LEUNCLAVIUS, Johannes [with] CURIONE, Celio Augustino

£2,750 · Offered by Sokol Books

An interesting sammelband of historical works on Ottoman Turkey from the library of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1655-1716), the great Scottish bibliophile, politician and adventurer, who, according to his own unlikely story, fought against the Ottomans at the Siege of Buda in 1684. Johannes Leunclavius (d. 1594) was a German orientalist and jurisprudist who edited Greek historical works and wrote treatises on Byzantine civil law. He visited Constantinople on embassy in 1584-85. The first of his works opens with the genealogies of Muhammad, various Ottoman rulers, and ruling families of the Balkan kingdoms, and is a chronicle of the rise of the Ottoman dynasty from medieval times, ending in the 1540s during the reign of Suleiman I. The text is followed by an extensive index of proper names and a glossary of Turkish words. The second work is Leunclavius s Latin translation of a manuscript chronicle in Turkish brought from Constantinople by Hieronymus Beck von Leopoldsdorf (1525-96), a German scholar who travelled widely in the Middle East, which was translated into German at the behest of Emperor Ferdinand II by his interpreter, Hans Caudir von Spiegel (d. 1579). This covers the complete history of the Ottoman Empire from its foundation to the time of publication. Leunclavius s own contribution to this chronicle is the Pandectes Historiae Turcicae, a compendious series of short historical sketches of wars and other events in Ottoman history, as well as commentaries on their cul

• Binding: Hardcover

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