Beyond the Senegal: inventing the tropics in the late Middle Ages

Abstract

For many modern observers, West Africa now stands as the most acute expression of a situation common throughout the tropics: a natural world defined by prodigious nature and debilitating febrile illness. I argue that this connection was inaugurated as a possibility – though not a definitive condition – over the course of the late fifteenth century, as a consequence of Portuguese voyages to West Africa. That connection was gradual rather than immediate. When seafarers first arrived at the African coast they believed it was uniquely healthy. Only by about the turn of the sixteenth century had observers come to the opposite conclusion. I first chart gradual shifts in opinions about the health of West Africa. I then argue that the interpretive challenges the region posed to fifteenth-century observers both at the Portuguese court and aboard ship along the Guinea Coast were the result of influences ranging from the authoritative texts of Pliny and Ptolemy to little known Portuguese devotional literature, and from the Hippocratic corpus to Aristotelian cosmology. Ultimately West African encounters with febrile disease engendered questions about the relationship between climate, environment, and health that had more global implications, especially where equatorial regions were concerned.