{1-664.} The Saxon Towns and the First (Lutheran) Wave of the Reformation in Transylvania

As western Europe entered a phase of development in the 1500s, the urban middle classes emerged as the key agents of change. The future of states, old and new, would be determined in large measure by what happened in the towns.

Compared to the rest of Hungary, Transylvania proper had many towns and quasi-urban settlements, and when the principality's new frontiers were stabilized after the mid-1500s, Nagyvárad, Szatmár, Nagybánya, and the mining settlements of the Máramaros joined the ranks of Saxon towns. To be sure, of Transylvania's 'towns', only Brassó, Szeben, Beszterce, Medgyes, Segesvár, Kolozsvár fully deserved the name, for the rest were modest settlements with no more than one or two thousand inhabitants. (On the periphery of the Great Plain, settlements — controlled by landowners — that were much more populous continued to be regarded as villages and were officially classed as 'market-towns'.)

These changes might have been expected to enhance the political and economic influence of the 'Saxon nation', i.e. the German community in Transylvania. Their right to local autonomy, of only marginal significance in the old Hungarian Kingdom, became one of the founding stones of the new state, for the union of the 'three nations' was an integral part of the legal framework underpinning Transylvania's feudal society.

Although the majority of Saxons were still peasants, the urban minority had risen over time to a position of leadership over the German community. The political and economic affairs of the Saxons came under the authority of the Saxon 'count' (comes), who combined the posts of royal magistrate and mayor of Szeben. The periodic national assembly of Saxons carried less weight than the councils of the larger towns. The royal magistrates of the several districts (seats) came from the urban patrician class. The extension {1-665.} of craft guilds to villages, and the restriction of market rights to the towns relegated the Saxon peasantry to a subordinate position.

Yet this comparatively modern society failed to exploit the opportunities inherent in the reduced size of the state. The process of self-isolation, which had emerged in the late 1400s, became more pronounced in the 1530s, and its effect was anything but beneficial.

The Saxons had sought to protect themselves against competition from Hungarian craftsmen and merchants by prohibiting settlement in their districts and by keeping their contacts within a circle of German-inhabited towns in Hungary and the German Empire. An early corollary of this retrenchment was the development of a certain 'national consciousness'. For a long time, that outlook remained free of political content, but it acquired new significance in the turbulent period leading up the Battle of Mohács. The hatred that Queen Mary bore for the Hungarian 'nation of nobles' owed much to the influence of her German courtiers, notably Markus Pemflinger and Georg Reicherstorffer, who came from Szászföld and played a leading role in civil war of 1527–35. After 1526, and except in the brief period of transition, Transylvania's Germans became steadfast supporters of the Habsburgs; meanwhile, the rest of the population gave its allegiance to the Szapolyai dynasty. The Saxons' defeat in the civil war, along with the bitter lessons of 1552–55, compelled them to come to terms with reality, but their sympathies continued to lie with the Habsburgs.

This faintly irrational attitude was nurtured by the economic and family links between Transylvania's Saxon towns and the German Empire. As Hungary disintegrated, these links gave new impetus to the growing German national consciousness of the Saxons.

In the period before Mohács, Queen Mary's court at Buda served Hungary's Germans as a training ground for political autonomy. At the same time, the court was a centre of humanistic learning. {1-666.} It was there that Reicherstorffer acquired a love of writing, which in a calmer phase of his life led him to produce one of the earliest geographical descriptions of Transylvania. It was also there that German harbingers of the Lutheran reformation — notably János Henckel, from Kassa, and Johannes Kresling, who came from Germany — made their first influential converts.

Around 1522–23, the first signs of the Reformation in Hungary began to appear in such German-inhabited towns as Sopron, Besztercebánya, and Bártfa. The new ideas reached Transylvania somewhat later, in the early 1530s. The Brassó-born Johannes Honterus pursued studies in Vienna, Cracow, and Basel before he returned in 1532 to Transylvania, imbued with the ideas learned from Luther's supporters in Switzerland. In 1538–39, he opened Transylvania's second printing-shop, in Brassó (the first, in Szeben, dated from 1529), and proceeded to publish his geographic and religious monographs, which became popular readings.

The turbulent period of Hungary's disintegration was propitious for the spread of new ideas. King John, and, later, György Fráter both tried to defend Catholicism, but they soon concluded that it made no sense to alienate the already hostile patricians of Brassó, Szeben, and Beszterce over questions of religion. In 1542–43, Honterus drafted the basic principles of the Saxons' rising Lutheran denomination and its Church. The last Catholic mass in Brassó was celebrated in October 1542. The following year, the diet at Gyulafehérvár dismissed charges of heresy against Brassó's Lutheran preachers. On 22 April 1544, Honterus was chosen as the town's Lutheran pastor, and his first initiatives were to reorganize the local school and establish a library.

The example of the largest town was soon followed in other Saxon settlements. In order to put an end to the initial disputes, the Saxon Universitas, meeting at Szeben on 28 November 1545, ruled that the Lutheran creed must be generally adopted. The Saxons realized that in the tense period following György Fráter's assassination, {1-667.} the Habsburg government was not likely to pick a quarrel with its most loyal supporters; seizing this opportunity, their Lutheran synod, meeting on 6 February 1553, took the step of naming a bishop ('superintendent') and chose Paul Wiener. The transformation was accomplished. Although the years of war that followed brought some organizational problems for the Saxon Lutheran Church, the latter's foundations proved to be solid and enduring.

The civil war and the resulting preoccupation of the government went a long way to explain the ease with which the Reformation conquered the Szászföld, but other factors helped as well. Europe's rapid economic transformation and the emergence of a world market also stood behind the spiritual renewal, and this linkage was present even in Transylvania.

By 1500, the guild crafts had developed considerable strength in the towns of Transylvania. Before Hungary was partitioned, craftsmen had to compete not only with their domestic counterparts in other towns but also with growing imports from Germany, Bohemia, and Silesia. The creation of the principality led to isolation from the earlier domestic competitors and a drop in imports from the west; on the other hand, the counties of the region east of the Tisza (Partium) attached to the principality saw a shift in their commercial links and became more open to Transylvanian products.

In fact, the principality's commercial isolation greatly enhanced the domestic economic influence of its towns. Saxon craftsmen were particularly energetic in exploiting the new opportunities. By the mid-1500s, there were nineteen craft guilds operating in Brassó, and, in the 1570s, the town became home to southeastern Europe's first broadcloth manufacture. Szeben had 28 guilds, representing some 30 different crafts, and at least forty crafts were practised in the towns of the Saxon region.

{1-668.} The towns expanded rapidly, and their appearance improved. At the beginning of the 16th century, Brassó consisted of 50 stone buildings and 1490 wooden ones; in 1550, the corresponding figures were 270 and 760, and, by 1600, there were 580 stone buildings but only 500 wooden houses listed in the town. Beszterce followed a similar pattern: 130 stone buildings and 450 wooden houses around 1500, 180 and 630 in 1550, and 350 stone vs. 450 wooden houses in 1600. Szeben and other towns no doubt underwent the same sweeping transformation, which not only served safety and comfort but also reflected a greater attention to style. In this period of war and economic recovery, the most noteworthy products of Saxon artisanship were those of the goldsmiths.

Amidst these signs of progress, there was little population growth in the major Saxon towns during the 16th century. Brassó counted some 7000 inhabitants in 1500, and 8000–9000 at century's end, when Szeben's population reached 6000 and that of Beszterce, 4000. The population of Segesvár and Medgyes did not exceed 2500.

Thus the cultural and economic revival that emerged in the mid-1500s was rather limited in scope, for the comparatively dense network of towns in Transylvania had a sparsely populated and economically backward hinterland. Local artisans soon filled the gap left by the decline in long-distance trade, but the initial recovery could not long conceal the inherent disadvantages of economic isolation. Access to the crucially important markets of Wallachia and Moldavia became increasingly difficult, and there was little scope for boosting trade within Transylvania. The towns were too small to nurture major handicrafts, while the rural economy suffered from a chronic shortage of money.

New difficulties arose when in the latter part of the century, foreigners arrived in quest of commercial opportunities: Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Romanian, and Armenian merchants who had previously crossed Transylvania to reach other markets, but who {1-669.} now sought to sell their cheap consumer goods within the principality. The 'Saxon nation' would regularly raise complaints about these 'newcomers' who bypassed the marketplaces protected by the staple right. In 1585, a law was enacted prohibiting Greek and Italian merchants from taking money out of the country. However, competition from foreigners could not be regulated out of existence, if only because the government realized that imports helped to satisfy consumer needs.

The principality's government acted against the Saxons' economic interests in other ways as well. The feudal estates were badly hit by the shortage of money coupled with inflation, and they reacted, in characteristic fashion, by blaming producers and merchants. Exploiting their political power, they got the diet to pass a series of laws (notably in 1556, 1560, 1571, and 1591) regulating prices. This state intervention seldom produced the desired results, but it did serve to hamper the economic development of the towns.

All in all, the economic revival of the mid-1500s brought little change in the circumstances of the urban middle classes. To be sure, lifestyles came to reflect the Renaissance: homes and the urban environment gained in elegance, and people read more. But the medieval structures of municipal administration, and Saxon rights grew stronger, and craft guilds survived unscathed. (The one attempt to establish a manufacture proved premature and failed before the end of the century.) The patrician-merchant class preserved the predominance it had gained in the 15th century. The leading merchant dynasties (Haller, Rapolt, Armbruster, Offner, and Lulay) continued to control the Saxon Universitas and suppress occasional rebellions, notably one, in 1556, at Szeben, which also had an anti-Hungarian thrust.

The brief phase of development in the 1530s and 1540s was reflected in the success of Honterus's life-work: the reformation, the foundation of a school at Brassó, his publications on language, astronomy, and geography. But as the economic revival faltered at {1-670.} mid-century, so did the cultural development of Saxon towns. Honterus, Pemflinger, Reicherstorffer had no successors in the spheres of religion, politics, and literature. The printing presses of Brassó and Szeben had less and less business; not a single German- or Latin-language work was published in Szeben between 1530 and 1575. It was emblematic of the Saxons' defensive retrenchment that their most significant achievement in these critical times was the publication of a legal work outlining their rights and privileges. After the royal magistrate of Szeben, Albert Huet ('Albert Süveg'), had secured official confirmation of the Saxons' privileges, Brassó's Mathias Fronius conscientiously collated the material into a comprehensive code. In order to publish the work, in 1583, the printing presses from Brassó and Szeben were brought together, with the result that the two firms once again found themselves on the brink of bankruptcy. Publishing in the Saxon lands began to revive only in the 1590s, when the demand for books became wide-spread.