The subject of this research article is canonical visitations which are used as a primary resource for researching regional history. The article contains an overview of the historiography which deals with this kind of resource. In addition, the article contains also characteristics of the visitation and conscription registries which can be traced to the 18th century of Abov - Turňa County. The special emphasis is placed on a synthesis of knowledge that can be gained from these documents.
The issue of conscriptions belongs among the unjustly neglected research topics in the Slovak military historiography. Therefore, the author’s detailed outline on the conscriptions in the Žilina chair district is a particularly inspiring and beneficial one. The conscription was a part of the so called “recruitment process” consisting of two main stages. It was aimed at acquiring new recruits. At the second stage, they were escorted to a selected place for medical examination or delivery of the recruits to the respective regiment. Practically, all soldiers recruited from these chairs were assigned, based on the conscription system from the 1781, to the regiments in Trenčín, mainly to the 2nd infantry and 8th hussar regiment. Acquisition of fresh troops for the imperial army was the most important part of the conscription. In fact, the entire burden lay on the reeves and their town councils, jurors and other “servants”. The author states that from the half of the 18th century, the competences and therefore also obligations started to be transferred to the local self-governance, whereby the bureaucracy in the higher places should have been simplified. Municipality has become a kind of basic administrative cell of the monarchy. This also included the duties regarding acquisition of new military recruits. Municipalities used their own recruitment methods to fulfil the required quotas, always having a particular sum of money allocated to be spent for the given purpose as a part of the budget. Some of the chair officers visited the villages to perform this task. Thus, the chair administration got the picture on the number of prospective recruits and therefore was able to determine quotas for individual municipalities.
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