"Mirat ul-Memalik" seeks to be a "mirror" of the "countries" (memalik is the plural of mulk) through which Sidi Ali Reis traveled on his long, difficult journey home after his shipwreck. It's extremely useful in that capacity, but it's also a wonderful reflection of its author's own temperament and view of the world. It moves fast, and makes for enjoyable reading.

My editing has consisted of correcting obvious typographical and other errors; I have also adjusted the punctuation for clarity and ease of reading, and broken a few extremely long paragraphs into shorter ones. I haven't sought to retain diacritics; but there weren't all that many in Vambéry's original text anyway. Standardization has been only very lightly imposed, mostly since Vambéry himself is so casual about it: he writes, for example, both "Ghazel" and "Gazel," and writes each of them either with or without a capital G; and similarly for many other names and terms. Where a name or term was important and interesting, I've tried to keep its spelling, even if archaic, consistent throughout. I haven't changed his transliteration system: "Ekber" has not been made into "Akbar," or "Djagatai" into "Chughtai." All comments added by me are in [[double brackets]] in the text itself.

All the footnotes are Vambéry's; but not all Vambéry's footnotes have been included. A few very short definitional ones have been incorporated in parentheses into the text, where they join many other such parenthesized definitions that he provides. Others have been omitted or shortened, especially those that deal with obscure points of medieval Turkish vocabulary and grammar. I tried to retain those that had historical or cultural interest in their own right. When Vambéry found an expression too obscure to translate, he replaced it with "...."; I have retained this usage. But then he usually reproduced and discussed it in a footnote as well, and such footnotes I have omitted. So any serious Turkish scholar will naturally want to go directly to Vambéry's text; but for the general reader, the present version should be satisfactory. I dedicate it to my students in "Islam in South Asia: an Introduction," whose enjoyment of this text has led me to make this version of it.

Ottoman culture is far afield for me, but for some quick basic background information you could always start with *The Ottomans*, from Prof. Richard Hooker's site, or with *Suleiman the Magnificent* from Wikipedia. About the janissaries: *"The Tribute of Children"*, from the Medieval Sourcebook; or *"The Turkish Letters" of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq*, from the Modern History Sourcebook. On the literary side, you could take a look at *"Selections from the Legends and Poetry of the Turks"*, from the Medieval Sourcebook; or *"Ottoman Lyric Poetry"*, by Walter Andrews et al. The Medieval Sourcebook also provides another version of *"Mirat ul-Memalik"*, but unfortunately it contains many undetected OCR typos.

And as for our translator, Prof. Arminius Vambéry, I've discovered two articles by him: "England in the Orient" (1893) and "Russia and England" (1895).

Fran Pritchett
February 2005