The Crusade Projects (Advises) of John Torcello and Bertrandon De La Broquière ‒ Translation and Commentary

The article presents a Bulgarian translation of two crusade projects (“advises”) written in the first half of the 15th century, with an introduction and scientific commentary. The author of the first project was the Byzantine diplomat John Torcello, and the second was written by the French knight Bertrandon de la Broquière, a member of the court of the Burgundian duke Philip the Good. Both texts have been preserved to this day only in Old French language. For the present translation, I used their well-known edition by the French scholar Charles Schefer, published in 1892. The two projects, by order of the aforementioned Duke of Burgundy, were added to the description of Broquière’s journey in the Levant and Southeastern Europe in 1432–1433. The latter was translated and published in Bulgarian in 1968, but without these additions. The complete texts of the projects have been translated into Bulgarian and supplemented with an extensive scientific commentary for the first time. The introduction provides details regarding the historical context, the authors, the composition of their works, and a new hypothesis supporting an earlier datе for the writing of the Broquière’s project.