The king of Naples and Iancola in 1444: the first official documentary mentions of John Hunyadi as Iancu Hunyadi

The “original name” of John Hunyadi caused several controversies. Most of them were due to “nationalist and post-nationalist” power-plays that echoed in historiography. Consequently, the sources in this study’s appendix that should have been known (and published) since the late 1890s-early 1900s were “lost” until very recently. The documents were issued by Alfonso V of Aragon, king of Naples, who had claims to the Hungarian throne. Two were the letters sent to Władysław I (III) Jagiello, king of Poland and Hungary (acknowledged only as king of Poland, Dalmatia and Croatia by Alfonso), and to his “second-in-command”, John Hunyadi, (co-) voivode of Transylvania (addressed as Iancola, by the Aragonese monarch). The third was a message sent by Alfonso to his viceroy (to-be) of Athens and Neopatras, Giovanni Vintimiglia, the father-in-law of Carlo II Tocco, despot of Arta (Epirus), Alfonso’s vassal and the object of the letter sent to Jagiello and to Hunyadi. Telling enough, none of the major Hungarian (Lajos Thallóczy) and Romanian (Constantin Marinescu) scholars that dealt with the Archives of the Crown of Aragon (in Barcelona), in which the said letters are preserved in the registers of King Alfonso V, have dealt with the mentioned sources (although Marinescu briefly mentioned one of them, without recording the “special name” of Hunyadi). This also calls for a historiographical appraisal of the issue.