Abstract

BIERSACK, Martin. Between Global Mobility and Local Identification: The Incredible Journey of a Turkish Herbalist from Constantinople to Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Hist. mex. [online]. 2024, vol.73, n.3, pp.1039-1080.  Epub Jan 22, 2024. ISSN 2448-6531.  https://doi.org/10.24201/hm.v73i3.4697.

The journey of Federico Saúl, alias José Cristóbal Porto, has all the characteristics of an adventure novel. The alleged Turk went from Constantinople to China, where -in Portuguese Macao- he took a ship to San Blas. From there, he went south to Nicaragua on foot and then returned to Mexico, where he was imprisoned in 1795 as a suspicious foreigner. This article reconstructs Federico Saúl’s journey as he recounted it to the Spanish authorities. It is primarily based on a file from the Archive of the Indies, contextualized with the support of other sources and historiographic contributions. This article is not limited to the purely anecdotal, but uses this particular case to analyze the identification practices applied by the Spanish authorities to determine the identity of this strange traveler who claimed to be a convert to Christianity and an herbalist with curative skills. The story of Federico Saúl connects the Americas with Asia, Africa and Europe, involving historical events such as the Crusades, the French Revolution and the botanical exploration of the Americas. It is therefore a microhistorical case that shows how the global mobility of people and ideas at the end of the eighteenth century involved a challenge in terms of the identification of travelers.

Keywords : orientalism; botanical history; global history; identification practices; conversion.

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