Delimitations Between Podoliniec and Toporzec in 13Th-18Th Centuries. From the History of Shaping the Linear Border of Spiš

Abstract

The shaping of the Polish-Hungarian border in the 13th century and the changes in its character in the later periods can be observed on a micro scale with the examples of two settlements: Podoliniec, which in the earlier medieval period belonged in turns to both countries, only to become a part of Treaty of Lubowla (“zastaw spiski”) in 1412, and Toporzec, a village belonging to the Hungarian family of Görgey. The borderline section had a particular meaning. It divided the territories of two owners, but was also a border for the influences’ outreach of Poland on the one hand and Hungary on the other hand.  
Preserved in the sources descriptions of delimitations made between the settlements between the 13th and the 18th century, from a perspective of historical geography and legislative archaeology we are interested in, bring information about a process of transforming the border from a wide strip of a frontier to a linear border and about the development of means for its indicating. In the first half of the 13th century the Polish-Hungarian borderland at a strip between Podoliniec and Toporzec was a poorly populated and covered with forest territory.  In these circumstances the border had an agreed-on nature, consisting of a strip of wilderness stretching on its both sides. The development of settlements in the second half of the 13th and in the 14th centuries as well as the thinning of wilderness, actively pursued by the Hungarian side, caused a necessity for outlining the course of the border, at first based on the elements of a natural landscape and together with the emerging settlements, using the border landmarks, mainly in the shape of mounds. The increasing precision in marking the border and the management of previous wilderness led to the meeting of territories of the settlements we are interested in and, subsequently, to the creating of a linear border between them. Despite that, in the period when Podoliniec belonged to “zastaw spiski”, the conflicts broke out on the border with a neighbouring Toporzec. Its foundation was a territory south of the peaks of the Magura Spiska, covered by woods and where the border had an agreed-on character and imprecisely marked.