a compilation of knowledge about the natural and cultural environments of Africa. This cosmography reveals a diversity of knowledge about Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together different scientific and literary disciplines (botany, geography, zoology, history, mythography, etc.). In 1550, in Venice, the Venetian geographer and politician Giovanni Battista Ramusio, a member of the Senate and then a member of the Council of Ten, published with the publisher and printer Giunti the first volume of a major collection of travel experiences entitled Navigationi et Viaggi. The text of the Description of Africa appears at the top of the Navigationi et Viaggi and was immediately translated into the various European languages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.
Using a comparative approach, the research aims to put into perspective the figure of Leo the African from the Renaissance to the way he is received today.
By looking at his itinerary, we seek to identify different trajectories, in particular that of the reception of knowledge about Africa in learned Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, making Léon l'Africain the tutelary figure of African knowledge for several centuries. This study examines the circulation of ideas by placing the writings of Léon l'Africain within a movement for the transmission of knowledge, in order to shed light from different points of view on the interpenetration of modes of knowledge that never ceased to interact. Through a variety of readings of this Mediterranean journey, and by invoking the modern novelistic and dramatic reappropriations of the traveller-humanist by Amin Maalouf and Wajdi Mouawad, this thesis seeks to highlight the exemplary nature of Leo the African.
Following on from the humanist interculturality of the Renaissance, it asks whether Leon the African can help to reinvent a new Mediterranean interculturality.
Through his exemplary role, we attempt to observe, from a literary perspective, how his different trajectories in the Mediterranean, as well as his contribution to knowledge of the world, have contributed to what the historian of African worlds at the Collège de France, François-Xavier Fauvelle, calls the "conversation of the world".