Translating Popular Wisdom into Learned Language and Practice:
Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis and the Changing World of the Eleventh Century

Hiram Kümper

Historical Institute, University of Mannheim

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 186-213 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.186

This paper explores the Fecunda ratis, Egbert of Liège’s early eleventh-century didactic poem in Latin, as an example of the transformation of vernacular, orally transmitted wisdom into structured, literary pedagogy. Drawing on recent theoretical and philological research, it develops a typology of proverbial adaptation in Egbert’s work and analyzes the rhetorical and poetic strategies employed to integrate popular sayings into the moral and educational discourse of the cathedral school. In doing so, the study situates the Fecunda ratis within the broader context of the emerging homiletic and didactic culture of the eleventh century, highlighting its role in shaping the clerical ethos and institutional memory through the literary canonization of the popular voice.

Keywords: classical learning, Latin, vernacular, cathedral schools, Middle Ages

Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis stands as one of the most ambitious and rhetorically refined didactic poems of the eleventh century, remarkable both for its formal complexity and for its systematic integration of proverbial material into a moral-pedagogical framework.1 This study examines the Fecunda ratis as a sophisticated site of cultural translation, in which popular proverbial wisdom, often rooted in vernacular, situational discourse, is rearticulated in the formal register of Latin didactic poetry. Drawing on recent theoretical approaches and the typological and rhetorical frameworks developed by Barry Taylor and Dave Bland, the following analysis seeks to reconstruct the mechanisms by which Egbert transforms orally transmitted sententiae into structured tools of moral instruction within the pedagogical and homiletic milieu of the early eleventh century. Particular attention will be paid to the stylistic, thematic, and performative dimensions of this transformation, as well as to the broader educational and ecclesiastical context in which the Fecunda ratis emerged and possibly circulated.

The Fecunda ratis

Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis (literally, “the fertile ship”) is an extensive collection of sayings in hexameters consisting of two books, which Egbert dedicated to his childhood friend Adalbold.2 It survived in only one eleventh-century manuscript kept in the Cologne Cathedral Library, which contains the poem, a Christmas hymn, and a short prayer.3 The manuscript’s tradition is characterized by eleven different hands following the main scribe with alterations and glosses, which indicates a lively reception and editorial work within the school. The poem was revised, glossed, and provided with alternative readings multiple times, especially by the hands E and L, whose emendations can be traced partly back to their own conjectures.4

The title of the work, Fecunda ratis, refers to the metaphorical idea of a school ship that is full to the point of overflowing, taking on proverbs, fables, parables, sayings, and stories from a wide variety of sources. However, Egbert himself also calls his work liber de aenigmatibus rusticanis,5 which refers to the quality and origin rather than the final purpose of the metaphorical cargo: a collection of popular, often enigmatic proverbs with a didactic purpose that is brought to the new shore of learned education. The poem was thus created from the desire both to add to the traditional educational materials, such as the Disticha Catonis and the fables of Avian, and to provide a new teaching tool for the trivium level that taught skills that could be turned into practice in everyday life.6

The work is divided into two books: the first one has the title prora (bow) and the second one the title puppis (stern). The first book consists of two large parts, the original collection of one-line verses and two-line verses and the extension in longer sections. It thus forms the core of the didactic tradition of sayings. The first part of the book consists of 1,008 verses that can be read as a self-contained collection with a prologue (1.1–4) and an epilogue (1.1005–1008), which suggests that there may well have been an earlier, shorter version that has not survived. The second part consists of longer poems and thematic elaborations, such as fables, allegories, satires, examples, and autobiographical reflections.

The second book, Puppis, contains a dense sequence of Christian ethical reflections, catechism-like pieces, verses about virtues and vices, quotations from Augustine, Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Jerome, and Bede, and Bible versifications and prayers. This book prepares students for the theological specialization, integrating the content of the spiritual curriculum in poetic form.

The stylistic orientation of the work is strongly influenced by the rhetoric of the trivium. There are numerous examples of ordo praeposterus, prolepsis, epistulae, and exempla, but also satirae, allegoriae, and fabulae, with echoes from classical authors such as Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, and Cicero as well as patristic authors and the Bible.7 Egbert uses ancient and patristic sentences, as well as popular proverbs, local idioms, and stylized scenes from everyday life.

Particularly noteworthy is the juxtaposition and interweaving of erudite high language and simple, popular diction. The style varies between an elegiac tone, mocking satire, pathetic invocation, proverbial brevity, and epic narrative. However, a pedagogical impetus runs through the entire work. It is intended to instruct, entertain, educate morally, and promote intellectually at the same time and thus forms an ideal reading book for adolescent students. Egbert emphasizes several times that his collection should serve to help students recognize and interpret allegorical, moral, and exegetical meanings. Thus, it should be understood as preparation for the study of the Bible.

Egbert of Liège

Not much is known about the author of the Fecunda ratis, Egbert of Liège.8 Sigebert of Gembloux, who lived roughly a generation after Egbert, made the following note: “Egbert, a cleric from Liège, wrote a book in metrical style about rustic riddles, initially brief. However, with an expanded reasoning, he wrote another book on the same subject, which was somewhat larger.”9 This is essentially all we know from contemporary sources. However, Egbert provides some hints himself. His letter of dedication to Adalbold of Utrecht, his childhood friend and the recipient of the Fecunda ratis, reveals relevant biographical information and an approximate dating and localization of the work. Adalbold, born around 975, served as archdeacon at the cathedral of Liège and became Bishop of Utrecht in 1010. He died on November 27, 1026. The time span of his episcopal office then provides the widest possible range for dating the composition or at least for the revision of the collection. Some scholars, including Voigt, have proposed that the Fecunda ratis was presumably commissioned by or at least under the influence of Bishop Durand (ruled 1021–1025), while Provost Johannes and the later Bishop Wazo served as dean of the Liège church.10 This seems well plausible although no exact evidence can be brought up. However, at this time, the cathedral school of Liège emerged as a pioneering center of a new manner of education, setting a precedent for cathedral schools throughout the Latin West.11 Its foundational innovation lay in institutionalizing a curriculum that combined liberal learning with the cultivation of elegant manners (honestas) and moral discipline (mores). This dual focus marked a clear departure from the Carolingian emphasis on doctrinal and scriptural training alone, and it is clearly adopted by Egbert in his Fecunda ratis.

Under Bishop Eraclius (959–971), a student of Brun of Cologne, the school was revitalized with a model that fused moral refinement with classical studies.12 His successor, Notker (972–1008), further established Liège as a leading intel­lectual and ethical center, producing clerics whose virtue and manners were seen as qualifications for high office.13 The pedagogical ethos prioritized visible comportment (how one walked, spoke, and gestured) as outward expressions of internal moral discipline. Wazo of Liège, who was active in 1005–1030, embodied this educational ideal by favoring students who excelled in manners over those merely proficient in letters. Under his leadership, Liège’s reputation flourished as a school of letters, manners, and religion. Later laments by figures like Anselm and Goswin underscore the sad end to this golden age, further attesting to its formative influence. The novelty of schools like Liège lay in integrating ethical and social formation (cultus virtutum) into formal education, shaping clerical elites not just intellectually but as embodiments of courtly, ecclesiastical, and civic ideals. The cathedral school thereby became both a pedagogical and a cultural institution for training future church and court leaders in the virtues of public conduct and personal decorum.

Egbert’s statement of age within the work (if we hold the poem De debilitate ēvī nostrī to give such an autobiographical indication)14 suggests that he was born around 972. He probably received his education together with Adalbold at the famous Liège Cathedral School under Notker, which under his leadership became one of the most important educational centers in the empire. References in the text suggest that Egbert initially enrolled as a student in the lower classes of the cathedral school and then devoted himself to the study of the septem artes liberales, with a clear focus on the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic). Although the work also shows knowledge of the quadrivium (e.g. arithmetic, music), his profile is clearly that of a philologically and pedagogically oriented schoolmaster, not a mathematically and theologically educated cleric.

After having completed his education, Egbert seems to have remained in Liège as a teacher, although he never held the position of head of the cathedral school as magister scholarum. Rather, he apparently worked as a submagister scholae or magister particularis, as was typical for larger schools with a differentiated teaching staff.15 In his dedication, Egbert describes himself as a presbyter and servorum Dei humillimus, that is, as a simple priest in the service of the church.

Egbert’s life is characterized by a continuous commitment to education. Although he was denied the social advancement experienced by other Liège scholars such as Adalbold or Wazo (neither was he appointed bishop nor was he given a position in the court chapel), he left behind a didactic work, Fecunda ratis, which surpasses all known pieces of school poetry of his time in terms of scope, diversity and pedagogical reflection. In his old age (in the Fecunda ratis, he repeatedly refers to himself as an old man, for instance in 1.1497, 1.1508, and 1.1517), he apparently wrote (or rewrote) his work as a summary of a long life in the teaching profession, interspersed with complaints about the decline in willingness to learn (1.508–509, 1.739–740, 1.801–802, 1.979–980, 1.1093–1096, 1.1612–1617), the increasing use of corporal punishment (1.1253–1280), and the growing material insecurity of the teaching profession (1.1075–1078, 1.1170–1173, 1.1497–1506, 1.1675–1683).

Poetics of the Medieval Proverb: from Situational Origins to
Collectional Transformation

In the theoretical discourse of the last few decades, the medieval proverb has increasingly been approached not as a decontextualized maxim but as an inherently situated utterance, one that encodes fragments of lived experience within compact, formulaic linguistic forms. As, for instance, Sebastian Neumeister has argued, proverbial speech resists definitional abstraction precisely because its meaning emerges not from conceptual fixity but from pragmatic pliability.16 Proverbs function less as detachable axioms than as mnemonic and hermeneutic devices: they anchor meaning in narrativized, affectively resonant scenarios, and they acquire significance through their repeated deployment in socially recognizable situations. Within this framework, literary proverb tales are not mere illustrations of gnomic content but acts of retroactive contextualization. They construct plausible experiential settings in which the proverb’s semantic logic can unfold.

A strikingly congruent line of thought undergirds Manfred Eikelmann’s philological study of the German proverb in medieval transmission, particularly as exemplified by the widely attested saying, Wenn man den Hund schlagen will, sagt man, er hat Leder gefressen (“If you want to beat the dog, you say he ate the leather”).17 While departing from different disciplinary platforms (literary theory and historical philology respectively), both Neumeister and Eikelmann converge upon a core insight: the proverb originates as a situational speech act, only subsequently becoming subject to processes of textual abstraction, literary stylization, and collectional systematization. Eikelmann’s contribution lies in his meticulous reconstruction of the stages by which proverbial expressions migrate from primary use in contextualized speech into the secondary realm of textual collections, acquiring new functions and forms in the process. Taking up an idea of the theologian Claus Westermann, Eikelmann draws a fundamental distinction between two modes of transmission: the primary tradition (primäre Überlieferung), where proverbs are embedded in lived communicative situations, and the secondary tradition (sekundäre Überlieferung), where they are extracted from their pragmatic contexts and compiled into collections. Eikelmann uses this theoretical scaffolding to interrogate a range of historical sources, revealing the extent to which medieval proverb collections not only preserved but also transformed the epistemic and performative status of the sayings they contain.

The proverb of the leather-eating dog appears for the first time not in vernacular German but in Latin, notably in the Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi, where it figures as part of a gnomic exchange between the idealized wise king Solomon and the grotesquely embodied trickster Marcolf.18 In this dialogic context, the proverb is not merely cited but activated within a stylized confrontation of rhetorical registers. Salomon utters a high-minded sententia on the unreliability of enemy speech, to which Marcolf counters with the proverb: “Qui suum canem vult perdere, per rabiem imponit illi nomen” (He who wants to kill/beat his dog claims it has rabies). Here, the proverb functions subversively, dismantling the moral absolutism of its predecessor and foregrounding the instrumental logic of accusation. While the Dialogus does not simulate spontaneous oral discourse, its dialogical structure reinstates a facsimile of situational logic, within which the proverb’s function is preserved as a performative utterance.

This early Latin transmission is paralleled in the Schäftlarner Sprüche, a twelfth-century florilegium from the Bavarian monastery of Schäftlarn. There, the proverb appears in a compressed, single-line form: “Suspendens catulum, vorat, inquit, opus coriorum” (As he hangs up the puppy, he devours, he says, the work of the tanners).19 While the narrative context is absent, the line’s framing within a monastic miscellany suggests a pedagogical function. It was perhaps to be glossed, recited, or imitated. Such texts underscore the role of ecclesiastical settings in the early formalization of proverbial knowledge, even before the widespread emergence of vernacular collections.

It is only in the thirteenth century that vernacular German attestations become frequent, particularly in didactic and literary contexts. Freidank’s Bescheiden­heit (c. 1230), a sprawling corpus of rhymed aphorisms and moral reflections, includes a stylized version of the proverb: “Der hunt hat leder gezzen, so man dienstes wil vergezzen” ([Claim that] the dog has eaten leather once you want to forget [his] service).20 The formal integration into a metrical couplet, as Eikelmann observes, distances the saying from its situational moorings and transforms it into a Kunstspruch, a self-contained artefact of poetic wisdom.21 The loss of contextual specificity is partially compensated by the stylization and compression of meaning, but it also signals a shift in the proverb’s reception, from a tool of social interaction to a component of authorial didacticism. However, it also presupposes a considerable degree of cultural knowledge on the part of the reader. In fact, this version of the proverb is hardly understandable for anyone not familiar with its proverbial meaning. Literally it translates “The dog has eaten leather once you want to forget service.” Thus, the question of whose service is forgotten is left absolutely open.

A more narrativized reintegration of the proverb’s situational logic is found in Sibote’s Märe von der Frauenzucht (mid-thirteenth century), where a knight plans to kill his horse as a warning to his unruly wife.22 The narrator interjects the proverb, thus casting the knight’s behavior in the moral light of opportunistic cruelty. Here, the proverb serves as a moral frame: it retroactively interprets the action and assigns it to a recognizable behavioral pattern. The tale does not merely illustrate the proverb but actualizes its logic in narrative form, a phenomenon Neumeister identifies as central to the mnemonic power of proverb tales.23

During the late medieval period, there is a proliferation of systematic proverb collections, many of which are tied to pedagogical or homiletic contexts. The Proverbia Fridanci, a set of Latin sermon outlines using vernacular proverbs as thematic prothemata, is particularly illuminating. In these texts, the dog-and-leather proverb is not only cited but subjected to allegorical exegesis: the dog becomes a figure for the preacher and the accusation of eating leather an emblem of unjust persecution. In one version, the commentary reads: “Canis spiritualiter est praedicator […] qui ex odio alterum vult persequi, causam fingit” (The preacher is spiritually a dog… who, out of hatred, wishes to persecute someone and fabricates a reason).24 The allegoresis reconfigures the proverb for moral instruction, but in doing so, it also preserves the narrative and situational logic by re-embedding the saying within a moralized exemplum. The Proverbia Fridanci thus constitute a hybrid form: at once agents of collectional abstraction and mediators of pragmatic intelligibility.

By the fifteenth century, the proverb surfaces in a range of vernacular compilations: the Houghton Codex, Bollstatter’s Spruchsammlung, and the widely diffused Proverbia Communia (in Dutch, Low German, and Latin).25 These collections display varying degrees of formalization. In some, the proverb is presented in bilingual format (for instance, “Coreum comedit canis dum pendere debet / Wenn man den hund hencken will, so hat er leder Gessen”), thereby serving the dual function of linguistic exercise and moral instruction. In others, such as the Tractatulus proverbiorum communium preserved in a Stuttgart manuscript, Latin hexameters are translated into rhymed German distichs, reinforcing the mnemonic architecture of the collection. These collectional forms participate in the broader humanist project of encyclopedic ordering, yet, as Eikelmann warns, they often efface the proverb’s embeddedness in social praxis.26

Taken together, the historical trajectory reconstructed by Eikelmann illustrates how proverbs undergo a double transformation, first, from situational speech to stylized literary form and, second, from literary instantiation to collectional codification. In each phase, the proverb’s semantic value is reshaped. The spontaneous, dialogical, and often performatively charged utterance becomes an object of curation and commentary. Yet as both Eikelmann and Neumeister insist, this shift does not entail semantic closure. On the contrary, the proverb retains a latent openness to context, a polysemous potential that collectional frames must either domesticate or accentuate.

Ultimately, the proverb resists total capture by either literary formalization or classificatory ambition. Its semantic vitality depends not merely on lexical content or syntactic patterning but on its capacity to conjure plausible scenarios of use, scenarios that are culturally coded, narratively inflected, and pragmatically legible. Eikelmann’s historicized philology and Neumeister’s theoretical poetics both converge on this point: the proverb, as a form of “discours répété”, derives its power from being at once open to iteration and singular, recognizable and contingent, collected and lived.27

This being said, we can observe similar phenomena in Egbert’s Fecunda ratis, and we can seek the modes in which he incorporated, transformed, and canonized popular wisdom in his Latin poem.

Proverbs and Popular Wisdom in the Fecunda ratis:
A Typology of Transmission

The search for vernacular origins in the rich proverbial and gnomic material of the Fecunda ratis can draw upon a variety of indications, including (1) explicit signs of being derived from the vernacular, such as the phrases vulgus or vulgo dicitur, (2) proverbs with thematic roots in rustic or popular everyday life, (3) formulaic expressions of demonstrably Germanic or Romance origin, and (4) popular sayings incorporated into scholastic or moralizing allegory.

Occasionally, Egbert prefaces a proverb with an explicit marker of its vernacular status, such as vulgo dicitur or analogous phrases. These cases are relatively rare but striking in their transparency. At least nine instances of such explicit attribution occur in the Fecunda ratis (1.31, 1.103, 1.106, 1.160, 1.179, 1.384, 1.387, 1.1162, and C 25, a variant of 1.385).

In his article Brotlöffel, haariges Herz und wundersame Empfängnis, Wolfgang Maaz offers a convincing demonstration of the second modus of transforming popular wisdom into learned knowledge. He shows how Egbert of Liège strategically integrated quotidian experiences into the fabric of his didactic poetry. The so-called “panificum coclear (edible spoon) – non crescit edentis in ore” (I 1368) offers a particularly vivid instance of Egbert’s use of lived experience. While the Fecunda’s editor Voigt left this verse uncommented, Maaz, drawing on S. Singer’s collection Sprichwörter des Mittelalters, identifies it as a proverbial reflection of a widespread eating practice.28 The bread spoon (coclear ex pane) was a common substitute for wooden or metal utensils, and it was consumed along with the meal itself: “Coclear ex pane utendo consumitur: sic omnis res frequenti usu minuitur.”29 Aristophanic Greek, lexical testimonies from Julius Pollux, Hesychius, and the Suda corroborate the antiquity of this usage, yet no proverbial form predating Egbert has been found.30 The second motif, that of the “pilose heart,” found in a fraudulent man’s corpse, leads Maaz into an intertextual investigation of anatomical lore. Egbert writes: “Verum defuncti rimantur viscera testes / Inventumque nefas mirantur et hispida corda” (But the witnesses probe the entrails of the dead, / and marvel at the discovered crime and the bristly heart).31 Although Voigt considered this a medieval invention, Maaz traces a compelling genealogy to Valerius Maximus, who recounts the vivisection of Aristomenes: “pectus dissecuere viventi, hirsutumque cor repertum est” (they cut open the chest of the living man, and a bristly heart was found). Here too, Egbert adapts a literary topos to a moralized didactic frame. Notably, the parallels in phrasing (callidior/calliditatem, fraudes/astutia, inventumque/invenerunt) suggest direct reception, which Maaz substantiates further through comparison with Rodulfus Tortarius’ De memorabilibus, whose Latin phrasing closely mirrors Egbert’s. Egbert’s realism extends beyond literary sources into empirical knowledge. Maaz draws on pathophysiological explanations of the cor villosum to interpret the “hairy heart” as a case of fibrinous pericarditis, possibly similar to conditions described by Salimbene de Adam, where autopsies revealed lesions and vesicles in the heart area. Through these case studies, Maaz not only dismantles the assumption that medieval school texts lacked engagement with lived experience but also reveals how Egbert’s work interweaves learned citation and empirical reality. More important for our case, the Fecunda ratis, though rooted in classical and patristic tradition, emerges in Maaz’s reading as a uniquely grounded and innovative contribution to medieval pedagogy. Consequently, other such references to rustic and agrarian wisdom (such as 1.73, 1.77, 1.130, 1.253, 1.258, 1.293, 1.617, 1.1162 and 1.1676) deserve similar in-depth investigation in the future.

The third modus of coping with vernacular material is indicated by proverbs found in later Middle High German or Old French collections. These proverbs suggest that Egbert tapped into a transregional corpus of popular sententiae. Examples can be found in 1.69, 1.78, 1.92, 1.96, 1.128, 1.398, 1.579, and 1.1164. Some were identified by Voigt in 1886, but since then, possibilities for wider recognition have increased markedly, most of all after the completion of the thirteen volumes of the Thesaurus proverbiorum medii aevi (1995–2002).32 In the future, digital methods may also add to the analysis of large historical corpora and will help identify related phrases, translations, and varieties of the “discours répété.”33

A fourth and final modus in Egbert’s Fecunda ratis consists of proverbs or proverbial forms that Egbert expands into mini-narratives or allegories. These texts are often longer, and though they preserve a sentential core, they are recontextualized within didactic exegesis or moralizing exempla. Examples include the tales of the fox and the sick lion (1.1174–1189), the sleeping student and the inattentive class (1.739–740), the gluttonous monk who prefers the kitchen to the choir (1.703–705), and the student who mocks his teacher but is later praised (1.1199–1220, 1.1221–1247). This last category attests to Egbert’s didactic craft: proverbial wisdom becomes material for rhetorical elaboration, moral reflection, and institutional critique.

Working with Popular Wisdom: Transforming the Vernacular into Latin

Building on the typology developed above, we now ask about the rhetorical and stylistic details of the transformation from vernacular into Latin. To do this, Barry Taylor’s influential study Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition (1992) offers one of the most comprehensive frameworks for analyses of medieval proverbial literature, particularly as it oscillates between the oral and the written, the vernacular and the Latinate, the popular and the learned. Rather than defining the proverb narrowly in terms of content or origin, Taylor proposes a functional and rhetorical understanding: a proverb, in the medieval context, is a brief moral statement on conduct, typically paratactically constructed and transmitted either as isolated maxims or within larger compilatory structures. He does not insist on terminological exclusivity (terms such as proverbium, sententia, maxima, and paroemia often overlap in medieval sources) but instead attends to their performative, literary, and didactic roles. The proverb, in Taylor’s reading, is not merely a relic of rustic speech, but a mobile form capable of participating in various textual economies: from schoolroom instruction to theological commentary, from moral florilegia to rhetorical handbooks.

Crucially, Taylor develops a set of criteria for tracing the transformation of proverbs, especially those of vernacular origin, into Latinate literary and didactic formats. These criteria include, first, the degree of semantic literalism or elaboration in the Latin version, with attention to whether the original structure is maintained or expanded for rhetorical effect. Second, the treatment of figurative language, especially the tendency to replace concrete, image-rich vernacular expressions with abstract or allegorical formulations. Third, the presence of pleonastic formulations or explanatory expansions, often indicating a transition from elliptical oral structures to grammatically complete and interpretively secure written ones. Fourth, the degree of formal restructuring, particularly the imposition of meter, rhyme, syntactic symmetry, or antithesis, which elevate the proverb into the realm of ars poetica. And fifth, the level of contextual embedding, or in other words, whether a proverb remains an isolated utterance or is integrated into thematic sequences, moral exempla, or exegetical commentary.

Taylor’s model is not merely descriptive but interpretive. It illuminates the cultural work performed by medieval proverb collections, especially those which seek not to preserve the vernacular for its own sake but to reshape it as an instrument of Latinate ethical instruction. This model proves particularly fruitful when applied to Egbert’s Fecunda ratis, which bears witness to a deliberate and sophisticated process of vernacular proverb adaptation. Egbert’s collection does not include overt markers of source language or explicit claims to translational practice. Yet the idiomatic simplicity, the imagistic familiarity, and the thematic range of many of his couplets suggest that they derive, at least in part, from orally circulated vernacular wisdom. The task, then, is to analyze how Egbert appropriates, transforms, and integrates such material into a highly structured Latin didactic poem, and Taylor’s criteria offer a precise heuristic for doing so.

One of Egbert’s most revealing translations of a likely vernacular source occurs in 1.84: “Neglegentibus pueris uerbera debes intentare, ut corrigantur; senibus et canis, quo digni sunt, honorem impendere” (You must threaten negligent boys with the rod, so that they may be corrected; but to the elderly and grey-haired, you should accord the honor they deserve).34 The moral economy at play is familiar: young people are to be disciplined, elders are to be honored. This combination appears in multiple vernacular traditions, including medieval German and Old French gnomic verse. Yet Egbert’s Latin formulation is not a mere calque. He expands and balances the structure syntactically, pairing two contrasting imperatives in a symmetrical construction. The verb intentare introduces an element of juridical abstraction (“you must threaten” rather than “you must beat”), while ut corrigantur provides a telic clause that rationalizes the punishment in moral terms. Likewise, quo digni sunt implies a measure of ethical discernment in bestowing honor. The line thus avoids both brutality and sentimentality, positioning itself within a moderate, reasoned discourse of pedagogical governance. According to Taylor’s schema, this constitutes a case of semantic and structural elaboration, coupled with didactic contextualization: the vernacular core is preserved but rearticulated in a moral-Latin idiom suited for clerical and scholastic reception.

Egbert frequently employs strategies of condensation and parataxis when adapting proverbs whose force lies in suggestive brevity. The line “Quando domus uicina flagrat, proximat ad te” (1.719: “When the neighboring house is ablaze, the flames draw near to your own) captures a classic motif of neighborly peril: the danger that befalls another may soon be one’s own. This idea, common across European languages, is expressed in Latin without any explicit interpretive frame. Egbert refrains from adding a moral imperative (such as cave or vide), instead relying on juxtaposition and implicature. The result is a maxim that simultaneously asserts and insinuates. Taylor observes that brevity itself can be a source of obscurity, especially when surface syntax remains simple but deeper meaning must be inferred. Egbert exploits this dynamic by maintaining a minimal lexical field: flagrat and proximat are semantically rich but syntactically undemanding verbs. The proverb’s moral significance (solidarity, vigilance, shared vulnerability) is conveyed not through exposition but through structured understatement. Here, the translation strategy involves not expansion but elliptical refinement, preserving the proverb’s gnomic form while transferring its imagery into an elegant Latin construction.

Other examples reveal Egbert’s propensity for allegorical intensification. “Lancibus appositis in villam transilit ignis” (1.384) is a proverb dense with symbolic potential. Literally, “once the platters are set out, fire leaps into the house,” the line evokes the dangers of opulence or complacency, perhaps warning against the vulnerability created by feasting or indulgence. The imagery may derive from a domestic warning in the vernacular, but Egbert’s phrasing is anything but rustic. The alliteration of Lancibus and appositis, the sudden violence of transilit, and the quasi-dramatic culmination in villam combine to produce a line of striking poetic energy. Taylor notes that in many medieval collections, proverbs are made obscure not only by brevity but by figurative saturation. Egbert clearly embraces this tradition, transforming a concrete domestic image into a moralized parable. The proverb, while still recognizable in content, becomes a tableau of moral consequence, in which lexical selection and rhetorical rhythm collaborate to enhance memorability and interpretive density.

This tendency toward poetic stylization is particularly evident in proverbs involving anthropomorphic allegory. “Qui credit vulpi, nudus ad horrea currit” (1.583: He who trusts the fox runs naked to the granary) exemplifies the fusion of vernacular folklore with Latinate moralism. The fox, a longstanding symbol of cunning and deceit, serves here as the focal point of misplaced trust. The image of running naked to the granary is deliberately absurd, designed to provoke not laughter but shame at credulity. Egbert does not tone down the grotesqueness; rather, he deploys it to reinforce the social cost of foolishness. The proverb’s structure (a conditional clause and a paradoxical consequence) is retained from the vernacular, but Egbert sharpens it with an almost Horatian sense of moral ridicule. The vernacular message is neither diluted nor merely repeated, but re-presented with formal concision and moral urgency.

A similar pattern appears in “Verba nocent aliquando magis quam tela cruenta” (1.387: Words sometimes wound more grievously than bloodstained weapons), where the familiar idea that words may wound more than weapons is cast in a strikingly symmetrical structure. The antithesis between verba and tela and the hyperbolic adjective cruenta create a poetic tension that elevates the saying from truism to thesis. He transforms vernacular into classical language which must have been apparent at least to his learned contemporaries.35 Moreover, Egbert’s lexical choices are calculated for rhetorical weight: the abstract noun verba is positioned first, giving it syntactic and semantic primacy; magis quam sets up a scalar evaluation; and aliquando introduces a note of prudent qualification. The line becomes not merely a proverb, but a statement of general moral anthropology, one that recognizes the power of language as a vehicle of harm. The Latin here does not translate a specific vernacular form, but reconstitutes a widely shared sentiment within the conventions of Latin gnomic verse.

In many cases, Egbert seems to reorganize the lexical structure of the proverb to match the syntactic expectations of Latin verse while retaining its ethical charge. The pervasiveness of thematic and lexical parallelism (pueris… senibus, verba… tela, credit vulpi… nudus currit) reflects a commitment to memorability and stylistic harmony. Moreover, Egbert’s preference for non-rhymed but rhythmically measured lines, often constructed in dactylic or elegiac cadence, indicates a desire to stabilize the proverb as a unit of instruction, not merely as a record of speech. Taylor’s observation that the imposition of meter and rhetorical structure serves to “canonize” the proverb within literary culture finds clear confirmation here.

Equally telling is the organization of the Fecunda ratis itself. Proverbs are arranged in thematic constellations: on speech, on punishment, on old age, on friendship, on folly. This allows Egbert to group vernacular wisdom within a moral architecture, reinforcing patterns of association and supporting gradual ethical acculturation. Such sequencing reveals that the translated proverb is not intended to stand alone, but to function within a cumulative pedagogy. Taylor’s distinction between reference collections and didactic anthologies is particularly apt in this regard: Egbert writes for edification, not for citation.

In sum, Egbert’s translation of vernacular proverbs is marked by a com­bination of semantic fidelity and stylistic sophistication. His practice aligns closely with Taylor’s descriptive categories: he elaborates and stylizes, metaphorizes and moralizes, compresses and expands. The result is a corpus in which the oral wisdom of the laity is absorbed into the moral discourse of Latin letters. The vernacular is not preserved in its original idiom, but transformed into a medium fit for moral instruction, poetic admiration, and clerical transmission. Thus, Egbert’s Fecunda ratis exemplifies the cultural work of translation in the high Middle Ages. It is not simply the mechanical reproduction of popular speech, but its disciplined reinvention within a literary and ethical order.

Between Auctoritas and Vox Populi:
The Didactic Potential of the Fecunda ratis

After examining the popular sources that Egbert drew on and the techniques of its translation and remodeling, now the function of the proverbs in his collection should be considered, building upon Dave L. Bland’s seminal study of the rhetorical, poetic, and didactic value of proverbial expressions in the Middle Ages.36 His analysis of the ars poetriae and ars praedicandi sheds light on the functional polyvalence of proverbs in medieval literary culture and provides a critical framework for an understanding of their broader epistemological and sociocultural implications. This framework proves particularly fruitful when applied to the Fecunda ratis.

Bland’s argues that proverbs, far from serving as mere ornamental devices, were deeply embedded in the inventive processes of medieval discourse. Writers such as Matthew of Vendôme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf are shown to integrate sententiae into the very structure of poetic composition, recommending them as legitimate and effective means of beginning a text. Sententiae functioned not only as figures of speech in the classical rhetorical tradition but, rather as sources of invention and amplification. From this point of view, the proverb becomes a dynamic point of departure for the expansion of meaning, adaptable to a variety of contexts and capable of sustaining complex moral and philosophical reflections.

The same holds true for the ars praedicandi, in which proverbs fulfilled a similarly multifaceted role. Preaching manuals by authors such as Robert of Basevorn and Henry of Hesse reveal that proverbial expressions were integral to all structural components of the sermon, from the antetheme and exordium to the subdivisions and conclusio. Proverbs served as mnemonic aids, attention-catching devices, markers of division, and moral signposts. They carried the weight of auctoritas, whether sacred or secular, and often functioned as points of access between learned culture and the lived experience of the laity. Bland’s extensive reference to Alan of Lille’s Ars praedicandi, with its pronounced reliance on scriptural and classical proverbs, further underscores the strategic value of the proverb as a bridge between the rhetorical elite and the oral culture of the common people.

Egbert’s Fecunda ratis can be productively analyzed within this discursive horizon. While Bland does not explicitly mention Egbert, the patterns he describes resonate deeply with Egbert’s method of proverb adaptation and didactic framing. In Fecunda ratis, proverbs function not only as moral axioms but also as generators of narrative exempla and ethical instruction. Egbert often begins or concludes a section with a proverb, which is then paraphrased, elaborated, and contextualized in a manner strikingly similar to the practice outlined in both poetic and preaching manuals. Thus, the proverbs in Fecunda ratis should be understood not as quotations but as rhetorical kernels from which complex interpretative and ethical structures emerge.

One of the most significant parallels lies in the role of proverbs as mediators between written and oral traditions. Bland emphasizes that proverbs are deeply rooted in the vox populi, the wisdom of the people, and that their presence in elevated discourses signals a recognition of this communal epistemology. Egbert’s frequent use of vernacular or vernacularly-inflected sayings, subsequently rendered into Latin, reflects this same dynamic. Proverbs such as “Neglegentibus pueris non discere, senibus autem non posse convenit” (Not to learn befits the careless young; not to be able to learn befits the old) encapsulate commonly held views on education and age, which Egbert then integrates into a broader ethical and theological discourse. These formulations serve to anchor his moral instruction in the everyday experiences of his audience, thus fulfilling the rhetorical ideal of docere, movere et delectare.

Furthermore, Bland’s insight into the casuistic use of proverbs in ethical reasoning finds a clear echo in Egbert’s textual strategies. Many sections of Fecunda ratis can be read as micro-case studies in applied morality, in which proverbs serve as both premises and conclusions. This resonates with Bland’s discussion of the proverb’s role in casuistry, where it provides guidance in exceptional or marginal cases. Egbert’s moral pedagogy is similarly attentive to the complexities of human behavior and frequently uses proverbs to illuminate ethical dilemmas, particularly those involving interpersonal relationships, familial obligations, or the responsibilities of youth.

In addition, the proverbs in Fecunda ratis mirror the formal characteristics identified by Bland as conducive to rhetorical and didactic efficacy. Their brevity, rhythmic balance, and semantic openness make them ideal vehicles for transmission and commentary. Egbert’s treatment of proverbial material often involves layering multiple interpretive voices (scriptural, patristic, classical) around a central gnomic core. This strategy enhances the text’s rhetorical force and underscores its participation in the broader tradition of sapiential literature, a tradition that, as Bland notes, spans both sacred and secular domains.

Finally, Bland’s reflections on the mnemonic and performative dimensions of proverbs in oral-literate cultures offer a compelling lens through which to view Fecunda ratis. Egbert’s text, though written in Latin verse, is suffused with oral resonances, and the proverbial expressions embedded in it would have facilitated both comprehension and memorization. This aligns with the educational and moral objectives of the text, which aimed to instill virtuous conduct in a young clerical readership. By encoding moral lessons in proverbial form, Egbert ensured their retention and internalization, thus fulfilling the pedagogical aims also articulated in the ars dictaminis and ars praedicandi.

The Fecunda ratis and the Educational Renewal of the Eleventh Century

After the first millennium, the Latin literary culture of Western Europe experienced a renewal in both pedagogical methodology and textual production, primarily centered in cathedral and monastic schools. The cathedral schools of Liège, Reims, Chartres, and Bamberg, as well as monastic institutions like Saint Emmeram in Regensburg, emerged as intellectual hubs fostering a learned Latin style that was both anchored in Carolingian precedent and open to rhetorical innovation.37 The educational literature produced in this period reflects a vibrant interplay between didactic intention, rhetorical craft, and spiritual formation. Two figures stand out for their contributions to this evolving landscape: Otloh of St Emmeram (c. 1010–c. 1070) and Arnulf of Saint-Pierre (fl. c. 1050), whose works exemplify the literary ethos of the cathedral school environment and offer valuable parallels for the textual strategies of Egbert’s Fecunda ratis.

Otloh, a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Emmeram in Regensburg, composed a number of texts that straddle the boundaries between autobiography, hagiography, and moral instruction. His Liber de tentationibus suis, written between 1050 and 1060, presents a confessional narrative of his spiritual struggles and also a model of Latinity accessible to educated clerics and advanced pupils. In a closely related genre, his Dialogus de tribus quaestionibus, which is framed as a conversation with the bishop of Regensburg, illustrates the discursive style cultivated in advanced schooling contexts, one which combines dialectical method with stylistic elegance. While Otloh was primarily a monastic writer, his works circulated in cathedral school milieus, a fact that betrays a sensitivity to the pedagogical needs of intermediate and advanced Latin readers. Notably, his Liber visionum compiled edifying exempla in an accessible narrative form, anticipating later developments in school collections of moral tales.

Arnulf of Saint-Pierre, a lesser-known but significant figure active in the ecclesiastical province of Reims, collected a corpus of prose letters and grammatical exercises which survive partially but are suggestive of the type of Latin composition training offered in cathedral schools. His epistolary style, while less ornate than that of contemporaries such as Gerbert of Aurillac (the later Pope Sylvester II), exhibits a clarity and conciseness aimed at instructing pupils in the art of correct and effective Latin expression. Fragments attributed to Arnulf include explications of Priscian and glosses on classical authors, underscoring the continuity of the Carolingian school tradition while adapting it to local didactic needs. His pedagogical output complements the broader effort observable in the early eleventh century to systematize Latin instruction through manageable, thematically coherent units. often using proverbs, fables, and moralizing narratives.

Both Otloh and Arnulf reflect the centrality of Latin prose composition and moral instruction in the curriculum of the early eleventh-century cathedral school. Their works, alongside those of figures such as Gerbert, Fulbert of Chartres, and Notker Labeo, created a literary and didactic environment in which compilatory works like Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis could flourish. Egbert’s text, though unique in its ambitious scope and its explicit program of proverb exegesis, partakes of the same impulse to educate through a mixture of moral authority, stylistic variety, and structural coherence. The intellectual and literary culture of early eleventh-century cathedral schools thus laid the groundwork for a genre of Latin educational writing that was at once creative, mnemonic, and deeply moral in orientation.

From School to Practice: The Fecunda ratis in the Context of
an Early Homiletic Movement

Beyond the notable development of learned education in the cathedral school, Egbert’s times also marked a crucial though still largely preparatory phase in the development of Western European preaching culture.38 This period, long overshadowed by the more prolific twelfth-century explosion of vernacular sermon collections and the rise of scholastic homiletics, deserves new attention as a time of quiet restructuring. From monastic reform centers in Burgundy and Lorraine to cathedral schools in Liège and York, a broad intellectual and pastoral current emerged that redefined the role of preaching in the Christian community. While the period still lacks systematic vernacular homiletic corpora, it offers rich evidence of rhetorical, doctrinal, and moral experimentation that laid the groundwork for such later developments.

In the Latin West, the dominant institutional impulses for reform and pastoral revitalization came from monastic centers such as Cluny, Saint-Vanne at Verdun, and Fleury. These communities, especially under abbots like Odilo of Cluny (d. 1049) and Richard of Saint-Vanne (d. 1046), stressed the internal spiritual discipline of monks and a reinvigoration of liturgical life, but they also supported a more didactically sensitive preaching practice. Although Cluny was primarily liturgical in its orientation, the sheer expansion of its monastic network (the ordo Cluniacensis) created new contexts for spiritual instruction, particularly for lay patrons, dependents, and oblates. Cluniac liturgical commentaries and the exemplary homiletic style found in the Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel or later in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (whose roots lie partly in this pre-1100 milieu) reflect a homiletic culture that, though still Latin, was increasingly attuned to the moral and spiritual needs of a broader audience.

Parallel developments can be traced in northern France and Flanders. The Benedictine houses of Saint-Bertin (Saint-Omer), Marchiennes, and Elnone began to show signs of liturgical and moral reform, supported by counts like Baldwin IV of Flanders (d. 1035). Although these reforms were primarily disciplinary, the increasing attention to clerical education and the use of simplified Latin texts for the instruction of conversi or lay brothers indicates a growing functional awareness of preaching as pedagogy. Similarly, the region’s close contact with Anglo-Saxon England facilitated the transmission of texts and models of popular preaching, particularly through shared hagiographic traditions and exempla.

Indeed, in Anglo-Saxon England, the eleventh century witnessed a remarkable resurgence of vernacular preaching centered on figures such as Ælfric of Eynsham (d. after 1010). Ælfric’s Homilies, written in Old English and based on patristic sources, were explicitly designed to provide priests with the materials to instruct the laity clearly and doctrinally soundly. His prefaces frequently express concern for the poor Latin competence of local clergy and the pastoral needs of their unlettered congregations. While Ælfric’s work is geographically removed from Egbert’s milieu, it nonetheless exemplifies the same reformist impulse: the desire to make Christian teaching morally effective and theologically correct across different social strata. Furthermore, Egbert’s re-Latinization of popular moral ideas can be seen as a mirror image of Ælfric’s vernacularisation of patristic doctrine.

In Lorraine and the Meuse region, the so-called Saint-Vanne Reform, while less centralized than Cluny, offered an even more directly didactic model. This network, which was associated with monasteries like Saint-Hidulf at Moyenmoutier and Saint-Evre at Toul, combined monastic observance with active pastoral outreach. Under Richard of Saint-Vanne, the region became known for promoting the intellectual and disciplinary renewal of both monks and secular clergy. Here, the integration of cathedral schools into the reform effort was more direct, and it is within this context that Egbert of Liège emerges as a key transitional figure. His alignment of rhetorical formation, moral didacticism, and pastoral purpose places Egbert in close proximity to the emerging preaching culture of the reform era. He reflects a world in which Latin homiletics were increasingly concerned with accessibility and affective impact, even if still formally composed. In this sense, Fecunda ratis may be seen as a pre-homiletic anthology, forming part of a larger pedagogical infrastructure for the training of future preachers in the cathedral and collegiate settings of the Western Empire.

Overall, the eleventh century saw preaching shift from a ritualized and largely elite practice to one increasingly invested in the formation of preachers, the codification of themes, and the pastoral effectiveness of rhetoric. While full-blown sermon cycles or vernacular collections would not appear until later in the twelfth century, the groundwork was already being laid in monastic, canonical, and scholastic environments. Figures like Egbert of Liège, Odilo of Cluny, Richard of Saint-Vanne, and Ælfric of Eynsham embody different strands of this emerging homiletic culture, one that was fundamentally moral, pedagogical, and reform-driven. Their works, though diverse in form and audience, share a common vision: that preaching, whether formal, poetic, liturgical, or proverbial, should serve the deeper transformation of Christian society. It is precisely in this formative ambiguity, between school and pulpit, between proverb and sermon, that the true contours of the early eleventh-century preaching movement in the West come into view.

From Segment to Structure: "Coherence" without "Cohesion" in Egbert of Liège

While Egbert’s Fecunda ratis has long been appreciated as a compendious re­po­sitory of moral instruction, its textual organization merits closer attention, not merely for its didactic architecture, but also for its subtle, rhetorically governed coherence. In contrast to cohesion, which is typically marked by lexical, morphological, or syntactic links between clauses, coherence refers to the underlying conceptual and pragmatic unity that renders a text intelligible and meaningful to its reader. As Helen Chau Hu stresses, coherence is “rhetorical and pragmatic,” while cohesion is “grammatical and semantic.”39 In the case of Egbert, who works with sources ranging from scriptural sententiae to oral vernacular proverbs, the challenge lies in ensuring that the textual units he composes retain thematic unity while exhibiting semantic range and formal independence.

A first observation is that Egbert eschews narrative or syntactic continuity across long stretches of his poem, yet his use of structural parallelism, thematic clustering, and serial progression creates a discursive fabric that can be described, following de Beaugrande and Dressler,40 as globally coherent. The coherence of Egbert’s proverbial corpus is not primarily a matter of grammatical devices but of conceptual chaining: individual couplets or distiches are rarely linked by anaphora or connectives, yet they participate in an implied topical progression, for instance by moving from one age group (children) to another (elders) or from social vices (lying, greed) to their corrective virtues (truth, moderation).

One need merely consider, for example, the aforementioned proverb “Neglegentibus pueris uerbera debes intentare, ut corrigantur; senibus et canis, quo digni sunt, honorem impendere (You must threaten negligent boys with the rod, so that they may be corrected; but to the elderly and grey-haired, you should accord the honor they deserve).41 This couplet functions both as a standalone ethical maxim and as the culmination of a thematic unit on age-appropriate moral treatment. While it lacks syntactic ties to its neighboring lines, it is conceptually coherent with them, continuing a pattern of juxtaposition that Egbert exploits frequently: youth and age, discipline and respect, ignorance and dignity. This rhetorical device corresponds to what van Dijk calls linear or segmental coherence, the relation between successive propositions that develop through difference, refinement, or contrast.42

Another strategy that reinforces coherence in Egbert’s work is the use of repetition and lexical thematization, both of which contribute to what Hadla calls “paragraph unity.”43 Though the Fecunda ratis is not organized in paragraphs, one can detect clusters of lines that cohere through partial repetition of key terms or motifs. A sequence may, for instance, use the verb fallere (to deceive) in several successive lines, either through lexical recurrence or through synonyms (mentiri, circumvenire, dolo uti), generating what Papegaaij and Schubert term “thematic progression by lexical variation.”44 This constitutes a higher-order kind of rhetorical coherence, in which the transmission of moral knowledge is facilitated by the reiteration of core concepts under different verbal guises.

Egbert also makes frequent use of binary structures that resonate with what text linguists identify as one of the primary vehicles of coherence: the organization of textual information into theme and rheme. While Egbert rarely employs grammatical devices such as pronominal anaphora or explicit connectives, he constructs lines in which the theme (the known or morally fixed point) is set against the rheme (the action or consequence to be advised or avoided). For instance, in “Quando domus uicina flagrat, proximat ad te,” the thematic anchor lies in the familiar setting (domus uicina), while the rheme (proximat ad te) introduces an inferred threat. The rhetorical function of the proverb depends upon the reader’s ability to grasp this given–new structure, even without formal markers of such organization. This reflects what Brown and Yule call “top-down coherence,” whereby interpretation arises not from textual cues alone, but from the readers’ background knowledge and expectations of logical or experiential continuity.45

Egbert’s coherence strategy is therefore not discursive in the sense of classical narration, but rather structural-rhetorical. He builds a “text” not out of narrative flow or grammatical cohesion, but out of moral adjacency, logical analogy, and thematic resonance. This aligns with what Hadla describes as a translation-relevant model of coherence, where the task is not to reproduce cohesion across texts but to retain conceptual and rhetorical connectivity, even when formal links are absent or restructured.46

A further dimension of coherence in the Fecunda ratis concerns its didactic sequencing. Egbert frequently arranges proverbs according to conceptual logic: a warning is followed by its remedy, a vice by its punishment, an error by its correction. This results in what Papegaaij and Schubert term “thematic patterns as a summary mechanism,” a cumulative coherence whereby the whole is more than the sum of its parts.47 For example, after the warning cited above about the neighboring house in flames, Egbert proceeds to related metaphors of contagion, including the aforementioned “Lancibus appositis in villam transilit ignis” (1.384: Once the platters are laid out, the fire leaps into the house), an image that maintains thematic proximity to the previous line through the motif of fire, while shifting the scene from neighborhood to domestic festivity. The referential continuity is thus lexically oblique but semantically tight, creating a coherence not by cohesion but by logical and metaphorical adjacency.

Notably, Egbert’s text is not a mere collection of isolated sententiae, nor does it read like a florilegium in which authorities are listed alphabetically or by source. Rather, it is constructed according to moral topology, a textual geography in which clusters of wisdom are arranged in proximity to reinforce one another’s didactic effect. The result is a rhetorical coherence that arises less from textual signals and more from the reader’s recognition of moral progression, structural symmetry, and thematic echo. This coherence, while “covert” in Beaugrande and Dressler’s terms, is nonetheless forceful, precisely because it relies on cognitive continuity rather than on mechanical linking.48

In sum, Egbert’s Fecunda ratis demonstrates textual coherence, despite or rather because of the sparseness of overt cohesive devices. His strategies are aligned with the classical rhetorical principles of dispositio and decorum, and anticipate what modern text linguistics describes as pragmatic, logical, and thematic coherence. Egbert does not require syntactic bonds to hold his text together. He relies instead on the reader’s capacity to perceive moral structure, ethical consequence, and rhetorical patterning. In this sense, the Fecunda ratis’ coherence is not merely a function of textual arrangement, but an artefact of interpretive design.

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Renardy, Christine. “Les écoles liégeoises du IXe au XIIe siècle: grandes lignes de leur évolution.” Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 57, no. 2 (1979): 309–28.

Senner, Walter. “Zur Geschichte der Kölner Dombibliothek und ihrer Hand­schriften­bestände.” In Mittelalterliche Handschriften der Kölner Dombibliothek: sechstes Symposion der Diözesan- und Dombibliothek Köln zu den Dom-Manuskripten, edited by Harald Horst, 185–220. Cologne: Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek Köln, 2015.

Simon, Eckhard. “Priamel, Short Verse Poems, and Proverbs from the Houghton Codex MS Ger. 74 (ca. 1460/70): Variants and Unpublished Texts.” Michigan Germanic Studies 2 (1976): 21–35.

Steckel, Sita. Kulturen des Lehrens im Früh- und Hochmittelalter: Autorität, Wissenskonzepte und Netzwerke von Gelehrten. Cologne: Böhlau, 2011.

Taylor, Barry. “Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 19–35.

Van Dijk, Teun A. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman, 1977.

Weijers, Olga. “The Evolution of the Trivium in University Teaching: the Example of the Topics.” In Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University, edited by John H. van Engen, 43–67. Notre Dame/Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2000.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. “A Fairy Tale from before Fairy Tales: Egbert of Liège’s ‘De puella a lupellis servata’ and the Medieval Background of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.” Speculum 67 (1992): 549–75.

What Factors Are Conducive to Coherence?
Translation Activity in Late Medieval Western Europe:
A Sketch of a Research Program

Péter Bara

HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 158-185  DOI 10.38145/2025.2.158 

Why is the history of intellectual change in the Middle Ages a history of selectively studied influences about which so few historians have dared venture generalizations? Why is it so rich with contradictions? And why do we have so little comprehensive knowledge about the translators behind these intellectual changes? To answer these questions, this article proposes a novel approach to the history of Greek-Latin translations between 1050 and 1350, which substantially reshaped the Medieval Latin intellectual landscape and the cultural history of Europe. After reviewing the conclusions in the most recent secondary literature, the essay offers a sketch of a historical analysis of translation-centered decision-making processes. In doing so, it singles out four hypotheses and describes four research areas corresponding to these assumptions. The proposed research examines the translators’ personalities and activities, their training, mobility, cultural patronage, networks and their audiences (including universities) that influenced their decisions when they chose to translate texts from Greek into Latin. Such an analysis will help us better understand the expanding cultural networks between the medieval Western and Eastern Mediterranean and the development of translations in Latin-using Western Europe.

Keywords: medieval translations, translations from Greek into Latin, medieval knowledge transfer, Byzantine influence on the medieval West 1100–1300

This Special Issue fills a scholarly gap, probably the most significant in historical translation studies. The endeavors and influences of single translators or groups of translators have already been studied for their historical, social, and literary contexts in greater numbers.¹ In contrast, there are relatively few overarching studies that further an understanding of “translation movements” and the coherence and social backdrop behind the works, methods, and results of subsequent generations of translators and epoch-long translation activities.2 The essays in this issue take steps towards establishing an explanatory framework and seek to identify factors conducive to translating texts between a wide range of source and target languages. This paper collects a preliminary set of criteria according to which the coherence behind translations in a specific period can be assessed. My expertise allows me to bring evidence concerning late medieval (eleventh-century to fourteenth-century) translations from Greek into Latin in Western Europe. The features described in the following pages lay the basis for the rest of the issue and offer ideas for future research.

Factors Conducive to Translations from Greek into Latin, 1050–1350:
State-of-the-Art

Translation activity from Greek (and Arabic) into Latin between 1050 and 1350 substantially reshaped the Medieval Latin intellectual landscape and brought about a dramatic shift in the cultural history of Europe. For example, Johannes, a scholar in late eleventh-century Northern Italy, put together a list of the medical books he possessed.3 His books contained 26 newly edited texts composed or translated in the previous century. Johannes witnessed a revolution in medical learning and book culture that had recently taken place. A look at the list of medical bestsellers in the long eleventh century reveals that, of the 18 titles, ten were translations from Arabic and Greek. How could this happen? By the mid-fourteenth century, the entire corpus of Galen’s works and some of Hippocrates’ writings had been translated into Latin. The landscape of medical learning and knowledge was not the only place where these kinds of changes were underway, however. According to my preliminary investigations on translated texts from Greek into Latin, 30 identifiable translators produced 208 texts between ca. 1050 and 1350. The working list of translations includes the Medieval Latin corpus Aristotelicum, a few texts by Plato, mathematical texts (in particular Euclid and Archimedes), Proklos, Dionysian texts, medical texts (especially Galen and Hippocrates), texts on geography, astronomy, miscellanea (horse medicine, falconry), patristic theology and religion, a few lives of philosophers, and astrology and esoteric texts.4

Although the origins of the Greek-Latin translations have long been of interest to historians of the period, an important point of departure is the observation that the last systematic attempt to explore how and why the translations came into being was made just over a century ago. Charles Homer Haskins and other modern scholars have seen the medieval translators’ achievements in a larger European context, which was labelled the “twelfth-century Renaissance.”5 They argued for the existence of a Western European renewal between ca. 1050 and 1200, which also had a lasting impact in the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Researchers noted that a significant body of translations from Arabic and Greek was produced, and these texts were salient features of developments in Western Europe. They referred to this as a “translation movement.” Haskins’ research focused on the long twelfth century, so the timeframe of his ideas concerning this “translation movement” covers this period. The task remains to approach subsequent translations from the perspective of a more analytical term that includes several “movements,” such as the term “translation phenomenon.”6

At present, scholarly explanations of a systematic “translation movement” can still be traced back to Haskins’ ideas. Haskins’ pioneering work laid the foundations of medieval translation studies and provided the first survey of Greek-Latin and Arabic-Latin translators and translations. However, the state-of-the-art of his day (especially the large number of unpublished sources) did not allow him to provide a standard, overarching analytical account of translations. Nonetheless, he developed partial hypotheses which, sometimes implicitly, influenced his views. The first hypothesis is that multicultural environments, such as trilingual (Arabic-Greek-Latin) Southern Italy in the eleventh century, provided the motivations and interactions necessary to produce translations.7 Michael Angold recently pointed out that this assumption needs modification.8 In multicultural environments, written multilingualism ran parallel to and followed the respective (Greek, Latin, Arabic) traditions of law and administration, as Julia Becker has shown.9 Latin translations were needed when information was channeled to Latin-using elites who did not know Greek (or Arabic). The second hypothesis, which is present in Haskins’ oeuvre10 and in many works since then,11 is to link knowledge of Greek in the Middle Ages to the eastward movement of people from Western regions where Latin was used. In other words, Medieval Latin scholars must have travelled “to the East” to learn the language(s) and acquire manuscripts. A third assumption is that school reform and the birth of universities played a role in the production and spread of translations. While these assumptions arguably call attention to certain aspects conducive to the development of a “Greek-Latin translation movement,” they do not offer a coherent explanation of this “movement.”

Since Haskins’ pioneering monographs in 1924 and 1927, the vast field of Greek-Latin translations has been researched in several ways. Scholars have studied the lives of translators and the bodies of translations they produced.12 This secondary literature is often useful as a body of work on specific individuals and texts, especially because it substantially updates Haskins’ oeuvre. Yet it is marked by systematic blind spots. It gives little consideration, for instance, to the broader historical context in which these translations were produced or the audiences for the new texts. More importantly, it does not go beyond Haskins’ abovementioned analytical assumptions, which at present beg reconsideration. This is particularly the case since researchers have in the meantime produced a significant number of critical editions (such as the Aristoteles Latinus13 and the Archimedes collection)14 that add considerably to the body of available sources, not only compared to Haskins’ day but also since d’Alverny and Berschin produced their surveys. The increasing number of critical texts makes it possible to draw a much more detailed picture than either Haskins or Berschin was able to do. The increasing quantity of available data at hand enabled scholars to offer synopses that focused on a region or center where translations were produced.15 Finally, scholars discussed the reception history of a single text16 or a coherent group of texts.17 Despite considerable research in the field, there is still no comprehensive explanatory framework that addresses the historical causes, processes, and effects of translations and translators. This issue sets out to address this challenge.

Daniel G. König offered the first overarching explanatory framework of Arabic-Latin translations.18 His study involved locations in Europe and the broader Mediterranean where translations were produced and read between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. König singled out the following explanatory building blocks. First, geopolitical shifts, such as the Western encroachment on al-Andalus, Sicily, and the Eastern Mediterranean, influenced the emergence and/or availability of specific forms of bilingualism (König labeled it “intellectualized,” a term which I will discuss below) and the beginnings of translation activity. Second, after the “translation movement” started, its scope and duration were determined by the availability and thematic breadth of appropriate texts, the motivations to translate, and the supporting institutions of patronage. Third, the translated texts became institutionalized as part of the curriculum in monastic and cathedral schools and nascent universities. Fourth, the medieval translation movement reached its end and left its legacy. Haskins’ assumptions and König’s explanatory scheme offer a point of departure for formulating four hypotheses and defining the areas of study that help us ap­proach late medieval Greek-Latin translations.

Factors Conducive to Translations from Greek into Latin, 1050–1350: A Tentative Explanatory Framework

Against the backdrop of previous scholarship, I will present in detail the following four hypotheses:

1. Study of translators’ “intellectual bilingualism” and mobility uncovers how the period’s emerging mobility infrastructure (trade routes, travel opportunities) was connected to the rapidly developing scholarly infrastructure (namely, schools, universities, and different courts).

2. Study of the strategies and means used by translators to characterize their roles (or what I will refer to as self-representation) reveals the ways in which their work overlapped and intersected with contemporary scholarly, political, and economic discourses. It also sheds light on the ways in which the decisions they made helped them establish themselves as cultural mediators and knowledge innovators.

3. Study of translators’ networks and writings demonstrates that a division of labor existed between men of learning and patrons, who were ultimately responsible for masterminding external knowledge import.

4. Dissemination of this imported knowledge took place on different levels and according to a complex set of factors that cannot be reduced to a simpler level of analysis. Analyses of translators’ multi-level knowledge import (including lists, texts, canons, and knowledge organization patterns) uncover mechanisms which remain unknown behind the medieval educational and intellectual shift after ca. 1150–1300 (i.e., the birth of universities and their influence on intellectual history).

Intellectual Bilingualism and Mobility

To understand the motivations of the historical actors who drove the growth of translation activity and the motivations behind the translations themselves, it is necessary to revisit König’s concept of “intellectualized bilingualism.” This means exploring translators’ mobility, through which they acquired their bilingual skills. The roles translators played as cultural mediators can be fruitfully studied by identifying two overlapping infrastructures, without which medieval Greek-Latin translators could not have become cultural agents on the move. These are the A) mobility infrastructure, which provided Greek-Latin translators access to B) scholarly infrastructure. Mobility had a linking function between Western educational centers (schools and libraries) and those of the multicultural zones, such as Southern Italy and Byzantine centers, especially Constantinople. The rediscovery of classical and Byzantine Greek heritage could not have occurred without Westerners exploiting manuscript holdings and Greek education in these zones. The correlation of the two infrastructures can be examined through concrete steps: 1) Collecting available data regarding Greek-Latin translators’ movement based on their biographies and works. 2) Examining the sending contexts of translators: where did the translators come from, what functions did they have in these places, and what was the purpose of travel? 3) Analyzing the receiving contexts: where did the translators go, and what functions did they have in these places? 4) Investigating the infrastructures translators used during their mobility (e.g. diplomats or tradesmen) and its relation to their work as translators. 5) Examining the specific cases of translators in the broader context of Western schools and Byzantine Greek education, with a focus on the possible influence on translations of factors such as different levels of education, curriculum, methods, and necessary time to attain specific skills and expertise. 6) Analyzing how Westerners became insiders in Greek educated society.

My approach, which is based on the notion that one must study translators’ mobility (their travels) and their education side by side, draws on previous scholarship which has called attention to the prerequisites for translating scholarly writings. By establishing the term “intellectualized bilingualism,” König created a novel analytical approach.19 His work provides a key to the study of translations in relation to multiculturality, as Haskins stressed. König emphasized that the translation of specific, in this case scholarly-scientific texts required not only appropriate language skill in oral communication in the source and target languages. In the case of Greek-Latin translations, it also required mastery of the language of Greek source texts, namely a classicizing artificial Greek language20 and patristic Greek, which could be learned from Byzantine masters in schools alongside the concomitant details (termini technici and cultural contexts) of disciplines such as philosophy, theology, or mathematics. In addition, the translator needed Latin schooling in language and the respective disciplines.

Scholars since Haskins rightly point to a breakthrough in the eleventh-century and twelfth-century Western Latin school system and a new, increased interest in manuscript heritage. Schools in their social milieus between 1080 and 1215 are surveyed by Cédric Giraud21 and universities in the volume edited by Hilde De Ridder-Symoens.22 Jacques Verger discussed all stages in the schooling of men of learning between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.23 Examples from regional contexts are given by Cédric Giraud, Constant Mews,24 Robert Witt,25 Stephen Ferruolo,26 Carl Mounteer,27 and Joachim Ehlers.28 With regards to Byzantine education (eleventh–fourteenth centuries), it was assessed in general by Paul Lemerle,29 Sita Steckel,30 and Costas Constantinides.31 Paul Magdalino32 and Niels Gaul33 described eleventh-century and early fourteenth-century Byzantine education as a social phenomenon. So, there are tools at hand to assess which types of schools Greek-Latin translators might have attended and the kinds of knowledge they could have mastered during the period in question, even if there is not much evidence concerning where, when, or if they actually attended schools, apart from the content of their translations and work (method, vocabulary, etc.), which gives an indication of their training.

I also set out from the hypothesis based on Haskins’ work that mobility was indeed a crucial feature of the translation movement. The availability of schools alone would have been insufficient unless translators had acquired language skills and specialized knowledge in both systems (the Latin and Byzantine). As König emphasized in his model, through geopolitical shifts, the period in question witnessed an expanding Western network in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean basin through trade, pilgrimage, territorial gains, and the crusading movement. The question is how Greek-Latin translations used these networks. As part of the expanding Western networks, cultural and linguistic contact zones became triggers behind the translation of texts. Future research must offer a comprehensive analysis of how Greek-Latin translators, (after) being educated in Latin language and scholarly culture, entered these contact zones, learned Greek, and became familiar with elements of classical Greek history and culture that enabled them to undertake the translation of scholarly texts.

Understanding translators’ mobility means examining the mobility of specific groups and general movement patterns. Previous scholarship has established some aspects of this migration and mobility, and it provides a useful methodological tool for further studies. My preliminary investigations proved that Haskins’ abovementioned hypothesis was right: between 1050 and 1350, 28 of the 30 best-documented translators pursued their activities by moving between centers (from England, France, and Italy to Greece, Constantinople, and Antioch).34 As part of Migrationsforschung in a Western-Byzantine relation, Krijnie Ciggaar examined Western travel to Byzantium.35 The presence of Western merchants,36 soldiers,37 and diplomats38 in Byzantium was also the subject of research. Most recently, Leonie Exarchos investigated the services performed by Western intellectuals in the Byzantine court.39 The Viennese project “Mobility, Microstructures, and Personal Agency” presented Byzantine society and culture at the crossroads of Eastern and Western influence.40 In these works, translators are members of specific groups, such as diplomats, intellectuals in Byzantine service, etc.

The approach I propose is to focus explicitly on individual translators and comparisons of their lives and works with the lives and works of their contemporary colleagues in translation. Whereas I accept many of the premises of the abovementioned contributions, I consider it more beneficial to analyze the characteristics and development of each individual topic (education in Latin and Greek and the mobility of translators) rather than moving too rapidly to a higher level of generalization.

Translators’ Self-Representation

To understand how translators carved out agency for themselves, I find it fruitful to assess Greek-Latin translators’ self-representation by discussing 1) the methods with which translators asserted themselves as figures of authority, 2) the reasons they used to justify translating texts, 3), their relation to their subject matter, namely classical Greek and Byzantine material, 4) their uses of ideas from and contributions to the translation theory tradition, and finally, 5) the ways in which they constructed their identities and roles in relation to political, social, and scholarly patterns of the period. In order to offer the necessary backdrop, the social milieus from which translators arrived must be explored. Hitherto, Greek into Latin translators’ roles as mediators have only been subject to case studies.41 Thus, there is no comprehensive picture of the knowledge transfer process. An obvious remedy to this state-of-the-art is to survey all available case studies with the intention of developing a comprehensive interpretative model of the sociocultural processes that framed Greek-Latin translation work.

Previous scholarship has implied that translators are not just implementers, but autonomous decision-makers and drivers of knowledge accumulation, with historical context-dependent roles and motivations. I plan to investigate these implications in a systematic way and consider what it meant for translators to belong to specific social groups and how they represented their complex and situational social identities.

Such research studies the agency of translators in the cultural and knowledge transfer process. Transfer agents have been investigated as “cultural brokers” in and between courts,42 and their roles in crossing spatial, religious, social, and cultural boundaries have been emphasized.43 The Toletan translator Dominicus Gundissalinus, for instance, introduced the Aristotelian classification of knowledge through Arabic intermediaries, such as al-Farabi.44 Translators’ relations to earlier traditions (e. g. in the case of Burgundio of Pisa45 or concerning Amalfitans)46 and to the achievements of other translators have been assessed.47 Dimitri Gutas collected texts on why translators interpreted specific (in that case, scholarly-scientific) texts.48 José Mártinez-Gázquez examined Arabic translators’ relations to Arabic science, which was their subject matter.49 I argued that some translators may have achieved more than others because of their birth/social status by highlighting that Cerbanus Cerbano could defy the doge of Venice because he (Cerbanus Cerbano) was the offspring of an ancient Venetian noble family.50 Peter Classen demonstrated that Burgundio of Pisa was a noble and leading statesman in Pisa.51

Based on the cases of eleventh-century Constantinopolitan imperial employees, Leonie Exarchos established a partial interpretative framework, calling attention to the authority-making process through language and factual skills and also stays and education in Greek-speaking territories.52 Rita Copeland wrote a tour-de-force model book on the influence of translation theory on medieval translations to vernaculars.53

Translators’ prologues and other paratexts are among the most essential sources for the study of their activities. A fruitful approach would be to survey all surviving prologues (both published and unpublished) from the quills of Greek-Latin translators from the period as a whole. Réka Forrai created an analytical framework.54 She looked at prefaces as conceptual narratives and investigated a small portion of recurrent commonplaces/topoi, namely utility, poverty, and bellic/martial topoi. The framework Forrai proposed can be extended by assembling a comprehensive list of clichés (as was also done with other text groups, such as Byzantine saints’ lives)55 alongside the role of other elements in these texts in relation to commonplaces. Consequently, the commonplaces can be analyzed as a means with which the translators constructed their “selves” to provide their credentials, establish their relations to contemporary science, indicate the novelties they brought to it, and show their relations to translation theory. Finally, the statements made by translators could be set against other contemporary narratives, be they private or public (the use of non-Christian knowledge in education and public discourse),56 political57 (e.g., the translatio studii et imperii),58 or social (for instance, utilitas),59 to show how translators construct self-representation in a social or political dimension. The investigation of topoi in the prefaces is closely linked to the systematic study of the social background of Greek-Latin translators on the basis of available sources. Accordingly, textual analysis is combined with historical research to further a nuanced understanding of the social positions of the translators and their networks.

Networks and Patrons

I also seek to understand the social factors that helped or hampered the successful circulation of translations. In order to achieve this goal, one must 1) construct a prosopography-centred dissemination history of translations and 2) analyze the roles of patrons. How can one make sense of the bewildering variety of circumstances under which translations were produced? I will explore what made up for the gaps and inconsistencies that characterized specific translators’ translating activities, bridged subsequent generations of translators, or, alter­natively, fostered systematic results and the coherence of translators’ work in other cases. I seek explanations by exploring the socio-cultural contexts of translators who belonged to a network of scholars and patrons and who, even unconsciously, practiced a division of labor that ultimately was responsible for producing an array of texts that suited their needs. I depart from the assumptions that 1) a scholarly community consisting of translators, scholars, and patrons was responsible for the coherence behind translations and the systematic results and, 2) their activities and efforts to make new texts accessible to a Western audience were influenced by filtering factors of textual transmission.

The first topic to be discussed is the question of the scholarly community, namely of a new social group which, as Jacques Le Goff and Jacques Verger have shown,60 came into being in the eleventh century and continued to place increasingly prominent roles in intellectual exchange: the medieval men of learning. I plan to explore this group as audience and initiators of translations and analyze the specificities of this community to understand better the conditions that shaped the production of translations. A crucial question to answer is how masters in cathedral schools and, after c. 1200, the university elite, including teachers and top-tier students, became the primary audience of translated texts.61 In this knowledge-production procedure, patrons played a crucial role. So far, patrons have been studied only on a case-by-case basis,62 and there is no coherent account of translators’ patrons that includes the impact of the shifting educational paradigm (monastic learning-cathedral school-university) and assesses the roles of different (princely, royal, papal) courts.

One major task is to forge a prosopography-centered dissemination history of published translated texts, studying the process as it unfolded until new materials become available and accessible to the interested public. This involves tracing the translators’ networks, i.e., translators’ personal connections from their perspective, and exploring the knowledge hubs/ learned networks that played crucial roles in the reception of the translated texts. The study of translators’ networks inevitably involves exploring textual dissemination patterns. Concerning textual dissemination, micro and macro levels can be identified. The micro-level refers to the milieu of the translator and first addressee(s) of the translated material involving the actual production circumstances. The macro-level refers to the spread of the translated text to a broader scholarly community and to knowledge hubs such as courts, schools, and universities. This might happen, e.g. through a ruler’s letter,69 monastic networks,70 or university copy houses (the stationarii in the pecia-system).71 From a methodological point of view, micro- and macro-level dissemination can be analysed using different source materials. The actual production circumstances might be found in the prologues to the translations and in documents related to the translators’ biographies. The macro level can be assessed only by studying the history of specific texts in great detail, which involves considerably more data than the study of the micro level.

Table 2. Number of surviving MSS of critically published translations

According to my preliminary overview, 49 percent of the textual corpus is critically edited, which is a prerequisite for a feasible and representative dissemination survey. Editors considered 2372 manuscripts to produce their texts, 66 percent of which had been copied within a century after the translators produced their first versions (Chart 1 above). Chart 2 shows that 87 percent of the texts survived in less than 50 witnesses (33 percent less than 10). The arguably high number of manuscripts significantly drops if one deducts the 6 percent of more than 100 witnesses, constituted by such works as Aristoteles’ Posterior Analytics or Metaphysics. More importantly, by drawing manuscript branches, the editors singled out which manuscripts would constitute the target of my research. I will focus on the “root manuscripts” that served as the basis for later copies. In the case of the Posterior Analytics (James of Venice’s eleventh-century translation), this means 10 out of the 289 witnesses.72 Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century translation of the Metaphysics survived in 202 manuscripts, which can be traced back to two Paris University manuscripts (copied in 23 smaller textual units-peciae) and six Italian witnesses.73 Based on the critical editions, manuscript catalogues, and consulting manuscripts, I will consider which people were connected to specific manuscripts and assess their roles in making texts accessible. My aim is to arrive at an understanding on a quantitative-empirical basis of how translated texts surpassed the threshold of the micro-level and reached the macro-level and became more widely accessible by being read, cited, and commented upon. This limitation is based on the scheme that Michael McVaugh established to study Galen’s university reception (see also the next unit).74 McVaugh distinguished between availability (the existence of a translation), accessibility (the specific translation was within the reach of particular groups), and adaptation (the scholarly community studied and interiorized the new text). By setting the limiting criteria of accessibility, my research focuses on the collective decision-making process of introducing new materials instead of assessing the adaptation process, which has been relatively well-researched by historians of the specific fields.

With regards to agency, the micro-level involves the translators and the patron. The patron existed as a commissioner (for instance, the pope in the case of Burgundio of Pisa)75 a financial sponsor (wealthy Amalfitan merchants in Constantinople),76 or simply the individual who gave the idea of translating specific texts (the Aragonese envoy Ramón de Moncada to Leo Tuscus).77 Sometimes, these roles overlapped. The study of patronage involves assessing its changing motivations and goals in secular, religious (ecclesiastical–monastic), and educational contexts: the importance of Benedictine and mendicant patronage (e.g. Monte Cassino’s essential role in manuscript production and housing Constantine the African’s medical project in the late eleventh century,78 or the role played by the Dominican cultural programme in William of Moerbeke’ translations),79 and the shift towards cathedral schools and universities. The roles played by courts in the selection of new texts from Greek is also to be investigated, such as the Papal Curia and Southern Italy under Norman,80 Hohenstaufen (translations from Greek were made especially during the reign of Manfred [r. 1258–1266]),81 and Angevin rulers.

Reaching the Audience: The Degree of Transmission

One important methodological challenge that I will tackle is the varying level of success that translations reached. In some cases (as e. g., I have argued),82 translators produced systematic results. This is particularly true of such cases as Aristotle83 or Galen,84 which were large corpora that successive generations of translators rendered into Latin step by step. Self-standing texts of great importance, such as John Damascene’s Creed/De fide orthodoxa, were also sought and seem to have entered into academic use relatively quickly. Éloi Buytaert has shown that the Creed was translated on the fringes of Latinate Europe (in the Hungarian Kingdom) ca. 1135, but within fifteen years Peter Lombard was already using it in Paris.85 Shortly afterwards, Burgundio of Pisa retranslated the entire work, which Robert Grosseteste reworked in the thirteenth century according to the new academic tastes.86 In contrast, several case studies show that translations were produced under accidental circumstances.87 Moreover, Greek-Latin translators seem to have worked in isolation: they were aware of previous results, but there is little evidence to suggest that they undertook shared projects with their contemporaries.88

To assess dissemination dynamics, I single out filtering factors that impacted the availability and accessibility of texts. These factors complement personal agency but crucially affected textual histories and the degree of transmission. Some texts did not even reach the macro-level or did not circulate widely for reasons that have only been partly identified. Based on case studies of Aristotelian translations, Pieter de Leemans emphasized the importance of external and internal transmission criteria.89

Leemans’ external criteria highlight the circumstances that helped or hampered the procedure through which a text became accessible to its audience. These included accidental events (e. g. some of the model manuscripts were lost in a shipwreck in the case of Constantine the African),90 competing translations from Arabic (see for instance the few people who read Moerbeke’s translation of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos from Greek)91 the association of authority with translations (e. g. Thomas Aquinas with Moerbeke’s oeuvre)92 etc. Leemans identifies the correct understanding of the text’s content and message as the internal criterion. I expand this interpretation and seek to understand what roles translators played in successfully transmitting specific contents.

I plan to examine, first, the specific contents transmitted by translators on different levels. This includes studying the lists translators made, which can be considered their first direct contribution to Western scholarship. Henry Aristippus (eleventh century), for instance, translated Aristotle’s life from Greek, which contained a list of the philosopher’s works;93 or Burgundio of Pisa was asked by a Salernitan physician to provide a list of the Galenic works.94 Afterwards, I consider how these lists became new canons in the respective fields. Furthermore, having obtained their intellectualized bilingual skills, translators had access not only to the languages themselves but also to Greek and Arabic systems of thought. Scholars have shown, for instance, that from the eleventh century the late antique Alexandrian medical canon influenced translators’ agendas (in the case of Constantine the African;95 or Burgundio of Pisa).96 Likewise, Alexander Fidora explained97 that the translator and scholar Dominicus Gundissalinus (ca. 1110–1190), in his On the Division of Philosophy, synthesised Latinate tradition (Holy Scripture, Boethius, and Isidore of Seville) with the corpus of Aristotle, which he consulted mainly in Arabic, alongside the explanatory teachings of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, among others.98 So, first, I will single out a set of transmission criteria considering the multilevel ways in which translators’ knowledge was imported.

Second, I consider how such developments were connected to a changing educational environment in which the primary venue of scholarly study and discussion shifted from monastic to cathedral schools and universities. My primary focus is on how the newly translated texts found a place in or remained outside of this framework and how they transformed it.

Third, I assess the varying pace of the introduction of new knowledge produced by translators. In doing so, I depart from the premises of previous scholarship,99 which claims that the result of external knowledge import was ubiquitous by the thirteenth century in higher education: Aristotle’s oeuvre superseded the previous medieval curriculum in the nascent universities. In contrast, Michael McVaugh argues that in medicine, novel texts entered curricula only decades after their production because the established terminology only gradually gave way to new terminology.100

In addition, I also analyze the mechanisms of translators’ knowledge import by focusing on the field that was a thirteenth-century innovation and was substantially influenced by translators: university education. For reasons of feasibility, I plan to study knowledge import in medical education, which constituted one of the three higher university faculties. I will examine the availability and reception of Galen’s works translated from Greek. The main questions are the following: 1) How can successive stages of the arrival of the “new Galen” be described from the viewpoint of translations from Greek considering multi-level knowledge import (lists of texts, texts, and coherent corpora, such as curricula)? 2) Which Galenic works became more successful and which remained marginal and why? 3) How did medical knowledge hubs/receiving contexts define this procedure ca. 1100–1350? Galen (129–216 AD) was a key medical authority in the Middle Ages.101 The Galeno Latino project provides a comprehensive dataset of Galen’s oeuvre in Latin, inventorying Greek and Arabic translators and translations, alongside their manuscripts.102 The census of manuscripts has proven that a larger corpus (some 25 works) entered Western curricula by the mid-thirteenth century through Arabic and Latin translations.103 The success of translations from Arabic104 and Greek105 has been sketched, and the first synthesis about their reception at universities has been made.106 I will expand McVaugh’s analytical framework to the period as a whole. In order to solve the problem of diachronic relations between successive translators and their translations, my research employs McVaugh’s availability, accessibility, and adaptation scheme.107 Scholars have shown that it took a relatively long time for new Galenic texts to enter circulation after having been produced. It has also been argued that translations from Arabic played the primary role in establishing medical vocabulary, even though medieval physicians and university teachers acknowledged the linguistic superiority of translations from Greek. The fourteenth-century case of Montpellier has proven that more practical masters did not wish to create a new vocabulary based on Greek models, since it had taken some fifty years for a coherent medical language to have been established, at last, from Arabic.108 While this idea has been accepted,109 the details should be subjected to a systematic survey which analyses additional factors, such as the importance of different academic genres.

Conclusions

The model I propose presents prerequisites and working mechanisms of a knowledge transfer process. This process substantially (re)shaped the institutionalization of learning in Latin-using Europe between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries and gave a decisive impetus to intellectual currents of the period. This model considers the knowledge import process as a series of decisions. By using these ideas as a critical framework and point of departure for research, I propose to further a richer understanding of the work and endeavors of the key figures who played major roles, as translators, in the late medieval Western European intellectual shift. In addition, this research also illustrates how the birth and development of ground-breaking notions and systems of thought came into being as the products of interactions among individuals and groups as well as historical, context-dependent influences.

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Coherence of Translation Programs and the Contexts of Translation
Movements, ca. 1000–1700 AD

Péter Bara

HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 155-157 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.155 

Why did pre-modern translators produce their translated texts? What societal, scholarly, and historical factors influenced their activities? How did such factors together create a coherent set of triggers behind translation efforts and the goals translators pursued? This Special Issue aims to explore the complex historical, literary, and material backgrounds that fostered the production of translations between an array of source and target languages, including Greek, Latin, Armenian, and various vernaculars. The essays span a broad timeframe, from the Middle Ages to the end of the Renaissance. The volume investigates the motivations and enabling factors that facilitated the creation of translations and their reception by different audiences. The variety of source and target languages establishes a comparative framework that enriches our understanding of the translation process as a multifaceted historical phenomenon.

Péter Bara explores translations from Greek into Latin between 1050 and 1350. Instead of focusing on a specific translator or group of translators, the essay adopts a programmatic approach to the period in question. Bara seeks to explain how translations were produced against the backdrop of specific historical contexts and the defining characteristics of the epoch. Additionally, Bara emphasizes the societal dimension of translating texts from Greek into Latin. The essay conceptualizes translation as a decision-making process in which translators, scholars, and patrons acted as key agents. The model he proposes takes into account the influence of audiences on the translation process. To this end, the essay identifies four hypotheses, each corresponding to a distinct research area.

Hiram Kümper studies the Fecunda ratis, an eleventh-century Latin didactic poem. The essay highlights several historical and cultural contexts that decisively shaped the poem’s content and generated new knowledge through their interaction. Egbert of Liège, the author, composed the poem for an audience at the cathedral school of Liège. The poem survives in a single manuscript, which shows signs of extensive use. It served to prepare students for proper, exemplary Christian conduct and for later specialization in theology. Accordingly, the second book contains versified passages from the Bible and the Church Fathers. By contrast, the first book is a collection of popular wisdom sayings translated from the vernacular into Latin verse. Kümper closely examines how vernacular sayings entered Latin thought, using contemporary theoretical literature as an analytical framework. He develops a typology of transmission and traces how popular proverbs were transformed into high-register, classicizing Latin. Kümper demonstrates that Egbert used these sayings as case studies for ethical dilemmas–personal relationships, familial obligations, and individual responsibilities–that could be memorized. The essay concludes by situating the Fecunda ratis within the broader context of eleventh-century Western pedagogical culture.

Gohar Muradyan investigates the influence of Greek and Latin models on fourteenth-century Armenian grammatical theory. Her paper demonstrates how the arrival of Catholic missionaries in late medieval Armenia created new conditions for knowledge transfer. The essay centers on the figure of Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i and his grammatical treatise On Grammar. K‘ṛnets‘i belonged to a group of Armenians known as the fratres unitores, who accepted the Catholic faith and maintained close ties with Dominican missionaries. Muradyan underscores the importance of their literary work as translators and original authors and provides a list of published works produced by the unitores. She shows that K‘ṛnets‘i based his grammar on Greek and Latin grammatical theory. After reviewing previous scholarly contributions, Muradyan examines numerous newly identified passages in K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar, arguing that the influence of the Latin grammarian Priscian and his commentator Petrus Helias is more substantial than earlier scholars had assumed.

Daniel Vaucher investigates the intricate transmission and transformation of the Prayer of Cyprian. This apotropaic prayer was traditionally attributed to Cyprian of Antioch, who was revered both as a magician and as a Christian martyr. Originally composed in Greek, the prayer crossed geographical and linguistic boundaries, appearing in Latin and multiple European vernaculars by the Renaissance. Vaucher argues that despite regional adaptations and ecclesiastical scrutiny, the prayer’s core structure and mythic framework remain rooted in Byzantine spiritual and ritual traditions. The essay proceeds in five stages. First, Vaucher shows that despite its Christian orientation, the prayer functioned both as an exorcism and a talisman, thereby blurring the line between liturgy and magic. The second section examines the Greek manuscript tradition, identifying ten extant copies from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These are divided into two functional categories: scholarly anthologies and practical ritual handbooks. Vaucher highlights manuscripts from southern Italy, Crete, and Cyprus, emphasizing their role in the transmission of Byzantine magical-exorcistic literature to Western Europe. The third section analyzes the Western vernacular translations–Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan versions that began to appear in the fifteenth century. These often took the form of small-format manuals intended for popular or private use. In the fourth section, Vaucher offers a comparative philological analysis of corresponding passages in the Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Catalan versions. These reveal strong textual parallels, especially in key motifs such as demonic control over nature, binding spells, and divine liberation. The final section addresses the growing concern of the Inquisition with the Prayer of Cyprian. Despite efforts to suppress it, the prayer continued to circulate and evolve. Vaucher concludes that the Prayer of Cyprian exemplifies the long-term, translingual, and transcultural transmission of ritual literature.

Alessandro Orengo provides a detailed analysis of Oskan vardapet Erewanc‘i (1614–1674), the influential Armenian printer, scholar, and translator. Erewanc‘i’s biography illustrates how geographical movement shaped translators’ accomplishments. Born in New Julfa, he traveled across Armenia and Poland before eventually settling in Amsterdam. Educated in part by the Dominican missionary Paolo Piromalli, Oskan translated and abridged the first two books of Tommaso Campanella’s Grammaticalia. His Armenian versions–one surviving in manuscript, the other as a printed abridgement–demonstrate both fidelity to Latin grammatical structures and critical adaptation to the Armenian linguistic system. He frequently points out where Latin grammatical categories, such as gender or the superlative, do not apply to Armenian. Oskan also translated an abridged version of Koriwn’s Life of Mesrop into Latin, dictating it to François Pétis de la Croix. While the translation is largely faithful, it contains minor interpretive errors, likely due to oral transmission. Oskan’s work exemplifies the seventeenth-century phenomenon of grammatization, in which Latin served as a universal linguistic model. His translations not only bridged cultural divides but also contributed to the modernization of Armenian grammatical scholarship, balancing inherited traditions with evolving European linguistic frameworks.

The History of the Macsó and Barancs Territories until 1316

Bálint Ternovácz

Budapest City Archives

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 1 (2025): 127-146 DOI 10.38145/2025.1.127

In the early thirteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary took control of the northern Balkan territories situated between the Drina, Sava, and Danube Rivers. This region was known as Trans-Syrmia or Sirmia Ulterior, though Southern Slavic sources commonly referred to it simply as Syrmia. At the time, this name referred to all the land south of Hungary’s borders and east of the Drina, without clearly defined boundaries. Apart from a brief period in the 1270s when forming banates was attempted, these lands were controlled by the women of the Árpád dynasty and their husbands until 1319. In 1284, the former King of Serbia, Dragutin was granted Macsó, along with Bosnia, Belgrade, and Barancs-Kucsó, and attempted to establish a vassal state of Hungary. After his death in 1316, his son Vladislav lost control, allowing King Milutin of Serbia to seize Macsó. In response, King Charles I of Hungary launched a military campaign, reclaiming the territory by 1319 and reinstating the banate and the title of ban was then given to Hungarian noble families as an honor. This study examines the history and administration of the territories known in secondary literature as the Banate of Macsó and Barancs, covering the period up to 1319 and the military campaigns of King Charles I of Hungary.

Keywords: Syrmia, Macsó, Kingdom of Hungary, Serbia, Angevin dynasty

The interest of the Kingdom of Hungary in the territory of the northern Balkans, bordered by the Drina, Sava, and Danube Rivers, reached the point of military expansion at the end of the twelfth century, as the Hungarian crown was able to take advantage of Byzantine internal struggles following the death of Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos (1143–1180). These territories, known as the Trans-Syrmia or Macsó (Mačva in Serbian) and Barancs (Braničevo in Serbian), began to come into closer contact with the Kingdom of Hungary in the early thirteenth century. With the exception of the 1270s (when an attempt was made to turn the territories south of the Sava-Danube line into a so-called banate, i.e. a frontier province governed by a governor or “ban”), the women of the Árpád dynasty and their husbands held these lands until 1319.

Research into the history of the area is complicated by the fact that there is no known surviving archival source base in the archives in Serbia and Bulgaria. We can reconstruct the events of the more than one hundred years covered in this paper mainly on the basis of Hungarian source material. Narrative sources, such as the Chronicle of Antivari or the work of Serbian Archbishop Danilo II,1 make only passing mention of the areas under study. In the discussion below, I reconstruct the history of the administration of the territories referred to in the secondary literature as the Banate of Macsó and Barancs from the beginning until 1319, until the military campaigns of King Charles I of Hungary (1310–1342).

The Banate of Macsó in Hungarian and South Slavic Historiography

The history and archontology of the banate and bans of Macsó were first dealt with by Frigyes Pesty in his study published in 1875.2 The first monograph that dealt with the subject was an introductory study to the source publication compiled by Lajos Thallóczy and Antal Áldásy on the connections between Hungary and Serbia, published in 1907.3 In this study, however, the Macsó region was mentioned more as a place of diplomacy or warfare between the Hungarian kings and the Serbian rulers, without no discussion whatsoever of the process by which the territories south of the Sava River, surrounded by the Kolubara and the Drina Rivers, were organized into a Hungarian dependent territory in the thirteenth century. Thallóczy attempted to describe the topography of the Macsó province, and regarding this I would like to emphasize two main issues. In his opinion, the Macsó region extended across the Drina River, and he also included parts of Inner Syrmia and Szávaszentdemeter (today Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia). Another noteworthy detail concerning Thallóczy’s map is the location of the castle of Macsó, which he placed on the site of the present-day settlement of Valjevo.4 Alongside the introductory study to this source publication, the work of Lajos Faragó, published in 1911 in the Kaposvár State High School’s newsletter, also merits mention.5 The most recent comprehensive article on the history of Macsó in Hungarian was the encyclopedic glossary of the archaeological background of Macsó, written by Péter Rokay and Miklós Takács,6 which, being a glossary, does not contain the findings of independent research but rather offers a summary of the accepted conclusions of the existing secondary literature, mainly from the South Slavic territories. Other Hungarian researchers have touched on the thirteenth-century history of Macsó, of course, but not a single monograph has been written on the subject in the last hundred years. South Slavic (mainly Serbian) historians have shown much greater interest in the medieval history of the Macsó region. This increased interest is understandable, as the former Macsó region was and still is the province of Mačva, which was liberated from Ottoman occupation and is part of present day Serbia. I would like to highlight the work of two historians from among the writings by many South Slavic researchers. In doing so, I summarize the findings of South Slavic historians on Macsó.

Chronologically, the first work on which I focus was written by Mihajlo Dinić about the areas inhabited by Serbs in the Middle Ages.7 Although he dealt with the history of the name of Trans-Syrmia, which was used as the name of the territories south of the Sava River before the name Macsó appeared and was used from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, Dinić mainly focused on the reign of Dragutin in Syrmia (Srijem in Serbian).8 According to him, the Hungarians named the region Macsó, either because they already had a county called Syrmia (which was organically linked to the kingdom, as the county structure had already been formed) or because they wanted to name the newly acquired territory after its center.9 According to Dinić, Belgrade was part of Banate of Macsó when it was organized in the 1270s.10 He also described how the Serbian king Stephen Dragutin received the territory of Macsó after losing his throne,11 along with Usora, Soli, and Bosnia, from the Hungarian king Ladislas IV after June 11, 1284.12 Along with Macsó, Belgrade also fell into the hands of Dragutin, who then established his residence there.13 The territories ruled by Dragutin were called “the Syrmia territories” by his Serbian contemporaries, and Dragutin himself was called Stephen of Syrmia.14 Before the 1970s, the view that Dragutin had also ruled the inner parts of Syrmia was accepted in the Serbian secondary literature, but this notion was refuted in 1978 by Mihajlo Dinić.

Another noteworthy historical work on thirteenth-century Macsó in the South Slavic historiography is Sima Ćirković’s study published in 2008.15 According to Ćirković, present-day northern Serbia came into Hungarian hands in the late twelfth century.16 The province of Macsó as an institution had no Byzantine antecedents.17 The Byzantine administrative arrangement, with imperial offices and ecclesiastical centers in the larger cities, may have been preserved; the largest settlement may have been Sirmium around 1020. Referring to Byzantine sources, Ćirković claims that in the twelfth century not only Zimony (today Zemun in Serbia, north of the Sava River) but also Bács (today Bač in Serbia) on the left bank of the Danube was included in the territory of Syrmia.18 According to him, the names Inner-Syrmia19 and Trans-Syrmia,20 which referred to the area between the Danube River and the Sava River, and the area between the Drina, Sava, and Kolubara Rivers, may have been created at this time, around the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and clearly represented a Hungarian perspective.21 Among the Serbs, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the name Syrmia was used to refer to the area south of the Sava River, while among Hungarians, the name Syrmia was used only to refer to the Syrmia County between the Danube River and the Sava River. The Byzantine tradition, according to Ćirković, was established in Hungarian circles after the foundation of the bishopric of Syrmia in 1229, according to which the name Syrmia was used to refer to territories on both banks of the Sava River.22 The castle of Macsó could have stood there, hence the name of the area,23 but it is not possible to identify the precise location of the castle on the basis of archaeological or archival sources. Ćirković refutes Thallóczy’s view that the castle of Macsó would have been on the site of the present-day settlement of Valjevo. He does not attempt to pinpoint its exact location, but he explains that the castle could have been closer to Szávaszentdemeter than to Debrc, the center of Dragutin.24

According to him, the name Macsó was only used by the Hungarians. It does not appear in Serbian or Byzantine sources, and neither does Belgrade. The Orthodox Church sources mentioned only Sirmium as the suffragan bishopric of the Archbishop of Ohrid.25 He contends that in the early thirteenth century the region south of the Sava River was granted to Margaret, daughter of King Béla III, who was mentioned as the lady of Macsó. This territory had no defined borders. It extended as far as the Serbian territory of the Nemanjić dynasty.26 After the Mongol invasion, the province was given to Anna, daughter of King Béla IV of Hungary, and her husband Rostislav Mihailovich (who was then Duke of Macsó), and after Rostislav’s death in 1263, their sons Michael and Béla were given the title of Dukes of Macsó. Duke Béla was murdered in 1272, after which the bans of Macsó and Bosnia and the bans of Barancs and Kucsó appeared in the charters, while between 1280 and 1284 Queen Elizabeth was recorded as the duchess of Macsó and Bosnia.27 Ćirković did not analyze the reign of Dragutin in detail.

The most recent study of the medieval territorial extent of Macsó and the collection of medieval settlements in the territory of the banate of Macsó was carried out by Ana Vukadinović Šakanović, who focused her study on the late medieval conditions due to the more favorable availability of sources.28 Attila Pfeiffer wrote a summary study on the location of the Macsó castle.29 Đura Hardi studied the history of the lords of Macsó,30 and Márta Font wrote a thorough study on Rostislav Mihajlovich, who was a prominent lord of the province in the thirteenth century.31

In the Crossfire between Byzantium and the Kingdom of Hungary:
Trans-Syrmia at the End of the Twelfth Century

In the area bordered by the Danube, Drina, and Kolubara Rivers, which was called the Macsó territory from the thirteenth century onwards, Slavs probably settled at the encouragement of the Avars, but their presence is only indicated by place names, and archaeological finds do not support this theory. At the beginning of the ninth century, the area was captured by the Bulgarian Empire, and after this empire fell, from 1018, the area belonged to Byzantium.32

The name Syrmia, which also refers to the area south of the Sava River, first appeared in the twelfth century in the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja. In the relevant part of the work, also known as the Chronicle of Antivari,33 in the description of the battle between Ban Beloš, who retreated after the death of King Béla II, and the Hungarians who attacked him, the name Syrmia in the chronicle referred to the territory south of the Sava River as well, since the Chronicle mentioned the town of Belyén (Bellina),34 which was south of the Sava River, as part of Syrmia (partes Sremi).35 That the presbyter meant the territory on the right bank of the Sava River as Beloš’ Syrmian parts is clear from the fact that when he wrote about the treaty after the battle lost by the Hungarians, he said that Beloš prohibited his opponents from crossing the Sava River from its beginning to the mouth of the Danube River, i.e. until Belgrade.36 The extent to which the presbyter had precise topographical knowledge of the southern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary is not known, but the southern Slavic literature accepts the description of the extent of Syrmia in the Chronicle.37 In my opinion, Ćirković’s view, according to which the distinction between the inner parts and Trans-Syrmia would have been established as early as the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, is not correct. Even if we accept the presbyter’s account, we can place the origin of the name in the mid-twelfth century at the earliest, but it is more likely that the author was mistaken in his use of the geographical name. In documentary sources, the name Inner and Trans-Syrmia first appears much later, in 1229, in the bull of Pope Gregory IX, dated March 3.38

After the death of Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos in 1180, Byzantine-­­Hungarian relations were characterized by a particular dichotomy. On the one hand, King Béla III of Hungary acted as a defender of Byzantine interests, while on other occasions, he sought to acquire territories that belonged to Byzantium. Regarding Byzantine-Hungarian relations, Ferenc Makk pointed out that the Kingdom of Hungary was always the active party, taking advantage of Byzantine political infighting, while Byzantium was the passive, defensive partner.39 In 1180–1182, King Béla III first reconquered the Croatian, Dalmatian, and Bosnian territories and also Syrmia, which were annexed by Emperor Manuel in 1167. In the second phase of the Hungarian expansion against Byzantium’s Balkan territories, between 1183 and 1185, as an ally of the Serbian Grand Duke Stephen Nemanja, who was fighting for independence from Constantinople, Béla III conquered the vast territory between Belgrade and Sofia. As a result of the Hungarian conquest in the Balkans, the Bulgarians also launched their own struggle for independence.40 Relations in the territories south of the Danube-Sava line changed completely. In 1185, the Kingdom of Hungary and Byzantium made peace, which King Béla III wanted to confirm with a dynastic marriage. His daughter Margaret was married to Emperor Isaac II (1185–1195), and Margaret received the Balkan territories between Belgrade and Sofia, which had been occupied by the Hungarians, as a dowry.41

Trans-Syrmia or Macsó in the Thirteenth Century

In 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, Byzantium was dissolved, but on its ashes a number of new states were born. The Serbs and Bulgarians, who had long fought for their independence, took advantage of the power vacuum to create their own states, with the territories south of the Danube River falling into Bulgarian hands. King Emeric of Hungary tried to arrange a crown for the Bulgarian Kolojan with the pope, who, recognizing the Hungarian king’s ambitions in the Balkans, bypassed Emeric and sent a crown directly to Kolojan. By accepting the papal crown, the Bulgarian Church was forced to join the Catholic Church. The (now united) Bulgarian Archbishop of Veliko Tarnovo was also given the title of Archbishop of all Bulgarians and Vlachs, bringing the orthodox bishoprics of Belgrade and Barancs under the jurisdiction of Veliko Tarnovo and thus into ecclesiastical union with Rome.42

After 1210 and by 1218 at the latest, King Andrew II of Hungary had recaptured the castles of Belgrade and Barancs, which had fallen into Bulgarian hands.43 After burying her third husband, King Béla III’s daughter Empress Margaret returned to Hungary in 1222,44 accompanied by her two sons, John (Kolojan),45 born to Emperor Isaac, and Gyletus47 (William), born to Margaret’s third husband, Nicholas Sentomna of Salona.46 In a charter issued by Pope Honorius III in 1227, Margaret was listed as a noblewoman and Empress of Constantinople, while John/Kolojan was only listed as a nobleman.47 Péter Gyetvai believes that John was listed as Prince of Syrmia in several charters of King Béla IV between 1240 and 1241,48 but I have found no evidence of this in the charters. The title of Prince of Syrmia did not exist at the time. He was first listed as lord of Syrmia (and count of Bács) in the spring of 1240.49 In his aforementioned bull of March 3, 1229, Pope Gregory IX wrote that the population of Trans-Syrmia ruled by Margaret was Greek-ritual regarding their religion, and they were mostly Greek and Slavic,50 and that the Latin bishopric of Syrmia, established in 1229, was intended to convert them to Rome.51 Although the diocese of Syrmia had its designated center at the time of its foundation, Kő (also known as Bánmonostor, today Banoštor in Serbia) or Kőér, at the northern foot of Fruška Gora, in Inner Syrmia, its jurisdiction extended mainly to the region of Trans-Syrmia.52

In 1232, after the Bulgarians had briefly gotten their hands on it, the territory of Belgrade and Barancs passed permanently into Hungarian hands.53 Pope Gregory IX, in his bull of March 21, 1232, asked the bishop of Csanád to investigate the Bulgarian bishops of Belgrade and Barancs, who had previously united with the Latin Church and who wished to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of Rome, and if they did not return to the allegiance of the Latin Church, to annex the two bishoprics to the Latin bishopric of Syrmia.54 This leads us to the conclusion that the territory of the Trans-Syrmia was not geographically defined. The term simply referred to the areas south of the Sava River and the Danube River that were under Hungarian rule, and in the years after 1220–1232, Belgrade and Barancs may have belonged to this territory. It is not known whether the two dioceses, which had moved away from Rome, were then incorporated into the bishopric of Syrmia. Around 1228, the Bulgarian Tsar John Asen II (1218–1241) broke the ecclesiastical union with Rome and established an autocephalous archbishopric in Veliko Tarnovo.55 In my view, the bishopric of Syrmia, based in Kő, could have exercised conversion and spiritual jurisdiction in the areas surrounded by the Drina, Sava, and Kolubara Rivers, later called the banate of Macsó. The orthodox bishoprics of Barancs and Belgrade (which belonged to the archbishopric of Ohrid before the rise of Veliko Tarnovo) were ecclesiastically attached to the Orthodox archbishop of Veliko Tarnovo and were secularly dependent on Hungary.

After the Mongol invasion, Béla IV gave the territories south of Sava River to his daughter Anna and her husband Rostislav Mihailovich, probably as early as 124756 but no later than 1254.57 The name Macsó first appeared in a charter in 1254. The use of the name Syrmia-Macsó for the territories south of the Sava River was not yet clear at that time. In his charter of December 17, 1256, King Béla IV issued a grant regarding land that was “in the district of Macsó, in the county of Syrmia, beyond the Sava.”58 At that time, it is clear that the name “Macsó” was used to refer to the area surrounded by the Drina, Sava, and Kolubara Rivers,59 as the area east of the Morava River was not yet under Hungarian rule.

The year 1247 was also a milestone in the history of the church in southern Hungary. It was then that the pope moved the seat of the bishopric of Syrmia from Kő, which was in the Inner Syrmia territories (which had been ravaged by the Mongols), to Szenternye (today Mačvanska Mitrovica in Serbia) in Trans-Syrmia.60 By this time, the Latin-rite ecclesiastical presence in the Macsó territories must have strengthened to such an extent that the bishop’s seat and the cathedral chapter could be moved there.

During his reign, Rostislav united the territories on the southern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary, from Bosnia to Barancs. He tried to keep good relations with the Bulgarian Tsar Michael I Asen (1246–1256) who married Rostislav’s daughter. In 1256, Tsar Michael was killed in a boyar revolt led by his cousin, Asen Kaliman.61 He seized power under the name Asen Kaliman II and married the widowed wife of Michael I Asen, but he died a few days later (with the widow’s help). In order to protect his daughter, Rostislav invaded Bulgaria, pushed all the way to Veliko Tarnovo, and laid siege to the city. He did not take Veliko Tarnovo, but retreated to Vidin, where he took the title of Tsar of Bulgaria in 1257.62 He managed to retain Vidin and the title of tsar, despite Bulgarian invasions, as well as Bosnia, Macsó, and the Barancs province until his death.63 The title of Duke of Macsó (like the earlier Trans-Syrmia) included the Barancs lands, in addition to the Macsó district defined above.64

Rostislav is referred to in the sources as the Duke of Macsó.65 Anna was men­tioned as Duchess of Macsó and Bosnia in a document dating from 1254–126466 and as Duchess of Galicia, Bosnia, and Macsó after her husband’s death in 1262.67

In the charter issued on December 17, 1256, King Béla IV defines the region of Trans-Syrmia in the following way when granting land: in county of Szerém, in the Macsó district located beyond the Sava.68

After the death of Rostislav, the title of Duke of Macsó and Bosnia was also held by the king’s youngest son, Béla.69 Duke Béla was surrounded by the power struggle between his uncle, the future King Stephen V, and his grandfather (in which he supported King Béla IV), and he was also attacked from the south by King Uroš I of Serbia.70 In this Serbian attack, Michael, son of Peter, of the Csák clan, later the count of Veszprém, came to the aid of Duke Béla and captured King Uroš’s son-in-law and son of the Serbian king’s master of treasury, for which he received a generous ransom.71 During the war, King Uroš I himself was taken prisoner by the Hungarians.72 Although Duke Béla was last mentioned in a charter in 1271,73 he died almost a year later, when he was murdered by Henrik Kőszegi in November 1272.74

The Banates of Macsó, Barancs and Kucsó

After the assassination of Duke Béla, Macsó was briefly organized as a banate. In 1272, the first documentary evidence of the new banates formed on the territories that were the vassals of the king of Hungary appeared: the bans of Macsó, Usora, Bosnia, Barancs, and Kucsó.75 The first known ban of Macsó was Roland of the Rátót clan (son of Domokos), who also held the office of the palatine of Hungary.76 It is interesting to note that in the year 1273 three persons were mentioned in the documents as bans of Macsó,77 and then between 1272 and 1279 five such officials were mentioned in the documents,78 all of whom held the title of ban of Bosnia apart from John, who seems to have been the exception, and Ákos of the Albert clan, who appeared only in a false document.79 From 1280, Queen Elizabeth’s titles included the title of Duchess of Macsó.80

After the death of Rostislav Mikhailovich in 1262, who had successfully retained and secured the Barancs province from the south with his Bulgarian conquests, his sons, Béla and Michael, shared the Barancs territories, and after Michael’s death in 1266, Béla remained the leader of Barancs, on the right bank of the Pek River, along with Bosnia and Macsó. In my opinion, the Barancs area at that time meant the area to the east of the border river of the banate of Macsó, Kolubara, bordered by the Danube River, including Belgrade. After the aforementioned murder of Béla in 1272, a ban was appointed to the head of the Barancs territories: Gregory the son of Mark of the Péc clan, who is mentioned in the documents as the ban of Kucsó and Barancs between 1272 and 1273.81

Kucsó was also situated on the right bank of the Pek River south of Barancs, and there are no significant sources from its earlier history. It probably shared the fate of Barancs, which was situated less than 40 km to the northwest. It was previously neither a religious nor a major administrative center. Like Barancs, Kucsó was ruled by Rostislav Mihailovich and his sons until the death of Duke Béla. It is possible that in 1272, when the new banates were formed, there were no separate banates of Barancs and Kucsó, but a single one made of the two territories. The case of Barancs-Kucsó was probably different from the case of Macsó and Bosnia,82 when the same person was appointed head of two provinces, which were historically and geographically separate but neighboring, sharing the fate of serving as a “buffer state.” Gregory the son of Mark of the Péc clan may have been ban of Kucsó-Barancs rather than the ban of Kucsó and the ban of Barancs. This question will probably never be answered with sufficient certainty, due to the extremely limited number of surviving sources. The name of Tekes’ son Stephen is mentioned in a source from 1279. Stephen only held the title of the ban of Kucsó.83 After this date, the title of ban of Barancs-Kucsó no longer appears in the sources, and neither Barancs nor Kucsó played a major role in the further history of medieval southern Hungary.

The Kingdom of Stephen Dragutin in Syrmia

As mentioned above, from 1280 to 1284, Queen Elizabeth, widow of King Stephen V of Hungary, held the title of Duchess of Macsó. Dragutin, the former Serbian king who had lost his throne in 1282 and had married Catherine of the Árpád dynasty (the daughter of Stephen V), received the territory of Macsó from his brother-in-law King Ladislas IV after June 11, 1284,84 as well as Usora, Soli, and Bosnia.85 Along with Macsó, Belgrade also passed into the hands of Dragutin, who could then create his residence there.86 The territories ruled by Dragutin were called “the Syrmian territories” by Serbian contemporaries, and Dragutin himself was called Stephen of Syrmia,87 the king of Syrmia. 88

Dragutin’s main ambition was to create a new Serbian state under his rule by unifying the kingdoms he had received from Ladislas IV. Presumably to prevent this, in 1291, Dorman and Kudelin, lords from Barancs, called in the Mongols (according to Ćirković, the Cumans),89 whom Ugrin of the Csák clan defeated at a port on the Sava River.90 By this time, Dragutin’s center had become Debrc, where he set up his court.91 One might ask why he did not make Belgrade his seat. In my view, Belgrade must have been a key fortress for the Hungarian king, and the Hungarian leadership could not have allowed Dragutin to establish the seat of his “Syrmian kingdom” in this strategically important settlement. Whether Belgrade was in the possession of Dragutin or the Hungarian king in the 1290s is not known for certain. According to a charter issued in 1298, the Mongols destroyed Macsó and then prepared to attack Hungary.92 A royal charter from March 20, 1310 states that the Serbian king Milutin, together with John of the Smaragd clan, son of Ajnárd, attacked Hungary and led devastating raids in the counties of Syrmia and Valkó.93 Dragutin died in 1316, and his son Vladislav inherited Macsó, but he was driven out from the territory by his uncle, King Milutin of Serbia in 1316.94

Between 1317 and 1319, there was a war between Hungary and Serbia for the Macsó territories occupied by King Milutin, and two campaigns were led by the Hungarians to retake the region. During the first campaign, in January 1317, the Hungarian army crossed the frozen Sava River to recapture Macsó, which had been occupied by the Serbs.95 In the cold winter weather, the port to cross the river was marked out by the count of Sopron, Nicholas, the son of Amádé from the Gutkeled clan, while on the other bank of the river, the Serbian army was waiting for them.96 Hungarians were also found in the Serbian army who previously had confronted King Charles of Hungary, namely Andrew, Lotár, and Dezső of the Gutkeled clan, the sons of Dénes, who was the son of Lotár.97 King Charles I of Hungary personally took part in the campaign, and he also captured the castle of Macsó that year98 and the castle of Kolobar (Kolubara).99 According to the contemporary documents, Paul Nagymartoni,100 Nicholas, the son of Amadé of the Gutkeled kindred who was the count of Sopron,101 Alexander Köcski,102 sons of Doroszló,103 Mark of Rady,104 the sons of Bereck of Bathur (of the Gutkeled clan) all fought in the war.105 After King Charles I recaptured the rest of the Serbian-occupied parts of the Macsó district, in early 1319,106 during the second campaign in Macsó, he restored the whole banate of Macsó. The office of ban was granted to Hungarian noble families, the Drugets, Ostfis, Garais, Horvatis, etc.107 On September 16, 1319, King Charles issued a charter in Macsó.108

Summary

The northern Balkan territories bordered by the Drina, Sava, and Danube Rivers came under the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Hungary in the early thirteenth century. This region was called Trans Syrmia(s), Sirmia Ulterior, but Southern Slavic sources often referred to the area simply as Syrmia. At the time, this was understood to mean all the territory lying south of the borders of Hungary, east of the Drina, without any actual designated borders. Between 1230 and 1240, King Béla III’s daughter Margaret and her son John ruled the province of Trans-Syrmia as lady and lord of Syrmia. It was at this time that the Hungarian-ruled district of Macsó began to be permanently separated from the territories of Belgrade and Barancs, which were often harassed by Bulgarian military campaigns.

The territories of Trans-Syrmia (including Bosnia) were given to Rostislav Mihailovich between 1247 and 1254, who held the title of Duke of Bosnia and Macsó (Barancs and Belgrade were not among his titles, nor were they among the titles of his wife Anna). By taking Veliko Tarnovo, Rostislav gained the title of Bulgarian Tsar, securing Barancs and Belgrade from the southeast. After his death in 1262, the title of Lady of Macsó was held by his wife. He was succeeded as Duke of Macsó by his son Béla, who also shared the Barancs territories with his brother Michael. After the murder of Béla in 1272, the territory of Macsó became a banate for seven years (the title of ban of Macsó was mostly held by the same person as the ban of Bosnia). In 1284, the Serbian king Dragutin, who had lost his throne, was given Macsó, together with Bosnia (including Usora and Soli) and the territories of Belgrade and Barancs-Kucsó. According to Serbian sources, Dragutin attempted to establish a new kingdom as a Hungarian vassal state as King of Syrmia, but after his death in 1316, his son Vladislav failed to hold on to power. His uncle, King Milutin, conquered the Macsó territories (Belgrade may have remained in Hungarian hands, but the fate of Barancs is unknown). In the winter of 1317, King Charles I of Hungary personally led a campaign against Milutin, and by 1319, he had recaptured the Macsó territories, where he restored the institution of the banate of Macsó, and the title of ban was then conferred on Hungarian noble families as an honor.

Already in the thirteenth century, the areas between the Drina and Kolubara Rivers were referred to as the banate of Macsó in both historical literature and popular thought. It is clear from the above that this is incorrect: the name Macsó was first used for the region only in 1254, and the title of ban of Macsó appeared in the documents of the period under study between 1272 and 1279. It was only in the Angevin period, after 1319, that the institution of the Macsó banate took root.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian State Archives] (MNL OL)

Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény (DF)

Diplomatikai Levéltár (DL)

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Marriages of Convenience, Forced Betrothals:
Dynastic Agreements in the Angevin-era Hungary

Renáta Skorka

HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 1 (2025): 96-126 DOI 10.38145/2025.1.96

The study deals with the dynastic marriages of the Angevin dynasty in Hungary during the fourteenth century. The dynastic marriages under analysis were made according to written and unwritten rules: the former was realized through the marriage contracts, and the latter covered customary elements regarding, for example, the consummation of marriage or the inspection of the bride. The marriage contracts regulated the logistics of a marriage, including, for instance, the delivery of the bride, the right of refusal of the marriage, the time of the nuptials, and details concerning property laws, with special emphasis on the financial conditions of the marriage, as well as the revenues and lands on which these rested. In this period, the king of Hungary provided a morning-gift of equal value to all the spouses of his sons and brothers and a dowry of equal size for the royal daughters and sisters. The dowry and morning gift of women who married into the Hungarian royal family were secured through the estates and revenues of the queens of Hungary. By the end of the Angevin period, the dynastic marriages were supported on a broader social scale, including the members of the ecclesiastical and secular elites and the towns. This support, furthermore, was confirmed through oaths.

Keywords: dynastic marriages, Hungary, Angevin dynasty, Central Europe, dynastic policy

In medieval Europe, feuding rulers sought to seal peace treaties and alliances between their countries by strengthening family ties when the opportunity arose, as it often did. Marriages negotiated at the negotiating table, depending on diplomatic interests and political games, sometimes involved unborn offspring, often children who were already related to each other, usually under the legal age. The situation of the betrothed couples could be further complicated if they were related to each other within four generations, in which case the fate of the agreement had to be sealed by and depended on the goodwill and will of the Holy See at the time. In addition, foreign policy and diplomatic interests could change and possibly reverse more quickly than the marriage between the parties concerned, and thus children were often forced to move from one matrimony to another after the severance of the already strictly regulated ties. This situation was naturally helped by the fact that the two betrothed had little opportunity to develop a more intimate relationship with each other. In addition to political and dynastic interests, legal and economic considerations also played an important role in the conclusion of marriage contracts in this period. Without exception, medieval marriage contracts were accompanied by the transfer of predetermined income or rights of property. In the following, I examine not the history of dynastic marriages in the Angevin era but the political, legal, and economic factors that played a role in the establishment of dynastic relations, which became compulsory elements and institutions of the engagements and marriages between the Angevins and neighboring dynasties.

Contracted for Marriage

In May 1318, Charles I, the first Angevin ruler of Hungary, who was seeking to consolidate his power and reunify the country, sent a three-man delegation to the court of the Luxembourg dynasty in Prague, hoping and planning to ally with the Czech king. Charles I wished to strengthen this collaboration by marrying one of King John’s sisters. On hearing the offer, the Czech monarch did not hesitate to take his sisters from Luxembourg to Königsaal, where the Hungarian king’s envoys, Thomas of Szécsényi, his cousin Simon of the Kacsics kindred and an interpreter named Stephen, were given the task of choosing Charles’ second wife, the next queen of the Kingdom of Hungary. Abbot Peter of Königsaal was also present to inspect the girls, and from him we learn that Beatrix of Luxembourg and her sister Mary were not yet 14 years old. The monk was candid about the main aspects of the inspection, as it turns out that the Hungarian ambassadors looked at the facial features, bodies, and gaits of the two countesses and decided in favor of the younger one. Beatrix was then betrothed (desponsatur) to the envoy of the departing Hungarian king, before the altar of the Blessed Virgin, amidst the tolling of bells.1 During the negotiations in Bohemia, the ambassadors probably also signed a marriage contract, which usually touched on the question of the transfer of the bride and detailed the dowry and the amount of the morning gift she was due. However, in the case of Beatrix, the sources reveal nothing about these issues. We do, however, have an account of the inspection, which was indispensable before the dynastic marriage, during which the physical aptitude and health of the future bride were examined, strictly with a view to the question of her suitability as a bride who would produce offspring. The health of the bride, as will be discussed later, was the responsibility of the parental court until the marriage, to the extent that if it could be shown to have suffered some impairment or cause for concern, the other party could be legally released from his oath of marriage. However, Beatrix’s physical health was not harmed, as revealed by the fact the transfer took place very soon after the contract was signed, at the Moravian-Hungarian border, according to the sources.2

The marriage of Charles I and Beatrix was expected to take place in November of that year.3 Their marriage could not be said to have been long-lived, as the queen died in November 1319, and Charles did not hesitate to look for another wife, at least according to an entry in the account book of the Counts of Tyrol, which states that in 1319, an envoy from Hungary was welcomed at the court of the prince of Carinthia to arrange a marriage. Considering the overwhelming burdens of succession, Charles probably did not choose one of the daughters (one born in 1317, the other in 1318) of Henry VI, prince of Carinthia and count of Tyrol, who, for a short period (in 1306 and 1307–1310) ruled as king of Bohemia. Rather, Charles sought a much more mature princess as his bride, according to the source, Elizabeth, princess of Carinthia,4 who was probably Henry’s niece.

In the end, Princess Elizabeth of Carinthia gave heirs to King Peter of Sicily instead of Charles after 1322, but the King of Hungary did not go without a male heir. His third wife, also named Elizabeth and daughter of the Polish king Vladislas I, gave birth to his first son, Ladislas, in 1324. The boy was barely three years old when he became involved in his father’s foreign policy plans. Charles, seeing the growing rapprochement between the Habsburg and Bavarian Wittelsbach dukes between 1325 and 1326, took the necessary precautions to forge closer alliances with his northern neighbor. On February 13, 1327, fearing a Habsburg attack, he entered into a defensive alliance with the aforementioned Czech king John of Luxembourg at Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia). The two rulers mutually agreed that if one of them were to be attacked by the Habsburgs, they could count on the support of the other, but that if one of them attacked the Austrian provinces, the other would remain neutral.5 This bilateral commitment was reinforced by a contract for the future marriage of Ladislas and King John’s eight-year-old daughter Anna, the details of which are no doubt explained more prominently in the contract than the elements of political cooperation. This contract stipulated that both parties would send envoys to Avignon as soon as possible to obtain the necessary permission from the Holy See for the marriage, which was necessary because both children were the great grandchildren of Rudolf I of Germany.6 The plan was that, within six months of having obtained papal permission, the two children would be formally married at a place of their choosing. The parties also expected that the decision of the Holy See would be delayed and that Pope John XXII would not grant the permission immediately, so the two kings postponed the marriage for three weeks but vowed to continue to apply to the Holy See for permission. After having successfully obtained permission, they would wait until Anna reached the age of twelve, the legal age of consent in that time, before handing her over,7 and then King John would send his daughter to the borders of the Kingdom of Hungary for her husband, Duke Ladislas. The letter contains no details concerning the actual transfer of the bride to the Hungarian side, but the example of Beatrix of Luxembourg shows that it may have taken place on the border of the two countries.

As was stipulated in the contract signed in Nagyszombat, Charles sent his envoy George, a citizen of Buda,8 to Avignon with a letter requesting exemption from the obstacle of consanguinity. In December of that year, Pope John XXII assured the king of Hungary that permission would be granted.9 Presumably, the Czech king did exactly what King Charles had done, and the decree of permission was issued on September 8, 1328, more than a year and a half after the agreement at Nagyszombat,10 which, in its content, offers convincing evidence that the role of the Holy See in such petitions was not a mere formality in those days. The decree suggests, rather, that the Holy See had significant influence in the European diplomacy. In addition to expressing his joy at the alliance between the Czech and Hungarian monarchs, the pope also supported the marriage of the two children because the marriage of Anna and Ladislas offered the prospect of reconciliation between the Czech and Polish kings, since Ladislas, as mentioned above, was the grandchild of the Polish king Vladislas I on his mother’s side.

The marriage contract of 1327 at Nagyszombat also contained other provisions concerning the dowry and morning gift, which are not mentioned in the marriage contract between Beatrix and Charles. The former refers to the assets and possessions of the daughter received from her father to cover the expenses of married life, which during the marriage were taken out of the hands of the bride’s ascendants and relatives. The latter was the property and assets pledged by the husband to his wife at the time of the marriage to strengthen her financial position and to support and secure her in the event of his death.11 In the agreement between the Czech and Hungarian kings at Nagyszombat, it was stated that after the handover of Anna her father had one year to transfer 10,000 marks in Czech groschen (calculated at 56 groschen per mark) at Magyarbród (today Uherský Brod, Czechia) in Moravia in the form of a dowry.12 In view of the amount involved, the marriage contract was also very careful to emphasize that, after the Hungarian party had received the sum, the Czech king would still have to guarantee the safe transport of the persons carrying the money to the castle of Trencsén (today Trenčín, Slovakia). In return, Charles also secured 15,000 marks of silver for his son’s morning gift.13 These 25,000 marks were intended to ensure the financial security of Anna in the marriage. It was clear from the fact that, in return for the sum of 25,000 marks, the Hungarian king had pledged estates in areas which had been in the hands of the queens in the Kingdom of Hungary since the previous century, which probably means that they were in the possession of Queen Elizabeth Piast of Hungary at the time of the contract of Nagyszombat. The 10,000 marks brought by Anna were, according to the wording of the charter, spent in the towns and villages of the queen.

The list of settlements includes a large number of market towns and villages that were part of the queen’s estate, mainly belonging to the Segesd comitatus14 in Somogy County: Segesd, Lábod, (Kálmán) Tschechi, (Alsó) Aranyos, Szabás, Nagyatád and Kisatád, Bolhás, Ötvös, Darány, (Erdő) Csokonya, Újlak and finally Verőce (today Virovitica, Croatia), and Szentambrus in Verőce County. For 15,000 marks, the entire county of Pozsega was secured for Anna, with all its castles, towns, villages, and market towns,15 which in the thirteenth century were also part of the queen’s royal estates. Given the dynastic interests of the time, a successful marriage was considered one that proved fruitful from the perspective of offspring and, hopefully, produced male heirs. These considerations were addressed in the Nagyszombat contract, which stipulated that in the event of the death of Ladislas, if he had one or more male heirs, they would inherit the Kingdom of Hungary and the lands reserved for Anna would also become their property. If they had only daughters, these daughters would inherit according to the customs of the Kingdom of Hungary. If, however, the marriage proved unsuccessful in the medieval sense (i.e., if there were no offspring), the widow Anna would enjoy the estates in the counties of Somogy, Verőce, and Pozsega for the rest of her life, and when she died, they would have to return the 10,000 marks she had brought to her father or to his heirs at that time. Until such time as this repayment was made, the estates in Somogy and Verőce, which were secured with that 10,000 marks, would be used by King John and his successors. The marriage contract also stipulated that the Hungarian king had to repay the sum in question in Trencsén in case of the events, guaranteeing its safe transport to the Moravian border. The charter makes no specific mention of this, but according to the medieval property laws and the medieval matrimonial property laws, it was also granted that, in the case of Anna’s death, the morning gift would be returned to the husband or her husband’s family so that whoever was ruling as queen at the time could take possession of it. In the event of the failure of a dynastic marriage, both families would thus get back what they had invested in the marriage when it was contracted. This phenomenon, together with the obligation to give the wife property in exchange for the marriage morning gift, was a common practice, and not only among the ruling families of the period.

However, the wedding, the details of which had been so carefully regulated by the contract in Nagyszombat in February 1327, could not be held within the time stipulated in the agreement, i.e. within six months after the granting of permission by the pope, and neither could Anna be handed over to the Hungarian court in her twelfth year, since Ladislas, who was barely four years old, died in February 1329. The marriage treaties of the period also dealt with such cases. King John and King Charles both stated that the possible failure of the plan for a marriage between their children should not cause discord between the dynasties, nor should it undermine the intention to further political cooperation. Moreover, they took the precaution of putting it in writing in their contract that, should one of the kings pass away, the children of the king that had passed away, including their rights and property, would be protected by the other king. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that, following the failed marriage of Anna and Ladislas, on March 1, 1338, the Luxembourg dynasty and the Hungarian Angevins made a further attempt to strengthen their alliance,16 which had existed since November 1332. Charles I and his wife and King John and his son Charles, Margrave of Moravia, again acted with the same caution as before. They betrothed the then twelve-year-old heir to the Hungarian throne, Louis, and the margrave’s only child at the time, Margaret. Under the terms of the agreement concluded at Visegrád, the Czech party undertook to hand over the daughter, who was not even considered of legal age in 1342, to the Hungarian envoys in Brno on September 29, 1339, provided that she had not suffered any bodily injury during the year and a half that would have elapsed in the meantime.

The issue of dowry and morning gift was also emphasized in 1338, when the margrave, who also appeared at the Brno transfer, presented the Hungarian commissioners with a document promising 10,000 marks in Prague groschen, this time at 64 groschen per mark, with his daughter.17 For this amount, he either had to give appropriate pledges or provide guarantors, and he had one year from the date of delivery to pay them, and if he paid only half of the amount within the time stipulated, he was obliged to continue to pledge the other half. The Moravian Margrave’s daughter thus received a somewhat more substantial dowry than Anna in 1327, but the payment was not made immediately and not in one sum, and the difference can be explained in part by the drop in the value of the money. As had been the case in the treaty of Nagyszombat, the Hungarian side promised 15,000 marks as the morning gift of the Angevine prince,18 and, as we have already seen, in exchange for these 25,000 marks, they pledged the castles of Szeged and Hasznos, also known as Becse, with their various accessories.19 Although the document does not mention that the estates in question belonged to the queen, since the estates of Szeged and Becse can still be traced back to 1382 as the estates of the queen,20we can conclude that the Angevin court had pledged, as the morning gifts and dowry for the daughters marrying into the family, estates and revenues which otherwise belonged to the estates of the queen. It was also stipulated that Margaret would be entitled to the above properties in accordance with Czech marriage law, which could not have meant anything other than the legal order detailed in 1327 for Anna.

The points of the treaty of Visegrád were set out in a separate charter on March 22 by Margrave Charles I and his wife, who acknowledged that they were bound by them. We do not know exactly when the transfer of Margaret took place, but it certainly took place during the lifetime of Charles I, as is revealed by the charter issued in August 1342 by Louis, who by then was ruling as king of Hungary. In this document, he promised to marry Margaret, who had not yet reached the legal age, within the next four years, and he also promised to uphold the documents previously drawn up regarding the marriage. Among these documents, the king mentioned the one that was issued at the time when Margaret was taken to his parents’ court to learn Hungarian customs and the Hungarian language.21 While in 1327 the marriage was planned to take place before Anna had reached the legal age and the handover would have been delayed until she was twelve years old, in 1338, the handover of Margaret took place before the she had reached the legal age, and the marriage was planned to take place after she had turned twelve. The marriage of Louis and Margaret can be dated to February 1344,22 but the marriage did not last long, nor was it successful from the perspective of the expectations of the time. In September 1349, the queen died of plague without leaving any descendants, and her dowry probably reverted to her family. The marriage treaties of 1327 and 1338 cannot be considered isolated cases. Similar treaties were probably drawn up to regulate and specify the terms of all marital dynastic relationships. As can be seen, a very important element of these agreements was the need to settle the question of matrimonial property law, especially since there was no consistency in the designations of the legal title to the various dower rights in the Kingdom of Hungary, nor was there any uniformity to the legal systems of the countries and provinces concerned. Differences in interpretation of the less detailed agreements could, over time, give rise to disputes, as happened in the case of the salary of Princess Margaret of Bavaria.

The widowed King Louis, who for the time being was not considering remarrying, regarded it as it one of his duties, in agreement with his mother, to tend to the marriage of his younger brother, Prince Stephen.23 The youngest descendant of Charles I married Margaret, daughter of the late Louis IV of the Holy Roman Empire, around 1350.24 The plan for the marriage was conceived during the emperor’s lifetime, in 1345, as the Hungarian king hoped to gain the support of Louis IV in his quest for the throne of Naples. However, Pope Clement VI rejected the idea, as the alliance was also directed against the Holy See, and he himself did not recognize the emperor’s power.25 Winning the hand of Princess Margaret after her father’s death was undoubtedly not as politically advantageous as it would have been during the emperor’s lifetime, but it did strengthen the family ties and the hereditary ties with Bavaria. Margaret of Bavaria had given her husband two children, and after his death in 1354, she began to demand that the king of Hungary pay her dowry. In January 1356, she asked Prince Albert II of Austria, in agreement with the Hungarian king, to settle the dispute and help her determine the amount to be paid to Margaret.26 Prince Albert gave her until Easter of that year to present her documents relating to the case. In the meantime, Louis was to deposit 30,000 forints with the duke in Vienna, while he had to give Nagyszombat to Margaret, and if it should prove that the amount claimed was higher than 30,000 forints, the necessary difference was to be made up with payments of 3,000 forints a year from Nagyszombat. In April 1356, Margaret showed the documents showing that she was due 60,000 forints because of Nagyszombat.27 We know that she was correct, as revealed by a document issued in 1358 in which King Louis I acknowledged that he had promised Margaret 60,000 forints on behalf of Prince Stephen and this sum could be legally regarded as a morning gift,28 as was confirmed by the fact that the sum of 60,000 forints was in fact equal to the sum of 15,000 marks, which was given in the case of Stephen’s brothers (Ladislas and Louis).29

The king also mentioned Margaret’s dowry,30 which was 40,000 forints. It is not known exactly what estates were turned over to her in return for these sums, but it seems that Nagyszombat was one of them, which may be linked to the office of the thirtieth customs-duty, which had been in operation in the town since the beginning of the Angevin era. These revenues were considered royal revenues,31 so in this respect, following his father’s custom, Louis could have taken the benefits of the princess who was getting married at the expense of the queen’s income. As is known, Margaret had already appeared in 1358 at the side of her new husband, Gerlach von Hohenlohe,32 with whom the Hungarian monarch had agreed on the amount she was due. The document does not specify this amount, so we cannot be sure whether the 20,000 forints that Louis sent to Margaret and her second husband in 1359 through the Austrian princes as a morning gift of the late Prince Stephen33 covered the whole or only part of the amount. The reason behind our lack of knowledge is that, in the document issued about this payment, Margaret only assured the deliverer Archduke Rudolf IV of Austria that he had transferred the sum to them in full.

As clear from the discussion above, marriage contracts drawn up in the framework of political alliances were not always implemented, despite the best intentions of the parties. The preceding cases clearly show that much depended on the good will of the Holy See, but the premature death of one member of the betrothed couple was also a factor. Sometimes, however, it was the changing political and dynastic interests that prevented an engagement from becoming a marriage, like in case of King Louis I’s niece, Elizabeth.

The Destiny of the Bride

The daughter of Margaret of Bavaria and Prince Stephen of the Angevin dynasty, mentioned above, was engaged to four different European dynasties in the course of a decade, and a fifth was also mentioned. In order better to understand the role of Elizabeth of the Angevine dynasty, we must consider her uncle’s difficult case of succession. King Louis had no children by his first marriage to Margaret of Luxembourg, and his second wife, Elizabeth Kotromanić, did not provide the monarch with an heir for many decades. Therefore, after the death of his younger brother Prince Stephen in 1354, Louis chose Stephen’s son John as his successor. When the need arose, he gave John’s sister, Elizabeth, a role in making political alliances. The first sign of this could be seen in 1356, when Louis and his father-in-law, Charles IV, who by then had been crowned king of Germany and Bohemia and who had once held the title of Margrave of Moravia, betrothed Elizabeth to Jodok,34 also known as Jobst, the eldest son of John Henry, Margrave of Moravia, who was born in 1351, to strengthen their alliance, which had been established three years earlier.35 Jodok was the nephew of Charles IV, and his importance and role in this period can be explained by the fact that Charles IV’s only living child at the time, Catherine, had already been married to Rudolf IV, duke of Austria, in 1353.36 In 1356, therefore, Jodok and Elizabeth were not the primary heirs of the Luxembourg and Angevin dynasties.

By the autumn of 1360, however, the tables had turned, and with the death of Prince John, Elizabeth became King Louis’ sole heir to the Hungarian and possibly Polish thrones, and her status was apparently enhanced. On February 2, 1361, the earlier intention to marry was confirmed, with Louis promising that as soon as Elizabeth reached the age of twelve, she would be given to Jodok, who would receive a dowry of 10,000 marks. Louis had offered the same amount for his niece as had been offered for the Czech princesses in the earlier contracts of 1327 and 1338.37 It should be stressed that Charles IV still had no son on February 2, 1361, but 24 days later, the situation changed with the birth of Wenceslas at Nuremberg, which further strengthened the position of the emperor and the European prospects of the Luxembourg dynasty.38

The news of Wenceslas’ birth prompted Prince Rudolf IV of Austria, who had regarded himself essentially as his father-in-law’s successor as a German king,39 to urge those who were concerned about Charles IV’s growing power to unite. This led to an alliance between Rudolf and his brothers, together with Prince Meinhard of Upper Bavaria, count of Tyrol, King Louis I of Hungary, and King Casimir III of Poland in Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia) on December 31, 1361.40 The agreement, which implicitly was against Charles IV, was followed by arming in 136241 over the Tyrolean inheritance.42 The events of the war in 1362 are documented in the scholarship of Hungarian historian Antal Pór,43 and the agreements between Rudolf IV, Duke of Austria, and King Louis I of Hungary, who had several meetings during the year, can be reconstructed on the basis of the surviving sources.44 There is not a single document among them which states that at one of these meetings Rudolf’s brother, Prince Albert III of Austria, was engaged to Louis’ niece Elizabeth. Only later sources report the engagement as a fact. The future marriage of Elizabeth and Albert was most probably decided in Vienna on January 7, 1362, when the Austrian princes entered into an alliance with King Louis I of Hungary against Charles IV and John Henry, Margrave of Moravia.45 The Hungarian king unilaterally broke the engagement agreement between Jodok and Elizabeth by marrying Elizabeth to someone else. The warlike atmosphere of 1362 was brought to an end on January 13, 1363 with the death of the Duke of Upper Bavaria and the transfer of Tyrol to Habsburg control,46 but a formal peace was not concluded until February 10, 1364.47

On the same day as the peace treaty was signed, the Luxembourg-Habsburg mutual succession treaty was concluded, which stipulated that, in the event of the death of Charles IV, his son, and brother without succession, their lands would be divided between Rudolf IV and his brothers Albert III and Leopold III. The treaty also declared that, were King Louis I of Hungary, his mother Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of the late Prince Stephen, to die without heirs, their property would be given to the Luxembourgs.48 The Hungarian Angevins were probably included in the latter clause because of the 1362 betrothal between Elizabeth and Albert III. It should be remembered that, at the time of the treaty of succession of Brno, neither Rudolf IV nor his brothers had any heir, but Albert was the only one of them who even had a fiancé, Elizabeth of Anjou, the potential heiress of the Kingdom of Hungary, and therefore the inclusion of the Hungarian monarch and his family members in the treaty of Brno was not only justifiable but almost expected. This also meant that, in the event of the death of the Habsburg dukes without succession, the primary heirs of their territories would be the Angevins of Hungary, a possibility that was not at all desirable for the Luxembourgs. Thus, Charles IV’s main aim may have been to prevent the marriage between Elizabeth and Albert III by any means possible and then to rewrite the Brno treaty, now without the relevant rights of the Hungarian party.

The time was all the more pressing for the Luxembourgs, because in July 1365, Rudolf IV died without an heir, and he was succeeded by Albert III and Leopold III. The research by aforementioned Hungarian historian Pór details how the emperor appealed to Pope Urban V, accusing Albert of having become Elizabeth’s fiancé in 1362 by failing to break his earlier engagement to Charles’ niece Catherine.49 The accusation was probably true, since Louis had done the same with Elizabeth and Jodok. On February 24, the pope refused to authorize the marriage between Prince Albert III of Austria and the niece of King Louis I of Hungary, Elizabeth, and he even revoked the permission issued by his predecessors, Clement VI and Innocent VI, for cases in which the marriage had not yet taken place.50 King Louis, who was clearly concerned to maintain the agreement between the Habsburgs and the Hungarian Angevins, sent first Johann von Bredenscheid, a doctor of Roman Law, and then Simon, Magister General of the Dominican Order, as ambassadors to Avignon to try to persuade Pope Urban V to come to a more favorable conclusion. The pope’s relentlessness in the matter is illustrated by his letters issued on May 23 to Louis I and to Queen Elizabeth, in which further aspects of the Holy See’s role in dynastic marriages are also revealed. The pope pointed out that, although the Hungarian king had sworn an oath regarding the marriage of his niece and the Austrian prince, he could break, his oath because the Holy See had not given its permission for the marriage. If the Hungarian king insisted on the wedding without permission, he would face severe consequences, as those who knowingly entered into a marriage without permission would be excommunicated and their country would be subject to ecclesiastical interdict.51 During the summer, the pope sought to intervene even more forcefully in the dynastic policy of Hungary, and he took the initiative to marry Princess Elizabeth to the brother of the king of France, Prince Philip of Burgundy, recently released from the English captivity. According to the pope, with the interests of the Valois dynasty in his mind, there was no more fitting or honorable marriage for a girl who was already approaching the age of marriage.52

In the light of all this, it is clear that the Habsburg-Hungarian alliance of 1362 was difficult and constituted an obstacle to the dynastic plans of several European dynasties, and its dissolution would probably have occurred regardless of the death of Prince Rudolf IV of Austria. Rudolf’s passing and the emergence of the Duke of Burgundy, however, undoubtedly prompted Emperor Charles IV to make some moves. The Emperor was in Buda in November 1365, negotiating with the king of Hungary the betrothal of his only son, Wenceslas, to Elizabeth. On December 5, Louis had already abandoned his plans for a marriage with the Habsburgs,53 and on December 20, he authorized Prince Ladislas of Opole to conclude negotiations on the engagement of his niece to Wenceslas.54 Albert III was also not without a future wife, thanks to the emperor’s success in diplomacy. In February 1366, Pope Urban V, who had so strongly opposed the marriage of Elizabeth and Albert, gave permission for a marriage between Albert and Charles IV’s eight-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.55 For this, it was necessary for the king of Hungary to release the Austrian prince from all the oaths he had sworn to him, which he did on February 25,56 and two days later, together with his mother and the royal council, he confirmed that his late brother’s daughter should be married to Wenceslas.57 According to a papal charter from 1369, Elizabeth was then a minor, and the marriage was postponed until she was of legal age.58

In March 1366, Albert III and his brother Leopold III travelled to Prague, as did Prince Otto V of the Wittelsbach family of Upper Bavaria, who had succeeded his deceased brother Louis as the Archduke of Brandenburg since 1365. A double wedding took place in Prague, with the emperor marrying off two of his daughters. Otto married Catherine of Luxembourg, the widow of Rudolf IV, while Elizabeth of Luxembourg was married to Prince Albert III of Austria. By marrying off the daughters, their father sought to build up considerable and lasting political capital. Otto essentially resigned from the Duchy of Brandenburg for six years after the wedding and transferred the government to his father-in-law.59 The Habsburg dukes renewed the mutual succession treaty previously signed in Brno in 1364, whereby the participating parties would leave to each other all their estates, both existing and future, in the event of their death without succession. The Hungarian party, which was no longer bound to the Habsburgs by any betrothal, was excluded from the treaty, and it was therefore emphasized that the person to whom the king of Hungary would leave his kingdom as his heir would be accepted as the rightful heir of the Kingdom of Hungary.60 This clause in the renewed succession treaty is extremely important in two respects. First, if there had been a Habsburg-Hungarian succession treaty in 1362, it was certainly invalidated by this document. Second, the case illustrates the Hungarian monarch’s ability and authority to assert his interests, as he managed to get his country excluded from the text of the Habsburg-Luxembourg succession treaty, despite the fact that his only heir was about to marry the only male heir of the Luxembourg dynasty. Charles IV may well have regarded Louis’ caution as unnecessary pomposity, and the emperor could not have been concerned about who would inherit Louis’ estate, as his letter of May 11, 1366 to his Italian governors, the Gonzagas, attests. According to this letter, his son Wenceslas would marry the Hungarian king’s niece within four weeks of the date of the letter and would then consummate the marriage, and Hungary would pass to their successors.61

The presumptuous statement relied on another important element of dynastic marriages, the consummation of the marriage. How the five-year-old Wenceslas and Elizabeth (who was a few years older than he) could have married in this way can only be reconstructed on the basis of a later case. An example survives from 1452 from the court of Naples, which was retold by an eyewitness, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II. In March of that year, King Frederick III, a member of the Habsburg family, was crowned emperor, and before the event, the monarch met his future wife, Eleanora of Portugal, in Siena. They were coronated together in Rome. The young couple received an invitation from the uncle of Eleonora, King Alfonso of Aragon, to stay in Naples, and during the last days of their stay, rumors began to circulate that the young Habsburg, who had shown great restraint in the area of physical pleasure, had not yet wished to know his young wife intimately and that he wanted to wait until they returned to the empire before doing so. The court of the Neapolitan monarch and Eleanor’s entourage were united in their efforts to persuade him to comply with his duties. They were allegedly successful. Frederick ordered the bed to be made according to German custom, and when this was done, the still reluctant husband of thirty-seven years laid down completely dressed in the presence of the court and allowed his eighteen-year-old wife, who was also wearing her clothes, to be put in his arms. Then, in the presence of King Alfonso and a number of nobles, they were covered. Nothing more was done, but he kissed his wife, and they both rose immediately afterwards. Piccolomini added as an explanation that this was a German custom at least at the marriage of princes. The Spanish woman present were astonished by this custom, as they firmly believed that the act was being done in earnest. A great uproar allegedly arose among them as soon as they saw the cushion covering the imperial couple. Everyone looked at King Alfonso, waiting for him to intervene, but he acknowledged the foreign custom with a pleasant smile on his face. 62

Although this type of consummation, which was native to the German territories, provoked astonishment in the Mediterranean world, we can be sure that in 1366 Charles IV did not think of any other form of consummation for Wenceslas and Elizabeth. The marriage of the two children, announced by Charles IV for June 1366, was probably not consummated, although Pór comes to the conclusion that it definitely was.63 The following question arises, however: on the basis of what did the emperor make his statement on May 11 that the marriage would take place within four weeks. He may have based this statement on the fact that Elizabeth, who, as we have seen, was not of legal age at the time of her betrothal at the end of February 1366, had reached the age of twelve.64 On June 15, 1366, the emperor wrote a letter from Vienna to Augsburg informing the town that he was going to the city of Pozsony to negotiate with the Hungarian queen, but he made no mention of a marriage. At the end of June, King Louis was also in the city, so it cannot be ruled out that he also took part in the negotiations.65 We can speculate that Elizabeth, who had reached the legal age, was for the time being discouraged by the court of Hungary from marrying Wenceslas (perhaps because of the boy’s age), because the Hungarian side was seriously concerned about Charles’ power politics.

In opposition to the Upper Bavarian-Luxembourg-Habsburg alliance under the emperor’s influence, Louis moved closer to the other branches of the extended Wittelsbach family, who strongly opposed the transfer of the Duchy of Brandenburg to the Luxembourg dynasty. In October 1367, the Hungarian monarch entrusted his chancellor, Bishop William of Pécs, with the task of negotiating with the Bavarian princes.66 Then, on November 2, he entered into an alliance in Buda with the Wittelsbachs’ Landshut branch, namely Prince Stephen of Bavaria and his sons, Stephen, who became the first prince of the later Bavarian-Ingolstadt branch of the family, Frederick, the future heir of the Landshut branch, and Albert, representing the Straubing-Holland branch.67 At the same time, the Hungarian king also signed a treaty with the Wittelsbach branch, which held the electorate Palatinate of the Rhineland, and made a pact  with Rupert I and his nephew, the future Rupert II, and the latter’s son.68 The Hungarian king was joined in the coalition by his Italian great-uncles, Prince Philip II of Taranto, Emperor Emeritus of Constantinople, and Prince Charles II of Durazzo. The alliance was aimed at the territories of the Austrian dukes, since the agreement was that in the event of joint military action, the provinces conquered from the Habsburg dukes would be divided between the Hungarian king and the Wittelsbachs along the Enns.69 Charles IV was hardly aware of the threat in 1368. He was distracted by other events. One of them was that he had to accompany his fourth wife to Rome to be crowned empress. At the end of August, the archbishop of Trier was informed from Modena that the emperor hoped that the relationship between him and the Hungarian king would lead to a mutual double bond. In addition to the betrothal of Wenceslas and Elizabeth, the emperor had also envisaged the formation of another family relationship, namely the marriage of the duke of Durazzo to a future, not yet born duchess of Luxembourg.70 However, there was not much chance of this happening, since a few months earlier, in February 1368, Empress Elizabeth of Pomerania had given birth to a son, named Sigismund in honor of the king of Burgundy, who had been martyred in the sixth century.71

However, Louis remained opposed to the emperor. In 1369, he met in Buda with King Casimir III of Poland, and they confirmed their alliance against Charles IV. Pope Urban V did not take a favorable view of the strained relations between Louis and Charles, and he sent envoys to try to reconcile them, but his initiative proved fruitless, because by the end of the year the Hungarian court had petitioned the Holy See for a dissolution of the engagement between Elizabeth and Wenceslas. The primary reason for this was the opposition of the people of the country to the engagement, which only the royal family and some of the ecclesiastical and secular nobles supported. Reference was also made to the princess’ reluctance to marry Wenceslas, since Elizabeth, who was already an adult, did not want the marriage and refused to enter into it.72 The above arguments give the impression that the kings who contracted the marriage, as well as the Holy See, paid special attention to the broad support of the subjects for the marriage to be contracted, a factor that should be examined with greater emphasis in future records. On the other hand, it seems that the independent will of a woman in her sixteenth year,73 that is to say, a woman who had reached adulthood, was considered an argument in favor of the person chosen for her, at least if it coincided with the will of the monarch, something which had hardly ever been the case before. Elizabeth’s coming of age and the fact that a marriage between ruling dynasties was by no means regarded as a purely family affair is well attested by the fact that the Angevin princess herself issued a charter in Buda in March 1370 releasing Charles and his son, Wenceslas, as well as all the ecclesiastical and secular princes, barons, and nobles of the Kingdom of Bohemia, from the oath they had sworn to Louis I and Queen Elizabeth in the matter of the marriage74

In the first third of 1370, events around Elizabeth accelerated. A month after Pope Urban V had granted a decree of annulment to the betrothal of Wenceslas and Elizabeth, he gave a permission on January 8, 1370 for Elizabeth to marry Prince Philip II of Taranto, then aged 41, one of Louis’ allies from 1367.75 After a decade of engagement, Elizabeth ended up with a prince who not only played a decisive role in European power politics but who also had only slim chances of succeeding to the throne of Naples. Thus, the marriage of the niece of the Hungarian king and the titular Emperor of Constantinople could be regarded as an event without any major dynastic stakes. This can only be explained by the fact that Elizabeth’s place in the succession order of the Kingdom of Hungary was shaken, as the hitherto childless marriage of the Hungarian monarch to Elizabeth of Kotromanić entered a new phase. By the summer of 1370, King Louis’ wife had given birth to a daughter,76 which meant that in December 1369, the Hungarian court initiated the annulment of the engagement of Elizabeth and Wenceslas at the Holy See, knowing that the queen was carrying a child.

Philip was one of the Angevin princes imprisoned by the Hungarian king in Visegrád between 1347 and 1352 because of the death of Andrew,77 and since his stay in Hungary preceded the birth of Elizabeth, it is likely that his first meeting with the Hungarian princess was in 1367, when he allied himself with the Bavarian dukes at Buda, on the side of Louis, as mentioned in the discussion above. Philip was a widower, having lost his first wife, Mary, sister of Queen Joan of Naples, in May 1366.78 There could have been no obstacle to the marriage of Philip and Elizabeth in 1370, which presumably took place in Zadar, where the duke of Taranto’s nephew Charles II was also holding court.79 Elizabeth’s misadventures in the political maze of engagement thus came to an end, but it is worth noting that there is no sign that she might have left the Angevin court to live at the court of her soon to be husband, nor have we seen any example of her chosen future husband moving to the court of Louis for either a longer or a shorter period of time. In this respect, however, there was a change in the marriage policy of the Hungarian Angevins in the case of King Louis’ daughters.

Your Place or Mine?

With the death of Casimir III in November 1370, the Wittelsbach-Hungarian alliance lost one of its supporters, but in April 1371, it gained a new member in the person of Archbishop Pilgrim of Salzburg.80 Military conflict became inevitable by July, and King Louis sent an army led by the Palatine Ladislas of Opole and Ban Peter Cudar of Slavonia to the Kingdom of Bohemia to fight against Emperor Charles IV, who had taken the Duchy of Brandenburg with his army.81 The war, which had lasted just over two months, ended with the armistice of October 16, 1373, which lasted until June 5, 1373.82 The emperor took advantage of the period to reestablish closer ties with the Hungarian king, who now also held the Polish throne, without renouncing Brandenburg. The fact that Louis had only daughters no doubt fueled Charles IV’s dynastic intentions. The second-born royal princess, Mary, had not even reached her first birthday when, in February 1372, her father, accepting the renewed rapprochement of the Luxembourg and sealing the truce of October 1371, trusted his palatine Ladislas and Archbishop Thomas Telegdi of Esztergom to conduct negotiations with the emperor over a marriage.83

During the negotiations in Buda in May of that year, a very vague plan was outlined. The king of Hungary promised the younger daughter to Charles’ second son, Sigismund,84 unless a male offspring was born in the future, in which case the first-born daughter or, in the event of her death, the second-born daughter would be given to Sigismund.85 There can be no doubt that the phrase “younger daughter” meant Mary, since at the time in question, she was considered the younger daughter of the king, alongside the slightly older Catherine. However, it is surprising to note the mention of a possible new offspring and a son in the confirmation of the king in 1372, who had been childless for many decades. This prompts one to suspect that the queen may have been pregnant at the time of the negotiations, perhaps with her third child, Hedwig.86 In any case, it is certain that one of the important cornerstones of the 1372 Hungarian Angevin-Luxembourg rapprochement was that King Louis and his wife had to take a special oath to maintain the marriage bond between their daughter and Sigismund. This also took place in May 1372, not in Buda, but in Visegrád, which means that the queen did not leave the Angevin seat87 and did not personally participate in the negotiations in Buda, which would also suggest that she may well have been pregnant.88

The instructions given to the Duke of Teschen, the emperor’s envoy to Buda, provide other details about the engagement. According to these instructions, Charles’ original idea was that the Hungarian king would take his daughter to his court in Bohemia and they would bring her up according to Charles’ will.89 In addition, the amount of the dowry to be given with the daughter was also discussed, which, according to Louis’ intention, would have been 200,000 gold florins,90 approximately five times the 10,000 marks promised to Jodok with Elizabeth.91 About a year after the meeting at Buda, in June 1373, the question of the marriage of the two children was important again at the end of the truce. By this time, the Hungarian king’s marriage plans had become clearer, which may also mean that his third daughter had been born in the meantime, which did not radically alter the situation in any way with respect to the original plans. According to a receipt issued by Louis on June 21, 1373, in which his daughter Mary is mentioned by name, the earlier commitment to the marriage contract had not changed in the months since.92 This was why, in August, Otto Wittelsbach of Brandenburg had waited in vain for military assistance from Louis I and, after Charles IV had occupied several castles and towns in the territory of the margraviate, had been forced to surrender himself. This in turn meant that the Wittelsbachs had finally relinquished the Margraviate of Brandenburg in favor of the Luxembourgs.93 At the end of 1374, the Hungarian king could take comfort in the fact that his daughters’ futures had been satisfactorily settled. Catherine was betrothed on August 10 to Louis, the second-born son of King Charles V of France.94 The Hungarian king promised the Duke of Valois the Kingdom of Sicily, which at the time was in the hands of Queen Joan of Naples, with the familiar clause according to which the territories would be inherited by the heirs of Catherine and Louis but if the princess died prematurely, childless, the dowry would revert to the Hungarian king. 95

In December 1374, as a further development in Mary’s case, Pope Gregory XI assured the Hungarian-Luxembourg alliance of his support, granted permission for the marriage of the children,96 who were the great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of King Vladislas I of Poland on the maternal side.97 On April 15, 1375, Charles IV arranged for secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries from both kingdoms of Louis to swear an oath to the future marriage of Mary and Sigismund, who by then had risen to the rank of margrave of Brandenburg. In Brno, in the presence of the entire Luxembourg dynasty, Archbishop Thomas Telegdi of Esztergom, Bishop Demeter of Transylvania, Prince Ladislas of Opole, Voyvode Stephen Lackfi of Transylvania, Count James of Szepes, the royal judge of Hungary, and the captains of Poland and Kuyavia promised to support their marriage during the lifetime of the Hungarian king and beyond, that as soon as the king’s daughter had reached the legal age stipulated in the treaty she would be married to Sigismund. They also promised that they would urge Louis to have 80 other Polish and Hungarian prelates and barons take a similar vow by August15 and have it recorded in a document bearing their seal.98 These seven persons also declared that neither war nor any other comparable circumstances would prevent the marriage contract from being fulfilled, which suggests that by 1375, dynastic interests had prevailed over political considerations.

We do not know how a possible new war would have affected the above agreement, but events did not fully confirm Charles IV’s preliminary expectations. There is no evidence that the Hungarian and Polish elites were so strongly in favor of the case, but the need to express their agreement and support may remind us of what we observed earlier in the case of Wenceslas and Elizabeth, when the Czech orders certainly swore an oath in favor of the marriage. The vows of the Hungarian and Polish lords in Brno, mentioned above, similarly reinforce our assumption that the establishment of dynastic relations was not a personal matter but had to be based on wider social acceptance. As we have seen, the idea that the betrothed princess had to be brought up in his court had already been implied by the emperor in 1372, which may remind us of the example of King Louis’ first wife. There is no evidence that Mary moved to the royal court of Charles IV until 1378, the year in which the emperor died, and certainly not that she moved to the Czech court after that, since her sister Catherine also died in 1378, and Mary’s value became too great to allow her to leave the Kingdom of Hungary. The betrothed couple did, however, move in together in December 1379, when twelve-year-old Sigismund was sent to the court of King Louis to be brought up with his future wife, Mary.

1374 also proved to be a year of considerable importance in the life of King Louis’ other daughter, Hedvig. Like her sister Mary, she must have been about a year old when the first decision concerning her fate as a bride was made. The future husband of Hedvig was also decided around the truce of October 16, 1371, signed by King Louis with Charles IV, and the latter’s allies, the Austrian princes Albert III and Leopold III. Eight months before the expiry of the armistice agreement, on 16 October 1372, a peace was concluded with the Habsburg dukes.99 King Louis I’s haste was understandable, as the Hungarian king was looking for a partner to implement his plans on the Adriatic. The alliance against Venice was forged in Vienna on March 9, 1373. It was joined not only by the two Austrian princes and the Hungarian monarch but also by the governor of Padua, Francesco Carrara.100 Hedvig’s betrothal in 1374 can be seen as a confirmation of this partnership, since the engagement was made between Hedvig and the son of the Austrian Prince Leopold III in 1374. In the charter issued on August 18, 1374, Leopold promised the Habsburg duke’s first-born son, William, to marry King Louis’ younger daughter, Hedvig.101 The customary morning gift that was typical in the case of sons and brothers of Austrian princes was also offered, though the precise amount is not known. It is stated that, in the event of the death of Leo, Louis would protect William and the other heirs of Leopold, and in return for this, in the event of the death of Louis, Leo also promised protection to Hedvig and her sisters. The reply of the opposing side was not long in coming. In Buda on March 4, 1375, Louis also acknowledged that he promised his younger daughter Hedwig to William, and he too emphasized the details of mutual support and the morning gift. The latter is defined in a similar way as the dowry in Leopold’s charter. It would be made according to the customs for the daughters and sisters of Hungarian kings.102

According to these two documents, by the 1370s, there was an established custom regarding the amount of dowry and morning gift to be given, in the case of both the Habsburg princes and the Hungarian princesses, but this was apparently not the case for the children of the king’s siblings. With Catherine, the Hungarian king gave the inheritance of Naples, the value of which cannot be estimated.103 With Mary, the future husband received 200,000 gold florins and a document dated June 15, 1378 in Hainburg offered testimony to and details concerning the dowry of Hedvig, too. King Louis offered Leopold a discount, asking him to give the same amount as a morning gift as he had given as a dowry with his daughter, so instead of the 300,000 florins, he had to give 200,000 florins.104 We should not forget that the morning gift offered with the Angevin princes was also equal to 15,000 marks. So the 1374 charter seems to have been accurate in its statement according to which the daughters and sisters of the Angevin monarchs received the same dowry and also in its statement that the morning gift was the same for the sons and brothers of the Angevin monarchs, and the same custom can be observed in the Habsburg and Luxembourg dynasties in the period.

The charter issued in Hainburg is connected with another event as well, as we learn from King Louis’ account of 1380. In the town of Hainburg, Demeter, who at that time did not yet hold the dignity of cardinal but was only archbishop of Esztergom, married Hedvig and William in the local parish church with due solemnity, and they were laid in the same bed and united in the same night.105 The two children certainly underwent the institution of the German consummation custom described above. The event probably took place at the same time as the aforementioned reduction of the tribute, so in mid-June 1378.106 However, the royal narrative of 1380 also reveals something else, namely that the king had his daughter transferred to the court of the Austrian prince Leo, who was only called frater.107 According to the Austrian chronicle108 compiled in 1406 by the contemporary Matthäus, also known as Gregor Hagen, Hedvig was taken to Vienna, where she was educated for a few years.109 It may be a source of uncertainty about Hedvig’s years of upbringing in Vienna that we know that the treaty of Neuberg of September 25, 1379 transferred the seat of Prince Leopold to Styria, while Lower Austria remained the property of Albert III.110 However, Hedwig’s upbringing in the court of Leopold was well attested to by a charter issued in Graz on February 25, 1380, in which Prince Leopold canceled the debts of his daughter, the chief court mistress of the young Hungarian queen.111 The duties of court mistresses, chosen from the wives or widows of noblemen offices in the court, included the supervision and management of the persons in the service of their lady and the management of the court mistresses.112 Hedwig, who was about seven years old, was the mistress of the court of Elizabeth von Reutenberg, the widow of Leopold von Reutenberg, a native of Krajna, who had previously served in the same capacity for Prince Leopold’s wife, Viridis Visconti.113 William and Hedvig must have visited the Kingdom of Hungary during their years together, at least according to a letter from after June 1381, in which the people of Pozsony report that, at the king’s command, they were to share the expenses of the locals that occurred during the stay of the Austrian prince and the daughter of the Hungarian king in Óvár.114 It is also possible that the young couple stopped at Óvár on their way to King Louis’ court, since Hagen also recalls that when the king sensed the end was near, he summoned Hedvig, whom William had accompanied to Hungary.115

It is not known whether Prince Leopold himself, like Charles IV, had re­quested that a large number of prelates, barons, and other lords of the Kingdom of Hungary, in addition to the ruling family, should support the marriage of Hedwig and William. In any case, it is certain that on February 12, 1380, King Louis swore an oath in Zólyom, with the two archbishops and seven bishops present, as well as with 29 members of the secular elite, to support the agreement between himself and the Austrian prince in the name of themselves and their successors, and to promote and uphold the consummation of the marriage between the two children.116 A little over a year later, other subjects who had not previously had a part to play on such an occasion pledged themselves to the cause as well. On March 20, 1381, the judges and jurors of nine towns in Hungary appeared in Wiener Neustadt to issue a document in Latin and German to promise, in their and their successors’ names, the observance of all the terms and promises of the marriage contract.117 The charter, bearing the city seals of Buda, Visegrád, Fehérvár, Sopron, Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia), Trencsén, Zagreb, Nagyszombat, and Pozsony, was written in two languages and was composed in Styria, primarily with the Austrian party’s reassurance in mind.

In the study above, I examined the political, legal, and economic characteristics of fourteenth-century engagements and marriages in the dynastic treaties of the Angevin rulers of Hungary and the neighboring countries. There is no doubt that the marriage contracts presented here faithfully reflect the changes and turning points in the Kingdom of Hungary’s foreign policy relations and dynastic ambitions from time to time. These political factors may have changed the identity of the actual actors, but for the most part they did not affect the scenario of the engagements. Marriage as a pledge of alliance was based on written and unwritten rules, the former being the marriage contracts concluded between the parties, the latter being elements rooted in customary law, such as the inspection of the bride-to-be or the different ways of consummating the marriage. Several examples have shown that the marriage contracts that sealed the political cooperation were as careful as possible in regulating the duties, obligations, and legal institutions of the parties, whether they concerned the conditions for obtaining papal permission, the place and time of the transfer, the right to renounce the marriage, the time of the marriage, or the property aspects of a successful marriage. In the marriage contract, particular emphasis was placed on the fixing of the amount of the marriage dowry and morning gift, the method of transfer, and the list of the income and property to be pledged in exchange for it, and their fate in the event of a successful or unsuccessful marriage. My observations show that, in the fourteenth century, the Hungarian kings granted their sons and brothers the same sums as a morning gift and their daughters and sisters the same sums as dowries, similar to the monarchs of other neighboring countries. In return for their dowry and morning gift, the daughters who married into the queen’s household were apparently entitled to the estates and perquisites of the queen. By the end of the era, dynastic marriages had to be based on broader social support. While earlier the support of a narrow advisory body was sufficient for an agreement between the monarchs, by the second half of the century, members of the ecclesiastical and secular elite and then representatives of the cities took oaths and signed commitments to abide by the contracts.

Archival Sources

Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv

Auswärtige Staaten

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian State Archives] (MNL OL)

Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény (DF)

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Croatian-Dalmatian Roles in the Organization of the Wedding
of King Vladislaus II and Queen Anne*

Tomislav Matić

Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 1 (2025): 65-95 DOI 10.38145/2025.1.65

This paper examines three aspects of the possible participation of Croats and Dalmatians in the organization of the wedding of King Vladislaus II and Anne of Foix-Kendal, which took place in 1502. The first is the possible participation of Felix Petančić of Dubrovnik, who, according to older historiography, produced a portrait of Anne and her cousin Germaine for King Vladislaus. The second is the epithalamium of Matthew Andreis of Trogir, probably composed on the occasion of Anne’s passage through Italy. The third is the participation of Croatian nobles in Anne’s arrival in Croatian lands and her journey from Senj to Zagreb. The paper shows that there is no proof of Petančić’s involvement in the wedding. As for Andreis, he was apparently familiar even with the more obscure details of the organization. The third aspect demonstrates the remarkable cooperation among Croatian magnates in Anne’s passage, even those who were previously enemies of Vladislaus.

Keywords: Renaissance, Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia, ceremonies, history of diplomacy, literary history, social history

Introduction

In 1502, a great wedding ceremony took place in the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia. King Vladislaus II Jagiellon (1490–1516), son of the Polish king Casimir IV (1447–1492) and ruler of the composite kingdom of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and their dependencies, then already a man well past his prime, took a young wife, a French lady distantly related to Louis XII, king of France (1498–1515). This lady was Anne, daughter of Gaston II of Foix-Kendal, a French count and (titular) English earl, known in French as the count of Candale.1 At the time of her wedding, Anne was about 18 years old and had until then been tutored by her cousin, Duchess Anne of Brittany, queen consort of France. This marriage was intended as a means to facilitate a large anti-Ottoman alliance in preparation for a multi-national crusade (which, however, never took place).2

Before examining the roles played by Croats and Dalmatians in the organization of this wedding, it is worth briefly considering the image of Anne of Foix-Kendal in the older Croatian historiography. As Croatia was one of the new queen’s realms, her marriage to King Vladislaus concerns Croatian history as well as its Hungarian and Bohemian counterparts. Unfortunately, no studies were devoted to Anne’s part in the history of Croatia. Croatian historians, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, took some interest in her marriage to Vladislaus, but none of them devoted more than cursory attention to the relevant sources. In short, they viewed this marriage extremely unfavorably. They thought it was frivolous, that it caused the king to ignore the business of ruling his kingdoms, especially their defense from the increasingly ominous threat of defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire (because he was allegedly “swimming in marital bliss,” as one Croatian historian put it), and that he drove the country into enormous debt so that he could shower his young bride with gifts.3

Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Croatian historians were not the only ones to have taken a dim view of Queen Anne and her influence on the king. Some of the royal couple’s contemporaries were even more unkind. Namely, one fifteenth–sixteenth-century chronicler, the controversial George of Syrmia, whom one nineteenth-century Croatian historian dubbed the “mad priest,”4 outright accused the queen of poisoning the children of the illegitimate son of the late king Mattthias Corvinus, John Corvinus, duke of Slavonia. According to George, the queen saw his children, Elizabeth and Christopher, as potential rivals to her own children for the throne of Hungary-Croatia.5 He described the queen’s alleged scheme in great detail and claimed that he had witnessed the events personally. His account is noticeably anachronistic, his Latin atrocious, and it is very likely that some of the more controversial claims in it are merely recorded gossip that was circulating when it was written. Despite its defects, it was too alluring for Croatian historians to disregard. This was because the victims of the queen’s alleged poisoning really did die at a very young age, but also because they were children of Beatrice Frankapan, wife of John Corvinus, and therefore descendants of the enormously wealthy and powerful Croatian Frankapan family. Their alleged murder was therefore seen primarily as a crime against Croatia by early Croatian historians, especially because they treated John Corvinus, by virtue of being duke of Slavonia and ban of Croatia and Dalmatia, as a champion of Croatian interests, and both he and Beatrice’s father Bernardine were seen as two of the most stalwart defenders of Croatia from Ottoman encroachments.6

Her alleged participation in this probably fictional murder cast Anne as a negative character in nineteenth-century Croatian historiography, as most historians kept George of Syrmia’s story about the poisoning of John Corvinus’ children in circulation, either by tersely dismissing it as a fabrication7 or by re­veling in its luridness.8 This circulation was helped by the fact that George of Syrmia’s text was one of the few published sources on late medieval Croatian history when these early Croatian historians’ were writing their works. It was printed in 1857 by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which made it readily available to contemporary researchers. George’s story about the alleged poisoning even filtered into Croatian historical fiction, such as the books by a locally very famous twentieth-century author Marija Jurić Zagorka. In her novel Gordana, Anne is depicted as a haughty and evil woman, and her list of crimes is expanded to (unsuccessfully) poisoning John Corvinus himself, together with his children.9 The fictional Anne in this novel gave birth to a disfigured son as punishment for the murders she committed.10

Such harsh treatment was undeserved by the young queen. Her real story was an unhappy one. If we consider her marriage to Vladislaus in the context of her life and the world in which she lived, it becomes apparent that there is no reason to blame her for her husband’s alleged failings. She was forced to marry Vladislaus, a man twice her age whom she had never previously met,11 despite already being in love with François d’Orléans, Count of Dunois.12 Without being given much choice in the matter, she was uprooted and forced to move to a country she did not know, where she died less than four years after her wedding.13 It is also groundless to assume that she was an enemy of the Croatian nobles, at least within the timeframe on which this paper focuses. The sources clearly reveal that she was well-received in Croatia during her wedding procession, and that several Croats and Dalmatians contributed to the spectacular event, primarily the aforementioned Frankapan family and Duke John Corvinus.

This paper presents the roles played by Croats and Dalmatians in the organization of Vladislaus II and Anne’s wedding. Several prominent Croatian and Dalmatian figures actively participated in the wedding and made substantial contributions to the grand event. The first chapter will focus on Felix Petančić from Dubrovnik, a painter and diplomat who perhaps painted Anne’s engagement portrait. The subject of the second chapter will be the literary work of Matthew Andronicus Andreis from Trogir, who composed a celebratory poem (an epithalamium) for the royal couple. Finally, the third chapter will study the roles of Bernardine Frankapan and his allies, who welcomed Anne to Croatia and escorted her and her entourage to the destination of her wedding and coronation.

Several caveats must be listed to clarify the scope and limits of this study.
Felix Petančić has long been a subject of research, although not widely publicized, both in Croatia and in Hungary. The possibility that he was the painter commissioned to make the portraits of Anne of Foix-Kendal and her cousin Germaine has long been a subject of conjecture, although much of the literature, predominantly older, treated it as a fact. Here, we will attempt to clarify this matter, as in some cases it is just as important to prove that something is not the case as it might have seemed to suggest that it is the case, especially when decades of repetition have allowed historiographical assumptions to harden into facts. The life and work of Matthew Andreis and, more narrowly, his epithalamium composed for the wedding of Vladislaus and Anne have been made the subject of study less frequently, yet this epithalamium offers insights into the ways in which contemporaries understood the processes behind the wedding. It is also a brilliant and sometimes puzzling piece of humanistic Latin poetry. Here, we consider not its artistic merits or influences, but only its relation to the wedding for which it was composed.

As for the last part of this paper, concerning Anne’s procession through Croatia and the participants in it, it will be limited to the roles of the Croatian participants in the ceremonies, primarily the counts of the Frankapan family. Many other Croatian figures took part, but they fall out of the scope of this study. The borders of late medieval Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia also will not be discussed,14 but I have decided not to include participants from medieval Slavonia, such as the Bishop of Zagreb. Lawrence of Ilok, who was neither a Slavonian nor a Croatian lord, is mentioned because the prominence of his role could not be disregarded, and John Corvinus is included because of his ties to the Frankapan family and the fact that he was ban of Croatia and Dalmatia at the time. The terms “Croatian” and “Dalmatian” are used in a purely territorial sense in this discussion, and not in an ethnic or national one. In other words, they indicate whether the given person originated from the Kingdom of Croatia or Dalmatia. It should also be noted that the persons studied in this paper will be considered only in the context of their roles in Vladislaus and Anne’s wedding, and only the relevant parts of their biographies will be mentioned.

Felix Petančić and the Royal Portrait

Of the Croats and Dalmatians who participated in the organization of the wedding of Vladislaus II and Anne of Foix, we first consider Felix Petančić, a native of Dubrovnik, the city also known as Ragusa. As we shall see, his role in this wedding is mostly a historiographical construct, built on assumptions based on other, older assumptions. Here, we consider the possibility that he painted the portrait of the future queen Anne, which allegedly induced King Vladislaus to choose her as his wife. Although there is virtually no evidence of this, this contention frequently appears in biographies of Petančić. As it concerns the subject of this paper, it behooves us to shed some light on the matter, particularly how this theory came to be and the sources on which it relied.

Petančić entered the public life of the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia in the 1490s. It was probably his godfather Christopher Stojković, Bishop of Modruš, who introduced him to the royal court in Buda. His life is still shrouded in mystery, and a modern comprehensive biography of Petančić has not yet been written, though it would clearly be of interest. As for his older biographies, it is possible that several persons were conflated into one by twentieth-century researchers. It is possible that Petančić was a skilled illuminator or that another person named Felix was. The only potential indication that Petančić was an artist depends on the interpretation of a passage from the book Hungaria by Nicholas Olah, archbishop of Esztergom. Olah wrote that at the time of his youth, a wise old illuminator named Felix Ragusinus (after Ragusa, the Latin name for Dubrovnik), who knew several languages, including Arabic, worked at the royal scriptorium in Buda.15 Other than this (and one could hardly call this evidence), there is no confirmation that Petančić ever painted anything. It is also difficult to determine precisely when Olah’s “youth” was, and we have no way of knowing how old Petančić would have been at the time. Nevertheless, this paragraph mentioning Felix Ragusinus was the cornerstone of the theories according to which Petančić was a painter.

This does not mean that there are no other, more reliable sources regarding Petančić. We know that he had other skills and that he used these skills to serve King Vladislaus II. Namely, he was an administrator and a diplomat in the service of the king, and a writer as well. Vladislaus II appointed him chancellor of the royal city of Senj in 1496 and entrusted him with several important diplomatic missions in the early 1500s.16 While he was in royal service, Petančić presented to King Vladislaus a treatise usually called the Genealogy of the Turkish Emperors (Genealogia Turcorum Imperatorum), and possibly some other writings as well.17

This closeness to Vladislaus, the diplomatic missions entrusted to him, and his putative artistic skills led to an intriguing theory about Petančić’s role in the wedding of Vladislaus II. Namely, the king was not certain whether he should marry Anne of Foix-Kendal or her cousin, Germaine of Foix-Navarra (granddaughter of Gaston IV of Foix-Béarn). As he had never seen either of the women, in order to decide which one to marry, he would have needed to dispatch an artist capable of painting their portraits. Some historians have argued that the artist he chose to send was none other than Felix Petančić.18

This theory depends exclusively on the assumption that Petančić was a painter as well as a diplomat. Although there is no conclusive evidence in support of this notion, earlier researchers examined the manuscripts containing the texts he wrote and assumed that Petančić must have illuminated them himself. This led them to the conclusion that he was skilled in painting miniature portraits, and consequently some of the most magnificent products of the Buda court scriptorium were ascribed to him. Further conclusions regarding Petančić’s supposed artistic achievements were based on similarities among illuminations in manuscripts originating from the royal court in Buda.19 This opened the way to further assumptions, such as the notion Petančić was the best portraitist at the disposal of the Hungarian king. This assumption could easily have been tethered to the fact that Vladislaus II sent Petančić on several diplomatic missions, culminating with the mission to Constantinople in 1513, which then prompted the very questionable conclusion that he was also tasked with painting the portraits of King Vladislaus’ prospective brides.

It is worth noting that Petančić’s supposed mission to the king of France is not explicitly mentioned in any of the contemporary sources, or, rather, that he is not mentioned by any of the sources dealing with the embassies tasked with arranging Vladislaus II’s marriage. The earliest work usually cited by modern studies that mention Petančić in this context is the Annales regum Hungariae by George Pray.20 To get to the root of the matter, we must therefore study Pray’s sources. According to him, Petančić’s supposed mission to France took place immediately after his mission to the Knights Hospitaller on Rhodes and before he presented the work Quibus itineribus Turci sint aggrediendi to Vladislaus II. Pray was familiar with this work and quoted extensively from it.21 However, he did not name any of his sources on which his contentions concerning Petančić’s French mission are based, and the only source he did name in that place was Regni Hungarici historia by Nicholas Istvánffi, but only in the context of Queen Anne’s heritage. Istvánffy himself did not mention Petančić at all.22

Fortunately, Petar Matković studied the older literature on Petančić in the nineteenth century and made it much easier to trace the transmission of statements.23 His work leads us to one of Pray’s contemporaries, Stephen Katona, who shed more light on the matter. He was more conscientious than Pray about stating his sources, and in his Historia critica regum Hungariae, he cited Pray when recounting Petančić’s mission to France, but he also cited and quoted Pray’s source. He did not accept this source as reliable in its entirety, as he thought it unlikely that the mission to France had taken place immediately after the mission to Rhodes, because it would not fit in the timeline of events.24 The source in question was Epitome chronologica rerum Hungaricarum et Transilvanicarum by Samuel Timon. In the relevant passage, Timon stated that he thought it likely that after the mission to Rhodes Petančić proceeded to France to select a wife for King Vladislaus II (Credibile est Petancium Cancellarium Segniensem, in Gallias usque profectum fuisse, ad deligendam sponsam Vladislao Regi).25

This sentence by Timon is the foundation on which centuries of histo­rio­graphical constructs rest. It is also the beginning of the thread we have been tracing in reverse. Timon did not list any source for his statement because he did not have any. He was simply stating an opinion. Indeed, if we look at the contemporary sources, there are none that would place Petančić in any of Vladislaus II’s embassies to France. The closest thing to evidence of his participation in such a mission which later (largely unwitting) proponents of Timon’s theory had to offer is a note made by the contemporary Venetian chronicler, Marino Sanudo. Sanudo wrote on August 14, 1500 that the Hungarian king had sent to France a painter, some Italian, to portray the women that the king was considering marrying. Sanudo himself, together with Antonio Venier, made an official visit with this painter while he was in transit in Venice, but he did not record the name of this painter in his diary.26 Historians later concluded that this painter might have been Petančić.27 This required a corollary assumption, namely that Sanudo mistook the Ragusan Petančić for an Italian, which is dubious, considering that he met him in person and conversed with him.

Due to scholarship that had piled up over the course of the centuries after Timon and Pray, the task of disproving the theory according to which Petančić was Vladislaus II’s envoy to France, and an envoy sent as a painter to boot, is not a simple matter. We will therefore list both its flaws and possible advantages. The main flaw is that the line of thinking which resulted in its formulation is not particularly convincing. First and foremost, the lack of written evidence is glaring. There is no evidence of Petančić’s involvement in any of the activities surrounding Vladislaus’ wedding. As for the portraits of Anne and Germaine, the sources confirm that they really did exist and were painted for the purpose identified above, but Petančić’s involvement with them is purely conjectural. This becomes apparent if we consider the sources that mention these portraits. One of them is the contemporary French chronicler Jean d’Auton, who stated that he had heard that King Vladislaus had dispatched an envoy, one George de Versepel (in Czech, Jiří z Běšin), a subject of the Kingdom of Bohemia, to negotiate his prospective wedding with the king of France. He was also supposed to inspect the potential brides in person and to have their portraits made from life. Said portraits were then made, and Vladislaus was, at least according to d’Auton, very satisfied with them.28 What d’Auton does not mention is any involvement on Petančić’s part. As we have seen, the only envoy he mentioned was George of Běšin. To salvage the theory according to which the portraits were painted by Petančić, we would be forced to assume either that he was dispatched separately from this envoy or that Jean d’Auton did not deem it necessary to mention him, possibly because Petančić, as a mere artisan, was not important enough to be recorded.

The other source which will be considered here, the diary of Marino Sanudo, affirms the flaws of the aforementioned theory, but it also complicates the matter. Namely, it should be admitted that it contains conflicting reports regarding King Vladislaus’ embassy to France.29 Sanudo had recorded, as mentioned in the discussion above, that King Vladislaus’ envoy tasked with seeing the Foix cousins was in Venice, alone, on August 14, 1500. However, this is not the only piece of information he gives regarding the king’s embassy to France. A few months later, he recorded that a dispatch from the Venetian envoy to King Louis XII, dated September 29, 1500, said that the ambassador of the king of Hungary, with the task identical to the one Sanudo earlier ascribed to the Italian painter, arrived at the French king’s court in Blois together with the French ambassadors who had returned from Hungary.30 This might mean that Vladislaus really had sent two envoys, one traveling with the returning French ambassadors and the other traveling separately.

Also, contrary to Jean d’Auton, the Venetian ambassador in the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia, Sebastiano Giustiniani, reported to his government in Venice that King Vladislaus’ envoy has returned from France on December 10, but that he had not seen the Foix cousins at all, because they were both, as he was told, in distant lands (which probably meant Brittany).31 This report was probably dispatched before Giustiniani found out everything he could about the embassy, as one of his later reports contained more information on it. About a month after dispatching the first report, he sent another one, saying that the king’s envoy, George of Běšin the Bohemian, had brought portraits of the two women with him, but that the king had not liked either of them.32 This also differs from d’Auton’s version, but let us examine how it relates to the theory with which we are dealing. If George had not seen the women but had brought back portraits of them, it is possible that another envoy had seen them, had made their portraits, and had given them to George, who subsequently presented them to the king. It is also possible that this hypothetical second envoy returned separately from George, as the Venetian ambassador reported on the portraits only several weeks after George’s return.

Another of Sanudo’s records makes this issue even more difficult to understand. On November 28, he wrote that he received news that an envoy of King Vladislaus returned to Hungary with the portraits of the two women.33 Considering this, it seems strange that the Venetian ambassador reported that the envoy returned on December 10, when he should have already been there for two weeks, and that he learned of the portraits even later, despite the said envoy allegedly having brought them with him. Due to this, we may consider the possibility that there really were two envoys traveling separately. This might mean that the second envoy might have been Petančić, and he may very well have made the portraits. However, this only provides the space for an assumption that there was a second envoy dispatched to France by King Vladislaus, and it would take many more assumptions, all of them unsubstantiated, to link Petančić to the portraits of Anne of Foix and her cousin Germaine. It is therefore clear that the sources offer no solid foundation for the theory according to which he made those portraits, although it cannot be rejected entirely.

Matthew Andreis and the Wedding Poem

As we have seen, Felix Petančić’s involvement in the making of the portrait of Anne of Foix cannot be proven. However, that does not mean that the Croats and the Dalmatians made no contributions to the artistic production prompted by her wedding to Vladislaus II. This production took many forms, both within and beyond the borders of Anne’s future kingdoms. For example, the future queen’s passage through Italy spawned a series of theatrical welcoming ceremonies, marked by allegorical displays and references to Classical mythology.34 This, in turn, sparked literary production, such as Angelo Gabriel’s description of Anne’s welcoming ceremony in Venice.35 In this atmosphere of spectacle, Matthew Andronicus Andreis composed an epithalamium in the honor of the forthcoming wedding36 titled Epithalamium in nuptias Vladislai Pannoniarum ac Boemiae regis et Annae Candaliae reginae. He published it in Venice on the occasion of the future queen’s arrival. This poem and its author, therefore, deserve to be considered in this paper. This chapter offers a brief description of Andreis’ background and then focuses on the context in which his epithalamium was composed, with a particular focus on Andreis’ knowledge of the events that preceded the royal wedding.

Matthew Andreis was a member of a very distinguished and noble family of the coastal city of Trogir in Dalmatia, which was ruled at the time by the Republic of Venice. The Andreis family’s lineage can be traced to the early thirteenth century. Its members were heavily involved in the turbulent history of Trogir, occasionally suffering penalties such as exile.37 They owned several houses and a palace in the city and perhaps even a tower by the city walls. Remains of their palace can still be seen today.38 The family name was old and venerable, but some of its bearers (those more inclined towards contemporary humanistic trends) started using the fashionably all’antica appellation “Andronicus” during the Renaissance, even as late as the seventeenth century.39 Matthew was apparently one of them.

Matthew Andronicus Andreis was born around 1480 and studied in Padua. Judging by his literary production, he received a good humanistic education, but the epithalamium we mentioned earlier is his only piece of poetry known to us. 40 It was not an obscure work in the period immediately after it was written, considering that it was known to and read by contemporary Dalmatian humanistic authors, such as Marko Marulić, and it even influenced them to some degree.41 Andreis combined motives taken from the works of various Roman poets, such as Statius and Claudian, displaying the breadth of his education and his mastery of Classical Latin.

Andreis was obviously well-read and took every opportunity to inform the reader of his vast knowledge of Classical mythology and literature. However, he compared the events surrounding the wedding not only with Classical mythology, as was customary for Renaissance epithalamia, but also with episodes from ancient history.42 He also hints towards contemporary history through the clever use of references to Antiquity. For example, he gives a subtle reference to the Italian Wars, mentioning how the Gauls under Brennus pillaged Rome,43 similarly to how the French (who are also called Gauls in his text) brought destruction to Italy. To counterbalance that, he describes the joy that followed Anne during her journey through the same country, caused by the fact that she had brought peace, not war.44 Some of Andreis’ references to contemporary politics are more convoluted and require careful reading, and one must always bear in mind that none of his parallels are coincidental. For example, his decision to draw a parallel between Vladislaus II and Peleus, the father of Achilles, who brought doom to Troy, the empire of the east, could be interpreted as a prophetic suggestion by Andreis that Vladislaus or his progeny would defeat the empire of the East of his day, the Ottoman Empire.45

Given some of the details of the poem, it is possible that Andreis was present in Padua, on the territory belonging to the Republic of Venice, for the meeting of the future queen with the honor guard sent by King Vladislaus. This was not merely a military detachment, but also a splendid selection of men from among the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia’s potentates, led by Lawrence of Ilok and tasked with escorting Anne and her entourage to Hungary.46 The fact that the wedding song in Andreis’ epithalamium is sung by soldiers might be the result of an adaptation of the setting in the epithalamium composed by the late Antique poet Claudian, but it also might have been a conscious choice prompted by Andreis’ first-hand experience of the encounter.47 As noted earlier, all of the details in the poem were carefully selected and arranged, so it is not likely that Claudian’s setting was used simply as an imitation.

Another detail which gives us reason to think that Andreis was present at the meeting of the future queen and her honor guard is that in a passage earlier in the poem he gave a detailed description of King Vladislaus’ troops and their equipment.48 This is a very long description, and it goes into great detail about the types of armor worn by the troops, their weapons and mounts, and even the color of their hair. Perhaps we might assume that he did not invent this description out of whole cloth but instead drew on his memories of the splendid attires and parade armors worn by Hungarian dignitaries and their escort for the occasion of meeting the queen’s procession in Padua. That would mean that he, like his contemporary Gabriel, was impressed by the spectacles accompanying Anne’s passage, which prompted him to write a fanciful but inspired account of what he had witnessed.

It is also surprising that Andreis was apparently relatively familiar with the queen’s lineage, or at least wanted to appear as if he were. He placed the origin of Anne’s family name in Britain and praised her Celtic ancestry.49 In another passage, he places the ancestors of the “Candalii,” Anne’s family, among the ancient and honorable “Gallic” dignitaries.50 This could mean that he knew of the ties Anne’s forefathers had to England and perhaps even that her family name, Candale, came from the French rendition of the name of the earldom of Kendal. Unfortunately, we do not know where he would have acquired that knowledge, but he certainly did succeed in appearing to be very well informed. Perhaps the person to whom Andreis dedicated the poem, Nicholas Csáky, bishop of Cenad, provided some of the information, as the dedication indicates that Andreis was familiar with the bishop’s doings. Namely, he mentions, as part of his praise for the addressee’s achievements, that the bishop negotiated the future queen’s passage with the Venetian Senate.51 It is possible that Andreis conversed with him on that occasion.

In addition to drawing parallels with current politics, Andreis also borrowed from fully classical tales. For example, he described how Venus had ordered Cupid to fly to Pannonia and make the king, who had until then thought little of the matters of the heart, fall in love.52 However, even there he did not digress dramatically from the events that really took place. This required some, to put it mildly, creative writing, as obviously neither Vladislaus nor Anne were pagans and thus could not acknowledge Venus’ assistance or even her existence. This makes the way in which he mixed the ancient and the medieval in his verses all the more interesting. For example, when describing how the king dispatched a bishop to France to negotiate the marriage, he describes the envoy as more eloquent than Nestor and Ulysses and decorated with episcopal honors for his virtues.53 This pleases Venus, who flies to France to facilitate the wooing secretly.

It was apparently not contradictory for Andreis that a pagan goddess should help a Christian bishop (or that the two could coexist), but his decision to place the pagan deities in the background of events enabled him to stay as true to reality as possible, as King Vladislaus II indeed did send a bishop to finalize the wedding agreement. We do not know whether this was the bishop Andreis had in his mind, but Nicholas Bacskai, Bishop of Nitra, was an ambassador sent to France with this task. In reality, he was only one member of a larger embassy, which visited England as well as France.54

Andreis’ epithalamium was, unlike Petančić’s supposed portrait, a real ad­dition to Vladislaus and Anne’s wedding. Its author was inventive, well-informed, and capable of mixing current politics of his day, Classical mythology, and his own literary preferences. It also demonstrates that contemporary educated Dalmatians were familiar with what was fashionable at the time and capable of producing suitable literary pieces when the occasion for them presented itself. As a digression, it is worth noting that this epithalamium was not a unique phenomenon, as it was not the only such piece of poetry produced by a Dalmatian author in the early sixteenth century. Another such work was composed by Michael Vrančić a few decades later, in 1539, for the wedding of another Hungarian king, John of Zapolje.55

Great Lords and Enemies of Old

So far, we have only considered artistic contributions, real or alleged, to the organization of Vladislaus and Anne’s wedding. However, Croats and Dalmatians provided more than just services of this kind. Some of them provided genuine political and military support, which was both crucial for the successful execution of the ceremony and a demonstration of King Vladislaus’ ability to secure their support. In the discussion below, we consider the role of the magnates who enabled Anne’s passage through Croatia on the way to Székesfehérvár in Hungary proper, where her wedding took place.

It is fortunate that we have a first-hand account of Anne’s arrival to and passage through Croatia. For this, we have Anne of Brittany to thank. It so happened that the French queen and Breton duchess liked her cousin and protégé, not least because Anne of Foix-Kendal had no claim to her own titles and therefore presented no danger to her.56 In any case, Anne of Brittany did not let her travel to distant lands unattended. She sent, among others, her own herald, Pierre Choque, to accompany her, with the express order that he write a report on everything that transpired.57 To fulfill this order, he made sure to write a thorough record of the journey and the subsequent ceremonies.58

Choque’s report was preserved in manuscript form, in two redactions, of which the most complete is the one preserved in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. fr. 90). Another one, truncated, is preserved in London (British Library, MS Stowe 584). A transcript of the latter redaction exists in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. fr. 22330).59 This means that it was sought after and transcribed and that it circulated among the Western European nobility.

This report was written, naturally, from the perspective of one of Anne’s attendants, and it therefore focuses on her and her interactions with the persons she encountered. It, therefore, does not delve into the background politics that precipitated her arrival to Croatia. Nevertheless, it lists enough examples to enable us to surmise that Count Bernardine Frankapan, at that time arguably the greatest Croatian lord, was essential for securing the future queen’s passage through Croatian lands.

The Frankapans, Count Bernardine’s family, were by the beginning of the sixteenth century a thoroughly westernized family. They were originally lords of the island of Krk, but by then, their domain had shifted to the Northeastern Adriatic coast and further inland. Each branch of the family, and there were quite a few, controlled its share of the vast family holdings, and Count Bernardine’s share was centered on Modruš, a great castle and town in the mountainous area at the border of medieval Croatia and Slavonia.60 Over the course of the late Middle Ages, the Frankapans developed a network of dynastic marriages with Italy and the Holy Roman Empire,61 and they often served as liaisons between the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia and Italy.62 Bernardine himself was half Italian, as his mother was Isolde, the illegitimate daughter of Niccolò III d’Este, margrave of Ferrara.63 He went on to marry Louise Marzano, a niece of the Neapolitan king Ferdinand I.64 One of their children was Beatrice, wife of John Corvinus, who was mentioned in the discussion above.65

Count Bernardine’s relations with King Vladislaus II had not always been cordial. He had rebelled against him as recently as 1493. It seems that the whole Frankapan family acted in concert, and that its goal was to regain the then royal city of Senj, which had belonged to the Frankapans. That was when Bernardine’s cousin, Count John Angel Frankapan of Brinje (in Croatian historiography known as Anž), allied with the Ottomans and unsuccessfully besieged Senj.66 Bernardine also had his reasons for not being friendly towards Louis XII of France. The latter had deposed Bernardine’s relative-in-law, King Frederick of Naples (1496–1501). The Croatian count had not forgotten his marriage alliance with the Neapolitan dynasty. Indeed, his troops participated in the Italian Wars and fought against the French, as Bernardine sent several hundred cavalrymen to aid Naples when it was invaded by King Charles VIII.67

Despite all this, it seems that neither Count Bernardine nor his family tried to impede the royal marriage. The fact that King Vladislaus secured the cooperation of the Frankapans was a significant feat, but it was not his only political success connected with his wedding. In fact, another of the Hungarian king’s former enemies, Lord Lawrence of Ilok, played a prominent role in the queen’s wedding procession, being at the head of the honor guard that greeted her in Padua and escorted her to Vladislaus’ territory. Seven years earlier, Lawrence had been a bitter enemy of the king, who had openly mocked royal authority. He had apparently enjoyed comparing Vladislaus to an ox. The campaign against Lawrence was one of the only times the king personally took to the field. The royal army utterly defeated the insolent lord and conquered his ancestral see of Ilok after a brutal siege.68

Given the key roles these persons had in Anne of Foix-Kendal’s arrival to the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia, it almost seems as if King Vladislaus purposely imposed services related with his wedding on the enemies he had defeated, perhaps both as an honor and as a test of faith. Even John Corvinus, Duke of Slavonia and ban of Croatia and Dalmatia, had once been his enemy, perhaps the most dangerous of them, as he had been Vladislaus’ competitor for the throne of Hungary-Croatia. Corvinus was a serious contender for the throne after his father’s death in 1490, and he renounced his claim only after a compromise with Vladislaus.69 Nevertheless, it was never forgotten that he was the son of King Matthias, and there were apparently those who were willing to offer him their support well into Vladislaus’ reign. As recently as 1496, there were reports of John Corvinus gathering malcontents and preparing an uprising against the king.70 It seems that he did not fully reconcile with Vladislaus until 1498, and even then, he was still bitter about the mistreatment to which he had been subjected and the promises the king had broken.71

The wedding ceremonies and processions of 1502 show nothing of these previous disagreements. If the participants harbored any ill will toward the king, they did not show it. In his report of Anne’s journey, Pierre Choque recorded that Count Bernardine was among those who greeted Anne upon her arrival in Senj and that his son-in-law, Duke John Corvinus of Slavonia, led an enormous escort for the future queen’s journey from Senj to Zagreb.72 This journey is a remarkable testimony to the cooperation between the previously recalcitrant Frankapans and King Vladislaus. The very first stop, the city of Senj (which impressed Choque with the size of its port), had recently been a point of contention between them. In 1502, it was a royal possession, but it had previously been violently taken from the Frankapan family in 1469 by Vladislaus’ predecessor and Duke John’s father, King Matthias Corvinus.73 The Frankapans had not forgotten that, and they had tried to regain the city (as noted in the discussion above) as recently as 1493.

According to Choque’s report, the future queen had taken the fastest route, by ship from Venice to Senj, while her train (including Choque himself), had taken the longer, overland route through the territory of the Holy Roman Empire.74 This is probably why King Vladislaus had arranged safe conduct with Emperor Maximilian I.75 Among the stops Anne and her escort made on the route between Senj and Zagreb, Choque mentioned only Modruš, Count Bernardine’s family seat.76 However, as the route was difficult and led through mountainous terrain, there must have been more stops. We can assume that Anne had taken the same route as King Louis XII’s emissaries on a journey just two years previously, in 1500, which is described in detail by Jean d’Auton.77 This route led from Senj to Brinje, the seat of Count John Angel Frankapan (Comte Angèle in d’Auton’s telling). From there, it went to Modruš, then to Zagreb, and then to Rakovac, Križevci, Koprivnica and over the Drava River into Hungary proper.78 The stop between Modruš and Zagreb named by d’Auton as “Lyre en Esclavonie” is probably Lipa on the River Dobra, which was a prosperous town at the beginning of the sixteenth century and also connected to the Frankapan family.79

One should notice that before the entourage arrived in Zagreb, two Frankapan castles were most likely used as stops, Modruš certainly and Brinje probably. Of these, Brinje and its master did not have a history of being well-disposed towards royal authorities. The castle had been temporarily occupied by the troops of King Matthias Corvinus some twenty years before Anne’s visit, when its owner, Count John Angel, ever a troublemaker, had been declared a rebel and an outlaw.80 In 1493, John Angel went as far as allying with the Ottomans against Vladislaus II (as was previously mentioned), and a royal army had been sent to subdue him. The Frankapans could not resist this army, and it besieged Brinje’s castle. Only the accidental arrival of a large Ottoman army prevented its fall.81

Of the rest of the stops on the way to the Drava River, Rakovec was a possession of Duke John Corvinus, but his ownership of it was heavily contested and had a troublesome past. It was one of the castles that had been given to him by his father, King Matthias. After his death and John’s unsuccessful bid for the crown, he was allowed to retain it, but he was burdened with a court case involving its previous owners, who continuously asserted their claims.82

As we have seen, not only had the persons who enabled Anne’s passage through Croatia been enemies of King Vladislaus until very recently, but the very places at which Anne stayed were former battlefields on which their forces had clashed. Nothing of this is mentioned in Choque’s report. In it, the people in question are presented as loyal subjects of the king and friendly hosts of his future bride. This was probably beneficial for the international standing of everyone involved. While describing Anne’s journey, Choque introduced Croatia and some of its aristocracy to the Western audience, primarily to Anne of Brittany, to whom he had dedicated his account. His report probably increased the Frankapans’ prestige, as it presented them as great and magnanimous lords. Choque reported that the future queen was received well in the great castle of Modruš. Also, as an aside, he noted that in that area the liturgy was performed in the Slavonic language. 83 This could mean that he, and presumably Anne herself, attended Glagolitic masses.84 This is not surprising, considering that the Frankapans were great patrons of the Slavonic liturgy. The area of Senj and Modruš was strongly Glagolitic, and at the time of Choque’s writing, there was an active printing house in Senj that produced religious books in the Glagolitic script.85

Although details such as this one sound interesting and exotic, Choque mentions only a few of them and only in passing. The most prominent part of his description of Croatia is the devastation wrought by the Ottoman armies.86 He noted that Anne’s train was safe from the Ottomans only after crossing the Drava River, and that the enormous escort, led by John Corvinus, was necessary for their protection.87 Although Choque mentions Modruš only in the context of the future queen’s reception, it should be noted that this once prosperous city had been sacked and put to the torch by the Ottomans less than ten years earlier, in 1493, with only the castle left intact. The Croatian countryside was regularly ravaged by Ottoman raids, which left many of the villages belonging to Count Bernardine completely abandoned. A census from 1486 lists more than a quarter of the villages belonging to the lordship of Modruš as deserted. Only a decade after Choque’s visit, the city itself lay abandoned.88 The count held a famous speech at the Reichstag in Nuremberg in 1522, begging for help in the fight against the Ottomans.89 From this viewpoint, Choque’s report was also beneficial for the persons included in it, as it presented them as victims of Ottoman depredations and also as valiant warriors. Choque stated that Hungary and its adjoined countries were the nation the Ottomans feared the most, for its men were hardy, experienced in warfare, and accustomed to hardships.90

As he was himself a herald, it is understandable that Choque expressed interest in local coats of arms. Upon crossing the Drava River, Anne was given a carriage to take her to Székesfehérvár, and Choque described the multifaceted coat of arms of King Vladislaus II that was blazoned on it. His description is unique in two ways. First, he described one of the Hungarian coats of arms, the one bearing the two-barred cross, as belonging to Dalmatia, and second, he ascribed the coat of arms bearing three crowned leopards’ heads or on a field azure to Croatia.91 In reality, even though both the Kingdom of Croatia and the Kingdom of Dalmatia were listed separately in the Hungarian-Croatian kings’ list of titles, a distinct coat of arms of the Kingdom of Croatia came into use only at the end of the fifteenth century.92 Until then, the two kingdoms had been jointly represented by a single coat of arms, the one with the three leopards’ heads.93 Hungary, on the other hand, was represented by two coats of arms, one of which was the two-barred cross, so Choque’s mistake is understandable.94 Nevertheless, it is strange that no one corrected this misconception, particularly as Choque apparently conversed with local nobles about coats of arms.

While conversing with the local nobles in Hungary, Choque was in a position not only to receive information but also to provide it. During Anne’s wedding and coronation, coats of arms of both France and England were carried before her, which surprised some of the magnates assembled. It was then explained to them that the earldom of Kendal was in England, and that Anne was therefore connected to both countries.95

We have followed Choque’s report of the future queen’s journey through Croatian lands and provided the context for his statements regarding this journey. While doing so, we tried to present his understanding of the lands he passed through, including their immediate past and their customs. It seems that the impression they made on him was overall favorable, or at least that is how he tried to present it. It is an impression of harmony between the king and his subjects, of a well-organized reception for the king’s bride, and of a nation persevering heroically against hardships. This image may have not reflected reality, but the fact that it was possible to create it offers testimony to King Vladislaus’ ability as a ruler.

Conclusion

The inquiry into the subject of the participation of Croats and Dalmatians in the wedding of King Vladislaus II and Anne of Kendal produced mixed results. When examining the role Felix Petančić might have played in it, the analysis of the sources and the secondary literature on the subject indicated that there is no evidence of Petančić’s involvement in the matter. However, it must be admitted that the reports on King Vladislaus’ embassy to France tasked with seeing and producing portraits of Anne and her cousin Germaine are unclear as to whether there was one or two envoys, and they are similarly unclear as to who produced said portraits. According to Marino Sanudo’s account, an Italian painter was sent, but other sources name only George of Běšin as the king’s ambassador. Despite this, the theory that this painter was Petančić depends on too many assumptions to be accepted without reservations, and even the assumption that he was a painter at all remains just that, an assumption. This theory should therefore be discarded unless evidence supporting it is discovered.

The epithalamium written by Matthew Andreis is, unlike Petančić’s portrait of Anne and Germaine, an existing work of art produced in relation to King Vladislaus’ and Anne’s wedding. An analysis of this epithalamium shows that Andreis was aware of many of the happenings connected with the wedding and of its background. Namely, he likely knew of Anne’s connection to England, as he places the origin of Anne’s family name (Candale) in Britain. This is more than many of the contemporaries in Hungary knew, at least according to Pierre Choque’s report. Also, Andreis knew that a bishop was sent to conclude a wedding contract with the king of France, and there are indications that he personally witnessed the meeting of Anne and her entourage with Lawrence of Ilok and the rest of the Hungarian guard of honor sent to escort the future queen to Hungary. In his text, he frequently mixes Christian images with images from Classical mythology, which sometimes produces bizarre results, such as Venus assisting a Christian bishop in his task of wooing Anne.

The future queen’s journey through Croatia and the Croatian participants in the ceremonies attached to it are described primarily based on the report written by Pierre Choque, a Breton herald in Anne’s retinue. When put into context, his report shows that Count Bernardine Frankapan played a prominent role in Anne’s passage through Croatia, as did his son-in-law, Duke John Corvinus. Choque explicitly mentions Anne’s stay at Count Bernardine’s family see, Modruš. However, other Frankapan lords probably participated in the ceremonies as well. If we look at the itinerary of French ambassadors sent to Hungary two years earlier, which is provided by Jean d’Auton, it may be assumed that Anne stopped in Brinje as well, which was a castle belonging to John Angel Frankapan. As this family was arguably the most powerful Croatian noble family at the time of the wedding, their role in the ceremony and the accompanying events seems logical, even more so considering their extensive ties with Italian noble houses. However, it is also notable that almost all of the Croatian lords mentioned had been enemies of King Vladislaus not long before his wedding, and their contribution to it was a remarkable show of cooperation on their part. Choque’s report also contains interesting observations about Croatia, such as its status as a border country adjacent to the Ottoman Empire.

In the end, we can conclude that the wedding of Anne of Foix and King Vladislaus brought together French and Croatian cultures and introduced the Croatian nobility and landscape to the French audience, while a Dalmatian humanist added a humanistic air to the accompanying ceremonies. Also, it is precisely this wedding that provided an opportunity for French observers to experience Croatia directly, making it less, or perhaps more exotic to the Western audience.

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