Letter to the editor: The role of the akinji in the 15th century massacre in Čepin, Croatia )

摘要

As one of the initiators of the joint Smithsonian-Universitynof Zagreb scientific project ‘‘Development of anForensic Data base at the University of Zagreb’’ and anmember of the multidisciplinary team of forensic expertsncommissioned by the Croatian Government to recovernand identify victims of the war that followed the dissolutionnof the former Yugoslavia (Sˇ laus et al., 2007), I knownhow hard it is to reconstruct events that happened in anwar-torn country just 15–20 years ago. The problemsnmultiply exponentially when the event in question happenednalmost 600 years ago. It is therefore possible thatnwe have made a mistake and that other parties werenresponsible for the attack on Cepin, although unfortunately,nneither of the candidates mentioned are reasonablensuspects. The Hungarian Kingdom could not havenattacked Croatia because from 1102 to 1527 Croatia wasnpart of the Hungarian Empire (Budak and Raukar,n2006), while the Habsburgs were, except for a short twoyearnperiod during which time they ruled the jointnHungarian-Croatian kingdom, not involved in this areanuntil 1527 when Croatian nobles offered them the thronenin exchange for protection from further Turkishnonslaughts (Kann, 1974). It is of course possible thatnother, unidentified, military contingents attacked Cepinnbut we stand by our original arguments that: 1) there isnno reason why this attack would not be mentioned innhistorical sources while the 1441 akinji raid was, and 2)nif such (undocumented) attacks were the norm rathernthan the exception one could expect similarly high frequenciesnof perimortem trauma in other skeletal series,nand analysis of 2,123 temporally congruent skeletonsnfrom the Balkans do not support this.