András Hess

• 1. Introduction

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  András Hess signed his name in Latin at the end of a book completed on the 5th of June 1473, on the eve of Pentecost: "Finita Bude anno Domini MCCCCLXXIII in vigilia penthecostes: per Andrea Hess." Completed in Buda, in the year of Our Lord 1473, on the eve of Pentecost, by Andreas Hess. With that single colophon sentence, the history of printing in Hungary began.

  Hess was a printer of German origin, and he had come to Buda under extraordinary circumstances. Who invited him, and why? What was printed on those 67 pages? And why did the press fall silent so soon after it had started?

• 2. The Invitation to Buda

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  János Vitéz, Archbishop of Esztergom, set the plan in motion. Research by Gedeon Borsa and Zoltánné Soltész shows that Vitéz commissioned László Karai, the provost of Buda and vice-chancellor to King Matthias Corvinus, to recruit Hess from a printing house in Rome operated by a printer named Lauer.

  The invitation went out in the late spring of 1471, though some sources date it to 1472. As late as February 1472, Hess was still in Rome. The evidence is indirect but telling: Lauer was still using the same type matrices that would later appear in the Chronica Hungarorum, which means Hess had not yet taken his equipment and departed.

  To fund the enterprise, Hess received support of 2,000 silver florins. With that sum, he established the first, and at the time the only, printing press in the Kingdom of Hungary. His arrival in Buda preceded the establishment of printing in most other European countries. Karai gave Hess lodging in the Buda Castle area, in a location that today is named Hess András Square.

• 3. The Chronica Hungarorum

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  Printed on 67 pages using rounded Antiqua type, the Chronica Hungarorum was set on thick white paper probably of South German origin. The work was written in Latin and presented Hungarian history in two parts: from the earliest times to the reign of King Matthias Corvinus.

  The first part was assembled by merging several earlier historical texts, drawing on a 14th-century chronicle compilation. The second part covers the period from the death of King Louis I of Hungary through Matthias's Moldavian campaign in 1468, where the chronicle ends. That final section was written by an unknown author.

  The work's naming has its own history. It became known as the Chronicon Budense following the convention introduced by the scholar Sándor Domanovszky. Because it belongs to the same textual tradition as János Thuróczy's chronicle, published in 1488, the two works share much of the same content.

  The original dedication was almost certainly intended for Archbishop Vitéz. But unfavorable political circumstances intervened, and Hess redirected the dedication to László Karai instead. Copies of the Chronica are preserved at the National Széchényi Library and the Library of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, with eight additional copies in foreign collections held in Paris, Prague, Saint Petersburg, Rome, Leipzig, Kraków, Vienna, and New Jersey. A handwritten copy once belonged to the German polymath Hartmann Schedel.

• 4. The Press and Its Operation

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  Earlier theories about Hess's press imagined a sizable operation: three presses, roughly a dozen assistants. The current scholarly picture is far more modest. It seems the press operated with a single press, and the most complex task, the typesetting, was carried out by Hess himself.

  There has been debate over whether Hess cast his type locally in Buda or brought it from Rome. The likeliest explanation is that he traveled to Buda in the spring of 1471 carrying his half-hundredweight set of type rather than matrices, since worn types could have been replaced using matrices if he had them. Gedeon Borsa noted that it was common practice for newly independent printers to receive a supply of type rather than matrices. József Fitz estimated Hess's type set at twenty-one capital letters, twenty-five lowercase letters, four ligatures, twenty-six abbreviation marks, and four punctuation marks.

  The pace of printing has also drawn scholarly attention. If Hess arrived in Buda in the spring of 1472, he would have had roughly ten months to complete the Chronica before the 5th of June 1473. But this creates a problem: Hess wrote in his dedication that he had long been without work, and a gap from April to July amounts to no more than four months, likely even less. It is therefore more probable that he began his work in 1471, printing at a rate of about seven or eight pages per month. Aladár Ballagi believed the press was ultimately destroyed by some natural disaster.

• 5. A Second Book, Two Surviving Copies

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  Hess's press produced at least one more work: the undated Magni Basilii de legendis poetis, meaning "On the Reading of Poets." According to Zoltánné Soltész, this was the last work the press printed.

  The edition contained two texts. The first was De legendis poetis by Basil the Great, a widely read work published multiple times during the Renaissance. The second was the Apologia Socratis by Xenophon. Both had been translated from Greek into Latin by the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni.

  Basil the Great used his text to urge young readers toward lasting spiritual values over worldly goods, drawing on examples like the work of bees and the practice of musicians and athletes. Xenophon, in the Apologia, depicted Socrates through his own words, showing the heroism with which the philosopher accepted his sentence at trial.

  Based on available evidence, Hess was the first printer to publish this particular edition, suggesting he may have received the manuscript in Buda itself. The paper came from the same mill as the Chronica, though the watermarks differ. Only two printed copies are known to survive: one in Vienna and one in Eichstätt.

  The colophon of this edition carries a quiet peculiarity: it bears only Hess's initials, "A. H.", and it appears not at the end of the book but after the first treatise, on the recto of the fifteenth leaf, because space allowed only there.

• 6. Silence After 1473

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  After 1473, Hess's press ceased operation. No further traces of it have been found. Some researchers attribute this to Hess's death; Aladár Ballagi suggested a natural disaster destroyed the equipment.

  The surname question adds another layer of uncertainty. According to József Fitz, Hess's original surname may have been "Huss," possibly changed upon arriving at the court of King Matthias Corvinus. That idea was later taken up in a historical novel by János Fodor.

  What is known is that the square where Karai gave Hess his lodging in the Buda Castle area still carries his name today: Hess András Square in Budapest. The single colophon sentence in the Chronica Hungarorum, bearing the date of the 5th of June 1473, remains the starting point of Hungarian printing history.