4to. [5], 320 pp., [24 pp., double column index], frontispiece engraving, 2 folding maps: the hemispheres and the Ottoman Empire, the copperplates show the pyramids, Mount Sinai, the Lebanon, Tripoli, Mount Tabor, the folded plate Jerusalem (caption partly cut off, with backed damages at margin and joint), available are plates to pages 38, 121, 122, 134, 164, 184, 192, 193, 195, 210, 215, 233, 241, 257, 274 and 280. – Lacks the view of Candia additionally bound-in a view of Raab (mounted), contemporary soiled and damaged vellum (spine pasted over with paper in former times), first three leaves with backed marginal damages, some marginalia by contemporary hand, scattered foxing, browned leaves, fly-leaves removed, paste-down and title with ms. ownership entry, small stamps on first two leaves, Miltenberger für Hoffmann, Nürnberg, (1674).

Synopsis

Georg Christoph von Neitzschitz’s career can hardly be reconstructed from external sources. According to his own data, he worked as a court preacher at Glücksburg; in 1630 he started extensive journeys through Europe, Asia and Africa, which were to last a total of seven years.
Neitzschitz joined forces with a company of Augsburger merchants in Naumburg on April 27, 1630, and crossed Augsburg, Innsbruck, and Padua to Venice, from where he embarked for Smyrna and Constantinople. He stayed in the capital of the Ottoman Empire for about a year before he crossed the country by road to Vienna, where he arrived in November 1631. Because of the difficulties he faced practising his religion in the imperial capital, he went to Pressburg several times and spent a few months as a guest at Schloss Althann. In January 1634 he joined the imperial embassy under Count Buchheim, and returned to Constantinople. The Polish-Turkish conflict prevented a trip to Palestine and so he returned to Vienna in the summer of the same year. In February 1636 he finally took his third trip, which led Neitzschitz to Jerusalem via Ljubljana, Trieste, Venice, Corfu, Crete, Alexandria, Cairo and Beirut. His return took him back to Vienna by way of Marseilles, Genoa, Pisa and Rome, before he returned to the “worthy Meissner Land” and died shortly after his arrival in 1637.
He left his brother, the elector’s colonel Rudolph of Neitzschitz, his diary, which was edited and published in Bautzen in 1666, almost thirty years after his death.
Bibliographic references: Kainbacher 325; Ibrahim Hilmy II, 62; Gay 269; Tobler 102; Röhricht 1030; Röhricht, Pilgerreisen, 297; one copy listed by COPAC at the British Library.