The Cultural Role of the Catholic Clergy

There is no evidence, either written or archaeological, that the Bulgars who lived in Southern Transylvania prior to the region's conquest by the gyula had an organized church, or that Christianity might have spread among Transylvania's other Slavic peoples before the 10th century. The bishopric established by the gyulas at Szávaszentdemeter belonged to the Greek, and not the Slavic rite, and there is no trace of bishops at the gyulas' court in Gyulafehérvár. The round church whose remains were excavated on the precincts of Gyulafehérvár cathedral dates back to no earlier than the 10th century. It is most unlikely, therefore, that Transylvania's Catholic episcopacy came about as the result of the Latinization of some earlier, Slavic bishopric. The interval between the subjection of Northern Transylvania and the defeat of the gyula was so brief that even if King St. Stephen had considered creating a bishopric that encompassed the northern salt route, he lacked the time to carry out such a plan. At best, the king's unrealized scheme is reflected in the attachment in the Middle Ages of the counties of Közép- and Belső-Szolnok, Kraszna, and Szatmár to the Transylvanian bishopric. After the occupation of Southern Transylvania, Gyulafehérvár passed from the gyula's to the king's authority, and it became the new episcopal seat. The bishop's authority extended over almost the entire territory of Transylvania. The only exception was the prepostship of Szeben, which was {1-530.} founded in 1192 and came under the immediate authority of the archbishop of Esztergom; it encompassed the desertum where King Géza II had settled Saxons, and came to be known as 'Altland' to differentiate it from Saxon regions that were attached to the Transylvanian episcopacy. The names of Transylvania's bishops from this time onwards can be found in codicils to royal charters, but little else is known about them.

There are grounds for believing that the Transylvanian chapter, and perhaps also the canonical school run by learned priests, was founded by King Ladislas (the Saint). Over time, most of the ecclesiastical estates around Gyulafehérvár became the property of the canon. In Southern Transylvania, the bishop retained only three villages: Sárd, Akmár, and Berve. He probably resided most of the time in the manor house at Sárd, although he owned a few small properties in the royal castle-town. It was presumably in compensation for property transferred to the chapter that the bishop received Gyalu and its dependencies, although this donation provoked a centuries-long dispute between him and the abbot of the neighbouring monastery at Kolozsmonostor.

The Transylvanian bishop was one of the wealthiest prelates in Hungary. During the reign of Béla III, his income from tithes amounted to two thousand silver marks, and, among the fourteen bishops, he ranked fourth in terms of wealth. Then, and subsequently, tithes accounted for the major part of the bishop's revenues. To protect this source, he turned against the Teutonic Knights of the Barcaság when the latter attempted to entice away tithe-paying Transylvanians, and later against Saxon gerébs who tried to draw Saxon villages outside the Altland (along with their tithes) under the jurisdiction of the prepostship of Szeben. In the course of this festering feud, the Saxons, as noted, attacked Gyulafehérvár in 1277 and burned down the cathedral. The following year, Gyulafehérvár lost its status as a royal castle town and became the property of the bishop (as did Kolozsvár for a short {1-531.} period), who proceeded to reconstruct the cathedral. However, this precipitated another conflict, with the voivode, who had been compelled to relinquish the towns and to take up quarters in fortresses in the mountains. The rivalry in the 14th century between Transylvania's three high officials — the bishop, the voivode, and the abbot of Kolozsmonostor — occasionally degenerated into armed clashes and did great damage to the church's spiritual and moral authority.

Transylvania's bishops may have been belligerent, but they were also cultured men. Until the end of the 13th century, most bishops had an aristocratic background, and study abroad had been within their means. In the 12th century, Paris was the centre of learning for Western Christians, but only wealthy Hungarians could afford to send their sons there. In 1176, the University of Paris reported directly to Hungary's king regarding the death of a student named Betlehem, who is generally considered to have issued from Transylvania's Bethlen family. This episode suggests that the king encouraged and perhaps sponsored foreign study for young aristocrats. In any case, most of them found employment at the royal court, e.g. Adorján, a royal scribe, who later became bishop of Transylvania, and who first systematized the drafting of Hungarian charters. Another royal scribe and eventual bishop of Transylvania, named Paul, drew up in 1181 a charter regulating administrative records and establishing the royal chancellery. Thus Transylvania's bishops were selected from among the most highly educated churchmen, and the practice was maintained in the 13th century, when the lure of Paris waned and Hungarian students began to attend universities in Italy.

This shift followed a change in the social and political functions of the Hungarian clergy. Monarchs charged the bishops with diplomatic and military assignments, while canonical chapters, monasteries, and convents were designated as 'responsible institutions' (hiteles helyek) and given notarial functions. All these activities {1-532.} required legal skills, which Hungarians would seek in Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara rather than in Paris. They abandoned Paris in the century when scholastic theology and natural philosophy began to flourish at that university, with teachers such as Siger de Brabant, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Aquinas. Responding to the growing demand for clerics possessed of legal expertise, the synod of 1279 ruled that such expertise was a condition of appointment even to the relatively lowly post of archdeacon. In the event, only a few of Transylvania's archdeacons became known for their erudition. They include, in the 14th century, the chronicler János Tótsolymosi Apród, who was archdeacon at Küküllő, and, in the 16th century, the outstanding humanist Salatiel Tordai, archdeacon at Torda. University training in law was required of clerics attached to the two 'responsible institutions' in Transylvania, the monastery at Kolozsmonostor and the chapter at Gyulafehérvár, which were responsible for the northern and southern regions, respectively. Among members of the Gyulafehérvár chapter in the period 1292–1355, five had studied in Bologna, and two in Padua. Since the designation of 'responsible institutions' nationwide dates from 1231, it is likely that both of these Transylvanian church institutions began issuing official charters before the Mongol invasion. That must remain an assumption, for Gyulafehérvár was burnt down, and the earliest chapter records that survive date from 1278; as for Kolozsmonostor, the earliest evidence of notarial activity dates from 1288, and its actual records date from after 1334.

A more detailed picture of ecclesiastical culture in Transylvania begins to emerge in sources dating from the second half of the 13th century. Most of the surviving information concerns bishops. There were twenty-four who served in Transylvania between 1270 and 1524. Nine of these bishops came from an aristocratic background; apart for one member of a Transylvanian geréb family, they came from other parts of Hungary and bore the family names Monoszló, Szécsi, Czudar, Pálóczi, Perényi, and {1-533.} Várday. The others came variously from the lesser nobility, the urban middle class, or abroad. They included the Saxon Goblin and Péter Knoll; Benedek and Demeter, known only by their Christian names; István Upori, Balázs Csanádi, György Lépes, Gabriele Rangoni, Miklós Bácskai, Zsigmond Thurzó, and Matteo De la Biscino. The first bishop to issue from a rural market-town family, in the early 1500s, was the scholarly humanist Domokos Kálmáncsehi. By the late 1300s, all of them, regardless of their social background, had a university education or at least an equivalent level of learning. Similarly, 25–50 percent of the names of chapter canons figure in the registers of 15th-century universities; most of the twenty-five chapter preposts known to have served between 1287 and 1534 had a university degree and came from the nobility. There were some five hundred ordinary priests in Transylvania around 1300, and at least a thousand in 1500; a fair number of these were domidoctus, i.e. educated in Hungary, while some, even from small village parishes, managed to pursue studies abroad on their savings and with the help of family and patrons. Some aspects of the clergy's peregrinations will be noted below.