Barbiano’s bears

Abstract

The paper examines an excerpt from Farkas Bethlen’s Historia de rebus Transsylvanicis, Book 13, which describes the antecedents and outbreak of the Bocskai Uprising in 1604. The author vividly portrays the miserable conditions of contemporary Transylvania before taking the reader to Kassa (Košice), where he reports on the atrocities committed by the chief captain, Barbiano, against the town’s citizens. These culminate in the case of Barbiano’s bears, which his servants set upon passers-by, causing grievous injuries for their own amusement. In examining the source of this detail, the study shows that the story is also found in slightly different forms in the fragments of Szamosközy. Since Bethlen had compiled the earlier sections of the work from the complete but unpublished writings of other authors, it is possible that he was not working from the fragments that are still known today, but that he still had Szamosközy’s now lost work on Bocskai. This hypothesis calls for further philological investigation and proof, following in the footsteps of the bears.