Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403-1406

The account of Ruy González de Clavijo's embassy to Tamerlane was first printed in Seville in 1582, then reprinted in Madrid in 1782 by Antonio de Sancha. These two editions were compared. The 1582 edition, digitized by Google from the copy in the Biblioteca de Catalunya, keeps the spelling and abbreviations of the sixteenth century, which make automated reading less reliable; the 1782 edition reproduces its text. Two fifteenth-century manuscripts survive, in Madrid and in London, but no reproduction of them was found online. The text we selected for our work is therefore the second printing of 1782, in the copy of the Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla digitized on Internet Archive.

The scan was converted to text, then proofread and cleaned. The editors' apparatus was set aside: the discourse of its first editor, Gonzalo Argote de Molina, and its accompanying pieces (letter, genealogies, lives of Tamerlane, poem), the printer's title, the running heads and an extract from the commentaries of García de Silva y Figueroa, written in 1618 and foreign to the narrative. The narrative reads as a single continuous whole, without chapters; a single subheading, devoted to the city of Calmarin, interrupts its course. The text thus established runs to about 80,000 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.