Neo-Latin Literature, Saracens and Mountaineering in the Tatra Mountains

Abstract

This paper discusses and contextualizes a curious event recorded in a poem by Leonhartus Nicasius of Poprad (now in Slovakia). On the arrival of the humanist physician Jacob Monau of Breslau in the Tatra region, several local humanists greeted him with a poem, including Nicasius, which described how a captured black African herbalist (Aethiops, or 'Saracen' in the early modern Hungarian context) had recently climbed the Tatra Mountains. An analysis of the poem shows parallels with the almost contemporary description of mountaineering in the Tatra by David Frölich, which discusses the upper limits of the middle region of the atmosphere (media regio aëris).