Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Mediaevalia Transilvanica 1998 (2. évfolyam, 2. szám)
Relaţii internaţionale
The Relations of Vassalage 251 without further nuancing the matter7. Somebody usually emphasized the military alliance against the Turks and the role of Wallachia in the Hungarian military strategy27 28. The relations between Mircea and Sigismund were accidentally mentioned in some general surveys on Sigismund of Luxemburg. For example, Joseph Aschbach considered Mircea to be the Hungarian king's ally and vassal29. He maintained that after the disastrous defeat of the Crusaders at Nicople, Mircea pledged fealty to the sultan and that in the following period he oscillated among the three powers, i.e. Hungary, Poland and Turkey, trying to maintain certain independence3". In his recent monography on Sigismund of Luxemburg, Jorg K Hoensch described the dispute between the Hungarian and the Polish kings over the suzerainty on Wallachia and the Romanian voivode's pledge of fidelity in the context of increasing Turkish threat31. We will mention two other opinions coming from historians of the crusades and of the Ottoman Empire. In Aziz S. Atiya's view, Mircea was the Hungarian king's vassal32. Halil Inalcik, a reputed expert in Turkish history, used the term vassalage for the relations established by Balkan states with the Ottoman Empire; however, he was quite cautious in defining the relations between Mircea and Sigismund, naming the former "the Hungarian-protected Prince of Wallachia33. Roughly speaking, Hungarian and Western historians who have mentioned accidentally the relations between Mircea the Old and Sigismund of Luxemburg have committed a series of chronological inadvertencies and have generalized situations which were particular only to a certain context. In the present study we shall attempt to evaluate first the relations between the Wallachian voivode and the Hungarian king from the perspective of the role played by Wallachia in the overall Hungarian anti-Ottoman strategy. Secondly, we intend to bring forth those aspects, both theoretical and practical, that could validate a historiographical interpretation of a suzerain-to-vassal relationship. We have used mainly documentary and narrative sources and we shall not quote from the vast bibliography of the subject those works, which exalted the nationalism and brought no original contribution to the field of study. 27 B. Hóman, Gy. Szekfű, Magyar történet, II, Budapest, 1942, p. 341; E. Mályusz, Zsigmond király (see note 3), p. 112; P. Engel, Magyarország és a török veszély Zsigmond korában (1387-1437), (hereafter referred to as: Magyarország és a török veszély), in Századok, 128, no. 2. 1994, pp. 274- 278. 28 Gy. Rázsó, A Zsigmond-kori Magyarország és a török veszély (1393-1437), in Hadtörténelmi Közlemények, XX, 1973, 3, pp. 412 et passim; F. Szakály, Phases of Turco-Hungarian Warfare before the Battle of Mohács (1365-1526), in Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, tomus XXXIII, fase. I, Budapest, 1979, pp. 74-84, names Mircea “Sigismund's faithful ally”. ~9 J. Aschbach, Geschichte Kaiser Sigmund's, 1, Hamburg, 1838, pp. 96, 116. 30 Ibidem, p. 234. 31 J. K. Hoensch, Kaiser Sigismund, pp. 76, 80. 32 A. S. Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1938, p. 451. 33 H. Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire. The Classical Age 1300-1600, translated by N. Itzkowitz and C. Imber, London, 1973, p. 15.
