Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600-1700

DISTANT LANDS AND DIVERSE CULTURES: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700

Glenn J. Ames Ronald S. Love Editors

PRAEGER

DISTANT LANDS AND DIVERSE CULTURES

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DISTANT LANDS AND DIVERSE CULTURES The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700

Edited by Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love

Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies, Number 45

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Distant lands and diverse cultures : the French experience in Asia, 1600–1700 / edited by Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love. p.cm. — (Contributions in comparative colonial studies, ISSN 0163–3813; no. 45) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–30864–0 (alk. paper) 1. Asia—Relations—France. 2. France—Relations—Asia. 3. Asia—Civilization—17th century. 4. Asia—Description and travel. 5. French—Asia—History—17th century. 6. Travelers—Asia—History—17th century. 7. Travelers—France—History—17th century. I. Ames, Glenn Joseph. II. Love, Ronald S., 1955– III. Series. DS33.4.F7 D57 2003 303.48'24405—dc21 2001057728 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2003 by Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001057728 ISBN: 0–313–30864–0 ISSN: 0163–3813 First published in 2003 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editors and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

To our teachers and mentors, who gave us the world and the knowledge to explore it.

“Un des plus grand avantages qu’un Voyageur pouvoit remporter de ses Voyages, etoit de se détromper des preventions qu’il a succèes dans son Pais contre les Étrangers, dont ceux qui n’en sont point sortis ne peuvent jaimais se défaire” —Chevalier d’Arvieux, 1673

Contents Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

xiii

1. Thévenot the Tourist: A Frenchman Abroad in the Ottoman Empire Glenn Sundeen

1

2. A Veritable Bedouin: The Chevalier d’Arvieux in the Camp of the Emir Turabey Deirdre Pettet

21

3. Secrets of the Seraglio: Harem Politics and the Rhetoric of Imperialism in the Travels of Sir Jean Chardin S. Amanda Eurich

47

4. Charles Poncet’s Travels to Ethiopia, 1698 to 1703 Theodore Natsoulas

71

5. The Travails of Madagascar: Rennefort’s Relation du premier voyage de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales Carl H. Sobocinski

97

6. Wonders of Nature, Diversity of Events: The Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval Diane C. Margolf

111

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7. Travels in India: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier Anne York

135

8. Mughal India during the Age of the Scientific Revolution: François Bernier’s Travels and Lessons for Absolutist Europe Glenn J. Ames

147

9. The Perils of Seeking a Multi-Cultural View of the East Indies: Charles Dellon, His Travels and the Goa Inquisition Glenn J. Ames 10. Simon de La Loubère: French Views of Siam in the 1680s Ronald S. Love 11. In Search of a Passage to China: Philippe Avril’s Quest for Grand Tartary, 1685 to 1690 Ronald S. Love

163

181

201

12. The Search for Souls in China: Le Comte’s Nouveaux Memoires Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey

231

Bibliography

249

Index

262

About the Editors and Contributors

267

Acknowledgments The successful birth of any new scholarly volume rests, in part, upon the valued aid and assistance of a variety of academic or professional midwives, who help to make it possible. This book is no different from others in that regard. Among those who merit special thanks are the respective editors of the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, the Journal of the Siam Society, the Proceedings of the French Colonial Historical Society, and the forthcoming publication, Huguenot Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France, who generously gave their permission to several of our contributors to reprint their essays in whole or in part. Our grateful thanks go also to Dr. Merrill Distad, Associate Director of Libraries, as well as David L. Jones, Map Librarian, and Bonnie Gallinger of the William C. Wonders Map Collection at the University of Alberta, who assembled most of the illustrations reproduced in this book. The William C. Wonders Collection may be only the second largest in Canada, but the staff that maintains it is without peer. Finally, we owe a great debt of gratitude to our editor, Heather Staines, of Greenwood Press, for her patience and flexibility over deadlines in the long process of bringing this book to fruition. Glenn J. Ames The University of Toledo

Ronald S. Love State University of West Georgia

Introduction “One of the greatest advantages that a traveler brings back from his journeys,” wrote the chevalier d’Arvieux in 1673, “is that he rejects the prejudices which he imbibed in his own country against foreigners, something which those who never leave will ever accomplish.” The seventeenth century in European history witnessed a great exodus of articulate globe-trotters who sought adventure, wealth, and prestige. This was an age, indeed, when Europeans could be found in nearly every corner of the globe, but especially in Asia, which had not lost its fascination for the West and had been its greatest lure since the days of Marco Polo. Fortunately for us, many of these individuals wrote voluminously of their experiences upon their return. In their accounts, these travelers reported the type of information one would expect regarding the details of geography, climate, flora, fauna, and the natural wealth of the land. But also included in these accounts is the very close attention their authors paid to the fullness and richness of the social, religious, and cultural structures of the people who constituted these non-Christian, non-Western societies. In short, the anthropological aspects of these travelogues compose an extraordinarily rich source for modern historians that, until now, has rarely been mined. Instead, scholars have limited themselves to the political and commercial contacts between Europe and the wider world during the Age of Discovery and Exploration. Over the past century, the topic of European expansion into the Indian Ocean basin and beyond to the southern shores of China has attracted extensive historical research, albeit not nearly to the degree of the Atlantic world. During that time, the literature has undergone several transformations. It has evolved

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from what M.N. Pearson has aptly described as the “seeds of empire” school of historiography on the topic to the current preoccupation with the experience of indigenous peoples, generally characterized as “the Other,” in relation to Europeans who are cast largely in the role of aggressors. Starting in roughly 1880 and continuing to 1940, English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese civil servants active in the administration of the twilight empires of their countries generated a literature that sought to glorify past colonial adventures as a means of legitimizing modern European imperialism. Not surprisingly, these studies are Whiggish, Eurocentric, even jingoistic. Only since the end of the Second World War, and during the past twenty-five years in particular, has a renewed interest resulted in more balanced monographs that endeavor to approach the topic from the perspective of a symbiotic economic, social, religious, and cultural interaction between Europe and Asia that opened with Vasco da Gama’s arrival at Calicut in 1499. This historiographical evolution began with the generation dominated by C.R. Boxer, J.H. Parry and Carlo Cipolla. The impressive body of work produced by these scholars and their contemporaries combined the best elements of the traditional literature with the methodological refinements of the post-1945 era. Nevertheless, they remained largely immersed in voyages and commerce a sort of “ships, guns and ports” focus that emphasized exploration and discovery above what John E. Wills, Jr., describes as the “interactive emergence of European domination” over the trade of maritime Asia from ca. 1500 to 1800. Building on their work and the methodological foundations they laid, a subsequent generation of scholars, including Pearson, T.R. de Souza, A.R. Disney, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and K.N. Chaudhuri, have brought to the field innovative research techniques to what hitherto had been viewed as a bastion of traditional history. This shift in outlook has resulted gradually in the modification of both the “Age of Discovery” literature and the Eurocentric “seeds of empire” school. As a result, the field today is much more multicultural, multilingual, and multifaceted. The past decade has witnessed still further, and sometimes extreme, revisionism in the field sparked by the quincentenary of Columbus’ voyage. Rejecting the Eurocentrism of the past, the best of this recent work has provided a useful counterpoint to the traditional concentration on the Western perspective by reminding scholars that there is an alternative point of view. By blindly embracing the siren call of postmodernism, however, much of this work has resulted in a hostile anti-European stance and, at base, a distorted representation of the contacts between the Western and non-Western worlds of the early modern period. In their efforts to vilify the former and exalt the latter, these writers, who include journalists, anthropologists, sociologists, and even professional historians, have deprived both the European and the “Other” of important aspects of their culture and heritage by resorting to simplistic Hollywood portrayals of “white hats” and “black hats,” neither of them historically accurate or compelling.

Introduction

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A common characteristic of this historiographical evolution has been an overwhelming concentration on the establishment of the seaborne empires of Portugal, England, and the Dutch Netherlands, and their interaction with the cultures of maritime Asia from 1600 to 1800. At the same time, the overseas endeavors of France have been generally overlooked in this literature. Doubtless, one factor behind this imbalance is that the French were simply less successful in the Near East and Asian trade than their European rivals. Colbert’s Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales (est. 1664) and Dupleix’s eighteenthcentury career in India, high points in an otherwise undistinguished two-century period, were the focus of studies by French historians of the Third Republic, such as Paul Kaeppelin, Jules Sottas, and Henri Weber. But few recent scholars have followed in their footsteps, at least for the periods prior to 1840 when France engaged with better success in the competition for Far Eastern empire with the other great powers. Another factor in this dearth of interest has been a parochial fascination with the internal and continental history of metropolitan France by academics who could not lift their eyes beyond the shores of Europe. To be sure, there is a large and impressive literature on seventeenth and eighteenth-century French Canada, and a growing body of work on the French Caribbean during the same periods. Yet even today most studies of France outre-mer are devoted to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century experience in Indo-China. The chapters compiled in this volume introduce the need for, and possibilities of, a new and exciting dimension in this field of study. They emphasize elemental cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and nonEuropeans, based on a close reading and analysis of contemporary texts, in a way that moves well beyond the “Age of Discovery” approach, on the one hand, and the methodological fadism of post-modernist theory, on the other. Inevitably, the chapters give frequent attention to economic matters. One must remember, after all, for whom the original texts, upon which these chapters are based, were written: seventeenth-century government ministers in France with compelling economic concerns. The fascinating thing, however, is that the same texts delved so widely and sometimes so profoundly into other subjects, ranging from geography and climate to court ceremonial, marriage customs, religion, and law, among a host of other topics. The potentially explosive intellectual impact of all this new information was noted in the mid-1930s by French scholar Paul Hazard in The European Mind, 1680–1715. He appealed for investigation of comparative social study as a possible “second root” of the Enlightenment, until then generally assumed to have been based upon the Scientific Revolution. Unfortunately, Hazard’s challenge was largely ignored as contemporary scholars rushed to participate in the concurrent rise of the Annals school, best represented by Fernand Braudel. To be sure, there is a voluminous literature concerning European voyages and victories. Much also has been written about Western impact upon other societies and, perhaps consequently, about structure in those societies before European contact. But almost no attention has been given to the “reverse flow,” the impact of non-Western societies upon the Europeans who

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were “discovering” them. The monumental work of Donald S. Lach is a notable exception to this general rule. That this mass of new and exotic information was eagerly sought and avidly devoured by contemporary readers is demonstrated easily. One has only to scan the printed catalogs of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Library to sec just how often the travel accounts were reprinted and translated, obviously because they found an active market. In addition, there is much evidence for the development of a sophisticated reading public. As a result, the trickle of exotic travel accounts of the early seventeenth century became a flood in the latter part of the century; and this market response sparked a whole new genre of “fictitious” voyages and voyagers: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The Persian Letters, and so on. Clearly, many Europeans were intrigued, stimulated, perhaps titillated, but certainly not offended by detailed accounts of nonEuropean, non-Christian societies with mores and morals that contradicted or simply ignored what had long been considered eternal verities in Europe. Although the chapters published here represent only the tip of the iceberg, they indicate forcefully the richness of the resources yet to be explored; resources that must be sorted and analyzed first for their content and then for their influence upon a changing European mind. With these studies Hazard’s challenge is accepted, and a new field opens. All of the contemporary works analyzed in this volume were chosen with deliberation because they represent a major area of French interest and effort, and also because they are the best available accounts written of the host society under scrutiny. The goal is not to offer an exhaustive general history of the French in Asia during the seventeenth century, therefore; nor is it an attempt to include all lands with which they sought relations. Rather, these chapters present a series of cultural snapshots, arranged in geographical order from the Levantine world of Ottoman Turkey, Persia, and Arabia, to the East African littoral, and finally to India, Siam, Grand Tartary, and China. The object is to give the professional academic, amateur historian and casual reader a sense not just of what can be learned from these colorful sources about the societies observed, but also what can be learned about the mentality of the seventeenth-century men who observed them. Thus, it is as much an effort to look at the Asian world through early modern French eyes as it is to achieve an understanding of Western perspectives on that world and how these shaped contemporary views of the place of Europeans within it. The book focuses exclusively on seventeenth-century Asia because it was during this period that the erstwhile dominance of the Portuguese Estado da India was challenged in earnest by the other major European maritime powers, all of which sought to stake out a colonial, commercial, and geopolitical claim from East Africa to the South China Sea. That objective was characterized by Adam Smith in his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), as the single most important goal during the Age of Discovery and Expansion; far more important, in fact, than the triangular trade of the Atlantic world. It was in pursuit of the same quest for the riches of the Indian Ocean trade that Bourbon

Introduction

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France entered this competition, though often with disappointing results. As for the contemporary authors who wrote the books that are scrutinized in the present volume, they came from many walks of life: Jesuit priests, ambassadors, merchants, physicians, tourists and men of letters. Remarkable for their sense of curiosity and adventure, they either immersed themselves in the host culture that they described or observed keenly its habits and customs regardless of the chronological limits of their exposure. Indeed, whether their length of stay was a mere six months or a protracted six years, it is astonishing how penetrating were the insights of these men, how sophisticated their understanding, and how sensitive their appreciation of these diverse societies. To be sure, they carried the baggage of their own culture, especially in terms of their Christian faith (which they saw as the engine for moral advancement) and the achievements of Western science and technology (which they saw as the engine for material progress). These twin pillars of Baroque Europe constituted for them the most striking contrast with the rest of the world of their day. They were, after all, men of their time and place. Nevertheless, the depth of their knowledge of the societies they experienced transcends a simple appreciation of superficialities. Their accounts reveal a profound recognition of the essential structures of these cultures and a sincere endeavor to explain them according to Asian standards, not European. As these works clearly demonstrate, their authors also found much that was worthy of admiration and emulation. These features they frequently contrasted with those accepted habits in Europe generally, and France specifically, that they considered to be immoral, unjust, irrational or plainly ridiculous. Thus, a developing cultural relativism is perhaps the most vital thread that runs through all of these books, as each author came to appreciate that difference a priori did not constitute inferiority or superiority. The same theme is common to the chapters in this volume, written independently by scholars chosen for their expertise in the field of early modern France. As well, nearly all of the works analyzed by them can be found in English translation, in either contemporary editions or modern versions. This is a way to introduce an English-speaking audience of university students and academics especially, but casual readers and amateur historians, also to the wealth of contemporary literature that is available to them without the need to learn foreign languages. An additional feature of that object is to encourage the translation of more works of this genre. This book is not intended to be exclusive, therefore; it is written for history students, scholars, and a general reading audience alike. The ultimate goal is to motivate professional academics to expand their views beyond the boundaries of the metropole to consider the importance of the French experience in the wider non-Atlantic world.

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1 Thévenot the Tourist: A Frenchman Abroad in the Ottoman Empire Glenn Sundeen “All who are curious, delight in the rarities they see; and there are but few, who if they were not otherwise engaged, would not willingly be themselves the witnesses and spectatours of them: these pleasing relations raised in my mind the first thoughts of travelling.” —Jean de Thévenot

French participation in the development of early modern European contact with Asia was both late and sporadic when compared to that of their Iberian and northern rivals. But one region in which they played second to none was in their relations with the Ottoman Empire. Through a combination of medieval French interest in the Levant and the well-known diplomatic expediency of a military alliance to thwart the Habsburg dynasty, France's primary contestant for continental supremacy, French contact with the Ottoman Middle East already had enjoyed a long and celebrated history by the seventeenth century. Whereas the first regular French contact with Asian potentates further east did not become significant until the quarter century before 1700, French merchants, soldiers, and diplomats had gained extensive experience with the Turks starting shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. A French reversal in the Bourbon-Habsburg contest of the early sixteenth century spawned regular French diplomatic relations with Ottoman Turkey, which became one of the most enduring aspects of the Ottoman relations with Europe until the twentieth century. This contact was not of a diplomatic nature only, however. The establishment of regular commercial relations between France and Turkey was one of the goals of the first French embassy to Constantinople in 1536 led by Jean de La Forêt. By the end of the century France had become the Ottomans’ most important European ally and trading partner, holding a sort of “most favoured nation” status in Constantinople.1 With both regular and consistent trade and diplomatic relations came a growing cultural and intellectual interest

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in the Levant as a region of historic and religious, as well as commercial importance. Frenchmen had been major participants in the medieval crusading movement and as subjects of the Most Christian King, they had long held an interest in the circumstances of the Christian Holy Places in Palestine. Rivaled only by that of Venice, the reading French public was probably better informed and had access to more literary resources on Ottoman Turkey than any of its neighbors. Written sources on Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt published in France abounded by the middle of the next century. According to Clarence Dana Rouillard, Ottoman Turkey was the most popular subject of French travel writing in the seventeenth century. In the first forty years of that century new publications or re-issued previous works on the Ottoman Turks appeared on average every three years. After 1640 the frequency doubled.2 These publications included travel accounts, histories, sermons, and the published letters of diplomats, missionaries, and pilgrims, many of which contributed to French, and indeed European, preconceptions of Ottoman Turkey based on religious antipathy, fear, and sensationalism. One of the more remarkable texts composed by Europeans sojourning in Ottoman Turkey in the seventeenth century was written, not by a soldier, merchant, or diplomat, but by an uncommon tourist by the name of Jean de Thévenot. Armed with an intense and self-professed curiosity as well as considerable talents as a sensitive and objective observer, Thévenot spent most of one year visiting the Ottoman capital of Constantinople and traveled through Anatolia and Egypt, and on a subsequent voyage through Persia and India, with no stronger motive than to be a spectator to the wonders of the eastern world. Upon his return to France he published one of the most erudite and exquisite accounts of Ottoman society of his times. Jean de Thévenot (1633–1667) was born into an independently wealthy Paris family and was educated at the Collège de Navarre. Little is known of Thévenot’s early life other than that he grew up under the auspices of a celebrated uncle, Melchisedech Thévenot (1620–1692). The elder Thévenot later gained notoriety as a translator, compiler, and editor of travel accounts of the non-European world, a sort of French “Samuel Purchas,”3 and in 1684 as Garde de Bibliothèque du Roi.4 After the completion of his studies, Jean de Thévenot soon demonstrated an interest in travel by touring England, Holland, and the German states-the primary objective of the latter was his interest in witnessing the Imperial Diet in action at Ratisbon. Next, accompanied by his uncle, he was off to Rome to observe a Papal Conclave and the inauguration of Pope Alexander VII. These travels seemed to have whetted his appetite for further exploration, no doubt encouraged by the elder Thévenot. He thus “resolved not to stop there, but to advance and inform myself of what was worthy of knowledge in other countries.”5 An impressionable young man with financial means, he decided to visit the Levant and in 1655 embarked for Constantinople. He spent eleven months in the Ottoman capital,6 and journeyed through Anatolia, Palestine and Ottoman Egypt before returning to France via

Thévenot the Tourist

3

Italy in 1662. The following year he embarked again, this time to expand the horizons of his intellectual curiosity even further east. He visited Aleppo, the Tigris Valley, and Persia, finally arriving in Surat by ship in early 1666. He spent the next year touring central India (where he met two other illustrious French travelers, François Bernier and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier) and the Coromandel Coast. From Masulipatnam he took ship to return to Europe via Persia. While traversing northern Persia, however, his health deteriorated and he died of exhaustion on the road to Tabriz in 1667. Thévenot’s legacy lies in his highly popular travel accounts, of which all but one were published posthumously. While he was on his second voyage to the East, his self-edited Relation d'un voyage fait au Levant appeared in Paris in 1664 to 1665. A sequel containing his account of Persia appeared in 1674 and a third on India was published a decade later. All three parts were published together in the late 1680s in Paris by the Sieur de Luisandre and François Pétis, under the title Voyages de M. Thévenot, tant en Europe qu'en Asie et en Afrique. This compilation was a great success and was translated into both English (by A. Lovell in London in 1687) and Dutch (in Amsterdam in 1705, 1723, and 1725).7 These publications were based on copious notes and daily journal entries compiled by the traveler until just a few days before his death. He also composed an unpublished five volume Hortus Siccus of plants he found on his travels. It is uncertain how this treatise or his diaries from Persia and India returned to Europe when he did not. Far more certain is that Thévenot’s description of the Ottoman Turks, and of Constantinople in particular, stands out from the myriad publications on that subject that strained the printing houses of France in the seventeenth century. His polyglot skills, quick eye and congenial character enabled him to fill his accounts with a richness of detail often lacking in his contemporaries’ travelogues. What seemed mundane to other travelers got top billing in Thévenot’s accounts, but only if they were not covered by other writers. Instead of concentrating on the popular perceptions of the heresy, debauchery, and depravity of the Turks, as promulgated by many of his contemporaries, Thévenot concentrated on such subjects as the physical well being, religious doctrine, and political society of the Ottomans generally and of Constantinople specifically. Perhaps even more remarkable is Thévenot’s rare ability to ignore the prevalent cultural/religious biases of his times and to describe the Muslim Turks in what comes across as a fair and sympathetic manner. These features were not lost on his readers and they earned him considerable contemporary praise. The editor of the compilation referred to him as “a treasury of knowledge,” and as a man wholly devoted to curious observation. He also claimed that “an honester man never lived in the world.”8 Perhaps more significantly, an “expert witness” in the form of no less than the secretary and interpreter of oriental languages to King Louis XIV, Monsieur de La Croix, commended Thévenot’s scholarship and works, claiming that “none but may reap profit from his instructions.”9 La Croix also supported Thévenot’s

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account in the face of a minor academic controversy, saying that his mastery of oriental languages combined with the quality of his published works meant that “there are but few in the western parts who come near him.”10 Two and a half centuries later, dwindling knowledge of his works still managed to attract some attention. In his analysis of early travel literature of Asia, E.F. Oaten observed that “to the historian who must regard these travellers’ writings as a mine whence facts may be extracted Thévenot is far more valuable.”11 The eleven months that Jean de Thévenot spent in Constantinople were of keen interest to the traveler. Not only was the city filled with the historical and imperial edifices for which it is still famed,12 but it was also a major center of commerce and political power of the Muslim world, which stretched from North Africa to the East Indies. Although it was still a world power, straddling Europe, Africa, and Asia with influence extending well beyond these frontiers, by the time of Thévenot’s visit, the Ottoman Empire had been in a state of slow decay since its apogee in the mid-sixteenth century. One of the sources of the decay was the bankruptcy of political and military leadership of the Ottoman dynasty since the death of Suleiman “the Lawgiver” in 1566. A series of bloody and inept rulers had brought it to its knees through indolence, massive bureaucratic corruption, and political anarchy in the capital. As early as 1608, the French ambassador to Constantinople, the baron de Salignac, wrote that he felt the collapse of the Turkish Empire was imminent.13 The timing of Thévenot’s visit is significant because he arrived in Constantinople just prior to one of the Ottoman Empire’s most severe crises, the Janissary revolt of 1656.14 And he was on hand to witness the beginning of the effective (but ultimately temporary) reversal of this crisis by one of the most significant Ottoman statesmen of the seventeenth century, the Albanian Mehmed Köprülü (Grand Vizier from 1656 to 1661). Less than a decade before Thévenot’s visit, Sultan Ibrahim (1640 to 1648) had become the second Ottoman victim of regicide in thirty years, being strangled by his own troops and replaced with his seven-year-old son, Mehmed IV (1648 to 1688) in 1648. The minority of the young ruler was dominated by the intrigues of his mother and grandmother in the Imperial harem, and was punctuated by economic stagnation and inflation, palace anarchy, and military paralysis in a decades-long war with Venice on the island of Crete.15 For the third time in thirty years, the Venetian navy blockaded the Dardanelles and defeated the Ottoman fleet sent to oust it.16 Ukrainian Cossacks raided the Black Sea coast near the capital. The army went unpaid and urban anarchy forced many of the inhabitants of the capital to flee to Anatolia. In the spring of 1656, just months after Thévenot’s arrival in the capital, the Janissaries revolted again, and “put the present Grand Signior into great fear.”17 Although Thévenot barely mentioned him (and never identified him by name), this crisis forced the Queen-mother to grant sweeping powers to the elderly Köprülü as the most experienced and capable official available.18 Upon his appointment, Köprülü soon restored order to the central government, defeated the Venetians,

Thévenot the Tourist

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and punished the Janissaries by massacring more than 3,000 of the rebels in the capital.19 Thévenot was unaware of the restoration of order, because he had left the capital for Anatolia and Palestine a month before. In retrospect, however, he asserted that the Grand Vizier, who had taken over after the rebellion, maintained that office for many years and died a natural death. According to Thévenot, this was quite an accomplishment, and to do so required “great prudence, and many friends everywhere.”20 Indeed, Köprülü’s achievement was almost unprecedented, as Thévenot observed that the preceding three Grand Viziers had all been executed during Thévenot’s stay in the capital. Thévenot’s visit to Constantinople also occurred at a time when Ottoman relations with France (as well as with every other European power) had taken a grim turn. During the so-called “reign of women” in the minority of Mehmed IV, the long-serving and later long-suffering French Ambassador, Jean de La Haye,21 had enjoyed superb relations with the feuding authorities of the Empire, the Sultan’s mother Valide Sultan Turhan and grandmother, Sultan Valide Kosem. Judging by his success in reopening Christian churches in the capital and in Palestine, and in freeing Christian slaves in the Ottoman galley fleets, both signs of significant prestige and favor of the court, La Haye seemed to have revived French fortunes with the Turks to the level of their apotheosis in the sixteenth century.22 All this radically evaporated with the appearance of Köprülü in 1656. In spite of France’s long-established alliance with the Ottomans, an alliance first established by François I in 1536,23 Franco-Turkish relations had never deteriorated so radically or so rapidly as the fall of La Haye from favour with the new Köprülü administration. One contemporary explanation of this departure was that La Haye, believing that Köprülü’s tenure as Grand Vizier would be as short-lived as that of his three predecessors, had refused to present the eighty-year-old former palace kitchen-hand with a diplomatic present. The iron-fisted Albanian responded to the insult by ultimately having the ambassador and his son imprisoned in the grisly Seven Towers Fortress and ordering the latter to be beaten.24 It is probable that the slighting of the Grand Vizier only heightened his hostility while the real cause of the deterioration of Franco-Turkish relations was the presence of French support for the Venetian fleet blockading the Dardanelles.25 Apart from describing the Venetian naval victory, Thévenot made no mention of these events, probably because he had already left the capital for Anatolia and Palestine by the time the storm broke. Nor did he make use of the abundance of information on events in Turkey that was widespread in France upon his return. Not only were there the numerous published accounts of travelers, but also the Paris periodicals, the Gazette and the Mercure François,26 reported regularly on French affairs in the Orient. Indeed, the events of La Haye’s embassy in Turkey were already widely known when he returned to France, and it is probably for this reason that Thévenot gave them little consideration in his book. As he mentioned several times in his account, he

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preferred to describe only what he saw firsthand and what was not already well known. As an observer of Ottoman society, Thévenot was exemplary. A true polyglot, he seems to have mastered Turkish, Arabic, and Persian as well as a number of European languages and probably some elements of Keralan and Tamil. He was well versed in astronomy, mathematics, and geography as well as the natural philosophy of René Descartes. Although the majority of his written observations focus on routine customs, social conditions, and the cultural pageantry of urban life, the wide range of subjects that interested him included politics, justice, religion, and war. Indeed, his many academic interests imbued his writings with a richness of detail and diversity found in few of the accounts of his contemporaries, who were most often interested in either the alleged and popularly believed stories of cruelty, barbarity, and sexual depravity of the Turks, or were intent on denigrating the Turks’ Muslim religious beliefs. Thévenot’s account of Ottoman society also benefits from the fact that the traveler was no over-worked merchant or discreet diplomat, but a free “gentleman-scholar” with both the financial means and the time to witness what he wanted and to observe the detail mostly at first hand. In other words, Thévenot had the leisure to do his own research. According to the seventeenthcentury editor of the compiled works, the author was seldom content to rely on hearsay or received knowledge of the Turks, and he tried to verify personally his information from multiple sources whenever possible. This was done by consulting local people from diverse walks of life: lowly coffee-house patrons, fearsome Janissaries, scholars, and the grandees of both the court and the European community in Constantinople. He questioned European apostates on such subjects as divination,27 debated the Islamic prohibition of human or animal images with his Turkish language instructor in Cairo,28 met with “the chief of their ecclesiaticks,” the Mufti of Constantinople,29 and interviewed the Ambassador La Haye, with whom he was on good terms.30 Even before he left Europe, he made good use of an opportunity to acquaint himself with the languages and cultures of the Levant by consulting one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Middle East, Barthélemi d’Herbelot, who was living in Rome at the time. Thévenot gleaned from him what he could on Eastern manners, customs, and languages, in which Thévenot deemed him “the most knowing man in Europe.”31 Thévenot was also careful to avoid repeating mere hearsay or popular rumor regarding such subjects as the daily routine of the Sultan or other inhabitants of the seraglio, which he admitted “are very hard to be known.”32 He did manage to find a reliable witness, however, in the form of a recently released court page whom he questioned with regard to the Sultan’s porcelain. There can be little doubt that Thévenot’s researches greatly benefited from his generally pleasant and cordial disposition. His editor described Thévenot as having “an easie unaffected conversation” and that “his company was very agreeable.”33 This affability of the author is upheld by a thorough gleaning of

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his account. On numerous occasions we find him chatting comfortably with Levantine merchants, local officials, and European apostate ex-patriots, and no doubt this approachable nature assisted him in his research into the rich detail of life in the Turkish dominions. This detail, which makes his account of Constantinople so outstanding, could only be derived from extensive and largely congenial interaction with local residents. Thévenot was also remarkably unbiased in his descriptions of Ottoman society. In an era when European interaction with the Muslim Turks all too often resulted in religious bigotry and mutual fear, Thévenot seemed able to observe their customs with objectivity, understanding, and at times even admiration. This understanding was in severe contrast to many of his contemporaries such as Michel Baudier,34 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier,35 and Guillaume-Joseph Grelot.36 While the very popular Baudier, who might not even have visited the Levant, popularized glowing stereotypical stories of debauchery and cruelty in the Ottoman Empire, Thévenot relied on his own observations and steered away from sensationalism. The result is a depiction of Ottoman society that is less chatty and anecdotal than Baudier or Tavernier but definitely more nourishing.37 The first several chapters of his description of Constantinople read like a modern-day travel guide with descriptions of the situation of the city and port and its major edifices. It appears most positive: “All who have seen Constantinople, agree in this, that it is the best situated city in the world; so that it would seem to be design’d by nature, for bearing rule and command over the whole Earth.”38 He praised the abundance of goods to be found of Ottoman provenance.39 He also extended praise to the Topkapi Palace, the “Seraglio” of literature and song, which “affords a very pleasant prospect, had in its markets and the grandeur of the great houses of worship, both of Byza” although he admitted that its exterior was strangely plain “in respect of what the palace of so powerful a prince ought to be.” 40 This lack of exterior ostentation also applied to the great houses of all of the grandees of Constantinople, and Thévenot was quick to identify the reason thereof: There are also many serraglios of private persons in Constantinople, but they have no beauty on the outside, on the contrary they are very ugly, and it would seem that they affect to make them have but little show without, for fear of giving jealousie to the Grand Signior.41

Thévenot’s French readers would have understood this wisdom very clearly in the aftermath of their own king’s jealous confiscation in 1661 of Vaux-leVicomte, the extravagant palace of the disgraced Surintendant des Finances, Nicolas Fouquet. If Thévenot was unimpressed with the exterior of Ottoman mansions, he did approve of the comfortable interiors that had “lovely apartments within, adorned with gold and azure [tiles], and the floor they walk upon covered with fine carpets.”42

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Thévenot then goes on to describe the suburbs of Galata and Pera, of which he had substantial experience since this is where most of the Latin Christian population (including himself) lived in a substantial community.43 Judging from this account, Pera must have been rather comfortable, much more so than Galata with its many Greek taverns that catered to “the rabble from Constantinople, who are very insolent in their drink, and very dangerous to be met with.”44 Thévenot also commended the way that the fine houses of Pera formed a sort of amphitheatre, “from whence with ease and pleasure the port and sea may be seen.”45 Pera was also the home for many of the wealthier Greek families as well as most of the foreign ambassadors. Only the envoys of the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, and Ragusa resided in the city itself. In his description of the city, Thévenot mentioned and obviously experienced many of the salient features that strike the modern visitor to Istanbul. He provided one of the first detailed accounts of the consumption of coffee and indeed is accredited by some with the introduction of coffee to France. Although he admitted that he did not become accustomed to the bitter taste until he had tried it several times, clearly Thévenot appreciated its potency as a stimulant and a cure for headaches: “In short, in the Turks opinion, it is good against all maladies; and certainly it hath, at least, as much virtue as is attributed to tea.”46 As for its popularity, Thévenot observed that all Turks, rich or poor, consumed at least two or three bowls of coffee a day. The smoke-filled coffee houses also provided a safe and sober social setting: All men are free to go to these houses, without any distinction of religion or quality; and it is no shame to go thither, many resorting to them for conversation: There is even withont doors stone seats, covered with mats, where those who would see those that pass by, and take the air, sit. In these coffeehouses, there are commonly several violins, players upon flutes, and musicians, hired by the master of the coffee-house to play and sing a good part of the day, to draw in customers.47

Other diversions noted by Thévenot include belly dancers,48 the ubiquitous use of tobacco,49 and puppet shows.50 It is clear that Thévenot was not uncomfortable among the Turks. At times he described his Ottoman objects with distinct praise. He depicted them as a robust and generally healthy people, “free from many defects which are more common in other countries of Europe.”51 The hygiene of the Turks clearly impressed him, especially the practice among Turkish men of shaving their heads and beards, “so that they are not subject to that filth and nastiness which breed among our hair, if we be not careful to comb it out.”52 Unlike most western Europeans of his day who held great fear of excessive bathing, Thévenot clearly appreciated the cleanliness of the Turks.53 This was emphasized by his detailed and colorful description of the Turkish bath house, which he obviously experienced at first hand. He even submitted himself to a rigorous Turkish massage:

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Then comes a servant stark naked, except those parts which modesty requires to be covered, . . . and making you lye out at length upon your back, he puts his knees upon your belly and breast, and embracing you very streight, makes all the bones of your body, arms and legs, crack again, to stretch and soften the sinews.54

Unlike many of his contemporary commentators, Thévenot was also quick to separate the truth from fiction regarding the common European perception that these bath houses were the den of all sorts of Turkish debauchery. The bagnios were clearly gender segregated and complete nakedness strictly prohibited. When women are there, they are served by women; and it is a capital crime for any man, of whatsoever religion or quality he be, to enter into the bagnio where the women are. It is also a great crime but punishable only by shame, or some bastonadoes [a beating with a stick] at most, to show ones privy parts, or to look upon another person’s.55

Instead, he described the ubiquitous bath houses as being “places of liberty and security, as though they were sacred, and there is no cheat ever.”56 He also correctly attributed to their frequent bathing the absence in Constantinople of several prominent diseases common in France, although he partially consigned this to their abstinence from excessive eating and alcohol consumption and, ironically, to their lack of professional physicians.57 Thévenot’s assessment of Ottoman feminine society is less detailed. He described the women as being commonly beautiful but generally vain and unfaithful. Although constantly veiled in public, Thévenot cited that it was common for Turkish women to risk their reputation as well as corporal punishment by exposing their faces to “some friend or young man that pleases them.”58 He also commented on their unwarranted idleness: Nevertheless they are extreamly lazy, spending the whole day sitting on a divan, and doing nothing at all, unless it be embroadering flowers upon some handkerchief; and so soon as the husband gets a penny, it must be laid out for purchasing a woman-slave. This great idleness makes them vicious, and employ all their thoughts how to find out ways of having their pleasures.59

This uncharacteristic negativity on the part of the normally unprejudiced Thévenot can largely be attributed to his own lack of contact with feminine society. As a male, the strictures of Muslim law would have made it difficult for him to meet and question Turkish women, especially those of higher society. In this case, most of his information would undoubtedly have come from the complaints of his male informants. But Thévenot was not without sympathy for this closely confined and under-appreciated side of Ottoman society. He recognized that Turkish women were not even afforded the freedom of women

10

Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures

in contemporary France, citing that Turkish men were so jealous that they “never show their wives to their friends how intimate soever they be; and in short, they hardly ever stir out of doors, unless to bath.”60 He speculated that the isolation caused by gender segregation led to loneliness, indolence, and infidelity. Incidentally, Thévenot noticed that it was not only the women who were unfaithful and sedentary. Although he recognized their vigor in sport and the military arts, he also found Turkish men to be peculiarly inactive in their spare time, sitting the whole day upon their divans, engaged in a game of chess, reading poetry, or playing the lute. Apparently Thévenot’s Turkish acquaintances found the European habit of taking a walk or pacing in the antechamber, both strange and amusing, “calling them fools, and asking them what business they have to doe at that side they go so often to, and then back again.”61 Evidently the amusement was mutual, as Thévenot could not help but see this immobility as indolence. Concerning religion, Thévenot was also remarkably sympathetic to the Turks, although as a good but moderate Catholic he could not help but regard Islam as being “so full of fopperies and absurdities, that certainly it is to be wondered at, that it hath so many followers.”62 His lack of malevolence towards Islam was spawned by his keen anthropological interest, and his criticisms are those of a sceptic rather than of a preacher. He devoted several chapters to describing the history and doctrines of the Koran, recognizing it as a blending of the doctrines of both the Old and New Testaments with the practical outlook of the desert-dwelling Arabs. Mohammed, Thévenot asserted, was “a man of wit,” who designed his doctrines to compel his followers.63 The Muslim paradise is portrayed as an oasis with gardens and fresh cool water, and this would appeal specifically to a people “of a countrey where it is excessively hot and where water is so scarce.”64 He outlined the five most important commands that the Turks, as good Muslims, must follow: the belief in one God, the fast of Ramadan, the daily prayers, the giving of alms, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.65 He then described in detail the basic tenets of the Islamic faith and found some ridiculous and some admirable. He revealed the Turks’ reverence of paper for its association with the printed word of God (the Koran) and for its potential of having the “Name of God” written on it. He attributed to this the fact that Turks never used paper in the toilet, “for it would be a great crime, and they would cudgel a Christian soundly, if they found that he employed it that way.”66 At the same time, however, he held the Turkish devotion to their religion to be admirable: “They are never seen to prattle and talk in their Mosques, where they carry themselves always with great reverence, and certainly they give us a lesson for devotion.”67 Similarly Thévenot was amazed by their sense of charity. Although commanded by Islamic law to donate one fortieth of their income and wealth to the poor, Thévenot was impressed by how generously this was put into practice: “This command is not ill observed among the Turks, for they are very

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charitable, and very willingly help the wretched, without minding religion, whether they be Turks, Christians, or Jews.”68 Even those without means were always ready to help a stranger, assist in public works, or share their meagre provisions. Thévenot seemed to challenge his readers that this same sense of generosity, especially to those of divergent faiths, was noticeably lacking in Europe. He also praised, with astonishment, the Turks’ kindness to animals. In every market Thévenot met shoppers who would buy caged birds for the sole purpose of setting them free.69 He wondered at the sight of well-dressed men building a protective wall of stones around a pregnant stray dog in the street. Even the method for dispatching a chicken was designed to be quick and painless, and he claimed that the Turks would never endure the manner employed by French butchers. The contrast with the manner in which people were treated was truly remarkable, and was the source of no small amount of confusion for the European observer. Thévenot nicely demonstrated this contrast by citing an anecdote of a merchant being severely punished by Sultan Murad IV for mistreating his own donkey. The man had failed to unpack his heavily laden beast while eating lunch and was summarily punished by being forced to carry the donkey’s load for the remainder of the journey.70 Like many of his contemporaries’ accounts of life in Turkey, Thévenot was acutely interested in the pageantry of festivals and processions, and his description of both the rigors and gaiety of Ramadan was one of his best. He was dumbfounded by the forbearance of the Turks who, even in the heat of a Cairo summer, did not succumb to the temptation of their thirst during the daylight hours: But finding the hour draw nigh, when it is lawful for them to drink and eat, they held a pitcher in their hand, and look’d up to the next minaret, waiting with great impatience till the man who was to publish the hour should come, and so soon as he began to cry, they instantly swilled down their bellies full.71

Thévenot was also quick to point out the often overlooked pragmatism of Islamic law, in that those who were sick, traveling, or at war could observe Ramadan at a time more appropriate to their condition. Although it is clear that Thévenot disdained their religion, he was determined to dispel the negative popular image of the Turks that had become so prevalent in Europe. This he set out in the chapter entitled, “A Summary of the Humour of the Turks.” He attributed this poor image to the long history of hostility between the Christian and Muslim worlds and to the received knowledge of earlier generations, which had relied on hearsay and the sensational accounts of pseudo-travelers.72 There is an implied warning of observing the Turks on these grounds because of the great diversity of experiences that travelers met with in Ottoman lands. Thévenot himself met with receptions in the provinces and in Egypt that were distinct from that in the

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capital. In Egypt he was robbed by Arab bandits and his description of the conditions of foreign travelers in Cairo is extremely negative: “When a Frank [European] goes along the streets, you shall have one rascally Moor [Arab] spit in his face, another give him a blow with a cudgel, and in the mean time he dares not so much as look them in the face, for fear of a present avanie.”73 In Constantinople, however, he never experienced such trials. His worst experience in the capital was to be the target of some well-thrown apples from some Turkish children.74 Here he declared in no uncertain terms: In Christendome many think that the Turks are devils, barbarous, and men of no faith and honesty, but such as know them, and have conversed with them, have a far different opinion; for it is certain, the Turks are good people, and observe very well that command of nature; not to do to others, but what we would have others to do to us.75

This support was qualified by his exclusion of the many Christian apostates whom Thévenot met and sometimes associated with in the Levant. He held little regard for these “renegadoes” who “are certainly capable of all sorts of wickedness and vice, as is known by experience.”76 Indeed, for his readers who were still sceptical of his appreciation of the Turks, it was on these heretics and other Europeans that he blamed most of their negative traits: the pride, xenophobia, extortion, and superstition that so many contemporary European travelers commented on. “But it is certain, that the Christians and Jews put them upon it and corrupt them; these men being themselves the Instruments of one anothers ruine, through a damnable envy that reigns ever amongst the Franks, that are in the Levant.”77 But the native Turks, he emphasized, are honest people who appreciated honest people in turn, be they Turks, Christians, or Jews. Almost as a footnote he mentioned two other vices. One was the Turks’ propensity for sodomy, which repulsed him.78 The other was their insatiable greed, for which he offered both a condemnation and a window of understanding: They are very covetous, and therefore their friendship is easily gained by money, or presents; by means of money one may receive all sorts of civility from them, and there is nothing but what may be obtained at the Grand Signior's court for money: Money makes heads flie off, and in fine money is the great talisman there, as well as elsewhere.79

The Greek and Jewish subjects of the Empire he held in little regard. The former he described as “covetous, perfidious and treacherous, great pedereasts, revengeful to extremity, but withal very superstitious, and great hypocrites; and, indeed, they are so despised by the Turks, that they value not even a Greek that turns Turk.”80 Regarding the Jews, Thévenot was even more dismissive: “they are the same in all places, that is to say, as great cheats in Turkie, as in Italy; and their thoughts run upon nothing else but devising and finding out taxes and

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tricks to vex Christians or Turks.”81 It is interesting to note that even the transparent tolerance exhibited by Thévenot reached its limit when confronted with the deep-rooted and time-honoured European prejudice against the Jews.82 One of the more popular subjects of early modern travel writers in the Ottoman Empire involved a voyeuristic fascination with Asiatic despotism. Thévenot was no exception, and he devoted four chapters to political matters. Whereas almost a century later, Montesquieu would denote the Ottoman dynasty as the paradigm of despotism, by the mid-seventeenth century, this was already becoming apparent. To Thévenot, Mehmed IV’s uncle, Sultan Murad IV (1623– 1640) was the archetype, a ruler “who in all appearance had no religion, and who made so slight a matter of the life of a man.”83 He also ruled as one “who knew no law, but his own will.”84 In this judgment Thévenot was not alone. In 1637, the experienced Venetian ambassador, Pietro Foscarini, reported to the Doge, that Murad was “the most immoderate, the most extravagant . . . a power absolute and despotic.”85 Like most of his contemporaries, Thévenot was not blind to the extremities of violence and tyranny of the Ottoman government. As already mentioned, he was witness to both the anarchy of the minority of Mehmed IV and to the early stages of the Köprülü’s reassertion of royal authority, with all of the bloodshed that entailed. But Thévenot was able to determine some of the roots of this despotism and seemed to offer it as a reflection to readers in France under the Ancien Régime. He definitely condemned the famed fratricide of the Ottoman royal succession, but correctly identified its decline at the time of his visit. At the same time he grudgingly admitted to its necessity in the face of an overbearing military which would use a royal alternative to lever privilege and financial concessions from the government for its own gain. But yet, he admitted, “it is very inhumane.”86 Thévenot also described the inertia and isolation of the central authority of the Ottoman Empire that reflected the anarchy of the time of his visit. Although Mehmed IV (like his uncle Murad) held a significant interest in ruling, Thévenot pointed out that many of his predecessors had “never beat his brains about business [of government],” but referred the management of the affairs of the Empire to his ministers. This isolation caused by the diversions of the harem and the intrigues of the bureaucracy had crippled the effective rule of the Empire. Before the emergence of Mehmed Köprülü, government efficiency was further paralyzed by the rapid succession of the senior state officials, all of whom were slaves of the sultan and at his mercy for their positions and their lives.87 The Ottoman political stage was one based on a society of fear. In spite of this despotism, Thévenot was in Constantinople at a good time to witness how unabsolute the ruler was. Without the co-operation of the infamous Janissary corps, even the sultans and grand viziers were vulnerable, as Thévenot aptly demonstrated with a description of the Janissary revolt that occurred during his stay: These very men, who when obedient to the Grand Signior, render him one of the most formidable princes on Earth, strangely limit his power, when

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Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures they lose that respect they owe to him, which happens pretty often, and then more like to rapid torrents, than a company of rational men, they run down all that comes in their way.88

Despite this negative picture of Ottoman government, Thévenot reserved judgement and once again looked for positive characteristics. He praised their social orderliness, citing that most citizens went about the city unarmed (as if in Europe they did not), and he attributed the absence of quarrels on the lack of gambling and alcohol, both of which are discouraged in the Koran.89 He commended the Ottoman judicial system for its swiftness. Regardless of religious, economic, or social status, all citizens had a theoretical right to seek justice at the highest courts of the realm, and the efficiency of the law courts would have made a French lawyer blush: All these things dispatched with so much expedition, that a matter no sooner comes to a hearing, but it is consulted, judged, and put into execution; and a tryal shall not last above four or five hours without sentence given one way or other . . . and so the parties are not undone by lawyers and pleading, as in other places.90

He also appreciated the impartiality of Ottoman justice, and attributed this to the society of fear, for the highest court of the land, the Divan, could be secretly scrutinized by the Sultan himself through a crepe covered window in the Divan hall. The judges never knew when the Sultan was watching, so out of fear for their very lives, they were “careful not to do partial justice, which would immediately cost them their life if the Grand Signior knew it.”91 In a country relatively saturated in travelogues of Ottoman Turkey and the Middle East, the Turkish account of Jean de Thévenot appeared with a remarkable freshness, and in this at least the author accomplished his selfappointed task, to describe what had not yet been laid out before the reading French public. But this was not his only achievement. Thévenot deliberately chose to break with the conventional mould of French travel literature on the Ottomans by observing them without the preconceived notions of his contemporaries. With the curiosity of youth he seems to have stripped away most of his cultural baggage and viewed his subjects as fellow human beings first. This is significant in the context of the travel literature of so many of his contemporaries. Writing in a climate of enduring religious confrontation as well as great intercourse between the Christian and Muslim worlds, Thévenot showed that not only he, but the significant numbers of his interested readers were capable of open-minded and objective inquiry beyond the horizons of their French or European world. Certainly many of his contemporaries were more interested in the bawdy tales of the seraglio or in describing the lascivious lifestyles of its inhabitants, and they proved the public interest in these subjects with their popularity. Others focused on demarcating the religio-cultural boundary of the western “Christian” world by outlining the negative features of

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those who lived beyond that frontier. In contrast to these “tabloid journalists” of his day, Thévenot preferred to take a more anthropological and definitely human approach to the subject of his fascination, and his own publishing record proved that his readership endorsed his method. More than in the copious minutiae that he described in his accounts, it is in his objectivity that his importance in the travel literature of the seventeenth century lies. He demonstrated that in spite of the deeply ingrained intolerance of his times, there was yet a diversity of western opinion of the non-Western world.

Notes 1. See M.E. Yapp, “Europe in the Turkish Mirror,” in Past and Present, vol. 137, no. 4 (November 1992): pp. 134–55. 2. Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature (Paris: 1941), p. 236. 3. His most famous work was the travel account compilation, Relations de divers voyages curieux qui n'ont point été publiés, et qu'on a traduits outirés des originaux des voyageurs français, espagnols, allemands, portugais, hollandais, persans, arabes, etc., published in Paris in two volumes from 1663–1672. 4. Melchisedech Thévenot was also a noted scholar and contributor to the founding of the Académie des Sciences. 5. Jean de Thévenot, The Travels of Monsieur de Thévenot into the Levant, in three Parts, trans. A. Lovell (London: 1687), p. 1. 6. September 1655–August 1656. Thévenot’s dates for his stay in Constantinople do not match the eight months he claimed to have stayed there. (See Thévenot, p. 65.) 7. It is the English translation of this latter work that was used for the preparation of this chapter. 8. Thévenot, unpaginated preface. 9. Ibid., unpaginated preface. 10. This concerned some etymological disparity between Thévenot’s account of Persia and that of Jean Chardin’s Coronation of Solyman that was published in both French and English in the same year. See the letter from La Croix that is appended to the 1687 publication of Thévenot’s combined travel accounts. 11. E.F. Oaten, European Travellers in India (London: 1909), p. 197. 12. These alone attracted many European visitors, including the sixteenth-century antiquarian, Pierre Gilles. (See Pierre Gilles, The Antiquities of Constantinople (New York: 1988).) 13. Rouillard, p. 142. Fourteen years later, the English diplomat, Sir Thomas Roe, repeated this warning, referring to the empire as “a sinke of men and sluttisheness.” Sir Thomas Roe, Negotiations in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte from the year 1621 to 1628 (London: 1749), pp. 37–38. 14. Thévenot mistakenly dated this insurrection in 1655. (Thévenot, pp. 77–81.) 15. The siege of Candi on Crete had begun on the orders of Mehmed’s mother, Sultan Valide Turhan, as an attempt to direct both the unruly Janissaries and urban public

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opinion away from the glaring problems at home. It lasted until Köprülü’s son Ahmed Köprülü finally captured the city in 1669. 16. Described by Thévenot, pp. 74–76. 17. Ibid., p. 77. 18 Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire (New York: 1995), p. 137. 19. Surprisingly, this fascinating character of seventeenth-century Ottoman history seems to have not yet merited a Western language biography since the fanciful seventeenthcentury work by François de Chassepol, Histore des grands vizirs Mahomet Caproglipacha et Achmet Caprogli-pacha (London: 1677). 20. Thévenot, p. 64. 21. La Haye served as ambassador to the Porte from 1639 until 1660, one of the longest tenures of such a public servant in the Levant in that period. For a brief synopsis of his time in Constantinople, see Rouillard, pp. 153–56. 22. Thévenot several times witnessed Ambassador La Haye being honoured by Köprülü's predecessors. (Thévenot, p. 34.) 23. This military and political alliance had been intended as a diversion of the victorious Habsburg Emperor Charles V in the aftermath of France's defeat at Pavia in 1525. It emphasized France’s leading role in the protection of the Christian Holy Places in Palestine and of Latin Christianity in general, the encouragement of commercial cooperation, and the maintenance of political and military solidarity, in that order. The most enduring aspect of this alliance was its anti-Habsburg nature. 24. Rouillard, p. 154. 25. Mansel, p. 196. 26. From its founding in 1605 the Mercure François had a strong interest in French affairs in the east. (See Rouillard, p. 146.) 27. Thévenot, p. 36. 28. Ibid., p. 52. 29. Ibid., p. 53. 30. Ibid., p. 18. 31. Ibid., p. 2. When Barthélemi d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale, ou dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des peuples de l’Orient was posthumously published in 1697, it immediately became one of the early landmark European studies on the Arab world. (Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: 1982), p. 137.) 32. “Many have written at large, how the Grand Signior spends his time in the Serraglio, his daily exercise, his way of eating and drinking, bed and the like, which is very hard to be known, there being no witnesses but eunuches, who never come out of the Serraglio, and some Itchoglans: For my part, I know none of these particulars . . . and therefore I shall not speak of them.” (Thévenot, p. 59.) 33. Ibid., unpaginated preface. 34. Baudier produced the best sellers of his day, Histoire generate du Serrail et de la Cour du Grand Seigneur published in ten editions between 1624 and 1662, and Histoire generale de la Religion des Turcs published in three editions from 1625 to 1641. (Rouillard, p. 250.) 35. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Nouvelle Relation de L’interieur du Serrail du Grand Seigneur: Contenant Plusieurs Singularitez qui jusqu ’icy n ’ont point esté mises en lumière (Paris: 1675). Tavernier, one of the most well-traveled Frenchmen of the seventeenth century wrote more extensively from his experience as a jewel merchant in

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India, but his account of the Seraglio in Constantinople was considered definitive in his day. 36. Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, A late voyage to Constantinople containing an exact description of the Proportis and Hellespont, with the Dardanels, and what else is remarkable in those seas, as also of the city of Constantinople, trans., John Philips (London: 1683). 37. A comparison between Thévenot and his English contemporaries weighs even more heavily in favour of the Frenchman. See especially the accounts of William Lithgow, Sir Henry Blount and the preacher John Cartwright in Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Review, ed., Kenneth Parker (London: 1999). For an overview, see Brandon H. Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York: 1987). 38. Thévenot, p. 19. 39. Namely the Byzantine former church Santa Sophia and the Ottoman Suleimanye and Sultanahmet Mosques, the latter which he refers to as the New Mosque. (Ibid., pp. 20– 23.) 40. He also paused to correct a popular misconception in France that the Seraglio is the place for the Sultan's collection of wives and concubines. He correctly identified it as the imperial palace. (Ibid., p. 23.) 41. Ibid., p. 25. 42. Ibid., p. 25. 43. Upon his arrival in Constantinople, Thévenot initially lodged with a Flemish innkeeper named La Roze in Galata, but then hired his own house in Pera. (Ibid., p. 18.) 44. Ibid., p. 27. 45. Ibid., p. 28. 46. Ibid., p. 33. 47. Ibid., p. 34. 48. “They have also a sort of women, whom they call Tchingueniennes, who are publick dancers, that play on castenets and other instruments while they dance; and for a few aspres, will shew a thousand obscene postures with their bodies.” (Ibid., p. 35.) 49. The heavy use of tobacco caused no small inconvenience in the mostly wooden residential districts of the capital as noted by Thévenot. In his eleven months in Constantinople, there were three catastrophic fires that he attributed to tobacco, “seeing they smoke when they are in bed.” (Ibid., p. 26.) This problem inspired Sultan Murat IV to attempt to prohibit tobacco use in the city. (Ibid., p. 60.) 50. Ibid., p. 35. 51. Ibid., p. 29. 52. Ibid., p. 30. 53. According to Anthony Reid, conventional European wisdom held that bathing in water was hazardous due to the spread of disease and effeminacy. (Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (Chiang Mai: 1988), p. 51.) 54. Thévenot, p. 31. 55. Ibid., p. 32. 56. Ibid., p. 31 57. Ibid., p. 37. This echoes the widespread distrust of the early “interventionist” (i.e., surgery and bleeding) medical profession in Europe in Thévenot’s time, which probably killed more people than it cured. (See Reid, p. 53.) 58. Thévenot, p. 56.

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59. Ibid., p. 56. 60. Ibid., p. 57. European readers would not receive a thoroughly reliable account of Turkish feminine society until the publication of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For her descriptions of the life of Turkish women see, Christopher Pick, ed., Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (New York: 1990). 61. Thévenot, p. 34. 62. Ibid., p. 38. 63. Ibid., p. 38. 64. Ibid., p. 39. 65. Ibid., p. 43. 66. Ibid., p. 43. For further discussion of this subject, see Andrew Wheatcroft, The Ottomans: Dissolving Images (London: 1995), p. xxiv. 67.Thévenot, p. 50. 68. Ibid., p. 50. 69. In contrast to the similar practice in Buddhist South East Asia, the Turks believed that the birds would announce their rescuer’s kindness in the presence of God on the Day of Judgment. 70. Thévenot, p. 51. 71. Ibid., p. 42. 72. Perhaps an indictment of Michel Baudier. (Ibid., pp. 58–59.) 73. Ibid., p. 255. 74. Regarding his lack of difficulty in Constantinople, Ambassador La Haye remarked to Thévenot with some surprise that he might brag he had “come better off than any other ever had.” (Ibid., p. 57.) 75. Ibid., p. 57–58. 76. Ibid., p. 57. 77. Ibid., p. 57. 78. “They are very amorous, but with a brutish love; for they are great sodomites, and that is a very ordinary vice amongst them.” (Ibid., p. 58.) Compare this sparse mention of sodomy to accounts by Baudier and Tavernier. 79. Ibid., p. 58. 80. Ibid., p. 83. 81. Ibid., p. 83. 82. Overt anti-Semitism was a common theme in early modern travel literature of the Middle East. For a brief discussion, see the introduction to Parker, pp. 23–25. 83. Thévenot, p. 51. 84. Ibid., p. 53. 85. Quoted in Lucette Valensi, Venice and the Sublime Porte: The Birth of the Despot, trans., Arthur Denner (Ithaca: 1993), p. 2. 86. Thévenot, p. 59. 87. During his visit in the capital, Thévenot outlined that there had been three Grand Viziers, three Muftis (religious judges), and three different Captain Pashas (military commanders), all of whom were executed while in office. (Ibid., p. 65.) An interesting statistic computed by Philip Mansel claims that of the seventeen grand viziers who held office between 1644 and 1656, only two died natural deaths. Before 1839, thirty-two of 178 grand viziers (eighteen percent) were executed while in office. (Mansel, p. 60.) 88. Thévenot, p. 77. 89. Ibid., p. 57.

Thévenot the Tourist 90. Ibid., p. 65. 91. Ibid., p. 65.

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2 A Veritable Bedouin: The Chevalier d’Arvieux in the Camp of the Emir Turabey Deirdre Pettet Curiosity was in fashion at the French Court, the Chevalier d’Arvieux observed in his memoirs, thinking back on his arrival there in 1667. “Because I was not known everyone was asking . . . who I was, where I was from, what business I had at Court.”1 Those questions reflected the courtiers’ usual nosiness about newcomers, but in d’Arvieux’s case the answers only further piqued their curiosity. Like other young men of the nobility who had arrived in Paris from the provinces, d’Arvieux had come to Court hoping for preferment and the opportunity to be of service to the king. But his unusual qualifications set him apart from the rest. In an effort to restore his family’s fortunes, he had spent twelve years in trade in the port cities of the Levant, also traveling extensively in the region. His passionate interest in learning Oriental languages, Turkish and Persian, Arabic and Syriac, had led to an acquaintance with local peoples and a familiarity with their customs. After his return to France in 1665, those qualifications (and a bit of chance) had resulted in his accompanying an official French mission to Tunis.2 His presence had proved crucial to its success and had subsequently earned him the attention of Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. They recognized that d’Arvieux’s knowledge and experience might prove useful to their plans for improving relations with the Porte, for expanding French trade within the Ottoman Empire, and for establishing a Levant company.3 Some at Court were quite simply curious to hear the stories d’Arvieux had to tell about the Arabs and the Turks. In the wake of more than a century of European exploration and

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expansion, the French were fascinated by reports of distant lands and different peoples. Obligingly, and not without some sense of gratification, d’Arvieux amused an audience at Court with stories of his adventures. But his pressing concern was employment. His hopes for further commissions from the king were not immediately realized, but eventually his patience paid off. He returned to the Ottoman Empire as envoyé extraordinaire to Constantinople in 1672 and later served for some years as French consul, first in Algiers, later in Aleppo. Between appointments he returned to the French Court where his arrival always provoked a new round of questions. At the request of “the Curious” he began writing his memoirs in 1673, adding to them in the years to come.4 They were never published in his lifetime. The first of them, Voyage à la Palestine, only appeared in 1717, fifteen years after his death. A six-volume edition entitled the Mémoires du Chevalier d’Arvieux was finally published in 1735. Edited by Jean-Baptiste Labat, the work comprehended the author’s “Voyages to Constantinople, in Asia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, & Barbary, the description of those Countries, the Religions, the Manners, the Customs, the Commerce of those Peoples, & their Governments, Natural History & the most significant of events.”5 A reflection of d’Arvieux’s own intense curiosity, of his pleasure in discovery, the work is a fascinating mélange. There are tales of adventure, of friendship, and of betrayal; tours of towns, cities, and countryside; visits to historical sites; reports on peoples and their customs; tips for the traveler and words of warning; pages of observation, opinion, and digression; some facts and probably not a few fictions. There is also commentary on commerce—on goods traded, problems within the French trading community, the competition among European nations for the Levantine trade, and the relationships of those nations with the Ottoman authorities. Reading around and through some of those things, one can also trace the course of d’Arvieux’s life over some thirty years, from 1653 when he first sailed from Marseille to Smyrna until the 1680s when he served as consul in Aleppo.6 Within the context of that biography, the first twelve years in the Levant are remarkable as an apt preparation for his later sometimes reluctant career in service to the king. But the culminating episode of that period, his visit with the Bedouins of Mount Carmel, deserves special attention.7 The story of his experience among a people feared as raiders and commonly viewed as “the enemies of all others” he deliberately presented to the French reader as an appreciation of Bedouin society and as an argument against prejudice.8 More than that, it was an expression of affection: in the Arab camps he had made good friends and had lived happily as a “veritable Bedouin.”9 It was precisely that episode that “the Curious” at Court had first urged him to record, arguing that few had his knowledge of the subject and that an account would be of interest to the public. He did not disagree. His response was a memoir in two parts, the first being an account of his particular experiences, and the second being a more general report on nearly every aspect of Bedouin life: nomadic existence, government and religion, manners and customs. But he

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wrote not merely to amuse or to satisfy the curiosity of the French reader; he intended to challenge a common stereotype: “one makes a grave error in characterizing the Arabs as impolite, coarse, brutal, unjust, violent, untrustworthy, and without sentiment.”10 He knew that characterization to be untrue: “[T]hey are the best people in the world, civil in their fashion, hospitable, helpful, exact in their promises, and far more honest people than Europeans imagine them to be. It is to correct mistaken notions, that having myself a very exact and extensive knowledge of the manners and customs of those People, that I find myself obliged to represent them as they are to those who would judge them so poorly, and that is what I am going to do.”11 After years in the Levant he was well aware that the Arabs’ reputation as raiders was not undeserved, but from his own experience he also knew that the traveler who came in good will to the Arab camps was welcomed. His admiration for the Arabs came from some six months of living among them, speaking their language, and accustoming himself to their ways. On that basis he considered himself qualified to act as cultural interpreter. In that role his claim to exact representation was immodest, even presumptuous; his writing was not completely free of bias. In writing his memoirs, the “veritable Bedouin” was conscious of his European and Christian identity and of a French audience he wanted to please. Nonetheless, he also wanted to persuade: the result of his efforts was an enthusiastic apology for the Arab way of life and a generally positive portrait of the Bedouins, a people he considered in many respects more admirable than the French. His success in getting to know them depended not only on what he had learned of Oriental custom during his first eleven years in the Levant, but on an interest in languages—a passion that dated from childhood. The published memoirs do not contain an account of those early years, but editor Labat’s preface to the 1735 edition supplies some pertinent details and an explanation of d’Arvieux’s original decision to travel to the Levant. The Chevalier d’Arvieux was born near Marseille on 21 June 1635 into the Arviou family; originally from Lombardy, it traced its nobility back eleven generations to 1310.12 The young Laurent lived with a grandparent until the age of eight; then his father made provisions for his education, eventually sending the boy to study at the Collége de Marseille. The curriculum there would have been traditionally classical; it seems the young d’Arvieux “made surprising progress despite his inclination for Mathematics and Foreign Languages, which took up a good part of his time.”13 In 1649 an outbreak of the plague in Marseille forced him to return to his father’s home in the countryside. The following year his father was stabbed by neighbors dissatisfied by the course of a land dispute. Before he died several weeks later he pardoned his killers and forbade his family to avenge his death. At the age of fifteen, d’Arvieux was left responsible for the welfare of the family—his mother, his two young brothers, and his two sisters. One option was for him to manage the family holdings in the countryside under the direction of his mother, who had been left everything by her husband’s will. It was not an attractive possibility; apparently the woman was a quarrelsome

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spendthrift. D’Arvieux decided on another course, one also better suited to his disposition and his interests. By a grant of special royal privilege, men of noble family could engage in commerce en gros in the ports or Echelles of the Levant without losing their noble status.14 It was a means for poor families to restore their fortunes.15 To d’Arvieux it was more than that: it was a chance to get away, to indulge his interest in foreign languages, and to satisfy his desire to travel. He had the example of relatives to follow. One of them, a Monsieur Bertandié, had just returned from Smyrna. The man’s two brothers were still active in the trade, one taking over in the Levant, the other handling the affairs of business in Marseille. They approved of the young man’s plan, took him in, and provided him with instruction before sending him off to the Levant. On 7 October 1653, d’Arvieux, only eighteen years of age, was on board when the king’s ship Postilion set sail from Marseilles bound for the port of Smyrna. In his memoirs he later described that first voyage as a test of his determination, the Mediterranean, was a dangerous place. But despite storm, enemy attack, and near shipwreck the ship arrived two months later at its destination.16 Smyrna proved to be a good place for trade. The policies of the local authorities favored commerce.17 Silks, cottons, goat’s hair, wool, spices and drugs, pearls and stones, and various other goods arrived in the port by ship or caravan. Under the terms of capitulatory agreements with the Ottoman Porte the French and other European traders resided in the city.18 In his five years there, d’Arvieux dutifully applied himself to learning business under the tutelage of his relative. He was generally happy and found the entertainments suited to his age. During get-togethers within the European community there were games and hunting, promenades and good conversation. Fine dining was another pleasure. The food in the markets was reasonably priced and the wines of the region were good. When he had the time he explored the town; his walks took him up to the château where the garrison was housed, down into the bazaars of merchants, and into the streets of artisans, past the caravanserai, past private houses, occasionally into gardens, through churches and cemeteries, and sometimes out into the countryside.19 There was one major disappointment in those years: although he made good progress in English and Greek, his efforts to learn other languages met with less success. Hours of study, of poring over grammars and dictionaries, did not make up for a lack of conversational practice. He had some formal contact with local people, but his youthful age did not permit him to befriend them. His knowledge of Smyrna—of the people and their customs—depended for the most part on visual observations and hearsay. Other Europeans in the city did not share his passion for languages;20 in fact, because they often did not bother to learn local languages, they usually had to rely on Armenians and Jews as intermediaries in the trade. D’Arvieux was not sorry when his relatives announced their intention to relocate their business in Saïda. He and Monsieur Bertandié left Smyrna on 7 February 1658. After some sightseeing in Egypt and a stopover of several months in Acre, the two men reached Saïda on 17 July 1658.

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In that city, the Sidon of Scripture, d’Arvieux would realize both of his ambitions: over the next seven years he made his fortune and learned the languages and customs of the place. English, Dutch, and Venetian ships sometimes put into the port to complete their cargoes for Europe, but the French were the only Europeans to maintain a Nation—a community—in Saïda. The French residents lived well. Food was inexpensive, plentiful, and rich in variety; wine they imported or made themselves. The traders occupied quarters in the three khans. The largest of them, with its galleries and promenades, was on a courtyard across from the French consular residence. This petite République, as d’Arvieux termed the khan, housed shops, an inn where merchants could dine, a few cabarets always filled with sailors, and quarters for the Cordelier and Jesuit fathers. D’Arvieux lived in the smallest of the khans with rooms facing the sea and enough space there to entertain his friends and to house his servants. His own rooms were delightfully quiet—perfect for hours of work and study. The time he continued to devote to the study of languages and his careful attention to the particulars of local custom were rewarded in Saïda: among a population that included Turks, Moors (d’Arvieux’s term for the Arab-speaking population), Maronites, Greeks, and Jews there were many opportunities for conversation and friendships outside the French community. What in Smyrna had been mere curiosity about other peoples gave way to the pleasures of acquaintance. He was particularly pleased to know the pasha and the cadi. Although d’Arvieux was always one to enjoy the ceremony and costume of formal occasions, he was proud to be on such good terms with the pasha that he was received sans cérémonie. In the pasha’s residence he saw almost everything—the women’s quarters of course an exception, “impenetrable to all but the master of the house and his eunuchs.”21 His relationship with the cadi was not so familiar as that, but d’Arvieux knew him quite well; he found it interesting to sit in on some of the legal cases that were presented for the man’s judgment.22 Commerce was good during his first years in Saïda. The town was a prosperous trading center, important not only for its own products but as a collection point for merchandise arriving from cities inland and along the coast. Cinders for the manufacture of soap and glass came from Rama, coffee and cotton from Jerusalem. From Acre came wool and woven cotton and more cinders. Silks arrived from Beirut and from Tripoli (in Syria). Saïda too produced silks, though not so fine as those from other parts. Senna arrived by caravan from Mecca. For the French there were special advantages to trading in Saïda: their European competitors were not established there; and the local customs, in assessing duties, valued goods at a low price. Nevertheless, d’Arvieux found some reasons to complain about the relations between the French Nation and some of the local powers. The resident governors often made excessive demands, assessing fines to satisfy their avarice or to make up the cost of their tax-farming contracts with the Porte. They also demanded money in loans, which they never repaid. Back in Marseilles the Chamber of Commerce was often insensitive to these difficulties, failing to

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recognize the burden imposed on its traders by the local authorities in the Echelles.23 Problems in the trade notwithstanding, d’Arvieux prospered; he sent to France for his two brothers, establishing one in Rama, and keeping the younger one with him in Saïda. In those years he enjoyed his travels in the region, whether he was stopping to see the Cedars of Lebanon, touring the city of Damascus, or taking the paths of the pilgrims through the Holy Land. In 1664, not very long before his return to France, he traveled to Mount Carmel and lived for several months among the Bedouin Arabs. That sojourn was a happy interlude in his life, a time when he did not have to deal with the pressures of business or with the frustrations that later characterized most of his work in service to the king. His decision to visit the Arabs was a consequence of troubles in another part of the Ottoman Empire.24 On 22 July 1664 the French navy captured the port of ‘Gigery’ on the Algerian coast, intending to make it a base for launching attacks on the Barbary pirates and for disrupting their trade to the eastern Mediterranean.25 Not surprisingly, throughout the Ottoman Empire, news of the event led to open hostility toward Europeans. The English, Dutch, and other Europeans hastened to distinguish themselves from the French, denying they had had any part in the action. Some among them suggested that the French should return to France until tensions had subsided. “I confess that the danger to which we were exposed could not have been greater,” d’Arvieux wrote.26 Whatever pleasure he had taken in making the acquaintance of the Turks in Saïda, he did not trust them. He feared a massacre, but also suspected departure from the Levant would mean the end of French commerce there. The best course would be not to return to France, but to lie low for a while. Hoping to take advantage of Arab antipathy toward the Turks, he would head south, make friends with the Bedouin Arabs of Mount Carmel, and seek the protection of their leader, the Emir Turabey.27 In preparation for the trip, d’Arvieux first arranged for a disguise, ordering three fine costumes “à l’Arabesque.”28 Then he grew a beard, tending it carefully, wanting it to be rich, long, and luxuriant—properly venerable among the people he would be visiting. His monies, books, and papers, and the most precious of his goods he stowed away. His brothers were to stay behind, waiting for instructions. On 16 August 1664, d’Arvieux, dressed in his new Arab robes, set out on horseback for Mount Carmel. With him were three of his servants, each of them well-armed and in Turkish disguise. An Arab led the two mules that carried the baggage. Their disguises were a success; during their journey no one challenged them. When they arrived three days later in the Arab camp word spread quickly that a Franc had come to see the Arab leader; it was an “extraordinary thing.”29 The Emir Turabey was already occupied, giving audiences that morning in his ceremonial tent, a green one larger than the ordinary black ones around it. Also waiting for an audience was a Turk of d’Arvieux’s acquaintance, an officer of the pasha. Omar Aga was surprised to see the Frenchman in disguise, but greeted him amicably, filling him in on the happenings in the camp and

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arranging for d’Arvieux’s baggage and horses to be tended to. Apparently, d’Arvieux had less to fear of Turkish enmity than he had imagined. When the Emir was free to see them, the two men entered the Emir’s tent together.30 In his account of that first audience, indeed of his whole stay in the Arab camp, d’Arvieux depicted his own comportment as exemplary; he brought to his acquaintance with the Arabs the same courtesy and sense of decorum he would later display at the French Court. In both places he was the perfect courtier, dedicated to serving the Emir in one, the monarch in the other. A deliberate comparison is implicit in the details of his descriptions, d’Arvieux referring to the Emir as the Prince and to his entourage as a “Court.” Aware that to his audience at the French Court the minute details of an increasingly refined code of etiquette were a daily concern, he stressed that the Bedouins too had a code of etiquette—particular rules of their own governing correct behavior; they were demonstrably a civil and civilized people. Some of their ways were simpler, some similar, some more honest; during his stay in the camp d’Arvieux adapted himself to Arab custom. His first meeting with the Arab leader was critical: if he hoped to have the Emir’s permission to stay on in the camp, he had to make a good impression. He was reasonably confident; he knew the Emir by reputation and had met him briefly four years earlier. He had also studied Arabic. Acquainted with some of the rules of Oriental ceremonial, d’Arvieux had come bearing gifts: “twenty-five pounds of dried jams in ordinary boxes tied with ribbon. Five ells of Venetian scarlet for making trousers, ten pounds of tobacco from Brazil, a dozen loaves of the finest sugar from Marseilles, two cases of various types of liqueurs, & a large string of fine red coral much estimed.”31 It was easy to recognize the Arab leader even though he was dressed more simply than the men around him. The Emir sat cross-legged on the carpet, “like our Tailors,” d’Arvieux noted. Others stood before him respectfully, as his valets waved away flies with their fans. D’Arvieux and Omar Aga hesitated, giving their servants time to place presents at the feet of the Emir and to station themselves off to the side, “their hands crossed on their stomachs, which is a sign of the most profound respect.”32 Then the Frenchman and the Turk approached the Emir, expecting to kiss his hand as was customary. But the Arab excused them from having to make that gesture of obeisance. Having expected to see someone in French dress, the Emir was surprised to learn that d’Arvieux was the Franc who had come to see him. No one would not take d’Arvieux for a “veritable Bedouin,” he remarked, adding, “You are dressed like them, & you speak our Language with perfection; the Francs do not speak it; they always need an Interpreter.”33 Next followed the necessary formal banter about the gift, the Emir giving thanks, but protesting that it was too fine and expensive. D’Arvieux in his turn argued that it was not nearly fine enough for so great a prince. Impressed, the Emir turned to his officers and remarked that the Francs were not all Barbarians as they had heard; perhaps they should not have used the name of Franc to frighten their children. To this d’Arvieux replied that “one

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imagines in France that the Arabs only look like men.” That he himself knew differently was one of the advantages of travel; one loses one’s prejudices.34 In that first interview, d’Arvieux wisely refrained from discussing the actual motive of his trip: “I knew it was not the custom of the Country to speak of business on the day of one’s arrival, a time reserved for compliments & ceremonies.”35 Instead he flattered his host, as was appropriate, saying that it was the Emir’s reputation for wisdom that had inspired him to undertake his trip. He asked only that he might stay on for a few days in the Emir’s camp. In response, the Arab leader expressed his pleasure in the Frenchman’s acquaintance and welcomed him to stay even longer if he found that Arab ways suited him. Those formalities completed, d’Arvieux was invited to sit down. Any doubts he might have had about his reception in the camp were quickly dispelled by the remarkable hospitality of his hosts. Although he would later discover that such hospitality was their custom, his own gracious behavior surely contributed to the warmth of his welcome. Another advantage was his status as an object of curiosity. The Arabs in the Emir’s camp were no less curious than the courtiers in the French king’s court. D’Arvieux answered questions about religion, government, and customs in France. But he got into a little trouble when the subject turned to women: “the pleasure that the Emir & his whole Court had had in listening to me vanished all of a sudden.”36 They did not approve of the French manner of greeting women, considering a kiss given to a man’s wife or his daughter an insult to the family’s honor. In fact, among those listening to d’Arvieux that day no Arab women were even present; custom demanded their veiling and seclusion. The conversation had taken a dangerous turn. D’Arvieux quickly changed to a safer subject, pleasing an attentive audience with an account “of our manner of making war, of the armies & navy of our invincible Monarch, of his conquests, of his Court, of his Government, of his riches, of his buildings.”37 If he ever committed another faux pas during his visit to the Arab camp, he did not mention it. During that audience, there were refreshments for the assembled company. First a wooden bowl was brought in, filled with all of the fruits of the season. The Emir was served first; he then passed some to others nearby. Fruit was tossed to those sitting at a distance. Juicy melons took the place of water. To conduct himself properly d’Arvieux followed the example of those around him. When servants appeared with lighted pipes, he knew he had to take one from the man who offered it, putting it to his mouth without first wiping it: “it would have been uncivil to have behaved any differently; one is expected to assume that those who have the honor to approach the person of the Prince are healthy & clean.”38 There was coffee and then sorbet too, the latter circulating in a single four-pint pot from which everyone drank. Sharing a pot in that fashion would not have been an unusual practice in sixteenth-century France, but by the late seventeenth century, refinements in manners at Court dictated that each drank from his own glass.39 Conscious of changing French attitudes and anxious to

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depict the Arabs favorably, in his memoir d’Arvieux was careful to note that the pot was very clean. The next offering gave d’Arvieux more trouble. He was served a generous dose of bergé, a confection he described in his memoirs as a derivative of opium, which, when mixed with other drugs and some honey, lost some of its foul odor and its bitterness. He had had opium before on visits with pashas, and he did not care for its stupefying effects. Although he observed that the Emir trembled badly and suffered other unpleasant consequences of opium addiction as well, d’Arvieux wisely kept his own counsel, reserving his criticisms of opium for a long digression in his memoirs, where he described its origin and character. So that his European reader would understand its pernicious character he compared its ill effects to those of eau de vie—a drink he thought more deserving of a different name, eau de mort. After a while the Emir was no longer capable of conversation. But men continued to arrive in the tent, curious to see the visiting Franc: “Those Princes looked at me as though I were a man from another world, and questioned me in a fashion that would have made me laugh in any place other than the one where I found myself.”40 D’Arvieux, not very alert, still tried to carry on, but was relieved when the party broke up. He went to Omar Aga’s tent, flopped down on his baggage, and dropped off into a deep sleep. Awakened by a slave later that afternoon d’Arvieux was installed in a small, but comfortable tent where his baggage divided the space in two, one part for himself, the other for his men. The sheets his hosts provided were striped, plain white ones forbidden by their religion. Contrary to French custom the Arabs only made up their beds at bedtime, leaving everything rolled up in a corner during the day. That evening d’Arvieux went to dine with the Emir. As was also the custom in France, his own men ate apart, joining the servants of the Arab leader. At the end of the meal, the Emir, out of consideration for his guest, allowed for the differences in their customs and habits, telling d’Arvieux that during his stay in the camp he should keep his own earlier hours and eat at the times he wished. He himself arose at ten, breakfasted at noon, dined at three, supped at ten, and went to bed two hours after midnight. D’Arvieux was an early riser, used to getting up at six. Grateful for the courtesy of his host, d’Arvieux went off to bed, satisfied that his first day in the Arab camp had been a success. At first d’Arvieux had only looked the part. But in the days that followed he really seemed to be a “veritable Bedouin,” so comfortably did he live among the Arabs. After a while he tired of answering their questions “on an infinity of things that piqued their curiosity,” but he remained patient and with this advantage: “I became better and better accustomed to expressing myself in their language in which day by day I discovered new beauties.’41 But the knowledge he acquired of Arab society did not depend solely on his understanding of Arabic or on his willingness to accustom himself to Arab ways. He had the advantage of a special acquaintance with a certain Hiché, a femme de chambre of the Emir’s wife. “It was from her that I learned an infinity of details that would have remained unknown to me without her help.”42

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Their relationship was the result of a naïve mistake; because her own husband was a Franc, she was certain d’Arvieux must be her husband’s cousin. Arguing a matter of courtesy, she had received the Emir’s permission to tend to the French visitor’s needs during his stay in the camp—to awaken him mornings, and to provide him with meals at the hours he preferred and according to his tastes. When she appeared in his tent to serve him his first breakfast in the camp, d’Arvieux let her think they were indeed cousins, even suggesting that she drop her veil. When she complied, he was shocked to discover that she was black and, in his view, very ugly. But her politeness, her devoted attention to his needs, and her generous and lively spirit won him over.43 He enjoyed her company. When Hiché’s husband Hassan, a man originally from Majorca, arrived in the camp for a visit from his nearby village, he was disappointed that d’Arvieux did not prove to be a relative. But neither man ever disabused Hiché of her mistaken notion of a family relationship. The two men later became so well acquainted that Hassan later made d’Arvieux his confidant. The Frenchman learned how this man from Majorca had been taken captive by the Bedouins and made a slave. He also learned how Hassan’s marriage to Hiché had remained unconsummated, because he was impotent.44 In time d’Arvieux had an opportunity for a secret audience with the Emir and was granted the protection he had hoped for, not only for himself, but for his brothers as well. Yet when he wrote them explaining the arrangements he had made for their safety, he curiously did not ask them to join him. Instead he wanted news of the situation in the Echelles and asked that more presents be sent! Two dozen pairs of perfumed women’s gloves, cases of liqueurs and candied jams, and a pair of telescopes later arrived. Even when word finally came that tensions in the Echelles had died down, d’Arvieux continued to stay on in the Arab camp . He was having a wonderful time; his hosts did not want him to leave; and he was in no hurry to return to business. A visit of a few days ended up being a stay of several months.45 Life among the Arabs was very different from the settled existence of the French; but it is scarcely surprising that it delighted d’Arvieux. For the French noblesse d’épée—avid horsemen, proud of their traditional role as fighters and scornful of other occupations—there was much to admire in the Bedouin way of life. The Bedouin Arabs d’Arvieux distinguished as a noble people of the desert, “the true Arabs,” disdainful of town dwellers, of artisans, and of peasants tilling the soil. Because they did not want to marry either Arabs from the towns or Turks, mésalliance was rare. As fighters, they were feared not only for their numbers, but for their qualities—they were brave, tireless, active, and vigilant. In warfare, they chose to use a lance rather than firearms or bow and arrow. It was cowardly to kill “one’s enemies without being close enough to speak to them.”46 As nomads, they cared for herds, moving seasonally, preferring always to be on horseback, whatever their activity. On the subject of raiding and thievery—their “favorite occupation”—d’Arvieux did not approving, but offered this apology: at least the Bedouins were considerate of their victims, and rarely

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mistreated or killed anyone, except in self-defense or as a matter of vengeance when blood had been spilled.47 Although the Arabs of Mount Carmel lived within the Ottoman Empire as a people subject to the Turks, they retained much of their independence, only making some concessions to Ottoman demands. Usually they were expected to keep roads open within their territories; and sometimes they escorted couriers and caravans. On special occasions they sent gifts to the Turkish sultan. Occasionally they put down rebellion among Ottoman subjects in nearby jurisdictions, as d’Arvieux knew from personal experience. On one occasion he had accompanied an Arab force charged with quelling a peasant tax revolt in an area called Napolous. But the Bedouins’ primary allegiance was to their own leaders, their emirs, and their sheiks. On one point d’Arvieux was emphatic: the Arabs were not ruled by a king. The emirs among them governed as lords, each over a branch of the family. One among them was recognized as chief and obeyed “in certain things; but in their own camps and territories they are as sovereign as their chief is in his own.”48 For some of d’Arvieux’s readers such an observation may have been a painful reminder of a very different situation: the impotence of the nobility under Louis XIV’s absolutist politic. When French nobles were not fighting in the king’s campaigns, they could languish in poverty on their provincial estates, their fixed revenues devalued by several centuries of inflation. Or if they were anxious for royal favor and opportunities to improve their fortunes, they could live under the king’s watchful eye at Court, where they were expected to accommodate themselves to a daily ritual of tedious ceremonies, governed by elaborate rules of precedence. Louis XIV kept the nobility in check.49 To them Bedouin life would have sounded like an exciting adventure. For d’Arvieux it had been. On Mount Carmel, the Emir Turabey was Grand Emir with eighteen other emirs heading up the various branches of the family, each leader having inherited his title. The Grand Emir often called for the Frenchman’s company; d’Arvieux came to know him quite well. His portrait of the man was at once critical and complimentary. Small, skinny, skeletal, and addicted to bergé, the Arab leader lived off raw fruit and coffee, smoking and dreaming the time away, whittling at a wooden stick. Though harsh and little loved, he was also of good character— generous, morally good, just, and trustworthy. He inspired obedience and kept his promises. A good warrior, he was at the same time ill-disposed to shedding blood. Responsible for justice in his camp, he served as judge. There were no lawyers. Each man pleaded his own case and justice was immediate, a fact d’Arvieux appreciated. Well aware that French lawyers could keep a case going for years, the chevalier had once chosen to settle a case quickly to avoid a long and expensive relationship. In addition, the Emir’s punishments were usually not harsh. Capital punishment was rare; the Emir preferred fines or public shaming. Cutting off a man’s beard was considered a worse penalty than beheading; it meant eternal shame. For crimes of enormity the Arabs might also hang, burn, impale, or

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behead the criminal. Such cruel punishments would not have shocked the Frenchman; torture and brutal executions were not uncommon in France.50 Elsewhere in the Mémoires he acknowledged the cruelty of such practices; nonetheless, that did not prevent his also describing in detail and with apparent nonchalance scenes he had witnessed in Egypt in 1658: the impalement of one criminal and the skinning alive of another.51 Such gruesome reports have no counterpart in his Arab account. Subservient to the emirs were the sheiks. They too sometimes served as intermediaries in disputes. In their jurisdictions they were responsible for collecting the levies on villagers and peasants—revenues that were another source of income for the Bedouins. Sometimes an honorary title of sheik was given to the lettered, those who could read and write Arabic. But most of the Bedouins in the camps were illiterate: “While the majority of them do not occupy themselves in study, that does not prevent them from having a good, solid, just and penetrating intelligence.”52 D’Arvieux remarked that merit did not depend on literacy or on university degrees, which in any case were no guarantee of a recipient’s understanding or probity. A little off in his logic, but determined to take advantage of a chance for a jibe at European scholars, he added that: if [the Bedouins] were to occupy themselves with the sciences as other Arabs had in the past, would they not become as proud, stubborn, contradictory, quarrelsome, full of themselves, and their chimeras, as are our scholars?”53 Perhaps when he wrote those lines, d’Arvieux was remembering how in Paris he had been passed over for a professorial post in Arabic language, an experience he thought not so grave a misfortune. He had not fancied wearing “the robes of a pedant with a squared bonnet—outfit that would not go well with my sword and my Chevalier’s Cross.”54 But he did imagine himself worthy of the title sheik: “Had I wanted to settle among the Arabs, unquestionably I would have been the first Sheik in the land.”55 His learning eventually earned him a special position in the Emir’s camp, for when the man who usually handled Turabey’s official correspondence fell ill, d’Arvieux was appointed secretary in his place. The Frenchman had the qualifications. With one Mehemed Cheleby Cherkez Agli as his tutor in Saïda he had learned to write Turkish and Arabic; and by some good fortune he had brought along with him a copy of Hincha, a Turkish book describing the appropriate formulas for writing letters on a variety of subjects. Not only did he improve upon his predecessor’s performance, working quickly and varying the style of his letters according to the quality of the recipients, but d’Arvieux was also responsible for some innovations that, he believed, later became part of Arab custom. He added flourishes to his pages and inserted the finished letters into little taffeta bags of different colors prepared for the purpose, according to Hiché’s orders. His replies were always written in the same language as the letters they answered. Those refinements were ones a reader at the French Court would have appreciated. 56

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When word got out that d’Arvieux was the Emir’s new secretary, he was besieged by a crowd of men around his tent, asking that he write the small notes necessary for their transactions. In consideration, each man brought a present— tobacco, coffee, a handkerchief, honey, cheese, fruit, or a lamb, whatever he could afford and deemed appropriate. Objecting that it was not the French custom to take presents in return for favors, d’Arvieux asked only that each man patiently wait his turn. It was a service he undertook for hours every morning for the next two months. The task itself was easy, but the ceremony and benedictions that accompanied every favor were fatiguing. All the same, d’Arvieux was pleased to serve in the Emir’s camp with the same dedication he would later bring to his work in service to the French king.57 But the chevalier did not spend all of his time in Turabey’s camp. Not only did he visit other camps nearby, he also accompanied Hiché’s husband to Muzeinat, a village of about 500 inhabitants located in a pleasant valley about three leagues distant from the Arab camps. Under the Emir’s jurisdiction, the Greek-Christian peasants living there paid the Bedouins taxes according to the quantity of their land and the quality of their harvests. Their crops included wheat and legumes, flowers and fruits, various melons, and grapes—a source of raisins for international trade. The importance of their agricultural activity to the Bedouins was noted by d’Arvieux: “These Greeks are hard-working and without them the Arabs would die of hunger because they do not like the work . . . ; [also] because they recognize the necessity of having Greek Peasants & Moors to cultivate the land, they treat them kindly and fairly.”58 During his several days in the town, the Frenchman took advantage of the chance to attend a mass in the Greeks’ small stone church. The Bedouins, he observed, were far more tolerant than the Turks; they allowed the Christians in such villages to engage openly in the practice of their religion. But during his visit, d’Arvieux was also privy to Hassan’s sad story: the unfortunate man had had to endure not just enslavement, but also circumcision and the Emir’s attempts to convert him to Islam. Not unsympathetic, d’Arvieux offered to help Hassan escape to Europe should the Majorcan ever manage to make his way to Saïda.59 The Frenchman’s arguments against prejudice, whether implicit or explicit, did not include a defense of the Arabs’ religion. D’Arvieux disliked Islam. Though not very pious himself, his comments reflected the common bias of the European Christian. He labeled Mohammed as a “seducer” and the religion as Mahometane. He further characterized the law and doctrine of Islam as “a confused, ill-formed, and ridiculous heap from Judaism, Christianity, & most of the heresies that had infected the Church in earlier times, & that had corrupted its true doctrine and its purity.”60 A little more generously he explained that among its adherents one could find “some devoted, some superstitious, some intelligent, some libertines, as in all Religions.”61 Assuming prior knowledge on the part of his reader, he provided no formal description of that religion: “One is familiar enough with it without my stopping to provide a more detailed report.”62 But whether d’Arvieux was really acquainted with the tenets of Islam is uncertain. In place of serious discussion of that religion, the memoirs contain a few curious

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anecdotes about Mohammed and Muslim beliefs describing attitudes toward mustaches, beards, and fallen whiskers.63 For the most part d’Arvieux contented himself with a description of religious practices among the Bedouins, pleased to note that they were more relaxed in their observances than the Turks he had encountered in his travels. The Arabs prayed privately in their tents or in the countryside and chose their times according to their convenience. But on Fridays and during Ramadan (the annual month-long day-time fast) the men spread their mats in the middle of the camp for the purpose of communal prayer. Out of compassion, they exempted the very young and old from the fast. For practical reasons owing to a scarcity of water, their ablutions were not performed as regularly as formal prescription dictated. They carefully abstained, however, from eating pork. Circumcision of the male children was also an important ceremony. No expense was spared, while families and neighbors gathered for the celebration. It was not a baptism or the naming ceremony known to the French, but was an operation performed when the child was old enough to remember the occasion. Children were placated with honey and with presents. So that other children waiting their turn would not be frightened, music was played to mask the sound of any weeping. D’Arvieux concluded his remarks on religion by observing that the Bedouins were more apt to speak of God than of religion. Perhaps because of his own aversion to Islam he chose to characterize his Arab friends as followers of natural law. Except for the raids they conducted, they were a good and moral people.64 The chevalier had witnessed one of those raids. During his visits to other Arab camps, he had become good friends with the Emir Dervick, a young and energetic man about eighteen years of age. It was with him that d’Arvieux enjoyed the best of his adventures. The two men hunted and feasted together, and when there was no one among the company to object, they also drank. On one occasion an expedition to the small port of Tartoura turned into a raid when high winds caused a Greek ship bound for Egypt to break to pieces on the coast. The mishap left the sailors stranded and their cargo of wine and cheese floating on the waves. The Arabs took advantage of their distress, salvaged what they could from the wrecked ship, and left the Greeks without a stitch of clothing or any of their possessions. Sympathizing with the plight of his fellow Christians, d’Arvieux persuaded Emir Dervick to let them have their things back—except for the wine, which he, the young emir, and others in the party enjoyed in several days of feasting. D’Arvieux kindly supplied the recipe for treating hangover— large quantities of coffee.65 Good food and drink were among the Frenchman’s enthusiasms. In writing about his travels he did not neglect to mention the specialty of a region or to assess the character of its wines. A particularly fine meal might even merit a description. Sometimes d’Arvieux recorded recipe (there is one for Turkish pilaf). Or he outlined the steps in a food’s preparation, as he did on one occasion for a wonderful bread he had enjoyed during a stopover on Cyprus. There were less satisfactory dining experiences too. Aboard an English ship, he

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found the puddings bad and cheeses rancid. What was needed, he wrote, was a French cook!66 In the Bedouin camps he generally approved of the food. His very first breakfast, prepared for him by Hiché, resembled the French petit déjeuner, but was even better. There was honey, fresh butter, and delicate little breads finer than any he had ever had. The coffee too was excellent, far better than in France: “They do not heat it as long as we do, & with reason; we let the oil evaporate too much. They grind it on the spot, let it simmer well in order to extract its substance, then drink it as hot as possible & usually without sugar.”67 Perhaps the poorer French product was a result of inexperience. Coffee had first been imported to France about 1643; but only after the Ottoman envoy to Paris served it to his guests in 1669 did it become popular.68 Some of the food in the camp took getting used to. Odd though the mixture seemed, d’Arvieux came to like a dish of honey, butter, and cream. The fruits were fine and the melons so good that he commented, “I accustomed myself to them so marvellously that I went for a whole month without drinking a drop of water.”69 Skewered meats, ragoûts, couscousou, and bourgoul were among the dishes he described. The French method of roasting meats he thought left them juicier. Two of the Arab breads were very good, but a third kind baked in cinders or between clumps of burning dung was less appealing. It was burned to blackness and had a smoky flavor. On his last trip to the Arab camp d’Arvieux brought the Emir a copper oven like the ones used aboard French ships. One of his men taught the Emir’s servants how to emply it and to make French bread. The Arabs seemed to enjoy the gift.70 The Bedouins’ simple diet, their temperance, and their habit of exercise meant they had little need for medicine, an advantage d’Arvieux appreciated. He despised French doctors. On many occasions in the Mémoires, he complained of their incompetence, often over the years blaming them for the death of their patients. In the seventeenth century, French medicine had little to offer; bleeding and purging were common treatments for illnesses.71 For good health d’Arvieux recommended the Arab regime: They never eat without necessity. The number of their meals are regulated, as are the hours. They eat with appetite, which is pardonable in people who get a lot of exercise. But they eat well . . . when they have the opportunity; they know how to fast marvelously when necessary. . . . They only drink once—after the meal is finished.”72 This was good advice for the French, many of whom were prone to overindulge. Louis XIV himself was notorious for having had a huge appetite.73 The painful penalty for gluttony could be a serious case of the gout. But were the French to follow the Arab model, d’Arvieux was certain they would have no need for physicians, “those legions of useless men to whom our health is death & to whom our intemperance brings riches.”74 Among the Arabs were men who survived well beyond the age of a hundred, “enjoying all the vigor, the strength & the ability of our men of thirty-five.”75 As an attentive guest, d’Arvieux was careful to observe Arab table manners. For the nomadic Bedouins the table was a conveniently portable sheet of leather around which they sat cross-legged; some among the company might show

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greater respect for a master or a guest by kneeling and sitting back on their heels. There was no bias against thirteen at the table: “The Arabs have no superstition about this number and in that they are more reasonable than many Europeans in whom that number inspires fear.”76 D’Arvieux also observed that when “they say Graces, they are not so long as those of our Monks; they consist in three words, Thanks to God, & that suffices.”77 All foods (soup, rice, meats, milk, cheeses, salads, fruits, and honey) were served at the same time, instead of by courses, each diner selecting according to his preference. During the meal itself there was no conversation; that came later when coffee was served and lighted pipes of tobacco were brought in. Servants ate after their masters.78 The actual manner of eating the food did not entirely meet with d’Arvieux’s approval. In seventeenth-century France the use of utensils was still by no means universal, but it was becoming more common in Paris among the upper classes, at least, for each diner to have his own plate, glass, utensils, and napkin.79 Among the Arabs spoons were usually of wood. When these were lacking, the right hand was used as a utensil; the left hand supported the body and was reserved besides for “uses we will not mention here.”80 Forks were unknown, so d’Arvieux recommended that the would-be traveler carry his own. Knives were not necessary since food was cut up during preparation or was so well-cooked that it could be broken up with the fingers. There were no napkins, but one could use a handkerchief and wash up after the meal. What d’Arvieux found most unappealing were the habits of eating soup from the hand; of forming pilau into a pellet large enough to fill the whole mouth; and of plunging the hand and arm into the common pot of bouillon to retrieve a morsel of meat. But if d’Arvieux found the Arab manner of eating unrefined, it was a minor complaint, and he made little of it. Indeed, on some points of social etiquette the Arabs were far stricter than French: spitting and blowing the nose were prohibited!81 And farting was far more than an indiscretion; indeed, judging by the anecdotes d’Arvieux records, it ranked as a terrible transgression. Even mentioning the offense was a conversational taboo. D’Arvieux’s own opinion was that holding back was bad for the health, but presumably among the Arabs he controlled himself.82 If there was an art to conversation in the Arab camp, it was the practice of restraint, a quality not characteristic of the French. The Arab demeanor was grave and serious, and the men were not often given to laughter. Arabs spoke little, unhurriedly, and only when necessary; they listened patiently in company without interruptions or contradictions. The speaker was to avoid any gesticulation, for in conversation the Arabs “cannot stand to see movements of the arms, head or body, something we consider gracious in conversation.”83 D’Arvieux invited his reader to imagine what the Arabs would say “were they to see the gesticulations of our preachers, and especially of the Italians, who need pulpits as long as galleries for the sweep of their gestures and speeches.”84 Conversations were generally respectful without derision or nastiness, and there was no destruction of another’s character. If one disagreed with the speaker, one kept one’s opinions to oneself. When the Arab gave his word, he kept it.

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D’Arvieux had only one qualified complaint about the Arabs’ conversational manner. “It is true that they are a bit long-winded in their compliments when one visits them and when one takes one leave. But, it is their custom; it is the effusion of their hearts. It is necessary to overlook these things and to answer them in the same way.”85 In spelling out the rules of conversation, d’Arvieux was not referring to the Arab women. Women and children were allowed to babble: “They are imperfect creatures, half-formed; one must pardon them.”86 It was a judgment with which the Frenchman was inclined to agree. Women the world over he viewed as silly gigglers and gossips.87 He made no exception for Arab women, though how he formed his opinion of them is difficult to say. Except for his relationship with his “cousin” Hiché, d’Arvieux did not have the opportunity to become acquainted with local women during his years in the Levant. Among many of the peoples in the region the practices of veiling and seclusion kept women apart from the company of men outside their own households. After years in Smyrna and Saïda, d’Arvieux was already long familiar with the custom, which he attributed as much to the jealousy of the men, as to the concern of fathers anxious to protect the virginity of their daughters and the honor of their families. Nonetheless, the Arab women were an object of his curiosity. He considered their appearance and comportment, their pleasures and their work, while drawing distinctions between the ordinary women and the ones more privileged. What he knew of their looks, their dress, their makeup, and their jewelry, depended on what he saw through slits in tents. (His friends had arranged a few opportunities for him to view the women.) Judging by the length and detail of his descriptions, his glimpses must have been very long ones. He concluded that many of the women were handsome. Their eyes, he noted, were particularly lovely and enhanced by shadow according to very ancient practice. He also observed approvingly that they were not powdered and rouged, as were so many European women, especially Spanish women. Also owing to their protective clothing, Arab women were “not at all sunburned, & have the same vermillion complexion as French & English women.”88 One aspect of their appearance he regretted, however; unlike European women they did not wear the garments necessary to support the chest or preserve their figures. The problem was not merely cosmetic, for “when they are nursing, their breasts hang so low that it is very disagreeable & in time becomes awkward for them.”89 Because of customs protecting women from the gaze of men, d’Arvieux wondered that courtship was even possible among the Bedouins. Girls were known to young men only by their walk and the sounds of of their voices, while opportunities for conversation were rare and very brief. But if a man discovered the beginnings of an attraction he enlisted the assistance of women relatives to see the girl from a place of hiding. If he wanted to marry her, he negotiated with the girl’s father. The father demanded payment and set the bridal price at so many horses, camels, cattle, goats, or sheep. To the Frenchman the Arab custom was laudable: “What a happy Country, where fathers find a way to rid

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themselves advantageously of such bad merchandise!”90 In France the woman’s family had to provide a dowry either to marry her off or to establish her in a convent. D’Arvieux remarked on other differences in custom as well. During the wedding festivities, for example, men and women celebrated separately, the men eating soberly in one tent, and the women dancing and singing joyously in another. At night in a separate tent the couple was left to consummate the marriage, the new husband emerging afterward to show a bloody handkerchief to the assembled company. D’Arvieux found it strange that the evidence of virginity should be shown publicly, and that the father of the bride was usually absent from the ceremonies so as to avoid seeing the formal evidence that his daughter had slept with a man. A French bride’s father would have been present to give her away.91 Midwives had the work of delivering babies in France, but among the Arabs “all women know that work.”92 Usually only those more privileged were attended in childbirth. Ordinary Arab women delivered alone and wherever they happened to be, either in the countryside or at home. Because they did not cry out in pain, d’Arvieux concluded that childbirth was either easier for them than for pampered women or that they were more courageous and patient. Babies were not swaddled as in Europe, but were put down on mats to move around as they wished. As a result of that common practice, infants “can walk alone within a year, . . .they are not stooped or crooked, . . . they grow easily, & [they] are exempt from all of those defects one observes in Europeans.”93 Arab children were generally healthier than French children, d’Arvieux observed, while parents were fond of their children.94 Some husbands and wives were happy in their marriages, the Emir Turabey and his wife among them. Even the unconsummated marriage of Hassan and Hiché was a good one. Those less satisfied in marriage could turn to adultery, but they did so at great risk. The act was punishable by the death of both lovers, there being “no tolerance on that point.”95 At the same time, however, the behavior of an adulterous woman did not reflect badly on her husband, as it did in France. To d’Arvieux the Arabs’ perspective seemed reasonable. The wronged husband did not consider himself a cuckold; it was the woman’s blood relatives who bore the shame. With the idea of reducing the temptations of adultery for the unmarried young men in the camp, the Emir provided for the sexual urges of the least disciplined among them. At some distance from the camp was a tent where prostitutes from Damascus were made available. That, d’Arvieux explained, was part of the Emir’s “politique”; nonetheless, the general view among the Arabs was one of disapproval; they frowned on extra-marital sex.96 D’Arvieux said nothing of the morals at the French Court; and he could hardly comment on the marital infidelities of the French sovereign in a memoir intended for that king’s perusal. The lot of Arab women was not easy, noted the chevalier. “There are scarcely any creatures in the world as hard-working as Arab women. One can say that they are truly the servants of their husbands.”97 There were few labors for which the women were not responsible. They did almost everything, tending

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the cows and sheep, doing the shearing, weaving goat’s hair for the fabric of their tents, and working wool. They made butter, cheese, and bread; they cooked; they fetched water and fuel (wood or dung); they sewed clothing and tended to the children. Sometimes they also cared for the saddles, bridles, and harnesses of their spouse’s horses. All those things women did, d’Arvieux wrote, “without neglecting to astound their husbands with their babble.”98 That one complaint aside, d’Arvieux suggested them as models for European women: “[T]he women in that Country do not at all resemble ours; they are obedient; they never talk back; their duty is always before their eyes. They look upon their husbands as their Lords, respect them, serve them, and love them with respectful tenderness. Our Princes would do something forever memorable were they to have some hundreds of these Asiatic women come to their States, to instruct their women by example, & to teach them the virtues that should be inseparable from their state.”99 What the Arab women would have thought of d’Arvieux’s compliment we do not know. Obviously d’Arvieux expressed traditional French expectations of women: that they be uncomplaining servants of their family and embodiments of virtue, modest, chaste, devoted, and discreet. In accordance with a tradition of paternal authority (confirmed in civil law) the French woman was subject first to her father and second to her husband or the abbess of a convent, depending upon the father’s decision. Perhaps d’Arvieux’s harsh criticism also reflected dismay at the outspokenness of some seventeenth-century French women, who were not reluctant to express their resentment of that tradition and the restrictions it imposed on their intellect and freedom.100 But if d’Arvieux had particular complaints about the women he met at Court, he did not describe them. He was far too gracious (and sage) a courtier for that. Quite possibly other experiences accounted for his negative attitude. His relationship with his mother had apparently been poor. In the Mémoires the woman received only the briefest mention; her son recorded the news of her death and complained of the bad job she had made of bringing up his younger brother. When the boy came out to the Levant d’Arvieux gave him the attention he deserved. Of his sisters he had nothing to say, except that after his return to France he had provided the means necessary to establish them in a convent as befitted their station in life. On the subject of romantic relationships in his life, he was silent—a curious omission for a man not reluctant to report on the intimate lives of others. In the Mémoires the only woman for whom he expressed tender affection was Hiché. Indeed, her affectionate attention and his good friendships among the Bedouins made those months in the Arab camps possibly the happiest period in his life. In November, when letters from his brothers demanded he return to Saïda to tend to the family’s business, it cannot have been easy for him to take his leave. Nor were the Arabs anxious to see him go. There were prolonged festivities in the various camps, another hunting trip, and of course a final exchange of gifts. From the Emir Turabey, he received a beautiful mare. This was a particularly extravagant present for the Arabs, for they were not rich. Another gesture of the

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Emir’s esteem was a document assuring d’Arvieux’s protection in Bedouin territories. It described the Frenchman (now renamed Dervick Nasser) as “a man who is one of us.”101 D’Arvieux arranged to send gifts to the Princesse, the Emir’s wife. With Hassan’s permission, he presented Hiché with his own ring set with an emerald and six small diamonds. Touched by the gesture, “she took my hand and kissed it tenderly, wetting it with her tears.”102 She had hoped that instead of leaving the camps, he would convert to Islam and marry a young woman from the Emir’s entourage. Early on the morning of his departure, she served him a large breakfast—un grand déjeuner that, he suspected, had taken the whole night to prepare. Her husband Hassan and a large escort were to accompany the Frenchman as far as the river at Haifa. From the plain as they rode away d’Arvieux could see Hiché in the distance on the eminence behind them, waving her handkerchief in the air to express her affection and to wish them a safe journey. It was 18 December 1664, and d’Arvieux had spent four months among the Arabs.103 The following year he returned twice more to the Arab camps. In the spring, with the younger of his brothers, he enjoyed six weeks of the same warm hospitality. In return, he gave his Arab friends news from Saïda and Europe and also amused them by modeling a French costume he had brought along. Later that year, on a final farewell visit before returning to France, he learned the sad news of Hiché’s death. Hassan had managed to escape to Europe, after all, leaving Hiché behind. Inconsolable; she died of a broken heart. The very last lines of d’Arvieux’s account were a tribute to her, ending with the words: “It is very rare to find women like Hiché.”104 Business reverses in Saïda forced d’Arvieux to return to France. He still had enough of a fortune left to provide for his brothers and sisters, but he was worried about his own future. The first years were particularly difficult. The Marseillais appeared to be interested in meeting him, but he soon doubted their friendship, commenting that “self-interest was the sole rule of conduct.”105 His experience in Paris was little better. The French Court might as well have been another country, one where he had not yet learned the mores or customs: “I was soon known by all of the Great at Court. They took pleasure in questioning me about the manners of different peoples I have seen. They all promised me their protection, & not one thought of procuring for me the smallest favor, nor the lowliest post in which I might serve the King & advance my fortune.”106 It seems unlikely that when d’Arvieux made that comment he did not have in mind an implicit comparison between his reception in the Arab camps and at the French Court, contrasting the sincerity of one with the empty promises of the other. His success on the French mission to Tunis in 1667, where the chevalier secured the ratification of the Beaufort Treaty and the release of several hundred French captives held as slaves, had led to no further employment. At one point he almost left for England, hoping to have better luck there. But friends persuaded him to remain in France rather than miss out on an opportunity to win the Sun King’s favor. Despite his disappointments in those years, d’Arvieux’s reminicences suggest that he always treated the illustrious with the same

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deferential courtesy and respect that had served him so well with people he met in his travels. Certainly, one does not look to his Mémoires for the scathing critique of the French Court one finds in the work of a La Bruyère. In time the chevalier became accustomed to his new milieu and occupied himself variously, sometimes with work on translations or dictionaries. One bit of work he particularly enjoyed was serving as advisor on Turkish manners and costumes for Molière’s new play, le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in 1670. That effort earned him a footnote in literary hisory.107 The year before, he had attracted some official recognition, too. During the visit to Paris of Soliman Aga, the Ottoman envoy from the Porte, d’Arvieux took over when the official translator proved to be incompetent. The chevalier sympathized with the Turkish visitor, who was so badly besieged by Parisian gawkers curious for a glimpse of the foreigner that guards had to be called in to restore order. Similarly, because trading companies were “in vogue” in those years, d’Arvieux was also consulted for his opinions on improving French commerce in the Levant. Jean-Baptiste Colbert even proposed him for the post of ambassador to the Porte. But that nomination was opposed in Marseille by a merchant community concerned that d’Arvieux lacked the means to support himself in that position.108 When the chevalier eventually returned to the Ottoman Empire on various commissions for Louis XIV, his knowledge of language and customs stood him in good stead. As an official representative of French political and commercial interests, however, he found it more difficult to establish cordial relations with local peoples than he had as a private individual. Each of his assignments was further marked by frustration: by his failure in 1672 to secure the renewal of the capitulations with the Porte; by difficult and unproductive dealings with the local authorities in Algiers from 1674 to 1675; finally by his many problems as consul in Aleppo in the early 1680s. Even so, d’Arvieux never lost his curiosity about people and places. In Constantinople he managed a month of sightseeing, disguising himself as a Turk and passing for an Anatolian businessman. In Algiers, through the good graces of the English consul, he was able to see the town despite the difficulties he had in his dealings with the local authorities. (His subsequent report about the people was a rare expression of dislike). Aleppo he considered a wonderful place, where he made new friendships. But for the most part his commentary about those last years is negative, even bitter at times. Tensions within the French trading community, concerns about European rivals, difficult relations with local authorities and the Porte, all wore d’Arvieux down. He did not finish his second three-year term in Aleppo, but returned to France. His memoirs too he left incomplete. It is possible that illness forced him to abandon the project, as editor Labat claimed. But it seems more likely that he simply tired of the task, which was indeed a very long one that involved thirty years of recollections. In his retirement, he married at the age of fifty-four, perhaps to satisfy family expectations for an heir. But d’Arvieux died childless in 1702.109 It is likely that the chevalier would have been pleased with the eventual publication of the memoirs. He once judged them superior to the usual run of

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travel narratives, which were based on a mere passing acquaintance with people and places. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he had bothered to learn eastern languages and also enjoyed the advantage of long residence in the places he described.110 Some forty years after its composition, Jean de la Roque, himself a traveler in the Levant, considered the Arab account so worthy of publication that he served as its editor. The appearance of Voyage à la Palestine in 1717 was followed the next year by the publication in London of an English translation. That work, titled Travels in Arabia the Desart, went through several editions in the decades that followed. The Mémoires du Chevalier d’Arvieux enjoyed a similar success, continuing in the eighteenth century to satisfy the curiosity of the French public, at the same time serving as a reminder that “intelligence and merit are not absolutely contained in France.”111 In his long years in the Levant, d’Arvieux had esteemed many individuals of his acquaintance, but the people whom he viewed with special favor were the Bedouins. There was little about Bedouin life that had not appealed to the Frenchman. Writing his memoir in Paris eight years after he left their camps, he had observed rather wistfully that though the French might consider the Arabs poor, they were a people who lived happily and enjoyed what they had. Words he had one spoken to the Emir Turabey are testimony to the satisfaction the Chevalier d’Arvieux had known as a “veritable Bedouin”: “I told him that were I able to enjoy the honor of being in his service all the rest of my days, I would not leave his Camp, nor distance myself from his person any farther than from the tent where I was lodged . . . & if I had business that forced me to banish myself from my own country, . . .I would choose no other retreat.”112

Notes 1. Chevalier d'Arvieux, Mémoires du Chevalier d'Arvieux, Envoyé Extraordinaire du Roy à la Porte, Consul d'Alep, d’Alger, de Tripoli, & autres Echelles du Levant, vol. IV, p. 98 (cited hereafter as Mémoires). The six-volume edition of the memoirs, edited and with a preface by Jean-Baptiste Labat, was first published in Paris in 1735 by Delespine. 2. The objective of that mission was to secure ratification of the recently negotiated Beaufort Treaty and to arrange for the release of French captives held as slaves in Tunis. A copy of the treaty appears in The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics, A Documentary Record, trans. and ed. J. C. Hurewitz (London: 1975), vol. I, pp. 29–32. 3. Colbert's earlier project for French expansion in Asia is analyzed in Glenn J. Ames' Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for the Asian Trade (DeKalb: 1996). 4. In the Mémoires d'Arvieux does not identify those whom he described as "the Curious," but among them may well have been Louis XIV who encouraged him to write an account of his experiences. (Mémoires, vol. V, p. 40.) 5. Advertisement from the title page of the Mémoires. 6. Tracing the course of d'Arvieux's life from those memoirs is exactly what W. H. Lewis did in Levantine Adventurer, The travels and missions of the Chevalier d'Arvieux, 1653– 1697 (London: 1962). Because the Mémoires end in the early 1680s; Lewis based the

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last pages of his own narrative on supplementary materials and the editorial remarks included in the 1735 edition of d'Arvieux's work. Although there are occasional errors in his reportage, Lewis substantially captured the spirit of d'Arvieux's memoirs, providing lively commentary and also a few observations from his own experience as a traveler and resident in other parts. Another work that revives material from d'Arvieux's Mémoires is Régine Goutalier's Le Chevalier d'Arvieux, Laurent le Magnifique, Un humaniste de belle humeur (Paris: 1997). Because of the liberties it takes with detail in the reconstruction of d'Arvieux's history, it is not suitable for scholarly use. Extracts from the first three volumes of the Mémoires appear in the second volume of Voyageurs d'Orient, with introduction and notes by Antoine Abdelnour (Beirut: 1982). The editorial commentary has the special merit of providing a local perspective on d'Arvieux, noting some weakness in his knowledge of Arabic dialects, while objecting more seriously that self-interest and antipathy made the Frenchman's depiction of certain local families less than honest. 7. That episode was published in 1717 as a separate account, Voyage à la Palestine, edited by Jean de la Roque. An English translation followed a year later. Why the work was never published in d'Arvieux's lifetime is unclear; according to the Mémoires, it had been very nearly ready for publication in 1673. 8. D'Arvieux did not entirely disagree with what he considered the common view that the Bedouins were the “enemies of all others.” Not without a touch of irony, he commented that “their usual work was to deprive Travelers of anything that might encumber them in their travels, like their clothing & their merchandise.” (Mémoires, vol. III. p. 143.) 9. It pleased d'Arvieux to think of himself as a “veritable Bedouin”; the phrase appears several times in his account. 10. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 188. 11. Ibid., pp. 143–144. 12. The family name in Italy had been Arveo (or Arvei in the plural, editor Labat carefully noted); in Provence it became Arviou. The future author of the Mémoires only became Arvieu years later at the French Court, the change in his name a matter of a more agreeable articulation and of French appreciation for euphonious pronunciation. It was the Foreign Minister and Secretary of State Hughes de Lionne, writing his instructions for Arvieux, Envoyé Extraordinaire to Constantinople, who effected the addition of the particle de and of the x at the end of the name. (Ibid., vol. I, pp. iii–iv). 13. Ibid., p. vii. 14. E. Levasseur notes that a declaration of Richelieu in 1629 provided that nobles could engage in overseas commerce without dérogéance, without losing their noble status. In an edict of 1669, Louis XIV permitted nobles to engage in large-scale commerce, only prohibiting retail trade. Labat mentioned that privilege in his preface to d'Arvieux's Mémoires, vol. I, p. x. 15. Noting that many of the lands of Provence are mountainous, dry, and sterile, Labat explained the attitude of the people there: “[They] look upon the Levant . . . as their Indies. They send almost all of their children there for training in business . . . and if those children are wise and fortunate, they amass enough wealth to reestablish their houses, & to spend the rest of their days in opulence.” (Mémoires, vol. I, pp. x–xi.) 16. The trials of that voyage are the subject of the first chapter of the Mémoires. That Arvieux refused to be deterred by the hazards of sea travel is clear from his statement: “I wanted too badly to go to the Levant, & I was willing to run the risks. . . .” (Ibid., p. 3.) 17. Indeed, when the taxes on trade had become too high in other places, some caravans had changed their routes and headed to Smyrna. Any traders found guilty of trying to get their goods around the customs to avoid payment of duties received lenient treatment:

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their goods were not confiscated; they received only a whipping on the soles of the feet. (Ibid., pp. 44, 56.) 18. Copies of capitulatory agreements with the Ottoman Porte appear in Recueil d'Actes Internationaux de l'Empire Ottoman, ed. Gabriel Effendi Noradounghian, vol. I (Paris, 1897). Translations of some of those documents appear in vol. I of The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics, A Documentary Record, trans. and ed. J. C. Hurewitz (London: 1975). 19. Mémoires, vol. I, pp. 45–58; 60–65; 123–126; 131–132. 20. Ibid., pp. 79 to 81. In Smyrna, d'Arvieux regretted the indifference of Europeans to learning languages, which he viewed as a disadvantage in trade. Later in the Mémoires, he also emphasized the importance of language to the traveler's appreciation of places and people visited. 21. Ibid., p. 307. 22. Ibid., pp. 310–323; 331–340; 455–456; 465–467. 23. Ibid., pp. 331–340; 455–456. For d'Arvieux’s general concerns about the state of France’s Levantine trade, see pp. 465–467. 24. D'Arvieux's motive for undertaking that journey is a matter of disagreement, the two published accounts offering different explanations. The 1717 edition described the tip as official, d'Arvieux having been charged by Louis XIV to negotiate permission for the Carmelites to return to their residence on Mount Carmel. The 1735 edition of the memoirs argued that someone else had undertaken that mission in 1660, during which d'Arvieux had been present merely as an observer. (Mémoires, vol. III, pp. 2–3.) A comparison of the two versions reveals differences in the smaller details of the story, however, that suggest d'Arvieux might not have been entirely truthful in his narrative, inventing where memory failed him or embellishing his account with deliberate fiction. Whatever the case, both accounts agree that the Frenchman’s decision to prolong his stay in the camps beyond the term dictated by the original motive was solely a matter of personal pleasure and friendship with the Arabs, regardless of politics, religion, or commerce. This made it possible for him to live among the Arabs as a veritable Bedouin. 25. See Charles de la Roncière, Histoire de la marine française (Paris: 1934), vol. V, pp. 257–261. 26. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 5. 27. Ibid., pp. 3–7. 28. Ibid., pp. 7–9. In the Levant, D’Avieux frequently traveled in disguise. 29. Ibid., p. 11. 30. Ibid., pp. 7–11. 31. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 32. Ibid., p. 13. 33. Ibid., p. 14. 34. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 35. Ibid., p. 16. 36. Ibid., p. 17. 37. Ibid. In writing about his experiences it did not hurt to flatter the French King. 38. Ibid., p. 18. 39. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 3 vols. (New York: 1979) vol. I, p. 205. 40. Mémoires, vol. III, pp. 23–24. 41. Ibid., p. 66. 42 Ibid., p. 33. 43. Ibid., p. 31.

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44. D'Arvieux devoted a chapter to the subject of Hassan's confidences. (See ibid., pp. 37–57.) While he did not go so far as to condemn slavery, several times in the memoirs, d'Arvieux expressed sympathy for those enslaved. See, for example, ibid., vol. I, pp. 152–153. 45. Ibid., vol. III, pp. 64–65. 46. Ibid., p. 148. 47. Ibid., pp. 143–150. 48. Ibid., pp. 151–152. 49. W.H. Lewis, The Splendid Century, Life in the France of Louis XIV (New York: 1957), pp. 140–45. 50. Elsewhere in his memoirs, d'Arvieux observed, “We have in France the sword, the gallows, and the wheel to punish our criminals. The last of these punishments is not in use among the Turks; but they have others that are no less cruel.” (Ibid., vol. IV, p. 272.) For an overview of justice and punishments in seventeenth-century France, see André Laingui, “La Justice,” in Le XVIIe siècle: diversité et cohérence, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: 1992), pp. 137–145. 51. Mémoires, vol. I, pp. 220–221. 52. Ibid., vol. III, p. 153. 53. Ibid., vol. III, p. 153. 54. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 106. 55. Ibid., vol. III, p. 153. 56. Ibid., pp. 76–82. 57. Ibid., pp. 82–87. 58. Ibid., p. 42. 59. Ibid., pp. 38–43. 60. Ibid., p. 146. Edward Saïd characterizes such a distorted notion of Islam as among the “commonly received ideas about the Orient” in European works. He cites in particular d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale (1697). (Edward Saïd, Orientalism (New York: 1978), pp. 65–66.) 61. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 170. 62. Ibid., vol. III, p. 170. 63. Ibid., pp. 202–212. 64. Ibid., pp. 170–178. 65. Ibid., pp. 88–96. 66. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 71–72; 154. 67. Ibid., vol. III, p. 32. 68. Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, vol. I, p. 256. 69. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 68. 70. Ibid., pp. 268–273. 71. Lewis, The Splendid Century, p. 180. 72. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 330. 73. Lewis, The Splendid Century, pp. 55–56. 74. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 331. 75. Ibid., p. 336. 76. Ibid., p. 135. 77. Ibid., p. 136. 78. Ibid., pp. 182–183. 79. Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, vol. I, pp. 203–205. 80. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 283. 81. Ibid., pp. 182–183; 282–286.

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82. Ibid., pp. 198–204; 212–214; 284–286. 83. Ibid., p. 192. 84. Ibid., p. 192. 85. Ibid., p. 191. 86. Ibid., p. 192. 87. Ibid., pp. 68–69. 88. Ibid., p. 296. 89. Ibid., p. 295. 90. Ibid., p. 303. 91. Ibid., pp. 305–307. 92. Ibid., p. 308. 93. Ibid., p. 309. 94. Ibid., pp. 308–313. 95. Ibid., p. 312. 96. Ibid., p. 314. 97. Ibid., p. 269. 98. Ibid., pp. 268–269. 99. Ibid., pp. 35–36. 100. For an overview of women's position in seventeenth century France, see Noémi Hepp, “Etre femme au XVIIe siècle,” in Le XVIIe siècle: diversité et cohérence, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: 1992). 101. Mémoires, vol. III, p. 121. 102. Ibid., p. 120. 103. Ibid., pp. 116–123. 104. Ibid., p. 340. 105. Ibid., p. 387. 106. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 101. 107. See, for example, Molière, Oeuvres complètes, ed. R. Jouhanny (Paris: 1962), vol. II, pp. 427–428. 108. Mémoires, vol. IV, pp. 150, 202, 241. 109. Ibid., vol. VI, p. 482. 110. “I will speak of my various travels, the interests of the Nation, the customs of the country, of its government, of the changes that have taken place; in a word, about everything that would make the place known more exactly than it has been in the accounts of travellers and pilgrims, of whom the majority have copied each other, or who have only recorded hearsay and other reports—ones often false, & always defective.” (Ibid., vol. I, p. 356.) 111. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 572. Those words d'Arvieux used particularly in reference to what he knew of the Grand Vizir Cupruli. But they summarize well a more general attitude, one based on his acquaintances in the Levant. 112. Ibid., vol. III, p. 168.

3 Secrets of the Seraglio: Harem Politics and the Rhetoric of Imperialism in the Travels of Sir Jean Chardin S. Amanda Eurich The publication of the first volume of Auguste Galland’s Mille et une nuits in Paris in 1704 marked nearly fifty years of frenzied French interest and travel in the countries and cultures of the Middle East and Asia.1 A career diplomat to the French embassy in Constantinople, Galland published eleven more volumes over the next several years, weaving a tantalizing tapestry of Oriental intrigue, sensuality, and despotism from the oral, folkloric traditions of India, Syria, Egypt, and Persia. The enormous popular and literary success of Galland’s Arabian tales often overshadows the veritable flood of travel memoirs written by French scholargentlemen, merchants, and missionaries who felt pressed by convention, pecuniary and commercial interest, or vanity to document their experiences among diverse cultures of the East.2 Among the many travel accounts published in France between 1650 and 1715, the writings of the Huguenot jeweler-cum-scholar, Jean Chardin, whose chronicles of his life in Safavid Persia informed much of Galland’s own work, merit especial attention. Chardin’s meticulous accounts of his two journeys to Persia and his clear, even-handed descriptions of Persian culture and society earned him the praise of Gibbon, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, all of whom consulted The Travels of Sir John Chardin to authenticate their own analyses of Persian literature and culture. Indeed for most of the eighteenth century, Jean Chardin was regarded as one of the most shrewd interlocutors of Persian culture in Europe. Jean Chardin’s career and writing reveal the complexity of the seventeenthcentury European-Asian exchange that introduced early modern Europeans to

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cultures that could not be easily configured in the language of the civilizing mission inherent in colonial discourse. In Safavid Persia, the young Huguenot merchant encountered a society that he recognized as more hospitable, more civilized, and more tolerant than his own.3 Nevertheless, Chardin also portrayed Safavid Persia as a society debilitated by the very luxuries and refinements he admired. For Chardin, no institution more clearly revealed the decadence of Persian society than the imperial harem, where addictions to voluptuous pleasure inverted the natural hierarchies of sex and race, permeated the very marrow of Persian culture, and destroyed the spirit of enterprise. Inspired by the competitive impulses of European mercantilism, he envisioned an empire that only the restless and rationalizing energies of European trading powers could transform. In their rich detail and diversity, Sir Jean Chardin’s accounts of seventeenth-century Persia explore the intrinsic paradox of civilization, gender, and empire in early modern Europe. Born in Paris on 16 November 1643 and baptized at Charenton eight days later, Jean Chardin was the eldest son of the prosperous Protestant merchantjeweler, Daniel Chardin, and his wife Jeanne Guiselin, who like her husband issued from among the ranks of the provincial Huguenot commercial elite.4 Chardin offers scant evidence of his childhood and early education in his Voyages, thus we can only presume from contemporary practice that Jean followed his father in the family trade as a young adolescent. At the tender age of twenty-one, he began his international apprenticeship, journeying in 1665 with one of his father’s associates, the Lyonnais merchant Antoine Raisin, to Persia, where the two managed during the course of their ten-week sojourn at the Safavid court in Ispahan to sell jewels and ornaments worth 15,000 livres to Shah Abbas II and secure a lucrative commission from the shah who designed a number of the models himself. After a scouting trip to India, Chardin and Raisin returned again to Persia in 1666 and witnessed the coronation of Abbas II’s eldest son and successor, Suleiman III, before returning to Paris in 1670, almost six years after they had set out on their commercial pilgrimage to the Orient. According to Chardin’s Voyages, the success of this first Persian venture and the increasing strictures of the French state toward Protestants encouraged him to mount a much more ambitious expedition with Raisin to the Safavid empire only fifteen months after his return.5 With the precious jewels and ornaments sewn into his clothing and safeguarded in secret compartments in special-order saddles, the twenty-six-year-old Huguenot merchant began the nine-year voyage that would establish his reputation as one of the foremost experts on Persia in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Negotiating the perils of international commerce—the duplicity of the Grand Vizier in Constantinople, the treachery of the Black Sea and the Muscovy pirates who patrolled it, and the inevitable corruption of Persian officials in the hinterlands—Chardin and Raisin reached Ispahan in June 1673 with their cargo largely intact, only to spend weeks haggling with Suleiman III, who refused to honor the favorable terms of sale offered by his father several years earlier.

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For the next five years, the two traveled extensively throughout Persia, cultivating the political and social contacts necessary to conduct business successfully. Chardin applied himself assiduously to the task and proved to be a keen observer of Persian culture and an enthusiastic student of the Persian language. Combing the streets and back alleys of Ispahan with his boon companion, Herbert de Jaeger of the Dutch East India Company, Chardin determined to become as familiar with the urban landscape of the Persian capital as he was with his native Paris, and even employed two mullahs to provide him with full descriptions of the mosques of Ispahan, which he was forbidden to enter as a non-Muslim.6 From 1677 to 1679, the young jeweler expanded his base of operation to India, where he signed an acte de separation with his partner Raisin on 15 December 1679 and boarded an East India Company ship bound for London.7 The various accounts of Chardin’s first encounters with polite society after his second voyage to Persia suggest the inescapable aura of exoticism that surrounded Europeans who had plumbed the mysteries of Persia and the Asian subcontinent. Jean Chardin returned to Paris in the summer of 1680 a minor celebrity, sought after by both court and salon society alike. Agents of the press to leading salonnières viewed Chardin less as a purveyor of jewels than as a purveyor of the exotic curiosities that excited and expanded the imaginative geographies of educated Europeans in the seventeenth century.8 In June 1680, for example, the Mercure Galant heralded Chardin’s Paris homecoming by enumerating his cargo of curiosities, including several rare manuscripts for Louis XIV, an ancient Bible written in Malabar on palm paper, to tortoises weighing more than 250 pounds each from the Ascension Islands.9 Traveling to London a month later to recuperate the bulk of his belongings still aboard the English East Indies Company ship, Chardin attracted the attention of the Royal Society, whose members immediately dispatched John Evelyn, Joshua Hoskins, and Christopher Wren to visit the “French stranger, one Monsieur Jardine . . . to salute him, & let him know how glad they should be to receive him.”10 Chardin impressed his guests as a reliable chronicler of his travels, who was in the words of John Evelyn “not inclin’d to talke Wonders.” Nonetheless, the Huguenot merchant-traveler presented an exotic image to his visitors, greeting them in full Persian dress. Evelyn recorded that Chardin spent the evening regaling them with stories of the barbarous Igniculi who still worshipped the sun and fire as gods, the unparalleled charms of women of Georgia and Mingrelia who comprised the harems of the Orient, and the race of Amazon women who only a century earlier had “given themselves to war.”11 Thus, it appears from his first meetings with the men who would become his patrons, Chardin was caught between the desire to offer a critical eyewitness account of his travels and the temptation to satisfy the expectations of European elites, steeped in classical historiographical tradition and the wonderbooks of the Middle Ages.12 This dichotomy, rooted in his own ambivalence about Persian culture, would continue to mark Chardin’s career as a travel writer and orientalist. Chardin’s meeting in London with members of the Royal Society could not have been more timely given the growing legal restraints imposed on the dwindling

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Huguenot communities in France. While in Paris, Chardin had met the English envoy, Henry Saville, who was surreptitiously using his court appointment to serve as a kind of broker for wealthy French Protestants anxious to relocate their families, talents and capital in England. In correspondence with his brother, the marquess of Halifax, Saville argued that it was precisely “such men as Sr. John Chardin [who] should be encouraged” to ply their trade in England.13 With letters of recommendation from Saville, Jean Chardin immigrated in the spring of 1681 to England, where his expertise and experiences catapulted him to the very center of English haute société. Knighted by Charles II in April 1681, elected to the Royal Society in November 1682, and appointed as the East India Company’s representative to the Dutch in May 1683, Chardin settled into the life of an English gentleman-entrepreneur and set about trying to capitalize on his travels in the fluid circles of court society, science and commerce in which he circulated.14 He tirelessly attended salons, wrote letters, dined with friends and dignitaries, and began compiling his memoirs with the assistance of John Evelyn.15 He also became an important fixture in the Huguenot émigré community, an energetic patron of his fellow exiles, and a close associate of the former French ambassador in London, the marquis de Ruvigny, who had also served as Deputy General of the Protestant churches in France.16 In his adopted country, Chardin became an indefatigable advocate for the expansion of English trade in the East. For over a decade he worked in close concert with Sir Josiah Child, director of the East India Company, to consolidate English trading monopolies in India. Chardin persuaded Child that Armenian merchants, who played a crucial role as factors in Persia, could build on trade and customs of English factories in Bombay and Madras.17 In 1688 and again in 1690, he served as an agent for the Armenian nation and negotiated contracts with the East India Company that gave Armenians liberal trading privileges with England in return for their services.18 During this same period, Chardin expanded his own commercial interests in the Mughal Empire, sending his younger brother Daniel to Fort St. George to establish a diamond export business in partnership with two Portuguese Jewish merchants. In the 1690s Chardin’s close ties with Child and the East India Company soured when Child reneged on promises to promote Chardin as his successor and Chardin’s investments in East India stock plummeted.19 The publication of the first volume of Voyages du chevalier Jean Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient simultaneously in French and English in 1686 brought Chardin the public stature and influence that he had so clearly desired to wield within the East India Company.20 Over the next decade, two successive editions of Chardin’s Travels were published in England, along with reprints of his 1671 Le Couronnement de Soleiman Troisième, a richly detailed account of the intricate court politics and factional struggles which provoked the succession crisis surrounding the coronation of Sefi II, the eldest son of Abbas II, to which Chardin had been an eyewitness in 1666.21 In 1711 with the publication of the four-volume edition of his Travels, Chardin finally provided a full and authoritative account of his travels. Abbreviated editions of this 1711 magnum opus followed in rapid

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succession, testifying to a nearly insatiable European interest in oriental studies and culture.22 By the time of his death in 1712, Chardin’s chronicles of life and society in Persia had become one of the fundamental texts for the burgeoning field of European oriental studies. He died in Turnham Green in the County of Winchester on 25 December 1714, leaving three surviving children, John, George, and Elizabeth, from his marriage to Ester de Lardinière Peigné. His generous legacies to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a foreign missions organization of which he was a charter member, testify to his close connections with his Calvinist heritage.23 The opening of Persia to western diplomats, merchants, travelers, and missionaries under Shahs Ismail and Abbas I in the sixteenth century rekindled broad European interest in the Safavid empire. By the early seventeenth century, the successful establishment of Augustinian missions within Ispahan as well as Jesuit reports of Shah Abbas’ tolerance toward Christian minorities within Persia periodically encouraged European secular and ecclesiastical officials to entertain visions of a dual offensive against the Turks24 and reconfigured the Safavid shahs in the Western imagination into potential allies battling the same depraved and hostile expansionist Ottoman empire. By the mid-seventeenth century, the quest of European monarchs and merchants for dominance in the East Indies trade, Abbas II’s keen interest in reorienting Persian trade by cultivating direct economic contacts with Europe, and the growth of an ethic of leisure travel among wealthy Europeans prompted an increasing flood of Western diplomats, gentlemanscholars, and merchants to Persia.25 Many of these Eastern adventurers deftly exploited the emerging mass print culture and European fascination with all things oriental by publishing vivid accounts of their experiences abroad. To attract readers, travel writers filled their narratives with harrowing tales of escape from pirates, of love and treachery in Eastern harems, and of court intrigues. No doubt some of these sensational stories were faithful renditions of the perilous conditions of travel, but popular demand for titillating, dramatic detail challenged the veracity of even the most rigorous self-proclaimed empiricist. The competition for readership provoked keen rivalries. In their titles as well as their texts, travel writers scrambled to out-scoop their rivals by promising to reveal the hitherto unknown or concealed mysteries of the Orient. In the earliest editions of his Travels, for example, Chardin assured his readers eyewitness descriptions of “Mingrelia, Imiretta, Georgia and several other Countries unknown to these parts of Europe.” The jeweler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who made an unparalleled six journeys to the Levant, claimed to offer his potential readers a “New Account of the Inner Workings of the Sultan’s Harem, containing several singularities which have never been revealed [brought to light] until now.” In similar fashion sieur Du Vignau published a Turkish etiquette manual in 1688 whose title promised “several particulars of the seril that have not before now ever been made publick.”26 As Edward Said has argued, the revelations of seventeenth-century travelers rarely shattered Western perceptions of the East.27 The language of concealment in which they cast the narratives often only confirmed Western conventions about the

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East, and the most secret of its institutions, the harem. Moreover, these firsthand accounts of life and travel in the East furnished ample material for popular sentimental dramas which continued to nurture standard Western literary topos of the sensual and despotic East. In 1696, for example, Chardin’s Travels inspired the publication and production of The Royal Mischief, a “harem tragedy,” by the prolific court dramatist, Mrs. Mary de la Riviere Manley, whose stock-in-trade were young, star-crossed lovers foiled by the unscrupulous and despotic designs of wily viziers, eunuchs, or their ravishing rivals.28 While most seventeenth-century travel writers were tempted on occasion to cross the boundaries of fact and fantasy, they vehemently insisted that they employed new, more exacting standards of empirical observation.29 Like his contemporaries, Chardin rooted the authority and authenticity of his text in personal experience, which he tendered as the guarantee of the essential truthfulness of his narrative. What distinguished him from other writers, however, was his insistence that language was the essential grid through which cultures must be understood. In deference to literary conventions, he dutifully cited Roman historians, such as Herodotus, Ptolemy of Alexandria, Strabo, and Ammianus Marcellanus, whose accounts of ancient Persia were an essential component of a classical education and therefore seventeenth-century travel writing. But Chardin’s most cherished accomplishment was his ability to incorporate Persian sources on religion, astrology, and astronomy as well as information gleaned from conversations with learned scholars, court officers, and local informants into his text. For Chardin, the originality and reliability of his memoirs lay in his relentless and exacting quest to permeate the subtleties and mysteries of Persian language and culture and to perfect his acquisition and understanding of them. As he explained to readers in the preface of the first edition of his Travels: And though I then provided myself of Observations, and all sorts of Materials for a Relation of it, in as great a Degree or perhaps greater than those that have visited those Countries before me (having Learn’d many things from the Turkish and Persian languages, which have not been observ’d by any that have hitherto Writ of Persia), yet I did not then think of myself sufficiently instructed for the Publication of so compleat a Work, as I intended . . . . And the earnest desire I had to improve my knowledge in that vast Empire of Persia, induced me to undertake a Second Voyage . . . . In a Word, I was so solicitous to know Persia, that I knew Isfahan better than Paris (though I was born and bred there). The Persian language was as easie to me as the French, and I could currently Read and Write it.

In later, expanded editions of his Travels, Chardin stubbornly refused to write about his two-year tour of India because he “understood only Vulgar Languages, without the knowledge of the Brahams.”31 Chardin’s rigorous epistemology and self-imposed silence on India reflect his firm belief that the key to European expansion lay in the acquisition of language. In the definitive 1711 edition of his Travels, Chardin repeated his conviction that

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linguistic precision was integral to his success at the courts of Abbas II and Suleiman III and to the success of any European power endeavoring to establish stable and profitable commercial ties with Persia. Throughout the course of his narrative, Chardin devoted considerable attention to the formulae that distinguished Persian royal decrees, diplomatic dispatches, petitions, and court protocol from Western practices, reproducing representative texts followed by extensive annotations. In their remarkable attention to both the linguistic and material details of diplomatic correspondence, these periodic explications du texte render Chardin unique among his contemporaries and demonstrate his unusual grasp of the cultural imperatives of East-West trade and diplomacy. Two examples illustrate his sensitivity to cultural difference. In the first volume of the 1711 edition of his Travels, Chardin described the circumstances surrounding the arrival of the first envoys of the French East India Company, who appeared at the court of Shah Abbas II in Ispahan in November 1666, bearing only a rather crude letter of recommendation from Louis XIV. The unusual composition of the embassy—comprised as it was of a rather motley assembly of merchant adventurers—and Louis XIV’s failure to send lavish gifts to the Shah and his servitors as was required by custom offended the entire Safavid court. Only Chardin’s timely intervention, if we are to believe his chronicle, redeemed the mission from total failure. Playing the role he clearly relished as broker between his native and adopted culture, Chardin explained to his host that it was indeed the curious European custom to deputize travelers and merchants as royal ambassadors without much thought to foreign protocol. Appeased but still mystified by the casual fashion in which the French treated foreign potentates, Abbas II granted the Company exemption from tolls and customs for three years, in accordance with the trading privileges that had been extended to the Dutch and English. Citing the problematic missive in its entirety, Chardin offered the following analysis: To frame a Judgment of this Letter, according to our Idea's and Manners, there is certainly nothing that can be found fault with it; but such is the Polite Civility of that other World to which it was address’d that they found two Defects therein. The first was, its being Seal’d with a Common Seal . . . . The second Fault which the Court of Persian found with the King of France's Letter, was, that it was sent only upon Occasion, or by a Friend’s hand as the trading people call it.32

He then took his compatriots to task for their ignorance of diplomatic gestures wellknown to other Europeans—the Viennese, Venetians, Poles, and Muscovites— experienced in the Persian trade. Most Europeans knew, he commented with a touch of irony that Persians presented patent letters with seals in elaborate gold boxes, and the whole document in turn was rolled in richly appointed cloths. Chardin also detailed the considerable advantages that he enjoyed at the Safavid court during his second tenure in Persia because of his careful attention to customs of courtly language and deportment. In his first audience with the nazir

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(superintendent of the household), for example, Chardin recorded that he used no interpreter, presented a memorandum describing his merchandise written entirely in Persian, and endured the interminable circumlocutions of Persian court protocol with the skill of a consummate Eastern diplomat.33 Seated in the immobile posture required by Persian custom (and reproduced in a print), Chardin explained that he distinguished himself from his countrymen and other European merchants and diplomats who “have naturally a motion or Gesticulation with them,” that engendered the Persian practice of referring to anyone who stirred in the presence of a courtier or official as “a Fool or a Frenchman.”34 On the strength of this interview, Chardin was pressed into service as an erstwhile translator by the nazir and propelled to the very center of the vigorous diplomatic exchange between Safavid court and the various European governments anxious to establish their dominance over the East Indies and Persian trade. The ad hoc system of translators upon which Abbas II depended to carry out his dealings with the European powers anxious to establish Asian trading monopolies rendered the Persian system of information vulnerable, and Chardin was not slow to underscore the potential commercial and diplomatic advantages available to any power that could dominate the translation trade. During the course of his second sojourn in Ispahan, Chardin noted that he was summoned frequently to the palace to translate petitions and letters of recommendation from various European embassies, where his mastery of several languages—Asian and IndoEuropean—allowed him to counter the influence of Portuguese and Dutch agents who had insinuated themselves into the shah's service as translators. He took particular pleasure in relating how he translated diplomatic dispatches from Charles II, which neither the shah's personal translator, a “Persian renegade,” nor the Arab interpreter employed by the Dutch East Indies Company could decode, much to their frustration. Shrewdly manipulating anti-Dutch sympathies of his intended Anglo/French audience, Chardin observed how very anxious the Arab translator was “to have those Letters in his Hands, that he might give a Copy thereof to his Masters who are very curious to know the Affairs of other People, but more especially those which have any relation to theirs and any-wise concern with commerce.”35 Much like seventeenth-century etiquette manuals designed to perpetuate new codes of civility, Chardin’s compendium also provided European merchants and travelers-cum-diplomats with practical information to facilitate their own conduct of business in the Safavid empire. Convinced that western Europeans did not sufficiently appreciate the delicacy of Persian protocol, Chardin earnestly apprised his readers—presumably many of them fellow merchants—of the mastery of the minute details that contributed to the success of his business dealings. When he wrested a promissory note from the nazir for the sale of 1500 tomans worth of jewels, Chardin reproduced the full text which ordered the Dutch to pay him the fees against their account with the Shah, with special attention to the signatures and seals of the first minister (his togra, an elaborate knot of Arabic letters and their meaning), nazir, comptroller-general, and comptroller of accounts.36 The departure

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of the embassy of French East India Company to India provided Chardin with the occasion to explain the proper salutations and address, third person, and signatures necessary to obtain a letter of passage from Persian shah.37 Just as Chardin’s discussion of the intricacies of Persian diplomatic protocol allowed him to expose the inherent tensions in East-West relations, his analysis of the complex religious geographies of the Middle East and Asia reexamined the veracity of standard European conventions concerning Islamic culture, many of which had been deeply inscribed into the European consciousness since the Crusades. In his relative tolerance toward Islamic thought, Chardin was not alone. The reasoned discourse of philosophical skepticism, the growth of European travel and trade in the East, and the collapse of Turkish military threat in the Mediterranean contributed to a resurgence of interest in Arabic literature and language among European elites, nearly rivaling the renaissance of the twelfth century.38 More specifically, Ahmad Gunny has argued that the European Protestant writer exhibited a certain “sympathy” toward Islam, penning glowing descriptions of the relative tolerance of Islam and Islamic rulers toward religious dissidents as part of a larger polemical strategy which implicitly vilified the putative intolerance of Roman Catholicism.39 Examples of this kind of veiled polemic can be found laced throughout Chardin’s narrative along with extensive discussions of Islamic theology and ritual.40 In the 1686 preface of his Travels, for example, he argued that his journeys to Asia offered him the opportunity to move beyond narrow confines of confessional and professional identities which restricted opportunities for social advancement in his native France. In the Indies where trade was “an Imployment so considerable, that even Soveraign Princes publickly follow it,” he could refashion himself “without altering my Religion, or abandoning the Condition of a Merchant” and “not fail to gratifie a moderate Ambition.”41 As he observed in later passages, even senior court officials in Ispahan, such as the nazir, allowed him to observe sanctity of the sabbath without interruption.42 In his discussions of religion, Chardin called into question the fundamental confessional divide upon which seventeenth-century European politics and diplomacy rested. In the opening chapter of his travels, the Huguenot merchant reminded his readers of the peculiar circumstances of Christian communities in the East that rendered the religious distinctions and confessional controversies of the Western world meaningless. Living in the shadow of powerful political Muslim majorities, he argued, “Christians learn to be at Peace in the East, and keep a good Correspondence one with another,” since the dominance of Islam reduced the “thousand Sects” of eastern Christianity to one simple dichotomy, “Christian and the Mohumetan.”43 Yet even this simplified taxonomy, Chardin revealed, was confounded within the first few days of his departure from European shores when the fleet of six trading vessels and two men of war with which he and his Catholic trading partner were travelling encountered one of the various and sundry Christian corsairs whose “impious and barbarous Crimes” threatened Mediterranean trade and their co-religionaries along the Adriatic.44 Thus, from the beginning of Chardin's voyage to the East, the fluid boundaries of identity along the Eastern

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trading routes redefined, relativized, and even inverted conventional European categories of meaning. Christians were impious and barbarous; Muslims were pious and civilized; and Catholic missionaries from the very religious orders in the vanguard of Huguenot persecution in France became Chardin’s most indispensable allies. The dangerous conditions of travel through the Black Sea, over the Caucasus, and through the Persian hinterland repeatedly rendered Western travelers completely dependent upon Theatine and Capuchin missionaries who had established a series of mission outposts along Eastern maritime and overland trading routes by the seventeenth century.45 Time and again Chardin recorded how their ministrations saved his precious cargo and his life. In Colchis, where the princess's overt sexual overtures made Chardin suspect that he was the target of the nefarious white slave trade or a robbery attempt, the Huguenot jeweler went so far as to assume the guise of a Capuchin monk to save himself. When the armored henchmen of the princess appeared at the mission the following day, Chardin scuttled out the mission window with 6,000 livres of jewelry while a Capuchin laybrother valiantly held off the armored thugs.46 In Mingrelia, where the eruption of hostilities with the Turks undermined plans for overland travel, the Theatine Father Zampi, a lay-brother and servant helped Chardin find passage on a felucca and provided him with company and safe conduct.47 In Georgia, Theatines provided Chardin with letters of recommendation that allowed him to take refuge in the castle of a Muslim Georgian turned Christian. In the Caucasus, Chardin appealed to a Capuchin missionary from the Propagande Fide to help him retrieve both his partner and the goods left in Mingrelia. They in turn urged him to recover his friend by donning the cowl of a Theatine friar.48 Even in Ispahan, Chardin was forced to appeal to Capuchins, who functioned as crucial intermediaries in his first efforts to gain access to court officials. The irenic, even generous tone that Chardin employed toward the Theatine and Capuchin missionaries who proved to be invaluable colleagues did not extend to the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs or catholicos, whose ignorance, immorality, and barbarism figured prominently in Chardin’s analysis of eastern Christianity in its many variations.49 The graphic catalogue of abuses that Chardin ascribed to the catholicos drew from both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant polemical traditions with which he would have been lamentably familiar. Drunkenness, desecrations of the Host, disregard for sacraments, and even the sale of children to the Muslim slave trade figured among the sins of the Eastern priests whose fundamental indifference and ignorance stood in stark contrast to the evangelical fervor and refinement of the Catholic missionaries of Chardin’s acquaintance.50 By casting his discussion of indigenous Christianity in such oppositional terms, Chardin only reinforced the geographic dichotomies so central to his representation of the reductive decadence of Eastern culture. It is clear from Chardin’s text, however, that religious superstition and enthusiasm in any guise—Christian or Islamic—were reprehensible.51 While he praised Muslims for their austerity, purity, and devotion to the disciplines of prayer,

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he was equally repelled by the long and dangerous pilgrimages, fasting, mortification, and ritual purification required by Islamic law. Embracing the philosophical skepticism of many late-seventeenth-century European elites, Chardin championed true religion as “the practice of justice and doing good and keeping oneself clear of the defilement of the world.”52 While Chardin’s chronicles of his life and travels in the East often contested the European paradigm of imperial conquest and conversion, they nevertheless perpetuated, rather than challenged, the binary oppositions of Eastern/Western society and character that scholars have argued lay at the heart of European imperialist discourse. Like most seventeenth-century travel writers, Chardin could not escape the compelling power of enduring Western myths of Eastern sensuality and sexual decadence that he argued were the very essence of Persian character and institutions.53 As Leslie Pierce has asserted, seventeenth-century European travel writers in Asia struggled to embrace the strict empiricism demanded by intellectual Cartesianism, while continuing to shape their travel narratives according to the moral imperatives of an earlier humanist tradition, where the exposure of the mechanisms of Oriental absolutism implied a latent criticism of European monarchy.54 For Chardin, as for many Europeans, the most potent symbol of the essential alterity of Eastern sexuality and culture generally was the harem, where sovereign potentates surrendered to the private pleasures offered by their wives, concubines, and slaves and in the process inverted natural gender hierarchies of power and authority. The sheer number and popularity of European chronicles of life within the imperial harems of the Ottoman and Safavid empires published in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries testifies to the Western fascination with an institution that seemed to epitomize the insidious nexus of sexual and political power exercised by the female sex.56 The frontispiece of Michel Baudier’s Histoire generalle du serrail (1626), one of the most lurid and sensationalist examples of the genre, graphically illustrated the inevitable subversion of the masculine authority and potency within the confines of the harem in two striking plates: the first presented the turbanned Ottoman emperor majestically entering the gates of his palace astride his caparisoned mount, surrounded by a retinue of armed guards, while the second depicted the turbanned but otherwise naked Turkish emperor within the confines of the harem reclining on a cushioned throne, surrounded by voluptuous concubines who fondled his body and genitals.57 In both word and image, these highly imaginary accounts of the secrets of the seraglio provided ample evidence of masculinized women and feminized men and fuelled the emerging critique within European society about the political influence exercised by women within the ostensibly private spaces of salon and court.58 Chardin's most extensive diatribe on political dangers of Eastern harems is found in his Coronation of Solyman III, where he attributed the decline of the Safavid empire in the late-seventeenth century to harem politics. In the opening pages of the narrative, Chardin envisioned the death of Abbas II itself as symptomatic of the sexual excesses and inversions that lay behind the general

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deterioration of the Persian body politic. Contrary to the rumors of poison that plunged the court into a vicious succession crisis, Chardin ascribed “the most certain cause of death” to sphyllis: the Foul disease attended with a cancer, which seizing the Gristle that forms the Conveyances of smelling, preyed not only outwardly upon the Nose, but inwardly upon the Palate, and then falling upon the Uvula stopped up the passages of Respiration.59

In the pages that followed, Chardin leveled his criticism even more directly at the polygamous practices of Eastern despots who mandated regimes of violence and cruelty toward their blood kin and male progeny. By the late sixteenth century, both the Ottoman and Safavid emperors had abandoned the traditional practice of appointing royal princes to provincial governorships under the tutelage of local chiefs, who trained their charges in the arts of war and statecraft. To protect themselves from their sons' ambitions and in turn to preserve their sons from one another, eastern rulers increasingly sequestered the heir presumptive within the harem and blinded or killed their younger sons to eliminate rival claimants to the throne.60 As a consequence, Persian princes were reared in the languorous atmosphere of the seraglio under the vigilant guardianship of their mothers, who assumed the vital task of ensuring their sons' survival and succession. Such a system, Chardin argued, transferred real power at the moment of succession to the queen mother who continued to exercise a nefarious influence over royal policies even after her son's coronation was secure. Aided and abetted by a host of eunuchservants, the queen mother naturally became the key player in the shah’s Privy Council, “which usually prevails above everything, and which lays down the law for everything.”61 According to Chardin, the precipitous death of Abbas II in 1666 revealed the extent to which this politics of the harem imperiled the peaceful transmission of power from one generation to the next. Virtually incarcerated in the imperial harem for over a decade as a punishment for youthful indiscretions, Abbas’ eldest son and putative successor, Sefi, was unprepared and ill trained for the monarchy. The mystery that surrounded the harem permitted the rebels to further obfuscate the truth of Sefi’s physical circumstances and thus undermine the principles of primogeniture and succession. Rumors circulated among certain advisers and members of the court, who were not allowed by custom to penetrate the harem, that Abbas had blinded Sefi to defend himself from the imperious young prince, whom he suspected of rebellion. Even more fearful that Sefi still possessed his sight and upon his succession would begin purging the palace of the servitors who had imposed his order of seclusion, a number of key officials at court began to consider the possibility of circumventing the normal order of succession in favor of Abbas’ younger and more malleable son, Hamzeh-Mirzah. Only the prudent refusal of Hamzeh's tutor, Aga-Mubarek, to violate custom, which Chardin depicted in almost miraculous terms, prevented the palace coup.

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However, as Chardin noted, Sefi was still unfit to assume the vast responsibilities implied by the title of “master of the universe” conferred upon him at his coronation. The countenance of the young ruler, he wrote, “was all in disorder like a person not in his senses,” a madness that he ascribed to Sefi’s confinement, which left the new shah unprepared to comprehend the appropriate exercise of sovereign power and unwilling to replace his female companions in the harem with the seasoned advisers of the court.62 Chardin depicted Sefi as a young and inexperienced ruler given to corporal, feminine pleasures, and sexual license rather than the masculine disciplines of leadership. In abdicating authority to the queen mother and palace favorites, Sefi subverted an imperial system of government, bureaucratic advisers, patronage networks, and a fiscal administration, whose subtleties he was too “feminized” to understand. As Chardin observed, “he had been bred up tenderly among the Women; accustomed only to talk of fine Cloaths, and Baubles, and to command Eunuchs.”63 In Chardin’s chronicle of the early reign of Sefi II, the greatest emblem of this subversion of the natural order is Sefi’s willful violation of the physical boundaries of the harem, which the Huguenot jeweler conflated in his text with the violation of the boundaries of feminine authority. In the first five months of his reign, Chardin recorded, Sefi imposed fifty-two kourocks, or curfews, that required all men over the age of seven to seclude themselves upon penalty of death while the young prince walked freely around the city with his wives.64 In Chardin’s political economy, Sefi’s submission to the rule of women ultimately undermined the very foundations of Persian prosperity. Trade, commerce, and agriculture were jeopardized by the caprices of the women of the harem and their palace favorites. When the shah of Mughal India “as if he resolv’d to declare open War . . . forbad his Subjects all manner of Commerce with the Persians either by land or sea,”65 Sefi continued to cavort with the Queen mother and his wives in and around Ispahan, abdicating the duties of governing to favorites. At the behest of his aunts and mother, the young shah reversed the time-honored policies of his father, liberating male relatives from prison and doling out offices that his father purposefully had left vacant in order to appropriate the revenues for the royal treasury.66 Pressed to replace his rapidly depleting fortune, Sefi also permitted his favorites to impose heavy contributions on the Christian Armenian merchants of Julfa, who served as vital brokers of Persian trade with European powers, thus provoking a revolt.67 Finally, Chardin took pains to record how a forty-pound rocket went astray during a fireworks display for Sefi’s wives and cut a swath of destruction through recently harvested fields, burning up over 16,000 pounds of corn.68 In short, no facet of the economy was left unscathed by the rule of women. Sefi’s eventual efforts to reverse the impact of trade wars with Mughal India, internal rebellions, plague, and famine by the imposition of general price maximums, fines and punishments, Chardin explained, ultimately could not counter the systemic corruption of the imperial government and depletion of the royal treasury by the queen mother, royal wives, and their ambitious palace favorites. Within eighteen months of his coronation, Sefi II had brought the Safavid Empire

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to the brink of ruin. Relinquishing authority to the Queen mother, who “took upon her the Government of the Empire,” Sefï “lay whole Weeks languishing in his Harem while his mother to shew her first Master-piece of Policy . . . reduced the Monarch her Son from one extremity to another.”69 In a telling passage, Chardin detailed Sefi’s final descent into a drug-induced maelstrom of drunken rages and sexual rampages through the Christian quarters of Ispahan—the Armenian suburb of Julfa—where the Persian monarch scoured the streets for virgins between the ages of ten and twelve to complete his harem.70 This double-edged violation of racial and religious sexual boundaries not only symbolized Shah Sefi’s total collapse into the realms of sexual depravity; it also offered the Huguenot merchant compelling evidence of the corrosive influence of harem culture on Christian communities in the East, where fathers sold their daughters into Muslim slavery for the promise of a thirty-guinea pension. Even young women were convinced of the great happiness to be found in the shah’s harem. As Chardin observed, only one of the twenty Armenian virgins who were sent to the palace during Sefi’s random sweep of Julfa was detained for the shah’s service, provoking the rest to weep “either because they were thought to [sic] Innocent or else believ’d to be too cunning.”71 The re-coronation of Sefi in 1666 only underscored the competitive struggle for power between courtly factions that impaired the effectiveness of government. As doctors, astrologers, and court officers disputed among themselves, the political situation deteriorated even further until the only solution seemed the perpetuation of a political fiction that Chardin considered the most telling example of the corruption of court life by superstition and intrigue: the renaming and recoronation of the shah as Suleiman III. In spite of his criticisms of the superstitions that induced court officials to seize upon the promise of a re-coronation, Chardin concluded his chronicle of Suleiman III as a kind of morality tale in which evil counselors and palace favorites received their just desserts, the loyal counselors of Abbas’ reign were recalled, and proper rule of men was restored.72 More than thirty years later, however, the seasoned scholar refashioned his history of Sefi’s recoronation, arguing that the ceremony only delayed the inevitable decline of the Safavid state since it failed to redress the fatal abuses of the harem system that had prompted the fiction in the first place.73 In the 1711 edition of his Travels, Chardin expanded his condemnation of the harem system to include descriptions of the Grand Seraglio of Constantinople and the harems of Mingrelia and Colchis, where despotic princes extorted forced offers of love from the young foreign-born women who were slaves to their passion and executed those who denied any vestige of pleasure to their master. He also recounted numerous examples of the cruel punishments that Persian shahs meted to harem women who refused his favors or failed to observe the exclusive conditions of their tenure. When a young favorite asked to refrain from sex because she was indisposed, for example, Abbas II summarily had her burned alive when he discovered otherwise.74 Yet even while Chardin was willing to envision some women as victims of a system in which young Circassian slaves were sold and then

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imprisoned to fulfill the shah’s unbounded appetites, he also described the harem as an institution that inexorably corrupted its inhabitants and transformed even the most innocent into sexual predators, governed by a life devoted to sexual preparation and intrigue: They spend their life in nonchalance, laziness, and softness, stretched out all day long on beds where they are pampered and massaged by little slaves, which is one of the greatest delights [voluptez] of the Asians or smoking the tobacco of the country.75

Reared in such an atmosphere of languor, luxury, and lust, Oriental women became “the most wicked women on earth: proud, superb, perfidious, cheats, cruel, and shameless.”76 As Alain Grosrichard has suggested, seventeenth-century Europeans perceived the harem as a sexual economy in which the flux of goods was reserved for the exclusive use and enjoyment of the sovereign.77 Most were also equally convinced that such a monopoly, especially in hot desert climates that they believed produced an excess of passion, drove harem women beyond the boundaries of normative sexuality to satisfy their frustrated desires.78 Few explored the issue as graphically as Michel Baudier who dutifully catalogued the animals, fruits, and vegetables purportedly prohibited within Grand Seraglio under the pretext that they might serve as pseudo-phalli.79 But like Chardin, most chroniclers argued that Eastern harems promoted a sexual economy in which the constriction of male partners encouraged women to seek solace and comfort from each other: “Oriental women have always been thought of as Tribadists. I have heard it insisted upon so often, and by so many people, that they are and that they have ways of mutually satisfying their passions that I regard it as something quite certain.”80 In the seraglio at Ispahan, moreover, the relentless dynastic politics of the harem perverted even normative sexuality and the production of pleasure and the procreation of children that the harem was designed to facilitate. Five years after Suleiman's succession, Chardin reported that the shah had fathered more than sixty children, most of whom were expeditiously murdered by the queen mother, who presided over the systematic elimination of her son’s rivals. Once the shah had a clearly designated heir, however, the women of the harem “lived in fear of their children losing their lives or being blinded by the shah.”81 Royal favorites dreaded the shah's attentions rather than desired them because once they had given birth to children they were never given in marriage. According to the brutal logic of the seraglio, then, pregnancy—the most natural consequence of the harem economy— was considered a singular misfortune that locked all but the mother of the future shah “into a perpetual, depressing slavery.”82 The perpetual cycle of preemptive abortions, forced terminations, and infanticide that regulated the prolific fertility of the harem offered only the slightest possibility of escape and transformed the intrinsic fecundity of the harem economy into a desert of barrenness. Even beyond the harem, Chardin observed, an early and indulgent attitude toward sex prompted the early onset of menopause in women and low fertility rates generally throughout

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Persia.83 Perhaps inspired as much by mercantilist theory as conventional Western morality, Chardin could only condemn harem experiments in population control as “the most ghastly abominations in the World.”84 For they threatened the most fundamental resources of an expansive economy. According to Alain Grosrichard, Enlightenment philosophes in the spirit of nascent capitalism continued to denounce the harem economy for its violation of the principles of utilitarianism and surplus-value.85 In Chardin’s critique, the same sensibility to blatant waste is palpable. Throughout Chardin’s writings, the harem figured as a metonymic device that signaled the vices endemic to Persian culture and character. Nowhere was this more apparent than his chapter on Persian manners, where Chardin delineated the dichotomy between the cultures of the East and West much more starkly than in any other part of his text. Chardin contrasted the roving curiosity of European elites (and indeed his own endless fascination with the highways and byways of the Persian hinterland, as well as the back alleys of Ispahan) with the singular lack of interest among Persians in any kind of displacement from simple exercise to “walking Abroad, or Travelling.”86 This natural lack of curiosity, he argued, stemmed from the harem itself where “the Women and the Eunuchs generally Speaking, use no Exercise, and are always sitting or lying, without prejudicing their health,”87 and explained the intrinsic inability of Persians to manipulate the rapidly expanding “traffick” between the East and West. “The Persians,” Chardin noted, “have a naturally eager bent toward Voluptuousness, Luxury, Extravagance and Profuseness for which Reason they are ignorant both of frugality and trade.”88 With equal vigor, Chardin described Persian society from the imperial court to the small artisans and producers as incapable of embracing the essential disciplines of a capitalist economy. Those who had money were careless with it and wasted it on conspicuous consumption; those with very little devoted it to dead-end investments. Institutional barriers, such as the inadequacy of credit mechanisms and Islamic prohibitions against usury, further frustrated the emergence of commodity capitalism in a country in which many of the vital preconditions of commercial progress—secure roads, inexpensive (even free) public lodging, and raw materials—had been met.89 Moreover, the addiction to excess and ease among the Persian elites who administered the Safavid Empire rendered them incapable of understanding or exploiting even the most basic fundamental diplomatic principles upon which the dynamic growth of trade with the West depended. Chardin indicted the Persians for their failure to take advantage of repeated European overtures to mount a dual offensive against the Ottoman Turks to regain the rich western provinces lost during the campaigns of the sixteenth century and thus secure their overland as well as maritime trade routes to the West.90 Dismissing European pundits who argued that Persian diplomacy reflected a conscious decision to embrace the politics of peace, he contended that the Ottoman-Persian detente of the seventeenth century could only be explained by the innate profligacy of Persian character. As he observed, “They [the Persians] have lay’d by their Warlike Temper and have given

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themselves up to Wantonness, which they don't suppose can be found in a great Bustle, and in dubious and laborious Undertakings.”91 In Chardin’s Travels, then, the spirit of enterprise, competition, and war upon which European powers were building their trading empires clearly lay beyond the grasp of Persian elites, a judgment that became critical to his justification of European imperialism. In his depictions of the latent state of industry and commerce, the wanton disregard of Persian elites to the very essential disciplines of nascent capitalism, and the strictures of Islamic law and local custom, Chardin sounded themes that had became critical elements in the construction of European imperial rhetoric from the sixteenth century onward.92 In the tradition of New World travelogues that depicted richly endowed, undeveloped, and easily exploitable landscapes, Chardin described Persia as a country rich in metals and minerals, whose extraction was only haphazardly pursued in spite of encouragement from the Safavid shahs. Mining enterprises, like most Persian commercial endeavors, were not as intensive as European ventures because Persians failed to embrace the ethos of consumption and acquisition critical to the expansive spirit of capitalism that might have overcome their natural propensity toward indolence.93 In similar fashion, Chardin attributed the underdeveloped commercial potential of the Persian economy to Persian merchants who confined their international commercial ventures to the relatively small market in dried goods, spirits, livestock, and small manufactured goods with India, leaving the extensive markets of the Mediterranean and Europe to Christian Armenian and Jewish intermediaries.94 In so doing, he carefully constructed a critical vacuum in which European merchants could easily insinuate themselves as crucial brokers in the development of a lucrative trading empire, supplying the requisite energy, acumen, and capital to reinvigorate and revitalize the Persian economy and wrest Safavid Persia from its fatal decadence. Throughout his writings, Sir Jean Chardin positioned himself as one of the most important arbiters of European expansion into the Persian empire, a traffic that he legitimated by appealing to the intrinsic paradoxes of the Persian culture he came to admire and abhor. To argue that Chardin was an architect of empire, however, does not detract from the considerable and justifiable influence that he has exercised over successive generations of Western scholars, or tarnish his reputation as a shrewd and fastidious chronicler of Persian institutions and society. Modern historians have confirmed the deleterious consequences of harem politics in the later Safavid Empire while drawing attention as well to the broader shifts in economics, politics, and diplomacy.95 For Chardin’s contemporaries, the tales he told of the perversions of the harem, where omnipotence was reduced to sexual dependency and slavery, where royal authority ceded leadership and power to foreign, low-born women and the bevy of female janissaries and effeminate eunuchs who served them, and where the pernicious addiction to luxury threatened the very threads of Empire, resonated with profound political truths. Beyond the rhetoric of imperialism lay an even more disquieting assessment of the properly gendered nature of political power in an ordered society.

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Notes 1. Auguste Galland, Mille et une Nuits, 12 vols. (Paris: 1704–17). 2. Among the literary historians who have drawn attention to the cultural importance this vast literature of travel, see Percy Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars: 1660–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1962); Charles L. Batten, Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1978); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: 1992). 3. According to Mary Louise Pratt, nineteenth-century European travelers to Latin American frequently praised South American elites for their hospitality, aristocratic civility and appreciation of Europeans, while indicting society generally for its backwardness, indolence and pre-capitalist economies. (See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 150–55.) 4. For a careful chronology of Jean Chardin's career and ancestry, see Leleh LabibRahman, “Sir Jean Chardin, the Great Traveller (1643–1712/3),” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, vol. XXIII, no. 5 (1981): pp. 309–18. Chardin's paternal grandfather, François, settled in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, around 1588, and fathered ten children. The eldest, Daniel, settled in Paris in the early seventeenth century and married Jeanne Guiselin, whose father was a Protestant merchant from Rouen. For the most recent biography, see R. W. Ferrier, A Journey to Persia: Jean Chardin’s Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Empire (London and New York: 1996), pp. 11–20. 5. Jean Chardin, Journal du voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes Orientales (par la mer Noire et par la Colchide) (London: 1686), p. iv. 6. David Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040–1797 (London and New York: 1988), p. 140. 7. Labib-Rahman, “Sir Jean Chardin,” pp. 310–11, 316. Chardin's sojourn in India and subsequent contacts with members of the East India Company in England encouraged him to establish a branch of the family business in India. In 1686, he formed a partnership with his brother Daniel. 8. Unusual objects and artifacts brought back by travelers and merchants in the Atlantic and East Indies trade filled the wunderkammern (cabinets of wonders) of seventeenthcentury wealthy European as well as royal treasuries of European princes, reflecting the Renaissance preoccupation with collecting and codifying the natural and man-made commodities of the colonial world. On the evolution of this phenomenon, see Oliver Impey and Arthur McGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: 1985). Leonard Helfgott has argued, however, that Islamic goods rarely figure in the inventories of early modern Wunderkammern because the late medieval revival of East-West trade had already familiarized and desensitized Europeans to their rarity and worth. (Cf. Leonard Helfgott, Ties that Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet (Washington and London: 1993), pp. 110–13.) 9. Le Mercure Galant, June 1680, p. 266 as quoted in Labib-Rahmen, p. 310. 10. E.S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. IV (Oxford: 1955), pp. 212–14. 11. Ibid. pp. 212–14. 12. For a recent critical discussion of the pervasive influence of the medieval tradition of

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wonder books in early-modern European travel writing, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY: 1988), esp. pp. 47–161. Campbell argues that the demystification and domestication of the Middle East by crusaders and chroniclers pushed the boundaries of European exotic imagination farther East. From the thirteenth century onward, Europeans transposed the fabled landscapes and peoples of their imaginations upon Persia, India, and China. 13. Labib-Rahman, p. 315. 14. Edgard Samuel, “Gems from the Orient: the activities of Sir John Chardin (1646– 1713) as a diamond importer and East India merchant,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain (forthcoming). My thanks to Mr. Samuel for sharing this article with me. 15. Evelyn, Diaries, p. 372. Evelyn, it appears, was instrumental in helping a number of French travelers translate their memoirs for an English audience, including François de Chassepol's Histoire des grands vizirs Mahomet Caprogli-pacha et Achmet Caproglipacha in 1677. 16. See, for example, the 1683 appeal made by P. Chauvin, a recent Huguenot refuge in Norwich, to Chardin after locals rioted and attacked various members of the émigré community provoked by fears that economic competition and religious nonconformity. Chauvin, who described Chardin as “a Joseph in our Goshen,” pleaded with Huguenot jeweler to use his “credit at court” to persuade Charles II to reconfirm the privileges of the Huguenot community and church in Norwich. (F.H. Blackburn Damell and Francis Bickley, Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, Charles II (July 1 to September 30, 1683) (London: 1934), p. 363.) In 1697, the Calendar State Papers also record that Chardin vouchsafed for a French refuge taken prisoner at sea. (William Harding, Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, William III (January 31 to December 31 1697), vol. VIII (Kraus Reprint, 1969), p. 284.) 17. Samuel, “Gems from the Orient,” n.p. 18. Hardy, ed., Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, William and Mary, vol. II, pp. 380, 591. 19. Samuel, "Gems from the Orient," n.p. 20. Jean Chardin, Voyages du chevalier Jean Chardin en Perse et en autres lieux de l’Orient (London: Moses Pitt, 1686); idem, The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies throughout the Black-sea, and the country of Colchis, describing Mingrelia, Imiretta, Georgia and several other Countries unknown to these Parts of Europe (London: Moses Pitt, 1686). 21. Cf. Chardin, The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia, and the East Indies . . . to which is added The Coronation of this Present King of Persia, Solyman the Third (London: George Monke and William Ewzey, 1689); idem, The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies (London: Christopher Bateman, 1691). The first edition of Le Couronnement de Soleiman Troisième appeared in France in 1671 and included a fulsome dedication to Louis XIV, lavish praises of the two “sun-blest” monarchies of France and Persia, and generous prognostications concerning trade between the two countries, which Chardin hoped to facilitate. 22. A four-volume edition of Chardin’s Voyages, along with his Couronnement de Suleiman, was published in Amsterdam in 1735. Passages critical of the Catholic Church that were omitted in the 1711 publication were included in this posthumous edition, as well as the 1811 ten-volume edition, which has become the standard reference text for most specialists. For a lengthy discussion of the publishing history, see Jean Chardin, Voyages . . . en Perse et autres lieu de l’orient, ed. L. Langles, 10 vols. (Paris: 1811),

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preface. Much of my discussion is also based on an early twentieth-century abridged edition of Chardin’s Travels published by Sir Percy Sykes. See Sir John Chardin, Travels in Persia, ed. Sir Percy Sykes (London: 1927). 23. For the text of Chardin’s will, see Public Record Office, London 11/530, sig. 231; for his association with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in America, see Edward Bateson, ed., Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, William III, vol. 11 (London: 1969), pp. 357–58. The royal charter granted in 1701 indicates the strong antiCatholic sentiment of members who envisioned their organization as an antidote to the activities of “divers Romish priest and Jesuits . . . engaged to pervert and draw over our said loving subjects to popish superstitions and idolatry.” 24. Roger Savory (Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge: 1982), pp. 107–08) has argued that this shared hatred of the Turk even gave way at times to dreams of a common alliance against the Ottoman Empire that distant geographies and culture rendered virtually impossible. 25. For a broad overview of European travel and travelers in seventeenth-century Persia, see Roger Stevens, “European to the Safavid Court,” Iranian Studies, vol. VII (SummerAutumn 1974): pp. 421–51; Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6 (Cambridge: 1986), pp. 373–411. 26. Sieur des Joanots du Vignau, The Turkish secretary: containing the art of expressing ones thoughts, without seeing speaking or writing to one another: with the circumstances of a Turkish adventures: as also a most curious relation made of several particulars of the seril that have not before now ever been made publick (London: 1688). 27. The language of concealment figured frequently in seventeenth and early-eighteenth century orientalist texts. In his preface to Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, Auguste Galland praised his contemporary for his prodigious research in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts which allowed him to reveal “matters hitherto concealed from Europeans.” Cf. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: 1979), p. 64. 28. Cf. Mrs. Manley, The Royal Mischief: A Tragedy as it is Acted by his Majesties Servants (London: 1696); idem, The Lost Lover (London: 1696). 29. Leslie Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: 1993), pp. 114–15. 30. Chardin, Travels (1689), p. 2. 31. As quoted in Donald F. Lach and Edwin Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. III (Chicago and London: 1993), p. 421n. Given his extensive business interests in India and his regular correspondence with his brother Daniel, who managed a branch of the family's business in Surat, Chardin’s refusal to write about the Mughal kingdom only underscores the inextricable connections he drew between language, knowledge, and power. 32. Chardin, Travels (1927), pp. 40–41. 33. Ibid., pp. 12–13. In his account of this encounter, Chardin notes that he had enjoined Ralph du Mans, superior of the Capuchin mission in Ispahan and an accomplished chronicler in his own right, to serve as his interpreter, fearing his “want of Persian” and knowing that “some things in the East are more properly delivered by the third person.” Du Mans refused, ostensibly because of the nazi’'s hostile treatment of western Christians in the Safavid Empire. In this artful aside, Chardin further establishes his knowledge of the nuances of court decorum. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., pp. 98–103. 36. Ibid., pp. 74–76.

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37. Chardin, Travels (1927), pp. 66–67. 38. Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européene, 1680–1715 (Paris: 1934); Pierre Rétat, he Dictionnaire de Bayle et la lutte philosophique au XVIIIe siécle (Paris: 1971). 39. Ahmad Gunny, “Protestant reactions to Islam in late seventeenth-century French thought,” French Studies, vol. XL, no. 2 (April 1986): pp. 129–40. 40. For a reasonably thorough treatment of Chardin’s treatment of Islamic ritual, see Ferrier, A Journey to Persia, pp. 97 to 109. 41. Chardin, Travels (1686), p. 2. 42. Chardin, Voyages (1811), vol. V, pp. 324–26. 43. Chardin, Travels (1686), pp. 3–4. 44. Ibid. While they emerge unscathed, the experience furnishes Chardin with the opportunity to recount the tale of a French captain who asked an Adriatic corsair if he feared for the salvation of his soul given “the Robberies, the Murders, the Sacriledges, which you dayly commit.” To which the belligerant pirate purportedly responded, “Not at all. I am a Lutheran, I do believe not a tittle of any such thing.” 45. Augustinians from Portugal and Carmelite missionaries from Spain and Italy had established missions in Persia by the early seventeenth century when Père Joseph and Cardinal Richelieu commissioned Père Pacifique de Provins to establish Capuchin missions in Isfahan and elsewhere in 1627. The plan to establish missions which were to be exclusively French in character reinforced the close tie between the Capuchins in Persia and the French government. Under the leadership of Père Raphael du Mans (1644–1696), whose mastery of the Persian language and customs made him an invaluable contact for French travelers and diplomats, the Capuchins flourished in Persia. In 1660 Du Mans composed his Estat de la Perse for Colbert, who with characteristic thoroughness was interested in collecting data on Persia before forming the French East Indies Company in 1664. (History of Iran, vol. VI, pp. 397–98; Savory, Iran under the Safavids, pp. 120–21.) 46. Chardin, Travels (1689), pp. 127–28. 47. Ibid., p. 150. 48. Ibid., p. 170. 49. Ibid., p. 93. Chardin so thoroughly accepted the assessment of Catholic missionaries on Mingrelian Nestorianism that he set aside his empirical methods and based most of his discussion on Father Zampi’s history, which he argued was the product of twenty-three years of experience. 50. Ibid., pp. 93–104, 192–93. 51. See Ferrier, A Journey to Persia, pp. 109–11. 52. As quoted in Ferrier, A Journey to Persia, p. 109. 53. See, for example, Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Mythos of Orient (Bloomington, Indiana: 1986), pp. 14–29. As Kabbani, for seventeenth-century travel writers, the seraglio was an “obligatory topos,” which “helped keep in currency notions of a cruel and vengeful Eastern male.” 54. Pierce, The Imperial Harem, pp. 114–15. For a trenchant discussion of the evolution of traditions of history-writing in France, see Erika Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: 1983). 55. In the past two decades, numerous works have examined the orientalist discourse on the harem since Edward Said directed the critical attention of scholars to the creation of the construct in his seminal study. See, for example, Mallex Allon, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: 1986); the post-colonial critic, Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts, and a Critique of Imperialism,” in Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates

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(Chicago: 1985), pp. 262–80; idem, In Other Worlds (New York and London: 1988); Paul Sadek Anis, “L’Orientalisme dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle: la représentation de l'autre,” Ph.D dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1995; Billie Melman, “Desexualizing the Orient: The Harem in English Travel Writing by Women, 1763-1914,” Mediterranean Historical Review, vol. IV, no. 2 (1989): pp. 301– 39. Other works that focus primarily on the imperialist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries include, Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: National, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Durham and London: 1996), esp. pp. 40–56; Lisa Lowe, Critical terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: 1991); and the richly illustrated, somewhat popularized discussion offered by Alev Lytle Croutier, Harem: The World Behind the Veil (New York, London and Paris: 1989). 56. See, for example, François Chassepol, The history of the grand visiers, Mahomet and Achmet Coprogli, of the three last grand siniors, their Sultana’s and chief favourites, with the most secret intrigues of the seraglio (London: 1677); Jean de Préchac, The chaste seraglian, or Yolanda of Sicily: a novel, in two parts (London: 1685); Thomas Dallam, Diary (1599–1600) of a Voyage to Constantinople, ed. J. T. Bent (London: 1893); Sieur de Joanots Du Vignau, op. cit. 57. Michel Baudier, Histoire generalle du serrail (Paris: 1626). 58. By the late eighteenth century, vehement critics of the Ancien Régime, such as JeanJacques Rousseau, explicitly conflated the sexual politics of the harem with that of Paris salons and courts. In his Lettre à M. D’Alembert, one of his most scathing indictments of the female sex, Rousseau likened Parisian salons to “harems of men more womanish” than the salonnières who presided over them. As quoted in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Los Angeles: 1992 ), p. 98. To understand the significance of the discussion of gender and power in Ancien Régime France, see Carolyn Lougee, “Le Paradis des Femmes ”: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: 1976); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: 1994), esp. pp. 5– 11, 54–56, 73–89; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: 1988). 59. Chardin, Coronation of Solyman the Third (1689), p. 10. 60. Savory, Iran under the Safavids, pp. 94–95; for a similar development among the Ottomans, see Pierce, Imperial Harem, pp. 21–27. 61. Chardin, Voyages (1711), p. 213. 62. Chardin, Coronation of Solyman III, p. 53. 63. Ibid., p. 35. 64. Ibid., pp. 77–78. 65. Ibid., pp. 103, 114. 66. Ibid., pp. 78–85. 67. Ibid., pp. 90–97. 68. Ibid., p. 114. 69. Ibid., pp. 128–30. 70. Ibid., pp. 129–30. 71. Ibid.,, p. 130. 72. Ibid., 150. 73. Chardin, Voyages (1811), vol. 10, pp. 95–97; see also Ferrier, A Journey to Persia, p. 107. 74. Jean Chardin, Voyages de Monsieur le Chevalier Chardin en Perse et Autres Lieux de l’Orient (Amsterdam: 1686), vol. II, p. 279, as cited in Kabbani.

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75. As cited in Kabbani, Europe’s Myths, p. 27. 76. Ibid., p. 27. 77. Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: 1998), pp. 123–47. 78. Ibid., pp. 141 to 142, 173–78. 79. According to Baudier, eunuchs scrutinized “gourds of an extended shape, cucumbers and other like fruits” with special care, often cutting them into rounds at the door, “so as not to admit among them this flimsy opportunity for wrongdoing.” (Cf. Baudier, Histoire généralle du sérail, p. 61, as quoted in Grosrichard, Sultan’s Court, p. 142.) 80. Chardin, Voyages (1711), p. 280. 81. Chardin, Voyages (1811), vol. 5, pp. 230–32, as cited in Ferrier, A Journey to Persia, p. 74. 82. Ibid., p. 74. 83. Ferrier, A Journey to Persia, pp. 74–75. 84. Chardin, Voyages (1711), pp. 277–78. 85. Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court, pp. xvi–xvii, 137. 86. Chardin, Travels (1927), p. 193. 87. Ibid., p. 193. 88. Ibid., p. 184. 89. Ibid., pp. 195, 279–87. For a discussion of the road guards, or rahdars, which successfully protected travelers from bandits in seventeenth-century Persia, see John Emerson and Willem Floor, “Rahdars and their tolls in Safavid and Afsharid Iran,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. XXX, no. 3 (1987): pp. 318–27. 90. During the sixteenth century, the Safavids were forced to surrender many of the western provinces of Persia to the Ottomans, including the legendary commercial and cultural entrepot of Bagdad. During the military campaigns of Abbas I between 1598 and 1625, much of this territory was reclaimed, with the exception of Bagdad. Meanwhile, European and Papal diplomacy were attracted to the idea of European-Persian offensive to further reduce the power of the Ottoman Empire. For a discussion of the diplomatic mission of 1599 to 1601, see Niel Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago: 1974), pp. 211–17; see also Savory, Iran under the Safavids, pp. 84–91. 91. Ibid., p. 185. 92. Among the varied works of literary and historical criticism concerning European narratives of exploration and discovery in the Americas and elsewhere, see Michel de Certeau, “Travel Narratives of the French to Brazil: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Representations, vol. XXXIII (1991): pp. 221–26; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: 1991); and of course Pratt, op. cit. 93. Chardin, Voyages (1811), vol. III, p. 353. 94. Chardin, Voyages (1811), vol. IV, pp. 159–62. 95. See, for example, Savory, Iran under the Safavids, pp. 92 to 95; Ferrier, A Journey to Persia, pp. 11–14.

4 Charles Poncet’s Travels to Ethiopia, 1698 to 1703 Theodore Natsoulas On 21 July 1699, when Charles Jacques Poncet entered the city of Gondar, he became the first western European to visit the Coptic Christian kingdom of Ethiopia since 1632 when Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were expelled. He went as a physician to treat an unknown skin ailment that Emperor or Negus Iya’su I (1682–1706) and his son suffered. He also went as a reluctant diplomatic sent by Benoit de Maillet, the French Consul in Cairo. The latter not only acted on behalf of his country but also as an agent for the Catholic Church. Poncet was instructed by the French Consul to ascertain the possibilities of the return of the Catholic Church to Ethiopia, and the extension of French influence into east Africa. At the time, France was in the process of securing its first worldwide empire and was active in the Indian Ocean. Poncet’s voyage was significant and notable since he was the first European in over sixty-five years to present an account of the culture, society, political culture, and economy of the Ethiopian state and to give a description of its capital city, Gondar. The Frenchman accomplished his medical mission, and affected a cure for the Emperor and his son. He was less than successful in his diplomatic role. Christian Ethiopian rulers, and both the religious and secular elite were deeply suspicious of Europeans since the aborted effort of Jesuit missionaries to convert Monophysite Ethiopia to Catholicism during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Between 1632 and 1699 Ethiopia had also experienced considerable change and upheaval. During this period, Ethiopian rulers consolidated their power in the central highlands and fixed at capital in Gondar. The Oromo migrations into the Christian heartland that began in the sixteenth century were temporarily stemmed. Those Oromo in the highlands were partially absorbed, and became active participants in the Ethiopian economic and

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political scene. The Christian rulers kept western Europeans out of their kingdom and very few Ethiopians left. At the time that Poncet entered Ethiopia, the Christian kingdom was at the height of the Gondarine period under Emperor Iya'su I. But with Poncet’s visit, an opportunity was available for Iya’su to learn first hand about Western Europe, and to send his own envoys to the West.1 Very little is known of the personal history of Poncet. He was born in Saint Claude in the Franche-Comte, in October 1655. He came from a paternal bourgeois family that had been established in the region since the middle of the previous century. His education was more than adequate and included instruction in Latin. In 1674, Poncet left Saint-Claude at nineteen after a quarrel with his parents, never to return again. He went to Rome, where he found himself penniless and soon sought assistance from the French ambassador. The latter, possibly seeing Poncet as an army deserter, decided to send him to fight in a war in Sicily. Sicily had been in revolt against its Hapsburgs rulers and France was aiding the rebels. Poncet, however, suffered from a gangrenous leg, which necessitated the amputation of several toes. He stayed in Holy Ghost Hospital in Rome for a year, and it was there that he began his medical education. Due to his knowledge of Latin, he worked in the hospital pharmacy. He remained in Rome for seven years at the end of which the University of Rome awarded him the title doctor. Poncet moved about quite often taking several trips within Europe before going to Malta, where he became friendly with a French Jesuit priest, Père Montauban. The Jesuit gave him a letter of introduction to the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, Comte de Guilleragues. Poncet traveled to the Levant in 1682. He remained in the ambassador’s service until Guilleragues’s death in 1685. Poncet then returned to France where he failed in his attempts to get payment from Guilleragues’s heirs and French officials for debts he had incurred while in the ambassador’s service. Some time latter, Poncet departed for Egypt.2 Poncet arrived in Cairo in 1691 but never explained the reasons for this move. He was obviously a restless man, an adventurer who was attracted to exotic locales. He established himself as the physician for European residents and Ottoman authorities in the Egyptian capital. As an apothecary, a physician and a surgeon he raised himself to a high economic and social station in Cairo. 3 By the late 1690s, he had met two men who were to play important roles in his life, the French Consul, Benoit de Maillet, and a Muslim merchant, Hadji Ali, who led regular caravans to and from Ethiopia. For fifty years, western Europeans had been formally barred from Ethiopia and those that had foolishly entered the kingdom were either killed or held prisoner. One most common entry route was by the Red Sea, through Massawa, where the local ruler, under the Ottoman authority would usually not allow the Europeans through. Another route was up the Nile River to Sennar and then east to Ethiopia.4 There Muslim rulers were also reluctant to grant Europeans passage. In part, this had been done because of informal agreements with the Ethiopians who no longer wished western Europeans, and especially Catholic priests in their midst.5 Exacerbating the isolation of Ethiopia was the Ottoman

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policy of discouraging Christian proselyzation, not only in the Sudan but in Ethiopia as well. What the Ottoman Empire feared most was the possibility of an Euro-Ethiopian alliance to its geo-political detriment. Yet, Ethiopia was not completely isolated and was in touch with events outside of Africa via commerce in the form of caravans to Egypt and the Red Sea. In addition to these caravans, there were also ecclesiastic relations with Egypt. The head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church or abun, was an Egyptian Copt who, since the fourth century, was chosen by the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria.6 The precipitating motive for Poncet’s journey to Ethiopia was the request of the Ethiopian Emperor for a physician to treat an ailment affecting he and his son. This invitation temporarily interrupted Ethiopia’s self-imposed estrangement from European contacts. Furthermore, coming in and out of Ethiopia were frequent caravans under the direction of Muslim merchants. In 1698, one such Muslim, Hadji Ali was in Cairo. While there, the Muslim had fallen ill and was treated by Poncet. In turn, Hadji Ali told Poncet that he had the confidence of the Ethiopian ruler whom, along with one of his sons was ill. The Muslim had been charged with the task of finding a doctor and bringing him to Ethiopia. Poncet relayed this information to de Maillet, who quickly placed the entire enterprise under an official imprimatur.7 De Maillet had two reasons for this move: he wanted to reopen commercial relations between France and Ethiopia, while facilitating the establishment of the Jesuits in Ethiopia who were under the protection of Louis XIV.8 De Maillet was from minor nobility and owed his office largely to the largesse of one of Louis XIV's ministers, Louis Pontchartrain. At the same time, he was the most important French official, other than the French Minister in Constantinople, in the Middle East. De Maillet was born in Lorraine on 12 April 1656 and held the title “chevalier, sire de Mézeray.” His enemies cast the title itself in doubt. De Maillet became consul in Cairo in 1692 and held the post until 1708. He held other positions in the Middle East and died in Marseilles on 30 January 1738. He was described as an authoritarian, but intelligent and cultured individual whose reports to France were well written as were his memoirs, Description de l’Egypt, published in 1735.9 From the western perspective, Poncet’s mission was an opportunity for the Catholic Church to return to Ethiopia and for France to expand its influence overseas. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese had carried the faith outside of Europe and challenged the power of the Ottoman Empire. One of the areas that Portuguese penetrated was Ethiopia. Christianity had existed in northeast Africa since the fourth century and had been in Nubia as late as the late 15th century. Ethiopia remained a ‘Christian’ kingdom. The Jesuits had been active in Ethiopia for over one hundred years, when the Ethiopians expelled them following their efforts to convert the Monophysite Ethiopians to Catholicism. They had managed to convert Negus, Susenyos (1607–1632) and several leading families, but this so antagonized the Ethiopian clergy and

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populace that there was a popular revolt which drove out the Jesuits and their Portuguese protectors and replaced the converted Negus with a Monophysite Ethiopian Orthodox ruler. There remained, however, a Catholic community because the converted Ethiopians and some Portuguese had intermarried with Ethiopian women. By the end of the seventeenth century, a substantial half-caste population that vaguely identified with Portuguese, was in Ethiopia.10 Zealous Catholic clergymen might have thought that Louis's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was evidence of his desire to champion Catholicism even outside of France and no doubt saw the French wars with Protestant England and the Netherlands as examples of this zeal.11 Furthermore, France in the seventeenth century was also expanding out of Europe and had commercial stations in Asia and possessions in the west Indies and North America, and trading relations in both the Ottoman Empire and Persian through the capitulation treaties. With this expansion came the Catholic Church. Louis XIV desired for some time to establish relations with the ruler of Ethiopia, which he associated with the mythical Prester John, for both commercial and religious reasons.12 As the most powerful Catholic nation in Europe, there were those that might have believed that France's mission were to spread the faith. The Negus’s request seemingly afforded the excuse needed by both the French and Vatican to resume European and western contacts with Ethiopia. De Maillet in particular considered this medical trip as the opportune moment for the return of Catholicism to Ethiopia.13 For their part, the Jesuits, still smarting from their expulsion, might have sought the aid of France to help them reclaim Ethiopia for Catholicism, and saw this desire for medical assistance by Iya'su as their entry back into Ethiopia. The Jesuits believed that they had an ally in King Louis, and they agreed to the Poncet mission provided the French doctor was accompanied by a Jesuit incognito.14 Complicating matters, however, there was a rivalry between the French Jesuits and Italian Franciscans over the proselyzation of Nubia and Ethiopia. Additionally, there was the rivalry between France and the Vatican, with the Jesuits coveting the favor of the king of France and the Franciscans under the protection of Pope Innocent XII. The Franciscans had approached Hadji Ali when they learned of his mission and suggested that he take with him two of their own who were skilled in medicine. James Bruce, the Scottish traveler, writing seventy years later, maintained that Hadji Ali was cured by two Capuchins, and that it was they that he intended to bring back to Ethiopia. When de Maillet heard of this, he undermined their medical prowess and recommended Poncet.15 The Italian Capuchins, apparently allied with the Franciscans, claimed to be the protectors of Ethiopian Catholics who had been left in that country after the expulsion of the Jesuits, and had been subject to persecution at the hands of Ethiopians. The Capuchins had convinced the Pope to allow them to return to Egypt and to look out after the Ethiopian Catholics who were between Sennar and Ethiopia. The Capuchins in fact did open a hospice in Upper Egypt. They not only sought to protect the Ethiopian Catholics but to convert Ethiopia to Catholicism. To this end, the Pope had awarded them some financial support.

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Pope Innocent XII sanctioned a Capuchin delegation to Ethiopia but it never Either Jesuit or Franciscan, the Catholics believed that Ethiopia arrived.16 should be converted, and in the Jesuit correspondence one finds a Franciscan clergyman, Francesco Marie da Saleme, O.M.R, referring to himself as “Prefetto dell’ Etiopia.”17 From the Ethiopian perspective, this medical emergency afforded an opportunity for Iya’su to open Ethiopia to Europe, and perhaps, in doing so strengthen his own political position. It was at the very least an opportunity to reverse a half century of self-imposed isolation. The cataclysmic events of the Jesuit period were over. Catholic Ethiopians had been given the choice of either leaving Ethiopia or returning to Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Iya’su, moreover, was facing other challenges. In 1689 due to both doctrinal and political pressures he had asked the Coptic Egyptian Patriarch to send an abun, while the present one still lived, and in 1693, he had the latter deposed. This was part of a factional struggle in the kingdom amongst the great lords and competing religious sectarian parties. These struggles would eventually lead to his dethronement and assassination in 1706.18 It also appeared that Iya’su wished technical assistance from Louis XIV. In subsequent correspondence to de Maillet, Iya’su requested architects, masons, carpenters locksmiths, armorers, an engineer, and canon maker. He expressed his concern that the King of Sennar, a neighboring Muslim kingdom to the east, had asked for military supplies from France.19 With the mission under official French imprimatur, De Maillet formally requested Poncet to undertake the journey. The Consul asked him to treat the Emperor's malady and above all to gain his confidence. At that point, he was to inform the ruler that he was an envoy of King Louis XIV, the greatest king in Europe, and that the Ethiopians should also consider him as a great king. He would also announce that the French and Jesuits would like the Negus to send an emissary to France, led by an Ethiopian who was well trusted by Iya’su. The emperor could also send representatives of noble families, and several young boys who could study in France and who presumably after imbibing in French culture, language, religion, be sent back to Ethiopia. De Mallet gave Poncet an official letter for the Negus written in Arabic. The Consul extolled the Poncet’s expertise as a physician and placed his skills on a level with Hypocrites and Galen. He characterized Poncet as the physician for the Ottoman Pasha and of all the Turkish officials in Cairo. Furthermore, he proclaimed Louis XIV’s amity toward a fellow monarch and included him in a grouping with the rulers of Siam and China. Finally, he asked Iya’su to appoint a formal ambassador to France.20 In all of this diplomatic activity, the most important individual was Poncet. It is difficult to discern his true reasons for embarking on this risky journey. After the completion of his voyage, de Maillet and others in Louis’s court criticized Poncet as an egotist and a wastrel. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1698 Poncet agreed to undertake this risky and important journey to Ethiopia when no layman was willing. Certainly, de Maillet, who was of a similar age as Poncet, was disinclined. Poncet had the requisite skills: he was a physician, he was a

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French Catholic with a history of relations with the Jesuits, he had a knowledge of Arabic which was most certainly the language he used in communicating with Ethiopians, and he was an adventurer. He also probably believed that this trip on behalf of the king of France would also raise his social status in Cairo and in France and well with suitable material rewards. A Jesuit priest, Charles Francis Xaverius de Brévédent, accompanied Poncet on this journey. He traveled incognito as the French physician’s servant under the name Yusuf. In Cairo, De Brévédent had been living under the pseudonym Joseph Duval. He spoke Arabic and had some medical knowledge, and therefore he would act as Poncet’s interpreter and medical assistant. His principal objective was to examine the religious situation in Ethiopia. De Brévédent was a scholar who spent most of his life studying theology and mathematics. For the previous fifteen years, however, he had lived in the Middle East where he sought to convert non-Catholic Christians to Catholicism in the Greek islands, Syria and Cairo.21 With the addition of De Brévédent on an officially sanctioned mission, the Jesuits appeared to be ready for a return to Ethiopia. Also joining the caravan was the brother of Abuna Marqos IV (1693–1716) of Ethiopia, who had made the trip at least twice before.22 On June 10 1698 the party left Cairo by boat and sailed up the Nile. After fifteen days, it stopped at a village called Ibnah where the men remained for three months while a large caravan was being assembled. Apparently, this was the rendezvous point for caravans to Sennar and Ethiopia. At Ibnah, Poncet purchased the necessary animals and provisions for his journey, which recommenced on 24 September. Poncet’s next stop was Asyut a major town on the Nile, about 230 miles south of Cairo. Word of his trip had preceded him, for he was invited to the home of a relative of the king of Sennar It had been, and still is, a major commercial center with impressive Roman ruins. On 2 October, the caravan departed on the fringe of the dessert. The town of Helaoue was the last inhabited area before the crossing the dessert and it was the furthest outpost of the Ottoman Empire. This is where the Blue and White Nile meet and it was the site of the future city of Khartoum. Poncet observed that there was an Ottoman garrison of five hundred janissaries and three hundred spahi or cavalry.23 By November, the caravan had reached Dongola. At this point, Poncet referred to the area as the “country of the negro’s.”24 He had already begun his commentaries on the people that he encountered. Merchants from Egypt traded in Dongola for gold and slaves. Poncet characterized this trade as “primitive” because rather than an exchange of specie such as silver, there was an exchange of goods. He portrayed the common people as “stupid,” who swore and cursed, and were so dissolute that they had neither “modesty nor civility nor religion.” Although they claimed to be Muslim, Poncet continued, they barely knew anything about Islam other than the profession of faith. In general, as a burgeoning courtier, he was predictably kinder to the king and the upper classes. The conversion to Islam had evidently taken place relatively recently here, for Poncet noticed that there were many hermitages and churches in various states of

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ruin. On the other hand, Poncet commented on the apparent good health of the populace and characterized the people, because of their diet, as healthier and more robust than Europeans.25 Not everyone, however, was in good health. A few years earlier, the plague devastated the region. The Frenchman commented that it was so devastating that many towns and villages just north of Dongola were uninhabited. In 1696, Poncet had dealt with the effects of the plague in Cairo and the upper reaches of the Nile. In Dongola, Poncet dined with the local ruler who was a tributary of the king of Sennar. Some of the latter’s relatives were ill, and after Poncet effected a cure the latter was invited to remain in Dongola. The king relented however, when Poncet told him that the Emperor of Ethiopia was waiting for him. Several months later, the governor of the Sennar frontier town of Gerri on the Nile allowed Poncet and his party to pass without being quarantined as most travelers were because of fear of small pox. He did so in deference to the Ethiopian emperor. Both these incidents demonstrated the delicacy of the health of the region and also were an indication that the prestige of the Ethiopian state extended to the Nile.26 The party reached the town of Sennar on 21 March 1699, which was the seat of the Funj state. Poncet estimated that it contained a population of approximately 100,000 people. Sennar was a commercial town with trade relations fanning out to the east; to Ethiopia and to Suakin on the Red Sea. Poncet described the king, whom he saw the day after his arrival, as young, intelligent, attractive, “not having thick lips nor flat nose, like the rest of his subjects.” Poncet followed the custom of the country and genuflected before the king kissing the ground three times. The king of Sennar appeared in public with his face covered. As in Dongola, the ruler, after learning that Poncet was going to Ethiopia showed “great affection and respect” for the Ethiopian ruler.27 Poncet once more was not too flattering about the common folk. He described them as “crafty and deceitful” with upper class women clad, but those of the lower class only covered themselves from the waist to the knee. Although Muslim, he found them superstitious. There was evidence that there were Christians in Sennar, because Poncet remarked that whenever Muslims met Christians in the streets, the former would utter their profession of faith: there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet. He wrote that Muslims did not drink publicly, but did so privately. One of the brothers of the king was in the Ethiopian court. Otherwise, the king had no other siblings since they were put to death whenever a new king came to the throne.28 Poncet remained for three months in the Muslim kingdom of Sennar and then left for Christian Ethiopia. James Bruce, seventy years later was to replicate Poncet's route. In fact, we know about Poncet’s travels because of Bruce's interest. Poncet commented on the relations between Muslims and Christian Ethiopians; he encountered what he called a caravan of gebertis who he described as Muslims dependents of Ethiopia and were treated as slaves.29 On his journey east from the Nile he traveled through the town of Serke which he claimed was the boundary between Ethiopia and Sennar. Once beyond

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Sennar he found the topography changed. It was much greener, and mountainous, and wetter with springs and small rivers and importantly, more populated.30 One of the villages he entered belonged to the Abun of Ethiopia. At a village called Girana, there was an Ethiopian contingent of thirty soldiers sent by the Negus in order to escort Poncet and the Patriarch's brother. There appeared to have been some cooperation between Sennar and Ethiopia, for at the market town of Chelga (25 miles south west of Gondar), the King of Sennar had a customs official collect duty from the cotton goods that entered Ethiopia. The two states divided the proceeds.31 At Barko, a half-day journey from Gondar, De Brévédent and Poncet fell ill. The priest died and although Poncet was not originally pleased that he had a companion, he nevertheless praised the priest as a man of God and so zealous that he gave up his life in an effort to convert Ethiopians. It was not clear if the Ethiopians were aware that the dead man was a Catholic cleric. But he was treated with respect by the religious establishment of the region. They performed an Ethiopian funeral ceremony and carried his body into a church of the Virgin Mary where the Jesuit was buried. When Poncet met Iya’su for the first time, the latter commiserated on the death of the cleric.32 All of this would have been quite odd indeed had the Ethiopians known that he was a Jesuit missionary, given the suspicion of their clergy for Europeans in general and Jesuits in particular. Poncet entered Gondar on 21 July 1699. Apparently, he was expected, and lodged near one of the Negus’s children. Poncet saw the Emperor privately on the day of his arrival and almost daily until 10 August when Iya’su officially and publicly welcomed Poncet. By this time, he had examined both the king and his son and prescribed a course of treatment for their ailments. They were cured quickly of whatever malady they had, thereby bringing Poncet closer to the King. It appears Poncet was housed in the same complex where the Negus resided, since he described the twenty apartments that he was taken through before arriving at the King's reception hall.33 According to de Maillet, Poncet was first housed at a “native” hut but after the Frenchman complained, he was moved to another building that had been built by the Portuguese.34 Because of the popular hostility towards Europeans, Iya’su saw Poncet quietly, but saw him often. On 10 August, three weeks after his arrival, Poncet was given a public audience. Despite the fact that Poncet was looked upon with suspicion by the Ethiopian clergy and nobility, the Negus treated him well. Poncet described Iya’su as a regal figure outfitted in clothes and jewelry befitting a monarch, seated on a throne in an alcove, “with his legs across, after the manner of the Orientals.” Poncet was given special considerations in that he did not genuflect and kiss the feet of the Emperor. However, he did kiss his hand. He gave him a letter from de Maillet, and had it interpreted at once. There were presents for the Negus; pictures, mirrors and fine glass objects. Poncet commented on the “awful silence” in the reception hall, although it was full with the Ethiopian nobility aligned on either side of the alcove and in order of their rank. 35 At his first dinner and thereafter, Poncet was often placed near the Emperor and they were

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able to converse. At times during the meals, Iya’su expressed curiosity about France, and inquired about Louis XIV. He referred to the French King as the most powerful ruler in Europe. Iya’su told Poncet that one of his ambassadors to the Indies convinced him that Louis was a great man and therefore considered him the “hero of Europe.” As in France, Poncet noted that there was an official food taster, to make sure that the food and drink is not poisoned.36 In the several months that Poncet was in Ethiopia, he became an astute observer of the Ethiopian political, religious and social environment. His relationship with the Negus was of great importance to him. He favorably impressed Poncet, who described him as 41 years of age, with many children; eight sons and three daughters. Poncet included among qualities “a quick and piercing wit [i. e. intelligence], a sweet and affable humour, and the stature of a hero.” and the “handsomest man in Ethiopia.”37 Although he was attracted to arts and sciences, Iya’su’s great fondness was for war. He marched at the head of his soldiers and was brave and daring in battle. He was loved by his subjects not only because of these previous qualities, but also because of his sense of justice. He was not reluctant to administer even the most extreme penalty of death, but other penalties include confiscation of property and goods, and ostracism. In fact, Hadji Ali was one of those who suffered from the Emperor’s justice. By the time they arrived in Ethiopia, the caravan leader had robbed Poncet and his party of all their possessions. When Iya’su learned of this, he had Hadji Ali imprisoned, confiscated his and sold his possessions in Gondar, and gave the proceeds to Poncet.38 Because of the system of justice, which apparently only the Emperor dispensed, Poncet noted that unlike France, there not only were very few murders but their was general good order in the country.39 The Emperor’s curiosity about things other than war was demonstrated by his interest in Poncet’s western medicines. Poncet had brought a medicine chest with him, which included remedies he had accumulated and prepared over the past several years. The Emperor wanted to know how and why they were prepared. Although Poncet told him verbally, the Negus insisted on a written account He told the Emperor what each medicine cured, how they were prepared, how they were applied, and what were their effects. Iya’su was particularly curious of medicines treating fevers; and how Poncet extracted certain medicinal herbs. Poncet claimed that he was impressed when Iya’su was pleased with physical reasons and preparations. He taught the Emperor how to prepare a remedy called “bezoar” for “intermitting Fevers” with which he treated the Negus and two of his sons. A “bezoar” stone is a calcium-like secretion found in the bodies of certain animals such as goats, which was used as antidote for poison. The Emperor sent Poncet to Tzemba monastery, about half a league from Gondar, where he set up his stoves and produced medicines. Over the three weeks that he was there, the Negus visited him secretly several times, and they discussed the properties and effects of the medicines.40 Poncet gave the Emperor some rudimentary knowledge of medicine, as well as the chest of

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medicines. But after Poncet left, there was no doctor, and in September 1701, Iya’su wrote and asked de Maillet for a physician, but none ever arrived.41 Women rarely sat at the Negus’s table. Poncet referred to a woman who visited after a meal as the Empress, but this was Malakotawit, Iya’su’s favorite concubine. The court retired after her appearance, and all left except for Poncet and a priest who acted as his interpreter. She was a large, fair complexioned woman adorned with jewelry and finely dressed. She was curious about French women; their clothes and how they occupied themselves. She had some unidentified ailments that Poncet treated.. The other woman Poncet referred to in his account was the Emperor’s sister who was married to one of the leading noblemen. Helcia would visit her brother three times a week, escorted by a large entourage of women. The princesses were not allowed to marry foreigners. According to their customs, the Negus and all Ethiopian could have only one wife. Many, however, looked into the Gospels and found evidence that a man could have more than one wife. Ethiopian Orthodoxy strongly opposed polygamy, but apparently it was practiced because the lay authorities were more 42 lenient. The Frenchman’s description of Gondar was the first ever by a European. Under Negus Fasiladas (1632–1667) the small settlement of Gondar was established in 1636 as the Ethiopian capita, which ended a long period of roving capitals. The dominant structure was the palace, which was situated on higher ground and in the middle of the city overlooking the surrounding countryside. Poncet described it as “great and spacious.” and a “league in compass” with the surrounding walls flanked with towers, upon which crosses were situated. Within the palace, there were four chapels, which were administered by 100 clergy or religious lay people. It also contained a school in which the members of the palace were taught to read the Bible. Other notables had palaces within the city, and he included Helcia and her husband who had a “magnificent palace.” Poncet was probably describing Fasiladas’s palace, which was repaired and extended during Iya’su’s reign. According to the chronicles of Iya’su the palace was finished in 1685 by an Ethiopian architect, Walda Giyorgis. Gold ivory and precious stones were added which made the palace 43 “more beautiful than the house of Solomon.” Poncet portrayal of Ethiopia was highly flattering. He depicted a country that was well populated, fertile, and abundant. Poncet described his entrance into Ethiopia from the Sudan on 20 June 1699 and his travels from Serke, the border town, to Gondar as an area that was so well populated that it seemed that it was one continuous town from the mountains to Gondar. The mountains were tree covered, with ample springs running through them, which meant that the land was so well watered that it was mostly cultivated without any “waste ground.” In Tigray, made the same observation, that there were so many houses that there appeared to have been one continuous town. There many people with teeming markets. He considered Tigray most pleasant and fertile, with fruits, wild flowers, and compared it favorably with Provence.44 Poncet was impressed with both the population and fertility of Ethiopia. “There is no country whatever

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better peoples nor more fertile than Aethiopia.”45 He observed that the fields and mountains were cultivated, the country was well-watered with its many rivers, and there was an abundance of herbs, plants, flowers, cardamom, ginger, lilies, and tulips. The mountains were heavily forested with orange, lemon and pomegranate trees, and because of the aromas given off by flowers and fruit tree blossoms, the country was not only beautiful but also fragrant.46 Poncet accompanied the Emperor on trips several times. They went to Lake Tana, where they took boats to a palace on an island in the lake. In the church there, Poncet performed several more chemical experiments for Iya’su. It was here that the Emperor was assassinated in 1706, and was buried on one of the islands.47 In the short time that he was in Ethiopia, Poncet attempted to learn of the power and extent of the Ethiopian state. He commented that there were several kingdoms, and made mention of Tigray and Agau. The former was so large that it contained twenty-four principalities. The later was recently conquered and he noted was different in laws and institutions. A third kingdom was Gojjam, which held the empire’s gold mines from which the court and army was sustained. The two standing armies were stationed in Gojjam and in a fourth kingdom called Nerea or Enarea.48 Poncet claimed that the governor of Adua was one of the seven prime ministers to the emperor, and one of the Emperor’s daughters married the governor’s son. Adua was so large, Poncet maintained that it too contained twenty-four municipalities or principalities. Poncet claimed that Tigray, which he referred to as a kingdom, had two governors, but did not identify a king.49 There was obvious confusion in Poncet’s accounts. Adua is a town in Tigray, and it is the latter that most likely contained the twenty-four municipalities. According to Poncet, the power and wealth of the Emperor was derived by his control of all the wealth of the kingdom. When a family head died, the Emperor had the right to take his possessions and then return two-thirds back to the heirs. The remaining third he dispensed in whatever way he chose. That individual became his vassal and was required to provide soldiers, at his own expense, in proportion to the fief that he was given. In this way, said Poncet, since the Emperor has an indefinite number of vassals, he could raise a large army quickly and cheaply. There was a register in each province that contained a record of all property that came to the Emperor and a list of the vassals. These vassals were confirmed through an official from the Negus who presided over a ceremony in which a headband inscribed with the words lettered in gold, “Iya’su, Emperor of Ethiopia, of the tribe of Judah, who always vanquished his enemies.”50 The early eighteenth century French propagandist, Joachim Le Grand reported that the Emperor’s seal had the image of a lion bearing a cross and the words “Vicit Leo de Tribu Judah.”51 Poncet attempted to explain the Ethiopian land system, which was called gult in which there was a feudal relationship between landholder and landowner. He saw it as similar to seventeenth century European form upon which he was making his assessment. Poncet was not really aware of the power held by the Ethiopian landholding

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nobility, the amount of land held by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, nor of the fact that many peasants owned their own land which was called rest. This land was inherited through the generations. Sometimes the Negus could grant gult rights to individuals, but the rest land could never be alienated.52 At one time there had been specific days and events when the Emperor appeared in public, but by the early eighteenth century, the Emperor would go and come as he pleased both in company of a large entourage, or more privately.53 He had some public functions one of which was to hear petitions from the citizenry. Sometimes he read the petitions, and sometimes one of his ministers did. He answered them himself.54 This exercise indicates that there was literacy in the Kingdom—the Emperor, his ministers, and whoever wrote the petitions. Literacy was probably, as in medieval Europe, the domain of the clergy. The previous Abuna, Synnad, had educated Iya’su. His education was conducted in Ge’ez, the classical Semitic Ethiopian language. Ge’ez was the dominant written language in Ethiopia. It was the liturgical language of the Church, and the chronicles of Ethiopian kings, the lives of saints, and land documents were all written in Ge’ez. After the rainy season, which ran from April to September, the Emperor engaged in warfare, especially in the south against people that Poncet referred to as Galla and Changalla. The former was the Oromo who had entered the Ethiopian highlands from the south and east in the sixteenth century. Poncet was completely unaware of the movement of the Oromo. The Frenchman identified both peoples as former subjects of Ethiopia who had broken free during a previous reign of weaker Ethiopian rulers. The war in 1699 was vicious with many Ethiopians perishing. Poncet claimed that the Ethiopian army was so large that it consisted of 400,00 to 500,000 men. Iya’su led the army himself. They assembled in a field outside Gondar, and he took three days to review it. The campaigns lasted for only three months.55 Poncet was interested in matters of race. He had already commented on the peoples that he had encountered on his way to Ethiopia who were black. He said that Europeans erroneously confused Ethiopians with their black neighbors. Poncet described them as olive in color, tall, graceful, and handsome. He found their eyes attractive; their teeth white and there nose and lip “not too big.” This was in opposition to the Africans of Sennar or Nubia who he described as flatnosed, with thick lips and very black.56 His comments on church and religion are particularly interesting in the light of Ethiopia’s brush with Catholicism. The grandeur and pomp and circumstances of Ethiopian religious practices impressed Poncet. He observed the feast day of the Assumption of Mary, 15 August, in which he cited twelve thousand men drawn up in order of their rank at the palace. He described the procession led by a richly clothed Iya’su who marched under a canopy and accompanied by two of his sons. The major ministers with one of them carrying the Emperor’s crown immediately followed them and singing his praises as if in a choir. The ministers and Poncet, who was part of this party, were escorted and held under the arm by officers. Then came “musketeers,” followed by archers,

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and then closing the procession, were richly harnessed horses. At the door of the church was the Abuna or Patriarch who was surrounded by almost one hundred clerics dressed in white. He led the Emperor into the church, where the cleric conducted the liturgy. At the end of the service, Iya’su received communion in both wine and bread. Iya’su was extremely religious, and even interrupted his medical treatment to attend church services on the important religious holiday of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on 15 August.57 Poncet noted that there were a large number of churches. There were four chapels within the palace, serviced by one hundred “religious persons” among who presumably he included clerics, monks, and laymen. Not only did they perform religious functions, but they also taught those attached to the palace how to read the Scriptures. This signified that the entourage and ministers of the Emperor were literate. In Gondar itself, there were one hundred churches. Poncet identified the finest church as the Patriarchal See and went on to explain that the abun was an Egyptian, chosen from the monastery of St. Antonios in Egypt. Poncet postulated that he was the only bishop in the church and had the right and power to select and ordain heads of monasteries and other monks. Poncet erroneously identified the religious figures as being only monks, but there was a secular clergy. In fact there was a hierarchy within both the regular clergy and the monastic clergy. At the time the Patriarch was the Egyptian, Abuna Marqos with whom presumably Poncet communicated directly in Arabic. The clergy has a great deal of power, which they sometimes abused. At times they were in opposition to the monarch. Poncet claimed that Negus Fasiladas had seven thousand clergy executed because they had revolted. Even the abuns were punished for disobedience. During Poncet’s stay, Marqos’s predecessor, Synnad, had fallen ill and passed away. Although the latter was deposed by Iya’su, he was held in great esteem by the Negus, because this man had been his chief tutor. Synnad taught him how to read and write and thus Iya’su was still fond of him. Iya’su ordered Poncet to cure the old man, but finding that the prelate was beyond hope, the Frenchman offered no remedy. The wily Poncet knew that the man was going to die and thus did not want to discredit himself by offering a remedy that would not work.58 According to Poncet, the Patriarch was the only one that could ordain priests and deacons and that was why it was of such great importance that the office not be allowed to stay vacant at the death or deposition of an abun. Relations with Egypt were often strained because Egypt sometimes would not send an abun, and negotiations had to take place. In the nineteenth century Emperor Yohannes IV (1871–1879) demanded and received four bishops from Egypt. Iya’su was very respectful of the office of abun, and he ordered Poncet to visit Marqos. The Abuna treated Poncet with civility and blessed him and recited prayers over the Frenchman’s head. Poncet remarked that he ordination of priests was often wholesale, and in one ceremony, Marqos ordained ten thousand priests and six thousand deacons. The Frenchman was disdainful of the ceremony, for Poncet reported that all the Patriarch did was to read the beginning of the Gospel of St.

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John over the heads of the supplicants and then give them a blessing. For the deacons, there was no reading of the gospel but only the blessing.59 Poncet spent three weeks at a monastery in Tzemba on the river Reb, not far from Gondar in order to manufacture medicines. There he set up his stoves to heat the medicines. Iya’su visited Poncet in secret during these weeks. Both the Negus and the abbot of the monastery attempted to engage Poncet in religious matters. Iya’su was curious about the differences between western Christianity and Ethiopian Orthodoxy. They discussed the most important single issue that divided the two: the nature of Christ. Ethiopians were monophysites who believed that the human nature of Christ was absorbed by the divine. Poncet explained the Catholic position on the dual nature of Christ. Either he was fooled or it was wishful thinking, Poncet commented that he believed that the Emperor and the Abbot, through whom they communicated, presumably in Arabic, were not hostile to that concept.60 Poncet was keen to make comparisons with Catholicism. The Ethiopian church accepted the Scriptures, sacraments, transubstantiation, and has the same saints. Communicants received communion in both kinds, and consecrate with leavened bread. Ethiopian Christians observe four fast periods or “Lents”; Great Lent for fifty days, St. Peter and Paul which is approximately forty days, the Assumption which is fifteen days, and the advent which is for three weeks. During Lent they abstained from dairy food and meat, and do not eat until after sundown. Like Muslims during their fast period, Ethiopian Christians could eat until midnight. They also fasted every Wednesday and Fridays; they prayed before each meal; everybody must fast including the ill and children past ten years of age which was when they first receive communion. Poncet found their confessional practice peculiar. They prostrated themselves before a seated priest, and they blamed themselves for being sinners and worthy of Hell. They did not, however, mention specific sins. The priest then absolved them by touching the eyes, ears and nose, mouth and hands of the sinner. The former recited several prayers, read from the Gospel, and then pronounced a penance.61 Poncet was impressed by the piety of the parishioners who held their churches in greater deference that Europeans did theirs. In church they went barefooted, they never spoke, or turned their heads, were dressed in clean clothing otherwise they would not be admitted. When communion was given, only those receiving remained in church. There were icons or pictures in church but no statues, or carved images. The priests continually used incense, they chanted from the holy book, and accompanied by musical instruments. The priests discarded their vestments after church but were distinguished by a yellow or blue cap that they wore. They were highly thought of by the population. Seven days after birth there is circumcision followed by baptism. The former is not a sacrament but an imitation of Christ and not necessary for salvation.62 The clergy were giving Iya’su problems especially over European foreigners and, and to a more subtle degree, over doctrinal matters. Although Poncet did not specify why, in a letter to de Maillet, he reported that four months before his arrival, one hundred thousand monks rebelled but were put down by the Negus.

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In 1701 as Poncet was leaving Africa via Massawa; the monks became disturbed over the arrival of a British ship in the port. The anti-European sentiment was so great in Ethiopia, especially among the religious establishment that even white grapes, that Poncet felt were very tasty, were not “esteemed.” When he asked why he was told that was the color of the Portuguese. Poncet felt that the clergy so detested Europeans, that they got the population to do so and that there is an aversion to anything that was white. Poncet became concerned over the trip of two Jesuits to Ethiopia and feared what might happen to them because of this attitude. He wrote “the country from which I have just come bears so violent a hatred of the name Frank that no one will eat a grape that is white in colour. I leave you to imagine what they implies.”63 The two Jesuits in question did arrive in Gondar after Poncet had left, and were well received by Iya’su. However a popular outcry forced them to secure safety in the house of the elder Mourad and compelled Iya’su to deport them compelled him to deport them Both never left Africa, one died on the road, and the other in Sennar.64 Poncet, however, failed to understand the deeper religious problems affecting Ethiopia. For years there was a struggle amongst the clergy, which spilled over to the various factions in court and in the countryside over the nature of Christ. The church leadership and most of the monastic orders accepted the purely Monophysite position that Christ’s human nature became inseparable from its union with the divine. Opposing this position and led by the monasteries in Gojjam were the unctionists who took the position that through anointment by the Holy Ghost, the two natures of Christ were united.65 Poncet developed his own version of the events and developments that led to the anti-European and anti-Muslim disposition of Christian Ethiopia. In an oversimplification, he traced this attitude back to the beginning of the previous century. He recounted that the Muslim invasion of the Christian highlands that rendered them so powerful in Ethiopia that the Ethiopians called the Portuguese for help. The latter came in and defeated the Muslims, and restored the Christian Ethiopian royal family to the throne. This made the Portuguese prestigious in Ethiopia. In gratitude the Ethiopian rulers gave them high offices in the court. Ethiopians became suspicious and jealous of them as their numbers multiplied, and they were seen as corrupting Ethiopian customs, and in general taking advantage of their positions. They entered into many facets of Ethiopian political and religious life, that Ethiopians feared that they were intent on making Ethiopia subject to Portugal. Ethiopians then took up arms, slaughtered many Portuguese and drove seven thousand Portuguese families out of the country. They settled in the Indies and on the coast of Africa where the Portuguese had possessions. Those who remained had descendants who were the white Ethiopians, whom the Iya’su’s consort may have traced her descent.66 The Muslims were tolerated in Gondar, but they live in another part of town and are referred to as gebertis or slaves. The Ethiopians keep themselves separate, do not eat with them, do not eat an animal slaughtered by them, and did not drink from the same cup. In the latter instance, they may drink if a priest blesses it, recites a prayer, breathes into it three times, thereby driving away any

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evil sprit. When a Muslim was encountered in the street, the Ethiopian greeted him with his left hand that was a sign of contempt. In the town of Emfras, about a day from Gondar, Poncet commented that that was the only place where Muslims could exercise their religion publicly and where their houses are interspersed with the Christians. Apparently elsewhere the Muslims were segregated. But the Christian Ethiopians picked up Muslim habits, such as taking off their shoes before entering Church, and breaking their fast at sundown during fast days.67 Although unlike Muslims who could eat until daybreak, they stopped at midnight. Poncet came to the unavoidable conclusion that the Christian Ethiopians had a dislike for both Muslims and Europeans. Since he had fallen ill at Barko, Poncet was never able to regain his health and he complained of continual relapses. Poncet argued that as long as he was in Ethiopia he could not fully recover, and had to leave. He promised Iya’su that once he recovered, he would return. Iya’su wanted the Frenchman to stay and attempted to keep him in Ethiopia by offering considerable property in the form of houses and land. The Negus, however, relented and allowed Poncet to leave. He gave Poncet a gold bracelet, dress of high rank, and a high official with one hundred horsemen to escort Poncet out of the kingdom and a letter for King Louis XIV.68 Poncet claimed that Iya’su was desirous of an alliance with France, and along with the letter, Iya’su sent an ambassador. In many instances Ethiopians had used non-Ethiopians as representatives abroad. It was a Muslim, Hadji Ali that procured Poncet for the Emperor. His choice as ambassador was the nephew of one of his advisers, an Armenian called Mourad ibn Madlum, who was to go as his emissary carrying presents which included of elephants, horses, and young Ethiopians. Mourad also carried the letter from Iya’su to Louis XIV, and many gifts and an entourage of several Ethiopian children, who presumably would be educated in France.69 The letter itself was idiosyncratic in that it really had little or nothing to do with alliances or proffered any other kind of relationship between Ethiopia and France. It was written in Ge’ez and translated by Claude Berault, a professor of Syriac languages. This was done at the request of Louis Pontchartrain, one of Louis XIV’s chief ministers. In the preamble Iya’su styled himself as Emperor of the world and King of Kings. He gave credit to Poncet in providing the inspiration to write the letter and then went on to explain the religious convictions of the Ethiopians. The letter contained no political, economic or diplomatic content.70 It is an affirmation of the religion of the Ethiopian Orthodox faith, and perhaps a warning against the reentry of Catholicism. It was only the western European Christians that the Ethiopians detested. Poncet related that there were several Armenians and Greeks in Ethiopia who were of considerable use to Ethiopian rulers. The most prominent Armenian was Khodja Mourad, a merchant, who was in Ethiopia for sixty years, and, according to Poncet, was one hundred and four years old. He was born in Aleppo, where he had one family, but lived in Ethiopia, where he had two other wives. He represented Ethiopian rulers on his trips to the East Indies, India, and the Red

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Sea ports. Three different Ethiopian rulers had at one time dispatched Mourad to India where he concluded “important negotiations,” presumably of a commercial nature with the Mogul rulers and other Indian princes. In 1663-1665, Mourad had been included by Fasiladas, Iya’su’s grandfather, as part of an Ethiopian official delegation to congratulate the Mogul ruler Aurangzeb, on his rise to the throne. Also Mourad went almost annually to Mocha where he met representatives of the British and Dutch East Indies Company and where gifts were exchanged. According to one source he was sent to Mocha every year by the Ethiopian ruler to purchase slaves and Indian merchandise.7 Other foreigners included his nephew who Iya’su designated as Ethiopian ambassador to France,72 and another Armenian, Agapyri who acted as a commercial factor on the Red Sea. There was also a Greek who went on missions for the Negus, and by 1702 had served in Ethiopia for seven or eight years. Poncet referred to him as one of Iya’sus’s ministers and called him, without explanation, “an enemy of our nation.” There was another Greek, who might have been the same “enemy” who performed some medical functions.73 The commercial representatives, however, were not legates in the European sense in that their purpose was to exchange gifts and pleasantries, and to act as mercantile agents, but not to engage in serious diplomatic or political activity.74 Both the British and the Dutch had attempted on several occasions to establish commercial relations with Ethiopia. Poncet speculated that the failure to do so might either had been the religious differences with the Dutch or that the Dutch were so powerful that the Ethiopians perceived there them with suspicion and that they might have ulterior motives. The British were not viewed with as great wariness, and there was an Armenian merchant in Massawa, Agapyri, who acted as an agent for the British and hoped to trade with Ethiopia. Poncet believed that the British would be interested not only in gold and ivory and skins, but also myrrh and coffee. Ethiopians do not care for coffee (“do not esteem much”), but the seed had been transported out of Ethiopia and was grown in Yemen from where it was purchased.75 Poncet left on 2 May 1700 with an escort of one hundred horsemen to take him to the borders of the kingdom, an interpreter who knew all the languages of the regions they were to pass, and several merchants. Mourad’s nephew, as the official ambassador, was to join him later. Poncet’s group went northwards towards the Red Sea. They went through Adua, which Poncet claimed that its governor was one of the seven prime ministers to the Emperor, and one of the Emperor’s daughters married the governors son. It was at this time that Poncet remarked that Adua was so large that it too contained twenty-four municipalities or principalities. Further north in Tigray province, he stayed for over two weeks in the town of Duvarna where he waited, to no avail, for Mourad The town was divided into two, with the Muslims inhabiting the lower portion—again separate from the Christians. Through it passed all of the merchandise in and out of Ethiopia. Poncet also spent some time in a town that he called Helkeni, which was Aksum. Aksum was under the jurisdiction of Iya’su heir Fasil, who died of fever while Poncet was en route out of Ethiopia. He described the three

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obelisks on which were written on in ancient Ge’ez, which he called hieroglyphics. On 16 September he arrived on the Red Sea port of Massawa where he was to wait for Mourad. The ruler was a Muslim attached to the government of Suakin, which are under the Ottoman Empire. Poncet claimed that the rulers were fearful of the Ethiopians, because of Massawa’s vulnerability to easy conquest.76 Since Mourad still had not joined him, Poncet decided to go on alone. He took a boat up the Red Sea on 28 October. He stayed for a month in Jedda waiting for Mourad, but found that because of a number of reasons, the Armenian further would delay his trip further. Poncet left again and after a number of stops, which included the monastery at Mount Sinai, where he waited for a month for Mourad. The latter finally arrived sometime in May 1700 in Sinai. He told Poncet of all his misadventures. The death of Prince Fasil delayed his journey, the king of Mecca took from him all the gifts and the Ethiopian children that Iya’su had selected to go to France, the boat on which he had presents for France was “cast away.” The two men agreed that Poncet would leave for Cairo first, and prepare the way for Mourad and prepare for his arrival as befitting an ambassador of a major power.77 With Poncet’s return to Cairo, his journal ends, but his relationship with Ethiopia did not. Poncet arrived in Cairo, on 10 June 1701, a day before Mourad. Immediately upon his return, de Maillet questioned him. Poncet reported that he was kept in seclusion most of the time while the Negus visited him secretly. There was such a hatred of Europeans, and especially Catholics, that he, even as a layman had a difficult time in “preserving” his life. Poncet believed that even if the younger Mourad were received at the court in Paris as the ambassador from the Emperor of Ethiopia, it would be impossible, due to the religious opposition, for an official legate from France to be received in Gondar. Poncet maintained that despite the hostility of the Ethiopians, the letter that he carried from de Maillet authorizing him on behalf of the French king, had allowed Poncet access into and leave from Ethiopia. Not only was their a problem with hostile monks, Poncet continued, but also the envoys that the Negus employed who were non Ethiopian, such as Hadji Ali and Mourad, would oppose a French legate because, it would mean a potential loss in their own profits. These individuals were engaged in commerce, and a French legate would be seen as a competitor.78 When Mourad arrived in Cairo, a quarrel broke out among de Maillet, Poncet and Mourad over the disposition of Iya’su letter. The three men developed a strong dislike for one another, and each had their own agenda. Mourad was seen by de Maillet and the European community in Cairo and especially the French colony as an individual with dubious characteristics; he had held several low-level occupations such as cook, valet, and brandy seller, always on the brink of economic disaster. Europeans living in the Middle East considered him as a man of low character. He had lived in Aleppo and Cairo but because of financial difficulties he eventually went to his uncle in Ethiopia. The Consul demanded that Mourad give him the letter, but Mourad insisted that he

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take it to France himself. At first de Maillet and Poncet agreed that the latter would go on to Paris to present Iya’su’s letter and to report directly to the French Court his findings in Ethiopia. Poncet took the Armenian’s side, which stoked de Maillet’s resentment towards Poncet. Apparently judging himself an important person, de Maillet also was angered that Iya’su did not answer him directly. But Mourad would not give the letter to de Maillet. The Turkish Pasha of Egypt angered over the fact that there were neither letters nor presents for him, jumped into the fray. He seized the letter, but de Maillet was able to retrieve it. De Maillet was able to arrange for Poncet, Jean Verseau the head of the Jesuits in Egypt, and Charles Jacques de Monhenault head of the chancellery in Cairo to go to Paris. Mourad would stay in Cairo and if King Louis showed interest Mourad would follow. They left Cairo in September and arrived in Paris at the end of the year.79 In Paris, Poncet was entertained, feted, and treated very well. There were those who doubted the authenticity of Iya’su’s letter and the veracity of Poncet’s account. Officials in the French Court eventually accepted the letter, sent presents to Mourad in Cairo, and a possibility of a French delegation to be sent to Gondar. De Maillet was to continue to defray Mourad’s expenses in Egypt until the latter returned to Ethiopia. Mourad’s credentials were examined, and although Joachim Le Grand, a confidant of the powerful Jean-Baptise Colbert, considered them a forgery, the French Court accepted Mourad as a legitimate legate from the Ethiopian court. As proof of forgery, Le Grand pointed to the beginning and end of the letter of credentials. Ethiopian rulers usually begin such letters with a confession of faith, and this was found by Le Grand to have been “imperfect.” More interestingly, he objected to the use of Gondar as capital of Ethiopia. The last time Europeans were in Ethiopia, Aksum was considered the capital, and Gondar was merely a camp. The French Court also maintained that another embassy be sent to Ethiopia, and that the Jesuits be maintained in Gondar there under French expense.80 Poncet’s voyage sparked a flurry of activity and efforts to rekindle relations with Ethiopia. The Chancellor returned to Cairo, but Poncet and Verseau went to Rome where they had an audience with the Pope. They presented a letter from Iya’su inviting the pope to send missionaries to Ethiopia. It is highly doubtful of the authenticity of such a letter. The rivalry between Franciscans and Jesuits once more reared itself. The Franciscans debunked the letter as a forgery, and sought to press their own mission to Ethiopia.81 According to E. A. Wallis Budge, the Pope sent out a Franciscan, Dom Joseph, to Ethiopia with a letter to the Negus. He returned to Rome with a reply (dated January 1702) together with seven young Ethiopians who were to be converted and instructed in Catholicism. The Jesuits organized another effort with Poncet. Poncet, a Jesuit priest, Guillaume du Bernat, an interpreter, and Mourad left Suez in November 1703. However Poncet and Mourad quarreled, the mission broke up, because, according to Poncet, Mourad did not want the French and Catholics in Ethiopia. Their were the above mentioned two Jesuits that had entered Gondar but perished on their way out of Ethiopia. A lay mission was organized led by

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the vice-consul of Damietta, Noir du Roule. He left Cairo in the middle of 1704, followed Poncet’s path to Sennar, which he reached in May 1705, stayed there for six months, and then was murdered before he left for Gondar.82 In the final analysis, Jesuits and French efforts to enter Ethiopia were futile. Since their expulsion in 1632, Poncet’s trip was the most promising endeavor for the Jesuits. There were, however, many problems surrounding Poncet’s venture. He tended to be quite positive about Ethiopia and Ethiopians in the pages of his journal, but their are other sources that indicate the problems that he encountered. In being held in seclusion with limited access to the Ethiopian population, he was dependent on, other than Iya’su, on a very few individuals for data on the country. His European experience and background also limited his understanding of Ethiopia and Ethiopians. He saw Ethiopian social and political system through a privileged Eurocentric lens. He was critical of the common folk, but thought highly of the upper classes. This was probably the view that he held of a European class system. He described a green, fertile, and prosperous country and left the impression that it also contained a happy peasantry. It is difficult to see the latter given the power and wealth of the royalty, nobility and church. Since he was not able to move about freely, he did not truly understand the full extent of Iya’su’s power and its limitations. He did not grasp the sectarian and factional rifts in the Ethiopian body politic which destroyed Iya’su a few years later. Finally, due to his inability to speak the local languages, he was unable to gain unfiltered knowledge. He was always dependent on someone who knew Arabic, for it is certain, that was the language in which he communicated. While alive, Poncet was treated well in European circles, but there were many that did not believe his account. His description of the capital city of Gondar was looked at with doubt. He described as a major town founded in 1636; four years after the Portuguese were removed. No one from Europe had seen it, and when Poncet described it, he was not believed. Le Grand, his severest critic, alleged that the capital was Axum, as the Jesuits had purported. In a letter to the elder Mourad, de Maillet alludes to the “breakdown” of arts and sciences after contact with Europeans was broken. After his death Poncet was attacked as a vagabond, devoid of honor, or religion, a liar and unintelligent. Le Grand criticized Poncet mercilessly. He claimed that since there was none to challenge him in Paris, Poncet spread lies “without scruples.” De Maillet reported to Louis XIV that Poncet had never even been to Ethiopia.83 These slurs on Poncet’s character were meant to debase his narrative of Ethiopia, in which a vibrant, well-stocked, and civilized country was depicted. Although Poncet was close to the French Jesuits, his rehabilitation came from non-French sources and particularly by the British. Poncet wrote his narrative while in Paris and the Jesuits published it in 1706; that copy disappeared and the earliest French version is dated 1713. An English translation appeared in 1709, and through the 18th century various English translations were published. In 1768 James Bruce, the Scottish traveler, followed Poncet’s route, and although he was critical of some of the

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Frenchman’s assertions, he found Poncet’s account quite credible. In his travel account to Ethiopia, Bruce denounced de Maillet’s attack on Poncet and saw it as mere jealousy.84 Little is known about Poncet’s life after failure of his second Ethiopian expedition. Apparently quite disillusioned, and unhappy that his journey did not yield greater fruit, he remained in the Middle East. Poncet settled in Persia, married, and apparently passed away sometime after 1708.

Notes 1. This study is based primarily on the Hakluyt Society edition of the English translation of Poncet’s account of his voyage, William Foster, ed., The Red Sea and Adjacent Countries at the Close of the Seventeenth Century as Described by Joseph Pitts, William Daniel and Charles Jacques Poncet (London: Hakluyt Society, 1949, Kraus reprint, Millwood, N.Y.,1990) and the correspondence between the Society of Jesus, the French Consul in Cairo and others relative to affairs with Ethiopia, C. Beccari, ed., Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores Occidentales Inediti a Saeculo XVI ad XIX, XIV, Relationes et Epistolae Variorum (Roma: Excudebat C. de Luigi, 1914). 2. Poncet to Pontchartrain, 31 August 1708, Becari, pp. 405–07. Salvatore Tedeschi, “Le Voyage de Poncet en Ethiopie (1699–1700),” in Voyages et Voyageurs, ed. Joseph Tubiana (Bruxelles: Foundation Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peirese, 1985), pp. 48–49. 3. De Maillet to Iya’su, 25 April 1698, Beccari, pp. 23–24. 4. In 1697 De Maillet wrote about the difficulties in both routes, see “Mémoire sur les veues que l’on a de pénétrer en Ethiopie,” in De Caix de Saint-Aymour, Histoire des relation de la France ave l’Abyssinie Chrétienne sous les regnes de Louis XIII et de Louis XIV(1634–1706), d’aprés les documents inédits des archives du Ministere des Affaires Etangeres (Paris: Challamel, Ainé, 1886), pp. 299–301. 5. For a discussion of Ethio-Muslim relations on the Red Sea, see Mordechai Abir, Ethiopia and the Red Red Sea: The Rise and Decline of the Solomonic Dynasty and Muslim-European Rivalry in the Region (London: Frank Cass, 1980). Idem., “Trade and Christian Muslim Relations in Post-Medieval Ethiopia,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies, Session B, 1978, ed., Richard Hess (Chicago: Nothwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, University of Chicago, 1979), pp. 411–14. 6. For a discussion of the introduction of Christianity into Ethiopia and the relationship with the Coptic Church of Egypt, see, Sergew Hable Sellassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa: United Printers, 1972), pp. 97–113. Stuart Munro-Hay, Ethiopia and Alexandria: The Metropolitan Episcopacy of Ethiopia, Bibliotheca Nubica et Aethiopica, no. 5 (Warszawa: Zas Pan, 1997). 7. De Maillet to Pontchartrain, 12 May 1698, Becarri, pp. 30–34. 8. Ibid. Foster, pp. xxiv. 9. Tedeschi, pp. 49–51. Benoit de Maillet, Descrption de l’Egypte (Paris: Chez L. Genneau et J. Rolin, fils, 1735). 10. The most authoritative work on this period is Merid Wolde Aregay, “Southern Ethiopia and the Christian Kingdom, 1508–1708” (Ph.D. diss., School of Oriental and Africa Studies, University of London, 1971). Also see Abir, Ethiopia and the Red Sea.

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Richard Pankhurst, An Introduction to the Economic History of Ethiopia (London: Lalibela House, 1961), p. 300. 11. In a fictionalized account of Ponet’s journey, these were the sentiments voiced by a Catholic clergy to de Maillet, Jean-Christophe Rufin, The Abyssinian, trans., Willard Wood (New York: W. W. Norton, 199), p. 16 12. De Caix, pp. 68–69. 13. De Maillet to du Roule, 20 November 1702, Beccari, p. 267. Tedesshi, p. 51. 14. De Maillet to Poncet, 25 April 1698, Beccari, p. 24. 15. James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773, III, 2nd. ed. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1804), pp. 481ff. Foster, pp. xxiv-xxv. Joachim Le Grand, Relation historique d’Abissinie du R. P. Jerome Lobo, traduite du Portugais, continuée et augmentée de plusieurs diffessertations, lettres et memoires. (Paris: Antoine-Urbain Coustteliré et Jacques Guerin Libraires, 1728), p. 158. 16. De Caix, p. 93. 17. Da Saleme to Sacripante, 22 April 1699, and da Saleme to Massiliam, 5 June 1699 1699, Beccari, pp. 72–74. Da Saleme’s order, Minor Osservante Riformato is a more rigorous sub-order of the Fransiscans. 18. For a discussion of factions in the Gondarine period, see, LaVerle Berry, “Ras Farés and the Tewahido Coalition in Late Seventeenth Century Gondar,” in Orbis Aethiopicus: Studies in Honorum Stanislaus Chojnacki, Piotr O. Scholz, ed., Bibliotheca Nubica, no. 3 (Albstadt: Karl Schuler Publishing, 1992), pp. 69–82. idem., “Factions and Coalitions During the Gondar Period, 1636–1755,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies, Session B, 1978, ed., Richard Hess (Chicago: Nothwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, University of Chicago, 1979), pp. 435–441. 19. De Maillet report, 24 September, 1701, Beccari, p. 178. 20. E. A, Wallis Budge, A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia, II (London: Metheun and Co., 1928, reprint Oosterhout, the Netherlands: Anthropological Publications, 1966), p. 422. Bruce, p. 488. De Maillet to Iya’su, 25 April 1698; de Maillet to Poncet, 25 April 1698; de Maillet to Hadji Ali, 25 April 1698, Beccari, pp. 23–27. Le Grand, p. 157. De Caix, p. 99. 21. De Maillet to Pontchartrain, 12 May 1698, Beccari, p. 32. Foster, pp. xxv, 115, n. 1. Le Grand, p. 159. De Caix, p. 98. Tedeschi, p. 51. 22. Foster, p. 96. 23. Foster, pp. 93–96. 24. Ibid., p. 96. 25. Ibid., pp. 98–99. 26. Ibid., pp. 100–01. De Brévédent to de Maillet, 12 April 1699, Beccari, p. 71. 27. Foster, p. 103. 28. Ibid., pp. 106–07. 29. Ibid., p. 110. The term gerbertis also was used by Christian Ethiopians to denote slaves. 30. Ibid., p. 111. 31. Ibid., p. 113. 32. Ibid., pp. 115, 117. 33. Ibid., pp. 116–117. 34. Ibid., p. 115, n.3. Le Grand, p. 367.

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35. Ibid., p. 116. 36. Ibid., pp. 116, 119, and n.2. 37. Ibid., p. 130. 38. Ibid., p. 168. 39. Ibid., p. 131. 40. Ibid., p. 131 to 132. 41. De Maillet report, 24 September, 1701, Beccari, p. 178; Foster, p. 140. Poncet promised to return. 42. Foster, pp. 120–21, 137. 43. Ibid., pp. 120–21. Ignatius Guidi, ed. and trans., Annales Iohannis I, Iyasu I, Bakaffa, Corpus Scriptorum Christianrum Orientalim, ser. 2, vol, 5 (Paris: Carolus Poussielgue Bibliopola, 1903), p. 89. 44. Foster, pp. 11, 144–45. 45. Ibid., p. 127. 46. Ibid., pp. 127–28. 47. Ibid., 135. 48. Ibid., pp. 125–26. 49. Ibid., pp. 145–46. 50. Ibid., p. 126. 51. Ibid., p. 126, n.2. Le Grand, p. 253. 52. For an authoritative study of the relationship between land, ownership and power, see Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago, Ill., University of Illinois Press, 2000). 53. Foster, p. 127. 54. Ibid., p. 119. 55. Ibid., p. 129 56. Ibid., p. 130. 57. Ibid., pp. 117–18. 58. Ibid., pp. 121–23. For a discussion of the religious hierarchy see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527 (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1972), pp. 107–118. 59. Foster, p. 123. 60. Ibid., pp. 132–33. 61. Ibid., p. 138. 62. Ibid., pp. 138–39. 63. Poncet to de Maillet, 5 December 1700, Beccari, pp. 115–17. Foster, pp. 137, 169. 64. Budge, p. 424. 65. On these doctrinal disputes, see Donald Crummey, Priests and Politicians (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1972), pp. 20–23. 66. Foster, pp. 124–25. 67. Ibid., pp. 125, 137–38. 68. Ibid., pp. 139–41. 69. Ibid., pp. 140–41. Tedeschi, p. 53. 70. My thanks to Stuart Munro-Hay who, along with some observations, provided me with a copy of the letter. A translation of the letter appears in Le Grand, pp. 451–464. 71. Foster, p. 133, and n. 1. E. van Donzel, Foreign Relations of Ethiopia: Documents Relating to the Journeys of Khodja Murad (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch Archaeologisch Instituut, 1979), pp. 168–69.

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72. Foster, p. 140. 73. Ibid., p. 169. Poncet to de Maillet, 5 December 1700, p. 116. Richard Pankhurst, An Introduction to the Medical History of Ethiopia (Trenton, N.J.: Red Sea Press, 1990), p. 141. 74. Van Donzel, p. 3. De Caix, p. 108. 75. Foster, pp. 154–55. 76. Ibid., pp. 141–42, 145–47, 154. 77. Ibid., pp. 160, 163. 78. Ibid., pp. 170–71. 79. Ibid., pp. 164, 170–172, xxx-xxxi. Le Grand, pp. 163–64, 364; De Maillet to Pontchartrain, 24 September 1702; Beccari, pp. 173–75; DeCaix, pp. 122ff.; Tedeschi, p. 54. 80. Le Grand, pp. 163–164. For Le Grand’s activities and relationship to Torcy, see Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda Under Louis XIV (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 246ff. 81. Ibid., p. 164. The letter to the Pope was a forgery. Iya’su would never accept the Pope as the leader of Christendom. A French translation of an Italian translation of an Arab copy is found in Le Grand, pp. 465 ff. 82. Foster, pp. xxxi–xxxiii; Budge, p. 424; Le Grand, p. 167. 83. Cf. Le Grand, pp. 159–60, 163, 429; De Maillet to Mourad, senior, 15 September 1703, Beccari, pp. 344 –45; and Budge, p. 424. 84. There is a short publishing history of Poncet’s book in Foster, pp. xxxiv; Bruce, p. 487 ff.

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5 The Travails of Madagascar: Rennefort’s Relation du premier voyage de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales Carl H. Sobocinski In March 1665 the first expedition of the French Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales, consisting of four ships, departed for the Indian Ocean.1 One important goal was to reinforce the tenuous colonies on Madagascar established by earlier enterprises.2 These settlements, centered around Fort Dauphin near the island’s southern tip, were intended as forward support bases for further ventures into the Asian trade, such as the English and Dutch had established at St. Helena, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope. Embarked on one of these ships was Urbain Souchu de Rennefort. This first expedition was already fraught with internal divisions when it landed on the island in July 1665, and it found the earlier French colony precariously clinging to existence. Rennefort’s account of this situation provides insights into the problems, such as internal dissent and inexperience in colonial matters, that led to the East India Company’s ultimate failure at colonizing Madagascar. Observing Portuguese and Dutch imperial successes, the French had been trying to break into Asian trade since early in the seventeenth century. Henry IV had charted a colonial company in 1604, but it organized no successful expeditions.3 In later decades, Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu were generally too preoccupied with European affairs to spare much for imperial ventures. Just before his death in 1642, however, Richelieu chartered the Compagnie Française de l’Orient, belatedly ratified by a young Louis XIV in September

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1643.4 Even before the formal ratification, in March 1642 an expedition embarked for Madagascar, under the command of Jacques de Pronis. He established the main French outpost of Fort Dauphin, and remained the senior French authority on Madagascar until the arrival of Etienne de Flacourt late in 1648. Flacourt would remain in command until his departure in February 1655, a period which saw little support from France due to the upheavals of the Fronde during the minority of Louis XIV. With the formal Compagnie Française de l’Orient drifting into inactivity, French nobleman and soldier, the duc de Meilleraye, began to organize his own expeditions to the Indian Ocean, despite the Company’s royal monopoly. De Meilleraye sent out several ships between 1654 and 1663. The largest of these endeavors, a four-ship squadron that arrived in 1656, transported Chaussé de Champmargou to Madagascar, who by 1664 had become the island’s governor. However, the French were too few to control much of the island. Subject to famine, disease, and conflict with Malagasy peoples, the French settlement led a precarious existence. By the 1660s, several developments converged to inspire Louis XIV and finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert to make another attempt at French imperialism. Following the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, Louis began his consolidation of power as absolute monarch. Furthermore, after de Meilleraye’s death in 1664, his heir the duc de Mazarin ceded his colonial interests to the crown.5 Combined with Colbert’s mercantilist designs for France, a renovated French East India Company was established later that year. Envy of the Dutch Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (VOC) was one motive behind this act. But this imitation of the Dutch extended beyond commercial rivalry, as Dutch maritime expertise found an attentive audience in France. During the 1660s there was a fair degree of cooperation between the French and Dutch in naval matters, particularly concerning Dutch rivalry with the English.6 Accordingly, the French regarded the United Provinces as a source for ships capable of long open-sea voyages.7 Through purchase of Dutch ships and the use of Dutch commercial and seafaring knowledge the French Company was able to send its first squadron to the Indian Ocean by March 1665. Accompanying this expedition was Souchu de Rennefort. Born in Tours around 1630, Rennefort had been treasurer of the King’s Bodyguard when the Royal East India Company was founded in 1664. Being in debt, he joined the expedition for potential economic gain, and was appointed Secretary of the Company’s Conseil Souverain to be established on Madagascar. However, Governor Champmargou was unwilling to accept the new royal company’s authority. This resulted in a struggle between Champmargou and Pierre de Beausse, president of the Conseil Souverain and commander of the 1665 expedition.8 Caught between these rivals, Rennefort became distrusted by both sides and was encouraged to return to France, embarking on the Vierge de bon port in February 1666. In July, just as the ship came within sight of France, an English warship attacked and sank it. Captured, Rennefort was detained on

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the Isle of Wight, finally returning to France in April 1667 as part of a prisoner exchange. While in English custody he wrote an account of his travels and observations, published as Relation du premier voyage de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales en l’isle de Madagascar, ou Dauphine in 1668. Although Rennefort is occasionally mentioned in historical works, his influence in more recent historiography has been limited. Henry Weber, in La Compagnie des Indes Orientales, briefly referred to Relation du premier voyage in describing the first expedition’s departure and the events of the Company’s early months on Madagascar.9 In Histoire de la Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales, Jules Sottas gave Rennefort a bit more attention. He is mentioned in Sottas’ account of the Company’s organizational structure, and Sottas’ portrayal of the voyage around Africa and the French struggles against the Malagasy peoples was taken largely from Relation du premier voyage.10 Other histories make no mention of Rennefort’s Relation. Charles Woolsey Cole’s Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism contains no reference to it at all, although its account of the Company’s first expedition to Madagascar is based on Weber's.11 Likewise, Glenn J. Ames, in Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade, concentrates on the works of Weber, Sottas, and Cole when discussing the Company’s early ventures on Madagascar. Furthermore, little mention of Rennefort is found in published primary works such as François Martin’s Mémoires or Pierre Clément’s well-indexed series Lettres, instructions, et mémoires de Colbert. It is earlier historical works on French imperialism that make the most use of Rennefort’s works. Some of the first references to them appeared in Fresne de Francheville’s Histoire de la Compagnie des Indes of 1747.12 The most extensive use of Rennefort’s writings, however, was during the French Third Republic’s renewed imperial interest in Madagascar of the late nineteenth century, led by such historians as Alfred Grandidier and Henri Froidevaux. These infrequent references to Rennefort’s works were largely due to their limited availability. Since its publication in 1668, the Relation du premier voyage has not been reprinted, although one of Rennefort’s later works, the Histoire des Indes Orientales of 1688, which summarizes many of the same events, was republished in 1988. Despite their similarities, the Relation du premier voyage has a particular value over the latter book. It focuses entirely on events that Rennefort either experienced personally or learned firsthand from actual participants, whereas the Histoire des Indes Orientales was written as a history, and contains much commentary on events in which Rennefort did not participate. Finally, the Relation du premier voyage exhibits a more positive tone concerning the Madagascar settlements, having been written before their abandonment in the early 1670s and the concurrent financial difficulties of the East India Company. Rennefort apparently hoped to acquire another office in the Company, and the Relation’s strong statements praising the Company’s great enterprise to the glory of France, a tone lacking in the later volume, place it

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firmly in the genre of imperialist propaganda of which this period saw many examples. Having departed from Brest on 7 March 1665, Rennefort’s outbound trip was uneventful. The squadron stopped briefly at the Canary Islands and had some contact with the Portuguese on Cape Verde, where the ships resupplied and French officers hunted local game.13 However, despite Rennefort’s avowal of good camaraderie amongst the ship's crews, there are hints of underlying strain. Prior to rounding the Cape of Good Hope, tensions aboard the Aigle-Blanc between embarked Catholic Company officials and the captain and crew, who predominantly followed the “so-called reformed religion” of the Huguenots, nearly erupted into violence before de Beausse managed to pacify things.14 Although such frictions do not have a large part in Rennefort’s account of his journeys, this reference corresponds to other observations. François Martin’s Mémoires describe how François Caron, a former VOC official who later worked for the French, was distrusted in some circles because of his Protestantism.15 Also, this incident reflects the religious tensions in France that influenced Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, an act Rennefort's Histoire des Indes Orientales praises.16 Further indications of internal dissent emerged as the squadron passed the Cape of Good Hope in June. From the journey’s beginning, each ship carried a sealed box containing orders and royal letters of appointment, to be opened upon rounding Africa. At the appointed time de Beausse, aboard the Saint-Paul, signalled the other ships to assemble and read the orders. M. Chevry, the Company marchand aboard the Vierge de bon port, remained on his ship, refusing to cooperate. De Beausse thus feared a power struggle within his command, and resolved to abandon the squadron and head straight to Madagascar in the Saint-Paul, the fastest of the four ships. His orders originally specified landing first at Mascareigne (now Réunion).17 Assuming that the others would first head to Mascareigne according to their orders, de Beausse sought to establish himself quickly on Madagascar and prevent serious ruptures in his authority.18 Later in his life, Rennefort would see these events as serious defects in the Company’s integrity. In Histoire des Indes, he wrote that the colonial endeavors on Madagascar were flawed from the beginning, due to this first expedition's failure to present a united front to the Malagasy peoples and rival Governor Champmargou.19 Upon landing at Fort Dauphin on 10 July, de Beausse claimed the island in the name of Louis XIV and the East India Company. He charged Rennefort with delivering letters to that effect to Champmargou. The governor asked why, if he were to be supplanted, did not de Meilleraye demand his resignation? Rennefort informed him that de Meilleraye was dead, and delivered a letter from his heir, the duc de Mazarin, thanking him for his services and requesting that he accept the new Royal Company’s authority. Champmargou then conceded to these letters’ validity, and agreed to step down. Despite this apparent acquiescence,

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the seeds of future tension are clear. Before he would accompany Rennefort back to the ship to meet with de Beausse, Champmargou insisted that two of Rennefort’s companions remain as a guarantee for his safety.20 Champmargou’s first meeting with de Beausse hinted at further discord. By royal authorization, de Beausse offered Champmargou the command of all military forces on the island. His reply was ambiguous. He neither accepted nor refused the offer, saying that he was unwilling to relinquish his position completely until he was certain that his duty to de Meilleraye was fully discharged.21 Initially, Rennefort’s account of this meeting seems benign. But when compared to later descriptions of tensions between these two, it is evident that Champmargou never accepted his removal as Madagascar’s governor. As one of the island’s leading planters, he likely feared the loss of a potentially 22 profitable enterprise. In addition to this power struggle, the new Company inherited a precarious situation. Since the first arrival of French colonists in 1642, fighting had repeatedly broken out with various groups of Malagasy peoples. A large part of Relation du premier voyage recounts these wars, particularly one which broke out about a year and a half before Rennefort’s arrival. The narrative of these struggles illustrates much concerning French colonial policies and their difficulty in establishing permanent, self-sufficient settlements on Madagascar. Although French records tend to regard the Malagasy peoples as an indistinct semi-barbaric whole, their societies were highly varied, although politically fragmented. Their ethnic backgrounds reveal a mélange of Arabic, Bantu, and Indonesian influences. Indonesians are believed to have been the first inhabitants, beginning around A.D. 600 at the earliest.23 A few centuries later, Arab traders established profitable commerce along the island’s east coast. Such traffic was tied to Arab trade routes along mainland Africa, thus bringing Madagascar its Bantu elements. This diverse ethnography resulted in numerous national groups on Madagascar, politically fragmented and often warring on each other. Two particular peoples the French would collide with most were the Antemoro and the Antanosy. The Antemoro were fairly recent immigrants to Madagascar, having arrived on Arab expeditions to southeastern Africa in the fourteenth century.24 Unlike neighboring peoples, they had a written language which evolved from Arabic script adapted to the Malagasy language. Some of their writings, which contained knowledge of medicine, astrology, and divination, provided the basis for a class of priest-doctors known as ombiasy. Such knowledge became diffused throughout the island, and the ombiasy were subsequently found in many other Malagasy nations. The Antemoro and ombiasy illustrate the eclectic nature of Malagasy cultures. Although they arrived under a distinct Arab influence, after a few generations they began to assimilate into Malagasy society, losing many of their Islamic roots.25 This

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corresponds to one of Rennefort’s observations of an Islamic influence in Malagasy culture but no firmly established Moslem religion.26 Surrounding Fort Dauphin itself was the region dominated by the Antanosy. Anthropologists speculate that they may have been related to the Antemoro, due to some of their Islamic characteristics.27 Neither the Antanosy nor the Antemoro were politically united, power being fragmented amongst various families regularly competing for dominance. Due to the universality of polygamy, tribal leaders tended to have more sons than positions for them to inherit. This led to the dispersal of disfavored sons to surrounding regions. Many such individuals of the Antemoro went to the Antanosy, where they sought to establish their power.28 Because Fort Dauphin was situated near the border regions between the Antemoro and Antanosy, the French were uniquely suited to exploit Malagasy divisions. His forces too few for direct military conquest, Champmargou allied with various local groups, levying tribute from the areas they controlled.29 By mid-1664 he had come to dominate some 3,000 people in the regions surrounding Fort Dauphin.30 One such client chieftain was Andrian Mananghe, with whom the French had been dealing since the mid 1650s.31 Through Champmargou’s favor, Mananghe received arms and training for his troops, and became a significant power in southern Madagascar. He also had a good command of French, and the colonial missionaries saw him as a potential gateway for the spread of Christianity throughout the island. However, religious policies would prove this arrangement's undoing. When Mananghe resisted converting, the missionaries began to exert pressure, saying that the French considered as enemies all those who rejected their religion. Mananghe did not entirely rebuff Christianity, for he did declare his willingness for any of his children to choose baptism. But he personally declined because converting would have meant surrendering his polygamous marriages.32 Mananghe’s position toward Christianity illustrates much concerning the differences between the French and Malagasy views on religion. His acceptance of Christianity’s presence while declining to follow it himself corresponds to Rennefort’s description of Madagascar’s people as having a variety of religious beliefs, such as native animistic practices and some elements of Islam.33 As such, they had little concept of a French Catholic’s intolerance. Another account of this time portrays Mananghe as unwilling to abandon polygamy because it would reduce his social status, in that a multiplicity of wives indicated a Malagasy man’s wealth and power.34 In February 1664 Champmargou summoned Mananghe to Fort Dauphin. After some initial resistance, he came. When he persistently refused to convert, Champmargou began to make threats, saying that obstinance from such an infidel was intolerable. He also said that Mananghe was no longer of any use to the French, and announced that he deserved “a pistol shot to the head.”35

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Although the missionary present condemned such extreme measures, Mananghe sensed his danger, and fled to the countryside. When he killed the missionary Nicholas Etienne and two other French who had gone to treat with him, it began a protracted war that severely strained the tenuous French colony.36 Champmargou responded with a punitive campaign. However, Mananghe had made an alliance with his brother-in-law Lavantague, and Champmargou’s foray proved fruitless. Embarking with a sense of righteous vengeance, the French soon encountered the usual difficulties Europeans meet when pursuing an elusive foe in a distant, unfamiliar land. The Relation du premier voyage recounts that the Malagasy war-parties were able to travel eighty leagues in eight days, whereas the French could only manage one hundred in five weeks.37 Guerilla tactics also caused much consternation. Referring to the Malagasies as “true children of the night,” the French came to fear recurrent night ambushes.38 Quickly losing their enthusiasm, Champmargou and his small force retreated to Fort Dauphin rather than face annihilation. At this point emerged one of the most fascinating figures of the Relation du premier voyage, a French adventurer known as Le Vacher La Case. He had arrived on Madagascar in 1656 with one of de Meilleraye's expeditions. Although initially a French agent, he left Fort Dauphin and swore homage to the tribal leader Andrian Rasissatte, who gave him his daughter Nong in marriage. From this arrangement La Case came to control significant land and resources, and became a power in his own right. As an independent player he would later aid Champmargou. However, the assistance he gave Champmargou in the spring of 1664 was incidental. Caught up in the island's recurrent tribal wars, La Case was loyal to his own interests and ended up a rival to Champmargou.39 Champmargou was in a dire position after his retreat to Fort Dauphin. Disease had swept through the settlement, leaving him only eighty men. Desertion amongst the French was another fear, and at one point Champmargou summarily executed four men he suspected of disloyalty. Inter-tribal wars had disrupted the countryside, and provisions, particularly cattle, were in short supply. At one point Champmargou considered relocating to St. Augustine Bay on the island’s southwestern coast, but this region was under the control of Lavantague, Mananghe’s ally. Having little other recourse under Mananghe’s 40 attack, Champmargou applied to La Case for assistance. La Case was given command of some French forces, and along with his own Malagasy troops embarked on a campaign against Mananghe. Failing to find him, he resorted to plundering the countryside. Meanwhile, Mananghe laid siege to Fort Dauphin. In this midst of this predicament La Case arrived from the countryside, lifted the siege, and brought supplies to the beleaguered garrison. Hailed as liberator, La Case preserved the struggling settlement and perpetuated Champmargou as governor.41 However, rivalry between Champmargou and La Case had been growing through this entire struggle. Champmargou had long resented La Case’s rise to

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power, and had attempted to have him assassinated soon after his marriage and assimilation into Malagasy society.42 Likewise, La Case distrusted Champmargou, and with the assistance of his wife Nong, organized a network of spies around Fort Dauphin.43 La Case’s rescue of Fort Dauphin thus emerges as part of his independent policy concerning rival Malagasy powers. He stood to eliminate one rival by joining Champmargou’s struggle against Mananghe, while having little to fear from Champmargou himself. Also, the acclaim given La Case by Fort Dauphin's survivors, who referred to him as père nourricier, made it less likely that Champmargou could mobilize any action against him.44 When the East India Company’s first expedition arrived in 1665, Champmargou already had a weak hold on power. These internal threats and political rivalries help to explain his animosity toward the Company’s actions to supplant him as governor. The rivalry between La Case and Champmargou reveals the difficulties the French had in establishing a solid presence on Madagascar. The arrival of the new Company’s first expedition in the summer of 1665 saw little improvement. De Beausse also had weak control over his subordinates. Chevry had already refused to cooperate with the other Company officers, prompting de Beausse to race toward Madagascar ahead of the other ships. Upon landing at Fort Dauphin and issuing his orders to Champmargou, he refused to establish the Company’s Conseil Souverain, resolving instead to govern alone. Furthermore, de Beausse’s difficulties extended beyond political rivalries. His health was very poor, and at one point Rennefort described him as “useless as he was ill.”45 There was also some fear that he would depart Fort Dauphin with the small garrison still loyal to him, weakening the remaining forces. Rennefort wrote, however, that this was unlikely. Knowing of the dissent amongst the Company’s officers, Champmargou sought to return to power upon de Beausse’s death, which he expected at any time.46 Although Rennefort believed that de Beausse was usurping the Company’s legitimate authority, another perspective shows sound reasons for his actions. Chevry was to have been part of the Conseil, and de Beausse undoubtedly feared his ambition and sought to keep him in the periphery. Rennefort made little mention of these motives. Instead, he continued to pressure de Beausse for the Conseil’s establishment. The only result was his alienation from de Beausse, a trend which would lead to Rennefort's departure from Madagascar less than a year after arriving. On the other side of this conflict, Champmargou saw Rennefort as an obstacle to restoring his power.47 Caught in the midst of these rivalries, Rennefort’s position became increasingly difficult. He knew of the dangers such factionalism might bring. The French outposts already faced serious threats from their environment and indigenous peoples, and Rennefort resolved to exercise self-restraint in his political dealings.48 Rennefort’s description of the Company’s status during his few months on Madagascar were not encouraging. The spread of Christianity to the Malagasies

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was making almost no progress. In August 1665, some missionaries returned to Fort Dauphin after several months afield. They had achieved only three baptisms during this time.49 In light of the disputes that helped to trigger the war against Mananghe, French religious policies were counterproductive to the Company’s goals of profitable Asian trade. Rennefort realized the difficulty of the religious goals, writing that indigenous beliefs were so deeply entrenched that imposing Christianity might not be achievable save through reducing the population to near slavery. Yet he never disavowed religion as an objective. Blending commercial and pious motives, and speaking in the idiom of his time, Rennefort maintained that the primary French goal in the “infidel lands” was to spread Christianity. But if France simultaneously profited from such expansion, so much the better.50 In addition to its difficulties in spreading Christianity, Rennefort recounted some of the Company’s inherent defects. Although the Saint-Paul departed for the Persian Gulf in September 1665, part of the Company’s stated goal of establishing Asian trade connections, its internal difficulties prevented significant success. Its agents were generally men of little talent and poor temperament, Rennefort wrote. His most severe assessments were directed at its principal officials, remarking that men of little ability tended to rise to high office. Insisting that the Company’s leaders had little concept of the task’s difficulty, Rennefort severely criticized their tendencies to enrich themselves rather than ensure the stability of their enterprise. Considering his friction with de Beausse, Rennefort treated him sympathetically in this instance, saying that he had great potential as a leader but illness and early death prevented it.51 His only words of praise were for the expedition's mariners, particularly Captain Kercadiou of the Taureau.52 Such accounts of incompetence contrast with Jules Sottas’ description in the Histoire de la Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales. According to Sottas, the Company recruited a highly talented group of professionals whose expertise promised success for its first expedition.53 Another problem Rennefort noticed was the French lack of experience in colonial matters. Hopeful that the Company would eventually be a success, he urged that it learn from the successes of the English and Dutch, whose colonial expertise was “known throughout the world.”54 Rennefort made no reference to the Company’s recruitment of the former VOC official François Caron, yet it is likely that he knew of it. News of the Company’s meeting of March 1665, after Rennefort had left France, arrived on Madagascar in February 1666 with the arrival of the ships St. Louis and St. Jacques. Furthermore, after his return to France Rennefort hoped to secure another position with the Company, and certainly would have been familiar with its maneuvers. De Beausse continued to govern alone through the remainder of 1665, consistently delaying setting up the Conseil out of rivalry with Champmargou. Rennefort persistently collided with de Beausse, making formal complaints in October concerning the employment of soldiers and workers around Fort

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Dauphin. His observations of incompetent leadership again appeared in his description of de Beausse’s lack of concern for these problems. This period also saw the dispersal of French forces to such distant regions as Galemboulle and the Isle Ste. Marie along Madagascar’s northeastern coast, which previous expeditions had attempted to develop. These areas are depicted as potentially valuable sources of food, yet their farms produced little due to disease and repeated wars.55 Such accounts of the tenuous French holdings at disparate locales forebode the afflictions that the Company’s second expedition, under Lopis de Mondevergue, would experience two years later. By the year’s end de Beausse’s health finally gave out. Dying on 14 December, M. de Montaubon succeeded him. Rennefort’s summary of their final conversations are congenial, which perhaps explains the sympathetic treatment of de Beausse when expressing his view of the Company’s incompetence. The months following de Beausse’s death saw the continuation of Champmargou’s power struggle with the Company. Furthermore, the ongoing war with and between Malagasy peoples sharpened the adversity between Champmargou and La Case. In February 1666 La Case returned to Fort Dauphin after having spent the previous several months afield in the Antemoro regions. Although this campaign did succeed in increasing Fort Dauphin’s security, La Case’s strongest motive was most likely the elimination of his local rivals. The Relation reports that during this war La Case commanded nearly 6,000 troops, only thirty of whom were French.56 Champmargou also commanded troops afield. He still claimed to be the senior authority on the island, and Rennefort wrote that he granted La Case the “privilege” of overall military command.57 Clearly, he maintained hopes of controlling the French colony despite the Company’s efforts. This month saw the culmination of Rennefort’s efforts to establish the Company’s Corneil Souverain as originally intended. On 12 February 1666, the ships St. Jacques and St. Louis arrived at Fort Dauphin. Rennefort apparently hoped that this would help lead to the Conseil’s creation. However, he reported little news from these ships other than the island’s official change of name from Madagascar to Dauphine.58 Montaubon subsequently called Rennefort to a meeting in which he explained that Madagascar’s isolation required the concentration of power. Rennefort wrote that he sensed his resignation was desired. He was careful to state that he perceived no ill will in these matters, although such a sentiment carries little credibility from the readers’ perspective. Realizing the difficulty of his situation, he agreed to return to France on the first available passage. Embarking on the Vierge de Bon Port on 20 February, Rennefort spent the following year in transit and detention in England, finally landing at Calais in April 1667.59 Although Rennefort’s departure brought an abrupt end to his narrative of Madagascar’s French colonies, the Relation du premier voyage contains many valuable insights into early French imperialism. His depiction of incompetence,

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internal power struggles, and simple lack of imperial expertise furnish explanations for the Company’s failure to show any return on its investments. Later expeditions' records of similar problems, such as Mondevergue and la Haye observed between 1667 and 1671, reinforce Rennefort’s initial observations. Despite such facts, the Relation du premier voyage expresses a significant degree of hope that the Company’s enterprises would be profitable. Throughout his narrative of events, Rennefort included descriptions of Madagascar’s geographical and cultural characteristics, much of them focusing on its potential profitability. In several places he referred to the island’s fertility, describing the abundance of fruit and livestock. He also urged the cultivation of indigo, tobacco, cotton, and silkworms.60 Despite constant war with indigenous peoples, Rennefort was certain that “lopping of the heads” of their leaders would make the remainder quite pliable.61 He also expressed a sense of French nationalism. When recounting earlier Portuguese and English forays on Madagascar, he wrote that they were inadequate to the task, implying that the French could succeed where others had failed.62 At various other places Rennefort proclaimed that the “glory of France” was a great motive for him and the Company. Rennefort’s Relation is particularly valuable as a source for the events of the French Malagasy establishments during the early 1660s, before the creation of Colbert’s Company. Etienne de Flacourt’s Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar covers well the early French imperial enterprises beginning in 1642, but his personal observations ceased upon leaving the island late in 1654, and Flacourt’s death in 1660 ended his supplementary accounts of Madagascar following his departure. From Flacourt’s death through the renovation of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales in 1664, records of French establishments on Madagascar are limited. As such, the Relation forms a valuable bridge between successive episodes of French Asian imperialism. Furthermore, it contains the most detailed known account of Le Vacher la Case, who would become a popular figure amongst patriotic French historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in their attempts to justify France's re-colonization of Madagascar.63 Considering Rennefort’s situation at the time of its publication, the Relation du premier voyage takes on the patina of propaganda. Although it never happened, he hoped to take part in future imperial endeavors. Also, the East India Company was a pet project of Colbert and Louis XIV, and by encouraging it Rennefort may have hoped to cultivate favor toward a career in the government. While acknowledging the Company’s problems, the Relation du premier voyage emerges as a positive expression of the potential perceived in continued imperial ventures. Such tracts were frequent during the 1660s. The second edition of Etienne de Flacourt’s Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar was published in 1661, much of which fits well into this genre. Another example of colonial propaganda was François Charpentier’s Discours d'un fidel sujet du

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roi, which Colbert commissioned in 1664 to popularize his reconstituted Compagnie des Indes Orientales. Other such appeals appeared in unpublished correspondence by such individuals as Hubert Hugo, who wrote a lengthy entreaty to Colbert and Louis XIV early in 1664, extolling Madagascar’s great potential while hoping to secure a profitable position in such enterprises.64 The propagandistic features of Rennefort’s Relation set it apart from similar relations written before and after. François Cauche’s Relations véritables of 1652, and Carpeau de Saussay’s Voyage de Madagascar, published in 1722 but narrating events of the early 1660s, do not contain the same appeals to claim Madagascar for the glory of France. Indeed, Cauche was very critical of the Compagnie Française de l'Orient’s attempts to monopolize trade on Madagascar, citing it as one reason for his return to France in 1642.65 Despite Rennefort’s ambitious vision, in reality the late 1660s would see the final French efforts of the seventeenth century to establish permanent stations on Madagascar. The large squadron under Lopis de Mondevergue, which was about to get underway when Rennefort departed the island early in 1666, would encounter the same difficulties of Madagascar’s hostile environment, belligerent inhabitants, and French lack of colonial expertise. Such problems, combined with the financial ruin of the Company and the beginning of Louis XIV’s disastrous wars in the 1670s led to France’s abandonment of its Madagascar enterprises and the severe weakening of the French presence in Asian trade.

Notes 1. The ships were the Saint-Paul, Aigle-Blanc, Taureau, and Vierge de Bon Port. Urbain Souchu de Rennefort, Relation du premier voyage de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales en l'isle de Madagascar, ou Dauphiné (Paris: 1668), pp. 1–2. I received a photocopy of the book through the generous efforts of Dr. Carol Urness of the University of Minnesota. 2. The Portuguese, under Diogo Dias, in 1500 were the first Europeans to reach Madagascar, naming it São Lourenço. They established no long-term settlements. The Dutch made some attempts at establishing a way-station in the 1590s, but recurrent disease made it unprofitable. The English followed suit in the 1620s, but encountered the same difficulties and left by 1640. This left the way open for the French, whose first officially sanctioned expedition to Madagascar embarked in 1642. Cf. Arthur Malotet, Les origines de la colonisation française à Madagascar (Paris: 1898), pp. 6, 28–34. 3. Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Fonds Français 16738, folios [fos.] 16–17; Charles de la Roncière, Histoire de la marine française, 6 vols. (Paris: 1899–1932), vol. IV, pp. 268–288. 4. Centre d'Archives d'Outre-Mer C 5A 1, pièce 2, fos. 1–2. Hereafter abbreviated as CAOM. 5. CAOM C5A1, pièce 10, fos 1–4. 6. Centre d'Accueil et de Recherche des Archives Nationales, Marine B 4 3, folio [fo.] 33. Hereafter abbreviated as CARAN.

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7. CAOM C 5A 1, pièce 6, fo. 2. 8. De Beausse was also the half-brother of Etienne de Flacourt, and during earlier expeditions had remained in France as one of the directors of the old Société française de l'Orient. Etienne de Flacourt, Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar, ed., Claude Allibert (Paris: 1995), p. 34. 9. Henry Weber, La Compagnie des Indes, 1604–1875 (Paris: 1904), pp. 136–38. 10. Jules Sottas, Histoire de la Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales, 1664–1719 (Paris: 1905), pp. 17–19. 11. Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (Morningside Heights, NY: 1939), vol. I, p. 504. 12. Fresne de Francheville, Histoire de la Compagnie des Indes (Paris: 1746), p. 20. 13. Rennefort, Relation, pp. 32–33. 14. Ibid., p. 49. 15. François Martin, Mémoires de François Martin (Paris: 1931), vol. I, pp. 97–100. Caron, however, had high governmental support. Because of his valued colonial experience, Louis XIV granted Caron French citizenship and a special dispensation to practice his Protestantism but not to evangelize in any way. Cf. CAOM C 5A 1, pièce 11, fos. 1–3. 16. Rennefort, Histoire des Indes Orientales, p. 407. 17. The French would soon give Mascareigne the name of Bourbon. In 1793 it was renamed Réunion in commemoration of the joining of forces (réunion) of the revolutionary Paris National Guard with a regiment from Marseille during the assault on the Tuileries palace in September 1792. Briefly named Bonaparte during the First Empire, it was again named Bourbon after the Restoration of 1815. The Second Republic in 1848 again gave it the name Reunion, which it retains to this day. Cf. Atlas colonial français: colonies, protectorats et pays sous mandat (Paris: L'Illustration, 1929), p. 189. 18. Rennefort, Relation, pp. 50–52. 19. Rennefort, Histoire des Indes Orientales, pp. 403–04. 20. Rennefort, Relation, pp. 60–61. 21. Ibid., pp. 62–63. 22. Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: 1996), p. 92. 23. Mervyn Brown, Madagascar Revisited: A History From Early Times to Independence (Hamden, CT: 1979), p. 13 24. Ibid., p. 23. 25. Ibid., p. 24. 26. Rennefort, Relation, p. 262. 27. Brown, p. 19. 28. Ibid., p. 24. Other accounts differ slightly. French traveler François Cauche, who voyaged to Madagascar in 1638, reported that some leaders passed their legacies on to sons-in-law rather than direct descendants. (François Cauche, Relations véritable et curieuses de l'isle de Madagascar et du Brésil avec l'histoire de la dernière guerre faite au Brésil entre les portugais et les hollandois (Paris: 1651), p. 124. 29. The Relation reports that in 1664 the total French population of the island was around one hundred, concentrated mostly around Fort Dauphin. Cf. Rennefort, Relation, pp. 71–72. 30. Ibid., p. 80

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31. Flacourt, Histoire, pp. 341, 345. Andrian is a Malagasy title, similar to the English “Lord” or “King.” French documents often render it as Dian. Cf. Raymond K. Kent, Early Kingdoms in Madagascar, 1500–1700 (New York: 1970), p. 7. 32. Rennefort, Relation, pp. 82–83. 33. Ibid., pp. 262–67 34. Carpeau de Saussay, Voyage de Madagascar (Paris: 1722), p. 191. 35. Rennefort, Relation, p. 86. 36. Ibid., pp. 87–90. 37. Ibid., p. 92. 38. Ibid., p. 98. 39. Ibid., pp. 106–14. 40. Ibid., pp. 115–29. 41. Ibid., pp. 126–31. 42. Ibid., p. 114. 43. Ibid., p. 115. 44. Ibid., p. 131. 45. Ibid., p. 136. 46. Ibid., pp. 138–42. 47. Ibid., pp. 138–42. 48. Ibid., pp. 183–84. 49. Ibid., p. 158. 50. Ibid., p. 267. 51. Ibid., pp. 171, 184. 52. Ibid., p. 171. 53. Sottas, p. 15. 54. Rennefort, Relation, p. 169. 55. Ibid., p. 192. 56. Ibid., p. 235. 57. Ibid., p. 242. 58. Ibid., p. 250. 59. Ibid., pp. 251–52, 269. 60. Ibid., pp. 258, 261. 61. Ibid., p. 261. 62. Ibid., p. 70. 63. R. de la Blanchére, Un épisode d'histoire coloniale. Le Vache de la Case à Madagascar (Alger: 1884); Henri Froidevaux and E.F. Gautier, Un manuscrit arabicomalagache sur les campagnes de la Case dans l'Imoro de 1659 à 1663 (Paris: 1907). 64. CAOM C5A1, pièce 7, fos. 2–9. 65. Cauche, Relations véritable, 1–2.

6 Wonders of Nature, Diversity of Events: The Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval Diane C. Margolf “It is an excellent custom among the Maldivians,” wrote Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, “that when a lord is disgraced he goes every day to pay his court to the king till he is taken again into favor: his presence disarms the prince’s indignation.”1 Such references to foreign peoples and cultures abound in The Spirit of the Laws, but Montesquieu owed this particular observation to François Pyrard, a Frenchman who had published a detailed account of his travels in South Asia (including a five-year stay in the Maldive Islands) more than a century before the first edition of Montesquieu’s masterpiece appeared. A close reading of the Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval suggests some interesting similarities between the two books. Like Montesquieu, Pyrard incorporated comments about climate, geography, politics, trade, and religion in his analysis of exotic peoples and places. His narrative offered many implicit or explicit comparisons of Europeans (especially the French) with the “others” he had encountered, yet it also reflected the kind of cultural relativism associated with The Spirit of the Laws and with the Age of Enlightenment more generally. It is tempting to see Pyrard not only as a source for Montesquieu’s comments about the Maldives and the Portuguese empire in South Asia, but also as a kind of intellectual ancestor to the eighteenth-century philosophe.2 On the other hand, the differences between Pyrard’s Voyage and The Spirit of the Laws are equally striking. Montesquieu’s masterpiece was clearly the work of an aristocratic scholar and judge. The fruit of twenty years’ study, travel, and reflection, it purported to analyze the connections among history,

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law, and politics on a grand scale, ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to the constitutional struggles of eighteenth-century France. Pyrard, however, drew upon his experiences as a shipwreck survivor, captive, soldier, and merchant for a more pragmatic purpose: to advocate greater French involvement in South Asian commerce. He clearly shaped the narrative of his adventures with an eye to sharing the practical knowledge he had gained; that knowledge, in turn, became the basis of his advice on how the French might profitably expand their role in South Asia. In his preface to The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu addressed “the public” and “his readers” to explain the purpose of his work. He expressed a desire “to afford new reasons to every man to love his prince, his country, his laws; new reasons to render him more sensible in every nation and government of the blessings he enjoys.” His goal, in short, was “to make mankind recover from their prejudices.”3 In dedicating the third edition of his Voyage to Guillaume du Vair, bishop of Lisieux, Pyrard described his aims in rather different terms: “Should it please you, Monseigneur, betimes to cast a glance on this little work, you will see herein the unvarnished and truthful image of all that is most wondrous in nature, as also the most remarkable diversity of events and occurrences in the life of man.”4 Pyrard thus emphasized the Voyage’s value to an aristocratic patron in terms of the natural wonders and unique human experiences it recounted, rather than the universal education it might offer. Nevertheless, Pyrard’s Voyage reveals a considerable body of information about Asia in the seventeenth century, as well as important insights into contemporary French views of the region. While Pyrard’s ten-year sojourn in the Maldive Islands and India (from 1601 until 1611) may be traced through his published account, details about his life before and after his travels remain unclear. Albert Gray, translator of the Voyage for the Hakluyt Society, speculates that François Pyrard was born around 1570 or 1580 in the Breton town of Laval, and that he may have traveled to the “East Indies” as a ship’s purser. Pyrard himself simply states that he was “not less desirous of seeing the world than of getting rich.”5 The expedition Pyrard joined consisted of two vessels, the Croissant and the Corbin. Outfitted by a group of merchants from St. Malo, Vitré, and Laval, the ships set forth in May 1601 “seeking a path to the Indies, to show the French the way; in short, to draw from the fountain-head.”6 This “fountain-head” was Europe’s trade with Asia, which Pyrard portrayed as unfairly dominated by Spain and Portugal through France’s own negligence: “[T]he French, after neglecting countless fair opportunities (which the Portuguese and Spaniards have not only taken but eagerly sought), are constrained to receive from those nations, in retail, the gold, spices, and the curious things of the East, in place of having fetched them themselves, and distributing them to others.” In essence, he argued that “the Portuguese and Spaniards are trying to keep to themselves those elements which are common to all, and by all manner of wrong-doing to chase from the seas the French and other nations who would voyage and traffic therein.”7

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For Pyrard, the mission to establish France’s rightful place in the arena of Asian commerce was deflected by shipwreck. After sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and surviving several dangerous storms off the coast of Madagascar, the Corbin foundered on the reefs of the Maldive Islands in July 1602. The islands’ inhabitants rescued Pyrard and about forty of his shipmates, including the Corbin’s captain, who promptly became prisoners of the Maldivian king. Despite the ravages of sickness and other misfortunes, Pyrard and three others survived until the arrival of a hostile fleet from Bengal ended their five-year captivity and offered them the chance of returning to France. Just prior to this event, Pyrard dreamed that he “was in full liberty in a Christian land”; awaking to find himself still in “Mahometan servitude” in the Maldives, he prayed for deliverance and vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Compostela.8 Two days later, his prayers were answered: the Bengali forces attacked and pillaged the main island of Malé, and Pyrard and his companions departed with them for Chittagong in February 1607. The next four and a half years comprised a mixture of travel and residence, illness and health, imprisonment and liberty. The pervasive theme of Pyrard’s adventures, however, remained his quest to return home. After a brief stay in Bengal, he visited various ports on the Malabar coast and spent about eight months at Calicut, “a very powerful state, and of great extent: it is the state which has given the greatest trouble and caused most of their reverses to the Portuguese.”9 Having failed to obtain passage on a ship headed for France, Pyrard and two other Frenchmen attempted to reach Cochin in March 1608, but they were seized by Portuguese robbers and taken to their destination by force. They were thrown into the Tronco prison, which Pyrard portrayed as “verily the most frightful and cruel, I think, that exists in any part of the world . . . the heat and infection were insupportable, and caused our whole bodies to be covered with large boils and eruptions, which gave us very grievous pain.”10 Thanks to the intervention of Jesuit fathers from the local college, Pyrard and his companions were released after about ten days and transferred to Goa in June 1608. Though Goa became his chief residence for the next two years, Pyrard traveled with Portuguese fleets, going east on one voyage to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Malacca (Melaka) and north to Diu and Cambaye on another. In February 1610, Pyrard finally succeeded in gaining passage on a carrack headed for Portugal, but the ship suffered damages off the coast of St. Helena and had to be abandoned. Pyrard was forced to spend two months in Brazil before joining the crew of a Flemish ship headed for Spain. After fulfilling his vow to visit the shrine of St. James at Compostela, he traveled by sea to La Rochelle and 11 reached his native town of Laval in February 1611. Pyrard set about writing an account of his experiences almost immediately upon returning to France. Published in Paris and dedicated to the queen mother, Marie de Medici, the Discours du voyage des François aux Indes orientales, ensemble des divers accidens, adventures et dangers de l’auteur en plusieurs royaumes des Indes et du sejour qu ’il y a fait par dix ans, etc. appeared in 1611.

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The volume included a special treatise that described the region’s animals and vegetation and offered advice to those who might undertake a similar voyage; this treatise was specifically dedicated to Pierre Jeannin, président à mortier in the parlement of Dijon. Four years later, Pyrard produced a second edition that expanded the narrative of his adventures from one volume to two and that carried another double dedication to Marie de Medici and Leonard Destrappes, royal councillor and archbishop of Aux. The last edition of Pyrard’s work published in his lifetime appeared in 1619, just two years before his death. The dedicatory epistle of volume one was addressed to Guillaume du Vair, while in the second volume Pyrard acknowledged (and requested) the favor of Charles Duret, sieur de Chevry. Now entitled Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval, contenant sa navigation aux Indes orientates, Maldives, Moluques, et Brésil, etc., it included a vocabulary of the Maldive language, which Pyrard had mastered during his stay in the islands. The subtitle also promised the reader detailed information about the “various accidents, adventures, and dangers” (divers accidens, adventures, et dangers) which the author had endured, along with the “customs, laws, methods, polity and government . . . trade and commerce . . . animals, trees, fruits, and other singularities” (moeurs, loix, façons de faire, police et gouvernment . . . trafic et commerce . . . animaux, arbres, fruicts et autres singularitez) of the countries he had visited. In this edition, the treatise on animal and plant life was dedicated to royal councillor and magistrate Guillaume Lusson, another of Pyrard’s acknowledged patrons.12 The rapid publication of three editions of Pyrard’s Voyage within the space of nine years suggests that contemporaries were intrigued by this travel narrative, while the dedications show that he enjoyed contacts and even favor among royal officials and intellectuals in Paris. Ironically, some critics later in the century disputed Pyrard’s authorship of the work. Samuel Sorbière implied that royal councillor Jérome Bignon had actually produced the two-volume edition of 1615, while Pierre-Daniel Huet and Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux asserted that Pierre Bergeron, a cleric with strong interests in literature and geography, not only edited but also wrote the 1619 edition, based on his conversations with Pyrard. Huet and Tallemant des Réaux both described Pyrard himself as a drunkard who was incapable of redacting his extraordinary travels in literary form.13 The 1619 edition’s dedicatory epistles certainly hint that Pyrard had fallen on hard times. “Receive, then, Monseigneur . . . the relics of this living wreck, who, having survived so many strange and luckless adventures, in so many quarters of sea and land, even now in the port fails not every day to experience all the rigours and violence of his habitual misfortune,” he wrote to Guillaume du Vair.14 Pyrard addressed himself to Charles Duret in similar terms: having expanded “the story of misfortunes and adventures no less various than strange and even wondrous,” he begged Duret “to collect as it were the last planks of my shipwreck, and to take into your particular protection my miserable fortunes.”15 Modern scholars, however, tend to endorse Pyrard’s role as the principal author of his own work, emphasizing that the Voyage clearly

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reflected the Frenchman’s own experiences in South Asia and contributed significantly to early modern Europeans’ knowledge of the region.16 Pyrard’s description of the Maldive Islands was an important part of that contribution. Few accounts of these islands were widely known in his day, no doubt because few Europeans had spent so much time there.17 Jean and Raoul Parmentier, two brothers from Normandy, had briefly visited the Maldives during the course of a voyage to Sumatra in 1529. They had stayed only about a week, however, and the tale of their voyage (including their comments about the islands’ geography and people) remained unpublished until the nineteenth century.18 An earlier visitor provided a more detailed description of the area and its people: the Moroccan Abu ‘Abdallah ibn Battuta, whose Rihla represents one of the most famous travel narratives of the fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta visited the Maldive Islands between 1343 and 1344, apparently having heard about them through the network of Muslim merchants who traveled between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Like Pyrard, Ibn Battuta was a keen observer of his surroundings, but as a Muslim scholar with legal training, he participated in Maldivian politics, society, and culture in ways that François Pyrard never did. Shortly after his arrival, Ibn Battuta became a qadi (judge) who executed his judicial duties with zeal; he also married four wives, which helped him to establish connections and status among the local nobility. Unfortunately for the new magistrate, these actions apparently provoked retaliation from his rivals at the Maldivian royal court, and he departed the islands after a sojourn of about eight months. Yet European readers probably would have been unaware of Ibn Battuta’s travels, including his impressions of the Maldive Islands; the Rihla was relatively unknown even in the Muslim 19 world until the nineteenth century. Just as Pyrard’s stay in the Maldives occupied five of his ten years abroad, his comments about the archipelago and its inhabitants dominated roughly the first half of his travel narrative. He himself was well aware that he possessed an unrivalled knowledge of Maldivian politics, culture, and society that he was anxious to impart, even at the risk of boring his audience: “Having then resided at these islands for the space of five years, or thereabouts, but sorely against my will, this long sojourn gave me a knowledge of the country, and an acquaintance with the language, manners, and customs of the inhabitants, greater, perhaps, and I may say it without vanity, than any other European has ever had.” In Pyrard’s view, “since God had granted me grace through the means of my misfortunes to learn so many particular things, I was obliged to share my knowledge with the public and my country.”20 In describing the Maldives, Pyrard juxtaposed images of natural, primitive beauty with considerations of divine order and material comfort. The islands, he wrote, “are divided in thirteen provinces, called by [the natives] atallons . . . each atallon is separated from the rest, and contains in itself a great number of little isles. It is a marvel to see each of these atallons, surrounded on all sides by a great bank of stone, and no human device could so well wall in a space of land

“Insula S. Laurentii, volgo Madagascar,” 1662, reproduced from Joan Blaeu’s Grand Atlas of the 17th Century World. Courtesy of Studio Editions Ltd., London, England.

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as it does.” In addition to such natural defenses, the atallons were separated by sea channels that enabled easy transportation and communication among them, “in which thing,” Pyrard declared, “is to be observed an effect of God’s providence, which leaves nothing imperfect.”21 He went on to enumerate the islands’ chief foodstuffs: millet, yams, bananas, citrus fruits, and most of all coconuts.22 He characterized the coconut tree as “the most wondrous manna imaginable: for this single tree can supply everything necessary to man, furnishing him in plenty with wine, honey, sugar, milk and butter . . . . Moreover, the wood, bark, leaves, and nuts provide the greater part of their furniture and utensils.”23 Poultry and fish were readily available, but ants and vermin constantly threatened the islanders’ food supply; as a result, they built their storehouses and residences on piles offshore. “This great abundance makes living easy,” Pyrard concluded, “and everything is cheap.”24 Pyrard’s view of the Maldives’ inhabitants reflected a complex mixture of curiosity, admiration, and disapproval. He described the natives as “exceeding adroit, much given to the manufacture of all kinds of things, and excelling therein, even in letters and science, according to their notions,” but he also characterized them as “indolent and negligent” when it came to the pursuit of wealth: “most of them care only for the wherewithal to live,” he noted, “without ambition, desire, or trouble for aught beside.”25 Despite his praise for the Maldivians’ industry, intelligence, and good manners, Pyrard condemned the sexual behavior of men and women alike. “Adultery, incest, and sodomy are common,” he asserted, “notwithstanding the severity of the law and penalties. As for simple lewdness, nothing is more common . . . . The women are strangely wanton, and the men are no better; but they have less of force and spirit.” Pyrard attributed these shortcomings to a combination of climate, lifestyle (“their nerves becoming slack by being continually in the water”), and the abuse of opium.26 On the other hand, Pyrard admired the Maldivians’ social organization and political institutions, many of which he apparently found comparable to those of Europeans. There were clear distinctions between Maldivian nobles and commoners and among the ranks of the native elite; an elaborate system of justice, tax collection, and provincial administration; and neatly arranged communities where “everyone knows his own parish.”27 Most of all, there was a government which was “royal, very ancient and absolute; the king is feared, and everything depends upon him.”28 Pyrard devoted several chapters to describing the Maldivian ruler’s palace, court and household. The royal residence, situated on the island of Malé, comprised several one-story stone buildings and a complex of gardens, ponds, courtyards, and orchards, as well as a guard house and magazines for weapons. In the great halls where the king would greet visitors and native lords, the floors were constructed of inlaid wood and raised three feet above the ground “for a precaution against the ants.” Colorful mats were spread across the floor, and

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silk tapestries hung on the walls and from the ceilings. soldiers and strangers,” Pyrard wrote,

“In the hall of the

the king had spread upon the ceiling the great ensign and banner of our vessel, which was blue, with the arms of France in gold, beautifully worked. He was greatly proud of this, showing it off as a curiosity to strangers; and offtimes he made me explain what was represented in the arms, as indeed I did, not without causing him to wonder at the greatness of our king.29

Some aspects of this royal court might have seemed exotic to Pyrard’s readers: the Maldivian king received visitors and bestowed honors while sitting cross-legged on a raised platform covered with carpet, while his nobles and gentlemen received dishes of fruit and betel as marks of great favor. In other respects, however, Pyrard’s portrait of Maldivian court etiquette almost anticipates descriptions of Louis XIV’s Versailles later in the seventeenth century: At this court the order of ranks is strictly observed; for those of lower condition remain standing, unless the king, or in his absence the grandees who may be there, bid them to be seated. The places next to where the king is wont to sit are the most honourable, and so on in proportion to the distance . . . . [Nobles] never come for a fresh visit without bringing a present: for no one, whether noble or merchant, is admitted to salute the king unless he brings an offering . . . . By this manner of offering presents a man is soon aware whether he is in his good graces or not, for if the king accepts his present, he is assured of his goodwill; but if not, or if the king says not a word to the messenger who announces his arrival and conveys his respects, it is a certain sign of royal disfavour and disgrace.30

According to Pyrard, the Maldivian king’s wealth derived primarily from the islands’ thriving commerce with merchants from India, Arabia, Sumatra, and Ceylon. In addition to revenues from his own domains, the king collected taxes from his subjects and claimed ownership of anything washed ashore. Despite their lack of mineral resources and arable land, the Maldive Islands were a rich source of coconut products, all of which were in high demand elsewhere. These included not only the coconut itself, but also its oil, leaves, and a sturdy rope made from the fibers of coconut shells.31 The Maldivians did a brisk trade in cowries, tortoise shells, fish, and rush mats, in return for which they obtained items they needed but could not produce: raw cotton and silk, spices, iron, and rice. Although barter was a chief means of exchange, the Maldivians accepted and retained gold and silver currency from abroad, and the Maldivian king issued his own silver coin (known as a larin). “So the Maldives are frequented from all quarters for their commodities,” Pyrard concluded, “inasmuch as they possess so many things that foreigners prize and require.”32

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Along with his analysis of the islanders’ economy and trade, Pyrard wrote at length about their ceremonies of marriage, burial, and religious worship. “The religion which they profess is that of Mahomet,” he stated, “and there is no other throughout the islands, save among the foreigners who land there.”33 His detailed portrait of the Maldivians’ marriage practices (which included polygamy and divorce), religious holidays, and daily routine of prayers and washing clearly reflected the predominant influence of Islam, for which he sometimes expressed a cautious approval. He admired the “cleanliness and neatness” of the natives’ preparations for the celebration of Ramadan, noting that the festivities reinforced rather than overturned social order: the soldiers, lords, clerics, and others entertained only those within their own group, and the king feasted each group in its turn.34 The themes of order and cleanliness recurred in Pyrard’s portrait of the Maldivians’ main mosque, located on the island of Malé: The paved floor of the temple is covered with pretty mats and carpets; and they are careful to keep it neat and clean; none durst even spit or blow his nose there . . . . And generally throughout the temple, which is spacious and of large extent, there are partitioned spaces . . . for those of a certain order, estate, age, or quality. And this order is so well observed, that no one would dare to set himself in a place ordained for one of another condition, otherwise he would be fined in a penalty prescribed in this behalf; so there is no jealousy or dispute about places.35

Pyrard’s comments sometimes suggested mild respect for Muslim worship and its impact on Maldivian society, as well as points of comparison between the natives’ religious practices and his own: “They also use beads, as we do,” he observed, “but without crosses.”36 Yet he could condemn just as quickly. “What I considered indecent,” he declared, “besides the superstition of their damnable and abominable errors, was their washing and bathing all in the public gaze.” While collectively praying aloud, male worshippers revealed intimate details of their sexual conduct with their wives and other women—another practice Pyrard decried.37 The Voyage’s description of the Maldives contained a wealth of information about the islands and their inhabitants, yet the book was more than just a catalogue of facts. Throughout the narrative, Pyrard conveyed a sense of similarity between Maldivian and French society that showed each could be understood in relation to the other, and he accomplished this without simplistic judgments of superiority or inferiority. Moreover, Pyrard described his experiences in terms that would have appealed to an elite audience of readers in early seventeenth-century France. Specifically, he presented himself as both a hapless victim of shipwreck, illness, and imprisonment and a courtier who ultimately won protection and favor from a foreign prince. Though he made no particular reference to courtesy handbooks or treatises on manners in the text of the Voyage, we know that such literature had been popular since the sixteenth

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century and still enjoyed wide circulation in his day.38 The story of Pyrard’s social and political advancement clearly showed that the requirements for winning a nobleman’s or monarch’s favor—obedience, intelligence, loyal service, and a desire to please—were much the same in the Maldive Islands as in early modern France. The key to Pyrard’s success as a courtier in the Maldives lay primarily in his efforts to learn the natives’ language. In the aftermath of the Corbin’s wreck, Pyrard and several of his fellow shipmates were seized by the Maldivian king’s brother-in-law, who was lord of the island where they were being held. Since the Frenchmen had no money to purchase food, they had to work for their sustenance, but Pyrard quickly distinguished himself among his companions because of his attempts to communicate in the Maldivian tongue (known as Divehi). Before long, Pyrard wrote of his captor, “he was at all times well pleased that I should be of his company to entertain him, and to answer all the questions he put to me about our manners and customs.”39 As Pyrard’s facility in Divehi grew, so did the lord’s favor toward him. This ultimately resulted in more food and better treatment for Pyrard and his companions, as well as opportunities for Pyrard to visit neighboring islands and be presented at the Maldivian king’s court. Indeed Pyrard’s account of his social and political advancement reveals a double transformation. For their part, the Maldivians now regarded him as “some great lord from this part of the world [i.e., Europe]”—an opinion Pyrard admitted he did nothing to correct, “seeing that it served me.” On the other hand, Pyrard described his lord as “in the highest degree kindly and merciful, as well as generous and magnanimous, . . . I venture to assert that in disposition and good manners he would yield to no gentleman of Europe.”40 If Pyrard had proven himself worthy to enjoy his foreign captors’ favor, his comments suggest that he saw them as equally deserving of his service and obedience. Pyrard’s linguistic abilities and courtly conduct ultimately led to his becoming a close companion of the Maldivian king himself, Ibrahim III.41 Arriving at the island of Malé with his lord, Pyrard wrote, “I saluted the king in the language and in the mode of the country—which I had carefully studied the moment I was admitted, and had been particularly instructed in beforehand.”42 At the king’s request, Pyrard explained the functions of several weapons and navigational instruments taken from the Corbin that were presented to the king on this occasion. His performance apparently pleased and impressed the king, for Pyrard was summoned for further conversation. He did not forget the original purpose of his voyage, nor the message he wished to urge upon those reading his account. He used his newfound access to the Maldivian monarchy to promote French interests: “While I discoursed upon the greatness of the kingdom of France, of the generosity of its noblesse, and their dexterity in arms, he said he was surprised that they had not conquered the Indies, and had left it to the Portuguese, who had given him to understand that their king was the greatest and most powerful of all the Christian kings.”43

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Finding that Ibrahim III possessed a lively curiosity about crafts and technical expertise of all kinds, Pyrard shared his knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation, as well as stories of France and its monarch. He also found himself much in demand by the king’s wives and ladies of the Maldivian court, who plied him with questions about their French counterparts. The Maldivian queens and princesses were surprised to learn that for all his greatness, the king of France had only one wife, but they approved of the relative liberty enjoyed by married Frenchwomen, in contrast to their own seclusion. “Thus was I ever a welcome guest at the palace,” Pyrard declared, “and went frequently to entertain them with various stories in answer to their questions.”44 Like many European courtiers, however, Pyrard also experienced jealousy and disgrace as a result of his advancement. Over the course of several months, he managed to reunite eight of his shipmates on the island of Malé and assured their kind treatment by the Maldivian lords. The group included five Flemings who, according to Pyrard, envied his privileged position and distrusted him because of the very talent that had proven so useful for them all—his command of the Maldivian language. “They were jealous of seeing me more courteously received than they were, and well liked and esteemed by the king,” he claimed, and “because I spoke the Maldive language with some facility, while they understood it not at all, they imagined that I spoke evil of them, and that I was the cause of their being less at their ease.”45 Four of the Fleming sailors then managed to escape, although Pyrard concluded that their small boat had been wrecked during a storm and that the men themselves had probably perished. Ibrahim III was incensed at this act of treason. Despite the fact that he had not known of or joined in the escape, Pyrard felt the sting of royal hostility and rejection: the king forbade any gifts of food to Pyrard from the royal household’s stores. “A man to whom the king does not give food is of no account,” he noted, “and has no position . . . even the great lords accept rice of the king, and it is a high honor, too; so, on the contrary, is it a kind of infamy to be deprived of it.”46 In accordance with “the custom of the country,” Pyrard continued to appear at the palace regularly for the next two months and finally succeeded in regaining the king’s approval. Indeed, the king rewarded the Frenchman with a residence close to the palace, gifts of rice, money, a servant, and clear demonstrations of royal regard that won Pyrard the friendship of other Maldivian lords. Possessing coconut trees (“which are there a source of riches”) and hired laborers to tend them, he had ample means to support himself. In fact, Pyrard observed, “I became somewhat rich, according to the notions of the country, to which I conformed in every possible way.”47 Moreover, his privileged status among the Maldivians enhanced his ability to represent foreign merchants in commercial transactions. “I trafficked with the foreign ships which arrived there,” he exulted, “and with so much address, that they put entire confidence in me, and left large quantities of merchandise of all kinds for me to

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sell in their absence, or to keep against their return, and gave me a certain share.”48 Though he possessed wealth, privileges, and a comfortable life in the Maldives, Pyrard realized that he remained a prisoner there. He regretted that he could not return to France and deplored the fact that since Christian worship was forbidden on the islands, he could not pursue religious devotions according to his own faith. All of that changed when he and his three companions (survivors of the shipwreck that had occurred five years earlier) left the Maldive Islands, joining the fleet from Bengal that attacked Malé in February 1607. Despite the favor he had received from the Maldivian king and court, Pyrard surrendered to the Bengalis with alacrity. At first the invaders threatened to kill him (thinking that he was Portuguese), but later they offered him their protection and a certain amount of freedom; in return, he shared with them information about the French ships’ cannon and equipment, which had been seized. “For all this,” Pyrard explained, “they valued me much, and were exceedingly kindly towards me.”49 After ten days of theft and pillage, the Bengalis prepared to return to Chittagong with valuable cargo, one royal prisoner (the Maldivian king’s brother-in-law), and the four Europeans who had survived the wreck of the Corbin. Though he regretted the death of Ibrahim III, which had occurred during the raid, Pyrard was not entirely sorry to see his captivity on the islands come to an end: “I went and took farewell of the queens and my friends, not without tears, indeed— theirs of sorrow and chagrin, but mine of joy.”50 During the course of the next thirteen months, Pyrard traveled extensively along the eastern and western coasts of India. He described the kingdom of Bengal with enthusiasm, though his stay there was brief. “I find no country in all the East Indies more abundantly supplied with all things needful for food, with the riches of nature and art,” he proclaimed, “and were not the navigation so dangerous, it would be the fairest, most pleasant, fertile, and profitable in the whole world.”51 Seeking passage to Calicut in the hope of departing from that port for France, Pyrard sojourned among the Malabars and visited some of their principal centers of governance and trade: Moutingué (Muttungal), Chombaye (Chombal), and Badora (Badagara). The Frenchman offered a detailed portrait of the Malabars’ conduct and society that clearly contrasted with what he had witnessed in the Maldives: They are but seldom artisans, almost all being merchants, robbers, or sea warriors. There is no class of nobles among them; their distinction is solely in valour and wealth, and all sorts of men are welcomed among them . . . . All their peoples are employed, for such as are not brave enough for soldiers, they make mariners, or press them into service for hire, or use them for selling the produce of their robberies.52

Despite the Malabars’ apparent lack of social hierarchy or established political leadership, Pyrard depicted them as orderly and successful marauders who exercised a principled kind of piracy. They only committed robberies at

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sea and divided the loot equally among themselves, giving a reward to the man whom they had elected to lead their expedition if they chose; they even donated alms to the poor from the proceeds of their thefts. In addition, he noted that the Malabars harbored a hostility toward the Portuguese which made them hospitable toward other Europeans, including Pyrard himself. “A man who would be welcomed among them must be always talking of warring against the Portuguese, and always speaking ill of them,” the Frenchman remarked, “for, in truth, I never heard a good word said for them.”53 Arriving in Calicut in June 1607, Pyrard left the world of the Malabar corsairs for one that contained more familiar political, social, and economic landmarks. “This town is not like the others of the Malabar coast, for it has its inns and drinking-shops, where food and lodging have their price,” he wrote, and the themes of commerce and politics resurfaced in his narrative. He described the city’s customhouse vividly: a huge, square stone building where goods of all kinds were stored in separate warehouses, kept under lock and key by both the merchant owners and the royal customs officers. Pyrard and one of his companions were escorted “with all honour and respect” to an audience with the king of Calicut, where Pyrard again noted the complex relations between such local princes and the European powers contending for influence in the region. The Dutch had already made overtures of friendship to this ruler, much to the dismay of the Portuguese. When the king asked “which was the more puissant prince, Count Maurice or the king of France,” Pyrard replied: I told him that without comparison it was the king of France; but he replied that the Hollanders said the same of their Count Maurice, and the Portuguese of their king, and that he knew not what he ought to believe; whereto I answered according to the truth.54

Pyrard and the rest of his companions (who rejoined him several weeks later) were treated well in Calicut during their eight-month stay. As in the Maldive Islands, Pyrard proved to be an observant visitor who incorporated details about Calicut’s climate, architecture, politics, and society into his narrative. These included an analysis of the caste system, with its distinctions among “Bramenis” (Brahmans), “Nairs” (Nayars), “Moucois” (Mukkuvans), and “Tiva” (Tiyans). Pyrard avidly described the caste members’ dress, hair styles, jewelry, and occupations, as well as other practices that supported this strict system of social differentiation. He wrote of the Brahmans: Their food must be prepared by those of their own race, or even by themselves, no matter how great folks they be: for after food is touched, whether cooked or during the cooking, none durst touch the man who carries it; if they had to die, they would not eat anything that had been touched by a man or woman who was not of their race and faith.55

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As in the Maldive Islands, Pyrard was intrigued by local religious practices. He referred to Hindus as “Gentiles” and commented extensively on their rituals and beliefs. “They believe that after death their souls pass into the bodies of cows, buffaloes, or bulls, and that when the cow or bull dies, they take to other bodies,” he remarked, “and I believe that to be the reason why they will not eat the flesh of these . . . . They would not for anything in the world willingly permit the slaughter of any animal, and would sooner redeem it with money.”56 Pyrard sometimes associated such practices with superstition, yet he praised the Hindus’ moral conduct: “The uprightness of conversation among men and women is most admirable; for although girls and boys live together, these as naked as those, yet there will never escape them a lascivious word or glance, nor any indecent act; . . . sodomy and incest are never heard of.”57 Pyrard also noted Calicut’s wealth, which derived from a combination of international trade and indigenous products. The kingdom possessed an abundance of natural commodities: pomegranates, oranges, lemons, melons, ginger, cotton, and precious stones; there were also exotic beasts, such as elephants and monkeys. Most of all, there was pepper—“the principal wealth of the country,” from which the king of Calicut drew great profits in gold.58 In addition to these riches, Calicut was a thriving commercial center that attracted merchants from around the world. Pyrard attributed this situation to something he had not seen in the Maldive Islands (nor perhaps even in his native France): a policy of religious toleration that encompassed Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Jews. The king of Calicut, he wrote, permits the exercise of every kind of religion, and yet it is strictly forbidden to talk, dispute, or quarrel on that subject; so there never arises any contention on that score, every one living in great liberty of conscience under the favor and authority of the king, who holds that to be a cardinal maxim of government, with a view to making his kingdom very rich and of great interest.59

Pyrard eventually made his way to Goa, the principal center of Portuguese power in South Asia. He characterized his arrival at Goa as “a revival of hope, and the commencement of a happier fortune; . . . thenceforward I have always lived among Christians, and no longer, as before, under subjection to infidels, deprived of the exercise of our Holy Religion.”60 As a result of this change, Pyrard’s gaze shifted more decisively toward the European presence in the region. While the second volume of the Voyage contains information about the customs, dress, and conduct of the native peoples Pyrard encountered in India and elsewhere, it focuses mainly on analyzing the Portuguese and their chief competitors, the English and the Dutch. “A man who has been at Goa,” Pyrard declared, “can assure himself of having seen the greatest curiosities of the Indies.”61 The chapters devoted to describing this city reveal a teeming multitude of peoples, products, and politics—a foreign capital that nevertheless bore the imprint of European

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influence. Pyrard marveled at how the Portuguese had “managed to construct so many superb buildings, churches, monasteries, palaces, forts, and other edifices built in the European style; also at the good order, regulation, and policy they have established, and the power they have acquired, everything being as well maintained and observed as at Lisbon itself.”62 He offered his readers details about the local geography and climate, as well as describing the city’s varied inhabitants and their activities. Natives (divided by caste) rubbed elbows with sailors, soldiers, and merchants from various Indian principalities, China, Japan, Armenia, Flanders, and Venice. Indian craftsmen and artisans of all kinds plied their trades, working under the supervision of Portuguese masters. Pyrard also noted that within their own ranks, the Portuguese of Goa had a clear social hierarchy that placed those who came to India from Portugal above those born in the city; the children of mixed unions of Portuguese and Indian or African parents were the “least esteemed.”63 Pyrard’s comments about Goa and the Portuguese administration reflected his usual keen observation of everything and everyone around him. In addition, he often expressed the same mixture of admiration, respect, and disapproval that was evident in his earlier descriptions of the native peoples he had encountered. He depicted the Royal Hospital at Goa, where he was a patient for about three weeks, in glowing terms, praising “the perfect order, regulation, and cleanliness observed, the great care taken of the sick, and the supply of all comforts that can be wished for, whether in regard to doctors, drugs and appliances for restoring health, the food that is given to eat, or the spiritual consolation that is obtainable at any hour.”64 His analysis of Portuguese officialdom in Goa was more nuanced: Pyrard admired its power but noted its weaknesses, especially regarding the position of the viceroy. As the direct representative of the Habsburg government, the viceroy governed Goa (and the Portuguese empire in Asia) with pride, splendor, and absolute authority—but only for a period of three years. Pyrard vividly portrayed the viceroy’s ceremonial entry upon arriving in India; his entourage of pages and gentlemen on richly caparisoned horses; his ability to pardon crimes and receive ambassadors; and his power to dispense appointments, gifts, and rewards to other royal officials. Yet such power and privileges were temporary, and all Portuguese officials tended to exploit their positions for personal profit. “So it is,” Pyrard claimed, “that for the three years the viceroy and the other captains and governors are in the Indies, they take more pains to enrich themselves than to protect and preserve the State.”65 In depicting government and society in Goa, Pyrard also emphasized the presence and influence of the Catholic Church. “All the churches and monasteries of Goa,” he stated, “are superbly built, and most richly equipped and adorned with numerous reliquaries of chased gold and silver, with pearls and precious stones.”66 He estimated that the city and its suburbs possessed fifty such institutions, along with schools and seminaries, and he noted approvingly that the Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans were working to convert native

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peoples and rulers to Christianity.67 Regular and secular clerics alike could administer the sacraments, he commented, and like their counterparts among the Portuguese officials, “all ecclesiastics are passing rich and make their private gains.”68 As the “first prelate in the Indies,” the archbishop of Goa exercised considerable authority over Catholic clerics and institutions throughout Asia. The Voyage provided a flattering portrait of Alexeio de Menezes, who held this office during Pyrard’s stay: it combined statements about the archbishop’s character (“a good-natured man, and free-handed in almsgiving”) with an exhaustively detailed account of his revenues, servants, and entertainments (“He is served with covered dishes, and eats in public”).69 For all his religious orthodoxy, Pyrard wrote with less enthusiasm about the Inquisition, which was also based in Goa. “It is a terrible and fearful thing to be there even once,” he noted, “for you have no proctor or advocate to speak for you, while they are judges and parties at once.”70 Not surprisingly, Pyrard also took pains to describe Goa’s enormous commercial wealth, which represented “the traffic of all the Indian nations.”71 The city served as an entrepot for trade among Asian and European countries. Foreign and native merchants bargained there for silk, porcelain, fine wooden boxes inlaid with ivory and gems, sugar, paper, musk, and metals—gold, silver, and tin. In describing the Portuguese trading ships that brought merchandise from Macao and Japan to Goa, Pyrard declared, “It is impossible to tell all the great riches and all the rare and beautiful things which these ships bring back.”72 Material goods were not the only things for sale: “As for the slaves of Goa,” he remarked, “their number is infinite; they are of all the Indian nations . . . . They are exported to Portugal, and to all places under the Portuguese dominion.”73 Plentiful goods at low prices meant that a man could maintain himself in some estate with relatively little money, though Pyrard apparently never considered himself rich, as he had in the Maldive Islands. After another bout of imprisonment (once again relieved through the good offices of a Jesuit father), he joined the ranks of soldiers who served on the Portuguese armadas, service that eventually took him on commercial and military expeditions to Ceylon, the Moluccas, and the Malabar coast. Pyrard’s description of the typical soldier’s life contrasted the danger and adventure of warfare against the Malabar pirates with the gambling, feasting, violence and sexual dalliances that occupied leisure hours. He also contrasted the Portuguese soldiers’ pretensions to aristocratic status with their limited means: “They walk in their suits of silk with the greatest pride imaginable,” he observed, “but as soon as they are arrived at their lodging they doff these promptly, and others take them who may want to go to town in their turn.”74 In this precarious world, Pyrard’s own fortunes fluctuated. As a foreigner, he was constantly under suspicion by the Portuguese authorities, threatened with death, and subjected to insults and abuse throughout his two-year stay. As in the Maldives, however, he adapted himself to local conditions by trying to heal whatever quarrels arose and obeying those around him. Ironically, he succeeded

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in disguising his skills and intelligence, convincing his companions that he was illiterate and could not understand their language. Such strategies enabled him to collect the information about the Portuguese government, economy, and military which he revealed to his countrymen in the Voyage.75 Pyrard’s detailed description of the Portuguese in South Asia thus enabled him to advocate greater French involvement in the region’s trade and politics. Initially beset only by the Malabar pirates, the Portuguese now faced the threats of ships captured by their enemies, rising prices, and serious competition from other European powers. As a result, their domination of local politics and commerce was weakening: The Portuguese used to tell these Indians that their king was the greatest in Christendom, that he had all the other Christian kings and princes for vassals, and that their nation was the most notable and valiant in all the West. This the Indians continued to believe until the English and Hollanders showed them the contrary: as also have we given them in those parts to apprehend the greatness and sovereignty of each of the 76 other Christian kings and princes, and especially of our own.

According to Pyrard, the time was ripe for the French to claim their fair share of the region’s commercial riches. To do so, they would have to establish good relations with native rulers and traders, some of whom remained relatively independent (or defiant) of Portuguese power.77 Pyrard also emphasized that flaws in the Portuguese government in South Asia offered opportunities the French could exploit. For all its riches, this overseas empire was costing the Habsburg rulers of Spain and Portugal dearly: “the revenue of the Indies cannot at present be sufficient to pay and maintain the state, in spiritual as well as in temporal concerns,” he claimed, “and the cost is greater than the value.”78 Noting that both Portuguese and Indian officials were dissatisfied with the temporary duration of their positions and privileges, he wrote: The viceroys, being there so short a while, cannot take resolution to revolt . . . . And when they could do it, they would require to be avowed by some powerful king in Europe, who would act as do the Spanish kings in Portugal . . . . They would need also supplies of men, money, munitions of war, ships, and merchandise from Europe. For the maintenance of this Empire is so great a business as would require a puissant king to undertake it, one who would have to bide his time by sinking more than 79 he would draw from it.

Pyrard himself seemed to offer the key to French intervention by publicizing the knowledge of politics, commerce, and society he had gained during his travels. Indeed, this information effectively took the place of the material goods he had not acquired.80

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The “Advice to those who would undertake the Voyage to the East Indies,” which appears at the end of volume two, concludes Pyrard’s account of his adventures; it also distilled his various experiences into a series of admonitions to other travelers. His counsels about the best time to depart, essential provisions, and organization of the ship’s crew offered few surprises. Yet Pyrard also argued that a voyage’s success would depend on the participants’ moral and religious qualities, and he presented the disasters that had befallen him as evidence for this view. After all, the wreck of the Corbin had occurred because of a dispute among the ship’s officers. In the chaos which ensued, men who were trying to save the ship (including Pyrard himself) or to prepare piously for death were hindered by other crew members who wasted food and drink, swore and fought among themselves, stole from their shipmates, and ignored their captain.81 Such disorders and lack of discipline, however, predated the shipwreck. Despite ties of kinship and locality among the crew, Pyrard complained, “there was ordinarily naught but strife and quarrel betwixt them, nor did I ever see any two men bear to one another any goodwill, friendship, or respect. None was willing to obey those that were in command.” He went on to enumerate the crewmembers’ sins—blasphemy, gluttony, drunkenness, theft—and noted that the men were “altogether lacking in devotion, and observed neither Lent nor Vigils.”82 Pyrard viewed this impious and immoral conduct as part of a general tendency toward disobedience and an inability to discipline themselves that he deplored among his countrymen, the more so because he believed that the French were “very good soldiers and mariners, and capable beyond all other nations of the highest enterprises.”83 Pyrard’s comments about the French mariners’ moral shortcomings are especially interesting when compared to his opinions of other Europeans whom he had observed. “The Portuguese are not men of valour on the sea, nor for the matter of that, on the land either,” he argued. “They are good merchants, mariners, and pilots, and that is all.”84 Portuguese crews often disobeyed their commanders, making themselves easy prey for the Dutch or other marauders, yet they surpassed the French in their religious observances while aboard ship. For that matter, so did the Dutch and the English; even the Indians were “more observant of their religion than we of ours,” according to Pyrard.85 To organize future voyages to Asia and fulfill their natural capacity for “the highest enterprises,” the French would have to curb disorders aboard ship by imposing a higher standard of moral conduct, religious observance, and discipline upon themselves and each other. Only then would they achieve the level of individual and collective discipline they would need to compete successfully against other Europeans in Asia. The Voyage thus reveals a religious and moral dimension of Pyrard’s observations that pervaded his view of Europeans, native peoples, and even himself. His portrayal of Catholic ecclesiastical administration and religious worship in Goa served as a kind of counterpoint to both the Maldive islanders’

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Muslim practices and the Hinduism found among the inhabitants of Calicut. Yet there was no question where Pyrard’s own sympathies lay: at one point he described the Maldive Islands as “infected with this accursed and false doctrine of Mahomet, which has wasted three-fourths of the world.”86 Among the many insults Pyrard endured from the Portuguese was being mistaken for a Lutheran—something that occurred on his journey to Cochin and later when leaving Goa.87 Despite such experiences and his evident desire for the French to supplant the Portuguese, Pyrard considered “the general merit of the increase of Christianity” to be one advantage of the latter’s presence in South Asia, no doubt because of their apparent success in effecting conversions among the native peoples.88 On occasion, Pyrard reminded his readers that his travels had served to confirm and strengthen his own piety, making him a combination of moral exemplar and object of charity. After recounting the inconvenience of having his pocket picked shortly before his departure from Goa, he wrote: Thus did ill fortune, that had accompanied me from the commencement of my voyage, pursue me through this last stage of it, and even to the end; nay, has pursued me since, and with the same constancy to the present moment, but God be praised who has given me grace to endure with 89 patience.

Situated at the beginning of the seventeenth century, François Pyrard’s Voyage thus looks both backward and forward in presenting one Frenchman’s view of Europe’s relations with Asia. On the one hand, Pyrard’s efforts to make the exotic accessible to his readers recall similar attempts by earlier European explorers to translate the “new worlds” they had encountered into familiar categories of experience.90 Yet his evident appreciation for the customs, laws, and institutions of native peoples suggests that Pyrard was one of those early modern Europeans who contributed to the kind of ethnographical approach to the study of foreign cultures that would flower more fully in the Age of Enlightenment. In spite of his vivid descriptions of Asia’s natural and commercial riches, he apparently brought back little in the way of material goods. Instead, his knowledge represented a kind of wealth that he offered to his patrons and readers, combined with a call to challenge the Portuguese in Asia and advice on how to do it. Amid the Voyage’s profusion of stories, observations, and information, Pyrard himself remains a complex and somewhat elusive figure: a courtier and merchant in the Maldive Islands; a soldier and adventurer in Goa; a pious Catholic who avidly described other religions; a proud Frenchman who conformed, chameleon-like, to foreign conditions. He was clearly an ambitious man who survived numerous hardships and achieved a measure of fame, wealth, and social advancement, yet he described himself toward the end of his life as a “living wreck” and a victim of “habitual misfortune.” François Pyrard’s call for French commercial expansion into Asian markets would not be fulfilled for

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decades, but the turbulent, colorful world of South Asia in the early seventeenth century remains alive in the account of his travels.

Notes 1. Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent. 2 vols. in 1 (New York: 1949), Bk. 12, Ch. 30, p. 206. I would like to thank Dr. Barry Rothaus, editor of the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History for giving permission to reprint a revised version of this paper, which first appeared in that publication under the title “François Pyrard: French Voyager to the Maldive Islands in the Early Seventeenth Century,” PWSFH, vol. XXVI (2000): pp. 76– 84. 2. Montesquieu’s coment that “[t]he constraining laws which the Dutch at present impose on the commerce of the little Indian princes had been established before by the Portuguese” was apparently based on Pyrard’s analysis of Portuguese trade regulations in the region. Cf. Montesquieu, Bk. 21, Ch. 21, pp. 366–67. 3. Montesquieu, p. lxvii. 4. François Pyrard, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. Albert Gray, 2 vols. in 3 (London: 1887–1890; reprint New York: 1964-1971), vol. I, p. liv. This English translation is based on the third edition of Pyrard’s work, published in Paris in 1619. 5. Ibid., pp. xvii–xx, 4. 6. Ibid., p. 2. 7. Ibid., p. 2. 8. Ibid., pp. 310–11. 9. Ibid., p. 398. 10. Ibid., pp. 429–32. 11. The chronology of Pyrard’s travels appears in Voyage, vol. I, pp. xx–xxvii, and vol. II, pt. 1, pp. ix–xxiii. For other useful summaries of Pyrard’s adventures, see: George A. Rothrock, Jr., “Seventeenth-Century India Through French Eyes,” The Historian, vol. XXII (1959): pp. 167–171; Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. III: A Century of Advance, bk. 2: South Asia (Chicago: 1993), pp. 840– 843, 855–856, 879–889, and 935–944. 12. On the publication history of Pyrard’s work, see Voyage, vol. I, pp. xxvii–xlii. Unlike the dedicatory epistles to Guillaume du Vair and Charles Duret, Pyrard’s encomium to Guillaume Lusson was inserted at the end of Gray’s edition of the Voyage. (See ibid., vol. I, pt. 2, pp. 535–36.) 13. Gray gives an account of this controversy in Voyage, vol. I, pp. xxxiii–xlii. For Bergeron’s role as Pyrard’s editor, see Robert O. Lindsay, “Pierre Bergeron: A Forgotten Editor of French Travel Literature,” Terrae Incognitae, vol. VII (1979): p. 33. 14. Voyage, vol. I, p. liii. 15. Ibid., vol. II, pp. xliii–xliv. 16. Ibid., vol. I, pp. xxxix–xli; Lach and Van Kley, vol. III, bk. 2, p. 945; Rothrock, pp. 169–170. Several older studies also note the value of Pyrard’s account: see Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420–1620 (Cambridge, MA: 1967), pp. 220–21; Zenobia Bamboat, Les Voyageurs françaises aux Indes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1933; reprint New York: 1972); and Edward Heawood, A History of

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Geographical Discovery in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1912; reprint New York: 1965), pp. 58–59. 17. For a detailed summary of earlier travelers’ descriptions of the Maldives (including excerpts from various accounts of the islands), see Voyage, vol. II, pt. 2, pp. 423–92. 18. Ibid., vol. I, pp. x to xi; an English translation of the Parmentiers’ description of the Maldive Islands appears in vol. II, pt. 2, pp. 486–92. See also The Maldives, C.H.B. Reynolds, comp., vol. CLVIII of the World Bibliography Series (Oxford: 1993), p. 36. 19. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century (Berkeley: 1986), pp. 213–40, 317. 20. Voyage, vol. I, pp. 309–10. 21. Ibid., pp. 93–94, 101. 22. Ibid., pp. 111–13. What Pyrard called bananas might have been a kind of plantain. He notes that the Portuguese referred to this fruit as “Indian figs” (Figos da India). In the section of his work entitled “Treatise and Description of the Animals, Trees and Fruits of the East Indies,” Pyrard described the banana as “very good and well-flavoured to eat; it is to be got at all seasons; at first it is green, afterwards it becomes yellow, and then is ripe. The Maldivians have large orchards full of it.” (Ibid., vol. II, pt. 2, pp. 364–65.) 23. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 111–13. 24. Ibid., pp. 115–17. 25. Ibid., pp. 106, 117. 26. Ibid., p. 195. 27. Ibid., pp. 118, 150–217. 28. Ibid., p. 197. 29. Ibid., pp. 218–20. 30. Ibid., pp. 220–21. 31. Pyrard offers a detailed description of these products, noting that he himself had produced and profited from them. (Ibid., vol. II, pt. 2, pp. 372–86.) 32. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 227–42. 33. Ibid., pp. 123–24. 34. Ibid., pp. 136–37. 35. Ibid., p. 126. 36. Ibid., p. 128. 37. Ibid., p. 128. 38. For an especially useful discussion of this literature with reference to France, see Elizabeth Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in SeventeenthCentury France (Philadelphia: 1988). 39. Voyage, vol. I, p. 67. 40. Ibid., pp. 73, 75. 41. For a historical overview of Maldivian politics, see Clarence Maloney, People of the Maldives (New Delhi: 1980), pp. 175–209. 42. Voyage, vol. I, p. 77. 43. Ibid., p. 77. 44. Ibid., pp. 242–44. Pyrard exulted in his privileged access to the Maldivian court, noting that the Maldivian royal women “sent for me without the king’s knowledge, a thing not allowed in the case of the others [i.e., the other shipwreck survivors].” (Ibid., p. 77.) 45. Ibid., pp. 80–81. 46. Ibid., p. 89. 47. Ibid., pp. 92–93.

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48. Ibid., p. 92. 49. Ibid., pp. 310–17. Pyrard later claimed that the Bengalis’ attack on the Maldives was motivated primarily by the desire to possess the cannon that the Maldivian king had captured from the Corbin and other ships. (See ibid., p. 325.) 50. Ibid., p. 320. 51. Ibid., pp. 326–32. 52. Ibid., p. 341. 53. Ibid., pp. 340–47. For a convenient summary of Pyrard’s travels and adventures in this region, see Lach and Van Kley, vol. III, bk. 2, pp. 879–89. 54. Voyage, vol. I, pp. 361–64. 55. Ibid., p. 377. See also Lach and Van Kley, vol. III, bk. 2, pp. 882–88. 56. Voyage, vol. I, p. 379. 57. Ibid., p. 385. Noting the Hindus’ refusal to eat meat from cattle, Pyrard added that “they are so bound to this superstition, that most of them, when they become Christians, enter into a bargain that they shall not be compelled to eat it.” (Ibid., p. 377.) 58. Ibid., pp. 399–400. 59. Ibid., p. 404. 60. Ibid., vol. II, pt. 1, p. 1. 61. Ibid., p. 105. 62. Ibid., p. 26. 63. Ibid., pp. 27–41. 64. Ibid., p. 5. 65. Ibid., pp. 76–85. 66. Ibid., pp. 61–62. 67. Ibid., pp. 57–61. 68. Ibid., p. 96. 69. Ibid., pp. 88–92. 70. Ibid., p. 94. 71. Ibid., p. 105. 72. Ibid., pp. 173–76. 73. Ibid., p. 39. 74. Ibid., pp. 130–31. 75. Ibid., pp. 105–06. For additional information about the world Pyrard inhabited during his stay in Goa, see: Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, “Exiles and Renegades in Early Sixteenth Century Portuguese Asia,” in Historiography of Europeans in Africa and Asia, 1450–1800, ed. Anthony Disney, vol. 4 of An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450–1800, ed. A.J.R. Russell-Wood (Aldershot: 1995), pp. 235 to 248; G.V. Scammell, “European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of Asia circa 1500-1750,” in Disney, pp. 289 to 309; Chandra Richard de Silva, “Beyond the Cape: the Portuguese Encounter with the Peoples of South Asia,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: 1994), pp. 295 to 322; The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: 1990); and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (New York: 1993). 76. Voyage, vol. II, pt. 1, pp. 203–04. 77. Ibid., pp. 205–10. 78. Ibid., p. 210.

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79. Ibid., p. 88. 80. Ibid., pp. 105–06. For additional insights about the role of material goods in Renaissance European culture generally, see: Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: 1996); Mary W. Helms, “Essay on Objects: Interpretations of Distance Made Tangible,” in Implicit Understandings, pp. 355–77; and Steven Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” Representations, vol. III (1983): pp. 40–67. 81. Voyage, vol. I, pp. 54–55. 82. Ibid., vol. II, pt. 2, pp. 396–97. 83. Ibid., p. 397. 84. Ibid., p. 335. 85. Ibid., pp. 200, 398; see also vol. II, pt. 1, pp. 196–97. 86. Ibid., vol. I, p. 266. 87. Ibid., pp. 422–29, and vol. II, pt. 1, p. 283. 88. Ibid., vol. II, pt. l,p. 88. 89. Ibid., p. 282. 90. See especially Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: 1992); Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. XXIII (1981): pp. 519–38; J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New (Cambridge: 1972); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters With the New World (New Haven, CT: 1993); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: 1991); Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: 1964); and New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: 1993).

“Insulæ Maldivæ,” detail from “Nova et accurata totius Asia tabula emendata,” by Jacob von de Sandrart, Nuremberg, 167?. Original map courtesy of the William C. Wonders Map Collection, the University of Alberta, Canada.

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7 Travels in India: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier Anne York “A man born to diplomacy and feeling himself called to the practice of negotiation must commence his studies by a careful examination of the state of European affairs . . . it is therefore desirable that before entering the profession of diplomacy the young man should have traveled to the principal courts of Europe.” —François de Callières1

Written by François de Callières as a guide for would-be diplomats of various ranks, On International Negotiations is now regarded as a classic text on diplomacy. Certainly, Callières’s belief that “friendship between men is nothing but a commerce in which each seeks his own interest,”2 is a well-accepted tenet both enshrining and elevating the concept of self-interest in any number of human endeavors. An ambassador as the word was understood in the seventeenth century covered a variety of titles. And the fact that ambassadors were drawn from many occupations, given missions that do not fit traditional views should not preclude an examination of a man largely overlooked in works of the seventeenth century. One of the most important merchant ambassadors was Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. The son of a Protestant engraver, and himself a dealer in gems, Tavernier made six important journeys to Persia, India, and Tonkin from 1631 to 1668. Born in Paris in 1605, Tavernier grew up in a lively household dominated by his father’s profession as a cartographer. He and his brothers gathered round exploring the charts and maps produced for his father’s clients and not

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infrequently engaged in their conversations. Thus, the idea of travel as an educational adventure took root in the young Tavernier and, by the age of twenty-two years, he had explored France, England, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Italy. These experiences led to various military services outside of France from 1620 to 1636. In 1636 fortune intervened and Tavernier met Cardinal Richelieu’s “grey eminence”, Father Joseph. With his help, 3 travel arrangements were made for Tavernier to journey to the Near East. He continued on to Persia alone, a willing student of the manners and mores of the Persians, but above all with the developing eye of a jewel merchant. Persian turquoise became his first article of trade.4 By the middle of the seventeenth century an awareness of the nonEuropean parts of the world had penetrated the European consciousness, giving rise to a literary hunger for travel literature. None of these travel accounts was as popular as Tavernier’s Six Voyages and the two-volume Travels in India. Combining travel as a merchant-ambassador searching for precious stones with the passion of a tourist and explorer, Tavernier’s work by the middle of the eighteenth century had twenty-one French editions plus several foreign translations. This earned a reputation for Tavernier as a keen observer. His works included geographical, botanical, and zoological accounts of India, Persia, Siam, and Cochin. Although not a philosopher, he handled meticulously and carefully matters concerning urban history, art treasures, food, and wine, along with precise information about markets, trade goods, and exchange rates.5 Nor did he neglect the political history of India. Having acquired the proper practical education for a merchant-ambassador and seeker of precious stones, Tavernier made his first journey to Mughal India in 1638.6 Arriving at Surat following an overland route across Persia, Tavernier wrote that “the city was not a credit to the great Mogul Emperor [Shah Jahan, r.1627–1658], for it was both dangerous and depressing, . . . a town surrounded by a mud wall and few decent houses.”7 Tavernier noted that though any traveler must beware of the nefarious money-changers, on the whole the city operated efficient customs and treasury departments.8 Describing the minting of coins in detail, complete with precise drawings and covering all the forms of metal used gold, silver, copper, Tavernier provides information regarding the Indian practice of devaluing coins in circulation after three or four years9—hence his earlier warning to beware of unscrupulous money-changers. Apparently, it was a common practice among them to pass on the devalued coins to unsuspecting and unknowing merchants and travelers.10 According to Tavernier, “the diamond is the most precious of all stones.”11 He had been trained by Torreles, a diamond cutter and merchant in Paris, to identify good quality stones from those of inferior quality. In order to acquire a thorough knowledge of these magnificent stones, Tavernier vowed to visit all of the mines and one of the two rivers where diamonds were found: And as the fear of dangers has never restrained me in any of my journeys . . . I have accordingly been at four mines and at one of the two rivers . . .

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Thus I am able to claim that I have cleared the way for others and that I am the first European who has opened the route for the Franks to these 12 mines.

Describing geologically the area where the diamonds are found, Tavernier wrote, “All round the place where the diamonds are found the soil is sandy, and full of rocks and jungle somewhat comparable to the neighborhood of Fontainbleau.”13 Tavernier was fairly typical of even contemporary travel writers. He attempted to understand new cultures along with new flora and fauna by describing it all in relationship to the known, so that his readers might be better able to picture the new. The details of India’s diamond mines provided by Tavernier would form the basis of an economic and a social history today. As he noted at one point, the “government mines employ poor people. . . . Their wages low and yet they must thoroughly understand their work.”14 Royalties on the precious stones purchased were due to the local king and the actual trading ceremony wove culinary practices with those of commerce: “The Banians never leave their houses until ten or eleven A.M. after they have washed and eaten sumptuously. . . . Then and only then do they take their diamonds out to trade.”15 At each trading stop, Tavernier, as an ambassador merchant for Louis XIV, met with the governor of the place in order to determine his self-interest, establish a relationship, and of course secure the best prices on the stones he wanted to purchase. Not infrequently, Tavernier wrote that the “Indians have a high regard for strangers and especially for those who they call Franks.”16 Usually the governors and the others ruling in the name of “the Great Mogul” embraced Tavernier and assured him that he was welcomed. When they did not, Tavernier examined his behavior and that of his party, in order to ascertain whether a violation had occurred of some important custom. He was acutely aware of the need to enter into Indian culture and exhibit those customary habits of etiquette without which successful trade missions were impossible.17 Tavernier proves to be much more than a travel writer giving merchant accounts of exotic journeys.18 As an urban historian, he achieved both descriptive analyses and complete architectural details of the important towns visited, such as Benares. It was, he wrote, “a large and very well built town, the majority of the houses being of brick and cut stone, and being more lofty than those of other towns of India.”19 Noting the inconvenience for caravans of the narrow streets, Tavernier admired the practice of creating large courtyards into which the various streets terminate. It was here that the Banian merchant sold his goods. Situated on the Ganges River, the town’s location facilitated not only trade but also travel. Central to the design of Benares was a mosque surrounded by several tombs—a garden enclosed by walls: The most considerable tomb is like a square pedestal, in the middle you see a tall column thirty-two feet in height . . . made of sandstone, it

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Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures terminates in a pyramid, and has a great ball on the point and below the ball it is encircled by large heads which represent fruit and are a favorite ornament in Hindu architecture.20

According to Tavernier, travel in India was as pleasant as in France with good inns, good wine (he and his compatriot and fellow adventurer François Bernier enjoyed two bottles of Shiraz in Patna), and rather easy customs travel. Personal property was exempt from duty. That was paid only on merchandise. Apparently, with a commission from Louis XIV, Tavernier had no difficulty obtaining the necessary governor’s passport as he journeyed from place to place.21 River travel on the Ganges provided opportunities for visits to the many towns located on the right or left bank of the river.22 These voyages on the Ganges proved to be far more comfortable than overland travel. Tavernier describes the ordeal of carriage travel, “neither sprung nor slung and horribly uncomfortable.”23 Unlike European carriages drawn by horses, native vehicles were drawn by oxen. Safety was no more of a concern in India than in Europe. The honor and security of a traveler was enhanced by a bodyguard detail of some twenty to thirty armed attendants. Wealthy travelers rode elephants, using camels to transport their goods. Tavernier favored an overland route crossing Persia and then travel by ship from Ormus to Surat in the Mughal Empire.24 Careful to always negotiate friendships on the basis of self-interest, Tavernier developed a number of strategies for securing the friendship and help of the Dutch and local governors. By developing an open table and generous hospitality, Tavernier frequently received favors in the form of transport on Dutch ships or easy access to the needed passport from the local governor: I have been very careful in all the places where the Dutch have settlements and where I made any sojourn, to contribute as far as possible to the amusement of their ladies, . . . for I never came to India without good wine, good fruits and one with me who understood cooking better than the Dutch in India.25

He hosted parties for the Dutch and their wives, providing grilled pigeons stacked to form a pyramid and flavored with pistachios obtained in Persia. Exotic fruits in the form of small tarts were prepared and served along with curried rice studded with raisins. Various fruit chutneys accompanied the pigeon. The wine was the fine Shiraz so admired by Tavernier and Bernier.26 Often Tavernier’s guest list would include local officials as well as Dutch commanders who were friends. These associations were beneficial, noted the jewel merchant. “The commander of Surat being a friend of mine offered me passage on any one of five vessels arriving from Batavia, but pointed out the risk I would run of meeting the English and of being engaged in combat.”27 The Dutch vessel carrying Tavernier was equipped with forty-eight guns and had more than 120 men aboard. It was commanded by an admiral so well trained

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that when fired upon by the English, his vessel returned fire much more effectively.28 Caught in an Anglo-Dutch war, Tavernier was neither dismayed nor stopped in his travel. Taking the naval engagement in stride, he continued on to Ormus. Intensely descriptive in his “word paintings,” Tavernier tells us that northward from Surat stretched a parched country up to the towering mountains of the northern frontier, dry plains, and some barren desert formed the travelers’ landscape.29 The road running east of Surat captured Tavernier’s particular interest for two reasons: it was not the barren landscape of the northern route, and it passed through rolling agricultural fields interspersed with heavy forests. If one turned northward again at Brampour, one arrived in Agra. The Mughal capital and one of the emperor’s residences, the city provided a view of the great gap between the wealthy and the poor. Tavernier, as a social commentator, described the exquisite shaded garden stretching out before the emperor’s palace, surrounded by clusters of hovels that housed the working poor. In 1665, the emperor invited Tavernier to the grand birthday festival prepared for him by his court. Tavernier was told that the new Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb (r.1658–1707), was unwilling to have him leave without participating in the festivities. As a merchant-ambassador, Tavernier accepted “as in duty bound, the honour he has bestowed on me . . . witnessing for five days the flocking to Court of the Omaras [nobility], governors of the provinces, and Prince of the blood royal.”30 In the palace where the festival was held (a full description of the place is found in Book I), there were seven magnificent thrones, one covered entirely in diamonds and the others covered with rubies, emeralds, or pearls. The principal diamond throne contained numerous precious jewels, a canopy the underside of which was covered with diamonds, and a jeweled peacock with an elevated tail of blue sapphires. The body of the bird was gold and bore a large ruby from which hung a pearl-shaped pearl weighing fifty carats. Two red velvet umbrellas stood on either side of the throne supported by posts studded with diamonds, rubies, and pearls. Certainly, the extravagance of the Great Mogul’s court formed an enormous contrast in Tavernier’s mind between working-class conditions for the miners, pearl divers, and peasants tilling the fields, and the elite. Numerous details are given regarding Aurangzeb’s court practices. The emperor “has imposed upon himself a great penance eating nothing but vegetables and sweetmeats, . . . fasting often on water and millet bread.”31 The bravest elephants trained for war were brought to the throne for inspection to see whether “the animal is in good condition or not and has been well fed.”32 Bridles were covered with precious stones, gold tassels abounded and trumpet fanfares announced each of the Great Mogul’s prize elephants. Concluding his account of the Mughal court Tavernier wrote: “All of this is done with much magnificence and with surroundings befitting the greatest power in Asia, comparable to what the King of France is in Europe.”33

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Both Bernier and Tavernier, while embracing the “new” Asian cultures, held a certain Eurocentric position when observing the inferiority of Indian as compared to European armies.34 Tavernier’s praise of Louis XIV’s armies stemmed not so much from cultural or racial prejudice as it did from a desire to please him. Such lavish flattery was used to obtain both the French king’s license as well as royal orders for precious stones.35 An astute merchant, Tavernier quickly saw that “the gem trade” could be worked in both directions, with a profit both at the European and at the Asian ends of the journey.36 Tavernier sold twenty quality diamonds to the Sun King, including an uncut stone of some 112 carats. The merchant-ambassador also completed 375 drawings of various stones and the methods of cutting them. The talent he had inherited from his cartographer father clearly appears in these excellent engravings executed by Tavernier. The flora, fauna, coinage, palaces, and pagodas are rendered in great detail, displaying his drafting skills. An immensely popular drawing depicted Fakirs (holy men) at Hindu shrines. No doubt Tavernier was fascinated with the many facets of their life. They followed an austere life and were poor, having divested themselves of all possessions. Liberty was important to them. Fakirs traveled in bands each with its superior. Frequently, several bands of mendicants came together in order to make pilgrimages to the main temples, called pagodas by Tavernier. They participated in the ritualistic public washing on certain days of the year in the Ganges River.37 Self-imposed penances and fasting for nine to ten days served as insurance for a better second life. Tavernier’s sympathies lay more with the followers of the Muslim or Hindu religions who were not professional beggars. Indeed, he had an excellent grasp on Muslim diversity, explaining clearly the differences between the Sunnis and the Shi’as. “The diversity which exists among the Muslims,” he observed, “consists not only in the different explanations which they give their Koran, but also of the different opinions which they entertain regarding the first successor of Mohammed.”38 Noting the geographical concentration of the two groups, Tavernier exhibited a more than cursory grasp of the doctrines of each. As one might expect, he was less well acquainted with Hindu doctrine, although he commanded some depth in his understanding of the caste system, giving a full description of each of the four Hindu castes.39 Tavernier also sketched the Hindu doctrine on the transmigration of souls, remarking that “God sends the souls of men of evil life . . . into the bodies of inferior animals . . . in order that they may perform penance for their crimes in these famous prisons.”40 Acknowledging the divinity imputed to cows, he wrote “it is believed that the souls which enter the bodies of cows are supremely happy because these animals are regarded as divinities.”41 Indeed, if the Hindus gave alms and other virtuous actions, “it is believed that after death their souls pass into the bodies of rich and powerful rulers.”42 Tavernier wrote with great empathy for the Hindu gods and goddesses worshipped on the subcontinent.

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Their stories, he noted, were often told in the form of mystery plays performed in Northern India in September and October.43 Tavernier’s critical eye turned toward his fellow Europeans in India as well as the Indians themselves. He took to task some of the Dutch and the English for their lack of manners and propriety in their social relationships with him, and he labeled them what might today be called “the ugly Europeans” abroad. Loud and obnoxious, these folk offended the cultured sensibility of Tavernier, and their behavior did not reveal the best European. His success as a merchant-ambassador was great. He made a fortune several times over serving both Louis XIV and the newly founded French East India Company (est. 1664) through the contacts and relationships he had made. The travel descriptions of the routes, markets, “holts” (inns), and trading practices served not only the Sun King and the East India Company, but Tavernier as well. His goal always was to write a splendid account of his travels. Sketching a fascinating picture of India, Les Six Voyages made distant places familiar. His travels comprised more than just India; in fact, his account of East Asia is almost encyclopedic. An inherent part of the seventeenth century, trade with China and India brought spices, silk, cotton (linen), and jewelry to European outlets in both southern and northern Europe. From time immemorial, Europe had a great appetite for these goods,44 and from that appetite developed a need for accurate, detailed, and, if possible, readable literature on travel to East Asia. Louis XIV received Tavernier at court in December 1668. This honor was soon consolidated with a patent of nobility issued to him in February 1669. Tavernier subsequently purchased the Barony of Aubonne in Switzerland, and complemented this estate with a splendid townhouse in Paris. Achieving huge success with the popularity of his books (as evidenced by the twenty-one French editions and numerous foreign translations in English, Italian, Dutch, German, and others), Tavernier acknowledged that the 1679 French edition was the most complete. Paul Hazard reminds us that travelers like Jean-Baptiste Tavernier “did not project their ego into the far off beyond.” “Were not their eyes,” he asked, “beginning to take in something of the picturesque wonders of the world? Did not these travelers unfold to an age steeped in intellectualism, pictures and scenes that laid a magic spell upon it?”45 That he participated in this endeavor was clearly understood by Tavernier, who made conscious choices about the approach and the content of his East Asian accounts. It was from the East that the most wonderful stories came, and Tavernier embellished his narratives with drawings of his own. By the turn of the eighteenth century one might agree that of the gentlemen Tavernier encountered abroad and more importantly at home “they are charming but a wee bit on the shady side.”46 A string of misfortunes forced Tavernier to sell both his town house and his county seat at Aubonne. Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 forced Tavernier to leave France.47 The Elector of Bradenberg promised

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sanctuary to persecuted French Huguenots, and so he welcomed the merchantambassador to his court:48 “Despite adversity and advancing years, the Frenchman seems to have been undaunted,” wrote one of his modern biographers. “The Elector was an economic planner and named Tavernier Director of a new government company.”49 Ignoring his age, the former merchant-ambassador planned another voyage for 1689, taking the route from Berlin through the Baltic to Moscow and south to Persia. He continued to be lured by the mysterious countries of East Asia, and intended to lead the new expedition himself. But his untimely death ended that dream of yet another journey to Persia and India. Many other travel writers left little or no legacy, compiling simple descriptions of exotic peoples and places and peppering their accounts with a goodly amount of cultural or racial prejudice. How Tavernier viewed himself and his missions accounts for the total lack of bitterness and narrow perspective in his works. Rarely did he display a Christian European sense of superiority— religion and warfare were the only ones noted. Generally, Tavernier did not relate his East Asian encounters from a Eurocentric perspective. The care with which he described Indian culture, history, and political life resulted in a portrayal of the whole of Indian culture in a largely unbiased manner. Tavernier’s sensitive and sympathetic anthropological, geographical, and sociohistorical method ensured that his words were widely read in his own century and the one that followed. It is important to note that not only was Tavernier a precursor for François Bernier, Jean Chardin, and others, but he reflected the seventeenth-century belief that distant people—in his case, Indian people—were neither backward nor inferior.50 Although not an admirer of Tavernier, Voltaire wrote in The Age of Louis XIV that one owed much justice to public men who benefited their own age.51 Indeed, India as seen through Tavernier’s eyes, revealed to Europeans a diverse continent—one that was politically, religiously, and socially varied. Each geographic area crafted into mental paintings by Tavernier for his readers evoked images of burning deserts, fertile plains, majestic peaks, and incredible waterways. His sensitivity to the religious customs, whether Muslim or Hindu, revealed a keen sense of toleration. His empathy for the destitute and the working class poor, particularly the Indian diamond miners, gave a glimpse of the subsequent Age of Enlightenment’s preoccupation with social groups rather than with individuals. Tavernier marveled at Indian architecture and town planning. He also had the rare good fortune to befriend the Great Mogul, mix with elite members of French and Mughal society, and associate with fellow travelers like Bernier, Thévenot, and Chardin.52 Throughout his journeys to East Asia, Tavernier proved to be a merchantambassador of the first rank. A good organizer of men and money, Tavernier’s power grew as his keen observations and social commentary opened new doors of cultural understanding for seventeenth-century Europeans. The immense popularity of his works in his own century resonated with the philosophers of

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the subsequent Enlightenment. Tavernier exemplified the most concrete form of truth—a truth that is nonjudgmental, unbiased, and timeless in its embracing and recording of differences.

Notes 1. Quoted in Andrew Lossky, ed., The Seventeenth Century 1600–1715 (New York: 1967), p. 311. 2. Ibid.p. 315. 3. William James Roosen, The Age of Louis XIV: The Rise of Modern Diplomacy (Cambridge: 1976), pp. 58, 67. 4. Charles Joret, J.B. Tavernier (Paris: 1886), pp. 40, 64. Excellent biography. 5. William J. Church, ed., The Greatness of Louis XIV (Lexington: 1972), pp. 62, 63. 6. George A. Rothrock, “Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: Merchant Extraordinary,” History Today, vo. XVII, no. 2 (November, 1967), p. 744. 7. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Tavernier en Turquie, en Pierse, et aux Indes pendant l’espace de quarante ans par tontes les routes qu’on peut y tenir accompagnes d’ observations particulìeres sur les qualitiés la religion, le gouvernment, les costumes et le commerce de chaque pays avec les figures, les poids et la valeur des monnaies enrichs des Cartes, plans et figures (Paris: 1679), vol II, pp. 6, 7. Hereafter cited as Tavernier. 8. Ibid., pp. 8, 9. 9. Ibid., p. 12. 10. Ibid., p. 15. 11. Ibid., p. 41. 12. Ibid., pp. 41, 42. See also pp. 8, 9. Here Tavernier was not aware that he had been preceded by other European visitors to the mines. Caesar Fredericke and Methold visited three of the four mines described, and a Portuguese attempted in 1610 to mine diamonds, without success. Tavernier, of course, was incorrect to assert that “these mines are the only places in the world where the diamond is found.” Borneo was another site. 13. Ibid., p. 43. 14. Ibid., pp. 46, 47. 15. Ibid., pp. 46, 47. 16. Ibid., p. 49. 17. Ibid., pp. 58, 59. Here Tavernier gives a detailed and objective account of the silent trade in diamonds and the various ceremonies when starting to work. He gives a vivid description of the prayers, the ritual washing of the body, and the feast distributed by the Brahman. 18. Although he certainly succeeded in doing this, contemporary writers called his works a prototype of the tradition established by Karl Baedeker in 1844. 19. Tavernier, p. 96. 20. Ibid.,pp. 97, 98. 21. Ibid., pp. 98, 99, 122. 22. Ibid., p. 160. 23. Rothrock, p. 747. 24. Ibid., p. 745. 25. Tavernier, p. 248.

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26. Ibid., p. 249. 27. Ibid., p. 247. 28. Ibid., p. 251. Tavernier related the story of how the English Captain flew the white flag after his ship was hit in several dangerous places, especially since his sailors preferred to drink the Shiraz wine rather than attempt to salvage the stricken vessel. 29. Ibid., pp. 122, 123. 30. Ibid., pp. 302, 303. Both Bernier and Chardin discussed and used Tavernier’s work in their own books. 31. Ibid., p. 309. 32. Ibid., p. 307. 33. Ibid., p. 308. 34. Ibid. “The Great Mogul has nothing comparable with him in might if he waged war with a valiant and clever people like our Europeans.” (See Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668 by François Bernier, ed. Archibald Constable (Westminster: 1891), p. 55.) A fuller description of differences in the size of the two armies along with the types of weapons used can be found in Tavernier, p. 311. 35. Tavernier, p. 144. Tavernier’s dedication to the King must be read in this manner. 36. Rothrock, p. 747. 37. Tavernier, pp. 421–23. 38. Ibid., pp. 137, 138. 39. Ibid., pp. 142–45. 40. Ibid., p. 158. 41. Ibid., p. 159. 42. Ibid., pp. 158, 159. 43. Ibid., p. 151. 44. Ragrhild Hatton, Europe in the Age of Louis XIV (Narwick: 1969). 45. Paul Hazard, The European Mind, trans. J. Lewis May (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 1964), p. 359. First published under the title La Crise de la Conscience European (Paris: 1935). 46. Ibid., p. 367. Here Hazard describes what the Amines innkeeper said of Manon Lescaut and Des Grieux. It seems to fit in light of the fact that Tavernier rather quickly lost his great fortune owing to betrayal within his family. According to Rothrock, Tavernier tried to recoup his fortune by outfitting his nephew with rich trade goods and sending him to Persia. There the nephew sold the goods, but then stayed in Ispahan, living very well off the profits. Tavernier never saw his money again. For a fuller account see Joret, Tavernier, p. 179. 47. For an excellent account of not only the Revocation, but also the various roles played by members of Louis XIV’s government and the strategies developed both before and after see Andrew Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (New Brunswick, NJ: 1994), pp. 216–29. 48. Rothrock, p. 749. Joret also provides an account of the rather sad latter years of Tavernier. 49. Ibid., p. 749. 50. Only in his discussions of the various Indian religions and their methods of warfare did Tavernier show a Christian European sense of superiority. As a jewel merchant, he displayed great admiration for the techniques of the diamond-miners and stone cutters in India. Their foods, wines, buildings, and above all fabrics, were carefully described without imposing a European standard or perspective on what he observed and obviously appreciated about the Indian culture. In Book III, for example, Tavernier discusses not

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only how learned the Brahmans were with regard to astrology, but also the religious rituals they had to practice before seeing an eclipse whether of the sun or moon. (Tavernier, pp. 192, 193.) 51. To give this idea the power of tradition with a contemporary slant, see Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass: 1992). 52. In 1667 Louis XIV was anxious to see so famous a traveler. Tavernier was equally pleased with his reception at court and the grant of a royal license to publish his work, as required at the time.

“Magni Mogol Imperi,” detail from “Nova et accurata totius Asia tabula emendata,” by Jacob von de Sandrart, Nuremberg, 167?. Original map courtesy of the William C. Wonders Map Collection, the University of Alberta, Canada.

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8 Mughal India during the Age of the Scientific Revolution: François Bernier’s Travels and Lessons for Absolutist Europe Glenn J. Ames European travel accounts of Asia and the Americas compiled during the “Age of Discovery” have long served as valuable documentary sources not only for historians of European expansion, but also for scholars compiling histories of the indigenous cultures that were encountered during this process. Indian historians, for example, have long been dependent on such sources for writing their own history. This is particularly true for economic historians, who have found the records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) at The Hague, and the holdings of the India Office Library, the Archives Coloniales in Paris, and the Arquivo Historico Ultramarino in Lisbon, invaluable for constructing an analysis of the Indian Ocean basin and its trade from 1500 until 1800. These official sources in conjunction with travel accounts and Jesuit writings constitute in large measure the primary extant sources for documenting “medieval” India. Traditionally, such sources served as the basis for much of the secondary literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially on the Mughal empire. This scholarship was compiled mainly by French, British, Portuguese, and Dutch historians with ties to the imperial bureaucracies of the European empires of that period, including Vincent A. Smith, W.W. Hunter, A. Martineau, and F.C. Danvers.1 As such, these men were influenced by the need to legitimize the European presence in India, and concurrently to compare it favorably with the preceding period of chaos and decline of the late Mughal

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period. For all of its merits, the resulting body of literature has aptly been described by M.N. Pearson as the “seeds of empire” school of imperial historiography.2 For the contemporary historian, the Eurocentric and Whiggish biases of this work are readily apparent and are in the process of being revised.3 Nevertheless, the shortcomings of this traditional orthodoxy should not undermine the value of the documentary sources upon which it was based. European travel accounts in particular can still be utilized to great effect, provided the inherent biases of the authors are acknowledged. Such accounts should be utilized in compiling the history of the Asian societies they describe and also perused for what they tell us about the structures and mentalité of the societies that produced these intrepid individuals. In this chapter, I will examine just such a case, that of the French physician and traveler François Bernier. By analyzing several key sections of his Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656– 1668, I will discuss what his account tells us about the structures of Mughal India and perhaps more importantly what it reveals about the changing structures and mentalité of Louis XIV’s France. François Bernier was born near Gonnard in Anjou in September 1620 in the midst of the political instability of the regency of Louis XIII. His parents were leaseholders in the barony of Etiau on land belonging to the canonary of St. Maurice at Angers. Bernier enjoyed a relatively prosperous early life and began his extensive travels as early as 1647 to 1650 when he visited Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Returning home to complete his studies in the heyday of the Scientific Revolution, he passed the examination in physiology and matriculated at the University of Montpellier in May 1652. In July of that year, Bernier passed his examination as licentiate in medicine at Montpellier and the following month took his doctorate in medicine and moved to Paris. A fundamental influence in his intellectual development at this time was the noted philosopher Pierre Gassendi, author of the Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri (1649). Like Francis Bacon, Gassendi accepted inductive reasoning and stressed the importance of experimental research, and empirical realism. As he informed his friend, the true method of scientific research was the analytic, rising from lower to higher notions of knowledge. Bernier evidently took these lessons to heart and mind. In the intellectual battles of the day, he also sought to defend Gassendi’s work from the attacks of J.B. Morino (Dissertatio de atomis et vacua contra Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream) by publishing his Anatomis ridicvli mvris in 1651. While Bernier and Gassendi also quarreled with René Descartes over many issues, it appears that the young physician must have embraced the notion that the vast world of nature could be reduced to a mathematical formula or formulae. In fact, Bernier would spend much of the next two decades seeking to find the “natural laws” that governed society and particularly its political and economic structures and relations. The laboratory for his empirical research would be as much of the world as it was possible for

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him to visit, observe, and analyze, utilizing the inductive techniques he had learned and discussed with Gassendi.4 After a short stay in Paris, Bernier began his travels in the Levant and Asia. In 1654, he visited Palestine and Syria. Two years later he reached Egypt, where he witnessed the plague at Rosetta. Bernier remained in Cairo for a year before embarking at Suez for Jedda. Arriving a Mocha in early 1658, he was forced to abandon his plans to visit Abyssinia, and instead sailed for the Gujarati entrepôt of Surat, which he reached in late 1658. Early the next spring, Bernier was on his way to Agra when he encountered the defeated Mughal Prince Dárá and his army fleeing from his brother Aurangzeb after their major clash at Deora in the war of succession for Shah Jahan’s Peacock throne. Bernier was compelled by Dárá to accompany him as his personal physician, a sign of the relatively high regard in which European medicine was held in Asia. After a short stay with Dárá, Bernier made his way to Ahmedbad. By late 1663, Bernier was in Delhi and subsequently accompanied Aurangzeb on a trip to Lahore in late 1664 to 1665. After traveling through Kashmir, the Frenchman parted company with the Mughal emperor. Bernier visited Bengal, the Coromandel coast, and Golconda between late 1665 and early 1667, before embarking in Surat for Europe. After a long stopover in Persia, he finally reached Marseilles in early 1669. Bernier was a prolific writer during his travels, dispatching frequent letters to colleagues and, after news reached him of the founding of the Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales in 1664, to Jean-Baptiste Colbert as well. After his return, he spent most of the period 1669–1671 arranging for the publication of his Histoire de la derniere revolution des Etats du Grand Mogul and Suite des Memoires du S. Bernier sur l'empire du Grand Mogul.5 Following the success of these volumes, Bernier’s interests returned to the intellectual debates of his earlier days in Paris and his Abrégé de la philosophie de Mr. Gassendi enjoyed five printings in the decade 1674–1684. He died in 1688 after making these notable intellectual contributions to the intellectual life of the Old Regime and European knowledge of Mughal India at a crucial point in its history.6 The compendium of knowledge on Mughal India that ultimately comprised Bernier’s Travels was originally published in four “volumes” in Paris from 1670–1671. Volume one contained his History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogul. Volume two contained the chronological continuation of this struggle, his Remarkable Occurences or an account of the most important events after the war, during the five years or thereby, in the States of the Great Mogul along with a letter to Louis XIV’s great minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert on the Extent of Hindoustan, the Currency towards and final absorption of gold and silver in that country; its Resources, Armies, the administration of Justice, and the principal Cause of the Decline of the States of Asia. Volumes three and four titled Suite des memoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’empire du Grand Mogul contained a collection of his mémoires to friends and

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colleagues written while in India. Among these documents were letters to Monsieur de la Mothe le Vayer (1588–1672) on court life at Delhi and Agra written from Delhi in July 1663; to Jean Chapelain (1594–1674) from Shiraz in Persia in October 1667 on the doctrines of the Hindus; a series of nine letters to Monsieur de Merveilles written from December 1664 through the summer of 1665 involving his march with Aurangzeb from Delhi to Kashmir; and finally his responses to five question posed to him by another noted early French adventurer, Jean Thévenot (1633–1667). A detailed analysis of the Revenues of the Great Mogul constituted an addendum to these initial sections. In 1669, when Bernier began the process of compiling his notes and letters for what would become his Travels in the Mogul Empire, Louis XIV’s France was also at a critical stage in its history. Following what had been chronic political instability under the Bourbon dynasty during the minorities of both Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the new king had assumed personal rule in 1661 and was determined to reduce the nobility and all other sources of potential opposition to obedience to an absolutist Crown.7 The French king’s geopolitical and dynastic ambitions in the Spanish Netherlands (1667–1668) had also been frustrated by the rapidly arranged and unlikely Triple Alliance of England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and Sweden in the months immediately preceding Bernier’s return to the kingdom. Louis was intent on exacting revenge on the upstart Dutch for this affront to his military gloire and was in the midst with his secretary of state for war, the marquis de Louvois, of revamping and enlarging the French army in preparation for the revenge that would ideally come.8 At the same time, the king’s great minister, Colbert, was completing a decade of vastly successful internal reforms for France that had doubled the king’s revenues, yielded a budget surplus, and resurrected a royal fleet that had been allowed to rot during the regency years of Louis’s youth under Cardinal Mazarin.9 A key component of Colbert’s mercantilist theories for entrenching French economic power was his desire to break into the exceedingly lucrative Asian trade, a trade he estimated yielded the Dutch some 10,000,000 livres annually. In order to break into this trade and in doing so to deprive the Dutch of this crucial source of economic wealth, Colbert had formed his own East India Company in 1664 with a nominal capital pool of 15,000,000 livres and monopoly privileges for fifty years. For perhaps the only time in the reign, the dynastic ambitions of the king in the Spanish Netherlands and beyond at the expense of the Dutch and the economic desires of Colbert against Hollanders coincided.10 Bernier recognized these realities of the day, and perhaps the two most important sections of his Travels deal: (1) with his long section (volume one) on the succession war waged between Shah Jahan’s sons for the Peacock throne; and (2) his detailed letter to Colbert (in volume two) on matters “touching Hindoustan.” Both were designed to provide practical detail on events

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in India and lessons for Louis and Colbert in their own conduct of power in both France and Europe. Since Bernier only reached Surat in late 1658, he did not personally witness the initial nor most important stages of the succession struggle. The key battles in this war, those of Dharmatpur (20 April 1658) and Samúgarh (28 May 1658) had already been fought. Based on his victories in those encounters, Aurangzeb had taken the throne on 22 July 1658. Nevertheless, his subsequent travels with both the retreating Dárá and the ascendant Aurangzeb certainly gave him the opportunity to hear both sides of the story and to form a more objective and comprehensive analysis of the causes and course of this notable struggle than was possible for contemporary Mughal historians with the possible exception of Kháfi Khán.11 The Frenchman’s descriptions of Dárá and Aurangzeb, the main combatants in the succession struggle, were revealing in themselves. Dárá “was not deficient in good qualities.” The Prince was: “extremely liberal . . . but he entertained too exalted an opinion of himself; believed he could accomplish everything by powers of his own mind and imagined that there existed no man from whose consel he could derive benefit . . . and thus deterred his sincerest friends from disclosing the secret machinations of his brothers.”12 On the other hand, Aurangzeb “was devoid of that urbanity and engaging presence, so much admired in Dárá.” Yet, “he possessed a sounder judgment, and was more skillful in selecting for confidants such persons as were best qualified to serve him with faithfullness and ability.”13 Bernier’s somewhat superficial appreciation for the religious issues that divided the brothers was revealed in his statements on Dárá’s religion. “Born a Mahometan [sic], he continued to join in the exercise of that religion; but although publicly professing his adherence to its faith, Dárá was in private a Gentile [Hindu] with Gentiles, and a Christian with Christians.” This Prince, “moreover for some time he lent a willing ear to the suggestions of . . . a Jesuit. There are persons, however, who say that Dárá was in reality destitute of all religion and that these appearances were assumed only from motives of curiosity, and for the sake of amusement.”14 Bernier was no doubt familiar with the political component of religious issues, as embodied best (or worse) in France with the multiple conversion of the first Bourbon king, and Louis XIV’s grandfather, Henry IV. Thus, his treatment of the religious dispute between Shah Jahan’s sons was not concerned with the theoretical aspects of this dispute, which in fact centered on the vital question of whether or not to incorporate indigenous rituals into traditional Islam, but rather on how religion could be integrated and utilized in the struggle. But even here, Bernier’s analysis was somewhat cursory. For him, its main importance was “that the reason assigned by Aurang-Zebe for causing him to be beheaded was that he [Dárá] had turned Kafer, that is to say an infidel without religion, an idolater.”15 Before 1657, Aurangzeb had been skillful in not alienating his

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father, despite Dárá’s rising preeminence at court. Aurangzeb even went so far as to terminate his successful campaign in the south at the behest of Shah Jahan, even though he knew that Dárá had prompted the action in an attempt to prevent him from increasing his power in the Deccan and beyond. “The Prince [Aurangzeb], however, betrayed no resentment, but acknowledged the duty of implicit obedience to his father’s commands.”16 Bernier began his treatment of the succession war between Aurangzeb and Dárá by mentioning Shah Jahan’s illness “which was apprehended would terminate fatally.”17 The emperor, in Bernier’s view, had previously fanned the flames of internal dissension by nominating each of his four sons to the “viceroyalty” of his four most important provinces, including Bengal, the Deccan, and Gujarat. In doing this, he had “inspired the sons with projects of ambitions, each laid claim to the empire, and a war was kindled among them.”18 This unwise delegation of authority, which no “absolutist” ruler in Europe, including most particularly Louis XIV, should ever contemplate had set the stage for the breakdown of the Mughal imperial system and legitimate authority. The succession struggle which dominated the Mughal empire for the remainder of the 1650s, therefore, emanated directly from this lapse in “true” absolutist principles, while providing a valuable lesson for European monarchs as well. Nevertheless, it was Shah Jahan’s illness, beginning in 1657, that provided the actual spark that set off this volatile powder keg. Soon, the emperor’s second son, Muhammed (or Sultan) Shujá was marching from Bengal at the head of a powerful army. Aurangzeb, the third son, then began a campaign to dupe his youngest brother, Murád Bakhsh, and the general Mir Jumla into advancing his own cause indirectly. Murád Bakhsh had begun his march on Delhi by capturing the rich entrepôt of Surat in January 1658, in the hopes of capturing a large treasure that Aurangzeb had told him would be there. No such booty was extracted from the Gujarati port. Yet, bolstered by Aurangzeb’s pleas of utter devotion to his cause, Murád continued his campaign. “I need not remind you, my brother, how repugnant to my real disposition are the toils of government. While Dárá and Sultan Sujah [sic] are tormented with a thirst for dominion, I sigh only for the life of a Fakire” In his view, Dárá was “not only incapable of reigning, but is utterly unworthy of the throne, insomuch as he is a Kafer . . . Sultan Sujah is equally undeserving the crown; for being avowedly a Rafezy . . . in you alone are to be found the qualifications of ruling a mighty empire.19 In the midst of the growing political chaos, Shah Jahan, despite his personal dislike for Dárá, had decided to support the claims of his eldest son in this struggle. At the same time, Bernier argues that the emperor’s primary goal at this point was to avoid an all-out succession war. The most immediate threat, that from Shujá advancing on Delhi from Bengal, was stopped by Dárá’s son, Sulaiman Shikoh, at the battle of Ilahbas in December 1657.20 Near Agra, in the meantime, Aurangzeb had joined forces with Murád and the pair advanced on

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Agra and Delhi. To meet this threat, Shah Jahan and Dárá sent an army under Kásim Khán Jawini and the Rajah Jaswant Singh. Bernier, however, in an attempt to bolster his argument on the emperor’s motives, notes that these commanders marched with orders to avoid battle if at all possible and to merely prevent the rebellious brothers from crossing the Nerbudda river. Nevertheless, the first major battle between troops loyal to Dárá and those supporting Aurangzeb had occurred near Dharmatpur on 20 April 1658. Bernier’s account of this clash is brief yet to the point. Aurangzeb’s forces were still disorganized from the march, “totally incapable of opposing any effectual” attack, and Kásim Khán and the Rajah “might have obtained an easy victory; such was the opinion entertained by every spectator, especially by French officers in Aurangzeb’s artillery.”21 Shah Jahan’s commanders, however, merely took up defensive positions along the Nerbudda and after regrouping for several days, Murád, the innocent dupe of Aurangzeb in Bernier’s account, led a gallant frontal attack that forced a passage across the river and carried the day. Kásim Khán offered little resistance and was even suspected of “treachery.” Thanks to the bravery of his brother, Aurangzeb was thus able to continue on his march toward Agra.22 Faced with this setback, Shah Jahan had been “reduced to a state of helplessness and misery.” He saw that “his sons were not to be turned aside from their determination to enter the capital, and viewed with dismay the mighty preparations made by Dárá for a decisive battle.”23 Utilizing the resources of the state machinery, Dárá raised a force that in Bernier’s view “was sufficient, in point of physical strength, to overwhelm two or three such armies as AurangZebe’s.”24 Yet, the “prince” squandered this advantage with several ill-advised decisions. First, despite the advice of his advisors, he refused Shah Jahan’s offer to lead the army then forming, a move that might have forced Aurangzeb and Murád to halt their march. Dárá also refused council recommending that he await the return of Sulaiman’s troops before engaging his brothers. In pushing for an immediate confrontation to decide the succession, Dárá, in the Frenchman’s view, committed a grave mistake. In a passage no doubt designed for his own monarch, Bernier’s message was clear: even great and absolute kings should accept wise council when it is offered. Moreover, by rejecting his father’s offer, the prince had compounded this error by himself denying the legitimate power of the emperor. Such a move, whether in Europe or India, would necessarily have adverse repercussions!25 In any event, the two armies faced each other approximately five miles from Agra near Samúgarh in late May 1658, with Dárá ignoring one last plea from his father to await Shukoh’s troops. Bernier’s narrative of this decisive battle in the succession struggle is one of the most detailed available. He began by giving a careful overview of the deployment of the troops on each side, the weapons employed, and the commanders and their qualifications. This level of detail was

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no doubt intended for European military leaders of the day, as well as for Colbert who quite rightly had a keen interest in the military strength, strategy, and armaments of any indigenous powers his East India Company would encounter. Bernier’s description of the battle of Samúgarh is very sympathetic to Dárá. In part, this opinion was no doubt due to Bernier’s acceptance of the rule of primogeniture in Europe, a rule that all true monarchs were obliged to uphold. Ensconced on his Sinhalese elephant, Shah Jahan’s eldest son “advanced towards the enemy’s cannon, and despite severe resistance he retained an admirable calmness and evince[d] his immovable determination not to recede.”26 No doubt inspired by his leadership, Dárá’s troops made inroads against Aurangzeb’s center, with the cavalry of each side joining the fray. During this melee, Dárá “afforded undeniable proofs of invincible courage . . . and performing such feats of valour that he succeeded at length in overthrowing the enemy’s cavalry and compelling it to fly.” At this point, it seemed that defeat was certain for Aurangzeb, who “without much success” was attempting to retrieve “the disasters of the day.”27 Surrounded by his personal guard of one thousand, he ordered that chains be tied to his elephant so that it would hold its position. At this critical juncture of the battle and the succession struggle, victory was turned into defeat for Dárá by several factors. First, the prince made an illadvised decision to move to his left wing against Murád Bakhsh instead of finishing off Aurangzeb at a most opportune time, an action that in Bernier’s words “was rendered abortive by an act of treachery, which involved Dárá in immediate and irretrievable ruin.”28 What was this act? At this point of the battle, Khalilu-llah, who commanded the right wing for the prince but secretly harbored a hatred for him engendered by a previous affront, rode up and duped him into abandoning his elephant in favor of mounting a horse since nothing then remained except “to pursue the fugitives with vigour.”29 According to Bernier, had Dárá remained on his elephant and continued to inspire his troops he “would have become master of the Empire, but the credulous Prince, duped by the artful obsequiousness of Calis-ullah [sic]” accepted his advice. Soon thereafter, unable to see him, his troops became uneasy “a rumour spread that he had been killed; and the army betrayed; a universal panic seized them.”30 According to Bernier, by remaining on his elephant for a quarter of an hour at the crucial juncture of the battle Aurangzeb “was rewarded with the crown of Hindoustan: Dárá left his own a few minutes too soon, and was hurled from the pinnacle of glory, to be numbered among the most miserable of Princes.”31 The succession struggle that formed the basis for the longest section of Bernier’s Travels had thus been decided on the battlefield with the victory of Aurangzeb, a struggle and a victory that contained valuable lessons for the rulers of Europe, and particularly Louis XIV.

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It is evident that throughout his analysis of the succession struggle, Bernier was heavily influenced by the French intellectual paradigm of the day, a paradigm that awkwardly combined a nascent scientific method and skepticism for past “knowledge” tempered with the rising sinews of the absolutist political state. The Frenchman, however, was also clearly writing for scholarly consumption within this paradigm. The lessons for Louis XIV of the struggle for Shah Jahan’s throne were clear: avoid the unwise delegation of authority, support primogeniture whatever the cost, listen to the advice of wise councillors whenever appropriate, and, as Samúargh showed, never be diverted from slaying your primary enemy when the opportunity arose. Had Louis in fact embraced all of these subtle dictums from Bernier, perhaps his own reign, especially with respect to economic reforms and military gloire, would have been more “glorious.” In his final dictum on the art of warfare in India, Bernier also offered reassuring words for his king, Colbert, and Europeans in general. While offering grudging respect for the Mughal cavalry, the Frenchman did not “think very highly of their proficiency in the art of war as compared with our own wellequipped armies.” Why? Because Bernier believed that once “thrown into confusion” it was impossible to restore them to discipline. “They resemble an impetuous river which has burst its banks.” He had often, it seemed, reflected on the ease with which “our veterans from the army in Flanders, commanded by Prince Condé or Marshall Turenne, would overcome these armies, however numerous.”32 Overall then, it would be hard to imagine a more comforting document for Louis, his generals, and the nobility in France than the unfavorable comparisons Bernier draws between the political and military systems of the two societies during the years of the succession struggle. Sometime in late 1669, Bernier also completed a concise analysis of domains of the Mughal emperor in a letter titled “Concerning the Extent of Hindoustan,” for Colbert, who was then in the midst of a notable escalation of his own Asian strategy.33 Like the accomplished courtier he had become during his years at Aurangzeb’s court, Bernier began this letter by asking pardon for not bearing suitable gifts for either Louis or his minister, since in “Asia, the great are never approached empty-handed.” He also praised Colbert for his reforms, addressing his mémoire “to one whose measures have so admirably restored order in many departments, which before my departure from France, I feared were irremediably confused; to one who has evinced so much anxiety to make known to the ends of the earth the character of our sovereign, and of what the French people are capable in the execution of whatever you project for their benefit and glory.” Geographically, he described the “mighty extent” of the Great Mogor’s empire from the frontier of Golconda in the southeast to Persia in the northwest in terms that Colbert could easily envision: stretching some “five hundred French leagues, or five times as far as from Paris to Lyon.” Much of

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this land was “extremely fertile,” especially the large kingdom of Bengal. The population of the Mogor’s empire was “sufficiently abundant,” and the artisans, although “naturally indolent,” were compelled by necessity or otherwise to manufacture “carpets, brocades, embroideries, gold, silver, cloths of the various sorts of silk and cotton, goods which are used in the country and exported abroad.”34 No doubt familiar with the intellectual tenets of Colbert’s mercantilism and its emphasis on bullionism, Bernier devoted a long section of his letter to examining the flow of gold and silver into Aurangzeb's domains. After “circulating in every other quarter of the globe,” these precious metals came “at length to be swallowed up, lost in some measure, in Hindoustan.” The gold and silver mined in the Americas and shipped to Europe, that exchanged in Turkey, the Levant, and Persia, and even that from Japan were all eventually introduced into India to pay for her multitude of trading products. To the perplexing question of why the large number of goods imported into the Great Mogul’s domains (copper, cloves, elephants, horses, et al.) did not engender a commensurate drain of these metals, Bernier provided what must have been a compelling answer for Colbert: “because the merchants who bring them find it advantageous to take back in exchange, the productions of the country.” Mughal India therefore demonstrated that it was possible for a country to supply itself “with articles of foreign growth and manufacture,” be “destitute of mines,” and still absorb “a large portion of the gold and silver of the world.”35 If France could only produce manufactured goods as much in demand as the lands of Aurangzeb, could it too ensure such a positive flow of precious metals? This influx of gold and silver in conjunction with the fact that Aurangzeb was “the proprietor of every acre of land in the kingdom,” meant that the emperor was in receipt of “an immense revenue” and possessed “incalculable wealth.” In his addendum, Bernier would estimate the emperor’s annual revenues at Rs. 225,935,500.36 Yet, this wealth was limited by several factors that held important lessons for Louis XIV and Colbert. Foremost among these was a “want of labourers” on the land; many of whom perished “in consequence of the bad treatment” they experienced from the local governors. When unable to meet the demands of their “rapacious lords” these people were not only deprived of their means of subsistence, but also of their children as well who were often sold into slavery. Thus, the peasantry “driven by despair by so execrable a tyranny,” abandoned the country to find less oppression and a greater degree of “comfort.” Louis would therefore be wise to keep the abuses of the rural nobility and seigneurs in check. Another problem for the Grand Mogor was that his domains contained several “nations, over which he [was] not complete master.” Although ideally forced to pay tribute to the Great Mogul, many of these petty “chiefs or sovereigns,” including the Hindu Rajas and Moslem kings of Bijapur and

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Golconda, were frequently at war with the emperor and a constant drain on his treasury. The Mughals, descendants of Tamerlane, were also foreign rulers in north India, Sunni Moslems in a land of Hindus who outnumbered them in Bernier’s estimate one hundred to one. “To maintain himself in such a country, in the midst of domestic and powerful enemies,” necessitated that Aurangzeb also maintain numerous armies at great expense. Bernier then detailed the military structure and power of the emperor, estimating that he possessed a cavalry of c. 200,000 in the empire as a whole, complemented by infantry totaling nearly 300,000. These figures must have convinced Colbert of the futility of any strategy in north India that would include inland territorial expansion: trading concessions negotiated with the Mogor and coastal enclaves would have to suffice. Overall, then, the financial situation for the empire was not as prosperous as generally assumed in Europe at that time. “Although the Great Mogul be in receipt of an immense revenue, his expenditure being much in the same proportion, he cannot possess the vast surplus of wealth most people seem to imagine.”37 Bernier concluded his overview of the empire and of the kingdoms he had visited in the Levant and Asia by informing Colbert that the Asiatic states in general were indeed entering into a period of decline. This was no doubt encouraging news as the minister’s Asian strategy continued to unfold. Exacerbating Aurangzeb’s royal financial troubles was the fact that the entire economic system of the empire was indeed precarious. Much of the gold and silver that flowed into northern India was not reinvested in trade, but instead made into jewelry in quantities that were “incredible.” In lieu of regular cash payments to his nobles and military officers, Aurangzeb was also forced to give them rights of lands that bestowed “almost absolute” authority over the peasants, artisans, and merchants in those districts. This power was exercised in a “cruel and oppressive manner.” Moreover, there was little judicial recourse: “no great lords, parliaments, or judges of local courts exist, as in France, to restrain the wickedness of those merciless oppressors.” This “sad abuse of the royal authority,” undermined the economic life of the empire. The fruits of trade and industry could be deprived at will, and much gold and silver thus remained “buried at a great depth in the ground.” This practice was, according to Bernier, especially prevalent among Jain and Hindu merchants, who dominated the trade of the empire.38 The intellectual quest to solve these seminal economic problems no doubt occupied much of Bernier’s energies both during his travels and after his return to Paris. By utilizing the natural philosophy of his student days, and based on his extensive travels and careful observations, Bernier implicitly believed that he had “discovered,” or perhaps better “proven,” one of the fundamental natural laws that ought to govern the economic and social fabric of all societies: the principle of private property. He revealed this belief in his concluding

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paragraphs to Colbert. Aurangzeb’s economic problems could be solved if only he would embrace the right of private property, as it had been increasingly embraced in the countries of western Europe. Comparing the condition of the European states “where that right is acknowledged, with the condition of those countries where it is not known,” had convinced the physician that its absence was “injurious to the Sovereign himself.” For Bernier, the tyranny inherent in this dearth of secure personal tenure over property had ultimately driven the peasantry from the land and the gold and silver of the merchants beneath it once again. The rapid decline of the Asiatic states had inevitably resulted from such practices and the failure of their monarchs to embrace this new natural law.39 “How happy and thankful we should feel, My Lord,” Bernier exclaimed, that “in our quarter of the globe, Kings are not the sole proprietors of the soil!” If they were, they too would soon reign over the “solitudes, deserts, over mendicants and barbarians.” The crucial error of the Levant and Asian rulers was therefore clear: “actuated by the laws of God and of nature, the Kings of Asia grasp at everything, until at length they lose everything.” Although Bernier admitted that the Crown indeed owned substantial property in France, these domains could still be properly cultivated because the laws were “so reasonable” and the King was “the first to obey them.” His domains were held without violation of the law, his “farmers and stewards” could be sued, and the aggrieved peasant or artisan could find redress against injustice and oppression. According to Bernier, the supposed advantages of despotic governments (“fewer lawyers, and fewer law suits, and those few are more speedily decided”) would be far outweighed by the evils inherent in destroying private property. Take away the right of private property and one would introduce “as a sure and necessary consequence, tyranny, slavery, injustice, beggary, and barbarism: the ground will cease to be cultivated and become a dreary wilderness; in a word, the road will be opened to the ruin of Kings and the destruction of Nations.” A review of the kingdoms of the world, in Bernier’s opinion, demonstrated that they prosper or decline “according as this principle is acknowledged or contemned: in a word, it is the prevalence or neglect of this principle which changes and diversifies the face of the earth.”40 If this was not a universal law governing society then what was? To date, I have not been able to find any direct response of Colbert to this particular letter. I have argued elsewhere that an earlier letter from Bernier dated March 1668 in Surat did indeed play a role in this minister’s calculations for the escalation of his Asian strategy in the spring of 1669. But that initial letter offered detailed practical advice on the type of embassy that should be sent to Aurangzeb’s court, the type of trading concessions the French Compagnie should seek in subsequent negotiations, and the ideal locations for trading factories in the Mughal’s domains. This was vital information that Colbert could and did readily exploit in his campaign.41 The letter of late 1669 was clearly

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quite another matter, postulating the natural laws of private property and the evils of despotism as evidenced by the examples of the Levant and Asia. I would argue that Colbert was probably not enthralled with this siren-call for inviolate private property and the implicit leap to free market economy it portended. Bernier’s warnings on the dangers of despotic power and the need for the rule of law and what amounted to intermediate bodies to keep the power of the Crown in check, which in some ways anticipated parts of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1748), would have also aroused little enthusiasm on the part of Louis. It was no accident, however, that the 1671 English translation of Bernier’s History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol also contained a copy of this 1669 letter.42 The gentry and merchants of England, having already overthrown one “despotic” king and soon to replace another judged unsuitable, must have found much of interest in Bernier’s view of natural law. The intellectual climate of Absolutist France may have been capable of producing such views but the French state under Louis XIV and Colbert was not yet prepared to embrace them. Bernier, nevertheless, was far too “shrewd” a philosopher and courtier to allow such beliefs to stand in the way of his social and financial success. After all, discovering the “natural laws” governing society was one thing and living in the manner to which one is accustomed decidedly another. The less than enthusiastic reception that no doubt greeted some of the more “enlightened” opinions expressed in his 1669 “Letter Concerning the Extent of Hindoustan,” to Colbert probably convinced Bernier to temper such views with what we might call more “politically correct” arguments in most other sections of his Travels. Above all, his analysis of the succession war between Dárá and Aurangzeb for Shah Jahan’s throne amounted to a virtual homily on the benefits of firmly adhering to absolutist tenets. As noted above, Bernier laid much of the blame for these unfortunate events, this “Tragedy which I have just seen acted in one of the largest Theaters in the World,” on the emperor himself for unwisely delegating authority and abandoning such principles.43 Implicit in this analysis of course was the belief that no king should emulate Shah Jahan’s actions and share real power during his reign, even with his own sons. This was clearly an argument that was music to Louis XIV’s ears and one that no doubt helped Bernier receive the king’s license dated 25 April 1670 to publish his account of Mughal India, adorned with a suitably flowery and groveling dedication to the royal “Master to whom I [am] accountable.”44 The intellectual tenets of the Scientific Revolution may have changed the manner in which men and women observed the physical and natural world around them but, as Bernier’s example demonstrates, human nature in its own way was as slow to change as the universe itself.

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Notes 1. Cf. V.A. Smith, The Oxford History of India (Oxford: 1919); W.W. Hunter, A History of British India, 2 vols. (London: 1899–1900); A. Martineau, Dupleix et l’Inde francaise, 4 vols. (Paris: 1920–1928); and F.C. Danvers, The Portuguese in India, 2 vols. (London: 1894 and 1966). 2. For Pearson’s views on this tendency in the traditional literature, cf. The Age of Partnership (Honolulu: 1979), pp. 3–4; Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: 1975), pp. 4–6; and Coastal Western India (New Delhi: 1981), pp. xii–xviii, 19–20. For a general discussion of post-World War II trends in the historiography on European expansion, cf. H.L. Wesseling and P.C. Emmers, eds., Reappraisals in Overseas History (Leiden: 1979); and John E. Wills, Jr., “Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination,” American Historical Review, vol. LXLVIII, no.1 (1993): pp. 83–105. 3. Cf. for example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese in Asia, 1500–1700 (London: 1993); J.C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580– 1640 (Baltimore: 1993); M.N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: 1987); and Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: 1996). 4. For details on Bernier’s early life, cf. Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668 by Francois Bernier, [Hereafter Travels] ed., Archibald Constable and based on Irving Block’s 1826 translation (Westminster: 1891), pp. xv–xviii. 5. For a concise outline of this journey, cf. Travels, pp. xv–xviii. The Histoire de la derniere revolution was published in Paris, 2 vols., 1670; and the Suite des Memoires in Paris, 2 vols., 1671 6. Cf. Abrege de la philosophie de Gassendi, 8 vols. (Paris: 1674). Constable provides a complete and useful bibliography of works by and on Bernier in Travels, pp. xxv– xxxix. 7. Standard studies of Louis XIV’s reign include John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (New York: 1968); Andrew Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (New Brunswick: 1994); Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (London: 1970); William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth Century France (Cambridge: 1985); Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: 1988); and François Bluché, Louis XIV (New York: 1990). 8. On the War of Devolution and preparations for the Dutch War of 1672, cf. André Corvisier, Louvois (Paris: 1993); Carl J. Ekberg, The Failure of Louis XIV’s Dutch War (Chapel Hill: 1979); S. Elizinga, “Le prelude de la guerre de 1672,” Revue histoire moderne, vol. II (1927): pp. 349–66; Herbert Rowen, The Ambassador Prepares for War: The Dutch Embassy of Arnauld de Pomponne, 1669–1671 (The Hague: 1971) Paul Sonnino, Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge: 1988); and Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest, pp. 49–145. 9. On Colbert’s reforms, cf. among others, Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest, pp. 14–18, 52–53; C. W. Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York: 1939), vol. I, pp. 201, 300–04, 450–54; D. Dessert, “Finances et

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société au XVIIe siècle: a propos de la Chambre de justice de 1661,” Annales ESC, vol. XXIX (1974), pp. 849–69; Julian Dent, Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers, and Society in Seventeenth Century France (New York: 1973), pp. 106 ff.; and Charles de La Roncière, Histoire de la marine française, 6 vols. (Paris: 1899–1932), vol. V, pp. 325– 31. 10. Cf. Ames, “Colbert’s Indian Ocean Strategy of 1664–1674: A Reappraisal,” French Historical Studies, vol. XVI, no. 3 (1990): pp. 536–59; and Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest, pp. 60–61 and the manuscript sources cited therein. 11. Muhammad Háshim or Kháfí Khan, like his father Khwája Mir, was a notable historian of the Mughal period who resided in Delhi during the final years of Shah Jahan’s reign and during the reign of Aurangzeb. Kháfí Khan compiled a minute register of the events in Aurangzeb’s life even after the emperor had prohibited such histories in 1668. His great work, the Muntakhabu-l Luba’b Muhammad Sháhi was published several years after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, providing one of few extant contemporary accounts of that important period in Mughal history. ( Cf. The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, ed., John Dowson, Volume VII: The Muhammadan Period (Allahbad: 1964), pp. 207–34. 12. Bernier, Travels, p. 6. 13. Ibid., p. 10. 14. Ibid., p. 6. 15. Ibid., p. 7. 16. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 17. Ibid., p. 4. 18. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 19. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 20. Ibid., pp. 35–37. 21. Ibid., p. 38. 22. Ibid., pp. 38–39. 23. Ibid., pp. 42–43. 24. Ibid., p. 43. 25. Ibid., pp. 43–47. 26. Ibid., pp. 47–49. 27. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 28. Ibid., p. 52. 29. Ibid., pp. 53–54. 30. Ibid., p. 54. 31. Ibid., p. 54. 32. Ibid., p. 55. 33. Titled “Letter to Monseigneur Colbert, Concerning the Extent of Hindoustan, the Currency towards and final absorption of gold and silver in that country; its Resources, Armies, the administration of Justice, and the principal Cause of the Decline of the States of Asia,” this letter (s.d.) can be found in Travels, pp. 200–38. Bernier’s lamentation “so soon after my return,” in its initial paragraph allows us to date it ca. late 1669. For a summary of the state of Colbert’s plans in late 1669, cf. Glenn J. Ames “Colbert’s Indian Ocean Strategy of 1664–1674: A Reappraisal,” pp. 536–59; and Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest, pp. 49–65. 34. Bernier, Travels, pp. 200–02.

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35. Ibid., pp. 202–04. 36. Ibid., pp. 456–59. 37. Ibid., pp. 204–22. 38. Ibid., pp. 222–26. 39. Ibid., pp. 226–35. 40. Ibid., pp. 232–38. 41. Bernier’s March 1668 memoire is found in the Archives Coloniales (AC) C2-62 fos. 14–25. For a discussion of its impact on Colbert’s policies in Asia, cf. Ames “Colbert’s Indian Ocean Strategy,” pp. 543–45. 42. Published by Moses Pitt in London, 2 vols., 1671. 43. Bernier, Travels, p. lv. 44. Ibid., p. lv.

9 The Perils of Seeking a MultiCultural View of the East Indies: Charles Dellon, His Travels and the Goa Inquisition Glenn J. Ames The foundation of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales in September 1664 had been the culmination of a long process of gathering information on the part of Louis XIV’s great minister. In the years that followed, Colbert devoted his considerable energies to the subscription campaign designed to raise the 15,000,000 livres which he believed the Compagnie needed to compete with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and, in doing so, establish French power in the Indian Ocean trade.1 As part of these activities, Colbert invested some 2,200,000 livres of the king’s money and was accordingly able to fund the dispatching of two expeditions from France to Madagascar and India in 1665 to 1666.2 These expeditions comprised some fourteen ships and more than 2,500 men, the second commanded by François de Lopis, the marquis de Mondevergue and carrying the enigmatic Dutch DirectorGeneral François Caron.3 The cost had come to more than 2,500 livres out of a total capital pool of 5,415,916 livres that the Compagnie enjoyed by July 1667.4 From 1667 until 1672, Colbert, with Louis’s strong support for his Asian project, had been able to ensure that regular sailings had been sent out to assist the new Compagnie’s operations. In March 1668, the ship Force had departed from the Compagnie’s new docks at Port Louis.5 Sailing aboard this ship was a young Frenchman, Charles Dellon. Dellon, like many educated European

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travelers of the day, would eventually compile and publish a useful travel narrative and description of his experiences in Asia. More significantly, Dellon would experience in Asia what very few Frenchmen ever did: arrest and trial by the much-feared Portuguese Inquisition established at Goa (1560). Dellon would not only survive the rigors of his imprisonment at Goa and travels, but also he would eventually reveal to Europe and the world many of the secrets of the Holy Office that the Portuguese Inquisition and Crown had done much to keep hidden for more than a century. Dellon had been born in the southern city of Agde, near Montpellier, in 1649. Like his father, he had trained as a physician there. At the age of nineteen, flush with youth and caught up in the enthusiasm that Colbert had labored so hard to create for his new enterprise, Dellon had entered the service of the Compagnie. He reported to Port Louis in the early spring of 1668 in time for the departure of the Force.6 In part, his motives for this journey were linked to his desire to satisfy a natural curiosity for the exotic and unknown. This motive had probably been reinforced in his medical studies undertaken during the age of the Scientific Revolution, of Descartes, and of Natural Law. “All mankind have a certain Natural propensity to Curiosity, but Young people have commonly a greater Inclination to satisfie their own Fancies, taken up for the most part with Novelties than those who are arrived to a ripe Age.”7 Dellon had always been “inflamed” with the thirst for such knowledge, and to understand the structures and workings of other societies. This thirst would initially prompt him to join the Compagnie. Ironically, this same thirst for knowledge would also help lead to his arrest and imprisonment by the Goa Inquisition. Ultimately, this quality would sustain him through his ordeal at the hands of the Holy Office and help him return to France largely unscathed by all his travails in the outre-mer. It would also add great power and importance to his two most important published works, A Voyage to the East-Indies and his Relation of the Goa Inquisition8 After departing from Port Louis on 20 March 1668, the Force had a difficult voyage to the island of Bourbon. The ship leaked badly. The ship’s pilots made various mistakes, “so that we did not come within sight of the Isle Dauphin (called by the Portugueses. St. Laurence, and by the Natives, Madagascar) . . . till 7 Weeks after we pas’d the Tropick of Capricon, on the West-side, which did not a little surprize our Pilates, who believed to have been on the East side of it.” Contrary winds had then caused “no small trouble” and the crew had “endur’d great fatigues” before they could double the southern cape of Madagascar. As a result of these difficulties and delays, “Distempers began to reign among our Ships Crew, two thirds of them being disabled by the Scurvy; this is that so much dreaded Sea-plague.”9 After finally reaching the island of Bourbon in July 1668, Dellon had then spent a year exploring that island and the isle Dauphine or Madagascar. This section of his Voyage to the East Indies reveals much about the formidable powers of observation that Dellon brought to bear in describing these

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new places “pursuant to [his] intention.”10 He provided meticulous detail on the geographic location of the places he visited no doubt in part to assist future French travelers and Compagnie activities. Bourbon, for example, was described as “under the 21 st Degree of Southern Latitude; 150 Leagues distant from the Isle Dauphine. Its Circuit is of about 22 French Leagues, and its figure almost circular.”11 Dellon throughout his Voyage was always quick to contrast the now-tainted traditional knowledge of previous epochs and authorities like the second-century geographer Ptolemy with the “new” knowledge that scientific observation and method was “discovering.” “What the Ancients have been perswaded about the Torrid Zone to be Uninhabitable, is sufficiently contradicted by the experience of our Modern Travellers.”12 Dellon provided extensive sections on the climate, flora and fauna of these islands for his readers. The taste, health benefits, and propagation methods of tropical fruits like bananas, pineapples, and water-melons were all described. “Here you have the most excellent Water-Melons, which the Indians call Patequas, and the Portugueses Balancias; they exceed our European Melons in bigness, their peel is greener, they’re much tenderer, nothing in the World is more proper to quench ones Thirst.” The land and sea tortoises of the islands received special attention. The flesh of the land tortoise was “accounted very good, coming in Taste next to Veal,” while the “Flesh of the Sea Tortoises is look’d upon as a sovereign Remedy against the Scurvy.”13 Given Colbert’s desire to break into the Indian Ocean trade, Dellon’s Voyage also contained a detailed section on the commerce and trading products valued in these islands. On Madagascar, foreigners could vend “painted Callicoes, and Linen Cloaths, Cornelius Bracelets, and Necklaces of Silver, Copper and Tin.” Iron was “of great esteem to among them because they have none in the whole island.” The Compagnie’s hopes of finding gold mines on the island had been in vain to that point, leading to great frustration to the French. “It was the hopes of discovering some considerable gold mines in those parts, which did not a little contribute towards the Establishment of this Company.”14 The checkered experiences of the French colonists from the 1665 and 1666 expeditions at Fort Dauphin, as well as earlier attempts by Richelieu’s 1642 Compagnie d’Orient and other French expeditions, no doubt colored Dellon’s views on the inhabitants of the island. By the time the large 1666 expedition under Mondevergue had reached Fort Dauphin in March 1667 the situation on the island was close to critical. The supplies and specie brought out by the 1665 fleet had been squandered and the colonists had spread out haphazardly over the huge island in a vain quest for the easy wealth (i.e., gold and silver) that Colbert’s propagandists had promised. No farming was underway, and the harsh tropical climate and low-lying location of Fort Dauphin had exacerbated the spread of disease. The French were also involved in periodic warfare with several Malagasy tribes. In short, Caron found the settlement so deplorable “and the prospect of being able to effect an amelioration so discouraging that he determined . . . to proceed at once too India.” Matters had not thereafter

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improved. These circumstances no doubt set the stage for Dellon’s description of the island.15 “The Inhabitants of this Island are for the generality Black, Treacherous, Savage, and Crue[l]. They wear their Hair very long: There are also a great many of a yellowish Complexion, and some approaching White, the last of which have much better features in their Faces, than the Rest.”16 Their petty tribal princes or Rohundrians had frequently ambushed Frenchmen and were constantly at war with other tribes. “They are much addicted to War, and very faithful to their Rohundrians” The basis of wealth for these “Kings” in this rural, agricultural, village society was “the great number of their Oxen and Slaves.” According to Dellon, these tribes were “embroil’d in continual Quarrels with their Neighbors, which commonly end[ed] in bloody Wars among themselves; the vanquish’d are most cruelly treated by the Conquerors, who spare neither Sex nor Age.” Fortunately for the French their firearms gave them some advantage in warfare with the Malagasy tribes whose weapon of choice was a poisoned dart or spear. Moreover they always fought on foot. “The first Horse that ever was seen in this Island, having been brought out of the Indies by order of Monsieur Mondevergue.”17 During Dellon’s stay on Madagascar, the French led by Monsieur Champmargou were involved in a “war” with one of the most powerful local chieftans, Rasaf. Although vastly outnumbered in this struggle, the superiority of French firearms, discipline, and Champmargou’s horse “which the poor Negroes were so surprised at the sight of this Creature, that they paid it the same respect as its Master.” Rasaf was defeated in this struggle and lost his life as well, “leaving a Booty of Thirty Thousand Oxen and a vast number of Slaves to the Conquerors.”18 Part of Dellon’s mission to describe and analyze the countries he visited also led him to include sections on religion and social customs. This aspect of his “mission” would eventually lead of course to problems once he was in India. On Madagascar, at least, he could indulge this passion freely and without fear. In the environs of Fort Dauphin there were “so few foot-steps of Religion to be seen among the Inhabitants of the Isle . . . that it might admit of a Question; Whether they have any or not?” The “most intelligible among them confess that there is an infinite Sovereign Being, which Being all Goodness has the direction of all Human Affairs . . . yet see no reason why we should direct our Prayers to him, who cannot do Evil, but that we ought to reserve our Veneration and Vows for the Demon who has power to Torment us.”19 Since the Malagasy tribes did not believe in “immortality of the Soul, and consequently making no account of a future state,” they had used this to their best advantage and “given themselves over to all manner of Debaucheries.” Some did not observe “any Rules in their Marriages, they copulate together without the least Engagement or promise on either side, and leave one another as freely again as they met at first.”20 To that point, French missionaries on the island had found it hard to compete with this “Libertinism”, especially given the “strict” rules of the Christian faith in such matters. Near the large Bay of

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Antongil, Dellon had found the religion “somewhat nearer to Mahometism.” What did this mean for the Frenchman? “The Men are here Jealous of their Wives, even to a degree of Madness, and Adultery with Death. They never eat any Swines-Flesh, and have such an Aversion to this Creature, that if one chances to Die, they Bury it very deep under Ground, least they should be defiled by the smell.”21 Dellon departed from Madagascar in mid-August 1669 and after a relatively swift passage across the Arabian Sea, reached Swally Road, the anchorage for the rich Indian entrepot of Surat on 21 September.22 The physician arrived at Surat at an exciting and crucial stage in the history of Colbert’s Compagnie. The enigmatic Dutchman, François Caron, who had been lured to the service of the French Compagnie in 1665 by Colbert, had established a trading factory in Surat in early 1668. Moreover, as a clear indication that India was to be a focal point of the Compagnie’s operations, along with Ceylon and the Indonesian island of Bangka, Caron transferred the conseil souverain there from Fort Dauphin. At the moment of Dellon’s arrival, Caron was in the midst of attempting to establish the Compagnie’s operations rapidly in the major trading areas of India, including Gujarat and its rich textile trade, the gemstone-rich sultanate of Golconda, and the pepper-rich Malabar Coast.23 Dellon’s account of Surat was as precise and detailed as his earlier observations in southeast Africa. “The City is Situate under the one and Twentieth Degree of North Latitude, and is one of the most considerable Ports in the Empire of the Great Mogul.” The warfare then ravaging between the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) and the Maratha-Hindu leader Shivaji had forced the Governor “to surround their City with a good Wall and to be constantly upon their guard.”24 According to Dellon, Shivaji was “a Very Potent Prince, who has managed his Affairs with so much Prudence as to have Establish’d himself, in spite of his Potent Enemies, in all the Territories Situate betwixt Surate and Goa, unless it be some few Sea-Ports, belonging to the Portuguese.”25 Surat, above all, was “a place of great Commerce.” Diamonds from the Muslim sultanate of Golconda, pearls from Cape Comorim and the Persian Gulf, amber from Africa, musk and civet from China, silks, cotton cloth, pepper, cinnamon from India and Indonesia were all available; “so that there is no thing so precious or rare, but the Ware-Houses of Surrate are sufficiently provided with it.” As such, it was of great importance to the “Great-Mogul” Aurangzeb, whose regional governor kept a “very Splendid Court.” That official was “attended by a strong Guard, Consisting of several Companies both Horse and Foot; when he goes abroad, he is carried by an Elephant, upon whose Neck, is fastned a Tent big enough to contain 12 or more persons.”26 As with his account on Madagascar, Dellon also provided a very detailed analysis of the religious and cultural customs of the plethora of traders established in Surat: Hindu, Parsi, Jain, Muslim, and Christian. Oddly, it was his views on the establishment and

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spread of his own faith in India that would cause him the most trouble in the ensuing years.27 Echoing the common view of this period, Dellon maintained that the “Christian Faith was first planted in those parts by St. Thomas, and that Apostle sealed the truth of the Gospel which he had preached to these Infidels with his Blood.” On the eastern or Coromandel coast, Dellon argued that it had been “preserved in its purity to this day.” Before the arrival of the Portuguese, these Christians had “only made use of the Gospel of St. Matthew.” They were thereafter surprised to find so many others “adored the Name of Jesus Christ.” According to the Frenchman, while it was true that there was “some difference in the ceremonial part, . . . the substance of their Religion is the same with ours.” The Portuguese had “made considerable progresses in the Indies, towards the Establishment of Christianity . . . but their Zeal is involved in no small difficulties, which obstructs their pious Endavours.” Above all, according to Dellon: “The severity of the Inquisition establish’d in all places under the obedience of the King of Portugal, Holy by its Name, but so terrible in its Consequences, serves for nothing else than to abalienate [sic] the Infidels from the Christian Church.”28 For the next three years, Dellon continued to work for the Compagnie both at the Tellicherry factory under M. Flacourt and at Surat under the DirectorsGeneral Caron and Gueston. During this time, he undertook several voyages on Compagnie ships. In 1670 and 1671, Dellon explored the western or Malabar Coast of India, and his account provided equally astute descriptions of the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious structures of that pepper-rich region.29 By late January 1672, following a brief encounter with Jacob Blanquet de La Haye’s large French fleet along this coast, he reached the rich Portuguese Asian capital of Goa.30 Mirroring earlier non-Portuguese accounts of Goa, such as those of Dutchman Jan Huyghan van Linschouten and Frenchman François Pyrard, Dellon provided his readers with a meticulous examination of the structures of the Estado da India. “The River of Goa is one of the finest in the whole World, no Ships of what Burthen soever, but may go up without the least danger to the City.”31 Perhaps with an eye for assisting Colbert’s project, Dellon detailed the major fortifications of the city, the trading products, sailing seasons, and location of the famed Casa da Polvera or Gunpowder Factory. He also offered descriptions of the functions of the major imperial functionaries in Goa: the Viceroy, the magistrates of the Supreme Court, the staff of the Misericordia, and the officials of the Inquisition. Much information was also provided on Portuguese social, cultural, and religious life in Asia.32 “The Portugueses in general have these three Qualities belonging to them: To be Zealous to the highest degree of Superstition; to be Amorous to a degree of Madness, and Jealous beyond all reason.”33 In Dellon’s view, these elemental charateristics had resulted in a plethora of problems in both Goa and its dependencies! By October 1672, Dellon had returned to Surat and made one final voyage in the

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Compagnie’s employ: to the Persian Gulf region aboard the ship St. Jacques, where he visited and described both Maskat and Hormuz.34 Upon his return to Surat, in February 1673, he received permission from Gueston to leave the Compagnie’s service and evidently resolved to undertake a voyage to China. As Dellon noted, “having obtained permission from him to go whither I thought most convenient my self, I disposed every thing to quit Suratte with the first opportunity, to satisfie my Curiosity in some other parts of the Indies.”35 Traveling overland through Gujarat, he stopped in the Portuguese stronghold of Damão (Daman). The Portuguese Governor of the town, Manuel de Mendonça Furtado, convinced the young Frenchman to practice medicine there. Dellon agreed and, in doing so made a fateful choice. As Dellon later described: “I was staying at Damaun . . . to rest from the fatigues I had endured in various voyages, and to recruit myself for the more ample gratification of my passion for travelling.” Ironically, this place where the Frenchman “had hoped to find repose” would mark the “commencement of trouble infinitely greater than those” which he “had previously borne.”36 The dashing twenty-four-yearold Frenchmen cut an impressive figure in the provincial Portuguese enclave. According to the Abbé Carré, “he had other qualities to recommend him, which soon gave him an entrée in Portuguese society. He was young, good-looking, and intelligent.”37 More irksome to some, however, was Dellon’s eagerness to discuss his views on both medicine and Catholic dogma. What occurred next is the subject of much debate, but what is certain is that Dellon and Mendonça Furtado quarreled, most probably over the affections of a woman, Mme. Vidal. Mendonça Furtado and an Indian priest (‘a black priest’), perhaps also jealous of Dellon’s attention to Vidal, denounced him to the Commissary of the Inquisition at Daman who in turn received an order for Dellon’s arrest, which occurred on 24 August 1673. For the next five months, Dellon was held in Daman, in “a stinking and dark dungeon” with forty other prisoners.38 Based on Dellon’s own account there is little doubt that he gave his enemies ample grounds to denounce him. “The first opportunity which I gave to my enemies to resort to the Inquisition for my ruin, was a conversation with an Indian priest, a Theologian of the order of St. Dominic.” Dellon in fact considered himself qualified to “enter the lists with even professed Theologians.” He claimed a great “enthusiasm for the Holy Scriptures, both the Old and New Testaments, which he “usually carried on [his] person.” His studies in France during the age of the Scientific Revolution and Descartes had also inculcated a thirst for investigative knowledge; a thirst that he had only begun to sate with the first five years of his voyage. “I had taken pains to acquire a knowledge of scholastic theology, because in extensive travels all descriptions of men, of every religion and sect, are to be met with; and I disputed freely with Heretics and Schismatics.” Dellon even possessed “several books on the subject, and had received much information, both from discourse and study, during the leisure afforded by my voyages, and my residence in various parts of India.”39 While this intellectual curiosity may have been

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possible in Paris, Amsterdam, or London at this time, it was certainly not wise for Dellon to indulge this passion in the Dominican house in Daman! As Dellon himself admitted, “though my conduct might not be entirely conformable to the sanctity of the religion in which I was baptized, I have ever been attached to the faith of my ancestors.”40 Nevertheless, during this conversation on “the effects of baptism” Dellon “merely for the sake of argument . . . denied the “efficacy of that which is called Flaminis; and to support my opinion, I adduced the passage, ‘Except a man be born of water and of the spirit &c.’ (John III, 5).” The Frenchmen had also failed to show proper deference to the small portable alms boxes common in Portuguese India adorned with painted images of the Virgin Mary or Catholic saints. “I sometime refused to receive and kiss the cabinet, whence it was concluded, (surely too rashly) that I despised the image, and was consequently heretical.” Dellon tried to excuse this lapse on the fact that “I was then only twenty-four years of age, and had not all the prudence which a person ought to have who lives amongst strangers.” Yet, he had been living in Asia for more than three years and had spent several months in Goa. In Daman, Dellon had also rather unwisely critiqued the “usual” Portuguese practice of worshipping the images of the “Holy Virgin” and the crucifix.41 During his initial incarceration, the French prelate and traveler, the Abbé Carré, visited him on Christmas Eve Day 1673. Carré was then on his return voyage to France bearing important dispatches from Louis XIV’s Viceroy La Haye, who was then involved in a taxing campaign over the Coromandel Coast city of San Thomé with the king of Golconda and eventually the Dutch.42 “Knowing how dangerous the Inquisition was . . . I pretended I had great repugnance to visiting this young Frenchman, and that I was doing so only out of consideration for his parents.” Dellon, “through a double grill,” had related the circumstances of his plight to the cleric and entrusted a letter to him for his family in France. Carré “found it an amazing thing that all the other prisoners came in a body to the grille” to beg him not to “try to rescue or deliver M. Dellon, because during the five months he had been with them they had lacked for nothing, calling him their father-provider.” This good fortune was due to “three or four” families in Daman who were extremely fond of the young Frenchman “but not daring in any way to procure his liberty had the satisfaction and consolation of sending him food and clothes.”43 Soon thereafter, on 1 January 1674, Dellon began his voyage south to Goa. After a stop at Bassein, his ship reached the Mandovi on 14 January and he was held in the “ordinary prison [Aljouvar] . . . more foul, dark, and horrible than any one I had seen” for two days until he was transferred to the direct custody of the Goa Inquisition.44 Dellon would spend the next two years in the cells of the Palace of the Inquisition undergoing periodic interrogations on matters of faith. As he later noted, he would have preferred the dark cells of the Aljouvar “to the neat and light cells of the Holy Inquisition; because here I had the blessings of

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society and conversation but in the prisons of the Holy Office I was informed these enjoyments were debarred.”45 Dellon’s account of these years constitutes the most complete description of the procedures of this imperial institution. The systematic method he adopted in this description in fact mirrored the method that served him so well in dissecting and noting the most interesting features of the lands he had already visited in the employ of the Compagnie.46 In essence, as he had for Madagascar, Dellon detailed the geographic, topographical, administrative, economic, and religious structures of the Goa Inquisition. His insights on the Grand Inquisitor of the Indies, Francisco Delgado de Matos, “a secular priest, about forty years of age,” are also significant. As was generally the case, Delgado de Matos sat on the Council of State in Goa during a crucial period in its history and he also played a notable role in the 1678 Royal Council in Goa that sought to redress some of the abuses relating to the religious orders operating in the Estado da India.47 The flora and fauna of this institution also fell under his sharp investigative gaze. “The prisoners are tolerably well kept. They have three meals daily. Breakfast is brought at six, dinner at ten, and supper at four.” The socio-cultural distinctions of the Portuguese Asia were maintained even within this institution. The breakfasts “for Blacks, is generally cange, or water thickened with rice; and their other meals always consist of rice and fish.” The “Whites are treated more delicately.” In the morning they received a soft roll “weighing about three ounces” with fried fish and fruits, “or in Sundays and sometimes Thursdays, a sausage.” On those days they also had meat with dinner with a roll, a dish of rice and some ragout with an “abundance of sauce to mist with the rice.” On the other days, fish was dinner staple. For supper, bread, fried fish, rice, a ragout of fish or eggs was the general rule, “but not any flesh, not even on Easter-day. In Dellon’s view this regimen was used “as much for the sake of economy (fish being very cheap in the Indies), as to mortify those who have incurred the pain of the greater excommunication.” As a physician, he also noted that such a diet would preserve the prisoners “from the cruel disorder which the Indians call Mordechi [sic], proceeding from indigestion, and which is frequent and fatal in these climates, especially in a place where exercise cannot be taken.” Dellon admitted that the “sick receive every necessary attention with the greatest care.”48 Nevertheless, the primary function of the institution, stamping out heresy in Portuguese India, was never compromised. Thus, while physicians and surgeons were commonly brought in to care for the sick and, “if the disease becomes dangerous,” confessors as well, “the Viaticum and Extreme Unction are never administered in this house, nor is either Sermon or Mass ever heard there.” Those who died were “interred within the house without any ceremony.” Yet those who “according to the maxims of the Tribunal,” were deemed to have occurred “capital punishment” could not escape this judgment even in a premature death: “their bodies are taken up, and their remains preserved to be burnt at the Next Act of Faith.”49 The bulk of his account predictably

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constituted an indictment of the practices of this body albeit with a plethora of valuable details particularly on the methods of interrogation utilized by the Holy Office in Goa and the treatment of the New Christians (converted Jews) resident in Goa.50 After undergoing at least eight interrogations over the next eighteen months, Dellon was convicted of heresy. Dressed in the sambenito (Cross of St. Andrew Dress) proscribed for sorcerers and heretics he took part in and provides an invaluable description of the auto-de-fe (l’acte de foi) celebrated in Goa on 12 January 1676 under the auspices of the Grand Inquisitor Dalgado e Matos and the Viceroy Luis de Mendonça Furtado, the first count of Lavradio. Dellon’s sentence was excommunication, banishment from the Indies, and condemnation to serve on the galleys of Portugal for five years. He also received a formal list of five penances he was proscribed to perform for the next three years. As part of this sentence he, like all others arrested by the Goa Inquisition, swore to guard as secret everything that had happened to him within its walls.51 As Dellon later related: “The Ship which was to carry me to Lisbon was called the San Pedro de Ratel, commanded by Captain Simon de Sousa. It was the seven and twentieth day of January when we sailed from the Bar of Goa.”52 After a stopover in Bahia, where Dellon evidently remained in prison the whole time the ship was in port, the São Pedro de Rates reached Lisbon in mid-December 1676.53 As part of his sentence in Goa, Dellon was thereupon conveyed to a galley in the Tagus. Thanks to the intercession of the sieur Fabre, chief physician to the Queen of Portugal, Marie-Françoise de Nemours, Dellon was released from custody in June 1677.54 He embarked aboard a ship bound for Bayonne on 22 July, and landed in his “Native Country” on the 16 August 1677 after nearly nine years aboard.55 Following his return to France, Dellon set about publishing accounts of his experiences in both Asia and at the hands of the Inquisition and also continued his medical career, serving as physician to the Prince of Conti. Dellon’s Relation d’un voyage fait aux Indes orientales appeared in two volumes in 1685, the second concluding with his Traite des maladies particulières aux pays orientaux et dans la route.56 Although Dellon had evidently completed his Relation de l’inquisition de Goa by 1681, his concerns over the power of the Holy Office and the oath of secrecy he had taken delayed his willingness to publish it until 1687, when it appeared in Leiden, and even then was published anonymously. As he noted at the time: “I have long delayed as to the publication of this account; for eight years have elapsed since my return to France, and upwards of four since the account was written.” Why the delay and why ultimately Dellon’s decision to publish it? “I was afraid to offend the Holy Office and to break my oath.” Yet, finally friends had convinced him “that it was important to the public and in many respects to be thoroughly instructed as to this tribunal, and the relation might even be serviceable to the gentlemen of the Holy Office.” Moreover, Dellon argued that it would be “still more so to those who have the power to regulate its

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proceedings, and restrain its jurisdiction.” What of his oath of secrecy? Since it had been “unjustifiably extorted . . . under the dread of being burnt, general utility was a sufficient dispensation to the conscience of the party taking it, and consequently imposed a sort of obligation upon him to communicate what he knew.”57 Fifteen consecutive editions were thereafter published in Paris, Amsterdam, London, Lyons, Rotterdam, and Köln between 1688 and 1709, the year in which Dellon’s name first appeared. It is significant that a Portuguese translation did not appear until 1866, nearly fifty years after the Goa Inquisition was abolished. Dellon’s seminal work on the Goa Inquisition constitutes the only detailed analysis of the structure, practices, inner workings, and abuses of this powerful early modern institution. As such, it provided much fodder to eighteenthcentury Enlightenment philosophies anxious to abolish it, nineteenth-century English historians anxious to create a Black Legend of the Portuguese empire in Asia to justify the creation of their own, as well as twentieth-century historians of Portuguese Asia. Nevertheless, Dellon’s subsequent notoriety or historical importance should not distract us from the attempt to understand the contemporary reasons of his arrest in 1673. His attentions to Mme. Vidal and unconventional views on matters of faith no doubt played a part in his temporary troubles. The fact remains, however, as Carré’s account makes perfectly clear, that there were a plethora of Frenchmen resident in Portuguese Asia during these years who no doubt shared the same views and committed the same offenses.58 The period ca. 1660–1670, however, were years characterized by a malaise of confidence and power in the once mighty Estado da India. As I have argued elsewhere, the Viceroy Luis de Mendonça Furtado (1671–1677) and Governor Antonio Paes de Sande (1678–1683) would do a notable job of overcoming this malaise.59 Yet, Dellon represented the archetype of everything Mendonça Furtado, his kinsman, the Archbishop of Goa Antonio Brandão, and the Inquisitor-General Dalgado e Matos resented about the growing French presence in India both economically and religiously. The French, led by François Caron, had reached Surat in early 1668 and begun throwing money around in lavish quantities in an effort to establish a trade.60 In contrast, the Royal treasury in Goa was frequently in dire need during the 1660s.61 The French presence on Madagascar, in Surat, and along the Malabar Coast was of growing concern in both Lisbon and Goa.62 The religious threat to the Padroado embodied most visibly in the form of foreign bishops like François Pallu, bishop of Heliopolis, had further incensed the Portuguese Crown and its servants.63 Colbert’s grand fleet of 1670 under La Haye and Caron had only recently departed from Goa overawing Mendonça Furtado with a display of military and naval power that he would have loved to have had at his disposal.64 Soon thereafter, word had also reached Goa that the strategic bay of Trincomalee on Ceylon had been take by La Haye as had the rich city of San Thomé on the Coromandel Coast, until 1662 a Portuguese possession.65

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It was precisely in these circumstances that Dellon was arrested. Not to stretch matters too much but Dellon, like the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, was young, dynamic, powerful, and virile. As such, he presented a target worth attacking and making an example of and, in doing so, show the up-start French that they still had to contend with the vestigial power of the Estado da India. The Inquisition represented the most effective and powerful weapon for settling both symbolic and personal scores, especially for the subjects of either allied or neutral kingdoms in an age of warfare, as the case of Fr. Ephraim and Dellon demonstrate. As Dellon himself pointed out: “I think too, that I am justified in believing that I was sent into Portugal, for the express purpose of pleasing the Viceroy and Governor of Daman, who was his relation; as out of upwards of two hundred persons who left the Inquisition when I did, I was the only one compelled to leave the Indies for Europe.”66 Ironically, while Fr. Ephraim, an earlier French “victim” of the Goa Inquisition, would not publish an account of his experiences at the hands of the Holy Office there, Dellon as a layman and a man of “science” did of course attack his attackers and ultimately to great effect.67

Notes 1. Among others, cf. Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: 1996), pp. 12–31; C.W. Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York: 1939), vol. I, pp. 483–96; P. Boissonade, Colbert et la souscription aux actions de la compagnie des Indes (Poitiers: 1909); Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Lettres, instructions, et mémoires, ed., Pierre Clément, 7 vols. (Paris: 1861– 1882), vol. II/2, pp. 428, 439 [cited hereafter as Lettres]; Bibliothèque Nationale, [BN] Paris, Mélanges de Colbert [MC], vol. 34, fos. 94–100; MC, vol. 100, fos. 200–02; MC, vol. 122, fos. 116, 483–86, 856; MC, vol. 123 bis, fos. 667–68, 886–87; L. Pauliat, Louis XIV et la compagnie des Indes Orientales de 1664 (Paris: 1886), pp. 101–12; and Dernis, Recueil et collection des litres, etc. concernant la Compagnie des Indes Orientales, 2 vols. (Paris: 1755–56), vol. I, pp. 84–87; and D. Dessert and J.L. Journet, “Le lobby Colbert: Un royaume, ou une affaire de famille?” Annales ESC, vol. XXX (1975): pp. 1303–36. 2. Cf. Ames, Colbert, p. 26; Cole, Colbert, vol. I, pp. 498–501; and BN Collection Clairambault, vol. 532, fos. 79–111. 3. Caron had extensive experience in Asia with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), rising to the position of Director-General in Batavia (1646). During his career in that organization, which began in 1618 and ended in 1650, he served in Indonesia, Japan, Formosa, and Ceylon. The best source for details on Caron’s service with the VOC is C.R. Boxer’s introductory notes to François Caron, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam (London: 1935), pp. xv–cxxi, 147–52. Cf., also François Martin, Mémoires de François Martin, fondateur de Pondichéry, 3 vols. (Paris, 1931– 34). 4. For details on the costs of these expeditions, cf. Dernis, Recueil, vol. I, pp. 170–72. On the 1665 fleet, as well as Mondevergue’s 1666 fleet, cf. Cole, Colbert, vol. I, pp. 504–

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07; Pauliat, Louis XIV, pp. 143–56, 211–17; Jules Sottas, Histoire de la compagnie des Indes Orientales, 1664–1719 (Paris: 1905), pp. 15–21, 24–25; Henry Weber, La Compagnie française des Indes, 1604–1875 (Paris: 1904), pp. 133–42, 269; and Paul Kaeppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin (Paris: 1908), pp. 7– 12, 653. 5. Cf. Kaeppelin, La Compagnie, p. 653; and “Journal du pilotage du vaisseau la Force, envoyé avec l’Aigle d’or, sa conserve, à l’isle Bourbon, à Madagascar, et dans l’Hindoustan, par la Compagnie des Indes Orientales,” found in BN MC, vol. 62, fos. 1– 135. 6. For details on Dellon’s background, cf. Biographie Universelle Ancienne et Moderne, vol. XI (Paris: 1814), pp. 12–13. 7. Cf. A Voyage to the East Indies (London: 1698), pp. 1–2. Cited hereafter as Voyage. 8. Originally published as Relation d’un voyage des Indes Orientales, 2 vols. (Paris: 1685), and Relation de l'Inquisition de Goa (Paris: 1687). 9. Cf. Voyage, pp. 2–7. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 7. 12. Ibid., p. 7. 13. Cf. ibid., pp. 8–12. 14. Ibid., p. 16. 15. On these problems, cf.George B. Malleson, History of the French in India (Edinburgh: 1909), p. 15; Pauliat, Louis XIV, pp. 226–40; Sottas, Histoire, pp. 16–18; and BN Nouvelles acquisitions françaises [NAF] 9342, fo. 63. 16. Voyage, p. 17. 17. Ibid., p. 19. 18. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 19. Ibid., pp. 21–22. 20. Ibid., p. 22. 21. Ibid., pp. 31–32. 22. For details on this part of Dellon’s journey, cf. ibid., pp. 34–36. 23. On Caron’s attempt to establish the French Compagnie in India at this time, among others, cf. Ames, Colbert, pp. 37–38. For Caron’s views on the trade at about the time of Dellon’s arrival, cf. Archives Coloniales, Paris, Series C (Correspondence) C2-62 (Indes Orientales: 1666 to 1676), Caron to Colbert: fos. 27–36, 21/IV/1668; fos. 42–43, 9/I/1669; fos. 45–46, 12/IV/1669; fos. 53–53v., 22/VIII/1669; and fos. 64–65, 1/I/1670. 24. Voyage, p. 37. 25. Ibid., p. 56. 26. Ibid., pp. 38–39. 27. For details, cf. ibid., pp. 43–55. 28. Ibid., pp. 43–44. 29. Cf. ibid., pp. 55–139. 30. As Dellon noted: ‘the next morning early [we] discovered a Squadron of 13 Ships, which proved to be the French squadron, Commanded by Monsieur de la Haye . . . . The Admiral with another Ship coming up with us, informed our Captain that the Sieur Caron, one of the Directors of our Company in the Indies, was on Board one of these Vessels, he went in a Challoup to pay him a Visit, and after his return, told us that there was a discourse among them of creating some Factories for the French East-India Company, in the Isle of Ceylon; so we left them.’ (Cf. ibid., p. 156.) For details on the movements of

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this fleet, cf. Ames, “Colbert's Grand Asian Fleet of 1670,” The Mariner’s Mirror, vol. LXXVI (1990): pp. 227–40. 31. Voyage, p. 157. 32. Cf. ibid., pp. 157–71. 33. Ibid., p. 164. 34. Cf. ibid., pp. 174–82. 35. Ibid., p. 182. 36. As part of his detailed analysis on the subject The Goa Inquisition, A.K. Priolkar provides large sections of Dellon’s Relation from the 1812 Hull edition. (Cf. Goa Inquistion, Part II, pp. 1–85.) For this quotation, cf. Priolkar, Dellon’s Relation, Part II, p. 7. 37. Cf. Bartélémy Carré, The Travels of the Abbé Carré in India and the Near East, 1672 to 1674, trans., Lady Fawcett, ed., Charles Fawcett, 3 vols. (London: 1947–48), vol. III, pp. 750–51. 38. Manuel de Mendonça Furtado had evidently come out to India with the Viceregal fleet of his kinsman, the new Viceroy Luis de Mendonça Furtado, that reached Goa in May 1671. In November of that year he had been appointed Governor of Daman. (Cf. Historical Archive of Goa, Panjim, India [HAG] Codex 1258, Livro de Homenagens (3).) 39. Priolkar, Dellon ’s Relation, Part II, pp. 7–8. 40. Ibid., p. 7. 41. Ibid., pp. 7–10. 42. For details, cf. Carré, Travels, vol. III, pp. 750–60. Dellon’s own views on his arrest can be found in his Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa. The most frequently cited English edition is Dellon’s Account of the Inquisition at Goa, printed at Hull by I. Wilson in 1812, the year the Goa Inquisition was finally abolished. Other English editions of the work also appeared at about this same time in London (1812, 1815), Boston (1815), and Pittsburgh (1819). Cf. also Priolkar, Dellon’s Relation, Part II, pp. 1–85. 43. Carré, Travels, vol. III, pp. 758–59. For Dellon’s description of the Daman prison, cf. Priolkar, Dellon’s Relation, Part II, pp. 14–19. 44. Priolkar, Dellon’s Relation, Part II, pp. 20–21. 45. Ibid., p. 20. 46. For details cf. Voyage, p. 235ff, and Priolkar, Dellon ’s Relation, Part II, pp. 20–85. 47. On Delgado de Matos, cf. Priolkar, Dellon’s Relation, Part II, p. 21; and Glenn J. Ames “Serving God, Mammon or Both?: Religious vis-à-vis Economic Priorities in the Portuguese Estado da India, ca. 1600-1700,” The Catholic Historical Review, vol. LXXXVI, no. 2 (April 2000): pp. 193–216. 48. Priolkar, Dellon ’s Relation, Part II, pp. 24–25. 49. Ibid., p. 25. 50. Cf. ibid., pp. 25–85. 51. On the 1676 Act of Faith, cf. ibid., pp. 49–64. 52. Cf. Voyage, pp. 194–95. It is interesting to note that in his Voyage, Dellon, still adhering to his oath of secrecy to the Inquisition, avoids all mention of his experiences at the hands of the Holy Office. He notes merely that “we arrived [at Goa] on the fourteenth day of January [1674] towards Night. I went on Shoar the next day, and by the advantageous offer made by my Friends, was prevailed upon to stay near three whole Years in this great city.” (Cf. Voyage, p. 193.) 53. It is interesting to compare Dellon’s two accounts of his return voyage to Europe given in Voyage, pp. 194–213, and that given in Priolkar, Dellon’s Relation, Part II, pp. 72–75.

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54. For details, cf. Voyage, p. 235ff; also given in Priolkar, Dellon ’s Relation, Part II, pp. 75–80. 55. Priolkar, Dellon’s Relation, Part II, p. 81. 56. This work, published by C. Barbin, was dedicated to Louis XIV’s confessor, Bishop Bossuet. It was reprinted in Amsterdam in 1699; translated into English (1688) and German (1700). The most recent edition is Charles Amiel and Anne Lima, eds., L’Inquisition de Goa: La relation de Charles Dellon (1687) (Paris: 1997–98). For details on Dellon and his publications, cf. Biographie universelle, vol. XI (Paris: 1814), pp. 12–13. 57. Cf. Priolkar, Dellon ’s Relation, Part II, pp. 6–7. 58. For Carré’s harsh denunciation of the fate of these Frenchmen like Mariage, Vidal, Martinot, and Seguineau who had wed Portuguese women in India, cf. Travels, vol. III: 730–47. 59. Cf. Glenn J. Ames, Renascent Empire?: The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, ca. 1640–1683 (Amsterdam, 2000) pp. 51–57, 205–213. 60. As Gerald Aungier, the English Company President in Surat, noted at this time, in terms of Caron’s “gifts” for a visiting Mughal dignitary, ‘French Gallantry exceeded all compare for theire Chiefe Directeur, the Here Caron, made him a present to the vallue of 10,000 in horses, Rich Tapestry, [and] Brasse Guns.’ (Cf. India Office Library, London [IOL] Original Correspondence [OC] 3515, Surat Presidency to London, 30/XI/1670 fo. 2; detailed in Ames, Colbert, pp. 40–43.) 61. As Antonio de Mello de Castro noted soon after reaching Goa, ‘the needs of this State are so many and so great . . . and there is not even a penny with which to meet regular and extraordinary expenses.’ (Cf. HAG Livros das monções do Reino [MR] 28A fol. 156v.–57, Mello de Castro to Queen Regent, 6/II/1663.) 62. Cf. for example, Portuguese apprehension over the rising French presence found in HAG MR/33 fo. 91, Afonso VI to São Vicente, 30/III/1666; MR/34 fo. 73, Pedro to São Vicente, 29/III/1669; and especially Arquivo Historico Ultramarino, Lisbon [AHU] Documentos avulsos relativos à Índia [DAI] Box 28 Document 94, consulta of Overseas Council, 14/V/1669, revised 17/X/1669; MR/36 fo. 318, Pedro to Mendonça Furtado, 20/III/1671, discussed in Ames, Renascent Empire, pp. 185–87. 63. For details on Pallu’s career, cf. Carré, Travels, vol. I, p. 209, n.2. 64. On the visit of La Haye’s fleet to Goa in January 1672, cf. Journal du voyage des grandes Indes, vol. I, pp. 126–40; Mendonça Furtado to Pedro: HAG MR/36 fo. 459, 25/1/1672; MR/37 fos. 129–29v., 24/VIII/1672, AHU DAI/29 Document 171, 18/II/1673; IOL OC 3624, Surat Presidency to Directors, 13/II/1672 fo. 3; IOL OC 3661, Batavia to Heeren XVII, 31/VII/ 1672 fo. 12v.; and IOL Factory Records [FR] G/36/106 fos. 72–73, Malabar Factors to Surat, 19/II/1672. 65. For the jealously of the Portuguese regarding these French conquests, cf. Mendonça Furtado to Pedro: HAG MR/37 fos. 129–29v., and fos. 203–03v., 15/IX/1672, MR/38A fo. 243, 11/X/1673, and AHU DAI/29, Document 131, consulta of the Overseas Council on French capture of San Thomé, 2/IX/1673; and particularly Carré’s account of his visit with Mendonça Furtado given in Travels, vol. I, pp. 217–20. 66. Cf. Dellon’s Relation given in Proilkar Inquisition, Part II, p. 65. 67. On the travails of Fr. Ephraim de Nevers, cf. Glenn J. Ames, “The Perils of Spreading the True Faith in Asia: Fr. Ephraim de Nevers and the Goa Inquisition, 1650–1651,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, vol. XXIII (1996): pp. 81–94. Fortunately from the Portuguese perspective, the reforms of Mendonça Furtado and

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Marie-Françoise’s husband, Pedro II, would provide the Estado with other weapons to use in the years after 1674. For details on these reforms and their results by ca. 1683, cf. Ames, Renascent Empire, pp. 205–13.

“A Mapp of the Kingdome of Siam,” 1693, from Simon de La Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (London: 1693).

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10 Simon de La Loubère: French Views of Siam in the 1680s Ronald S. Love In the “epistle dedicatory” of his new, two-volume book, Du Royaume de Siam, Simon de La Loubère wrote to the marquis de Seignelay: It was by the orders, which I had the honor to receive from the king upon leaving [Versailles] for my voyage to Siam, that I observed in that country, as exactly as possible, all that appeared to be the most singular; and at my return I awaited fresh orders from you before deciding upon what form I would give to the observations that I made. I hope, Monseigneur, that [the results] please you.1

Whether or not the overworked minister of the Marine ever saw La Loubère’s finished tomes, if only in manuscript, is impossible to say; for he died suddenly in 1690, a year before their publication. Nevertheless, the book was received enthusiastically by other contemporaries who lavished praise upon its author. “Your observations are so exact, so accurate,” lauded the abbé de Dangeau at La Loubère’s reception into the Académie Française in August 1693, an honor the former envoy had coveted for some time, that whoever reads your work with close attention, will learn many things long ignored, and will understand perfectly the religion, the government, the mores of. . . nations that are separated from us by so many seas . . . . We will profit from it, Monsieur.2

Another French scholar, Daniel Larroque, also extolled the book as singular and “more curious than any we have seen up to now, because it is a kind of natural

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history of that country,” and not just another travel narrative.3 Gottfried Leibnitz, the noted German savant with whom La Loubère had corresponded regularly since 1680, and to whom he had sent a copy of his account as soon as it had appeared in print,4 was equally effusive in his praise.5 Esteeming his French colleague as “one of the most knowledgeable and able men of these times,”6 Leibnitz criticized the relations of other travelers for reporting only superficialities dressed-up with “exterior prettiness.” By contrast, “you have given us solid truths and research of great consequence.”7 What these seventeenth-century readers found so significant about La Loubère’s new book—a significance made more apparent by historical hindsight— was his effort to move beyond a simple description of prices and products or cultural exotica common to so many travelogues of the day, to attempt an understanding of the anthropological underpinnings of Siamese society. This appealed not only to a contemporary European audience whose perceptions of the non-western, non-Christian world already had begun to change as a result of extensive contact with foreign civilizations. It spoke also to the philosophes of the next century, who used such travel literature to blast apart old preconceptions about European society itself. Thus, in a vital way Simon de La Loubère contributed to a vibrant literary tradition, inspired and perpetuated in large part by an elite cadre of diplomats—including William of Rubruck, Ghiselin de Busbeq, Sir George Sansom, and W.A.R. Wood8—whose accounts of the countries in which they served were at once intelligent, sensitive, and influential. Nor did the impact of La Loubère’s book diminish over time, though it enjoyed only five printings.9 Even after his death in 1729 at the age of eighty-seven, praise was still being lavished on his account as the “most appropriate model for works of this genre.”10 “[There] are very few relations,” eulogized Jean-Baptiste Mirabaud, chancellor of the Académie Française: that can stand next to that which he gave us of the kingdom of Siam. Geography, natural philosophy, religion, government, daily employments, all are treated in a manner that satisfies the most curious and demanding 11 reader.

Claude Gros de Boze, historian of the Académie royale des inscriptions et belleslettres, agreed with this assessment. He admired in particular what the late La Loubère had accomplished despite the brevity of his stay in Siam;—a “trimester worth more than any fame,” Leibnitz had declared in 1692.12 “In an interval lasting only three months,” wrote Gros de Boze, he collected information on the history and physical nature of this country, on the origin, language, employments, mores, industry, and religion of its inhabitants, which is so exact, that the relation he published on his return [to France], even though preceded by three or four others, was regarded as unique.13

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Curiously, despite the relative renown La Loubère gained from the publication of his book, his biography is sketchy.14 Born into a distinguished parlementaire (judicial) family of Toulouse in 1642, he showed an early aptitude for literature and science that was encouraged by his father, Arnauld—a magistrate and man of letters—and by his paternal uncle, Antoine, a Jesuit priest noted for his own work in mathematics and geometry. As a young adult Simon moved to Paris, where he participated actively in the literary circles of the day, making a number of influential contacts. His public career began soon after with his appointment in 1672 as secretary to the baron de Saint-Romain, the French ambassador to Switzerland, followed by other postings to Strasbourg and Hanover in 1678 and 1679 respectively. Apparently, La Loubère’s success in these three commissions, combined with patronage at court, won him appointment as Louis XIV’s envoy extraordinary to Siam in 1687. The goal of this new mission was to negotiate a political alliance with that Asian kingdom in fulfillment of long-established foreign policy. Ever since 1664, when Jean-Baptiste Colbert had chartered the Compagnie des Indes Orientales with royal backing, the Bourbon Crown had sought ways to establish France as a great commercial, political, and military power in the Far East, in direct challenge to Dutch hegemony. First efforts to realize this goal by colonizing Madagascar had failed in the 1660s, however. There next followed the humiliating defeat in 1674 of the sieur de La Haye’s “Persian squadron” by Dutch forces.15 Subsequently, French attention had shifted to the strategic kingdom of Siam, whose monarch, Phra Narai (r. 1656 to 1688), already had made some tentative steps toward opening diplomatic relations with the Sun King as a counterpoise to the threat of Dutch encroachment. 16 Meanwhile, French policy had received a further incentive in the form of assurances from the vicars apostolic of the Société des Missions-Étrangères, who had been active in Siam since 1662. They asserted that the Asian monarch was ready to convert to Christianity, having misinterpreted his generosity toward them as a sign of his desire to embrace the Catholic faith.17 Encouraged by these prospects for success, Louis XIV dispatched two embassies to Southeast Asia from France. The first, led by the chevalier de Chaumont in 1685,18 failed to achieve the conversion of Phra Narai as anticipated. Two treaties were signed, nevertheless, that gave extensive trading privileges to the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales and protection to Siamese converts to Catholicism. The second legation, headed by La Loubère in 1687,19 was sent ostensibly to strengthen these ties by concluding a firm alliance. But the real goal probably was to gain ascendancy over Siam, using the 636 soldiers sent out with the ambassador as an initial holding force. But this embassy, too, failed to achieve its objectives. A new commercial treaty was negotiated, though under very trying conditions; meanwhile, the steady growth of strong anti-French sentiment at the Siamese court over the foreign military occupation of Bangkok and the port of Mergui on the Bay of Bengal did not bode well for the future. In fact, within six months of La Loubère’s departure for France in January 1688, Siam exploded in a

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bloody xenophobic revolution that toppled Phra Narai’s dynasty from the throne, overthrew the French garrison, and closed the kingdom to Europeans, except for a single Dutch trading post.20 By the time news of the disaster had reached Europe, Louis XIV was engaged heavily in a new war with his continental enemies and was in no position to respond. French contact with Siam thus ended abruptly for the next 150 years. Despite the ultimate failure of his embassy, Simon de La Loubère produced a remarkable book on his return to Europe, a masterpiece of travel literature as highly valued today as it was admired in 1691. One of the many elements that make modern Thailand unique among other Asian nations is that most of what is known of its history in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries is preserved only in contemporary European sources. The Siamese archives were destroyed in 1767, along with the former royal capital of Ayutthaya, by invading Burmese armies. Of the western sources, La Loubère’s Du Royaume de Siam is considered to be the best. David K. Wyatt, an American specialist of Thai history, describes the book as “a lucid, comprehensive, and extremely accurate account of the life and civilization of Ayutthaya in the seventeenth century”: The information with which [La Loubère] provides us, whether of physical geography, manners and customs, political and social structure, or religion and administration, remains extremely useful to our understanding of Thai culture and society. Nearly three centuries have passed since he wrote, yet much of what he saw... is still to be seen in Thai villages, monasteries, and 21 homes.

A recent French editor of the work adds further that one must “render homage to the efforts of La Loubère to maintain his impartiality, objectivity, and prudence in making final judgments while writing the book.”22 Indeed, this quality of fairness is a salient feature of the two volumes, the author having endeavored conscientiously to maintain a balanced view of his subject. No doubt his efforts here were aided by the significant fact that he approached Siam from the broad perspective of a writer and diplomat, rather than the much narrower focus of a merchant, soldier, or cleric. Moreover, his account is free of the bitterness one might have expected, given the disappointments of his embassy to which few references are made, except to illustrate particular points from personal experience. As well, the book is largely unaffected by cultural or racial prejudice often found in other travelogues of the period. Only in matters of religion, warfare, science, and technology does La Loubère betray a Christian, or at least European sense of superiority; yet, even in these matters he did not dismiss the Siamese as inferior or simply primitive. Rather, he explained their apparent “backwardness” according to contemporary notions of anthropology, geography, and even rudimentary sociology. This gives still greater dimension to his analysis. As a result, his portrayal of Siam is not only sensitive and sympathetic; it reveals almost as much about seventeenth-century European mentality and habits as it does

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about the Siamese people and their kingdom. In his introduction, La Loubère outlined his method in scholarly consideration of his audience. He developed his text by stages, he wrote, in order that the farther the Reader shall advance in the perusal of the work, the more he will find it worthy of Curiosity; by reason that the Nature and Genius of the Siameses, which I have every where endeavoured to penetrate into, will be

discovered more and more.23 He also consulted the relations of previous visitors to the East with whom his readers already were familiar. Fernào Mendes Pinto,24 Jeremias van Vliet,25 and Nicolas Gervaise26, all of whom had spent time in Siam, are cited frequently in the text, as are Joào de Barros,27 François Pyrard,28 Sir Thomas Herbert,29 Father Navarete,30 and François Bernier.31 Thirty-seven contemporary and nearcontemporary writers are quoted in total.32 La Loubère even drew upon Classical authors, such as Aelian, Ptolemy, and Strabo, to strengthen his work with stillaccepted authorities.33 Such preliminary research was essential, he observed, as it “supplied the defect of a longer residence, and has made me to remark and understand in the three months I was at Siam, what I could not perhaps have understood or remark’d in three Years.”34 For similar reasons, he devoted the entire second volume of his book to various moral, mathematical, astronomical, and historical texts obtained from India, China, and Siam, because “it seems to me that the Comparison of the things of Neighbouring Countries with each other, does greatly illustrate them.”35 At the same time, La Loubère applied to these sources a very critical eye. He was particularly careful to warn his readers against the hidden snares in contemporary travel literature. He remarked, for example, that the use of adjectives such as good, ugly, magnificent, and so on, already “equivocal in themselves, must always be understood with reference to the Phantasie [i.e., the cultural perspectives and individual tastes] of the Author of the Relation.” For the natural tendency was to evaluate unfamiliar things by comparison to what was known in Europe.36 Yet even then, what was habitual to a Portuguese was not necessarily so to a Frenchman. Consequently, he cautioned, such words should be seen as culturally charged, relative terms only and never as absolutes. Another defect in relations, he noted, was the inaccurate rendering of foreign labels or expressions by translators, who disregarded cultural significance when selecting European equivalents. Or, as La Loubère put it, “when the same Words and the same Ideas are transferred from one [context] to the other.”37 This practice distorted meanings as grossly as the contemporary travel writer’s other bad habit of judging unfamiliar societies on the basis of a few traits only, according to what seemed “either extravagant or admirable.” The false impressions created by such careless approaches to translation and observation would disappear, he argued, if translators were more sensitive to the cultural nuances of native appellations, and if foreign civilizations were viewed comprehensively, not piecemeal. For this would reveal “that there is

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not in any place anything marvelous or extravagant.”38 La Loubère divided the first volume of his text into three parts (copiously illustrated with maps, drawings, and diagrams of people, places, and things), reserving the second volume for supporting documentation.39 Part I deals with “the Country of Siam, its Extent, Fertility, and the qualities of its Soil and Climate.”40 It broadly describes the kingdom’s physical geography, territorial boundaries, water courses, agriculture, seasonal changes, natural resources, and centers of population. Part II attempts to “explain the manners of the Siameses in general, and then their particular Customs according to their various Qualities.”41 Here are found details on the physiognomy of the people; their dress, attitudes, and character; their houses, furnishings, and means of travel; their diversions and daily activities; their notions of education, marriage, and community; and finally their skill in medicine, science, music, and the plastic arts. Part III, concerning “The Manners of the Siameses according to their several conditions,” scrutinizes the structure of Siamese society, its hierarchy, government, laws, social relations, and administration. In the third part the religious establishment also is examined, with extensive discussion of Buddhist history, theology, and morality. Like so many other Asian kingdoms, observed La Loubère, Siam was familiar to western travelers only by its coasts, chief waterways, major cities, and ports, “which some report to be the best in all India.”42 Otherwise, detailed information was scanty, the Siamese having made no effort even to map their country for fear, perhaps, that such valuable intelligence might fall into the hands of would-be invaders.43 The history of the kingdom and its people was equally obscure, “the Books thereof [being] very scarce, by reason the Siameses have not the use of Printing,” although they had borrowed so much else from neighboring China. As for those few “chronological Abridgements” that did exist, the former envoy dismissed them as “dry and insipid” and more “full of Fables” than reliable facts.44 His purpose, therefore, was to correct the prevailing dearth of knowledge by writing a comprehensive treatment of Siam that would satisfy the interest of a receptive European audience. That audience already was acutely aware of the world around it and was imbued as never before with an anthropological curiosity about foreign, non-Christian societies. This curiosity was fueled by the enormous body of contemporary travel literature that “continued to swell till it overflowed all reasonable limits,”45 and that was complemented by both a growing sophistication of analysis and a declining sense of ethnocentrism. Thus, La Loubère’s work does far more than simply reflect the mood and mentality of his readership. It also mirrors the late seventeenth-century intellectual revolution—identified by Paul Hazard in his book, The European Mind—that was sparked to a large degree by Europeans looking eastward and discovering there “a vast agglomeration of nonChristian values, [and] a huge block of humanity which had constructed its moral system, its concept of truth, on lines peculiarly its own.”46 Compelled to reconsider the fundamental concepts of the Western world “as a result of the conditions in which [these same ideals] were seen to operate in far-off countries,” articulate

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Europeans recognized that they no longer could take their old perceptions for granted.47 Instead, noted Hazard: Practices deemed [formerly] to be based on reason were found to be mere matters of custom, and, inversely, certain habits which, at a distance, had appeared preposterous and absurd, took on an apparently logical aspect once they were examined in the light of their origin and local circumstances.48

Or, as La Loubère observed more simply, “so true it is that the Phantasies [i.e., social tastes and cultural perspectives], even they which seem to be most natural, do greatly consist in Custom.”49 Hence, “difference,” not “superiority” was becoming the emphasis of the day, which represented “a striking psychological readjustment” in the European mind.50 This change of perspective is what lends so much significance to La Loubère’s book. It helps also to explain the remarkable fairness of his judgments, as well as his depth of analysis, sensitivity to Asian conditions, and willingness to accept most indigenous practices on native terms, however peculiar or strange they might first have appeared. For example, La Loubère used what he knew of Asian linguistics and demography to trace the ethnic origins of the Siamese.51 Like so many other cultures in Asia, he noted, the people of Siam spoke two languages—the “Vulgar” and a second “dead” tongue, called “Bailie” (or Pali, the language of the Theravada Buddhist scriptures used primarily by monks in the writing of law and religion),52 which European missionaries had traced to India and ultimately to Ceylon, the birthplace also of Buddhism. These factors alone indicated that the Siamese people “are near of the same Genius with their Neighbours.”53 But the former envoy hypothesized still further, suggesting that to escape political turbulence elsewhere (“the Crowns of Asia [being] always instable”), various peoples had migrated to Siam where they had intermarried. Consequently, Siamese blood was “very much mixed with foreign,”54 a phenomenon evinced in his own day, he believed, by the physiognomy of the people in comparison with other Asians and the existence of twenty-one separate foreign communities, long-established in the suburbs around Ayutthaya.55 Whatever questions one may raise about the ultimate accuracy of La Loubère’s analysis, what really matters here is the way he blended empirical evidence gathered from observation with thoughtful reflection, and then used an almost scientific method to reach his conclusions. This approach is similarly evident in his treatment of other themes, such as the nature and extent of Phra Narai’s royal authority, a topic of obvious interest to the subjects of Louis XIV. Portrayed outwardly as an autocrat who ruled through fear and mistrust (since “despotick Authority is almost destitute of [other] defence”),56 the king of Siam held the power of life and death over his subjects, whom he tortured or executed “without any formality of Justice, and by the hand of whom he pleases.”57 But he was nevertheless a responsible monarch who knew his duty well, having once observed to La Loubère’s deep admiration that good kingship was not “inspired” (natural) in a prince, and that from

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his “great Experience and Reading he perceived that he was not yet perfect in understanding it.”58 Nor was his justice as arbitrary as at first appeared. Punishments, though cruel, usually fit the crime and carried no lingering stigma of disgrace as in Europe.59 They were looked upon, rather, as proof of the king’s “paternal care” for his subjects.60 Equally striking was that a criminal's immediate superior shared his sentence “by reason that . . . having the power to correct him, he ought [also] to answer for his conduct.”61 Thus, the yoke of autocratic authority fell most heavily across the shoulders of court nobles and other men of rank, whose “Ambition in this Country leads to Slavery.” Meanwhile, “Liberty, and other Enjoyments of Life are for the vulgar conditions,”62 a point not lost on the philosophes of the next century, who would use such examples to fashion their own version of Enlightened European despotism. Still more revealing of cultural differences were the direct contrasts La Loubère drew between native and Western customs, often to the discredit of Europe. Remarking on native hygiene and dress, for instance, the former envoy wrote that the Siamese bathed regularly, cleaned their teeth, and washed their hair, which they anointed with scented oil “as the Spaniards do,” before combing it carefully, “which most of the Spaniards do not.”63 And although they wore almost no clothing, “so great a Nudity renders them not immodest.” On the contrary, the Siamese were so scrupulous about revealing parts of the body “which Custom obliges them to conceal,” that whenever the French soldiers went bathing, “’twas necessary to give [them] some Pagnes [panungs or swaddling loincloths] to wash in, to remove the Complaints which these People make, of seeing them all go naked into the River.”64 “[This] proves, in my opinion,” reflected La Loubère, “that the simplicity of Manners, as well as the heat, is the cause of the Nakedness of the Siameses” They were surprised in turn by the numerous layers of clothing worn by Europeans. Particularly baffling to them was the overly abundant garb of French ladies, an excess “absolutely contemn’d... as too intricate and troublesome for the Husband that would pull it off from his Wife.” “I have since consider’d,” mused La Loubère, “that [the Siamese] imagin’d perhaps that our Wives lay in their Cloathes, like theirs, which would doubtless be very troublesome.”65 Equally inscrutable was the European use of cosmetics. Just as some Westerners chewed tobacco, it was customary in Siam to chew betel nut, which blackened the teeth and stained the lips a blotchy red, though both were considered a sign of beauty. Consequently, when the natives saw “in the Pictures of our Ladies” the rich vermilion coloring of the lips, they were impressed, concluding erroneously “that we must needs have in France, better Betel than theirs!”66 Such cultural differences, though amusing, were largely superficial. Far more evocative were La Loubère’s thoughtful comments on the character and intellect of the Siamese, and the searing criticisms these implied of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of contemporary European society. This critique was especially evident in his description of the Siamese as an honest, courteous, and imperturbable people, both “plain in their Habits” and “Rich in a general Poverty, because they know how

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to content themselves with a little.”67 How different was the materialistic Westerner. And if the Siamese were sometimes guilty of minor faults, such as timidity and occasional lying, real “Vices are detestable amongst them, and they excuse them not as witty conceits, nor as sublimity of mind”68—La Loubère’s implication being that Europeans did. And despite their paganism, the social blemishes of divorce and beggary—so common in the West, where the Christian virtues of marital fidelity and charity were supposed to operate—were seen rarely in Siam.69 There family life was close and loving,70 and relatives “charitably maintain those that cannot maintain themselves out of their Estate or Labour.”71 Even their Children were physically better proportioned than French offspring, which the former envoy attributed “to their not swadling in their Infancy.” Whereas, the “care that we take to form the Shape of our Children, is not always so successful, as the liberty that they leave to Nature to proceed in forming theirs.”72 In each of these comments, one almost can hear the rumblings of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and a host of later philosophes. La Loubère was well aware, of course, that there were many negative aspects of Siamese society, in which slavery was practiced widely and “servitude was the reward of Ingenuity.”73 Yet he was willing to forgive and justify much. He deplored, for instance, the intellectual backwardness, cowardliness, and sheer superstition of the Siamese people. He declared them to be “utterly ignorant” of the sciences at which Europeans excelled and inclined “to imagine Wonders,” despite their being intelligent, rational, and quick to learn. Their astronomy, he charged, was both rudimentary and inexact, while their knowledge of medicine and biology was primitive even by contemporary Western standards. As well, he noted, their facility in such technical fields as metallurgy, mechanics, and fortification was so inferior that Phra Narai already had begun to rely upon European expertise to supply the deficiencies.74 “But it must be confessed for their excuse,” the Frenchman added swiftly, disarming his own criticisms, “that all application of Mind is so laborious in a Climate so hot as theirs,... that the very Europeans could hardly study there, what desire soever they might have thereto.”75 La Loubère was similarly even-handed when describing what he perceived as a singular lack of martial spirit among his late Asian hosts and their apparent faintheartedness when confronted with force. The presence of a strong warrior mentality, backed by skill at arms and a powerful military establishment, was one of the principal yardsticks still used by contemporary Westerners to gauge the sophistication of non-European societies against their own. “The Sight of a naked Sword is sufficient to put an hundred Siameses to flight,” he scoffed, adding with an air of cultural, even racial superiority that “there needs only the assured Tone of an European, that wears a Sword at his side, or a Cane in his hand, to make them forget the most express Orders of their Superiors.”76 Nevertheless, the former envoy could not help but admire “the Constancy [bravery] with which it is reported that the Siameses do undergo” the savage punishments that they frequently were subjected to under native law and custom. That kind of fortitude, he confessed, was

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almost “incredible in persons who express so little Courage in War.”77 As for Siamese superstitiousness, manifested by such things as their faith in lucky and unlucky days, La Loubère had only to remind his readers that this “Folly [also] . . . is perhaps too much tolerated amongst Christians; witness the Almanac of Milan, to which so many persons do now give such blind belief.”78 Moreover, he turned the same criticism against those Catholic priests at work in Siam for refusing to interpret the Buddhist religion and rituals to him. Sneered La Loubère, they “look’d upon these things with Horror, as Witchcraft and Compacts with the Demon, altho’ it be very possible that they are only Fooleries full of Credulity and Ignorance.”79 Just like any other European of his day, the former envoy had been imbued deeply since infancy with an unshakable belief that Christianity, and specifically Catholic Christianity, was the only true faith. But rather than dismiss Buddhism summarily out of hand as Western missionaries appeared to do, he attempted to understand and explain in detail its characteristics and underlying precepts within the Asian context, though in the final analysis his comprehension was imperfect. Hampered by a lack of time during his embassy, the inadequacies of his printed sources (most of which described the faith as it was observed in India or China, rather than Siam),80 and the dense filter of his own Christian bias, he was prevented from penetrating beneath the surface of Buddhism to reach a more subtle appreciation of its essential concepts and moral philosophy. Certainly, he seems to have had no knowledge of either the Four Noble Truths upon which the religion was founded or the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment, which consists of right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindedness, and right concentration. Instead, La Loubère focused on the exterior features of Siamese Buddhism that appeared to have Christian parallels, in addition to those doctrines—such as the nature of heaven and hell, the concept of sin, and the eternity of the world—that were of greatest interest and accessibility to his European audience. He described at length, for example, the hierarchical organization, dress, housing, and training of the “talapoins” or monks, of whose rigorous lifestyle he seems to have approved. His intention, perhaps, was to draw an implicit contrast with the licentious behavior of some Catholic clergy, whose bad conduct periodically scandalized European society. Yet because of his Western outlook, the former envoy did not understand the full significance of certain aspects of the monks’ daily routine. That consisted, he thought, of preserving themselves from sin, while leading “a penitent Life for the Sins of those that bestow Alms upon them, and to live on Alms.”81 This was an essentially Christian concept of monastic duty. La Loubère had simply failed to grasp the larger Asian view that by practicing the ethical precepts of the faith, meditating regularly, and aspiring to purity of character, the monks were a living example to their people, who looked upon them as moral leaders. Furthermore, by accepting charity from the laity, the “talapoins” afforded them an opportunity to practice the householder's virtue of giving, the performance of good deeds being the basic condition for moral improvement in accordance with the Eightfold Path to

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Enlightenment. More successful, however, was the former envoy's representation of the Buddhist concept of the human soul (which he defined as a material substance inhabiting the human form, but without being “physically united with the Body, to make one with it”) and its transmigrations through successive existences. This continuous pattern of rebirth, he explained, was a form of penance “to extirpate . . . Sins by . . . Sufferings, because that indeed there is no kind of Life which has not its Troubles.”82 Hence the soul’s “perpetual necessity of animating Bodies, and of passing from one to another” until, having reached the state of “Nireupan” (Nirvana, the extinction of individuality and absorption into the supreme spirit), it “disappears, they say, like a Spark, which is lost in the Air.”83 In addition, though he did not know the name for it, La Loubère clearly understood that these transmigrations were governed by the Buddhist concept of karma—the universal causality and law of deeds—that determined a person’s fate in his next life by the sum of his actions in one of his successive states of existence. Or, as the Frenchman put it more simply, the Siamese attribute this distributive Justice to a blind Fatality. So that according to them, ‘tis the Fatality which makes the Soul to pass from one state to a better or a worse, and which retains them more or less proportionably to their good or bad works.84

Ultimately, however, La Loubère rejected Siamese Buddhism as little more than “a Texture of Fables.”85 Although he seems to have approved of its underlying moral teachings to kill nothing, steal nothing, commit no “impurity”, tell no lies, and “drink no intoxicating Liquor,”86 probably because these corresponded to basic Christian virtues, he could not accept a doctrine that contained “no Idea of a Divinity . . . being far from acknowledging a God Creator.” This was, after all, fundamental to his own system of belief. By the same token, he doubted that the historical Buddha ever existed, there being “no reasonable [i.e., written] memory of him” comparable to the life of Jesus Christ as preserved in the Christian Bible, apart from a few texts replete with what he dismissed as inconsistencies, contradictions, and “gross Ignorance.”87 Thus, he wrote, “we ought rather to call [the Siamese] Atheists than Idolaters.”88 The former envoy even criticized the kingdom’s toleration of other religions not because he disagreed with the idea in principle, but because he considered the principle naive. For “by approving that other People have each their worship, [the Siamese] comprehend not that some would exterminate theirs.”89 This was a thinly veiled reference to the Jesuit priests and French fathers of the Missions-Étrangères who were trying even then to convert the realm to the Roman faith. Harsh as his final judgment of Buddhism was, however, La Loubère was fully aware of the religion’s profound cultural significance to the Siamese, and he even accorded its ancient “legislators” (Buddha and his later disciples) with “the merit of having known before the Greeks some Intelligent Beings superior to [mortal] man,

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and the Immortality of the Soul.” For that reason alone, he asked, “Why should we not praise the Legislators of the east, as well as the Greek Legislators [so admired by Christian Europeans], for that they have applied themselves to inspire into the People, what to them has appeared most virtuous, and most proper to keep them in Peace and Innocence?”90 Besides, he observed, Buddhist doctrine “comforts men in the Misfortunes of Life, and fortifies them against the Horrors of Death,” even if it was erroneous by Christian standards.91 Such an enlightened evaluation, if not acceptance, of a pagan faith would be difficult to find elsewhere in Europe, even among the most forward-looking thinkers of his day. Consequently, La Loubère could not blame his former Siamese hosts for believing blindly in what he viewed as a collection of “Fables, which a long succession of Ages full of Ignorance has invented upon their Account.”92 But if they were to be converted to Christianity it was essential, he warned, “that the Missionaries, which preach the Gospel in the East, do perfectly understand the Manners and Belief of these People” first. 93 They also had to speak respectfully of Asian religious figures and their learning at all times, the more effectively “to insinuate, that being men, they are deceived in several things important to the eternal Salvation of Mankind, and principally in that they have not known the Creator.”94 Only then should the missionary fathers, “who have not the gift of Miracles” to aid them, begin to reveal Christian truth cautiously to the Siamese “for their better understanding,” starting with “the Existence of God the Creator.”95 This first lesson was essential, for “as they acknowledge no Author of the Universe, so they acknowledge no first Legislator.”96 “But in my opinion,” continued the former envoy, it is one of the most important Articles of the conduct of the Missionaries, to accommodate themselves entirely to the simplicity of the Manners of the Orientals, in their Food, Furniture, Lodging, and whatever the Rules of the 97 Talapoins prescribe, wherein they have nothing contrary to Christianity.

And he cited the example of Robert Nobili, S.J., who had adopted the customs of the Brahmins in India to preach the Roman faith more successfully. But if after all of these efforts, the former envoy concluded, “the beauty of Christianity [still] has not convinc’d” the Siamese to accept the faith, the Europeans would have only themselves to blame “by reason of the bad opinion, which the Avarice, Treachery, Invasions, and Tyranny of the Portugueses, and some Christians in the Indies, have implanted and rivetted in them,” not including “the bloody Madness of our Wars.”98 Clearly, La Loubère respected the culture, religion, and character of the Siamese whose moods, he wrote, “are as calm as their Heaven, which changes only twice a year and insensibly.” If these people seemed “invincibly lazy” by European standards, it was because of a debilitating climate and a social outlook that placed no merit in action, in the strong belief that it was unnatural that labor and its pains “should be the Fruite and Reward of Virtue.” This was the essential difference between their culture and his. For having “the good Fortune to be born

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Philosophers,” reflected the former French envoy, the Siamese naturally showed no interest “at the wonders, which our inquietude has produced in the discovery of so many different Arts, whereof we flatter ourselves, perhaps to no purpose, that necessity was the Mother [of our invention].”99 That was a significant admission by a man trained in science, who lived in a burgeoning age of Reason. In his book, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, Anthony Grafton writes that the intellectual who sets out to describe another culture must first make some essential “strategic and tactical decisions” about approaches to be taken, topics to be discussed, and the literary form to be adopted. “In each of these decisions, models matter.”100 This clearly was understood by Simon de La Loubère, who not only had made conscious choices of approach and content in writing his account, but who also had consulted widely the relations of other travelers to Siam before casting his own. Moreover, he advocated the use of such examples in the pursuit of knowledge on the principle that “as to what concerns the Description of a Country, we cannot have too many Relations, if we would perfectly know it: the last always illustrating the former.”101 Ultimately, in the process of composing his work, he provided a new model for others to follow that rarely has been surpassed for its quality or comprehensiveness. But perhaps his greatest achievement—acknowledged even by contemporaries such as Leibnitz, Mirabaud, and Gros de Boze—was giving his remarkable book a rare quality of timelessness that, according to David K. Wyatt, “serves to provide us with the essential sense of continuity of past and present which so vibrantly characterizes Thailand yesterday and today.”102

Notes 1. Michel Jacq-Hergoualc'h, ed., Étude historique et critique du livre de Siam de La Loubère “Du Royaume de Siam” (Paris: 1987), pp. 109–10. Hereafter cited as La Loubère. I would like to thank the late Professor George A. Rothrock, Dr. Merrill Distad and Mr. James DeCrocco, the former Honorary Editor of the Journal of the Siam Society, for their suggestions and encouragement in the preparation of this manuscript. I would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Renard, the current editor of the journal, for his permission to reprint a revised version of this essay, which first appeared in the JSS, vol. LXXXII, pt. 2 (1994): pp. 155–65. 2. Discours prononcés dans l'Acedémie française le mardie vingt-cinquième d'août, fête de Saint-Louis à la reception de Monsieur de La Loubère (Paris: 1693), p. 16. Quoted also in La Loubère, p. 99. 3. Daniel Larroque to Gottfried Leibnitz, 25 May 1691, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Erste Reihe, series 1, 11 vols. (Berlin: 1970), vol. III, p. 497. Larroque was a French scholar and the author of several histories and biographies. 4. Simon de La Loubère to Gottfried Leibnitz, 1 June 1691, ibid., vol. VI, p. 504. The correspondence between the two men covered a wide range of subjects, from their mutual interest in mathematics to friendly chatter about mutual friends in the scientific world, to European diplomacy and even to La Loubère’s aid in 1683 in defending a relative who had

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killed a man in a duel. Indeed, La Loubère admitted on one occasion that he had “no greater joy than to [discuss] philosophy and mathematics” with the German savant. (See Simon de La Loubère to Gottfried Leibnitz, 22 January 1681, ibid., p. 458.) 5. In a letter of 21 July 1691, Leibnitz thanked Daniel Larroque for news he had sent of La Loubère’s safe return to France, writing that “we are very much relieved here by having good news of him, and will be delighted to see the relation of his voyage.” (Ibid., p. 587.) 6. Gottfried Leibnitz to Hortensio Mauro, March 1681, ibid., vol. III, p. 470. 7. Gottfried Leibnitz to Simon de La Loubère, 4 February 1692, vol. VII, p. 553. 8. William of Rubruck (1215–70) was a Franciscan priest sent by Louis IX of France in 1253 to open communications with the Mongol Khan. His relation is one of the most interesting and intimate travel records in existence, and it provides the most complete firsthand record available of the Mongol empire at its height. Oger Ghislain de Busbecq (1522– 92) served as Imperial ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1555–62, on behalf of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I. His description of his experiences (first published in Latin in 1589 under the title Turkish Letters) gives one of the most substantial accounts of Ottoman society and government in the early modern period. Sir George B. Sanson (1883– 1965) was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1904–47, holding diplomatic appointments principally in Korea and Japan. The author of three major books on Japanese history, he earned an international reputation as an outstanding authority on the island empire. Like Sansom, W.A.R. Wood (1878–1970) also was in the British Foreign Service, eventually becoming Consul-General to Thailand, where he spent sixty-nine years of his public career. In 1924 he wrote the first comprehensive history of Siam to appear in any European language. 9. The two volumes were published originally in Paris and Amsterdam in 1691, followed in 1693 by an English translation. The French edition was reprinted twice more in Amsterdam, in 1700 and 1713, under the title Description du royaume de Siam. Finally, portions of the English translation appeared in vol. II of J. Harris' Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca in 1705. No doubt the dearth of publications was due to the complete reversal of French fortunes in Siam in 1688. 10. Discours prononcés dans l'Académie française, p. 12. 11. Ibid., p. 21. Quoted also in La Loubère, p. 100. 12. Gottfried Leibnitz to Simon de La Loubère, 4 February 1692, Leibnitz, vol. VII, p. 553. 13. Claude Gros de Boze, Histoire de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres avec les mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de cette Académie, depuis l'année 1726 jusques et compris l'année 1730, vol. VII (Paris: 1733), pp. 420–21. Quoted also in La Loubère, p. 100. 14. For the biographical details of La Loubère's life, see: Jean Pierre Niceron, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres, vol. XXVI (Paris: 1734), pp. 151–60; F. Michaud, Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, nouvelle édition, vol. XXV (Paris: 1854), pp. 145–46. See also the introduction of David K. Wyatt to Simon de La Loubère, The Kingdom of Siam (London: 1693; facsimile reprint, Singapore: 1986—hereafter cited as Wyatt) and especially that of Jacq-Herougalc'h in his edition of La Loubère's book. 15. For French efforts in Madagascar, see: Louis Pauliat, Madagascar sous Louis XIV (Paris: 1886); S.E. Howe, The Drama of Madagascar (London: 1938); and J. ChailleyBert, Les compagnies de colonization sous l’ancien régime (Paris: 1898). The major printed primary sources for La Haye's “Persian squadron” include: Henri Froidevaux, ed., Mémoires de L.A. Bellanger de Lespinay Vendômois sur son voyage aux Indes Orientales (1670–1675)

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(Vendôme: 1895); Journal de voyage des grandes Indes, 2 vols. (Orléans: 1697); François L'Estra, Relation; ou journal d'un voyage fait aux Indes Orientales (Paris: 1677); Abbé Barthélémy Carré, The Travels of the Abbé Carré.in India and the Near East, 1672 to 1674, trans., Lady Fawcett, ed., Sir Charles Fawcett, 3 vols. (London: 1947–48); A Martineau, ed., Mémoires de François Martin, fondateur de Pondichéry, 3 vols. (Paris: 1931–34). For more recent treatments, see: Glenn J. Ames, “Colbert's Grand Indian Ocean Fleet of 1670,” The Mariner's Mirror, vol. LXXVI, no. 3 (August 1991): pp. 227–40, and by the same author, “Colbert's Indian Ocean Strategy of 1664–1674: A Reappraisal,” French Historical Studies, vol. XVI, no. 3 (Spring 1990): pp. 536–59; J. Barassin, “Compagnies de navigation et expéditions françaises dans l'Océan Indien au XVII siècle,” Studia, vol. XI (1963): pp. 373–88. 16. These efforts included the dispatch of two Siamese embassies to France in 1680 and 1684 respectively. The first was lost in a storm off Madagascar in autumn 1681; the second was sent to enquire into the fate of the initial embassy and to request that French envoys be dispatched to Siam to conclude a treaty of trade and alliance. 17. See Ronald S. Love, “Monarchs, Merchants and Missionaries in Early Modern Asia: The Missions-Étrangères in Siam, 1662–1684,” the International History Review, vol. XXI, no. 1 (March 1999): pp. 1–27. 18. The principal contemporary sources for Chaumont’s embassy include: “Relation de l’ambassade de monsieur le chevalier de Chaumont à la cour du Roy de Siam,” in F. Danjou et Cimber, eds., Archives curieuses de l'histoire de France, vol. X (Paris: 1839), and a seventeenth-century English translation entitled, A Relation of the Late Embassy of Monsr. de Chaumont, Knt. to the Court of the King of Siam (London: 1687); Abbé François Timoléon de Choisy, Journal de voyage de Siam fait_en 1685 et 1686, ed., Maurice Garçon (Paris: 1930); Claude comte de Forbin, Mémoires, in F. Michaud et Poujoulat, eds., Nouvelle collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France, vol. XXXIII (Paris: 1854); Père Guy Tachard, S.J., A Relation of the Voyage to Siam (London: 1688). 19. For La Loubère’s mission, in addition to his own account see: Père Guy Tachard, S.J., Second Voyage du Père Tachard et des Jesuites envoyéz par le Roy au Royaume de Siam (Paris: 1689); Claude Boulaye de Cébéret, “Journal du voyage de Siam, fait par le sr. Cébéret envoyé extraordinaire du Roy prés le Roy de Siam; et coste de Coromandel pendant les années 1687 et 1688,” Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Français nouvelles acquisitions, fos. 216–67v.; Jean Drans and Henri Bernard, S. J., eds., Mémoire du Père de Bèze sur la vie de Constance Phaulkon (Tokyo: 1947), published in English translation under the title, 1688: Revolution in Siam, trans., E.W. Hutchinson (Hong Kong: 1968); Père d'Orléans, S. J., Histoire de M. Constance, premier ministre du Roy de Siam (Paris: 1690); J.C. Gatty, ed., Voiage de Siam du Père Bouvet (Leiden: 1963). 20. For the Revolution in, and repulse of, the French from Siam, see: A Full and True Relation of the Great and Wonderful Revolution that happened lately in the kingdom of Siam in the East-Indies (London: 1690); A Narrative of the Revolutions which took place in Siam in the Year 1688 (Amsterdam: 1692, reprinted by O. Frankfurter, trans., in the Journal of the Siam Society, vol. V (1969): pp. 1–50; Bèze; Orléans; Bouvet; Père Marcel Le Blanc, Histoire de la révolution du Royaume de Siam arrivée en l’année 1688, 2 vols. (Paris: 1692); Tachard, Second voyage. For modern accounts, see E.W. Hutchinson, “The Retirement of the French Garrison in the Year 1688,” Journal of the Siam Society, vol. XXVIII (1935): pp. 37–77; David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, CT: 1984); W.A.R. Wood, A History of Siam from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (Bangkok: 1924).

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21. See Wyatt, pp. viii–ix. 22. La Loubère, p. 100. 23. Wyatt, p. 1; La Loubère, p. 114. To preserve the texture of seventeenth-century language, all quotations have been taken from the 1693 English translation (i.e., Wyatt), though I have cited also the page numbers from the French original, edited by JacqHergoualc'h (i.e., La Loubère). 24. Fernào Mendes Pinto, Peregrinaçam (Lisbon: 1614). For a modern English translation of this work, see Rebecca D. Catz, The Travels of Mendes Pinto (Chicago: 1989). 25. Jeremias van Vliet, Révolutions arrivées au Royaume de Siam (Paris: 1673). Fora modern English version, see L.F. van Ravenswaay, “Translation of Jeremias van Vliet's Description of the Kingdom of Siam,” JSS, vol. VII, pt. 1 (1910): pp. 1–108. 26. Nicolas Gervaise, Histoire naturelle et politique du royaume de Siam (Paris: 1688) Gervaise’s book has been translated twice in this century, both times under the title The Natural and Political History of the Kingdom of Siam (Bangkok: 1928, Herbert S. O'Neill, trans.; and Bangkok: 1989, John Villiers, trans.). 27. Joào de Barros, Quarta decada da Asia de Joào de Barros (Madrid: 1615). 28. François Pyrard, Discours du voyage des Français aux Indes orientales, ensemble des divers accidents, aventures et dangers de l'auteur en plusieurs royaumes des Indes etc. (Paris: 1611). A modern English translation of this work was published by the Hakluyt Society: The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. and ed., Albert Gray, 3 vols. (London: 1887–90). 29. Sir Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels into Diverse Parts of Africa and Asia the Great (London: 1665). 30. Father Fernandez Domingo Navarete, S.J., Tratado historicos, politicos, ethicos y religiosos de la monarchia de China (Madrid: 1676). A modern English translation of this work was published by the Hakluyt Society: The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, 1618–1686, ed., J.S. Cummins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: 1962). 31. François Bernier, Voyages de François Bernier. . . contenant la description des États du Grand Mogol de l’Hinsoustan, du royaume de Kachemire etc. (Paris: 1670–71; Amsterdam: 1699) There are two English translations of this work, one of which is contemporary: The History of the Late revolution of the empire of the Great Mogol (London: 1671). The second, modern rendition was published under the title, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668, ed., Archibald Constable (New Delhi: 1968). 32. Other contemporary travelogues cited often by La Loubère include: Jan Struys, Les voyages de Jean Struys en Moscovie, en Tartarie, aux Indes et en plusiers autres pays étrangers (Amsterdam: 1681); Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Histoire de la navigation de Jean Hugues de Linscot, Hollandais, et de son voyage es Indes orientales (Amsterdam: 1610); Father Alexandre de Rhodes, S.J., Histoire du royaume de Tonkin et des grands progrés que la prédication de l'Évangile y a faits en la conversion des infidèles, depuis l'année 1627 jusques à l'année 1646 (Lyon: 1651); the chevalier de Chaumont (see note 17 above); Abbé François Timoléon de Choisy (see note 18 above); Vincent Le Blanc, Les Voyages fameux du sieur Vincent Le Blanc, Marseillais, qu'il a faits depuis l'âge de douze ans jusques à soixante, aux quatre parties du monde (Paris: 1648); Father Gabriel Magaillans, S.J., Nouvelle Relation de la Chine (Paris: 1688); Jean Albert de Mandelslo, Voyages célèbres et remarquables faits de Perse aux Indes orientales, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 1659); Father Nicolas Trigault, S.J., Histoire de l'Expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine (Lyon: 1616). Linschoten's relation can be found in two English translations. The first is contemporary, J.H. van Linschoten his discours of voyages into ye Easte and West

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Indies, trans., W. Phillip (London: 1598). The second is a nineteenth-century reprint of the 1598 translation, edited by Arthur Burnell and P. A. Tiele for the Hakluyt Society under the title, The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies, 2 vols. (London: 1885). 33. Other Classical authors La Loubère consulted include: Aristotle, Diogenes, Epicurus, Herodotus, Lucianus, Plato, Pythagorus, Suetonius, Tacitus, and Virgil. La Loubère quoted from both the Bible and the Koran, as well. 34. Wyatt, p. 2; La Loubère, pp. 114–115. As Jean-Baptiste Mirabaud remarked in 1729, “few voyagers ever embarked with as great a fund of knowledge as he.” (Discourses prononcés dans l'Académie française, p. 21.) 35. Wyatt, p. 2; La Loubère, p. 114. 36. Ibid., p. 36; p. 207. 37. Ibid., pp. 36–37; p. 208. 38. Ibid., p. 37; pp. 208–09. 39. Among other sources, these documents include: “The Life of Thevetat, translated from the Balie,” “The Principal Maxims of the Talapoine of Siam, translated from the Siamese,” “An Account of the Charges of Justice, translated out of the Siamese,” “Of the Siamese and Balie Tongues,” and “Rules of the Siamese Astronomy for calculating the Motions of the Sun and Moon, translated from the Siamese, and since examined and explained by M. Cassini of the Royal Academy of Science.” 40. Wyatt, p. 1; La Loubère, p. 114. 41. Ibid., p. 114. 42. Ibid., p. 8; p. 136. 43. Ibid., p. 3; p. 119. 44. Ibid., p. 8; p. 137. 45. Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680-1715, trans., J. Lewis May (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 1964), p. 23; first published under the title, La Crise de la consience européene (Paris: 1935). 46. Ibid., p. 45. 47. Ibid. p. 25. 48. Ibid., p. 26. 49. Wyatt, p. 27; La Loubère, p. 188. 50. Hazard, p. 34. 51. La Loubère did not inovate here. Rather, he drew upon a tradition in French historical discourse initiated by Jean Bodin in the 1560s. In his book on historical method, Bodin wrote: “There are three proofs in the light of which [ethnic] origins can be known and evaluated when reported by historians,” the second of which was to be found “in traces of language.” These traces included etymologies of individual words, as well as the spread of language and its adoption by foreign peoples. (See Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans., B. Reynolds (New York: 1945) pp. 337–59.) Thus, La Loubère followed a model for his own research that had been established in the sixteenth century. 52. Wyatt, p. 9; La Loubère, pp. 140, 141. Pali (spelled variously by La Loubère as Ballie, Baly and Balie) is used still by monks in Thailand for religious purposes. Evidently, its variants were spoken about the time of the historical Buddha, while linguistically—and to a remarkable degree, phonetically—Pali has a similar relationship to Sanskrit as modern Italian has to classical Latin. 53. Ibid., p. 10; pp. 141–42.

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54. Ibid., pp. 10–11; p. 143. 55. These communities included Japanese Christian refugees expelled from their homeland by the anti-Christian policies of the Tokagawa Shogunate, Chinese and Persian merchants, Macassars who had been forced out of Malaysia by the Portuguese, Hindus, East Indian Moslems, Peguans, Cambodians, Burmese, and a host of others, not including a large number of Portuguese residents, some English and Dutch and the missionaries who had come from various European countries. 56. Wyatt, p. 107; La Loubère, p. 357. 57. Ibid., p. 104; p. 351. 58. Ibid., p. 100; p. 343. 59. Ibid., p. 105; p. 354. These punishments included such sentences as pouring molten silver down the throat of anyone found guilty of robbing the royal treasury; sewing shut the mouth of those who lied or divulged state secrets; and pricking or slicing the temples of officials who had failed to carry out their orders, in order “to punish the Memory.” For more heinous offences, the penalties included being devoured by degrees by starving tigers—a particular favorite; trampling by elephants; and wearing the severed head of an accomplice on a cord around one’s neck, the better to contemplate one’s treason before being executed in turn. 60. Ibid., p. 105. 61. Ibid., p. 106; p. 354. 62. Ibid., p. 106; p. 355. 63. Ibid., p. 29; p. 190. One also sees the force of European national rivalries in this comment, transported to an Asian setting. 64. Ibid., p. 26; pp. 185–86. 65. Ibid., p. 28; p. 189. 66. Ibid., p. 24; p. 176. 67. Ibid., p. 29; p. 191. 68. Ibid., pp. 73, 76; pp. 286, 290. 69. Ibid., p. 73; p. 286. That divorce was rare, wrote La Loubère, was due not just to the disgrace it brought the family or the power of life and death husbands (who were allowed polygamous marriages) enjoyed over an adulterous wife, but also to the character of Siamese women, who “are not corrupted by Idleness, nor by Luxury of the Table or of Cloaths, nor by Gaming, nor by Shows”—an obvious criticism of European noblewomen. 70. Ibid., p. 50; p. 234. Although fathers ruled in Siames families with “despotic” authority, they “love their Wives and Children exceedingly, and it appears that they are greatly loved by them.” 71. Ibid., pp. 74–75; p. 288. 72. Ibid., p. 27; p. 188. 73. Ibid., p. 69; p. 274. 74. La Loubère, pp. 13, 14–18, 62, 64. 75. Wyatt, p. 64; La Loubère, p. 261. According to accepted European thought: “The Essential Character of the People of Countries extreamly hot, or extreamly cold, is sluggishness of Mind and Body; and with this difference, that it degenerates into Stupidity in Countries too cold, and that in Countries too hot, there is always Spirit and Imagination, but . . . which soon flagg with the least Application.” (See ibid., p. 60; p. 253.) 76. Ibid., p. 90; p. 320. La Loubère attributed the “effeminacy” of the Siamese not to any intrinsic character flaw, but to “the heat of the Climate, the flegmatick Aliments [i.e., the humors], and the Despotick Government.”

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77. Ibid., p. 87; p. 314. 78. Ibid, p. 66; p. 265. 79. Ibid., p. 66. 80. La Loubère’s chief sources on Buddhism and other eastern religions were: Père Alexandre de Rhodes’ Histoire du royaume de Tonkin (1651); Père Philippe Couplet’s Confucius Sinarum philosophus... (1687–88); Père Nicolas Trigaut’s Histoire de l'expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chin. (1616); Abraham Roger’s La porte ouverte pour prévenir à la connaissance du paganisme caché ou la vraie représentation de la vie, de la religion et du service divin des Brahmines qui demeurent sur les côtes de Coromandel (1670); Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville’s Bibliothèque orientale, ou dictionnaire universel contenant tout ce qui regarde la connaissance des peuples de l'Orient (1697); Père Fernandez Domingo Navarete’s Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos y religiosos de la monarchia de China (1676); Johann van Twist’s Description générale de l'Inde, et en particulier du royaume de Gusuratte (1638); Clement Tosi’s Dell'Inda Orientale descrittione geografica et historica . . . con la confutatione dell’idolatrie, superstitione et altri (1662); and finally Père Nicolas Gervaise’s Historie naturelle et politique du royaume de Siam (1688), the only one that dealt directly with the Siamese context. 81. Wyatt, p. 114; La Loubère, p. 372. 82. Ibid., p. 119; p. 380. 83. Ibid., pp. 129, 130; pp. 399, 400. 84. Ibid., pp. 133–34; p. 406. 85. Ibid., pp 138–39; p. 415. 86. Ibid., p. 126; p. 393. 87. Ibid., pp. 138, 139, 414, 416. According to La Loubère, the Buddha “seems to have been invented to be the Idea of a Man, whom Vertue, as they apprehend it, has rendered happy, in the times of their Fables, that is to say beyond what their Histories contain certain.” 88. Ibid., p. 140; p. 417. 89. Ibid., p. 139; p. 416. 90. Ibid., p. 141; p. 420. 91. Ibid., p. 142; p. 420. 92. Ibid., p. 141; p. 420. 93. Ibid., p. 140; p. 418. Clearly, this was a major part of La Loubère’s rationale to write his account of Siam. 94. Ibid., p. 141; p. 421. 95. Ibid., p. 140; p. 418. Indeed, wrote La Loubère, “before all things it would be necessary to give them the true Idea of a God Creator,” an “omnipotent, all-wise, and most just God, the Author of all good, to whom only everything is due.” 96. Ibid., p. 139; p. 417. 97. Ibid., p. 143; p. 422. 98. Ibid., p. 143. 99. Ibid., p. 76; p. 291. 100. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: 1992), p. 42. 101. Wyatt, p. 1; La Loubère, p. 114. 102. Wyatt, p. ix.

“Nouvelle Carte de la Siberie et du Kitay,” 1692, from Père Philippe Avril, Voyage en divers états d'Europe et d’Asie, entrepris pour découvrir un nouveau chemin à la Chine (Paris: 1692).

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11 In Search of a Passage to China: Philippe Avril’s Quest for Grand Tartary, 1685 to 1690 Ronald S. Love In 1693, Père Philippe Avril’s relation, Voyage en divers états d'Europe et d'Asie, entrepris pour décourvrir un nouveau chemin à la Chine (Paris: 1692), appeared in English. In his preface, the anonymous translator assailed those Catholic clergymen who had been so “zealous to spread abroad their Superstitions in far-distant and New discover’d parts of the World.”1 He was no doubt keen to declare his religious position during the final stages of the “Glorious Revolution” and the opening rounds of a new war with France. But Avril seemed to invite this attack, in any case, by his frank admission that the chief goal in finding a new land route to fabled Cathay was “to preach [the Gospels] to the Barbarians.”2 This in itself was a revealing, perhaps even significant inversion of the dismissive label applied by the Chinese to foreigners, and above all Western foreigners, in accordance with their cultural arrogance. In view of such evidence, continued the translator, certain it is, that the Jesuits and other gadding Orders of the Roman Religion, have for several years had a longing desire to settle themselves in China, as well as in all the other parts of Asia, under the Title of Missionaries.3

Yet in spite of his strong anti-Catholic bias, the Englishman confessed, however reluctantly, that the “same zealous curiosity” of the priests he denounced so roundly had “tack’d together two Extremities of the World, that were thought to lie disjoined from one another before.” He eschewed Avril’s ultimate religious

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purpose, to be sure, while urging his Anglican readers to avoid it “just as our Seamen shun the Rocks and Shelves which they see before their eyes in Ordinary, though Necessary Navigation.” He similarly asserted that the design of his own translation was “not to teach men the way to Heaven, but to instruct ‘em in the several New-found Roads to China.” So even he had to acknowledge the book’s practical, geographical value, particularly for anyone involved in trade. It was, he confessed, a work “of great importance for the Advantages of Foreign Commerce and Traffick, and becoming the Encouragement of all the European Princes.”4 Père Avril’s objective was no less pragmatic, though his inspiration followed from an evangelical rather than a mercantile impulse. At this time, a major preoccupation of the Catholic Church and its China mission was to discover a safe land route from Europe to Peking through central Asia. This was due to the large numbers of out-going clergy who perished tragically every year at sea.5 Of course, wrote Avril, their calling obliged priests not to be sparing of their lives, and to travel to “the ends of the earth” regardless of the many hazards along the way. The foreign missions were regarded, after all, as “the most essential, and most holy part of our Profession.”6 Even so, the religious authorities at Paris and Rome were anxious for the good of both Church and faith not to expose the priests needlessly to danger. This concern for priestly safety was especially vital to sustain the China mission, since of “all the Eastern Countries to which the Light of the Gospel has been convey’d, there are few wherein more considerable Progresses have been made.”7 But as the Holy See also recognized the need to dispatch “new recruits of Evangelic Labourers, to uphold and propagate the Faith in this vast Kingdom,” continued Avril, “what with Pirates, Shipwrecks and Diseases, what with other inconveniences of a tedious and tiresome Navigation, still many more are destroy’d and miscarry than safely arrive in the Country.”8 This high rate of priestly mortality was confirmed by the Belgian Jesuit, Philippe Couplet (1622–1693), who had served with his brethren in Asia since 1661. Returning to Europe two decades later as the Society’s pro-curator of the China vice-province, he visited the French court late in 1684 to request new missionary recruits for Peking.9 Couplet, wrote Avril, had “made it his business to make an exact computation of the number of Jesuits who had set forward out of several parts of Europe, in order to undertake the Mission he had quitted.” According to his calculations, of 600 priests sent to China since the Society of Jesus first gained access to that empire, fewer than 200 had arrived safely, “all the rest being sacrific’d by the way, either by Sickness or Shipwreck.”10 Due to such heavy losses among missionaries traveling by sea, wrote Avril, the resolution was made some years before to discover a passage to China by land.11 Spearheading this search, the Jesuits explored a variety of routes from Persia, India, and the Middle Kingdom itself. This effort began in 1602 with the Portuguese Bento de Goës (1562–1607). Starting at the Mughal capital of Agra in India, he crossed the “roof of the world” north of Tibet (via Afghanistan, Turkestan, and Sinkiang), en route to Peking.12 But he never reached his goal. He died in 1607 at

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Suchow, China’s western-most limit, though not before he had warned his fellow Jesuits to abandon “any future attempts to travel by the route which he had followed, as being both dangerous and useless.”13 De Goës’ journey had one positive result, at least: it proved beyond doubt that China and Cathay were one and the same land. Yet his advice to give up the search was ignored. Instead, the quest for a land passage was taken up anew by the German Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592– 1666)14 in 1629, and the Frenchman Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660)15 in 1654. Drawing upon long, independent experience of missionary conditions in the Far East, both men urged that no time be lost “in discovering an overland route to China, for this is very much the wish of Rome.”16 Hence, in 1661 the search resumed. Johann Grueber (1623–1680) and Albert D'Orville (1621–1662) were dispatched by their superiors at Peking to find a passage westward from the Chinese frontier. Traveling through Tibet and the Himalayas, they reached Agra in 1662, just as the ailing D'Orville died.17 In 1664, Grueber arrived in Rome where he delivered letters and reports from the China mission, wrote a memorandum on the results of his expedition, and recounted his discoveries and observations before the Grand Duke of Tuscany.18 A decade later, Pope Clement X (r.1670—1676) gave the Jesuit cause a boost. Like his predecessors, he wanted to end the Portuguese claim of spiritual monopoly in Asia. So in 1673 he instructed all out-bound priests to use the existing land routes to the Far East, in order to by-pass Lisbon’s Padroado real and yet maintain direct communications with the Church’s Asian missions.19 Thus, Philippe Avril’s subsequent five-year search (1685–1690) for a secure passage to Peking via Siberia—that vast terra incognita known vaguely to contemporary western Europeans as “Grand Tartary”—was no isolated undertaking. It was part of a much longer, on-going process of exploration begun early in the century. His new quest also coincided with a period of intensified French interest in Asia, with specific focus on China and Siam.20 Prior to 1661, France was too absorbed by domestic turmoil and European war to consider possibilities in the Far East. With the return of peace in 1659, however, and the beginning of Louis XIV’s personal reign two years later, the situation changed. The Bourbon Crown became more and more interested in extending French power and prestige throughout Asia by means of trade, diplomacy, and missionary work in competition with its European rivals. This eventually included plans to dominate the China mission, spurred on by the Sun King's Jesuit confessor, Père La Chaise.21 It was thus no coincidence that the same year Avril left for the East, six French Jesuits sailed with Louis’ first embassy to Siam on their way to China. Ultimately, however, Avril was prevented from reaching his final objective. Mistrustful of foreigners, who were regarded as little better than spies, and eager to exploit the riches of its expanding Asiatic empire free from Western interlopers, a secretive Russian government refused him permission to traverse its jealously guarded Siberian possessions to the Chinese frontier. Nevertheless, the relation he

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published on his return to France was important for “several new insights . . . particularly into Geography.”22 Even his English translator noted grudgingly that this was Avril’s real contribution. Apart from his careful observations on the conditions of life and travel in the many lands through which he passed, the Jesuit was among the first to distinguish between North and Central Asia as distinctive regions with separate histories and cultures of their own. He certainly was the first to give Europeans a detailed description of the geography and inhabitants of Siberia, as well as “the different Roads the Muscovites and Tartars use to travel into China.” So even if, as Avril lamented, “I have not had the happiness to reach it my self, according to my expectation,”23 he finished the journey intellectually by drawing upon contemporary accounts and documentary evidence gathered from Russian and Polish sources unavailable in the West. That intellectual conquest of Grand Tartary gave his relation its chief significance. For it opened European eyes to a remote portion of Asia that, hitherto, had been clouded in mystery. Prior to the second quarter of the sixteenth century, knowledge in western Europe of the topography and different peoples of this immense area of the globe was appallingly scant. Until then almost everything known about Grand Tartary was derived from a handful of ancient and medieval authors: Ptolemy (c. 85–165 A.D.),24 John of Plano Carpini (1182–1252),25 William of Rubruck (1215–1270),26 Sir John Mandeville (?–1371),27 Marco Polo (1254?–1324?),28 and Friar Odoric of Pordenone (1274?–1331).29 There were, in addition, three early maps that gave some geographic idea of at least the western portion of the region.30 As for Middle and North Asia, except for a few names supplied by the cartographer Edrisi in c. 1150, early mapmakers relied most heavily upon Polo’s Travels for their knowledge. What actually lay at the center of this vast continent was an unsolved riddle, however. Much of the information provided by these early medieval sources was a “confused jumble of mountains and rivers” founded more upon hearsay and myth than upon any concrete fact.31 Even the name for this immense region, so “litle knowen to Strabo and Ptoleme,”32 was vague. It was derived from “Tartar,” a term applied indiscriminately since the Middle Ages to the Ural-Altaic tribes of Mongol and Turkish extraction, including the later Manchu conquerors of China. Hence, “Grand Tartary” generally denoted all lands east of the Ural Mountains and Persia, north of India, Tibet, and China, as far as the Pacific Ocean. It embraced modernday Siberia, Central Asia, Mongolia, and Manchuria, which together encompass half the continent.33 At the same time, the term was applied much more narrowly to indicate specific parts of North or Central Asia (e.g., Turkomania, Transcaucasia, Kirgiz, Kazakstan, etc.), according to one's outlook or experience. To Marco Polo, for example, Grand Tartary was synonymous with the Mongol empire, centered on the Great Khan’s seat of Karakorum. This territory lay next to the Altai Mountains on lands allegedly conquered from the mythic Christian prince, Prester John. Extending to “the extremity of the continent, in a direction between north-east and east,”34 it excluded the subject kingdoms of the Silk Road (viz.,

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Turkestan, Bokhara, Samarkand, etc), but included Cathay, which was not yet identified with China. Divided between the domains of the eastern and western Tatars, the Mongol realm also embraced the “Region of Darkness,” far to the north. During winter in that distant place, “the sun is invisible, and the atmosphere is obscured to the same degree as that in which we find it just about the dawn of day, when we may be said to see and not to see.”35 By contrast, to Polo’s near contemporary, John de' Marignolli, Grand Tartary (or “Asia the Great”, as he termed it) encompassed half the globe. It allegedly stretched “from the White Sea beyond Hungary, where now are the Wallachians, in a straight line over all the empire of Uzbek, Katay [Cathay], the Indies, and Ethiopia to the World’s end.”36 But this description was so broad as to be meaningless both to contemporary and modern readers. It poses an additional problem in that the White Sea today is simply too remote from Hungary and Wallachia to have been the body of water indicated by this account.37 One explanation for the confusion in medieval minds over what actually constituted Grand Tartary and its inner geography was given by Marignolli. “Before the days of the Tartars,” he wrote, “nobody believed that the earth was habitable [north of the Gobi Desert], nor indeed was it believed that there was any country at all beyond.”38 The great frozen wastes, high mountains, harsh climate, and local tribes effectively barred the way to would-be explorers. Besides, even the relatively well-traveled routes that Polo, Plano Carpini, and others had used during the period of the Pax Mongolica had slipped into oblivion with the collapse of that empire. This contributed to the prevailing dearth of information prior to the midsixteenth century. As a result, instead of making progress since the Middle Ages, geographic knowledge of Grand Tartary had retrogressed.39 But this situation began to change with the appearance of two landmark books in 1525 and 1527 respectively. First was Johann Faber’s account of Muscovy,40 which Richard Eden soon rendered into English for a short collection of northern voyages he compiled in 1555.41 Second was the relation published by Faber’s contemporary, Paolo Giovio.42 Together, these volumes represent the most important texts touching upon Grand Tartary prior to the first printing of Baron Sigismund von Herberstein’s detailed relation of Russia in 1549.43 Coincidentally, the German Faber and the Italian Giovio appear to have based their respective accounts upon materials collected independently from Demetrius Germassinof. “Learned . . . in the Greek tongue & Latin,” he had been sent as Russian ambassador in c. 1525 to the courts of Archduke (later Emperor) Ferdinand von Habsburg (1503–1564) at Tübingen and Pope Clement VII (r.1523–1534) at Rome.44 Among his papers was a map bearing a “description of Moscovia, and the provinces subiect to the same.”45 Perhaps a version of this was the one reproduced in Faber’s book. The same chart also might have supplied much, if not all, of the information for another one later drafted by the German painter, Anton Wied, in 1542.46 Similarly recounted by both authors was Paolo Centurione's embassy to

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Moscow on behalf of the late pontiff, Leo X (r.1513–1521). The chief purpose of this mission had been to weaken Portugal’s control of the maritime trade routes to Asia by opening, if possible, any vyage by land, whereby spyces myght be brought from India by the lande of Tartaria, or by the sea Caspium . . . to Muscovia, and from thence to be brought in shippes by the ryver [Volga to] Riga, which runnying by 47 the countrey of Livonia, falleth into the sea of Germanie [i.e., the Baltic].

In reality, however, accurate intelligence of at least western Siberia, the threshold of Grand Tartary, dates only from the mid-sixteenth century onward.48 It began with the publication of baron von Herberstein’s account of Russia during the reign of Czar Vasili III (1505–1533),49 followed in 1589 by Anthony Jenkinson’s relation of his travels to Bokhara and the Near East.50 Both works embody more than the experiences and observations of shrewd and assiduous men. They added largely to contemporary geographic knowledge of the region, which enabled cartographers to correct and expand their maps. Indeed, observes one editor, these two books bridge the gap between the early travelogues of the thirteenth century and those of the eighteenth century, “a long period of uncertainty and vagueness in the accounts of Central Asia.”51 Hence, both have been hailed as standing reference works and starting points for subsequent historians of late medieval Russia.52 Twice sent as Imperial ambassador to Moscow for a combined total of about sixteen months (1516–1517, 1526 1527), Herberstein (1486–1566) relied not only upon personal diligence and his own knowledge of the Russian tongue, but also upon any secondary account he deemed “worthy of credit” when compiling his notes. He cultivated the best-informed and most intelligent minds of Moscow; he took every opportunity, as well, to talk with men who had traveled extensively throughout the country. They included his three interpreters.53 At the same time, the baron consulted the works of Giovio, Faber and Wied for their “maps and commentaries.”54 Thus, rather than depend upon a single source or two, Herberstein “trusted only to the unvarying statements of the many,” in order that his opinion would not be viewed “with suspicion, or considered presumptuous.”55 To this he added a high degree of skepticism that allowed him to question the “fabulous and scarcely credible” tales of grotesque men or mythological beasts that, “by universal report . . . are held to be true.” He only included these fables, he wrote, because of his reluctance “to omit anything.”56 By contrast, Anthony Jenkinson (15?–1611) based his account solely upon first-hand experience. Twice, between 1557 and 1564, he traveled through Russian territory as an agent of the London-based Muscovy Company (est. 1555). At that time, most Englishmen were engaged in searching out a viable Northeast Passage to China by sea,57 of which “there coulde not any nauigation be imagined so commodious and profitable to all Christendom.”58 But Jenkinson rejected the polar route. Instead, he journeyed through Muscovy, the western parts of Central Asia and part way along the ancient Silk Road in quest of a land route to Peking.59

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Coincidentally, he was the first western European to visit those eastern territories just recently wrested from the Mongols by Czar Ivan IV “the Terrible” (r. 1533– 1584), and to descend the Volga River after Russia’s defeat of the Khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556). He also was the first Englishman to navigate the Caspian, and to recognize that it was a landlocked sea.60 The accounts of Herberstein and Jenkinson greatly expanded contemporary knowledge of Russia, to be sure. Nevertheless, their remarks on western Siberia and the vast interior spaces of Grand Tartary that lay beyond still amounted to little more than the naming of places, rivers and different tribes along the fringes.61 This, then, evokes two major questions. First, what precisely could an articulate European like Philippe Avril have learned about Grand Tartary from these sources, in combination with the earlier printed references to North and Central Asia published prior to 1550? Second, how many of these works did the Frenchman have access to, let alone consult, before embarking on his own search for a secure land passage to China? According to these accounts, the czar's dominions lay in Asia, or “at any rate on the very extreme confines of Europe, where it joins Asia.”62 From there they stretched along a north-south axis from the Arctic (or “Frostie”) Sea against the boundaries of Norway and Lapland, “even to the Mare Caspium” (Caspian Sea).63 Here at Astrakhan, “the great emporium of the Tartars,” the Volga delta began, dividing “into many branches, described as seventy in number.”64 This formerly Moslem city was “the furthest holde that this Emperour of Russia hath conquered . . towardes the Caspium Sea, which hee keepeth very strong” to guard against the hostile Crimm (or Crimean) Tatars.65 These nomadic people ranged between the Volga and Dnieper Rivers, “having no fixed abodes,” and enjoyed the protection of the Ottoman sultan.66 East of the Volga dwelt the Nogai and Kalmyk Tatars as far as the Jaick (or Ural) River, “which hath his spring in the lande of Siberia, nigh vnto the . . . river Cama [Kama], and . . . falling into this Mare Caspium.”67 If Astrakhan represented the limit of czarist rule in south Tartary, then the Ob River was recognized as “the furthest border of thempyre of the Prince of Muscovia” in northeast Tartary.68 Lying between it and the Ural Mountains on the west (the so-called Catena Mundi, or “Girdle of the Earth”)69 was Obduria, the first Siberian province to be conquered in 1499. Hence, the Ob, together with its southern tributary the Irtish, were recognized vaguely as “the cornerstone of the Russian Asiatic empire.”70 Dwelling along their banks were various groups of nomadic Tatars, “said to be dependents of the Grand Duke of Muscovy,” with whose subjects they traded furs.71 The source of both rivers was located in Lake Kitai (i.e., the Aral Sea). Situated here was “the fyrst habitation of the Tartars, that pay tribute to the Great Cane,” or Khan, namely the emperor of China.72 The journey from this body of water to “the most noble citie of Cambalu” (i.e., Peking) allegedly took two months.73 In fact, on most charts of the period “Cambalu” is situated on Lake Kitai’s eastern shore. Its name doubtless had led early cartographers to suppose that the frontiers of Cathay began at that point.74

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Otherwise, everything east of the Ob River and north of the ancient Silk Road was pure conjecture, as reflected by contemporary maps. Those of Martin Waldseemüller (1507), Diego Ribero (1529), Sebastian Cabot (1544), Herberstein (1549), Pierre Desceliers (1550), Jenkinson (1563), Gerardus Mercator (1569), Abraham Ortelius (1570), and Willem Blaeu (1635)—to name only the more prominent examples—all delineated large empty spaces filled with depictions of, or references to, wholly fictitious cities, rivers, mountains, and peoples lifted from earlier written accounts.75 Indeed, the fantastical nature of geographic treatments of this vast interior (still associated by cartographers of the day with ancient Scythia or Sarmatia) is evident from the fanciful, if attractive drawings of devils, dragons, and other fabulous creatures scattered across these charts. Notes historian John Baddeley, this illustrates just “how slowly knowledge grew, or, rather how obstinately the mere map-maker clung to his old rubbish.”76 Even western Siberia on the fringe of Grand Tartary was largely mysterious prior to 1580, if only because Muscovite armies had not yet penetrated the area deeply.77 To be sure, contemporary writers and geographers in western Europe were aware that its boundaries were contiguous with those of the Russian province of Permia.78 First occupied in 1558, this region was located about 200 miles east of Moscow along the western face of the Urals. But beyond the fact that Siberia was an abundant source of furs and inhabited by Tatars who “possesse the moste large desertes, even vnto the famous city of Cathay, in the furthest Ocean of the East,”79 no one knew whether it contained any cities or fortresses. Nor did this prevailing want of knowledge improve much during the Russians' rapid conquest of Grand Tartary between 1581 and 1648, called by some modern writers “an unparalleled phenomenon” and “the greatest colonial enterprise in history.”80 A handful of English accounts published between 1591 and 1626 provided a few more details about the people, geography, climate and trade of this enormous domain, the actual dimensions of which still no one knew or imagined.81 But even this intelligence contributed little beyond a general acknowledgment that the formidable Russian ruler “hath layed unto his realme a great breadth and length of ground, . . . so that hee is bold to write himselfe now, the great commaunder of Siberia.”82 The real problem that confronted western Europeans thirsty to know about the region after c. 1558 was the czars’ firm refusal to “disclose vnto a straunger and vnknowne men” any intelligence gathered in the wake of their conquests.83 The region was rich in furs, fish, precious metals, and other resources from which the royal treasury drew enormous revenues. A vast frontier not easily defended from attack, it was politically sensitive besides. Hence, Russian rulers were naturally determined to monopolize the natural wealth of Grand Tartary, and to prevent foreign intrusion at the same time. They were particularly secretive about the various routes that had been opened through Siberia as far as the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese frontier. In 1617, for example, Sir John Mericke’s request to explore a way to China via the Ob River was denied. Instead, Moscow took steps to secure

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this vital trade route for itself.84 Already in 1615 and again in 1618 two expeditions had been dispatched to establish diplomatic and commercial relations with the Ming court. An account of the second, led by Ivan Petlin, managed even to find its way to London, where it was printed by Samuel Purchase in 1625.85 This gave western Europe its first real description, however sketchy, of a viable overland route via Grand Tartary to the gates of Peking. But as neither mission succeeded, Moscow did not send out a third until 1653. Headed by Fedor Isakovich Baikov, it too failed.86 In the meantime, the czar and his government kept silent. Such, then, was the general extent of information about Grand Tartary that could be gleaned from existing sources in 1684 to 1685. It is significant, however, that each of these works was available to Père Avril, whether only in Latin (such as those of Herberstein and Faber) or in translation. The accounts of Plano Carpini and Rubruck,87 Polo and Mandeville,88 Odoric of Pordenone, Giovio, and Jenkinson89 all had appeared in French during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sometimes in multiple editions. French versions of the more recent travels of Bento de Goës90 and Johann Grueber91 also were published in 1614 and 1670 respectively, with additional printings. The account of Fedor Baikov’s expedition to China was printed in Melchisédich Thévenot’s compendium of travel literature, the Recueil des voyages (1681). A summary also appeared in the report of a Dutch embassy that happened to visit the Ch’ing capital at the same time.92 In other words, what had begun as a trickle of travelogues in the sixteenth century had developed into a veritable flood by 1650, as European presses struggled to meet the reading demands of an ever-growing audience that was thirsty for knowledge of foreign lands and cultures around the globe. That Avril consulted the relations of at least the medieval voyagers prior to departing for the East is suggested by an off-hand remark in the preface of his book. The search for a secure route across Grand Tartary, he mused, “did not seem impracticable, since History mentions some Travellers who have had the good fortune to reach China by Land,” though, he lamented, they left little accurate record of their routes.93 After all, these early sources, however incomplete or conjectural, still formed the standard reference works for inner Asia. He similarly appears to have been familiar with the travels of Andrew of Perugia, John of Monte Corvino, John of Marignolli, Pascal of Vittoria, and other Catholic friars who had visited Cathay between 1290 and 1346, as missionaries or papal emissaries.94 Some of these men left more or less extensive accounts of their experiences,95 to which Avril referred indirectly by his allusion to “several Franciscan monks” sent to China in the fourteenth century to convert the pagans.96 In all, he cited twenty-one authors of different works on Asia, geography, and astronomy, both medieval and “modern.”97 These encounters between East and West, it is clear, had been established either in whole or in part by overland routes. Otherwise, the only enduring effect derived from this phase of Sino-European contact was reports “about the continued existence of a Christian kingdom in Asia under the legendary king, Prester John.” His realm Avril associated, after detailed discussion of sources

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and geography, with the remote, mysterious land of Tibet. 98 It was, however, the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688), “a famous Missionary of China,”99 who offered the most promising solution to the problem of a land route through Grand Tartary. Like Adam Schall, Alexandre de Rhodes, and Philippe Couplet, he too urged the need for more missionaries in Asia to spread the Christian faith. He also asserted that it would be simple to send them eastward by land, without exposing them to the many hazards of sea travel. To support this contention, wrote Avril, he had shown his superiors at Rome “that the Tartars [the Manchus] in making themselves Masters of China, have made Passage into that vast Empire through Grand Tartary, and that it would be easy to take the advantages of the Commerce the Tartars had maintained ever since with the Chinese, to introduce the Light of the Gospel among both Nations.”100 In fact, it might even have been Verbiest who first conceived of the idea of searching for a route through Siberia specifically, as opposed to northern India or the lands of the ancient Silk Road, for he had insider knowledge from a unique source. As the Jesuit Superior in Peking and director of the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy since 1669, Verbiest was the most prominent European at the Ch’ing court. At one point he even had tutored the young K’ang-hsi emperor (r. 1663– 1723) in mathematics and astronomy. In subsequent years, the Manchu ruler engaged the Jesuit’s many skills not only for such technical services as casting artillery, building aqueducts, and designing a massive observatory for the imperial palace, but also for diplomacy. In particular, Father Verbiest served as official interpreter in Ch’ing negotiations with a new Russian embassy. This was led by Nikolay Gavrilovich Milescu, called Spathari (his Modavian title), in 1675 to 1676.101 Its purpose was to establish permanent diplomatic and commercial relations with Peking, and to explore possible trade routes through Siberia. Spathari also had to deal with Manchu complaints about Russian encroachment on the strategic Amur River, China’s northern frontier, and the closely related question of “fugitive” tribes (i.e., former tributaries) that had switched allegiances from Peking to Moscow. These issues were not resolved until 1689, however, when the Amur was established as the boundary line between China and Siberia by the Peace of Nerchinsk, after years of escalating border disputes and occasional open war. Like its predecessors, Spathari’s embassy ultimately failed to achieve its goals, having foundered on the rocks of Chinese protocol and Ch’ing interests along the Amur. But it succeeded in two things. First, its contribution to geographic knowledge was enormous. The ambassador’s meticulous report of his journey from the Russian settlement at Tobolsk in the heart of Grand Tartary to the Chinese frontier covered many thousands of miles of country never before described. Remarkable for its extent and accuracy, Spathari’s account of seven different land routes to China was “an original and valuable contribution to geographical knowledge, the merit of which has . . . been wrongly attributed to Father Avril.”102 Second, this information formed the basis of Ferdinand Verbiest’s belief that a safe

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passage was possible between Rome and Peking via Grand Tartary. Keen to discover just such a route, the Jesuit superior carefully cultivated Spathari’s trust—even while serving as court interpreter—to the extent of betraying Ch’ing interests and strategic plans to the Russian envoy.103 In fact, Spathari later reported that the priests “were glad to serve the Tsar as they serve God, for they love not the Manchus, as they did the Chinese [i.e., Mings].”104 From their conversations in Latin, Verbiest gathered much useful information about the Russian advance eastwards. To this he added personal experience of Tartary, having attended K’ang-hsi on two “hunting” trips north of the Great Wall in 1682 and 1683. Accompanied by 160,000 troops, the emperor’s real object was threefold: first, “to keep his soldiers in continual exercise during peace, as well as in war”; second, to strengthen local allegiances to Peking; and third, to make a show of force to discourage Russian encroachment.105 Consequently, the manner in which he “went forth to the chase, had all the form and appearance of a royal progress to war.”106 Verbiest recorded the details in two letters that he sent to Europe with Philippe Couplet. Though not printed at Paris until 1685, Avril probably read the manuscripts prior to his departure for the East the previous autumn. Following his return to France five years later, the Jesuit explorer published a relation of his own experiences in 1692. Part travelogue and part travel guide, the narrative divides naturally into two sections. One describes Avril’s journey from Europe to Syria, and thence through Kurdistan, Armenia, and Persia across the Caspian Sea to the Volga delta, where he landed at Astrakhan. The other section recounts his trek to Moscow, his cool reception by Muscovite officials suspicious of his purpose and, most importantly, his explanation of the various routes across Grand Tartary lifted from Russian and Polish records. To guard against redundancy, Avril promised to write nothing in his account “which might be found in Authors who have already given a clear Description of the Countries where I travell’d after ‘em,”107 though he did not hesitate to dispute their works where he thought they were in error. At the same time, in order “to discover the exact extent of” Grand Tartary, he wrote, I have taken information from the Inhabitants; I have spoken to them, I have learned from them how many days they employ’d in travelling to China, and how many Leagues they travell’d a day: I have seen them go from Moscow, and come back from Peking: In a word, I have taken such precautions, that I have reason to believe I have not been deceived.108

In some respects, Avril was the ideal choice to undertake the new venture. Following his ordination, he had taught philosophy and mathematics at Paris until, “pitch’d upon by Providence,” he was selected by his superiors for this important task. It was to be led, however, by Père Louis Barnabé, a fellow Jesuit active in Armenia since 1680. He had learned much about the caravan routes through Central Asia while working at the cities of Erzerum and Erivan, where Avril was to

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meet him. The journey itself was arduous, occasionally risky, but never dull. Nor did Avril regret the experience. On the contrary, he boasted, “I expos’d myself, though with a great deal of pleasure and delight, to all those Dangers which I knew were not to be avoided by Those who undertook such laborious and tiresome Voyages.”109 Philippe Avril left Paris in autumn 1684. Accompanied by Père Couplet as far as Lyon, he continued alone to Marseilles, Rome, and the port of Livorno. From there he set sail, on 13 January 1685, for Cyprus and the Levant. During the voyage, Avril experienced first-hand exactly those maritime hazards that took so many missionary lives year after year. His vessel almost sank in “a most dreadful Tempest” off the coast of Crete and nearly collided with another ship a week or so later. Finally, in early February, the Jesuit explorer landed at the Syrian port of Alexandretta (modern-day Iskanderum) where, tradition had it, Jonas was disgorged by the whale. He remained in that city for three weeks until, disguised as an Armenian for greater security, he set out by caravan across the plains of Antioch en route to Persia and his pre-arranged rendezvous with Louis Barnabé. Not until a year later, however, did the two men meet, in April 1686. This lengthy delay was not due to Avril’s mode of travel, though that was rigorous enough. Exposed continuously to the elements, his health and constitution were taxed further by the monotonous routine of caravan life, the inadequate food, and the nightly threat of attack by marauding bands of thieves. Avril also endured long periods of loneliness, as he had not yet learned any of the native languages. At least he had no problems with the Turkish caravan leaders, whom Avril praised for their honesty. In fact, even before leaving Europe, he had been advised by men of experience that ‘tis better to make choice of a Turk [as a guide] than a Christian of the Country; the latter neither having Authority to defend you, nor courage to oppose himself against cruel Inquisitors that are demanded of ye, nor that Fidelity which is always observable in the other; especially when he has sworn upon his head to conduct you safely.110

But this hardly compensated for the many other travails the Jesuit had to endure. Thus all things considered, he confessed, “I look upon it as a kind of Miracle, that I was able so long to undergo such excessive Hardships.”111 Nevertheless, Avril left a fascinating record of caravan travel in the seventeenth-century Near East. His journey through Syria, Kurdistan, and Persia to the shores of the Caspian Sea was punctuated by halts at various cities along the way, many of which he admired for their size, prosperity, and cosmopolitan character. At two of these centers, the Kurdish capital of Bitlis and the commercial hub of Erzerum on the Turko-Persian frontier, he interrupted his trek for six months at a time on orders from Rome to assist with the fledgling Jesuit missions in both places. Although he complained obliquely in his relation about these unwanted delays, they had their advantages; for they allowed Avril ample opportunity to

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observe the patterns of life and behavior in this region of Islam. He noted, for example, how Catholic missionaries used European medicine to gain converts and “to settle themselves in a Post so advantageous to the Christian Religion, as appears by the surprising Progresses they have made.”112 However primitive by modern standards, medical practice in the West was far superior in many respects than that of the East. Even if it did not cure, it at least had the virtue of being different. At all events, European science and technology opened many doors to Western priests throughout early modern Asia, from Constantinople to Peking, that otherwise might have remained closed to them. At Bitlis, Avril experienced this phenomenon first hand when summoned to the court of the local emir. This prince had been told that, as a Jesuit and therefore a man of high moral character, the Frenchman would not use profanity. Furthermore, he was alleged to be “a most skilful Clock-maker, who might be greatly serviceable . . . to the whole City.” In reality, confessed Avril, “I know no more of that Art, than every body knows that will look to their Watches themselves, or have learnt to make some little amendments, when they are not over-much out of order.”113 Eager to verify both claims for himself, the emir wagered that he could force his French guest to curse, knowing how common the habit was among his own people. Though he lost the bet, he was more than satisfied when Avril dismantled a watch he had brought from Paris, explaining its different springs and motions. The demonstration concluded, the Jesuit judiciously presented the timepiece to his delighted host as a gift.114 What impressed Avril most of all, however, was Islamic piety and dedication to their devotions, in sharp contrast to the neglectfulness of Christian Europeans. As a Catholic priest who believed firmly in the superiority of his own faith, it troubled him “to see a Nation . . . altogether endu’d with Reason, yet so blind and stupid in matters of Religion.”115 Even so, he noted that most Moslems never missed their daily prayers and reproached the few who did. “How much were it to be wished,” the Jesuit lamented, “that the same Sentiments were able to touch the hearts of so many Christians as we find in Europe, who are so far from believing such a holy Practice to be a Duty, that they think it a shame to pray to God, that Worship is so justly due to him.”116 Nearly eighteen months after leaving France, Avril at last reached the Persian city of Erivan and his rendezvous with Louis Barnabé. While there, the two priests completed preparations for their long-delayed expedition into Central Asia. After examining the potential land routes to China, they “fix’d upon that of Astrakan, as the most safe, and most commodious of all the rest, by reason of the Caravans that set from thence three or four times a year for Bokara and Samarkand, where the Muscovites and the Yousbecs [i.e., Uzbecs] traffic together.”117 In other words, they planned to follow the ancient Silk Road with minor variations. On 23 April 1686, the Jesuit explorers set out. Disguised this time as Georgians, they traveled mostly by night “to avoid the excessive Heats, which an European is not able long to endure, as being accustom’d to a more temperate

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climate.”118 Their route took them through modern-day Azerbaijan, past Lake Gokcha to Gandja (or Elizapatpol, “one of the best Cities in Persia”), over the southern Caucasus to Shemankha, and thence to the Caspian. They reached “this little Sea” somewhere near Baku, where they waited for a ship to carry them to Astrakhan. In early July, Avril and Barnabé set sail for the Volga Delta and “the first City of Tartary.” As the “Season was extreamly proper for Navigation,” the voyage lasted a mere six days, though it took another two weeks to sail up river due to the Volga’s strong current and many sand bars. Along the way the vessel stopped at a great sturgeon fishery, where the Russians harvested that “glutinous Substance, so well known in Foreign Countries under the name of Caviar.” That, Avril noted, “is one of the best [sources of] Revenues which the Czar has.”119 But whatever pleasure he took in watching “this Fishing sport” was ruined by the clouds of gnats that hovered over the Volga and stung the two Jesuits to disfigurement. Thus, by the time they reached Astrakhan on 25 July, Avril and Barnabé “should have been taken for Leapers [sic], or people that were troubl’d with a Dropsie, but that the Inhabitants were well acquainted with the reason of the Wheals and Blisters that disfigur’d us.”120 The two men immediately began to collect all the information they could about the different routes to China, hoping to be “thoroughly instructed in what till then, notwithstanding our diligence, we could only gain a confus’d and obscure glimmering.” In fact, they anticipated that at Astrakhan, they could obtain all the intelligence they required “without going any further.” Nor, at first, were they disappointed in their surmise. Lodged in a caravanserai reserved for foreigners, Avril and Barnabé met a number of men who had made several trips to Peking.121 Particularly informative was a merchant from Bokhara, who had been to China four times. From him they learned that their proposed route through Uzbekistan to the Middle Kingdom “was neither so difficult nor tedious as generally believed,” and moreover, that “the conditions [of travel] were the same as those in Persia and Turkey.” Caravans were large and well armed against attack, and refreshments were readily available at the many towns and villages situated along the way. The merchant claimed further that the whole journey to the Chinese frontier required only two months, “whether you take the South-East Road through the Cities of Samarkand, Kabool, Kachemir and Barantola [Lhasa], or go directly East, through the middle of the Moguls, who . . . are subject to the King of the Yousbecs.” But, he warned, entry into China could be obtained only by attaching oneself to a tribute embassy, in accordance with Ch’ing protocol. This was arranged easily, he continued, by applying to some Taiso, or Prince of those Tartars that lie in the Road, and request him to send an Embassador to Pekin, under some pretence or other, which he presently will do upon the allurement of some little Present: And under the protection of this Deputy it is, that the Merchants, who pretend to be all of his Train, enter freely into China, and trade with all the security of his Train, enter freely into China, and trade with all the security imaginable.122

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Avril subsequently placed great trust in this account, “because it perfectly agreed with all the Relations which were afterwards communicated to us both at Astrakan and Mosco.” About the same time, he and Barnabé were shown “a very curious Journal” written by three merchants who had traveled to Peking from Astrakhan, via Bokhara and Samarkand, in a matter of just 111 days. From this evidence, combined with his other investigations after returning to France in 1689, Avril concluded that Western scholars and geographers had “been a long time in Error, as to the certain distance from hence to China.” The ancients in particular, he argued, had placed the empire 600 leagues farther east than it actually was, and that the real distance from Bokhara to Peking, following in a straight line, was only 613 leagues (or 1,819 miles). “This being so,” he wrote, “there is no question but that the way by land to China is much more safe and short than to go by Sea, let the Wind serve never so fair.”123 As for those who doubted his calculations, Avril freely confessed “that things speculatively consider’d, appear always more easy then they prove to be in practice, because we cannot certainly foresee all the Accidents we may meet with in long Journeys.” But he felt certain from considerable personal experience and later study that the route to China was “more easie in the practical part than it appears perhaps to others in the speculative.”124 Moreover, he asserted, perhaps more to convince himself than his readers, “though there were as many Dangers to run through, as Christopher Columbus had formerly to undergo upon the Score of Private Gain, or Vain Honour; why should a Minister of the Gospel fear to expose himself for the Glory of God, who repays with interest the Services that are done for him?”125 The two Jesuits now resolved to join a Muscovite caravan bound for Samarkand. But at the last minute, their hopes were dashed when rumors of war between the Kalmyk Tatars and the Uzbecs on the steppes between the Caspian and Aral Seas caused the cancellation of the journey. But their hopes just as quickly revived when news reached them from Moscow that a caravan of Chinese merchants had arrived there with the intention of returning to Peking via Grand Tartary in the spring. Consequently, Avril and Barnabé applied to the voevode (military governor) of Astrakhan for the necessary passport to the Russian capital. But he delayed them for almost four months. An unrepentent drunk in the last stages of alcohol poisoning, the voevode was convinced that the two Jesuits could cure him, owing to accounts of their medical expertise. So the very knowledge that opened doors to Catholic missionaries throughout Asia now threatened to lock both men in. Finally, the archmandrite of the Orthodox Church interceded on their behalf and obtained the necessary passports for Moscow.126 By the time they embarked for the voyage up river, however, it was already 19 October and the Russian winter had begun to set in. The first few days of the journey were smooth and easy, but then the weather changed suddenly. It became so cold that the two Jesuits feared they would freeze to death. Meanwhile, their vessel was delayed repeatedly by “many unlucky Accidents,” the most dangerous of

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which occurred when it burned because of carelessness in the galleys. Barely escaping with their lives, the Russian crew and their French passengers were rescued by another boat. But when they were only forty miles from Saratow, the river froze, trapping that vessel in the ice. Avril and Barnabé had to complete the remainder of their journey to Moscow by sled, a novel experience remarkable “for swiftness and convenience.” After thirty-five days the priests finally reached the Russian capital, where they boarded with fellow Jesuits who ministered to German officers in the czar's army.127 These priests advised their two guests to apply to Prince Galitzin, then “Prime Minister of the State,” for the necessary travel permits across Grand Tartary to China. From this point onward, Avril and Barnabé were subjected to every kind of delay and prevarication that Russian “red-tape officialdom” could devise to prevent their departure eastward. Past-masters of the art of postponing the issue and of secretiveness, the royal ministers had little sympathy for their China scheme, especially since the Russians were engaged at the same time in colonizing their Siberian possessions to manage and develop the fur trade. The last thing they wanted was to have foreigners “peering and prying into their affairs.”128 They even suspected the two priests of spying—a suspicion encouraged, no doubt, by Jesuit involvement at Peking in the ongoing controversy over the boundary line between the Muscovite and Ch’ing empires along the Amur River. This only heightened Russian xenophobia. Hence, Prince Galitzen passed the two priests over to the Chancellery, where they were examined closely for several hours, almost like common criminals.129 That ordeal concluded, they still had to wait for the official approval to enter Grand Tartary. Nor was this their only frustration. They discovered that the “Chinese” merchants they had come to Moscow specifically to see were only Mongols from the interior. Even so, the French fathers hoped to return with them to Siberia the following spring, provided their permits were granted. In the meantime, Avril collected all of the information he could find about the overland routes connecting China with the outside world. He recorded the results in a carefully written memorandum addressed to his superiors at Rome, which he later amplified with intelligence obtained from the Russian Chancellery, Polish documents, and newly published sources consulted after his return to France. The Jesuit already had paid close attention to describing Astrakhan and its environs, noting in detail the geography of the city, its ethnic and religious composition, its wealth, its chief trade goods, and its relations with the neighboring Nogai and Kalmyk Tatars. He remarked in particular that although the czar had seized this territory years before, Russian rule was still not fully secure, but had to be reinforced with bribes of food, alcohol, and tobacco to the local tribes. This gift, “or rather Tribute, . . . seems to keep good correspondence between both Nations.”130 Avril also had recognized the important role played by Orthodox Christianity as a political tool in subduing the native Moslem population. But of this he disapproved on spiritual grounds; for “the Muscovites look upon Religion to

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be no other than as a means to shoore up their Politique Government, as they have always done, and would never permit their Politicks to give way to the Interests of Religion.”131 The Jesuit began his new investigation of Grand Tartary with a geographic discussion of the region, observing that the Muscovites still distinguished between China and Cathay, which even western Europeans had “thought till now, to have been a particular kingdom.” He then criticized ancient geographers who had tried “to make known unto us that vast extent of Northern Countries that lye between the Obi, and the famous Chinese wall,” but who offered “Conjectures instead of real Truths.” Nor had modern geographers fared any better. What they had done was “to fill up the vast wide spaces with Forests, or several horrible Deserts,” all of which were fictitious. Consequently, available books of geography were untrustworthy. But Avril was not above reproach in his turn for such faults either. Part of the map he procured from Russian sources for his own book had been copied upside down, so it was just as unreliable as any other.132 The Jesuit next described the initial Cossack conquest of the region that bordered on the Ob River, “which is properly call’d Siberia, from the word Siber, which in the Slavonican Language signifies the North.” But within a short time, he noted, the Russians had assumed direct control over the progress of territorial expansion all the way to the Amur River, “which has occasion’d the present war [1685–1689] between them and the Chinese.” In the process, they had developed the highly lucrative fur trade and founded colonies, to which the czars also banished “Malefactors of the State,” as well as “Officers and Boyars who have not behav’d themselves well in their Employments, or of whom they have any reason to be afraid.”133 It was by means of these “irregular Incursions,” continued Avril, that the Russians had “laid open several New Roads which led ‘em insensibly into China.” These he separated into two distinct groups, one for the south and one for the north. Two of the southern routes began from Persian Armenia, which was best reached from France by traveling through Constantinople and the Black Sea port of Trebizont. He identified the city of Erzerum as the terminus for the first long stage of the journey, and the ancient center of Bokhara as the second stopping-point. Travelers could reach the former via Astrakhan and the Kirgiz Steppes, as Avril intended to do. Or they could circle around the southern end of the Caspian Sea and then continue along the Persian portion of the old Silk Road, via Tabriz, Teheran, and Meschad. An alternative choice was to go southward from Bokhara through Samarkand, across the desolate mountain passes of Afghanistan via Kabul, and from there into northern India, Kashmir, and Tibet, as Johann Greuber and Bento de Goës had done earlier in the century. Indeed, boasted Avril, “we are beholden to the Jesuits for the knowledge of this route. But it was impractical, he admitted, owing to desert conditions and roving bands of thieves. The third alternative was to follow the road used most frequently by Russian and Uzbec merchants, from Turfan to Suchow on the Chinese frontier. But he erred in tracing its western section not

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through Bokhara, but through northern Siberia, past Lake Balkash as far as the Russian settlement of Tobolsk.134 If much of the information he collected on the southern roads to China was erroneous and even contradictory, the Jesuit had greater success in his attempts to investigate the northern or Siberian routes.135 The one he recommended most strongly was that taken in 1675 by Spathari, whose account he clearly had consulted. If the ambassador’s report was correct, the Frenchman argued, then “this Road is as safe as it is short.”136 It was best, Avril began, to leave Moscow for Tobolsk near the end of February, when the snow was hard and firm “by reason of the great number of Sledds that pass continually to and fro at this time.” In less than three weeks, travelers would arrive at the Irtish River, 350 leagues away. Here at Tobolsk, “the Capital City of Siberia,” they could wait for the spring thaw to clear the rivers of ice. Transferring to boats, they would sail down the Irtish to the point where it flowed into the Ob. Then following that river in a south-easterly direction, travelers would turn sharply up the Keta, a tributary, to the settlement of Eniseisk on the Enissei River. In winter, the distance between Tobolsk and this Siberian outpost could be traversed easily in reindeer sleighs, to which the Russians occasionally attached makeshift sails to take advantage of the wind “to spare their Beasts.” Leaving Eniseisk, travelers would continue by boat upstream along the main river, and then follow the upper course of the Tunguska until they reached Lake Baikal. Its waters were reputed to be so clear that it was possible to see the colored stones that rested on the bottom. A short sail across this great lake would deliver travelers to the mouth of the Selenga River, on the opposite shore, which was also navigable. This would bring them to the Mongolian frontier, not far from the town of Ulan Bator. From there it was possible to take the old “Tea-route” across the Gobi Desert to Kagan and Peking, but for the fact that the Chinese had blocked this direct route of entry to the Muscovite interlopers. This required them to make a wide detour by ox-cart to the Shilka, which flows into the Amur River just below the Russian outpost of Nerchinsk on China's northern boundary. Peking was within easy reach from that settlement.137 Although generally accurate, observes Felix Plattner, Avril’s recommended route relied too heavily on the Siberian river system. For one thing, he made no reference to available roads, however rudimentary, or the difficulties of travel by water. He also erred in asserting that Grand Tartary could be traversed in only two months. That was too short even for the last segment of the journey, from Tobolsk to Peking. Nevertheless, he “was quite right in maintaining that he had discovered a practical route to China” overland. 138 His account also showed, Avril asserted, that “all the Countries that were formerly but confusedly known under the Name of . . . Grand Tartary, are neither so desert, nor so untill’d, as people to this day imagine.” On the contrary, the region was rich in commodities, including fur, rhubarb, semiprecious stones, beaver pelts, ginseng, fresh-water pearls, ivory, silver, and lead, the proceeds of which contributed handsomely to the czar’s purse.139 The vast solitudes of Siberia were populated, as well, by numerous tribes, many of which he identified

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from Russian documents. Not only did he describe the regions in which these people lived, he also provided extensive ethnographic information as to their customs, clothing, language, religion, politics, and physiognomy.140 But he failed to understand why it was that western Europeans persisted in calling these folk Tartars, “seeing that in Poland, Muscovy and even in Tartary it self, they abridge the Name, and call 'em only Tator.”141 Finally Avril noted four of the principal Siberian river systems—the Ob, Enissei, Lena, and Amur—as well as the location of the major Russian settlements. From this information, he concluded that “the Road from Muscovy to China is no Chimera nor impractical thing; and that it would be likewise the most commodious and shortest way.”142 But to his great disappointment, Avril was not permitted to test this theory. Seizing on the pretext that he and Barnabé had entered the country illegally, without proper letters of introduction or the necessary passports, the Russians refused to authorize the travel permits that they “had been requesting ever since we arriv’d in Moskow.” The two Frenchmen appealed the decision, but in vain. They received, instead, “a precise Order to be gone,” issued in the czar’s name. This led Avril to complain bitterly of Russian secretiveness, adding that “no man dares overcuriously inform himself in Muscovy for fear of giving a Jealousy to that Nation, the most distrustful and suspicious of any other perhaps in the World.” But this should have come to him as no surprise, in view of his own confession that during their brief residence in the Russian capital, he and Barnabé had been compelled to use great discretion and even stealth “to discover that little which I have made known.”143 The rest of Philippe Avril’s story can be summarized quickly. Though obliged to leave Moscow, he did not return to France with Louis Barnabé, who hoped to obtain support from Louis XIV and Père La Chaise for a renewed effort. Remaining instead at Warsaw, which the two Jesuits had entered in early March 1688, Avril attempted twice more to achieve his objective of reaching China by land—if not through Siberia, then via Persia and Central Asia. Aided in part by the Polish monarch, John Sobieski (r. 1674 to 1696), and his ambassador to Russia, the French priest once again traveled to Moscow in late spring. Just two days after his arrival in the Muscovite capital, however, Avril was ordered summarily out of the country. Once again, he appealed the command in vain. “Russia intended to keep her trade with China a secret.”144 Nor did he have better luck later the same year (1688), when he and a fellow Jesuit, Père de Beauvillier, tried going south to Constantinople instead, and thence through Persia to Bokhara, Samarkand, and the Chinese frontier. Crossing secretly into Ottoman territory, the two men were arrested as spies. After several weeks, they secured their release and resumed their trek. But Avril, whose health had been waning as a result of relentless exertions, suddenly developed a hemorrhage. Ordered to abandon the search and return home by his superiors, he reached France in autumn 1689.145 During five years of tireless effort and exploration, Philippe Avril had succeeded in fulfilling at least part of his mission. He had discovered a safe land

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route to China and, with the help of Russian and Polish sources, had recorded it more or less accurately. “So that it may be inferr’d from thence,” he boasted, that the Jesuit authorities at Paris and Rome “would not have hazarded Twelve of their Brethren, all Persons of Singular Merit, who are gone within these few Months for China, and all of them by Land, unless they had found some solidity in the Memoirs and Instructions I have given them.”146 Avril believed that the Siberian route was preferable to the long and often treacherous sea voyage to the Far East—provided, of course, that the Russian czar was willing to grant Catholic missionaries free passage across his domains in Grand Tartary. Otherwise, he recommended the southern route, along the ancient Silk Road. The late Ferdinand Verbiest’s successor at Peking, Philip-Maria Grimaldi, similarly encouraged the use of this alternate, for he did not want Catholicism to become associated with the “heresy” of Russian Orthodoxy in Chinese minds. Meanwhile, Grimaldi promised to use his “utmost Endeavours to facilitate their design in China.”147 According to Felix Plattner, Philippe Avril “composed a memorandum describing his experiences and researches which deserves a place of honour in the travel literature of [early modern] Europe.”148 Certainly, his account of Grand Tartary—whatever its many geographic merits—is illustrative of a period during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when European interest in nonWestern, non-Christian peoples was remarkably sensitive to and accepting of cultural differences. Although none of these authors could escape entirely the baggage of a Christian heritage, their observations were ethnographic in scope as they struggled to understand these very foreign societies on native, as opposed to European terms. Avril’s book was no different. Its contribution to contemporary geographic knowledge also was enormous, giving western Europeans their first reliable account of Siberia, its topography, river systems, natural wealth and various peoples. That an English translation appeared so quickly also suggests that the book found an eager audience. Finally, Avril’s example underscores the integral role played by Catholic missionaries as explorers and discoverers in their own right, many of whom were French. That role is too often muted, when not ignored altogether by modern scholars. Indeed, none of the secondary literature about European expansion into Asia during the great Age of Discovery deals comprehensively with the establishment of the Christian mission, the nature of the secular and religious problems it faced, or the contribution it made to the evolution of cross-cultural contacts.149 Yet Philippe Avril had a different view of his achievement, as befitted the humility of his religious calling. “The more I strove to cross Grand Tartary and enter China,” he wrote modestly, “the more vigorously Divine Providence, to whose decrees I bow, flung me back to my Fatherland, so that in the end I found myself, not in Peking, but in Paris.”

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Notes 1. Père Philippe Avril, S.J., Travels into divers parts of Europe and Asia, Undertaken by the French King's Order to discover a new Way by Land into China (London: 1693), n.p. I would like to thank Dr. Aran S. MacKinnon for his help and advice while completing the final draft of this paper. I would also like to thank Prof. Robert S. Duplessis, editor of the Proceedings of the French Colonial Historical Society in which an earlier version of this essay first appeared, for permission to reprint portions of it. 2. Travels, p. 130; Voyage, n.p. To preserve the texture of seventeenth-century language, all quotations have been taken from the 1693 English translation (i.e., Travels), though I have cited also the page numbers from the French original (i.e., Voyage). 3. Ibid., p. 130. 4. Travels, n.p.. 5. Avril’s preface, Travels, n.p.; Voyage, n.p.; Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: 1993), vol. III, bk. 1, p. 385. 6. Avril’s preface, Travels, n.p.; Voyage, n.p. 7. Travels, p. 2; Voyage, p. 1. Given “the prodigious number of those who have quitted their Superstitions for the Adoration of the True God, and who abandon their Pagan Follies every day,” continued Avril, “T’is to succour and help forward such pious and happy Inclinations, that extream diligence has been us’d to procure as many Labourers [i.e., priests] as . . . possible to disseminate the Christian Doctrine.” 8. Travels, n.p.; Voyage, p. 3. 9. Lach and Van Kley, vol. III, bk. 1,p. 263; Joseph Sebes, S.J., trans. and ed., The Jesuits and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689): The Diary of Thomas Pereira, S.J. (Rome: 1961), p. 95. Back in Europe, Couplet authored or contributed to a number of important works on China, including: Confucius, Sinarum philosophus, sive Scientia sinensis latine exposita studio et opera Prosperi Intorcetta, Christiani Herdtrich, Francisci Rougemont, Philippi Couplet . . . Adjecta est tabula chronologica sinicae monarchiae ab hujus exordio ad haec usque tempora (auctore P. Couplet, et Tabula genealogica trium familiarum impoerialium monarchiae sinicae, eodem auctore) (Paris: 1686–87), a study of Confucian philosophy and commentaries, with translations from various texts; Tabula chronologica monarchiae Sinicae...ad annum post Christum 1683 (Paris: 1686), a separate publication of portions from the previous work, such as the Chinese calendar and geneologies of the various emperors; Breve ragguaglio delle cose più notabilit spettanti al grand' imperio della Cina (Rome: 1687), a short account of the China mission; and Histoire d'une dame chrêtienne de la Chine (Paris: 1688), which recounted the story of Candida Hsü to demonstrate the piety and fidelity of Chinese converts to Christianity. 10. Avril, Travels, p. 3; Voyage, p. 3; Pereira, p. 96; Christopher Hollis, The Jesuits, A History (New York: 1968), p. 69; Thomas J. Campbell, S.J., The Jesuits, 1534–1921, 2 vols. (New York: 1922), vol. I, p. 266. Couplet subsequently published his figures in the “Catalogus Patrem Societatis Jesu qui post obitum S. Francisci Xavieri ab anno 1581. usque ad annum 1681. in imperio sinarum Jesu Christi fidem propagarunt,” a listing of Jesuit priests who had served in the China mission from 1581–1681. It was contained in a larger work by the Belgian Jesuit, Ferdinand Verbiest, entitled Astronomia europaea sub imperatore tartaro sinico Cám Hý appellato, ex umbra in lucem revocata a R.P. Ferdinando Verbiest (Paris: 1687). An eighteenth-century writer found that 127 of the 376 (or thirty-

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three percent) of the Jesuits who had set out from Europe for China between 1581 and 1712 died en route. (Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, CA: 1996), p. 141, fn. 49.) 11. Avril, Travels, p. 4; Voyage, p. 4. 12. An narrative of Goës’ journey was compiled from fragments of his notebook and published first by Père Pierre du Jarric, S.J., at Bordeaux in 1614, and the following year by Père Nicolas Trigault, S. J.: De Expeditione Christianâ Expeditione apud Sinas, Suscepta ab Societate Jesu, ex P. Matthaei Ricii commentariis, etc., auctore P. Nicolao Trigautio (Augsburg: 1615). Of the several seventeenth-century English translations, one was published by Purchase in 1625 (vol. III, pp. 310 et seq.), and another, entitled “A Long and Dangerous Journey from Lahor, a City of the Greaty Mogul, to China over Land, by Benedict Goez,” was appended to Avril’s Travels by his translator in 1693 (pp. 163–170). For a modern edition of Goës’ narrative, see “The Journey of Benedict Goës to Cathay,” Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. IV, 169–259. For a modern narrative of Goës’ journey, see Felix A. Plattner, Jesuits Go East (Westminister, MD: 1952), pp. 135–48. 13. “The Journey of Benedict Goes,” Yule, vol. IV, p. 250. 14. A native of Cologne, Adam Schall von Bell went to China in 1618, where he soon became the most prominent and influential member of the Jesuit mission. Not only did he head the Calendrical Bureau in Peking from 1630–1644 under the late Ming, as well as its Ch’ing successor, the Imperial Board of Astronomy, from 1645–1665. He enjoyed the confidence of more than one emperor of China, who awarded him numerous titles and honors, such as Imperial Chamberlain and a mandarin of the first class, and he published more than twenty-five books in Chinese on Christian theology, mathematics and astronomy. Schall died at Peking in 1666. (See Lach and Van Kley, vol. III, bk. 1, pp. 187–88, 191–93, 197, 528; Pereira, p. 91; Hollis, pp. 64, 68.) 15. A native of Avignon, Alexandre de Rhodes (known as “the Apostle of Vietnam”) left France in 1618 for the Far East. Serving first at Macao, he was transferred to Cochinchin from 1624–1626, and then to Tonkin from 1627–1630. Returning to Macao, where he worked among the Chinese Christians for the next ten years, he was sent back to Cochinina in 1640 as superior of the Jesuit mission. Exiled in 1645 by the local monarch, Rhodes left for Europe where he urged Rome to send bishops to Indochina to train an indigenous clergy to minister to the needs of what he hoped would become a flourishing Christian community. This led eventually to the establishment of the Société des Missions-Étrangères at Paris in 1659. Rhodes was dispatched once more to the east, to Persia, where he died in 1660. (Lach and Van Kley, vol. III, bk. 1, pp. 229–30, 380–81; Pereira, p. 91; Hollis, pp. 59–60.) 16. Quoted, Pereira, p. 91. 17. The two Jesuits trekked from Peking to Lanchow, and then soutward to Köke-nuur and Lhasa, which they reached on 8 October. Here they stayed for about six weeks, becoming the first Europeans to visit the Tibetan capital in nearly 300 years, since the Franciscan, Odoric of Pordenone (1274?–1331), stopped there on his return to Europe after a twelveyear missionary journey to India, Southeast Asia, and China. For a modern account of their journey, see Plattner, pp. 176–83. 18. Grueber’s account was summarized subsequently in the first edition of China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata.(Amsterdam: 1667) by the German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher (1601–80). Known simply as China Illustrata, this work contains, among other details, descriptions of the land routes to China that were known at that time. 19. For general descriptions of these early Jesuit efforts, see: Lach and Van Kley, vol. III,

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bk. 1, pp. 147, 264, 385, 485–86; Gail Roberts, Atlas of Discovery (New York: 1989), pp. 112–13. See also Pereira, p. 94. 20. As Lach and Van Kley observe in this regard, the “story of the dissemination in France of knowledge about the East neatly divides into two distinct periods”: 1600–60, 1660–1700. This is evident especially from the number of works produced during each. Where the first period is marked by the sheer paucity of French writings about Asia, the second is distinguished by “the richness and abundance” of such sources. (Vol. I, bk. 1, p. 433.) 21. Lach and Van Kley, vol. III, bk. 1, pp. 263, 429, 433–34; Georges Guitton, S.J., Le Père de La Chaize, confesseur de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: 1957), vol. II, pp. 10–17. 22. Avril’s preface, Travels, n.p.; Voyage, n.p. 23. Avril’s preface, Ibid., n.p. 24. Numerous editions of Ptolemy’s books appeared in Latin and French in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His work on geography still formed the basis of much geographic knowledge at the time, and certainly was one of the canon of works read by any schoolboy with a classical education. 25. John of Plano Carpini, a Franciscan friar, was sent by Pope Innocent IX in 1245 to persuade the Mongols to give up war and convert to Christianity in the hope of halting an anticipated invasion of Europe. Carpini reached the Mongol summer court at Syra Orda in time to witness the coronation as Great Khan of Kuyuk, but he achieved none of his diplomatic goals. Returning to Europe in 1247, he wrote an account of his journey, the first French translation appearing in 1634. For modern English versions, see: Christopher Dawson, ed., Mission to Asia (Toronto: 1980); Manuel Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco Polo (New York: 1989). 26. Sent by Louis IX of France from 1252 until 1255 to convert the Mongols to Christianity and secure an alliance against the Moslems in the Holy Land, Rubruck was unable to achieve either objective. But he was the first European to visit the Mongol capital of Korakorum, of which he left an account. “The Journal of Friar William de Rubruquis, a French man, of the Order of the Minorite Friars, unto the East parts of the Word, Anno Dom. 1253,” was issued by Samuel Purchase his great collection, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purechus His Pilgrimes. Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, 20 vols. (London: 1625; reprinted, Glasgow: 1905), vol. I, pp. 5–149. A French version followed a decade later. For a modern translation of Rubruck’s account, see: Dawson, Mission to Asia; Komroff, Contemporaries of Marco Polo. 27. Although the identity and even existence of Mandeville are still disputed, his account had a wide readership. From 1322–1356, he allegedly traveled through France en route to the Holy Land, served several years under the Sultan of Egypt and the Great Khan of Cathay. After thirty-three years’ wanderings in Asia, he returned to Europe, and died at Liège. The earliest printed version of Mandeville’s text in English appeared in 1499; other editions followed in 1503 and 1568. An undated French translation was published at Paris probably in the late sixteenth century. In 1625 an abridged Latin version of the “Travels and Memorials of Sir John Mandevile” was included by Purchase in his collection of voyages (vol. XI, pp. 365 to 394). For modern renditions of the book, see: Malcolm Letts, Sir John Mandeville, the Man and His Book (London: 1949); C.W.R.D. Moseley, trans. and ed., The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 1983). 28. In 1271 Marco Polo crossed Central Asia with his father and uncle, Niccolo and Maffeo, via the ancient Silk Road. Reaching China, where they stayed for sixteen years, Marco served the Yuän Emperor Kublai Khan as an inspector of customs revenues in the provinces until 1295, when the Polos returned to Europe. Marco’s account, dictated to the writer

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Rusticello while incarcerated as a Genoese prisoner of war, gave Europe a fabulous picture of the East and a detailed account of large parts of Central Asia. The first printed French edition appeared at Paris in 1556. An English translation, “The first booke of Marcus Paulus, Venetus, or of Master Marco Polo, a Gentleman of Venice, his Voyages,” appeared in Purchase in 1625 (vol. XI, pp. 188–308). There are numerous modern translations in English of Polo’s account, including: Marco Polo, The Travels (Ware, Hartfordshire: 1997). 29. Odoric of Pordenone was a Franciscan friar who made a twelve-year missionary journey to India, the East Indies, and China from 1318 to 1330. He returned to Europe overland via Lhasa and the ancient Silk Road. He was the first European after Marco Polo to write a realistic description of the East. Initially published in Latin in 1513, the first French edition appeared at Paris in 1528. The first English translation was published in the expanded 1599 edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (vol. II, pp. 53–67). For a modern English version of Odoric’s account, together with the original Latin, see: “The Travels of Friar Odoric of Pordenone (1316–1330),” Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. II, pp. 3–367. 30. These were the maps of Edrisi (ca. 1154), the cartographer royal to King Roger II of Sicily, the so called “Catalan map” (1375) and the map of Fra Mauro (1459). (Baddeley, vol. I, p. cxi; Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. I, pp. 299–310.) 31. Baddeley, vol. I, p. cxi; Pereira, p. 90. 32. Paolo Giovio, A History . . . of the Legation or Ambassade of Great Basilius Prince of Moscovia, to Pope Clement the VII. of that name, in Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes Upon Russia, R.H. Major, trans., 2 vols. (London: 1852), vol. II, p. 228. 33. Siberia divides into two parts: Western Siberia from the Ural Mountains to the River Yenisei, a flat region bordered by mountains on the south; and Eastern Siberia which begins near the Yenisei, rises gradually into hilly regions and culminates in the high mountains in the extreme east. Central Asia, including Turkestan, Sinkiang, and the Kazaks region, features deserts bordering Siberia. Mongolia (both outer and inner) is a pleateau with deserts in the south and higher mountain valleys in the north. Manchuria, including the Amur River region with the Khingan Mountains on the north and south, slopes eastward to the Pacific. The mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush, Pamir, Tien Shan (on the south of Russian Turkestan) and Altai (between Tukestan and Mongolia) form major watersheds. Other ranges include the Sayan and Yablonoi Mountains, both of which lie between Siberia and the plateau of Mongolia. (See Vincent Chen, Sino-Russian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (The Hague: 1966), pp. 5–6.) 34. Marco Polo, The Travels (Ware, Hertfordshire: 1997), pp. 64–65, 74. Prester John refers to the story of a powerful Christian ruler to the east of the Muslim world whom Medieval Europeans believed could be trusted to aid them in the crusade against Islam. For a brief discussion of the myth, see Lach and Van Kley, vol. I, pp. 24–27, 31. 35. Polo, pp. 3, 4, 260. 36. “Recollections of Travel in the East by John de’ Marignolli, Papal Legate to the Court of the Great Khan, and Afterwards Bishop of Bisignano,” 1342–46, in Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. III, p. 246. By tradition, notes Marignolli, this region had been granted by Noah to his firstborn son Shem to rule after the biblical Flood. 37. Marignolli, p. 246, fn. 2. According to Henry Yule, the Caspian, the Sea of Marmora, the Mediterranean and the Baltic are all potential candidates for the name. 38. Marignolli, p. 213. This view is endorsed by Donald Lach, who writes: “It was not until the Mongols appeared in eastern Europe that Christendom awakened for the first time to the immediacy of the danger from the ‘barbarian’ frontier to the east. (Vol. I, p. 31.)

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39. Pereira, p. 90. 40. Jon. Fabri Lencurchensis, Episcopi Viennensis, Epistola de Moscovitarum juxta mare glaciale religione sen de deogmatibus Moscorum (Tübingen: 1525; reprinted, Spire: 1582). The book was prepared specifically for the benefit of Archduke Ferdinand, brother of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. 41. Of the North-East Frostie Sea and the Kongdomes Lying that Way, etc. Gathered in part and done into Englyshe by Richard Eden (London: 1555). This work is included as an appendix in vol. II (pp. 177–256) of the Hakluyt Society’s publication of Herberstein’s Notes Upon Russia. Richard Eden was secretary at the time to Sir William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley. 42. Paolo Giovio (Paulus Jovius), Libellus de legatione Basilii Magni, principis Moschoviae, ad Clementem VII, pontificem mas., in qua situs regionis antiquis incognitus, religio Gentis, mores et causae legationis fidelissime referuntur... (Basil: 1527; reprinted, 1551 and 1556). Called usually De Legatione Moscoviticarium, the work also appeared in the collection of voyages compiled by the Venetian geographer, Giovanni Baptista Ramusio, Della navigatione et viaggi, 3 vols. (Venice: 1550). The first French translation appeared at Lyon in 1552. It was included as well in Richard Eden’s History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (London: 1585). Finally, Giovio’s text was given as an appendix to most of the early Latin editions of Herberstein’s relation of Muscovy since its second publication in 1551. Hence, it appears in vol. II (pp. 228–56) of the Hakluyt Society’s edition of the baron’s account. 43. Herberstein, Notes Upon Russia, editor’s note, vol. II, p. iii. 44. For their respective meetings with Germassinof, see Faber, pp. 186–87; Giovio, p. 228. These two accounts are so close in content that one is tempted to lay a charge of plagiarism. There is no indication, however, that the similarities are anything but coincidental. It was in return for these civilities by Germassinof that Sigismund von Herberstein was dispatched by Charles V on his second embassy to Muscovy in 1526. 45. Faber, p. 188; Giovio, p. 229. 46. In his preface, Sigismund von Herberstein refers specifically to the maps reproduced by Faber and Wied (or Bied). (Notes Upon Russia, vol. I, p. clx.) It is John F. Baddeley’s contention that, given the accuracy of some of Wied’s map, in comparison to contemporary knowledge in western Europe, the German artist probably had access to a now-lost Russian map. (Baddeley, vol. I, p. cviii.) It is a reasonable hypothesis, therefore, that the missing map and that carried by Demetrius Germassinof were perhaps one and the same. 47. Faber, p. 188. Giovio similarly wrote that Centurione was sent to discover “how by a new and incredible viage, spices myght be brought from India” overland, via Bactria, Turkomania, and Muscovy to the Baltic Sea and thence to the West (p. 229). Centurione did not succeed in his quest; age and infirmity conspired to prevent him, despite his loathing of the Portuguese and his keeness to break their maritime trade monopoly. 48. Baddeley, vol. I, p. cxi; Jenkinson, editors’ introduction, vol. I, p. cxx. 49. Herberstein’s account, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, was published first at Vienna in 1549. Subsequent editions followed rapidly. In 1551 an improved version appeared at Basle, which gave Paolo Giovio’s De Legatione Moscoviticarum as an appendix. Another edition appeared in 1556 also at Basle, with Herberstein’s additions and improvements. New versions were published at Antwerp (1557), Frankfurt (1560), and Basle (1521, 1573 and 1574). There appears to have been no French translation of the work, while the first English edition was published by the Hakluyt Society as Notes Upon Russia in 1852.

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50. “The first voyage made by Master Anthony Ienkinson from the Citie of London, toward the land of Russia, begonne the twelfth day of Maye, in the yeare, 1557,” “The voyage of M. Anthony Ienkinson, made from the citie of Mosco in Russia, to the Citie of Boghar in Bactria, in the yeare 1558: written by himselfe to the Merchants of London of the Muscovie companie,” and “A compendious and briefe declaration of the iourney of M. Anthonie Ienkinson, from the famous Citie of London into the Lands of Persia, passing in this same iourney through Russia, Muscovia, and Mare Caspium...Being begonne the fourteenth day of May, Ann. 1561,” were published initially by Richard Hakluyt in the first edition of his famous compilation of voyages, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 2 vols. (London: 1589; reprinted in facsimile, Cambridge: 1965), vol. II, pp. 333–47, 347–59, 365–74. All three relations, together with related documents, were published separately by the Hakluyt Society as: Anthony Jenkinson, Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia, eds., E. Delmar Morgan and C.H. Coote, 2 vols. (London: 1886). 51. Jenkinson, vol. I, p. cxix. 52. Herberstein, Notes Upon Russia, editor’s preface, vol. I, p. ii. 53. Herberstein’s preface, ibid., p. ii. 54. Ibid., clx-clxi. See also the editor’s preface, pp. i to iii. 55. Herberstein’s “Note to the Reader,” ibid., 1. 56. Ibid., vol. II, p. 42. 57. For English voyages in search of a Northeast Passage, see Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, specifically vol. II: “The true copie of a note found written in one of the two ships, to wit, the Sparanza, which wintred in Lappie, where Sir Hugh Willoughby, and all his companie died, being frozen to death, Anno 1553,” pp. 265–70; Clement Adams, “The newe Nauigation and discoverie of the kingdome of Moscouia by the Northeast, in the yeere 1553: Enterprised by Sir Hugh Willoughby, knight, and perfourmed by Richard Chancelor, Pilot major of the voyage,” pp. 280–95; “The Nauigation and discoverie toward River of Ob, made by Master Stephen Burrowe, . . . 1556,” pp. 311–21. For further accounts, see Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, specifically: “The first voyage for discoverie with three ships, set forth under the charge of Sir Hugh Willoughby, Knight, in which he dyed; and Moscovia was discovered by Captaine Chancellor,” vol. II, pp. 595–622. 58. This remark was attributed to Galeazzo Botrigari, quoted in Faber, p. 186. 59. That Jenkinson also endorsed the search for a Northeast Passage is clear from his “Petition Relating to the North-East Passage,” 31 May 1565. (Hakluyt, Principall Nauigations, vol. II, p. 375; Jenkinson, Early Voyages and Travels, vol. I, pp. 159–66.) He urged Elizabeth I to undertake an “Enterpryse to discouer Certeyne Regions and Ilonds by the North Seas not heretofore discouerid by any prince in these partes of the worlde,” not only to “highly advaunce your most noble fame and Renowne, but also merveylously increase your domynions and Riches, God prosperinge th'enterpryse.” 60. Jenkinson, vol. I, pp. cxiv–cxv, 97–98. 61. Editor’s preface, ibid., p. cxii. 62. Jenkinson, vol. II, p. 342; Herberstein, vol. II, p. 37. See also Faber, pp. 195–96. 63. Herberstein, II, 4. According to the baron, if a straight line were drawn from the mouth of the Don River, which “divides Europe from Asia,” at Azov to its source at Lake Okonitzkilies (or Jepiphanovlies) just south of the Russian capital, “you will find that Moscow is in Asia, and not in Europe.” (Vol. II, pp. 11, 13.) See also Marco Polo's chapter on Russia (p. 261). 64. Herberstein, vol. II, p. 76. See also Jenkinson, vol. I, pp. 58–59.

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65. Jenkinson, vol. I, p. 58. 66. Ibid., p. 53; Herberstein, vol. II, p. 76. As late as 1591, the czar’s authority over the region between Astrakhan and Moscow was reported to be still so precarious that the Russian Crown paid the Crimm an annual tribute in furs to keep the latter at bay. (See Dr. Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth (London: 1591), reprinted in Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, ed., Edward A. Bond (London: 1856), pp. 86–87.) 67. Jenkinson, vol. I, p. 61; Herberstein, vol. II, pp. 73, 76; Faber, p. 20. 68. Faber, p. 187. The Ob is one of three great river systems that begin in the mountains in southern Siberia. Its source is found among the lakes and glaciers of the Altai Mountains. The other two great systems are: the Yanesei, originating from the Sayan Mountains and Lake Baikal, into which the River Selenga falls from Mongolia; and the Lena, which takes its rise in the Yablonoi Mountains. All three rivers flow into the Arctic Ocean. (Chen, SinoRussian Relations, pp. 5–6.) In Turkestan, from the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya run parallel to the Aral Sea. From the Tien Shan range, the Ili River runs into Lake Balkash. Further east in Manchuria, the Amur River flows from the Yablonoi, Stanovoi, and Khingan Mountains into the Pacific. 69. Faber, p. 187; Herberstein, vol. II, p. 43. 70. George V. Lantzeff and Richard A. Pierce, Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier, to 1750 (Montreal: 1973), p. 127. 71. Herberstein, vol. II, pp. 40–41; Giovio, p. 235. 72. Faber, p. 187. 73. Ibid. Cambalu (Polo’s Cambaluc) is a corruption of Khanbalikh, the name given in the thirteenth century by Kublai Khan to his new southern capital. 74. Jenkinson, vol. I, p. cxxviii. 75. See, for example, Herberstein’s account of certain “men of prodigious stature,” some of whom were covered completely with hair, and others without heads, “their breast occupying the place of a head.” (Vol. II, p. 41.) 76. Russia, Mongolia, China, vol. I, p. cxxii. 77. Giovio, p. 243. By 1591, however, Dr. Giles Fletcher reported that the Russian conquest and systematic colonization of western Siberia had proceeded at such a rapid pace and over such a large area, that the czar “is bold to write himselfe now, the great commander of Siberia.” (Fletcher, pp. 82–84.) 78. See, for example, Herberstein, vol. II, pp. 37–40, 47. 79. Herberstein, vol. I, p. 115, and vol. II, p. 47; Giovio, p. 235. 80. W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (New York: 1994), p. 30; Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: 1990), p. 15. 81. See: Dr. Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591); The Travels of Sir Jerome Horsey (1626); and William Gourdon, A Voyage made to Pechora (1611). The first two works are reproduced in Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, ed., Edward A. Bond (New York: 1856). The third was printed by Samuel Purchase in 1625 as part of his multi-volume compilation of voyages. Fletcher and Horsey were ambassadors of Elizabeth I to the Muscovite court, while Gourdon was chief pilot aboard the Amitie, which was sent to explore the mouth of the Ob River. 82. Fletcher, p. 82. 83. Giovio, p. 230. 84. R.K.I. Quested, Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History (Sydney: 1984), p. 26; Mark Mancall, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (Cambridge, MA: 1971),

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p. 41; Vincent Chen, Sino-Russian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (The Hague: 1966), p. 2. 85. “A Relation of two Russe Cossaks travailes, out of Siberia to Catay, and other Countries adjoining thereunto,” Purchase, Hakluytus Posthumus, vol. XIV, pp. 272–85. 86. For discussions of these three expeditions, see: Quested, pp. 27 to 30; Mancall, 41–45; Chen, pp. 35–38, 48–55; Tien-fung Cheng, A History of Sino-Russian Relations (Westport, CT: 1957), pp. 21–22; Lantzeff and Pierce, Eastward to Empire, p. 167. 87. Relation des voyages en Tartarie de Fr. Guillaume de Rubruquis, Fr. Jean Du Plan Carpin, Fr. Ascelin, et autres religieux de S. François et S. Dominique (Paris: 1634). 88. For Polo, see: La Description géographique des privinces et villes plus fameuses de l'Inde orientale, meurs, loix, et coustumes des habitans d'icelles...par Marc Paule...nouvellement réduit en vulgaire françois (Paris: 1556). For Mandeville, see: S’ensuit le livre du noble et puissant chevalier nommé maistre Jehan Mandeville, . . . lequel parle de la terre d'oultre mer et du sainct voyage de Jherusalem et de plusieurs aultres pais (Paris: n.d.). 89. For Pordenone, see: L'Hystore merueilleuse Plaisante et Recreatiue du grand Empereur de Tartarie seigneur des Tartres nomme le grand Can (Paris: 1528). For Giovio, see: Histoires de Paolo Jovio . . . sur les choses faictes et avenues de son temps en toutes les parties du monde, traduites du latin en françois par le seigneur Du Parq, champenois (Lyon: 1552). This edition was followed by three more printings at Lyon (1558) and Paris (1570, 1581). For Jenkinson, see: Voyage d'Anthoine Jenkinson pour découvrir le chemin du Cathay par la Tartarie, écrit par luy-mesme aux marchands anglois de la Compagnie de Moscow . . . Extrait du voyage des Hollandois envoyez ès années 1656 et 1657 en qualité d'ambassadeurs vers l'empereur des Tartares, maintenant maistre de la Chine, traduit du manuscrit hollandois—Relation de la prise de l'isle Formosa par les Chinois, le cinquiesme juillet 1661, traduite de l'hollondois (Paris: 1663, in two editions). 90. Père du Jarric, S.J., ed., Troisiesme Partie de l'Histoire des Choses plvs memorables advenves tant ez Indes Orientales, qu'autres païs de la descouuerte des Portugais (Bordeaux: 1614), pp. 145–162. An abstract, “Le chemin qu’a tenu le Père Benoit Goës de la Compagnie de Jésus: pour aller en Cathaie ou la Chine,” was published subsequently by Athanasius Kircher, S.J., in La Chine d'Athanase_Kirchere . . . à quoy on a adjousté de nouveau les questions curieuses que le . . . grand duc de Toscanne a fait . . . au P. Jean Grubere touchant ce grand empire, Avec un dictionnaire chinois et françois (Amsterdam: 1670), pp. 85–88. 91. Grueber’s account, along with Athanasius Kircher’s greater work China Illustrata--in the German Jesuit’s relation first appeared—was translated into French by F. S. Dalquié and published as La Chine illustreé de plusiers monuments tant sacrés que profanes. A second French version appeared at the same time (1670) in Amsterdam. Finally, Melchisédech Thévenot (1620–1692), the renowned French collector of travel literature, also republished Greuber’s account in the final part of his Relations divers, voyages curieux (1672). 92. Nieuhoff, L'Ambassade de la Compagnie Orientale des Provinces Unies (Amsterdam: 1665). See pp. 153–54 in particular. 93. Avril’s preface, Travels, n.p.; Voyage, n.p. 94. John of Monte Corvino (c. 1247–ca. 1328) was sent by Pope Nicolas IV in 1290 to China with letters for Kubilai Khan. Traveling via India and the Silk Road, he reached Peking in 1292 or 1293, where he established the first Catholic mission. Named bishop of Khanbalikh (Peking) in 1307, he remained in China until his death in 1328. John of Marignolli (dates unknown) spent four years at the Khan’s court (1342–1346) as a papal

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legate. He left one of the more extensive accounts of China in the Middle Ages. Andrew of Perugia (dates unknown) was the last survivor of six bishops sent to China in 1306 by Pope Clement V. (Only he and two of his fellow prelates, Gerard and Peregrine of Castello, actually reached their destination). Named bishop of Zaytun, he possibly returned to Rome in 1328 at the head of the Great Khan’s embassy to the pope. Pascal of Vittoria (dates unknown) was sent to carry out missionary work in inner Asia. He was martyred at Armalec on the Ili River in the Middle Empire of Tartary in 1340. All of these men were members of the Franciscan or Dominican orders. (See Yule, vol. III, pp. 3–35, 177–207; Peireira, p. 82.) 95. John of Monte Corvino left three letters (dated 1292, 1305 and 1306); Andrew of Perugia left a single letter (1326), as did Pascal of Vittoria (1338). All of these letters were reproduced in Cathay and the Way Thither by Henry Yule (vol. III, pp. 45–70, 71–75, 81– 88). John of Marignolli’s lengthy account of his experiences was published also by Yule (vol. III, pp. 210–69). 96. Avril, Travels, p. 162; Voyage, p. 193. 97. In addition to the medieval authors noted above, Avril cited Bento de Goës, Althanius Kircher, Ferdinand Verbiest, André Thévenot, Jean-Baptist Tavernier, Isaac Vossius, and the royal astronomer Cassini, among other contemporary writers. 98. That the existence and location of the mythical kingdom of Prester John still preoccupied contemporary geographers is apparent from Avril’s lengthy discussion of the matter. (Avril, Travels, pp. 154–62; Voyage, pp. 182–94.) 99. Avril’s preface, Travels, n.p.; Voyage, n.p. 100. Ibid., n.p. 101. For details about Spathari’s embassy to Peking, see: Quested, pp. 34–37; Mancall, pp. 65–110; Chen, pp. 63–75. 102. Baddeley, vol. I, p. v. 103. Mancall, pp. 98–100; Quested, p. 37; Chen, p. 71. 104. Baddeley, vol. II, pp. 395–96. 105. Pierre Joseph Orléans, S.J., History of the Two Tartar Conquerors of China (New York: 1854), pp. 80, 82, 112, 121–24. 106. Ibid., pp. 121–22. 107. Avril, Travels, pp. 115–16; Voyage, p. 110. 108. Avril’s preface, Travels, n.p.; Voyage, n.p.. 109. Travels, p. 4; Voyage, p. 4. 110. Ibid., pp. 23–24; pp. 19, 25. 111. Ibid., p. 27; p. 30. 112. Ibid., p. 29; p. 32. 113. Ibid., pp. 40, 42; p. 45. 114. Ibid., pp. 42–43; pp. 45–47. 115. Ibid., p. 59; p. 66. 116. Ibid., p. 44; p. 49. 117. Ibid., p. 66; p. 77. 118. Ibid., p. 68; p. 75. 119. Ibid., pp. 83–84; pp. 93–94. 120. Ibid., pp. 84–85; pp. 94–95. “I am easily induc’d to believe,” declared Avril of these pests, “that of all the Plagues of Egypt, the Plague of the Flies was the most noisome, and insupportable (p. 85; p. 94).” 121. Ibid., pp. 91–92; p. 103. 122. Ibid., pp. 93 to 94; pp. 103–106.

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123. Ibid., pp. 94–97; pp. 107–09. 124. Ibid., p. 97; pp. 109–10. 125. Ibid., p. 99; p. 112. 126. Ibid., pp. 100–15; pp. 112–28. 127. For Avril’s account of his journey up river to Moscow, see Travels, pp. 115–131; Voyage, pp. 136–58. 128. Plattner, p. 195. See also Avril, Travels, p. 133; Voyage, pp. 359–61. 129. Avril, Travels, p. 133; Voyage, pp. 360–61. 130. Ibid., pp. 85–91; pp. 97–100. 131. Ibid., p. 130; p. 156. 132. For Avril’s reference to this map, sec Voyage, p. 213. 133. Travels, pp. 138–39; Voyage, pp. 161–63, 167. 134. Ibid., pp. 141–44; pp. 170–75. 135. Plattner, p. 198. 136. Avril, Travels, p. 145; Voyage, p. 174. 137. Ibid., pp. 172–74; pp. 203–08; Plattner, pp. 198–99. 138. Plattner, p. 199. 139. Avril, Travels, pp. 174–78; Voyage, pp. 208–09. 140. Ibid., pp. 146–64; pp. 145–46, 174–84. 141. Ibid., p. 154; pp. 183–84. 142. Ibid., p. 168; p. 203. 143. Ibid., pp. 183–86; pp. 218–25. 144. Plattner, p. 203. 145. Ibid., p. 203. 146. Avril’s preface, Travels, n.p.; Voyage, n.p. 147. Ibid., n.p. 148. Plattner, p. 204. 149. Lach and Van Kley, vol. I, bk. 1, pp. xviii, 229–30. See also M.N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: 1987), pp. 124–25.

12 The Search for Souls in China: Le Comte’s Nouveaux Mémoires Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey On 1 July 1700 Le Comte’s Nouveaux Mémoires were denounced to the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne for containing propositions that “overthrew religion, which introduced pelagianism and which merited censure.”1 Who was the man who generated such controversy? Louis Daniel Le Comte (1656?–1728) or Li Ming Fou-Tch'ou, to use the Chinese rendering of his name2—astronomer, naturalist, geographer, and missionary, was born into a noble family of Bordeaux, entered the novitiate in 1671, and became a priest in 1684. His studies of mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics had been guided by the provision in the Constitution of the Jesuits that the “end of the learning which is acquired in this Society is with God’s favor to help the souls of its own members and those of their fellow men.”3 In 1685, the thirty-year-old Le Comte was continuing his studies in theology when he was chosen as one of six Jesuit mathematicians to go to China. The director of the astronomical observatory in Paris, Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625–1712), had approached Jean-Baptiste Colbert with a proposal to send men to China in order to increase the knowledge about that kingdom. Colbert, who had supported the project hoping to advance French interests there, died before it could be implemented.4 Subsequently, the marquis de Louvois agreed to finance the undertaking and asked the Jesuit superior in Paris to select six men to travel to China who “when not occupied in preaching to make observations in several places.”5 The two ministers might have had commercial motives, but Le Comte and the other Jesuits hoped “that under covering of learning they might the easier insinuate the Gospel.”6 Another Jesuit, Nicolas

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Trigault, had stated the case even more bluntly: “Whoever may think that ethics, physics and mathematics are not important in the work of the Church is unacquainted with the taste of the Chinese, who are slow to take a salutary spiritual potion, unless it be seasoned with an intellectual flavoring.”7 The Jesuits realized that in “proportion as a Person excels in the European Sciences, the more likely it is for him to ingratiate himself with the Nation in Question (particularly with their great men) who [hold] foreigners in the utmost Contempt.”8 The subsequent success of the Jesuits in China confirmed the importance of sending men well versed in the sciences. The six chosen, Jean de Fontaney (1643—1710), Claude de Visdelou (1656– 1737), Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730), Louis Le Comte, Jean Francois Gerbillon (1654–1707) and Guy Tachard (1651–1712), were among the best educated men in Europe.9 They brought with them a knowledge of astronomy, physics, mathematics, and cartography and the intellectual skills and discipline to master Chinese and Manchu.10 They were members of an elite world-wide organization dedicated to Christian service and apostolic activism. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius inculcated a detachment from the world, but that detachment was designed to encourage action rather than contemplation and to motivate men to answer the call of Christ. “It is My will to conquer all the world and all enemies and so to enter into the glory of My Father; therefore, whoever would like to come with Me is to labor with Me, that following Me in the pain, he may also follow Me in the glory.”11 Their training had also made them self-reliant. A contemporary noted that dispatches sent from Peking via Macao, Goa, and Lisbon took up to two years to reach their destination and another two to get back.12 The six had gone to the church of Montmartre to ask for God’s blessing. In this very place Loyola and his companions had earlier taken their vows.13 They were being sent (in Le Comte’s words) almost to the “end of the world for the establishment of religion, the glory of the king, the advantage of his subjects.”14 They were undertaking a dangerous mission. They had to be tough to survive the physical challenges—storms, thirst, hunger, exhaustion—and lucky. An eighteenth-century writer estimated that 127 of the 376 or 33.7 percent of the total number of Jesuits who set out from Europe for China between 1581 and 1712 died before reaching their destination.15 After being admitted into the Academy of Sciences, given the title of Mathematicians of the King, and furnished with astronomical instruments, they departed from Brest on 3 March 1685 aboard the ship l'Oiseau, which was carrying the French ambassador, the chevalier de Chaumont, to Siam.16 After a voyage of almost eight months, they arrived in Siam at the end of September 1685. The Siamese king, who admired the Jesuits’ skills in predicting an eclipse of the moon, asked Le Comte to remain at court and Guy Tachard to return to France to request that mathematicians be sent to his realm. The other four departed in a small ship for China. After several days of tempestuous weather, they found themselves becalmed on the coast. The Jesuits, anxious to continue their journey, did not want to wait for the wind and so went ashore in order to

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proceed by land. After wandering in the forest with little water and less food, torn by thorns and brambles, and harried by leeches, mosquitoes, serpents, tigers, and assorted other wildlife, they finally reached a village where they were directed back to the ship they had left fifteen days before. In the meantime, Le Comte found himself “almost in as ill a Case.”17 Hoping to convert the religious officials of Siam, he had asked to be placed in a convent with them and had opted to dress as they did and live in the same austerity. Meanwhile the other four Jesuits had had no choice but to return to Siam on the ship they had left. There they picked up both Le Comte and a Chinese junk sailing for the east coast of China. In Le Comte’s words, “God was pleased in his Wisdom to give us an Occasion of exercising our Patience.”18 The patience of lesser men would have been tried. Despite “huffing and hectoring the winds,” the voyage proceeded slowly.19 The Jesuits found themselves on board a small Chinese vessel with no shelter from a blazing sun or the spray of the sea. The quarters were so cramped that they could not lay stretched out. To add to the physical discomfort, the men were placed next to a “great eyesore,” an idol in front of which the Chinese had placed a lamp that burned in its honor and that, in Le Comte's words, they worshipped “each day with a diabolical superstition.”20 During the thirty-six-day voyage they had only rice to eat. The captain of the boat had offered them meat, but since it had originally been offered to the idol, they had felt compelled to refuse it. On one occasion they felt threatened by the seamen who had armed themselves with pikes and lances only to discover that they were gathering to form a procession to the idol. On another occasion when pirates were sighted, the Jesuits feared being murdered and, as Le Comte related, “religion or Martyrdom was not then the thing in question, we were in danger of being immediately strangled by Villains who give no quarter.”21 After idolatrous seamen and ruthless pirates, a typhoon threatened to swamp the ship and later to dash it on the rocks. Their physical trials were hardly over for once they had landed the captain forced them to hide in stifling hot quarters below deck. The local official was reluctant to admit them and made them return to the vessel. After most of them became extremely ill, he relented and let them come ashore. Only the intervention of a Jesuit at the court enabled them to proceed to Peking. They had left Siam in June 1687 and arrived at Ningpo on 23 July 1687 and at Peking on 8 February 1688, almost two years and eleven months after they had left France. Le Comte did not remain in Peking but was assigned to Shensi, a large area with almost impassable roads and far-flung churches. He traveled more than 2,000 leagues in five years in his pastoral work.22 He had to forget his native language in order to “find the spirit of the barbarous words and strange ideas.”23 He found the study of Chinese hard and discouraging for “self same words do often signify quite different things.” “It is not the memory that is put to a stress upon this occasion,” he added, “but the imagination and ear . . . the tone is all in all.”24 Nor did he neglect his scientific mandate; he not only preached, he also recorded astronomical observations. He left China at the end of 1691, going to

“Imperii Sinarum nova descriptio,” c. 1660. Original map courtesy of the William C. Wonders Map Collection, the University of Alberta, Canada.

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France and then to Rome. Although he intended to return to China, he was appointed confessor to the duchess of Burgundy in 1696.25 Once home he soon found himself entangled in the politics of court and church and never returned to China. Le Comte’s letters to members of the court were published in two volumes as Nouveaux Memoires in 1696 and 1697.26 Le Comte’s work on his experiences contributed to the vast literature on China and continued the tradition of Jesuit letterbooks that had begun to appear in French in the sixteenth century.27 These books underscored the success of the Jesuits and uncovered a portrait of China “blurred by a veneer of legend and fable.”28 Le Comte’s great work of missionary propaganda was extremely successful; it went through seven editions in four years and was translated into several languages.29 Its success can be partially attributed to the interest of the European elite in travel literature and to its engaging style and logical organization.30 Le Comte appealed to a European audience with classical allusions and implicit and explicit comparisons to a European world they understood. A self-deprecating humor undergirded the account of his travails and personal experiences. He took care to relate only what he personally witnessed.31 The title of the English edition gives an idea of the enormous scope of the work: Memoirs and Observations, Topographical, Physical, Mathematical, Mechanical, Natural, Civil and Ecclesiastical Made in a Late Journey through the Empire of China and Published in Several Letters. A perceptive and sensitive observer, he was acutely aware of the problem of terminology for he noted that if a writer used terms such as cities, counties, palace, ministers, “and a hundred other Terms of that Stamp, presently we think our selves at another Paris, Versailles.”32 Le Comte was confronted with a Chinese system, based on a hegemonic world view, which clashed with the European, because it was posited on the basic equality of states. Unlike the European system, the Chinese system was not multilateral, but bilateral—between a superior China and a barbarian other.33 Le Comte was well enough versed in court etiquette to quote the prince who was shown Louis’s portrait and remarked that “Europe had a master just as Asia has its own.”34 The analogy of the king of France with the emperor of China would have appealed to the Sun King’s sense of gloire. Unlike France, outsiders could only communicate with the Chinese through the tributary system, which became self-perpetuating and made any other system impossible.35 Europeans saw the exchange of diplomats as a regular function of the state but the Chinese regarded it as an act of submission. Those who wanted to “come and be transformed” had to recognize the position of the emperor, who represented all mankind in his ritual sacrifices.36 China’s refusal to recognize diplomacy as a normal function of the state was deeply embedded in Chinese institutions and psychology.37 The Chinese had practiced reciprocal diplomacy, but that practice was only a dim memory from a distant past. The Chinese perception of the world order militated against their acceptance of the Western multi-state system. Le Comte noted that the Chinese called China the middle kingdom because they thought

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themselves the center of the world and all the rest barbarous nations.38 “They lookt upon themselves as a chosen elect people, that Heaven had produced in the center of the Universe to give them a law. . . . They fancied other men but as dwarfs and pitiful monsters, that had been the out-casts in to the extremities of the earth as the dross and offscouring of Nature whereas the Chinese placed in the middle of the world, had alone received from God Almighty a rational form and shape and true size.” This perception illumined the “disdain they shewd all mankind.”39 The Chinese interpreted the European missions in the light of the traditional system. They could only view the West as both barbarian and tributary.40 In the K'ang-hsi period (1662–1722), the Chinese patronizingly and elegantly alluded to the tributary activity of Holland which “reveres righteousness and pays its allegiance by sailing across the sea to cultivate tributary [relations]. We are mindful that the route is dangerous and long. Let them come once in eight years to court, thus manifesting our compassionate sympathy for men from afar.” The European states were as insignificant as the other barbarian states. As late as 1818 the Chinese grouped the European countries with Sungora, Kelantnan, Ligor, and other small places in the Malay Peninsula. The Chinese could cling to this view because of an appalling and ultimately tragic ignorance about Europe typified by their identification of England as a dependency of Holland.41 Nor did the initial contacts with the West challenge the established order. Between 1655 and 1795 approximately seventeen Western missions were granted an audience with the emperor; six from Russia, four from Portugal, three or four from Holland, three from the Papacy, and one from Britain.42 In the records from 1661–1820, the Chinese regularly listed Western nations along with other tributaries, but noted that these nations were too distant from China to fix regular tribute periods.43 Just as the Sinocentric world view of China differed significantly from that of the West, so did the government of China. Le Comte found the government that regulated a very populated and very large land “good,” “true” and “just.”44 The emperor “lookt upon himself not so much as a king of a grand state, as a father of a numerous family.”45 “Conspicuous wisdom . . . informs its government,” which was “not troubled with such swarms of officers and commissioners as Europe had.”46 He praised the state-supported educational system open to talent, the bestowal of nobility on the basis of merit rather than inheritance, the appointment of bureaucrats by written exams, the custom of communal responsibility, the injunction which forbade officials to be sent to their native province, and the efficiency of the courier system. All of these were contrasted implicitly or explicitly with the institutions of France. The number of large cities, particularly the size and stateliness of Peking, amazed him: “the multitude of people in the streets is so great that one is frightened by it.” “Our most populous cities,” he added “ are wildernesses” in comparison.47 Europeans could not but admire a civilization that had had for “time out of mind gunpowder, printing and the use of the compass.”48 China

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had the resources to undertake the “prodigious” work of the Great Wall, which was vividly described. Le Comte even managed to estimate its length of 500 Leagues (1,500 miles) correctly.49 Chinese crafts such as porcelain, lacquer, silk, paper, ink, and the casting of bells were lauded.50 His curiosity was universal: the white adopted for mourning, the length of the elite’s fingernails, the foregoing of perspective in painting, the decoration of interiors, the different standard of civility, the length of the evening meal, etc. He provided extremely accurate descriptions of the flora and fauna, including winter onions, and an extended discussion of the wonders of herbs including ginseng, which sounds very modern.51 A talented cartographer, he painstakingly drew maps of several river basins. Through his words he painted a vivid picture of the physical geography of the areas he traversed.52 In describing China as “the most fruitful and beautiful [country] in the world,” he realized (as Marco Polo had earlier) that the tale will have “somewhat of the air of fable.”53 In this beauty, Le Comte saw “the finger of God who for our sakes had embellished the world many thousand ways.”54 Indeed the land “wants nothing to make it a real land of promise but to be cultivated by God’s people and inhabited by true Israelites.”55 Le Comte also admired the intellectual tradition and the moral precepts of the Chinese. He had a sophisticated knowledge of the Confucian tradition and of the moral philosophy of Mencius. In Confucius he found a man who cultivated “reason and virtue” and who spoke “like a doctor of the new law,” rather than “like a man that was brought up in the corruption of the law of nature . . . his actions never bely'd his maxims . . . his humility and modesty would make a man apt to judge that he was not a mere philosopher formed by reason, but a man inspired by God for there formation of this new world.”56 Like his Jesuit predecessors, he found this tradition compatible with Christianity. Concerning the first age of men, Confucius was “conformable to Holy Scripture.” Moreover, the descendants of Noah had “at length penetrated into China.”57 Some might harbor the suspicion that Le Comte discarded anything that challenged his view and found what confirmed a deeply held orthodoxy, that he was a counterpart to what Paul Hollander describes as a political pilgrim (we could dub him a religious pilgrim), with the pilgrim’s “puzzling juxtaposition of insight and blindness, sensitivity and indifference.”58 First, we have few examples in Le Comte of selective perception, although there are some in his analysis of the government and of religion. Second, Hollander argued that the “alienation from one’s own society and susceptibility to the attractions, real or imagined of others are very closely linked.”59 Le Comte was not alienated from his society; a scion of a noble family, he even won an appointment at court, however temporarily. In the area where his alienation was probably most evident, however, namely religion and morality, his judgment is most suspect. Third, according to Hollander, “Intellectuals critical of their society must believe that social institutions superior to those in their own society can be created.

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They must be in a position to point, at least tentatively, to the actualization of their ideals in some existing society in order to lend strength to their social criticism at home.”60 For the most part Le Comte can be acquitted of this charge, although he implicitly criticized French institutions and practices. Others such as Voltaire would use the same technique. Unlike Le Comte who had first-hand experience of China, Voltaire only knew China through the eyes of others. Fourth, Hollander emphasizes that it is “psychologically difficult for the visitor to develop and express negative sentiments or critical thoughts towards his hosts and toward the society they represent.”61 Le Comte’s very success and the feelings he developed for the Chinese Christians made it difficult for him to leave and possibly difficult to criticize them. “No, o lord, I have lost nothing by leaving France since I find some saints here; thy spirit hath indeed filled the earth.”62 He told his readers that he wanted to stay but that he was forced to leave.63 Fifth, most of what Hollander’s political pilgrims witnessed was controlled by the host government. By contrast the emperor of China in the seventeenth century did not attempt to control the impressions Le Comte received. Unlike the modern political pilgrim he was hardly shielded from daily life. He learned the language, he traveled unescorted and extensively. Sixth, Hollander argues that certain techniques tended to reinforce a positive impression, namely “warm reception on arrival [Le Comte was threatened with death and forced aboard a stifling vessel until he became extremely ill], comfortable accommodations [most of the time he slept on the floor with little or no covering], pleasant travel experiences [nearly impassable roads (on one occasion he had to creep on all fours) threats from tigers and robbers, dangerous excursions over cataracts (“I don’t believe I can run through so many dangers for ten years as we have done in ten days upon these torrents) in short, he found the valleys of the Alps and Pyreness “more passable”],64 fine food [normally he had “only rice, vegetables and water”],65 interesting sights [yes], encounters with important and busy political figures [yes, in the beginning with the emperor but later in many cases, he was avoided by high officials]”66 Le Comte was not an uncritical Sinophile. He found the Chinese the “most covetous nation in the world” and “superstitious to excess.” He deplored concubinage.67 He deprecated the idleness of the army and the failure of the Chinese to drill, contending that their “natural effeminacy” meant that one could “never instill in them principles of honor and bravery.”68 He shared the derogatory attitude of most Western commentators who did not realize the real strength of the military.69 Nor was he blinded by his own illusions. Although he had hoped and indeed prayed for the conversion of the emperor, Le Comte realized that reasons of state and the emperor's own passions did not allow him “to open his eyes to the truth of the gospel.” Indeed “the love of pleasure and the fear of giving occasion to some revolution in the empire were . . . almost invincible hindrances to his conversion. But who can find out the Almighty’s designs?”70

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Le Comte had a sophisticated understanding of the emperor’s role as Son of Heaven, who represented all mankind in his ritual sacrifices, and of the principles of proper conduct which governed his actions. The Mandate of Heaven legitimated the regime as long as the people acquiesced; it strengthened a strong government but undermined a weak one. Le Comte generalized that “they have not ingenuity enough to be compared with our learned and knowing men in Europe yet do they not give place to us in Arts; that they equal us in politeness, and that perhaps they may surpass us in politics and government.”71 Except in a limited sense Le Comte was not a “political pilgrim,” but his work might have helped the formation in the eighteenth century of many Enlightenment thinkers who were. The exoticism of and unfamiliarity with China only increased the appeal of this distant land. The Jesuit works in general and Le Comte’s in particular helped “revolutionize Europe’s view of itself and the world.”72 The best travel literature provides a new view on the readers’ culture and forces them to examine previously unexamined assumptions about their own society. Le Comte did just that and forced many Europeans to question the superiority of their world. In the English edition the publisher compared the globe “to a true Glass, in which maybe seen the different faces of Nature with the several Arts and mysteries of Governments.”73 Europeans could see an image of China and an inverse image of their own society refracted through the lenses of this indomitable Jesuit. Le Comte anticipated that his work would receive a mixed reception. He noted that an author instead of entitling his work “Relation of that which is the most notable in the new world would do better much to entitle it instead Relations of that which all the rabble of the Indies, the Mores, Kafirs, slaves . . . have faithfully reported in the interviews which I have had regularly with them.”74 He touched on another problem when he noted the difficulties of travel literature that was more laborious and expensive than to “supinely tumble over the history of the world by the fire-side.” He lamented that “travellers when they come home are as hard put to it to gain a patient hearing from their own Country-men, as they were at first going abroad to make themselves be understood by Strangers.”75 That last statement proved to be prophetic. Although these letters were intended for public consumption, several statements reveal the rivalries among the religious orders and European countries in China.76 His work was a blow struck for the Jesuits in the ongoing rivalry. He lamented that the Jesuits who had left friends, relations, and country were painted in “black colors” and accused of ambition, avarice, impiety, and idolatry.77 These letters underscored their phenomenal success; by 1700 there were approximately 300,000 Christians in the empire.78 A recent historian points out that despite lack of personnel and financial resources, the Jesuits “achieved almost as many conversions in China by the end of the century as their colleagues in Japan had before 1614, and their leaders attained prestigious positions in the Ming and Ch'ing governments that were never matched in Japan.”79 Le Comte believed that the Jesuits were “about to change the old

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Babylon into the new Jerusalem.”80 Though the Jesuits had not converted the emperor as they had hoped, on 22 March 1692 he issued an edict of toleration: “Since they have been living among us they have merited our esteem and gratitude, by the great services they have rendered us in the civil and foreign wars, by their diligence in composing useful and curious books, their integrity, and their sincere regard for the public welfare.”81 Le Comte’s memoirs not only trumpeted the Jesuits’ achievements but also justified their methods. His work may be considered an apologia for the Jesuit program of cultural accommodation advocated by earlier Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci. “We endeavour,” Le Comte explained, to become all things to all men, after the apostles' example, that we may the more easily win and come to Jesus Christ; being persuaded that as to a missionary, the garment, diet, manner of living and exterior customs ought all to be referred to the great design he proposes himself, to convert the whole earth. A man must be a barbarian with barbarians, polite with men of parts, . . . handsomely dressed in China . . . to the end that the Gospel always uniform, always unalterable in itself, may the more easily insinuate it self into the Minds of Men whom an holy compliance and conformity to customs regulated by Christian prudence, have already prepossesst in favor of us.8

Again, Le Comte is continuing a practice that had begun much earlier and contributing to the debate about that practice.83 The Jesuits required priests to learn Chinese, to wear Chinese dress, in short to practice what has been called cultural accommodation. Christianity should, in Dunne’s words, enter “quietly into the body of Chinese culture . . . [in order] to transform it from within.”84 This policy in China, which dated back to 1582, contrasted with the Europeanism practiced in Macao where Chinese converts were forced to wear Portuguese clothes, take Portuguese names, and adopt Portuguese customs. The Jesuits’ creation of a Confucian-Christian synthesis led to the allegation that they created “a Christian veneer under which Confucianism still flourished.”85 The debate revolved around missionary methods and certain Chinese rites. Critics alleged that tolerating certain rites that the Chinese performed in honor of Confucius and of their ancestors encouraged superstition and idolatry and compromised the faith, that the Jesuits created “Christian neophytes in name and idolaters in fact.”86 The Jesuits’ enemies targeted Le Comte’s discussion of religion and morality in their allegations to the theology faculty in Paris and to the pope in Rome. Le Comte had contended that the Chinese had received the first truth revealed by God. The people had only to rediscover the truth which they had lost because of idolatry and atheism. Christianity was not antithetical to their history or their traditions.87 In tracing “these footsteps of the true religion which we find in China for so many ages,” Le Comte argued that “China for two thousand years had the knowledge of the true God and have practiced the most

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pure morality while Europe and almost all the world wallowed in error and corruption.”88 He claimed that the Chinese sacrificed to “their creator in the most ancient temple of the world,”89 that they followed “the dictates of the purest Charity which is the very quintessence and perfection of religion,”90 and that they “have preserved the knowledge of the true God for near two thousand years and did honor their maker in such a manner as may serve both for an example and instruction to Christians themselves.”91 In the midst of the dispute Le Comte was dismissed from his post at court. One Dominican alleged that Le Comte’s writing fostered the error of Deists and Socinians by encouraging the belief that those who acknowledged the existence of God and who practiced a natural religion would be saved without faith in Jesus Christ.92 Le Comte’s defense was sophisticated and direct. He argued that many of his remarks had been taken out of context and others were quoted inaccurately. Moreover, he had written not a theological but a historical treatise.93 His arguments did not sway the faculty. On 18 October 1700 eight deputies reported to the theology faculty that then condemned the majority of nineteen passages extracted from his works as false, erroneous, and foolhardy.94 On 6 August 1762 the Paris parlement ordered Le Comte's works to be burned. The dispute continued in Rome. Le Comte traveled there to defend his work and to request a hearing before the full congregation that was denied to him.95 Clement XI forbade the policy of accommodation and tried to end the controversy in 1704, and again in 1710, and yet again in 1715. He had even sent a legate, Charles Thomas Maillard de Tournon, to China, who had only angered the emperor by enforcing the papal decision. Le Comte died at Bordeaux on 19 April 1728 at the age of seventy-three, but the Jesuits fought on. Benedict XIV, also entangled in the acrimonious controversy, tried to bring the matter to a conclusion in 1742 with his publications of Ex quosingulari. He tried again in 1744.96 Only the suppression of the Jesuits ended the controversy. In the wake of the rites controversy in 1721 the Chinese emperor K'ang-hsi banned Christianity from China, although he continued to allow individual missionaries to reside there.97 Upon his death in 1722 his successor outlawed the practice of Christianity and grouped it among other “perverse sects and sinister doctrines.” The number of Catholics fell from about 300, 000 to 200,000.98 Through the work of Le Comte and the controversy it generated we see, however imperfectly, the China of the Ch’ing dynasty (1644–1712) and Emperor K’ang-hsi (1661–1722), the world of France and Louis XIV, and not incidentally the hopes and aspirations of a young Jesuit. Through Le Comte’s mission we witness the “sustained communication between the intellectual elites of two civilizations.”99 A recent historian John Young underscores the continuing relevance of the Jesuit experience in China in understanding China’s relations with the West.100 The problematic linkage of technology and foreign influence is not unique to the twentieth century.101 The Chinese sought the technological knowledge that the Jesuits brought but at the same time rejected foreign influence. The Jesuit experience does not support the revisionist view of

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the Chinese as pristine, innocent, noble victims of a wicked aggressive insensitive European exploitation. The image of a sophisticated China presented by Le Comte and other missionaries contributed to the Sinophilism of the philosophes and artists of the eighteenth century. For example, Le Comte’s colleague Père Joachim Bouvet maintained an extensive correspondence with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz.102 The latter was “so impressed with the social and familial organization of China that he puckishly suggested that the Son of heaven should send missionaries to the West to teach Europe about the precepts governing civil relationships.”103 The work of Le Comte raised troubling issues not only about European superiority but also about certain theological questions. The divorce in China of morality from religion led some to doubt the utility of religious institutions. By implication it cast doubt on the Biblical explanation of the origins of the world since the Chinese chronology did not accord with the Biblical one despite Le Comte’s claims.104 His work also led some to question the “universality” of certain customs. As Donald Lach argues, “The knowledge that there existed in Asia several high cultures which owed nothing to the Greco-Roman heritage or to the Christian revelation helped to produce a new sense of cultural relativism in Europe that was earth-rocking in its ultimate implications.”105

Notes 1. Jacques Davy, “La Condamnation en Sorbonne des Nouveaux Memoires sur la Chine du P. Le Comte,” Recherches de science religieuse, vol. XXXVII (1950): p. 367. The authors would like to thank Dr. Barry Rothaus, editor of the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History for permission to reprint an earlier version of this paper published in that publication, cf. PWSFH, vol. XXVI (2000): pp. 85–95. 2. See Joseph Dehergne, Repertoire des Jesuites de Chine de 1552 a 1800 (Rome: 1973), pp. 146–47, and Louis Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jesuites de l'ancienne mission de Chine, 1552–1773 (Shanghai: 1932), vol. I, pp. 442– 43, and Jin Dai Lai Hua WaiGuo Ren Ming Zi Dian, Whos Who: Foreigners in Modern China, trans and ed., the Institute of Modern History, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing: 1984), p. 128. 3. St. Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans., George E. Ganss (St. Louis: 1970), section 351. 4. See Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: 1996). 5. Letter of de Fontaney to de la Chaize, 15 February 1703, quoted in Mr. Lockman, Travels of the Jesuits into Various Parts of the World: Compiled from their Letters now First Attempted in English (London: 1743), vol. II, pp. 50–52. 6. Louis Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations Topographical, Physical, Mathematical, Mechanical, Natural, Civil and Ecclesiastical Made in a Late Journey through the Empire of China and Published in Several Letters. (London: 1697), p. 3. Cited hereafter as Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations.

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7. Edward L. Farmer, Technology Transfer and Cultural Subversion: Tensions in the Early Jesuit Mission to China (Minneapolis, Minn: 1983), p. 14. 8. Father de Chavagnac to Father Le Gobien, 30 December 1701, quoted in Lockman, Travels of the Jesuits, vol. I, p. 155. 9. Fontaney was a professor of mathematics and physics at the college Louis-le-Grand. Visdelou wrote on Chinese literature and culture, and a history of the Huns and one of Tatars. A distinguished mathematician and talented linguist, Gerbillon helped the emperor solve a boundary dispute with Russia and to conclude the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689. He also wrote on geometry (in Chinese and Tatar) and on the geography and customs of the Tatars and probably a Tatar grammar. Tachard was a distinguished mathematician and linguist who wrote two volumes on his voyages to Siam. 10. John W. Witek, “Understanding the Chinese: A Comparison of Matteo Ricci and the French Jesuit Mathematicians Sent by Louis XIV,” in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773, eds., Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Chicago: 1988), p. 94. 11. The Spiritual Exercises, section 96, cited in A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France (Ithaca, NY: 1988), pp. 28–29. 12. Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire and Beyond, 1540-1750 (Stanford: 1996), pp. 148–49, fn 81. 13. C.W. Allan, Jesuits at the Court of Peking (Shanghai: n.d.), p. 197. 14. Louis Daniel Le Comte, Nouveaux Memoires sur l'etat present de la Chine (Paris: 1696), vol. I, pp. 3, 5. 15. George Pray, cited in Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, p. 141, fn.49. According to Philippe Couplet’s calculations, of 600 Jesuits sent to China since the Society first gained access to the Empire, fewer than 200 had arrived safely, representing less than a third. Pere Philippe Avril, S.J., Travels into divers parts of Europe and Asia, Undertaken by the French King's Order to Discover a New Way by Land into China (London: 1693), p. 3. 16. The letter of introduction of Francois d’Aix de la Chaize to Ferdinand Verbiest, Paris, 26 February 1685, is printed in Correspondance de Ferdinand Verbiest de la Compagnie de Jesus (1623–1688), eds., R. Josson and L.Willaert (Brussels: 1938), p. 428. 17. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, p. 5. 18. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 19. Ibid., p. 6. 20. Ibid., p. 7. 21. Ibid., p. 9. 22. Ibid., p. 55. 23. Louis Daniel Le Comte, Nouveaux Memoires sur l'etat present de la Chine (Paris: 1696), vol. I, intro. 24. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, pp. 180–83. 25. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Francia, pp. 49, 47ff, 78–79. A special thanks to Maria del Pilar Ryan for her assistance. 26. P. Charles Le Gobien wrote a work that constitutes the third volume. Part of Le Comte’s Memoires are published in Père Le Comte, “Lettre sur les Moeurs des Chinois,” Bulletin de la Societe des Etudes indochinoises, vol. XXXVII (1918): pp. 73–96. Le Comte subsequently wrote Eclaircissement sur la denonciation faite a N. S. P. le Pape, des Nouveaux Memoires de la Chine (Paris?: 1700). 27. See Knud Lundbaek, “The First European Translations of Chinese Historical and Philosophical Works,” in Thomas H. C. Lee, ed., China and Europe: Images and

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Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, Chinese University of Hong Kong Monograph, Series 12 (Hong Kong: 1991), pp. 29–43, and Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. I: The Century of Discovery, bk. 2 (Chicago: 1965), p. 746 ff. 28. Lach, p. 730. 29. Le Comte, “Eclaircissement sur la denonciation faite a Notre Saint Pere Pape des Nouveaux Memoires de la Chine,” quoted in Davy, “La Condamnation en Sorbonne,” p. 382. 30. Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680-1715 (London: 1953), Ch. 1. 31. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, p. 58. 32. Ibid., preface. 33. Mark Mancall, “The Ch’ing Tribute System: An Interpretive Essay,” in The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations, ed., John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968), p. 65. 34. LeComte Nouveaux Memoires, vol. I, introduction. 35. Fairbank and Teng, “On the Ch'ing Tributary System,” p. 148. 36. Lord Elgin in 1857 summed up the exasperation of the English when he asked, “In all earnestness, how is it possible international relations can subsist under such a system?” Quoted in Immanuel Chung Yueh Hsu, China’s Entrance into the Family of Nations (Cambridge, Mass.: 1960), p. 47. 37. Ibid., p. 199. 38. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, pp. 14, 16. Also see Father de Chavagnac to Father Le Gobien, 10 February 1703, quoted in Lockman, Travels of the Jesuits, vol. II, p. 304, where he discusses the obstacles to conversion. “The Contempt in which they (not excepting even the Vulgar) have of all other Nations is one of the greatest. Madly prejudiced in Favour of their native Country, their own Manners, Customs and Maxims, they cannot fancy that any Thing out of China deserves the least Regard.” 39. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, pp. 123–24. 40. In a court letter of 16 July 1793, the Grand secretariat instructed the local officials that Lord George Macartney, “the tribute envoy, can be feasted and given presents along with . . . the tribute envoy of Burma and other places.” Quoted in V. L.Cranmer-Byng, “Lord Macartney’s Embassy to Peking in 1793: From Official Chinese Documents,” Journal of Oriental Studies, vol. 4 (1957 to 1958): p. 131. 41. John K. Fairbank and Ssu-Yu Teng, “On the Ch’ing Tributary System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. VI (June 1941): pp. 180, 182, 190. 42. Russian envoys to China accepted the tributary practice and performed the kowtow, but the Chinese envoys to Russia in 1729 and 1731 also performed the kowtow to the Russian ruler. Hsu, China's Entrance into the Family of Nations, p. 14. Portugal sent a mission to China in 1520. 43. John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1953), p. 14. One learned official described, whether correctly or not, the present given to George III via Lord Macartney as a jui, a piece of jade in the shape of a sceptre, a gift normally bestowed on feudal lords as token of their investiture. Cranmer-Byng, “Lord Macartney’s Embassy to Peking in 1793,” p. 161, fn. 112. 44. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, pp. 85, 125. 45. Ibid., p. 125. 46. Ibid., pp. 125, 308. 47. Ibid., pp. 89, 73, 56. 48. Ibid., p. 231.

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49. Ibid., p. 75. 50. Ibid., pp. 81, 84, 154–55, 191–92. 51. Ibid., pp 102–03, 230. 52. Ibid., p. 113. 53. Ibid., pp. 105, 115. 54. Ibid., p. 117. 55. Ibid., p. 118. 56. Ibid., pp. 202, 204. 57. Ibid., pp. 121–22. 58. Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: 1981), p. 3. 59. Ibid., p. 7. 60. Ibid., p. 8. 61. Ibid., p. 17. 62. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, p. 414. 63. Ibid., p. 427. 64. Ibid., pp. 236, 398. 65. Ibid., pp. 236, 397, 398. 66. Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 18. 67. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, pp. 85, 156, 415. 68. Ibid., p. 309. 69. Lach (p. 787, fn 328) estimated that the military establishment included about 4,000,000 troops of all categories in late Ming China. 70. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, p. 343. 71. Ibid., p. 240. 72. Lach, p. 253. 73. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, preface. 74. Quoted in Tchao-Ts’ing Ting, Les Descriptions de la Chine par les français (1650– 1750) (Paris: 1928), p. 17. 75. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, preface. 76. Ibid., p. 376, for example. 77. Ibid., pp. 439–440. 78. Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, p. 149. According to a list of 1701, there were in China fifty-nine Jesuits, twenty-nine Franciscans, eight Dominicans, fifteen secular priests, and six Augustinians, serving 250 churches or oratories. (J. de la Servière, Les Anciennes Missions de la compagnie de Jesus en Chine (1552–1814) (Shanghai: 1924), p. 55. 79. Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, p. 140. 80. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, p. 442. 81. Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742, (New York: 1994), p. 176. 82. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, pp. 148–49. 83. The earlier critics noted among other issues that in baptizing women the Jesuits had failed “to apply saliva to their ears, salt to their mouths, and oil to their breast and head.” (George H. Dunne, Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (London: 1962), p. 272.) 84. For the background to the rites controversy and the policy of accommodation, see ibid., p. 17. 85. Ross, A Vision Betrayed, p. xvi. See also Dunne, Generation of Giants, p. 269.

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86. Ting, Les Descriptions de la Chine, p. 21. 87. Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France (1640– 1740) (Geneva: 1971), p. 91. 88. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, p. 320. 89. Ibid., p. 314. 90. Ibid., p. 315. 91. Ibid., p. 317. 92. Davy, “La Condamnation en Sorbonne,” p. 375. See also Bibliotheca Missionum, vol. VII, Chinesische Missionsliteratur 1700-1799, p. 29. Deists maintained that nature proved the existence of God. They disdained formal religion and rejected claims of supernatural revelation. Socinianism stemmed from the beliefs of the sixteenth-century Italian religious reformer Faustus Socinus, who denied the validity of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Socinians held that the Scriptures could be interpreted rationally and that the sacraments were only spiritual symbols. 93. Davy, “La Condamnation en Sorbonne,” pp. 378–386. See Bibliotheca Missionum, vol. VII, Chinesische Missionsliteratur 1700–1799, p. 34. 94. Bibliotheca Missionum, vol. VII, Chinesische Missionsliteratur 1700–1799, pp. 16– 18. 95. See Pro memoria du P. Louis Le Comte au Pape, 1 mai 1700, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, 726/I/4. 96. Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France, pp. 117–33. 97. John D. Young, Confucianism and Christianity (Hong Kong: 1983), pp. 120–28. He concludes that “it was the moral absoluteness of the Confucian tradition, supported by a Neo-Confucian metaphysical base, which was responsible for the failure of the first encounter between China and the West (p. 128).” Also see Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi (New York: 1974), pp. 72–84, and Francis A. Rouleau, “Maillard de Tournon, Papal Legate at the Court of Peking: The First Imperial Audience (31 December 1705),” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, vol. LXII (1962): pp. 264–323. 98. Robert E. Entenmann, “Catholics and Society in Eighteenth-Century Sichuan,” in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed., Daniel H. Bays (Stanford, CA: 1996), p. 8. 99. Farmer, Technology Transfer and Cultural Subversion, p. 6. 100. John D. Young, Confucianism and Christianity (Hong Kong: 1983), p. x. 101. Farmer, Technology Transfer and Cultural Subversion, p. 7. 102. Bibliotheca Missionum, vol. VII, Chinesische Missionsliteratur 1700-1799, p. 282. 103. Lach, vol. I, bk. 1, p. xii. See also Danielle Elisseeff-Poisle, “Chinese Influence in France, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed., Thomas H. C. Lee, Chinese University of Hong Kong Monograph Series, 12. (Hong Kong: 1991), pp. 151–63; and Henri Cordier, La chine en France au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: 1910). 104. Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France (1640–1740), pp. 427–29. 105. Lach, vol. I, bk. 1, pp. xiv–xv. Farmer argued that the “counter-example of China played a role in the development of certain trends in the thought of the Enlightenment which tried to achieve a level of generalization which transcended European historical experience.” He contended that the counter-example was “largely a function of European self-perception and was only partially guided by Chinese reality or Jesuit biases in the

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interpretation of that reality to a Western audience.” Farmer, Technology Transfer and Cultural Subversion, p. 5.

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Index Aga, Omar, Turkish officer, 26–27 Aga, Soliman, Ottoman envoy to France, 41 Ali, Hadji, Muslim merchant in Egypt, 70–71 Alexander VII, Pope: inauguration of, 2 Antamosy, territories on Madagascar, 101–102 Antemoro, territories on Madagascar, 101–102 Arvieux, chevalier de: appointed secretary to Emir, 32–33; description of Bedouins, 30–33; description of food and table manners, 34–35; early life, 23–24; early travels, 21–22; his death, 41; initial description of court of Emir Turabey, 27–29; on Arab women, 36–39; on French customs, 28; return to French court, 40–41; return to Saïda, 39; trip to Mount Carmel, 26; views on Islam, 33– 34; views on justice, 31 Aurangzeb, Mughal emperor, 139; economic problems, 158; fights succession war, 151–56 Avril, Philippe: his early educational background, 211; his available sources, 207–209; itinerary of voyage, 212–219; mission to Grand Tartary, 203–207 Barnabé, Louis, S.J.: leads mission to Grand Tartary, 211–218; returns to Paris, 219 Battuta, Abu ‘Abdallah ibn: voyages in Indian Ocean, 115 Beausse, Pierre de: arrival on Madagascar, 100; death, 106; discord with Champmargou, 101; president of the Fort Dauphin conseil souverain, 98; problems of, 104 Bedouins, of Mount Carmel, 22

Bengal, description by Pyrard, 122 Bernier, François: his family and educational background, 148–149; letter to Colbert on India, 155– 158; summary of his travels, 149; travels with Tavernier, 44; views on Mughal succession war, 151, 156 Bertandié, Monsieur: activities in Smyrna and Saïda, 24 Brèvedent, Charles François Xavier, S.J.: death, 79; mission to Ethiopia, 77 Bruce, James: account of Ethiopia, 92; arrival there, 78 Calicut: wealth from trade, 124 Capuchins: religious houses in Levant and Persia, 57 Caron, François, Director-general of French East India Company, 70, 101, 174, 195 Carré, Abbé, 171; visits Dellon in prison, 171, 174 Cassini, Jean Dominique: lobbies Colbert for mission to China, 231 Champmargou, Chaussé de: discord with Beausse on Madagascar, 101; favors war on island, 103, 166; French Governor 98, 101; power on island, 102; rivalry with La Case, 103–104 Chardin, Sir Jean: assists French Company in Ispahan, 54; celebrity on return to France, 50; death, 52; description of imperial harems, 58–64; emigrates to England to avoid religious persecution, 51; family background, 49; honors granted by Charles II, 51; mastery of Persian, 53–54; summary of early travels, 49–50; tolerant views of Islam, 56–57; translator at Persian court, 55

Index Charpentier, François: propagandist for French Company, 107 Chaumont, chevalier de, 183 Chevry, Charles Duret, sieur de, 114 Child, Sir Josiah: Director of English East India Company, 51 China: described by Le Comte, 236– 241; European interest in, 201– 203; missionaries in Peking, 202 Clement VII, Pope, 205 Clement X, Pope: challenges Portuguese religious monopoly in Asia, 203 Clement XI, Pope, 241 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste: finance minister for Louis XIV, 98; founds French East India Company, 108, 149– 150, 163–164; internal financial reforms, 150; views on mercantilism, 156 Constantinople: French embassy to, 1– 2 Couplet, Philippe, S.J., 202, 212 Dárá Shikoh, Mughal prince: role in succession war, 151–156 Delgado de Matos, Francisco, GrandInquisitor of Indies, 172, 174 Dellon, Charles: arrested by Inquisition in Daman, 170–171; departs for Asia, 163–164; describes practices of Goa Inquisition, 172–173; description of Madagascar, 165– 167; family background, 164; imprisoned in Goa, 171; on Christians in India, 169; return to Europe, 173 Dervick, the Emir, Bedouin chief: adventures with Arvieux, 34 Destrappes, Leonard, 114 Dutch East India Company (VOC): assists Tavernier, 138; at Persian court, 55; relations with French, 98; rivalry with Portuguese in India, 123 Ethiopia: expulsion of Jesuits from, 71; Prester John legend, 75, 204, 209; state of empire, 71–75

263 Etienne, Nicholas, 103 Evelyn, John, 50; assists Chardin with memoirs, 54 Fasildadas, the negus of Ethiopia: establishes capital at Gondar, 81 Flacourt, Etienne de, description of island, 107; directs French on Madagascar, 198 Fort Dauphin, 98, 102 Fouquet, Nicholas, 7–8 France: desire for empire in East Africa, 71; European wars of, 150; expeditions to Madagascar, 97– 99; trading relations with Ottoman empire, 1–2 French East India Company: capital pool and early voyages, 163–164; establishment by Colbert, 98, 150; first commercial expedition, 97– 98; first envoys to Persia and India, 54–56; problems on Madagascar, 165–166; in Siam, 183–184; Galland, Auguste, 47 Gassendi, Pierre, 148 Goa: capital of Portuguese Asia, 113; description of Dellon, 169; description by Pyrard, 124–127 Goës, Bento de, trip to China, 202–203 Guilleragues, comte de, French ambassador to Constantinople, 72 Hassan, confidant of Arvieux, 30, 33, 40 Henry IV, king of France: charters East India Company, 97 Herbelot, Barthélemi d’, 6 Herberstein, baron Sigismund von: description of Russia, 205–206 Hiché, femme de chamber of Emir Turabey, 29–30; marriage, 30; relations with Arvieux, 32, 39–40 Ibrahim III, king of the Maldives, 120– 121 Innocent XII, Pope: supports Franciscans in Ethiopia, 75

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Inquisition of Goa, 126, 164 Ivan IV, tsar of Russia, 207 Iya’su I, negus of Ethiopia, 71–72; appoints ambassador to Louis XIV, 87; challenges to his power, 76; description of, 79–82; sacral duties, 87

Spanish Netherlands, 150; ratifies Richelieu’s East India Company, 97; receives Tavernier at court, 141; relations with nobility, 31; revocation of Edict of Nantes, 75, 100; supports Jesuits in Ethiopia, 75

Jaeger, Herbert de, 50 Janissaries: revolt of 1656, 4–5; 13–14 Jeannin, Pierre, 114 Jenkinson, Anthony: search for route to China, 205–206

Madagascar: claimed by French, 100; described by Dellon, 164–167; potential for European base, 97– 98; warfare of Malagasy tribes with French, 101 Maillet, Benoît de, French consul at Cairo, 71–72; seeks greater influence in Ethiopia, 73, 76 Malabar Coast: detailed description by Pyrard, 122–124 Maldive Islands: described by Pyrard, 111–112, 115–122 Mananghe, ‘Adrian’, Malagasy chieftain, 102; firm refusal to convert to Christianity, 102–103 Marqos IV, patriarch of Ethiopia, 77 Mazarin, duc de: cedes colonial claims to Crown, 98, 100 Medici, Marie de, queen of France, 113–114 Medlum, Mourad ibn, Ethiopian ambassador to France, 87–88 Mehmed IV, Ottoman emperor, 4–5 Meilleraye, duc de: interest in Indian Ocean, 98, 100 Mendonça Furtado, Luis de, first count of Lavradio, Viceroy of India: reforms in Portuguese Asia, 173– 174 Mendonça Furtado, Manuel de, Portuguese Governor of Daman: relations with Dellon, 170 Mir Jumla, 152 Mondevergue, marquis de: leads French expedition to Madagascar, 163, 165 Monophysite Church, 73; pressured by Jesuits over doctrine, 73–76 Montauban, Père, S.J., 72 Montesquieu, baron de: views on Asia, 111–112; 159

K’ang-hsi, emperor of China, 236, 239–241 Köprülü, Mehmed, grand vizir, 4–5, 13 La Case, ‘Le Vacher’, French explorer: lifts siege of Fort Dauphin, 103– 104; on Madagascar, 103; rivalry with Champmargou, 104; warfare on island, 106–107 La Forêt, Jean de, 1 La Haye, Jacob Blanquet de, commands Colbert’s grand fleet of 1670, 174; French Viceroy in Asia, 169 La Haye, Jean de, French ambassador to Ottomans, 5–6 La Loubère, Simon de: appointed envoy to Siam, 183; family background, 183; on Buddhism, 190–192; views of Siamese culture, 188–189 Le Comte, Louis Daniel, S.J.: arrival in Peking, 233; background, 231; death, 241; description of Peking, 236–237; mission to China, 231– 232; on religion, 240–241; publishes account of travels, 235; view of Chinese Christians, 238 Leibnitz, Gottfried, 182 Leo X, Pope, 206 Louis XIV, king of France: and Chardin, 50; commission to Tavernier, 138; and Fronde, 98; huge appetite, 35; initial letter to Safavid court, 54; quest for

Index Mughal India: relations with Safavid Persia, 60; succession struggle, 151–156 Muhammed Shujá, 152 Murád Bakhsh, 152 Pallu, François, bishop of Heliopolis, 174 Parmentier, Jean, 115 Parmentier, Raoul, 115 Persia: arrival of first French envoys, 54; classical accounts of, 53; description by Enlightenment writers, 47; sixteenth century relations with Europe, 52 Phra Narai, king of Siam, 183–184, 187–188 Polo, Marco: views on Grand Tartary, 204 Poncet, Charles: begins journey, 77; family background, 72; at Gondar, 79–80; reasons for journey to Ethiopia, 71, 76; return to France, 88–90; at Sennar, 78–79; views on religion, 83–87 Portugal: reputation in Asia, 123; rivalry with Dutch, 123 Prester John, 75,204, 209 Pronis, Jacques de, 97–98 Pyrard, François, advocate for French interest in Asian trade, 111–112; critiques French behavior in Asia, 128; description of Maldives, 115–122; early life and travels, 112–113; views on Hinduism, 124; views regarding India, 122– 123; visits Goa, 124–127 Raisin, Antoine, 49–50 Rasissatte, ‘Andrian’, Malagasy chieftain: 103 Rennefort, Urbain Souchu de: background, 98–99; describes religious customs of Malagasy tribes, 102; and religious tensions on his voyage to the island of Madagascar, 100–101; views on making conversions, 105 Ricci, Matteo, S.J., 240

265 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal: charters East India Company, 97 Royal Society, England: relations with Chardin, 50–51 Ruvigny, marquis de, French ambassador to England, 51 Saïda: European trade there, 25–26 Salignac, baron de, 4 Saville, Henry, English envoy to France, 51 Sefi II, Safavid ruler of Persia: 51; unprepared to rule, 59–60; weaknesses and re-coronation as Suleiman III, 60–61 Shah Abbas I, Safavid ruler of Persia, 52 Shah Abbas II, Safavid ruler of Persia: his death, 58–59, 61; interest in direct ties with Europe, 49, 52, 54–55 Shah Jahan, Mughal emperor, 136; succession struggle, 151–155 Smyrna, 24 Sobieski, John, king of Poland, 219 Societe des Missions-Étrangères, 183 Society of Jesus: activities in India, 126–28; early attempts to establish foothold in Ethiopia, 73–75; expulsion from Ethiopia, 71, 73; intercedes for Pyrard, 113 Sulaiman Shikoh, 152 Suleiman III (Sefi II), Safavid ruler of Persia: 49, 54; re-coronation, 60– 61 Surat: described by Dellon, 167–168; description by Tavernier, 136 Susneyos, negus of Ethiopia, 73–75 Tamerlane, 157 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 52; describes Benares, 137; details Mughal court life, 139; family background and early travels, 135–136; forced to leave France, 141–142; rewarded by Louis XIV, 141; sells gemstones to Louis XIV, 140; views on religion, 140–141

266 Theatine Order: religious houses in Levant and Persia, 57 Thévenot, Jean de: description of Topkapi palace, 7–8; family background, 2–3; on Asiatic despotism, 13–14; on religion, 10– 12; summary of travels, 2–3; views on bath houses and Ottoman women, 9–10 Turabey, Emir, Bedouin leader, 26, 39

Index Vair, Guillaume du, 114 Verbiest, Ferdinand, S.J., 210–211

About the Editors and Contributors GLENN J. AMES is professor of history at The University of Toledo. A graduate of the University of Rhode Island (Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude) and The University of Minnesota (M.A. and Ph.D.) he has received many awards and fellowships including a Fulbright, an American Institute of Indian Studies Grant, a Portuguese Ministry of Education Award, and a Leverhulme European PostDoctoral Fellowship in England. He is the author of two monographs: Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest for Asian Trade (1996) and Renascent Empire: The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, ca. 1640-1683 (2000). He has also published some thirty scholarly articles. His current project is a study of the life and times of Vasco da Gama. S. AMANDA EURICH, of the History Department at Western Washington University, is the author of The Economics of Power: The Private Finances of the House of Foix-Navarre-Albret during the Religious Wars (1994), runner-up for Huguenot Society biennial book award. She has also authored a number of articles on confessional identity and culture in early modern France, a topic on which she is preparing currently a book-length study. She earned her Ph.D. from Emory University. LINDA S. FREY and MARSHA L. FREY are professors of history at the University of Montana and Kansas State University, respectively. They graduated B.A. summa cum laude, B.S. summa cum laude, M.A., and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. In tandem they have written a number of books on seventeenth

268

About the Editors and Contributors

and eighteenth-century Europe, with special focus on France, the French Revolution and Germany. Their most recent publications include The Treaties of the War of the Spanish Succession (1995) and an authoritative study on The History of Diplomatic Immunity (1999). RONALD S. LOVE, of the History Department at the State University of West Georgia, is a former Isaac Walton Killam Scholar at the University of Alberta and Canada Research Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan, both in Canada. A graduate of the University of Alberta (where he took a B.A. with honors and an M.A.) and the University of Southern California (where he earned a second M.A. and a Ph.D.), he has published widely in the field of early modern French political, military, religious and cultural history, with a primary focus on the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV. He is also a specialist in French overseas expansion during the great age of European exploration and discovery. He is the author of “Blood and Religion”: The Conscience of Henri IV (2001). His current projects include a book-length study of the Crown corporation, SaskTel, and the early development of the Saskatchewan telephone system in Canada (forthcoming), and a monograph on the voyages of discovery. DIANE C. MARGOLF received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University. She has taught at Stanford University and the College of Charleston, and is currently Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University. Her research interests include religion, law and culture in early modern Europe, with a focus on France, and she received the Harold J. Grimm Prize from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 1996. Her major research project is a study of the Paris Chambre de l’Édit in seventeenth-century France. THEODORE NATSOULAS received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University with a specialization in African history. His publications include The Hellenic Presence in Ethiopia: A Study of a European Minority in Africa, 1740-1935 (1977), as well as numerous articles in such publications as Northeast African Studies, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Horn of Africa, and the Journal of Asian and African Studies. He is professor of history at The University of Toledo. DEIRDRE PETTET received a M.A. in French from Yale University. She has variously studied economics, computer science, and history. Her most recent focus has been on Russian studies, particularly on nineteenth-century literature and history. CARL H. SOBOCINSKI received his B.A. (in French) from Ohio University, and his M.A. degree (History) from Kent State University. He has traveled throughout the Indian Ocean basin and has recently completed his Ph.D. in history at The

About the Editors and Contributors

269

University of Toledo. He was the 1998 Lloyd and Betty Lapp Award recipient as the outstanding graduate history student at Toledo. His doctoral dissertation, which he is revising for publication, focused on a history of the French on Madagascar, and he conducted extensive archival research in Paris and Aix-en-Provence for this project. GLENN SUNDEEN completed his graduate training in modern European History at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1996. His areas of specialization include the diverse subjects of the diplomatic relations of Poland during the Second World War and early modern Western diplomatic relations with Ottoman Turkey, Muscovite Russia and other eastern states. He currently teaches on the faculty of Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea, where he continues to pursue his research interests in European contacts with Asia during the early modern period. ANNE YORK is associate professor of History at Youngstown State University. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from The University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of numerous works on Jansenism and Pasquier Quesnel. Her current research focuses on women’s congregations in seventeenth-century France, women’s education in the same period, and French immigration to the Ohio Valley in the early nineteenth century. Actively involved in the Youngstown community, she serves on the National Leadership Assembly for the Gamamliel Institute and is president of the Greater Youngstown League of Women Voters.