Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
[3] Tavernier, a private individual and merchant traveling at his own expense, covered, by his own account, 60,000 leagues in making six voyages to Persia and India between the years 1630 and 1668.
The conversations he heard in his father's house inspired Tavernier with an early desire to travel, and by his sixteenth year he had already visited England, the Low Countries and Germany.
In the following year Tavernier traveled, as a translator, with an Irish mercenary in the service of the emperor, Colonel Walter Butler (afterwards notorious for killing Albrecht von Wallenstein).
[8] In the Six Voyages, Tavernier states that he departed from Butler's company, in 1630, with the intention of traveling to Ratisbon (Regensburg), to attend the investiture of the son of Emperor Ferdinand II as King of the Romans.
In their company he reached Constantinople early in 1631, where he spent eleven months, and then proceeded by Tokat, Erzerum, and Erivan to Safavid Persia.
In these later voyages, 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.
The details of these voyages are often obscure; they nevertheless added to an extraordinary knowledge of overland Eastern trade routes and brought the now famous merchant into close and friendly communication with the greatest Oriental potentates.
He received patents of nobility on 16 February 1669; in the following year purchased, for 60,000 livres, the Seigneury of Aubonne, located in the Duchy of Savoy, near Geneva.
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; and it also contains a violent attack on the agents of the Dutch East India Company, at whose hands Tavernier had suffered more than one wrong.
[8] This work is much prized by historians and geographers for its detailed accounts of the places visited by Tavernier, from 1631 to 1668, and his dealings with politically important persons at a time when reliable reports from the Near East and the Orient were scanty or lacking altogether.
In 1689, he passed through Berlin and Copenhagen and entered Russia on a passport issued by the king of Sweden, and a visa signed by the Czar's First Minister, Prince Andrea Gallatin, perhaps with the intent of traveling overland to India.
His remarkable three-hundred-year-old book (Le Six Voyages...1677) tells the stories of many significant gems that remain in the public mind today.
[14] 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 and was told of his intention to travel to Persia via Moscow.
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 was made by Charles Joret, in Jean-Baptiste Tavernier d'aprés des Documents Nouveaux, 8vo, Paris, 1886, where the literature of the subject is fully given.
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, 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.
The gem was reset by his great-grandson Louis XV in The Medal of The Order of the Golden Fleece, stolen in 1792, recut, and re-emerged in London 30 years later as the Hope Diamond.)
