The Historie of the Great Emperour Tamerlan wherein are expressed, encounters, skirmishes, battels, sieges, skalings, taking of cities and strong places… Drawen from the ancient Monuments of the Arabians

Du Bec-Crespin, Jean [Messire Iean du Bec].

1597. London. Willam Ponsonby. 4to. [4], 265, [3]. Seventeenth century calf, boards with double gilt fillet, spine sympathetically rebacked in the 19th century, with raised bands and red lettering piece all elaborately tooled; overall scratched and slightly worn, corners bumped. A fine copy overall, light marginal damp-staining to first gatherings, minor foxing at the end, lightly browned, trimmed a little close at head, occasional marginal marking or finger-soiling, except for the above, an excellent copy of this rarity in it’s genuine condition, a copy that escaped washing and pressing in the 19th century; lacking final blank.

First English edition of this rare work on the life, conquests, travels and military deeds of the Great Tamerlane, the 14^th century leader and Emperor who conquered much of Asia, the Middle East and stretched to Russia and the Byzantine Empire; this account purportedly derived from an Arabic biography by “Alhacen” though this is unconfirmed. Woodcut device to title, woodcut initials, head- and tail-pieces. The translation is sometimes credited to Humphrey Mildmay.

 

“Tamburlaine, historically Temur, was born in the 1320s or 1330s near the city of Samarkand in Transoxiana, part of the Ulus Chaghatay, one of the four provinces into which the Mogol Emperor Genghis Khan divided the vast territories he conquered… Temur undertook a series of increasingly wide-ranging military campaigns by which he created an empire stretching from Syria to India… By 1393 he had conquered Iran. In 1394 his marched as far as Moscow. In 1398 he sacked and burned Delhi. In 1400 he was campaigning in Syria and took its important cities, including Damascus. In 1402 he turned his attention to Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire (at the invitation of the Byzantine emperor, according to Dubec-Crespin), defeating its emperor Bayezit I at Ankara. He died in February 1405 on the campaign trail to China… there is no doubt that Temur’s armies committed numerious atrocities in their conquests. Kjustin Marozzi writes that ‘On every battlefield they [Tamburlaine’s armies] left soaring towers and bloody pyramids built from the skulls of their decapitated victims, deadly warnings to anyone who dared opposed them’” (Edited by Mathew R. Martin “Tamburlaine the Great Part One and Part Two Christopher Marlow, pp.16-17).

 

Rare in the market, we can trace only 2 copies including this one at auction in the last 70 years.

 

Provenance: James Sotheby (1682-1742, pencil note 'J.S. Sept 23rd, 1731' to title); C.W.H. Sotheby (bookplate to pastedown).

 

According to OCLC we can locate copies at Latrobe University, York University, National Library of Scotland, BL, Cambridge Trinity College, Oxford, University of London, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Fisher Library (Canada), University of Minnesota, and the following copies in the United States: Huntington Library, Univeristy of California, Yale, Emory Univ., Newberry, Harvard, Williams College, Princeton, Pennsylvania, University of Michigan Library.

 

[STC 7263].

1597

$35,000.00