A Merchant, a Spy, an Artist, and a Viennese Coffeehouse Owner: Some Notes on an Armenian Sketchbook-Chronicle Preserved in the National Library of Austria

Abstract

This essay is a detailed study of a heretofore largely ignored and extraordinary notebook written by an Armenian merchant, tailor, and late-seventeenth-century artist named Gabriel stored at the Austrian National Library (Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek). Part sketchbook with beautiful illuminations of religious and other landmarks and part chronicle, this notebook destabilizes clear-cut distinctions between travel diary, first-person narrative, chronicle, and a work of “nouveau literacy” in Islamicate Eurasia. This essay probes the multilayered contents of Gabriel's notebook and on the basis of an archival reconstruction of the author's microhistory, it places the author at the center of a complex underground spy ring involved in the 1687 Habsburg reconquest of the Ottoman fortified city of Buda in Hungary.