The rare first English edition of Nicolay's Navigations, a work whose illustrations helped shaped the West's popular imagination of the Islamic world. The artist, geographer and spy Nicolas de Nicolay (1517-1583) went to the court in Constantinople as part of an embassy from Henri II to the Sultan; Henri's predecessor had counted Suleiman as an ally and Henri wished to revive that accord. Nicolay's work, a combination of a travelogue with a survey of the Ottoman Empire, was first published in French at Lyon in 1567 and quickly translated into other European languages. His depiction of the Ottomans is less pejorative than other similar accounts although still interwoven at times with salacious details of sex, drugs and cruelty (lesbians at the hammam, the genital mutilation of religious ascetics, opium-laced sorbets, etc).

The 60 woodcuts in the present edition were copied from the Antwerp versions, possibly by a Dutchman called Charles Tressell. The monogram CT appears in at least two cuts. The explicit woodcut of "a Religius Turke" to leaf 101v, is often found mutilated, but remains intact in this copy. Other woodcuts include the earliest depictions of inhabitants of Algiers, Tripoli, Turkey, Greece, Persia and Armenia. Jewish occupational costumes are represented by a physician, a Jewess and a merchant. The work is frequently cited by Shakespeare scholars as a source for The Merchant of Venice.

First edition in English; small 4to (20 x 15 cm); title within decorative border, 60 full-page woodcuts within decorative borders, small repaired marginal tears to third prelim page, ff 108, 109, and 134, with tear to margin of ff 153 repaire with loss to text of last two lines of verso; later full calf by Brentano's, New York, gilt rule frame to boards, spine in six richly gilt compartments with gilt green morocco lettering piece, all edges gilt, a very good copy; [4], 163, 3 (contents) ff.

Blackmer 1197; Koç V, 1346 (also cf. Koç I, 18 & 18a for Lyon & Antwerp editions); cf. Colas 2206; STC 18574.