Viaggio di ritorno da Bassora a Costantinopoli

First edition, with three folding tables printed within the text. The title-page bears the false imprint of Yverdon; modern bibliography establishes that the book was in fact printed in Leghorn. XII, 196 pp. Brunet III, 330; Vivien de Saint-Martin, Voyages faits en Asie Mineure depuis le XIIIe siècle, no. 148; Atabey, The Ottoman World, 1126; Weber II, 595. Not in Blackmer, but see nos. 1530 and 1531.

Contemporary half brown calf with corners, smooth spine decorated with gilt lyre tools and ornamental rolls, black morocco lettering-piece, speckled paper boards, patterned paper pastedowns and endpapers. Old restorations with small losses at head and foot of spine; dampstaining to the boards and to the upper and lower margins of the leaves.

The work opens with a five-page printed dedication, dated Pera, 16 December 1787, to Enrico Federigo de Diez, the Prussian representative at the Ottoman Porte. The dedication immediately places Sestini's journey within the diplomatic and scholarly world of Constantinople, where ambassadors, antiquarians, interpreters and collectors facilitated the circulation of manuscripts, coins and knowledge between the Ottoman Empire and the capitals of Europe.

Domenico Sestini belonged fully to this milieu. Having reached Constantinople in 1778 after several years of Mediterranean travel, he learned Turkish there and pursued interests ranging from natural history and antiquities to numismatics. Following a period in Wallachia and a journey as far as Vienna, he returned to the Ottoman capital and came into contact with Sir Robert Ainslie, British ambassador to the Porte. Recognising Sestini's expertise as a numismatist, Ainslie commissioned him to form a major collection of ancient Greek and Roman coins, of which Sestini eventually assembled more than ten thousand specimens.

It was in this context that Sestini undertook his great Mesopotamian journey in 1781. The Viaggio da Costantinopoli a Bassora, published in Leghorn in 1786, related the outward journey. Sestini had accompanied John Sulivan, a representative of the East India Company travelling towards India, as far as Basra. Recent scholarship clarifies that Sulivan did not accompany him on the return journey: at Basra, Sestini instead joined an English merchant arriving from Bengal. The present volume, published two years after the account of the outward journey, therefore forms the second part of this extensive narrative.

From Basra back to Constantinople, Sestini again crossed a region in which commercial, diplomatic and antiquarian routes converged. Mesopotamia, Baghdad, Mosul, Syria, Cyprus and Alexandria successively become subjects for observation. His narrative is never confined to the mere succession of places: vegetation, natural resources, local populations and customs, antiquities and the practical conditions of travel constantly occupy his attention. His travel writings are distinguished by precisely this determination to record the material realities of the countries through which he passed rather than reduce them to a conventional picture of the East.

The three folding tables give the clearest material expression of this method. Sestini records weights, measures, prices, commodities and transport costs relating to trade between the principal centres of the Levant. Modern scholarship on his journey has emphasised his almost systematic attention to prices, tolls, customs duties, navigation costs on the Tigris and the expense of the armed protection required by caravans. Travel thus becomes an exercise in collecting data as much as a geographical experience.

Numismatics formed part of the same approach to knowledge. For Ainslie, ancient coins were objects to be sought, identified and classified; for Sestini they also became instruments through which the political geography of the ancient world might be reconstructed. His journeys during these years were inseparable from this search, and his researches would soon result in numerous volumes devoted to the Ainslie collection and other major European cabinets.

The dedicatee of the present work was pursuing a different but parallel enterprise in Constantinople. Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (1751-1817), Prussian representative at the Porte from 1784, used his years in the Ottoman capital to deepen his knowledge of Oriental languages and literatures and to assemble an important collection of Turkish, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, now preserved in Berlin. When Sestini addressed his dedication to him from Pera in December 1787, Diez was therefore both diplomat and collector, participating in the same European circulation of Oriental objects and knowledge.

The moment was also politically charged. The Russo-Turkish War had just begun, and Diez stood at the centre of Prussian diplomatic efforts to draw Berlin and the Porte closer together. His diplomatic correspondence from these years, parts of which were written in cipher, reflects the strategic importance Constantinople had acquired in the foreign policy of Frederick William II.

Diez's later reputation, however, would rest elsewhere. After returning to Germany, he published, among other works, his translation of the Buch des Kabus and the Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien. Several decades later, while preparing his West-östlicher Divan, Goethe consulted Diez on Oriental questions and drew upon his publications; Goethe explicitly acknowledged his assistance in the notes and commentaries accompanying the Divan. German scholarship would accordingly describe Diez as one of Goethe's "Oriental advisers".

There is, of course, no basis for suggesting a direct line of influence from Sestini to Goethe. The dedication instead provides material evidence of a chain through which knowledge travelled: in 1787 an Italian traveller and numismatist recently returned from Mesopotamia dedicated his account to a Prussian diplomat collecting manuscripts in Constantinople; a generation later, the texts and knowledge assembled by that same diplomat would contribute to Goethe's engagement with the East.

First edition of this important account of the journey from Basra to Constantinople, complete with its three documentary folding tables and dedicated from Pera to Heinrich Friedrich von Diez: a volume bringing together Sestini's direct experience of the East, the diplomatic and scholarly Constantinople of the 1780s and, through its dedicatee, one of the future mediators of the Orient to Goethe.