16th-Century Travel Narratives of the Near East
In 1516 and 1517 Sultan Selim I crushed the Mamluks and took Syria, Jerusalem and Cairo. In a single campaign almost the whole Levant became Ottoman, and for the rest of the century the story was played out between Constantinople, Venice, Vienna and Safavid Persia. For a European, going east now meant entering one empire, the one Suleiman the Magnificent ruled from 1520 to 1566 and carried to the walls of Vienna in 1529.
Travel became first of all a matter of diplomacy. The Venetian baili stationed in Pera sent the Senate detailed reports on the sultan, his viziers and his revenues. The alliance struck by Francis I opened the road to French ambassadors: in 1547 Gabriel d'Aramon took a small band of scholars to the Porte, among them Guillaume Postel and Jean Chesneau. Habsburg envoys crossed occupied Hungary to negotiate truces; Hans Dernschwam, an Augsburg merchant who joined one of these missions in 1553 to 1555, wrote down everything from caravanserais to the ancient inscriptions of Ancyra.
With them came a new kind of curiosity, that of naturalists and draughtsmen. The geographer Nicolas de Nicolay brought back from his stay of 1551 figures of janissaries, dervishes and Turkish women, engraved in Lyon, that shaped the European picture of the Ottomans for generations. The physician Leonhard Rauwolf gathered plants in Aleppo, sailed down the Euphrates to Baghdad in 1574 and left one of the first Western descriptions of coffee.
Jerusalem kept its pilgrims. They still sailed from Venice, though the yearly galleys grew rare, and the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land, expelled from Mount Zion in 1551, received them under the eye of an Ottoman pasha. Further east, Shiite Persia, the sultan's rival, drew those looking for an ally in his rear: Michele Membré went there for Venice in 1539, the Englishman Anthony Jenkinson arrived by way of Muscovy in 1562, and the Sherley brothers reached the court of Shah Abbas in 1598.
The gaze also travelled outward from Istanbul. The painter and mathematician Matrakçı Nasuh followed Suleiman to Iraq in 1534 and 1535 and painted, stage by stage, the towns along the campaign route, and Seydi Ali Reis, shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean, came home overland from India and told the story of his journey in 1557. Captives, renegades and dragomans who had crossed from one shore to the other complete the picture of a world that fought at Lepanto in 1571 while trading in Aleppo.
This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts.
Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
-
Peter Füssli, Voyage à Jérusalem en 1523 et lettre sur la chute de Rhodes (1523)
Four years after Tschudi, another Confederate takes the road to the Holy Sepulchre: the Zurich bell and cannon founder Peter Füssli, a former captain of the Italian wars and a member of his city's Great Council. His account of 1523, drier than the Glarus man's, follows the same pilgrim route through Venice, but it comes with a letter on the fall of Rhodes, taken by Suleiman the Magnificent at the end of 1522: the island where Tschudi had Peter Falck and Melchior zur Gilgen buried is now Ottoman, and its knights have gone. Füssli's two texts were edited together in 1982, and reading them directly extends Tschudi's retrospective aside on Rhodes.
-
Pierre Belon, Les Observations de plusieurs singularités et choses mémorables (1546-1549)
The naturalist Pierre Belon of Le Mans set out in 1546 in the retinue of the French embassy to Suleiman and returned only in 1549. His Observations, published in 1553, lead the reader through Greece, Crete, Constantinople, Egypt and the Holy Land, but with a different eye from Tschudi's: Belon notes plants, fish, snakes, remedies and trades, and describes people more than relics. A generation after the Glarus pilgrim, the eastern Mediterranean becomes a field of learned inquiry, and the road to Jerusalem a path for the curious as much as for the devout. The stopovers at Candia and Rhodes take on quite a different aspect there.
-
André Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant, Lyon, 1554 (1554)
The Franciscan friar from Angoulême travels the eastern Mediterranean in the same years as Pierre Gilles. He visits Chios, Rhodes, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and in 1554 publishes this large volume mixing field observations, ancient quotations, and woodcuts. Thevet lacks Gilles's topographical rigor, but he shares his enthusiasm and curiosity. The contrast between the two works, published seven years apart in Lyon by neighboring publishers, gives the measure of what scholarly travel meant for the generation of Francis I.
-
Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Lettres turques, written in Constantinople from 1554 to 1562 (1554-1562)
The ambassador of Ferdinand of Habsburg arrives in Constantinople seven years after Gilles's departure. He stays eight years and brings back manuscripts, plants (the lilac, the tulip), coins, and above all four detailed letters describing the Ottoman court, its customs, and the aging sultan. The same city, the same years, but seen from the diplomatic side. An indispensable complement to Gilles's archaeological gaze.
-
Nicolas de Nicolay, Quatre premiers livres des navigations et pérégrinations orientales, Lyon, 1568 (1568)
The geographer from the Dauphiné accompanies the French embassy to Constantinople in 1551. He brings back an illustrated book with sixty engravings showing Ottoman costumes and types with unmatched documentary precision. Here again, Lyon publishes the book some dozen years after the journey. The generation of scholarly travelers who cross paths with Suleiman the Magnificent has left a scattered and fascinating literature, of which Gilles is one of the high points.
-
Leonhard Rauwolf, Description véritable du voyage en Orient (Aigentliche Beschreibung der Raiß) (1573-1576)
A physician and botanist from Augsburg, Leonhard Rauwolf sailed from Marseille in 1573 on behalf of a trading house, lived nine months in Aleppo, went down to Baghdad, then, recalled by the bankruptcy of his backers, made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1575 before returning by way of Venice in early 1576. His account, printed at Lauingen in 1582, is a herbarium as much as a diary; in it one reads one of the first European descriptions of coffee. Like Tschudi, Rauwolf writes in German for readers who stayed at home, but he discovers a Holy Land where the Ottoman administration, still brand new in 1519, has been in place for more than half a century.
-
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. Salomon Schweigger goes as preacher with the imperial embassy of Joachim von Sinzendorf, sent by Rudolf II to Murad III, and reaches Constantinople at New Year 1578. There he observes the same janissaries, the same audiences, the same watchfulness toward Christian envoys, then in 1581 goes on to Egypt, Jerusalem and Damascus. His account, printed in Nuremberg in 1608, shows the routine of a diplomacy that Busbecq had lived through at its beginnings: the treaty of 1562 has become a habit, with its tribute and its gifts.
Read a free edition →