Florentine Families in Hungary in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century*

Krisztina Arany

National Archives of Hungary

 

This essay, based on a prosopographic database backed by extensive archival research both in Florence and Hungary, offers an overview on the patterns of the presence of Florentine merchants in medieval Hungary. Among the research questions, the Florentine businessmen’s main fields of interest in the kingdom are of utmost importance, because their interests shaped the patterns of their presence in the kingdom. Also, their financial and economic background in Florence significantly influenced the opportunities they had in Hungary. Thus, the forms of cooperation within the closer local and extended international networks within which they moved prove to be revealing with regards to business as it was run in Hungary. The reconstruction of this network also allows us to identify clusters of Florentine business partners residing in Florence who were investing in Hungary by cooperating with their fellow countrymen actively present in the country. I also offer a detailed analysis of the Florentines’ use of credit in Hungary, focusing on both commercial and money credit transactions and the various forms of transactions used to run business ventures there. Finally, I examine Buda’s role as a royal seat and major trade hub from the point of view of the two major foreign trading diasporas hosted in the town, the Italian/Florentine and southern German ethnic groups. I offer a comparative analysis of their interaction and the different patterns of their social ambitions and economic activity in Buda.

Keywords: Florentine merchants, German merchants, Hungary, Buda, King Sigismund of Luxemburg, Florentine Catasto, financial administration, economic relations

 

Introduction

Florentine merchants were present all over medieval Europe, trading in a wide range of goods, providing large loans, and holding key offices in financial administrations in several regions, including Central Europe. In this essay, I offer an overview of the patterns of their presence in medieval Hungary. In particular, I seek to explore the economic and social context provided by the Hungarian Kingdom for a relatively large number of Florentine businessmen working there, whose activity is documented in both Florentine and Hungarian sources.

The study of the activities of Florentine merchants in various geographical regions of medieval Europe looks back on a long historiographic tradition. However, for a number of reasons, in this context, Central Europe has been considered an area of less importance in the international scholarship.1 In Hungary, in contrast, the question of medieval Florentine–Hungarian relations has been a subject of interest in the scholarship from as early as the late nineteenth century. The majority of the works focusing on the topic, however, address predominantly the history of diplomatic relations, leaving out the study of economic affairs partly because of a lack of relevant source material available in Hungary at the time. However, this neglect of the socio-economic aspects of the presence in Hungary of a social cluster characterized by marked international mercantile activity today seems symptomatic of a somewhat misleading approach. Fortunately, this tendency to regard political historical analysis as the priority when addressing the topic has undergone a shift in recent decades, as evidenced by a number of recent economic historical studies.2 These inquiries lay the foundations for more thorough analyses of Florentine–Hungarian economic relations in the Hungarian historical context.

Following in the footsteps of these recent publications on the topic and, at the same time, making extensive use of new possibilities provided by the easier access to information (the result of mass digitization, processing, and the online publication of archival sources), I pursued research on the different aspects of the economic activity and social strategies of the Florentine families working in Hungary, drawing on as diverse an array of sources as possible. My research yielded a set of data, which can be regarded as unusually rich in the Central European context, as it includes written evidence from various Florentine, Hungarian, German, etc. archives. Building also on hitherto unused evidence, I explore new aspects of these businessmen’s strategies in Hungary. I also revisit some of the earlier research questions.3

My methodology is based on a comparative analysis carried out on two levels: a quantitative and qualitative one. The first is a generalized survey of the research questions from the whole data set collected in the form of a prosopographic database. The latter, the so-called micro level, consists of case studies of the activities of a few of the most characteristic and best documented families. This qualitative analysis is meant to function as a control for the results of the quantitative inquiry.4

A Word on the Sources

The prosopographic database primarily contains information from the fond of the Florentine Catasto, the documentation on the new, direct taxation system introduced in Florence in 1427.5 This is a corpus of fiscal documents, and it is homogeneous, unified, and extremely rich in information. Also, the Datini Archives of Prato were worth exploring, because a significant cluster of Prato businessmen were present in Central Europe.6 In addition, I examined the online Regesta Imperii and the digitized archival records and database of the Monasterium, looking in particular for information related to King Sigismund’s Florentine noble retainers (familiares). The data yielded by the Hungarian archival material is much smaller in quantity.7 Nevertheless, I consider these records very important complementary evidence, since the study is also intended as a comparative and complementary survey of the available Florentine fiscal sources and the rather scattered Central European records. The latter records also provide valuable evidence concerning the Florentines’ social and economic integration in this region, something not documented in the Italian archival material at all.8

This dataset, of course, could still be enlarged if further research were feasible in other rich holdings of the Florentine archives, and the project is still far from being complete. At present, the prosopographic database includes altogether 191 persons belonging to 100 Florentine families who worked or invested in Hungary. Out of this sample, 81 persons (43 families) appeared personally in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary on at least one occasion. The database contains 31 families who had several family members (altogether 94 persons) interested in business in the territory of the kingdom, of whom 77 businessmen personally worked in the region. Where there were several family members of the same generation (basically brothers or cousins), 10 families (17 persons) are listed along with another nine families (31 persons) who stayed and established themselves in the kingdom for at least two generations. The latter two groups, altogether 19 families with 48 persons, are particularly relevant for the analysis of their attitude towards integration within the socio-economic structures they encountered in the Hungarian Kingdom.9

Florentines in the Hungarian Financial Administration

Florentine businessmen engaged in an array of activities in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary. In all probability, the most important and best documented of these was their participation in the financial administration. In the case of the businessmen who were active in administration, we have a more complete picture of their activity, because the Florentine Catasto’s open account reported on the features of the complementary trading-banking operations, partners, and their social and economic backgrounds, and the majority of the scattered records preserved in Hungary and elsewhere in the region provide precious insights into their tasks as royal officers and noble retainers and their relations with local communities. Finally, these scattered sources sometimes corrected the picture given in the tax declarations on these merchants’ rather poor business profits in the kingdom. Therefore, I first outline and analyze the chronology of the first appearances of these merchants and their main activities in the kingdom.

Their presence was mainly tied to the collection of papal incomes and the lease and exploitation of mines for precious metals and salt until the second half of the fifteenth century. Based on the prosopography, of the 35 Florentines settled for a longer period of time in Hungary, 30 individuals (19 families) worked in the financial administration. The administration of royal revenues was a traditional field of activity for Florentine businessmen working abroad.10 The written records reveal their presence in the financial administration of a number of countries, including England, France, the German lands, and Poland. This kind of activity differed in its possibilities and duties from the work of the collectors of papal revenues.11 Unlike the collectors, who acted as part of an extended international network which also involved the great banking houses, the activity of the officers of the Hungarian royal chambers was based on their relationships as noble retainers to the chief officers, in other words, the counts of the chambers who employed them, and the leading office holders were also bound as servants to the king himself. The formation of royal monopolies required their prolonged presence in the country and their regular interaction with both the royal court and, in the case of second-level officers of the royal monopolies, also with members of the local nobility and urban clusters.12 Thus, for someone to work in the royal financial administration, it was preferable that he was continuously present in person, and it also required greater flexibility and an ability to adapt to changing conditions and increased the probability of someone settling in the chamber centers. The administrative reforms introduced by King Sigismund in 1395–97 set the framework for a mixed system of appointed officers and entrepreneurs, who managed the centralized chamber system, contrary to the previous general lease system of the chambers.13 Most of the Florentine office holders were rather officers and financial experts than entrepreneurs, especially in the case of the salt chambers and the offices of the thirtieth custom of the kingdom.14 This is confirmed by the research on the financial background of officers of Florentine origin. The information gathered is particularly revealing, as it shows that most of them, in fact, did not dispose of larger amounts of capital.15 The importance of the salt chambers is best shown by the keen participation of these businessmen in the proffered positions under the leadership of Filippo di Stefano Scolari.16 This, however, is not reflected in the Florentine Catasto entries, in which little mention is made on shipments of salt, an item generally considered a regular ware traded over long distances. Hungarian sources, on the other hand, include mentions of officers often being paid with salt, which had to be put to market.17

Many of the businessmen in the table of officers of mining and minting chambers also held offices in the salt administration on occasion.18 Sometimes, they were responsible for several offices in the same royal monopoly or even managed different monopolies at the same time. The counts of mining and minting chambers also had to fulfil local jurisdictional tasks. In a few cases, members of the same family acted in one another’s stead in the same office with royal permission, particularly in the case of the offices of salt chambers. Generally speaking, a restricted circle of leading officers of the salt and mining chambers replaced one another in the most important offices from year to year. This mobility also confirms that this replacement represented a shift in the top positions of the financial administration, and not new lease contracts.19 The only striking exceptions are the members of the Manini family, who focused almost exclusively on salt administration. This also limited their mobility, which remained confined geographically to Transylvania and the Maramureş region, where most of the salt mines were found. Transylvania seems distinctive as, at the moment, only one Florentine officer is known to have shifted offices between the salt administration and the mining and minting chambers found in that region.20

Also, the theory of business competition between southern German and Italian, mainly Florentine businessmen in the royal monopoly of precious metal mining at the turn of the fifteenth century (a theory further reinforced by the events between 1402–1403, which led to the expulsion of the Italian inhabitants of Buda and the seizure of their properties) needs to be reconsidered.21 The image of strong conflicts of interests should be revisited, particularly for Buda, in the light of new findings.22 Buda had a considerable Florentine community at the time. Citizenship in the city of Buda was also necessary for the Florentines working for the Buda minting chamber and trading in the first half of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, after 1410 Buda became the center of the royal financial administration (chambers), following King Sigismund’s centralizing reforms. The database also contains information on the appearance of southern Germans with Florentines in the royal administration, in particular on a count of the Buda minting chamber, Michael Nadler, a Buda burgher and judge and a member of the leading urban elite of southern German origin.23 He shared this office with Giovanni Noffri.24 In any case, King Sigismund’s preference to employ Florentine and southern German financial experts was probably mainly motivated by his desire to make the existing administration more efficient and draw as much liquid assets as possible from the royal monopolies.

The Buda Partnerships

The evidence concerning trade practices of Florentines in Hungary is much less representative in Hungarian archival material than the information on financial administration. Thus, the set of data provided in the 1427 Florentine Catasto of three Florentine companies with Buda as their principal seat (for the Carnesecchi–Fronte, the Melanesi, and the Panciatichi firms) is essential to any effort to obtain a more complete image of their activity and also of Buda’s position, at least in a regional context. Due to the array of information and the central position of the three partnerships in the business network of Florentines working in Hungary, social aspects and business forms are also addressed in detail. The members of the partnerships working in Hungary mostly ranked among the merchant-bankers of middling wealth in Florence. Although they worked in a less developed region, they continued involving external capital, as was general for Florentine partnerships. Their start-up and working capital rank them among the average-size partnerships in Florence.

The proportion of Hungarian and Florentine partners and clients and the volume of business could only be addressed in the case of the Carnesecchi–Fronte and Melanesi companies. Among the Florentines listed in their declarations, one most frequently comes across mention of their fellow countrymen working or investing in Buda and in Hungary in the period covered by the records. It is no surprise, of course, that the sums involved in Hungarian business by Florentines were decidedly higher than those sums, mostly debts, listed by the names of Hungarian partners. In fact, comparing the two latter Buda companies, the most striking difference seems to be with respect to the proportion of Hungarian partners and clients with the Florentines. The lists of the Melanesi brothers reveal fewer Hungarians compared to the Carnesecchi–Fronte company. The latter firm lists mainly members of the Hungarian lay aristocracy and prelates among their debtors and creditors, in some cases with larger sums, usually loans (3–400 fl), by their names. The debts and loans of the Melanesis’ Hungarian partners varied in their volume: from small loans up to 100–200 fl. The lists reveal extensive cooperation with some prominent burghers of Buda, among them Michael Nadler (144 fl) and Gregory Ferenci Gubacsi (136 fl), who was interested in cattle trade and also served as the town judge of Pest.25 They also met the needs and accepted various commissions of the guests, diplomats, and members of the royal court.26 Some of the foreigners staying at the court of Sigismund can be identified in the Florentine Catasto lists, including the Genoese Bartolomeo Mosca, legate of the duke of Milan, and Peter, the first duke of Coimbra (1392–1449), son of King John I of Portugal.27

The most important client of the Florentine investors and partnerships, although quite often identified as the worst one in their tax declarations, was King Sigismund himself, though his wife, Queen Barbara, is also mentioned a few times in the lists.28 The constant need for liquidity is well-known and fairly comprehensible in the case of Sigismund of Luxemburg, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and king of Hungary. On the other hand, the ruler’s support and his commissions were of utmost importance to these international merchant-bankers, though his changing political relations with Florence rendered circumstances unstable for them at times. The direct relation some of them (including representatives of the three stable Buda companies) managed to achieve by entering into the ruler’s service as his noble retainers notably increased the business potential of the region for them. Not surprisingly, agents of the two Buda partnerships were granted royal support for their activity in the kingdom.29 Nevertheless, as was the case among the Florentines in England prior to the bankruptcies, some of Sigismund’s “bankers,” like the Melanesi, faced serious losses against other Florentine investors involved in the Hungarian business, in all probability partly due to delayed or neglected rendering of the loans provided for the king.30 The ruler seems to have compensated them for their losses in some way or another, but their legal situation back home was worsened by these circumstances. The rather negative, somewhat one-sided picture of him as a client in the Florentine Catasto’s open accounts can probably be ascribed to these difficulties.31 However, some Hungarian archival records also preserved mentions of transactions in which the debts owed to the Florentines were settled by King Sigismund.32 According to these records, the payments were usually fulfilled by pledging royal revenues, like that of the yearly gift of royal free towns, to settle smaller loans, or salt was allocated for the settling of larger loans. In other cases possessions, sometimes including towns, were pledged with the restraint of redemption.33

Among the Florentine investors present with their capital in Hungary, a few businessmen of medium or higher wealth were identified.34 Their investments were distinctive, as they were present in Hungary with different investment forms at the same time: a common pattern is that, in addition to investing in the Buda companies, they apparently also employed their own agent in the kingdom.35 As we saw above, the aim may have been to keep the proportion of long term and more liquid investments balanced.

The highest ranking Florentine investor entrepreneurs and partnerships in the Hungarian market disposed of sizeable amounts of capital.36 They were investing in the Florentine companies of Buda, but their investments made in Hungary were not high compared to their funds in other, more developed geographical regions. Hungary attracted them with its stock of precious metals and salt, and may also have served as a secondary market to attenuate investment risks. In case of disputes abroad between Florentine citizens, they could turn for legal decision to the court of the Mercanzia of Florence.37 This was also true for Florentine business partners in connection with their common business ventures in Hungary. The Florentines were also supported by their urban government. In cases involving business problems in foreign lands, Florentine diplomacy moved on behalf of its citizens.38 Of course, when the ruler was the debtor, these efforts were not always effective.

The participation of some medium and small-scale investors, mostly belonging to the kin group or neighborhood of other Florentine businessmen working in the kingdom, is a clear indication of solidarity within the kinship network, a strategy particularly characteristic in Florentine economic context explicitly in the cluster of medium and small-scale entrepreneurs.39

Transaction Types and Volumes

Another question addressed by the research concerns the volume of these transactions, or more precisely, whether the rate of commercial and money credits is also reflected in their volume. Of course, Hungary lacked intensive circulation of money. As was observed in the analysis of the transaction types, commercial credit was more prevalent than money credit.40 Both credit types were risky due to lack of necessary capital on the side of most of the potential local Hungarian or German business partners. Interests, however, were clearly higher than in Italy in the same period, which made such transactions favorable despite the relatively high risks they involved.41 The high number of Florentine crediting partners can mainly be ascribed to the general tendency of diminishing risks not really by contract enforcement, but mainly by making a greater number of lower investments in different companies working in different regions at the same time. Also, the fact that their clients were primarily members of the lay aristocracy or part of the royal court (including the ruler himself) implies that they needed to gather major capital, be it money credit or, in most cases, commercial credit, and thus a broader base of partners and external investors provided the required assets.

The number of transactions carried out between Florentine–Hungarian business partners compared to that of Florentine–Florentine partners participating in business in Hungary confirms at the outset the predominance of the latter (44 transactions versus 237). This can only partly be explained by the motivation of Florentines to hide the transactions that were difficult for the otherwise very thorough Florentine taxation authorities to verify. Clearly, references to Hungarian or local partners in Hungary could be easily avoided if the Florentines chose to do so, blaming differing regional uses of contracting business and the general lack of literacy in trade in Hungary.42 This is somewhat contested by information found in the correspondence of Florentine chamber officers among themselves in Hungary, because here one finds references to debtors and even mention of accountant books.43 However, one must also take into account that the data used by the Florentine fiscal authorities were provided primarily by Florentine investors in Florence whose direct business partners were mainly Florentines working in Hungary and who, therefore, rarely had detailed information concerning their partners’ local business contacts, nor presumably considered it worthwhile to enter these data into the tax returns. Only in a few cases, particularly in the tax returns of Florentine entrepreneurs who employed their own agents in the region, are names of Hungarian persons listed, although usually they are registered jointly as Hungarian debtors.44

To sum up, I identified a rather restricted circle of local partners in the records. Clearly, the number of Florentine partners collaborating to meet the demand for luxury goods among a narrow circle of local clients (mainly members of the lay aristocracy and the ecclesiastical elite) was higher than that of the local partners. Also, transaction types need to be addressed, although again in a rather limited way, because details concerning transactions are sporadic in the source material. Altogether, the information on the Florentines’ crediting activity found in the Florentine tax returns provides hitherto unknown details both on the volume of cargo and the business and banking techniques applied among the Florentines to supply the Hungarian market. The general lack of references to bills of exchange in the Florentine sources (and a similar absence of references in the Hungarian records) and the extremely few banking operations also clearly indicate the limits to international trade and banking, given the lower level of development in the region.45 At this point, however, one must also emphasize Venice’s role as a banking center and seat of branches of Florentine banking houses, which basically covered the transfer of ecclesiastical revenues, a traditional business of Florentines in Europe.46

Florentines and Southern Germans in Buda: A Comparative Analysis

The gradually developing database showed the clear regional geographical preferences of the Florentines in the Kingdom of Hungary and in Central Europe on a wider, regional scale, and thus led to the conclusion that the presence itself of the Florentines and also the shifts in the intensity of their presence in the regional hubs of Central Europe may be of interest and would yet position the Kingdom of Hungary, and especially Buda, within a regional context. For this reason, I examine the main features of Florentine diasporas in the region, with particular emphasis on Buda.47

Italian merchants in Buda aimed to supply the demand for luxury goods for the whole Hungarian market in this period.48 In Buda by the late fourteenth century, however, they confronted a new, fully integrated German elite (mainly coming from Nuremberg, although there were Buda burghers from Basel, Passau, Vienna etc. in lesser numbers), which in the meantime took over the leadership of the town. They replaced the former, fourteenth-century urban elites, which had been rather passive in long-distance trade but were at the same time eager to integrate into the Hungarian nobility in the most important urban offices.49

As shown above, the theory of conflict among German and Italian merchants in the town has been interpreted as the result of business competition. However, in the context of Buda, the ambitions and business targets of the two ethnic groups and the strategies they developed to meet them seem to have been complementary rather than contrasting when it came to trade.

From the information gathered so far, it seems that rather than competing with each other, the Italians and southern Germans of Buda divided the fields of operation among themselves. The Germans’ activity mainly focused on the sale of lower-value wools, even those coming from northern Italy (Verona), whereas trade in luxury goods and prestigious textiles was “left” to the Italian businessmen with major financial potential. The Florentines were able to provide the necessary capital for such trade by involving homeland investors, using well-developed banking techniques, and, finally, taking advantage of the extensive business networks within which they operated. They were also active in providing large loans, not only to the ruler, but to the members of the Hungarian aristocracy and to foreigners visiting the Hungarian royal court, as one sees in the case of the Buda companies.50 The sources on their business activity reveal the use of occasional banking services in the form of assignments and bills of exchange carried out mainly for prominent foreigners sojourning at the court.

Both Germans and Italians in Buda were interested in the operations related to royal monopolies.51 Here too, the sources indicate cooperation among members of the two ethnic groups in Buda. The Italians still focused closely on the business of the sale of copper and salt and on the lease of the Slavonian thirtieth customs. All the officials operating in this field were noble retainers, that is, servants of the king, assessed usually as a rather medieval feature of the financial administration,52 which implied a personal relationship to King Sigismund of Luxemburg. Out of 12 noble retainers of Florentine origin, six certainly had Buda citizenship as well.

According to the Buda Town Law (Ofner Stadtrecht), retail trade or shop keeping in the territory of the town was only granted to the citizens of Buda, who also paid a tax for the right to sell merchandize.53 This norm, which most probably existed in earlier decades, made urban citizenship essential for wealthy foreign merchants from the late fourteenth century onwards. Therefore, most of both the Italians and southern Germans in Buda acquired citizenship of the town. As citizenship required possession of real estate, many of them also had houses, gardens, vineyards etc. within the town walls. Looking only at the Florentines, in the 1420s, at least 30 businessmen (belonging to 25 families) were Buda citizens based on the prosopographic database.

For the German elite of Buda, however, real estate may also have played a notable role in trade transactions. As these families frequently lacked the necessary capital for long distance trade in wool or cattle, these possessions may have also served as mortgage items for business operations. Although the medieval archives of Buda were destroyed, the existence of so-called Verbotbücher seems to be plausible based on analogy with other towns in the region engaged in the same sort of trade.54 Such operations were, in fact, inserted in the Verbotbücher of Pozsony (Pressburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia) and Vienna in order to cover the potential losses of the investors.55

The Germans tended to integrate into the local urban community. However, even their integration seems to be somewhat odd, as they were not keen to marry into Buda’s patrician families, whether they were from the former German elites of Regensburg origin or the developing Hungarian elites. In fact, the Germans preferred to establish family ties with members of the German elite in other Hungarian towns, particularly those involved in their business network, such as Pozsony, Vienna, Crakow, and especially Nuremberg, their hometown. In this respect, the southern Germans’ presence and social network has a marked regional character in Central Europe.56 As opposed to their marriage policies, the members of the southern German elite in Buda were very active politically. In fact, they were present in the town council and almost “monopolized” the office of the town judge in 1403–39.57

In the case of the southern Germans, not much changed over the course of the fifteenth century: their presence in Buda and in the economic life of the kingdom was continuous, with a greater number of newcomers observed in the 1470s. Later, the southern German trade houses, such as the Welser and Fugger from Augsburg, also established permanent agents in Buda.58 These German firms with their substantial capital finally set up real competition for the Italians, first in the field of tithe collection, which they took over in the Habsburg territories from the Italians,59 and then in Hungary particularly in the management of mining chambers.60 The Germans of Buda also provided supplies for the royal court on some occasions, although still at a lower volume compared to the Italians according to András Kubinyi, who analyzed the average value of their shipments in the accountancy of the royal court.61

Italians, in contrast, even if they were wealthy merchants or their established agents living and working in Buda for decades, rarely married into the local urban community. Most of them had left their families in their homeland and did not settle permanently in Buda.62 Accordingly, they did not directly participate in Buda’s urban government either, but tried to maintain good relations with the leading German and, later, also Hungarian merchants of the town.63 In the few cases of marriage alliances into local families, they mainly chose spouses from the nobility.

In any case, Buda seems to be the only Central European center which was targeted by flows of both the southern German and Florentine merchant diasporas from the last decades of the fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth century. Therefore Buda can be perceived as a kind of borderline regional urban center, where direct contacts and on occasion even cooperation were documented between these two foreign merchant communities, which dominated regional trade and which did not appear to have had direct contacts elsewhere, except for Venice.64

Although Venice with its Fondaco dei Tedeschi and large Florentine community could and did function as such a trade hub, the Serenissima, as an intermediary center for long-distance trade, does not seem to have been considered sufficient to seek, find, and finally cover the increasing demands and possibilities provided by Central Europe during the reign of King Sigismund. One must also consider the city’s serious conflicts of interest with King Sigismund. Buda, in my understanding, must have benefited greatly from this controversy. The Florentine diaspora in Venice (the only institutionalized Florentine colony in the region), therefore, played a crucial role in promoting the area’s business possibilities, and the Venetian branches of Florentine banking houses provided the necessary banking facilities for trade in the region.65

Florentines in Central Europe

At this point of my inquiry, I look at the social economic patterns of the presence of Florentines in Central Europe in a relatively broad time framework, lasting from the early fourteenth century up to the end of sixteenth century. Except for Venice, no institutionalized Florentine colony seems to have been established in the region in the period in question, and the records indicate very few cases of exogamy or integration.66 Also, geographically Central Europe is considered here for the purposes of this investigation in a rather broad sense to include Ragusa (today Dubrovnik, Croatia) (which during most of fifteenth century was under nominal Hungarian overlordship and which had a significant Florentine community within its walls) to the south, Poland (primarily Crakow) to the north, and Wrocław, Vienna, and Nuremberg to the west.67

Ethnic provenance appearing in urban toponyms, like the vicus latinorum, platea italicorum etc., was present in several towns, although the case of Buda shows that this alone must not be overestimated as a crucial indicator for ethnic clustering of Italians and particularly Florentines in late medieval urban centers of Central Europe.68 However, it does suggest a relatively dense presence of Italians in the given urban environment in a certain (probably early) phase of urban evolution. Therefore, other factors, like use of language, political representation in urban community etc., must be evaluated as possible indicators of a more precise assessment of the possible presence of Florentine or Italian diasporas in the regional centers.

In contrast with Buda, the Latin community of Zagreb (also an important hub for Italians along the main inland trade route), which had formed earlier (beginning at the end of the thirteenth century) and was made up primarily of Italians (mainly Florentines) disposing of lesser assets (and including many artisans), seems to have been clearly identified as an ethnic cluster within the urban community.69 The Latins of Zagreb also aspired to acquire and acquired urban political representation as the town’s Latin nation in a peak period, which lasted from the last decades of the fourteenth century to the first half of the fifteenth century. This may be interpreted as a conscious endeavor on their part to participate and also to integrate into the local urban community, which is further confirmed by the higher number of marriage alliances with local families from other ethnic clusters of the town. Of course, limits to a comparative analysis again are set by the available sources, which differ both in their quality and quantity from place to place.

The notion of the Florentine diaspora as a diaspora’s diaspora based on geographical distance (Buda–Zagreb–and ultimately Venice) is an intriguing idea. However, one must take into consideration that in both Venice and Buda rather large-scale and medium-scale Florentine merchants were present, whereas Zagreb’s Italian community hosted mainly Florentines of a lower social and economic standing, more keen on integrating, particularly compared to the Florentines of Buda. Of course, there was a number of Florentines who figured in both or all three of these urban centers. Thus, their mobility can also be understood as a distinctive feature of a diaspora within a diaspora, but this question needs further research.70

Another point in favor of Buda’s rise as a regional trade hub can be ascribed to King Sigismund and the royal court’s definite establishment in the city. When addressing the factor played by the royal court in Buda, one must also emphasize Sigismund of Luxemburg’s rise to the position of emperor. Thus, Buda hosted the imperial aula from time to time and became a European political-representational center and thus must have generated an increasing presence of Florentines in the city. Neither Vienna, nor Prague, nor any other town in Central Europe assumed a position of such prominence in the fifteenth century. Buda also disposed of an international trade deposit and market hall, a Nyder lag as it was called in the Ofner Stadtrecht.71 The town’s staple rights, however, were from time to time weakened by similar privileges acquired by neighboring towns along the main trade routes in the early fifteenth century. The information on the three Florentine partnerships with seats in Buda in the 1420s (analyzed at length in the previous paragraphs) makes Buda the only Central European trading center with such an intensive Florentine presence in this period. The next town to host a Florentine company was Nuremberg (the earliest reference to this dates back to 1512).72 The presence of Florentine partnerships in Crakow also dates to the sixteenth century.73

Social and Economic Strategies of Florentine Families Working in Hungary

Eight families (Panciatichi, Buondelmonti, Manini, Attavanti, Melanesi, del Rosso, Lamberteschi, Capponi) were selected for the qualitative survey for a number of reasons. First, they represent a cross-section of Florentine merchant families from the perspectives of wealth and social standing.74 The Panciatichi family was taxed as one of the wealthiest families in Florence at the time. The Buondelmonti family had a high social status but a somewhat weakened financial situation at the time of their stay in Hungary. The Manini and Attavanti families were the last families recorded in the Florentine Catasto of 1427 as miserabile, with no taxable wealth at all. I focused on the role that the closer and extended family played in the activity of the Florentine businessmen working in the Kingdom of Hungary in the first half of the fifteenth century. I also investigated the extent and characteristics of cooperation among the members of a family belonging to both the same and consecutive generations, and I compared these features to the business organization of Florentine merchant families operating in their homeland.

In families involved in trade and credit activity in the kingdom, very often members of two generations cooperated. The father was the commissioner and owner of the goods, while the sons played the roles of agents, travelers, or resident agents. This was true in the case of both the Lamberteschi and the Panciatichi families. In the case of the Panciatichi partnership, the extended family was represented by Filippo di Simone Capponi, Giovanni di Bartolomeo’s Panciatichi’s brother-in-law, who worked as a salaried agent settled in Buda.75 Another example of members of a Florentine extended family jointly running a company in Hungary is provided by the Melanesi brothers, Simone and Tommaso. They resided in Buda, but were in partnership with their uncle, Filippo di Filippo, who remained in Florence. They also involved other members of the wider lineage, men like Melanese di Ridolfo Melanesi, in their business operations.76

Altogether, the solidarity of the Florentine families was realized in different ways in Hungary compared to their homeland, where business competition was much more intense. As the case of the Attavanti family shows, the solidarity and cooperation of the family found manifestation in several different ways. The separate fiscal declarations of the brothers Cristofano and Leonardo suggest two separate households. However, the fact that the younger children and the widowed mother also moved to Hungary suggests that probably both brothers supported them, and that the two separate fiscal households still formed an integral economic unit.77

The examples cited above show brothers staying together in a common household with their families and apparently running their business together and sharing the profit, the financial potential, and also the risks, regardless of their actual financial situation. This pattern is very different from the practice of merchant families operating in Florence. The few cases of integration, on the other hand, show full adaptation to the local community, be it urban or noble. In cases of integration into the nobility, there clearly was a tendency to give up previous activities, linked mainly to financial administration.

In the very few cases of ennoblement, the relationships of businessmen to the king and the types of services rendered to King Sigismund were crucial.78 In the case of families acquiring nobility and estates, their joint possession also secured the perpetuation of the estate for subsequent generations of the kin group, even if one of the ennobled branches became extinct. The case study proposed on Niccoló Buondelmonti’s settlement and integration into the Hungarian landed aristocracy in 1440, long after Scolari’s death and also after King Sigismund’s death, proves that the Buondelmonti kin group’s success cannot be ascribed solely to their family ties to the Scolaris. The Hungarian branch of the Florentine Buondelmonti family, however, became extinct after two generations, but the large estates in their possession from the Lévai and Treutel families were subject to long legal debates between the son of Peter Lévai Cseh on one side and Paul Herceg of Szekcső on the other.79

On the basis of our present knowledge, the majority of Florentines who settled in the Kingdom of Hungary lived in urban society. Leaving aside Buda for the moment, other towns can be identified as permanent or temporary residences of Florentines in the first half of the fifteenth century, among them mostly mining, minting, and trade centers, particularly Transylvanian Saxon towns. The Transylvanian towns, particularly the Saxon towns, which enjoyed notable autonomy from the late fourteenth century onwards, seem to have offered a particularly favorable context for urban integration for Florentines in Hungary.80 Thus, a few of them established themselves and integrated into local families of local leading elites through marriage in the Saxon communities of these towns. They had houses and estates in the most important local towns, and in a few cases we can trace the activity of their descendants in the area through the fifteenth century.81 Two of them, Cristoforo Italicus and Zanobi de Florentia, counts of the salt chambers at Vízakna (today Ocna Sibiului, Romania), were selected as examples of successful integration into urban community in Hungary. This time, the Hungarian source material served as the point of departure.82 These records at least revealed that they were brothers, and they also mentioned another count of chamber called Pero de Rassys.83 The identification of the family they belonged to was not possible exclusively on the basis of the Hungarian sources. Fortunately, the Florentine Catasto records provided necessary information to retrace them in Florence as members of the Del Rosso family. Their situation is somewhat similar to that of other Florentine families working in financial administration: more family members worked in Hungary due to the family’s weakened economic situation back in Florence according to their tax return (which was submitted collectively), except for one brother, Guido. The del Rosso family ranked among the guild consular families in Florence. Rosso, the father, held consular office nine times, and was interested in building constructions in the Tuscan city and producing kiln products.84 After his death, some of the altogether seven brothers sought business activity abroad, like Francesco di Rosso di Piero Rosso, the householder and eldest brother of all, who went to Rome and later to Naples. Another brother, whose name is not specified, was in Hungary working in the service of other Florentines in 1427.85 Cristoforo appears in the Hungarian sources only in 1438 for the first time, as count of the chamber of salt of Vízakna in the service of Matko Tallóci.86 In the Florentine records he is first mentioned to be in Hungary only in 1442.87 Among Cristoforo’s brothers, Zanobi appears in Hungary for the first time in 1442, while the earliest mention of his brother Giovanni having been in the city dates to 1469.88 Back in Florence, he also held the office of Prior twice (1442, 1456), and he served as guild consul for six terms.89 His apparent ambition to integrate notwithstanding, Cristoforo maintained contact with Florence to an extent that he even submitted his tax declaration in 1457, at least thirty years after his arrival to Hungary.90 The same seems to be confirmed by the fact that he and his brothers kept a few possessions in Florence until at least 1480. Cristoforo’s business interests were not restricted to his obligations of managing royal monopolies. In fact, he also had business activity in Venice, but he put it as a loss. His son Paul (Pagolo) appears in the family tree drawn by Goldthwaite.91 Zanobi’s wife Anna was daughter to Nicholas son of Ivan of Rakovica, a nobleman and estate owner in the neighborhood of Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt, today Sibiu, Romania). The family, known also as Zanobii in Nagyszeben, definitely settled in the city and was the forebear of the prominent Proll family, among them the renowned Nicholas Proll of Nagyszeben, who controlled the Transylvanian mint and in the 1490s also the salt chambers.92

Excursion: An Unrevealed Aspect of Florentine–Hungarian Economic Relations

Finally, my research on Florentine–Hungarian economic relations quite unexpectedly also shed light on the migration of skilled and unskilled craftsmen from Central Europe towards the Tuscan city. This was surprising, since it is only rarely documented and not in much detail.93 From the very isolated information, however, vague evidence of solidarity and cooperation among the Hungarians in Florence can be assumed, although it never matched the extent of solidarity among Germans, with its sophisticated organizational forms around lay confraternities. In fact, in a subsequent period, apparently the German speaking immigrants coming from Hungary tended to join the institutions of Germans in the Tuscan city, and this leads to the conclusion that German speaking persons from Hungary may be hidden among the householders identified as Germans in the Florentine Catasto of 1427. This phenomenon also led to another, completely new point, namely the question of levels of self-identification of members of the multiethnic and multilingual communities of Central Europe. This question is particularly interesting considering the foreign environment in which these Central European immigrants defined themselves, because this foreign context lacked an important aspect, namely the points of reference which the homeland multiethnic community provided to establish clearly the position of the people in the local context. Thus, in Florence these immigrants used a whole range of levels of self-identification, from the wider-closer geographical provenance, be it the home town or the wider geo-political unit, namely the Kingdom of Hungary, to ethnic affiliation and spoken language. The identification sometimes seems vague, although the sparse related information in the Florentine Catasto shows the prevailing use of geographical affiliation, whereas in other, later cases found in recent scholarly literature it seems to be clearly driven by conscious use of possibilities provided by Florentine urban organizations for foreign artisans. This may not be closely connected to the main research question, but it could be perceived as a starting point for a future inquiry to identify the main features of the other extremes (be it both the destination and the social cluster involved in it) of diasporas in late medieval Europe.

Conclusion

Altogether, both the quantitative data set and the case studies confirm that a large number of Florentines targeted the Kingdom of Hungary during the reign of King and Emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg. Most of them were keen on working in the royal financial administration, as their fellow countrymen did in other regions of contemporary Europe. Sigismund’s constant need for liquid assets certainly played a crucial role in the decision to employ them. However, when taking a closer look at these Florentines’ financial backgrounds in Florence, one finds that most of them did not belong to the social cluster of the wealthiest merchants in the Tuscan city. Some of them disposed of rather humble financial assets but still operated within a large and efficient business network created by the Florentines in general. Thus, they could involve external investors to gather larger amounts of capital for their transactions when needed. Also, the Florentine officers’ vast knowledge of financial operations, their ability to adapt to various local socio-economic contexts, and their mobility rendered their services useful to the ruler, who himself gradually fulfilled his high aspirations by finally being crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1433.

Florentine archival records also confirm the existence of extensive trading activity on the part of Florentines in Hungary, at least in the case of some better documented Florentine officers working for the Buda companies. The information on the volume and forms of their activity in Hungary is not preserved in Hungarian documents. Due to the comparative backwardness of the region, other classical fields of operation, particularly banking, were not present among their operations in Hungary. The Venice branches of Florentine banking houses mostly covered such transactions for the region. However, three major trading partnerships formed by middle and even large-scale merchants were active in Buda in the 1420s, a presence not yet verified for any other urban center of Central Europe. Also, the members of companies had close ties to the royal and even imperial court of the ruler, whose court rendered Buda an urban center of utmost importance. In fact, in one case the company’s apparent bankruptcy is clearly linked to their loans provided to the ruler, and this is a clear sign of the higher business risks in the region. The Florentines, however, were compensated with higher interest rates for the risks they ran in Hungary. When considering the major forms of loans, commercial credit prevailed, and during the analysis of business partners of Florentines related to transactions in Hungary, the number of Florentine partners is higher, whereas the circle of local partners is much more limited. This suggests business operations involving several Florentine investors with a small number of Hungarian clients.

Buda’s two major trading diasporas, the southern German and the Italian, cooperated in the royal financial administration, and when it came to trade they met differing demands, the Italians mainly shipping luxury goods, while southern Germans merchandized lower-value cloth, primarily for urban customers. This difference in the fields of interest shaped their relations with the local urban community and their ways of integration, but their presence rendered Buda the only Central European urban center that functioned as a long-term direct meeting point for the two trading ethnic clusters most active in long-distance trade in the region. Finally, the migration of artisans from the Kingdom of Hungary to Florence reveals unexpected aspects of migration of humbler clusters, like the complexity of layers of self-identification and identification of artisans coming from the colorful Central European region to the Tuscan city.

 

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Accessed May 15, 2016. http://datini.archiviodistato.prato.it/www/query.html.

 

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Prajda, Katalin. “Florentine Merchant Companies established in Buda at the Beginning of the Fifteenth century.” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Moyen Âge [En ligne], 125-1, 2013. Accessed December 8, 2013. http://mefrm.revues.org/1062.

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Weisz, Boglárka. Vásárok és lerakatok a középkori Magyar Királyságban [Markets and staples in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary]. Magyar történelmi emlékek, Értekezések. Budapest, MTA BTK Történettudományi Intézet, 2012.

Wenzel, Gusztáv. Ozorai Pipo. Magyar történelmi jellemrajz Zsigmond király korából [Pipo of Ozora: A Hungarian historical portrait from the age of King Sigismund]. Pest: n.p., 1863.

* This work was made possible with the support of the Croatian Science Foundation under project number 6547 (Sources, Manuals and Studies for Croatian History from the Middle Ages to the End of the Long Nineteenth Century; principal investigator: Damir Karbić).

Florentines’ Trade in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: Trade Routes, Networks, and Commodities*

Katalin Prajda

Contract Researcher, University of Chicago, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

 

The article proposes to analyze some general characteristics of Florentine merchants’ trade in the Kingdom of Hungary in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on the basis of written sources housed predominantly by various Italian archives. It opens with a new evaluation of the importance of Florentine merchants in long-distance trade by examining examples of the organizational framework of their enterprises in the town of Buda during the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387–1437). It also looks at the well-known cases of the families that were engaged in trade in Hungary, beginning with the period of Louis I (1342–82) and ending with the reign of Matthias Corvinus (1458–90). The second subchapter concentrates on the commodities transported by Florentines between the two states by describing their nature and their quantitative and qualitative features mentioned in the documents. Among the commercial goods, the article considers the import and export of metals like gold, silver, and copper, as well as Florentine silk and wool. It also mentions exotic animals and spices transported from extra-European territories. The third part of the article offers a reconstruction of the outreach of the Florentine network operating in Hungary, with particular consideration of its most important markets for raw materials and luxury goods. The fourth subchapter discusses the commercial routes used by Florentines when transporting their goods between the towns of Buda and Florence, emphasizing the importance of Venice as a major trading hub along the route. The conclusion puts the Florentines’ trade in Hungary into a broader picture of international trade, and it draws connections between the development of the Florentine silk industry, for which the city became famous, and the marketing of its finished products in Hungary.

Keywords: Buda, Florence, Hungary, Venice, commercial routes, merchant, textiles, silk, precious metals, merchant company, trade, network

 

The Florentine Community

Studies have already traced the existence of a Florentine trading community in the Kingdom of Hungary as far back as the reign of Louis I.1 Since Hungarian sources regarding commerce are very fragmented in nature, researchers mostly rely on Florentine documents, which started to be produced from the late fourteenth century. Recently found new written evidence have revealed the existence of a Latin consul in the town of Buda as early as 1392. The consul acted as a judge in cases involving the Florentines, and he was also the person in charge of mediating between the merchants and local Hungarian society. They occasionally appear also as royal relators when Florentine merchants were involved in court cases in Hungary. The Latin consulate in Buda, one of the earliest such organizations including Florentine merchants outside their homeland, functioned throughout the entire period of Sigismund of Luxemburg’s reign in Hungary (1387–1437).2 The first consul known by name, Giovanni Saracino, an important member of the royal administration, was of Paduan origins. Later, in the early 1430s, a Florentine (also a royal officer) occupied the position. In his absence, which might only have lasted for a relatively short period of time, a Sienese was elected to serve as deputy Latin judge.3 This information suggests that the judge or consul, indeed, was common for all merchants from the Italian Peninsula. No indications have been found so far suggesting that this form of organization survived even in the subsequent period. One can only suspect that, because of the general decadence of the relations between Florence and Hungary on the state level, Florentine merchants may have lost their representation in the region.4 Furthermore, King Sigismund’s order, issued sometime before 1428, authorized the town judge of Buda to act in cases involving foreign merchants who were trading within the territory of the town.5 This may have considerably weakened the role played by the Latin consul in the resolution of business conflicts between local and Florentine merchants.

Given the nature of the sources, we have no exact statistics regarding the population of the Florentine trading community in Buda or in other parts of the kingdom. All we know is that the community was well-connected to Florence and other European commercial centers. There must also have been a continuous flow of Florentine merchants between the two states. The resident Florentine community in Buda during the reign of Sigismund was seemingly more numerous than in the preceding and subsequent periods, including the reign of Matthias Corvinus (1458–90). The vivid life of the trading community in the Kingdom of Hungary probably came to an end when Sigismund’s attitude toward Florentine merchants changed, a shift that culminated in 1432 by his order to arrest all of them on Hungarian territory.6

The importance of the Florentine community is also illustrated by the fact that at least twelve Florentine trading companies were established in Buda during the first three decades of the fifteenth century. As far as we can tell, they were medium-size companies, mainly set up for the export of Florentine textiles to Hungary in exchange for precious metals from the local mines. The senior partners of these companies were important actors in long-distance Florentine trade, and they played a significant role in the textile industry of their homeland. Some of them were also leading investors in the Florentine silk industry, both in terms of domestic production and marketing abroad. In addition to the resident Florentine companies and autonomous partnerships, other merchants relied on their business networks or on independent agents when marketing their textiles in Hungary. The “accomanda” system, involving limited liability contracts, was also used in dealings between Buda-based companies and silk companies or silk firms and local agents.7

Meanwhile, the Florentine community during the reign of Louis I (1342–82), and even until about the turn of the century, was characterized by the strong presence of a small business group constituted by the business partners of Vieri di Cambio de’Medici and the Panciatichi family, the earliest documented companies operating in the region. By the first years of the fifteenth century, however, the business circle of the Scolari family had acquired a position of dominance in the Hungarian–Florentine long-distance trade. The years immediately following the deaths of the Scolari brothers in 1426 saw a power play between the Scolari nephews and the Bardi brothers, old familiares of the Scolari. Following these conflicts, the leading position of the Bardi brothers as well as other internal dynamics in Florence led probably to the reorganization of key positions in the royal administration and the network of long-distance trade.

1434 witnessed considerable changes in the history of Florence as well with the rise of the new regime headed by Cosimo de’Medici. Several families, which once had been important in long-distance trade with Hungary, lost their political influence and were exiled. Thus, their ties to domestic and international commercial networks loosened considerably. Among them, we find the Albizzi, Guadagni, and Infangati families, old friends, close relatives, and once political allies to the Scolari brothers.8

In the 1430s, this may have given rise to a new influx of Southern German businessmen to the royal administration and trade network in Hungary. Already in the 1390s, local Germans in Buda cooperated with Florentine and Venetian businessmen who sought to sell their goods in the city. Michael Nadler, a respected citizen of Buda of Southern German origins, acted as a dealer in Venetian merchants’ silk textiles with his partners, including his father, Michael Nadler senior.9 In 1427, he was among the debtors of the Melanesi di Buda, most probably because he was selling textiles for them as well.10 In the same year, he also acted as judge for the city.11 Nadler, who worked in the royal administration of mines, may have had other ties to the Melanesi, since Tommaso di Piero, a member of Sigismund’s familia and a citizen of Buda, managed copper mines in the kingdom. Nadler also established close business ties with the more influential Leonardo di Nofri de’Bardi, with whom he held royal offices.12 In the early 1430s, Leonardo and his brother Giovanni, both of whom were already Hungarian noblemen, figured in the role of Latin consul. In other words, they served as judges for the Florentines residing in Buda.13 In 1431, Leonardo Bardi was staying in Nuremberg, probably for a longer period of time, which may suggest that he actually had begun to cooperate in some way with local German merchants.14 Leonardo was probably away from Buda frequently for business purposes; another source mentions that he was staying in Bohemia for a certain time. The involvement of the Melanesi and the Bardi brothers, key figures of the local Florentine community, in business activity with some German businessmen, therefore, must have had long-term consequences.

Following King Sigismund’s death in 1437, very few of the Florentine families which had had an interest in the region as early as the turn of the fifteenth century continued to work in long-distance trade in the kingdom. Among them, we find members of the Del Bene and the Zati families, who thanks to their contacts in Buda, Florence and Venice managed to maintain their economic activity until around the middle of the fifteenth century.15 During the reign of Matthias Corvinus, however, the allies of the Medici dominated the Florentine-Hungarian relations; among them, members of the Attavanti and Gondi families became important distributors of Florentine goods in the royal court.16

 

Commodities

From its outset, the Florentine trading community in the Kingdom of Hungary was built upon the export of wool textiles from Florence and the import of precious metal coins/bullions to the Italian Peninsula. By the end of the fourteenth century, by which time some investors had begun to produce high quality silk fabrics in the city for the international market, Florentine merchants had already started to export silks to Hungary, among other places. Along with these goods, Florentines were occasionally involved in the administration and probably also in the marketing of salt, which was extracted in various parts of Hungary.17 Furthermore, exotic spices and animals are also mentioned in the sources. Few of the resident companies in Buda provided banking services, but a considerable share of money exchange and safe-keeping, as well as the purchase of trade insurance, may well have gone through the Florentine companies that operated in Florence and Venice. From this point of view, the Medici of Venice seem to have been especially important. Since, to our best knowledge, account books of Florentine companies based in Buda have not survived, we have only fragmented information at our disposal regarding the quantity and the quality of these commercial goods, as well as their transportation and marketing.

By the mid-fourteenth century, Florence was already considered an important producer of wool textiles; her goods had already reached the international market. There were two general types of wool textiles manufactured in the city: the high-quality San Martino cloths and the lower-quality Garbo cloths. The areas in which they were brought to market were decisively different. The high-quality cloths were sold mostly in the Italian and Iberian Peninsula, while the low-quality cloths were sold in the Levant.18 Though differences between the two were considerable, probably due to the absence of corresponding account books, Florentine sources do not refer to the type of wool textiles transported to the Kingdom of Hungary. They were generally labelled panni, a term which clearly distinguished them in the Florentine dialect from the silk drappi. Given the considerable distance between Florence and Buda, one can presume that profit-oriented Florentine businessmen sold mainly high-quality San Martino cloth in Hungary. This hypothesis is also supported by the activity of some of the merchant-entrepreneurs who had an interest in selling their goods in Hungary. In the fourteenth century, the Del Bene were among the most important entrepreneurs in the wool industry, and members of the family had already developed business connections in Hungary during the reign of Louis I.19 Similarly, around the turn of the fifteenth century, the Borghini brothers ran a wool workshop in the convent of San Martino, and they appear later as suppliers of textiles in the royal court. At that time, the Lamberteschi were also considered important producers of high-quality wool; they imported raw material directly from Flanders and sold some of their finished cloth in Hungary. They distributed wool textiles in Hungary, also by relying on other companies, like the Melanesi of Buda.20 The Melanesi brothers seem often to have acted as dealers in textiles produced by the workshops of other Florentine businessmen; they sold both finished and semi-finished cloth in Hungary.21 In most cases, the provenience of wool textiles sold in Hungary is not mentioned in the sources. Probably the earliest information on Florentine wool sold in Hungary dates back to 1387, when Gabriello di messer Bartolomeo Panciatichi sent four and a half pieces of textile to Zagreb.22

In addition to wool textiles, which definitely had a vast circle of customers, silk textiles became the other important item of Florentine trade. Richard Goldthwaite contends that silk textile was the first product manufactured in Florence which Florentine merchants sold all over Western Europe. The local silk industry underwent the earliest phase of its evolution in the first part of the fourteenth century.23 By that time, in addition to Lucca (the first major site of silk production in Italy), Bologna, Genoa, and Venice also emerged as centers of silk production. However, in the case of Florence, the manufacturers in the city only started to produce silk fabrics for the international market in the late fourteenth century. The first investments of considerable size into the sector arrived in the 1380s when maybe a handful of entrepreneurs and silk manufacturers began to invest their financial and human capital into the foundation of silk manufacturing companies.24

This important moment in the history of the domestic silk industry coincides with the earliest report about silk fabrics being sent to the royal court in Hungary. In 1376, the politician and wool manufacturer Giovanni di Amerigo del Bene advised the government to have the Florentine ambassadors heading to Hungary carry as gifts three pieces of velvet and three pieces of silk, decorated with gold.25 Though Giovanni did not specify whether or not the silk textiles should be domestic products, one can reasonably hypothesize that the gifts were intended to represent the city and therefore the domestic industry. In that particular case, however, we have no information at our disposal concerning whether these diplomatic gifts actually reached the royal court. Ten years later, in 1386, another document informs us that the count palatine of Hungary had purchased silk textiles of considerable value from a Florentine company.26 The provenience, even in this source, was unspecified. It might just as well have been Florence as Venice. However, both of the documents indicate the rise of a certain demand for silk textiles in the various courts of the kingdom.

It seems logical to assume that as soon as the volume and quality of domestic production permitted, Florentine silk companies, well-connected to the local Florentine network, tried to sell their products in Hungary too. The silk manufacturers who sent silk fabrics to the region included several pioneer businessmen of the domestic industry, such as the workshop-company of Bartolomeo di Luca Rinieri and Antonio di Giovanni Panciatichi and the workshop of Parente di Michele di ser Parente. They probably marketed their textiles in Hungary, using other Florentine companies operating in the region as agents. These silk fabrics may have consisted, for example, of red damask, the so-called “chermusi.”27 Others, like the merchant Bernardo di Sandro Talani, who maintained a very diverse business profile, purchased silk textiles in Florence in order to sell them in Hungary.28

The triple-rooted Zati family, whose members developed business and social ties simultaneously in Florence, Venice, and Hungary, had an important interest in the marketing of silk in the kingdom.29 In the 1430s, they traded in silver brocades, among other things.30 Also, the company of Zanobi Panciatichi exported silk fabrics of various colors to Hungary; velvet of black, green, blue, and red colors, green and brown silk and damask cloths.31 But they also sold “zetani,” i.e. very heavy silk fabrics, using the Melanesi of Buda as dealers.32

The Melanesi seem to have maintained a vast circle of suppliers among the producers of silk and wool textiles who used their services to bring their fabrics to market in Buda.33 The Melanesi brothers themselves also invested capital into a silk manufacturing company with the Davizi and the Corsi brothers, whose families had been engaged in silk production since the 1380s.34 Presumably, some of the silk fabrics sold by the Melanesi in Buda should have come directly from their own workshop.35 The same workshop might have provided silk fabrics for the funeral of Andrea and Matteo Scolari in Hungary, which were displayed as flags and other textiles of liturgical use during the ceremony.36

One of the leading figures of the Florentine silk industry, Tommaso di Domenico Borghini, also sold the products of his own workshop-warehouse in Hungary using his own merchant company, which he had set up with Matteo di Stefano Scolari.37 In 1424, for example, Tommaso and Matteo imported twenty braccia of heavy black silk fabrics to Buda.38 The frequent mention of Hungarian golden florins of considerable quantity in the account book of a Florentine silk manufacturing company also indicates that the royal and baronial courts in Hungary were considered important buyers of Florentine silk textiles.39 However, due to the lack of detailed references in documents closely related to the transportation and marketing of textiles in Hungary, we have only fragmented information at our disposal on the kind of silk fabrics the Florentines sold in the kingdom.

In addition to textiles, other luxury items like spices and exotic animals also appear occasionally in the sources. In 1386, István Lackfi bought spices from the Panciatichi company.40 In his chronicle, Bonaccorso di Neri Pitti notes that he, as an apprentice, took a load of saffron with his master, Matteo di Scelto Tinghi, to Buda.41 In 1422, Matteo Scolari mentions in his letters spices as well as exotic animals like Arabian horses, falcons, ostriches, and monkeys, which his agent imported from Tunis, probably in the intention of taking them to the royal court in Hungary and to his brother, Pippo Scolari.42

The most important import items transported to the Italian Peninsula by the Florentines were the precious metals: gold, silver, and copper. In 1429, for example, Tommaso di Piero Melanesi imported copper to Venice in the amount of 1,000 Venetian ducats.43 In 1435, Tommaso was in charge of copper mines, which suggests that he may have traded in copper bullions on a regular basis. Other Florentine merchants were engaged in the silver trade. Among them we find Bernardo di Sandro Talani, from whom King Sigismund confiscated textiles, money, and silver in 1427.44 Another Florentine, Giovanni del maestro Niccolò Falcucci, was probably also interested in the trade in silver and gold.45 In one case, Giovanni, at the demand of Andrea Scolari, sold a piece of gold in Italy (6 pesetti di Buda, 18 carats) for 522 florins, 66 denari and 100 solidi.46 Interestingly, the precious metal trade to Italy was not monopolized by Florentine businessmen. A few sources indicate that a business group from Arezzo may have cooperated with the Florentines, including the nobleman Mariotto di Biagio Griffolini, his grandson, and a couple of other businessmen, who occasionally traveled to various parts of Hungary.47 Furthermore, we have some fragmented information concerning the import of Hungarian leather to Italy.48

The Geographical Outreach of the Network

Thanks to their continuous travels and their cooperative enterprises with a number of businessmen coming from other Tuscan towns like Arezzo, Prato, and Siena, Florentine merchants operating in the Kingdom of Hungary maintained a vast business network outside their homeland. This network extended from Flanders to Tunis and from Catalonia to Alessandria. One of the most important trade hubs for Florentine merchants operating in the Italian Peninsula was Venice, which, by the late fourteenth century, was already filled with Florentines. Similarly, Ancona may have served as a port city for Florentines’ goods to be transported to Dalmatia. However fragmented, its archives may shed some light on the commercial activity of the city with the other side of the Adriatic Sea.49 Another major transit point was Genoa, which was used by Florentines who imported various luxury items from North Africa to Florence. Merchants like Matteo Scolari, the Zati brothers, and the Lamberteschi used the services of Genoese captains.50 In addition to Tunis, Florentine merchants operating in Hungary were well-connected through their networks to other extra-European markets as well. Matteo Scolari, for example, invested money into overseas ventures several times; he ordered goods with the first galley to Alessandria.51 Bernardo Lamberteschi also purchased goods in Alessandria, but his agents were mostly traveling to destinations like Flanders and Catalonia to ensure the supply of raw wool.52 In the 1430s, they relied on the services of the Florentine galleys, which departed from Pisa.

In Rome, the papal court also offered business opportunities for Florentine merchants. For instance, in cooperation with another churchman Currado di Piero Cardini, Andrea Scolari, the bishop of Várad (today Oradea, Romania), traded in textiles there.53 Matteo Scolari’s in-law, the banker Vieri di Vieri Guadagni, may have offered banking services in the papal court instead.54 Other merchants, like Filippo di Giovanni del Bene and the aforementioned Currado, became papal collectors in Hungary.

Commercial Routes between Florence and Buda

In spite of the considerable distance between the two cities, Florence and Buda became closely connected by commercial routes. The most important documents in this regard are the accounts of the brothers Rinaldo and Luca di messer Maso degli Albizzi, who traveled to the Kingdom of Hungary in 1426 and 1427.55 The two distinct collections reveal more than any other source about the itineraries and the difficulties of the most frequently used land and sea routes, on which Florentine merchants traveled for business purposes. Even though the Albizzi brothers were heading for Buda as members of diplomatic contingents, the reference to itinerant Florentine merchants in their travel accounts proves that businessmen used the very same routes.56

Both of the embassies used the commercial route leading north from Florence to Bologna through the Apennines. In Rinaldo’s case, the first segment of the trip after Bologna included Ferrara and Padua. Luca went through Corticella, Torre della Fossa, Francolino, Crespino, Loreo, and Chioggia.57 Generally, transport from Florence to Bologna was by pack animals over the Apennines. Travelers then went from Bologna to the region of Ferrara overland or by canal and river and from Ferrara to Venice by river and by sea. According to Luca’s diary, he was traveling by land until Corticella, located north of Bologna, from there he continued his trip by river to Ferrara. He then continued his journey on horseback again from Ferrara to nearby Francolino, a port on the Po River, where he boarded a boat. Turning to the north at Loreo, he left behind the Po River and arrived in Chioggia, probably by river, from where he took another boat to Venice. Including the several compulsory stops during their trip, which were made both for relaxation and networking, the travel from Florence to Venice took approximately one week.

As the main hub for the redistribution of commercial goods along the route, Venice played a crucial role in the transportation of the Florentines’ merchandise. They typically stopped there for several days to purchase goods, socialize with their fellow-citizens, and arrange shipping. After having arrived in Venice, Rinaldo continued his travels overland to the north, through Villach and Vienna, reaching Buda after 40 days of travel and diplomatic visits. At the same time, Luca took a ship in Venice and followed the coastline through Livenza (today Caorle, Italy), Daira (today Dajla, Croatia), Parenzo (today Poreč, Croatia), Fagiana (today Fažana, Croatia), Vegli (today Veli Brijuni, Croatia), Pola (today Pula, Croatia), Medulino (today Medulin, Croatia), and Ossero (today Osor, Croatia), arriving at the port of Segna after 8 days.58 Maritime navigation depended a great deal upon weather conditions, which might shorten or lengthen a trip. Because of an illness caused probably by the harsh weather at sea, Luca felt sick during their trip and was forced, after a long stay in Segna, to return to Florence, without ever reaching the royal court in Hungary. On the way back, Luca used the same sea route with smaller modifications. Having arrived from the Northwest to Hungary, Rinaldo left the kingdom in a southwestern direction, following another overland route past the Mura river, reaching Venice by following the road from Vienna.59

Given the fact that Florence was not a major transit center for commercial goods, it was the Florentine merchants who, by operating in the most important trade hubs, built up an international transport system for their goods.60 Therefore, in the travel of the Florentine ambassadors, the transportation of commercial goods, and the movement of Florentine merchants, a crucial role was given to cooperation between Florentine businessmen living in the cities situated along the commercial routes. Florentines offered each other hospitality in their foreign home, as well as shelter and supplies for their horses and sometimes even accompanying servants. Their reliable and experienced men carried messages and goods, and occasionally they offered traveling Florentines protection as well. The social network used by itinerant Florentine merchants was a business network of fellow-citizens who were active far from their homeland. Members of these networks very often maintained not only business but social ties as well with one another, thus ensuring the circulation of goods, messages, and people. Their primary concerns were weather conditions, health issues arising during their travels, and the security of their goods and people. Given this, merchants may well have often traveled together in order to guarantee their own safety and defray the otherwise elevated costs of toll and travel.61 For the safety of their goods, they might even have signed an insurance contract with one of the Florentine banks operating either in Florence or in Venice.62 Safe-conducts, obtained from the Florentine or the Venetian Signoria or from King Sigismund himself, may also have given traveling Florentine merchants a major sense of security.63

Venice as Major Trade Hub

There is no question that Venice played a crucial role in the redistribution of commercial goods transported by Florentine merchants and in their networking and business activity. The supply of raw wool in Florence and the circulation of finished Florentine textiles in the eastern Mediterranean and the eastern part of the continent depended a great deal upon the work of Florentines living in Venice. To a large extent, local and international banking, the trade of bills of exchange going through Venice, and the insurance business were in their hands.64 Thanks to its importance, Venice probably had the most sizeable Florentine business community living outside of their home city. Reinhold Mueller claims that Florentines settled in the city in high numbers as soon as the first part of the fourteenth century.65 However, in spite of the importance of the Florentines in Venetian trade and economy, Mueller’s study is the most detailed analysis of their economic activity in the city so far. Apart from the scholarship on the well-known cases of the Venetian branch of the Medici company and the settlement of members of the Gaddi family, no in-depth research has been done on Florentine merchant families who were engaged in trade around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Earlier, Zsuzsa Teke suggested that some Florentines living in the Venetian Republic seem to have developed business connections in the Kingdom of Hungary as well.66 Her hypothesis has not been put to the test so far. Only the involvement of the Medicis in the Hungarian copper trade in the 1380s has been studied.

In 1433, at the time of the second general census in the city of Florence, nine companies were recorded which had been established by Florentine merchants in Venice.67 Among them, at least five cooperated with the Florentines who worked in the Kingdom of Hungary: the Panciatichi&Portinari, the Medici&Portinari, the Gaddi, the Zati, and the Ugolini.68 Unfortunately, the scarcity of documents regarding commercial activity in Venice leaves little room for analysis of their trade connections or their involvement in the redistribution of goods directed to and from Hungary. As has been suggested, in the first decades of the fifteenth century the Medici did not completely lose their interest in the region and may have continued to play an intermediary role, offering banking services in Venice and in Florence for the merchants working in Hungary. The possible role of the Medici of Venice in providing credit for Florentine merchants operating in the kingdom is underlined by its fragmented account book, dated to 1436. It lists among its clients several Florentine businessmen who traded simultaneously in Venice, Florence and Hungary, including for instance members of the Borghini, Scolari and Zati families.69

By the first decade of the century, Branca di Rinieri Scolari, a nephew of Andrea Scolari, had already settled in Treviso. He was followed by his brother, Giambonino di Rinieri Scolari. Their third brother, Filippo, returned to Florence in order to manage the family business and properties there. They had also a fourth brother, Lorenzo, who may have served as a kind of travel agent for the family, since he was occasionally in the Kingdom of Hungary. Unlike Lorenzo, Giambonino never returned to Florence. His heirs obtained Venetian citizenship, and their families lived in Treviso for two more centuries.70 The Scolari brothers’ careers could be said to exemplify the successes of the triple-rooted Florentine merchant families who developed commercial and social ties in the three states. This model was adopted by other families, for instance the Del Bene family and the Zati family. Their cooperative enterprises with other Florentine kinship networks active outside their homeland may also be called typical, like the Scolari, Borghini, and Melanesi families, each of which was an active participant in international trade in the three states.71

The Melanesi company and the Scolari family were also closely linked to the firm of Andrea Lamberteschi, a Florentine wool manufacturer and merchant. Lamberteschi himself managed the production of San Martino cloth in Florence, together with his eldest son, Tommaso. Meanwhile, his agent, Giovanni di Cenni Ugolini, ran the Venetian branch.72 Three other sons of his lived in Hungary. They traded in the textiles produced in their father’s workshop and also worked as employees of the Scolari family. Andrea’s fifth son was in charge of the import of raw wool from Flanders to Venice.73 In fact, Andrea is mentioned only rarely in the Venetian documents, while his branch manager and partner may have been the key figure of their activity in Venice. Ugolini, who settled for life in the Stato da Mar, is mentioned several times in documents of Venetian court cases.74

Giovanni Ugolini and the other aforementioned merchants maintained strong economic connections to Filippo di Giovanni del Bene as well.75 By the turn of the fifteenth century, Filippo had moved to Hungary, while his cousin, Jacopo di Francesco, with whom he had many business ventures, was exiled to Venice in the 1390s. Jacopo had been involved in business with Andrea Lamberteschi.76 Meanwhile, the Del Bene back home turned into important wool manufacturers by the first part of the fourteenth century. In Hungary, however, they were employed in various administrative positions, and they also became papal collectors.

Similarly, members of the Zati family developed this triple-rooted social and business profile. Close cooperation between the Zati siblings and cousins and the geographical spread of members of the family guaranteed the efficiency of their business network. The six brothers, Bartolomeo, Francesco, Niccolò, Simone, Giuliano, and Uberto d’Amerigo, kept merchant companies and businesses simultaneously in Buda, Florence, and Venice. They also cooperated closely with the Medici of Venice as agnatic kin to Lipaccio di Bindo Bardi, a partner of the company.77 The Zati acquired a reputation in Florence in the fourteenth century thanks to their participation in the wool-business. Their father was a wool manufacturer in Florence, and he was still active in the second decade of the fifteenth century.78 Into the 1420s, the six brothers maintained their Florentine citizenship and continued to pay taxes there, in spite of the fact that they used Venice as the base for their activity. For their businesses, they made use of Genoa as well, the other main maritime trade hub alongside Venice.79 Some of their commercial goods came directly from the workshops they maintained in Florence. In the mid-1410s, there was a wool manufacturing company registered under Uberto’s and Niccolò’s names which was still operating in 1433.80 It seems likely to me that one of them, Giuliano, who clearly lived in Venice, was running another workshop in Florence. The Venetian company, instead, was operating under Giuliano’s and Niccolò’s names, and they were the ones who formally operated the Buda branch in the 1430s.81 Meanwhile, Uberto played the role of travel agent in Buda. Their business in Hungary lasted at least until the 1440s, when Uberto died and his brothers petitioned to the Florentine chancery as heirs to help them recuperate his credits and other belongings in the Kingdom of Hungary. In addition to wool, which was also the most common item for the Lamberteschi-Ugolini company, the Zati sold silk textiles in the Kingdom of Hungary. As far as one can tell on the basis of the available sources, the supply of silk textiles in the royal court provided by the Zati brothers did not overlap chronologically with the Scolaris’ trade in silk fabrics in Hungary. There is no direct evidence indicating that the two families obtained, in the 1420s and 1430s, a monopoly in trading with silk textiles in the royal court. However, the lack of references to other merchants selling silk to King Sigismund suggests that the two families may have managed to secure an exclusive agreement with the sovereign.

Venice, as the major producer of wool and silk fabrics, exercised a protectionist policy aimed at strengthening the domestic industry throughout the period. In spite of this, Florentine textiles made their way to the city, and from there to the international market.82 Their trade may well have been facilitated by the Florentines who received citizenship in Venice, which made it easier for their fellow-citizens to obtain permissions for the transiting of domestic products.

Conclusion

By the second part of the reign of Louis I, the continuous trade contacts between the Florentine Republic and the Kingdom of Hungary gave rise to a lively Florentine community in Buda, which probably reached its peak in terms of political influence and economic activity during the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg. After a depression of two or three decades following King Sigismund’s death, the period of Matthias Corvinus again saw the arrival of a considerable number of Florentine tradesmen to Hungary, who provided the royal and baronial courts with their goods. Because of the considerable distance between Florence and Buda, as well as her importance as a major trading hub and producer of wool and silk textiles, Venice played a leading role in the transportation and the redistribution of the Florentines’ goods. The commercial triangle formed between Florence, Venice, and Buda was built first and foremost upon the network of Florentine merchants. Venetians seem to have had only a minor share in this commerce. Throughout the period, the Florentines ensured the continuous distribution of their domestic products: wool textiles, initially, and later, from the 1380s onwards, also their high-quality silk fabrics. The appearance of Florentine silk textiles at this early phase of domestic production may testify to the simultaneous development of the Florentine silk industry and its marketing in the courts of Hungary. At the time, silk in the Kingdom of Hungary was often sold by the manufacturers themselves. Meanwhile, silk, which back then may have been a highly individualized item, became very popular and widespread by the reign of Matthias Corvinus, thanks to the development of the domestic industry, which made possible its continuous distribution by Florentine merchants even in the eastern part of the continent. The marketing of Florentine silk textiles, as luxury items, shaped the tastes of the local population. Imitations of silk, which were common in Florentine wall- and table-paintings, became part of the visual landscape.

Bibliography

Archival Sources

Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti (AOI)

Estranei

 

Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF)

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Catasto

Consulte e Pratiche

Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese (Corp. Rel. Sopp.)

Diplomatico

Mediceo avanti il Principato (MAP)

Mercanzia

Signori

Missive

I. Cancelleria

Dieci di Balia

Otto di Pratica

Legazioni e Commissarie

Missive e Responsive

Legazioni e Commissarie

 

Archivio di Stato di Treviso

Estimi

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* The study benefited from the support of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office - NKFIH no. PD. 117033 (entitled: Italy and Hungary in the Renaissance). Research at the Venetian National Archives and the National Archives in Treviso were supported by the Vittore Branca Center, The International Center for the Study of Italian Culture.

Austrian Salt in Pozsony in the Mid-Fifteenth Century

István Draskóczy*

Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Medieval and Early Modern Hungarian History

 

In this essay, I explore how the city of Pozsony (Preßburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia), which lies in the valley of the Danube River on what was once the most important trade route connecting the Kingdom of Hungary with Western Europe, managed to acquire Austrian salt, an import that, in general, was forbidden by the rulers. The city facilitated this not only by obtaining a number of privileges, but also by farming the tax collected in the city on foreign trade, the so-called “thirtieth” (tricesima). In practice, however, this could only be done in varying ways. In the course of my research, it also became clear that Pozsony needed Austrian salt for a variety of reasons. The city was distant from the salt mines, so the Transylvanian salt that was brought to the borderlands in the west was already very expensive. In many cases, however, none of the salt that was produced in the country even made it to Pozsony because of the complications posed by transportation, the deficiencies of the fiscal system, and fluctuations in production. The Austrian salt mines, in contrast, were relatively nearby, the cooked salt that was produced at these mines was essentially consistent in its quality, and it was also less expensive. In this essay, I also examine how the quantities of salt that were imported from Austria changed in various periods and how the city marketed excess salt in other parts of the country. Naturally, the people of Pozsony were not able to sell the salt in the entire territory of Hungary. My analysis indicates that the market for this salt was limited to the County of Pozsony itself, part of Nyitra County, the part of Komárom County to the north of the Danube River, and parts of Győr and Moson Counties.

Keywords: Pozsony, Austrian salt, royal salt chambers, volume of salt imports, fifteenth century

Introduction

In the first half of the fifteenth century, Pozsony became the most important trading city in the Kingdom of Hungary, in no small part because in 1402 King Sigismund granted the city the staple right and in 1430 he gave it the right of coinage. The burghers of the city played important roles in commerce in Hungary in cloth and other manufactured goods from Western Europe, and they had ties to merchants in cities like Vienna, Cologne, and Nuremberg.1 The various textiles constituted wares of particular importance in the large-scale trade of imports because of their value and their significance in international commerce,2 and Austrian salt was, in comparison, less important. However, the fact that, despite a royal ban repeatedly put on the import of salt, Austrian salt made its way to Pozsony time and again, indicates that it was an item that merits the attention of historians.3

In Hungary, salt was mined in Transylvania and Máramaros (today Maramureş, a region most of which now lies in Romania), and the mines in these two regions provided salt for the entire country. By the beginning of the fourteenth century at the latest, the mining and sale of salt had become a royal monopoly.4 In 1397, King Sigismund issued detailed regulations concerning commerce in salt. Salt was transported from the mines in Transylvania and Máramaros to other parts of the country by boat or in carts (territories to the south of the Sava River used sea salt). In several places, new royal chambers were created (or old chambers were revived), which sold the salt at prices established by the king.5 The chambers were also entrusted with the task of ensuring that the royal court maintained its monopoly on salt and preventing unauthorized foreign salt from reaching the markets in Hungary. One of these revived chamber centers was established precisely in Pozsony. While, in the terms of the regulations issued in 1397, the price of 100 pieces of rock salt in the mining regions was one golden florin, by the time such a unit reached Pozsony, Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia), or Sopron, the royal officials already sold it for five golden florins. According to the available sources, the chamber prices then established by the ruler remained in effect until the early sixteenth century. King Sigismund also issued regulations specifying the respective marketing areas of salt from Máramaros and Transylvania. Rock salt from Máramaros could be sold on the markets in the part of the country between the Tisza River and the Zagyva River.6 Accordingly, Pozsony was one of the markets for the distant mines of Transylvania, a distance which, as mentioned above, resulted in a huge increase in the price of rock salt in Pozsony and its region.

In the fourteenth century, salt production in the Austrian provinces neighboring Hungary began to grow. Because of the geological conditions, salt was found there in different kinds of stone, from which it could be dissolved by water and then cooked. This cooked salt was taken to the markets in Hungary. The records concerning salt were kept according to “Fuder,” or wooden tubs (into which the salt was originally packed), the precise size of which actually varied depending on the mine from which the salt came (one Fuder from Aussee was 125 pounds or 70 kilograms,7 whereas a Fuder from Hallstatt was between 100 and 115 pounds, or 56 and 64,4 kilograms). After drying, the salt was put in smaller drums called “Küfel,” or “cupa” in Latin, which made it easier to transport. A Küfel weighed roughly 7 kilograms.8 The salt that made it to the markets in and around Pozsony and Sopron came primarily from Hallstatt. In Hungary, it was already referred to as Gmunden salt (in 1453, King Ladislaus V of Hungary called it “unser Gmundisch Salz”), after the town of Gmunden in Upper Austria, where the ducal salt office was located. In Gmunden, the salt was packaged into “Küfel” and sent on its way (by boat) to market destinations. Some salt was even transported to Gmunden from Aussee. Lower Austria (first and foremost the areas lying to the south of the Danube River) constituted a natural market for the mining wares shipped from Gmunden, but some of these mining wares were also taken to the southern territories of Bohemia. In Bohemia and the areas to the north of the Danube, however, Hallein and the mines in Bavaria offered some competition, so the merchants were only too happy to be able to take salt to the markets in Hungary as well.9

Austrian Salt in Pozsony

The earliest data concerning the importation of Austrian salt into Pozsony dates to the fourteenth century. The available sources suggest that in the middle of the century, there were problems with the supply of salt in the country, and the territories on the periphery had difficulty obtaining adequate amounts. In 1354, King Louis I of Hungary permitted the northern territories of the kingdom to use rock salt from Poland and Sopron to use Austrian cooked salt. A charter issued in 1355 indicates that salt from Austria was already being imported into Pozsony as well. Indeed, the burghers of the city had been using Austrian salt even earlier than this. The permission that was issued by the ruler in 1356 specified that German (i.e. Austrian) salt had already been used in the area earlier.10 Later, the import of salt from Austria was forbidden, but in 1362 the ruler again had to grant a concession permitting it. A new prohibition was issued later, which again had to be withdrawn in 1381, though the royal salt chamber was active in the city. These measures indicate that the royal chamber system was not able to provide enough salt for the peripheral regions in the west.11 Nor was King Sigismund able to prevent the import of salt from Austria and Poland. While the 1405 law prohibited the use of salt from abroad, in 1407 the city of Pozsony itself purchased salt from Vienna. In the 1430s, the importation of salt must have been quite regular.12

Following the death of King Albert of Habsburg, Hungary fell into a state of civil war. István and György Rozgonyi, who were serving as the ispáns of Pozsony County, supported Wladislas III of Poland, while the city stood behind Queen Elisabeth until her death in December 1442 and then supported Ladislaus V.13 The salt mines were in the hands of János Hunyadi and Miklós Újlaki, who supported Wladislas III. When János Hunyadi was elected as regent in 1446, he also assumed the administration of the royal revenues. Hunyadi remained in control of the royal incomes even after Ladislaus V had effectively come to the throne in 1453. He devoted particular attention to the salt mines and salt chambers, and as a consequence of the measures he introduced, the income from the salt monopoly increased.14 His allies, György and Sebestyén Rozgonyi as ispáns of Pozsony (the latter taking the place of his deceased father István), royal treasurer Mihály Ország, who was also captain of Nagyszombat, Pongrác Szentmiklósi and Miklós Újlaki exerted close control over the counties of Pozsony and Nyitra. Hunyadi only extended his direct influence to Pozsony in 1450, when he took control of the royal castle there.15 Because of the uncertain political circumstances, Hungarian rock salt hardly made it to the borderlands in the west until 1450. Thus, the people of Pozsony were able to purchase and sell salt from the mines in the neighboring lands of Austria without hindrance (see the import volumes for 1444–1464 and 1496–1499 in Tables 1 and 2 in the Appendix). At the end of 1439 or the beginning of 1440, the city farmed the local office that administered the collection the thirtieth by charter from the dowager Queen Elisabeth. Pozsony used this opportunity to support the trade interests of its burghers.16 By establishing control over the administration of the thirtieth, the city further eased the import of Austrian salt.17 The sources suggest that at the time no royal salt chamber operated in the city. After Hunyadi took power, he seized the chance to establish a salt chamber in Pozsony and prohibit the import of Austrian salt. He provided compensation for the city by leasing the salt chamber to the city for a year at the end of 1450. According to the charter, Hunyadi gave the city every tyminum (10,000 pieces) of Hungarian rock salt for 410 golden florins (to be paid half in Hungarian golden florins, half in Viennese coins). The chamber provided for the territories between Nagyszombat, Galgóc (today Hlohovec, Slovakia), and Komárom.18 A charter issued in April 1451 indicates that Stefan Gmaitl, a burgher of Pozsony, became a special familiaris of Hunyadi, and assumed the office of salt chamberer in his service. Regrettably, the document does not reveal whether or not he held this office in Pozsony, though one can assume he probably did. In any case, the relationship between Gmaitl and his native city was not always smooth, for the city council demanded that he pay the thirtieth after his wares, though in principle he was exempt from the tax.19 After the lease had expired, Hunyadi took direct control over the chamber, and he put István Sasvári, another familiaris in his service, at the head of the two chambers in Pozsony and Nyitra. In March of 1452, Sasvári transferred 400 golden florins-worth of rock salt to the city of Pozsony on the regent’s account. However, Pozsony still had control of the royal salt, which was not under the jurisdiction of the chamber, and at the instructions of the regent it could make drafts on this salt. At the beginning of 1453, Sasvári was still in this position, and the salt chamber continued to function in the city that year.20

After Ladislaus V finally started his personal rule in 1453, the burghers of Pozsony rushed to have him affirm their old privileges. In July of 1453, the king once again granted the city permission to import salt from Austria. As the royal charter reveals, salt from Hungarian territories was also sold in Pozsony. Before a month had passed, however, the king issued a general ban on the use of foreign salt in the Kingdom of Hungary. Thus, it is hardly surprising that in July 1454 Pozsony again managed to prevail on the king to grant a concession and allow the city to import salt. True, the royal charter (which refers to the concession granted by King Louis I of Hungary) specified that the “German” salt that was brought into the city could only be used by the people of Pozsony.21 The available sources clearly indicate that in the spring of 1455 the royal chamber was functioning again. At the time, it was managed by the city of Pozsony, in all likelihood on Hunyadi’s behalf. According to the accounts from this year, Hungarian rock salt was sold there.22 Yet the accounts of Pozsony also attest that “German” cooked salt was also sold in the city in spite of the fact that it functioned as the seat of the royal salt chamber. In April of 1453, Hunyadi therefore called on the city, in an indignant letter, not to permit the import of salt from Austria (as it had been doing thus far) and to allow the representatives of the chamber to carry out investigations at the branch thirtieth offices, and even help their work there. He put pressure on the council by threatening it with the confiscation of the thirtieth.23 These data indicate on the one hand that Hunyadi was resolute in his opposition to the import of salt from Austria, while the ruler (who was also duke of Austria) was not. On the other hand, they also suggest that the Hungarian chamber organization (which was under the oversight of Hunyadi) was not able to provide even close to enough salt, which was precious indeed, for the borderlands in the west, so the territory remained a good market for salt from Austria (which was cheaper anyway).

The Volume of Salt Imports

Beginning in the 1443–1444 financial year, the municipal accounts offer an overview of the quantities of the salt imports.24 The financial affairs of the city were administered by a chamberer (Chamerer), who from the late 1430s are known by the name, and were assisted in their work by paid employees (Chammerschreiber or Chammerknechte). The chamberer was responsible for rendering all of the accounts. He usually began his tenure in office on May 12 (the day of Saint Pancras), and he usually remained in office for a year, though some of the people who held this position were in office for less than a year. The mayor was responsible for overseeing the work of the head of the chamber.25 The accounts were not kept consistently, however, and today we often have only incomplete volumes on the basis of which to make hypotheses. The salt that was imported to the city was measured in Küfel. The account entries indicate that the suppliers did indeed pay a thirtieth (i.e. one Küfel for every thirty).26 It was beneficial to the city to be able to levy the thirtieth in kind, since some of the salt thus collected was sold and some of it was given to the city officials as a gift. The city’s income stemming from the traffic of salt was not a substantial amount, oscillating between 100 and 160 golden florins annually. With regards to the value of the import, according to the calculations of Ferenc Kováts, in the 1440s it was somewhere between 3,000 and 4,800 golden florins annually, while in the 1450s it rose to 6,000 golden florins. This amount is a mere 4 percent of the 150,000 golden florins-worth of taxable merchandise brought into the city.27

The numbers accounted by the employees of the chamber indicate that the amount of salt imported into the city fluctuated. In 1446–1447, very little salt was imported. There are no records of any legally imported salt between 1451 and 1453 or in 1455. And yet, in the 1440s and 1450s, significant amounts of salt may well have been imported into Pozsony. Of the various accounts that are at our disposal, the one from 1448 seems the most complete. According to this record, between January 28 and November 30 of this year, 194,464 Küfel (1,361.25 tons) of salt were officially imported. In all likelihood, this quantity increased in the 1450s. In the period between April 22 and December 22 1456, 170,406 Küfel were imported (1,192.82 tons). Duties were imposed on 133,800 Küfel (936.6 tons) of imported salt between May 9 and December 13 1457. After this, however, the amount of salt on which duties were levied began to decrease, and after 1465 the import of salt completely ceased, disregarding a few exceptional cases. Thus, in the 1440s and 1450s, there were significant imports (between 1,000 and 1,400 tons a year), though there were years in which only smaller quantities of salt were registered by the customs officials.28 Unfortunately, the available sources do not indicate how much salt was produced within the Kingdom of Hungary in the middle of the fifteenth century. The demand for salt within the kingdom at the end of the century must have been somewhere between 24,000 and 30,000 tons,29 of which 1,000–1,400 tons constituted between 3 and 5 percent. Naturally, if one takes into consideration contraband as well, these numbers are obviously higher.

Initially, King Matthias Corvinus did not take measures to hinder the import of salt through the city of Pozsony. Nonetheless, the amount of salt that was brought into the kingdom through the Pozsony customs office dropped drastically after 1459. This coincided with a general drop in foreign trade flowing through the city. The explanation for this lies in the Austrian financial crisis and the catastrophic drop in the value of the Viennese denarii.30 However, one must also take into consideration the shifts in the policy of the royal court. In 1464, the national assembly forbade the import of salt. In 1465, King Matthias sent stern instructions to the city of Pozsony in which he prohibited the import of salt. This order had to be issued again in 1468. In other words, in spite of the prohibition, salt continued to be smuggled into the city.31 Later, it became possible again to occasionally import salt from Austria with a royal license, but in their quantity these imports never reached the levels that had been attained in the 1440s and 1450s.

It is also worth considering the importance of exports to Hungary from the perspective of mining in Austria. In Hallstatt, roughly 8,000 to 9,000 tons of salt were extracted annually. If one adds to this the salt that was mined in Aussee and then transported to Gmunden, at least 9,000 to 10,000 tons of salt had to find a market.32 With the most prudent calculation, 1,000–1,400 tons is 9–13 percent of this amount. Thus, the export to Hungary was hardly trifling. If one also keeps in mind that a significant amount of salt was brought into the Kingdom of Hungary through Sopron, and takes into consideration contraband as well, which, regrettably, cannot be quantified, and adds those amounts of salt that, for whatever reason, were not actually noted in the records, it becomes quite clear that the Hungarian market was in all likelihood very important for the producers and merchants (the princes who profited off of the trade of salt) of Gmunden (and Aussee). When King Matthias brought an end to the legal import of salt, this measure had serious consequences for the producers and merchants alike, since they had to find new markets for their export.

The Markets for the City of Pozsony

What was the extent of the territory that the burghers of Pozsony were able to provide with salt imported from Austria? The city itself gave an answer to this question when it explained the details of its right to import salt from Austria to the ruler in 1453. Its delegates explained to the ruler (who raised no objections) that the city had previously transported and sold salt on the territories extending, on one side of the Danube River to the Rába River, and on the other side of the Danube River to the Vág River.33 Regrettably, the charter gives no other, more detailed information.34 The river Danube referred to in the charter should by no means be interpreted as the small branch of the Danube that in the Middle Ages was called Csalló (the Danube Csalló, or Csallóduna),35 but rather as the main branch of the Danube (which was nowhere near as important then as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), or the branch of the river known as “szigetközi” (an island plain in Western Hungary bordered by the Danube and its branches), both of which in the Middle Ages were used by boats traveling from Vienna and Pozsony to Visegrád and Buda (traffic on the “szigetközi” Danube must have been particularly large).36 Thus, the territory to which the city of Pozsony had royal license to transport and sell salt imported from Austria included the river island known today as Csallóköz (today Žitný ostrov, Slovakia), as well as, at least to some extent, the area of the southern shores of the main branch of the Danube.

The burghers of Pozsony had close ties to Csallóköz. They regularly traveled to the island and the area surrounding it, from where they returned with foodstuffs. Their carts also often traveled by way of Csallóköz to Komárom on their way to Buda.37 Place names of Csallóköz and settlements on the southern bank of the Danube are often found in the last wills and testaments of the denizens of Pozsony, in a way outlining the territories that were part of the narrower market zone of the city.38 According to Kováts, the extent of the city’s reach stretched on the northern side of the Danube to the mining towns, Esztergom, and Vác. In other words, the whole of Pozsony and Nyitra counties depended on the markets and fairs in Pozsony, and so did the southern part of Bars County and the northern part of Komárom and Esztergom counties, lying just beyond the Danube.39 The extent of the territory that the burghers of Pozsony alluded to as the area where they marketed imported Austrian salt was smaller than this, since it was bordered by the Vág river, but it did stretch to the southern shore of what today is the main branch. Most of the thirtieth offices farmed by the city of Pozsony in the 1450s were located in this territory.40 Thus, the part of the country where the salt that came to Hungary through the customs office of Pozsony was sold consisted of Pozsony County itself, part of Nyitra County,41 at least the stretch of Komárom County lying to the north of the Danube, and parts of Győr and Moson Counties. Towards the northeast, it bordered the market zone of Nagyszombat, and towards the southeast it bordered the markets of Sopron, the border of which was also the Rába River. They were both important commercial centers. It is the territory described above that can be identified as the market zone of Pozsony.42 Furthermore, this was the part of the country for which the Hungarian chamber organization was no more able to guarantee adequate provisions of salt, even if only at times. The 1,000–1,400 tons of salt that were imported from Austria would have been enough for a population of 100,000–140,000 people at most, if one reckons with a demand of 10 kilograms of salt per person. The population of this territory may well have been approximately this size.43

It is worth taking note of a bit of information dating from 1470. With the consent of the ruler, treasurer János Ernuszt permitted the purchase and sale of 400 pounds of imported salt. This amount corresponds to 96,000 Küfel (673 tons),44 which in principle would have been enough to meet the demands of 60,000–70,000 people in a given year. The contents of the charter indicate that the city (and the royal chamber) was the center of the salt trade in the region. People may well have come to the city to purchase this important item not only from most of the settlements in Pozsony County (Nagyszombat was also home to a salt chamber, so its market zone should not be taken into consideration), but also from the settlements in the neighboring territories of the surrounding counties.45 For the sake of comparison, it is worth considering some of the later data. When Wladislas II of Hungary permitted the import of salt from Austria in the period between 1496 and 1498, people could purchase the salt from the city chamber. Data from 1498/9, a period of almost a whole year, indicate the import of 8,160 Küfel (57 tons).46 This quantity would have been enough for 5,000 to 6,000 people for one year. The population of Pozsony at the beginning of the sixteenth century was between 4,200 and 4,700 people.47 Thus, this import would have been adequate for the local community and the very narrow surroundings at most.

It is worth saying a few words about the prices of salt as well. In the 1440s and 1450s, the city sold one Küfel for 7–9 Viennese denarii. Between 1496 and 1499, the city purchased one Küfel in Vienna for 13–14 Viennese denarii (roughly 4.5 Hungarian denarii) and then sold it in Hungary for 20 Viennese denarii (roughly 6–7 Hungarian denarii). At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the price of a Küfel at Pozsony was still 18–20 denarii (6–7 Hungarian denarii). At the end of the 1520s and the beginning of the 1530s, a Küfel could usually be purchased in Hainburg for 16 Viennese denarii and then sold in Pozsony for 20.48

In Transylvania, different sizes of rock salt were mined, depending on whether it was going to be transported by boat or by cart. Under the rule of the Jagiellonian dynasty, in the town of Torda (today Turda, Romania) the rock salt mined for shipment by boat was 2.7 kilograms (5.5 pounds) and the rock salt cut for shipment by cart was 8.6 kilograms (17.5 pounds). In the town of Vízakna (today Ocna Sibiului, Romania), rock salt for shipment by boat weighed 4.9 kilograms (10 pounds) and rock salt for shipment by cart 10.8 kilograms (22 pounds). In Dés (today Dej, Romania) presumably rock salt in the amount of 9.33 kilograms (19 pounds) was cut for shipment by cart and perhaps 2.5 kilograms (5 pounds) for shipment by boat. In 1515/6, one hundred units of the rock salt cut for shipment by boat were worth 1.1 golden florins, and one hundred units of the rock salt cut for shipment by cart could be purchased at the mines for 3 golden florins. One can easily imagine how much these prices jumped by the time the salt had made it to the borderlands (whether brought by boat or cart). These prices could hardly have competed with the price of a hundred Küfel, which weighed about 700 kilograms, and cost 6–7 Hungarian golden florins).49

Conclusion

In the middle of the fifteenth century, a great deal of Austrian salt was consumed in the territories of Western Hungary. The rise in the import of salt can equally be explained by the domestic political circumstances and the fact that the city of Pozsony leased the local chief customs office. The burghers of the city strove to take full advantage of this opportunity. Drawing on their privileges, they brought quantities of salt to Hungary that far exceeded the needs of the local population. Others also took advantage of the profits to be made in the trade in salt. As power was centralized and consolidated under the rule of King Matthias, the king took back the thirtieth, and the amount of Austrian salt was imported to Hungary decreased accordingly. One should also keep in mind that Hungarian salt was too expensive in the parts of the country that were far from the mines, and indeed it was not always possible to get enough salt from the mining areas to the distant borderlands. This was due to the difficulties of transportation, the inefficiencies of the chamber system, and the fluctuations in production in Hungary (though production also fluctuated in Austria). Furthermore, the rock salt mined in Hungary was sold in quantities that differed in their weight, while the Küfel brought in from Austria were always roughly the same. Finally, while in general the salt that was mined in Transylvania was very pure, the cooked salt from Austria may have been more uniform in its quality.50

 

Appendix. The import of Austrian salt in Pozsony

 

Table 1. Salt imported between 1444 –1464 on which the thirtieth was paid in Pozsony51

Period	Number of Küfel	Kilograms
June 10–December 9, 1444	79,200	554,400 (532,224)
March 12–December 30, 1445	127,080	889,560 (853,978)
January 1–April 3, 1446	7,080	49,560 ( 47,578)
July 17–December 8, 1447	76,440	535,080 (513,677)
January 28–November 30, 1448	194,464	1,361,248 (1,306,798)
May 13–October 11, 1450	113,580	795,060 (763,258)
March 29–May 28, 1454	18,720	131,040 (125,799)
April 22–December 22, 1456	170,406	1,192,842 (1,145,129)
May 9–December 13, 1457	133,800	936660 (899136)
March 14–July 7, 1458	60,840	425,880 (408,845)
June 2.–December 31, 1459	94,170	659,190 (632,823)
May 30–September 21, 1461	37,800	264,600 (254,816)
January 2–July 8, 1463	19842	138,894 (133,339)
December 16–December 22, 1464	6,925	48,475 (46,536)

 

 

Table 2. Salt imports into the city of Pozsony in 1496–149952

Period	Number of Küfel	Kilograms
December 13, 1496–April 17, 1497	6,000	42,000 (40,320)
May 17–December 12, 1498	6,840	47,880 (45,965)
March 21–April 20, 1499	1,320	9,240 (8,871)
1498–1499	8,160	57,120 (54,836)

 

Bibliography

Archival sources

Archív Mesta Bratislavy (=AMB, Archives of the City of Bratislava)

Archív Mesta Šamorin (=AMŠ, Archives of the Town of Šamorin)

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (=MNL OL, Hungarian National Archives)

MNL OL Diplomatikai Fényképtár (=DF, Photograph Collection of Charters)

MNL OL, Diplomatikai Levéltár (=DL, Medieval Charter Collection)

 

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Kováts, Ferenc. “A magyar arany világtörténeti jelentősége és kereskedelmi összeköttetéseink a nyugattal a középkorban” [The significance of Hungarian gold in world history and Hungary’s commercial ties to the West in the Middle Ages]. Történeti Szemle 11 (1922): 104–43.

Kováts, Ferenc. “Korakapitalisztikus gazdasági válság Magyarországon I. Mátyás király uralkodása idején” [An early capitalistic economic crisis in Hungary during the reign of King Matthias]. In Emlékkönyv Dr. Mahler Ede nyolcvanadik születésnapjára [Commemorative volume on the occasion of the eightieth birthday of Dr. Ede Mahler], 178–94. Budapest: Arany János Irodalmi és Nyomdai Műintézet, 1937.

Kováts, Ferenc. Nyugatmagyarország áruforgalma a XV. században a pozsonyi harmincadkönyv alapján: Történet-statisztikai tanulmány [The circulation of commercial goods in western Hungary in the fifteenth century on the basis of the Pressburg thirtieth customs register]. Budapest: Politzer, 1902.

Kováts, Ferenc. “Pozsony városának háztartása a 15. században” [The household of the city of Bratislava in the fifteenth century]. Magyar Gazdaságtörténeti Szemle 9 (1902): 433–66.

Kubinyi, András. “Buda és Pest szerepe a távolsági kereskedelemben a 15–16. század fordulóján” [The roles of Buda and Pest in long-distance commerce at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries]. Történelmi Szemle 26 (1994): 1–52.

Kubinyi, András. “Die Bevölkerung des Königreichs Ungarn am Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts.” In Historische Demographie Ungarns (896–1996), edited by Tibor Schäfer, 66–93. Herne: Gabriele Schäfer, 2007.

Kubinyi, András. “Die königlich-ungarischen Salzordnungen des Mittelalters.” In Das Salz in der Rechts- und Handelsgeschichte, edited by Jean-Claude Hocquet et al., 261–70. Schwaz: Berenkamp, 1991.

Kubinyi, András. “Königliches Salzmonopol und die Städte des Königreichs Ungarn im Mittelalter.” In Stadt und Salz, edited by Wilhelm Rausch, 213–32. Linz–Donau: Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, 1988.

Lederer, Emma. A középkori pénzüzletek története Magyarországon (1000–1458) [The history of money transactions in medieval Hungary (1000–1458)]. Budapest: MTA, 1932.

Lukačka, Jan. “Verkehrs- und Handelsbeziehungen zwischen den Städten Wien, Preßburg und Ofen bis zur Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts.” In Städte im Donauraum, edited by Richard Marsina, 159–68. Bratislava: Slovenská historická spoločnost’, 1993.

Majorossy, Judit. “Egy határ menti szabad királyi város középkori igazgatásának vázlatos története (Tanulmány egy készülő pozsonyi archontológiai kötet elé)” [A historical sketch of the administration of a borderland royal free city in the Middle Ages (Essay preceding an archontological volume uder preparation on Bratislava)]. Történelmi Szemle 57 (2015): 441–69.

Majorossy, Judit. “Egy város a ‘regionális’ kapcsolati térben. A középkori pozsonyi polgárok városon kívüli kapcsolatainak térbeli kiterjedéséről (1430–1530)” [A city in the ‘regional’ space of connections: The spatial extent of the relations of the burghers of medieval Bratislava beyond the city]. Korall 13, no. 50 (2012): 188–211.

Mayer, Theodor. Der auswärtige Handel des Herzogtums Österreich im Mittelalter. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1909.

Mollay, Károly. Német–magyar nyelvi érintkezések a 16. század végéig [German and Hungarian language contacts until the end of the sixteenth century]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982.

Neumann, Tibor. A Korlátköviek. Egy előkelő család története és politikai szereplése a 15 – 16. században [The Korlátkövi family: The history of a prominent family and its political roles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries]. Győr: Győri Egyházmegyei Levéltár, 2007.

Ortvay, Tivadar. Pozsony város története [The history of the city of Bratislava]. 4 vols. Pozsony: Pozsonyi Első Takarékpénztár, 1892–1912.

Pálosfalvi, Tamás. “Rozgonyiak és a polgárháború (1440 – 1444)” [The Rozgonyi family and the civil war (1440–1444)]. Századok 137 (2003): 897–928.

Pálosfalvi, Tamás. “A pozsonyi vár elfoglalása 1450-ben” [The capture of the castle of Bratislava in 1450]. In Analecta Mediaevalia II. Várak, templomok, ispotályok. Tanulmányok a magyar középkorból [Analecta Mediaevalia II: Castles, churches, alms houses. Essays on medieval Hungary], edited by Tibor Neumann, 197–219. Budapest: Argumentum, 2004.

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Pribram, Albert Francis, ed. Materialen zur Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Österreich I. Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1938.

Schraml, Carl. Das oberösterreichische Salinenwesen, von Beginne des 16. Jahrhunderts bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Vienna: n.p., 1932.

Pickl, Otmar. “Die Salzproduktion im Ostalpenraum am Beginn der Neuzeit.” In Österreichisches Montanwesen, edited by Michael Mitterauer, 11–28. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1974.

Pohl, Artur. “Die Münzstätte Pressburg im Mittelalter.” Südost-Forschung 24 (1965): 81–102.

Püspöki Nagy, Péter. “A Csallóköz vízrajzi képének története Strabón Geógraphikájától IV. Béla koráig” [The hydrographical history of Žitný Ostrov from Strabo’s Geographica to the era of Béla IV]. Új Mindenes Gyűjtemény 4 (1985): 64–124.

Uhlirz, Karl, ed. Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Wien. Vol. 2. Vienna: Alterthums-Verein, 1900.

Skorka, Renáta. “Pozsony gazdasági szerepe a 15. század első felében a zálogszerződések alapján” [The economic role of Bratislava in the first half of the fifteenth century on the basis of the pawn contracts]. Századok 138 (2004): 433–63.

Szende, Katalin. “Beziehungen zwischen Pressburg und Ödenburg im späten Mittelater.” In Städte im Donauraum, edited by Richard Marsina, 135–48. Bratislava: Slovenská historická spoločnost’, 1993.

Szende, Katalin. Otthon a városban: Társadalom és anyagi kultúra a középkori Sopronban, Pozsonyban és Eperjesen [At home in the city: Society and material culture in Sopron, Bratislava, and Prešov in the Middle Ages]. Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 2004.

Takáts, Sándor. “A dunai hajózás a XVI. és XVII. században” [Shipping on the Danube River in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries]. Magyar Gazdaságtörténeti Szemle 7 (1900): 97–122.

Weisz, Boglárka. “Az erdélyi sókamarák ispánjai a 14. század végéig” [The comites camerarum salium from Transylvania until the end of the fourteenth century]. In Certamen, IV, edited by Emese Egyed, Emőke Gálfi, and Attila Weisz, 241–57. Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület, 2017.

Weisz, Boglárka. “Megjegyzések az Árpád-kori sóvámolás és -kereskedelem történetéhez” [Comments on duties imposed on salt and the salt trade in the Árpád era]. Acta Universitatis Szegediensis. Acta Historica 125 (2007): 43–57.

* The author is a member of the “Lendület” (Momentum) Research Group on Medieval Hungarian Economic History at the Research Center for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (LP2015-4/2015), and of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences–ELTE Research Group on University History (213TKI738).

Bavarian Cloth Seals in Hungary

Maxim Mordovin*

Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Archaeological Sciences

 

The import of cloth was one of the most important sectors of international trade throughout the European Middle Ages and early modern period. Its history and impact on medieval economies have been studied by scholars for quite a long time, creating the impression that there are no new sources waiting to be found. Improved methods of archaeological excavations, however, have produced data significant to the international trade connections. This data was hidden in small leaden seals that were attached to the textile fabrics indicating their quality and origin. In this paper, I examine the cloth seals originating from Bavaria that have been found so far in the Carpathian Basin and compare the information provided by them with that already known from the available written sources. This comparison leads to several important conclusions. Perhaps most importantly, the dating range of the known cloth seals can be convincingly limited within the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for all the nineteen known textile production centers. Also, the cloth marked by these seals indicates that some serious changes arose in textile consumption at the end of the Middle Ages. In this study, I identify some new places of origin not mentioned in the written sources and trace their distribution in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary.

Keywords: international trade, textile production, medieval Bavaria, cloth seals, cloth and linen trade

Introduction

The reshaping and transformation of the Western European economy in the late Middle Ages had several consequences, including an increase in the role of the southern German and Silesian textile industry1 and an ever greater presence of its fabrics on the Hungarian markets.2 By the end of the Middle Ages, the cloth import of the Kingdom of Hungary had become dominated by the production from the Holy Roman Empire, and a large portion of these fabrics consisted of cloth from southern Germany.3 The appearance of such textiles and the changes in their temporal and geographical distribution can be very clearly traced in the contemporary written sources. Fortunately, this part of the research has already been successfully accomplished by scholars of Hungarian medieval economic history, such as György Székely and Walter Endrei. Székely evaluated the available written sources on German cloth in Hungary in his 1975 article,4 and Endrei discussed the “rest” of the archival material in his book published in 1989.5

In this paper, I introduce a new – archaeological – type of source in the research on late medieval and early modern Hungarian cloth imports. This source is a group of small lead seals, which can help in identifying the origins of particular finds.6 These seals, however, indicate the provenance of the product, but not the route by which it was transported or the origin of the merchants. Certainly, I am not the first person to notice the significance of such finds in the region. Along with the work of Walter Endrei, some articles on the subject were written by Lajos Huszár, Ján Hunka, Radu Popa, and others.7 Nevertheless, the number of cloth seals in the last two decades has increased significantly, enabling one to pursue more detailed research according to smaller regions of the provenance of such finds.8

Although the cloth seals are very well known and widely evaluated in the Western scholarly literature, until about ten years ago their significance as a source was greatly underestimated in East Central Europe.9 The use and function of these seals and the institutional background of the authentication process in the larger textile centers are thoroughly analysed and described in the works of Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus, Geoff Egan and Dieter Hittinger.10 Here, therefore, I concentrate only on the seals as a new type of source omitting the details of the production process.

The last two decades of archaeological excavations and the intensive use of metal detectors (both legally and illegally) in several countries of the Carpathian Basin have produced a relatively large number of cloth seals the provenance of which lie in very different European regions, including Flanders, the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia, Silesia, Italy, etc. A significant group among them consists of finds connectable to the southern German regions, most of all to present-day Bavaria.

The borders of the huge number of principalities, counties, and duchies were continuously changing throughout the history of the Holy Roman Empire, so it is very hard to choose a single larger political-historical unit within the southern German region. This persuaded me to do an analysis of the items from the medieval and early modern finds that can be connected to the cities of the present-day Free State of Bavaria. Modern Bavaria includes parts of the historical regions of Franconia, Upper Palatinate, and Swabia. Unfortunately, the limits of the present study do not permit me to evaluate the whole German territory.

The temporal frames of the analysis are given by the dating of the earliest and latest known cloth seals provenanced from Bavarian cities. Thus, at the present stage of the research, the period in question can be limited to the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

In his 1975 article, György Székely mentions six southern German cities as origins of cloth exports to Hungary: Bamberg, Eichstätt, Schwabach, Ulm, Nuremberg, and its suburb, Wöhrd. All of them appear in the contemporary written sources evaluated by Székely.11 He at the same time emphasizes that despite the obvious and well-known significance of textile production of Augsburg, he found no written evidence indicating that its cloths ever made it to Hungary.12 Endrei names eight additional Bavarian cities: Dinkelsbühl, Isny, Kempten, Memmingen, München, Öttingen, Rothenburg, and Waldsee. Altogether, the available Hungarian written sources give us a list of fourteen textile production centers, which undoubtedly exported their fabrics to the Kingdom of Hungary in the period beginning in the fourteenth century and ending in the seventeenth.

Nevertheless, the total number of cities in the region in question that produced textiles in the late Middle Ages and early modern time was much higher. According to Rudolf Holbach’s monograph, at least 46 settlements had significant cloth industry.13

The Purely Written Evidence (Bamberg, Eichstätt, Öttingen, and Wöhrd)

Some of the aforementioned places, such as Bamberg, Eichstätt, and Wöhrd, can be discussed very briefly. Despite their intensive and significant cloth production in the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, so far no archaeological evidence has been found indicating that their fabrics were sold in Hungary. No cloth seals from these cities have been found so far in any other parts of Europe. This is surprising because their cloth fabrics are mentioned relatively frequently in the Hungarian written sources.14

The cloth of Bamberg as Pabenperger is first mentioned in the so-called Sybenlinder-register from 1436.15 This register was compiled by Hans Sybenlinder, the royal castellan of Óbuda and Solymár in 1436, and it specified the tariff articles imported to Hungary. According to it, the Bamberg cloth appeared as the second-to-last cheapest item.16

The situation with Eischstätt, Öttingen, and Wöhrd on the one hand, was similar to that of Bamberg since no indisputably identifiable cloth seals connected to these cities have been found so far. On the other hand, the state of the research is a bit worse, because their fabrics are only rarely mentioned in the available written sources. The largest of the three cities is Eichstätt. Goods from Eichstätt appear in the Sybenlinder account in 1436 (de panno Achsteter) among the cheapest articles.17 The other known source for its cloth is the 1457–58 custom register from Pozsony (Pressburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia) – tuch aechstetar.18 The quality of the cloth imported to Hungary from Eichstätt can be considered medium according to the duties paid for it.19 Öttingen appears in the sources only in the sixteenth century, alongside other southern German linen fabrics traded in Hungary by the Funck Trading Company. Balázs of Csepreg (Walasch zu Tschapring) bought twenty rolls between 1517 and 1522.20

The identification of Wöhrd was problematic even in the written sources. György Székely was the first person who convincingly identified the werderÿn, werder cloth as a product of a Nuremberg-suburb, present-day Wöhrd. Known as an important textile production settlement, its fabrics appear in the Hungarian sources as early as the first half of the fifteenth century: in the Sybenlinder account21 and in the Pozsony custom register.22 They are mentioned in custom registers and north-western toll accounts from the end of the century in Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt, today Sibiu, Romania).23 Most probably, its disappearance from the later sources and the lack of the cloth seals can be explained by the fact that from the end of the Middle Ages the craftsmen of Wöhrd were actually citizens of Nuremberg. Therefore, they produced the same sort of cloth as the imperial city and – most probably – sealed it the same way. The regulations of the Nuremberg City Council from 1489 and 1522 clearly imply this practice,24 and behind some of the Nuremberg seals, actually Wöhrd may be hiding (see the Nuremberg chapter).

Written and Probable Archaeological Evidence (Schwabach, Isny, Kempten)

The cloth from Schwabach is mentioned only once in the Hungarian sources. In 1501, the royal city of Bártfa (today Bardejov, Slovakia) was allowed to pay part of its taxes in cloth from Schwabach.25 The coat of arms of Schwabach depicts two crossing beer kettles with long handles combining the lion and the symbol of the Hohenzollern family (Quarterly Argent and Sable).26 This coat of arms is interesting because a similar but very damaged image is familiar from two cloth seals. Both of them are stray finds but while the find location of the first is unknown (somewhere in south-eastern Hungary), the second one was discovered in the vicinity of Szolnok. The image visible on the obverse side depicts two crossing rods with some kind of basket at the ends. Thus, it resembles the charge of the Schwabach coat of arms. The background of the escutcheon is quarterly indicating the two different tinctures of the Hohenzollern coat of arms. According to the fragments of an inscription on the seals they can be dated to the late fifteenth or the sixteenth century (Fig. 1a).

Another city of origin which might be traceable among the archaeological finds is Isny im Allgäu. The coat of arms of Isny includes a one-headed eagle holding a smaller escutcheon with a horseshoe.27 No sources have been published on this in detail yet, but Endrei mentions the appearance of aisner or eisner linen fabrics in Hungary.28 So far, only one cloth seal can be connected with Isny. It was found on the site of a deserted village destroyed in the late sixteenth century, located near Nagyszénás in south-eastern Hungary. The obverse side of the seal shows a well-executed horseshoe in a pearled circle, and a one-headed eagle-like bird can be seen on the reverse side. Since this is the only such find known both in and outside Hungary, the identification cannot yet be confirmed. It is not possible to date the find more precisely than sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century based on the style of the details and the ante quem dating given by the destruction of the settlement (Fig. 1b).

The third more-or-less probable identification concerns the products of Kempten. The linen fabrics of the city were well known in the sixteenth century,29 and they can be traced on the Hungarian markets.30 The coat of arms of Kempten is party per pale with a demi-eagle and a tower31 or party per pale with a double-headed eagle united by a crown (without a tower).32 The cloth seal identifiable as being from the Kempten linen or fustian is very damaged. However, the impressions on the obverse side recognisable as a double-headed eagle (without the crown) and a small fragment of a tower. The precise find location of the item is unknown but it was discovered in the vicinity of Szolnok, most probably beside a crossing over the Tisza River. There is no firm evidence to date this find. Only the bent sides of the escutcheon with the eagle suggest the sixteenth or seventeenth century (Fig. 1c). Cloth seals from Kempten have been found in Bremen (Germany),33 London,34 and Salisbury35 but all three of them are quite different from the Hungarian one. The German find and the one from London can be dated to the seventeenth century, while the item from Salisbury is undated.

The Most Popular Cloth in Hungary (Nuremberg)

According to the fifteenth–sixteenth-century registers, Hungary had the most intense relationship with Nuremberg, of all the Bavarian cities in that period.36 This is indicated not only by the large amount of different goods imported from the city37 but also by strong family relations of the Nuremberg and Hungarian urban patriciate.38 Cloth imports played a significant role in this.

The written evidence documents the appearance of the Nuremberg fabrics on the Hungarian markets as early as the fifteenth century. The earliest reference to this can be found in the custom register of Pozsony from 1457–1458, which mentions medium quality cloth from Nuremberg. In 1497, the fabrics of the city appeared in the Saxon region of Transylvania.39

From the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the import of the Nuremberg cloth production increased significantly, a process which is reflected in the custom registers. At the same time, the available written sources report on at least two types of cloth brought from Nuremberg: more expensive long and medium-priced short fabrics.40 These products are often mentioned in the custom accounts of Brassó (1529–56, Kronstadt, today Braşov, Romania) and Zsolna (1530–31, today Žilina, Slovakia). The local regulations of Kolozsvár (Klausenburg, today Cluj-Napoca, Romania) also recorded two types of the Nuremberg cloth.41 It seems that from the 1540s the import of the higher quality textiles into Hungary became dominated by the cloth from Nuremberg. Thus, Nuremberg provided 73.67 percent of the more expensive fabrics but only 4 percent of the medium-quality fabrics, and even including the cloth from Wöhrd this figure climbs only to 16 percent. At the same time, there were no Nuremberg textiles within the cheapest group.42 The intensity of this trade was so important that the German city became seriously dependent on sales in Hungary. The collapse of the Hungarian market in the late sixteenth century caused notable financial difficulties in Nuremberg.43

Despite the wars and financial obstacles, from the mid-sixteenth century onward the cloth from Nuremberg was the most popular higher quality textile in the Kingdom of Hungary. It is mentioned in hundreds of letters and inventories, even if in some cases the contemporaneous spelling of the Nuremberg cloth may be confusing, causing it to be conflated with the cloth from Löwenberg (today, Lwówek Śląski, Poland).44 In 1551, the Transylvanian Chamber of Salt paid its employees (salt cutters) with short lurnberg cloth. During the Ottoman wars, this cloth was transported to occupied territories and sold there by the Hungarian merchants throughout the second half of the sixteenth century.45

The cloth production of Nuremberg was thoroughly analysed in 1993 by Hironobu Sakuma. According to his monograph, the textile was produced and dyed here from the late thirteenth century onward, while the differentiation of the fabrics began in the following centuries. Sources from 1504 already mention seven sorts of cloth produced in the city.46

The practice of sealing the local products first appears in the archival sources in ca. 1300 but with no indication of whether wax or lead seals were used.47 The earliest reference to detailed regulation dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. According to this regulation, at the time, the quality of the cloth was indicated by the number of lead seals. There were three sorts, which had respectively one, two or three seals. Unfortunately, the source does not discuss the imprints on the seals.48 By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the information concerning the seals becomes more detailed. The table given below summarizes the available data concerning the seals used for the Nuremberg cloth49

 

Table 1. Types of the Nuremberg cloth sealed according to the regulations

Bleached cloth	15th	Seal with a cross	single seal1
Dyed cloth		Seal with N	three seals according to the three examiners2
Dyed cloth of different origin but examined in Nuremberg	15693	Painted N and F.A.R.B.	no lead seals, except those traded in Italy. They received a usual N
Fustian		Ox, Lion, Grape and Letter
English wool 1		Saint Lawrence and Imperial Eagle
English wool 2		Coat of arms of Nuremberg, twice
English wool 3		Divided coat of arms of Nuremberg and N
English wool (other cloth)	15704	N and Shield [probably the coat of arms of the city without the eagle]

 

1 Sakuma, Die Nürnberger Tuchmacher, 50–53, 122.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 137–38.

4 Ibid., 139.

The data given in the table is well reflected in the cloth seal finds in Hungary. There are four types, which can undoubtedly be connected to Nuremberg (Fig. 2).

 

Table 2. Main types of the Nuremberg cloth seals found in the Carpathian Basin

T1	Obverse: Saint Lawrence holding book and gridiron; reverse: Gothic minuscule or Renaissance type NUE/REMBE/RG	5 finds	Eastern Slovakia, Stapar (Serbia: József Géza Kiss’ Collection), vicinity of Szolnok (3 items)
T2	Coat of arms of Nuremberg on both sides of the seal	14 finds	2 from southern Transdanubia (Private collection and Hungarian National Museum [hereafter HNM]); northern Transdanubia (HNM) Unknown (HNM) Bácska-Bánság (József Géza Kiss’ Collection) Csomorkány; Ópusztaszer; Szeged vicinity; Orosháza-Csorvás; Orosháza–Szentetornya; 3 from the vicinity of Szolnok; Paks-Cseresznyés, Pápa
T3	Coat of arms of Nuremberg and Renaissance W with floral ornament	12 finds	Orosháza–Gerendás; Orosháza–Nagyszénás; Kunágota; Bácska-Bánság (József Géza Kiss’ Collection) Unknown (2 items in private collections) Castle of Bács, 3 from the vicinity of Szolnok, Paks-Cseresznyés
T4	Coat of arms of Nuremberg and Renaissance N with floral ornament	7 finds	Unknown (HNM) Battonya–Basarága; Castle of Diósgyőr; Castle of Bajcsa; Castle of Sempte (today Šintava, Slovakia); Orosháza-Szentetornya, Feltót

 

As the two tables make clear, the known cloth seals most of all fit the category either of textiles produced from English wool or English cloth dyed in Nuremberg. The first type of seals unambiguously corresponds to the first group of “English” fabrics from the sixteenth-century regulation, since there is no other version with an image of Saint Lawrence. The only difference is the lack of the imperial eagle and the inscription on the reverse side. The reason for this might be that, according to the type of NUE/REMBE/RG, these seals seem to precede this regulation chronologically. They are datable to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century (Fig. 2a). Unfortunately, all four such seals are stray finds and cannot be dated any more precisely. The one found near Szolnok with the Renaissance […]RE[…]/[…]RK[?] inscription indicates the use of this type until at least the mid-sixteenth century. A very interesting fact about these finds is that there are no known similar cloth seals from other countries.

The second type completely corresponds to the regulation. These seals have identical coats of arms of Nuremberg on both sides (Fig. 2b). Four out of the fourteen such seals are stray finds without even a precise location. Two were found somewhere in southern Transdanubia, another one in northern Transdanubia, while in case of the fourth find there is no data available at all.50 Five more seals from different private and museum collections found in the vicinities of Szeged and Szolnok should also be considered stray finds since there is no data regarding their precise localisations. At the same time, there are several luckier finds from Ópusztaszer, Csomorkány, Paks-Cseresznyés, Orosháza-Csorvás, and Orosháza-Szentetornya on which considerably more information is available. Four of them were found during archaeological field surveys, while the fifth (the one from Ópusztaszer) was discovered during the excavations of an abandoned rural settlement and monastic site.51 The stratigraphy does not help in these cases but the historical events define the ante quem data of the finds. All five villages were more-or-less significant settlements before the Ottoman expansion in the mid-sixteenth century. Surviving the first period of military activity, all of them fell victim to the 1596 Ottoman campaign, the first phase of the Long Turkish War (or Fifteen Years War: 1591–1606).52

The cloth seals with the coat of arms of Nuremberg on one side and a Renaissance W letter on the other cannot be directly connected to any of the versions described in the regulations (Fig. 2c). However, the coat of arms seems identical with that on the second type. All of the twelve such finds were discovered either around Szolnok (three items) or in the southern part of the Great Hungarian Plain: Orosháza-Gerendás; Nagyszénás; Kunágota; Bácska–Bánság (József Géza Kiss’ Collection); unknown (two items in private collections) and the Castle of Bács (today Bač, Serbia). The chronology of this group can be also given according to the ante quem date of the sites: all the settlements around Orosháza (Gerendás, Nagyszénás, Kunágota) were destroyed at the end of the sixteenth century, which means that these seals must have been brought there earlier. The Renaissance details around the letter W and the coat of arms suggest that they date back to the sixteenth century. Since the known regulation does not give any hints concerning the interpretation of the fabrics marked with these seals, in my opinion, it should be identified with textiles not necessarily produced locally. It is very important that in the sixteenth century not only fabrics that were made in Nuremberg were given Nuremberg cloth seals, but also cloths that were imported from different places. Certainly, this product was also checked to be sure it met the required standards, and then it was sealed. After 1566, the local and the foreign cloths were marked differently.53 At the same time, the most plausible explanation for the simultaneous appearance of the coat of arms of Nuremberg and a W on the same seal is that such fabrics were also produced in Wöhrd. In this case, the W refers to the name of the suburb. The fact that the Hungarian accounts and registers drew a distinction between the cloth from Wöhrd and Nuremberg54 proves that this difference was somehow recognisable and that for some reason it was important to separate these fabrics. The easiest way to present the different origin was to mark it on the seals.

The fourth group of the known Nuremberg seals seems the best datable one. This is the type with a coat of arms on the obverse side and a letter N on the reverse side with a clear Renaissance character (Fig. 2d). According to the contemporary regulations, this version appeared in the late 1560s.55 Altogether seven such finds are known so far, and they are all from the Carpathian Basin. Except the already published stray find,56 three were discovered in castles: Bajcsa,57 Diósgyőr,58 and Feltót (today Tauţi, Romania). Two more were found around Orosháza (the deserted villages of Szentetornya and Battonya). The last one, from Sempte, cannot be identified indisputably as a cloth seal from Nuremberg, because apart from the letter N, it bears no other characteristic details of the group.59 As is known from the case of Switzerland, the letter N may also refer to Nördlingen.60 The situation with the dating is in some ways similar to that with the other groups of Nuremberg finds since at least four of the seven sites existed until the last decade of the sixteenth or the first of the seventeenth century.

Summarizing the Nuremberg cloth seal finds from Hungary, two details are very conspicuous. One is that there are no known published analogies from outside the territory of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, except a single stray find of the third type from Bohemia.61 The other such detail is that the dating of all known Nuremberg cloth seals fits within the sixteenth century, with slight variance towards the late fifteenth and early seventeenth. Both of these observations are hard to explain. Perhaps the lack of foreign analogies is primarily the result of the different states of the research. The reason for the second one might be explained by the relatively late introduction of lead cloth seals in the textile production in Nuremberg. The interruption at the beginning of the seventeenth century must have been the consequence of the collapse of the cloth market in Hungary during and after the Long Turkish War.

Written Sources and Rich Archaeological Evidence (Ulm)

The case of Ulm is somewhat clearer than the previous ones. The connections between Hungary and the city are well documented from the fourteenth century when Ulm became an important importer of Hungarian wool. From as early as the mid-fifteenth century, medium quality Ulm cloth can be traced in the Carpathian Basin. In the Sybenlinder list it appears as VLMER.62 Even if its quality decreased during the Ottoman period, it was still presented in the sixteenth–seventeenth-century custom records.63 Beginning in the late Middle Ages, Ulm was producing mainly two types of textiles: woollen cloth and cotton fabrics. However, there is not yet any contemporary evidence for differences in the sealing practices used with these types of textiles. The written sources from Ulm itself show a gradually developing cloth industry up until the early seventeenth century, when it was interrupted by the Thirty Years’ War and never recovered.

As archaeological finds, there are three types of cloth seals from Ulm in the Carpathian Basin, and all of them include the coat of arms of the city: party per fess Sable and Argent.64

1) obverse: coat of arms of Ulm; reverse: imperial eagle (Fig. 3a)

2) obverse: coat of arms of Ulm; reverse: party per pale, demi-eagle at the pale (Fig. 3b)

3) obverse: coat of arms of Ulm; reverse: inscription ULM written in Humanist capital letters (Fig. 3c)

There is a fourth type known in Germany, on which the coat of arms on the obverse is supplemented with Renaissance letters V-L-M65 or a date (for example 1518), and the imperial eagle of the reverse is replaced with the Gothic minuscule type ULM. However, at the moment no examples of this version of the Ulm seals have been found in East Central Europe.

The largest collection of the Ulm seals in Hungary originates from the excavations of the old market square in the small western Hungarian town of Pápa. These finds represent the first two of the known types of such items. In Pápa the 14 seals were found in very different layers. Apart from three stray finds, two more came from modern features in secondary positions. The stratigraphy of the rest of the eight items can be dated from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. The layers datable by coins indicate significant strata from the mid-sixteenth century. They are connected most of all to the layers associated with the rearranging of the market square when some new houses were built on the formerly paved surface. This process took place between 1526 and the late 1560s.66 According to the numismatic finds from the same layers, the dating can be narrowed to the 1550s or 1560s. Some other Ulm seals were found in a destruction or levelling layers datable not later than to the beginning of the seventeenth century. These layers indicate a huge catastrophe that struck the town around 1600. There were two such events in the history of Pápa in this period, which may have led to the destruction of all the buildings at the market square. The first was the siege of 1597 when the explosion of the gunpowder destroyed the castle and burnt most of the town to the ground.67 The next event, which was less likely to have been the cause, took place in 1600. The unpaid Walloon mercenaries revolted and turned to the Ottoman side. This led to another siege, which might have caused damage to the town as well. In any case, from the first decade of the seventeenth century, the market square of Pápa was again rearranged and new stone houses were constructed on the site of the earlier timber-framed ones.68 This construction activity was preceded by a significant levelling of the debris of the earlier structures. This is the levelling layer that contained the Ulm cloth seals. To conclude these observations, all the datable seals from Pápa come from the second half of the sixteenth century. The similar finds from Germany69 and Great Britain confirm this dating,70 indicating at the same time the earlier appearance of this type of Ulm seals.

Apart from the fourteen items found at Pápa, there are sixteen more cloth seals with the coat of arms of Ulm found in Hungary. All of them are metal-detector finds and thus cannot be dated properly. Eight seals were collected in the vicinities of Szolnok, and five additional seals were found in the plain region of Hungary: Révbérpuszta, Hajdúböszörmény, Nagyszénás, Orosháza-Fecskés, and Orosháza-Szentetornya, one more not far from Bény (today Bíňa, Slovakia). The last one is a stray find from a private collection. The finds from the plain region can be dated to before the end of the sixteenth century, because the deserted villages were destroyed in that time, during the so-called Long Turkish War (or Fifteen Years War: 1591–1606). Most of the stray finds (six seals) belong to the first group (arms and a whole eagle). Five more represent the second group with the demi-eagle. Only two items have the inscription VLM on the reverse, and three more were identified only on the basis of the fragments of the coat of arms. At the present stage of the research, there is not enough data to make any chronological distinction between the three types of seals from Ulm.

Scarce Written and Firm Archaeological Evidence (Augsburg, Dinkelsbühl, Memmingen, Rothenburg, and Waldsee)

The absence of the written sources concerning a particular production center does not necessarily mean the complete absence of its fabrics in the Kingdom of Hungary. This is the case of Augsburg. Cloth production in the city began in the thirteenth century. Its fabrics were very widespread all across the Europe. This fact is well documented not only by the contemporary written sources71 but also by a large number of the cloth seals with the coat of arms and symbols of Augsburg. The most popular product from the Augsburg textile industry was the fustian, which can be dated from the thirteenth century onward, and by the end of the Middle Ages was represented by fabrics of different quality and colours.72 According to Székely, there is no mention of Augsburg in the Hungarian sources. However, he checked primarily the sources on the north-western section of the border of the Hungarian Kingdom referring exclusively to the cloth fabrics (i.e. woollen production). He did not collect references for the linen or cotton textiles, which, however, was also regularly imported to Hungary. Correspondingly, the fustian – which was made of cotton – was omitted from his collection. At the same time, it is perfectly possible that the products from Augsburg were used as duties paid elsewhere, probably crossing the northern or western borders.

Walter Endrei in his study states that the Augsburg fustian was traded in Hungary. Thus, for example, in 1519 the Funck Trade Company sent some rolls of this textile to Kőszeg.73 The presence of the Augsburgian fustian in the Kingdom of Hungary can be confirmed so far on the basis of two cloth seals. One of them is known from the private collection of József Géza Kiss. It was found originally in the south-eastern part of Hungary (Fig. 4a). The other was discovered during a field survey in Kóny (north-west Hungary) (Fig. 4b). Both of them represent a very characteristic type of seal with a Gothic majuscule A referring to the name of the city on the obverse and the pine cone on the reverse. The last one appears in the coat of arms of the city from the Middle Ages.74

This type of cloth seal was in relatively widespread use all across Europe, and it is familiar from at least five countries: England,75 Germany,76 Poland,77 Denmark,78 and the Netherlands.79 Since the seals from Hungary are stray finds, their dating can be done according to similar finds from other sites. The form of the coat of arms and the size of the Hungarian finds are very common for most of the similar European seals. These analogies enable us to date the item from the private collection to the sixteenth century and the one from Kóny to the seventeenth century. However, the style of the cone of the seal from Kóny and the fact that the reverse side of the seal has specific iconography suggest an even later date for this item, sometime around the late seventeenth or even the eighteenth century.

There is a relatively large group of southern German cities known as exporters of linen or fustian fabrics to Hungary in the late Middle Ages. The written sources from the first half of the sixteenth century mention Dinkelsbühl, Memmingen, Rothenburg, and Waldsee.80 These places were relatively well known for their high and medium quality textile production in the late Middle Ages, up to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.81 There is no information concerning the quality of their fabrics sold in Hungary or the quantities that were sold. Nevertheless, the number of the identifiable cloth seals is relatively small. The most widespread type is from Memmingen, which can be identified by its coat of arms blazoned party per pale demi-eagle and cross gules.82 When readable, the reverse side in most of the cases shows a Gothic minuscule M referring to the name of the city. Altogether, six indisputable finds (i.e. finds that bear a recognisable coat of arms) are known from the Carpathian Basin: Pápa (Fig. 4c), Csejte (today Čachtice, Slovakia), Bény, Battonya-Kovácsháza, Szolnok, and one in a private collection (Fig. 4d). There are two more finds, which can be identified as originating in Memmingen on which only the Gothic M survived. Both finds were discovered at the market square of Pápa. Concerning the dating, only the finds from Pápa and Csejte have any stratigraphical data. In the first case, the seals with the letter M came from the layers datable to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The one from Csejte, which was improperly identified by Ján Hunka as a cloth seal from Opole (Silesia, Poland), was accompanied by two coins, the younger of which was a quarting of King Sigismund from 1430–37.83 As they are almost identical with the stray finds, the dating seems to have been the same, roughly the period from the mid-fifteenth until the mid-sixteenth century.

All four cloth seals connected to Dinkelsbühl should be regarded as stray finds, including the two from the vicinity of Szolnok. The find locations of two others are completely unknown: one is in a private collection (Fig. 5a), the other, which is in the Hungarian National Museum (Fig. 5b), has already been published but as of unknown provenance.84 These items can be identified according to the three corns in the ear from the coat of arms of the city.85 The reverse side of the seals depicts an imperial eagle. In one case, only the reverse side survived with the eagle but its characteristic shape enables one to identify the seal firmly. There is no data so far for dating this group of seals more precisely than the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, based mostly on historical references on the settlement structure of the Great Hungarian Plain, where these finds might have been discovered. I have not yet found any published seals from Dinkelsbühl outside the Carpathian Basin.

The last two cities, Rothenburg and Waldsee, have relatively simple and thus not unambiguously identifiable coats of arms. The coat of arms of Rothenburg is Argent a castle with two towers Gules;86 for Waldsee, the coat of arms is even simpler: Sable a fess Argent.87 The identification of the seals was possible due to the inscriptions on them: ROTEN/BVRG and WALDSEE. Two seals from Waldsee were found in the course of the excavations at Pápa, and another one comes from the vicinity of Szolnok (Fig. 5c). The latter is a stray find, but those from Pápa were discovered on the sixteenth–seventeenth-century surface layers of the market. The reverse side of the seals in all cases depicts the coat of arms of the city. There is only one known item firmly identifiable with Rothenburg, also found somewhere around Szolnok, but with no information that would make it possible to identify the location any more precisely (Fig. 5d). The dating can be deduced only from the type of inscription. The antique style of the fonts suggests dating not earlier than the first half of the sixteenth century.

Only Archaeological Evidence (Munich, Regensburg, Hof, Kulmbach, and Kaufbeuren)

The list of the cities the textile products of which were imported to the Kingdom of Hungary (as we know from the written sources) can be extended by five more places. This information comes from the archaeological finds. All five cities, namely, Munich, Regensburg, Hof an der Saale, Kulmbach, and Kaufbeuren, played more or less notable roles in the textile industry of southern Germany, but none of them appears in the known contemporary written documents as an exporter of textiles to Hungary. The most significant center for them was Munich,88 the cloth seal of which found at Castle Szitnya (today Sitno, Slovakia) was first identified by Ján Hunka.89 Since then, one more has been found in the vicinity of Szolnok and at least eight at the market square of Pápa (Fig. 6a–b). The basis for the identification of them is a monk’s head on the obverse, which at the same time refers to the name of the city and to its coat of arms.90 The reverse of the seals varies considerably, presenting at least five different imprints: a stylized image of a church (a triangle or rectangle with a cross on top), a Gothic minuscule letter M or flowers. Only the last type recurs twice. There is no convincing explanation for this phenomenon, but it might indicate that these marks were some kind of privy marks. The Munich seals found in Pápa can be dated predominantly to the sixteenth century, even if two items were discovered in later layers. It seems that no cloth from Munich arrived to Pápa after the occupation of the town by the Ottoman army in 1594 and its destruction during the siege in 1597.91 The seal found at Castle Szitnya has been dated to the fifteenth century.92 The last one from Szolnok is a stray find, but the characteristic late Renaissance style fonts from the fragmented inscription on the reverse ([…]HA) suggest a relatively late dating, maybe even to the seventeenth century.

Outside the territory of medieval Hungary, only two cloth seals that can be connected to Munich are known so far, both of them from the metal detectorists’ web forums. The monk’s head on the obverse is almost identical with that on the Hungarian finds, while the reverse shows privy mark-like symbols.93 Their dating is uncertain, as are their find locations.

The textile production of Regensburg was as important as that of Munich, but only four cloth seals that can be indisputably connected to the city have been found so far (both in and outside of Hungary). The unquestionable identification is possible only when the imprints on the seals included the name of the city, because the relatively widespread crossed keys in its coat of arms may refer, for example, to Leiden, Lubań or Weil der Stadt. The obverse of all four certain finds shows the head of St Cassian (the patron of the oldest parish church of Regensburg), with the circumscribed text RATISPONENSIS (Latin for of Regensburg). In some cases, the reverse side has also survived, presenting the coat of arms, i.e. the crossed keys. Three of the seals from Regensburg are stray finds: one was found in the vicinity of Győr (Fig. 6c), two others are still in a private collection with no indication of their find locations (Fig. 6d). The fourth item was found during rescue excavations carried out at the Buda castle. However, no archaeological dating is available for it either.94 The chronology of these finds is based only on stylistic features, namely the fonts of the inscription, suggesting most convincingly that they were made in the fifteenth century.

There are some more cloth seals with crossed keys but with no other identifying details. According to their quality and comparing them with the reliably identified seals from Leiden and Lubań, they may be connected to Regensburg. Such seals have been found during field surveys in the vicinity of Szécsény and in the deserted village of Orosháza-Pereg.

Hof an der Saale was a less significant textile production center95 but it is nonetheless relatively well represented in Hungary by its cloth seals. The obverse of these seals usually shows the coat of arms of the city: Gules two towers Argent in escutcheon between them Sable with Lion rampant Or.96 The reverse could have been executed in two ways: a large Renaissance H referring to the name of the city, or a ligature HOF. Altogether, five cloth seals can be identified as provenanced from Hof. Four of them have been found in Pápa, predominantly on the sixteenth-century surface of the market (Fig. 7a). The fifth similar item has already been published but only as an unidentified find datable to the seventeenth century97 (Fig. 7b). It was donated to the Hungarian National Museum as part of a larger collection and thus has no data concerning its origin. There are no other known seals from Hof elsewhere.

Another city not mentioned in the Hungarian written sources but represented in Hungary by its cloth seals is Kulmbach. The place was known primarily for its fustian production, which reached its peak in the late Middle Ages.98 The cloth seals, both of which were found at the Market Square of Pápa, can be identified by the inscription CVLM/BACH (Fig. 7c) or by the easily recognisable coat of arms: party per pale with Hohenzollern arms on the left and Azure Lion and Eagle Argent on the right.99 Seals from the Kulmbach-fabrics have been discovered in the layers dated by fifteenth and sixteenth-century coins. Most probably, the cloth was imported to Pápa in the time of the heyday of the city, i.e. in the middle of the sixteenth century.

The last city represented by only two items is Kaufbeuren. This relatively small place was not too significant but it produced reasonably good quality fustian.100 There are two seals that can be connected to Kaufbeuren, in both cases on the base of the coat of arms visible on them: Gules bend Or with two stars Or.101 The one discovered in Pápa has been published. It can be dated to the sixteenth century according to the stratigraphy of the excavation site102 (Fig. 7d). The second cloth seal was recently acquired within a larger collection from the vicinity of Szolnok. Unfortunately, there is no data available concerning the find location of the seal. According to the similar features of the coat of arms, it must be dated correspondingly to the sixteenth century. There is a single known analogy for cloth seals from Kaufbeuren in Switzerland.

Conclusion

An evaluation of the written and archaeological sources together produces a complex image of textile imports from the southern German region to the Kingdom of Hungary in the late Middle Ages and early post-medieval period (more precisely, the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries). The most important result of this analysis is the creation of a long list consisting of nineteen textile production centers, fabrics from which undoubtedly reached Hungary in the period in question. The analysis also illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, even in questions concerning economic history. The archaeological finds function as contemporary written documents, offering important details concerning geography and chronology and creating a special puzzle missing from the early approaches, which relied entirely on traditional written sources. By evaluating cloth seals, we not only learn the names of other medieval cities, which from now can be connected to Hungary, we also can identify the very last stop of the fabrics of the city-exporters, the very places of consumption, where the rolls of cloth, fustian, or linen were finally sold in retail (Fig. 8).

Summarizing the information gained from the different sources, the chronological framework can be limited to a bit less than two centuries, from the mid-fifteenth century until the first decades of the seventeenth century. The lack of the cloth seals from the seventeenth century still needs explanation. Despite continuing reports in the written sources about the trade in German fabrics, the gradually shrinking market of the Kingdom of Hungary, which was devastated by endless wars with the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a spectacular decrease in the cloth import by the end of the Long Turkish War. The transformation in the composition of the goods consumed must have begun even earlier. According to the archaeological evidence (primarily from Pápa), the decrease in the overall value of the textiles consumed must have begun in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. While there is strong evidence for the presence of higher quality products (from centers like Nuremberg, Memmingen, and Dinkelsbühl) in the first half and middle of the sixteenth century, products which were marked with large, nicely elaborated seals, by the end of the century the size and the quality of the seals declined noticeably. The drop in the import and sale of quality textiles can also be seen in the appearance of a large quantity of relatively cheap fabrics (Hof, Waldsee, Munich, etc.). Trends in the import of cloths from other regions (e.g. the Low Countries, Silesia, Bohemia, and Austria) confirm and reflect this tendency.

This work should be regarded as preliminary, as there are still many unidentified cloth seals that have been found in the Carpathian Basin. From a longer perspective, an interdisciplinary analysis of all available finds will give a more detailed overview of this topic.

 

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Pálffy, Géza. A pápai vár felszabadításának négyszáz éves emlékezete 1597–1997 [The four hundred year-old memory of the liberation of the castle of Pápa: 1597–1997]. Pápa: Jókai Mór Városi Könyvtár, 1997.

Popa, Radu. “Plumburi de postav medieval” [Medieval cloth seals]. In Radu Popa, studii şi articole I, edited by Daniela Marcu Istrate and Adrian Ioniţa, 237–39. Cluj-Napoca: Editura MEGA, 2014.

Posthumus, Nicolaas Wilhelmus. De Geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie II: De nieuwe tijd (zestiende tot achttiende eeuw). De lakenindustrie en verwante industrieën [The history of Leiden cloth industry II: The new era (sixteenth to eighteenth century)]. ‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1939.

Sakuma, Hironobu. Die Nürnberger Tuchmacher, Weber, Färber und Bereiter vom 14. bis 17. Jahrhundert. Nürnberg: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, 1993.

Sammelband mehrerer Wappenbücher, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, BSB Cod.icon. 391 [S.l.] Süddeutschland (Augsburg?) um 1530, f. 80. Accessed June 15, 2016. https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/search?oclcno=162303086&db=100.

Schenk, Hans. Nürnberg und Prag. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1969.

Steck, Friedrich. Das Münchner Loder- und Tuchmachergewerbe bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg and Aumühle: Konrad Triltsch Verlag, 1936.

Stromer, Wolfgang von. Die Gründung der Baumwollindustrie in Mitteleuropa: Wirtschaftspolitik im Spätmittelalter. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1978.

Székely, György. “Posztófajták a német és nyugati szláv területekről a középkori Magyarországon” [Cloth fabrics from German and western Slav territories in medieval Hungary]. Századok 109 (1975): 765–95.

Tyroff, Konrad. Wappenbuch der Städte in Königreich Bayern. Nürnberg: In der Hofagent Tyroff’schen Kunstverlagshandlung, 1835. Accessed June 15, 2016. http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10379418-0.

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Between “Faithful Subjects” and “Pernicious Nation”: Greek Merchants in the Principality of Transylvania in the Seventeenth Century*

Mária Pakucs-Willcocks

Nicolae Iorga Institute of History

 

Towns in Transylvania were among the first in which Balkan Greeks settled in their advance into Central Europe. In this essay, I investigate the evolution of the juridical status of the Greeks within the Transylvanian principality during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to understand how they were integrated into the institutional and juridical framework of Transylvania. A reinterpretation of available privilege charters granted to the Greeks in Transylvania sheds light on the evolution of their official status during the period in question and on the nature of the “companies” the Greeks founded in certain towns of the principality in the seventeenth century. A close reading of the sources reveals tensions between tax-paying Greeks, whom the seventeenth century Transylvanian princes referred to as their “subjects of the Greek nation,” and the non-resident Greek merchants. Furthermore, strong inconsistencies existed between central and local policies towards the Greeks. I analyze these discrepancies between the princely privileges accorded to the Greeks and the status of the Greek merchants in Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt, today Sibiu, Romania) in particular. The city fathers of this town adhered strongly to their privilege of staple right and insisted on imposing it on the Greek merchants, but the princely grants in favor of the Greeks nullified de facto the provisions of the staple right. While they had obtained concessions that allowed them to settle into Transylvania, Greeks nevertheless negotiated their juridical status with the local authorities of Nagyszeben as well.

Keywords: Transylvania, Saxon towns, Greek merchants, Saxon traders, annual fair, staple right, trade, seventeenth century

Introduction

This paper explores the juridical status of Greek merchants in Transylvania during the second half of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, a status created through norms (dietal legislation, princely grants, and town statutes) and, as Zsolt Trócsányi argues, practice.1 The emphasis of my analysis is on the policy of the Transylvanian princes toward the Greeks and the tensions and dissensions between the central legislation and local regulations in this respect. The town of Nagyszeben serves as the case study for the purposes of my analysis. The Transylvanian Diet regularly issued decisions concerning the Greeks, but this dietal legislation has been studied by Lidia A. Demény and Zsolt Trócsányi and consequently will not be revisited here at length.2 It is crucial, however, to understand the interplay and the hierarchy between the different laws and statutes, while the Greeks themselves were naturally active factors in creating their juridical status and, in my opinion, used the shifting attitudes and the discrepancies in the rules to their benefit.

A brief introduction into the historical background of the political and economic situation in early modern Transylvania provides a better framework for the argument. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Greek and other Balkan-Levantine merchants, Ottoman subjects, had taken control of the trade with products coming from or via the Ottoman Empire.3 The complex notion of the Greek merchants in early modern Transylvania shall be discussed later. The “Turkish goods,” as they are called in the contemporary sources, were much sought after and made the Balkan merchants indispensable in the supply of products from the east for Transylvania.4 The so-called “Turkish goods” in which the Greeks traded consisted mostly of cotton and silk textiles, cotton and silk threads, carpets, specific carmine and saffian leather products, spices, dried fruits, olive oil, rice, alum, and various dyestuffs. While a detailed analysis of the commercial exchange in seventeenth-century Transylvania is sorely lacking, evidence from the unpublished customs accounts of Nagyszeben shows that the imports of goods from the Ottoman Empire by the Greeks continued along the patterns set in the previous century. The great obstacle with regard to the Greeks was accommodating the need for their skills with the Transylvanian political and juridical system of nations and privileges. We know from Olga Cicanci’s monograph that in 1636 the Greeks founded one “company” in the town of Nagyszeben and one in Brassó (Kronstadt, today Braşov, Romania) in 1678.5 In my analysis of a wider array of documentary evidence, I argue that these “companies” were the result of a longer process of accommodation and integration of the Greeks in Transylvania, and that the nature of these organisations has been largely misconstrued. I use the term “merchant associations” instead.

Transylvania was among the first polities in Central Europe in which Greek and other Hellenised merchants from the Ottoman Balkans settled for business. The reasons for their choice were probably manifold. Beginning in 1541, Transylvania was a vassal state to the Porte, a situation which encouraged entry of the Ottoman subjects into the local market. Furthermore, the towns of Brassó and Nagyszeben in particular had been leading trading centers in the region since the Middle Ages, offering good business opportunities for profitable trade. One should not ignore a declared preference to live in Transylvania for religious reasons as well: in an official statement from 1624, Arbanassi merchants from Chervena Voda, which lies to the south of the Danube River in what today is Bulgaria, who settled in Transylvania declared that living in a Christian country was more precious than their life or merchandise.6

The seminal article of Traian Stoianovich distinguished several categories of Balkan Orthodox merchants who dominated international trade in Southeastern and Central Europe in the eighteenth century. Among them, he listed “the Greek, Vlach and Macedo-Slav muleteer and forwarding agent of Epirus, Thessaly and Macedonia,” and “the Greek and the Bulgarian of the Eastern Rodope.”7 The customs accounts of Nagyszeben and the records of the Greek merchant association show that the merchants who preferred Transylvania as their business destination belonged to this particular group described by Stoianovich: their places of origin were in historical Epirus, in northeastern and northwestern Bulgaria, or in the Pirin Mountains.8 Wallachia and Moldavia, neighboring principalities to the south and east of Transylvania, were significant places of origin for the Greek merchants. A recent study by Lidia Cotovanu on the Greek migration in Wallachia and Moldavia in the late Middle Ages reveals the same regions in the Balkans as the original homelands of the Greeks.9

The Transylvanian Diet proposed and passed articles of law concerning the legal status of the foreign merchants, including the Greeks.10 In seventeenth-century Transylvania, there was more than just one kind of “foreign” merchant. Zsolt Trócsányi has rightfully differentiated between the dietal decisions concerning alien merchants and those dealing strictly with the Greeks.11 Trócsányi identifies the main directions in the legislation on the Greeks, although his assertions regarding the attitude of the princes in this matter are not entirely accurate. For instance, Trócsányi argues that Prince Gabriel Bethlen (1613–29) restricted the activity of the Greeks owing to his “monopolistic foreign trade ideas.”12 As will become evident, Prince Bethlen was in fact supportive of Greek trade in Transylvania.

A discussion of identity among Greeks from the Ottoman Empire is beyond the scope of this paper, especially since I am using exclusively Transylvanian official sources on the matter.13 Nevertheless, it is worth asking: who was a “Greek” in early modern Transylvania? The term was used in various ways: a “Greek” was a Greek-speaking, Eastern-Orthodox merchant, but essentially any merchant coming from the Ottoman Empire and bringing oriental goods was called a Greek.14 Nevertheless, in many situations Greeks were set apart from non-Greek Ottoman subjects, such as Armenians, Jews, and Turks, just as in certain situations Transylvanian Greeks were distinguished from foreign Greeks. Once they became “inhabitants” of the country, i.e. once they agreed to pay taxes, Greeks were treated differently from the merchants who had the same origins but had not settled in Transylvania. The first official mention of this dichotomy between Greeks who owned houses in the principality and those who did not comes from the decision of the Diet in 1591.15 In the eighteenth century, this polarization of the diasporic Greek communities between Ottoman subjects and naturalized Greeks was also evident in Vienna and Naples.16

Furthermore, while we can argue that the notion of a “Greek” was polyvalent, with their growing presence in the country in the seventeenth century, the term was used with more precision, and the Greeks were definitely distinct from the merchants of other nationalities coming from the Ottoman Empire. This is evident, for instance, in a decision of the Transylvanian Diet from 1650: “All Jews and all Greeks should wear cloaks according to their sort, and if anyone of them should wear a Hungarian military cape, he will be fined 200 florins.”17

I present first the juridical status of Greeks in Transylvania created through the agency of princely grants and then discuss the regulations of the town of Nagyszeben as an example of a local policy toward these alien merchants. I conclude with an interpretation of the complex relations between norm and practice in this respect. Owing to the staple right of Brassó, Nagyszeben, and Beszterce (today Bistriţa, Romania), the three major towns on the southern and eastern borders of Transylvania with the neighboring principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, foreign merchants were not allowed to enter Transylvania beyond these points and were obliged to sell wholesale to the local merchants.18 The Saxon towns who enjoyed this privilege argued constantly for their rights to be preserved and observed: throughout the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the grants given in favor of the Greeks were made at the expense of the ancient rights of the Transylvanian Saxons.

While generally the presence of the Greeks in Transylvania was seen as beneficial, there were recurrent fears and concerns about them that came up from time to time in the dietal legislation: one of the concerns was that they were draining the country of good coins and precious metals (e.g. the 1618 decision of the Diet), and another stemmed from the mistrust in the Greeks as spies for the Ottomans (e.g. the 1600 decision of the Diet or art. 1 in tit. LII of the Approbatae Constitutiones).19

Greeks and the Princes of Transylvania

The first decision of the Diet, most probably initiated by Prince Gabriel Báthory (1608–13), to give all alien merchants the freedom to enter Transylvania and sell their goods after having paid the customs duties came in 1609.20 While subsequent legislation retreated on this measure and reinforced the obligation to visit only the staple sites, the breach into the system of the staple towns had been made.

The recent digital publication of the Libri Regii, the protocols of the Transylvanian chancery,21 brought to light unknown princely charters, uncovering crucial facts concerning the settlement of Greeks in the principality. Historical research has hardly taken these “royal books” into account; beginning with Nicolae Iorga, all researchers have relied exclusively on the rich material of the Greek merchant associations in Nagyszeben and Brassó and the decisions of the Transylvanian Diet regarding the Greeks. Furthermore, the presence and activity of Greek merchants in other Transylvanian towns has been entirely neglected by scholarship, some authors only stating that such associations (“companies”) might have existed but that evidence was not available. A linguistic barrier and a national bias were evidently at play here: authors who took a keen interest in the Greek communities in Transylvania did not have access to the Hungarian archival material, while scholars specializing in Transylvanian history with good access to local historical sources have not paid much attention to the presence of the Greeks in trade and the economy in the early modern period.22 Since the inventories of the Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben and Brassó both contained copies of the 1636 privilege of George Rákóczi I (1630–48), scholars considered it the first document issued for the Greeks in Transylvania.23 Authors such as Nicolae Iorga and T. Bodogae state that the protocols of these two Greek “companies” include copies of further confirmations of this charter, which was renewed frequently.24 According to the Libri Regii however, this 1636 document is not the first grant of privileges to Transylvanian Greeks. At the complaint of Greeks of Alba County and of the towns of Kolozsvár (today Cluj Napoca, Romania), Marosvásárhely (today Târgu-Mureş, Romania), and Hunyad (today Hunedoara, Romania) concerning other Greeks, Wallachians, Moldavians, and Turks, Prince Gabriel Bethlen issued a mandate on 22 October 1627.25 The rivalry between tax-paying Greeks and the other Balkan-Levantine merchants, including other Greeks, became a recurrent issue among these trading communities. Bethlen’s privilege in favor of the Transylvanian Greeks reveals that there were established communities of Greeks in several cities in Transylvania (in the princely capital Gyulafehérvár [today Alba Iulia, Romania], Kolozsvár, Marosvásárhely and Hunyad), most notably in ones without the staple right. I would also underline that the text of Bethlen’s grant drew a clear distinction between his “faithful subjects” and other foreign merchants coming from Wallachia, Moldavia, or the Ottoman Empire. This charter throws an entirely different light on the issue of the Greek presence in the principality of Transylvania, as it addresses the resident/non-resident, i.e. tax-paying/non-paying dichotomies in a manner suggesting that the Greeks had been settled in these towns for quite some time. The non-resident merchants were ordered to sell only their own merchandise and not to buy goods from other traders:

We have understood from the humble request of our faithful subjects of the Greek nation who live in the towns of Gyulafehérvár, Kolozsvár, and Marosvásárhely and in the market town of Hunyad that many Wallachians, Moldavians and Greeks, Vlachs, Turks and other people of similar kind of the Turkish Empire who come to do their trade with Turkish merchandise sell their goods with the ell and by the florin […] to the great damage of our inhabitants of the Greek nation living here in Transylvania.26

Prince Bethlen thus called the Greeks “his faithful subjects of the Greek nation,” which suggests a good relationship between the two parties. Greeks did business for the prince, as is clear from a 1619 free pass given by Bethlen’s wife, Zsuzsanna Károlyi, to a number of Greek merchants who were entrusted by the prince to sell 24 hundredweights of mercury. The motivation was that, “according to the law,” the Greeks could not leave the country with gold or silver good coins, and therefore they had to invest their money after the fair in Nagyszeben.27 Indeed, in April 1618, the Diet passed a decision forbidding Greeks to export good currency or objects made of precious metals.28

In the literature dealing with the founding of the Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben, the succession of events appears to be straightforward: in 1636, Prince George Rákóczi I granted them the privilege of setting up their own association under the direction of a “principal” and administering their own justice.29 The Nagyszeben Greek association, according to its internal documents, was founded only in 1638 or 1639, when its members held the first meeting and elected their proestos.30 The document published by T. Bodogae was hailed by this author and others as the founding privilege of the Nagyszeben Greek trading “company.”31 A cliché was born out of this simplification: recent literature, including works I have written, took it over from Cicanci’s book without criticism.32

When reading the text of the 1636 charter, two things become obvious which should have raised questions: there is no mention of Nagyszeben or of any other place in Transylvania whatsoever, and the charter does not contain the word “company.” Principally, the grant sets the limits for the Greeks’ trade and allows them their own administration of justice.33 Nicolae Iorga had indicated as early as 1906 that the 1636 charter was a grant issued to all Greeks living in Transylvania, but his opinion did not become part of the mainstream scholarship. Iorga also asserted that the Nagyszeben “company” was “one of the most significant branches of the great Transylvanian Greek company,”34 and even though this assertion would be a logical conclusion of the foundational charter, other evidence suggests that such a guild or association encompassing all Greek merchants in Transylvania did not exist. Although “company” is not a term used in Rákóczi’s grant, it was used by the Greek merchants: kompania.

Despina Tsourka-Papastathi argued against Cicanci’s interpretation of historical facts immediately after the publication of her book.35 Tsourka-Papastathi offered a more elaborate argumentation of the accurate reading of this 1636 charter in her own book on the Nagyszeben “company,” and she published a critical edition of the document as well.36 She expressed her doubts about this charter being the foundational privilege of the Nagyszeben “company”.37

Let us analyze briefly the contents of the 1636 privilege charter. The preamble mentions beyond any doubt that this grant was offered to all Greek merchants in Transylvania: ex humillima totius communitatis universorum Graecorum in ditione nostra, quaesturam exercentium, supplicatione.38 This phrase strengthens my arguments concerning the Transylvanian Greeks: they had been paying taxes to the treasury, a fact which entitled them to approach the prince with their grievances. The terms of Rákóczi’s grant were very clear: first, the Greeks could elect a suitable man to be their head (idoneum virum in principalem eorum inspectorem eligere possint et valeant), who would arbitrate disputes between Transylvanian Greeks and foreign Greeks. Any litigation with a nobleman or an inhabitant of the country was to be brought to the attention of the local courts, who had the power to arrest any accused Greek. Secondly, the Greek merchants could sell freely at the fairs, under strict conditions. However, they could only offer their stock wholesale (i.e. sell by the bale and not the ell, and not under the value of 100 denars), and for only three days before and after the fair. These restrictions on free sale in fact were intended to favor local traders and merchants, who thus had the benefit of retail sale and could obtain profit margins on the goods bought from the Greeks wholesale.

While Greeks in other Transylvanian towns had established themselves and had been acknowledged by the central authorities as shown by the 1627 charter of Gabriel Bethlen, Nagyszeben had placed many obstacles to stop the Greeks at the gates, obstacles matched only by the opportunities for good business in the town. In my opinion, the non-specific charter granted by Prince George Rákóczi I in 1636 created the first opening for the Greeks to enter the most coveted town in Transylvania. In a memoir from 1747 addressed to Empress Maria Theresia, the Greek merchants from Nagyszeben claimed to have lost in a fire the founding charter for their association. Despina Tsourka-Papastathi believes this assertion, and she suggests that a separate grant for the Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben must have been issued in 1637 or 1638.39 Cicanci mentioned that an undated memoir of the Nagyszeben Greek merchant association addressed to the Transylvanian governor alludes to privileges obtained by the Greeks in 1623, 1630 and 1632, and 1656.40 Iorga also knew of another privilege charter of 1641, preserved in transcripts in the protocols of the Nagyszeben “company,”41 although other authors who studied this archive do not mention it. I personally do not think that a different founding privilege existed at all: the Transylvanian prince could not have overlooked the fact that Nagyszeben possessed the staple right. Greeks entered Nagyszeben by bending the law slightly. According to the protocols of the Nagyszeben Greek association from 1655,42 the scribe could not recover the privileges of the “old Greek merchants” because they were lost due to bad archiving.43 If there are so many confirmations and copies of the 1636 privilege, surely the one that allegedly was lost could have been replaced over time. Furthermore, the 1636 charter was preserved in copies in the archives of the Brassó Greek merchant association as well.44

The founding privilege of the Brassó Greek association from 1678 acknowledges the Nagyszeben “company” (compania) as a model. First, a decision of a Diet was confirmed by Michael Apafi (1661–90), setting the annual tax payable by the Brassó Greeks,45 separately from other Greek communities in Transylvania.46 Subsequently, the Prince issued the charter ad normam companiae Graecorum nostrorum Cibinii commorantium, according to which the Brassó Greeks were allowed their own administration of justice.47 The choice of the Greeks to organize themselves in localized trading associations or guilds instead of a community encompassing all Greeks in Transylvania has to be explained through the social and cultural experiences and expectations of these newcomers into Transylvania. Their solidarities relied more strongly on local connections: extended family and neighbors from their villages or towns of origin. Nevertheless, Greeks paid their taxes jointly at first and also had common duties. I shall return here to the idea, put forward by Iorga, that a pan-Transylvanian Greek association was divided into local branches, the Nagyszeben one being one of the most prominent ones.48 While the historical evidence does not support this hypothesis, it is clear that in the eyes of the Transylvanian political and fiscal authorities the Greeks were one entity, one “nation.”

As a final amendment to another misconception regarding the Greek “trading companies,” I would stress that they did not copy the English Levant Company49 or any other Western European trading company.50 The Greek “companies” in Transylvania were not joint-stock business ventures. Before arriving to the wrong conclusion, Olga Cicanci was rightly looking in the Balkans for the possible models for the Nagyszeben and Brassó associations of the Greek merchants. The Transylvanian Greek “companies” were associations of individuals engaged in trade, but each merchant was responsible for his own ventures. When in 1694 the head and other members of the Nagyszeben merchant association appeared in front of the town judges to testify for a fellow “companion,” they strongly refused to settle any unpaid debts. They stated: Nemo enim pro alio solvere tenetur.51 The aim of their association was more a juridical and political one, aimed at protecting their individual commercial interests. Thus, it was very similar to a merchant guild.

The following princely charter dealing with the Greeks was issued on May 14, 1643 by the same George Rákóczi I. This is a mandate instructing clerks and officials to allow foreign Greeks, Armenians and Serbs to trade freely in Transylvania, because these merchants had agreed to pay an annual tax of 2000 florins.52 The document names the individual Greeks entrusted with collecting the tax from all concerned, including Greeks from Hunyad, Hátszeg (today Haţeg, Romania), and Marosvásárhely. Lidia Demény asserted that a similar mandate was given by George Rákóczi I two years earlier.53

Five years later, on April 9, 1648, at the request of the Greeks in Gyulafehérvár, Prince George Rákóczi I ordered that the Jews share the burdens of the services assigned to the Greeks: either transporting mercury or managing the post-house and post-horses. In this mandate, significant details about the legal framework for the trade of the Greeks emerge:

The Greeks living in our suburb of Gyulafehérvár inform us jointly that […] the Jews had taken away business from them, because whenever a Turk comes with goods, the Jews go even as far as Deva to meet him and buy up his stock, selling it onward for double the price, although they are not allowed to do so.54

Jews had been allowed to settle in Transylvania in 1623, when Gabriel Bethlen had stipulated in his privilege that one of their tasks was to bring merchandise from Istanbul.55 Rivalry quickly ensued with the Greeks, who were competing for the princely favors and for the distribution of the same goods.

On February 1, 1653, Prince George Rákóczi II (1648–60) issued a mandate at the request of tax-paying Greeks according to which all Greek, Armenian, and other foreign merchants (except for the Jews) who traded in Transylvania pay their due taxes. The competition between tax-paying Greeks and the other Balkan-Levantine merchants, including the non-resident Greeks, was a recurrent theme throughout the seventeenth century. This document reveals how the Greeks themselves explained their predicament to the Transylvanian prince:

Tax-paying Greeks doing commerce in our realm of Transylvania have reported that often Greeks who do not belong to any society [társaságokon kivül levö görögök], Armenians, and other nations come to this country to do trade, but refuse to pay the rightful contribution [paid by the Greeks]. Many of them resort to local judges and public officers for protection, paying them bribes. Furthermore they [Greeks outside the associations] don’t allow others to pay taxes either, those who get married and settle in towns and villages, claiming that they are now inhabitants of the country, even though they continue to do trade. 56

A mandate of Prince Michael Apafi from October 21, 1678 settled the annual contribution that the Greek merchant association from Nagyszeben had to pay, separately from the other Greeks, and gave the Nagyszeben Greeks an order to change to good money the contribution paid by the Szeklers for the tribute to the Porte. This annuentia thus sheds light on a new duty entrusted to the Greeks, that of money-changing: “the tax of 10 000 florins that [the Szeklers] owe on St. George’s day, the said Greeks should take into their hand to change into good money, as is the custom to change it to good imperial thalers.”57

Nagyszeben and the Greek Merchants: Town Statutes and the Staple Right in the Seventeenth Century

The town magistrate and council of Nagyszeben issued their own statutes and regulations aimed at organizing the political, social, and economic life of the town. The Greek merchants had become an issue for the local authorities by the sixteenth century, and this issue was addressed accordingly by the town officials. The growing pressure from the southern merchants to be allowed to trade freely was more important for the town of Nagyszeben than it was for the Transylvanian Diet. The struggle58 was to preserve the privilege of the staple right, granted to the town of Nagyszeben in the fourteenth century. In a nutshell, the original privilege allowing the exclusive distribution of cloth on the local market for the Nagyszeben merchants against the merchants from Upper Hungary (Kassa [Kaschau, today Košice, Slovakia]) had come to offer local Saxon traders a lucrative position to buy up and sell the products coming from the Ottoman Empire. Well into the sixteenth century, according to the staple right, merchants coming from Wallachia had to deposit their goods at Talmács (Talmesch, today Tălmaciu, Romania) and later Sellenberk (today Şelimbăr, Romania) and offer their stock wholesale to local merchants.59

However, there was undeniable pressure from these foreign merchants to sell unhindered on the Transylvanian market. Otto Fritz Jickeli mentioned that in 1577 a Greek merchant obtained the first princely privilege to sell salted fish, blankets, and sheep.60 The Saxon towns succeeded in having the Diet on their side throughout the sixteenth century, but the overall attitude and consequently the legislation gradually shifted in favor of the Greek merchants. The last weapon the Saxons could resort to was their own town statutes. Sixteenth-century documentary evidence, albeit scant, indicates that the Greeks had not entered the town and that they carried out their business at the staple place.61

The first town statute of the seventeenth century was issued in 1614. Nagyszeben was recovering politically and economically from the devastation caused by the former prince of Transylvania, Gabriel Báthory, who had occupied, plundered, and emptied the city of its inhabitants. The new prince, Gabriel Bethlen, was trying to pacify the Saxons, and he negotiated with them new terms of mutual collaboration. Gabriel Báthory had deviously occupied Nagyszeben, after asking to spend the winter in the city; now the Saxons were asking for safeguards and guarantees that Bethlen’s winter sojourn in Nagyszeben would not end in occupation and distress. The new prince tried to make amends, reaching an agreement with the community of Transylvanian Saxons62 and, particularly, with the authorities of Nagyszeben.

Among the conditions requested by the Saxon universitas, which negotiated the terms on Nagyszeben’s behalf, one concerned foreign merchants:

16. The Greeks and other traders, coming with their goods from Moldavia, Wallachia, and other places, should be obliged to go first to the staple places, to the twentieth, and to the customs stations without any delays; they should sell their wares there, and not go to fairs, under the penalty of confiscation of their goods, because this causes great damage to the Transylvanian merchants and to the country. This is evident also from the fact that the good money, ducats and gold, is paid for them, and they [the foreign merchants – MPW] take the good money into foreign countries, causing a shortage of money in Transylvania.63

Despite the prince’s reassurances, the position of the Saxons within the Transylvanian Diet had waned significantly, and they rarely prevailed. Prince Bethlen’s own stance was in favor of an abundance of goods from the Ottoman lands, and as we have seen, he had forged good relations with the Greeks.

In 1631, the city fathers of Nagyszeben issued their statuta specialia, the first article of which tackled the issue of Greek merchants and their disregard for existing laws:

We shall discuss first the harmful nation of the Greeks (die schädliche nation der Griechen), who have become prevalent not only in Siebenbürgen [i.e. Saxon Seats – MPW], but travel unhindered through the entire country [i.e. the principality of Transylvania – MPW], causing great damage to the country; also they have taken such liberties (Licencz) within our towns, staying here all year round and selling their goods as they wish, causing damage and disadvantage to our city folk and merchants, by taking the food from their mouths, not taking into account the fact that the locals are the ones who carry the burdens of the city.64

The privilege of the staple right (Staffel) was at the core of this statute: the Nagyszeben merchants had become accustomed to having the Ottoman products brought to their doorstep, giving them the upper hand in relation to foreign merchants, especially the Balkan-Levantines.65 Such an attitude cost them in the long-run: the Greeks had access to the oriental goods, information, and support networks.66

The 1631 town statute argued that Greeks were the only ones who disregarded the ancient privilege obtained by the Nagyszeben citizens for their faithful services to the Hungarian monarchs. The city council and the community therefore decided that the Greeks and other nations coming with goods and products through the Turnu Roşu pass should go to the staple place or Niederlag, and after they have paid the twentieth dutifully, they should not repack [the goods – MPW] but sell them in open shops to the inhabitants and artisans, who should be able to get whatever they need for their work. [The Greeks] should not sell to other foreigners, and should only sell by the pound, the centner, and the dozen, and for gold florins. After the fourteen days set by the law run out, local traders are allowed to sell their goods to the Greeks, but the Greeks should not take [these purchases] to the houses or to the inn, under the penalty of losing their goods. Furthermore, the Greeks should not take their goods back home, and if they try to cheat and sell them in secret, their goods should be confiscated when the truth is uncovered.67

The city fathers of Nagyszeben organized their concerns according to the interests of the guilds and townsfolk, giving them, at least in theory, the first choice in buying the goods they wanted or needed. The 1631 Nagyszeben town statute also stipulated that “Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Jews and other nations” who pay the customs duties were allowed to enter the country during the times of the annual fairs.68 It was, however, an article that had little effect on the actual situation of the Greeks and foreign merchants in Transylvania. This statute echoes the 1597 “articles,” which aimed to create the rules to establish equal access for all townsfolk to merchandise and services, of which first on the list were the “goods brought by the Greeks.”69

The fact that the Greeks established their own trading guild in Nagyszeben after George Rákóczi I’s 1636 privilege was not acknowledged in any official document issued by the local Saxon authorities. The general conflux of the Saxon universitas on 19–24 January 1654 had decided that “foreign merchants, Greeks, Armenians and Jews, cannot trade with goods that grow or are made in this country,” and it listed things such as pigs, lambskins, wool, or wax.70

In 1656, the city council of Nagyszeben issued a decision intended to control the Greeks who had settled in the town by imposing harsh rules and limits on their trading. This regulation built on the privilege granted by George Rákóczi I twenty years earlier: unless the Greeks were willing to pay 50 florins a year to rent the town shops, they could only sell freely within the time span of 14 days before and after the annual fairs. Furthermore, a curfew was set for the Greeks at eight o’clock in the evening, they could only buy wholesale from the market and not to the detriment of locals, and they could not practice their religion or open schools.71 Although this statute does not mention the staple right, it became the reference point for the very harsh negotiations with the Viennese authorities for the statute of Greek merchants during the eighteenth century. Thus, a later memoir (1726) of the Saxons addressed to the Viennese court confirms the fact that the 1656 statute had been accepted and agreed to by the Greeks. Nagyszeben officials declared that they only made these concessions to the Greeks because a plague in 1654 had taken a hard toll on the Nagyszeben merchants, thus compelling them to take advantage of the presence of the Greeks temporarily.72

The town statute from 1698 addressed the question of foreign and local merchants by declaring that the locals had always had an advantage over foreigners, “a privilege which should not be overlooked or forgotten,” and arguing that even though the “Greeks and other foreigners are tolerated temporarily (ad tempus), they should be given precedence over the locals after having supplied the town with goods.”73

I have argued that, although there was no formal abolition of the staple right, this medieval privilege became obsolete and surpassed by legislation and historical context. In the aforementioned memoir of 1726 addressed to Vienna, the Saxons stated that the Greeks had never been granted the right to sell freely in Nagyszeben and that this was a harmful abuse of the law.74 However, the Saxons had created a norm from the practice of the staple right, shifting the original provisions of the medieval privilege to suit their own needs and the changing economic realities.75

The Greeks in Transylvania between Freedom of Trade and Limitations

After discussing the documentary evidence, I offer a summary of the findings, focusing on the gains obtained by the Greeks in the principality of Transylvania and the strict legal and institutional framework that was created for them.

In the seventeenth century, Greeks made great advances in securing their leading position in the distribution of goods from the Ottoman Empire in Transylvania. However, they were far from being on equal footing with the local merchants. They were given specific duties to carry out for the common good of the principality, which were mentioned in this article. Their prowess and acumen for business were undeniably acknowledged by the Transylvanians: in 1671 the Greek judge was given the task of appointing people to investigate the exchange rates of foreign currencies.76 Greeks were allowed to pursue their trade under strict conditions, which are underlined in a mandate of Prince Michael Apafi from 1675 sent to the royal judge of Nagyszeben:

We have read your letter and understood, about the goods of that Italian, that the Greeks living there [in Nagyszeben – MPW] have bought up his goods perfidiously, acting very badly and wickedly, whereas they had no permission (annuentia), neither from ourselves, nor from the country [the Diet – MPW] to buy such goods for profit to the detriment of our citizens, goods that other foreign merchants bring into our country to sell. On the contrary, we know that it is forbidden for them to interfere.77

The text of the princely instruction highlights one crucial limitation imposed on foreign merchants, and particularly on the Greeks, who wanted to do trade in Transylvania: they were only permitted to sell the goods they carried themselves. This rule had two major implications. First, the prohibition against foreign merchants selling the goods of other non-locals stems from the 1627 privilege given by Gabriel Bethlen to the Greeks in various towns in Transylvania, and one comes across it in subsequent official documents. In 1648, the Greeks themselves complained about Jews who purchased oriental products in Transylvania for resale, while an article of the Diet from 1654 clearly stated that “Jews and other foreign merchants […] should bring the goods from abroad themselves.”78 Furthermore, in 1675 it was decided that Greeks, Armenians, and Turks could only buy from local merchants.79 Some of these concerns and stipulations were mirrored by regulations of the Nagyszeben Greek merchant association as well: in 1687, the members of the associations were not allowed to pass on their merchandise to another merchant to sell. Moreover, a regulation from 1690 limited the number of fairs members of the Nagyszeben merchant association were allowed to visit to two per year.80 Secondly, Greeks and Jews, as we have also seen, were confined to selling only goods imported by them from the Ottoman Empire. The Diet had decreed this in 1591,81 and Bethlen’s 1627 privilege defined Greeks by their dealing in “Turkish goods.”

Fundamentally, while their situation improved in the seventeenth century, the Greeks and other foreign merchants from the Ottoman Empire retained their status of aliens and outsiders. Even when they decided to declare themselves inhabitants for tax purposes and own property in Translyvania, their juridical standing was inferior to that of the local merchants. These interdictions and limitations to business were meant to preserve the advantages of the local merchants for distribution and retail sale. In this intricate and definitely not linear construction of their juridical status, the Greeks resorted to individual strategies to improve their chances for integration. These strategies included marriages to local women (e.g. in 1646 a certain György Policzani asking for permission from the prince for his betrothal to a Saxon woman),82 the purchase of property, ennoblement,83 and entering the service of the Prince (certain Greeks farmed out the customs and the salt mines). János Pater, a Greek active in the second half of the seventeenth century, was the most representative example in this respect.84 Similar strategies of integration have been identified in Wallachia and Moldavia, though the scale of the Greek presence was incomparably larger there than in Transylvania.85

The inconsistent legislation and the ambiguity of attitudes toward the Greeks, centrally and locally as well, are characteristic of this century. For instance, the Diet of November 1675 retreated on its previous policy to encourage the Greeks and other foreign merchants, deciding that they should not be allowed to travel or wander freely through the country or use the back roads, where they could be a danger to the country: “and they are allowed free entrance until Brassó, Nagyszeben, Szászváros (today Orăştie, Romania) and Bánffyhunyad (today Huedin, Romania) towards Kolozsvár, but they are forbidden to go anywhere else.” The article of the law points to corrupt customs officers who allowed these merchants to travel further into the country, but also to fellow traders who acted as guides for the newcomers.86 It is clear that these were two of the most common ways of entering Transylvania clandestinely. In Nagyszeben, there was also pressure from the community to have a constant supply of the “goods brought by the Greeks”: requests for the better regulation of trade in oriental goods were presented to the city council.87 Furthermore, in the 1640s, the wife of the royal judge in Nagyszeben, Colomann Gotzmeister, during a bitter divorce trial, was accused of having connections to the recently established Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben.88

Final Remarks and Suggestions for Further Research

How many Greeks were there at any given moment in seventeenth-century Transylvania? The number of members in the trading associations can be an indicator of rough figures: Olga Cicanci has identified 32 members in the Greek merchant association of Nagyszeben in 1695, while in other years for which she could find data the numbers are even lower, usually less than 30.89 In 1670, the Diet had ordered the Nagyszeben Greek merchant association not to have more than 60 members at any given time.90

The Brassó association of the Greek merchants seems to have been larger than the Nagyszeben one, but along with these figures we also need to take into account the unknown figures for the Greeks settled in other places. As mentioned before, Transylvanian authorities also unsuccessfully tried to count the Greeks in the 1670s,91 but the Habsburg administration of Transylvania managed to organize a census of the registered Greeks in Transylvania at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The number of merchants was a little over 200,92 a number consistent with the estimate for the seventeenth century.

A significant feature of the Greeks in Transylvania in the seventeenth century was that they were still quite mobile:93 visiting homes and families, undertaking business trips, or fleeing uncomfortable situations in Transylvania were strong reasons for the underlying mobility of Greeks and other Balkan merchants.

The frictions between the settled and non-settled Greeks in Transylvania reveal how dynamic their diaspora was and how the communities were constantly replenished with new members. Late-seventeenth-century data from the account books of Siguli Stratu show how a Greek trading house operated: based in Nagyszeben, the merchant had family members acting as his agents at fairs and in other trading centers, buying and selling, borrowing and settling debts, and exchanging money. 94

The work of Márta Búr has shown the situation of the Greeks in Hungary, where the first official Greek merchant associations were founded in Tokaj, Gyöngyös, Miskolc, and other towns in the second half of the seventeenth century. Greeks were faced with hostility in these towns as well, while authorities attempted, to no avail, to restrain the scope of their economic activity. As was the case in Transylvania, local authorities had assigned Hungarian Greeks the role of providers of Ottoman products, but Búr noticed that the Greeks chose to settle in market towns, where they could have good access to natural products and livestock. Greeks buying and selling grains, cattle, and sheep organized themselves in traders’ associations similar to the Transylvanian ones in order to protect themselves and their businesses, whereas Greeks dealing in Turkish goods remained individual traders with no guild-like bonds between them. Greeks in Hungary, at least in the early stages of their settlement, also constantly returned to their hometowns in the Balkans.95

Vassiliki Seirinidou has argued that there were two types of Greek diaspora in Central Europe, an early one in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, carrying out retail trade in Turkish products but also keeping shops and monopolizing retail distribution of local goods in towns and villages, and a second diaspora, which formed around the middle of the eighteenth century and engaged in wholesale trade between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. She argues that while the second diaspora was born out of the first one, it had a different status, outlined in the peace treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718).96 I agree with Seirinidou that the status of the Greek merchants changed drastically after the Ottomans lost their authority over Hungary and Transylvania, but I cannot second her opinion that the second diaspora was formed by new merchants, who had to have the capital to engage in wholesale trade. As I have tried to show here, the Greek and other merchants, subjects of the Ottoman sultans, were very diverse in their origin, financial capability, interests, and status. If we are going to arrive at a subtle understanding of how the Greek diaspora in early modern Central Europe came into being, we must take into account a variety of factors. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the migration of the Greek merchants was still marked by a constant return to their homeland: the absence of the close family and the reliance on the extended male kinship for business is, in my opinion, a better indicator of the status of the Greeks. While some of them acquired either membership in an association (“company”) or paid their share of the common tax, until the eighteenth century, when the extended privileges were granted by Vienna, they could be considered as “migratory labor”97 force. They had a highly-specialized profession, which was based on decades of shared experience, knowledge about the target markets, capital, and so on. In Transylvania, the Greeks, Jews, and Armenians were assigned specific tasks: their role was to provide goods from the Ottoman Empire.

Further research on the still underexplored archives of the Greek merchant associations in Nagyszeben and Brassó should offer more insights into the world of these Balkan merchants. Also, the close study of private letters, business correspondence, bills of exchange, and letters of credit which are found in the local archives will further a better understanding of their business activities and their increased share in Transylvania’s foreign trade beginning with the last decades of the seventeenth century.98

 

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* Archival research for this article was made possible with the support of the European Research Council grant, Luxury, Fashion, and Social Status in Early Modern South-Eastern Europe, ERC-2014-CoG no. 646489–LuxFaSS, hosted by the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania.

Production of and Trade in Food Between the Kingdom of Hungary and Europe in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries): The Roles of Markets in Crises and Famines*

Andrea Fara

Tuscia University of Viterbo

 

Over the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, Western Europe was stricken by cyclical crises of subsistence or famines, related to several economic and social factors, such as the trend of production and the increasing price of wheat, the inadequate functioning of the market, the inappropriate intervention policies at the time of particular difficulties, and so on. In the Kingdom of Hungary crises and famines were caused by the same forces. But, surprisingly, cyclical large crises of subsistence and vast course famines had been nearly unknown in the kingdom between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this context, it is argued that the models of Ernest Labrousse and Amartya Sen may explain the emergence and development of crisis and famine not only and simply by the occurrence of exogenous forces such as a fall in crops, environmental shocks, war events and so on, but also and above all through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning and its degree of integration with other markets. The paper thus highlights the particular Hungarian alimentary regime as characterized by a non-contradiction, but rather a thorough-penetration, relationship between agricultural and sylvan-pastoral activities. This not-contradiction was reflected by an alimentary equilibrium that characterized the kingdom throughout the period. In comparison with other parts of Europe, in Hungary alimentary alternatives such as grain, meat and fish remained accessible to most of the population, so the inhabitants’ normal diet remained diversified and not entirely based on cereals. The specific production and exchange structures of the kingdom permitted the maintenance of this alimentary equilibrium that prevented the rise of vast alimentary crises, unless a shock such as war, climatic difficulties and so on occurred. Another reason for the absence of vast course famines was the kingdom’s place in the exchange structures of Europe. The paper argues that, while wars—first of all against the Ottoman Empire—caused great damages and problems in food supplying, the complex economic interaction between crisis, famine and war that characterized the Hungary between over late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period is evidence of the kingdom’s increasing and notable maturation as a market in the European context.

Keywords: food, production, commerce, market, nutrition, crisis, Hungary, Europe.

 

In the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, Western Europe was stricken by cyclical famines. In this part of the continent, the crises of subsistence and famines alternated in cyclical waves, both short cycles (at least once a year, in periods preceding the harvest, essentially in relation to an expected increase in the price of wheat) and long cycles (approximately every 7–10 years, in relation to several complicated economic and social factors, such as the trends in production and the increasing price of wheat, the inadequate functioning of the market, inappropriate interventionist policies in a moment of particular difficulty, and so on).1 As remarked by Fernand Braudel, “famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar even in Europe, despite its privileged position.”2

In the Kingdom of Hungary famines were clearly caused by the same forces that caused them in Western Europe, such as a drop in the harvest, environmental shocks, wars, and so on. And, of course, when a famine occurred, it afflicted Hungary no less severely that it did other European regions. But, surprisingly, regular and cyclical large subsistence crises and long famines were nearly unheard of in the Kingdom of Hungary between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Similarly interesting, a growing number of food crises and famines was recorded with the passing of time, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with the largest number of events in the last one. Why did this happen? Does the admittedly fragmentary documentation provide an incomplete or distorted picture of the food regime of the Hungarian population? Or can the virtual absence of mention of famine and subsistence crises in the sources be interpreted as a sign of the existence of what might be termed a specific “nourishing order”? Can the political and institutional context and the production, distribution, and exchange structures of the Kingdom of Hungary explain the absence or limited impact of famine in these territories between late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era? And can this particular phenomenon be explained by applying to the world of medieval and Early Modern Hungary the models elaborated by Ernest Labrousse and Amartya K. Sen to clarify the appearance and evolution mechanisms of crisis and famine in a preindustrial and industrial context, respectively (with a non-Malthusian approach) through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning, and its degree of integration with other markets?3

Labrousse has defined the imbalance between production and demand of alimentary goods, and in particular the supply and demand of wheat (which was almost the sole basis of nourishment in the preindustrial societies of Western Europe), as a crise de type ancien. In the absence of intervention by the central or local authorities to address the consequences of a bad harvest or misguided speculation, this imbalance caused a famine, which should not be understood as a shortage of wheat, but rather as an increase in wheat prices. This increase could give rise to a large-scale crisis, and not only with regard to nourishment. In fact, in cases in which wages were non-elastic, i.e. they were not adjusted in any way to compensate for increases in the prices of agricultural goods, the necessary purchase of these goods (primarily of wheat) for daily nourishment meant a drop in available resources to purchase other agricultural and manufactured articles. It brought about a fall in consumption, prices, and the production of some articles. As mentioned, the central or local authorities could eliminate or limit the most negative effects of this imbalance through specific interventions: they could import alimentary goods or regulate prices. However, such measures did not always yield positive results, as they could inhibit the farmers’ will to invest, since the husbandmen expected to earn higher profits thanks to crisis and famine, or rather thanks to increases in the price of wheat. In conclusion, sometimes such steps were followed by a phase of economic stagnation and crisis.4

Amartya K. Sen has explained the rise and diffusion of alimentary crises, including the phases when crises evolve into famines of vast proportions, through the concept of the entitlement approach, meaning the possession (or not) of some suitable entitlement (title). Hunger does not become a problem because of a shortage of alimentary goods (on the contrary, in most cases, goods are available in sufficient if not abundant quantities on domestic or international markets), but because an individual has no useful title with which to acquire alimentary goods or participate on the marketplace. By entitlement, Sen means above all an income (in general, the whole of suitable rights) that guarantees the satisfaction of individual needs, among which the primary need is for nourishment. In order to understand hunger and famine it is therefore necessary to put the accent on market dynamics and dysfunctions: when there is no possibility to join or participate on the marketplace or some market actors are engaged in speculation (even if not on a large scale) and intervention by central or local authorities is lacking, these anomalies can cause the emergence of sudden and unexpected alimentary crises.5

In this sense, the models of Ernest Labrousse and Amartya K. Sen can explain the emergence and development of crisis and famine not simply as a consequence of the concurrence of external forces, such as a bad harvest, environmental shocks, wars, and so on, but also and above all, through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning, and its degree of integration with other markets more or less distant. It thus exceeds the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian approaches, which attribute the onset of crisis and famine to the imbalance between the growth of food supply (expected to be arithmetical) and the growth of population (expected to be exponential).

So, in order to understand how and when crisis and famine began to appear in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era and to see whether it is possible to apply the models elaborated by Labrousse and Sen, it is necessary briefly to describe: a) the available sources; b) the market, i.e. the structures of production, distribution, and exchange in these territories, in particular with reference to food.

Sources

The first and greatest difficulty for anyone seeking to study the economic history of Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages is caused by the scarcity of the available sources, a consequence of both the more limited use of the written word than in Western Europe and the extensive damages suffered by the archives of the region over the centuries. The Kingdom of Hungary is no exception, and because of this dearth of sources, the economic and demographic conditions of the vast domains that were subject to the crown of Saint Stephen in the Middle Ages in many ways remain obscure.6

There are no comprehensive records regarding the collection of taxes or the number of settlements. The only source of this kind is the records of the collection of taxes prepared by papal collectors active in the Hungarian lands from the end of the thirteenth century to the second half of the fourteenth century, and these records are fragmentary at best.7

It was probably during the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437) that records began to be compiled for large estates, with inventories of settled tenants and villages, for military and fiscal purposes. But not many of these documents have survived, and they are mostly incomplete until 1531. The most important and extensively used among them are the lucrum camerae registers of five northeastern counties (Abaúj, Gömör, Sáros, Torna, and Ung) from 1427;8 the register of lucrum camerae of the Tramontane district of Nyitra County from 1452;9 the tax list of Nógrád County from in 1457;10 and the register of royal revenues prepared by Sigismund Ernuszt, bishop of Pécs and royal treasurer, for the fiscal year 1494/95, which is also incomplete, but which contains important information, such as the number of estates and tenants in each comitatus of the kingdom.11 Similar documents for noble estates are exceptional before the end of the fifteenth century, and even then, they remain a rarity and are generally incomplete. A notable exception is the record prepared by Ippolito d’Este, bishop of Eger, then archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary (†1520).12 However, more detailed administrative documents survive from the sixteenth century, and they offer, at least indirectly, valuable data concerning demographics and population.13

For the urban settlements, beginning with the reign of Louis I (1342–82), lists of accounts and taxes paid by the towns begin to survive in increasing numbers.14 Some records of tax estimation have survived from the first period of Ottoman rule in the central territories of the kingdom (1540–90).15 The daily life of peasants, on the other hand, is described only superficially in official documents, and mostly in relationship to legal matters.16

Given this scarcity of sources, it would be foolish to hope to arrive at accurate mortality rates, and in particular mortality rates for times of subsistence crises and/or famines, in the Kingdom of Hungary between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era: the available documents provide no precise information, and they offer only a rather impressionistic and vague image of such events. However, there are good indicators, such as descriptions of the phenomena and their amplitudes, in sources of different types from more or less neighboring geographical areas; prohibitions on the export of alimentary goods and (more or less) simultaneous requests for their import; some information about prices and price increases (though the available sources are not detailed enough to allow us to arrive at any overview of continuous trends in price increases); interventions or regulations concerning prices and markets on which alimentary commodities were sold by local and/or central authorities. Archaeological investigations have also contributed useful information.

Despite these limitations, it is possible to reconstruct a coherent framework of the economic structures and arrive at a realistic picture of the impact of famines in the Kingdom of Hungary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.

Market and Food in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary

The sources dating from between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, in particular those of a narrative character, agree in their characterizations of the Kingdom of Hungary as a fertile land, rich in waters, pastures, and woods, where farming and cattle-breeding were practiced with good results.17 At the beginning of the fourteenth century, an anonymous Dominican who traveled a lot in East and Central Europe reported that the Realm of Saint Stephen was rich not only in cereals, meat, fish, and wine, but also in salt, gold, and silver.18 Accordingly, the anonymous chronicler deduced that the ancient names of Messia and Panonia derived from abundant harvests and the availability of bread in Hungarian lands.19

The territorial expanse of the kingdom, Croatia included, was about 325,000 km2, and the average population density was very low. While some areas were more densely inhabited, in general land was available in great abundance, and most villages had a vast area for arable land, pasture, and woods at their disposal. Moreover, urbanization lagged far behind by Western European standards. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, most uncultivated land was colonized thanks to the arrival of hospites coming, above all, from the Holy Roman Empire.20 Colonization proceeded until the fourteenth century, but at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Kingdom of Hungary was still far from densely inhabited. For instance, only a few settlements were clearly identified as civitates.21 Density remained low, with considerable differences between individual regions. The situation may have partially changed by the beginning of the fifteenth century, but the overall size of the population of medieval Hungary (and therefore calculations concerning population density, mortality, etc.) remained a highly controversial issue on account of the lack of relevant sources. As Pál Engel remarks, “it is almost impossible to determine how large the population of Hungary was at the end of the Middle Ages. Indeed, current estimates vary between 2.5 million and 5.5 million, which only serves to underline the prevailing uncertainty surrounding this issue.”

In this sense, the size of the settlements varied greatly throughout the kingdom. The urban network of the Kingdom of Hungary included some 30–35 towns with urban privileges of various degree, but they were all small from a Western European perspective, and the urban population is estimated to have been no more than 3 percent of the total population. Buda had about 10,000 inhabitants; Sopron, Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia), Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia), Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Brassó (today Braşov, Romania), Nagyszeben (today Sibiu, Romania) and the mining towns of Besztercebánya (today Banská Bystrica, Slovakia) and Selmecbánya (today Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia) about 4-5,000 each; Pest, Szeged, Székesfehérvár, Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia), Eperjes (today Prešov, Slovakia), Bártfa (today Bardejov, Slovakia), Lőcse (today Levoča, Slovakia), and the mining towns of Gölnicbánya (today Gelnica, Slovakia) and Körmöcbánya (today Kremnica, Slovakia) about 3,000 each. In the southern and southwestern part of Transdanubia and in the eastern edge of Transylvania there were hundreds of little villages with a population of well under 100, while in the Great Plain much larger villages were more common. These villages had at their disposal a large quantity of land, albeit with great differences between the various Hungarian territories. According to Engel, in the counties of Abaúj and Tolna the average village territory was around 2,800 acres at the end of the Middle Ages. Yet there existed great regional differences. The Great Plain was characterized by populous villages with extensive territories, whereas in the southern part of Transdanubia and south of the Drava small villages were more usual. For example, around 1500, in the County of Vas the extent of a village’s territory was 2,100 acres on average, while the corresponding figure in Zala was 1,700 acres.22

It is nevertheless important to underline two general features: a) there was a general trend of population increase; b) there was a large availability of land. These two elements, and above all the second one, affected the structures of production in the primary sector (agriculture and livestock) and led to economic specialization. Agriculture (cereals and wine) had represented an important economic sector in the kingdom’s economic structure since the twelfth century, although it was practiced above all through a periodic change of cultivated lands, given the abundance of available land. This remained the principal cultivation method, up to the first half of the thirteenth century, when it was progressively replaced by a more coherent system of open fields, most of which were still exploited in an extensive way, but with the use of more developed techniques (such as the two-field rotation and in some regions even the three-field rotation, as well as the assymmetrical heavy plough). Agricultural productivity increased from a yield of 1:2 at the beginning of the thirteenth century to 1 : 3–4 one century later.23 Nevertheless, livestock breeding (above all the raising of horse and oxen) maintained a fundamental economic role, in accordance with the traditional Hungarian nomadic and semi-nomadic forms of organization, as well as the abundance of land, forest, and pastures.24 Hunting and fishing were also notable natural resources, and in general not closed to peasants; only limited areas were subject to absolute royal and noble control.25

Thus, Hungarian lands produced and exported more agricultural products and livestock than they did raw materials, but they also exported mineral and metals like iron, copper, salt, gold, and silver, as well as slaves (at least up to the beginning of the thirteenth century). Imported goods were mostly luxury products: the crown, the royal court, and the nobility demanded these goods in great quantities. Italian, French, and German cloths of various quality were brought into the country from the West, as were jewels and handicraft products; from the East, goods like skins, wools, and cloths of different types were imported, along with wax and spices.26 Non-luxury items were also imported in large quantities, for instance knives, pottery, etc.27 A considerable share of the imported commodities passed through the region on its way to Eastern or Western Europe.

Western sources almost unanimously describe the Kingdom of Hungary as a land in which it was possible to make good profits through the exchange of Western luxury products for local livestock, precious metals, spices, and other Levantine articles. Unfortunately, the available sources do not enable us to reconstruct price levels continuously from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era. However, on the basis of the available documents, scholars agree that the difference in price between local and imported goods created many profitable bargains, above all for Italian and German mercatores, with a considerable outflow of cheap staples from Hungary to Western Europe.28

For instance, in 1376, the Florentine Bonaccorso Pitti was in Buda and, before going back to Italy, he decided to buy six Hungarian horses. Their local price was very low, though they were famous in Western markets, thus making it possible to make a good profit. During his journey home, Bonaccorso lost one horse, gave another away as a present, and sold two others, losing some of his profits through gaming. Nonetheless, he returned to Florence with two horses, 100 gold florins, and the satisfying experience of having made an excellent bargain.29 Other documents also indicate that the Kingdom of Hungary was rich with economic opportunities.30 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the price of an ox in Hungary was around three or four florins, and a horse of average quality was not much more expensive. Bertrandon de la Broquière noted that in Hungary a horse of the best quality cost around ten florins, while in Western Europe it could cost as much as 50 florins. On the other hand, a cheap roll of Bohemian cloth could be bought for seven florins, while the same quantity of the best Italian cloth cost around 45 florins, that is, the price of 10-15 oxen.31

In this context, Hungarian households were able to produce a substantial share of their own food instead of purchasing it on the local markets. Of course, it was always possible to turn to the market, but only in cases of specific necessity. This allowed most of the Hungarian population to have almost continuous access to different alimentary resources, such as cereals, meat, and fish, and also to maintain a very diverse diet, not based almost entirely on cereals, as was the case in Western Europe. Moreover, long-distance trade did not affect the availability of food for the Hungarian population. Data gathered by Vera Zimányi confirms that before the ‘price revolution’ in the 1520s, for the price of an ox it was possible to have Moravian cloth [of average quality and largely accessible] sufficient for an item, an item and a half, of clothing; after the differentiating effects of the ‘price revolution’ around the 1580s, in exchange for an ox it was possible to buy cloth sufficient for 2 items and a half of clothing, and, in the 1600s, for 3 and 1/3. […] Livestock breeding, therefore, involved, temporarily, greater advantages than cloth production.32

On average, about 100,000 cattle were exported from the Hungarian lands per annum, with peaks of up to 200,000. In periods of strong demand, more cattle could be added from Moldavia and Wallachia through Transylvania. About four fifths of all cattle reached the Austrian, German, and Moravian markets, while about one fifth went to Venice. Only a few cattle were destined for the Ottoman lands (essentially to satisfy the demand of a section of the armed forces). It is calculated that in 1580 the total number of cattle was about 3 million. This would mean that, at least in that year, the exports comprised merely six per cent of the available livestock: evidently the rest remained available for domestic consumption.33

Indeed, meat was the main protein source for most of the inhabitants of the kingdom, and it played a central role in the Hungarian diet in the Middle Ages and in the Modern Era. If in the Hungarian lands the average annual consumption of cereals was about 112 kilograms (well below the European average, estimated at 175 kilograms), the consumption of meat was very high, 63 to 69 kilograms per capita (well above 50 kilograms in Nuremberg, 47 kilograms in the cities of southern Germany, and 26 kilograms in southern France). Moreover, the large size of the animals should also be kept in mind. Between the tenth and the twelfth centuries, Hungarian cattle lacked the special traits that became their distinguishing features by the sixteenth century, specificially the large size and large horns: these features were probably the product of a selection of species, even for commercial purposes, which took place over the course of several centuries; so, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the weight of an average Hungarian ox was about 300–350 kilograms, a figure which increased to about 450–500 kilograms by the beginning of the seventeenth century, while the European standard was 200 kilograms.34 Not surprisingly, in the Hungarian lands the production and consumption of cereals continued to have only limited importance until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Hungarian agricultural structures underwent a deep transformation, with an increasing economic and commercial integration into the Habsburg Empire and, as part of the Empire, Europe.35

In his Cronaca of 1348, the Florentine Matteo Villani offers information concerning some Hungarian alimentary habits based on meat and the importance of cattle-breeding in the local economy:

The Hungarians [...] are well and easily stocked with food even when they are in inhospitable places. This is because there is a large number of oxen and cows in Hungary which are not used to work the land; and since there are wide pastures in which to graze them, the animals grow faster and fatter. The animals are then slaughtered for leather and fat, which are heavily traded; the meat is boiled in large pots, and when it has been cooked and salted and separated from the bones, it is desiccated in ovens or in some other manner. Once dried, the meat is pulverized in a subtle mode; in this manner, it is preserved. And when they are traveling or marching with the army, when they cannot find anything to eat, they carry pots and copper vessels and each a small bag with this meat powder, as a war provision; and other bags are carried on carriages at the orders of their lord. And when they encounter a river or other water, they stop and fill their pots and pans with water; once the water has come to a boil, they add an amount of the pulverized flesh depending on the number of men who are eating. The meat powder grows and swells, and a handful or two of it can fill a pot with a kind of soup which is very nourishing to eat and which makes men vigorous with little bread, or even without bread.36

Between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, the general characteristics of production and exchange in the Kingdom of Hungary remained almost unchanged, including in regard to food. With the passing of time, a notable development in the internal market occurred, characterized by a greater use of money and a meaningful increase in commercial activities over short, medium, and long distances. Although the prices of the Hungarian products slowly but consistently increased, potentially these prices remained low in comparison with prices in the West. Thus, the exchange of Hungarian raw materials and livestock for Western and Eastern products (textiles in particular) remained profitable.37

The realm of Saint Stephen was rich in alimentary resources, which were easily accessible to a large stratum of the population. The levels of nutrition in the Kingdom of Hungary were therefore higher, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than in Western Europe. The normal diet of the kingdom’s inhabitants was based not only on cereals but also on fish and, above all, meat, which was available to most of the population. Even if there was a decrease in crops, it was always possible to fall back on the consumption of meat, or even pulse, fish and game.38

The kingdom of Hungary remained in this state of alimentary equilibrium for the whole of the Middle Ages and most of the Modern Era. The absence in the sources of mention of crises or famines suggests that in this period famine, which was cyclically frequent in other territories of Europe, was nearly, if not completely, unknown in Hungary. Furthermore, the structure of exchange in the kingdom also suggests that there were no enduring famines. Keeping in mind the general lacunae in the available documentation, there are very few traces of a resort to the import of alimentary goods (while there are some signs that they were exported), and very few indications of intervention or regulation of prices and markets of alimentary commodities by the crown or by another secular or ecclesiastical authority of the kingdom.39

I will now offer a brief survey of the main events related to hunger and famine in the Kingdom of Hungary between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.40

Crisis and Famine in the Thirteenth Century

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, hunger and famine were reported in 1044, 1074 (or 1075), and 1141. These dates all overlapped with periods of military conflicts, but unfortunately the sources do not permit a real analysis of the economic impact of the events of the wars. One should note that there were wars and conflicts in other years too, but no signs of other hunger or famine events.41

More interesting data are available beginning in the thirteenth century, when a great famine occurred in 1243/45. It was not caused by earlier or repeated bad harvests, however, or by correlated speculations. Rather, the famine was a direct consequence of the Mongol invasions and devastation wreaked by the Mongols, which led to a genuine collapse of the political, economic, and social structures of the kingdom in 1241/42.42 According to the Chronicon Austriacum, in 1243–45 famine took a much bigger toll on human lives than the previous invasions and devastations; in all likelihood, the episodes of cannibalism referred to by the author never took place, but they do give an idea of the emotional impact of the catastrophe on contemporary society.43 The destruction and demographic loss were certainly considerable, estimated to between 20 and 50 per cent of the entire population, and even higher, with high divergences among the different Hungarian territories.44

Another famine was recorded in 1263, in a period characterized by clashes between the Hungarian nobility and the crown, as well as conflicts within the royal family itself (with civil wars in 1262 and 1264–66 between king Béla IV and his son and heir Stephen). So, the uncertain political situation created by the trauma of Mongol invasions seems to have contributed to a breakdown of normal economic and commercial progress.45 In this context, the Chronicon Austriacum reported a maxima fames in 1263, not only in Hungary, but in most of East and Central Europe. Nevertheless, this generic report does not allow us to assess the real impact of the famine.46

Crisis and Famine in the Fourteenth Century

On the other hand, the same wartime events also triggered wide-ranging political, economic, and social changes which overlapped with: a) elements of the previous period of economic expansion and growth (which was interrupted by the trauma of the Mongol invasions); b) the political and economic reforms, institutional stability, and stronger royal power established by the new Angevin dynasty, with Charles I (1301–42) and his son Louis I the Great (1342–82);47 c) the so-called “advantage of backwardness” (as explained by Alexander Gerschenkron).48

In the fourteenth century, the Hungarian markets were still not adequately developed, and thus they offered profitable spaces for investment for European merchant capital, which had fallen on hard times. With the reorganization of the kingdom’s economic structures, Hungarian raw materials and livestock found extensive markets, and trade over short and long distances with the Italian Peninsula and the Holy Roman Empire suddenly grew considerably livelier. These innovations launched and favored dynamic and sustained economic development in the kingdom. The series of subsistence crises that struck Western Europe between 1315 and 1322 had a limited impact on the Hungarian lands.49 This economy continued to grow until at least the beginning of the fifteenth century, and this was followed by a further growth phase in the same century and in the next one, with a different economic cycle in comparison with Western Europe.50

In this political and economic context, fourteenth-century sources report on four main cases of increases in the prices of alimentary goods; three of these cases include mention of famine phenomenon and/or food crises of varying extents. Two events were just local and occurred in the northern regions of historical Hungary (in what today is Slovakia). In 1312, in the Szepesség (Spiš) region, the prices of alimentary goods increased to the point of causing a food crisis; prices increased again in 1316 in Pécsújfalu (today Pečovská Nová Ves, Slovakia), but without bringing about large scale famine.51 In all likelihood, these two episodes were influenced by the struggle for the throne, which divided the kingdom at the time.52 However, there is no evidence of large scale economic or demographic impact.

Two other events were of greater importance with regards to external factors. In 1338, a great locust invasion hit Transylvania, from Brassó up to Lippa (today Lipova, Romania): with the exception of the region around Arad (today Arad, Romania) region, locusts devoured a great share of the crops, triggering an increase in the prices of alimentary goods, which eventually ushered in a food crisis. The famine was not terribly prolonged, however, because summer rains forced the locusts to move westwards.53 A second event is reported to have taken place in 1363/64. The summer was remarkably dry, and it was followed by a hard winter. This caused a fall in agricultural production, which led to an increase in the prices of alimentary goods and therefore a food crisis. Even in this case, the famine was of limited significance. It was felt above all in the eastern territories and the markets of the Great Hungarian Plain. Moreover, with the intention of preventing food crises and famines of greater dimensions, King Louis I ordered his officers to locate and inventory the cereal stocks in order to put the surplus on the market.54

However, beginning in the fourteenth century, with the progressive involvement of the Kingdom of Hungary in the so-called “world economy,”55 crises and famines began to be reported with growing frequency, and they had an ever larger impact, even in prosperous periods, evidently in connection with the oscillations in the functioning of the market.56 Furthermore, wars (first and foremost the conflicts with the Ottoman Empire), caused considerable damage and led to problems in the food supply. However, warfare often created opportunities for profitable bargains.57

Crisis and Famine in the Fifteenth Century

In the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary played an important role in European politics and the European economy. The strong royal power of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437)58 and Matthias Corvinus (1458–90)59 and the prestige and valor of Filippo Scolari (Pipo Ozorai or Pippo Spano) (1369–1426)60 and John Hunyadi (c. 1407–56)61 made the crown of Saint Stephen strong again after the political crisis that had weakened the country after the extinction of the Angevin dynasty.

In the fifteenth century, most of the Hungarian political and economic resources were devoted to war. While the “centrifugal forces” of the nobility were thwarted by Sigismund after years of intense struggle, military pressure increased along the borders of the realm. In the north, the Hungarian lands were involved in the Hussite Wars, triggering far-reaching political, economic, and social transformations. In the West, clashes with the Habsburgs became inevitable. In the south, the struggles with the Ottoman Empire increased to the point of constant war. Other conflicts put Hungary in opposition to political entities in the Balkans and the Carpatho–Danubian area (first and foremost Serbia and Bosnia, Wallachia, and Moldavia), which were struggling to maintain an uneasy equilibrium between the long-established power of the Kingdom of Hungary and the increasing strength of the Ottoman Empire.62 Yet, despite the internal political difficulties and the almost endemic warfare along all of its frontiers, the kingdom enjoyed a phase of strong economic growth throughout the whole century.63

The events of the wars interfered with normal commercial activities; but often war was an occasion to make profits and bargains.64 For instance, in the summer of 1438, the eastern territories of Hungary suffered a large scale Ottoman invasion. All of the Transylvanian towns suffered huge damage, and many inhabitants were carried off as slaves.65 This brought about a partial interruption in the import of wheat from the Carpathian regions, a shortfall aggravated by attempts at speculation. For this reason, in January 1439 the authorities in Nagyszeben sent a missive to the authorities in Brassó urging the restoration of the normal flow of wheat imports from the south; in the case of a refusal, Nagyszeben threatened to close paths of communication between the north and Brassó. The sources do not allow us to know whether the city ever actually made good on its threat, nor do they indicate when the situation was normalized. But the attempt is evident: the municipal authorities of Brassó, taking advantage of the fact that their city was situated in a border area through which a significant share of the commodities coming from the Carpathian regions was being transmitted, tried to raise the price of wheat in the Transylvanian territories in order to make huge profits.66

Years of unfavorable climate could also lead to a poor harvest. Documents report on events of greater importance, such as hard winters in 1407/08, 1428/29, 1441–44, 1457/58, 1463, and 1491 and dry summers in 1460, 1463, 1473 (which also bore witness to a locust invasion), 1474, 1478–80, 1491, and 1493/94. In particular, the cold winter in 1428 and the warm summer in 1429 caused a fall in wheat and wine production, again limited to the eastern territories of the Great Hungarian Plain. Food crises of some importance occurred in 1456, 1463, 1470–74, and 1493/94.67

Nevertheless, the documents make no mention of events of widespread or prolonged hunger or famine in any of these years. In 1456, further difficulties arose because of the critical political and military situation of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Ottoman advances towards the west were halted at Belgrade in a battle led by John Hunyadi.68 For 1463, sources mention a particularly unfavorable year, with direct consequences for crops; but the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia, involving a reorganization of markets, probably had a greater impact on commercial exchange.69 In February 1470, King Matthias of Hungary forbade the Transylvanian Saxon towns from exporting “triticum, milium, avenam et alias fruges” to Wallachia in order to avoid a shortage of these products on the Hungarian markets.70 It is not possible to establish, however, whether this decision was motivated by a real shortfall of agricultural products in the eastern territories of the kingdom. Prolonged difficulties due to low crop yields were registered up to 1474.71

It is worth noting, however, that at the time a customs war was underway between the Kingdom of Hungary and the voevodate of Wallachia. The clash dated back to the times of Voevode of Wallachia Vlad III Ţepeş–Dracula (October 1448; 1456–62; November–December 1476), who tried to annul the staple right of the Transylvanian Saxon towns by creating a parallel line of border markets in Wallachian territory and to penetrate the Hungarian markets directly and secure the free circulation of Wallachian merchants in Transylvanian lands.72 So it is probable that the decision of 1470 was intended to protect the Hungarian markets, not only from the commercial threat posed by the Wallachian towns but also from the excessive dynamism of the Transylvanian Saxon towns, which made high profits from the exchange of commodities between East and West, often undermining the interests of the Kingdom of Hungary. Sources do not reveal whether or not the import ban actually took place or, if it did, how it was enforced. The customs war between the Kingdom of Hungary and the voevodate of Wallachia certainly dragged on for a long time. Thus, in all likelihood, it was a combination of political conflicts and adverse climatic factors that badly affected the normal course of the market, giving rise to a new famine in Transylvania in 1493/94.73 Events affected above all the chief urban centers, but not the surrounding villages: for instance, Brassó faced a stagnation of its population in the town center, but not in its outlying territories.74

In conclusion, in the fifteenth century neither wars nor bad harvests exerted a considerable influence on the availability of foodstuffs in the Kingdom of Hungary, and they certainly did not give rise to famines. Only on a few occasions do documents make mention of increases in prices, and they contain no references to alimentary crises of vast proportions. Mentions of hunger and underfeeding are also rare.

Crisis and Famine in the Sixteenth Century

In the sixteenth century, Hungarian territories were characterized by a notable institutional instability and prolonged external and internal wars. The defeat at Mohács (1526), the tripartite division of the kingdom (1541), and the Treaty of Speyer (1570) left the ancient lands of Saint Stephen in a situation of confusion and war, to which the most deleterious effects of famine and the decrease or relocation of the population were added.75 Nevertheless, in the middle of the century the situation quickly normalized in connection with the integration of western and northern Hungarian territories into the Habsburg dominions, the formation of the Ottoman Vilayet of Buda, and the creation of the autonomous Principality of Transylvania. Therefore, in the sixteenth century, a phase of political decadence was not accompanied by a parallel economic decline. A partial adjustment of the commercial network and the exchange flows took place. Documents suggest that merchants of different origins operating in the area looked for and easily opened new and convenient commercial paths. Imports of large consumer goods increased (including cheap textiles from the East and the West), as did exports of raw materials (agricultural products and livestock to the East and the West).76 Hungarian lands were becoming increasingly integrated into the European markets.77

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the so-called Little Ice Age began to affect the entire European continent, and it reached its peak in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Little Ice Age was characterized by increasingly adverse and unstable climatic conditions, which influenced all the spheres of the economy and agriculture in particular. Nevertheless, the shift in the climate did not have an absolutely negative impact on the agriculture, because the disappearance of some crops brought about the introduction of others (including new ones) in the different climatic areas of the continent. Thus, famine was not the product of periodic and ordinary climatic adversities; on the contrary, more often famine was tied to some short term, anomalous, and extreme climatic perturbation, aggravated by the poor functioning of the markets.78

In this context, Hungarian documents report on three famines of local importance: in 1529–31 (when abundant rains and bloody wars for the Hungarian throne between the supporters of Ferdinand of Habsburg and John Szapolyai caused a crop failure), in 1545 (caused at least in part by an invasion of locusts and the continuous wars against the Ottomans), and in 1553 (after a very severe winter). Sixteenth-century documents also refer to another seven years characterized by severe and widespread famines with high mortality rates. The first event was recorded in 1507/08. It was caused by excessive rains and floods, followed by a period of drought. These events caused a food shortage on all of the Hungarian markets, with a general increase in the price of food and the emergence of intense speculation (“magna caristia rerum”).79 Between 1534 and 1536, unfavorable climatic events were recorded: they caused a shortage of various goods, followed by a steep increase in prices. In 1534, a cubulus (80–85 litres)80 of wheat could cost 18 silver coins in Brassó, 12 in Medgyes (today Mediaş, Romania), 14 in Nagyszeben, and up to 3½ gold florins in other territories of Transylvania; the following year, the price of a cubulus of wheat rose to six gold florins. The price of livestock witnessed an analogous rise: a cow could cost six gold florins, a calf 60 silver coins, and a sheep 12 silver coins. Thus, a food crisis of vast proportions was recorded, marked by high mortality rates.81 The excessive drought and the persistent war caused a new food shortage of alimentary goods between 1574 and 1575, with the hardships continuing up to 1577 in some regions. To limit damages and losses, between April and May, the Diet of Transylvania decreed a general tax reduction and total tax exemption for unmarried young people, wage-earning servants, and people belonging to other categories with low incomes.82 Drought again caused low crop yields, and food prices rose between 1585 and 1586: in Kolozsvár and Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureş, Romania) a cubulus of wheat ended up costing six gold florins.83

There were other examples of crisis and famine in Transylvania, one of the most economically developed lands in the kingdom. It is interesting to note that, in the sixteenth century, famines had a greater impact in the Transylvanian lands before and after the division of the Kingdom of Hungary. Historical data show that in sixteenth-century Transylvania, over a period of 80 years, crop yields were of exceptional quantity in 28 seasons, on an average level in 27 years, below the average in 18 (only three of which were characterized by limited hunger of only local impact), and in seven years crops were not available in sufficient quantities, resulting in widespread famine.84 Of course, throughout the entire century, these territories were marked by bloody clashes, but the war also offered occasions to make profits. Indeed, Transylvania consistently remained very active from the point of view of commerce, as it was in a favorable position of mediation between East and West. Although it remained in a basically marginal position from a European perspective, Transylvania functioned as an important market up to the Modern Era.85 Even the famines recorded in Transylvania were closely connected to a malfunctioning of the local markets: in particular, in periods of exceptional difficulty (a drop in the harvest, environmental shocks, or events caused by the war), the absence of suitable policies for food imports or price regulation could favor a rise in the prices of food and consequently lead to crisis and famine.86

It is evident that, also in the sixteenth century, famines in the Hungarian territories were conditioned not only by external elements, such as poor harvests, environmental shocks, events cause by the war, and so on, but above all by a malfunctioning of the markets. In fact, in other periods when wars, unfavorable climatic events, and/or crop failures were recorded, there were neither famines nor higher mortality rates, and even the prices of food did not go up. Moreover, it is interesting to note that, although in general the sixteenth century represents a period of political and institutional crisis in Hungary, major demographic crises (which involved significant drops in the population and the desertion of villages and whole regions) only occurred at the end of the century as a result of all of these factors, eventually combined with climatic changes. Thus, the huge population decrease which took place in the last part of the century was not the result of famines.

Conclusion – An Alimentary Equilibrium

Documents and observations thus apparently confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to apply the models of crise de type ancient by Ernest Labrousse and entitlement approach by Amartya K. Sen to the Kingdom of Hungary between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era to clarify the appearance and evolution mechanisms of crisis and famine in a preindustrial and industrial context (according to a non-Malthusian approach).

In comparison with other parts of Europe, in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era alimentary alternatives in Hungary, such as wheat, meat, and fish, remained accessible to most of the population, which maintained free access to the alimentary resources (agricultural and sylvan-pastoral). Consequently, the normal diet remained diversified and not entirely based on cereals or on wheat, in particular. This permitted the maintenance of an alimentary equilibrium which, in part because it was based on a wide and comparatively diverse array of foods (and on meat in particular), prevented the rise of vast alimentary crises and famines, unless a shock such as war or climatic changes occurred. Moreover, the production and exchange structures were very specific. Raw materials and agricultural articles, in which the country abounded, were exported, while imports consisted mainly of specific luxury articles demanded by the crown, the nobility, and the wealthiest social groups of the kingdom. As a consequence of this economic situation, the Hungarian population turned to the market only in cases of specific necessity, and rarely merely to obtain necessary foodstuffs.87

Western Europe had also had a similar alimentary regime, characterized by vast access to resources and based above all on meat, but this was between the Early and High Middle Ages.88 In the most developed and integrated markets of Western Europe, between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, cereals and wheat in particular had emerged as the almost exclusive basis of nourishment. The shortage of these goods, the production of which was subject to significant fluctuations as it depended on seasonal rhythms and not (or not completely) on market movement, led to increases in their prices. Therefore, given the rigid wage system and the lack of alimentary alternatives that might be socially approved, and in the absence of adequate policies to complement supplies, shortages could easily lead to famines with large impacts and even to a fall in demand and production (sometimes of significant proportions) of non-agricultural goods and services until the phase of economic crisis passed.89

In contrast, although increasingly integrated into the European markets, Hungary did not suffer periods of serious famine because it preserved an alimentary equilibrium and the free access of its population to the food resources in most of the regions of the kingdom. Engel notes that on the whole, by the 1500s the living conditions of the peasantry had improved rather than deteriorated. They could freely change their place of residence, they were allowed to bear arms and to hunt and they sometimes even took the field alongside the nobles. […] Famine was a rare visitor among them. Although sometimes there was less bread than necessary [...], they had no difficulty in supplementing their diet with pulse, meat, fish and even game. As the density of the population remained rather low, there were abundant expanses of woodland and pasture throughout the country. At the beginning of the sixteenth century an average household raised two or three cattle and—at least in the eastern part of the kingdom—no fewer than eight pigs, not to mention poultry. In the 1510s it was quite natural for the servants of the domain of Ónod to eat meat every day, sometimes even twice, and we have no reason to believe that the diet of the peasantry in general was significantly worse.90

The complex economic interaction of difficulties due to crop yields, climate, war, and famine, together with the responses of the institutional framework to these factors, are evidence of the economic dynamism and increasing and notable maturation of the Hungarian market, as well as its growing integration into and role as a mediator between Western and Eastern markets between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.91

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* This paper is based in part on the following conference papers: Andrea Fara, Crisis and Famine in the Kingdom of Hungary in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period (XIIIth–XVIth centuries), in XVth World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, August 3rd–7th, 2009 – Session B6, Medieval Central– and Southeast Europe: Towards a New Economic and Social History; Idem, Some Considerations about Crisis and Famine in East–Central Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period (XIIIth–XVIth centuries), in 7th CEU Conference in Social Sciences: “What Follows after the Crisis? Approaches to Global Transformations.” Budapest, Central European University, May 27th–29th, 2011.