ABSTRACT
Balint Balassi was the greatest lyric poet of late sixteenth-century Hungary. He is not familiar to English readers, though some may have come across his name in connection with his exact contemporary Philip Sidney. This chapter explores the deeply religious yet non-sectarian nature of Balassi’s Christian heroism as it is represented in what may be his most famous lyric: ‘Egy katonaenek in laudem confiniorum’. The katonaenek could deal with more or less any aspect of the military life, but during the period of the Turkish occupation there was inevitably an emphasis on the miles Christianus. Balassi’s hymn to God the Son belongs squarely in the tradition of the katonaenek in the generality of its soldier-speaker, and also in its deployment of the stock themes and imagery of the genre. Hunger and thirst are the natural concomitants of battle-fatigue, but the ‘great heat’ also mentioned belongs to a different category of physical experience.
