page_title: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Porträt des Goldschmieds und Orientreisenden Jean-Baptiste TavernierFrançais&#160;: Portrait oriental de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
context_page_description: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was a 17th-century French gem merchant and traveler. Tavernier, a private individual and merchant traveling at his own expense, covered, by his own account, 60,000 leagues in making six voyages to Persia and India between the years 1630 and 1668. In 1675, Tavernier, at the behest of his patron Louis XIV, published Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.
  Tavernier was born in Paris of a French or Flemish Huguenot family that had emigrated to Antwerp, to escape persecution, and which subsequently returned to Paris after the publication of the Edict of Nantes, which promised protection for French Protestants. Both his father Gabriel and his brother Melchior Tavernier were cartographers. Though it is clear from the accuracy of his drawings that Tavernier received some instruction in the art of cartography/engraving, he was possessed of a wanderlust. While still a teenager, he traveled extensively through Europe and achieved a working knowledge of its major languages.
context_section_description: The conversations he heard in his father's house inspired Tavernier with an early desire to travel, and by his sixteenth year he had already visited England, the Low Countries and Germany.
  In 1624, at eighteen, Tavernier took service with the Viceroy of Hungary. By 1629, after four and a half years, he had grown restless. At the invitation of the young Duke of Rethel, to whom he had previously been briefly attached as a guide and translator, Tavernier traveled to Mantua and took service as an ensign of artillery under the duke's father, the Duke of Nevers, who was besieging the city.
  In the following year Tavernier traveled, as a translator, with an Irish mercenary in the service of the emperor, Colonel Walter Butler (afterwards notorious for killing Albrecht von Wallenstein).
  In the Six Voyages Tavernier states that he departed from Butler's company, in 1630, with the intention of traveling to Ratisbon (Regensburg), to attend the investiture of the son of Emperor Ferdinand II as King of the Romans. However, as the investiture did not take place until 1636, it is probable that he attended the ceremony between his first and second voyages. By his own account he had seen Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and Hungary, as well as France, England and the Low Countries, and spoke the principal languages of these countries.
caption: Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier by Nicolas de Largillière (c. 1700).
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