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The Adriaan Reland Collection at Leiden University Library

Private Oriental manuscript collections convey mixed messages.1 There can be no doubt that they reflect to a large extent the scholarly interests of their collectors, but in the background other factors are also at play. Availability plays a prime part, and anyone who has ever attended an auction will readily admit that one’s desire to possess an object is not always commensurate with the depth of one’s pocket. If the scholar in question travelled to the Orient he could tap directly at the source, but unlike their seventeenth-century predecessors, eighteenth-century Dutch Orientalists were not of the travelling kind, with the main exception of Johannes Heyman (1667–1737), who had been pastor of the Dutch Protestant community in Izmir before taking up the Chair of Oriental languages at Leiden in 1710. He owned a small collection of Oriental manuscripts which was dispersed after his death.2 In isolated cases scholars could perhaps use the intermediary of diplomatic channels. The lively booktrade in the Dutch Republic did not import manuscripts as such, but a modest number of handwritten volumes arrived through the well-developed Dutch trade in Asian commodities. Some employees of the Dutch East India Company or Protestant missionaries acquainted themselves with Oriental languages such as Persian and Malay, and sometimes assembled collections which they took home upon retirement. As a result, the best opportunity to acquire manuscripts was to attend the auctions of deceased predecessors, and collections kept on being recycled from one generation to another. This inevitably limited one’s choice, so the presence of a certain manuscript, or the absence of others, does not necessarily fully reflect a scholar’s own tastes or proclivities. A case in point is the Dutch Orientalist and Islam scholar Adriaan Reland (1676–1718), who never set foot outside his native country but nevertheless left

a collection of about 155 Oriental manuscripts,3 which were sold many years after his death.4 In this contribution we shall investigate the Reland manuscripts kept in the Special Collections of Leiden University Libraries. We shall set off selected items against Reland's professed scholarly interests, and devote special attention to the intricate byways through which Reland's manuscripts ended up in a library which, to our knowledge, did not acquire any manuscripts directly from his auction. Last, but certainly not least, we shall look into the problem of identifying manuscripts in the Leiden collections on the basis of the often laconic and erroneous descriptions provided by the auctioneer. At the end of this contribution the reader will find an appendix with a list of the Reland manuscripts which were previously detected in the Leiden collections from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as well as a number of new additions (pp. 391-393).

Two Persian Manuscrips by Antoine Galland
Adriaan Reland was nominated professor of Oriental languages in 1701. He accepted his nomination by giving an inaugural lecture on the importance of the Persian language 'and related Oriental letters ' [Fig. 12.1].5 In another Dutch professorial oration from 1990, almost three centuries later, the Persian scholar J.T.P. de Bruijn argued that Adriaan Reland was not particularly aware of the chronological development of Iranian languages and the distinction between Old, Middle and New Persian. Reland, he explained, stressed the value of Persian first and foremost for the study of Scripture and Classical Antiquity, and secondly for the conversion of the Muslims to Christianity.6 The latter theme found its maturest expression in Reland's magnum opus De religione Mohammedica of 1705 (second edition 1717).7 Reland's call for the study of Persian, however flawed, did not remain an empty promise: he elaborated on the theme in the second volume of his Dissertationes miscellaneae, dating from 1707. It contains both a Dissertatio de reliquis veteris linguae Persicae ('Treatise on the ancient vestiges of the Persian language') and a Dissertatio de Persicis vocabulis Talmudis ('Treatise on Persian words in the  The text of the Pandnāma, though of spurious origin, fared much better in the hands of Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), the doyen of Oriental studies in the decades after the French Revolution. In 1819 he published his own edition with French translation and commentary at the Imprimerie royale in Paris: Pend-nâmeh, ou le Livre des conseils. Later in the nineteenth century a German translation appeared by Georg Ferdinand Heinrich Nesselmann (1811Nesselmann ( -1881, printed in 1871 at Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad, Russian Federation). The Bulbulnāma has never found a Western translator.
The fact that Reland published neither work, however, does not necessarily mean that he ignored them altogether. In the second edition of his De religione Mohammedica from 1717 he added an appendix with an 'Index Manuscriptorum' not only from his own private collection, but also other manuscripts belonging to the German Orientalist Heinrich Sike or Henricus Sikius, who taught Arabic to Reland in Leiden and then at Utrecht, or from the City Library of Amsterdam.10 Under item XXII we find the two Persian manuscripts kindly donated by his 'dearest friend' (amicissimus) Antoine Galland. The extent of Reland's actual use of the Pandnāma and Bulbulnāma, however, is yet to be ascertained, but it seems very limited.
Apparently Reland had no interest in Modern Persian belles-lettres. He did not dwell on the subject in his inaugural lecture of 1701, nor in any other of his works. Perhaps Galland was too optimistic about Reland's scholarly interests and ambitions, but one should also bear in mind that Reland died at an early age, and it is quite possible that he would have turned his mind to it if he had lived to a ripe old age. In any case, the Persian manuscripts are not only testimonies to the cordial relationship between Antoine Galland and Adriaan Reland, but also to the scholarly networks in the early-eighteenth-century Republic of Letters at large.

Provenance
In September 1780 the extensive private library of Jan Jacob Schultens (1716-1778) was put up for sale by the Leiden  To begin with, Reland's Oriental manuscripts were not auctioned off after his death in 1718, for they are conspicuously lacking in the sales catalogue that was printed by his regular publisher Willem Broedelet in Utrecht, Pars magna Bibliothecae […] Hadriani Relandi.14 Rather, they remained in the possession of Adriaan Reland's son and heir Jan Hubertus Reland or Relandt, a citizen of Utrecht and councillor and alderman of the town of Zierikzee in the province of Zealand. He died on 10 September 1760 and the following year, in April 1761, his library was sold from his home on Nieuwegracht in Utrecht, by Willem Kroon and Gijsbert Tieme van Paddenburg. At the end of the auction catalogue a special sixteen-page appendix was added with the Oriental manuscripts of Jan Hubertus's father Adriaan. Judging from a note scribbled on the front cover of a rare surviving copy of the auction catalogue, this Oriental appendix was compiled by Sebaldus Ravius or Sebald Rau (1721-1818), professor of theology and Oriental languages and librarian at Utrecht University. At the auction the Bulbulnāma fetched a price of 5 guilders. It is therefore only reasonable to assume that Johann Peter Berg attended the auction in 1761 and passed the manuscript on to Jan Jacob Schultens shortly afterwards as a token of his recognition. At the same auction Schultens bought the Pandnāma for himself for 4 guilders and 5 stuivers (Or. 1226).15 Their shopping spree did not end there as we shall see below, but it must here be noted that Schultens, after all a Leiden professor, failed to act on behalf of his employer, and as a result Leiden University bought nothing at the auction. But the presence of the two Galland manuscripts alone implies that there is indeed such a thing as a Reland collection at Leiden, which reached the university in various ways. 14 Cat .  In his turn De Bruin acquired Oriental manuscripts from a much more likely owner, Jacobus Willemsen (1698-1780), also from Middelburg, Zealand. He studied Hebrew and theology in Utrecht and was actually a pupil of Reland, whose funeral he attended in his birthplace De Rijp in 1718. There may have been a special affinity between Reland and his student Willemsen, for at the funeral Reland's widow bestowed a silver medal on him in memory of the deceased.26 He taught as professor at the Athenaeum in Middelburg and also served as a minister of the established Dutch Reformed Church. He possessed a vast fortune through his marriage to a rich lady from the Dutch East Indies, who, upon her untimely demise, left him the sum of 800,000 guilders. Grief-stricken, he promptly sought refuge in the fashionable watering hole of Spa in the Ardennes to restore his spirits.27 His exquisite private library was so large that after his death it had to be sold on two separate occasions. When his books and manuscripts on theology, Classics and Oriental studies came up for sale at the firm of Luchtmans in Leiden in 1781, the auction took no less than nine days.28 Most probably Willemsen had bought books and manuscripts directly from the Reland auction in 1761 in memory of his old professor.
In all, Pieter de Jong discovered seven Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Academy loan collection which had passed along these lines from Reland to Willmet, and his approach was so thorough that only three more Reland items have now come to the surface in this particular collection. The efforts of his Leiden colleagues to detect Reland manuscripts in the other holdings of Leiden University Library, however, proved much less successful. The results were mixed at best, but in the case of the private library of the aforementioned Jan Jacob Schultens the score was abysmally low with only one single Reland manuscript, which was traced only because De Jong had found a similar one in the Royal Academy loan collection and made a note of it in his catalogue.29 As a result, only fifteen Reland manuscripts were previously known to exist at Leiden. By going through the Reland auction catalogue and checking it against the complete Leiden holdings acquired before the close of the nineteenth century, it was possible to identify another twenty-four manuscripts which had not previously been ascribed to Reland. In the collection of Jan Jacob Schultens alone there turned out to be nine Reland manuscripts instead of only one. Among these twenty-four, one undetected Reland manuscript was brought to our attention by Anna Pytlowany of the University of Amsterdam, a Persian-Dutch glossary with Hindustani elements which had ended up in the collection of the Society for Netherlands Literature kept at Leiden University Library (LTK 589). Bart Jaski, Keeper of Manuscripts at Utrecht University Library, contributed three new items: a collective manuscript on magic (Or. 1576); Mukāshafat al-qulūb or 'Disclosure of the Hearts' , a work attributed to Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (Or. 1634); and the Dīvān or collected works of the Persian poet Qāsim-i Anvār, who died in 1433 CE (Or. 1893).30 In combination with the fifteen listed so far, this has resulted in a new total of 39 manuscripts at Leiden which may be ascribed to Reland with varying degrees of certainty. Ironically for a university which bought nothing at the Reland auction of 1761, this makes it the largest single Reland collection in the world.
Other collections with a Reland provenance exist outside Leiden, most notably in Utrecht, the Vatican and Berlin (Staatsbibliothek), each with their own particular strands of ownership, but, as such, they are beyond the scope of the present contribution, unless there is a direct link with a Leiden manuscript. For the other manuscripts we refer the reader to Bart Jaski's contribution to the See also Appendix 2, A oct 28, D 4 and A oct 4. present volume. Where appropriate, reference will be made to individual items and their provenance.

The Enigmas of an Auction Catalogue
An analysis of the Leiden Library catalogues from the nineteenth century reveals that the authors recorded a Reland provenance only if they encountered his name in a manuscript, and consequently worked their way backwards through the various auction catalogues until they arrived at the Reland catalogue from 1761, of which they had a copy at their disposal which is now lost.
For the present identification of additional Reland manuscripts-i.e. the ones that bear neither his name nor in many cases his annotations-the opposite procedure was adopted. Starting from the 1761 catalogue, we tried to link the Latin descriptions to existing items in the Leiden collections. Generally speaking, however, auction catalogues from the eighteenth century can be exasperatingly vague, and many scholars must have been driven to despair when confronted with elusive descriptions such as 'Liber Persicus incerti argumenti' , 'A Persian book on an uncertain subject' , and what could they think of 'Liber Arabicus ignoti auctoris' , 'An Arabic book by an unknown author'? Sebaldus Ravius, the scholar who prepared Reland's catalogue, must have been a competent Hebraist but his knowledge of other Oriental languages was negligible. He therefore limited himself to blindly copying the author and title details that Reland had left behind in his manuscripts and for the rest simply tried to make the most of it. The only listing that Reland himself made of his collection is the aforementioned Index Manuscriptorum which is attached to both editions of De religione Mohammedica. The Latin descriptions in this Index percolated into the auction catalogue together with a numbered reference. But Reland also provided additional details in his Index, especially in Arabic, that cannot be found in the auction catalogue. Glaring mistakes can be very helpful, as in the case of the utterly obscure name 'Anhaswaliensis' , which occurs both in the Index and the auction catalogue, but which turns out to be based on a misreading of al-Jazūlī, the renowned Moroccan author of the Dalāʾil al-khayrāt, an immensely popular devotional work (for more details see below under the description of MS Leiden, Acad. 32). Otherwise catalogue entries, however garbled, usually contain snippets of useful information such as part of a name, isolated title words, a date, a previous owner or even the format.
Furthermore, it may be argued that a text such as the Qurʾān, which enjoyed a wide circulation even in the West, is difficult to associate with a specific manuscript. A description such as 'Selecta quaedam capita Corani' , 'Certain selected chapters of the Qurʾān' , will not help you find a corresponding manuscript on the shelf before you. Conversely, rare texts by authors who are not particularly well known will be correspondingly easier to identify.
We have already discussed the efforts of a scholar such as Pieter de Jong to trace manuscripts along a fixed line of ownership from Reland to Willemsen, De Bruin, Willmet and finally the loan collection of the Royal Academy. It is therefore hardly surprising that a closer look at Willmet's collection disclosed more Reland manuscripts, and the same applies to the Leiden professor Jan Jacob Schultens, who was the grateful recipient of a gift from his German student Johann Peter Berg. It often turned out that the descriptions in the Reland catalogue, as erroneous and idiosyncratic as they are, were echoed-often verbatim-in the auction catalogues of one or more subsequent owners, suggesting that it concerned the same manuscripts which had passed from one owner to the next. But here a caveat is in order: certain Reland items in the Leiden collections whose provenance seemed to be established with a fair degree of certainty also appear in the auction catalogue of a scholar such as Johann Peter Berg, the student of Jan Jacob Schultens, whose books and manuscripts came under the hammer in Duisburg in 1801. The descriptions in this catalogue also hail back to the Reland catalogue of 1761.31 This may be explained in various ways: either Reland possessed more than one copy of a text, or the attribution of a Leiden manuscript to Reland is possibly wrong. The latter question is not easy to decide, for only in isolated instances can Berg's manuscripts be traced in modern public collections. But there is also the third possibility that a manuscript passed from Reland to J.P. Berg, but eventually found its way back to the Netherlands. A previously identified and described example is Leiden Or. 1628, an Ottoman Turkish work on oneiromancy.32 Finally, one must assume that an auction catalogue can hardly be regarded as the alpha and omega of a scholar's collection. If the descriptions of individual items are faulty, it is not very likely that the entire listing will be complete and without error. The auctioneer or the heirs of the deceased may have decided to withhold certain items. During a scholar's lifetime his collection remained fluid; he may have bought certain manuscripts and sold or even 31 Cat. given away others-as Galland did with his two Persian manuscripts. So, if we find a manuscript that unequivocally belonged to Reland, we should not be surprised if it does not appear in the auction catalogue.

Reland's Manuscripts in the Leiden Collections
Below, the reader will find a brief survey of a selection of recently detected manuscripts that may have belonged to Reland, together with a discussion of the considerations that led to their identification. As already said, the attributions have varying degrees of certainty, but are never wholly speculative.
If an ascription to Reland is problematic in any way this will be noted, and if it remains doubtful after all, the pressmark will be marked with an asterisk, for example '[Or. 1296*]' . The survey will be followed by an appendix with the short titles and pressmarks of all manuscripts under consideration.33 It is listed in the auction catalogue as a folio manuscript; our Leiden manuscript is technically speaking not a folio but a very large octavo, but with its height of c. 26.5 cm it could easily pass for a folio. It sold for 4 guilders and 8 stuivers, which is far above the average price. In the Schultens Cat. 1780, p. 604, no. 7006, it appears as an octavo manuscript with the correct title 'Anwâr Soheili s[ive] versio Persica Fabularum Bidpai s[ive] Coleilah we Dimnah' , 'The lights of Canopus, or the Persian translation of the fables of Bidpai or Kalīla wa-Dimna' . The manuscript was rebound, probably in the late eighteenth century, and all flyleaves or pastedowns which might have contained a name or other inscriptions are lost. Both the subject (stories and fables) and the exceptional illumination in gold of the opening pages suggest that this is indeed the manuscript that once belonged to Reland [Fig. 12.3].
[  (Cat. Golius 1696, p. 21, no. 80). Not mentioned as such in the Reland auction catalogue. It was bought at the J.J. Schultens auction of 1780, but the specific title cannot be found in his auction catalogue either. The manuscript was rebound in the eighteenth century and it no longer contains any information about its previous European owners, so it is not immediately possible to establish a link for the Leiden codex Or. 1299 between Golius, Reland and J.J. Schultens.
Interestingly, however, Reland possessed at least one copy of the Risāla-yi Ḥasaniyya, which is hidden behind a very generic description in Cat. Reland 1761, p. 4 quarto 1: 'Institutiones Religionis Muhammedicae, quibus continentur tum dogmata fidei, tum Liturgiae, tum aliae cerimoniae Arabice & Persice' , 'The institutions of the Muhammedan religion, containing the dogmas of the faith as well as the liturgy and other ceremonies, in Arabic and Persian' . Reland apparently obtained this item from Golius, see Cat. Golius 1696, p. 16, no. 3, where it is listed under exactly the same title. At the Reland auction it fetched 10 guilders and 10 stuivers, an exceptionally high price. The item was acquired by J.P. Berg and his auction catalogue (Cat. Berg 1801, p. 436-437, no These three texts were acquired at the J.P. Berg auction by the Prussian diplomat and Orientalist Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (1751-1817) and are now in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Cod. Diez quarto 102.38 They are not original manuscripts but modern apographs, most likely made by Golius's amanuensis Nicolaus Petri of Aleppo or Nīqūlā ibn Buṭrus al-Ḥalabī.39 Nicolaus Petri also transcribed an unrelated fragment at the end of Risāla-yi Ḥasaniyya which harks back to an addendum in a different hand at the end of the Leiden Cod. Or. 1299 (pp. 313-314). This unique addition allows us to conclude that the codex Or. 1299 served as the exemplar for Nicolaus Petri's apograph, and also that Or. 1299 actually belonged to Golius. It equally allows us to assume that Or. 1299 passed from Golius to Reland and thence to Schultens, not only because of the unique addition but also the overall rarity of the text.
[  Hamburg,sub nos. 148,151,171,209,210,213,216,217. an unknown hand on the new flyleaf, resulting in the Latin title 'Liber persicus seu chronicon regum persarum' or 'Persian book or chronicle of the kings of the Persians' . In combination, this could very well have led to the entry in the auction catalogue. But in spite of all considerations, the Reland attribution remains uncertain. Incidentally, Leiden University Library possesses two more manuscripts with a Mutter connection. The first is MS Acad. 138, a copy of Saʿdī's Gulistān or 'Rose Garden' from 1086 AH / 1676 CE, which was partly transcribed by Mutter's friend and VOC colleague Daniël Havart, who had learned Persian together with him in Golconda in the year 1675.45 This manuscript probably never belonged to Reland. The second one is the aforementioned Leiden manuscript LTK 589, a Persian-Dutch vocabulary with additions in Hindustani, judging from the handwriting also by Havart, which is most likely identical with the 'Vocabularium Persico-Belgicum' in Cat. Reland 1761, p. 6 quarto 23. There can be little doubt that this Havart manuscript came to Reland through Cornelis Mutter.
[Or. 1347] al-Taqrīb fī ʾl-fiqh or Mukhtaṣar fī ʾl-fiqh, 'The approach (or compendium) of Islamic jurisprudence' , by Abū Shujāʿ Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Iṣfahānī (d. after 1106 CE, Brockelmann, GAL, I 392, S II 676). An Arabic manuscript with an incomplete interlinear Malay translation. The manuscript does not mention Reland's name, but there is a title entry on the first flyleaf in a hand that may be safely attributed to him: 'Liber iste est [in Arabic script: Mukhtaṣar fī ʾl-fiqh] i.e. Breve compendium Juris Mohammedanorum secundum sectam Schafaeorum [etc.]' . A detailed table of chapters and subjects on the pastedown reveals that the owner had a profound knowledge of Islamic law, and in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic this could only have been Reland. Like Or. 1343 mentioned above, and indirectly also Or. 1893 (Dīvān of Qāsim-i Anvār, Cat. Reland p. 10, octavo 4), this manuscript was also bought by Leiden from the estate of Nicolaus Wilhelm Schroeder, professor of Oriental languages at Groningen, who died in 1798.46 But note, however, that this work on Islamic law by Abū Shujāʿ is not the same as an anonymous theological work mentioned in Cat. Reland 1761, p. 8 quarto 46, under (d. 1111, Brockelmann, GAL, I 425, S I 755 sub no. 61). It is neither in Reland's Index Manuscriptorum nor in his auction catalogue. But, as Jan Schmidt noted, there is an inscription on the pastedown in Reland's handwriting reading 'Scheich Soliman Efendi liber de praxi pietatis erga Deum, de munditia, de precibus &c., de jejunis etc. Arabice' (Book by Shaykh Sulaymān Efendi on the practice of piety towards God, on ritual purity, on prayers et cetera, on fasting et cetera. In Arabic). Reland, who was unaware of the text's attribution to al-Ghazālī, mistook a certain Sulaymān Efendi, who endowed the book as waqf, for its author.50 Bought in 1851 from Belinfante publishers and booksellers, The Hague.
[Or. 1661] Riyāż al-inshāʾ, 'The meadows of epistolography' , or Inshā-yi Khvāja-Jahān, 'Epistolography of Lord Jahan' , a Persian work by the Indian vizier ʿImād al-Dīn Maḥmūd Gāwān from Gīlān (d. 1481 The Van Voorst auction proved to be an important source for Reland manuscripts at Leiden: among the 63 Oriental manuscripts offered for sale, Leiden bought no fewer than 33, and five of these revealed a Reland provenance (Codd. Or. 1649, 1652, 1661, 1665, 1666 Leiden. However, the fact that this apograph is erroneously described as 'authentic' has created great confusion in establishing the provenance of the second manuscript, Acad. 197. This is not an original ferman either but a certified copy made in Istanbul and therefore at any rate a genuine Turkish document. Pieter de Jong linked this copy to Reland,and 54 MS Leiden, Or. 1945 three decades after Golius's death, this collection came up for sale in Leiden. Archbishop Narcissus Marsh of Dublin (1638-1713, Anglican Primate of Ireland and consequently a wealthy man, sent an agent and �200 to Leiden to buy up the greater part of Golius's manuscripts. But he left many of the smaller and less important items to the locals. It is more than likely that the 20-year-old Adriaan Reland came over from Utrecht to attend the auction. Among the 39 Leiden manuscripts now attributable to Reland, no fewer than nineteen can be traced back to Golius-almost fifty per cent. This only confirms the general idea that Oriental manuscripts were recycled from one generation to the next in a scholarly community where few manuscripts were imported directly from the Orient. Before concluding, though, a few words may be added about the acquisition policy of the Leiden University Library. As already said, Leiden did not attend the Reland auction of 1761. Among the 39 Reland manuscripts that trickled into Leiden before the late nineteenth century, only four do not belong to the familiar triad of Arabic, Persian or Ottoman Turkish, and not a single penny was paid for any of these: Or. 1692, the Malay manuscript of Tāj al-salāṭīn ('Crown of the sultans'), a work in the mirror-for-princes genre, was transferred from the Delft training college for colonial civil servants in 1864;64 Or. 1945, the aforementioned Qurʾān from the Moluccas with an interlinear translation in Malay, was donated in 1870 by Mr Koopmans van Boekeren, whilst Acad. 223, a Chinese manuscript with quotations from the Lunyu of Confucius, entered the Leiden library as part of the permanent loan collection of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1856.65 Finally, a Russian Orthodox Calendar of Saints from c. 1593 was donated to the Society of Netherlands Literature (Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde) in 1887 by S.J.E. Rau, a descendant of the Professor Sebaldus Ravius who had prepared the Reland catalogue of 1761 (LTK 965). This small and delicately made manuscript was previously catalogued as a 'work on astrology and chiromancy' , and it is under this title that it occurs in Reland's cat. 1761, p. 12  This illustrates the persistent reluctance of a university such as Leiden to explore new languages and fields of study until well into the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the 1761 auction catalogue shows us that an academic like Reland was quick to follow up the scholarly activities of early travellers and missionaries in the Dutch colonial empire. This, if nothing else, can only increase our admiration for Adriaan Reland, a dedicated scholar from Utrecht with a catholic interest in many Oriental languages, who respected the tradition of his predecessors and understood the value of the handwritten sources. It more than justifies his reputation as the finest Oriental and Islam scholar of his day.