Porumbăcean, Claudiu et al. (szerk.): Satu Mare. Studii şi comunicări. Seria istorie-etnografie-artă 31/2. (2015)

Istorie

PETRU PERÉNYI, „PRIMUM INTER CETEROS NOSTROS REGNICOLAS.” UN BARON ÎN TIMPUL LUI SIGISMUND DE LUXEMBURG

Gianina-Diana IEGAR

Keywords: social history, Middle Ages, Petru Perényi, Sigismund of Luxemburg, baron.

Abstract: Starting with the 15th century, the significant increase in number of the written sources enables unprecendented historical reconstructions from the perspective of the detail. An important part of these reconstructions regards the biographies of some important people - the social elite. In fact, for the Middle Ages, the reconstruction of the entire society is based on elites. More and more researchers consider that biographies are not mere historical curiosities having some value at the level of the individual, but a starting point for the study of collective biography, the prosopography - the method of determining the social structure and mobility and the motivation of the political actions through an analysis of the lives of a group of people.

From this perspective, the case of Petru Perényi represents a fortunate choice. His life covers to a great extent the troubled period from the beginning of the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg and the subsequent period characterized by the consolidation of the power of the future Emperor, fully capturing the political and social transformations accompanying all these stages. In addition, there is one more advantage of choosing this personage: the complexity of the individual metamorphosis of Petru Perényi, the first in his family of middle rank noblemen to accede to a first rank career at the royal court. The number of the preserved documents is relatively high and allows the reconstitution, sometimes in detail, of the family relationships, the military activity and the career at the royal court, the economic status and the strategies of extending the nobiliary domain, the individual privileges of the noblemen. The present paper aims to be a detailed case study, a contribution to the broader history of the group of Sigismunds barons, a historical issue which, as a whole, caught the attention of a large number of researchers.

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începând din secolul al XV-lea, creşterea semnificativă a numărului de surse scrise permite reconstituiri istorice fără precedent din perspectiva nivelului de detaliere. O parte importantă a acestor restituiri priveşte biografiile personajelor importante - elita socială, de la care porneşte de fapt pentru evul mediu reconstituirea întregii societăţi. Din ce în ce mai mulţi specialişti consideră că biografiile nu reprezintă doar o curiozitate istorică, valoroasă la nivel de individ, ci punctul de plecare al biografiei colective, al prosopografiei, metoda prin care structura şi mobilitatea socială, motivaţia acţiunilor politice pot fi determinate prin analiza vieţilor unui grup de personaje1.

Petru Perényi reprezintă din acest punct de vedere o alegere fericită. Viaţa sa acoperă în mare măsură perioada tulbure de la începutul domniei lui Sigismund de Luxemburg şi apoi cea de consolidare a puterii viitorului împărat, surprinzând din plin transformările politice şi

1 Lawrence Stone, Prosopography, in "Daedalus”, voi. 100, No. 1, p. 46.

Satu Mare - Studii şi Comunicări, nr. XXXI/II, 2015, p. 11-35