Petercsák Tivadar - Berecz Mátyás (szerk.): Információáramlás a magyar és török végvári rendszerben - Studia Agriensia 20. (Eger, 1999)
KORPÁS ZOLTÁN: Habsburg információszerzés a kereszténység északafrikai végeinél a 16. században
STUDIA AGRIENSIA 20, 1999 Korpás Zoltán HABSBURG INFORMÁCIÓSZERZÉS A KERESZTÉNYSÉG ÉSZAK-AFRIKAI VÉGEINÉL A 16. SZÁZADBAN ABSTRACT: Zoltán Korpás: Habsburg Intelligence Work in the North African Borderlands of the Christian World in the Sixteenth Century. Up until the end of the 1520s northern Africa formed the “forgotten frontier“1 between the two major powers, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. On these outposts the empires attempted to develop their information gathering systems. This paper deals with the Spanish network and makes a clear distinction between formal, that it to say official informants (spies, agents, double agents, interpreters, diplomats, doctors) and informal, informants who would be given occasional duties (ransomed imprisoned members of orders, freed or unfreed galley slaves, prisoners, occasional doctors, interpreters, traders etc.). Depending on their background there were “preferred“ types of agent, for example expelled Sephardies or Christians who had turned away from their faith and become mohamedans, that is to say those fleeing renegades who became informants. The Spanish news gathering system, which embraced both sides of the Mediterranean was at one and the same time divided up vertically and horizontally. News went first from the Tunis, Gelves information centre to the viceroy of Sicily from whence it went to the centre of the system the Secretario del Estado, while news from the Oran centre went via the Duke Medina Celi of Grenada to the court centre. Many parallels may be drawn between the methods used by the Spanish news gatherers in northern Africa and their counterparts in eastern Europe. This can of course be explained by the fact that both were operating in similar circumstances against a common foe. „Mivel ezek nem lehetnek mások, mint gazdag főemberek, ajánlatos jól megfizetni őket. És aki már beszervezett ilyeneket, ne legyen velük bizalmatlan, mert a már említett don Fernando (a Katolikus Király- KZ.) rendelkezett néhányukkal a francia király, Vili. Károly házában és tanácsában. Esteban Petit és a monacói Ambrosio Albiense, az előbbi egy nagy hatalmú tanácsos, 1 Andrew C. Hess: The Forgotten frontier. A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African frontier, University of Chicago, 1978. 269
