Download PDF | ( History Of Oriental Studies, 4) Hamilton Alastair Johann Michael Wansleben's Travels In The Levant, 1671– 1674 Brill (2018)
551 Pages
Introduction
Johann Michael Wansleben, or Jean Michel Vansleb as he was called in France, is known for three great achievements. He collected over 580 eastern manuscripts for Louis xiv. He wrote a work on the Copts, his Histoire de l’Eglise d’Alexandrie published in 1677, which was by far the best study of its kind and can still be consulted with profit. And, in two of his publications, the Relazione dello stato presente dell’Egitto (Paris, 1671), and above all the Nouvelle relation en forme de iournal, d’un voyage fait en Égypte … en 1672 & 1673(Paris, 1677), he provided a remarkable description of Egypt which, in many respects, anticipated the great Description de l’Egypte by the scholars who accompanied Napoleon to the East at the end of the eighteenth century.1 It was also used by later scholars as an invaluable source of statistics.
Other of his achievements are less known. First of all he made a number of anthropological and archeological discoveries in Egypt which have rarely received their due. He was exceptional in exploring the country and its history on the basis of information partly contained in the manuscripts he collected for the French crown and partly supplied by his Coptic friends. His enquiries extended to the Ottoman political and economic administration and to countless facets of daily life at a time which has been little studied by later historians. And finally we must add Wansleben’s immense merits as an Ethiopicist, a copyist and discoverer of Ethiopic manuscripts who, had he lived longer, would probably have taken his place as the greatest practitioner of Ethiopic of the seventeenth century. This book is an edition of the hitherto unpublished ‘Giornale nel quale egli racconta le sue osservationi le più curiose, che egli ha fatto sopra li luoghi e paesi per dove egli è passato e li avenimenti li più memorabili che gli sono arrivati nel suo viaggio in Levante’, now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (bnf ms italien 435). It is an original Italian version of Wansleben’s Nouvelle relation en forme de iournal, d’un voyage fait en Égypte … en 1672 & 1673. In addition to Wansleben’s description of Egypt, however, it also includes material lacking in the printed edition – an account of his journey to Egypt from France in 1671 by way of Cyprus and Syria, and his journey back to France, as far as Istanbul, by way of Chios and Izmir, in 1673 and 1674.
The Life of Wansleben
But who was Johann Michael Wansleben? Born in Sömmerda close to Erfurt in 1635, he was the son of a Lutheran pastor who seems to have given him his first lessons in eastern languages.2 He attended the Latin school in Erfurt and then, at the age of nineteen, proceeded to the university of Königsberg. He there studied theology, philosophy and oriental languages, but although it has been said that these included Samaritan, Syriac, Arabic and Persian,3 there is nothing in the diary he kept at the time to suggest that they went beyond Hebrew and, perhaps, a very basic Arabic (in which he writes two words in 1654).4 His teacher, the professor of Hebrew, was Stephan Gorlov.5 Appointed in 1647, Gorlov had been in Amsterdam to study under Menasseh ben Israel and left his mark on Hebrew studies in Germany with various publications on Biblical themes.6 Wansleben completed his studies at Königsberg with a disputation in March 1656.7
In September he entered the service of Countess Theodora Maria von Dohna, married at the time to Wilhelm von Eppingen, in Marienwerder, south of Danzig in West Prussia (now Kwidzyn in Poland).8 The king of Sweden, Charles x Gustav, had invaded Poland in 1655 and, at the end of 1656, driven by lack of money, Wansleben enlisted as a mercenary in the Swedish army under the command of the Lord High Admiral Carl Gustav Wrangel, then called the Count of Salmis.9 In 1657 the Swedish forces in Poland returned westwards in order to fight the Danes in Jutland. Amid the constantly shifting alliances which characterised the Second Northern War, Wansleben followed his regiment south to Toruń and Bresten (Brześć Kujawski) in Poland, then west through Pomerania, to Tempelburg (now Czaplinek), Falkenburg (now Złocieniec), Stettin, Mölln and Hamburg, where he arrived on 25 July. His regiment now marched north, to Holstein, but in Flensburg, in September 1657, he obtained his discharge ‘ex carcere militiae’, as he wrote exultantly in his diary.10 From Husum on the west coast of Holstein he took a ship for Holland, landed in Harlingen on 15 November, and arrived in Amsterdam three days later. In Amsterdam Wansleben hoped to take part in a commercial expedition to Izmir equipped by Cornelis Tromp, the son of Maarten Tromp, the great admiral.
Cornelis Tromp11 had himself recently returned from the Northern War where he had fought the Swedes and relieved Danzig.Wansleben, however, was rejected since his Dutch was not good enough, and he narrowly missed a ship sailing to the East Indies.12 He again found himself in financial difficulties. He owed his return to Germany to the generosity of the German pastor of the largely German-speaking Lutheran community in Amsterdam,13 Paulus Gordes from Hamburg. Thanks to Gordes he managed to take a ship from Enkhuizen to Glückstadt on the Elbe and reach Hamburg at the end of December.14 Wansleben was back in Erfurt in February 1658. In the course of his passages across Europe Wansleben continued to keep the diary he had started in 1654 at the university of Königsberg. It shows that, already in his university days, he had a strong interest in antiquarianism and in the assembling of historical information.15 As a student he copied, besides commonplaces, the epitaphs in the cathedral of Königsberg. On his travels, in addition to recording epitaphs and other inscriptions, he wrote more or less detailed descriptions of the towns he visited – Bresten, Stettin, Mölln, Flensburg, Harlingen, Amsterdam, Enkhuizen, and Glückstadt. His father had originally wanted him to join the clergy, but Wansleben, restless, adventurous, and with a taste for travel, was far more interested in what he called ‘politische Welthandel’, international political affairs, than in ‘studium theologicum ecclesiasticum’.16
Shortly after his return to Erfurt he was fortunate enough to encounter one of the foremost orientalists in Germany, Hiob Ludolf, already known as thefinest Ethiopicist in Europe, to board and lodge with him in Erfurt, and, under his supervision, to study Ethiopic.17 The German interest in Ethiopia was connected with an increasing Protestant concern with the eastern Churches which can be traced back to the late sixteenth century.18 The Christian communities of the East, it was believed, were far closer to the primitive church of Christ and his Apostles than the Church of Rome. They had consistently rejected the advances of the papacy and could serve not only as models for the young Protestant Churches, but also as a justification for their existence. The practice of clerical marriage and of celebrating the eucharist in two kinds and the widespread western belief that they were mainly national Churches, with a liturgy much of which was in the vernacular, made them particularly attractive, and demanded closer investigation. The first German Lutheran to attempt to explore Ethiopia was Peter Heyling from Lübeck.19 He set out for the East in 1632, spent five months in the Coptic monasteries of the Wādī Naṭrūn in Egypt studying Arabic and Syriac, briefly continued his studies with the Copts in Jerusalem, and then, disguised as a Copt, undertook the journey from Cairo to Ethiopia which he reached in 1634. To start with his expedition was a success and he was welcomed by the ruler,but when he revealed his true missionary objectives and became involved in theological disputes he was banished and died mysteriously in Suakin in about 1652. Nevertheless, in Ethiopia Heyling had won a number of devoted followers.20 One of these was the monk Abba Gregorius who subsequently travelled to Rome and lodged in the Ethiopian convent known as Santo Stefano dei Mori behind St Peter’s.21 It was there, in 1649, that he met Ludolf, who was part of a Swedish embassy.
The two men became close friends and Ludolf took Abba Gregorius not only as his teacher of Ethiopic but as his principal informant about the beliefs of the Ethiopians. Abba Gregorius’s accounts inspired him with a profound reverence for Heyling and led him to believe that the faith of the Ethiopians was far closer to that of the Lutherans than to that of the Catholics. Ludolf also matured a veritable hatred of the Jesuits who had managed to impose Catholicism on Ethiopia from 1622 to 1632,22 and, although his sources were nearly all Catholic, he attacked their endeavour in his far later Historia Aethiopica (1681).23 When he returned to Germany in 1651 he entered the service of the duke of Saxe-Gotha, Ernest the Pious, and persuaded him to invite Abba Gregorius to Germany. Abba Gregorius accepted, assisted Ludolf with the Ethiopic grammar and dictionary he was preparing, but left Gotha in 1652 with the intention of returning to Ethiopia. Ludolf wished to have his theory that the Ethiopians were in fact the Protestants of the East confirmed by Wansleben, but he was also looking for somebody who could explore the country, gain information about its history, its geography, and the present state of learning, and acquire manuscripts. Wansleben was not the only candidate. In the spring of 1660 Ludolf divulged his project to the Swiss orientalist Johann Heinrich Hottinger, who was teaching at the university of Heidelberg, in the hope of gaining the financial support of the Elector Palatine, Karl i Ludwig.
To Hottinger Ludolf suggested that the journey be undertaken byJohann Philip Hepp, a law student from Kassel who might attract the elector since he too was a Calvinist. But the plan came to nothing.24 So pleased was Ludolf with Wansleben’s progress in Ethiopic that, in June 1659, he told him of his plan to send him to Ethiopia.25 First, however, he sent Wansleben to Gotha, where he lodged from 20 November 1659 to 29 August 1660, and then, in September, decided to dispatch him to England to supervise the publication of his work on Ethiopic by the English scholar Edmund Castell who was preparing a polyglot dictionary. Wansleben arrived in London on 11 October 1660. Ten days later he took up lodgings with Castell.26 When he was in London Wansleben made a number of editorial changes to Ludolf’s work without consulting his master. He provided an appendix with additions and emendations to the lexicon and added to the grammar the Ethiopic text, with a Latin translation, of the liturgy of Dioscorus, based on a manuscript belonging to the professor of Arabic at Oxford, Edward Pococke. He also compiled a Latin index at the end of the lexicon thereby making it possible to look up Latin words in Ethiopic.27 Although Ludolf was not entirely pleased with the editorial changes, he wrote a courteous prefatory epistle addressed to Wansleben which appeared when the work was first published in 1661, praising his knowledge of Ethiopic and expressing gratitude for his assistance.28 In the meantime Wansleben stayed on in London to help Castell with his polyglot dictionary,29 and continued his research into Ethiopic manuscripts. Some of these appear to have belonged to the Danish orientalist Theodor Petraeus. According to a later report by Ludolf, who, by then, was collecting anecdotes discrediting his former pupil, Wansleben had deliberately misappropriated them and, in the summer of 1661, Petraeus had to retrieve them by force.
Castell evidently thought highly of Wansleben, and with Castell Wansleben, who also copied Ethiopic manuscripts in Oxford, must also have met a number of other scholars – the various contributors to the London Polyglot Bible in which Castell played such an important part, as well as members of the Royal Society and the Hartlib Circle. He thus established his place in the world of learning.31 During the nineteen months he spent in London he learnt fluent English – so fluent that the pages describing his departure from England in April 1662 in his diary32 are actually written in English. His mastery of English is by no means perfect, but the fluency reveals an aptitude for languages which would stand him in good stead in years to come. On Wansleben’s return to Erfurt in the summer of 1662 the duke of SaxeGotha agreed with Ludolf that the time had come for him to travel to Ethiopia by way of Egypt. The duke was toying with the idea of an anti-Turkish alliance with Ethiopia, and the purpose of the journey was to establish relations with the ruler, to gather information about the inhabitants, government, religion, politics and military strength of that remote country, to inform the Ethiopians about the Lutheran Church, to enquire about the possibility of establishing a Lutheran mission, and to persuade some young Ethiopians to travel to Germany in order to study the state of the Protestant Churches of theWest.33When he was in Egypt, moreover, Wansleben was supposed to enquire into the fates of Heyling and of Abba Gregorius.34
The allowance that the duke gave to Wansleben for his travel expenses was parsimonious.35 It amounted to 1,000 Reichstalers36 in all, 200 of which were supposed to cover the journey and 300 his living expenses. Wansleben, supplied with safeconducts and medicines (with instructions as to their use),37 set off in July 1663, travelling overland to Venice and Livorno and then by sea to Alexandria. In Alexandria, where he spent three weeks, he seems to have had his first encounter with the Coptic community when he called on Qummuṣ Yūḥannā, the archdeacon of the church of St Mark, and told him of his plan to travel to Ethiopia. Qummuṣ Yūḥannā advised him to consult the patriarch in Cairo.38 In January 1664 Wansleben was in Cairo. At first he stayed with the English consul, Richard Bendish,39 and he managed to meet further members of the Coptic community. In accordance with the advice of Qummuṣ Yūḥannā and the instructions issued by the duke of Saxe-Gotha,40 he sought out the patriarch of Alexandria, Matthew iv.41 He again disclosed his plans to go to Ethiopia and asked the patriarch for letters of recommendation. Matthew iv, however, strongly advised him against the journey. Foreigners, he told Wansleben, were not welcome in Ethiopia, and the journey was all but impossible to undertake. Wansleben, moreover, fell ill in Egypt, badly affected by the heat, and would not have had the stamina to make the expedition. Wansleben decided to combine his interest in the Church of Ethiopia with a thorough investigation of the Copts of Egypt. He started to take Arabic lessons from a Coptic scribe, Muaʾllim Gabriel who, he said later, was converted to Catholicism by Capuchin missionaries,42 and, furnished with a letter from the patriarch, he set off for the south and spent two months in what he called the Abyssinian Monastery, or the Monastery of St Peter and Paul, a dependencyof the Coptic monastery of the Virgin known as Dayr al-Muḥarraq between al-Minyā and Asyūṭ. He there copied a number of Ethiopic manuscripts. On his return to Cairo he took up lodgings with the Dutch consul, Jan Theyls de Jonge (with whom he visited the pyramids),43 and pursued his research into the Church of Alexandria. In order to draw up an inventory of all the various Coptic churches and monasteries in Egypt, and with an eye to mapping Christian Egypt, he summoned a meeting in Cairo of members of the Coptic clergy. It lasted for two weeks and enabled him to make an extensive list of ecclesiastical buildings in a large part of the country.44 But he also had to cope with the chronic shortage of money which dogged all his travels. He thus met certain members of the Jewish community in Cairo from whom he borrowed sums which he never managed to repay.45 In the report, which he first wrote in German, Wansleben displayed his knowledge of the Church of Alexandria (to whose observances he devoted a substantial section) as well as his concern with ‘politsche Welthandel’. After a survey of the history, geography, flora and fauna of Egypt he provides details about the Ottoman administration and trade, and ends with a brief section on the ancient monuments. But, in contrast to the reports on his second journey, he gives few details about his everyday life. He searched for manuscripts, but not with the commitment with which he did so on his second visit some ten years later. He thus formed a small collection of Arabic and Ethiopic codices, including the copies he had made himself, which he brought back to Europe. He kept a pet chameleon which died of starvation46 (just as his crocodiles would do on his second visit). He cited a number of earlier travellers – Leo Africanus,47 George Sandys,48 Bernardinus Surius49 and Pietro Della Valle50 – and he referred to the work of Athanasius Kircher, whose attempts to decipher the hieroglyphs he then seems to have accepted.
Wansleben set sail from Alexandria on 9 January 1665 and arrived in Livorno on 16 February.52 He appears to have had every intention of returning to Germany, and the Germans expected him. The duke sent him a further hundred Reichstalers at the end of May,53 and on 19 June, after what would appear to have been some reluctance to approach the duke directly, Wansleben made his excuses to him for not having reached Ethiopia. He stressed the difficulties and expense of the journey, his own ill health, the hostilities of Bādī ii Abū Duqn, the sultan of the Funj state of Sannar on the Blue Nile, who had been blocking the borders for the past twelve years, and the advice of the Coptic patriarch.54 He would subsequently send the original attestations provided by Matthew iv, by Qummuṣ Yūḥannā, and by the Dutch consul Jan Theyls.55 While the two Copts emphasized the dangers of the expedition and dwelt on the Ethiopian hostility to foreigners, Theyls added that the expense, which would have included lavish gifts and heavy bribes, would have been prohibitive. As late as November, by which time Wansleben was in Rome, the duke still declared that he would cover all his travel expenses to Germany.56 When he was in Livorno Wansleben lodged, after a brief period of quarantine, with the influential English merchant who had once been the agent of the English Admiralty, Charles Longland.57 A republican and a devout Protestant with non-conformist sympathies, Longland had a collection of the works of the political thinker James Harrington. While he was staying with Longland Wansleben drew up a digest of Harrington’s writings.58 His reasons for doing so have been debated – did he intend the digest for the duke of Saxe-Gotha or for another patron, or was he driven by the interest in ‘politische Welthandel’ which had prevented him from becoming a clergyman? At the end of June Wansleben left Longland’s lodgings bound, according to Longland, who also supplied the duke of Saxe-Gotha with an attestation stating how exemplary a guest Wansleben had been,59 for Venice. In fact Wansleben, as he would later admit,60 got no closer to Venice than Bologna. He there heard that the roads to Venice were infested by brigands and, as he so frequently did on his travels, he took fright. He made for Loreto instead. According to Ludolf61 the grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand ii, visited Livorno at the time whenWansleben disembarked and was struck by the appearance of a man in Egyptian dress and with a long beard.
He summoned him and invited him back to Florence. Ferdinand was particularly intrigued by Orientalists, as he proved when he welcomed the compiler of the Bibliothèque Orientale, Barthélemi d’Herbelot, whom he also first met in Livorno in 1666. Whether the story of his first encounter with Wansleben is true or not, Wansleben was indeed invited to Florence, where he arrived in mid-July, and stayed for four months. He there acquired some distinction in the local world of learning. He encountered the members of the Accademia del Cimento, an academy of scientists with a strong interest in oriental culture which had been founded in 1657 by pupils of Galileo Galilei and Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, and which was sponsored by the grand duke. Wansleben formed a lasting friendship with one of its most distinguished members, Francesco Redi and, it would seem, with Galileo’s pupil Carlo Dati.62 He also met Sir John Finch, the future English ambassador to Istanbul, on whose support he thought he could count when they were both in Izmir in 1673.63 In the months he spent in Florence Wansleben copied the Ethiopic manuscripts he found in the Florentine libraries and completed the German version of the report of his travels in Egypt. Of this Wansleben made a number of copies, one of which he hoped to have sent back to Gotha from Rome in October.64 When he finally received a copy the duke, who would have excerpts read aloud to him before meals, was pleased with it.65 First published in 1794, the German text contained certain discrepancies with regard to the Italian Relazione, which was otherwise very faithful to it. In the German, however, a light emphasis was laid on potential points of community between the beliefs of the Copts and those of the Lutherans – the Copts’ loyalty to the patriarch of Alexandria rather than to the pope and their habit of taking communion in both kinds – while, in contrast to the Italian version which stressed the similarities with Catholicism, he said little about the Copts’ belief in transubstantiation.66 When Wansleben left Florence he had with him letters of recommendation from Ferdinand ii, with whom he communicated through the intermediary of the Tuscan ambassador in Rome, Torquato Barbolani di Montauto.67 One letter seems to have been for Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of Pope Urban viii, a munificent patron who shared Ferdinand’s interest in the Arab world and the Christians of the East. Thanks to the influence of Barberini and the subsidies he provided, Wansleben could pursue his oriental studies after his arrival in Rome in October 1665. For seven months in 1666 he attended courses – probably of Arabic, Syriac, and Italian – at the Maronite College which had been founded by Gregory xiii in 1584.68 As the protector of the Maronite nation69 Barberini alone could authorise such an irregularity in the Jesuit-run college intended exclusively for Maronites from the Levant dispatched by the patriarch.70 Probably also thanks to Barberini Wansleben met the man regarded as one of the greatest orientalists in the Catholic world, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Wansleben continued to copy Ethiopic manscripts at the Vatican and at Santo Stefano dei Mori. Frequented by the Abyssinians ever since 1481 when a true community in Rome was first established, by the early sixteenth century the hospice beside the church housed a growing number of Abyssinian monks and pilgrims and became a centre of Ethiopic studies.71In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, the community was in decline –Wansleben told the duke of Saxe-Gotha that there were no more than three Abyssinians there.72
Nevertheless it was at Santo Stefano dei Mori that Ludolf had met Gregorius and that Wansleben made friends with Dom Pietro, an Abyssinian priest who helped him find his way around the manuscript collection and whom he would come across again on his second visit to Egypt.73 He lodged, in the meantime, with other students at the Maronite College. These too he would encounter some years later when he was in Aleppo.74 And he worked on theItalian version of the report on his journey to Egypt, the Relazione.75 By November 1666 Wansleben, who had never been inscribed as a regular student at the Maronite College,76 was dismissed. At this point he decided to fulfil a plan he had apparently cherished for over a year and to join the Order of Preachers. Athanasius Kircher wrote to Barberini asking him to provide Wansleben, who had no money, with a large enough sum to purchase a Dominican habit, and to intervene on his behalf with the general of the order, Giovanni Battista de Marinis.77 Officially converted to Catholicism in March 1667,78 Wansleben entered the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva to begin his novitiate at the end of the year or the first days of 1668.
He continued to write to the duke of Saxe-Gotha. In October 1668 he sent him, through Nicolaus Rösen, the original attestations explaining his inability to reach Ethiopia, a portrait of himself, a catalogue of the publications by the Propaganda Fide,79 a map of the Red Sea, a copy of Kircher’s Obeliscus Pam philius, and a present for his eldest son.80 Yet Wansleben’s decision sealed the hostility mounting against him in Germany. Wansleben’s conversion to Catholicism has raised many questions. Had it occurred far earlier, or would it only take place when he arrived in Rome and planned to join the Order of Preachers? And indeed, why did Wansleben convert? Was it, as was once believed,81 under the influence of Matthew iv, who seems to have had little time for Lutheranism? Or was it, as Gaby Mahlberg suggests,82 to satisfy the vow he took to convert and make a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Madonna of Montenero when he was threatened by shipwreck off the Calabrian coast on his way to Livorno early in February 1665?83 Although the vow may have played a part, a highly plausible solution, proposed by Alessandro Bausi, is that his conversion was closely connected with his Ethiopic studies. He had, after all, been dispatched to Ethiopia partly in order to advertise Protestantism and to confirm the idea of his mentor Hiob Ludolf that the Church of Ethiopia was far closer to Lutheranism than to Catholicism. As he studied Ethiopic material, however,Wansleben became increasingly convinced that the very contrary was true.
The text that probably had a decisive effect on his conversion was the Ethiopic pseudapostolic Senodos. He prepared an edition, the Liber Synodorum, based on an Arabic version and various Ethiopic ones, but it has since disappeared.84 The Ethiopic text was copied while he was in Italy. He found a version in Florence belonging to the grand duke of Tuscany and kept at the Palazzo Vecchio and he would find another at the Vatican. But it was at Santo Stefano dei Mori that he discovered the best one of all.85 Some three years later, when he was in Paris, Wansleben seemed to confirm Bausi’s hypothesis in his Conspectus operum aethiopicorum. He there listed the beliefs of the Ethiopians which convinced him that their Church was close to that of Rome. They held, he said, that the pope was the head of the Church and the legitimate successor of St Peter.
This was a point he would also make about the Copts of Egypt, but it was qualified by his statement that he was referring to events before the Council of Chalcedon in 451. They believed, he went on, that the mass was a ‘true bloodless and propitiatory sacrifice’, that the bread and the wine turned into the true body and blood of Christ after the consecration, that the apostolic traditions should be revered, that the Virgin Mary and the saints should be venerated, and that prayers should be said for the dead. For this reason he had decided to abjure ‘the Lutheran heresy’, to take up his pen in defence of the Church of Rome, and to edit the Liber Synodorum.86 There may, however, also have been more practical reasons for Wansleben’s conversion. That Wansleben’s Catholic convictions ran deep may, as we shall see, be doubted. But for an orientalist Italy was a far more attractive country than Germany. There was a widespread interest in the East, particularly in the Christians of the East, encouraged by princes and prelates.
In Rome there was an abundance of eastern manuscripts; there were communities of native speakers; and there were scholars who were working on subjects close to the ones chosen by Wansleben and with whom he could exchange information.87 This was infinitely more than Gotha had to offer. For a man such as Wansleben with no money of his own, moreover, a religious order provided a guarantee. He would be lodged and fed at the expense of the Dominicans and could pursue his studies in relative comfort without any financial preoccupations.
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