Trial and Execution 1713 – Jánošík Before the Liptov County Court

Juraj Jánošík was interrogated, tortured and sentenced by the Liptov County court in Svätý Mikuláš (today Liptovský Mikuláš) on 16 and 17 March 1713: he was to be pierced through the left side with a hook and hung up¹². When and where the sentence was carried out was not recorded. Tradition gives 17 or 18 March 1713 and the execution ground of “Šibeničky” east of the town³⁴⁶.

Few periods of his life are as well documented as these two days. The protocol is still kept in the State Archive in Bytča, and a copy of the lost torture interrogation survives in the hand of the poet Janko Kráľ². That is exactly why a close look pays off. The records show no hero dancing beneath the gallows, but a 25-year-old robber captain who tried to shield his friend, confessed under torture and was condemned under the Hungarian law of his day.

The final arrest in Klenovec

The court records do not say how Jánošík was caught. The historian Ivan Houdek put it plainly as early as 1929: “Ako a kde sa to stalo, o tom niet v súdnych spisoch ani zmienky, odkázaní sme v tom len na podanie” – “How and where it happened, the court records do not mention at all; we must rely on tradition alone.”²

Most of the literature places the arrest in Klenovec, then in Malohont County. Jánošík’s former captain Tomáš Uhorčík was living there under the false name “Martin Mravec”, and Liptov county haiduks seized the robber at his house¹²⁹. Drawing on older research, the Slovak Wikipedia speaks of some 25 to 30 county guards under the nobleman Andreánsky, with the search organised from Liptov under Emerich Kubínyi¹¹. The spot is still called “Mravcov vŕšok” in Klenovec¹¹.

Why Liptov? In autumn 1712, between Východná and Važec, Jánošík had robbed the wife – or widow – of an imperial officer named von Schardon. The county had to compensate her and so had its own reason to catch the culprit⁶¹¹.

It was not his first arrest. In autumn 1712 Jánošík and “Mravec” had already been detained in Klenovec and held in the manor house at Hrachovo, but they were released after the Malohont deputy county head Pavol Láni intervened – they did not escape, as later stories claim⁹¹¹.

Disputed When and where was Jánošík finally arrested? Miroslav Nemec dates the arrest “around the turn of 1712/1713”¹⁴. The municipality of Klenovec and the historian Diana Duchoňová give “early March 1713”⁹¹⁰. Klenovec as the place is broadly agreed in the scholarly literature; the version that he was caught in Valaská Dubová comes from folk tradition². Because the records are silent, both questions remain open.

Custody: the Palúdzka manor or the town prison?

Where was Jánošík held before the trial? Liptovský Mikuláš has long told that he was imprisoned in the Vranovo manor house in Palúdzka, which at the time belonged to the later presiding judge, Ladislav Okolicsányi⁶¹¹.

In 2022 the historian Miroslav Nemec of the Janko Kráľ Museum examined this tradition in Historický časopis. It goes back to a note written by the poet Samo Chalupka in 1868 – a family story set down 155 years after the event¹.

Disputed Vranovo or Svätý Mikuláš? According to Nemec, detention at Vranovo is “improbable”: the county was already holding its criminal sessions in Svätý Mikuláš, a town prison is attested there from the late 17th century, and the county later used it for its own prisoners. He does not rule Vranovo out entirely¹. The town of Liptovský Mikuláš still mentions the Palúdzka tradition⁶.

The court and its law

The case was heard before the sedria, the criminal court of Liptov County, in Svätý Mikuláš. Representatives of Trenčín County also attended and put their own questions – after all, the band had committed many of its robberies there, around Žilina and Strečno²¹¹.

The roles were clearly assigned¹¹¹:

The indictment opens in Latin and calls him “providum Georgium Janossik publicum praedonem seu malefactorem” – “the provident Georgius Janossik, a public robber or malefactor”². The Slovak part accuses him of having rejected God’s commandments and the prohibitions of the law of the land, of becoming a “zbojnyczkim wudczem”, a robber leader, of robbing, wounding and murdering merchants and others, and of wounding the parish priest so gravely that he had to die². The mix of Latin and Slovak in the record was deliberate: the accused was meant to understand the charges².

The indictment cited Hungarian law as its basis: article 13 of 1625, article 26 of 1655 and István Werbőczy’s Tripartitum (part I, title 15), together with the Fifth and Seventh Commandments². The Tripartitum assigned the gallows to thieves and the stake or the wheel to robbers: “fures scilicet patibulo; praedones vero palo, vel rota, caeteri autem gladio” – “thieves, namely, to the gallows; robbers, however, to the stake or the wheel; all others by the sword”². The court also drew on Kitonich’s procedural handbook, Directio methodica processus iudiciarii¹¹.

Documented No “Carolina”. One sometimes reads that Jánošík was condemned under the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina. That is wrong. The Carolina (1530/1532) was the criminal code of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of Hungary was not part of the Empire¹². The protocol itself invokes Hungarian law². Criminal procedure in Hungary was also shaped by the Habsburg Praxis criminalis of 1656: printed for Hungary at Trnava in 1687, it never gained the force of law there but remained influential into the 19th century¹³.

Other cases show how Liptov dealt with robbers. The documented punishments were hanging, hanging on a hook, beheading by the sword and breaking on the wheel, after which the body could be woven into a wheel and put on display. Around 1700 the prosecutor demanded the hook or quartering for one Peter Štefančík; the sentence was reduced to hanging².

Day one, 16 March 1713: confession and confrontation

The trial began with a voluntary confession, known in the sources as the Fassio Janossikiana²¹¹. First came the 17 questions from Trenčín County. Jánošík answered them fairly openly, and he was confronted with two of his victims: the Žilina merchant Ján Šipoš, whom the band had robbed in October 1711 and again in May 1712, and the goldsmith Ján Skalka, also of Žilina, from whom they had taken rings, silver spoons and a broadsword²¹¹.

The 29 questions from Liptov were another matter. Jánošík gave no answer at all to 14 of them and only evasive answers to 10²¹¹. And he lied to protect a friend: Uhorčík, he claimed, had died in the Kremnica Mountains. In fact “Martin Mravec” was sitting in the same custody – not yet recognised¹¹.

The prosecutor, Čemický, demanded death by the stake, the hook or the wheel, preceded by torture. The defender, Palugyay, asked for acquittal¹¹.

Day two, 17 March 1713: torture

The next day the court ruled that, because Jánošík had revealed neither his helpers nor the whereabouts of the loot, he was to be subjected “ľahšiemu, potom i ťažšiemu mučeniu” – “to lighter, and then also to heavier torture”¹¹. Interrogation under torture in a lighter and a heavier degree was standard in the criminal procedure of the time².

We do not describe the methods here. What the record preserves is the outcome: Jánošík answered seven questions. He admitted the robberies of Mrs von Schardon and of the Orava nobleman Zmeškal, and he named a hiding place – a beech beside a fir “with a cut hand” on the way from Jablonka to Klenovec¹¹.

The defender now put forward two grounds for leniency: Jánošík was young, and he had killed or wounded no one⁴¹¹.

One small uncertainty remains. The archivist Peter Vítek dates the record of the torture interrogation to 16 March 1713, while most other accounts place it on the second day of the trial²¹¹.

The priest of Domaniža

One case weighed heavily even though Jánošík had not fired the shot himself. In September 1712 – on the 4th or the 8th – Juraj Vrtík, parish priest of Domaniža, was shot on his way back from Frivald (today Rajecká Lesná); he died on 2 October. The Domaniža register of deaths records: “a duobus praedonibus traiectus est” – “he was shot through by two robbers”⁵.

In answer to the 13th question from Trenčín, Jánošík testified: “Dva tovarišia Plavčík z Dunajova a Turiak predpsaní strelili naňho a on v ten čas vodu pil na studni, a že od toho pátera nič nevzali a že ho Huncaga postrelil.” – “Two companions, Plavčík of Dunajov and the aforementioned Turiak, shot at him while he was drinking water at a well; they took nothing from the priest, and Huncaga wounded him.”⁵¹¹ Whether it was Jánošík or the priest who was drinking is left open by the sentence¹¹.

The court found that his companions had shot the priest “kde on též bol prítomný” – “where he too was present”⁵¹¹. It did not charge him with firing the shot; his presence was enough for the court to hold him complicit.

The sentence in full

The sentence survives in the original Slovak wording of the protocol¹¹:

“Poneváč predepsaný Juro Janošak zavrhujúce prikázaní jak božské, tak též zákon krajinský predo dvema roky dal sa na zbojstvo a vúdcem aneb hajtmanem takovým se učinil … jeho tovariši, kde on též bol prítomný, pána pátera z Domaniže prestrelili a bezbožne zamordovali … Protož pro takové zlé účinky a prikázaním prestúpení má být na hák na levém boku prehnatý a tak na príklad jinších takových zločincov má být zavesený.”

In English: “Whereas the aforesaid Juro Janošak, rejecting both the divine commandments and the law of the land, took to robbery two years ago and made himself leader or captain of such … and his companions, in his presence, shot and impiously murdered the reverend father of Domaniža … therefore, for such evil deeds and transgressions of the commandments, he shall be driven onto a hook through the left side and so hung up as an example to other such criminals.”¹¹

Two details stand out. The sentence speaks of two years of robbery, the indictment of three¹¹. And it states its purpose openly: deterrence, “na príklad jinších”. The hook did not appear in the Tripartitum, but it was among the punishments imposed in Liptov².

The execution: what we know and what we don’t

No record of the execution is known²¹¹. From here on we are in the realm of conjecture.

Disputed Day, place and manner of execution. The town of Liptovský Mikuláš gives 17 March⁶; the Žilina regional library and the municipality of Klenovec give 18 March 1713³⁹. Miroslav Nemec of the Janko Kráľ Museum said in 2026: “Nevieme presne kedy, ale v nasledujúcich dňoch bol vykonaný aj ten samotný rozsudok” – “We don’t know exactly when, but the sentence itself was carried out in the following days.”⁴ The traditional site is Šibeničky, east of the town between Okoličné and Vrbica; written sources place the town’s execution ground of the period on that eastern side. Ivan Houdek, by contrast, suggested the toll point on the Váh by the bridge to Palúdzka²⁶. Whether the sentence was actually carried out with the hook or as a simple hanging is likewise undocumented¹¹.

The executioner was probably brought in from Levoča, Banská Bystrica or Žilina – but that too is an assumption¹¹. Nobody knows where Jánošík was buried. The tradition of a “Kuruc cemetery” at Čemice cannot be checked, because the register of deaths only begins in 1715². Today a memorial with a replica gallows on 1. mája Street marks the traditional site⁷.

Uhorčík, Hatala, Mikulčík and brother Ján

Jánošík’s lie about the dead Uhorčík did not last. “Martin Mravec” was unmasked and condemned by the same Liptov court; his case occupies pages 568–573 and 577–578 of the same protocol volume². According to the historian Marián Liščák of the Kysuce Museum, proceedings opened on 19 April and Uhorčík was broken on the wheel on 21 April 1713⁸. The tradition is that he was broken “from the neck”, the form that brought a quicker death¹².

Helpers were punished too. On 24 May 1713 the manorial court at Teplička nad Váhom tried Martin Hatala alias Bartoviech of Klenovec and Ján Mikulčík of Poland; both were beheaded after torture for consorting with Jánošík and Uhorčík². On 18 December 1713 the same court sentenced Jánošík’s younger brother Ján to death by hanging for helping his brother².

Where the records are – and what was lost

A widespread error holds that the original trial records were lost in the 19th century. The archivist Peter Vítek has set the record straight²:

• Surviving: the protocol of the Liptov county congregation for 1710–1717 (Protocollum I. Comitatus Liptoviensis), section Series causarum criminalium, case no. 17, pages 563–567, now in the State Archive in Žilina, seat Bytča (fonds Liptov County I, inv. no. 21). It contains the indictment, an extract of the defence, the prosecutor’s reply, the court’s decision, the deeds admitted under torture and the sentence.
• Surviving: the questions of Trenčín County, with the confession made after the confrontation with Šipoš and Skalka (fonds Trenčín County, Iudicialia miscellanea).
• Lost: the original of the interrogation with the 29 Liptov questions and the torture interrogation. It vanished from the Liptov archive in the third quarter of the 19th century. It is known through a copy made by the poet Janko Kráľ, collated and signed by Gašpar Fejérpataky-Belopotocký on 15 September 1844 and now held by the Slovak National Museum in Martin.

A complete transcription was published in 1986 in the jubilee volume of the Janko Kráľ Literary Museum².

Which building did the court sit in?

In 1712 the county bought the Hanzely family’s house in Svätý Mikuláš, rebuilt it and used it from 1713 as its first county house. Today it houses the Janko Kráľ Museum on Námestie osloboditeľov¹. The town presents a courtroom and a “Jánošík torture chamber” there and describes the building as the probable trial site⁷.

It is not certain. Houdek (1936) and the historian Uličný (2010) also considered the neighbouring Pongrác curia, alongside the old Hanzely house¹².

Where the gallows legends come from

Few images are as firmly tied to Jánošík as his last moments at the gallows. Remarkably, the hook is the only part of that picture that appears in the records².

Legend The dance beneath the gallows. In folk song Jánošík smokes three pounds of tobacco on the way to the gallows, dances round it several times and refuses a pardon with the words “Keď ste si ma upiekli, tak si ma aj zjedzte!” – “Since you have roasted me, eat me too!” These verses are collected in anthologies of folk poetry (1958, 1988)². In Martin Frič’s 1935 film he dances a last dance and leaps onto the hook himself; the “pardon that came too late” is a literary motif, used for instance by Jiří Mahen (1910)¹⁴. None of these motifs has any basis in the records.

The legend has an understandable core: the hook meant a slow death, and the sentence explicitly set out to make an example of him¹¹. Folk poetry and Romanticism turned the example into a sign of defiance. That is cultural heritage – but not a source for what actually happened in March 1713.

Nor do the records support the image of a robber who gave to the poor: what was taken was cloth, linen, rings, weapons, wigs and small sums of money, and no source documents any sharing with the poor¹⁰.