Giovanni Michele Bruto between the Transylvanian and Viennese Courts (1572–1574)

The Venetian historian Giovanni Michele Bruto (1517–1592) arrived in Transylvania in January 1574 to begin to work on his monumental Rerum Ungaricarum libri commisioned by Stephen Báthory. The project’s original initiator was the Transylvanian chancellor Ferenc Forgách (1535–1577), who in 1572 sent a message to Bruto through his client Farkas Kovacsóczy (1540–1594), asking him to undertake the same task offered already eight years before: the writing of a major historical work on 16th century Hungarian history. Brutus accepted Kovacsóczy’s offer enthusiastically at first, but following the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre instead of Alba Iulia he went to Vienna, where he also made some arrangements with Emperor Maximilian’s court physician, Johannes Crato von Krafftheim (1519–1585), to write a history on the reign of Ferdinand I. In 1583 Bruto was working already in Cracow as the court historian of Báthory, King of Poland since 1576. In his book of letters printed that year, the historian attempted to cover up his seemingly unethical behavior ten years prior by publishing his letters to Crato, Kovacsóczy, Forgách, and Báthory from the two years in question either without dates or with modified dates. This caused some confusion in the literature up to this day. Through a close reading of the letters and by bringing in new sources, this study reveals Bruto’s peculiar self‑fashioning technique and restores the chronology of the historian’s two journeys to Hungary and Transylvania between 1572 and 1574.