Majorossy Judit: Egy történelmi gyilkosság margójára. Merániai Gertrúd emlékezete, 1213 - 2013. Tanulmánykötet - A Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, A. sorozat: Monográfiák 2. (Szentendre, 2014)
I. - Szabó Péter: A pilisi királyi erdő a középkorban
Péter Szabó: The Royal Forest of Pilis in the Middle Ages Figure 1 Settlements mentioned in written documents supplemented by archaeological dates. (The grey lines indicate a date based on archaeological evidence. Unless indicated otherwise, the settlements were deserted during the Ottoman occupation in the sixteenth century.) In addition to settlements that we know of from documents, there were many others never mentioned in writing and only discovered in field surveys. The chart that depicts these settlements (Figure 2), although it can display tendencies only, reveals a rather different and indeed contrary picture from that in Figure 1. There are many settlements in the eleventh century, another peak in the thirteenth century, and then the number decreases. It is also remarkable that the chart shows almost twice as many such settlements as those known from written sources. Such a proportion was not a peculiarity of Pilis; similar settlements, typically from the elevenththirteenth centuries, were located in large numbers in other parts of Hungary as well. All this is line with the generally accepted theory of medieval Hungarian settlement history, which put down the disappearance of these usually small settlements to wars, epidemics and agrarian crises.55 Recent research has emphasized the fundamental role of the changes in agrarian production structures, namely that estates based on work performed by serfs were gradually replaced by nucleated villages where peasants worked their individual plots.56 The next figure (Figure 3) shows the location of all possible settlements. Along the Danube, their distribution seems even, and they appear not to have penetrated the depths of Pilis Forest. However, this might be the result of field survey techniques. The latter drawback would not affect the settlements that have written documentation, since charters and their survival do not depend upon geographical features. Nevertheless, the settlements that have charter evidence basically surround the Forest. It appears that the people living in more stable settlements preferred to stay outside of the woodland, or vice versa, that those settlements that managed to survive longer were the ones that were not within the woods. Figure 2 Settlements not mentioned in written sources. (Grey lines - MRT V; black lines - MRT VII. Numbers identify sites in the MRT volumes.) 55 Szabó 1966. 56 Tringli 2001:102-104. 80
