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Between 1549 and 1553 Thevet travelled through the Middle East, aided by his benefactor, Cardinal Jean de Lorraine. During his travels, Thevet joined the French Embassy in the Ottoman Empire. He returned to Europe towards the end of 1553 and, by 1554, he published his Cosmographie de Levant. That very same year, Thevet was appointed chaplain to Vice-Admiral Nicolas Dourand de Villegaignon. Thevet accompanied him in an expedition that would come to be known as the “France Antarctique,” through which France sought to invade Brazil in an attempt to launch a colonial campaign in the New World. The mission, which Thevet chronicled in his Singularites de la France Antarctique (1574), was a failure. By 1559, Thevet was back in France. In 1559, he secured the courtly position of chaplain to Queen Catherine de Medici, mother of Elizabeth of Valois.14 Both Lestringant and Nicholson have noted that Thevet developed a close relationship with the queen, from whom he received all sorts of presents and curiosities that could contribute to his work as cosmographer. Some of these, according to Thevet’s remembrance registered in his Grande Insulaire, could have been Mexican manuscripts and may have included the Codex Mendoza.