SCHILTBERGER, JOHANN or HANS German traveller and writer, was born of a noble family in 1381, probably at Hollern near Lohof, half way between Munich and Freising. In 1394 he joined the suite of Lienhart Richartinger, and went off to fight under Sigismund, king of Hungary (after wards emperor), against the Turks on the Hungarian frontier. At the battle of Nicopolis (Sept. 28, 1396) he was wounded and taken prisoner; Sultan Bayezid I. (Ilderim) then took him into his service as a runner (1396-1402). During this time he accompanied Ottoman troops to Asia Minor and Egypt. On Bayezid's overthrow at Angora (July 20, 1402), Schiltberger passed into the service of Bayezid's conqueror Timur : he now visited Samarkand, Armenia and Georgia. After Timur's death (Feb. 17, 1405) his German runner became a slave of various suc cessors. He next accompanied Chekre, a Tatar prince living in Abu Bekr's horde, on an excursion to Siberia, of which name Schiltberger gives us the first clear mention in west European literature. He followed Chekre in his attack on the Old Bulgaria of the middle Volga. Wanderings in south-east Russia; visits to Sarai, the old capital of the Kipchak Khanate on the lower Volga and to Azov or Tana, still a trading centre for Venetian and Genoese merchants; travels in the Crimea, Circassia, Abkhasia and Mingrelia; and finally escape (from the neighbourhood of Batum) followed; he lay hid at Constantinople for a time, then returned to his Bavarian home (1427) by way of Kilia, Akker man, Lemberg, Cracow, Breslau and Meissen. After his return he became a chamberlain of Duke Albert III.
Schiltberger's Reisebuch contains not only a record of his own , experiences and a sketch of various chapters of contemporary Eastern history, but also an account of countries and their man ners and customs. First come the lands "this side" of Danube,
where he had travelled ; next follow those between the Danube and the sea, which had now fallen under the Turk; then the Otto man dominions in Asia; last come the regions from Trebizond to Russia and from Egypt to India. Schiltberger is perhaps the first writer of Western Christendom to give the true burial place of Mohammed at Medina; he contributed to fix Prester John, at the close of the middle ages, in Abyssinia.
Four mss. of the Reisebuch exist: (I) at Donaueschingen in the Fiirstenberg library, No. 481 ; (2) at Heidelberg, university library, 216; (3) at Nuremberg, city library, 34 ; (4) at St. Gall, monast. library, 628 (all of 15th century, the last fragmentary). The work was first edited at Augsburg, c. 1460 ; four other editions appeared in the 15th century, and six in the i6th ; in the i9th the best were K. F. Neumann's (Munich, 1859), P. Bruun's (Odessa, 1866, with Russian commentary, in the Records of the Imperial University of New Russia, vol. i.), and V. Langmantel's (Tubingen, 1885) ; "Hans Schiltbergers Reisebuch," in the 172nd volume of the Bibliothek des literdrischen Vereins in Stuttgart. See also the English (Hakluyt Society) version, The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger . . ., trans. by Buchan Telfer with notes by P. Bruun (1879) ; C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography (1897, etc.) iii. 356-378, 55o.