Acsády, Ignácz

Born Sept. 9, 1845, in Nagy-Károly; died Dec. 17, 1906, in Budapest. Hungarian historian and corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1888).

Acsády worked on the socioeconomic history of feudal Hungary. His main contribution is the establishment of the dominant role of large landholdings in 16th century Hungary (Landholdings in Hungary, 1494–1598, 1894, and other works). After many years of research, he published History of Hungarian Peasant Serfdom (1906, republished in 1948 and 1950; Slovak translation 1955, Russian translation 1956). Acsády’s works, thanks to the vast range of sources and empirical materials he used, have retained their value to this day, although his bourgeois-liberal conceptions led him to underplay the class struggle and to idealize the feudal state.