The Collection

One leaf out of the votive section at the back of a large Mass-book, carrying three Masses in sequence: the end of a Mass for the sick, a complete Mass of Joseph the patriarch, and the opening of the Mass of the Holy Crown of Thorns, which breaks off in mid-Gospel at the foot of the page. The folio number stands in red at the head of the recto — cxlviii, 148 — and chants are often given by incipit with a further reference, in cxl, cxxxviij. The parent volume was a large book, and this leaf came from deep inside it. It was a working book for daily use, not a display manuscript: no flourishing, terse rubrics, plain initials.

Why Solomon, for a feast about thorns? The verse was read through the Middle Ages as a figure of Christ — the true Solomon — crowned by his mother, which is to say crowned in his humanity. The introit verse, the epistle and the Alleluia of this Mass all turn on it. The Gospel that follows is John 19: Pilate, the scourging, the plaited crown, the purple garment, Ecce homo. The feast itself honours the Passion relic brought to Paris in 1239 and enshrined in the Sainte-Chapelle.

Why Hungary

The discriminating item is that Alleluia. The version catalogued from thirteenth-century Dominican sources in France and the Low Countries runs Diadema spineum veneremur hodie, cuius per aculeum sertum datur gloriae — a rhymed line. This leaf does not follow it. After Diadema spineum the verse returns to Canticles 3:11.

That second form is the one Béla Holl's Repertorium hymnologicum medii aevi Hungariae records at entry 189, in three Hungarian manuscript missals of roughly 1341 to 1426 and in the printed missals of Esztergom, the Pauline order, and Pécs. In every one of those books it sits in the votive block at the back — which is exactly where this leaf comes from.

The nearest physical comparandum is the Gyergyó Missal, finished in Transylvania in 1428: the same two columns and twenty-nine lines, the same plain initials, the same run of votive Masses with the Crown of Thorns among them. It is not the same book — its Gospel initials read In diebus illis where this leaf reads In illo tempore — but the family resemblance is close.

The part that does not fit

The Joseph Mass matches nothing. Its prayers leave no doubt which Joseph is meant: a dream interpreted, a prison, Pharaoh's favour, and the title propheta belong to the son of Jacob, not to the husband of Mary. The Latin West normally treated the patriarch as a Lenten typological figure rather than as an intercessor with a votive Mass of his own, and these particular prayers have not been found in any database, printed missal, or study so far consulted — Hungary included.

They are most likely a local composition: an altar dedication, a confraternity, a patron of that name, a relic. Which makes them the single feature most likely, one day, to identify the book this leaf was cut from.

Assessment

• OriginKingdom of Hungary most probable; Bohemia or Moravia and Austria each materially possible — a lead, not a settled attribution
• Datec. 1370–1430, outer range c. 1340–1460 — inferred from script, content and photographs, not from the original
• AlleluiaHungarian rather than Dominican text — to be confirmed on the sheet itself under a loupe
• Joseph MassUnmatched in any indexed tradition — open

The postcommunion of the Joseph Mass begins at the foot of one face and finishes at the head of the other. That sentence is the seam, and it survives only because this particular leaf did.

The long horizontal band of loss across both columns, with its darkened, crumbling edges, is the signature of reuse. Central European missals were superseded by the Roman Missal of 1570 and cut up for bindings in the century that followed; this leaf was very probably a wrapper before it was anything else. What survives of it is damaged enough that several passages can only be read by reconstruction from the standard texts, and the page says so wherever that is the case.

Münster's Cosmographia, first issued in German at Basel in 1544, was among the most widely read printed books of the sixteenth century, enlarged and reprinted for decades in German, Latin, French, Italian and Czech. These two leaves come from the Latin folio of 1559, out of the long European book, in the section headed De Ungaria.

Between them they carry roughly 1437 to 1464 of Hungarian history: the death of the Emperor-King Sigismund; the brief reign of Albert of Habsburg; the disputed succession between Albert's widow Elizabeth, with the infant Ladislaus the Posthumous, and Władysław III of Poland — including the theft of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen from Visegrád; the campaigns of János Hunyadi against the Ottomans and Władysław's death at Varna in 1444; the murder of Ulrich of Cilli and the execution of László Hunyadi; the early death of Ladislaus V; and the election, ransom and 1464 coronation of Matthias Corvinus.

That is the entire arc of The Raven & the Crown, printed in Basel within living memory of its end. Münster leans on the Hungarian humanist chronicle tradition — above all Bonfini's decades and the histories associated with Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pius II — and the vivid set-pieces are recognisably from it: the widowed queen's speech to the estates, the crown slipped to an old woman during an inventory of the treasury, and the botched beheading of László Hunyadi, which took five strokes.

The four woodcuts

• p. 879An open jewelled crown, for the Holy Crown of St. Stephen — hidden by Elizabeth, stolen from Visegrád, and used to crown the infant Ladislaus
• p. 880A standing figure labelled Vaivoda, standing in for Hunyadi as voivode of Transylvania. Like most such figures in the Cosmographia it is a generic, reusable type-cut and not a portrait
• p. 881Armed men cutting down a figure in a landscape — the murder of Ulrich of Cilli at Belgrade, or by association the violence of the execution recounted across these pages
• p. 882A roundel portrait in antique coin style, lettered MATTHIAS REX HVNGARIAE BOHEMIAE DALMATIAE: Matthias shown all'antica as a laureate Roman bust, and the one genuinely portrait-like image on either leaf

The leaves are framed with pages 880 and 881 outward, so the crown and the medallion face the backing. The photographs above are how those two stay consultable without unframing them.

One passage does not resolve. Münster has Matthias promising Transylvania to “his brother John” — but his only brother, László, had been executed years earlier. The sentence looks garbled in whatever source he was following, and no amount of care with the Latin will fix it.

One leaf, hand-coloured on both faces, carrying two episodes of the same campaign season. The recto is Chapter XLVII — “the situation of the city and castle of Zigeth, together with a true depiction of the Turkish camp” — with a numbered key to the fortress, the munitions yard, the Turkish trenches, the river Maro, and the surrounding marsh.

In 1566 Nikola Zrínyi held Szigetvár with some 2,500 men against the full weight of the Ottoman army. The garrison was overwhelmed and died almost to the last man, in a siege still counted among those that blunted the Ottoman advance into Central Europe. The German text beneath records, almost in passing, that Suleiman the Magnificent died at Fünffkirchen — Pécs — on 4 September, aged seventy-six, during what proved his final campaign.

The verso shows “the fortress of Sacca, and how it was conquered by the Voivode's forces.” Sacca is Zsáka, a small water-castle in Bihar County taken the same year by the Transylvanian voivode János Zsigmond Zápolya. That identification rests on the caption's phrase erobert von den Wayodischen rather than on anything printed on the leaf, and is recorded as an inference.

Bihar County is the home region of my mother's family, whose origins trace to Nagyvárad in that same county. A single leaf therefore carries the most famous siege in Hungarian national memory on one face and, on the other, a castle in the family's own county.

A “GS” monogram appears in both blocks — the block-cutter's mark. It has not been matched to any documented Cosmographia formschneider, and is recorded here rather than attributed.

The leaf is framed with the recto facing out, so the Sacca side is hidden against the backing. The photograph above is how that face stays consultable without unframing the sheet.

Van den Keere (Ghent, 1571 – London and Amsterdam, c. 1646) trained under his brother-in-law Jodocus Hondius and spent a long career engraving maps for the Hondius atlases. Around 1642 he was commissioned to engrave a set of twenty small maps for a pocket companion to Speed's Prospect. The first printing appeared in London in 1646 — the year of his death — and the plates were reissued through 1676.

The map is trilingual in character, which is typical of these English atlas plates: English for the editorial region-labels, Latin for the formal geography (fluvius for river, com. for county) and the engraver's signature, and local Hungarian and German town names phonetically anglicised — Presburg for Pozsony, Vienna al Weenen, Tokaya for Tokaj.

For a plate this small it carries a remarkable number of places that matter to this family at once. Wardeyn is Nagyvárad, the town of the Erdélyi line. TRANSILVANI sits astride the eastern edge — the land from which that surname derives. Zatmar, the Samos flu., Ungwar, Eperies and Barto in Upper Hungary, Tokaya and Sárospatak in the north-eastern wine country all appear on the same sheet.

The leaf is complete and not laid down: the map on the front, Speed's English description of the kingdom printed on the back of the same paper. That text praises Hungary as long “exposed to hazard in the defence of Christendom,” and then retells the Magyar origin tradition — the Hunni, “a Scythian people” — which is the same story preserved in the medieval Gesta Hungarorum.

This is the Hunyadi seat. János Hunyadi began building it in 1442 on the rock above the river; his son Matthias Corvinus enlarged it substantially from 1486; Gábor Bethlen added further towers in 1619–24. It stands today at Hunedoara in Romania, and it is the single building most bound up with the family that the book is about. Everything else on this page is a picture of a person or a place; this is a picture of the house.

The castle burned badly in 1854 and was restored at state expense from 1870. That gives the underlying design a window — the condition of the towers and roofline on the plate ought, on close reading, to place it inside it.

Is it actually an engraving?

Worth setting out, because the two physical findings pointed in opposite directions and the answer turns on which one is the better witness.

There is no plate mark — no trace of the broad, shallow trough an intaglio plate's edge presses into the sheet under a rolling press. Taken alone that points at lithography. But the densest, most heavily hatched passages of the image, the bridge piers above all, feel distinctly rougher under the fingertip than the open passages do. Texture that tracks the density of the linework is a signature of intaglio and is very hard to fake: ink is forced up out of the incised lines in proportion to how much line is cut there, so the blacks stand physically higher than the greys. A lithograph lays down an essentially uniform film of ink whatever the tone.

The two findings are not in conflict once you ask what survives. A plate mark is a wide, gentle depression, and a century and a half of handling, binding and rehousing flattens it. Ridges of ink concentrated in the darkest lines are physically thicker and far more durable. The absence of the fragile evidence alongside the presence of the robust evidence is what you would expect. Under magnification there is no halftone dot screen, which rules out a modern photomechanical reproduction outright; the ink sits embedded in the paper fibres, and the paper reads as nineteenth-century stock.

Assessment

• Design & publisherConfirmed — the imprint matches known plates from the Rohbock and Hunfalvy series published by G. G. Lange, Darmstadt
• Printing processA genuine period steel engraving with a plate mark since flattened — strongly supported, on the density-correlated ink texture. Assessed by eye and touch, not by instrument; a paper conservator could settle it
• DateOpen. Comparable plates from the series are documented at 1857; this sheet is recorded as 1865, which has not been checked against a dated example of this exact plate
• ConditionFull margins, printed ruled border and corner register marks intact — an as-issued book leaf, not a later trimmed extraction. Scattered light foxing in the margins; no tears or losses

The interesting part is not the answer but the shape of the argument. One test said lithograph, one said engraving, and the way through was to ask which kind of evidence a hundred and fifty years is more likely to have destroyed.

The Royal Palace runs along the crest of Castle Hill at Buda, seen from the flat Pest side of the river. In the foreground a column of pilgrims moves left to right with banners up, past a tented cart and a horse and a knot of figures resting on the ground, and funnels onto the bridge, where it thins to a dark thread running all the way out to the far bank.

The bridge is the date

That crossing is a bridge of boats: pontoons moored in line with a roadway laid over them. Until 1849 it was the only way across between the two cities, and it was not permanent — it was taken up each year before the ice ran and put back in the spring, which meant that for weeks at a time Buda and Pest were simply two towns on opposite banks. Bartlett sketched his Danube views on a tour in the 1830s, so the view necessarily predates the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, and with it the joining of Buda, Pest and Óbuda into one city in 1873. The picture is of a place that was still, in every practical sense, two places.

Not the plate it is usually taken for

Beattie's book plates were issued as large single-sided sheets on heavy plate paper with wide margins. This is not one of them. It is small, double-sided, printed on thin lightly toned magazine stock, and cut in wood rather than engraved on steel — the dense parallel hachure of the sky and hillside is the giveaway. Illustrated weeklies recirculated popular Bartlett views as smaller in-text wood engravings for decades after the book appeared, and this is one of those.

Saying so costs the sheet nothing. It is a genuine period impression with even overall toning and honest wear, and it is worth having precisely because the composition kept being reprinted — the measure of how thoroughly Bartlett fixed the Victorian idea of the Danube.

Assessment

• CompositionW. H. Bartlett, confirmed — a well-documented and much-reproduced view
• This impressionA later periodical wood engraving, not the 1844 steel plate
• Date of printing1872 as reported with the sheet; no periodical has been named and the date is not confirmed — open