Petercsák Tivadar - Berecz Mátyás (szerk.): Magyarország védelme - Európa védelme - Studia Agriensia 24. (Eger, 2006)

AZ EGRI VÁR DIADALA - 1552 - SARUS KISS BÉLA: Egy hegyvidéki végvár katonai infrastruktúrája. Murány katonasága, építményei és fegyverzete

ments show that those soldiers serving at the palace in Murány were more likely to get paid than their German counterparts.

Murány continued to be the centre of Gömör County’s iron industry, even when out of its domain. It is for this reason that from an early stage, and as the first such place in the border castle system, Murány was also involved in casting cannons and in weapon production in general. The evolution of Murány’s arsenal and cannon foundry was due partly to the castle’s favourable position and natural setting, and partly for being able to go into service before Kassa (now Kosice, Slovakia) came into Habsburg hands. This was probably because Murány was even closer to the necessary raw materials than Kassa was. It was the iron from the Murány estate, arriving under the terms of the iron quota, which made it possible to construct small calabre cannons made of iron and harquebuses. From the castle finds it would appear that there was a substantial supply of weapons right from the very beginning, due to Murány’s role as an arsenal rather than a place of manufacture.

The castle was not modernised in any way, and did not benefit from corner bastions or any of those solutions characteristic of the revolution that was then going on in military engineering. Hence the castle was able to repel sieges with the help of modem firearms alone. Major reconstruction would have been totally out of the question anyway due to the enormous sums and the amount of effort involved. The smaller fortifications in operation near Murány, however, were not capable of withstanding major attacks, something shown in the regular and successful attacks the Turks made on the palace lying just below the castle.

172