Dr. Péter Balázs: Guide to the archives of Hungary (Budapest, 1976)

Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén Megyei Levéltár (Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County Archives)

The Miskolc city hall stood at its present place from the earliest times; according to a notice from 1684 the council preserved its valuable old records in an iron chest there. The material was arranged, together with the ransom papers of the 1700s; in 1714 the whole was packed into three chests, and stored in bundles according to subjects. In 1909, at the establishment of the municipal city organization, the archives became one of the special offices, consisting of a chief archivist and a scribe. The city archives remained in the building of the city council up to 1971. The most ancient part of the archives is made up by 121 charters prior to Mohács; among them 50 belong to the material of Borsod county, 39 to Zemplén county, 32 to Miskolc city. The latter are the various city privileges, while the charters in the county archives are either documents presented in law-suits or pieces of family archives. The earliest pieces are two originals dated from 1270, belonging to Borsod or Zemplén county archives, respectively. The material of the three archival bodies, reaching back to the feudal period, begins with their sixteenth century journals, starting in Borsod county with 1578, Zemplén county with 1558, Miskolc city with 1569. The arrangement of the acts at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries followed similar principles, classifying them according to subjects, and this system lasted till the establishment of the Josephine administration in 1785, nay the dual registration to administrative and judicial records remained practical in Zemplén county archives during the nineteenth century. The archives of Borsod county with 1785 inclusively contains the following series': Acta política, Acta judicialia, Acta nobilitaria and Acta perceptoralia, besides the series Acta politica has I to XXVII "materiae". After the interpolated records of the age of Joseph II, from 1790 all the acts are a unitary, continuous series up to 1848, parallel with the journals. The archives of Zemplén county up to 1789 are classified according to subjects: Jurídica, Politica, Perceptorialia et commissariatica and Criminalia. From 1790 the four series were contracted into two, Acta jurídica and Acta politica, from 1814 to 1822 all the records were registered together, in 1823 the separate administrative and judicial series were reestablished. The oldest records of Miskolc city were arranged to I to XXX classes