Gentlemen Errant; Being the Journeys and Adventures of Four Noblemen in Europe During the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A MASTER OF WAR INTRODUCTORY The biographer of the knight Wilwolt of Schaumburg has hidden himself behind the beloved figure of his hero, and, were it not for the patient investigations of Professor Ulmann, we should still be at a stand in our efforts to discern him. But the learned historian, in his interesting article on the unknown author of the Stones and Deeds, discovers the personality of one of the most remarkable memoir-writers of the fifteenth century. The chronicler, then, was himself a knight and courtier of no paltry pedigree. Son of Ludwig von Eyb, famous councillor and annalist of the Elector Albert Achilles, and nephew of Albrecht von Eyb, distinguished translator of Plautus and writer of the Spiegel der Sitten, he had also a blood-claim on the heritage of letters. He was born in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and passed his life in the halls of the great: of the Margrave of Brandenburg, of the Bishop of Eichstadt and of three Electors Palatine of the Rhine.1 Nor is it improbable thathe was personally present at much of the fighting in the Netherlands and elsewhere, that he so graphically describes in the biography of Schaumburg. To his personal character a contemporary, Kilian Leib, gives splendid testimony: ' in the opinion of reasonable men, he was held for the most honourable and clean- lived nobleman of his time.' It is allowable, moreover, to imagine that some of the virtues with which he delights to adorn his friend were shared by himself. They were to him, at least, the qualities of the ideal hero, and he expresses the hope that his writings may encourage their like in all his readers. Of these qualities, valour, wisdom and kindness were the chief, and they form no bad equipment for a soldier and man of the world. 1 The declining years...