Education at Home and Abroad

The schools run by ecclesiastical chapters, monasteries, and mendicant orders concerned themselves with educating the next generation of priests and monks and preparing students for foreign study. To provide more education, schools were supposed to be established in every parish, but these materialized only slowly, first in the larger towns, then in smaller ones, and finally in villages. In the 14th century, such schools — supervised by the parish priest — were operating in Kolozsvár, Szeben, Brassó, and Beszterce. They must have attained a respectable standard; sources indicate that, by the late 1300s, Szeben had a library serving both parish and school, and that in 1442 it held 138 volumes. Some priests are known to have had private libraries, which no doubt also served educational purposes. In 1444, a scolasticus, seconded to the priest, served as the village teacher at Egeres, in Kolozs county, but this was more the exception than the rule in rural Transylvania. There was, in any case, little need for schools that prepared students for entrance to university, for only aristocrats and the wealthiest patricians could afford to attend the institutions in faraway Italy and France. When, in the mid-1300s, universities were established in East Central Europe, at Vienna, Cracow, Prague, and Pécs, the situation {1-544.} changed: it became possible for the sons of urban guildsmen and noble landowners to obtain a university education within reasonable distance, and at affordable cost.

Little is known about the medieval university at Pécs, for its archives, including rosters of students, were destroyed, and there is no way to find out how many Transylvanians studied there. More information is available about enrolment at Vienna and Cracow, and there is some fragmentary data concerning Prague. In the Middle Ages, over 90 percent Transylvania's itinerant students attended one or the other of these universities. The first to register at Vienna came in 1368, at Prague in 1369, and at Cracow in 1405. However, few Transylvanians attended the latter institution until 1409, when donors, apprehensive about Hussite influence, ceased to offer scholarships for study in Prague. Thereafter, and until 1526, there were few years when Cracow did not welcome some Transylvanian students. A similar continuity can be observed in their attendance of Vienna University.

A smaller number travelled to more distant universities. King Matthias was a devotee of the Renaissance, and this helped inspire students to go to Italy, where the most popular destinations were Bologna and Padua; those universities enrolled their first Transylvanians in 1464 and 1468, respectively, and new ones would arrive almost every year. Others, far fewer in number, would attend the universities at Rome, Naples, Ferrara, Perugia, and Siena. German universities became popular with Hungarians only during the Reformation; before the Battle of Mohács, only a few dozen Transylvanians are recorded as having studied in Leipzig, Heidelberg, Ingolstadt, and Cologne.

The records at hand show 2,026 Transylvanian students attending foreign universities in the period to 1520. They also reveal the places of origin of all but two hundred of these students. The larger numbers came from Szeben (285), Brassó (267), and Kolozsvár (122), and Segesvár (95); although the relevant data is {1-545.} unclear, another major town, Beszterce, can probably be added to this list. Medgyes, Szászsebes, Berethalom, Nagydisznód, Torda, Gyulafehérvár, Nagyenyed, Szentágota, and Dés — small towns with a Saxon, or mixed, Saxon and Hungarian population — each sent 26–50 students. Between 10 and 25 students came from Kereszténysziget, Szelindek, Beszterce (?), Muzsna, Prázsmár, Földvár, Kőhalom, Hermány, Segesd, Vidombák, Régen, Alvinc, and Marosvásárhely; with the exception of Marosvásárhely, whose inhabitants were all Hungarian (Székely), these even smaller towns were inhabited mainly by Saxons. Another sixty Transylvanian localities were represented by 2–10 students, and thirty-four — including some villages — by one student each.

A disproportionately high number of students came from the Szászföld, between the Olt and Nagy-Küküllő rivers, the Barcaság, and the Beszterce district. In fact, Saxons made up a majority of the Transylvanians who attended university abroad. This probably owed in part to the fact that the cities of Vienna, Prague, and Cracow offered a German-language environment, and were thus more congenial for Saxon than for Hungarian students. To be sure, mother tongue was not a factor at the universities, where the language of instruction was Latin. A more important reason was the privileged legal status of the Saxon parishes. The deaneries of Szeben and Brassó, which encompassed thirty-seven parishes, came under the direct authority of the archbishop of Esztergom, bypassing Transylvania's bishop; these parishes enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in managing their finances and in administering ecclesiastical justice, which was an important source of revenue. The free towns, along with 250 parishes in the Szászföld, came under the bishop's jurisdiction, but they too were vested with archdeaconal authority, including the right to select their priests. Many of these localities would offer scholarships for study at foreign universities, and thereby end up with priests qualified to administer ecclesiastical justice; alternatively, the priests' emoluments {1-546.} allowed them to upgrade their educational qualifications abroad. The Hungarians' and Székelys' smaller towns and villages did not enjoy such advantages. They were tightly controlled and heavily taxed by the bishop, and lacked both the freedom to select their priests and the material means to send students abroad.

The geographical distribution of Hungarian and Székely university students was uneven. Most came from the Kis-Szamos valley, from Kalotaszeg (near Kolozsvár), from the villages in the Mezőség, on the right bank of the Szamos, from Alsórépa and Marosillye, along the Maros, and Csula to Alpestes in the Sztrigy valley. Székely students came mainly from the seats of Aranyos and Maros. In the more easterly seats, the towns of Kézdivásárhely, Gyergyószentmiklós, Nyujtód, Vargyas, Uzon each sent some students, but other towns, notably Sepsiszentgyörgy, Udvarhely, and Csíkszereda are absent from the list. Thus the Székelys' low level of education, which aroused comment as late as the Reformation, can be traced back to a lack of educational opportunities in the Middle Ages.

An analysis of the students' social background shows that the stratum of urban tradesmen was well-represented. This is evident from the large number of surnames denoting certain trades, e.g. Szabó (tailor), Kovács (smith), Varga (cobbler), Szűcs (furrier), Ötvös (goldsmith), Takács (weaver), and Mészáros (butcher); a few other trades are evoked in their Latin, German, or Hungarian forms. The list of students had always included aristocrats, prelates, and burghers. In the later 1400s, they began to be joined by members of Transylvania's Hungarian nobility. Some of the latter went on to distinguished careers, notably Péter Kecseti Agmánd, royal chancellor in 1445; Tamás Mérai and his nephew, Barnabás, both canons at Gyulafehérvár; and Máté Frátai Szentes, who was also a canon in that town at the turn of the century. Some students came from noble families that were of Romanian descent but had converted and become Magyarized, e.g. three members of the Osztró {1-547.} family of landowners, in Kolozs county, Márton Haczaki, the humanist and coadjutor of Várad, and a scion of the Csulai family, whose men more commonly chose a military career.

Most of Transylvanians who sought education abroad were drawn to legal studies, this being a qualification for employment in the church's notarial, 'responsible institutions' as well as for priestly duties in the more privileged parishes. The records show that of some two thousand students who came from Transylvania, nearly five hundred obtained Bachelor's or Master's degrees. Of the smaller number who obtained a Doctorate, four did so in Philosophy, five in Medicine, and five in Theology; but, in testimony to the prestige afforded by legal training, fully fifty-seven became Doctors of Law. These statistics, and particularly the predominance of law, confirm that despite the disproportionate number of Saxons, Transylvania's intellectual stratum, clerical and lay, was adapting to the cultural norms that prevailed in the rest of Hungary.