CATROU, François
Histoire generale du l’Empire du Mogol.
Paris, Chez Jean de Nully, 1705-15.£575.00
FIRST EDITION. 4to. pp. (xx) 272, 207 [i]. Wanting a folding map. Roman letter, t-p with woodcut ornament, next with engraved headpiece showing arms of the Duke of Burgundy, woodcut initials, typographical and woodcut headpieces. Engraved vignette of the Mughal seal to E1r. The third part lightly browned in places (different paper). An excellent copy in attractive C18 speckled calf, gilt, floriated cornerpieces and border roll, edges tooled, spine, spine in compartments, raised bands tooled, red morocco label, placemarker of coloured thread, corners bumped, joints slightly cracking. Macclesfield library bookplate and blindstamp.
First edition, the rare quarto issue, of this history of the Mughal shahs beginning with Tamerlane or Timur by the Venetian traveller Niccolò Manucci (1638-1717), adapted and condensed by the Jesuit author Catrou. A more common duodecimo edition in two volumes was issued in the same year. The third part, Catrou’s account of the rise of ‘Orangzeb’ or Alamgir I (1618-1707) against Shah Jahan (1592-1666), which occurred during Manucci’s time in India, was printed in 1715 and appears here without a separate title-page. This is an important first-hand account of the Mughal court: ‘Manucci practically spent his life in India and witnessed so many things and records them so personally that he is almost second to none as an historian of [Alamgir’s] reign’ (Cox).
Manucci travelled as a stowaway on an English vessel to India in 1653, when he was hired by Henry Bard, 1st Viscount Bellomont, on embassy to Shah Abbas II of Persia and the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. After Bard’s death in Hodal in 1656, Manucci worked as an artilleryman in Surat, before seeking work in the Portuguese territories, and later became a physician in Mughal Lahore. He finally ended up in English controlled Madras, where he married a Catholic Englishwoman, widow of a Portuguese interpreter. His memoir in Portuguese of his life in India, the ‘Storia do Mogor,’ was first sent to Europe in manuscript in 1701, illustrated with Mughal miniatures of its chief protagonists. Catrou published this manuscript without Manucci’s permission, much to the author’s indignation, and in the preface admits to having altered it significantly.
The account proceeds in a series of histories of the shahs, beginning in the sixteenth century. It is followed by Manucci’s first-hand description of the court, armed forces, system of government and laws, and subsidiaries of the Mughal Empire, which includes the revenues in rupees of all the kingdoms contained therein. Manucci was favourable towards the Mughal rulers, noting in particular that their love of justice was hereditary, a virtue exemplified above all by Shah Jahan. He notes, however, that the same emperor exceeded all the other Mughals in debauchery, possessing not only an enormous seraglio, but also stealing the wives of his army officers.
In North America, OCLC notes copies of the 1705 and 1715 quarto editions at DePaul, USF and Toronto only. Cox, I, 1709. Not in JFB.