He mentions his mother, but says nothing of his father. He does speak of his older brothers, ʿAbdallāh and Anṭūn, whose correspondence with him during his travels suggests they were responsible for him.9
Another detail one may infer from the book’s first pages pertains to the Maronite community to which Diyāb belonged. Like other Eastern churches, it was undergoing a process of catholicization that had begun in the sixteenth century. Only a few years after the Council of Trent, in the late sixteenth century, the first Catholic missionaries established themselves in Aleppo and began to reformulate Eastern Christian rites and dogma. A decade later, the Holy See opened a Maronite college in Rome. This catholicizing of the Eastern churches, which peaked in the first decades of the eighteenth century, entailed the establishment of new teaching institutions, the proliferation of books and literacy, the introduction of a printing press, and the formation of the Melkite Greek Catholic church.10
It was during this time of change that Diyāb set out, in 1706, for the Monastery of Saint Elishaʿ, the main residence of the Lebanese Maronite order. The order had been established in 1694 by the young Aleppans ʿAbdallāh Qarāʿalī, Jibrīl Ḥawwā, and Yūsuf al-Baṭn, with the permission of the patriarch Iṣṭifān al-Duwayhī.11 In founding the first indigenous monastic order based on a European model, these young men became important figures in the catholicization of the Maronite community.12 Hoping to become a monk, Diyāb arrived at a moment when the community was still in the throes of an internal dispute over hierarchy and doctrinal direction.13
The experience at Saint Elishaʿ and his meeting with one of the founders, ʿAbdallāh Qarāʿalī (d. 1742), left a profound impression on Diyāb. He vividly portrays his reverence for the monks’ “angelic conduct” (§1.17) and for the orderly rhythms of monastic life. He soon came to feel, however, that he did not belong in the community. When at one point he fell ill, he received permission from the abbot to leave the monastery, under the pretext of convalescing in his hometown. Failing to find a job in Aleppo, he resigned himself to returning to the monastery. On his way back, he met Paul Lucas, a traveler “dispatched by the sultan of France,” and joined his entourage (§1.29).
The “gentleman” (khawājah) Paul Lucas, as Diyāb first calls him, was born in 1664 to a merchant family in Rouen. Two years later, after serving in the Venetian army, he embarked on his first tour to the Levant.14 By the time he met Diyāb, he was in the midst of his third voyage to the East. Drawn by Diyāb’s linguistic skills, Lucas offered him the job of personal companion and dragoman on a journey across the Mediterranean world. In exchange, Lucas promised Diyāb a position at the Royal Library in Paris. The young Aleppan was intrigued by the offer, and quickly accepted, presenting himself as a traveler interested in seeing the world rather than a humble novice returning to his monastery. After making a few discreet inquiries about the Frenchman’s integrity, he agreed to accompany him on his travels.
When they arrived in Paris, Diyāb lived with Lucas, from September 1708 to June 1709, waiting patiently to be hired into the position at the Royal Library, as he had been promised. When no such job materialized, Diyāb grew frustrated. In the meantime, he had made the acquaintance of Antoine Galland, whom he describes as an “old man who was assigned to oversee the library of Arabic books and could read Arabic well,” (Volume Two, §10.9). After Galland arranged for Diyāb to be hired by a member of the French court to work, like his former master, as a traveler dispatched by Louis XIV, he decided he would leave the French capital, but the offer of employment—like the library position he coveted—never came through. On his way home to Syria, he stopped for some time in Istanbul, where he worked as a valet and a housekeeper until he was urged by a friend to accompany him to Aleppo. Right after Diyāb’s return from his travels in June 1710, his brother ʿAbdallāh, with the help of an uncle, opened a textile shop for him. A few years later, Paul Lucas returned to Aleppo, sought out Diyāb, and reproached him for leaving Paris so rashly. After going on one last adventure together in the vicinity of Aleppo, the two men went their separate ways. Diyāb tells us that he worked as a textile merchant for twenty-two years, but gives no details about his life after he retired in his forties.
The encounter with Lucas had a profound influence on Diyāb. It was common for Aleppan Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to work for (French) consuls, traders, missionaries, and travelers who formed part of the social fabric of the city. In fact, Lucas was not Diyāb’s first patron; like his brothers, Diyāb had worked for a dozen years, beginning before he was ten years old, as a domestic servant in the employ of various French merchants. His contact with Europeans helped him acquire a good knowledge of French, Italian, and Turkish. His association with Lucas also helped him to attain a prestigious position within his community. In the 1760s, when he wrote The Book of Travels, it was important to Diyāb to assert this prestige before his extended family and larger community. Lucas is accordingly mentioned in two of the book’s chapter headings. He doubtless also appeared in the now-lost first pages of the narrative, and perhaps even in the title of the book.
In the first chapters of Diyāb’s travelogue, Lucas’s discoveries and his acquisition of artifacts—rare precious stones, coins, books, and a mummy, among other things—are the main focus of the narrative. Diyāb describes how Lucas offered to treat people’s illnesses in exchange for objects he wanted to acquire, something Lucas himself reports that he did. Diyāb mentions Lucas’s expertise in astronomy, geometry, philosophy, natural history, and other disciplines. He recounts how Lucas came to his aid on more than one occasion, such as when Diyāb nearly froze to death during the icy winter in Paris, or when he was arrested by the French gendarmerie.
Given Diyāb’s apparently reverential attitude toward Lucas, it is noteworthy that the latter nowhere mentions Diyāb in his own travelogue. The young Syrian cannot even be discerned among the nameless servants and dragomans that Lucas happens to mention on occasion.15 This discrepancy between the two works can be seen in other ways. Diyāb offers a richly detailed account of the logistics of travel, of the food they consumed, and of the different types of clothing he saw. Lucas’s focus is, rather, on sightseeing at ancient ruins, collecting antiquities, and describing his adventures, which include the occasional miracle.16 He excludes from his account the countries of Catholic Europe that so fascinated Diyāb, who describes them along with the parts of the Ottoman Empire that were largely unknown to Aleppans. Thus, although the itinerary described in the two travelogues is generally the same, only a few episodes correspond well enough to be fruitfully compared.17
One such episode is the story of the jerboas that Lucas presented to Louis XIV and his entourage at Versailles. In his account, Lucas offers a drawing of a jerboa,18 and claims to have witnessed a hunt for the animals in the desert in Upper Egypt.19 In Diyāb’s version of the story, we learn that Lucas had in fact acquired the jerboas at a French merchant’s house in Tunis. As he reports the lie his patron told the king, Diyāb gives his readers a glimpse of his own feelings about Lucas’s posturing. He also recounts how Lucas, unable to identify the exotic species for the king, turned to his companion for help. Diyāb knew the animal’s name in both French and Arabic and was able to write these down at Louis XIV’s request.
The jerboas—a subject