Conquering Turk in Carnival Nürnberg: Hans Rosenplüt's Des Turken Vasnachtspil of 1456

Summary

One of the more curious European reactions to the traumatic Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 is a carnival play (Fastnachtspiel) by the Nürnberg armorer and gunsmith Hans Rosenplüt. This earliest of the datable German carnival plays is something of an anomaly as the piece depends not upon the usual cast of boorish peasants, quack doctors, or inebriated celebrants of the pre-Lenten festival, but rather upon the arrival of the Turkish sultan himself, Mehmed II al Fatih, Mehmed the Conqueror.

There is a clear temporal marker early on in Rosenplüt's text: “Der groβe Türk ist kumen her, / Der Kriechenlant gewunnen hat / Der ist hie mit seinem weisen rat” (288, lines 2–4) [The Great Turk has arrived here, he who conquered Greece; he's here with his wise counselors]. Likewise, in the Great Turk's central prophetic speech, a date is encrypted — “wenn eins und vier und funf und seβ” (294, n. 15). In 1456, three years after the Fall of Constantinople, the so-called “Duchy of Athens,” a remnant of the Fourth Crusade then ruled by a Florentine, was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. Between 1458 and 1460 the Peloponnesian Peninsula (the “Despotate of Morea”) and adjoining Aegean islands (mostly Genovese colonies) were likewise incorporated. To the north and west, the rebellious vassal state of Serbia was crushed between 1454–1459, with Bosnia and Herzegovina falling in 1463 and 1467, respectively. The Nürnberg artisan Rosenplüt was thus making festival entertainment out of current and threatening developments to the not-so-distant southeast.