Oligarchs, King and Local Society: Medieval Slavonia
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Antun Nekić OLIGARCHS, KING AND LOCAL SOCIETY: MEDIEVAL SLAVONIA 1301-1343 MA Thesis in Medieval Studies Central European University CEU eTD Collection Budapest May2015 OLIGARCHS, KING AND LOCAL SOCIETY: MEDIEVAL SLAVONIA 1301-1343 by Antun Nekić (Croatia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ Chair, Examination Committee ____________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________________ Examiner CEU eTD Collection ____________________________________________ Examiner Budapest Month YYYY OLIGARCHS, KING AND LOCAL SOCIETY: MEDIEVAL SLAVONIA 1301-1343 by Antun Nekić (Croatia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. CEU eTD Collection ____________________________________________ External Reader Budapest Month YYYY OLIGARCHS, KING AND LOCAL SOCIETY: MEDIEVAL SLAVONIA 1301-1343 by Antun Nekić (Croatia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ External Supervisor CEU eTD Collection Budapest Month YYYY I, the undersigned, Antun Nekić, candidate for the MA degree in Medieval Studies, declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person’s or institution’s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. Budapest, 20 May 2015 __________________________ Signature CEU eTD Collection Abstract In 1301 the ability of the king to exert some kind of authority in medieval Slavonia reached its nadir, and the royal power was replaced by that of the oligarchs: the Babonići and the Kőszegi kindreds completely controlled medieval Slavonia. However, in the next three decades Charles Robert managed to establish effective royal control and the power of these two kindreds was crushed to a large degree. The aim of the thesis was to analyze this process from several perspectives. First of all, various strategies that the oligarchs and the king employed in the different stages of these power struggles were analyzed. Secondly, the interaction between the oligarchs and the king with the local society was investigated. Focus was especially placed on the question of loyalty. It was argued that the oligarchs managed to create closed system of service, mostly visible in the phenomenon of multi-generational service. The task to crack this system was entrusted to Nicholas Felsőlendvai and Mikac of the Ákos kindred, whom Charles Robert installed in the office of the ban after 1323, and whose power rose with that of their lord. This task was done through the various grants given by these two bans or through their patronage that lead to the royal court. Finally, the examination of the last segment, that is the possibility of local nobility to reach the royal court, revealed different mechanism of integration of medieval Slavonia (locality) and the court (center) in the fourteenth century. CEU eTD Collection i Acknowledgements I would like to thank first of all to my supervisor Katalin Szende, who has been giving me the best support and the best critique one could imagine in the last nine months. Her questions and suggestions have made me approach writing in an entirely different manner, bringing in the clarity without which many of arguments would be still stuck in the mud. Big thanks also go to Zsuzsa Reed for her help with the English – it is not a small matter to teach Croatians when and where to put an article, not to mention the rest. Without the jokes and laughs that I had with my colleagues all of this would have been much harder to accomplish – special thanks goes to them. It is my pleasure also to express gratitude to Professor Mladen Ančić, not least because he was the one who encouraged and advised me to come to CEU in the first place; long hours of talks and discussions with him revealed me little by little the tricks of the craft. Finally, although for the most part of this adventure six hundred kilometers away, my wife Lucijana gave me the support one can only imagine – without her nothing of this would be even slightly possible. CEU eTD Collection ii Table of contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. OLIGARCHS AND KING, 1301-1343 ............................................................ 9 1.1 Oligarchs and King, 1301-1309 .................................................................................9 1.2 Oligarchs and king, 1310-1322 ................................................................................ 22 1.3 Oligarchs and king, 1323-1343 ................................................................................ 24 Chapter 2. LOYALTY AND POWER ............................................................................. 29 2.1 Closed system of service ......................................................................................... 29 2.2 Untying the oligarchical knot .................................................................................. 34 2.3 The road to the royal court ...................................................................................... 46 2.3.1 Patterns of the visits to the royal court ................................................................ 47 2.3.2 Royal court and the ban’s patronage .................................................................. 60 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 70 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 80 Appendices ................................................................................................................... 86 CEU eTD Collection iii List of Figures Figure 1. The map of Slavonia and Croatia (from the eleventh until the fourteenth centuries) 3 Figure 2. Genealogical tree of the Kőszegis 89 Figure 3. Genealogical tree of the Babonići 89 Figure 4. Genealogical tree of Nicholas of Ludbreg of Péc kindred and Stephen son of Apay 89 CEU eTD Collection iv Introduction In the period from the 1270s to the 1320s the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia was a political stage imbued with constant struggles. Striving and fighting for the throne between number of contenders and battles of oligarchs to expand and keep their positions and power marked these turbulent years. Medieval Slavonia was not exempt from this turmoil either. From the 1270s constant struggles ensued, and from the beginning of the 1280s two oligarchical fractions emerged as the strongest: the Babonić and the Kőszegi kindreds. These two kindreds practically split medieval Slavonia into two halves, which was particularly emphasized after the death of Andrew III.1 This point in time (1301) is also a starting point for this thesis. The year of 1301 is a point when the ability of the king to exert some kind of authority in medieval Slavonia reached its nadir. In 1343, the closing date of the temporal scope of this thesis, an entirely different situation prevails. The power of the Babonići and the Kőszegis was crushed to a large extent and the king’s power in medieval Slavonia was firmly established. Although some earlier date could have been taken as the end of the period studied here, the year 1343 also possesses a symbolic value; in that year the man who was most meritorious for the restoration of the king’s power in medieval Slavonia, ban of Slavonia Mikac2 of the Ákos kindred, died. This kind of political situation provides a researcher with an opportunity to question a string of interconnected issues. First of all, we can follow the strategies of the oligarchs to preserve and extend their power in various phases, from the struggles fought between each CEU eTD Collection other, to the phase when their main opponent was the king. On the other hand, it is also possible to analyze the situation created by the installment of two of the king’s oligarchs 1 Nada Klaić, Povijest Hrvata u razvijenom srednjem vijeku [The history of Croats in the late Middle Ages] (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1976), 343-60. 2 In the Hungarian historiography know as Mikcs. 1 (Nicholas and Mikac) as bans. Observing the situation created by the power struggle of several oligarchs of different nature also provides an insight into different strategies for extension and preservation of power at work. Besides looking at the political processes of the time from the perspective of the oligarchs, examining the restoration of royal power from the king’s perspective opens up another research question. Specifically, this will entail analyses of the methods