Historia Iohan Petri Contareni ...

A fair copy of Heinrich Habermehl’s (=Habermel) German translation of Contarini’s account of the Battle of Lepanto. Translated from Johan Stupano’s Latin translation of Contarini’s Italian text, the manuscript is dated 1581 on the title, and the watermark, displaying the arms of Saxony, links it to the Saxon court. The questions posed by this manuscript are many. Habermehl’s translation was published in 1599/1600, almost twenty years after it was produced. But a German translation of Contarini’s Cose Successe already existed, produced by Georg Henisch and published in 1573, a year after the first Italian edition. Why did Habermehl chose to translate Contarini’s text again almost ten years later? And why was it published? The work appeared under the title Historische und gründlich Beschreibung der letzten grossen Schlacht so zwischen den Venedier und dem Türcken uffn Meer gehalten …, published in Dresden in 1599/1600 by Hieronymus Schütz, edited by Johannes Weniger and with a preface by Habermehl. The title differs from that of our manuscript, and the preface in the printed version, which seems to be contemporary with the publication, does not occur in the manuscript. Little is known of Habermehl. He is described in catalogues of the Royal Library of Dresden as ‘Churfurstlichen Sächsischen Diener’. Two other translations by him are recorded: Sabellicus’s history of Venice (for which he received 100 florins) and Johannes Sleidanus’s De quatuor summis imperiis (Kurtzer historischen Auszug der vier monarchien), the latter in several copies dated 1574, 1581 and 1589. Habermehl also translated a sermon of Caecilius Cyprianus that was published together with Nikolaus Selnecker’s Chrislicher bericht … Leipzig, 1566. The singer Heinrich Habermehl was the music master of the chapel choir of Wurtemberg in 1551. It is possible that the singer and the translator are the same person; if they are one and the same, what brought the singer to Dresden is unknown.