Reconstruction of the settlement system in medieval Turopolje : examples of archaeological sites of Šepkovčica and Okuje (13th -16th centuries)

Abstract

Turopolje lies in Zagreb County. The region is bordered on the north and east by the Sava River and the Vukomericke Gorice hills to the southwest. The aim of this doctoral thesis is to reconstruct the medieval settlement system of the region using historical, archaeological, onomastic, cartographic and ethnographic sources. The idea of this work came out of the attempt of putting two archaeological sites excavated in the highway rescue excavations on the track of Zagreb-Sisak highway in the period 2006-2009 in their medieval environment. These sites, called Sepkovcica and Okuje, were geographically placed in the middle of Turopolje. Although they were just 6 kilometres distant from each other, the ownership structure of the settlements surrounding the sites was different. This has drawn the attention to the complexity of the settlement system of the region. As the sites have remained the spatial focus over which the research was developing, the text of the thesis is divided in two main parts. The first part concerns settlements surrounding the site of Okuje and the second part deals with settlements that surrounded the site of Sepkovcica. The site of Okuje was surrounded by the estates of various owners of different social status. At the same time, the owners of most of the estates changed over centuries. As was the case with the settlements around the site of Sepkovcica, some settlements that surrounded the site of Okuje were inhabited by the castle warriors of Turopolje. These smaller conditional nobles formed the noble community of Turopolje, an organization by which the history of the region is most known and studied in the scholarly literature. These people were originally the castle warriors of Zagreb castle that had managed to preserve their status of lesser nobles long after the castle system disappeared in the other areas of the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia. Along with their estates, in the area around the site of Okuje were also estates of the Hospitallers, bans (that is, kings), as well as mid rank (the Ivanovic family, the Farkas family etc.) and high nobility (the Babonici, the Thots, the Hennings, Baltazar Alapic). In this respect, it is shown in this work that the noble community, which until now was the primary focus of the research of historians, was not the only important factor in forming of social, economic and natural environment of medieval Turopolje. At the same time, it was shown that changes of ownership structure in the area around the site were reflections of some major political changes in Zagreb County and the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia in general. Thus, political history is also important for understanding the changes of the settlement system of this area. The site of Sepkovcica, on the other hand, was surrounded exclusively by the villages of the nobles of the noble community of Turopolje. As the thirteenth and fourteenth century sources concerning these villages were scarce and not equally extant for each village the research was expanded on the wider area inhabited by the nobles. Primarily through study of spatial data recorded in charters, processes of a division of land between kindreds, breaking up of lands of kindreds into the smaller estates and the emergence of the villages was shown. At the same time, it was shown that due to the noble community kindreds in Turopolje did not cease to exist in the early modern period. Even more, the renewal of the brotherhood of Turopolje 1560 marked a new stage in this process. I hope the data gained through the analysis done in this chapter will contribute to the research of the earliest history of the noble community. Finally, it should be emphasized that the goal of this work is to create a general framework for studying the settlement system of Turopolje region in the interdisciplinary manner, by studying all the available sources. It is just the first step that should be complemented and most likely corrected with the new data gained both through the further analysis of historical sources and new archaeological research.