François Pétis de la Croix (Orientalist, 1653)

François Pétis de la Croix (* 1653 in Paris ; † December 4, 1713 there ) was a French orientalist .

Born as the son of the elder François Pétis de la Croix (1622–1695), an Arabic translator at the French court, de la Croix inherited this office when his father died in 1695 and later passed it on to his own son Alexandre-Louis-Marie , who also excelled in oriental studies. Colbert sent Pétis de la Croix to the Orient at an early age ; He spent ten years in Syria , Persia and the Ottoman Empire . He mastered Arabic, Persian and Turkish and collected extensive materials for his future writings.

He briefly served as secretary to the French ambassador to Morocco and was a translator for the French armed forces sent to Algeria . He contributed to the peace treaty, which he drafted in Turkish and ratified in 1684. He conducted the negotiations with Tunis and Tripoli in 1685 and in Morocco in 1687. The zeal, tact and the linguistic knowledge that he showed in these and other business with oriental courts were finally rewarded in 1692 with his appointment to the Arabic professorship at the Collège Royal de France which he held until his death.

François Pétis de la Croix published Contes turcs (Paris, 1707 ), Les Mille et un jours (five volumes, Paris, 1710–1712); an Armenian dictionary and a report on Ethiopia . But the lasting monument of his literary fame is his excellent French version of Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi's Zafar Nama or Histoire de Timur Bec (from 828 AH; AD 1425 ), a biography of Timur Lenk published posthumously (four volumes, Paris, 1722). This work, a rare example of critical Persian history, was prepared under the leadership of Sultan Mirza Ibrahim , the son of Shah Rukh and grandson of the great Timur.

The only flaw in his otherwise impeccable translation is that he mistakenly ascribes the important part that Sultan Ibrahim had in the Zafar Nama to Timur himself.

Web links

• Literature by and about François Pétis de la Croix in the catalog of the German National Library