Joanot Martorell

Mossèn Joanot Martorell (* 1410 in Gandia south of Valencia ; † beginning of 1465 ) was a Valencian writer and knight from the late Middle Ages . His work Tirant lo Blanc , written in Catalan , is considered the forerunner of the modern novel .

Title page of the first Catalan edition of Tirant lo Blanc , 1490

life and work

Joanot Martorell's family came from the middle nobility of the Kingdom of Valencia . His grandfather Guillem was a member of the Aragonese Privy Council of Martin I , his father Francesc royal chamberlain in the service of the same. Martorell's sister Isabell was married to Ausiàs March . He had six siblings in total. Joanot's nurse was a certain Floreta, widow of the seaman Pedro de Santander, who nursed him for three years. She was rewarded with 24 libras , 11 sueldos and 8 dineros by Francesc Martorell, as can be seen from a deed of March 17th ( declaration of debt) and May 31st, 1413 (debt repayment). The wealthy family could easily afford to provide a modest sum for a rather simpler service. The well-respected guillem was in an extraordinary position to lend money to the king. After the death of his father in 1435, Joanot inherited the lands of Jalón (cat. Xaló), where there is now an avenue named after the poet . In addition, it was owned by the towns of Murta and Benibrafim, where the majority of Muslims lived. The grandfather probably died in Gandia in 1415.

In March 1438 the young Martorell went on a trip abroad to London , where he stayed until February 1439 to avenge the dishonor of his youngest sister Damiata by his cousin Joan de Monpalau. Martorell challenged him to a life and death duel with the accusation that he had promised his sister marriage , abused her and then abandoned her. A high-ranking referee was necessary for the correct execution of the fight, whom Martorell had to look for abroad for legal reasons. Henry VI. from England agreed and asked Monpalau to take up the challenge. In addition, he probably made Martorell a knight, which allowed him to be addressed as “Mossèn” from then on. However, the direct confrontation between the two relatives no longer took place. The messenger who was supposed to deliver the promise of King Monpalau of England was arrested on the way to Valencia. All papers brought with them were on the instructions of Queen Mary, daughter of Heinrich III. , confiscated because she did not tolerate any feuds between her knights. Eight years later, the affair between Martorell and his cousin came to an uncomplicated end. King Alfonso V , the consort of Maria, who ruled in Valencia, decreed in a letter dated January 31, 1445 from Naples that Monpalau had to compensate Damiata in monetary terms. During the year 1442 Martorell had demonstrably denied three further feuds : against Jaume Ripoll, because he rejected him and trained with another, good knight; against Felip Boil because of an inappropriate testimony and against Gonzalo de Budixa. In addition, it is known from Martorell's letter, dated April 1, 1450, that he planned to send the Roman-German King Friedrich III. to seek him out as a referee for a duel in which he wanted to get revenge on a dishonest business partner.

Martorell's trip to England was so costly that while he was away the family felt compelled to lease his land for four years. Although only half of the deadline was over, the feudal lord, scarcely back home, broke the law without further ado by using a private armed force to drive out the tenant, who stole his annual harvest and robbed the cultivating Muslims of their work, so that the localities temporarily orphaned. A little later the judiciary gave the tenant justice and Martorell decided to sell all of his lands, whereupon he gradually became impoverished and had to report for military service . In 1449, as the leader of a gang of Moors, he attacked some cattle dealers out of financial difficulties who were traveling home with four hundred head of cattle from Valencia. He robbed her of her income and stole her clothes before he quietly dragged her from cave to cave south towards Chiva (cat. Xiva), where he then locked her up overnight in the local fort . One of the dealers was killed in the robbery while trying to take his clothes. Martorell, who was supervising the whole operation from a cave, showed himself to the prisoners only after this fatal incident, on horseback and armed with a lance and shield . In response to their protest, the knight replied gruffly: “We are at war.” Three weeks later, the innocent incarcerated traders were freed. The criminals responsible, Martorell and the bailiff , were arrested, brought to Valencia and taken to the streets as criminals in public. Since they were not directly involved in the manslaughter, they only had 33 days to serve in prison before they were released.

In 1454 Martorell traveled to Naples for at least a year for reasons that were not fully understood, following a boastful announcement by Alfonso V that the year before, with express reference to the fall of Constantinople, he was preparing a campaign against the Ottomans and attempting to evacuate Christian princes the Mediterranean region to participate. The minutes of a civil court hearing that took place in Valencia on June 21, 1455 reports that both Joanot Martorell and his older brother Galceran had left Valencia since 1454 at the latest. The Tirant translator Fritz Vogelgsang suspects that Martorell, due to his personal commitment to chivalry, had to follow Alfons' appeal to "liberate Christianity" and could not have reacted differently in order to live up to his ideal of chivalry. It is not known whether he returned to Valencia. The rescue campaign failed to materialize and Martorell turned more and more to poetry. Nevertheless, it is not entirely unlikely that Martorell had appeared with the hope of a "last great deed" at the widely announced Congress of Mantua , which Enea Silvio Piccolomini had convened immediately after his appointment as Pope Pius II , and for several years from 1459 stayed in Italy for a long time . According to the Pope's invitation, all the princes of Christianity should gather in full in Mantua to form a common army. The armed force must be large and strong enough to withstand the continual westward attack of the Ottomans and, at best, push them back into Asia. With that Pius had the plans of his predecessor Kalixt III. resumed, but failed miserably. To his regret, Pius discovered that four days before the scheduled opening of the congress on June 1, 1459, not a single person had appeared. He then gave a hate speech against the Muslims in Mantua Cathedral on September 26th. At the latest then Martorell gave up the practical life as a knight. “The professional knight, who had set out to fight with the sword, leaned over the paper and began to play with the quill, only to indulge himself in the satisfaction of his own imaginative needs for years, entangled in a day-to-day struggle with the wild and blissful Challenges his imagination, which challenged him to the extreme. "

On January 2, 1460 Martorell began to write his Tirant , which was dedicated to both the Portuguese Prince Ferrando, a son of Edward , and his compatriots, the Valencians . On October 23, 1469, his inheritance was divided. The corresponding document incorrectly states that Martorell died in the course of 1468. In fact, however, he died in the first months of 1465, as evidenced by court records. He left no children and was unmarried at the time of his death.

Afterlife

On April 24, 1465, Joanot's older brother Galceran declared before the state court in Valencia that the Tirant manuscript was illegally in the possession of the Junker Martí Joan de Galba . He requested that the book be handed over to the court, auctioned off and the amount paid out so that he could pay off his deceased brother's high debts. Galba refused to comply and replied that he had taken the manuscript from Joanot as pledge for a hundred reales . The condition of the trade was that, as the owner, he could freely dispose of the manuscript if he did not get the advanced sum refunded within one year. However, Galceran could not assert a repayment claim due to a lack of official documents, whereas Galba could easily prove that a loan agreement existed between him and Joanot Martorell. In the end, the court ruled in Galba's favor by awarding him ownership. Then he was persuaded by the Portuguese Dona Isabel de Lloris to excel as editor of the work.

The original edition of Tirant went to press on November 20, 1490 by Nikolaus Spindeler from Zwickau in a Valencian workshop. When Galba died on April 27, 1490, seven months before completion, the Swiss Johann Reich from Kur (Catalan Joan Rix de Cura ) stepped in as the new publisher, but his life was no longer sufficient to see the work being delivered. In the closing note, Galba is titled as the author of the last part of the book, which is doubted by modern Catalan studies . It is quite conceivable, however, that Galba might have made some changes to the manuscript: According to the Catalan philologist Martí de Riquer (1914–2013), “Galba's interference in the novel was limited to a superficial revision and, very hypothetically, isolated insertions, like this that we dare to say that the Tirant lo Blanc, from the dedication to its last chapter, is the work of a single author: Joanot Martorell. "

In 1497 the novel was republished in Barcelona . In 1511 a first anonymous Castilian translation was published in Valladolid . The modern Spanish new translation, however, was only available from 1974. The first Italian translation was published in 1538. The first English translation was made available to the public in New York in 1984 . The Dutch translation followed in Amsterdam in 1987 . There were also translations into Romanian, Swedish, French and finally into German. In 1501 the cultural worker Isabella d'Este is said to have commissioned a translation into her mother tongue, which is now lost.

Work edition

• Jannot Martorell and Martí Joan De Galba: The novel of the white knight Tirant lo Blanc . First and Second Book. From the old Catalan language of the Kingdom of Valencia first brought into German by Fritz Vogelgsang. Afterword by Mario Vargas Llosa . Frankfurt 1991. ISBN 3-76323903-0 [1]

literature

• Fritz Vogelgsang : Profile on the search for a suspected ore manufacturer , in: The novel of the white knight Tirant lo Blanc (foreword), Volume 1, Frankfurt a. M. 2007, pp. 7-39, ISBN 978-3-10-042606-2
• Fritz Vogelgsang: Dutiful information about search successes, which are now recorded , in: The novel of the white knight Tirant lo Blanc (epilogue), Volume 1, Frankfurt a. M. 2007, pp. 687-700

Web links

• Literature by and about Joanot Martorell in the catalog of the German National Library
• Detailed biography of Martorell from the web portal "Jonaot Martorell i el Tirant lo Blanc" (Catalan)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Vogelgsang, epilogue, p. 695
2. ↑ Vogelgsang, foreword, p. 21f
3. ↑ Vogelgsang, foreword, p. 22
4. ↑ Vogelgsang, epilogue, p. 691