François Savary de Brèves

François Savary, Seigneur de Brèves, Marquis de Maulévrier,

Baron de Semur et Artois
Date of Birth 1560
Place of Birth Maulévrier, France
Date of Death 1628
Place of Death Paris

Biography
François Savary, Seigneur de Brèves, from an ancient family that origi-
nated in Anjou, was born in Maulévrier, south of Angers, in 1560. He
had a good education, during which he evinced a special interest in his-
tory and politics. In 1582 his kinsman, Jacques Savary de Lancosme, who
had just been appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte by Henry III
(r. 1574-89), took him to Istanbul as his assistant. De Brèves distinguished
himself at the embassy, gaining the respect of the ambassador who
relied on him increasingly. De Lancosme died in 1591 and de Brèves,
who had acquired a sound knowledge of Turkish language and culture,
to which he owed the favour of the sultan, Murad III (r. 1574-95), was
permitted to succeed him as ambassador. Thanks to de Brèves, who was
devoted to the new king, Henry IV (r. 1589-1610), the insurgent inhabit-
ants of Marseilles bowed to the threat of Ottoman invasion and agreed to
submit to the French crown in 1593. In 1604 he concluded a further treaty
between the king of France and the sultan, now Ahmed I (r. 1603-17),
confirming the earlier French privileges, which were mainly commercial,
and adding new ones, which included freedom of worship for Roman
Catholics and the right to protect not only Christian pilgrims to Jeru-
salem but all foreigners travelling under French colours. In Istanbul he
himself brought about the release of numerous Christian captives, and
succeeded in blocking the Habsburgs in their endeavours to establish an
embassy. He was particularly proud of the fact that he always ensured
French precedence over any Habsburg ambassador.
De Brèves’s influence on three sultans – Murad III, Mehmed III
(r. 1595-1603) and Ahmed I – was altogether exceptional. Twice respon-
sible for the nomination of the Ottoman viceroy in Tunis, he had a
pasha of Algiers put to death for violating the treaties with France and
416 françois savary de brèves

an Ottoman dignitary condemned to the galleys for insulting a French

consul. He was recalled in 1605. As a reward for his services in the Otto-
man capital he received the gift of the French consulate in Alexandria,
to which he would appoint his protégés as vice-consuls, first Gabriel
Fernoulx, who had been his secretary in Istanbul, and then André Du Ryer.
On his return voyage from Istanbul to France de Brèves stopped off to
visit the Holy Land and Egypt and paid a more extensive call on the rul-
ers of Tunis and Algiers with orders from the sultan to release Christian –
particularly French – slaves and to return French shipping captured by
the corsairs. In Tunis he was partially successful. In Algiers, where the
pasha was a personal enemy, he failed. He finally arrived in Marseilles in
November 1606. In the following year he was created a state councillor
and gentleman of the chamber and married Anne, the sister of Jacques-
Auguste de Thou, one of the architects of the Edict of Nantes guarantee-
ing freedom of worship for the Huguenots. In 1608 he was appointed
ambassador in Rome.
In Rome, de Brèves won the unreserved favour of Pope Paul V
(r. 1605-21). Besides strengthening relations between France and the
papacy, he again managed to ensure the precedence of the French over
the Habsburgs and succeeded in arranging a special funerary service and
address on the death of Henry IV, something which had few precedents.
He also set up an oriental printing press, having Arabic, Syriac and possi-
bly even Persian types cut. One of his objectives was to publish Christian
texts for the benefit both of European students of Arabic and of Arabic-
speaking Christians, but he also wished to promote the culture of the
Islamic world. His first project when he set up his press in Rome was to
publish an Arabic dictionary, but it came to nothing. Besides devotional
manuals – Arabic translations of Bellarmine’s Doctrina Christiana, which
appeared in 1613, and of the Psalter, published in 1614 – de Brèves hoped
to produce an Arabic edition of the entire Bible. He was assisted by two
Maronites, Gabriel Sionita and Victorius Scialac, who were amongst the
first students to be invited to attend the Maronite College founded by
Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572-85). Loyal to their Jesuit educators and to the
papacy, they planned to use de Brèves’s press for the benefit of the mis-
sions striving to unite the Arabic-speaking Christians with the Church of
Rome, and themselves translated into Arabic both Bellarmine and the
Psalter.
Henry IV died in 1610 and de Brèves was recalled from Rome four years
later. On his return he came under the protection of the regent Marie
de Médicis and her minister the Maréchal d’Ancre, and was appointed
 françois savary de brèves 417

tutor to the younger brother of Louis XIII, Gaston, Duc d’Anjou and
later d’Orléans. In a position of power, de Brèves set up his press, the
Typographia Savariana, in Paris and was joined by Gabriel Sionita and
another Maronite from Rome, Johannes Hesronita. De Brèves also hoped
to found a college of oriental studies that would offer instruction in Turk-
ish, Arabic and Persian, but this was an ambition he failed to achieve.
The press, on the other hand, produced a small number of works in Paris.
The first, published in 1615, Articles du traicté faict en l’annee mil six cens
quatre, entre Henri le Grand, Roy de France, et de Navarre, et le Sultan
Amurat Empereur des Turcs, was in Turkish and French, and contained
the articles of the treaty signed with the sultan in 1604. It was followed
by an Arabic grammar compiled by de Brèves’s Maronite collaborators.
In 1617, however, de Brèves fell from favour with the assassination
of the Maréchal d’Ancre, the arrest of Marie de Médicis, and the rise
of the Duc de Luynes. In the following year other protectors died – his
brother-in-law de Thou and Cardinal Jacques Davy Du Perron, who had
taken an interest in his publishing projects. To his fury de Brèves was
relieved of his duties as tutor to the king’s brother. When his press pub-
lished the only Islamic book it ever produced, al-Idrīsī’s work on geogra-
phy, in 1619, it was all but out of his hands and was managed by Sionita
and Hesronita. Its last publications, in 1625 and 1628, were in Syriac and
intended for Christians alone. Although he had lost much of his political
influence, de Brèves’s estate of Maulévrier was erected to a marquisate
in 1625, three years before his death.
Savary de Brèves had an ambivalent approach to Islam and the Islamic
world. Determined to serve French interests, he saw to the protection of
the Catholic missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. Although he failed in
his attempts to found a college of oriental languages and to propagate
Islamic culture with his printing press, rumours abounded about his
liking for Islam. The collection of 110 manuscripts he brought back to
France was very largely Islamic, with texts mainly in Turkish, Arabic and
Persian. Acquired for the king by the typographer royal Antoine Vitré
in 1632, this was housed first in the library of Cardinal de Richelieu; it
passed into the hands of the Sorbonne 20 years later, and went to the
Bibliothèque Nationale after the French Revolution. Even if his press was
run chiefly by Maronites, de Brèves himself was advised by a man he had
met in Istanbul in 1603, the Muslim Hüseyn of Buda, an educated Otto-
man and a versatile linguist, who had accompanied him first to Rome in
1608 and then to Paris. According to the great assembler of court gossip,
418 françois savary de brèves

Tallement des Réaux, de Brèves not only referred to the pope as ‘le grand
Turc des chrestiens’ (the Grand Turk of the Christians), but had spent
so long in Istanbul ‘qu’il en estoit devenu tout mahométan’ (that it had
made him entirely Muslim). On his deathbed in 1628, his friend Louis
Gédoyn de Bellan, the former French consul in Aleppo, who shared his
views and was known as ‘Gédoyn le Turc’, advised him to confess ‘for
political reasons’, but he is nevertheless rumoured to have died with the
word ‘Allāh’ on his lips.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Primary
Many of de Brèves’s diplomatic dispatches from Istanbul are in MSS Paris
BNF – français 7161, fols 120r-125v; 16144, fols 208r-210v, 236r-237v,
242r-243r, 246r-247r, 250r-334r, 340r-395v, 362r-382v; 16145, fols 41r-42v,
49r-51v, 61r-62v; 23515, fols 290v-347v (instructions delivered by the king
in 1592); 15975, fols 90r-94v, 99r-100v.
François Savary de Brèves, Relation des voyages de Monsieur de Breves, tant en
Grece, Terre Saincte et Aegypte, qu’aux Royaumes de Tunis et Arger, Paris
1628
A. Gachet d’Artigny, Nouveaux mémoires d’histoire, de critique et de literature,
Paris, 1751, vol. 4, pp. 345-73 (this remains the fundamental biographical
study)
J. de Guignes, Essai historique sur la typographie orientale et grecque de
l’Imprimerie Royale, Paris, 1787, pp. 40-2 (‘Catalogue des manuscrits
apportés du Levant par M. de Breves’)
Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, ed. A. Adam, Paris 1960-1, vol. 1,
p. 242 (the original work, which long remained in manuscript, dates from
about 1660)
Secondary
S. Larzul, art. ‘Savary de Brèves, François’, in F. Pouillon (ed.), Dictionnaire des
orientalistes de langue française, Paris, 2008, 871-2
A. Hamilton and F. Richard, André Du Ryer and oriental studies in seventeenth-
century France, London, 2004, pp. 21-3, 40-4
R. Zaimova, ‘Les voyages de Guilaume Postel et Savary de Brèves en Orient. Mis-
sions diplomatiques ou recherches humanistes?’, Etudes Balkaniques 36
(2000) 139-55
G. Duverdier, ‘Savary de Brèves et Ibrahim Müteferrika. Deux drogmans culturels
à l’origine de l’imprimerie turque’, Bulletin du Bibliophile 3 (1987) 322-59
N. Gemayel, Les échanges culturels entre les Maronites et l’Europe. Du Collège
Maronite de Rome (1584) au Collège de ‘Ayn-Warqa (1789), Beirut, 1984,
pp. 212-49, 362, 377-8
 françois savary de brèves 419

G. Duverdier, ‘Les impressions orientales en Europe et le Liban’, in C. Abous-

souan (ed.), Le livre et le Liban jusqu’à 1900, Paris, 1982, 157-279, pp. 159-73
M. Emerit, ‘Au temps de saint Vincent de Paul. La mission de Savary de Brèves
en Afrique du Nord (1606)’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer 52
(1965) 297-314
G. Tongas, Les relations de la France avec l’Empire Ottoman durant la première
moitié du XVIIe siècle et l’ambassade à Constantinople de Philippe de Harlay
Comte de Césy (1619-1640), Paris, 1942, pp. 10, 63-4
J.B. Derost, François Savary, comte de Brèves, Marcigny, 1904
W-a., art. ‘Brèves (François Savary de)’, in L.-G. Michaud (ed.) Biographie univer-
selle ancienne et moderne, Paris, 1854, vol. 5, 502-3

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations

Relation des voyages de Monsieur de Breves,
‘Account of the travels of Monsieur de Brèves’
Date 1628
Original Language French
Description
The description of Savary de Brèves’s journey from Istanbul to France by
way of the North African coast, running to 383 pages, was compiled by
de Brèves’s secretary Jean-Baptiste Vinois de Bavon, edited by Jacques du
Castel, and published in Paris in 1628, the year of de Brèves’s death, under
the full title Relation des voyages de Monsieur de Breves, tant en Grece,
Terre Saincte et Aegypte, qu’aux Royaumes de Tunis et Arger. Ensemble, un
traicté faict l’an 1604. entre le Roy Henry le Grand, et l’Empereur des Turcs,
et trois discours dudit Sieur, et tout recueilly par le S. D. C.
The work contains innumerable details about the topography and the
political situation of the places he visited and is followed by four further
texts by de Brèves himself, which are independently paginated and with
signatures starting anew.
The first of these, Traicté faict en l’annee mil six cens quatre, entre
Henry le Grand Roy de France et de Navare, et Sultan Amat Empereur des
Turcs (34 pages), is the French translation of the treaty concluded in 1604
between Sultan Ahmed I and King Henry IV, first printed in Turkish and
French by de Brèves’s oriental press in Paris in 1615. The 50 articles stipu-
late a number of commercial privileges for the French and guarantee a
defence from pirates, the safety of the Catholic clergy in the Holy Land
and elsewhere, the immunity of French ambassadors and consuls, and
420 françois savary de brèves

the protection of foreigners travelling under French colours. There fol-

low notes emphasising the novelty of the treaty and reconstructing the
earlier situation.
In the next report, Discours abbregé des asseurez moyens d’aneantir et
ruiner la Monarchie des Princes Ottomans (47 pages), de Brèves stresses
the importance of an alliance with the Eastern Christians, Greeks, Arme-
nians, Copts, and also Maronites, Druze, Georgians and even Cossacks,
who, if they were persuaded to rebel, could contribute to the overthrow
of Muslim rule. Despite the unquestionable strength of the Ottoman
armies, which de Brèves assesses at length, the empire, which was fun-
damentally corrupt, would be quite unable to withstand a united west-
ern European attack together with revolts by the local Christians and
the armed intervention of the king of Poland. Certainly this would mean
ignoring the religious differences that prevailed in Europe, although, if
it were done, the power of the Turks would be destroyed. Such was the
plan de Brèves defended in Rome in the hope of gaining the support of
the pope.
The third text, Discours sur l’alliance qu’a le Roy, avec le Grand Sei-
gneur, et de l’utilité qu’elle apporte à la Chrestienté (26 pages), is on the
advantages of an alliance with the Turks. The sultan, de Brèves points
out, had proved to be invaluable both as a military ally and as a commer-
cial partner. Thanks to their privileged position, moreover, the French
could guarantee the freedom of worship and interests of the Catholics
residing in Istanbul and elsewhere and act as the protector of Christians
throughout the Ottoman Empire. De Brèves added to his report grateful
attestations from the pope and the missionaries.
The last of the four texts, Discours veritable, fait par Monsieur de
Breves, du procedé tenu lors qu’il remit entre les mains du Roy, la personne
de Monseigneur le Duc d’Anjou, frère unique de sa Majesté (47 pages), is an
indignant justification of de Brèves’s earlier career after his dismissal as
tutor of the Duc d’Anjou in 1618. He stresses both the qualities of the duke
and his own talents as a tutor, and recounts his achievements as ambas-
sador in Istanbul and Rome. The text is followed by letters between de
Brèves, Marie de Médicis and Henry IV.
Significance
After 22 years in Istanbul, during which he became a friend of three
sultans and their ministers and acquired an altogether exceptional
knowledge of Turkish and of the Ottoman government, de Brèves was
better qualified to write about the Ottoman Empire than most of his
 françois savary de brèves 421

contemporaries. How true the report of his Islamic sympathies (and

behaviour) was remains open to doubt, but he formed part of a circle
whose members were accused by the extreme Catholic dévot faction in
France of being free thinkers and libertines. One of the points at issue
was the desirability of the treaties with the sultan. The dévots, sympathis-
ers with the highly Catholic Ligue (to which de Brèves himself had been
close in his youth), were against it and maintained the need of a Catho-
lic alliance with Spain and the Habsburgs. Their more moderate oppo-
nents, on the other hand, appreciated the traditional rivalry between
the French crown and the Austrian dynasty, and believed that an alli-
ance with the Porte would successfully block a Habsburg advance. They
appealed to the political expediency of the alliance but they rarely dared
express wholehearted sympathy for the sultan and his religion. We thus
find them clamorously planning crusades against the Ottomans, arguing
for the protection of Catholics, supporting the missionaries and, as in the
case of de Brèves’s protégé André Du Ryer, claiming to place the transla-
tion of the Qur’an at the service of the Catholic Church. The Relation des
voyages de Monsieur de Breves is a good example of this position.
Publications
François Savary de Brèves, Relation des voyages de Monsieur de Breves,
tant en Grece, Terre Saincte et Aegypte, qu’aux Royaumes de Tunis
et Arger, Paris: Nicolas Gasse, 1628; RES-G-1267 (digitalised version
available through BNF)
François Savary de Brèves, Relation des Voyages de Monsieur de Breves,
faits en Hierusalem, Terre Saincte, Constantinople, Ægypte, Affrique,
Barbarie, qu’aux Royaume de Tunis et Arger, Paris: Thomas de la
Ruelle, 1630
Editions of the additional texts included in the Relation:
François Savary de Brèves, Articles du traicté faict en l’annee mil six
cens quatre, entre Henri le Grand, Roy de France, et de Navarre, et
le Sultan Amurat Empereur des Turcs, Paris, 1615 (French-Turkish);
4 A.or. 3252 (digitalised version available through MDZ)
François Savary de Brèves, Articles du traicté faict en l’annee mil six
cens quatre, entre Henri le Grand, Roy de France, et de Navarre, et le
Sultan Amurat Empereur des Turcs, Paris, 1625
Discours abbregé des asseurez moyens d’aneantir et ruiner la Monar-
chie des Princes Ottomans, Paris, (s.d.) (c. 1615); in Recueil histo-
rique contenant diverses pieces curieuses de ce temps, Cologne, 1666,
pp. 101-45; H.misc. 254 a (digitalised version available through MDZ)
422 françois savary de brèves

François Savary de Brèves, Discours sur l’alliance qu’a le Roy, avec le

Grand Seigneur, et de l’utilité qu’elle apporte à la Chrestienté, Paris,
n.d. (c. 1615); for a slightly different version see MS Carpentras, Bib-
liothèque Inguimbertine – 1777
Discours veritable, fait par Monsieur de Breves, du procedé tenu lors
qu’il remit entre les mains du Roy, la personne de Monseigneur
le Duc d’Anjou, frère unique de sa Majesté, Paris, 1618; in Gachet
d’Artigny, Nouveaux mémoires d’histoire, de critique et de literature,
vol. 4, pp. 374-419
Studies
Hamilton and Richard, André Du Ryer and oriental studies, pp. 40-1

Alastair Hamilton
Christian-Muslim Relations
A Bibliographical History
Volume 9. Western and Southern Europe
(1600-1700)

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