ABSTRACT
It is nearly seventy years since Samuel C. Chew surveyed the accounts of British travellers to the East in his The Crescent and the Rose. Islam and England during the Renaissance, and his work remains valuable. In subsequent decades, much work has been done on the religious and cultural interaction, or rather, the fraught and intermittent interaction, of Western Christendom and the Islamic East; here, such names as those of Norman Daniel, Dorothy Metlitzki, Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, William Montgomery Watt, Sir Richard Southern and Maxime Rodinson spring to mind.1 Often perverse and wrongheaded and patently biased in its coverage though it is, the late Edward Said’s book Orientalism has during the last two decades sparked off a revival of interest in the accounts of Western diplomats, travellers, visitors, captives and missionaries who went to the Orient, from Morocco to Mughal India, and who interpreted what they saw for the beneÀ t of their fellow-countryman when they returned, and this has involved a fresh consideration of the interaction of Western Christendom with the Ottoman empire and other Islamic powers of North Africa and the Near and Middle East and also of Western contacts with Turks and ‘Moors’ and their ways of life (as already observed, the attitudes involved here being not invariably hostile). This is not the place in which to review this already quite extensive recent literature, which will be cited below where it is relevant to the thread of the story, except to note that the most recent study here, one already mentioned in the Preface and Acknowledgements, Gerald MacLean’s The Rise of Oriental Travel. English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720,2 with its theme, enunciated in the light of these other recent studies, of the experiences of four Englishmen interacting with the Ottoman lands and society, forms an illuminating complement to the following study of our early seventeenth-century Scottish traveller Lithgow.
