Abstract
While composing The Travels for the press, a further matter that Biddulph must often have considered was how the epistolary form was Pauline in inspiration. He needed to make it apparent to his readers that, like Paul, his object had been to meet other Christians, to teach and thereby to set the record straight on matters of crucial concern. His third letter, purporting to be written after two years in Aleppo, records his doubts and his strategies for overcoming them. It concludes: ‘And that is the best lesson which I have learned in my travels, Mundi contemptum, that is, The contempt of the world. And S. Pauls lesson, Phil. 4.11: In whatsoever state I am, therwith to be content’ (p. 84).
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Notes
Biddulph’s comment that the people in question ‘worship the Devill’ clearly indicates that he has the Yezidis in mind, a sect of Kurdish origin who never embraced any form of Islam. Thomas Cartwright also confused the Kurds in general with the Yezidis in his Turcophobic Preacher’s Travels (1611), writing: ‘the Curdies… doe adore and worship the Divell, to the end he may not hurt them or their cattell’ (pp. 20–1; reprinted in Purchas, 8: 487–8). Although his account was published after Biddulph’s, Cartwright travelled in 1600. Among the papers in the British Library of the antiquarian Thomas Birch is the following transcription extracted from a lost original: ‘Mr Edmund Dunch’s Travels from February 1678/9 to July 1680. The sect among them [the Turks] that I saw most of, were the Izedee, or those of the Christian faith — I visited their priests, or fathers, who in countenance resemble Frankes more then others of that countrey, in a modest garb different from other people. They are very poor, live upon charity, and highly respected. I take them for a mighty good sort of men. They have pleasant countenances, and sung and danced bravely. They told us, that they were Christians, and detested Mahomet, but the Turks were strong, and they durst not declare themselves, as they did desire. Our table was often covered; every follower brought in his offering, beeing thin bread like pancakes just made for us, milk, leban [thick sour milk], wine, eggs, etc. This treatment was under tents at the bottom of a hill, to the top of which in the afternoon I climbed to see their cheife, who dwelt there in a convent. An old and very grave person he was; he sat still to receive us, I kissed his hand, and in respect to him, itt being an affront to refuse itt, I drank part of a draught of sour wine with him; but he spoake not a word, while I was there, and they say he never talkes. He was clad in a strange warm garment, peculiar to the holy men, and like the other preists, forcing[?] that this man upon his hat wore a cap hanging downe over his was fringed with silke ––Mr. Frampton, once minister to the English in Aleppo, had been among these people formerly, and christened four of their children, as I have been told; thou little religion is to be found with them. They esteme any creature, that is blacke; and worship the devill, that he may doe them no hurt.’ 5. Birch added: ‘Mem. See Pococke’s Travels, Vol. ii. p. 1. pag. 102, 200, concerning a sect of religious persons among the Mahomentans there called Ja’seedes’, BL Add Ms 4254, Birch papers, f. 107. Unfortunately it is not possible to know where Dunch met the Yezidis. Robert Frampton was chaplain in Aleppo 1655–66. These accounts are important since they indicate a continuing Yezidi presence west of the Euphrates during the seventeenth century. Following constant persecution by Sunni Muslims, other Kurds and Christians, the Yezidis had moved east to an area between Mardin, the Jebal Sinjar and Mosul by 1840 when they were visited by Austen Layard, the early Assyriologist: see Nineveh and its Remains (1849), 1: 270–325. Following Layard’s account, the Yezidis came to be of considerable interest to generations of subsequent English travellers: for reports of visits to the Yezidi temple near Mosul, see W. A. and Edgar T. A. Wigram, Cradle of Mankind (1914), Lady Drower (Ethel Stefana Stevens), By Tigris and Euphrates (1923), Peacock Angel (1941) and the more recent scholarly account by Edmonds, Pilgrimage to Lalish (1967). The Yezidis continue to be persecuted; most from the Mardin area of modern Turkey have migrated to Germany since the late 1970s, while those in and around Mosul were among the victims of Saddam Hussein’s anti-Kurdish campaigns of the 1980s and were subject to the anti-Iraq bombing by NATO during the 1990s. Recent accounts of the sect can be found in Guest, Survival Among the Kurds (1993), McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (1997) and Fuccaro, The Other Kurds (1999).
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© 2004 Gerald MacLean
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MacLean, G.M. (2004). Journey to Aleppo. In: The Rise of Oriental Travel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511767_8
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