The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq is a tell-all of de Busbecq's experiences as an ambassador. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, sometimes Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, was a 16th-century Flemish writer, herbalist, and diplomat in the employ of three generations of Austrian monarchs. He served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople and in 1581 published a book about his time there, Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum, re-published in 1595 under the title of Turcicae epistolae or Turkish Letters.

Excerpt from The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin De Busbecq, Vol. 1 of 2: Seigneur of Bousbecque Knight, Imperial, Ambassador WE ask to be allowed to introduce the Reader to a kind and genial cicerone, who can take him back, three centuries deep, into the Past, and show him the Turk as he was when he dictated to Europe instead of Europe dictating to him; or conjure once more into life Catherine de Medici, Navarre, Alencon, Guise, Marguerite the fair and frail, and that young Queen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522-92) was a Flemish herbalist, diplomat and writer. In 1554, Ferdinand I, soon to be Holy Roman Emperor, dispatched him to Suleiman the Magnificent's court as an ambassador to the Ottoman empire, where Busbecq spent years negotiating a border dispute between his employer and the sultan. While there, he also discovered important manuscripts and sent the first tulip bulbs to Europe. He returned to Vienna in 1562, where he acted as counsellor to Ferdinand, after whose death he continued to serve the Habsburgs. This two-volume work, first published in 1881, contains Busbecq's letters, edited and translated into English from Latin by two Cambridge scholars. Volume 1 contains a lengthy biography of Busbecq, written by the editors, and his famous Turkish Letters, which are a unique source of information on Ottoman court life in the sixteenth century. Volume 2 contains letters written in France to the Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian II and Rudolph II, and an index and appendix to both volumes, the latter including Busbecq's itineraries and a helpful outline of Hungarian history. --Back covers