chapter 2 The Fate of the Medieval Archives of Buda and Pest

István Kenyeres

There is not a single item that survives from the medieval archives of Buda, Pest and Óbuda. The archives of Buda were lost during the course of the successive sieges and occupations of the city that took place after 1526. The documentary remains for the history of Buda thus largely consist of char- ters and letters that found their way into private collections. A significant quantity has, however, remained. The published volume of charters, dating from the mid-twelfth century up to 1301, thus contains more than 300 items directly relevant to the history of the city.1 For the period from 1382 to 1439 we have a further 1200 charters in Latin and a smaller but significant num- ber in German.2 In addition, the city’s early-fifteenth-century Stadtrecht sur- vives together with a later code known as the Laws and Customs of the Seven Towns, as well as heterogeneous material relating to the operation of the German Butchers’ Guild in the last decades of the medieval city. The very few archival documents from the Middle Ages currently held by the Buda- pest City Archives (Budapest Főváros Levéltára – bfl) derive from elsewhere and were never part of an earlier municipal archive. Investigations aimed at reconstructing the archives of the several urban units that later coalesced to form Budapest started in the late nineteenth century, and they have been in progress, with some breaks, ever since. This study reviews the current state of knowledge on the medieval archives, particularly of Buda, and discusses their reconstruction.

The Medieval Archives of Buda

Charters of privilege mark only a stage in the development of medieval towns, and not their beginning. Municipal archives, however, began only when the first charters affording the privileges of self-governance and municipal admin- istration were granted. It was in the towns’ interests to preserve the documents and charters which furnished their rights, i.e. for each to set up, maintain and

Translated by Alan Campbell 1 btoe, i. 2 btoe, ii. This series only publishes the documents issued in Latin.

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The Fate of the Medieval Archives of Buda & Pest 53 operate an archive (archivum civitatis).3 Buda’s archives were also influenced by the special circumstances of the city’s foundation – the resettlement of the community of Pest, on the left bank of the Danube, in the middle of the thir- teenth century. The people of Pest brought the name of their former town with them (hence, castrum novi montis Pestiensis), and probably brought with them too their existing archives and any other documents produced in the wake of the Mongol invasion of 1241–1242.4 Having become the de facto capital by the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, Buda became the judicial and administrative model for other Hungarian free royal towns, which thus adopted similar municipal chancelleries and the related practice of keeping municipal archives.5 We thus have good reason to assume that the archives of late medieval Buda were very similar to the surviving medi- eval archives of Pressburg, Sopron, Košice and Bardejov, except that Buda, ow- ing to its size, economic power and significance within the kingdom, probably produced rather more written documents than these other towns. Another factor contributing to the archival record was the reliance on places of authen- tication as institutions rather than on public notaries in Hungary, and the way that the urban magistracies fulfilled this role in much the same way as eccle- siastical institutions. Official documents (of sale, agreements, contracts and the deposit of wills) were thus made before the councillors of privileged towns

3 Ilona Pálffy, “A városi