Biography
Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq was born in 1522 at Comines, in Flanders, the natural son of Georges Ghislain, lord of Busbecq, and Catherine Hespel. Charles V legitimized him in 1540. He studied at Louvain, where he was enrolled in 1536, then attended universities in Italy and France, where he followed, according to Wikipedia, the lessons of Giovanni Battista Egnazio in Venice. He spoke Flemish, French, Latin, Greek, German and English.
Around 1552 he entered the service of Ferdinand of Habsburg. In 1554 he accompanied to London the mission sent to congratulate Mary Tudor on her marriage to Philip of Spain, then was called to Vienna to replace an ailing envoy in Constantinople. He reached the city in January 1555 and joined Suleiman at Amasya in April. Back on the Bosphorus, he spent most of the years 1556 to 1562 there, at times under close watch, and finally obtained a truce with the grand vizier Ali Pasha. He left Constantinople in August 1562 with the Ottoman envoy Ibrahim.
The book is born of this embassy. Busbecq wrote his accounts in the form of letters to his friend Nicolas Michault. A first partial version, Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum, appeared in Antwerp in 1581-1582. The complete text, Legationis Turcicae epistolae quatuor, was published in Paris in 1589. In it he also tells of his finds: the copy of the text of Augustus at Ancyra, a manuscript of Dioscorides brought back to Vienna, inscriptions, medals, a list of words of Crimean Gothic. Tradition credits him with introducing the tulip and the lilac to Europe, which specialists partly dispute.
Back in Austria, Busbecq became a privy counselor, tutored the emperor's grandchildren and was knighted at Pressburg in 1563. In 1570 he escorted archduchesses to Madrid. After the death of Charles IX in 1574, he went to France to manage the estates of his widow, Elisabeth of Austria, for some fifteen years. The Deutsche Biographie disputes the old idea that he represented Rudolf II there as titular envoy, while other notices speak of letters addressed to the emperor on French affairs, published after his death in 1630. He also left a treatise on the war against the Turks, edited in 1633.
On the road back to the Low Countries, he was attacked by soldiers of the Catholic League near Rouen. He died a few days later, at the château de Maillot, in Saint-Germain-sous-Cailly: on 28 October 1592 according to the Biographie coloniale belge and the Deutsche Biographie, on the 29th according to English Wikipedia. His body was buried on the spot and his heart was brought back to the family vault at Bousbecque. Two manuscripts, a history of Belgium and a treatise on true nobility, are lost, and the Deutsche Biographie notes that the State Archives in Vienna hold some of his letters. His Turkish letters were translated into English by Forster (1881, then Eland, 2005) and into French by Dominique Arrighi at Champion.
