Neumann Tibor: A Korlátköviek. Egy előkelő család története és politikai szereplése a 15-16. században - A Győri Egyházmegye Levéltár kiadványai. Források, feldolgozások 5. (Győr, 2007)
Hely- és névmutató
English abstract 231 Therefore the author had two main objectives: while studying the history of the family he put an emphasis on their political role, along with striving to give a relevant, accurate social background to it. * * * The research method the author used in the course of making the paper was a simple but rather time-consuming one: he conducted data acquisition aiming at completeness. In compliance with the special properties of middle age sources he primarily aimed at the families who later obtained the settlements and with them parts of the Korlátkövi archives; on the other hand the author examined the authoritative local and town archives near their estates, several family archives in Upper Western Hungary and the Neo-regestrata Acta, which is the biggest collection of middle age documents. This huge amount of data gained this way was grouped around the following thematic units: biography of the heads of the family (their offices and duties, their roles as retainers, barons or at the court, obtaining castles, family relations), their estate and concerning affairs (which is demonstrated by a data store) and socio-historical aspects. Since this work deals with the events of a century, from the point of view of a family at that, the author could not linger over a significant political event. In these cases he rather concentrated on the role of the family members. It was not his aim either to write such a traditional piece of family history that deals with possessory actions (often lasting for many years) - which may easily be charted due to the properties of middle age sources - in details, and demonstrates the history of the family in question in chronological order. He only made an exception in cases arising in connection with castle affairs that he considered worthy of setting forth in details because of their significance in political and social history. Since the estates of the family were inherited by several families on the female line and the Nyáry’s, their scattered archives subsist in various places: most of their documents were preserved in the Apponyi collection of the Batthyány archives, but important documents are held in the Korlátkő archives of the Motesiczky, the Novák archives of the Majthényi, and the partly ruined Bashalom, Óvár and Turócdivék archives of the Pongrácz families. The sources found here are fairly completed by the pieces of information gathered in authoritative local collections, in the archives of the chapters of Bratislava, Nitra and Esztergom in particular. The biggest difficulty, however, is caused by the selection presumably carried out in the 16th century rather than the destruction and disappearance of the documents in the modern times. The new gift impetrated by Oswald Korlátkövi Jr. in 1498, which listed almost all the estates of the family, seems to be an important dividing line: a significant part of documents - dated before that age - dealing with estate affairs disappeared. Nevertheless, one might say: although there are not so many sources available to write the history of the Korlátkövi’s than in the cases of the Gersei Pető, Kállói or Kisvárdai families, it seems that we still have enough information to outline tendencies due to the relative abundance of data.
