Rocoles, Jean-Baptiste de. Les imposteurs insignes ou histoires de plusieurs hommes de néant. De toutes nations, qui ont usurpé la qualité d'Empereurs, Roys & Princes: des guerres qu'ils ont causé, accompagnées de plusieurs curieuses circonstances.

€ 650.00

Rare first edition of this popular work on royal impostors, usurpers and other false rulers; reprinted several times (later also expanded by other hands). An English translation ("The history of infamous impostors, or, The lives & actions of several notorious counterfeits who from the most abject and meanest of the people, have usurped the titles of emperours, kings, and princes") was published in the same year as the first edition, followed by the German translation "Geschichte merkwürdiger Betrüger" in 1761. Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York, and Sabbatai Zevi are among those described and depicted. "Sont assez recherchées" (Brunet).

The cleric, jurist, philologist, and historian Jean-Baptiste de Rocoles (1620-96) served as apostolic protonotary, councillor to Louis XIV, almoner, and doctor at the faculty of law at the Sorbonne, when he left his offices and converted to Protestantism in Geneva in 1652. In 1673 he succeeded Martin Schoock as historian to the House of Hohenzollern in Berlin, upon which occasion he certainly learned of the famous False Waldemar, an impostor who was invested with the Margraviate of Brandenburg from 1348 to 1350, also featured in the book. Rocoles soon left Berlin for Leiden and eventually returned to France and the Catholic faith in 1687. As a philologist, Rocoles translated works of Herodotus and Tacitus into French.