Schools, Libraries, and Printers

As the era of comparative peace and prosperity drew to a close, Apáczai and his fellows deplored the limited coverage and old-fashioned pedagogy of the Transylvanian school system. Many localities still lacked a primary school, and the country had no university. Education was almost entirely in the hand of the Churches. Reform was overdue, but the system suffered severe losses after {2-457.} 1658. With the Turkish capture of Várad, a renowned school lost its home; the college of Gyulafehérvár fell victim to the Tartars' punitive raid. Few of the students at Kolozsvár's Calvinist college survived the plague in 1660. In 1704, the imperial commander's reprisals included burning down the college at Nagyenyed and massacring many of its teachers and students.

Despite these reverses, Transylvania's school system did not regress, but showed capacity for modernization. In the period of consolidation under Apafi, the schools that lost their homes were revived on new sites: Várad's school was reinstalled in the college at Debrecen, while Gyulafehérvár's college got a new lease on life at Nagyenyed. Transylvania also gave temporary shelter to the teachers and students who had fled Sárospatak. The schools got financial help from wealthy foundations and benefited from the prince's active support. Between 1660 and 1690, school buildings were restored, village schools flourished, and new momentum was given to mother-tongue education as well as to the schooling of girls.

The state guaranteed the right of the four recognized religions as well as of the Greek Orthodox Church to found their own schools. The college founded by Barcsai at Szászváros began to prosper. With the help of Chancellor János Bethlen's foundation, a primary school at Székelyudvarhely was transformed into a Calvinist college. Unitarian schools also gained in strength, and the Catholic as well as the Greek Orthodox Churches laid the foundations of what would become an extensive school system. The Romanian school at Fogaras, founded by Zsuzsanna Lorántffy in 1657, was the first and best institution of its kind; it tried to meet the demand for Romanian priests and teachers. Apafi gave his full patronage, including financial aid, to this school, and he was also instrumental in the creation, in 1667, of a Romanian school and printing-house at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Fehérvár.

{2-458.} After 1690, the growing influence of Jesuits and the Roman–Greek Catholic merger caused no little commotion in the sphere of Transylvanian education. The Jesuit colleges, along with expanded opportunities for further study in Rome and at the universities of Vienna and Graz compensated, in part, for the sudden dislocation in the educational system. The Protestant schools' well-established program of scholarships for foreign study helped them to weather the storm. To be sure, fewer people managed to pursue studies abroad during the war years, but, between 1700 and 1703, fifty-three Transylvanian students enrolled at the University of Wittenberg. There was growing interest in the option of study in England. When, in 1702, John Paget left his diplomatic post at Constantinople, four young Transylvanians — three Hungarians and a Saxon — accompanied him to pursue their studies in London. Miklós Bethlen and Mihály Teleki, Transylvania's leading politicians, and the scholar Ferenc Pápai Páriz all sent their sons to study in England. In his journal, the young Mihály Bethlen not only recorded his experiences in colleges, libraries, and laboratories but also reproduced in drawing the century's most important scientific instrument, a microscope; the younger Ferenc Pápai Páriz, for his part, got Isaac Newton to autograph his travel diary. The Churches tried to provide an institutional framework for study abroad. The Protestant Churches expanded their network of scholarship foundations to cover not only Holland but also universities at Frankfurt an der Oder, Leyden, Franeker, and Zürich.

All this could not compensate for the fact that despite much planning and effort, Apafi and his circle failed to establish a university in Transylvania. As for the Habsburg government, it chose to nurture centres of higher education only in Upper Hungary; in Transylvania, it concentrated on further development of the already well-established intermediate schools.

After 1660, Várad's scholarly community broke up; some members went to Debrecen, while others attached themselves to {2-459.} Apafi's court or to aristocrats such as Mihály Teleki and Miklós Bethlen. In response to the urgings of Balázs Uzoni, Bethlen established a soon-to-be-famous school that was attended by both men and women. The activities of a cultural circle, organized at Kolozsvár in the 1690s, were recorded in a reader printed and distributed free of charge by Miklós Misztótfalusi Kis. István Szőnyi Nagy, a Kolozsvár preacher who had studied at Utrecht, wrote a book — Magyar Oskola (Hungarian School) — for the express purpose of teaching reading to peasants, carters, and other illiterate adults. He successfully applied his new, phonetic method to reduce illiteracy in Kolozsvár.

Pedagogy and the curriculum came to reflect the stress placed by Apáczai on cultivation of the mind and on the natural sciences, although a shortage of books and laboratory instruments held back the pace of change. The Cartesian spirit had made great inroads in education during the 1660s. After 1690, Protestant schools tended to revert to a more conservative, orthodox approach. The new Jesuit colleges, which were strongholds of scholasticism, became potent centres of education for the scions of the aristocracy.

Transylvania's book collections suffered irreparable losses between 1657 and 1711. The library at Gyulafehérvár was destroyed, and the books of the Várad school were scattered to the four winds. Many books belonging to the Saxon secondary school at Szeben and the colleges of Kolozsvár, Marosvásárhely, and Székelyudvarhely were destroyed. Brassó's library, which had been founded by János Honterus and was the richest in the land, suffered a devastating fire in 1689; what remained of its collection was too little and too out of date to satisfy demand in later decades. A report, dating from 1680, at Marosvásárhely's college confirms that considerable sums were expended to meet the demand for books, and that when some works were not available, manuscript copies were acquired. More and more people came to value books and regard libraries as workshops of culture. The personal libraries of {2-460.} scholars like Apáczai and Pápai Páriz contained many important works acquired during their studies abroad. It became a custom for schools and churches to develop permanent collections from the books left to them by clergymen, teachers, and laymen. Mihail Halici bequeathed over five hundred books to the Calvinist school at Szászváros. This was the period when the 'coetus' library of Udvarhely College acquired the Tolnai, Apafi, and Bethlen collections.

The growth of private holdings is exemplified by the libraries of Elek Bethlen, Miklós Bethlen, and Pál Béldi. Their collections, as well as that of Mihály Apafi, included recent publications on politics, constitutional theory, history, and Cartesian philosophy. The four thousand works in the collection of a Nagyszeben doctor, Sámuel Köleséri, made it one of the largest private libraries of the times. The library of Anna Bornemissza at Radnót, along with those of Kata Bethlen and Jankó Teleki, indicate the emergence of a new readership: women and children. 'Gyurkó Bánfi sent a new edition, with gilded binding, of Aesop', reads the last entry in the 1676 inventory of Anna Bornemissza's library.[160]160. J. Herepei, 'Bornemissza Anna fejedelemasszony radnóti könyv-tára', in Herepei, Adattár III, p. 82.

Printers in Transylvania were too few to meet the growing demand for books. The latest calculations show that, between 1650 and 1680, the printers at Brassó, Szeben, Gyulafehérvár, Kolozsvár, Debrecen, and Nagyvárad published 396 titles, not counting reprints. The country's first printing press, established in Várad through the generosity of István Bethlen, remained in operation through the 1650s. Printing activity ceased in 1660 at Gyulafehérvár as well; it was resumed ten years later, but the rate of production did not exceed a few books per decade.

Várad's expert printer, Ábrahám Szenczi Kertész, had learned his trade with the world-famous Elsevier printers at Leyden. From Várad, he moved his printing press by way of Debrecen and Huszt to Kolozsvár; then he once again packed up his machines, tools, printing type, and paper stock, and transferred to Szeben. As several {2-461.} of his decrees attest, Apafi was intent on drawing printers to Kolozsvár and turning that town into a publishing centre. A highly qualified printer, Mihály Versegyházi Szentyel, settled there in 1662; over a period of sixteen years, he published in excess of a hundred books, mainly in Hungarian, using the typeface that he had brought from Holland. Printing houses were also established at Csíksomlyó and Keresd, and a Romanian church document was printed at Szászsebes in 1683, but the output of these presses was very small indeed. Transylvania thus had to rely on Hungarian printing houses, and more complex printing jobs had to commissioned abroad.

The modernization of book publishing was linked to the name, and short career, of Miklós Misztótfalusi Kis. In 1684, he drew up a plan for an up-to-date printing house, one that would be integrated with a paper mill and employ new technology to produce high-quality books in large quantities and at a low cost. His initiative won the support of influential Cartesians, and of the state as well. However, by the time he had assimilated the higher art of printing in Holland, and returned home, the circumstances had changed. Under the difficult conditions of the 1690s, in a country shorn of its independence, Misztótfalusi drew on his modest financial resources and, with the help of a tiny band of supporters, had a single-story book-publishing facility constructed in Kolozsvár. It was Transylvania's first purpose-built printing house, with the premises of the type founder, typesetter, and bookbinder laid out in a logical fashion to facilitate smooth production. His Ország Typográfiája (National Typography) was also innovative in that it could produce a large quantity of high-quality but cheap books, serve the printing needs of the state administration, and give the lower social estates of Hungarians access to books that, in content and form, were up to general European standards. Within a decade, the number of books published in Kolozsvár more than doubled (see the table). Alas, the changes that were imposed on culture and education after 1690 led {2-462.} to the collapse of Transylvania's first innovative printing house, burying both its talented creator and the prospects of modern book publishing.