Apocalypse Now: Bernhard von Kraiburg’s Letter on the Fall of Constantinople (1453)

Abstract

Bernhard von Kraiburg, chancellor of the archbishop of Salzburg and bishop of Chiemsee, was a man of letters esteemed by his contemporaries. His best-known and most influential work is an epistle on the fall of Constantinople and other miseries of his time, addressed on 23 July 1453 to Silvester Pflieger, bishop of Chiemsee. The aim of this study is to provide a brief biographical sketch of Bernhard, to outline the manuscript tradition and the structure of his epistle, and to identify its main sources, which are not negligible even for the exegesis of the text: the Divinae institutiones of Lactantius and Petrarch’s Liber sine nomine.