A levéltárnok és tanítványa. Historiográfiai háttérrajz Tagányi Károly és Holub József történetírásának összefüggéséhez

In: Csóka-Jaksa Helga , Schmelczer-Pohánka Éva , Szeberényi Gábor (szerk.): Pedagógia - oktatás - könyvtár: Ünnepi tanulmányok F. Dárdai Ágnes tiszteletére. Pécs, 2014. 453-472

The Boundaries of Slavonia in the 13th–14th Centuries: Remarks on the Border Roles of the River Drava and Mount Gvozd

Hrvatski prijevod članka: „Szlavónia ’határai’ a 13-14. században. Megjegyzések a Dráva és a Gvozd határszerepének megítéléséhez”, u: Középkortörténeti tanulmányok 8. A VIII. Medievisztikai PhD-konferencia (Szeged, 2013. június 17-19.), ur. Márta Tober i Ágnes Maléth (Szeged: Szegedi Középkorász Műhely, 2015), str. 215-226.In a merely geographical sense the river Drava and Mount G(v)ozd are treated by Hungarian historiography and historical topography with ease as natural borders of medieval Slavonia. Nevertheless, in a purely political sense these two geographical phenomena provided boundaries of “Sclavonia” during the whole Middle Ages, thus the evolution of the meaning of their roles as borders, and the dimensions related to this function, require a thorough analysis of the extant written sources. In the first half of my paper I try to confute some definite misconceptions within the older and more recent historiographies realated to the reconstruction of the Drava river’s role as a political border. Based on the interpretation of papal charters from 1230 and 1232, I point out that, although in the early 1230s at the very latest, the differentiation between Hungary and Sclavonia was already unequivocally defined in a political sense, these papal charters are insufficient to give us any serious support in defining the early boundaries between Hungary and Croatia which existed a few centuries before that point. The second half of the paper deals with the reconstructional problems of the exact location of the “mount Gozd” (this problem is mostly neglected in Hungarian historiography in general). Based on the analysis of the border mountain’s sporadic mentions in charters and narrative sources, I emphasize the importance of geographical perspectives of our available sources (Croatian and Hungarian/Slavonian, respectively), and I suggest to bring some definite institutional/legal facts into consideration at the same time. These factors together might support the idea that the structural (legal, institutional, and even social) “border” between Hungary (i.e. Hungary and Slavonia taken together) and Croatia lay in the so-called “Kordun region”, next to the river Korana (between the two Kapelas and Petrova gora). This observation suggests that “mount Gozd” as it appears in our different sources as the “Southern border” of Slavonia is not necessarily an exact natural phenomenon, but a political concept: a metaphor of structural differences

Nobles, Praediales and Castle-Warriors of Rovišće in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

U radu se raspravlja o povijesti jedne od najreprezentativnijih skupina predstavnika “kondicionalnog plemstva”, točnije predijalaca i iobagiones castri (várjobbágyok) u Rovišću, kako bi se pokazalo da su odnosi između te dvije društvene grupe – iobagiones castri i predijalaca (koji su živjeli na kraljevskim i drugim svjetovnim posjedima) u Slavoniji tijekom 13. i 14. stoljeća složeni i manje jednoznačni nego što se dosad pretpostavljalo i u mađarskoj i u hrvatskoj historiografiji.One of the most significant general assumptions arising in the historiography regarding the forming processes of Slavonian nobility during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was connected to the presumed correspondence that supposedly existed between the stratum of the castle-warriors (Hung. várjobbágyok), and those members of the lower-ranking nobility in Slavonia who are generally referred to in the sources as praediales. This generalised opinion can be summarised briefly as follows: on the territory of medieval Slavonia, most of the royal “castle lordships” or ispánates (Hung. várispánságok), similarly to the ones existing in the central areas of the Kingdom of Hungary, were handed over to various ecclesiastical and lay landlords during the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, but the elites of the microsocieties of the various “vanishing” ispánates, i.e. the stratum of the castle-warriors, did not cease to exist (as happened in the aforementioned central areas of the Kingdom): rather, most of them were able to keep their special rights and districts, and were converted eventually into a special “castle nobility” (várnemesség) or praedial nobility, which was able to maintain its social and organisational framework until the end of the Middle Ages, or even beyond. Thus, as Pál Engel correctly stated, “the stratum of castle-warriors was transformed into the praediales nobility in Slavonia.

Zala és Somogy megye a Dráván túl : megjegyzések a szlavóniai igazgatástörténet Árpád-kori rekonstrukciójának néhány kérdéséhez

It is well known that the transdanubian counties of Hungary, Zala and Somogy, as royal institutions of the Árpáds definitely had some impact on the making of Hungarian administration of the Sclavonian region during the 12th-13th centuries. Nevertheless, even though defining the exact (temporal and spatial) range of this impact is not easy, mosdy because of the sporadic nature of the available historical sources, selective interpretations gave a free range of assumptions in the historical literature. In this paper I try to define of the exact temporal and spatial existence of the two Hungarian counties beyond the river Drava by an almost „positivistic" approach: by using all the fragments of available diplomatic sources I try to find the „exact boundaries" of Zala and Somogy counries within the Sclavonain region. In the case of Zala, the temporal frame of the county's verifiable existence in Sclavonia could only be defined between 1210 and the 1270s, while in the case of Somogy its provable existence south of the river Drava cannot be traced back earlier than the foundation of the Zagrabian diocese, and is not beyond the 1270s as well. However, it is more important that the spatial (territorial) extension of the two counties in the Sclavonian territory within this temporal frame could be defined more precisely than before. Thus, possessions related to Zala county could be found in the Muraköz (Medimurje) and only within a slim belt south of the river Drava, while all of the possessions related to Somogy can only be detected within the boundaries defined by the Velika — Cesma — Moslavacka gora — Ilova region, and a small 'enclave' near Vaska beyonf that. Moreover, in the case of Somogy, its southern tcrriory had some special institutional aspects until the 1270s: the jurisdiction over this territory was held by the count of Somogy, but the comitatus of Garic, Gordova, Cesmice and (probably) Zdenc also had some institutional/ social framework of their own. Nevertheless, the two transdanubian county's southern territories slowly became part of Körös (Krizevci) county's during the 13th century, thus Zala and Somogy jurisdiction ceased to exist in the medieval Sclavonia by the end of the Árpád era

A rojcsai prediálisok a 13-14. században

One of the most significant generalizations rose in the relevant historiography about topics of the forming processes of the Slavonian nobility during the 13,h-14'h centuries, was connected to the presumed correspondence that supposedly existed between the stratum of the castle-warriors (várjobbágyok), and that members of the lower-rank nobility in Slavonia who are generally called in our sources as praediales. This generalized opinion can be summarized briefly as follows: on the territory of medieval Slavonia, most of the royal „castle lordships"/ ispánates (várispánságok), similarly to the ones existed on the central areas of the Hungarian Kingdom, were handed over to various ecclesiastical and lay landlords during the 13th—14th centuries, but the elites in the micro-society of the various „vanishing" ispánates, i.e. the stratum of castle-warriors, did not cease to exist (unlike their counterparts in Hungary), but most of them were able to keep their special rights and districts, and were converted eventually into a special „castle nobility" (várnemesség) or praedial nobility which was able to keep its social and organizational frames till the end of the Middle Ages, or even beyond. Thus, „the stratum of castle-warriors was transformed into praedial nobility in Slavonia" (P. Engel). In this paper I will discuss the history of the most prominent representative of these groups of „conditional nobility", i. e. the strata of praediales and castlewarriors of Rovi§ce (Rojcsa), with the aim to prove that the presumed relation between castle-warriors and praediales (lived on royal or other lay tenures) in Slavonia during the 13th-14Ul was more complicated and less straightforward than it has been suggested in the historiography. The beginning of the story of the Roviscan praediales in the 13th century, and mainly the huge debate around them in the decades at the turn of the H^-IS" 1 centuries, when this group had been eventually subordinated to lay landholders, has been already discussed in Hungarian and Croatian historiography in detail. However, the events and stories between these turning points have got less attention so far, albeit our data from the 14th century enlighten many aspects which bring us closer to understand the socio-historical processes which accompanied the „vanishing" of the old Slavonian ispánates during the later Middle Ages