EN
The author discusses the budget of the town of Bardiów (today: Bardejov/Slovakia), located along the historical Polish-Hungarian borderland and with an excellently preserved municipal archive. The diversity and range of the sources made it possible not only to determine the size of the town’s revenues and expenses in the fifteenth century but, first and foremost, to consider the particular components of the budget of this Hungarian urban centre. The annual income of fifteenth-century Bardiów totalled 1500–25 000 florins. As a rule, the yearly budget featured a slight deficit stemming mainly from additional expenses generated by the struggle against the Hussites. In certain years, such as 1497, the town budget revealed a slight surplus. The most important revenues in the Bardiów budget was the tax paid by the burghers, the tricesima, i.e. the tax on merchandise, the mill tax, the so-called schrotter, i.e. the town monopoly on the storage of barrels of wine and beer, the rent paid on the cloth production, and the profits gained from the local baths and the villages belonging to the town. The expenses consisted predominantly of the annual tax of 500 florins paid in the fifteenth century to the Polish Balicki family, which leased Bardiów from King Sigismund Luxembourg, the costs of the expansion of the town and the parish church, as well as expenses connected with the town school, the fees paid to the town scribes, the rychtarz (advocatus), who frequently travelled outside the city limits, and the purchasing of gifts, which comprised an important element in the policy conducted by the town council. On the other hand, the preserved sources do not make it possible to establish the way in which during certain years Bardiów covered its deficit.