Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 109-112. (Budapest, 1985)

IN MEMORIAM JOHANNES SAMBUCUS - Zsámboky János (Johannes Sambucus) (magyar, angol, német nyelven)

JÁNOS ZSÁMBOKY (JOANNES SAMBUCUS) 1531-1584 Polymath physician and historigrapher of considerable significance in the history of European and Hungarian humanism, he was born in Nagyszombat in Northern Hungary (today Trnava in Czechoslovakia) on 25 or 30 July 1531. He refers to his origin in the preface to his Plautus edition, and remembers his father Péter Zsámboky in his works Poemata(1555) and Emblemata (1564). Accordingly, his family had fled the Turks from Zsámbok in Pest county to Nagyszombat. His father was granted nobility in 1549 by Emperor Ferdinand I. for his heroic behaviour in the fights against the Turks and for his merits as town magistrate. His heraldic animals tell about this, too: two cranes facing each other entwining with one leg, each holding a ring in the beak. The legend runs that the crane on watch holds a stone in one leg and in time of danger warns its companions by dropping it. Zsámboky began his studies in Vienna which he left at the age twelve in 1543 for a study tour around the universities and spiritual centres of Europe, and where he returned after 22 years, at the age of 33 in 1564 to sttle down definitely as court physician and historiographer first to Ferdinand I, then Maximilian II. The stages of his perligrination were Leipzig (1543), Wittenberg (1545), Ingolstadt (1548), Strassburg (1550), Paris (1551), Padova (1553, 1558, 1560), Bologna (1557) and other Italian towns, Gent (1563—1564), Antwerp (1564), Augsburg (April 1564), and finally Vienna (24 September 1564). In Leipzig Zsámboky the child lived at Joachim Camerarius' house who recommended him to this master and friend Philipp Melanchthon, thus he got to the University of Wittenberg on 29 June 1545. The edict of Ferdinand I threatening with exile all those who attended universities other than those of Vienna, Freiburg or Ingolstadt, made him move to the University of Ingolstadt in 1549. His professor of rhetoric was the renown scholar on Cicero, Veit Amerbach. In August 1550 he attended the courses of the famous Latinist pedagogue Johann Sturm, in Strassburg already. He arrived in Paris in the early autumn of 1551 drawn by the ancient university and the royal college founded by François I. His favourite professors in Paris were Adrien Turnébe in the Greek language, Pierre de la Ramée in Greek and Latin philosophy, and Pascal Duhamel in mathematics. He became magister of philosophy there in 1552. In Paris he formed a friendship with the philologist - printer Henri Estienne and it was there in the centre of Greek manuscript trade that he bought his first Greek manuscripts. He arrived in Italy, the centre of humanism, in 1553 with the help of Archbishop Miklós Oláh, charged with the supervision of his nephew György Bona. He began his medical studies at the University of Padova where he attended the lectures of Andreas Vesalius, Gabriele Falloppio, Giambattista da Monte. In 1555 he was examined by professors Oddus de Oddis and Victorius Trincavellus and obtained his licentiate. He probably never acquired the title of doctor. In 1557—1559 he lived in Vienna drawning a salary from the court. In 1561 he was in Paris again, a regular frequenter of humanist societies there, among his friends were Charles de l'Écluse