Colloquia Maruliana, Vol. 33 No. 33, 2024.
Original scientific paper
The Humanist and the Dark Legends of Hungarian History: Antun Vrančić as User of the Manuscript Epistola de perditione regni Hungarorum by Georgius Sirmiensis
Péter Kasza
; University of Szeged / Széchényi National Library
Abstract
Georgius Sirmiensis is one of the more intriguing figures of 16th century historiography in the Hungarian Kingdom. Born in around 1490 in the region of Sirmium, most probably in the city of Kamenica (Kamonc in Hungarian), Sirmiensis became a member of the lower clergy and attended different town schools, but since he was a domidoctus, his education level cannot be compared to that of the humanists. He nevertheless served as chaplain of two kings, Louis II and John of Szapolya, a position that made him an eyewitness of many events of the turbulent decades between 1520 and 1543. We have no precise data concerning the date of Georgius Sirmiensis’ death. It is generally accepted in the literature that he died after 1548.
As he himself stated in the last lines of his work Epistola de perditione regni Hungarorum, in around 1545–46 he put his memories down in writing at the request of Antun Vrančić, who was at the time provost of Transsylvania. Sirmiensis’s Epistola remained in manuscript, and what is more important, in a single copy. It was in possession of the Vrančić family in Šibenik until the middle of the 17th century. Given the uniqueness of the copy, it century, when it was published in print for the first time. Or rather: almost no one had access. On the margins of the manuscript there are numerous annotations: corrections, comments, different notes. All are written in a hand different from that of the main text. To date, scholarship has paid no attention to these marginalia. This paper aims to report in detail on the characteristics of these notes and to attribute them, upon paleographical grounds, to Antun Vrančić. Firstly, I intend to prove that Vrančić read Sirmiensis’s work, and read it very carefully; secondly, I will show that he used some information from it in his own writings; finally, I am going to demonstrate that the contact of the two authors and of their works led to a turn in the perception of the Jagiellonian period in Hungary.
Keywords
Georgius Sirmiensis; Antun Vrančić; historiography; Hungarian Kingdom; early modern history; textual studies; marginal notes
Hrčak ID:
321783
URI
Publication date:
25.10.2024.
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