CHAPTER LXII.
[(1.)] “Karawag.”—This must have been the plain of Karabagh, between the rivers Kour and Araxes, where Shah Rokh spent the winter of 1420, being accompanied by his vassals; Khalyl Oullah, the shah of Shirwan, and Minutcher, his own valorous brother, being among his guests (Dorn, Versuch einer Gesch. d. Schirwan-Sch., vi, 4, 549). Like Schiltberger, Barbaro and Contarini have called the Kour, Tigris, and the Tigris, Shat or Set.—Bruun.
[(2.)] “they call the Germans, Nymitsch.”—This term is borrowed from the Slaves, who have applied it to the Germans from the earliest times, either because the latter spoke an incomprehensible, a dumb language, or, as Schafarik explains (Slawische Alterthümer, i, 442), because they followed the example of the Celts, who called certain German tribes settled in Gaul, Nemetes.[1]—Bruun.
[1] Nyemoï is the Russian adjective for dumb. Ed.
[(3.)] “then did the sultan of Alkenier conquer it.”—Sis became finally subject to the Egyptians in 1374–75, having fallen into their hands upon several previous occasions, to wit, in 1266, 1275, and 1298 (Weil, Gesch. der Chal., iv, 55, 78, 213, 233). They had frequently appeared in force in its neighbourhood, notably in 1278 (Makrizi by Quatremère, I, i, 166), a date which nearly corresponds with the year in which the city was taken; a statement that would have been communicated to the author by his friends the Armenians, the most interested in the fate of their capital. It need not in this case be supposed that Schiltberger confounded the Mahomedan with the Christian year, and that he conceived 655 of the Hegira to correspond to 1277. In 655 or A.D. 1257, Egypt was in too disturbed a state for the sultan to trouble himself about the conquest of Sis.—Bruun.