L'image de l'Orient dans des récits de voyage portugais du XVIème siècle : vers une nouvelle image mythique de l'Orient

摘要

The Portuguese discoveries were an essential step in the meeting between the West and the East. Although the East wasn’t a land completely unknown by the Europeans, the distance and the difficulties that the western travellers who were going to the East during Middle Ages had to face with, made the informations they transmitted goods almost as rare and precious than the spices or fabrics for which they had taken the famous silk road. The significant success of the relation of the renowned Italian explorer Marco Polo demonstrates the interest that the East provoked in these times. This account left a deep impression and continued to spread marvels and myths in the European imagination until the early XVIth century. Before the first travel of Vasco da Gama (1497-1498) and despite the trade of the Silk Road, the knowledge of the East remained approximate, indeed sometimes fanciful. After the discovery of the sea route to the Indies, the meeting of the Portuguese with the East permitted to update this knowledge. The Portuguese travellers offered to the Europeans, accounts that broke with the medieval tradition, reporting observations made in loco and as a consequence closer to the eastern reality. But although these travellers contributed to the demystification of some myths linked to the East, the image of the East they transmitted continued to be ruled by the laws of imagination. Our tesis will talk about the Renaissance’s image of the East and constitute a study of the images and symbols that were associated to the East by five Portuguese travel accounts of the XVIth century. So as to determinate the permanences and the evolutions of this image, we will at first talk about the image of the East from Antiquity to Middle Ages. Then we will talk about the Renaissance’s image of the East by studying five Portuguese travel accounts that we consider representative of different aspects of this new mythical image of the East. This accounts being Peregrinação of Fernão Mendes Pinto, Algumas coisas sabidas da China of Galiote Pereira, the Tratado das Coisas da China of Gaspar da Cruz, the Verdadeira Informação das terras do Preste João das Índias of Francisco Álvares and the Livro do Oriente of Duarte Barbosa.