Moeurs, usages, costumes des Othomans, et abrégé de leur histoire ; avec des éclaircissemens tirés d'ouvrages orientaux, et communiqués par M. Langlès

First edition, published in Paris by Nepveu in 1812 in six volumes, illustrated with 72 engraved plates by Lambert, most of them reduced from those in Dalvimart’s Costume of Turkey, published in London in 1802. Complete with all plates; without the binder’s directions and the leaf concerning the orthography of Arabic words, both of which are absent from many copies.

Contemporary full mottled tan calf. Smooth spines, slightly faded, decorated with gilt rules, garlands and figures; red morocco lettering- and numbering-pieces; gilt rolls to the headcaps; boards framed with gilt dentelle, rules and garlands; marbled endleaves and pastedowns; gilt roll borders to the pastedowns; gilt dotted decoration to the board edges; all edges gilt. Small wormholes at the foot of the spines of volumes II and III, some rubbing to a few spines and headcaps, and a few worn corners. Some foxing, otherwise an attractive copy.

A painter attached in 1797 to the mission of the engineer Ferregeau to Sultan Selim III, Antoine-Laurent Castellan spent several months in Constantinople, where he drew the city, its inhabitants and its customs from life. Out of this experience came his Lettres sur la Morée et sur Constantinople, followed by the present work, conceived in a more portable and systematic form, in which personal observation is combined with a broader historical, ethnographic and philological apparatus.

Castellan supplemented his own notes with oriental texts and translations supplied by Louis-Mathieu Langlès, founder and first director of the École spéciale des langues orientales and curator of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque impériale. The work thus ranges across costume, court life, the seraglio, religious practice, administration, arts, trades and everyday customs; its imagery, largely derived from Dalvimart, gives immediate visual form to this learned material.

The book’s success soon extended beyond France. On 28 August 1813, Lord Byron, then still working on The Giaour, recommended it to Thomas Moore as “the best compendium of the kind I ever met with, in six small tomes.” A few days later, on 1 September, he sent Moore the work himself. The gesture is enough to show the place Castellan could occupy in the reading of Romantic writers who were then looking to the Ottoman East not merely for scenery, but for a precise world of forms, customs and narratives.

From Constantinople to Byron’s reading, these six small volumes thus follow an unusual trajectory: born from Castellan’s direct observation, enriched by Langlès’s scholarship, and then passed from one poet to another at the very moment when the East was entering fully into Romantic literature.