Literature, Medieval -- Translations into English; Tales
From Bressaw he went toward Cracovia, in the kingdom of Polionia, where
he beheld the academy, the which pleased him wonderful well. In the city
the king most commonly holdeth his court at a castle, in which castle
are many famous monuments; there is a most sumptuous church in the same,
in which standeth a silver altar gilded and set with rich stones, and
over it is a covenance full of all manner of silver ornaments belonging
to mass. In the church hangeth the jaw-bones of a huge dragon, that kept
the rock before the castle was edified thereon: it is full of all manner
of munition, and hath always victuals for three years to serve three
thousand men; through the town runneth a river, called the Vessnal or
Wessel, where over is a fair wooden bridge; this water divideth the
town and Gasmere; in this Gasmere dwell the Jews, being a small walled
town by themselves, to the number of twenty-five thousand men, women and
children; within one mile of the town there is a salt mine, where they
found stones of pure salt, one thousand pound, two thousand pound, or
more in weight, and that in great quantity: this salt is as black as the
Newcastle coal when it comes out of the mines, but being beaten to
powder, it is as white as snow. The like they have four miles from
thence at a town called Buckma.
From thence Faustus went to Sandentz, the Captain thereof was called Don
Spicket Jordan. In this town are many monuments, as the tomb and
sepulchre of Christ, in as ample a manner as that is at Jerusalem, at
the proper costs of a gentleman that went thrice a year to Jerusalem
from that place and returned again. Not far from that town is a new town
wherein is a nunnery of the order of St. Dioclesian, into which order
may none come except they be gentlewomen, and well formed, and fair to
look upon, which pleased Faustus well; but having a will to travel
further, and to see more wonders, mounting up towards the east, over
many lands and provinces, as in Hungaria, Transilvania, Shede, Ingatz,
Sardinia, and so into Constantinople, where the Turkish emperor kept his
court.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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