John Albert de Mandelslo (1616-44) was a German adventurer. He began his career as an attaché in the court of the Duke of Holstein in Germany. In 1635 the Duke sent ambassadors to the courts of Russia and Persia. Mandelslo travelled with this mission for nearly three years and then in 1638 left them and sailed from Ispahan to India landing at Surat in April of that year. Here he journeyed through the cities of Gujarat, and thence to the Mughal court at Agra and Lahore. From there he returned to Surat and sailed for England in January 1639. This is a rare recording his experiences in India in the reign of Shah Jahan and a valuable source of information on the political and social conditions of the country at that time. Some accounts of places he gives are second hand but he always makes a mention of this fact.
M.S. Commissariat, was in Indian Educational Service; Professor of History and Political Economy, Gujarat College, Ahmadabad; Fellow of the University of Bombay.
THE author owes a few words of explanation in presenting this little book to the public in the form in which it appears. The first English translation of Mandelslo's Travels, by J. Davies, was published in London, nearly three hundred years ago, in 1662, and the work is at present but little known and very rare. As the most valuable part of Mandelslo's Travels refers to his tour through Gujarat, I decided at first to give a critical summary of the same, with extracts, in my History of Gujarat which is in preparation. But when completed it was found that this account, in spite of my attempts at compression, extended over several chapters, and took up a rather disproportionate space in the larger historical work.
It has, therefore, been decided to publish it as a separate book with the addition of chapters on Mandelslo's interesting visit to Goa, his account of the Portuguese in Western India and his return voyage to Europe.
Students of Indian history would naturally wish to see a new edition of the original English text of Mandelslo's work, and the firm of Routledge has already made arrangements for the publication of this text, in its excellent series of the 'Broadway Travellers', under the general editorship of Sir E. Denison Ross and Miss E. Power. But it is expected that the present work will supply a different want in its critical, historical and topographical remarks. As explained in the Introduction, it includes what is considered to be the original and authentic portion of Mandelslo's Travels which thus requires to be carefully examined. All that is first-hand and based on Mandelslo's personal experience and observation during the very few months that he was in India has been incorporated in this book.
My thanks are due to Principal H. G. Rawlinson, I.E.S., of the Deccan College, for his interest in this book, and to the Oxford University Press for valuable suggestions in its publication.
I hope that the map of Mandelslo's tour and the illustrations supplied will be appreciated by my readers, and I also trust that this little work will help to some extent to meet the interest, which I notice is every year on the increase, in the history of the province of Gujarat-a history which in the wealth of its materials and the variety and interest of its progress is perhaps unequalled by that of any other province in India.
JOHN ALBERT DE MANDELSLO was a young man of gentle birth attached as a page to the court of the Duke of Holstein, a small principality in the north of Germany. In 1635 the duke sent two ambassadors to the courts of Muscovy (Russia) and Persia on a commercial mission, and Mandelslo, then only twenty years old, was at his own request permitted to join them as an attaché. After sharing their adventures for three years, he parted company with them at Ispahan, in Persia, in 1638, being desirous of visiting India. Taking ship at the Persian Gulf, he arrived at Surat at the end of April 1638 and passed the whole of the rainy season there. In October he journeyed through the cities of Gujarat to the Mogul headquarters at Agra and Lahore. After a very brief stay at both these capital cities, he returned to the port of Surat, whence he sailed for England on 5 January 1639.
Adam Olearius, the secretary to the Duke of Holstein's embassy, was a learned person, being librarian and mathematician to the court, and he published in German, in 1646, an account of the adventures of the embassy in Russia and Persia under the title of The Travels of the Ambassadors. The work known to students of Indian history as Mandelslo's Travels into the Indies has, in some of its editions and translations, been given to the world as a supplement to Olearius' famous treatise and has been bound up with it as one volume. In this form it appears in the first English translation published in London by John Davies in 1662.
The credit to be given to the fairly voluminous production of Mandelslo has formed the subject of an interesting paper by the late Dr. Vincent A. Smith. It is now clearly established that nearly two-thirds of the work which goes under his name is the contribution of the erudite Olearius and of his French translator, A. de Wicquefort. Mandelslo never went further east than India and yet the published versions of his voyages give long accounts of Sumatra, Java, the Moluccas, Japan and China, none of which countries was ever visited by him. He was also no scholar and yet his account of his tour in India is full of elaborate dissertations on the political, religious and social conditions of the people. Many of these interpolations are due to the pen of Olearius, to whom Mandelslo had entrusted his scanty narrative with an injunction that, if it was published, his friend 'would rather regard there- in his reputation after his death than the friendship they had promised one another'. The French translator went even further and made large additions based on works of eastern travels available to him.
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