Laudivius Zacchia. Lettere del Gran Mahumeto, Imperadore de Turchi..., collation: A-M8, title with woodcut device and head-piece, some water-staining, old small armorial stamp to title, new endpapers, contemporary limp vellum, spine ends nicked, 8vo (155 x 95 mm.), Venice, Gabriel Giolito G.G. de' Ferrari, 1563.
⁂ First Italian, and apparently the earliest vernacular edition of the celebrated Epistolae Magni Turchi, a best-selling fifteenth century literary invention by Laudivius Zacchia of Vezzano [= Laudivio da Vezzano, not to be confused with his C17 namesake, the Cardinal of Santa Romana and prosecutor of Galileo]. Translated here by the ubiquitous Lodovic Dolce, these letters purport to represent the correspondence of Mahomet II, the living conqueror of Constantinople and Byzantium, with governors and potentates from Persia to the Mediterranean islands, Greece, and Italy - through which Laudivio could highlight Turkish/Islamic territorial ambitions, as well as (by implication) political and ethical differences between East and West not always to the credit of his Christian contemporaries. The little collection proved hugely popular, calling for more than twenty incunabular editions, all now individually rare, and further reprints in the C16 and C17, including the English version of 1607 titled The Turkes Secretorie, which took them (historically) at face value. In many of these, the short text is paired, suggestively, with the fabricated letters of Phalaris, the C6 BCE tyrant of Agrigento, whose authenticity was widely suspected among learned C15-16 readers, and finally exposed as sophistic exercises by Richard Bentley in 1697.
Literature: BM, STC Italian 455; Gollner 1047; Blackmer 955