Richard Knolles (c. 1545 – July 1610) was an English historian, famous for his account of the Ottoman Empire, the first major description in the English language.
A native of Northamptonshire, he was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow. Some time after 1571, he left Oxford to become master of a school at Sandwich, Kent, where he died in 1610. In 1603, Knolles published his Generall Historie of the Turkes, of which several editions subsequently appeared, among them Sir Paul Rycaut's edition (1700); Rycaut brought the history down to 1699.The Generall Historie of the Turkes by Richard Knolles, is the first British chronicle written on the military and political aspects of the Ottoman Empire in the medium of English, instead of Latin. This is a clear indication that knowledge about the ‘terror of the World’ was becoming essential not only for the sophisticated reader who could read Latin, but also for the general reading public. Thus, meaning a greater circulation compared to a text in Latin
Knolles' original work was dedicated to King James I and VI. His work has considerable merits of style and arrangement. Samuel Johnson said that the Generall Historie of the Turkes showed all the excellencies that narration can admit, explaining Knolles' limited reputation by the fact that he wrote of a subject of which none desires to be informed.
Knolles also published a translation of Jean Bodin's Les Six livres de la République in 1606, but the Grammatica Latina, Graeca et Hebraica, attributed to him by Anthony Wood and others, is the work of the Rev. Hanserd Knollys (c. 1599-1691), a Baptist minister.
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