Agria 43. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2007)

Berecz Mátyás: Tinódi Sebestyén históriás éneke, mint az egri vár háromdimenziós számítógépes rekonstrukciójának információs bázisa

that can be supplemented with other source materials, like the castle plans which were drawn only a few decades subsequently. Apart from its literary and musical merits Tinódi's historical ballads are generally considered to be a reliable primarysource by modem historians. For us its reliability is not in doubt for the very reason that Tinódi was in Eger only a few weeks after the siege, something we know from the castle accounts. He thus collected the data he used in his work himself having seen the castle with his own eyes. It is thanks to his own personal experience, therefore, that we can find not only the names of individual buildings, their topography and structural paramètres, but in some cases their exact function and their defensive role. The value of the Tinódi description is increased by the fact that it is the earliest detailed description of the castle we have. Although earlier references to the state of the castle and its buildings exist, as in the account books of bishop Tamás Bakócz and Hippolit d'Esté from the turn of the 16

th century, they only give sporadic details which fail to provide a fully-rounded picture. It was by analysing the details referring to the castle in the historical ballads that we hoped to add a new methodological dimension to research currently going on into the building. 719