12mo. 165 pp., [2], contemporary full-calf, worn with little loss to corners and top spine partly detached, browning to margins of title and subsequent leaf, bookseller's small sticker to foot of inside front cover, William Crook, London, 1671.

Synopsis

The true first edition of this work appeared in 1636, eight editions had appeared by 1671 and the work was also translated into German (1687) and Dutch (1707).
Sir Henry Blount was a traveller and explorer, who was educated in Oxford. On 7 May 1634 he left Venice in a Venetian galley on his well known voyage to the Levant. He sailed down the Adriatic, and descended on Bosnia plains, then Sarajevo. He departed with the Turkish troops proceeding to the war in Poland. He travelled through Serbia, to Belgrade, proceeding to Sophia in Bulgaria, then crossing the Balkans – the Land of mosques.
Henry King complimented Blount in a poem “To his noble and judicious friend Sir Henry Blount upon his Voyage”. The work was deservedly popular; Blount treated his subject with objectivity and viewed Turkish society as different from but equally valid to the life he knew in England. In the preface he describes himself as ‘not dazzled with any affection, prejudicially or mist of education’. According to some accounts he left Venice for the Levant in company with a Janissary he met there; this may account in some part of his open-minded attitude to the Turks.
Bibliographic References: Blackmer 154 for second edition; Wing B3319; Weber 289.