Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq - at The Ottoman Court

At The Ottoman Court

In 1554 and again in 1556, Ferdinand named him ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent. His task for much of the time he was in Constantinople was the negotiation of a border treaty between his employer (the future Holy Roman Emperor) and the Sultan over the disputed territory of Transylvania. He had no success in this mission while Rustem Pasha was the Sultan's vizier, but ultimately reached an accord with his successor Semiz Ali Pasha.

During his stay in Constantinople, he wrote his best known work, the Turkish Letters, a compendium of personal correspondence to his friend, and fellow Hungarian diplomat, Nicholas Michault, in Flanders and some of the world's first travel literature. These letters describe his adventures in Ottoman politics and remain one of the principal primary sources for students of the 16th century Ottoman court. He also wrote in enormous detail about the plant and animal life he encountered in Turkey. His letters also contain the only surviving word list of Crimean Gothic, a Germanic dialect spoken in some isolated regions of the Crimean at the time.

Busbecq discovered an almost complete copy of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, an account of Roman emperor Augustus' life and accomplishments, at the Monumentum Ancyranum in Ancyra. He identified its origin from his reading of Suetonius and published a copy of parts of it in his Turkish Letters.

He was an avid collector, acquiring valuable manuscripts, rare coins and curios of various kinds. Among the best known of his discoveries was a 6th-century copy of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, a compendium of medicinal herbs. The emperor purchased it after Busbecq's recommendation; the manuscript is now known as the Vienna Dioscorides. His passion for herbalism led him to send Turkish tulip bulbs to his friend Charles de l'Écluse, who acclimatized them to life in the Low Countries. Less than a century later tulip mania was sweeping the United Provinces and ruining its financial markets. Busbecq has also been credited with introducing the lilac to Europe (though this is debated) as well as the Angora goat.