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During the reign of Mircea the Shepherd (1545-1554, 155S-1559) the cultural-artistic life is amplified, the elements of Romanian culture become preponderant.
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This article focuses on Unitarian relationships between Transylvania and Baranya in the 17th century. It presents relevant new data, for example, it comes to light that at the synod of Kolozsvár in 1609, the Unitarian bishop Máté Toroczkai (1553–1616) delegated four ministers to Baranya. Maybe this is related to the passage of exemplars of the Disputation of Pécs from west to east, from Baranya, the western periphery of the Unitarian Church to its eastern periphery (where the Sabbatarians lived). Th e article interprets a 1632 letter from Valentinus Radecius (cca 1550–1632) to the ministers of Baranya together with other historical documents, and concludes that Baranya had more freedom in the 17th century than Transylvania. The ministers in Baranya were not bound by Transylvanian dogma and the indifference of Transylvanian Unitarians contributed to the freedom experienced there.
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Die Identifizierung eines fragmentarisch erhaltenen Textes aus dem Speculum Historiale, das von Vincent de Beauvais um die Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts zusammengestellt wurde – eine im Mittelalter überall sehr geschätzte historiographische Arbeit – könnte eine Diskussion über den Wert der Geschichtsschreibung innerhalb der Lesepraxis im vormodernen Siebenbürgen anregen. In vorliegendem Aufsatz wird versucht, auf verschiedene Aspekte einzugehen, in erster Linie auf Fragen der Datierung und der Lokalisierung dieses Fragments. Es wird dann weiter argumentiert, dass die beiden noch vorhandenen Blätter ursprünglich Teil einer Handschrift waren, bislang die östlichste Rezeption des Textes in dieser Form darstellt; die Handschrift war bereits um 1500 im Besitz eines Siebenbürgers.
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Bobory Dóra: Batthyány Boldizsár titkos tudománya. Alkímia, botanika és könyvgyűjtés a tizenhatodik századi Magyarországon.(Mikrotörténelem 7.) L’Harmattan, Budapest, 2018. 321 oldal.
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Crusading culture played a significant role in the conceptions and practices of religious warfare in the Early Modern Period, as French authors and militant nobles redeployed Hungary as a crucial theater of crusading war. Examining crusading warfare in Hungary reveals new facets of warrior nobles’ military activities in early modern France and abroad, building on recent studies of French noble culture. The article concludes that French readers developed notions of crusading warfare in part through reports of the war in Hungary, contributing to a burgeoning literature on the production, diffusion, and reception of early modern news and information across Europe.
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This study is concerned with the everyday lives, survival strategies, and social composition of the German armed forces who served in the border fortresses and field units of the Imperial and Royal Army during the wars against the Ottoman Empire that were fought on the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study shows that these troops enlisted to escape poverty and starvation, sometimes serving without weapons, and that their families often followed them onto Hungarian battlefields. As the rich source materials analyzed here demonstrate, however, their new positions confronted them with even greater challenges than they had faced previously, including the day-to-day threat of mortality, epidemics, the vicissitudes of the weather, and the constant deprivations caused by idle mercenaries. They strove to support themselves through fraud and deceit, as well as by forcefully plundering their surroundings; nonetheless, volunteering for military service did not provide them with a permanent solution to the problem of earning a living.
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This contribution focuses on two issues: first, the land- and waterscape of Vienna in light of modernizations to its fortification; second, the challenges faced in fortifying the city during a period now known as the Little Ice Age. The Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 showed that new technology in warfare combined with certain topographic features represented a danger to the town. In reaction to the lasting Ottoman threat, Vienna was fortified with bastions, curtain walls, and a broad moat. The fortifications were surrounded by the glacis, which was cleared of buildings. The emperor’s military advisers and Italian fortress architects planned and created an artificial landscape oriented towards military needs. Rivers running through this area, such as the Wienfluss and the Ottakringer Bach, posed strategic problems and had to be dealt with. The Danube floodplain to the northeast of the city was an especially difficult environment to control. Solutions for the waterscape, but also for the hilly terrain in the west had to be found. The city’s Danube front was included in the fortifications. This construction took place during a severe phase of the Little Ice Age when heavy rainfall caused frequent inundation and ice jams. High water, unstable sediments, and the erosion of foundations forced planners and builders to find solutions adapted to this special environment. Highlighting these aspects of environment and war in sixteenth-century Vienna is the aim of the paper.
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The present paper analyzes the relationship of the Ottoman wars to the loss of forests in the Carpathian Basin. An important thesis of twentieth-century scholarship was that the Ottomans were to be blamed for the crash of the so-called “traditional” landscape of the lowlands of the Carpathian Basin. The paper argues that this view needs serious reconsideration, especially in light of research into two interconnected aspects found in a Hungarian region, Transdanubia, that is the focus of the paper. First, we estimate the amount of woodland before and after the Ottoman occupation. Second, we quantify the role military fortifications may have played in wood consumption (and therefore potentially in deforestation). We focus on the central parts of the Transdanubian region. The counties to be examined in more detail (Vas, Veszprém, and Zala) were among those most significantly impacted by the continuous wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This area arguably could be indicative of processes in other lowlands and hilly areas in the Carpathian Basin, though bearing in mind that forest regeneration may have been fundamentally different in the territories of lowlands, hilly areas, and mountain ranges.
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This study analyzes the organization of the independent Transylvanian central court of law, the so-called Royal/Voivodal/Princely Table (Tabula) and its court of appeal, the court of personal presence (personalis presentia), in light of the modest secondary literature, the dietary decisions, and archival sources. We offer a sketch of the organization of the Hungarian royal and Transylvanian voivodal court of law in order to present the model on which the central court system was established in the period of the Principality. We also present the characteristics of the functioning of the central court that can be attributed to the special features of Transylvanian society and the newly emerging state.
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In this essay, I examine the formularies that were used in the chancellery of the Transylvanian Principality which took form at the end of 1556 during the first 50 years of its existence. I offer brief descriptions of four of these formularies in which I indicate their length and present the most important aspects concerning the nature of the information they contain. I also offer a detailed presentation of one of them in order to call attention to the importance of the rigorous study of every detail of these sources. Historians cannot afford to ignore these sources, which contain over 1,100 formulas, as they are vital to the study of the history of law and the history of the chancellery itself. They offer glimpses into the work of the chancellery, the ways in which charters were produced, and the processes according to which the texts of the charters were transformed into formulas, processes over the course of which, for the most part, the compilers “cleaned” the documents of their specific details (i.e. proper names, place names, and dates), keeping only the essential elements on the basis of which they would be able to compose the texts of new charters.
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The aim of this study is to present the society of the town of Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia / Weissenburg) in the fifty years following the secularization of the holdings of the Church. The transformation of the episcopal estate into a princely domain brought a number of changes in the life of the settlement, such as the reorganization of its government and the acquisition of legal and economical privileges. In the period of the Báthory princes (1571–1602), the town was again transformed to meet newly arisen needs.
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It has been well known for ages that atypical elements of a border line, such as ditches, large trees etc., may have served as points for orientation. Literate societies, however, have had the privilege of conserving the knowledge not only by oral tradition but also by various kinds of written word. In the following, I present an especially well-documented conflict between Styrian and Hungarian families regarding the riverbed of the River Mura, which was the border of the two polities for some 20 kilometers. The debate emerged in the beginning of the sixteenth century and lasted until 1546. The Mura-question was one of the most permanent ones in the political discourse of the first third of the sixteenth century. Although we can grasp hardly any of it, the conflict involved a fear on the part of the estates of both countries that they might lose lands. First, my goal is to show the dynamics of such phenomena as an archetype of border conflicts in a nutshell. Second, I seek to identify the main reason why the conflict was so protracted and explain how eventually the issue was addressed in order to put an end to the conflict in 1546.
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Beside the peoples of the 16th-century Habsburg Monarchy (Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Moravians, Croats, Dalmatians, Slovaks, Ruthens, Vlachs and Uskoks), Rudolf II’s army included Slavs from the Ottoman-ruled territories (Serbs, Bulgarians and Christian Bosniaks), imperial Germans, Cossacks, Scots, Englishmen, Walloons, Frenchmen, and many Lotharingians as well. This final group was referred to as “borderland nobility” by Péter Sahin-Tóth, as they had a dual identity, language, and culture. Regarding their career and advancement, they had two choices: serving either the Habsburg family or the French kings. From among the Lotharingians who arrived at the Hungarian theatre of the Long Turkish War (1591-1606), my paper intends to present Gilbert de Santhilier’s military career, including his connections, his efforts and his proficiency in ground and naval warfare.
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OBORNI Teréz: Az ördöngös Barát. Fráter György (1482–1551). Sziluett. Korszerű történelmi életrajzok, Kronosz Kiadó–Magyar Történelmi Társulat, Pécs–Budapest, 2017
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In the two decades which followed the battle of Mohács (1526), Albert Peregi was an influential member of the Habsburg administration in Hungary, who played an important role in the reorganisation of the Hungarian Chamber, and was regarded as a member of the decision-making elite. Although we have no information as to his schooling, he was evidently an educated person who kept a close relationship with his humanist contemporaries, and moved with apparent ease among the educated circles of Vienna and Cracow. His library contained several works of Erasmus, and his closeness to Gábor Pesti also hints at his Erasmian attitudes. His tolerance is showed by his efforts at protecting the Jewish communities living in the Hungarian towns from atrocities. That he likewise acted as a patron of literature is proved by the fact that the anthology entitled Pannoniae luctus, which was published in 1544 at Vienna, was dedicated to him by the editor.
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The significant age difference between Princess Zofia Jagiellonka and her husband had as one advantage for the princess that she had no competitors within her age group (e.g. a stepmother). Moreover, her stepdaughters were approximately the same age and, after her husband’s death, she found herself in similar circumstances to the as a widow. Zofia Jagiellonka eventually resolved the long-standing relationship between her husband and his mistress, knowing in this regard how to defend her social position. She consciously took up the role of mediator among the relatives, and she had a mitigating effect on the tensions between father and son. Her social consciousness included providing for the welfare of the new family by meeting the expectations placed on her with regards to her stepchildren. Her life was not that of the stereotypical “evil stepmother.” Rather, she was someone from whom her stepchildren and others repeatedly sought counsel. Through her royal birth, she was (with regard to her social status) superior to her Guelph relatives, and she had the king—her brother—as her protector. In terms of her relationship to her stepchildren, it was perhaps a great advantage that she herself bore no children, and thus there was no competitive milieu at the court in Wolfenbüttel.
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After discussing the notion of Bánság (Romanian, German, Serbian: Banat) and the geographical and political-administrative characteristics of the region in question, the paper focuses on the development of Temesvár, medieval precursor of modern Timişoara, in the period that preceded the mid-16th century. Temesvár was and remained the centre of Temes county and the seat of the archdeaconry of Temes, and was the place where between 1315 and 1323 Charles I of Anjou, king of Hungary, had his royal residence. Later, in parallel with the Balkans policy of the Hungarian Kingdom and the Ottoman menace, the importance of Temesvár increased significantly, especially from the military point of view. This situation, however, restricted the self-government of the town to that extent that Temesvár did not succeed in gaining admittance to the category of the most developed towns (royal free towns) of the realm in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. After averting a siege in the fall of 1551, Temesvár finally fell to the Ottomans in 1552. This opened a new chapter in the history of the town.
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The paper is an attempt to reconstruct the importance of alimentation for the economic and cultural development of an episcopal town in Medieval Transylvania, by the example of Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár, Weissenburg) in the first decades of the 16th century. The inquiry is based mainly on sources from the family archive of bishop Ferenc Várdai (1513–1524): accountable registers, missives, testament etc. The text is divided into three parts, the first traces the provenience of consumed food, while the second and third one show the personnel and inventory related to the nourishment of the bishop and his household. The bishop played an ambivalent part in the economic development of his residence town. On one hand, he stimulated its development by granting privileges, creating workplaces and attracting a large number of potential buyers, on the other hand, he inhibited economic growth by spending relatively small sums on food purchases in the town, retaining the monopoly of wine trade and imposing taxes. Sumptuous meals aimed to express the power and wealth of the bishop and thus to attract more and more people, familiars, into his household. The episcopal household from Alba Iulia had certainly a significant part in disseminating the Renaissance lifestyle throughout Transylvania.
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