Malfante l’Africain, a volume in the series “Global Perspectives on Medieval and Early Modern Historiography,” is devoted to a four-page letter composed in Latin in 1447 by the Genoese merchant Antonio Malfante in Touat (in the northern Sahara). The single surviving copy of this letter is contained in a manuscript--Paris, BNF, Nouvelles acquisitions latines 1112--likely dating from the late fifteenth century. The letter was discovered in 1918 by Frenchman Charles de La Roncière, who published a transcription of the Latin with a translation into modern French. Revisiting the original manuscript copy and La Roncière’s treatment of it over a century later, an interdisciplinary team of experts, François-Xavier Fauvelle (African history and archaeology), Benoît Grévin (late medieval Euro-mediterranean languages and rhetoric), and Ingrid Houssaye Michienzi (late medieval economy and social history) undertake a double project: analyzing La Roncière’s edition/translation as “a textual object to be deconstructed” (18), thereby extracting it from its early twentieth-century colonial-era reception, and providing a “decolonized” (24) version of the text reflecting the contribution of a rare combination of fields.
Chapter 1, “Malfante’s letter in context: manuscript environment, language, style,” unpacks the assumptions and prevailing practices underpinning La Roncière’s transcription and translation. First, he paid little heed to the other texts in the manuscript that contained Malfante’s letter--a miscellany (on which more below) which at the time would have been seen as an example of an “incorrigible confusion” typical of late medieval or early modern minds. Second, the letter, with its descriptions of the Sahara and Sahel--two areas then key to French colonial ambitions--was taken as a precursor to explorations conducted under the Third Republic. Finally, for La Roncière the letter suggested the “almost French” destiny of Malfante’s native Genoa, which at several points in its history had come into the orbit of the French kingdom and later republic.
The chapter then turns to a codicological and paleographic analysis of the manuscript itself. Containing some letters of Cicero plus selections of a chronicle and travel narratives concerning Asia and Africa, BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat. 1112 was an “unremarkable” humanist miscellany, probably from northeastern Italy. Various fragments and annotations place it between 1447 and 1508 and suggest that it circulated in a milieu of humanists with legal interests or training. Where La Roncière could dismiss the compilation for its “confusion,” our coauthors bring out its coherence, on two levels. Typologically, most of the pieces in the manuscript (ff. 1r-122r) are epistolary. Thematically, the second section of the manuscript (ff. 123r-139v) are devoted to accounts of distant worlds. Malfante’s letter is preceded by Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti’s description of Asia (ff. 123v-131r), as recorded by the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini in his De varietate fortunae (1447-48); and a version of the famous “Letter of Prester John” (131r-136v). Together, these three documents are connected by a Christianizing geography, notably in interpreting Asian and African rivers after the four Rivers of Paradise. Malfante’s letter does in fact differ from all the other texts in the manuscript, however, by its linguistic register: composed not in a humanist but in a mercantile Latin, generally correct in grammar but heavily inflected by vernacularizing (mainly northern Italian) traits in both vocabulary and syntax. BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat. 1112 concludes with a short fictive letter from Pontius Pilate to the Emperor Tiberius describing the Passion of Christ (f. 139v).
Chapter 2 is devoted to the letter itself, providing a diplomatic edition (45-52); a critical edition (52-57), La Roncière’s translation (57-62), a Commentary pointing out the “colonial and racializing” elements of La Roncière’s translation; a literal working translation (70-76); and an interpretive working translation (76-81).
Chapter 3 furnishes information and context for the letter itself. Antonio Malfante was the illegitimate (subsequently legitimized) son of a member of a prominent Genoese family that had prospered in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but that had, by the fifteenth, fallen on hard times. In fact, the fifteenth century was tempestuous for the Genoese in general. The city itself was riven by factional rivalries; its commerce in the eastern Mediterranean had been eroded by Ottoman expansion as well as ongoing rivalries with the Venetians, the Catalans, and the Florentines. What took Malfante to North Africa? Surveying hypotheses ranging from “sent as an official envoy of Genoa” to “went purely from individual initiative,” our authors see him linked to two family-based companies, the Marioni (his letter is addressed to Giovanni Marioni) and the Centurione, both with extensive connections in the Iberian Peninsula that positioned them well to explore opportunities in North Africa. For the Genoese, as for other Latin European commercial powers, a primary driver of the African trade was to secure sources of gold to compensate for the constant outflow of gold to pay for the spices and other Asian commodities obtained in the trade emporia of the eastern Mediterranean.
Chapter 4 provides an extensive paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the Letter (in the literal translation). Collating a vast array of historical, philological, archaeological, and anthropological evidence and secondary research, these commentaries contextualize or speculate on matters such as the problematic place names cited, the distances Malfante records separating them, and the role of Jews in the African trade and its decline in the fifteenth century. They mobilize our current state of knowledge to comment on some of Malfante’s observations about Touat--its (lack of) agriculture, reliance on external importations of wheat, the proliferation of dates; on copper and salt as central to long-distance trade; on the customs of various groups of nomadic Berber-speakers (whom Malfante calls “Philistines”) and their shifting political relations in the wake of the decline of the Mali empire; on likely sources of influence on Malfante’s “information” on Black African idolatry, on descriptions of the Niger River, on an otherwise unattested siege on the city of Gao; on reports of “Egyptians” and Christians “from India.”
Far from an inert addition to our archive of European knowledge of late medieval Africa, Malfante l’Africain takes the Genoese merchant’s four-page letter from Touat as a lens--or better, a magnifying glass--to assemble state-of-the-art knowledge of West Africa (from the Mediterranean coast to the Sahel and beyond) and European attempts at exploration and trade during a pivotal moment, the mid-fifteenth century, just before European maritime expansion would change the globe forever. More than that, however, Malfante l’Africain offers a tour-de-force demonstration of the payoff of mobilizing the insights of Translation Studies, Philology and Codicology, and Decolonial Studies alongside those of the historian and the archaeologist