For Lust of Knowing (11 page)

Though Nicolas de Nicolay (1517–83) can be variously described as a soldier, spy or cartographer, he was effectively a professional travel writer who travelled throughout Europe, North Africa and Turkey and then wrote about his experiences, most notably in
Les quatre premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations orientales
(1567). Nicolay's book was illustrated with the exotic costumes of the East and was presumably much consulted by European painters of Eastern themes as well as by people who had been invited to fancy-dress parties.
²⁷
However, the number of travellers who went out to the Near East and then wrote about their experience in the sixteenth century was a mere trickle compared to what it would become in the seventeenth century. As merchants, pilgrims and scholar
adventurers brought exotic objects of all kinds back to Europe – American Indian drums, unusual seashells, Persian ceramics, hitherto unknown herbs, stuffed mermen, Chinese ivories, Indian money, narwhal horns and so on – private collectors set up cabinets of curiosity that were unsystematic collections of the rare and the marvellous. The cabinet of curiosity, a primitive and often fanciful attempt to organize the flood of new knowledge coming from exotic parts, besides being the ancestor of the museum, was also one of the institutional precursors of serious Orientalism.
²⁸

Apart from travellers' narratives of the exotic parts, European scholars also learned a great deal from native informants. Leo Africanus was easily the most important of these informants in the sixteenth century. Leo, whose original name was Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, was an Arab, born in Granada in 1493 or 1494. His family migrated to Fez in Morocco when he was young. Hasan received a good education and as a young man he served on various North African diplomatic missions, so that he came to know parts of Africa, including Egypt, quite well. In 1518 he was captured by corsairs close to Jerba, an island off the Tunisian coast, and brought to Rome. There he learned Italian. The Medici Pope Leo X became his patron and therefore, when Hasan converted in 1520, he took Leo as his Christian name. Leo Africanus studied the Latin historians. He wrote a great deal, most of which has not survived, and, among other things, he provided biographies of famous learned Arabs for use by European scholars. Leo also had links with the Christian cabalists and he introduced Guillaume Postel to the
za‘irja
, a strange kind of North African divination machine, consisting of concentric rotating wheels inscribed with letters, which could be made to answer questions about unseen things. He also provided crucial information about which Arabic works were important and this was to guide generations of future manuscript hunters in their search for Arabic works. It was from Leo, for example, that the West learned about the importance of al-Hariri's twelfth-century classic literary
jeu d'esprit
, the
Maqamat
, as well as the philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun's theoretical prolegomena to the study of history, the
Muqaddima
. However, Leo's chief work was
The History and Description of Africa and the Notable Things Therein Contained
. He wrote this in (poor) Italian and finished the manuscript
in 1526. The
Description
is mostly about Africa north of the Sahara and the section on Leo's home town, Fez, is especially detailed. Leo drew heavily on his own observations as a travelling ambassador, but he also took a great deal from the poet Ibn al-Raqiq al-Qayrawani's lost history of North Africa and he cited classic works by authors like al-Mas‘udi, al-Idrisi and Ibn Khaldun. Ramusio published the
Description
in 1550 and it was later translated into Latin, French and English (the last by John Pory). Some time before 1550 Leo slipped away back to North Africa and, home once more, he presumably resumed his Muslim identity.
²⁹

In general, Christian attempts to evangelize among the Muslims of the Near East and North Africa had no success and in the sixteenth century it was more a matter of writing treatises for the hypothetical use of missionaries than of sending preachers out into the infidel fields. Moreover, some of those who wrote books about Islam or Oriental languages, though they suggested that such studies might be useful in the furtherance of missionary activities, seem to have been using that claim as a pretext to justify their more purely intellectual interest in the exotic. The declaration in the preface to a treatise on, say, the Arabic language, that it had some exalted Christian purpose, might well be successful in securing patronage and a financial subsidy from some senior ecclesiastical dignitary. It is also useful to remember that Catholic and Protestant missions were not necessarily directed towards the Muslims. Quite often the proposed aim was to bring the Eastern Christian Arabs, Greeks and Copts into the Catholic or Protestant fold. In particular, Catholics and Lutherans competed with each other to reach an ecumenical understanding with the Greek Orthodox Christians who were now subjects of the Ottoman Sultan. The only Eastern Church that was in communion with Rome was the Maronite Church. Lebanese Maronites in Italy, under the patronage of the Pope and the Republic of Venice, were instrumental in fostering the study of Syriac, and Maronites also provided the Vatican library with Arabic manuscripts.
³⁰
In addition to attempts to correct the ways of the Eastern Christians (as missionary-minded folk in the West saw the matter), for centuries to come other Christian missionaries worked on the conversion of the Jews, for many believed that the total conversion of the Jews was a necessary precondition for the end of the world.
(This was a period when the pious actually looked forward to the end of the world with some enthusiasm.)

Though Guillaume Postel was in some senses a wholly exceptional figure, in many ways he was entirely a product of his times. Like Thenaud, Busbecq and Belon, Postel took scholarly advantage of French diplomatic missions in the Near East; he was a writer who produced both scholarly treatises for those who were versed in Latin and Hebrew, as well as accounts of Turkish and Muslim manners and customs that were written in the vernacular and aimed at a wider French readership; the intellectual heir of Pico's Christian cabalism and of Nicholas of Cusa's strivings for concord between the world's great faiths; and an advocate of preaching missions to the Muslims.

That Guillaume Postel – the first true Orientalist – was also a complete lunatic may be taken as an ominous presage for the future history of an intellectual discipline. Born in 1510, he was an orphan and child prodigy, who first supported himself by working as a servant in a school at Beaucé, where he allegedly taught himself Hebrew. He subsequently found inspiration in his reading of Pico della Mirandola on the cabalistic version of Christianity and he followed Pico in believing that the occult doctrines of the Cabala could be used to demonstrate the truths of Christianity and therefore the study of Hebrew and mastery of the Cabala could be of great use to missionaries, as they could use this occult lore to demonstrate the irrefutable truths of Christianity. However, Postel's mastery of the Jewish sources was far greater than Pico's. Postel translated a large part of the cabalistic text, the
Zohar
, into Latin. He was also one of the grand figures in research on the primordial language, the
Ursprache
. In his
De originibus seu de Hebraicae linguae et gentis antiquitate
(1538), he argued that Hebrew was the primordial language and from it descended, not only Arabic and Chaldaean but also Hindi and Greek – and all other tongues. His belief in the primacy of Hebrew was not in his time particularly controversial. What was a little eccentric was
his idea that in order to achieve world peace and a utopian manner of life it was necessary for everyone to return to speaking Hebrew, for it was the
via veritas perdita
, ‘the lost way of truth'. Moreover, he held that the very structure of the Hebrew language, divinely ordained as it was, would confirm the Christian revelation. Given the extraordinary status he assigned to Hebrew studies, his interest in other languages was inevitably subsidiary to those studies. However, his knowledge of Greek was also excellent and he wrote a pioneering study of Athenian institutions.

In 1535–7 Postel accompanied the French ambassador sent by François I to Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople, where Postel's commission was to collect Oriental manuscripts for the French king. At the same time, Postel studied Arabic and Turkish. In Istanbul he learnt Arabic so fast that his teacher thought that he might be a demon. He also managed to pick up colloquial Greek, and Armenian. (He later boasted that he would be able to travel as far as the frontier of China without experiencing any language problems.) He studied Arabic primarily in order to improve his knowledge of Hebrew, for the two Semitic languages had many grammatical features and items of vocabulary in common. But Arabic was also useful for study of the doctrines of the Eastern Christians. In 1539 he became holder of the first chair of Arabic in Paris – at the Collège de France. (The Collège de France was a humanist institute of higher learning founded by François I in 1530.) Around 1538–43 Postel, drawing heavily on medieval Arabgrammars, wrote and published
Grammatica Arabica
, the first ever grammar of classical Arabic in Europe. Although it was not a particularly accurate one, it would remain the basic textbook until Erpenius, drawing on and improving Postel's work, published his Arabic grammar in 1613. After Postel undertook another eastern trip, this time to the Holy Land in 1549, a slightly puzzling story circulated that his beard had been grey when he set out for the East and black when he returned. There were also rumours that this amazingly learned and mysterious figure possessed the elixir of life. As a result of his trips to the Near East, he was able to publish
De la république des Turcs, et là ou ‘l'occasion s'offera, des meurs et loys de tous Muhamedistes
(1559), which was followed by two companion volumes with even more verbose titles. These books
introduced French readers to the life of the Prophet, the history of Islam, the Arabic langauge, as well as the religion, laws, customs of the Ottoman Turks.

In his lifetime he was the foremost expert on Arabic and Islam in Europe, but he was also quite barmy. In Venice in 1547 he had met up with a woman called Johanna, whom he confidently identified with the Shekinah (divine presence) of the Cabala, the Angelic Pope, the Mater Mundi, the New Eve, and the consummation of eternity, among other things. Johanna (like Superman) had X-ray vision, so that she could see Satan sitting at the centre of the earth. Postel, impressed, became her disciple. By the time he returned from his second trip to the Middle East, the Mater Mundi was dead. However, this was only a temporary setback, as in 1551 she returned to this world and possessed Postel's body, so that he became the Mater Mundi, the New Eve and so on. (He does not say if he got the X-ray vision.) As prophet of the New Age, he then produced a succession of strange books and pamphlets, which got him into trouble with the Inquisition in Venice. However, the Inquisition, in an unusually benign frame of mind, decreed that he was not a heretic, merely insane. An official of the Holy Office, who had examined Postel's writings for heresy in 1555, reported that, though his ideas were definitely heretical, ‘no one, fortunately, could possibly understand them except the author'. Postel was imprisoned in Italy from 1555 until 1559 and then again detained as a lunatic in St Martin des Champs in Paris from 1563. The latter term of incarceration was more in the way of a comfortable and honourable medical house arrest, as his erudition, as well as his amiable personality, continued to command enormous respect until his death in 1581.

Postel's erudition drew heavily on the Cabala and Neoplatonism, but also on what he could discover of the doctrines of such Muslim groups as the Druze and the Isma‘ilis. In particular, his notion of the successive incarnation of the Divine in men (and he considered himself an outstanding example) may have ultimately been derived from his reading of Druze literature. He was especially enthusiastic about the Druze because he had determined that they were of French origin and that their name derived from ‘Druid'. The alleged Frenchness of the Druze was particularly important, as Postel was a fervent patriot who
believed that the French were the chosen people of the Last Days and that the King of France had the rightful claim to be king of the world by virtue of his direct descent from Noah (though one would have thought that there were many in Postel's time who could have made a similar claim).

Doubtless there were many sixteenth-century Frenchmen who believed that they belonged to the chosen race. But Postel had plenty of other more unusual ideas – such as his belief in the superiority of women. And to stick with Oriental issues, he argued that Muhammad was a genuine Prophet and that Muslims should be considered as half Christians. Furthermore, his
De la république des Turcs et là ou ‘l'occasion s'offera, des meurs et loys de tous Muhamedistes
offered an unusually favourable account of Muslim manners and customs. While not wholly uncritical of the way of life of the Turks, he thought that they were better than Christians in the way that they arranged marriages and divorces, in their charity, in their provision for education and in the decorous quiet of their prayers. He admired and praised the Ottoman sultan's palace-harem, the Seraglio (and he was by no means the only European visitor to Istanbul to do so). He maintained that almost everything in Asia was superior to almost everything in Christendom: ‘All things that we hold in the West as of extraordinary artifice are like mere shadows of oriental excellencies.' The East as a whole was superior to the West, because the earthly paradise had been located there. He cited supporting evidence for Eastern excellence, such as borametz, an oriental bush which bore lambs as its fruit, or another oriental tree which produced bread, wine, silk, vinegar and oil. (Pico della Mirandola had entertained vaguely similar notions about the Orient, for he believed that the sun was stronger in the eastern part of the world, where it produced gems, perfumes, lions, tigers and elephants.) Another proof provided by Postel for the superiority of the East was that the Three Wise Men came from there. As late as the eighteenth century, leading thinkers in the European Enlightenment looked for stimulus to Oriental sages – not just to Buddha and Confucius, but also to Near Eastern figures such as the ancient Arabian sage Luqman, the Aesop of the Arabs.