Histoire de la conquête des isles Moluques par les Espagnols, par les Portugais, & par les Hollandais

irst edition of the French translation, and the first appearance of the work in French, of Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola’s major history of the conquest of the Moluccas, first published in Spanish at Madrid in 1609. The illustration comprises three repeated frontispieces, one portrait, six maps and twenty-six folding plates, making thirty-six illustrations in all; the present copy is complete with all plates, including the map of Ceylon, often lacking.

Contemporary full mottled brown calf. Spines with raised bands, decorated with central floral lozenges and gilt rolls across the bands, brown calf lettering- and numbering-pieces. Armorial stamps to the upper boards and a cipher to the lower boards, both unidentified; the gilding is faded or reduced to traces, while the ciphers appear to have been impressed in blind. Some rubbing and three worn corners. Light marginal dampstaining at the head of the opening leaves of volumes I and III and to a few other leaves and plates, occasional foxing and browning; three plates with old repairs on the verso closing tears. Small areas of gnawing to the upper board of volume II and lower board of volume III. A good copy.

The portrait bound at the front of volume I represents the dedicatee of the French translation, Georg Wilhelm von Inn- und Kniphausen (1635-1709), lord of Nienoord and Vredewold, raised to the rank of Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1694. 

By the time this translation appeared in 1706, the history told by Argensola had already acquired a wider scope. The Spanish original was chiefly concerned with Spanish and Portuguese enterprises in an archipelago whose cloves and nutmeg had placed it at the centre of European rivalry; the French version adds an entire third volume devoted to the Dutch conquests. This is no mere appendix: it carries the narrative forward to the moment when the United Provinces had themselves become one of the decisive powers in the region.

The maps and plates follow the same enlargement of perspective, setting out the ports, islands and sea routes around which Iberian and later Dutch ambitions competed. Boucher de la Richarderie had already noted that, beyond its political and military history, the work preserves valuable information on the physical character of the Moluccas, their natural productions and the customs of their inhabitants at the time of the early conquests.

The maps, plates and third volume make this French translation far more than a simple transmission of the Spanish text; they reveal a work enlarged in step with the upheavals that transformed the archipelago itself. Two centuries after the first conquests, the Moluccas already emerge here as a territory whose history could no longer be told from a single point of view.