Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)

Interethnic spaces

156 József Liszka

This, however, provides no information on the location and size of the Mátyusföld region. A passage in the foreword to Szenei Molnár Albert's Hungarian-Latin Dictionary, in which the author gives some autobiographical facts, brings us closer to the answer. The illustrious writer, while telling the history of his family, explains that his great-grandfather, coming from Transylvania, “married a daughter of a noble family from the village Vága in Mátyusföld” (Szenei Molnár 1993: 439).

Both sources speak about the land of a person called Mátyus. According to a widespread belief, the man behind this name is Máté Csák, the petty monarch of Trencsén (Trenčín in Slovak) living in the 14th century, and the term Mátyusföld refers to a region formerly ruled by him.3 There is, however, no consensus among scholars on the precise location and size of these estates. Tivadar Botka for example, who wrote Máté Csák’s biography at the end of the 19th century, writes of Mátyusföld as “a little country within a big country”, and based on a 15th century source he gives a list of counties that belonged to Mátyusföld: “...Árva, Liptó, Turócz, Zólyom, Trencsín, Nyitra, Bars, Hont, Nógrád, and the parts of Pozsony, Komárom, and Esztergom counties north of Danube. So, this was the land of Mátyus originally, which, as I have mentioned, could be considered as a little country" (Botka 1873: 60). Elsewhere he writes:

Later, since the middle of the 17th century, historical and geographical works indicate that several regions formerly belonging to the Mátyusföld region were forgotten to be parts of it, which made the Mátyusföld region smaller and smaller. For example, Kálnoky, while marching through the Nógrád and Hont counties with Rákóczy’s army, regarded his troops as having arrived to Mátyusföld only when they reached the fortress of Léva. He also noted in his diary that the border of Mátyusföld lay at Léva, in Bars.4

(Botka 1873: 61)

Hereafter Botka, concerning the survival of this vernacularism, relies on Gergely Czuczor’s definition. But, if we take a