About this Item
[Colophon:] Lauingen; Leonhard Reinmichel. 1582. Small 4to. Early 19th-century German marbled boards with two contrasting gilt-stamped lettering-pieces; pp. [xvi], 487, main title printed in red and black and with woodcut illustration, two sectional titles each with woodcut illustrations; light wear to extremities, internally only a little spotted, one gathering browned, a few traces of worming to the last leaves, a few 19th-century marginal restorations; a good copy of a great rarity; provenance: 1830s bibliographical annotations in ink to endpapers; upper outer corner of rear endpaper cut away, Cyrillic collectors stamp, dated 1861 on blank verso of the last leaf. First edition, very rare, of this early travelogue of the Levant by Leonhard Rauwolf (1535-1596), a medical doctor well versed in Arabic, natural history and pharmacological texts who had travelled Lebanon, Syria, Kurdistan and modern Iraq, including a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 1570s. Rauwolf's employer was the Augsburg merchant Melchior Manlich, who had close trade relations with the Levant, exporting mechanical goods, hardware made in Nürnberg and textiles, and importing spices, pearls, precious stones and silk. Manlich sent him to visit the Middle East in 1573, partly as trader and partly as physician. 'After a nine-month sojourn in Aleppo he continued travelling towards Mesopotamia and, after a river journey of several weeks on the Euphrates, he reached the ruins of Babylon and Baghdad at the end of October. He had to abandon his plans of continuing to India as he got news of the bankruptcy of the Manlich trading house and was ordered to return immediately. The route to Aleppo and Tripoli (where he arrived in May 1575) led him through Kurdish territory. Before leaving for Augsburg Rauwolf stayed for a while in the Lebanon mountains and undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem' (translated from Neue Deutsche Biographie, online). 'Leonhard Rauwolf, a Bavarian physician after whom the genus of tropical plants Rauwolfia is named, was the first modern botanist to collect and describe the flora of the Near East. His own account of his travels in the Levant from 1573 to 1575, published in 1582, provides a fascinating illustration of the difficulties and dangers of early scientific field trips. Not for another two hundred years did other botanists identify and more fully describe the plants of the areas which Rauwolf visited. Rauwolf's three-year journey took him to Tripoli, Aleppo, Raqqa, Baghdad, and Jerusalem. In addition to his botanical investigations, he observed and recorded his impressions of the people, customs, and sights of these Levantine trading centers. For example, he was the first European to describe the preparation and drinking of coffee, and the first European of modern times to travel the newly opened route from Baghdad to Mosul. Written from the point of view of an early Protestant pilgrim, his depictions of Jerusalem and of religious life in the Near East, both Christian and Moslem, are of particular historical value' (Karl H. Dannenfeldt, Leonhard Rauwolf: Sixteenth-century Physician, Botanist, and Traveler, Harvard University Press, 1968, via National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, online). 'The eighth chapter of part I contains the celebrated description of the coffee drink and of the coffee berry ⠦ Rauwolf was the first modern botanist to collect and describe the preparation and consumption of coffee' (Hünersdorff and Hasenkamp, Coffee, 1221). VD16 R 430, not in Atabey or Blackmer; WorldCat locates eight copies in the US, at Harvard; Hamilton College, NY; NYPL; Bowling Green State; Folger; University of Michigen; Linda Hall, and Arizona State. Seller Inventory # 2103801
Contact seller
Report this item
