The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq
Modernized, illustrated English edition of The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (Legationis Turcicae epistolae quatuor) by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1554-1562).
The ambassador who brought the tulip from Istanbul tells of a fascinating and feared empire.
Read more ↓- about 420 pages
- Paperback
- English
- 16th century
Countries covered: Türkiye · Tunisia · Ukraine · Russia · Iran · Hungary · Serbia · Bulgaria
About this book
November 1554. In Lille, a Flemish humanist is ordered to leave at once: Ferdinand of Habsburg is sending him to negotiate with Suleiman the Magnificent, the most feared ruler of his age.
Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq travels down the Danube by way of Buda and Belgrade, crosses the Balkans through Sofia and Adrianople, enters Constantinople, then rides across Anatolia to Amasya for a chilly audience with the sultan. Sent back to the Bosphorus, he spends years there as a politely treated hostage, shut up in a house guarded by janissaries.
He turns this confinement into an observatory. He keeps an extravagant menagerie, copies the inscription of Augustus at Ancyra, questions two envoys from the Crimea who still speak the language of the Goths, ransoms Christian captives after the disaster of Djerba, and sees the plague strike his own household. Above all, he witnesses the drama of the imperial family: Prince Mustapha executed on his father's orders, then open war between Selim and Bayezid, ending with the loser's flight to Persia.
In four long letters to his friend Nicolas Michault, Busbecq tells it all with tireless curiosity and a quiet irony, then draws the lesson of what he has seen: the discipline of the Turkish soldiers, the sobriety of their camps, the weakness of the divided Christian princes.
What is left to negotiate, face to face with an empire that fears no one?
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- The Old Orient
- The author
- Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq
- Date of the journey
- 1554-1562
- Modern edition by
- Erik de Boisgrollier
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 420
The author
Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq
Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq was born in 1522 at Comines, in Flanders, and made his career in the service of the Habsburgs. Sent in 1554 by Ferdinand to Suleiman the Magnificent, he spent about seven years in the Ottoman Empire and drew from it four letters to his friend Nicolas Michault, published in Latin in Paris in 1589. They made him famous for their account of the Ottoman court and for his discoveries, among them the copy of the text of Augustus at Ancyra. He died in October 1592 near Rouen, after an attack by soldiers of the League.
All books by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq →Sources
The letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq appeared in stages: the first in Antwerp in 1581, the second in 1582, then all four together in Paris, published by Gilles Beys, in 1589. Two witnesses were compared: the Latin edition printed in Munich in 1620, adorned with images by Sadeler, and the English translation published in London in 1744. The Munich edition brings together the four letters, Busbecq's discourse on the war against the Turks and the documents of Suleiman's embassy; the translation does not give the text in its own language. The text we selected for our work is therefore the Munich edition of 1620, in the copy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma digitized by Google.
The scan was converted to text, then proofread and cleaned. The editor's prefatory pieces, a dedication to Ferdinand II, a life of Busbecq and an epitaph by Justus Lipsius, have been set aside, as have the index, the errata and the colophon. Busbecq's discourse has on the other hand been kept, together with the documents of the peace of 1562: the Turkish envoy's address, Suleiman's letter and the list of the envoy's retinue, which belong to the narrative. The work consists of four letters dated from Vienna, Constantinople and Frankfurt, followed by this discourse. The text thus established runs to about 65,000 words.
How we transform the text. This book is neither a literal translation nor a facsimile: it is a rewriting in today's language, carried out in three stages. Modernisation renders the text in contemporary English; each place and person receives a single modern form, and period terms (currencies, measures, titles) are kept, with a light gloss where needed. Clarification untangles the long sentences of the period, one idea per sentence, adding nothing and removing nothing. Shaping the narrative divides the text into titled chapters and restores its flow; repetitive passages are condensed, but no dated, numbered or named fact is removed. Each stage is followed by a review of fidelity to the original text.
| Status | Edition | Copy | Language | Note | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selected | Augerii Gislenii Busbequii Legationis Turc. epistolae IV, with the De re militari contra Turcam instituenda consilium and the Solimanni legatio ad Ferdinandum I, Munich, Anna Berg, widow, at Raphael Sadeler's, 1620, engraved title page | Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, digitized by Google, available on Internet Archive | Latin | The author's Latin text, with the four letters and his discourse on the war against the Turks; edition adorned with images by Sadeler. | View |
| Set aside | Travels into Turkey: containing the most accurate account of the Turks, and neighbouring nations…, London, J. Robinson and W. Payne, 1744 | Project Gutenberg, transcription from Internet Archive images | English | Eighteenth-century English translation: it does not give Busbecq's Latin, which the Munich edition preserves. | View |
The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
-
Salomon Schweigger, Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung auss Teutschland nach Constantinopel und Jerusalem (1576-1581)
Some fifteen years after Busbecq's return, a Swabian pastor takes the same road.
Read a free edition → -
Jean de Thévenot, Relation d'un voyage fait au Levant (1655-1659)
A century after Busbecq, a wealthy young Parisian sets out alone for the East, with no mission or embassy, out of pure curiosity.
Read a free edition → -
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters (1716-1718)
In 1716, the wife of the new English ambassador to the Porte takes in her turn the road through Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia and Adrianople to Constantinople.
Read a free edition → -
Edmondo De Amicis, Costantinopoli (1874)
In 1874, an Italian writer already famous for his travel books lands on the Golden Horn.
Read a free edition →
The modern editor
More in this series
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