The New State and Its External Environment in the mid-1500s

The state that emerged from the ruins of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, and which by century's end was officially known as the Principality of Transylvania, was not favoured by historical circumstances. It was buffeted by irresistible, external forces that were anything but beneficial to its peaceful development.

The harshest and most immediate of these factors was the perpetual state of war induced by Ottoman expansion. It brought significant territorial losses to the fledgling state. The fragment of Hungary ruled by King John had extended from Lake Balaton to Brassó, and from Titel and Karánsebes to Kassa. Turkish conquests in the 1540s and 1550s moved the frontiers to east of the Tisza and north of Temesvár, and many of the remaining Hungarian counties — including the Partium — became permanent war-zones.

Successive armistices and peace treaties failed to guarantee lasting tranquillity along the frontier. Even when the major military campaigns came to an end, a 'little war' of attrition would rage without respite. Even at its height, Turkish power could not preserve its Hungarian domain from raids by light cavalry coming from the royal (or Transylvanian) border forts; and the Ottomans, too, would conduct raids behind enemy lines. Thanks to the marauding hussars, the Hungarian nobility was able to keep watch over the lands it had lost, and this was to have important consequences when the Ottomans were eventually driven out. Moreover, {1-658.} the Hungarian border forts could survive only by launching raids that brought plunder and weakened the enemy's front-line defences.

An inevitable consequence of this type of warfare was the emergence and expansion of a zone that paid taxes to both sides. A large part of this zone consisted of the principality's 'parts' east of the Tisza. In the early 1550s, some 53 per cent of the manors in Bihar county paid taxes to Turkish landlords and the Turkish treasury, and this despite the fact that the Porte acknowledged John Sigismund's rule over the county. Even some of Hunyad county's eastern villages ended up in Halil bey's defter (the Turkish tax register).

The new line of demarcation resulting from the Turkish advances also led to creation of a new customs border. By the 1550s, Transylvania had established a network of customs posts (for collection of the 'thirtieth') on the western perimeter of the Partium, at Várad, Debrecen, Bajom, Székelyhíd, Margitta, Nagyfalu, Hídvég, Zilah, and Zsibó. The system underwent frequent modification; for a time, Kolozsvár also had a customs house. By 1586, customs duties were collected also at Karánsebes, Szászváros, Hunyad, Magyarzsombor, Varadia, Dés, Körösbánya, and Zilah, and, four years later, at Déva and Nagybánya as well. The Hungarian and royal parts of Hungary imposed their own customs duties, at Tokaj, Vác, and other points. Thus merchants moving between Transylvania and Italy or Austria, within the territory of the former Hungary, had to cross two additional frontiers, and pay duty four times; those trading with Poland needed to pay duty twice.

That brings up the second consequence for Transylvania of the changed external environment, the decline in her foreign trade. Inevitably, trade suffered from the unending war and the multiplication of customs duties. The principal trading route, which linked Transylvania to central Hungary and Vienna (Vienna — Vác — {1-659.} Szolnok — Debrecen/Nagyvárad — Kolozsvár) remained busy even after the Turkish occupation, but it came to serve mainly the region east of the Tisza. Traders from beyond the Királyhágó, in Transylvania proper, preferred the more secure, northern route, from Kolozsvár to Kassa and westward along the Vág valley. Due to this shift, Cracow joined Vienna as the principal destination of Transylvanian trade.

Trade with the south also declined. The trading routes along the Maros valley toward Italy and Dalmatia fell into disuse. Trade between Saxon towns and their traditional markets, the Romanian principalities, stagnated, first because of the recurrent wars, then because of the policies pursued by the Turkish administration. In 1568, the Porte prohibited Moldavia and Wallachia from selling their principal products — mainly comestibles, such as grain, livestock, butter, and wine — to any country other than Turkey. The intention was to reserve the rich agricultural output of the nearby vassal states for Istanbul, which had grown into a metropolis of several hundred thousand people. In the event, the effectiveness of the measure was undermined by the Turkish economy's backwardness and the covert resistance of the Romanian principalities. To be sure, Transylvania had never imported much grain from south of the Carpathians, but the Turkish restrictions had a generally dampening effect on its trade.

Most of the trade with Moldavia and Wallachia originated in Beszterce, Brassó, and Szeben, towns that had long enjoyed staple rights. Of these, Beszterce was the least important: in 1552, its customs office was leased out for 200 forints, which suggests that the duties normally collected were something in excess of that sum. In 1569, the cost of the lease fell to 70 forints, then rose to 100–120 forints around 1574. The statistics on customs duties collected at Brassó reveal similar decline and stagnation. In 1503, the turnover in foreign trade at Brassó was valued at some 167,000 forints. In 1530, at the height of the domestic wars in Transylvania, it stood at {1-660.} around 33,000 forints, but even at the time of the short lived economic boom after 1550, the turnover amounted to no more than 80,000 forints, and another decline set in at the end of century. The turnover in trade at Nagyszeben seldom amounted to more than half of that at Brassó, and it underwent similar fluctuations.

The fate of the province's prized mines (salt, gold, and non-ferrous metals) gave further evidence of Transylvania's economic isolation from western and eastern markets. In the 1520s, the salt-deposits were leased by one of Europe's biggest entrepreneurs, the Fugger family; to negotiate with them, King John called on no less a man than Gritti, the Italian-Turkish agent of the Istanbul government. When, in the mid-1530, the salt-mines momentarily had no owner, some Bavarian businessmen took up the challenge, but they were the last foreigners to show any interest. In 1541, and for some years thereafter, local interests with little capital made attempts to operate the mines. After the advent of the principality, the efforts of government and those of transplanted Italians (including the famous physician Biandrata) brought no substantial improvement.

The erosion of foreign interest in Transylvania cannot be wholly attributed to the geopolitical circumstances of the new state. The 'encirclement' of Transylvania coincided with a major shift in the world economy, which may be regarded as the third external factor influencing the region's development. It was not only prudence that kept Western European investors away from the war-torn Carpathian Basin. (After pulling out of Transylvania, the Fuggers, in 1546, also gave up their copper mines in Upper Hungary.) In the mid-1500s, Europe turned to economic exploitation of the lands that its adventurous seamen had discovered a few decades earlier. Sailing around the Horn, Portuguese ships brought back silk from China and other rare and precious goods from India and the Spice Islands. Arabian traders recovered from the naval defeat inflicted by the Portuguese and once again plied their traditional route through the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea to the Levant {1-661.} and thence to Venice. However, the Arabs failed to regain their predominance, and the Europeans kept the lion's share of trade with the East, which produced immense profits for traders and entrepreneurs. Thus the wealthy burghers of Western Europe preferred to invest their energy and resources in developing trade with the distant East, and to neglect the less rewarding and more risky markets of the Levant and of eastern and southeastern Europe.

Spain's conquests in the Americas also had important consequences. Unprecedented amounts of precious metals, especially silver, began to flow from Mexico and Peru into Europe, and the trade grew at an astonishing rate: in the early 1540s, Mexico's mines were producing 3,400 kg of silver a year; the output reached 15,000 kg in the 1560s, 50,000 kg in the 1570s, and 74,000 kg at the end of the century. Peru's silver mines (the major one being at Potosi, in today's Bolivia) had an annual yield of 183,000 kg in the 1550s, 151,000 kg in the 1570s, and 255,000 kg at century's end. All these dwarfed the average output of some 5,000–6,000 kg a year in Hungary, previously one of Europe's principal producers of silver.

The development of transatlantic trade was accompanied by dynamic growth in Western Europe's industries. As towns expanded, they could no longer rely for their food supply on their overpopulated hinterlands. In any case, the agricultural sector had greater difficulty than industry in adapting to rising demand. Over the last sixty-odd years of the 16th century, the price of grain rose by a factor of 4–6, while the price of manufactured goods barely trebled. The growing need for money was met by imported gold and silver, and the result was steadily rising inflation.

These changes were eventually felt in the Carpathian Basin. The price changes in royal Hungary (which, by all indications, were reflected in Transylvania as well) are illustrative. Between the 1520s and the 1580s, the price of cattle grew threefold, of grain fivefold, and of wine, fourfold. The economic boom in the west brought a rise in the standard of living and induced population {1-662.} growth; the consequent, growing demand for foodstuffs could only be satisfied through imports, and eastern Europe became a major supplier. Polish grain and Hungarian cattle found a ready, and highly profitable market.

Transylvania, a small and distant land, experienced only the adverse side of this development. The principality's agriculture was generally less developed than that of Hungary proper. There was no shortage of land, but the climate was less clement, and distance hampered the transmission of new methods of cultivation from Western Hungary. The Saxons were the most advanced in agriculture; by contrast, in the Székelyföld, the first attempts at three-course rotation date from the 1590s. The cultivation of vegetables and fruit also had late beginnings. Livestock was a major product, but the practice of open grazing remained predominant; only at the end of the century did the growth in livestock spur experiments in storing fodder and stabling the animals.

The exporting of Transylvania's grain to western Europe had never been profitable, and this situation did not change; in any case, the difficulties of transportation were insurmountable. In the wine trade, Transylvania could not compete with the nearby Hegyalja (the Tokaj wine-growing region). Hungarian cattle-breeding was concentrated in the Great Plain, of which only a small part belonged to the principality. Salt was a potentially valuable export commodity, but Poland also had salt-pits, and its major ones happened to be located along the Kassa-Cracow road, at Wieliczka and Bochnia.

Thus Transylvania continued to suffer from an unfavourable balance of trade. The decreasing exports of cattle could not compensate for even the lower volume of imports, which included textiles, manufactured goods, arms, and luxury goods. Precious metals helped somewhat to reduce the trade gap, but the lodes were not particularly rich, and the cost of labour was far higher than in the mines of Spanish America, which were worked mainly by enslaved {1-663.} natives. The competition was too strong, and production began to fall at Transylvania's mines. The trade deficit led to a shortage of money, and this at a time when the value of money in Transylvania, as in the rest of Europe, was being eroded by inflation.

This economic revolution laid the foundations of global trade and made Europe the world's richest and most rapidly developing region. It also gave great stimulus to Europe's cultural life. Renaissance culture, which had been nurtured in Italian towns made prosperous by trade with the Levant, spread to Flanders, then to Burgundy, France, and the rest of Europe. The abundance of money promoted expensive lifestyles and new artistic creations. In the late 1400s and early 1500s, some parts of eastern Europe profited sufficiently from the growth in trade and agricultural exports to partake in this cultural Renaissance. To be sure, the less 'expensive' aspect of this revival, intellectual humanism, had reached eastern Europe earlier. The impact of the Renaissance in Hungary went back to the age of the Hunyadis, and it reached a glittering peak during the reign of King Matthias, with the remarkably early introduction of new styles of art and architecture.

Although Transylvania did welcome a few early bearers of humanistic thought, its comparative poverty and remoteness delayed the arrival of the Renaissance. That delay had a significant consequence: the Reformation, that late and arguably most radical emanation of the Renaissance, reached the principality at about the same time as the earlier innovations in art, architecture, and lifestyle. Transylvania had suffered much in the course of the 16th century, and it was an open question how its economy might serve these new criteria of modernity. Transylvania's future, indeed, its very survival were at stake. An examination of how society evolved in the new state will throw some light on these issues.