Biography
Johannes Schiltberger (c. 1380-after 1427) was a Bavarian squire from Munich. Taken prisoner at the crusading defeat of Nicopolis in 1396 at the age of sixteen, he was successively a captive and page of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I, of Tamerlane and his sons Shah Rukh and Miran Shah, then of the Mongol prince Çekre in the Golden Horde. He escaped in 1427 and walked from Crimea back to Bavaria, dictating his memoirs around 1430 to a scribe. This account, first published in Augsburg around 1473, is the earliest German first-hand testimony on the post-Mongol Orient.
