Századok – 2007

TANULMÁNYOK - Zsoldos Attila: Az 1267. évi dekrétum és politikatörténeti háttere (IV. Béla és Ifjabb István király viszályának utolsó fejezete) IV/803

842 ZSOLDOS ATTILA THE DECREE OF 1267 AND ITS POLITICO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND (The Last Chapter of the Strife between Béla IV and Stephen the Younger King) (Summary) by Zsoldos Attila Late in the summer of 1267 Béla IV, king of Hungary (1235-1270) and his sons — Stephen the younger king and Béla, duke of Slavonia — issued a decree. It was in its preamble that the ruler first declared that the smaller but independent land-holders, who had been referred to as royal servants (servientes regales) since the 1210s, enjoyed the same privileges as the nobles of high birth (nobiles). The decree, whose articles were supposed to offer remedy for the grievances of the royal servants which had accumulated throughout the long reign of Béla iy came to play an important role in the emergence of the medieval Hungarian nobility, and has consequently been treated primarily from a legal and social point of view by the historiography. The present study, on the other hand, lays the emphasis on the politico-historical aspects of the decree. By inserting it into the sequence of political events in the 1260s light will be shed on circumstances which have hitherto evaded the attention of historians. In the early 1260s a serious conflict opposed king Béla IV and his elder son, Stephen. The conflict led at the end of 1264 to open war, which ended with the complete victory of Stephen in March 1265. After the war the kingdom was again divided, with minor modifications, on the model of 1262: Béla ruled the lands west of the Danube, whereas Stephen received the eastern half. Hungarian historians have hitherto thought that civil strife was thus definitively ended. Yet a thorough analysis of the political events have proved that the conflict revived in the summer of 1267 and Béla was planning a new war in order to suppress the quasi-autonomous rule of Stephen in Eastern Hungary. The congregation (communis congregatio of the royal servants at Esztergom, which preceded the issue of the decree of 1267, was accordingly not a common initiative of the royal servants living in the two halves of the kingdom, as has so far been supposed, but an assembly of those belonging to Béla's territory mobilised for the campaign against Stephen. Under pressure by his own royal servants, who urged for a remedy of thier grievances, Béla was ultimately forced to abandon his plans and issue the decree of 1267. Such a reconstruction of the events is supported by an analysis of the decree itself. Its articles all concern the territory under Béla's rule, and none of them can anyhow be connected to the problems of the royal servants on Stephen's lands. Moreover, the charter which contained the text of the decree had only two seals. Although both have been lost, they can be shown to have been those of Béla IV and Duke Béla. The name of Stephen was only inserted in the charter because the royal servants hoped thereby to force him to respect the decree, and to confirm it after the settlement of the conflict within the royal family by another, eternal and formally impeccable decree. Their expectations were vain, however, as the future fate of the decree showed. At the time of his coronation in 1270 Stephen failed to confirm the decree of 1267, and it cannot be shown to have had any kind of influence on similar dispositions issued later in the course of the Middle Ages.