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In 1623, an Italian traveler, Pietro della Valle, reached the Portuguese colony of Goa, in western India, after nine years of travel in the Near East. In the same year, a Jesuit, Christopher Borrus (or Borri), on his way back to Italy, also stopped in Goa after his missionary work in Cochin-China (southern Vietnam ). Della Valle and Borrus stayed in the same monastery and met for the first time at a midday meal. They exchanged views about the various Eastern cultures they had explored. Borrus bragged of how he had impressed the Chinese literati by making accurate astronomical predictions, thus convincing them to convert to Christianity. In response, della Valle mentioned meeting a brilliant Persian astronomer, Mullah Zayyn al-Dīn al-Lārī, who had firmly rejected the possibility of conversion. Borrus then offered to use the same approach that had proved successful in China: to send a translation of his book on the Tychonic system to al-Lārī, with the hope of convincing him that the advanced state of European astronomy resulted from religious superiority. Quickly agreeing, the two men— della Valle, trained in classical and Near Eastern languages, and Borrus, skilled in astronomy, cartography, and mathematics—worked to translate into Persian a short Latin work by Borrus on the Tychonic system. The translation, as it has come down to us, is in the form of a Persian-Italian manuscript letter, made up as a booklet. It was addressed to a Persian astronomer, al-Lārī, and eventually became part of the collections of the Vatican Library. The outcome of this meeting seems to represent an interesting attempt to convert a Muslim by using arguments about the superiority of European astronomy, but the details of the project, as found in the margins of the letter, indicate something rather surprising. Della Valle’s handwriting in the manuscript letter to al-Lārī appears in a column of Italian and a column of poor Persian, but also includes phrases and terms in Arabic, Ottoman-Turkish, and Latin. The heart of the translation sets out the technicalities of the Tychonic system, but certain autobiographical inserc h a p t e r t w o Exchanging Heliocentrism for Ur-Text 48 Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660 tions on the margins of the introduction and the concluding sections introduce the possibility that the Copernican cosmology, based on the Galilean discoveries, might be a better world-system. There is another source for students of della Valle’s letter. After returning to Italy in the 1650s, della Valle published a popular travel journal, De viaggi. The journal is a collection of letters taken from correspondence with his patron , Mario Schipano. Subjected to the scrutiny of inquisitorial censorship and intended for a large audience, De viaggi silences the incident of the letter and accentuates a culturally adventurous della Valle. The journal serves as a backdrop to the manuscript letter to al-Lārī, allowing us to detect the places where della Valle self-censored De viaggi, omitting the names of Galileo and Johannes Kepler, whom he mentioned in the manuscript letter. Finally, in 1662, ten years after della Valle’s death, the antiquarian Giovanni Pietro Bellori published a short biography of him that provides a useful third source. Bellori, who later became famous for composing biographies of artists, depicted della Valle as the descendant of a distinguished Roman family, a man linked with leading scholars in Naples. The Neapolitans fostered in della Valle a passion for antiquity that eventually led to his long and famous trip to the Near East. Bellori also supplied some important details that the letter to al-Lārī and De viaggi could not include—namely, della Valle’s life after returning to Rome and his affiliations and activities among various radical and subversive intellectual societies. Each of these three main sources is incomplete and provides insufficient clues to our Pythagorean messenger and his motives. The bilingual letter says nothing about della Valle’s intellectual background. De viaggi, published in Rome for the general public as a curiosity, gives a descriptive account of the trip but is quiet on the question of cosmology. Finally, Bellori’s Vita addresses della Valle’s life before and after his return, but gives us only a glimpse into his social and cultural affiliations . And yet the faint echoes of Galilean discoveries apparent in the letter written in Goa in 1623 provide evidence of a more interesting story of patrons...

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