At the Center and the Periphery: Joseph Pitton de Tournefort Botanizes in Crete

Abstract

The French physician and botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708) set sail from Marseille to Crete on 24 April 1700, in the company of the German physician Andreas Gundelsheimer and the artist Claude Aubriet, on a voyage to the Levant financed by the French crown. Among the many aims of the voyage – scientific, ethnographic, political, economic – was the identification of the plants described in Dioscorides’ Materia medica, still an important source for the early modern pharmacopia, and the discovery of new plants, especially those with medical uses. Crete was the first port of call on Tournefort’s two-year voyage, in part because ancient sources had praised its botanical riches. But Tournefort’s own experience of Crete shook his expectations, both of the reliability of ancient botanists and the continuity of ancient and modern Greek culture. His perceptions of Crete fuse the seventeenth-century categories of the Ancients versus Moderns debate with incipient Enlightenment views on intellectual progress and stasis. The discoveries and disappointments of Tournefort’s report on Crete, recorded in the form of letters to colleagues and crown officials back in Paris, reveal the moment when Greece ceased to be a purely historical and highly idealized notion and began to be relegated to the periphery by a self-declared West European center.