Bernard Randolph (merchant)

Bernard Randolph (baptised 1643 – c. 1690) was an English merchant and author on the Morea and Aegean islands.^[1]

Life

Randolph was born in Canterbury, the son of Edmund Randolph M.D. and his wife Deborah Master; Edward Randolph was his elder brother. In 1664 he was a merchant at Smyrna in the Levant trade.^[1]

Randolph then visited the Morea and Mystras in 1669, shortly after a peace was concluded between the Venetian Republic and Ottoman Empire.^[2] He was resident in what is now Greece 1671–9.^[3] In 1680 he was in Crete.^[4]

In the period 1683–4 Randolph made voyages to New England, in support of his brother Edward's work there as a customs official. He then returned to England. He is thought to have died by about 1689.^[1]

Works

Misithra olim Lacedimon, engraving around 1687 of the attack by Venetian forces on Mystras, once wrongly thought to be the site of ancient Sparta

Randolph published:

• The Present State of the Morea (1686),^[1] illustrated with engravings from his own topographical drawings.^[5]
• The Present State of the Islands in the Archipelago (1687), travel writing on the Aegean islands and commentary on the Great Turkish War^[1]