The grave of Kálmán Thaly

Kálmán Thaly was born on January 3, 1839, in Csép, Komárom County, into an impoverished noble family. He attended the Lutheran Lyceum in Bratislava and the Reformed Gymnasium in Pápa. His father, Lajos Thaly, was a lawyer graduated in Debrecen, who tried to provide his family with the necessary income as a county official. During the revolution, he was the chief treasurer in Komárom, but he retained his office even under the imperial government. He died tragically suddenly in 1850. His mother was Katalin Barthaloss, who, after the death of her father, tried energetically and with great diligence to provide the necessary goods for her children. Through her mother, Thaly was a second cousin of Mór Jókai. ; In his youth, it seemed that Thaly wanted to become one of the immortals of Hungarian culture not as a historian, but as a poet, and in the second half of the 1850s, several poems were published, with which he imitated the style of János Arany, Sándor Petőfi and Mihály Tompa, but the Rákóczi War of Independence as a theme only appeared in his poetry from 1859. He usually wrote his poems based on fairy tales and folk tales, philosophy and love did not play a role in his poetry. It can be observed even at a young age that he tried to provide his poems with historical themes with notes. ; The following year, he became a first-year law student at the University of Pest, and although his teachers praised his diligence and perseverance, he threw himself into the political movement rather than legal studies, participating in several student demonstrations, and soon became one of the leading figures of the youth movement. (As a result of the defeat suffered by Piedmont and Napoleon III in 1859, Franz Joseph decided to modernize the Habsburg Empire, and in this spirit he issued the October Diploma on October 20, 1860, and then the February Patent on February 26, 1861. However, the convened Hungarian Parliament rejected both.) The young Thaly sensed that the country was in trouble, but in his poems (At the Funeral of Géza Forinyák, In Memory of Széchenyi, On the Naming of Széchenyi Hill) he also expressed his belief in the nation's imminent prosperity. ; However, Thaly took politics to an extreme, and was sued for lese majesty for one of his poems, which forced him to flee to Transylvania. Here, he was received by the royal judge of the court of Udvarhelyszék, Dániel Vargyasi, who had a good relationship with his family, and during his stay here, he gave Thaly an old chest containing documents, letters and poems from the time of Gábor Bethlen and Ferenc Rákóczi II, from which Thaly compiled a volume entitled Historical Grains 1603-1703. As an intellectual from an impoverished noble family, Thaly easily identified with the world of the Kuruc he imagined thanks to his vivid imagination. ; Although he continued to write poems for a few years (e.g.: The Necked Kuruc from 1863), his attention gradually turned towards historiography, and within this the history of the Rákóczi War of Independence. This was also indicated by his first publications, e.g.: The Graves of Ferenc Rákóczi II and the Other Hungarian Refugees in Istanbul (published in Pesti Napló in 1862), II. Ferenc Rákóczi (published in the Nemzeti Képes Újság in 1863). In the latter, he called Rákóczi the greatest Hungarian, and the issue was confiscated by the authorities. After that, his two-volume work entitled Régi magyar vitézi énekek és elegyes dalok (Old Hungarian Knightly Songs and Mixed Songs), in which he published historical songs from the 16th-18th centuries, caused a great stir. The newspaper Koszorú, which is associated with Arany János, criticized this publication, partly because of the principles of selection and partly because of the errors in annotation. ; László Szalay, the outstanding historian and jurist, who could not even finish his six-volume work entitled Hárgyorót története (History of Hungary), died in 1864. Thaly immediately announced that he wanted to continue his life's work, so József Eötvös entrusted him with the publication of Szalay's unfinished works. He then began his biography of János Bottyán, published in 1865, which was met with strong criticism from the profession. According to literary historian Pál Gyulay, it did not meet the scientific standards of the time. He was criticized primarily because Thaly did not separate the essential from the unessential, did not recognize the weight of the events, and only considered positive data from the point of view of the Kurucs, so his work became very one-sided and difficult to use. Many years later, in the preface to the IX. volume of the Archivum Rákóczianum, Thaly replied that he had originally wanted to publish it years later, after further research, but finally gave in to the haste of the publisher and the public. ; Despite all this, his scientific career took a sharp upward turn. Between 1860 and 1864, he was a member of the editorial board of the Pesti Napló, where his relative and guardian Sándor Csajághy introduced him. Here he wrote the newspaper's news and novelties column. On 20 January 1864, he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and from 1867 until 1875 he was the editor of Századok, and at the same time the secretary of the Hungarian Historical Society. However, Thaly also earned these positions with his diligence. His main research area was the Rákóczi material of the Erdődy Archive in Vörösvár, from which (between 1866 and 1868) he published diaries, parliamentary documents and letters in two volumes of the Rákóczi Archive. He then created the Archivum Rákóczianum series, in which he published the letters of Ferenc II. Rákóczi, General-in-Chief Miklós Bercsényi and János Bottyán in ten volumes, which are still the alpha and omega of most studies related to the period. He also planned to publish the papers of Simon Forgách, but this did not happen. In addition, he is also responsible for publishing the diaries and correspondence of Imre Thököly. Furthermore, he published sources on several occasions, either individually or in smaller groups, in various issues of Századok, Történelmi Tár, and Hadtörténelmi kommunikationek. In addition, he wrote numerous books and studies on the subject. ; However, he received numerous criticisms from the greats of historiography and culture. Primarily, his one-sided perspective, the lack of source criticism, and the frequent failure to cite sources were blamed as his main faults. Gyula Pauler criticized him for calling himself the prince's writing deacon. He considered the research of the Rákóczi War of Independence his own hunting ground and did not tolerate other researchers venturing into it. For this reason, he had a serious falling out with Iván Nagy (1824-1898) when he prevented him from publishing his collection of documents, Antal Eszterházy's field book, which was eventually published by Thaly himself after Iván Nagy's death. His book on László Ocskay and the youth of Ferenc II Rákóczi also received much criticism. ; In his history writing, he always preferred to present military events, but in doing so he portrayed the uprising as a cockfighting of kurucs and labancs, which did not fit the real, much more complex picture of the war of independence, burdened with both internal and external tensions. In the mid-1880s, his interest turned from Rákóczi to Bercsényi, and he wrote three volumes about the Bercsényi family, in which the first dealt with the ancestors, and the second and third with Bercsényi's life, but he only reached the middle of the war of independence, 1706. His history presents the War of Independence and Bercsényi as a romantic triad of “rise, peak, decline”. However, Thaly – as in his previous works – did not know what to do with the enormous amount of sources at his disposal. He portrayed Bercsényi as the real leader of the uprising, who was always right and always knew what to do. In contrast, we learn hardly anything from Thaly about Bercsényi’s role in preparing the War of Independence or his Russian-oriented diplomatic views. The parts about Miklós Bercsényi stretched the framework of a traditional family history. At the same time, in the third volume, he analyzes the events of the Rákóczi War of Independence in the most detail of his work so far, but he did not undertake to write his history even after this. ; Despite the criticisms and their mistakes, Thaly’s works enjoyed great popularity among ordinary people. Taking advantage of this, Thaly also engaged in politics in addition to writing his history. In 1878, he represented Ferencváros, and from 1881 onwards, the first district of Debrecen, in the parliament, for the Independence Party, of which he was also the second and honorary chairman for a long time. In this capacity, he proposed that monuments be erected in seven places as part of the millennium commemoration, and he also participated in their construction as a government commissioner. For his merits in organizing the Hungarian section of the Paris World Exhibition, he received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Saint Stephen from Franz Joseph. However, his greatest and probably dearest political success was when Franz Joseph allowed the ashes of Rákóczi and his fellow exiles to be brought home. On 29 October 1906, the remains of Rákóczi and his companions were paraded through Budapest amidst spectacular displays, and then laid to rest in Košice. At that time, the remains of Imre Thököly and Ilona Zrínyi were also returned to Hungary, while the former was reburied in Késmárk and the latter's skull in Košice. ; While Thaly more or less successfully fended off the criticisms heaped upon him during his lifetime, after his death in 1909 (his old friend Béla Polyák died on September 27 at his estate in Zablát, Trenčín County), he was buried in Bratislava.