Франсуа Пети де ла Круа: Французский востоковед XVII века

French orientalist (1653–1713)

François Pétis de la Croix (1653–1713) was a French orientalist. De la Croix was born in Paris, the son of the Arabic interpreter of the French court and author, also named François Pétis de la Croix (1622–1695) and inherited this office at his father's death, afterwards transmitting it to his own son, Alexandre Louis Marie, who also became a notable orientalist. At an early age, de la Croix was sent by Jean Baptiste Colbert to the Middle East; during the ten years he spent in Syria, Persia and Turkey he learned Arabic, Persian and Turkish and collected materials which he would use in future writings.

He served briefly as secretary to the French ambassador in Morocco, and was interpreter to the French forces sent against Algiers, contributing to the satisfactory settlement of the treaty of peace, which was drawn up by him in Turkish and ratified in 1684. He conducted the negotiations with Tunis and Tripoli in 1685, and those with Morocco in 1687; and in 1692 he was ultimately rewarded with an appointment to the Arabic chair in the Collège de France, which he held until his death in 1713.

He published Contes Turcs (Paris, 1707), an Armenian Dictionary, and an Account of Ethiopia. He also wrote The Thousand and One Days , a collection of fairy tales based on the model of One Thousand and One Nights. It was published in five volumes between 1710 and 1712. He supposedly translated it from a Persian compilation titled Hazar u yek ruz (هزار و یک روز, lit. (literally) ) which he acquired from one 'Dervish Mocles' or 'Moklas' in Isfahan in 1675. In fact, it was a very free adaptation of the Turkish Ferec baʿd eş şidde The book's publisher Barbin asked Alain René Lesage to rework de la Croix's translations into marketable French. Barbin also included two of the stories at the end of the eighth volume of Antoine Galland's Les mille et une nuits (1709), outraging Galland, who switched publishers for subsequent volumes. Stories from The Thousand and One Days inspired other works including Carlo Gozzi's Il re cervo (The King Stag) and Turandot. He edited and published in 1710 his father's authoritative biography of Genghis Khan, History of Genghizcan the Great, First Emperor of the Ancient Moguls and Tartars, translated into English by Penelope Aubin and published in 1722. This work was popularized in the American colonies by Benjamin Franklin and may have influenced Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. His best known work is his French translation of Sharaf ad Din Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama, which was published after Pétis de la Croix's death (4 vols., Paris, 1722; Eng. trans. by J Darby, London, 1723). Although the translation is generally well regarded, Pétis de la Croix erroneously identified Timur himself as the biography's sponsor, when in fact the book was commissioned by Timur's grandson Ibrahim Sultan.