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

1 7™ CENTURY VIEW OF THE ISLAND

Needless to say, wars—especially the battles fought for the retaking of Buda in 1542, 1598, 1602-1603 and 1684—caused great destruction on the island. Etchings made at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth as well as the end of the seventeenth centuries—including a view whose sketch was made on the spot—show large groups of ruined buildings on Margaret Island. After the retaking of Buda in 1686, some of the ruins were in such a condition that, with their roofs covered temporarily, they could be used as military warehouses and hospitals. In 1708, when a dispute with the municipality of Pest flared up about the ownership of the island, the treasury official in charge sent a report to Vienna saying that although the island was owned by the Clarissa order, it was here that, because of the natural isolation of the territory, a hospital with quarantine facilities had been set up for invalid soldiers and epidemic patients during the war.

Margaret Island in the Eighteenth Century

It is also very little that we know of the eighteenth-century fate of the island beyond the fact that the legal suc18