The French Orientalist scholar François Pétis de la Croix, author of the Thousand and One Days (Les Mille et un Jours; 1710–12), presented his work as a translation from a Persian manuscript titled Hezār va yek ruz (A Thousand and One Days). Research has meanwhile proved beyond reasonable doubt that s allegation constitutes a wilful mystification. The direct source Pétis de la Croix exploited for the majority of tales was not Persian but rather an anonymous Ottoman Turkish manuscript titled Ferec baʿd eş-şidde (Relief after Hardship). The work, first mentioned in Antoine Galland’s Istanbul diaries, has been compiled before the end of the fourteenth century and undoubtedly constitutes a translation of one or several Persian works. Scholars of Persian and Ottoman studies, such as Fritz Meier and Andreas Tietze, have proposed a detailed discussion of the sources of Ferec baʿd eş-şidde since long, but the detailed commentary Tietze intended to prepare on the work was never published.
My presentation will discuss the complicated relation between the early eighteenth-century French Mille et un Jours, the fourteenth-century Ottoman Ferec baʿd eş-şidde, and a genre of Persian literature that is known as Jāmeʿ al-ḥekāyāt (Compilation of Tales). Until recently, the oldest representatives of the latter genre were known from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The recent discovery of a Jāmeʿ al-ḥekāyāt dating to the twelfth century opens up new perspectives on the relation of Pétis de la Croix’s text to the Ottoman Turkish and Persian texts.