Gyepű
The Gyepű was a border protection system used by Hungarians in the Middle Ages . It existed from the 10th to the middle of the 13th century. The Hungarian word Gyepű comes from the Turkish word yapı (dt palisade ).
prehistory
From 899 the Magyars made incursions into neighboring Eastern Franconia . In 955 the Magyars were defeated by Otto I the Great in the battle of the Lechfeld and pushed back to the east.
Grand Duke Géza then began to build a Hungarian state that also took over elements of the Slavic and Frankish administration. This development was his son I Stephen continued. The state organization was based on the counties . Stephan I set up 44 counties. At the head of a county of appointed by the king stood bailiff (lat. Comes ). 23 of the first 44 counties were border counties. The border counties were called comes confiniorum (see Margrave ) and their seat was the county castle. The inhabitants of the counties were divided into free and unfree . Officials such as the Jobagions (servants) and the border guards (Latin: custodes ) served to support the Gespane . The jobagions and the border guards were settled together with their families in “ten-mansions”, an organization that was taken over by the Hungarian nomads.
The Gyepűsystem
The structure of the Hungarian state organization required an effective border protection, which was set up in the manner of the Hungarian nomads . The Gyepű on the one hand protected the Hungarian interior from the outside and on the other hand the individual tribal settlements of the Hungarians among themselves. It was a system of several border lines connected in series with earth castles and border guard settlements in places that were easiest to defend. In between lay impassable and sparsely populated wasteland ( Gyepűelve ). The strips of wasteland were approximately 10 to 40 kilometers in size. The innermost line formed the settlement boundary. The wasteland was, however, increasingly populated under the Árpáds .
In the area of Gyepűelve the border guards worked in the service of border guards. The border guards had two tasks. The archers (lat. Sagittarii ) guarded the border areas. The task of the speculatores was to watch enemy troops. The border guards themselves fended off minor incursions, while larger incursions were also fought by troops from the castles. If this was not enough, the king's troops had to intervene. In the event of a Hungarian attack, the border wasteland was a staging area and the castles served as bases for supplies. The border guards were among the free members of the county. The Latin name of the leaders of the border guards was decurio or centurio , the Hungarian name has not been passed down. The decurios and centurios received their orders from the clan.
From the middle of the 13th century the Gyepű was gradually abandoned. Last but not least, the unsuccessful defense in the course of the Mongol storm in 1241 had shown that the system was no longer up to date. The more stable stone castles took the place of the Gyepű .
The West Hungarian Gyepű
The western Hungarian border protection area was expanded after the defeat of the Hungarians against the King of Eastern Franconia Otto I the Great in the Battle of Lechfeld in 955. The Gyepű served in this region to protect against invasions by the Germans from the west. The Hungarians settled guards in the region. The Gyepűzone along the border with Eastern Franconia was divided into two parts. The innermost line was a chain of castles from Karlburg via Eisenburg to the south. This line of defense was fortified with ramparts and stakes. Only on the most important entry and exit roads there were narrow passages, the so-called "Portae regni", which were separately fortified. The outermost line was the border wasteland in the west with impassable forests, swamps and flood plains, which stretched between Muraszombat in present-day Slovenia and Regede in present-day Styria . A large part of today's Burgenland in Austria lay in the Gyepűelve.
The inner line of defense of the castles on the western Hungarian border ran along the Raab . Before that border guards were along the rivers of the Badlands Pinka , Lafnitz and Strem- and the bitch creek located. The settlements of the border guards were mainly populated by Hungarians. On the western Hungarian border, prehistoric earth castles (e.g. Burg and Purbach ) were included in the Gyepű, and palisade fortifications of the Slavs such as Mosapurc , Devín Castle and Brezalauspurc were reactivated. The Hungarians also built new earth castles such as the county castles Ödenburg and Wieselburg , Kotenburg ,
A number of Burgenland villages such as Pöttsching , Oberpullendorf , Oberwart and Mischendorf emerged from the settlements of the border guards. The Burgenland Hungarians are the descendants of the border guards of the western Hungarian Gyepű. The Burgenland place names with the ending "wart" such as Oberwart, Unterwart , Siget in der Wart still refer to the settlement areas of the "Grenzwarte", while place names such as Oberschützen , Unterschützen or Deutsch-Schützen are reminiscent of settlements in which the armed border guards lived at the time . The Hungarian name Gyepűfüzes for Kohfidisch is also reminiscent of the former Hungarian border security. The border guard settlements were able to hold out for centuries and their inhabitants enjoyed royal privileges until 1848 .
Remnants of the western Hungarian Gyepű system are still visible , for example, at the Buchberg in Lower Austria . In Vasvár a piece of a gate (passage) of the inner fortification line was reconstructed.
literature
- Endre Marosi: Castles in the Austro-Hungarian border region , edition roetzer publisher, Eisenstadt 1990
- Hansgerd Göckenjan : Aid peoples and border guards in medieval Hungary , Steiner Franz Verlag, Wiesbaden 1972, ISBN 978-3515007757
- Tagányi Károly: Gyepű és Gyepűelve , (German border guards and border wasteland) in the specialist magazine Magyar Nyelv 9, in Hungarian, Budapest 1913
- Ferenc Fodor: Adatok a magyar Gyepűk földrajzához , (Geography of the Hungarian Gyepűk), in Hungarian, Budapest 1936
Web links
- Archaeological finds from the early Arpad period on the Atlas-Burgenland.at homepage http://www.atlas-burgenland.at accessed on October 6, 2018
Individual evidence
- ↑ Oberpullendorf - From the earliest traces of human settlement to the Middle Ages on the website of the municipality of Oberpullendorf (accessed on November 5, 2010)
- ↑ István Fodor: The descent of Hungarians and land grabbing in the commemorative publication “Die Obere Wart”, ed. Ladislaus Triber, Oberwart 1977, p. 112
- ^ History of the Őrség , accessed on November 5, 2010
- ↑ László Somogyi: The Burgenland Magyars in a geographical perspective , dissertation, Graz 1966, p. 19ff
- ^ Rauchsteiner Manfried: From Limes to Ostwall. In: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Hrsg.): Military historical publication series. Issue 21. Austrian Federal Publishing House for Education, Science and Art. Vienna 1972, p. 8