Travel accounts are so familiar to the researcher dealing with the Ottoman Empire that after a while saturation sets in. That the authors of travelogues quite frequentıy copied from one another does not help matters. Moreover, the classical reminiscences of the more erudite writers probably constitute the kind of material which the investigator concerned with the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries most often skips with impatience. Thus it is easy to gain the impression that nothing very new can be learned from the perusal of seventeenth-century European travel accounts. Even worse, one might be pardonedin assuroing that most of these authors, apart from Tavernier and a few others, were altogether a dreary company