On May 2, we started out by crossing the Tisza, to reach Kallo by night. We passed through the village of Keresztur, on the Turkish side. The village owes the Sultan 500 Thalers and certain number of cattle as annual tax. Desolated. It has two reeves, one appointed by the Ottomans, another by the emperor and they have to share all intelligence with each other, Kallo is a small fort with three towers in the midst of marshes, well supplied with artillery and other needs of war. When the Turks are approaching, the canons warn the peasants of the surroundings to run to the fort with all their valuables. The garrison is 200, all Germans, augmented by a good number of Hussars and freebooters. The fort was built 14 years ago by the generals Tauffenbach and Ruber, just preempting the Turks, who had already piled up the lumber necessary for the building.
We know from other sources that the peasants, more or less protected by the Kallo garrison, were obliged to pay a tax to them, that is, to the Habsburg king of the country, as well. This kind of dual government and double taxation was not a rarity in the Ottoman-held territory, and most certainly in a wide strip along the ever-changing frontier.
Comments
1 Fragmenta legationum, // Roger C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire 2, Cambridge, 2009; cf. also. Colin Douglas Gordon, The Age of Attila: Fifth-century Byzantium and the Barbarians. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966.
2 Vita S. Gerhardi episcopi Morosiensi, ed. Imre Madzsar 11 Imre Szentpetery, ed. Scriptores rerum Hungaricarum tempor e ducum regumque stirpis Arpadianae gestarum, Budapest, 1938 2: 480-506
3 Vita Lietberti episcopi Cameracensis auctore Rudulfo monacho S. Sepulchri Cameracensis, ed. Adolf Hofmeister, MGH Scriptores 30-2, Leipzig 1926, pp. 838–868, here 854.
4 Ottonis et Rahevinigesta Friderici imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS rer. Germ, in usum scholarum 46, Hannover & Leipzig, 1912, pp. 49–51.
5 On this, see Erik Fügedi and Janos M. Bak, “Foreign knights and clerks in early medieval Hungary,” // Nora Berend, ed. The Expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages, Farnham, 2012, pp. 319-32.
6 Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem; The Travel of Louis VII to the East,