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E-book Bishop John Vitez and Early Renaissance Central Europe : The Humanist Kingmaker
By studying the lives, careers and actions of individuals or groups in a given his-torical period, we can draw conclusions on the causes, courses and consequences of historical events, which will in turn help us to attain a clearer image of a past soci-ety, its customs and its perception of reality. Such an approach makes history more “human,” as well as more understandable and interesting.1 However, the fabric of real-ity is woven of human expectations, attempts, successes and failures, and their identi-fication as such depends more on a historian’s perception than on the data preserved in sources. That often makes one’s conclusions uncertain.Such uncertainty was often a problem during my study of John Vitez’s life. The sources are often vague or, especially in the case of narrative sources, unreliable. Vitez’s contemporaries, such as John of Thurocz (Thuróczy), Jan D?ugosz or Enea Sil-vio Piccolomini, often reported on events in a way that would serve the purpose they were trying to accomplish—to flatter a ruler, praise their religion, or selfaggrandize. As for the charters, they mostly present brief reports on the consequences of Vitez’s actions, offering nothing in the way of his motives and the actions themselves. There-fore, it was necessary to avoid making (too many) poorly founded assumptions, basing conclusions on conditional statements, and outright guessing (although if we want to reach any conclusions whatsoever, the latter is sometimes unavoidable). It soon became obvious that the task would be impossible if I treated Vitez’s life as an isolated phenomenon.To alleviate this problem, I decided to focus on the context of Vitez’s historical period, meaning the political, ecclesiastical and cultural events and developments con-temporary to him, instead of studying his actions and making assumptions about his motives.2 Sometimes this approach yielded very little, as I have often reached the same conclusions as other researchers had before. However, sometimes it led to findings different from the established narrative. Still, as the sources remain silent on many important issues, it proved to be impossible to altogether avoid assumptions based on the general tendencies of Vitez’s historical period. In other words, we still do not know why Vitez acted as he did, what he was trying to accomplish, or whether those actions were his to begin with or he was simply executing someone else’s will. Despite that, the assumptions based on the results of such a comprehensive approach are somewhat more reliable than they would otherwise be. In cases when the data on Vitez’s actions were insufficient, such as regarding his study in Vienna or his bearing during the Tran-sylvanian revolt of 1467, comparing them to the actions of other Hungarian prelates made it possible to determine things that would otherwise be unattainable. Also, this procedure provides the benefit of offering a panoramic view on the elite social strata of the fifteenthcentury Kingdom of Hungary and wider Central Europe.Before laying out the results of my own research, I briefly summarize the state of the previous historiographic research of the topic treated in this book, as well as how literature and the relevant sources are treated in it. It should be noted that, due to his importance for Hungarian national sentiment, John Vitez is a very common topic in Hungarian historiography. In Croatia he was also studied, but nowhere near as much as north of the Drava. That said, it is surprising that so few works dealing exclusively with his life and career have been published. Right at the outset of my research, it became apparent that the study of John Vitez was sharply divided into two separate compartments. The first, which produced very few publications, deals with Vitez’s political, ecclesiastical and diplomatic activities. The second, much more copious, deals with his role as a Renaissance humanist and patron of the arts and sciences.The representative work of the first compartment is the first and, until now, only complete biography of Vitez: Vitéz János esztergomi érsek élete by Vilmos Fraknói, pub-lished in 1879.3 Although its historiographical value is enormous, it has many short-comings, primarily due to its nineteenth-century understanding of history. Of other works by Fraknói, his article “Zrednai Vitéz János primás származása” deserves men-tioning, as it revises his previous theory on the Sredna family.4Of other authors, Vince Bunyitay studied Vitez’s activities as a prelate in his monu-mental history of the diocese of Oradea, but he focused only on the time when Vitez was its bishop.5 The next study dealing with Vitez as a politician did not come out until 1990—the article “Vitéz János, a politikus és államférfi (Pályavázlat—kérd?jelekkel)” by Ferenc Szakály.6 It, however, follows Vitez’s career only until the time of Matthias Corvinus’s accession. András Kubinyi devoted several articles to Vitez,7 but he mostly studied his career from the viewpoint of his work in the royal chancery, assessing other aspects of his life according to that.Studying Vitez as a Renaissance humanist and patron of the arts has been much more appealing to historians. Fraknói himself published several works on that top-ic.8 In the second half of the twentieth century, Iván Boronkai devoted much effort to studying Vitez’s writings from the viewpoint of history of literature.9 He published the first modern edition of Vitez’s letters, which also included his speeches and letters which were not part of the original Epistolarium compiled in 1452.10 Klára Csapodiné Gárdonyi published an overview of Vitez’s book collection in 1984.11 Over the last few decades, Maria Prokopp published a number of works on Vitez’s cultural activities,12while the largest number of works on that topic was published by Klára Pajorin, whose contribution to the study of John Vitez could be compared only to Fraknói’s.13In Croatian historiography too, Vitez was studied mostly as a Renaissance human-ist and a patron of the arts. Olga Peri? devoted several articles to his collection of letters,14 and Miroslav Kurelac studied his contributions to science, culture and politi-cal theory.15 A semi-biographical novel about Vitez was also published in Croatian.16More recently, a brief account of Vitez’s life was published by Borislav Grgin in his book Po?eci rasapa.
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