Horváth Richárd: Itineraria regis Matthiae Corvini et reginae Beatricis de Aragonia, 1458-[1476]-1490 - Subsidia ad historiam medii aevi Hungariae inquirendam 2. (Budapest, 2011)
9. Summary
ITINERARIA REGUM ET REGINARIUM REGNI HUNGÁRIÁÉ The most important problem concerns the sources upon which the book is based. As regards the history of medieval Hungary, charters constitute the prime material at the historian's disposal. It should be emphasised, however, that in Hungarian historiography the term charter/Urkunde (Hung, oklevél) is used somewhat more comprehensively than in England or Germany. With some exaggeration it is reasonable to say that practically all written sources from the period before 1526 are called charters. The basic exceptions to the rule are books and codices as well as letters. In terms of numbers, more than 300 000 "charters" have come down to us from the five and a half centuries preceding 1526. This represents basically the whole written legacy of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, which had covered the entire Carpathian basin. Roughly a quarter of them, some 85 000 charters were issued in the course of Matthias' reign from 1458 to 1490. Some 15 000 among them are of crucial importance to us; those which were issued in the king's name. They constitute the basis of the itinerary. Of course, the sheer quantity of the sources tell us nothing about their quality or their usability from the point of view of making itineraries. Not only is the chronological distribution of the charters fairly random, but their form of survival is far from uniform. It is consequently important to know how many among them have come down to us as originals, transcriptions or in the form of brief references in the text of other charters, for the usability of the individual charters depends heavily upon the form of their survival. By far the most important are the originals, whose number can be put to almost 7900. Their importance lies in the fact that seals (in case they still exist) and chancellery notes (if there were any) can only be examined upon the originals. The number of transcriptions and copies exceeds 6900, but they offer considerably less chance for the historian who prepares an itinerary. This is especially true in the case of transcriptions, most of which are writs of inquisition issued upon complaint. These are mostly contained by the charters which reported upon the results of the inquisition thereafter. Consequently, these charters are almost useless, for they contain no individual mark which could be used for identification. In terms of their number, the formulas used or the forms of corroboration no difference can be observed between the periods of royal presence and absence. In view of their quasi official nature this is quite natural, yet this fact significantly reduces the number of sources available for the making of an itinerary. Nor were they gathered with the aim of attaining completeness; the royal writs which are preserved in transcriptions by charters emanating from the places of authentication (loca credibilia) or the counties (comitatus) were left out of the source material used for the preparation of the present volume. Finally, we have some hundred partial transcriptions and whole texts preserved by different formularies, in most cases lacking any indication of place and date of issue; their value as a source of information, at least from the point of view of a royal itinerary, is almost null. Foreigners may be surprised by what has been said so far. The nature of the sources available in Hungary is indeed profoundly different from what the historian can work with in countries such as, for instance, England, France and Germany. The main difference is that the role of narrative sources, so dominant 168
