WORLD LITERATURE IN PRACTICE:

THE ORIENTALIST’S MANUSCRIPT BETWEEN

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND GERMANY

Paul Babinski

A DISSERTATION

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY

OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE

OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY

THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Advisers: Nikolaus Wegmann, Anthony Grafton

November 2020

© Copyright by Paul Babinski, 2020.

All rights reserved.

iii

Abstract

This dissertation traces how European “oriental studies” emerged from a sustained

encounter with an earlier Ottoman intellectual tradition. In the seventeenth century, books

acquired in cities like Istanbul or looted from Ottoman Europe formed the basis of many of the

first major collections of Islamic manuscripts in non-Ottoman Europe, and Western European

scholars who specialized in the study of Islamic texts worked mostly from sixteenth and

seventeenth-century Ottoman commentaries, dictionaries, translations, and bibliographies, often

with the help of Muslim scholars. “World Literature in Practice” builds on a broad survey of

Islamic manuscripts from early modern German collections to reconstruct the scholarly practices

of orientalists and their collaborators. Examining their notes and marginalia, it uncovers an early

chapter in the history of world literature during the two centuries before Goethe coined the term,

as Ottoman letters became the foundation of orientalist literature.

Three chapters follow the strands of this encounter from the early seventeenth century to

the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter one looks at the first orientalist readers of Saʿdī’s Gulistān,

a work of classical Persian literature which orientalists discovered through its various Turkish

and Arabic commentaries and translations. Chapter two follows the formation of diplomatic

language schools founded to train interpreters for work in the Ottoman Empire, and the

generations of diplomat-orientalists they educated. Chapter three examines how orientalists

collected and organized information from Islamic manuscripts in the decades after the formation

of major manuscript collections in the second half of the seventeenth century, culminating in the

work of Johann Jacob Reiske. A conclusion looks broadly at the transformation of orientalist

practices over the early modern period.

iv

Acknowledgments

This project evolved over years with the help of many mentors, colleagues, and friends. It

is the product of my training at the University of Colorado - Boulder, University of Regensburg,

Princeton University, and Bielefeld University, and research at the August Hermann Francke

Study Centre – Archive and Library (Halle), Austrian National Library (Vienna), Austrian State

Archives (Vienna), Bavarian State Library (Munich), Berlin State Library, Bodleian Library

(Oxford), British Library (London), Erfurt-Gotha University and Research Library, Göttingen

State and University Library, Frankfurt University Library, Hamburg State and University

Library, Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, La Courneuve Diplomatic Archives, Leiden

University Library, Leipzig University Library, Lincoln College Library (Oxford), National

Library of France (Paris), Lippe State Library (Detmold), Prime Minister’s Ottoman Archives

(Istanbul), Princeton University Library, Royal Danish Library (Copenhagen), Saxon State and

University Library (Dresden), and Thuringian State and University Library (Jena). At these

libraries and archives, I benefited from the advice of experts whose input was formative to both

the object and methods of my research. I would like to especially thank Khalid Chakor-Alami,

Berhanu Baysa, Nicolé Fürtig, Thomas Haffner, Stefan Hoffmann, Eva-Maria Jansson, Britta

Klosterberg, Monika Müller, Erik Petersen, Ernst Dieter Petritsch, Christoph Rauch, Ulrich

Schneider, and Arnoud Vrolijk.

I had the privilege to complete this dissertation in the German Department at Princeton

University, and I am deeply grateful to Janine Calogero, Patricia Heslin, Lynn Ratsep, Fiona

Romaine, and Ed Sikorski for their support over the years. The German Department, the

Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional

Studies (PIIRS) supported my language study in Istanbul, and the research for this dissertation

v

was made possible by a Hyde Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. I completed the

dissertation as a fellow at PIIRS, in the PIIRS Graduate Fellows Seminar under the direction of

David Bellos and along with Daniela Barba-Sanchez, Marina Bedran, RJ Bergmann, Kyle Chan,

Sheryl Chow, Claire Cooper, Michael Faciejew, Rebecca Faulkner, Kalyani Monteiro

Jayasankar, Sarah-Jane Koulen, Irina Markina-Baum, Amna Qayyum, Jesse Rumsey-Merlan,

Irina Simova, Kristen Starkowski, Sean Toland, and Xue Zhang.

My chapters bring together material presented at various workshops and conferences.

Chapter one is a modified version of the essay “Ottoman Philology and the Origin of Persian

Studies in Western Europe: The Gulistān’s Orientalist Readers”, which will appear in a

forthcoming issue of Lias, Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources, and

material from this chapter was presented at the conference “La circulation du savoir linguistique

et philologique entre l’Allemagne et l’étranger XVIe-XXe siècles” at the École Normale

Supérieure in January 2018, at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in

March 2019, the annual meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies Association in November 2019,

and the Harvard-Princeton Graduate Conference in Early Modern History in February 2020.

Material from chapter two was presented at the workshop “Histories of Sexuality and Erudition:

Institutions, Texts, Practices” at Princeton University in May 2019, and given as a talk at the

Leipzig University Library in May 2018. Material from chapter three was presented at two

meetings of the working group “Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century”, in March 2018 at

Dartmouth University and February 2020 at the University of Missouri, at the workshop

“Extrahieren, Speichern, Verwerten” at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in July

2019, and in the seminar “The Nations of Philology” at the annual conference of the German

Studies Association in October 2019.

vi

I owe a great debt to my teachers, at Boulder—David Ciarlo, Zilla Goodman, Patrick

Greaney, Thomas Hollweck, Helmut Müller-Sievers, Henry Pickford, David Shneer, Davide

Stimilli, Beverly Weber—and at Princeton—David Bellos, Gabriele Brandstetter, Brigid

Doherty, Anthony Grafton, Michael Jennings, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Inka Mülder-Bach,

Barbara Nagel, Jamie Rankin, Sally Poor, Anne Marie Rasmussen, Nikolaus Wegmann, and

Sigrid Weigel. Those who have taught me a foreign language have given me an immeasurable

gift: Erika Gilson, Nilüfer Hatemi, Saskia Hintz, Sangbok Kim, Petra Landfester, Amineh

Mahallati, and Tatiana Mikhailova.

Three teachers left an indelible mark on this dissertation, inspiring its conception and

overseeing its development. Nikolaus Wegmann’s support and mentorship have been the

bedrock of this process, from broad conceptual questions about the nature of archival work to the

practical details of research, travel, and funding. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann first inspired me to

study early modern art and literature, and taught me how to think about material circulation in a

global context. He also taught me how to approach objects, to formulate arguments and marshal

evidence on questions of provenance, function, and style, and the foundational elements of this

dissertation were first formed in his seminars. Finally, I owe much to Anthony Grafton.

Professor Grafton introduced me to the study of manuscripts and taught me to decipher the traces

of the labors that once made a work of scholarship. I first learned Latin at his lunchtime readings

of Poggio Bracciolini and the diaries of Pius II with graduate students, and he drew my attention

to the seventeenth-century German commonplace book whose pages were my crash course in

paleography. It would be impossible to express my debt to these scholars, and I often discovered

only later, when, immersed in the myriad tasks of research, I encountered some small conundrum

whose answer I somehow already knew, that I had been the recipient of their deliberate and

vii

expert instruction.

Trudy Jacoby gave me perhaps the most important advice I received as a graduate student:

to abandon the proprietary database software I had been using and embrace a more robust system

of information management using spreadsheets and the internal architecture of my operating

system. This decision paid off, especially later on as my database grew and became more

complex. It was Christoph Rauch who first encouraged me to study manuscripts systematically,

working on the level of the collection rather than picking and choosing from the catalogs,

something about which I learned a great deal from Boris Liebrenz, who served throughout as a

model for the rigorous, comprehensive study of manuscripts. Carlos Spoerhase was an important

mentor as I began to write up the dissertation, and many of its ideas and arguments were first

presented at his colloquium in Bielefeld, where I benefited enormously from the insights and

advice of Annika Differding, Helene Kraus, Jørgen Sneis, and Fabienne Steeger. Many other

scholars and friends helped me along the way, sharing ideas, references, and unpublished

research, and correcting my many errors. I would especially like to thank Renée Altergott, Sonja

Andersen, Zeinab Azarbadegan, Alex Balistreri, Joshua Bauchner, Megan Baumhammer, Asaph

Ben Tov, Anat Benzvi, Benjamin Bernard, Alexander Bevilacqua, Matthew Birkhold, Ann Blair,

Philip Bockholt, Elio Brancaforte, Stefanie Brinckmann, Alexander Bubb, Richard Calis, Hülya

Çelik, Chris Clarke, Simon Conrad, Robert Decker, Elisabeth Décultot, Enis Dinç, Mary Helen

Dupree, Andrew Edwards, Mateusz Falkowski, Christian Flow, Sean Franzel, Lela Gibson,

Mladen Gladic, Stefan Hanß, Julia Hartley, Eva Hausteiner, Walter Höflechner, Cynthia Houng,

Murat Umut Inan, Ininca Iurascu, Mariusz Kaczka, Mariel Kessel, Verena Klemm, Sebastian

Klinger, Klaus Kreiser, Harun Küçük, Jamie Kwan, Eva Lieberich, Jan Loop, Carolina Malagon,

Hannes Mandel, Paula Manstetten, Irina Markina-Baum, Jonathan Martin, Petra McGillen,

viii

Madeline McMahon, Martin Mulsow, Nil Palabiyik, Kristine Palmieri, Maryam Patton, Ying

Pek, Mert Peksen, Frederic Ponten, Maria-Magdalena Pruß, Meredith Quinn, Pascale Rabault-

Feuerhahn, Jelena Radovanovic, Robyn Radway, John Raimo, Yael Rice, Mike Rottmann, Emily

Rutherford, Ron Sadan, Dennis Schäfer, Jakob Schillinger, Deborah Schlein, Kimia Shahi, Tanvi

Solanki, Richard Spiegel, William Stewart, Julia Stone, Andreas Strasser, Evren Sünnetçioğlu,

Himmet Taşkömür, William Theiss, Sean Toland, Tom Tölle, Gerald Toomer, Abdullah Uğur,

Nicholas Underwood, Luciano Vanni, Chloé Vettier, Matthew Vollgraff, Duygu Yildirim, Genie

Yoo, and Helmut Zedelmaier. I am particularly grateful to Alastair Hamilton and Suzanne

Marchand for their advice and encouragement.

I would be nowhere without my family. My parents always encouraged and supported my

education, despite my own inclination at times to think of classroom learning as onerous and

secretly voluntary, and, if I have accomplished anything, it has been through their love and

support, and that of my siblings, Charles and Katerina.

A final acknowledgment, but one that defies explanation: I shared every step of this

journey with another scholar, Maureen DeNino, whom I love dearly. It would be unjust to pass

over her part in silence, and yet it feels a different sort of betrayal to tally up her contribution.

Suffice it to say, her hand was in every sentence of this work, and for that it feels all the more my

own.

ix

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . THE PHILOLOGY OF ORIENTALIS T LITERATURE 1

CHAPTER ONE . OTTOMAN PHILOLOGY AND T HE GULISTĀN’S ORIENTALIST READERS

Introduction 22

The Ottoman Tradition of Persian Studies 27

The Beginnings of Persian Studies in Non-Ottoman Europe 31

Du Ryer and the French Orientalists 38

Adam Olearius 47

From Aleppo to Oxford: Greaves and Pococke 59

The Gulistān in Leiden: Golius and Haqq-vīrdī 69

Levinus Warner in Leiden and Istanbul 94

Georg Gentius 102

From Sūdī’s Commentary to Gentius’s Rosarium politicum 118

Olearius’s Persianischer Rosenthal 134

The Rosarium politicum in England: William Guise 142

Gentius in India 151

x

CHAPTER TWO . TEACHING TURK ISH : ORIENTALISM’S PEDAGOGICAL LABORATORY

Introduction 158

Learning in Istanbul 165

Wojciech Bobowski and his Manuscripts 168

The First Diplomatic Language Schools 183

The École des jeunes de langues in Paris 192

The Philological Classroom: The Jeunes de langues Translations 204

The Orientalische Akademie 217

Joseph Hammer 237

Hammer’s Literary Debut 244

CHAPTER THREE . INDEXING ORIENTAL L ITERATURE : INF ORMATION AND READING

Introduction 258

Theodor Petraeus 262

Andreas Acoluthus 277

Türkenbeute 283

Sigismund Seebisch 302

Reference Works: Warner and d’Herbelot 309

Registering Information Exchange: A Kufic Specimen 319

Connected Literary History: The Case of Kalīla wa Dimna 325

Johann Jacob Reiske 329

Philology and the Index 343

Conclusion 353

xi

CHAPTER FOUR. CONCLUSION 356

BIBLIOGRAPHY 405

1

INTRODUCTION

THE PHILOLOGY OF ORIENTALIST LITERATURE

This dissertation recovers a lost early chapter in the history of world literature. Its thesis

is that the emergence of what we call “orientalism” or “oriental studies”—specifically, the

increasingly sophisticated understanding of Islamic cultures and literatures in early modern

Western and Central Europe—was neither a discovery of the foreign, nor a deciphering of the

unintelligible, nor an ideological construct, but rather a translatio studii from one seat of empire

and learning, Istanbul, to an increasingly global network linked by print publication. At the heart

of this process was a centuries long material and intellectual exchange between German lands

and the Ottoman Empire, a point of sustained contact between two vast, multilingual republics of

letters. By the time world literature was theorized as a concept in the nineteenth century, it had

long existed in practice among a corps of philologists and diplomats who consciously mediated

between literary traditions.

These ideas are hardly novel. Recent scholarship has shown how early modern

orientalists relied on Ottoman scholars, manuscripts, and institutions.1 Continuities between

1 Alexander Bevilacqua, “The Oriental Library”, in The Republic of Arabic Letters (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2018), 17-43; Alastair Hamilton, Maurits van den Boogert, and Bart

2

Islamic scholarship and the supposedly pioneering works of orientalists have been observed on

many occasions.2 Literary scholars have also begun to reconstruct the Ottoman sources of

orientalist literature.3 Still, we have no comprehensive account of how Ottoman literature

became orientalist knowledge. This is due to both the difficulty of the many languages involved

and the obscurity of the relevant sources. While Europeans first printed in Arabic type in the

sixteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that most major works in Turkish,

Persian, and Arabic saw print. Until then, orientalists lived largely in a manuscript world, and it

is those manuscripts—in addition to their notebooks, annotations, and letters—that show us how

they worked and thought.

The inaccessibility of sources has fostered a focus, particularly within literary studies, not

on the underlying philological problem—identifying and analyzing the manuscripts that are the

historical witnesses to the formation of oriental literature as a field—but on the identification of

Westerweel, eds, The Republic of Letters and the Levant (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Alastair Hamilton and

Francis Richard, André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France (London: The

Arcadian Library, 2004); Simon Mills, A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship

between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Natalie

Rothman, “Dragomans and ‘Turkish Literature’: The Making of a Field of Inquiry”, Oriente Moderno 93,

no. 2 (2013): 390-421.

2 Marshall Hodgson succinctly observed this point in his The Venture of Islam: “For a long time, in any of

the paths it took, Modern Western scholarship was largely a matter of translating the results of pre-

Modern Muslim scholarship and adapting them into Occidental categories. Improvement in Western

scholarship was largely a matter of moving from later, secondary Muslim texts to earlier, more nearly

primary ones.” The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, volume 1: The

Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 40. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi has

written of the “formation of Orientalism as an area of European academic inquiry” as “grounded on a

‘genesis amnesia’”, borrowing the term from Pierre Bourdieu. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Orientalism’s

Genesis Amnesia”, in Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (Palgrave:

London, 2001), 18-34.

3 See, in particular, Katharina Mommsen’s work on Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, especially Katharina

Mommsen, Goethe und Diez: Quellenuntersuchungen zu Gedichten der Divan-Epoche (Berlin:

Akademie, 1961).

3

discourses that can be inferred from works of literature.4 This approach has had a certain

inevitability since Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, which broadly conceived of oriental studies

in “Europe” and “the West” as a “systematic discipline by which European culture was able to

manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically,

scientifically, and imaginatively during the post Enlightenment period.”5 While Said was largely

unfamiliar with the long tradition of orientalist historiography (and critique) that preceded him,

the political urgency of his thesis (which only grew more acute in the wake of decades of

economic and military harm as a result of American and European policy) has dictated the terms

of new research across a range of fields, and even scholars working over the vast terrain of

orientalist material unrelated (or only tangentially related) to European colonialism have offered

their work as confirmation, modification, or refutation of Said’s thesis.

This dissertation sits at the confluence of multiple Saidian blind spots. Famously, Said

discussed German academic Orientalistik only to justify its exclusion from his study, and nearly

4 In the study of German orientalism, this was particularly a active field of study in the years after 2000,

and was often framed around Said’s exclusion of Germany. See Nina Berman, German Literature on the

Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000-1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011);

Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Andrea

Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus: Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005); Hamid Tafazoli, Der deutsche Persien-Diskurs: Von der frühen

Neuzeit bis in das neunzehnte Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007). These years also saw the

appearance of two major historical surveys of modern German oriental studies, Sabine Mangold, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft”: Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004),

and Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2009).

5 Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage: New York, 1979), 3.

4

everything of substance he said on the matter is demonstrably false.6 Said’s brief treatment of

early modern oriental studies, a vast field which he addressed through a single example,

Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s 1697 Bibliothèque orientale, has not fared much better. Said focused on

the fact that d’Herbelot’s encyclopedic work was arranged systematically:

What is thus conveyed by the Bibliothèque is an idea of Orientalism’s power and

effectiveness, which everywhere remind the reader that henceforth in order to get at the

Orient he must pass through the learned grids and codes provided by the Orientalist. Not

only is the Orient accommodated to the moral exigencies of Western Christianity; it is

also circumscribed by a series of attitudes and judgments that send the Western mind, not

first to Oriental sources for correction and verification, but rather to other Orientalist

works.7

As others have pointed out, this is a baffling statement about a work compiled largely from an

earlier (and similarly alphabetized) Ottoman bibliography.8 There is also considerable evidence

that d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque was in practice precisely what Said claims it was not: a guide to

the study of Islamic manuscripts. More significantly, these “Oriental sources” are, in Said,

6 The best discussion of this remains Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, xviii-xx.

Said’s errors are enumerated there as elsewhere, but they are worth reviewing, if only to emphasize that

they are so egregious they transcend the politicized environment of scholarship in which approval or

disapproval of Said can be a gauge of other commitments. In Orientalism, Said claims that “at no time in

German scholarship during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century could a close partnership have

developed between Orientalists and a protracted, sustained national interest in the Orient” (19), even

though many of the most prominent German-speaking orientalists were diplomats and interpreters trained

by the state to occupy positions in Istanbul and along the vast land border between the Habsburg and

Ottoman Empires. Said’s suggestion that “the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at

least a classical Orient” which “was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but […] was

never actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli,

or Nerval” (19) is only intelligible if we accept that Germans either did not travel, or did not write about

their travels. Finally, his claims that “the major steps in Oriental scholarship were first taken in either

Britain and France” (17) and that “What German Oriental Scholarship did was to refine and elaborate

techniques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the

Orient by imperial Britain and France” (19) could have been refuted by consulting the work of historians

familiar with the tradition of German Orientalistik (such as Johann Fück, Die arabischen Studien in

Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1955)), the footnotes of an actual

work of German orientalist scholarship, or a manuscript catalog from any major German collection.

7 Said, Orientalism, 67. 8 See Nicholas Dew, “The Order of Oriental Knowledge: The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque

Orientale”, in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergrast (London: Verso, 2004), 233-252.

5

entirely void of specific content. He does not discuss the contributions of earlier Muslim scholars

in the history of orientalism or elsewhere reflect on their exclusion. He simply takes it for

granted that they do not count enough to be named.

These sources, however, are the very crux of the matter. One could not, to use Said’s

words, simply “send the Western mind” to them for “correction and verification”. They had to be

found, purchased (often, looted), stored, identified, and organized. To acquire the learning

necessary to clumsily decipher their meaning was a mark of distinction and the reward of

extraordinary effort. Only a select few ever developed true competence with their languages, and

even the best orientalists had to rely on available translations, glosses, commentaries, and

dictionaries, as well as on the many learned Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians who acted as

their informants, middlemen, and teachers. This profound dependency rooted the development of

orientalist thought in the intellectual traditions it drew from. The history of orientalism in

practice was obscured in the prefaces of the few works that passed into print, but it comes to life

on the pages of the orientalist’s manuscript.

The collections in which these manuscripts are found have remained remarkably intact

since the seventeenth century, and their analysis is the principal aim of this dissertation.

Throughout, I have approached the history of orientalist literature as a question, not of discourse,

but of philology, a term which warrants some clarification. It is now commonplace to lament the

unfashionableness of philology while claiming the word for one’s own methods, and, in the

study of modern literatures, “philology” has often come to be used in the impoverished sense of

6

mere “close reading”.9 I use the word in a more conventional way, to signify the specialized

study of material texts, particularly in the analysis of manuscripts and the production of

editions.10

For this dissertation, that meant consulting several thousand manuscripts in more than a

dozen collections in order to reconstruct the scholarly libraries of orientalists and to piece

together their reading practices through an analysis of their annotations and the identification of

their sources. Why look at so many manuscripts? This approach runs the risk of being, at the

same time, both too narrow and too vast. Too narrow, because it remains confined to the small—

and very elite—world of those who collected and made these manuscripts. Too vast, because it

inevitably subjects the reader to several continents worth of (sometimes quite obscure) names,

dates, and facts. However, a study of the practice of orientalist scholarship would have been

impossible without research on this scale. Outside of a few major collections, little work had

been done on the manuscripts of early modern orientalists. Many annotated manuscripts had not

been identified, and the confident attribution of handwriting requires comparison across a range

of examples. Identifying and contextualizing a selection of representative manuscripts

necessitated working systematically across multiple libraries. I hope that, at the very least, my

9 This goes back to a short Paul de Man essay published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1982,

reprinted as “Return to Philology”, in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota

Press, 1986), 21-26. On de Man’s “return” and its legacy, see Jan Ziolkowski, “Metaphilology”, The

Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104, no. 2 (2005), 239-272.

10 On philology and scholarly reading practices, see Nikolaus Wegmann, “Was heißt einen ‘klassischen

Text’ lesen?: Philologische Selbstreflexion zwischen Wissenschaft und Bildung”, in

Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik, eds Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp (Stuttgart:

Metzler, 1994), 334-450. More recently, philology has become an organizing concept for thinking about

the relationship between epistemology and practice across a variety of media. See Friedrich Balke and

Rupert Gaderer eds, Medienphilologie: Konturen eines Paradigmas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017). In

particular, this dissertation draws on Carlos Spoerhase’s concept of the “philology of the format” and the

analysis in Spoerhase, Das Format der Literatur: Praktiken materieller Textualität zwischen 1740 und

1830 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018).

7

analysis will serve others as a guide to the manuscript sources in the history of early modern

oriental studies, and at many points I have only skimmed the surface of complicated and

important manuscripts which could easily warrant their own studies.

The multilingual character of this material might make it an odd fit for a German

Department. While in recent years German Studies has shifted (in the words of David Gramling

and Bethany Wiggin) “from the intercultural to the multilingual”, one might still question

whether it can accommodate the study of non-German literatures to the extent they appear in this

dissertation.11 However, because this is a problem that emerges directly from the sources, I opted

against mitigating questions of disciplinarity by excluding non-German material or anchoring my

historical analysis in readings of more canonical writers.

The causes for the multilingualism of these sources are varied. The orientalists discussed

here had to navigate both the main languages of Islamic philology (Persian, Turkish, Arabic) and

the languages of orientalist scholarship (most commonly, Latin, French, English, Dutch, and

Italian), and most wrote in a combination of German, French, and Latin.12 They frequently

traveled for study, and sometimes secured patronage abroad. While my focus here is largely on

11 David Gramling and Bethany Wiggin, “The Fall, or the Rise, of Monolingualism?”, German Studies

Review 41, no. 3 (October 2018): 457-463, here 457. On literature and multilingualism, see German Studies Review 41, no. 3 and Til Dembeck and Rolf Parr, eds, Literatur und Mehrsprachigkeit: Ein

Handbuch (Tübingen: Narr, 2017). 12 Throughout the dissertation I refer to “Islamic philology” as an umbrella term for the connected

traditions of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic-language philological scholarship.

8

German-speaking orientalists, I have tried to maintain throughout a perspective on both the

Western European and Ottoman contexts of orientalist work.13

There are advantages to observing the body of orientalist written material as a whole. For

one, it offers useful distinctions for thinking about the practice of orientalist scholarship. What

does it mean to say an orientalist “read” or “translated” a work? This could entail the close study

of a commentary in an intermediary language. It could also refer to the comparison of an existing

translation with the original, or the act of reading with the help of a foreign scholar. Often, a

manuscript exists that offers a clear answer to this question, without either unwitting assumptions

of effortless comprehension or the mystification of hermeneutic inaccessibility (“the

untranslatable”). Taken together, these scenes of reading show how orientalist philology

developed as a history of practices. We might think of the mass of orientalist writing—the

aggregate of the manuscripts orientalists collected and produced, their notebooks and

annotations—as a kind of border crossing. By analyzing, identifying, and dating these

manuscripts, we can see how texts passed from one republic of letters into another, as well as the

transformation of this crossing over time. 14

13 A point on terminology: I have sought to avoid a simplistic differentiation between “Europe” and the

Ottoman Empire, even as an imperfect short-hand for a complicated cultural geography, since much of

the scholarship and manuscript material that taught orientalists was already European (from Hungary and

South-Eastern Europe). I often opt for the more precise “non-Ottoman Europe” and a somewhat

expansive use of “Western Europe” (which includes much of what one might otherwise call “Central Europe”). “Orientalist” and, less often, “orientalism” are used here to refer to scholars and scholarship in

non-Ottoman Europe concerning written traditions from North Africa to South-East Asia. It is intended,

alongside “oriental studies”, to signify a distinct field of study that emerged in Europe at this time.

14 In the Western European context, “Republic of Letters” was an early modern term (Respublica

litteraria/literarum, Gelehrtenrepublik, République des lettres) signifying a transnational scholarly

community linked by correspondence and print publication. See Anthony Grafton, “A Sketch Map of a

9

This approach also offers a new perspective on an old problem of philological practice,

one posed by Erich Auerbach in his “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (Philology of World

Literature).15 Auerbach’s essay is perhaps most famous for articulating a universal understanding

of world literature within the ambit of modern humanism, a view he famously expressed without

qualification (“our philological home is the earth; it can no longer be the nation”).16 Auerbach’s

valorization of difference in the face of encroaching uniformity made him a touchstone for later

theorists and a point of contact between post-colonial thought and Goethean humanism – though,

as Till Dembeck and Dieter Heimböckel recently observed, “mostly with an eye to Weltliteratur

and less with an eye to Philologie”.17 Still, much of his essay addressed a practical philological

question: the possibility of synthesis in the face of world literature’s sheer magnitude. How can

we order the mass of heterogeneous stuff? Auerbach’s own suggestion is inspired by Curtius’s

Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter: the formulation of a point of departure

(Ansatz), which “must sort out a firmly circumscribed, manageable set of phenomena, and the

interpretation of these phenomena must have a radiant power so that it can order and help

Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters”, in Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the

Modern West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 9-34. I use the word here to refer as

well to Ottoman networks of scholars, to suggest commonality and for want of a better term to describe

the networks, institutions, and practices that shaped Ottoman intellectual life and which, much as in

Western Europe, incorporated the study of multiple languages and traditions. See Helen Pfeifer, “To

Gather Together: Cultural Encounters in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Literary Salons” (PhD diss.,

Princeton University, 2014).

15 Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur”, in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70.

Geburtstag, eds Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger (Bern: Francke, 1952), 39-50.

16 Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur”, 49: “Jedenfalls […] ist unsere philologische Heimat die Erde;

die Nation kann es nicht mehr sein.” Translation by Maire Said and Edward Said, Erich Auerbach,

“Philology and Weltliteratur”, The Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969): 1-17, here 17. 17 Till Dembeck and Dieter Heimböckel, “Anmerkungen zu Erich Auerbachs Essay Philologie der

Weltliteratur”, Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 9 (2018): 187-188, here 187.

10

interpret a much larger area as that of the point of departure”.18 Auerbach had in mind here

something like the topoi that Curtius followed from antiquity to modernity.19 Said, who was a

careful and perceptive reader of Auerbach (and who helped Maire Said translate “Philologie der

Weltliteratur” into English), might be seen as having offered, via Foucault, his own solution to

this problem of synthesis.20 The method of this dissertation, in turn, takes another approach to the

ordering of the world literary mass: historicizing the specific methods by which Islamic

literatures were collected, read, and translated as distinct practices of world literature.

Showing how these practices—and their institutionalization within both the state and the

academy—predated the concept of “world literature” is another aim of this dissertation. The

problem of historically situating “non-European” literatures has been a feature of recent

scholarly debate. Pascale Casanova’s influential World Republic of Letters famously deferred

their appearance in “world literary space” until after the Second World War.21 Aamir Mufti’s

more recent corrective of Casanova situated the “deep encounter between English and the main

Western languages and the languages of the global periphery” only as far back as the late

eighteenth century, which he refers to as “the dawn of the modern era”.22 Both Casanova’s and

18 Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur”, 47: “Der Ansatz muß einen fest umschriebenen, gut

überschaubaren Kreis von Phänomenen aussondern; und die Interpretation dieser Phänomene muß

Strahlkraft besitzen, so daß sie einen weit größeren Bezirk als den des Ansatzes ordnet und

mitinterpretiert.”

19 Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948).

20 On Auerbach’s essay and Said’s engagement with it, see Aamir Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms

and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 206-222.

21 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2004).

22 Mufti, Forget English!, 79.

11

Mufti’s accounts in turn reflect popular periodizations from non-specialists like Michel Foucault

that situate a “philological revolution” around 1800.23

However, research has long shown that both global trade and the philological study of

“non-European” traditions in Europe began much earlier.24 Globalization was in full swing by at

least the seventeenth century, when the Dutch and English East India Companies, following the

earlier example of the Portuguese, linked trade across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

Art Historians have shown that there was already by this time a sustained European encounter

with objects from across the globe, as well as the diffusion of Western European forms and

artistic practices through the movement of merchants, travelers, and missionaries.25 By the turn

of the eighteenth century, many of the literatures of the “Orient” had been studied in Western

Europe, by a small, but growing community of specialized scholars—eventually called

“orientalists”. These scholars emerged from local philological traditions and contexts of

23 On the continuities between nineteenth-century and early modern philology, see Sebastiano Timpanaro,

The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006);

and Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld

Institutes 44 (1981): 101-129. 24 On early modern oriental studies, see, in addition to the works mentioned above, Franz Babinger, “Die

türkischen Studien in Europa bis zum Auftreten Josef von Hammer-Purgstalls”, Die Welt des Islams 7

(1919), 102-29; Asaph Ben Tov, “The Academic Study of Arabic in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-

Century Protestant Germany”, History of Universities 28 (2015): 93-135; Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa;

Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2013); and Gerald J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of

Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

25 On the global circulation of art in the early modern period, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and

Michael North eds, Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press, 2014); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux,

Circulations in the Global History of Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015). On the European market for Indian

art in the seventeenth century, see Pauline Lunsing Scheurleer, “Het Witsenalbum: zeventiende-eeuwse

Indiase portretten op bestlling”, Bulletin of the Rijksmuseum 64 (1996) 167-254. On the global circulation

of textiles, well advanced by the eighteenth century, see Amelia Peck, ed., Interwoven Globe: The

Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). On Ottoman goods and

objects in Western Europe, see Alexander Bevilacqua and Helen Pfeifer, “Turquerie: Culture in Motion”,

Past and Present 221, no. 1 (2013), 75-118.

12

intensified intercultural contact, but they operated—almost as a rule—within a transnational

European context, through networks that crossed linguistic and political boundaries.

Nor did this globalization begin and end in Western Europe. On Europe’s eastern edge,

Istanbul stood at the hub of another republic of letters: the capital of the vast Ottoman Empire,

where manuscripts and scholars arrived from throughout Ottoman Europe, North Africa, Iran,

and Central Asia.26 Ottoman learning was essentially trilingual. Persian was above all the

language of belles lettres, the medium of great poets like Ḥāfiẓ and Saʿdī. Arabic was the

language of religion and law, and a vast literature that spanned the time from the pre-Islamic

Arabs to the present. Turkish was the language of the state and, increasingly, of new literature

and scholarship. The Ottomans had inherited much of this tradition from a succession of earlier

Islamic courts. They read classical Arabic literature through earlier Arabic commentaries and

penned their own commentaries on canonical works of Persian literature. They prized the

Chagatai Turkish poetry of the Timurid Mīr ʿAlī Şīr (1444-1501), who had interpreted classical

Persian works and compared Persian and Turkish as languages of literary expression.27 And just

as Western Europeans were interested in the knowledge transmitted in Islamic manuscripts,

Ottomans sought out Western European learning in subjects like medicine and geography.

26 On early modern Ottoman intellectual history, see Cornell Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the

Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541-1600) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);

Pfeifer, “To Gather Together: Cultural Encounters in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Literary Salons”. On the

emergence of the scholar-bureaucrat in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth-century, see Abdurrahman

Atçıl, Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern European Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2017). On the circulation of manuscripts in the Ottoman Empire, see Ismail Erünsal, Ottoman

Libraries: A Survey of the History, Development and Organization of Ottoman Foundation Libraries

(Cambridge, MA: The Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 2008);

Ismail Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar (Istanbul: Timas Yayınları, 2013); Meredith M. Quinn,

“Books and their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2016).

27 See Mīr ʿAlī Şīr, Muḥākamat al-Lughatain, ed. and trans. Robert Devereux (Leiden: Brill, 1966).

13

Accounting for this earlier trans-imperial legacy in world literature has long been a

problem of synthesis (to return to Auerbach), not understanding. The basic facts were as obvious

in 1800 as they are today, but their elision was a feature of Goethe’s theorization of the concept

of Weltliteratur, and later writers have echoed his assumptions. The reasons for both Goethe’s

disregard (and its acceptance by those invoking him as a founding theorist) are complex and, to

some extent, unknowable. While generally acknowledged to have coined the term, Goethe’s

founding theorization was, at best, fragmentary. We know from a few scattered observations that

he toyed with the idea of Weltliteratur only later in life, and it was through the account of his

assistant Johann Peter Eckermann that a few thoughts reached a broad readership. Invested with

Goethe’s authority, the—enigmatically prophetic—proclamation reported by Eckermann

resonated: “National literature does not have much to say; the epoch of world literature is at

hand, and everyone must act to hasten its advent”.28 Accordingly, German readers understood the

term as part of a diagnosis of the globalizing present.

Goethe the theorist of world literature is a product of later philological reconstruction.

Aided by a uniquely complete picture of Goethe’s life and work—Goethephilologie can be used

as shorthand for myopically detail-oriented scholarship—Fritz Strich (1882-1963) pieced

together the fragments of Goethe’s theorization of the concept alongside a study of the writer’s

engagement with non-German literary traditions.29 Strich’s 1946 Goethe und die Weltliteratur

was rooted in the upheavals of his lifetime, based on lectures he gave in London after the First

28 Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Francke, 1946), 397.

29 On Strich and the genesis of his understanding of Weltliteratur (and its divergences from Goethe’s

own), see Elizabeth Powers, “Fritz Strich and the Dilemmas of World Literature Today”, Goethe

Yearbook 26 (2019): 233-250.

14

World War, which he then reworked and expanded in the wake of the second.30 For him,

Weltliteratur was a cosmopolitan creed that Goethe embodied and held up as an example to the

present, what Strich called “an intellectual space […] in which peoples get to know and learn to

tolerate, respect, and understand each other through their literatures, and, in a common effort,

climb to higher levels of human culture”.31

Strich smoothed over and filled out Goethe’s fragmentary notes to make him a suitable

post-war emissary of international reconciliation, but he was also a careful observer of the

written record, and his study is a powerful testament to how philology can respond to the

demands of the present. While Weltliteratur had largely survived as a publishing-industry

catchall and shorthand for a global canon, Strich saw that the term coalesced in Goethe’s

writings around a series of trenchant observations on how literature crossed Europe’s national

boundaries.32 Goethe had noticed, for instance, that the transnational reception of national

traditions set off diverging processes of canon-formation, as translators and anthologizers made

selections and foreign readerships revealed their tastes.

While many students of world literature have since cited Goethe as their founding

theorist, his vision of Weltliteratur has proven a trickier fit for the present than to Strich’s

30 The material from Strich’s London lectures first appeared as “Goethes Idee einer Weltliteratur,” in Fritz

Strich, Dichtung und Zivilization (Munich: Meyer and Jessen, 1928), 58-77. 31 Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur, 7: “Wenn Goethe unter der Weltliteratur den geistigen Raum

verstand, in dem die Völker durch ihre Literaturen einander kennen, dulden, achten und verstehen lernen

und in gemeinsamer Bemühung zu höheren Stufen der menschlichen Kultur emporzusteigen suchen

[…]”. 32 On Goethe’s understanding of Weltliteratur, see Hendrik Birus, “Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur: Eine

historische Vergegenwärtigung”, in Weltliteratur heute. Konzepte und Perspektiven, ed. Manfred

Schmeling (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 5-28. On the contexts and formation of

Goethe’s concept, see Manfred Koch, Weimarer Weltbewohner: Zur Genese von Goethes Begriff

‘Weltliteratur’ (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002). On the conceptual history of Weltliteratur after Goethe, see

Peter Goßens, Weltliteratur. Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert

(Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011).

15

moment of intra-European Völkerversöhnung. For all his openness to other cultures, Goethe saw

world literature in hierarchical and teleological terms that many today would reject, and, despite

his wide-ranging literary interests, the purview of his reflections on Weltliteratur is distinctly

Western European. In fact, Goethe is explicit in stating that world literature should remain rooted

in the Western (particularly, Greek) tradition, noting in one of the aphorisms “from Makarie’s

archive”, appended to the 1829 edition of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (Wilhelm

Meisters Wanderjahre): “May the study of Greek and Roman literature always remain the basis

of higher education (Bildung)”, adding that “Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian antiquities are always

only curiosities”, which “are of little use to us in moral or aesthetic education (Bildung).”33

This exclusion is all the more noteworthy, because Goethe was responsible for one of the

first—and still one of the most insightful—reflections on the European tradition of oriental

studies: his 1819 West-Eastern Divan (West-östlicher Divan).34 The project first arose from

poems Goethe penned in response to his May 1814 reading of Joseph Hammer’s German

translation of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān.35 Goethe framed this poetic response as a kind of communion with

the Persian poet, collecting his first efforts as “Poems to Ḥāfiẓ”. While this remained a

prominent part of Goethe’s own Divan, the project soon evolved under the influence of another

work by Hammer. In December of the same year, Goethe visited the orientalist Georg Wilhelm

Lorsbach, where he read an 1811 review by Hammer in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on

33 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden (ALH) (Cotta:

Stuttgart, 1829), 23:278-279: “Möge das Studium der griechischen und römischen Literatur immerfort die

Basis der höhern Bildung bleiben”; “Chinesische, Indische, Aegyptische Alterthümer sind immer nur

Curiositäten; es ist sehr wohlgethan sich und die Welt damit bekannt zu machen; zu sittlicher und

ästhetischer Bildung aber werden sie uns wenig fruchten.” 34 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan, trans. Eric Ormsby (London: Gingko, 2019). 35 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, trans., Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis (Stuttgart: Cotta,

1812, 1814).

16

Jacob von Wallenburg’s unfinished translation of Firdousī’s Šāhnāma.36 Goethe scoured

Hammer’s review for a reading list of earlier orientalist scholarship, and in the weeks that

followed, he read his way through a number of major works of seventeenth and eighteenth-

century oriental studies. Under the influence of these readings, Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan

expanded into something more ambitious: a multi-layered poetic reflection on both the poet’s

personal encounter with the “Orient” and the orientalist tradition more broadly.

Here, Goethe employed methods akin to those of the orientalists he studied. He gathered

information, took notes, translated, delegated work to his scribes, and prepared at least one

reading in Weimar (which Charlotte von Schiller vividly described).37 Goethe worked some of

this material into the Divan, whose poems, at times, verge on exercises in poetic documentation.

Other material became the basis of the short essays which comprise the volume of “Notes and

Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan” (Noten und Abhandlungen zum

besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans) accompanying Goethe’s poems. The “Notes

and Essays” were the culmination of a series of experiments with paratexts in Goethe’s published

work, which he used to both mediate specialized knowledge to the reader and provide an outlet

for Goethe’s own meta-reflections. He had included similar notes in his translations of

Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography (1803) and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (Rameau’s Neffe,

1805), and in Winckelmann and his Century (Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, 1805), a

36 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, “Orientalische Literatur”, Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 239 (1811): 1-8;

240, 9-16. The work in question was Anton von Bianchi, ed., Notice sur le Schàh-namé de Ferdoussi, et

traduction de plusieurs pièces relatives à ce poëme. Ouvrage posthume de M. le Conseiller I. et R. de

Wallenbourg, précédé de la biographie de ce savant (Vienna: Degen, 1810).

37 On the material around Goethe’s Divan project, see Anke Bosse, “Mein Schatzkammer füllt sich

täglich”: Die Nachlaßstücke zu Goethes West-östlichem Divan, Dokumentation—Kommentar (Göttingen:

Wallstein, 1999). For Schiller’s account, see Heinrich Düntzer, Briefe von Schillers Gattin an einen

vertrauten Freund (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1856), 181.

17

collaboration with Johann Heinrich Meyer and Friedrich August Wolf which employed a

combination of documentation, historical synthesis, and short, cultural historical sketches.38 The

Divan, however, represented the most ambitious meeting of Goethe the poet and Goethe the

editor, and is one of the few (if not the only) major poetic works from the time published with an

index.

While Goethe’s Divan is often cited alongside his concept of Weltliteratur, they belonged

to distinct phases of his career, and the Divan was conspicuously absent from his later reflections

on world literature, which are largely European in their focus. We can only speculate on why

Goethe failed to connect the two. Perhaps he did and it simply fell through the cracks of the

written record. However, Goethe’s admonition from the Wanderjahre (cited above) to privilege

Greek and Roman antiquities over their Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian counterparts suggests that

the Eurocentrism of Goethe’s Weltliteratur was at least in part a reaction to the Romantic

Orientalism associated with Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1852), whose Symbolik und

Mythologie der alten Völker posited the Indian origins of Greek religion.39 Creuzer, whom

Goethe knew, had become a flashpoint of controversy, and, in a letter, Goethe once called his

Symbolik a “dark-poetic-philosophical-priestly labyrinth”.40

Creuzer and the response he provoked are a reminder that one consequence of post-

colonialism (at least in the German context) was to loosen the association between anti-humanist

38 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans., Leben des Benvenuto Cellini, 2 volumes (Tübingen: Cotta, 1803);

Goethe, trans. Rameau’s Neffe. Ein Dialog von Diderot (Leipzig: Göschen, 1805); Goethe, ed.,

Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Cotta, 1805).

39 Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 4 vols

(Leipzig and Darmstadt: Heyer and Leske, 1810-1812).

40 Cited in George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth In Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture From Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 137: “dunkel-

poetisch-philosophisch-pfäffischen Irrgang”.

18

thought and the imperative to decenter Europe. The universalism of Goethe and Strich might be

found wanting, but it can be even harder to find common ground with Eurocentrism’s most

perceptive critics. For instance, Strich’s contemporary, the Turkologist Georg Jacob (1862-

1937), whose wide-ranging study of the global diffusion of shadow theater exemplified a truly

global scholarly vision, wrote in 1928 (using the example of China) a passionate defense of the

enormity of small disciplines:

the philosophical faculty in Berlin recently decided to reject Chinese as too narrow (!) an

area for an examination subject. The Chinese language, dominant in vast regions, in

possession of a millennia-old, massive literature, which among other things teaches us

about the beginnings of humanity’s most significant inventions on which our culture rests

(paper, printing, the compass, etc.), and which sheds light on the causes of the

Völkerwanderung, […] has an eminently practical significance, in contrast to the

relatively small area of classical languages, which has been sliced up for doctoral

candidates into half a dozen disciplines (ancient history, in which one ignores both

cuneiform and hieroglyphics, ancient philosophy, in which Chinese philosophy, which is

certainly more important than that of Hylics, and the profound musings of the Indians

have been shut out, etc.).41

Jacob’s core insight is irrefutably positivist: the world is big, and the classical tradition’s place in

it shrinks under the weight of accumulated material. However, Jacob’s observations also belong

to an anti-humanist screed with clear National Socialist sympathies (he distributed the essay,

entitled “Classical Fanaticism as the Gravedigger of German Culture”, to his colleagues as a

typescript) which is in turns unhinged and appalling. Jacob cites approvingly Hitler’s party

41 Georg Jacob, “Die klassisistische Fanatismus als Totengräber deutscher Kulture”, 17 September 1928.

Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen, 4 Or. A 54, 12f: “So beschloss z.B. die Berliner philosophische Fakultät

kürzlich, das Chinesische als ein zu enges (!) Gebiet als Prüfungsfach abzulehnen. Das Chinesische, in

gewaltigen Gebieten herrschend, im Besitz einer vieltausendjährigen Riesenliteratur, die unter anderem

uns über die Anfänge der wichtigsten Erfindungen der Menschheit, auf welchen unsere Kultur beruht

(Papier, Buchdruck, Kompass etc.) belehrt, die über die Ursachen des grössten historischen Ereignisses,

das unsere modernen Kulturnationen schuf, die Völkerwanderung Aufschluss gibt, hat im Gegensatz zu

dem verhältnismāssig winzigen Gebiet der klassischen Sprachen, die für Doktoranden in etwa 1/2

Dutzend Fächer zerschnitten werden (alte Geschichte, bei der man Keilschrift und Hieroglyphen ignoriert,

alte Philosophie, bei der die chinesische, die sicher bedeutender als die der Hyliker ist, und das tiefsinnige

Grübeln der Inder ausschaltet etc.) auch eine eminent praktische Bedeutung.”

19

program, compares the Latinate jargon of the learned to the Yiddish of Eastern European Jews,

and sneers about whether future generations will marvel in museums at the pants buttons of the

French-African occupation forces.42 This was more than historical coincidence. Crankish

ethnonationalism and the critique of Eurocentrism formed an ideological constellation, with

precedents in Goethe’s time and a place within the academy by the early twentieth century (one

might also think of pioneering Vienna art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941)).43

I propose that we abandon Strich’s project of recovery. Goethe may have coined the term,

but his theorization of Weltliteratur was belated and incomplete, and its scope was limited even

within the context of Goethe’s late work. Rather than try to discover, complete, and correct a

better Goethean Weltliteratur, this dissertation proposes that we follow his Divan and move

backwards in time, through Goethe’s informants and their own sources. To do so would take us

back, not to the first orientalists, but to their Ottoman teachers. This is where my dissertation

begins.

Chapter one follows how sixteenth-century Ottoman philology became seventeenth-

century oriental studies through the example of a single work, the Gulistān of Saʿdī. Ottomans

read the Gulistān through commentaries that both explained the meaning of the text and parsed

its grammar. The orientalist discovery of this earlier exegetical tradition drove the study of

Persian literature throughout Europe. The Gulistān was read, translated, and retranslated

throughout the seventeenth century in a variety of contexts and configurations, and the Gulistān

manuscripts that passed through the hands of orientalists and their amanuenses registered a

42 Georg Jacob, “Die klassisistische Fanatismus”, 9, 22, 10, respectively. 43 On Strzygowski, see Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 403-410.

20

growing orientation toward Ottoman philology. Here, we see the emergence of a new kind of

scholar, one who pursued advanced studies in Istanbul and used Ottoman learning to forge their

own scholarly careers.

Chapter two charts the unexpected consequences of language learning. As Western

European states sought to negotiate and do business with the Ottoman Empire, they grappled

with how best to train interpreters able to speak, read, and write in Turkish. Diplomatic language

schools founded by Western European states solved this problem only gradually, through trial

and error, rivalry and emulation, driven by an insight into the formative power of philology. To

learn Turkish, students read, translated, and compiled texts. In the process, language schools

shaped distinct forms of orientalist self-understanding and produced generations of diplomat-

scholars who were anchored in the Ottoman context in which they worked and studied. One of

these, Joseph von Hammer, wrote the translation that inspired Goethe’s Divan.

Chapter three looks at the practices of scholarly information management that shaped

orientalist reading and drove the formation of modern academic oriental philology. The chapter

first traces the upheavals in the practice of orientalist scholarship at the end of the seventeenth

century, in the wake of major acquisitions of Islamic manuscripts from Istanbul and the mass

looting of Ottoman European libraries after 1683. It then focuses on the career of the eighteenth

century’s most celebrated Western European Arabist, Johann Jacob Reiske. Reiske, although he

worked with manuscripts from Ottoman collections, represented a break from Ottoman

scholarship. Working only through a single language, Arabic, Reiske constructed an elaborate

information system for reading, a paper machine to retrieve information about texts and produce

philological editions.

21

Finally, a conclusion reflects on the problem of the historicity of material and intellectual

mediation in early modern world literature.

22

CHAPTER ONE

OTTOMAN PHILOLOGY AND THE GULISTĀN’S ORIENTALIST READERS

Introduction

In the seventeenth century, European orientalists first collected, read, and translated

Saʿdī’s Gulistān, a work of singular importance in the history of Persian literature. Completed in

1258 and composed in alternating prose and verse, the Gulistān comprises an author’s preface

and eight books of stories that illustrate moral and ethical conduct.1 By the time European

orientalists began working their way through its pages nearly four hundred years later, it already

belonged among the world’s most popular works of literature, and Gulistān manuscripts had

been read, copied, translated, and glossed over a vast and culturally diverse expanse, from India

to Eastern Europe.

The continuity between this earlier transnational reception of Persian literature and its

nascent study among orientalists in the seventeenth century is the subject of this essay. In one

view, the Gulistān’s new Western European readers and translators were pioneers. They had no

comprehensive dictionaries or grammars of Persian at their disposal, and found no professors

1 On Saʿdī, see Henri Massé, Essai sur le poète Saadi (Paris: Geuthner, 1919), and A.J. Arberry, Classical

Persian Literature (London: Routledge, 1958), 186-213.

23

trained in the language who could teach them. Yet, historians have often noted that Ottoman

books sat on the shelves of these early Persianists, and, indeed, by the time orientalists turned

their attention to the language, there was already a tradition of advanced study of Persian and its

literature by non-native speakers, written in Turkish and Arabic (sometimes by Europeans) in the

Ottoman Empire. Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, in their exemplary study of André Du

Ryer, captured this point succinctly: the first orientalist readers of Persian “followed in the

footsteps of the Turks.”2 However, there is as yet no comprehensive account of the orientalists’

debt to their Ottoman predecessors.

This absence is all the more acute because historians, in recent years, have offered new

insight into the practice of early modern orientalist scholarship.3 As the everyday of orientalist

scholarship comes into view, so does the orientalist’s place on the outskirts of Ottoman

philology. Personal connections between orientalists and Ottoman scholars are one part of this

story, but lines of influence were built into the very materials of scholarly production. By the

turn of the seventeenth century, the conduits that brought Arabic, Turkish, and Persian

manuscripts from throughout Asia and North Africa to the centers of Ottoman power—where

they were collected, annotated, catalogued and translated—sprung a leak. Western European

scholars and diplomats shipped off hundreds of manuscripts, turning libraries in places like

Oxford and Leiden into peripheral depots of Ottoman knowledge.

2 Hamilton and Richard, André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies, 75.

3 To name only a few, Asaph Ben Tov, “The Academic Study of Arabic in Seventeenth- and Early

Eighteenth-Century Protestant Germany”, History of Universities 28 (2015): 93-135; Bevilacqua, The

Republic of Arabic Letters; Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009) and Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth

Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

24

The orientalists who collected and read these manuscripts brought their own aims and

interests. Some saw prospects of an academic career, while others hoped to recover ancient

knowledge or church history. However, these new storehouses of Ottoman knowledge made their

own demands. Manuscripts drew attention to particular works, guided interpretation, and

rewarded an orientation toward the combined study of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, and,

particularly, the mastery of Turkish as a language of scholarship. They also made a strong case

for the study of Persian and its literature, teaching knowledge of its structure and admiration for

its beauties. The first decades of orientalist study of Persian, then, represent a pertinent test case

for a broader question about orientalism's place in the global study of philology.

Research on early modern manuscript collections and manuscript practices offers a way

of approaching this question. Orientalists might be best remembered today for the portion of

their scholarship that passed into print, but they lived, as a rule, in a world of manuscripts, and

the careful study of these objects affords a fuller view into the history of orientalist scholarship.

Accordingly, in past decades, historians and manuscript specialists have studied early collections

of oriental manuscripts in their historical, intellectual, and political contexts.4 More recently,

efforts to survey manuscript ownership across collections promise a new bibliographic

foundation for the study of early modern orientalism, allowing historians to ground broad claims

4 Some of these studies focus on particular collections. See, for instance, Jan Just Witkam, Jacobus Golius (1596-1667) en zijn Handschriften (Leiden: Brill, 1980), and Boris Liebrenz, Arabische, persische

und türkische Handschriften in Leipzig: Geschichte ihrer Sammlung und Erschließung von den Anfängen

bis zu Karl Vollers (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2008), and Jan Schmidt, The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History and Orientalism, 1500-1800 (Istanbul: Isis, 2002).

Others focus on the work of individual orientalists with close attention to their manuscripts and working

practices. See, in particular, Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, and Hamilton and Richard, André Du Ryer

and Oriental Studies.

25

about its development, geography, and periodization in terms of a large corpus of manuscript

sources.5

The work of sorting out provenance, identifying and dating readers’ marks, and

reconstructing the manuscript sources used by orientalists promises to revise our broader

understanding of early modern oriental studies in two ways. First, the study of manuscripts

clarifies the place of orientalist scholarship in a broader transnational history of philological

study. The seventeenth-century Turkish scholar Kātib Çelebi was no more “native” to the world

of early Arabic literature than the orientalists who read his foundational bibliography, and the

practice of bridging cultural and temporal distance, of glossing antiquated words, collecting

useful information for the study of the past, and learning languages as a non-native speaker, was

already an integral part of the manuscript traditions that European orientalists inherited and

relied upon. Second, these sources illuminate the “how” of orientalist scholarship. Without the

granular view of scholarly practices afforded by the study of notebooks and annotated

manuscripts, the scholar’s knowledge of foreign languages can appear as disembodied and

abstract fact, and the record of their studies a mere parade of titles, without consideration of the

traditions and material contexts they inhabited. Even the papers of minor orientalists can show us

the texture of the orientalist’s everyday scholarly experience and chart the innovations and shifts

in the character of this work that passed through friends, rivals, and mentors.

In the case of the Gulistān, these sources demonstrate how the orientalist study of the

text—and Western European Persian studies more broadly—emerged directly from the earlier

transcultural reception of Persian literature, and in particular from sixteenth-century Ottoman

5 Notably, the Bibliotheca Arabica project at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, and the ERC

Synergy project The European Qurʾan: Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion, 1150-1850.

26

philology.6 In charting the transformation that made Ottoman knowledge the foundation of

Western European Persian studies, I proceed chronologically, following orientalists as they

attempted to read and translate Saʿdī’s Gulistān. The core of this essay reconstructs a group of

related efforts to study Persian literature which followed the movement of Ottoman

commentaries and Persian speaking amanuenses to centers of orientalist study in Western

Europe around 1640, and which culminated in the publication of the first printed edition and

complete Western European translation of the Gulistān: Georg Gentius’s 1651 Rosarium

politicum.7 In this light, one could speak of the first efforts to read and translate Persian literature

in Western Europe as a discovery of Ottoman scholarship, rather than a “discovery of Persian”.8

This chapter will also sketch out the development of Persian studies in the wake of

Gentius’s translation. If the decades that preceded the publication of the Rosarium politicum

were marked by a dawning awareness of and engagement with Ottoman scholarship, the century

that followed, I suggest, saw the Latin Gulistān employed in a broader study of manuscript

sources on the work. Far from replacing non-Western European manuscript sources, the

Rosarium politicum offered a roadmap for their study, and centered a practice of reading the

printed Latin translation alongside manuscripts and commentaries that registered the shifting

6 In particular, the sources of D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale have been the subject of a number of

studies, most recently, Bevilacqua, “How to Organise the Orient”. Historians and literary scholars have

also discussed particular examples of the use of Ottoman commentaries by translators from Persian (the

focus of much of this essay). See Murat Umut Inan, “Crossing Interpretive Boundaries in Sixteenth-

Century Istanbul: Aḥmed Sūdī on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz”, Philological Encounters 3 (2018): 275-

309, and Hendrik Birus, “Goethe’s Approximation of the Ghazal and its Consequences”, in Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre, eds Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth

(Beirut, Lebanon & Würzburg, Germany: Ergon Verlag, 2005): 415-429.

7 Georg Gentius, trans., Musladini Sadi Rosarium politicum, sive amoenum sortis humanae theatrum

(Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1651).

8 J.T.P. de Bruijn, De ontdekking van het Perzisch: Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar in de cultuurgeschiedenis van Iran sedert de komst van de Islam aan de

Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden op vrijdag 9 maart 1990 (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, 1990).

27

global context of orientalist scholarship, most notably the growing significance of colonial India

and the eventual globalization of print over the course of the nineteenth century.

The Ottoman Tradition of Persian Studies

The European study of Persian has its origin in Istanbul. Murat Inan recently framed the

tradition of Ottoman Persian studies that flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth century in terms

of “imperial ambitions and mystical aspirations”.9 The Persian literary model formed part of

Ottoman imperial identity, and knowledge of Persian was essential to the “hybrid language of

Rum” that constituted good chancery style.10 Sultans and scholars wrote Persian and heavily

Persianate poetry, and the works of Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ were read at the palace school.11 At the same

9 Murat Umut Inan, “Imperial Ambitions, Mystical Aspirations: Persian Learning in the Ottoman World”,

in The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, ed. Nile Green (Oakland:

University of California Press, 2019), 75-92. The following account of Ottoman Persian studies is largely

indebted to Inan’s essays. For a broad survey of the Turkish reception of Persian literature in the

preceding centuries, see Ahmet Kartal, Şiraz’dan Istanbul’a: Türk-Fars Kültür Coǧrafyası Üzerine

Araştırmalar (Istanbul: Kurtuba Kitap, 2011). On the question of Ottoman imitation, see Murat Umut

Inan, “Rethinking the Ottoman Imitation of Persian Poetry”, Iranian Studies 50, no. 5 (2017): 672-689.

10 Inan, “Imperial Ambitions, Mystical Aspirations”, 78.

11 This was observed by Wojciech Bobowski in his account of Topkapı. Albertus Bobovius [Wojciech

Bobowski], Topkapi: Relation du sérail du Grand Seigneur, eds Annie Berthier and Stéphane Yerasimos

(Arles: Acte Sud, 1999), 133. This is actually an edition of a French-language palace account (Paris,

Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter: BnF), NAF 4997) under the name of the French ambassador,

Pierre de Girardin, which was largely adapted from Bobowski’s account. It is likely that the works

Bobowski mentions were, in fact, Turkish commentaries, since they are cited alongside two

lexicographical works for beginning Persian learners, the Kitāb-i Dānistan and the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī. On

Bobowski, see Hannah Neudecker, “From Istanbul to London? Albertus Bobovius’ Appeal to Isaac

Basire”, in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, eds Alastair Hamilton, Maurits van den Boogert, and

Bart Westerweel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 173-196, and Hannah Neudecker, “Wojciech Bobowski and his

Turkish Grammar (1666): A Dragoman and Musician at the Court of Sultan Meḥmed IV”, Dutch Studies-

NELL 2 (1996): 169-192.

28

time, Persian was an important language of Sufism (taṣawwuf), encompassing the various

traditions of mystical thought whose orders and lodges played an important role in Ottoman

intellectual life and where Persian was the language of Rūmī’s Masnavī and the works of

Ǧāmī.12

As professors in the empire’s madrasas and as teachers at court, Ottoman Persianists—

who wrote the dictionaries, glossaries, and commentaries later used by Western European

orientalists—moved between these two worlds. Şāhidī Ibrahim Dede (1470-1550), who penned a

popular Turkish-Persian rhyming dictionary called the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī (The Gift of Şāhidī) was a

Sufi sheikh.13 The renown won by Lüṭfullah Ḥalīmī (d. c.1497), who compiled the first

comprehensive Persian-Turkish dictionary, secured him a position as a tutor at the Ottoman

court. The great commentary writer Musliḥüddin Sürūrī (1491-1562), also known for his Persian

poetics, the Bahrü’l-Maʿārif (Sea of Knowledge), was a medrese professor, the tutor of

Suleyman I’s eldest son, Şehzāde Mustafa (1515-1553), and the member of a naqshbandi order.

The most important commentary writer after Sürūrī, Aḥmed Sūdī (d. 1600), whose work

undergirded much of the seventeenth-century Western European reception of Persian literature,

taught the select slave boys (gılmān-i ḫāṣṣa) at the Ibrahim Pasa palace school.14

In the Ottoman—and, later, Western European—study of Persian, commentaries were

central to language learning and the interpretation of literary texts. These commentaries

12 On the Ottoman reception of Ǧāmī, see Francis Richard, “Un cas de ‘succès littéraire’: la diffusion des

oeuvres poétiques de Djâmî de Hérât”, in Le Livre Persan (Paris, 2003), 66-77

13 On Ibrahim Dede, see Yusuf Öz, Tarih Boyunca Farsça-Türkçe Sözlükler (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu

Yayınları, 2010): 138-145, and Öz, Tuhfe-i Şahidi Şerḥleri (Konya: Selçuk Üniversitesi, 1999). The

European reception of the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī is briefly discussed below.

14 On Sūdī and his commentaries, see Murat Umut Inan, “Writing a Grammatical Commentary on Hafiz

of Shiraz: A Sixteenth-century Ottoman Scholar on the Divan of Hafiz” (PhD diss., University of

Washington, 2012).

29

proceeded line by line, offering a translation of each passage alongside glosses of individual

words, discussion of variants, refutations of earlier readings, and occasional digressions on

points of interest or relevant intertexts.15 Commentaries varied in style and language. Sürūrī

wrote in Arabic, and his concision and attention to manuscript variants later endeared him to

nineteenth-century German philologists.16 Şemʿī (d. 1591/1592) wrote in Turkish and was

attentive to the mystical significance of his texts.17 Sūdī, who also wrote in Turkish, was

renowned for his precise grammatical explanations and his numerous refutations of earlier

readers.18 The Gulistān in particular was a frequent object among Ottoman commentary writers,

first in a 1504 commentary on its preface by Lāmiʿī Çelebi (d. 1532).19 Later, Yaʿḳub bin Seyyid

ʿAlī (d. 1524-1525) wrote a commentary of the entire work in Arabic, followed by Sürūrī’s

Arabic commentary in 1550. The second half of the century saw three Turkish commentaries: by

Şemʿī, Sūdī, and Kefevī Hüseyin Çelebi.

These commentaries formed part of a diverse spectrum of Gulistān manuscripts from the

Ottoman Empire, the full variety of which can be found in the libraries of later orientalists. By

15 Inan provides English translations for the beginnings of Sūdī, Sürūrī, and Şemʿi’s Ḥāfiẓ commentaries

in Inan, Writing a Grammatical Commentary on Hafiz of Shiraz, 133-149.

16 Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1869) wrote of Sürūrī, comparing his commentary with the 1828 Calcutta

edition, that “ses explications, qui suivent le texte pas à pas, sont en général plus exactes et plus

complètes que celles de l’édition de Calcutta, et se distinguent en même temps par une plus grande

concision de style.” Saʿdī, Le Boustân de Saʿdī, ed. Karl Heinrich Graf (Vienna: Imprimerie impériale,

1858). On Sürūrī, see İsmail Güleç, “Gelibolulu Musluhiddin Sürûri, Hayatı, Kisiliği, Eserleri ve Bahrü’l-

Maârif isimli eseri”, Osmanli Araştırmaları: The Journal of Ottoman Studies 21 (2001): 211-236, and

Güleç, “Sürûrî, Muslihuddin Mustafa”, in TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 38 (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet

Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi Genel Müdürlüğü, 1988-), 170-172.

17 See Şeyda Öztürk, Şem’i Efendi ve Mesnevi Şehri (Istanbul: ISAM, 2011).

18 On Sūdī, see Inan, “Writing a Grammatical Commentary on Hafiz of Shiraz”, and Nazif M. Hoca,

Sudi: Hayatı, Eserleri, ve İlk Risalesi’nin metni (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1980). 19 On Lāmiʿī Çelebi, see Günay Kut Alpay, “Lam’i Chelebi and His Works”, Journal of Near Eastern

Studies 35, no. 2 (Apr. 1976): 73-93.

30

the seventeenth century, the Gulistān had been translated several times into Turkish.20 Interlinear

translations glossed Saʿdī’s text word for word (the French diplomat and orientalist André Du

Ryer (1580-1660) likely used such a manuscript in writing the first partial Western European

translation of the work).21 Ottoman scholars and scribes also annotated Gulistān manuscripts in a

variety of ways, with notes ranging from the occasional gloss to elaborate annotations and

excerpts from commentaries. These annotated manuscripts sometimes record the work of a

single scholar pulling material from multiple sources as they copy the work. This is the case in

the sixteenth-century Ottoman Gulistān which Jacob Golius (1597-1667) carefully read and

collated.22 Other manuscripts register the additions of generations of readers, accumulating new

glosses and notes on the margins. Mindful of this tradition, some orientalists added their own

Turkish, Persian, and Arabic notes, as Georg Gentius (1618-1687) did in his copy of the work,

where we find his Turkish marginalia.23

This variety was the norm. Not one early modern orientalist read the Gulistān on the

pristine pages of an unannotated manuscript. Indeed, commentaries and annotations formed the

foundation of how orientalists understood the text. Without the benefit of comprehensive

20 On Turkish translations of the Gulistān, see Fatma Büyükkarcı Yılmaz, “On Gulistan’s Turkish

(Re)translations: A Chronological Survey Through Paratextual Data”, in Studies from a Retranslation

Culture: The Turkish Context, eds Özlem Berk Albachten and Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar (Singapore:

Springer, 2019), 11-26. The first Turkish Gulistān translation was completed in 793/1391 by Seyf-i

Sarāyī. See András Bodrogligeti, A Fourteenth Century Turkic Translation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān (Sayf-i

Sarāyī’s Gulistān Bi’t-Turkī) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University; The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1973).

Other Turkish translations of the Gulistān before the eighteenth century were: Sibīcābī (1397-1398),

Manyasoǧlu (1430), Zaīfī’s verse translation in the sixteenth century, and the translation of Hocazade

Esad Efendi in the early seventeenth century.

21 André Du Ryer, trans., Gulistan ou l’Empire des roses, by Saʿdī (Paris: Sommaville, 1634). The

manuscript du Ryer likely worked with is BnF, ms Turc 272.

22 Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden (hereafter: UBL), ms or. 242.

23 Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (hereafter: SLUB), ms Ea.

228.

31

dictionaries or translations in Western European languages, orientalists relied on earlier Turkish

and Arabic-language exegesis. When early modern orientalists read the Gulistān, they read

looking over the shoulders of the Ottoman scholars.

The Beginnings of Persian Studies in Non-Ottoman Europe

This holds for the orientalist study of Persian more broadly. While they were rarely cited, works

of Ottoman scholarship permeated the first centuries of Persian studies in non-Ottoman Europe.

Orientalists used them to learn the language, read literature, identify manuscripts, and translate.

No work’s reception better illustrates this shared tradition than the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī, a common

Persian-Turkish verse dictionary that served as a standard introduction to Persian vocabulary for

generations of Ottoman readers. The sheer number of annotated copies in Western European

collections attests to both its ready availability and its popularity among orientalists. A Tuḥfe-i

Şāhidī (Figure 1) from the library of Sebastian Tengnagel (1563-1636) contains the Vienna

librarian’s careful, immaculate hand alongside the sprawling and messy transliterated notes of

the Coptic interpreter and language teacher, Yūsuf ibn Abū Daqn or Josephus Barbatus.24 The

notes of Levinus Warner (1618-1665) show the German orientalist carefully studying the Tuḥfe-i

Şāhidī in Istanbul.25 Among the manuscripts he acquired in the Ottoman capital, the French

24 Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (hereafter: SUBG), ms Pers. 4. I identified Barbatus’s

hand on the basis of a comparison with a letter signed by him in Tengnagel’s correspondence (Vienna,

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (hereafter: ÖNB), Cod. 9737t, f.1r-2v). On Barbatus, see Alastair

Hamilton, “An Egyptian Traveller in the Republic of Letters: Josephus Barbatus or Abudacnus the Copt”,

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 123-150.

25 Warner’s notes on the work are found among the still unorganized remnants of his Persian studies,

collected in UBL, ms or. 1118.

32

orientalist Antoine Galland’s (1646-1715) annotated copy of the work includes a note on its

purchase which he rendered in nine languages (Figure 2).26 Later the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī was even

refashioned for pedagogical purposes. When the study of Turkish was first institutionalized in

the École des jeunes de langues in Istanbul and Paris, students worked together to transform the

Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī into an introductory language primer for French students.27 Similarly, a copy with

Latin annotations can be found among the manuscripts of Vienna’s Oriental Academy.28 Rarely

cited in print, but ubiquitous in practice, the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī illuminates the Ottoman everyday of

orientalist scholarship.

26 BnF, Turc 210. These languages are French, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic,

and Persian.

27 This work exists in two copies: BnF, Supplément Turc 902 and BnF, Supplément Turc 903.

28 Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien (hereafter: HHStA), ms Or HS 22f.

33

Figure 1. SUBG, ms Pers. 4, 1v: Tengnagel’s copy of the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī with the annotations of Josephus

Barbatus.

34

Figure 2. BnF, ms Turc 210, Iv: Galland recorded his acquisition of his copy of the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī in nine

languages.

35

For more than a century, the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī, alongside similar dictionaries, was the

common gate through which both Ottoman and Western European scholars of Persian passed,

but how did orientalists find their way around the rest of the Ottoman tradition? At first, they did

so only tentatively, and with little orientation. One of the first Western European scholars to

follow a program of studying Persian was the director of the Medici Oriental Press Giovanni

Battista Raimondi (c. 1536-1614), and he worked squarely from the Ottoman tradition. He wrote

a grammar on the basis of the work of a near contemporary Ottoman scholar, Leālī Aḥmed

Çelebi, and compiled lexicographical material from a number of Turkish-Persian dictionaries and

wordlists.29

After Raimondi, the next orientalist to approach Persian through Ottoman sources was

Sebastian Tengnagel, the librarian of Vienna’s Imperial Library from 1608 to 1636, and his

manuscripts show the demands of approaching an unknown literature through an intermediary

language.30 Tengnagel’s Persian studies were a byproduct of war.31 He read with looted

manuscripts, on one of which his friend Job Hartmann Enenkel had written simply that he “saved

this book from destruction”.32 He also employed an Ottoman prisoner, Ibrāhīm Dervīs, as his

29 On Raimondi’s Persian studies, see, Angelo Michele Piemontese, “The Emergence of Persian

Grammar and Lexicography in Rome”, Rivista degli studi orientali 83, no. 1/4 (2010): 399-415.

Piemontese discusses Raimondi’s Turkish sources on 404-407. I have not yet seen Raimondi’s

manuscripts in Florence. A Nisāb al-Ṣibyān with Raimondi’s notes is now BnF, ms Supplément Persan

941. Two important travelers and collectors, Giovan Battista Vecchietti (1552-1619) and Gerolamo

Vecchietti (1557-1636), should also be mentioned. On the Vecchietti brothers, see Francis Richard, “Les

frères Vecchietti, diplomates, érudits et aventuriers”, in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, eds

Hamilton, van den Boogert, and Westerweel, 11-26.

30 In my discussion of Tengnagel, I am indebted to the generosity and expertise of Hülya Çelik.

31 This remained an important feature of oriental studies through the end of the seventeenth century, when

German orientalists worked from looted manuscripts carried west from newly conquered Ottoman cities

after the 1683 Siege of Vienna.

32 ÖNB, ms A.F. 175: “hunc librum ab interitu vindicavit”.

36

scribe.33 Ibrāhīm Dervīs copied manuscripts that Tengnagel borrowed through his connections

with other orientalists in the Republic of Letters, most famously Guillaume Postel’s copy of Abū

al-Fidāʾ’s Taqwīm al-Buldān (then in Heidelberg, but later in the Vatican, having been itself

looted in war).34 We find the best evidence of Tengnagel’s Persian studies in another

commission for Ibrāhīm Dervīs: a copy of the Persian-Turkish dictionary of Emīr Hüseyin el-

Ayāsī, from a manuscript in Scaliger’s collection in Leiden.35 Tengnagel added Latin definitions

for most of the dictionary’s words. On the manuscript’s flyleaf, Tengnagel remarked on his

collaboration with Ibrāhīm Dervīs, noting that the dictionary was produced “as much as was

possible through an interpreter nearly ignorant of my language, translated over about forty five

days with a hurried pen.”36

33 See Claudia Römer, “An Ottoman Copyist Working for Sebastian Tengnagel, Librarian at the Vienna

Hofbibliothek, 1608-1636”, in Essays on Ottoman Civilization: Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the

CIEPO [Comité International d’Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes] (Archív Orientální, Supplementa

VIII) (1998): 330-349.

34 This manuscript had a long and complicated history that winds through the history of early modern

oriental studies. After Postel’s manuscript was taken to Italy, the Tübingen orientalist Wilhelm Schickard

copied Tengnagel’s manuscript, which he partially translated. At the same time Abraham Ecchellensis

translated part of the Postel manuscript. His translation was later published in Melchisédech Thévenot’s

Relations de divers voyages curieux: “Les Climats Alhend et Alsend de la Geographie d’Abulfeda; traduit

d’un Manuscrit Arabe du Vatican”, in Relations de divers voyages curieux, qui n'ont point esté publiées

ou qui ont esté traduites d'Hacluyt, de Purchas et d'autres voyageurs anglois, hollandois, portugais, allemands, espagnols et de quelques persans, arabes et autres auteurs orientaux (Paris: Langlois, 1666).

Thevenot also arranged for the acquisition of Schickard’s copy of Tengnagel’s manuscript (with the help

of none other than Leibniz). Nicholas Dew has carefully reconstructed Thévenot’s efforts to edit Abū al-

Fidā” (in Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, 107-130). Meanwhile John Greaves, who consulted and

collated Postel’s manuscript in the Vatican, began but ultimately abandoned a translation, noting that the

work was less precise than its reputation suggested. Interest in the now storied manuscript continued into

the eighteenth century. The Dresden librarian and orientalist, Sigismund Seebisch, copied Schickard’s

manuscript when he was in Paris in the 1690s (now SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 379).

35 ÖNB, ms A.F. 26. Scaliger’s manuscript is now UBL, ms or. 227. The dictionary of Ayāsī is based on

the dictionary of Nīʿmetullāh. I am thankful to Hülya Çelik for drawing my attention to this manuscript.

36 ÖNB, ms A.F. 26. “a me quantum per interpretem licuit mei idiomatis quasi ignarum, subito atque

festinante calamo intra XLV plus minus dies Latine versum.”

37

Tengnagel knew of the Gulistān’s importance, but even with his collection of

manuscripts and the help of Ibrāhīm Dervīs, he lacked the resources to read and understand the

work. He did acquire multiple copies of both the Gulistān and the Būstān as well as several

Gulistān glossaries.37 However, besides a few annotations in one of the glossaries and in the

story headings in a Būstān manuscript, there is little indication that Tengnagel studied either

text.38 He does not appear to have read them, even selectively, and he did not own any

commentaries or translations for either work.39 Tengnagel never seems to have made the leap to

reading Persian literature. Tengnagel’s copy of the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī, the most common Ottoman

introduction to Persian, is illustrative. We find it full of the notes of Josephus Barbatus, but

Tengnagel himself only went to so far as to record his name and the title of the work.40

In venturing down the paths already laid out by Ottoman scholarship, and despite their

limited accomplishments, Tengnagel and Raimondi represented a distinct approach that later

scholars would follow and improve upon. Tengnagel and Ibrāhīm Dervīs’s translation of the

Luġat-i Ayasī was one of the first major efforts to disentangle the knot of Ottoman lexicography,

the various Persian-Turkish, Persian-Arabic, and Turkish-Arabic dictionaries which, over the

course of the seventeenth century, formed the basis of foundational works of orientalist

37 The Gulistān copies from Tengnagel’s collection are now ÖNB, mss A.F. 316, 416, and 451. The

Būstān manuscripts are mss A.F. 187 and 404. The two Gulistān glossaries are mss A.F. 320c and 466c.

38 The headers are glossed in ÖNB, ms A.F. 404 and the glossary with notes from Tengnagel is ms A.F.

320c.

39 Similar annotations indicating selective reading of headings can be found in ÖNB, ms A.F., 21.

40 SUBG, ms Pers. 4.

38

lexicography.41 His acquisition of two Gulistān glossaries also show him approaching Saʿdī’s

text through the Ottoman tradition, even if they were ultimately of little help. Tengnagel and

Raimondi began following the trails of Ottoman scholarship; they simply did not make it very

far. Ultimately, they were ill equipped, with limited knowledge of Ottoman bibliography, Arabic,

or Turkish.

Du Ryer and the French Orientalists

Travel was one way to overcome this steep linguistic barrier. In the first decades of the

seventeenth century, the establishment of permanent diplomatic relations between Western

European powers and the Ottoman Empire and direct patronage of language learning within

diplomatic networks produced scholars better prepared for Tengnagel’s course of study. One in

particular can be considered Western Europe’s first proper Persianist: Andre Du Ryer, who

served as a diplomat in Istanbul and Alexandria and penned the first partial Western European

translation of the Gulistān, into French, published in 1634.42 Du Ryer’s biography and his

41 Similar efforts to extract a comprehensive dictionary from the available Ottoman dictionaries continued

throughout the following generations. Golius’s Persian-Latin and Turkish-Latin dictionaries were one

important step. Theodor Petraeus’s heavily annotated Ottoman dictionaries and lexicographical notebooks

are a somewhat less organized effort to solve the same problem, as is Wojciech Bobowski’s Turkish

translation of the Janua linguarum reserata (now BnF, ms Turc 216). Ultimately, it was Meninski who

first succeeded. His Lexicon Arabico-Persico-Turcicum remained the standard Turkish dictionary into the

nineteenth century and is still used today. However, while it does bill itself as a “Arabic-Turkish-Persian”

dictionary, its Persian vocabulary was not comprehensive enough to form a strong basis for reading

Persian literature. This is one reason why the dictionary was revised at the end of the eighteenth century

by the students and instructors at Vienna Oriental Academy. For the new edition of the dictionary, they

incorporate words from the Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī, a Persian-Turkish dictionary from the turn of the eighteenth

century that was among the first works printed in Müteferriḳa’s press.

42 Du Ryer, trans., Gulistan ou l’Empire des roses.

39

manuscripts show that this was made possible by a distinctly Ottoman course of study, following

the example of his mentor and patron François Savary de Brèves, who in 1615 sent him to Egypt

to study Turkish and Arabic.43 A manuscript, now in the BnF, suggests that Savary de Brèves

might have also modeled for Du Ryer the study of Persian through Ottoman Turkish sources.

Here, an Ottoman scribe copied for Savary de Brèves a common Persian-Turkish wordlist

(Kitāb-i Dānistan) into two columns, alongside which were added French and Latin definitions

(Figure 3).44 Returning to France in 1621, Du Ryer was soon sent back with an appointment as

French vice-consul in Alexandria, where, after conflicts with the French merchants in Egypt, he

was recalled in 1626 and made royal interpreter instead.45 His Turkish grammar was published in

1630, and in the following year he accompanied the new ambassador, Henri de Gournay, comte

de Marcheville, to Istanbul.46 There, as in Egypt, he had the opportunity to collect the

43 On Savary de Brèves, see Alastair Hamilton, “François Savary de Brèves”, in Christian-Muslim

Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 9, eds David Thomas and John Chesworth (Leiden: Brill,

2017), 415-422.

44 BnF, ms Persan 208. The manuscript is linked to Savary de Brèves in Hamilton and Richard, André Du

Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France, 74.

45 The reason for Du Ryer’s recall remain unclear. Hamilton and Richard speculate that Du Ryer’s youth

and inexperience, as well as his generally high-handed and punitive treatment of the French merchants (at

one point he felt compelled to have a group of merchants in Alexandria sign a letter attesting that Du Ryer

had merely threatened to beat the merchants and had not, in fact, laid a hand on them), might have

rendered Du Ryer so unpopular that his continued occupation of the position of vice-consul was

untenable. See Hamilton and Richard, André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century

France, 27 and 130 (for a transcription of the Alexandrian merchants’ letter).

46 André Du Ryer, Rudimenta grammatices linguae Turcicae. Quibus eius praecipuae difficultates ita

explanantur, ut facile possint a quolibet superari (Paris: Vitray, 1630).

40

manuscripts that would form the basis of his pioneering French translations of the Gulistān and

the Qurʾan (1647).47

Figure 3. Bnf, ms Persan 208, 1r: Savary de Brèves’s Kitāb-i Dānistan.

47 Hamilton and Richard emphasize the correspondence between the identified Du Ryer manuscripts and

his publications, in contrast to orientalists like Golius (who traveled and collected in Morocco and the

Levant in the 1620s), who collected more broadly and on a greater scale. Alastair Hamilton and Francis

Richard identified more than fifty manuscripts from Du Ryer’s library. See Hamilton and Richard, André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France, 39-40. The identified manuscripts are

listed on pages 159-174.

41

Figure 4. BnF, ms Turc 272, 1r: A Turkish interlinear translation of the Gulistān that was owned by Andre

Du Ryer.

42

Du Ryer’s translation practices are difficult to reconstruct. His marginalia are rare and

there are no surviving drafts of the translations. Still, Hamilton and Richard have given a

remarkably full portrait of his scholarship by identifying manuscripts linked to Du Ryer and

comparing these sources with his published work. These manuscripts suggest a scholar who

worked first from Turkish, with a strong enough foundation in Arabic to read the Qurʾan through

Arabic-language commentaries. In his study of Persian, he would have been dependent on

Turkish translations, commentaries, and dictionaries. For his translation of the Gulistān,

Hamilton and Richard have identified four Gulistān manuscripts that Du Ryer “almost certainly

used for his work”.48 Still, these manuscripts lack clear evidence of Du Ryer’s reading or

translation practices, and there is no sign that he compared them. One manuscript stands out as a

probable candidate: BnF, ms Turc 272, a Turkish interlinear translation with additional Arabic

glosses and notes (Figure 4). Turc 272 contains Du Ryer’s ownership inscription and, while we

don’t find his marginalia, it would have provided the best guide among the identified

manuscripts to the meaning of Saʿdī’s original.

Du Ryer wasn’t the only student of the Ottomans in France, but rather at the forefront of

a broader French encounter with Ottoman scholars and scholarship that first took form around

Marcheville’s departure for Istanbul in 1631.49 This owed in part to the input of Nicolas-Claude

Fabri de Pereisc (1580-1637), who collected information about the Levant through a network of

correspondents and advocated for the embassy’s scientific mission. The 1630 catalog by Pierre

48 Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer, 83. These are BnF, mss Persan 288, Persan 335, Supplément

Persan 855, and Turc 272. However, none of these contain Du Ryer’s annotations.

49 On Marcheville’s ill-fated embassy, see Alastair Hamilton, “‘To Divest the East of All Its Manuscripts

and All Its Rarities’. The Unfortunate Embassy of Henry Gournay de Marcheville”, in The Republic of

Letters and the Levant, eds Hamilton, van den Boogert, and Westerweel, 123-150.

43

Gassendi (1592-1655) (one of Pereisc’s first picks for the mission, although he could not go) of

manuscripts collected abroad by Jacob Golius lauded a model for these efforts.50 Ultimately,

Marcheville’s embassy was a disaster, and its haul of manuscripts would be dwarfed by the well-

coordinated efforts of subsequent ambassadors, but in its wake a growing orientation towards

Ottoman material and the combined study of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic can be registered

among the manuscripts of French orientalists. Gilbert Gaulmin (1585-1665), whose Persian

studies were in full swing by 1640, consulted many of the same manuscripts as Du Ryer and will

be discussed in more detail below. Another amateur orientalist, the mathematician and conseiller

at the court of the Châtelet Claude Hardy (1604-1678), studied Turkish, Persian, and Arabic

together through a variety of Ottoman sources, and it was perhaps Hardy (or someone in his

circle) who around this time compiled a Latin-Arabic dictionary from the Turkish-Arabic Luġat-i

Aḫterī.51

Word of mouth also brought back reports of scholarly Istanbul. Writing from Izmir in

1647, the astronomer Ismaël Boulliau described an atmosphere of hesitant, but open exchange in

the Ottoman capital:

By God’s grace I have had no bad encounters in Constantinople. On the contrary, I have

found men to be very modest and more moderate than we Frenchmen. Besides, I had

already made the acquaintance of persons who could have helped me in case of a bad

encounter. For this I am obliged to the Ambassador and Mr. de Ventelay with whom I

have many times been at the home of Adam Ephendi, Director of Dervishes, which is a

refuge for people of stature and for the beaux esprits of Constantinople. One among

them, Hismahil Ephendi Emin du Tersenad, was very affectionate toward me (me faisoit

grandes caresses) on account of our having the same name, and often, when we met, he

50 Pierre Gassendi, Catalogus rarorum librorum, quos ex Oriente nuper aduexit, et in publica Bibliotheca inclytae Leydensis Academiae deposuit Clariss. Et de bonis Artibus meritiss. Jacobus Golius in illa

eadem Academia, et Linguarum Orientalium, et Matheseos Professor insignis (Paris: Vitray, 1630).

51 This dictionary is now BNF, ms arabe 4341. There is still no clear picture of Hardy’s activities as an

orientalist, and there remain, even after Francis Richard’s comprehensive and foundational work in

identification and attribution, unidentified Western European hands in manuscripts from seventeenth-

century French collections.

44

called me “Sabal hhair Hismail Celebi” and always showed me civility. I have also met

another man who is an “aphis”, that is to say, a man of letters and a poet, whose name is

Teleatin Ephendi and who has much of the genius of Mr. Luillier.52

Boulliau captures the burgeoning receptivity to elite Ottoman society among French scholars,

staging his encounter with an eye for the affective bonds of learned exchange. The comparison

with François Luillier (d. 1652), a friend and patron of freethinkers, both evokes Luillier’s

libertinage érudit and conveys the communicability of intellectual style across the boundaries of

language (Boulliau and his Ottoman contacts spoke through an interpreter). Here, Boulliau

makes the case for Ādem Dede’s circle as an erudite scene.

As the first orientalist to sufficiently master the languages of Ottoman scholarship, Du

Ryer played a leading role in this moment of dawning cultural awareness. This was certainly true

in France, where many of his Persian manuscripts found their way into other French orientalists’

collections, as for the Republic of Letters at large. His Gulistān translation introduced Persian

literature to a Western European reading public and was soon translated from French into

German.53 The German translation similarly made the case for recognizing Islamic models of

cultural sophistication, and in its preface Wilhelm Schickard proclaimed it a “common

52 Ismaël Boulliau to J. Dupuy, 22 May 1647, BNF, ms Dupuy 18, fol. 185v: “par la grace de Dieu je n’ay

faict aucune mauvaise rencontre dans C.P. au contraire j’ay trouvé des hommes tres modestes et plus

moderés que nos francois, outre que j’avois des-ia faict des cognoissances avec des personnes, qui en cas

de mauvaise rencontre m’eussent servi, j’en ay l’obligation a Mr L’Amb. et à Mr de Ventelay avec lequel

j’ay esté plusiers fois chéz Adam Ephendi, Directeur des Drevichs [sic] qui et un reduict des gens de

condition et des beaux esprits de C.P. Un entr’autres Hismahil Ephendi Emin du Tersenad me faisoit

grandes caresses a cause que nous avons mesme nom, et souvent que nous nous sommes rencontrés, il me

donnoit du Sabal hhair Hismail Celebi et me faisoit tousjours civilité; J’ay aussy cogneu un autre homme

qui est aphis c’est à dire hommes de lettres et poete qui a nom Teleatin Ephendi qui a beaucoup du genie

de Mr Luillier.”

53 Johann Friedrich Ochsenbach, trans., Gulistan, das ist/ Königlicher Rosengart, welchen der fürnehmste

Poët, unter den Türken/ und Persianern/ Sadi genandt/ vor ohngefähr drey hundert siben und sibentzig

Jahren verfertiget. Warinnen allerhand denckwürdige/ zuvor unbekandte Historien/ auch vernünfftige Unterricht/ und gute Lehren/ so zu Fried und Kriegeszeit/ auch in dem Hoff und gemeinen Leben in acht

zunehmen/ sich befinden, by Saʿdī (Tübingen: Brunn, 1636).

45

misunderstanding among us Christians, that Turks, Persians, and other heathens are just rough,

wild, and unstudied people”, surmising instead they might even surpass Western Europeans in

some respects.54

Despite its success in promoting awareness of Persian literature, Du Ryer’s translation

proved of little help to scholars hoping to study the original Persian. To render a work in another

language does not always mean offering a path back to the original. Du Ryer’s translation was

only partial.55 He left out many stories entirely, and, clothing Saʿdī’s Persian à la française, he

elided many foreignizing particulars. Orientalists continued to read the work, but it was hopeless

to scrutinize the translation as a literal gloss on the Persian. This is confirmed by the occasional

references to Du Ryer in the marginalia of orientalists. One of Gilbert Gaulmin’s manuscripts

includes numbers marking the corresponding pages in Du Ryer’s translation, but nothing else to

suggest comparison, and in Golius’s heavily annotated copy I could find only a single French

gloss taken from Du Ryer.56

The first orientalist students of Persian represented two distinct types that would persist

throughout the history of early modern oriental studies: the armchair orientalist situated at a hub

of the movement and collection of information and the learned traveler who collected

manuscripts abroad. Despite their differences, the work of reading and translating presented them

with a common, fundamentally philological challenge: how to reconstruct and completely

decipher Saʿdī’s Persian text. Their work, in turn, was the prelude to a boom in the study of

54 Wilhelm Schickard, “Newe Vorred”, in Ochsenbach, trans., Gulistan, das ist/ Königlicher Rosengart: “Es ist ein gemeiner wohn under uns Christen/ als wann die Türcken/ Persianer/ und andere Heyden eitel

solch Grobe/ Wild und ohngestudirte Völker weren.”

55 Behzad’s concordance provides an overview of the chapters Du Ryer left out. See Faramarz Behzad,

Adam Olearius’ “Persianischer Rosenthal” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), 131-140.

56 BnF, ms Persan 339; UBL, ms Or. 242, fol. 21r.

46

Persian literature around 1640, when orientalists in multiple locations throughout Western

Europe began a more expansive program of studying and translating Persian literature.

Why did orientalists simultaneously turn their attention to Persian literature around 1640?

This was, in part, due to Western Europe’s growing position in global trade, particularly the

establishment of the Dutch and British East India Companies, which intensified contact with the

Persian-reading world. At the same time, both diplomacy (which facilitated the acquisition of

manuscripts in Istanbul) and war with the Ottoman Empire (which brought looted manuscripts

from Hungary) facilitated the growth of Western European collections of Persian manuscripts.

The simultaneity of these efforts around 1640 was also a product of coordination. Although we

have only a portion of the correspondence between orientalists which once criss-crossed

Europe,57 available evidence suggests that orientalists collaborated, sharing knowledge and

material.58 Scholars traveled, acquiring, selling, copying, and gifting manuscripts. Their

amanuenses, some of them important scholars in their own right, traveled as well, moving

between the various centers and stations of European oriental study.59

57 Notable extant correspondences are those of Sebastian Tengnagel (ÖNB, Cod 9737r, Cod. 9737s, and

Cod. 9737t) and the collection of letters, now in UBL, ms or. 1228, which the Dutch orientalist Martijn

Theodoor Houtsma partially edited and translated in Uit de Oostersche correspondentie van Th. Erpenius, Jac. Golius en Lev. Warner; een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de beoefening der Oostersche letteren

in Nederland, ed. Martijn Theodoor Houtsma (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1887).

58 Coordination did not necessarily imply collaboration, and it is difficult to gauge the extent to which

orientalists cooperated with each other, or in many cases to distinguish between cooperation and

emulation.

59 One of these, Ḥaqq-vīrdī, the Persian amanuensis to Olearius and Golius, is discussed below. On

another traveling language teacher and amanuensis, Solomon Negri, see John-Paul Ghobrial, “The Life

and Hard Times of Solomon Negri: An Arabic Teacher in Early Modern Europe”, in The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, eds Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett

(Leiden: Brill, 2017), 310-331.

47

Adam Olearius

One significant, though ultimately unsuccessful, effort to translate the Gulistān emerged

directly from a diplomatic trade mission to Moscow and Isfahan, an attempt by the Duke of

Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf Frederick III to open a new trade route through Russia, down the

Volga to the Caspian Sea and on to Iran.60 The secretary of this embassy, Adam Olearius, seized

the opportunity to study foreign lands and languages, and his account of his travels, first

published in 1647, was both popular and influential in its depiction of Persian culture and as a

model for later travel accounts.61 The first trip, to Moscow, left Hamburg on 6 November 1633,

returning in April 1635. The second trip, continuing on from Moscow down the Volga and over

the Caspian Sea to Isfahan, left soon thereafter in October 1635.

Olearius’s Persian studies, and the seeds of his later attempts to translate the Gulistān,

can be situated specifically in the context of his three-month stay in the city of Shamakhi during

this second trip. It was there that Olearius made the acquaintance of a group of learned men who

60 On Olearius and the Gottorf envoy, see Elio Brancaforte, Visions of Persia: Mapping the Travels of

Adam Olearius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Dieter Lohmeier, “Nachwort des

Herausgebers”, in Adam Olearius, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung Der Muscowitischen und Persischen

Reyse: Schleswig 1656, ed. Dieter Lohmeier (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971), and the essays in Kirsten

Baumann, Constanze Köster, and Uta Kuhl, eds, Adam Olearius: Neugier als Methode (Petersberg:

Michael Imhof Verlag, 2017). The hope was that this trade route would be a profitable alternative to the

two other routes that brought goods from Persia to Europe: the land route over Turkey and the sea route,

first to Batavia and then around the Cape of Good Hope. Other states had shown interest in the Russian

route, but a contemporary letter from the Resident of the Dutch East India Company in Isfahan wrote that

it “hangt niet anders over’t hooft als oncosten, groote schade, travaillie sonder eynde”. See Hendrik

Dunlop, ed., Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis der Oostindische Compagnie in Perzie. Eerste deel, 1611-1638

(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1930), 638.

61 On the seventeenth-century illustrated travel account, see Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2015).

48

shared their knowledge and manuscripts with him. He recounts his first encounter in a madrasa

with the “mullah”, a “young, convivial, and pious man” named Muḥibb ʿAli:

The children along the walls, the mullah held in his hands the Qurʾan in a very beautiful

script. For a while, he let me look through it. Finally he took it, kissed the beginning of

the work, and offered it to me to kiss as well. However, I took my friendship album,

which I had in front of me so that I could collect their names, and kissed in it the coat of

arms of my most gracious lord, his excellency, saying: I know this book, whereas your

book is unknown to me, at which they laughed and thought it well done.62

Olearius provides a vivid description of what followed, demonstrating, much like Boulliau’s

letter, that among scholars the draw of shared interests could overcome the lack of a common

tongue.63 The Arab astrologer (müneǧǧim) of the governor of Shamakhi, an older man named

ʿAbd al-Ǧalīl al-Hiǧāzī, happened to be teaching a figure that Olearius recognized from Euclid,

and a lively exchange ensued. Olearius immediately fetched his astrolabe and globe. Although he

knew little Persian, and they knew no German, in the weeks that followed Olearius and his new

contacts bonded over such common objects, making attempts to learn each other’s languages.

Their visits were so frequent it drew the ire of the German ambassador, who schemed to separate

them.64 The same album amicorum that Olearius kissed documents these friendships in

62 “Die Knaben sassen an den Wänden herumb/ der Molla hatte den Alcoran mit sehr schöner Schrifft in

den Händen/ ließ mich eine weile darinnen blättern/ nam ihn endlich und küssete den Anfang der Schrifft/

reichte mirs auch zu küssen. Ich aber nam mein Stambuch/ welches ich umb ihre Nahmen darein zu

bekommen/ vor mir liegen hatte/ küsset in demselben I. F. Durchl. meines gnädigsten Herrn Wapen/

sagend: Daß mir dieses bekand/ ihr Buch aber unbekand wäre/ worüber sie lacheten/ und hiessen es auch

wolgethan seyn.” Adam Olearius, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung Der Muscowitischen und Persischen

Reyse (Schleswig: Holwein, 1656), 433.

63 A similar depiction of scholarly show and tell is found in Galland’s diary. Antoine Galland, Journal

d’Antoine Galland pendant son séjour à Constantinople (1672-1673) (Paris: E. Leroux, 1881), vol. 1, 30.

Such examples point to the function of scientific instruments and figures as forms of learned

communication across the boundaries of language.

64 The head of the mission, Otto Brüggemann (later executed for the mission’s failure), had his interpreter

send a young boy to see Muḥibb ʿAli and Olearius, pretending to come at the behest of the khan, and ask

what business Muḥibb ʿAli had with a German Christian. The intention must have been to scare Muḥibb

ʿAli, but under direct questioning the young boy admitted to the ruse. Olearius, Vermehrte Newe

Beschreibung Der Muscowitischen und Persischen Reyse, 434.

49

Shamakhi. Among its pages we find verses of Persian poetry, an entry by Muḥibb ʿAli, a poem

by Imru’ al-Qais signed by the Arab astrologer, and the very diagram that had caught Olearius’s

eye.65

Olearius’s account is enticingly vague. He says that Muḥibb ʿAli showed him “good

friendship and service in learning the language”, and he speaks of Muḥibb ʿAli’s friend, a

“captain named Imam-Qulī.” These two

took turns coming to me each day in order to teach me the language and to learn my own.

Indeed, since they thought that they would be viewed with suspicion for religious reasons

(which a number of our own gave them good reason to believe), they ultimately came at

night.66

Olearius does not say how exactly they spent these evening sessions, but a manuscript, now in

Berlin, likely offers a partial record of these studies.67 The manuscript is a small, safina-shaped

volume containing Persian verse written out, in parts by Olearius, and elsewhere by at least one

other Persian hand.68 The format and multiple hands of this manuscript offer a fascinating

contrast to Olearius’s friendship album as two culturally distinct forms of shared writing. The

manuscript can be confidently linked to Muḥibb ʿAli, because he signed it (Figure 5), alongside

several verses from the Gulistān:

65 Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen Schloss Gottorf (hereafter: SHLM), ms 2006/128, 331-335.

ʿAbd al-Ǧalīl al-Hiǧāzī’s entry also includes his seal. I have not consulted the original album amicorum

but rather photographs in Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek (hereafter: CKB), ms phot. 305 kvart.

66 “Der Molla selbiger Schulen Nahmens Maheb Aalij, ein junger lustiger und frommer Mann/ erzeigete

mir in erlernung der Sprache gute Freundschafft und Dienste. Imgleichen auch ein Ohnbasche oder

Capitain Nahmens Imamculi, des Maheb Aalij guter Freund/ welche täglich um mir ihre Sprache zu

lehren/ und meine zu lernen/ abwechselsweise zu mir kamen/ ja auch endlich/ da sie vermeineten/ daß sie

der Religion halber (worzu etliche der unserigen nicht wenig Uhrsache gaben) solten in Verdacht gezogen

werden/ bey Nachts Zeiten sich einstelleten.” Olearius, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung Der

Muscowitischen und Persischen Reyse, 434.

67 Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (hereafter: SBB), ms orient. oct. 3.

68 The safina is a small, oblong book of poetry bound on the narrow side, and was a common format for

collecting verse.

50

جهان ای برادر نماند بکس دل اندرجهان افرین بند و بس

مکن تکیه بر ملک دنیا و پشت که بسیار کس چون تو پرورد و کشت

چو آهنگ رفتن کند جان پاک چو بر تخت مردن چو بر روی خاک

The world, O brother, does not remain for anyone. Set your heart upon the world-creator,

and that is enough.

Rely not on the kingdom of this world, for many like you has it nourished and then killed.

When a pure soul is about to depart, what difference does it make whether it dies on a

throne or in the dust?69

To this Muḥibb ʿAli added a line of his own, one that extended Saʿdī’s gesture to our common,

unadorned humanity to the dynamics of human encounter, the meeting of a “we” and a “you’:

چه تکلف میان ما و شما ما بی تکلف بیا بخانه

Come to our house without ceremony

For what ceremony is between us and you?70

If we read the note as addressing Olearius, it is a powerful (and rare) document of how Muslim

scholars who taught orientalists abroad conceived of learned exchange across cultures. Olearius’s

safina is also our only concrete glimpse into Olearius’s first efforts to learn Persian. The volume

contains numerous other selections from Persian poetry. Some, like Muḥibb ʿAli’s, were taken

from the Gulistān, and many were copied by Olearius himself. It is likely that he studied these in

the presence of a Persian speaker, since Olearius numbered the verses and added his own

transliterations and translations (Figure 6). We can speculate, on the basis of Muḥibb ʿAli’s

inscription and the errors in his translations, that this is a record of his studies in Shamakhi.

69 SBB, ms Orient. Oct. 3, fol. 9r. Translation from Wheeler Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi

(Bethesda, MD: Ibex, 2008), 12.

70 SBB, ms Orient. Oct. 3, fol. 9r.

51

Figure 5. SBB, ms orient. oct. 3, 9r: Verse from the Gulistān written by Muḥibb ʿAli, signed (along the left

side) with a line of additional verse.

52

Figure 6. SBB, ms orient. oct. 3, 6r: Olearius’s transliterations and translations of Persian verse in the album

given to him by Muḥibb ʿAli, indexed by number.

53

Olearius’s safina and its excerpts from the Gulistān are of particular interest because it

was Muḥibb ʿAli, according to Olearius, who gave him his first copy of the Gulistān, and,

indeed, Olearius framed his 1654 German translation of this work as the fulfillment of the

request of his friend in Shamakhi:

As a souvenir, he honored me with a copy of this book, that is, the Gulistān, and

requested that I translate it and make it known to our countrymen when I was more

proficient in the language and once again in Germany, so that we would see that they also

have good books in Persia.71

There is reason to view Olearius’s version of events with suspicion. As we will see, Olearius

carefully crafted his account of the circumstances of his Gulistān translation to bolster his

authority as a translator, and at times it bears an only tenuous resemblance to the archival record.

Nevertheless, while Muḥibb ʿAli’s manuscript has not been identified, several manuscripts dated

to the period after Olearius’s return to Schleswig document the German’s attempts at translation.

At the center of these efforts stood another learned collaborator, a former secretary of the

subsequent Safavid envoy to Gottorf named Ḥaqq-vīrdī. In his travel account, Olearius recalls

how Ḥaqq-vīrdī, along with his son and servant, defected from the Safavid mission when it

departed in late September 1639.72 Ḥaqq-vīrdī likely brought with him a number of manuscripts,

but it was his knowledge of Persian language and culture that most interested Olearius, and the

German soon employed him as an amanuensis in the production of a Persian-Latin dictionary

and an attempt to translate the Gulistān. Both attempts were unsuccessful, and their failure is

71 Adam Olearius, “Vorrede an den günstigen Leser”, in Adam Olearius, trans., Persianischer Rosenthal, by Saʿdī (Schleswig: Holwein, 1654). “… [er hat] mir ein Exemplar dieses Buches/ nemlich den Gülustan

zum Gedächtnis verehret/ und darneben gebeten/ daß/ wenn ich der Sprache kündiger würde/ und wieder

in Teutschland käme/ selbigen verdolmetschen/ und unsern Landesleuten auch bekand machen solte/

damit wir sehen/ daß sie auch gute Bücher in Persien hätten.”

72 Olearius, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung Der Muscowitischen und Persischen Reyse, 764. Olearius

counts six in total who stayed behind from the Safavid mission.

54

indicative of the challenges in learning Persian faced by someone like Olearius, who had little

knowledge of Arabic or Turkish. It also serves as a reminder that the delegation of philological

work was, like other scholarly practices, a skill to be mastered. Olearius’s experience abroad and

the help of an educated Persian-speaker might seem at first glance an ideal combination for such

an undertaking. In fact, he was in a less advantageous position than his contemporaries who read

the work with the help of commentaries and translations.

The first manuscript Ḥaqq-vīrdī copied for Olearius was a Gulistān, dated 21 Šawwāl 21,

1048 (25 February 1639).73 The work is bound in an unusual but fitting hybrid style, in the

simple parchment binding characteristic of many seventeenth-century German scholarly

libraries, but with a fore-edge and envelope flap in imitation of Islamic manuscripts (Figure 7).

Ḥaqq-vīrdī copied the text, which lacks a number of stories, onto one half of each page (Figure

8).74 The source manuscript is unidentified, and might well be the same manuscript that Muḥibb

ʿAli gave Olearius.75 Ḥaqq-vīrdī left the remaining space on each page for Olearius’s notes and

translations. These are few and scattered throughout the text, mostly translations of selected

verses, which Olearius prefaced with the first word (transliterated) from the corresponding

Persian text. Nowhere do we find any indications of a more complete translation, or even a

complete reading of the entire work. This likely reflects the limits of Olearius’s Persian at the

time, as well as the difficulties that plagued his attempts to coordinate work with Ḥaqq-vīrdī.

That Ḥaqq-vīrdī and Olearius had trouble communicating can also be inferred indirectly from

73 CKB, ms Cod. Pers. 84, fol. 135r. Ḥaqq-vīrdī states in his colophon that the manuscript was copied “at

Gottorf Castle”.

74 Behzad provides an overview of the missing sections. See Behzad, Adam Olearius’ “Persianischer

Rosenthal”, 25, n. 9.

75 It cannot be ruled out that the “Gulistān” in question is, in fact SBB, ms orient. oct. 3, the safina-

shaped volume, with its Gulistān verses, discussed earlier.

55

Olearius’s own account, which links Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s openness as an informant with his later

conversion, as well as the fact that Ḥaqq-vīrdī soon left Olearius’s employ.76

Another manuscript from Olearius’s collection offers a second example of the scholarly

dysfunction that characterised Olearius’s and Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s working relationship. The manuscript,

a Persian word list that was intended to become a Persian-Latin dictionary, remained incomplete

and entirely unusable.77 This was partly due to its unwieldy format. Ḥaqq-vīrdī listed words by

initial letter (without any internal organization), working through the entire alphabet twice and

repeating a number of entries. In addition, the would-be dictionary comprised a seemingly

random selection. The contents of the word list give the impression that they were culled from

the ambient surroundings, the product of sessions much like the ones Olearius mentioned in

Shamakhi. A colophon marks the completion of Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s work on 22 Ḏū l-Qaʿda 1049 (15

March 1640). It was probably at this point that Olearius began translating individual entries. In

any event, Olearius only made it through a handful of entries before giving up. It must have

struck him that, even if he completed the arduous task of finding a Latin equivalent for each

word, the resulting dictionary could not have served any use in either reading or translating from

Persian. A second manuscript in Berlin represents a subsequent attempt by Olearius and Ḥaqq-

vīrdī to write a Persian-Latin dictionary.78 While it is undated, commonalities in format and

content clearly link it with the Persian word list, and it appears to represent an effort to fashion

the same material into a working dictionary. Nevertheless, this dictionary, which Sonja Brentjes

76 See, Olearius, “Vorrede an den günstigen Leser”, in Persianischer Rosenthal, and below.

77 SBB, ms orient. fol. 102.

78 SBB, ms orient. fol. 100.

56

has studied in detail (although the earlier word list was unknown to her), is far from

comprehensive, and it, too, would have been unusable for reading Persian texts.79

The case of Olearius illustrates the plight of the Persian learner, and it challenges the

sometimes tacit assumption that translations are rooted in disembodied “knowledge” of a

language or a culture. When he returned to Germany, Olearius appears to have acquired the

rudiments of Persian, but even with a stronger command, the task of deciphering an often

difficult and obscure literary language would have been daunting, requiring a closer coordination

with Ḥaqq-vīrdī – which itself presented challenges due to the lack of a common interlanguage.

The question of Olearius’s knowledge of Persian is also relevant to the subsequent history of his

German translation, published in 1654, and I will return to this subject further on. In the

meantime, the fifteen years between Olearius’s first efforts and his eventual translation of the

Gulistān saw dramatic developments in the study of Persian, as well as the publication of the

complete Latin translation of the Gulistān by Georg Gentius in 1651.

79 See Sonja Brentjes, “ms. or. fol. 100. Adam Olearius’s and Haq Virdi’s (c. 1584-1650) Persian-Latin

Dictionary”, in Adam Olearius: Neugier als Methode, 144-151. A Turkish word list copied by Ḥaqq-

vīrdī, on similar paper and identical in format to the Berlin Persian word list, is found in the Staats- und

Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg (hereafter: SUBH), ms Orient. 187. It also contains Olearius’s additions

(both Latin transliterations and German translations), and suggests that Olearius took at least a passing

interest in learning Turkish as well as Persian.

57

Figure 7. CKB, ms Cod. Pers. 84. Ḥaqq-vīrdī's copy of the Gulistān for Olearius was given the standard

parchment binding of seventeenth-century German scholarly libraries, but with an envelope flap

characteristic of Islamic manuscripts.

58

Figure 8. CKB, ms Cod. Pers. 84, 11r: Ḥaqq-vīrdī copied out the Gulistān for Olearius onto half of the page,

leaving the rest for the orientalist’s notes. This space remains mostly blank, but we find on occasion

Olearius’s Latin translations of individual lines.

59

From Aleppo to Oxford: Greaves and Pococke

As Olearius struggled to wring meaningful scholarly production from his collaboration

with Ḥaqq-vīrdī, scholars elsewhere were going further down the path set by Raimondi,

Tengnagel, and Du Ryer. At almost the exact same moment, scholars in Oxford, Leiden, and

Paris realized they could best read the Gulistān by following in the footsteps of its earlier

reception in Islamic letters. Like Olearius, they sought out and employed Persian speakers as

amanuenses. However, these new efforts to study Persian literature were rooted in the

manuscripts being collected in Istanbul and the Eastern Mediterranean. In the case of the

Gulistān, this meant, above all, the study of Ottoman commentaries written in Arabic—a

language many orientalists knew better than Persian or Turkish—and the study of Ottoman

lexicography. Interestingly, this moment at the end of the 1630s was marked by the appearance

of the same obscure Arabic-language Gulistān commentary in Oxford, Leiden, and Paris.

Following this manuscript as it moved first from Aleppo to Istanbul, Paris, Leiden, and Oxford,

illuminates both the networks that linked orientalists across Europe and the changing character of

how they worked, as scholars and their students navigated more confidently the growing

collections of manuscripts at their disposal.

A picture of this particular manuscript’s circulation emerges from the letters of

orientalists, as well as from clues in its various copies. In total, three copies of the commentary

are in European collections. Two were written in distinct Ottoman hands. In addition, there is a

copy from one of these apographs by the French orientalist Gilbert Gaulmin. All likely go back

to a single manuscript in Aleppo, where the English orientalist Edward Pococke (1604-1691) and

the Discalced Carmelite Celestin of St. Lidwine, formerly Petrus Golius (1597-1672), competed

60

for manuscripts. Pococke served in Aleppo as the chaplain to the English merchants there, and

procured manuscripts for himself and for William Laud (1572-1645). During this time he worked

closely with a scribe and teacher named Darwīš Aḥmad, learning Arabic from him and

employing him as an intermediary and scribe in the acquisition of manuscripts. Celestin was the

brother of the Leiden Arabist Jacob Golius, for whom he procured manuscripts, and was later

known for his translation of Thomas von Kempen’s Imitation of Christ into Arabic.80 Their rival

efforts to acquire manuscripts are attested to both in Celestin’s letters to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de

Pereisc, who acted as an intermediary between the brothers, and in Darwīš Aḥmad’s letters to

Pococke.81

It was during Pococke’s second trip east, this time to Istanbul, that he began searching for

an Arabic Gulistān commentary. At least one Turkish Gulistān commentary (by Şemʿī) entered

Laud’s collection in 1638, likely through Pococke’s mediation.82 However, there is no sign it

was read, which might reflect the limited knowledge of Turkish at that time. Since Pococke’s

biographer Twells mentions a wishlist given to Pococke in 1638 by his traveling companion,

John Greaves, which includes, alongside a “Mircondus in Persian” and “Avicenna de Anima”, a

80 Thomas von Kempen, Al-iqtidā bi-al-Masīḥ wa-huwa muštamil ʿalā arbaʿat asfār, trans. Celestin of St.

Lidwine (Rome: Propaganda fide, 1663).

81 Peter N. Miller, Pereisc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017),

140. Darwīš Aḥmad’s letters are discussed and partially translated in P.M. Holt, Studies in the History of

the Near East (London: Routledge, 1973), 42-45, and Hilary Kilpatrick, “Arabic Private Correspondence

from Seventeenth-Century Syria: The Letters of Edward Pococke”, Bodleian Library Record 23, no. 1

(2010): 20-40.

82 Oxford, Bodleian Library (hereafter: OBL), ms Laud 124. The manuscript’s title is given (in Arabic) in

what appears to be Pococke’s hand.

61

“Gulistan in Arabic”, Greaves was probably the driving force behind the acquisition of the

Arabic commentaries.83

Greaves’s interest in oriental studies was marked by a desire to recover useful

information.84 He translated part of Abū al-Fidāʾ’s Taqwīm al-Buldān and compiled the

astronomical tables of the Timurid astrologer, Uluġ Beg.85 It is perhaps primarily as a specimen

of the language that he was interested in the Gulistān, since he used a selection of excerpts from

the work for his Persian grammar, the 1649 Elementa linguae Persicae.86 Here, Greaves

regularly cites the Gulistān (without attribution) to illustrate particular grammatical points. For

example, for the negative verb he quoted Saʿdī’s poetic reminder of ambition’s toll: ه کس نیاید بخان

که خراج زمین و باغ بده –درویش (“One does not come to a poor man’s house asking him for land and

83 Leonard Twells, The Lives of Dr. Edward Pocock, the celebrated orientalist, vol. 1 (London:

Rivington, 1816), 66. Twells also mentions a letter from Greaves which is a witness to the relative

advantages of Istanbul for manuscript hunting: “[Greaves] assured him, that notwithstanding all the

search he had made after manuscripts for himself and him both at Alexandria and Cairo (where he

ventured openly to go to the Bezar, and to many of the Moors houses) he could find, besides common

things, nothing but a few old papers, or rotten and imperfect books. Several letters complaining of this

disappointment, he sent to Mr. Pocock, first from Alexandria, and afterward from Leghorn, wherein he

pressed him to do his utmost for supplying this defect at the place where he now was, being, he said, as he

found by experience, the sea, into which all the lesser rivers had emptied themselves, all books of any

value in other parts having been taken up, and brought to the port” (64).

84 On Greaves, see Gerald J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in

Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 127-142, and Zur Shalev, “The Travel

Notebooks of John Greaves”, in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, eds Hamilton, van den Boogert,

and Westerweel, 77-102.

85 On Greaves’s work and manuscripts, see Toomer, Easterne Wisedome, 167-179. Greaves published

Uluġ Beg’s star catalog, alongside several shorter astronomical works, in John Bainbridge, Canicularia,

ed. John Greaves (Oxford: Hall, 1648). A translation of a short work on abbreviations in astronomical

works was published the following year with Greaves’s Persian grammar: John Greaves, Elementa linguae Persicae item Anonymus Persa de Siglis Arabum et Persarum Astronomicis (London: Flesher,

1649). Part of Greaves’s translation from Abū al-Fidāʾ was published as Abū al-Fidāʾ, Chorasmiae, et

Mawaralnahrae, hoc est Regionum extra fluvium Oxum descriptio, ex Tabulis Abulfedae Ismaelis,

Principis Hamah, trans. John Greaves (London, 1650).

86 Toomer notes that Greaves, in a letter to Hardy, claims that he composed the grammar much earlier in

Paris (presumably in 1635, before his trip to Istanbul). See Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 172.

62

orchard taxes”).87 To illustrate the use of the preposition der (in), he similarly channeled the

poet: نه صبر در دل عاشق نه آب در غربال –قرار بر کف آزادگان بگیرد مال (“Money cannot rest in the hands

of the free: neither can patience in a lover’s heart nor water in a sieve”).88 In this way the

Gulistān provided most of Greaves’s examples, and his use of the work—it appears to be the

only work of Persian literature that he studied—suggests that his interest in acquiring a Gulistān

commentary was much in line with its Ottoman use: as a means of understanding Persian.

There is no indication that Greaves consulted the commentary he requested, but a Turkish

interlinear translation of the Gulistān contains his annotations and can be linked to the Elementa

(Figure 9).89 The manuscript’s colophon offers no details on its scribe or date. Much like the

Turkish interlinear translation from Du Ryer’s library, it contains additional glosses in Turkish

and Arabic. Greaves’s own annotations consist mostly of glosses on individual words, and the

scope and character of this glossing suggest that Greaves read selectively. The combination of

languages used—Greaves noted glosses in English, Latin, and Italian—suggests that Greaves

worked together with more expert readers from diplomatic circles in the Ottoman Empire.

In any event, we know that Pococke relayed Greaves’s request to his old teacher in

Aleppo, Darwīš Aḥmad. Darwīš Aḥmad, writing to Pococke in Istanbul, soon reported that “the

commentary on the Gulistān has been completed.”90 Sometime later, he noted that he was

87 Greaves, Elementa linguae Persicae, 60. Greaves translates the verse as “Nemo veniet in domum

pauperis,/ Ut vectigal agri, et vineae solvat.” The English translation above is modified from Thackston,

trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 26.

88 Greaves, Elementa linguae Persicae, 82. “Non permanent in manibus prodigorum divitiae;/ Nec

patientia in corde amantis; nec aqua in cribo.” Translation from Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi,

23.

89 OBL, ms Greaves 16.

90 Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East, 43.

63

sending a more complete copy of the work, along with a note on Golius’s competing efforts to

acquire another Arabic commentary on a work of Persian literature:

Golius, the brother of the Flemish monk, sent to ask for a copy of the Dīwān of al-Ḥāfiẓ

in Arabic but it was unobtainable. He also asked for some historical works but did not get

anything he asked for. But I saw a fragment of the commentary on the Dīwān of al-Ḥāfiẓ

in Arabic. I had written a commentary on the Gulistān for you but the copy from which

the commentary came was defective and now I have completed it and it will soon come

to you.91

Darwīš Aḥmad’s letter conveys a sense of his value as an intermediary who could confer

advantage to Pococke in the arms race of orientalist scholarship. Pococke and Golius both took

as their object of study the literature and history of a vast expanse, but, as here, it often played

out within the limits of distinct, local contexts. Indeed, Golius had worked with Darwīš Aḥmad

years earlier, when he came through Aleppo on his travels collecting manuscripts, and he, like

Pococke, had employed Darwīš Aḥmad as a scribe.92

Darwīš Aḥmad’s description is vague, but the two Gulistān commentaries that he copied

for Pococke can be identified. The first is Bodleian Library, Seld. Superius 75. Darwīš Aḥmad

did not sign its colophon, but the manuscript displays the characteristics of a copy made for an

orientalist—the absence of earlier readers’ marks and parallel orientation of the notes on its wide

margins—and its handwriting is identical to Darwīš Aḥmad’s hand in his letters and

91 Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East, 45.

92 Darwīš Aḥmad copied for Golius the Arabic translation of Apollonius’s Conics that he collected during

his trip, now UBL, or. 14(1). See Jan Just Witkam, Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Library

of the University of Leiden, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 19-21. On Golius’s relationship with Darwīš

Aḥmad see Jan Schmidt, “An Ostrich Egg for Golius: The Heyman Papers Preserved in the Leiden and

Manchester University Libraries and Early-Modern Contacts between the Netherlands and the Middle

East”, in The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History, and Orientalism (1500-1923) (Istanbul: Isis, 2002), 31. Schmidt notes, referring to the letters of Darwīš Aḥmad to Golius contained in

John Rylands University Library at Manchester, ms Persian 913, “Aḥmad accuses Golius of having left

him with empty hands after he, Aḥmad, had done so much for his, Golius’s, sake and had given him

lessons” (32).

64

manuscripts.93 Seld. Superius 75 is also heavily annotated (Figure 10) with the graphite notes of

a Persian learner who copied out the conjugations of verbs encountered in the text (not always

correctly).

These are Pococke’s notes, jotted down during a first, soon abandoned reading of the

text. Another manuscript completes the picture: an undated copy of the Gulistān in nastaʿlīq with

a Latin note marking its entry into Laud’s collection in 1637, and graphite annotations in

Pococke’s hand (Figure 11) that show the orientalist working word for word through the text.94

Correspondences between the content and distribution of Pococke’s annotations in both works

suggest that he studied the manuscripts together, and follow a differentiation in his annotations

that paralleled the commentary’s dual purpose, guiding readers in both understanding the text

and acquiring the language. Pococke used the commentary as a workbook for Persian grammar

while his annotations in the Laud manuscript focus on deciphering the meaning of Saʿdī’s work.

Pococke’s reading can be confidently dated to before 1651, since his Latin glosses don’t match

Gentius’s translation. Nevertheless, Pococke gave up his reading a short way through the work,

and the small number of Persian manuscripts in his collection suggest that he never engaged

broadly with Persian literature.

93 For instance, UBL, ms or. 1228:90.

94 OBL, ms Laud 121. The note appears on fol. 1v.

65

Figure 9. OBL, ms Greaves 16, 46r: Greaves’s annotated copy of a Turkish interlinear translation of the

Gulistān.

66

Figure 10. OBL, ms Seld. Superius 75, 2v: Pococke’s annotations in the Gulistān commentary copied by

Darwīš Aḥmad.

67

Figure 11. OBL, ms Laud 121, 1v: A copy of the Gulistān which Pococke read alongside Seld. Superius 75,

with corresponding annotations (compare the noting of infinitive verb forms دنیکش دن،ی در دن،یرس with Figure

10).

68

A closer examination of the content of the commentary strengthens the hypothesis that all

Western European copies of the first Arabic commentary Aḥmad copied were descended from a

single manuscript in Aleppo. The work is anonymous, and distinct from the two most common

Arabic-language commentaries on the Gulistān, by Sürūrī and Yaʿḳub bin Seyyid ʿAlī.95 The

structure of the text is also unusual. Whereas other commentaries parse the text line by line, with

notes on grammar and pronunciation, the author of Seld. Superius 75 worked through the text in

paragraph length sections, offering first an Arabic translation for each, followed by a selection of

glosses with grammatical notes on individual words.

The second Arabic commentary mentioned in Darwīš Aḥmad’s letters can also be

identified. A commentary in the same format and hand as Seld. Superius 75 is found among the

Bodleian manuscripts from Pococke’s library.96 This second Arabic Gulistān commentary is that

of Sürūrī, and, consistent with the description in Darwīš Aḥmad’s letter, it is bound together with

a fragment from an Arabic commentary on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ.97 The manuscript contains no

readers’ marks. As we will see later, there is evidence that Pococke might have read another

copy of Sürūrī’s commentary, which contained useful annotations from an Ottoman reader.

Nevertheless, Pococke’s Persian studies appear to have been quite limited, and, even taking into

consideration Greaves’s study of the Gulistān, the efforts of the Oxford orientalists remained

behind those of Gaulmin in Paris and of Golius and his students in Leiden.

95 Ozan Yılmaz mentions a third Arabic commentary by “Kâsim Şerif bin Muhammed”, but gives no

additional information about the author or manuscript copies, and I have been unable to find the work

elsewhere. See, Ozan Yılmaz, “Klâsik Şerḥ Edebiyatı Literatürü”, Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür

Dergisi 5, no. 9 (2007): 271-304, especially 282-283.

96 OBL, ms Pococke 146.

97 If this is, indeed, the more complete manuscript that Darwīš Aḥmad mentions in his letter, it is unclear

if, in identifying the first manuscript as deficient, he meant that sections were missing from ms Seld.

Superius 75 or that ms Pococke 146 was a more thorough commentary.

69

The Gulistān in Leiden: Golius and Haqq-vīrdī

Another westward trajectory from Aleppo of the same manuscript that Darwīš Aḥmad

copied for Pococke casts light on these rival efforts. A second copy of Pococke’s anonymous

Arabic Gulistān commentary, containing Golius’s marginalia, is also found among manuscripts

from the Dutch orientalist’s library which were later given to the Bodleian by Narcissus Marsh

(1638-1713).98 This manuscript (Figure 12) is written in an Arabic hand distinct from Darwīš

Aḥmad’s and its colophon is dated 1048 (1638/1639), placing it squarely in the period when

Darwīš Aḥmad was copying manuscripts for Pococke and reporting to the orientalist in Istanbul

about how he got the better of their Carmelite rival Celestin and his brother, Golius.99 While no

scribe is recorded, the handwriting is distinctive and identical with that of a Syrian scribe named

Ṯalğa who corresponded with and copied at least one manuscript for Pococke, who described

him as “an honest man whose friendship I formerly enjoyed, distinguished for his calligraphy

rather than for any part of learning.”100 Presumably, Celestin arranged for Ṯalğa to copy the

Arabic commentary.

The years leading up to 1638, when Golius’s manuscript was copied, had seen a

collaborative effort to study Persian in Leiden, but seemingly no sustained interest in classical

Persian literature. Willem Leyel, a member of the Danish East India Company and student of

98 On Golius’s manuscripts, see Witkam, Jacobus Golius.

99 OBL, ms Marsh 566.

100 Eutychius of Alexandria, Contextio Gemmarum, sive, Eutychii Patriarchae Alexandrini Annales,

trans. and ed. E. Pococke, 2 vols (Oxford: Hall, 1654-1656). Translation from Holt, Studies in the History

of the Near East, 49, n. 47. Ṯalğa’s letters to Pococke are preserved in OBL ms Pococke 431, fols 14-16.

A copy by Ṯalğa for Pococke of the Annals of Eutychius of Alexandria is now OBL Pococke 351, and is

signed in the colophon.

70

Persian, traveled through Leiden and shared his manuscripts with scholars there.101 One

particular manuscript illustrates the link that Leyel forged between India as a place of language

learning and the academic study of oriental philology in Leiden. Bodleian Library, Marsh 267

includes a copy by an Indian scribe of two stories, written in a large, clear, and widely spaced

script, offering enough room for the successive notes of two different students of the language.

Here we find next to Leyel’s Danish glosses the additional notes and Latin glosses of another

reader (Figure 13).102

More than anything else, however, the attention of Leiden scholars was focused at this

time on a manuscript that had arrived from India: a Persian translation of the Gospels by a Jesuit

missionary at the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, Father Jerome Xavier.103 Students and

professors carefully studied the work, titled Mirʾāt al-quds (The Mirror of Holiness), as a

document of Catholic missionary activities, and the Leiden professor Lodewijk de Dieu

produced an edition of it with Latin translation and critical notes that drew attention to

discrepancies with the Biblical gospels. It conveys something of the tenor of the work that de

Dieu made sure that every page was marked with a warning. On the headers of the facing Latin

and Persian text, the reader finds, in their respective language, “The Story of Christ, but in a

corrupted form.”104

101 On Leyel, see Asta Bredsdorff, The Trials and Travels of Willem Leyel: An Account of the Danish

East India Company in Tranquebar, 1639-48 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculunum Press, 2009).

102 OBL, ms Marsh 267 also contains a similarly annotated copy of the Nisāb al-Ṣibyān.

103 On the Mirʾāt al-quds or Dāstān-i Mesīḥ (Story of the Messiah) see P.M. Carvalho, Mirʾāt al-quds

(Mirror of Holiness): A Life of Christ for Emperor Akbar: A Commentary on Father Jerome Xavier’s

Text and the Miniatures of Cleveland Museum of Art, Acc. No. 2005.145 (Leiden and Boston: Brill,

2012).

104 “Hist. Christi, sed contaminate”/“Dāstān-i Masīḥ ammā ālūde.”

71

If the accompanying Persian grammar is any indication, the scope of these studies

remained narrow, confined mostly to Xavier’s translation and the Judeo-Persian translation by

Jacob Ṭāvūs printed in Eliezer Soncino’s 1547 Constantinople Polyglott Pentateuch.105 The step

to works of classical Persian literature, and away from the familiar Biblical material, was a steep

one. To navigate this new terrain, Golius looked to the Ottoman tradition.

How did Golius learn of Ottoman literary commentaries? He does not appear to have

sought them out during his earlier travels, though he might have encountered them excerpted in

marginalia.106 The annotated manuscripts of earlier Ottoman readers, with glosses and excerpts

from a variety of sources, offered an introduction to the scholarly tradition to which they

belonged. One manuscript in particular, a mid-sixteenth century Ottoman copy of the Gulistān

with extensive excerpts from the Arabic commentary of Yaʿḳub bin Seyyid ʿAlī is noteworthy

because it played a central role in Golius’s later study of the text.107 Whatever it was that

compelled him when he enlisted his brother to acquire literary commentaries in Aleppo around

1638, it appears to have been the start of a concerted program of studying Persian literature,

coming on the heels of de Dieu’s Historia Christi, one that would occupy the years that

followed.

105 Lodewijk de Dieu, ʿUnṣurhā-i zibān-i fārsī, Rudimenta linguae Persicae (Leiden: Elsevier, 1639).

106 No commentaries are listed in Gassendi’s 1630 catalog of his manuscripts. Gassendi, Catalogus

rarorum librorum, quos ex Oriente nuper aduexit.

107 UBL, ms Or. 242.

72

Figure 12. OBL, ms Marsh 566, 277v: Golius’s copy of the same Gulistān commentary that was copied for

Pococke. Ṯalğa's colophon.

73

Figure 13. OBL, ms Marsh 267, 77r: The manuscript was copied out by an Indian scribe with large spaces for

a Persian learner’s notes. Leyel first glossed the words in Danish before a later reader added Latin

translations.

74

Figure 14, UBL, or. 242, 166v-167r. Golius’s copy of the Gulistān with excerpts from an Ottoman-Arabic

commentary on the margins. Here, Golius copied the colophon of the manuscript with which he collated or.

242, and recorded the completion of his work. The page opposite contains informal indexing by Golius, noting

points of interest during his reading (a practice that Reiske would also employ in the eighteenth century).

75

It is unclear when the Arabic Gulistān commentary from Aleppo arrived in Leiden, but

Golius’s studies were in full swing by August 1641, when he completed a collation of the

sixteenth-century Ottoman copy of the Gulistān mentioned above (Leiden University Library,

Or. 242) with a “Thysius” Gulistān.108 Marking the completion of his work alongside the

colophon, he inscribed himself into the manuscript’s already rich history, evoking the multiple

material entanglements undergirding orientalist scholarship (Figure 14). Or. 242 documents an

earlier, Ottoman reading of the work, with extensive notes and glosses, mostly taken from

Yaʿḳub bin Seyyid ʿAlī’s commentary. In 1566, soon after its scribe copied the manuscript and

recorded these notes (its colophon is dated 958/1551), it was looted by Habsburg troops

overrunning an Ottoman fortress in Hungary.109 The troops presented the manuscript as a token

of victory to their captain, and in the years that followed, it found its way into one of Leiden’s

collections.110

During the August 1641 collation, Golius seems to have paid relatively little attention to

the content of the work, only noting variants and copying out from the Thysius Gulistān a longer

section that was missing in his manuscript. The extensive Latin ink glossing in Golius’s hand

that appears throughout Leiden, Or. 242 was added only later. These glosses can be confidently

108 This manuscript perhaps belonged to another Leiden professor, Antonius Thysius (1565-1640) or his

son, also Antonius Thysius (c. 1613-1665). Golius recorded its colophon (dated 998) on UBL, ms Or.

242, fol. 166v.

109 This is recorded in two separate inscriptions on the recto and verso of UBL, ms Or. 242’s front flyleaf.

110 That the manuscript was affixed with a slip of paper reading “Ex Legato Illustris Viri Josephi

Scaligeri” offers no certainty that it belonged to Scaliger’s collection, since, as Alastair Hamilton has

pointed out, a number of Raphelengius’s books were erroneously marked with this label. See, Alastair

Hamilton, “The Perils of Catalogues”, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 1 (2010): 31-36. These

manuscripts had been borrowed by Scaliger, and remained in his possession after Raphelengius’s death in

1597. While at first distinguished from Scaliger’s bequest, institutional memory faded, while the

Raphelengius manuscripts remained among Scaliger’s books. In 1741, the interim librarian, David van

Royen, labeled them all “Ex Legato Illustris Viri Josephi Scaligeri”.

76

dated to 1642-1643, because they occasionally mention a new informant. It was then that Ḥaqq-

vīrdī left Olearius’s employ and made the journey from Schleswig to work as Golius’s

amanuensis in Leiden.111

While Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s manuscripts for Olearius betray a lack of organization and rigor,

Golius not only had a clear plan, but went so far as to draft a legal contract to ensure it was

carried out. The first contract, written in Dutch, signed by both parties, and dated 21 May 1642,

details Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s twelve-hour workday and the specific tasks he would perform:

They agree that every day without exception H. will come to the house of said Professor

and remain there from six in the morning until noon, at twelve o’clock, and from two

o’clock in the afternoon to eight o’clock in the evening, and during this time there

undertake the writing of several copies, in such a way that the Professor can meanwhile

pose to him questions on Persian and Turkish, to be expounded and explained according

to the best of his knowledge.112

The contract further specified two tasks. The first was a copy of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ. The second

would be either a translation of “Kalīla wa Dimna from Turkish into Persian” or a copy of the

Gulistān. A second contract, dated 2 September 1642, renewed their agreement, adding

additional, unnamed manuscripts to be copied. It also specified philological work that Ḥaqq-vīrdī

would perform in Golius’s absence:

First, it is agreed that he, Ḥaqq-vīrdī,…shall in absence of the Professor do “mokabula”

(i.e., collate) and do “teshih” (i.e., emend) against others all such books or writings, as the

Professor sees fit and prefers. And also in his absence, as before, and instead of the above

mentioned, do “tertib” (i.e. bring in order and in register) on such words as shall be

presented to him. Furthermore, at all times as the Professor would like, H. shall join him

111 There are also a smaller number of graphite notes in Golius’s hand whose function and date I have not

yet established.

112 Houtsma, Uit de oostersche Correspondentie, 75-76. “Zij komen overeen, dat H. alle dagen gene

uijtgesondert comen sal ten huijse van den gemelden Heer Professor ende aldaer blijven van des ses uijren

smorgens tot des middachs de cloeke twaelff uijren ende van den twee uijren namiddach tot den acht

uijren savonts ende denselven tijt aldaer besteden met schrijven van eenige Copijen hier naer te noemen

doch op soodanige wijse dat de Heer Professor ondertusschen vermogen sal hem H. te vragen uijt

Persiaens ofte Turcx tgene hem goedduncken sal, omme bij hem H. naer sijn bester wetenschap uijtgelegt

ende verclaert te werden.”

77

personally and (stopping his writing, collating, and ordering), be obliged to concern

himself with reading and translating whatever it is from Persian or Turkish, without

exception, which the Professor presents him and wishes of him.113

The colophons of the manuscripts Ḥaqq-vīrdī copied, now in Oxford, allow a precise

reconstruction of the timeline of his work for Golius. Ḥaqq-vīrdī finished his copy of the Dīvān

of Ḥāfiẓ on 17 Rabīʿ al-awwal 1052 (15 June 1642).114 His Persian translation of Kalīla wa

Dimna was completed nearly a month later on 23 Rabīʿ aṯ-ṯānī (21 July 1642).115

Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s source was not, as one might expect, the sixteenth-century Ottoman

Humayūnnāme of ʿAli Çelebi, a Turkish translation of Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn bin ʿAlī Vāʿiẓ

Kāšifī’s Anvār-i Suhaylī that was studied by other seventeenth-century orientalists and found

among Golius’s manuscripts, but a fourteenth-century Turkish translation of the twelfth-century

Persian translation which was Kāšifī’s source.116 Why did Golius arrange for a Persian

translation of a Turkish translation from Persian? Golius did own a copy of Kāšifī’s Anvār-i

Suhaylī, although it is unclear when it entered his collection.117 While Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s translation

appears untouched, Golius’s notes in his copy of the fourteenth-century translation (now

113 Houtsma, Uit de oostersche Correspondentie, 76-77. “Eerstelijck wordt nog overeen gecomen, dat hij

Hacquardi…in absentie van de Heer Professor sal mocabula maecken, dat is collationieren ende teshijh

maecken, dat is emenderen tegen den andre alle ende alsulcke boecken oft geschriften, als het den Heer

Professor goetbeduncken en gelieven sal. Ende ooc in absentie als voren in plaetse vantgene voorsz. staet

soodanige woorden tertijb maken, dat is in orde en in register brengen als hem H. voorgestelt sullen

werden. Datwijderstot allen tijden, als het den heer Prof. believen en gelegen sal sijn bij hem H.

persoonlijc te wesen, denselven H. (ophoudende van schrijven collationeren ende ordonneren) gehouden

sal sijn sich te verledigen tot het lesen ende vertalen vantgeent hem de Heer Professor uijt persiaens off

turcx niets uijtgesondert voorhouden en van hem H. begeren sal.”

114 OBL, ms Marsh, 450.

115 OBL, ms Marsh, 455.

116 On the translation, by a certain Masʿūd, see Hermann Ethé, “On some hitherto unknown Turkish

versions of Kalilah and Dimnah”, in Actes du sixième Congrés international des Orientalistes, tenu en

1883 à Leide, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1885), 239-255 (241-248).

117 OBL, ms Marsh 553. This manuscript’s connection with Gaulmin is discussed below.

78

Bodleian Library, Marsh 180) point to a likely answer. There we find extensive graphite glossing

in Golius’s hand, including Persian glosses taken from Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s translation. Evidently, the

translation was meant as a guide for the study of this earlier Turkish work, whose relative

antiquity must have appealed to Golius.

After this Ḥaqq-vīrdī completed his copy of the Gulistān (26 Rağab 1052/10 October

1642),118 Ǧāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulayḫa on 7 March 1643 (according to a note by Golius),119 and

Saʿdī’s Būstān in “August” (almost certainly in 1643).120 Another manuscript, now in Berlin,

suggests that Ḥaqq-vīrdī also used this time to apprentice his son, Muḥammad Riżā, in scribal

work. This manuscript, a copy of the Būstān by Muḥammad Riżā, was completed in Ṣafar 1053

(April-May 1643).121 It is possible that the manuscript was copied for Golius, who for

unspecified reasons then had the work copied again by Ḥaqq-vīrdī.122

A note by Golius in the manuscript of his Latin-Persian dictionary, later published as part

of the Lexicon Heptaglotton of Edmund Castell (1606-1686), completes the picture of Ḥaqq-

vīrdī’s work during this time, and might help explain Muḥammad Riżā’s copy. In the note,

Golius explains that Ḥaqq-vīrdī collated the manuscript, a Latin-Persian dictionary that Deusing

had likely compiled sometime earlier, from 23 April to 11 July, at the same time as Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s

son was copying the Būstān.123 It is possible that Muḥammad Riżā was enlisted to meet Ḥaqq-

118 OBL, ms Marsh, 174.

119 OBL, ms Marsh, 449.

120 OBL, ms Marsh, 447.

121 SBB, ms Orient. Fol. 47.

122 One annotation in a European hand in the manuscripts looks like Golius’s collation (91r). Ḥaqq-vīrdī

appears to have corrected the manuscripts at parts (for instance, fol. 66r).

123 OBL, ms Marsh, 213. Another, seemingly later version of this note is found in the papers collected in

OBL, ms Marsh, 714.

79

vīrdī’s contractual obligation with the addition of this new project. The dictionary itself is a

compilation from a number of Turkish and Arabic lexicographical works, and would have made

use of Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s knowledge of both Persian and Turkish. As might be expected, Golius’s

notes grace the pages of several dictionaries found today in Leiden and Oxford.124 Golius’s

annotations are also found in several Turkish manuscripts, and some can be dated to the time of

Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s stay.125

Golius’s study of the Gulistān, then, should be understood as part of an ambitious, well-

organized project to produce a small library for the academic study of Persian literature. The

other manuscripts copied by Ḥaqq-vīrdī demonstrate the breadth of Golius’s readings. He closely

read the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ and Ǧāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulayḫa, in both cases extensively annotating his

manuscript.126 He also made several attempts at translation, although each time he appears to

have given up not long after he began.127 The numerous corrections and additions in these

124 The copy of the Luġat-i Nīʿmetullāh, full of Golius’s notes, is now UBL, ms Or. 164. His annotated

Ḥalīmī dictionary is now OBL, ms Marsh, 281. His annotated copy of the Arabic-Persian dictionary of

Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Ḫāliq bin Maʿrūf (كنز اللغات) is now OBL, ms Marsh, 329. Golius also heavily

annotated a copy of another lexicographical work, a common Persian-Turkish glossary (called the Kitāb-i Dānistan because it begins with the word dānistan), which is now OBL, ms Marsh, 31. These are listed in

Catalogus Librorum MSS quos Doctissimus Clarissimusque Vir D. Jacobus Golius collegit (Leiden: Jan

du Vivie, 1669).

125 A note below the colophon of OBL, ms Marsh 557 (a copy of the Şāh ü Gedā of Taslıcalı Yahya)

dates Golius’s reading to 11 August - 22 August 1642. OBL, ms Marsh 82, a copy of the Revnaḳ-i Būstān

(an Ottoman work on horticulture) copied by Ḥaqq-vīrdī or his son in May 1643 contains a similar note

from Golius dated 14 July 1643. Golius’s annotations in OBL, ms Marsh 313 are also dated, but the year

is not given.

126 OBL, mss Marsh, 449 (Yūsuf va Zulayḫa) and 450 (Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ) Curiously, while William Jones,

more than a century later and at the very start of his career as a scholar, mentions the Ǧāmī manuscript in

a letter to Reviczky, he says nothing of Golius’s annotations in the Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, although Ḥāfiẓ was a

regular topic of their correspondence. William Jones to Karl Reviczky, 17 March 1771, in William Jones,

Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, vol. 5, ed. John Teignmouth

(London: Hatchard, 1815), 115-118 (116).

127 A fragment of Golius’s translation of Yūsuf va Zulayḫa is found among the papers and letters bound in

OBL, ms Marsh, 714.

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fragments suggest that Golius the translator might have suffered under the same rigor and

precision that distinguished Golius the philologist.

In Golius’s encounter with Persian literature after 1641, Saʿdī’s Gulistān played a special

role, and he appears to have entertained hopes of editing and translating the work. We can chart

his progress through annotations. His notes move between different manuscripts as Golius

sought the best vantage point from which to study the work and compare versions of the text. I

have already mentioned Golius’s first reading of the Gulistān in 1641, when he compared the

text of Leiden, Or. 242 with another, “Thysius” Gulistān. When Golius returned to the same

manuscript sometime in 1642-1643 in order to study it with Ḥaqq-vīrdī, he also worked through

the text to decipher its meaning. It was at this time that Golius consulted the anonymous Arabic

Gulistān commentary copied for him in Aleppo. Golius recorded in the margin of this

commentary variants from another manuscript (referred to simply as “al.” or “al. ex.” for “alius

exemplar”), as well as several of Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s emendations, suggesting that he planned at first to

use the commentary as the base text for his comparison with other witnesses.128 At a certain

point, Golius began recording the “al.” variants instead in Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s copy of the Gulistān

(which likely incorporated Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s own emendations, although they are unmarked).129

Sometime later, Golius began recording variants from yet another manuscript (dubbed “R.”).130

Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s Gulistān also contains graphite Latin glossing, indicating Golius’s study of the text.

However, not long thereafter, Golius switched manuscripts once more, midway through his

128 Marsh 566 also contains marginal additions in Ṯalğa’s hand that suggest he compared the Persian text

of the commentary with another manuscript. Additions indexed to the text and written, in what appears to

be Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s hand, on separate slips of paper, are now bound into the manuscript.

129 OBL, ms Marsh 174.

130 The order in which these variants were recorded can be identified from their relative placement on the

margin.

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collation, returning to where he began: Leiden, Or. 242.131 After this, Latin glossing and variants

from both “R.” and “al.” witnesses continue in Leiden, Or 242 until the end of the work. Ḥaqq-

vīrdī must have been present or, at least, consulted during this last stage, since we find notes that

directly refer to his input.132

Golius’s marginalia in Leiden, Or. 242 also casts light on the language of scholarly

communication between Golius and Ḥaqq-vīrdī. This had presented a challenge to Olearius, who

knew neither Turkish nor Arabic, and did not appear to have been comfortable communicating in

Persian. Golius, however, knew Arabic well, and this appears to have been the language they

used when Golius called Ḥaqq-vīrdī to him to explain a difficult passage. This is demonstrated in

a note on the term در مرگ (the door of death) in the verse “A poor man who bears up under the

weight of poverty comes lightly burdened to the door of death.”133 The Ottoman who copied

Leiden, Or. 242 had also added the literal gloss “أي الى باب الموت” (that is, to the door of death).134

The meaning of this was evidently still unclear to Golius, or he sought clarification on a point of

possible theological significance, because he wrote an additional gloss in Arabic—“time of

death” (وقت الموت)—adding an attribution to Ḥaqq-vīrdī. Further evidence that they spoke to each

other in Arabic is found in Golius’s correspondence, which contains later letters from Ḥaqq-vīrdī

to the Dutch orientalist, all written in Arabic.135

131 Golius nowhere explains why he stopped using Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s copy.

132 For instance, on UBL, ms or. 242, f.153v, in the beyt “گر نشیند فرشتهای با دیو – وحشت آموزد و خیانت و ریو”

(“If an angel sits with a demon, it will learn fury, treachery, and deception”, Thackston, trans., The

Gulistan of Saʿdi, 157). Golius added Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s name alongside his gloss of the word ویر (guile,

deception) as “fascinum, peccatum Sodomiticum”.

133 Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 140.

134 UBL, ms Or. 242, fol. 138r.

135 UBL, ms Or. 1228, nos 59-62.

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Together, these sources paint a picture of how Golius worked through the Gulistān. His

interests were philological and consistent with the aim of the production of a printed edition.

First, he attempted to recover Saʿdī’s text through the comparison of manuscripts. Second, using

a combination of Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s input and the commentaries and notes at his disposal, he strove to

decipher the work in its entirety. In both, he went much further than his predecessors. Still, his

Latin translation was quickly abandoned. Although the manuscript is interleaved, only the first

few pages contain the heavily-corrected beginnings of his planned translation.136 Hope of an

edition with a Latin translation would have to wait nearly a decade, when it was completed,

under very different circumstances, by one of Golius’s students, Georg Gentius.

At the same time as Golius’s efforts in Leiden, a third center of Persian studies took form.

Around 1640, the maître des requêtes and later conseiller d’État Gilbert Gaulmin (1585-1665)

began a period of focused study of Persian literature.137 Like Golius, he worked with both a

Persian speaking assistant and an assortment of scholarly tools from the Ottoman philological

tradition. By this time, Gaulmin’s penchant for languages was well-known. At the age thirty he

was publicly lauded for his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish.138 Decades

later, near the end of his life, Pierre Costar (1603-1660) said he knew “perfectly all the languages

136 OBL, ms Marsh, 174. Fol. 4r marks the end of Golius’s translation.

137 On Gaulmin, see Henri Omont, “Gilbert Gaulmyn, de Moulins, et sa collection de manuscrits

orientaux”, Revue bourbonnaise 3 (1886): 120-140, which includes a transcription of the inventory that

Claude Le Cappellain and Pietro della Valle made of Gaulmin’s library. See also François Secret,

“Gilbert Gaulmin et l’histoire comparée des religions”, Revue de l’histoire des religions 177 (1970): 35-

63 and Samuel Kerner, “Gilbert Gaulmin, érudit et hébraïsant français, 1585-1665”, Archives juives 10

(1974): 35-39 and 61-67. Secret’s essay refers to printed works with Gaulmin’s annotations.

138 See Secret, “Gilbert Gaulmin et l’histoire comparée des religions”, 39. Gaulmin learned Arabic with

Etienne Hubert (c. 1568-1614) and the Gabriel Sionita (1577-1648).

83

which the confusion of the Tower of Babel introduced to the Earth.”139 Such exaggerations are a

convention of orientalist biography, but the many annotations on the margins of his

manuscripts— he eventually owned more than five hundred volumes in Hebrew, Turkish,

Persian, and Arabic—show his reputation was well earned.140 We find glosses, notes, and

excerpts that attest to the breadth of his reading, even in Turkish and Persian.

Du Ryer must have had an influence on Gaulmin (who owned a number of Du Ryer’s

manuscripts), but it is possible that Gaulmin’s turn to Persian literature happened in coordination

with or in response to the efforts of Golius and Pococke. At the end of 1639, Pococke passed

through Paris on his way back from Istanbul. Twells observes that two contacts in Paris at this

time were documented among Pococke’s papers—Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Gabriel

Sionita (1577-1648)—but he could have met Gaulmin as well, considering their mutual

interests.141 The case for Gaulmin’s connection to Golius is stronger. Golius had documented

connections with other French scholars. Pierre Gassendi had not long before arranged for the

publication of the catalog of manuscripts Golius had collected abroad.142 Pereisc had also

mediated Golius’s correspondence with his brother in Aleppo. Two manuscripts establish a

direct link between Gaulmin’s and Golius’s Persian studies. The first is a copy of Kāšifī’s Anvār-

i Suhaylī from Golius’s collection, now OBL, ms Marsh 553.143 There can be no doubt that this

139 Pierre Costar, Apologie de Mr Costar à Monsieur Menage (Paris: Courbé, 1657), 140: “…qui possede

parfaitement toutes celles que la confusion de la Tour de Babel a introduites sur la terre…”

140 Gaulmin presented his collection of oriental manuscripts to Christine, the Queen of Sweden, for which

she gave him a substantial award. There is no catalog identifying the present call numbers of the volumes

from his collection, but Gaulmin’s manuscripts are easy to identify by the characteristic numbering and

signatures written in the back while inventorying the collection.

141 Twells, The Lives of Dr. Edward Pocock, 76.

142 P. Gassendi, Catalogus rarorum librorum.

143 The copy by Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī is now BnF, ms Persan, 383.

84

was the same manuscript that Gaulmin’s assistant copied in 1640, since the colophons are

identical and we find in Golius’s volume a line of verse in the handwriting of Gaulmin’s

assistant.144 The second manuscript is a copy of the same anonymous commentary that was

copied for both Pococke and Golius in Aleppo (Figure 15), found among Gaulmin’s

manuscripts.145 Its scribe is none other than Gaulmin himself, and the entire work is written out

in his characteristic Arabic hand. The colophon, dated 1048 (1638/1639), is identical to the one

in Golius’s manuscript. How these manuscripts moved between Paris and Leiden is unclear,

since no letters between the two orientalists have been identified.

There are other parallels between Gaulmin and Golius’s Persian studies around 1640.

Like Golius, Gaulmin employed a learned Persian-speaking assistant who read and copied

manuscripts for him: Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī, a Christian from Isfahan who came to Paris

through the Capuchin mission founded in 1628.146 In 1641, Claude Hardy reported in a letter to

Greaves the opportunity provided by the Persian’s arrival.147 Already in 1640 we find the first

evidence of his collaboration with Gaulmin.148 In the years that followed, Dāvūd copied around a

dozen works, some of which contain Gaulmin’s annotations.149 Their collaboration also resulted

144 OBL, ms Marsh 553, fol. IIr.

145 BnF, ms Arabe 3516.

146 The mission was founded after the arrival of Fathers Gabriel of Paris (c. 1595-1641) and Pacifique of

Provins (1588-1648) in Isfahan in 1628. I could find no account of the exact circumstances under which

Dāvūd came to Paris.

147 “Est in hac civitate Persa Spahani natus, egregie in sua lingua eruditus: si tantisper isthuc proficisci

posses, facile expleres ardentem illam cupidinem discendae linguae Persicae, quam in te admirabar.” John

Greaves, Miscellaneous Works of Mr. John Greaves, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Oxford:

Many of which are now published (London: Birch, 1737) 2:449.

148 Interestingly, one of the manuscripts he copied for Gaulmin (BnF, ms Persan 8, a Persian translation

of Richelieu’s L’Instruction du Chrétien) contains corrections by Gaulmin of Dāvūd’s Persian.

149 The works copied by Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī are BnF, mss Persan 8, Persan 177, Persan 185,

Persan 233, Persan 356, Persan 383, Supplément Persan 11, Supplément Persan 64, Supplément Persan

76, Supplément Persan 185, Supplément Persan 739, and Supplément Turc 463.

85

in one published translation from Persian during Gaulmin’s lifetime: a 1644 French translation of

Kāšifī’s Anvār-i Suhaylī (a Timurid reworking of the Kalila wa Dimna fables), published under

Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī’s name.150

As with Golius, Gaulmin’s annotations also show the orientalist reading Persian texts

through their Ottoman reception. In addition to the Arabic Gulistān commentary that he copied

by hand, Gaulmin used Ottoman dictionaries and Turkish translations to better understand

Persian. Marginalia in Dāvūd’s copy (Figure 16) of the Anvār-i Suhaylī show Gaulmin

consulting both the sixteenth-century Turkish translation of Kāšifī’s work (Humāyūnnāme) and

Ḥalīmī’s Persian-Turkish dictionary.151 In fact, the Persian amanuensis copied the entirety of

Ḥalīmī’s dictionary, leaving (much like Ḥaqq-vīrdī did for Olearius) half of each page for

notes.152 Dāvūd also copied out a Turkish-Persian glossary (ordered by Turkish headword),

alongside which Gaulmin wrote French definitions and made his own additions.153

150 Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī, Livre des Lumières, ou la Conduite des roys, composé par le sage Pilpay,

indien (Paris: Piget, 1644). A portion of Gaulmin’s translation of Yaḥyā Qazvīnī’s Lubb ut-Tevārīḫ was

published (without title or attribution to Gaulmin) in 1672 in the fourth volume of Thévenot, Relations de divers voyages curieux (Paris: Cramoisy, 1672). Antoine Galland later corrected and completed this work.

Galland’s translation was then printed in 1690, but is exceedingly rare and its later eighteenth-century

German editor speculates that its publication had been suppressed. In any event, a handwritten copy made

from Galland’s personal copy of the 1690 edition, likely by Frederick Rostgaard (1671-1745), came to

Dresden by the early eighteenth century and is now SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 363 (more precisely, the

copyist used the 1690 edition to correct and supplement their own copy of the 1672 printing). Sometime

later, the Leipzig Arabist Johann Jacob Reiske (1716-1774) copied ms Dresd. Eb. 363, which he later

gave to Anton Büsching (1724-1793), who published it as “Lubb it-Tavarich seu, Medulla Historiarum,

Auctore Ommia Jahhia, Abd-Ullatifi filio, Kazbiniensi; interpretibus e persico Gilberto Gaulmino et

Antonio Gallando”, Magazin für die neue Historie und Geographie 17 (1783): 1-180.

151 See Bnf, ms Persan 383. Gaulmin’s marginalia is, however, confined to the books final chapters, 861-

930. Gaulmin’s copy of the Humāyūnnāme is now Bnf, ms Turc 371.

152 Bnf, ms Persan 177. However, the empty space left by Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī remains entirely

unannotated.

153 Bnf, ms Supplément Turc 463. Later in the century, Antoine Galland used the manuscript, making

additional corrections and additions.

86

This was the context for Gaulmin’s encounter with the Gulistān, and his reading of

Saʿdī’s work shows how these various resources could be united in the study of a single text. The

inventory of Gaulmin’s library drawn up by Claude Le Cappellain (d. 1702) and Pietro Della

Valle (1586-1652) mentions seven Gulistān manuscripts.154 Ground zero for his reading of the

work was almost certainly the Arabic commentary he copied by hand from Golius’s

manuscript.155 Here, Gaulmin’s occasional annotations show him to be an attentive reader of the

manuscript he was copying. He caught his own errors, offered emendations, made notes on

individual words, and recorded variants found in at least one other Gulistān manuscript. Notably,

Gaulmin left out most of the Persian text from his copy, recording only the beginning of each

commented passage. In this way he spared himself part of the arduous scribal work (copying is a

skill acquired through practice, and such a long manuscript was already a considerable

undertaking for a seventeenth-century orientalist). Instead, he noted variants from the Persian

text of the Arabic commentary on the margins of another Gulistān manuscript.156 This second

manuscript also contains a sign of Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī’s input: the addition of vowel

marks. Since these are written in the lighter brown ink characteristic of Western Europe, it can be

assumed that they were added in Paris, in all likelihood by the Persian amanuensis.157 A note

found in another Gulistān from Gaulmin’s collection suggests that Dāvūd was also tasked with

154 Omont, “Gilbert Gaulmyn de Moulins et sa collection de manuscrits orientaux”. These are numbers

393 (“Gulistan et Bostan, persice”, now BnF, ms Persan 288), 407 (“Gulistan persan, glosé en turc”, now

BnF, ms Turc 272), 412 (“Gulistan, persice”), 418 (“Gulistan, persice, in-8o”), 425 (“Gulistan, persice),

429 (“Gulistan, persice”, now BnF, ms Persan 300), 543 (“Gulistan, persice”).

155 BnF, ms Arabe 3516.

156 This manuscript is now BnF, ms Persan 340.

157 The manuscript’s vocalization is, in contrast to the text, in the brown ink characteristic of Western

handwriting.

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comparing manuscripts.158 Traces of Gaulmin’s readings can also be found in the remaining

Gulistān manuscripts from his collection. In one (which similarly came from the library of Du

Ryer), Gaulmin copied a Turkish fable onto the flyleaf.159 Another does not have the marginalia

of Gaulmin, but contains a rich assortment of Ottoman glosses and excerpts from the

commentaries of Sürūrī and Şemʿī. It is unclear if and when Gaulmin consulted the various

Gulistān manuscripts in his collection. However, it is likely that Gaulmin read the same Turkish

interlinear translation that Du Ryer might have used for his 1634 French translation, because at

one point he completed a portion of the text that had been scratched out by an earlier owner.160

158 BnF, ms Persan 339, f. 3v: “icy il y a après Daved 14 vers de moins que dans les autres manuscrits.”

159 BnF, ms Persan 288. f.1r.

160 BnF, ms Turc 272, f. 22v.

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Figure 15. BnF, ms Arabe 3516: 245v: Colophon of Gaulmin’s copy of OBL, ms Marsh 566.

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Figure 16. BnF, ms Persan 383, 884: Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī’s copy of the Anvār-i Suhaylī with Gaulmin’s

notes comparing the text with the Turkish translation.

Like Golius, Gaulmin never produced a complete translation or edition of the Gulistān,

but as the two senior orientalists carefully collated their manuscripts, the next generation of

orientalists prepared for their trips to Istanbul. This was brought about by another innovation in

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orientalist learning. For Gaulmin and Golius, engagement with Turkish as a language of

scholarship belonged to their working practices but remained marginal. Golius had won fame as

an orientalist scholar who traveled Ottoman lands in search of old and valuable manuscripts and

had made one of the storied “finds” of early modern orientalist scholarship, the Arabic

translation of the missing sections of Apollonius’s Conics.161 Such discoveries represented the

promise of orientalist scholarship to recover lost knowledge, and Gassendi’s catalog is as much a

celebration of Golius as a new type of scholar as an inventory of his manuscripts. Still, Golius

was never quite at home in the more recent scholarly traditions of the lands he traveled. In

particular, while he knew enough of the language to work his way through some stories and

make use of various dictionaries, he does not appear to have mastered Turkish (or did so only

much later), and he ultimately made only limited use of Ottoman Turkish scholarship over the

course of his career. What Ottoman scholarship he did use was, like the commentary discussed

above, often in Arabic.

While many of Golius’s students followed in his footsteps as traveling manuscript

hunters, the most successful among them forged a different strategy: they studied in Istanbul

with Turkish scholars, mastered Turkish, and used Turkish scholarship as the basis of their own

scholarly output. They were the first in a long tradition of such scholars, followed by figures like

Antoine Galland at the turn of the eighteenth and Joseph Hammer at the turn of the nineteenth

161 On the history of the lost books of Apollonius’s Conics, see Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and

Learning, esp. 235-242. Published editions and translations of the books begin with Abraham

Ecchellensis and Giovanni Alphonso Borelli, Apollonii Pergaei Conicorum lib. V, VI, VII: additus in calce Archimedis assumptorum liber, ex codicibus arabicis mss. Florence: Cocchini, 1661. We have

Toomer to thank for a critical edition, as well. Gerald J. Toomer, ed., Apollonius Conics Books V to VII: The Arabic Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banū Mūsā, 2 vols (New York:

Springer, 1990).

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century, who drove the development of Western European oriental studies through their

engagement with Turkish scholarship in Istanbul.

As with his collaborations with amanuenses, how Golius taught and worked with his

students can only be reconstructed indirectly from their manuscripts and publications. Johann

Fabricius’s 1637 Specimen Arabicum, for instance, offered a record of the materials from his

earlier studies with Golius.162 In the case of Golius’s Persian studies at the beginning of the

1640s, this work spawned at least one publication directly and lead indirectly to Gentius’s 1651

Rosarium politicum.

In the seventeenth century, Leiden was the best place in Western Europe to become an

orientalist. Golius was the model of a new kind of scholar who studied Arabic, Persian, and

Turkish together, and his introduction carried weight with contacts in Istanbul. Leiden was also

home to other renowned scholars and orientalists. De Dieu and his Historia Christi have already

been discussed. Another influential professor was the Hebraist Constantijn L’Empereur (1591-

1648), with whom both Gentius and Warner studied.163 While a differentiation between the study

of Hebrew and the Islamic philologies had emerged by the mid-seventeenth century, the work of

Hebraists like L’Empereur offered a model both for the production of editions and the

collaboration with scholars across lines of cultural and linguistic difference.

162 See the “Prefatio ad Lectorem” in Johannes Fabricius, Specimen Arabicum aliquod scripta Arabica

partim in prosa, partim ligata oratione composita (Rostock: Richelianus, 1637). On Fabricius, see Jan

Loop, “Arabic Poetry as Teaching Material in Early Modern Grammars and Textbooks”, in The Teaching

and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, 230-251.

163 On L’Empereur, see Peter T. van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in

the Seventeenth Century: Constantijn L’Empereur (1591-1648) Professor of Hebrew and Theology at Leiden (Leiden: Brill, 1989), esp. 191-197, which discusses L’Empereur’s pupils, including Gentius and

Warner.

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Not all budding orientalists in Leiden took advantage in equal measure. Some went East

on similar manuscript expeditions and, whatever their future success, spent their careers clinging

tenuously to their manuscript collections as signifiers of supposed expertise and stores of secret

wisdom. These same manuscripts, along with the accounts of their contemporaries, betray them

to posterity. The German orientalist and manuscript collector Christian Raue (Ravius) (1613-

1677), passed through Leiden long enough to get Golius’s recommendation and, on his trip east,

assembled one of Western Europe’s largest and best collections of Islamic manuscripts.164

However, he did little of scholarly significance with them and his manuscripts today suggest he

lacked the mastery of the necessary languages.165 Like his intellectual models, he employed an

amanuensis. However, his assistant, Niqūlāwus al-Ḥalabī (c. 1611-c.1661), embittered by

unfulfilled promises and poor treatment, later spoke openly with scorn about the character and

incompetence of his former employer.166 Jöcher’s Gelehrten-Lexikon (the standard German

eighteenth-century biographical encyclopedia) offers a similar assessment of another middling

orientalist who staked his scholarly career on the manuscript haul from a subsidized trip east:

Theodor Petraeus (c. 1630-1672). In a theatrical touch, Jöcher has Petraeus give a full confession

as a member in bad standing in the Republic of Letters to a scholar who had the temerity to

travel to Copenhagen to learn from him: “What?” he’s supposed to have said, “…I’m supposed

164 Many of Raue’s manuscripts are now in the SBB, and can be identified by Raue’s characteristic hand,

often found lurking around the initial page or the colophon and nowhere else.

165 This was my impression from my study of the pre-1800 collection of Islamic manuscripts at the SBB.

Very few of Raue’s manuscripts, most of which are today in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, contain

glossing or notes, and I could find no indication of mastery of Arabic or Turkish.

166 Of Raue, he wrote to Golius, “I did not expect that among the Europeans there exist such liars”,

adding elsewhere “Raue’s aim in having me accompany him is only to astound and boast. He talks with

me in the Turkish language and tells people that he is talking in Arabic. And he orders me the while not to

tell anyone [the truth], so that he may become a professor.” Hilary Kilpatrick and Gerald J. Toomer,

“Niqūlāwus al-Ḥalabī (c.1611-c.1661): A Greek Orthodox Syrian Copyist and His Letters to Pococke and

Golius”, Lias 43, no. 1 (2016): 1-159 (75).

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to share the knowledge I acquired with my hard work, and at great cost and risk? You can travel

there yourself, if you want to have knowledge of these things.”167

In contrast, the cases of Levinus Warner and Georg Gentius could be deemed success

stories, although neither has been given his due in the history of oriental studies.168 Warner is

most famous for amassing an outstanding collection of manuscripts in Istanbul, which he then

bequeathed to Leiden University. The Legatum Warnerianum ensured Leiden’s place as a center

of orientalist study, and the pioneering Western European Arabists of the eighteenth century to a

large extent merely retraced the various paths Warner had worn through his manuscripts.

Gentius, for his part, produced the first edition and complete Western European translation of the

Gulistān: the crowning achievement of seventeenth-century Persian studies in non-Ottoman

Europe and a turning point in the Western European reception of the work.

Levinus Warner in Leiden and Istanbul

167 Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (hereafter: AGL) (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich

Gleditsch, 1751), 3:1439: “Was? (sagte er) solte ich die durch meinen sauren Schweiß, mit viel Unkosten

und Gefahr erworbene Wissenschaft andern mittheilen? Sie mögen selber dahin reisen, wenn sie von

diesen Sachen Wissenschaft haben wollen.” The visiting scholar was the Tübingen professor Benedict

Höpfner. On Petraeus, see Erik Iversen, “Theodor Petraeus og det 17. Aarhundredes Orientalske Studier”,

Fund og Forskning 9 (1962): 79-113.

168 Warner, while celebrated, remains understudied. On Warner and his collection, see Arnoud Vrolijk,

Jan Schmidt, and Karin Scheper, eds, Turcksche Boucken: de oosterse verzameling van Levinus Warner,

diplomaat in 17e eeuws Istanbul/The Oriental collection of Levinus Warner, Dutch diplomat in seventeenth-century Istanbul (Eindhoven: Lecturis, 2012). On Gentius, see August Beyer, Historia vitae,

fatorum atque meritorum Georgii Gentii Dhama-Saxonis Consiliarii Electoralis Saxonici, viri linguarum tum orientalium tum occidentalium peritissimi literati infelicissimi (Dresden and Leipzig: Hekelius,

1733).

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Warner and Gentius were in Leiden at precisely the moment when Golius turned to

Persian literature, and both built directly on their studies there when they traveled to Istanbul to

find new teachers. In Istanbul, they collected manuscripts and learned from the Ottoman scholars

who read, copied, and wrote them. Warner arrived somewhat later than Gentius, but he was the

first to make his mark: a 1644 collection of proverbs, entitled Masalhā-i zabān-i fārsī,

Proverbiorum et Sententiarum Persicarum Centuria. The book offers a glimpse into Warner’s

Persian studies in Leiden.169 Of its hundred proverbs, a majority are taken from the Gulistān.

In format, Warner’s collection imitates Scaliger and Erpenius’s collection of Arabic

proverbs, which introduced many seventeenth-century orientalists to the language.170 It presents

the proverb first in Persian, and then in Latin translation, followed by Warner’s commentary. In

his preface, Warner offers his modest collection as a taste of the Persian language’s innate

character and an opportunity to judge its singular charm.171 This charm is elegance, which

Warner contrasts to the subtlety of Arabic and the majesty of Turkish. The relationship between

Persian, Turkish, and Arabic is one of Warner’s central concerns in his notes, where he

169 Levinus Warner, مثلهای زبان فارسی Proverbiorum et Sententiarum Persicarum Centuria (Leiden: Maire,

1644). On Warner’s Proverb collection and its sources, see Tea Shurgaia, “The Earliest Printed Collection

of Persian Proverbs”, Proverbium 29 (2012): 307-330.

170 Joseph Scaliger and Thomas Erpenius, eds, Kitāb al-amṯāl, Proverbiorum Arabicorum centuriae duae/

ab anonymo quodam Arabe collecte et explicata: cum interpretatione Latina et scholiis Iosephi Scaligeri…et Thomae Erpenii (Leiden: Raphelengius, 1614). A copy of the 1623 edition in Princeton

(Princeton University Library (hereafter: PUL), 2007-2480N) offers an example of how a seventeenth-

century reader might go about using Erpenius and Scaliger’s collection to learn Arabic. As indicated in an

inscription on the title page verso, the copy was a gift of the edition’s dedicatee, Méric Casaubon. Its

seventeenth-century owner quickly gave up their reading of the work, but they annotated the first sections

and had the work bound with blank sheets of paper for a word index to be compiled while proceeding

through the work.

171 Warner, “Benevole Lector,” Proverbiorum et Sententiarum Persicarum centuria: “Illis, inquam, cum e

genuinis Persarum scriptis nihil hactenus in Latinam linguam sit translatum, aliquem hujus linguae

gustum propinare volui, unde indolem eius ac genium aestimare, ac de singulari ejus lepore judicare

possent.”

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sometimes gives Turkish and Arabic equivalents to his Persian proverbs, and compares the use

of imagery between languages.172

Reading Warner’s proverbs with an eye to his sources reveals the ingenuity with which

he spun the impression of wide-ranging erudition from a limited set of sources. Scaliger and

Erpenius had the good fortune to work in an existing apothegmatic tradition. Their collection of

Arabic proverbs was an edition of a collection of proverbs copied in Rome, which had, in turn,

pulled from major apothegmatic collections like the Kitāb al-amthāl of Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b.

Sallām (770-838).173 Warner, in contrast, pulled mostly from a single source: the Gulistān.174

His strategy can be quickly summarized. He usually left the proverbs unattributed, but

made occasional reference to the Gulistān in his notes, alongside other works. This gave the

impression of broad, unspecified learning supported by knowledge of particular passages in

particular books, and suggested he could spin a web of intertexts to illustrate grammatical points

172 As, for instance, in a longer comment on the poetic and metaphorical uses of “dirt” that follows its use

through different examples in Persian and Turkish. Warner, Proverbiorum et Sententiarum Persicarum

centuria, 4-5.

173 Arnoud Vrolijk, “The Prince of Arabists and His Many Errors: Thomas Erpenius’s Image of Joseph

Scaliger and the Edition of the Proverbia Arabica (1614)”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld

Institutes 73 (2010): 297-325. Vrolijk reconstructed the genesis of Scaliger’s project, which Erpenius

corrected and completed after his death in 1609. It rested on a compilation of proverbs, perhaps copied by

a Tunisian convert at the Collegium Neophytorum in Rome known as Domenico Sirletto (by whom two

collections of proverbs have been identified, Vatican Library, ms arab. 194, and BnF, ms Arabe 3969).

Near the end of the sixteenth century, an aristocratic traveler to Rome, David Rivault (c. 1571-1616)

commissioned a Latin translation of the work from a Maronite in Rome. This translation was then copied

by Isaac Casaubon in Paris, and another transcription of the Arabic proverbs (copied, likely from

Casaubon’s apograph, by Adriaen Willemsz) was sent to Scaliger, who translated it. This translation, with

Scaliger’s notes, as well as Casaubon’s copy with the Maronite translation, formed the basis of Erpenius’s

edition. Vrolijk writes that “many of the manuscripts which Erpenius had at his disposal in France are

now lost.” Some of these can be found today in Hamburg. The autograph manuscript of Erpenius’s

proverb collection, as well as copies in Erpenius’s hand of Scaliger’s translation and Casaubon’s

manuscript (with the Maronite translation Rivault commissioned) is now SUBH ms 154.

174 I counted 62 borrowings from the Gulistān, three more than Shurgaia. The additional borrowings are

proverbs 42, 75, and 97, corresponding in Yusūfī’s edition to stories 3.27, 2.14, and 7.19, respectively.

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and elucidate relevant historical or cultural contexts. In one proverb he presented related

passages from the same story in the Gulistān as distinct intertexts. The final story in Saʿdī’s first

book (on the conduct of kings) delivers the lesson, through the example of Alexander the Great,

that a king should not disparage his predecessors. According to the story, Alexander was asked,

“How did you take the orient and the occident, when ancient kings had more treasure and

soldiers than you but could not accomplish such conquest?” He replied, “With God’s help in

every country I took I did not vex the peasantry, and I only spoke well of their kings.” To this,

Saʿdī added, as usual, a verse to summarize the lesson:

The wise do not call him wise who speaks ill of the great.

All these are nothing when they pass away: throne, fortune, the power to command and

forbid, and the ability to give and take.

Do not sully the good name of those who have gone, and thus your own good name will

remain forever.175

Warner reversed the order of elements in Saʿdī’s story and recast them as intertexts in Persian

culture more broadly. First, he offered the initial line of verse (“The wise do not call him wise

who speaks ill of the great”) as a “proverb”, without attribution. Then, in his note, he cited the

first part, again without attribution, as illustrative of the proverb’s cultural context, prefacing it

with a general observation on “the Persians”: “The Persians judge Alexander truly great, because

he always honored the kings that came before him.”176

Other evidence in Warner’s proverb collection points to the role played by Ḥaqq-vīrdī.

Alongside the proverbs taken from the Gulistān, a smaller number have no clear textual basis. In

one instance, Tea Shurgaia has identified a deviation from other recorded versions that likely

175 Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 45.

176 “Hinc Alexandrum vere magnum judicant Persae, quod Regum qui eum antecesserunt, honorifice

semper meminisse consueverit”. Warner, Proverbiorum et Sententiarum Persicarum centuria, 29.

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indicates translation or misremembering.177 Elsewhere, in his notes, Warner includes information

that seems indebted to oral input. Where else could he have learned that Persians refer to the

particularly ignorant with the expression “an ass with tašdīd” (خری با تشدید; tašdīd is the doubling

of consonants in Arabic script, i.e. “two times an ass”)?178 And on what authority could he state

that “to know a lion by its claws” was an idiom entirely foreign to Persian?179 These indicate

contact with a native Persian speaker, almost certainly Ḥaqq-vīrdī, whose knowledge of Turkish

would also help explain Warner’s use of Turkish material in his notes.180

The 1644 collection reflects only Warner’s first efforts as a Persianist. Another set of

sources offers a picture of how Warner’s studies developed after his arrival in Istanbul. Along

with the famed Islamic manuscripts of the Legatum Warnerianum, Leiden University Library

received a remarkable collection of Warner’s notes. While Warner had little impact in print, no

non-Ottoman European of his day (excepting perhaps his teacher, Golius) came close to

matching the breadth and intensity of Warner’s study of Islamic manuscripts. His notes are a

177 Shurgaia, “The Earliest Printed Collection of Persian Proverbs”, 323. This refers to proverb 57 in

Warner’s collection: “ ندارد نقصان لیسا به سگ ادیفر ” (“The dog’s bark does no harm to the beggar”). Shurgaia

identifies two similar proverbs in later collections (“A dog’s bark doesn’t reduce a beggar’s daily meal”),

and concludes on the basis of this distinction and the “loose” use of دشتن with نقصان that Warner likely

relied on an oral source.

178 Warner, Proverbiorum et Sententiarum Persicarum centuria, 16.

179 Warner, Proverbiorum et Sententiarum Persicarum centuria, 15. Warner makes this claim in the

course of faulting the Jesuit Hieronymus Xavier for using this supposedly foreign idiom in his translation:

“Sic e.g. ubi scribit, ex illis quae adduxerit, satis posse cognosci quis Christus sit, subjungit: چنانچه فیل را

Sicuti elephantem ex signo pedum eius cognoscunt, & leonem ex از نشان پای او بشناسند وشیر را از پنچه

unguibus. Graecos & Latinos proverbialiter ita loqui, notum est…. Ex unguibus leonem aestimare. Sed

Persis hic dicendi modus est inusitatus. Unde ne divinando illi quidem similem ex illis verbis sensum

exsculpant.” See Shurgaia, “The Earliest Printed Collection of Persian Proverbs”, 316.

180 An error in a line of Turkish poetry quoted in Warner’s notes suggests an oral source (Warner,

Proverbiorum et sententiarum Persicarum centuria, 5). Warner writes the line کوره کورم یدل یقنره بر اهل

with an erroneous ی replacing the correct ezafe اهل دل (ehl-i dil). This might be the result of an error in

transcribing a line of poetry recalled by Ḥaqq-vīrdī.

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document of these studies, and they served as support and orientation for the generations of

Leiden students that followed him.181

Among them we find papers documenting his study of Persian literature. They show that

he studied Persian as a Turkish-speaking Ottoman would, and worked extensively with Turkish

commentaries, in particular, those of Sūdī. A portion of this material has been identified. Some

of Warner’s notes on Sūdī’s commentary on the Divan of Hafez were collected as Leiden, Or.

1157b. An even larger group of papers with Persian material is found in a collection of

unordered, unbound gatherings of Warner’s notes.182 Its contents, while fragmentary, offer a

survey of Warner’s Persian studies and document his reading practices. A few pages contain

stray notes with words jotted here and there. However, the bulk of the papers show Warner as he

sat down with a series of Turkish works on Persian language and literature. He read, for instance,

the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī, on which he took notes. We also find another portion of Warner’s notes on

Sūdī’s Ḥāfiẓ commentary (part of the same collection of papers in UBL, or. 1157b), as well as

notes from Sūdī’s commentaries on the Bustān and Gulistān, and another commentary on the

Masnavī of Rūmī.183

The organization and format of these notes offer a view of the scholar at work (Figure

17). Warner wrote on unbound gatherings of a few sheets. He followed the (for him more

familiar) ordering of pages from left to right, and wrote sloppily, without consideration for future

181 The role the notes and annotations in the Legatum Warnerianum played in directing the studies of the

generations of eighteenth-century scholars that followed Albert Schultens in the study of Arabic literature

has yet to be worked out. Bevilacqua discusses Warner’s marginalia and their later readers in Alexander

Bevilacqua, “Islamic Letters in the European Enlightenment” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014),

373-376.

182 UBL, ms Or. 1118.

183 Warner’s notes in his copy of the Būstān (UBL, ms Or. 896) also include references to Sūdī.

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readers.184 The notes exhibit a minimum of organization, and appear intended to focus thought,

not record for posterity. The gatherings are unpaginated, and there is no table of contents or title

page, although Warner did often fold pages to demarcate a margin, and he marked out the

beginning of poems or sections by writing out their initial words, separate and centerd on the

page.185 Reiske, who knew Warner’s manuscripts better than anyone, captured the spirit of the

orientalist’s pen when he said, speaking of one of his translations, “those things are recorded

only for private use and hurriedly, or the learned cast them out rashly, that they might serve

temporarily, and then be wiped away with a sponge, when it pleases.”186 Warner’s notes offered

a space to gather information, an aid in deciphering a dense literary language, as when he pulled

glosses from Sūdī’s commentaries, working out particular passages through translation into

Latin. Still, the occasional addition from Warner’s hand in ink distinct from the main text

suggests that Warner did, at times, return to and consult his notes.

Warner never published again after his arrival in Istanbul, where he died in 1665, but his

notes show the emergence of the new kind of orientalist scholar I described above. The core

competencies of this new type are in evidence in their pages: mastery of Turkish and an

184 The difficulty of reading Warner’s notes, along with the range of languages that he worked in, is likely

the reason that he remains understudied relative to his importance as a scholar and collector.

185 This is in evidence, for instance, in the notes from his reading of Sūdī’s Ḥāfiẓ commentary collected

as UBL, or. 1157b.

186 Translation from Bevilacqua, “Islamic Letters in the European Enlightenment”, 375-376. Reiske

added “These things must not be brought forth in public, as ambitious compilers of anecdotes do to the

ignominy of authors, but rather they are to be kept within domestic gates, as perpetual monuments of

learned efforts.” Johann Jacob Reiske, trans., “Prologus”, Tharaphae Moallakah: cum scholiis Nahas e

mss. Leidensibus, by Ṭarafa ibn al- ’Abd. Leiden: Luzac, 1732), vii: “Talem enim puto esse, qualem qui

velit edere, sollicitaret doctissimos manes et furias haberet sibi merito ultrices. Quae enim in usus tantum

privatos et raptim consignant, aut temere effundunt docti, ut inserviant ad tempus, spongia, quando placet,

iterum detergenda, proferri illa non debent in publicum, quod ambitioisi faciunt anecdotorum

compilatores, in auctorum ignominiam, sed cancellis premenda domesticis, perpetua eruditarum

lucubrationum monumenta.”

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orientation towards existing Ottoman scholarship in the selection of texts and manuscripts. The

case of Gentius allows us to follow in detail how this orientation towards Istanbul and Ottoman

Turkish scholarship could be productively translated into scholarly output.

101

Figure 17. UBL, or. 1118, [unpaginated]: Warner’s notes on his reading of the Gulistān (here, 5.14) show how

the orientalist worked through the text using Sūdī’s commentary (as well as the challenges of his

handwriting).

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Georg Gentius

Born in 1618 in Dahme, a village near Querfurt, Georg Gentius entered the city

gymnasium in Halle, then run by Christian Gueintz, in 1633.187 Gentius then traveled as a tutor to

Schleswig, before studying at the universities of Hamburg, Bremen, and, beginning in 1638,

Leiden. In Leiden, Gentius learned under Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), Lodewijk de Dieu,

Constantijn L’Empereur, and Golius. We can only speculate about the scope of his early studies.

His eighteenth-century biographer, August Beyer, states that Gentius quickly learned Arabic,

Turkish, and Persian during this time.188 All other indications suggest a focus on the study of

Hebrew, working in the mold of Constantijn L’Empereur. Throughout the 1630s, L’Empereur

produced dual language editions from the Mishnah that used Latin translation as a guide to

careful study of the original text, alongside additional explanatory notes.189 The influence of

these can be seen in Gentius’s first publication, a 1640 translation from Maimonides’s Mishneh

187 The best source on Gentius remains August Beyer’s (1707-1741) 1733 biography. Beyer, a scholar

from Freiberg (where Gentius died) was a librarian in Dresden and worked in the same position as

librarian for Heinrich von Bünau later occupied by Johann Michael Francke (1717-1775) and Johann

Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). Beyer wrote his biography on the basis of a collection of letters,

papers, and manuscripts from Gentius’s Nachlass that are now missing.

188 Beyer, Historia vitae, fatorum atque meritorum Georgii Gentii, 15.

189 The format of L’Empereur’s editions imitated that of another Leiden Hebraist, Johannes Cocceius.

Cocceius’s 1629 edition of the Sanhedrin and Makkot differed from previous editions of Hebrew texts in

the inclusion of a literal Latin translation in a parallel column, adding detailed notes at the end of each

section. Over the course of the 1630s, L’Empereur produced a number of Hebrew editions with parallel

translations that further developed this format. The first of these, a 1630 edition of the Middot (a tract

from the Mishnah on the Second Temple), copied the format of Cocceius’s edition, to which L’Empereur

added several indices. L’Empereur employed this model again in his edition of two additional tracts from

the Mishnah: Halikhot Olam (1634) and Bava Kamma (1637). Another work from this time,

L’Empereur’s 1633 edition of Benjamin of Tudela’s travel account, offers perhaps the clearest

predecessor for Gentius’s Rosarium politicum, as the bilingual Hebrew-Latin edition includes endnotes

similar to Gentius’. See van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in the

Seventeenth Century, 110-132.

103

Torah, which followed an identical format.190 Gentius dedicated his work to Gerbrand Anslo

(1612-1643), a young merchant and enthusiastic student of Hebrew letters.191 Anslo supported

Gentius’s studies more generally, and he helped finance Gentius’s trip to Istanbul in 1641, after

the chance arose, as Beyer recounts, to depart with the retinue of a returning Ottoman legate

named Mustafa Ibrahim.192

What happened over the course of those seven years can be pieced together from a

variety of sources: Gentius’s letters, his own manuscripts, and the two works he published soon

after his arrival. The first of these, a Latin translation of Solomon ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehuda,

was done with the encouragement of Menasseh Ben Israel, and appears to have occupied

Gentius’s time during his first years in Istanbul. He mentions working on the translation in a

1642 letter to Anslo, and Beyer suggests that he had completed a dedication to Anslo before his

patron’s death in 1643.193 The translation was eventually published as Historia Judaica in 1651

with a dedicatory letter to the Hamburg Senate advocating both tolerance for and effective

conversion of the city’s Jews.194

190 Moses ben Maimon, Hilkhot De’ot sive Canones ethici R. Moseh Meimonidis, Hebraeorum

sapientissimi, trans. Georg Gentius (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1640).

191 Gentius also wrote the first dedication of his 1651 Historia Judaica to Anslo, but it is, like the rest of

papers that Beyer used in his biography, now missing. See Beyer, Historia vitae, fatorum atque

meritorum Georgii Gentii, 12, note m. On the Maimonides translation of Gentius, a “favorite of the

Amsterdam rabbis”, see Aaron L. Katchen, Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis: Seventeenth Century

Apologetics and the Study of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1984), 247-259.

192 “Et quod continuo optavit, ipsi praeter opinionem contigit, scilicet, ut in comitatu Legati Turcici

MUSTAPHAE nomine ABRAHAMI ad praepotentes foederatarum in Belgio provinciarum Ordines a

novo Turcarum Imperatore IBRAHIMO missi terras Orientem versus sitas invisere potuerit.” Beyer,

Historia vitae, fatorum atque meritorum Georgii Gentii, 16-17.

193 Georg Gentius to Gerbrand Anslo, 21 June 1642, SBB, Slg. Darmstaedter 2b. Gentius, Georg.

194 Solomon ibn Verga, Historia Judaica, res Judaeorum ab Eversa Aede Hierosolymitana, ad haec fere tempora usque, complexa (Amsterdam: Niellius, 1651). On Gentius’s letter, see Katchen, Christian

Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis, 263-266.

104

The second product of Gentius’s years abroad was his edition and translation of the

Gulistān. In the context of his time, Gentius’s Rosarium politicum was a remarkable

undertaking: an edition of a major work of Persian literature with nearly one hundred pages of

learned notes pulling from a variety of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic sources. While these notes

leave the impression of a (for his time, at least) vast orientalist erudition, the work took form in

very specific circumstances: through a close reading of Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary in the

context of a mentorship relationship with an Ottoman scholar in Istanbul, probably around 1645.

To follow this process is to reconstruct how an Ottoman tradition of reading a text was

refashioned into a scholarly work in the mold of L’Empereur’s editions. It also demonstrates the

magnitude of support and resources that were necessary to undertake such a publication.

Gentius arrived in Istanbul by September 1641. At least one Ottoman source attests to

Gentius’s time there, a letter from the Ottoman jurist and fetvā-emīni (scribe under the

şeyḫülislām responsible for religious rulings), Şeyḫzāde Meḥmed Efendi to Jacobus Golius, is

dated more than three years later (1 Muharram 1055/27 February 1645), but it speaks to the

problem of forging connections across learned cultures.195 It also shows how contact between

Leiden students and Ottoman scholars was a legacy of Golius’s own travels. Here, Meḥmed

Efendi took pains to enumerate his earlier efforts to connect Golius with scholars in Istanbul:

When you came from Aleppo to Istanbul in 1036, you met the head astrologer Meḥmed

Efendi in his quarters, you visited his excellency the şeyḫülislām Hüseyin Efendi, and the

fetvā-emīni Rahmetullah Efendi, and his excellency Riyāẓ Efendi, recalled from Egypt,

and some dealings and friendships were made.196

195 The letter is found in OBL, ms Marsh 714, no. 28 (by the uncorrected old numbering). On Şeyḫzāde

Meḥmed Efendi, see Al-Muḥibbī, Ḫulāṣat al-aṯar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿashar (Beirut, 1867/1868),

474-475.

196 OBL, ms Marsh 714. “biñ otuz altı tārīḫleri ḥudūdunda Ḥalebden Istanbula geldiġiñizde rā’is al-

müneccimīn Meḥmed Efendi saʿādetḫānelerinde mülāḳāt ėdüb Şeyḫülislām Husseyn Efendi ḥażretlerine

ve fetva emīni Rahmetullah Efendiye ve Mısırdan maʿzūl olan Riyāẓ Efendi ḥażretlerine varub niçe

muʿāmele ve dostluḳ olunmus idi.”

105

Reminiscing about old times served a purpose: a reminder that networking entails mutual

obligation. With this, Meḥmed Efendi then came to the point of his letter. Christian Raue owed

him money:

A few years later one of your pupils, Rāvī Çelebi, came and gave news from you and

showed your letter, that you wanted some things to be ordered, and we got them and

delivered them to Rāvī Çelebi, and we also had a number of various dealings, and we

enjoyed ourselves and he entertained us, as your ambassador did, for your sake. Now,

after everything there remained a bill of eighty guruş and he promised to send it within

one hundred and twenty days, which passed and nothing arrived. Please do us the

courtesy and favor, respecting friendship, to get it from Rāvī Çelebi, whatever the

trouble, and send it to the palace of the ambassador.197

In a draft reply, Golius’s amanuensis, Niqūlāwus ibn Buṭrus al-Ḥalabī (c. 1611-c.1661),

identifies the core of the problem: manuscripts.198 Niqūlāwus, who had traveled as Raue’s

amanuensis from Istanbul to London, appears to have known about the situation from another

source, and while he communicated Raue’s response to the allegations (namely, that Raue had in

fact left the manuscripts in Istanbul), he also added his own observation, tinged by unpleasant

197 OBL, ms Marsh 714. “Bir kaç seneden soñra cenābiñiziñ telāmiẕelerinden Rāvī Çelebi gelüb cenāb-i

serīfiñiz tarafından ḫaber virüb ve ḫaṭṭ-i serīfiñiz gösterüb baʿẓı esyā sipāris olunub istemissiz biz daḫī

alub Rāvīye teslīm ėdüb niçe dürlü daḫī muʿāmele ėdüb aʿẓīm ḥaẓẓ ve ṣafālar ėdüb bizi żiyāfetler ettı ve

siziñ elçi beg ḥażretleri daḫī żiyāfet etti ḫaṭırıñız içün hele benim efendim baʿd küll-i hesāb seksen riyal

gurusumuz ḳalub yüz yiġirmi güne dek göndermeġe vaʿd ėtmis idi gelüb vāṣil olmadı luṭf ve iḥṣān ėdüb

dostluġa riʿāyet ėdüb Rāvī Çelebiden alub nekadar zaḥmet ise bu cānibine elçi beg ḥażretleriniñ sarāyina

gönderesiz.”

198 On Niqūlāwus al-Ḥalabī, see Kilpatrick and Toomer, “Niqūlāwus al-Ḥalabī.” Niqūlāwus’s work as a

copyist is also in evidence among Warner’s notes and papers in the Legatum Warnerianum. Boris

Liebrenz identified a draft letter from Golius to Niqūlāwus in the margin of a Leipzig manuscript

(Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek (hereafter: LUB), ms Vollers 643). Boris Liebrenz, “Golius and Tychsen

and Their Quest for Manuscripts: Three Arabic Letters”, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 8 (2017): 218-

239.

106

personal experience: “I know he’s lying, because I was with him in Istanbul and I know

everything that did or did not take place.... This liar cheated you badly, just as he did to me.”199

Niqūlāwus assured Meḥmed Efendi that Golius would act in his interest, but he also took

the opportunity to make his own request. He asked if Meḥmed Efendi could visit Kumkapı (a

neighborhood in Istanbul on the Marmara), where “there are many people from Aleppo” and ask

around to see if there was a letter for him. Golius also wasn’t one to let the opportunity of

learned contact go to waste, and he had Niqūlāwus append a list of books Golius was hoping to

acquire (this list was, unfortunately, not included in the draft copy of the letter).

This brings us to Gentius, who played a small role, as courier, in the affair. In the first

letter, Meḥmed Efendi notes:

In the palace of his excellency the ambassador there is a learned student of science called

Görji Çelebi. We see each other often. The gentleman is an unmatched student of

knowledge and science and he has done us a very great favor in sending word. He is a

very good gentleman.200

The contrast between Gentius and Raue is helpful for thinking about the broader collaborative

processes at work in orientalist scholarship. For these men, even the basic operations of scholarly

life were, in Istanbul, weighed down with difficulty and, at times, perceived danger. Gentius’s

correspondence attests to the challenges and rewards of the Ottoman capital. Only a few letters

from his time in Istanbul have been identified, but those we have paint a picture of the scholar

establishing strong ties, and at least one sustained mentorship relationship, in elite Ottoman

199 Translation in Kilpatrick and Toomer, “Niqūlāwus al-Ḥalabī”, 132-133: “ben bilürüm ki kendi kiẕbdir

zīrā ben onuñ ile Istanbulda idim ve niçe oldu olmadı hebsi bilürüm...bu keẕẕāb niçe seni aldattı beni daḫī

böyle etti.”

200 OBL, ms Marsh 714: “elçiniñ ḥażretleriniñ sarāyinde Görcī Çelebi derler bir okuryazar ṭālib al-ʿilm

çelebi olur gāh bigāh görürüz bir bī-naẓīr ṭālib-i maʿrifet ve ʿilm çelebidir Allāh teʿāla rāżī ola bizim içün

size ḫaber irsāl etmede bize ḳati çok iḥsān etmistir ġāyet iyi çelebidir.”

107

circles. His manuscripts, in turn, fill out this picture, and show how his translation of the

Gulistān arose directly from his studies with these scholars.

Soon after his arrival, Gentius reported to his patron Anslo the slow progress of his

efforts to collect manuscripts.201 Gentius mentions only a few titles he was able to acquire, and

his letters express concerns that the book market was off limits to him and about being caught as

a Christian with a Turkish book.202 In one letter to Anslo, Gentius described the tortures meted

out as punishment among the Ottomans.203 He also adds, in a note that situates him in the same

milieu as Şeyḫzāde Meḥmed Efendi:

The day before yesterday I was at the place of a certain learned man who is in the

quarters of the Mufti (that is, the high priest of the Turkish Church). He has many

renowned authors on magic and Galenic and hermetic medicine. But such men are more

likely to buy up than sell the very rare authors.204

Gentius’s observation is a helpful reminder that learned Ottoman contacts were just as frequently

unwelcome competition as helpful guides in the acquisition of manuscripts.

Another letter from the same year, this time to his friend, Adrian Junius, paints an even

more vivid picture of the complex social relations engendered by learned exchange. Here,

Gentius recounts his experience at a villa outside of Istanbul with a Turkish “teacher” (magister)

who was “very knowledgable in Arabic.”205 After a successful start to his studies, Gentius’s

201 Four letters to Anslo written in 1642 are now in the SBB, dated 12 March, 19 April, 21 June, and 27

August. SBB, Slg. Darmstaedter 2b, Gentius, Georg.

202 Gentius to Anslo, 21 June 1642, SBB, Sgl. Darmstaedter 2b, Gentius, Georg.

203 SBB, Sgl. Darmstaedter 2b, Gentius, Georg.

204 Gentius to Anslo, 12 March 1642, SBB, Sgl. Darmstaedter 2b, Gentius, Georg. “Nudius tertius fui

apud doctum quendam virum qui est in aedibus Mufti (id est summi pontificis Turcicae Ecclesiae) ille

plurimos et insignes habet scriptores de Magia, Medicina Gallenica atq. Hermetica. Sed tales viri rariores

scriptores non vendunt, quin coemunt.”

205 Gentius to Junius, 27 November 1642, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (hereafter: BSBM),

Autogr. Cim. Gentius.

108

teacher said he would return to Istanbul and could no longer work for so little. After some

wrangling, and an even more generous offer from Gentius, his teacher said he would not teach

him even for an extraordinary sum. Rather, he made a counter offer:

I really don’t care about that. Rather, I’m accustomed to loving young men. If you’d like

me to love you, then I wouldn’t take any money from you, and I’ll teach you and further,

as best I can, your studies of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.206

Gentius was careful to recount in detail his disapproval:

…I was stunned at the man’s insane mind. I offered examples of piety and sought to heal

the insane, raving man with sane counsel, but in vain. The damage had been done.

Brought up on vice, he spurned virtue. He hardly believed in God, and he, the insane

man, took others to be insane. Otherwise he was a learned man and a votary of Turkish

theology who, on account of his learning, administered justice for three years as a Kadi or

judge on the island of Cyprus. O insane judges! With whom Turkey abounds. After this, I

paid him and quietly sent the man back to Constantinople, so that it would do me no

dishonor.207

Gentius describes a more idyllic vision of cross-cultural mentorship in a 1644 letter. After the

death of his patron, Gerbrand Anslo, Gentius wrote to several figures of importance in Dutch

letters with the hope of securing new patronage, among them Constantijn Huygens. Gentius

aimed to impress, so his account should be taken with a grain of salt, but in his letter to Huygens,

Gentius went into considerable detail about his learned contacts in Istanbul. The following comes

as an aside after mentioning the appointment of a new Şeyhülislam, Ebū Saʿīd Meḥmed Efendī,

whose cousin, Gentius claimed, was a close friend:

Hardly a day goes by without studying together (sine literarum consortio), and he brings

me every month to his villa, where we read selections from the annals (annalium flores

206 “ego vero non aestimo illud, sed juvenes amare soleo. Quod si vis te amem nihil aeris a te accipiam et

docebo et omni industria studia tua Arabica, Persica et Turcica promovebo.”

207 “…stupescebam insanam hominis mentem, pietatis exempla producebam, sanis consiliis insano et

furioso homini mederi studebam, sed frustra: actum erat: innutritus vitiis virtutem spernebat. Deos esse

vix credebat, aliosque homines insanos esse ducebat insanus; alioquin doctus, et Turcicae Theologiae

cultor: qui propter eruditionem in insula Cypro Kaddi sive judex per triennium justitiam administrabat: o

insanos judices! qualibus abundat Turcia. Hinc ego exoluto pretio hominem tacite Constantinopolim

remisi; ne mihi infamia esset.”

109

legere) on the green banks of the running streams. I learn much from this man, whose

grandfather and great-grandfather held the post of Şeyhülislam, and he offers me his

apartments, not just once, but nearly every day. However, it is commendable to remain

within the bounds of virtue.208

The friend Gentius describes was evidently from one of the Ottoman Empire’s most powerful

ulema families: the Hocazades. The members of this family were not only powerful judges, but

also important scholars. Gentius’s description is particularly intriguing because his friend’s

great-grandfather, Hoca Saʿdüddin Efendi (1536/1537-1599) wrote an important chronicle, the

Tāc al-tevāriḫ, and his grandfather, Hocazade Esad Efendi (1570-1625) translated Saʿdī’s

Gulistān (which Gentius would around this time translate into Latin) into Turkish. Gentius might

have exaggerated to win an influential ally, but his claim to learning in the context of an intimate

friendship with an educated Turk is noteworthy, not least because it so sharply contrasts with the

account of the Turkish magister of the Junius letter.

Gentius’s mention of his friend’s regular offer of hospitality, in turn, links this letter to a

remark made by Gentius’s eighteenth-century biographer, August Beyer. Beyer did not have

access to the Junius or Huygens letters, but was able to work from Gentius’s own papers (which

are now missing). He describes how in 1645, in connection with conflicts with the Dutch

Resident Hendrik Cops, Gentius moved in with his Turkish instructor (praeceptor).209 Beyer also

says that Gentius had worked with this teacher for three years. This lines up with his description

208 Constantijn Huygens, Briefwisseling, ed. J.A. Worp (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1914), 3:484: “Abu Said, vir

splendidus, illustri familia ortus, opibus ditissimus, aetatis annorum quinquaginta sex, cujus patruelis, vir

item illustris, maximus mihi amicus; vix diem terit sine nostro literarum consortio, meque in villam suam

singulis mensibus deducit, ubi juxta virides decurrentium rivorum oras annalium flores legere solemus.

Ex quo viro, cujus avi proavique pontifices maximi fuerunt, multa haurire soleo, mihique idem non semel,

sed singulis quasi diebus aedes suas offert, sed intra virtutis terminos consistere laus est.”

209 Beyer, Historia vitae Gentii, 29-30. “Nihilominus noster illud, quod rectum et justum, agere

constanter institit; attamen, ne fortassis occasionem suspicandi majorem daret, apud praeceptorem suum,

quem per triennium jam coluerat, virum, laudante Gentio, facile maximum habitare coepit et Copsii aedes

die Dominica quavis adiit.”

110

of sending off his Turkish instructor in his 1642 letter to Junius, and overlaps with the date of

Gentius’s letter to Huygens, suggesting that he began this scholarly mentorship relationship not

long thereafter.

Manuscripts offer another witness to Gentius’s time in Istanbul. Several manuscripts that

were owned or copied by him can be identified and show how his studies evolved.

Reconstructing Gentius’s library presents considerable challenges, since his manuscripts were

dispersed, and Gentius never signed his books. To date, only one of his manuscripts has been

identified. This also reflects a particularity of Gentius’s manuscript practice that mirrors his close

relationship with his Turkish instructor. In many of his manuscripts, Gentius avoided Latin script

entirely. He also wrote Turkish, Persian, and Arabic competently enough to sneak past the

watchful eyes of the nineteenth-century cataloguers, although the Leipzig orientalist Heinrich

Leberecht Fleischer did note “indicia doctoris germanici” in a medical miscellany copied by

Gentius because a short glossary at its end had Latin words transliterated into Arabic according

to a distinctly German pronunciation (e.g., “ašpārāġūs”).210 As such, most of his manuscripts can

only be identified on the basis of his very competent, but nonetheless characteristic Ottoman

hand.

The one book that does contain extensive Latin marginalia was acquired by Gentius

relatively early in his stay in Istanbul.211 This manuscript is a copy of Muḥammad bin Maḥmūd

Šīrvānī’s Cevhernāme (Book of Gems), a fifteenth-century Turkish translation from a standard

210 Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer and Franz Delitzsch, Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum qui in

Bibliotheca Senatoria Civitatis Lipsiensis Asservantur: Codices orientalium linguarum (Grimma: J.M.

Gebhardt, 1838), 514. LUB, ms B. Or. 205, fols 83r-84v.

211 Gentius mentions the work in Gentius to Anslo, 27 August 1642. SBB Darmstaedter Sgl. 2b. Gentius,

Georg. The manuscript is now LUB, ms B. Or. 231.

111

Arabic survey of minerals and gems, Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf al-Tīfāšī’s Kitāb azhār al-afkār fī

ğawāhir al-aḥğār (The Flowers of Thoughts on Precious Gems).212 Gentius’s annotations show

the scholar as he slowly deciphered the work. Alongside the manuscript’s table of contents,

Gentius wrote out the chapter numbers (each on an individual mineral) in the margin (Figure 18),

and as he worked and read, he added in the Latin equivalents to the corresponding minerals. This

work ultimately remained incomplete. In contrast, a later copy made by Gentius from a

collection of medical texts contains not a single word in Latin script.213 Even the Latin entries in

a glossary of terms compiled by Gentius were transliterated into Arabic script (the same glossary

that, more than 150 years later, tipped off Fleischer). The differences in these manuscripts

suggests that Gentius evolved as a scholar in Istanbul towards a distinctly Ottoman model.

A Gulistān manuscript from Gentius’s library containing Gentius’s annotations was

identified by Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer in his catalog of Dresden’s Islamic manuscripts.214

However, Fleischer misunderstood the convoluted flyleaf inscription of the manuscript’s

eighteenth-century owner, Johann Christian Clodius (1676-1745), Professor of Arabic in

Leipzig, and misidentified the Latin marginalia in the volume as belonging to Gentius. In fact,

these Latin annotations belonged to Clodius, and Gentius’s hand can be found among the

volume’s Turkish marginalia.215

212 LUB, ms B. Or. 231. On al-Tīfāšī and the Kitāb azhār al-afkār fī ğawāhir al-aḥğār, see Manfred

Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 125-127.

213 LUB, ms B. Or. 205.

214 SLUB, ms Dresd. 228.

215 Gentius’s annotations are clustered towards the end of the work. SLUB, ms Dresd. 228 was not the

primary text that Gentius used for his translation, and I have not yet determined the relationship between

the annotations in this volume and the other sources Gentius used.

112

This combination of imitating Ottoman manuscript practices and cautiously avoiding

marks of his own Western European extraction is found in Gentius’s most ambitious scribal

undertaking: his copies of Sūdī’s commentaries. These manuscripts also provide the best

evidence of Gentius’s studies with an Ottoman teacher. Gentius copied two commentaries by

Sūdī, on the Gulistān (two volumes) and the Būstān (one volume). Gentius’s volumes of Sūdī’s

Gulistān commentary were split with the sale of his manuscripts. After Gentius died, the first

volume came into the hands of Clodius, who added his notes on its margins (Figure 19). After

Clodius, the manuscript arrived in Copenhagen through the Kall collection, amassed by two

generations of German orientalists who taught there.216 The father, Johann Christian Kall (1714-

1775), like Clodius, studied in Jena.217 In 1735 he was appointed instructor of the royal pages in

Copenhagen, and in 1738 he became the crown prince’s tutor and Professor of Oriental

Languages at the University of Copenhagen. His son, Nikolai Christoffer Kall (1749-1823), after

studying in Göttingen, Vienna, Rome, and Paris, succeeded him as Professor of Oriental

Languages after his death in 1775.218 Johann Christian’s other son, Abraham Kall (1743-1821),

traveled like his brother to Göttingen for his studies (among others, with Christian Gottlob

Heyne) before returning to Copenhagen and joining the family trade, first as a Professor of

Greek, and then of History and Geography, in Copenhagen.219 Abraham Kall’s collection of 688

216 CKB, ms Cod. Turc. 19.

217 See “Johann Christian Kall”, in C.F. Bricka, Dansk biografisk Leksikon (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske

Boghandels Forlag), 9:86-87.

218 See “Nikolai Christoffer Kall”, in Bricka, Dansk biografisk Leksikon, 9:88.

219 See “Abraham Kall”, in Dansk biografisk Lexikon, 9:84-86.

113

manuscripts was acquired by the Royal Library after his death in 1821.220 Among these,

Gentius’s copy of Sūdī was one of only two Islamic manuscripts and was described simply as a

“Turkish commentary of the Gulistan.”221 Considering Abraham Kall’s limited interest in

oriental philology, it is unclear how the volume came into his collection. The second volume of

Gentius’s copy of Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary (now Leipzig University Library, B. or. 365)

belonged to the Breslau orientalist Andreas Acoluthus (1654-1704), whose collection of oriental

manuscripts the Leipzig Ratsbibliothek acquired after his death.222 It does not, like most of his

manuscripts, contain Acoluthus’s ex libris, but we can be certain it came from his library because

Acoluthus offered emendations on the margins of the volume’s first pages (similar notes are

found in many of his manuscripts).223 Finally, Gentius’s copy of Sūdī’s Būstān commentary,

similarly copied out in his hand, is now in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.224

220 An auction catalog for Kall’s library was published the following year: Bibliotheca Kalliana sive

index librorum quos possidebat beatus Abrahamus Kall professor quondam historiarum in Univ. Reg. Havniensi, Regi a Consil. Status et Ord. Danebr. Eques, ordinumque regiorum historiographus

(Copenhagen: H.F. Popp, 1822).

221 “Commentarius Turcicus in Gulistan s. rosarium Musleheddini Sadi Schirazensis.” Bibliotheca

Kalliana, XXII.

222 On the history of Leipzig’s collection, see Boris Liebrenz, Arabische, Persische, und Türkische

Handschriften in Leipzig: Geschichte ihrer Sammlung und Erschließung von den Anfängen bis zu Karl

Vollers (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2008).

223 Acoluthus was also diligent in recording when and where he acquired his manuscripts. The absence of

either an ex libris or note by Acoluthus suggests that the manuscript was rebound after it arrived in

Leipzig. Indeed, ms B. or. 365 has considerable water damage and is bound with blank pages of a

different stock corresponding to missing sections. Perhaps the manuscript was damaged sometime in the

early eighteenth century, then rebound with blank leaves replacing particularly damaged sections, where

the text were to be completed later from another manuscript. On the front cover, a fragment of a slip of

paper remains: “Pars 2d Comment: Persici in Sadii—— ex bibl———peratoria”. A likely reading here is

“ex bibliotheca imperatoria”, which might indicate awareness (perhaps based on an earlier note from

Acoluthus), that the manuscript was Gentius’s, since Gentius is supposed to have copied manuscripts

from the Ottoman imperial library. In any event, this knowledge was lost by the time Fleischer wrote his

catalog, as he makes no mention of it.

224 ÖNB, ms A.F. 259. Unfortunately, a later owner cut out a portion of the name of its eighteenth-

century owner. The inscription reads: “Ex libris Francisci Caroli Alexandri de [cut out portion] 1712.”

114

Figure 18. LUB, ms B. or. 231, Iv: Gentius rarely annotated in Latin script, but here he used the margins of

the page to work out the minerals corresponding to each section of the book.

115

Figure 19. CKB, ms Turc. 19, 28r: The first volume of the copy Gentius made of Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary,

with the later annotations of Clodius.

116

Figure 20. LUB, ms B. or. 365: At several points throughout Gentius’s copy of Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary,

an Ottoman scholar’s hand takes over for Gentius.

Can we identify Gentius’s source manuscripts? It is possible that he borrowed from a

contact in Istanbul or from his teacher. Another, more intriguing, possibility is that he borrowed

them through a waqf like the one at the Ḥafız Aḥmed Pasa mosque in Istanbul described by

Galland in his diary, where copies of Sūdī’s commentaries were lent for a deposit.225 The first

225 Galland, Journal, 1:234-236. Meredith M. Quinn has identified a part of a Ḥafız Aḥmed Pasa mosque

Sūdī Gulistān commentary, now Süleymaniye Library Hafiz Ahmed Pasa, ms 33. See Quinn, “Books and

Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul”, 64-68.

117

eleven folios in Gentius’s copy of Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary are written in a professional

Ottoman scribal hand (after which Gentius takes over mid-page). This might suggest he

borrowed the manuscript, at first took it to a scribe, and then changed his mind, perhaps in the

interest of money, or as a kind of a training.226

Two other particularities of the Leipzig manuscript might help in identifying Gentius’s

source. In his edition of Sūdī’s Şerḥ-i Gulistān, Ozan Yılmaz identifies three forms of the final

chronogram. Leipzig B. or. 365 corresponds to the second of these forms.227 Another

particularity speaks more directly to the context in which Gentius copied the manuscript. As he

copied a story from the third book, Gentius stopped writing mid-sentence, during Sūdī’s Turkish

paraphrase: “from there I will take Chinese goblets to Anatolia, Anatolian silks to India, Indian

steel….” On the next gathering, and after several blank pages in the bound volume, Gentius

picked up where he left off: “..Indian [steel] to Aleppo, Aleppan crystal to the Yemen, and

Yemeni swords to Fars. After that I will give up trading and sit in a shop.”228 This evidence of

interrupted writing suggests that he might not have been in possession of the source manuscript,

perhaps only copying from it in the presence of his teacher. That he began with the last word of

passage he had earlier copied might also be an indication that the word in question (hindī) was

the catchword on the previous page.

226 CKB, ms Cod. Turc. 19, fol. 11v.

227 Sūdī, Gülistān Şehri, ed. Ozan Yılmaz (Istanbul: Çamlica, 2012), CCCV: “Şu dem kim serḥe hātif didi

temmet / Gadandı sorarısan sāl-i hicret / Safer māhinun üçünciydi rūzī / Ki tekmīlini Mevlā kıldı rūzī /

Mübārek olsun okuyup yazana / Dahi sehv ü hatāsını düzene”.

228 LUB, ms B. or. 365, 55r (the blank pages are skipped in the pagination): “...hindī Ḥalebe ve Ḥaleb

sīsesini Yemene burd-i yemānīyi Fārsa ve andan soñra ticāreti terk ederim ve bir dükkānda otururum”.

Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 296; Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 85.

118

Gentius copied these works, including their marginalia (which mostly identify refutations

of earlier commentary writers) with only a few, minor additions of his own. Still, his Gulistān

commentary contains an intriguing mark of the context in which it was produced. At points

throughout the work, the hand of an Ottoman scholar takes over for Gentius (Figure 20).229 Is

this the hand of Gentius’s teacher, following Gentius’s progress through the work? This seems

the most likely explanation. Nevertheless, it is unclear what function it served. It might have

been meant as a model of proper handwriting.230 These pages may also be a gesture of the

teacher’s participation in his student’s reading, and might highlight passages of particular

significance. Whatever their purpose, they suggest that Gentius’s reading of the Gulistān was

doubly mediated, first through Sūdī’s commentary and then through the instruction of his

teacher.

From Sūdī’s Commentary to Gentius’s Rosarium politicum

A comparison between Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary and Gentius’s Rosarium politicum confirms

the central role the Ottoman commentary played in all aspects of the 1651 publication. Gentius

worked from Sūdī’s recension (with one notable exception, discussed below), translated from

Sūdī’s glosses, and raided the Ottoman scholar’s longer digressions for material for the nearly

one hundred pages of learned notes in his edition. A closer examination of these notes and their

229 These occur in CKB, ms Cod. Turc. 19, fols 140rv., in LUB, ms B. Or. 365, fols 55v, 65rv, 105v.

230 The quality of Gentius’s hand varies considerably throughout the volume. However, the pages of

Gentius’s writing that follow the Ottoman hand do not adhere in any more noticeable way to them.

119

relation to Sūdī’s commentary clarifies the nature of Gentius’s debt, as well as the German

orientalist’s strategy for presenting material from Sūdī’s notes as the product of his own

expertise. Nowhere does Gentius acknowledge Sūdī directly. However, in his preface, he does

indicate his use of commentaries:

By a happy fate, I obtained the work, illustrated by the commentaries of diverse and most

authoritative men, either copied with my own hand or collated with great care, and I have

presented to you here its genuine roses, and, so that you can experience better their

fragrance, I have displayed them in order in a Latin field.231

This is a clever obfuscation that couches Gentius’s almost exclusive dependency on Sūdī in

terms of a vague reception of an exegetical tradition. Gentius did consult at least one other

commentary, but he appears to have done so only later in the writing process.232 In addition, he

offers no attribution in his notes to his sources. Much like Warner, Gentius informed his reader

while spinning his limited material into the appearance of a more impressive display of wide-

ranging erudition.

A closer look at their content shows the variety of knowledge he channeled through Sūdī.

Many of Gentius’s more than two hundred individual notes give basic background information

necessary for understanding references in the text, along with sometimes lengthy explanations of

Persian and Arabic culture and history. Gentius glosses the Persian New Year ( نوروز) and the

celebrated Shahanshah Khosrow I, provides a long digression on Ḥātim al-Tā’ī, a legendary

231 Gentius, “Benevole Lector”, in Rosarium politicum. “Ego id nactus fato feliciori, variorum et

gravissimorum virorum commentariis illustratum, iisque manu mea vel descriptis, vel intenta cura

collatis, hic tibi genuinas ejus Rosas exhibui, easque, ut majori earum fragrantia afficereris, in Latio

campo ordine suo explicavi.”

232 Gentius incorporated material from Arabic commentaries (which was then identified by Guise,

discussed below) in his notes for the later books. Besides stray glosses or notes that could have easily

been taken from the margins of another manuscript, there is no indication in his volumes of Sūdī that he

consulted other Gulistān commentaries at this time. This, and the late appearance of material from these

commentaries in the Rosarium politicum, might be an indication that Gentius studied them after his return

to Western Europe.

120

figure in Arabic letters, and relates information culled from sources like Firdousī’s Šāhnāma and

al-Zamaḫšarī’s tafsīr (Qurʾan commentary). These references were not exclusively taken from

Sūdī, but a comparison of Gentius’s notes with the Ottoman scholar’s commentary shows that

Sūdī was Gentius’s principal informant, and most often the source for the impressive variety of

Persian and Arabic sources mentioned in his notes.

Gentius not only used Sūdī as a storehouse of information, but also adopted from him the

authoritative voice of a scholar able to interpret difficult passages through a deep knowledge of

language, literature, and interpretive traditions. A note in the Rosarium politicum on a passage in

Saʿdī’s preface illustrates this well. Here, Gentius offers two separate interpretations of a

difficult passage based on different readings of the Persian word نای. The passage in question

appears in the course of a poetic enumeration of God’s mercy and power. Saʿdī likens the

universality of God’s mercy to rain, falling on all, believer and non-believer, saint and sinner,

alike. He then depicts nature’s springtime resurgence as God’s bounty, the work of a generous

master delegating to his servants the tasks of nurturing and spreading spring’s vernal blossoming.

In this way, he continues:

کشته باسق نخل تشیب بتر خرما وتخم شده فائق شهد بقدرتش یینا ه وعصار

Through his power the nectar of a reed becomes superior honey, and a date seed turns

into a towering palm through his nurturing.233

Which Gentius translates as:

Succus arundinis illius potentia saccharum factum est praestantissimum. Dactyli nucleus

ipsius cura procera palma evasit.234

233 Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 11; Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 1.

234 Gentius, trans., Rosarium politicum, 4.

121

He then adds an endnote speaking to an unresolved and, indeed, unresolvable, dispute among

Saʿdī’s learned readers:

This passage can be understood in another equally reasonable way, which is neither

unlike the author’s mind and spirit, nor held in less regard by the reader: the word نای

signifies “reed” and, on account of the similarity of form, also “neck”, which in Arabic is

denotes particularly both the honey and honeycomb ,شهد less commonly ,شهد and ,حلقوم

produced by the bee. If we take نای to mean “reed”, then we understand شهد

metaphorically as sugar. If we understand it as “throat”, then the other word keeps its

usual meaning and a reading emerges that is not less admirable: “through his power the

nectar of a throat (that is, of the bee) becomes superior honey”.235

By the standards of orientalist knowledge in his time, Gentius’s note is nothing short of virtuosic.

Gentius shows here that he not only understood Saʿdī’s work but could also situate him in a

history of interpretation, distinguishing between different readings and assessing their validity.

He marshaled lexicographical knowledge such that he can distinguish literal from plausible

metaphorical usage, and, working from the multivalence of a single word, produced two equally

convincing interpretations.

Unsurprisingly, then, this note was lifted almost word for word from Sūdī’s Gulistān

commentary, which reads:

with an ,حلقوم is a word meaning both reed and windpipe, which in Arabic they call نای

undotted ḥa and ḍamma, as, for instance, what is extruded from the throat with the liver

of animals, and yā can be ḥarf-i nisbet and can be ḥarf-i vaḥdet, that is to say, either a sap

particular to the reed or a sap particular to the throat or a kind of sap of the reed or of the

throat… شهد in Arabic is a word with either a ḍamma or fatḥa after šīn, but Persian uses

fatḥa. Basically, what they call the honey in the comb. If این is then taken to mean sugar

reed, شهد would mean, figuratively, sugar or drops of the plant, but if نای is taken to mean

throat, then شهد would mean the honey of the comb, throat being that of a bee, since the

honey bee travels the various flowers and plants and the sorts of leaves of the fruits and

235 Gentius, trans., Rosarium politicum, 535-536. “Iste locus alia pariter ratione, nec dispari autoris studio

et mente, non minori saltem lectoris cum admiratione accipi potest in hunc modum: Vox ینا significat

arundinem, et ob formae similtudinem quoque gulam, quam Arabes حلقوم vocant: et شهد inusitatius شهد

proprie mel una cum favis suis ab apibus productum notat: si itaque per arundinem capiamus, tum per ینا

ینا metaphorice saccharum intelligitur: si vero gulam intelligamus per شهد , tum altera vox propriam

significationem tenet, et sensus talis emergit non minus admirabilis; Succus gulae (scilicet apis,) illius

potentia, factum est mel praestantissimum.”

122

from each it fills its stomach with whatever can become honey and then goes to the hive

and presses out the honey material essence in its stomach, that is, squeezing, vomits it out

and fill the chambers arranged in the hive, then, with God’s power, after a little time it

becomes superior honey. Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī pointed to this meaning. Beyt: بدان غرض که دهن

مترصد که قی کند زنبور ه نشست –غایت حرص ز خوش کنی [Know that the anger that the mouth

sweetens with the utmost of care/Is the raw material that the bee regurgitates].236

In another note, Gentius takes a more distanced approach to his source material.

Commenting on the inscription purportedly found on the “arch of Farīdūn”, Sūdī includes a long

digression that, by way of providing Farīdūn’s backstory, pulls from Firdousī’s Šāhnāma to tell

of the evil king that Feridun defeated.237 This king, Żaḥḥāk, was cursed with two snakes growing

out of his shoulders which, if not fed with human brain, would attack him. Żaḥḥāk’s advisor,

tired of sacrificing two men each day to satiate the snakes, successfully managed to split the

daily meal between goat and human brain, in effect saving one person each day. Gentius gives

236 CKB, ms Cod. Turc. 19, fol. 10r-v: “ نای lafẓ-ı müsterektir ḳamıs ile boġurtlıġı beyninde ki ʿarabca aña

ḥulḳūm dirler ḥā-yı mühmeleniñ żammıyla meselā ḥayvānātıñ ciger ile boġazdan çıḳan nesne ve yā

cā’izdür ki ḥarf-i nisbet ola cā’izdür ki ḥarf-i vaḥdet ola yaʿnī ḳamısa mensūb ṣıḳındı veyā boġaza

mensūb ṣıḳındı veyā bir dürlü ḳamısuñ ve bir dürlü boġazuñ ṣıḳındısı.... شهد ʿarabīde sīnuñ żammı ve

fetḥiyle lüġatdür ammā ʿacem fetḥ-i sīnla istiʿmāl ider ḥāṣılı gömeç bala dirler pes neyden seker ḳamısı

murād olursa sehdden mecāzen seker murād olur veyā ḳaṭr-ı nebāt ammā nāydan ḥulḳūm murād olursa

sehdden gömeç bal murād olur ve ḥulḳūm arı boġazı zīrā bal ārısı envāʿ-ı ezhār u escār ve eṣnāf-ı evrāḳ-ı

esmārı ṭolanub her birinden ʿasele mādde olmaġa ḳābil nesne ile sikemini pür ėdüb ve beteke gelüb

sikeminde olan mādde-i ʿaseli nefsini ʿusr eylemekle yaʿnī ṣıḳmaġıla istifrāġ eyler ve ol petekde tertīb

eyledigi ḫāneleri mümtelī ider pes ḳudret-i Ḫudā ile azacuḳ zamānda sehd-i fāyıḳ olur. Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī bu

maʿnāya isaret buyurmıs beyt Badān ġaraż ki dahan ḫuš kunī z-ġāyat-i ḥirṣ - Našastaī mutaraṣṣid ki qayy

kunad zanbūr”.

237 Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 73. “Ferīdūn ḳadīm zamān pādisāhlarından bir pādisāhdır ki ekser-i rubʿ-ı

meskūn taḥt-ı taṣarrufında idi. Babasına Ābtīn dirlerdi ki Ḍaḥḥāk-i Mārī anı öldürüb omuzında biten

yılanlara beynisiñ yidürürdi zīrā her omuzunda Allāhü teālānıñ emriyle kendi gevdesinden birer yılan

bitmisdi ve her bār ki aç olsalar tek durmayub yüzine ve basına çarparlar idi ve hīç nesne yemezler idi,

illā ādem beynisini bu cihetden her gün iki ādem helāk idüp anlara beynisini yedürürler idi soñra ʿāḳil

vezīri ẓuhūr eyledi ve ḥukemā ile mesveret eyledi ki ādem beynisinden bedel bir nesne peydā ėdeler ki bu

ḳadar ādem helāk olmaya diyü pes keçi oġlaġınuñ beynisini bedel bulub günde bir insān beynisini ve bir

keçi beynisini ḳarısdurub yidürürler idi ki sākin olurlar idi soñra Ferīdun yetisüb yiyid olunca ḫalḳ

üzerine cemʿ olub Ḍaḥḥāk-i nā-pāki ḳatl eyledi ve bu Ḍaḥḥāk Nūḥ ṭūfānından biñ yıl ṣoñra ẓuhūr eyledi

ve meẕkūr Ābtīn Ṭaḥmūres-i Dīvbend neslinden idi ziyāde tafṣīlin murād ėden Firdevsī Şāhnāmesine

mürācaʿat eylesün dirler ki evvel merkebi āta ṣıçradub ḳatır peydā ėden Ferīdūndur ve dirler ki besyüz yıl

salṭanat sürdi ve evvel menāṣıb u merātib tertībini viren oldurb ve el-ʿuhdetü ʿale’r-rāvī.”

123

Sūdī’s account in its entirety, but expresses his skepticism. Evidently unwilling to read it as an

allegory for how wise intervention can mitigate the destructiveness of a mad ruler, he speculates

on what the story might tell us about ancient Persian medicine:

However, I don’t think these serpents were real at all, of which I see many men, even

learned men, convinced. Rather, I reckon they were most terrible sores, whose malignant

voracity, unless alleviated by applying externally an emollient of human brain, would at

once have devoured the rest of the body’s flesh.238

These remarks are in keeping with Gentius’s broader interest in recovering Persian medical

knowledge from Islamic manuscripts.

Another work in Leipzig’s University Library, the printer’s manuscript of Gentius’s

Rosarium politicum, gives a more granular look at the connection between commentary and

translation. This manuscript might have arrived to Leipzig, like the second volume of his

Gulistān commentary, with Acoluthus’s library.239 The printer’s marks along its margins show

the progress of printing, and the manuscript’s corrections and marginalia (all in the hand of

Gentius) cast light on how the transformation of Sūdī’s commentary into Gentius’s 1651 edition

happened in practice. Indeed, the printer’s manuscript confirms that Gentius worked mostly from

Sūdī’s commentary. Most of the corrections come in one of two forms (Figure 21). In some cases

Gentius glued them into the manuscript on strips of paper. Elsewhere he simply crossed out

words and made additions in the margins or between lines. The printer’s manuscript is also

instructive in what we do not find. There is no second hand of an amanuensis or editor. We find

238 Gentius, trans., Rosarium politicum, 551. “Ego autem minime veros istos serpentes fuisse existimo,

quod tamen multis etiam doctis viris persuasum fuisse video; sed teterrima ulcera fuisse autumo, quorum

maligna edacitas nisi mitigata fuisset inpositis extrinsecus humani cerebri malagmatis, reliquam corporis

carnem depastura protinus fuisset.”

239 LUB, ms 2954. The manuscript does not contain Acoluthus’s ex libris or notes, but a nineteenth-

century librarian identified the collection of papers as “Arabica MSSta eorumque Versiones e Bibliotheca

Acoluth”. Since the manuscript was previously out of order, I will cite it according to the pagination of

the Rosarium politicum, not the pagination of the manuscript.

124

no trace of any dictionary or consultation of any other work of Persian literature. When Gentius

puzzled over a particular passage, he seems to have simply worked more closely with Sūdī’s

commentary, whose glosses were then written out, on occasion, in the margins of the printer’s

manuscript.

Mostly, Sūdī’s glosses appear to have served Gentius in understanding the text and

translating. For instance, several pages into the manuscript, he begins jotting glosses pulled from

Sūdī’s commentary on the bottom of the page. For the word طفل (child, pl. اطفال) in “ اطفال شاخ را

He places caps of blossoms on the heads of the children of“) ”به قدوم موسم ربیع کاله شکوفه بر سر نهاده

the branches with the arrival of the vernal season”) he notes “ طفل up to seven years old, after

that one says 240.”صبى For the nearby passage “فراش باد صبا را گفته تا فرش زمردین بگسترد” (“He tells

the custodian of the zephyr to spread a carpet of emerald”),241 Gentius extracts Sūdī’s gloss

on زمردین (emerald), noting “زمردین is, simply put, a green stone.”242 A third gloss on the words

“ in (Christian) ترسا and (Zoroastrian) گبر یفه خور داریگبر و ترسا وظ –غیب ه انای کریمی که از خز ” (“O

bountiful one from whose unseen treasure house both Zoroastrian and Christian are fed”) notes

.”idol worshipping infidel ترسا and ,مجوسی fire worshipper, in Arabic گبر “

All three of these notes, although they refer to different passages, are grouped together at

the bottom of the page without indication of their function. However, corrections in Gentius’s

Latin show that they aided the translation of their corresponding passages. He crossed out

“viridem” (green) and added the more precise “smaragdinum” (emerald). He noted گبر and ترسا

below his Latin translation – probably a note to return to these terms later, as indeed he did,

240 “Tufl yedi yasına dek andan soñrā ṣabī derler”. LUB, ms 2954, 4. Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 11.

241 Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 1.

242 “zümürrüdīn ziyāde ḥāṣilī yesil bir ṭas”. LUB, ms 2954, 4. Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 9; Thackston, trans.,

The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 1.

125

following Sūdī’s commentary and changing his translation of ترسا to “simulacrorum cultoribus”

(worshipers of idols).243 This last alteration is particularly instructive, because it gives an

indication that Gentius worked solely through Sūdī’s commentary for much of both the first

version of the translation and the subsequent revisions. If he had consulted Sürūrī’s Arabic

commentary he would have found the more precise gloss “النصاري” (Christian).244

The process of grappling with the difficulties of Saʿdī’s text through Sūdī’s notes is

evident in a more challenging passage later in the Gulistān, one that stumped Gentius enough

that he initially left the word blank in the printer’s manuscript.245 It comes from a story in the

second book (“The Character of Dervishes”) that treats the challenges of renouncing worldly

pleasures in their very proximity. Saʿdī tells here of a Syrian hermit who is offered by the king

the chance to perform his devotions in luxury. At first he refuses, but is won over by a vizier’s

appeal to the propriety of accepting the king’s generosity and his assurance that, once he has

experienced city life, he will be free to leave. The unreasonableness of this suggestion is lavishly

illustrated in what follows, and Saʿdī describes the hermit’s first entrance into the beautiful

garden of his new home in terms of the expectant pleasures, bursting at the limits of biological

containment, that await him:

گل سرخش چو عارض خوبان سنبلش همچو زلف محبوبان

هیب برد عجوز شیر ناخورده طفل دایه هنوز همچنان از ن

و افانین علیها جلنار علقت بالشجر االخضرنار

Its red roses like the cheeks of beauties, its hyacinths like the tresses of beloveds.

As from fear of the old chill, a child who has not yet drunk the nurse’s milk.

Branches with pomegranate blossoms upon them, like fire hung in green trees.246

243 LUB, ms 2954, 5.

244 PUL, New Series 943, fol. 3v.

245 LUB, ms 2954, 203.

246 CKB, Cod. Turc. 19, fol. 251v. Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 247. English translation modified from

Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 65.

126

This scene of sensual anticipation is only heightened by the arrival of a beautiful handmaiden

(“After seeing her there would be no patience in the bodies of hermits”)and a gorgeous slave boy

(“The eye was not satisfied from seeing him, just as someone dying of thirst [would not be

satisfied seeing] the Euphrates”).247 As might be expected, the ascetic soon succumbs, giving

cause for another vizier’s observation: “Give gold to the learned that they may study more, and

give nothing to the ascetics that they may remain ascetics.”248

It was the initial passage describing the hermit’s garden that puzzled Gentius. The

difficulty arises from two questions about the second beyt: “ شیر ناخورده –همچنان از نهیب برد عجوز

.(”As from fear of the old chill, a child who has not yet drunk the nurse’s milk“) ”طفل دایه هنوز

The first problem concerns the definition of برد عجوز (“old chill”). The second question concerns

the subject to which “fear” refers. We know that Gentius struggled to find a Latin equivalent,

because he left the space in the manuscript empty, to be filled in later (Figure 22).249 That he then

turned to a careful examination of Sūdī is clear, because he both marked the passage in his copy

of the work and excerpted it onto the lower margin of the Leipzig printer’s manuscript (Figure

23).250

247 Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 248-249: “ که بعد از دیدنش صورت نه بندد – وجود پارسایان را شکیبی”. Translation based

on Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 65.

248 Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 250: علما را زر بده تا دی گر بخوانند و زهاد را چیزی مده زاهد بمانند” Thackston, trans., The

Gulistan of Saʿdi, 66.

249 This is identifiable because the strokes are notably thinner when Gentius later returned to the passage

to fill in the word and he modifies a letter from his earlier writing.

250 The passage occurs at LUB, ms 2954, 203, and CKB, ms Cod. Turc. 19, fol. 252r.

127

Sūdī offers a crucial bit of information. برد عجوز refers specifically to the week at the end

of winter before spring, when “the wind cataclysm happened to the people of Lot.”251 He

provides textual evidence as well: a verse that enumerates the days of this week.252 Elsewhere

throughout the printer’s manuscript, Gentius made similar excerpts and, more often, translations

from Sūdī that formed the first version of his printed endnotes.253 While this excerpt from Sūdī’s

commentary did not find its way from the margin of the printer’s manuscript into Gentius’s

Rosarium politicum, it did inform his translation. When he returned to the passage he filled the

blank space he had left, coining a phrase (“bacchanalian cold”)that attempted to capture both the

specificity of Saʿdī’s reference and the atmosphere of the story: “Memoratae descriptae rosae ex

bacchanalis metu frigoris / Similes erant infantibus recens natis nutricis lacte nondum refectis”

(emphasis mine).254

The Leipzig printer’s manuscript also casts light on an interesting anomaly in Gentius’s

recension. In the selection and order of stories, Gentius followed Sūdī with one notable

exception: a story towards the end of the second book. Since this story appears in the copy of

Sūdī’s commentary that Gentius copied by hand, the omission could not be the result of a faulty

manuscript. Why then did Gentius leave it out? The story itself provides an indication of why

251 Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 247; CKB, ms Cod. Turc. 19, fol. 252r: “Berd-i ʿacūz kīsiniñ āḫirinde bahāra

ķarsı yedi günüñ ismidir ki ḥażret-i Lūṭ ḳavmine yel ḳiyāmeti ol yedi günde vāḳiʿ olmus”.

252 “ʿArabca her biriniñ bir ismi var (ķıṭʿa) hast ayyām-i ʿaǧūz ay sarvar-i dānā sih ruz/z’āḫir-i māh-i

Šubāţ u avval-i Āẕar čahār/Ṣinn-u Ṣinnābrast-u Vabr-u ʿĀmirast-u Mu’tamir/Muṭfi l-ǧamrast u Mukfi ẓ-

ẓaʿn haftum bar-sumār.” Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 247.

253 LUB, ms 2954 also contains two subsequent (incomplete) versions of the annotations as endnotes that

allow us to follow the genesis of these notes in their published form. For other examples of Gentius

excerpting from Sūdi on the margins of his printer’s manuscript, see LUB, ms 2954, 35, 146, 148, 174. At

one point Gentius appears to have cut out an excerpted text from Sūdī on the bottom of the page (54).

254 Gentius, trans., Rosarium politicum, 203.

128

Gentius might have chosen not to translate it. It tells of a great man who, suffering from

indigestion, audibly farts in the company of others. A model of poise even in that uncomfortable

situation, he offers his companions a plea for understanding: “My friends...I had no control over

what I did. I have not been charged with a crime, and I am greatly relieved. You too be kind

enough to forgive me.”255 On this, Sa’dī formulates his lesson about generously interpreting

biological necessities’s unexpected breaches of decorum by drawing an analogy between

flatulence and the departure of unpleasant company:

ردمند ندارد هیچ عاقل باد دربند شکم زندن بادست ای خ

چو باد اندر شکم پیچد فر و هل که باد اندر شکم باریست بردل

حریف ترش روی ناسازگار چو خواهد شدن دست پیشش مدار

The stomach is a prison for gas, O wise one, and no one keeps gas in chains.

When gas writhes in the gut, let it out, for gas in the gut is a burden on the heart.

When a sour-faced, incompatible fellow wants to leave, don’t hold up your hand to stop

him.256

Whether or not he already felt misgivings, Gentius translated the story, rendering its central

imperative, in his characteristic faithfulness to the original, as “Cum ventus in ventre oberraverit

excludas,/Ventus enim in ventre animis est gravitas.”257 However, he returned to the manuscript

with second thoughts, perhaps while he made his corrections, working through the many words

and phrases pasted over with improvements and additions on the margins. Whatever it was that

brought him back, he was moved to run a diagonal line through both the Persian original and his

translation, and between the two facing pages he offered an order and a justification, each in a

255 Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 242: گفت ای دستان مرا در آنچه کردم اختی ار نبود وبزه بر من ننوشتند و راحتی بمن رسید شما نیز

.Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 62-63 . دیبکرم معذور دار

256 Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 63. Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 242-243.

257 LUB, ms 2954, [p. 196] (If this story had been included, it would have come at this page in the

Rosarium politicum).

129

different language. To the typesetter, he wrote in Dutch: “This you must not set, up to the

following page”,258 and, across from it, he explained his omission in Latin through a challenge to

the story’s authorship, blaming its inclusion “not on the author, but on the scurrility of the

scribes.”259

Gentius got his wish. The story was never published, and his editorial intervention

ultimately required no justification, for it was neither publicly announced nor discussed. But his

decision to cull the story is more than a mere curiosity, casting light on how and what orientalists

self-censored. Gentius didn’t flinch at the admiration of youths or matters of religion.260 He was,

however, sensitive to the demands of decorum and the conventions of cultural register.

258 LUB, ms 2954, [p. 197]. “Dit mot jiy niet setten tot in de folgende page.”

259 LUB, ms 2954, [p. 197]. “quidem non autori sed scribarum petulantiae.”

260 In contrast to Olearius, who announced at the beginning of his translation that beautiful youths would

be regendered as “girls”. See below.

130

Figure 21. LUB, ms Ms. 2954, 31: Gentius’s printer’s manuscript shows how the orientalist made corrections,

and wrote down the first version of his endnotes on the margins.

131

Figure 22. LUB, ms Ms. 2954, 204-205: Gentius left a word in the first line blank as he scoured Sūdī’s

commentary for an explanation, returning later to write in his translation.

132

Figure 23. LUB, ms Ms. 2954, 202/204: Gentius copied Sūdī’s gloss onto the bottom of the page to help

decipher a difficult passage.

133

Gentius’s Rosarium politicum represented an inflection point in both the history of the

reception of the Gulistān in non-Ottoman Europe and the history of Western European Persian

Studies more broadly. Before discussing what exactly this entailed, it is worth stepping back to

reflect on the development of Persian studies laid out up to this point. The first efforts by

orientalists like Raimondi and Tengnagel to read and translate Persian literature were piecemeal,

and hampered in particular by inadequate dictionaries or insufficient knowledge of Arabic and

Turkish. These scholars found and collected Ottoman scholarship, but were unable to make

efficient use of it. Around 1640, stimulated by Du Ryer’s pioneering efforts, a deeper knowledge

of Ottoman bibliography, and closer contact with the Ottoman Empire, the study of Persian

literature took off at the same time in different centers of orientalist study, led by scholars with

more experience abroad and a stronger knowledge of Arabic and Turkish. This period of study

was marked by a broader engagement with a variety of Persian texts and more confident use of

available commentaries and dictionaries in Turkish and Arabic. Immediately following this

period of intensive engagement with Persian by Golius, Gaulmin, and Greaves, the students of

Golius, through travel to Istanbul, delved even deeper into Ottoman, and particularly Turkish-

language, scholarship, resulting in the publication of Gentius’s Rosarium politicum.

In this context, Gentius’s dependency on Sūdī is instructive. It might be tempting to cast

the history of Persian studies in Western Europe as that of a progressive bond between two

national traditions, but the history of reading the Gulistān up to Gentius’s 1651 edition had much

more to do with successfully navigating and learning from the Ottoman philological tradition

than with mastering Persian. Orientalists used a variety of materials from throughout the Persian-

learning world, but Ottoman scholarship was particularly helpful because of two factors. First, it

parsed and explained texts and words through an intermediary language. Second, its

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thoroughness and orientation toward even beginning learners made it in many instances an

adequate substitute to an expert teacher (of which there were almost none in Western Europe). In

effect, Ottoman commentaries had solved the problem of how to read works of classical Persian

literature as a non-native speaker, and Gentius, through Sūdī, translated this solution into another

model of language study: the parallel edition with literal Latin translation and explanatory notes,

as in Constantijn L’Empereur’s Hebrew editions from the 1630s.

The Rosarium politicum, in turn, initiated a new period of Persian study in Western

Europe. In the century after its publication, it often stood at the center of efforts to learn Persian,

and both the popular reception and scholarly study of Saʿdī’s text went, directly or indirectly,

through Gentius’s Latin translation. However, far from replacing the use of commentaries and

translations from outside of Western Europe, Gentius’s Latin translation, which often (but not

always) offered a reliable indication to the literal meaning of the Persian original, served as a

guide around which later orientalists assembled and compared other works of Ottoman, Safavid,

and Indian scholarship. The margins of copies of the Rosarium politicum throughout Europe

offer evidence of this new, more comparative period of the text’s study.

Olearius’s Persianischer Rosenthal

Gentius’s translation’s most immediate impact was to allow Olearius to complete his

own. Soon after the publication of the Rosarium politicum, Olearius finished his German

translation of the Gulistān. In his preface, Olearius carefully constructed an image of himself as

an independent translator relying on his knowledge of the language and culture from his travels

135

and the help of Ḥaqq-vīrdī. While no notes or earlier drafts of the work which could offer a

definitive account of his working practices have been identified, it is very likely that Olearius

translated in large part from Gentius’s Latin. We find traces of this reliance in the translation

itself, but there are also significant inconsistencies between the account Olearius gives in his

preface and the available evidence from his manuscripts, and, more broadly, doubts about

whether or not it was practically feasible for him to translate the work on his own.

I discussed earlier the first years of Olearius’s language study. Since many of the later

manuscripts are difficult to date, I will begin with Olearius’s own account and compare it with

the manuscripts from his collection. In his preface, Olearius identifies the work clearly as a

“book translated from Persian into High German”.261 Here, Olearius recounts the story of

Muḥibb ʿAli’s gift of the manuscript and Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s participation. He also states that he

translated the work into Latin “during idle hours”, and that he completed this Latin translation

around 1650 (just as Gentius’s translation was going to press), and gave the manuscript of his

translation to the Gottorf library. It is worthwhile to consider here Olearius’s precise wording:

I thus prepared the just mentioned copy [from Muḥibb ʿAli] for publication and on the

most merciful order of his Serene Highness, my most merciful prince, translated it into

Latin in my idle hours with the participation of an old, experienced Persian named

Hakwirdi. I finished just before his death, over three years ago, and added it to his Serene

Highness’s library.262

261 “ein aus der Persischen Sprache in Hochdeutsch übersetztes Buch”. Olearius, “Zueignungsschrift”,

Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654.

262 Olearius, “Vorrede”, Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654. “Habe also itzt erwehntes Exemplar mit heraus

gebracht/ und auff S. Fürstl. Durchl. meines gnädigsten Fürsten und Herrn gnädigsten Befehl mit zuthun

eines alten wolerfahrnen Persianers Namens Hakwirdi/ (welchen ich 5. gantzer Jahr in meinem Hause

gehabt) bißweilen bey müssigen Stunden ins Latein übergesetzt/ auch kurtz vor seinem absterben/ so

nunmehr über 3. Jahr/ zum ende gebracht/ und hochermelter S. Fürstl. Durchl. Bibliothec einverleibet.”

136

This passage is, with superficial differences, the same in both editions published during

Olearius’s lifetime. In the first edition, however, Olearius continues with additional details

omitted in the second edition:

The dearly departed took great pleasure in bringing out this book at our own costs. We

had already had a new Persian type cast in Holland. Since his untimely death came before

we could publish it, his son (earlier called Riza but now named Hans Georg Fars, serving

at our most merciful prince’s court as armorer) took his father’s place and did the press

work with me.263

Here, Olearius, without mentioning his name, purports to have completed and begun publishing a

work nearly identical with Gentius’s Rosarium politicum: a complete Latin translation alongside

the original Persian. The details of his account present his translation as entirely independent of

Gentius. He used the manuscript given to him in Shamakhi, worked on the translation with

Ḥaqq-vīrdī, and began publication at his own costs and with the help of Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s son. The

last detail would seem to imply that the young man was needed to set or correct the Persian text.

Later in the preface, Olearius explains how this Latin-Persian project became a German

translation. His explanation has two parts. First, he wished to serve a larger project furthering

German letters. He recounts that his decision was brought about by

the high head of the Fruitbearing Society, the Tasteful [i.e., Wilhelm IV of Sachsen-

Weimar], who in taking up my unworthy person, as they heard that I had this work in my

possession, mercifully wrote to me that I would do well if I translated it not into Latin,

but into our German mother tongue […] and teach the Persians to speak German.264

263 Olearius, “Vorrede”, Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654. “Es hatte der seelige Mann grosse Lust neben

mir diß Buch auff unsere Unkosten herauß zugeben. Wir hatten auch allbereit in Holland eine newe

Persische Schrifft darzu giessen lassen. Weil ihn aber der Todt/ ehe wir es zu Wercke richteten/ übereilet/

ist sein Sohn (vor diesem Risa/ nunmehr aber Hans Georg Fars genandt/ so an unsers gnädigsten Fürsten

Hoff das Zeugmeister Ampt bedient) in des Vaters stelle getreten/ und mit mir den Verlag gethan.”

264 Olearius, “Vorrede”, Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654. “das hohe Haupt der Fruchtbringenden

Gesellschaft/ der Schmackhaffte/ welcher bey auffnehmung meiner unwürdigen Person/ als sie

137

Secondly, Olearius claims he gave up the Latin-Persian project in deference to Gentius when he

learned of Gentius’s translation:

In part also because three years ago in Holland I learned from my good friend, Georgius

Gentius, that he wished to publish this very book in Latin, and so I felt it necessary and

beneficial that I would also make it available in our native language German as well.265

This passage indicates that Olearius spoke personally to Gentius during a trip to Holland in 1650,

as Gentius was preparing his translation for publication.

Olearius also claims to have collated his copy of the Gulistān with another, in a passage

that might also indirectly excuse any errors in his translation (indeed, he would later make this

argument in a letter to Gentius).266 Olearius presents himself here as an expert informant on

Islamic manuscripts, and recites a litany of complaints, such as might be familiar to his audience

from works of classical philology:

Since the Persians have no printing press in their land, and for certain reasons (of which

I’ve spoken elsewhere) do not wish to have one, and so must only make use of books

written by hand, it happens, that through the negligence of scribes and copyists here and

there a number of words, even entire lines and paragraphs, are left out. Particularly in

copying out the poets and the writings of Saʿdī (although not with the Qurʾan, which they

treat carefully), they will sometimes even add in this or that from their own head, and

they aren’t very precise, and sometimes, having left something out, they’ll stick it in three

or more pages later, such that one couldn’t find among ten copies two that are the same in

all points. It is easy to understand that in this way the intention of authors can be

vernommen/ daß ich diß Werck unter Händen hätte/ gnädig an mir geschrieben; daß ich wol thun würde/

wenn ich dasselbe nicht in Lateinischer/ sondern in unser Teutschen Muttersprache […] und den

Persianer Teutsch reden lehren würde.” The Fruitbearing Society was a learned academy, founded in

1617 on the model of Italian academies like the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, with each member

receiving a corresponding society name and plant.

265 Olearius, “Vorrede”, Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654. “Theils auch weil ich vor drey Jahren in Holland

von Herrn Georgio Gentio, der Orientalischen Sprache wolerfahrnen/ meinem guten Freunde/ verstanden/

daß er eben dieses Buch in Latein herauß zugeben willens/ also habe ichs nöthig und dienlich zu seyn

erachtet/ daß ich es in unser Muttersprache den Teutschen auch bekand mache.”

266 See Beyer, Historia vitae, fatorum atque meritorum Georgii Gentii, 94-96, note o.

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obscured or even turned around. Accordingly, I have made many notes from my copy of

the Gulistān into another copy.267

Finally, Olearius discusses a turn in his relationship with Ḥaqq-vīrdī that occurred with the

Persian’s conversion to Christianity, and makes a claim to the authority of his translation based

on his expert knowledge of Persian culture.

Whereby I admit freely that the translation of this book was too much for me alone, if I

hadn’t, in part, seen the customs of the Persians myself, and, in part, received a further

account from the old, learned Persian, experienced in these things, that I mentioned

above, both from his mouth and also from the writings he had with him. Early on, before

he converted, he didn’t want to divulge all of their traditions and precepts, because he

noticed that they didn’t hold up and would have been laughed at by us. However, when

he was properly instructed in our articles of faith and baptized, he was more forthcoming,

and he gave me information about this and that, although cautiously, so as not to insult

his fatherland but rather out of sympathy lamenting the blindness of the poor, misled

people. This then served me in the explanation of difficult passages.268

Olearius’s account of the genesis of his translation can then be summarized as follows. Having

received his copy of the Gulistān and the exhortation to translate it from Muḥibb ʿAli in

267 Olearius, “Vorrede”, Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654. “Weil die Perser keine Druckerey im Lande

haben/ auch umb gewisse Uhrsachen/ (darvon ich an einem andern Ort gesaget habe) haben wollen/ und

sich nur mit den geschriebenen Büchern behelffen müssen/ geschihet es/ daß durch der Schreiber und

Copijsten unfleiß bißweilen etliche Wort/ ja gantze Zeilen und Paragraphi aussen gelassen werden/

bißweilen auch wol/ sonderlich in außschreibung der Poeten/ und dieses Saadi Schrifften (nicht aber im

Alcoran/ mit dem sie behutsam umbgehen) sie aus ihren eigen Köpffen eins und das ander darzu thun/

nehmens auch so genawe nicht/ daß/ wenn sie bißweilen etwas aussenlassen/ und hernach gewar werden/

selbiges auff das dritte und fernere Blat erstwieder einschieben/ daher kommt es auch das man unter 10

Exemplaren kaum zwey finden sol/ die einander in allen Punkten gleichförmig seynd. Dadurch dann/ wie

leicht zuerachten/ die meinung der Autoren entweder verdunckelt oder gar vekehret wird. Wie ich

dergleichen Exemplar in Gülustan auß meinem gegen einem andern Exemplar gar viel auffgezeichnet.”

268 Olearius, “Vorrede”, Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654. “Worbey ich gerne bekenne/ daß in übersetzung

dieses Buches ich für mich zu wenig gewesen/ wenn ich nicht der Perser Gebräuche theils selbst gesehen/

theils von obgedachten alten gelarten und der Sachen wolkündigen Perser Hakwirdi ferneren Bericht/ so

wol auß dessen Munde als auß den bey sich habenden Schrifften empfangen hätte. Er hat zwar anfänglich

und vor seiner bekehrung mit allen ihren traditionen und Satzungen/ weil er wol merckte/ daß sie den

Stich nicht halten/ und von uns verlachet werden möchten/ nicht recht herauß gewolt/ als er aber in unsern

Glaubens Artickelen recht unterichtet/ und getaufft worden/ hat er sich besser herauß gelassen/ und von

ein und anderen jedoch behütsam/ daß er nicht gerne zum Schimpff seines Vaterlandes sondern vielmehr

auß mitleiden der armen verführten Leute blindheit beklagende/ deutlichern nachricht gegeben/ welches

mir dann in erklärung der dunckelen Orter wol zu statten gekommen.”

139

Shamakhi, Olearius began translating the Gulistān into Latin, in a leisurely way, after his return

from Persia. He did so with the assistance of Ḥaqq-vīrdī, who shared with him his knowledge of

Persian language and culture, as well as the collection of books that the “old, experienced

Persian” had brought with him. He also diligently compared and collated his copy of the

Gulistān with another manuscript. When Ḥaqq-vīrdī converted, he became more forthcoming

and the collaboration intensified, growing with the completion of the Latin translation into a self-

financed project for the publication of a Latin-Persian edition. For this, they had type cast in

Leiden. After the death of Ḥaqq-vīrdī, who had been actively involved, in 1650, Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s son

took over his duties in the publication project. However, on learning of Gentius’s translation and

the wishes of the Fruitbearing Society that he write it in German, Olearius abandoned his project

and began writing the translation in its published form on the basis of his collated manuscript and

the earlier Latin translation.

On the face of it, this might seem probable. However, as discussed earlier, Olearius’s first

attempts at learning Persian and translating the Gulistān were plagued by difficulties. There is

little indication that his later efforts were more successful. Indeed, the only manuscript from the

Gottorf library (purchased in the eighteenth century for the Danish Royal Library in

Copenhagen) that fits the description in Olearius’s preface is the very same copy by Ḥaqq-vīrdī

described above, which contains, at best, the occasional translated verse.269 If one squints, it is

possible to make out other elements of the archival record as well. When Olearius suggests that

Ḥaqq-vīrdī became more forthcoming after his conversion, he might be referring to the collection

269 CKB, ms Cod. Pers. 84. On the Danish acquisition of the Gottorp Library, see Erik Petersen,

“Bibliotheca Gottorpiensis Manuscripta: The inventories of the manuscripts of Gottorp”, in Die Bibliothek der Gottorfer Herzöge, eds Ulrich Kuder, Babette Tewes, and Hans-Walter Storck

(Nordhausen: Bautz, 2008): 117-128.

140

of Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s writings on matters of religion that were ornately bound in an orientalizing style,

now Danish Royal Library, Cod. Pers. 42.270 However, the manuscript contains little indication

that Olearius read it. Ḥaqq-vīrdī also wrote a short work on the Safavids that is now Berlin State

Library, Orient. quart. 135, which contains a few notes, but nothing that would suggest a careful

reading.271 In fact, of the Islamic manuscripts that came from Olearius’s collection (some of

which must have been from Ḥaqq-vīrdī’s library) not one contains any sign of study by

Olearius.272 In addition, while there is no question that Olearius, as he claimed, compared at least

two versions of the Persian text, as Behzad points out, the second was almost certainly Gentius’s

Rosarium politicum.273

On its own, this is insufficient to state that Olearius’s professed account was merely an

exercise in cynical self-branding by an incompetent Persianist. Perhaps Olearius’s purported

Latin translation will turn up somewhere unexpected. There is also evidence (most notably a

later Persian-Turkish-Arabic-Latin dictionary from his collection) that Olearius continued to

improve his Persian over the course of his life.274 Even in the absence of a definitive claim,

however, the question of Olearius’s Persian ability is more than mere arcane speculation.

270 For an overview of the contents of CKB, ms Cod. Pers. 42 see Irmeli Perho, Catalogue of Persian

Manuscripts: Codices Persici, Codices Eyseriani, Codex Persicus Add (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2014),

178-179.

271 This manuscript’s similarity in format to the Gulistān that Ḥaqq-vīrdī copied for Olearius (CKB, ms

Cod. Pers. 84)—the text is similarly copied out onto only half the page—suggests Olearius’s intention to

translate the work and might indicate that it was written earlier, around the same time as ms Cod Pers. 84.

Giorgio Rota describes the manuscript and its contents in detail in “Three Little-Known Persian Sources

of the Seventeenth Century”, Iranian Studies 31, no. 2 (1998): 159-176 (especially 164-169).

272 Most of the manuscripts can easily be identified by their large inscriptions in the hand of Christian

Raue.

273 Behzad, Adam Olearius’ “Persianischer Rosenthal”, 25. Behzad’s judgment is based on observations

in the 1660 edition, Olearius, Persianischer Rosenthal, 1660, 312 note “a”, 314 notes “a” and “b”.

274 SBB, ms orient. fol. 60.

141

First, these questions are interesting because Olearius’s knowledge of Persian and his

reliance on his sources bear in significant ways on his 1654 translation of the Gulistān. In

addition to his elaborate self-presentation in the preface, Olearius also had a curious propensity

to invent facts about the text so that he could stage their explanation in the footnotes of his

translation. In Saʿdī’s seventh book, for instance, Olearius made a cruel schoolmaster even

crueler by having him carry out the bastinado (in the original the teacher merely strikes his

students), so that he, Olearius, could add a learned footnote to say that he had witnessed such an

act in person and add an engraving vividly depicting it.275 An even more striking example is

found in the fifth book, “On Love and Youth”, the contents of which Olearius found alarming

enough to warn his reader that he would either render its young male beloveds as female

(Mägdigen) or obscure gender altogether (Person, Mensch).276 In one story, Olearius went a step

further, offering a clever, but wholly invented, reading for a line depicting the loss of adolescent

beauty with the physical transformation of manhood:

یروز که خط شاهدت بود صاحب نظر از نظر براند آن

ی برنشاند ضمه و فتحه کش صلحش به یامدیب امروز و

Back when you had beautiful handwriting, you drove your admirer from sight

Now that you have filled it with vowel marks, you have come to conciliate him.277

Gentius knew from Sūdī that خط (handwriting) alluded to the adolescent boy’s downy cheeks,

and “vowel marks” to the young man’s beard and mustache, and he translated accordingly with a

275 Olearius, trans., Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654, 135.

276 His reasoning was twofold. First, he feared that such content would be inappropriate for young

readers. Second, he acknowledged that such passages “sound to the ears of Germans, for whom such

things are foreign, more unpleasant than among the Persians.” Olearius, “Vorrede”, Persianischer

Rosenthal, 1654. Behzad discusses Olearius’s treatment of the subject in detail in Behzad, Adam

Olearius’ “Persianischer Rosenthal”, 94-106.

277 Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 353. Translation based on Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 110.

142

short explanatory note.278 In contrast, Olearius, while he used the opportunity to praise the

beauty of the original, said these referred to the “wrinkles, lines, and folds” of age, an

explanation entirely of his own invention, and which he expounded in a footnote that included

the original Persian alongside a literal translation.279 Such interventions are a reminder that the

expertise of the literary translator can be as carefully constructed as the work they translate.

Second, the critical analysis of Olearius’s knowledge of Persian and translation practices

captures the remarkable strides the study of the Gulistān had taken in the fifteen years since

Olearius first attempted its translation. It also articulates a space between independent mastery of

a language and blind dependency on a translation that is relevant to the Gulistān’s subsequent

reception in non-Ottoman Europe.

The Rosarium politicum in England: William Guise

After 1651, orientalists deciphered Saʿdī’s Persian in careful comparison with Gentius’s Latin.

However, this did not diminish the significance of non-Western European sources, but rather

provided a Latinate foundation for understanding and comparing them. Orientalists continued to

consult Persian manuscripts, as well as Ottoman translations and commentaries, but these

278 Gentius, trans., Rosarium politicum, 341. His note reads “Per Fetha et Samma Arabum vocales ob

figurarum similitudinem barba intelligitur, ut qui imberbis antea discesserit, nunc barbatus rediisse

videatur,” p. 607. Sūdī is more specific, and explains that Fetḥa (the diagonal line placed above a letter to

mark the short “a” ) referred in particular to the moustache. Żamma (the curl, placed above the letter, to

mark a short “u” or “o”) meant the curling hairs of the beard. See Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistan, 353.

279 Olearius, trans., Persianischer Rosenthal, 1654, p. 104. “Zu der Zeit/ da du noch glat und schön

außsahest/ (a) triebest du von dir hinweg den/ der dein Gesichte ansahe und beliebete/ heute komstu nun

wieder dich beliebt zumachen/ da du allerhand Caracteren und Runtzeln im Gesichte hast/ (b).”

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sources generally entered into conversation with Gentius and, by extension, with his principle

source, Sūdī.

The Rosarium politicum’s reception alongside Persian, Turkish, and Arabic scholarship

on the Gulistān is documented in copies of the work found throughout Europe. One seventeenth-

century reader, probably Samuel Clarke, compared an Oxford copy of the Rosarium politicum

with the manuscript of a Turkish interlinear translation from Sion College.280 Clodius, who

owned both the first volume of Gentius’s Sūdī commentary and a Persian Gulistān annotated in

his hand, also worked through the text in the pages of Gentius’s 1651 edition, which he marked

up extensively.281 Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Dutch orientalist Joannes

Willmet (1750-1835) copied variants recorded by Albert Schultens (1686-1750) from an Indian

Gulistān manuscript into his copy of the Rosarium politicum, which had once belonged to Isaac

Vossius (1618-1689).282

Curiously, comparison with other Ottoman manuscripts led at least one orientalist to

reverse-engineer Sūdī’s own refutations, as seen in a remarkable volume, now in Lincoln

College Library in Oxford.283 The annotations in Lincoln College’s Rosarium politicum

document what might be seventeenth-century Western Europe’s most careful reading of the

Gulistān, by the English orientalist William Guise. Guise worked through the entire text

alongside the other great Ottoman commentary on the Gulistān, the Arabic commentary of

280 OBL, E.1.11.Art.Seld. I have not yet identified the hand, nor the Turkish interlinear translation, which

appears to be no longer among the former Sion College oriental manuscripts. The attribution with Clarke

is based on a comparison with an 12 August 1656 letter to Pococke in OBL, ms Pococke, 432, fol. 2.

281 British Library, 757 k 36.

282 BnF, FB-14765.

283 Lincoln College Library, Oxford (hereafter: LCO), L.12.29.

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Sürūrī.284 As Guise notes at various points in his annotations, he borrowed the manuscript from

Pococke, and based on the marginalia that Guise reports, it is likely this was the manuscript that

is now Bodleian Library, Pococke 25.285 Guise, a promising scholar who died young, signals his

intentions of close reading in a note at the beginning of the volume, stating that Thomas Marshall

(1621-1685) had heard from Golius that Gentius had given his translation to someone unfamiliar

with Persian to polish his Latin, and this was the reason that the translation did not always match

the original.286 The claim itself is likely false. The revisions in the Rosarium politicum printer’s

manuscript, often quite extensive, were written by Gentius himself. However, the inscription is

notable, since it evokes a chain of expert knowledge about how to properly read the translation.

It is also an indication that Guise encountered the work through Marshall.

On the margins of the Lincoln College Rosarium politicum, Guise shows himself an

attentive reader of Sürūrī’s commentary. He collated the Persian of Gentius with the text in

Sürūrī’s work, and between the lines of the printed text he recorded even slight variants. Guise

went so far as to record obvious scribal errors in his manuscript as variants, followed by his own

284 The identification of Guise’s hand is based on comparison with similar annotations in a collection of

orientalist texts in Oxford (OBL, Mar. 119), including a note signed by Guise. I thank Thomas Roebuck

for confirming the attribution. OBL, Mar. 119 offers further evidence of Guise’s readings and his

connections, through Thomas Marshall, to the Leiden school of orientalist scholarship around Golius. It

contains a copy of Warner’s proverb collections with Guise’s annotations (which also contain traces of

the reading of the Rosarium politicum discussed here) as well as a copy of Greave.” Elementa linguae

Persicae containing Guise’s copy of Golius’s marginalia from his own copy of the work.

285 OBL, ms Pococke 25 contains the occasional graphite annotation indicating that Pococke read it. It is

unclear to what extent Pococke concerned himself with the commentary or when this reading took place,

but, much like Golius’s return to UBL, ms or. 242, Pococke’s use of the manuscript (as opposed to those

made for him by Darwīš Aḥmad) suggest a dawning preference for the such rich, heavily annotated

manuscripts.

286 It was likely a misreading of this inscription that led the notes to be attributed to Golius in the online

catalog. The inscription reads: “Hic liber cum rudiori latino a Gentio donatus fuerat, ab ipso alii cuidam

Persicae linguae plane nescio tradebatur, ut stylo politiore et litteratiore ederetur, unde non usque quaque

Persica et latina inter se congruunt: ita me edocuit vir omnifaria literatura ditissimus Dr. Marshall, Coll.

Lincoln Rector, ipsum vero Cl. Golius.”

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observation on the mistake (usually evident from a comparison between the Persian text and

commentary). Guise also wrote longer notes on the margins of the page, pulling extensively from

the Ottoman Arabic commentary and several other sources. These show that Guise read both

Gentius’s edition and Sürūrī’s commentary with a critical eye to the text and its transmission. For

instance, he diligently recorded Sürūrī’s observations on Gulistān manuscripts. Like Sūdī, Sürūrī

noted and evaluated variants, and while he did not mention individual manuscripts, he did

distinguish whether variants appear “in some copies” (في بعض النسخ) or “in most copies” ( في اكثر

في ) ”At one point, he noted that certain lines do not appear “in the old and correct copies .(النسخ

Guise, as a rule, recorded this specific language, copying the variants 287.(النسخ القدیمة و الصحیحة

from Sürūrī in the context of the commentary. Guise sometimes offers his own preference,

remarking at one point that a reading is “much more elegant.”288

From his references to other texts, we can get a sense of Guise’s readings more broadly.

He notes variants in passages that appeared in Levinus Warner’s 1644 collection of proverbs and

Greaves’s Persian grammar.289 He cites Olearius’s travel account and refers twice to the

publication of Golius’s Persian-Latin dictionary in Castell’s Lexicon Heptaglotton.290 He also

cites two manuscript sources. Alongside Gentius’s note on Firdousī’s Šāhnāma Guise observed

that much on this work could be found in the entry on Firdousī in Dawlatšāh’s (c. 1438-

287 LCO, L.12.29, 14.

288 LCO, L.12.29, 20.

289 LCO, L.12.29. References to Warner appear on 44, 174, 198, Greaves at 10, 88.

290 LCO, L.12.29, 280, 306.

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1494/1507) Taẕkira al-Šuʿarā’.291 Elsewhere, he uses al-Ǧawharī’s dictionary to correct an

Arabic word in a gloss he copied.292

Guise must have realized that Gentius translated using a manuscript much like the one he

borrowed from Pococke, because he observed similarities between Gentius’s printed endnotes

and Sürūrī’s commentary and the marginal annotations in Pococke’s manuscript.293 Next to a

long note by Gentius on the figure of Qarun, for instance, Guise noted that the same story, in the

same order, was recounted on the margin of his Sürūrī manuscript.294 Elsewhere, he recorded

Gentius’s use of Arabic and Persian verse found in his own commentary.295

Nevertheless, in the Lincoln College copy, Sürūrī and Sūdī take up their old

disagreements, channeled through the two orientalist readers. In his observations on Gentius’s

Latin, Guise reverse-engineered Sūdī’s refutations of Sürūrī by noting discrepancies between the

translation and his own reading of the “Arab commentator”. A story from the first book offers a

vivid illustration. Here, Saʿdī tells of a king who reflects on his freedom from care in a moment

of drunken revelry: “ کز نیک و بد اندیشه و از کس غم نیست –را بجهان خوشتر ازین یکدم نیست ما ” (“For us

there is nothing in the world better than this one moment, for we have no worry over anything

and no concern for anyone”). Thackston renders the subsequent response of a dervish, lying

outside in the cold (“ گیرم که غمت نیست غم ما هم نیست –آن که به اقبال تو در عالم نیست ای ”) as follows:

“Oh, no one in the world is as fortunate as you. I take it that you have no cause for concern: you

291 LCO, L.12.29, 553.

292 LCO, L.12.29, 272.

293 When and how Gentius read these commentaries is a mystery. Since there is no trace of them on the

pages of the printer’s manuscript, and they appear only in later versions of the notes, they were perhaps

consulted after Gentius’s return to Western Europe.

294 LCO, L.12.29, 556.

295 LCO, L.12.29, 620, 622, 627.

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have none for us.”296 However, the precise wording of the latter part (corresponding to the

second hemistich in Persian) leaves room for ambiguity. Here, the dervish takes the words of the

king (“از کس غم نیست”, literally, “there is not sorrow from anyone”)and, in confirming them,

unsettles their meaning. As usual, Saʿdī is attentive to the functions of style and the small

imprecisions in language. نیست, “is not”, casts the absence from sorrow as a general fact. That

that sorrow (غم) would come from someone leaves unspoken the particular character of this

transfer. Is the other person the cause and author of new suffering (i.e., being a nuisance or

bother) or are they conduits of another’s pain, which is their own burden? The dervish’s response

hinges on just this ambiguity in the original language between freedom from care and callous

indifference to the world, and it is phrased in two short declarations that mimic the king’s own

proclamation: literally, “I take it, your sorrow is not, the sorrow of us is also not.”

This walks a fine line between being without care and being careless. Saʿdī’s play with

this ambiguity in turn leaves open a question of interpretation. Is the dervish pointing to a

common freedom from suffering that unites the king and the ascetic? Or is the relationship

between the two causal, in which case the dervish is stating that the king is free from suffering

because he is free from the suffering of others? Both readings have their virtues, and the

commentator, like the translator, was forced to choose between them. Guise, moving back and

forth between the Latin of Gentius and Sürūrī’s commentary, registered these divergent readings

(Figure 24). Gentius’s translation renders the dervish’s words as an admonition and reads:

“Ponamus, (te eo felicitatis evectum,) ut de te nihil sis solicitus; sed nonne de nobis miseris

solicitus eris?’297 In the margins of his copy of the Rosarium politicum, Guise noted that the line

296 Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 23; Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 111.

297 Gentius, trans., Rosarium politicum, 74.

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does not appear as a question in his commentary (by Sürūrī) and offers his own translation for

Gentius’s “sed nonne de nobis miseris solicitus eris?”: “nec nos vero soliciti sumus”, adding a

gloss from Sürūrī’s commentary: “فال فرق بیني و بینك” (“there is no difference between me and

you”).298

At moments like this, the Ottoman substrate of orientalist reading comes to the fore.

Surūri, whose commentary Guise so diligently compared with Gentius’s edition, suggested the

first of the readings proposed above, providing the Arabic gloss that Guise recorded in his

annotation and translating the part in question into Turkish as “You do not have sorrow. I also

have none.”299 In this way, the dervish draws a parallel between the ascetic’s renunciation of the

world and the king’s ecstatic drunkenness. This would not have been out of place in Persian

literature, which generally relishes the comparison between dervishes and kings. Sūdī, however,

took issue with this reading, offering an alternative:

I take it that you do not have any sorrow concerning yourself, do you not have sorrow for

us? That is, do you not feel the sorrow of the poor and the wretched?300

Saʿdī’s words remain the same, but the message of Sūdī’s dervish stands in sharp contrast to

Sürūrī’s. It is now an admonition that casts the king’s statement as cold-hearted. Sūdī’s use of the

question participle to soften the admonition helps explain why Gentius translated this passage as

a question. As at other points, his deviation from the literal meaning of Saʿdī’s words can be

explained by his adherence to Sūdī’s.

298 LCO, L.12.29, 74.

299 “ġamıň yok benimde hem yok”. PUL, Islamic Manuscripts, New Series, no. 943, fol. 36r-v.

300 “Farż ideyin ki kendüñe maḫṣūṣ ġamuñ yoḳdur, bize maḫṣūṣ ġamuñ da yok mı. Yaʿnī fuḳarā vü

mesākīnüñ ġamın çekmez misin.” Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gülistān, 112.

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Figure 24. LCO, L.12.29, 75: Guise noted a discrepency between Gentius’s reading of a passage (based on the

commentary of Sūdī) and the reading in the earlier Ottoman-Arabic commentary Guise was using (which

Sūdī refutes).

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What then recommends one reading over another? One could point to how Saʿdī’s beyt

emphasises distinction, not similarity. The dervish prefaces his remark on their respective

sorrows with the observation that “there is no one in the world as fortunate as you”, and in the

application of different genitive constructions – “your sorrow” (غمت) and “the sorrow of us” ( غم

,Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the text is essentially irresolvable. This is perhaps why Sūdī .(ما

usually quick to claim his predecessors were mistaken (or simply ignorant), softens the edges of

his refutation of Sürūrī, stating

some read the meaning of the hemistich as “I take it you don’t have sorrow, we also do

not have any. Therefore we are, together with you, without sorrow.” Although this

sentence carries this meaning, it does not capture the entire meaning.301

The poet, in Sūdī’s view, goes further: both readings are valid, and, in fact, Saʿdī intended the

passage to have multiple interpretations. Sūdī grounds his argument in an analysis of Saʿdī’s

wordplay, observing, “in this beyt, the combination of غمand همis not without

correspondence.”302 Ham means “also” in Persian (as in “there is also not the sorrow of us”).

Sūdī observed that, in Arabic, written the same way but with a doubling of the second consonant

(hamm), the word is a synonym of غم (sorrow). Revisited with this polyglot echo in mind, the

hemistich reads: “I take it you have no sorrow, since our sorrow is not sorrow.”

Guise was an exceptional reader, and the rigor with which he treated both Gentius’s

edition and Sürūrī’s commentary in the pages of the Lincoln College Rosarium politicum

illustrates how old voices echo up through traditions of interpretation. Not only did Guise ferret

301 “miṣrāʿ-ı sānīniñ maʿnāsına ṭutālım ki ġamıñ yoktur bize de yoktur pes seniñle beraber bī-ġam

olmakta diyen egerçi bu ʿibāret bu maʿnāya müteḥammildür ammā maḳām bu maʿnādan külli ibā ėder.”

Sūdī, Şehr-i Gülistān, 112.

302 This is a tricky passage with a number of different readings for what I have rendered here as

“correspondence”, possibly an unfamiliar rhetorical term. Gentius’s copy, CKB, ms Cod. Turc. 19, fol.

90v, reads: “bu beytte هم ve غم ictimaʿi luṭftan ḫālī deyil.” Sūdī, Şehr-i Gülistān, 112 reads “هم ve غم

iʿtibārı luṭften”. Yılmaz reads it as “هم ve غم ictimāʿ-i lafẓdan” (Sūdī, Gülistān Şerḥi, ed. Yılmaz, 165).

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out the intricacies of Sūdī’s readings, he read much like Sūdī’s Ottoman contemporaries did,

studying the language through the glosses, and collecting and comparing readings from different

commentaries. In this sense, Gentius’s Rosarium politicum was as much a translation of Sūdī’s

commentary as of Saʿdī’s Gulistān.

Gentius in India

A final example sets this dynamic on a global stage and provides a view of the processes

that would mark the study of Persian in the centuries to come. Several decades after the

Rosarium politicum’s publication, two Dutchmen in the Dutch East India company, Cornelis van

der Mutter (b. 1659) and Daniel Havart (1650-1724), began studying Persian literature together

with the help of an Indian scribe, Šāh Qāsim, who copied a number of manuscripts for them.303

The manuscripts of Mutter and Havart, now divided between Leiden, Hamburg, and Göttingen,

offer a glimpse into their friendship, the scholarly collaboration it occasioned, and the workings

of Mutter’s Dutch translation of the Gulistān. The translation, which was nearly completed but

never published, is today in Göttingen, written on interleaved sheets bound with Šāh Qāsim’s

copy of the Persian text, where Mutter has added his own occasional glosses.304

Interestingly, Šāh Qāsim’s text matches the 1651 Rosarium politicum, omitting the same

story as Gentius. Another manuscript clarifies the link between Mutter’s translation and

303 Šāh Qāsim describes himself in one colophon as “منشی سرکار کمپنی ولنده” (“munshi of the master of the

Dutch Company”) (SUBH, ms Or. 158, fol. 123).

304 SUBG, ms Pers. 8. Later, the manuscript was in the library of Adriaan Reland (1676-1718).

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Gentius’s publication: a collaboration between his friend Havart and Šāh Qāsim.305 As in the

Göttingen manuscript, Šāh Qāsim copied Gentius’s Persian text, but this time it was bound

together with a copy by Havart of Gentius’s Latin translation. That both of Šāh Qāsim’s copies

are identical is an indication that they might have been copied at the same time. Facing

inscriptions in Persian and Latin, placed before Saʿdī’s preface, mark the completion of Šāh

Qāsim’s work at Havart’s request (“بفرموده سنیور آورت ولنده”) on 16 Muḥarram 1086 (12 April

1676).306 Colophons after each book record Havart’s progress. He completed the first book in

Golconda “in the middle of the night” on 11 April 1676, the second book “early in the morning”

on 18 April, continuing at a steady pace until he completed the final book on 17 July.307

A Havart inscription, dated 1701 in Utrecht, marks the presentation of the manuscript to

Cornelis Mutter, “who with him at the same time, in the city of Golkonda, in 1676, began to

learn the Persian language.”308 The precise connection between Havart’s manuscript and

Mutter’s translation remains unclear. However, Mutter appears to have started his translation of

the work only after the completion of Havart’s manuscript, suggesting that Mutter relied on

Gentius’s Latin edition, through the scribal mediation of Havart and Šāh Qāsim. That Mutter

would use Gentius as a guide to Saʿdī’s Persian is unsurprising, since without a dictionary or

expert knowledge of the language, Mutter could have otherwise hardly managed to translate a

work of literature.

305 UBL, ms Acad. 138, 138.

306 UBL, ms Acad. 138, 13. Havart’s appears to have begun earlier, since his date reads: “mense martio

ao. post partim virginis de 1676” (p. 14).

307 UBL, ms Acad. 138, 136. Chapter endings are found at 86 (Book 1, April 11), 130 (Book 2, April 18),

165 (Book 3, April 26), 172 (Book 4, April 29), 203 (Book 5, May 9), 212 (Book 6, June 8), 241 (Book 7,

June 15), and 278 (Book 8, July 17).

308 UBL, ms Acad. 138, front flyleaf verso: “[dat] met hem te gelijk, in de stad Golkonda, 1676, de

persiaansche tale heeft beginnen te leeren.”

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Like Havart, Mutter recorded his progress at the end of each book. He completed his

translation of the preface on 17 December 1676 (fol. 18v), the first book on 16 September 1677

(fol. 72v), the third book on 11 September 1678 (fol. 151v), the fourth book on 16 September

1678 (fol. 161r), the fifth book on 23 June 1679 (fol. 191v), and the sixth book on 13 January

1680 (fol. 201r).309 Mutter then abandoned his translation after the beginning of the seventh book

for unknown reasons. The translation itself shows that Mutter relied mostly on Gentius, as his

Dutch remains close to Gentius’s Latin even when it diverges from the literal meaning of the

Persian original. For instance, in the story of the dervish and the king discussed above, Mutter

renders the dervish’s reply through a literal translation of Gentius, not Saʿdī: “Ik stelle vor, dat

ghij negens over besorgt sijt, maar ben je over ons niet besorgt?’310

Gentius was not Mutter’s only source on the Gulistān. He studied Gentius’s Latin

translation alongside a sixteenth-century Indian glossary on the work, entitled Miftāḥ-i Gulistān

(Key to the Rose Garden), by a scholar at the Bahmani court at the turn of the sixteenth century

named “Uveys ibn ʿAlā”. Mutter had Šāh Qāsim copy out the work twice.311 As sometimes

happened in the world of orientalist learning, Mutter had not anticipated how cumbersome

working according to an unfamiliar organization might be. The first was arranged not by initial

letter, as would have seemed obvious to Mutter, but according to the final letter.312 Šāh Qāsim

copied the work onto two columns on each page, leaving space for Mutter’s Dutch additions.

The manuscript does not have a colophon, but Mutter inscribed the back flyleaf with his name,

309 Mutter did not provide a date for the completion of the second book.

310 SUBG, ms Pers. 8, fol. 38r.

311 SUBH, mss Orient. 158, 192.

312 SUBH, ms Orient. 192.

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the date (9 January 1679), and a short ownership inscription in Persian.313 Mutter then tried his

hand at providing definitions for each entry. He soon gave up and had Šāh Qāsim copy the

manuscript once more, this time in the alphabetical order more familiar to him.314 In this second

manuscript, Mutter added Dutch definitions for nearly all of the words. Around the same time,

Mutter had Šāh Qāsim copy a Persian-Arabic rhyming dictionary meant to teach Arabic to

school children, entitled Niṣāb al-ṣibyān (The Children’s Primer) which he then gifted to Havart,

marked by an inscription to his friend accompanied by Persian verse.315

There is no sign of any other dictionaries Mutter might have used or whether he worked

with Šāh Qāsim in reading the Gulistān. In general, the Göttingen, Leiden, and Hamburg

manuscripts paint a picture of someone who worked mostly from Gentius’s Latin, using

translation as a tool for studying the language. Translation can be understood here not so much

as evidence of mastery of the language but rather as a process that structures learning. Much like

the Ottoman readers of Sūdī, Mutter explored the language through the text.

Havart and Mutter’s work with the Gulistān was only a portion of their Persian studies in

India, and Havart soon published a guide to Persian epistolary style along with a collection of

proverbs, entitled the Persiaanse Secretaris.316 Nonetheless, with the manuscripts that circulated

313 SUBH, ms Orient. 192, back flyleaf recto: “این کتاب الفاظ از مال کرنلیس وندرمتر است” (“This book of words

is from the property of Cornelis van der Mutter”).

314 SUBH, ms Orient. 158. The manuscript’s colophon gives the day of completion (26 Šawwāl) but not

the year.

315 SUBH, ms Orient. 243. According to the colophon, the work was completed 12 Shaʿbān 1088

(October 10, 1677). The inscription to Havart is dated October 20, 1677. Mutter owned another copy of

the same work, with an ownership inscription dated 1679, now Göttingen University Library, ms Pers. 5.

316 Daniel Havart, Persiaanse Secretaris, of een Nette beschryving van de stijl die de Persianen gebruiken

in hare brieven en notariale stukken; als ook van de feest- en vierdagen der Muhammedanen door het gehele jaar in het Koninkryk van Golconda; Waar by gevoegt zijn enige zedespreuken uit verscheide

geleerde Arabische en Persiaanse Schryvers (Amsterdam: Hoorn, c. 1680).

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between these two friends and their scribe, the Rosarium politicum arrived in India, a place that

would come to play a central role in the study of Persian among orientalists, especially in the

second half of the eighteenth century. Mutter’s translation remained unpublished, and of little

consequence, but it illustrates a dynamic that intensified in the following centuries: the

accelerated circulation of scholarly literature between centers of oriental philology in India, Iran,

the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. Even then, particularly in German-speaking lands, much of the

study of Persian remained into the nineteenth century rooted in the Ottoman philological

tradition. When Carolus Dadichi (1694-1734) and Solomon Negri (d. 1727) taught and studied

Persian in Halle in the first half of the eighteenth century, they worked from Gentius’s edition,

and a fragment of a Gulistān copied by Solomon Negri, who studied Turkish and Persian in

Istanbul, contains Latin glossing that shows the scholar working word for word through

Gentius’s translation.317 Similarly, the selection of Latin translations from the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ by

Karl Reviczky (1737-1793), who first encountered Persian through his Turkish instructor in

Istanbul, relied on Sūdī’s commentary.318 Nevertheless, more and more, orientalist scholarship

began to resemble the broader composition of sources evident among Mutter’s manuscripts. A

copy of the Gulistān owned by Jean Chardin (1643-1713) shows the scholar working much like

Mutter, but with a more profound knowledge of the language. Chardin eventually published a

317 Halle Franckesche Stiftungen (hereafter: FSH), ms AFSt/H K 87, 12-35. See Erika Pabst,

Orientalische Handschriften im Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle (Halle: Archiv der

Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle/Saale, 2003), 208-209. The three other copies of the preface (AFSt/H Q

77-79) were made from Gentius’s edition, perhaps copied by Georg Jacob Kehr. Pabst, Orientalische

Handschriften, 202-207.

318 See Karl Reviczky, Specimen poeseos Persicae, sive Muhammedis Schems-eddini notioris agnomine

Haphyzi Ghazelae, sive Odae sexdecim ex initio Divani depromptae, nunc primum latinitate donatae,

cum metaphrasi ligata et soluta, paraphrasi item ac notis (Vienna: Kaliwodian, 1771), XLVIII. On

Reviczky, see Michael O’Sullivan, “A Hungarian Josephinist, Orientalist, and Bibliophile: Count Karl

Reviczky, 1737-1793”, Austrian History Yearbook 45 (2014): 61-88.

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partial translation of the work, and in his manuscript we find the French traveler criticizing and

improving on Gentius’s translation.319 More than a century later, the pioneering French

orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) read the Gulistān with an interleaved copy of Francis

Gladwin’s edition of the work, pulling notes not only from a variety of Ottoman sources

(including Sūdī), but also from Gentius and Olearius.320

Even into the nineteenth century, Ottoman commentaries were still in use throughout the

centers of orientalist studies in Europe. Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer taught the Gulistān at the

University of Leipzig for decades using Sürūrī’s commentary, and one of his students, Karl Graf,

worked much like Gentius did, copying Sürūrī’s Būstān commentary by hand.321 Still, these

Ottoman commentaries were studied alongside a growing collection of printed books,

lithographs, and manuscripts from throughout the broader Persian-reading world. Finally, the

case of Reviczky’s Ḥāfiẓ translation casts light on these new global circulations. Reviczky

translated and wrote his commentary on the basis of Sūdi. Several decades after its publication in

Vienna, John Richardson translated the work into English as A Specimen of Persian Poetry in

1774, with a preface that signaled its use as a Persian primer for service in India, so that “English

gentlemen can officiate as their own interpreters” as a “guard against treachery…in negociation

319 OBL, ms Ouseley 25. It was in the collection of the William Ouseley (1767-1842), who identified

Chardin’s notes and published an essay on the manuscript in his Oriental Collections. See William

Ouseley, “Original Notes, written by Chardin, in a manuscript copy of the Gulistān”, Oriental Collections

(1797): 93-96.

320 BnF, Arabe 5210. I have not identified de Sacy’s source manuscripts, but the variety and frequency of

his manuscript sources would be consistent with an annotated Ottoman copy of the Gulistān.

321 Fleischer’s Latin translation of the commentary is LUB, ms Vollers 931. Graf’s copy of Sürūrī’s

commentary from a manuscript in Diez’s collection (SBB, ms Diez. A. Quart. 42) is now LUB, ms

Vollers 932.

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and war, and against fraud in revenue and commerce.”322 This work, which Samuel Rousseau

revised and reprinted in 1802, marks the final station of the remarkable trans-imperial circuit that

Sūdī’s Ḥāfiẓ commentary traversed, from the Ibrahim Pasa Palace school in Istanbul, through the

studies of Habsburg diplomats, on to the Persian students of the British East India Company.323

322 John Richardson, A Specimen of Persian Poetry; or Odes of Hafez with an English Translation and

Paraphrase. Chiefly from the Specimen Poeseos Persicae of Baron Revizky, Envoy from the Emperor of

Germany to the Court of Poland. With Historical and Grammatical Illustrations, and a complete

Analysis, for the assistance of those who wish to study the language (London: 1774), iv.

323 John Richardson, A Specimen of Persian Poetry; or Odes of Hafez, ed. Samuel Rousseau (London,

1802).

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CHAPTER TWO

TEACHING TURKISH: ORIENTALISM’S PEDAGOGICAL LABORATORY

Introduction

Vienna, 22 March 1792. The seventeen-year-old Joseph Hammer stood before the

Ottoman ambassador and his retinue, fiddling with a table of scientific instruments. The setting:

Vienna’s Orientalische Akademie, a school that trained young men for diplomatic work in the

Ottoman Empire. The visiting Ottoman embassy gave the academy’s students a taste of their

future employment as Sprachknaben (language boys) in Istanbul. For the Orientalische

Akademie, the visit was a chance to showcase an unprecedented pedagogical undertaking. The

school was not the first diplomatic language school to teach Turkish, Persian, and Arabic (the

École des jeunes de langues in Paris had inspired it), but it was the first to integrate their study

into a broad, educational program that included both the natural sciences and classical languages:

a place where students read both Livy and Ḥāfiẓ in the original. The instruments on the table

next to Hammer were for demonstrations in a rapidly expanding field of scientific inquiry:

physics. That Hammer could narrate twenty-five experiments in Turkish to a distinguished

Ottoman visitor exemplified the school’s mission and purpose.

Multiple witnesses tell the story of the ambassador’s visit. The first is the ambassador

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himself. Ebū Bekir Rātib Efendi was born in Tosya (a town in northern Anatolia near the Black

Sea) in 1750, and rose through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (āmedī ḳalemi).1 His embassy to

Vienna was a high point of his career and of the modernizing state reforms under Sultan Selim

III (Niẓām-i Cedīd, “new order”). Rātib Efendi’s embassy involved a comprehensive study of

Habsburg institutions, and Carter Vaughn Findley has compared the resulting embassy report to

contemporary Western European political surveys like Mouradgea d'Ohsson's Tableau général

de l’Empire Othoman.2

In his report, Rātib Efendi recalled: “This academy invited and entertained us and made a

demonstration of twenty-five wonders and marvels of the sciences they call ‘physica.’”3 He

devoted more attention to ceremony, recording, word for word, the elaborate greeting in florid

Ottoman Turkish which welcomed him to the school. The students addressed him as the

“overflowing sea of sciences and talent, prosperous and gracious, the honorable Rātib Efendi,”

and humbly requested that “the world-illuminating sun of the arts and sciences remove and

efface the dark night of our ignorance and error and, with the shower of the stars of the

beneficence of the orbits, eliminate and annihilate the darkness of our endless deficiency.”4

1 On Ebūbekir Rātib Efendi and his Vienna embassy, see Ebūbekir Rātib Efendi, Nemçe Sefāretnāmesi, ed. Abdullah Uçman (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2012); Carter Vaughn Findley, “Ebu Bekir Ratib’s Vienna

Embassy Narrative: Discovering Austria or Propagandizing for Reform in Istanbul?,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 85 (1995): 41-80; Joshua M. Stein, “An Eighteenth-Century Ottoman

Ambassador Observes the West: Ebu Bekir Rātip Efendi Reports on the Habsburg System of Roads and

Posts,” Archivum Ottomanicum 10 (1985): 223; and İ.H. Uzunçarsılı, “Selim III´ün Veliaht iken Fransa

Kralı Lui XVI. ile Muhabereleri,” Belleten 2, no. 5/6 (1938): 191-246.

2 Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire Othoman, 3 vols (Paris: Imprimerie de

Monsieur, 1788-1820).

3 Ebūbekir Rātib Efendi, Nemçe Sefāretnāmesi, 27b: “bizi mezbūr aḳādīmyāya daʿvet ve żiyāfet ve fizīḳa

didikleri fünūndan yirġmi bes ʿacā’ib ve ġarā’ib iẓhār ve irā’et ėttiler.”

4 Rātib Efendi, Nemçe Sefāretnāmesi, 28a: “Bahr-i zaḫār-i ʿulūm ve hünermendī saʿādetlu ʿināyetlu rātib

efendi cenābleri…velākin āftāb-i ʿālem-tāb-i ʿulūm ve maʿārifleri seb-i deycūr-i nādānī ve ḳuṣārumuzu

izāle ve imḥā ve ifāẕa-i envār-i kerem-i medārları birle ẓalām-i noḳṣān-i bī pāyānımızı imāṭa ve ifnā

buyurub…”

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A second witness was compiled at the school itself.5 A volume in the academy’s

manuscript collection documents several proud moments, as when its students celebrated

Emperor Franz I’s 1808 marriage to Maria Ludovika with a congratulatory message in Turkish,

Persian, Arabic, and German. It also offers a version of Rātib Efendi’s visit. Like the

ambassador’s report, it records the students’ welcome verbatim, helpfully translating the florid

Turkish into a German idiom. The account also includes the script that Hammer memorized

(Figure 25). We can follow the budding orientalist as he introduces the experiments and

describes their progress:

We know if you rub certain kinds of natural materials, and in particular pitch and amber

and glass, soft particles are attracted and repelled with the appearance of a spark. This

property is well-known under the name “electrica”.6

Another source speaks to the ambassador’s reaction. Ignaz von Stürmer, a graduate of the

academy who kept a running diary of the embassy, recalled the demonstration’s success:

On March 22 at 4 in the afternoon, this minister went into the Academy of Oriental

Languages and showed such a great satisfaction, on account of its organization as well as,

in particular, the ability and skill of its students in various electrical and air experiments,

which the students explained to him in his own mother tongue, that he not only remained

there until 9 o’clock, but also expressed to Hofrat von Jenisch and the Director Abbé

Höck his particular pleasure as he left. As well, he promised to leave a poetic work to the

academy as a monument to his visit.7

5 HHStA, ms Or HS 588.

6 HHStA-KA Or HS 588, fol. 5r: “envāʿ-i icsām-i ṭabīʿiyya ve bā-ḥuṣūṣ zift ve kehrübā ve cām mesḥ

olunursa ḥafīf ve ḫurde olan seyleri bir serāreniñ iẓhāriyle ceẕb ve yine redd ėttikleri maʿlūm ahālī-i

ʿulūm olduğundan māʿadā yine ḫāṣiyya mezbūr ki elektriḳā nāmıyla meshur olmusdur.” 7 HHStA, Türkei IV/9, “Journal der Türkischen Gesandtschaft vom Jahre 1791 verfasst von dem kais.

königl. wirkl. Hof-Sekretär und Hof-Dollmetsch v. Stürmer mit ersten Oktober 1792 sammt 17.

Anlagen”, [unpaginated]: “Den 22. März um 4 Uhr Nachmittags verfügte sich dieser Minister in die

orientalische Sprachen-Akademie, und bezeigte über deren innere Einrichtung sowohl, als besonders über

die Geschiklich- und Fertigkeit der Zöglinge in verschiedenen elektrischen und Luft-Experimenten,

welche ihm durch die […]ank von denselben in seiner eigenen Muttersprache erkläret wurden, ein so

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Indeed, Rātib Efendi wrote a poem to commemorate his visit; this poem was long one of the

school’s prized possessions.8

A final witness recounts the meeting. Joseph Hammer, returning to the episode decades

later as he wrote his memoirs, zeroed in on one key moment. At the end of the presentation, the

ambassador stood up and told the teenage Hammer: “You will become a great man.”9 It is fitting

that Hammer (by then Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall), in his characteristic humility, added that

this remained “unfortunately an unfulfilled prophecy”. Few figures are as contested in the history

of oriental studies. In his lifetime, Hammer was both revered as a towering figure and dismissed

as an unrigorous dilettante, and it is a mark of Hammer’s particularity that both claims have their

merits. His contributions to oriental studies are undeniable. He founded the first orientalist

journal, Fundgruben des Orients, which appeared in beautifully illustrated folio volumes with

contributions in German, French, Italian, and Latin. He penned pioneering translations of

foundational works of world literature, such as the divans of Ḥāfiẓ and al-Mutanabbī, and the

großes Wohlgefallen, daß er nicht nur bis 9 Uhr daselbst verweilen, sondern auch beim Fortgehen dem H.

Hofrathe v Jenisch, und dem Direktor H. Abbe Höck sein besonderes Vergnügen zu erkennen gab, wie

auch der Akademie ein dichterisches Werk zum Denkmal dieses Besuchs von seiner eigenen Feder zu

hinterlassen versprach”. I thank Lela Gibson, who drew my attention to this manuscript and shared her

research photos.

8 I was unable to identify the present location of the poem, but the poem is both translated and in Victor

Weiß von Starkenfels, Die kaiserlich-königliche orientalische Akademie zu Wien, ihre Gründung,

Fortbildung und gegenwärtige Einrichtung (Vienna: Gerold, 1839),.

9 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, “Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben”: 1774-1852, ed. Reinhart Bachofen

von Echt (Vienna and Leipzig: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1940), 26: “Eines der glänzendsten Ereignisse,

welches die orientalische Akademie während der Anwesenheit der türkischen Gesandtschaft erlebte, war

der mit einer großen Anzahl physikalischer Versuche gefeierte Besuch derselben. Die Vorbereitung und

Erklärung der Experimente traf mich. Das Haupt- und Glanzexperiment war die gleichzeitige Explosion

von 24 an der Wand aufgestellten elektrischen Pistolen, welche untereinander und mit der aus 24

Flaschen bestehenden Batterie durch Messingdrähte verbunden waren. Der Gesandte belobte mich am

Schlusse auf das schmeichelhafteste und schloß mit den Worten: ‘Du wirst ein großer Mann werden’—

eine leider nicht in Erfüllung gegangene Vorhersagung.”

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travel account of Evliya Çelebi. His magnum opus, the ten-volume Geschichte des osmanischen

Reiches, a ground-breaking synthesis of Ottoman historiography and Western European archival

documentation, is still consulted today.10 Nevertheless, Hammer often strayed beyond his areas

of competency. Most famously, he once argued—in a long, erudite, and elaborately documented

Latin treatise—that tourist-trade forgeries were the Baphomet idols of the Knights Templar.11

Even in his more traditional endeavors, Hammer also worked quickly, and his many small errors

diminished his standing with the growing corps of academic orientalists.

More recently, another aspect of Hammer’s work has renewed interest in the orientalist:

his profound respect for the traditions he studied.12 Hammer was a skillful ambassador of Islamic

literatures as high culture, replete with unique beauties and conferring status on those skillful

enough to master them. It is characteristic that, while other orientalists compared Muslim writers

with models from antiquity, Hammer preferred analogies that saw Islamic intellectuals through

the lens of contemporary or near-contemporary Western Europeans. He called the sixteenth-

century Ottoman scholar Musliḥüddin Sürūrī “the Turkish Boileau”, and evoked Jean Paul in his

discussion of Persian metaphor (which inspired Goethe’s own reflections on Jean Paul in the

West-östlicher Divan).13 His generous view of the Islamic past has, in turn, made him all the

more relevant to the present, and Hammer has even become an object of fiction in novels such as

10 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, Grossentheils aus bisher

unbenützten Handschriften und Archiven, 10 vols (Pest: C. A. Hartleben, 1827-35).

11 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, “Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum”, Fundgruben des Orients 6

(1818): 1-120, 445-499. Curiously, since this work has long been sought after by aficionados of the

occult, it might prove to be his most enduring work.

12 Notably, the recent three volume online edition of Hammer’s letters, Walter Höflechner, Alexandra

Wagner, and Gerit Koitz-Arko, eds, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Materialien, 3

vols (Version 2, 2018) (http://gams.uni-graz.at/context:hp) has offered a new material basis for the study

of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall.

13 Hammer, Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens (Vienna: Heubner & Volke, 1818), 27; 34.

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Matthias Enard’s Boussole and Dirk Stermann’s Der Hammer.14 Hammer’s contradictions were

rooted in his training between the capitals of two empires: Istanbul and Vienna. His sense for the

possibility of elite literary communication between the Ottoman empire and non-Ottoman

Europe both mirrored the courtesies of diplomatic communication and reflected his own

experience as a scholar, and his career as an orientalist largely rested on interpreting and

compiling earlier works of Ottoman scholarship.

This chapter tells the story of the institutions that formed and shaped Hammer and other

diplomat-scholars who pioneered the study and translation of Islamic literatures in Western

Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It begins with one of the first Turkish teachers

in Istanbul, Wojciech Bobowski, charts the development of diplomatic language schools in

Istanbul, Paris, and Vienna, and ends with an examination of Hammer’s education and early

work. Its thesis is that both the scholarly program and personal identification with Islamic high

culture that defined the work of these scholars emerged out of a pedagogical context whose

institutional transformations were driven by a simple—but intractable—problem: how to teach

“oriental languages”, above all Turkish, in non-Ottoman Europe.15

This was a pressing matter of state, but no simple task for pedagogy. By the second half

of the seventeenth century, a few works had introduced Western European readers to the Turkish

language, but no program existed to take beginners to advanced proficiency. It was not enough to

write a grammar, or a dictionary, or to send young men to Istanbul. Learning required an entire

infrastructure. One had to build a school, hire teachers, bring together a library, recruit students,

14 Matthias Enard, Boussole (Arles: Actes Sud, 2015); Dirk Stermann, Der Hammer (Hamburg: Rowohlt,

2019).

15 Natalie Rothman has already made similar arguments, pointing to the central role of dragomans in early

modern oriental studies. See Rothman, “Dragomans and ‘Turkish Literature’: The Making of a Field of

Inquiry”, Oriente Moderno 93, no. 2 (2013): 390-421.

164

and motivate them to invest the time needed to master not only Ottoman Turkish (which meant

learning Persian and Arabic) but also the codes of educated Ottoman society.

Figure 25. HHStA-KA, ms Or HS 588, fol. 5r: A transcription of Hammer’s physics presentation.

165

This project’s success was the result of a long process of emulation and experimentation,

one that passed through Istanbul and Paris before arriving in Vienna. At its core was an insight

into the formative power of philology. The first diplomatic language schools in Istanbul provided

little more than room, board, and access to a Turkish hoca (teacher). Slowly, these schools

transformed. The best way to teach Turkish, it turned out, was to study its literature and enlist

students in a variety of philological tasks, as readers, compilers, collectors, translators, archivists,

and catalogers. Enlisting philology as an instrument of learning, diplomatic language schools

linked professional advancement with scholarly contribution, educating generations of graduates

who were both conversant in the mores of elite Ottoman culture and increasingly linked to

transnational scholarly networks. This chapter traces how this long development culminated in

one of the nineteenth century’s most ambitious orientalists, Joseph von Hammer, and shaped his

first major work: the translation of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, which inspired Goethe’s West-eastern

Divan.

Learning in Istanbul

The massive, multi-lingual, and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire functioned through the

constant mediation of a professionalized corps of interpreters—called dragomans—who

facilitated communication and translated the letters and documents whose circulation drove the

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workings of a complex state.16 When Western European powers established permanent

diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, they

were faced with this same problem of translation to and from the linguae francae of the Ottoman

capital, especially Turkish. Over time, Christian families in Galata specialized as interpreters,

forming dragoman dynasties that cut across alliances.

At the same time, a small corps of Istanbul orientalists took shape, as Western European

travelers to Istanbul succeeded in learning Turkish, Persian, and Arabic on an advanced level

within a distinctly Ottoman context. These orientalists studied with Ottoman scholars, used

Ottoman networks to acquire manuscripts, and, gradually, collaborated and taught each other.

One well-documented example, discussed in more detail in chapter one, is Georg Gentius.

Originally from a village outside of Querfurt, Gentius first studied oriental languages in Leiden,

but it was during his extended stay in Istanbul that he acquired the bulk of his orientalist

learning. In his letters, Gentius described his forays into the world of Ottoman learning, reading

with his elite Turkish contacts, with whom he learned Persian like Ottoman scholar, through

literary commentaries which he copied out by hand.

Another young German orientalist who studied in Leiden, Levinus Warner, followed in

Gentius’s footsteps, arriving in the Ottoman capital several years later. Perhaps no orientalist

delved more deeply into the Ottoman tradition than Warner, whose mastery of languages helped

secure him a diplomatic career (he was eventually named the Dutch Republic’s Resident in

Istanbul), which in turn financed an ambitious program of manuscript collecting. His papers and

16 On dragomans, see Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and

Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Rothman, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and

Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 4

(2009): 771-800.

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manuscripts bear traces of his learned network: the notes of the Melkite scribe Niqūlāwus al-

Ḥalabī, who worked for Warner (as he had once worked for Warner’s teacher, Golius) or the

letters of the Muslim scholar Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-ʿUrdī al Ḥalabī, who helped him acquire

manuscripts.17 Warner’s contacts with learned Ottomans were already legendary in his own time.

Rumors circulated about his long discussions with the Turkish atheist, Lārī Meḥmed Efendi, who

was said to have greeted Warner on visits with the Turkish word “yok” (there is not), as in “there

is no God”, to which the German replied “var” (there is), before the two launched into learned

argument.18

17 On Warner’s network see “Een verzamelaar en zijn netwerk/A collector and his network”, in Vrolijk,

Schmidt, and Scheper, eds, Turcksche Boucken, 91-107.

18 Thomas Smith, Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government of the Turks, Together with a

Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia, As They Now Lye in Their Ruins, and a Brief Description of Constantinople (London: Pitt, 1678), 116-117: “This Mahomet Ephendi (which is a title of respect they

usually bestow upon men of learning and authority) was born in Larr in Armenia major, a man of great

esteem in Constantinople among all who knew him, for his skill in the Law, and in the Arabick and

Persian languages, of a temper mild and sociable, which made him covet the acquaintance and friendship

of several Western Christians, from whom he could learn somewhat, and whom he acknowledged to

understand the laws of discourse, and to reason much better than his Brother Turks, whom he lookt upon

as very dull and heavy fellows. His inquisitive genius put him upon the search of several things, and his

pride and conceitedness were so great, that he thought he had found the secret indeed, which all the

Atheists have been seeking after to quiet and banish those fears which perpetually haunt their guilty

minds. Ambitious of fame and applause, he sets up for a profest Atheist, being so far from suppressing

these extravagant fancies, the effect of the greatest madness whatever, that he takes care to divulge them

in all companies where he thought to meet with opposition, and disputes fiercely against the being of a

God. Whenever he went to visit Signor Warner, whose extraordinary learning and worth derived a great

lustre upon his publick character, the first salute upon the very sight of him was, there is not, meaning a

God; to which the Resident would immediately reply, there is; after which they would often descend to a

close dispute about that dictate of universal nature, and right reason”. Lārī Meḥmed Efendi was later

executed for professing his beliefs and is also documented in Ottoman sources; see Ahmed Yasar Ocak,

Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve Mülhidler (15.-17. Yüzyıllar) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayinları,

1998). He was also the object of particular fascination among Western European travelers. Paul Rycaut’s

account (The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire. Containing the Maxims of the Turkish

Politie, The most material Points of the Mahometan religion, their Sects and Heresies, their Convents and

Religious Votaries. Their military discipline, with an exact Computation of their Forces both by Land and by Sea. Illustrated with divers Pieces of Sculpture, representing the variety of Habits amongst the Turks

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Wojciech Bobowski and His Manuscripts

Wojciech Bobowski (c. 1610-1675) was, next to Warner, the linchpin of the circle that

made Istanbul a new site of orientalist scholarship, though he traveled there under very different

circumstances.19 Bobowski’s early life is largely a mystery. Bayle states that he “was born a

Christian in Poland, but having been taken by Tatars at a very young age, he was sold to the

Turks, who raised him in their religion in the palace.”20 Among his later works, he described

Topkapı palace and its page school at a level of detail that implied first-hand experience, and

Paul Rycaut (who relied heavily on Bobowski’s account) described him as an “understanding

Polonian, who had spent nineteen years in the Ottoman court”.21 His notebooks of musical

notation—crucial documents in the history of Ottoman music—indicate that he was court

(London: Starkey, 1680]), 130) cemented Lārī Meḥmed Efendi’s reputation as an atheist martyr: “And it

is observable, that this man might, would he but have confessed his error, and promised for the future an

assent to the principles of a better: but he persisted still in his blasphemies, saying, That though there were

no reward, yet the love of truth obliged him to dye a Martyr.” Pierre Bayle later invoked Lārī Meḥmed

Efendi (alongside Lucilio Vanini) as proof of the existence of atheist martyrdom. See Pierre Bayle,

Pensées diverses, écrites à un docteur de Sorbonne, à l’occasion de la Cométe qui parut au mois de

décembre 1680 (Rotterdam: Leers, 1683), 571.

19 The best overview on Bobowski and the sources related to his life is Cem Behar, “Wojciech Bobowski

(Ali Ufkî): Hayatı ve Eserleri (1610?-1675)”, in Cem Behar, Musikiden müziğe: Osmanlı/Türk müziği: gelenek ve modernlik (makaleler-kaynaklar-metinler) (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005), 17-53. See

also Hannah Neudecker, “Two Hitherto Little-Studied Turkish Translations by Wojciech Bobowski alias

Albertus Bobovius”, Oriens 45 (2017): 330-363; and Neudecker, “From Istanbul to London? Albertus

Bobovius’ Appeal to Isaac Basire”, in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, eds Hamilton, van den

Boogert, and Westerweel, 173-196.

20 Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Amsterdam: 1740), 2:685: “Hali-Beigh, prémier

Dragoman à la Cour du Grand-Seigneur au XVII siecle, étoit né Chrétien dans la Pologne; mais aiant été

pris fort jeune par les Tartares, il fut vendu aux Turcs, qui l’élevérent dans leur Religion au Serrail.”

21 Rycaut, “To the Reader”, The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire. On Bobowski’s

palace account see footnote 11 in Chapter one, and Pier Mattia Tommasino, “Travelling East, Writing in

Italian: Literature of European Travel to the Ottoman Empire Written in Italian (16th and 17th Centuries),

Philological Encounters 2 (2017): 28-51.

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musician.22 Sometime after around 1650, Bobowski, also known as ʿAlī Ufuḳī (or Ufkī), began

working for the English ambassador Thomas Bendish, the start of a period of collaboration with

Western Europeans that resulted in a number of works. Besides the palace account, which

circulated in Pera and was quickly translated from Italian into French and German, he translated

the Anglican catechism, assisted Warner in a Turkish translation of the Bible, and penned a

Turkish grammar.23

Bobowski’s combination of Latinate schooling and Ottoman training made him an

important “go-between” in Istanbul, but render him all the more difficult to classify today. Was

he an “Ottoman scholar”? Was he an “orientalist”? This difficulty is compounded by a tendency

to overstate Bobowski’s proficiency in languages. Bayle cited the figure of eighteen known

languages, other contemporary sources said seventeen, and a recent study claimed he “mastered

more than ten”.24

Bobowski’s manuscripts offer a more nuanced picture. Pier Mattia Tommasino has

analyzed the errors and Levantine features of Bobowski’s Italian in his palace account.25 Judith

Haug has studied the copious medical content of his musical notebooks.26 There is, however, no

22 Bobowski’s musical notebook, BnF, ms Turc 292 has been the subject of several studies. See Cem

Behar, Saklı Mecmua: Ali Ufkî’nin Bibliothèque National de France’taki [Turc 292] Yazması (Istanbul:

Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2008), and Judith Haug, “Medical Knowledge in ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s Musical Notebook

(Mid-17th Century)”, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 6 (2018): 117-143.

23 On Bobowski’s Bible translation and related efforts, see Hannah Neudecker, The Turkish Bible

Translation by Yahya bin ʿIshak, also called Haki (1659) (Leiden: Het Oosters Institut, 1994); Noel

Malcom, “Comenius, Boyle, Oldenburg, and the Translation of the Bible into Turkish”, Church History and Religious Culture 87, no.3 (2007): 327-362. Bobowski’s Turkish grammar (Grammatica

Turcicolatina), which is dated 1666 and was made for Henry Denton, is now OBL, ms Hyde 43.

Bobowski’s catechism is now Glasgow University Library (hereafter: GUL), ms Hunter 160.

24 Tommasino, “Traveling East, Writing in Italian”, 41.

25 Tommasino, “Traveling East, Writing in Italian”, 44-46. However, no copy of the account in

Bobowski’s hand has been identified.

26 Judith Haug, “Medical Knowledge in ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s Musical Notebook”.

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definitive list of his notes and manuscripts, even those the French orientalist Antoine Galland

acquired after Bobowski’s death.27 These notes and manuscripts cast light on how he read and

learned in Istanbul. Like the manuscripts of Warner and Gentius, they show that Bobowski

studied within Ottoman traditions and primarily through Turkish, though with the important

distinction that Bobowski learned as an Ottoman subject and a convert to Islam. How the study

of language could be linked to religious practice is illustrated by a short treatise on prayer bound

in with his notes, illustrating both the process of his conversion and his early study of Arabic

(Figures 26-27).28 The work, the Muqaddima fī al-ṣalāt (Introduction to Prayer) of Abū al-Layth

Samarqandī (d. 983), had long been a popular work for teaching religious obligations to

converts.29 Bobowski annotated the manuscript extensively, adding Turkish glosses to nearly

every word through the first portion of the Arabic text. Bobowski carefully recorded his notes,

which are sequentially numbered, flagged in the text, and written out separately along the

margin. They are also written in Latin script. This peculiarity might be a clue to the context of

Bobowski’s study, with the glosses representing the oral input of a teacher explaining the text as

Bobowski took notes, rather than excerpts from a separate commentary.30 Other transliterated

glosses on vocabulary related to religious instruction in Arabic, Turkish, and Italian are found

27 There is, to my knowledge, also no definitive list of the manuscripts at the BnF from Galland’s

collection, although they are consistently inscribed (“Gallandianus”) and numbered. In looking for

Bobowski’s manuscripts, I benefited immensely from an unpublished essay by Francis Richard, “Antoine

Galland et sa quête inlassable de manuscrits orientaux: De ʿAlī Ufkī Bey à la liste de 1685”, posted on his

www.academia.edu page.

28 BnF, ms Arabe 4645 and ms Turc 221.

29 On Abū al-Layth Samarqandī, see J. van Ess, “Abu’l-Layt Samarqandī”, Encyclopædia Iranica I/3,

332-333.

30 For instance, the work begins (with the corresponding numbers flagging Bobowski’s notes), “ [1] الحمد

و العاقبة العالمین [3] رب [2] هللا [4] which Bobowski glossed as follows: “1 Gemi ,(fol. 25v) ”[5] المتقین

Muhamiden hamdu, Ab omnibus laudantibus laudes. 2 Alla iciun sabitdur ieany machsusdur 3 Angilein

Allahki gemi alemlerin rabbisi ieany besleigidur 4 Gennet 5 Alahtan korkanlar iciundur” (fol. 25r).

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elsewhere in the same volume.31 For Bobowski, learning Arabic was part of becoming a

practicing Muslim.

Bobowski’s notes also show a broad engagement with printed works. His excerpts from

orientalist publications indicate that, much like those who sought him out as a teacher or

translator, the Polish-Ottoman dragoman used his Western European contacts as a resource. In

his notes, he listed a number of works by scholars like Erpenius and Raphelengius (though it is

unclear to what end).32 Elsewhere he recorded a French prophecy attributed to Nostradamus.33

Notes from Bobowski’s other Latin readings chart the path of his reflections. Facing a page of

Turkish grammatical notes on Arabic, Bobowski excerpted a short text (titled “On Inconstancy”)

from Pierre Charron’s (1541-1603) De la sagesse (1601):

There is no one who does not daily alter his intentions and vows. Now he wants a wife,

now a mistress, now he wishes to rule, now he is the most obedient servant, now he

throws around his money, now he hoards it, now he seems frugal and serious, now lavish

and vain. We constantly change the role we play.

He hates what he sought and seeks what he tossed

He fluctuates, and varies in all aspects of life34

On another page, Bobowski jotted down a passage from Aristotle’s Poetics which speaks to the

embodied conditions of intellectual labor:

31 BnF, ms Arabe 4645, fols 16r-22v.

32 BnF, ms Arabe 4645, fol. 45r.

33 BnF, ms Turc 216, fol. 2r: “Si poisson couronné conduit par pierre riche / Peut entrer en Bosphore, on

revoit un grand Roy / Esbransler le croissant et lui faire la niche / Bisance entre deux ans au plus en

desarroi”.

34 BnF, ms Arabe 4645, fol. 44r: “Nemo non quotidie consilium mutat et votum, modo uxorem vult, modo

amicam, modo regnare vult, modo non est eo officiosior servus, nunc pecuniam spargit nunc rapit, modo

frugi videtur et gravis, modo prodigus et vanus, mutamus subinde personam. Quod petiit spernit, repetit

quod nuper omisit / Aestuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto” The quotation in Charron is a composite of

a passage from Seneca’s 120th moral epistle to Lucilius and two lines from Horace’s Epistles (1.1).

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for it is wrong to work hard with the mind and the body at the same time; for it is the

nature of the two different sorts of exertion to produce opposite effects, bodily toil

impeding the development of the mind and mental toil that of the body.35

These represent only fragments from Bobowski’s reading, but they suggest a broader encounter

with Latin works. In general, Bobowski’s readings straddled both the manuscript circulations of

the Ottoman capital and the printed works available through his Western European contacts. We

see this mirrored on the written page in a collection of Bobowski’s manuscripts bound together

as BnF, ms Turc 221. He copied from Francesco Martelloti’s Institutiones linguae Arabicae

(1620) and excerpted the overview of the Qurʾan from Hottinger’s Bibliotheca Orientalis onto

the margin of a collection of Turkish letters (Figure 28).36 Perhaps the clearest expression of

Bobowski’s place between Ottoman and Orientalist scholarly traditions is the copy he made of a

Turkish translation of al-Zamaḫšarī Muqaddima al-Adab—a common dictionary for learned

Ottomans in the early modern period—which makes up the largest part of BnF, ms Arabe

4645.37 Bobowski copied the entire work in a regular and clear Ottoman hand, but used Latin for

the chapter headings and his own glosses and notes. We also find the occasional reference to

another lexicographical work: the Latin-Arabic dictionary of Jacob Golius.38

35 Aristotle, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 21, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University

Press 1944), Perseus Digital Library (accessed August 2020),

http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg035.perseus-eng1:8.1339a: “Nam simul

mentem et corpus laboribus fatigare non convenit: quoniam hi labores contrarium uterque affectum

habent. Labor enim corporis menti est impedimento, mentis autem corpori.”

36 BnF, ms Turc 221, fols 236r-245v; fols 128r-140r.

37 BnF, ms Arabe 4645, 74r-578v.

38 For instance, see BnF, ms Arabe 4645, 391r.

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Figure 26. BnF, ms Arabe 4645, 25v. Bobowski’s text of the Muqaddima fī al-ṣalāt. The numbers correspond

to Bobowski’s glosses in Figure 27.

174

Figure 27. BnF, ms Arabe 4645, 25r: Bobowski wrote his glosses (corresponding to Figure 26) on the back of

the text (elsewhere, he wrote in the margins).

175

Figure 28. BnF, ms Turc 221, 131r: Bobowski exerpted from Hottinger’s Bibliotheca orientalis onto the

margins of a collection of epistolary compositions (inşā’). Image from Gallica.

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That Bobowski consulted Golius’s dictionary to read the Muqaddima al-Adab is—along

with his excerpts—a reminder of the limits to understanding Bobowski as a cultural

intermediary. Bobowski’s Ottoman training gave him excellent handwriting and a deep

knowledge of Turkish, but his broader orientalist studies (for instance, his study of Arabic and

Persian) developed in part on the basis of his Latin training and in dialog with orientalists in

Istanbul. His use of Golius also illustrates the intensifying interconnections between scholarship

in Istanbul and in the centers of Western European orientalist study. Bobowski dated his

completion of the first part of the Muqaddima al-Adab 1 Ṣafar 1066 (30 November 1655), only a

few years after the publication of Golius’s dictionary, suggesting the rapidity with which new

orientalist works arrived in Istanbul.39 Indeed, Golius’s Lexicon Arabico-Latinum would have

been particularly useful in studying the Muqaddima al Adab, because Golius had used al-

Zamaḫšarī’s work in compiling his dictionary, from a manuscript sent to him by another

orientalist, Adam Olearius.40

Bobowski’s most enduring legacy, however, was as a teacher of and collaborator with

other scholars, and several of the seventeenth century’s finest orientalists studied with him.

Besides Warner, who arranged for Bobowski’s Bible translation, Franciscus à Mesgnien

Meninski (whose 1680 Thesaurus linguarum orientalium was the most enduring monument of

early modern Turkish studies) learned under Bobowski in the 1650s, and Antoine Galland was

later his student. Bobowski appeared on the title page of one of his manuscripts, a “Grammatica

Turcico-Latina”, as a “Linguae Turcicae Professor”, and was one of the first instructors to teach

39 BnF, ms Arabe 4645, fol 153v. The copy was completed in Istanbul the following year (fol. 578v).

Bobowski signed the colophon “ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-maʿrūf b-al-Ifranğī”.

40 See Jacob Golius, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum contextum ex probatioribus orientis lexicographis. Accedit index Latinus copiosissimus, qui lexici Latino-Arabici vicem explere possit (Leiden: Elsevier, 1653), “Ad

lectorem, linguae Arabicae amantem ac studiosum, Praefatio”.

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advanced Turkish in a Western European pedagogical context.41 Unfortunately, no direct record

of Bobowski’s methods exists.42 Nevertheless, one focus of his scholarly output was the

production of Turkish language learning material.

One manuscript in particular stands out. Around the time Meninski was studying with

him, Bobowski undertook a Turkish translation of the seventeenth century’s most popular

language primer, the Janua linguarum reserata aurea (The Golden Door of Languages

Opened).43 Originally the brainchild of an Irish Jesuit in Spain, William Bathe, and later

reworked and popularized by Johann Comenius (1592-1670), the Janua linguarum structured a

universal program of language study around the insight that students should learn the most

frequent and useful vocabulary in the context of meaningful sentences.44 Bathe sought a third

way between the “regular” study of grammars and dictionaries and “irregular” exposure to

everyday speech. Without access to the second, one was simply memorizing a dictionary. Even

beyond its grueling monotony, Bathe saw the study of dictionaries marred by three basic

problems:

The first, because in a Dictionarie there are many words out of use, and not fitting the

purpose of many men. The second, because there is so neere affinity among some, that

one originall word being knowne, the rest are easily gathered from thence, as it were

from the fountaine of all: of which sort these are, turbo, perturbo, conturbo, disturbo,

turbidus, turbatu, turbatio, and many others, which are easily knowne by the signification

of any one first understood, and therefore deserve not any speciall labour of the learner.

The third, and that the chiefest, because words, as they stand in a Dictionarie beare no

41 OBL, ms Hyde 43, 1r: “Grammatica Turcicolatina Alberti Bobovii Leopolitani Linguae Turcicae

Professoris.”

42 However, the front flyleaf of Hyde 43 does contain both Bobowski’s handwriting and that of a

language learner.

43 BnF, ms Turc 216. 44 On Bathe and the Janua linguarum, see Seán P. Ó Mathúna, William Bathe, S.J., 1564-1614: A pioneer

in linguistics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986).

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sense: whereupon it is, that the memory, being deprived of the helpe of understanding, is

not capable of them.45

Bathe’s solution was to compile a list of the most frequent words and use it to compose a

lexicographical overview of a language through short, simple sentences. The promises of the

Janua linguarum read like an early modern Pimsleur ad. Already the preface of the 1611 first

edition spoke of a “certain Irishman and Frenchman, the former of whom, having earlier

understood these sentences and committed them to memory, and whom we saw, though he had

never read a single Latin author before, translate extempore a Cicero letter that was assigned

him.”46 Successive editions and new translations honed and expanded the formula, and numerous

annotated copies attest to the Janua linguarum as the Swiss army knife of seventeenth-century

language learning, used for school Latin and business German alike.47

Bobowski’s Turkish translation of the Janua linguarum reserata aurea was the first

attempt to develop a program of Turkish study that would take a beginner to advanced

proficiency. It was an ambitious undertaking, comparable to the compilation of a major

dictionary, and while never published, Bobowski’s manuscript—whose completion is dated

1658—casts light on both Bobowski’s practices and, more broadly, the philological workshop of

mid-seventeenth-century Istanbul.

45 William Bathe, “The Third Chapter,” Ianua linguarum, or An Easie and Compendious Methode and

Course for the attaining of all Tongues, especially the Latine. Wherein are Latine Sentences one thousand

two hundred, containing all the more usuall words of the Latine Tongue simple and compound, scarce

any word being iterated, except for the supplying the sense sometimes (London: Young, 1631).

46 William Bathe, Ianua Linguarum, sive Modus Maxime Accommodatus, quo patefit aditus ad omnes linguas intelligendas (Salamanca: Franciscus de Cea Tasa, 1611), 9: “His accessêre quidā Ibernus, &

Gallus: quorum priorē memoriae hisce sententijs mandatis, & explicatis, cùm nullum vnquam autorem

Latinum antea legisset, vnam Ciceronis epistolā, quae illi proposita est extempore interpretantem

vidimus.”

47 Even a quick glance at several of the countless copies of this work in research libraries will show the

variety of approaches readers took to this text, and a study of annotated copies of the Janua linguarum

reserata would do much to clarify the concrete practices of language learning in the early modern period.

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Bobowski translated the entire work, which he wrote out in a clean copy with Latin and

Turkish translations in parallel columns.48 He employed someone else to produce the Turkish

index, as its handwriting is distinct from Bobowski’s (Figure 29). There are strong indications

that this person was, in fact, Meninski. The handwriting of the index, clearly that of an orientalist

and not an Ottoman scribe, is markedly similar to the annotations in Meninski’s copy of the

Humāyūnnāme (Figure 30).49 Meninski was also in Istanbul at the time and mentions in his

Thesaurus linguarum orientalium that Bobowski sent him a copy of the Janua linguarum

translation while he was there.50 After copying out the clean copy and the compilation of the

index, Bobowski then worked through the text again, adding corrections and improvements.

48 I have found no traces of either an earlier version or slips used in its compilation.

49 ÖNB, ms A.F. 191. Meninski signed the manuscript “FM” on fol. 2r. It is a challenge to compare

sloppier notes like those in A.F. 191 with a well-ordered clean copy like the index of BnF, ms Turc 216,

but, viewing the handwriting in both manuscripts side by side reveals similarities between how each hand

rendered, for instance, the medial hā’, the final kāf, and initial fā’/qāf. However, there is a notable

distinction between them in the placement of the dot in the final nūn, which throughout most of A.F. 191

is within the curve of the letter, but in Turc 216 is placed above it, although in Figure 30 from A.F. 191 it

has been rendered as in Turc 216. Since very few of Meninski’s manuscripts have been identified, we do

not have a complete picture of the range of his handwriting, which would allow us to confirm or reject

this attribution.

50 Meninski remarks on this in his list of sources, Franciscus à Mesgnien Meninski, “Prooemium”,

Thesaurus linguarum orientalium (Vienna, 1680-87): “Bob, Bobovius, seu Janua Linguarum aurea

reserata ab eo in Turcicum idioma olim translata et mihi Constantinopoli communicata.”

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Figure 29. BnF, ms Turc 216, 128r: The index of Bobowski’s translation of the Janua linguarum reserata. The

main entries were copied out by a scribe (possibly Meninski) and Bobowski later added additions and

corrections.

181

Figure 30: ÖNB, ms A.F. 191, 5r: Meninski’s marginal annotations in his copy of the Humāyūnnāme are very

close to the hand that copied out the index of Bobowski’s Janua linguarum.

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Figure 31. BnF, ms Turc 216, 331r: A page from Bobowski’s Turkish translation of the Janua linguarum with

a note in the hand of Levinus Warner correctly suggesting “dumbaz” as an equivalent for “pontoon”.

Bobowski must have mistakenly read the “d” as a “j”, since he then translated the word as یومباز .

An example from the main text shows how Bobowski edited his work through the input

of another orientalist contact in Istanbul. In the 473rd sentence—“Where there is nowhere to ford,

they cross with a pontoon, called a ferry, but the ferry man demands a fare” (Ubi vadum deest

vel desit, pontone trajiciunt, diciturque trajectus; sed portitor naulum poscit)—Bobowski

struggled to find Turkish equivalents (Figure 31). He seems to have not understood “pontone”

(with a pontoon), since he first translated it as “gemi köprüyle” (with a boat bridge). Levinus

Warner, whose hand appears occasionally throughout Turc 216 with notes and corrections on the

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margins, offered here a more precise translation, “dumbaz” (tombaz; pontoon), but Bobowski

misread Warner’s (admittedly quite sloppy) handwriting, and corrected the text with the

nonsense word “yūmbāzla” (with a yūmbāz).51 He also tinkered with other elements of the

translation. He first translated “ferry” as “ʿubūr” (crossing, ferry), but then, unsatisfied, noted

several other possibilities: “maʿber” (place of crossing, ferry) and “ʿuburgāh” (place of crossing,

ferry).

While never published, Bobowski’s translation of the Janua linguarum illustrates the

problem of pedagogical method that would characterize other efforts to institutionalize the study

of Turkish, and offers a window onto the moment when, in the circle around Bobowski and

Warner, advanced Turkish studies by orientalists took root in Istanbul. The Janua linguarum also

helps situate Bobowski’s scholarship in a distinctly orientalist milieu. While Warner’s

contribution is clear from his corrections, nowhere do we find the notes of a native Turkish

speaker. Here, the possibility of Meninski’s participation is especially significant, and suggests a

point of continuity with later studies, since Meninski would use the Janua linguarum translation

as one of the sources for his dictionary.

The First Diplomatic Language Schools

As circles of advanced study and collaboration like the one around Bobowski took shape,

a new institutional form of Turkish study began to evolve. The establishment of diplomatic

51 BnF, ms Turc 216, 331r. Bobowski also notes another possibility, “īpṣālla”, which I have not been able

to identify.

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language schools to train interpreters for service in the Ottoman Empire goes back to the

sixteenth century, when Venice founded a school for giovani di lingua (language youths, a

calque of the Turkish dil oğlanları) in 1551 in Istanbul.52 Already then the basic challenges of

Turkish-language pedagogy were being negotiated. Hearing the word “interpreter”, one might

think first of simultaneous oral translation, but the demands on dragomans were in large part

textual. They had to read, write, and translate the letters and documents that circulated through

and around the Ottoman state and commerce. This demanded both mastery of the language and a

familiarity with literary conventions. In 1555, the bailo (the top Venetian diplomat in Istanbul)

Antonio Erizzo complained that the dragomans in Venetian service could only speak—but not

write or translate—Turkish, and as a result had to rely on a Turkish cozza (hoca; teacher).53 The

use of a Turkish hoca for textual work was so common among dragomans that an observer could

note, as late as the first decades of the eighteenth century, in praising the French dragoman

Dominique Fornetti as the most gifted Turkish speaker, that he did not have to rely on one.54

The resolution to educate giovani di lingua opened up onto a host of new questions.

Should the school be in Venice or Istanbul? Should the teacher be Italian or Turkish? What

materials should students use in their studies? Who should house and discipline them? How

much should be spent to secure students’ comfort abroad? It was understood that contact with

native speakers facilitated language study. The bailo Antonio Tiepolo even proposed having his

52 On the school of the giovani di lingua, see Francesca Lucchetta, “La scuola dei ‘giovani di lingua’

veneti nei secoli XVI e XVII”, Quaderni di Studi Arabi 7 (1989): 19-40; Isabella Palumbo Fossati Casa,

“L’École vénitienne des ‘giovani di lingua’”, in Istanbul et les langues orientales: Actes du colloque

organisé par l’IFÉA et l’INALCO à l’occasion du bicentenaire de l’École des Langues Orientales,

Istanbul 29-31 mai 1995, ed. Frédéric Hitzel (Paris: L’Harmattan), 109-122.

53 Lucchetta, “La scuola dei ‘giovani di lingua’”, 21, citing Archivo di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Senato,

Disp., Cost., 1/A, n.38, 99v-100r, dated 19 April 1555.

54 Centre des archives diplomatiques de la Courneuve (hereafter: CAD), 50 Md 155, fol. 98v.

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two giovani di lingua, who had achieved only limited command of Turkish after years in

Istanbul, live with a Turkish dragoman so that they could learn better through immersion.55 At

the same time, there was a sense of danger lurking, and apprentice dragomans were generally

confined to the bailo’s house. A seventeenth-century bailo warned of Jesuits in Pera “filling the

youth, whom they teach, with pernicious concepts”, and tales circulated of dragomans who had

“turned Turk” (i.e., converted to Islam)—perhaps out of newfound conviction, perhaps to duck

creditors or avoid punishment.56 Already in the 1560s, a Venetian giovane di lingua named

Colombina converted to Islam, and more than a century later, Antoine Galland mentioned an

enfant de langues who ran off and converted, “on account of the trouble he made after getting

drunk”.57

The transformation of these schools into training grounds for orientalists began only later,

in the second half of the seventeenth century, through a series of French initiatives and reforms

that were then imitated in Habsburg Vienna. The French Conseil royal de commerce (Royal

Council on Trade) passed two resolutions in 1669 and 1670 to establish the diplomatic language

school, later known as the École des jeunes de langues, under the supervision of Capuchin

missionaries. The resolutions established the number (eighteen) and age (between nine and ten)

of incoming students, but in practice enrollments were fluid, incoming students were older, and,

though the resolutions mentioned both Istanbul and Izmir, students were lodged exclusively in

55 Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci, Lettere di Ambasciatori, Costantinopoli, b. 4, c. 159r (15 Jan. 1574), cited

in Rothman, “Between Venice and Istanbul”, 244. As Rothman points out, the dragoman in question was

likely Christian.

56 Rothman, “Between Venice and Istanbul”, 246.

57 Galland, Journal, I:175-176: “Un des enfans de langues se fit Turc après s’estre enfui, de crainte d’estre

chastié, à cause des désordres qu’il avoit faits après s’estre enyvré le jour de la resjouissance [held by the

French ambassador for the Duke d’Anjou, Louis François, and Louis XIV’s recent conquests].” On

Colombina, Rothman (“Between Venice and Istanbul”, 229) cites Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci, Letteri di

Ambasciatori, Costantinopoli, b.5, c.88 (18 June, 1579).

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Istanbul.58

The school’s founding belonged to a larger effort to capture French-Ottoman trade. It was

an initiative of the Chamber of Commerce in Marseille, which had a monopoly on the growing

trade in French textiles, produced mostly in Languedoc, with the Ottoman Empire.59 The key to

French success in Ottoman markets was standardizing, through regulation, the production of

medium-quality textiles, called londrins seconds.60 European woolens had long been popular in

the Ottoman Empire, and the organization of textile production under Colbert allowed France to

edge out Dutch and English competition in the Ottoman market. However, this created new

demand for interpreters, since profits rested on expanding trade into secondary markets.

How were students trained during the first decades of the École des jeunes de langues?

Only a few seventeenth-century sources on the school survive. The historian Gustave Dupont-

Ferrier’s pessimistic view of these early years (“Un peu de français, un peu de latin, de grec

vulgaire, d’italien, du turc, pas d’arabe, pas de persan”) likely reflected his reading of later

French reformers motivated to paint the school in a bad light.61 In actuality, the few manuscripts

available attest to a modestly successful program where students learned from a Turkish

instructor and more or less “on the job,” working with the Turkish-language letters and

documents that formed much of the dragoman’s métier.

58 On the École des jeunes de langues, see Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, “Les jeunes de langues ou

‘Arméniens’ à Louis-le-Grand”, Revue des études arméniennes 2 (1922): 189-232; 3 (1923): 9-32.

59 On French trade with the Ottoman Empire, see Edhem Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1999), esp. 34-67; Paul Masson, Histoire du commerce Français dans

le Levant au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1911).

60 Eldem gives the hierarchy of French cloth as “mahouts premiers, followed by the mahouts seconds, the

londrins premiers, londrins seconds, sayes, nims premiers, nims seconds, londres larges and londres

ordinaires.” Londrins seconds mades up the majority of this trade. See Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul

in the Eighteenth Century, 37f.

61 Dupont-Ferrier, “Les jeunes de langues ou ‘Arméniens’,” 2:196.

187

Antoine Galland, who first arrived in Istanbul in 1672, observed the life of the school in

his diary. He noted the care that the school’s Turkish hoca (teacher) took with the students’ pen

shavings, fearful “that something taken from an object destined to form the characters in which

the Qurʾan is written not be sullied by falling to the ground.”62 Galland also once sat in on the

hoca’s lesson, as he, like many language teachers after him, instructed students with an engaging

tale. Galland, who later translated the 1001 Nights, recorded it in detail: the adventures of Koca

Muẓaffer, whom chance made King of Alemabad and who, after fortune tore him from his

family and forced him to wander in poverty, arrived in another city to be reunited with his wife

(who, dressing as a man, had become a shopkeeper) and his two sons (now the city’s mayor and

judge).63 Presumably, this instructor initiated students into the basics of the language, while the

Capuchin friars kept a watchful eye.

A French-Turkish manuscript dictionary, now in Gotha—perhaps the only surviving

work from the hands of the young men who listened to the tale of Koca Muẓaffer with Galland—

offers a closer look at the character and range of their studies.64 The jeunes de langues, listed as

“les auteurs” in an elaborate colophon (which in some respects resembles a title page) at the end

of the work (Figure 32), compiled the dictionary between October 1672 and February 1673.65

The manuscript was copied out in a single hand, that of Honoré Barbier, who signed and dated

the colophon after the last entry and gave himself a prominent place among the names. Barbier

62 Galland, Journal, 1:163. The entry is dated Wednesday June 22, 1672: “Je remarquay que le hogia des

enfans de langues de France en taillant des cannes pour écrire en turc en gardoit soigneusement les

coupures et empêchoit qu’elles ne tombâssent à terre de peur, disoit-il, qu’une chose tirée d’un sujet

destiné à former les charactères dans lesquels l’Alcoran est écrit ne fut souillé en tombant à terre.”

Galland later (Galland, Journal, 2:2) recounted that the instructor brought him ḳanūnnāme manuscript.

63 Galland, Journal, 2: 45-46.

64 FBG, ms Turk. 34.

65 FBG, ms Turk. 34, 362v.

188

incorporated orientalizing elements into the title page, listing the names in Arabic script and

flanking his own with two lines of Turkish verse.66

Even without an established curriculum, the Gotha dictionary suggests that students had

ample opportunity to learn from the materials circulating within Pera, Istanbul’s diplomatic

quarter. This broader encounter with Turkish-language material might have left its traces in the

pages of the dictionary itself, and the dictionary’s composition and materials allow for some

speculation on how it was compiled. Turkish headwords were written out with consistent

spacing, with margins and lines marked out in graphite, suggesting the original Turkish wordlist

was either taken from a single source or compiled first in an earlier manuscript or on slips of

paper.67 The latter seems the most likely possibility, if we take seriously the claim that this was a

collaborative project. The addition of vowel marks, consistent throughout, in turn suggests

another source of input: the students’ hoca. The same hand—presumably Barbier’s—also later

made numerous additions, found on the margins, between entries, and on slips of paper. Some of

these entries seem to have been added individually, as the occasion presented itself. Others,

listed in regular intervals on the margins, suggest that Barbier returned to the manuscript with a

list of words from another source (Figure 33). A second colophon, containing only a تمت (noting

completion) and the date 1700 in Arabic script, perhaps marks the ending of this second phase of

work.

66 The use of two different inks and an incongruous “āmīn” near the center of the page suggests that the

names were first added in Arabic script, after which Barbier returned to the manuscript and added the

additional information in French.

67 The dictionary begins: “āb - De l’eau de l’eau; ab - Pere; abādān - habité, fabriqué; ibtidādan - des le

Commencement; ibtidā - Commencement; ibnet - fille; ebeter - Pire; ibtihāl - Imploration; ebed - toujours

eternel; ebedan - toujours eternellement a jamais; ābdār - Liquide; ebedī - a toujours eternel; ebr - nüee,

nüage”. FBG, ms Turk. 34, fol 1r.

189

Figure 32. FBG, ms Turk. 34, 362v: Barbier’s colophon for the Gotha dictionary lists the jeunes de langues as

collaborators.

190

Figure 33. FBG, ms Turk. 34, 6r: The Gotha jeunes de langues dictionary appears to have been produced in

at least two distinct phases. The regularity of the marginal additions suggets that they were copied in from

another dictionary or wordlist.

191

These additions indicate the dictionary’s continued use, and inscriptions from its

subsequent owners suggest that it served later students and interpreters. It belonged to a jeune de

langues, named Berault, who signed the first page, and, at the turn of the nineteenth century,

Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1767-1811) acquired it in Syria during his expedition collecting for

August, Duke of Saxe-Gotha (1772-1822).68 The collective effort continued, and the dictionary

kept evolving. Another jeune de langues, Jean-Baptiste de Fienne, made a copy of Barbier’s

manuscript which incorporated the numerous marginal additions and later entered the Istanbul

school’s library.69 In 1712, J.B. Couet, another jeune de langues, completed a dictionary of

Turkish phrases (with transliterations and French translations) compiled from Ottoman state

documents, which similarly entered the library of the École.70

Later critics were right to observe that the École had no clear curriculum and the

Capuchins could offer little instruction, but the dictionaries (together with Galland’s account)

offer some optimism. The Capuchins did not have the knowledge to carry out an advanced

course of study in Ottoman-Turkish, but neither were they tasked with such a program. Rather,

they oversaw the housing and disciplining of a group of young men in an unfamiliar city, and

mediated their contact with Turkish speakers and texts, a process in which the production of

manuscripts like FBG, Turk 34 was a learning exercise (much in the vein of the dictionary

learning that Bathe had sought to supplant with his Janua linguarum). This arrangement, while

imperfect, seems to have achieved the school’s goals. The dictionaries show a relatively high

68 FBG, ms Turk. 34, fol. 1r. The manuscript also bears the mark “Damask No 57”. Translations Berault

completed as jeune de langues are now BnF, ms Supplément Turc 864 and Supplément Turc 886.

69 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 688. De Fienne signed and dated the work on fol. 1233r.

70 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 689. Dated colophon on p. 275.

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level of study and mark a point of continuity with the manuscript production and circulation that

would characterize the school’s later development. There are also signs that the program was

successful in staffing the expanding project of French diplomacy and trade throughout the

Levant. In 1712 the order was given to install advanced students as second dragomans in each of

the échelles (lit. ladders, i.e., the centers of French trade according to the capitulations with the

Ottoman Empire), and we find some of the names of the authors of the Gotha French-Turkish

dictionary on a 1719 list of French dragomans in consular duty throughout the échelles.71

The École des jeunes de langues in Paris

In the meantime, a second pedagogical project took form that, while short lived, would

shape the future of the École des jeunes de langues. On its face, this project was the inverse of

the diplomatic language school. Rather than teach young Frenchmen to speak and read Turkish

and Arabic, they would bring Christians from the Ottoman Empire to Paris and, raising them

under the supervision of the Jesuits at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, would train them as Catholic

missionaries.72 This was not a new idea. Pope Gregory XIII had founded the Maronite College in

Rome in 1584, and there had been earlier plans for a similar institution in Paris. In the early

seventeenth century, two Maronite scholars, Victor Scialac and Gabriel Sionita, hoped to found a

71 A letter from Pontchartrain to Arnoul dated April 27 mentions the decision to place the students as

second dragomans “en conformité de la Deliberation des Deputez du 31. mars” (in accordance with the

deliberation of the deputies on 31 March). An excerpt from this letter is included in CAD, 50 Md 155, fol.

43r. The list of French dragomans is “Estat des Drogmans de la Nation françoise établis dans le Levant et

de leurs appointements”, CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 83r-84r.

72 On Lycée Louis-le-Grand see Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, Du College de Clermont au Lycée Louis-le-

Grand (1563-1920), Paris: Boccard, 1921. Dupont-Ferrier notes that the building that housed the

“Arméniens” and, later, the “jeunes de langues” was called into the twentieth century the “bâtiment des

Arméniens.” See p. 75. The “Arméniens” were also distinguished at Louis-le-Grand by their long robes.

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school for Eastern Christians in Paris, where they had arrived with the French ambassador

François Savary de Brèves (1560-1627).73 However, the founding of the school for Eastern

Christians at Louis-le-Grand was a reaction to the immediate exigences of Jesuit missionary

work in the Levant. Already in 1692 the Jesuit fathers had presented their plans to Louis XVI,

but it was not until 1700, after the establishment of a similar project in Oxford, that the state

provided for the education of twelve “Armenians” (as the arrivals were called regardless of

origin) in Paris.74 A 1698 letter from a Jesuit father in Izmir conveys the urgency of the situation:

the Oxford seminar not only represented a rival effort of indoctrination but drained human

capital directly from Jesuit schools as the English poached the “flower of Greek youth.”75

“Father Portier,” he writes,

had taken such care to make good Catholics of them, and it seemed that he had

succeeded. God willing, they may return with a faith as pure, and with morals as good as

when they left. The English have boasted here of having created this institution in order

to destroy everything the Jesuits do in their missions.76

The foundation of a competing school for Christians from the Levant would bolster the Catholic

position and form a corps of future “priests and bishops of the Orient.”77 While the Jesuit fathers

did appeal to the common interests of the state, suggesting at one point that the students could

73 See Henri Omont, “Projet d’un collège oriental a Paris au début du règne de Louis XIII,” Bulletin de la

Sociéte de l’Histoire de Paris et l’Ile-de-France 22 (1895) : 123-127.

74 Later, “Arménien” was used to refer as well to the French students who studied for dragoman work at

Louis-le-Grand.

75 “Extrait d’une lettre du Pere de Ressins écrite de Smirne le 11 Novembre 1698,” CAD, 50 Md 155, fol.

8r. In his letter, the Jesuit father, de Ressins, says that of the five students who left from Izmir, three were

among the Jesuits’ best students.

76 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 8r, “Le Pere Portier si estoit donné bien des soins pour en faire de bons

Catholiques, et il sembloit qu’il y avoit reussi. Dieu veuille quils reviennent avec une foy aussi pure, et de

moeurs aussi bonnes, que le sont celles avec lesquelles ils viennent de partir. Les Anglois se sont icy

vanté d’avoir faite cette institution pour detruire tout ce que font les Jesuites dans leurs Missions.”

77 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 9r.

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become interpreters, there is no indication that the “Armenians” were ever destined for

diplomatic work.78

This school operated parallel to the École des jeunes de langues for twenty years, without

exhange or communication between them. A report on the students’ progress documents their

inclinations and talents, but mainly expresses the aims and interests of their teachers. For

instance, the report notes that Jean Abdalla, a Syrian of Aleppo whose uncle, Archbishop of

Aleppo, died “in defense of the faith,” “is inclined to the clergy,” but “does not have as great a

potential in letters as his classmates.”79 Another student received a more positive review: “Jean

Louis Rigo, Greek, native of Smyrna, of Latin rites, 17 years old. He arrived in France on June

18, 1700. He will begin rhetoric next year. He had the first prize in verse in the second class and

an honorable mention in Greek. He is destined for the clergy.”80 Rigo’s later career suggests the

limited opportunities available to for graduates of the school. We find, among the school’s

documents, letters from Rigo himself, in which he proclaimed to return “with a heart truly

Catholic and entirely French” and penned alexandrine verse dedicated to the Minister of State,

Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain (1674-1747):

A heart captivated by your favors and your glory

Speaks to you in these verses in the name of twelve souls

Receive this first fruit of a timid vein

78 See Dupont-Ferrier, “Les jeunes de langues,” 198, which cites the Jesuits on “the intention that the

children, on returning home, serve either religion, as missionaries, or the state, as interpreters.”

(“...l’intention que ces enfants, de retour en leur patrie, y serviroient ou la religion, en qualité de

missionaires, ou l’État, en qualité d’interprètes.”). Howver, there is little evidence to suggest this second

path was seriously considered.

79 “État des jeunes orientaux entretenus dans le College de Louis Le Grand par la liberalité du Roy”,

CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 17r-19r. “Il est Neveu du feu Archevesque d’Alep, mort dans la deffense de la foy.

Il se porte a l’état Eclesiastique. Il n’a pas tant d’ouverture pour les Lettres que ses Compatriotes.”

80 CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 17v-18r. “Jean Louis Righo, Grec de nation, natif de Smirne, du Rit Latin, agé

de dix sept ans. Il est arrivé en France le 18. juin 1700. Il entrera l’année prochaine en Rhetorique. Il a eu

le premier prix de vers en seconde, et un accessit grec. Il se destine à l’état Eclesiastique.”

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which should be opened in your name and flow with ease.81

Despite his avowed commitment to France and the Catholic Church, Rigo would ultimately be

remembered as a long-tenured secretary to the Dutch ambassador in Istanbul, whose diaries are

an important eyewitness account of everyday life in eighteenth-century Istanbul.82 Another

document among the school’s papers, a proposal that the “Armenians” be taught medicine

because French-trained doctors were in demand in the Levant, similarly evokes the uncertain

future that awaited students disinclined to missionary work.83

Eventually, the limits of the project became apparent. Graduates, returning home, soon

felt a loosening of the bonds that tied them to their adopted church and state. One observer noted,

in 1724:

Most of those young people, after having finished their course of studies and promised to

make the expected use of it, having returned home have used the knowledge they had

acquired either to enter into trade or serve as dragomans for other nations, from which

they imagine to take more profit than from our own. Some have even gone to other

foreign countries. And a number of them, of the Greek or Armenian nation, have returned

to their errors and declared themselves even greater enemies and persecutors of the

Catholics than those who would have less obligation to express their gratitude.84

It was only through the dissolution of the school for the “Armenians” at Louis-le-Grand that its

81 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 27r: “Un coeur de tes faveurs et de ta gloire épris, / Te parle dans ces vers au

nom de douze Esprits: / Reçois ce premier fruit d’une timide veine, / Qui devroit sous ton nom naître et

couler sans peine.”

82 On Rigo, see Rosanne Baars, “Constantinople Confidential: News and Information in the Diary of Jean-

Louis Rigo (c.1686-1756), Secretary of the Dutch Embassy in Istanbul,” LIAS 41/2 (2014): 143-171.

Rigo’s diaries are today in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague (1.10.16.01, Collectie Calkoen,

1131-1953. 213-230, and 1.02.20, Inventaries van het archief van de Legatie in Turkije, 1668-1810, 595).

83 CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 46r-49v.

84 Quoted in Dupont-Ferrier, “Les jeunes de langues,” 203: “La plupart de ces jeunes gens, après avoir

achevé le cours de leurs études et promis d’en faire l’usage qu’on en devait attendre, estant renvoyez dans

leur païs se sont servis des connaissances qu’ils avaient acquises, ou pour se mettre dans le négoce, ou

pour servir de drogmans à d’autres nations, dont ils croyaient retirer plus de profit que de la nôstre.

Quelquesuns mêmes ont passé dans les païs étrangers. Et plusieurs, de nation grecque et arménienne,

rentrez dans leurs erreurs, se sont déclarez plus ennemis et plus persécuteurs des catholiques que ceux qui

n’avaient point autant d’obligations qu’eux à marquer leur reconnaissances….”

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fate was intertwined with the École des jeunes de langue, since in its place a preparatory school

was formed to train jeunes de langues before their departure for Istanbul. This preparatory school

was part of a series of watershed reforms. The founders of the École—like their Venetian

counterparts in the sixteenth century—had considered only the basic logistics of schooling. In the

memos of the statesmen who put the École des jeunes de langue under the microscope around

1720, the minutiae of everyday instruction became a matter of state. The result would mark a

turning point in orientalist pedagogy. For the first time, a program of Turkish study was

administered in Western Europe by trained orientalists as part of a broader education.

The precise start of these reforms is unclear. Around 1716, the French ambassador to the

Ottoman Empire, Jean-Louis d’Usson, the Marquis de Bonnac, took an active interest in the

École des jeunes de langues. Around that time he visited and wrote an evaluation of the

Capuchin school in Pera.85 His report returned to the 1669 and 1670 resolutions, compared them

with his own observations, and noted discrepancies. The resolutions had provided for two

schools, while only one was founded. They had established places for eighteen students, but not

all had been filled. He inquired why the students did not learn Arabic—the language of many of

the échelles crucial to Levantine trade. The Capuchins’ answer could not have inspired

confidence:

They informed me that this was not possible, not only because one could find only with

difficulty good Arabic teachers in this land, but also because these young people were

overwhelmed with studying the three languages that were taught to them at the same time

and with the care that had to be taken that they not forget French.86

85 CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 59r-62v.

86 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 62r: “ils m’ont fait connoistre la dessus que la chose n’estoit point possible; non

seulement parcequ’on trouveroit au peine dans ce païs des bons maitres pour l’Arabe; mais aussi parceque

ces jeunes gens estoient surchargés d’estude par les trois langues qu’on leur faisoit apprendre dans le

mesme temps et par le soin qu’il falloit prendre qu’ils n’oubliassent le françois”.

197

The ambassador’s text is short and to the point, focused on the question of policy and practice.

Another observer wrote more candidly in a memorandum from 1716:

It is only too true that for a number of years the enfants de langues haven’t had any other

masters than the Capuchins, who deserve to be praised for the care which they’ve taken

in their instruction and moral conduct, but these friars cannot teach what they do not

know and what does not suit their organization. They travel to the Levant to instruct the

native Christians and the French who have established themselves there, to preach, and to

take confession. They typically learn only to speak well enough to be understood and to

carry out the functions of their ministry, but it is very rare that they study the language

intensely or even read those books that would instruct them more fully. One also notices

that they have very little knowledge of the books of the Eastern Christians, in which they

could learn religious and theological terms. In lieu of these studies, they compose books,

for the most part in a very bad style, as soon as they’ve acquired a little knowledge in

oriental languages, principally Arabic, such as translations of various catechisms, an

abridgment of Baronius, and other similar works, which they have their students read,

and from which one can learn nothing more than to speak poorly and to write even

worse.87

The author of the memorandum was already turning his attention to what would come next. The

insight of the French statesmen who reformed the École des jeunes de langues was that language

learning did not happen in a vacuum but rather existed at the nexus of publishing, collecting, and

scholarship more broadly. It was as important to establish a library and design a course of study

as to found a school, and all could be regulated and rationalized like any other matter of state.

87 “Memoire pour le Conseil de la Marine sur les ouvrages proposer pour l’instruction des Enfants de

langue,” CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 52r-58v, here 52v: “Il n’est que trop vray que depuis plusieurs années les

enfants de langue n’ont point d’autres maitres que les Capucins qui méritents d’etre loües par le soin

qu’ils ont pris de leur instruction, et de leurs moeurs, mais ces religieux ne peuvent pas leur aprendre ce

qu’ils ne sçavents pas, et qui ne convient pas à leur institut. Ils vont au Levant pour instruire les chretiens

du païs, et les francs qui y sont etablis, pour prêcher, et pour confesser, ils n’apprenent donc

ordinairement qu’à parler assez pour se faire entendre et s’acquiter des fonctions de leur ministere, mais il

est fort rare qu’ils étudient les langues à fond, ny même qu’ils lisent les livres dont la lecture les pourrait

instruire plus amplement, on remarque aussi qu’ils connoissent fort peu les livres des chretiens orientaux,

ou ils pourroient aprendre les terms de religion, et de théologie, mais au lieu de ces études, dés qu’ils ont

eu quelque connaissance des langues orientales; principalement de l’arabe ils composent des livres la plus

part en tres mauvais stîle, comme sont les traductions de divérs catéchimes, un abregé de Baronius, et

d’autres semblables qu’ils font lire à leurs écoliers, et ou il n’y à rien à aprendre qu’à mal parler et écrire

encor pis.” The author of the memorandum is unidentified, but they were clearly well-versed about life in

Istanbul.

198

The memorandum discussed the particular works that would form the basis of the students’

instruction, including a survey of available dictionaries and grammars, and proposed to revive

orientalist publishing in Paris with the undertaking of a new version of Meninski’s Turkish

dictionary. In a later letter, the Marquis de Bonnac explained the necessity of this last measure in

more detail:

The dictionary of Meninski which they use is absolutely useless for those who do not

know Latin and Italian, of whom there are many, and quite difficult for the others, as

well. The book has become extraordinarily rare, and one finds it with difficulty for 100

ecus, such that almost no dragoman has one nor could have one.88

A new Meninski never materialized, but the question of learning material and methods was

gradually worked out over the first years of the new school.

Why did the French state turn its attention to the École des jeunes de langues at this time?

Once again, the textile trade offers the likeliest explanation. The first decades of the eighteenth

century saw France come to dominate the textile trade in the Levant as Dutch and English

exports declined, and the Turco-Venetian war of 1716 (the same years as the first memo on

instruction at the École) led to a ban on Venetian imports into the Ottoman Empire. 89

In July 1721 the French Council of State (Conseil d’État) passed a resolution dissolving

the school for “Armenians” at Louis-le-Grand and putting in its place a preparatory academy for

the École des jeunes de langues. The resolution specified that “ten young French children,

around eight years of age […] will be instructed there and taught Latin, as usual, up to and

including rhetoric and, at the same time, the Turkish and Arabic languages by two teachers of

88 CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 92v-93r: “Le Dictionaire de Meninski dont ils se servent est absolument inutile à

ceux qui ne scavent pas le Latin et l’Italien qui sont en grand nombre et il est fort embarassant pour les

autres de plus, il est devenu d’une rareté extraordinaire et on en trouve à peine pour cent ecus, de sorte

que presque pas un Drogman n’en a et n’en peut avoir.”

89 See Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century, 43.

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those languages”, before heading to Istanbul to “perfect” their knowledge of Turkish and Arabic

under the Capuchins.90 The resolution also specified that students would be taken alternately

from families within France and from French families in the Levant. The explicit aim was a dual

socialization. The Levantine students would be accustomed to France and the French students to

the Levant. As one Jesuit father remarked, “Conversing with each other, the children from the

Levant would learn French from the children taken from France, and these would learn the

languages of the Levant from the others.”91

At the same time, the introduction into the jeune de langues curriculum of a more general

course of study made dragoman training resemble more and more a humanist education which

incorporated Ottoman learning, rather than specialized professional training. One proposal

sought to:

oblige the Capuchin fathers—who, as filled with good will as they are, were not trained

from their youth in the education of children and do not usually have among them those

with intelligences suited to instructing them in belles lettres—to have, on the example of

the maîtres de Pension a good preceptor capable of teaching, besides Latin, geography,

and history, and who could bring them all the way up to rhetoric and even philosophy.92

90 Quoted in Dupont-Ferrier, “Les jeunes de langues ou ‘Arméniens’ à Louis-le-Grand”, 205: “À l’avenir

il sera élevé dans le Collège des Jésuites, à Paris, au lieu de douze jeunes Orientaux, dix jeunes enfants

français, de l’âge de huit ans ou environ, qui seront par Sa Majesté nommez et pris alternativement de

familles de ses sujets, habitans dans le royaume et de celles des négociants, drogmans ou autres François

etablis dans les Échelles de Levant, lesquels y seront instruits et enseignez dans la langue latine, à

l’ordinaire, jusques et y compris la rhétorique et, en même temps, dans celles turque et arabe, par deux

maîtres de ces langues, qui iront les leur montrer dans ledit Collège des Capucins de Constantinople, pour

se perfectionner dans les Langues orientales et estre destinez aux employs de drogmans”. 91 Quoted in Dupont-Ferrier, “Les jeunes de langues ou ‘Arméniens’ à Louis-le-Grand”, 207n1:

“Conversant les uns avec les autres, les enfans venus du Levant apprendroient le françois des enfans pris

en France et ceux-ci apprendroient les langues du Levant, de ceux-là.”

92 CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 127r -143v, “Memoire concernant les enfans de langue les drogmans tant a

Constantinople que dans les autres Echelles du Levant et les Consuls de l’archipel” by d’Andrezel, here

fol. 132r: “M. Le Marquis de Bonnac avoit aussi proposé une chose tres utile, qui seroit d’obliger les

200

While this does not seem to have taken place, by 1731 the prefect of the students in Istanbul had

ordered a list of books whose contents mirror the proposal’s course of study. Besides major

reference works like Pierre Richelet’s Dictionnaire françois and Thomas Corneille’s

Dictionnaire geographique, we find a small library of canonical Latin authors: Virgil, Pliny,

Terrence, Tacitus, Suetonius, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal.93

The climate of critical pedagogy around the reorganization of the school was palpable.

Every aspect of learning was under consideration. The German Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Holdermann

(1694-1730), who was préfet des enfants at the Paris school before travelling to Istanbul, even

explained for his successors point by point the proper method of teaching Turkish, remarking

that

[…] two or three have responded so well to my efforts that they can already speak and

explain Turkish better than their colleagues sent last year to Constantinople, and I’m

certain that they will be able to understand and speak this language perfectly before

leaving the college if they continue to follow the method that I have given them.94

His enumeration of this method deserves to be quoted in full, as it captures the depth and

attention to detail at work in the new school:

I. The professors will arrive at the college exactly at 12:30 from the beginning of the

academic year until Lent, and from Lent until vacation they will begin the class at 1:00.

II. They will hold class for an hour and a half.

III. For the first months, they will have the beginners read Arabic and Persian, after

which they will apply themselves entirely to teaching them the Turkish language.

Peres Capucins qui tous remplis de bonne volonté qu’ils soient n’estant point elevés dès leur jeunesse à

l’education des enfants, n’ont pas ordinairement parmy eux des genies propres à les instruire dans les

belles lettres, d’avoir à l’exemple des maitres de Pension un bon précepteur qui fut capable de bien

enseigner outre le Latin, la géographie et l’histoire et qui les pût pousser jusqu’à la Rhetorique et même à

la Philosophie.”

93 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 173r.

94 CAD, 50 Md 155, 155r: “…deux ou trois ont si bien repondus à mes peines, qu’ils scavent deja mieux

parler, et expliquer le Turque, que leurs collegues, qu’on envoya l’année passée à Constantinople, et je

suis persuadé, quʼils entenderont et parleront parfaitement cette langue, avant de quitter le College, si ils

continuent à suivre le methode, que je leurs ai donné.”

201

IV. They will have the beginners learn and recite a lesson in Turkish grammar every day,

they will give to the others as lessons, fables, histories, translation exercises, letters,

dialogues, etc.

V. They will give the beginners nouns to decline, verbs to conjugate, and short sentences

to compose according to grammatical rules and, for the most advanced students, texts to

translate.

VI. They will dictate the exercises they assign.

VII. They will themselves teach writing and Turkish orthography as soon as their

students can read a little.

VIII. They will read and explain the lessons that they give to be read and explained.

IX. They will give an account to the House Prefect on the advancement or the negligence

of their students, and they will warn him if they notice that someone does not have a

disposition for oriental languages so that he can in turn inform the Minister of the Navy.

X. Should one of the two professors be indisposed or have some other reason for not

being able to give their lesson, they will inform their colleague who will substitute for

him or, if he will arrive late, they will extend the class to recuperate the lost time.

XI. They will have the students clearly and cleanly copy their assignments into their

notebooks.

XII. They will do reviews from time to time to remind their students what they have

forgotten.

XIII. They will speak Turkish during the entire class with the more [illegible]

XIV. One instructor will generally concentrate on having the students translate from

Turkish into French, the other from French into Turkish.

XV. While they must give equal attention to each student, they will nonetheless take

particular care to advance those students who will be the first to have to leave for

Constantinople.

XVI. From time to time, they will have the students translate from of a selection of

French books which they judge best suited to their students.

XVII. They will follow this method exactly, and will omit nothing of that which could

contribute to the advancement of their students.

XVIII. They will take a month off during the summer vacation.95

95 CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 153r-154r: I. “Les Professeurs se rendront exactement au college à Midy et

demie depuis le commencement de l’année scholaire, iusqu’au caréme, et depuis le Caréme, iusqu’aux

vacants, ils commenceront la classe à une heure. II. Ils tiendront classe pendant une heure et demie. III. Ils

feront lire aux commençants, les premiers mois l’arabe et le persan, apres quoy ils s’appliqueront

uniquement à leurs apprendre la langue Turque. IV. Ils feront apprendre et reciter aux commençants

chaque jour, une leçon de la grammaire turque, ils donneront aux autres pour leçon, des fables des

hystoires, des lettres des themes, des dialogues, etc. V. Ils donneront aux commençants des noms à

decliner, des verbes à conjuger, et des petites phrases à composer sur leures regles et aux plus avancés des

themes des versions. VI. Ils dicteront corects les devoirs qu’ils donneront. VII. Ils apprendront à écrire, et

l’Orthographe Turque, aussitot que leurs écoliérs sçauront un peu lire. VIII. Ils liront et expliqueront eux

mémes les leçons, qu’ils donneront, à lire et à expliquér. IX. Ils rendront compte au Préfét de la chambre,

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Many of Holdermann’s suggestions would be familiar to a language instructor today. He

advocated for language immersion, understood that students should do a variety of activities,

noted the importance of review, and had a sense for appropriate and engaging foreign language

material. Holdermann’s methods, in the use of fables, histories, letters, and translation exercises

in intermediate and advanced language instruction, also pulled from existing traditions in Latin

pedagogy.

A list of manuscripts acquired for the jeunes de langues in Paris shows that efforts were

made soon after the school’s founding to procure suitable and authentic learning material.96

Some of this was likely made to order, since the list begins with “six Turkish alphabets” and “six

books of passages from the Qurʾan, which one reads after the alphabet”.97 For more advanced

material, there is a clear focus on histories and folk tales. We find “a book on the war of Sultan

Murad”, “a book on the history of the Turks”, “a book of histories”, as well as “a book of forty

de l’avancement, ou de la negligence de leurs Écoliérs, et ils l’avertiront, lorsqu’ils s’apperceveront, que

quelqu’un n’a point de disposition pour les langues orientales, affin qu’il en donne avis au Ministre de la

Marine. X. Lorsque quelqu’un de deux Professeurs serat incommodé, ou aurat quelques autres raisons,

qui l’empecheront, de tenir classes, il ferat avertir son collegue, pour regenter pour luy et lorsqu’ils

viendront tard, ils prolongeront la classe, pour recuperer le tems perdu. XI. Ils feront décrire dans des

cayéts nettes et propres les devoirs qu’ils donneront. XII. Ils feront de tems en tems des repetitions

generales pour rappeller à leurs écoliers ce qu’ils auront oubliés. XIII. Ils parleront turque pendant toute la

classe avec les plus [illegible]. XIV. L’un s’appliquera principalement à faire traduire le turque en

françois, et l’autre le françois en turque. XV. Quoy qu’ils doivent également donnér leurs soins, pour les

uns, comme pour les autres, ils s’appliqueront cependant principalement à avancer ceux, qui doivent

partir les premiers pour Constantinople. XVI. Ils feront de tems en tems quelques traductions, des

quelques morceaux des livres françoises qu’ils jugeront le plus convenir à leurs écoliers. XVII. Ils

suivront exactement cette methode, et n’omettront rien, de ce qui pourra contribuer à l’avancement de

leurs écoliers. XVIII. Ils prendront un mois de conge pendant les grands vacants.”

96 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 126r. 97 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 126r: “six alphabets Turcs”; “six livres des passages de l’Alcoran qu’on lit après

l’alphabet”.

203

vezirs” (Kırk Vezir), and “a book of forty one nights”.98 Another list of books acquired in 1730

includes a similar mix of histories (“The conquests of South Arabia by Sultan Selim”, “History

of the Recent Revolutions in Persia up to the Conquest of Isfahan”) and folk tales

(Humāyūnnāme, “The Stories and Witticisms of the Facetious Nasreddin Hoca”).99

The focus on material both engaging and accessible to learners is a testament to the Jesuit

fathers’ consideration of the affective elements of learning. The flip side of this was a special

interest in the “disposition” of the students. The demands of training were such that it was

understood that children should be selected by virtue of their “qualities, suited to the purpose we

have for them, and not on the recommendations of persons interested in getting their children off

their hands,” and that these qualities were, above all “intelligence (esprit) and memory”.100 The

reports of Holdermann’s successor Pontigny devoted detailed attention to students’

psychological profiles. He noted, for instance, that Etienne Roboly, one of the Levantine students

from Istanbul, “does not lack intelligence (esprit), but is excessively interested in games and

pleasure”.101 Another Levantine student, François Fourneti “is not very advanced in writing and

reading, he seems to have some intelligence (esprit), but nonetheless he does not learn

98 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 126r: “un livre de la guerre de Sultan Amurat”; “un livre de l’histoire des Turcs”;

“un livre d’histoires”; “un livre des quarante vesirs”; “un livre de quarante et une nuits”.

99 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 169rv: “Les conquêtes de l’Arabie heureuse par Sultan Selim”, “Histoire des

dernieres Revolutions de Perse jusques à la prise d’Ispahan”, “L’Humayoun Name”, “Les contes et bons

mots du facetieux Nasradin Kodgea”. It is likely, based on the date, that this later list was related to the

translation efforts that began around that time.

100 CAD, 50 Md 155, 113r: “1. Le choix doit être fait sur leurs qualités, convenables aux desseins, que

l’on a sur eux, et non sur des recommendations de personnes interessée a se défaire de leurs enfans 2.

Leurs qualités doivent être entre autres d’avoir de l’esprit et de la memoire, qualités necessaires pour

apprendre les langues. ” 101 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 166r: “Etienne Roboly de Constantinople ne manque pas d’ésprit, mais

excessivement passionné pour le jeu et le plaisir”.

204

readily”.102 In contrast, “Denys Cardonne of Paris is a very likable child, and very bright, he

grasps things easily and he has an excellent disposition for learning.”103 In general, Pontigny,

perhaps with some prejudice, found fault with the Levantine students:

Speaking generally, our little Frenchmen have more intelligence (esprit) and openness to

what is called science than our little Levantines who—although older—are infinitely less

advanced. The latter have less ardor and inclination to study. They want to be pushed

despite themselves, while the others, in contrast, only ask me to be helped and taught.104

Despite the advances in pedagogy, not all of the aims laid out in earlier memoranda were

realized. An updated Meninski was never printed, although a certain Barouth was tasked with

compiling a dictionary for the students.105 While there had been talk of reviving Arabic-script

printing in Paris, only one work intended for use by the jeunes de langues was ever published: a

Turkish grammar written by Holdermann and printed in 1730—not in Paris, but in Istanbul—by

Ibrāhīm Müteferriḳa, the founder of the first Ottoman-Turkish press. However, a new idea had

replaced the proposed program of print orientalism: the schools would become centers of

manuscript production.

The Philological Classroom: The Jeunes de langues Translations

102 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 166r: “François Fourneti de Constantinople est tres peu avancé par l’écriture et

la lecture, il paroisse avoir de l’esprit, il a cependant la conception dure”.

103 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 166v: “Denys Cardonne de Paris est un enfant fort aimable par le caractere, il

est d’un ésprit extremement vif, il concoit aisement, il a d’excellentes dispositions pour bien apprendre”.

104 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 166v. “generalement parlant, nos petits françois ont plus d’esprit et d’ouverture

pour tout ce qui s’appelle science que nos petits Levantins qui quoque plus agés sont infiniment moin

avancés; ces derniers ont moin d’ardeur et d’inclination pour l’étude, ils veulent etre poussés malgré eux,

les autres au contraire me demandent qu’a etre aidés et enseignés”.

105 This may have existed in multiple copies, one of which survives: BnF, ms Supplément Turc 682. A

Turkish grammar written by Barouth is now, like Barbier’s dictionary, in Gotha (FSG, ms Turk. 33).

Barouth also wrote an overview of BnF, ms Supplément Turc 196.

205

Pedagogical reasoning informed this decision. By translating and copying works, students

were supposed to improve their knowledge of Ottoman Turkish while serving the interests of a

wider community of scholars and amateur orientalists. Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Count of

Maurepas, who succeeded his father as Minister of the Navy, requested the translations “for the

Royal Library” in 1723, although translation work does not appear to have been started until

sometime later, around 1730.106 Around this time, the new ambassador in Istanbul, Louis Saveur

de Villeneuve, made it known that producing such translations would “contribute infinitely to

forming [the students] in their knowledge of Turkish”.107 Villeneuve also asked that working

dragomans at the various échelles produce translations, in addition to seeking out works deemed

worthy of translation.108 The book lists among the École des jeunes de langues documents at the

Paris Diplomatic Archives might be linked to these efforts, and a draft letter including another

list of books acquired for the jeunes de langues was later bound into a copy of Müteferriḳa’s

edition of the Tarīḫ-i Rāşid, providing additional evidence of efforts to acquire works of Turkish

106 See Annie Berthier, “Turquerie ou Turcologie? L’effort de traduction des langues au XVIIe siècle,

d’après la collection de manuscrit conservée à la Bibliothèque nationale de France”, in Istanbul et les

langues orientales, ed. Frédéric Hitzel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 283-317, here 284, citing Archives

historiques de la chambre de commerce, AA 34 (cited in Omont, Missions archéologiques, 2:694): “M. de

Villeneuve (qui est alors l’ambassadeur de France à Constantinople), qui a esté chargé, Messieurs, de

faire faire par les Enfans de langue des traductions des manuscrits turc pour la Bibliothèque du Roy, me

marque que ces traductions ont occasionné quelque dépense, tant en achat de manuscrits qu’en relieures et

autres frais […]”.

107 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 178rv: “Je réponds séparement à quelques articles des lettres que vous m’avez

fait l’honneur de m’écrire les 15. May et 9. Juin concernant les drogman et les enfans de langue, ces

derniers continuent à s’apliquer aux traductions dont j’eprouve que l’usage contribue infiniment à les

former dans la connoissance de la langue Turque”.

108 On the request to acquire useful manuscripts, see Villeneuve’s letter (Archives de la Marine, B7 137,

fols 426v-427r) cited (in turn from Omont, Missions archéologiques, 2:694) by Berthier, “Turquerie ou

Turcologie”, 284: “Je me remets à vous de donner à ceux qui sont en Syrie et dans les autres Échelles, les

mesmes ordres que j’ay donnés aux drogmans de celles d’Égypte et de leur faire fournir des manuscrits

turcs, arabes ou persans que vous estimerez bons à traduire.”

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literature.109

The students worked quickly. A 1732 announcement in the pages of the Mercure de

France mentioned ten translations, and a list of translations made before 1735 included several

dozen titles.110 Over the following decades they produced more than 120 translations.111 These

translations might be best understood as collaborations in the production of an object: the

manuscript. They are, as a rule, dual language, with the French text beginning from one side of

the manuscript and the Turkish text from the opposite side. It was a sign of the translator’s

mastery if he could write well enough to copy out the Turkish, as Denis Cardonne (earlier the

“enfant fort aimable” of Pontigny’s report, later second interpreter in Salonica) did in his 1743

translation of a printed work, Ibrāhīm Müteferriḳa’s edition of Ömer Efendi’s Aḥvāl-i ġazavāt

der diyār-i Bōsna (an account of the Habsburg-Ottoman war in Bosnia 1736-1739).112 More

often, an Ottoman scribe was employed. Care was also taken to give the translations the look and

feel of an Ottoman manuscript. Most were likely bound in Istanbul, in more or less ornate

Ottoman bindings.

For quality control, the royal interpreter, Alexandre-Louis-Marie Pétis de La Croix was

ordered to examine the translations, confirming in each that it “conforms to the original”. A note

by a nineteenth-century curator of oriental manuscripts in a 1734 translation by the jeune de

langues Louis Dantan suggests that Pétis de La Croix might have taken his duty lightly:

It is undoubtedly only after having lightly browsed this manuscript that Mr. Pétis de La

Croix placed this note. If he had attentively compared the translation with the Turkish he

109 BnF, J-896-897. The volumes were purchased from the widow of Armain.

110 Mercure de France (October 1732) : 2209-2215; CAD, 50 Md 155, fols 188r-190r.

111 These are listed in Annie Berthier, “Turquerie ou Turcologie?”, 295-317.

112 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 930. Cardonne signed the colophon: قاردون ثانی ترجمان عن شهر سالنیک

(Cardonne, second dragoman in the city of Salonica), and the manuscript also carries a dedication to

Maurepas.

207

would not only have realized that it does not conform to the latter, but that it differs in

many misinterpretations, omissions, and passages that do not exist in the original text.113

Two nearly identical copies of a French translation of a standard Turkish-Persian

rhyming dictionary, the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī, exemplify the possibilities opened up by the new

manuscript circulations between Istanbul and Paris. The Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī was one of the first

Persian works that Ottoman students of the language encountered. Rhyming dictionaries, a genre

more popular in the Ottoman Empire than in non-Ottoman Europe, introduced vocabulary

through word pairs incorporated into memorable lines of rhymed verse. For example, the Tuḥfe-i

Şāhidī begins:

tañrınıñ adı durur īzid-u yazdān ḫudāi / daḫī büzürg ulu yol gösterici rehnumāi

This might be translated, preserving the rhyme and distinction between languages, as:

God’s name is Seigneur and Dieu, Créateur / also grand, great; wayfinder, conducteur

Much like the Janua linguarum, the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī was an answer to the question of how to

study a dictionary, introducing a selection of relevant words in a format that aided rote

memorization. As its author, Ibrāhīm Şāhidī explained in the preface, his vocabulary was a

primer for navigating the learned world: “And I knew that the innocent child who reads

dictionaries in verse / any branch of science comes easy to them, and they become in the world

113 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 881: “Ce n’est sans doute qu’après avoir parcouru très légèrement ce

manuscrit que Mr. Petis de La Croix aura mis cette apostille. S’il en avoit attentivement confronté la

traduction avec le Turc il auroit non seulement reconnu qu’elle n’étoit pas conforme à ce dernier, mais

qu’elle en differoit par plusieurs contre sens, des omissions, et des passages qui n’existent pas dans le

texte original”. For a close analysis of the accuracy of another translation by Dantan (BnF, ms

Supplément Turc 887), see Gilles Veinstein, “Le jeune de langues Dantan avait-il bien traduit?”, in

Istanbul et les langues orientales, ed. Fréderic Hitzel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 319-332.

208

an eloquent person”.114 In this way, an Ottoman learner could acquire a basic Persian vocabulary,

one of the foundations of proper epistolary style and a stepping stone to the study of the Persian

classics.

The Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī counted among the most collected and studied works in early modern

oriental studies. It was readily available in numerous copies, and it promised orientalists an

introduction to Persian, a subject for which, even by the early eighteenth century, there was still

a dearth of study material. As pedagogy at the École began to emphasize Ottoman literature, it

was natural that the jeunes de langues would turn to the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī , and, indeed, it is listed

(as “un Chaidy”) among the manuscripts acquired for the school in May 1730.115

Seven years later, the jeunes de langues collaborated to turn the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī into an

introductory textbook for Turkish and Persian. The resulting work exists in two manuscripts,

representing perhaps the most involved—and certainly the most creative—of the jeunes de

langues translations. They show the students, under the direction of their prefect, working with

an Ottoman scribe and taking exacting care in both the construction and the layout of the book.

The result is an elaborate study tool that is both beautiful and useful.

Ibrāhīm Şāhidī’s preface—in which the author framed his motivation specifically in

terms of the spiritual significance of Rūmī’s Masnavī—is given in a French prose translation

facing the Turkish original, which was copied by an Ottoman scribe who rendered the lines of

verse in alternating red and black ink below a Latin-script transliteration (Figure 34). The use of

114 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 902, p. 6: “yaḳın bildim ki bir nevreste maʿṣūm - lüġatlar oḳuya veznile

manẓūm / aña her ʿilm olur elbette āsān - olur ʿālemde bir merd-i soḫandān”. The French translation

reads: “j’ay appris et connu que si un enfant s’applique des sa jeunesse a l’étude des livres de poesie avec

cadence, il se perfectionner à aisement dans les sciences auxquelles il voudra s’appliquer et deviendra un

Orateur eloquent.” 115 CAD, 50 Md 155, fol. 169rv. In fact, the school purchased two copies, since another item on the list

reads “Le Pendattar et le Chaidy dans un même volume”.

209

two inks was a clever way to aide both reading (the inks divide each line into three groups of

three syllables) and comparison with the transliteration, which is correspondingly rendered in

black and red, allowing the reader to easily move between both texts. The work itself was copied

in the same manner, though without translation. However, at the end of every chapter (and at the

end of the preface), the reader finds a glossary that presents the Turkish-Persian word pairs in the

order of their appearance alongside a French equivalent. In addition, the manuscripts were

outfitted with multiple indices, making each Turkish and Persian word searchable in both Arabic

script and Latin transliteration.

The manuscripts’ orientalizing aesthetic was in part aspirational. Turkish proverbs—

given in Arabic script, a Latin transliteration, and a French translation—punctuate the end of

each chapter, most of which relate to education and learning. Prompted by such proverbs as

“surely ignorant conversation is worse than the flames of hell” and “science, perfection, and

knowledge are pleasures for the scholar”, the student is given to reflect on their scholarly

formation as a distinctly Ottoman elite sensibility.116

Care was also taken to properly fashion the manuscripts as distinctly Ottoman objects.

Each was bound in full-leather Ottoman bindings with a gilded central medallion (Figure 35).

The second copy of the work even includes the beginnings of a title illumination. Above the

preface heading we find a sketch in graphite of two oriental figures standing outdoors (Figure

36). The drawing seems to have been a personal touch added by the student or students

responsible for the volume. It is a curious visual hybrid, showing both familiarity with—and a

certain distance from—conventions of illumination in Islamic manuscripts. The drawing imitates

116 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 902, p. 91 (“ḥakka cāhil ṣoḥbeti nār-i cehennemden beter”); p. 211 (ʿilm-u

kemāl-u maʿrifet ʿārife özge ʿaysdir).

210

the style of Islamic miniature painting, but is used in a distinctly Western European manner.

While Islamic manuscripts contain illuminations marking the beginning of a work or section of

text (called an ʿunvan), they usually contain non-figurative decoration. In contrast, the drawing

by the jeunes de langues reworks elements from Islamic miniatures into a figurative illuminated

chapter heading.

The BnF copies of the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī show how the pedagogical lab of the French state

became a workshop for philology. The administrative reorganization of dragoman training

around 1720 approximated a new paradigm of orientalist education, one that aimed at mastery of

Islamic letters by incorporating Ottoman literature into a more traditional program of humanist

study. While this program was not formally laid out, it came together through the input of

numerous actors who participated in the institution of the school: the Jesuits at Louis-le-Grand,

the Turkish hoca in Istanbul, the demands passed down from the Minister of the Navy, and the

students themselves, with their “dispositions” and “inclinations”.

Between the French diplomatic language schools in Paris and Pera, dragoman training

became for the first time an encounter with Ottoman literature. In order that they could later

decipher and translate Ottoman diplomatic letters and edicts, the students read Turkish histories

and fables. This was also an encounter with manuscripts, a philological apprenticeship

increasingly supervised by trained orientalists. The core pedagogical insight was simple: jeunes

de langues learned by becoming active participants in a living scribal tradition, through copying,

compiling, and translating manuscripts and printed works from Istanbul.

211

Figure 34. BnF, ms Supplément Turc 902, 4: The jeunes de langues Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī was an elaborate

production. An Ottoman scribe copied out the work in alternating red and black inks which mark out

syllables and aid comparison with the transliteration.

212

Figure 35. BnF, ms Supplément Turc 902: Both copies of the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī were bound in Ottoman bindings.

213

Figure 36. BnF, ms Supplément Turc 903, p. 1: Variations between the two copies suggest students were free

to embellish them. One contains the beginnings of a miniature-like scene above a calligraphic section title and

bismillah.

214

While Maurepas, the Minister of the Navy, had envisioned the jeunes de langues

translations serving a broader scholarly public (through the Bibliothèque du Roi), it appears that

only few, if any, scholars read them, and we find only sporadic mention of the manuscripts in the

following centuries. Nevertheless, for some graduates the school did function as a stepping stone

to future scholarship. Charles Fonton, who as a jeune de langues translated an account of the

1703 Janissary uprising into French, later penned a treatise on Ottoman music and a translation

from the Šāhnāme.117 Denis Cardonne was named professor at the Collège Royal in Paris, where

he had a distinguished career as an orientalist.118

Still, at moments, the school became a nexus of literary coordination between Istanbul

and Paris. One episode in particular stands out. In 1739, Charles Peyssonnel, the under-secretary

to the French ambassador Villeneuve, who was neighbors with Ibrāhīm Müteferriḳa (with whom

he conversed through the remnants of the Hungarian convert’s school Latin), enlisted a Turkish

scholar to write an account of “an overview of the different sciences to which the Turks apply

themselves, the choice of books that they consult in every science, the colleges where they are

taught, etc.”119 In Peyssonnel’s correspondence, one can follow how a transnational network was

mobilized to produce a single work. In his letters to the Marquis de Caumont, Peyssonnel

described how he framed his project as a counter to French prejudice in order to convince the

117 BnF, ms Supplément Turc, 716. Fonton’s treatise and translation is now BnF, ms NAF 4023. On

Fonton, see Anne-Marie Touzard, “Un drogman musicien: coup d’oeil sur la vie et les oeuvres de Charles

Fonton”, in Istanbul et les langues orientales, ed. Hitzel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 197-214.

118 See Denis Cardonne, Mélanges de littérature orientale, traduits de différens manuscrits turcs, arabes

et persans de la Bibliothèque du Roi (The Hague, 1771).

119 BnF, ms NAF 6834, 90v: “un état des différentes sciences auxquelles les Turcs s’appliquent, du choix

des livres qu’ils consultent sur chaque science; des colleges ou on les professe, etc.” Jonathan Haddad

discusses Peyssonnel and the account in detail, see Haddad, “People Before Print: Gens de lettres, the

Ottoman Printing Press, and the Search for Turkish Literature”, Mediterranean Studies 25, no. 2 (2017):

216-220. Peyssonnel’s letter is quoted in Haddad, “People Before Print”, 217.

215

author, an unnamed tutor to the children of the reis efendi (chief of scribes), to write his account:

He asked to what end I was asking him for information, and I responded to him that most

nations reproach one another for being blind or one-eyed, and that I hoped to make it

known in France that the Turks have two eyes like other men. The idea flattered him

[...].120

We soon learn that the work had been written, and had now passed into the hands of the reis

efendi “who is reading and correcting it”.121 However, all was nearly undone by a paratext.

Several weeks later, Peyssonnel reported:

The dissertation, which I told you about is done, but it was done too well. The author who

is, as I said to you, the hoca of the reis efendi, has foolishly made it into a matter of state

in placing at its head a dedicatory epistle to M. l’ambassadeur. This epistle must

apparently contain something which the reis-efendi did not approve of.122

It took until after the negotiation of the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739 for Peyssonnel to successfully

win the manuscript’s release, and it was given to one of the former jeunes de langues, Julien-

Claude Galland (Antoine’s nephew) to translate. What exactly happened with Galland’s

translation is unclear. Peyssonnel complained the following year that the translation had not yet

been finished, and no such work is found among the translations at the French National

Library.123 However, the same Barouth who produced materials for the jeunes de langues did

120 BnF, ms NAF 6834, fol. 90v: “[il] s’informa dans quelle vüe je luy demandois les eclaircissements, je

luy repondis, que la pluspart des nations se reprochoient reciproquement d’etre aveugles ou borgnes, et

que j’etois bien [aise] de faire voir en France que les Turcs ont deux yeux, comme les autres hommes.

Cette idée le flatta [...]”. Cited in Haddad, “People Before Print,” 217. On Peyssonnel and Müteferriḳa,

see Haddad, “People Before Print”, 212, citing BnF, ms NAF 6834, fol. 81rv.

121 BnF, ms NAF 6834, fol. 99v: “cette dissertation est actuellement entre les mains du Reys-effendy, qui

la lit et la corrige; autant que les circonstances des affaires luy en lassent le temps”.

122 BnF, ms NAF 6834, 103v: “La dissertation, que je vous avois annoncé est faite, mais elle est trop bien

faite; l’autor qui est, comme je vous ay dit, le codgea du Reys-effendi, en a fait etourdiment une affaire

d’etat, en mettant a la tete une epitre dedicatoire a M. l’ambassadeur. cette epitre doit contenir

apparemment quelque chose, que le Reys-effendy n’a pas approuvé;”

123 Haddad, “People Before Print,” 219, citing BnF, ms NAF 6834, fols 132v-133r.

216

write up a detailed overview of the work, which today is bound in at the end of the manuscript.124

A shorter work related to Peyssonnel’s project did eventually see print, under

circumstances that offer a glimpse of the Turkish contacts of the jeunes de langues. As he was

waiting for the release of the hoca’s manuscript, Peyssonnel commissioned a similar, though

much shorter, work from a certain “Hussein Efendi”, whom Peyssonnel described as a “A man

of intelligence (esprit) and merit, who is always with our jeunes de langues” and who hoped to

learn French and travel to France one day.125 Galland included his translation of Hüseyin Ẕihnī

Efendi’s discours alongside several other works in a 1754 publication.126

The detours of Peyssonnel’s project trace the life cycle of orientalist knowledge in

Istanbul around 1740. In trying to coordinate between the different hands at work in the

production and translation of the treatise—the reis efendi, his hoca, the printer Ibrāhīm

Müteferriḳa, the jeunes de langues and dragomans—Peyssonel was witness to both the

limitations and nascent possibilities of collaboration in Istanbul. This was a sometimes clumsy

approximation of the vision of coordinated action between classroom, library, and printing press

put forward by the reformers of the École des jeunes de langues, but it marked a point where

state-led efforts to collect manuscripts, ongoing since the mid-seventeenth century, gave way to a

more comprehensive, integrated system of orientalist knowledge production.

124 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 196.

125 BnF, ms NAF 6834, 106v: “Je ne puis avoir l’ouvrage du Cogea du Reys Effendi, j’ay taché d’y

suppleer par un petit discours que m’a donné, sur le meme sujet, usseïn effendi, homme d’esprit et de

merite, qui est toujours avec nos jeunes de langue et qui a voulû etre de ce voyage pour connoitre toujours

mieux le génie des François; il veut meme apprendre notre langue pour voyager quelque jour en France

avec plus d’utilité.”

126 Julien-Claude Galland, “Traduction d’une Dissertation de Zehny Effendy, sur les Sciences des Turcs,

& sur l’ordre qu’ils gardent dans le cours de leurs études”, in Receuil des Rits et des Cérémonies du Pélerinage de la Mecque, auquel on a joint divers écrits relatifs à la Religion, aux Sciences & aux

Moeurs des Turcs (Amsterdam: Desaint and Saillant, 1754).

217

The Orientalische Akademie

This system was perfected at a school modeled on the École des jeunes de langues:

Vienna’s Orientalische Akademie.127 Since the mid-seventeenth century, Sprachknaben (the

German word for dil oğlanları, jeunes de langues, etc.) had been trained on the job at the

residence of the Internuntius (Habsburg Resident) in Pera. It has generally been assumed that the

Orientalische Akademie in Vienna was founded at the instigation of Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz

(1711-1794), who would have had the opportunity to visit the École des jeunes de langues when

he served as ambassador in France from 1750-1753. Following his appointment as chancellor in

May 1753 (a position he would hold for nearly four decades), Kaunitz spearheaded a long period

of state reform, and only a month before he assumed his new position, the Jesuit Joseph Franz

(1704-1776) submitted a report recommending that the school for Sprachknaben in Istanbul be

moved to Vienna.128

127 On the Orientalische Akademie and its successors, see the essays in Oliver Rathkolb, ed., 250 Jahre:

Von der Orientalischen zur Diplomatischen Akademie in Wien (Innsbruck: Studien, 2004); Paula Sutter

Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526-1850 (London: Reaktion,

2008), 117-161; Victor Weiß von Starkenfels, Die kaiserlich-königliche orientalische Akademie zu Wien,

ihre Gründung, Fortbildung und gegenwärtige Einrichtung (Vienna: Gerold, 1839). On Vienna and the

Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, see David Do Paço, L’Orient à Vienne au dix-huitième siècle

(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015). 128 HHStA, StK Interiora, 55, alt 67, “Erste Schrift Welche ich in Anfang des Monat April 1753 Ihro

Maytt: unmittelbar übergeben habe”. The Internuntius in Istanbul, Heinrich von Penckler (1700-1774),

replied to Franz in a defense of the existing system, stating that Turkish “werde […] nur durch die praxim

bey der Nation perfectioniret. So müssten die Türckische Staats-Maximen und Gesäze, auch der Humor

und modus tractandi negotia in loco studiret werden, indeme man öffters mit einem Wort mehr oder

weniger alles verderbe” (HHStA, Türkei II 55, Berichte 1753 IV-VIII, fols 102-106, quoted in Petritsch,

“Die Anfänge der Orientalischen Akademie”, 49.

218

Franz was an Enlightenment jack of all trades. He had tutored the future Holy Roman

Emperor Joseph II in Philosophy, was Professor of Mathematics at the Jesuitenkolleg of the

University of Vienna, on whose roof he built the university’s first observatory, and later oversaw

the standardization of weights and measures in the Empire. His orientalist interests were

awakened on a trip to Istanbul, when he traveled to the Ottoman capital as Anton Corfiz Ulfeldt

(1699-1769)’s secretary in 1740-1741. While he must have acquired some familiarity with

Turkish at this point, the extent of his oriental studies remains unclear.

Franz’s report argued that the current system was the shame of Pera, an embarrassment

bloated with too many incompetent and unscrupulous Sprachknaben, whose appointments were

doled out as favors.129 The problem was not a lack of opportunity—Istanbul was an ideal place to

find Turkish manuscripts and teachers—but rather a lack of pedagogical vision and organization.

The Internuntius could hardly be expected to train Sprachknaben in addition to his other

responsibilities, and indeed, was known to use them as servants rather than apprentice

interpreters. Better, Franz suggested, to train them in Vienna, “where the presence of the court

would provide the students with a particular incentive”, noting that “Turkish can be learned

completely just as well outside of Constantinople as French outside of Paris”.130 There can be no

doubt that he had the Paris preparatory school in mind, and he proceeded to describe something

much like the École des jeunes de langues, with the students living together, a prefect

129 HHStA, StK Interiora 55, alt 67, “Erste Schrift ”, fols 4v-5r: “In die Erfahrnus hat es gelehret und ganz

Pera hat schon vorlängst öfters hiervon gesprochen, das die einzige Kays. Königl. Sprach-Knaben in der

Anzahl zwar die mehriste, und wegen der Besoldung sowohl, als 10, 12 bis 16 Lehr-Jahren die

Kostbahrsten wären. Doch in dem fleiß, in der Uebung, in der belehrung, und hieraus erwachsenen

tauglichkeit sehr wenig Lob, und wegen übeln Sitten und gemachten Schulden zuweilen Vorachtung

verdienten”

130 HHStA, StK Interiora 55, alt 67, “Erste Schrift ”, fol. 6v: “wo die höchste Anwesenheit des Hofs

denen Lehrnenden einem besonderen Trieb beyleget, und die Türckische Sprach eben so wohl ausser

Constantinopel, als die Fränzösische ausser Paris volkommen kan erlehrnet werden”.

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responsible for their day-to-day activities (ideally someone “at the same time Christian and

experienced in the typical school sciences”) and an instructor who would come to teach at

appointed times (Franz suggested an Armenian named Joseph).131

In a second report from June 1753, recapitulating much of his first, Franz added more

detail about the methods that would be used at the school and gave a clue as to the reason for his

involvement with the new Orientalische Akademie. Evidently, he had been perfecting a method

of language instruction:

Sixth, the instructor specializing in languages will remain outside of the house, and will

only come at particular hours, and will give exercises in the language only in the manner

prescribed to him by me. I do not want to claim to be a Turkish interpreter or language

master. Nevertheless, the very short method I composed for basic Turkish grammar and

copia verborum has already accomplished its goal and stood the test with many priests of

our order (one of whom recently departed for the Turkish mission). Indeed, two laymen,

one of which is Herr Kollár, were instructed through this short path to the Turkish

language a few years ago by one of my clerical disciples.132

Franz’s experiments in teaching Turkish place him in a tradition—with Holdermann and, long

before him, Bathe—of Jesuit language pedagogy as a bridge between Latinity and oriental

studies.

His mention of the Turkish studies of the Slovak polymath Adam Kollár (1718-1783) is

131 HHStA, StK Interiora 55, alt 67, “Erste Schrift ”, fol. 7r: “Die nächste und beständige Obsorg über

diese Knaben wurde einen weltlichen Vorsteher, oder Prefecto aufgetragen, welcher nicht jung an jahren,

zugleich Christlich, und in denen gewöhnlichen Schulen-Wissenschaften erfahren wäre”.

132 HHStA, StK Interiora, 55, alt 67, “Anderte Schrifft Welche von der Erstern in Einigen Puncten

unterschieden ist und in Anfang des Monats Juny 1753 der Staats-Canzley auf Befehl Ihro Mayt.

übergeben ist worden und worauf die höchste Resolution erfolget ist”, fols 14v-15v: “Sechstens wird der

Sprachen kündige Instructor ausser dem Haus verbleiben, und nur zu bestimenden Stunden sich dahin

verfügen, auch die Üebung in der sprach nur auf jene Art fürnehmen, welche ihme von mir wird

fürgeschriben werden. Ich wil mich weder für einen Türckischen Dollmetschen, noch Sprachmeister

aufwerffen und ausgeben; diesen ohngeachtet hat mein von mir ganz kurz verfaste Methode der

Türckischen Gramatical-Gründen, und Copia Verborum schon bey vielen geistlichen unsers Ordens /:

daruon einer in die Türckische Mission vorlängst abgegangen ist :/ ihr kurzes zihl erreichet, und die Probe

gehalten. Eben also seynd 2 Weltliche, worunter der Herr Kolar ist, von einem aus meinen geistlichen

discipulis durch diesen Kurzen Weeg zur Türckischen Sprach vor einigen Jahren eingeleitet worden.”

220

of note, because it points to the burgeoning coordination with Vienna publishers. Kollár, a

graduate of the Jesuit College who was then second custos (overseer) at the Imperial Court

Library, helped revive Arabic-type publishing in Vienna around this time. He rescued from

obscurity the Arabic type Meninski had designed and used for his dictionary, and employed the

type in two works in the years after the Orientalische Akademie’s founding. The first of these

was a 1755 edition—with Kollar’s Latin translation—of a portion of Saʿdüddin Efendi’s Tāc al-

Tevāriḫ (The Crown of Histories, a standard historical work).133 The second was a new edition in

1756 of the grammar that accompanied Meninski’s dictionary.134 This second publication (and

perhaps the first, as well) was likely related to the new school, but the exact nature of the

connection is unclear.

Franz’s arguments prevailed (likely a foregone conclusion) and he was named the

Orientalische Akademie’s first director when the school opened in 1754 within the walls of the

Jesuit College. Surviving documents from the first years of the school offer a curated view of

Franz’s methods. A tabular report on the students’ progress registered the particular aims of

instruction, accounting for each prospective Sprachknabe’s “natural ability and ease of learning”,

“industry”, “progress in Latin studies”, “progress in Turkish”, “progress in other languages,”

“progress in the study of geography and history”, “handwriting”, and “morals, devotion,

133 Adam Kollár, ed. and trans., Saad ed-dini Annales turcici usque ad Muradem I cum textu turcico

impressi (Vienna, 1755). 134 Adam Kollár, ed., Francisci à Mesgnien Meninski Institutiones Linguae Turcicae, cum Rudimentis

Parallelis Linguarum Arabicae et Persicae, editio altera (Vienna: Schilgen, 1756).

221

obedience”.135 Apart from their Turkish studies, the students seem to have participated in classes

at the Jesuitenkolleg, since the report mentions their respective “school” within the Jesuit college

and the university. For example, the eighteen-year-old Johann Amadeus Franz de Paula Thugut

(1736-1818), who later succeeded Kaunitz as Chancellor of State, was identified as a “candidatus

juris” and pursued, in addition to Turkish, for which he received an “A” (though only a “C” in

pronunciation), Italian, French, and Greek.

Franz also presented a collection of student exercises with his progress report: copies of

Turkish proverbs with accompanying transliterations according to “Asiatic” and

“Constantinople” pronunciations (Figure 38).136 The exercises highlight the growing centrality of

scribal work in orientalist learning. The multiple transliterations, in turn, probably responded to

concerns about the lack of access to authentic spoken Turkish in Vienna.

Two volumes tucked in among the collection of Islamic manuscripts from the school

library show the Sprachknaben participating in another tradition of Jesuit pedagogy: student

theater.137 Both manuscripts are copies of a play about the famed crusader Godefroy de Bouillon,

135 HHStA, StK Interiora 55, alt 67, “Allerunterthänigste Viertel Jährige Information von denen Monaten

Januario, Februario, Martio über Das Verhalten der acht Knaben in der K.K. Academia der Orientalischen

Sprachen welche den ersten January 1754 angefangen hatte”, fols 47-50, here fols 49v-50r: “Natürliche

Fähigkeiten und Leichtigkeit in Lehrnen”, “Fleiß”, “Fortgang in den Lateinischen Studiis”, “Fortgang in

der Türkischen Sprach”, “Fortgang in anderen Sprachen”, “Fortgang in Studio Geographia und Historia”,

“Handschrift”, “Sitten, Andacht, und Gehorsam”. There is also a (completely blank) column for “Forgang

in Concipiren oder Aufsätzen”.

136 HHStA, StK Interiora 55, alt 67, “Num I Türkische Handschriften der acht Knaben”, fols 50-66, “Num

II Zweyfache Aussprachs-Art die Asiatische und die Constantinopolitanische worzu die Knaben

angeleitet werden”, fols 68-70.

137 On the Orientalische Akademie plays, see Metin And, Şair evlenmesi’nden önceki ilk Türkçe oyunlar

(Istanbul: İnkilâp and Aka, 1982). A number of manuscripts made by the students themselves belong to

the portion of the school library that is now in the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna, but which are

not listed in Albrecht Krafft, Die arabischen, persischen und türkischen Handschriften der k.k. Orientalischen Akademie zu Wien (Vienna, 1842). The reading room of the HHStA has both an annotated

copy of the Krafft catalog that includes these other items and a later, comprehensive typescript inventory.

222

written in Turkish and French, most likely by Franz with the input of another Turkish speaker.138

The students performed the play three times for their “très-augustes fondateurs”, the royal couple

Maria Theresa and Franz I, in 1757, 1758, and 1761.139

The manuscripts’ meticulous layout gives an indication of their function (Figure 39). The

text is unmarked and written in a regular arrangement, and the Turkish text is provided in both

Arabic script and a Latin-script transliteration, in addition to a French translation. This was likely

a manuscript intended for the viewer, allowing them to follow what would otherwise be half-

incomprehensible dialogue. There are also notes indicating the short performances of Turkish

customs between acts.

The tale of Godefroy de Bouillon, the storied hero of the First Crusade’s conquest of

Jerusalem, had long been the stuff of literature, familiar across Europe through Torquato Tasso

(1544-1595)’s La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). It was also a common subject

for Jesuit school plays.140 Franz’s exact motivation is unknown but the topic proved a clever

choice, because it allowed him to produce a showpiece for his students’ mastery of the two

languages of diplomacy, French and Turkish, which coexist in the play side by side in mutual

intelligibility. The Muslim characters speak Turkish, the Christians speak French. This was novel

enough to warrant a remark in the short avant-propos that grounded Franz’s decision in the

138 HHStA, ms Or HS 590a, 590b. This can only be speculation, since there are no clear indications of its

authorship.

139 For the third performance, the play was printed using the Meninski type: Godefroi de Bouillon,

représenté par les Eleves de l’Academie des Langues Orientales devant Leurs Trés-Augusts Fondateurs le 18, Décembêre 1757 et le 28 Janvier 1758, répété par Leur Ordre et par celui de LL.A.A.R.R. Mgr.

L’Archiduc et Mad. L’archiduchesse, le IV Mars 1761 MDCCLXI à Vienne en Autriche (Vienna:

Schilgin, 1761).

140 Johannes Müller, Das Jesuitendrama in den Ländern deutscher Zunge vom Anfang (1555) bis zum

Hochbarock (1665) (Augsburg: Filser, 1930), 2:108 lists performances of plays on Godefroy de Bouillon

in 1596 (Munich), 1682 (Innsbruck), 1687 (Freiburg), 1697 (Olmütz), 1704 (Vienna), 1710 (Munich),

1715 (Vienna), 1762 (Solothurn).

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authority of the play’s literary source:

We made a supposition for the dialogues between the Turks and Christians, unheard of, it

is true, in the theater world, but still within the rules of verisimilitude, that the two

nations through their long mutual commerce, had learned one another’s languages, just as

the famed Tasso had already assumed in his words: E perché i Franchi han già il sermone

appreso / Della Soria, fu quel ch’ei disse inteso (And as the French had already learned

the speech / of Syria, what he said was understood).141

In the three-act play itself, the scheming Ormond conspires against Godefroy with the

help of Alet, King of Jerusalem, as Pierre l’Ermite scours Jerusalem for the True Cross (which

the Turks have hidden). In the end, chance saves Godefroy from an assassin’s sword and, offered

the crown in victory, he demurs:

It was not the thirst for rule, to be great

To add to my names that of conqueror

Which brought me earlier to leave my lands

I do not love that indomitable courage of kings

Who, marching ringed with ardent warriors,

Make others miserable to win their happiness

It is God who moves me, that great and lovable God

Who, offering his favor to humankind,

Deigns to root out vice and return virtue

It is he who brought down the Turks’ pride142

Such an act of humility by a great man moves Alet to the brink of conversion:

Amazing! To find among the Christians such a man of skill and a master of excellence.

One is left speechless and stunned at seeing accomplishment in the highest degree. This

is clear evidence for the truth of their religion over others, that religion prevents them

generally from following the spirit that commands misdeeds, and, in particular, from

desire for power and taking revenge. Your munificence and constancy were already

141 HHStA, ms Or HS 590a, fol. 2r: “On fit une supposition pour les Dialogues entre les Turcs et les

Chrêtiens, nouvelle à la verité en fait de Théatre; mais pourtant dans les règles de la vraisemblance; que

les deux nations moïennant leur long commerce mutuel, eussent apris les langues l’une de l’autre, ainsi

que l’avait deja supposé le fameux Tasse par ces paroles, E perché i Franchi hangià il sermone appreso /

Della Soria, fu quel ch’ei disse inteso.”

142 HHStA, ms Or HS 590a, fol. 28rv: “Ce n’était pas la soif de regner, d’être grand, / D’ajouter à mes

noms celui de conquérant, / Qui me portat jadis à quiter mon partage. / Je n’aime de ces Rois l’indomtable

courage / Qui marchant entourés de guerriers fougueux, / Pour faire leur bonheur rendent tous

malheureux. / C’est Dieu, qui m’anima, ce Dieu grand et aimable, / Qui prodiguant soi-même aux

humains favorable, / Daigna chasser le vice et rendre la vertu; / C’est lui qui des Turcs a l’orgueil abattu;”

224

known to me, but I was dumbfounded and awestruck that your virtue would go so far. I

was treacherous and unjust until this moment, but now I love you and am astonished at

your excellence.143

Revisions recorded in the Vienna manuscripts and the alterations between the manuscript

and the later (1761) print edition give an impression of the challenges of both using Turkish as a

literary language and adapting the conventions of Turkish style to a novel genre. The author (or

authors) struggled, for instance, in deciding if Alet, expressing his admiration for Godefroy,

should address him in the formal second-person singular pronoun siz or the informal sen. First

written with the informal, the line was altered to the formal in the manuscript, and afterwards

reverted back to the informal sen in the printed version.144

It is something of a curiosity that the first modern stage play to be performed in Turkish

was largely the work of a Jesuit father and a group of Austrian teenagers. When Ottoman

Turkish writers took up the dramatic form in the nineteenth century they never invoked the name

of Joseph Franz, nor did they even know of the play’s existence, but Godefroi de Bouillon was

influential in its small circle, beginning a tradition of performing Turkish plays at the

Orientalische Akademie, of which several others survive. With Godefroi school drama entered

the Orientalische Akademie’s pedagogical repertoire, part of the school’s gradual reorientation

toward the ideal of active participation in Ottoman intellectual life. Even Franz’s Godefroi, with

143 Godefroi de Bouillon, pp. 45-46: “taʿaccüb ḫrıstiyān miyānında böyle bir ehl-i hüner ve ṣāḥib kemālet

kisi bulunsin derece-i ʿulyada olan hüneri müsāhedesiniñ ādam lāl-[ü] bīhūs ḳalur bunlarıñ ḥaḳīḳat

dīnlerine sā’irden ḳaṭʿ-i naẓar bu bir delālet-i ṣarīḥe dir ki dīn bunları ʿumūman tıbʿ-i nefs-i bedfermādan

ve ḥuṣūṣan ḥırṣ-i tesallut ve aḫẕ-i intiḳāmden bile gīru çeker seniñ mürüvvetin ve üstüvārlığın baña

muḳaddemadan maʿlūm idi amma ol ḳadar bülend himmet ėdiğinden dembeste ve medhūs oldum ḫāyın

ve ḥaḳḳ nāsınās idim simdiye dek amma bundan böyle hem seni severim hem fażīletini taʿaccüb ėderim”.

The French translation provided is “Quoi donc? les Chrêtiens ont tant de vertu, je demeure immobile à ces

grands efforts et commence presqu’à croire qu’une religion qui a tant de force sur les esprits doit être la

vraie. J’ai connu ta constance, ton amitié, ta foi; mais cette grandeur d’ame m’éblouit. Honteux de vous

avoir trahi, je vous aime et vous admire.”

144 HHStA, ms Or HS 590a, fol. 30r.

225

its romantic view of the Crusades, qualified somewhat its vision of Western European

superiority, rejecting the conquerors who “make others miserable to win their happiness” and

imagining admiration as a proxy for conversion. The later plays eschewed a Western European

framing entirely, structuring an exercise in mastering Turkish by embodying the “Turk”.

Figure 37. HHStA, StK Interiora 55, alt 67, 52r: The copy of Turkish proverbs made by Bernhard von

Jenisch. Such exercises showcased students’ handwriting as a gauge of their character and promise.

226

Figure 38. HHStA, ms Or HS 590a, 5v-6r: The layout of the manuscript copy of Godefroi de Bouillon suggests

that it was created to orient viewers of the play in a spectacle they would have only partially understood.

It is characteristic of this participatory attitude toward Ottoman culture that the young

man who—in the role of Alet—expressed his boundless admiration for Godefroi, later helped

translate a major medical work into Ottoman Turkish. Thomas von Herbert (1738-1760), the son

of an Irish nobleman who had settled in Istanbul, soon returned there as an interpreter, where he

assisted the Ottoman court physician (hekimbaşı), Ṣubḥīzāde ʿAbdülʿazīz Efendi (d. 1769), in

composing a Turkish translation from two works on medicine by Herman Boerhaave (1668-

1738): Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis and Institutiones medicae in usus annuae

227

exercitationis domesticos.145 In his preface to the work, entitled Ḳiṭaʿāt-i naḳāve fī tercüme-i

kelimāt-i Boerhave (Choice sections in the translation of the words of Boerhaave), ʿAbdülʿazīz

Efendi described how he translated the work with the help of another scholar (presumably

Herbert) using a commentary by his counterpart in Vienna, Boerhaave’s former student Gerard

van Swieten.146

The incremental transformation of the school continued apace. Like the École des jeunes

de langues, the Orientalische Akademie, led by active and engaged Jesuit teachers, remained a

locus of state rationalization and reform. The directorship of Franz’s successor, Johann Nekrep

145 The best overview of the sources related to Ottoman translations of Boerhaave is still C.E. Daniels,

“La Version orientale, Arabe et Turque, des deux premiers livres de Hermann Boerhaave”, Janus, 17

(1912): 299-312. Daniels learned from one of the library catalogs published with Flügel’s edition of Katip

Çelebi’s Kašf al-ẓunūn that a copy of the Turkish translation was in Istanbul, and procured a description

of the manuscript and selected translations from the work from a professor in Istanbul, Akil Muhtar

Özden. As Feza Günergun notes, three copies of the manuscript are listed in Istanbul libraries. Feza

Günergun, “Ottoman encounters with European science: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century translations

into Turkish”, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, eds Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 192-211, here 209. It appears that there was also an

earlier translation from Boerhaave, although it has not yet been identified. Albrecht Schulten’s claims that

he saw proof sheets from a planned Müteferriḳa edition of the work, but these have not yet been

identified. See Schultens, Oratio Academica. In Memoriam Hermanni Boerhaavii, viri summi ex decreto rectoris magnifici et senatus academici habita die IV. Novembris, An. MDCCXXXVIII (Leiden: Luzac,

1738), pp. 48-49: “That most splendid torch has not only illuminated Europe since the beginning of the

century but has also begun to illuminate the lands of the East and has made a name for Boerhaave in the

Ottoman Empire, under the auspices of the grand mufti, who translated the excellent work [the

Institutiones medicae] as well as the Aphorismi into an elegant and faithful Arabic, and is now ready to be

sent through Constantinople’s press. Five years ago I examined a section of the translation, which had

been sent to Boerhaave from Constantinopel, and I found it true to the original.” (“Splendidissima haec

Fax, non solum Europam inde a principio seculi volventis collustrat, sed etiam alio sub sole calentes

Terras illustrare coepit, atque imperium Othomannicum, sub auspiciis supremi sacrorum Antistitis, ad

Boerhaavianum nomen erexit, praeclaro opere per Eum, una cum Aphorismis, in Arabicum Sermonem

eleganter, et concinne, converso, atque ad Typographiam Constantinopolitanam exercendam jam parato.

Ante quinquennium examinavi specimina versionis, Boerhaavio transmissa Constantinopoli, atque

Archetypo fideliter respondere deprehendi.”). Toderini notes Suphizāde Abdülaziz Efendi’s translation,

which he attributes to Herbert, and mentions rumors of an earlier translation during the reign of Ahmet

III. See Giambatista Toderini, Letteratura Turchesca (Venice: Storti, 1787), I:134-135.

146 Gerard van Swieten, Commentaria in Hermanni Boerhaave aphorismos de cognoscendis et curandis

morbis, 9 vols (Leiden, 1742-1776). I could not consult any of the Istanbul manuscripts, but sections from

the preface are translated in Daniels, “La Version orientale, Arabe et Turque, des deux premiers livres de

Hermann Boerhaave”, 301-302.

228

(1738-1784), was one such opportunity to improve and streamline the school’s curriculum. An

unsigned treatise on pedagogical method for the school from 1770 (the year Nekrep took over)

might reflect the evolving practices at the school. The work, entitled “Entwurf von Erlernung

einer Sprache insonderheit der Lateinischen”, which uses the study of Latin to illustrate a general

method for language instruction.147 It was also during Nekrep’s directorship that students, much

like their predecessors at the École des jeunes de langues, were first enlisted in the production of

orientalist scholarship.

With the help of the rediscovered Meninski type, these efforts drove a program of

orientalist publishing. Rather than produce a collection of translations for the visitors of a library

(as the jeunes de langues had done), the academy’s students were employed in the production of

major scholarly publications. One of the first was also the most ambitious: a revised edition of

Meninski’s dictionary. A new edition had long been a desideratum of orientalist scholarship.

Already in Meninski’s lifetime the work had become scarce, and a new Meninski had been the

centerpiece of the (unrealized) call to revive orientalist publishing in Paris that accompanied the

reform of the École des jeunes de langues. Several years earlier, The British orientalist William

Jones (1746-1794) had sought to revise the dictionary with support from the East India

Company.148 When Jones’s project stalled, one of the academy’s graduates, Bernhard von

147 HHStA Stk Interiora , 55, alt 67b, “Entwurf von Erlernung einer Sprache insonderheit der Lateinischen

als eine Beylage zu der Instruktion für die Orientalische Akademie, und den allgemeinen Plan für

Schulen”, fols 1r-30r. An overview of the “Entwurf” is given in Alexandra Joukova, “‘Ein Glück für

jeden fremden Mann, der selbst mit Türken sprechen kann.’ Zur Sprachausbildung vor und kurz nach

Etablierung der Orientalischen Akademie”, 250 Jahre: Von der Orientalischen Akademie zur

Diplomatischen Akademie in Wien, ed. Rathkolb (Innsbruck: Studien, 2004), 29-46.

148 Jones’s project fell through because of lack of East India Company interest and his own realization that

Meninski’s dictionary was more suited to the study of Ottoman Turkish than Persian. See Garland

Cannon, “Sir William Jones’s Persian Linguistics, Journal of the American Oriental Society 78, no. 4

(1958): 262-273, here 264.

229

Jenisch (and later Franz von Klezl) oversaw the production of the work by the academy’s

advanced students. Their revisions simplified Meninski’s entries by removing the polyglot

assortment of Polish, German, and Italian definitions in favor of Latin. They also supplemented

it with words from two Ottoman dictionaries printed by Ibrāhīm Müteferriḳa: the Arabic-Turkish

Luġat-i Vānḳulu and the Persian-Turkish Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī. The aim was to make good on

Meninski’s promise of a “Turkish-Arabic-Persian” dictionary. Orientalische Akademie students

also collaborated on an anthology of Persian literature with Latin translations. Coming on the

heels of William Jones’s 1774 Poesos Asiaticae commentariorum libri sex, the 1778 Anthologia

Persica offered a selection of hitherto unpublished excerpts from works of Persian literature such

as Ǧāmī’s Bahāristān and the Pendnāme attributed to ʿAṭṭār, with facing Latin translations and

the occasional note.149

The new dictionary and the Anthologia were expensive showpieces of Vienna oriental

studies. The first volume of the new Meninski dictionary included an engraved portrait of Maria

Theresa and copies were presented as gifts abroad. A copy in Paris bound in full leather

ornamented binding with the Habsburg double-headed eagle is likely one such gift. The printer

Joseph Kurzböck (1736-1792) employed a modified version of the same Meninski type that

Kollár had unearthed. Kurzböck and the type founder Anton Magatsch made a number of

alterations to the type using handwriting specimens from a Syrian merchant in Vienna named

Yusuf Sassati.150 The changes were remembered as a misstep—later observers complained that

they upset the unity of the type—but this was only the first of a series of typographic

149 Notably, both of these works have Turkish commentaries.

150 On Kurzböck and Vienna Arabic-type printing, see Geoffrey Roper, “Music, Drama and Orientalism

in Print: Joseph von Kurzböck (1736-1792), His Predecessors and Contemporaries” in Ottoman Empire and European Theatre II (The Time of Joseph Haydn: From Sultan Mahmud I to Mahmud II), eds

Michael Hüttler and Hans Ernst Weidinger (Vienna: Hollitzer, 2014), 209-230.

230

improvements over the following decades, inspired by new type in Istanbul, Iran, Egypt, and

Western Europe.151 The new transnational ambitions of Viennese Arabic-script publishing are

also evident in Kurzböck’s printing, around this time, of a commentary on the Psalms and a

doctrinal treatise for the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem.152

The academy projects show that, by the 1770s, a tradition of scholarship had already

formed around the school, perhaps best represented in Jenisch, who would also go on to translate

part of Mīr-Ḫwānd’s history, Rawżat al-ṣafā fī sīrat al-anbiyā wa al-mulūk wa al-ḫulafā

(Gardens of Purity in the Biography of the Prophets, Kings, and Caliphs) and pen the detailed

overview of oriental studies which appeared with the Meninski dictionary.153 The students who

trained on the job as compilers and translators in turn furnished the next generation of academy

scholars, and several went on to distinguished careers.

The school’s archive can help trace their development. A progress report on one

particularly promising student, Jacob von Wallenburg, noted that the twelve-year-old

Wallenburg’s knowledge of Turkish was “exceedingly great, such that he can already read to the

151 On the history of Vienna Arabic-type printing, see Anton Gevay’s review of Joseph von Hammer’s

1829 Wiens erste aufgehobene türkische Belagerung in Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur 47 (1829): 186-

208, who observes (199): “So wahr es indessen einerseits ist, daß aus dieser Reform die Typen mit

mancher recht zweckmäßigen Verbesserungen wieder hervorgegangen sind, so muß doch andererseits mit

Bedauern bemerkt werden, daß durch das Zusammengießen zweyer Elemente die ursprüngliche schöne

Einheit der Meninskischen Schrift im Ganzen bedeutend gelitten hat”.

152On Kurzböck’s commissions for the Patriarch of Jerusalem, see Geoffrey Roper, “The Vienna Arabic

Psalter of 1792 and the Role of Typography in European-Arab Relations in the 18th Century and Earlier”,

in Kommunikation und Information im 18. Jahrhundert: Das Beispiel der Habsburgermonarchie, eds

Johannes Frimmel and Michael Wögerbauer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 77-89. Anthimus,

Patriarch of Jerusalem, Al-hidāya al qawīma ila al-amāna al-mustaqim, Firma manuductio ad veram

fidem (Vienna: Kurzböck, 1792); Anthimus, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Kitāb tafsīr al-zabūr al-ilāhī al-šarīf

(Vienna: Kurzböck, 1792).

153 Bernhard von Jenisch, trans., Historia priorum regum Persarum post firmatum in regno Islamismum,

ex Mohammede Mirchond Persice et Latine cum notis geographico literariis (Vienna: Kurzböck, 1782).

Jenisch’s overview (Bernhard von Jenisch, De fatis linguarum orientalium Arabicae nimirum, Persicae,

et Turcicae commentatio (Vienna: Kurzböck, 1780)) was also printed separately.

231

amazement of those who know the language, and writes somewhat”, lauding him as “the most

devout, most malleable, most diligent child that one could wish for”.154 After leaving the

academy, Wallenburg continued his studies in Pera with the help of the Habsburg Internuntius in

Istanbul, Philipp Herbert (1735-1802). There he completed one of the great lost orientalist

works—an edition and translation of Rūmī’s Masnavī, which was consumed in the Pera fire of

1799—and started a translation of the foundational Persian epic, Firdousī’s Šāhnāma, which was

cut off by his premature death in 1807.155 Wallenburg, who pursued his Persian studies in

addition to his other duties (and with the assistance of his wife), envisioned a lavish edition with

a new nastaʿlīq type, and it is characteristic of his dedication to his work that Wallenburg’s

biographer, Anton von Bianchi, reported that, on his deathbed, he said, “I only wish to prolong

my life so that I can see our country recover from the blows delivered by the scourge of war, to

realize the education of my children, and to finish and see my Šāhnāma printed.”156 Bianchi

honored him appropriately in the biography’s opening pages, with an elaborate engraving of his

154 HHStA, Stk Interiora 56, “Bericht Ueber die K.K. Akademie der orientalischen Sprachen”: “überaus

groß, so daß er zur Verwunderung der Sprachkundigen schon liest, und etwas schreibt”; “Ist das

frömmste, biegsamste, emsigste Kind, so wie man es wünschen kann”.

155 On Wallenberg, see Bianchi, ed., Notice sur le Schàh’-Namé de Ferdoussì (Vienna: Degen, 1810).

Bianchi offers here (6-8) a description of Wallenbourg’s lost translation of Rūmī: “Il avoit porté, selon sa

coutume, dans la traduction de cet ouvrage, la fidélité du texte jusqu’au dernier scrupule. Il conservoit

par-là dans leur intégrité les traits originaux, ainsi que la nouveauté des idées, l’énergie des expressions,

et la fraîcheur du coloris vierge encore; mais, pour éviter toutefois le risque de devenir fastidieux ou

barbare par un assujettissement trop servile, il paraphrasoit en forme de notes ce qu’il étoit impossible de

rendre littéralement en françois, ainsi que tout ce qui avoit rapport aux moeurs, au caractère national, aux

localités, ou aux anciennes traditions persannes. Ces notes renfermoient en même tems l’interprétation

des mots et des tournures qui ne trouvent qu’incomplètement, ou point de tout, dans les dictionnaires qui

sont à la portée de nos orientalistes; et sous ce rapport elles devoient servir et de commentaire et de

glossaire à tout le Messnévi: vraie méthode de rendre aussi agréable qu’instructive la traduction de pareils

ouvrages, à tant d’égards si différens des nôtres.”

156 Bianchi, ed., Notice sur le Schàh’-Namé de Ferdoussì, 14.“Je ne désire pouvoir prolonger ma vie […]

que pour voir notre patrie se relever des coups que le fléau de la guerre lui a portés, pour achever

l’éducation de mes enfans, et pour terminer et voir sortir de la presse mon Schàh-namé.”

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portrait, flanked by two cypress trees, framed by ornament characteristic of Islamic manuscripts.

In the cartouche, two lines of Persian praise Wallenburg as a scholar and a man: “True scholars

lament the man of letters / The truly wise lament the good man”.157

Another notable diplomat-scholar who cut his teeth on the Meninski project was Franz

von Dombay (1758-1810), who was later sent to Morocco to compile a dictionary of Moroccan

Arabic.158 Perhaps the most influential graduate from this period is one of its more forgotten:

Thomas Chabert (1766-1841). The son of a dragoman in Istanbul, Chabert studied at the

academy in the mid-to-late 1780s, after which the new director, Franz Höck, hired him to teach

advanced language instruction.159 Chabert’s tenure, which lasted almost thirty years, until 1817,

marked the high point for the academy as a training ground of orientalist scholars. Class

schedules and memoranda also suggest that a comprehensive curriculum for language study was

first developed around the time of Chabert’s appointment. In the years prior to 1788/1789,

advanced studies largely consisted of work on the Meninski dictionary, which took two forms:

unsupervised preparatory work excerpting and correcting in the first part of the day and

unspecified work in the evening under the supervision of the dragoman Franz von Klezl. The

description of other advanced students’ activities suggests a lack of order and supervision. For

157 Bianchi, ed., Notice sur le Schàh’-Namé de Ferdoussì. The lines present a challenge to the translator.

The Persian reads “ دانشمند ناالنند نیعلم و معرفت بر ارباب / The lords of“) “ انندیهنرمند گر نیبر لتیاصحاب کمال و فض

science and knowledge weep for this scholar / The possessors of perfection and excellence cry for this

artist”). Here translated according to Bianchi’s French translation, “Les vrais savans regrettent l’homme

de lettres, / Les vrais sages regrettent l’homme de bien”.

158 On Dombay, see Jan Schmidt, “Franz von Dombay, Austrian Dragoman at the Bosnian Border, 1792-

1800”, in Jan Schmidt, The Joys of Philology. Studies in Ottoman Literature, History and Orientalism

(1500-1923) (Istanbul: Isis, 2002), 2:75-151.

159 Weiss, Die kaiserlich-königliche orientalische Akademie zu Wien, 56 states that Chabert entered the

Academy in 1779 and became professor there in 1785, but both dates are too early. Chabert is still listed

is a student in Academic documents from the late 1780s, and appears to have been appointed professor at

roughly the same time as Hammer entered the school.

233

instance, it is specified that the students “must train themselves in translations from oriental

languages, in part from letters and other commercial writing, and in part from history books in

Arabic and Persian that are presented for this purpose, and they will hand in their work from time

to time to the Chancellery of State for inspection and judgment.”160 That no such translations

seem to have survived might indicate this work was insignificant and irregular.

In contrast, class schedules from the years around Chabert’s appointment demonstrate a

clear course of studies through advanced proficiency, using a combination of earlier orientalist

publications, Ottoman printed works, and manuscripts. A 1788 outline of the curriculum over

four years begins with the study of Turkish proverbs, Meninski, and Richardson’s Arabic

grammar, continuing through the study of native Arabic grammars, Fabritius’s edition of Ḥarīrī’s

Maqāmāt, Jones’s Poesios Asiatico Commentarii, Gentius’s Rosarium Politicum, and ending

with an introduction to Turkish written style.161

The curriculum continued to evolve, and similar outlines from 1791 and 1792 show a

turn toward the study of printed Ottoman histories.162 The 1791 outline specified that students

read and translate the Tārīḫ-i Fenāī, a Turkish translation of a Chagatai work by Mīr ʿAlī Şīr that

Kurzböck published in 1784-1785 (possibly as learning material for the academy) as well as

160 HHStA, Stk Interiora 56, “Entwurf der Tage und Stunden Vertheilung bey den Vorlesungen in der

Orientalischen Akademie”, [unpaginated]: “[…] müßen sich in Uebersetzungen aus der Orientalischen

Sprachen üben, und werden ihnen verschiedenen theils Briefe und andere Geschäffts Schrifften, theils

aber Geschichtsbücher in Arabisch und Persischer Sprache zu dem Ende vorgelegt werden, und haben

solche zur Einsicht und Beurtheilung von Zeit zu Zeit ihre Arbeiten und Uebersetzungen zu überreichen

an hiesige Staatskanzley.” Another schedule notes that “die vier älteren Eleven […] werden sich diese 3

Stunden hindurch mit orientalischen vorgelegten Wissenschaften beschäftigen, auch werden sie unter

dieser Zeit an bestimmten Tagen die Reitschul frequentieren.” (HHStA, StK, Interiora 56, fol. 186v).

161 HHStA, Stk Interiora 56, “Gegenstände der Vorleßung bey der Orientalischen Sprachen Akademie”,

fols 182r-183v. 162 HHStA, Stk Interiora 56, “Gegenstände der Vorlesungen bey der Orientalischen Sprachen Akademie”,

fols 158r-159v.

234

selections from two histories (those of Naʿīmā and Rāsid) published in Istanbul. It also

mentioned selections from the Turkish translation of the Kalila wa Dimna tales (Humāyūnnāme)

to be read after studying Gentius’s edition of the Gulistān.163 Another lesson plan from the same

year added the tales of Nasreddin Hoca and specified the number of “Divani Letters” to be read

each semester.164 To this the 1792 outline added the histories of Ṣubḥī and Izzī and the

introductory grammar from the printed Turkish-Persian dictionary, the Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī.

This curriculum seems to have remained relatively stable over the duration of Chabert’s

professorship, and is best summarized in an 1810 memorandum that describes in detail the

materials used in instruction:

In Turkish: a. Meninski’s grammar alongside some supplements from the director. b.

ṣarf, or Turkish grammar in Turkish. c., combined Arabic-Persian-Turkish grammar from

the writings of the director. d. Dialogues from Meninski’s language primer, and other

authors. e. fables and letters. f. proverbs and sayings, of which a considerable collection

is available in the academy. g. Turkish letters, commercial and diplomatic documents

written in Turkish chancellery handwriting (dīvānī), a large collection of which the

academy possesses, in both originals and copies. h. Tārīḫ-i Fenāī—Tārīḫ-i Naʿīmā—

Tārīḫ-i Rāşid—Turkish historians. i. Peace and trade treaties between Austria and the

Porte. k. Overview of the Ottoman state according to Mouradgea’s Tableau de l’empire

ottoman. l. Description of the Ottoman Empire from the writings of the Baron von

Jenisch.

2) In Arabic; a. the writings of the director. b. Erpenius’s Arabic grammar. c. ṣarf, or

Arabic primer, in which the rules of this language are explained from the main text by

two famous linguists, Ibn al-Masʿūd and Ibn al-Ḥāǧib, and determined exactly. d. Al-

Aǧurūmiyya, or Arabic syntax, in this language explained. e. Fables of Loqmān. f.,

Arabic anthology of Hirtius. g. Schultens’s life of Saladin. g. Suras, or a number of

chapters from the Qurʾan. i. Dombay’s Moroccan Grammar. k. Moroccan peace treaty.

3) In Persian: a. Dombay’s Persian grammar. b. Muqadimma, or grammatical treatise

from the Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī in Turkish. c. Muqadimma, or gramatical treatise from the

Burhān-i Qāṭiʿ, explained in Turkish. d. Proverbs, conversations, fables, anecdotes from

163 Mīr ʿAlī Şīr, Tārīḫ-i Fenāī (Vienna: Kurzböck, 1199 h. [1783]). https://reader.digitale-

sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10219865_00083.html] 164 HHStA, Stk Interiora 56, “Studienplan der orientalischen Sprachen für die Zöglinge der k.k.

orientalischen Akademie”, fols 68r-71v.

235

Dombay’s Persian grammar. e. Anthologia Persica, edited by the academy. f. Gulistān, or

Rose Garden of Sheykh Saʿdī, a Persian poet. g. Some odes of the Persian poet Ḥāfiẓ.

Students are also trained in deciphering the various oriental characters, among which

belong above all a., those forms of writing commonly used among the Turks; b. tuğra, or

monographs of sultans and vezirs; and c. inscriptions on stones, coins, and seals.165

Surviving student exercises confirm that this curriculum was implemented, and Latin translations

from Müteferriḳa’s edition of the history of Muṣṭafā Naʿīmā by students in the academy in the

1790s are now found in the library of Vienna’s Diplomatische Akademie (the successor to

165 HHStA, Stk Interiora 57, fols 145r-146v: “In der türkischen Sprache: a., Meninsky’s Gramatick nebst

einigen Zusätzen des Herrn Directors. b., ṣarf, oder türkische Grammatick in türkischer Sprache. c.,

combinirte arabisch-persisch-türkische Grammatick aus den Schriften des Herrn Directors. d., Dialogen

aus Meninsky’s Sprachlehre, und anderen Authoren. e., Fabeln, und Briefe. f., Sprüchwörter, und

Redensarten, wovon eine beträchtliche Sammlung in der Akademie vorhanden ist. g., türkische Briefe,

Geschäfts- und diplomatische Aufsätze in türkischer Kanzleyschrift (: Diwani :) geschrieben, daran die

Akademie eine große Sammlung theils an Originalien, theils an Kopien besitzt. h., Tarichi Fenaji—

Tarichi Naima—Tarichi Raschid;—Tarichi Wasif; türkische Geschichtsschreiber. i. Friedens und

Handlungs-Verträge zwischen Oesterreich, und der Pforte. k. Uebersicht des ottomanischen Staates nach

Mouradgea’s Tableau de l’empire ottoman. l., Staatskunde des Ottomanischen Reiches aus der Schriften

des Baron von Jenisch.

2.) In der arabischen Sprache; a., die Schriften des Herrn Directors. b., Erpenius arabische Grammatick. c.

ṣarf, oder arabische Sprachlehre, wodurch die Regeln dieser Sprache aus dem Grundtexte der berühmten

zwey Sprach Lehrer Ibnül-Mesud, und Ibnül Hadschib erläutert, und genau bestimmt werden. d.

Edschrumije, oder arabische Syntax, in eben dieser Sprache erkläret. e. Fabeln des Lockman. f. arabische

Anthologie des Hirtius. g. das Leben Saladins von Schultens. h. Suren, oder mehrere Kapital aus dem

Alkoran. i. Dombays mauritanische Grammatick. k. marokanischer Friedenstraktat.

3.) In der persischen Sprache: a. Dombay’s persische Sprachlehre. b. Mukaddema, oder

grammatikalischer Traktat aus dem Ferhengi Schuri in türkischer Sprache., c. Mukaddema, oder

grammatikalischer Traktat aus dem Burhani Katy, türkisch erklärt. d. Sprüchwörter, Gespräche, Fabeln,

Aneckdoten aus Dombays persischer Grammatick. e. Anthologia persica, von besagter Akademie

herausgegeben. f. Gülistan, oder Rosengarten des Scheich Saadi eines persischen Dichters. g. Einige

Oden des persischen Dichters Hafis.

Außerdem werden die Eleven auch in der Auflößung verschiedener orientalischer Karaktere geübt,

worunter vorzüglich a., die—bei den Türken gewöhnlichen Gattungen der Schriften; b. Tugra, oder

Monogrammen der Sultane, und Vesire; dann c. die Aufschriften auf Steinen, Münzen, und Insiegeln

gehören.”

236

Orientalische Akademie) and the John Rylands University Library in Manchester.166 Hammer

offers additional details on the library’s collection of Ottoman letters and documents in his

memoirs, where he describes how the school’s director, Franz Höck, amassed an enormous

database of Ottoman documents, organized by students of the academy:

In the following year I was occupied with the classification and ordering entrusted to me

of the large and estimable collection of the so-called Divan letters, that is, Turkish letters,

fermans, documents, and state writings, which, through the director’s constant attention,

abundantly streamed in from the sources of commerce reopened by peace. Once a

sufficient number were on hand, these were then glued onto pasteboard with wheat paste

by the students, dried, and then ordered into a particular box based on the organization

system that I designed.167

This collection is now missing, but the academy’s efforts to systematize the study of Ottoman

diplomatics can be seen in two manuscripts produced by students in the following decade. Each

include a selection of inscriptions and documents translated into Latin, as well as the copies of

the tuğras.168 A nineteenth-century inventory of the school’s collection shows that these

examples are only a portion of the considerable manuscript output of the Orientalische

Akademie’s students.169 Claudia Römer identified a number of these manuscripts in the library of

the Diplomatische Akademie and others are now held—like the diplomatics primers—in the

166 On the student translations of Naʿīmā, see Claudia Römer, “Latin Extracts from Naima’s History

translated by students at the ‘K.K. Akademie orientalischer Sprachen’, Vienna 1796”, in Pax Ottomana:

Studies in memoriam Prof. Dr. Nejat Göyünç, ed. Kemal Çiçek (Haarlem/Ankara: SOTA/Yeni Türkiye

Yayınları, 2001), 581-588. On Naʿīmā, see Lewis Thomas, A Study of Naima, ed. Norman Itzkowitz

(New York: New York University Press, 1972).

167 Hammer-Purgstall, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, 28: “Ich war im folgenden Jahre mit der mir

anvertrauten Klassifizierung und Ordnung der zahlreichen und schätzbaren Sammlung der sogenannten

Diwan-Briefe, das sind türkische Briefe, Fermane, Urkunden und Staatsschriften, beschäftigt, welche aus

den durch den Frieden wieder eröffneten Quellen des Verkehrs mit der Türkei durch des Direktors

beständige Fürsorge von allen Seiten reichlich zuströmten. Dieselben wurden, so oft eine hinlängliche

Menge vorhanden war, von den Zöglingen auf Pappendeckel mit Mehlpapp aufgekleistert, getrocknet und

dann nach dem von mir aufgestellten Einteilungssystem in die hierzu bestimmten Kisten eingeordnet.”

168 HHStA, OH 570, 571. 169 HHStA, OH Kat. 1, fols 41r-42v lists eighty “von Eleven der k.k. Orientalischen Akademie theils

übersetzte theils abgeschrieben Bücher”.

237

academy’s library of oriental manuscripts now stored at the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv in

Vienna. Still others remain to be found.

Joseph Hammer

The Orientalische Akademie at the turn of the nineteenth century—the institution that

trained Hammer and put him on stage in front of the Ottoman ambassador—was the culmination

of more than two centuries of pedagogical experimentation, and for the decades of Chabert’s

professorship it offered something without precedent: an elite Western European education with

Ottoman learning at its center. As the culmination of a long development in diplomatic language

schools, its program had emerged from the laboratory of the state—first in Istanbul, then Paris,

and, finally, Vienna—but it was never narrowly defined by the state’s interests, and the

atmosphere of learning was marked by an aspiration, not of intellectual mastery over a foreign

“other”, but of direct participation in an existing Ottoman—or, more broadly, Islamic—scholarly

tradition.

The sense of anticipation that surrounded learning at the academy is captured in an

observation by a former student, Albrecht Krafft, in his 1842 catalog of the school’s collection of

oriental manuscripts. Krafft noted that panels of Ottoman calligraphy, imperial edicts, and a

picture of the library of Meḥmed Rāġıb Pasa hung in the study room.170 The calligraphic panels

are preserved with the academy’s manuscripts and can be identified today by the pinholes in

170 Albrecht Krafft, Die arabischen, persischen und türkischen Handschriften der k.k. orientalischen

Akademie zu Wien (Vienna: P.P. Mechitaristen, 1842), 4, 6, 42.

238

their mountings (Figure 39), and while the picture of the library is no longer in the collection, it

was almost certainly an engraving from Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s Tableau général (Figure 40).

D’Ohsson’s engraving presented an idealized vision of Ottoman book culture: a vast, ornately

decorated interior with rows of learned men immersed in reading.171 At the same time, students

understood libraries depicted in d’Ohsson’s work for what they were—modern institutions of

learning. They would have been able to check the holdings of the Rāġıb Pasa library by

consulting the catalogs of Istanbul collections that had been made for their own academy

library.172

171 On d’Ohsson and his Tableau, see Carter Vaughn Findley, Enlightening Europe on Islam and the

Ottomans: Mouradgea d’Ohsson and His Masterpiece (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

172 HHStA, OH, mss 6-10.

239

Figure 39. HHStA, HO, Karton 42: Three panels from the school’s collection of Islamic calligraphy were

mounted on boards and hung on the wall of the academy’s study room. A note affixed to the back of one of

these panels identifies it as a gift to the school from Wallenburg.

240

Figure 40. Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau général: This image hung on the wall of the Orientalische

Akademie’s study room, offering an idealized vision of a real Ottoman library, whose catalog was found in the

academy library (PUL, 1789.658.11e).

241

It was in the academy’s study room that Ebū Bekir Rātib Efendi watched Hammer

perform physics experiments. Over time, the Orientalische Akademie’s study room had evolved

into a liminal space. In 1839, besides the edicts and calligraphic panels which decorated the

walls, portraits of the sultans hung next to portraits of Maria Theresa and the Kaiser.173 At that

point, the school’s library (with over 438 Islamic manuscripts and 163 Ottoman printed books),

was a major European collection (worthy of Krafft’s writing a catalog) with several manuscripts

of considerable importance, such as an important copy of Kašf al-ẓunūn which the Internuntius

Franz von Ottenfels-Geschwind (1778-1851) had given to the school.174 Like this manuscript,

much of the library had come from the gifts of earlier students, and their traces made it not only a

space of immersion in Ottoman learning, but a place of initiation in an imagined community of

scholars. The students browsing its shelves could pick up the volume of Rūmī’s poetry which

Valentin von Hussar (1788-1850) copied out by hand, or the dictionary gifted to the school from

a Turkish student of medicine in Istanbul who later became the Ottoman chief physician

(hekimbaşı).175

Throughout the nineteenth century, a distinct type of orientalist was trained in the this

room. The characteristics of this type were in evidence on the room’s walls and shelves: an

intellectual orientation towards Istanbul and an orientalizing aesthetic meant to evoke shared

173 Victor Weiß von Starkenfels, Die kaiserlich-königliche orientalische Akademie zu Wien, 45.

174 On the Orientalische Akademie Kašf al-ẓunūn (HHStA, ms Or HS 1), which Flügel used for his

edition, see Krafft, Die arabischen, persischen und türkischen Handschriften der k.k. orientalischen

Akademie zu Wien, 1-2. The copy of Kātib Çelebi’s work which Flügel copied out by hand is now LUB,

mss Vollers 9-12. HHStA, ms Or HS 1 illustrates how much orientalists relied on the invisible labor of

scribes, as the usefulness of the manuscript rested on the diligence of its scribe, who copied from Kātib

Çelebi’s autography copy and compared the work with other sources.

175 Hussar’s manuscript is now HHStA, ms Or HS 194. See Krafft, Die arabischen, persischen und

türkischen Handschriften der k.k. orientalischen Akademie zu Wien, 9-10: “Dieser Musztafa Mesu’ud

Efendi hatte in Wien die Medicin studiert und wurde nach seiner Rückkunft in Konstantinopel zum

Hofarzte, später an die Stelle seines Vaters zum Protomedicus daselbst befördert.”

242

participation in an elite Islamic cultural tradition. Joseph von Hammer exemplified both of these

aspects, and over a long, prolific career, Hammer carefully constructed his scholarly persona as a

mediator between an Islamic high culture and a European readership.176

While best remembered as the inspiration for Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, Hammer’s

path-breaking translation of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, its first complete translation in Western Europe,

was also the first major orientalist work produced (at least in part) at an Ottoman library. Its

genesis from Hammer’s training at the Orientalische Akademie shows the many hands at work in

the making of a mediator between literary traditions, a job which, for Hammer, ran both ways.

Just as he reviewed contemporary works from the Ottoman press for the Allgemeine Literatur-

Zeitung, he presented his own publications as gifts to sultans and shahs, and even translated

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations into Persian.177 At the heart of this process was Hammer’s

training at the Orientalische Akademie (whose long historical roots this chapter has traced), but it

was also a result of a concerted effort within German literature to recruit an expert orientalist, as

well as a product of the growing openness of Ottoman institutions to Western Europeans.

Hammer was born in 1774, the son of an upwardly mobile civil servant charged with

administering lands seized from the Jesuits after the suppression of their order in 1773. Although

176 Hammer’s focus on works of “high” literature and general disregard for folk traditions was noted

already in his time, and became one of the points of contention in the ongoing feud between him and

Heinrich Diez.

177 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣ ΕΑΥΤΟΝ / اشعه فانوس افانین در صبابای مارقوس انطونین (Vienna:

1831). One review noted that “such works will be more useful for the orientals than the Methodist tracts

which English missionaries disseminate in Eastern lands”. On Hammer’s translation, see Jeffrey

Einboden, “Stoicism or Sufism?: Hammer-Purgstall’s Persian Meditations”, Middle Eastern Literatures

13, no. 1 (2010): 49-68. The review is unsigned, “Übersetzung aus dem Griechischen in das Persische”,

Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung n.162 (2 July 1832), 1290: “Bey dem sich immer fester schlingenden

Verkehre der Morgen- und Abendländer ist es wohl an der Zeit, die Orientalen mit den classischen

Werken des occidentalischen Alterthums bekannt zu machen; und es ist nicht zu bezweifeln, dass

Uebersetzungen derselben für die Orientalen nützlicher seyn werden, als die methodistischen Tractate,

welche englische Missionare in den Morgenländern verbreiten.”

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he was part of a new academy cohort supposedly selected through a competitive admissions

process—students had to successfully complete a preparatory course before entering the

school—he was one of only two applicants for two spots. Hammer’s memoirs recount the daily

grind of life at the Orientalische Akademie, the only description of the workings of the school

from the perspective of a student:

At six o’ clock we got up and immediately assembled in the study room for the morning

prayer. After this pattered prayer we went to mass with the Dominicans, in the choir. The

hour from seven to eight was assigned for preparation for the lessons beginning at eight.

From eight to nine was the philosophical or juridical lecture, from nine to ten drawing

hour, namely technical drawing and civil and military architecture. From ten to eleven the

oriental lesson, from eleven to twelve French, from twelve to one was spent, three times a

week, in a writing lesson, and, the other three times, with the dance instructor or, for the

adults, in the riding school. Lunch was at one: five dishes at lunch and three at dinner, of

which admittedly not all were edible. The hour from two to three was free and could be

used for music instruction. From three to four the lesson in Philosophy, namely

Mathematics, Logic, Physics, and the course on law, from four to five Geography or

History, from five to six oriental languages, from six to seven the private lesson in

oriental languages, and from seven to eight review of Geography and History, from eight

to nine break, at nine supper, then rosary and evening prayer.178

It was a sign of Hammer’s success within this rigid program that several years later he could

perform physics experiments before the Ottoman ambassador, but the course his life took after

Rātib Efendi’s prophecy that he would “become a great man” was due to a single stroke of bad

178 Hammer-Purgstall, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, 22-23: “Um sechs Uhr ward aufgestanden und

sogleich im Studiersaale das Morgengebet gemeinschaftlich verrichtet. Nach diesem hergeplapperten

Gebete ward sogleich in die Messe zu den Dominikanern auf den Chor gegangen. Die Stunde von sieben

bis act war zur Vorbereitung zu den um acht beginnenden Lehrstunden bestimmt. Von acht bis neuen war

der philosophische oder juridische Vortrag, von neun bis zehn Zeichenstunde, namentlich

Situationszeichen und Zivil- und Militärarchitektur. Von zehn bis elf orientalische Lehrstunde, von elf bis

zwölf französische, von zwölf bis eins dreimal die Woche Schreibstunde, die anderen dreimal der

Tanzmeister und für Erwachsene die Reitschule. Um eins das Mittagmahl, fünf Speisen zu Mittag und

drei des Abends, davon freilich nicht alle eßbar. Die Stunde von zwei bis drei war frei und konnte zu

musikalischem Unterricht verwendet werden. Von drei bis vier Lehrstunde der Philosophie, nämlich

Mathematik, Logik, Physik, und des juridischen Kurses, von vier bis fünf Geographie oder Geschichte,

von fünf bis sechs orientalische Sprachen, von sechs bis sieben Privatstunde des Orientalischen, von

sieben bis acht Wiederholung der Geographie und Geschichte von acht bis neun Erholungsstunde, um

neun das Nachtmahl, dann der Rosenkranz und das Nachtgebet.”

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luck. The Orientalische Akademie had been all too successful in its goal of training

Sprachknaben, and Hammer was left waiting years in Vienna for a position to open up.

Hammer’s Literary Debut

To occupy his time during the five-year wait, Hammer took on tasks which were

formative to his scholarly and literary careers. The first of these was a commission to transcribe

and translate sections from Kātib Çelebi’s Kašf al-ẓunūn. Kātib Çelebi’s bibliography was the

foundation of much of Western European oriental studies, and, while Hammer’s translations

were published only later (as part of Hammer’s 1804 Encyklopädische Uebersicht der

Wissenschaften des Orients), studying Kātib Çelebi’s work was a crash course in the breadth of

Islamic letters, and it formed the basis for Hammer’s future studies.179 Even more decisive was

his encounter with the Swiss historian, Johannes Müller, then chief librarian at the imperial

library in Vienna, for whom Hammer worked as an assistant. Müller guided the young orientalist

as a scholar and a translator, and mediated Hammer’s contacts with the German literary scene.

One of the era’s outstanding mentors, Müller’s homoerotic inclinations were well known

enough that Hammer, in his memoirs, felt compelled to address Müller’s “grieschische

Liebhaberei” and its place in their mentorship relationship:

He was at that point busy completing the twenty-four books of his general history, and

requested permission from Jenisch and Stürmer that I be allowed to spend a few hours

with him in his apartment in the afternoon three times a week so that I could collate his

manuscript with him. The permission was given without a second thought, because back

then there was not the slightest suspicion of Müller’s griechische Liebhaberei, whose

excess forced Müller to leave Vienna seven years later. Soon enough there was no doubt

179 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Enzyklopädische Uebersicht der Wissenschaften des Orients, aus sieben arabischen, persischen und türkischen Werken übersetzt (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1804).

See Hammer, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, 29.

245

about the most repellent tenderness in Müller’s repeated hugs; I quickly broke the ice

with an unambiguous declaration of my decidedly anti-Greek taste and forbade myself

any further physical contact, should I repeat my visits and not lessen my admiration and

gratitude for the literary confidence he had shown me. This he promised, although he

only held fast to his oath after I fended off his inappropriately straying hand with good

smacks from an iron ruler.180

Hammer assisted Müller on his universal history (never completed, but published in part after his

death), and Müller, in turn, helped Hammer network and craft his persona as a mediator of

foreign literature.181 What did it mean to present Near Eastern works to a German readership?

What was the work of the translator? Hammer’s earliest published efforts, pamphlets for the

circle of students and statesmen around the Orientalische Akademie, find Hammer answering

these questions by employing a clumsy eroticizing metaphor for the orientalist’s contribution to

German letters, exhorting the reader in his 1796 “An die Freunde der Literatur” (an occasional

poem dedicated to Jenisch) to “break open the palaces / abduct the beckoning Graces / of

Knowledge from the harems!”182

180 Hammer, Erinnerungen, 30: “Er war damals mit der Vollendung seiner 24 Bücher allgemeiner

Geschichte beschäftigt und erbat sich von Jenisch und Stürmer die Erlaubnis, daß ich dreimal in der

Woche ein paar Nachmittagsstunden in seiner Wohnung mit ihm zubringen dürfe, um mit ihm die

Abschrift zu kollationieren. Dies wurde unbedenklich erlaubt, denn damals hatte man noch nicht den

geringsten Verdacht von Müllers griechischer Liebhaberei, deren Übermaß ihn sieben Jahre später Wien

zu verlassen zwang. Mir war schon beim ersten Besuche die wiederholte Umarmung auffallend und

unangenehm. Gar bald konnte ich an der widerlichsten Zärtlichkeit von Müllers wiederholten

Umarmungen nicht zweifeln; ich brach schnell das Eis durch meine ganz unumwundene Erklärung

meines ganz antigriechischen Geschmackes und verbat mir, wenn ich meine Besuche wiederholen und

meine Bewunderung und Dankbarkeit für das mir geschenkte literarische Zutrauen sich nicht mindern

sollte, alle weiteren Annäherungen. Er gab das Versprechen, hielt es aber erst dann unverbrüchlich,

nachdem ich die sich unanständig verirrende Hand des Meisters mit tüchtigen Schlägen eines eisernen

Lineals abgewehrt hatte.” On Müller as mentor, see “Excurs: Johannes von Müller als Förderer junger

Talente—August Ferdinand Lindau”, in Bonstettens Niederlassung in Genf, Le Groupe de Coppet, eds

Doris Walser-Wilhelm, Peter Walser-Wilhelm, and Anja Höfler, volume 9/2 of Bonstettiana:

Briefkorrespondenzen Karl Victor von Bonstettens und seines Kreises (Wallstein: Göttingen, 2002), 878-

922.

181 Müller’s history remained unfinished at his death, but portions were later published as Johannes von

Müller, Vier und zwanzig Bücher allgemeiner Geschichten besonders der Europäischen Menschheit, ed.

Johann Georg Müller, 3 vols (Tübingen: Cotta, 1810).

182 Joseph von Hammer, “An die Freunde der Literatur”, Neue teutsche Merkur, (November, 1796), 311.

246

Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), the editor of the Neue teutsche Merkur, used his

platform to make a more sophisticated case for Hammer’s literary pursuits. Müller had given

Hammer’s work to Wieland, who soon published the young orientalist in his journal. Hammer’s

first translation in the Neue teutsche Merkur was a literary curiosity, a poetic enumeration of sin,

rich in cultural detail, which Hammer found appended to a commentary on the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī

(the same Turkish-Persian dictionary the jeunes de langues translated), which he called “Of the

Last Things: A Turkish Poem” (Von den letzten Dingen: Ein türkisches Gedicht).183 The article

is notable for the long footnote Wieland appended to Hammer’s translation. The note was a

forceful attempt to wrest the young talent from his diplomatic duties and win him for the cause

of literature. Wieland’s appeal to his readers, and indirectly to Hammer’s superiors, helps clarify

the stakes of Hammer’s literary career:

Everyone will be able to sense that we are talking here about a real translation from

Turkish and not an orientalizing fabrication from the West. May the author, who

combines rare gifts with a rare knowledge of literature more broadly and the languages of

the Orient in particular, become for our fatherland, what William Jones—admittedly

under a different constellation than could shine down on any mortal on this side of the

channel—has been to the Brits! The superb Imperial Library in Vienna contains,

according to the admission of experts, so many unused oriental treasures—indeed, works

about which we know little more than the title—such that they might offer, just as the

royal library in Paris once did, some excerpts from oriental manuscripts in multiple

volumes.184

183 Joseph von Hammer, “Von den letzten Dingen: Ein türkisches Gedicht,” Neue teutsche Merkur (July

1796): 225-238.

184 Hammer, “Von den letzten Dingen”, 225n: “Daß hier von einer wirklichen Uebersetzung aus dem

Türkischen, und von keiner morgenländischen Erdichtung im Abendlande die Rede sey, wird jeden sein

eignes Gefühl lehren. Möge der Verfasser, der mit seltenen Fähigkeiten seltene Kenntnisse in der

Literatur überhaupt, und besonders in den Sprachen des Orients, verbindet, unserm Vaterlande das

werden, was William Jones, freylich unter einer Konstellation, die diesseits des Kanals kaum einen

Sterblichen leuchten kann, den Britten gewesen ist! Die vortreffliche kaiserliche Bibliothek zu Wien

enthält, nach dem Geständnisse aller Urtheilsfähigen, so viel ungebrauchte, kaum dem Titel nach

gekannte morgenländische Schätze, daß sie, so gut als einst die königliche zu Paris, einige Auszüge aus

orientalischen Handschriften in mehreren Bänden darböte.“

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Wieland situated Hammer’s promise in a system of intra-European emulation and rivalry. The

young Austrian orientalist, he implied, had the potential to become a German William Jones or

Sylvestre de Sacy (whose Notices et extraits de la Bibliothèque du Roi Wieland referenced here).

After appealing to Hammer’s superiors that “such a man may be forever won over to the sciences

and the arts”, Wieland ended with a gesture toward our common humanity: “It is hardly worth

pointing out that the Turkish mythology laid out here offers a nice proof of the observation che

tutto il mondo è fatto come la nostra famiglia [that all the world is made like our family]”.185 In

the years that followed, Wieland made good on his promise to work Hammer’s translations into

the program of his journal. Hammer published translations from Persian and Turkish poets, an

excerpt from al-Qazvīnī’s ʿAǧāʾib al-maḫlūqāt (The Wonders of Creation), and a Horatian ode to

French orientalists (which dared to rhyme “faisant naitre l’occasion” with “Anquetil

Duperron”).186

When Hammer finally traveled to Istanbul as a Sprachknabe, letters from Müller attest to

the Swiss historian’s continuing mentorship role. As Hammer began work on the most enduring

product of his prolific early years, his translation of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, Müller, with whom

Hammer corresponded in French, offered advice on the role of the translator:

185 Hammer, “Von den letzten Dingen”, 225-226n: “Der Herausgeber konnte hierbey nur seine eigene

Empfindung und den Wunsch nicht unterdrücken, daß ein solcher Mann auf immer den Wissenschaften

und Musenkünsten gewonnen werden möge, so wie es ihm nicht gleichgültig seyn kann, wenn der

Merkur auch in der Folge noch oft mit dergleichen exoticis, die Farbenschmelz mit Wohlgeruch

verbinden, beschenkt werden sollte. Es müssen noch lieblichere Blumen unter einem Himmel düften, wo

die Natur einen ewigen Frühling feyert et in urna perpetuum ver. Kaum bedarf es übrigens eines

Fingerzeigs, daß die hier vorgetragene türkische Mythologie einen schönen Beleg zu der Beobachtung

liefert: che tutto il mondo è fatto come la nostra famiglia.”

186 Joseph von Hammer, “Orientalische Sagen. Auszüge aus dem Adschaibul-Machlukat”, Neue teutsche

Merkur (June 1797): 93-108; Joseph von Hammer, “Les Orientalistes français: Ode imitée d’Horace. Ode

12, LI”, Neue teutsche Merkur (March 1798): 317-322. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-

1805) was a French orientalists best known for his translation of the Avesta.

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How charmed I am by what you tell me of Ḥāfiẓ. To introduce a great poet like him, like

Saʿdī, like Firdousī (on whom Ludolf is hard at work) into the circle of European

literature is to associate yourself with his merit and with his glory. I truly hope that one

day you will give us such a present: no one is more suited to the task. A poet can only be

translated poetically, and—it follows—by a fellow poet (son semblable). That is why we

have translations of the Psalms and the prophets that are so unworthy of the sublime

beauties of the originals. There is only Herder who has the talent to render them as they

are. Mendelson, although Jewish, less so, because the poetic fire did not warm his

speculative head.187

Müller’s advice clarifies both the stakes of Hammer’s planned translation and its potential

pitfalls. A translation of the entire Dīvān was ambitious, a promise to make good on Wieland’s

suggestion that Hammer’s name might one day be uttered alongside Jones and de Sacy. It was

also a particularly tantalizing object for an orientalist. Few works were more prominent in

Persian literature, and a long exegetical tradition from Istanbul to India had furnished numerous

commentaries for orientalists to use. At least one orientalist, Levinus Warner, had worked

through the entire text with the help of Ottoman commentaries, though the Latin paraphrases

scattered throughout his notes from the reading likely only served to clarify the orientalist’s

understanding of the original Persian.188 That Antoine Galland considered translating the Dīvān

is clear from the Latin translations that grace the margins of portions of his copy of a Turkish

187 Johannes Müller to Joseph von Hammer, 1 November 1799, in Walter Höflechner, Alexandra Wagner,

and Gerit Koitz-Arko, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall: Briefe, Erinnerungen, Materialien, Version 2

(https://gams.uni-graz.at/context:hp), 2:75-76: “Que je suis charmé de ce que vous me dites de Hafyz

d’introduire un grand poète comme lui, comme Sadi, comme Ferdousi (auquel Ludolf travaille à force)

dans le cercle de la littérature européenne, c’est s’associer à son mérite et à sa gloire. Je souhaite

beaucoup qu’un jour vous nous fassiez un tel present: personne y est plus propre. Un poète ne peut

qu’être traduit que poétiquement, et par conséquent par son semblable: c’est pourquoi nous avons des

psaumes et des prophètes des traductions si peu dignes des sublimes beautés des originaux: il n’y a que

Herder qui ait le talent de les rendre tels qu’ils sont; Mendelson, quoique juif, bien moins, parce que le feu

poétique n’échauffoit pas sa tête spéculative.”

188 Warner’s notes are divided between UBL, mss or. 1156b and or. 1118, and are similar in format to the

notes from his reading of the Gulistān shown in Figure 17. On the early reception of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ,

see Inan, “Crossing Interpretive Boundaries in Sixteenth-Century Istanbul”.

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commentary on the work, but there is no indication he ever entertained plans to publish.189 Only

bits of Ḥāfiẓ had found their way into print. In his 1680 grammar, for instance, Meninski had

explicated the Dīvān’s opening poem following Sūdī’s commentary.190 No doubt, the orientalists

who had given up on translating Ḥāfiẓ had something like Müller’s words in mind: a poet can

only be translated by son semblable. More than any other author, Ḥāfiẓ made demands on the

poetic qualities of translation.

Around 1770, Ḥāfiẓ quickly won a prominent place in orientalist letters through the work

of two scholars: Karl Reviczky (1737-1793) and William Jones (1746-1794).191 In a letter to

Jones, Reviczky, a Hungarian diplomat who had served for some time in Istanbul, recounted how

he, like many orientalists before him, had first encountered Persian literature through his hoca in

Istanbul:

Indeed, I should say, my interest in oriental letters was first imparted by reading this

strophe from Saʿdī’s Gulistān which, by chance, my teacher in Istanbul recited and

explained:

داری خور وظیفه ترسا و کبر غیب خزانه از که کریمی ای

داری نظر دشمنان با که تو محروم کنی کی دوستانرا

[O bountiful one from whose unseen treasure house both Zoroastrian and Christian are

fed,

How could you, who gaze with favor upon your enemies, deprive your friends?]

189 BnF, ms Turc 277.

190 Meninski, Thesaurus linguarum orientalium, 189. 191 On Reviczky, see Michael O’Sullivan, “A Hungarian Josephenist, Orientalist, and Bibliophile: Count

Karl Reviczky, 1737-1793”, Austrian History Yearbook 45 (2014): 61-88.

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But who could not feel indignation that this most elegant writer was put into Latin by as

inelegant a translator as, in my opinion, Gentius.192

It was, above all, Ḥāfiẓ who occupied Reviczky’s subsequent studies, and, like Warner and

Meninski before him, he read the Dīvān with the help of Sūdī’s Turkish commentary. Sūdī also

furnished material for the notes in Reviczky’s translations. In the introduction to his 1773

Specimen poesos Persicae, which included the first sixteen poems of the Dīvān, Reviczky drew a

contrast within the Ottoman exegetical tradition between Şemʿī and Sürūrī, who “adorn the

author’s text with grammatical and critical notes, and attempt, by means of various suspect

conjectures, to restore to orthodoxy those passages that are suspect and contrary to the beliefs of

the Muslims”, and Sūdī, who “everywhere fiercely attacks Şemʿī and Sürūrī” and “disregards all

the lofty and hidden mystical meanings of the poems”.193 An error in Reviczky’s account (the

192 English translation of verse from Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 1. I’ve corrected here

several errors in the Persian of Teignmouth’s edition, although it is unclear whether any of them might

reflect Reviczky’s own. Karl Reviczky to William Jones, 7 March 1768, in John Teignmouth, ed.,

Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, 2nd edition (London: Hatchard,

1806), 417: “Immo scire te volo, mihi primum stimulum additum fuisse ad Orientales literas per

discendas hâc Sadii strophâ, quam fortuitò didascalus meus Constantinopoli recitavit et interpretatus est:

تو که بادشمنان نظر داری –کی کنی محروم کبر و ترسا وطفه حور داری / وستانرا –غیب ه ای کریمی که از خزان Sed quis non

indignetur lepidissimum scriptorem, à tam illepido metaphraste, quàm fuit meâ sententiâ Gentius,

Latinitate donatum.”

193 Karl Reviczky, Specimen poeseos Persicae, sive Muhammedis Schems-eddini notioris agnomine Haphyzi Ghazelae, sive odae sexdecim ex initio Divani depromptae: nunc primum latinitate donatae, cum

metaphrasi ligata et soluta, paraphrasi item ac notis (Vienna: Kaliwoda, 1771), XLVIII: “Haphyz

Schirazius complures interpretes nactus est apud Turcas: praecipui sunt Ahmed Feridun, qui ghazelas

hasce in mystico sensu acceptas explicuit, et de quo jam supra affatim dictum. Sururius item ac Schemius,

qui Scholiis grammaticis et criticis textum auctoris adornarunt, et variis etiam conjecturis suspectas, et

Moslemorum opinionibus adversantes sententias ad orthodoxiam revocare sunt conati. Sed palmam

omnibus praeripuit Sudius, scholiastarum gentis illius facile princeps, qui non hunc tantum, sed

praecipuos quosque persicos Poëtas notis doctissimis illustravit quive Schemium et Sururium acerrime

ubivis impugnat, nonnunquam tamen aemulationis potius quam veritatis studio. Hic posthabitis omnibus

de sublimi et abstruso carminum sensu somniis, nihil aliud pensi habuit, quam ut nudam et omnis

aenigmatis expertem auctoris phrasin verbis dilucidis explicaret, ideo et mihi praeplacuit, loca dubia et

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inclusion of a non-existent commentary writer) suggests that he might have been less familiar

with this tradition than he claimed, pulling his information largely from Sūdī’s preface and

d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale.194 Reviczky’s insight, however, was to read Sūdī against the

grain, and to subtly conscript the Ottoman commentary writer into his own novel reading of the

Persian poet. Ḥāfiẓ’s transgressive verse, with its taverns and blasphemies, had long been

understood in relation to the poet’s use of mystical allegory. Without rejecting allegorical

readings of Ḥāfiẓ, Sūdī had deliberately foregone the explanation of the Dīvān’s mystical

meaning in order to focus specifically on its language. Reviczky went one step further, rejecting

the mystical interpretation entirely, as a mere ploy to avoid the censors. He wrote to Jones:

As for myself, as much as I’m inclined to believe that Ḥāfiẓ, in speaking of wine and of

love, does not intend any subtleties, I also must admit that I do not find any obscenities in

him, nor any base and vulgar expressions, as often happens in Saʿdī. Nor can I help but

obscura ad illius mentem explanare.” (There are many interpreters of Ḥāfiẓ found among the Turks: in

particular Aḥmed Ferīdūn, who explicates these ghazals according to their mystical meaning, about which

enough has been said already, and Sürūrī and Şemʿī, who adorned the author’s text with grammatical and

critical notes, and attempted, by means of various suspect conjectures, to restore to orthodoxy those

passages that are suspect and contrary to the beliefs of the Muslims. But it is Sūdī who snatched the palm,

easily the first among the scholiasts of this people. He elucidates not only Ḥāfiẓ but also the other main

Persian poets with the most learned notes, and everywhere fiercely attacks Şemʿī and Sürūrī, sometimes

out of rivalry rather than zeal for the truth. Disregarding all of the fantasies about the lofty and hidden

mystical meaning of the poems, he puts no value on anything but explaining in clear language the sense

of the author simply and without obscure terms. For this reason I’ve chosen to explain difficult and

obscure passages according to his interpretation.)

194 Reviczky must have cribbed his information about the commentary of “Aḥmed Ferīdūn” from

d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, which in its entry on Ḥāfiẓ explains that this commentary writer

“Ahmed Feridoun a expliqué en langue Turquesque ces mysteres, & a fait une allegorie perpetuelle des

termes de vin & d’amour qui s’y rencontrent aux transports d’une ame devote attachée à la conduite d’un

Directeur spirituel, & éclairé, qui la mene par des voyes bien élevées jusqu’au sommet de la perfection”

(“makes a perpetual allegory of the expressions of wine and love which come together in the ecstasies of

a devout soul under the guidance of an enlightened spiritual director, who leads it through lofty paths to

the summit of perfection.” D’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 416). However, there was no such

commentary writer, and D’Herbelot’s account probably rests on a misreading of a line of Persian verse to

Şemʿī’s patron that ends the preface to his commentary. Inan provides the line (with English translation)

in Inan, “Writing a Grammatical Commentary on Hafiz of Shiraz”, 126-127 (transliteration); 146-146

(translation): “ - دونستیاحمد لقب فر نامش هر که دارد عداوتش دونست ” (“His name is Ahmad, and his epithet is

Faridun / Whoever is hostile to him is a wicked man.”). Whether d’Herbelot took this information from

another source is unclear.

252

see him as a freethinker (esprit fort), and I could cite a hundred examples to show that he

mocks the prophet and the Qurʾan […]195

Reviczky’s Latin Specimen remained obscure, but his correspondent Jones soon popularized

Reviczky’s vision of Ḥāfiẓ as a secular love poet through his own translations.

Jones deftly wove the most celebrated of these translations, A Persian Song (based on a

ghazal which Reviczky had mentioned in their correspondence), into the fabric of his Persian

Grammar. He introduced it first in the original Persian with a transliteration, but without any

translation, as an exercise in reading Persian letters.196 He then returned to the ghazal at the end

of his grammar, offering a literal translation into English.197 It was only after this literal

translation that Jones then introduced his famous translation of the poem into verse, moved, he

says, by its “wildness and simplicity”.198 The poem’s first stanza captures the transformation of

Ḥāfiẓ into a pastoral poet:

Sweet maid, if thou wouldst charm my sight,

And bid these arms thy neck enfold;

That rosy cheek, that lily hand

Would give thy poet more delight

Than all Bocára’s vaunted gold,

Than all the gems of Samarcand.199

This image of Ḥāfiẓ proved enduring, and discussions of the poet in Western Europe were

thereafter framed by the supposed controversy between literal and allegorical interpretations of

195 Karl Reviczky to William Jones, 24 February 1768, in John Teignmouth, ed., Memoirs of the Life,

Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, 413: “Quant à moi, tout autant que je suis porté à

croire que Hafyz en parlant du vin et de l’amour n’entend point finesse en cela, de même je dois avouer

que je ne trouve point des obscénités en lui, ni des expressions sales et grossières, comme cela arrive

assez souvent à Sadi. Je ne puis m’empêcher non plus de le regarder comme un esprit fort, et je pourrois

citer cent exemples, pour montrer qu’il se moque du prophète et de l’Alcoran”.

196 William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London: Richardson, 1771), 10-14.

197 Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language, 135-136.

198 Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language, 137.

199 Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language, 137.

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his work.200 The dual success of Jones’s translation as an illustration of the Persian language and

as poetry helped secure Ḥāfiẓ’s place as both an object of study and a test of the translator’s

poetic mettle. In the years that followed, a number of amateur orientalists who first learned the

language through Jones’s Persian Grammar later tried their hands at their own translations from

the Dīvān.201

It was one thing to make a selection for translation, and another to take on the entire work,

and Hammer’s project promised to be a major achievement. The extent of Hammer’s exposure to

the work at the Orientalische Akademie is uncertain, but the Dīvān was later listed among the

works studied at the school, and an 1810 Turkish play by Chabert performed there includes two

scenes of reading the Dīvān.202 In one, students acted out a scene of Sufi exegesis (likely inspired

by study of a Turkish commentary) as a sheykh commented on one of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals. In

another, they performed the Fāl-i Ḥafiẓ (Divination of Ḥafiẓ), a bibliomantic operation using the

Dīvān.203

200 Perhaps the most original reading of this “controversy” was by Goethe, who, in one of his Divan

poems (“Open Secret” (Offenbar Geheimnis))—written after reading Jones’s Poeseos Asiaticae

commentariorum libri sex—proposed that Ḥāfiẓ was “mystically pure” (mystisch rein) precisely because

he was misread: „Mystisch heißest du ihnen, / Weil sie närrisches bey dir denken, / Und ihren unlautern

Wein / In deinen Namen verschenken // Du aber bist mystisch rein / Weil sie dich nicht verstehn, / Der

du, ohne fromm zu seyn, selig bist! / Das wollen sie dir nicht zugestehn.“ (For them you are called

mystical because they think foolish things of you and pass their illicit wine around in your name. But you

are mystically pure because they do not understand you—you who without being pious, are blessed! They

will never concede you that.). Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 11.1.2:26-27. Translation from Goethe, West-

Eastern Divan, trans. Eric Ormsby (London: Gingko, 2019), 59.

201 For instance, John Nott, trans., کتاب اللهزار از د یوان حافظ Select Odes, from the Persian Poet Hafez, Translated into English Verse, with Notes Critical, and Explanatory (London: Cadell, 1787); John

Hindley, trans., Persian Lyrics, or Scattered Poems, from the Diwan-i Hafiz: with Paraphrases in Verse

and Prose, a Catalogue of the Gazels as Arranged in a Manuscript of the Works of Hafiz in the Chetham

Library at Manchester, and other Illustrations (London: Oriental Press, 1800).

202 Thomas Chabert, Hadgi Bektache ou La création des Janissaires, Drame en langue Turque en trois

actes (Vienna: Schmid, 1810).

203 Chabert, Hadgi Bektache, 13-14.

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In Istanbul, Hammer had access to the commentaries that informed his translation. His

use of these commentaries is all the more remarkable because he studied them in a new Ottoman

library. Hammer described his workday after arriving in Istanbul in 1799:

I went to sleep at nine and woke up at four. I devoted the first three hours of the day to

writing and study. Now these belonged to the translation of Ḥāfiẓ which I had already in

part begun and now completed during the first four months of my stay in Istanbul. From

seven to ten I completed the work assigned to me for the chancellery, took then my hours

with the hoca, the Turkish instructor of the Sprachknaben at the embassy, and went after

that to the library of ʿAbdü’l-Ḥamīd on the other side of the harbor [i.e. across the Golden

Horn] where Herr von Vollenburg had introduced me, or I accompanied him on his

business so that I could get to know the city. Around four o’clock was a meal at the place

of the Internuntius, and I spent the evening hours in society. My research and studies at

the library concerned the humanistic sciences (die humanistischen Wissenschaften) and

literature, as much due to taste and inclination as to the fact that I could obtain works of

this sort without the difficulties I would have certainly run into if I had requested

diplomatic or juridical manuscripts. I investigated all of the sources of Ottoman histories,

anthologies, and biographies of poets, the titles of which I knew from Ḥācī Ḫalīfe [Kātib

Çelebi]. In no other library where I later worked did I do it with such zeal and blessed

edification as in the ʿAbdü’l-Ḥamīd library.204

The library Hammer visited belonged to the Ḥamīdiye complex, which, as Ünver Rüstem has

shown, was erected under Sultan ʿAbdü’l-Ḥamīd I in the late 1770s as a new kind of sultanic

complex without a congregational mosque, whose host of other buildings—public kitchen

(imaret), fountain (sebil), madrasa, masjid, shops, library—were not walled off, as in earlier

204 Hammer-Purgstall, Erinnerungen, 46: “Ich ging um neun Uhr schlafen und stand um vier Uhr auf. Die

drei ersten Stunden des Tages widmete ich schriftstellerischer Arbeit und Studien. Jetzt gehörten sie der

Übersetzung des ‘Hafis’, die ich zum Teil schon versucht und jetzt während der ersten vier Monate

meines Aufenthaltes in Konstantinopel vollendete. Von sieben bis zehn Uhr vollendete ich die mir

zugeteilte Arbeit für die Kanzlei, nahm dann meine Stunden beim Chodsch, dem türkischen Lehrer der

Sprachknaben bei der Gesandtschaft, und ging darauf in die gleich auf der anderen Seite des Hafens

gelegene Bibliothek Abdul Hamids, in der mich Herr von Vollenburg eingeführt hatte, oder begleitete ihn

auf seinen Geschäftsgängen, um das Innere der Stadt kennenzulernen. Um vier Uhr war Tafel beim

Internuntius, und die Abendstunden verbrachte ich in der Gesellschaft. Meine Forschungen und Studien

in der Bibliothek betrafen die humanistischen Wissenschaften und die schöne Literatur ebenso aus

Geschmack und Neigung wie aus dem Grunde, weil ich Werke dieser Art ohne Schwierigkeiten erhielt,

die mir sicher begegnet wären, wenn ich diplomatische oder juridische Handschriften verlangt hätte. Ich

forschte allen Quellen osmanischer Geschichte, Anthologien und Dichterbiographien nach, deren Titel ich

aus Hadschi Chalfa kannte. In keiner Bibliothek, wo ich später gearbeitet, tat ich es mit solchem Eifer und

seliger Erbauung wie in der Abdul Hamids.”

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complexes, but faced the street, integrated into the surrounding city.205 As a result, the complex’s

library offered unprecedented access to a broader public, and became the first major Ottoman

library freely accessible to Western European scholars, an openness echoed in the verse on the

door of the library that greeted Hammer each day:

The dwelling and mess hall of books is open

So that students may strive in the pursuit of knowledge.206

Hammer later observed that it was also “on account of both its proximity and the helpfulness of

the custodians” that the library was “the most accessible and usable” for the residents of Pera and

Galata.207 The ʿAbdü’l-Ḥamīd library, which no longer exists, was depicted—like the Rāġib Pasa

library, whose image hung in the Orientalische Akademie study room—in Mouradgea

d’Ohsson’s Tableau général (Figure 41). Hammer captured the experience of this unprecedented

institutional openness in a remarkable description of his days working alongside Muslim scholars

at the library:

When the noon prayer was called out, all of the readers left their places, and positioned

themselves in rows facing the qibla, with one of the custodians stepping forward as imam

to perform the prayer. Such practice of religion without bothering the European—who

took no part himself—is a proof that study here does not diminish devotion and, at the

same time, religious tolerance is nourished.208

As Hammer explained in the preface to his translation of the Dīvān, it was here that he consulted,

205 See Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 234.

206 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Constantinopolis und der Bosporos, örtlich und geschichtlich

beschrieben, 2 vols (Pest: Hartleben, 1822), XXII-XXIII: “mesken-ü meʾkel-i kütüb aḥāda dır ʿaẕr

ėtmeyüb / ṭālibān taḥṣīl-i ʿilm eylesin saʿy ferīd”

207 Hammer, Constantinopolis und der Bosporos, 1:522: “Von allen Bibliotheken der Hauptstadt ist diese

sowohl wegen der Nähe der Lage, als wegen der Gefälligkeit der Custoden die für den in Galata oder Pera

gerade gegenüber im Hafen wohnenden Europáer die zugänglichste und benützbarste.”

208 Hammer, Constantinopolis und der Bosporos, 1:522-523. “Wenn das Gebeth um Mittag ausgerufen

wird, verlassen alle Leser ihre Sitze, und stellen sich mit dem Gesichte gegen die Kibla in Reihen, denen

einer der Custoden als Imam vortritt, um das Gebeth zu verrichten; und solche Religionsübung ohne

Störung des an derselben keinen Theil nehmenden Europäers ist ein schöner Beweis, dass hier durch das

Studium die Andacht nicht vermindert und zugleich religiöse Duldung genährt wird.“

256

in addition to the work of Sūdī, the commentaries of Şemʿī and Sürūrī.209 Like Reviczky and

Jones, he framed the difference between these commentaries in terms of a reading of Ḥāfiẓ as an

“anakreontic or Catullic” poet.210

Figure 41. The engraving from d’Ohsson's Tableau général of the library of ʿAbdü’l-Ḥamīd, where Hammer

studied Ottoman commentaries on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ (PUL, 1789.658.11e).

209 Hammer, Der Diwan von Hafis, 1:IV. Hammer says here that he owned a copy of Sūdī’s commentary.

210 Hammer, Der Diwan von Hafis, 1:V: “Die meisten ähnlichen Stellen schienen dem Uebersetzer so

wenig mystisch, ja vielmehr so ganz anakreontisch, oder katullisch, daß er ähnliche Parallelstellen aus

griechischen und lateinischen Dichtern, so weit sein Gedächtniß zureichte, immer mit anzuführen für

ersprießlich hielt”.

257

It took a decade for Hammer’s translation to make it into print (its two volumes appeared

in 1812-13), but it found its way soon thereafter into the hands of its most famous reader: Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan first emerged from this reading and

Goethe’s own imagined communion with Ḥāfiẓ, but as Goethe soon realized, a long history of

mediation stood between him and the Persian poet. In following the shifting practices of

European diplomatic language schools, this chapter has offered one way to think about the

processes that rendered Ḥāfiẓ intelligible to Goethe: as an institutional transformation which,

over time, staged a sustained philological encounter with Ottoman literature.

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CHAPTER THREE

INDEXING ORIENTAL LITERATURE: INFORMATION AND READING

Introduction

In 1748-1749, the German Arabist Johann Jacob Reiske (1716-1774) penned two now

legendary reviews of his old mentor, Albert Schultens (1686-1750).1 They probably tanked

Reiske’s promising career, but the reviews have since taken on epochal significance, as founding

documents of a new philology. Schultens was one of Europe’s most famous orientalists, and he

had made a career of studying the language of classical Arabic texts as a guide to Hebrew

etymologies and a means to explain difficult passages in the Old Testament.2 Reiske’s reviews

1 Albert Schultens, ed., Thomae Erpenii Grammatica Arabica: cum fabulis Locmanni, etc.; accedunt

excerpta anthologiae veterum Arabiae poetarum, quae inscribitur Hamasa Abi Temmam (Leiden:

Luchtman, 1748); Albert Schultens, ed., Proverbia Salomonis. Versionem Integram ad Hebraeum Fontem

Expressit, atque Commentarium adjecit Albertus Schultens (Leiden: Luzac, 1748). Reiske’s review is

Nova Acta Eruditorum, 1748, 689-704 (Review of Schulten’s edition of Erpenius); 1749, 5-20 (Review of

Proverbia Salomonis). Schultens replied personally to Reiske’s reviews. See, Albert Schultens, Proverbia

Salomonis. Versionem Integram ad Hebraeum Fontem Expressit, atque Commentarium adjecit Albertus

Schultens (Leiden: Luzac, 1748).

2 In Leiden, Schultens’s friend, Tiberius Hemsterhuis, pursued very similar etymological methods in

Greek. Reiske observed in his autobiography that he could not say “which of the two infected the other”

(Reiske, Lebensbeschreibung, 124: “Dagegen sein [Hemsterhuis’s] albernes etymologisches System in

der griechischen Sprache war just eben dasselbe, mit dem schultenschen in der arabischen. Schultens und

Hemsterhuyß waren Herzensfreunde: wer von beyden den andern angesteckt habe, kann ich nicht

sagen.”).

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outlined a forceful, uncompromising rejection of Schultens’s etymological methods. Instead,

Reiske countered this with an appeal to mere reading:

The old Arab poets, whose words are polished in this way, were ignorant of the first

meanings of their words, and still did not understand any less their own texts and could

make others understand them. This gives us hope that we can likewise grasp what was

written by them, even if we do not grasp perfectly their etymologies.3

Later German Arabists saw in this moment—and Reiske’s work more broadly—a turn from

Arabistik as a Hilfswissenschaft for Biblical philology to an autonomous discipline.4

While the idea of a turn from Biblical philology to “modern” oriental studies around 1800

still resonates, scholarship has mostly complicated, not confirmed, this picture.5 We now have a

renewed appreciation for Schultens’s pioneering contributions to oriental studies, and a better

sense for the variety of Reiske’s own work.6 We also have a deepening understanding of what

orientalist scholarship meant in practice. This deflates Reiske the legend, but leaves open the

question that legend once answered: how did the modern disciplines of oriental studies form?

The nineteenth-century philologists who sought to differentiate themselves from earlier traditions

of orientalist scholarship still claimed Reiske as one of their own. What made him so different?

3 Reiske, Nova Acta Eruditorum (1748), 693: “Arabes ipsi veteres Poetae, quorum verba sic limantur,

primas suorum verborum vires ignorabant; & nihilo minus tamen intelligebant ipsi sua scripta,

poterantque aliis intelligentibus approbare. Unde spes est, nos quoque ab illis exarata illecturos esse,

etiamsi Arabicas origines perfecte non calleamus.”

4 Johann Fück’s account of the history of Arabic studies in Europe has been influential in this respect, see

Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, 108-124.

5 On Reiske and his methods, see Jan Loop, “Johann Jacob Reiske”, in Christian-Muslim Relations: A

Bibliographical History, eds David Thomas and John Chesworth (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 14:192-208, and

the essays in Hans-Georg Ebert and Thoralf Hanstein, eds, Johann Jacob Reiske – Leben und Wirkung: Ein Leipziger Byzantinist und Begründer der Orientalistik im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Evangelische

Verlagsanstalt, 2005), in particular, Jan Loop, “Kontroverse Bemühungen um den Orient. Johann Jacob

Reiske und die deutsche Orientalistik seiner Zeit”, 45-85.

6 On Schultens, see Jan Loop, “Language of Paradise: Protestant Oriental Scholarship and the Discovery

of Arabic Poetry,” in Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities, eds Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2020), 395-415.

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This chapter suggests we look for an answer in another aspect of Reiske’s assault on

Schultens: his valorization of reading. The banality of Reiske’s statement—that we might hope

to understand these texts because the Arabs who wrote and read them once did—implied a

critique: unlike the Arabs, Schultens did not understand these texts, even those he edited and

adorned with elaborate footnotes. The obviousness of such reading gave Reiske’s attack

polemical force, but it obscured a basic fact, one which both Reiske and Schultens knew all too

well: reading was very, very hard. Reiske could excoriate those who “write commentaries for

Arab poets whom they don’t understand, thinking they have done enough, if they spend a few

days excerpting from and defiling Golius [i.e., Golius’s 1653 Arabic-Latin dictionary]”, but there

was little one could do besides consult Golius’s dictionary.7 By that time, few Arabic texts had

been properly edited, and even Golius had conveniently avoided including a Latin translation

with his famously faulty 1636 edition of of Aḥmad ibn ʿArabšāh (1389-1450)’s history of Timur,

Aǧā’ib al-maqdūr fī nawā’ib al-Tīmūr (The Wonders of Fate in the History of Timur).8

Reiske could be so brazen in his critique because, unbeknownst to his readers, he had

largely solved the problem of understanding Arabic texts. The solution was not a matter of

disciplinary self-understanding, or even of method in the abstract sense, but rather of an

unprecedented feat of information management. Throughout his entire education, Reiske had one

advantage over his teachers: he could write well. With pen and paper, he had strung together the

intertextual web of Arabic literature. Reiske might have been the first of the modern Arabists,

but his accomplishment rested on two very old practices: copying and indexing. Over a decade as

7 Reiske, “Thomae Erpenii Grammatica Arabica”, 694: “Commentarios scribunt in Arabicos Poetas, quos

non intelligunt, satis fecisse se putantes officio, si Golium exscribant & commaculent, paucorum dierum

cum jactura”. 8 Jacob Golius, ed., Ahmedis Arabsiadae vitae et rerum gestarum Timuri, qui vulgo Tamerlanes dicitur,

historia (Leiden: Elsevier, 1636).

261

a student in Leipzig and Leiden, Reiske produced one of the finer private libraries of Islamic

manuscripts in Europe largely through his own scribal initiative, copying several dozen texts

which he emended, annotated, cross-referenced, and indexed.

Recently, historians like Ann Blair have drawn attention to early modern practices of

organizing information, and, in a pioneering essay on d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale and its

readers, Alexander Bevilacqua discussed the concrete practices used by seventeenth- and

eighteenth-century scholars to “organize the Orient”.9 This chapter situates Reiske’s note-taking

in a longer history of German orientalism, following how orientalist knowledge production

evolved over the decades before and after the publication of d’Herbelot’s landmark

encyclopedia. As Bevilacqua and others have pointed out, the second half of the seventeenth

century saw two key developments: the rapid growth of Western European collections of Islamic

manuscripts and the close study of a work which represented the cutting edge of Ottoman

bibliography: Kātib Çelebi’s Kašf al-ẓunūn.10 In France, England, and the Netherlands, these

new collections came largely from the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, especially Istanbul. In

German lands, most major collections of Islamic manuscripts formed from so-called Türkenbeute

manuscripts in the years after the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. These manuscripts,

looted from mosque and madrasa libraries throughout Ottoman Europe, stimulated new

scholarship and helped train a generation of orientalists.

While earlier scholars had made do with the limited material available to them, working

in multiple languages to use earlier Ottoman scholarship, orientalists were increasingly

9 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2010); Alexander Bevilacqua, “How to Organise the Orient: d’Herbelot and the

‘Bibliothèque orientale’”.

10 See, Bevilacqua, “The Oriental Library”, in The Republic of Arabic Letters, 17-43.

262

confronted with an unprecedented availability of manuscripts. As collections grew, so did the

potential to venture out beyond the territory circumscribed by earlier exegesis and to use

manuscript collections as a resource for doing the work of a philologist: glossing difficult words,

explaining historical context, and comparing versions of the same text. However, there was no

search engine for Islamic manuscripts. Many collections did not even have reliable inventories,

and the manuscripts themselves had no indices. Even presuming an orientalist was capable of

reading them (something very few could do), access remained limited. A scholar might be

allowed to regularly consult a manuscript, but only the privileged few could take one home to

read it outside of the limited opening hours.

Organizing this knowledge entailed a massive collective effort of manuscript study, from

which a new image of the Orient and its literatures slowly emerged. It also required awesome

individual effort. This chapter charts these efforts, following the methods orientalists devised to

master the mass of information circulating among scholars and accumulated in their manuscripts,

and, eventually, to wrest from a multilingual Ottoman tradition the specialized study of a single

“literature”.

Theodor Petraeus

In some ways, Reiske’s work was a continuation of an earlier Leiden tradition of oriental

studies that had died out. Jacob Golius, the Professor of Arabic at the University of Leiden

whose 1653 Arabic-Latin dictionary was the standard reference for generations of scholars,

embodied many of Reiske’s philological virtues and shared a common focus on Islamic

263

literatures and history.11 However, after the deaths of Levinus Warner (1665) and Johann

Heinrich Hottinger (1667), Golius had no clear successor, and the interest in Islamic traditions

that had inspired Golius’s students to travel to Istanbul in the 1640s was only rediscovered again

later through the collection of one of those students, Levinus Warner. Advances in Biblical

philology also drew students from Golius’s philological project. This was the era great polyglot

dictionaries, the culmination of a vast and sophisticated project of sacred philology. The Paris

polyglot, which expanded on the earlier Antwerp Polyglot Bible, was completed in 1645. Brian

Walton’s London polyglot, which included a total of nine languages, was published in 1657.12

Beyond their utility in understanding scripture, the polyglot dictionaries were powerful

instruments for comparing words across languages, turning the Bible into a linguistic master

index, and they exerted a gravitational pull on a generation of orientalist scholarship, even

beyond the realm of sacred philology. Scholars had already noted similarities between languages

that would later be grouped under terms like “Semitic” or “Indo-European”. By the second half

of the seventeenth century, there was a dawning awareness that these comparisons might form

the basis of a larger program of study that might help read ancient texts.13

11 Golius, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum.

12 On the polyglot bibles, see Theodor Dünkelgrün, “The multiplicity of Scripture: The confluence of

textual traditions in the making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568-1573)” (PhD diss., University of

Chicago, 2012); Peter Miller, “Making the Paris Polyglot Bible: Humanism and Orientalism in the Early

Seventeenth Century”, in Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublic im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus, ed.

Herbert Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 59-85; Peter Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of

Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653-1657)”, Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no.

3 (2001): 463-482.

13 In 1678 Christoph Cellarius (1638-1707) penned a short work on the use of Arabic to Hebrew. Cellarius, Sciagraphia Philologiae Sacrae, Difficiliores Quaestiones plerasque, et Linguarum

Orientalium usum genuinum delineans. Editio Secunda, emendata, et Usu Arabismi Etymologico aucta

(Zeitz: Hetstedt, 1678). Cellarius in turn invoked an earlier authority: the twelfth-century exegete

Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089/1092-1164/1167).

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The manuscripts of the German orientalist Theodor Petraeus (1630?-1672) offer a

glimpse into how the linguistic promise of polyglot dictionaries shaped orientalist practices.

Petraeus belonged among the minor orientalists who appeared in the wake of the success of

scholars like Golius and Pococke. Born in or near Flensburg, little is known about Petraeus’s

early life.14 A note from the German philologist Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) which was copied by

one of his students observed that Petraeus borrowed his manuscript Ethiopic-Latin dictionary in

1649, and in the following year he matriculated in Leiden.15 Petraeus’s first publications were

slim editions of Ethiopic and Coptic Biblical texts, which he produced with another German

student in Leiden, Johann Georg Nissel (1623-1662).

These were not entirely original, since Petraeus and Nissel worked from earlier printed

editions (a fact they conveniently elided). Still, they made suitable calling cards in the Republic

of Letters, and Petraeus had a good enough reputation that he received soon thereafter support

from the King of Denmark, Frederick III to travel to the Levant and collect manuscripts. These

printed works also vouched for Petraeus’s scholarly credentials abroad. The pastor of the

Swedish legation to the Ottomans, Conrad Jacob Hiltebrandt, remarked in his diary that Petraeus

showed them to him when the two met in Istanbul in 1658.16 In the Ottoman Empire, Petraeus

14 On Petraeus, see Alfred Rahlfs, “Nissel und Petraeus, ihre äthiopischen Textausgaben und Typen”,

Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (1917): 268-348; Erik

Iversen, “Theodor Petraeus og det 17. Aarhundredes Orientalske Studier”, Fund og Forskning 9 (1962):

79-113)

15 See Rahlfs, “Nissel und Petraeus”, 300. The note appears in SUBG, ms Cod. Michael. 264: “Hoc est

meum Lexicon quod Ao 1649 commodato a me accepit. J.L.”. Ludolf’s autograph Latin dictionary is now

UBF, ms Ludolf II, 4. 16 Not unsurprisingly, the pastor recommended the young orientalist to the Dutch Resident, Levinus

Warner. Franz Babinger, ed., Conrad Jacob Hiltebrandt’s Dreifache Schwedische Gesandtschaftsreise

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sought after “jewels of Christendom” (to use Hiltebrandt’s expression)—in particular, Coptic and

Ethiopic sacred texts—but, like others before him, he also availed himself more generally of the

offerings of the Ottoman book market.17

Petraeus took a business-like approach to his manuscripts, and his annotations show him

generally focused on the fastest route to print. Petraeus focused on shorter, easily publishable

texts, each of which would offer him a new chance to pen dedicatory letters and craft his

scholarly persona, and his manuscripts are dotted with mock title pages (drafted before he

finished the text itself) which show both the scope of his planned projects and the care he

invested in presenting himself to a learned readership.

For Petraeus, each title page was a new platform for a performative multilingualism

rooted in Biblical study. For instance, in his draft of the title page for an edition of the Coptic

Gospels, Petraeus chose a line (in Coptic) from I Corinthians 12:10, which speaks to God’s

common endowment of spirt to mankind in all its variety: “to another [is given] divers kinds of

tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues”. A title page for a Coptic edition of the Gospel

of Mark bears a motto from I Corinthians 14:26: “How is it then brethren? when ye come

nach Siebenbürgen, der Ukraine und Constantinopel (1656-1658) (Leiden: Brill, 1937), 141: “Üm diese

Zeit reisete der Hl. Ablegatus Welling zu dem andern Hln Ablegato Ralamb hinüber und haben in der

Christ Nacht zu Pera sonderliche Türckische München tantzen und Ihren Gottesdienst Verrichten sehen.

Ich muste unterdeßen zu Hause bleiben und auf eine Predigt meditiren, den am Heil. Christtage Kam der

H. Abges: Welling mit dem andern Hln. Abges: Ralamb und Seinen Leuten heim, da Ich dan einen

Weinacht Sermon hielte; hatte unter andern auch Einen Magistrum zum Auditore, welcher Von Jerusalem

gekommen war und ungern die Niederlag der Dähnen Vernam, den Er war I: Königl. Maytt: zu

Dennemarck Stipendiat undt wuste nu nicht, wohin. Er hieß Petraeus, war Ein Holsatus, hatte ein

Psalterium Copticum, welches Er als ein Kleinoht der Christenheit mit bringen und übersetzten wolte,

zeigete Mihr Epistolam Jude, welche Er zu Leyden in gleicher Sprach Verfertiget hatte, wieß dabey, wie

der Coptische Rabbi schier nicht ein wohrt in der Schrifft hatte ungecorrigiret gelaßen. Ich schlug Ihm

den Holländischen Hln. Residenten Vor.”

17 It is difficult to know exactly how representative Petraeus’s manuscripts were of his collecting

activities, since customs agents seized a number of his manuscripts as he left the Ottoman Empire. See

Rahlfs, “Nissel und Petraeus”, 296.

266

together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an

interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying.”18 Petraeus also adopted the nisba al-Maqdisī

(the Jerusalemite) in many of his title pages, on one of which (Figure 42) he also brainstormed

equivalents of the name Theodor (i.e., God given): عطا هللا, donum dei, ḥaḳḳ vėrdī, etc.19

While abroad, Petraeus focused on collecting Ottoman dictionaries, and we find him

preparing these works for publication already in 1659, as he returned from the Ottoman Empire

through London. It was then that Petraeus drafted a title page for a planned publication from the

standard Persian-Turkish wordlist, the Kitāb-i Dānistan, which was later bound in with his

manuscript of the work.20 Petraeus annotated the manuscript throughout, giving Latin

equivalents to the Persian-Turkish word pairs (Figure 43). On occasion he jotted down references

to other works (he cites Gentius’s Gulistān translation, among others) and Bible verses, as well

as equivalents in a host of other oriental languages.

The prevalence of references to Bible verses in Petraeus’s Kitāb-i Dānistan and his other

Ottoman dictionaries suggests that the German orientalist consulted a polyglot dictionary in

order to generate linguistic data for word comparison.21 Pages of longer entries on individual

words which were bound in with the manuscript suggest that this was intended as a method for

identifying phonetic similarities between words across languages. For instance, a particularly

comprehensive note (Figure 44) on شاشه (urine) gives equivalents in Czech, German, Low

German, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Coptic, offers shorter subentries

on related words like شاشیدن (to urinate), and noted the word’s occurence in a story in Gentius’s

18 SBB, ms orient. quart. 167, fol. Ir. 19 CKB, ms E don var. 38 kvart, [unpaginated]. 20 SBB, ms orient. quart 130, fol. 35r 21 It is notable, in this respect, that we find no reference to specific questions of Biblical exegesis.

267

edition of Saʿdī’s Gulistān (in which the son of a religious leader says that they should not put

Qurʾanic verses on his father’s gravestone because “dogs will piss on them”).22 Likely recalling

the everyday language of his Flensburg childhood, Petraeus also noted that in Low German, boys

used the word “pölicken” (from poel for “pool” and the diminutive suffix, i.e. “to make a

puddle”) for “to piss”, presumably because of its phonetic resemblance to the Arabic word for

urine (بول).

Petraeus annotated other dictionaries and vocabularies in a similar fashion, such as his

copy of the Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī (now in Hamburg).23 As in the Kitāb-i Dānistan, we find his

sprawling, multilingual annotations, as well as Petraeus’s peculiar habit of citing Biblical verses.

In addition to the dictionaries he purchased abroad, Petraeus seems also to have acquired several

major dictionaries copied by Golius’s Armenian scribe, Shāhīn Qandī, in Leiden, since they are

bound in his library’s characteristic full leather European orientalizing binding.24 Ultimately,

Petraeus’s project of word comparison proved to be a dead end. Although he expended

considerable energy assembling for comparison words from so many languages, there is no sign

that this work bore any fruit. Nor did he manage to compile a major dictionary from the many

sources at his disposal. While several other lexicographical notebooks are also found among his

22 SBB, ms orient. quart 130, [unpaginated]. Gentius, trans. Rosarium politicum, 424; translation from

Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 138.

23 On Petraeus’s Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī, now SUBH, ms orient. 195, see Johannes Zimmermann, “Theodor

Petraeus”, Manuscript Cultures 9 (2016), 152-155. 24 Luġāt-i Aḫterī, SBB, ms orient. fol. 57; Luġāt-i Niʿmetullah, SBB, ms orient. fol. 101; Kanz al-luġāt,

SUBH, ms orient. 157; an unidentified Persian-Turkish dictionary in the same hand and format is SUBH,

ms orient. 194. An unrelated manuscript, SUBH, ms orient. 33, which contains a marginal note in

Petraeus’s hand on fol. 395v, has a similar but distinct orientalizing binding. It is possible that Petraeus

did not commission these dictionaries, since none contain his annotations and the completion date (June

15, 1658) recorded in the colophon of one of the manuscripts (SBB, ms orient. fol. 57, fol. 593r) falls

during Petraeus’s time abroad.

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papers, only a single very short publication resulted from his lexicographical studies, the 1663

Clavis Linguae Arabicae, Persicae et Turcicae.25

Figure 42. CKB, ms E don var. 38: Petraeus used his many draft title pages to experiment with forms of self-

presentation. Here he listed equivalents to “Theodor” in multiple languages.

25 Theodor Petraeus, Clavis Linguae Arabicae, Persicae et Turcicae, sive Breve Lexicon Dictionum Arabicarum, à Persis usurpatarum, facta Vocabulorum Turcicorum accessione (Leiden, 1663).

Petraeus’s manuscript is now SBB, ms orient. fol. 59.

269

Figure 43. SBB, ms orient. quart 130, fol. 35v: Petraeus collected and studied a number of Ottoman

dictionaries. He glossed the entries of this copy of the Kitāb-i Dānistan in Latin and added notes comparing

entries with words in other languages. Here, he notes the similarity between رفتن (raftan, to go) and the

German word “aufraffen”.

270

Figure 44. SBB, ms orient. quart 130: On a sheet bound in with the Kitāb-i Dānistan, Petraeus explored the

similarities between different words for “urine”.

271

Petraeus’s attempts to edit and translate a Turkish work did not fare much better. A series

of draft title pages and dedications chart the projects’ many stops and starts. The first undated

draft title page, which Petraeus later used as scrap for his notes, worked out the Latin title of the

prospective historical work: “Historia de Suleiman Imperatore Turcico Victorioso et Glorioso

quae continet victorias, res gestas, vitam et benefacta”.26 In the next version, Petraeus added a

Turkish title: “Dāstān-i Sulṭān Süleymān Ḫān ibn Ġazī Selīm Ḫān al-Muẓaffer Dā’ima, Historia

de Sultano Suleimano Muslimanorum Imperatore Bellicoso, Semper Victorioso”.27 He continued

to tinker, changing “Historia” to “Historia Turcica” and crossing out “Muslimanorum

Imperatore”. He also mused over the best way to say that he had translated the work, weighing

“Latine reddita”, “interpretatione Latina donata”, and “versione Latina donata”, before setting on

“quam in Latinum vertit, et primus publicavit Elmukdasi Petraeus”. The third title page, dated

1664 in Leiden, added a line from Cicero: “Historia est testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita

memoriae, magistra vitae, nuncia vetustatis” (History is the witness of time, the light of truth, the

life of memory, the teacher of life, the herald of antiquity).28

In the meantime, Petraeus began the translation itself. The “Historia Turcica” in question

was an anonymous Turkish history of Süleyman I which Shāhīn Qandī had copied for Petraeus.

Shāhīn Qandī’s source manuscript is unclear, as no work fitting the description is found in

Leiden’s collection or among Petraeus’s manuscripts, although a Dāstān-i Sulṭān Süleymān is

listed in the Topkapı Palace Library.29 Petraeus wrote his translation onto pages interleaved with

26 CKB, ms E don. var. 39 kvart, 379v. The title page was later reused and is buried under a number of

unrelated notes. 27 CKB, ms E don. var. 38 kvart, [unpaginated]. 28 CKB, ms E don. var. 38 kvart, [unpaginated]. 29 Topkapı Palace Library, (hereafter: TSMK) ms R 1286. I did not have the opportunity to compare this

manuscript to Petraeus’s.

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Shāhīn Qandī’s copy. It might generously be called an incomplete rough draft. Sections are

untranslated or only partially translated, and what Petraeus did complete contains corrections and

often lists alternative translations parenthetically inserted within the text. His translation suggests

that despite his study of Ottoman dictionaries, Petraeus did not have the resources to completely

decipher the text.30

Petraeus still lacked something crucial: patronage. Petraeus clearly sought support for the

project from Frederick III, who had financed his travels, and financial concern weighed on him

enough that he wrote out a parodic dedication (Figure 45) to complement his aspirational title

page:

A dedication to the most venerable and unequaled King of Denmark, Norway, etc. most

sought after father of a nation, Frederick III, of most glorious memory, pious, blessed, the

greatest, occurred to me just now, mais faute d’argent on manque à faire beaucoup de

choses (but for want of money, there are a great many things one can’t do)!31

Manuscripts also came in handy searching for patronage. In December 1664, Petraeus presented

Frederick III with an ornately-bound Qurʾan which the orientalist adorned with an elaborate

inscription in Latin and Arabic (Figure 46), signing the latter inscription العبد الفقیر الحقیر مقدسي عطا

-the poor and wretched servant Maqdisī, Theodor, known as Ibn al) هللا المعروف بابن الصخري

Ṣaḫrī).32 In July of the following year, he gifted another manuscript to the Royal Library, a

miniature Qurʾan in an orientalizing red leather European binding.33

30 Material from the translation is also found in CKB, ms E. don. var 39.

31 CKB, ms E. don. var. 38, [unpaginated]: “Dedicatio ad Augustissimum et incomparabilem Dan. et

Norw. etc. Regem, desideratissimum Patriae Patrem, Fridericum Tertium, gloriosissimae memoriae,

Pium, Felicem, Optimum, animo iam dudum meo erat concepta; Mais faute d’argent on manque à faire

beaucoup de choses!” 32 CKB, ms cod. arab. 19, fols 1v-2r. Note: Petraeus’s followed the etymology of his translating Petraeus

as Ibn al-Ṣaḫrī (from صخر (stone), i.e., “stony”). 33 CKB, ms cod. arab. 29. Petraeus’s inscription on the front paste down endpaper is dated 9 July 1665.

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Figure 45. CKB, ms E. don. var. 38: Petraeus vented his frustration in one of his draft dedications.

274

Figure 46. CKB, ms cod. arab. 19, fols 1v-2r: In search of patronage, Petraeus presented several of his

manuscripts as gifts to Frederick III.

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Petraeus does not seem to have succeeded in obtaining Frederick III’s patronage. In

October 1666, Petraeus accepted an appointment as Professor of Oriental Languages at the

University of Königsberg.34 However, he received permission to delay his appointment so that he

could continue his publishing efforts in Amsterdam.35 It is also possible that he was angling for

another position. He was involved around this time in cataloging the Legatum Warnerianum at

Leiden University, and Jacob Golius died in 1667, leaving open his prestigious Leiden

professorship. Petraeus’s name came up in talks of establishing an Oriental College in Kiel.36

Ultimately, he did not end up in any of these posts, and an unspecified misfortune put him in a

difficult financial position. When he arranged for the publication—partially at his own

expense—of the 1667 Doctrina Christiana, Armenice, it proved enough of a disappointment that

he had to pawn a number of his manuscripts.37

Petraeus never recovered. He soon moved to Copenhagen (the exact circumstances of the

move are unclear) and when Benedict Hopfer sought him out to inquire about his manuscripts

(and receive Petraeus’s rejection), he was living in poverty:

34 Rahlfs transcribed the “Konzept seiner Bestallung” in “Nissel und Petraeus”, 307f. 35 This is explicit in the document Rahlfs cites: “Jedoch ihme dabey frey stehen möge, seiner gelegenheit

nach so lange zu Amsterdam zuverbleiben und seine Orientalische Bücher dem gemeinen wesen zum

besten drucken zulassen, alß er solches nöhtig befinden werde.” Rahlfs, “Nissel und Petraeus”, 307. 36 Rahlfs cites in this regard FBG, ms Chart. B 511, an “Entwurf einer Geschichte der von Herzog Ernst

zu Sachsen-Gotha versuchten Beförderung des innern und äußern Wohlstands der Evangelische-

Lutherischen Kirche” by Wilhelm Paul Verpoorten (1721-1794), which includes an account on the

planned “Collegium Orientale”. See Rahfls, “Nissel und Petraeus”, 308n. 37 See Rahlfs, “Nissel und Petraeus”, 310. Theodor Petraeus, Doctrina Christiana, Arminice, in Latinum versa, et publicata a مقدسي M. Theodoro Petraeo, Linguarum Orientalium Propagatore (Amsterdam:

1667). Rahlfs relies here on Johannes Werner, Dissertatio Guelphica de Linguarum Orientalium Studio,

Historiae titulo, Sereniss. B. et L. Ducibus inscripta, et cum Armeniorum Doctrina Christiana, sive Catechesi Armeno-Latina, ad Serenissimam Bibliothecam Librorum Oceanum, nomine imprimis M.

Theodori Petraei, Holsati Flensburgens. Linguarum Orientalium per Europan hodie Propagatoris, repraesentata; Nunc autem chalcographico opere, Germaniae Proceribus Universis sacrata, nec non

cum Viris cordatis seu sapientib. quibusl. communicata (Halberstadt: Hynitzsch, [no date]), 14.

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If you were to look at the man’s appearance, his walk, indeed his whole manner of living

(as I learned from others), everything is base, and without charm, dignity, or distinction.

His lodgings and company were likewise hardly reputable.38

Reduced to destitution, Petraeus returned one last time to his Süleyman I translation, creating a

fourth and final title page for the project, dated 1671 in Copenhagen, this time pinning his hopes

on his former patron’s son, the new King of Denmark, Christian V.39 Nothing came of the new

effort, and Petraeus died the following year.

Petraeus’s struggles illustrate the perils of philological advancement in the wake of the

polyglot Bibles. While it was still possible to edit short Biblical texts for publication, the barriers

for new contribution were steep. Even with Petraeus’s experience abroad and the manuscripts he

collected, the promises of word comparison were, for reasons Petraeus could not have known,

largely illusory. At the same time, it was impossible to edit and translate a work, as Petraeus

attempted, without a major dictionary. To make either approach work would require not just a

few manuscripts, but a whole system.

38 L.A. Rechenberg, Rolandi Maresii Epistolarum Philologicarum Libri II. Cum aliquot amicorum ad

eum, nec non aliorum Cl. Virorum ad alios, non dissimilis argumenti Epistolis (Leipzig and Frankfurt:

Meyer, 1687), 685: “Hominis istius si habitum spectes et incessum, imo totam vitae consuetudinem

(quam ab aliis didici) sordida sunt omnia, nec quicquam suavitatis, dignitatis vel decori habent: aedes et

convictus, quibus utitur, parum quoque audiunt honeste.” 39 CKB, ms E don. var. 38 kvart, [unpaginated].

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Andreas Acoluthus

Another seventeenth-century orientalist, Andreas Acoluthus, from Breslau, tried to do just

that.40 Not long after Hopfer visited Petraeus in Copenhagen, the young Acoluthus undertook an

ambitious program of reference works for his personal use. Much like the scholar today who

sinks hours into their database software in hopes that one day it will streamline their scholarly

production, Acoluthus copied out an elaborate system for one single, but seemingly important,

task: comparing words across languages.

Acoluthus was the son of a Breslau priest, Johann Acoluth, who also served as the young

orientalist’s first instructor, training his son in Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac.41 Later, he studied

at the Elisabeth-Gymnasium in Breslau and, after 1669, when he accompanied his father to

Wittenberg, he continued his oriental studies under August Pfeiffer (1640-1698), then Professor

of Oriental Languages in Wittenberg, and later Professor of Oriental Languages and archdeacon

40 On Acoluthus, see Tautz, Die Bibliothekare der churfürstlichen Bibliothek zu Cölln an der Spree im siebzehnten Jahrhundert, Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1925, 215-224; Carl Heinrich Tromler, “Leben und

Schriften des Hrn. Andreas Akoluth, weil. Predigers und Professors zu Breßlau, und der Königl. Preuß.

Akad. der Wissenschaften Mitglieds,” Neue Beyträge von Alten und Neuen Theologischen Sachen 4,

Leipzig, 1761, 414-471; Alastair Hamilton, “A Lutheran Translator for the Quran: A Late Seventeenth-

Century Quest”, in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, eds Hamilton, van den Boogert, and

Westerweel, 208-15; and Krzysztok Migoń, “Der Breslauer Orientalist Andreas Acoluthus (1654-1704).

Seine Beziehungen zu Leibniz und zur Akademie in Berlin”, Sitzungsberichte der Leibniz-Sozietät 53

(2002): 45-58. 41 Tautz, Die Bibliothekare der churfürstlichen Bibliothek, 219. Tautz’s biography of Acoluthus is based

on Christian Schmid’s eulogy, Die mit vielem Segen geschmückte Lehrer/ bey Christlicher und Volck-reicher Leichen-Bestattung des Weyland Wohl-Ehrwürdigen […] Herrn Andreä Acoluthi […] als Er im

Jahr Christia 1704. den 4. Novembr. […] verschieden/ und darauf den 16. dieses ihme die gewöhnliche

Leichen-Ceremonien gehalten worden (Breslau: 1704). Tromler, “Leben und Schriften des Hrn. Andreas

Akoluth”, reports, with the exaggeration characteristic of many scholarly biographies that “in seinem

sechsten Jahre war ihm das Ebräische schon so geläufig als das Deutsche; und darauf ward in wenigen

Jahren hernach eine feine Kenntniß des Lateinischen, Griechischen, Chaldäischen und Syrischen gebauet”

(418).

278

of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig.42 Carl Heinrich Tromler, whose eighteenth-century biography

of Acoluthus remains the most thorough source on the scholar’s life, reported that Acoluthus,

who “exceeded by far the famous secretary of Muhammad, Zeyd b. Ṯābit”, learned from Pfeiffer

“Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, and Aetheopic”, and, after following Pfeiffer to Meszibor, “trained

in Mauritanian, Turkish, Coptic, Armenian, Chinese, and what was almost his main focus in

Meszibor, Rabbinic Hebrew.”43 As is often true of orientalist biography, we should approach this

list with skepticism, though not outright dismissal, and manuscripts from Acoluthus’s

collection—now Dresden—help contextualize this extreme range of study.

Working under Pfeiffer, from 1672 to 1674, the teenage Acoluthus was steeped in the

same polyglot orientalism that Petraeus had navigated. However, his philosophy of manuscript

production could not stand in sharper contrast. Whereas Petraeus saw manuscripts as preparatory

stages to print, Acoluthus—perhaps in imitation of his teacher—envisioned a deeper pact with

pen and paper. Here, Acoluthus’s choice of historical models is instructive. As he began work on

his first manuscript, after recording the date—“Anno 1672, mense Decembri”—he jotted down

several quotations. From 1 Corinthians 14:39, he wrote in Greek: “forbid not to speak with

tongues”, and he channeled Jerome’s reminder to the learner to never think the fundamentals

42 Tromler, “Leben und Schriften des Hrn. Andreas Akoluth”, 419. Tautz’s Die Bibliothekare der

churfürstlichen Bibliothek states they moved to Leipzig (219). It’s unclear if this is an error or if Johannes

remained in Leipzig while Andreas traveled to nearby Wittenberg to study with Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer’s

manuscripts, like Acoluthus’s, later entered the Leipzig Ratsbibliothek. 43 Tromler, “Leben und Schriften des Hrn. Andreas Akoluth”, 419-420: “Von diesem [Pfeiffer] erlernte er

das Samaritanische, Arabische, Persische und Aethiopische. Er folgte mit seiner unersättlichen Begierde,

noch mehr zu fassen, diesem Lehrer bez seinen Amtsveränderungen nach Medzibor und Stroppen nach,

und übte sich im Mauritanischen, Türkischen, Koptischen, Armenischen, Chinesischen, und welches zu

Meszibor fast sein Hauptzweck war, im Rabbinischen.”

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beneath them: “Those things are not to be dismissed as small, without which the great cannot be

built”.44

Jerome’s words echo throughout Acoluthus’s manuscripts, which resemble a kind of

personal print: clean, orderly, and indexed. The young scholar creased his pages to mark out

regular margins and wrote on alternating sides to leave space for future notes and additions.

Following Jerome, one might say that, by doing the small things with diligence, Acoluthus had

invested in his own scholarly infrastructure. Under Pfeiffer, Acoluthus produced a small library

of reference works which never saw publication, but were meant to serve the young scholar

throughout his career.

Indeed, the uniformity of these works suggests he had a plan. Over almost two years,

Acoluthus systematically processed much of the available printed orientalist scholarship. He

produced grammars of Ethiopic, Armenian, Chinese, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan,

Arabic, and Coptic, all bound together in two volumes, and uniform in format.45 Since he dated

each work, we can follow his progress. Between July 19 and August 10, he compiled a Latin-

Coptic dictionary from Athanasius Kircher’s Podromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus and Lingua

Aegyptica restituta.46 In September, he produced a “phraseologia” for Victorio Scialac and

Gabriel Sionita’s 1619 Latin translation of the Arabic Psalms: an index of the translators’ Latin

44 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 319, front pastedown endpaper: “Non sunt contemnenda quasi parva, sine

quibus magna constare non possunt”.

45 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 318, 319. 46 Athanasius Kircher, Prodromus Coptus sive Aegypticus (Rome: Propaganda Fide, 1636). Athanasius

Kircher, Lingua Aegyptica Restituta Opus Tripartitum, quo Linguae Coptae sive idiomatis illius primaevi

Aegyptiorum Pharaonici, vetustate temporum paene collapsi, ex abstrusis Arabum monumentis, plena instauratio continetur (Rome: Grignani, 1643). On Kircher’s Coptic studies, see Daniel Stolzenberg,

Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2013), 88-103 and Alastair Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 1439-1822: The European

Discovery of the Egyptian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 195-228.

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as it appeared in the translation, with inflection and immediate lexical context.47 Encompassing

more than two hundred folios in two columns marked off by a crease folded on each page, this

was an enormous undertaking that would have involved an initial stage of collecting individual

entries on slips of paper before transcribing them into the clean copy.48 As an appendix, he

produced a “Phraseologia ex nonnullis Alcorani Capitibus, sive Suratis, Collecta”. This Arabic

“phraseologia” consisted of excerpts grouped under headwords, such as “Deus”, “Impius,

Impietas”, and “Occultare, Taciturnus”. Acoluthus also produced similar works for the Hebrew

Old Testament, Chaldean, and Amharic, to which he appended indices.49 In November,

Acoluthus turned his attention to Chinese, compiling an index of Kircher’s Latin transliteration

of the inscription of the famous Nestorian Stele, as well as an index of Kircher’s Latin

translation.50 Finally, in 1674, he compiled a Latin-Persian dictionary (organized alphabetically

by Latin headword) from the few available Persian works at his disposal.51

Acoluthus’s manuscripts from this time are mostly clean copies with title pages that

identify Acoluthus as the author, but it is unlikely any were intended for publication. An index to

a rare Latin-Arabic edition printed in Rome in 1619 was obscure even by the high standards of

orientalists. In addition, Acoluthus’s later notes suggest their auxiliary function for his own

47 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 187. Victorio Scialac and Gabriel Sionita, trans., Davidis Regis et

Prophetae Psalmi (Rome: Paulinus, 1619). 48 One such slip might be found toward the end of SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 186. 49 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 195, Ea. 187. 50 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 193. The Nestorian Stele was an eighth-century monument in Chinese and

Syriac documenting early Christian communities in China which had been unearthed in Xi’an around

1625 and which Chinese scholars brought to the attention of Jesuits. 51 Acoluthus lists this at the beginning of his lexicon: Lodewijk de Dieu’s Grammatica Persica, de Dieu’s

editions of Hieronymus Xavier’s Historia Christi and Historia Petri, and Gentius’ Rosarium poltiicum.

Acoluthus took very little from this last work, and the majority of the entries come from the grammars

and the Historia Christi.

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scholarship. The grammars are all copied out onto alternating pages, leaving the facing page

blank for notes. This gave Acoluthus a foundation to build on in his studies, and in at least one

case—his Arabic grammar—we find a significant number of later additions.52

The idea of creating Latin indices might seem, from the perspective of modern

scholarship, odd. Seen as whole, Acoluthus expended months of effort to organize words from

the available orientalist material in print according to their meaning in Latin. While Acoluthus

nowhere explains his intentions, there is no sign that he sought to translate into these languages,

and the most plausible explanation is that he used them to compare words with similar meanings

across languages. We find something of this sort in Acoluthus’s notes in his 1680 edition of the

Armenian Book of Obadiah,53 and his 1682 De aquis amaris (a 440-page commentary on the

52 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 319. 53 Andreas Acoluthus, Abdias Hayeren, id est: Obadias Armenus, quo, cum analysi vocum Armenicarum

grammatica, & collatione versionis Armenicæ cum fontibus aliisque, maximam partem Orientalibus versionibus, exhibetur primum in Germanica specimen characterum Armenicorum (Leipzig: Brand,

1680). Acoluthus studied Armenian with Hagop Grigorentz, one of the more remarkable figures in early

modern orientalist letters. Grigorentz, who hailed originally from Istanbul, had ventured off out of an

interest to see the world, and he left a trail of manuscripts along the stations of orientalist Europe.

Grigorentz is the only itinerant language teacher in early modern Europe to leave a volume of poetry

about his travels. In 1675, before he set off on the road that brought him to Acoluthus’s door, he dedicated

to the Oxford Vice-Chancellor Bathurst a short work, titled Elogium Brittaniae, with poems of praise for

all segments of society (In the nineteenth century, the work was discovered and translated by one of the

fathers of San Lazzaro in Venice, where the translation was printed and sold to visitors. Grigorentz,

England’s Eulogy, trans. [anonymous] (Venice: San Lazzaro, 1875)). Besides poems to Charles I,

Marshall, and the Priests, Judges, Doctors, and Students of England, he included a touching poem to the

street children who, frightened by his foreign garb, ran from him:

What aileth you Boys, that you flee in such haste at my sight?

No goblin am I, but a lover of all good children;

Why cry you with fear? big men you will also become.

Your books you must use and learn all your lessons by heart;

You have ink, pens, and paper; write much, it will help you to learn.

Have no dread of your master; correction will make you wise.

In the streets misbehave not, and quiet remain when at home.

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description in Numbers 5:11-31 of administering “bitter water” to women suspected of

adultery).54 One eighteenth-century observer noted that Acoluthus’s comparison of translations

gave his work a “more general utility”, pointing to how such word comparisons might serve to

make an obscure work more broadly relevant.55 However, a closer examination of these works in

light of the indices is needed to say what use, if any, they had.

Acoluthus’s investment in scholarly infrastructure does not seem to have paid off. He

constructed a powerful engine of scholarship, but to do something—compare words across

languages—that was ultimately of only limited utility. Still, Acoluthus’s early manuscripts are

significant as evidence of a scholarly strategy, one that Reiske would later employ with more

success: constructing a novel information system as the basis of future scholarship. In the end,

the program of study that defined Acoluthus’s early scholarship was overshadowed by current

events, as, in the years after the publication of his De aquis amaris, hundreds of Islamic

manuscripts streamed into Central Europe.

We no sugarplums have, and to eat other things you refuse;

Happy children, rejoice! nor your parent’s affection abuse. (Grigorentz, England’s Eulogy, 31)

Before he came to Leipzig, Grigorentz had also spent some time in Berlin, where he inscribed a Coptic

manuscript that he sold to Andreas Müller (Described in Johann Uhl, ed., Thesauri Epistolici Lacroziani

(Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1742), 1:325.

54 Andreas Acoluthus, De aquis amaris maledictionem inferentibus, vulgo dictis Zelotypiae, et Num.

V.v.II. usque ad finem Cap. descriptis, ex Anatolica Antiquitate, hoc est: Fontibus Sacris, eorundemque variis tùm Orientalibus, tum Occidentalibus Versionibus, Thalmude utroque, & omnium aetatum

Hebraeis Exegetis, Homiletis, Philosophis, Kabbalistis, atque Masorâ, Erutum, Adeoque Judaeorum in

Textûs Sacros commentandi rationem multiplicem ostendens Philologema (Leipzig: Brand, 1682).

55 Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten, Nachrichten von einer hallischen Bibliothek (Halle: Gebauer, 1749),

3:379: “Die beigefügten Anmerkungen enthalten vornemlich eine grammaticalische Erleuterung der

armenischen Worte, und sind, wie diese ganze Ausgabe, den Anfängern gewidmet; doch aber auch der

angestelten Vergleichung mit anderen Uebersetzungen wegen von algemeinerer Brauchbarkeit.”

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Türkenbeute

After 1683, the shape of scholarly opportunity changed. Christian armies brought back hundreds

of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic manuscripts looted from the newly conquered cities of Ottoman

Europe. Within a decade, a substantial portion of the material and intellectual legacy of Ottoman

Hungary and South-Eastern Europe was circulating in Germany and Italy. The significance of

this so-called Türkenbeute in the subsequent formation of oriental studies in Germany was

immeasurable.56 Circulating alongside a mass of looted orientalia—textiles, metalwork, coins,

and weapons from Ottoman Europe—these manuscripts produced a moment of collective

curiosity. They were prized as war trophies and exotic souvenirs, and people flocked to

orientalists to make sense of these objects and decipher their inscriptions.57 Almost overnight, the

material basis for the advanced study of Islamic philology gathered on the shelves of scholars

like Acoluthus, who turned their attention with increasing sophistication to Islamic sources.

Whereas earlier scholars had traveled to Leiden and Istanbul to study, new generations of

German orientalists were now trained to work with Islamic manuscripts in places like Leipzig

and Dresden.

It would be easy to downplay the debt of subsequent scholarship to Türkenbeute. While

there were no storied “finds” among the war booty like the lost books of Apollonius’s Conics,

56 On earlier looted manuscripts in Europe, see Robert Jones, “Piracy, war and the acquisition of Arabic

manuscripts in Renaissance Europe”, Manuscripts of the Middle East 2 (1987), 96-110. On Türkenbeute

in Germany after 1683, see Liebrenz, Arabische, Persische und Türkische Handschriften in Leipzig, 25-

28; Holger Preissler, “Orientalische Studien in Leipzig vor Reiske”, in Johann Jacob Reiske — Leben und

Wirkung, eds Ebert and Hanstein, 19-43.

57 See, Tromler, “Leben und Schriften des Hrn. Andreas Akoluth”, 449: “Türkische Ringe, Bogen,

Schilde, Briefe, Kanonen, u.a.d. mehr, so mit dunkeln Ueberschriften bezeichnet waren, verlangten

Haufenweise seine Dollmetschung, und er war darinnen glücklich.”

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assumptions about its insignificance rest in part on a misunderstanding about the context of

transmission.58 The occasional inscriptions from soldiers found in these manuscripts can cast the

act of looting in a personal light—one finds, for instance, claims that the owner took the

manuscript from a dead Ottoman soldier—but the vast majority of Türkenbeute manuscripts

contain no such notes and their contents represent the entire breadth of the Ottoman intellectual

tradition, including history, literary commentary, Islamic jurisprudence, tafsīr (Qurʾanic

commentaries), and encyclopedic works. This is consistent not with the piecemeal acquisitions of

war trophies but rather the systematic looting of libraries, which finds confirmation both in the

manuscripts themselves—where we find waqf inscriptions from endowment libraries—and in

contemporary accounts of the conquest of Ottoman cities. In addition, at least some of the

Türkenbeute manuscripts came not through soldiers but Greek and Hungarian merchants.59

Historical memory of this looting was selective. The most iconic scene of Türkenbeute

has long been the looting of the Ottoman encampment after the failed siege of Vienna in 1683.

After months trying to take the city, the troops under the control of the Ottoman Grand Vizier

Kara Mustafa Pasa collapsed under attack from relieving forces. When he retreated, Kara

Mustafa famously took the banner of the Prophet and little else. The massive Ottoman

encampment outside of Vienna, which had once fed and housed tens of thousands of men, was

left first to the victorious soldiers and then to the curious Viennese. Items from the camp, like the

ornately embroidered tents, became objects of courtly pomp and proud display, and the scene

persisted in the historical imaginary as a moment of encounter with Ottoman objects and an ideal

58 See Alastair Hamilton, “‘To Rescue the Honour of the Germans’: Qurʾan Translations by Eighteenth-

and Early Nineteenth-Century German Protestants”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 77

(2014): 173-209, esp. 174: “the vast majority of the looted manuscripts were Qurʾans, mainly looted by

soldiers in the imperial armies who were fighting the Ottomans.”

59 See, for instance, LUB, ms B. or. 175.

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site of cultural transfer. As a coda to a heroic battle scene, it envisioned the encounter with looted

Ottoman objects as a triumphant rummage through a foreign ghost town. Most famously, the

citizens of Vienna, pouring out from the city gates after months of fearful confinement, were

supposed to have discovered Ottoman provisions of coffee. One contemporary account of the

siege billed itself as a “Diary found in the Turkish Encampment”, and later inscriptions recording

secondhand that manuscripts were taken from the encampment attest to the aura it continued to

lend objects even decades later.60

In actuality, most Türkenbeute manuscripts were looted in the years that followed, as

armies advanced down the Danube. Accounts of the aftermath of the siege of Buda in 1686 (two

years after an earlier, unsuccessful siege) offer a very different vision of material transfer. Buda

had spent nearly 150 years under Ottoman control, and travelers marveled at the city’s layers of

Ottoman and Hungarian history. Edward Brown (the son of Thomas Brown) lauded the city’s

baths, “esteemed the noblest of Europe”, and like other travelers observed with curiosity its

rituals.61 The Jesuit Paul Tafferner searched the city for signs of its former splendor, using what

he supposed to be the worm-eaten remnants of the storied library of Matthias Corvinus as an

60 [Anonymous], Diarium, welches am Sonntag den 12. Septembris 1683 nach glücklich von der

Türckischen Belagerung befreyten Statt Wien in dem Türckischen Lager gefunden worden. Nebst

außführlicher Relation der Wienerischen Belägerung/ auch was vorhero/ als die Tartarn denen

Unserigen bey Regels-Brunn in die Arriereguarde eingefallen (so den 7. Julii 1683 geschehen) passirt;

sambt Der Beläger- und Eroberung beeder Vestungen Baracan/ und Gran. Auch einer Lista der jenigen

Bassen/ so in Person der Belägerung obgedachter Statt Wien beygewohnt (1684). 61 Edward Brown, A brief Account of some Travels in divers Parts of Europe, viz. Hungaria, Servia,

Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli, through a great part of Germany, and the Low-Countries. Through Marca Trevisana, and Lombardy on both sides the Po. With

some Observations on the Gold, Silver, Copper, Quick-silver Mines, and the Baths and Mineral Waters in those Parts. As also, the Description of Many Antiquities, Habits, Fortifications and Remarkable Places.

The Second Edition, with many Additions (London: Tooke, 1685), 20-24.

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opportunity to rue that “one can see how little learning is valued among the barbarians and the

uncultivated”.62

Another visitor to Buda, the celebrated Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi, described the

city’s institutions in expert detail. Among its mosques and madrasas, he devoted the most

attention to the Great Mosque (Büyük Cāmiʿ)—originally a church, looted63 and converted into a

mosque after the Ottomans took the city in 1541, and today the Matthias Church—relating a

story of the Ottoman encounter with the city’s Christian art:

The Süleyman Han Mosque [i.e., the Great Mosque] was once a well-constructed church.

The length of this old mosque from the qibla door to the mihrab is two hundred feet and

its width is one hundred feet. It has a minaret which was earlier a bell tower. It is two

hundred and ten steps high, and atop it Pest appeared tiny and I looked out at the plain of

Buda. It was made from a pure marble and it has a well-proportioned and well-crafted

minaret.

The mosque has two doors. Above the eastern door there is a Master Kūhken-like64 white

marble winged dragon, which was done such that it appears alive. Its mouth is open and

its lips stretched and its tail coiled. In front of the dragon, Saint George, similar to the

idol Lāt, is riding a horse and giving the dragon a stab with a lance and is about to

trample it. At the time of the conquest [of Buda] Ebu’suʿūd said “images are forbidden,

but this likeness was not destroyed.” Süleyman Han, the warrior of the faith, handled the

matter with delicacy and, saying “No one should look at this figure, the believers should

not see it!”, he took a Kashmir shawl from his neck and covered the sculpture, and so

saved it from being destroyed.65

62 Tafferner, Caesarea Legatio, 176: “nunquam videlicet apud Barbaros, et inter rudes pretium eruditioni

fuit; non secus ac Minervae apud Anticyras.” 63 Candlesticks from the church can still today be found in Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul. 64 Farhad, the legendary sculptor who was the Sassanian king’s rival for the love of the princess Šīrīn in

Niẓāmī’s Ḫusrau va Šīrīn. 65 Evliya Çelebi, Seyāḥatnāme, 6:237f: “Süleymān Ḫān Cāmiʿi müṣannaʿ bir kelīsā imis bu cāmiʿ

ḳadīmiñ ḳibla ḳapusundan tā miḥrāba varıncaya ḳadar ṭūlu iki yüz ayaḳ, ʿarżi dāḫī yüz ayaḳdır. Bir

mināresi var eskiden çānlığı imis. İki yüz ḳademe ʿalī ser āmed mināre olub ḥaḳīr üzerinden Peste, Būdīn

ṣaḥrālarını seyr-ü temāsā eyeldim. Ṣāf beyāż mermerden yapılmıs mevzūn ve müṣannaʿ bir mināredir. Bu

cāmiʿiñ iki ḳapusu var. Cānib-i sarḳdaki ḳapu üzerinde bir beyāż mermere üstād kūhken ḳanadlı bir

ejderhā taṣvīri yapmıs ki gūyā ẕī rūḥdur. Aǧızını açub dudaklarını gerüb ķuyruǧunu ḳıvırub ṭurur. Bu

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This sculpture, which Tafferner—who ascribed its poor condition to the Ottomans’ iconoclastic

rage—also mentioned in his embassy report, is now lost.66

Many European Christians saw Buda’s Ottoman occupation through a prophetic lens and

within a historical conflict between Islam and Christendom. Bartholomej Djurdjević, who spent

more than a decade enslaved among the Ottomans after the Battle of Mohācs (1526) and

recorded a widely circulated “Ottoman prophecy”, mentioned Buda among the candidates for the

Ottoman “red apple” (kızıl elma), the ultimate object of Ottoman imperial ambition.67 Djurdjević

presented the prophecy encased in an elaborate philological apparatus, including a transcription

and a word-by-word gloss:

Patissahomoz ghelur, Ciaferun memleketi alur, keuzul almai alur, Kapzeiler, iedi yladagh

Giaur keleci csikmasse, on ikiyladegh onlaron beghligh eder: cui iapar, baghi diker

ejderhā önünde lāt-sebīh Ḥażret-i Hıżır at üzere süvār olub elinde mızrağıyla ejdere bir süngü urub

ejderhāyı altina alub çiǧnemekdedir. Ḥattī ḥīn-i fetḥde Ebu’suʿūd “taṣvīr ḥarāmdır, bu timsālı ḳırmak

deǧildir didiklerinde Süleymān Ḫān ġāzī nezāket edüb “kimse bu ṣurete bakmasın, müslim olanlar

görmesin!” diye gerdeninden kesmīrī sālını çıkarub bu hey’etleriñ üzerlerine örtdürüb ḳirmadan ḫalāṣ

etdirmisdir.” 66 See G. Supka, “Berichtigung: Der Sanct Georg zu Ofen,” Orientalisches Archiv 2, no. 2 (1911-1912):

95, correcting Georg Jacob’s translation of the description in Georg Jacob, “Sultan Soliman als Retter des

Sanct Georg zu Ofen”, Orientalisches Archiv 2, no. 1 (1911-1912): 10. Tafferner’s description of the

object appears at Paul Tafferner, Caesarea Legatio, quam Mandante Augustissimo Rom: Imperatore

Leopoldo I. ad Portam Ottomannicam suscepit, perfecitq; excellentissimus dominus, dominus Walterus S.R.I. Comes de Leslie, Dominus Pettovij, et Neostadij ad Mettoviam: Sac: Caes: Majestatis à Consiliis

intimis, et Aulae Bellicis, Campi Marschallus, et Confiniorum Sclavoniae, et Petriniae Generalis

(Vienna: Lochner, 1672), 173f: “In the middle of city stands a building consecrated in the name of Saint

George which has been turned into a mosque and, in part, an armory. The portico depicts the martyr from

the most elegant stone, but the head was broken off. Nor was the Dragon beneath him spared from the

foolish rage.”(“Urbi mediae S. Georgii sacra aedes in Moschéam versa insidet; ex parte in

armamentarium translata. Porticus è lapide cultissimo Martyrem praefert, sed capite ferociter diminutum:

Nec Draconi subjecto stulta saevities pepercit”.) 67 On Djurdjević and his prophecy, see Kenneth Setton, Western Hostility to Islam and Prophecies of

Turkish Doom (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1992). N. Melek Aksulu, Bartholomäus Georgevićs Türkenschrift ‘De Turcarum ritu et caeremoniis’ (1544) und ihre beide deutschen

Übersetzungen von 1545 (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 2005).

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bahcsai baghlar, ogli kezi olur: onichi yldenssora Hristianon Keleci csichar, ol Turchi

gheressine tus kure.68

[Our emperor will come and take the land of the kafir, will take the red apple, they will

surrender. If in seven years the Christian sword has not arisen, he will rule them for

twelve years. He will build houses, plant vineyards and gardens, and have sons and

daughters. After twelve years, the Christian sword will appear and drive the Turk back.]

More than a century later, Djurdjević’s prophecy continued to circulate. Erasmus Finx (1627-

1694) included it in a compilation of historical and prophetic accounts concerning the Ottomans,

published in 1664, the same year as the Treaty of Vasvar, which ushered in the twenty years of

peace preceding the Ottoman advance on Vienna.69

In the meantime, new wonders were supposed to presage impending Turkish defeat.

Reports circulated of ethereal visitations attacking the Turks of Ottoman Buda, with Christians

reporting sightings of spirits in human form, among them the storied Hungarian king Matthias

Corvinus.70 From Hamburg, Eberhard Happel (1647-1690) elaborated on these reports in his

68 Different publications vary in the transliteration. Here quoted from Bartholomej Djurdjević,

“Vaticinium Lingua Turcica”, in Libellus Vere Christi ana lectione dignus diversas res Turcharum

(Rome: Blado, 1552). Jean Deny, “Les Pseudo-prophéties concernant les Turcs au XVI siècle,” Revue des

études islamiques 10 (1936): 201-220, here 218, includes a reworking of the prophecy following modern

Turkish orthography: “Padısahımız gelir, kâfirin memleketini alır, kızıl elmayı alır, kabzeyler; yedi

yıladek gâvur kılıcı çıkmazsa oniki yıladek onlara beğlik eder, ev yapar, bağ diker, bahçe bağlar, oğlu kızı

olur; oniki yıldan sonra hristiyanın kılıcı çıkar, ol Türkü gerisine tösküre.” 69 Erasmus Finx, ed., Türckischen Staats und Regiments Beschreibung: Das ist: Gründliche Nachricht

von der Ottomannischen Monarchi Ursprung/ Wachstum/ derselben Form zu regieren/ Landschafften/ Städten/ Vestungen/ u. Item was vor Potentaten auf dasselbe Reich zu praetendiren. Diesen sind

beygefügt etliche der berühmtsten so woln alten als neuen Weissagungen/ Muthmassungen und

Erklärungen/ von gedachten Türckischen Reichs Tyranney und Untergang (1664). 70 Paul Conrad Balthasar Han, Alt und Neu Pannonia, oder kurz-verfaßte Beschreibung des uralten edlen

Königreichs Hungarn/ als der allgemeinen Christen considerablen Schutz- und Vor-Mauer/ von mehr dann 1000. Jahren hergeholet. Vorzeigend/ aller Christlichen Könige (deren an der Zahl XLV.) Leben/

Regierung/ Groß-Thaten/ und Absterben; samt Vermeldung/ aller angehörigen Länder/ Städte und

vornehmsten Plätze[…] (Nuremberg: Bleul, 1686), 469: “Zu Eingang des 1676. Jahrs/ wurde von Ofen/

als der gewesenen Königl. Hungarischen Haupt- und Residenz-Statt/ überschreiben: Was massen allda

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multi-volume Ungarischer Kriegs-Roman, one of his sprawling novels reworking the events of

the day into fiction:

In the evening the gate toward Gellért Hill opened, and a donkey ran out towards a

mountain where it climbed into a cave that no one had ever seen before. As I was told of

this strange event, I ordered a number of Turks to go there and to search the cave, but

since none of them could be convinced, even after I offered them much, I promised a

Christian slave freedom if he took care of it. This man went out, in the middle of day, and

found not only a cave that had never been seen before, but also, sitting in it, four strong,

huge men in German clothing who were at that moment quarreling with each other.

However, one of them went hard at the slave for his audacity, who plead on account of

his position as slave, explaining that he was forced there in order to gain his freedom. The

man then gave the slave a large sword and said “go to the Vizier of Buda and say what

you have seen, and also that he should prepare himself to soon leave the city, as it has

been long enough to Turkish hands, and if he does not want to believe this, he should

recognize its certainty in the fact that one side of this sword will bleed in his presence,

but not the other side.71

einige Tag her/ die Geister und Gespenster sehr rumoret/ die Türken mit Prügeln geschlagen/ und theils

übel geplaget/ deren dann der Vezier/ ezliche Trouppen vor die Statt commandiret/ denen es daselbst

nicht besser ergangen; worauf er auch einige Christen (ob sie vielleicht durch ihren Gott solches ändern/

und die Geister vertreiben könten) hinaus befehlicht/ als nun diese auch hinaus kommen/ haben sich die

Geister in leiblicher Gestalt und grösserer Anzahl (worunter König Matthias Corvinus) sehen lassen/ und

die Christen also angeredet: Sie solten getrost seyn/ und der Christenheit andeuten/ daß der Christliche

Glaub wiederum werde vermehret/ daß Muhamedische Reich aber gänzlich zerstöret werden.” 71 Eberhard Werner Happel, Der ungarische Kriegs-Roman, außführliche Beschreibung deß jüngsten

Türcken-Kriegs wobey Aller darinnen verwickelter hoher Potentaten Länder/ Macht/ und Herrschaft/ absonderlich aber eine curieuse Beschreibung von Ungarn/ Persien/ und Türckey/ zusamt denen

denckwürdigsten Belagerungen und blutigsten Feld-Schlachten so die Türcken Zeit ihrer Herrschaft zu jedermanns Verwunderung vorgenommen und erhatten haben. Unter einer anmuthigen Liebes- und

Helden-Geschichte auf Romantische Weise in einer reinen ungezwungenen Teutschen Redens-Arth

verfasset und mit allerhand Nutz- und ergötzlichen Historischen/ Politischen und dergleichen leswürdigen Sachen angefüllt, vol. 1 (Middelburg, 1685), 267-267: “In der Nacht thāte sich ein Thor nach

dem Gerhards-Berge auff/ und ein Esel lieff hinauß/ nach einem Berge/ woselbst er sich in eine Höhle

verkrochen/ die man vorhero nimmer gesehen hatte. Als man mir diese Seltzamkeit erzehlete/ordnete ich

etliche Türcken/ dahin zu gehen/ und solche Höhle zu suchen/ als aber sich deren keiner dazu/ auch mit

grossen Verheissungen wolte bereden lassen/ versprach ich einem Christlichen Sclaven die Freyheit/

wann er es verrichtete. Dieser gieng hinauß am hellen Tage/ fand nicht allein eine sonsten niemal

gesehene Höhle im Berge und 4. starcke ungeheure Männer in Deutschen Kleidern darinnen sitzen/ die

sich gleichsam miteinander zancketen/ sondern der eine davon fuhr den Sclavin hart an/ wegen seiner

Kühnheit/ als aber derselbe seinen Sclaven-Stand fürschützete/ und erwiese/ daß er zu diesem Gang/ seine

Freyheit zu erlangen/ gezwungen worden/ da reichte ihm derselbe Mann ein grosses Schwerdt/ und

sprach: Gehe hin zum Vezier von Ofen/ und sage/ was du gesehen/ auch daß er sich bereit mache, die

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Happel’s novel synthesized the shifting mass of information surrounding current events, which

developed quickly in the wake of Vienna. Emboldened by the Ottoman retreat, the Holy League

besieged Buda in 1684, without success. When forces amassed again outside its walls in 1686,

the position was less advantageous for the Ottomans, and after a prolonged siege, the city fell.

The field surgeon Johann Dietz described the horrors that followed. “Everything had to

die”, he wrote, and recalled women, “bodies ripped open, such that their unborn children fell

out”.72 The image of the dead disemboweled so that soldiers could search for swallowed

valuables was familiar enough that it could stand in generally for the violent excesses of war. A

contemporary published account celebrating the victory reported coolly, “Since such a bloody

siege had cost so many lives, the victorious soldier was furious and tyrannical, such that he cut

open half-dead Jews and Turks in order to loot gold from their intestines.”73 Dietz also gave a

vivid account from the perspective of the looter, reporting how he rummaged among the

Stadt bald zu verlassen/ als welche lange genug in der Türcken Händen gewesen/ und wann er dieser

Rede nicht glauben will/ soll er die Gewißheit derselben daran erkennen/ daß dieses Schwerd in seiner

Gegenwart auff der einen Seithen wird Blut schwitzen/ an der andern aber nicht.” On Happel, see Gerhild

Scholz Williams, Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel: Eberhard Werner

Happel, 1647-1690 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 72 Ernst Consentius, ed., Meister Johann Dietz des Großen Kurfürsten Feldscher und Königlicher

Hofbarbier, nach der alten Handschrift in der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin zum ersten Male in Druck

gegeben (Munich: Langewiesche-Brandt, 1915), 75: “So aber nackend ausgezogen, die Leiber mit

Partisanen durchstochen, durch die Geburt; die Leiber aufgerissen, daß die noch nicht gebornen Kinder

herausgefallen; welches mich am meisten gejammert.” 73 Sieghafte Teutsche Waffen, oder außführlicher Bericht von der mit vielen Blut überwundenen Stadt

Ofen wie solche Welt-berühmte Festung denen türckischen Bluthunden mit stürmender Hand von denen

Christlichen Waffen abgenommen worden. Alles außführlich/ was sich von Tag zu Tage so wol bey den Türckischen als Kayserlichen zugetragen/ nach den Wienerischen Brieffen accurat zum Druck befodert

(Prague, 1686), 64: “Weilen solche blutige Belägerung ein grosses Volk gekostet/ ist der siegende Soldate

also ergrimmet/ und tyrannisch gewesen/ daß er auch die noch halb lebende Juden und Türcken die Leiber

auffgeschnitten/ umb auß ihren Gedärmen das Gold zu erbeuten.”

291

buildings for objects of worth, encountered Turks in hiding, and protected his finds from other

looters, quick to muscle in on any object of value.

An account appended as a supplement to Johann Christoph Wagner’s Interiora Orientis

detecta offered the most comprehensive run-down of the massacre.74 As the soldiers fought their

way into the city, they met a group of more than eight hundred Ottoman soldiers who

“mistakenly thinking that they would receive mercy, threw down their weapons, and were all cut

down”.75 In the meantime, Hungarian foot soldiers (Tolpatschen) murdered and plundered the

Jewish families seeking to escape the city.76 Others who took refuge in the synagogue managed

to negotiate—for a steep price—their safe passage. In total, of those fortunate enough to have

survived the siege’s bombs and the dysentery that raged through the city, the massacres claimed

more than three thousand lives. After the fires that soon consumed the city burned out, the

surviving Jews and Turkish prisoners were forced into hard labor, clearing the city and throwing

the dead in the Danube. Afterwards, the prisoners were sorted, and the old and wounded were

executed.

74 “Anhang/ welcher zu Vollführung derer dem dritten Theil beygefügten Beschreibung der annoch

wehrenden Siegreichen Progressen Ihro Kayserl. Majest. und dero hohen Alliirten Waffen wider den Erb-

Find vorstellet die Kriegs-Begebenheiten deß 1686. und 1687. Jahres”, in Johann Christoph Wagner,

Interiora Orientis Detecta, oder Grundrichtige und eigentliche Beschreibung aller heut zu Tag bekandten grossen und herrlichen Reiche des Orients: als da sind: Das Königreich Persien/Indien/ oder das Reich

deß grossen Mogols/ die Konigreiche Decan/ Kunkan/ Visiapour/ die See-Küst Malabar und

Coromandel/ die Königreiche Bisnagar/ Narsinga/ Carnatica/ Golconda/ Arakan/ Tipra/ Asem/ Pegu/

Martaban/ Tanassery/ Siam/ Cambodia/ Cochin-China und Tunquin […] (Augsburg: Koppmayer, 1687). 75 “Anhang”, 8: “Es haben zwar die Kayserlichen Anfangs solchen Widerstand gefunden/ daß sie zurück

gewichen/ seyn aber gleich wieder mit grosser Menge/ weilen die Türcken weder Minen springen lassen/

noch Pulfer-Säck geworffen/ hertzhafft angelauffen/ also/ daß sie nach einem halbstündigen Scharmützel

schon in die Stadt/ wo die Palisaden gestanden gekommen/ über 800. Janitscharen/ so auß der Einbildung

Gnade zu erhalten/ das Gewehr von sich geworffen/ seynd alle nidergehauen worden.” 76 “Anhang”, 8: “Die meisten Juden/ so sich samt anderen Familien mit Haab und Gut auf Schiffen

salviren wollen/ sind von den Tolpatschen bey dem Wasser-Rondell erdapt und erwürget/ alles das ihrige

zur Beute gemachet/ und darauf die Plünderung gestattet worden.”

292

The looting of Buda’s libraries began immediately. Buda was unique among the

conquered cities of Ottoman Europe in that much of its largest manuscript collection, housed in

the Great Mosque, remains intact. This was due to the work of a single individual, an aristocratic

engineer who had participated in the siege, Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli. This was not Marsigli’s

first encounter with Ottoman Europe, nor his first trip to Buda. In 1679 Marsigli, the scion of a

prominent Bolognese family, had accompanied the Venetian envoy, Pietro Civran, to Istanbul,

where, aided by interpreters, he discoursed with Ottoman scholars such as Hezārfenn Ḥüseyin

Efendi.77 In 1683, as Kara Mustafa’s troops moved towards Vienna, Marsigli, then working his

way up through the military ranks during the hasty defense preparations in Hungary, was taken

prisoner. He witnessed the siege of Vienna from the Ottoman encampment, where he roasted and

brewed coffee.78 After an escape attempt, he was sold to Bosnian horsemen who took him, via

Buda, to Sarajevo. The memory of the city was vivid enough that, participating in the first siege

of Buda in 1684, Marsligli could recall the city’s fortifications from memory when he wrote to

the War Council in Vienna.79 It is unclear if Marsigli had the mastery required to navigate such a

library, but he had learned enough Turkish to question Turkish prisoners during the siege and had

enough first-hand knowledge of Ottoman intellectual life in Istanbul to understand its value.80

77 See John Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli,

Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 23-27. Hezārfenn’s Telhīs al-beyān

bī kavānīn-i Āl-i Osmān (Memorandum on the rules of the House of Osman) formed the basis of

Marsigli’s later history of the Ottoman military: Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Stato militare dell’imperio

Ottomano, incremento e decremento del medesimo (The Hague and Amsterdam, 1732).

78 See Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 20. 79 Endre Veress, Gróf Marsigli Alajos Ferdinánd Jelentései és Térképei Budavar, 1684-1686-iki,

Ostromairól, Visszafoglalásáról és Helyrajzáról (Budapest: Gusztáv, 1907), 17-19. 80 Veress, Gróf Marsigli, 22.

293

Joseph von Hammer, when he traveled to Bologna—where the collection of manuscripts

from Buda is housed in the Academy of Sciences—recalled reading the institute’s charter, which

recounts how Marsigli “during the conquest of Buda found the old sheykh-custos sitting in the

library and saved from fire and plundering two cabinets filled with manuscripts in the great

mosque.”81 Boris Liebrenz has noted the inconsistency between Marsigli’s account (via

Hammer) and the inscriptions of two looted manuscripts in Leipzig.82 These suggest that

Marsigli only took a portion of the available manuscripts, and that, whatever he did to “save” the

library, he did not save the librarian, who was soon thereafter executed. Several inscribed

manuscripts invoke a scene in which the learned man was lying on the ground, brutally murdered

among the half-plundered manuscripts. An inscription in a Leipzig manuscript claims it was

looted in the “mufti’s study room”, where the learned man “lay, shot, in his own blood.”83 Yet

another ownership note is even more detailed. Written in Latin, it stages a scene of recognition

between the looter and the cruelly executed “mufti”:

One found the corpse of the Turkish pontiff, who had been shot in the middle of the

forehead, lying prostrate on the ground in his study, where I found this book, much like a

second Archimedes, as if buried among his countless books and manuscripts, torn and

81 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, 281: “wie Marsigli bei der Eroberung

Ofens den alten Scheich-Kustos in der Bibliothek sitzend gefunden und die zwei mit Handschriften

gefüllten Kabinette in der großen Moschee vor Feuer und Plünderung gerettet hatte.” 82 Liebrenz, Arabische, Persische und Türkische Handschriften in Leipzig, 27n70. 83 LUB, ms Vollers 894: “dieses türkische Buch hat mir Herr Anton Heinrich Rudolf Freyer Röm. Kays.

May. unter dem Sächs. Merseburgischen Regiment verehrt, welches er bey Einnemung Ofens in Ungarn

aus des Muphti Studir-Stube, allwo er selbst ist geschossen in seinem Blut gelegen, genommen.

Merseburg am 10. Mai, Ann. 1689”.Quoted in Liebrenz, Arabische, Persische und Türkische

Handschriften in Leipzig, 27n72.

294

strewn about by the uncultivated soldiers. It was apparent from his features that he was a

man of venerable learning and a combination of courtesy and dignity.84

The elaborately staged realization of common humanity in this note only underscores the

triumphant violence that otherwise pervades both Türkenbeute inscriptions and accounts of the

siege’s aftermath. Celebration of violence against Muslim and Jews—if sometimes accompanied

by acknowledgement of its excesses—formed part of the siege’s commemoration. Two series of

tapestries commissioned by Prince Leopold, Duke of Lorraine (1679-1729) depicting the

campaigns of his father, Charles V, included depictions of the sack of Buda, “bathed in janissary

blood”.85 Coins minted to commemorate the victory also refer indirectly to the aftermath of the

siege.86 One contains a chronogram reading “WarM Vergosnes tUrken bLVt kVhLet DIeses

ofens gLVt” (“warm spilled Turk’s blood cools this oven’s glow”—“Ofen” in German means

both Buda and oven).87 The loss of Buda was also memorialized in the Ottoman empire, where

poetic laments circulated about the empire’s loss.88 “The smoke of my sighs climbs to heaven,

says Buda/come to my aid, o my padisah, says Buda” went the refrain of one.89

84 LUB, ms B. or. 104, Iv: “Pontificis Turcici cadaver mortuum, cujus caput in medio frontis sclopeto

militari seuitia erat perforatum in museo suo ubi hoc libro sum potitus in terra prostratum jacebat et instar

alterius Archimedis inter innumerum fere librorum et manuscriptorum suorum a literarum imperito milite

dilaceratorum et dissipatorum catervam quasi sepultum inveniebatur. Vir, uti ex lineamentis exanimati

poterat colligi, cultu venerabilis et comitate gravitate mixta conspicuus fuerat”. Liebrenz, Arabische,

Persische und Türkische Handschriften in Leipzig, 28n72.

85 This is found in the description in the cartouche of the tapestry: “Budam expugnatam janissariorum

sanguine exundantem direptioni tradit Victor Carolus V. 2. Sept. 1686”. See Kinga Frojimovics, Géza

Komoróczy, Viktória Pusztai, and Andrea Strbik, Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History

(Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 503-505, which gives an overview of both series. 86 On coins commemorating the 1686 siege, see Ödön Gohl, “Budapest Emlékérmei”, Budapest régiségei

7 (1900): 116-162. 87 Gohl, “Budapest Emlékérmei”, 120. 88 Markus Köhbach, “Ein unbekanntes osmanisch-türkisches Klagelied über den Fall von Buda 1686”,

Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 34, no. 1 (1988): 57-62. 89 Köhbach, “Ein unbekanntes osmanisch-türkisches Klagelied über den Fall von Buda 1686”, 58-60:

“Āsumāna sütūn oldu dūd-i āhım dėr Budun / Gel ėris imdadıma hey pādisāhıma dėr Budun”. A

translation of the poem appears in Hammer, Geschichte der osmanischen Dichtkunst, 3:611f.

295

Many of those fortunate enough to survive moved onto new hardships. Enslaved men,

women, and children from Buda and the former Ottoman Europe soon began arriving in the

markets of German towns and cities. When they are mentioned, it is often with a keen interest in

their distinguished social status, reflecting both their enslavement—breeding was, in effect, a

commodity —as well as the fact that they often only appear in the historical record through

baptism. The eighteenth-century historian Johann Jacob Vogel noted the sale in Leipzig months

after the conquest of Buda by a merchant from Hungary of a pregnant Turkish woman for fifty

kilograms of sugar and a six- or seven-year-old boy, “whose father had been an Agha in Buda”,

for ten Reichstaler.90 Vogel also noted that in September of the following year a certain female

Turkish slave died unbaptized, and mentioned another woman, “Turkish by birth, named

Heuscha, born in Buda (her father was called Clima Osmann Bassa, her mother Asia Kattana,

and her husband Che Mechmet Chiautzi, who is supposed to have been a Janissary lieutenant,

often used in embassies of the Turkish court, and who died during the conquest of the mentioned

main fort.”91

90 Johann Jacob Vogel, Leipzigisches Geschicht-Buch, Oder Annales, Das ist: Jahr- und Tage-Bücher Der Weltberühmten Königl. und Churfürstl. Sächsischen Kauff- und Handels-Stadt Leipzig : In welchen

die meisten merckwürdigsten Geschichte und geschehene Veränderungen, die in und bey belobter Stadt und Gegend, beydes in Geistl. als Weltlichen Sachen, sowohl in Friedens- als Krieges-Zeiten, von Anno

661. nach Christi Geburth an, bis auf die neuesten Zeiten, von Tage zu Tage sich begeben haben,

enthalten sind (Leipzig: Lankisch, 1756), 848: “Dieser Tage brachte ein frembder Kauffmann aus Ungarn

ein schwangeres Türkisches Weib und einen jungen Türcken/ ungefehr von 6 biß 7 Jahren/ dessen Vater

ein Aga in Ofen soll gewesen seyn/ mit sich nacher Leipzig/ und verkauffte jenes vor einen Centner

Zucker/ diesen vor 10 Reichsthaler zweyen Leipzigischen Kauffleuten.” Liebrenz, Arabische, Persische

und Türkische Handschriften in Leipzig, 24 91 Vogel, Leipzigisches Geschicht-Buch, 857: “eine gebohrne Türckin/ Heuscha genant/ gebürtig von

Ofen (daselbst ihr Vater Clima Osmann Bassa/ ihre Mutter Asia Kattana/ ihr Mann Che Mechmet

Chiautzi geheissen/ und dieser ein Janitzscharen Lieutenant soll gewesen/ offt in Gesandschafft von

Türkischen Hoff gebraucht worden/ und bey Eroberung gedachter Haupt-Vestung mit umkommen

seyn/)”. Liebrenz, Arabische, Persische und Türkische Handschriften in Leipzig, 24.

296

Looted goods from the conquests streamed westward, and within a decade, much of the

manuscript legacy of Ottoman Europe was circulating in German lands. Manuscripts were only a

small portion of the flood of objects that accompanied the returning armies. Ottoman goods

moved through big cities as well as small towns, and a sense of what this mass of material was

like is given by an account of looted objects from a later siege of Belgrade:

A banner with a gilded silver button, and a silk red, yellow, and violet blue wrapping; the

marriage contract of a pasha (among whose possessions, no doubt, the other Turkish

things were found) with the daughter of a defterdar, three ells long, half of which is

covered with partially and fully embellished circles and writing; a calendar in which is

found writing, in two round discs and in between, in two columns, as well as many other

books; a large book of his entries and travels; a prayer book; an exceptional seal, made of

carnelian, with Arabic writing; a Turkish rosary made of amber; an inlaid knife, with

gilded writing on its blade; a copper, ornamented coffee pot with gilded lid; another of

Russia leather with silver stitching; a black bathing cap stitched with Gold; a wooden

spoon with ivory, and other household goods; a cingulo castitatis of human hair. These

were received by a distinguished officer after the battle and looting of Belgrade.92

Much of this material haul is now lost, and what remains gives little indication of its history.

However fragmentary, manuscripts offer a privileged view into the social life of Türkenbeute

more broadly, allowing us to follow the chain of ownership and reconstruct their circulation.

92 Johann Christian Kundmann, Rariora Naturae et Artis item in Re Medica, oder Seltenheiten der Natur und Kunst des Kundmannischen Naturalien-Kabinets, wie auch in der Artzeney-Wissenschaft (Breslau

and Leipzig: Hubert, 1737), 708-709: “Diesen Alcoran habe nebst andern Türkischen Seltenheiten: Als

einen Roß Schweiff mit einem vergoldeten silbernen Knopff, nebst dessen seidenen roth, gelb und violet

blauen invulcro; Einen Heuraths-Contract eines Bassa (bey welchen unfehlbar auch die andern

Türckischen Sachen angetroffen worden,) mit der Tochter eines Deffterdars, so 3. Ellen lang, die Helffte

mit gantz und halb umschriebenen Circuln und Schrifft; it. Einen Calender, darinnen in 2. runten

Scheiben und darzwischen in zweyen Columnen Schrifft sich befindet, und viele andere Scripturen; it. ein

grosses Buch von seinen Intraden und Reisen; ein Gebet Buch; einige vortreffliche Siegelsteine von

Carneol mit Arabischer Schrifft; einen Türckischen Rosen-Crantz von Birnstein; ein Einlege-Messer, da

auf der Klinge goldene Schrifft; einen kupffern und verzienten Caffée – Krug mit vergoldeten Deckel; it.

einen anderen von Juchten mit Silber gesticket; eine schwartz mit Gold gestickte Bade-Mütze; einen

höltzernen Esse-Löffel unten mit Elffenbein und anderen Haußrath; it. einen cingulo castitatis von

Menschen-Haaren nach emportirung Belgrads und gewonnenen Schlacht davor, von einem vornehmen

Officier erhalten”.

297

Although indecipherable to most, these manuscripts circulated widely, functioning in

turns as trophies, conversation pieces, and windows onto a foreign world. The front flyleaf of a

small, leather-bound prayer book in Hamburg contains a scribal note in Arabic from a certain

ʿAlī ibn ʿAbdüllah, dated 1063/1652. Across from it, two inscriptions in German and Latin attest

to its circulation as Türkenbeute. The first, in Latin, is from Gottfried Jentzsch of Oschatz (a

town in Saxony between Leipzig and Dresden), who dedicated the book “in witness of unsullied

affection and steadfast friendship” to its recipient, Johann Michael Hummel of “Bittelbr.”

(presumably either Bittelbronn or Bittelbrunn, both in Baden Württemberg), who in a note, dated

1687, described, in German, the circumstances of its acquisition.93 Jentzsch had served as

chaplain in a troop of Saxon soldiers who fought alongside the Venetians against the Ottomans

on the Peloponnesus in Greece. Soldiers looted the manuscript after taking the fort of Corone in

1685. In another manuscript from Hummel’s collection—a Qurʾan section (juzʾ)—Hummel noted

that Christoph Faber sent him the manuscript from Buda in 1691, after it had been looted from a

mosque at Szigetvár.94 A second Qurʾan section which Hummel inscribed and which is identical

in binding, format, and script, must have come from Szigetvár as well.95

Years later he returned to both volumes to record bits of information about the Ottoman

world that came to him in his village parish. In a note dated 13 July 1700, he jotted down in the

second manuscript news from Istanbul on the marriage of the second daughter of the Prince of

93 SUBH, ms or. 90, front paste-down endpaper: “In affectus intemerati constantisque amicitiae

testimonium”. Transcribed in Carl Brockelmann, Katalog der orientalischen Handschriften der

Stadtbibliothek zu Hamburg (Hamburg: Meissner, 1906), 126. A short biographical sketch of Jentzsch,

who was also present at the Siege of Vienna is included in Johann Gottlob Frenckel, Diptycha Ositiensia, oder Historie derer Herren Superintendenten und Diaconen zu Oschatz in Meißen (Dresden: Krause,

1722).

94 SUBH, ms Or. 50. This was likely the Ali Pasa Mosque, later turned into the Church of Saint Roch. 95 SUBH, ms Or. 49.

298

Moldovia with the son of the head interpreter at the Ottoman court, Alexander Mavrocordatos.96

Hummel returned to the other Qurʾan section seven years later, to record rumors of a “miracle”

(Wunder Zeichen): the cathedral that housed Muhammad’s grave had collapsed.97

Hummel’s notes illustrate how objects like the Hamburg Qurʾan sections circulated as

fragments of a distant Islamic present, one that could be linked to villages like Bittelbronn (or

Bittelbrunn) through both the direct experience of soldiers and the grand stage of sacred history.

Other manuscripts attest to their value as gifts within learned networks, up and down social

hierarchies, and even within families, such as in May 1687, when the Meissen Superintendent

and theologian Matthias Zimmermann presented a Turkish Qurʾan translation, likely acquired

around that time, to his daughter, Anna.98

Earlier Ottoman inscriptions offer glimpses into the world from which these manuscripts

were torn. A number were marked as belonging to charitable endowments (waqf, pl. ewqāf).

Such endowments had long been a common feature of Islamic societies, and in many cases

provided for the care, holding, and dissemination of manuscripts. Because manuscripts so

endowed were clearly marked—often the word وقف (waqf) was written throughout the book—

Türkenbeute manuscripts containing waqf statements help cast light on their earlier institutional

contexts and subsequent dispersal. Boris Liebrenz has traced a number of manuscripts that

belonged to the waqf of Süleymān Efendi from the Great Mosque in Buda, many of which are

immediately recognizable by the characteristic labeling on their front cover.99 Several remained

96 SUBH, ms Or. 49, back paste-down endpaper. 97 SUBH, ms Or. 50, back paste-down endpaper. 98 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 369 Zimmermann was a theologian from Eperies (now Prešov, Slovakia),

who . See, AGL, 4:2109f. At some point in the following decades Sigismund Seebisch bought the work

for sixteen ducats. 99 See Liebrenz, Arabische, Persische und Türkische Handschriften in Leipzig, 27n71.

299

in (or returned to) Buda. Others came into the libraries of German orientalists, and from there to

the various institutions that lured them away or bought their collections. Eight found their way

into the Leipzig Ratsbibliothek through the libraries of August Pfeiffer und Andreas

Acoluthus.100 Three are now in Dresden, from the collections of Sigismund Seebisch and the

bookseller Moritz Weidmann.101 Four others were acquired by Siegfried Bayer, eventually

arriving among the Hunterian manuscripts in Glasgow.102 Four are found in Hamburg, from the

libraries of Abraham Hinckelmann, Johann Christian Wolf, and Zacharias Uffenbach.103 Three

more manuscripts are now in the Jena University Library.104 That nearly every major German

collector of Islamic manuscripts had at least one is a testament to the broad dispersal of

Türkenbeute. Elsewhere, we find more personal traces of the lives of the Ottomans who read

these manuscripts: the names of owners, their drawings, reports on the births of their children,

and occasionally the scrawl of a child’s hand. In a copy of Taʿlīqīzāde Firāsetnāme one reader

recorded dozens of notes commemorating important life moments in the years before Christian

armies stormed through Ottoman Europe and some unknown chain of hands brought the

manuscript to its current home in Dresden. The dates of these inscriptions ascend, following the

rhythms of births and deaths, toward an unmentioned catastrophe.

100 Liebrenz mentions LUB, ms B. or. 006, 009, 101 (Pfeiffer), 103 (Pfeiffer), 104 (Pfeiffer), 140

(Acoluthus), and two others that entered the collection later, LUB, ms Vollers 100 (Jacob Fritsch), 1044. 101 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 141 (Weidmann), 183 (Seebisch), 246 (Weidmann). 102 GUL, ms Hunter 145, 148, 150, 152. See, David Weston, The Bayer Collection: A preliminary catalogue of the manuscripts and books of Professor Theophilius Siegfried Bayer, acquired and

augmented by the Reverend Dr. Heinrich Walther Gerdes, now preserved in the Hunterian Library at the

University of Glasgow, version 1.0 (University of Glasgow: 2018).

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_586405_smxx.pdf 103 SUBH, ms Orient., 9 (Hinckelmann), 16 (Uffenbach), 63 (Hinckelmann), 78 (Wolf) 104 Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek – Jena (hereafter: ThULB), ms Prov. o 37i, Prov. o 37l,

G.B. o. 17.

300

That Türkenbeute manuscripts had an immediate impact on the work of orientalists is

shown by the rapidity with which these manuscripts entered their libraries. Acoluthus, who was

unusually diligent in recording information about the acquisition of his manuscripts, quickly

assembled a sizable collection. Already in 1684, he received a manuscript from the Vienna

encampment which a soldier had given to the rector of a school in Międzychód (Birnbaum).105 In

1685, he acquired a manuscript of religious texts “from the kindness of a friend who visited me

in my study and did not want me to know his name.”106 Other friends who gifted their

manuscripts are named. A certain Christopher Saltzmann gave him a Turkish translation of

Ǧāmī’s hagiographic compilation, Nafaḥāt al-uns, in 1687.107 In the same year, Johannes Conrad

Barth from Sopron (Ödenburg) gave him a copies of Meḥmed Fażlī’s Gül ve bülbül and Saʿdī’s

Gulistān.108 Johann Sigismund Haunold (1634-1711) also gifted him a number of manuscripts.109

Acoluthus also collected Türkenbeute on his travels. During a 1687 trip to Vienna, Acoluthus

acquired at least eight manuscripts, one of which he noted was purchased from Greek

merchants.110 He purchased another group of manuscripts in Banská Bystrica (Neusohl) in

October 1688.111 While the majority of dated manuscripts (dozens of other manuscripts from his

collection contain no such notes) are grouped in the late 1680s, Acoluthus’s contacts continued to

send him books until his death. In 1698, for instance, he received a prayerbook that had

105 LUB, ms B. or. 255.

106 LUB, ms B. or. 165: “Ex liberalitate amici in musaeo me invisentis, nomen vero suum nescire me

volentis, accepi Anno 1685. d. 26. Novembr.”

107 LUB, ms B. or. 47.

108 LUB, mss B. or. 66, 149.

109 LUB, mss B. or. 79, 153, 209 on November 23, 1687, and, the following year, a Qurʾan which was

looted from a mosque in Indonesia and brought back by Heinrich Mucha, LUB, ms B. or. 130.

110 LUB, mss B. or. 52, 81, 154, 156, 175, 225, 233, 253. B. or. 175 was the manuscript acquired “a

Graecis Mercatoribus”.

111 The manuscripts acquired are Banská Bystrica, LUB, mss B. or. 53, 58, 69, 201, 223, 242.

301

supposedly once belonged to a Turkish acrobat (Seyltäntzer) who had carried it with him so that

he could not be bewitched.112 One officer even presented Acoluthus with an enslaved Ottoman: a

learned woman from Belgrade whom Acoluthus emancipated and employed in some capacity as

an informant or amanuensis.113 Acoluthus’s hopes of converting her to Christianity were dashed

when she disappeared without a word after six months.

Overnight, the Islamic manuscript became a feature of the German library, and this mass

of material made new demands, generating interest and providing manuscripts for new projects.

Acoluthus soon turned to the study of Türkenbeute, and he was inundated with requests to

explain looted material. He studied the Islamic coins in Haunold’s collection, contributing a

volume to Haunold’s Theatrum Monetarium.114 In particular, he began a close study of the

Qurʾan, and amassed dozens of copies of the Qurʾan and its translations over the following

years.115 Acoluthus’s great unfinished work was a polyglot Qurʾan, which would have included

the Arabic text with its Turkish, Persian, and Latin translations.116 While one might interpret as a

sign of divine providence the fact that, as the celebratory poem that concludes the published

specimen of his polyglot Qurʾan observed, “Tu edas Alcoran” (you publish the Qurʾan) is an

112 LUB, ms B. or. 197, Ir: “dieses Buch hat der Seyltäntzer der [ ] Großfeldherren, eingebohrner Türcke

bey sich getragen, und gebraucht, damit man ihn nicht bezaubern können”.

113 Tautz, Die Bibliothekare der churfürstlichen Bibliothek, 212-222.

114 UB Wrocław, ms R 672

115 The note in LUB, ms B. or. 130 suggests that he was closely studying the Qurʾan at least as early as

1688. Acoluthus also made a copy of the Qurʾan himself (LUB, ms B. or. 351).

116 Andreas Acoluthus, Tetrapla Alcoranica, Sive Specimen quadrilinguis, arabici, persici, latini: Cujus

textus authenticus arabicus ex collatione XXX. Codicum, recensendus, hujus autem difficillimisensus, tanquam obserata Satanae Abyssus, Gemina Clave, eaque felicissima, nimirum Versione Persica, in ipso

oriente rarissima, et Turcica, adhuc rariore, Christianis autem hucusque prorsus ignorata, recludendi, ac

Triplici Latina Versione exponendi, Annotationibus etiam Philologico-Theologicis, ex ipsorum Arabum, Persarum, et Turcarum scriniis, genuina ipsorum Mataeologia Sede, nec non ditissimo Coelestis Veritatis

Thesauro, depromendis, Ad Sectae Muammedicae certam Confusionem, Regni Christiani non desperandam Ampliationem, Et Scientiae Orientalis insignem Augmentationem, illustrandi sunt (Berlin:

Salfeld, 1701).

302

anagram for “Andreas Acolut”, this project seems to have been driven by the circulation and

acquisition of Türkenbeute manuscripts.117

Sigismund Seebisch

The generations that followed Acoluthus were trained in this glut of Islamic manuscripts.

The career of Sigismund Seebisch (1669-1753) is characteristic of this moment of transition in

the wake of Türkenbeute. Seebisch was born in Zwickau in 1669, fifteen years Acoluthus’s

junior.118 The difference was decisive. Whereas Acoluthus cut his teeth on the hyper-multilingual

Biblical philology after the polyglot Bibles, Seebisch came of age in the wake of the Ottoman

defeat, as Ottoman manuscripts circulated among the notables of cities like Dresden, where his

father was then pastor at the Kreuzkirche.119 The elder Seebisch had managed to acquire a

number of these manuscripts, and so that his son could learn to read them, he sent Sigismund to

Breslau to study with Acoluthus.

Seebisch studied under Acoluthus for two years, and showed enough promise that the

Saxon elector August II financed a trip abroad to further his orientalist studies. Seebisch left for

Paris in 1694 and passed through Leiden in 1697, on his return to Dresden. Little is known of

this trip, but a bundle of Seebisch’s notes found among his manuscripts shows the young

orientalist at work abroad and offers a glimpse into his Paris life.120 Seebisch spent at least a

117 Acoluthus, Tetrapla Alcoranica, 58.

118 On Seebisch, see Tromler, “Leben und Schriften des Hrn. Andreas Akoluth”, 435-437. 119 In 1697, Johann Seebisch was named Stadtprediger. On Johann Seebisch, see Christian August

Freyberg, Historie der Frauen-Kirche in Neu-Dreßden, wie auch Lebens-Geschichte der Herren Stadt-

und Mittags-Prediger bey diesem Gottes-Hause (Dresden: Bodenehrn, 1728), 50-55. 120 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 317.

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portion of his stay in Paris under the roof of the Flemish engraver Gerard Edelinck, since a letter

to Seebisch which he later used to transcribe a list of manuscripts from the library of

Melchisédech Thévenot is addressed to “Monsieur Sebisch chez Mons. Edelinck dans la rue St.

Jacques”.121 In Paris, he focused his attention on Qurʾan manuscripts, a number of which are

mentioned and excerpted in his notes. Seebisch was particularly interested in Persian and Turkish

translations of the Qurʾan. He studied an interlinear Persian translation from Colbert’s library,

and among the notes we find excerpts from another Persian translation and copies of the

colophons of Turkish and Persian translations.122 This mirrored the Qurʾanic studies of his

teacher, Acoluthus, and, more broadly, the intensified engagement with the Qurʾan among

German scholars at the end of the seventeenth century.123 The year Seebisch left for Paris, the

first widely-available printed Arabic Qurʾan was published in Hamburg, edited by Abraham

Hinckelmann, and it was around this time that Acoluthus was working on his polyglot Qurʾan.124

Seebisch’s studies with Türkenbeute had prepared him well for his trip, and his notes

show how, scouring the Qurʾans of Paris, he brought a keen sense for the social life of the

Islamic holy book. In an ornately bound and lavishly illuminated Ottoman Qurʾan, Seebisch

recorded a note in Turkish that marked its endowment after the conquest of Györ (Yanık Kale,

“burned fortress”) by Sinan Pasa.125 The irony would not have been lost on Seebisch: the

121 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 317.

122 The Colbert Persian interlinear translation is now BnF, ms Arabe 397 (Colbert 1032). According to a

note on fol. 173r, the manuscript belonged to Claude Naulot du Val d’Avallon and later the Jesuit Collège

de Clermont. I have not identified the specific manuscripts whose colophons Seebisch copied. 123 See Alastair Hamilton, “A Lutheran Translator for the Quran: A Late Seventeenth-Century Quest”, in

The Republic of Letters and the Levant, eds Hamilton, van den Boogert, and Westerweel, 197-221. 124 Abraham Hinckelmann, ed., Al-Coranus, sive Lex Islamitica Muhammedis, filii Abdallae

Pseudoprophetae (Hamburg: Schultz, 1694). 125 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 317. The manuscript (Colbert 1391) is now BnF, ms Arabe 418.

304

Ottomans lost the city—and likely the manuscript—only a few years later. From another Qurʾan

he copied a prayer to be recited after its reading and a Fālnāme, a set of bibliomantic procedures

(written in Persian in nastaʿlīq script) with a corresponding chart to interpret the result.126

Seebisch also focused on the manuscripts of earlier orientalists. He copied a list of

Turkish place names he found appended to a dictionary Savary de Brèves had commissioned

from a common Persian-Turkish dictionary.127 The Persian and Turkish word lists found among

the notes were likely compiled from a Paris manuscript. Seebisch also copied and translated a

remarkable early work of orientalist art history: François Pétis de la Croix’s description of the

paintings in an important fifteenth-century Timurid Miʿraǧnama (account of Muhammad’s

ascension).128 Written in Uygur script, which no orientalist could read, Pétis de la Croix had

relied on earlier Arabic and Turkish descriptions earlier owners had added above and below the

paintings.

Two more substantial scribal undertakings, while never published, played a role in the

subsequent development of oriental studies, and represent important points of continuity with

Reiske. The first of these was the collation of Golius’s 1636 edition of Aḥmad ibn ʿArabšāh

(1389-1450)’s history of Timur, Aǧā’ib al-maqdūr fī nawā’ib al-Tīmūr (The Wonders of Fate in

the History of Timur), with manuscripts from the collections of Louis Picques (1637-1699) and

126 These are located at BnF, ms Arabe 401, fols 460v-461r and fols 461v-463r, respectively. 127 BnF, ms Persan 208. The manuscript, a Kitāb-i Dānistan (Persian-Turkish vocabulary) copied by an

Ottoman scribe onto columns, flanked by columns with French and Latin equivalents. It later belonged to

the library of Claude Hardy. The list begins on fol. 58v. 128 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 190. Pétis de la Croix’s description was at first bound into the manuscript,

but was later detached and is now BnF, ms Supplément Turc 190 bis. The story of Muhammad’s

ascension, traveling the Earth and visiting heaven and hell, are based on several Quranic verses, but

mostly evolved through subsequent oral and written transmission. On BnF, ms Supplément Turc 190 and

the Miʿraǧnama, see Christiane Gruber, The Timurid ‘Book of Ascension’ (Miʿrajnama): A Study of Text

and Image in a Pan-Asian Context (Valencia: Patrimonio Ediciones, 2008).

305

Jean-Baptiste Colbert.129 The history, written in a florid and difficult style, had acquired a special

status among orientalists as one of the few major works available in print. Golius (like

Hinckelmann in his 1694 Qurʾan) had not provided a translation, and the text had proven so

faulty as to warrant another edition. Golius had intended to produce this edition himself, and a

copy with his annotations is supposed to exist, but it remained unfinished. Seebisch’s variants

later passed on to Reiske, and were eventually used in Samuel Heinrich Manger’s edition of the

work.130 Seebisch also copied Abū al-Fidāʾ’s Taqwīm al-Buldān in its entirety from manuscripts

in the French Royal Library. He worked primarily from a copy that had been arranged several

decades earlier from a Leiden manuscript (containing Abū al-Fidāʾ’s autograph notes and

corrections) as part of Melchisédech Thévenot’s efforts to produce an edition of the work.131

Seebisch also consulted another manuscript Thévenot had acquired, a copy of a manuscript from

Guillaume Postel’s collection made by the Tübingen orientalist Wilhelm Schickard, whose Latin

translation Seebisch copied onto the margin of his own copy.132 No comparable set of notes

exists from Seebisch’s time in Leiden, although he did take the time to compile a list of the

dictionaries among Leiden’s Islamic manuscripts.133 In Leiden, Seebisch also acquired several

129 Jacob Golius, ed., Ahmedis Arabsiadae vitae et rerum gestarum Timuri, qui vulgo Tamerlanes dicitur,

historia (Leiden: Elsevier, 1636). Picques’s manuscript is now BnF, ms Arabe 1901. 130 Samuel Heinrich Manger, ed., Ahmedis Arabsiadae Vitae et Rerum Gestarum Timuri, qui vulgo

Tamerlanes dicitur, Historia (Franeker: Coulon, 1767-1772).

131 BnF, ms Arabe 2240. The scribe is not named in the colophon, but in a 12 March 1665 letter from Jean

Chapelain to Isaac Vossius (BnF, ms NAF 1888, 62r), Chapelain mentions that he would have an

“Armenian” do the work. See Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, 113-114. 132 Schickard’s Taqwīm al-Buldān is now BnF, ms Arabe 2241-2242. Seebisch’s copy is SLUB, ms Mscr.

Dresd. Eb. 379. 133 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 317. Some of the notes in Eb. 317 clearly post-date his trip to Paris, so it

is difficult to say for certain if he compiled the list while abroad.

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manuscripts from the library of Jacob Golius, such as his a copy of Saʿdüddin Efendi’s Tāc al-

tevāriḫ .134

Seebisch became one of the most capable orientalists of his day, and in 1708 he was

appointed librarian at the Electoral Library in Dresden, a position he held until 1746. Despite

never producing a work of published scholarship, Seebisch continued to collect and study during

his tenure as Dresden’s librarian, and the notes that fill the flyleaves of many of his manuscripts

show how he used both manuscript sources from his own library and a growing body of

orientalist reference material to begin to piece together a broader bibliographic picture of Islamic

letters.

A copy of Ibn al-Ğazzār’s Zād al-musāfir wa qūt al-ḥāḍir (Provisions for the Traveller

and Nourishment for the Sedentary), a standard (and oft translated) tenth-century medical

handbook, illustrates how Seebisch used his manuscripts to gather bibliographic knowledge. This

involved both collecting information about and indexing the contents of the work. On the front

flyleaf of his manuscript, Seebisch noted the title and author and, in a series of inscriptions,

recorded sources on the Zād al-musāfir and its translations. He cited Conrad Gessner’s

Bibliotheca universalis and Diego Hurtado. Later, he returned to the flyleaf to add information

from the 1739 catalog of the manuscripts at the Bibliothèque du Roi and on Peter Lambeck’s

description of a Greek translation of the Zād al-musāfir acquired by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq

in Istanbul.135 In loose pages tucked into the same manuscript, Seebisch copied the entirety of

Lambeck’s entry. He also included a detailed table of contents for the manuscript.

134 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 386. 135 See Lambeck, Commentariorum de Augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarea Vindobonensi, 6:125-132.

307

In another manuscript, Seebisch’s copy of al-Baidāwī’s commentary (tafsīr) on the

Qurʾan, we find another group of notes (Figure 47) which show the librarian turning not to the

printed works of orientalists, but to his own manuscripts. We see here the beginnings of a new

approach which would find its fullest expression the work of Reiske. Seebisch scoured his

sizable collection for mention of al-Baidāwī, and, copying the relevant passages to the back

flyleaf of his manuscript, he began to string together the intertextual threads of his manuscripts.

He pulled a genealogy of the author from folio 133a of a miscellany.136 In a Turkish chronology,

he found a notice on al-Baidāwī’s death under the year 685. Finally, he found a longer entry on

al-Baidāwī in the margins of another manuscript in his possession: Muḥammad b. Qāsim b.

Yaʿqūb’s Rawḍ al-aḫyār al-muntaḫab min Rabī al-abrār, a sixteenth-century Ottoman

abridgment of al-Zamaḫšarī’s encyclopedic Rabī al-abrār wa nuṣūṣ al-akhbār.137

136 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb 394. “Genealogiam Autoris in MSC. quod varia Collectanea ex omnibus

fere scientiis continet, invenio talem p. 133.a.” 137 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb 404.

308

Figure 47. SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb 394: Seebisch used the back flyleaf of his copy of al-Baidāwī’s tafsīr to

collect information about the author from other manuscripts in his collection.

309

This last work was particularly useful. The Dresden librarian was not the first orientalist

to study the Rawḍ al-aḫyār. Gilbert Gaulmin owned a copy, and d’Herbelot had consulted its

pages in preparing his Bibliothèque orientale.138 How Seebisch acquired the manuscript, which

was copied in 1572, is unclear, but on the front flyleaf he recorded its purchase in February 1701

in Dresden for twelve thaler, suggesting the manuscript was, like most in Seebisch’s possession,

originally Türkenbeute.139 Seebisch’s manuscript was particularly valuable on account of its

copious marginal annotations, which were a goldmine of useful information, glossing precisely

the kind of references and terms an orientalist like Seebisch (or Reiske, who later copied and

indexed this same manuscript) were liable not to understand.

Reference Works: Warner and d’Herbelot

Among the works regularly cited in Seebisch’s flyleaf bibliography, two sources stand

out, linking Seebisch’s practices to a broader collective effort to organize the mass of information

about Islamic manuscripts: the 1674 catalog of Leiden’s oriental manuscripts, and d’Herbelot’s

1697 Bibliothèque orientale. The Leiden catalog had been compiled to publicize the acquisition

of the Legatum Warnerianum, the collection bequeathed to Leiden University by Levinus

Warner.140 Warner, while remembered as a collector, is today largely forgotten as a scholar. His

published work consisted of a few short tracts from his time as a student in Leiden, and Fück

138 Gaulmin’s manuscript is now BnF, ms Arabe 3501. On D’Herbelot’s use of the Rawḍ al-aḫyār, see

Bevilacqua, “How to Organise the Orient,” 223. 139 The manuscript contains the note and seal of an earlier Ottoman reader, Meḥmed b. Ferhād. SLUB, ms

Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 404, IIr, 1v. 140 Catalogus Bibliothecae Publicae Lugduno-Batavae noviter recognitus accessit incomparabilis

thesaurus librorum orientalium, praecipue mss (Leiden: Elsevier, 1674).

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awarded him only a single, brief mention in his history of European Arabic studies.141 However,

the Legatum Warnerianum made Leiden a destination for oriental studies.

After studying at Leiden, Warner, like Gentius several years earlier, had traveled to

Istanbul. Despite the offer of a Leiden professorship in 1648, Warner remained in Istanbul,

where he spent the rest of his life. He was eventually made envoy and finally, in 1657, the Dutch

Resident (roughly, ambassador). Diplomacy was lucrative. In addition to a salary which was an

order of magnitude greater than what he could have hoped for in Leiden, Warner earned a

percentage of the earnings from trade under Dutch protection.142 Warner had to set aside funds

for gifts and for the maintenance of a large household in Pera, but he still had enough left over to

amass one of the finest private collections of manuscripts in the Ottoman capital.

Although Istanbul was a destination for orientalists in the seventeenth century, Warner’s

collection was unique in its quality and composition. It was, more than any other orientalist

library, the work of an engaged scholar, pieced together gradually over Warner’s years in

Istanbul. We find in it none of the lavishly illuminated manuscripts cherished by other collectors,

and its contents attest to Warner’s active interests. It might be better compared to contemporary

Ottoman collections, and Warner owned manuscripts that had once belonged to Kātib Çelebi,

whose Kašf al-ẓunūn would later prove indispensable to orientalists.143 Warner’s manuscripts are

also exceptional for the extent they show the work of Warner himself. While he never published

141 Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, 81.

142 See Vrolijk, et. al, Turcksche Boucken, 45.

143 Warner’s efforts coincided with developments in Ottoman book collecting. On the formation of the

library of Warner’s contemporary, the Grand Vizier Köprülü Fāżıl Aḥmed Pasa, the first Ottoman “to

build an independent library where books were the focus of the endowment rather than tools or

infrastructure to support other activities”, see Quinn, “Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century

Istanbul,” 74-83 (here 75). Erünsal also emphasizes the exceptional quality of the library’s independence.

See Erünsal, Ottoman Libraries, 44.

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after his departure to Istanbul, Warner left a legacy as a reader and a scholar that was only

gradually uncovered by the later orientalists who studied his manuscripts. Warner’s annotations

are found throughout the collection, as are hundreds of pages of notes, excerpts, letters, and

unfinished works.

These papers show a scholar who was far ahead of his own time, in that his extensive

Ottoman training made him better prepared to follow the scholars that came before him. Like

Gentius, Warner studied the Gulistān and Būstān of Saʿdī through the commentaries of Aḥmed

Sūdī. But Warner kept going where Gentius stopped. He read Rūmī’s Masnavī through a Turkish

commentary, and slowly worked his way, pen in hand, through Sūdī’s commentary on the Dīvān

of Ḥāfiẓ, more than a century before any orientalist translated the work. Like the better Western

European Arabists of his age, he read the Qurʾan through a variety of commentaries (tafsīr), but

he also studied these among a much greater variety of early and pre-Islamic texts. He compiled

these sources into an unfinished work entitled Ǧāḥilliyet al-ʿarab De Rudioribus Saeculis

Arabum, a study of the Arab world before Muhammad.144 Here, he pored over the everyday

details gleaned from al-Zamaḫšarī’s commentaries on the Hadith (sayings of Muḥammad). He

also studied and began to translate the Muʿallaqāt (Hanging Poems), a collection of pre-Islamic

poets, through a later commentary.145 Warner’s collection was more than a resource; it

encapsulated an entire course of study, one that would form the basis for much of the pioneering

eighteenth-century work on Arabic literature, especially Reiske’s.

144 UBL, ms or. 1131. 145 A copy of al-Tibrīzī’s commentary with Warner’s Latin annotations is now UBL, ms or. 292. His

translation of one of the poems, by Imru’ al-Qays is UBL, ms or. 1103.

312

To make this collection available to scholars, however, Warner’s manuscripts would have

to be organized, identified, and cataloged. On 22 June 1665, Warner died in Istanbul,

bequeathing on his deathbed the entirety of his manuscript collection to Leiden University. After

some difficulties, and delayed by fears of piracy, the first manuscripts arrived in Leiden more

than three years later, in December 1668. Faced with the unexpected acquisition, the university

administrators considered “what action to take, to ensure that the said books benefited and added

luster, not only to the university but to the entire world of learning.”146 They employed the

orientalist Theodor Petraeus (then in Amsterdam) and the Armenian scribe Shāhīn Qandī

to produce a catalog. They began work immediately, and, although Petraeus soon left, Qandī

was assisted, after 1672, by a German student in Leiden named N. Boot. Boot, about whom very

little is known, was also responsible during this time for what appears to be the first attempt to

translate Warner’s bequest into a work of orientalist scholarship: a dictionary compiled from

Warner’s papers which is so crammed with information that it would serve better as a metaphor

for the Legatum Warnerianum’s unexpected richness than as a usable dictionary.147

When the fruits of their labor appeared in 1674 it offered, for the first time in print, a

comprehensive catalog of Islamic manuscripts against which scholars and librarians could

compare their own collections. Accordingly, we find evidence of its use across bibliographic

inscriptions on manuscript flyleaves throughout European collections. The size and range of

Leiden’s collection made the 1674 catalog more than just a guide to the library’s manuscripts,

but an overview of Islamic letters more broadly, and the way in which orientalists mined the

146 Quoted and translated in Vrolijk, Schmidt, and Scheper, eds, Turcksche boucken, 172f: “in wat

manieren met deselve boucken ten meesten dienste ende luyster niet alleen van de Universiteyt maer oock

van alle de geleerde werelt sal worden gehandelt.”

147 UBL, ms or. 1224.

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catalog for useful information is illustrated by an unpublished manuscript in which the Augsburg

orientalist Matthias Friedrich Beck (1649-1701) alphabetized the Leiden catalog’s entries, adding

an index of authors.148

The second orientalist work that Seebisch relied on was d’Herbelot’s 1697 Bibliothèque

orientale. While d’Herbelot himself never traveled to the Ottoman Empire, the Bibliothèque—

like the Legatum Warnerianum—was the product of orientalist study in Istanbul. Comprising

more than eight thousand articles covering a broad range of Islamic history, the Bibliothèque

became the main reference work for generations of orientalists.149 Scholars have reconstructed

the genesis and organization of d’Herbelot’s encyclopedia, which was compiled from a number

of earlier reference works, above all the Kašf al-ẓunūn of Kātib Çelebi.150

Early modern orientalists had long drawn from the available bio-bibliographical literature

written in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, at least since the first decades of the seventeenth century.

Jacob Golius owned copies of Ibn Ḫallikān’s biographical dictionary and the foundational tenth-

century bibliography, Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist al-ʿulūm.151 The collection and study of these works

intensified within the framework of France’s increasingly sophisticated and organized efforts to

collect manuscripts in the Levant.152 In the interest of rationalizing the process of identifying and

148 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 380. 149 As a general reference work on oriental history and letters, d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque was preceded by

Hottinger, Promtuarium sive Bibliotheca Orientalis. D’Herbelot’s work was reprinted and revised several

times throughout the second half of the eighteenth century.

150 See Bevilacqua, “How to Organise the Orient”; Dew, “The Order of Oriental Knowledge”; and Dew,

Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, 41-80, 168-204.

151 On Golius and the Fihrist, which Hottinger also consulted, see Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, 139;

Sjoerd van Kongingsveld, “Das von J.H. Hottinger (1620-1667) benutzte Exemplar des Kitâb al-Fihrist =

Cod. Or. 1221 der Universitātsbibliothek zu Leiden,” Der Islam 49 (1972): 294-295. 152 The best source on these efforts remains Henri Omont, Missions archéologiques françaises en Orient

aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902).

314

acquiring manuscripts, and of orienting scholars in the rapidly growing collections in Paris,

French orientalists turned to an expansive bio-bibliographical literature written in Turkish,

Arabic, and Persian.

By far the most comprehensive was Kātib Çelebi’s Kašf al-ẓunūn, which lists more than

14,000 titles and promised a comprehensive basis for the systematic collection and study of

Islamic manuscripts.153 Kātib Çelebi was an Ottoman polymath—roughly, a contemporary of

Jacob Golius—who amassed a substantial library and compiled a number of major encyclopedic

works (including, with the help of converts, from sources in Latin).154 Two Kašf al-ẓunūn

manuscripts were sent to France from Istanbul in the 1680s, and Antoine Galland, then in

Istanbul collecting manuscripts, played a central role in the initial study of the work.155 In the

colophon of his unpublished translation, Galland’s contemporary François Pétis de la Croix

described the two Kašf al-ẓunūn manuscripts which had arrived in Paris:

Finished copying the Arabic text from two original exemplars that came from

Constantinople, one well written and poorly transcribed, brought by R.P. Besnier, Jesuit,

and the other poorly written but well transcribed by the late Mr. d’Hermanges, doctor to

the grand vizier Köprülüoğlu and later to his serene highness, Monseigeur the Count of

Touloze Admiral of France.156

153 On Kātib Çelebi see Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit. Entstehung und

Gedankenwelt von Kātib Çelebis Ǧihānnümā (Berlin: Schwarz, 2003), and Gottfried Hagen, “Katib

Çelebi”, in Historians of the Ottoman Empire, https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en/historian/katib-

celebi.

154 Hagen refers to these works together as Kātib Çelebi’s “Encyclopedic Project”, and observes that

Kātib Çelebi both likely collected information on slips of paper he could organize alphabetically, and

through the accumulation of marginal annotations in his autograph manuscripts. See Hagen, “Katib

Çelebi”.

155 On Galland, the Kašf al-ẓunūn, and d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, see Bevilacqua, “How to

Organise the Orient”, and Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, 168-204. 156 BnF, ms Arabe 4464, p. 2266: “Achevé de copier le texte Arabe sur les deux Exemplaires originaux

venus de constantinople scavoir l’un bien escrit et mal orthographié apporté par le R.P. Besnier Jesuite et

l’autre mal escrit et bien orthografié le feu S. d’Hermanges medecin du grand vizir Koprolioglu et depuis

de son Altesse serenissime Monseigneur le Comte de Touloze Amiral de France”. The colophon is also

recorded by Flügel in Kātib Çelebi, كشف الظنون عن اسامي الكتب والفنون Lexicon Bibliographicum et

Encyclopaedicum, ed. Gustav Flügel (London: Bentley, 1835), 1:VII.

315

Pétis de la Croix’s reminder to not judge a book by its cover helps clarify the provenance of the

two seventeenth-century copies of the Kašf al-ẓunūn in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The “poorly written but well transcribed” manuscript must be the nasḫ copy (dated 1091 H.),

now BnF, ms Arabe 4460, which Galland bought in Istanbul in 1682 and mentioned that year in a

letter to Jacob Spon, and which Sylvestre de Sacy would study closely a century later.157 The

“well written but poorly transcribed” copy brought by Pierre Besnier is the copy (also dated 1091

H.) in nastaʿlīq that is now BnF, ms Arabe 4459.158 The French ambassador in Istanbul, Pierre de

Girardin, noted in a September 1687 letter that he paid 150 piastres for the manuscript, which

had been stolen by the son of the “chief military judge” Feyżullah from his father’s library.159

Girardin knew of Galland’s manuscript, which he observed in another letter was “mal écrit et peu

étendu”.160 Later orientalists sided with Galland.161

Heidrun Wurm has suggested Galland first learned of the work from the Ottoman scholar,

Hezārfenn Ḥüseyin Efendi, since it is assumed that Galland was speaking of Hezārfenn when he

noted almost two decades later in a letter to Pierre-Daniel Huet that he had known in Istanbul

“one of his [i.e., Kātib Çelebi’s] intimates, himself well-known for several works, who had

157 See, Omont, Missions archéologiques, 1:218f, and Abdel-Halim, “La correspondance d’Antoine

Galland,” 158-166. In his edition of the Kašf al-ẓunūn , Flügel used the Paris manuscript, “quo Ill. Silv.

de Sacy fere semper usus est”. See Kātib Çelebi, Lexicon Bibliographicum, I:VI. BnF, ms Arabe 4460

entered the Bibliothèque du Roi with the acquisition of Colbert’s library in 1732. 158 BnF, ms Arabe 4459. 159 Girardin recorded this letter in BnF, ms Français 7170, 7r: “J’ai achetté ce jour là pour la Bibliothèque

du Roy un Catalogue de livres Turcs, Persiens et arabes moiennant 150 piastres, il a eté volé au

Cadileskier Fez oullah par son fils.” See Omont, Missions archéologiques, 1:263n1. 160 BnF, ms Français 7170, 63v. Omont, Missions archéologiques, 1:260. 161 The Kašf al-ẓunūn’s nineteenth-century German editor, Gustav Flügel, observed of Girardin’s 150

piastre purchase that it “fere nullius pretii esse recte dicitur”, whereas Galland’s, despite its faults, was

“satis magnae…utilitati in lectione dubia confirmanda et vero a falso discernendo” (Kātib Çelebi, Lexicon

Bibliographicum, I:II).

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published his Bibliothèque orientale [i.e., the Kašf al-ẓunūn] and his chronology with a number

of his own additions.”162 Already by October 1682 Galland compiled and translated titles of

historical works from the bibliography.163 Galland made it clear that the translation was meant to

guide an already highly organized French program of collecting, so as to make the oriental

manuscript collection of the Bibliothèque du Roi “the most complete in Europe and,

consequently, the entire universe.”164 At least two copies of the translation exist (dated 1682 and

1685) with different prefaces by Galland, who also compiled another list of works from the Kašf

al-ẓunūn in Latin.165

D’Herbelot had already begun compiling the Bibliothèque from other sources as the first

copies of the Kašf al-ẓunūn arrived in Paris, but he soon had a copy of BnF, ms Arabe 4459 (the

“well written but poorly transcribed” manuscript) made. While it is not true, as Galland claimed

in his preface, that the work was incorporated “almost in its entirety” into the Bibliothèque, it

162 Antoine Galland to Pierre-Daniel Huet, 21 March 1701, in Mohamed Abdel-Halim, ed., “La

correspondance d’Antoine Galland: édition critique et commentée” (PhD diss., Université de Paris, 1964),

369-381, here 376: “un de ses intimes, illustre lui mesme par plusieurs ouvrages, qui a publié sa

Bibliothèque orientale, et sa Chronologie avec quelques additions de sa façon”. Galland continues, “et ce

personnage m’en fit un portrait comme d’un homme très habile, très savant et grand philosophe”. See

Heidrun Wurm, Der Osmanische historiker Ḥüseyn b. Ğaʿfer, genannt Hezārfen und die Istanbuler

Gesellschaft in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Schwarz, 1971), 86. 163 Galland describes his study and translation of the work in the 1682 letter to Jacob Spon. 164 BnF, ms Français 6130, fol. 6v: “le plus accompli de L’Europe, et par consequent, de tout l’univers.”

The passage ends Galland’s second (1685) preface. 165 The 1682 manuscript is now BnF, ms Français 6131. The 1685 manuscript is BnF, ms Français 6130.

Galland’s also compiled a Latin compilation (BnF, ms Latin 11408) of works in literature and the arts

from Kātib Çelebi’s work.

317

was by far d’Herbelot’s most important source, and furnished the countless references to authors

and titles that made d’Herbelot’s work indispensable in identifying manuscripts.166

The impact of these reference works cannot be overstated. A group of seventeenth-

century bibliographic inscriptions in Gotha illustrates the challenge of identifying Islamic

manuscripts in the decades before the Bibliothèque appeared. The unnamed scholar who was

tasked with describing the Ottoman manuscripts that had come into the Ducal Library found a

novel solution to the problem of identification: he made everything up.167 For instance, in the

manuscript that later became FBG, ms Pers. 14, he wrote: “codex composed in Turkish,

containing prayers and sighs to God, especially directed to Ishi, son of Mary, as the author calls

him at the very beginning of his book”. 168 The note is a tantalizing display of erudition, but a

poor description of what is in actuality a common Turkish-Persian rhyming dictionary.169 Getting

these identifications right was more than a question of competence; it was a burgeoning program

of “normal philology”, a collective project of incremental improvement, whereby print reference

works like the Bibliothèque facilitated the study of collections, which in turn informed works

which disseminated new information through print.

166Galland, “Discours pour servir de Preface”, in Bibliothèque orientale: “Mais, ce qui rend la grande

quantité de Livres, qui sont ici rapportez, aussi complete que l’on peut souhaiter, c’est la Bibliotheque de

Hagi Khalfah qui y est inserée presque toute entiere, M. Dherbelot n’en ayant rejetté volontairement que

les titres qui ne faisoient pas assez connoistre ce qui étoit contenu dans les Livres, ou dont le sujet ne lui a

point paru assez important, pour meriter l’attention du Lecteur.”

167 The manuscripts with these bibliographic inscriptions are FBG, mss Arab. 472, 506, 515, 595, 779,

794, 1062, Turk, 162, Pers. 14

168 FBG, ms Pers. 14: “codex Turcice compositus continet preces et suspiria ad deum praesertim vero ad

Ishi primogenitum Mariae, uti ipsum auctor in fronte statim hujus libri vocat, directa”.

169 In fact, it was the same Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī encountered throughout this dissertation.

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Figure 48. BnF, ms NAF 891, p. 71: A facsimile of a specimen of Kufic script from Louis Bourguet’s

unpublished global history of script. Although the specimen never appeared in print, facsimiles circulated

among orientalists.

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Registering Information Exchange: A Kufic Specimen

The intensifying circulation of knowledge between centers of orientalist study is difficult to

quantify, but the circulation of a fragment in Kufic script (an early calligraphic script in which

many of the first Islamic texts were written) illustrates the changing information landscape by the

end of the seventeenth century (Figure 48). A note that circulated with the fragment—today

known through its different seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century facsimiles—explained

that a traveler, Tobias Krum, acquired the manuscript in Egypt where, “in a very venerable

temple of the Turks, adorned with six hundred columns of marble, there are still now many boxes

full of such ancient books, whose scripts nobody understands. It is commonly believed that these

books have been preserved there since pharaonic times”.170 Apparently, Krum had bribed one of

the overseers of the Cairo mosque to give him the fragment.171 In 1645, the Zürich orientalist

Johann Heinrich Hottinger recorded these details and made a facsimile from the manuscript, as

well as another Qurʾan fragment that had been looted from Tunis in 1535.172 Jan Loop has shown

how the specimen was a crucial source for Hottinger (who discussed the manuscript in his

170 Trans. Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, 126. Universitätsbibliothek Kassel (hereafter: UBK), ms

Orient. 4, 145: “in Templo quodam Turcarum valde augusto, sexcentis columnis marmoreis ornato,

etiamnum multae sint arcae talium librorum antiquorum plenae, quorum characteres nemo quidem

intelligat, sed quod vulgo credatur, nonnullos eorum jam inde à temporibus Pharaonis ibi asservators

esse”. 171 Trans. Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, 126: “hoc specimen autem sibi à Praefecto illius templi pro

αντιδωροω non magno donatum fuisse, A. 1620.” 172 Jan Loop has shown how Hottinger (who discussed the manuscript in his Bibliotheca Orientalis) used

the specimen as evidence concerning the antiquity of vowel points in Arabic script. Hottinger may have

encountered the fragment through Sebastian Schobinger in St. Gallen. The source manuscript remains

unidentified. See Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, 125. Hottinger’s first facsimile is now

Universiteitsbibliotheek Groningen, ms 468. See Leemhuis, “A Peculiar Manuscript of the Koran”, in The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam, edited by Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort,

Kees Versteegh, and Joas Wagemakers (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 91-103.

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Bibliotheca Orientalis) on the question of the antiquity of vowel points in Arabic script.173 In

1655, Hottinger made another facsimile and presented it to the Elector Palatine.174

When interest in the fragment was reactivated decades later, news traveled faster. In 1690

Hiob Ludolf in Frankfurt was sent the manuscript with Hottinger’s facsimiles so that he could

assess the two specimens. Again, Ludolf produced a facsimile from each fragment, to which he

appended the description he sent to Kassel with the returned specimens. He also made another

copy of the Kufic fragment, which he sent to the Oxford orientalist Edward Bernard, who had

just finished an elaborate table of scripts, called Orbis eruditi Literatura a Charactere

Samaritico deducta, which included an alphabetum cuficum. Word of Ludolf’s consultation soon

got out through the orientalist’s scholarly network. The December 1690 edition of Wilhelm

Tentzel (1659-1707)’s Monatliche Unterredungen brought up Ludolf, Bernard, and the Kassel

manuscript in the course of a discussion of Athanasius Kircher’s fanciful reading of an

inscription.175 Ludolf also sent a copy of his table for Kufic script to Andreas Acoluthus in

Breslau, who pasted it into a notebook of grammars on Near Eastern languages (Figure 49).176 At

the end of the table, Acoluthus offered a note measuring Ludolf’s table against his own

observations: “This copy of the Kufic alphabet still suffers from many errors, as I have found

173 See Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, 122-130. The immediate context for this debate was the

controversy unleashed by Louis Cappel’s 1624 Arcanum punctuationis revelatum, which argued that

vowel points were a relatively late addition to Hebrew script. 174 UBK, ms Orient. 4.

175 Monatliche Unterredungen (December 1690), 1080. On Tenztel and the Monatliche Unterredungen,

see Thomas Habel, “Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel As a Precursor of Learned Journalism in Germany:

Monatliche Unterredungen and Curieuse Bibliothec”, in Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge

and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century, edited by André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin

Stuber, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 289-317.

176 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 319. The manuscript, discussed above, contains three hand-written

grammars by Acoluthus: “Grammatica Lingaurum Chaldaeae, Syriacae, et Samaritanae”, “Grammatica

Arabica”, “Grammatica Aegyptica, sive Coptica”. Ludolf’s table is pasted onto the front flyleaf.

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letters both in manuscripts and on coins which do not appear here.”177 Two facsimiles of script

(neither Kufic, but similarly angular) pasted into the same manuscript (opposite the title page of

Acoluthus’s Arabic grammar) (Figure 50), offers both additional evidence of the growing

circulation of codicological knowledge and an idea of what Acoluthus referred to in his note. The

first is a bismillah of unknown origin. The second, a calligraphic title for a Persian work on

astronomy, was taken from a Berlin manuscript from the collection of Christian Raue (Figure

51).178 Around that time, yet another facsimile of the script was made, likely from the Kassel

manuscript, by Louis Bourguet (1678-1742), who prepared a global history of scripts.179 The

case of Hottinger’s Kufic specimen registers how even just between Hottinger and Seebisch’s

time, denser communication networks, a stronger foundation of orientalist literature in print, and

the appearance of learned journals like the Monatliche Unterredungen, made current orientalist

scholarship an object of collective scrutiny and coordination.

177 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 319: “Haec Alphabeti Cufici delineatio multo adhuc defectu laborat; tum

enim in libris mss. tum in nummis ego litteras reperi, quae hic non conspiciuntur.” 178 SBB, ms orient. oct. 64. Many of Raue’s manuscripts, most of which were collected during a trip to

the Levant, passed after the death of his brother, Johann Raue, into the collection of the Electoral Library

in Berlin. On Raue and his manuscripts, see Gerald Toomer, “Ravius in the East”, in Scholarship between

Europe and the Levant, eds Jan Loop and Jill Kraye (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 179 Bourguet’s manuscript is now BnF, ms NAF 891.

322

Figure 49. SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 319: A table of Kufic script that Ludolf sent to Acoluthus, and which

Acoluthus compared to his own observations.

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Figure 50. SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 319: When Acoluthus wrote the note in (Figure 49), he might have had

these in mind. Across from the Arabic grammar he made as a student Acoluthus collected two facsimiles of

scripts from other sources.

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Figure 51. SBB, ms orient. oct. 64, 1r: One of the source manuscripts for (Figure 50) can be identified: a

manuscript from the collection of Christian Raue, who left his annotations across the page.

325

Connected Literary History: The Case of Kalīla wa Dimna

One consequence of the increasing circulation of bibliographic information was the

dawning sense of the interconnected literary traditions that scholars would later discuss under the

heading “world literature”. A case in point are the tales of Bidpai. Perhaps no work had a more

wide-ranging diffusion throughout the medieval world.180 Originating in India, the tales were

translated into Pahlavi (Middle Persian) during the time of Ḫusrau I (reign: 531-579), soon

thereafter from Middle Persian into Syriac, and, in the eighth century, into Arabic. From the

eighth-century Arabic translation of ʿAbdullah ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Kalīla wa Dimna, the tales were

translated and retranslated over a vast expanse.

The first generations of orientalists to engage broadly with Turkish, Persian, and Arabic

literatures noticed the proliferation of translations of the work in the different languages. Gilbert

Gaulmin and Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī, a Persian Christian who came to Paris, probably

through the Capuchin mission in Safavid Persia, and worked for a time as Gaulmin’s

amanuensis, translated from the Timurid Persian translation, Kāšifī’s Anvār-i Suhaylī, into

French.181 In the 1640s, Jacob Golius had his Persian amanuensis, Haqq-vīrdī, translated a

fourteenth-century Turkish version of the work (based on the same source as Kāšifī’s translation)

into Persian so that Golius could use the translation to study the Turkish original (see chapter

one). A copy of the Humāyūnnāme (a sixteenth-century Turkish translation) with Franciscus à

Mesgnien Meninski’s notes can be found in Vienna, and Meninski included in the grammar that

180 A comprehensive study of the texts and transmission of this work is now underway at the Freie

Universität in Berlin (“Kalīla and Dimna—AnonymClassic”). 181 Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī, Livre des Lumières, ou la Conduite des roys, composé par le sage Pilpay,

indien (Paris: Piget, 1644).

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accompanied his dictionary corresponding excerpts from Kāšifī’s Persian and the

Humāyūnnāme’s Turkish as an exercise for his reader.182 Another reader in Vienna, perhaps the

Armenian Bedros Bedik, also carefully read the Humāyūnnāme around this time.183

Around this time, other branches of the Kalīla wa Dimna tales came under scrutiny.

Ibrāhīm al-Ḥāqilānī (Abraham Ecchellensis) introduced orientalists to the famous Syriac

translation of the work in his translation of ʿAbd Isoʿ bar Berika (d. 1318)’s catalog of Syriac

works.184 The Vatican librarian Leo Allatius, a native of Chios, included a description of Simeon

Seth’s translation in his Diatriba de Simeonum scriptis, and observed the location of extant

manuscripts in Vienna and Augsburg, as well as a sixteenth century Italian translation. The

Jesuit, Peter Poussin soon used Allatius’s manuscript for a Latin translation of the work, which

182 See Meninski, Thesaurus linguarum orientalium, 1:196-216. Meninski’s annotated copy of the

Humāyūnnāme is now ÖNB, ms A.F. 191. 183 I could find little information on Bedik, who is today known only for his 1678 Cehil Sutun, seu

explication utriusque celeberrimi, ac prettiosissimi theatri quadraginta colmnarum in Perside orientis, cum adjecta fusiori narratione de religione, moribusque Persarum, et eorumdem vivendi modo, Populis

vicinis, aliisque de hac Orientali Natione famosissima scitu dignis (Vienna, 1678), which has been

translated as Man of two worlds: Pedros Bedik in Iran, 1670-1675, trans. Colette Ouahes and Willem

Floor (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 2014). Bedik seems the likeliest candidate for a very curious and

distinctive Ottoman hand which appears in two manuscripts, a copy of the Humāyūnnāme in Dresden

(SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 402), which contains numerous marginal annotations, and a Humāyūnnāme

in Vienna (ÖNB, ms A.F., 102) which has a note in the same hand on the front flyleaf about an error in

the manuscript’s pagination. 184 Ibrāhīm al-Ḥaqilānī, trans. and ed., Ope Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Incipimus Scribere Tractatum

Continentem Catalogum Librorum Chaldaeorum, tam Ecclesiasticorum, quam Profanorum. Auctore Hebediesu Metropolita Sobensi (Rome: Propaganda Fide, 1653), 103. The Syriac translation illustrates

how much can be communicated in a title. Even before orientalists tracked down an extant copy of the

manuscript in the second half of the eighteenth century, they surmised that the translation came before Ibn

al-Muqaffaʿ’s Arabic translation. Rasmus Rask and Marcus Joseph Müller had noticed that Pahlavi words

ending with “k” ended in “h” in modern Persian (See Marcus Joseph Müller, “Essai sur la langue

pehlvie”, Journal asiatique (1839): 289-346. While the title of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s translation indicated that

it was written after this shift took place, the title given by ʿAbd Isoʿ bar Berika (“Kalilag and Damnag”).

On the Syriac translation, see Gustav Bickell, ed., Kalilag und Damnag. Alte syrische Übersetzung des

indischen Fürstenspiegels (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1876).

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he appended to his 1666 edition of George Pachymeres’s history of the Byzantine emperor

Michael VIII Palaeologus.185

Pierre-Daniel Huet was the first to start piecing together the strands of Bidpai’s global

diffusion, considering, in his 1670 Traité de l’origine des romans, Poussin’s “Specimen

Sapientiae Indorum Veterum” alongside Gaulmin and Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī’s Livre des

Lumières.186 Huet’s German readers, in turn, spun an even broader intertextual web around the

tales. The September 1695 issue of Tentzel’s Monatliche Unterredungen brought together

information from Huet, Allatius, and Poussin, with bar Berika’s catalog, Peter Lambeck’s

description of a manuscript in Vienna’s Imperial Library, Meninski’s mention of the Persian and

Turkish translations, and information on manuscripts in the collections of Abraham Hinckelmann

and Christian Raue.187

In the preface to his 1697 edition of Seth’s Greek translation (which Poussin had

translated decades earlier), Sebastian Gottfried Starck continued the work begun in Tentzel’s

Monatliche Unterredungen and offered the first comprehensive scholarly overview of Kalila wa

Dimna’s diffusion.188 Starck grounded each translation in its context and cut through the often

185 Georgii Pachymeris Michael Palaeologus sive Historia Rerum a Michaele Palaeologo Ante Imperium,

et in Imperio gestarum (Rome: Barberini, 1666). The appendix with Poussin’s translation is titled

“Appendix ad Observationes Pachymerianas Specimen Sapientiae Indorum Veterum”. 186 See Pierre-Daniel Huet, “Lettre de Monsieur Huet à Monsieur de Sagrais,” in Madame de La Fayette,

Zayde, Histoire Espagnole (Paris, 1671), 20-22. Dāvūd bin Seyyid Iṣfahānī, Livre des Lumières, ou la

Conduite des roys, composé par le sage Pilpay, indien (Paris: Piget, 1644). 187 Monatliche Unterredungen (September 1695): 707-717. For Lambeck’s discussion of the Vienna

manuscript of Simeon Seth’s translation, see Commentariorum de Augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarea

Vindobonensi (Vienna: Cosmerovius, 1674), 6:119-120. 188 Sebastian Gottfried Starck, Specimen Sapientiae Indorum Veterum [rest of title] (Berlin: Rüdiger,

1697). On Starck, see Tautz, Die Bibliothekare der Churfürstlichen Bibliothek,187-191. Tautz includes

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confused transliterations, proceeding much like a scholar today would, working individually

through each translation, identifying extant manuscripts from catalogs and eyewitness testimony.

The case of Kalīla wa Dimna suggests how disparate bits of manuscript knowledge—the

notes scholars like Seebisch pooled on their flyleaves or the letters Ludolf and Acoluthus traced

in their facsimiles—could come together into something resembling a global history of literature.

At the same time, another pattern emerged in the bibliographic data: distinct, historically

bounded traditions rooted in a single language. Already in the first decades of the eighteenth

century, there seems to have been a sense for cultural continuity, which decades later would

inform major works purporting to recover distinct cultures as integral wholes, embodying not

only a written tradition but a distinct way of living and thinking.189 The instruments for studying

these cultures continued to improve. In 1690, a catalog of the oriental manuscripts in Vienna

appeared.190 Around 1700, Starck worked on a catalogue of the Arabic manuscripts in Berlin, and

in 1723, Georg Jacob Kehr (1692-1740) completed a catalogue of Leipzig’s oriental manuscripts,

the decree, dated 20 January 1696 (270-271). Starck, a pastor’s son from Freiberg who had studied at

Leipzig and assisted Hinckelmann in his edition of the Qurʾan, was commissioned in 1696 to write a

catalog of Berlin’s oriental manuscripts (now SBB, ms Cat. A 465a). In 1698 he became deputy rector

(Konrektor) of Berlin’s Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster. Starck finished his catalog of the Arabic

manuscripts in 1705, and received that same year an appointment as Professor of Oriental Languages at

the University of Greifswald, and then in 1708 as director of the Ritterschule in Brandenburg. His health

soon declined, and he died in 1710.

189 This view is exemplified in Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois (1748). Reiske’s smaller editions and

translations from Arabic manuscripts throughout the 1740s and 50s paralleled other efforts that shared

this common ambition: Lowth’s De sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1754), Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755) and Geschichte der Kunst

des Althertums (1764). These works in turn followed on the heels of the great bibliographic projects of the

turn of the eighteenth century and the age of historia literaria. This shift tracked an increasing emphasis

within “literature” on belles lettres as a privileged expression of culture.

190 Daniel von Nessel, Catalogus sive Recensio specialis omnium codicum manuscriptorum Graecorum, nec non linguarum orientalium, augustissimae Bibliothecae Caesareae Vindobonensis (Vienna: Voigt,

1690).

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a work which is now lost but can be partially reconstructed from the slips with Kehr’s

descriptions still found in many of Leipzig’s oriental manuscripts.191

Johann Jacob Reiske

Despite the abundance of information and manuscripts, the problem of reading remained.

There was no successor to Golius’s 1653 dictionary, and only a few new editions appeared.

However, in the decade before Reiske began his studies, the German orientalist’s future teacher

(and rival) Albert Schultens offered a new direction to oriental studies by shining a light into the

library of Levinus Warner. No one had gone further in the study of Arabic literature than Warner,

who spent his adult life learning and collecting in Istanbul, and the manuscripts that Warner had

bequeathed to the University of Leiden were a goldmine for the study of classical Arabic

literature, with numerous commentaries and glosses. The careful reader of Schultens’s footnotes

in his 1731 edition of a portion of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt would have found, among his

comparisons with Hebrew words and references to earlier printed texts, that the Dutch orientalist

had glossed the Maqāmāt by mining earlier Arabic commentaries on other works, such as the

Ḥamāsa of Abū Tammām (a ninth century anthology), and the Dīwān Hudhayl, the collection of

the poetry of the tribe of Hudhayl redacted by the ninth-century philologist Abū Saʿīd al-Sukkarī.

192 It is possible that this method was merely a byproduct of Schultens’s etymological interests,

191 On Kehr see Liebrenz, Arabische, persische und türkische Handschriften in Leipzig. 192Albert Schultens, ed. and trans., Haririi eloquentiae Arabicae principis tres priores consessus. E codice

manuscripto Bibliothecae Lugduno-Batavae (Franeker: Bleck, 1731).

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but a young reader in Leipzig, Johann Jacob Reiske, glimpsed in it something else: Schultens

was using Warner’s manuscripts to recover something called “Arabic literature”.

Born in 1716, Reiske was, like Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) and Karl

Philipp Moritz (1756-1793), one of eighteenth-century Germany’s “poor students.”193 The son of

a tanner, he studied first in Halle, at the famous Waisenhaus (Orphanage), and then at the

University of Leipzig, where he worked as assistant to Leipzig’s then Professor of Arabic,

Johann Christian Clodius (1676-1745). Reiske assured the reader of his autobiography that

Clodius had taught him very little:

Clodius, my predecessor, was an odd, curious man, who plagued me with letters, not only

of unpleasant content, but also very illegibly written. Before I properly knew him, I

entered his home in 1734 in the hopes of learning some Arabic from him, but I was

deceiving myself. He denied me all instruction. He only allowed me to wait on him, and

to write the letters he dictated to me and to carry them to the post office. In a word, I was

for a year, as it is called here in Leipzig, his famulus. For I could not have withstood it

any longer with him, especially since I never learned anything from him, and as I took

otherwise no advantage from him. No one got to see his books, not to speak of actually

using them. His recommendation counted for nothing. It was sought by no one, and if

someone had desired it, he would have denied it to them.194

Reiske’s complaint about Clodius’s handwriting is both accurate (Clodius’s notes and letters are

barely legible) and telling. Reiske scrutinized the philological virtues of his teachers from their

193 See Anthony La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional

Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

194 “Clodius, mein Vorfahre, war ein seltsamer wunderlicher Mann, der mich mit Briefen plagte, nicht nur

von unangenehmen Inhalt, sondern auch sehr unleserlich geschrieben. Ehe ich ihn recht kannte, zog ich in

sein Haus 1734, in der Hoffnung etwas bey ihm im arabischen zu lernen; aber ich betrog mich. Er

versagte mir allen Unterricht. Nur erlaubte er mir, ihm aufzuwarten, seine Briefe, die er mir in die Feder

dictirte, zu schreiben, und auf die Post zu tragen. Mit einem Worte, ich war, was man hier zu Leipzig so

nennt, sein Famulus, auf ein Jahr. Denn länger konnte ich es bey ihm nicht aushalten; zumal da ich nichts

von ihm lernte, und auch sonst keinen Vortheil von ihm hatte. Seine Bücher bekam kein Mensch zu

sehen, geschweige denn zu gebrauchen. Seine Empfehlung galt nichts, ward auch von niemanden

gesucht; und hätte man sie ja verlangt, so würde er sie versagt haben.”

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handwriting. A sloppy hand was the outward sign that Clodius was not forthcoming as a teacher

because he had little to teach.

Forced to copy out Clodius’s letters, Reiske plotted a scribal revolt. He worked alone

through the available printed material in Arabic, and in the following years he copied his first

manuscripts. Reiske’s working practices appear to have been firmly established by the time he

left Leipzig for Leiden in 1738. His manuscripts also suggest at least one clear role model for his

work: Sigismund Seebisch. The Dresden librarian had the privilege of being among the few

individuals left unscathed in Reiske’s memoir (“Der gute alte Sebisch, Gott habe ihn selig!”

(Good old Seebisch, may God bless him!)).195 Just as Reiske planned to do himself, Seebisch had

traveled abroad to visit major collections of Islamic manuscripts, and, unlike Clodius, Seebisch

was generous with his material. He not only lent out manuscripts from his collection, but also

shared with the young Reiske his own unpublished scholarship. Reiske had hoped to improve

upon Golius’s 1636 edition of Aḥmad ibn ʾArabšāh’s Ağā’ib al-maqdūr fī nawā’ib al-Tīmūr (The

Wonders of Fate in the History of Timur) and Seebisch, who had collated Golius’s edition with

two manuscripts in Paris, lent his notes to Reiske.196 Two copies by Reiske are now among his

papers in Copenhagen: the copy he made directly from Seebisch’s notes and a later clean copy

(dated 1736) which included additional notes and emendations added during his first year in

Leiden (Figure 51).197

195 Johann Jacob Reiske, Von ihm selbst aufgesetzte Lebensbeschreibung, edited by Ernestine Reiske

(Leipzig, 1783), 134.

196 Reiske never realized this project, and, as he notes (Reiske, Lebensbeschreibung, 134), these variants

passed via Schultens to Manger, who used them in his edition without crediting Reiske. 197 CKB, ms Reiske, kaps. 11. The objects collected here under the heading “Reiske” have provisional

call numbers that are liable to change as his papers are organized and identified.

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The real work, however, was in copying Arabic manuscripts. From Johann Christoph

Wolf (1683-1739) in Hamburg he borrowed a copy of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt that contained glosses

from two Arabic commentaries.198 Reiske periodically dated his progress as he copied out the

entire work. Reiske knew the importance of the earlier commentaries from Schultens’s notes, and

he diligently recorded the manuscript’s interlinear glosses (written in red ink) into his own copy,

first on a facing page and then along the margins of his copy (Figure 53).199 After copying the

entire work, he moved on to another manuscript, copying a collection of Arabic texts compiled

by a seventeenth-century Syrian scholar.200

198 SUBH, ms Orient. 168. The selection of translations from the work that Reiske returned as thanks is

now Orient. 169.

199 CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 227.

200 LUB, ms B. Or. 212. The manuscript was taken as Türkenbeute at some point in the late seventeenth

century. Reiske dated one section of the manuscript to September 23, 1736 (fol. 142v), but this is almost

certainly an error, since this occurs between two sections dated September 16, 1737 (fol. 117r) and

October 1, 1737 (fol. 153v).

333

Figure 52. CKB, ms Reiske, Kps. 11: Reiske’s copy of Seebisch’s collation of Golius’s edition with two Paris

manuscripts mark a point of continuity between Reiske and the Dresden librarian.

334

Figure 53. SUBH, ms Orient. 168, 1v: Wolf’s copy of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt contained interlinear glosses, which

Reiske carefully copied (see Figure 54).

335

Figure 54. CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 227, 2v-3r: In his copy of SUBH, ms Orient 168, Reiske

recorded its glosses, first on the page opposite and later on the margin.

336

Figure 55. CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 241, IIIr: Reiske used his title pages to collect information on works he

copied, often from the other manuscripts he copied.

337

Through his first years in Leiden, Reiske maintained his focus on Arabic literature,

largely in deference to Schultens, who was pursuing its study as a repository of pure Arabic,

which could shed light on Hebrew.201 Reiske was also an accomplished scholar of Greek, but he

does not appear to have attempted to learn Turkish or Persian, even though both languages were

well represented in Leipzig’s collection and would have afforded him advantages during his

studies in Leiden.202 In Leiden, he cobbled together a living from irregular scholarly work, as an

assistant to Schultens and Jacques Philippe d’Orville (1696-1751), and as a tutor and corrector.

Meanwhile, he explored manuscripts of classical Arabic poetry from the Legatum Warnerianum,

and Schultens looked the other way when Reiske brought manuscripts home at night to copy.

Soon after his arrival, he copied Yaḥyā ibn ʿAlī al-Tibrīzī’s Šarḥ al-qaṣāʿid al-ʿašr (A

commentary on the Muʿallaqāt), filling the margins with his notes and emendations.203 As he

continued to do throughout his career, he also produced an elegant title page on which he

collected references to the work (Figure 55). The care with which he copied out al-Tibrīzī’s

commentary is striking, and show Reiske honing his skills as a scribe, and the features of

Reiske’s copy of al-Tibrīzī’s commentary remained consistent across the dozens of works he

copied in the following years. He carefully marked out each page’s margins with a crease, and

we find him adopting the use of a board with nails to mark out lines that are regular across pages.

He copied out the manuscripts in their entirety, in a clean, regular script, leaving wide margins,

201 See Reiske, Lebensbeschreibung, 26.

202 One notable blind spot in this chapter is that I do not take into consideration Reiske’s Greek

manuscripts, and it is possible that Reiske had a more obvious model for his scholarly practices among

Greek scholars.

203 CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 241. Reiske’s source manuscript was UBL, ms or. 292, which once belonged to

Warner, and contains a a partial Latin translation in the margins. Alexander Bevilacqua, “Islamic Letters

in the European Enlightenment”, 362-380 discusses Reiske’s Ṭarafa edition, including Reiske’s copy of

or. 292.

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such as might appear in print. He incorporated textual distinctions from his source manuscripts,

such as variations in size to distinguish between main text and commentary. His manuscripts

were also sites of philological work. Reiske copied marginal annotations, alongside which he

added his own emendations and notes. These notes show how Reiske read—honing in on

questions of interpretation, Golius’s dictionary in hand—as well as how he reread. Reiske often

returned to his manuscripts, doing systematically what Schultens, in his edition of al-Ḥarīrī’s

Maqāmāt, had done more irregularly: marking where a passage was cited elsewhere or where a

gloss from a different commentary might be of use.

This is one of the few instances in which Reiske’s study of a manuscript resulted in a

publication. In Leiden, Reiske prepared a translation and edition of one of the poems of the

Muʿallaqāt (by Ṭarafa), using his copy of al-Tibrīzī’s commentary, as well as a copy Schultens

had made from another Warner manuscript of an earlier commentary by Ibn al-Naḥḥās. The

edition marked the first signs of difference between the German orientalist and his Dutch teacher.

Reiske used his disclosure of the edition’s sources to publicly reproach Schultens for his

sloppiness. He explained that the scholia he included in his edition from this second commentary

were incomplete because Schultens had mucked up the transcription.204 Not only that, he claimed

204 Reiske, “Prologus”, Tharaphae Moallakah, ix (trans. and ed. Bevilacqua, “Islamic Letters in the

European Enlightenment”, 377): “When the Arabic text was printed, the most polite gentleman shared

with me his copy of the Diwan Hudeil [i.e. the collection of the poetry of the tribe of Hudhayl], which,

when I finally compare it with the same codex in the Library, I see, that the scholia of Sukkari [Sukkarī,

the collector of the Hudhayl corpus] were excerpted in his copy by the most learned man [Schultens] only

for private use, and not completely. Suspicion therefore overcame me, that the same perhaps was done

with the scholia of Nahas. Nevertheless, I did not wish to inspect the codex before printing of the Arabic

text was complete, so that I could not be at fault, had I happened to have conjectured rightly. Nor was I

wrong.” (Cum imprimitur textus Arabicus, idem vir politissimus suum Diwan Hudeil mecum

communicat, quod aliquando cum ipso codice in Bibliotheca confero, et video, Sukkari scholia a Viro. Cl.

in privatos tantum usus in suo apographo excerpta esse, non integra. Suspicio inde me invasit, idem forte

cum scholiis Nahasi factum fuisse. Nolui tamen prius ipsum codicem inspicere, quam absoluta esset ipsa

textus Arabici impressio, ut culpa vacarem, si recte me conjectasse accideret. Nec falsus fui.)

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that he was able to infer this even before he compared Schultens’s manuscript with its source

because he noticed that his teacher had done the same thing with another work. The transparently

formal politeness of Reiske’s excuse for Schultens— that his teacher had copied the manuscripts

“only for private use”—is apparent when one compares Reiske’s “private” copy of the Dīwān

Hudhayl with the considerably sloppier manuscript he borrowed from Schultens (Figures 56-

58).205

The contrast suggests how the innovation of Reiske’s program was linked to his

discipline as a scribe. Reiske could return to his manuscripts and cross-reference passages across

his copies because his transcriptions were reliable and complete. Indeed, the scope and regularity

of Reiske’s manuscript production was unprecedented. No orientalist had ever copied so much.

In total, Reiske copied close to ten thousand pages of manuscript material. The quantity of his

output allowed him to not only produce manuscripts in the service of editions, but as the

foundation of a sophisticated system for organizing and retrieving information about Arabic

literature. Reiske had already had a broad exposure to Arabic manuscripts, since he was tasked

with reorganizing and cataloging Leiden’s collection.206 The methods in evidence in his early

manuscripts—the title pages where he collected bibliographic information and the glossing and

cross-referencing of commentary material on the margins of his manuscripts—continued

throughout his life, but Reiske soon went one step further: he indexed.

205 Reiske’s copy is now CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 240. Schultens’s manuscript is UBL, ms or. 3043. Their

common source manuscript is UBL, ms or. 549. 206 Reiske described this work (also complaining about the paltry pay he received for months of

cataloging) in Reiske, Lebensbeschreibung, 23-24. Reiske’s catalog is now UBL, mss or. 1373-1374.

340

Figure 56. UBL, ms or. 549. Warner’s copy of the Diwan Hudhayl, which both Schultens and Reiske copied.

341

Figure 57. UBL, ms or. 1501, 1r: Schultens’s copy of UBL, ms or. 549, which Reiske said tipped him off to the

lack of rigor with which Schultens copied manuscripts.

342

Figure 58. CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 240, 2r: Reiske’s copy of the same work shows how scribal discipline could

form the basis of philological discipline. By accurately and regularly copying out works, Reiske was able to

use them as repositories for his notes and a stable referent for notes in other manuscripts.

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Philology and the Index

When Reiske began indexing is unclear, as is his inspiration.207 Several forms of indices appear

in Reiske’s manuscripts. Many are irregular, listing references to passages in a work, and their

ascending page numbers suggest they record points of interest encountered while reading. Many

other indices are comprehensive. These were often compiled on separate gatherings divided by

initial letter (and perhaps also on slips of paper, although there is no direct evidence for this), and

then again in a clean copy. For several works of particular importance he even produced

multiple, thematic indices.208

Copying manuscripts in Leiden, Reiske had not just amassed a small library of important

manuscripts, he had constructed a powerful engine of scholarship. After obtaining a degree in

medicine in 1746, Reiske returned to Leipzig, marking his most productive period as an Arabist.

In 1747, he translated Kātib Çelebi’s chronology, Takwīm al-Tevārīḫ, which Seebisch had first

introduced to him a decade earlier in Dresden.209 Two drafts of the translation show the evolution

of the project.210 Reiske first envisioned a heavily annotated edition of the work, which he copied

out onto alternating pages, with each facing a blank page which he then used to collect his many

207 Reiske also indexed Greek works, but I was not able to study these indices. See [Mitchell], ed., Indices

Graecitatis, quos in singulos oratores Atticos confecit J.J. Reiskius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1828).

208 Reiske’s elaborate information system offers an instructive contrast to that of Levinus Warner, whose

manuscripts Reiske studied and copied. While Warner’s papers are still largely unstudied, a survey of

Warner’s notebooks and unpublished works suggests that his scholarly tool of choice was the excerpt.

How this might have translated into a finished work of scholarship is suggested by an ambitious

unfinished treatise on the pre-Islamic Arabs that was culled from a variety of historical, literary, and

exegetical works (UBL, ms or. 1131).

209 As Reiske explains in his first draft introduction in CKB, Reiske, kaps. 9]. 210 CKB, Reiske, kaps 9 and 10.

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notes.211 These annotations pull from earlier printed sources, like d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque, and

Reiske’s manuscripts to contextualize and explicate the events reported by Kātib Çelebi. As in

many of the manuscripts he copied, Reiske collected references on and around his title page, as

he scoured the rest of his library recovering the intertextual strands around Kātib Çelebi’s work.

Although later additions suggest that Reiske continued to add to his annotations, these notes are

absent in a second manuscript, where we find instead a short introductory essay on the study of

Islamic history.212 This text is an early draft of the essay, dated July and August 1747, which

appeared nearly two decades later, as “Prodidagmata ad Hagji Chalifae librum memorialem

rerum a Muhammedanis gestarum”, appended to his student Johann Bernhard Köhler’s 1766

Abulfedae Tabula Syriae.213 Soon after that, Reiske completed another major translation: a Latin

version of Ibn Qutaybah’s universal history, Kitāb al-Maʿarif.214 Reiske had copied the work

from a Warner manuscript in Leiden in October and November, 1745, adding his own notes and

emendations.215

Yet another project completed at this time represents Reiske’s most ambitious

undertaking as an Arabist: an edition and Latin translation of Abū al-Fidāʾ’s Al-Muḫtaṣar fī

211 This version is CKB, Reiske, kaps. 10. The title page is dated January and February 1747 (“et

Februario” was later crossed out). 212 This second manuscript is now CKB, ms Kapsul 9]. The claim that Reiske continued to add to the

notes in the first version rests in particular on the appearance of annotations citing the Rawḍ al-aḫyār,

which Reiske copied from Seebisch’s manuscript in 1755. 213 Johann Jacob Reiske, “Prodidagmata ad Hagji Chalifae librum memorialem rerum a Muhammedanis

gestarum exhibentia introductionem generalem in historiam sic dictam orientalem”, in Johann Bernhard

Köhler, Abulfedae Tabula Syriae cum Excerpto Geographico ex Ibn ol Wardii. Accessere Io. Iacobi

Reiskii V.C. Animadversiones ad Abulfedam et Prodidagmata ad Historiam et Geographiam Orientalem

(Leipzig: Schönermark, 1766), 215-240. On Reiske’s Prodidagmata, see Bevilacqua, The Republic of

Arabic Letters, 142-143.

214 Reiske’s translation is now found in CKB, Reiske, kaps 16. 215 The manuscript is UBL, ms or. 782. Reiske’s copy is CKB, ms cod. arab. 116.

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aḫbār al-bašar. Buoyed by orientalists’ particular veneration for Abū al-Fidāʾ, an edition of this

history was, like the author’s geography (Taqwīm al Buldān) a desideratum of orientalist

scholarship. Jean Gagnier had produced a Latin translation of a portion of the work (dealing with

the life of Muḥammad) from a manuscript that had belonged to Edward Pococke, which was

published in 1723.216 Schultens had also edited another section of the work in 1732.217 As Reiske

later explained in his autobiography, the project emerged from a meeting with the Leiden printer

Elias Luzak—then in Leipzig for the book fair—who encouraged Reiske, on the instigation of

Schultens and with the famous orientalist’s active support, to prepare an edition of the entire

work.218 Luzak later printed a sample of the work and traveled to England and France to drum up

subscribers.

It is an irony characteristic of Reiske’s sometimes difficult personality that this edition,

which should have made Reiske’s name as an orientalist, was sunk by the very work that became

a cornerstone of his disciplinary legend. In 1748 Reiske penned the critical reviews of Schultens

which opened this chapter. Reiske’s own account of the reviews cloaks his act in the mantle of

objectivity and scholarly duty:

In that year, 1748, two works appeared by Herr Schultens. The commentary on

Salomon’s proverbs and a second edition of Erpenius’s grammar. I had to make a review

of both for the Latin Acta Eruditorum. I wrote them for the readers, not for him

[Schultens], nor for myself. I mean to say: I wrote according to my conscience, and

thought on no personal relationship between the author and the reviewer. I told the reader

what I thought I owed them and had to tell them as an impartial reviewer from whom the

216 Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAlī Abū al-Fidāʾ, De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis, Moslemicae Religionis Auctoris,

et Imperii Saracenici Fundatoris, trans. Jean Gagnier (Oxford: Sheldon, 1723). 217 Albert Schultens, Vita et res gestae Sultani, Almalichi Alnsiri, Saladini, Abi Modaffiri Josephi f. Jobi,

f. Sjadsi. Auctore Bohadino f. Sjeddadi. Nec non excerpta ex historia universali Abulfedae, easdem res

gestas, reliquamque historiam temporis, compendiose exhibentia (Leiden, 1732).

218 Reiske, Lebensbeschreibung, 46.

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world demands a thorough and truthful account. The review turned badly for Herr

Schultens and for myself.219

Reiske’s words fail to convey the young scholar’s brazenness: on the cusp of publishing what

would have been the crowning achievement of orientalist historiography, Reiske had penned a

withering refutation that mercilessly dismantled the very foundation of his predecessor’s

reputation and professional success. While it may not be true, as Reiske suggested—and his wife

and editor, Ernestine, gently suggested in a footnote that it was not—that the fever which killed

Schultens two years later was a result of his uncontrolled rage at the Acta eruditorum review, it

does seem likely that Schultens saw to it that Reiske’s planned edition fell through. This deprived

the world of the other side of Reiske’s wager. If the review showed how not to study Arabic, the

edition was to be the definitive showcase for Reiske’s “philological” method. Only a short

excerpt from Reiske’s translation appeared in his lifetime, although Jacob Georg Christian Adler

(1756-1834) later published his edition of the work from the material in Reiske’s Nachlass.220

Going directly to this material—preserved almost in its entirety in Copenhagen—gives a

better picture of the scope and character of Reiske’s edition. The Arabic text is preserved in two

versions. The first of these is the copy Reiske made from Warner’s manuscript (UBL, ms or.

219 Reiske, Lebensbeschreibung, 46-47: “Es kam nemlich in gedachtem 1748 Jahre, ein doppeltes Werk

von Herrn Schultens zum Vorscheine. Der Commentarius über die Proverbia Salomonis, und seine

zweyte Ausgabe der erpenischen Grammatik. Von beyden mußte ich Recensionen in die lateinischen Acta

Eruditorum machen. Ich machte sie für das Publicum, nicht für ihn, noch für mich. Ich will damit so viel

sagen: Ich schrieb nach Gewissen, dachte an keine persönliche Verhältnisse, zwischen dem Autor, and

dem Recensenten: sagte den Lesern, was ich schuldig zu seyn vermeinte, ihnen als unpartheiischer

Recensent sagen zu müssen; von dem die Welt eine gründliche, und der Wahrheit gemäße Nachricht

fordert. Die Recension fiel also für Herrn Schultens, und für mich, unglücklich aus.”

220 Johann Georg Christian Adler, ed., Abulfedae annales muslemici arabice et latine. Opera et studiis Io.

Iacobi Reiskii, apud Lipsienses quondam profess. celeb. sumtibus atque auspiciis Petri Friderici Suhmii, S.R.M. clavigeri et historiographi regii, 5 vols (Copenhagen: Thiele, 1789-1794); Johann Jacob Reiske,

trans., Abilfedae Annales Moslemici (Leipzig: 1754).

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554), which later came to Kiel with Adler’s manuscripts.221 The second is the copy Reiske made

from his own manuscript for publication as he prepared his edition.222 This manuscript was at

some point also used as a printer’s manuscript, since it contains markings and annotations that

would have served to facilitate typesetting by a non-specialist. Slashes mark word breaks and

unusual letter forms and ligatures were rewritten between the lines. The manuscript, completed

29 May 1749, also contains a number of marginal notes. Bound in with this second copy we also

find “Notae ad textum Arabicum Abulfedae” which largely consist of notes on variants in a copy

from the collection of Jacques Philippe d’Orville (1696-1751). However, this only gives a

glimpse of the massive critical apparatus which Reiske planned for the edition. Elsewhere he

assembled countless notes on the Arabic text, some of them long excursions on individual words

which include copious references from Reiske’s other manuscripts, bringing to bear on Abū al-

Fidāʾ’s text the breadth of his own scribal production.223 These notes were written on individual

slips of paper, some of which we find collected on a string, and were later copied (and sometimes

pasted) into a clean copy.224 Reiske’s Latin translation was written out in two volumes.225 These

contain a clean copy of the translation, with a number of additional corrections in Reiske’s hand,

as well as lettered annotations to the text. As Reiske’s annotations began to exceed the bounds of

the page, he pasted in pieces of paper, each formatted consistently with the corresponding

volume and page number noted in the right hand corner of each slip.

221 Üniversitätsbibliothek Kiel, cod. ms or. 17. See Ronny Vollandt, “Jacob Georg Christian Adler (1756-

1834) and his Books”, in Jewish Manuscript Cultures: New Perspectives, ed. Irina Wandrey (Berlin: De

Gruyter, 2017), 275-306. 222 CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 122.

223 Reiske’s notes are spread across CKB, Reiske, kaps 4, 6, 13, and 14].

224 This clean copy, CKB, Reiske, kaps 4 and 6, was completed on 25 March 1750.

225 CKB Reiske, kaps 7 and 8.

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A random, loose slip among his papers offers a glimpse into Reiske’s mind as he prepared

his edition, and shows that the scrutiny Reiske exacted on others was the outward manifestation

of an unrelentingly self-critical man. On the slip, Reiske brainstormed Abū al-Fidāʾ’s failings as

a historian. Later, something compelled Reiske to return to the list, this time turning his attention

inward. The third person singular suddenly transformed into the first person singular: “I do not

understand Turkish”, “I have not studied various rituals and points of religion”, “my Latin is not

good enough”.226

After his planned edition of Abū al-Fidāʾ’s history fell through, Reiske never again

undertook an Arabic project of comparable ambition, although several smaller works saw print in

the following decades.227 Still, he continued to hone his information system late into his life, and

the layers of accrued labor make it difficult to date his annotations and production of indices. The

scope of his system in its final form is staggering. Reiske indexed earlier printed works, such as

Gagnier’s translation from Abū al-Fidāʾ’s history and François Pétis de la Croix’s 1710 Histoire

du grand Genghizcan, and produced multiple indices for Gabriel Sionita’s 1619 edition of

Muḥammad al-Idrīsī’s geography.228 He indexed his own manuscripts, including multiple indices

to the Dīwān Hudhayl and an index of etymologies in Ibn Durayd’s Kitāb al-Ištiqāq.229 The most

226 CKB, Reiske, kaps. 1, “Defectus Abulfedae”: “Turcice non intelligo. / ritus varios, puncta religionis

non novi. / non satis Latine callui.”

227 Johann Jacob Reiske, Abi’l Walidi Ibn Zeiduni Risalet seu epistolium: Arabice et latine cum notulis

(Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1755); Johann Jacob Reiske, Thograis sogenanntes Lammisches Gedichte aus dem

Arabischen übersetzt nebst einem kurtzen Entwurff der Arabischen Dichterez (Friedrichstadt: 1756);

Johann Jacob Reiske, Proben der arabischen Dichtkunst: in veliebten und traurigen Gedichten, aus dem

Motanabbi, Arabisch und Deutsch, nebst Anmerkungen (Leipzig, 1765).

228 Muḥammad al-Idrīsī, Geographia Nubiensis, id est accuratissima totius orbis in septem climata divisi

descriptio, continens praesertim exactam universae Asiae, & Africae, rerumq; in ijshactenus incognitarum explicationem, trans. Gabriel Sionita and Jean Hesronita (Paris: Blageart, 1619). Reiske’s

indices to the Geographia Nubiensis (which exist in multiple drafts) are found in CKB, Reiske, kap. 1, to

Gagnier’s De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis in kaps. 2, and to Petis de la Croix’s history in kaps. 22.

229 The index to Ibn Durayd is now in CKB, Reiske kps. 6, those to Dīwān Hudhayl in kps. 2.

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extensive of these were actually done by Reiske’s student, Johann Christian Krüger. Krüger

indexed Reiske’s copy of al-Meydānī’s collection of proverbs.230 The commentaries on these

proverbs were a treasure trove of useful information, which Krüger systematically extracted from

the work through four separate indices.231 He also indexed a particularly significant reference

work for Reiske’s later years, Seebisch’s copy of the Rawḍ al-aḫyār. Reiske copied the

manuscript, writing out its extensive (and very useful) marginal annotations as endnotes, and

Krüger produced indices for both the text and the marginal commentary.232 After Krüger’s

premature death, Reiske returned to these indices to write a note commemorating his student’s

work.

Reiske also compiled indices for major reference works. He produced a parallel index

that brought together works mentioned in d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (which Reiske

transliterated back into Arabic script, essentially reverse engineering much of Kātib Çelebi’s

Kašf al-ẓunūn and the oriental manuscripts listed in the 1739 catalog of the Bibliothèque du

Roi.233 He made an index for the catalog of Leiden’s manuscripts, as well as indices for

physicians and place names that appear in the Bibliothèque orientale.234 This last work seems to

have played a central role in Reiske’s information system. As Alexander Bevilacqua has

230 Reiske’s copy of al-Maydānī, completed between 1741 and 1745, is now Deventer Stadsarchief &

Athenaeumbibliothek, ms 10 O 11. See Arnoud Vrolijk “‘Entirely free from the urge to publish’: H.A.

Schultens, J.J. Reiske, E. Scheidius and the 18th-century attempts at an edition of the Arabic proverbs of

al-Maydānī”, in From Codicology to Technology: Islamic Manuscripts and their Place in Scholarship,

eds Stefanie Brinkmann and Beate Wiesmüller (Leipzig: Frank & Timme, 2009), 59-80.

231 A copy of these indices is now UBL, ms or. 1369.

232 It gives an impression of the comprehensiveness of the work that Krüger felt compelled to have

separate indices for all of the names beginning with “Abū” and “Ibn”.

233 CKB, Reiske, kaps. 2. 234 CKB, Reiske, kaps. 2 (Leiden catalog), kaps. 20 (“medici qui apud d’Herbelotum citantur”), kaps. 22

(“Index Geographicus in D’Herbeloti Bibl. Or.”).

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observed, Reiske pooled information in his annotated copy of the Bibliothèque orientale (Figure

59), cross-referencing the contents of the work, and compiling information from his other

manuscripts, above all his copy of the Rawḍ al-aḫyār (labeled “S.R.”).235

235 CKB, Reiske, kaps. 24. See Bevilacqua, “How to Organise the Orient”, 248-252.

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Figure 59. CKB, Reiske, kaps. 24, p. 5: Reiske’s copy of d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale contains countless

annotations. Most are either cross-references to where a name appears elsewhere in the Bibliothèque. “S.R.”

marks names that appear in the marginal commentary of Reiske’s copy of Seebisch’s Rawḍ al-aḫyār

manuscript. “CBRP” marks entries in the 1739 catalogue of oriental manuscripts in the Bibliothèque du Roi.

352

Reiske also began amassing his own encyclopedic entries. Some of these saw print after

his death in Hendrik Schultens’s supplement to the 1779 The Hague edition of the Bibliothèque

orientale. Schultens (the grandson of Reiske’s teacher) culled his additions from Reiske’s

Nachlass, finding them, as he notes, “written on the margins of his [Reiske’s] copy, to which I

added those which I found in some loose papers”.236 These “loose papers” are still in

Copenhagen.237 There we find, piled in a discarded red vellum binding, countless small sheets,

each with an individual entry, written in German and marked at the top, in alphabetical order.

The entries cite the same sources—like Rawḍ al-aḫyār and d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque—that

Reiske relied on throughout his later studies. Reiske’s purpose in amassing the notes is unclear,

but they almost certainly were not intended for a revision of the Bibliothèque orientale, since

Reiske, in his entry on Ibn ʿArabī, distinguishes his project from d’Herbelot’s, observing “our

intention here is not to write a bibliothecam orientalem”.238

236 Hendrik Albert Schultens, “Additions”, in Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, ou

Dictionnaire universel, contenant tout ce qui fait connoitre les Peuples de l’Orient, leurs Histoires et Traditions tant fabuleuses que véritables, leurs Religions et leurs Sectes, leurs Gouvernemens, Politique,

Loix, Moeurs, Coûtumes, et les Revolutions de leurs Empires, les Arts et les Sciences, la Theologie,

Médecine, Mythologie, Magie, Physique, Morale, Mathematiques, Histoire Naturelle, Chronologie, Geographie, Observations Astronomiques, Grammaire et Réthorique, les Vies de leurs Saints,

Philosophes, Docteurs, Poëtes, Historiens, Capitaines, & de tous ceux qui se sont rendus illustres par leur Vertu, leur Sçavoir ou leurs Actions, des Jugements critiques et des Extraits de leurs Livres, écrits en

Arabe, Persan, ou Turcs sur toutes sortes de Matières & de Professions par Mr. D’Herbelot et continuées

par Mrs. C. Visdelou et A. Galand (The Hague: Neaulme and van Daalen, 1779), 4:682-683: “J’avois

pour cela les meilleurs moyens en main, dans les remarques de feu Mr. Reiske écrites sur la marge de son

exemplaire; à quoi j’ai ajouté celles, que j’ai trouvées dans quelques papiers détachés, dont Messieurs les

Libraires m’avoient permis l’usage avec le consentement de Madame Reiske; qui par cela même fait voir,

qu’elle n’a rien plus à coeur, que de produire tout ce qui peut servir à étendre les lumieres du monde

savant. La plupart de ces remarques regardent l’Histoire Littéraire”. 237 CKB, Reiske, kaps. 23. 238 CKB, Reiske, kaps. 23, “Arabi”: “Doch da unser Vorsatz hier nicht ist, eine bibliothecam orientalem

zu schreiben, so begnügen wir uns mit der Nachricht, welche wir in Raudh ol Achjar gefunden haben, mit

zu theilen.” I did not have an opportunity to closely examine all of the entires.

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Conclusion

Much as Acoluthus constructed an elaborate system to aid the comparison of words

across languages, Reiske’s annotated title pages, marginalia, and indices together formed a

system of knowledge management with a single aim: the retrieval of information about Arabic

words and things. After more than a century during which orientalists often carefully chose their

texts based on the limits of their understanding, Reiske created a system which allowed its user

to reliably read Arabic texts, and to ground these readings in references to other texts. Reiske was

not the first to develop advanced proficiency in classical Arabic (Warner, Pococke, and Golius

had all mastered the language to some extent). Nor was he the first to employ the techniques of

information management that defined his scholarship. Still, he might rightly be called the first

Arabist: that is, the first scholar to practice Arabic philology in the sense understood by academic

orientalists after the nineteenth century.

The irony is that Reiske’s achievement rested, not on publication, but on a herculean

scribal effort. Reiske was able to produce an original philological edition of a text, one that did

not fill its footnotes with irrelevant observations or plagiarize earlier commentaries, because he

copied and indexed a small library by hand. The singularity of this effort has somewhat obscured

his accomplishment. In fact, Reiske’s most immediate impact was as a scribe. While he managed

to publish only a small portion of the work in evidence in his manuscripts, his techniques of

manuscript production influenced generations of eighteenth-century Arabists who studied in

Leiden or Leipzig. Reiske’s colleagues must have anxiously recalled the public shaming

Schultens had received for his sloppy “private” manuscripts, and they produced instead,

following Reiske, volumes that served equally as manuscripts for future editions, building blocks

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of the Arabist’s library, and quasi-public documents of the scribe’s philological virtues. The first

to imitate Reiske’s manuscript style was a younger student and friend, Gerardus Johannes Lette

(c. 1724-1760), who copied from Reiske’s 1737 copy of a Leipzig manuscript.239 The date of

Lette’s apograph, 1745, puts it squarely in the final phase of Reiske’s scribal production in

Leiden. The manuscript shows how Lette recorded Reiske’s notes and emendations, and Lette

later published an edition of the same work.240 It was also the first of many other manuscripts in

this style, both by Lette and later Leiden orientalists, a large number copied from the same

Warner manuscripts Reiske copied, and some directly from Reiske’s own copies. These copies of

copies suggest that the manuscripts circulated between scholars, and many were eventually

brought together, around the turn of the nineteenth century, in the collection of Joannes Willmet

(1750-1835).241

Reiske’s later students in Leipzig also imitated not only his print-like manuscripts, but

also his indexing.242 It was likely a desire to employ Reiske’s indices that motivated his student

Johannes Bernhard Köhler to record the corresponding pages to Reiske’s manuscript in his own

copy of Ibn Qutaybah’s Kitāb al-Maʿārif (Book of Knowledge).243 Köhler even imitated Reiske’s

239 Now UBL, ms Acad. 115. The Leipzig manuscript is LUB, ms B. or. 296, and Reiske’s copy is now

CKB, ms Cod. Arab. 216.

240 Gerardus Johannes Lette, Caab. Ben. Zoheir. Carmen panegyricum in laudem Muhammedis. Item

Amralkeisi Moallakah cum scholiis, et versione Levini Warneri. Accedunt sententiae Arabicae

imperatoris Ali. Et nonnulla ex Hamasa, & Diwan Hudeilitarum. Omnia e MSS. Biblioth. Bat. edidit,

vertit, notisque illustravit (Leiden: Moens, 1748).

241 Today these manuscripts are in the Leiden’s University Library, as part of the collection of the Royal

Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

242 On Reiske’s Leipzig students, see Boris Liebrenz, “Johann Jacob Reiskes arabistische Schüler”, in

Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer—Leben und Wirkung: Ein Leipziger Orientalist des 19. Jahrhunderts mit

internationaler Ausstrahlung, eds Hans-Georg Ebert and Thoralf Hanstein (Peter Lang: Frankfurt, 2013),

169-196.

243 CKB Cod. Arab., 116.

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practice of flyleaf indexing, and recorded references to particular passages in the text as he

progressed through the work. It was, however, another student of Reiske’s, Krüger, who

represented the culmination of the Reiskian manuscript. Reiske wrote in his memoirs that Krüger

was “loyal and hardworking to the point of astonishment”244 Krüger’s manuscripts give ample

evidence of his industry. He produced the two most extensive indices made for Reiske

manuscripts: the four-part index to Al-Meydānī’s collection of proverbs and the multiple indices

for Seebisch’s Rawḍ al-aḫyār. Other copies by Krüger of Reiske’s manuscripts demonstrate his

own ambitious paratextual work, and the margins of his copy of Golius’s 1653 Arabic-Latin

dictionary show that he read extensively among the manuscripts Reiske had copied in Leiden.245

Ultimately, Reiske’s students met with even less opportunity for scholarly advancement than

their teacher, and the tradition that Reiske initiated ended by the turn of the nineteenth century.

Nonethless, their manuscripts remained, offering a source for scholarly publication well into the

nineteenth century, when German orientalists looked to Reiske as a founding father of their

discipline. In a testament to the lasting influence of Reiske’s manuscript methods, Heinrich

Leberecht Fleischer, the towering figure in nineteenth-century Arabistik, spoke of Reiske’s

student Krüger’s manuscripts, which Fleischer knew from his days as a student in Leipzig, as

“monument of German diligence”.246

244 Reiske, Lebensbeschreibung, 126: “treu und fleißig war er bis zum Erstaunen.” Reiske added, “nur

hatte ihm die Natur Genie versagt.”

245 See UBL, mss Vollers 597-598. Krüger’s Golius dictionary is now UBL, Orient. Lit. 112.

246 Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, ed and trans., Samachschari’s goldene Halsbänder, nach dem zuvor

berichtigten Texte der v. Hammerschen Ausgabe von neuem übersetzt und mit kritischen und exegetischen Anmerkungen begleitet (Leipzig: Reclam, 1835), VIII: “Denkmal deutschen Fleißes”. Fleischer’s praise is

also an indirect jab at the target of Fleischer’s edition, the Austrian diplomat-orientalist Joseph Hammer.

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CHAPTER FOUR

CONCLUSION

The preceding chapters have traced three trajectories of early modern oriental studies: as

an encounter with Ottoman philology (chapter one), as a pedagogical problem (chapter two), and

as a question of information management (chapter three). Each offers a different perspective on

the movement of material and knowledge from the Ottoman Empire to Western Europe. In one

case, Ottoman commentaries became Latin and German translations. In another, a distinct

scholarly tradition emerged from the demands and intercultural exchange of diplomacy. In the

last, a feature of Ottoman learning—the study of classical Arabic—emerged as a field of

academic specialization.

Both intellectual and literary historians, in explaining how oriental studies developed as a

field before the nineteenth century, have traditionally emphasized factors internal to Western

Europe: developments in adjacent fields such as classical philology, changing attitudes about the

“other”, the rise of global trade, diplomacy, and state-sponsored colonialism, and broad, epoch-

defining concepts like “Renaissance” or “Enlightenment”. This focus on Western Europe has

often rendered the developments that happen to fall outside its borders in vague, ahistorical

terms. Scholars with otherwise clear and identifiable intellectual and institutional contexts

become “native informants”, manuscripts with rich histories become mere titles, and the

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complicated genealogies of knowledge that link scholarly traditions simply evidence of the

scholar’s readiness to use “non-European” sources.

The material, institutional, and intellectual developments outlined in this dissertation

support an alternative explanation: that orientalist literature rested on a massive transfer of

philological knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and, particularly, Istanbul. The rise of the

Ottoman Empire as a transregional power, court patronage, and the emergence of an Ottoman

scholarly bureaucratic class made Istanbul a center of study and manuscript collection that

produced distinct forms of knowledge. Study of Persian and Arabic was supported and

institutionalized, and a body of literature formed that both served the interests of educated

Ottomans and was, in turn, reworked under their pens. Through the development of the first

Western European oriental manuscript collections, this Ottoman legacy became the material

basis of scholarly work for a small group of orientalists.

Working among these manuscripts rewarded an orientation toward studying together

Arabic, Persian, and, in particular, Turkish. It also facilitated the study of particular works (like

the Gulistān) which had been widely copied and glossed. Productive scholars followed the paths

set by their Ottoman predecessors, and students were trained who were well prepared—by virtue

of their acquired knowledge, interests, and established connections with Ottoman scholars—to

study in Istanbul. In turn, these students, like Gentius or, later, Galland and Hammer, acted as

mediators of Ottoman scholarship, translating and compiling the works which would later form

the basis of the orientalist’s expert knowledge.

In the meantime, due to the Ottoman Empire’s economic and geopolitical significance,

Western European states created programs to train the interpreters without whom business and

diplomacy in Istanbul and other cities in the Eastern Mediterranean was impossible. The first

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efforts to train interpreters placed students in Istanbul to learn on-site. When these schools

moved to Paris and Vienna, their curricula increasingly focused on the study and production of

texts, in turn training generations of oriental philologists who pursued scholarly careers in

addition to or in lieu of their diplomatic careers. This was supported both by states, which helped

coordinate and finance publications and employed diplomat-orientalists in collecting

manuscripts, and by a broader literary community which sought out orientalists like Hammer as

informants on non-European literatures.

A parallel movement of orientalist scholarship emerged in this period within the

academies of Western Europe. Embodied in the figure of Reiske, a growing corps of university-

trained philologists, while they continued to rely—often indirectly—on earlier Ottoman

manuscripts and scholarship, sought to construct new instruments of knowledge organization

which would allow them to bypass the earlier multilingual traditions of Islamic philology and

focus on individual “national” literatures.

These strands chart the beginning and end of orientalism’s Ottoman centuries, the years

before the rise of colonial India, Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, and the institutionalization of

oriental studies as an academic discipline. They also offer perspective on the institutional and

cultural mediation of literary texts. Poets and translators often imagined themselves in

unmediated communion with foreign literary traditions, but philology uncovers chains of

transmission that bear on our reading of a work and our understanding of its historical context.

How do we make sense of this transmission in both the instances of individual texts and in the

aggregate, as constitutive of “orientalist literature”?

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The nineteenth century was the age of empire, but much of the orientalist literature of the

period was deeply rooted in the dynamics of early modern material and intellectual transmission.

This is illustrated by a well-known example. The romantic poet Karoline von Günderrode (1780-

1806) famously chose a “Sanskrit epitaph” before she committed suicide on the banks of the

Rhine:

Earth, you my mother

and you my nourisher

the gentle breeze

holy fire my friend

and you, oh brother, the mountain stream

and my father the aether

I say to you all

with reverence friendly thanks

with you I’ve lived here below

and I go to the other world

leaving you gladly

farewell then

brother and friend

father and mother

farewell1

The lines exude immediacy, but they were the product of a long, intercontinental game of

telephone. The original was penned by the Sanskrit writer Bhartṛari around the fifth century CE.

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company chaplain in Pulicat (the capital of

Dutch Coromandel) Abraham Rogerius (1609-1649) included a translation into Dutch of much

1 Karoline von Günderrode, Gesammelte Dichtungen, ed. Friedrich Götz (Mannheim: Götz, 1857), X:

“ERDE DU MEINE MUTTER / UND DU MEIN ERNÄHRER / DER LUFTHAUCH / HEILIGES

FEUER MIR FREUND / UND DU O BRUDER DER BERGSTROM / UND MEIN VATER DER

AETHER / ICH SAGE EUCH ALLEN / MIT EHRFURCHT FREUNDLICHEN DANK / MIT HAB

ICH HIENIEDEN GELEBT / UND ICH GEHE ZUR ANDERN WELT / EUCH GERNE

VERLASSEND / LEBT WOHL DENN / BRUDER UND FREUND / VATER UND MUTTER / LEBT

WOHL”. I emended this using a photograph of the gravestone from WikiCommons

(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KarolineVonG%C3%BCnderrodeGrabmal.JPG , accessed

August, 2020). On Günderrode’s epitaph, see Dorothy Figueira, “Karoline von Günderrode’s Sanskrit

Epitaph”, Comparative Literature Studies, 26, no. 4 (1989), 291-303.

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of Bhartṛari’s Śatakatraya as a supplement to his 1651 De Open-Deure tot het verborgene

Heydendom (The Open Door to Hidden Heathendom).2 Even then, Rogerius did not translate

directly. Rather, he worked from the oral input, in Portuguese, of a Brahmin named Padmanabha.

Rogerius’s Open-Deure was soon translated into German, and it was this 1663 translation that

Herder used as the basis of his own German adaptation, which appeared as “Abschied des

Einsiedlers” (The Hermit’s Farewell) in the fourth volume of his Zerstreute Blätter.3 Herder’s

Nachdichtung, with Günderrode’s alterations, became her epitaph.

The circuitous route of Günderrode’s epitaph illustrates how the experience of the “East”,

despite the illusion of immediate access to the foreign, was rooted in a long European tradition

(in this case, one dating to the generation following Martin Opitz) and a complex material

mediation. Through the Portuguese conversations between Rogerius and Padmanabha, the work

that brought his Open-Deure to press, its translation from Dutch, the poetic reworking of Herder,

Günderrode’s appropriation as an epitaph, and the construction of her gravestone, the text was

worked and reworked, translated and commented on in different contexts. In this, Bhartṛari’s

verse was not exceptional: pull at nearly any thread of nineteenth-century orientalism, and a

similar constellation of actors and operations appears. There was no unmediated encounter

2 Abraham Rogerius, De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom, ofte Waerachtigh vertoogh van het

Leven ende Zeden, mitsgaders de Religie, ende Godsdienst der Bramines, op de Cust Chormandel, ende

de Landen daar ontrent (Leiden: Hackes, 1651). On Rogerius and his translation of Bhartari, see Willem

Caland’s introduction in Abraham Rogerius, De Open-Deure tot het verborgen Heydendom, ed. Willem

Caland (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1915), and A. Leslie Willson, “Rogerius’ ‘Open Deure’: A Herder Source”,

Monatshefte, 48:1 (1956), 17-24. 3 Abraham Rogerius, Offne Thür zu dem verborgenen Heydenthum: Oder Warhaftige Vorweisung deß

Lebens und der Sitten samt der Religion und dem Gottesdienst der Bramines, auf der Cust Chormandel,

und denen herumligenden Ländern. Samt Christoph Arnolds Auserlesenen Zugaben von den Asiatischen

Africanischen und Americanischen Religions-sachen so in XL. Capitel verfasst, trans. Christoph Arnold,

Nuremberg: Endter, 1663. Johann Gottfried Herder, Zerstreute Blätter, vierte Sammlung, Gotha: Ettinger,

1792, 342.

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between cultures. Pen and paper bridged traditions, but how they did so depended on format,

conventions of use, and the division of labor in the production of written texts in the form of

manuscripts and printed books. Each step in the process formed and reformed the text.

The terminologies of “cultural encounter” and “discovery” capture the earlier romantic

conceit of poetic communion, but they elide these mediating instances, which can be formative

in interpretation and coextensive with the act of poetic production. In concluding this

dissertation, I would like to offer some general observations on how one might think of world

literature as mediated literature.

While the notion of encounter between national traditions still frames much of our

discussion of orientalism, the specialization in a single language was a late arrival and a product

of increasing sophistication in the instruments and resources of orientalist scholarship. To work

exclusively on Arabic literature meant to forgo the vast resources available in Turkish and

Persian. Rather, as a rule, orientalist scholarship had long passed through two multilingual

written traditions. The first was the largely trilingual (Arabic, Turkish, Persian) Islamic tradition

of scholarship, particularly as it was practiced in the Ottoman Empire. The second was the post-

Renaissance humanist tradition, rooted in Latinate learning but increasingly inflected by

vernacular literatures emanating from the centers of print production. Within the manuscript

world of Islamic learning, the orientalist relied on the glosses of earlier readers, commentaries,

dictionaries, and translations. Closer to home, they worked from a library of printed texts

published in Latin, French, Italian, German, and English, and maintained correspondences

between the centers of orientalist study throughout Western Europe.

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The genesis of a work of orientalist literature usually cut a path from one “republic of

letters” to the next. As discussed in chapter one, Adam Olearius styled himself as an eyewitness

to Persian culture in his 1654 Persianischer Rosenthal, but his work was largely a translation

from the Latin translation in Georg Gentius’s 1651 Rosarium politicum, which Olearius

compared with the original Persian with the help of a Safavid amanuensis, and which in turn was

a translation from the Turkish of Aḥmed Sūdī’s Commentary on the Gulistān (which Gentius

copied with an Ottoman scholar in Istanbul), itself the culmination of a century-long tradition of

Ottoman commentaries written in Arabic and Turkish, which in turn grew out of an even older

transnational reception of Persian literature among Muslims from South Asia to Europe and

North Africa.

These traditions entailed different understandings of the formation of the scholar, down

to the smallest details: the instruments of writing, the layout on the page, the conventions of

annotation, the position assumed while reading and writing. In both realms, mastery of these

forms could facilitate access to resources and acknowledgment among peers. As a consequence,

when orientalists annotated and copied manuscripts, they consciously and unconsciously moved

between these traditions. Antoine Galland jotted a line of Persian verse on the flyleaf of his copy

of Şemʿī’s commentary on Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān (Figure 60) as if he wished to pass incognito among

the learned men whose own notes graced the same page. The verse, in turn, points to a different

kind of dissolution of the self: “ هر کس بسر زد از همه اندیشه فارغست –دیوانگی گلیست در این باغ روزگار ”

(“Madness is a flower in this garden of time / Everyone afflicted is free of all worry”).4 Galland’s

source is unclear, but the practice of recording flyleaf poetry was common among the scholars

4 BnF, ms Turc 277, fol. Vv.

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from whom he learned in Istanbul, and Galland’s Persian, alongside the ownership inscriptions

and verses of previous readers, inscribed him into this community of readers.

Galland only flirted with immersion in the Ottoman habitus. When he opened the same

book to decipher Ḥāfiẓ’s Persian through Şemʿī’s Turkish, he recorded his Latin translations

with no regard for upsetting the time-honored conventions of Muslim readers (Figure 61). Others

took the play of scholarly dress-up more seriously. The French orientalist, probably Eusèbe

Renaudot, who put his pen to the late fifteenth-century copy of the Gulistān that is now BnF, ms

Supplément Persan 851 wrote himself into the long line of readers of the heavily annotated

manuscript.5 He somewhat redundantly added his own “تم کتاب گلستان” (end of the book of the

Gulistān) below the manuscript’s colophon and penned a short note in Persian on its acquisition

in Paris: “ ستایش بی قیاس از همه زبان و ذهن باشد وهللدر شهر پاریس المحروسه این کتاب بدستم آماده بوده است / ”

(In the city of Paris the protected this book came into my possession / praise immeasurable to

God from every tongue and mind).6 Elsewhere he showed himself a careful observer of both the

text and the flyleaf additions of earlier readers, wryly adding a line plucked from the Gulistān

below a note containing Turkish instructions for the recitation of an Arabic love spell: “ که صبر

7.(Without patience, one has no wisdom) ”نیست حکمت نیست

5 BnF, ms Supplément Persan 851. See, Francis Richard, Catalogue des manuscrits persans. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Tome II: Supplément persan (Rome: Instituto per

l’Oriente), 2:1159-1160, who identifies the hand as Renaudot’s. No one would know better than Richard,

but I was not able to find a comparable note linked directly to Renaudot, and so leave the attribution open. 6 BnF, ms Supplément Persan 851, back flyleaf, verso. The author of these notes incorrectly rendered

شیستا as شیشتا . 7 BnF, ms Supplément Persan 851, 124v. The line comes from the first story of the third book, see

Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi, 75.

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Figure 60. BnF, ms Turc 277, Vv: Galland recorded a line of Persian verse on the flyleaf of his copy of a

Turkish commentary on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, a common practice of Ottoman readers.

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Figure 61. BnF, ms Turc 277, 2v: Galland sought to fit in on the flyleaf of his manuscript, but he annotated

the manuscript as a Western European scholar would, recording his Latin translations as he deciphered the

text of the Dīvān from the Turkish commentary.

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Figure 62. SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 228, 146v: In his manuscripts, Gentius often avoided writing in Latin

script entirely. In one of his copies of the Gulistān Gentius recorded glosses from a Turkish source on the

margins, imitating the slanted annotations of Muslim readers. The Latin annotation on the right was the

work of a later orientalist, Johann Christian Clodius, who owned several of Gentius’s manuscripts.

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The German Georg Gentius (1618-1687) went even further, fully immersing himself in

the role of Ottoman scholar. Gentius, who was known to venture out from the diplomatic enclave

of Pera for days on end, avoided the use of Latin script entirely in many of the manuscripts he

copied and annotated (Figure 62). This practice evolved over the course of his stay in Istanbul

through his study with Ottoman scholars. He annotated his Gulistān with notes in Turkish, and

copied out entire manuscripts without leaving a trace of his German origins, even going so far as

to transliterate into Arabic script the Latin terms in a glossary that he appended to a medical

miscellany.8

The aesthetics of Islamic learning could touch all aspects of orientalist scholarship. In

preparation for writing his own translation of the Gulistān, a young orientalist, Auguste Herbin

(1783-1806), modified his copy of Gentius’s 1651 Rosarium politicum with the trappings of an

Islamic manuscript, including writing the Persian title of the work on the bottom edge of the

volume (a convention in Islamic libraries, where books were stacked on their side) (Figure 63).9

Earlier, August Pfeiffer had used his knowledge of Islamic manuscripts to fashion Turkish,

Persian, and Arabic versions—replete with characteristic embellishments in their presentation—

of a text conveying the “joy of the whole world” (der ganzen Welt Freude) to the Saxon elector

8 Gentius’s copy of the Gulistān with his Turkish notes is now SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Ea. 228. He also

copied the entirety of Sūdī’s commentary on the work, as well as Sūdī’s commentary on Saʿdī’s Būstān.

The medical miscellany, copied in Gentius’s hand, is now LUB, ms B. Or. 205. 9 BnF, RES-E*-45. A promising young scholar, Herbin (a graduate of the École des langues orientales)

produced only a single published work in his short life, Auguste Herbin, Développemens des principes de la langues arabe moderne, suivis d’un Receuil de phrases, de Traductions interlinéaires, de Proverbes

arabes, et d’un Essai de Calligraphie orientale (Paris: Baudouin, 1803).

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in fifteen languages (including Egyptian hieroglyphs).10 The prominent orientalists who

graduated from Vienna’s Orientalische Akademie around the turn of the nineteenth century drew

inspiration, in both their scholarly self-presentation and their print publications, from Islamic

models, most famously in the calligraphic Arabic title page of Joseph Hammer’s Fundgruben des

Orients.

Orientalists’ manuscripts could also present texts as objects to be deciphered through the

instruments of Western European philology. Scholars wrote their marginalia parallel to the text,

not slanted (as in Islamic manuscripts). They used Latin terms to mark the function of their

notes: to designate emendations and variants, and to add their own observations. Sometimes this

involved a readiness to violate the text in the service of understanding. Christian Raue, for

instance, often used pen to mark the division of words during reading, and in at least one

manuscript (a Qurʾanic commentary) we find entire pages so disfigured (Figure 64).11 An

orientation towards an imagined Western European print readership could manifest itself in

elaborate mock-title pages and a print-like division of text and apparatus on the page. These

manuscripts acted as quasi-public documents attesting to a scholar’s ability and rigor, and,

increasingly, orientalists used them as signifiers of oriental philology’s disciplinary status. This

is most evident in the manuscript tradition that emerged from the circle of Johann Jacob Reiske

(discussed in chapter three), whose print-like copies of Arabic manuscripts formed the

productive engine of his scholarship and a model for his colleagues and students.

10 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 359. The manuscript commemorates the new year, 1677. The Arabic

version includes an “Arabischer Glücksvogel” filched from Olearius’s travel account (Adam Olearius,

Offt begehrte Beschreibung der newen orientalischen Reyse/ so durch Gelegenheit einer Holsteinischen Legation an den König in Persien geschehen, Schleswig: Jacob zur Glocken, 1647). The Persian version

is a (somewhat clumsy) imitation of Persian calligraphy, and the Turkish version imitates the sloping

script that Pfeiffer would have known from Ottoman state documents. 11 SBB, ms orient. fol. 41.

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Understanding “orientalism” at the confluence of two republics of letters also helps

clarify the agency of non-Western European institutions. Early modern orientalists worked

mostly from Islamic scholarship and manuscripts produced by Muslim scribes, and changes

within the Ottoman context of orientalist learning such as the formation of libraries, the

facilitated contact between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars, and the composition of major

works of original scholarship shaped orientalist thought. We might ask, then, to what extent the

Western European discovery of the Islamic East was in fact a globalization of Islamic philology

emanating from the Ottoman capital.

Manuscript annotations and provenance offer some clues. Most of the manuscripts that

entered Western European collections before 1800 were Ottoman. Of these, most came over in

one of two ways: either collected by scholars in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, above all

(but not exclusively) Istanbul, or looted from Ottoman European libraries, particularly in the

years after 1683. Orientalist collectors relied on—and competed with—an existing culture of

book collecting in the Ottoman Empire. The importance of Istanbul’s book market, and its

gravitational pull on manuscripts from throughout the Islamic world, made the Ottoman capital

an ideal location to find and study manuscripts. Later, as in the case of Joseph Hammer’s

translation of the Dīvān of Ḥafiẓ, Istanbul libraries began to play a direct role in the production

of scholarship.

The pervasive influence of Ottoman institutions in orientalist scholarship is suggested in

Antoine Galland’s revisions to d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, for which he compiled

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additional entries translated on the margins of his own copy of the work.12 D’Herbelot’s work

had been based in large part on Ottoman sources, most notably the bibliography of Kātib Çelebi.

Galland’s annotations show the orientalist going back to the well of Ottoman learning: three of

the four sources he cites in his notes were written in Turkish (two are Ottoman works, and one,

Mīr ʿAlī Šīr’s Maǧālis al-nafāʾis, in Chagatay Turkish). The fourth work, Tuḥfe-i Sāmī (The Gift

of Sami), an anthology of Safavid poets, was written in Persian. However, if we look at the

specific manuscript that Galland used, we discover again an Ottoman connection. Not only did

Galland purchase his copy of the Tuḥfe-i Sāmī in Istanbul, but an ownership inscription in the

manuscript identifies a previous owner: the overseer (mütevellī) of the endowments (ewqāf) at

the Ḥafiẓ Aḥmed Pasa mosque.13 This is noteworthy because Galland records in his diary that

this same mosque had an endowment for the dissemination of Sūdī’s Turkish commentaries on

Persian literature.14 For a deposit, individuals could borrow sections of the work for reading and

copying. While the exact connection between this enterprise and Galland’s copy of the Tuḥfe-i

Sāmī is a mystery, its appearance on the flyleaf of Galland’s manuscript is a reminder of the

Ottoman institutional contexts on which at least a significant portion of orientalist learning

relied.

12 Galland’s Bibliothèque is now in the Austrian National Library, ÖNB, Altprunk 12.C.9. The annotated

copy is discussed in detail in Bevilacqua, “How to Organise the Orient”, 245-248.

13 BnF, ms Persan 247, fol. 2r.

14 Galland, Journal, 1:234-236.

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Figure 63. BnF, RES-E*-45: When Auguste Herbin, a young orientalist at the turn of the nineteenth century,

studied Gentius’s 1651 Rosarium politicum to produce his own translation of the Gulistān, he modified his

copy to resemble an Islamic manuscript, copying the title onto the bottom edge of the book.

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Figure 64. SBB, ms orient. fol. 41, 1v: Christian Raue sometimes dismembered the text of his Islamic

manuscripts as he read, drawing a line between each word.

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Alexander Bevilacqua has recently emphasized the place of “bookish encounters” in the

history of oriental studies.15 The scope of these encounters went far beyond the scholar’s study.

Islamic learning had a parallel life in non-Ottoman Europe, where manuscripts circulated as

trophies, exotic goods, and gifts. This was particularly true in the German lands, where hundreds

of looted manuscripts from Ottoman Europe circulated widely in the late seventeenth century.

The flyleaves of these manuscripts show how they commemorated war, recorded legend,

collected information, and passed from hand to hand.

The social lives of these indecipherable objects are glimpsed indirectly in the work of the

forger. One way of drumming up the value of a work was to associate it with a great scholar. A

Qurʾan section, now in Berlin, contains a note by a student who traveled to Leiden, Ambrosius

Förster, which purports that the manuscript came from the library of Julius Caesar Scaliger, then

passed to his son Joseph Scaliger, and through Scaliger’s sister Anna (“his heir”) came into

Förster’s possession.16 Förster’s claim might, at first, seem plausible. Joseph Scaliger, who died

in 1609, left his French possessions to his sister Anna. However there is no indication that Anna

Scaligera traveled to Leiden around this time, and it is almost impossible that a manuscript

would have taken such a route.17 The manuscript was also likely from the late sixteenth century,

making its connection to Julius Caesar Scaliger unlikely.18 Moreover, Joseph Scaliger’s last will

15 Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters, 5.

16 SBB, ms orient. quart. 34, front pastedown endpaper: “Ex bibliotheca Magni illius Julii Caesaris

Scaligeri, ad manus Josephi Scaligeri F. pervenit; mihique ab huius haerede Anna (Scaligera Pictavi) 13.

Aug: Anno 1620. Lugduni Battavorum oblatus.”

17 I can take no credit for these observations. Having found (and, I should admit, fallen for) the

inscription, I sent it to Anthony Grafton, who shared it with Henk Jan de Jonge, who, in turn, tore apart its

every detail and exposed it as a fraud “from beginning to end”, and kindly pointed me to the relevant

sources. My brief discussion of the inscription here is only a pale reflection of Professor de Jonge’s expert

analysis.

18 Ahlwardt dates the manuscript to around 1590.

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is also clear in bequeathing all of his Arabic books to Leiden University.19 Scaliger’s

provenance, it would follow, was Förster’s invention.

Another manuscript offers faked scholarly provenance with a more sophisticated spin. A

Qurʾan section once owned by Abraham Hinckelmann (now, with the rest of Hinckelmann’s

manuscripts, in Hamburg) contains the calligraphic ownership inscription of Anna Maria van

Schurman (Figure 65).20 Schurman, famed for her erudition, was reputed to have learned Arabic

and to have “read the Qurʾan more than once with pen in hand”.21 The inscription does appear to

be in Schurman’s hand, but, as Carl Brockelman pointed out skeptically at the beginning of the

twentieth century, the inscription was clearly pasted into the manuscript, and a note for the

endowment of the book by a certain Ḥācī Aḥmed is dated 1066 (1655), more than three decades

after the date given on Schurman’s ownership inscription (1623).22 Although Schurman lived

until 1678, the waqf inscription is a strong indication that the manuscript was looted in war, in all

likelihood, with the flood of Türkenbeute after 1683. Some enterprising individual then sought to

earn a profit by transferring the ownership inscription from another volume.

Such forgeries played at the overlap between the expectation that these objects were

exceptional and exotic, and their increasing prevalence. Perhaps nowhere is this more vividly

19 P.C. Molhuysen, Bibliotheca Universitatis Leidensis. Codices Scaligerani (Leiden: Brill;, 1910), vi:

“Touchant la bibliotheque, laquelle selon mes petites facultez ie laisse bien fournie, ie legue a l’Academie

de cette ville de Leyden tous mes livres de langues estrangeres, Hebraics, Syriens, Arabies, Aethiopiens,

lesquels livres sont contenus dans le Catalogue que i’ay adiouste a la copie latine de ce mien testament, et

que i’entens estre une partie ou appendence de mon dict testament, ou servir de supplement en façon de

codicille.”

20 SUBH, ms orient. 38

21 G.D.J. Schotel, Anna Maria van Schurman (The Hague: Muller, 1853), 35-36: “De Historia Arabica

van Rodericus Ximenez, de arabische overzettingen van de Tabula Cebetis en der Aurea carmina van

Pythagoras, het Compendium historicum van Levinus Warnerus, de fabelen van Locman, en een aantal

andere arabische werken waren in hare boekverzameling, en den Koran had zij meer dan eenmaal met de

pen in de hand gelezen.”

22

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illustrated than in a manuscript from the seventeenth-century Ducal Library in Gotha which blurs

the line before forgery, legend, and codicological study. Opening the manuscript, the reader finds

a harrowing account of the book’s acquisition:

I received this book as a present from the honorable Mr Pieterson, captain of the ship

Hoorn. As he was returning home from Ceylon, in pursuit of an Arabic and Mughal

pirate ship, he was fortunate and overtook it around Madagascar, and on boarding the

ship he tore this book from the hands of an Arab priest, or mullah, just as he was

occupied with conjuring a new speedy wind with the wind bird in its pages and a magical

Mughal letter and other spells, such that though they tried in vain to flee, the priest went

down with the whole ship and crew.23

The account appears in both the Dutch “original” (signed “J. van der Sluys”) and a German

translation, and while it might strike today’s reader as fanciful, it is laden with the kind of detail

that lent it, if not credibility, at least a tantalizingly rich significance to the seventeenth-century

collector. The inscription charts a passage with the Dutch East India Company from the Indian

Ocean that would have been familiar to German readers from travel accounts and the reports of

those who joined the Company, and it refers directly to the contents of the manuscript. Indeed,

the reader finds in its pages the very “wind bird” described in the account (Figure 66). A letter

pasted into the manuscript, written in the same German hand who translated the Dutch

inscription (and gave the manuscript as a gift), weaves observations on the manuscript and its

history into an account of the letter writer’s own travels. The handful of scholars who had

proficiency in Turkish by the late seventeenth century might have offered a competing account,

however, as the nineteenth-century orientalist Wilhelm Pertsch did in his catalogue of the Gotha

23 FBG, ms Turk 9: “Dit boeckje hebbe als een presentje ontfangen van d’Edle Heer Pieterson, Capitain

van’t Schip Hoorn, retourneernde uyt Ceylon naer’t vaaderland, toen hy een Arabisse en Mogullisse

Seerover, op hen jagt gemaackt hebbende by’t punt van S. laurent geluckig enterde, en by’t bespringen

des Roovers dit boeckje uyt handen raapte van een Arabisch paap, ofte Mollah juyst besig synde met hed

daarin leggende Wind Vogeltje en Mogollisse toover briefgen een verdere characters, niewen Schielycken

wind te maacken, een daar door hoewel te vergeefs, t’ontvlyten, synde de paap met het geheele sootje

Schip en equippage naer de kelder gesonden.”

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collection, remarking that the manuscript comprised 150 folios with writing in different hands,

and contained a variety of untitled astrological writings, verse from various poets, and a short

legal text.24

24 See Wilhelm Pertsch, Die orientalischen Handschriften der herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Gotha, zweiter

Theil: Die türkischen Handschriften (Vienna: k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1864), 15-16.

377

Figure 65. SUBH, ms orient. 38, Ir: The ownership inscription of Anna Maria von Schurman, which was

pasted into a Qurʾan which later entered the library of Abraham Hinckelmann. Unbeknownst to the forger, a

waqf inscription in the manuscript postdated the inscription by thirty years.

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Figure 66. FBG, ms Turk. 9: A painting “corroborates” the story of a fanciful Dutch inscription. This is the

very talismanic wind bird that the Arabic mullah of a Mughal pirate ship supposedly used to conjure a

speedy wind.

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Access to and understanding of manuscripts was the primary determinant of success in

orientalist scholarship. While it is difficult to weigh the contributions of written and unwritten

sources, the manuscript material analyzed in this dissertation suggests that the textual scholarship

of early modern orientalists was largely rooted in the study of other texts. Since this could seem

obvious to the point of triviality, it might better be framed in terms of what orientalists for the

most part did not do. They did not have sufficient ability in the source languages to read works

of literature without a textual aide, ideally an earlier commentary or translation. There is some

evidence that orientalists relied on the oral input of amanuenses while reading (as described, for

instance, in Golius’s contract with Haqq-vīrdī (see chapter one)), but this input appears to have

been limited. This is true even in the case of Golius, which, if anything, demonstrates the

exceptional conditions such a collaboration would presuppose, including the ability to delegate

and coordinate work, the presence of a functional interlanguage, and an unusually cooperative

amanuensis.

As a result, the usual distinction between the armchair orientalist who worked primarily

with books and the traveling orientalist who had direct experience with a language and culture is

less useful for understanding how these scholars engaged with texts. For both, reading was

rooted in a problem of textual information management: either relying on existing tools (such as

commentaries), or developing new systems (through compilation and indexing (see chapter

three)). Without such aids, orientalists were liable to read selectively and avoid translating

altogether.

A consideration of the material contexts and scholarly practices of orientalist reading

suggests other possible distinctions. For instance, orientalists differed in their use of languages

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and sources. We might distinguish between “polyglot orientalists”, who worked with a limited

corpus over a large number of languages, and “Istanbul orientalists”, who studied Persian,

Turkish, and Arabic through Ottoman sources, using Turkish as a primary language of

scholarship. Some worked entirely within a single language (usually Arabic). Others worked

primarily in Western European languages, from earlier translations, which they “improved”

through comparison with the original, while still other eschewed even this comparison. These

distinctions usually remained stable over the entire career of an orientalist.

Following Goethe, who conceived of Weltliteratur in terms of participation (Teilnahme),

one might consider the literary circulations outlined in this dissertation in terms of distinct

collaborative forms. More abstractly, we can imagine the respective Islamic and Western

European contexts of philological work in terms of a series of discrete operations. The

production of orientalist scholarship was the work of many hands. It involved identifying,

selecting, and procuring manuscripts, copying and collating texts, glossing difficult passages,

translating, and, if a work went to print, setting type and correcting proofs. Depending on

individual initiative, institutional context, and material conditions, these operations could be

distributed differently, both temporally and spatially.

The variety of these collaborative forms is conveyed by the case of the album amicorum,

or friendship album. Friendship albums, manuscripts in which friends and acquaintances

recorded personalized entries, were a staple of learned sociability in early modern Europe.25 For

the owner, they offered a record of their travels and social network. For the inscriber, they were a

25 The most comprehensive study of the friendship album is Werner Schnabel, Das Stammbuch: Konstitution und Geschichte einer textsortenbezogenen Sammelform bis ins erste drittel des 18.

Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003).

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platform for curated self-presentation. In the selection of quotations, the inclusion of images, and

the choice of languages, students and scholars showed the world how they would like to be seen.

While the practice of keeping friendship albums continued in Western Europe into the

twentieth century, it was primarily during the period from the end of the sixteenth century to the

end of the seventeenth century that alba amicorum took on a global dimension. In some cases,

the cross-cultural aspect of these albums was in their production. Dozens of albums later used as

alba amicorum were produced in Istanbul by Ottoman artisans. Starting in the second half of the

sixteenth century, we find these albums with entries recorded by Western Europeans in Istanbul.

They contain a variety of Ottoman decorative papers, such as marbled paper, produced by

applying paper to pigments floating on the surface of water (a technique soon adopted

throughout Europe), and silhouetted paper, made by pressing wetted leather cut-outs to paper.26

Some of these albums also contain paintings of single figures characteristic of costume books, a

common genre of manuscript which depicted professions, social types, and positions at court.27

These manuscripts, which are the subject of a forthcoming study by Robyn Radway, are

documents of both Ottoman craft and Western European social life.28 In at least one instance, an

orientalist even used an oriental manuscript as an album amicorum. Andreas Müller (1630-1694)

26 On Islamic decorative paper, see Jake Benson, “The Art of Abri: Marbled Album Leaves, Drawings,

and Paintings of the Deccan”, in Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy, ed. Navina

Najat Haidar and Marika Sardar, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, 157-159. 27 I have seen at least one manuscript of this type with paintings more characteristic of Islamic miniatures:

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, ms Blanckenburgensis 206, which contains two paintings of

Ottoman sultans and one of an armored man on horseback which is reminiscent of a figure from an

illustrated historical work. The manuscript contains album amicorum entries dating to the 1570s. 28 See Robyn Radway, Paper Portraits of Empire (forthcoming).

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collected entries from contacts in Hamburg in a Syriac psalter which he acquired in Amsterdam

in 1658.29

We find in alba amicorum another, primarily textual, manifestation of contact with the

Islamic world. Friendship albums offered a stage for performative multilingualism, and their

pages display the breadth of learning that characterized orientalist study of this period. Besides

Latin and the Western European vernaculars, the most common languages were Hebrew and

Greek, but we also find a smaller number of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic inscriptions. As

expected, orientalists were especially keen to show off linguistic mastery, whether or not their

readers could decipher their inscriptions. In an entry dated January 1650 in Leipzig (Figure 67),

Georg Gentius did not even bother to add the dots that would have allowed someone without an

expert command of the Persian and Turkish to decipher his citations.30 He began his inscription

with Arabic: “ من خدم خدم” (He who serves, is served). In Persian, he cited, with some

modification, a passage from Saʿdi’s Gulistān: “ وگر باشد در مهرش پایبندم –دنیا اگر نباشد دردمندم ” (If

there is no world, I am pained / if there is, I am in its pleasure bound).31 The quote, in turn,

reflects a complex textual encounter. In 1650, Gentius was finishing his Latin translation of the

Gulistān, a work he studied in Istanbul under an Ottoman scholar and using a Turkish

commentary.32 Even in the single line of Gentius’s inscription, we find both traces of the

commentary and marks of the orientalist’s intervention. In his 1651 Rosarium politicum, Gentius

followed the commentary’s Turkish paraphrase, but in the album amicorum he personalized the

29 SBB, ms orient. oct. 2. 30 SBB, Darmstadt, 1912.43, 20. 31 Gentius changed Saʿdī’s first person plural to the first person singular. The original appears in the

twenty eighth story of the second book (Thackston, trans., The Gulistan of Saʿdi,, 61), about a poor

beggar whom fortune makes king. 32 Gentius’s translation appeared in 1651 as Rosarium politicum [details].

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Persian—changing the third person plural (“we are pained”, etc.) to the first person singular—

and a Latin translation that accompanied the verse in a later album amicorum entry shows

Gentius tightening the somewhat clunky verse of his earlier translation.33 Gentius also employed

a Turkish proverb: “At ve ḳatır arasında esek ölür” (An ass dies between a horse and a mule).34

Finally, below that, he added in Spanish: “Mucho saver, pocho diser / Mucho valer et pocho si

tener” (Know much, say little / worth much if one has little). Gentius made similar inscriptions

fifteen years later in two alba amicorum in Sopron (Hungary), and they seem to have been a

stable repertoire of mottos that represented Gentius in the many languages of his scholarship.35

33 Compare the original translation, “Facultates si non habuerimus, miseri sumus / Si habuerimus, illarum

curisve exedimur” (Gentius, Rosarium politicum, 193) to the translation that appears in National

Széchényi Library (NSL), ms Oct. Lat. 135, 97r, “Si spes non habeo, miser sum / Si eas habeam, amoris

laqueo illaqueor”. The passage in the Turkish commentary appears at Sūdī, Şerḥ-i Gulistān, 239. 34 The meaning of this proverb is lost on me, and I have not yet identified it in any collection.

35 NSL, ms Oct. Lat. 135, 97r and ms Oct. Lat. 136, 64r (Inscriptiones Alborum Amicorum, nos 3731 and

3824). In the Berlin sheet, Gentius also added several words in Hebrew which I could not decipher but are

elsewhere glossed as “proximum amare est seipsum honorare” (to love one’s neighbor is to honor

oneself).

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Figure 67. SBB, Darmstadt, 1912.43, 20r: A 1650 album amicorum entry by Georg Gentius shows the

multilingual assortment of quotes Gentius had chosen to represent himself to the learned world.

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Figure 68. DLB, ms Mscr. 124, 197v: The entries of Engelbert Kaempfer’s album amicorum, collected

throughout his travels from Europe to Iran and Japan, suggest the general intelligibility of the format.

Finally, collaboration could be shared and participatory. In a few exceptional cases

orientalists employed the friendship album in a truly global sense, collecting inscriptions from

scholars on their travels beyond Europe’s borders. Adam Olearius recounts how he, discoursing

with learned men in a Shamakhi mosque, was prompted to kiss a Qurʾan manuscript and kissed

instead the heraldic arms of his patron in his album amicorum (see chapter one). He then passed

the album around to collect the inscriptions of those present. Even more wide ranging is the

album amicorum of Engelbert Kaempfer, who on his travels recorded entries (Figure 68) in

Russian, Georgian, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Tamil, and Japanese, among others.36

36 Kaempfer’s album amicorum is now Detmold, Lippische Landesbibliothek, ms Mscr. 124.

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Along similar lines, the forms in which philological labor was distributed between

Western European and Ottoman contexts might be grouped roughly as textual, mechanical, and

collaborative. Textual distributions of labor encompass the uses of earlier written scholarship,

such as the study of readers’ marks and the use of existing commentaries and dictionaries.

Mechanical distributions of labor relate to the delegation of work on the materials of scholarship:

the use of binders, scribes, and amanuenses. Finally, collaborative distributions of labor involve

equal participation in a common object of study.

This distinction is useful as a means to gauge the shifting practices of oriental studies.

Some historians have suggested, for instance, that orientalists turned away from the use of

Islamic scholarship, in particular Qurʾan commentaries, in the late eighteenth century. However,

the evidence for this is largely anecdotal, and other sources indicate more continuity in their

use.37 However, orientalists did turn away from the use of translations. Whereas seventeenth-

century orientalists put considerable weight on Persian and Turkish translations of the Qurʾan,

these were largely disregarded after the early eighteenth century. A much more profound shift

occurred in the distribution of scribal labor. Seventeenth-century orientalists relied on the scribal

work of Eastern Christian, Muslim, and Jewish amanuenses (and, in some cases, could not have

37 Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters, 202 cites Johann David Michaelis’s rejection of tafsīr, and

suggests that orientalists saw commentaries as disposable: “The ladder could be kicked away once it had

been climbed, learning more about the Islamic tradition led to the devaluation of many of its aspects”.

However, Michaelis was not really an Arabist and is not representative of the attitudes of Arabists in

general. It might be true that the most advanced students of Arabic in Germany devoted less attention to

the Qurʾan in the second half of the eighteenth century, which could have been due to various reasons (the

success of earlier translations, the abundance of Türkenbeute Qurʾans, or the influence of Reiske, to name

three), but tafsīr manuscripts were available in all major German collections, and at least one manuscript

(Seebisch’s copy of al-Baidāwī’s commentary mentioned in chapter three, SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb.

394) contains the annotations of an orientalist. Among the following generations of German Arabists, the

example of Fleischer alone should be sufficient to dispel any suggestion that there was a turn away from

Islamic scholarship.

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easily performed this work themselves). Over the course of the eighteenth century, however,

orientalists took on almost the entirety of this work. In diplomatic language schools, students

perfected their handwriting as part of their training, and those scholars who rose through the

ranks of eighteenth-century academic oriental studies copied extensively from Islamic

manuscripts—to further their own studies or commissioned by others—and (as in Reiske’s case)

worked as scribal assistants much as Eastern Christian and Muslims had done for earlier

orientalists like Jacob Golius and Gilbert Gaulmin.

The question of collaborative labor is trickier, as very little cross-cultural scholarly

coordination was truly collaborative. Moreover, while orientalists relied on earlier Ottoman

scholarship, the slow pace of manuscript production meant that there was almost always a lag of

at least several decades between the completion of a major Ottoman work and its reception

among orientalists. Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary was completed at the turn of the seventeenth

century, but the first documented reading of the work by an orientalist was not until the 1640s,

when Georg Gentius studied it in Istanbul.38 Similarly, Kātib Çelebi’s Kašf al-ẓunūn was

completed in the 1650s, but not studied by orientalists until the 1680s, long after its author’s

death. Still, we find a number of possible exceptions. Gentius’s studies in Istanbul might be seen

as collaborative, and they appear in any case to have transcended any transactional student-

teacher relationship. Galland’s diary offers several examples of open scholarly exchange, and he

transliterated a work by Hüseyin Hezārfenn from the author’s manuscript in Istanbul already in

38 Notably, there is no evidence that André Du Ryer (who wrote the first partial Western European

translation of the Gulistān, the French Gulistan ou l’Empire des roses, published in 1634) ever consulted

the work in the previous decades.

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1686.39 Yet another example, Charles Peyssonnel’s arrangement for the production and

translation of a manuscript written by the hoca of the reis efendi, is discussed in chapter two.

The possibility of scholarly collaboration took on a much greater significance with the

founding of the first Ottoman Turkish press by the Hungarian convert to Islam Ibrāhīm

Müteferriḳa (1674-1745) around 1729.40 Müteferriḳa’s press is often discussed in terms of its

belated entry into a modernizing world, offering a chance to speculate on the causes that might

have delayed that entry, such as the intercession of a Sultan, the concerns of religious authorities,

or scribal revolts in the face of the new technology.41 Notions of civilizational advancement were

already central to discussions of the press in in its own time, as diplomats in Istanbul followed

closely Müteferriḳa’s progress, and news of his publications was discussed across Europe.

The figure of Johann Friedrich Bachstrom (1688-1742) shows just how quickly

information about the press could travel.42 Bachstrom, an intellectual entrepreneur who studied

in Halle, Breslau, and Jena before being ousted from a position in Torun, traveled to Istanbul

around 1728, where, besides chiding the Patriarch for not speaking Ancient Greek and

attempting to found an academy of sciences, he appears to have worked with Müteferriḳa in the

39 BnF, ms Supplément Turc 694.

40 On Müteferriḳa and his press, see Henri Omont, ed., Documents sur l’imprimerie à Constantinople au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Bouillon, 1895); Henri Omont, ed., Nouveaux documents sur l’imprimerie à

Constantinople au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1926); Vefa Erginbas, “Enlightenment in the Ottoman

Context: Ibrahim Müteferrika and His Intellectual Landscape”, in Historical Aspects of Printing and

Publishing in Languages of the Middle East, ed., Geoffrey Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 53-100; and Orlin

Sabev, Waiting for Müteferrika: Glimpses of Ottoman Print Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press,

2018).

41 See Kathryn Schwartz, “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?”, Book History 20 (2017): 1-39. On the

“belatedness” of Müteferriḳa’s press, see Orlin Sabev, Waiting for Müteferrika.

42 On Bachstrom, see Hermann Ullrich, “Johann Friedrich Bachstrom”, Euphorion 16 (1909), 320-349,

and Harun Küçük, Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732, (Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 209-213. I’m grateful to Harun Küçük for drawing my attention to

Bachstrom.

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new press.43 When Bachstrom left Istanbul in 1729, he brought news (as well as proof sheets)

from Müteferriḳa’s press. We know of Bachstrom’s report indirectly, through Johann Christian

Kundmann (1684-1751), who relayed the information in his Rariora naturae et artis:

The founder is neither a disgraced monk nor a Socinian from Siebenbürgen, but rather a

Hungarian renegade, who was Prince Rakoczi’s agent and interpreter. Since the Prince

resided in a country house fifteen hours from Istanbul, he handled his affairs at the Porte

and in the city. He then made a proposal to the Grand Vizier. Since a certain Arabic

dictionary which was indispensable to scholars was usually sold for 350 piastres (a

piaster is worth 40 para, and a para is as much as a Mariengroschen or 8 Pfennigs) and

was often difficult to find and poorly transcribed, he wanted to print this work correctly

and elegantly for a tenth of the price, that is, for 25 piasters. For this he received written

permission from the Sultan, Grand Vizier, Mufti, Efendi, etc. to carry out this work

unhindered. For this reason he first purchased a bad press from an Armenian printer, but

then ordered two presses from France. And since there had already been for many years

various Jewish presses in Constantinople, so he got from them several Jews who founded

the type, and also began to print the work mentioned above, which they successfully

brought out in two folio volumes (as several sheets brought by Mr. Doct. Bachstrom

prove, since nothing is lacking in the clarity of the print or the beauty of the paper).44

43 The anecdote about Bachstrom and the Patriarch was recounted to a German traveler two decades later,

in 1753, See Stephan Schulz, Der Leitungen des Höchsten nach seinem Rath auf den Reisen durch Europa, Asia und Africa (Halle: Hemmerde, 1774), 4:131. Schulz’s story captures Bachstrom the legend:

“Der Hr. Bachstrom redet den Patriarchen in dem Altgriechischen (Hiliniko) an, dieser aber entschuldigt

sich, daß er in dieser Sprache nicht reden könne, worüber ihn der Hr. Bachstrom bestraft, daß als ein

Griechischer Patriarch die eigentlich Griechische Sprache nicht verstünde. Der Patriarch antwortet ihm:

die Apostel sind auch Idioten gewesen, und haben doch viele Christen gemacht. Hr. Bachstrom sagt: ob

die Apostel als gewesene Idioten und Galilāer, nicht die Gabe der Sprachen auch gehabt hätten? und da

die Altgriechisch die sey, in welcher das neue Testament geschrieben worden, so seye es sehr schlimm,

wenn ein Griechischer Patriarch dieselbe nicht sprechen könnte. Hiermit giebt der Patriarch einen Wink,

das Räuchwerk und Narden-Wasser herbey zu bringen, damit Herr Bachstrom und Benisch besprenget

und geräuchert wurde; und so nahmen sie ihren Abschied.”

44 Johann Christian Kundmann, Rariora naturae et artis item in re medica oder Seltenheiten der Natur

und Kunst wie auch in der Artzney-Wissenschaft, Breslau: Herbert, 1737, 713f: “Der Inventor hiervon sey

weder ein abgefallener Mönch, noch Socinianer aus Siebenbürgen, sondern ein hungarischer Renegat, so

Agent und Dolmetscher des Fürsten Ragozy gewesen; Und da der Fürst 15. Stunden von Constantinopel

auf einem Lust-Hause sich aufhalte, tractire selbiger seine Affaires bey der Pforte und in der Stadt: Dieser

nun habe dem Groß-Vezier proponiret, da ein gewisses Arabisches Dictionarium, so denen Gelehrten

unentbehrlich, ordinair vor 350. Piaster (ein Piaster gilt 40 Para, und ein Para so viel als ein Marien-

Groschen oder 8. Pfennige) verkauffet würde und offt schwer und ziemlich falsch abgeschrieben, zu

bekommen wäre; So wolte er dieses correct und schön gedruckt, vor den 10ten Theil Preiß liefern,

390

Bachstrom’s account (via Kundmann), captures both the actors and objects at the heart of

Müteferriḳa’s project—Jewish type founders, French printing presses, and the enterprising

Hungarian convert himself—as well as the eagerness with which Western European scholars and

readers followed the new development. Word of the decision to found the press had reached the

Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres already in January 1727, and was subsequently

reported on in the Journal des Sçavans, and the Mercure de France.45 Müteferriḳa’s editions

quickly left Istanbul as evidence of print’s newest conquest. Christian Ernst von Sachsen-

Coburg-Saalfeld (1683-1745) gifted two books from Müteferriḳa’s press to Halle’s Orphanage

library in 1731, with a letter expressing the wish “that soon a divine light may rise in that dark

land from which this book came, and the gospel of Christ may also be made known there through

the press”.46 He framed the press’s founding in terms that highlighted Ottoman opposition to

progress, noting that the book was a “great rarity, because there is no hope that a book will be

nehmlich vor 25. Piaster. Er bekam hierüber schriftlich von dem Groß-Sultan, Groß-Vezier, Muffti,

Effendi, etc. Permission, solche Arbeit ungehindert zu vollführen: Deßwegen er erst aus einer

Armenischen Buchdruckerey eine schlechte Presse kauffte; Er ließ aber darauf 2 Pressen aus Frankreich

kommen: Und da allbereit in Constantinopel verschiedene Jüdische Buchdruckereyen von vielen Jahren

her sich befunden, so bekam er daraus einige Juden, welche die Schrifften gossen, auch obbemeldtes

Werck zu drucken anfingen, und glücklich in Folio in zweyen Voluminibus zu Stande brachten; (wie

einige dazumal von Herr Doct Bachstrohm herausgebrachte Bogen es bezeugen, da an der Nettigkeit des

Drucks und an Schönheit des Papiers nichts abgehet.) ”

45 See Jonathan Haddad, “Imagining Turkish Literature: Between the French Republic of Letters and the

Ottoman Empire” (PhD diss., University of California – Berkeley, 2016), 47-49, citing Omont, Missions

archaeologiques, 1:394. Journal des Sçavans, “Nouvelles Littéraires de Constantinople” (February 1727);

Mercure de France (December 1729): 2916.

46 FSH, 190 F 1 and 190 F 2. The letter was copied onto one of the front flyleaves of 190 F 2: “Der herr

gebe, daß in dem finßtern lande, aus welchen dieß buch gekommen, bald ein göttliches licht aufgehen und

das Evangelium von Christo auch dort durch den druck einmal bekant gemachet werden möge. Uns wolle

er aber auch seinen leüchter biß ans Ende der Welt erhalten und viele unter uns täglich laßen erleüchtet

und bekehret werden. Er segne fernerhin Ihren dienst dazu überschwenglich und laße Sie auch unseres

Orts in Ihrem Gebet nicht vergessen.” I am particularly grateful to Dr. Britta Klosterberg for drawing my

attention to these volumes.

391

allowed to be printed there again soon”, an allusion to the Patrona Ḫalīl revolt which had

deposed Sultan Aḥmed III the year before.47 Yirmisekizzade Meḥmed Said Pasa brought

Müteferriḳa’s editions of the history of Naʿīmā and Kātib Çelebi’s Cihānnümā as gifts during his

1742 embassy.48

There is another witness to Müteferriḳa’s press. At least two of the proof sheets that

Bachstrom brought back from Müteferriḳa’s shop survive (Figures 69). The Dresden librarian

and orientalist Sigismund Seebisch had them bound into his manuscript of the same Turkish-

Arabic dictionary Müteferriḳa had printed (Lugat-i Vankulu).49 At the end of Seebisch’s

manuscript, we find two of Müteferriḳa’s corrected proof sheets marked “Constantinopel”. 6

While Kundmann and Bachstrom had prized them as a first view of Ottoman print, today it is the

corrections on the proof sheets that stand out, as they offer a unique (albeit fleeting) glimpse into

the workings of Müteferriḳa’s shop.

47 FSH, 190 F 2: “Vor wenig Tagen ist mir eines von denen beyden in Constantinopel gedruckten

Büchern zu handen gekommen, und als eine große rarität angepriesen worden, weil man keine Hoffnung

habe, daß daselbst so bald einiges Buch wieder gedrucket worden dürffen.”

48 BnF, J-890/891; BnF, RES G-G-18.

49 SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 365. Seebisch’s manuscript (according to a later note in Seebisch’s hand)

had been looted at the 1683 Siege of Vienna. Seebisch also recorded the manuscript’s price: 16 Ducats

(fol. Vr). The sheets correspond to pages 166 and 175 of the printed edition.

392

Figure 69. SLUB, ms Mscr. Dresd. Eb. 365: One of two corrected proof sheets from Müteferriḳa’s edition (p.

166) of the Lugat-i Vankulu which were bound into Seebisch’s copy of a manuscript of the same work. The

use of the tridot, which appears to indicate a point of uncertainty to later check against another source,

suggests the rigor with which Müteferrika’s works were corrected. On this page, the tridot is used twice (both

times crossed out). In one instance the word ( لثغه خود ) was left uncorrected, and in the other instance (هلیش)

was corrected (to هیش).

393

It may very well have been Müteferriḳa who carried out these corrections. Written in red

ink, they appear to have been done in two phases. In the first, the corrector, reading the proof

sheet against the manuscript, corrected obvious errors, for instance, the omission of the initial

ʾalif in اولماز (olmaz) or the second nūn in نسنه (nesne). Other places are marked with an asterism

(tridot). These occur at points where a reader, particularly a non-native speaker, might be

uncertain whether something required emendation. For instance, an asterism appears in the

definition of the word وطثال (kick), over the non-word “ لثغه خود ” in a remark on an alternate

spelling.50 Since not all of the instances where an asterism appears are corrected, this sign seems

to have functioned as a “check later” mark.

The rigor in evidence in these proof sheets is a testament to Müteferriḳa’s

accomplishment, not merely as a symbol of “civilizational” progress, but as a real contribution to

a community of scholars. It would be easy to overlook the importance of Müteferriḳa’s

dictionaries, but as Kundmann pointed out, manuscripts of such works had been at once very

expensive, susceptible to scribal error, and indispensable. This applied equally to orientalists.

Müteferriḳa’s publications were an immediate boon to orientalist pedagogy, separating the study

of a number of standard texts from both the inconsistencies of manuscripts and the specialized

knowledge they often demanded of their reader. They were among the works translated by the

jeunes de langues and were later incorporated into the curriculum of the Orientalische Akademie

(see chapter two).

The contribution of these works among orientalist scholars can be gleaned from their

writings, notebooks, and annotations. For instance, the Persian-Turkish dictionary, Ḥasan

Şuʿūrī’s Lisān al-ʿAcem—often called the Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī (Şuʿūrī’s Dictionary)—was the last

50 I could not find another instance of “ خود لثغه”, and suspect this is a corruption of “خود لغت”.

394

work Müteferriḳa printed, in 1742.51 Orientalists soon discovered that it was not only far superior

to any available Persian dictionary, but also that the many passages of literature quoted in its

entries offered an exceptional florilegium. One scholar who trained at the Orientalische

Akademie, Franz von Dombay, worked through the volumes of Müteferriḳa’s edition, excerpting

the verses Şuʿūrī cited. Three notebooks of his excerpts from the work are now in the Austrian

National Library (Figure 70).52 Dombay proceeded page-by-page through the book, and for each

entry recorded along the margin both the headword from which it was taken and the author

(when given). Another former student at the academy, Joseph Hammer, worked through the

entire dictionary, from beginning to end, recording copious notes in the margins of his copy

(Figure 71).53 An ownership stamp in Hammer’s book shows that it had earlier served another

Persianist in Istanbul, Carl Wilhelm von Ludolf (1754-1803), who had undertaken at that time a

translation of the Persian epic, the Šāhnāma.

51 On Ḥasan Şuʿūrī and his dictionary, see Yusuf Öz, Tarih Boyunca Farsça-Türkçe Sözlükler, 204-209.

52 ÖNB, mss Mxt. 269a, b, c. Dombay’s notebooks are not dated. Franz von Dombay, تعلیم طوطی زبان

یفارس , Grammatica Linguae Persicae, accedunt dialogi, historiae, sententiae, et narrationes Persicae

(Vienna: Camesina, 1804) mentions the Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī in the introductory note “lectori philopersae”,

but it is unclear how much of his material was culled from the work.

53 LUB, Orient. Lit. 21k.

395

Figure 70. ÖNB, ms Mxt. 269a, fol. 11r: Dombay worked through the Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī , excerpting the

numerous lines of Persian poetry in the work. Dombay copied out each line, noting the author, page, and

corresponding headword.

396

Figure 71. LUB, Orient. Lit. 21k, p. 180: Hammer also worked through the Ferheng-i Şuʿūrī from beginning

to end, annotating as he deciphered the text.

397

Hammer worked throughout his life as a kind of print emissary to the Ottoman Empire

and Iran, and his vision of a community of scholars in common study and veneration of the

Orient is exemplified in the opening of the first issue of his journal, Fundgruben des Orients.

After multiple title pages—in German, French, and Arabic—a programmatic statement laid out

the simultaneously pan-European and Euro-Asiatic scope of the venture, historicizing its

transcultural mission within a vision of mutual influence and parallel development linking the

late Middle Ages with the present:

In the Middle Ages, when Asia came into Europe through the conquests of the Arabs in

Spain, and Europe into Asia through the crusades to Palestine, the genius of the Orient

first illuminated with its torch the darkness of gothic barbarity, and the waft of its life-

giving breath softened the rough air of northern customs. The fifteenth century saw the

fall of the Arabs in Spain and the Greeks in Constantinople. However, it also saw a new

dawning in oriental and occidental cultures. Since that moment, oriental studies in Europe

have been stimulated at many times, and their fundamental value and usefulness for

understanding science and religion, history and the formation of humanity, have been

generally acknowledged. England and Holland, Italy and Spain, France and Germany

have competed for the victory palm, to say nothing of the literary riches held aloft up to

the present day in the seat of the Ottoman Empire by its libraries and academies, as well

as its learned society and printing press.54

This was not idle talk. Hammer worked tirelessly to use print to forge new transnational literary

bonds. His reviews of Ottoman books in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung kept German readers

abreast of recent publications from Istanbul, and the dozens of works from the Ottoman presses

54 Joseph Hammer, “Vorrede,” Fundgruben des Orients, 1:I: “Im Mittelalter, wo Asien in Europa

einbrach durch die Eroberung der Araber in Spanien, und Europa in Asien durch die Züge der

Kreuzfahrer nach Palästina, erhellte der Genius des Orients zuerst mit seiner Fackel die Finsternisse

gothischer Barbarey, und milderte durch seines Odems Wehen den rauhen Anhauch nordischer Sitte. Das

fünfzehnte Jahrhundert sah den Fall des Reichs der Araber in Spanien und den Sturz des Reichs der

Griechen in Constantinopel; aber es sah auch eine neue Morgenröthe abendländischer und

morgenländischer Kultur. Seitdem ist in Europa das orientalische Studium vielfach angeregt, der

wesentliche Werth und Nutzen desselben zur Erkenntniss der Wissenschaften und Religionen, zur

Geschichte und Bildung der Menschheit, allgemein anerkannt worden. England und Holland, Italien und

Spanien, Frankreich und Deutschland, haben um die Palme gewetteifert; des literarischen Wohlstands zu

geschweigen, der im Sitze des osmanischen Kaiserthums durch Bibliotheken und Akademien, durch

Gelehrtenverein und Druckerey, bis auf unsere Zeiten emporgehalten ward.”

398

in his library—many of which contain his notes—show that he closely followed the development

of nineteenth-century Ottoman printing.55 Hammer’s vision also resonated with a broader

reading public.When Hammer mentioned in a review of the recently published court chronicle of

Aḥmed Vāṣif Efendi (c. 1730-1806) that Vāṣif Efendi had included in his work the embassy

report (sefāretnāme) of Aḥmed Resmī Efendi’s trips to Vienna (1757) and Berlin (1763/1764),

one of his readers, the Berlin bookseller and Aufklärer, Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811), reached

out to Hammer expressing his interest in the work.56 Hammer responded to Nicolai’s letter with a

translation of the whole report, and Nicolai, whose own travel accounts represent the

Enlightenment culmination of the ars apodemica, edited the translation with his own critical

footnotes, which carefully observed how the Ottoman statesmen observed the Germans.57

Vienna’s Arabic type publishing constantly improved over Hammer’s lifetime, in part

through his own initiative. Several of Hammer’s works were also explicitly directed toward a

Muslim audience (such as his translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations into Persian), and

presented to the Ottoman sultan a copy of his edition of Šabestarī’s Gulšan-i Rāz, printed with

lithographed border illustrations copied from an ornate 1586 manuscript of the work from the

collection of Heinrich Diez.58

55 While Hammer’s manuscripts are now in Vienna, his printed books (including those in Arabic-script)

were sold to the University of Leipzig. The books were taken up into the library’s holdings without any

distinguishing mark, and today can only be identified by Hammer’s annotations. Since the Ottoman books

(as of 2020) have not been listed in the online catalog, those interested in studying these volumes should

consult first the nineteenth-century Sachkatalog to identify the call numbers.

56 On Aḥmed Vāṣif Efendi, see Ethan L. Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hammer’s reviews are

Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, 1806 (nos. 47, 48, 49. 74, 75, 76)

57 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, trans., Des türkischen Gesandten Resmi Ahmet Efendi gesandtschaftliche Berichte von seinen Gesandtschaften in Wien im Jahre 1757, und in Berlin im Jahre

1763, ed. Friedrich Nicolai (Berlin: Nicolai, 1809). 58 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Mahmud Schebisteri’s Rosenflor des Geheimnisses (Pest: Hartleben,

1838). The manuscript from Diez’s collection is SBB, ms Diez A oct. 3.

399

Hammer’s crowning achievement, his Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (History of

the Ottoman Empire), was largely a product of his study of printed Ottoman court chronicles.59

These histories offered a privileged view into the Ottoman court, and had long interested

orientalists. Antoine Galland had translated one of them into French (although his translation was

never published).60 Müteferriḳa published the histories of both Naʿīmā and Rāsid, works that

were later studied by both the jeunes de langues and the students at the Orientalische Akademie,

and more chronicles—up to Vāṣif Efendi’s history, [which ends in 1774]—were published once

the press started up again. Hammer’s history was a synthesis of dozens of Ottoman and Western

European print and manuscript sources, but the core of his work came from the printed Ottoman

court chronicles. Hammer’s annotated copies of these histories show a workmanlike approach, as

he compiled a mass of information, pulling details from the main text into the margins.61

Hammer’s vision of a transnational community of oriental studies was, if anything,

prophetic, but the orientalizing trappings of his publications became an object of derision among

a new generation of university-trained orientalists who prized philological rigor over inclusion in

the transnational circle of learned men Hammer’s works evoked. Hammer had been no stranger

to controversy. The critical footnotes he added to one Turkish translation submitted to his

Fundgruben earned him a sprawling, self-published response from its author (Heinrich Friedrich

von Diez), which was equal parts philological quibbling and ad hominem attack.62 Hammer read

59 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches.

60 Galland’s translation is now BnF, mss Français 6067-6079.

61 Hammer’s annotated copies are LUB, Orient. Lit. 72h (Tārīḫ-i Naʿīmā), Orient. Lit. 72m (Tārīḫ-i Sāmī

ve Şākir ve Ṣubḥī), Orient. Lit. 72a (Tārīḫ-i Vāṣif), Orient. Lit. 72k (Tārīḫ-i Rāsid), Orient. Lit. 72f

(Tārīḫ-i Izzī). 62 Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, Unfug und Betrug in der morgenländischen Litteratur nebst vielen hundert Proben von der groben Unwissenheit des H. v. Hammer zu Wien in Sprachen und Wissenschaften

(Halle: Waisenhaus, 1815).

400

the work closely enough to underline the choicer insults and offer, on occasion, his own

commentary, largely variations on “you ass”.63

That the stakes of the young philologists’ offensive against Hammer were much

greater—not a matter of personal difference but of the very fate of the discipline— is expressed

already in the insurgent philologists’ rival aesthetic.64 On the title page (Figure 72) of his 1835

edition of a work by al-Zamaḫšarī, Hammer presented the book to a community of learned

amateurs as a “new year’s present” (Neujahrsgeschenk). Under Hammer’s name the reader finds

a small wood engraving imitating the style of the Islamic seals commonly used to identify

manuscript owners. The engraving contains a verse by al-Mutanabbi, for which Hammer offered

his own translation:

My desire is not gold,

So as to enjoy its use

But rather fame and honor’s reward

That it be always renewed65

63 LUB, Orient. Lit. 893c: “O Esel!” (526), “O Esel” (653), “Esel!” (912), “Du Esel” (916), “O Asinus”

(943). On Diez and Hammer, see Klaus Kreiser, “Eine langatmige und unergiebige Polemik?: Die Fehde

zwischen Heinrich Friedrich von Diez und Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall”, in Heinrich Friedrich von Diez: Freidenker—Diplomat—Orientkenner, eds Christoph Rauch and Gideon Stiening (Berlin: De

Gruyter, 2020), 243-272 and Katherina Mommsen, Goethe und Diez. The Polish orientalist Joseph

Senkowski had also published an attack on Hammer, in the form of a letter from a “véritable philosophe

turk”. Joseph Senkowski, Lettre de Tutundju-Oglou-Moustafa-Aga, véritable philosophe turk, à M.

Thaddée Bulgarin, Rédacteur de l’Abeille du Nord; traduite du russe, et publiée, avec un savant

commentaire, par Koutlouk-Fouladi, ci-devant ambassadeur de la cour de Boukhara à Khiva (l’ancienne

Germania), actuellement marchand d’abricots confits de Samarcande, et littérateur (St. Petersburg:

Gretsch, 1828). Hammer’s annotated copy of this book is also in Leipzig: LUB, Hist. Ross. 317h.

64 On the “Samachschari” controversy, see Boris Liebrenz, “Zum Verhältnis von Fleischer und Joseph

von Hammer-Purgstall”, Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer—Leben und Wirkung, eds Ebert and Hanstein,

115-133; Mangold, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft”, 79-82.

65 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Samachschari’s Goldene Halsbänder. Als Neujahrsgeschenk (Vienna:

Strauß, 1835): “ ـكنها فى مفخــر أستجدهما رغبتى فى عسـجد أستفیده ول ” “Mein Begehren ist nicht Gold, / Um des

Nutzens mich zu freuen, / Sondern Ruhm und Ehrensold, / Der sich immer soll erneuen.”

401

Hammer’s poetic dedication imagined the slim volume’s readership—like the title, Goldene

Halsbänder—as a “golden chain” binding East and West.66 In contrast, the title page of

Fleischer’s edition, published soon after Hammer’s as a brazen corrective to the senior scholar’s

work, laid out a rival sensibility. Hammer had directed his work toward a community of learned

amateurs as a gift of cultural mediation bridging East and West. Fleischer directed his at a new

community of scholars. He emphasized his academic credentials, stated the textual basis of his

work, and specified his contribution: the work had been translated “anew” from Hammer’s

edition, with “critical and exegetical annotations”. A short Latin motto offered a pointed

alternative to Hammer’s translation of al-Mutanabbī. Where Hammer had cited the Abbasid poet

to express a desire, not for wealth, but for recognition. Fleischer invoked instead a higher power:

“Amicus Plato, amicus Aristoteles: sed magis amica VERITAS” (Plato is a friend, Aristotle is a

friend, but the greater friend is TRUTH).67

66 Hammer, Samachschari’s Goldene Halsbänder: “Gruß Euch! Ihr Glieder all’ der goldnen Kette / Von

Ostens Wiege bis zu Westens Bette! / Euch lehrte sie Pythagoras, wenn nicht / Euch Dschami’s gold’nes

Buch belehret hätte.“

67 Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Samachschari’s goldene Halsbänder.

402

Figure 72. LUB, Orient. Lit. 1517o: The title page of Hammer’s Samachschari’s Goldene Halsbänder (1835),

with an Arabic motto taken from al-Mutannabī in the style of an Islamic seal.

403

Hammer soon had his revenge. He tore apart Fleischer’s 1831 catalog of Dresden’s

oriental manuscripts (“thousand and one geographical, historical, grammatical, orthoepical, and

orthographic blunders”) in a review essay in the Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur.68 Still,

Fleischer’s “serious scholarliness” (ernste Wissenschaftlichkeit) won the day, and by the

following century, Hammer, while still celebrated as a Turcologist, had been relegated to a side

note in the history of Orientalistik, with Fleischer’s edition representing the moment the “chinks

in his philological armor” were finally exposed.69

Hammer died in 1856, the last of the Istanbul orientalists. Before him, two centuries of

scholars had made Ottoman learning the philological basis of the Western European “Orient”. By

Hammer’s time that was no longer possible. However, Hammer’s Geschichte des osmanischen

Reiches did find its way back to the Ottoman Empire, where it was read in its French translation,

informing a new generation of Ottoman scholars.70 When the Ottoman Academy of Sciences

(Encümen-i Dāniş) tasked Aḥmed Cevdet Pasa (1822-1895) with writing a history of the

Ottoman Empire, he picked up in 1774, where Hammer and Vāṣif Efendi had left off. We know

that Aḥmed Cevdet sent the resulting work, often called the first modern Ottoman history, to

68 Joseph von Hammer Purgstall, “Uebersicht von drey und siebzig Werken über orientalische Literature”,

Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur, 76 (1836), 133-258, here 251: “Recensent könnte zu diesen vierhundert

Nummern des Fleischerschen Katalogs auch ein Tausend von Noten schreiben, wie Hr. F. ein halbes zu

den hundert Worten Samachschari’s, aber er hat dazu weder Zeit noch Luft, und fühlt zu große Ehrfurcht

vor der Geduld der Leser und dem Wesentlichen der Wissenschaften, um die Tausend und Einen

geographischen, historischen, grammatikalischen, orthoepischen und orthographischen Schnitzer Hrn. F’s

demselben als ein Schlächtermesser an die Gurgel zu halten; er wendet sich lieber von diesem schlechten

bibliographischen Machwerke weg [...].” Liebrenz, “Zum Verhältnis von Fleischer und Joseph von

Hammer-Purgstall”, 122.

69 Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, 165: “Auf die Dauer konnten aber die Mängel seiner

philologischen Ausrüstung nicht verborgen bleiben. Als er 1835 Zamaḫšarī’s Aṭwāq ad-dahab arabisch

und deutsch herausgab, deckte Fleischer in seiner noch im gleichen Jahre folgenden Gegenausgabe

schonungslos die völlige Unzulänglichkeit von Hammers Leistung auf.” 70 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours,

trans. J.J. Hellert, 8 vols (Paris: Bellizard, 1835-1844).

404

Hammer, because among the books from Hammer’s collection which were later sold to the

Leipzig University Library, we find volumes of the Tārīḫ-i Cevdet (Cevdet’s History), one of

which contains the Ottoman scholar’s personal dedication to the Austrian orientalist (Figure 73).

As a student at the Orientalische Akademie six decades earlier, Hammer had studied the Ottoman

histories printed by Müteferriḳa, and later brought these histories together with European

archival documentation in his Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches. Aḥmed Cevdet, in writing a

work which was both inspired by and followed from Hammer’s history, honored his predecessor,

completing, for the first time, a circuit of scholarly communication between the Ottoman Empire

and orientalist Europe, one which would only intensify in the century that followed.71

71 It is characteristic of the shifting terms of transnational communication that Hammer was mildly

offended that Cevdet Pasa had written to him in French. See, Christoph Neumann, “Primärquelle und

Sekundärliteratur im Dialog: Zu den Beziehungen zwischen Ahmed Cevdet Pasa und Joseph von

Hammer-Purgstall”, in Turkologie heute—Tradition und Perspektive. Materialien der dritten Deutsche Turkologen-Konferenz, Leipzig 4.-7. Oktober 1994, eds Nurettin Demir and Erika Taube (Wiesbaden:

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Figure 73. LUB, Orient. Lit. 1176: Aḥmed Cevdet’s personal dedication to Joseph Hammer in the first

volume of his history.

406

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