Georgius de Hungaria

Georgius de Hungaria (also Frater Georgius , Georgius de Septemcastris , Rumeser student , nameless Mühlbacher , * 1422 in Rumes , Transylvania , † 1502 in Rome ) was a Transylvanian Dominican who was captured as a youth during an attack by Ottoman troops and taken to Turkey and later wrote an autobiographical book about his experiences, which is one of the early occidental works on the Turks and Islam. Martin Luther translated the work into German in 1530.

Life

The Mühlbacher Kirchenburg with remains of the fortifications

Research only knows about Georgius' life from his own work. A second tradition consists of information about a Rumeser student who was also abducted by the Turks and from whom writings are handed down. For a long time, research assumed that these were two different people. Recently, however, the majority have assumed that they are the same person. The following biography is based on the synthesis of both lines of tradition:

Georgius was born in Rumes, a village of the Transylvanian Saxons , in 1422. It can therefore be assumed that he himself was a German-speaking Saxon, but this is not clearly certain. His works and other contemporary mentions are written in Latin, which means that ethnicity cannot be clearly established. He could also have been a Transylvanian Hungarian, or a Romanian, although the latter is rather unlikely since there were practically no Catholic Romanians at the time. In any case, he already received school education as a teenager. In 1436 he went to Mühlbach (rum. Sebeş ), where he attended the Dominican school there as a novice. Only one year later, in 1437, at a time when Constantinople was still Byzantine, Mühlbach was attacked and besieged in one of the first so far northern advances by Ottoman troops. In the army of Sultan Murad II there were also Wallachian troops under Vlad II Dracul . The residents soon capitulated, only a few students holed up in a tower under the command of a nobleman. After the attackers set fire around the tower, this small group also had to surrender. A large part of the residents of Mühlbach was captured and kidnapped by the Turks. While most of them returned to their hometown a year later after paying a ransom, the group was dragged from the tower to Adrianople and sold there as slaves, including the 17-year-old Georgius.

According to his report, he then lived in Turkey for more than 20 years, made several unsuccessful attempts to escape, was repeatedly sold from one man to the next, but during this time he came into close contact with the Turkish way of life and got to know Islam . As an educated slave, he was treated well and viewed by his last master as a son of his own. He traveled both Rumelia and the Asian part of Anatolia , he came into contact with Islamic scholars, including dervishes . Under the impression of the then flourishing Ottoman high culture, he began to doubt his upbringing and in a certain way admired the Islamic way of life of the Turks. He was particularly impressed by the moral rigor, the politeness and the modesty. At one point he was even offered a senior position as a teacher in a dervish madrasa . In 1458 he was finally able to convince his last master that he would like to travel back to the West for further theological studies, which he was granted. He now went to Italy and in Rome rejoined the Dominicans whom he knew from his youth. In Rome he finally wrote his autobiographical work, which was published in Latin in 1481. He lived until 1502 and died in Rome. It is not known whether he ever returned to his Transylvanian homeland.

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His work Tractatus de moribus, condictionibus et nequicia Turcorum (treatise on the customs, living conditions and malice of the Turks) appeared in 1481 and initially received little attention. It was only after his death, when the Turks defeated the Hungarians in the Battle of Mohács in 1526 and stood in front of Vienna in 1529 , that the Christian West became interested in information about the Turks. Martin Luther, who had known the work for a number of years, translated it into German in 1529 and published it in 1530. Thanks to the book printing system , which had meanwhile been invented , it was quickly distributed. Eleven German editions are known from the 16th century alone. As one of the few eyewitness reports from the Ottoman Empire, it became a kind of "bestseller" in the 16th century, while later it was largely forgotten again and only played a role in local Transylvanian historiography in the 20th century.

Georgius, who wrote down his experiences more than 20 years apart, was still quite a person of the Middle Ages, characterized by a scholastic education . He rejected the beginning renaissance in Italy, criticized the corruption in the curia , the purchase of offices ( simony ), the luxury and vanity of the upper class, but also the viciousness of the common people in western countries. Despite all the rejection of Islam as heresy, he was impressed by the strict moral standards, cleanliness and righteousness of the Turks. Torn between his conscience and what he experienced as a benevolently treated slave in the Ottoman Empire, he developed his own explanations of how a Christian could deal with such experiences. He was particularly impressed by the Turkish dervishes who, similar to monks, practiced a mystical religiosity. As a scholastic who trusted in the power of reason and argument, however, he found the militaristic expansion of Islam by the sword repulsive. Arab or Persian Muslims do not appear in his work, nor does he mention Orthodox Christians under Turkish rule at all, although he must have met them in Adrianople or Constantinople. His work is entirely a juxtaposition of the Latin Church with the Muslim Turks. In an appendix he refers to Joachim von Fiore , who lived three centuries before him and who dealt theoretically with Islam. In a further appendix he provides two poems in the Turkish language that have not previously been handed down in writing in the West - one reason why his report is regarded as authentic.

Tractatus de moribus, condictionibus et nequicia Turcorum

Chapter:

• 0.1. Preface
• 0.2. preface
• 1. How the Turks gradually occupied and settled the Orient
• 2. How the sect of the Turks increased and where the name Turk came from
• 3. How terrible the sect of the Turks is and how much they must be feared
• 4. How the persecution of the body and the persecution of the soul differ
• 5. How eager the Turks are to track down and rob Christians
• 6. How they keep, buy and sell prisoners
• 7. Of their greed for possession of slaves and of the escape and liberation of slaves
• 8. Of those who, not against their will and under duress, but voluntarily expose themselves to this danger or put themselves into it.
• 9. Of the reasons for being convinced of this sect and giving it preference over the Christian faith, and of its various types
• 10. The special reasons of experience
• 11. Of the reasons that attract others and at the same time strongly encourage the Turks themselves in their erroneous beliefs
• 12. On the honesty of Turkish women
• 13. From the supernatural and spiritual reasons and first of all from the creed and law of the Turks
• 14. Of the supernatural and religious reasons
• 15. Next from supernatural reasons and deceptive signs and wonders
• 16. Whether any reason is sufficient to take a Christian's faith
• 17. On the interpretation of the reasons
• 18. Of the great future advances of this sect as they result from the consideration of its foundation
• 19. On the interpretation of the other reasons
• 20. Of the reasons that lead one away from the heresy of the Turks
• 21. Of the second and third of the reasons that lead one away from the mistaken belief of the Turks: their ignorance and stubbornness
• 22. From a remarkable incident that occurred in Turkey - as confirmation of what has been said so far
• 23. Of the virtues of the Christian religion
• A.1. To certify the testimony of what has been said
• A.2. Two poems in Turkish vernacular
• A.3. Abbot Joachim's opinion on the sect of Mechomet

literature

• Reinhard Klockow: Georg of Hungary and the seductive exemplary character of the Turks. In: Gereon Sievernich, Hendrik Budde (ed.): Europe and the Orient 800–1900. Berlin 1989, pp. 43-46.
• Georgius de Hungaria: Tractatus de moribus, condictionibus et nequicia Turcorum. Edited after the first edition in 1481, translated and introduced by Reinhard Klockow. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1993.
• Almut Höfert: From Antichrist to Man. The change in the Western European image of the Turks in the early modern period based on the treatise on the customs, living conditions and malice of the Turks by George of Hungary. In: Jürgen Reulecke (Ed.): Balancing act with a headscarf. Essays on the German-Turkish Summer Academy of the Körber Foundation. Edition Körber Foundation, Hamburg 1997, pp. 47–72.
• Hans-Joachim Böttcher : The Turkish Wars in the Mirror of Saxon Biographies , Gabriele Schäfer Verlag, Herne 2019, ISBN 978-3-944487-63-2 , p. 31.

Web links

• povestisasesti.com: Legenda Turnului studentului din Sebeș , accessed on March 3, 2016 (Romanian)