The Nuremberg Chronicle VI. The Description of Europe

About this book

The Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum) was printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg on 12 July 1493 and became one of the most splendid books of the early age of printing. Its 1,809 woodcuts came from the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, where the young Albrecht Dürer was then an apprentice. Schedel told the history of the world in seven ages — and at the end he added a description of the lands of Europe, taken almost word for word from the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, who tells of the rulers and events he saw with his own eyes.

About the translation: translated into modern English from the Latin edition of 1493 by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of a hand-coloured copy. A complete, sentence-by-sentence translation — not a summary; where a word had faded in the print, the sense was restored from the context and from Schedel's own sources.

What is inside

• nine parts: Sarmatia, Poland and Cracow (the Jagiellonian kings, St Stanislaus, Lübeck, Neisse, a prayer for King Maximilian); the praise of Germany, Hungary and the Turks (John Hunyadi, Matthias Corvinus, Wallachia, Thrace, the Ottoman sultans, Tamerlane, the battle of Varna); the fall of Constantinople, Greece and Austria (Mehmed II, the siege of Belgrade, Athens, Albania and Skanderbeg, Dalmatia, Carinthia, the counts of Cilli); Lithuania, Livonia, Prussia and the North (the sacred groves and sacred fire of the Lithuanians, the Teutonic Knights and Grunwald, Saxony and the Hanseatic towns, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Bohemia, Frisia, Holland); the German lands and Nuremberg (the secret court of Westphalia, Hesse, Franconia, Bavaria, Switzerland, Savoy); France, England, Spain and Portugal (Talbot and the end of the Hundred Years' War, Scotland, Ireland, the fall of Granada, Martin Behaim and the voyages along Africa); Italy: Genoa, Venice and Florence (Milan, the Sforza, the doge Foscari, Ferrara, Bologna, Cosimo de' Medici, Siena); Rome and the kingdom of Naples (Nicholas V, Callixtus III, the condottieri, Urbino, Rimini, St Bernardino, Alfonso of Aragon); Germany, the map of Europe and the conclusion
• the complete text, to be read straight through, with 581 footnotes — every strange name explained on the page where it first appears; the authors' mistakes are kept and explained
• 32 original woodcuts from the 1493 edition, in the colours of a hand-painted copy: the great panoramas of Cracow and Lübeck, views of the lands of Europe, and the woodcut map of Europe of 1493 across two pages
• nine colour illustrations in the manner of late 15th-century manuscript miniatures, one opening each part (created with AI tools)
• a Commentary section at the end: each part in plain words and what history tells us
• foreword

Who it is for

Readers of medieval and Renaissance history; anyone interested in Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic lands, Byzantium and the Ottomans, or Italy of the Medici; lovers of old books, woodcuts, early printing and old maps; anyone curious about how people in 1493 saw the lands of Europe.

About the series

This is the sixth and last book of a series of six. With it the whole Chronicle is complete.

A historical source: Schedel and Enea Silvio write as men of the fifteenth century, with the beliefs and prejudices of their time.