Paul Cobb (Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania), Crusade, Captivity, and Wonder: Johannes Schiltberger's Traveler Tales. Co-sponsored by the Committee on Medieval Studies and the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

In 1396, a German teenager, Johann Schiltberger, was taken captive while on crusade against the Ottoman Turks and he became a personal attendant of the sultan Bayezid I. At Bayezid's death, he joined the household of the Central Asian warlord Timur (Tamerlane) and spent the next thirty years of his life in service to various Timurid princes across the Middle East and Central Asia. After escaping back to his Bavarian home, he dictated his remarkable account of this captivity and the work survived in various guises into the early modern period. What can Schiltberger's text teach us about the Middle East (and Middle Europe) at the close of the Middle Ages?