Ferenc Kovats

Bratislava, March 15, 1873 – † Budapest, October 26, 1956 / economic historian, university professor, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1923) ; ; His father, György Kováts (Bratislava, November 30, 1843 – Bratislava, May 1, 1907), was a physician, pediatrician, and director of the Ferenc József Children's Hospital in Bratislava. His younger brother, Lajos Kováts (Bratislava, July 7, 1876 – Bratislava, September 22, 1968), was a physician and was the city medical officer of Bratislava between 1906 and 1936. Ferenc Kováts studied at the Bratislava Law Academy, then at the universities of Cluj and Borosló. From 1900, he was the librarian of the Bratislava Law Academy. In 1903 he obtained a doctorate and a private teaching qualification at the University of Cluj-Napoca, and in the same year he became an extraordinary professor at the Bratislava Law Academy. From 1914 he was a public full professor of national economics and finance at the University of Bratislava and from 1921 at the University of Szeged, and was rector from 1930 to 1931. In 1934 he was a public full professor of Hungarian economic history and auxiliary historical sciences at the Budapest University of Technology. From 1900 to 1905 he edited the Hungarian Economic History Review. ; He was a recognized researcher of the economic history of medieval and early modern Hungary, and his source analyses of the foreign trade of the period from an economic perspective are of outstanding importance. He published several significant economic history studies, mainly on the topics of medieval urban development, money circulation, and foreign trade, especially based on the rich source material of the Bratislava city archive. He also dealt with botany, and primarily carried out considerable collecting and research work related to lady's mantles (Hieracium). He published the IV. volume of the Hungarian-Jewish Document Archive (Bp., 1938). ; ; His main works: ; City taxation in the Middle Ages, 1900, ; Additions to the history of Danube navigation and Danube customs in the Anjou era, 1901, ; Outline of medieval monetary history, 1901, ; Western Hungary's merchandise trade in the 15th century, 1902, ; The Great Pozsony Land Register 1439–1517, 1914, ; The Pozsony city economy at the end of the Middle Ages, 1918, ; The world-historical significance of Hungarian gold, 1923, ; Medieval Loans of the City of Bratislava (Academic Chair, March 10, 1924), ; Church and City Economy in the Middle Ages, 1934, ; Additions to the Social and Economic History of Bratislava in the First Half of the 18th Century, 1935, ; Hungarian Economic History: General Knowledge of Economic History and the Economic History of Hungary.