1687 The Martial Law of Antonio Caraffa at Eperjes

On 3 March 1687, the Court of Eperjes, presided over by the Imperial General Antonio Caraffa, began its work, and in the following months, it condemned a total of 24 nobles and wealthy citizens to death in the Concepcion trials.

The reasons for the establishment of the Martial Art Court date back to the early 1670s, when the Viennese court attempted to forcibly convert Eperjes, which had been a bastion of Lutheranism and one of the most important educational centres in Hungary, to Catholicism. In 1671, on the orders of Emperor Leopold I, the town’s Lutheran churches were taken over by Catholics, the College was taken over by the Jesuits, and the Protestant clergy was expelled from Eperjes. The intervention of the emperor was also manifested in other areas, notably in the destruction of most of the fortifications of the town and in the court’s attempts to influence the economic affairs of the wealthy town.

Eperjes thus became seemingly Habsburg-friendly, but in reality, there was a serious conflict lurking deep down, which came to the surface during the uprising of Thököly Imre. From 1682, the town in the Uplands suddenly became one of the main pillars of the Kuruc ‘rebellion’, expelling the Jesuits from its walls, destroying the Franciscan monastery, and providing many soldiers to Thököly, who had been appointed vassal prince of the Ottoman Empire.

However, Thököly’s luck gradually ran out after the unsuccessful Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, and at the same time, dark clouds were gathering over Eperjes. In 1685, the city came under Habsburg rule, which, in addition to the further destruction of defences and looting, had other serious consequences, as the most influential advisers to Emperor Leopold, such as the Czech Chancellor Kinsky and the Imperial Chancellor Strattmann, felt that after the successes against the Turks it would be useful to intimidate the Hungarian nobility and punish the enemies of the Viennese court in an exemplary manner.

Eperjes, as one of the strongest bastions of the Thököly uprising, was a “good chance” to start the scapegoating, and its fate was sealed when General Antonio Caraffa, who was active in the Upper Hungary, informed the court that the citizens of the town were secretly corresponding with the castle of Munkács, which was protected by Zrínyi Ilona, Thököly’s wife.

As a result of this report, in February 1687, Emperor Leopold commissioned Caraffa to investigate the matter, and in his cruel way, on 3 March, he launched an investigation to unravel the conspiracy. The Imperial General set up a court of Martial Law in Eperjes, which has been remembered as a conceptual court, as the letters of accusation were never found and in the following months, the sentences, most of which were death sentences, were passed without evidence and based on oral statements.

Caraffa – this time under the guise of lawfulness – carried out a similar massacre to the one the people of Debrecen had already experienced in 1686: two days after the “trial” began, on 5 March, he sent to death the citizens of Eperjes, namely, Keczer András, Zimmermann Ferenc, Rauscher Gáspár and Baranyai Ferenc, and in the following months executed 20 more people, while hundreds of others were brutally tortured.

Caraffa kept the town practically in terror until November 1687, as the confessions extracted on the rack could land any rich citizen or nobleman in a dungeon, and the inhumane methods of execution – such as quartering – also horrified the people of Eperjes. Needless to say, it was the wealthiest who had most to fear from the general’s greed, and the nobles who were also afraid of Caraffa’s executioners, as the court of Vienna also tried to put pressure on the nobility.

The intimidation was successful, but Caraffa also overdid it, as the tortured had already implicated the country’s leaders in the alleged conspiracy to avoid further suffering. However, Leopold’s advisers could have had the Palatine put on the rack, but they realised that the proceedings threatened to cause a real social explosion and urged the Emperor to moderate his actions. As a result, at the Diet of 1687 – the Diet at which the nobility abolished the resistance clause of the Golden Bull – Leopold granted amnesty to those in prison and recalled Caraffa from Eperjes, whose name is still a hated one in Hungary.