Gripla - 2020, Síða 133

GRIPLA132
tire known world as well the histories of many nations.21 Timur appears
on two occasions, firstly in Book V (principally concerned with Asia),
where the Tartars are described and a list of their leaders is given.22 The
section of interest to us here, however, appears in Book IV, as part of the
description of Greece. The recent history of that land is presented through
a list of the Ottoman emperors, and Timur’s cruelty and claim of divine
justification appears within the description of Baiatzet der vierd türckisch
keyser ‘Bayezid, the Fourth Turkish Emperor’.23 Münster’s description,
which tells summarily of the trampling of the olive-branch-bearing maid-
ens and Timur’s haughty response on being questioned about his cruelty
(points ii and iii), includes no comparison with Hannibal, no date when the
events took place, and, while saying that Timur is a Tartar, only mentions
Scythia as one of the regions he conquered. Thus for similar reasons to
those presented with respect to Mexia’s text, Münster’s, which also owed
a clear debt to Pope Pius II’s work, is unlikely to have been the immediate
source of the entry in Oddverjaannáll.24 Later editions and translations of
the Cosmographia often contain additional material, but none of it seems
to bring us any closer to the extract in Oddverjaannáll.
Of the four potential sources suggested by Cook, the Magni tamerlanis
scytharum Imperatoris vita ‘Life of the Great Timur, Emperor of the
Scythians’ (1553, reprinted on many occasions) by Petrus Perondinus stands
out as being the only work exclusively concerning itself with Timur as a
21 See Matthew McLean, the Cosmographia of sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the
Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
22 Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia: Beschreibung aller Lender durch sebastianum Munsterum
in welcher begriffen aller völcker, Herzschafften, stetten und namhafftiger slecken herkommen
(Basel: Henrichus Petri, 1544), dcxxv.
23 Münster, Cosmographia (1544), dlxxvii.
24 The title alone is suggestive of the influence, Pope Pius II’s work also commonly being
referred to as his Cosmographia (see, for example, the title page of his Cosmographia
Pii Papae in Asiæ et Europæ eleganti descriptione ([Paris]: Henricus Stephanus & Ioannis
Hongontius, 1509)). Münster’s phrasing, sihstu mich für ein Menschen an: Du irrst, dann ich
bin der Zorn Gottes und ein verderbung der Welt [You consider me a man: You are wrong, for
I am the wrath of God and the destruction of the world], Cosmographia (1544), dlxxvii, is
also a faithful reproduction of Pope Pius II’s tu me hominem esse arbitraris? Falleris: Ira dei
ego sum et orbis vastitas [You judge me to be a man? You are mistaken: I am the anger of God
and the destruction of the world], Cosmographia (1509), 26v. Münster also includes details
about Bayezid being used as a stool for Timur to climb up onto his horse, taken from the
Europa of Pope Pius II (Cosmographia (1509), 93r).