Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

Ruins of the Franciscan church

FROM THE WEST

in a charter, these edifices were already in place, their premises being exempted from the jurisdiction of the nuns.

There might have been some village-like settlement on the island, too, where those working for the cloister must have lived. Several medieval sources make mention of a village on the island, but as no excavation has found any trace of such a settlement, several archaeologists and historians doubt its existence. There is, however, a document dated to 1294, in which the Premonstratensian order withdraws its complaint filed earlier against the nuns on Margaret Island and “their whole village on the said island, its magistrate and jury”; moreover, they vouch not to sue in the future either “the said nuns and their people living on the island”. The document, whose abstract was published in 1957 by Ferenc Oszwald, an expert on the history of the Premonstratensian order, confirms the logical assumption that there must have been labouring commoners on the island beside the members of the orders, even if no traces of their villages have been, or will ever be, found.

In the thirteenth century, Margaret Island, mainly called the Island of Hares, sometimes the Island of the Blessed

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