John Hunyadi and the Genesis of the “White Knight” of the West
John Hunyadi and the Genesis of the “White Knight” of the West

Summary/Abstract: The overwhelming majority of authors agree today that the final model for the hero of the novel Tirant lo Blanch—written by the Valencian writer and knight Joanot Martorell (and completed by yet another Valencian knight, Martí Joan de Galba)—was John Hunyadi. The present paper challenges the premise that the cognomen lo Blanch is related to the ethnic origin of John Hunyadi (Wallachian—Valachus, Balachus), as the name Iancu was allegedly not known in that part of Europe. In point of fact, the first name Iancu/Ianco, given to John Hunyadi by the Romanians (his ethnic community) and by all the Balkan peoples, first became known in the Italian Peninsula. It was there that Ianco became Bianco, as Bianco also makes sense, meaning ‘white.’ Thus, the “white” crusader or Romanian extraction came to overlap with an older Western mythological figure and engendered a number of literary characters, of whom the best-known is Tirant lo Blanch.

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