Pliny the Elder writes in his Natural history that the crocodile can fast for months at a time. To test this claim, in 1672 the German scholar Johann Michael Wansleben, then on his second journey to Egypt, starved the two crocodiles that he kept in his Cairo house, the larger one ‘with his snout tied with a large rope, so that he could do no harm’. They lasted respectively twenty days and almost a month, leading Wansleben to conclude that ‘it is not plausible that they can live without eating for four months’ time’. Pliny had exaggerated.
Natural history was but one of Wansleben's many interests, and this episode is merely a passing one in the rich diary of his Egyptian travels that Alastair Hamilton has edited from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Wansleben surely led one of the most picaresque lives of any seventeenth-century man of learning: born near Erfurt the son of a Lutheran pastor, he converted to Catholicism in 1667 at age thirty-two. By then he had already served as a mercenary in the Swedish army, travelled all over Europe, studied Hebrew, Arabic and the much rarer Ethiopic, and earned the sponsorship of the duke of Saxe-Gotha to travel to Ethiopia (though he never made it further than Egypt). His first Egyptian sojourn, between 1663 and 1665, sparked his interest in the Copts, whose language and traditions he would extensively study. Upon his return to Europe he met the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand ii, then studied in Rome with the Maronites before professing the Catholic faith and joining the Dominican order.
The Lutheran part of Wansleben's life traces the themes of his entire existence: peregrinations, near shipwrecks, a steady sequence of new patrons and friends, unkept promises, unpaid loans, the constant threat of penury, and the starvation of Egyptian reptiles (the first time it was a chameleon). At the same time, it bespeaks an irrepressible engagement with the world around him, and particularly with the knowledge to be found in Oriental manuscripts and on Levantine journeys. Wansleben came of age at a time when the contest between Catholicism and Protestantism had drawn attention to the Christians of the Levant as potentially independent witnesses to the liturgy and theology of the primitive Christians. Wansleben's disenchantment with Lutheranism may have emerged directly from his study of the Ethiopian Church, which, he came to believe, resembled Roman Catholicism much more than it did Lutheranism. Thus his research, meant to fortify his faith, may have ended up leading him to a different one.
As a Catholic, Wansleben gained the patronage of Louis xiv, whose enterprising minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert was then attempting to make the French collections of Oriental manuscripts the best in Europe. Wansleben was commissioned to collect manuscripts, medals, coins, antiquities and specimens, and to copy inscriptions, draw buildings and excavate ruins. He travelled to Syria, Egypt, the Aegean and the Anatolian coast between 1671 and 1674. During this time he produced a History of the Church of Alexandria (published in 1677) as well as an account of his Egyptian travels, though he still managed to displease Colbert. By his own admission more interested in ‘politische Welthandel’ – global geopolitics – than theological studies, Wansleben could not resist observing local political and commercial affairs. Recalled to Paris in 1676, he spent the final years of his life in relative obscurity and poverty. He died in 1679, aged forty-four.
Wansleben's interests were remarkably broad. Besides the Christian Churches of the Levant, he also seriously studied Egyptian history, as well as magic and talismans. The latter was more than a purely academic interest: on his way from Egypt to Istanbul in 1673, terrified by the prospect of impending shipwreck, he cast one of his best Arabic manuscripts on magic into the waves to atone for the sin of owning it. (He lived to regret his rashness.) Yet Hamilton also points out Wansleben's neglect of the mosques of Cairo, part of an overall disinterest in Islam which set him apart from many of his European contemporaries.
In a sixty-page introduction that would delight Borges and Amitav Ghosh alike, Hamilton narrates Wansleben's life and guides the reader through his travel report. Wansleben published two accounts of Egypt, the first in Italian in 1671, and the second, more significant one, in French in 1677. Johann Michael Wansleben's travels in the Levant offers an original Italian-language version of the second report, never before printed, and also includes explanatory notes, maps, appendices and a glossary, as well as reproductions of Wansleben's beautiful illustrations.
In the end, Wansleben collected nearly 600 Oriental manuscripts for the French Royal Library; wrote a great study of the Copts, which remains a valuable scholarly resource; and published two novel descriptions of Egypt. These form an important chapter in the early European study of that country. His career also offers us an entry point into the peculiar intellectual world of Oriental studies in seventeenth-century Europe: highly sophisticated yet confronted with vast unknown horizons, at once broad-minded and confessionally motivated, shaped by a common agenda and yet sufficiently flexible to allow individual intellectual dispositions to flourish.
