A few items from the West Horsley Place library were offered as part of the Sotheby’s travel sale of May 15 – the most important of them a copy of the first book printed in English in Turkey.
This was The Capitulations and Articles of Peace… agreed between Britain and the Ottoman court at Constantinople following negotiations led by Heneage Finch, Earl of Winchelsea and ambassador to the Porte in the years 1661-62.
The terms of these ‘Capitulations’, or trading privileges – first established during the reign of Elizabeth I – were here printed by Abraham Gabbai, who had established a press in Constantinople in 1660.