To the sceptic, Leo Africanus may be the latest in a line of travellers, including Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, whose narratives have been ghosted, massaged, and inflated by their amanuenses, to the point at which their claims have been questioned. In Leo's case, the publication of his Libro de la Cosmogrophia [sic] et Geographia de Affrica (henceforth the Geography) in Italian has cast doubt on the authenticity of an account that should have been written in Arabic. It is the discovery of the author's own Italian manuscript of the work, alongside a handful of other works in Latin or translations into Latin from the Arabic, that has prompted Natalie Zemon Davis's comprehensive re-evaluation. She examines not simply his magnum opus but also the man himself in the extraordinary position in which he found himself in Rome, first captive then convert, before his departure, apparently for Tunis, and presumed reversion to Islam. Unlike Ross Dunn in The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, who portrays the world of the fourteenth century in the footsteps of his (anti-)hero, Davis invokes the world of the sixteenth century to find all possible clues to the life and thought of her protagonist. If the assumption of his point of view is unconventional, and the result conjectural, it is as convincing as the polyglot and polymath evidence allows. The erudition required to elucidate the literary production of Leo in Rome from 1518 to 1527 blazes a trail, in the best Renaissance fashion, through fields of scholarship that pass, in this day and age, for discrete areas of expertise: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian; Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Italian; political, social, cultural, and intellectual. The binding thread is bibliographical. Beyond manuscripts and editions, questions of sources, composition, translation, libraries, commissions, and readerships all bear on the crucial question of what the author wrote, what he meant, and how it was understood.

The trail begins with the man's own biography, his upbringing at Fes, his employment by the Wattasid sultan in Morocco, and his experiences as a roving ambassador on two journeys. The first took him across the Sahara to Songhay and Borno, and eventually to Cairo. The second led across the Mediterranean through Tunis to Istanbul, and to Cairo once again, before his capture at sea on the return voyage. It is an account that portrays a typical man of his class at Fes, and positions his travels in the context of contemporary events, including the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt. Once in Rome, it is a question of his imprisonment, his baptism under the name of Giovanni Leone (henceforth in Davis's text Yuhanna al-Asad), his patrons and acquaintances, known or surmised, his commissions and compositions, his travels around Italy, and his private life. As to how he began to write in foreign languages, his collaboration with the Jewish Jacob Mantino on an Arabic–Hebrew–Latin dictionary recalls previous exercises in translation, notably at Toledo and Norman Sicily, or for the treaties between Venice and Florence and the Mamluks. When it comes to Leo's Geography, Davis is able to show the limited extent to which Ramusio, its publisher, modified the original, even if we are not quite sure what that original may have been in its final recension. If that ghost has been laid, the questions begged by what the author actually wrote remain: how much did he remember of his experiences and his literary sources; how much of his information is accurate, how much mistaken, and how much was calculated to mislead.

A relevant comparison, which Davis does not make despite citing him, is with a fellow citizen of Fes, the historian al-Maqqari. A hundred years after Leo, al-Maqqari composed his Sweet smell of the tender bough of al-Andalus, an encyclopaedic lament for the glories of Muslim Spain, in the form of a vast anthology of its literature. He said that he had abandoned the original in Fes when he fled to Cairo to escape troubles there, but that he was persuaded to recompose and enlarge it extensively from memory by his hosts in Damascus. This amazing feat, running to thousands of pages, generally stood up to the criticism of Reinhard Dozy as a tribute to the power of a trained memory. With the same training, Leo himself may not have been in the same class, but must nevertheless be credited with the range of reference on which Davis builds her case. The difference is that, while al-Maqqari was writing for a sympathetic Muslim audience to extol the civilization of al-Andalus, and conceivably to justify a war of revenge against Spain, Leo was writing for the enemy. Davis accordingly takes the view that, while professing to tell the truth about Africa, ‘warts and all’, he employed a fable, common to the Arabic tradition and to Aesop, of a creature, in his case a seabird, that evaded any obligation, and escaped from any danger, by pretending to be two quite different animals on different occasions, explicitly to avoid identification with anything that he might write. Leo, wrestling with the linguistic problem of translation into a second language and the diplomatic problem of ‘economy with the truth’, had recourse to dissimulation on good authority from either side of the religious divide. In Italy, Machiavelli and Castiglione were advocates of the ‘smiling villain’ approach to politics. In Islam, the ancient Shi'ite doctrine of taqiyya (concealment of one's faith) had been revived to accommodate Muslims of al-Andalus who had been obliged to accept baptism. This reading gives Davis her arresting title of Trickster Travels.

Her reading is the more plausible in view of Leo's own expressed determination to return to Africa. It is developed by consideration of a number of topics raised by the Geography. In the chapter ‘Conceiving Africa’, Leo is shown to follow the Ptolemaic style of Arab geographers and historians down to Ibn Khaldun, dividing the lands he had visited into parallel bands of climate and race. These are nevertheless subsumed under the heading of Africa, a new name for a new continent, still conceived in the ancient Greek manner as ending in the east at the Nile, and lacking the southern dimension revealed by the Portuguese discoveries. A mixture of approval and disapproval of peoples and places is set against the familiar stereotypes of races descended from the sons of Noah. In the circumstances, however, Leo's great achievement was to depict a real interior of the continent for the benefit of his Italian audience, while keeping it, thinks Davis, for Islam, by refusing to take into account the new knowledge of its coast. Partisanship is nevertheless muted. The chapter ‘Between Islam and Christianity’ portrays him as a representative of the jurists of Fes, frowning upon Mahdist millenarianism, holy war, and al-Maghili's fanatical persecution of the Jews, much in the manner of Ibn Khaldun. By extension, he becomes a mourner for the human and physical costs of the conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Mediterranean, diplomatically eschewing the indignation voiced by al-Maqqari a century later at the fate of Muslim Spain. The emphasis is on the need for the law of Islam to moderate excess within the community of the faithful, following a long strand of juridical opinion in favour of accommodation with other faiths. There is a great deal of Ibn Khaldun in this, but the authority that Davis finds in Leo's writings is that of al-Ghazali, the theologian of many ways upon a single path.

Such a position is of a piece with the curiosity that Davis finds in a third chapter, ‘Curiosity and connections’. Curiosity towards Christianity and Judaism underlay Leo's conversion and helped, presumably, to explain the element of trickery. The ‘connections’ in this chapter turn out to be erotic, consisting of speculation on his sex life from his references to women and homosexuality, in the context of Mediterranean sexual mores. The nearest thing to demonstration is the appearance in a census of 1527 of one Joannes Leo living with a wife (?) and child (?). While women may define cultural differences, and hence social exclusiveness, sexual encounters are, in Davis's words, a well-known channel for cultural crossings. What a pity, thinks Davis in conclusion, that Rabelais did not arrive in Rome in time to meet with Leo, and open him up to a general and irreverent celebration of humanity.

In her encounter with Leo, Davis has certainly opened up his times, if not necessarily his life. Having constructed a sympathetic portrait of a trickster in a tricky position, she has sought answers to the questions of today by raising them for the sixteenth century, entirely legitimately, from the record of her subject. The problems of intercultural, interfaith, and international relationships, and of race, colour, and gender, are discussed from the agreeable point of view of a man who had become aware of many sides to these questions. In this, she is the latest contributor to a revisionist approach to Leo, barely twenty years old, which seeks to substitute a holistic appreciation of the man and his work for a detailed concern with the accuracy of his reports. It is a little ironic that Davis herself is concerned with his truthfulness. Even allowing for his trickery, she finds it hard to explain the occasional condemnations of Islam and its Prophet, which are not to be passed off as embellishments by Ramusio. As for her own occasional arguments from silence, they remain just that. Trickster Travels cannot be read as an account of the way in which the Geography transformed European knowledge of the interior of Africa, and it stops short of evaluating the contribution of Leo's oeuvre to the development of Arabic and Islamic scholarship in western Europe. But, as a plausible fiction, like any good biography, it brings to life, if not quite the man himself, then the age in which he lived. It is a thought-provoking read on the subject of the frères ennemis, whose conflicts in the sixteenth century framed their life together within the confines of their Mediterranean homeland.