BUSBECQ, Ogier Ghislain de.

by Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq

£1,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

Second edition of these remarkably important letters on Turkey, written in the 1550s, with the only surviving glossary of a long-extinct Germanic language. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522-92) was a scholar, keen herbalist and diplomat in the service of the Austrian monarchy; he spent several years in Constantinople where he negotiated the boundaries of disputed territories and was involved in politics at the court of Suleyman the Magnificent. First published without authorial licence in Paris in 1589 as Itinerarium Constantinopolitanum , Epistolae is his most famous work and one of the earliest Western testimonies on the Ottoman world. It gathers letters which Busbecq sent to the Hungarian diplomat Nicholas Michault. In addition to observations on the natural environment, he included in his work the first and only recorded glossary (80 words), as well as the excerpt of a song, in a Crimean dialect. Having heard of a Germanic language being spoken in Turkey, he managed to have an interview with a native speaker noting words close to Dutch (e.g., tag day , plut blood ), others which differed, and cardinal numbers (Considine, Dictionaries , 140-41). Busbecq also expresses strong opinions on the conquest of the New World, as colonisers seek the Indies and the Antipodes through the vastity of the ocean because there the booty is easy to take from naïve and gullible natives, without bloodshed . One of the English annotators of this copy, who wrote in English, Greek, Latin and Arab

• Binding: Hardcover

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