A Historical and Archival Guide to Székesfehérvár (Székesfehérvár, 2003)
AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY WRITING OF SZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR
data of the settlements of the county. Originally it was intended to be a three-volume book, but the monograph which processed the data of the destroyed settlements finally came out in five volumes. 22 The richly-illustrated work contains archontology and genealogical charts as well. Károly commenced writing his monumental work preceded by a thorough research. Following Károly Tagányis advice he thrived to study the histoiy of the villages. His prime aim was to give rise to local history research and to use the history of the given village in the frame of school education. The volumes of the monograph contain a cartulary too; a part of them are unpublished documents, but the author used the Fejér Codex, the archives of the Árpád period and Anjou period, Turkish period records, the Zichy Codex, the Hazai archives and other important sources. In the preface of the book Károly complains about the difficulties of his research, the state of disorder in which the county archives existed at the time, the unprofessional selection of documents for destruction. His research was further hindered by the fact that the records of the pre-Turkish era had been completely destroyed in the town archives, only a couple of the documents survived. When collecting the material for the monograph , besides the national archives, he searched the Batthyány family' s archives in Körmend, the Lamberg family's archives in Mór, the Cziráky archives in Lovasberény, the Nádasdy archives in Nádasdladány. This research; however, had been started in the 1 860s because he had been arranging the family archives as the administrator of count Lipót Nádasdy's estate in Agárd. The second volume of the book deals with the history of Székesfehérvár. Not only did he write about the earliest mentioning of the town, its topography, founding, names and privileges but he also deals with the nominations, church institutes and the history of the chapter, the monastic orders, the parishes and the chapels in details. In his book, besides the chapter dedicated to the "the inner life of the town" he investigated the history of the major educational, social and health institutions of Székesfehérvár, and he processed the town history in chronological order in a separate chapter. The other three volumes of the monograph were published between 1899 and 1904; they contained the history of the villages in Fejér county. Preceding the village history texts he quotes censuses from the 14 th — 18 th centuries in the
