Gripla - 2020, Síða 135

GRIPLA134
published posthumously in Paris in 1509 alongside his work on Europe,30
was written shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in
1453 and thus is permeated by this looming threat. He describes an east-
west itinerary, but ends up devoting most space to Asia Minor and its
inhabitants. Before arriving at this destination, Timur is described ‘in
the section devoted to Parthia ­ the country lying just south of Scythiaʼ.31
A compelling case is made by Margaret Meserve for Pope Pius II’s having
occluded Timur’s ‘barbarousʼ Central Asian, Mongol or Scythian origins,
for the purpose of presenting a Parthian/Persian power of the kind which
Christian Europe could attempt to forge an alliance with against a com-
mon threat which lay between them. It is probably for this reason that,
though the account of the siege with the olive-branch bearing maidens (ii),
Timur’s angry response on being questioned about his lack of mercy (iii)
and the comparison with Hannibal (iv) are all present,32 Timur is clearly
not said to be a Scythian king (i). Once again the year when the events took
place (v) is absent.
While none of the four authors mentioned by Cook quite fit the bill
as being the source of the entry in Oddverjaannáll, Pope Pius II’s ac-
count is the closest, and this aids us in identifying the actual source. The
Nuremberg Chronicle, written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel in 1493 and
translated into German in the same year by Georg Alt, is yet another of
the texts which borrows the section on Timur almost word-for-word from
Pope Pius II’s Asia.33 While the Nuremberg Chronicle begins its entry on
Timur by stating that he died in the year 1402, yet another work based pri-
30 Other influential editions in the sixteenth century were his collected works, Opera quae
extant omnia (Basel: Henricus Stephanus, 1551; repr. 1571).
31 Margaret Meserve, “From Samarkand to Scythia: Reinventions of Asia in Renaissance
Geography and Political Thought,” ‘El Pìu Expeditivo Pontifice’: selected studies on Aeneas
silvius Piccolomini (1405–1464), ed. by Zweder von Martels and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden:
Brill, 2003), 34.
32 Pope Pius II, Cosmographia (1509), 26r–26v.
33 Hartmann Schedel, Registrum huius operis libri cronicarum cum figuris et imaginibus ab inicio
mundi (Nuremberg: Koberger, 1493); Hartmann Schedel, Register des Buchs der Croniken
und geschichten mit figuren und pildnussen von anbeginn der welt bis auf disse unnsere Zeit,
trans. by Georg Alt (Nuremberg: Koberger, 1493). The description appears on the same
page (ccxxvii) in both the Latin and German versions. As already stated, the Asia was first
published in Paris in 1509, thus Schedel’s sources were handwritten manuscripts. See
Berrnd Posselt, Konzeption und Kompilation der schedelschen Weltchronik, Monumenta
Germaniae Historica 71 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 250.