Breslau in the 15h-century Nuremberg Chronicle
Our 15th-century Spanish traveller goes home, mixing with the imperial elite along the way.
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Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Script:
After his visit to Antwerp and its thoroughly remarkable fair, our Pedro was headed next for Louvain. It’s somewhere which has featured before fairly recently on this podcast, though not for its place in any particular medieval traveller’s itinerary, but rather for the WWI destruction of its university library. And Pedro mentions that university, referring to it as “very notable for the study of all the sciences,” with theology taught more than the others. He found two of the Duke of Burgundy's illegitimate sons at their studies of philosophy there. He also found that the town was “much depopulated,” perhaps on account of the recent round of plague which had struck the region, still was striking, as we saw last episode with Pedro’s cancelled plans for Paris.
He was on to Frankfurt next, best known then for its fair but not especially impressive for someone who had just visited Antwerp’s. He found its beasts to be more remarkable, though he declines to elaborate on why or indeed exactly what, though he probably meant something in the horse family. He was heading back toward parts of Germany where he’d already been, some of them places which we’ve been with him, but on this occasion, he became a little caught up in things.
He was in Cologne, and here he makes no mention here of that lady who he’d spent so much time with before. Instead, he was dropping in on an archbishop who he’d promised to visit again, and he was also pulled on by other social obligations. He was falling in with an embassy on the way back from the Burgundian duke, for there was a bishop in that party who he’d met on Chios and he was obliged to join him.
The embassy had been sent forth from that ecumenical council in Basel, an effort to convince the duke to drop his support for the pope. Now, as it reached Mainz, word was sent to a Duke Stephen to request safe passage. But this request and the answering assurances were apparently complicated by the context of that conflict, for Stephen was himself a supporter of Pope Eugene IV. They travelled on with the promise of security, but they were not far up the road when they were captured by 200 horsemen and taken off to a mountain castle.
For a fortnight, they were held as prisoners there, but as Pedro says, “at least there was no likelihood of death from want. On the contrary, at night and break of day, indeed at all hours of the day,” he writes, “we were forced to eat and drink with our guards, as is the custom there, which was quite strange to us and became us very ill.” It was all tremendously “young noble’s adventures in 15th-century Europe” type stuff, and I don’t know that everyone in the diplomatic party was being treated with such hospitality, even if it was unwanted.
The whole thing would get cleared up eventually. Pedro would be able to send a messenger to Duke Stephen, not so much pleading his case as declaring his identity and demanding his release, which was promptly given. And once freed of the guards with all their excessive sharing of food and drink, Pedro was then able to go see the duke himself, to speak to him and insist that the rest of the embassy be released, with Pedro threatening that the duke would lose his belongings over the matter and a nervous Stephen now saying that he would be all too happy to release the others but only if they promised not to complain to the council or the emperor. Only if they didn’t kick up a fuss over what he’d done. One gets the sense that he hadn’t really gamed this all out too far in his head beforehand.
Soon, it was all smoothed over, with the embassy apparently pleased enough not to press the issue and the final remaining complication being that someone, somehow, had lost or stolen Pedro’s own sword. And Pedro was not pleased. He was amazed and enraged by this new turn of events. He was entirely scornful of offers that he just take one of the duke’s swords instead, something which he made very clear he would never, ever do. He promised that the duke and his people would pay dearly for what they had done to him under the guarantee of safe passage, and fair enough, to be so upset, but I do find it amusing that it appears to have been this missing sword issue that pushed him to that point rather than actually being accosted on his travels and imprisoned.
Fortunately for all involved, one of the duke’s squires would soon catch Pedro on the road and return that sword, telling him that it had cost the duke more labour to recover it than it would to capture a city, which I suppose is how you might measure such efforts, and pleading with him to put aside his wrath. They had only ever meant to act against the ambassadors, the duke’s man insisted, never against Pedro himself. From then on, and in light of the ongoing conflict between supporters of council and of pope, the embassy would take an armed escort from each city that could bring them safely on to the next, and so on to Basel, which they would reach without further issue.
They were rejoining the council there in that city, but Pedro would be travelling on and we will be going with him.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast which follows historical figures on their journeys in that world. A podcast which is supported by a Patreon, where for as little or as much as works for you per month, you can enjoy your listening early, without the bother of advertising, and with some extra mini episodes thrown in, and you can do so patreon.com/humancircus. Thank you, all of you who have already done so. I really do appreciate it!
And now, let’s get back to the story. It’s the Pedro Tafur story, and it is our very last one on that traveller. I’d thought we might get there last time out, but that conclusion has been only just a little bit delayed. Today, we wrap his journey up with imperial encounters in central Europe and the way home.
We pick our protagonist back up as he leaves Basel again, and as he travels east into the now-Swiss town of Schaffhausen, by his judgement, “small, but pleasant and very clean.” Perhaps it is still that way, though I haven’t been myself to be able to say.
When Pedro visited, the town was just then playing host to a grand tournament, and he takes a moment to tell us of the arrangements, an indication, it would seem, that something of the process was unfamiliar to him. He wrote of how certain knights had gathered to produce a list of all the district’s noblemen. How a coat of arms was painted for each and taken around by heralds to the houses, announcing the date when they ought to present themselves with arms and horse for the tournament. How the great ladies of the region were likewise given notice.
Inquiries were made, as to whether any of the listed knights had somehow degraded their rank, whether through carrying out violence against women, seizing the goods of an unprotected minor, debasing themselves with greed, or marrying with a match of low birth. Under any such circumstances, at the first sign of the offender’s arrival, a party of chosen knights would leap forward and thrash him with sticks, before driving him away. He would then be informed of exactly why he’d been set upon and then escorted back to the tournament, as if that sin had now been beaten out of him and he was again unsullied and sufficiently pure to compete.
After Schaffhausen, came Konstanz, the German city on the lake of the same name, in English at least, and again, a “fine place to see” with “delightful houses, streets, churches and monasteries, and excellent inns and lodging houses,” its lake one of “sweet water [that flowed] up to the walls” and brought abundant supplies and pleasant fish for eating. Pedro spent eight days there with a cardinal who he’d met before and reported that he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “So great was her beauty,” he wrote, “that I doubted if she could be really human. If she was as good as she was beautiful,” he further enthused, “they should make much of her in Paradise.”
Travelling northeast toward Bohemia, he stopped in Nuremberg, “a very ancient city,” as he would say, and “one of the greatest and richest in Germany.” He was shown a relic, a lance which was said to be the very one which had pierced Christ’s side, but he announced that it wasn’t the real one, for he had already seen the real lance in Constantinople. He later wrote that if it weren't for the strong folk in his company then, his undiplomatic remarks would have had him in great peril from the Germans.
There was peril on the road too, enough so that Pedro had to wait around in Nuremberg before the opportunity came to travel on in a larger company for safety. There was a chance to meet the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, but they arrived to find that he had already moved on to Poland. Like Nuremberg, Prague was ancient and very rich. It was home to a great university, one which I’ve attended a field school at myself in the now distant past. However, to Pedro’s mind the city had, quote, “declined since the Bohemians became heretics.” Jan Hus had been killed just over two decades earlier but the Hussite Wars were still fresher than that and with more Hussite-related battles still to come. Pedro singles out the Taborites among the movement, saying that their “heresy” was far from ended in the region and that the people persisted in their costly “errors.”
Travelling on, he came to a town where a battle had just recently been fought with those “Bohemian heretics,” and further on to “many places and churches [that were] in ruins” from quite a different struggle, that of the emperor with the Polish king. The latter would have been Wladyslaw III, at this point in his very early teens but already less than a full decade from death near the Black Sea in modern-day Bulgaria. His body would be lost in a doomed assault upon the Ottoman sultan’s camp, and the failure to recover it would allow for legends around his survival and the life he supposedly led after that to develop. The former, the emperor, would be Albert the Magnanimous of Germany, for when I said last episode that his predecessor, Sigismund, must have had very little time left, that indeed had proven to be true. But then poor Albert didn’t have a whole lot of time remaining either. He had only a year or so to go before he too would die on campaign against the Ottomans.
When Pedro found him, it was three days before Christmas and Albert was in Breslau. The emperor was, quote, “a man of sovereign virtue, a good Christian and devout, as well in the hearing of divine offices as in the acts of piety which he did. He was honest in his bearing and very continent, an open and vigorous knight.” He was also, as Pedro had it, “a man of light-hearted disposition, very graceful in person and face, although of unusual stature.” In what way unusual, Pedro doesn’t opt to say, instead then relating Albert’s relatively dark skin, and how people in those parts joked that he must be part Castilian.
The “open and vigorous” Albert was clearly ready for war, with a great host all about him, but as Pedro put it, “the fighting did not hinder the festivities, nor the jousts, tourneys and nuptials which the Emperor had planned for his people, nor did the festivities hinder the fighting, but due provision was made for each.” Pedro was going to mostly focus on the festivities.
There was a wedding between a widowed countess and a knight of the court at which the emperor himself jousted and was unhorsed before the company enjoyed a great feast and dancing until dawn. Albert rose merrily from jousting fall and was ever at Pedro’s elbow that night, asking him to point out which women he fancied most to dance with. There were feasts every day, and rarely one without jousts. There was the arrival of envoys from across Europe—from this or that duke, this king or that pope, and from the Italian city states—each bringing gifts to the new emperor. He graciously accepted them all, except for that from Venice, as to which he said it was “not fitting for him to take presents from a people upon whom he intended to make war.” Most of those around him seem to have been very pleased at this pronouncement, the understandable exception being the Venetians who quickly departed.
Pedro would also have a chance to meet Albert’s adversary during this period. The King of Poland was in a village about a day’s journey from Breslau when Pedro saw him, “with a great company of lords who were very wonderfully clad and armed according to the custom of their country.” The king himself was “of a pleasant face, and very valiant,” he said, though that king was all of about 12 years old at this point.
As for Breslau, it was large and well populated, able, Pedro praised it, to put many men into the field of battle, but it was also cold, brutally so: “cold in comparison with Lower Germany, as Germany is in comparison with Castile,” as Pedro would say. Chimneys and stoves could do nothing against it, but fires under the floors with holes to let through the heat would help. Meanwhile, outside in the streets and quite unlike everything Pedro would have known, no one with any money would ride for fear of falling, for the roads were like glass from the frost, and carriages or even feet were much preferred. More money was spent on furs and spices, he remarked, than half the world besides, and strangest of all to him, the people “fortif[ed] themselves by taking great quantities of food and drink.” Strange to him at least, though it seems entirely reasonable to me.
Pedro would receive permission from the emperor to leave Breslau but not before speaking about the intolerable actions of that Duke Stephen, of whom nothing more would be said, but before we speak of other things, we will take just a short break.
…
Departing from Breslau, Pedro would travel in the company of a pair of knights and their 200-horse escort bound for the area of Vienna, and he was very glad of the company. All around them there was evidence of recent fighting and many places “wasted and burnt” by the Bohemians. For Pedro, the ascension of Albert held the promise of an emperor who would actually oppose those oh-so-villainous Bohemians, Sigismund, in his view, having been found wanting in this regard.
Signs of violent conflict were not alone in making their journey unpleasant. As he had in Breslau, Pedro would complain heartily of the harsh climate. They suffered much from the frost and cold as they brought their carts across rivers of ice, and Pedro would write, rather colourfully, that, quote, “It was so cold that my teeth almost fell out of my mouth. Without doubt,” he continued, “it is a terrible business to travel through such country in winter.”
He was perhaps making a bit much of all of this, one is tempted to say, but then again you and I, or definitely “I” and very probably also “you,” have the luxury of not actually needing to put in day after day of overland travel exposed to the wintery elements, even in the relative luxury of the time.
They were two leagues out of Vienna when the two knights and their two-hundred-strong escort parted ways with Pedro and his much smaller party. They were scarcely half a league closer to the city than that when they were attacked by “some unmounted noblemen with intent to rob.” The timing was inopportune, to say the least, but the unmounted nature of the attackers was not, and Pedro and his friends were easily able to ride off for safety. Having reached Vienna and settled down at an inn which had been recommended to them, imagine Pedro’s surprise when he sat to eat only to see his would-be robbers then arriving at that very same inn.
He accosted them, demanding to know how they could behave thus, and they protested if not their innocence then their very great need. They were only very poor noblemen, they told Pedro, begging him to understand that they absolutely needed to carry out such robberies in order to support themselves. But he would not concede this point. I too am noble and poor, he insisted, perhaps straying from the truth a little there as to the poverty, and his needs as a stranger in their midst were every bit as great as theirs.
At this, they begged his pardon and offered to go find some money somewhere, maybe from some wandering traveller, one wonders, so that they could properly entertain him in their city. But he invited them to instead join him at the table and gave them some money, with which they were, quote, “greatly pleased, and they accompanied [him] on most of the days that [he] was in the city.” It was very kind of him, but also kind of underlines the point that he was not, in fact, poor like them, and there was certainly nothing of his stay in Vienna to change our mind on that, though perhaps it had always been more of a rhetorical point on his part than a strictly factual one.
Pedro spent his time in the city dropping in on the empress. He brought news of what the emperor was up to in Poland, and she provided him with “certain of her gentlemen” who were charged with guiding him about Vienna in what was, one can only assume, quite pleasant fashion—he was not getting the “Europe on X dollars a day” tour there.
He spent his time just outside the city on the land of one of the knights who he had travelled with from Poland. It was “among the largest and most splendid [estates] I have seen,” he wrote, complete with a rampart and a moat. There, was a park on one side of the house with a river running through it, and it was well stocked with wild pigs, deer, and other game. And there, Pedro refreshed himself from the exertions of travel, and when he left it was with gifts, with a sword, spurs, and golden stirrups from the knight, along with linen from his wife. It was also with one of the knight’s squires who guided him on to his next destination, a place which Pedro, it must be said, did not particularly care for.
The Hungarian city of Buda had many people, but, quote, “not so cleanly as the German cities. The inhabitants are somewhat gross, which comes, they say, from their plenty.” His words, I want to emphasize, not mine. There was, he admitted, a noble palace there with a great audience chamber like that of Padua, but not nearly, to Pedro’s tastes, so magnificent. He does not say exactly how much time he spent there, but it cannot have been very long.
There would be one more stop of note in Germany, where they would see yet another imperial figure, then “only” a Duke of Austria but an Emperor Frederick by the time Pedro was writing. There were more festivities, wedding preparations for the duke’s daughter and daily dinners that Pedro attended and thoroughly enjoyed. Frederick had recently returned from Jerusalem, and the two had plenty to bond over beyond just the bridge between them that was their shared membership in the relatively exclusive club of European nobility.
After that, Pedro turned toward home, or at least south, which was a start. Through the Alps he went “with great labour and peril on account of the severe frosts,” though he added that “the passes [were] all so well populated, and provisions [were] so plentiful that it [was] a marvel to behold.” Through Friuli where the Patriarch of Aquileia had lost much to the Venetians, losses he had complained of to the emperor and which the emperor had vowed to set right. Pedro’s travels tended to take him flitting in and out of these stories as to the very powerful of his day.
In Padua, he admired another city said to have been born of Trojan origins, said to have been founded by one of King Priam’s councillors after he fled from that city. Pedro spoke of the great university, already then more than two centuries old. He admired the great hall, also about two centuries old, with its Milanese metalwork and magnificent frescoes, its hall below full of the stalls of cloth and shoe makers, and pretty striking even now.
In Ferrara, he reconnected with the Byzantine emperor, who was ever happy to see him, and he watched the departure of the pope for Florence, describing it in this way.
Quote:
“All the archbishops, bishops, and other prelates and clergy, went on foot in procession with the crosses. Then followed the cardinals on horseback, staffs in hand, in order of precedence, and after them came twelve horses with crimson trappings, one bearing the umbrella, one the chair and another the cushion, and so on until the end. The last horse was covered with brocade, and on a rich silver saddle was a casket containing the Blessed Sacrament. This horse had a silver bell, and two prelates led it by the reins. Then came the Pope himself, upon a horse with crimson trappings. He was vested as for Mass, wearing a bishop's mitre and giving his blessing on one side and the other, while men cast coins into the street, so that those who picked them up might gain pardons. This was done to prevent the crowds from pressing upon the Pope, whose horse was led by the Marquis of Ferrara and the Count of Urbino.”
The marquis would go with Pope Eugene while some of his men marched in misdirection to another city, and this was done to prevent the rumoured aggression of the Duke of Milan.
Pedro would circle about the Italian cities for a while still. He would pick up his money in Venice and see that his friend shipped the goods, and the people, that he’d left there on to Spain. He would travel through the region where he thought the Battle of Cannae had been fought, though he seems to have misplaced that by some distance. He would speak of a burnt clearing in the mountains of Pistoia, where any wood thrown in was immediately consumed though there was no sign of fire. He would find a ship bound for Sicily. “They say,” he wrote, “that Naples and the island of Sicily were at one time joined together and formed one country, and that an earthquake broke off this island.”
They also said that there were fish in those waters with the upper bodies of women, mermaids we would say, and these, unlike the ones around Croatia last time, without the wings of a bat. These mermaids were known to live in the deepest depths, from which they could sense the first signs of wind or brewing storms. When especially violent storms were on the way, they would rise to the surface and sing a song of lamentation, and all who heard it knew then that the song of mourning was for them and that they were certain soon to die. For that reason, there were never any survivors to be found, no witnesses, and it was rather difficult to prove that it wasn’t true.
Pedro’s journey was nearing its end, but his writing wouldn’t really reach any kind of conclusion, at least not as it has come down to us. His ship started for Sardinia, but it was carried off course to Tunis.
Pedro would write that, quote:
“I desired much to go on shore to see the town, but the captain would not suffer it, as he intended leaving at once. The harbour of Tunis is very shallow so that ships cannot enter it, and they unload their cargoes into light boats. We remained there one day, and then sailed for two days and nights, and came to the island of Sardinia, which belongs to the King of Aragon, and entered the port of Cagliari, which is a fine place. We discharged our merchandise and remained there two days. This island is very unhealthy, having bad air and bad water…”
But there the text abruptly cuts off, with his telling of the journey ending on complaints of another unhealthy island, with bad air and water to match. It would not take him all the way home to assist his king in war, as he often brought up as the reason he had to be heading that way. It would not give any indication of his life after that, the years since he had returned and leading up to his writing.
As for what Pedro leaves us, I picture it as a kind of rolling snapshot of his time. His place of privilege brings him in and out of conflicts involving the most powerful figures of his day—sultans, emperors, popes, etc—but though he is very much an insider in every way, he exists sufficiently outside of those conflicts that he seems to move fairly comfortably among and between them, seeing Albert and the Polish king, for example, or the Byzantine emperor and the Ottoman sultan. He offers us a bit of his tastes in towns and people, and he shows us some practicalities of travel in his day, at least for someone like him.
We get a little about the inns of his day, about banking and the early equivalent of travellers cheques, hints as to personal security on the road patchworked together with local promises of safe conduct, armed escorts, and attaching yourself to larger parties who were going your way. We get looks at some places on the cusp of big changes, often falls, from Western Europe to the Eastern Roman Empire. We get fragments of myth and folklore, which I always enjoy finding in these writings. And I hope you’ve enjoyed them and this series also.
Like last time when I finished up something longer, I have some shorter stories in mind to follow this one, some standalone listening before we get into another series. For now though, I’ll say thank you for listening. I’ll be back soon with one of those one-offs, and I’ll talk to you then.