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A Displaced Noble Family during the Ottoman Threat: the Example of the Berislavići de Werhreka de Mala Mlaka (First Part – Stephen Berislavić of Vrhrika and Mala Mlaka)
Ivan Jurković
Sažetak
The phenomenon of the almost complete displacement of the population on the territory of medieval Croatian lands, which took place during the Ottoman threat and particularly after 1463 when the Ottoman Empire encroached upon Croatian borders after its conquest of Bosnia, encompassed, among others, the members of the Croatian lesser and middling nobility. Their attempts, hundreds of years long, at securing a bare existence for their own families resulted in the diversified strategies of domestication of displaced noble families in new surroundings. Mala Mlaka, a village in the area of Turopolje in medieval southern Slavonia, became during that period the refuge for the Berislavići family of Vrhrika belonging to the noble kindred of the Čubranići. Stephen was the first member of that family to settle in Turopolje, first in 1486 as the castellan of the small castle of Lukavec in Turopolje, administering (in the name of King Matthias Corvinus) the Turopolje part of the great landed estate of Medvedgrad. Some ten years later, as captain of Medvedgrad, he took over the administration of the whole estate, at that time in the possession of the king’s son Duke John Corvinus. He succeeded in keeping this position almost to the very end of his life and, moreover, in securing that position for his son George. As governor and captain of the Medvedgrad estate, Stephen achieved an exceptionally good co-operation with both the owners of the estate on the one hand and the noble community of Turopolje subjected to them on the other. He gained the confidence of both sides as an intermediary between them (as Corvinus’ loyal retainer and the adoptive “brother” of the noblemen from Turopolje), by means of which position he gradually gained properties in Turopolje, which than evolved into a respectable landed estate centred in Mala Mlaka. By means of different strategies of domestication into those surroundings (business relations, administrative positions, adoptions, marriages and ecclesiastical connections) he secured for his successors an undisturbed existence in Turopolje, but still did not lose sight of the need to maintain connections with the area whence he originated (the district of Vrhrika in the county of Knin) and transferred to them also the values of the cultural heritage of that area. Such a style of domestication may be defined from several aspects with the modern term of integration into new surroundings, by which is understood the mutual enrichment of both the older indigenous population and the newcomers by accepting elements of both cultural traditions.
Ključne riječi
Croatia; Early Modern Age; Ottoman Empire; refugees; nobility
Hrčak ID:
9395
URI
Datum izdavanja:
1.3.2003.
Posjeta: 2.822 *