The younger son of Tamerlane had in Persia a kingdom, and after his father’s death came a vassal named Youssouf, who expelled Miran Shah from his kingdom. He sent to his brother Shahrukh, and asked him to help him to recover his kingdom. His brother came with eighty thousand men, and sent thirty thousand men to his brother, that he might expel the vassal, and kept to himself 42 k men. With these he marched against Youssouf, who, on learning this, went to meet him with 60 thousand men, and they fought a whole day, without either the one or the other being overcome. Then Miran Shah asked his brother, Shahrukh, to come with the rest of his people. He came. Then he fought with Youssouf and drove him away, and Miran Shah returned to his kingdom. There were also two countries that were subdued by Youssouf; the one was called Churten, the other was Lesser Armeny. Shahrukh went into these countries and conquered them, and bestowed them on his brother, and then returned into his own country, leaving, for the assistance of his brother, twenty thousand men from amongst his people, with whom I also remained.
This was Johann Schiltberger summing up the situation, and situating himself in the post-Timur Timurid Empire. As we heard last episode, Timur had died following his aborted invasion of China, and he left behind him a void which several figures rushed to occupy. His sons were there certainly, but, quite aside from competition with one another, they were not guaranteed their place in line.
In some tellings, Timur had, on his dying day, bequeathed all of his power to his grandson Pir Mohammed, familiar to us from the Delhi campaign, and urged all his followers to transfer their loyalty to this grandson. He is said to have promised that none would oppose them, so long as they remained united, but warned that discord and disunity would allow ill fortune to creep in, bringing with it irreparable damage. Though hardly an unpredictable set of outcomes, this all sounds a bit too neat and tidy, but in any case, it was going to be discord and disunity that the empire opted for once he was gone.
Maybe chaos was always going to be the immediate result, but it might have fallen out differently if Timur’s grandson and chosen heir, Pir Mohammed, had been on hand to smoothly step into power. As it was, he was in his territories in Northern India when the rush for the throne started and would not be the first to reach Samarkand. That honour fell to another of Timur’s grandsons, Khalil Sultan, who quickly needed to turn aside an attempted takeover by yet another grandson, Sultan Husayn. This Husayn will quicky drop off our list of competitors when he then is executed by his uncle Shahruhk. Pir Mohammed, death-bed front-runner, is going to drop out too. He’d campaign with mixed success against Khalil Sultan, apparently relying heavily on an emir named Pir Ali Taz, an emir who would betray Pir Mohammed, and kill him.
But Khalil Sultan won’t have everything his own way either. Remember from last episode that Timur had kept his army happy, and loyal, with the fruits of perpetual expansion, that they were not so much a professional standing army as a standing body of professional plunderers. With the internal struggles following Timur’s death, expansion was not happening and neither was any looting. Khalil’s army in particular was not a local one; they from all across his grandfather’s conquests, and had no tribal loyalty to him or personal interest in the health of the dynasty. They would need to be bought, and Khalil could not do buy them indefinitely. He could, for 4 years, burn through the considerable wealth of Samarkand, but as his treasury melted away, so did his armies.
In 1409, Khalil and what was left of his followers sought refuge with his uncle Shahrukh, just as Sultan Husayn had. But Shahrukh would prove once again that he had no great soft spot for his nephews. Apparently, he’d poison this one. Yet another nephew, Umar, would come to Shahrukh after losing control of territories we’d label Azerbaijan. Umar too, would die soon after, though Shahrukh does not appear to be implicated in this death at least.
And what of Timur’s sons, Miran Shah and Shahrukh, the world’s worst uncle? They had not simply been resting while the younger generation struggled for power. All across the lands Timur had dominated, there were uprisings, some on the part of men who had risen to power in his service and others led by local rulers who saw an opportunity to regain the control they or their families had once had, or to carve out new dominions where Timur had violently made space to do so.
Shahrukh had managed to survive these grabs for power quite neatly, to stave off rebellions in his territory of Khorasan, and to finish off a few relatives as well. When Khalil Sultan had died, Shahrukh had taken control, moving the seat of his rule from Samarkand to Herat, and leaving the old imperial capital to his son.
Then bizarrely, things take a turn for the better. Territories in the west would be lost, but, born out of chaos, Shahrukh’s reign will actually be a long and relatively stable one, lasting 38 years. It was going to be ended abruptly by his own son, yes, but there would be good years in between. Shahrukh and his wife Gohar Shad invested heavily in theology, arts, and science, in the latter most notably with their son’s construction of the renowned observatory at Samarkand. Timurid culture reached new peaks it had not under Timur, and this can still be viewed as a golden age highlighted by Persian miniature and by Islamic ceramic art responding to Chinese influences.
And Miran Shah, Timur’s other living son - still others haven’t lived long enough to enter our story - his story takes us back to Schiltberger’s. Let’s get back to our friend Johann and see how he fit into the early 15th century upheavals. He hadn’t much to say during his brief years with Timur, but in the aftermath he really reemerges as a character within his own story. He’d remained, as we heard, with Miran Shah, and he’d get a front row seat to some of the turmoil we’ve just been covering. As he long had, he was living in interesting times.
Schiltberger tells us that Miran Shah continued to be bothered by the Youssouf we heard about at the beginning of the episode. This Youssouf, by the way, was no small time bandit lord to be swatted away, and he has been on the periphery of our story for quite some time. His territory, present day Iraq and Iran, was that of his Kara Koyunlu - also known as the Horde of the Black Sheep. It had been invaded by Timur and he’d sought safety with Bayezid, and in the following years he’d fallen on hard times and been imprisoned by the Mamluks. By this point in Schiltberger’s story, he’s clearly free and back to commanding a substantial force, one that challenged the powers of Shahrukh and Miran Shah.
Challenging Miran Shah may not have been all that hard actually. Looking back through Timur’s reign, there are indications that he was at times dissatisfied with Miran Shah’s capabilities. There were reports of outrageous debauchery and a related decline in health and mental faculties, with some military embarrassments to show for it. Some spoke of his having lost his senses after a fall from his horse, but Clavijo, our Castilian friend from last episode, saw something more like insecurity in the “large, corpulent, and gouty man” he met in Sultaniya.
Clavijo relates that Miran Shah was said to have proclaimed “I am the son of the greatest man in the world. What deed shall I perform in these cities, that I may be remembered after I am dead?” Having not been able to come up with anything productive he might accomplish, Miran Shah is then said to have settled on tearing down many of the city’s great buildings that its people might indeed remember him after he was gone. And if all that were not enough, he may have actually plotted against Timur or at least urged his early exit from the scene. Perhaps this did not actually happen though, for Timur would not, as you’d expect, have him killed, and there are stories seeking to explain this, of people begging him to have mercy on his wayward son. Timur would however relieve Miran Shah of his regional governing position, placing the blame on a corrupting court culture, and dragging him along on a revivifying military campaign.
None of this is particularly apparent in Schiltberger of course, though it does maybe put Shahrukh’s needing to come to Miran Shah’s rescue in a new light. And we see what happens when Sharukh isn’t there to help. Schiltberger tells us that Miran Shah and his son Abu Bakr clashed with Youssouf. They were trying to retake the region of Azerbaijan, but it was going to be lost to the Timurid Empire, never to be regained.
This was because they, and Schiltberger with them, were about to be defeated by Youssouf. We read that they went to meet him with 400 thousand men, but however many they had, it wasn’t enough. Not only does Youssouf defeat them, but Miran Shah is killed, either in the battle or, as Schiltberger has it, after he is taken prisoner. We read:
And Youssouf had Miran Shah’s head stuck on a spear, and taken to a city called after the kingdom, and showed it there, that they might give themselves up the sooner. When they saw that their lord was dead, they gave themselves up; and then he took the city and the whole kingdom with all its dependencies. ... And after that Miran Shah, Tamerlane’s son, was taken in battle and beheaded, I came to his son Abu Bakr, with whom I remained 4 years.
So Schiltberger had followed another lord or ruler until their death. If you’re keeping score at home, that list is Leinhart, Bayezid, Timur, and now Miran Shah, and Schiltberger would now be following Abu Bakr. Of Abu Bakr he has this to say. He’d strangled his brother, and he was very strong; he was so strong that he’d once shot an arrow through a plowshare and on another occasion cut an ox right through with a single sword blow.
These stories aside, Schiltberger doesn’t linger on his time with Abu Bakr. In fact, he pretty quickly jumps into telling us of his departing with another lord named Tchekre, the son of a king of Great Tartary who was returning home with 600 horsemen including Schiltberger and 4 other Christians. He initially speaks of the places through which they passed - “First through a country called Astara, where silk grows; then through a country called Georgia, where there are Christians…” And so on, and so on, until they come to a region which our travel guide speaks of at some length.
There, he tells us, is a great mountain which borders a desert, and this desert is believed by the people of the mountain to be the end of the earth, uninhabitable due to snakes and wild beasts. On the mountain live savages, not like other people. They are covered in hair save for the hands and the face, and they run like wild beasts, eating grasses and leaves. Presumably, these were humans of quite average hairiness, heavily furred against the cold, that Schitberger encountered. He goes on to describe the abundance of animals unknown to him which he has no name for, as well as the horses as small as donkeys, and the dogs as large as donkeys, which were made to carry luggage or to pull carts and sledges. Dogs, he continues, are eaten in this country. The furry people’s funeral practices are briefly discussed, and so is their Christianity, and their diet: nothing but millet, we are told, and no bread. He concludes: “All this I have seen, and was there with the above-named king’s son Tchekre.
Clearly the journey continued, but we’re not told of it. Instead, we get the kind of swerve in direction one becomes accustomed to in reading Schiltberger’s Travels. We get a kind of “X begat Y who begat Z,” except it’s a violent succession of kings: 15 reigns with some repeats, the longest and year and a half and the shortest, the unfortunate Doblabardi, only 3 days. And just as we’re becoming numbed by the repetition of unfamiliar names, we get this: Then came Muhammed, and he overcame his enemy and again became king. After that, came my lord Tchekre, and he fought with Muhammed and was killed. And so it was that Schiltberger’s lord had again been slain, and that’s his 5th now. But we’re going to put his immediate situation aside for the moment, and spend some time with Schiltberger the travel guide, teller of tales, and observer of social and religious practices. After that, we’ll return to see how he finally makes it home.
Now I have described the battles and the fights which took place, during the time that I was with the Infidels. Now I will also write and name the countries that I have been in, since I left Bavaria. At first I went into Hungary, before the great expedition against the infidels. There I remained ten months, and after that we went amongst the Infidels as described. I have also been in Wallachia and in its two chief cities; one is called Ardschisch in Wallachia, the other Bucharest; also in a city called Ubereil, situated on the Danube. There were the keggen and the galleys, in which merchants bring their goods from the land of the Infidels. It is also to be noted, that the people in Little and Great Wallachia hold to the Christian faith, and they also speak a particular language; they also allow their hair and beard to grow, and never cut it. I have also been in Little Wallachia, and in Sybenburgen.
Schiltberger the travel writer
Schiltberger goes on at some length after this. He has after all not even left Europe in this passage, and we know by now that he was a widely travelled man. His travel writing is dotted with fantastic little details: in this city there are 50 thousand houses; in that city there are 8 hospitals which serve the poor; here the trees are unusually fruitful; there they make their bread of millet. One unfortunate country is described as “an unhealthy country, and men and women wear flat caps on their heads, which they do because the place is unhealthy.” It’s not clear in what way the country is unhealthy, nor how the flat caps aid its inhabitants.
Greater detail is offered on the nomadic way of life in what Schiltberger terms Great Tartary. Of their diet, he notes that camel and horse meat is eaten, and milk drunk from both, and they eat seated upon the ground. When the people travel and have no time to prepare food, they slice meat and place it, salted but uncooked, beneath their saddles so that is dried by the warmth of the horse and made tender as they ride. When no food is available, Schiltberger tells us he has seen them drinking the blood of their horses, saying they cook it first. They move often, from pasture to pasture as the season demands, with their children and cattle and all that they have. Their kings, or khans, when selected, are raised 3 times on white felt. “Then they lift him up and carry him round the tent, and seat him on a throne, and put a golden sword in his hand.” He is then sworn in. When he rises in the morning, he is given mare’s milk, in a golden goblet.
One way in which Schiltberger differentiates between locations that I think is particularly interesting is by saints, miracles, and holy places. In one town is the grave of Saint John the Evangelist. In one monastery there is a lamp for every monk, and when a monk is dying that monk’s lamp burns low, and dies with him. In another city, by the White Sea in Greece, lies another saint, from whose body oil flows. In Konya lies a saint who was an infidel priest but was secretly baptised; when he was dying he received, from an Armenian priest, the body of God in an apple. This saint, Schiltberger continues, has worked great miracles.
These little details, and there are many of them, create an interesting religious map. It is a picture of the world that relies less on the physical constructions of human beings - “you come now to the fortress with the redstone walls” or “turn left at the coffee shop with the hideous mural” - than it does on the memories of the miraculous, the touches of god upon the earth. This is a spiritually infused landscape, and it’s completely alien from our own. Imagine driving down the highway, and as the exit signs appear they’re not advertising gas stations or fast food chains; instead it’s this town and its bleeding statue or the next with its church’s well that only holds water on its saint’s day and is dry on every other day.
The Travels of Schiltberger does actually make a stop in Jerusalem, and, though -as we’ll learn- Schiltberger himself may not have been there, it participates in the tradition of the pilgrimage narrative. These are the works, of which there were many, which depicted the journey to the holy land. They provided everything from itineraries to travel diaries, from attempts to convey the experience itself to narrative combined with useful travel recommendations. Distances might be provided, or directions, practical travel tips, wine drinking suggestions, or notable religious sites. The holy land and the surrounding area was teaming with such locations, biblical and otherwise, and the many spiritually significant stops made the journey very much as important as the destination. While Schiltberger’s Travels offers little in the way of inspiration or advice for those who may follow him, it certainly presents the region as a kingdom of magic, a landscape pierced by the otherworldly and linked to the transcendent.
It is to be noted, that the Infidels have five religions. First, some believe in a Giant called Ali, who was a great persecutor of the Christians. Others believe in one who was called Molwa, who was an infidel priest. The third believe believe, as the three kings believed, before they were baptised. The fourth believes in fire, because they say that Abel, the son of Adam, brought his offering to almighty God, and the flames of the fire were the offering; therefore they believe in this offering. Among the fifth, some believe, and the largest number among the infidels believe, in one who is called Muhammed.
Schiltberger on Religion
The religious material in The Travels of Johann Schiltberger is fascinating. The story begins with an actual crusade, so we know we’re not in the context of peak mosaic-style multiculturalism here. Yet, even with the use of the term “infidels,” Schiltberger seems a fairly sympathetic observer of unfamiliar practices both within broader Christianity and without. Let’s take a look at those observations and their consequences.
We’ll start with what he makes of the Christianities which he encounters. One encounter that strikes me as interesting is difficult to place exactly, but appears to be have been in the region of the Caspian Sea, North of the Caucasus mountains. There, Schiltberger tells us, are many Christians who follow a bishop and a body of priests belonging to what he calls the Order of the Shoeless, possibly a reference to the Discalced or “barefoot” Carmelites.
These priests, he says, did not know Latin, and so they sang and read their prayers in the local tongue, the language understood by all. Schiltberger reports that the laity became stronger in their faith than they otherwise would have been because they understood their priests’ words and that, for the same reason, many infidels converted. His saying this is of course no small thing, was hugely provocative in fact in pre-reformation Europe where it might be seen as a critique of the Church.
Now the question is, were these Schiltberger’s words, his opinions? Was this something he thought about in the first quarter of the 15th century, or was it something added later by that scribe at the Munich court who recorded his travels? Did he report on the vernacular language of the priest and the scribe then add his opinion to it, that this strengthened belief in those who listened? Or was it something added after the fact, as the book shifted over successive iterations and publications, changing slightly over time? They’re interesting questions, but as questions they’ll have to remain.
Another critique of Christianity, or, more accurately, Christian society, might be seen in what Schiltberger presents as “what the infidels say of Christians.” He reports that the infidels claim that what land they have taken from Christians they owe not to their own strength, wisdom, or holiness; rather, it is because of the injustice of the Christians: against Muslims, but also against their own Christian poor. “... they do not conduct their affairs, whether spiritual or temporal, with justice,” we read “because they look to wealth and favour, and the rich treat the poor with haughtiness, and do not help them either with gifts or with justice, and do not hold to the doctrine which the Messiah has given them.” Schiltberger goes on to report that there is a prophecy among the infidels that Christians will retake their old territory, but only when their lords live a just and ordered life. As such, there is little worry that this will occur. All of this seems much less likely to have been controversial than the compliments paid to the barefoot priests, for it confronts a failure to live up to the ideals of the Church, rather than confronting the Church itself.
Schiltberger also reports on other Christianities. The Greek tradition is described in some detail, and there does not appear to be much in the way of judgement in this presentation, at least in reading the words over the great distance of time and translation that separates us. There is perhaps even an implied critique of Latin Christendom in the depiction of a Greek clergy that is in some ways encouraged more to be worldly but, by Schiltberger’s estimation, is actually policed seriously to see that they remain within their boundaries.
The Armenians receive similar treatment with something of a mythology developed and their practices presented as more similar to Latin Christianity than to Greek. There are two sections here that stand out to me. The first is very complimentary, of the outward appearance of the people and their churches but also of the devout behaviour of the church attendees. He admires their devotion, the way they do not look about, do not speak or become distracted by other matters during service. He goes on to point out that only priests are allowed to read the gospel and that for the laity to do so would invite “the ban of the Patriarch.” This I find intriguing because a pattern of interest in the issue starts to emerge, on the part of Schiltberger or on that of the Schiltberger scribe, in these issues of language of religious practice and its accessibility for the laity.
Before we move on from the topic of religion, we must of course look at Schiltberger’s treatment of Islam. You may remember from episode 2 that Schiltberger would sometimes be invoked as something of an expert on the “cruel Turk,” the fearsome other, but what of discussion of the religion of Islam itself in Schiltberger’s Travels? What kind of a witness is he, other than being, as we heard a moment ago, one who sharply divides those who follow that Giant Ali from those who follow Muhammed.
It so happens that the Schiltberger presentation of Islam is rather more reasonable than one, or at least I, could really expect from a one-time underage crusader. By this I mean that negative editorialising appears virtually non-existent, but of course in its basic presentation it’s quite likely there are things here that I’m missing, points that would be obviously perceived in a negative light by a 15th century central European no matter their presentation.
There’s an origin story, not the one you would learn now admittedly, and then a kind of disorganized Islam 101, a ramble through the five pillars, the Rashidun Caliphate, the Ghazi, and the religious holidays which the text persists in referring to as the Infidel’s Easter days. We’re told what temple attendance looks like, hear about the call to prayer, and are given a haphazard introduction to Islamic law. Throughout, the text that has come down to us is not always accurate, but it doesn’t place itself in confrontation with this other religion either. At times a compliment will even be tossed out, something like “The infidels have a good practice among their merchants…” and so on.
During the time that I was with Tchekre, there came to Edigi, and also to Tchekre, a Tartar woman named Sadurmeliekh, with 4 thousand maidens and women. She was powerful, and her husband had been killed by a Tartar king. She wanted revenge, and therefore came to Edigi, so that he should assist her to expel the king. And you must also know, that she and her women rode to battle and fought with the bow, as well as men; and when the women rode to battle, they had on one side a sword, and on the other a bow. In a battle, she had with a king, there was the king’s cousin who had killed the husband of this woman, and he was made prisoner. He was brought before the woman; she ordered him to kneel, and drew her sword, and cut off his head at one blow, and said: “Now am I avenged.” I was present there, and I also saw this.
Schiltberger the Storyteller
Reading The Travels of Johann Schiltberger is a curious experience. It’s really an alien object in its distance from any kind of modern genre that might deal with similar material, whether it be adventure novel, travel guide, or history text. Occasionally though, you get Schiltberger the storyteller, and I want to give you a taste of that here, because it shows another side of the text, and because it’s a fun little story. It’s a bit of a caper film, but it’s one where the comedic bungling turns to tragedy. It’s a story of personal ambition, of what we would call a sleeper agent, and of the taking of a city. The city in question was Alexandria.
We are told from the outset that “Alexandria is quite seven Italian miles long, and three broad, and is a fine and pretty city, and the river Nile flows past the city into the sea; and the city has no other drinking water, and it is conducted into the city by means of cisterns. Many merchants come there from over the sea, from Italian countries, from Venice and from Genoa. Those from Genoa have their own counting houses at Alexandria and those from Venice likewise.”
Schiltberger goes on to tell us that by the hour of Vespers each day, the time of the evening prayer, that all these Italians must have returned to their counting houses, for to remain outside in the city is strictly forbidden. Then comes a man, an infidel he says, to lock the doors of those counting houses, shutting the Italians within. This man then takes away the key with him until morning, when he will return to release the Italians again. The people of the city were careful you see because they had once been conquered by Cyprus, and they were not keen for this to happen again. As an aside, my edition of the text has Cyprus given variously as Zipern (with a Zi), Zypperen (with a Zy), and Cipern (a Ci), all in about a page and a half.
Returning to the narrative, we are told that near the port is a high tower, a fine one, but not otherwise remarkable save for the fact that it contains a mirror, and in this mirror can be seen, from Alexandria toward Cyprus, all those who are on the sea and, apparently, whatever they are doing. This early warning system was said to ensure that should the king of Cyprus return, he could do them no harm. Naturally, this presented a problem for the king of Cyprus, who we could start calling by his name, Pierre de Lusignan. Pierre, however, was about to be presented with a solution to this problem.
The solution came to him in the form of an ambitious priest who asked Pierre what he would give to the man who broke the mirror for him. Pierre replied that the priest could expect to receive whichever bishopric he desired within Pierre’s realm. The priest, whose name we are not given, goes away then, and he goes to the pope in Rome and he asks him for his permission. He needs the pope’s permission because to carry out his mission he is going to need to abjure his Christian faith. He is going to renounce his religion, to deny that he is Christian. If he does this, he tells the pope, he is going to be able break the mirror at Alexandria. Would the pope permit him to do such a thing? Yes he would.
So this nameless priest leaves, and he goes now to Alexandria, where he presents himself as a former Christian priest, and a convert to Islam. Apparently this all goes over very well for him. The people of the city accept him and Schiltberger tells us that he becomes, in time, an infidel priest, and their preacher, and he is held in great honour and trusted completely. He’s told that he may choose any temple in the city, and says, well I’ll take the one in the middle of that tower over there then - the tower, of course, where the mirror was. And they give him the temple in the middle of the tower, and they give him the keys to the mirror. But he, perhaps moved by an excess of caution, or perhaps by having grown extremely comfortable in his life there, does not quickly move to take advantage of this trust. Indeed, he lives this way for nine years. For nine years he remains, and then one day he sends to King Pierre that he should come with his galleys, and that the mirror would be broken as promised.
Now Pierre’s man in Alexandria seems to have had an escape plan, but he did not have a good one. He apparently assumed that he’d be able to hop on board one of the invading galleys and slip safely away from any repercussions, but things would not turn out that way. One morning he saw many galleys coming, and I’m assuming here that he saw many galleys coming through that mirror and they hadn’t generally been spotted by the city’s people yet. So he sees the fleet approaching and he sets about destroying that mirror.
Unfortunately, the mirror does not break easily. This is clearly not a makeup mirror or something mounted on the washroom wall above the sink. He strikes it three times with a hammer before it finally gives way, and this creates a dreadful noise, a noise which immediately brings the people of the city running to the tower. And they reach it too quickly for the priest to slip out unnoticed; he’s trapped in there now, and he clearly hasn’t considered this possibility in all the nine years he spent preparing for this day. He’s up the tower with no way down, no conveniently large collection of bedding to be knotted together, no artfully constructed bird-wing device for gliding off in, no rope ladder, or even a rope. But he has to leave; it’s that or be torn apart, so he goes out the window.
As Schiltberger sums up, “he jump[s] out of a window of the tower, into the sea, and [is] killed.” Maybe it’s the fall that gets him, maybe he drowns, or perhaps he’s slaughtered there when he gets to the bottom. However his story ends, he doesn’t live to get his bishopric, but King Pierre does carry off his invasion. He takes Alexandria and remains for 3 days until he’s driven off by the arrival of the Mamluk Sultan, driven off, but able to take a great deal of treasure and a great many prisoners with him.
Some of this did happen by the way. This King of Cyprus did indeed capture Alexandria in 1365 with a large crusading force. He did stay for 3 days, and actually intended to stay for longer, but his allies were quite content with the loot they’d already taken. He was forced to depart by the arrival of the Mamluk Sultan and his army. So all of that is quite historically valid. As for the Alexandria Tower Job, and the unfortunate priest, I do not know. It’s a good story though.
There is on a mountain a castle, called that of the Sparrow Hawk. Within, is a beautiful virgin, and a sparrow hawk on a perch. Whoever goes there and does not sleep but watches for 3 days and 3 nights, whatever he asks of the woman, that is chaste, that she will grant him. And when he finishes the watch, he goes into the castle and comes to a fine place, where he sees a sparrow hawk standing on a perch; and when the sparrow hawk sees the man, he screams, and the woman comes out of her chamber, welcomes him and says: “Thou hast served me and watched for three days and three nights, and whatever thou now askest of me that is pure, that I will grant unto thee.” And she does so. But if anybody asks him for something that exhibits pride, impudence, or avarice, she curses him and his offspring, so that he can no longer attain an honourable position.
Schiltberger the Plagiarist
Plagiarist is not necessarily the right word here; it’s too modern in the way it carries notions of authenticity and originality which don’t necessarily transfer back as smoothly as one might imagine. Schiltberger, or perhaps we should say his scribe, is not so much a plagiarist as an enthusiastic borrower. His narrative is interspersed with the imported descriptions of pilgrims’ stories; sometimes showing places he had not visited, sometimes adding colour to ones he had. The Schiltberger author has multiple sources, but the one he goes back to the most is The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
It’s from Mandeville that he gets the Castle of the Sparrow Hawk which you heard a part of a moment ago. The story is presented with a few changes. First, the lady of the castle is no longer the fairy she had been in Mandeville’s telling. A second change is that Schiltberger is said to have personally passed close to the castle, his party hiring a local guide but then being convinced to turn away before actually sighting it. And the third change concerns the knight who comes to the castle asking, as one should never do in these stories, for a purse that would never empty.
Predictably the knight is sent away with nothing but a thorough cursing of himself and his order, but it’s the order itself that’s interesting. In the Mandeville version the knight is a Templar, an order already doomed and dissolved prior to publishing, but in Schiltberger’s story he is of the Knight’s Hospitallers, not yet ended in Rhodes and thus still a prophecy concerned with the future rather than a nod the past. Samuel Wilcocks has pointed out that this prophecy, later proved correct, may have added to the authority of the text, verified it in a sense, and even helped it to survive to see successive printings.
There are other pieces of Mandeville strewn about in Schiltberger, the story of how pepper grows in India is almost certainly borrowed, as are his descriptions of Jerusalem and Babylon, and also, less understandably, his short treatise on how to test the purity of balm, a somewhat odd thing to appropriate.
Why was the Mandeville material included? There are a number of possible explanations. In some cases, it’s possible that Schiltberger actually encountered some common root of these stories on his travels, that he came by them honestly. But some of the Mandeville material seems too close to his for this to be likely. Another explanation is that he became familiar with these other sources after he returned to Bavaria and that he assimilated them into his own memories, found places for all the pieces to fit together - this was not, after all, a 3 week road trip he was returning from; it’s easy to imagine his reconstruction of his own past becoming entangled with these other elements. Or, of course, it could be that nameless scribe who made the additions, and in this he had at least few possible motivations. He might have used them to make this new narrative somewhat familiar to its courtly readership, to put it into pre-established frameworks of understanding so that it may be comfortably received. Alternatively, it could have been a move to borrow authority, to take up some of the legitimacy of those earlier texts and tie them onto this new work and join it in the reader’s mind with those more established writings.
The fascinating thing about John de Mandeville as a source for the unknown Schiltberger scribe is that John de Mandeville is widely believed not to have existed. The Travels written under his name has itself been found to be a tremendous collage of earlier travellers, pilgrims, and missionaries such Hayton, Jean le Long, Oderic of Pordenone, Wilhelm von Boldensele, and Ricoldo da Monte di Croce. It draws on the 12th century Romance of Alexander, the Letter of Prester John, Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis, and still other works. Mandeville then was something of a fraud in modern terms, but the text was not treated as such. We find near the end of the 15th century, that a Mattheus Bratzl, Receiver of Revenues at the Munich court, had a collection of manuscripts bound together that was made of Schiltberger, Marco Polo, and Oderic with St Brendan and Mandeville. He was joining up the, largely, fantastical with the, mostly, historical with no sense of division; each is equally authoritative, with their travels depicted on a map that he helpfully included.
When Tchekre was defeated, as is already related, I came over to a lord named Mantzusch; he had been a councilor of Tchekre. He was obliged to fly, and he went to a city called Kaffa, where there are Christians; it is a strong city in which there are people of six kinds of religion. There he remained five months, and then crossed an arm of the Black Sea, and came to a country called Zerchkas; there he remained half a year.
Schiltberger finally goes home
Here Schiltberger was, on the cusp of returning home, and he’d get a little outside help, nudging him in the right direction. A powerful king is going to contact the local ruler and communicate that it would a great favour if that ruler would not allow this Mantzusch to stay in his land. And so Mantzusch was going to need to move on again, and Schiltberger with him. This time, when they come to rest, Schiltbeger and the 4 other Christians agree that it is time for them to go on to their native country.
I’m not sure what sparks this decision. Maybe they’d simply been enjoying themselves up to this point, or perhaps the way home had previously seemed horribly long and perilous, the difficulty imposing its own kind of prison walls. Whatever the case, this group, presumably the group that had left Abu Bakr’s company together, chose an opportune time, when they were less than 3 days journey from the Black Sea, and they escaped from their lord. It may have been more than 25 years since his last escape attempt, but Schiltberger was finally headed for home.
Things don’t get off to a smooth start. The group of five come to a town on the Black Sea shore and there they beg to be taken across the sea, but this they are denied. Maybe they had fled with few resources and are simply unable to pay for such a passage. They are forced to follow the shore, working their way around and into mountainous country, probably around the western end of the Caucasus mountains. There they have a bit of luck, for out to sea, about 8 Italian miles from coast, sits a ship.
The 5 men wait until nightfall and then set up a signal fire hoping to draw the ship in, and it works. A small boat is sent in towards them, and as it draws close they make themselves known, probably leaping up and shouting like people who haven’t been home in 30 years. But the boat doesn’t scoop them up and cuddle them off to safety just yet. It’s night time on the Black Sea coast in the early 15th century. These sailors have no idea who this is who wants them to come closer, or to what purpose. Understandably, they are cautious, and they call to shore, asking who it is that signals them. To this Schiltberger replies that they are “Christians, and were made prisoners when the King of Hungary was defeated at Nicopolis, and had come so far with the help of God.”
This, by the way, is the first hint Schiltberger gives that his companions here are also survivors of that ill-fated crusade, and, if true, that’s really quite remarkable that they should have reached this point together, surviving first Nicopolis and then battles in service of the Ottomans, Angora, whatever it was they got up to during the reign of Timur, and the bloody wars of succession that followed, and now they are gathered, this small group, trying to convince these potential rescuers of who they are.
Their claim must have been a striking one, but how were they to persuade the sailors of its truth? They did not, after all, carry identification of any sort, no letters of reference, and there was nobody with the sailors who knew and could vouch for them. What do you do at this point, and how convincing do you need to be before these sailors are going to expose themselves to death or captivity by bringing their boat in? It would after all be so much easier simply to return to their ship and inform the captain that they suspected Turks and/or pirates.
But these sailors didn’t do that. Instead they hit upon an acceptable means of verification; they asked if the 5 companions could recite the Our Father, the Ave Maria, and the Belief. This the 5 did. Satisfied, the sailors reported to their captain who promptly had Schiltberger and his friends brought aboard. The ship continued on, and the 5 with it, bound for Constantinople.
On their third day at sea, a trio of ships sighted and pursued them, Turkish pirates who followed them for another 3 days but could not catch them, for their ship put in at Amastris, a Genoese port on the Anatolian coast, until the pirates went on their way. Back at sea, terrible weather battered the ship, driving it back east to the city of Sinop. Again to sea, after 8 days, they ran short of food and water, but they survived on the snails and crabs found on a small rocky island. Finally, we’re told, after a month at sea, they reached Constantinople, parting ways with the ship, which continued on for Italy.
At the gates, they were asked again to identify themselves. They repeated their story and were brought before the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II of the Palaiologos dynasty. Again, they were asked for their story: how had they escaped from the infidels; again, they told it. When he heard them out in full, Manuel reassured them that they would be sent home, for he would see to it. They waited three months in Constantinople before being sent on in a galley, stopping at a fortress where the Danube flowed into the Black Sea. There the company of 5 parted ways, and Schiltberger went on with a group of merchants through Wallachia, immobilized by illness for 3 months but moving on then Krakow. From there, he’s moving west. He’s getting closer to home, but it’s a home he hasn’t seen since he was a teenager. He goes from city to city, until finally we read this:
From Landzut to Fridingen, near which place I was born; And, with God’s help, I returned to my home and to Christianity. Almighty God be thanked, and all those who have helped me. And when I had almost despaired of coming [away] from the Infidel people and their wicked religion, amongst whom I was obliged to be for XXXII years, and of any longer having fellowship with holy Christianity, God Almighty saw my great longing and anxiety after the Christian faith and its heavenly joys, and graciously preserved me from the risk of perdition of body and soul; THEREFORE, I ASK ALL WHO HAVE READ OR HAVE HEARD THIS BOOK READ, THAT THEY SHOULD THINK KINDLY OF ME BEFORE GOD, SO THAT THEY SHOULD BE ETERNALLY FREED, THERE AND HERE, FROM SUCH HEAVY AND UNCHRISTIAN CAPTIVITY. AMEN.
Schiltberger’s three decade adventure was finally over, and, as alluded to in the first episode, he’d actually settle quite comfortably into the Munich court aristocracy, finding substantial positions there and, unsurprisingly, garnering enough interest in his story for this text to be written. He had a life after this of course, but this is the end of this story, and this where we’ll leave him. Think kindly of Schiltberger.