{2-162.} The Ruling Class

At the turn of the 17th century, the principality's ruling class consisted of landowners in the seven Transylvanian counties and the Partium, along with those who by virtue of their ennoblement owned land in the Székelyföld. The boyars of Fogarasföld enjoyed growing authority over their villeins but could not yet be counted as part of this class.

Information is scarce on the circumstances of the ruling class in the Partium, but ample on the upper social strata in Transylvania proper, where they encompassed some 350–400 families at the end of the 16th century. Their landed property was highly fragmented, with parts of villages belonging to different owners. The same applies to members of the ruling class: 80 percent of them had only dispersed bits of land, and only around 15 percent owned one to three entire villages. Six nobles disposed not only of small parcels of land but also of an estate encompassing several villages, but these were still too small to be classified as latifundia. The six owners were János Gálfi, the Kendi family, Miklós Apafi and his widowed sister-in-law, Judit Cserényi, his widowed sister-in-law, and the two Erdélyi families. The Losonczi Bánffy and the Csáky families stood at the apex of this propertied class. Their respective estates in Kolozs County, at Almás and Bánffyhunyad, would have counted among the larger ones even in royal Hungary. By this time, most of latifundia that had been in private hands in the Middle Ages belonged to the treasury; the treasury estates were, in their entirety, comparable to the holdings of a wealthy aristocrat in Hungary, but far more extensive than the remaining private estates in Transylvania. The Csáki or Bánffy domain was dwarfed by the Zrínyi family's huge estates, which stretched from Csáktornya in the Muraköz down to a long strip of the Adriatic coast.

Property conditions in the Partium were similar, and they reinforced the eminence of the Bánffy and Csáky families, which had {2-163.} sizeable estates in Kraszna and Bihar counties, respectively. Although the Somlyai Báthori family was similarly wealthy, its major estates were not in the Partium but in Szatmár county. A few who had risen to prominence in the 16th century — notably the Iktári Bethlen, Zólyomi, and Wesselényi families — had most of their estates in the Partium. None of the Székelys rose to the authentic Transylvanian ruling class, although, by the standards of the Székelyföld, the Lázár, Mikes, and Apor families were quite wealthy.

Neither the turbulence at century's end nor Gábor Báthori's donations did much to alter the structure of the ruling class. The Bánffy and Csáky families continued to play the leading role, and there was little change in the second rank. Even those who amassed great fortunes around the turn of the century failed to assemble truly vast domains. When, in the 1610s, the prince began to expand the state's holdings and his own domain, he incorporated mainly former treasury estates; the rest of his acquisitions consisted of small, village-size fragments of land.

When György Rákóczi I became prince in 1630, his wealth already far outshone that of any of his contemporaries. He owned eleven domains, encompassing 228 villages, in royal Hungary; in contrast, at the end of the 16th century, the Transylvanian property of the seventy wealthiest families encompassed no more than 167 villages altogether. Subsequently, the reorganization of crown lands by Gabriel Bethlen only reduced the nobility's economic power.

This process of economic attrition continued under the reigns of Bethlen, György Rákóczi I, and György Rákóczi II, yet, remarkably, it did not undermine the ruling class. Thanks to the dispersal of its property, the latter always managed to retain some land. Moreover, it took less property to stand out amidst the general impoverishment. Thus the leading families managed to weather the uncertainty that marked property relations in the early 1700s. The only casualty was the Csáky family, and István Csáky's move to royal Hungary was prompted by politics more than economics; his {2-164.} property losses were no greater than those suffered by the Bánffy family. With Csáky's departure, the Losonczi Bánffys were left as sole medieval aristocratic family in Transylvania. Curiously, this socially preeminent clan stayed generally aloof from politics throughout the period.

One step down from the Bánffys came a cluster of nine great Transylvanian clans. The Gyerőffy, Apafi, Mikola, Kendi, and Bethleni Bethlen families originated in Transylvania; the Pekry, Kamuthy, Kornis, Haller, and Rhédey families had moved to the principality in the 16th century, but the differences in origin faded as they joined the ruling elite. They formed a closed circle; the Gyerőffy, Apafi, and Kamuthy families all became linked to the Bánffys by marriage.

Although these families enjoyed social eminence, they did not constitute a separate order within the ruling class. The reason is that there was no hereditary peerage in Transylvania; the egalitarian principle of una eademque nobilitas, which in Habsburg Hungary had lapsed by the mid-1500s, remained in effect in the principality. Neither title, rank, nor honours were inheritable — a situation that had become exceedingly rare by the 17th century, when, in most parts of Europe, the relationship between the two components of the feudal ruling class, the aristocracy and lesser nobility, underwent fundamental change. In the west, the aristocracy was said to be in crisis: numerical growth undermined its social eminence, and its economic and political eminence also declined. On the other hand, east of the Elbe, and notably in Habsburg Hungary, the creation in the 16th century of hereditary peers consolidated the economic power of great landowners and perpetuated the leading role played by the oldest-established noble families.

Transylvania was untouched by these trends. There, the Losonczi Bánffys were the only remaining medieval aristocratic family, and neither the Szapolyai dynasty nor the succeeding princes handed out hereditary titles. If, in the 17th century, someone {2-165.} in the principality bore the title of peer, he or one of his ancestors must have moved there from royal Hungary. Transylvanian titles were of a wholly different order. Although the magnates coming from the kingdom were also called dominus, the Transylvanian 'lords' (urak) and 'great lords' (nagyságos urak) were not officially differentiated from the rest of the nobility. They were not distinguished by great differences in wealth, and their social gradations essentially derived from common consent. A Transylvanian dominus enjoyed no particular rights or privileges. Even his participation in the diet depended on the caprice of the prince.

All this only serves to confirm that the prince enjoyed not only a unique social status but also unchallengeable economic and political power. At the end of the 1500s, no Transylvanian nobleman had wealth comparable to that of a Báthori; and in the 17th century, the prince's vast domains made him at least as wealthy as the entire Transylvanian ruling class. The nobility's lack of political power was underscored by the fact that even its involvement in the discussions of public issues depended on the prince's invitation. Thus the 'second serfdom' acquired a unique form in Transylvania; the system was polarized not between great landowners and villeins, but between the prince — the only great landowner — and his serfs. He was at once their prince and their landlord.

The Székelys and Saxons were outside this basic social structure, for they had no large, surplus-producing estates. The noble landowners and their villeins were, to a limited extent, allowed to produce for the market. There are no statistics to indicate the extent of their participation and amount of socage services extracted from villeins. The landowners must have disposed of marketable products, otherwise the diet would not have struggled against the prince's trading monopolies. But they were not serious competitors, which may be why György Rákóczi I felt free to liberalize trade.