The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, 1396-1427Schiltberger, Johannes
History
The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, 1396-1427
Schiltberger, Johannes
Timur, 1336-1405 -- Early works to 1800; Turkey -- History -- Bayezid I, 1389-1403; Voyages and travels -- Early works to 1800
(3.) “Troya, on a fine plain, and one can still see where the city
stood.”—The ruins of the city of Priam did not exist in Schiltberger’s
time any more than they do now; but in the absence of the material
vestiges that Lechevalier and other travellers, his successors,
believed they found beneath the surface of the earth, there is Homer’s
admirable description, precise as that of the most accurate geographer,
and which restores to us the primitive map of the Trojan plain. I am
here under the necessity of quoting at some length, a passage from
Vivien de Saint-Martin’s _Description de l’Asie Mineur_, 489:—“Dès que
l’on accepte le plateau de Bounar-Bachi” (a name, says this author,
derived from two sources of the Scamander) “comme l’emplacement de la
Troie homérique, les indications circonstanciées et si nombreuses que
fournit le Poète sur les localités environnantes, viennent s’adapter
d’elles-mêmes an terrain actuel.”
“Une ville de fondation éolienne qui usurpe le nom d’Ilion, et qui par
la suite des temps et d’obscurité des traditions, prétendit occuper
l’emplacement même de la cité de Priam, s’était élevée sur une autre
éminence éloignée d’une lieue vers le Nord, et située non plus sur la
gauche, mais sur la rive droite du Simoïs. Cette ville est l’Ilium
des siècles postérieurs, l’Ilium Recens; et lorsque les poètes ou les
historiens de l’époque romaine parlent du berceau de leur race, c’est
toujours à cette Ilium éolienne qu’il faut rapporter leurs allusions
et leurs descriptions, car le site réel de l’Ilium primitive était
dès lors oublié. La nouvelle Ilium est maintenant ruinée, comme
l’Ilium homérique; près de l’éminence isolée qu’elle occupa, on trouve
aujourd’hui le village Turc de Tchiblak.”
The ruins near the sea and at no great distance from Constantinople,
believed by Schiltberger to have been those of the royal city, must
have been the remains of Alexandria Troas opposite the island of
Tenedos. It was there that the Russian pilgrim Daniel, and the author’s
contemporaries, the archdeacon Zosimus and Clavijo, thought they saw
the ruins of Troy, as was the case one hundred years later, 1547, with
the French traveller Belon, who landed that he might examine them
with the greater facility. At the base of a small hillock, but within
the circuit of the walls of the city, were some ancient arches and
the remains of two palaces in marble (_Obs. de plusieurs singularités
trouvées en Grèce, en Asie_, etc.; in Saint-Martin, ii, 8). Belon
passes lightly over the difficulty he experienced in not finding near
this, the supposed site of the Homeric city, the two rivers Simoïs and
Xanthus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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