[(2.)] “one hundred are quite of brass.”—Schiltberger is scarcely to be charged with exaggeration, if we consider what Manuel Chrysoloras has said of these walls. “I cannot conceive the walls of Constantinople, in regard to their extent and circuit, to have been inferior to those of Babylon. The towers are without number; the proportions and height of any one tower sufficed to astonish the beholder, and their construction and the large flights of steps excited universal admiration.”
In stating that there were one thousand churches, the author intended to convey the idea that they were very numerous; indeed Clavijo estimated the number at three thousand. Schiltberger appears to have been too much dazzled by the magnificence of the church of St. Sophia, to think of entering more largely upon a description of it as others have done.—Bruun.
[(3.)] “A city called Asparseri.”—This is Ak-kerman, a name which is the equivalent for Byelgorod, the Slave for White-Town, a place mentioned in the Russian and Polish chronicles of the middle ages—called Tchetate Alba by the Moldavians, and by the Maghyars, Feierwar, not Feriena as it appears through a printer’s error in Dlugocz (Hist. Poloniæ etc., xi, 324).
The Greeks of the Lower Empire changed the name from White-Town to Mavrocastron, turned by the Italians into Mocastro and Moncastro, as we find it in De Lannoy, Barbaro, and others.
There are good grounds for the supposition that the name White was given originally by the Greeks, because the Aspron mentioned by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (De Adm. Imp., 167) should be looked for in this locality, notwithstanding that the emperor situates it on the Dnieper, a scribe’s error for Dniester. I know of no author who speaks of a White-Town on the Lower Dnieper, and the emperor himself describes the place to which he alludes, as being situated on the bank of the river nearest to Bulgaria.
It would appear that the ancient name was not forgotten by the Greeks after they had changed it to Mavrocastron, because some authors of the latter part of the middle ages have alluded to the place as Leucopolichnion or Asprocastron; in all probability identical with “Asparseri”, and certainly to be distinguished from White-Town, but a distinction that is to be attributed to a mistake on the part of the transcriber. How otherwise are we to account for the appearance in the Heidelberg MS., of the native name Asparsaraï—White-Town—and for the statement in the Nuremberg MS. (Penzel’s edition) that Schiltberger took his departure, not from Asparsaraï but from White-Town, direct for Soutchava[1] at that time the chief city of Little Walachia or Mavrovlachia as Moldavia was then called.
Grecian colonists were attracted to the neighbourhood of modern Ak-kerman in very remote times. The Tyrites of Herodotus lived there, probably at Ophiussa, a city known to Strabo. There, also, flourished Tyras, to be identified perhaps with Turis, ceded by the emperor Justinian, A.D. 547, to the Antes, a Slave tribe which may have been the first to give the name of Byelgorod to the place which Edrisi certainly had in his mind, when he wrote about the Coman city distant one day’s journey from the mouth of the Danube, called Akliba; a name composed of two Turkish words, Ak and liva—White District—and therefore possibly the Coman designation for the “White City” of Schiltberger, the Akkerman of Aboulfeda.—Bruun.
[1] ... ich zu einer Wallachischen Stadt kam, die unter dem Nahmen der weissen Stadt bekannt ist. Von da kam ich nach Sedhof; welches die Hauptstadt der kleinen Wallachey ist.—Page 205.
[(4.)] “Linburgch, the chief city in White Reissen the Lesser.”—This White Russia was the eastern part of Galicia, alluded to by Marino Sanudo in his letter to the king of France. “Russia minor quæ confinat ab occidente cum Polonia....” (Kunstmann, Stud. über M. S., 105).
In distinguishing White Russia from the kingdom of Russia (see [page 50]), Schiltberger refers to the grand-duchy of Lithuania, and not only to the White Russia of our own times, which then formed part of the grand-duchy.—Bruun.