Seer aenmerkelyke reys-beschryving na Constantinopolen, en Egypten, gedaan in het jaar 1605, en vervolgen...

DESCRIPTION OF A VOYAGE to

1605.

it is well provided with very strong bastions, which are built of earth on the land side, but on the side of the Danube, they are built of baked brick. Furthermore, it has a deep and very wide water-moat. This city is well maintained by the Emperor and is always well supplied with war necessities, just as I counted eighty pieces of cannon on the ramparts on one side of the city. Although this Komárom is a reasonably large place, it has only one gate, before which could be seen many heads of Turks displayed on stakes, at which our soldiers, when they were being drilled, had to shoot with their muskets as if at a target.

Nicolaus Schmidt is captured by the Turks.

Until now, the war had seemed reasonably sweet to me, but alas, how quickly this imagined sweetness has turned into a fierce bitterness! For with the Turks swarming in heaps around Komárom, a troop of us was sent out to drive away a band that appeared near the city; but since we found ourselves too weak, we were forced to retreat. And I, who went a little to the side, was captured with five others from our band, placed on a cart, and taken across the Danube, where they had pitched their camp. At about one o'clock in the night, I had to climb onto a horse, upon which they dragged me to the city of Graen Esztergom after they had tied my feet under the belly of the horse.

Graen.

The houses of this city, which has already groaned for some years under the yoke of the Turks, still lay for the most part in ruins, the city walls dilapidated, and—which is a very great negligence on the part of the Turks—there were thousands of unburied bodies and skeletons around the city, which they say are of Christians who died in the sorties when the city was besieged by the Turks.

Schmidt

From Graen, I was taken further to Kanizsa, and