Achille Harlay de Sancy

Achille de Harlay de Sancy, bishop of Saint-Malo (1581, Paris – 20 November 1646), the son of Nicolas de Harlay, seigneur de Sancy, was a French clergyman, diplomat and intellectual. He was noted as a linguist and orientalist.

He was educated for a career in the Roman Catholic Church, but, though he remained a friend to his fellow pupil Armand-Jean du Plessis, who became Cardinal Richelieu, he resigned his vocation to become a soldier after the death of his elder brother in 1601. For seven years, from 1610 to 1619, he was French Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, where he amassed a fortune of some 16,000 sterling by doubtful means, and was bastinadoed by order of Sultan Mustafa I for his frauds. One of his secretaries, M. Lefevre, wrote a manuscript Voyage de M. de Sancy , ambassadeur pour le Roi en Levant, fait par terre depuis Raguse jusques à Constantinople l'an 1611.

On his return to France, Harlay joined the Oratorian Fathers, and when François de Bassompierre was sent to England in 1627 to regulate the differences between Henrietta Maria and her husband Charles I, Harlay de Sancy was attached to the queen's ecclesiastical household, but Charles I secured his dismissal. He became bishop of Saint-Malo in 1632.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)