Palla Ákos szerk.: Az Országos Orvostörténeti Könyvtár közleményei 24. (Budapest, 1962)

The deads of the battle of Mohács

General opinion has it, as well as our textbooks for schools, that the great burial was organized by Dorottya Kanizsai, lady of the castle of Siklós, who set her 400 serfs to the big job. This, however, is not confirmed by contemporary data. A century later, Miklós Istvánffi writes: "the number of the dead was very great, the air got foul and after the enemy's departure lots of dogs gathered to devour the corpses; they impaired even the wayfarers' security. A zealous lady, Dorottya Kanizsai, widow of Palatine Imre Perényi, took pity on the Christian soldiers killed in actien, in defense of the fatherland; she hired 500 men to gather the scattered dead and to put them into ditches, lest they should fall a prey to wild beasts and dogs."

:i The lady Dorottya Kanizsai was probably staying in the castle of Siklós during the battle. A troop of disbanded Turkish "tsharkadshis" tried, afterwards, to besiege Siklós but had to abandon it soon. Istvánffi's report seems to be creditable because, apart from being a pious and compassionate woman, Dorottya Kanizsai felt bound to care for the warriors out of a sense of kinship too. Palatine Perényi's two sons were fighting in the Hungarian army and she was surely worried about the fate of her stepsons. But last not least - always according to Istvánffi - this multitude of corpses started to decay rapidly in the warm August weather, frequent rainfalls furthering this process; there was a horrid stench and the outbreak of an epidemy became a very real menace. Thus, about the role Dorottya Kanizsai played in the internment of the fallen warriors nothing much is known, still the fact remains that the dead were buried. Where, then, were the already existing ditches, where the other smaller and bigger ones made to hold the dead? As we have tried to show, this question is closely related to antother one, namely, where exactly did the big fight, whose story is more or less well known to all Hungarians, take place? Since a long time 'historians, and writers of military history seek the answers to these questions and, their request, archeology too has stepped in the breach since quite a few decades. Historical works of reference are exhausted. From the 1820's onwards scores of papers dealt with the preliminaries and the process