Konrad Kyeser

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Konrad Kyeser (26 August 1366 – after 1405) was a

.

A native of Eichstätt, Kyeser was trained as a physician and lived at the court in Padua before he joined the crusade against the Turks which ended in disaster at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396. Kyeser lived in exile in a mountain village in Bohemia during the reign of Sigismund in 1402 to 1403.

Bellifortis

During his time in exile, Kyeser began to write his book on the

(1459).

The book is divided into ten chapters, though there are also issues with the full content divided into 7 chapters. The topics of the chapters include cars, siege engines, hydraulic engines, elevators, firearms, defensive arms, "wondrous secrets", fireworks for warfare, fireworks for pleasure, and auxiliary tools.

The

, and his work contains various applications of magic in warfare.

Editions

The original codex is kept in the

library (Cod. Ms. philos. 63). Other editions include the following:

• Götz Quarg (ed.), facsimile of the Göttinger MS Philos. 63, VDI-Verlag, Düsseldorf (1967)
• Udo Friedrich (introduction), Fidel Rädle (trans.), Bellifortis, Codices figurati - libri picturati, Lengenfelder, Munich (1995),
  ISBN 3-89219-303-7
  . (facsimile of Cod. Ms. philos. 64 und 64a Cim.)
• electronic edition (CD ROM), facsimile of
  Cod. Pal. lat.
  1994, Palatina manuscripts of the 12th-15th centuries, Belser, Wildberg (2001)

In popular culture

Kyeser appears as an NPC in the 2018 video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and is voiced by Brian Blessed.

See also

• De rebus bellicis

Literature

• L. White, Kyeser's "Bellifortis": The First Technological Treatise of the Fifteenth Century, Technology and Culture (1969).
• Brian R. Price, Bellifortis: Conrad Kyeser and his war-book in THEME: The Knights Templar vol. 6, 2006, pp. 48–51.

Further reading

• Boehm, Barbara Drake; et al. (2005). Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  ISBN 1588391612
  .

External links

• Bellifortis - complete digitized version
• documents
• history Archived 2020-01-07 at the Wayback Machine