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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Matković, Petar. Putovanja po Balkanskom poluotoku XVI. veka: Felix Petančić i njegov opis puteva u Tursku [Journeys though the Balkans in the sixteenth century: Felix Petančić and his description of pathways into Turkey]. Zagreb, 1879.

Mesić, Matija. Hrvati na izmaku srednjega vijeka – izabrane rasprave [Croats at the end of the Middle Ages – Selected treatises]. Slavonski Brod: Hrvatski institut za povijest – Odjel za povijest Slavonije, Srijema i Baranje – Matica Hrvatska-Ogranak Slavonski brod – Povijesni arhiv Slavonski Brod, 1996.

Miličić, Irena. “Književnost ili povijest? Knjižica o opisu putova u Tursku: Feliks Petančić i njegov renesansni bestseler” [Literature or history? The itineribus in Turciam libellus: Feliks Petančić and his Renaissance bestseller]. Povijesni prilozi 32, no. 44 (2013): 155–68.

Mlinar, Janez. “Tipologija prekograničnih odnosa u kasnom srednjem vijeku: Primjer knezova Frankapana” [Typology of cross-border relations in the late Middle Ages: The example of the Frankopan counts]. Historijski zbornik 62 (2009): 29–45.

Palotás, György. “‘The Scythian–Sarmatian Wedding’ and the epithalamion of Michael Verancius (1539).” Colloquia Maruliana 23 (2014): 99–118.

Pastrnak, Patrik. “The Bridal Journey of Bona Sforza.” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 24 (2018): 145–56.

Petešić, Ćiril. “Glagoljski prvotisci i pavlini” [Glagolitic first editions and the Paulines]. Croatica Christiana periodica 13, no. 24 (1989): 27–44.

Plosnić Škaričić, Ana. “Blok Andreis u Trogiru: Prilog poznavanju romaničke stambene arhitekture” [The Andreis Block in Trogir: A contribution to the study of Romanesque residential architecture]. Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnosti 31 (2007): 9–28.

Rakova, Snezhana. “The Last Crusaders: Felix Petančić and the Unfulfilled Crusade of 1502.” In Au Nord et au Sud du Danube: Dynamiques politiques, sociales et religieuses dans le pasée, edited by Snezhana Rakova, and Gheorghe Lazăr, 49–73. Braila: Editura Istros, 2019.

Runje, Petar. “Senjski kulturni krug i senjska tiskara” [The cultural circle and the printing house of Senj]. Senjski zbornik 35 (2008): 91–114.

Santrot, Jacques. Les doubles Funérailles d’Anne de Bretagne. Le corps et le cœur (janvier-mars 1514). Genève: Droz, 2017.

Smičiklas, Tadija. Poviest hrvatska. Dio prvi: Od najstarijih vremena do godine 1526 [History of Croatia. Part one, from the earliest times to the year 1526]. Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1882.

Szeberényi, Gábor. “’Granice’ Slavonije u 13.-14. stoljeću: napomene za prosudbu granične uloge Drave i Gvozda” [The boundaries of Slavonia in the 13th–14th centuries: Remarks on the border roles of the River Drava and Mount Gvozd]. Scrinia Slavonica 17 (2017): 419–34.

Šercer, Marija. “Žene Frankopanke” [The Frankapan women]. Modruški zbornik 4–5 (2011): 21–81.

Špoljarić, Luka. “Feliks Petančić.” In Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 7, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America (1500–1600), edited by David Thomas, and John Chesworth, 50–57. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Špoljarić, Luka. “Zov partenopejskih princeza: Kosače i Frankapani u bračnim pregovorima s napuljskim kraljem Ferranteom” [The call of Parthenopean princesses: The Kosače and the Frankapani in marriage negotiations with Ferrante king of Naples]. Radovi - Zavod za hrvatsku povijest 52, no. 3 (2020): 121–88.

Woodacre, Elena. “Cousins and Queens: Familial Ties, Political Ambition and Epistolary Diplomacy in Renaissance Europe.” In Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500, edited by Glenda Sluga, and Carolyn James, 30–45. London–New York: Routledge, 2016.

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1. 1* I would like to thank the Fulbright Program and the University of California, Los Angeles for supporting the research required for the completion of this text.

   Gaston’s grandfather, Gaston I de Grailly, whose family had been English subjects for generations, refused to become a vassal of the king of France when Guyenne was conquered by the French in 1451. He chose to emigrate to England together with his son John, Earl of Kendal, and he sold his French titles and holdings to his relatives. John’s son, the three-year-old Gaston II, was left in the care of his cousin Gaston IV of Foix-Béarn as a hostage. This situation lasted until John de Grailly returned to France in 1462 and rendered homage to King Louis XI, regaining most of his ancestral holdings. See Courteault, Gaston IX, 154 and 249.

2. 2 Cornette, Anne de Bretagne, 235–36; Santrot, Les doubles Funérailles d’Anne de Bretagne, 545; Brown, The Queen’s Library, 27. Regarding the family ties of Anne of Brittany, Anne of Foix-Kendal and Germaine of Foix, see Woodacre, “Cousins and Queens.” Regarding the planned anti-Ottoman crusade, see Rakova, “The Last Crusaders,” although note that some of the opinions regarding Petančić were refuted by other authors, and also in the discussion here.

3. 3 The quote above comes from Smičiklas, Poviest hrvatska, 682; see also Mesić, Hrvati na izmaku, 48–49 and Klaić, Povijest Hrvata, vol. 4, 264. The latter two historians, while disparaging Vladislaus II, admit that Anne was an “energetic woman” who acted as a positive influence on him.

4. 4 Kukuljević Sakcinski, Beatrica Frankapan, 40.

5. 5 Sirmiensis, Epistola de perdicione regni Hungarorum, 39–44.

6. 6 Despite his parentage having nothing to do with Croatia, early Croatian historians saw John Corvinus primarily as a “Croatian” magnate; see, for example, Horvat, Ivan Korvin, ban hrvatski.

7. 7 Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski was very critical of George of Syrmia’s text, and the story about the alleged poisoning prompted him dismissively to call George a “mad priest,” as was mentioned above. Kukuljević Sakcinski, Beatrica Frankapan, 40. Matija Mesić also thought that the story could be disregarded as untrue. See Mesić, Hrvati na izmaku, 46, no. 1.

8. 8 For example, Smičiklas, Poviest hrvatska, 683. Rudolf Horvat claimed that George’s story was most likely not true, but that George did not make it up. According to him, George had simply recorded rumors that were circulating at the time. See Horvat, Ivan Korvin, 58–61. The story is also mentioned in passing in Klaić, Povijest Hrvata, vol. 4, 266, and the author refrained from assessing its veracity.

9. 9 Zagorka, Gordana, vol. 5, 182–95.

10. 10 Ibid., 204–5.

11. 11 Kosior, Becoming a Queen, 28.

12. 12 Ibid., 47.

13. 13 Brown, The Queen’s Library, 32.

14. 14 A good and relatively recent discussion of a part of this problem can be found in Szeberényi, “‘Granice’ Slavonije u 13.-14. stoljeću.”

15. 15 Kniewald, Feliks Petančić i njegova djela, 11.

16. 16 Banfi, “Felice Petanzio da Ragusa”; Kniewald, “Sitnoslikar,” 55–58. Regarding Petančić’s supposed career in Dubrovnik and his entry into Vladislaus II’s service, see Kolendić, “Feliks Petančić pre definitivnog odlaska u Ugarsku.” For a short and relatively recent biography and description of his treatises, see Špoljarić, “Feliks Petančić.” All these works presume that Felix the illuminator (the one from Nicholas Olah’s report) and Felix Petančić are the same person. This assumption is challenged in Géza Dávid and Lakatos, “Felix Petancius,” 47–54. Regarding Petančić’s diplomatic missions in King Vladislaus’ service, see Lakatos, “A király diplomatái,” 304, no. 52, 312, no. 69, 324–25, no. 121 and 327–28, no. 125.

17. 17 Kniewald, “Dubrovčanin Feliks Petančić,” 80–81 and 104; Kniewald, “Sitnoslikar,” 58–59; Špoljarić, Feliks Petančić, 53–57. These authors claimed that this work was presented to Vladislaus in 1502, upon Petančić’s return from a mission to the Knights Hospitaller on Rhodes; Dávid and Lakatos propose a different date of origin, perhaps as early as 1498. See Dávid and Lakatos, “Felix Petancius,” 68–69.

18. 18 Dragutin Kniewald treated this assumption as a fact and also summed up older historian’s opinions on this matter; see Kniewald, Feliks Petančić, 20–23.

19. 19 As Ilona Berkovits put it, “è naturale, anzi, più che naturale, che sia stato Felice Petanzio Ragusino pittore a miniare e decorare l’opera di Felice Petanzio Ragusino scrittore.” Berkovits, “Felice Petanzio Ragusino,” 55. Kniewald agreed with her and added his own opinions on the matter. His argumentation is an excellent example of the extent to which the theory depended on the premise that Petančić was a skilled artist and “must have” illuminated his own texts. See Kniewald, Feliks Petančić, 84. Going even further, when describing in detail the miniatures of Ottoman sultans and officials in Petančić’s Genealogia Turcorum imperatorum. Kniewald concluded that they were painted by a skilled miniaturist, who had an affinity for painting portraits. See Kniewald, “Sitnoslikar,” 84. Note that Edith Hoffmann, one of the earliest researchers of illuminated manuscripts later attributed to Petančić, did not attribute the relevant illuminations to him, though she did speculate on the possibility that they were the work of a “Felix Ragusanus,” an illuminator in the royal scriptorium mentioned by, as explained earlier, Nicholas Olah. See Hoffmann, “Der künstleriche Schmuck der Corvin-Codices,” 148 and 151. Much earlier, Petar Matković claimed that Olah’s Felix was one and the same person as Felix Petančić, because they were both from Dubrovnik and bore the same first name, lived at about the same time and engaged in diplomatic activities. See Matković, Putovanja po Balkanskom poluotoku XVI. veka. Felix Petančić i njegov opis puteva u Tursku, 6–7 and 10.

20. 20 Pray, Annales, vol. 4, 296–97.

21. 21 Ibid., 299–303.

22. 22 Istvánffy, Regni Hungarici historia, 31.

23. 23 Matković, Putovanja, 6–17; regarding the alleged French mission, see 11–12.

24. 24 Katona, Historia critica regum Hungariae, vol. 11, ser. 18, 323–24.

25. 25 Timon, Epitome chronologica rerum Hungaricarum et Transilvanicarum, 106.

26. 26 “È ytaliano et, come intisi, era pytor, andava a veder le done per il maritar dil re.” Sanudo, I Diarii, vol. 3, 630.

27. 27 Kniewald, “Sitnoslikar,” 84–85. Some authors were so certain that it was Petančić who traveled to France on King Vladislaus’ behalf that they referred to Petančić’s mission as a fact, not a possibility; for example, Berkovits, “Felice Petanzio,” 54; Krmpotić, “Dubrovčanin Feliks Petančić,” 300; Jembrih, “Feliks Petančić i njegovo djelo,” 116; Miličić, “Književnost ili povijest?” 157.

28. 28 D’Auton, Chroniques, vol. 2, 80–81. See also Kosior, Becoming a Queen, 29, and Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 28–29, where the possibility that the portraits were painted by Petančić is also discussed.

29. 29 Lakatos, “A király diplomatái,” 301–302, no. 44. Lakatos considers the possibility that there might have indeed been two embassies.

30. 30 Sanudo, I Diarii, vol. 3, 890.

31. 31 Ibid., 1245. Interestingly, George of Běšin carried a letter of recommendation from King Vladislaus II addressed to Anne of Brittany. This letter shows that the king knew the women were in her care. See Le Roux de Lincy, Vie de la reine Anne, vol. 4, 75–76, no. 1.

32. 32 Sanudo, I Diarii, vol. 3, 1267.

33. 33 Ibid., 1111.

34. 34 Brown, The Queen’s Library, 33–38; Kniewald, Feliks Petančić, 21–22.

35. 35 Angelo Gabriel, Libellus hospitalis munificentiae Venetorum in excipienda Anna regina Hungariae (Venice, 1502). See also dal Borgo, “Gabriel, Angelo,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 51 (1998), accessed on April 8, 2023, https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/angelo-gabriel_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/.

36. 36 Classical-inspired epithalamia were a fashionable addition to the wedding festivities at the time; see Kosior, Becoming a Queen, 116–17.

37. 37 For an outline of the family’s involvement in politics in Trogir, see Benyovsky Latin, Srednjovjekovni Trogir, 11–40. For a list of members of the family and an outline of its own history, see Andreis, Trogirsko plemstvo, 118–28.

38. 38 Benyovsky Latin, Srednjovjekovni Trogir, 161–62. For a more thorough analysis of the Andreis palace and tower, see Plosnić Škaričić, “Blok Andreis u Trogiru.”

39. 39 Andreis, Trogirsko plemstvo, 95.

40. 40 Jovanović, “Jedan rani humanistički epitalamij,” 717.

41. 41 Jovanović, “Moja muza, Mnemozina.”

42. 42 Jovanović, “Jedan rani,” 725–26.

43. 43 Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium in nuptias Vladislai Pannoniarum ac Boemiae regis et Annae Candaliae reginae, 11, lines 250–260; Jovanović, “Jedan rani,” 719.

44. 44 “…saevi non horrida classica Martis

    Triste minaxque fremunt, sed tota haec pompa triumphi,

    Virgo, tui…“; Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium, 14, lines 390–392.

45. 45 Jovanović, “Epithalamium,” 62.

46. 46 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 42–43; Lakatos, “A király diplomatái,” 305–6, no. 56.

47. 47 Jovanović, “Epithalamium Mateja Andreisa. Žanrovski okvir i struktura djela,” 63; Jovanović, “Jedan rani,” 723.

48. 48 Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium, 8–9, lines 117–138.

49. 49 “Nomen ab extremis ductum regale Britannis

    Supremos hominum Morinos et Belgica regna

    Quod rexit longumque reget…

    …

    …horum sit Celtica testis

    terra, Calidonii sint, ultima regna, profundi.“ Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium, 11, lines 230–233 and 236–237.

50. 50 “Hos inter titulos antiqua ab origine patres

    Candalii apparent et honorae stemmata gentis.” Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium, 11, lines 263–264.

51. 51 Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium, 5, dedication. See also Lakatos, “A király diplomatái,” 305. There are indications that Csáky was a member of the delegation sent by Vladislaus to Venice, or at least that he was supposed to be.

52. 52 Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium, 8, lines 101–106

53. 53 “Seligit e numero procerum, cui plurimus extat

    Eloquii splendor, Pyliae cui mella senectae

    Dulichiique oris torrentia flumina cedunt.

    Cuius saepe fides in summis cognita rebus,

    Orantem magnae stupuit quem curia Romae,

    Cuius honorato praefulget vertice clarae

    Pontificalis honos, pretium virtutis…” Andronicus Tragurinus, Epithalamium, 10, lines 191–197.

    Andreis liked presenting his readers with riddles. Here, Nestor and Ulysses are hidden behind the names of their domains, Pylos and, because Ithaca would have been too obvious, Dulichium. For other examples of such wordplay, see Jovanović, “Jedan rani,” 725–26.

54. 54 See Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 30–31 and Lakatos, “A király diplomatái,” 303–304, no. 50, and 305, no. 54.

55. 55 See Palotás, “‘The Scythian-Sarmatian Wedding’ and the epithalamion of Michael Verancius (1539).”

56. 56 Woodacre, “Cousins and Queens,” 39. The letters sent by King Vladislaus to Anne of Brittany regarding her cousin’s and his wedding demonstrate her importance in the negotiations concerning the marriage; see Le Roux de Lincy, Vie de la reine Anne, 75–80.

57. 57 Brown, The Queen’s Library, 30.

58. 58 For a brief description of Choque’s report and the context in which it originated, see Brown, The Queen’s Library, 27–38.

59. 59 For descriptions of these manuscripts and an explanation of the text’s transmission, see Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 12–16 or Györkös, “Pierre Choque Magyarországról,” vol. 2, 545–50. Attila Györkös transcribed both the (complete) Paris redaction and the London redaction in Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 129–51, in parallel columns, and added a translation into Hungarian. However, it should be noted that Choque’s text only began to be studied by Hungarian historians in the nineteenth century. Its Paris redaction was first published in France by Antoine Jean Victor Le Roux de Lincy, the author of a monumental biography of Anne of Brittany: “Discours des cérémonies du mariage d’Anne de Foix, de la maison de France, avec Ladislas VI, roi de Bohême, précédé du discours du voyage de cette reine dans la seigneurie de Venise, le tout mis en écrit du commandant d’Anne, reine de France, duchesse de Bretagne, par Pierre Choque, dit Bretagne, l’un de ses rois d’armes. Mai 1502,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 22 (1861): 156–85 and 422–39. A transcript of the same text appeared in Hungarian in 1877: Marczali, “Közlemények a párisi nemzeti könyvtárból.” A Hungarian translation of this text was published in 1891: Szamota, Régi utazások Magyarországon és a Balkán-félszigeten, 131–46.

60. 60 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 54–55. For a biography of Bernardine Frankapan, see Kruhek, “Bernardin Frankopan.” The latter article is mostly a summation of 19th and early twentieth century literature. The most complete history of the Frankapan family is still Klaić, Krčki knezovi Frankapani, and it covers only the period until the year 1480, as the second intended volume was never produced. Also, much information can be gathered from Grgin, Počeci rasapa. Kralj Matijaš Korvin i srednjovjekovna Hrvatska, which is a newer work. It ends with the death of King Matthias Corvinus in 1490.

61. 61 Regarding the latter, see Mlinar, “Tipologija prekograničnih odnosa u kasnom srednjem vijeku.”

62. 62 For example, Bernardine’s father Stephen maintained contacts with King Alfonso of Naples and Aragon (l. 1396–1458); see Kurelić, “Alfonso V. i ugarsko-hrvatsko prijestolje.”

63. 63 Klaić, Krčki knezovi, 230; Ivan Jurković, “Family Ties,” 207–8.

64. 64 The politics behind their marriage, which needed a papal dispensation, as the prospective spouses were related, is explained in admirable detail in Špoljarić, “Zov partenopejskih princeza,” 146–56.

65. 65 Her life and marriage to John is briefly recounted in Šercer, “Žene Frankopanke,” 46–50.

66. 66 Jurković, “Turska opasnost 77–79; Kekez, “Bernardin Frankapan.”

67. 67 Špoljarić, “Zov partenopejskih princeza,” 155–56.

68. 68 Fedeles, “Opsada Iloka 1494.”

69. 69 Engel, The Realm of St. Stephen, 345–46. Regarding John Corvinus’ life and legacy, see also Farbaky, “The Heir,” 413–32.

70. 70 Šišić, “Rukovet spomenika,” 96–98, no. 92–196.

71. 71 Ibid., 109–18, no. 201–202.

72. 72 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 130–31. A fictional account of this journey was written by the afore­mentioned Marija Jurić Zagorka in her novel; despite some deliberate distortions, her description closely follows Choque’s report. Zagorka, Gordana, vol. 5, 163–67.

73. 73 Grgin, Počeci rasapa, 104–5.

74. 74 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 131. Similar compromises between haste and pomp had to be made for the bridal journey of Bona Sforza; see Pastrnak, “The Bridal Journey of Bona Sforza,” 148–49.

75. 75 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 32.

76. 76 Ibid., 133.

77. 77 This was proposed by Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 55–56.

78. 78 D’Auton, Chroniques, vol. 2, 79. In this edition, “Bergue” is obviously misread; the only logical reading would be “Bergne,” a French rendition of Brinje.

79. 79 Regarding Lipa, see Lopašić, Oko Kupe i Korane, 171–80.

80. 80 Grgin, Počeci rasapa, 109.

81. 81 Kekez, “Bernardin Frankapan,” 73–74.

82. 82 Klaić, Medvedgrad i njegovi gospodari, 168–80.

83. 83 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 132.

84. 84 Although none of the local churches is mentioned in the report, there were plenty that would have been worthy of a royal visit at that time; today most of them lie in ruins. See Horvat, Srednjovjekovne katedralne.

85. 85 Petešić, “Glagoljski prvotisci i pavlini”; Runje, “Senjski kulturni krug i senjska tiskara.” The whole issue of the latter journal was devoted to the Glagolitic printing house in Senj.

86. 86 “Celluy pays d’Esclavoye est destruit pour les courses et pillaiges que font les Turcqs.” Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 132.

87. 87 “Partit pour venir passer une riviere nommée la Drave affin d’estre hors des dangiers des Turcqs. Laquelle riviere fait la separation de la principauté de Crevasie et du royaume de Hongrie.” Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 132.

88. 88 Kruhek, Srednjovjekovni Modruš, 55–59.

89. 89 See Frankapan Modruški, Oratio pro Croatia / Govor za Hrvatsku (1522.).

90. 90 “C’est la nation que les Turcqs craignent le plus, car ilz sont bon combatans et hardiz; et sont accoustumez de coucher troys-quatre moys hors, sans lict…” Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 148.

91. 91 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 134.

92. 92 See Hye, “Zur Geschichte des Staatswappens von Kroatien und zu dessen ältester Darstellung in Innsbruck”; Božić and Čosić, Hrvatski grbovi, 66–86.

93. 93 Regarding this, see Božić and Čosić, Hrvatski grbovi, 30–49.

94. 94 Regarding this, see also Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 15–16.

95. 95 Györkös, Reneszánsz utazás, 140; see also the editor’s comment in the accompanying study in ibid, 61.