Rise of Oriental Travel

This book retells the stories of how four seventeenth-century Englishmen journeyed around the Ottoman Mediterranean, from Istanbul through the Levant and Holy Land into Egypt, and across North Africa to the Regency of Algiers. Contrary to the hostile declamations of Protestant preachers, they all found much to admire, from the multi-culturalism of the Ottoman system to the food, weather and styles of life. Beginning with Thomas Dallam, the skilled artisan sent by Queen Elizabeth to present his clockwork organ to Sultan Mehmed III in 1599, Professor Gerald MacLean subsequently examines William Biddulph, chaplain to the Protestant expatriates of Aleppo, Henry Blount, a self-appointed intelligencer who was knighted in 1641, and 'T. S.', whose libidinal Adventures in Algerian captivity mark the nation's taste for historical and romantic fiction. The book closes with an examination of evidence for British women travelling in the Ottoman empire before Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The story that emerges tells not of an encounter between a unitary 'Englishness' and some absolute Other, but rather richly varied evidence of how English travel writers from differing social, religious and educational backgrounds found common interest in the operations of Ottoman imperialism. This is the first book to consider the contemporary historical setting of these visits as seen from the Ottoman side, and uses previously unpublished sources to show the importance of archival research for the study of travel literature. As the author explains, 'I have travelled in the footsteps of all four and have noted some instances of curious coincidence.'