Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Mediaevalia Transilvanica 1998 (2. évfolyam, 2. szám)
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Stat Some Remarks on the Political History of Transylvania in the Years 1440-1443 Tamás Pálosfalvi The aim of the present study is double. Firstly, we would like to summarize what we know about the political history of Transylvania in the critical period between the death of king Albert and the summer of 1443, with a special emphasis on the activity, political and military, of its voivodes. While the first of these dates is in no need of any explanation, the second seems arbitrary enough to necessitate some further justification. In fact, the history of the "long campaign" of 1443 and of the tragic expedition which led to the fatal battle of Varna has attracted much more attention so far than the events of the preceding years, and some important questions have been definitively answered in the meantime1. On the other hand, we found that some rather obscure and highly problematic aspects of the history of Transylvania in the early 1440s have been neglected by recent research, and that they could be at least partially illuminated on the basis of the hitherto unused (though rather scarce) charter evidence. Our second aim was, especially as regards the political-military history of the years 1441-1442, to raise some problems that seemed to us still unsolved, and suggest some possible solutions, before all to generate a scholarly debate and elicit the contribution of other researchers facing the same problems. We tried to base our hypotheses on an extremely critical approach of our sources, for it soon became obvious for us that many of them have so far constituted an obstacle to our understanding and should consequently be rejected once and for all. The death of king Albert on 27 October at Neszmély led to a tragic division within the ruling class of Hungary. His pregnant wife, Elisabeth, the daughter of the late emperor Sigismund, was determined to secure the Hungarian throne for her newborn if it turned out to be a son, while it is not altogether clear what her plans were for the case of her giving birth to a daughter. She could as a matter of fact count on the support of her cousin, Ulrich of Cilli, whose only chance to regain his power in Bohemia (where he had lost his office of landesverweser in the summer of 1439) and to reaffirm the family's positions in Slavonia (considerably weakened after count Hermann's death in 1435) was to help the queen with all his force. She could also count on László Garai, her other cousin, whose attitude was not as clearcut as that of Ulrich, however. Her party consisted of barons somehow related to the Cillier or to Garai and of those who hoped to restore the power once enjoyed by themselves or by their ancestors under Sigismund through the service of the queen (Szécsi, Kanizsai, Frangepán, Tamási families, one branch of the Rozgonyi family, etc). Opposed to them were the 1 See for example Pál Engel, A szegedi eskü és a váradi béke. Ada k az 1444. eseménytörténetéhez, in Mályusz Elemér emlékkönyv, ed. by Éva H. Balázs, Erik Fügedi, Ft Maksay, Budapest, 1984. Mediasva/ia Transitvanlca, tóm 11,1998, nr. 2.
