One of the prototypes for Levantine costume plates. a work whose illustrations helped shaped the West's popular imagination of the Islamic world. The artist, geographer and spy Nicolas de Nicolay (1517-1583) went to the court in Constantinople as part of an embassy from Henri II to the Sultan; Henri's predecessor had counted Suleiman as an ally and Henri wished to revive that accord. Nicolay's work, a combination of a travelogue with a survey of the Ottoman Empire, was first published in French at Lyon in 1567 and quickly translated into other European languages. His depiction of the Ottomans is less pejorative than other similar accounts although still interwoven at times with salacious details of sex, drugs and cruelty (lesbians at the hammam, the genital mutilation of religious ascetics, opium-laced sorbets, etc). The wooducuts are among the earliest representations of the inhabitants of Algiers, Tripoli, the Barbary Coast, Turkey, Greece, Persia and Armenia. Together with Le Hay's Recueil de cent estampes (1714), Nicolay's work forms 'the prototype for Levantine costume plates' (Atabey 429).

Second French edition, 4to (21.5 x 15 cm), title within typographical border and with a small device at foot, 60 full-page woodcuts in the text, contemporary vellum, yapp edges, later morocco label, spine darkened, splits to upper joint but firm, a very good, clean well margined copy.

Atabey 871; cf. Blackmer 1196; Colas 2201; Gollner 1664; cf. Ioannou, II, 375; Koç, I, 18a.