‎ARGENSOLA, BARTOLOMÉ LEONARDO.‎
‎Histoire de la conquête des isles Moluques par les Espagnols, par les Portugais, & par les Hollandais. 3 vols. - [FIRST FRENCH TRANSLATION]‎

‎Amsterdam, Jacques Desbordes, 1706. 12mo. Uniformly bound in three nice contemporary Cambridge-style mirror binding with four raised bands and richly gilt spines. Small paper-labels pasted on to upper compartments of spines. Boards with wear and with some loss of leather. Title-page in vol. 2 with red underlignings. Small worm-tract to first 20 ff. in vol. 1. Upper margin closely trimmed in vol. 1, occassionally touching header, otherwise internally nice and clean. (10), 405, (3) pp. (2), 402, (30) pp." (2), 388, (20) pp. + 3 frontispieces, 1 portrait, 5 maps and 26 plates.‎

Reference : 61007

‎A fine copy of the first French translation of this seminal work on the Maluku and Philipine Islands: ""Few narratives are written with so much judgment and elegance (…) One of the most important works for the history of the Philippine islands (…) The book also contains matter relating to Sir Francis Drake and American voyages, and to the history of Spanish and Portuguese exploration in the Indies"" (Cox). This present French translation, although being comparatively late, is considered superior to the Spanish original (1609) containing much more material than the original. “Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola [1562-1635] had a brilliant ecclesiastic career which he complemented with valuable forays into the literary field. One of his most outstanding works was the Conquista de las Islas Malucas [...] (The Discovery and Conquest of the Molucco and Philippine Islands […]), written at the request of the president of the Conselho de Indias de Espanha (Indian Council of Spain) and published in Madrid in 1609. In it the author describes the complicated relationship between the Moluccas [presently Maluku Islands] and Europe in a period prior to 1606, giving special attention to the geography and ethnography of the people in this archipelago. Bartolomé Leonardo thoroughly investigated the royal archives in Seville, paraphrasing even texts of several Portuguese chroniclers, mainly of João de Barros (See: Text 9 & João de Barros), António Galvão and Diogo do Couto.Conquista [...] (The Discovery and Conquest [...]) was the first work printed in Europe on the Moluccas, the distant Oriental archipelago which, from 1512, was regularly visited by Portuguese ships, and was the object of an intense dispute between the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns for many decades. This work, which was prepared with abundant recourse to sources of Portuguese origin, was little known in Spain even among those specialised in the subject, and not even the date survives of any partial of full translation. The period written about here refers to China in an artificial way, one of the oriental regions which never stopped appearing in the sights of Spanish conquistadors, especially after the colonisation of the Philippines.” (Rui Loureiro, Review of Culture, no 32) Sabin 1947‎