In 2007 the translation into English of the first two books of Evliya Çelebi's (EÇ) Seyahatnâme Footnote 2 by the celebrated Austrian diplomat and orientalist Joseph von Hammer-PurgstallFootnote 3 was republished in the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) series Classics of Islam.Footnote 4 Hammer's translation was based on what is now ms. RAS 22 in the RAS Library, and was first published under the auspices of the Oriental Translation Fund (OTF) in three parts: in 1834 (as Vol. I/i), 1846 (Vol. I/ii) and 1850 (Vol. II).Footnote 5 It includes EÇ's account of his home city of Istanbul (Vol. I) and his first trip away – to Bursa in 1640Footnote 6 – as well as subsequent travels during the 1640s, including to Crimea, the Caucasus and northern Anatolia (Vol. II).Footnote 7 The Committee of the OTF agreed to buy the manuscript and its continuation, now ms. RAS 23, from Hammer in 1832.Footnote 8
Scholarly opinion tends to the view that the Seyahatnâme was written down during the last years of EÇ's life – he died c.1685, probably in Cairo – although this remains a matter of debate.Footnote 9 What seems certain is that the archetype of what may be the longest travel account in world literature remained in Cairo until it was brought to Istanbul in 1742 as a present for the powerful Chief Black Eunuch, Hacı Beşir Ağa;Footnote 10 two known copies were made at that time.Footnote 11 A handful of later eighteenth-century copies of various degrees of faithfulness to the extant 1742 manuscripts survive in whole or in part.Footnote 12
It was many years before EÇ's Seyahatnâme became available in print. The press set up in Istanbul by the Hungarian renegade İbrahim Müteferrika (d.1746) published a number of works in Ottoman Turkish between 1729 and 1742, and we may speculate whether the Seyahatnâme might have been among these had it been available earlier. In the event, the earliest print version in Ottoman Turkish, comprising extracts from the first volume only, appeared in 1843.Footnote 13 Six volumes of the work, in a fuller, albeit corrupt, version, were published at the end of the nineteenth century; this cycle was only completed many years later – Volume 10 appeared in 1938 – by which time the Roman alphabet had replaced the Ottoman.Footnote 14 Extracts of varying worth have since been published in a variety of languages, including abridgements in modern Turkish.Footnote 15 Remarkably, scholars have had to wait until recent years for the appearance of a reliable academic transcription in modern Turkish characters that, given the limits on access to the manuscripts, currently provides the best basis for research.Footnote 16
The publication of Hammer's translation was the first time that any part of the Seyahatnâme had appeared in print, and it remains the fullest translation of the work in a language other than Turkish.Footnote 17 It brought EÇ's text to the attention of a ‘non-native’ readership hungry for the new and exotic. The purpose of this essay is to provide some background to the OTF's publication of Hammer’s translation, both by revisiting his own account of his relationship to EÇ's work, and also by introducing unpublished documents from the OTF archives which reveal the difficulties of bringing the project to fruition. I make no claim to have exhausted the topic; rather, I hope to raise questions for further research.
Joseph von Hammer and the ‘Discovery’ of Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatnâme
Hammer published over 700 works on a variety of oriental and other topics, among which Ottoman literature and history are prominent.Footnote 18 He is best known to Ottomanist historians as the author of the 10-volume Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, of which the first volume was published in 1827.Footnote 19 Hammer was born in 1774;Footnote 20 he studied Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Arabic at the Oriental Academy in Vienna, and in May 1799 went to Istanbul for the first time. By the end of the year he was appointed a translator at the Austrian embassy. During his stay he searched libraries and bookshops for works mentioned by the seventeenth-century Ottoman intellectual Haci Halife,Footnote 21 and began to collect both manuscripts and printed books. In February 1800 Hammer was sent to visit Austrian missions in the Levant (sic), and then spent some months in Egypt, where he continued his quest.Footnote 22
Between 1802 and 1806 Hammer worked as secretary to the Austrian embassy in Istanbul, and the pursuit of books and manuscripts was again one of his main preoccupations.Footnote 23 In 1804, as the result of “a happy coincidence”, he was able to buy the “final, fourth, part”, of the “Reisegeschichte Ewlia Efendi's”. This discovery, and that of the first four books that followed, are recounted in a piece that appeared in a Viennese periodical in January 1814.Footnote 24
Hammer's 1804 success spurred him on, and he enlisted acquaintances in the hunt for the earlier parts of EÇ's work, which he regretfully acknowledged would be expensive on account of its rarity. “After ten years effort”, Hammer records, his friend “Johann Aegyropulo”, who had served as an Ottoman diplomat in Berlin,Footnote 25 bought the “complete work”, in excellent condition, for the library of Count Rzewuski. By the time of writing, the work was already in Vienna in Hammer's hands.Footnote 26
Hammer's ability to amass a substantial collection of Islamic manuscripts indicates that they were at the time widely available for purchase in Istanbul, in Cairo and elsewhere. He does not, however, reveal in his ‘Merkwürdiger Fund’ the source of either the volume of the Seyahatnâme that he came by in 1804,Footnote 27 nor how Argyropulo located those bought for Rzewuski, presumably in 1813. In his account of his second visit to Istanbul in 1802–1806, he writes of time spent in the company of the English merchant [Thomas] Thornton, where he met Lords Brooke and Aberdeen, the latter a “former foreign minister”, and “a great lover of manuscripts”.Footnote 28 Hammer was also friendly with the elderly [Peter] Tooke, agent of the East India Company, and writes that that on Tooke's death in April 1805 he bought many books (sic) at the subsequent auction.Footnote 29 He gives no further clues about his acquisitions. Might answers be found in the original manuscript of Hammer's Memoirs, or among his prolific correspondence? An annotation on the end paper of the first volume of the Seyahatnâme acquired for Rzewuski indicates that it was copied in [1]198 ah/1783–84 ce at the request of one Mehmed Emin bin Velieddin.Footnote 30
Hammer wrote his account of the discovery of Rzewuski's manuscript with EÇ's Seyahatnâme close to hand. He notes that its four books were bound in two large volumes of 450 and 472 leaves respectively. He describes their contents at length, and marvels at the originality and rarity of the work, recommending that it be translated so that Europeans could read it, preferably in as full a version as possible. Since Hammer considered these four books to be the entirety, he summised that the work therefore ended with the year 1066/1656.
A long letter to Hammer from the German explorer Ulrich Jasper Seetzen, dated Cairo, 10 July 1808, indicates that he had mentioned the 1804 find of Book 4 of the Seyahatnâme before publishing his ‘Merkwürdiger Fund’ in 1814. Seetzen writes that Hammer had told him of a very important work of travel literature but had omitted to give its name.Footnote 31 An extract from this letter appeared in the first issue of Fundgruben des Orients,Footnote 32 the periodical devoted to oriental matters that Hammer and Rzewuski published between 1809 and 1818. In a footnote to Seetzen's letter in the journal, Hammer reveals that he refers to the Seyahatnâme, calling it “the great Turkish work”, and promising to describe it more fully in due course.Footnote 33
Later in the year that Hammer's ‘Merkwürdiger Fund’ appeared, he published three short notes on Kurdish language that drew on the Seyahatnâme.Footnote 34 That winter, he writes, he was occupied with two great literary labours, translating EÇ's Seyahatnâme into English, and working through Dr Johnson's Dictionary, a book he found useful for the translation.Footnote 35
In summer 1814 Hammer suffered an eye disease and feared he was going blind. He attributed the illness in part to the strain of translating EÇ's work, and in part to the effort of learning Hebrew.Footnote 36 Luckily he soon recovered, and in autumn 1815 he writes that he again took up the translation after an interruption of a year.Footnote 37 Hammer completed his translation of EÇ's Seyahatnâme on 18 March 1816.Footnote 38 In the same year he drew on the work for a note on the language of the Dobruca Tatars, a second note on the name ‘Attila’ and a third on the origins of the HungariansFootnote 39 .
There is some confusion about the next stage of Hammer's translation of the Seyahatnâme's passage into print. Hammer writes that he sent the first 30 sheets of the completed translation to Lord Aberdeen, whom he had met in Istanbul years earlier, via his brother [Robert] Gordon, with the request that he find a publisher in England.Footnote 40 In 1842, however, he notes that Aberdeen lost these sheets in the campaign of 1814.Footnote 41
The chronology of Aberdeen's loss of Hammer's few sheets of translation is illogical as it stands. Hammer was almost 70 years old when he began writing his Memoirs,Footnote 42 and it is probable that his recall was faulty. Events are more easily remembered than dates, and a different chronology may therefore be proposed: namely, that if Aberdeen did indeed lose the sample sheets of the translation with which he had been entrusted, Hammer must have given them to him before Aberdeen's well-attested presence close to the battlefields of the Sixth Coalition War of 1812–1814Footnote 43 – not after he had completed the translation but during its course.
The fate of Hammer's translation of the Seyahatnâme from this time until it was accepted for publication by the OTF is obscure. I have not found evidence to indicate whether, following Aberdeen's loss, Hammer continued his efforts to find a publisher in London. The OTF was founded in 1828, and in the same year, The Travels of Evlia Effendi; translated by Ritter von Hammer was one of 19 translations “preparing for publication, and which are generally accompanied by the Original texts, and elucidated with Notes”.Footnote 44
Evliya Çelebi Reaches London
Yet, despite the lacunae in our information about Hammer's endeavours during these years to achieve publication of his translation of the Seyahatnâme, we are afforded other glimpses of EÇ's magnum opus. A few scholars could read the work in the original Ottoman Turkish but, once translated into English, albeit not yet published, it could be perused by a new readership of whom many, like Hammer, were eager for works about the Orient.
Reference to EÇ's text occurs in a letter Hammer received from the young orientalist Charles Bellino (b.1791), dated 16 May 1816. Bellino wrote from Baghdad, having just arrived there after travelling across Anatolia as secretary to the scholar Claudius Rich – they were introduced by Hammer in June 1814.Footnote 45 The party had passed through Mardin, and Bellino notes that he disagreed with EÇ's opinion that the battle between Alexander [the Great] and [the Persian king] Darius [III] took place in the plain two hours south of that city.Footnote 46
Hammer had supported Bellino's application to study at the Oriental Academy in Vienna, where he himself had studied, and they maintained close relations. Hammer considered Bellino to be his protégé, and we may suppose that he would have invited him to examine the EÇ manuscript during the time between its discovery and Bellino's departure for Baghdad in summer 1815. Several other letters of Bellino to Hammer survive, and Hammer wrote an obituary of Bellino upon his premature death in 1820.
Another curiosity, EÇ's account of the embalming practices of the Abkhazians, reached readers of the London-based Quarterly Review in 1819, in an essay about a book on the cemeteries of Paris and another on Parisian catacombs.Footnote 47 The language of the piece suggests that the author had access to the English version, implying that at least some parts of Hammer's translation were available for consultation by at least some individuals. This section is found in Volume 2 of Hammer's Narrative of Travels, which was not published until 1850, perhaps implying that he had already translated the full four books into English.
A substantial account of the discovery of the Seyahatnâme entitled ‘Turkish Memoirs of Ewlia Efendi’ appeared in 1821 in the London periodical The Classical Journal.Footnote 48 The story of Hammer's 1804 acquisition – for a price, apparently, of 100 piastres – and of the purchase by Argyropulo, “late Turkish minister at Berlin” – of “the complete work filling two large folio volumes”, is told at third-hand, via a “foreign correspondent” of the Journal. The piece describes the contents along the lines of Hammer's description in his ‘Merkwürdiger Fund’, and notes, “We have just learned, with much satisfaction, that a gentleman in this country has lately received from Vienna an English translation of Ewlia's work, made from the original Turkish by that learned Orientalist and eminent linguist Mr Hammer. . .”. There are no hints as to the identity of this “gentleman”, nor to the extent of the translation.
In 1827, the author of an article entitled ‘History of the Dominion of the Arabs and Moors in Spain’ in the first issue of The Foreign Quarterly Review referred to the view of “The Turkish writer, Ewlia” that the many mutinies and revolutions occurring in Istanbul [in Ottoman times] were portended by the infelicitious position of the heavenly bodies when Constantine founded the city. The writer wrote that such violence was characteristic of “Mohammedan government”, and faulted EÇ for not inquiring into the true causes of the phenomenon: namely, in the writer's opinion, that Muslim societies were grounded in false religion.Footnote 49
EÇ's work clearly aroused interest as a source of arcane knowledge. In 1828 the Seyahatnâme was mentioned again, in a discussion of the arrival of tobacco in Europe as part of a review of a book on the history of the West Indies. The author or reviewer cites “a curious fact stated in the very curious travels of Ewlia Effendi”: that EÇ wrote of a tobacco pipe, still smelling of smoke, being found between the stones of a wall of “a Grecian building at Constantinople”, and said that the find proved the antiquity of smoking. The author or reviewer refers to a conjecture by “the translator” that because the pipe had been secreted for the reason that smoking was at first prohibited by Islamic law as an innovation, its presence would “furnish an argument for the antiquity of the custom; and, therefore of its lawfulness”.Footnote 50
It is unclear how writers gained access to EÇ's text, but their unearthing of nuggets such as these suggest that it could be scrutinised. Did Hammer's translation circulate in some form, or did he allow access on request? Or had he made allusion to these sections of the text incidentally, among his other voluminous writings? The anonymous “gentleman” who received the translation from Vienna in 1821 may be the key to its subsequent availability.
Hammer's History of Carelessness
In his Introduction to the 2007 reprint of the Narrative of Travels, Robert Irwin writes that Hammer was a “careless” author, and that his translations from Arabic and Persian attracted much criticism. He considers that Hammer's Turkish was good, and his knowledge of Turkish history excellent.Footnote 51 Elsewhere Irwin characterises Hammer's Persian translations as clumsy and ugly, and his translations from Arabic as even worse.Footnote 52
The emerging field of oriental studies produced large personalities with differing approaches and conflicting opinions. One of Hammer's earliest and most ferocious detractors was his fellow diplomat and orientalist, Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (d.1817) who in 1815 published a thick tome subtitled ‘Several hundred samples of the great ignorance of Herr von Hammer of Vienna in language and learning’.Footnote 53 Hammer refers to the spat with Diez in his Memoirs, where he writes that his response was moderate – “nur einen Bogen starken” – and that the hundreds of examples of his writings in the Fundgruben des Orients were sufficient evidence to counter the attack.Footnote 54 In fact, his “few sheets” amounted to 29 pages, and the title parodied that of Diez's diatribe.Footnote 55 In a review of Diez's translation of the history written by the Ottoman statesman Ahmed Resmi Efendi in The Edinburgh Review the following year, the anonymous reviewer considered the controversy to have been carried on “à la Turque, and with a most uncivilized and unchristian virulence, which ill beseemeth gentlemen and scholars”. The leading orientalist Silvestre de Sacy took Hammer's part,Footnote 56 while Goethe took Diez’s.Footnote 57
Diez's assault was matched some years later by another high profile episode that went far beyond the normal bounds of scholarly argument and was calculated to embarrass Hammer deeply. In 1828, the year that his translation of EÇ's Seyahatnâme was accepted for publication by the OTF, he was subjected to a humiliating rejoinder to the publication of his Sur les origines Russes, extraits de manuscrits orientaux. . . Footnote 58 by the enfant terrible of oriental studies, Osip Szenkovskii, a Russian of Polish extraction. Szenkovskii questioned Hammer's competence in a detailed 75-page satirical tract, Lettre de Tutundju-Oglou-Moustafa-Aga, véritable philosophe turk, a M. Thaddée Bulgarin. . ..Footnote 59 The thrust of his argument was that Hammer, and other orientalists, did not have a proper knowledge of the East, and that what they wrote reflected their own fantasies, rather than the realities, of eastern cultures and peoples derived from competent reading of the sources. The Lettre purported to be written by a Turkish philosopher Mustafa Ağa, son of a tobacco seller, and was published along with a “learned commentary” by one “Koutlouk-Fouladi”, supposedly once an ambassador of the khanate of Bokhara to the khanate of Khiva, now a merchant selling dried apricots from Samarkand. One of Szenkovskii's most trenchant criticisms was that Hammer purported to have found mention of the Russians in the Koran.
Szenkovskii wrote that the way to foist poor translations from oriental works on an unsuspecting readership was to fail to provide the original text – so the translation could not be checked – or to translate such works in verse – where errors could be concealed because the demands of metre took precedence.Footnote 60 Moreover, in a letter to his teacher, the historian Joachim Lelewel, Szenkovskii wrote that Hammer was not only ignorant of oriental history and geography but also of Arabic, Persian and Turkish. He added that it was not Hammer's practice to give the original text alongside his translations.Footnote 61
In June 1828 an unsigned review of Szenkovskii's fiction by a writer who derived much amusement from the satire, appeared in the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register. Among the “proofs of gross negligence” he cited were that Hammer had mistaken participles and parts of speech for the names of “nations”.Footnote 62 This further assault could not go unanswered, and Hammer responded in a letter to the editor of the July 1828 issue of Journal Asiatique.Footnote 63 The September 1828 issue of Asiatic Journal. . . carried a synopsis of a shorter rebuttal by Hammer of Szenkowskii's charges – Hammer can have taken little comfort from the anonymous author's conclusion: “we must confess that, upon the whole, there appears to be more ground for the objections of the Russian writer than we hoped to find when we took up M. Von Hammer's answer to them”.Footnote 64
Hammer refers to his detractors in his Memoirs. He describes Diez and Senkowskii – and the Dutch orientalist Hendrik Arent Hamaker, then Professor of Oriental Languages at Leiden – as “diese[s] gladiatorisch[e] Triumvirat meiner literarischen Gegner”. He mentions Hamaker's lengthy, unfavourable review of the first volume of his ambitious Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (GoR), and adds four more critics of his scholarship – [Heinrich Leberecht] Fleischer, [Gustav] Weil, [Christian Martin Joachim von] Frahn and [Isaac Jacob] Schmid[t].Footnote 65
Hamaker's review of Hammer's GoR appeared in Latin in the Bibliotheca Critica Nova, published in Leiden.Footnote 66 Hammer responded with a point-by-point refutation of Hamaker's charges,Footnote 67 provoking Hamaker to write a pamphlet rebutting Hammer's charges of negligence, ignorance, lack of seriousness and injustice, and stating that he preferred to publish his response independently rather than avail himself of the pages of the Journal Asiatique where his words would doubtless be edited. He followed Hammer's point-by-point format in this bitter 54-page retort.Footnote 68
The first three volumes of Hammer's GoR also attracted a critical review in the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register, attributed to the German orientalist and explorer Julius Klaproth. Extracts from Hammer's reply were also printed, prompting Klaproth to write that he had treated Hammer with “extreme forebearance” and had “passed over in silence a great number of defects that disfigure his work”. Footnote 69,Footnote 70
The learned journals of the time contain many further attacks on Hammer's readings of oriental works by some of the most eminent scholars of the day: the new generation of British gentlemen interested in Asian affairs cannot have been ignorant of the controversy.
EÇ's Seyahatnâme Translated at Last
The publication of Hammer's translation of EÇ's Seyahatnâme that was announced, as we have seen, at the time of the establishment of the OTF, was initiated by the scholar Reverend George Cecil Renouard (1780–1867) who offered to prepare it for the press.Footnote 71 Between 1804 and 1806, Renouard had been chaplain to the British Embassy in Istanbul and had good knowledge of oriental languages, including the Ottoman Turkish of EÇ's work. Indeed, he corrected proofs of the Bible in Turkish, and worked on many translations in Turkish and other languages for the OTF. He also corresponded with the foremost oriental scholars of the time, and contributed to learned journals.Footnote 72 By December 1828, the manuscripts of EÇ's Seyahatnâme were in Renouard's hands, and he began to collate Hammer's translation with the “original”.Footnote 73 In November 1829 the OTF ordered that the translation be printed under Renouard's supervision.Footnote 74
In May 1831, Hammer requested that, with Renouard's permission, the translation be edited by James Mitchell, who had been engaged by the Committee of the OTF in 1828 “to transcribe Arabic, Persian and Turkish works and to assist in preparing them for and carrying them through to the Press”.Footnote 75 The reason that Hammer wanted Renouard's work to be looked through by a second editor may be innocent; however, it would not be surprising if his confidence had been shaken by the vocal criticism of his scholarship – this was the very time when he was coming under fierce attack from the two surviving members of the “gladiatorial triumvirate” and other critics of his abilities as a historian and translator. In the circumstances, a second opinion may have seemed advisable.
On 2 May 1832 a letter from Hammer was read before the Committee of the OTF, offering the EÇ manuscript for sale; the Committee proposed a purchase price of £50 for the two volumes.Footnote 76 As we have seen, it had not initially belonged to Hammer but to Count Rzewuski; Rzewuski died in 1831 but had apparently bequeathed his oriental manuscripts to Hammer many years earlier, after being wounded in battle in 1809. Although Rzewuski did not yet possess the two volumes of EÇ's work, we might assume that the gift included his future acquisitions. Hammer had presumably had the Seyahatnâme on permanent loan since soon after it was discovered, and with Rzewuski's death would have gained full possession.Footnote 77
Hammer followed the preparation of his translation for publication intermittently. When he approached the OTF Committee about the sale of EÇ's manuscript, he also inquired how the printing was progressing. This was a more vexed issue – the Committee decided that given the “very incomplete state of his translation”, EÇ's manuscript should be returned to Hammer if he desired. Furthermore, a specimen of his corrected translation would be sent to him.Footnote 78 Renouard and Mitchell were clearly finding the task of editing it more onerous than they had expected.
For the present, this seems to be the sum of our information about the acquisition of EÇ's manuscript for the RAS library, the work today catalogued as mss RAS 22 and RAS 23. A note on the inside cover of each volume indicates they were rebound in 1929. Hammer's pencilled, geographical index (plus a few topical references) to EÇ's work are left intact, as was the note recording the identity of the individual who commissioned this copy of the work, Mehmed Emin bin Velieddin, as observed above.
In 1834, eighteen years after Hammer reported that he had completed his translation of EÇ's work, the first part of the Seyahatnâme, namely folios 1–102 recto of the 450 folios of ms. RAS 22, was finally published in English. In March 1838 he wrote to the Committee to ask about progress on publication of his translation of the next part of the Seyahatnâme, and it was resolved to inform him that there had been no further advance since Mitchell's death in 1835.Footnote 79 A second enquiry from Hammer came two months later, asking again when the second part of his translation would appear.Footnote 80 The Committee responded that it had been impossible to find a new editor, and that Mitchell's death was a great loss to the cause of translation from Turkish in particular. The work, wrote Secretary Reynolds, “involved considerable labours. A continual reference to the original, and a retranslation of many passages was necessary in order to arrive at the meaning of certain obscurely written portions of the English translation, the exact import of which did not at first appear, without consulting the Turkish text; and the whole MS. has required to be written fairly before it could be sent to the press.” Moreover, the difficulty of finding a qualified scholar “willing to undertake so arduous a task” was compounded, because “the primary honor must appertain to another”.Footnote 81 Sure enough, there is no acknowledgement in the 1834 publication of Hammer's translation of Renouard's and Mitchell's editorial scrutiny, without which the work would never have met OTF standards.
The lack of anyone to continue Mitchell's work was not easily resolved. The matter was again on the agenda in 1844, after being “suspended for several years”. William Nicol, Her Majesty's Printer, was willing to print the work, but the OFT could not spend any more on editing or “unusual corrections” necessitated “on account of the difficulty of the MS copy”.Footnote 82 Nevertheless, the second part of the translation (folios 102 verso–252 recto of ms. RAS 22) was published early in 1846, and Hammer was informed by Reynolds that the problems were “overcome by the care and ingenious industry of [Nicol's son] Mr George Nicol. . .who corrected the original with great accuracy, and decyphered those portions which are obscure to the English reader”. However, George Nicol was unable to give further time to Hammer's translation, which ideally required the attentions of an editor “conversant with the Turkish original”. Reynolds suggested that this work might better be done in Vienna, under Hammer's supervision, and that Hammer look for funds to assist the OTF with the costs of publication.Footnote 83 A further letter from Hammer was read before the Committee on 16 January 1847, but its contents were not described beyond saying it concerned his translation of EÇ's work.Footnote 84
Although the record books of the OFT fall silent on the subject, the editing of the manuscript clearly continued, because in July 1849, “a further portion” was sent to the press.Footnote 85 Just before the end of the year, sample sheets came back to the Committee,Footnote 86 and in 1850 Volume II of the Narrative of Travels (comprising folios 252 verso–450 verso of ms. RAS 22) appeared. This completed the publication of the translation of the first of the two volumes of EÇ's Seyahatnâme that Hammer had sold to the OTF. George Nicol proposed in December 1850 that he continue his revision of the work, with a view to printing another portion, presumably part or whole of Hammer's translation of Book 3, the first book of ms. RAS 23, and the Committee agreed that printing it at intervals was acceptable.Footnote 87 Three months later, it was agreed that a further portion be printed.Footnote 88 Here the trail runs cold, however; no further parts of Hammer's translation of EÇ's work were ever published.
Hammer's Mistaken Assumptions
The first published volume of Hammer's translation is prefaced by a “Biographical Sketch of the Author”, i.e. EÇ. Hammer repeats here that four books of the Seyahatnâme were indeed all that had been found, “notwithstanding every endeavour, and the most careful search in all the markets and sales, no more of the work has been discovered”. He continues, “It may, therefore, be taken for granted that [EÇ] never wrote any continuation of it”.Footnote 89 However, Hammer was able to write of events subsequent to the span of time covered in the pre-1066/1656 parts of the work that were available to him, because EÇ mentions them in his account of the reign of Mehmed IV in the first book of his work. These include campaigns in the Balkans that EÇ participated in from 1659, and the Ottoman embassy to Vienna of 1665 of which he was a member; Hammer also refers here to EÇ's claim to have travelled in Europe once the Habsburg peace was concluded.Footnote 90
Needless to say, Hammer's assumption that the four books that Argyropolu came by c.1813 constituted the whole work led him to some erroneous conclusions. Among these was the notion that EÇ had retired to Edirne, where Mehmed IV's court spent much of the time, and that he wrote his work there. Hammer is wildly off the mark when he posits that EÇ died in c.1090/1678 (sic), following the successful Ottoman siege of Candia (modern Iraklion) that ended the long Cretan war – an event he also mentions in his account of Mehmed's reign. In fact, the Cretan war ended in 1080/1669, and Hammer's assertion that this was the last major event in EÇ's life neatly fits with his erroneous assumption that his 40 years of travel began in 1040/1630 when he was 20 years old.Footnote 91
Another of Hammer's misunderstandings concerns the year in which EÇ undertook his pilgrimage. He expresses his fervent wish to do so at the very beginning of the Seyahatnâme,Footnote 92 and in 1058/1648, with this intention in mind, he attached himself as chief prayer-caller to the entourage of Silahdar Murteza Paşa who was appointed to a state office in Damascus.Footnote 93 From Damascus he would continue to the Holy Places, and Hammer writes that he travelled to Mecca in 1059/1649.Footnote 94 This he derives from EÇ's statement, “Hakîr ol sene Mısır’a Hacc‑ı şerîfe azîmet edüp Şam’a geldiğimizde bu gazâda [the victory of Murteza Paşa over the Ma’anoğlu Druze in January–February 1649] bulunup”,Footnote 95 which he (loosely) translates as: “I, the humble writer, had this year (1059) made the pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Egypt, and on my return to Syria was present at this battle”.Footnote 96
Hammer dwells on this matter at length. He observes in the “Biographical Sketch” that there is no account of this pilgrimage in the manuscript of the Seyahatnâme at his disposal, and supposes that EÇ died before he could write about it. He insists, however, that there is no doubt about the timing, because EÇ himself dates it to the year of Murteza Paşa's defeat of the Ma’anoğlu.
On setting out from Istanbul in September 1648, EÇ mentions his expectation that his journey east with Murteza Paşa will be his opportunity to make the pilgrimage. The party crossed Anatolia to reach Damascus, where news came of the dismissal of the encumbent grand vezir, who had been Murteza Paşa's patron, and EÇ was required by Murteza to return to Istanbul with some letters, presumably offering the Paşa's services to the new grand vezir. EÇ witnessed a violent military revolt close to the capital, and then was ordered back to Damascus to report its suppression, and take news back to Murteza of his confirmation as military commander in the region. The battle against the Ma’anoğlu happened soon after his return from Istanbul, and EÇ wrote a beyt to celebrate the outcome. He continued as far south as Gaza, for the purpose of collecting taxes, returned to Damascus, and then, leaving Murteza Paşa in Aleppo, travelled by a circuitous route through eastern Anatolia to reach Istanbul once more in July 1650.Footnote 97
EÇ's dreams of completing the pilgrimage at this time went unfulfilled. Had Hammer had access to Book 9 of the Seyahatnâme, he would have read that EÇ made the haj only once, in 1671–1672. When visiting Safed en route to Gaza in spring 1649, he writes that he describes its shrines at the time of his subsequent visit, “the year he made the Haj”.Footnote 98 Hammer must have failed to notice this detail, which is further evidence that EÇ did not reach his long-desired destination in 1648–1649. EÇ's statement that Hammer interprets to indicate that EÇ returned from Mecca via Egypt in time to share in Murteza Paşa's victory over the Druze, should instead be read as expressing a hope and intention, not a fait accompli. Evliya had, after all, set out from Istanbul to go on the haj. The statement in Book 1 of the Seyahatnâme that Hammer offered as evidence that he did so in 1059 is an aside in the section of his work that is a summary chronology of events of the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV, rather than a detailed place-by-place account of his subsequent journeyings, where his pilgrimage is recounted in full.
By Way of Conclusion
EÇ's Seyahatnâme is the most frequently cited source for the Ottoman seventeenth century, and a small band of scholars have long dedicated their writings to comprehending the many dimensions of this unique work. Yet, only now, with the catalyst of the publication of the academic transcription from 1996, and the added impetus of the celebration of the quater-centenary of EÇ's birth in 2011, has wider attention focused on this most individual of writers.
The story of Hammer's relationship to EÇ's Seyahatnâme that I have tried to piece together in this essay has many loose ends. Hammer's Memoirs are still only available in full in the difficult hand of nineteenth-century German manuscripts, and many of the letters he received remain to be published. The labours of the University of Graz team in this regard are to be applauded, and we must hope they will continue. Closer to home, a treasure trove of letters and papers in the RAS Library awaits cataloguing; funding to do this is currently being applied for.
The cataloguing of the RAS papers will further open our window on the fractious world of the early orientalists, and greatly augment what we know about the establishment and operation of the OTF and the RAS itself. Even such basic matters as when the holdings of the OTF merged with the RAS Library are unclear. That the single donation register of the RAS Library that can be consulted at present dates from 1831–1875 contains no mention of the acquisition of the Seyahatnâme suggests they were once separate holdings; the accession registers of the RAS Library are at present unavailable or lost.
The OTF was a subscriber-funded body that eventually found itself short of money. Operations were suspended in 1860 owing to lack of funds, and from 1864 no more subscriptions were raised. By 1865, the OTF's stock of published translations was disposed of to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society,Footnote 99 but the disposal of its holdings of manuscripts such as the Seyahatnâme is not mentioned, suggesting the OTF did not, at least by that time, have its own library. Particularly tantalising is the question of the fate of Hammer's translation of Books 3 and 4 that he makes clear he had completed, and that was on the road to publication in 1850–1851.
Hacı Beşir Ağa was the first to realise the importance of EÇ's Seyahatnâme, and Hammer the first to bring it to the attention of a non-Ottoman audience. It was many splenetic years before his translation made the first parts of the great work available, but he showed the same persistence in getting it published as he had devoted to ‘discovering’ it. For all the criticism heaped upon Hammer personally, the tribulations suffered by his various editors at the OTF, and the obvious shortcomings of the end result, we can be eternally grateful to him for enabling a wide readership to gain access to EÇ's world.
