Finally, there is an edition of the most detailed firsthand description of the Ottoman Empire in early modern England: The Present State of the Ottoman Empire by Sir Paul Rycaut (1629–1700). Rycaut served as secretary to the English ambassador in Istanbul (ca. 1661–67), after which he served as the consul to the Levant Company in Smyrna (ca. 1668–79). During these years, he collected information about all aspects of the Ottoman Empire, from its system of taxation to the structure of the military, and from the “Turkish Religion” to (allegedly) life in the harem. The first edition appeared in the mid-1660s but Rycaut continued adding to it in the next twenty years, making it the most thorough and informative description of the Ottomans in the English language to date.

John Anthony Butler has done a great service to students and scholars by preparing this erudite edition. He opens with an extensive introduction about the life of Rycaut, then examines the history of relations between England and the Islamic World—not just the Ottoman Empire, but also the semi-independent regencies in North Africa and the kingdom of Morocco. Butler engages with the vast amount of scholarship that has appeared in the past few decades about Euro-Islamic relations and looks at the trajectory of cultural and diplomatic history: he shows how Rycaut accurately (and, in a few cases, not so accurately) represented the Ottomans in their daily lives, beliefs, customs, and social organizations. Butler richly footnotes all the allusions that Rycaut made—to individuals, regions, sects, texts, and practices—providing thereby the English and international context for The Present State. The introduction ends with a description of the impact of the book in later centuries and its place in the early modern history of the Anglo-Islamic Mediterranean.

It is unlikely that there will be need for another edition of The Present State—unless manuscript and archival materials, both in England and in Turkey, are brought into the study. Butler relied exclusively on secondary sources but still was able to enrich our reading of Rycaut's text. I have, however, a few reservations about some of the notes in this book: first, outdated sources about Islamic history. In the footnotes about Islam and about the Ottoman Empire, Butler relied on nineteenth-century books. It is unclear why he did not turn to the vast amount of scholarship on Islam that is better examined in the Encyclopedia of Islam than in John Pair Brown (1868), James Creagh (1880), and Thomas Hughes's A Dictionary of Islam (1886). Hughes, for instance, had been a missionary in India and wrote his book, as he stated in his 1885 introduction “to the Government official called to administer justice to Muslim peoples; to the Christian missionary engaged in controversy with Muslim scholars; to the Oriental traveler seeking hospitality amongst Muslim peoples” (Hughes, 290). Such a view does not reflect the rigors of modern scholarship, which may help to explain why Hughes made mistakes. On some occasions, Butler corrected Hughes's mistakes, but he referenced authors on Islam who did not take into account academic research (Sharfaat, 301), and he quoted from sources of uncertain authority (305, Dictionary of Spiritual Terms). My second reservation concerns generalizations. While Butler consulted scholars on conundrums in Turkish history and language, and cited the most recent studies in the field, he did not consult scholars on Islam—an area that was clearly not his forte. Do all Muslims believe that “only a member of the Quraish tribe … could be a prophet or successor to Muhammad” (307)? True, the caliph had to be a member of Quraish, but was there to be another “prophet” from Quraish? Do the one-billion-plus Muslims in the world believe that “hell is divided into seven parts”? (Do all Christians in the world believe that there are seven mortal sins?) This and other generalizations about “Islam” and “Muslims” (“according to Muslims”), and repeatedly stated without any scholarly support, are disturbing. And what exactly is the value of referring to the Taliban (322) and their abhorrence of music in the twenty-first century? Would an edition of a seventeenth-century Muslim description of Europe need to appeal to presentism and mention a contemporary Western aberration? And how reliable is hearsay in confirming Rycaut's views (“In our own day, I am informed that” [312])?

It is unfortunate that Butler did not take as seriously his research about Islam as he did about other subjects. Still, this edition of The Present State in the ACMRS series is a must for students and scholars alike who wish to examine a foundational text about England's knowledge of the early modern Ottoman world.