This imaginary autobiography starts with a true story. In 1518, a meghreb ambassador, receiving a pilgrimage to Mecca, was captured by Sicilian pirates, who offered him as a gift to Leo X, the great pope of the Renaissance. This traveler was called Hassan al Wazzan. He becomes the geographer Jean Leon de Medici, says Leon the African. His life, made of passions, dangers and honors, and that punctuate the great events of his time, is fascinating: he was in Granada during the Reconquista, from where, with his family, he had to flee the Inquistion, in Egypt when taken by the Ottomans, in Black Africa at the peak of the empire of the Askia Mohamed Toure, finally in Rome during the finest hours of the Renaissance, as well as at the time of the bag of the city by the soldiers of Charles V. A man of East and West a man of Africa and Europe, it was difficult to find in history a person whose life corresponds more to the astonishing age of the sixteenth centure.