Arthurian Literature in Medieval Central and Eastern Europe

In Central and Eastern Europe Arthurian literature was associated with chivalric values. Already present in the byliny tradition of the Kievan Rus’, Arthurian elements cannot be traced to a specific origin/text. The fourteenth-century Old Czech Tristan , also known as Tristan a Izalda , derived from specific German Arthurian texts. This was also the case with the Old Czech Tandariuš ( Tandariàš a Floribella ). The Tristan tradition appears in Bulgarian (or Bulgarian-Macedonian-Serbian) songs. The sixteenth-century Belarusian Tristan had Italian sources. Polish literature includes only short references to the Arthurian tradition. The so-called Artus Courts ( curiae regis Artus ) became highly popular in the Hanza towns of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and they showed that Arthurianism still stood for high moral values at the time.