Hans Dernschwam was a Bohemian humanist, mining manager and traveller who came to Amasya with the Habsburg embassy in the spring of 1555 and stayed in the city for nearly two months. He held neither the rank of envoy nor any official post in the mission. A man approaching sixty, he had set out to see the Ottoman lands with his own eyes, paid every expense out of his own pocket and recorded what he saw in a notebook day after day. That notebook is the diary known today as the Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien. No other sixteenth-century source is known to describe in such detail the Amasya where Süleyman the Magnificent wintered after his Nakhchivan campaign: its bridges, its palace, its houses, the sultan's Friday procession, and the anger that had gathered among the people after the death of Şehzade Mustafa.

Dernschwam's pages on Amasya are read side by side with the famous letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who headed the same embassy. Busbecq was a diplomat whose eye was on the negotiating table; Dernschwam was a merchant and a mining man who asked prices, paced out bridges, measured the height of doorways and sketched the way roofs were rolled flat. His prejudices are plain as well: in many places he belittles the Turks and passes harsh judgements on Islam. Even so, it is thanks to his dry notes, crowded with figures, that we know how buildings which have not survived looked in the sixteenth century.

From Brüx to Leipzig

Dernschwam was born in the Bohemian town of Brüx (today Most in the Czech Republic). The Deutsche Biographie gives his birthday as 23 March 1494; Turkish sources mention only the year. His family belonged to the armigerous burghers of the town, would later supply members of its council, and remained in Brüx until the seventeenth century. He evidently grew up in a well-to-do household and, together with his siblings, received a good education.

His name appears in the University of Vienna's register for 1507, which means he enrolled at the age of thirteen. He then went to Leipzig and graduated from that university's faculty of philosophy on 5 September 1510. The Deutsche Biographie records that besides Leipzig and Vienna he also studied in Rome. His interest in the Greek and Roman classics, in historians and geographers, began in these years; the books he collected and the inscriptions he copied throughout his life are the fruit of that curiosity.

Buda, Neusohl and the Fugger Service

After living for a while in Vienna he went to Buda (Ofen) in 1514 and worked alongside the humanist Hieronymus Balbi, tutor to the princes at the Hungarian royal court. In 1515 he moved with him to Pressburg (Bratislava). His ties with the humanist circle of Vienna were formed in these years. Court service also brought him into contact with two great names of the Hungarian mining world, the Thurzo family and the Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger.

The longest and most profitable period of his life was spent in mining. According to the Deutsche Biographie he probably joined the Thurzo copper enterprise at Neusohl (today Banská Bystrica in Slovakia) in 1518. In 1525 he intervened successfully during the uprising in Buda against the Fugger branch office, and thereafter became the factor who managed, at Neusohl, the copper mines the king had leased to the Fuggers; he held this post until the contract ended in 1546. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi likewise states that from 1525 he was in the service of Anton Fugger, famous for his collections. Ferruh Toruk, for his part, places this period between 1517 and 1546 and notes that Dernschwam acquired a considerable fortune in the business. The dates shift by a year or two from source to source, but the picture is the same: Dernschwam was a manager who for many years ran the Hungarian mining interests of one of the richest trading houses in Europe.

Trade and mining did not draw him away from his intellectual interests. Between 1520 and 1530, travelling through Hungary and Transylvania, he copied the Roman inscriptions he came across into a notebook; this collection is today in Vienna, in the Austrian National Library. In 1538 he married at Schattmannsdorf (today Častá in Slovakia). In 1549 he left the Fugger service, but stayed in Upper Hungary and from there kept up a correspondence and an exchange of books with a humanist circle that reached as far as the Rhine.

Joining the Embassy

In 1553 King Ferdinand I sent two envoys to Süleyman to mend relations that had broken down over the question of Transylvania: Antal Verancsics (Verantius) and the Hungarian naval commander Ferenc Zay. Dernschwam, "of his own free will" in the words of the Deutsche Biographie, joined this embassy at the age of fifty-nine. He brought his own servants, coachman and grooms, and three horses. At the end of his diary he states plainly that he made the journey at his own expense and paid all the costs of the outward and return trips himself. His aim was to see Istanbul and to get to know the Ottoman state at close quarters.

The embassy left Vienna on 22 June 1553 and reached Istanbul on 25 August. At that very moment the sultan was about to set out on the Nakhchivan campaign; the envoys were not received and had to wait for more than a year and a half. Dernschwam spent this time in the Elçi Hanı, the envoys' inn opposite the Column of Constantine (Çemberlitaş). Over more than eighteen months in Istanbul he studied the city in detail; his notes on foodstuffs and prices, and his mention of a community in the Yedikule quarter who spoke Turkish but were Christians (the Karamanlides), are passages to which researchers have often returned.

The news that Şehzade Mustafa had been killed in October 1553 in the army camp near Ereğli in Konya also reached him in Istanbul. He wrote in his diary that news and all manner of rumours were constantly arriving from the sultan's camp, that everyone feared a revolt, that the people loved the prince dearly and called him "sultan". These notes were a prelude to what he would hear in Amasya a year later.

The new envoy, Busbecq, arrived in Istanbul on 20 January 1555 and found Verancsics and Zay there. Süleyman, meanwhile, had returned from the campaign and decided to spend the winter in Amasya; he had entered the city in the late autumn of 1554. When word came that the envoys could appear before the sultan in Amasya, the embassy made ready for the road. This extension, which Dernschwam had never reckoned on, was to become the most valuable part of his journey.

From Istanbul to Amasya

The embassy crossed to Üsküdar on 9 March 1555 and reached Ankara by way of Kartal, Gebze, İzmit, İznik, Eskişehir and Mihalıççık. Dernschwam describes the journey stage by stage; he notes the roofs of the village houses, the fountains, mills and cemeteries, the abundance of eggs and yoghurt, the way bread was baked in the tandır oven. At the village of Kutlugün near Ankara he learns that the women spun mohair yarn for wages and that Ankara merchants collected and distributed it.

They stayed three days in Ankara, which they entered at the end of March. Dernschwam climbed up to the citadel, sketched the walls and the small Armenian church inside the fortress, drew in his notebook the cauldron in which mohair was boiled, and wrote that Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Turks lived together in the town. He took the Temple of Augustus for a palace or a theatre and recorded that the ancient inscriptions on its walls could be read. That inscription is the famous Res Gestae, in which the Roman emperor Augustus recounted his own deeds. The Deutsche Biographie states that the first copy of the text was entered in Dernschwam's diary in 1555 and that this copy is what raises the diary's value. Busbecq too had his men copy the same inscription, and for a long time the learned world knew the text under his name; the sources do not explain how the two copies relate to each other.

After Ankara the party crossed the Kızılırmak and headed for Çorum, and from there for Amasya. Along the road Dernschwam saw mounds heaped up at fixed intervals and describes with astonishment how they were used to announce the sultan's passage, the news being passed on by firing a gun towards the next mound, and how there were men specially appointed for the task. Leaving Çorum on the morning of 6 April, the party passed through Elvan Çelebi, Çağna, Avkat and Bağlıca. Lodging at the dervish lodge of Elvan Çelebi, Dernschwam writes that the dervishes lived in mud-brick huts round about, that they were rough, ragged and begged for their living, and yet were greatly loved and respected by the people. He adds that he could not decide whether the wooden prayer house was a Turkish building or one left over from the Christians. The next day, 7 April 1555, a short sentence entered the diary: they had arrived in Amasya.

Two Months in Amasya

The embassy stayed in Amasya from 7 April to 2 June, that is, fifty-six days. Since Dernschwam had no diplomatic business, he could devote most of his time to exploring the city. These were no ordinary weeks for Amasya either. The sultan was in the city with part of his army, and the peace envoy of the Safavid Shah Tahmasp was on the road and would enter the city with a large retinue on 10 May. The first peace between the Ottomans and Iran, the Peace of Amasya, took shape in these days. Dernschwam found himself both in the midst of this crowd and in the quiet mourning of a city that had lost its sanjak governor a year and a half earlier.

First Sight of the City

They entered the city along the Yeşilırmak. "A fairly large river flows towards Amasya on the right-hand side. This river is called the Yeşilırmak," he writes. His first impression is of a city hidden among mountains: Amasya cannot be seen from a distance until one is right beside it. The road is narrow, and one cart cannot make way for another; the embassy reaches the city with difficulty, through a narrow gorge of bare rock and over an old stone bridge wide enough for a single cart. The surrounding country does not please him, and he sees "terrible places, so many as to be beyond counting". Where there are no mountains there are vineyards and orchards divided from one another by mud-brick or stone walls, and inside these gardens small summer houses.

He describes the city itself in harsh terms. Amasya, built on both sides of the valley, is to him "a poor city made up of houses of mud brick, piled one on top of another like swallows' nests". Most houses have two storeys and are no better finished inside than out. The ground floor holds a stable; above it people live in rooms built of planks and beams and covered over with earth. The houses have no proper windows and no kitchens; food is cooked on small hearths in the rooms. What catches Dernschwam's attention most are the roofs: not content with describing the roller stone (yuvak taşı) used to pack down the earthen roof, he draws a picture of it.

He counts eleven mosques in the city. The finest of them, in his view, is the double-minaret mosque built by Bayezid II, to which the sultan went for Friday prayers; today this is the Sultan Bayezid Mosque at the centre of the Bayezid II Külliye. He listens to the call to prayer sung by two muezzins answering each other from the minarets and writes that this is no easy task, that it is "a great work of art and at the same time a form of worship". It is one of the diary's rare gentle sentences about Islam. He also mentions churches from Byzantine times at the entrance to the city.

Bridges and Citadel

The section of Dernschwam's Amasya notes most often cited concerns the bridges. "So there are three stone bridges and one wooden bridge in Amasya," he writes. Counting the bridge they crossed before entering the city, he speaks of four bridges over the Yeşilırmak; what they all have in common is that they are narrow and no cart can cross them. He measures the bridges in paces and records whether they have railings and whether they are of stone or of timber. Much of what is known about how narrow the city's old bridges were in the sixteenth century comes from these notes. The fact that the same count, one wooden and three stone bridges, is given on Dernschwam's authority in the Amasya entry of the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi shows how widely his testimony on this point has been accepted.

He sees Harşena Castle "on a lofty, imposing rock". He writes that the castle commander and his servants lived in mud-brick houses inside the castle and that every morning and evening trumpets and drums were sounded towards the city. He also notes that the curtain walls were thin. Busbecq says that the same castle held a permanent garrison against the Persians and the restless tribes of Anatolia; the two accounts complement each other.

The Palaces

Dernschwam's notes on the palace buildings of Amasya cannot be found anywhere else, since none of these buildings has survived. The first description concerns the place where the sultan was staying: "The residence where Şehzade Mustafa formerly lived and where the sultan is now staying lies at the foot of the mountain." It is a fairly large, plain palace surrounded by a garden. At the entrance there is a wooden gate between mud-brick walls; the rooms beside the gate remind him of the rooms of a village house. In the courtyard stands a long single-storey building of mud brick, and beside it, within the garden, another single-storey building of fired brick. He hears that the sultan lodges in the second of these and does not hide his surprise: in his own country it would pass for the house of an ordinary tradesman. Next to it there is a large gate of mud brick, in front of it a wooden arbour, and under the arbour sit four gatekeepers in gold-embroidered robes with silver staffs in their hands.

According to Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn's Amasya Tarihi, Süleyman lodged at the Beyler Sarayı when he entered Amasya. The plainness Dernschwam saw seems at first glance to contradict accounts of the prince's palace as a grand building. The mud-brick walls that struck a foreigner's eye may show the entrance and courtyard rather than the palace as a whole; the diary does not make that distinction.

The second description is dated 1 June, the day before the departure. This time Dernschwam visits the Lower Palace (Aşağı Saray). Its walls are of stone and its inner parts of fired brick; its roof, as is the custom, is a flat roof covered with earth, and the windows are set high up. In the middle stands a large building that looks as if it were sunk into the ground or carved out of the rock; its top is covered with lead, one can climb onto it and look out over the surroundings, and inside one can walk round along a square plan. The sultan's tent is kept in this building, and the craftsmen who pitch, raise and mend it also live there. He writes that the tent poles were thicker than the shaft of a racing chariot, that they could be taken apart in two pieces, and that nearly a thousand camels were needed to carry so large a tent. He also describes the litter he saw inside the palace: a clumsy vehicle so heavy that only four horses could draw it, enclosed on all four sides with lattices and able to be covered with silk gauze. Amasya's site management plan takes the place Dernschwam calls the Lower Palace to be the Kızlar Sarayı terrace in front of the Rock Tombs of the Kings; elsewhere the same plan gives the name Aşağı Saray to the area where the Hatuniye quarter now stands. The diary's description leaves both readings open.

The Sultan's Procession and Table

Dernschwam saw Süleyman several times on his way to Friday prayers. The sultan sets out on horseback, dressed in green, with three pashas ahead of him. Before him seven horses are led, ridden by no one, their saddles worked with gold and hung with coloured cloths falling down their flanks. Çavuşes push the people from the middle of the road to the sides. On another Friday the sultan sets out to come down to the double-minaret mosque in the middle of the city; this time solaks, wearing plumes like brooms on their heads, march in front of him, ahead of them again three pashas with their janissaries and servants, and at the very front courtiers in gold-embroidered silk robes. The word "people" first appears in the diary in this scene, as a crowd being shoved aside as the procession passes.

He also describes the carrying of food to the sultan as "a ceremony in itself". Eleven food-bearers in silk kaftans like the janissaries carry the dishes in covered, deep tinned-copper bowls, and behind them one man brings a round leather table cloth; they all go in through the sultan's door together and after a while come out holding the empty lids. He sees two religious scholars going to consult, then three pashas and the envoys, greeting the gatekeepers who sit under the bower beside the great gate, and at once corrects himself: in truth they were not greeting the gatekeepers, they were bowing in reverence towards the sultan's door.

There are also places where admiration and fear stand side by side. On 12 April it comes to his ears that, on his way to the mosque, the sultan told Ali Pasha that he wished above all to see Vienna and wanted to live longer for that alone. Dernschwam records this rumour with a curse. The fear that Vienna would fall is a nightmare running through the whole diary.

Mourning for Şehzade Mustafa

What makes Dernschwam's Amasya notes especially valuable to historians is that he recorded, on the spot, the reaction of the people to the death of Şehzade Mustafa. As the embassy approached Amasya he describes what he saw along the way: "On the roads we travelled we found the people grieved and angry. Some are grieving that Şehzade Mustafa was killed, others that the Persian campaign drags on." He takes the reason for the sultan's long stay in Cappadocia to be the arrest and execution of those who stirred up unrest here and there. Everyone praises Mustafa, people fear that disorder will break out in the land when the sultan dies, and they believe that the two remaining princes cannot be like their father. Elsewhere he writes that "almost all the people of Cappadocia are angry over the calamity that befell Mustafa", and adds that some of the people secretly sided with Persia.

What Dernschwam calls Cappadocia is Amasya and its region; Busbecq too speaks of Amasya as "the chief town of Cappadocia". Written in the city where Mustafa had been sanjak governor for fifteen years, barely a year and a half after his death, these lines match the mourning that Hüsâmeddîn relates from local records. Hüsâmeddîn also tells how the city's scholars turned away from the sultan, and how Süleyman, during the months he spent in Amasya, tried to win hearts by remitting taxes and bestowing favours on the notables. The anger Dernschwam saw explains why such a policy was needed.

The Persian Envoy and the Departure

On 10 May Shah Tahmasp's envoy arrived in Amasya with a large retinue, and for several weeks the city was the scene of banquets and receptions. The splendid tables Dernschwam brings before our eyes belong to these days. Busbecq writes that peace was granted to the Persians at once, while the Habsburg embassy had to content itself with a six-month truce. It was decided that the envoys should return with this result. The embassy set out from Amasya for Istanbul on the afternoon of 2 June. Dernschwam wrote up the return day by day, just as he had the outward journey; Zeki Arıkan points out that the details of the return journey, passed over briefly in Busbecq's letters, are to be found in this diary.

A passage he wrote on leaving Amasya does not hide his admiration for the Turkish soldier: he writes that the Turks are a sturdy and hardy nation, that they eat yoghurt above all, that though their bread is not plentiful they endure heat, cold, hunger and thirst; while Christian soldiers want to live in comfort even in war, carry wine and needless provisions with them, and ruin their stomachs amid this abundance. Among his prejudiced pages, this comparison shows an observer who knew how to give credit where it was due.

Return and Last Years

Following the same road, the embassy reached Istanbul on 23 June and left it on 3 July. Dernschwam took with him a German gunsmith whom he had ransomed from captivity in Istanbul. By way of Silivri, Babaeski, Edirne, Plovdiv (Filibe), Sofia, Niš, Belgrade and Osijek they reached Buda, and a few days later, on 11 August 1555, Vienna. According to the note at the end of the diary, Dernschwam brought back from Turkey Greek manuscripts, horses, carpets, kilims, various fabrics and precious stones, which he sold.

His life after the return is obscure. Documents in the finance section of the Vienna archives show that he lived in the mountain mining towns of Hungary. In 1560 he was living in Neusohl or in nearby Kremnitz (Kremnica); a memorandum he wrote in 1563 about a mining building in Neusohl is kept in Budapest. The date of his death is not certain. The Deutsche Biographie says he died around 1568 at Schattmannsdorf. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, for its part, infers from the sale of his library to the Vienna Court Library by a relative in February 1569 that he was no longer alive at the end of 1568. Toruk records that the 500 gulden paid for the books were sent in 1569 in the name of his nephew Markus.

The greatest material legacy Dernschwam left is this library. Of the collection, some two thousand works in 651 volumes, part went to Munich, while most of it is today among the treasured holdings of the Austrian National Library. In the court library's catalogue, a list of the books that came from Dernschwam appears under a separate heading in an inventory taken in July 1575. The year of the library's sale is given as 1568 in the Deutsche Biographie and as 1569 in Turkish sources.

The Fortunes of the Diary

Dernschwam did not publish his diary. The original copy, belonging to the Fugger family, remained in that family's archive for centuries and was found around 1889 by the archivist Friedrich Dobel at Babenhausen Castle. One of the earlier copies is in the Wolfenbüttel Library; there is another eighteenth-century copy in the same place, and in Prague, at the Royal Bohemian Museum, a copy with many passages left blank. The famous cartographer of Anatolia Heinrich Kiepert made the first thorough study, based on the Wolfenbüttel copy, mapped the embassy's route in a paper presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1863, and in 1887 published a longer series of articles in the journal Globus.

The complete text was edited by Franz Babinger from the original in the Fugger archive: Hans Dernschwam's Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien (1553/55), Munich and Leipzig 1923. Babinger added a long introduction and explanatory notes, but left the text in the early German in which it was written. The complete Turkish translation was made by Yaşar Önen; it was printed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 1987 under the title İstanbul ve Anadolu'ya Seyahat Günlüğü and reissued in 1992. Babinger's introduction was not included in full in this translation, but the drawings in the original text, two maps and an index were added. Semavi Eyice writes that a new edition prepared by a specialist well versed in early German, with notes on the places, buildings and customs mentioned in the text, would be a great gain for Turkish readers. An earlier attempt at a complete translation by Hayrullah Örs had been left unfinished.

The pages of the diary contain copies of Latin and Greek inscriptions in the author's own hand, drawings of farming and craft tools, and sketch plans of historic sites. Toruk takes Dernschwam's habit of leaving blank the figures and measurements he was unsure of as a sign of his care.

Dernschwam as a Witness

Almost everyone who reads the diary agrees on two points. The first is Dernschwam's sentences that in places belittle the Turks and are written from a harsh, Protestant standpoint towards Islam. He says that the Turks do not know how to make use of the blessings God has given them, that they do not cultivate vines, that they live by herding like shepherds; he likens their houses to a "prison". Sevim Karabela Şermet, in her article examining the Amasya section of the diary from the standpoint of imagology, shows how this negative view runs through the whole narrative, from geography to houses and from food to belief.

The second is that beneath these prejudices lies a body of tangible information, measured and counted. Zeki Arıkan stresses that the diary gives details about the structure of the sixteenth-century countryside that are hard to find in any other source, and that it voices the feelings of the people. Semavi Eyice writes that the information he gives about the places he passed through is valuable for their history. For Amasya this value is greater still: the prince's palace, the Lower Palace, the houses inside the castle, the railings of the bridges and the roller stones on the roofs can today be seen only through his eyes. Almost every study of Amasya's bridges, palaces or sixteenth-century townscape turns to Dernschwam at some point.

Chronology

1494: Born in the Bohemian town of Brüx (on 23 March, according to the Deutsche Biographie).

1507: His name is entered in the register of the University of Vienna.

1510: Graduates from the faculty of philosophy of the University of Leipzig on 5 September.

1514: Goes to Buda to work with Hieronymus Balbi; moves with him to Pressburg in 1515.

1520-1530: Copies Roman inscriptions in Hungary and Transylvania.

1525: Enters the Fugger service and takes over the management of the Neusohl copper mines.

1538: Marries at Schattmannsdorf.

1549: Leaves the Fugger service.

1553: Leaves Vienna on 22 June with the embassy of Verancsics and Zay; reaches Istanbul on 25 August.

1555: Leaves Istanbul on 9 March; is in Ankara at the end of March; arrives in Amasya on 7 April; leaves the city on 2 June; returns to Istanbul on 23 June and to Vienna on 11 August.

1560: Documented as living in Neusohl or Kremnitz.

1568: Evidently no longer alive by the end of this year.

1569: His library is sold to the Vienna Court Library.

1889: The original copy of the diary is found at Babenhausen Castle.

1923: Franz Babinger publishes the diary.

1987: Yaşar Önen's Turkish translation is published.

Bibliography

The following sources were used in this article:

Online sources