| The Landed Nobility: Innovation and Conservatism | 1. OLD AND NEW IN THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC LIFE OF TRANSYLVANIA | Markets and Merchants |
A textbook that was published in the languages of Transylvania's three principal nationalities summarized the distinctive features, evolved over centuries, of the towns and of a rural society still marked by feudalism. A town was 'a place where there are many fine and large buildings. There live the princes, governors, and legislators, many merchants, and craftsmen plying diverse trades. Towns have printing plants and major fairs; for money, one can get anything in a town, but that is not the case in a village.' In villages, people 'serve the landowner;' 'most of their homes are small thatched houses, and they make their living by cultivating the land and breeding animals, but there is little commerce or craftsmanship.'[42] Strictly speaking, only Kolozsvár, the 'capital,' and Nagyszeben, home to the military headquarters and the treasury, fitted the description. But some of the same features were found in the eleven free royal towns and the thirteen 'taxpaying localities' that were represented in the diet, as well as in the 50–60 market towns, half of which were under the authority of village magistrates. For {3-49.} instance, all of them were 'like towns in so far as they hosted weekly markets or national fairs.'[43] As will be detailed in the sections on commerce, industry, and mining, a community had to exercise some distinctive function to earn the status of town. An administrative role was not sufficient. Felvinc, the principal town in the Aranyosszék, was distinguished by the common ownership of land. It was not sufficient to have a single economic activity, such as salt mining, even though the latter was an essential supplier of the domestic market, and of southern Hungary and the Banat as well. As the mines near Torda, Vizakna, Désakna, and Kolozs became depleted, these long-established towns acquired an increasingly agrarian character. Parajd and Marosújvár, where the exploitation of rich mineral deposits was just beginning, had a population of under two thousand. The small, urbanized centres of precious-metal mining, Abrudbánya and Zalatna, were at the apex of a network of mining villages that encompassed shepherds' settlements in the Erdőköz; they constituted an important category in the hierarchy of towns.
Commerce and markets were the most important factor in urbanization. Both older towns like Kolozsvár, and newer ones like Erzsébetváros tried to consolidate their status by securing additional market privileges. Villages of varying size also tried, with mixed success, to obtain permission for the holding of markets. From the end of the seventeenth century onwards, the government in Vienna awarded, on average, one market license per year, but it issued twenty-six licenses between 1840 and 1848. This higher rate reflected not so much a growth in production and commercial activity as a growing desire for such activity and for social contact. Markets conformed to the seasonal rhythm of production and consumption, and they were often made to coincide with local feast days in order that people could socialize after the church service. For the people who lived in scattered mountain settlements, the annual fair was an opportunity for marital engagement and even {3-50.} impromptu marriage. The famous 'maidens' fair' at Gaina, in the Érc Mountains, which grew out of a shepherds' feast and was held without a license. The holding of village markets also prevented urban craftsmen and merchants from acquiring a dominant position. Village merchants, who went by the name of kalmár, enjoyed the protection of the landowner. The itinerant merchants — Armenians and Greeks, a growing number of Jews from Hungary and other parts of the empire, and some Slovaks from Upper Hungary — would do the rounds of village fairs, peddling textiles and spices, and some of them eventually settled in one of the localities. Village fairs served a geographically small area, or, alternatively, specialized in a certain product. Towns remained the principal trading centres; by virtue of their location, industry, and market, towns were also the main meeting place for the various social strata and ethnic groups.
Thus villagers must have been both attracted and repelled by the towns. Market villages aspired to win the privileges associated with towns. The market towns, which were under the authority of the border guards or of landowners, sought additional activities to strengthen their position in the regional and economic division of labour. Bánffyhunyad did so by promoting commerce; Torockó, which had a good elementary school but not a single shopkeeper, did it by way of iron mining and manufacturing.
Towns were distinguished from villages mainly by their 'freedom' and a large degree of administrative autonomy. Thus the merchants of Kánta, which had a population numbering in the hundreds as well as a renowned high school run by the Minorite order, considered their 'town' to be just like 'any European capital.'[44] Yet their settlement was but a stone's throw from the industrial town of Kézdivásárhely, which had 3,000 inhabitants, the majority of them border guards.
If towns are to be differentiated in terms of their interaction with the rural environment, they can be divide into two broad categories, Saxon and Hungarian. Saxon towns exercised administrative, {3-51.} judicial, and, with regard to Lutherans, cultural hegemony with the 'participation' of the villages, for delegates from the latter constituted a majority in the district assemblies. Movement from village to town was facilitated by the fact that serfdom had never been implanted in the Szászföld. Hungarian towns, on the other hand, depended on the goodwill of the monarch to rise above their feudal environment. This process was marked by a series of transitional forms: free royal towns, localities endowed with a variety of privileges, and villages that aspired to the status of town. Saxon and Hungarian towns also differed in their layout. Unlike their Saxon counterparts, the Hungarian towns — excepting Kolozsvár — were not walled; walls were built only around the churches, and the general layout was focused on the market.
Although urban society was stratified, it remained more homogeneous than the nobiliary-feudal society. Even wealthy noblemen generally managed to adapt themselves to the urban order of rights and duties. Yet they were not welcomed in Saxon towns, and, in the event, few took advantage of the possibility of 'concivilitas.' (Even the Bruckenthals were rather unpopular among Saxon officials and burghers because of their close links to Transylvania's aristocracy.) Residents of Nagyszeben would have been pleased, of course, if their town had hosted the diets and become, once again, the seat of the Gubernium (moved to Kolozsvár after the death of Joseph II), for both craftsmen and merchants benefited from the presence of noblemen. When nobles began to settle in the Hungarian towns, they gave a considerable impetus to urban development. Kolozsvár's tax rolls recorded some 80–90 aristocratic residents as honoraciors, that is, people of belonging to a higher order; each of them paid twice as much in civic dues as ordinary burghers. In 1840, the centumvirate overrode the resistance of the magistracy and elected two aristocrats to its ranks.
In market towns such as Zilah, Székelyudvarhely, and the Szászföld's Szászváros, public offices would be shared out among noblemen and long-established burghers. In so-called noble towns, {3-52.} such as Dés, Torda, and Nagyenyed, the burghers were nominally members of the nobility and demanded that their towns be freed from county supervision; at the same time, a growing number of aristocrats and well-educated nobles, who had moved to these towns and become nominal burghers, showed up as the most active participants in county councils. In the towns, the nobles basked in the prestige conferred by title and landed property; vis-à-vis other nobles, they could exploit the growing prestige of the towns. At times, notably in Torda, they were called upon to mediate disputes between long-established burghers and new arrivals. At other times, as at Gyulafehérvár, they would back 'the young' — better educated, and proud of their professional qualifications — against the older, corrupt councillors.
To be sure, the traditional burghers were, like the nobles, creatures of the feudal order. There were frequent complaints that long-established burgher families formed an exclusive caste, jealous of its privileges, that dominated local administration and tried to limit the award of civic rights. Like the conservative nobles, they wished to preserve the established order, and all the more when their status carried the right of preemptive purchase in the town's market, the exclusive right to operate taverns, and a greater share from forest and pasture, not to speak of access to public office. The burghers would freely proclaim that these privileges were theirs by inalienable political right, and remind the world that they paid the lion's share of taxes. Spurred by a more realistic appraisal of needs, higher authority instituted a second type of civic rights that offered neither political nor economic privileges but allowed people to engage in commercial and industrial activity. Having acquired houses and other property, these people could then rise to the rank of full-fledged burghers. The measure would facilitate the regeneration and development of the towns.
The largest towns, such as Brassó, Marosvásárhely, and Kolozsvár, were the most receptive to change, for their citizens {3-53.} understood the fundamental importance of commercial and industrial development. Of those who were granted civic rights in Kolozsvár between 1846 and 1849, 110 were born in the city, 33 elsewhere in Transylvania, 33 in Hungary proper, five in other parts of the empire, and two abroad. In most of the smaller Saxon and Hungarian towns, the award of civic rights was contingent on property. In Torda, for example, civic rights were granted only to those who owned at least eleven hectares (twenty cadastral acres) of ploughland and meadow.
In general, civic rights were reserved for members of the recognized 'nations' and Churches, but economic factors would increasingly outweigh such considerations. A case in point is Abrudbánya, which, by virtue of being a gold-mining town, was so open that new settlers had to pay only a token amount in order to be recognized as burghers. To be sure, the new arrivals' chances of advancement and participation in local government varied from town to town. In the stagnating town of Nagyszeben, civic rights were granted after ten years' residence, which helps to explain the absence of serious tensions. In the rapidly developing city of Brassó, Orthodox merchants did not tarry in exploiting the decree of Joseph II on 'concivilitas.' Some purchased homes in the inner city, and by the 1840s they figured among the city's major taxpayers. Yet only after a long struggle did a few of them manage to win full induction into the community, for the council was reluctant to grant political rights even to those who met the property qualifications. The town's governing council was answerable to the centumvirate, or 'communitas,' and the latter filled its vacancies by appointing one of the burghers nominated by the council.
This stratification of the bourgeoisie induced severe tensions. In Kolozsvár, it was proposed to alleviate the problem by raising the fee and extending political rights to all citizens. However. this remedy would have upset the 'oligarchic' municipal system and undermine the alliance between the urban order and bureaucratic {3-54.} absolutism. Although the initiative for reform had come from the 'communitas,' the majority of that body rejected it, and so did the government.
Although the traditional burghers tried to shelter their privileges, towns progressed on the path of modernization by nurturing a citizenry more open to democracy. The initiatives aiming at such change came from the odd senior official possessed of talent for organization (known in Kolozsvár as the 'town master') as well as from nobles and members of the intelligentsia who chose to play a role in municipal affairs.
Such urban reformers aimed not only to change the political structure of the towns but also to modernize agriculture in the hinterland. The mid-1840s saw the establishment of the Transylvanian Economic Association (Erdélyi Gazdasági Egylet) in Kolozsvár and the Saxon Agricultural Society (Landwirtschafts-Verein) in Nagyszeben. These organizations aimed to modernize agriculture by holding exhibitions and ploughing competitions and by popularizing more advanced farming methods.
Contemporary observers bemoaned the small number of towns. In the counties and the Székelyföld, only one out of fifty localities counted as a market town, and one in five hundred as a free royal town; in the Szászföld, the ratios were one out of seventeen and fifty. Indeed, by Austrian standards, these ratios were low. On the other hand, compared to other regions of eastern and southeastern Europe, Transylvania was truly a 'land of towns,' and not only because of the number, but also because of its social structure and quality of urbanization. The Romanian towns south of the Carpathians represented a transition between the towns of east-central Europe and those of the Balkans. Although these towns harboured many craftsmen and merchants, their society mirrored the 'feudal' society at large, the pattern of which was implanted by the boyars who established great urban households encompassing domestics and Gypsy slaves. On the other hand, Transylvania had {3-55.} no towns as large as Iaşi, with 40,000 inhabitants, or Bucharest, with 100,000; these were by far the largest towns in southeastern Europe.
Geographic features fragmented Transylvania and impeded the concentration of urbanization. Beyond Transylvania's borders, where river valleys reached into Hungarian Great Plain and the Banat, there arose 'gateway towns' with populations of 20,000–40,000; facing these, on the Transylvanian side of the border, were clusters of more modest-sized towns. Among the former, Arad, Temesvár, and Nagyvárad exploited the economic advantages of their location on trade routes and showed rapid growth; meanwhile, the smaller Transylvanian towns concentrated on domestic trade and the opportunities for a regional division of labour. Entrepre-neurial serfs from Bánffyhunyad floated timber on the Körös River, carted wood to less forested districts, and traded in livestock. The success of these ventures inspired a hope that if the ancient restrictions on the sale of land were erased, and if this market borough, which currently belonged to a landowner, was raised to the status of full-fledged town, Bánffyhunyad might become the 'leading Hungarian trading town.' Such speculations lacked a sound economic base, but they did reveal the intertwined desires for economic progress and political change.
In Transylvania, urbanization did not bring dramatic changes, such as the collapse of old urban centers and the emergence of new ones. The pattern was one of gradual development. Beszterce, with its immense church and a central square ringed by terraced houses, still struck visitors as a town in economic decline, yet by 1830 — and for the first time since the 16th century — its population had risen to over five thousand.
Between 1800 and the 1840s, the number localities with a population of over two thousand doubled, to around a hundred. Some important and well-located settlements, such as Balázsfalva (famous for its schools), Csíkszereda, and Csíksomlyó, had not yet {3-56.} reached this level. The state of agriculture did not allow more rapid urbanization, for people in the mountain regions were also dependent on food supplies from the lowlands. By virtue of their privileges, marketplace status, and population (above 2,000 in 1786), some three dozen settlements can be classified as towns. Between 1786 and 1850, their population grew at half the average annual rate for the country as a whole, 0.45 percent; for local residents (the so-called legal population), the rate was 0.2 percent, but if domestics and seasonal workers are included, it stood at 0.29 percent. To be sure, in Nagyenyed, Abrudbánya, and Zalatna, between a third and half of the population fell victim to the civil war in 1848–49, prior to the 1850–51 census. In the 1840s, there were only nine towns that had over 6,000 inhabitants; they ranged from Torda, where two-thirds of the population was agrarian, to Brassó, which by the 18th century had become a centre of industry and commerce. Only in four of these nine towns did the population increase faster than the national rate. The growth in Brassó and Segesvár was stimulated by industrial development; new settlers, from abroad and from the countryside, made the growth rate of the actual population (0.54 percent in Brassó, 0.57 percent in Segesvár) higher than that of the legal population (0.33 percent and 0.42 percent). However, the population of the surrounding villages grew at an ever faster rate, due in part to the proximity of the towns. The other two towns showing an above-average of growth, Kolozsvár and Marosvásárhely, were centres of government, national and local, as well as of culture and commerce; the annual rate of increase of their actual and legal populations were 0.51 and 0.51 percent, and 0.67 and 0.64 percent, respectively.
After the turn of the century, urbanization was marked by a burst of town-planning. Towns of all sizes acquired well-tended promenades, streets were progressively paved, and, in the larger towns, oil-burning street lamps began to appear. Although timber construction had been banned, the prohibition on pipe-smoking in {3-57.} the street was not lifted. The slow expansion of the towns was scarcely perceptible, to the point that the almanac's description of Nagyszeben did not change between the edition of 1790 and that of 1830. Years would pass before the annual local census recorded the construction of a new house. This was the case even in Kolozsvár, whose population, forecast a Saxon statistician, would soon exceed that of Nagyszeben and Brassó. Meanwhile, Kolozsvár was the first town where defensive fortifications were pulled down to facilitate expansion.
Between the 1790s and the 1850s, Transylvania's housing stock rose from under 300,000 to 400,000. The stages in this progression cannot be precisely determined. Construction was certainly more rapid in rural areas. In the Szászföld, new houses with tiled roofs proliferated, and in the Székelyföld, foreign visitors would admire the timber houses with Székely gates and columbariums. In the counties, on the other hand, much of the housing was of miserable quality; one visitor remarked that 'in no other country does it cost so little to build a village house.'[45] In Romanian papers, the random layout and poor quality of village dwellings was blamed on the surviving feudal system: 'Most of the serfs' homes are located and built according to the whim of the landowners, who never try to impose any symmetry on villagers. The latter, on the other hand, are not proprietors, and are ever ready to leave their home and move to another landowner's estate; as a result, the serf is not so stupid as to take pains in maintaining the home — nor his wife to tend a garden — for someone else's benefit.'[46] In places where the serfs had no incentive — personal or imposed — to move, their plots were 'packed with farm-buildings,' and there were flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees in their gardens.[47]
If construction proceeded more quickly in villages than in towns, the same could be said about the towns in comparison to castles and manor houses in the countryside. In the towns, many a construction foreman became a full-fledged contractor. Builders {3-58.} suffered in the lean years; some aristocrats were driven to near-bankruptcy by major construction projects, such as a park at the classicist Cserhalom Castle, the potentially monumental, classicist castle at Koronka, and the Neo-Gothic addition to the castle at Bonchida. Meanwhile, expanding Kolozsvár took on the appearance of a capital and generated considerable long-distance travel. Gaetano Biasini, an entrepreneurial fencing master, innkeeper, and hotel owner, organized a passenger-coach service to Pest that operated twice a week in summer; later, the business was taken over by his son. The coaches were scheduled to cover the 400 kilometres in three days; the travelling time to Nagyszeben was, at worst, two days, and, to Brassó, three days. If foreign visitors to Kolozsvár 'could imagine that they were in Paris, London, or Vienna,' it was not merely because local aristocrats spoke English or French fluently.[48] To be sure, Kolozsvár was not free of the misery commonly found in large cities; one reminder was the flickering candlelight emanating from the tiny hovels cut into the cliffside under the citadel.[49] But in the town below, the Neo-Gothic steeple of the church in the main square, the town hall in classicist and Neo-Renaissance style, the aristocratic palaces adorned with Romantic, Neo-Gothic features, and the massive, classicist Calvinist church in Magyar Street all testified that Transylvanian architecture was keeping up with the times. In the Baroque era, Transylvania had lagged behind Hungary proper in following Austria's lead. The classicist style spread much more rapidly through the Carpathian Basin, and the rapidly developing city of Pest would serve as a model. Classicist, then Romantic Neo-Gothic funeral monuments lent a distinctive character to urban cemeteries, and it was mainly these stylistic forms that came to be replicated elsewhere in Transylvania. Other towns could scarcely afford to emulate the scale of Kolozsvár's new buildings; instead, in a token display of modernity, panels in Empire and neo-classical style were added to the facades of otherwise anodyne town houses. The contrast and {3-59.} close proximity of the old urban culture and archaic conditions remained in evidence longer in Transylvania than in the rest of the Carpathian Basin. Urban development did have a certain stimulating effect on villages, but the latter fell farther and farther behind.
Conflicts between town and village became acrimonious when they involved the landlord-serf system, although the pattern varied by region. Brassó and Nagyszeben served as the 'landlords' of numerous multiethnic villages. Kolozsvár and Szamosújvár each owned but one village, where serfs were rather better off than most of their fellows: they could commute their services in cash and had excellent opportunities (by Transylvanian standards) for producing and marketing goods. As will be seen, the guilds' marketing privileges did give rise to some tensions, but it was mainly the merchants who suffered.
In the counties, and to some extent in the Székelyföld as well, the landowners had become town dwellers. As a result, the prevailing tensions between landowners and peasants had an impact on the relations between town and village. This was even more evident when the serfs belonged to town-based institutions, such as Nagyenyed's high school, the monastery of Kolozsmonostor, or, in the case of the Érc Mountains, the treasury itself. These tensions would be felt in the towns as well as in the countryside, and the suburbs served as a link between the two.
The suburbs and other peripheral settlements had close links with the rural world. Many of their inhabitants were former villagers drawn by the opportunities for work in the towns. (The odd craftsman would back a peasant movement, especially if he could turn this to profit, as in the case of the printer who was paid by peasants from Bács to reproduce the draft reform of 1820, which evoked a possible reduction in corvée.) The suburbs benefited from the town's proximity, and although they suffered from their subordinate status, resentment was attenuated by the fact that suburban homeowners became eligible for both types of civic rights.
{3-60.} The tensions between town and suburbs also had an ethnic dimension, which varied according to the mix of nationalities. These tensions prevailed even when the 'unity' of the suburb was undermined by social differentiation. Multi-ethnic Brassó, where Romanians were the largest single ethnic group, is a unique yet evocative example of this phenomenon. In the course of the eighteenth century, people in predominantly Romanian suburb of Bolgárszeg developed a preference for converting their suburb into an autonomous town. In the 1780s, there began a progressive move by the more prosperous merchants into the inner city; forty years later, the suburb became a focal point of the struggles by intellectuals and tradesmen for public office and on behalf of the political rights of Romanians. Most towns in the Szászföld had a Saxon majority, while some of the suburbs were predominantly Romanian (or, in the case of the Brassó suburb of Bolonya, Hungarian). The Romanians advanced their political demands (notably for representation and a share of public funds) through their Church; the clergy, resentful of its subordinate, semi-legal status, took a leading part in these efforts. To be sure, Greek Catholicism was a legally-approved religion, but the Saxon towns were dominated by religious and cultural isolationism, to the point that in Szászsebes, for example, even German Protestants from Moravia who had settled in the 1740s took an inordinately long time to secure full civic rights.
Tensions of this nature did not arise in towns of the Székelyföld, where there prevailed a more open attitude towards the society at large and in the counties. Except for a couple of Romanian market towns, these localities were predominantly Hungarian in population and culture. Some prosperous Romanians had settled in the centre of some towns, notably Abrudbánya and Szászváros (which, though located in the Szászföld, was very different from other Saxon towns), and they became, to some extent, assimilated, much as Romanian nobles had become absorbed into the society of Hungarian nobles (even in regions that were not predominantly {3-61.} Hungarian). The ethnic Romanian burghers who lived in the centre of Torda were regarded as Orthodox Hungarians, and they generally used the Hungarian language; meanwhile, the Hungarians communicated with suburban Romanians in the Romanian tongue. Even in predominantly Romanian Fogaras and Zalatna, a few people of Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox faith called themselves Hungarian in 1850. Municipal posts at the town and county level were allocated with some regard for the representation of the recognized religions, and in a few places, notably the Gyulafehérvár district and Vizakna, the Romanians made some efforts to participate in this contest for office. In places, like Hátszeg, where Romanians constituted a clear majority, most of the municipal posts were filled by Romanians.
The village was both attracted and, to some extent, repelled by the example of the town. By providing an outlet for the products of the village, town markets created an opportunity for urbarial peasants to loosen their feudal bonds while, at the same time, heightening consciousness of those constraints. Since towns were integrated into the feudal system, they also served to focus the resentment of serfs; at times, the towns were akin to islands threatened by a stormy sea of villages. The process of urbanization promised to resolve these problems by a gradual erosion of the feudal system. By their commercial and economic activities, the towns would expand the market and promote rural development.
| The Landed Nobility: Innovation and Conservatism | 1. OLD AND NEW IN THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC LIFE OF TRANSYLVANIA | Markets and Merchants |