C. Tóth Norbert (szerk.): Documenta ad historiam familiae Bátori de Ecsed spectania I. Diplomata 1393-1540 - A nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum kiadványai 67. (Nyíregyháza, 2011)
Előszó
Preface 19 century, and - thankfully - the exploration of this period got a significant advance in the last years, too.8 In the year of the conference a large scale, 3 billion Forints worth EU project entitled „Faith and Health” was started, and finished in 2011. Beside the renovation of the pilgrimage church of Máriapócs, the bath of Nyírbátor was completely reconstructed and a boulevard connecting the two churches of the town was built. A research was conducted both in the Calvinist church (the former parish church of the market-town) and in the Minorite cloister by specialist of architectural heritage, while, in the latter case, an archaeological excavation was carried out, in order to support the scientifically based reconstruction of the buildings. As a result of the work of Zoltán Simon, Péter Németh, Juan Cabello, Attila Jakab and Tamás Balázsik, new results were delivered on the history of the two church buildings and that of the cloister. These inspired also our enterprise: can we inteipret art historical and archaeological results with the help of the written sources? By this time, it became clear that the history of the Ecsed branch of the Bátori family is not only a simple genealogy, coloured with politics and changes of the estates, but it has a much more important significance. As a matter of fact, the late medieval history of the Hungarian Kingdom or at least a number of its details cannot be interpreted without the role of the Bátoris. So, the aim of the program was changed in some degree. Its first real result appeared in December 2010. Norbert C. Tóth published the collection of charters pouring light on the period of governorship of the palatinus István Bátori from the Ecsed branch.9 As it is widely known, the archive of the Ecsed and Somlyó branches of the Bátori family has not been completely preserved. Though several documents among the charters of the Somlyó branch of the Bátori family were published in the collection of charters of the Bánffy family, at the end of the last century, the documents pertaining to the Ecsed branch were not collected at all. In the present volume, therefore, we attempted the virtual reconstruction of the archives of the Ecsed branch. Of course, our goal could not be a complete exploration of all the documents connected with this branch. The main reason for this is that there are tens of thousands of documents, their examination could not be fulfilled and it would be sometimes redundant even with the use of the modern research tools. Therefore, we tried to explore the documents considering possessor rights only. At the same time, it would be important to note that not all kinds of charters on the possessions were included in our work. What does it exactly mean? Hopefully, we collected completely all the charters which granted estates of land, the mortgages of possessions, the mutual legacy contracts and sources on the instauration of the possessions rights (sometimes these kind of sources were all on our disposal, because the donation charter had not survived). However, we ignored the publication of the most frequent source type of medieval Hungarian history: the charters of suits with delaying force and those examining violence, though in some cases we marked their data at certain 1 1C. Tóth Norbert'. Ecsedi Bátori István nádor pozsonyi tartózkodásának számadáskönyve. Adalékok Magyarország 1526 végi politikatörténetéhez. Levéltári Közlemények 80. (2009) 169-208. 8A Báthoriak és kora. A Báthoriak és Európa. (A Báthori István Múzeum Füzetei 3.) Ed. by Dám László, Ulrich Attila. Nyíregyháza, 2008. 9Politikatörténeti források Bátori István első helytartóságához (1522-1523). Published by C. Tóth Norbert. (A Magyar Országos Levéltár Kiadványai II. Forráskiadványok 50.) Budapest, 2010.
