923 



TAVERNIER, BARON D'AUBONNE. 



TAVERNIER, BARON D'AUBONNE. 



924 



made gradual and steady progress ; and in order to settle the question 

 permanently, the king issued a command that deputies of the Roman 

 Catholics and Protestants should appear on the 8th of September 

 1530, before the assembly of the states, and explain their creeds and 

 points of dispute. Tausan and the principal men of his party were 

 present, and it was finally settled that the Protestants should preach 

 and propagate their doctrines. The tranquillity thus restored was 

 interrupted by the king's death in "1533, when the Roman Catholic 

 party, and more especially the bishop of Roeskilde, again began to 

 trouble Tausan, who was on the point of being driven out of his 

 country. For a time he absented himself from Copenhagen; but 

 Protestantism in the meanwhile made such progress, that the opposi- 

 tion to it in a short time either ceased or became very weak. In 1537 

 iu which year John Bugenhagen was sent by Luther to Denmark to 

 assist in arranging the ecclesiastical affairs of the country, Tausan was 

 appointed preacher and lecturer on theology at Roeskilde ; and four 

 years later he was made bishop of Ripen, an office which he held until 

 his death, on the 9th of November 1561. 



Tausan wrote a considerable number of theological works in Danish : 

 some of them are controversial, others exegetical, and a third class 

 consists of translations of portions of the Scripture and of original 

 hymns. His works, as well as the history of his life, show that he 

 was a simple and straightforward man ; but in talent he was far 

 inferior to the great reformers who were his contemporaries. 



(L. Holberg, Dcinnemarckische Norwegische Staats-und Reichs-His- 

 (oric, p. 128, &e. ; compare Jb'cher, Allgem. Qelehrten-Lexic., iv., p. 

 1030, &c.) 



TAVERNIER, JEAN-BAPTISTE, BARON D'AUBONNE, the son 

 of an Antwerp engraver who had settled at Paris and dealt in maps, 

 was born in 1605. He was a traveller from his boyhood. The sight 

 of the maps with which he was surrounded, and the conversation of 

 the geographers who frequented his father's shop, inspired him with a 

 passion for seeing foreign countries, which he soon contrived to gratify, 

 it does not very clearly appear by what means or in what capacity. 



Between 1620 and the close of 1630 he visited most of the countries 

 of Europe : this may be considered as his apprenticeship to the pro- 

 fession of a traveller. Between 1630 and 1669 he made six journeys 

 to the East : this was the portion of his life devoted to productive 

 toil. The story of the remainder of his life, from 1670 to 1680, 

 impresses us with the idea of an elastic and untired spirit, which, 

 stimulated in part by his dilapidated fortune, but still more by an 

 incapacity of repose, sunk in an attempt to re-enter that world of 

 active exertion in which his place had been occupied by younger men. 

 To appreciate Tavernier, it is necessary to examine his character as it 

 displayed itself in each of these three periods. 



He appears to have left his paternal home before he had completed 

 his fifteenth year ; for he tells us that after visiting England, Antwerp, 

 Amsterdam, Frankfurt-on-the-Main, Augsburg, and Niirnberg, he was 

 induced by what he heard at the last-mentioned place of the mustering 

 of armies in Bohemia to repair to the theatre of war. About a day's 

 iourney from Niirnberg he met Colonel Brener, son of the governor of 

 Vienna, who took him into his service. Tavernier.was present at the 

 battle of Prague, 8th of November 1620. Some years later he followed 

 his master to Vienna, and was presented by him to his uncle, the 

 governor of Raab, at that time viceroy of Hungary, who received the 

 young Frenchman into his family in the capacity of a page. With 

 this nobleman Tavernier remained four years and a half, and ultimately 

 obtained his dismissal with a view to entering the service of the Prince 

 of Mantua. Something appears to have made him change this deter- 

 mination ; for after a brief stay in Mantua he left it about Christmas 

 1629, and after making a short toxir in Italy, and visiting his friends 

 at Paris, returned to Germany. During the summer of 1629 he made 

 an excursion into Poland, on his return from which he attached him- 

 f-,elf for a short time to the family of Colonel Butler, " who afterwards 

 killed Wallenstein." Hearing a report that the son of the Emperor 

 Ferdinand II., (afterwards emperor himself, with the title of 

 Ferdinand III.) was to be crowned king of the Romans in Regens- 

 burg, Tavernier, who had been present at that prince's election as king 

 of Hungary (1625) and his coronation as king of Bohemia (1627), 

 wished to be present at this third solemnity also, and with this view 

 threw up his appointment (whatever it was) in Butler's household. 



Taveniier has nowhere explicitly stated what were his rank and 

 occupations while he led this unsettled life. No expression escapes 

 him to intimate that he at any time found himself at a loss for money. 

 The appointment of page in the family of a nobleman holding the 

 high office of viceroy of Hungary was generally the first step to the 

 command of a troop. Yet there is a vagueness in the language of 

 Tavernier while speaking of this part of his history, which leads us to 

 suspect that his station was more of a menial character. His lively 

 and enterprising disposition seems however to have made him a general 

 favourite, and his power of expressing himself not very elegantly, if 

 we are to judge from his French, yet intelligibly in several European 

 languages, rendered hit i an eligible attendant. His position was most 

 probably that of one of the ready-handed, quick-witted, not over- 

 scrupulous attendants, with whom men of high rank in that age found 

 it necessary to surround themselves. From hints dropped iu different 

 parts of his travels, it is highly probable that he had picked up some 

 money in the wars; he had acquired some knowledge of the military 



art ; he knew something of watchmaking and jewellery ; and, above 

 all, ho had learned to shift for himself. Beyond such a general 

 acquaintance with maps and geography as he had picked up in his 

 father's shop, he possessed no literary or scientific attainments ; and 

 his tastes and habits were those of the young rufiiers of his age. A 

 naturally frank and kindly though somewhat boisterous temper had 

 done much to neutralise the worst impressions of the lax school in 

 which he had been educated. 



After such preliminary training, and with a character thus far 

 developed, Taveruier commenced his travels in the east. He had 

 already been turning his eyes in that direction, and making interest to 

 be received into the suite of a new ambassador the emperor was about 

 to despatch to the grand seignior, when the confidential agent of 

 Richelieu, Father Joseph, who had known him at Paris, proposed that 

 he should accompany two young French noblemen who were travelling 

 to Palestine by the way of Constantinople. Tavernier closed with 

 the offer, and in company with his employers reached that city during 

 the winter of 1630-31. A recent biographer has stated that he began 

 his first journey in 1636 : the origin of the mistake is as apparent as 

 that it is a mistake. Tavernier says, "after the ceremony of the coro- 

 nation was finished," and Ferdinand III. was not crowned king of the 

 Romans till December 1636. Tavernier gives no dates in the 

 account of his first journey ; but we know that he embarked at 

 Marseille for his second in September 1638 ; and we also know that 

 he arrived at Rome on his return from his first voyage on the day of 

 Easter. He was detained eleven months at Constantinople, waiting 

 for a caravan, and seven weeks by a severe attack of sickness at 

 Aleppo ; so, if we assume he set out from Regensburg in December 

 1636, we have only three months left for the overland journey from 

 Regensburg to Dresden, Vienna, Constantinople, Erzeroum, Tabriz, 

 Ispahan, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Scanderoon, and the voyage from 

 Scanderoou to Rome. It is impossible that Tavernier's first journey 

 could have been subsequent to Ferdinand's coronation as king of the 

 Romans. But a strong effort was made by that prince's father to have 

 him crowned at the close of the diet held at Regensburg in 1630; and 

 Tavernier, writing from memory forty years later, may have imagined 

 that the festivities he witnessed at that time were in honour of a 

 coronation which was expected to take place, but did not. Two 

 passages in his Travels seem to place it beyond a doubt that the visit 

 to Regensburg which led to his first journey took place in 1630. In 

 his first volume (p. 689 of the Paris edition of 1676) the expression 

 occurs, "in 1632 on the road from Ispahan to Bagdat." He only 

 travelled that road once, and that was on his return from his first 

 expedition into Persia. It would be unsafe to rely upon the evidence 

 of a figure in a book not very correctly printed ; but in the account 

 of his first journey to Ispahan he mentions having seen at Tocat the 

 vizir, who was executed a few days later, after being obliged to raise 

 the siege of Baghdad. This can only refer to Khosrew Pasha, executed 

 there about the end of April 1632. 



This date being ascertained, the chronology of the ensuing forty 

 years of Tavernier's life may be gleaned from his travels with tolerable 

 accuracy. He began his first journey to the east from Regensburg iu 

 December 1630, penetrated by way of Constantinople and Tabriz to 

 Ispahan, and returned by Baghdad and Aleppo to Europe early in the 

 summer of 1633. From this date till the commencement of his second 

 voyage his history would be a complete blank had he not told in a 

 parenthesis that he was appointed comptroller in the household of the 

 Due d'Orldans, who gave him leave of absence during his journeys to 

 the east. On the 13th of September 1638 he embarked at Mar.seill 

 in a Dutch vessel, and, landing at Scanderoon, proceeded by way of' 

 Aleppo and the Great Desert west of the Euphrates to Basra. There 

 he embarked in a vessel sailing to Ormuz, and, landing at Bushire, 

 proceeded through Shiraz to Ispahan. After some stay in that capital, 

 he travelled by Shiraz and Lars to Gombroon, where he embarked for 

 Surat. He visited Agra on this occasion; but here a^ain we are at a 

 loss for dates to enable us to trace his routes. We only know that he 

 passed through Burhampore on his return from Agra to Surat in 1641 ; 

 that he visited Goa, and returned to Surat by land about the end of 

 that year ; and that he was at Ahmedabad, either going to or returning 

 from Agra, in 1642. That he had revisited Ispahan in the interval is 

 not improbable, since he says that " for six journeys which I have 

 made between Paris and Ispahan, I have made twice as many from 

 Ispahan to Agra and other parts of the Greal Mogul's dominions." 

 He was at Ispahan towards the close of the year 1642, and probably 

 soon after returned to France. On his third voyage he took with him 

 the brother already alluded to, and left Paris on the 6th of December 

 1643. This time, after visiting Ispahan as usual, he embarked at 

 Gombroon for India. In January 1645 he left Surat on an excursion 

 to the diamond-mines near Golconda. In January 1618 he made a 

 voyage by sea to Goa; and in April of the same year be embarked at 

 Miugvela for Batavia, whence he returned to Europe in the Dutch 

 fleet in 1649. Tavernier's fourth journey occupied him from the 18th 

 of June 1651, when he set out from Paris, till 1655. On this occasion 

 he proceeded from Persia to Masulipatan in May 1652 ; he revisited 

 the diamond-mines near Golconda in 1653 ; and in 1654 he travelled 

 from Ormuz to Kerman, and after spending three months there took 

 the route of 5Tezd to Ispahan, and returned to Europe by Smyrna. 

 His fifth journey was begun iu February 1656. He was at Agra iu 



