Michel Beheim’s Von Den Türken und dem adel sagt dis: A demotic lament and crusading song contemporary with the fall of Constantinople in 1453

McDonald, William C. (2017) Michel Beheim’s Von Den Türken und dem adel sagt dis: A demotic lament and crusading song contemporary with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 70 (3). pp. 371-384. ISSN 0001-6446

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Abstract

Michel Beheim, a prominent 15th-century German author and musical composer — who was at the Siege of Nándorfehérvér (1456) in the entourage of King Ladislaus V (the Posthumous) of Hungary — wrote one of the first song-poems in reaction to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Entitled Von den Türken und dem adel sagt dis, these verses, translated here into English for the first time, have previously been neglected in scholarship. Beheim’s perspective is particularly important, documenting as it does an emotional reaction to a defeat that spawned invective-filled rhetoric, crusading propaganda, castigation of the Christian nobility for a failure to come together, and an interpretation of the Turks under Mehmed II as a scourge of God. Beheim here, and in his subsequent body of anti-Turkish works, including his detailed depiction of the Crusade of Varna (1443–1445), contributes to the shaping of a late mediaeval and early modern negative Türkenbild.

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