Simon I Nagymartoni
This made Count Simon and Bertram afraid, and they came to Hungary with the said King Andrew's second wife [Yolanda of Courtenay], who was from Champagne [sic!].
There is in Hispania no kindred which dares to carry an eagle in its coat of arms except that of Simon and Michael; and the reason is that this kindred is said to have driven out the army of the sultan of Tunis [Abu Zakariya Yahya] when he had attacked with ships the islands of Majorca and Minorca and had defeated the fleet while the other warriors of the king of Aragon were unable to withstand him.
Having had proof of their noble qualities, King Emeric received them with open arms and is recorded to have granted them extensive fiefs in various parts of Hungary.
While both authors mention their castles in the Iberian Peninsula ("Boiot"), their clashes against the "sultan of Tunis" (plausibly Abu Zakariya Yahya) in Mallorca and Menorca and the coat-of-arms donation derived therefrom, but, the two authors disagree as to why they left Aragon; according to Ákos, the unidentified father of Simon I and Bertrand (or Bertram) rebelled against King James I of Aragon, which resulted his imprisonment.
In contrast, Simon of Kéza writes the brothers embroiled into a conflict with an unidentified count and though they defeated him, the resulting hostility forced them to settle in Hungary.
[8] For his service, Simon was granted the land Röjtökör in Sopron County (Rahtukeuri, present-day Neudörfl, Austria) together with its local border duty by Andrew II in 1223.
Her wealth – Bajót and Nagymarton – was inherited by Simon, who, however, was forced to prove the legitimacy of his ownership right over the latter place during a lawsuit against the sons of the original owner and disloyal Ayan in 1230.
[10] Sometime around the late 1220s, Simon was also granted the land Csenke in Esztergom County (laid near present-day Mužla, Slovakia) by Andrew II.
[13] Simon was a member of that three-member diplomatic delegation, along with Palatine Denis, son of Ampud and Rembald de Voczon, to the Holy See in the first half of 1232, which the king sent to complain against Robert, Archbishop of Esztergom, who put Hungary under an interdict in February, because of the employment of Jews and Muslims in the royal administration.
[6] They [the Mongols] could not take the citadel of the city [Esztergom], because the Spaniard Simon [Symeon Hispanus] manfully defended it with his many crossbowmen.Béla IV ascended the Hungarian throne in 1235.
[7] While Béla IV and the royal court fled to Dalmatia thereafter, Simon was among those barons of noblemen, who organized the armed resistance against the Mongols in 1241–1242.
In early 1242, the Mongols crossed the frozen Danube, hoping to pillage the richest territories of Hungary, in addition to chase and capture King Béla.
Master Roger states that when the Hungarians and foreigners in the city realized it was going to fall, they torched their houses along with huge amounts of dyed fabrics and any other valuable commodities.
The Mongols were beaten back time after time, with Roger noting the effectiveness of Simon's crossbowmen in inflicting enormous damage on the Mongol force (the exact term Roger used, "balistarii", was used in most contemporary sources to refer to crossbowmen; despite some confusion, he and other contemporary chroniclers usually referred to siege engines such as ballistas as "machina").
[16] Following the siege of Esztergom, Simon and Bertrand have completed diplomatic missions several times throughout the year 1242 on behalf of Béla IV in order to seek military assistance and financial aid against the Mongols.
[7] As a reward for his military merits, Béla IV returned the land Csenke with its accessory island in Esztergom County to Simon in January 1243.
The family reached its peak in politics and elite, when his grandson Paul served as Judge royal for two decades in the first half of the 14th century.
