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Description

Detailed map of the Persian Empire, as described by the Italian Renaissance Traveller Pietro della Valle.

Pietro Della Valle was born in Rome on April 2,1586, to a wealthy and noble family. He became a member of the Roman academy of the Umoristi, and acquired some reputation as a versifier and rhetorician. Mario Schipano, a professor of medicine in Naples, suggested to Valley the idea of traveling in the East. It was Schipano who received a sort of diary in letters from Pietro's travels.

Before leaving Naples, Pietro took a vow to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He left Venice by boat in June 1614 and reached Constantinople where he remained for more than a year and acquired a good knowledge of Turkish and a little Arabic. In September, 1615, he went to Alexandria. From Alexandria he went on to Cairo, and, after an excursion to Mount Sinai, left Cairo for the Holy Land, arriving in March, 1616, in time to take part in the Easter celebrations at Jerusalem.

After visiting the holy sites, Pietro traveled from Damascus to Aleppo. After seeing a portrait of the beautiful Assyrian Christian Sitti Maani Gioerida, he went to Baghdad and married her a month later. While in the Middle East, he made one of the first modern records of the location of ancient Babylon and provided "remarkable descriptions" of the site. He also brought back to Europe inscribed bricks from Nineveh and Ur, some of the first examples of Cuneiform available to modern Europeans. At that time Baghdad was being contested between Turkey and Iran during the frequent Ottoman-Persian Wars, so he had to leave Baghdad in January, 1617. Accompanied by his wife Maani, he proceeded to Persia, and visited Hamadan and Isfahan. In the summer of 1618, he joined Shah Abbas in a campaign in northern Persia. Here he was well received at court and treated as the shah's guest.

On his return to Isfahan he began to think of going back home through India, rather than endanger himself again in Turkey. However, the state of his health and the war between Persia and the Portuguese at Ormuz generated problems. In October 1621, he left Isfahan, visited Persepolis and Shiraz and made his way to the coast. But it was not until January 1623 that he found a passage for Surat on the English ship Whale, Captain Nicolas Woodcock.

He was at Muscat in January 1625, and at Basra in March. In May he started by the desert route to Aleppo, and boarded on a French ship at Alexandretta. He reached Cyprus and finally Rome on the 28th of March 1626. There, he was received with many honors, not only in literary circles, but also from Pope Urban VIII, who appointed him a gentleman of his bedchamber. The rest of his life was uneventful; he married his second wife, Mariuccia (Tinatin de Ziba), a Georgian orphan of a noble family. She had been adopted by his first wife as a child, had traveled with him, and was the mother of fourteen children. He died in Rome on the 21st of April 1652, and is buried at his family's burial vault at Santa Maria in Aracoeli.

By 1665 the portion of his "Travels" dealing with India and with his return had been translated into English. They contain accounts of his discussions with "Hindoo" Brahmans about whether the Egyptians or Indians first came up with the concept of reincarnation, a dialogue with a woman who invited him to her upcoming sati, a description of the barefoot Queen of Olaza, who was out on the embankments giving directions to her engineers-and many other bits of first-rate ethnography.

Pierre Du Val Biography

Pierre Duval (1618-1683) was a French geographer, cartographer, and publisher who worked in Abbeville and Paris during the seventeenth century. He was born in the former city, in northeast France, before moving to Paris. Duval was the nephew of the famous cartographer Nicolas Sanson, from whom he learned the mapmaker's art and skills. Both men worked at the royal court, having followed the royal request for artists to relocate to Paris. In addition to numerous maps and atlases, Du Val's opus also includes geography texts. He held the title of geographe ordinaire du roi from 1650 and died in 1683, when his wife and daughters took over his business.