François Petis de la Croix

François Pétis de la Croix (Paris, 1653 - December 4, 1713) was a French orientalist and antiquarian.

Biography

He was born in Paris, the son of an Arabic interpreter for the French court. He inherited his father's office on his father's death, in 1695, and subsequently passed it on to his own son, Alexandre-Louis-Marie. Jean-Baptiste Colbert sent him to the East, where he spent ten years between Syria, the Persian Empire, and Turkey. There he studied the Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages.

He pursued a diplomatic career and briefly served as secretary to the French ambassador to Morocco. He was also an interpreter for the French troops sent to Algiers, where he helped to reach a peace treaty whose draft in Turkish he wrote, and which was ratified in 1684. He directed the negotiations with Tunis and Tripoli in 1685 and with Morocco in 1687: the zeal, tact and linguistic management that he demonstrated in the negotiations with these oriental courts ended up being rewarded in 1692, when he was chosen for the chair of Arabic at the College of France, where he remained until his death.

Work

Notable works of his are History of Louis XIV, translated into Persian; The thousand and one days; Persian Tales; Armenian and Latin Dictionary and History of Egyptian Antiquities. But the one that contributed the most to his literary fame is his excellent French translation of Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi's Zafar Nama or History of Tamerlane (the original dates from 1425)., which was published posthumously and consists of four volumes. This work, a rare specimen of the critical history of Persia, was compiled under the auspices of Mirza Ibrahim Sultan, son of Shah Rukh and grandson of Tamerlane. The only mistake made by Pétis de la Croix in translating him was that he attributed Ibrahim Sultan's important intervention in the Zafar Nama to Tamerlane himself.