BOK, Incunable, Rome 1473.

[Laudivius Zacchia] | Mahomet II:

Epistolae magni Turci. [Prelim:] Laudivius Zacchia: Epistola ad Francinum Beltrandum.

Rome, Johannes Philippus de Lignamine, 27 Nov. 1473. 4to. 19 x 13,5 cm. 25 leaves (of [32], one of which blank).

19th-century boards, somewhat worn, spine defective, in a Solander box. Initials supplied in red (the opening initial in red & green), chapter marks in red. Lacking a total of 7 leaves, including initial blank and final leaf or leaves. Provenance: H. Guppy (early 20th-century inscription); Bonhams (London), The Library of the Late Hugh Selbourne, 1 (25.3.2015), 30.

ISTC im00057000. GW M25642.

Falsely attributed to Mahomet II by the author, Laudivius Zacchia.

Rare, with a total of just 13 copies worldwide listed in ISTC. The present copy mentioned in GW online.

This work claims to be a translation of letters by Mehmet II, Sultan of Turkey. It is part of a literature of purported communications from Eastern potentates written at a time of great anxiety about incursions by the Ottoman Empire; the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks coincided with the invention of the printing press. This example is essentially popular epistolary fiction by Laudivio Zacchia, who styles himself in his foreword as being only the collector of a small quantity of very short letters exchanged between Mehmet II and various Christian and oriental principalities. These very short letters of hardly more than one or two pages were supposed to have been written by an Egyptian or Ottoman sultan to a Christian prince and were highly popular in the 14th to 16th centuries.

Laudivio Zacchia was an Italian poet born near Genoa (active c. 1470). This is the second edition of his ”Letters of the Grand Turk” (Epistolae Magni Turci), antedated by the fist (Naples 1473) by just 2 months. The text was reprinted twenty times in the 15th century. See F. Babinger, Laudivius Zacchia, der Erdichter der "Epistolae Magni Turci", Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, Heft 13, 1960 (CIBN).

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