Author Description

Though not much is known about Di Varthema, the native Italian wrote a vivid account of his travels across Asia during the late Middle Ages. As the introduction to this title explains: "The motives which led him to undertake this journey are briefly set forth in the dedication of his Itinerary. He had an insatiable desire of becoming acquainted with foreign countries, not unmixed with ambition for the renown which had been awarded to preceding geographers and travelers but being conscious, withal, of his inaptitude to attain that object by reading, "knowing himself to be of very slender understanding" and disinclined to study, he "determined, personally, and with his own eyes, to endeavor to ascertain the situations of places, the qualities of peoples, the diversities of animals, the varieties of the fruit-bearing and odoriferous trees of Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Felix, Persia, India, and Ethiopia, remembering well that the testimony of one eye-witness is worth more than ten thousand hearsays." His surprising travels in search of this knowledge are recorded in the accompanying narrative with ingenuousness and honesty, and his personal adventures with a ready wit and humor, which do credit to his head and heart; the remarkable success of his book is attested by the successive editions which were called for in the course of a few years after its first publication, and its translation into several European languages but what reward was reaped by the enterprising traveler himself, beyond the barren honor of knighthood conferred upon him by Don Francisco de Almeyda after the battle of Ponani, and subsequently confirmed by Don Emanuel of Portugal, we have no means of ascertaining. As far as we know, the copyright of his Itinerary, secured to himself and to his heirs for ten years, officially granted at the special mandate of Pope Julius II, by the Cardinal Chamberlain of the Court of Rome, as appears from the document attached to the first edition of 1510, was the