The Hungarian Heritage Archives Foundation brought this thick, beautifully displayed volume home from the United States, New Jersey. Its Latin title is: Elenchus Biliczensium litteralium instrumentorum confectus 1808. (\u201cList of B\u00e9licz documents made in 1808\u201d). B\u00e9lic, i.e. Kis- and Nagyb\u00e9lic, was located in the historical Nyitra County, on the \u201ccorridor\u201d connecting the county\u2019s core area with the Privigye Basin, in the neighborhood of Trencs\u00e9n and Bars Counties, today part of Simony (Partiz\u00e1nske, 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 \u2013 taking advantage of the blank pages \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kis- and Nagyb\u00e9lic belonged to the Gimes castle estate of the Forg\u00e1ch family at the end of the Middle Ages. However, in the second half of the 16th century, the F\u00e1ncsy family from Boz\u00f3k or Denna also acquired estates here. The Forg\u00e1chs had a castle in Kis-, and the F\u00e1ncsys had a castle in Nagyb\u00e9lic. However, after the F\u00e1ncsys died out at the end of the 17th century, new owners appeared in the person of the Medny\u00e1nszkys, who obtained the title of baron in 1688. The elenchus mostly reports on their activities. Baron P\u00e1l the Elder and his sons, P\u00e1l the Younger and Bishop L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Ferenc acquired the whole of Kisb\u00e9lic and some parts of Nagyb\u00e9lic through hard work. However, it was not this family that had the volume prepared: in 1804, the Medny\u00e1nszkys sold all their Kisb\u00e9lic and Nagyb\u00e9lic property rights to their lawyer, Ign\u00e1c Vagyon from Hanzlikfalva. Since, according to one of the extracts, he once organized the archives of Baron Antal Medny\u00e1nszky, it is even possible that he personally prepared the list. The entire archives of the aristocratic family were kept in B\u00e9lic 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 B\u00e9lic is unknown: the list states that Vagyon first bequeathed the parts of Nagyb\u00e9lic to the Count Majl\u00e1th family, and then in 1823 \u2013 according to the last entry in the volume \u2013 he sold his entire estate to Mrs. P\u00e9ter 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 Nyitrazs\u00e1mbokr\u00e9t). 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What sources did the B\u00e9lic archives preserve? By far not only the documents relating to Kis- and Nagyb\u00e9lic, although these two settlements were undoubtedly at the center of the documents. The collection was largely made up of the documents of the Forg\u00e1chs, the F\u00e1ncsys, and primarily the Medny\u00e1nszkys, and then Ign\u00e1c Vagyon, and through them we find data on numerous estates in Trencs\u00e9n, Nyitra and Bars counties (for example, the Lietava estate, Zs\u00e1mbokr\u00e9t, Simony, Brogy\u00e1n) in the register, and numerous aristocrat and noble families appear in B\u00e9lic cases (for example, the Per\u00e9nyi, Batthy\u00e1ny, Kvassay and Boss\u00e1nyi 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 Medny\u00e1nszky family members with each other or the university and law degrees of Ign\u00e1c 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, M\u00e1ty\u00e1s B\u00e9l, written from Bratislava on June 4, 1729, to Bishop L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Ferenc Medny\u00e1nszky, in which he requested a scientific examination of the B\u00e9lic thermal waters so that a printed description could be published about them, similar to the Tren\u010d\u00edn spa (the text of the letter is known from M\u00e1ty\u00e1s B\u00e9l\u2019s published correspondence). The elenchus preserved detailed descriptions of a very rich 17th\u201319th 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tibor Neumann<\/p>\n\n\n