Finally, Bertrandon describes a tournament, held a propos the marriage of the young Count of Cilje, which he found very different from what he was used to in France. This paragraph is a unique source for such tournaments in Hungary.10
I saw him [the son of the governor Ulrich of Cilje – JMB] at a tournament after their manner where the combatants were mounted on small horses and low saddles: they were gallantly dressed and had strong and short lances. It was a pleasing spectacle. Whenever the two champions hit, both perhaps, but certainly one of them must be unhorsed – and it is then seen, who has the firmest seat.
Bertrandon then left for Austria, where he encountered the first skepticism regarding his crusading plans. After a month he arrived back in Burgundy. Received with grace by his Duke Philippe, but his message was not much listened to. However, the Koran and a Life of Muhammad (in Latin translation), which he brought with him and was given by the duke to a learned cleric, engendered some polemical writings against Islam.
In the later fifteenth century, especially during the reign of King Matthias I (Corvinus) several foreign, mainly Italian, Humanists travelled to Hungary and made notes of their journey. None of them contains particularly relevant information, mainly because they, couched in elegant Ciceronian Latin, reflect more literary conventions than actual personal observations. Therefore, let us conclude with an interesting paragraph from the travelogue of the learned Jacques Bongars,11 ambassador of France to the Holy Roman Empire, editor of the first collection of medieval Hungarian sources, who crossed what was left of the kingdom of Hungary in 1585, on his way to Constantinople. By that time, the medieval kingdom ceased to exist: the west and the north (today’s Slovakia) was part of the Hamburg Empire; the east (today’s Transylvania in Romania) a tributary of the High Porte; and the middle belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Bongars visited several places in the non-occupied regions, always listing the strength of the garrisons, giving a picture of a country continuously at war. In this short paragraph, he describes the peculiar frontier-conditions along the Ottoman-held territory.
On May 2, we started out by crossing the Tisza, to reach Kallo by night. We passed through the village of Keresztur, on the Turkish side. The village owes the Sultan 500 Thalers and certain number of cattle as annual tax. Desolated. It has two reeves, one appointed by the Ottomans, another by the emperor and they have to share all intelligence with each other, Kallo is a small fort with three towers in the midst of marshes, well supplied with artillery and other needs of war. When the Turks are approaching, the canons warn the peasants of the surroundings to run to the fort with all their valuables. The garrison is 200, all Germans, augmented by a good number of Hussars and freebooters. The fort was built 14 years ago by the generals Tauffenbach and Ruber, just preempting the Turks, who had already piled up the lumber necessary for the building.
We know from other sources that the peasants, more or less protected by the Kallo garrison, were obliged to pay a tax to them, that is, to the Habsburg king of the country, as well. This kind of dual government and double taxation was not a rarity in the Ottoman-held territory, and most certainly in a wide strip along the ever-changing frontier.
1 Fragmenta legationum, // Roger C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire 2, Cambridge, 2009; cf. also. Colin Douglas Gordon, The Age of Attila: Fifth-century Byzantium and the Barbarians. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966.
2 Vita S. Gerhardi episcopi Morosiensi, ed. Imre Madzsar 11 Imre Szentpetery, ed. Scriptores rerum Hungaricarum tempor e ducum regumque stirpis Arpadianae gestarum, Budapest, 1938 2: 480-506
3 Vita Lietberti episcopi Cameracensis auctore Rudulfo monacho S. Sepulchri Cameracensis, ed. Adolf Hofmeister, MGH Scriptores 30-2, Leipzig 1926, pp. 838–868, here 854.
4 Ottonis et Rahevinigesta Friderici imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS rer. Germ, in usum scholarum 46, Hannover & Leipzig, 1912, pp. 49–51.
5 On this, see Erik Fügedi and Janos M. Bak, “Foreign knights and clerks in early medieval Hungary,” // Nora Berend, ed. The Expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages, Farnham, 2012, pp. 319-32.
6 Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem; The Travel of Louis VII to the East, ed. and transl. by. V.G. Berry (New York 1948), p. 31.
7 Ystoria de expeditione Friderici imperatoris edita a quodam Austrensi clerico qui eidem interfuit nomine Ansbertus, ed. Joseph Fiedler//Fontes rerum Ausri-carum I Scriptores, vol.5, Wien 1863, pp. 18-9.
8 Summarized in Istvan Szabota, Regi utazasok Magyarorszagon es a Balkanon 1054–1717 [Old travels in Hungary and the Balkans], Budapest, 1891 (repr. several times since)
9 The Travels of Bertrandon de la Brocquiere… to Palestine and his Return…, (ed. by M. Legrand d’Aussy) transl. by Thomas Johnes, Hafod Press, 1807; here pp. 308-16. [Online: http://books.google.hu/books?id=CSgLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA 288&hl=hu&source – vidi 01.10.2014]
10 See Erik Fügedi, “Turniere im mittelalterlichen Ungarn// Das ritterliche Turnier im Mittelalter I hrsg. von Josef Fleckenstein (Gцttingen1985),S. 390-400
11 Published by Hermann Hagen, Zur Geschichte der Philologie und zur romische Literatur. Vier Abhandlungen (Berlin, 1879); I have used the Hungarian translation in Szamota, Regi utazasok, pp. 103-82, here p.171
«Путешествие туда и обратно»: Континентальные маршруты английских дипломатов и формирование единого церковнополитического пространства в Западной Европе (40-е – 50-е гг. XII в.)
А.К. Гладков
(Институт всеобщей истории РАН)
«Гражданские войны», возникшие в результате считавшегося нелигитимным правления Стефана I Блуаского (1135–1154), значительно ослабили Англию на международной арене. Многие связи и контакты, налаженные предшественником «нечестивого узурпатора», были либо разрушены, либо сведены к минимуму. На долю нового короля – Генриха II Плантагенета – выпало восстановить прежнее социально-экономическое и военно-политическое положение страны, укрепить мощь государства настолько, насколько этого требовали условия «многополярного мира» XII в.
Приход к власти представителя династии Плантагенетов и, как отмечали современники, законного преемника Генриха I, «льва правосудия», положил начало череды масштабных преобразований и дипломатических кампаний, целью которых было обеспечить поддержку
