(hence: couch!), with tall wheels on the rear, now (and probably then, too) called “sandrunner” (
homokfuto). Finally, Bertrandon describes a tournament, held a propos the marriage of the young Count of Cilje, which he found very different from what he was used to in France. This paragraph is a unique source for such tournaments in Hungary.
>10I saw him [the son of the governor Ulrich of Cilje – JMB] at a tournament after their manner where the combatants were mounted on small horses and low saddles: they were gallantly dressed and had strong and short lances. It was a pleasing spectacle. Whenever the two champions hit, both perhaps, but certainly one of them must be unhorsed – and it is then seen, who has the firmest seat.
Bertrandon then left for Austria, where he encountered the first skepticism regarding his crusading plans. After a month he arrived back in Burgundy. Received with grace by his Duke Philippe, but his message was not much listened to. However, the Koran and a Life of Muhammad (in Latin translation), which he brought with him and was given by the duke to a learned cleric, engendered some polemical writings against Islam.
In the later fifteenth century, especially during the reign of King Matthias I (Corvinus) several foreign, mainly Italian, Humanists travelled to Hungary and made notes of their journey. None of them contains particularly relevant information, mainly because they, couched in elegant Ciceronian Latin, reflect more literary conventions than actual personal observations. Therefore, let us conclude with an interesting paragraph from the travelogue of the learned Jacques Bongars,>11 ambassador of France to the Holy Roman Empire, editor of the first collection of medieval Hungarian sources, who crossed what was left of the kingdom of Hungary in 1585, on his way to Constantinople. By that time, the medieval kingdom ceased to exist: the west and the north (today’s Slovakia) was part of the Hamburg Empire; the east (today’s Transylvania in Romania) a tributary of the High Porte; and the middle belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Bongars visited several places in the non-occupied regions, always listing the strength of the garrisons, giving a picture of a country continuously at war. In this short paragraph, he describes the peculiar frontier-conditions along the Ottoman-held territory.