Tag Archives: early modern sources

European Journals and Correspondence from early modern Libya (sources for the study of early modern Libya ii)

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Previous posts in this series on historical sources for the study of early modern Libya:
i. Early Modern Libyan Manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The present post gives references to journals and correspondence written by English observers, mostly diplomats of some kind, who lived in the region for a period of time. Travel accounts, which are far more numerous, will be dealt with separately. Fortunately, several of the most extensive collections of correspondence have been collected and published—those are the ones detailed here, with a few references thrown in to unpublished material; this post is not necessarily exhaustive.

17th century

Thomas Baker, English consul in Tripoli between 1677 and 1685 (then part of the Ottoman Empire and a key base of the “Barbary pirates”), kept a detailed journal during his time in the city-state. Though English consuls had been in Algiers and Tunis for some time, one was only sent to Tripoli from 1658, primarily for dealing with pirates, rather than trade. Baker’s journal, now preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, is an intriguing early record at a time for which hardly any historical sources exist.

  • Piracy and Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century North Africa: The Journal of Thomas Baker, English Consul in Tripoli, 1677-1685, edited by C.R. Pennell (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989)

In the late 1600s, Dominique Girard, a Provençal surgeon captive in Tripoli between 1668 and 1675, composed a lengthy (over 1,000 pages) chronicle-diary, known as the Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly de Barbarie. It is now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France as BNF ms. fr. 12219 & 12220. It seems to have been little studied, excepting a recent PhD thesis.

  •  (al-Gawhari) Bushreida, Amal. 2017. Le Manuscrit de « L’Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoli de Barbarie ». Université de Poitiers Thèse de doctorat.
  • Laronde, André. 2006. Dominique Girard et la Cyrénaïque : le regard d’un captif français en Barbarie au XVIIe siècle. Bulletin de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France 2001(1). 120–127.

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