The Noble Elite in the County of Körös (Križevci) 1400–1526
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THE NOBLE ELITE IN THE COUNTY OF KÖRÖS (KRIŽEVCI) 1400–1526 BY TAMÁS PÁLOSFALVI MONUMENTA HUNGARIAE HISTORICA DISSERTATIONES Redigit PÁL FODOR Institutum Historicum Sedis Centralis Studiorum Philosophicorum Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae Budapestini, 2014 MAGYAR TÖRTÉNELMI EMLÉKEK ÉRTEKEZÉSEK The Noble Elite in the County of Körös (Križevci) 1400–1526 BY TAMÁS PÁLOSFALVI MTA Bölcsészett udományi Kutatóközpont Történett udományi Intézet Budapest, 2014 Th e research was supported by the OTKA (No K 100 749) Th e publication of the book was supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences © Tamás Pálosfalvi, 2014 © Institute of History, RCH HAS, 2014 ISBN 978-963-9627-84-0 ISSN 2063-3742 All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced, broadcasted, transmitted or translated in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction . 7 1.1. Justifi cation of the subject . 7 1.2. Research of the late medieval Slavonian nobility . 13 1.3. The sources and their limits . 20 2. The Nobility and their Histories . 25 2.1. the nobility in the county of Körös: the criteria of selection . 25 2.2. The noble families – short biographies . 52 3. Social Analysis . 307 3.1. Origins . 307 3.2. Wealth, traffi c of land and social mobility . 321 3.3. Service, offi ceholding and familiaritas . 345 3.4. The nobility and the king . 368 3.5. Marriage patt erns . 388 3.6. The nobility and the church . 397 3.7. Elite or not? Internal stratifi cation and defi nition . 401 4. Conclusion . 415 Appendixes . 420 1. Persons listed as representatives of the Slavonian nobility . 420 2. Bans, vicebans and ispáns of Körös and Zagreb 1423–1526 . 423 3. Genealogical trees . 427 Bibliography . 471 Primary sources – unpublished . 471 Primary sources – published . 471 Secondary literature . 477 Gazett eer of place names . 493 Index . 497 5 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. JUSTIFICATION OF THE SUBJECT At the origins of the present book lay a research which was simply aimed at shedding some light upon the social background of the persons who functioned as vicebans1 in the late medieval regnum Sclavonie.2 It soon became evident, however, that in terms of landed wealth the great majority of them were mostly, or exclusively based in the county of Körös (in Croatian Križevci). The reasons of this phenomenon will be explored later on. Yet it also became clear that such an analysis could not be complete without uncovering the whole social network which linked these families to the rest of the nobility3 within and without Slavonia in the fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Hence my decision to include into the research the whole noble “élite” of the county of Körös, in the widest possible sense of the word. I use the term “noble élite” to defi ne the object of my research, although it is as chimerical as possible. With one exception, no one ever tried to fi nd out whether such an élite within the nobility of a given county existed at all in the sense of a social group that can be defi ned in terms of wealth, att itudes, career possibilities or marriage strategies as distinct from the rest of the nobility both upwards and, more importantly, downwards. Expressions such as “well-to- 1 The term viceban (vicebanus in Latin) designates the deputy of the ban, the offi ce-holder who, appointed by the king, governed Slavonia, from 1476 together with Croatia. See also next note. 2 The Slavonian realm, Regnum Sclavonie, was a territorial-administrative unit within the medieval kingdom of Hungary. It was headed by the ban (banus Sclavonie), who was always appointed by the Hungarian king. It comprised, during the period which is investigated in the present book, the two counties of Körös and Zagreb, and, from the latt er part of the fi fteenth century, that of Varasd (Varaždin, CRO). That is, these counties were, or became, subjected to the ban’s political and judicial authority. From a geographical, and indeed, social, point of view, the small county of Verőce (Virovitica, CRO) also belonged to Slavonia, although administered throughout the middle ages by an ispán of its own appointed directly by the king. 3 Unlike in England, the word nobility (Hung. nemesség) refers in Hungarian scholarship to all those persons who enjoyed the privileges att ached to noble status which were codifi ed by royal decrees from 1222 on. See the article “nemes” by Pál Engel, in Korai Magyar Történeti Lexikon (9–14. század) [Lexicon of Early Hungarian History (Ninth to Fourteenth Century)], ed. Gyula Kristó, Pál Engel and Ferenc Makk (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1994), 483–84. 7 1. INTRODUCTION do/rich nobility” (tehetős/jómódú/vagyonos köznemesség in Hungarian),4 “illustrious noblemen” (nemesi előkelők),5 “noble élite” (köznemesi elit)6 or “nobility of middling wealth” (középbirtokos nemesség)7 are commonplace in the historical literature. Yet, with the exception perhaps of “well-to-do nobility” (in the Latin form of nobilis benepossessionatus), none of these terms is warranted by contemporary usage, but are the results of scholarly eff orts at grasping social diff erences which must have been clearly perceived by contemporaries as well. Such categories are normally described in terms of offi cial titles and revenues in the West: knights and esquires in England, chevaliers and écuyers in France, represent more or less clearly distinguishable strata within noble society, with corresponding levels of income.8 These categories, on the other hand, were indissolubly connected to an underlying chivalric-military ethos, the rites of which clearly marked the joining of any individual, of whatever birth, the ranks of the nobility, and the att ribution of the quality of “noble” remained strictly dependent on the continuous manifestation of the outward signs of chivalric life.9 In Hungary, however, no such titles and no similar chivalric ethos and corresponding practice existed, 4 István Tringli, Az újkor hajnala. Magyarország története 1440–1541 [The Dawn of the Modern Age. A History of Hungary 1440–1541] (Budapest: Vince, 2003), 129–30. István Kádas, “Egy abaúji atyafi ság Mátyás király udvarában. Adalékok a Semsei család Hunyadi-kori történetéhez” [A Family from Abaúj County in the Court of King Matt hias. On the History of the Semsei Family in the Hunyadi Era], in Micae Mediaevales II., ed. Bence Péterfi , András Vadas, Gábor Mikó, and Péter Jakab (Budapest: ELTE BTK Történelemtudományok Doktori Iskola, 2012), 142. 5 Pál Engel, Gyula Kristó, and András Kubinyi, Magyarország története 1301–1526 [The History of Hungary 1301–1526] (Budapest: Osiris, 1998), 311; András Kubinyi, Mátyás király [King Matt hias of Hungary] (Budapest: Vince, 2001), 34. 6 Elemér Mályusz, Zsigmond király uralma Magyarországon 1387–1437 [The Reign of King Sigismund in Hungary 1387–1437] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1984), 139. 7 András Kubinyi, “A középbirtokos nemesség Mohács előestéjén” [The Nobility of Middling Wealth on the Eve of Mohács], in Magyarország társadalma a török kiűzésének előestéjén [The Society of Hungary on the Eve of the Expulsion of the Ott omans], ed. Ferenc Szvircsek (Salgótarján: Nógrád Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága,1984), 5–24. 8 Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1996), 69–73; Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation. England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 136–38; Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages. The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven–London: Yale U. P., 2009), 340–41; Philippe Contamine, La noblesse au royaume de France de Philippe le Bel a Louis XII: Essai de synthese (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 131–33. On the problems of social stratifi cation of the English gentry, the diff erent points of view involved, and the evolution of terminology see Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity. A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: University Press, 1992), 39–95. 9 „Si la société politique bourguignonne accepte l’entrée d’hommes nouveaux dans le groupe nobiliaire, qui n’est en rien une caste, elle semble toutefois très att achée à l’idée qu’il n’est de noblesse que d’armes et qu’un individu, qu’il soit gentilhomme de naissance ou anobli, ne peut être juridiquement considéré comme noble au plein sens du terme que s’il ‘fréquente les armes.’” Bertrand Schnerb, “Noblesse et pouvoir princier dans les pays bourguignons au temps de Jean sans Peur (1404–1419),” in Marco Gentile and Pierre Savy, eds., Noblesse et états princiers en Italie et en France au XVe siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2009), 11. 8 1.1. JUSTIFICATION OF THE SUBJECT and, the basis of taxpaying being the tenant plot (sessio jobagionalis), no lists of noble revenues can be found or reconstructed. “The Hungarian nobleman was noble not because he was an off spring of knights or because he lived and thought as a knight, but simply because the land he lived on was his own, as opposed to the peasant who lived on someone else’s land.”10 This is probably one of the main reasons which prevented historians even recently, after the fall of ideological boundaries, from trying to fi ll with “numbers and facts” the vague categories cited above. The enterprise is far from straightforward. Accordingly, Pál Engel was the only one to make an att empt at reconstructing a social stratifi cation within the boundaries of a single county. He found that the families possessing from 150 to 300 tenant plots11 can clearly be distinguished from the rest of noble society both upwards and downwards, and that the characteristic feature of this group was “the king’s service and courtly career”. He referred to this group as nagybirtokosok, literally “great landowners”.