If you’ve ever Googled “how to avoid scams in [destination],” you already know the genre: YouTube videos breathlessly (and ominously) exposing the 15 tricks that will ruin your trip to Florence, Bangkok, or Marrakech. Full disclosure: We watch them too. But the historically minded traveler will be quick to note that almost none of these scams are new.

Structurally, the “hey, did you lose your wallet” scam is identical to cons recorded in Chinese travel literature over 400 years ago. The “helpful stranger” who leads you to his friend’s shop? A porter scam from 1617. Fake antiquities? Egyptian villagers were running that play on European collectors since the days of Napoleon.

In this episode, we trace the world’s most common travel scams back to their historical origins across three centuries and three continents, and then embarrass ourselves by sharing the ones we’ve fallen for personally or that have happened to people on our trips we’re supposed to be protecting.

From that point on, he carved out his own destiny in a way that almost none in a similar situation before him had managed. Not only did he become one of the most widely travelled individuals of the 18^th century, but also a one-man publishing powerhouse.

Join us as we tell the incredible story of Olaudah Equiano – Royal Navy veteran, entrepreneur, merchant, hairdresser – and the spark that lit the flame under the British abolitionist movement.

In his lifetime, he set foot in countries ranging from Canada and America to Barbados, Portugal, France, Turkey, Nicaragua and Italy. He even sailed to the Arctic as a lab assistant on the same expedition as a young Horatio Nelson. But it was his memoir – The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African – that turned him into a global sensation in his own right, and led to real, lasting change.

This episode traces Equiano’s life from a childhood in what is now Nigeria, through the Middle Passage and the Caribbean sugar trade, to freedom, marriage, and a self-published book that made him one of the wealthiest Black Britons of his century.

We ask whether Equiano was really born in Africa, discuss what freedom actually meant for a free Black man in the Atlantic world, and delve into the perils of life on the ocean in the 1700s. Plus: a walking tour of Equiano’s London, and the Black Georgian community he called home.

Topics: Black British History, Olaudah Equiano, Gustavus Vassa, Horatio Nelson, Transatlantic slave trade, Sons of Africa, Seven Years’ War, Northeast Passage, abolitionist movement, 18th-century travel writing.

In the clip above – exclusively for paid subscribers to the By Their Own Compass Club – Sarah and Jeremiah discuss what happened to Nellie after the around-the-world trip, Nellie’s legacy as a journalist, and her surprising second act. As always, we have Sarah’s travel notes and tips for following (at least part) of Nellie’s incredible journey.

Read more

Sure enough, her record-breaking attempt for newspaper The New York World was a smash hit, and had its readers clamouring for updates day after day, collectively wondering: Where in the world is Nellie Bly?

She raced by steamship and rail through England and France – including a detour to Amiens to meet Jules Verne himself – Italy, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, acquired a spectacularly ill-behaved monkey en route (why is there always a monkey!?), and then embarked on a final dash across America by train to the finish line.

What she didn’t know for most of her trip is that a rival newspaper had decided to pit another woman, Elisabeth Bisland, against her. So how did Nellie Bly travel around the entire world in just 72 days before the era of air travel? Who was this fearless woman, who wrote that if she failed she could never return to New York (“I would rather go in dead and successful than alive and behind.”) And what did she do with her newfound fame on her return?

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we explore the extraordinary life of Nellie Bly, the pioneering reporter who transformed investigative journalism, became one of the world’s first celebrity correspondents, smashed Phileas Fogg’s fictional record, and went on to become an inventor, industrialist and one of the most remarkable women of the Gilded age.

Topics: Nellie Bly, investigative journalism, undercover reporting, Ten Days in a Mad-House, Blackwell’s Island Asylum, Around the World in 72 Days, Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne, Phileas Fogg, Elisabeth Bisland, Joseph Pulitzer, New York World, Victorian travel, Gilded Age America, women in journalism, women's history, newspaper history, circumnavigation, record-breaking journeys, solo female travel, travel history.

Follow By Their Own Compass on Instagram!

https://www.instagram.com/bytheirowncompass/

On the subject of throwing away a perfectly good lead, in our latest episode, we revisited the mother of all World Cup disappointments: 1966, when North Korea – yes, North Korea – went 3-0 up against Portugal in the quarter-finals and dared to dream, only to blow it in the second half. All of this much to the dismay of their new biggest fans, the English.

Still, at least the North Korean team had an excuse. As we learned in the episode, their tactical masterplan came directly from portly dictator Kim Il Sung, whose directive was simply to “run fast and kick hard”. Advice which, having watched England’s semi-final, is clearly no longer the least sophisticated game plan in World Cup history.

But it’s ok! Not bitter in defeat, Sarah has worked hard to secure our lovely paid subscribers a special treat for this week’s football-themed mailout: free access to the documentary The Game of Their Lives. It’s thanks to the film’s director, Dan Gordon, and Koryo Tours’ founder, Nicholas Bonner, that we know anything about the North Korean players after they returned home to the DPRK in 1966, so it’s a wonderful watch.

Follow the directions below to claim your free film, and scroll down for Nick Bonner’s first-hand account of how the documentary – and the DPRK team’s heartwarming 2013 return to England – came about.

Read more

This is the story of North Korea at the 1966 World Cup – and one of the biggest upsets in footballing history.

Not only did this diminutive, 22-man team knock out mighty Italy – one of the favourites to win the whole thing – but in the quarter-final against Portugal, barely 25 minutes in, they were 3-0 up and within touching distance of the semis. So what went wrong?

In this episode, Jeremiah and Sarah invite DPRK expert Simon Cockerell to explain just how the hell Cold War era North Korea qualified for the World Cup in the first place, and to give us the inside story on what happened to the team after they returned home.

Not only has Simon been to the secretive country 183 times as General Manager of Koryo Tours, but he knows the players personally, having helped organise a 2002 return visit for them to the site of their iconic victory against Italy.

Was their entire game plan really based on advice from Kim Il Sung to “run fast and kick hard”? Were the players imprisoned on their return home? And did an Italian chef really try to poison striker Pak Doo-ik in revenge for his country’s most humiliating defeat?

Plus: Sarah and Jeremiah discuss their favourite moments from their own trips to North Korea and ask whether you can still visit in 2026, before finishing on the Middlesbrough housing estate where, on the site of the old Ayresome Park pitch, a bronze cast still marks the exact spot of Pak Doo-ik’s winning goal.

A story of pride, determination, and one of the unlikeliest runs in football history – eat your heart out, Cape Verde 🫶

Watch the Game of Their Lives

The documentary is available to buy or rent on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thegameoftheirlives

Check out all the great work that Koryo Tour does on their website here: https://koryogroup.com/

Topics: 1966 World Cup, DPRK history, Pak Doo-ik, North Korea vs Italy, Middlesbrough, Ayresome Park, Cold War history, Kim Il Sung, Chollima, North Korea travel, Koryo Tours, Simon Cockerell, The Game of Their Lives documentary, Swinging Sixties Britain, football's greatest upsets, Eusébio, Teesside history, sports diplomacy, World Cup underdogs, Cape Verde 2026

I have, in fact, stood on the corner of Winslow, Arizona. About 25 years ago, my Dad and I were cruising across the American Southwest, including stretches of the by-then defunct Route 66, and despite driving the most cumbersome vehicle imaginable (a U-Haul rental box truck), he graciously agreed to make a pit stop so that I could live out a fantasy immortalised by a band that I don’t really like all that much. Such is the power of Americana. Today, that same corner features a bronze statue (with a second, honouring the late Glenn Frey, added in 2016) and a ‘flatbed Ford’ parked conveniently nearby to complete the scene.

Read more

But what made this particular route so legendary? Covering almost 2,500 miles, Route 66 passed through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Depression-era migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl used the Mother Road to head west; a famous footrace on the route, known as the Bunion Derby, captured the public imagination; then a Nat King Cole song and a television show cemented its place in the American psyche once and for all.

As author Michael Wallis says, “Route 66 is Woody Guthrie and Mickey Mantle and Jack Kerouac. It’s thousands of waitresses, service station attendants, fry cooks, truckers, grease monkeys, hustlers, state cops, wrecker drivers, and motel clerks”.

But who was the road really for – and who did it leave out?

A large stretch of it also sold a decidedly manufactured Southwest – “Native American” wigwam hotels; cafés built in the shape of a giant sombrero. Roadside “trading posts” and “snake pits” promising a brush with a Wild West more imagined than real.

Meanwhile, Black travellers were forced to consult The Green Book just to stay safe on the very same route – a compendium of the diners, hotels and gas stations that would actually serve them at a time when segregation and sundown towns made a simple road trip genuinely dangerous.

Then, in 1956 the Interstate Highway Act slowly kills the road. Towns were bypassed in the interest of speed, and businesses die. But in 2026, the myths (and the wigwam hotels) are as alive as ever.

In this episode, we dive into the romance, the reality, the open road, and everything it leaves unsaid. Plus, we unpack in detail how to do the trip yourself, which car to drive, and why this centennial year might just be the perfect moment to go.

Topics: Route 66 centennial, US highway history, Dust Bowl migration, Jack Kerouac, On The Road, Beat Generation, John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, Nat King Cole, Green Book, Black travel history, racial segregation, Native American representation, Chicano culture, American exceptionalism, Chicago to Santa Monica, Southwest USA travel, Interstate Highway Act.

Follow By Their Own Compass on Instagram!

📸 Instagram: By Their Own Compass

• Research notes on eunuchs, giraffes, elephants, and the most savage book review you’ll read this week

• A reading list to learn more about Zheng He, eunuchs, and the importance of the Indian Ocean in world history

• Sarah’s modern travel notes and links for following Zheng He across the oceans

• Full Episode Transcript

Research Notes

It seems every episode results in a pile of notes on Jeremiah's desk that, through no fault of their own, failed to make the cut for the episode. Zheng He’s voyages are an epochal world event that spanned many decades and have left a legacy that remains hotly contested. But we also believe that telling a good story shouldn’t take longer than the tube ride from Epping to Oxford Circus or the 7 train from Flushing to Grand Central.

The eunuch problem (and the historian problem)

There was a lot more we could have discussed regarding eunuchs. In the podcast, we argued that while everybody seems fascinated by the institution and its role in Chinese history, the eunuchs themselves have had a rough go of it in the sources, and the historians who have long taken those sources at face value. Nearly everything we know about eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty was written by bureaucrats who saw the eunuchs as rivals for the emperor’s ear, and the idea that “Men of Learning” might be getting their advice shoved aside in favour of the dude who changed the emperor’s diapers two decades ago did not sit well with the bureaucracy. Trusting the official records for an even-handed account of eunuchs in the Ming and Qing era is a bit like writing a biography of Zlatan based entirely on Pep’s diary.

Read more

Born into a Muslim family and orphaned at a young age, Zheng He was castrated around the age of 10 and forced to work as a servant for Ming Dynasty prince Zhu Di. But this young eunuch soon outgrew his role – literally and figuratively – and when his master became the emperor, found himself entrusted with an imperial expedition that would turn him into one of history’s greatest travellers.

So great, in fact, that some – including 1421 author Gavin Menzies – believe that China discovered America before Columbus.

Across seven voyages spanning around 30 years, Zheng sailed south and west to Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, and the east coast of Africa. He captured a Sri Lankan king, saw off the most feared pirate in the Strait of Malacca, and collected exotic animals to present to the Yongle emperor, from giraffes and ostriches to zebras.

So, did this roving eunuch ambassador really reach America first? And why, when the fleet was so impressive, did it suddenly just… disappear?

What would have happened if Zheng He, his hundreds of enormous boats and tens of thousands of crewmen had reached European shores? What if he’d continued to be an imposing presence? Might Europe’s destructive colonial expeditions in Asia never have happened?

Join Sarah and Jeremiah as they separate fact from fiction, discuss what an alternative history might have looked like, and follow in Zheng He’s footsteps today in Java, Indonesia, Malacca in Malaysia, and Galle in Sri Lanka.

Topics: Zheng He, Chinese treasure fleet, Ming Dynasty, eunuch admiral, Age of Exploration, maritime history, Indian Ocean trade, Strait of Malacca, did China discover America, 1421 Gavin Menzies, Christopher Columbus, Yongle Emperor, piracy, Sri Lanka history, Malacca, Malaysia, Java, Indonesia, Sam Po Kong temple, Southeast Asia travel

British travel writer and podcaster Jamie Fullerton has spent his career documenting communities and places that the average guidebook doesn’t cover – from the Dance of the Little Devils ritual in Boruca, Costa Rica, to overnight hikes on Guatemala’s Fuego Volcano and obscure bagpipe festivals in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria.

His work bears witness to traditions in the midst of being revived, and cultures at risk of dying out – often asking what effect tourism has on local communities caught somewhere between preservation and exploitation.

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, Jamie discusses his new podcast series, Keep Going: An Unexpected Travel Podcast, and the controversial trips that tourists make in Central America and elsewhere that do little for the local people they’re meant to help or celebrate.

Sarah and Jamie examine cases ranging from Mexico’s Tren Maya railway displacing indigenous communities, to volcano guides risking their lives for tourist dollars, and ask whether the modern traveller is part of the problem.

How do you know whether your presence in a foreign country is benefitting the community? Should we all travel with a journalist’s curiosity to ensure we’re doing less harm than good? And is the act of being a travel writer part of the problem – or is there an insidious new force in the content ecosystem causing even greater damage?

Sarah also quizzes Jamie Fullerton on his writing inspirations, the most dramatic hike he’s ever done, and why a visit to an Albanian film archive changed his view of how we record – and preserve – history.

Topics: ethical travel, responsible tourism, indigenous communities, overtourism, vanishing cultures, Central America travel, Guatemala volcano hiking, Costa Rica traditions, Mexico Tren Maya, travel writing, Keep Going podcast, Jamie Fullerton

Follow By Their Own Compass:

📩 Substack: https://bytheirowncompass.substack.com/

📸 Instagram:

Listen to By Keep Going: An Unexpected Travel Podcast:

Keep Going: An Unexpected Travel Podcast: https://linktr.ee/keepgoingtravelpodcast

Jamie Fullerton on Instagram: @jamie_w_fullerton

Let’s stay with that image for a second, but imbue it with a more pleasing idea: Spanish tapas. Sarah recently returned from a short trip to Cadaqués – a location which elicited one response every time she mentioned it: “Sorry where? In Spain? Never heard of it.”

Which is fair enough given its size (population: 2,900) and relative obscurity compared to nearby Barcelona. However, what Cadaqués lacks in outrageously underperforming church construction projects, it makes up for in sheer beauty – and when it comes to zany artists, essentially told the Catalan capital: “Hold my cerveza”.

That’s because Cadaqués was home to Salvador Dali for over 40 years, inspired almost all of his work, and remains the part of the world most associated with him. Born in nearby Figueres, he moved to the tiny village of Portlligat (technically adjacent to Cadaqués) in the 1930s, and began doing up a fisherman’s hut there, gradually adding and expanding rooms until it became the rather grand house it is today.

Knowing full well what Dali’s driving aesthetic was, you may or may not be able to imagine the home he created. It might best be described as a feast for the senses – except one made up of those dead quails you see people eating in period dramas.

It’s all deeply unsettling in a “fascist folly” kind of a way. In fact, it reminded your correspondent of a sort of seaside Eagle’s Nest – if Hitler had been replaced by a man with an even more eccentric moustache who was frightened of grasshoppers rather than dentists.

Let’s just say it’s giving “thanks, but no thanks”.

Much more pleasing is the museum dedicated to him in Figueres, about an hour’s winding drive over the foothills of the Pyrenees – the mountains responsible for keeping Cadaqués secluded for so long (and Sarah reaching for a sick bag).

Housed in a former municipal theatre that spent 35 years as a bombed-out ruin after the Spanish Civil War, today it is a tourist-ridden physical embodiment of Dalí's audacity.

In the 1960s, when the mayor of Figueres asked old Sally D if he’d donate one of his artworks to the town’s local museum, the artist was offended by his lack of ambition. In a move that puts even Donald Trump’s self-aggrandising to shame, he essentially said “why display a single artwork when you could build an entire museum dedicated to me while I’m still alive?”. And if you think that’s an exaggeration, here’s the exact quote: “In this museum you will not only find most of my work, but also the entirety of my genius.”

However, in addition to the surrealist clocks and creepy faded mannequins you’d expect in a venue dedicated to Dali’s eccentricities, you’ll also find floor after floor of wonderful paintings and sketches so varied in style and so technically perfect that honestly, you can’t fail to be deeply impressed.**

Sarah’s top tips for Cadaqués

An excellent place to stay is Hotel Blaumar in the Bay of Cadaques, a gorgeous and reasonably priced boutique outfit that echoes the aesthetic of the surrounding fishing village and throws in a dash of modern surrealist art (naturally). The same company also runs the more high-end Villa Salvador. It’s further from the action but perfect if you want secluded sandy beach access.

For dinner, grab a table at Restaurant Es Baluard for upscale paella, or El Viatge for Catalan tapas with a global twist overlooking the bay. Oh, and if you can visit JOIA just once during your visit, please tell us how you did it. This creative gelateria has so many wonderful flavours (Catalan black truffle, candied ginger) it’s impossible not to want to try them all.

In addition to Salvador Dali’s home and museum (remember to book both several days in advance), a hike along the Cap de Creus peninsula is a must, as is a visit to the medieval town of Besalu on the way back to Barcelona airport. It’s worth visiting just to stand on the 12th-century Romanesque bridge over the pretty Fluvià river.

On this day in 1804

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson – presumably schlepping about in Monticello in his comfy corduroy breeches – took one look at his recent impulse purchase (828,000-square-miles of land) and decided it was probably best if “someone else” went to find out what it contained.

On May 14, 1804, his Corps of Discovery – originally comprised of 45 men – set off from Camp Dubois in Illinois to begin their ascent of the Missouri River. It was the start of an epic, 8,000-mile expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that would go down as one of the greatest overland journeys in history.

But as we all know, behind every great man (or in this case, group of men) is a woman quietly holding the entire thing together without proper pay. Enter Sacagawea – a teenage kidnap victim from the Shoshone tribe whose legacy and input have been debated for generations.

If you haven’t already, make sure you go back and listen to our episode on her, in which we attempt to debunk some of the myths and examine her role as a voyager and cultural pioneer navigating between two radically different worlds.

And if you’re as into this subject as we are, you may also want to check out the excellent new book by Craig Fehrman, This Vast Enterprise. Unlike other authors who have penned one-directional tomes on the expedition, Fehrman writes each chapter from the point of view of a different person involved in the story, including previously overlooked individuals such as York, an enslaved African American, and Black Buffalo, a Lakota leader who controlled trade along much of the Missouri.

Happily, our gal Sacagawea gets two dedicated chapters, described by the New York Times’ Andrea Wulf as highly illuminating: “She emerges as a strong and courageous teenager who, despite her tragic past – kidnapped by the Hidatsa at the age of 12 and bought by a brutal French Canadian trader to be his ‘wife’ – exerted agency and played a vital role in the journey’s success.”

Play it again, Em

Finally, this week we’re re-releasing our Emily Hahn episode, which remains one of our favourites. If you’re new to our podcast or mailouts, there may be a few eps in our back catalogue you’ve missed. So while Jeremiah slogs away at his book and Sarah prepares for this year’s Podcast Show in London, we’ve decided to push this one back to the top of your feed for a second take.

Few people have been more overlooked than Emily “Mickey” Hahn – a staff writer for The New Yorker for 60 years, opium addict, keeper of pet gibbons, and one of the most prolific travel writers of the 20th century.

She partied with poets and posed nude for property magnates in 1930s China, and stayed in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation when everyone else left. She wrote biographies while dodging bombs in wartime Chongqing, and she did her best to keep herself and her family alive in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. What’s more, she pioneered the dry and direct first-person style later made famous by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion.

In short, she’s an absolute hoot, and we loved spending time with her for this episode.

Give it a listen here.

That’s all from your correspondents, who remain committed to exploring history whilst the present remains, frankly, a bit much.

Adiós, amigos.

**While still acknowledging that Dalí was so clearly a terrible human being.

Meet Emily “Mickey” Hahn, a writer, an adventurer, and a professional rule-breaker whose wanderlust took her from the American Midwest to Europe and Africa, and finally to China, all before she turned 30.

By the time she got to China, she had already established herself as an up-and-coming literary voice and one of the New Yorker’s earliest star writers. In her career, she published 54 books and over 200 articles, but her most famous book is China to Me, a memoir of the years that we’re going to talk about in this episode.

She partied with poets (and her pet gibbon) at Shanghai soirees. Wrote biographies while dodging bombs in wartime Chongqing, and did her best to keep herself and her family alive in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. Along the way, she became famous (some might add “notorious”) for her affairs, including with Chinese writer Sinmay Zau (Shao Xunmei 邵洵美) and the head of British intelligence in Hong Kong, Charles Boxer.

Mickey lived through some of China’s most tumultuous moments. While many foreigners experienced these events, Mickey gave her readers an unvarnished look at what was happening, with a style all her own.

We’ll explore Mickey’s life, travels, and adventures, and we’ll also discuss how to follow in her footsteps today through the modern cities of Chongqing, Hong Kong, and especially Shanghai.

In diplomatic history, some missions don’t always go off with a bang, but with a cringe. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the US Navy attacked Guam and waited for return fire that never came. Turns out the Spanish-run island had no idea they were enemies and sent an army officer and port commander out in a rowboat to go say a cheerful hello instead. In 1715, Louis XIV donned his finest diamond encrusted outfit to welcome a Persian “ambassador” in his spectacular Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles only to be told his translator was no good; and in 1870, Chinese diplomat Chonghou went all the way to France to say sorry for the murder of some nuns during the Tianjin Massacre, only to wait around for a year to find someone to apologize to.

In this episode, Jeremiah and Sarah take turns to tell the stories of three of history’s most embarrassing diplomatic incidents and attempt to put themselves in the shoes of those who were there. Jeremiah balks at Sarah’s lack of Beatles song recognition, and Sarah reveals her favourite modern diplomatic fail: when Emmanuel Macron surprised Donald Trump with a Daft Punk medley performed by the Garde Républicaine.

• Mailbag: 147 of 189 killed at the Last Stand of the Swiss Guard

• Musical tribute to Leo Africanus

• Full Transcript to last week’s episode

It’s an off week for us here at By Their Own Compass HQ, but we’re still thinking about our most recent episode about Leo Africanus. Which for us means research, cleaning the kettle, and parody songs. We started by asking: What would Leo Africanus say about his fellow traveler (and fellow member of the “I got published by Ramusio” Club), Marco Polo?

So we sat down, wrote lyrics, and got a little help with the music. This is just a teaser. Full song and lyrics are below. Be sure you check it out before you go.

As a special treat, and because we rather like the song, we’re making this edition available to everyone.

Mailbag: Last Stand of the Swiss Guard

Before we get to that, we’ve got something from the mailbag about the Last Stand of the Swiss Guard. A listener wrote in asking why we said 189 Swiss Guards died defending the Pope during the Sack of Rome, when other sources give the number as 147. Fair question, and the answer is: both numbers are right, depending on what you’re counting.

On the morning of May 6th, 1527, there were 189 Swiss Guards in Rome. When the mercenaries broke through, the Guard split. Forty-two men, under Lieutenant Herkules Göldli of Zurich, hustled Pope Clement VII through the Passetto di Borgo to the Castel Sant’Angelo. The other 147 stayed behind on St. Peter’s Square to hold the line against an army of 20,000. They were killed to the last man.

That’s the 147 figure. It’s the one engraved on the Guard’s institutional memory: the rearguard that bought the Pope his escape. But the forty-two who made it to the Castel weren’t exactly out of the woods. The siege of Castel Sant’Angelo dragged on for months, and by the time it was over, all forty-two of them were dead too. The Swiss Guard as a unit was effectively wiped out. It had to be rebuilt from scratch by Clement’s successor, Pope Paul III, in 1548.

So 147 died in the initial stand. 189 died before the whole thing was finished. We went with 189 because it’s the full count of men who walked into May 6th wearing the uniform and didn’t walk out. But if you want to honor the rearguard specifically, 147 is the number you want. Either way, they still swear in the new recruits every May 6th.

Song: Africanus (Marco Who? Remix)

Another week. Another parody song. (One which also namechecks The Last Stand of the Swiss Guard). Enjoy.

Episode Transcript

Leo Africanus: Pirates, Popes, and the Moor Who Knew Too Much

Jeremiah: It’s the morning of May 6th, 1527. Twenty thousand soldiers are massed outside the walls of Rome. They are hungry, unpaid, and mutinous. Their commander lost control of them weeks ago. They are Catholic Spaniards, Lutheran Germans, Italian mercenaries. They were supposed to threaten Rome, not sack it, but nobody is taking orders anymore, and Rome is right there for the taking.

The walls are breached by mid-morning. Pope Clement VII is in the Vatican. He’s protected by 189 elite mercenaries, the Swiss Guard. All will die defending the Holy Father, but their sacrifice gives the Pope enough time to reach the relative safety of the fortress, Castel Sant’Angelo. For months after, Rome tears itself apart. The Pope is a virtual prisoner in Castel Sant’Angelo, helpless as soldiers loot churches, ransack libraries, and stable horses in St. Peter’s.

But somewhere in the city is a man who knows a bit about what the Pope is feeling. He’s a Muslim from Fez, captured by pirates on the Mediterranean, delivered to the previous Pope as an object, bartered for a crusader’s soul, and once kept prisoner in the same Castel where Pope Clement now waits to see what will become of Rome.

No scholar or sojourner wants to be caught in the middle of someone else’s war. But this man has been waiting nine years for just such an opportunity. The chaos of a dying city is a door left open. The people who kept track of him, the patrons who valued his knowledge, the churchmen that claimed his soul — they’re hiding in a fortress, running for their lives, or likely dead. Nobody is watching. So he disappears. He gets out of Rome. But whether he could ever truly go home again, well, that’s the story we’re going to tell right now.

Sarah: Welcome to By Their Own Compass. I’m Sarah Keenlyside, journalist and lifelong traveller.

Jeremiah: And I’m historian and writer, Jeremiah Jenne.

Sarah: Together, we dive into the remarkable lives of those who crossed borders, bridged cultures, and made the connections that built our world.

Jeremiah: It’s about the journey and the destination. After all, one person’s frontier is another person’s front door.

Sarah: And today we’re telling the story of a book that shaped how Europeans understood an entire continent for 300 years. The book was called The Description of Africa, published in Venice in 1550, and its author was identified on the title page as Giovanni Leone Africanus, the African.

Jeremiah: His publisher, a Venetian editor named Giovanni Battista Ramusio, assured readers this was the work of an actual African. But the man who wrote it wasn’t born with the name Africanus, nor was he born in Africa. For most of his life, he’d been called Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad Al-Wazan. And while he grew up in Morocco, he was born in Granada, Spain, around 1488. He traveled widely in his job as a roving ambassador for a Sultan. He served one of the most powerful men in the world. And when he got a chance, he recorded what he saw in an influential book published years later.

Sarah: Now, if any of that sounds a bit like our Marco Polo episode, then it should, because both men are famous for a single book and both books were shaped by someone other than the author. Both have been picked apart by scholars asking how much the writer actually saw and how much he borrowed from other sources. And both men ended up producing the text that defined European understanding of a place for centuries. With Marco Polo, it was China. With our subject today, it was Africa.

Jeremiah: The man we’re talking about today wrote his book as a captive turned convert living on a papal pension in a city that was curious about him, but also somewhat hostile to everything he’d been raised to believe.

Sarah: Now, over the course of his life, this man went by many names: Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad Al-Wazan, Giovanni Leone, Yuhanna al-Asad, which is Arabic for John the Lion, and Leo Africanus, the Latinized version that stuck. So we’re going to call him Leo Africanus in this episode because that’s the name most people will find if they go looking for him.

Jeremiah: Our primary guide through his life is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, whose book Trickster Travels is the most thorough reconstruction of who this man was, what he was doing, and the book he wrote, The Cosmography and Geography of Africa. A new English translation, the first new one in over 400 years, is available from Penguin Classics.

Sarah: And as always, at the end of the episode, we’ll discuss how you can follow in the footsteps of Leo Africanus today.

Jeremiah: In 1492, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella conquer Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. The fall of Granada ends seven centuries of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula, and it sets a lot of people on the road. Among them, a family called Al-Wazan, who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with a young son and resettled in Fez, Morocco.

The boy is Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad Al-Wazan, our Leo Africanus. He’s only five years old when the family moves to Fez, and he would not remember much of Granada. He is a child of North Africa, and Fez is the city that raises him. One of the great cities of the Islamic world, Fez is home to the University of Al-Qarawiyyin, founded in the ninth century before Oxford or Bologna existed.

Al-Wazan, our Leo Africanus, studies grammar, rhetoric, law, and theology at the madrasas there. He works for two years as a notary at a hospital for sick travelers, earning money to supplement his scholarship. He is being trained, in other words, as a man of learning and of practical affairs. His uncle is a diplomat in the service of the Sultan of Fez, and Leo Africanus follows him into the profession, first accompanying his uncle and then going on his own. On one early trip, during what he calls his unbridled youth, he tries to ride a desert ram belonging to a Berber herdsman and manages to stay on the animal for a full quarter of a mile.

Commerce and diplomacy often overlap. So he travels with merchant caravans of Muslims and Jews, and everywhere he goes he has a sharp eye for markets, goods, and prices. For example, he stays three days at a salt mine in the Sahara just to watch how the salt was loaded for transport to Timbuktu.

This job requires a special kind of emotional intelligence. A diplomat serving the Sultan of Fez might find himself before a half dozen different rulers in a single year. Everybody has their own protocols. Leo Africanus learns them all. A kiss of the hand for an Atlas chieftain. A kiss on the ground beneath the feet of the Sultan of Fez. Three deep bows and kissing the floor before the rug of the Mamluk Sultan in Cairo. Each gesture signals that he understands where he is and who holds the power in the room. He is a professional reader of royal mood swings, and by all evidence, a good one.

And being a roving ambassador at this time meant racking up some serious miles and oasis points. By caravan, he goes across the Sahara to Timbuktu and Gao, where he meets the Songhai Emperor Askia Muhammad. He rides a horse from Fez to the Berber kingdoms of Tlemcen and Tunis. He watches the Mamluk dynasty fall to the Ottoman Sultan Selim in Cairo in 1517. He takes to the oceans, sailing the Red Sea to Arabia, where he makes the Hajj, and then on to the Ottoman court at Istanbul.

This man gets around, and wherever he goes, he asks questions. He is a sponge for learning. He copies tomb inscriptions in cemeteries, visits libraries along the route, sits up late in conversation with his hosts collecting their tales about local politics, about their history, about their customs. On a boat going up the Nile, he stays up in his cabin all night studying by candlelight while everyone else has gone to sleep. And everywhere he goes, he carries his books and his writing materials in pouches. He always writes down what he sees. He writes down what he hears. It’s an old Islamic tradition, and Leo Africanus takes it seriously.

Now, a caveat. Some of these travels, including to sub-Saharan Africa that he’ll later write about, are disputed. It’s possible he compiled his material from traders and West African pilgrims he interviewed in Morocco. Whether he went or not, the man’s still a relentless collector of knowledge. He doesn’t necessarily need to visit a place to find out about it. He just needs to find someone who has.

But the 16th century world is a dangerous place to be a wandering scholar and a roving ambassador.

In 1518, Leo Africanus is on a boat returning from Cairo to Fez. He’s always been nervous at sea. On an earlier voyage between Cairo and Tunis, he’d heard about attacks from Sicilian corsairs or the Knights Hospitaller based on Rhodes. He knows there are risks. And on this trip, his fears are justified. The boat is seized by a Spanish pirate named Pedro de Cabrera y Bobadilla. In the days and weeks that follow, as Bobadilla’s ship makes a leisurely course through the Mediterranean, stopping at Tripoli, at Rhodes, at other ports, the pirate follows standard pirate practice. Question his captives, sort them into those worth ransoming, sort the others to be sold into slavery, and sort those who are destined to be fish food.

Then he gets to Leo Africanus: a North African diplomat with Ottoman connections, pouches full of travel notes and dispatches, fluent in Arabic, competent in Turkish, conversant in several dialects. This is not a man to sell at a slave market or even to ransom. This is the pirate version of a winning scratcher. And Bobadilla knows exactly what to do with a prize like this. He has the perfect recipient in mind, who just happens to be one of the most powerful men in the world.

Sarah: So we’ve been going back and forth between Al-Wazan and Leo Africanus, Jeremiah. Can you help us sort out the names?

Jeremiah: Right, so as we’ve mentioned, his birth name is Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad Al-Wazan. Then, depending on the context, he also adds Al-Fasi, which means “from Fez,” or Al-Gharnati, “from Granada.” These are descriptors — where you’re from, who your father was — and they change as your circumstances change.

Sarah: Is that quite normal for this period, or is that what we’ve done to him afterwards?

Jeremiah: It is very normal. The idea that we have one name that sticks with us throughout our lives and gets written down is a relatively modern thing, brought about by the need to register people in a modern state. In the past, people often had many different names, or names that would change depending on circumstance. And let me tell you, it makes the historian’s job challenging, because you’re searching archives for a list of all the possible variations, cross-referencing, and you see two documents with names that are somewhat similar. With Leo, we’re a little lucky because the historian Davis did all that legwork. With less famous figures, sometimes you just can’t tell.

Sarah: So, Granada. His family is part of the wave of Muslims leaving Spain after 1492, correct?

Jeremiah: Ferdinand and Isabella conquer Granada. It’s the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. The initial surrender terms are generous. Muslims get to keep their property, they get to keep their faith. Within a decade, though, that’s when things change. So you have forced conversions, Arabic books being burned, mosques turned into churches. Leo’s family gets out early, but he would have grown up hearing about this from his parents, from relatives in Fez, stories filtering over the Straits of Gibraltar about how Christian rulers conquer a Muslim kingdom, promises made, promises broken. So early on, I think it does have an effect on how he thinks about Christianity and Muslim relations with Christians.

Sarah: Right. And then there’s Bobadilla, this pirate who captures him. He sounds like an interesting character to me.

Jeremiah: He is, and there’s an interesting religious backstory there too. So Pedro de Cabrera y Bobadilla. His family are probably conversos — they’re Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity. His brother is the Bishop of Salamanca, based in Rome, so close to the Pope. And I believe Bobadilla himself, before he was a pirate, was a Dominican friar who got expelled for his antics, as one scholar puts it.

Sarah: Okay, I’d love to know what those antics were that got you expelled. So he becomes a crusader and a pirate.

Jeremiah: A pirate. Oh yes, a pirate he is. I guess another word for it might be corsair — raiding Muslim shipping in the Mediterranean, that kind of thing. So when he captures Leo Africanus and searches his belongings and finds all these dispatches and notes and evidence that this is a pretty important diplomat, Bobadilla recognizes what he’s got. He also has a brother in Rome, and he knows through his brother that there’s somebody else in Rome trying to build support for a crusade against the Ottomans. A North African diplomat with this kind of intelligence is worth way more than any ransom money any Sultan could come up with. So Bobadilla comes up with a plan for this particular captive.

Sarah: In October 1518, Bobadilla presents his prize to Pope Leo X. The Pope is a Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and he has been trying since 1513 to rally Europe’s Christian rulers for a crusade against the Ottoman Turks. A North African diplomat carrying Ottoman dispatches and years of first-hand knowledge about Muslim courts is exactly the kind of intelligence asset he wants.

The gift wins Bobadilla forgiveness for his piracy, and Leo Africanus is taken to the Castel Sant’Angelo. The Castel Sant’Angelo sits on the bank of the Tiber. It’s an ancient fortress that has served the Vatican for centuries. Below are dungeons and a pit called the Sammalò that all the prisoners feared. Above are the Pope’s private apartments, chapels, and treasure rooms. The Pope dines there in summer. He watches processions from its windows, stages plays in chambers designed by Raphael, and arranges tournaments in the drained moat, including, at Carnival in 1519, a tournament of people throwing oranges at each other.

Leo Africanus is in the cells, not the dining rooms, but he can probably hear the noise.

He is recognized quickly as a learned jurist. Within a month of his arrival, he’s being loaned Arabic manuscripts from the Vatican Library. His Italian and Latin improve through conversations with jailers, soldiers, churchmen, and even a bankrupt Roman financier who gets thrown into a nearby cell shortly after Leo arrives. He’s not a common prisoner, but he is still a prisoner.

And after 15 months, on the feast of the Epiphany, January 6th, 1520, Leo X personally baptises him at St. Peter’s. He’s given the Pope’s own names, Ioannes Leo, Giovanni Leone. Three cardinals serve as his godfathers. He’s also given the Medici surname, though he never uses it. In Arabic, he calls himself Yuhanna al-Asad, John the Lion.

The conversion is pragmatic. He has no way to go home, and he knows what happens to uncooperative captives — slavery, the galleys, or simply rotting in a cell. Many North African captives in Italy convert under similar circumstances. Leo does too. And it gives him a measure of freedom, at least within Rome.

He crosses the Tiber and enters Rome properly for the first time. And the city he finds is probably not what he expected. Davis imagines him comparing it to Fez, the city he knows best, and the comparison is not flattering. Rome is about half the size. Rome has monuments from centuries before Fez existed, but they’re crumbling. Stones are being carted away from the Colosseum for building material. Wolves prowl at night up to the Vatican walls. New streets are being opened, palaces planned. St. Peter’s itself is being rebuilt, but the work is slow and uneven.

Leo is used to powerful people. The Pope quizzes him on North African and Ottoman politics. Churchmen want him to teach Arabic. Scholars seek him out for information about Egypt, about the Mamluk sultans, about Africa. He is a source, an informant, an exotic curiosity. But the elite humanist circles of Rome still keep him at arm’s length. His Italian is imperfect. His religious conversion is suspect. His closest relationships are with other outsiders serving the same powerful patrons — other refugees, other converts, other men who are valued for what they know, but not fully accepted into the world they serve.

By 1525, his Italian is strong enough to start putting his experiences and memories of his travel days down on paper. He has spent seven years being asked questions about Africa and Islam — questions about geography and politics, but also prurient ones about harems and baths and other things that fire European curiosity. He has seen European maps of Africa with woodcuts of headless people in the interior and the word “cannibals” printed in the Southeast. He knows what Europeans think they know about his continent, and he’s seen enough of Italy to have a frame for presenting his own world to them.

But as he sits down to write, the political situation all around him is starting to shift in precarious ways. Ottoman victories in Hungary, the rivalry between France and the Holy Roman Emperor tearing Italy apart. The new Pope Clement VII’s flexible attitude towards alliances has already provoked one uprising and a sacking of St. Peter’s in September 1526. And something far worse is coming.

Sarah: So Jeremiah, this conversion of Leo Africanus — Davis covered it, but put your historian hat on for a second. How sincere do you think it was?

Jeremiah: Well, I research missionaries for a project I’m working on right now. And I’ll tell you, people convert for all sorts of reasons — political advantage, survival, faith, love, sometimes a mix of all of these things. And one thing I have learned is not to be skeptical about conversions. With Leo, we don’t know what was in his head. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty one-directional. He’s a prisoner with no way home. If he converts, he’s given a certain amount of freedom in the context of where he’s trapped, if that makes sense. But he’s still in Italy. He’s still in Rome. And so when that city is sacked in 1527, it allows him to leave, and by all accounts — we’ll talk about this in a bit — he does return to Islam, or he returns to the Muslim world. That suggests to me that the conversion was probably one of convenience more than one truly of faith.

Sarah: Do we know what he looked like?

Jeremiah: This is another thing that’s hard in history, because images of people going back often aren’t really depictions of what they look like anyway, even if we know that there are paintings of them. With Leo Africanus, like so many things, there is no one painting that says “this is Leo,” or a selfie of Leo in front of the Colosseum holding a brick.

There is one painting that might be him. Sebastiano del Piombo was a Venetian artist working in Rome, and he paints a portrait around 1520 called Portrait of a Humanist. It’s in the National Gallery in Washington today. There are scholars who have theorized that the subject, the humanist in the picture, is in fact Leo Africanus.

Sarah: On what basis?

Jeremiah: Some of it is timing. 1520 is around the time when Leo is baptized, and it’s quite a publicized event, so his name is out there. He’s also starting to circulate in Rome’s intellectual world, and he’s this fresh new face. He’s a little bit the talk of the town, and Sebastiano del Piombo paints portraits of exactly those kinds of people. It’s one of those things, and like a lot of what we’re talking about with Leo Africanus, it is speculation.

Sarah: Can you describe the painting for our listeners? What does he look like in it?

Jeremiah: He looks European. He’s wearing dark European clothes, holding a hat that kind of looks Italian. All the books next to him have European bindings, so it’s not an Arabic scene. The manuscript on the table is in Roman script. The pen is an Italian quill, not the kind of reed pen that you’d use for writing Arabic. There’s a globe next to him, which is also somewhat associated with Europe at this time. In the Islamic tradition, you’d have a celestial globe or perhaps a flat map. So even if it is Leo, what we’re seeing in the painting is Leo as Rome wanted to present him — this domesticated, if you will, African, or this domesticated representative of the Muslim world. Every object in the painting that might have been familiar to Leo has been swapped for a European equivalent.

Sarah: Which is more or less what happened to the man himself, really.

Jeremiah: Yeah, for a while, for sure.

Sarah: One thing about his years in Rome is he’s constantly being sought out. The scholars, the churchmen, the politicians, they all want to know about Africa, about Islam, about the Ottomans. And I think that dynamic is quite familiar, because when you live abroad, you’re the foreigner who everyone assumes is an authority on your entire country, your entire continent. So they’re asking him, what’s Africa really like? What do Muslims actually believe? The same questions over and over. And half of what people think they already know is wrong. So at a certain point, I’m not surprised he thought, right, I’m just going to write it all down.

Jeremiah: In 1526, Leo Africanus finishes his manuscript. He titles it Libro de la Cosmografia et Geografia de Affrica. 936 pages in a simplified but lively Italian, composed largely without notes. He even apologizes in places for his weak memory and admits he hasn’t seen a proper Arabic history book in 10 years.

His own work mixes genres — geography, travel account, ethnography, history, and autobiographical notes sprinkled throughout. He organizes it by region: general introduction, and then moves through the countries of Africa — Morocco, a special section on Fez, Tlemcen, Tunisia, Libya, sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, all the places that Europeans think of when they think of Africa. The emphasis falls heavily on Morocco, and the description of the region he grew up in takes up almost as much space as Tunisia and Libya combined.

“The moist gardens replenished with all manner of fruits. Quinces there are of great size and have a most fragrant smell. And pomegranates likewise, which being very large and most pleasant in taste, have no stones within them, and are sold exceedingly cheap. Likewise, here are plenty of damascenes, of white plums, and of the fruit called chuchupa, which being dried in the sun, they eat in the spring and carry a great number of them to Fez.”

Side effects may include anal bleeding, bleeding out your eyes, and mental worms.

He instead writes informatively and sometimes with admiration. His criticisms are ones any educated Sunni would share — condemnations of Shia heresies, mockery of popular superstition. There’s a sensitivity and a nuance in Leo Africanus’ book that’s missing from previous works about Islam written by European Christians. And the world that emerges from his pages undercuts a lot of the nonsense circulating in those European texts. Timbuktu has a splendid mosque and a palace, artisans and merchants, scholars there are held in high esteem, and Arabic manuscripts are the hottest commodity at the market. Fez’s mosques are decorated with colored marble. The gardens are like a terrestrial paradise. Cairo’s fame, he writes, flies everywhere. Africa and its bounty more than match anything he has seen in Italy.

Sarah: May 6th, 1527. The troops of Charles V breach the walls of Rome and sack the city Leo Africanus has called home for nine years. The Pope flees to the Castel Sant’Angelo, the fortress where Leo Africanus was once a prisoner, but which is now a refuge for anyone lucky enough to get inside. But Leo Africanus isn’t one of them. He’s gone, and nobody knows where he went or how he got out.

Most scholars think he eventually finds his way to Tunis. Why? Well, he gives that city a pretty glowing review in his book, so it’s not the worst place to end up. But it may be that a return to Fez would have meant disgrace or worse. As a former ambassador who then served the Pope, he would be suspected of collaborating with the enemies of Islam. In 1524, in fact, the Sultan of Fez burned alive a captured Muslim who had converted to Christianity and served the Portuguese. Tunis seemed safer, more cosmopolitan — a mix of Muslims, Jews, and Christian merchants providing a bit of a safe harbor for somebody who was caught between worlds.

Why else do historians think Leo’s in Tunis? We do have a clue. Around 1532, apparently bearing no grudge, a cardinal directed a young German Orientalist named Johann Widmannstetter to Leo Africanus’ whereabouts. Johann wants to study Arabic. The cardinal knows Leo’s a good teacher, and the cardinal tells Johann that Leo is in Tunis. Perhaps the cardinal had been keeping tabs on the wayward Leo Africanus. We don’t know. Widmannstetter sets off to visit him, but storms turn back his boat.

In the geography, Leo Africanus had written that Africa was like his wet nurse. Well, he got back to her. But what kind of life he lived there, how long he lived, and whether he found something like peace or spent his remaining years looking over his shoulder — we don’t know. The man with many names disappears from the historical record. He goes home, or close enough to home, and then he goes quiet.

Sarah: So I have to say, when we were researching this episode, I kept a running list of all the parallels with Marco Polo, and it got quite long. Both men are famous for this book of travel and geography, and both books were edited by someone else who made changes to enhance its mass appeal, but which also may have introduced errors or removed key details that have since resulted in Marco Polo and Leo Africanus getting picked apart over whether the author actually went to all the places they claimed.

Jeremiah: That’s true, and there’s an even more direct connection. Ramusio, the Venetian publisher who printed Leo’s book in 1550, also published an edition of Marco Polo’s travels. And he’s the one who added the famous homecoming feast story, covered in the research notes sent to members of the By Their Own Compass Club after our Marco Polo episode.

Sarah: Exactly. So if you want that story, then you all have to subscribe. Don’t forget to do that.

But whether it’s Ramusio, or Ramusio and Marco’s ghostwriter Rustichello, we see the same pattern. A traveler produces a text, and then an editor reshapes it for a wider readership. With Polo, it was Rustichello adding Arthurian romance conventions. With Leo, it was Ramusio turning simple Italian into literary prose and inserting enough Christianity for it to be palatable to Europeans. Which wasn’t the worst of it. Some translators added insults about Islam that Leo never wrote.

Jeremiah: And that Leo probably later hoped nobody in North Africa would read and associate with him. And there are also omissions. When you’re editing something, you take stuff out, and it might seem an insignificant detail to the editor or the ghostwriter, but later on people look back and go, wait, Marco, where’s this Great Wall? Where’s the tea, the chopsticks? With Leo, it’s the printing press. He’s living in Rome, he’s traveled around Italy, everywhere there are printing shops. He must have seen them, but he doesn’t really write about printing, at least as something that’s an alternative to scribal copying, which is what’s being done in the Islamic world. This is the kind of thing — kind of like Marco Polo — what is he writing about and who is he writing for? He’s writing about North Africa for Europeans, not about Europeans for North Africans.

But I think calling out travelers for what they don’t see, or didn’t see, distracts us from the descriptions that they do include in their accounts. So for example, Leo has these evocative stories of Timbuktu that create a romantic myth that draws explorers and causes them to risk crossing the Sahara Desert and facing heat and thirst and brigands and all manner of danger to reach this fabled city. Why? Because Leo’s writing about how this place has gold ingots weighing 500 kilos.

Sarah: And when they did get there in the 19th century, they were disappointed. The French adventurer René Caillié reached Timbuktu in 1828, and he described it as a rather poor town consisting of nothing but a mass of ill-looking dirt houses. He seemed genuinely pissed off, like Leo Africanus had been waiting 400 years to have a laugh at his expense.

Jeremiah: Yeah, or it may have been just that cities change when there’s a multi-century gap between when you’re going and the publication date of the guidebook in your backpack. Another thing, to be fair, Leo’s description of everything south of the Sahara, or the southern part of the Sahara and south, is the shortest and least well-developed section of the entire book. I talked about the idea of Africa being his wet nurse and his attachment to it. But it’s worth noting that in the book, the “wet nurse” line comes across almost apologetic, because it follows some pretty brutal descriptions of Black Africans that contribute to a lot of the stereotypes and images of the interior of Africa that will also persist for centuries.

One of the Leo scholars, Pekka Masonen, has pointed out that there’s very little in the sub-Saharan sections that would require firsthand observation. They sound a lot like he is recycling gossip, stories, and frankly jokes that even Donald Trump would be like, really, you went there? So I guess it is fair to hang the same question on Leo that we did on Marco. Did he go, or did he just say he went, or did he just talk to people who had gone?

Jeremiah: When in Rome — I always wanted to say that — when in Rome, everything in Leo Africanus’ story is kind of within walking distance. We can start at the Castel Sant’Angelo, which is central to a lot of our story. That’s where he arrives as a prisoner in 1518. It’s where the Pope flees when the city falls in 1527. Still visited today.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s a great place. You enter through Hadrian’s original funeral ramp, and there’s this wide spiral passage nearly 2,000 years old, and then you climb up through the medieval dungeons, Renaissance papal apartments, and there’s still frescoes on the walls. Then you end up out on the terrace at the top with the angel statue and St. Peter’s dome.

Jeremiah: Right, because it began as the tomb of the emperor Hadrian, and then it evolved later on to become this dungeon slash papal luxury suite, all kind of in the same building. I guess you’re walking through all these different layers of Rome just as much as you’re walking through the structure. Twenty minutes, 2,000 years.

Sarah: And then there’s the Passetto di Borgo, the corridor from the opening of this episode that we began on. That’s still open now.

Jeremiah: Right. I think it’s just been recently restored. It’s the same 800-meter passage that Clement VII ran through with the surviving Swiss Guards when he was making his escape. Not wide — military passages were more functional. If you’re thinking in terms of the terror and the confusion and what was happening that night, you can get a sense of just how tight that escape must have been.

Sarah: And what about the Vatican Library? This is where Leo was loaned these Arabic manuscripts while he was still a prisoner, and where he would have done quite a lot of his research. Is that somewhere you can visit and follow in his footsteps?

Jeremiah: It is a working research institution and one of the great research archives. But the Vatican Library is one of those places where you need some academic credentials, probably a research proposal, some decent references, that kind of thing, to get through the door.

Sarah: Yeah, like the Bodleian stacks.

Jeremiah: I have no idea. You’re also not going to believe this — I never got an invite to go to or teach at Oxford, but I’m open to offers. You can walk through some of the old library rooms that are part of the Vatican Museums, and they do have occasional exhibitions. The reading room, though, where Leo would have sat — and this is one of the cool things about these old libraries, whether it’s the British Library or the Vatican Library, it’s not just the books that are on the shelves. It’s the asses who have been in the same seat. So, where Leo sat looking at the Arabic manuscripts is not close to the public. But if you’re lucky enough to get inside, maybe try to have a thought for our North African friend, who was an impromptu and somewhat unwilling visitor to the Vatican.

Sarah: And how do the Swiss Guards figure into all of this? They’re quite a prominent feature of the Vatican, aren’t they?

Jeremiah: They are the last remnants of a great old Swiss tradition of being really, really good at killing people efficiently. The short version is this: Switzerland, a small country surrounded by larger countries. Larger countries kept attacking them. The Swiss were always outnumbered, outarmed, and out-horsed. So they developed innovative techniques for taking on their neighbors, including — speaking of the Swiss Guards — the halberd, which if you haven’t seen it, is this two-meter-long pole with a hook at one end, a pointed top at the top, and an axe on the other side.

Here are the IKEA instructions for a halberd if you are a Swiss defender. Guy on horseback is riding at you. Apply hook end to the guy on the horse. Pull. When guy falls off horse, turn hook end over to axe implement. Apply axe implement to their head and chest region until they stop moving. Then take the pointy end and stick that through whichever part of the body is not armored. Conveniently enough, usually the face hole.

The Swiss became so good at this that eventually their neighbors stopped attacking them. But other states around Europe were thinking, wow, the Swiss are very good at defense. And so Swiss mercenaries started working for all these courts around Europe. Later on, the Swiss government banned the Swiss from serving as mercenaries in other armies, but there was a carve-out for one of the oldest clients, the Vatican, who had been hiring Swiss Guards for centuries and still do. There are still Swiss Guards — people who have served their time in the Swiss military and then go through a special recruitment process to join this elite unit at the Vatican. They have a special swearing-in ceremony every single year.

Sarah: The swearing-in ceremony. The date matters here, doesn’t it?

Jeremiah: It does, because each year new recruits to the Swiss Guard take their oath on May 6th, the anniversary of the sack of Rome, the date we opened this episode with, and of the 189 guards who died defending the Vatican and the Holy Father. The recruits still swear their oath on that date every year in the San Damaso courtyard, in the full Renaissance dress uniform, holding halberds.

Sarah: All right, Jeremiah. And I think it’s also worth mentioning a bit about Morocco, obviously, where Leo Africanus was from and where he grew up and where a lot of his descriptions were about. Have you ever been to Morocco?

Jeremiah: I have not been to Morocco. I would love to go to Morocco. One of my very favorite songs of all time is about Morocco, except it’s named after a place in Asia. It’s called “Kashmir.”

Sarah: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So I think one of the things that’s interesting to me is that he grew up in Fez, because Fez is one of those places that I’m not sure it’s always on everybody’s top of their list in Morocco. Most people start with Marrakesh. I’d say Marrakesh is sort of Morocco Lite. It’s the safe and easy place to start with. But Fez is actually a really interesting city. The old Medina is amazing. It’s a real labyrinth. It is literally somewhere where you can get very, very lost and very, very confused. And there are plenty of little street kids who like to tell you that you’re going the wrong way — I assume to engage you in some kind of scam, which I’ve managed to avoid. But there’s something you can still feel — it has that medieval feel to it, and that’s something I really love about it.

There’s also the famous Chouara tanneries, which are these big leather-dyeing vats. You can climb up to the surrounding terrace shops, and they’ll usually give you some tea, and they’re selling handmade leather goods. The smell is quite strong, but it’s really amazing up there. Every vat has a different color dye in it, so it’s just like this enormous series of paint pots laid out before you.

It’s also a great place to have really authentic mint tea — really, really delicious. They put a lot of sugar in it over there. One word of warning, though: if you do go and stay in a city like Fez, it is a bit more traditional. So if you are a heathen and you’re not actually married to your opposite-sex partner, they won’t let you stay in their Airbnb or in their hotel. So word of warning there, don’t get that wrong. You will get kicked out at the last second, even if you’ve booked it.

But yeah, it’s an incredible place, loads of great restaurants. Again, you might sometimes need to be shepherded from your hotel to the restaurant. That’s how much of a labyrinth it is. If you want to see some of the places that were there when Leo Africanus was around, a lot of that old infrastructure remains. I highly recommend it as a place to go in Morocco. It might just be a good idea to get a tour guide to make things a bit easier for you.

Jeremiah: And shameless plug time. You can also get more information about Sarah’s adventures and information in Fez, a little bit more about the Swiss Guards and Rome, if you are a member of the By Their Own Compass Club on Substack. So be sure to subscribe. Doesn’t cost very much, but the gratitude is real.

Sarah: The gratitude is real. Thank you, Jeremiah. We will be back soon with more stories of those who traveled by their own compass.

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we tell the story of how a roving ambassador from Fez ended up a prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the dungeons and luxury apartments rolled into a single fortress on the Tiber. We follow his capture at sea in 1518, his fifteen months in the papal cells, his baptism by the Medici pope who gave him his own names, and the nine years he spent in Rome as a convert, a scholar, and a curiosity. We also follow him out, because when the city was sacked by mutinous Imperial troops in May 1527, Leo Africanus used the chaos to disappear, most likely back to Tunis, where he becomes untraceable in the historical record.

Along the way, we talk about what it meant to be a Muslim diplomat captured in Renaissance Europe, the family history that starts with the fall of Granada in 1492, and the Venetian editor Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who published Leo’s manuscript and, in the process, smoothed over the Islam and sharpened the Christianity for his European readers. We also ask the same question we asked of Marco Polo. How much of Leo’s Africa did he actually see, and how much did he hear about in the markets of Fez and write down as if he’d been there? Our guide through the tangle is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, whose Trickster Travels is the most thorough reconstruction of who this man was. An updated edition of Cosmography and Geography of Africa is out from Penguin Classics, the first new English translation of the book in over four hundred years.

Sarah and Jeremiah take you through the Rome and Fez of Leo’s life too, from the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Passetto di Borgo (the corridor the Pope fled down in 1527) through the May 6 swearing-in ceremony of the Swiss Guard, and across the Mediterranean to the medina of Fez and the Chouara tanneries, where the smell still hits you on the terrace.

Research Notes

In the episode, we mentioned that the Ford-Rhys situation produced a small library. Sarah noted that Stella Bowen wrote a memoir, Rhys wrote Quartet, and Ford wrote When the Wicked Man. What we didn’t have time for was the fourth author.

Read more

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was the book that launched a thousand tote bags. But that version of 1920s Paris with its champagne, café feuds, and glamorised poverty (trust funds and inheritances conveniently hidden) is only one man’s memories, written down and romanticised decades after the fact.

In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we take a look at three writers who were all in Paris at the same time, but writing about three different cities. Jean Rhys was a writer from Dominica. Later, she would become famous for her 1966 classic, Wide Sargasso Sea, but in 1920s Paris, she was a struggling writer with little money and a husband in a French prison. George Orwell was there, too. Washing dishes at a fancy hotel and scraping by in a rundown hotel just 500 metres from where Hemingway lived.

We trace their haunts from the Place de la Contrescarpe to Montparnasse, from Jean Rhys’ beautifully evocative Left Bank and Other Stories to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, whose stories of crowded, profane kitchens would be among the inspirations for Anthony Bourdain and his famous book Kitchen Confidential. And we offer a Paris travel guide for those on their way to France or just dreaming of a trip. Sarah and Jeremiah walk you from the Latin Quarter to the Luxembourg Gardens.

We also want to hear from you. We’ve been doing the podcast for about six months now, and we’d love to know what you think. Is there an episode you loved? Which one were you more inclined to skip? Is there something we’re doing you’d like to see more of? Less? Let us know. You can leave a comment below or send us a message.

All the best!

Jeremiah and Sarah

Read more

• The extraordinary story we cut from the episode about what allegedly happened when the Polos came home

• Travel notes from Sarah on following in Marco Polo’s footsteps in Beijing and Hangzhou today

• A reading and viewing list for all things Marco

• A major new book about Venice and the Mongols tells us about the real Marco Polo, and our interview with Professor Nicola Di Cosmo (out now!)

• Full Episode Transcript

Research Notes

The Homecoming Marco Polo Didn’t Tell You About

As almost always happens, we had to cut a cool story from the episode. Time is a cruel mistress, especially when it comes to editing a podcast.

The story is not from the Travels of Marco Polo, but instead is attributed to a Venetian scholar and geographer named Giovanni Battista Ramusio. Keep in mind that Ramusio is writing this story about 250 years after Marco returned to Venice, so, like many things Marco, it’s wise to take the literal truth of Ramusio’s account with a bit of the old kippered herring.

Read more