Oldal 117 [117]
OCR
Hungarus consciousness - Hungarian consciousness: the appropriation of the Biblotheca Corvina At the beginning of this chapter, we point out that the 16th-17th century history of the Bibliotheca Corvina has conclusions that go beyond philological findings. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries every major cultural policy course adopted a position on this library, so in the 16th and 17th centuries the collection and its disintegration were a symbol of the disintegration of the country. The Habsburg and Hungarian succession struggles (Ferdinand I and Janos Szapolyai), the independence of Transylvania from Hungary as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish conquest of the central regions of the country precisely chart the directions of the library’s dispersal. In this analogy, the humanist intention to save the codices, to find textual variants of the works of certain classical or medieval authors, can be interpreted as Christian unity (unio christiana) behind the political intention to push back the Muslim Turkish Empire. Just as the central idea of Hungarian (and Transylvanian) political thought was the reunification of the country (Habsburg party, Turkish party, independent Hungarian national aspirations), the rescue and reassembly of the Bibliotheca Corvina became a symbol for Hungarian" culture as a culture in its own right. ‘The sources quoted here in more detail are intended as examples of the three different attitudes. The letters and prefaces of the Western European humanists on the history of various pieces of the Corvina lament the loss of the texts of antiquity, and Istvan Szamoskézy, the Transylvanian Hungarian humanist historian, naturally joins in. But for him, it is not only that. From the very beginning of Transylvania’s transition from a voivodeship to a principality (1541), the Transylvanian princes made efforts to encourage the culture of Hungary (and not only Transylvania) centered on Western Christian values. The princely court of Gyulafehérvar is a worthy heir to the court of Buda in its function of organising culture, even if their financial resources are not comparable. The establishment of 536 Iris important to emphasise that it is not Hungarian culture, since the national aspect did not exist in the same form as it did in the mid-18th century. It was about the unity of the Hungarian Kingdom against the Habsburg and Turkish Empires, and this Hungarian Kingdom had a very large number of ethnic inhabitants. At the same time, there did exist a unified ,, Hungarus” consciousness. See KLANICZAY T. 1988; Kranıczay T. 1993. 115
