The Foundation brought this thick, beautifully displayed volume home from the United States, New Jersey. Its Latin title is: Elenchus Biliczensium litteralium instrumentorum confectus 1808. (“List of Bélicz documents made in 1808”). Bélic, i.e. Kis- and Nagybélic, was located in the historical Nyitra County, on the “corridor” connecting the county’s core area with the Privigye Basin, in the neighborhood of Trencsén and Bars Counties, today part of Simony (Partizánske, Slovakia). The number of inscribed pages of the unnumbered volume exceeds 820. The leather binding of the volume, the gilded ribbed spine, and the red coloring of the engravings were made in 1808, according to the title, and the first part, which makes up the majority of the volume, has indeed survived to this day, although it was continued in several parts by another hand from 1811 – taking advantage of the blank pages – until 1823. We find no mention of who wrote or had the manuscript prepared, but it is certain that they took special care: we can read detailed extracts in Latin, usually with daily dates, from the documents numbered from 1 to 1436 and arranged in 63 bundles, in strict chronological order (this method was maintained even after 1808, restarting the chronological order each time). The archive presented by the list only kept copies of documents from the 15th and 16th centuries, the first original document was dated 1636. From that time on, the archive had very rich material. But which family or families did this archive belong to? We can only answer this question by examining the extracts.
Kis- and Nagybélic belonged to the Gimes castle estate of the Forgách family at the end of the Middle Ages. However, in the second half of the 16th century, the Fáncsy family from Bozók or Denna also acquired estates here. The Forgáchs had a castle in Kis-, and the Fáncsys had a castle in Nagybélic. However, after the Fáncsys died out at the end of the 17th century, new owners appeared in the person of the Mednyánszkys, who obtained the title of baron in 1688. The elenchus mostly reports on their activities. Baron Pál the Elder and his sons, Pál the Younger and Bishop László Ferenc acquired the whole of Kisbélic and some parts of Nagybélic through hard work. However, it was not this family that had the volume prepared: in 1804, the Mednyánszkys sold all their Kisbélic and Nagybélic property rights to their lawyer, Ignác Vagyon from Hanzlikfalva. Since, according to one of the extracts, he once organized the archives of Baron Antal Mednyánszky, it is even possible that he personally prepared the list. The entire archives of the aristocratic family were kept in Bélic for a while by Vagyon, and in 1811 he had them transported to Buda to their owners. The further fate of the archives that remained in Bélic is unknown: the list states that Vagyon first bequeathed the parts of Nagybélic to the Count Majláth family, and then in 1823 – according to the last entry in the volume – he sold his entire estate to Mrs. Péter Rudnay born Baroness Christina Hellenbach. Items were occasionally removed from the list, which suggests that documents were sometimes removed from the archives (for example, this was done with many sources relating to Nyitrazsámbokrét). The last evidence of the volume’s use dates back to around 1900: at that time, an unknown person underlined or marked details he considered interesting in several places with a blue pencil, and occasionally wrote notes in Hungarian with graphite. He mentions the Gosztonyi family several times, and even indicated next to one document that it had been removed from the bundle because it was of interest to this family.
What sources did the Bélic archives preserve? By far not only the documents relating to Kis- and Nagybélic, although these two settlements were undoubtedly at the center of the documents. The collection was largely made up of the documents of the Forgáchs, the Fáncsys, and primarily the Mednyánszkys, and then Ignác Vagyon, and through them we find data on numerous estates in Trencsén, Nyitra and Bars counties (for example, the Lietava estate, Zsámbokrét, Simony, Brogyán) in the register, and numerous aristocrat and noble families appear in Bélic cases (for example, the Perényi, Batthyány, Kvassay and Bossányi families also owned land here). Although it was mostly composed of property law, manorial and economic documents, we can sometimes read personal items (for example, the correspondence of the Mednyánszky family members with each other or the university and law degrees of Ignác Vagyon). The reader may also come across cultural history sources in some places: the archive contained a letter from the famous polyhistorian of the era, Mátyás Bél, written from Bratislava on June 4, 1729, to Bishop László Ferenc Mednyánszky, in which he requested a scientific examination of the Bélic thermal waters so that a printed description could be published about them, similar to the Trenčín spa (the text of the letter is known from Mátyás Bél’s published correspondence). The elenchus preserved detailed descriptions of a very rich 17th–19th century document material, so we can rightly say that it was a real treasure discovered in New Jersey. The Foundation donated this work to the Hungarian National Archives.
N. T.