IN 1521 NICOLAUS Hussovianus, an aide to Bishop Erazm Ciołek, Polish delegate to the Vatican during the papacy of Leo X, was watching the bullfights at a papal celebration in Rome. As Hussovianus tells it, the fury of the wounded animals reminded him of the bison hunts he had witnessed as a young man in the Polish–Lithuanian woods. His loose tongue earned him a writing assignment, for Bishop Ciołek asked him to write a poem about the bison hunts.

Pope Leo, who was an avid devotee of hunting, was fascinated by stories of the primeval Polish–Lithuanian forests and the fierce animals found in the northern woods, and he asked Bishop Ciołek to obtain a hide of the Lithuanian bison to be stuffed and put on display in Rome. Bishop Ciołek then wrote to Mikołaj Radziwiłł, palatine of Vilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), asking for a bison hide, and commissioned Hussovianus to write a poem about the animal for the occasion. But Pope Leo, who was famously said to have remarked, on his election, “Let us enjoy the papacy since God has given it to us,”1 did not live to enjoy his gift of a stuffed bison from Bishop Ciołek. In the next few months, before the plans could be carried out, the pope, the bishop, and the palatine all died. Hussovianus returned to Poland in 1522 and put the finishing touches to his poem, which was published in Kraków in 1523. The poem was dedicated not to the late pope but to Poland's Queen Bona, Hussovianus's patroness after his return to Kraków, and it was prefaced by an epigram addressed to the queen's secretary.

Hussovianus's 1,072-line poem in elegiac couplets, Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis (A Poem about the Size, the Ferocity, and the Hunting of the Bison), is a learned and exciting work that is both a natural history of the magnificent European bison and its habitat as well as an ethnography of the region's rugged people. In addition, the poem touches on social and aesthetic issues and creates a powerful image of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.4 While the bison hunt takes place at the edges of the civilized world, Hussovianus's polished and erudite Latin brings the Poles and Lithuanians into the context of European Christian culture.