Хорватские знамена в церемониальной репрезентации монаршей власти в Священной Римской империи и Венгерском королевстве в XVI–XVII вв.
Croatian flags in monarchical representation of the Holy Roman Empire and Hungarian Kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries

Summary/Abstract: The essay undertakes to enrich significant new research results concerning Croatian national symbols in connection with the less extensively researched 16th and 17th centuries: it introduces the earliest copies of the Croatian flag to the Slavic scholarly audience. Not only had the flag of Croatia an important role at the inaugurations (installatio) of Croatian-Slavonian bans (banus) but it was also present at Hungarian coronations and German imperial funerals of common Hungarian-Croatian rulers from the Habsburg dynasty after the battle of Mohács in 1526, since the Kingdom of Croatia was one of the Hungarian Crown’s countries. The author has found several flags of Croatia represented on manuscript and printed documents from the 16th and 17th centuries — among others in Emperor Maximilian I’s (1493–1519) lately restored Triumphzug (1512–1515), in a colored, printed volume about the funeral ceremony of Emperor Ferdinand I (1556–1564) and King of Hungary and Croatia in Vienna in August, 1565 and in the manuscript of the ordinance of Hungarian King Ferdinand II’s (1619–1637) coronation (Ordo coronationis) in Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia) on July 1, 1618. The flag portrayals of the latter served as models to the coronation flags made for the ceremony of the last Hungarian ruler, Charles IV (1916–1918) in late December, 1916. Along with these instances lately the Hungarian historian successfully discovered the earliest remaining original flag of the Kingdom of Croatia so far. This was carried by a young Hungarian aristocrat, Count László Esterházy (1626–1652) at the Hungarian coronation of Ferdinand IV Habsburg in Pozsony on June 16, 1647. That is why it was preserved in the famous treasury of the family, which is nowadays kept and owned by Esterházy Privatstiftung in Forchtenstein Castle, Burgenland in Austria. Hopefully the essay also proves that a joint exploration and interpretation of the eight-century-old Hungarian-Croatian common history is only possible by close professional cooperation and by introducing the subsisting common Central European cultural heritage to each other.

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