Gulyás Katalin et al. (szerk.): Tisicum. A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok megyei Múzeumok évkönyve 27. (Szolnok, 2019)

Történettudomány - Bagi Gábor: Lehetett-e Balaszentmiklós mezőváros a XV. században?

TISICUM XXVII.

GÁBOR BAGI:

COULD BALASZENTMIKLÓS HAVE BEEN A MARKET TOWN IN THE 15TH CENTURY?

Before Mohács, the predecessor of the city known as Törökszentmiklós today was the settlement called Balaszentmiklós, that later became a market town, and which got the last part of its name after the guardian saint of its church, and the first part presumably after its first land owner clan or family. However, rather little chartered data remain concerning the settlement, and its legal status (village or market town) is not evident either.

In order to determine the hierarchy of medieval Hungarian settlements, the historian András Kubinyi (1929-2007) worked out a list of criteria of ten items a good quarter of a century ago. With the use of this, he

collected the central locations of the more significant settlements of the region of the country. According to this, Balaszentmiklós is to be placed between the insignificant market towns and the significant villages. However, even András Kubinyi himself implied that, in the cases of settlements of transitional categories, the dissatisfactory states of sources often distort the real picture.

In this paper, the author examined the available sources in order to give Balaszentmiklós a more precise categorization. Based on several factors (population, traits of a bigger centre for a landlord’s manor, the existence of a manor house or a castle, the appearance of locals at foreign universities, the national right to host markets, locals getting into the Hungarian ecclesiastical middle class, written literary records from before 1526), he finds that the settlement is to be placed at least in the higher part of market towns considered average by Kubinyi (or in the better case, even in the lower part of market towns with partial city functions).

150