De bello Pannonico: Epic on the Long Turkish War by Johannes Czernovicenus

De bello Pannonico by Johannes Czernovicenus is the only Neo-Latin epos from the Early Modern Czech Lands describing the events of the wars with the Turks. Its author, the respected burgher and councillor of the Old Town of Prague, was at the turn of the seventeenth century a member of the group of poets around Paulus Gisbicius, who were close to the court of Rudolf II. The epos itself consists of six books, comprising 7,455 dactylic hexameters and including events from 1591–1605. Czernovicenus published De bello Pannonico in print fourteen years later in 1619, on the occasion of the coronation of Frederick of the Palatinate as the King of Bohemia. Apart from the addition of accompanying poems, there was a need to somehow modify the content of the epic itself to reflect the political needs at the time. This work is typical evidence of the thesis that no work of literature can be studied without examining the context of its creation and the circumstances of its publication.