The Travels and Journal of Ambrosio Bembo, and: Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (review)

Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's scholarly work opens with remarkable clarity and large brushwork some new vistas on the way in which the rich and varied cultural space between Turkey and China was perceived, inhabited, appreciated, and made sense of by the Persian, Turkish, and Indian Muslim (with the exception of the Russian orthodox Nikitin) travel ers from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. For a young Venetian aristocrat, too junior (nineteen at the time) to enter the Grand Council or to take up any other public office and yet anxious to acquire theoretical and practical knowledge, travel and travel writing were a natural way of marking his coming of age.