Balázs Nagy (Budapest)
A good number of reports have survived from travellers who visited Hungary from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries or who had reliable information on the country. These persons arrived from various parts of the continent and were of different origins and religions, some being Christians, others Muslims or Jews. Having different traditions, they accordingly had different preconceptions of towns and urban life.
This paper starts from the hypothesis that a comparative analysis of their experience, as described in their reports, can help us not only to understand differences in the civilisations they were coming from, but also to gain more knowledge of the towns and the nature of urbanisation in the region.
The earliest distinct group of sources, mainly from the tenth and eleventh centuries, consists of the notes of Arab and Jewish travellers: Ibn Khordadbeh, Ibrahim Ibn Yaqub, and Abu Hamid Al-Gharnati,. The reports of crusaders who travelled through Central Europe from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries constitutes the next group, Abbot Guibertus, Odo de Deoglio, and Bishop Otto of Freising being the most important among these. They arrived in a region inhabited by fellow Christians, but their remarks give some evidence of the special characteristics of local urbanisation. From the later Middle Ages more detailed reports have survived, e.g. the Anonymi Descriptio Europae Orientalis and the report of Bertrandon de la Brocquière.
On the basis of these authorities the paper will discuss the nature of the information the travellers recorded and the ethnic composition of urban society as they reflected it.