The paper deals with knowledge about the religious community of Anabaptists, which can be found in the work of the Hungarian polymath, geographer and historian Matthias Bel. The territory of presentday western Slovakia was inhabited in the past by several German-speaking ethnographic groups. One of them was the members of this radical religious- -social movement, who were also known under the ethnonymic name – Habans. The primary goal of my study is a comprehensive analysis of the information contained in Bel’s work Historical and Geographical Knowledge of New Hungary (Notitia Hungariae Novae historico-geographica), which relate to the Haban population and its settlement within the territory of Slovakia.
The territory of the former German-speaking islands in central Slovakia, which is generally referred to as the Hauerland, was in the past one of the three largest residential areas of the German population in Slovakia. Together with other groups of Germans, Hauerland formed a cultural and linguistic group of Slovak Germans, which, despite its regional specificity, maintained a common consciousness. The paper focuses on the description of the German population living in Turiec County, which belonged to the Hauerland residential area. I draw knowledge about the researched topic from Matthias Bel’s work Notitia Hungariae Novae historico-geographica (“Historical- geographic knowledge about New Hungary”). The primary goal of my study is a comprehensive analysis of the information found in Bel’s work, which relates to the German population in Turiec County.
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