Bernard Randolph (merchant)

Bernard Randolph (baptised 1643 – c. 1690) was an English merchant and author on the Morea and Aegean islands.[1]

Life

Randolph was born in Canterbury, the son of Edmund Randolph M.D. and his wife Deborah Master; Edward Randolph was his elder brother. In 1664 he was a merchant at Smyrna in the Levant trade.[1]

Randolph then visited the Morea and Mystras in 1669, shortly after a peace was concluded between the Venetian Republic and Ottoman Empire.[2] He was resident in what is now Greece 1671–9.[3] In 1680 he was in Crete.[4]

In the period 1683–4 Randolph made voyages to New England, in support of his brother Edward's work there as a customs official. He then returned to England. He is thought to have died by about 1689.[1]

Works
Misithra olim Lacedimon, engraving around 1687 of the attack by Venetian forces on Mystras, once wrongly thought to be the site of ancient Sparta

Randolph published:

  • The Present State of the Morea (1686),[1] illustrated with engravings from his own topographical drawings.[5]
  • The Present State of the Islands in the Archipelago (1687), travel writing on the Aegean islands and commentary on the Great Turkish War[1]

Notes
  1. Johnson, Richard R. "Randolph, Bernard (bap. 1643, d. after 1689?)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23114. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. Runciman, Steven; Runciman, Sir Steven (1980). Mistra: Byzantine Capital of the Peloponnese. Thames and Hudson. p. 121. ISBN 978-0-500-25071-6.
  3. Sutton, Susan Buck; Adams, Keith W.; Project, Argolid Exploration (2000). Contingent Countryside: Settlement, Economy, and Land Use in the Southern Argolid Since 1700. Stanford University Press. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-8047-3315-1.
  4. Greene, Molly (11 March 2002). A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton University Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-1-4008-4449-4.
  5. Stoneman, Richard (2 July 1998). A Luminous Land: Artists Discover Greece. Getty Publications. p. 72. ISBN 978-0-89236-467-1.
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