A Merchant, a Spy, an Artist, and a Viennese Coffeehouse Owner: Some Notes on an Armenian Sketchbook-Chronicle Preserved in the National Library of Austria.

This article examines an extraordinary late-seventeenth-century notebook authored by Gabriel, an Armenian merchant, tailor, artist, and covert agent, preserved at the Austrian National Library. The notebook, blending travel diary, chronicle, and illuminated sketchbook, offers unique insights into Gabriel's multifaceted life and his involvement in a clandestine espionage network aiding the Habsburg War Council during the 1687 reconquest of Ottoman-held Buda (Budapest). Archival evidence reveals Gabriel's connections with prominent Armenian figures in Vienna, including Joannes Diodato, a wealthy Armenian merchant and pioneer of Vienna's first coffeehouse, who facilitated Gabriel's recruitment as a spy and arranged his marriage to a formerly enslaved Muslim Turkish woman. The study situates Gabriel as a representative of "nouveau literacy" among non-elite Armenian authors and highlights his role in pivotal early modern Habsburg-Ottoman conflicts, including possible sabotage of Ottoman gunpowder stores during the siege of Buda.