A magyar-horvát együttélés fordulópontjai: intézmények, társadalom, gazdaság, kultúra / Prekretnice u suživotu Hrvata i Mađara: Ustanove, društvo, gospodarstvo i kultura,, 2015
THE MAGNATE FAMILY GORJANSKI (GARAI)
AND THE KINGDOM OF CROATIA
A branch of the old Dorozsma kind... more THE MAGNATE FAMILY GORJANSKI (GARAI)
AND THE KINGDOM OF CROATIA
A branch of the old Dorozsma kindred, which acquired the eponymous land of Gara (now Gorjani) in Vukovo/Valkó County in the thirteenth century, the Gorjanski family included some of the most important fi gures in the political life of the late medieval Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary–Croatia). For decades the family was among the few
wealthiest seigniorial families in the kingdom. Although Croatia (in the medieval territorial sense) was not a primary area of activity for the family members, several of them nevertheless played signifi cant roles in various political and other related processes which connected this land, once an independent kingdom, with the rest of the large Danubian state ruled by the heirs of the Holy Crown. In the late fourteenth
century and in the fi rst half of the fi fteenth century, the Gorjanskis performed political functions (bans of Croatia, royal counts, castellans, city counts) and carried out military missions there. They held lands and other possessions in Croatia and Dalmatia (the islands of Cres and Osor, salterns on the island of Rab). Finally, some of them were
married to the members of the Croatian noble families who took sides with King Sigismund of Luxemburg during the dynastic strife (the counts of Krk and the Kurjakovići of Krbava).
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Papers by Stanko Andrić
The paper continues with a review of the forms and occurrences of the horonym meaning 'Slavic land': Greek Σκλαβηνία (with slight orthographical variants) and Latin Sclavinia, Sclavenia, Sclavania, Sclavia, Sclavonia. The Greek word appears first in historiographer Theophylact Simocatta in the first half of the seventh century, where it refers to the presumably large Slav-inhabited land on the northern side of the lower Danube. The regular use of the horonym only begins in the early ninth century with Theophanes the Confessor, who speaks of Σκλαβηνίαι as areas inhabited and de facto ruled by the Slavs in the provinces of Macedonia and Thrace. Theophanes uses the name in the plural, which is characteristic of the Byzantine way of referring to 'Slavic lands'. What distinguishes these "Sclavinias" from each other is obviously a separate (although probably very similar) social organization of the Slavs in each of them, and apparently also some measure of internal "tribal" connection, which is manifested in ethnonyms such as those recorded in The miracles of Saint Demetrius. After Theophanes, the name Σκλαβηνία is used in the same sense by other Byzantine writers, including Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in whose treatise "on the governance of the Empire" the name Σκλαβηνία refers to a more general ethno-political category, and individual ethnic names correspond to each entity of this type. "Chrovatía (= Croatia) an the rest of the Sklaviníai" is one of his expressions illustrating such two-layered nomenclature. The Byzantine Σκλαβηνία / Σκλαυηνία, therefore, was not a geographical name in the true sense, but a designation for a category of territorial communities or "proto-state" formations whose common feature was that they were predominantly Slavic and/or dominated by Slavs. Such use of the name for 'Slavic land' in the Byzantine environment is strikingly different from the use of the corresponding words in the Frankish Latin written culture.
After the first known appearance of the Latin horonym in 780 or a little earlier (an isolated and somewhat enigmatic expression in Slawinia terrae, found in Hygeburg's Vita Willibaldi), the systematic use begins at the end of the eighth century in the works of Carolingian annalists and chroniclers. The preferred form in this tradition is Sclavania, and it is also used in charters, alongside the corresponding ethnonym Sclavani or Sclavanii and the adjectives Sclavanicus and Sclavanensis. The form Sclavania predominates as late as in the chronicle of Adam of Bremen (composed in the 1070s and supplemented in the 1080s). "Sclavania" primarily denoted the totality of lands inhabited by Western Slavic peoples, stretching from the Elbe to the Vistula and from Bohemia and Moravia to the Baltic. It was known by the "Frankish" authors to be inhabited by numerous mutually related and similar peoples, some of whom managed to create stronger centers of power, mostly short-lived, except in two cases, the Czechs and the Poles, where the early Slavic principalities grew into kingdoms in the eleventh century. In this connection, the name "Sclavania" appears sometimes in narrower uses, for just one of the many Slavic lands.
The form Sclavinia is associated with the southeastern zone of the Empire, appearing for the first time in 824 in the Latin (translated) letter of the Byzantine emperor Michael II to emperor Louis the Pious and also in Louis' charter concerning a possession in Carantania. The expression found in the letter, et circumiacentibus Sclaviniis, uses the plural and is entirely in accordance with Byzantine chronicle practice. The use of the horonym in Louis' charter is the first in a short series of examples of the use of the form Sclavinia for the Slavic regions east of Bavaria, which in the course of the ninth century became East Frankish margraviates or dependent principalities. As shown by the expression in Sclaviniam, in partes videlicet Quarantanas atque inferioris Pannoniae (from the 870 text of The conversion of the Bavarians and the Carantanians), "Sclavinia" can here too be a collective name for several lands inhabited by Slavs.
On the southernmost section of the eastern edge of the Carolingian Empire, along the Adriatic Sea, the lands inhabited by Slavs were first referred to by the Latin horonym in 871, in an indirectly preserved letter of the king of Italy and the Frankish emperor Louis II. With the expression populis Sclaveniae nostrae, the emperor most likely refers to the land of the Croats, ruled by prince Domagoj at that time. The eleventh-century Chronicon Venetum by John the Deacon speaks of the same land also using the name Sclavenia. In Italy until the eleventh century the preferred form of the name for a Slavic country might have been Sclavenia, but it appears that in the papal chancery the form Sclavinia prevailed. It seems most likely that in the letters sent to Dalmatia probably in 925 (but preserved only in a much later transcription) pope John X also used the form Sclavinia and related words. As these examples show, for the main political centers in Italy that were involved in the events on the eastern side of the Adriatic (the Holy See, the King of Italy and the Frankish emperor, Venice), "Sclavenia" or "Sclavinia" was primarily the principality and then the kingdom with which they mostly dealt in that area, that is, Croatia.
The name Sclavonia/Slavonia appears in original documents in the late 10th century, with the earliest example probably in the charter of Otto II issued in 975, where Slauonia is listed among countries of the East Frankish (German) kingdom and designates the Slavic region around the middle Elbe recently organized as the margraviates of Saxony. In less than a century since it first appeared, the name form Sclavonia has established itself - in charters, chronicles, and hagiograpy - as the main variant of the Latin word for 'Slavic land'. As with other variants, this word could denote Slavic lands in a geographically unspecified sense, that is, more of them or even the totality of them; on the other hand, it could also refer to a specific country of the Slavs (which one - can only be derived from the context of the respective usage). Thus, in several sources from the second half of the eleventh century, the country ruled by Croatian kings is referred to as Sclavonia too. Among these, the 1091 letter of Ladislas I, king of Hungary, to the abbot of Monte Cassino refers to Croatia under the guise of Sclavonia; Ladislas certainly knew that the country, which he was in the process of annexing to the crown of Hungary, had a more particular name too (his sister was married there), but he preferred to use the name Sclavonia, which was common in Italy. Just like elsewhere, in Europe's southeast "Sclavonia" did not always denote just one Slavic state in the eleventh century. An example of the horonym's use in a broader sense is offered by a chronicle of the First Crusade, written by Raymond of Aguilers between 1099 and 1101, according to which "Sclavonia" extended through the entire hinterland of the Adriatic coast as far as Scutari (Shkodër) and included at least the territories of the kingdom of Croatia and the kingdom of Dioclea (ruled by a Scutari-based "king of the Slavs").
Since the short form of the Slavic ethnonym appeared as early as the late sixth century, it is somewhat puzzling that the shortest variant of the horonym, Sclavia, derived directly from Sclavus, appears no earlier than the beginning of the eleventh century, as the youngest variant of the horonym. It is first found in the German, more precisely the Saxon chronicle tradition. At first rarely found, only in the twelfth century will the form Sclavia / Slavia become relatively popular, though already in the shadow of Sclavonia / Slavonia.
Western artists have been depicting places in this area since the late 16th century, as a rule in the function of documenting diplomatic trips along the Danube from Christian Europe to the Ottoman Empire. Travelogues form an extremely interesting and data-rich group of sources for the history of the middle Danube region during the Ottoman rule (16th-17th centuries). Dozens of European travelers who traveled through the Danube region to Constantinople or other parts of the Ottoman Empire during this period, for diplomatic or other purposes, left detailed records of the circumstances they observed and experiences they had. Some of these texts are accompanied by artistic illustrations – drawings of individual settlements and other scenes seen on the trip. The Baranya, Slavonian and Syrmian sections of the Danube region appear in illustrations in four travelogues. Heinrich Ottendorf's work, Der Weg von Ofen auf Griechischen Weissenburg, compiled in 1663-1665 and preserved in manuscript (published in 1943), provides the plans of various towns between Buda and Belgrade based on the sightings of a traveler using the roads. Of the cities on the Danube, Vukovar and Zemun are shown here. Edward Brown's travelogue, first published in London in 1673 under the title A brief account of some travels in Hungaria ..., contains copperplate engravings depicting the long Turkish bridge from Osijek to Darda and a village in Srijem with dugout houses.
The remaining two illustrated travelogues can be defined as "Danubian" in the proper sense because their authors used the Danube waterway for travel. A manuscript "travelogue" was recently discovered in Leiden, consisting of the drawings only, without a textual description of the journey, and was probably made by an unknown member of a group mission to Constantinople that traveled the Danube waterway and the Balkans by land around 1580. Leiden's "drawing block", later entitled Imagines urbium quarundam Hungariae et Turciae, contains 26 completed drawings and five unfinished sketches showing places from Hainburg on the Danube to the western approaches to Constantinople. Among them are depictions of seven Slavonian-Syrmian places: Osijek, Erdut, Vukovar, Šarengrad, Petrovaradin, Slankamen and Zemun. The exceptional historical value of these realistic drawings is underlined by the fact that they are the oldest known visual representations of Western provenance that reveal the appearance of settlements in the lower interfluve of the Drava and Sava rivers.
The main attention in the paper is paid to the lost illustrated codex by Maximilian Prandstetter (Brandstetter), with a description of the journey of 1608-1609. The travelogue entitled Itinerarium oder Raisbeschreibung has been known since the 19th century, in which Prandstetter described in German the path of the Habsburg imperial embassy to Constantinople under the leadership of Baron Adam of Herberstein. The travelogue has been preserved in two manuscript codices, and was published both in excerpts and in its entirety in the 20th century. One of the two codices, housed in the private library in Hédervár owned by the counts of Viczay and then Khuen-Héderváry, was richly illustrated, but after World War II it disappeared and was probably destroyed. Among other illustrations, it contained views, made in watercolor, of six places from the mouth of the Drava to the mouth of the Sava into the Danube; indirectly, in various copies, depictions of Erdut, Vukovar, Ilok and Zemun have survived. From illustrations with depictions of other places, those depicting Buda and Mohács have been preserved, apparently as fragments of the original codex.
in Syrmia as well as Syrmian wine or wine „of Marchia“ (another medieval name for Syrmia) as a subject of trade in the central and northern parts of the kingdom. Sources unveil details about the wine duties towards the landowners and the taxes taken from Syrmian wine at the markets of Esztergom and Pest. The late and final section, on the other hand, is presented here through a selection of diverse records that reveal the
great reputation that Syrmian wine enjoyed at the dawn of the modern times which coincided with the Ottoman conquest of the Hungarian Danube region, including Syrmia. The most eloquent praises of Syrmian wine can be found in humanist writers of the 15th and 16th centuries, several of whom are considered here: Galeotto Marzio, Stephen Brodarić, Nicholas Olahus and Antun Vrančić-Verantius. The widely accepted
judgment on this wine was summarized by Stephen Brodarić, bishop of Srijem and diplomat of King John of Zapolja, who described it, with a little exaggeration, as “the most praised wine in the entire North”.
Apart from these three direct references, Pliny's mention of an island on the Sava named Metubarbis (described in addition as „the largest among river islands“) is also frequently connected with the Bosut. Matija Petar Katančić was thus among the first who thought that the name Metubarbis (which he linguistically interpreted as „među barama“ or paludibus circumdatus) covered the large territory enclosed by the Biđ and the Bosut on one side and the Sava on the other. Despite being widely accepted in more recent literature, this identification remains questionable and Pliny's island of Metubarbis still topographically enigmatic.
The codex consists of 215 entire parchment leafs (the first leaf being an empty dust cover) and a small fragment of the last leaf. The main text is written mostly in black (and at some places brown) ink, while initials and rubrics in many parts of the codex are executed in red ink.
The main text is written in a tiny and careful Gothic script, in two columns. Each column consists of 46 lines on average, and each line contains usually between 45-50 characters. Corrections and interlinear additions are rare in the main text. However, some marginal notes and additions are clearly contemporaneous with the main text.
Changes and variations in the size and shape of the script, sometimes visible in the continuous text as well, suggest that the codex was executed by several hands (scribes). On the margins of the main text (i.e. left, right, and also usually wide lower margins), as well as on the originally textless central parts of the leafs, there are various notes and signs (conventional symbols, e.g. “nota”; hands showing places in the text; anthropomorphous and zoomorphous heads or drôleries), which have been added subsequently, probably by several hands. These later additions are usually done in a somewhat larger cursive script and in brown ink.
Some pages are without any text (fols. 72v, 124v, 153v), while at many places leafs are or appear to be missing due to cutting or tearing out of the codex. It is possible that some leafs were removed from the codex even before any text was written in it. For a definitive knowledge about the places and the number of the missing leafs it will be necessary to determine the gaps in the texts at the places in question (after fols. 1, 5, 57, 91, 101, 108, 116, 163, 179, 181, 196, 212, 213, 214).
Besides that, some leafs are partly damaged by cutting or tearing. Such mutilations reach into the main text on fols. 1-4, 15-16, 27, 44-45, 59, 148, 182, 212, 214. Other folios suffered only minor damages, covering only marginal notes (on fols. 5, 12r, 28, 48, 57, 88). Also, some marginal notes were damaged by what appears as a subsequent trimming of the leaf edges. It is clear on the other hand that some damages on the leafs preceded the writing of the main text and that scribes adapted to their presence (this can be seen, for example, on fols. 7, 11, 46, 61, 70, 89, 94, 101, 164, 174, 179).
Based on our examination of the codex so far, it contains: eight main texts of different lengths and in more or less complete transcriptions, one shorter text in a half-preserved transcription, and one (last) text of which there is now only a small fragment. The last two texts, found at the end of the codex, appear to be later attachments to the main contents. Besides that, there are also some brief marginal notes of later origin in various parts of the codex.
Out of the eight main texts, five have been so far historically identified. They are the well known writings by medieval authors, one of whom belongs to the Early Middle Ages (pope Gregory the Great’s Liber pastoralis, on fols. 189r-204v), and three were active around 1200: Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis (fol. 110r-118r); Alan of Lille, Liber poenitentialis (fol. 118r-124r) and Summa de arte praedicatoria (fol. 153r-188v); Peter of Roissy, Manuale de misteriis ecclesie (fol. 125r-144r). I have also proposed working hypotheses regarding the authorship of two more of the remaining texts found in the codex.
Among the younger notes in the codex, particularly interesting seems to be the one found on fol. 204v, alongside the main text occupying the left column. The note reads: Anno D(o)m(ini) m(illesim)o ccc-o xcix-o xviii-o die mensis Nouembris facta fuit choruscacio mirabilis per omnes partes Slesie in crepusculo pridie Elizabeth.
On the basis of this historical note, we can conclude: firstly, that the main text in the codex is certainly older than 1399; and secondly, that the codex was in use in a church institution in Silesia at the end of the 14th century. Silesia (Duchy of Silesia) belonged at that time to the Kingdom of Bohemia which itself made part of the Holy Roman Empire.
As a terminus post quem of the codex’s creation we can only take, at this moment, the time when the most recent of the identified texts was written down. This is the Liber poenitentialis by Robert of Flamborough, dating from around 1210.
Since manuscript books and other handwritten documents originating from the times before the 18th century are extremely rare in Slavonia, the newly found medieval codex from the Museum of Slavonia in Osijek means an exceptionally interesting discovery (it could easily be the oldest preserved book in Slavonia nowadays). In a future investigation one will have to complete and publish a systematic and detailed description of the codex and its contents, thereby drawing the attention of the international scholarly community to its so far unnoticed existence. From the viewpoint of Slavonia’s cultural history, it will also be important to try to find out how the codex came to Slavonia, Osijek and eventually the Museum of Slavonia.
AND THE KINGDOM OF CROATIA
A branch of the old Dorozsma kindred, which acquired the eponymous land of Gara (now Gorjani) in Vukovo/Valkó County in the thirteenth century, the Gorjanski family included some of the most important fi gures in the political life of the late medieval Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary–Croatia). For decades the family was among the few
wealthiest seigniorial families in the kingdom. Although Croatia (in the medieval territorial sense) was not a primary area of activity for the family members, several of them nevertheless played signifi cant roles in various political and other related processes which connected this land, once an independent kingdom, with the rest of the large Danubian state ruled by the heirs of the Holy Crown. In the late fourteenth
century and in the fi rst half of the fi fteenth century, the Gorjanskis performed political functions (bans of Croatia, royal counts, castellans, city counts) and carried out military missions there. They held lands and other possessions in Croatia and Dalmatia (the islands of Cres and Osor, salterns on the island of Rab). Finally, some of them were
married to the members of the Croatian noble families who took sides with King Sigismund of Luxemburg during the dynastic strife (the counts of Krk and the Kurjakovići of Krbava).
AND THE KINGDOM OF CROATIA
A branch of the old Dorozsma kindred, which acquired the eponymous land of Gara (now Gorjani) in Vukovo/Valkó County in the thirteenth century, the Gorjanski family included some of the most important fi gures in the political life of the late medieval Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary–Croatia). For decades the family was among the few
wealthiest seigniorial families in the kingdom. Although Croatia (in the medieval territorial sense) was not a primary area of activity for the family members, several of them nevertheless played signifi cant roles in various political and other related processes which connected this land, once an independent kingdom, with the rest of
the large Danubian state ruled by the heirs of the Holy Crown. In the late fourteenth century and in the fi rst half of the fi fteenth century, the Gorjanskis performed political functions (bans of Croatia, royal counts, castellans, city counts) and carried out military missions there. They held lands and other possessions in Croatia and Dalmatia (the
islands of Cres and Osor, salterns on the island of Rab). Finally, some of them were married to the members of the Croatian noble families who took sides with King Sigismund of Luxemburg during the dynastic strife (the counts of Krk and the Kurjakovići of Krbava).
This paper examines the history of the ecclesiastical institutions in Ilok (Hung. Újlak), tracing how their development reflected the economic rise of the town during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ilok was one of those rather few towns in Slavonia and Srijem (Syrmia) which simultaneously had more than one Mendicant friary - Franciscan and Augustinian in Ilok’s case (the latter in existence from the mid-fourteenth century, the former a few decades earlier). Besides these two houses of the Mendicants, the town-walls enclosed the parish-church of St. Peter, which was a relatively large basilica with two aisles. In the suburbs, another parish-church dedicated to St. Helen the Empress is found, along with three smaller chapels, of Holy Spirit, of St. Ladislas, and of All Saints. The last two were accompanied with the hospices or hospitals.
An accurate list of the town's medieval churches may serve as the basis for an estimation of the size of the town's population. A calculation developed by A. Kralovánszky allows for the hypothesis that seven churches correspond to the population of 2100-2500. Thus, in Central European context, the fifteenth-century Ilok can be ranked above the category of the common market-towns (oppida) and below that of the big urban centres of the Kingdom (according to the classification proposed by J. Wiesiołowski).
Ilok received royal privileges in 1453 and its statute-book in 1525; in addition, the parish clergy was granted an autonomy vis-à-vis the archdeacon in charge (archdeacon of Marchia), which was confirmed by the bishops of Pécs in 1439 and 1471 and by the Pope in 1479. Further, the town enjoyed the protection of a powerful baronial family, whose most ambitious member, Nicholas of Ilok (†1477), voivode of Transylvania, even became crowned as the king of Bosnia. The death and the burial of the famous Italian Franciscan friar John Capistran in Ilok in 1456 contributed enormously to the fame of the town and its Franciscan convent. These and some other elements point to the mutual influence of the ecclesiastical and economic development of the town, which was, however, doomed to an abrupt change following the Ottoman conquest.
The paper continues with a review of the forms and occurrences of the horonym meaning 'Slavic land': Greek Σκλαβηνία (with slight orthographical variants) and Latin Sclavinia, Sclavenia, Sclavania, Sclavia, Sclavonia. The Greek word appears first in historiographer Theophylact Simocatta in the first half of the seventh century, where it refers to the presumably large Slav-inhabited land on the northern side of the lower Danube. The regular use of the horonym only begins in the early ninth century with Theophanes the Confessor, who speaks of Σκλαβηνίαι as areas inhabited and de facto ruled by the Slavs in the provinces of Macedonia and Thrace. Theophanes uses the name in the plural, which is characteristic of the Byzantine way of referring to 'Slavic lands'. What distinguishes these "Sclavinias" from each other is obviously a separate (although probably very similar) social organization of the Slavs in each of them, and apparently also some measure of internal "tribal" connection, which is manifested in ethnonyms such as those recorded in The miracles of Saint Demetrius. After Theophanes, the name Σκλαβηνία is used in the same sense by other Byzantine writers, including Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in whose treatise "on the governance of the Empire" the name Σκλαβηνία refers to a more general ethno-political category, and individual ethnic names correspond to each entity of this type. "Chrovatía (= Croatia) an the rest of the Sklaviníai" is one of his expressions illustrating such two-layered nomenclature. The Byzantine Σκλαβηνία / Σκλαυηνία, therefore, was not a geographical name in the true sense, but a designation for a category of territorial communities or "proto-state" formations whose common feature was that they were predominantly Slavic and/or dominated by Slavs. Such use of the name for 'Slavic land' in the Byzantine environment is strikingly different from the use of the corresponding words in the Frankish Latin written culture.
After the first known appearance of the Latin horonym in 780 or a little earlier (an isolated and somewhat enigmatic expression in Slawinia terrae, found in Hygeburg's Vita Willibaldi), the systematic use begins at the end of the eighth century in the works of Carolingian annalists and chroniclers. The preferred form in this tradition is Sclavania, and it is also used in charters, alongside the corresponding ethnonym Sclavani or Sclavanii and the adjectives Sclavanicus and Sclavanensis. The form Sclavania predominates as late as in the chronicle of Adam of Bremen (composed in the 1070s and supplemented in the 1080s). "Sclavania" primarily denoted the totality of lands inhabited by Western Slavic peoples, stretching from the Elbe to the Vistula and from Bohemia and Moravia to the Baltic. It was known by the "Frankish" authors to be inhabited by numerous mutually related and similar peoples, some of whom managed to create stronger centers of power, mostly short-lived, except in two cases, the Czechs and the Poles, where the early Slavic principalities grew into kingdoms in the eleventh century. In this connection, the name "Sclavania" appears sometimes in narrower uses, for just one of the many Slavic lands.
The form Sclavinia is associated with the southeastern zone of the Empire, appearing for the first time in 824 in the Latin (translated) letter of the Byzantine emperor Michael II to emperor Louis the Pious and also in Louis' charter concerning a possession in Carantania. The expression found in the letter, et circumiacentibus Sclaviniis, uses the plural and is entirely in accordance with Byzantine chronicle practice. The use of the horonym in Louis' charter is the first in a short series of examples of the use of the form Sclavinia for the Slavic regions east of Bavaria, which in the course of the ninth century became East Frankish margraviates or dependent principalities. As shown by the expression in Sclaviniam, in partes videlicet Quarantanas atque inferioris Pannoniae (from the 870 text of The conversion of the Bavarians and the Carantanians), "Sclavinia" can here too be a collective name for several lands inhabited by Slavs.
On the southernmost section of the eastern edge of the Carolingian Empire, along the Adriatic Sea, the lands inhabited by Slavs were first referred to by the Latin horonym in 871, in an indirectly preserved letter of the king of Italy and the Frankish emperor Louis II. With the expression populis Sclaveniae nostrae, the emperor most likely refers to the land of the Croats, ruled by prince Domagoj at that time. The eleventh-century Chronicon Venetum by John the Deacon speaks of the same land also using the name Sclavenia. In Italy until the eleventh century the preferred form of the name for a Slavic country might have been Sclavenia, but it appears that in the papal chancery the form Sclavinia prevailed. It seems most likely that in the letters sent to Dalmatia probably in 925 (but preserved only in a much later transcription) pope John X also used the form Sclavinia and related words. As these examples show, for the main political centers in Italy that were involved in the events on the eastern side of the Adriatic (the Holy See, the King of Italy and the Frankish emperor, Venice), "Sclavenia" or "Sclavinia" was primarily the principality and then the kingdom with which they mostly dealt in that area, that is, Croatia.
The name Sclavonia/Slavonia appears in original documents in the late 10th century, with the earliest example probably in the charter of Otto II issued in 975, where Slauonia is listed among countries of the East Frankish (German) kingdom and designates the Slavic region around the middle Elbe recently organized as the margraviates of Saxony. In less than a century since it first appeared, the name form Sclavonia has established itself - in charters, chronicles, and hagiograpy - as the main variant of the Latin word for 'Slavic land'. As with other variants, this word could denote Slavic lands in a geographically unspecified sense, that is, more of them or even the totality of them; on the other hand, it could also refer to a specific country of the Slavs (which one - can only be derived from the context of the respective usage). Thus, in several sources from the second half of the eleventh century, the country ruled by Croatian kings is referred to as Sclavonia too. Among these, the 1091 letter of Ladislas I, king of Hungary, to the abbot of Monte Cassino refers to Croatia under the guise of Sclavonia; Ladislas certainly knew that the country, which he was in the process of annexing to the crown of Hungary, had a more particular name too (his sister was married there), but he preferred to use the name Sclavonia, which was common in Italy. Just like elsewhere, in Europe's southeast "Sclavonia" did not always denote just one Slavic state in the eleventh century. An example of the horonym's use in a broader sense is offered by a chronicle of the First Crusade, written by Raymond of Aguilers between 1099 and 1101, according to which "Sclavonia" extended through the entire hinterland of the Adriatic coast as far as Scutari (Shkodër) and included at least the territories of the kingdom of Croatia and the kingdom of Dioclea (ruled by a Scutari-based "king of the Slavs").
Since the short form of the Slavic ethnonym appeared as early as the late sixth century, it is somewhat puzzling that the shortest variant of the horonym, Sclavia, derived directly from Sclavus, appears no earlier than the beginning of the eleventh century, as the youngest variant of the horonym. It is first found in the German, more precisely the Saxon chronicle tradition. At first rarely found, only in the twelfth century will the form Sclavia / Slavia become relatively popular, though already in the shadow of Sclavonia / Slavonia.
Western artists have been depicting places in this area since the late 16th century, as a rule in the function of documenting diplomatic trips along the Danube from Christian Europe to the Ottoman Empire. Travelogues form an extremely interesting and data-rich group of sources for the history of the middle Danube region during the Ottoman rule (16th-17th centuries). Dozens of European travelers who traveled through the Danube region to Constantinople or other parts of the Ottoman Empire during this period, for diplomatic or other purposes, left detailed records of the circumstances they observed and experiences they had. Some of these texts are accompanied by artistic illustrations – drawings of individual settlements and other scenes seen on the trip. The Baranya, Slavonian and Syrmian sections of the Danube region appear in illustrations in four travelogues. Heinrich Ottendorf's work, Der Weg von Ofen auf Griechischen Weissenburg, compiled in 1663-1665 and preserved in manuscript (published in 1943), provides the plans of various towns between Buda and Belgrade based on the sightings of a traveler using the roads. Of the cities on the Danube, Vukovar and Zemun are shown here. Edward Brown's travelogue, first published in London in 1673 under the title A brief account of some travels in Hungaria ..., contains copperplate engravings depicting the long Turkish bridge from Osijek to Darda and a village in Srijem with dugout houses.
The remaining two illustrated travelogues can be defined as "Danubian" in the proper sense because their authors used the Danube waterway for travel. A manuscript "travelogue" was recently discovered in Leiden, consisting of the drawings only, without a textual description of the journey, and was probably made by an unknown member of a group mission to Constantinople that traveled the Danube waterway and the Balkans by land around 1580. Leiden's "drawing block", later entitled Imagines urbium quarundam Hungariae et Turciae, contains 26 completed drawings and five unfinished sketches showing places from Hainburg on the Danube to the western approaches to Constantinople. Among them are depictions of seven Slavonian-Syrmian places: Osijek, Erdut, Vukovar, Šarengrad, Petrovaradin, Slankamen and Zemun. The exceptional historical value of these realistic drawings is underlined by the fact that they are the oldest known visual representations of Western provenance that reveal the appearance of settlements in the lower interfluve of the Drava and Sava rivers.
The main attention in the paper is paid to the lost illustrated codex by Maximilian Prandstetter (Brandstetter), with a description of the journey of 1608-1609. The travelogue entitled Itinerarium oder Raisbeschreibung has been known since the 19th century, in which Prandstetter described in German the path of the Habsburg imperial embassy to Constantinople under the leadership of Baron Adam of Herberstein. The travelogue has been preserved in two manuscript codices, and was published both in excerpts and in its entirety in the 20th century. One of the two codices, housed in the private library in Hédervár owned by the counts of Viczay and then Khuen-Héderváry, was richly illustrated, but after World War II it disappeared and was probably destroyed. Among other illustrations, it contained views, made in watercolor, of six places from the mouth of the Drava to the mouth of the Sava into the Danube; indirectly, in various copies, depictions of Erdut, Vukovar, Ilok and Zemun have survived. From illustrations with depictions of other places, those depicting Buda and Mohács have been preserved, apparently as fragments of the original codex.
in Syrmia as well as Syrmian wine or wine „of Marchia“ (another medieval name for Syrmia) as a subject of trade in the central and northern parts of the kingdom. Sources unveil details about the wine duties towards the landowners and the taxes taken from Syrmian wine at the markets of Esztergom and Pest. The late and final section, on the other hand, is presented here through a selection of diverse records that reveal the
great reputation that Syrmian wine enjoyed at the dawn of the modern times which coincided with the Ottoman conquest of the Hungarian Danube region, including Syrmia. The most eloquent praises of Syrmian wine can be found in humanist writers of the 15th and 16th centuries, several of whom are considered here: Galeotto Marzio, Stephen Brodarić, Nicholas Olahus and Antun Vrančić-Verantius. The widely accepted
judgment on this wine was summarized by Stephen Brodarić, bishop of Srijem and diplomat of King John of Zapolja, who described it, with a little exaggeration, as “the most praised wine in the entire North”.
Apart from these three direct references, Pliny's mention of an island on the Sava named Metubarbis (described in addition as „the largest among river islands“) is also frequently connected with the Bosut. Matija Petar Katančić was thus among the first who thought that the name Metubarbis (which he linguistically interpreted as „među barama“ or paludibus circumdatus) covered the large territory enclosed by the Biđ and the Bosut on one side and the Sava on the other. Despite being widely accepted in more recent literature, this identification remains questionable and Pliny's island of Metubarbis still topographically enigmatic.
The codex consists of 215 entire parchment leafs (the first leaf being an empty dust cover) and a small fragment of the last leaf. The main text is written mostly in black (and at some places brown) ink, while initials and rubrics in many parts of the codex are executed in red ink.
The main text is written in a tiny and careful Gothic script, in two columns. Each column consists of 46 lines on average, and each line contains usually between 45-50 characters. Corrections and interlinear additions are rare in the main text. However, some marginal notes and additions are clearly contemporaneous with the main text.
Changes and variations in the size and shape of the script, sometimes visible in the continuous text as well, suggest that the codex was executed by several hands (scribes). On the margins of the main text (i.e. left, right, and also usually wide lower margins), as well as on the originally textless central parts of the leafs, there are various notes and signs (conventional symbols, e.g. “nota”; hands showing places in the text; anthropomorphous and zoomorphous heads or drôleries), which have been added subsequently, probably by several hands. These later additions are usually done in a somewhat larger cursive script and in brown ink.
Some pages are without any text (fols. 72v, 124v, 153v), while at many places leafs are or appear to be missing due to cutting or tearing out of the codex. It is possible that some leafs were removed from the codex even before any text was written in it. For a definitive knowledge about the places and the number of the missing leafs it will be necessary to determine the gaps in the texts at the places in question (after fols. 1, 5, 57, 91, 101, 108, 116, 163, 179, 181, 196, 212, 213, 214).
Besides that, some leafs are partly damaged by cutting or tearing. Such mutilations reach into the main text on fols. 1-4, 15-16, 27, 44-45, 59, 148, 182, 212, 214. Other folios suffered only minor damages, covering only marginal notes (on fols. 5, 12r, 28, 48, 57, 88). Also, some marginal notes were damaged by what appears as a subsequent trimming of the leaf edges. It is clear on the other hand that some damages on the leafs preceded the writing of the main text and that scribes adapted to their presence (this can be seen, for example, on fols. 7, 11, 46, 61, 70, 89, 94, 101, 164, 174, 179).
Based on our examination of the codex so far, it contains: eight main texts of different lengths and in more or less complete transcriptions, one shorter text in a half-preserved transcription, and one (last) text of which there is now only a small fragment. The last two texts, found at the end of the codex, appear to be later attachments to the main contents. Besides that, there are also some brief marginal notes of later origin in various parts of the codex.
Out of the eight main texts, five have been so far historically identified. They are the well known writings by medieval authors, one of whom belongs to the Early Middle Ages (pope Gregory the Great’s Liber pastoralis, on fols. 189r-204v), and three were active around 1200: Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis (fol. 110r-118r); Alan of Lille, Liber poenitentialis (fol. 118r-124r) and Summa de arte praedicatoria (fol. 153r-188v); Peter of Roissy, Manuale de misteriis ecclesie (fol. 125r-144r). I have also proposed working hypotheses regarding the authorship of two more of the remaining texts found in the codex.
Among the younger notes in the codex, particularly interesting seems to be the one found on fol. 204v, alongside the main text occupying the left column. The note reads: Anno D(o)m(ini) m(illesim)o ccc-o xcix-o xviii-o die mensis Nouembris facta fuit choruscacio mirabilis per omnes partes Slesie in crepusculo pridie Elizabeth.
On the basis of this historical note, we can conclude: firstly, that the main text in the codex is certainly older than 1399; and secondly, that the codex was in use in a church institution in Silesia at the end of the 14th century. Silesia (Duchy of Silesia) belonged at that time to the Kingdom of Bohemia which itself made part of the Holy Roman Empire.
As a terminus post quem of the codex’s creation we can only take, at this moment, the time when the most recent of the identified texts was written down. This is the Liber poenitentialis by Robert of Flamborough, dating from around 1210.
Since manuscript books and other handwritten documents originating from the times before the 18th century are extremely rare in Slavonia, the newly found medieval codex from the Museum of Slavonia in Osijek means an exceptionally interesting discovery (it could easily be the oldest preserved book in Slavonia nowadays). In a future investigation one will have to complete and publish a systematic and detailed description of the codex and its contents, thereby drawing the attention of the international scholarly community to its so far unnoticed existence. From the viewpoint of Slavonia’s cultural history, it will also be important to try to find out how the codex came to Slavonia, Osijek and eventually the Museum of Slavonia.
AND THE KINGDOM OF CROATIA
A branch of the old Dorozsma kindred, which acquired the eponymous land of Gara (now Gorjani) in Vukovo/Valkó County in the thirteenth century, the Gorjanski family included some of the most important fi gures in the political life of the late medieval Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary–Croatia). For decades the family was among the few
wealthiest seigniorial families in the kingdom. Although Croatia (in the medieval territorial sense) was not a primary area of activity for the family members, several of them nevertheless played signifi cant roles in various political and other related processes which connected this land, once an independent kingdom, with the rest of the large Danubian state ruled by the heirs of the Holy Crown. In the late fourteenth
century and in the fi rst half of the fi fteenth century, the Gorjanskis performed political functions (bans of Croatia, royal counts, castellans, city counts) and carried out military missions there. They held lands and other possessions in Croatia and Dalmatia (the islands of Cres and Osor, salterns on the island of Rab). Finally, some of them were
married to the members of the Croatian noble families who took sides with King Sigismund of Luxemburg during the dynastic strife (the counts of Krk and the Kurjakovići of Krbava).
AND THE KINGDOM OF CROATIA
A branch of the old Dorozsma kindred, which acquired the eponymous land of Gara (now Gorjani) in Vukovo/Valkó County in the thirteenth century, the Gorjanski family included some of the most important fi gures in the political life of the late medieval Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary–Croatia). For decades the family was among the few
wealthiest seigniorial families in the kingdom. Although Croatia (in the medieval territorial sense) was not a primary area of activity for the family members, several of them nevertheless played signifi cant roles in various political and other related processes which connected this land, once an independent kingdom, with the rest of
the large Danubian state ruled by the heirs of the Holy Crown. In the late fourteenth century and in the fi rst half of the fi fteenth century, the Gorjanskis performed political functions (bans of Croatia, royal counts, castellans, city counts) and carried out military missions there. They held lands and other possessions in Croatia and Dalmatia (the
islands of Cres and Osor, salterns on the island of Rab). Finally, some of them were married to the members of the Croatian noble families who took sides with King Sigismund of Luxemburg during the dynastic strife (the counts of Krk and the Kurjakovići of Krbava).
This paper examines the history of the ecclesiastical institutions in Ilok (Hung. Újlak), tracing how their development reflected the economic rise of the town during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ilok was one of those rather few towns in Slavonia and Srijem (Syrmia) which simultaneously had more than one Mendicant friary - Franciscan and Augustinian in Ilok’s case (the latter in existence from the mid-fourteenth century, the former a few decades earlier). Besides these two houses of the Mendicants, the town-walls enclosed the parish-church of St. Peter, which was a relatively large basilica with two aisles. In the suburbs, another parish-church dedicated to St. Helen the Empress is found, along with three smaller chapels, of Holy Spirit, of St. Ladislas, and of All Saints. The last two were accompanied with the hospices or hospitals.
An accurate list of the town's medieval churches may serve as the basis for an estimation of the size of the town's population. A calculation developed by A. Kralovánszky allows for the hypothesis that seven churches correspond to the population of 2100-2500. Thus, in Central European context, the fifteenth-century Ilok can be ranked above the category of the common market-towns (oppida) and below that of the big urban centres of the Kingdom (according to the classification proposed by J. Wiesiołowski).
Ilok received royal privileges in 1453 and its statute-book in 1525; in addition, the parish clergy was granted an autonomy vis-à-vis the archdeacon in charge (archdeacon of Marchia), which was confirmed by the bishops of Pécs in 1439 and 1471 and by the Pope in 1479. Further, the town enjoyed the protection of a powerful baronial family, whose most ambitious member, Nicholas of Ilok (†1477), voivode of Transylvania, even became crowned as the king of Bosnia. The death and the burial of the famous Italian Franciscan friar John Capistran in Ilok in 1456 contributed enormously to the fame of the town and its Franciscan convent. These and some other elements point to the mutual influence of the ecclesiastical and economic development of the town, which was, however, doomed to an abrupt change following the Ottoman conquest.
In addition, the oldest monastery in Srijemska Mitrovica is the only one historically, even if indirectly, connected with the saint it highlighted in its patrocinium. (Similarly as can be stated today, in a more direct sense, for the Franciscan monastery of St. John Capistran in Ilok.) Although this was almost forgotten in the "tempests of history" and covered by a different legend and a highly developed cult in Byzantine Thessalonica, the early Christian martyr Demetrius was actually a deacon in the beginnings of Christianity in the important Roman city of Sirmium, probably an assistant of the local bishop Irenaeus, with whom he may have perished in the same "persecution of Christians" within a few days of each other. Surprisingly, this fact about Demetrius' origin from Sirmium was known in Hungarian-Croatian ecclesiastical and cultural circles at least since the early 13th century. It was certainly known in the monastery of St. Demetrius, and it is entirely possible that the Mitrovica Orthodox monks contributed to the spread of this knowledge, by reworking the established Greek legend about the saint's life and supplementing it with an introduction about his birthplace and youth. The monastery thus stood under the protection and especially venerated the saint who, rightly, was considered local on the land of ancient Sirmium.
The history of this monastery is also exceptional in terms of how broadly it involves the political, cultural and ecclesiastical history of its time. This breadth of context, which must be taken into account when interpreting its history, stands in great disproportion with the modest amount of written sources which refer to the monastery. Concerning the character and circumstances of the monastery itself, the last source - which speaks of its demise as an Orthodox institution and the bringing of the Benedictines - is in fact the most telling. A handful of earlier sources, as important as they are in themselves for the overall history, say little and often vaguely or even confusingly about the monastery. This had the consequence that around each of these data, tangles of different alternative interpretations were created in historiography. As for the material legacy or at least the traces of the bygone monastery, one could think that there are would be no major research difficulties on that side simply because nothing is reliably known so far about the exact place where the monastery stood and because practically no material remains of it have been preserved (except for one seal ring described in historical literature). However, this is not the case either, because researchers have so far engaged in various assumptions about the location of the monastery, argued for in different ways, and one relatively wide-ranging historiographical hypothesis or theory depends on where the monastery was located in relation to the settlement of Mitrovica and the nearby Kalocsa-Pécs diocesan border.
The late antique bishopric of Sirmium in southeastern Pannonia, eliminated by the Avars in 582, was indirectly resurrected as a title by Pope Hadrian II, who conferred it in 869 on Saint Methodius of Thessalonica, missionary of the Slavs in Moravia and in Pannonia. Contrary to the opinion of some modern historians, it is not probable that at the same time, in the region of Syrmia itself, the Bulgarians restored a national bishopric. The Bulgarian bishopric of Sirmium/Syrmia was probably founded around 1000 by Tsar Samuel, who integrated it into his patriarchate of Ohrid. The cathedral of this bishopric was on the site of Zidine or Širingrad, in the territory of the modern settlement of Mačvanska Mitrovica on the right bank of the Sava, facing Sirmium or medieval Mitrovica. The locality was conquered by the Byzantines in 1018 and the Eastern rite episcopal church, having Saint Irenaeus as its titular probably already at that time, remained there until the middle of the 13th century, when it was Latinized and turned into a co-cathedral of the Hungarian bishop of Syrmia.
On the left bank of the lower Sava, „Syrmian“ in the strict sense, the Hungarians dominated from the middle of the 10th century. It was probably already at that time that a church dedicated to Saint Demetrius was built in the territory of Sirmium for a bishop brought from Constantinople, or else for a Slavo-Byzantine mission working among the Magyars. It is also conjectured that King Stephen I founded a Greek (Basilian) monastery near this church. The first mention of the church is in a charter of the Hungarian count palatine named Rado, dated 1057. It is a pious donation in favor of the bishopric of Pécs. The gift included, among other things, „the monastery of Saint Demetrius on the river Sava“, which Rado had reconquered by arms at the same time as „this whole province“. He ceded to Maurus, bishop of Pécs, the spiritual as well as temporal authority over the monastery, asking in return for himself and his wife to be buried in it. The monastery belonged, according to Rado's charter, to the diocese of Pécs: this assertion, as well as certain stylistic peculiarities of the charter, have led historians to suppose that it was largely a later interpolation, probably from the 13th century, arranged by the bishop of Pécs at the time (Györffy's hypothesis). However, the historical facts cited by Rado and the very existence of the monastery in the middle of the 11th century do not seem to be invented.
The prestige of the monastery is confirmed by the events of 1072, when King Solomon completed an incursion into Byzantine territory by bringing to the church of Saint Demetrius a relic of Saint Procopius which he had seized in Niš. Later, the episode was repeated in reverse: in 1164, the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos entered Hungary with his army, crossing Syrmia and advancing as far as the episcopal city of Bač (Bács); according to the chronicler John Kinnamos, who described the country traveled by the Byzantines as devoted to Greek Christianity, the emperor recovered the hand of Saint Procopius, kept until then with Saint Demetrius, and returned it to Niš. A charter of King Béla III of 1193, confirming the possessions of the convent of the Hospitallers in Székesfehérvár, mentions an "abbot of Saint Demetrius" as a neighbor and the owner of a water and a meadow, probably located in the vicinity of Pacsinta (now Pačetin), in Vukovo/Valkó county.
At the beginning of the 13th century, the documents of the Holy See indicate the existence of two monasteries of Saint Demetrius in Hungary, the distinction between them remaining vague. In the registers of Pope Innocent III, notes from 1215 mention a "monastery of Saint Demetrius on the Sava" and another "monastery of Saint Demetrius of the Greeks in Hungary", both forming part of a group of monasteries to which the Pope conferred “the protection of St. Peter” (i.e. exemption from episcopal authority) and exemption from payment of ecclesiastical tithes for land cultivated by monks.
Even more complicated is the place of these two monasteries in the two bulls, dated 1216 and 1218 and almost identical, by which Pope Honorius III confirmed the goods and privileges of the monastery of Saint Theodosius the Cenobiarch of Laberria/Laberia. The census of possessions there begins with the church of Saint Theodosius „near Jerusalem“ and other possessions in the Holy Land, which makes it possible to identify the addressee of the bull as the famous lavra located south of Jerusalem and founded in 5th century by the monk Theodosius of Cappadocia. However, the geographical indication of Laber(r)ia seems to refer to the Byzantine city of Beroia (Veroia) in Macedonia, which at that time belonged to the Latin Kingdom of Thessalonica (in existence between 1204 and 1224) and which the Frankish crusaders called La Verre. (The Slavic version of the name is Ber.) According to the rather convincing hypothesis of Gy. Papp and A. L. Tăutu, the monks of Saint Theodosius left the Holy Land after the fall of Jerusalem (1187) and, probably by way of Cyprus where they would have stayed for a time, arrived in Béroia to stay there for an unknown period. After those in the Holy Land, the bulls list the possessions of St. Theodosius located in Cyprus and Constantinople, as well as a wax income donated by two Russian princes from Galicia. The possessions in Hungary follow, beginning with two monasteries of Saint Demetrius with their dependencies. One is said to be offered by Béla, king of Hungary, and the other is explicitly described as „Greek“ (Grecorum). In addition, 29 localities are listed, including villages, various estates and 14 churches, most of them difficult to identify with certainty, but which appear to have been located in the Danubian and southern parts of the Kingdom of Hungary. (...)
After a long historiographical controversy, most researchers today agree to link the Benedictine monastery of Grab or Garáb with Grabovo, a modern hamlet located in the region of Syrmia (Srijem), between the Danube and the mountain of Fruška Gora. The difficulty of this identification comes from the fact that there is almost no documentary indication of the precise geographical site of this monastery, apart from the general fact that it belonged to the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Kalocsa. Moreover, the oldest documents, concerning certain possessions of the monastery which were located in a different region, motivated other topographical combinations.
The first mention of the monastery is in a verdict of Ugolin (Ugrin), archbishop of Kalocsa, dated 1234. Hozuga, abbot of Grabovo, and his “ministerial” named Bertolo accused Ivanka, son of Abraham, of having occupied their land called Szelkaróna, located between the river of Peker (now Bijela) and the mountain of Kamena Brda (part of the Ravna Gora). But the patrons of the monastery, James and Petka, sons of Budur, claimed to have sold this land to Ivanka and the accusation was dismissed accordingly. The disputed land probably corresponds to the surroundings of the modern (now deserted) hamlet of Zaile, around the upper course of the Bijela, between the mountains of Ravna Gora in the south and Papuk in the north, in today's Western Slavonia. This area constituted the border region of the counties of Požega and Križevci, and also of the dioceses of Pécs and Zagreb. On one side were large estates acquired by Ivanka, the best-known ancestor of the Velički (de Velyke) family, and on the other lay Toplica, the land of the Tibold family, from whom descended the two patrons of Grabovo. The curious fact is that, according to the known documents, the Tibolds had no possessions in Syrmia, nearer to the monastery itself. The charter of 1234, and also another of 1250, mention, without naming it, another possession of the monastery, close to that sold to Ivanka of Velika.
After a long silence from the sources, an anonymous abbot of Grabovo participated in 1319 in a canonical concession of the Archdeaconry of Vaška (Zagreb Diocese), enjoined by Pope John XXII. In 1332, the same pope allowed the bishop of Belgrade, named Paul, to attach to his episcopal mensa the revenues of Bijela (Bela), an “ecclesiastical place” in the diocese of Zagreb that was “immediately subordinated” to the Benedictine monastery of Grabovo. The decision was provoked by the presence of a “deranged abbot” (fatuus abbas) named Stephen at the head of Grabovo. In a bull of 1337, lamenting the unrest that overwhelmed the Benedictines in Hungary, Pope Benedict XII dealt with the case of Stephen himself, a renegade of a mendicant order who usurped abbatial authority and dissipated temporal goods not only in the abbey of Grabovo, but also in three other Benedictine monasteries of different dioceses. The pope demanded the deposition of this impostor, and also the restoration of the monastic community in Grabovo, with an abbot worthy of this office. The deposition was however unsuccessful, as in 1340 the same abbot Stephen, through his official, protested against the royal donation of land named Rusd (near Baja, Bodrog County) to Count Töttös of Becse.
It was during the first chapter of the Hungarian Benedictines, meeting in 1342, that the success of the restoration of the monastery of Grabovo, as well as four other monasteries, was proclaimed. The credit was due to Syffridus, abbot of Hronsky Beňadik (Hung. Garamszentbenedek), whose full expenses incurred during his efforts for the benefit of the restoration were to be compensated gradually by the monasteries in question. In the two charters concerning these arrangements, the names of Bijela (Bela), Grabovo (Grab) and also “Bijela or Grabovo” (Bela sive Grab) are alternated. The apparent interchangeability of these names has led some Croatian historians to regard Grabovo simply as an older name for the monastery in Bijela, richly documented in the late Middle Ages.
There are, however, several facts that oppose such an explanation of the relationship between these two Benedictine institutions. The provincial chapter of 1366 promulgated a charter of crucial importance for this question. The presiding abbots published there the details of a new disorder reigning in the monastery in Grabovo, of the diocese of Kalocsa, and in its “grange” called Bijela (grangia eiusdem Bela vocata). An abbot named Conrad lived there with his concubines, wasting the monastery's property. All the unfavorable rumors have been certified by four abbots “closer” (viciniores) to Grabovo and its “grange”: those of Grgurevci (Szentgergely) and Francavilla or Manđelos (Nagyolaszi), in the diocese of Kalocsa, that of Rudina, in the diocese of Pécs, and that of Zselicszentjakab, in the diocese of Veszprém. The geographical distribution of these four abbeys indicates the proximity of Grgurevci and Francavilla to the monastery of Grabovo, thus confirming the location of the latter in the Syrmian part of the Archdiocese of Kalocsa. The same chapter prescribed the arrest of abbot Conrad and his substitution by the monk Thomas, then residing in the monastery at Szekszárd. This last decision was really made true, because we find Thomas in 1371 as abbot of Bijela, this fact once again attesting to the interchangeability of the two titles. Indeed, surviving sources indicate that after the usurpation of abbot Conrad, the monastery of Grabovo was gradually reduced to a mere title, with the main seat of the abbot being transferred to Bijela.
Grabovo's title still enjoyed some prestige for several decades, especially in papal documents, but the material content of the sources nevertheless shows that it was actually the house located in Bijela, in the eastern part of the diocese of Zagreb. Thus, for example, “the abbot of Grabovo” participated, in 1368 and 1390, in the collations of the Čazma canonries to a cleric of Virovitica and another of Međurić. When abbot Lawrence began his office as “the abbot of Grabovo and Bijela” in 1390, a monk named Stephen appeared as his rival, in which he was supported by a priest from Bijela (both of whom were later reprimanded). In 1419, Lawrence received a bull from the pope in confirmation of the exemption of his two monasteries – that of Bijela being said to be subordinate to that of Grabovo – from the authority of the bishop of Zagreb, whom the abbot accused of having appropriated some abbey property. And yet, after the death of this abbot in 1421, it was precisely another bishop of Zagreb, John of Alben, who became the administrator of the abbey of “Grabovo or Bijela”. The rest of the documents always speak of the abbot and the monastery of Bijela without mentioning Grabovo, with the sole exception of the title assumed by the abbot Eustace in 1476-9, where the monasteries of Grabovo, Babócsa (diocese of Veszprém) and Bijela were named as “canonically united”. But here, too, the sources reveal quite clearly that the only living part of this formal “union” was the monastery at Bijela.
In the second part of the book, also based on the analysis of all known original material, the history of the monastery of St. Margaret in Bijela (to the east of today's Daruvar) is reconstructed. This is the only reliably documented Benedictine monastery in the area of the medieval Zagreb diocese. According to preserved sources, this monastery grew out of a kind of dependent house founded on the property in the western foothills of Papuk by the abbey of St. Margarete of Grabovo in Syrmia. After decades of administrative crisis in the latter abbey, the institution in Bijela became the abbot's main seat and a monastery in its own right during the last third of the 14th century. The sequence of abbots and non-monachical administrators was interrupted for a long time in the early 1480s, when the fortified abbey in Bijela together with its large manor came into the hands of the bans of Jajce (in the Hungarian-ruled part of Bosnia), and religious life in it died out.
After the service of Abbot Eustace (last mentioned in 1482), the goods of the monastery in Bijela came into the hands of the bans of the Banate of Jajce, established by King Matthias Corvinus in the Vrbas valley shortly after the Ottoman destruction of the Kingdom of Bosnia. The large monastery estate with its seat in Bijela lay close to the new banate and in its relatively safe Slavonian hinterland, so it was very suitable as a source of income and supplies in kind. In total, for at least three decades, the abbey estates functioned as the "main granary of the Banate of Jajce " (L. Thallóczy).
After the restoration in 1513, which was primarily due to the efforts of Matthew of Tolna, a very capable and influential abbot of Pannonhalma, the abbey of Bijela lived under the supremacy of the Pannonhalma „archabbey“ until the 1530s, when it finally ceased to exist in the face of the imminent threat of Turkish conquest. (...)
Although the archaeological examination indicates the foundation of the monastery in the twelfth century, the earliest surviving written sources are later. In 1210, a place called Rudina is mentioned, located on the "Duke's road" (Ducauta) coming from Pakrac (Pekrec) and probably leading to Požega (Pozsegavár). In 1250, in the description of the land of Bedech between Papuk and Ravna gora ranges, the property of Ivanka of Velika, “the land of the Rudina monastery” is mentioned as its southern neighbor. In 1279, George, abbot of Rudina, exchanged the land of Lipina for the land of Vučjak with the descendants of Ban Borić; the monastery's patrons Roman and Otholin's sons John and Peter – probably also members of the same Borić kindred – agreed to the exchange. The land of Orljavica (probably present-day Šnjegavić), the property of the sons of Odola from the kindred of Ban Borić, is said in 1283 to be located next to the "land of the church of St. Michael" (i.e. the land of the abbey of Rudina). These and some later data support the assumption that the monastery in Rudina was founded by Borić, the Hungarian ban of Bosnia in the 1150s and 1160s. Borić was the first known holder of this title and was either a vassal of the Hungarian-Croatian king or, possibly, did not himself originate from Bosnia, but from the areas north of the Sava, most likely from Požega County, where his numerous descendants are mentioned in the course of later centuries and where the bulk of their possessions was situated.
Around 1330, the abbot of Rudina was a Nicholas who leased, sub nomine prediali, two monastic lands to master Emeric Giletffy (son of Gilet) for an annual fee of four marcs and a foal. Nicholas' successor, Peter, confirmed this contract in 1335; in the same year, he contributed 28 grosses (half a marc) for the extraordinary pontifical tithe. In a lawsuit conducted before the chief royal judge in Buda between 1347 and 1349, Andrew, the provost of the Požega Collegiate Chapter and the patron of Rudina, obtained the annulment of the contract on the lease of the Koprivna and Selna estates to the Giletffy family, because the abbots had not asked for the patrons' approval. The abbot of Rudina at the time of the lawsuit was a certain Hermann. In the 1360s an abbot of Rudina participated on several occasions in the execution of papal provisions of various ecclesiastical benefices in the Diocese of Pécs. The abbot of Rudina named Nicholas participated in the provincial chapter of the Hungarian Benedictines, held in 1366 in Monyoród, and testified in the case of a rogue abbot in the abbey of St. Margaret in Grabovo (Garáb) and its "grange" in Bijela (Béla). An imprint of the seal of Nicholas, abbot of Rudina, with the image of Saint Nicholas, once kept in Pannonhalma, probably originated from this abbot Nicholas.
In 1380, abbot Stephen protested against the behavior of the patrons of the monastery, members of three noble families, of Cernik, of Podvršje and of Godesna, whom he accused of occupying the monastic estates of Selna, Koprivna, Kapronca, Felső Podversa, Nyemtza, and Hruševac. A Pauline hermit from the monastery in Bajcs (Baranya county) decided before 1395 to become a Benedictine and move to Rudina, for which he obtained the permission of Pope Boniface IX; finds at the site of the abbey include two leaden seals from the bulls of this pope, one of them possibly from the bull addressed to this monk. According to a charter from 1396, Rudina abbey owned a portion of land in Cernik. In 1408, abbot Cosmas refused to return to Gregory of Gyepű, nobleman from Zagreb County, the documents he had previously given for safekeeping in the monastery; it can be assumed that the abbot acted in such way at the request of the powerful prelates from Alben family, who had previously acquired Gregory's confiscated estates.
By a decision of King Sigismund from 1405, Paul of Podvršje (now Podvrško) was deprived of the patronage right over the monastery because of a murder and infidelity to the ruler, and this right was given to John of Tamásy, voivode of Transylvania. As new partial owners of the domain of Podvršje, John of Tamásy and his sons encountered a strong opposition from the old owners, the noblemen of Podvršje. In 1414, in front of the monastery of Rudina, the retainers of Dominic of Podvršje and his son-in-law Andrew Kapitanffy of Desnice beat the castellan of Podvršje and other retainers of the Tamásy family and killed one of them, John of Rápolt. In 1417, all neighbors of the Rudina monastic estate were obliged to testify at the hearing ordered by King Sigismund into various atrocities committed by Kapitanffy and Dominic of Podvršje against the subjects of Ladislas and Henry of Tamásy. Ladislas sued abbot Stephen in 1419 for inciting violence against his subjects (murder, arson and beatings on the Selna estate), but the abbot was acquitted by the testimony of the county nobility. The abbot, Stephen of Milovanić, apparently preferred the old patrons over the new ones of Tamásy family. King Sigismund supported the right of the Tamásy brothers to appoint an abbot in Rudina who suited them, because this right was previously also enjoyed by Paul of Podvršje as the “chief patron” (principalis patronus ipsius ecclesie), whose possessions the Tamásy acquired by the king's decision. In 1423, Demetrius, prior of the monastery in Szekszárd, apparently supported by the Tamásy, addressed the Holy See with a request to appoint him abbot of Rudina instead of the "self-proclaimed" abbot Stephen. According to the Papal Curia, the abbey was legally vacant since the death of the previous abbot John; the annual income of the abbey was 70-100 gold florins. The move to replace the abbot Stephen apparently failed, because he was mentioned again in 1425, representing the Tamásy brothers, patrons of Rudina, at the Požega Chapter.
Henry of Tamásy concluded an agreement on mutual inheritance with Lawrence of Hédervár in 1443, including the patronage over Rudina in it. Henry died as early as 1444 and his estates passed to the Héderváry family. Abbot Martin participated in passing judgment in a 1444 dispute between some landowners in Požega County. Soon after that the monastery became victim of a Turkish incursion; its archive was burned in it. Pope Nicholas V granted certain privileges to the monastery and its church in order to help repair the damages. The same pope appointed the bishop of Pécs, the abbot of Rudina and the abbot of Bijela to a commission to consider and confirm the sentence of excommunication against the nobles who denied the church tithes to the provost of Čazma in the Diocese of Zagreb. In 1451, Andrew, bishop of Pécs, and abbot Martin of Rudina transferred the authority of the commission to two canons of the Pécs Cathedral Chapter. In 1455, for the first time a manager (gubernator) of the abbey is mentioned, named Nicholas. A decade later, we find again abbot Martin, probably identical to the one from 1444. Stephen of Cernik and his relatives sued him in 1464 for kidnapping a peasant, appropriating the toll for the fair in Cernik and excluding them from patronage; in return, the abbot sued them and some other nobles for various acts of violence, especially on the monastic estates of Selna and Gučani (imposition of undue taxes, seizure of cattle and other goods, murder, beatings). In 1491 King Vladislaus II Jagiellon confirmed to Nicholas of Hédervár and his sons the patronage over Rudina, because they lost older charters; next year, on the occasion of the reintroduction of the Hédervárys into their estates inherited from the Tamásy family, abbot Thomas of Rudina is mentioned. After he became abbot of the monastery at Báta, Pope Julius II appointed the cleric Stephen of Gibolt (or Földvár) as an administrator of Rudina; the annual income of the abbey was listed as 50 florins.
In 1500, Francis of Hédervár pledged his estates, including patronage over Rudina, to his brother-in-law Stephen of Rozgony. Francis' sister Catherine, Stephen's wife, forbade him repeatedly in 1511 and 1513 to sell or otherwise alienate joint family estates. Nevertheless, Francis of Hédervár concluded an agreement on mutual inheritance with Francis Dessewffy of Cernik, in which he included, as a separate entity, the patronage of Rudina with the corresponding monastic estates. King Louis II Jagiello confirmed the agreement in 1516. After the death of Stephen, administrator of Rudina, the king handed over the administration of the monastery to Nicholas Dessewffy of Cernik. However, the abbey was already usurped by the priest Nicholas Vukodlačić; after the king's admonition and also an admonition of the papal legate to Hungary, Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, the usurper left the monastery. In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave Nicholas Dessewffy the abbey of Rudina in com...