This study consists of two parts: the first part summarizes the development and operation of the city leadership in the period between the acquisition of the borough title (1361) and the free royal city status (1693). Based on the charters given to the city, it shows how Debrecen developed a high degree autonomy by the end of the 17th century. The second part presents the foundation of the ancient town hall, the „domus senatoria” consisting of several civic houses where the magistrate directed the city life with absolute power. Both parts of the study were written based on original archival data.

In the first part of my paper I write briefly about the burdens that afflicted Debrecen during the recapture wars and Rákóczi’s War of Independence. In the further sections of the study, I examine the crimes perpetrators or victims of which were some kind of soldiers (e.g. quartered German soldiers, Kuruces). I used the city magistrates’ and criminal tribunal protocols between 1697 and 1705 as source material, which contain a lot of useful information about how the civil population of the city kept contact with the various soldiers.

Our organization performs and supports researches about the present-day Hajdú-Bihar, the old Hajdú and Bihar counties and Partium. The biharkutatas.hu website is one of the two essential enterprises which collect the Bihar related knowledge and make it available together. The other one is Új Nézőpont (New Perspective), an online quarterly periodical which uses and publishes multidisciplinary studies. The events happening until now let us hope that both will work as highly sought and useful forums in the future, too.

The database about the Miskolczy family’s writings summarizes the legacy documents of the Miskolczy family of Mezőtelegd generated between 1569 and 1940 which are kept in the Museum of Bihar. In addition to basic data of the writing of the papers, it provides comments referring to the content of the documents to assist the scientific research of the family which played a historical role in Bihar county. The database, together with the general information attached to it is available in the Database menu of the Bihar research site (http://biharkutatas.hu).