Johannes Leo Africanus (born al-Hasan Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, Arabic: الحسن محمد الوزان الفاسي; c. 1494 – c. 1554) was an Andalusi diplomat and author who is best known for his 1526 book Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Descrittione dell'Africa (Description of Africa) in 1550, centered on the geography of the Maghreb and Nile Valley.

In 1517 when returning from a diplomatic mission to Constantinople on behalf of the Sultan of Fez Muhammad II he found himself in the port of Rosetta during the Ottoman conquest of Egypt.

The usual fate of unransomed Muslim captives was slavery in Christian galleys, but when his captors realized his intelligence and importance, he was moved to the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome and presented to Pope Leo X.

[3] It is likely that Leo Africanus was welcomed to the papal court as the Pope feared that Turkish forces might invade Sicily and southern Italy, and a willing collaborator could provide useful information on North Africa.

This was based on records by German orientalist Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter, who arrived in Italy and planned (but ultimately failed) to travel to Tunis to meet Leo who had since reconverted to Islam.

[citation needed] It is doubtful whether he visited Hausaland and Bornu and it is even possible that he never crossed the Sahara but relied on information from other travellers that he met in Morocco.

[8][citation needed] The historian Pekka Masonen has argued that the belief of his further travels was based on misreadings by modern scholars who interpreted his book as an itinerary.

At the time of Leo's journey there, it was the centre of a busy trade carried on by traders in African products, gold, printed cottons, slaves and in Islamic books.

[3] In an autograph in one of his surviving manuscripts, a fragment of an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin medical vocabulary he wrote for the Jewish physician Jacob Mantino, he signed his name in Arabic as Yuhanna al-Asad al-Gharnati (literally means John the Lion of Granada), a translation of his Christian name, John-Leo, or Johannes Leo (Latin), or Giovanni Leone (Italian).

[3] Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Description of Africa in 1550, is Leo's most famous work.

Unlike Description of Africa, this biographical work was hardly noticed in Europe; the book contains various erroneous information, likely due to his lack of sources when he was in Italy, forcing him to rely on memory.

[citation needed] It has been suggested that William Shakespeare may have drawn on Leo Africanus' book when preparing to write Othello.