How to “Ravage” a Country: Destruction, Conservation, and Assessment of Natural Environments in Early Modern Military Thought

Jan Philipp Bothe

University of Göttingen

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This article examines the practice of “ravaging” the countryside as a part of Early Modern military thought. It analyses the arguments for destroying or conserving cultivated natural environments and how they were integrated into the emerging theoretical framework on war in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I argue that depriving the enemy of local natural resources by consuming or destroying them was an extreme form of exercising control over an area which was used to exert control over both the supplies for an enemy army and the use of land by the local population. To legitimize this practice, specific arguments were used: destruction was meant to “shorten” a war, and gradually use of this tactic was confined to the home country and defense against enemy invasions. In addition, it was important which resources were targeted: while the destruction of forage and harvests was seen as a form of short-term damage, cutting down trees counted as a form of lasting damage that was undesirable. Some authors of works on military strategy started to argue that devastating the land in the enemy’s country was unpractical, and that (forced) contributions from locals were far more useful. Thus, while authors of works on military strategy did make arguments against “scorched earth” warfare and the “ravaging” of the countryside, they did so purely out of practical considerations which rested on notions of utility, rather than out of any humanitarian considerations.

Keywords: early modern period, environment, warfare, military thought, wartime destruction

During the winter months of 1688 and 1689, much of the land in the territory of the Electoral Palatinate was in flames. After the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War and the Dutch War earlier in the century, the border region along the Rhine again had become a major gateway for French troops traveling towards the German Empire at the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War. The roots of this conflict lay not only in the events leading to the Glorious Revolution in 1688, but also in King Louis XIV’s fear that a strong Habsburg Empire might be able to contest the territorial gains that he had achieved during the Reunions.1

As the bulk of the German armies was still fighting the Ottoman Empire in the Great Turkish War, Louis XIV’s forces met with little resistance when occupying a large part of the Palatinate. Important cities and fortresses of the area, like Heidelberg (the seat of the Elector of the Palatinate), Mannheim, Worms, Kaiserslautern, and Speyer, surrendered within weeks.2 But the French did not enjoy a quick and decisive victory. German princes continued to put up resistance. They soon opposed the French troops, together with the forces of the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I. After the Glorious Revolution, the Generalstaaten and England under William of Orange also joined the conflict. In the autumn of 1688, the Minister of War François Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois, and the king’s consultant Jules-Louis Bolé, Marquis de Chamlay suggested to put the Palatinate and other occupied areas to the torch after having collected large amounts of contributions. By demolishing major cities and strongholds in the region, Louvois hoped to slow down any progress of German forces against French borders.3 At its core, this was a defensive strategy. The act became known as the infamous “devastation of the Palatinate,” as it was characterized in various pamphlets which were intended to foment a sense of scandal. The destruction of the Palatinate became a media event.4

The French army was not the first and not the last to use this tactic.5 Nevertheless, the “burning of the Palatinate” was a prominent example of a tactic put to use in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that has been called “scorched earth warfare.”6 Both major cities but the surrounding countryside suffered as a consequence of efforts to transform the region into a “logistic obstacle.”7 In this article, my intention is to demonstrate that this devastation was not simply an act of desperation, but rather was a tactic which drew on an element of Early Modern military thought.

Most handbooks and memoirs concerning the art of war included examples of when and how to “ravage” a country. These reflections also underline that this type of “scorched earth warfare” not only targeted towns and villages by burning down buildings and driving off or killing their inhabitants, but also targeted the cultivated nature of the countryside. By consuming or destroying forage and crop yields, this tactic of attrition was used, as Lisa Brady has noted in the case of the American Civil War, to sever the connection between the rural civilian population, the enemy army and the land on which both depended for sustenance on the other.8 It was thought to be possible to starve out an enemy and to exercise control over the enemy’s use of land in a radical way: by destroying it.

Examining this aspect of Early Modern military tactics and its consequences for the natural environment as a part of military knowledge, I aim to contribute to fields of research for environmental historians and historians of warfare. As a synthesis, this environmental history of warfare focuses not only on the environmental impact of war, but also, as Richard Tucker has pointed out, on the ecological settings of war through history.9 As J. R. McNeill has observed in a study on the history of woods and warfare, scorched earth tactics like destroying natural resources are “as old as war itself,” and Emmanuel Kreike underlined the importance of environmental warfare as a colonial war practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.10 An examination of this form of warfare as a part of the emerging theoretical framework on war in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries furthers an understanding of environmental warfare as a special field of military knowledge.

The article consists of three sections. Initially, I sketch an episode of the devastation of the Palatinate with a focus on the local consequences of this type of warfare to highlight its impact on civilian use of land. The efforts of the French armies were intended to ensure not only the demolition of fortifications and towns, but also the consumption of as much forage as possible. This deprived enemy troops and the local population of a vital natural resource. I then analyze the idea of “ravaging” a region in Early Modern military thought as a legitimate modus operandi that was addressed in certain contexts. Finally, I briefly examine the idea of protecting the countryside during wartime, as violence against the rural population and their local resources was also connected to ideas of “just war” and legitimate versus illegitimate conduct of warfare. This protection, as I will argue, was meant to ensure the effectiveness of one’s own army and did not entail the idea of a humanization of warfare; rather, in the discourse of military thought and theory, utilitarian arguments prevailed.

The Hunger for Forage: The Case of Baden-Baden 1689

Fernand Braudel once called the times before the nineteenth century and the beginning of the consumption of large amounts of fossil fuels the “Old Biological Regime.”11 One key implication of this term is its focus on energy production: Before large amounts of energy began to be drawn from the use of fossil fuels (an “underground forest,” as Rolf-Peter Sieferle has put it),12 the “Old Biological Regime” was mainly bound to organic sources of energy. Wood for fires and food for both man and animals alike were subject to the biological laws of fertility and plant growth. John Landers has described this configuration as an “organic economy,” its limitations having a direct impact on the military logistics of pre-industrial Western societies. As Landers suggests, the dependence of this “organic economy” on large rural areas meant that military forces could only advance if armies and military administrations were able to make use of local agricultural resources. Depriving an enemy of this resource, thus, was often the only way to win a war.13

This perspective proves exceptionally interesting if one considers the ways in which Early Modern armies ensured their mobility. Often, it has been noted that winter campaigns were uncommon in Early Modern Europe and that warfare was typically bound to the seasons, just like agriculture. If military operations dragged on into the harsh winter months,14 this was considered especially problematic. One of the main reasons for this limitation was the dependency on forage. Grass growth determined the point of time armies could leave their winter quarters. Without this “fuel,” no army could be expected to move anywhere. The cavalry needed a daily portion of forage to feed their horses, as did all the other animals used in convoys for supplies or to transport baggage and heavy and expensive siege weapons, which were very important in an age of fortress warfare.15

As John Lynn has argued, drawing on the example of the French Army, a force of about 60,000 soldiers could easily muster about 40,000 horses, 20,000 for the cavalry and another 20,000 used for logistical tasks. As the amount of forage for troops in winter quarters was quantified in Réglements, it is possible to estimate at least the amounts of dry forage that a body of troops like this would consume on a daily basis. The Réglement of the French Army in November 1665, for example, prescribed a ration of 20 pounds of hay for each horse. For the cavalry alone this would have meant that about 200 tons of dry forage were needed to sustain about 20,000 horses, if these estimates are accurate.16 The problem with forage was that it effectively could not be procured from distant regions via carts, as this again would require the use of horses, which would also need to be fed. Dried forage was vital for troops in their winter quarters, but the same problems arose as in the case of fresh forage. Furthermore, it proved complicated to dry fresh forage in the field, as it rotted very quickly. Thus, the subsistance militaire was divided into food for soldiers and food for animals.

This tactic sheds some light on the core problem of logistics that was connected to military tactics in the Early Modern era. Military strategy and military organization changed between the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution. This can only be briefly covered here: out of the mercenary armies of the early seventeenth century emerged more or less permanent forces with an aristocratic officer class more closely bound to the military hierarchy and the authority of the sovereign; soldiers were gradually subjected to harsher forms of drills, as the ideal tactic of linear warfare of the early eighteenth century to maximize firepower demanded even greater discipline; the ever-present army “tails,” still known in the early seventeenth century, consisting of the women and children of mercenaries who occasionally even outnumbered the armed forces, declined in the late seventeenth century as the supply of soldiers increasingly became a matter of a military administration. At the same time, European armies experienced a dramatic growth, fostered by changes in recruiting and supply practices.17

The supply of troops underwent a major transformation since the end of the Thirty Years’ War.18 As for the French example, the growth of the army was to a large part only possible because of reforms under Le Tellier and his son Louvois. These reforms were reactions to the increasing problem of providing adequate supplies for a large force without actually having the funds to purchase food for the troops directly. By institutionalizing the establishment of magazines using private contractors, the French administration tried to improve army supply and reduce damage dealt to the home country. In theory, food could then be carted from the magazines towards the field of operations.19

In contrast to these obvious changes, however, there remained certain key problems of Early Modern warfare. Often, forage had to be obtained in the field as a local resource, either by requisition or by purchase.20 “Foraging” was the most basic daily routine for armies.21 However, concentrating large quantities of dried forage in magazines could also become a major advantage, as this would allow an army to take to the fields early. Under Le Tellier and his son Louvois, this became one of the key factors in the quick successes of the French army during the Dutch War, as the troops could draw on substantial stocks of hay and straw that had been established at major fortresses along the Rhine. The river was used to transport the enormous quantities of forage.22

This shows two main factors that also played a key role during the devastation of the Palatinate. First, forage was one of the main resources that an army needed to keep itself mobile, and it was also a resource of which one could deprive one’s enemy only by consuming or destroying it. As it was a local resource, the availability of which was bound to its own growth time, keeping an enemy away from forage could potentially slow down his operations. Also, a considerable advantage was to be obtained if one could concentrate large amounts of dried forage in magazines. This concentration of forage could be achieved by drawing on contributions from the enemy territory, which were to be paid both in money and “in natura.”23 It became common practice to obtain these “contributions” as a mixture of taxes and extortion not only for the French, but for all European armies after the Thirty Years’ War, and this remained common practice until the end of the eighteenth century. This method of sustaining an army in enemy territory was a vital part of financing warfare, and levying contributions was legitimate in terms of military law. The collection of this “war tax” was relatively orderly most of the time, as commanders even worked together with the civil administration of occupied regions to raise the required sums or the required amounts of foodstuffs and fodder. So-called contributions were often seen, in comparison to pillaging and looting, as a lesser evil. If a town or region failed to pay, however, armies could burn villages and towns as a form of rightful punishment.24

Yet, the burning of the Palatinate in the winter months of 1688 and 1689 was not done as punishment for failure to pay the increasing sums demanded by French intendants. Instead, this common practice provided the pretext for a plan that had been designed very early on.

The example of the fate of Baden-Baden, a small county south of the Electoral Palatinate which also was partly occupied by French forces and compelled to make contributions (as were most territories on the Upper Rhine), sheds light on what this practice meant for civilian populations.25 Demands were being made not only for considerable sums of money, but also for forage to supply French troops in their winter quarters. For the territory of Baden-Baden, these demands were sent by Jacques La Grange, who had been the intendant of Alsace since 1674 and had served in the Nine Years’ War as the intendant of Alsace, Brisgau, and the French army in Germany.26

In a letter to the Baden-Baden officials written on February 7, 1689, he elaborated on the consequences the county would face if his demands were not met. “I have heard that of the 20,000 rations of forage, which have been imposed on you for our part of the contribution, you have only paid 600 so far.”27 If this did not change quickly, he threatened to “burn without consideration.”28 Eleven days later, La Grange issued yet another official letter to levy new contributions, demanding 1,500 sacks of oats for the cavalry.29

While it was a common practice to draw upon enemy resources to sustain one’s own army, especially during winter, the motive in early 1689 was not only subsistence. As John Lynn has pointed out, there had been plans to demolish not only fortifications, but also towns on the Upper Rhine as early as the end of October 1688. In a letter to Louvois, Chamlay suggested completely destroying the town of Mannheim. In a letter from Louvois to the Lieutenant General Joseph de Montclar written on December 18, the Minister of War ordered Montclar to destroy all settlements along the Neckar completely so that German troops would find neither food nor forage.30 This included consuming or destroying forage before retreating to the left side of the Rhine, as Montclar wrote in an order concerning the French officer Peyssonel in 1688: his troops should consume all forage if possible and burn the rest.31 It is not unlikely that this is the context in which the repeated demands for new deliveries of substantial amounts of forage from the county of Baden-Baden to Strasbourg is to be seen: as an attempt to consume the fuel available and establish a logistical obstacle for the German forces.

This tactic seemed to work, as reports by Baden-Baden councilors to Count Hermann of Baden-Baden in Regensburg suggest.32 In a report dated to January 24, 1689, an official wrote about destruction around the town of Pforzheim, but also about raiding parties that took forage and grains. The “conservation of the country” was at risk, as many of the subjects had already fled the surrounding countryside.33 To ease the burden of contributions, especially that of providing forage, a letter directly addressed to La Grange himself34 tried to dissuade the French official from demanding copious amounts of hay and straw: “The supply of grains and forages is absolutely impossible, as it is completely consumed by the billeting and continued passages of the royal troops.”35 According to the letter, the financial and ecological limits of the small territory had been reached, and during winter it was simply not possible to grow more forage.

One could contend that these sources are not entirely reliable, since the councilors and officials may have exaggerated the situation in Baden-Baden to persuade the French to relieve the burdens of war or to persuade Hermann of Baden-Baden to force the Reichstag in Regensburg to respond to the French more quickly. However, another document supports the conclusion that the description of the situation given by the councilors in their reports was accurate. In a record dated March 24, 1689, several Baden-Baden officials discussed the next response to the growing French threat.36 Even though the governor of Strasbourg Count Chamily had given an order allowing the contribution in forage to be paid in money, the councilors found this obligation impossible to meet. In addition, the document illustrates the growing sufferings endured by the civilian population and the damage done to their methods of land use. Again, they wrote that “a large share of fruits and forage” had already been consumed “in natura,” and soon there would be nothing left. Many subjects, they contended, had fled the territory because of famine, and the lack of forage had led to the slaughter of a large part of the remaining cattle.37 As the subjects had neither grain nor forage left, they could hardly sell them to meet the demands in money.

While this kind of shortage was common if an enemy army was present in a territory, the authors linked it to the tactic of consuming everything so that German commanders would find nothing with which to feed their troops and mounts, even though this hardly made any sense to them. As they wrote, the French insisted on their demands “even though the German troops quartered in this county do not get their supplies from our land…”38 Thus, the shortage was to some degree artificial and intentional, a tool of war meant to constrain German forces.

This brief example shows the importance of a local resource like forage in keeping an army supplied, a resource that was “natural” because it followed its own biological mechanisms and rhythms.39 While military organization and tactics gradually changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this factor remained a critical logistical problem that was examined writings on military theory. If all dried forage had been consumed in a region during winter, there was simply no other solution than to wait for fresh grass to grow again or to engage in large-scale logistics operation, procuring large quantities of hay and straw via rivers. Also, this understand of the importance of forage and the shortage of it in a given territory clarifies the meaning of the term “logistic obstacle.” By consuming (or destroying) this necessary fuel, the army directly impacted the use of local land, the inhabitants of which needed forage, for example, to keep cattle. This shortage, together with the burning of villages and all sorts of violence against the civilian population, drove the subjects from the territory. This in turn meant that in some areas, there was nobody left to cultivate the land so it would again yield grains or forage, thus making it difficult to supply an army in the region.40 This impact on land use by a large military force was not always accidental, nor was it always a result of faulty organization. Rather, sometimes it was used as a way of depriving an enemy of supplies. This warfare of attrition, which has been seen as characteristic of the wars under Louis XIV,41 was widely discussed in contemporary military thought, both before and after the reign of the sun king.

“Ravaging” a Country as a Part of Military Thought

The devastation of the Palatinate also became a topic in Early Modern military theory. One example is Hanns Friedrich von Flemings “Der vollkommene Teutsche Soldat,” an encyclopedic effort to summarize the state of the art of war in the early eighteenth century. The author placed particular emphasis on the wars of Louis XIV and the destruction wreaked in the course of these wars. This included burning down houses, poisoning wells, and desecrating graves, actions that were seen as a violation of the “divine law or the law of nations.”42 Flemings’ accusations repeat claims found in leaflets in which the French conduct of war was presented as scandalous. However, it is telling that he used this example in a chapter in which he discussed the theory of a “just war” and laws during wartime in general. In this context (of course from a German perspective), French actions served as an example of misconduct.

Flemings’ compilation also shows the specific nature of military discourse of the period. In the appendix, he included a list of examples of “soldiers who distinguished themselves both by sword and scholarship.”43 The list was meant to illustrate one of Flemings’ key points, which he made clear on various occasions in his work: officers should educate themselves to master the art of war.

This points towards an emerging new ideal of educated officers and the idea that war itself could be controlled and systematized by reducing it to certain basic principles. As Azar Gat and other scholars of the “military enlightenment” wrote, military thought did not remain untouched by processes and currents in the general spirit of the age, which has been dubbed (at least by its European heirs) the “Enlightenment” and the “Age of Reason.”44 The doctrine of natural law combined with a general search for rules and principles in the arts, together with the “gospel of Newtonian science,”45 created a particular intellectual atmosphere. However, many modern scholars of the Enlightenment argue that this cannot be summed up as a “revolution” or the personal project of few “enlightened” thinkers, but rather as a large-scale process of losing and questioning traditional orders and thus a resulting concentration of communication.46

The study of these general principles of warfare and sharing them with young officers and interested amateurs alike were key factors in the establishment of “military science” and a “military enlightenment.”47 Ever since Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Dell’Arte della Guerra” (1521), a new genre of printed texts emerged that focused on how to wage war, primarily drawing on examples borrowed from Ancient authors like Vegetius, Caesar, and Onasander.48 It has been argued that the influence of Antiquity on military treaties remained very high until the end of the eighteenth century, with most authors following technically outdated formations and ideals of warfare, with only few exceptions.49 While it is indeed true that Ancient authors, primarily Vegetius but also Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico,” were frequently referenced in nearly all works on the art of war of the period, it is also important to consider the changes to the discourse on military theory during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gradually, writings about European warfare came to adopt a more skeptical perspective that emphasized the experiences of the authors and made references to recent events, especially after the Seven Years’ War, while occasionally drawing on the authorities of Antiquity.50 As a genre, writings on the Art of War tried to give the reader examples of the best practices in nearly every field of military life, making the knowledge of the Ancients and the knowledge of great commanders available, but also commenting on it in an increasingly reflective manner.

Despite Flemings’ harsh judgment concerning the destruction wreaked by the French, there indeed was a place in this discourse for the planned devastation of a country by an army through the destruction of forage and harvests. Thus, the French officials drew on an idea that was already present in military thought and remained part of it even after the Nine Years’ War. A French example that was written before the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War and was broadly published and read illustrates this.

Henri II, the duke of Rohan, was one of the most reputable French authors on military theory of the seventeenth century. Born in 1579 to an old and powerful protestant family, de Rohan served in campaigns against Spanish forces in Flanders under King Henry IV. Due to his close relationship to the king, Rohan could hope to rise rapidly into the highest circles of power. However, the assassination of Henry IV in 1610 shattered his hopes, and soon he found himself the leader of protestant resistance in France and in opposition to the ruling Marie de’ Medici and Louis XIII. In the following uprising of the Huguenots, Henri de Rohan played a key role in repeatedly defeating larger royalist forces until the peace of Alès in 1629. He was then ordered by Louis XIII to become his ambassador in the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft. There, he fought a campaign in Valtellina in an offshoot of the Thirty Years’ War. He was mortally wounded at the siege of Rheinfelden in 1638, were he had fought in the army of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar.51

In 1636, Henri de Rohan published a translated extract from Julius Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico,” “Le Parfaict Capitaine.” Combined with this however, Rohan published his own “Traité particulier de la Guerre” in which he sought to adjust the “good maxims” of the Ancients to the new art of war.52 In his treatise, he wrote that he wanted to show that “despite the difference in our arms to those of the Ancients, we should not ignore their orders.”53 The reference to Antiquity was his main source on which he drew for illustrations.

However, Henri de Rohan was also a practitioner of warfare in the early seventeenth century, which bore witness to the rising importance of siege warfare. In the chapter dedicated to defending a country against enemies, he addressed the question of the proportion of fortresses to an army in the field to defend a territory. At this point, he also wrote about the tactic of wearing out an enemy by entrenching large garrisons in strong fortresses. He warned that this would threaten the land itself, as it would be desolated by the besieging armies. Without a force to counter the besiegers, “you put the means to keep an army in the field at risk; and the damage to two or three harvests will put your neck in the noose.”54

Nonetheless, a few pages later, Henri de Rohan explicitly suggests laying waste to the lands. If a territory is attacked by a larger force, there is only one option: “consume the enemy [consommer l’enemy]”55 and cut off his food supply: “In this case, it is necessary to leave the country and burn all sustenance which you cannot contain in your fortresses, and also all towns and villages that you cannot defend: because it is better to defend oneself in a ruined land than to conserve it for the enemy.”56 According to his reasoning as a practitioner of warfare during the Thirty Years’ War, destroying forage and harvests and displacing the local population (even if it were one’s “own” population) were legitimate means of starving out an enemy, justified by the reference to the common good.

Henri de Rohan’s works were widely published and translated, and many authors of the later seventeenth and eighteenth century alluded to his “Le Parfaict Capitaine” as an influential treaty on warfare, mainly a work which offered a better understanding of warfare in Antiquity.57 This does not mean, however, that Rohan was the inventor of this tactic, nor was he the only author suggesting its use. In fact, other contemporary authors had similar views. Many quoted the famous Roman author Vegetius as the main Antique authority on warfare:58 in his general rules of war he wrote that “everything that is of use for you harms your enemy; everything that is of use for him is harmful to you.”59 According to this logic, it was “a great deed to fight your enemy with hunger rather than with the sword.”60 This, together with Henri de Rohan’s work, shows that laying waste to a region and destroying or consuming forage and food were well-established elements of military strategy before the Nine Years’ War.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that many authors still supported this tactic after the Nine Years’ War, partly drawing on their experiences in that conflict. Even though the reputation of Louis XIV suffered because of the burning of the Palatinate, which also failed to bring the war to a quick end, the approach of devastating a region which should be defended remained part of various treatises.

One telling example is that of the French nobleman and officer Antoine de Pas, Marquis de Feuquières. Born in 1648, Feuquières served in nearly all the wars of Louis XIV. During the Nine Years’ War, he commanded a regiment and contributed to the French victory at Neerwinden in 1693.61 He was also one of the French officers who led raids deep into German territory, demanding large sums of contributions. After the Nine Years’ War, Feuquières fell from Louis’ grace, and the War of Spanish Succession was launched without him as a member of the king’s army.62 During this time, he wrote his memoirs, in which he commented (often in a harshly critical manner) on many operations that had been led by French and German officers.

His work was published in 1711, the year of his death, and it instantly became a popular lecture as the various reprints and translations into English and German suggest. Again, in his chapter dealing with defensive wars, Feuquières concerned himself with the possibilities of waging war against an enemy that had invaded a territory by surprise. It was “very difficult to prescribe, by general maxims, how to wage this war.”63 But as a general maxim, Feuquières again suggested that the countryside should not be spared: “The rural countryside should not be conserved. It is imperative that one take everything possible into the best fortresses and consume, even by fire, all grains and forage which one cannot take to a safe place, as to diminish the subsistence of the enemy army.”64 Local resources that were not controlled by one’s own troops were a threat to the region and to one’s own army. Thus, if necessary, they were to be destroyed. The phrase “even by fire” suggests that simply burning everything was a matter of last resort, however. Preferably, forage and grains were to be consumed.

Even after considerable time, this rationale of disrupting land use to deplete local natural resources was an element in the discourse of military theory. The time of the great encyclopedias, which were meant to gather and systematize all forms of knowledge for the use of mankind (most prominently, the “Encyclopédie” of Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert) also saw a fair share of efforts to put together encyclopedias and dictionaries specializing in military knowledge.65 One of the best-known examples is the “Dictionnaire Militaire” by German officer and engineer Jacob von Eggers. Eggers was born in 1708 and was active in the Swedish service, where he received an education in military engineering and the building of fortifications. In 1737, he joined the army of Saxony. During the War of the Austrian Succession, Eggers fought on the side of the Saxon army, securing river crossings by building field fortifications. After the war, Eggers was promoted to the serve as the head of the Saxon corps of engineers. He became the educator of the princes of Saxony and was admitted to the Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1751, he published his “Dictionnaire Militaire.” Until his death in 1773, Eggers was mainly the commanding officer of the city of Gdańsk (Danzig), where he built up an impressive library specializing in military science.66

Eggers was the prototype of the “enlightened” officer: well-educated (partly due to his specialization in military engineering) but also with experience in the field. His efforts as a military writer and collector of books on military science make him one “of the educated officers of the eighteenth century who laid the foundation for the rationalization of warfare,” as Daniel Hohrath puts it.67 Still, in his dictionary there is an entry for “to ravage [ravagiren]”: “ravage, is the act of troops ravaging a province or region where they cannot hold out against an enemy by burning and pillaging and taking everything with them if possible.”68 In his entry concerning the “le plat pais” (the rural countryside), Eggers noted that it was common to lay waste to most of these kinds of lands due to problems with discipline or due to enemy raids.69 It is striking that for Eggers, the option of “ravaging” a country was not bound to war on friendly territory, but yet was a defensive measure that deserved to be mentioned in his dictionary, thus making this tactic a codified part of military knowledge. However, the idea of desolating an area to gain advantages remained an element of military knowledge that was repeatedly mentioned in writings on the subject until the end of the eighteenth century.70

The destruction of the countryside was justified as a defensive measure that was meant to ultimately protect the “common good,” even though nearly all of the authors in question mentioned this tactic in reference to friendly territory. If an enemy army would otherwise use a resource to its own benefit, it was better to destroy it and to deprive him of this opportunity. Thus, exercising control over the use of local resources was the main motive. What is important in the case of each of these examples is the way in which military land use and civilian land use were related to each other. To all military writers, the primary focus lay on the use of the rural countryside for the armies. Food and especially forage were broadly mentioned as targets along villages, resources that could be of direct use to anyone controlling a territory. By consuming or destroying as much as possible, one could at least keep the enemy at a safe distance while harming him indirectly due to the lack of supplies. Also, the use of fortresses as key factors of resource mobilization becomes clear. This tactic was related to the fact that campaigns were fought following the seasons. Depriving an enemy of sustenance was confined locally and possibly lasted until the following spring, but this meant that it lasted until the next campaign. Thus, it could be used to exert at least some degree of control over the movement of the enemy army and its use of local resources. If a region simply could not sustain an army any longer, it was unlikely that the region would be the next theatre of operations. The displacement of the local population could worsen the situation, as locals were needed to cultivate the land and to harvest grains and forage.71 However, there also were instances of authors arguing against the idea of devastating the land. Their arguments reveal the utilitarian point of view that was prevalent in military theory regarding the destruction of the rural countryside and natural resources.

Conserving Local Resources as Military Rationality

In fact, there was a prominent reference in one of the most important texts on international law to both the destruction and the conservation of local, natural resources. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, who is often considered one of the founders of international law and the law of war, also dealt with the damage done to the countryside during conflicts. In his “De Iure Belli ac Pacis” from 1625, Grotius made a considerable contribution to the discussion of the theory of a “just war” and “just warfare,” drawing on scholastic and humanist traditions. Devised by St. Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century and St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, the theory of “just” war played a vital role as a background for international laws of war for the whole Early Modern period. While the area of the jus ad bellum addressed the causes to declare war, the category of jus in bellum regulated the conduct of warfare. The theory of just causes for war, however, outlawed wars of aggression or out of motives like greed, expansion, and the like and emphasized that war was to be used as a means of reestablishing order against a perpetrator.

While this setting of laws and rules worked well as legitimization for campaigns against non-Christian enemies and “outlaws” (like bands of criminals or marauders),72 this focus on just causes was subjected to scrutiny by Gentili and Grotius. The question of what was, precisely, a “just” cause for war had become problematic. The notion of sovereignty proposed by Hobbes and Bodin meant that the emerging state was regarded as the only legitimate actor that could rightfully set rules and use force to establish them. Thus, conflict between two states posed a problem, as both parties claimed to have “just” causes for their military actions. In this problematic setting, Gentili and later Grotius emphasized the ius in bellum as regulation of the conduct of warfare; while war was accepted as a way of settling disputes between two sovereigns, the notion of ius in bellum at least offered some hope of mitigating its worst effects.73

In this context, Grotius addressed the question of damage done to cultivated natural resources.74 In the twelfth chapter of the third book in “De Iure Belli ac Pacis,” he explicitly wrote about the importance of moderation when it came to efforts to “desolate or ravage the enemy country.”75 Firstly, Grotius noted that the destruction of the “fruits of the land” was not necessarily an illegitimate tactic. As he explained, destroying land and the goods of an enemy was not unjust if the destruction was necessary. Alluding to Ancient authorities like Polybius and Onasander, he stated: “A general will remember to desolate an enemy’s land and to burn it to devastate it; because if the enemy is lacking the fruits of the land and money, the war will be halted […] So desolation is permitted if it can force the enemy to make peace quickly.”76 But as he mentioned, this kind of desolation happened “commonly out of wrath and resentment or out of the desire for bounty”77 rather than for strategic reasons.

However, Grotius also explicitly stated that there were indeed limits on the justifications for attacking natural resources. Referring again to writers of Antiquity like Plato, he illustrated that devastating a country was not necessary in most cases. If an army had already occupied an enemy territory so that the enemy “cannot use the fruits of it,”78 this was a reason for sparing the countryside. Furthermore, Grotius mentioned “divine law,” which compelled armies attacking cities to use only the “wild trees” for earthworks and to spare the “fertile trees,” because “the trees cannot rise up against us and give battle.”79 Quoting the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, Grotius wanted to spare “fertile fields” for the same reasons: “Why do you want to vent your anger on inanimate things, which are themselves gentle by nature, and bear fruits?”80

The example of Grotius shows two important arguments that provide some theoretical context for the deliberate destruction of the countryside as part of military campaigns and strategy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, Grotius argued that special necessities could arise in warfare that made destroying forage or harvests a viable tactical option. On the other, however, this argument of necessity meant that any act of destruction that was “unnecessary and useless” was illegitimate. If the enemy could not reasonably be expected to gain any use from the resources because he had no control over them, then there was no legitimate reason to destroy them. Interesting is the specific mention of fruit-bearing trees, which are used as an example. With this reference to Ancient authors, Grotius condemned the useless destruction of resources that needed a lot of time to regrow, meaning that destroying them was not simply a matter of gaining an advantage during a war, but was also a means of inflicting damage that was out of proportion.

Several military writers brought up this argument of utility, especially since the beginning of the eighteenth century. One example is the well-known French military writer Jean Charles, Chevalier de Folard. Born in 1669 to a clerical noble family in Avignon, Folard received his education at a Jesuit college. His first experience of the military was under the command of Duras in the fall campaign of 1688, precisely in the context of the Nine Years’ War and the destruction of the Palatinate. Later, he fought under the Swedish king Charles XII, where he started to develop his own system of military thought during his time at Stockholm. As an expert on classical Roman and Greek warfare, Folard tried to draw on Antiquity while at the same time presenting a new system of military theory derived from Classical sources. In his “Nouvelles Découvertes sur la guerre, dans une dissertation sur Polybe” and his “Histoire de Polybe,” he made contributions to many spheres of Early Modern military thought, one of the most controversial being the idea of using the formation of columns as a form of attack.81

Despite his sometimes seemingly eccentric ideas, he was not an “armchair general.” He had served in the French and Swedish armies and had participated in several campaigns. In his “Histoire de Polybe,” Folard commented on contemporary examples of warfare. In fact, other authors repeatedly quote him not for his disputed ideas concerning column tactics but for his original thoughts on war in mountains, the “coup d’oeil” in warfare, and for his critical approach, which emphasized the search for general principals in war.82 He also wrote on the question of destroying forage and harvests.

While he at one point explicitly quoted Vegetius with reference to his maxim of starving an enemy by burning forage as “admirable,”83 he later criticized this practice. While devastating one’s own territory seemed like a necessary evil, Folard deemed destroying enemy territory as unnecessary and ineffective. Here, he quoted Raimondo Montecuccoli, one of the most important Habsburg generals of the seventeenth century:84 “The raids of armies or a large part of troops into enemy territory do not yield any advantage if they are not part of a considerable operation: because nothing is better suited to ruin an army. This kind of enterprise, which consists solely in ravaging and doing damage far away from a border, is hardly useful […] If we have no other intent than to destroy a certain portion of land, one deprives oneself of contributions one could collect. […] These kinds of invasions are not useful except for during the time of the harvest, and this is precisely the time which should be chosen […].”85

These remarks show that the decision to burn forage and harvests or at least to consume them to gain an advantage implicitly included civil land use, as his suggestion concerning the proper season for an attack suggests. However, two factors made this tactic unfavorable. First, the advantage gained by destroying forage only lasted for a short while, and it furthermore only worked at the expense of the rural population. It was not necessarily compassion for the fate of displaced and impoverished peasants that made Folard disdain this tactic; rather, he argued from an utilitarian perspective. Exploiting the population by demanding contributions (which, as pointed out before, were also paid in natura) promised far greater incomes in the end. Remarks that went into detail concerning compassion for the local population or, simply, addressed humanitarian concerns were not decisive. Rather, this emphasis on the importance of conserving natural resources and sparing the local population originated in a military rationality that emphasized the role of the enemy countryside as an economic factor.

This economic argument, which rested on the idea of necessity and the proportionality of force, was raised in works by other authors.86 The idea that enemy territory should be conserved not only as a possible territorial gain after the war but also as a possible theatre of operations for future campaigns is echoed in several writings, but it was always part of the effort to ensure military effectiveness. As such, it can be seen as analogous to the shift from irregular looting to the rather orderly process of collecting contributions and the efforts to outlaw looting in general in order to avoid driving off the local population, which proved vital as a workforce for any army in a region.

However, it is important to note that the authors of works on military theory saw looting and ravaging the lands as concepts that were related but not essentially the same. Ravaging the land meant targeting the enemy’s rural infrastructure and local resources in a planned and orderly fashion, while looting was the outright loss of all discipline. In practice, of course, the two could not be so clearly or easily separated. As John Lynn has put it, it was scarcely possible to order a soldier to burn down a farm and at the same time prevent him from simply taking everything that was inside or abusing the inhabitants.87 The option of destroying a region that could not be protected against an enemy remained a discussed and viable option until the end of the eighteenth century,88 but it slowly came under scrutiny after the Seven Years’ War, as two final examples illustrate.

When the English officer and engineer Henry Lloyd issued his “Military Memoirs” in 1781, he also touched on the subject of conserving enemy territory. Lloyd, who has come to be known as one of the most important military theorists of the second half of the eighteenth century alongside the French officer Guibert, had a long history of military service. Born presumably in 1720, Lloyd got his education at the Oxford Jesus College, where he acquired a high degree of skill in geometry and cartography.89 Having left England in 1741, Lloyd served with the French during the War of the Austrian Succession. After having caught the attention of Maurice de Saxe during the battle of Fontenoy (1745), Lloyd was recommended to different generals as a skilled engineer and officer, and he served in Prussian, French, Austrian, and Russian armies before returning to England.

His “The History of the Late War in Germany,” in which he described his experiences and the general setting of the Seven Years’ War, became widely known and read. In his “Military Memoirs,” this experienced and educated soldier also wrote about the habit of detaching forces from the main army to raid a country: “To force the enemy to battle, or to the clearing of the land, one naturally has to put the whole force to use together, and one may not occupy oneself with detachments, raids, or similar: because this weakens the army; the detachments risk being cut off, and they devastate the country that one has to preserve if one wants to stay there.”90 In this rather general remark, which made no direct mention of the old practice of burning forage, Lloyd emphasized the later use of a region by one’s own army as an argument against devastating an area by detaching too many troops. However, his formulation “if you want to stay there” suggests that this was generally bound to strategic plans rather than to moral imperatives. Few authors identified the “ravaging” of a countryside as something that was generally unwanted and morally deplorable.

One of the authors who commented on this practice in a critical manner was the French lieutenant-colonel Paul-Gédéon Joly de Maizeroy. He was a recognized student of warfare in Antiquity and due to this was admitted to the French Royal Academy of belles-lettres. But he also became known as a military writer himself, having published his “Cours de tactique” in 1766, which was reprinted twice and translated into German in 1767. In 1777, he completed his work on tactics with his “Théorie de la Guerre.”91 In this, he scorned the light cavalry and troops of the “small war,” such as Hussars, Croats, and Pandures, who were employed excessively during the Seven Years’ War by both the Austrian and the Prussian armies. His disdain for these kinds of troops was prompted in part by the fact that the “small war” waged by raiding parties of light troops basically consisted of forays in the course of which these troops “ravaged” the areas.92 For Paul-Gédéon Joly de Maizeroy, though, this constituted a considerable disadvantage for both armies and was a feature of a “barbaric” way of war: “and this apparent advantage can even turn against him, if one abandons the devastated land. In general, this barbaric manner of waging war is detrimental to both parties.”93 He had moral disdain for the practice of “ravaging” a country as barbaric, and this sentiment explains in part his criticism of the widespread use of light troops.

The practice of laying waste to the countryside was often summed up with the term “ravaging” or “ravager,” but the explicit mentioning of burning forage or harvests gradually declined in the writings by military theorists until the end of the eighteenth century, which could be interpreted as a form of marginalization in the discourse. Still, even if the tactic of destroying villages and local resources and the pillaging and displacement of the population gradually became something the authors were more inclined to discourage, the reasons for this were almost always utilitarian. In their writings, they rarely expressed pity for suffering peasants. Rather, it was important to point out that one’s own army might suffer dire consequences if lands were made “sterile” and “unfertile” by war.

Conclusion

The tactic of depriving an enemy of local natural resources by consuming or destroying them was part of Early Modern military thought. This tactic was intended not simply to reduce or eliminate supplies for the enemy army. Rather, it also targeted local populations and their use of land as a way of creating artificial shortages of food and forage. When and how to “ravage” a country was discussed in various texts that dealt with the theory of how to wage war in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this discourse, four factors stand out as main motives and categories of thought.

First, in order for efforts to destroy forage and harvests and “ruin” a country to be seen as legitimate, they had to be presented as necessary. This notion of necessity was often based on Ancient axioms of warfare or arguments in favor of “shortening” a war. Second, however, it seems to have been extremely important where this tactic was used. Military thinkers explicitly wrote about this tactic of “scorched earth warfare” in the context of enemy invasions that were unforeseen or simply overwhelming. In these cases, desolating one’s own country was discussed as a defensive method to starve out an enemy. Paradoxically, these same thinkers tended to suggest that enemy territory should be treated carefully, as it was more practical to extort contributions, a perspective that somewhat economized military land use. Third, to some degree the authors explicitly assessed which resources should be targeted and why. “Devastating” the countryside meant that not only villages were burned, but also forage and harvests, which were seen as directly useful for the enemy troops. However, as Grotius suggested, there were limits to this logic. Trees, for example, were never mentioned in the context of “ravaging” a country and starving out an enemy. Forage could be grown again for subsequent campaigns, but cutting down useful trees was seen as a form of lasting damage.94 Fourth, the factors of duration and effectiveness played a role in the reflections of the authors. Some of them considered the usefulness of “devastation” by raiding parties as minimal and something that did not last long enough to be worthwhile. In addition, again the practice of extorting contributions promised a more effective source of income in the end. These arguments of utility were used to criticize the tactic of “scorched earth warfare” and the “ravaging” of the countryside, while the authors on military theory seldom touched on humanitarian concerns.

While I have focused in this article on ideas and categories prevalent in military thought, it is also important to consider that the practical side of warfare often followed its own rationalities. Often, the devastation of the countryside was not the effect of a conscious decision by generals or officers, but a consequence of mismanagement and logistical shortages. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, these kinds of problems could lead to armies doing substantial damage to the countryside, as the aftermath of the Battle of Warburg on July 31, 1760 illustrates. There, the British army remained in the area for nearly three months, and it used anything and everything that could be burnt as fuel, including fruit-bearing trees, hedges, and even wooden statues of saints.95 In order to explore further the effects of Early Modern armies on the natural environment in wartime, case studies for regions that frequently became the theatre of war could prove exceptionally fruitful.

In the end, this poses the critical question of the place of military theory in relation to military practice and, on a larger scale, in relation to warfare and the environment as a whole. While military theory certainly provided a framework for discussion of scorched earth tactics, an explicit reference to theoretical texts is hard to grasp in military practice itself: French officials did not quote de Rohan every time they ordered the destruction of villages and forage. However, even if works on military theory presented idealized versions of how their authors thought war should be waged, they often included examples of contemporary warfare. While military theory certainly does not reflect military practice itself, it forms a special discourse in which these practices are described and situated in an argumentative context. Thus, the treatises make it possible to analyze the special discourse on war and the systems and categories in which military knowledge was conceived and presented. As far as the relationship between warfare and the environment is concerned, this means that violence against the natural environment was a defining part of Early Modern military knowledge, and even at the end of the eighteenth century it had not vanished from the discussions. Rather, it remained embedded in contemporary conceptions of “just” war and the “right” and “rational” conduct of operations.

When Carl von Clausewitz, sometimes regarded as the “prophet“ of modern warfare, worked on his influential opus magnum “On War,” he drew on a vast body of works by military theorists like Feuquières, authors whose writings were available to him in the Prussian royal library.96 It would certainly be an exaggeration to draw a clear line from Clausewitz to Agent Orange. But the Early Modern military theory on which Clausewitz at least partially relied reminds us just how deeply embedded environmental warfare was in military thought well before the of armies of the post-industrial age developed their now infamous capabilities of mass destruction.

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Tucker, Richard P. “The Impact of Warfare on the Natural World: A Historical Survey.” In Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare, edited by Richard P. Tucker, and Edmund Russel, 15–41. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press 2004.

Tucker, Richard P. War and the Environment. In A Companion to Global Environmental History, edited by J. R. McNeill, and Erin Stewart Mauldin, 319–39. Malden Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Vetter, Roland. “Anhang.” In Das Schloß gesprengt, die Stadt verbrannt: Robert Salzer zur Geschichte Heidelbergs in den Jahren 1688 und 1689 und von dem Jahre 1689 bis 1693. Nachdruck der Ausgaben von 1878 und 1879, edited by Roland Vetter, 145–219. Heidelberg: Verlag Brigitte Guderjahn, 1993.

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Wilson, Peter H. “Warfare in the Old Regime, 1648–1789.” In European Warfare 1453–1815, edited by Jeremy Black. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

Wrede, Martin. Das Reich und seine Feinde: Politische Feindbilder in der reichspatriotischen Publizistik zwischen westfälischem Frieden und siebenjährigem Krieg. Mainz: von Zabern, 2004.

Wunder, Bernd. “Zerstörungswut oder militärische Logik? Die französische Kriegführung am Oberrhein 1688–1697.” In Karl Wilhelm 1679–1738, edited by Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, 23–27. Munich: Hirmer, 2015.

Peacetime Changes to the Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Transylvania: Attempts to Regulate the Mureş River and to Eliminate Its Meanders in the Josephine Period

Dorin-Ioan Rus

University of Graz

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The article focuses on the attempts of Habsburg authorities in eighteenth-century Transylvania to regulate the Mureş River and eliminate its meanders in order to improve salt and timber transport to Hungary and the Banat region. These attempts ultimately led to changes in the landscape of the province by reshaping riverbanks and removing their vegetation. These changes were prompted by the need to change the type of transport vessel as a result of the timber crisis. To this end, specialists from Upper Austria were brought to build the new softwood vessels that were cheaper and corresponded with the characteristics of the Mureş River. The engineer Mathias Fischer was appointed project leader. He also initiated and planned cleaning operations on the river. The article also presents the work methods and machines employed during these operations and discusses the failed operation to eliminate the meander at Ciugud. In addition, the efforts of the Transylvanian Gubernium and Salt Office led to the accelerated development of towns such as Alba Iulia and Topliţa.

Keywords: environmental history, river regulation, landscape changes, early modern era, timber trade, salt trade

In the eighteenth-century, many West European states initiated canal building and river regulation projects. They were promoted and carried out in order to increase agricultural output as well as to protect agricultural land and human settlements from floods. In addition, they played a significant role in preventing and reducing the spread of epidemic diseases among humans and animals alike.1

Navigable rivers played an important role in transportation. The expansion of internal waterways was an essential requirement for the economic development of pre-industrial societies. Before the planned expansion of the road network and the emergence of railways, rivers and canals had been the main transportation routes for natural products and resources. Transportation costs over water were cheaper than over land, especially given that the poor state of roads was a serious hindrance to traffic.

River regulation and river bank stabilization greatly contributed to the expansion of internal waterways. Thus, many river sections were straightened by eliminating meanders and deepened by removing sediment through dredging, and river banks were stabilized, which not only made the passage of ships smoother, faster, and safer, but also reduced the risk of floods.

The main focus of this study is how the landscape of the Mureş River changed in the context of the eighteenth-century timber crisis and the efforts made by the Habsburg state—central and local authorities alike—to achieve this change, and how it impacted economic growth and human settlements.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Transylvania went through a timber crisis. Due to the reduction of wood resources and an increase in their price, the Transylvanian Gubernium decreed that, instead of hardwood, softwood should be used in shipbuilding. The new task of shipbuilding was given to Upper Austrian masters.2 One of the most critical measures that the Gubernium took was to regulate the Mureş River based on the model of the Traun River in Upper Austria. Austrian specialists viewed this river as a model for Transylvania because its course and discharge were similar to those of the Mureş River.3 Their aim was to accommodate the new salt ships made of softwood timber. As a result, significant material efforts were made to eliminate all potential obstacles and meanders on the river, which could damage the salt ships and implicitly their precious cargo, as well as hinder the transportation of other resources from Transylvania to Hungary, such as timber and military matériel.

The first part of the article deals with the technologies used in the cleaning of the Mureş River in 1779, discussing the issues that emerged during this operation and its environmental impact. In parallel with this dredging operation, they also attempted to improve the waterway by stabilizing the riverbanks and removing obstacles, such as rocks, trees, mills, and bridge ruins. The navigable section of the Mureş River extended from Mirislău (Miriszló in Hungarian) to Zam (Sameschdorf in German, Zám in Hungarian) where it left Transylvania, flowing into the region of Banat. This operation involved the local town halls from the provinces adjoining the Mureş River, such as Transylvania, the Banat, and Hungary, as well as engineers, a local workforce, and representatives from Vienna.

The final part discusses the operation to eliminate meanders, which mainly targeted the area around Ciugud (Schenkendorf in German, Csügöd in Hungarian), close to the Alba Iulia fortress, in 1786. The so-called “Limba” (Tongue) meander was the first to be eliminated. However, because there was no hydrotechnician to run the operation, it was carried out inexpertly and in an improvised manner, which ultimately made it unsuccessful. In the end they were forced to move the village instead. These operations, apart from their primary target of eliminating meanders, also focused on the removal of vegetation from the river banks, more precisely brush and smaller wooded areas that could potentially hinder work and transportation.

State of the Art

This topic on the changes to the landscape that occurred following attempts to regulate the Mureş River has not yet been tackled either by Romanian historiography or Hungarian historiography. Works dealing with transportation on the Mureş River tend to focus on the history of salt mining. Given the interdisciplinary character of this topic, which brings together knowledge and perspectives from the fields of history and geography, one should take a brief look at the scholarly works that have touched upon it.

The subject was briefly approached in a recently published monograph on forests in eighteenth-century Transylvania, more precisely in the chapter dealing with knowledge transfer from Austria to Transylvania and the search for solutions to the timber crisis that affected inland navigation in this province.4 Given that a detailed approach to the issue of forestry would go beyond the limits this paper, only one of its aspects will be analyzed in this article.

in the eighteenth century, Transylvania and Europe witnessed an acute timber crisis, principally caused by overharvesting. At the time, wood was the main energy source in industry. The increase in the price of timber strongly impacted each economic sector. As for the military, the oak timber crisis affected the construction of fortifications, transport vessels, and bridges. As a result, Transylvanian town halls regulated the access of individuals as well as goats and cattle to forests and the harvesting of certain tree species, restricted construction, replaced timber with brick, stone, and roof tiles as primary building materials, and introduced fast-growing tree species.

Konrad Müller5 was the first to approach the subject from the perspective of the history of transportation in his work on the Habsburg economic policy before and during the reign of empress Maria Theresa. Müller discusses, among others, the efforts of the Salt Office, Treasury and Gubernium to modernize transportation by land and by water alike. His work, largely based on documents from the State Archives in Vienna, provides an overview of the aforementioned modernization efforts. Mercantilist policies in Transylvania were principally focused on the exploitation of natural resources. Maria Theresa’s reforms offered the province the much-needed opportunity to develop its economy. However, their implementation was hindered both by underpopulation and resistance from the aristocracy and landed nobility.

In the category of works on the history of transportation one should also mention the authors who approach the history of salt mining and timber rafting. Thus, authors such as Beniamin Bossa,6 Ioan Dordea,7 Volker Wollmann,8 Harald Heppner,9 Viorica Suciu and Gheorghe Anghel,10 Dorin-Ioan Rus,11 and Dorel Marc12 discuss ethnographic and historical aspects of transport by water without approaching the issue of the regulation of the Mureş River.

One should also mention the most recent approaches concerning the regulation of the Tisa (Tisza) River and the Danube. For the first case, Linda Szücs’s study13 focusing on the impact that the regulation of the Tisa River had on the agriculture in the surrounding areas is notable. Edit Király’s work,14 despite mainly focusing on the regulation of the Danube and its perception in the nineteenth century, provides many pieces of relevant information on the eighteenth century as well.

Transylvania’s Rivers and Their Role in Salt Transportation

Transylvania’s navigable waterways (Mieresch/Maros/Mureş, Samosch/Samos/Someş, Alt/Olt, partially Arieş/Aranyos and Körös/Criş) had been used for salt transportation since the Roman period. The earliest plans to render navigation easier, which were included into larger projects for the reorganization of salt mines, can be dated back to the time when the province was an autonomous Principality (1541–1688).15

River projects in Transylvania trace their origin to the issue of efficient salt transport. In 1699, shortly after Transylvania came under Habsburg rule, the Aulic Chamber reorganized the salt monopoly as well as the main warehouse located at Partoş (Alba Iulia) where a dockyard for the building of ships, ferries, rafts, and other types of vessels needed for the transportation of salt and other goods on the Mureş River operated in the eighteenth century. The main task of the Salt Office, whose headquarters were located in Alba Iulia, was to organize the transportation of salt and other goods on the Mureş River, which required the hiring of an ever-growing number of rafters and crews for ships.16 Ordinarily, the Office carried out the transport of salt, but it also often carried out the transport of various other goods, such as grain, foods, wine, iron, lead, copper, lumber, boards, and building stones, to the western areas of Transylvania, the Banat, and Hungary. In 1788, following the outbreak of the Austro-Russo-Turkish War (1787–91), the Office became involved in the transport of war matériel too. On 28 January 1788, the Transylvania Gubernium requested the Salt Office to put at the Army’s disposal 25–30 pontoons needed by troops to build bridges for crossing rivers and streams.17

In 1786, the Austrian hydrologist François Joseph Maire describes in his work the empire’s great waterways and the economic advantages that their navigability could bring. Regarding raw materials and goods that could be more cheaply transported by water from Transylvania, Maire mentions salt, antimony, grain, tobacco, hemp, wine, horses, sheep, leather, wax, and honey. Salt played a crucial role within trade. Hungary, Slavonia, and Croatia were supplied with Transylvanian salt, the quantity delivered annually reaching 600,000 quintals. As for goods that could be transported to Transylvania by water, he mentions manufactured products, sugar, coffee, and luxury items.18

In 1772, the Office at Partoş owned 262 vessels, but the transport to Szeged (Seghedin) of the necessary 600,000 quintals of salt (30,000 tons) required at least 400 vessels. In 1778, 92 vessels were brought back from Arad to Partoş for reuse, while in 1780 the number of vessels included in the Office’s inventory reached 300.19

Measures for the Navigability of Transylvanian Rivers
in the Eighteenth Century

After Habsburg authorities took control of Transylvania, they started to draft plans to render the rivers navigable again, given that they had been used for salt transport in Roman times (106–275 AD). In 1700, Count Johann Friedrich von Seeau submitted such a plan for the Someş and Olt rivers,20 but it failed for same reason as later plans, because of a lack of qualified personnel and technology. For example, a 1771 project aimed to bring ship crews from the German states and regulate the Mureş and Arieş rivers with the help of modern machinery brought from the German states. Although the plan was approved, it was ultimately abandoned21 likely because of the devastation caused by floods that year,22 which prompted the Financial Directorate to reallocate the funds to flood relief efforts.

Throughout Maria Theresa’s reign, new river regulation projects were submitted in order to improve navigation on the Monarchy’s main rivers.23 One of them was Maire’s ambitious project to create a waterway connecting Sibiu and Trieste. The first step was to link up the Olt and Mureş rivers at Sibiu, thus creating easier access to the Danube. Then, this waterway was to be unified with another one that linked Szeged to Pest, thus allowing Austria access to West European markets by water. In Maire’s vision, a logical consequence was to link up the Mureş and Someş rivers as well, which would hasten Transylvania’s economic progress.24 Colonel Jean-Baptiste Brequin de Demenge’s 1766 plan,25 which aimed at linking the provinces of Croatia, Transylvania, Hungary, and the Banat to the Drava River in order to facilitate trade by water, was ultimately abandoned.26

According to a mercantilist-inspired transport system in Europe, navigation on internal waterways was seen as the best quality means of transportation. Certainly, transport by land was not neglected either. The developmental potential of navigation on internal waterways was especially significant in this time period. Wherever opportunities for economic development arose, the use of waterways was always taken into account. However, this development was somewhat slowed down due to the limited territory of many states, and their separation by trade barriers and customs.27

Under the influence of mercantilist theories, absolutist rulers improved transport conditions by promoting navigation on internal waterways in order to increase the economic power of their states, and started the systematic reorganization by connecting the various fluvial transport systems. Thus, in Western Europe numerous plans to regulate rivers and to build canals between the main navigable rivers were drawn up. In 1770, the Austrian government issued a navigation ordinance for the Danube (Donau-Schifffahrtsordnung) and initiated the systematic regulation of navigable rivers.28 Although certain mercantilist states also expanded their road infrastructure, in most states transport was moved on internal waterways. For instance, during the Russo-Austro-Turkish conflict, war matériel was mostly transported by water. The era of mercantilism witnessed a wave of canal building in Central Europe too. Absolute monarchs perceived transport policies, which included the planning and construction of canal networks, as a means to further unify their state. Canals were also supposed to stimulate trade and bring together economic zones. Canal building also contributed to the transformation of the landscape with the aim of achieving economic unity.29

In 1773 Count Auersperg, who was at the time Governor of Transylvania, claimed that the regulation of the three rivers would be very costly, which is why the Diet ultimately rejected the project.30 Navigation on the Mureş River was hindered by numerous obstacles that caused material and human losses. For example, in 1771 several vessels sank, and total material losses were estimated at 1,165 florins. In 1774, a tower located in the village of Folt collapsed into the river and prevented navigation. Vessel owners and inhabitants of surrounding villages were ordered to clear the riverbed of stones and fallen trees, and remove sunken vessels and rafts.31

The value of canals was recognized from the early eighteenth century when numerous plans were drawn up. Their implementation, however, generally failed due to financial constraints. In Transylvania, several military and civil engineers, such as Fischer, Croner, Mraz, and other scientists participated in the mapping of the province initiated during the reign of Joseph II. Their river measuring and mapping endeavors laid the foundations for the 1779 Mureş River regulation project.

Canal building targeted the removal of all obstacles and the creation of a safe environment for the transport of timber and salt with the new types of vessels on the Mureş River. The documents sent by Viennese Court to the Treasury and the War Council in June 1781 reveal a plan for the comprehensive regulation of the Mureş River.32 According to a 1775 report and its annexed map, which has since been lost, there were 96 meanders along this river, 87 of them quite large, which had to be partially straightened. In addition, all the points of entry and exit from the old riverbed had to be sealed off. Given that the total length of the meanders measured 3,532 lines,33 the Financial Directorate in Vienna proposed shortening it to 1,620 lines (calculated in Viennese feet34), which would cut the distance by 1,912 lines. Thus, many dangerous obstacles would be eliminated and the duration of the trip would be reduced by half. By increasing transport speed, they would be able to reduce the size of the vessels and consequently keep the amount of “material losses to a minimum, which would increase the yearly revenues of the Imperial Treasury” (“auch das Schwenden selbst des Materials auf geringerer Prozent heruntersetzt, damit dem königlichen Ärarium jährlich großen Nutzen zuwenden würde”).35

In 1786, the engineers Fischer, Mraz, and Croner were entrusted with planning the regulation of the Mureş, Someş, and Olt rivers, respectively. The greatest technical challenge that the engineers faced during the regulation of these rivers was the elimination of the numerous rocks and meanders that required many machines and specialists.36 They had to report on the obstacles that hindered navigation on the aforementioned rivers, on how they could be eliminated, and on the number of specialists that would be required to carry out the task.37

The 1779 Regulation Plan

The 1779 plan drawn up by the Salt Office envisaged the regulation of the Mureş River and the introduction of new types of softwood vessels. It was arguably one of the most ambitious landscape transformation projects in eighteenth-century Transylvania. It required the dredging and cleaning of the Mureş River, and its regulation through the elimination of its meanders, with the aim of making navigation easier. Carrying out this project would require the transfer of experts and technology and the professional training of local specialists, which counted as something new for Transylvania. The greatest hurdle, however, was technical. The main reason for commencing this project was the rising price of oak timber needed in shipbuilding due to the aforementioned over-harvesting crisis starting in the mid-eighteenth century.38 The previous source for hardwood timber had been the Hungarian state forests in the area of Arad, more precisely in Vărădia de Mureş (Waradia or Totvărădia / Tótvárad), (Fig. 1) from where it was brought to Partoş.39 The price of softwood for vessels was considerably less, and varied according to dimensions and furnishing. A softwood vessel without a roof cost 83 florins and 13½ kreutzer, while the price of one with a roof could reach 101 florins and 16¾ kreutzer. The cost price of an oak ship reached 125–140 florins.40

In December 1778, the navigation engineer Fischer, head of the Mureş River project, sent the Treasury a proposal for the building of softwood vessels. According to Fisher, the length, width, and depth of these ships would make them more efficient. They could also sail on rivers with lower water levels. The test ship measured 10 klafter in length,41 15–16 Austrian ft. in width, 2 ½ Austrian ft. in height. Soon after it was built, the Treasury approved a pilot trip on the Mureş River between Maros-Portu and Szeged.42 The minutes of the discussions following the test reveal that the engineers Fischer and Hubert were satisfied with the outcome. They argued that the vessel’s slight bent forward was no reason for concern, but still recommended that the vessels be covered with canvas instead of wood.43

Figure 1. Salt mines and waterways in Transylvania (made by Bianca Tămăşan)

 

Because the new vessels built from softwood were less resistant to accidents than those built from hardwood oak, the Treasury ordered at its meeting held in Lugoj on 13 February 1778 a new cleaning operation of the Mureş River, the demolition of floating mills, and the removal of logs, broken bridge pillars, and other elements that could potentially jeopardize navigation. At the same meeting, the Treasury also decided on what type of machinery was necessary and set the summer of 1778 as starting date of the operation so that the new ships would be serviceable by the spring of 1780.44 The engineers Samuel Nazdroviczky and Fischer, upon testing each machine, comparing prices, and evaluating maintenance costs, gave a professional opinion in favor of the windlass (Erdwinde in German) for the Transylvanian sectors of the river. According to the two engineers, this machine was used the following way: (1) if placed on a ship, it could easily be attached to any part of a log; (2) in order to better attach the logs to the machine, Wallachian workers would be hired due to their ability to stay longer underwater; (3) once the log was taken to the riverbank and attached to it, it could be conveniently redirected and easier unattached; (4) the machine’s force could be increased with the help of a tackle; (5) if the riverbank was uneven, the logs could be removed with various lifting machines, which, required more work; and (6) experience showed that with the help of the windlass even larger tree trunks with branches could be removed. Both Commissions representing the regions of the Banat and Hungary, respectively, agreed with the two engineers’ technical proposal. The wooden debris removal operation started on 11 August and ended on 1 October 1778 with the removal of 117 logs and tree branches of various sizes.45

On 27 February 1779,46 the Financial Committee in Vienna (Wiener Finanzkommission) approved the plan drawn up in Sibiu (Nagyszeben/Hermannstadt) and tasked the engineer Hubert with building the new ships projected to be 100 feet long, 15–16 feet wide, and with a total depth of 2½ feet (= 28.35/4.5–5/0.75 m.). As for the width of the Mureş River, it reached 150 paces at Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár), 200 paces at Deva (Déva), Şoimuş (Marossolymos), and Ilia (Marosillye), while in the flatland, as it slowed down, it reached up to 300 paces. As for its average depth in the navigable sector that started at Alba Iulia, it reached at least 1 fathom or even more.47

On 27 March 1779, the Viennese Financial Directorate set the production cost for each new ship at 83 florins and 13½ kreutzer. The timber would be brought from the Giurgeu Mountains in the Eastern Carpathians.48 The engineer Karl Loidl was tasked with building a sawmill in the mountains to mill planks and beams for shipbuilding.49 As for the building technique, the Viennese Aulic Chamber proposed the use of the same methods as navigators in Upper Austria because the Traun River had a similar course and flow speed to the Mureşin Transylvania. In addition, they recommended the adoption of Austrian shipbuilding methods and ordered the relocation of several masters from Upper Austria to Alba Iulia in order to create a shipyard.50 Finally, the Commission sanctioned the building of a road that ran parallel to the Mureş River in order to facilitate the traction of ships with the help of oxen and horses. The road was to be built with the help of peasants from villages along the river.51 With the new ships, the Transylvanian Treasury was aiming for higher revenues, given that they were more spacious, required only a small crew, and their maintenance costs were low in comparison to the older hardwood ships.

The navigation engineer Fischer was tasked with organizing the transport of logs in the river, beginning in December 1778, for the building of the new vessels. Upon conducting field research, Fischer reported first in February and then in May to the Financial Directorate that it was necessary to build a canal at the confluence between the Topliţa stream and the Mureş River. In his opinion, it would be an easy task because it merely required the removal of a few rocks that hindered transport. In addition, he also considered that in order to facilitate transport up to the sawmill at Ditrău (Ditró/Dittersdorf) (Fig. 1), it would be necessary to build a road that would cost an estimated 100 florins.52 On 23 May 1781, the Transylvanian Treasury submitted to Vienna a protocol on the cost of building the waterway on the Topliţa stream, which amounted to 633 florins. According to the same document, the logs moved on this waterway would be used to mill planks.53

This politically directed transformation of salt transport by changing the type of ships required not only the regulation of rivers, but also the dredging of riverbeds. Thus, in December 1779,54 the General Staff in Sibiu considered the possibility that the 2nd Wallachian Border Guard Regiment could take over this task on the Someş and Tisa rivers where the new ships would operate. The experience of the cleaning operation on the Mureş River from the summer and autumn of 1778,55 when an insufficient workforce was recruited from among local peasants, provided the Financial Directorate with the opportunity to make the above decision. In February 1780, they informed Colonel Enzenberg, commander of this regiment in Năsăud, that border guards could now use larger ships for salt transport on the Someş River.56

On 5 August 1780, the Financial Commission in Vienna sent their approval to the Gubernium in Sibiu of the sum of 8,760 florins for the shipyard at Maros-Portu, of which 4,261 florins were allocated for the building of 31 ships (each cost 137 florins and 47½ kreutzer). The remaining sum was allotted to auxiliary buildings.57 In addition, on 2 December 1780, the Commission allotted an extra 1,873 florins and 20 kreutzer for the construction of 10 wintering places for ships.58 According to Fischer’s plan, these places were to be built beyond the river, in an area protected from floods (Fig. 2).59

The plan followed the design of wintering places for salt transport vessels at Salzkammergut (on the Traun River, especially at Wels) conceived by the imperial and royal cameral engineer Hubert in 1776.60 Hubert had already provided technical instructions regarding these places as well as other similar designs for the region of Banat.61

The aim of this measure was to reduce travel time to Szeged by a third, which meant that each round-trip salt transport, which had required five weeks until then, would now require about three weeks without pause. This also meant that several shipments of salt could be moved by the newly-built ships over a short period of time. As a result, lower quantities of timber would be used, which would bring more revenues to the Imperial Treasury; however, the quantity of timber to be used depended on the ship’s size and furnishing. In order to build the a along the river, arable lands had to be reduced, brush and forest surplus on riverbanks had to be cut. In addition, the construction work required timber, stone, as well as skilled and manual laborers, carts, and various tools. In order to carry out the first set of requirements, the engineer Fischer made the following proposal:62 (1) landowners had to build levees and embankments wherever banks were sunken or uneven in order to protect villages and lands from floods; (2) cavities located next to riverbanks had to be filled up or crossed by a bridge; (3) brush and trees along riverbanks had to be cut; (4) garden fences along riverbanks had to be torn down so that ships could be hauled upstream; (5) mill owners had to erect tall and strong protection bars around mills, which were obstacles to navigation of rivers. In 1771, the Mureş River alone numbered 186 mills that had to be bypassed. The projected demolition of these mills caused an uproar among owners.63

Unfortunately, Fischer’s plan to render the Mureş River navigable with softwood vessels, which can be considered very ambitious for the prevailing technical conditions in Transylvania, was ultimately abandoned for lack of qualified personnel.

According to the 1779 plan to regulate the Mureş River, wherever the river had two branches, one of them had to be closed off. For this they adopted a holistic approach, meaning that every angle and aspect was taken into account, from the width, length, and depth of the waterway to safety measures for ships as well as the adjoining roads, agricultural lands, and human settlements.

While choosing the trajectory and outlining the scope of the regulation work, Fischer started from certain principles that reflected the necessity to maintain a stable riverbed: (1) respect for the natural evolution tendency of the riverbed and creation of favorable water-flow conditions; (2) preservation of floodwater flow direction and water transport capacity by avoiding flow blockages; and (3) regulation works carried out in stages by following the evolution in time and space of morphological phenomena and by avoiding unwanted effects.

As we indicated above, the works to protect the banks of the Mureş River had to be conducted according to the particularities of its flow, the necessity of these works being closely connected to the regulation solutions. Because riverbank protection works were costly as they absorbed a significant amount of building materials, the Viennese Financial Directorate wanted them reduced to the required minimum. In any case, cutting through the meander neck required at least two consolidation points (upstream and downstream). However, there was the risk that calibration works could destroy natural consolidations (Fig. 3). It was also stipulated that levees should be built in certain sections near the riverbanks for their protection.

This planned transformation of the landscape could also appear as an attempt by the Financial Directorate to improve transportation by water and riverside living conditions alike.64 In this time period, the custom of regulating internal waterways within ample projects in order to facilitate transport, to ensure protection against floods, and to prevent the outbreak of epidemic diseases was always linked to centralizing interests of state power.65 This implies the existence of a political-economic will, as well as a group of advisers and specialists that perceived the transformation of the landscape as an impetus for agriculture and for economic progress in general.

The new transformation of the landscape was based on the use of techniques and work methods theretofore unknown in Transylvania. They represented the best premise for carrying out projects on river regulations, canal building, and draining operations. The great technical projects were not carried out simply by bringing or importing know-how, but also by connecting them with institutions, scientific ideas, and technical procedures.66 A novel element of this project was that it placed the landscape within the general context of its use, thus serving economic interests, such as the promotion of transport. Secondly, it relied on extensive mapping and surveys, which helped engineers eliminate risk factors. The technical plan was accompanied by mission statements, financial proposals, as well as revenue and expenditure estimates.

Impact on Human Settlements

By building new transport routes in the era of mercantilism, the transport reorganization plan created the premise for the economic development of regions rich in raw materials or located in the proximity of waterways, also giving an impetus for the structural transformation of human settlements and landscapes alike. The fact that transportation by water played a substantial role is also demonstrated by the presence of human settlements along the rivers. Among them, those situated at each end of a route or at the intersection of major waterways and roads acquired greater significance. Because waterways were used only for a short period in a year, travelers and traders had to stop over in these settlements for a longer time and then continue their journey by land. This had a positive impact on the local economic and cultural life.

This is also how the settlement of Partoş developed. The local Naval Office contracted annually administrative personnel and ship crews, who lived in the neighborhood close to the port. Moreover, this area of town hosted many shipbuilders. There three plans for the fortress and town of Alba Iulia from this time period that describe the main salt warehouse and the shipyard, both located on the right bank of the Mureş River between the bridge over the river and the mouth of the Mureş Canal, known as the “sanitary canal” in the nineteenth century. The plans were drawn up by the Fortress’s Corps of Engineers.

Figure 4. Maros-Portu in the year 1740
(Suciu and Anghel, “Mărturii,” 367–87.)

 

The first plan was drawn up in 1740 and entitled “Situation Plan for the Alba Iulia Fortress in Transylvania” (“Situations Plan der Festung Carlsburg in Siebenbürgen”). On the south side, one can distinguish the course of the Mureş River, the bridge with the customs office, and the road that links Alba Iulia to Sibiu via Sebeş. On the same bank is also located the mouth of the Mureş Canal and the salt warehouse (Salzniederlag). The latter, comprising a total of nine buildings, stretched along the right bank of the Mureş River for around 300 meters. The buildings of the salt warehouse were placed on the western side of a rectangle (Fig. 4).

Figure 5 Maros-Portu in the year 1771
(Muzeul Naţional al Unirii Alba Iulia, fond “Colecţia de documente,” no. 7409.)

 

The second plan was drawn up in 1771 and illustrates only the town’s main elements: streets, canals, churches, as well as the salt warehouse at Partoş. They also marked the locality Maros-Portu on the right bank of the Mureş River. Apart from the 20 houses, one can also notice that the location of the buildings of the salt warehouse is identical to that from the previous plan (Fig. 5).67

The Mureş River project was also the source of demographic growth in Topliţa. In 1750 it counted 50 households,68 and by 1785 their number reached 227, with a population of 1,470 inhabitants.69 Work at the Austrian sawmill and in timber rafting increased the town’s population as more individuals found employment there (Figs. 6 and 7).70

The River Regulation Attempt at Limba

The 1786 operation to eliminate meanders on the Mureş River started with the so-called “Limba” (The Tongue) meander, close to Alba Iulia. This operation included technical measures that Transylvanian Treasury were ultimately unable to implement properly due to lack of experience and inadequate equipment. The flawed intervention combined with eroding riverbanks resulted in the flooding of Ciugud. As a result, its population had to be evacuated and moved elsewhere.

The navigation engineer Fischer submitted to the Magistrat in Alba Iulia a formal request for the relocation of the inhabitants of Ciugud and for 300 laborers needed for the hydro-technical works.71 On June 14, 1786, during the preparation stage for this operation, Fischer was asked the following questions: “where and how was the sector of the Mureş River, that was assigned to him, navigable, if meanders prevented safe navigation, […] and whether circumstances required the employment of personnel.”72

Fischer explained that the Mureş River was navigable from Mirislău, a locality upstream from Aiud (Enyed/Strassburg am Mieresch), where navigation was surely possible in springtime, even with a 5–600 quintal cargo on a type of vessel built straight and wide in order to be useful on lower-depth waterways. On deeper waterways, such as the Danube, larger and heavier cargo ships could navigate, which was important to the economy of the province as local produce could be moved easier, safer, and in larger quantities. On the lower course of the Mureş River up to Arad or to the Tisa River, navigation was possible until June.

In relation to the numerous meanders, small islands, and other obstacles hindering easier and safer navigation, Fisher maintained that the greatest issue was the dispersal of the current. This dispersal meant that the river, at higher current velocity, rather eroded the riverbank, which consisted mostly of soft earth, than deepened the rocky riverbed. He then proposed several measures to improve the course of the Mureş River, such as the improvement of the riverbed, the building of roads with effective drainage along the riverbanks, the protection of side valleys from floods, the regulation of mills and weirs, the construction of bridges over dangerous places, and the installation of water conveyance systems or similar objects that could be useful for the local population.

For the elimination of the meander he proposed: (1) building adequate machinery for the river; (2) the prior cleaning of the riverbanks and of the river sector; (3) cutting through the neck of the meander; (4) securing the lower part of the riverbanks; (5) sealing off the free branch; and (6) eliminating the possibility of floods.

They intended to cut through the neck of the meander at the point opposite Ciugud, namely, at the village of Drâmbar (Drombár), which meant building a canal between the two points. Then, Fischer argued, the population of Ciugud had to be relocated (Fig. 8).73

In a report dated 5 April 1786, Fischer asked the Transylvanian Treasury when it could finance the improvement of navigation and hydraulic issues. He explained that, similarly to Hungary, each county should employ an engineer specialized in hydraulic issues so that several works could be executed at the same time. In addition to this, he suggested that it would be very useful if they also conducted research and drew up future improvement plans with the help of a hydro-technician who was able to implement them and who was familiar the country’s particularities as well as its problems.74 Following this request, Transylvania’s Gubernium approved on 2 July 1787 the payment of 1,397 florins and 20½ kreutzer to the Transportation Office at Partos for the execution of hydro-technical works at Ciugud.75

The resolution of these issues required the employment of experienced personnel, especially laborers who had previously worked on similar building projects, such as the improvement of road infrastructure, the renovation of public buildings, etc. These projects were ultimately abandoned, either for technical or financial reasons. The year 1786 was especially difficult for Transylvania due to a devastating earthquake,76 numerous floods, and an epizootic outbreak,77 which compelled the Gubernium in Sibiu to redirect financing towards the affected areas and to postpone the planned regulation of the Mureş River.

Three-quarters of a century later, on 6 May 1850, another project for the regulation of the Mureş River was submitted by the deputy Military Commissar of the Alba District, Dimitrie Moldovan, to the General Staff in Sibiu. The plan targeted rendering this river navigable for steamboats, but it was ultimately rejected.78 The idea of regulating the Mureş River would be reexamined almost a century later, during the communist period.

The following question arises: How did the regulatory works influence the lowland downstream settlements? As we have seen, the policies to improve transportation on the Mureş River, which included its regulation, led to the further development of the town of Alba Iulia, the prime example of this study. Similar developments can be noticed in other towns, such as Deva and Arad, while the operation near the village of Ciugud, which ended in failure, caused the relocation of its entire population. It is certain, however, that river regulation operations reduced the risk of flooding generally. Another example is the successful operation on the Târnava Mare River at Dumbrăveni (Ebesfalva in Hungarian/Elisabethstadt in German), which took place in 1771.79

Conclusions

The plans to regulate navigable rivers can be considered a novel element within the evolution of navigation on internal waterways in the early stages of Transylvania’s industrialization in late eighteenth century. Industrial growth was a decisive factor in waterway regulation and the reorganization of timber and salt transport. This induced numerous changes in the natural environment and prompted the development of human settlements.

The Mureş River plan consisted of: (1) rethinking the timber and salt transport system on the internal waterways, which was determined by the acute shortage of oak timber needed in shipbuilding; (2) building softwood vessels according to the design of those used in Upper Austria; (3) regulating the channel of the Mureş River by straightening and reinforcing its banks as well as by eliminating menders; and (4) building canals for moving timber to the specially constructed sawmills.

The following changes were made to the landscape: (1) reinforcement of riverbanks; (2) building of a road which ran parallel with the Mureş River for the traction of vessels upstream; (3) building of the sawmill at Ditrău; (4) construction of the canal at Topliţa; (5) rearrangement of the shipyard at Partoş; and (6) growth of towns and villages in the proximity of logging sites (for example Topliţa) and of the sailors’ neighborhood in Alba Iulia.

These projects aimed at reshaping the landscape and subordinating it to the economic imperatives of the Viennese Court. The centrally planned regulation of the Mureş River in Transylvania was meant to make the downstream transportation of goods (primarily salt) easier and more cost-efficient. In addition, this project was beneficial not only for the local labor market, given that the dredging, cleaning, and building works required a considerable number of skilled workers and manual laborers, but also for local industry and commerce as more goods could be moved.

Moreover, these operations had an environmental impact as they reduced ground water levels and the average discharge of the Mureş River. One should also add, however, that constant and long-lasting tree harvesting in the area and climate change, as well as increasing demand for water in the fast-growing towns and in agriculture, may have very well contributed to this.

The poor state of roads meant that the expansion of internal waterways (regulation of rivers and construction of canals) became a necessity. In comparison to roads, which became unusable in bad weather, waterways were much more reliable and cost-efficient. The latter were better suited for moving heavier cargo, especially salt. Around ports located alongside waterways, several towns grew and thrived as a result of commercial and shipping activities.

Novel for Transylvania was the dissemination of technical innovations as well as the rethinking of the shipbuilding system that was achieved by bringing specialists from Austria. There were, however, several obstacles that had to be overcome, such as cost, safety issues, and lower water depths. Revolutionary for the province was also the progress of institutional structures and infrastructure. Further improvements to infrastructure involved the facilitation of water transport through the building of a new type of vessel, adopting a new navigation system, and expanding the Maros-Portu port.

The geographic distribution of salt and timber resources required the design and promotion of new cargo vessels. Topographic difficulties and landscape particularities propelled the improvement of these means of transportation and of the infrastructure. The development of the “salt industry” led, on the other hand, to the creation of new economic centers in areas where timber was used in construction.

Towards the mid-eighteenth century, transport over waterways had become a major revenue source for the state. During this century, states were willing to invest heavily in the expansion of internal waterways and to encourage the creation of transregional waterway networks in order to move larger quantities of goods and to increase their revenues. As for Transylvania, the measures that central authorities took were revolutionary for the time since they transformed the landscape by expanding and improving transport routes and by rethinking transport over water and ways to conserve timber. According to a 1791 report, approximately 500,000 quintals of salt produced from the mines at Turda, Cojocna, and Ocna Sibiului were transported on the Mureş River annually.80

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Dordea, Ioan. “Aspecte ale transportului sării pe Mureş în veacul al XVIII-lea” [Aspects of salt transport on the Mureş River], Sargetia 15, Deva (1981): 165–93.

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Marc, Dorel. “Sisteme de transport şi de comercializare tradiţională a sării” [Traditional Salt Transportation and Marketing Systems]. In Sarea, timpul şi omul, edited by Valerii Cavruc, and Andreea Chiricescu, 152–57. Sf. Gheorghe: Muzeul Carpaţilor Răsăriteni, 2006.

Marc, Dorel. Evoluţia habitatului tradiţional în zona Topliţei Mureşului Superior (sec. XVII-XX) [Evolution of the Traditional Habitat in the Area of Topliţa on the Upper Mureş]. Tg. Mureş: Ardealul, 2009.

Marc, Dorel. “Izvoare etnografice surprinse în Conscripţia urbarială din 1785 : Ocupaţiile şi veniturile (Beneficia) satelor de pe Mureşul Superior şi Valea Gurghiului, comitatul Turda” [Ethnographic Sources Found in the 1785 Urbarial Census: Professions and Income of Villages on the Upper Mureş and in the Gurghiu Valley]. Angustia, 14, Sfântu Gheorghe (2010): 471–82.

Müller, Konrad. Siebenbürgische Wirtschaftspolitik unter Maria Theresia. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1961.

Prodan, David. Din istoria Transilvaniei: Studii şi evocări [From the History of Transylvania: Studies and Accounts]. Bucharest: Enciclopedică, 1991.

Rus, Dorin-Ioan. “Din istoricul societăţii de plutărit din Reghinul-Săsesc (1852–1908)” [Aspects from the History of Timber Rafting in Reghinul-Săsesc (1852–1908)]. Revista Bistriţei, 14, Bistriţa (2000): 91–95.

Rus, Dorin-Ioan Wald- und Ressourcenpolitik im Siebenbürgen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Peter-Lang Verlag, 2017.

Rus, Dorin-Ioan. “Böhmische und slowakische Berichte über die Waldnutzung im siebenbürgischen Bergbau (16–18. Jahrhundert).” Die Montangeschichte: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte des Berg- und Hüttenwesens, 2015–2016. (2017): 90–103.

Rus, Dorin-Ioan. “Die Überschwemmungen des Jahres 1771 in Siebenbürgen: Die Rolle des Zentrums und der Peripherie bei der Bewältigung der Krise.” Transylvanian Review 26, no. 4 (2017): 43–62.

Scholl, Lars Ulrich. Ingenieure in der Frühindustrialisierung: staatliche und private Techniker im Königreich Hannover und an der Ruhr (1815–1873). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978.

Schönburg-Hartenstein, Johanna and Renate, Zedinger. Jean-Baptiste Brequin (1712–1785): Ein Wissenschaftler aus Lothringen im Dienst des Wiener Hofes. Forschungen und Beiträge zur Wiener Stadtgeschichte, 42. Vienna, 2004, 69–71.

Suciu, Viorica and Anghel, Gheorghe. “Mărturii ale practicării plutăritului în Transilvania din antichitate, evul mediu şi perioada modernă: Rolul oraşului Alba Iulia în istoria plutăritului” [Evidence Regarding the Practice of Timber Rafting in Transylvania in the Antiquity, Middle Ages and the Modern Era: The Role of the City of Alba Iulia in the History of Timber Rafting]. Apulum 41, Alba Iulia (2004): 367–87.

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Wollmann, Volker, and Dordea, Ioan. “Transportul şi comercializarea sării din Transilvania şi Maramureş în veacul al XVIII-lea” [The Transportation and Marketing of Salt in Eighteenth-Century Transylvania and Maramureş]. Anuarul Institutului de Istorie şi Arheologie Cluj, 21 (1978): 135–71.

Wollmann, Volker. “Der siebenbürgische Bergbau im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Silber und Salz in Siebenbürgen. Bd. 1, edited by Rainer Slotta, Volker Wollmann, and Ioan Dordea, 41–59. Bochum: Deutsches Bergbaumuseum, 1999.

“Fighting Where Nature Joins Forces with the Enemy:” Nature, Living Conditions, and their Representation in the War in the Alps 1915–19181

Daniel Marc Segesser

University of Bern

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First World War propaganda, but also popular movies like Luis Trenker’s Berge in Flammen, for a long time presented the image of the war in alpine territory as a place, where solitary heroes fought a war in a magnificent natural scenery that was so different from the carnage of the western front. Based on recent research that has shown that the latter was not true, the following contribution focuses on the perception and representation of nature and natural phenomena in contemporary publications, diaries, and letters from Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. It analyzes the relationship between soldiers from many countries on the one hand, and nature as well as natural phenomena such as avalanches, fog, or rain on the other. The contribution discusses the reactions of officers and soldiers to nature and the respective natural phenomena and offers new insights on everyday living conditions of officers and soldiers in a landscape with harsh conditions that had never before been a battlefield for such a prolonged period of time.

Keywords: First World War, environmental history, nature, weather conditions, Alpine territory

Slightly above the Passo dello Stelvio, close to Rifugio Garibaldi and Piz Trais Linguas, the following inscription in German as well as Hungarian can be found:

Faithful unto death to its Emperor and Apostolic King, fatherland, and home […] the IV Reserve Battalion of the 29th Hungarian Infantry Regiment under the command of Captain Kalal and Lt.-Col. Edler von Kunze gloriously and without giving way even one step defended […] the Stilfserjoch [Passo dello Stelvio] as well as the snow-covered, barren, and icy heights between the Piz Trais Linguas, the Scorluzzo, the Naglerspitze, and the Krystallkamm in the war years 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918.2

Still today, many people passing the Passo dello Stelvio come up to this commemorative plaque, which has been moved a few meters onto Swiss territory, and lay down wreaths to honor the memory of those for whom it was erected in 1918 by the commanding officer Freiherr Moritz von Lempruch.3

Photo 1: Commemorative plaque for officers and soldiers of the IV Reserve Battalion of the 29th Hungarian Infantry Regiment on Piz Trais Linguas

(Photograph by the author, August 2017.)

Dangerous, Barren, Awesome, and Beautiful: An Introduction to Nature’s Role and Natural Phenomena in the War in the Alps 1915–18

All of this is part of an ongoing fascination amongst a large numbers of visitors to the former war zone between the Umbrail pass in the west and Mt. Krn in the east with a war that for a long time has been portrayed as an unconventional battlefield, so different from the many other fronts of the war.4 Although historians like Isabelle Brandauer, Christa Hämmerle, Marco Mondini, or Markus Wurzer have shown that life and fighting on the alpine front was not so much different from the brutal reality of other fronts,5 the majority of the literature dealing with this part of the war—published mainly by non-professional historians6—offers interpretations that stress either the heroic character of the men involved, the sacrifice they made, or the perseverance they showed. In similar ways efforts of today’s regional tourist offices present the former battlefield in several outdoor museums as an awesome experience of nature, but in which the reality of war is no longer present.7

In this context nature is usually presented simultaneously as dangerous and barren as well as awesome and beautiful, not least because it was the essential prerequisite for the existence of the mountaineer warrior, who fought out this war individually rather than as part of an indiscernible mass. The impressive natural scenery formed the aesthetic aura for a war fought out personally, with death coming suddenly and in the sight of one’s homeland’s highest summits rather than in the mud of the frontline in the west or the east. And yet, the mountainous landscape was represented as even more dangerous than the enemy. Officers and soldiers not only had to fight the enemy’s armed forces, but also the forces of nature which were even viewed as the ultimate conquest to be made in some sort of sportsmanlike alpine competition.8 In a manner similar to the description of the mountaineer warrior, who is at the same time archaic and modern, nature too is likewise described as active as well as indulgent, as both destructive and majestic and as a force, which “joins forces with the enemy.”9

This was also the way that nature was presented in wartime propaganda as well as in interwar era movies, novels, and publications. In contrast to many places on the eastern and western front as well as in the Balkans, many of the alpine areas were rather well known to the general public as a consequence of pre- and postwar tourism promotion. In contrast to other places where winter battles took place, such as the Carpathians or the Caucasus,10 it was fairly easy to get stories about this part of the war out to the public early on, a fact that has shaped the memory of the war in alpine territory up to the present. In their publications, people like Walter Schmidkunz and Luis Trenker,11 Fritz Weber,12 Gunter Langes,13 and Heinz von Lichem,14 following views common among the Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein, presented a picture of the war in which the enemy on the one hand was a traitor, while on the other his mountaineering achievements had to be acknowledged.15 It is probably in this context that Lichem also claimed that according to the testimony of the surviving commanding officers, as well as of accounts of soldiers from all sides, about two-thirds of the 150,000 to 180,000 war victims of the alpine front died because of the rigors of the high altitude (including disease), with 60,000 deaths on the alpine front being attributable to avalanches alone.16 Looking at figures given by Heinrich Menger in 1919, who speaks of 2,840 dead officers and soldiers for the winter of 1916/17 for the Tyrolean and Carnic front,17 and at the official data in the official history of the Austro-Hungarian army, stating 880 dead for November and December 1916,18 this figure seems to be too high19 and may probably be attributed to the fact that—apart from statistical problems20—the impact of the environment was amplified to fit with the argument that men on the frontline were not just fighting the enemy, but an enemy far bigger, that is, nature.

It is in light of this latter question of perceptions that this contribution explores what officers and soldiers of the time wrote about nature as well as natural phenomena, such as avalanches, fog, or rain, and how they coped with weather and climate in locations where no one before had ever tried to stay for the entire year. It will not be possible to present the entirety of perceptions of nature and natural phenomena, but in exploring rarely used and partially only recently published diaries as well as letters and contemporary publications from Austria, Italy, and Switzerland that disclose natural phenomena in wartime, this contribution will attempt to give a transnational picture—and thereby try to overcome the criticism of Hans Heiss that Austria and Italy have remained in a state of friendly ignorance of each other, working back to back.21 In diaries officers and soldiers recorded their own impressions of nature over time and in real time. Either as manuscripts or in some cases as published versions diaries survived, but many were also lost.22 What is clear is that not all officers or soldiers kept diaries. Therefore only a specific extract of experiences is left to us, which often stems from people who had an affinity for writing. This latter aspect is also true in regard to the second type of source, letters written to relatives at home; although, as Mondini has shown for the Italian side, many illiterate soldiers turned to writing during the war with the help of their literate comrades.23 Contemporary publications, often written by people closely attached to official bodies such as the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier, can therefore be considered to represent the official or semi-official discourse on nature in alpine territory. In some cases—mainly in publications in newspapers—they were, however, also written to keep the home front informed and reassured. The first part of this contribution will give a quick overview on the war in alpine territory in the years 1915 to 1918 before looking at the three types of sources, in order to map out the existing presuppositions and stereotypes. A short conclusion will complete this article.

The War in the Alps, its Historiography, and its Development

So far Marco Armerio, Tait Keller, Selena Daly, Diego Leoni, and Mario Podzorski have been among the few professional historians who specifically discussed the perception of nature in their studies. Armiero and Keller claimed that as a consequence of the Great War, the “Alps were celebrated as the natural bastion of the nation, the ultimate borders of the Italian community,”24 or “a bastion for Germany and Austria […,] a national sanctuary and a ‘Volkssanatorium’ […,] where martial and mountaineering ethos [fused].”25 While Armiero mainly concentrated on the memory of the war and only included a few testimonies mainly of veterans,26 Keller’s studies contain an analysis of several contemporary sources from the war years. However, he mingles information from such sources with accounts of the interwar period, which weakens his conclusion that “soldiers on the Alpine Front felt their spirits rise when they saw the mountains” and that those “on the home front believed that the mountains aided the war effort [… giving] strength and courage.”27 In her article Daly looks at the experiences of mountain combat by Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, thereby concentrating on one specific experience.28 Leoni gives an impressive account of the daily lives of soldiers in the war in alpine territory. He makes great use of diaries and letters, but when relating to nature his focus is more on its impact than on perception.29 Podzorski analyses daily lives of Swiss soldiers in Val Müstair and on the border triangle between Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland in the region between the Punta di Rims and Piz Cotschen. He gives an impressive overview about the daily routine, sentry and patrols, construction work, cutting wood, repairing roads, accommodation, food and drink, leisure time, health issues and hygiene, contacts with soldiers from the belligerents, and last but not least, nature (as weather and landscape). His study is, however, limited to Switzerland, which was neutral and whose military therefore only had a limited experience of the war itself in the form of border violations and the watching of operations of the belligerents.30

The war in the Alps formally began on May 23, 1915 with Italy’s declaration of war against Austria-Hungary. The largest part of the frontline between the Passo dello Stelvio in the West and Tolmin in the East consisted of mountainous terrain with heights mainly between 1,000 and 2,000 meters above sea level, but sometimes reaching almost 4,000 meters in the Ortles region and 3,000 meters in the Dolomites.31 Operations along the alpine border did not, however, begin immediately, although some of the troops had been deployed to their positions before the war began.32 The Italian High Command had decided to proceed cautiously on this part of the front and rather concentrate on offensives in the lower Isonzo/Soça region, where it believed the chances for a breakthrough were best.33 For sure, this was largely due to the fact that up to the 1880s the military high command had not considered alpine territory a possible battleground, and consequently fighting in high altitude was to a large extent a novelty to modern warfare.34 Already long before the war the Austrian military high command had decided to build fortresses at strategic positions blocking the entry into the main valleys of Trentino, Tyrol, and Carinthia, even if this meant giving up some parts of its territory, such as Cortina d’Ampezzo.35 Although two major offensives—the so-called Austro-Hungarian “Strafexpedition” in 191636 and the battle of the Ortigara in 191737—were mounted, for two years in its eastern part and three years in its western part the frontline did not change much until the end of the war. Soldiers were compelled to fight and survive year-round in an environment in which human beings usually only lived and came into contact for a very short part of the year.38 At the beginning of the war the terrain was mostly unknown to the soldiers deployed into these areas and there had been almost no military training for fighting and surviving in high altitude before 1914. On either side, the number of troops who even to a small extent had been trained for mountain warfare was small. Troops therefore at first had to adapt to this new way of warfare, a fact that offered opportunities for the mythologizing of figures like mountain guide Sepp Innerkofler. Over time, however, technology took over also in high altitude and officers as well as soldiers adapted to a way of warfare previously unknown, but no less brutal than on the western front.39

Making Sense of the War and its Natural Environment in Official and Semi-official Publications

Not least in view of the growing number of victims caused by the war, but mainly because by the end of 1914 it became clear that this global war was not going to be short, governments of all the major belligerents actively began to make sense of the war. In the case of Italy the Habsburg authorities used the image of the traitor, who had to be fought on the heights of one’s native mountains, while for Italy the war against the Danube monarchy was presented as one of freeing Trento and Trieste from the yoke of the tyrant in Vienna.40 This propagandistic effort did not remain without effect on the officers and soldiers in the frontline, although not all of them were responsive in the same manner. Amongst those using demeaning terms for the enemy was Karl Ausserhofer, who spoke of “Bölz” or “Katzelmacher” in his diary when referring to Italians.41 Even more explicit was Franz Josef Krug, who specifically called the Italians “traitors” and “greedy for booty.” They would, however, never be able to tear down this mountain rampart that was well defended against the “archenemy.”42 Karl Hane,43 Walter Schmidkunz,44 Emilio Campi,45 and Nicola Ragucci46 on the other hand avoided demeaning terms and only spoke of the enemy, the “Italians” or the “Austrians,” respectively. Ragucci went a little further, eulogizing his own soldiers as “soldiers that the world ignores […]! Unknown heroes! Worthy descendants of ancient Rome!”47

In contrast to many others, writers and artists were often able to avoid being recruited as frontline troops. Instead they served as official and semi-official war correspondents, photographers, and painters and became part of the propaganda effort of the belligerents.48 In this function they published realistic, fictitious, or semi-fictitious reports about the war, mainly with the aim to reassure the population at home that all was well and that, if men fell, they had given their lives for a good cause. Of course the primarily male reporters were not entirely free in what they were writing, but in regard to their representations of nature there was some leeway as the following analysis will show. The authors chosen all grew up in middle-class families and were officials, professional officers, teachers, or journalists. As such they were most certainly influenced by the positive and often nation-centric view of alpine nature that was dominant among the bourgeoisie of many European countries.49

It comes as no surprise that the mountaineer Walter Schmidkunz, who was an active member of the Deutsch-Österreichischer Alpenverein as well as the Wandervogel-Bewegung,50 was amongst those whose description of nature and natural phenomena was most pronounced. Being a war correspondent of the Kriegspressequartier between August 1917 and October 1918, his book Der Kampf über den Gletschern was published in three editions between 1917 and 1918. He opened with romantic language, speaking of the “deserted wilderness made up of snow and granite,” of the “icy heart of the Adamello,” of a spuming stream, where bear and fox say goodnight to each other, or of the eternal mountains,51 only to continue with the weeks of wet and cold, the night of a stormy foehn, fog, avalanches, hunger not quenched by a hunted chamois buck, or the difficulties of discerning an enemy attack from noises of natural phenomena, such as the falling of a rock, or the light of a star from that of an enemy lantern.52 Schmidkunzen’s presentation of living and fighting in high altitude was ambivalent, showing both nature’s splendors as well as its dangers, but of course his chapters, which he wrote as if he had been present himself in the actions he described, always ended on a positive note such as a sunrise, which brought back warmth to freezing soldiers, whose cry of joy told nature as well as the enemy that they were still in control.53

In a similar manner popular writer Franz Karl Ginzkey54 spoke of the “romantic surging of valleys and heights, half flogged by rain, half kissed by the sun,”55 the “brilliance of […] the hilly high plateau of Folgaria,”56 or the beauty of mountains like the Rosengarten and the Latemar,57 only to describe a “witches’ cauldron full of uncertainty and lurking death”58 as well as emplacements reclaimed by hard labor out of solid rock. In this latter case man and nature are combined by Ginzkey to create a bulwark that men never could have built themselves.59 The bulwark or mountain rampart was also an important symbol that Franz Joseph Krug used. He was a former editor of the Grazer Tagblatt and an officer from the frontline in Carinthia. Supported by the command of the 10th Army and the Karnisch-Julische Kriegszeitung, he was very eager to tell the people at home about the so-called silent front in the Carnic Alps, where heroic soldiers stopped the enemy from entering the homeland, while at the same time fighting the forces of nature. In this “unique double war” against the enemy as well as against the “adverse forces of nature in high-altitude mountains,” a large number of “maximum performances” were necessary not only to “wage war against the archenemy, but also against the tremendous forces of nature in winter.”60 Krug, however, not only pointed to the heroic deeds of soldiers and officers in difficult circumstances, but also mentioned the fact that every benefit had been drawn from engineering, in order to enable officers and soldiers to wage war.61 Visiting Swiss Colonel Karl Müller,62 the German director of the Alpine Museum in Munich Carl Müller, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti were even more fascinated by the way modern (and urban) technology worked in the mountains and how infrastructure originally built for tourists could now be used for wartime purposes.63 For Carl Müller the war and its technology was able to overcome problems that had seemed insurmountable in peacetime:

 

The war in alpine territory has become lord over [all the problems]; there are no constraints and there is no resistance. Using the most refined resources of technology, but also the help of the simple power of untiring human hands supported by ordinary tools, but animated by formidable energy [the war in alpine territory] has subdued steep pinnacles as well as rugged glaciers and made them subservient to man, without taking account of the casualties it takes and despite the fact that subjugated nature does not want to acquiesce to the yoke and again and again revolts against its conquerors, destroys their works often enough, and tries to take revenge on body and life of those who try to enslave it.64

To some extent Müller’s words resembled those of Marinetti, who in a much more ideologically oriented language, also tried to “enslave the mountains to Futurist ideals [and] visions of industrialised modernity.”65

Marinetti also tried to exploit the positive associations that were attributed to the Italian alpine soldiers, the so-called Alpini, equalizing the efforts of the Volunteer Cyclists, to whom he belonged, with those of the venerated Alpini, who were the protagonists of “a warrior myth” because they were “descendant[s] of mountain stock, which allows only the strongest, the most able and most determined to survive.”66 Amongst those praising the Alpini to the utmost was Cesare Battisti, a former deputy of the Cisleithanian Reichsrat, who fought on the Italian side, before being caught and executed in Trento in July 1916 for high treason. For him

 

mountaineers and mountains form just one thing. The terrain merges with the people. You will find thousands of men from the plains, who have never paid any attention to the form of the terrain, who do not know six inches of earth without pavement; but the mountaineer has a feeling for the mountain, he has a geographic sense of the area he lives in. […] An Alpino from Valtellina, who explained to his comrades the reasons for war, said: “Let us go to liberate our waters.” Do we really have to tolerate that the sources of our rivers are in the hands of the enemy?67

 

Battisti’s aim was to show that these soldiers, growing out of a different community, loved their country and their people, but nevertheless remained a harmonic family, in which the person was more important than his military function. It was the alpine environment that generated such a quality within the men of the Alpini battalions.68 Battisti was not alone in this assessment. Between 1915 and 1917 the Italian high command almost tripled the number of Alpini battalions and also created a substantial number of new mountain artillery batteries to support them. Nevertheless it proved unable to use these valued special forces in a manner adapted to warfare in the mountains. Except for their success in taking Mt. Krn (Monte Nero) in June 1915, the Alpini failed as much as the infantry along the Isonzo/Soça Valley.69 The myth nevertheless remained intact. Not least therefore the Futurist Marinetti stressed the fact that his unit survived the same conditions with less supplies than the Alpini, implying that he and his unit were able to overcome even greater hardships. Marinetti’s major aim in this context was to escape from the perception of futurism as a preserve of the urban middle class and to align himself with the simplicity of the common soldier, with whom a majority of Italians seemed to sympathize. At the same time he tried to prove that “industrialised modernity” was still superior to nature.70

While Schmidkunz, Ginzkey, and both Müllers had been part of an orchestrated propaganda effort of the belligerents and Marinetti as well as Battisti tried to prove their irredentist credentials, Jakob Heer’s texts were published out of a different motivation. He was a teacher and part of the Infantry Battalion 85 from Glarus, which was stationed in different parts of Switzerland to guard its mountainous border.71 The publication of his texts in the local newspaper Glarner Nachrichten aimed to inform and put at ease relatives back home as to the fate of their loved ones, who had to serve in an unfamiliar environment.72 Heer generally presented an ideal picture of nature, pointing to the echo of cowbells, the romantic mountain landscape, the picturesque and monumental setting, magnificent air, skiing competitions, or even the great number of very old Swiss stone pines, left in place to protect the valley from falling rocks and avalanches.73 Sometimes, however, Heer also considered real war, like when throwing stones down a slope, even though there were no enemy troops there;74 when he grumbled about the weather, referred to historical figures like Jürg Jenatsch and writers like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, or criticized the fact that the local population had used up natural resources such as wood to an extent that was detrimental to society.75 When called upon not to write about positive aspects only, Heer stressed that Swiss soldiers had no reason to complain. They should not forget their privileged situation, living in peace in the midst of a terrible war.76 In September 1916 Heer came close to the battlefield at the Passo dello Stelvio and was rather depressed when he pondered the fate and living conditions of Austrian and Italian soldiers. He therefore showed great sympathy for refugees and deserters, offering them bread and cheese.77

Joining Forces with the Enemy? Nature and Natural Phenomena in Wartime Diaries from Austria and Italy

In contrast to contemporary publications—whether government-inspired or otherwise—war diaries do not contain that many reflected accounts, but can be considered self-testimonies written shortly after events, forming a sequence of notes, thoughts, and moments summing up what happened. As a consequence mental leaps and gaps are often present in diaries, unless their authors edited or changed them after the war.78 Five diaries, by Karl Ausserhofer, Emilio Campi, Karl Hane, Joseph Mörwald and Nicola Ragucci, were chosen for this study.79 Each has been edited by a professional historian and contains at least a short introduction about the authors as well as on the state of the diaries. This helps to understand the context in which the diaries came into existence and gives an idea about the way the authors approached nature and what interpretative patterns influenced them.

Three of the diaries are from Austria and two from Italy. Ausserhofer was a farmer from South Tyrol born in 1880. Due to his age and his being a Landsturmmann, he was not sent to the eastern front in 1914, but remained on duty close to his hometown, before being assigned to the Dolomite front (Fanes Valley, Son Pouses, Lagazuoi, Asiago) for the remainder of the war (1915–18).80 Campi was a military chaplain with the battalion Pieve di Cadore, a local unit from the alpine zone in Italy, which formed part of the 7th Alpini Regiment. Campi had been born in 1888, consecrated as a priest in 1911 and sent from his parish in the region of Verona to his new position in the Cadore, where he often stayed with his troops close to the frontline.81 Hane was a teacher from Vorarlberg, born in 1892, who served as a cadet and non-commissioned officer in the area between Rovereto and Lavarone.82 Mörwald was a gardener from Upper Austria born in 1894, recruited into the artillery and on his way to the eastern front, when his unit was redeployed to the region around the Plöckenpass in the Carnic Alps, where he served until the armies of the central powers broke through at Caporetto/Kobarid in October/November 1917.83 Ragucci was a medical doctor and pharmacist from Naples. He was the oldest of the diarists, born in 1863. In 1915 he was called up again and served as a major in the Italian medical corps, first in Aversa and Naples, before being sent to the Field Hospital 040 in Cortina d’Ampezzo in August 1916. While neither Ausserhofer nor Mörwald had any intellectual background,84 Ragucci was friends with some writers and painters like Edmondo de Amicis and Luigi de Luca, a fact that very probably influenced the writing of his diary, which is more deliberative than those of Ausserhofer and Mörwald.85 As a priest and a teacher respectively, Campi and Hane had some intellectual background, which may explain their reflection, though neither of them at the time had connections beyond local intellectuals.86

In contrast to wartime publications, diaries were much less coherent and there was a considerable fluctuation in length as well as in the numbers of entries. Using the example of Karl Ausserhofer’s diary, Sigrid Wisthaler has shown that the fluctuation in entries on the one hand depended on the conditions at the front. In October and November 1916, Ausserhofer was confronted with an extremely cold autumn and early winter, a fact that explains why his entries for that period were very short. Similarly and probably because of lack of supplies in April and May 1918, Ausserhofer stopped making daily notes and often summarized events for several days in one entry.87 Wisthaler also tried to assign Ausserhofer’s entries to different categories such as weather, military service, food and leisure time, perception of the enemy, self-perception, clothing, hygiene and accommodation, emotions, sickness and death, family and civilian population, depiction of landscape, hope for the future, comrades, and religion. According to her calculation, the first two ranked highest for the period that Ausserhofer spent in the frontline, while food and leisure time, emotions, sickness and death, family and civilian population, and hope for the future were aspects that Ausserhofer mainly discussed in his diary when away from the front in military hospitals, during rehabilitation, or while on leave. For Wisthaler, it is clear that the particular context was an essential prerequisite to explain the topics that Ausserhofer wrote about. Weather phenomena were essential, while he was in the frontline, as they were a precondition for surviving in high altitude.88

With the exception of the case of Karl Hane, where some information is available,89 no such detailed analysis exists for the other diaries, but the tendency is the same. Fog, rain, hail, and (for those who were in the mountains during winter) snow were among the natural phenomena that Hane most often mentioned, not least because several times he had to sleep in wet clothes or could not sleep at all.90 Campi and Mörwald also complained about bad and especially cold weather when it kept on going like this for over a month up in the mountains.91 Hane, Mörwald, and Campi were therefore very glad when “eventually good weather”92 eased the situation and hoped it would stay that way for at least some time.93 In such situations they also spoke of (a most) splendid weather.94 Because of his serving in a field hospital, Ragucci’s notes tend to be a little more deliberative. Nevertheless, apart from talking about the wounded—sometimes at length, especially when he felt very much with a specific person95—the weather also took up a large share of his entries. As he was serving through the harsh winter of 1916–17,96 Ragucci’s emphasis was most often on the massive snowfall in and around Cortina d’Ampezzo. This was especially the case in November and December 1916, when Ragucci was not only preoccupied with the communications of Cortina, but when he also wondered about the height of snow that had amassed on the barracks of the Alpini close to the peaks of the Tofane.97 While in such contexts Mörwald mainly referred to the shoveling of the snow,98 Ragucci found time to reflect on it, calling it “awesome and impressive,” when he found that 1.25 meters of snow had accumulated on his terrace overnight.99 He also spoke of the silver slopes of the valley and the sea of snow that covered the area around his hospital.100

In such circumstances of heavy snowfall, numerous avalanches came crashing down. Such was the case in February and March as well as November and December 1916. Mörwald called this a “terrible snow weather,” or the “terror of winter,” and described the “thundering and rolling” of avalanches.101 Ausserhofer, whose diary for February–March 1916 is lost and who was on leave from 12 November 1916 onwards,102 nevertheless already spoke of the “lasting bad weather” and “a terrible mass of snow,” with avalanches that killed 6 people of his company and many more in other places during that early period.103 Campi also commented on snowfall, specifically in September, October, and December 1915 as well as February and March 1916, which caused frostbite and made paths difficult,104 but also offered a lovely panorama.105 Although he was hampered by heavy winds, dense snowfall, and barren paths, Campi decided to spend Christmas 1915 amongst his troops and in the proximity of the Zygismondi cabin. He recorded that in spite of the difficult conditions, he was glad to have shared this moment with men on the frontline rather than staying in his comfortable hotel room.106 In February and March 1916 Campi’s desire to be close to his soldiers made life very difficult. At first he had to bury a number of soldiers that had been killed by the avalanches that had overwhelmed a number of barracks and emplacements.107 Finally he contracted a cough, a headache, and high fever in the same area where he had spent Christmas.108 He could not be evacuated, as neither the paths were open nor was the cable car operating: “we are blocked by snow, without food, without wood, the mail has neither reached us nor departed. […] Our situation becomes more critical and more dangerous as time goes by.”109 Only on 16 March could he finally leave the mountains.110

Campi was not the only one affected so closely by avalanches. Mörwald had similar experiences in February–March as well as December 1916, suffering from frostbite that could not be treated, as snowfall and avalanches blocked his unit for almost 10 days.111 In December 1916 Mörwald just returned from his leave when he was again caught in heavy snowfall, avalanches having destroyed some barracks and the unit’s two kitchens.112 The next day Mörwald and his comrades unsuccessfully tried to dig out their gun that had been buried in snow. The day after an avalanche hit part of their camp, and Mörwald and his comrades succeeded in saving 24 soldiers and their NCOs. They could not, however, save another man who was stuck on a slope on the other part of the valley. It was extremely difficult for Mörwald and his comrades to hear the cries for help and not be able to do anything for that man, who finally died during the following night.113 Avalanches did of course not come down as far as Cortina, but nevertheless Ragucci was also affected by their outcome, as many of the wounded were transported to his hospital. Without knowing what had already happened, on 13 December 1916 Ragucci commented in his diary on the “great proof of courage and readiness to make sacrifices that the marvelous young men have to submit to in this horrible period. Today it is not the ordinary enemy that you are fighting, but today you are fighting the snow; you don’t seize the gun, but the best weapon currently is the shovel.”114 Late that night Ragucci was informed by the divisional command that a high number of wounded would be transported to his hospital, the first reaching it the following day with ventral bruises and bone fractures. Transport proved difficult, however, especially as the snowfall continued. Ragucci was therefore very pleased that the snowfall stopped during the evening of 15 December, and for the following day he spoke of “splendid weather,” which was a great respite for him.115

Snowfall and rain, however, were not the only weather that distressed officers and soldiers. They also had to be on their guard against fog, or more specifically what the fog could hide. In Ausserhofer’s dairy we read of the opportunities afforded to the enemy to approach the emplacements without being seen.116 For Mörwald, bad weather such as fog could, however, also be a protection in a difficult situation such as after the fall of the summit of the Cellon just above his emplacement at the end of June 1916.117 Ragucci’s description of nature—such as in the case of the defiant and solemn peaks of the Cinque Torri118—was closer to that of the published sources discussed above. On the other hand he was much closer to death in his hospital and his descriptions of dying soldiers are much longer than those of either Ausserhofer, Hane, or Mörwald.119 As a priest Campi also had to cope with dead officers and soldiers fairly often, but he usually referred to them in a religious manner, because this was as much his job as his vocation.120

There were, however, experiences of nature that were also quite exceptional. Amongst them there is Campi’s climbing of the Cima Undici on 13 May 1916 and his celebrating mass on the Terza Tofana on 17 September of the same year.121 Hane’s exceptional experience with nature was quite unique, and none of the others analyzed here seem to have experienced anything like it. He was struck by a lightning and gave a very detailed description of what happened. Although Hane’s record of the event was written down in hindsight, when he was in hospital, his account is very detailed, which is rather unusual for his entries. As a rule Ausserhofer, Campi, and Mörwald only gave short accounts of storms or heavy rain, mentioning at most the severity of the storm or the fact that they got wet.122 The same was true of Hane, at least up to 11 July 1916.123 That day was very hot and for Hane very dull, that is, until he saw a storm coming from Monte Zugna. He tried to turn his tent canvas into a raincoat. While calling on his officer cadet to turn off the telephone, he was struck by lightning, which he experienced as:

 

a loud noise, a strong shock onto my knee, and a feeling as if someone had been cruising on the skin of my feet with a red-hot iron. From the pain I cried out loudly. The foot was lame, but soon recovered some strength. The grass around us was on fire. The officer cadet dead. […]. Horrible! I am saved! What fortune! But pain! […]. The officer cadet held the shell of the telephone in his hand when the lightning went through his head. He cried: “Extinguish the fire, I am burning!” Then he turned pale and was dead! I remained conscious. The lightning went through my loaded gun, but it did not go off, as Dobmayer [a good friend of Hane] later found out, looking at the surface quality you could just see where the lighting had gone down, and then passed onto my knee. […] My coat and jacket have a small hole, just as big as a Heller coin. Trousers, underpants, shirt, and leggings were in tatters, charred and burnt from knee to hip.124

Hane was finally evacuated to hospital, where he had to undergo a long treatment, because large parts of his skin had been burnt. He therefore never returned to the front line, and like Ausserhofer did not talk about the natural conditions or natural phenomena while in hospital or in rehabilitation.125

The Dwindling of the Image of the Magnificent Alps: Wartime Natural Phenomena in Exemplary Letters from the Frontline

Like diaries, letters are also a form of self-testimony, but in contrast to the former they have a specific addressee, are not for the writer alone, and usually reflect on what he (or she) can tell the recipient.126 As letters were less often preserved than diaries,127 this contribution will only focus on a few of them written by German artillery captain Carl Franz Rose to his wife and children.128 Rose was sent in 1915 to the Italian front as part of the German Alpenkorps to support the weak Austro-Hungarian artillery units, first on the plateau of Lavarone, then in Sesto, and finally until January 1916 in Corvara. Like Schmidkunz, Rose was also a mountaineer and therefore showed a strong love of nature.129 This became very clear already in his first letter of 2 June 1915, where he commented on the “magnificent alps [… with] fine cows […] luscious meadows [and a] splendor of flowers.”130 Nature was glorious, all the rest—especially food and the Austrian comrades—lukewarm.131 In letters to his wife and his son Heinz, he spoke of the “superb Dolomites” that the two would have to come to see after the war. Rose, however, also mentioned how dangerous as well as difficult fighting in high altitude was, and how well the horses and mules served the troops.132 Nevertheless the constant climbing was tiring and Rose especially disliked the cold nights and bad weather. He was therefore glad that as an officer he did not have to stay outside most nights,133 and not very happy when he learnt that he would have to stay in the mountains in winter. Rose’s conviction that the war was a good thing waned more and more: “[It is] dreadful being so alone, almost impossible to bear. And now it looks as if this is going to continue for a long time! It seems that things do not go according to the will of the High Council [the German government], as I was told in Berlin back then. This is a misery and I will not take part in this for much longer.”134

He nevertheless accepted it and asked his wife to send him the necessary clothing.135 With some irony he commented that “men from the flat country became alpine mountaineers, learning to ski,” only to complain about the large quantities of snow as well as the problems with heating the provisional dwellings that had been set up.136

Conclusion

In conclusion, you can state that the experience of nature and everyday life in the war in alpine territory was very complex and diverse, but also to a considerable extent influenced by presuppositions and stereotypes. Publicly—and this later became the master narrative—many stressed the splendor of the mountains and the way in which mountains, though dangerous, became symbols of national defense that could in some cases even tangibly support those fighting in high altitude. Carl Franz Rose is a good example of a man who came to the mountains with a romantic view and told his family about the monumentality of the alpine scenery. In his case it took some time to realize and describe also the negative aspects of a life at high altitude, in the cold, with fog, rain, and snow. Ragucci’s testimony was quite similar, and as he was always able to return to his hospital, a former grand hotel, his experience of nature and weather conditions was less negative over the long term than that of Rose. Men like Ausserhofer, Hane, and Mörwald were less deliberative. They almost never talked about the splendor of the mountains. Their eyes were fixed on everyday fighting and the weather—good weather giving respite, bad weather making life even more miserable. There are several essential factors that explain their ambivalent representations of nature: class, intellectual connections, upbringing, education, and personal attitudes; the daily changing conditions; and the various contexts behind why all these men wrote. Further research is necessary to verify the findings of this exemplary study. By analyzing a more important number of contemporary documents and linking them more closely to the existing master narrative in the current historiography, it will then be possible to gain a more sophisticated understanding of a theatre of war that was as much different as it was similar to the other fronts in this global war. In this context it is important to be more aware of the diverse perceptions and understandings of nature in a war where nature itself seemed to have joined forces with the enemy.

 

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Magrin, Giuseppe and Frederico Maria Fiorin. Il cappellano del Cadore: Diario di guerra di don Emilio Campi, cappellano del battaglione Pieve di Cadore. Udine: Paolo Gaspari Editore, 2000.

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Mondini, Marco. “Kriegführung: Die italienische Gebirgsfront.” In Katastrophenjahre: Der Erste Weltkrieg und Tirol, edited by Hermann Kuprian, and Oswald Überegger, 367–84. Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 2014.

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Müller, Karl. An der Kampffront in Südtirol: Kriegsbriefe eines neutralen Offiziers. Bielefeld, Leipzig: Verlag von Velhagen, Klasing, 1916.

Pieropan, Gianni. Ortigara 1917: il sacrificio della 6. armata. Milan: Mursia, 2007.

Podzorski, Mario. “Kriegsalltag und Kriegserfahrungen von Schweizer Soldaten am Umbrail und im Münstertal im Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Jahrbuch 2016 der Historischen Gesellschaft Graubünden, 87–124. Chur: Historische Gesellschaft Graubünden, 2016.

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Was There a Socialist Type of Anthropocene During the Cold War? Science, Economy, and the History of the Poplar Species in Hungary, 1945–19751

Róbert Balogh

HAC RCH / University of Debrecen

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The paper argues that exploring the content and sites of transnational entanglements is a more adequate way to study the relationship between the Cold War and the Great Acceleration phase of Anthropocene than looking at the so-called East vs. West in isolation. By focusing on how scientific ideas, economic concepts, industrial projects, and data production emerged and intertwined in the case of activities related to poplar trees in Hungary, it becomes clear that anthropogenic landscape change during the state socialist period was embedded into the global circulation of ideas about forests, materials and ecology. The paper also points out that forestry is a relevant area of knowledge for studying the reasons behind anthropogenic change leading to the Anthropocene because of continuities it provides across World Wars and regions, and because the profession engages with biological knowledge production, business interests, political demands regarding long-term economic growth, and notions of ecological crisis in its everyday practice.

Keywords: anthropocene, science studies, history of forestry, state socialism, paper production

Anthropocene, Cold War and Poplar from the Perspective of Hungary

Trees can become symbols of historical change. In early 2018, a group of Australian scientists proposed that one of the rings of the only Sitka spruce tree living on Campbell Island, 600 kilometers south of New Zealand, namely, the ring dated to 1965, should become the marker for the divide between Holocene and Anthropocene epochs. Chris Turney and his team found that the 14C content of the tree rapidly grew in 1965 date due to fallout from nuclear bomb testing that had taken place some years earlier.2 This perspective emphasizes the globalized nature of ecological change. Turney’s observation focuses on a location that looks extremely remote, thus, marginal from the Global North. Reinforcing the same message, the scientist talks of biochemical changes taking place at the level of cells in a tree that a human being purposefully planted there, thousands of kilometers away from its natural habitat. Turney overcomes what might appear as a contradiction between global challenge and local phenomena by stressing that human activity had its impact even in the most remote locations in 1965.

Anthropocene may simply be translated as the Age of Humans. This term emerging around the year 2000 indicates that human influence has become the single most important factor changing the biophysical system of the Earth. The use of the term has been criticized from a number of perspectives. According to critics, talking of Anthropocene recreates the idea of a sharp division between nature and culture that is the very notion that has led to the current damages to sustainability, it veils the role that capitalism has played in biophysical change, and it also ignores non-Western perspectives of ecology as well as the historical contingency of thinking of ecological crisis in the West.3 Despite the importance of chronology and historical narrative in these discussions, few historians have used Anthropocene as a framework of analysis. Coming close to Turney’s proposed dating, J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke’s recent global environmental history associated Anthropocene with the term Great Acceleration that signifies the rapid rise of the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.4 The authors posit that while the post-1945 period was the age of omnipresent ecological destruction, the Cold War was only one of the factors behind biophysical changes since global-scale urbanization, demography, and consumption were powerful factors in their own right. McNeill and Engelke also demonstrate that while talking about the impact of Cold War, countries of the ‘West’ and the ‘Socialist States,’ including China, were all engaged in environmentally harmful activities as part of the arms race and struggle for influence. This latter view is not the mainstream among environmental historians working on East-Central Europe. As Zsuzsa Gille’s and, more recently, Viktor Pál’s monographic studies have pointed out, a number of writings emphasize that it is the Soviet Union and Sovietized thinking that is to blame for pollution and loss of biodiversity and habitats.5 The purpose of this paper is to contextualize planned and actual anthropogenic landscape change taking place in Hungary, one of the countries of the ‘Socialist Bloc,’ emphasizing both specificities of global connectedness and locally specific features. As Zoltán Ginelli has recently argued, Hungary’s semiperipheral position is a vantage point from which relations that look like dichotomies may be reviewed: “Semiperipherality shares both central and peripheral aspects: being strongly connected through its cultural or geographical proximity to the global center, but remaining peripheral, dependent and subjugated to the global core as its ‘internal other’; not having colonies, but benefiting from civilizational superiority and imperialist practices over the global periphery; developing a strong urge to catch up with and imitate the center, while sharing its civilizational and modernization mission towards the periphery.”6 Looking at the Anthropocene thesis from this angle contributes to describing the relationship between capitalism and global biophysical change as well as the ‘Western’-ness of the term Anthropocene.

The idea that state socialist regimes developed a Sovietized and harmful pseudo-science instead of carrying out research in the interest of humans has encroached on the popular image of poplar trees in Hungary. On August 30, 2017, the Assembly of the Capital City of Budapest decided that it should get rid of all the trees belonging to the species commonly called ‘Canadian poplar’ because its flowers damage respiratory health, carry the risk of fire, and is a relic from socialist times.7 The decision indicated that it referred to the species taxonomically named Populus × canadensis. However, this term is a terrain of ambiguity. In the accepted nomenclature of the poplar species, which came into force in 1955, Populus × canadensis is no longer accepted as a name of a taxon.8 It is most likely that the decision of the assembly targeted Populus × euroamericana, which is a hybrid of a North American poplar species, Populus deltoides, and another one believed to be an indigenous species of Hungary, Populus nigra. The text of the decision errs when it ignores that this hybrid is not the result of a scientific or pseudo-scientific project; instead, it is a natural outcome that has been around since the eighteenth century. The frequency with which hybridization can take place is in fact talked of as a danger to the genetic stock of poplars.9 Throughout the twentieth century, especially since the 1920s, a number of cultivar varieties have been produced of the Populus × euroamericana hybrid. In fact, the name Populus × canadensis may also refer to the variety called Merilandiana that is called ‘early poplar’ in common Hungarian.10 With the recent politicization of the poplar, we are at the heart of the uncertainty between nature and culture and its archival production in the post-socialist context. Moreover, this is an instance when dendrology experiments and conventional historical records both form part of the archives used for historical research.

The short proposal to eliminate the poplar from Budapest did not spell out the most important context of the link between state socialism and poplar species: paper and cellulose production. Moreover, there are a number of other contexts to keep in mind. Poplar, growing faster than all other families of species considered for forestry in the twentieth century, made it important for urban planning, design of highways, and for containing desertification of areas of the Great Plains of Hungary since the 1920s. Yet, it was the rapid rise of demand for paper products and the cost associated with their import that brought the poplar project to center stage in the history of forestry of the state socialist period of Hungary. Poplar was not the only species that triggered large-scale investment and institutional and transnational effort for increasing the area of growth—in the hope of obtaining more arable land and raw material for industry. The story of pine, especially Pinus silvestris, merits a separate study in this regard.11 The history of afforestation is also intertwined with the history of poplar projects in Hungary, though it cannot be equated with it.12

In this paper, I study the history of knowledge production about poplar in Hungary in order to look at links between state socialism, scientific approaches, global institutions, ideas about the economy, and the Anthropocene during the Cold War period until the mid-1970s. In the first part, I explore the question if there was both an ‘Eastern’ and a ‘Western’ science in light of the production of poplar species and emerging views and research about a canker disease that attacked poplar plantations in various parts of the northern hemisphere in the twentieth century. The second section interprets and contextualizes formulas that high-ranking Hungarian foresters presented at global events related to projecting future commodification of forest resources. I will consider these thoughts in light of activities and agendas of Cold War institutions, such as, the European Economic Committee of the UN (UNECE) and the Comecon. The third section brings together the issues of science, data and economic decisions, and relates these to the social and political context of the Yugoslavian-Hungarian deal about paper production that had been in preparation since 1969 and was eventually signed in 1975. Studying the entangled nature of scientific, political, and economic projects related to poplar species, along with the history of how knowledge emerged in state socialist Hungary, contributes to understanding projects and actual changes in the nature-culture relationship during the Cold War decades.

The picture I draw here will not be a complete discussion of how the Anthropocene unfolded in state socialist Hungary. I do not discuss the roles that afforestation and poplar played in the history of the relationship between changing flood basin landscape and hydropower generation projects, such as Bős-Nagymaros or Lake Tisza. I also exclude the issue of pollution that the papermaking industry produced. Energy production, pollution, and protest are topics that other historians have been working on and they deserve separate papers.13 The present approach is relevant for the discussion on the validity of the term Anthropocene. It looks at developments from the perspective of a semiperiphery and studies forestry, which is an area of knowledge production where the relationship between nature and culture had a century of history by the 1960s.

A Case for Entangled History: Poplar Science in Hungary in the Context
of Postwar Ideas about Development and Transnational Science

The history of the poplar species is an entangled history transgressing geopolitical and chronological demarcation lines. Thus, the history of how the transnational scientific poplar project interacted with the launch and expansion of the poplar project in Hungary is a site for assessing the plausibility of the assumption that there was a ‘Socialist’ as opposed to a ‘Western’ science during Cold War.

Poplar is one of families of the tree species that are termed as fast-growing because its rotational cycle, as established by modern forestry, is a fraction of the number of decades that beech, pine, and oak take to reach what is believed to be their optimum industrial size. As a result, proliferation of poplar tree hybrids was one of the global projects that intended to bring about large-scale anthropogenic change in the post–World War II decades under the umbrella of the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO). As a result of an emerging global timber market, new ideas of economic development, and the growing importance of exploring industrial uses of timber in forestry research, beginning in the 1930s there were botanical and forestry experiments aimed at selecting and improving the poplar species.14 By that time, the European experience in the cellulose industry showed that the material was indispensable, but importing spruce as a major resource put a large burden on the national economy in times of exportation difficulties.15 European countries lacking pine forests or with significant regional variation of accessibility, such as the Netherlands, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, were in a particularly difficult situation in this regard. Italy became the first hub of collecting and selecting poplar species and Italian foresters gained specialized knowledge in vegetative propagation (cloning) of selected clones.16

The poplar program in Hungary has to do with three transnational histories. First, there were pre–World War II links to Italian forestry. Second, Hungary took part in so-called international provenance studies that aimed at finding what the optimal conditions were for certain varieties.17 Third, in 1949 the government of the Rákosi era allowed some foresters to take part in the 3rd Full Session of the International Poplar Commission (IPC) in Belgium and in the Netherlands.18 In fact, Hungarian foresters Miklós Rosner and György Koltay were the only participants from the ‘Socialist Bloc’ at the event. The international event in actual fact included only European participants: Swedish, British, Swiss, French, Hungarian, Italian, many Dutch and Belgian, and a few Luxembourgian foresters. FAO and the international organization of forestry research institutes, IUFRO, also sent a representative in their own right.19 The meeting of 1949 was an important milestone for the Hungarian perspectives because, due to discontinued membership of countries of the ‘Socialist Bloc’ in FAO and other UN organs in the 1950s, there was no Hungarian delegation at the subsequent six full meetings. During that decade, Yugoslavia was the only East-Central European country to take part in some of the full IPC meetings. From 1955, meetings became biannual or less frequent. Yet, this was a sign of decline only until 1961 when the IPC started to have its Executive Committee. By the 1960s the IPC stopped being a Western and Southern European event. Yugoslavia hosted a full session in 1962, Teheran was the venue of the full meeting in 1965, Bucharest in 1971. In the light of this trajectory, the regional event that Hungary hosted in September 23–29, 1956 was an important opportunity for reinvigorating the IPC network of contacts both among socialist countries and across the Iron Curtain.20 Assessing the international embeddedness of the poplar project of Hungary, the report on the event believed that:

 

In the first place, we need to highlight the general impression that foreign participants took with them. A few of them have taken part in other poplar conferences and when comparing our event and the other ones they stated that what they saw here was proof of the high standard of research and practical work. We may say that we used to work in isolation, but it has its advantages besides disadvantages, namely, we continued to work on processes (cross-breeding distant species, homogenous hybrid poplar stands) that have been rejected abroad and we managed to bring these to fruition.21

In other words, the report was critical of the era of isolation but was keen to point out that parallel experiments and innovation might contradict and refute contemporary mainstream practices. The IPC regional event was an occasion to gather feedback on ongoing experiments and applications. It also indicated that poplar research in Hungary began around 1950, during some of the coldest years of the Cold War and that is why a booming and high international visibility was possible and feasible immediately after Stalin’s death. Moreover, the event highlighted that there were three crucial issues for a transnational poplar research program, namely, reconciling sustainable levels of biodiversity of forest stands with needs of industrial use and with the push to lower costs of planting and felling, the acceptance and credibility of experimental results, and the issue of a poplar disease, Dothichiza canker. It was also clear that the three issues were intertwined. What the report on the regional event suggested as a definitive conclusion about the viability of homogenous plantations was actually still in an experimental stage in 1956. Two years earlier, János Magyar, the forester with superior knowledge of mathematics, set out to resolve the question of what constituted the minimum necessary biodiversity for the poplar project. His conclusion was that it would not make sense to mix different poplar species in the same stand; however, best results may be expected if below poplars there is a second tree level in the stand that is made up of species that tolerate shade. During the discussion of his results, György Koltay plainly stated that “The biological condition of homogenous poplar stands is bad, and their productivity remains acceptable only as long as the negative impact of biological conditions does not show up.”22 The concise nature of Magyar’s methodology and presentation asked for more research on more numerous stands before a final conclusion could be reached.

In the same years, another factor, the spread of Dothichiza canker, also underlined the salience of experiments about the biological condition of stands where poplar hybrids dominate. The issue of canker became so serious that it looked it would end the career of some of the most promising Populus × euroamericana clones in the second half of the 1950s. The disease causes the bark of poplar trees to swell and deform, but it may also begin as a leaf infection. Trees are likely to survive initial the disease, though many tend to die and collapse during the next wet period because of their reduced level of resistance. In Hungarian poplar stands, the symptoms appeared suddenly in the early 1950s, and specialists had to dig for a description that appeared in print in 1938. The cause of canker was a mystery that took years to solve. The bibliographical references of papers published in the 1950s point to lacunae in transnational knowledge circuits during Hungary’s years of relative isolation. In 1953, T. R. Peace’s the comprehensive study of poplar in UK stated that it had no information about the spread of canker in Eastern Europe, while researchers of the Forestry Research Institute of Hungary (Erdészeti Tudományos Intézet – ERTI) did not reference Dutch experiments and results from the 1930s and 1940s that T. R. Peace of the UK Forestry Commission praised.23 Hungarian foresters also did not know of Alma Waterman’s work which referenced turn-of-the century results, including specifications of large-scale canker damage registered in 1915–1916 in some of the states of the USA.24 The common denominator in literature was another British botanist, K. A. Sabet, who posited a link between weather and Dothichiza canker and between fungi and bacterial infection causing it.25 Eventually, foresters agreed that the disease appeared as a result of combined presence of fungi known as Cryptodiaporthe populea (Sacc.) and bacteria.26 By the time Magyar nyárfatermesztés (Hungarian Poplar Cultivation) was published in 1962, Hungarian researchers were aware of all previous publications and the various names that authors used to name the disease.27 Since all authors agreed that there was no cure for the disease, research was oriented towards identifying resistant and vulnerable varieties and circumstances that increase risk. To avoid a major loss of stands, foresters needed to prevent weakening of trees from dry periods and unsatisfactory soil conditions, and too much manure also increased susceptibility. The example of Dothichiza canker allows one to highlight three features of the transnational aspects of poplar research. First, the range of the poplar species and varieties that forestry experimented with was a common pool across the Iron Curtain in the 1950s. In fact, if it was not for the widespread of Populus × euroamericana clones, Dothichiza canker would not have threatened poplar plantations. Second, decades of expertise in vegetative propagation for engineering suitable variants did not mean that it became possible to control nature-culture interaction. Third, in the early 1950s, knowledge circulation was lacking between Hungarian foresters and their Western counterparts, but this did not mean a complete stop to scientific articles crossing borders. Peace’s study mentioned the lack of information in key publications appearing in the ‘West.’ This situation changed by the early 1960s, but the regional IPC event of 1956 played a key role in realizing distances and reconnecting Hungarian researchers to the circulation of ideas elsewhere.

These conclusions clarify the fact that the contemporary status of the state socialist form of political control was relevant to the history of the poplar in Hungary. Initially, planting more poplar species as means of water management along rivers and as part of protective forest belts was one of the aspects of afforestation. Afforestation had nearly a century of history by 1950, but it was during Rákosi’s regime that it became a means of mobilization and a link to ‘Stalin’s plan to transform nature,’ which was launched after the postwar famines in the Soviet Union. Propaganda and the need to respond or adjust to it remained an integral part of political life after the Rákosi era and after 1956. The poplar project evolved into a national assessment of all postwar poplar stands, and, subsequently into the National Poplar Committee under one of the key bodies of the early Kádár era, the Committee of Economic Affairs of the Council of Ministers. This meant the politicization of the attitude towards the poplar species and ever more propaganda about the issue.28 The high number and content of articles that appeared in the most important contemporary journal targeting foresters, Az Erdő, also confirm that the poplar campaign and the goals it set had a profound impact on forestry in the early 1960s. Looking at propaganda related to the poplar campaign is one of the ways to connect related written source material that researchers and institutions produced and a wider social realm of foresters and forestry employees working on the ground. Under such conditions, oversimplification of tasks and the tendency to look at poplar species as panacea were everyday issues. Poplar made its way to the agenda of the local units of the National Forestry Association. It appears from the debate articles that a younger generation of foresters was impatient with the limitations that classification of niches meant in terms of the choice of species. In regions such as Hajdú County, replacing oak with poplar looked like a natural process that loss of soil humidity had been triggering for nearly a century. However, senior researchers, especially Imre Babos, who produced textbooks about afforestation, were squarely against replacing oak stands along the Tisza River or overusing spruce and poplar in the Western border area.29 The tone that some members of the generation of foresters who played major role in producing basic literature for afforestation campaign in the 1950s used in an official professional journal to discredit the excesses of poplar propagation shows that there was a political decision to place limits on the undesirable transformation of forests, land use practices, and landscapes that the propaganda might have brought about. Debates about the ways soil and niche classification limited the expansion of the area covered by poplar species, in other words, about the usefulness of experimentation and scientific observation, intensified among Hungarian foresters as the poplar project gained political salience and a national dimension throughout the 1960s. As we shall see in the third section of this paper, the assessment carried out between 1973 and 1976 found that while the campaign of 1960–61 reached its goal in terms of drastically increasing the presence of poplar species in terms of both percentage and visibility in specific landscapes, poplar-based afforestation often took place without due regard for soil quality and requirements.

Studies summarizing knowledge produced on poplar cultivation (volumes published in 1954, 1962, 1978, and 1996) are consistent about stating that the poplar program in Hungary began as a set of transnational entanglements.30 This consciousness reflects that taking part in projects with global reach was considered to be a prestigious and valuable act throughout these decades. The interaction between the agenda of IPC and poplar research in Hungary shows that differences between experiments and goals did not constitute a fundamental divergence of scientific work on specific fields. This unity did not only stem from common elements of point of departure such as the reception of related work in Italy and the IPC meeting of 1949. The goal of Hungarian poplar researchers was to produce and eventually present globally relevant results on the occasion of regional level academic meetings even when formal full-scale participation in FAO meetings was halted by the ‘Eastern Bloc.’ Dendrology and scientific forestry aspects of the poplar project were fundamentally about the belief that it was possible to transform the state of nature into another one in which a group of specifically designed non-human species turn into resources in the foreseeable future and, thus, benefit goals of national economic development.

In summary, increasing the area covered by poplar was a transnational project in the post–World War II era. Despite years of relative isolation from transnational level knowledge production, the main goals of the poplar project in Hungary were in tune with international developments and major threats were also shared. Due to relatively fast growth, short rotational cycle, and the industrial qualities of its timber, the poplar species carried the promise for growing industrial output and economic growth, or at least, improving the terms of trade in a number of countries of the northern hemisphere by the late 1950s. The Hungarian poplar project was not a pseudo-scientific exercise. Yet, politicization of the poplar campaign and, thus, the difficulties of setting limitations for it, arguably, distinguished it from parallel projects elsewhere. However, zeal and propaganda were coupled with professional demand for experimental evidence before moving forward with plantation and the selection of cultivars.

Global Commodification, Economic Projections, and Cold War Institutions

Before turning to the question of how landscapes changed and how the timber was eventually used, the next step in assessing the relationship between the Anthropocene and the Cold War in the light of poplar projects is to consider the changes that the years between 1955 and 1975 brought about in terms of thinking about the calculability of the timber commodity chain and how entanglements worked in this field from the point of view of Hungarian foresters. The proposals that Hungarian forestry economists aimed to mainstream at the transnational level were closely intertwined with the vision about Hungary’s position in global economy that informed the “New Economic Mechanism” of the second half of the 1960s. This introduction of a new approach to state socialist economy in Hungary catalyzed thinking about linkages between timber and commodification and the global position of Hungary. Thus, the argument of this section complements recent results in the analysis of the global position of Hungary at that time. Tamás Gerőcs and András Pinkasz and the monographic study of István Feitl argue that one of the major histories of the political economies of 1960s was the failure of the countries of the Socialist Bloc to set up frameworks of closer integration that might have opened a way of emancipation in place of dependencies. Dependence was the result of the contemporaneous drive of modernization and import substitution and, more generally, a semiperipheral position.31 Second, this section also contributes to bridge the gap that seems to exist between the popularity of long-term economic projections with Hungarian foresters and the market-oriented New Economic Mechanism.

There were three sites where interaction between Hungarian foresters’ economic ideas and transnational environments took place. Two of these were institutions operating within the framework of the United Nations: the FAO World Forestry Congresses, held every six years since 1948, were essential for aggregating and disseminating new ideas about what forests meant for society and economy. The congresses of Seattle (1960), Madrid (1966), and Buenos Aires (1972) were groundbreaking in this regard for their role in drawing attention to both global inequality and ecological sustainability in these assessments.32 At the European level, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE, operating since 1947) was another important and permanent site for prognostication that brought together experts from across the ‘blocs.’ In 1972, the summary report of the activities of UNECE emphasized that collecting statistics about production and trade of wood and timber products was a novelty in the postwar period.33 The regular publication of Timber Bulletin for Europe was a key output of the activities of UNECE in the field. It maintained a database of commodity prices that allowed projecting and mapping economic factors, such as, demand for certain goods, availability of resources, and patterns of aggregate growth. Third, a specialized body of experts working on issues related to timber, cellulose, and paper appeared on the Comecon scene in the late 1950s. The Permanent Committee on Timber, Cellulose, and Paper Comecon was set up in 1956 and soon began to work on a 15-year prospective plan.34 The documentary footprint of that plan was an assessment of technological development vis-à-vis ‘capitalist’ countries, assessing the volume and extent of trade between individual member states and capitalist countries, with an evaluation of dependency and setting up a framework of exchange within which growth in efficiency and catching up would be possible. This exchange potentially included joint projects, but no specific ones were launched.

Biographies are the link connecting archives of a regionally specific UN body, professional global meetings, Comecon, the ministry-level dossiers of state socialist Hungary, and the story of poplar projects. In Hungary, foresters working in key positions during the late 1960s and early 1970s belonged to the same generation attending the Forestry College of Sopron just before 1945: Emil Sali, Aladár Halász, András Madas, and Béla Keresztesi were in their early fifties in 1970. While in the early 1960s, Keresztesi had the most political capital, it was Madas who reached the highest position in the group. After spending decades in senior positions at the Office of Planning, he was deputy minister at the giant Ministry for Agriculture and Food Procurement between 1972 and 1975. Upon his retirement, he produced academic texts that are keys to understanding how a generation of high-ranking forestry economists thought about turning forests into sustainable commodities under conditions of state socialism.35 Having to engage with the issues that a new price mechanism meant for forestry, and with the poplar project, influenced Madas’s thinking in a decisive way. From the mid-1960s, Madas posited in all his publications that the export of primary agricultural products could not finance paper related import, but export of previously imported timber material was an important asset in this regard.36 Madas became committed to applying the idea of ‘timber economy’ that reflected that forest management, timber processing, and international trade should be treated as a whole.37 For him, this meant that calculations about future timber consumption and availability at the continental and global scale should precede regional and national level planning and decisions.38 The long-term plan that the National Technical Development Committee of Hungary published in 1967 frequently referred to the Timber Bulletin that the UNECE published. Together with Aladár Halász, he was one of the Hungarian expert delegates to UNECE and he had a career there: Madas was repeatedly elected chief expert of forestry. In the mid-1960s, as a result of his participation in UNECE and his familiarity with statistical work produced at that institution, Madas began to work out a model about timber supply for the global scale. He presented his work at the section he chaired at the World Forestry Congress of 1973 and a year later the publishing house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences published his model in English.39 On the one hand, his work was premised on assessing whether a certain region was a major timber importing region or an exporting one and if it was feasible to establish link between centers of demand and of supply. He did not see sites of export as underdeveloped. Rather, he argued that the most underdeveloped areas were those that were unable to export due to lack of infrastructure. His prime example for this was mechanization of timber production in Canada, the country that needed to double its export capacity if growing demand in the USA was to be satisfied. His geographic analysis had blind spots: he only considered growing demand in China in passing and he believed that the lack of infrastructure in Western Africa and in Latin America would prevent these areas from becoming centers of export. He was most nuanced in his assessment of Northern Europe, Japan, and North America. One of the most outstanding features of his presentation was that he treated Europe together, without reference to the Iron Curtain, but discussed the Soviet Union separately. In this form, ‘socialist’ countries were only one of a group of countries where Soviet exports were expected to grow to an unspecified extent. Madas’s second but related starting point was that historical trends and correlation between demography, GDP, and demand for different timber products should be combined in arriving at plausible estimate. He offered corrections to earlier models published by UNECE on this basis. Importantly, he posited that 20 percent of all forested areas should be reserved in the interest of the oxygen balance of the atmosphere and for recreational purposes. Altogether, Madas argued that demand would double until 2000 due to a surge in the consumption of paper products and despite a relative decline of many other categories of timber commodities, but he believed that this increase may be met in a sustainable manner. The model showed a belief in the possibility of prediction based on economic rationality and mathematical modeling and was receptive to fresh concerns about ecological crisis. He did not spend time on discussing the role of Hungary in the model, but the implicit message was difficult to miss: each country needed to integrate into a regional and global economic scene that had nothing to do with being or not being a socialist economy or a Soviet ally. His analysis also made it obvious that there was no database available at the time that could match his ambition to predict supply and demand.. Therefore, for his projection and estimation he used data available for end points fixed in time. He also thought it obvious that it is demand and supply that determined the future of commodities. Within this picture it would make no sense at all for a government to force the use of resources disregarding its own global position or not admitting uncertainties. For Madas, a sensible policy was one that was clear about challenges, addressing them strategically. Rational economic decisions and projections had a place, but short-term decrees contingent on concerns for a political support base could hardly fit in. In 1966, Halász, as head of a team of foresters, edited a publication that consisted of tables about timber trade. These tables did not list the ‘socialist bloc’ or Comecon member states as a separate region within Europe and did not apply political divisions to any other part of the world.40 This choice reflects a vision where commodity and hard currency requirements depended more on opportunities and availability than on power blocs.

‘Paper timber’ export and import in several European countries between 1955 and 1964 in 1000 m3

Country	Import			Export
	1955	1960	1964	1955	1960	1964
Austria	138.6	307.4	626	–	–	3.2
Belgium	201.9	330	516	12	13.7	11
Bulgaria	–	–	–	–	–	–
Czechoslovakia	–	–	–	125.9	307.1	445
Denmark	4.9	3	–	0.3	0.3	9.5
United Kingdom	364	328.8	313	–	–	–
Finland	28.4	206.1	1120	3083.8	3176.1	837
France	656.7	833.3	1108	5.7	400.6	733
Greece	–	–	–	–	–	–
The Netherlands	335.2	276.4	374	0.3	11.8	10
Yugoslavia	–	–	–	700.2	445.1	358
Poland	–	75.3	205	534	372.7	512
Hungary	177.6	196.4	331.8	82.6	69.2	176.7
GDR	435.8	675.7	843	–	–	–
FRG	1663.8	1272.3	1242	0.9	8	34
Norway	818.7	1133.7	1898	225.8	290.2	286
Italy	740.1	1127.7	1203	–	–	–
Portugal	–	–	1.3	0.1	120.9	155
Romania	–	–	–	0.2	354.8	926
Spain	8.6	48.4	123	–	–	1.6
Switzerland	440.6	144.2	127	0.7	1.8	10
Sweden	279.9	603	259	1051	407	1308
Soviet Union	302.1	150	–	547.2	1589.4	4046

 

Table 1. Export and import of ‘paper timber’ in several countries
(Translation of Halász 1966, 54.)

 

These published tables had their roots in Ministry reports showing that Hungary was chiefly integrated into the European timber market via cellulose and paper products.41 The narrative was clear: the volume and value of imports multiplied between early 1950 and the early 1960s and stabilized at the high end. The changing figures related to export was the outcome of Hungary being increasingly involved in the re-exportation of timber from the Soviet Union for the purposes of paper production.42 Emil Sali, the Head of Forestry Department within the ministry, and member of Madas’s generation, believed that a greater capacity to share across Comecon countries would reduce the financial difficulties that paper demand caused.43 The report of Madas’s team about global trends and resources had reservations about Soviet Union’s capacity to open up new routes to timber in Siberia, and thus underlined that cooperation has to mean more than trade with the Soviet Union. Moreover, Madas’s team of researchers also saw limited further growth of timber resources and high labor costs in Northern Europe, and thus predicted that timber imports would grow steadily in ‘capitalist western’ economies.44 In their view, for Hungary, the way to go forward was to grow its own timber stock, and equally importantly, push for regional cooperation across borders. Comecon would have been a likely candidate for becoming a framework for this change, but Madas and the generation of forestry economists discussed above never seemed to have proposed anything in that regard. And this was a not simply a coincidence.

In 1957–58, as part of breaking away from the Stalinist notion of autarky, but keeping to the idea of import substitution, a number of experts’ meetings discussed the position and status of Comecon member countries in terms of potential timber resources and timber processing industrial capacity as well as their major problems. However, there was a long-lasting disagreement regarding the scope of the committee. While Hungary, the GDR, and Bulgaria were interested in more cooperation, Romania wanted to limit it. Their stance was that the Permanent Committee on Timber, Cellulose, and Paper should first discuss whether a certain product could be included in the agenda. Initially, the Soviet Union supported Romania’s position.45 One of the turning points of the discussion was when Hungarian representatives of the Committee argued that the Soviet support for the Romanian position related to agenda setting was untenable in the light of statements that the Soviet delegation at UNECE made about the importance of cooperation.46 During the first years of its existence, the work of the Permanent Committee revolved around gathering data and information, and decisions about strategic direction that should be followed. The meeting held in Moscow in February 1958 accepted that in the field of developing paper production, one of the goals should be sharing the burden of industrial capacity building among Comecon member states. The Hungarian delegation suggested that considering the technological superiority of GDR industry in processing hardwood, it might be considered if GDR can increase its capacity to take resources of other member states to produce cellulose.47

The document that Comecon’s Permanent Committee accepted was premised on a dilemma: it highlighted that paper production and production capacity were insufficient in Comecon countries and that these countries had overused their forest resources since the end of World War II and that this trend had to be reversed. As a workaround, the document promoted the use of reed, hay, and waste until better machines and production lines became available for more efficiency. The report that Hungary prepared about its own situation emphasized that with all efforts of afforestation and mechanization, only 50 percent of yearly timber requirement was expected to come from the forests of the country. The summary also showed that Hungary imported only 3 percent of its paper needs from Comecon countries while its paper import from ‘capitalist’ countries increased 62-fold even as overall paper supply decreased between 1950 and 1957. The drop in total use of paper was a sign of shortage rather than of drastically increased efficiency.48 Moreover, some of the technologies of cellulose production were entirely absent.

Cellulose and paper production were not the main focus of reports that Hungarian authorities prepared for the purposes of drawing up the 15-year plan of Comecon. The possibility of replacing timber with other materials, reusing waste, introducing more and better machinery in felling, moving, sawing, furniture making, and meeting the requirements of railways, mines, and construction occupied the center stage.49 Yet, these documents recognized that there was a need for change in the type of resources and cellulose products the paper industry utilized for better keeping up with demand in Hungary. The initiative regarding the shared establishment of cellulose factories among Comecon countries did not have a bright future. It also disappeared from the agenda of the meetings of the Permanent Committee by early 1961–62.50 Unfortunately, the archival record of the work of Hungarian representatives in the Permanent Committee between 1963 and 1968 is yet to be located. For the years in which related documents reappear in the archives of the supersized Ministry of Agriculture and Food Provision, Hungarian reports on meetings of the permanent Comecon committee on agriculture and forestry express a degree of disappointment in regard to how much cooperation actually took place. This picture resonates with István Feitl’s argument about the failed attempt of Hungary and Poland to fundamentally change the structure of Comecon.51 Despite wide-ranging data collection, estimates, and prognoses about the way substantial coordination within Comecon could improve the economic position of member countries in global comparison, by 1970 standardization and bi- or trilateral scientific cooperation were the only noticeable Comecon activities in the field of forestry. There were serious issues with mechanization due to the lack of available machines within Comecon and the unwillingness of member states to sign multilateral agreements.52 In terms of the archival landscape, the simple filing of reports written in Russian replaces discussions and position papers.53 There were no plans submitted for a joint cellulose project.

A revealing episode from 1973 connects global thinking and local events of the paper supply chain. Besides Madas, several members of the Hungarian delegation to the Seventh World Forestry Congress were also stakeholders in the issue of the poplar project. In 1973, Keresztesi was the head of ERTI and editor of collective efforts to summarize the state of the art of the Hungarian poplar project in 1962 and also in 1978. Aladár Halász was deputy head of the Department of Economics of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Procurement; Endre Szenes was the director general of LIGNIMPEX, the state export-import agency dealing in timber. Thus, it was one of the highlights of the weeks spent in Argentina when, as part of their organized study trip, the delegation joined a Finnish party visiting a cellulose and papermaking factory near Rosario. The Hungarians were delighted to see an adjacent paper tree plantation consisting of 5–15 year old pine and eucalyptus species with felling going on in a part of the area at the time of visit. The group was so impressed with the method of propagation and care for the seedlings that they gathered and produced a detailed technical description of each step of the process.54 The scene represented the ideal situation of high technology applied in a paper tree plantation of very short rotational cycle a few kilometers away from a large processing complex that produced both cellulose and paper products. The ground reality in Hungary was far from this exotic perfection.

On the Ground: Data, Cooperatives, and the Yugoslavian-Hungarian
Paper Deal

In response to the lack of effective Comecon coordination in timber processing, the Hungarian government eventually moved to bilateral solutions, and imported related machinery from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the USA, and Italy. In the field of paper imports, the major bilateral move was a contract on timber products that LIGNIMPEX, on behalf of the Hungarian government, signed in the autumn of 1975 with Yugoslavia concerning joint production of cellulose and paper. The deal with Yugoslavia entailed that Hungary would transport poplar as raw material for paper to two Yugoslav paper mills along the River Sava: Krsko in present-day Slovenia, and Srmska Mitrovica (Szávaszentdemeter) in present day Serbia. Throughout the second half of 1960s, the relationship between the political elite of the Hungarian and the Yugoslavian party-states improved beyond imagination.55 Thus, bloc level politics did not stand in the way of using the opportunities that the Danube provided for timber trade. At the same, the relationship with another potential partner, Czechoslovakia, was at an all-time low around 1969–70. The volume of timber that Hungary had to bring to the factory at Srmska Mitrovica was three times larger than the volume intended for the Krsko plant. In return, Hungary would receive cellulose and paper products at a price that was 5% below the Scandinavian market price. The most important objective of the Hungarian government was to save hard currency on paper importation.56 In the lack of records about the negotiations, one may only assume that the Yugoslav government was interested in signing a deal to overcome problems of raw material supply to the factories. Transports to Krsko were to begin in the summer of 1976, while to Sremska Mitrovica only in 1977. The contract signed with Yugoslavia meant that the volume of poplar timber production needed to rise sharply until 1980 and stabilize at a high level for the next fifteen years.57 To gain insight to the ground realities of the poplar project in Hungary, we may look at the Yugoslav–Hungarian deal as the outcome of three decisions on the Hungarian side. First, it had to be decided that there should be no processing capacity built in Hungary for the timber material that the poplar project would produce. Second, the quantity and quality of timber had to be calculated. Third, transporting timber from Hungary to the processing plants had to be judged feasible and possible from the point of view of logistics.

Regarding the first question, archival traces are scanty, but it is clear that it was a matter discussion for nearly a decade as to whether the country should build its own productive capacity.58 In 1958, Madas believed that expansion of the paper mill at Csepel would solve the question.59 Another potential candidate was the paper mill in Dunaújváros (formerly Sztálinváros), south from Budapest, along the Danube. It was built and became operational in the mid-1970s, but studies submitted to the Ministry of Light Industry did not see it feasible to expand it further to process poplar grown in Hungary.60

The question of how the quantity and quality of available poplar timber was assessed is a more complex issue. The Hungarian–Yugoslavian poplar-paper deal entailed a large-scale effort of resource commodification that consisted of several steps during the 1960s and the 1970s. In 1966, the assessment of the implementation of the plan that the National Poplar Committee drew up showed that by 1970 there would be an abundance of poplar ready to be commodified. As András Madas put it in a letter to the deputy head of the National Planning Office (OT): “since liberation we have planted circa 330,000 hectares of forest. Fast-growing poplar species constitute around 20 percent of these new forests. Thus, the capacity of the country to produce raw material has been considerably increased.”61 However, the scale of the planned Yugoslavian–Hungarian deal made authorities feel that there might not be enough poplar trees in Hungary to fulfill contractual obligations.62 Thus, only a year later, the Department of Forestry of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Provision also carried out an assessment of the availability of raw material for the Yugoslavian–Hungarian deal, making an account of poplar and willow species that were considered ‘paper timber.’ The assessment showed that the Hungarian party would be able to fulfil its obligation in the first year of the contract, especially since supplies to Sremska Mitrovica were to begin in 1977. The calculation also stated that even though large areas of poplar stands were set to mature in the same period, it would only be possible to keep up with such a rise in demand if additional species and sources were included, such as spruce imported from the Soviet Union and beech from Hungary.63 In 1975, amid such uncertainty, the Department of Forestry embarked on a third survey that was intended to produce a reliable database and be more comprehensive than the previous ones. The design of the study was such that it reflected awareness of the fact that the partnership with Yugoslavia meant that calculations about economic feasibility and availability of supplies had to be combined with a long-term ecological assessment of the poplar project that had been on-going since 1960. Sali explained in the books summarizing poplar research that researchers used data directly from management plans, but they checked each area for which a plan was prepared before 1966, and the survey included all forests where the proportion of poplar species was at least 5 percent.64 The assessment of 1958, which preceded and conditioned the forming of the National Poplar Commission, concluded that several local level forest management plans erred in assessing ratios of poplar species in afforested areas. In 1958, Keresztesi, in his paper summarizing this data, estimated that 162,658 ha. of poplar would be planted between 1958 and 1975.65 The assessment of 1975–78 showed that in 1973 the total area of poplar was 154,300 ha. and this figure was expected to decrease in the coming decade. This meant that in peak years poplar species covered around 11 percent of total forested area, while this figure was closer to 8 percent in most years of the period under discussion. This figure is comparable to the area covered by pine in the late 1960s. Delegated staff of ERTI and the planning unit of the Department of Forestry used computers for developing the predictive model and for calculating the quantity and quality of timber for each subsequent year. The models showed that certain factors, especially considerations of quality, would result in loss of the area of poplar until 1990, while additional plantation was also considered.66 Although when narrowing it down to the question of the Yugoslavian–Hungarian deal, the survey gave a positive response, the overall result was that the quality of poplar in Hungary was less than mediocre and that this was due to hasty decisions about the locations of poplar stands that did not take soil conditions seriously enough during the early 1960s. Foresters also concluded that Hungary would not be able to supply a pulp making factory if it were built on its territory. The recurring evaluation of the impact and implementation of the 20-year plan of the National Poplar Committee, namely, increasing the area and quality of poplar within the total forested area and within the afforestation effort, was one of the catalysts and opportunities for thinking in terms of a ‘timber economy’ in Hungary.67 The assessment was a formidable and successful exercise that contained valid methods for assuring data quality, evaluation, and predictive analysis using all available computational technology to achieve the best results. It was no less than the reappraisal of the sustainability of commodification of poplar species and stands in the light of changes that the new economic thinking, collectivization, and global market integration brought about in the relationship between nature and culture in Hungary. Uncertainty about the conclusion of assessments might make the impression that the study was the outcome of ‘communist’-style official optimism and calculation.68 However, the methods of data collection were the outcome of several factors, such as, ideas about the economy and about nature, transnational circuits of and long-term practices of knowledge production, and conflicts over land use. Forestry has been a data intensive science since the mid-nineteenth century. As part of the forest management documentation, foresters were expected to create a plan about how and when a specific forest area reached optimum timber output for the intended type of product. Experiments and mathematics were used for producing tables about growth rate of different tree species, and calculations of value and prices were also an integral part of the knowledge base. Data collection and the assessment of data played a key role in the poplar project as a result of continuities within the profession, and not only due to the nature of the state socialist regime or advances in computational technology.

As part of the complexity, specifically state socialist conflicts over land use also mattered. The launching of the plan of National Poplar Committee coincided with the final wave of aggressive collectivization. Studies of Gábor Máté demonstrate that in the drive to apply chemicals and water management techniques, collectivization at times brought about landscape degradation and created ecological issues that were not present before.69 It is yet to be explored how the poplar plan impacted the first years of new cooperatives, but there is at least one document that allows researchers to highlight points of tension. In regard to Somogy County, the author of a 1963 report believed that natural conditions were suitable for poplar and it would be possible to plant 6,000 hectares. According to the draft, cooperatives would have to undertake the bulk of the task, besides the Hungarian State Railways and Water Management authorities. The author, however, noted that 40–70 percent of seedlings died due to carelessness and grazing.70 When Madas and Halász dealt with the economic behavior of newly formed cooperatives and the actual shortage of raw materials such as pine and firewood, they brought attention to several risks that rational economic behavior of the leadership of cooperatives might cause. Madas pointed out that in terms of land ownership pattern, Hungary was unique among ‘socialist’ countries. There was virtually no private forest by the 1970s, but cooperatives managed 22 percent of forested areas and a relatively low proportion, 77.7% of forests, were under direct state management. Madas and Halász believed that this was not an ideal situation since cooperatives treated forests as secondary areas of activity and used timber for relatively inferior purposes, thus keeping the valuable material off the market.71 The pressures that the Yugoslavian-Hungarian deal triggered resulted in a showcase of these issues. In the first year of the contract, issues with actual supplies were so serious that they could potentially jeopardize the entire deal. The question of prices was no less complicated than logistics. In the climate of post-1968 economic regime where enterprises were encouraged to make profit, buying up stocks was only possible if the price offered was higher than it would have been for other products. Ministerial administration sought a fix to these pressing issues experienced on the ground. In order to make the supply chain operate, central administration organized meetings for various regional level actors of the reshaped realm of cooperatives, forestry enterprises, and state enterprises involved in trading timber related commodities.72 Despite serious issues encountered regarding cooperation between forestry enterprises and cooperatives, the latter were expected to take an ever-larger share in the poplar program since without their poplar stands the entire operation would have fallen short of supply.73 Because of these developments, and other logistics issues, less than half of the required quantity left for Yugoslavia by mid-June 1976, and later months looked uncertain too. It was also a difficult logistical task to make sure that production in the eastern part of Hungary reached the ports where ships departed from. Although the two neighbouring Pest and Bács-Kiskun counties, and a county along the Danube, Győr-Moson-Sopron, were the prime areas of poplar, without the output of the Trans-Tisza region there would not have been enough timber to transport.74 Despite these concerns and the social sensitivity of the World Forestry Congress of 1973, forestry economists did not consider social conflict or forms of resistance to the poplar campaign as a factor.75 It requires a further reading against the grain to locate specific instances and forms of resistance to the poplar project.

The Yugoslavian–Hungarian paper deal led to a major professional, institutional, and academic enterprise to assess and predict the future availability of a species seen as a natural resource, the presence of which had been the result of anthropogenic intervention in the late 1950s and during the 1960s. Attention shifted to the issue of identifying and sustaining ecological conditions that made commodification possible. The assessments of the poplar project included the problem of the distance between data and information, institutional interests, Hungary’s place in the global economy and within the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc,’ and the problem of combining local efforts into a single cause. The correlations and risks that the tables point to reflected that the production of paper poplar was a site where the collectivization of agriculture, forestry, prices induced by the New Economic Mechanism, and scientific practices of producing information about nature all intertwined.

 

 

 

Conclusion

This paper addressed the science and economy of an Anthropocene thesis from the vantage point of semiperipheral Hungary during the Cold War. It chose the poplar species as the subject matter because poplar-based industrial production underwent a surge in post–World War II Hungary and it included large-scale efforts at landscape change, while research activities began in the first half of twentieth century. Historicizing poplar is an opportunity to study how the performativity and transnational nature of economics and life sciences intertwined with the political history of Cold War institutions and the social-political history of state socialist countries to bring about a new era of nature-culture relationship that we may call the Anthropocene.

The first section highlighted that forestry research on the poplar species was an essentially transnational one, even if that history might look domestic or isolated to present-day interpreters. The history of the interaction between activities of the International Poplar Committee was intertwined with major stages of the Cold War, such as the withdrawal and return of countries of the Socialist Bloc to UN organizations. Moreover, the institutionalization of links among researchers also connects to natural-cultural histories, such as the history of engineering hybrid clones, the idea and technology of tree plantation, and the presence, destruction, and economic loss that living organisms preying on trees might cause. This is not to deny that that the social history of landscape change, and the way professional groups might influence it, was arguably specific to state socialist regimes such as Hungary. That is because the science of the Anthropocene is about entanglements.

Economic models that top leaders of Hungarian forestry profession presented at global events were reflections and an attempted means to break away from a semiperipheral position, despite the limitations and failed hopes that Comecon meant by the 1960s. The section on the projecting of long-term patterns of timber availability showed that it was the combination of the drive to growth, consciousness of dependencies, emerging notions about a potential ecological crisis, and a shifting social context that resulted in changes in the nature-culture relationship. The global economy and ecology of the era of Anthropocene has been a process of emergence, rather than an outcome of plans.

Besides transnational entanglements of science and economic models, the history and specific stories of data collection proved to be a hub for understanding what was specific about the way ideas about aggregate demand and economic potential come together with measurements of ecological sustainability—to turn potentially valuable resources into commodities of calculable-calculated value in state socialist Hungary. The third section addressed how the state socialist economy of Hungary adapted to the changing natural-cultural circumstances that its very actions of commodification contributed to. The assessment of the poplar project between 1973 and 1976 pronounced that what looked like policy at first sight was the hybrid of many factors: incompletely counted trees, the political decision to promote or harm certain interests, human economic behavior and its perception, and regional and global ecological, economic, and political contexts. The Yugoslavian–Hungarian paper and cellulose deal signed in autumn 1975 was the key element at the juncture of the poplar planation campaign that began 1960s and assessments of timber resources. The context of the deal underlines that linking local events and global change is indispensable for the studying the Anthropocene from a historical perspective.

These histories of linkages, entanglements, and complexities help us see both state socialism and the Anthropocene less as a matter of course. Since the history of the formula of nature-culture is not fully accessible, there is scope to add new and unexpected elements to it in order to change the model of future ecology.

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XIX-K-9-aj box no. 37. Földes László miniszterhelyettes iratai. “A fafelhasználás, az erdőgazdálkodás és a fafeldolgozás;” Az erdőgazdasági termelés feladatai;” “Földes László;” “TSZ-ek faanyagának értékesítése” [Papers of László Földes, Deputy Minister for Agriculture and Food Supply. Timber use, forest management and timber processing; Tasks of production in forest management; Papers of László Földes; Selling timber from coops.]

XIX-K-9-m box no. 206. MÉM Erdészeti Hivatal. A nyárfa program értékelése 1967–68 és várható famennyiség [Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply, Department of Forestry. Assessment of poplar project in 1967–68 and expected volume of timber.]

XIX-K-9-m box nos. 209, 294, 311 and 412. MÉM Erdészeti Hivatal. “Jugoszláv-magyar nyárfa egyezménnyel kapcsolatos iratok” [Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply, Department of Forestry. Papers related to the Yugoslavian-Hungarian paper deal.]

XIX-K-9-m box no. 327. MÉM. Erdészeti Hivatal. A várnai KGST-találkozó [Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply, Department of Forestry. Comecon meeting at Varna, Bulgaria.]

XIX-9-m box nos. 116, 244, and 346. MÉM Erdészeti Hivatal. “KGST-vel kapcsolatos iratok” [Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply, Department of Forestry. Comecon-related documents.]

XXVI-K-3 box no. 16. Az Erdészeti Tudományos Intézet iratai. “Jelentés a nyárfakonferenciáról” [Papers of the Forestry Research Institute, Report on the poplar conference.]

 

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The Participation of the Medieval Transylvanian Counties in Tax Collection

András W. Kovács
Research Institute of theTransylvanian Museum Society
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In Transylvania the county authorities had to assist in collecting royal (state) taxes owed by the serfs of noble estates (like in other parts of Hungary). In 1324 the king exempted the Transylvanians from paying the tax called collecta that they previously had to submit to the voivode. (Based on analogies, it can be suggested that this tax was collected either because of the cancellation of the yearly renewal of money or the refusal of the compulsory exchange of older money.) From 1336 the yearly renewal of money and with this the compulsory exchange of the former money ceased to exist. In order to compensate this profit of the treasury (the chamber), King Charles I (1301–1342) assessed a new tax, which similarly to the previous one was called the chamber’s profit (lucrum camerae), but the “gate” (household or porta) became the taxation unit. This tax, according to the lease contract of the Transylvanian chamber from 1336, was also collected in Transylvania, but in 1366 King Louis I (1342–1382) exempted the Transylvanians from paying it. In 1467 the king tried to have the tax called tributum fisci regalis (that substituted the chamber’s profit) collected also in Transylvania, whereon an uprising broke out. This latter tax and the more and more frequently collected extraordinary tax (subsidium, contributio, taxa) usually made up one florin per household. For the upkeep of their delegations sent to the king, the Transylvanian counties collected an occasional tax, the so-called courting money (pecunias udvarnicales), from their serfs. There is data of its collection from the fifteenth century on. These taxes, normally collected from estates located in territory of the counties, were exempt from payment because of royal privilege or because they belonged to the town of Szeben (Sibiu/Hermannstadt), the Seven Seats (‘Sieben Stühle’), but estates of the towns of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca/Klausenburg), Brassó (Braşov/Kronstadt), Beszterce (Bistriţa/Nösen, Bistritz), and Medgyes (Mediaş/Mediasch) were also exempt. These settlements’ exemption from paying the taxes had to be confirmed by recurrent voivodal (or sometimes royal) mandates sent to the vicevoivodes of Transylvania, the county authorities, the tax assessors, and tax collectors.

Keywords: Middle Ages, Transylvania, tax collection, counties, pecunia udvarnicalis, taxa, contributio, subsidium

 Introduction

This study investigates the royal (state) taxes collected in Transylvania, the eastern province of Hungary, from the serfs who lived on noble estates, and the role county authorities1 played in the process until 1526. The taxation of these counties (Belső-Szolnok, Doboka, Kolozs, Torda, Hunyad, Fehér, Küküllő), because of a local tax and the exemption from paying the chamber’s profit (lucrum camerae), differed from the taxation of other parts of the country, and was fundamentally dissimilar from the taxes paid by the privileged Transylvanian Székely and Saxon areas.

Fourteenth-Century Taxes

The most important bodies of the financial administration were the chambers; the Transylvanian chamber probably existed already by the end of the Árpádian period.2 In 1324 King Charles I exempted the Transylvanian nobility and their serfs from paying the lodging and upkeep tax (the descensus and the victualia) as well as the tax named collecta, which until then had to be submitted to the voivode of Transylvania (vayvoda Transsilvanus), the officeholder appointed by the king to lead the province.3 From 1336 the chamber’s profit (lucrum camerae) became the direct tax of the serfs, which bears its name from the previous practice in which the treasury (chamber) earned profit through the yearly renewal of the money and the compulsory exchange of old coins. The taxation unit from that time on was the porta (household).4 According to the lease contract of the Transylvanian chamber from 1336, the levying of the household tax in the counties belonged to the jurisdiction of the chamber count, and the tax had to be collected by the officers of the chamber count (per comitum camere nostre vel suos officiales) in the presence of a delegate of the archbishop (of Esztergom), of the master of the treasury (in presentia hominum domini archyepiscopi et magistri tawarnicorum nostrorum), and the county authority. The count (comes provincialis; ispán) and the judges of the nobles (iudices nobilium; szolgabíró) received one-third of the fine that was inflicted on those who refused to pay the tax.5 In 1366 King Louis I exempted the Transylvanian nobles and their estates from paying the chamber’s profit (and the upkeep tax).6 Although later royal confirmations of the privilege charter are not known, the serfs of the Transylvanian nobles enjoyed this exemption for a long time (until 1467). Outside of Transylvania the chamber counts with their administration, the tax assessors and tax collectors (dicatores, exactores) assisted by county authorities, were in charge of collecting the tax.7

Extraordinary and local taxes however were sometimes also levied in Transylvania. According to a charter from 1368, the officialis at Szentimre (Sântimbru) of Péter Járai, vicevoivode of Transylvania (1344–1350, 1359–1368), with the help of the judges of nobles of Doboka and Kolozs Counties, had to collect a tax, four denars for each plot (mansio), awarded to the vicevoivode by the nobles of the country.8 There is no later reference to this tax.

Courting Money

The nobility of the Transylvanian counties collected the courting money (1448, 1456, 1477, 1488, 1499: pecunias udvarnicales)9 or courting denars (1466: denarios udvarnicales)10 from their serfs for the upkeep of their delegations11 sent to the king. The contemporary name of the tax according to data from 1491—if it is not a misspelling—may have been udvarlópénz,12 which, if one can connect with later mentions (1619, 1710), also attests to the meaning of the adjective ‘courtier’ (udvarló) as a ‘person who does service at the court.’13 There is no data on the collection of the courting tax elsewhere than in Transylvania.

The (deputy) counts (comites and vicecomites) and the judges of the nobles in Transylvania took part in the collection of this local (and extraordinary) tax directly. In 1448 the Transylvanian vicevoivodes ordered the barons, nobles, and people of all origin and rank in Szolnok County to collect the courting money from their serfs because the Transylvanian nobles decided to send a delegation, including Miklós Kémeri and János son of Gyerő of Gyerővásárhely, to the prelates, barons, and honorable persons of the country in Buda; but many people disregarded paying the money. So they again ordered the collection of money by the first day of the next court period of Szolnok County, and if nobles would again deny fulfilling it, the task shall be remitted to the vicecounts and the judges of the nobles to have it collected from every single estate under the fine of three marks.14

In 1456, at the assembly called by the vicevoivodes to Torda (Turda/Thorenburg) of Transylvanian nobles, Székelys, and Saxons, the deputies of the universitas of the nobility reported that they elected Tamás Lökös (Wass) of Cege (Ţaga) to join the delegation to the king, and he was given 32 gold florins of courting money (pecunias udvarnicales) for garments and horses. Afterward, the heirs of Tamás Lökös gave testimony that the deceased did in fact spend the money on clothes and horses.15 According to this account, the courting money was paid only by the nobility of the counties and not by the Székelys and Saxons. The exemption of the Saxons is also confirmed by the fact that royal, voivodal, and vicevoivodal mandates disallowed the Transylvanian nobility and the counties from collecting courting money from the estates that were lying in county territories but were attached to the Seven Seats (‘Sieben Stühle,’ its center was Szeben; 1488; 1491; 1492; 1501; 1505).16

In 1477 upon the request of Erzsébet, widow of János Dengelegi Pongrác, voivode of Transylvania (1475–1476, 1467–1472, 1475–1476), King Matthias (1458–1490) exempted her serfs from paying the courting money and sent a mandate to the voivode of Transylvania, the vicevoivode, and the county authorities stating such.17 Although it was the king who forgave its collection, the courting tax was not a tax collected for the ruler; in 1499 and 1501 voivode Péter Szentgyörgyi (1498–1510) referred to the royal taxes (contributio regie maiestatis; taxa regalis) and the courting money (pecunia udvarnicalis) as separate types of taxes.18

In 1492, when upon the request of the abbot of Kolozsmonostor (Cluj-Mănăştur), King Vladislas II (1490–1516) exempted the serfs of the abbey from paying the courting money, the abbot himself also called this tax in Transylvania an occasional one, but which the people of the abbey had not paid in living memory.19

In 1496, Vladislas II ordered that the tax the Transylvanians called courting money should be collected from all serf-holding nobles proportionately to their estates, with the exception of those nobles only who already live in the royal court.20

So the courting money was an occasional tax that the nobles of the Transylvanian parts would levy for no other reason than to cover the expenses of the delegates sent to the court. This is the reason why Székelys and Saxons did not pay it: as privileged peoples they appealed their issues on their own, and, what is more, the nobility of the counties was not entitled to offer any tax in their name.

Extraordinary Taxes

From the coronation of Matthias onwards, there is a markedly large quantity of data on the collection of extraordinary—including war—taxes,21 but the data on their collection originates mostly from the archives of Saxon towns.22 The war taxes however had been collected earlier as well, and in Transylvania too.23 The taxes passed by the Hungarian diet also applied to Transylvania, but the Transylvanian nobility in itself had no right to vote on the tax.24

In 1467 King Matthias eradicated the chamber’s profit (lucrum camerae) when the taxes of the treasury (tributum fisci regalis) were substituted for it;25 this was also to be introduced in Transylvania. However, after the Transylvanian uprising of 1467, the previous tax system was reintroduced (and even if more families lived behind one “gate,” they still had to pay only after one household). From the 1470s onwards, when Matthias had the extraordinary tax (subsidium, i.e., benefit, or contributio, i.e. tax) collected, he included the chamber’s profit in it, meaning that the lucrum camerae (or portal tax) was not collected separately; the two taxes added up to one florin per porta.26 The normally passed tax to be paid by tenant peasant households was collected yearly.27

The so-called royal account book of treasurer Zsigmond Ernuszt from 1494–1495 preserved the name of the royal tax collectors (exactores et dicatores) who were sent to Transylvania (in both years they were István Istvánfi and Miklós Kápolnai), their salaries (300/331 florins), as well as the sum of the tax levied on the seven Transylvanian counties. In every county, the tax collectors were accompanied by the counts and the judges of the nobles, who also received salary from the treasury (168/148 florins). In 1495 during the period of tax levying, the treasury either granted an honorarium to ten better-off Transylvanian nobles (potioribus nobilibus regni Transsilvanensis) or exempted their estates from the tax payment (probably because they mediated for the undisturbed collection of the tax).28

The levying (of the serfs) of nobles—one of the contributions (contributio) of the three privileged “nations”—was not amongst the largest Transylvanian incomes of the king. The instructions and reports29 written during the reign of King Ferdinand I (1526–1564) in Transylvania (1552–1556), of which the ones by royal deputies György Werner and Pál Bornemissza are likely the most important, testify to this.30 Thanks to the sophisticated literacy of the Habsburg administration, previously unknown data of major significance is available for this short period that also mirrors the medieval situation. According to the treasurer Péter Haller, the deficiencies of the collection of Transylvanian contribution can be attributed to the negligence of the counts; it was not possible, not even with voivodal powers, to force them to have the taxes collected, which was confirmed by the collectors of the contributio as well (1553).31 According to a 1554 letter of László Gyalui Vas, Transylvanian financial director (supremus proventuum Regie Maiestatis in Transsilvania administrator) of Ferdinand I, sent to an unknown recipient, it was almost impossible to collect the remainder of the contributio of the Transylvanian counties even with the power of the voivodes.32

There are no surviving tax accounts from the territory of the Transylvanian counties from before 1526.33 The participation of the counties in collecting the taxes for the king at this point is verified by the following charter evidences.

On December 4, 1464, King Matthias ordered his tax collectors (dicatoribus), Antal Patai Dezső and Mihály Zsuki, to present him their tax accounts.34 There is no information concerning the representatives of the county authority who were ordered to accompany them (previously Antal Dezső was count of Kolozs and Doboka Counties in 1460). From 1470 there is data pertaining to a royal tax collector of Fehér and Küküllő Counties called Miklós Piri (de Piry).35 A damaged charter of Matthias from 1472 urged the authority of one of the—probably Transylvanian—counties to collect the contributio from the estates of the nobles.36

On February 4, 1499, Péter Szentgyörgyi, the voivode in a mandate to Doboka County—to the comites or the vicecomites and judges of the nobility—and the universitas of its nobility urged them to collect the royal tax (contributio regie maiestatis) from the serfs of the county according to the register of the tax assessors, as the deadline set by the tax collectors, Tamás Harinai Farkas and János Somkeréki Erdélyi, had passed.37

In 1513 the voivode János Szapolyai (1510–1526) forbade Kolozs County from collecting the 47 florins of royal tax (subsidia maiestatis regie) owed by István Zsuki based on his wealth totaling 53 portas. He addressed the order to the authority of Kolozs County and to the tax collectors (exactoribus presentis subsidii);38 in 1518 it was also Szapolyai who sent a mandate to the authority of Hunyad County to gather and hand over to the tax collectors the 60-denar tax offered to the king (subsidium sue maiestatis) by the Transylvanian nobles;39 while in 1526 he ordered Fehér County to pay the royal tax (subsidia maiestatis regie) to the delegate of the treasurer.40

It was possible to compensate for the unpaid taxes directly from the estates of the nobles who denied payment, but this had to be brought into effect by the counties. In 1523 the vicevoivode István Tomori (1523–1526) informed Torda County that there was no longer any need to avenge the estates of Tamás Háportoni Forró as he did in fact pay the taxes (subsidium regie maiestatis).41

In Transylvania tax collection was supervised by the voivode,42 and the related lawsuits also belonged to the jurisdiction of his court, not that of the counties. In 1499, the voivode Péter Szentgyörgyi instructed every Transylvanian county that the lawsuits concerning the contributio due to the king and the courting money should be heard in front of the voivode and not at county courts.43 The example of the lawsuit below does not contradict this principle: in 1483 the voivode, István Báthory (1479–1493), ordered the steward (provisor curie) of Csicsó (Ciceu) castle to bring those servants and serfs of Mihály Szerdahelyi from Retteg (Reteag) who set themselves up for tax collectors and taxed the serfs of István Erdélyi at Virágosberek (Floreşti), Németi (Mintiu), and Csépán (Cepari/Tschepan) to the coming court period of Belső-Szolnok County. So the lawsuit was not about taxation,44 but about the related fraud, and by his authority, the voivode gave the order to the provisor.

Exemptions

In villages owned by and legally “attached” to the Saxon towns and seats but lying in county territory, the taxes paid by the serfs of the county nobility were not collected.45 The “separation” from the county primarily meant the exemption from its authority, but it went hand in hand with the exemption from the taxes collected in the counties as well as the exemption from mandatory soldiering. This of course did not mean that their tax-paying and soldiering duties ended, but that these duties had to be fulfilled according to their new environment. This paper does not aim to list every area that was exempted from county taxation and soldiering (e.g., the whole of the Székely Lands and Saxon Lands, for a while the Fogaras District, which was outside of the county organization, as well as towns that paid taxes in a different way, their lands, and also some market towns). In the following pages we will only discuss those cases that have data on the prohibiting of county tax collectors or on exemptions typically in the case of settlements that previously belonged to the authority of the counties but later were attached to one of the privileged towns, seats, or districts. The orders issued on these matters preserve important, elsewhere irretrievable data mostly on county taxation, as they specify what kind of tax should not be collected there.

The abbey of Kolozsmonostor

As noted above, according to the privilege charter of August 27, 1492 issued by King Vladislas II, the estates of the monastery of Kolozsmonostor were exempted from paying the courting money.46 Based on this it can be assumed that the serfs of other ecclesiastical institutions were also exempted from paying this tax, but as of now no further data confirms this.

The estates of the Saxon Seven Seats and the town Szeben

The inhabitants of the settlements lying in the territories of the counties but owning Saxon privileges were taxed differently than other serfs of the counties. From the fifteenth century numerous royal, voivodal, and vicevoivodal mandates survive which forbade the assessment and collection of the county taxes at the privileged settlements. As the majority of these estates lay in Fehér and Küküllő Counties, the addressees in most cases were the authorities of these two counties or the tax collectors being sent there, and in the case of the royal charters usually the voivodes and the vicevoivodes. For instance, the addressees of the mandate of Matthias dated to June 9, 1475 were the collectors of the one-florin tax of the Transylvanian parts, but primarily those of Fehér and Küküllő Counties, and the grantees were the Saxons of the Seven Seats and Two Seats (‘Zwei Stühle’), the Barcaság (districtul Bârsei, Burzenland, terra), Brassó and Beszterce (both civitates), furthermore the abbeys of Kerc (Cârţa/Kerz) and Egres, and the estates of the provostry of Szeben attached to the Saxons. The reason for this exemption was the obligation of the Saxons to pay a total of 10,000 gold florins, taking care of the division of this burden themselves.47 The methods of taxation applicable to the estates attached to the Saxon seats became established relatively late. In 1473 the envoy of Beszterce to Szeben was informed that the county tax would be collected also from the (county) territories attached to the Seven Seats.48

The exemption of the settlements from taxation had to be provided with recurrent voivodal (sometimes royal) mandates addressed to the vicevoivode, counties, tax assessors, and tax collectors.49

The abbey of Egres, the provostry of Szeben, the lands confiscated from Miklós Salgói, and the estates of the abbey of Kerc

In 1416 King Sigismund (1387–1437) sent a mandate to Miklós Csáki, voivode of Transylvania (1402–1403, 1415–1426), to further allow the hospites living on the estates of the abbey of Egres called Monora, Csanád, Apátfalva (Holdvilág), and Sorostély (all in Fehér County) to join the ‘banderial’ army of the seven Saxon seats and to prevent the Transylvanian nobles from forcing them under their own banderia.50 In 1416 the king, on the request of Imre, his special chaplain and abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Egres, forbade anyone from the occupation or collection of the incomes, the census, and the collecta of the same estates of the abbey after the abbot’s death as he put these lands under the protection of the Seven Seats.51

In 1424 King Sigismund donated the Saint Ladislas provostry to the town of Szeben, including its three estates (Nagyekemező, Kisekemező, Rüsz), and from the estates of Bolkács and Zsidve in Küküllő County, the sections that were confiscated from Miklós Salgói.52

The abbey of Kerc and its estates enjoyed the privileges of the Seven Seats in terms of jurisdiction, taxation, and soldiering already in the thirteenth century,53 but in 1474 King Matthias once again donated the estates to the Holy Virgin Church54 of Szeben.

Péterfalva (Petiş/Petersdorf) and Rovás

In 1486, King Matthias issued a mandate to the Transylvanian voivode and Fehér County in which he ordered that no tax (taxa, collecta) paid by the (serfs of the) nobility of the county shall be collected from the inhabitants of the Péterfalva and Rovás estates, as he attached these territories to the Saxon seats and exempted them from the authority of the Transylvanian voivode and the comes of Fehér County, as well as from soldiering (the two estates were earlier bequeathed by the widow of Péter Veresmarti to the Virgin Mary Church of Szeben).55 In 1488, referring to a royal privilege (exemptionalis), vicevoivode István Telegdi forbade Fehér County from collecting the royal taxes or the courting money from the inhabitants of Rovás as the estate belongs to the Virgin Mary Church of Szeben.56 However, even later on, there were noble holdings to be found at Rovás, where noble and voivodal jurisdiction remained.57

Talmács (Tălmaciu/Talmesch)

The king had the right to remove a settlement from the jurisdiction of the county. In 1453 King Ladislas V (1440–1457)—actually János Hunyadi (1452–1455), who wielded power with the title of chief-captain (supremus capitaneus regie maiestatis)—detached from Fehér County the castles of Talmács and Latorvár (Lotrioara/Lauter), as well as Vöröstorony (Turnu Roşu/Rothenturm) and its related estate and donated these to the Seven Seats. He also extended the Seven Seats’ right to the donated estates,58 the donation being confirmed by Matthias in 1468.59 Later this estate formed the basis of the Saxon sub-seat (Filialstuhl) of Talmács.

Rukkor (Rucăr/Ruckersdorf)

In 1453 King Ladislas V donated half of Rukkor, along with the estate of Talmács, to the Seven Seats,60 but its fate was different than that of other estates because its other half was obtained by the Saxons only in 1486.61 In 1488 Matthias banned the Transylvanian counties and the tax collectors there from assessing taxes on Rukkor, the tax of which had to be added to the census of the Saxons.62

Fogaras and Omlás (Amnaş/Hamlesch)

The district (districtus) of Fogaras and the estate of Omlás came into the possession of the Seven Seats as a royal donation in 1469,63 which then was confirmed by Matthias in 1472 and again in 1483.64 In 1486 Fogaras came back into the hands of its previous owners, the Vingárti Gerébs.65 The villages of the estate of Omlás later formed the Saxon sub-seat of Szelistye (Sălişte/Grossdorf). In 1485 the tax collectors of Fehér and Küküllő Counties had to be forbidden from collecting taxes from Omlás and Talmács (and other Saxon estates).66

Felek (Feleacu) (estate of Kolozsvár)

In 1377 King Louis I gave the ‘sheep fiftieth’ (quinquagesima ovium; this was a tax due to the king) of the Romanian serfs of Felek village to its owner, the town of Kolozsvár, and further forbade the tax collectors from the collection this tax.67 In 1415 King Sigismund also guaranteed the town that the Romanian inhabitants of Felek shall not be obligated to turn in the sheep fiftieth and foodstuffs (prandium),68 and in 1478 King Matthias issued a mandate to the Transylvanian tax collectors forbidding them to oblige the peasants of the two estates of Kolozsvár, Felek, and Fejérd (Feiurdeni; this latter was also donated to the town by him) to pay the taxes collected in the province, as their taxes should be tallied with that of Kolozsvár.69 In 1509 the palatine (1504–1519) and regie maiestati locumtenens Imre Perényi (1509–1510, 1510–1511, 1515) ordered the collectors of the taxa and the contributio of Transylvania not to count the serfs of Felek amongst those of the county, nor to collect their taxes.70

The estates of Brassó

The estates of Brassó that lay in Fehér County were also exempted from the taxation of the county. In January 1496 King Vladislas II—in response to the complaints of the town of Brassó—ordered the tax assessors and tax collectors of Fehér County not to demand provisionment (victualia) from the estates of Tohán (Tohanu/Tohan), Zernyest (Zărneşti), Újfalu (Barcaújfalu; Satu Nou/Neudorf), Sárkány (Şercaia/Schirkanyen), and Páró (Părău/Mikesdorf). This was because he donated them to the Corpus Christi altar of the parish church of Brassó for his salvation and in terms of taxation attached them to the town; therefore its inhabitants shall not pay taxes in the manner of the serfs of noble estates.71

Brassó received Törcsvár (Bran/Törzburg) and its estate from King Vladislas II in 1498 as a pledge.72 On July 24, 1500,73 in terms of paying the contributio and taxa, and soldiering, King Vladislas classified the serfs and other inhabitants living on the estates of Brassó as Saxons, mandating that voivode Péter Szentgyörgyi, treasurer János Bornemissza (1500–1504), and the tax assessors shall tax them accordingly. From the estates mentioned in the privilege—Pürkerec (Purcăreni), Zajzon (Zizin), Tatrang (Tărlungeni), Szentmihály (Cernatu), Türkös (Turcheş/Türkesdorf), Bácsfalu (Baciu/Batschendorf), Krizba (Crizbav/Krebsbach), Apáca (Apaţa/Geist; estate complex of Törcsvár), Sárkány, Mikefalva (= Páró),74 Újfalu (holdings of the town), Zernyest, and Tohán (the latter two belonging to the Virgin Mary parish of Brassó)75—some were in Fehér County and accordingly were exempted from county taxation. On June 24, 1501 in response to the complaints of the magistrates of Brassó and the Barcaság district, King Vladislas II gave a mandate not only to the county authorities but also the universitas of the nobility of the Transylvanian parts that they shall not assess taxes on the town of Brassó and its estates in the Barcaság and the tax collectors should not demand the taxa and the census, because they would then be taxed twice; in the meantime he also ordered the voivode Péter Szentgyörgyi to protect the grantees.76 In 1533, voivode István Báthory (1530–1534) explained in his answer sent to the authorities of the town Brassó that he had received their letter expounding on the privileges and exemptions of the town (namely, that Törcsvár and its parts belonged to the church of Brassó and since the “holy kings” these had been exempted from the contributio, that is from the taxa regia and the exercituatio, or had been paying those together with the Saxons) and that he also received knowledge of the fact that not long before, when the Saxons paid two florins per capita as subsidium, Brassó refused to pay the tax, and as a result the inhabitants of Törcsvár and its parts did not pay the tax at all, be it as Saxons or as nobles.77

The district of Radna (Rodna) (estate of the town of Beszterce)

Not long after the decision of the diet of 1467, which declared that the castle estates of Radna, Omlás, and Fogaras cannot be given away, in the autumn of 1469 Matthias gave the district of Radna (districtus Radna) to the town of Beszterce. The Saxon lands also counted amongst the royal domains, so this did not mean the contempt of the 1467 decision, in the background of which the king’s wishes can be supposed anyway. In 1472 King Matthias—in answer to the complaints of the town of Beszterce—ordered the tax assessors and tax collectors not to tax the Romanians (Vallachos) living in the district of the valley of Radna (in districtu Rodna Velgje).78

Volkány (estate of Segesvár)

Volkány was bestowed to Segesvár from Fehér County by King Matthias in 1487.79 King Vladislas II confirmed it again in 1491,80 and so did King John I (1526–1540) in 1531. In 1501, Péter Szentgyörgyi, the voivode of Transylvania—with reference to the royal donation that the mayor of Segesvár, Anthon Polnar, presented—ordered the incumbent counts, vicecounts, and tax collectors not to collect the royal taxa and the courting money in Volkány, the estate of the St. Nicholas Church of Segesvár; and also forbade the county to fine the people of Volkány, as had happened a couple of times in the past.81 In 1521, when Louis II (1516­–1526) confirmed the belonging of Volkány to Segesvár, he mandated the Fehér County authority and the universitas of its nobility to respect the extension of the rights of Segesvár.82 In 1527 it was Péter Perényi, voivode of Transylvania (1526–1529), who ordered the Transylvanian county authorities and the tax collectors not to force the inhabitants of Volkány to pay in any way the taxes levied on the county, as that would constitute double taxation of the village.83

Pócstelke (Păucea/Puschendorf; estate of Medgyes)

In 1508 Vladislas II exempted the serfs who lived at the part of Pócstelke that belonged to the St. Margaret Church of Medgyes from paying any ordinary or extraordinary royal tax (the estate of Pócstelke was bought for the church by the town),84 and in 1514 he ordered Küküllő County not to collect any tax at all (taxa, contributio and subsidium) in the estate part of Medgyes at Pócstelke.85

The above-listed exemptions (with the exception of Kolozsmonostor, and the its privileges later acquiring Pócstelke) are all recorded in the section of the 1494/1495 royal account book registering the exempted county territories (although it does not give details about the estates of Szeben). According to this source, amongst others, no tax was collected from Fogaras (the king forgave that to its previous landlord, Péter Geréb), from Radnavölgye, from the estates of Szeben, from “Csanád” (this meaning the Csanád, Monora, Apátfalva, and Sorostély estates of the abbey of Egres), and neither from the village of Felek, which belonged to Kolozsvár.86

Conclusions

The direct state tax of the serfs, the chamber’s profit (the lucrum camerae), was collected from 1336 onwards also in Transylvania with other local taxes; however, King Louis I exempted the Transylvanians from paying these in 1366. So far we only have fifteenth-century data on the collection of the so-called courting money in the Transylvanian counties for the upkeep of the delegates sent by the Transylvanian nobles to the royal court. When in 1467 instead of the lucrum camerae King Matthias introduced the tributum fisci regalis and wanted to collect it in Transylvania, an uprising broke out. After its fast repression only the one-florin tax was collected with growing intensity. The collection of the taxes of the counties was supervised by the leading officeholder, the voivode (and his deputy, the vicevoivode). The settlements which belonged to any of the privileged towns (Kolozsvár, Beszterce, Brassó) or to the Saxon Seven Seats, or which received a privilege themselves, were exempted from the jurisdiction of the counties, did not pay the taxes collected by the counties, and did not take part in the banderial army of the counties.

The sources do not suggest whether the counties were divided into smaller units, such as districts, and if so what role these played in taxation.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára, Budapest [Hungarian National Archives, State Archive] (MNL OL)

Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény [Collection of Diplomatic Photographies] (DF)

Diplomatikai Levéltár [Collection of Diplomatics] (DL)

Archiv der Evangelischen Kirchengemeinde Mediasch

Urkunden

Arhivele Naţionale ale României. Serviciul Judeţean Sibiu al Arhivelor Naţionale [Sibiu County Branch of the Romanian National Archives], Sibiu (SJAN-SB)

Magistratul oraşului şi scaunului Sibiu. Colecţia de documente medievale (Urkunden). [The magistrate of the town and seat of Sibiu. Collection of medieval documents (Urkunden)]

Arhivele Naţionale ale României. Serviciul Judeţean Braşov al Arhivelor Naţionale [Braşov County Branch of the Romanian National Archives], Braşov (SJAN-BV)

Arhiva oraşului Braşov, Colecţia Schnell [Archive of city Brassó, Collection Schnell]

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Temesváry, János. Erdély középkori püspökei [The medieval bishops of Transylvania]. Kolozsvár: Minerva, 1922.

Thallóczy, Lajos. A kamara haszna (lucrum camerae) története [History of the chamber’s profit (lucrum camerae)]. Budapest: Weiszmann, 1879.

Trauschenfels, Eugen von. Zur Rechtslage des ehemaligen Törzburger Dominiums. Kronstadt: Gött, 1871.

Tringli, István. “Le contee in Ungheria nel periodo degli Angiò.” In L’Ungheria angioina, edited by Enikő Csukovits. Bibliotheca Academiae Hungariae, Roma. Studia 3. 139–78. Roma: Viella, 2013.

Tringli, István. “Megyék a középkori Magyarországon” [Counties in medieval Hungary]. In Honoris causa: Tanulmányok Engel Pál tiszteletére [Studies in honor of Pál Engel]. Társadalom- és művelődéstörténeti tanulmányok 40 = Analecta Mediaevalia 3, edited by Tibor Neumann, and György Rácz, 487–518. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Történettudományi Intézet and Piliscsaba: Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kara, 2009.

Weisz, Boglárka. “A kamara haszna okán szedett collecta” [The collecta collected on the chamber’s profit]. In „Köztes-Európa” vonzásában: Ünnepi tanulmányok Font Márta tiszteletére [In attraction of “Middle-Europe:” Studies in honor of Márta Font], edited by Dániel Bagi, Tamás Fedeles, and Gergely Kiss, 547–57. Pécs: Kronosz, 2012.

Weisz, Boglárka. “Kamaraispánok az Árpád-korban” [Chamber counts in the Árpádian period]. Turul 83, no. 3 (2010): 79–87.

Weisz, Boglárka. “Royal Revenues in the Árpádian Age.” In The Economy of Medieval Hungary, edited by József Laszlovszky, Balázs Nagy, Péter Szabó, and András Vadas, 255–64. Vol. 49 of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018.

* The research has been implemented with the support provided from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund of Hungary, financed under the K 119 430 funding scheme, and the Hungarian Academy of Science Domus Hungarica Program. I am thankful for the comments of Géza Hegyi and Boglárka Weisz on this article.

(Map drawn by Béla Nagy)

Did Romanians Living on Church Estates in Medieval Transylvania Pay the Tithe?

Géza Hegyi
Research Institute of the Transylvanian Museum Society
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The Romanians of Transylvania, who were followers predominantly of the Orthodox rite, did not pay tithe to the Western Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, again according to the secondary literature, beginning in the fifteenth century, two groups of Transylvanian Romanians were obliged to pay this tax: those living on church properties and those who had moved to settlements formerly inhabited by Catholics (referred to as “terrae Christianorum”). This study deals with the issue of the first group, analyzing the only source that would support the thesis in question, namely a letter of King Sigismund of Luxembourg (which in some editions was dated to 1398 and in others to 1425 or 1426). Although the facts described in the document would correspond to realities from 1426, the contradictory dates, the confusing language, and the absence of the original (the earliest manuscript copies of the text are from the eighteenth century) arouse suspicions. Even if we accept it as authentic, the phrase “decima Volahorum,” which is used in the letter, cannot be interpreted as an ordinary tithe, but only as a royal tax. Neither the late medieval registers of revenues of the Alba Iulia chapter nor the urbaria of the estates of the Transylvanian bishopric offer any evidence in support the thesis according to which Romanians who lived on church properties paid the tithe.

Keywords: Transylvania, tithe, Romanians, church property, source criticism

Introduction

One of the most significant differences between Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity in the Middle Ages was the paying of the tithe. While Catholics had to pay one tenth of their most important agricultural produce to the Church (or its value in currency), members of the Orthodox Church had no such obligation.1 Given this difference, the study of the collection of the tithe in a region in which members of the two Churches lived side by side but in which the Catholic Church was nonetheless the religion of the state (and therefore also the more dominant religious institution) is of particular interest. The following question arises: how did this asymmetrical intercultural relationship affect the original exemption from paying the tithe among Orthodox communities?

In the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the Western Church was compelled to confront this issue when relatively large groups of people who followed the Eastern rite came under its authority, first in southern Italy and then, as a consequence of the Crusades, in the Holy Land and Greece.2 In these areas, which were denominationally mixed, the new landlords preferred to put Orthodox serfs on their estates (which sometimes earlier had been worked by Catholic serfs), from whom they could demand higher seigneurial taxes, since Orthodox serfs did not have to pay the tithe. Since this clearly led to reductions in the incomes of the Western Church, at the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 the Church stipulated, in the 53rd canon, that estate owners collect the tithe from all tenants regardless of whether the serfs followed the Western or Eastern rite.3 We know very little about how this measure was actually put into practice, but with the fall of the Latin states at the end of the thirteenth century, it became irrelevant anyway.

The History of the Research on the Subject

The other region in which communities belonging to the two Churches (the Catholic and the Orthodox) lived intermixed was East Central Europe, or more precisely, Bosnia, Galicia, and Eastern Hungary (including Transylvania), where Catholic Hungarians, Székelys, and Saxons lived alongside comparatively large Orthodox Romanian, Serb, and Ruthenian communities under the jurisdiction and rule of the Hungarian kingdom, which was fundamentally Western in its cultural and religious orientation.

Hungarian and Romanian scholars and historians have studied the question of the relationship between the Romanian communities of this region and the paying of the tithe for a long time. Transylvanian historian József Kemény (1795–1855) did some of the fundamental groundwork on the subject,4 drawing on the source work of József Benkő (1740–1814), Ignác Batthyány (1741–1798), and Antal Szeredai (1740–1798), among others.5 Greek Catholic historian Zenovie Pâclişanu (1886–1957)6 and Orthodox theologian Ştefan Lupşa (1905–1964)7 made Kemény’s findings part of the Romanian historiography, often adding their own interpretations of the sources. In his monumental work on the burdens placed on the serfs of Transylvania in the sixteenth century, David Prodan (1902–1992) offers a relatively short but all the more thorough discussion of this question.8 Historians Andor Csizmadia (1910–1985),9 Ernst Wagner (1921–1996),10 Adrian Andrei Rusu (1951–),11 and Ioan-Aurel Pop (1955–)12 only touch on the question of the “tithe paid by Romanians.” Viorel Achim (1961–), in contrast, has added considerably to our understanding of this question with numerous essays on the issue as it arose in Banat13 and with the publication of several new sources.14 Thus, today he is considered the expert on the subject.

The historians and writers named above are in almost complete consensus on the view that, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Orthodox Romanians did not pay the tithe.15 If from time to time one finds references to Orthodox Romanians alongside the word “decima” in the sources, either this was a reference to a tithe paid to the Archbishop of Esztergom by the king from his incomes (including the fiftieth paid by Romanian-speaking subjects)16 or the Romanian community in question had converted to Catholicism17 (although the Hungarian kings, in an effort to further religious conversion, strove to prevail on the pope to exempt these converts from paying the tithe).18

The situation began to change under King Sigismund, but the changes affected only some of the Romanian communities.19 In Hungary more narrowly understood (i.e. not including Transylvania), with the exception of the efforts of a few prelates (in 1415 and 1469), Romanians remained exempt from the tithe.20 In Transylvania, however, according to the consensus in the secondary literature, first Romanians living on the estates of the bishop and of the chapter were compelled to pay the tithe, followed by the Romanians who had settled on “Christian lands,” i.e. villages or plots which earlier had been inhabited by Catholics.21

An Analysis of the Charter of 1426

In this article, I examine the first of these two cases, i.e. the case of Romanians who were living on estates owned by the Church and the question of whether or not they were obliged to pay the tithe. On the basis of the sources, I throw into question the consensus mentioned above in the secondary literature.

Some historians have dated the start of this practice to 1398,22 while others have dated it to 1425 or 1426.23 When one examines the secondary literature more closely, however, one notes that in each case these conclusions are based on the same source, specifically a letter in which King Sigismund informed the Transylvanian nobility that, the request made by their delegates (Miklós Apafi of Almakerék [Malâncrav/Malmkrog] and László Gyerőfi of Szamosfalva [Someşeni]) notwithstanding, for the moment he would not oblige the Romanians living on the estates of bishops and other Church estates to pay the tithe (“decimam Volahorum episcopalium et ecclesiasticorum exigere distulimus”), since in order to maintain the bishops’ banderia24 and in order for the chapter and other figures of the Church to be able to fulfill their obligations to the military, they would have to tax the Romanians on their estates (“episcopus banderium proprium, capitulum autem et alii viri ecclesiastici certas summas pecuniarum ratione exercitus solvere et propter illas expediendas eorum Volahos exactionari habent”). He did promise, however, to come to Transylvania once the military campaign that was underway at the time had come to an end and to reach a decision on this issue, after thorough negotiations, that would satisfy both parties. In a separate postscript he even exempted the noblemen without lords (“nobiles dominos ... non habentes,” i.e. a nobleman who was unwilling to serve as the familiaris25 of another, wealthier lord) from military conscription (“ab ingressu presentis nostre exercitualis expeditionis duximus supportandos”).26

The different datings by different historians are explained by the fact that, in the clause of the document, at the date formula, the year according to the Christian Era is not indicated next to the place (Visegrád) and the day of the year (“vigilia festi Visitationis Virginis gloriose,” i.e. July 1). True, one should be able to determine the year in which the letter was written on the basis of the three regnal years of King Sigismund specified in the same place (“regnorum nostrorum anno Hungariae XImo, Romanorum vero IIdo, Bohemiae VIto”), but these three dates contradict one another. His eleventh annus regni as King of Hungary refers to 139727 (and not 1398, as it was considered by some of the editors!), while his second regnal year as “Roman” (i.e. German) King refers to 1412, and his sixth annus regni as King of Bohemia to 1426.28 It is possible that individual numbers were distorted when the text was copied or issued, and we could even presume how this distortion took place if we could assume that the Czech annus regni is accurate,29 in other words that the letter was written on July 1, 1426.30 In this case, the original text must have read “regnorum nostrorum anno Hungarie XLmo, Romanorum vero sedecimo,” and the Latin numerals could easily have been miscopied as “XI” and “secundo.”31

The simplest way of verifying the abovementioned emendation, clearly, would be simply to consider the original of the charter. We do not, however, have any such charter, and indeed to my knowledge there are no reliable transcriptions either, neither from the Middle Ages nor from the Early Modern Era. Most of the editions (more precisely, those dated to 1398) are based on József Benkő’s edition, but Benkő did not indicate the source he used. The editions dated to 1426 follow quite faithfully (servilely) one of the copies made by József Kemény sometime around 1840,32 which refers to Count Ádám Székely’s (†1789) collection of manuscripts, which at the time was held in the library of the Calvinist college in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca/Klausenburg).33 The collection is currently held by the Cluj County Directorship of the Romanian National Archive, and one of the two volumes containing the text was indeed found in it, but the volume contained no reference to the source on which the text was based, so it offered no further clues.34 Given the similarities in the ways in which the text was apparently miscopied, however, one can assume that this version and the Benkő edition are closely related and indeed were perhaps themselves based on the same flawed copy.

The text is found three more times in Kemény’s collection of manuscript copies.35 One of these versions is less interesting than the other two because it simply reproduces Benkő’s version.36 In the second, however, the regnal years which were reconstructed by me figured, and, according to this, it was dated to 1426, but Kemény later “corrected” the numbers, prompted by the works of Benkő and Kósa, and changed the year to 1398.37 Thus, it is possible that Kemény was using the original document or, more probably, a better quality copy, a hypothesis which seems plausible in part because some of the names are written using forms that were historically accurate (e.g. Gerew and Wissegrad for Gyerő and Visegrád). The third version of the text, which has not yet been published, is even more interesting. It is found in the copy of the November 1, 1426 transcription made by the convent of Kolozsmonostor (Cluj-Mănăştur), a copy which includes a plethora of explanatory notes.38 The original version of this transcription has not survived either, and again, Kemény has failed to indicate the source, but the use of medieval spellings for names and the almost correct date formula39 suggest that this version is in all likelihood a relatively close variant of the original.

A summary of the letter, dated to 1425, was published by György Fejér, who refers to the Codex Széchényianus held in the Manuscript Collection of the National Széchényi Library as the source, though in all likelihood he never actually set eyes on this codex, since he repeats word for word the corresponding passages from the first catalogue of the collection, which offers ample summaries of the contents of the individual holdings.40 Regrettably, the Codex Széchényianus, which once consisted of eleven tomes, cannot actually be identified among the holdings of the Széchényi Library at the moment, but I did manage, using the old catalogue, to find a version of the text in question dated to 1425 in a volume of copies made in 1792–1793.41 A reference in this work led me to the valuable collection of Dániel Cornides,42 but since this collection also failed to indicate the sources on which it was based, I again failed to find any version of the text dating back earlier than the second half of the eighteenth century, and thus also failed to come any closer to the hypothetical original.

It was necessary to go into detail concerning these texts and the issues surrounding them because the absence of the original and the decisive role played by Benkő and Kemény in bringing the charter into “circulation” casts a shadow of doubt on the source in question.43 However, the manner in which the text has been passed on (down several branches, see Fig. 1) makes it seem highly unlikely that the charter is merely a fabrication cobbled together by erudite eighteenth-century source collectors (even if, given the confusion concerning the date of its composition, it is not free of all doubts). Of course, this alone hardly suffices to confirm its authenticity, and thus further study is necessary, more specifically, an examination of its contents.

 

Figure 1. The textual filiation of the July 1, 1426 charter issued by King Sigismund. I used bold to indicate what was allegedly the medieval original and its transcriptions, italics to indicate manuscript copies made in the Modern Era, and parentheses to indicate textual “witnesses” which today are either lost or inaccessible.

The fact that the source seems to correspond, from the perspective of its genre, to the age in which (one assumes for the moment) it was composed can be cited as evidence of its authenticity. The first examples of comparable “closed letters” (litterae clausae) date to the 1420s, i.e. documents in which only the address written on the exterior indicates the person to whom the letter is addressed, and in the text of the letter only “fideles dilecti” is used as a form of address, but in the line in which the dates are written various years of reign are given (often without the date for the Christian era).44 The various details mentioned in the text seem to correspond to the facts as we know them on the basis of other sources. For instance, there is mention of Miklós Apafi between 1399 and 1446 in the sources and of László Gyerőfi between 1411 and 1430.45 Sigismund was indeed in Visegrád in July of 1426, and he did indeed spend an extended period of time in Transylvania between November of 1426 and July of 1427, as he had promised to do.46 The announcement of the coming war was also accurate, since on June 12, 1426 the king wrote a letter to Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, in which he indicated that he wanted to send three armies to the fields, in part to fight against the Hussites and in part to fight, under his leadership, against the Turks, who Dan II of Wallachia (1422–1431) had driven from his land at the end of May.47 The military campaign was indeed launched in the summer or autumn of that year in accordance with these plans, with only the slight alteration that the royal army was led not by the king himself, but by Pippo Spano, Count of Temes (Timiş).48

The written materials which have survived from the period in question draw a distinction, too, between members of the petty nobility who served as “familiaris” and those without lords (“dominos non habentes”). According to King Sigismund’s decree of 1435 (his so-called fifth decree), the former had to join the army at their lords’ expense as part of their lords’ banderia, while the latter had to do so at their own expense, under the leadership of the count of the county (“eorum comes parochianus”).49 It is quite clear that for the people who belonged to this second group, which was of little value on the battlefield anyway, the exemption in 1426 from having to participate in the military, which was a significant financial burden, came as a relief.

The language and tone of the source, however, are both problematic. While most of the words which seemed to me at first a bit unusual and more part of the Latin used in the Modern Era (for instance, words like conspectum, facunde, gratitudo, subsistens, and involutus) can actually be found in the charters of the time, the same cannot be said of the rare phrases built out of them (for instance “ingratius apparere non debet,” “exigere distulimus,” and “causis rationabilibus subsistentibus”).50 In some places, the sentences are so complex that they are almost incomprehensible, and the text is heavy with interpositions and stylistic frill. This baroque phrasing, furthermore, is coupled with a remarkably restrained and diplomatic tone. The king almost seems to be making excuses for himself to the Transylvanian nobility (which would be odd indeed) for his refusal to compel Romanians living on Church properties to pay the tithe. If one compares this with the clear and simple phrasing and style of similar orders,51 the difference is striking. Thus, while there are strong arguments in favor of considering the text authentic, given the absence of the original and the unusual stylistic features we would be wise to use the charter only with some qualifications and reservations.52

The question of authenticity, however, ultimately is of only secondary importance, since in my assessment we would not be able to use the document as a source in a discussion of the question of the Romanian-speaking communities and the Church tithe even if its authenticity were beyond any doubt. If we interpret the phrase “decima Volahorum episcopalium” as a reference to the tithe as it is generally understood, then why would the document present the notion of the ruler not collecting this “tithe” for a time as some kind of unusual favor or kindness, and why would the nobility of the province complain of releasing it (to the Church!)? Collecting the tithe, after all, was hardly possible without the assistance of the secular authorities (“brachium seculare”) and in particular the support of the king and the participation of the county authorities.53 Nonetheless, in the Middle Ages it did not become an official state tax, since at least in principle the justification for the collection of the tithe was the notion that it was “Christ’s inheritance.”54 In other words, it was the rightful property of the Church and the Church alone. Similarly, although the nobility often came into conflict with the higher clergy over the issue of the tithe, these conflicts never broke out over questions of principle, but rather over the practical matters concerning the tithing on the estates of the noblemen or over personal differences. In the question of how the bishop taxed his own serfs (with a tax, furthermore, that he was entitled, as a “religious right,” to collect from every member of the Catholic Church), laymen quite certainly had no say whatsoever.

One might propose as a solution to this dilemma the changing relationship between the state and the tithe, which was shifting because of the growing threat posed by the Ottoman Empire. Following defeat in the Battle of Nicopolis, at diet held in Temesvár (Timişoara/Temeschwar) in October 1397, Sigismund decreed, at the prompting of the barons and noblemen, that as long as the war with the “pagans” was still underway, every figure of the Church was obliged to surrender half of his income55 for the defense of the border. Furthermore, according to Sigismund’s decree, estate owners were to turn over half of the tithe collected from their serfs directly to the individuals designated by the assembly.56 This measure was still in effect in 1439 (since the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire had hardly vanished,)57 and according to some of the scolars this may well explain the king’s and the nobility’s interest in the question of the tithe in 1426.

An essay was recently published on the implementation of paragraph 63 of the 1397 law, and the conclusions reached in this essay make it easier to verify the above hypothesis.58 Two of the findings are important from the perspective of the question at hand here. One of them is the observation that, when paying this wartime tax, the figures of the Church always turned over precisely the same sum59 to the representatives of the king60 or his treasurer (a sum which varied only depending on the individual institution in question). The exact amount was determined by those compelled to pay it in the course of negotiations with the king,61 and it was not changed at the councils which were later held and announced every year (where the only question was whether or not someone would be given an exemption for the year in question).62 Thus, this wartime tax can be considered a sort of “flat fee,” and it did not in fact depend on the actual income for a given year (the stipulation of the 1397 law notwithstanding).63 Indeed, the state made no effort to determine the actual annual revenues of the churchmen or to seize its precise share of them.

Furthermore, as was determined in the aforementioned article, the misleading phrasing of some of the charters notwithstanding, the tax in question in fact was only paid by the members of the middle layer of the Church, i.e. the provosts and their chapters, the archdeacons, and some of the monastic orders (the Benedictines and the Premonstratensians), not the bishops. The bishops contributed to the defense of the country by keeping their banderia ready and armed (as indeed is indicated in the document allegedly from 1426 under examination here).64 They were only able to do this, of course, by using their incomes as prelates, the vast majority of which came from the tithes collected from the serfs on their estates.65 Thus, it would hardly have been in the interests of the state to have attempted to put these incomes under its direct administration (furthermore, it would have been a violation of canon law). This could only be done when a seat was left empty. When a bishop died, Sigismund often left his diocese under the control of a secular “governor,” and the tithes that were collected from the estates were used to strengthen defenses in the southern borders.66 This practice, however, cannot have been the solution adopted in the case of the situation described in the July 1, 1426 document, since Balázs Csanádi (1424–1427) was serving as Bishop of Transylvania at the time.67

Thus, in my view, the phrase “decima Volahorum,” if indeed existed at all, did not mean the “normal” Church tithe. Rather, it must have been some kind of royal tax which Romanians, specifically, were obliged to pay to the royal treasury. One could mention, as a comparable example, the charter of 1293, in which King Andrew III of Hungary exempted the 60 Romanian families who were going to be settled on the estates of Fülesd (Feneş) and Enyed (Aiud) of the Transylvanian chapter from payment of the so-called fiftieth (“quinquagesima ovium”)68 and the tithe (“decima”). The text is very precise in this case and specifies that this latter is a royal tax too, not a Church tithe.69 Prodan interprets the mention of a tax in both the 1293 document and the 1426 document as a synonym for the fiftieth.70 This interpretation is interesting in part because sources indicate that Sigismund collected the fiftieth from the Romanians of the Transylvanian chapter, neglecting its aforementioned exemption. This happened because the king allegedly bore a grudge against the Transylvanian elite, perhaps because of its mass participation in the uprising of 1403. The chapter only regained its right to keep the “quinquagesima” from Regent János Hunyadi in 1446.71 In this context, it is easier to understand why the nobility of the province protested in 1426 against the favors granted to the Church landlords regarding the collection of the “Romanian tithe” (i.e. the fiftieth). The goal of the king, however, is quite clear from the text: with the exemption, he sought to strengthen military potential of the Church.

Evidence Found in Economic Documents from the Late Middle Ages

Thus, the letter from 1426 does not suffice to prove that the Romanians living on Church estates in Transylvania were compelled to pay the (Church) tithe. Apart from this document, there are no other sources which one could cite in support of this contention. The lists and registries which were drawn up in the Late Middle Ages, furthermore, clearly reveal this notion to be false. In the records concerning the incomes of the Transylvanian chapter in 1477, 1496, and 1504, villages which paid their taxes in sheep (i.e. the villages with Romanian populations) are clearly distinguished from the settlements which paid the Church tithe, i.e. paid the tithe in grain and wine.72 Even if it were possible, in principle, that some of the latter settlements had Romanian populations (too),73 it is still clearly obvious that the vast majority of Romanian villages were not obliged to pay the tithe. The urbarium which was drawn up sometime around 1552 for the estates of the Transylvania bishopric does not indicate which settlements were obliged to pay the tithe and which were not, but the villages which are identified as Romanian (“Walacalis”) or under the stewardship of a so-called “kenezeus” (head of a local Romanian community)74 do not figure in the 1587–1589 tithe-lease registry listing the settlements of the seven Transylvanian counties which paid the tithe.75

Conclusions

As this discussion has shown, there is no real evidence in the sources in support of the contention according to which the Romanians living on Church estates in Transylvania were in a disadvantageous position, from the perspective of an obligation to pay the tithe, in comparison with the serfs living on royal or noble estates (through this contention which has gained widespread acceptance in the secondary literature and is often repeated as something of a cliché).76 In fact, the same principle applied to all of them in the Late Middle Ages: they could only be compelled to pay the tithe if they had settled on so-called “Christian lands” (i.e. in settlements which earlier had been inhabited by Catholics). At most one could suggest that in their implementation of this principle the bishop and the chapter were more consistent when dealing with their own estates than when dealing with the estate of others. This question, however, will have to await further study.

Archival sources

Arhivele Naţionale ale României, Serviciul Judeţean Cluj al Arhivelor Naţionale, [Cluj County Branch of the Romanian National Archives], Cluj-Napoca (SJAN-CJ)

Colecţia colegiului reformat Cluj [Collection of the Calvinist college in
Kolozsvár] (Fond 890)

Biblioteca Academiei Române [Romanian Academy Library], Filiala Cluj [Cluj-Napoca Branch], Cluj-Napoca (BAR-CJ)

Ms. KJ 288/C, Josephus Kemény, Diplomatarii Transilvanici Supplementum, 13 vols.

Ms. KJ 288/D, Josephus Kemény, Diplomatarii Transilvanici Appendix, 22 vols.

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [National Archives of Hungary],
Budapest (MNL OL)

Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény [Diplomatic Photograph Collection] (DF)

Diplomatikai Levéltár [Diplomatic Archive] (DL)

Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtár és Információs Központ [Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences], Budapest (MTAKt), Kézirattár és Régi Könyvek Gyűjteménye [Departement of Manuscripts and Rare Books]

Ms. TörtOkl 2o15–26 és 4o31, Daniel Cornides, Diplomatarium, 13 vols.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár [National Széchényi Library], Budapest (OSzK), Kézirattár [Manuscripts Collection]

Fol. Lat. 1119., Chartae Transsylvanicae diversi argumenti ex documentis fide dignis descriptae.

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ZsOkl = Elemér Mályusz, Iván Borsa, Norbert C. Tóth, Tibor Neumann, Bálint Lakatos, Gábor Mikó, eds. Zsigmondkori oklevéltár [Document Archive from the Era of King Sigismund]. 14 vols. Vol. 1, 3–4, 22, 25, 27, 32, 37, 39, 41, 43, 49, 52, 55 of Publicationes Archivi Hungariae Nationales 2: Fontes. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó–MNL OL, 1951–2013.

 

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(Map drawn by Béla Nagy)

(Map drawn by Béla Nagy)