Michel d’Asquier, Imperial Interpreter and Bibliophile

half of the seventeenth century speakers of oriental languages were employed incidentally as interpreters. They generally had other occupations in the Church or at the universities. In Habsburg Austria the situation was different. On the western borders of the Ottoman Empire, in a more or less permanent state of war with its Turkish neighbour, Austria offered abundant opportunities for interpreters, just as it did for soldiers of fortune. The post of imperial interpreter in Vienna was both influential and demanding. It was attended by political and administrative responsibilities which left no time for an academic or ecclesiastical career. Although the Austrians set up an interpreters' school, the Orientalische Akademie, only in 1754, long after the Venetians and the French had done so,1 linguists from all over Europe had found employment by the Hofkriegsrat or war council in Vienna, the body of officials and generals responsible for Habsburg military dispositions and above all for the administration of areas bordering on Ottoman territory and the settlement of frontier disputes.2 Like the later products of the Orientalische Akademie, the interpreters included highly educated men with refined scholarly tastes.3 One was Michel d'Asquier, a book collector, an antiquarian, and a citizen of the Republic of Letters, who has hardly received the attention he deserves. Michel Asquier was born in Marseilles in about i598.4The family, of Piedmontese origin, seems to have had two branches, one which produced jurists and the other which produced merchants.5 It is tempting to assume that Michel came from the