Kelemen Mikes
Kelemen Mikes (* August 1690 in Zágon , Szeklerland , Transylvania ; † October 2, 1761 in Rodosto , Turkey ) was valet, secretary and closest confidante of Prince Franz II Rákóczi .
Life
Origin and youth
Kelemen (Eng. Klemens) Mikes (pronounced 'Mikesch' ) was the son of Pál (Paul) Mikes and his wife Éva geb. Torma de Csícsókeresztúr, who married in 1685. The Mikes were part of the area's long-established landed gentry; an ancestor, Miklós Mikes, was honored for his services by Prince Sigismund I. Rákóczi in 1567 and was rewarded with rich lands. The family members have called themselves 'Mikes de Zágon' since then.
The father, Pál Mikes joined the Kuruzen movement under Emmerich Thököly ; In November 1690, the year his son was born, he broke into his home village with a detachment of Kuruzen in search of Labanzen and had five Austrian supporters fusilized innocently. While on the run, he was imprisoned by the Prince of Wallachia, Constantin Brâncoveanu , and handed over to the Austrians. He was cruelly tortured by them and then executed. In addition, he was expropriated, his property was confiscated and so his widow and only son were completely destitute.
Kelemen therefore grew up without a father. He stayed either in his hometown of Zágon or with relatives in Zabola ( Rum. Zăbala). During this time he attended the denominational elementary school of the Reformed Church . Around 1696 his widowed mother entered into a second marriage with Ferenc Boér. The half-brother Josef also emerged from this marriage. At the instigation of his stepfather, Kelemen and his mother converted from the Reformed to the Catholic faith. From the age of ten (~ 1700) he attended the Jesuit College in Cluj for six years , where, among other things, he received a thorough humanistic education and learned Latin .
In the service of Prince Franz II Rákóczi
Around 1707 Kelemen came on the recommendation of his uncle, Count Mihály Mikes, as a page at the court of Prince Rákóczi. This decision remained fateful for the rest of his life. He belonged to Rákóczi's inner circle († 1735) for 28 years. He took part in all of Rákóczi's campaigns in the anti-Habsburg uprisings . He also experienced its defeats: in 1708 in the Battle of Trenčín and in 1711 the final defeat at Nagymajtény (Rum. Moftinu Mare) and also took part in the peace negotiations of Sathmár , which ended the uprising. With Rákóczi, Kelemen Mikes went first to Poland and then in 1713 into exile in Paris , where he lived at the court of King Louis XIV . Franz II. Rákoczi rejected the contract and an amnesty for himself (including the offered German principality). He received a pension from Louis XIV in 1714 and was a welcome guest in Versailles .
In 1717 Kelemen Mikes left France together with his prince after the Turks had given Rákóczi hope of regaining power. In Marseille itself Rákóczi embarked along with 40 followers and left France. In the meantime, however, the Turks were defeated by Prince Eugene . According to the Peace of Passarowitz in 1718, Rákoczi and the other Hungarian insurgents had to leave Europe and were banished to the Asian part of Turkey. He and his faithful were from Sultan Ahmed III. assigned to twenty houses in Rodosto. Not only did Rákóczi spend the rest of their lives here, but also those with them. It was Kelemen Mikes who looked after the aged prince until his death. It was also he who, together with the chief steward of Prince Miklós Sibrik (* ~ 1673, † October 7, 1735 in Rodosto) organized the funeral and arranged his estate.
After the death of Rákóczi
Kelemen Mikes outlived Prince Rákóczi by 26 years. However, he had to remain in exile even after Rákóczi died. He found this fate difficult to bear. According to unconfirmed reports, he should petition for mercy from Emperor Charles VI. (As King of Hungary Karl III.), As well as with his daughter Maria Theresa . Maria Theresa should express this request for grace with the words “ Ex Turcia non est redemptio! ”(“ There is no replacement from Turkey! ”). However, this statement is not historically secure, as no written documents about it have been found in the archives. And so Kelemen Mikes sent himself to his fate on the shores of the Marmara Sea , at times he was in the service of the Sublime Porte , and because of his good knowledge of foreign languages he also worked as a translator. In 1758 he became leader of the (shrinking) Hungarian colony in Rodosto. He survived almost all of the Hungarian exiles who went into exile with Rákóczi in Turkey. In 1761 Kelemen Mikes died lonely and abandoned of the plague at the age of 71 in Rodosto and was buried there too. Gradually he was forgotten, even his grave site is unknown today.
Letters from Turkey
In his fictional letters from Turkey to a fictional Countess EP, which Kelemen Mikes referred to as "his aunt", he wrote down his experiences and observations. From these letters, posterity has learned many details not only from the life of Prince Franz II Rákóczis, but also from the other Hungarians who had to live in exile with the Prince. The value and beauty of these letters lies not least in the fact that the person who looks at us from them is one of the loveliest, most attractive people in Hungary and in all of Hungarian literature.
The letters from Turkey ( Hungarian "Törökországi levelek") are a bundle of 208 letters. Since the exiled author was forbidden to correspond with compatriots in his native Transylvania (and Hungary), he put all his thoughts, longings and worries in these fictional letters. The manuscripts of the individual letters were probably summarized by the author in a leather-bound book at a later date. The first of these letters is dated October 10, 1717 and the last letter was written on December 20, 1758. The leather strap, which consists of 223 sheets, consists of eleven unevenly thick booklets and has eight different watermarks. An indication of the long time the work was created.
The further fate of the letters
After the death of Kelemen Mikes, the letters came into the possession of the then 82-year-old former servant of the prince, István Horváth († 1799 in Rodosto). Thirty years after the death of Kelemen Mikes, the latter handed the letters over to a Mr. Mészáros, who was in the service of Selim Pascha and was on a business trip to Vienna. When Mészaros arrived in Vienna, he handed the manuscript over to the art historian and editor Demeter Görög, who immediately recognized the value of the letters. Since Görög saw no possibility of publishing the letters in the imperial city (because of the very strict censorship ), he passed the letters on to István Kultsár (* 1760, † 1828), a writer and teacher of Hungarian literature living in Steinamanger . But even in Hungary the work was not allowed to be printed without censorship, so Kultsár applied for censorship in the oven . The censorship was perceived and carried out by a Jesuit , the canon Matthias Riethaler in Ofen. The latter treated the manuscript extremely generously and on July 10, 1792 granted permission to print. The original title: "The stories of Prince Franz Rákóczi and the Hungarians living in exile with him" (ung. Rákóczi Ferenc fejedelemnek és a vele bujdosó magyaroknak történetei ) had to be in "Letters from Turkey" (presumably at the request of the censor) ( ung. Törökországi levelek ). The work was first published in February 1794 in the Offizin Anton Joseph Siess in Szombathely. The publishing rights lay with István Kultsár. After his death, they passed to his heir Ferenc Toldy . In 1867 Toldy sold the manuscript to the Archbishop of Erlau Béla Bartakovics . He took the manuscript into the Archbishop's Library, where it is still located today.
Since then the letters from Turkey have appeared in numerous Hungarian editions and have also been translated into numerous foreign languages. The letters from Turkey belong to the most important works of Hungarian literature up to the present day.
literature
- Kelemen Mikes: Letters from Turkey, Styria-Verlag Graz, 1978, ISBN 978-3-222-10901-0 (German translation from Hungarian).
- Dániel Veress: Így élt Mikes Kelemen, Budapest 1978, ISBN 963-11-1178-4 (Hungarian)
- Anton Klipp: Die Rákóczi in Carpathian Yearbook 2014, ISBN 978-80-89264-85-8 , vol. 65, pages 63 to 80
Individual evidence
- ↑ On April 30, 1711 the Kuruzenheer of Prince Franz II Rákóczi, consisting of 12,000 men, laid down their arms in front of the imperial family. On May 1, 1711, the day the treaty was signed, they swore an oath of allegiance to the Habsburg emperor in front of Marshal Pállfy .
- ↑ Dániel Veress ... p. 184 (see literature)
- ↑ István Horváth is said to have reached a " Methuselah " age of 116 years. (from Dániel Veress ... p. 185)
- ↑ All information comes from the book by Dániel Veress (see literature).
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Mikes, Kelemen |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Valet, secretary and close confidante of Prince Franz II Rákóczi |
DATE OF BIRTH | August 1690 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Zágon, Szeklerland , Transylvania |
DATE OF DEATH | October 2, 1761 |
Place of death | Rodosto , Turkey |