DE LA CROIX, François Pétis.
A FAVOURITE OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS
Histoire du Grand Genghizcan.
Paris, dans la boutique de Claude Barbin, Chez la Veuve Jombert, 1710£1,950.00
FIRST EDITION. 8vo. pp. (xvi) 562 (ii). Roman letter. Typographical headpieces. Some copies contain two extra preliminary leaves with a privilege du roy. A very good copy in C17 sprinkled calf, gilt, single fillets and floriated cornerpieces, spine in compartments, very lightly rubbed and marked, silk coloured headbands and placemarker. Macclesfield library bookplate to front pastedown and blindstamp to first few ll., ink shelfmark to rear pastedown.
First edition of this French history of the rise, conquests, and succession of the great medieval Mongol emperor Genghis Kahn, conqueror of China, Central Asia and much of Europe, and creator of the Mongol Empire, in which the French orientalist and Arabist De la Croix (1653-1713) describes Mongol and Tartar costume, customs and laws, as well as the geography of Central Asia. De la Croix translated and compiled his history from Arabic accounts mostly by Turkish authors and from European authors, both medieval and modern, whose travel accounts and works are said to prove and verify the facts in De la Croix’s history. In several cases De la Croix provides the shelfmarks of manuscripts in the French Royal Library or gives the dates of the printed edition that he was using. A bibliography of De la Croix’s sources, with biographies, concludes the volume.
De La Croix was one of a group of young linguists, les Jeunes de Langues, who were sent by the Minister for Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83) into the Ottoman Empire to learn its principal languages and act as interpreters for the French government. At age seventeen De la Croix travelled to Turkey, Persia and Syria, spending time in Aleppo and Isfahan in modern-day Iran. Later he worked as secretary to the French ambassador in Morocco and successfully negotiated a peace treaty with Algeria, thereby fulfilling Colbert’s designs.
De la Croix argued that religious freedom was one of the mainstays of Genghis’s empire, his ‘First’ or ‘Great Law’ (pp. 99-100), which supposedly made this book popular with two of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson bought numerous copies from a Parisian bookseller, giving one copy to his granddaughter Cornelia and exhorting her to read it, also donating copies to the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia, both of which he founded. Franklin meanwhile printed advertisements for the book and offered it for sale with delivery available throughout the American colonies (Jack Weatherford, Genghis Kahn and the quest for God (London: 2017), p. xxi).
Not in Brunet or Graesse.