Absztrakt

The War of Succession which broke out after the death of Polish king, Augustus II, in 1733 is mentioned in Hungarian scholarship mostly on account of the treaty that ended the conflict: Francis of Lorraine, Maria Theresa’s husband, renounced his claims to Lorraine as his inheritance which in turn entitled him to appropriate Tuscany after the death of the last Medici. The present study, however, focuses on a different aspect of the war and its progress. Szemethy examines the Csáky correspondence held at the National Archives of Austria to reconstruct the available means of communication connecting officers of the Csáky Regiment in the remote and hard-to-access southern Italian areas and their general, György Csáky residing in Sopron and Vienna. The corpus, especially the letters smuggled across the frontline after the defeat at Bitonto on 25 May, 1734, reveals substantial changes in the mode and content of the hussars’ communication with their regiment owner.