Leo Africanus languages spoken, written or signed Arabic
Works
Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Description of Africa in 1550, is Leo's most famous work. He wrote an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin medical vocabulary for the Jewish physician Jacob Mantino. He also wrote an Arabic translation of the Epistles of St. Paul, which is dated in January 1521; the manuscript belongs to the Biblioteca Estense in Modena. Another surviving work is a biographical encyclopedia of 25 major Islamic scholars and 5 major Jewish scholars which was completed in Rome before he left the city in 1527 and published for the first time in Latin by Johann Heinrich Hottinger in 1664. 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. In Description of Africa, he referred to plans to write other books. He planned two descriptions of places, one for the Middle East and another for Europe. He also planned to write an exposition of the Islamic faith and a history of North Africa. None of these books survived nor has there been any proof that he completed them, which might have been due to his possible return to North Africa.
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