„Olyan szép kísérete lesz, mint kevés úrnak Itáliában”. Az esztergomi érseki udvartartás szervezése 1486/87 folyamán
“He will have such a beautiful entourage as few lords do in Italy”. The organisation of the archiepiscopal court of Esztergom in 1486/87

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the paper is to show how the Ferrarese ducal and Hungarian royal courts organised the entourage of the seven-year-old Ippolito (I) d’Este, who had been invited for the archiepiscopal see of Esztergom in 1486, but only came to Hungary in the summer of 1487. The inquiry was based on seven drafts that have survived in the State Archives of Modena, and are published, together with two other sources, in the appendix. Having presented the diplomatic negotiations between the two courts and the journey of Ippolito to Hungary, the paper explores separately the Italian delegation that came from Ferrara, part of which remained in Hungary, and the Hungarian court that was set up around the infant prelate by the Hungarian royal couple. The ar chi epis copal court set up in 1487 – which in fact was supervised by Ippolito’s aunt, queen Beatrice of Aragon – was served by a mixed Ferrarese, Neapolitan and Hungarian personnel, and for reasons of prestige both courts made serious efforts to appoint persons in great numbers and of high social standing in order to make Ippolito’s court look princely enough. The Hungarian barons and nobles selected to the archiepiscopal court left Esztergom within one and a half year, however, and thereafter the only thing that distinguised it from the households of other Hungarian prelates was the high profile of the Italians serving there. The reasons for these changes may have been twofold: on the one hand, the prestige for the Hungarian elite of serving an infant and foreign archbishop must have been lesser than service in the royal court; on the other hand, main taining a great representative entourage, which took no part in estate ad ministration, must have presented the archbishopric with an untolerable financial burden.

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