Kubinyi András: Nándorfehérvártól Mohácsig. A Mátyás- és a Jagelló-kor hadtörténete - A Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum Könyvtára (Budapest, 2007)
Hadtörténeti áttekintések
Nearly three decades passed and I published my essay titled The southern frontier castles ofHungary at the end of the Middle Age in 1992, which outlined the castle inventories that I had processed. At that time it did not occur to me at all that a castle inventory was compiled in respect to Fejérkő in 1521. The castle was well equipped with arms and it was a private castle, which belonged to the secondary internal frontier fortress line. The fact was unequivocal: the castellans were in need of their serfs in case of Turkish assaults, thus they did not intend to spoil the relationship with them. As a result, the circumstances of the peasant movement in Fejérkő were grossly correlated to national defense. Two of the essays included in the volume were published abroad. One titled The impact of the Turkish wars on Hungary's centrally located cities until 1514 (Die Auswirkungen der Türkenkriege auf die zentralen Städte Ungarns bis 1541) was published as a conference presentation in the German language in the conference volume of the international conference held in Graz, Austria in 1970 (Die wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Türkenkriege. Hrsg, von Othmar Pickl. Grazer Forschungen zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Bd. 1. Graz, 1971. 201-219.), of which agenda focused on the economical effects of the Turkish wars. It has not been published in the Hungarian language to date, so that I have translated it into our mother tongue without essential changes for the sake of this volume. The other one was published in the English language in a military history study volume (The Road to Defeat: Hungarian Politics and Defense in the Jagiellonian Period.= From Hunyadi to Rákóczi. War and Society in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Hungary. Ed. By János M. Bak, Béla К. Király. War and Society in Eastern Central Europe. Vol. III. Eastern European Monographs, No. CIV. Brooklyn, 1982. 159-178.). I published it in the Hungarian language in its slightly modified and expanded form titled Politics and National Defense in the Jagellonian Hungary in the 2000 volume of the Hadtörténelmi Közlemények (Quarterly of Military History). This version has been inserted in this volume. The rest of my essays included herein with the exception of two was genuinely published in some of the Hungarian periodicals or volumes of essays and studies; I have just picked them from these issues. I wondered if I was supposed to modify the original contents, since there are more sources that I can use today than was available when I wrote these essays; bibliography has also produced updates and my own standpoints may have changed even if it rarely occurs. Finally, I have decided to keep the original contents in addition to correcting the conspicuous errors and marking the Df. indexes currently effective at the National Archives of Hungary in lieu of the old archive indexes. The readers may follow the shifts in my standpoints based on the essays compiled afterwards. I wrote two essays expressly for this volume; these have been published for the first time. The crusades commanded by János Hunyadi and St. John of Capestrano prevailed over the Turkish forces in Nándorfehérvár in 1456 as many as 550 years ago. I myself have never spent much time with it. However, I not only intended to report on this great event as an introduction due to its anniversary. Numerous questions have arisen in respect to Hunyadi’s campaigns that are required for the in-depth understanding of the historic path leading to Mohács. Thus, I deliberated to apply this subtitle: Questions and consequences. On the 550th anniversary of János Hunyadi’s victory over Sultan Mehmed II at Nándorfehérvár (today Belgrade, Serbia) on 22 July 1456,1 have looked for the answers to questions concerning the siege of Nándorfehérvár and its consequences. There are few 304