TAVERNIER, JEAN BAPTISTE French traveller and pioneer of trade with India, was born in 16o5 at Paris, where his father Gabriel and uncle Melchior, Protestants from Antwerp, pursued the profession of geographers and en gravers. He had already travelled much in Europe, and was well acquainted with the principal European courts, when he started from Regensburg with two French fathers, M. de Chapes and M.
de St. Liebau, for the Levant. In their company he reached Con stantinople early in 1631, where he spent eleven months, and then proceeded by Tokat, Erzerum and Erivan to Persia. His farthest point in this first journey was Isfahan ; he returned by Baghdad, Aleppo, Alexandretta, Malta and Italy, and was again in Paris in 1633. In September 1638 he began a second journey (1638 43) by Aleppo to Persia, and thence to India as far as Agra and Golconda. His visit to the court of the Great Mogul and to the diamond mines was connected with the plans realized more fully in his later voyages, in which Tavernier traded in costly jewels and other precious wares, among the greatest princes of the East.
The second journey was followed by four others. In his third (1643-49) he went as far as Java and returned by the Cape; in his last three journeys (1651-55, 1657-62, 1664-68) he did not proceed beyond India. In 1669 he received letters of nobility and in 1670 purchased the barony of Aubonne, near Geneva. Tavernier's narratives of his travels are : Nouvelle Relation de l'Interieur du Serail du Grand Seigneur (4to, Paris, 1675), based on two visits to Constantinople in his first and sixth journeys; Le Six Voyages de J. B. Tavernier (2 vols., 4to, Paris, 1676) and Recueil de Plusieurs Relations (4to, Paris, The closing years of Tavernier's life are obscure. He left Paris for Switzerland in 1687, in 1689 he passed through Copen hagen on his way to Persia through Muscovy, and in that year he died at Moscow.
See Charles Joret, Jean Baptiste Tavernier d'apres des Documents Nouveaux (1886, bibliography), and an English translation of his account of his travels in India, by V. Ball (1889).