Jean-Baptiste Tavernier

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
Born	1605 Paris, France
Died	July, 1689 Moscow, Russia
Nationality	French
Occupation	traveller, travel writer, merchant
Known for	Tavernier Blue (The Hope Diamond) Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1676)
Title	Baron of Aubonne (1670–1685)

Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier by Nicolas de Largillière (c. 1700).

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605 – July 1689) was a French traveller and pioneer of trade with India, and travels through Persia (Iran), most known for works in two quarto volumes, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (Six Voyages, 1676) and diamond merchant for some important diamonds of the century. He was born in Paris, where his father Gabriel and uncle Melchior, Protestants from Antwerp, pursued the profession of cartographers and engravers. Tavernier was one of the most remarkable men of a most remarkable century, the 17th century, known as the Age of Exploration. Tavernier, a private individual, a merchant traveling at his own expense, covered by his own account, 180,000 miles (290,000 km) over the course of forty years and six voyages. Though he is best known for the discovery and sale of the 118-carat (24 g) blue diamond that he subsequently sold to Louis XIV of France in 1668, (it was stolen in 1792 and re-emerged in London as The Hope Diamond), his writings show that he was a keen observer of his time as well as a remarkable cultural anthropologist. He was the owner of the seigneurery of Aubonne in Switzerland from 1670 to 1685.

Early life

The conversations he heard in his father's house inspired Tavernier with an early desire to travel, and in his sixteenth year he had already visited England, the Low Countries and Germany, and seen something of war with Hans Brenner, a colonel of cavalry in the Imperial service during the Thirty Years' War, whom he met at Nuremberg. Four and a half years in the household of Brenner's uncle, the viceroy of Hungary (1624–29), and a briefer connection in 1629 with the Duke of Rethel and his father the duke of Nevers, prince of Mantua, gave him the habit of courts, which was invaluable to him in later years; and at the defense of Mantua in 1629, and in Germany in the following year with Colonel Walter Butler (afterwards notorious by having killed Wallenstein), he gained some military experience.

In the Six Voyages Tavernier states that he departed from Butler's company (1630) with the intention to travel to Ratisbon (Regensburg) to attend Ferdinand III's investiture as King of Romans. However, as the actual investiture did not take place until 1636, it is probable that he actually attended the ceremony between his first and second voyages. By his own account he had seen Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Poland and Hungary, as well as France, England and the Low Countries, and spoke the principal languages of these countries. He was now eager to visit the East; and at Ratisbon he, with the help of Pere Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's agent and Eminence grise he was able to join the retinue of a pair of French travelers, M. de Chapes and M. de St Liebau, who had received a mission to the Levant. In their company he reached Constantinople early in 1631, where he spent eleven months, and then proceeded by Tokat, Erzerum and Erivan to Persia. His farthest point in this first journey was Isfahan; he returned by Baghdad, Aleppo, Alexandretta, Malta and Italy, and was again in Paris in 1633.

Of the next five years of his life nothing is known with certainty, but Joret, his French biographer claims that during this period that he may have become controller of the household of Gaston, duke of Orléans. We do know that twice during his Six Voyages he claimed the Duke's patronage.

Second journey

In September 1638 he began a second journey (1638–43) traveling via Aleppo to Persia, and thence to India as far as Agra and from there to The Kingdom of Golkonda. His visit to the court of the Great Mogul - Emperor Shah Jahan at the time - and to the diamond mines was connected with the plans realized more fully in his later voyages, in which Tavernier traveled as a merchant of the highest rank, trading in costly jewels and other precious wares, and finding his chief customers among the greatest princes of the East.

Later voyages

Church and castle with its minaret-style tower, built in 1680 for 'Jean-Baptiste Tavernier', at Aubonne, Switzerland

The second journey was followed by four others. In his third (1643–49) he went as far as Java, and returned by the Cape; but his relations with the Dutch proved not wholly satisfactory, and a long lawsuit on his return yielded but imperfect redress.

During his last two voyages (1657–1662, 1664–1668) he did not proceed beyond India. The details of these voyages are often obscure; but they completed an extraordinary knowledge of the routes of overland Eastern trade, and brought the now famous merchant into close and friendly communication with the greatest Oriental potentates. They also secured for him a large fortune and great reputation at home. He was presented to Louis XIV, in whose service he had travelled sixty thousand leagues by land, received letters of nobility (on 16 February 1669), and in the following year purchased the barony of Aubonne, near Geneva. In 1662 he had married Madeleine Goisse, daughter of a Parisian jeweller.

The Voyages

Thus settled in ease and affluence, Tavernier occupied himself, as it would seem at the desire of the king, in publishing the account of his journeys. He had neither the equipment nor the tastes of a scientific traveller, but in all that referred to commerce his knowledge was vast and could not fail to be of much public service. He set to work therefore with the aid of Samuel Chappuzeau, a French Protestant littérateur, and produced a Nouvelle Relation de l'Intérieur du Sérail du Grand Seigneur (4to, Paris, 1675), based on two visits to Constantinople in his first and sixth journeys.

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in oriental costume, 1679

This was followed by Les Six Voyages de J. B. Tavernier (2 vols. 4to, Paris, 1676) and by a supplementary Recueil de Plusieurs Relations (4to, Paris, 1679), in which he was assisted by a certain La Chapelle. This last contains an account of Japan, gathered from merchants and others, and one of Tongking, derived from the observations of his brother Daniel, who had shared his second voyage and settled at Batavia; it contained also a violent attack on the agents of the Dutch East India Company, at whose hands Tavernier had suffered more than one wrong. This attack was elaborately answered in Dutch by H. van Quellenburgh (Vindictie Batavicae, Amsterdam, 1684), but made more noise because Antoine Arnauld drew from it some material unfavorable to Protestantism for his Apologie pour les Catholiques (1681), and so brought on the traveler a ferocious onslaught in Pierre Jurieu's Esprit de M. Arnauld (1684). Tavernier made no reply to Jurieu.

The Later Years

An Italian map (1682) gives credit to Tavernier's accounts among its sources

The closing years of Tavernier's life are not well documented; the times were not favorable for a Protestant in France. In 1684 Tavernier traveled to Brandenburg at the request of the Frederick William I, Elector of Brandenburg, to discuss the Elector's scheme to charter his own East India Company. The Elector wished Tavernier to become his ambassador to India. He awarded Tavernier the honorary posts of Chamberlain and Counselor of Marine. The scheme, unfortunately, came to nothing.

In 1679 Louis XIV began to seriously undermine his Protestant subjects. He established the Bureau of Conversion to reward Catholic converts. In January 1685, Tavernier managed to sell his Château Aubonne to marquis Henri du Quesne for 138,000 livres plus 3,000 livres for horses and carriages. His timing was good,: in October of the same year, Louis XIV repealed the Edict of Nantes. Louis then instituted the Verification of Nobility which deprived those Protestant nobleman who refused to convert to Catholicism, of their titles.

In 1687, despite an edict prohibiting Protestants from leaving France, he left Paris and traveled to Switzerland. In 1689 he passed through Berlin and Copenhagen and entered Russia on a passport from the King of Sweden, perhaps with the intent of traveling overland to India. It is not known if he met with Czar Peter who was just 17 years old at that time. What is known is that Tavernier, as with all foreigners resident in Moscow, would have been required, by imperial decree, to take up residence in the foreign quarter, known as the German Suburb (Nemetskaya Sloboda). Peter was very interested in all things foreign and had many friends in the suburb and spent a great deal of time there beginning in mid March 1689. Tavernier arrived in Moscow in late February or early March of that year. Tavernier was a famous man. Given Peter's curious nature, it would be surprising if they did not meet. Tavernier's biographer Charles Joret, produced a fragment of an article published in a Danish journal by Frederick Rostgaard who states that he interviewed the aging adventurer who told him of his intention to travel to Persia via Moscow. He was, not however able to complete this last journey. Tavernier died in Moscow in 1689, after an attack by wild dogs, at the age of 84.

Legacy

Tavernier's original sketch of "The Tavernier Blue".

Tavernier's travels, though often reprinted and translated, have a defect for his biographer: the chronology is much confused by his plan of combining notes from various journeys about certain routes for he sought mainly to furnish a guide to other merchants. A careful attempt to disentangle the thread of a life still in many parts obscure has been made by Charles Joret, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier d'aprés des Documents Nouveaux, 8vo, Paris, 1886, where the literature of the subject is fully given. See also an English translation of Tavernier's account of his travels so far as relating to India, by V Ball, 2 vols. (1889). He was first subject of an English film, The Diamond Queen (1953) by John Brahm Using Tavernier's Les Six Voyages as a template, gemologist/historian Richard W. Wise has written a historical novel, The French Blue, that dramatizes Tavernier's voyages up until the sale of The Great Blue Diamond to Louis XIV. The book's website includes a detailed timeline of Tavernier's life and voyages. [1]

For the 400th anniversary of Tavernier's birth in 2005, the Swiss filmmaker Philippe Nicolet made a full-length film about him called Les voyages en Orient du Baron d'Aubonne. Another Swiss, the sculptor Jacques Basler, has made a life-sized bronze effigy of the great 17th-century traveller which looks out over Lake Geneva at the Hotel Baron Tavernier where there is also a permanent exhibition of all his drawings and archives in Chexbres.

See also

• The Hope Diamond
• The Florentine Diamond

Works

• The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier: Baron of Aubonne, by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, tr. John Phillips. William Godbid, for Robert Littlebury at the King's Arms in Little Britain, and Moses Pitt at the Angel in St Paul's Church-yard., 1677
• Tavernier, Jean Baptiste; Ball, Valentine (tr. from the Org French Ed. 1676) (1899). Travels in India (Vol. 1). Macmillan & Co., London. http://www.archive.org/stream/travelsinindia00unkngoog#page/n8/mode/2up. 
• Tavernier, Jean Baptiste; Ball, Valentine (tr. from the Org French Ed. 1676) (1899). Travels in India (Vol. 2). Macmillan & Co., London. http://www.archive.org/details/travelsinindia00tavegoog. 
• Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, Travels in India translated V. Ball, second ed. edited William Crooke, in 2 vols. (bound in 1). Low Price Publications, Delhi 110052. 2000. ISBN 81 7536 206 5.

Further reading

• The French Blue: A Novel of the 17th Century. Richard W. Wise. Brunswick House Press, 2010. ISBN 0972822364.
• Tavernier, Later Travels and Peter the Great. Richard W. Wise. http://www.thefrenchblue.com/article2.htm.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.  Online
• The French Blue

External links

• Describing Tavernier's travels in India, including his trade in gems, diamonds and visits to Maharadja's Tavernier: Travels in India (English Translation), Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, Translated by Ball, London 1925.
• Tavernier part II + appendices on Koh-I-Noor, diamonds and diamond and gold mining. Both Volumes translated from Le Six Voyages de J. B. Tavernier (2 vols. 4to, Paris, 1676)
• http://www.thefrenchblue.com . Website: Novel describing Tavernier's Six Voyages with article on history of the Great Blue diamond and timeline of Tavernier's life