Femme moresque de Tripoly en Barbarie. (61)

Sought-after copper engraved plate of a woman with child from Tripoli. Plate from Laonikos Chalcocondyle’s "L'histoire de la décadence de l'empire grec et establissement de celuy des Turcs." by Thomas Artus d'Embry, after Nicolas de Nicolay.
The Athenian Laonikos Chalcocondyle who flourished in the mid-fifteenth century and died in about 1464, concentrated on the later period of the Byzantine empire. His history was first published in a Latin translation in 1556. It was translated into French by the humanist Blaise de Vigenère in 1577. The 1612 edition contains a long appendix on the costumes of Turkish magistrates and officers and of the peoples subjected to them. The engravings are made after designs of the sixteenth-century French traveler Nicolas de Nicolay, seigneur d’Arfeuille.

Nicolas de Nicolay (1517-1583), was a French geographer and traveler and originally from the Dauphiné region. In 1556 he received the official title of "geographer of the king."
Nicolay had traveled extensively in northern Europe (Germany, Denmark, Livonia, Sweden, England, Scotland) for diplomatic missions. In 1551, Henry II ordered Nicolas de Nicolay to follow Gabriel Aramon, during an embassy to the Grand Turk Suleiman the Magnificent. During this trip, his mission was to make informal surveying: the mission passed through Malta, Algeria, Tripoli (in Libyan) and the Greek islands.
He returned with 800 to 900 drawings of sites, cities, islands, ports, castles and fashion.

Reference: Lipperheide, 1407 (for the edition of 1662).