The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1986 (27. évfolyam, 104. szám)
HISTORY - Petrovics István - György Endre: Capystranus, a Late Medieval English Romance on the 1456 Siege of Belgrade
142 T H E N E W H U N G A R IA N QU A RTERLY with amendations and annotations. We also have to express our due acknowledgement for his scholarly opinion on many aspects of this introduction. Juxtaposing the text, Éva Róna’s early evaluation, Professor Ringler’s suggestions, as well as related English and Hungarian historical works, the problems can be grouped as follows: 1. The literary aspect: the problem of genre, the circumstances of composition, the sources, the transmission to print, and, last but not least, the possible identity of the author. 2. The historical side: the relationship of fiction and fact in Capystranus. The actual description of the siege of Belgrade; the role of Capistrano in the fighting; the identity of the two foreign knights, one English, one an ex-muslim convert; the Hungarian environment, especially the reference to the “greatest university, Gottauntas;” just to mention the most obvious riddles in and about this text. As for the work, the text itself suggests that it was meant to follow the tradition of the medieval heroic romances. William Ringler sees the work as one closely following the manner of the earlier Charlemagne poems. Examining the tail-rhymed stanzas, the hackneyed cliches, the formulatic phrasing, he also thinks that the author must have been a minstral poet and that the work reached print through oral transmission. This is in contrast to Éva Róna, who supposed that the printer, de Worde himself, was the author, having heard the story while he lived on the Continent. The long gap in time between hearing the story and composing it directly for the press would account for the distortions of the names and for other inconsistencies. The radical modernizations in the text (which lead to its degeneration) indicate a longer process of oral transmission before printing, rather than composition immediately preceding publication. The possible sources also suggest an earlier date for composition. As we know from Lajos Kropf, a 15th-century theological lexicon, Dr Thomas Gascoigne’s Liber vmtatum, gave a full account of the events at Belgrade. Gascoigne even claimed to have seen a letter from Hunyadi to the Archbishop of Canterbury and delivered by a Hungarian priest, Erasmus Fullár, containing a full account of the siege. Gascoigne’s summary has as many fictitious elements and exaggerations as our romance, and its style—together with the contemporary chronicles, English and Continental—is direct, rough and completely medieval. By the time “Capystranus" was printed about 1515, the general style of chronicles as well as occasional poets had totally changed. This can be clearly seen from the comparison of two Hungarian poems, both dealing with Hunyadi and the historical past, both written in Latin, though totally different in style and tone. The anonymous leonine rhymes, entitled “Lamentation over the Dead Hunyadi,” dating from 1456, and “Capystranus” are quite similar to each other in poetic forms as well as in their view of the world. Unpolished versification, ragged lines, an ecstatically religious overtone, a strong emphasis on military heroics and miraculous elements characterise both of them. Márton Nagyszombati’s long poem, Opusculum ad regni Hungáriáé Proceres (printed in Vienna, 1523), on the other hand, is the learned and refined achievement of a humanist. The smooth distichs inspired by the 1521 fall of Belgrade also emphasise heroism and try to recreate the atmosphere of the days of old victories; all this is conveyed in a style overloaded with classical and mythological allusions, ornaments of the new, learned, Renaissance versification. The publication of Capystranus and the two reprints in the first half of the 16th century do not so much indicate the time of composition as the actuality of the theme, since the Turks continued to be the major threat to Christendom. The fall of Rhodes in 1522, then the disastrous battle at Mo.