Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) was a French traveller, merchant and gem dealer whose six journeys to Persia, India and the Ottoman Empire between 1631 and 1668 established him as the principal European authority of his century on the gemstones, jewellery and courts of the East. His memoir Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes, published in 1676, is the foundational European text on the diamond mines of Golconda and on the gem trade of the period, and Tavernier is the named seller of the great blue diamond that became the French Blue and ultimately the Hope Diamond.

Life

Tavernier was born in Paris in 1605 to a Protestant family of Antwerp origin engaged in the cartographic and travel trades. From his youth he was attracted to travel rather than to formal education, and he made his first journey to the Ottoman Empire in 1631. Over the following four decades he undertook six long journeys overlapping in some cases, reaching as far east as Bengal and Java, with extended periods in Persia at the Safavid court and in India at the Mughal court of Aurangzeb. He was ennobled in 1669 by Louis XIV and granted the title Baron of Aubonne in recognition of his service.

The Six Journeys

Tavernier's six journeys are documented in detail in his memoir, with itineraries, dates, observations of trade routes, courts, customs and the gem mines that were his principal commercial interest. He visited the diamond mines at Raolconda, Coulour and the wider Golconda region, providing the first detailed European description of Indian diamond mining and the trade in rough and cut stones. He also traded in pearls from the Persian Gulf, in coloured stones from Burma and Sri Lanka, and in Persian turquoise, all observed with a merchant's eye for the practical realities of the trade.

The Tavernier Sale to Louis XIV

In 1668 and 1669 Tavernier sold to Louis XIV a substantial parcel of stones gathered on his sixth journey, including approximately one thousand diamonds and many coloured stones. The most celebrated of the diamonds, a 115-carat or 116-carat (in some accounts 112-carat) blue stone of Indian origin and rough triangular shape, was subsequently recut at Louis's direction by the court jeweller Jean Pittan into a 67-carat heart-shaped stone known as the French Blue or Bleu de France. This stone was stolen from the French royal collection in 1792 during the Revolution, and the present Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution is widely considered to be the recut residue of the same stone, although some historical questions remain about the exact recutting sequence.

Tavernier's sale also included the stone subsequently known as the Tavernier Blue, of approximately the same provenance, and a number of other named stones in the French royal collection until the Revolution. The full inventory of the Tavernier sale is preserved in seventeenth-century French royal records and has been the subject of extensive subsequent scholarship.

Memoir and Influence

Les Six Voyages was published in Paris in 1676 in two volumes, with engravings of stones, mines and courts. It became the standard European reference on the eastern gem trade for the remainder of the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, and it remains a primary source for historians of the period. Tavernier's accounts of the Mughal court, of the Persian Safavid court and of the Indian diamond mines are detailed and on the whole reliable, although his observations on the political affairs of the courts have been more cautiously assessed by later historians.

Death

Tavernier left France in 1685 following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes which removed protection from Protestant subjects, and he died in Moscow in 1689 while attempting a seventh journey to the East at the age of eighty-four. His memoir, his trading activity and his role in delivering the Tavernier Blue to Louis XIV have made him one of the most consequential individual figures in the history of the European gem trade.