The Arms of Košice City / 1502 - The fourth armorial warrant

On the 8th of December 1502 in Budín, King Wladislaus II issues Košice with an armorial warrant consummating the development of the city’s coat of arms, the first in the realm giving a city a shield together with a helmet and crest and mantling.

It was only with its fourth warrant, towards the end of the period of active heraldry, that the city succeeded after 133 years in acquiring the status it longed for, that of being granted a complete achievement of arms by the monarch, a coat of arms whose use would be based on royal privilege, justified by force of rights, beyond dispute. Usage based on force of habit established through maintenance was not considered sufficient. There was special awareness of this point, because in the warrant of 1453 the use of coats of arms by free royal cities was specified either according to right or according to custom.

The fourth armorial warrant for the city of Košice from year 1502.

The first step Wladislaus II took was to tackle the bearings on the shield, making an alteration to them which transformed the whole shield.

Miniature of the coat of arms from 1502.

He left unchanged the blue strip at the top with its three gold lilies, but he vertically bisected the lower field, originally divided seven times into the silver and red bars. He corrected the error in the order of colours which arose in the warrant issued by Ladislaus V, and in his description he restored the original pointed form of shield. Into the heraldic left-hand field created by the bisection, he placed half of a Polish eagle taken from his own ancestral arms. Using part of the coat of arms of his wife, Queen Anna, he made the area at the foot of the shield blue, put in another bar, sloping to the left of the shield, divided seven times into gold and red segments, and complemented it with three more gold lilies, one above and two below. At the top of the shield, he removed the gold coronet and replaced it with two helmets with crests and mantlings. The detailed description of the achievement he granted is consistent in its respect to heraldic principles. This is most clearly evident in the description of the newly-included half-eagle. In the heraldic right-hand field, after the vertical bisection, he left the original design, placing the eagle in the left half of the shield. At the same time, he maintained the original unified character of the fields. The heraldic problem of the description of the half- eagle, whose head is normally always turned to the right, so that the left half should by rights be headless, was solved by his inclusion in the introduction of an ordinance concerning the whole head. The gold claws and beak, coronet and perizonium or breast-band, which has trefoil-shaped ends, are described separately.

The description of the coat of arms in the warrant, however, does not begin with the shield. It begins with the supporter and other accessories, which appear here in a city’s coat of arms by virtue of privilege for the first time in Hungarian heraldry. The angel is clothed in an amethyst-coloured robe woven through with gold, with fair, curly hair compressed by a wreath set with precious stones and a golden cross. The wings are of sky- blue colour laced with grains of gold. The angel holds the pointed shield with both hands. The two silver helmets have gold coronets and gold c.phps. In the centre of the crests, which are a pair of wings with yellow topsides and blue undersides speckled with gold, there is one gold lily apiece. The mantlings are described as being "like many-coloured tumbling flowers, as if scattered by the wind".

Despite the rich description heraldically more informative, it shows visually how the coat of arms of the city was formed according to the rules of heraldry. How, for instance, the crests carefully symbolise the head of the shield, and thus the Anjou dynasty, while the red and silver mantlings symbolise the arms of the state from the field of the shield, and thus the Árpád dynasty, even though these details are not mentioned in the heraldic description. This means in fact that the crests and mantlings were created additionally after 133 years on the basis of the original first shield. In their content they were conceived so as to correspond with the shield bearings in just the way they could and should have been with the first shield of 1369.

The semi-figure of the angel was changed to full-length, and acquired a halo. When previously there had been a choice between only two colours for the angel’s robe, that is, one of the basic colours of the monarchy, red or white, now there appeared a combination of red with blue, which together produced amethyst. Moreover, in this warrant we find mentioned for the first time in Hungarian heraldry the additional interpretation of the silver bars on the shield, which are taken to represent the principal rivers of the realm, the Danube, Tisa, Dráva and Sáva.

This armorial warrant is the richest in terms of style and content of the four which were issued to Košice, and it gives a wide-ranging account of the merits of the city presented by the monarch as his reason for granting it. He recalls events which occurred twelve years previously, just after his coronation, when his brother Johanes Albertus, who also.phpired to the crown, attacked him with his army from Poland. He took Eger, but then Košice stopped his advance by involving him in a siege lasting several months. The city endured and did not break, suffering heavy losses and the spilling of much blood, and finally the citizens tore into the enemy positions and carried off a great victory and great spoils. They did not heed the flattering promises, the provocations or the wild threats during the long and cruel siege, but as the one and only bastion of the kingdom, the city stood its ground out of loyalty to the new king.

In the year 1504, the city commissioned one of the most beautiful of the Hungarian Renaissance city seals based on the armorial warrant from 1502.

1. Silver seal die of the great seal of the city of Košice from the year 1504 (mirroring image). 2. Impression of the great seal of the city of Košice.

The silver seal matrix with the circular inscription SIGIL LUM CIVITA TIS. CASSA. was prepared by the Košice master goldsmith Antonius. In contrast to the text and miniature in the warrant, the seal has a late-Gothic shield, and the angel is supplemented with ribbons in criss- cross over the chest. Impressions of Antonius’ seal became for a long time the model for further illustrations of the coat of arms of the city, as the originals of the armorial warrants were not accessible to the public and were specially stored away like jewels under several locks in the Secret Archive of the City of Košice.

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/Text: Dr.JOZEF KIRST/
/Translation: A.Y.Billingham/
/© Photo: Marián Krlička/

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