Bidspirit auction | MANRIQUE (Sebastião). ITINERÁRIO de Sebastião

MANRIQUE (Sebastião). ITINERÁRIO de Sebastião Manrique. Lisboa. 1946. - MANRIQUE (Sebastião) ITINERÁRIO de Sebastião Manrique . Edição organizada e prefaciada por Luís Silveira. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1946. 2 v.: il.; 225 mm. A fine edition of the travel itinerary of Sebastião Manrique, an Augustinian hermit born in Porto (c. 1590-1669), sent to the Bengal missions in 1628, where he remained for thirteen years, traveling through the kingdoms of Pegu, Arakan, the Mogor (reaching Agra and Lahore), Cochinchina, Makassar and other territories of the East. He returned to Europe by land, via Kandar, Kabul, Baghdad and Aleppo, arriving in Rome in 1643, where he would serve for twenty-six years as General Definitor and Procurator General of the Augustinian Province of Portugal at the Curia. He then went to London, where he was brutally murdered by a servant who intended to steal his travel money. The Itinerary is one of the most important and detailed Western sources from the 16th and 17th centuries about these eastern kingdoms, particularly about Arakan, of which it constitutes one of the rare European accounts prior to the 19th century. Originally published in Spanish in Rome in 1649, and republished in 1653, it was only in this 1946 edition, organized and prefaced by Luís Silveira and published by the Agência Geral das Colónias, that it became fully available in Portuguese. A definitive edition, essential for the study of the Portuguese presence and Augustinian missionary activity in the 17th-century East. ⚑ Auto-translated via Google Translate