In stating that there were one thousand churches, the author intended to convey the idea that they were very numerous; indeed Clavijo estimated the number at three thousand. Schiltberger appears to have been too much dazzled by the magnificence of the church of St. Sophia, to think of entering more largely upon a description of it as others have done.—BRUUN.
(3.) “A city called Asparseri.”—This is Ak-kerman, a name which is the equivalent for Byelgorod, the Slave for White-Town, a place mentioned in the Russian and Polish chronicles of the middle ages—called Tchetate Alba by the Moldavians, and by the Maghyars, Feierwar, not Feriena as it appears through a printer’s error in Dlugocz (_Hist. Poloniæ_ etc., xi, 324).
The Greeks of the Lower Empire changed the name from White-Town to Mavrocastron, turned by the Italians into Mocastro and Moncastro, as we find it in De Lannoy, Barbaro, and others.
There are good grounds for the supposition that the name White was given originally by the Greeks, because the Aspron mentioned by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (_De Adm. Imp._, 167) should be looked for in this locality, notwithstanding that the emperor situates it on the Dnieper, a scribe’s error for Dniester. I know of no author who speaks of a White-Town on the Lower Dnieper, and the emperor himself describes the place to which he alludes, as being situated on the bank of the river nearest to Bulgaria.
It would appear that the ancient name was not forgotten by the Greeks after they had changed it to Mavrocastron, because some authors of the latter part of the middle ages have alluded to the place as Leucopolichnion or Asprocastron; in all probability identical with “Asparseri”, and certainly to be distinguished from White-Town, but a distinction that is to be attributed to a mistake on the part of the transcriber. How otherwise are we to account for the appearance in the Heidelberg MS., of the native name Asparsaraï—White-Town—and for the statement in the Nuremberg MS. (Penzel’s edition) that Schiltberger took his departure, not from Asparsaraï but from White-Town, direct for Soutchava[1] at that time the chief city of Little Walachia or Mavrovlachia as Moldavia was then called.