Századok – 2011

200 ÉVE SZÜLETETT PERCZEL MÓR - Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór levelei Csány László kormánybiztoshoz III/655

PERCZEL MÓR LEVELEI CSÁNY LÁSZLÓ KORMÁNYBIZTOSHOZ 687 THE LETTERS OF MÓR PERCZEL TO LÁSZLÓ CSÁNY by Róbert Hermann (Summary) The documentation relating to the revolution and freedom fight of 1848-1849 has suffered several serious damages in the past 160 years. In the final days at Arad the personnel of the different ministries destroyed hundreds, or even thousands of documents. The major part of the documentation of the troops which surrendered themselves also perished or disappeared. The next considerable loss was caused by the procedures of the Austrian military tribunals. In the course of these hundreds or thousands of documents were separated from the documentation confiscated from the Hungarian government and army, most of which were never restored to their original place. In the best of cases they can be reinvented in the courtmarshal dossier of the given persons, or arranged into a thematic collection. But in the worst of cases these documents simply fell victim to the selection carried out by the Austrian authorities in the 1850s and 1860s. Most probably such documents were also preserved by the police archives kept in the Justizpalast at Vienna, but part of this collection was annihilated in the course of the upheaval in 1927. Further original pieces were taken from the collections of the ministries of 1848-1849 (before all of the ministry of defence) after the introduction of military subsidies in 1867, and these were regularity lost as well. Finally, dozens of documents disappeared during the archival reorganisations which followed 1945. Nevertheless, there is still some hope that further original pieces will be discovered from among these lost or apparently disappeared materials. In this respect it is the systematic scutiny of the Austrian archival collections which offers the greatest prospective result. It was in the course of such a research that thirteen original letters, written by general Mór Perczel to government commissioner László Csány, were unearthed in the unregistered material of the Militargouvernement of Vienna. The commissionary material of Csány preserves four further letters to the general. The present publication publishes all of them. Though most of them can be regarded as personal letters written in a friendly tone, all of them contain important information on the movements of general Perczel in the Muraköz and along the Mura river, on the battle of Mór and the evacuation of the capital in the beginning of January 1849.