Ottoman Hungary Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The paper gives an overview of the beginnings of the artistic presentation of individual cities and towns on the Danube in the central part of its course, from Buda to Belgrade. These depictions were initially, from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, limited to the two cities mentioned. We find them in the works or editions by Hartmann Schedel, Wolfgang Resch, Erhardt Schön, Sebastian Münster and other, more recent authors or publishers. The earliest depictions of certain places in the part of the Danube between the Drava and the Sava (for example Vukovar) can be found in miniatures of illuminated Ottoman codices. Among them, the first place belongs to a chronicle codex from 1546, illustrated by Matrakçı Nasuh el-Visokavi, a polymath author of Bosnian origin.
Western artists have been depicting places in this area since the late 16th century, as a rule in the function of documenting diplomatic trips along the Danube from Christian Europe to the Ottoman Empire. Travelogues form an extremely interesting and data-rich group of sources for the history of the middle Danube region during the Ottoman rule (16th-17th centuries). Dozens of European travelers who traveled through the Danube region to Constantinople or other parts of the Ottoman Empire during this period, for diplomatic or other purposes, left detailed records of the circumstances they observed and experiences they had. Some of these texts are accompanied by artistic illustrations – drawings of individual settlements and other scenes seen on the trip. The Baranya, Slavonian and Syrmian sections of the Danube region appear in illustrations in four travelogues. Heinrich Ottendorf's work, Der Weg von Ofen auf Griechischen Weissenburg, compiled in 1663-1665 and preserved in manuscript (published in 1943), provides the plans of various towns between Buda and Belgrade based on the sightings of a traveler using the roads. Of the cities on the Danube, Vukovar and Zemun are shown here. Edward Brown's travelogue, first published in London in 1673 under the title A brief account of some travels in Hungaria ..., contains copperplate engravings depicting the long Turkish bridge from Osijek to Darda and a village in Srijem with dugout houses.
The remaining two illustrated travelogues can be defined as "Danubian" in the proper sense because their authors used the Danube waterway for travel. A manuscript "travelogue" was recently discovered in Leiden, consisting of the drawings only, without a textual description of the journey, and was probably made by an unknown member of a group mission to Constantinople that traveled the Danube waterway and the Balkans by land around 1580. Leiden's "drawing block", later entitled Imagines urbium quarundam Hungariae et Turciae, contains 26 completed drawings and five unfinished sketches showing places from Hainburg on the Danube to the western approaches to Constantinople. Among them are depictions of seven Slavonian-Syrmian places: Osijek, Erdut, Vukovar, Šarengrad, Petrovaradin, Slankamen and Zemun. The exceptional historical value of these realistic drawings is underlined by the fact that they are the oldest known visual representations of Western provenance that reveal the appearance of settlements in the lower interfluve of the Drava and Sava rivers.
The main attention in the paper is paid to the lost illustrated codex by Maximilian Prandstetter (Brandstetter), with a description of the journey of 1608-1609. The travelogue entitled Itinerarium oder Raisbeschreibung has been known since the 19th century, in which Prandstetter described in German the path of the Habsburg imperial embassy to Constantinople under the leadership of Baron Adam of Herberstein. The travelogue has been preserved in two manuscript codices, and was published both in excerpts and in its entirety in the 20th century. One of the two codices, housed in the private library in Hédervár owned by the counts of Viczay and then Khuen-Héderváry, was richly illustrated, but after World War II it disappeared and was probably destroyed. Among other illustrations, it contained views, made in watercolor, of six places from the mouth of the Drava to the mouth of the Sava into the Danube; indirectly, in various copies, depictions of Erdut, Vukovar, Ilok and Zemun have survived. From illustrations with depictions of other places, those depicting Buda and Mohács have been preserved, apparently as fragments of the original codex.