[Turkey - 16th century]. - Lot 77

[Turkey - 16th century]. POSTEL, Guillaume. De la République des Turcs & Là Ou l'occasion s'offrera, des meurs & lois de tous Muhamedistes. [Followed by] Histoire et considération de l'origine, loy, et coustume des Tartares, Persiens, Arabes, Turcs, & tous autres Ismaelites ou Muhamediques; dits par nous Mahometains, ou Sarrazins. [Followed by] La tierce partie des orientales histoires, ou est exposée la condition, puissance, & revenu de l'Empire Turques, avec toutes les provinces & païs generalement depuis 950 ans en ça par tous Ismaelites conquis... Poitiers, Enguilbert de Marnef, 1560. Three parts in one volume in-4. [8]-127-[1] pp. ; 57 pp., [1] blank f. ; [8]-90 pp. 17th-century fawn calf, spine ribbed and underlined with cold fillets, small repeated gilt iron, gilt fillets and rhombuses underlined with cold fillets on the boards, irons pushed to the center, yellow edges (minor lateral soiling on a few pages, wormhole on a blank leaf, without the last blank page (f vi), slight wear to the binding and stressed inner spine, traces of missing laces, minor oxidation of the paper, a few freckles). Precious first edition of the collection of three books known as La République des Turcs by the orientalist humanist Guillaume Postel. In a very rare binding from the early days of nationalism in the German Empire in the 17th century. The book subsequently belonged to the d'Arenbergs, from their library at Nordkirchen Castle. A Renaissance intellectual and mystic, Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), a philologist, linguist and Christian Kabbalist, was a self-taught polyglot who was as much a diplomatic traveler as he was a writer of religious works, which got him into trouble with the Inquisition and the Papacy. He accompanied Jean de La Forest's embassy to Constantinople in the 1530s to bring back oriental manuscripts for the Royal Library and information for François I. With a fine, well-documented account, he draws from his journey an in-depth analysis of Ottoman society, driven by the ambition for dialogue and Christian conversion that animated him until his death. "Postel warns that he is writing about what he saw, as a witness to Turkish power and Suleiman's greatness. This is not the chronicle of a Christian escaped from the East; nor is it a more or less romanticized travelogue. It's a mission report. And therein lies the scandal for French opinion, which for the past twenty years has been reading very different things about this Eastern empire." (C. Postel, Les Écrits de Guillaume Postel...1538-1579). Rare binding. Monarchical constitution of the Empire and birth of the German nation within Germanic student communities in European university cities. The arms on the book, affixed at a later date or made shortly after the edition, feature the double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, struck in an oval with the Inclyta Natio Germanica (Illustrious German Nation) dated 1667 (a probable reference to the date of publication of Pufendorf's De statu imperii Germanici), perhaps by German students in France because of Postel's title. Scratched out, they were then redacted, probably in the 17th century, with a gilded interlacing motif; in the center, however, we can make out a fess coat of arms, which would refer to the Austrian arms or to the Landgraviate of Leuchtenberg, if we refer to the Quaternionenadler. Rare artifact illustrating the beginnings of the Empire's monarchical constitution and the birth of the idea of a German nation in the communities of young intellectuals and students, applied to a work that was certainly taken as a source of information at the time (in parallel, France had been seeking since the Renaissance to exchange and create bridges with the Ottoman Empire, in contrast to the desire for a hermetic Germanic nation initiated by the policies of Charles V). The three title pages bear a rare typographical mark in black by Marnef in Poitiers, a woodcut of a man with a mirror and a motto in Greek. Provenance: Handwritten bookplates on the title page, including an ex-dono in the name of Fürstenberg (XVIIIᵉ century); crossed-out "Lalaing" bookplate and Bibliothèque duc Engelbert-Maria d'Arenberg (1872-1949), with engraved bookplate of the Nordkirchen with the arms of the d'Arenberg family on the first endpaper (dubbed the "Versailles of Westphalia", the duke acquired the Nordkirchen in 1903). "His work is not so much a descriptive account of his travels as a collection of information gathered during his travels and from other sources. The third book, La Tierce Partie des Histoires Orientales, offers a rare and richly accurate picture of the Ottoman Empire's system of government" (Blackmer). "Postel's work on Ottoman Empire ... represents the fruition of his exper