Viktor Kanász delivered a lecture titled "Ambassadors, Soldiers, and Captains from Kanizsa in the Balaton Museum in Keszthely. Military and Diplomatic Sources on the History of Kanizsa from Vatican and Northern Italian Archives, as well as at the Thúry György Museum," as part of the Zala County Museological Days on November 7, 2023.
In his presentation, he primarily reviewed the early modern Italian sources related to the history of Kanizsa. Accounts of bloody battles fought for the possession of Kanizsa in the 16th and 17th centuries were among the leading news across Europe. Due to the foreign archival materials and Hungarian source conditions, the significance of foreign archives' Hungarian materials is substantial. Besides Hungarian archives, numerous European institutions preserve unpublished and unknown sources related to the history of Kanizsa. Viktor Kanász highlighted in his lecture how archives and libraries in Italy can enrich our knowledge with crucial new information, primarily concerning the years 1580-90, the sieges of 1600, 1601, and 1664, as well as the successful recapture of the castle in 1690. He presented newly discovered sources from the Vatican Apostolic Archive, the State Archives of Parma, Modena, and Mantua, including reports from Viennese and Grazian papal nuncios, contemporary news arriving in Mantua, and letters written from the Christian camp during the siege of Kanizsa in 1601. Additionally, he emphasized the exceptional insight provided by the Haym protocol volumes preserved in the Thúry György Museum in Nagykanizsa into that era.
