Volume 2 Issue 4 CONTENTS

Péter Erdősi

The Theme of Youth and Court Life in Historical Literature Regarding Gábor Bethlen and Zsigmond Báthory

This study explores the causes of the sharp disparity that emerged in assessments of two rulers of the early modern Transylvanian state, Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungarian historiography. The author compares two aspects of the images of the princes—their childhood and youth and their courts. Bethlen, born in 1580, grew up in Báthory’s princely court and stood in his service between the years 1593 and 1602. The life paths of the princes of Transylvania were thus interconnected, though biographical constructions originating over subsequent generations symbolically separated them. These constructions highlighted the malleable character and weakness of the disdained Báthory in connection with his youth and court. The fiction-laced development history of the venerated Bethlen, contrarily, depicts the antecedents of exemplary rule, while illustrations of his princely court also serve to emphasize the prince’s virtues. The examined contrasts in the established images of Báthory and Bethlen are a product of a polarizing approach to history by which the tarnishing of Báthory has enhanced the brilliance of Bethlen.

Keywords: princely image, courtly culture, biographical construction, national historiography

There hardly exist two rulers whose appraisal in the historical memory of the early modern Transylvanian state contrast to the same degree as those of Princes of Transylvania Gábor Bethlen (1580–1629) and Zsigmond Báthory (1572–1613)—the former widely considered to be the greatest ruler of the semi-independent principality, while the latter is known primarily for his failures.1 The personalities of these princes can be seen and judged with particular clarity when compared to one another. Such comparison of the contrasting personal attributes of Gábor Bethlen and Zsigmond Báthory likewise presents the opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the logic underpinning historical memory and historiography regarding the two Princes of Transylvania.

This essay will not present a detailed account of the long process involved in the formation of the images of princes Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen from the time of their rule to modern academic historiography.2 Instead, it will emphasize some of the main thematic elements lying at the foundation of comparisons between the two princes of Transylvania. This essay will examine two clearly definable themes within this complex issue: childhood and youth; and depictions of the princely court of Transylvania beginning with Bethlen’s first appearance at the court in 1593 and ending with Báthory’s abdication and emigration in 1602.

Opposing Images: Báthory and Bethlen

The attempt to compare Gábor Bethlen with Zsigmond Báthory may at first appear to be a peculiar undertaking, since comparisons between Bethlen and his immediate predecessor, Gábor Báthory, are both more obvious and customary. The struggle between Gábor Bethlen and Gábor Báthory (Prince of Transylvania 1608–1613) and the formation on the part of the former and his followers of the latter assassinated prince’s image3 offer a clear explanation for the broad disparities existing between representations of the victorious Bethlen and the defeated Báthory.4 Interpretations of the conflict between them become richer in the broader context of representations of the two historical personalities, Zsigmond Báthory and István Bocskai (Prince of Transylvania 1605–1606). Narratives of their lives and rule submit themselves to contrast- and analogy-based patterns. On the negative pole stand the two Báthorys, while Bocskai and Bethlen stand at the positive pole. Bethlen is depicted as Bocskai’s successor, the heir to his objectives, and as such having turned against Gábor Báthory, just as István Bocskai drew away from Zsigmond Báthory. These narratives inform the reader of the reasons for which the paths of the initially allied historical actors deviate: the successes gained following their divergence become more spectacular and convincing if the narrator disparages the unsuccessful predecessor or opponent. This essay attempts to portray the most important themes that impel the dynamic illustrating Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen within the context of the paradigm described above. Its analysis and conclusions are thus based on conjecture and opinion regarding the princes just as much as they are on document-supported fact.

Aside from the success with which they performed the functions of Prince of Transylvania, the fact that posterity has remembered Zsigmond Báthory with disdain and Gábor Bethlen with admiration is due undoubtedly to the success with which they were able to establish cogent and convincing images of themselves and whether long-lasting negative opinions were formed about them. Among the historiographers active during the life of Zsigmond Báthory, the harshly critical narratives of István Szamosközy (1570–1612) and Ambrus Somogyi (1564–1637) foreshadow the generally negative appraisal of the prince formed in the course of history. These historiographers cited circumstances surrounding Báthory’s birth, childhood and youth, his upbringing and the courtly environment to support their portrayals of his unsteady character and capriciousness. The positive assessment of Báthory contained in the works of János Baranyai Decsi and Giorgio Tomasi’s apologia La Battorea published in 1609 did not exercise a major impact on the historical image of the prince.5

Szamosközy’s contention that the volatile political career of Zsigmond Báthory could be explained by his impulsive lack of consistency remained influential into the nineteenth century, when critical scholarship began to examine his rule for the first time. The image formed of Gábor Bethlen during and immediately after his life also endured until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but contrary to the negative opinion that took root with regard to Báthory, was almost universally positive. Bethlen himself contributed to the foundation of this favorable image, establishing a group of reverent followers, including János Keserűi Dajka, Pál Háportoni Forró, Gáspár Bojthi Veres and János Kemény among others, who wrote historical works, letters and memoirs praising the ruler. These laudatory voices overwhelmed expressions of criticism toward Gábor Bethlen, such as those of Cardinal Péter Pázmány, and served as the foundation of scientific research regarding Bethlen beginning in the nineteenth century.6

The extremes contained in the ex post facto assessments of Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen and the genuine differences and interconnections in their lives warrant comparison of youth and the court—two aspects of biography and political environment. While Zsigmond Báthory was raised to be prince as a member of Transylvania’s ruling family, Gábor Bethlen emerged from a much more modest background and the possibility of his becoming prince was not even considered for many years. The religious affiliation of the historians writing about the Catholic Báthory and the Protestant Bethlen obviously influenced their narrations of the princes, just as it did their view of relations between the House of Habsburg and Transylvania. The period in which the lives of Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen intersected also serves to justify comparison of the two Princes of Transylvania: the nine-year interval between 1593 and 1602 during which Bethlen was part of Prince Báthory’s court. Gábor Bethlen became Prince of Transylvania in 1613, the year that Zsigmond Báthory, just eight years his senior, died in Prague just six months following the assassination of his nephew, Gábor Báthory. Gábor Bethlen’s rule as prince of Transylvania thus began the same year that both Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Báthory died.7

Assessment of the Youthful Bethlen

Along with the large number of academic sources published in the final third of the nineteenth century with regard to Bethlen’s reign, the desire arose among historians to understand where this Prince of Transylvania had come from and what factors had exercised an influence on him during his youth. Endre Veress supplemented the existing fragmentary knowledge, some of which was of dubious accuracy,8 surrounding Bethlen’s youth in an independent study published on this topic in the Kolozsvár-based periodical Erdélyi Múzeum in 1914. In this study, Veress published the letters Bethlen had written in the period between his rise to the princely court in 1593 and his accession to the position of Prince of Transylvania in 1613.9 Veress, who as a specialist on the entire Báthory era also plays a key role among historians dealing with Bethlen’s youth, summarized the results of academic research on this topic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

Historical research over the past decades has uncovered details regarding his reign with singular success and has collected hundreds of letters regarding his life. However, just a few of these letters originate from the period of his youth and thus the few occasions on which data emerged from the time before Bethlen rose to the throne counted as true events.10

Veress’s statement on the lack of information regarding this period of Bethlen’s youth between 1593 and 1602 remains valid one-hundred years later. We know from a letter written from Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia, Romania) in 1593 that Zsigmond Báthory more than one year previously had “at the word of many coaxing people” seized property and “upon the exertion of a few primary kinsmen” offered restitution or other lands in return. The letter reveals that the orphaned thirteen-year-old Bethlen traveled to the princely court in Gyulafehérvár to acquire such recompense and that he was confident in the success of this endeavor and counted on the intervention of influential people. The letter states that Bethlen had been occupied with studies until that year and was seeking to engage his services with a lord, perhaps even Prince Báthory himself.11 This was followed by almost a decade of silence during which Bethlen’s relations with Prince Zsigmond Báthory are shrouded in almost total obscurity. The Jesuits who wrote regular, well-informed reports on the affairs of the court do not mention Bethlen. Known charters from the period do not yield sufficient information regarding the youthful future prince to provide contemporary historians with a detailed description of his life path from 1592 to 1602. Not even the presumed support of his influential relatives, notably Bocskai, manifested itself in the form of any duty, function or office that merited citation in charters or private letters originating from this period. Historical literature does not indicate whether Gábor Bethlen was continually in the service of Prince Zsigmond Báthory during these nine years or whether he even lived in Gyulafehérvár during this entire interval. One cannot thus make positive assertions on either account.

In 1600 Gábor Bethlen concluded an agreement with his brother István regarding the division of their lands. The agreement shows that Gábor received the family estates in Marosillye and also reveals the uncertainty of the times, referring to the gloomy possibility of “either pagan or some godless prince or the governor of the country” seizing these lands from him. Following Giorgio Basta’s occupation of Gyulafehérvár, Mózes Székely’s invasion,12 the defeat of Michael the Brave at Miriszló (Mirăslău in Romania) and, particularly, the banishment of Bocskai and the confiscation of his territories at the Transylvanian Diet held in that year provided the brothers with ample cause to attend to the fate of their family estates.13 Zsigmond Báthory’s June 1602 deed of gift, which describes Bethlen as generosus, though it does not reveal his position or office, indicates only that the prince had rewarded his service during the final stages of the struggle for power in Transylvania with an endowment of land.14 Bethlen demonstrably remained loyal to Báthory as he struggled with Ottoman support to retain control over Transylvania even after István Bocskai had taken exile in Prague. Thus the deed’s customary expression mentioning the intercession of councilors in its justification for the gift of land could not have pertained to Bocskai, but rather to those who continued to support Báthory.15 Twelve days following the publication of the deed Bethlen participated on Báthory’s side in the engagement against General Basta and his forces at the Battle of Tövis, just as he presumably did in the course of the prince’s previous campaigns, seeking refuge following the defeat in the Ottoman-controlled city of Temesvár and offering his support to Mózes Székely. We encounter Bethlen again in the pages of Szamosközy’s history, which portrays him as one of the leaders of Mózes Székely’s forces during the 1603 siege of Gyulafehérvár. Bethlen himself later read and annotated this work.16

That described above is essentially all the credible information that is known about Gábor Bethlen from the period of his life between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one years old. Those historians who wanted to say more about Bethlen’s youth—his reflections, his development, his investigations—relied on data contained in later memoirs, accounts and other sources that can scarcely reveal more about the intentions underlying the formation of the future prince’s past than the aforementioned sources, though may appear to be valuable because they originate from “Bethlen himself” or people who knew him directly.

The source attributes described above naturally present historians with a dilemma. The quality and conclusions of their narratives regarding Bethlen’s youth vary depending on the degree, if any, to which they accept sources belonging to the latter category. The decision of historians on this account determines the feasibility of writing a history of Bethlen’s life between 1593 and 1602 that can be of fundamental importance to any analysis of his personal development. Those who reject sources that do not stand up to the test of historical criticism can hardly conclude that there is sufficient credible information available to write a coherent history of Bethlen’s youth.

Numerous historians have nonetheless taken the pains to piece together these ex post facto sources in order to compile a narrative of Bethlen’s youthful development while he was a member of Zsigmond Báthory’s court, some of them drawing heavily upon their imaginations in order to compensate for inadequate information. These historians describe Bethlen in the role of a court page, though they can only make assumptions with regard to his actual duties due to the lack of sources. They typically depict Bethlen lounging about in the court’s antechamber, serving as court messenger and caring for the prince’s hunting dogs in addition to his more significant and valorous participation in military campaigns. These historians tend to associate Bethlen with his “relative” and “supporter”, the distinguished military leader Bocskai, in order to strengthen the historical analogy between the two. The concept of Báthory’s court as the site where the future prince formed his political and diplomatic consciousness, a process that culminated in his participation in a diplomatic mission to Prague, is indeed an enticing one.17

The dispute that arose between Gyula Szekfű and István Rugonfalvi Kiss surrounding the 300th anniversary of Gábor Bethlen’s death in 1629 illustrates the dilemma concerning historical representation as outlined above. In his 1929 biographical synthesis, Szekfű contents himself with Veress’s collection and processing of data regarding Bethlen’s youthful years as a part of Báthory’s court and does not impart any additional information. Szekfű states in the work that the letters published in Veress’s book provide a satisfactory depiction of the “external image” of Bethlen’s early political development, though furnish “precious little” data concerning his “internal development.” The pages of Szekfű’s work dealing with Bethlen’s early years are interesting due to the aforementioned attitude of skepticism, particularly from a methodological standpoint, which the author suggest is the result of the factors that limit the scope of knowledge surrounding figures from the early modern history of Hungary. Szekfű’s observations are not limited to Bethlen, but apply to Hungarian historical personalities from the period in general, suggesting that images of their lives and actions are based almost exclusively on external perceptions, while personal (that is, not public) images are rare and those that exist are conventional and stereotypical.18 Might the reservations that Szekfű maintained toward the romanticized historical images have impelled this practitioner of Geistesgeschichte to reject the notion of certainty surrounding the formation of historical knowledge? Or was he, who otherwise so enthusiastically discussed issues related to the soul or spiritual constitution, simply avoiding the prospect of doing research that would have entailed the exposure of the hidden aspects of the personality and their behavioral manifestations?

Szekfű’s version of Bethlen’s youth is correspondingly short and reserved. In his response, István Rugonfalvi Kiss attributed Szekfű’s methodological scruples to negative bias toward Bethlen. Rugonfalvi Kiss states in his response, which is imbued with boundless respect for Bethlen, that the main mission of historians is to explore the inner world of the historical heroes under consideration—the key to which is an examination of childhood and youth. Rugonfalvi Kiss charges that Szekfű’s theses regarding Bethlen amount to sacrilege, castigating his peer’s decision to, as Veress, reject the historical credibility of information regarding the future prince’s youthful merits and deeds contained in the works of laudatory court literati such as Gáspár Bojthi Veres and János Keserűi Dajka or the accounts of Bethlen himself.19 Disparities in the various narratives of Bethlen’s youth indeed stem from the authors’ decision regarding the validity of the image of the future prince formed by Bethlen and his propagandists. Szekfű long remained among the minority of historians who rejected the historical objectivity of this image. Szekfű’s reservations, that is, his defensive and unaccepting attitude, did not prevent his peers from writing true developmental histories of Bethlen’s early years.

Sources dealing with the childhood and youth of Zsigmond Báthory, who was raised to be prince, were much richer than those dealing with this period in the life of Gábor Bethlen, though the majority of these sources appeared only in the first half of the twentieth century and for a long time did not correct the image based on information contained in the works of Szamosközy and other contemporary historiographers. Sources collected and published by Endre Veress served as the foundation for knowledge regarding the childhood and youth of Báthory in the first half of the twentieth century, providing historians with much more information than those dealing with the same period in Bethlen’s life. However historians did not make significant use of Veress’s documentation and subsequent sources on the same theme appearing in Jesuit publications edited by László Lukács as the basis for works examining the childhood and youth of Zsigmond Báthory until the 1980s.20

Thus whereas the processes of uncovering and utilizing historical sources regarding Bethlen took place in direct correlation to one another, there was a conspicuous interval between the two in the case of Zsigmond Báthory. For a long period of time, it was not possible to find out any more information regarding Báthory’s childhood and youth or subsequent reign than that contained in the negative assessment of him that had imbued the collective historical consciousness. At the same time, researchers devoted attention to the childhood and youth of Bethlen, but it resulted in a rather meager body of historically reliable sources regarding this early period of his life that biographies attempted to enhance through repetition of inadequately supported stories portraying the future prince of Transylvania in a positive light. The contours tracing Bethlen’s early years were formed in accordance to the general knowledge surrounding Zsigmond Báthory’s rule and inferences projecting the known characteristics of the adult Bethlen onto his youthful self. Scientific, though not always critical, historiography did not depart from the dominant opinions formed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarding either Báthory or Bethlen. This essay will depict over the subsequent pages concrete examples portraying the themes and interpretations of historical works regarding the youthful and courtly lives of the two princes of Transylvania.

Possibilities for Comparison

There exists the inherent possibility to make comparisons with regard to such themes as the formability of character, upbringing, education and the use thereof in the course of ruling. Accounts of the lives of Bethlen and Báthory are inclined to seek the origin of both the positive and negative characteristics of the adult princes in their early years and to identify traits in the princes that are either receptive or resistant to the harmful influence of the court environment—in Báthory’s case primarily the Jesuits and the Italian courtiers. Historiographers expressed a significant degree of the customary Bible-based skepticism toward child rulers and impetuous youth with regard to Zsigmond Báthory, doubt from which Bethlen was exempt since he became Prince of Transylvania well after the age of 30. Many historiographers indeed highlight the great breadth of experience that Bethlen had accumulated by the time he became ruler.21

With regard to the differences in the early lives of Báthory and Bethlen, historiographers criticize the former for squandering his talents, while they extol the latter as a man who rose to power through his own resolve and strength of character. They portray Báthory as restless and erratic, while Bethlen was calm and reliable, his pleasures and diversions a function of his “noble passions.”22 The occasionally exaggerated emphasis placed on Báthory’s “Renaissance” education serve to temper the portrayed malleability of his character, though the lesson to be drawn from this emphasis is clear: education is found wanting on the balance of power. The internal division of the character can be highlighted through references to education in terms of the contrast of a high degree of culture with minimal political aptitude. Biographical narratives regarding Bethlen generally suggest that the wisdom he gained from his life experiences, his even temper and sound judgment, his military prowess and his support for culture and intellectual life—a factor connected to the theme of his court building—counterbalanced the prince’s lack of formal education.

Divergent directions opened with regard to the themes of political simulation and foreign political orientation as well. The deceptions of Zsigmond Báthory aimed at misleading both foreigners and his own subjects are considered reprehensible, while in Gábor Bethlen’s case such duplicity is portrayed as legitimate response to the same in others. Báthory’s use of force is usually described as a product of the prince’s arbitrary character, though is occasionally depicted in the context of a certain political-theoretical acumen, namely familiarity with the teachings of Machiavelli. In 1879, Sándor Szilágyi attempted to dispel or mitigate charges among Bethlen’s contemporaries portraying him as a duplicitous despot: “for centuries and decades on end, stories of Bethlen’s deceit were passed on by word of mouth, engraving themselves so deeply in the consciousness of people that the only reason that did not refer to Machiavellianism as ‘Bethlenism’ is that the former word existed before he did.” Szilágyi contended that Bethlen’s detractors were personally biased and excessive in their criticism, portraying changes of allegiance as an established custom when people switched religions and claiming that the Holy Roman Emperor was, himself, simply feigning allegiance with the Turks.23

Zsigmond Báthory’s alliance with the Prague court was depicted as disregard for the “Turkish party – peace party” reality, though when he became disillusioned with this coalition and turned to the Porte, this was portrayed as evidence of his indecision. Gábor Bethlen’s decision to maintain his alliance with the Turks was, contrarily, deemed to be necessary in order to serve the best interests of the country. 24 Historians cited Báthory’s policies toward the feudal estates as the product of the dangerous, stifling despotic régime he had created, while they gladly appraised Bethlen’s exercise of power in terms of so-called national absolutism.

One must unquestionably separate the young Gábor Bethlen from Zsigmond Báthory’s pro-Habsburg policies, which bearing in mind the former’s subsequent pro-Turkish orientation is not a difficult task. Bethlen’s alleged visit to Prague as a member of Báthory’s—or Bocskai’s—delegation corresponds to this objective. However, the Imperial Court “failed to dazzle him, because life had provided him with clear insight from a young age. He noticed the shadows lying behind the splendor, the true lack of power behind the displays of power and, most importantly: the squeezing of the interests of Hungary and Transylvania into the background.”25 Mention of Bethlen’s inadequately documented visit provides the historian with a good opportunity to foreshadow the anti-Habsburgism that constituted the cornerstone of his policies.

It is difficult for those writing developmental histories of Gábor Bethlen to avoid examining the degree to which the experiences of the future prince as part of Zsigmond Báthory’s court influenced his character and later policies. The lack of concrete information regarding this issue opens room for conjecture. Historians are inclined to associate the period that the young Bethlen spent in the princely court in Gyulafehérvár with the broadening of his personal horizons, though refrain from identifying him with harmful influences of this environment that would serve to impair their positive assessment of him. Among the arguments serving to distance Gábor Bethlen from Zsigmond Báthory, images founded upon notions of innate character traits and even “healthy instincts” represent a suitable means of defending the former from the “following the dangerous example, the bloodthirsty and wanton tyrant.”26

Narratives on the life of Bethlen portray the environment of the Gyulafehérvár court not only as the site of his childhood and youthful upbringing, but the scene of princely creation and performance, support for the arts and sciences and various forms of political action and conduct and sometimes as the location at which the politically influential relationship between ruler and consort was formed.27

With regard to the characteristics and assessment of court life in Gyulafehérvár, historians conspicuously praise Bethlen for supporting intellectual education and material culture, while at the same time condemn Báthory for encouraging dissolute pleasures. The material culture at the Gyulafehérvár court is more evident in Bethlen’s case as a result of purchase records that have fortunately survived and were published at an early date.28 These records provide much more information than that available from the list of items that Báthory destroyed, at least according to Szamosközy, the inventory of the plundered Gyulafehérvár palace at the calamitous end of the prince’s reign and other bits of sundry data. Narratives regarding Gábor Bethlen based on available documentation pertaining to material culture conclude that court expenditures were warranted under his rule and that he put its financial affairs in order, whereas the situation under Zsigmond Báthory was just the opposite.

Authors writing about Báthory highlighted his conflict with the intellectual élite composed of humanists who studied at the University of Padua, though failed to mention his foundation of the Jesuit college in Gyulafehérvár with the aim of transforming Transylvania’s capital city into a center of education on the scale of that existing in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania).29 Contrary to the university college that Bethlen founded, Báthory’s Jesuit college ceased to exist as a result of the war, the caution of the Jesuits and the prince’s impending abdication and is thus unmemorable. The achievements that Zsigmond Báthory attained in the field of court culture are either separated from his political deeds or they are portrayed as factors moderating his policies in a forgiving concession of political history to cultural history. Contrarily, there is complete harmony between political policy and court culture in histories of Bethlen.

Szamosközy criticized Báthory’s Italian courtiers as useless from the perspective of the common good, a criticism that became deeply entrenched in historical narratives of the prince, while similar disapproval is absent vis-á-vis Bethlen’s Spanish dance master, Don Diego de Estrada. The use of King Matthias Corvinus as a model appeared to be an appropriate means of analyzing the rule of the princes and their courts. Szamosközy condemned relations between Zsigmond Báthory and his Italian courtiers as an inversion of the praise that Bonfini expressed for the patronage of Matthias Corvinus.30 Szamosközy portrays Báthory as an anti-Corvinus of sorts, while Bethlen is depicted as the reincarnation of the king, such as can be seen in the memoirs of János Kemény.

Descriptions of the court’s moral condition rarely pass up the opportunity to invoke the subject of deviation from sexual norms. In comparison to the amorous failures and adventures of his predecessors—Zsigmond Báthory’s inability to consummate his marriage and Gábor Báthory’s seduction of even the wives of the lords—Gábor Bethlen’s sexuality is either portrayed as conventional or is not highlighted. Narratives regarding Bethlen depict his consort, the German-born Catherine of Brandenburg, within the context of stereotypical intricacies of women of the court.31 Catherine is thus remembered less favorably than Zsigmond Báthory’s consort, Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria, who is regarded primarily as a victim of the latter prince’s erratic nature.

The contrasting viewpoints surrounding the personalities of Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen tend to dissipate when the princes are examined from a greater perspective in which their individual actions and personal characteristics are interpreted as functions of the process of assimilating European culture in Transylvania and not as mere factors governing their political practices. József Bíró, for example, described Zsigmond Báthory as an outmoded “baroque character” with “his rambling imagination and extravagance” amid the burgeoning Renaissance culture of his age, whereas he depicts Gábor Bethlen as “the greatest Transylvanian patron of Renaissance art” whose “cultural policy, radiant court and entire lifestyle” attempted to “transplant the European spirit in Transylvania.”32

Gyula Szekfű examines the courts of Báthory and Bethlen from the perspective of Transylvania’s distance from Europe, foreignness, national character and the successful adaptation to the western model. Szekfű wrote that “the court of the Prince of Transylvania . . . existed in the distant East, where hardly any foreigners ventured and if they did marveled primarily at the unexpected foreign, Italian elements: musicians, dancers in the court of Zsigmond Báthory.” With regard to Bethlen, Szekfű asserted that “he is the first to keep a truly Hungarian princely court,” which westerners consider to be barbarian from afar, though are convinced of the opposite after first-hand experience shows them its true ambiance of courtesy and culture.33 István Rugonfalvi Kiss suggests that Gábor Bethlen carried on the courtly precedents of Zsigmond Báthory, writing in connection to the former prince of Transylvania that “This is how he came to know Zsigmond’s brilliant court, which he later imitated.” However, Rugonfalvi Kiss was referring only to the culture of the court, supplementing the latter sentence with the following statement regarding Bethlen: “Zsigmond Báthory’s volatility soon devastated his peaceful, harmonious development and with it the happiness of Transylvania.”34

Thus knowledge surrounding the youth and courts of Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen are based on assessments of their personalities, lives and entire character of their rules. Observations or omissions in narratives about the prince demonstrate the sensitivity of the question regarding the reality that the early influences on the idealized Bethlen, his political experiences and the antecedents to the building of his court, could be sought in the person of the scorned Báthory. Reservation and inhibition concerning this issue is, of course, largely related to the labels placed on the two princes, though stems also from the fact that the study of princely courts was long a dependent subcategory of political history. The theme of the court of Transylvania hardly appeared in historiographies and was long connected to an excessive degree on the life histories of the princes and depictions of their political actions and personal characteristics. In this way, evaluations of the princes projected themselves on interpretations of the court.

How might the increasingly independent discipline of court research emerge from this condition? The first task would be to remove the aforementioned labels. Court researchers can break free of the biographical constraints that have circumscribed this discipline without calling the importance of biographical and political-historical correlations into question. However, the most far-reaching necessity would be to analyze the long-term processes extending beyond the rule of individual princes in the same spirit with which Zsolt Trócsányi transcended the boundaries of political-historical periodization in his examination of central government. One of the main questions stemming from the issue currently under consideration is: what was lost from sixteenth-century court life as a result of the Long War and what survived to reemerge in the seventeenth century. Those who sought Transylvanian models for the regeneration of the court in the latter century often found such paradigms primarily in the period of Zsigmond Báthory’s rule. At the same time, forcing this image of reproduction would lead toward the opposite extreme in which foreign influences and the role of renewal are neglected and models known to Bethlen and his contemporaries confined to those found in the sixteenth-century Gyulafehérvár court.

Reducing the weight of political-historical narrative and the focus on personal acts and character makes the court appear to be less a creation of individual princes than a collective product of a society or culture to which the ruler makes a personal contribution. This shift in approach can serve to heighten the perception of continuity and discontinuity between the eras of Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Bethlen. Viewed within the context of the broad research problem undertaken from the former perspective, the manner in which Gábor Bethlen regarded his personal memories of Zsigmond Báthory’s rule in the course of building his own court and the magnitude to which the precedents of the final decades of the sixteenth century served as patterns in this endeavor represents an issue of only modest importance.

With regard to Bethlen’s personal experience and memory, the existing knowledge surrounding the early period in the future prince’s life can contribute little to the elaboration of the similarities and differences between the two courts until the emergence of new dependable sources. An examination of Bethlen’s life before he came to power suggests that the military experiences he gained between 1593 and 1602 were of crucial importance to his later performance as ruler of Transylvania and placed him on a similar military-political course as his frequently cited analogue, Bocskai.35 At a personal level, Bethlen did not represent continuity in terms of central government, diplomacy or court culture, gaining the knowledge and experience required to conduct affairs in these areas only during a later period of his life.

Summary

To summarize, the demonstrably corresponding aspects of the political practices and court culture of Báthory and Bethlen are nevertheless subject to contrasting interpretation within the context of disparate assessments of their life histories. The religious affiliation of those who wrote about Báthory and Bethlen provides one possible reason for the sharp disparity in interpretation surrounding the princes, the former a pro-Habsburg Catholic and the latter an anti-Habsburg Protestant. However the religious bias that so deeply divided nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography is not enough in itself to explain the entrenchment of radically contrasting evaluations of Báthory and Bethlen. One must also take into account the impact of assessments of the princes based on the degree to which the personal and dynastic interests of the princes coincided with those of the political community. Another factor that contributes to the contrasting appraisals of the princes is the perpetuation of the premodern phenomenon according to which the court, the state and the ruler are regarded as associated and mutually representative entities forming a symbolic unity.

The contrasting images of Gábor Bethlen and Zsigmond Báthory are highlighted prominently in the writing of the history of the Hungarian nation: whereas the former is portrayed as an indispensable, exemplary, continuingly relevant, power-projecting hero figure, the latter is deemed unsuited to fill this role. It is simply not significant enough—laudatory attention is not directed toward his losing, prodigal-son personality and his court. The cult-building approach to history based on making sharp contrasts rather than nuanced comparisons serves to further strengthen the image of Bethlen’s greatness. Such glorification implicitly entails the degrading of others. The historical images of Zsigmond Báthory and Gábor Báthory thus grew increasingly dark as a means of casting an even more brilliant light upon Bocskai and Bethlen.

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Translated by Sean Lambert

Volume 2 Issue 4 CONTENTS

András Kovács

Gábor Bethlen and the Construction of the New Seat of the Transylvanian Princedom

The development of the town of Gyulafehérvár into a town of central importance in the middle of the sixteenth century took place at the same time as the formation of the Transylvanian principality. The town became increasingly important as the princes of Transylvania consolidated power, first in the time of the rule of the Báthory family and then under the rule of the Bethlen and Rákóczi families. This essay presents the measures that were implemented by Gábor Bethlen, his predecessors, and his successors in the interests of developing and fortifying the town and transforming it into a fitting site for the court of the prince.

Keywords: Seat of Transylvanian Princedom, Princely Court in Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia), Gábor Bethlen, Collegium Academicum

After the fall of Buda in 1541, the royal court, which had fled with queen Izabella to Transylvania, occupied the palace and demesne of Bishop János Statileo in the interlude following his death in 1542. In 1556, with the spread of the Reformation they took possession of church estates and the town became as a matter of fact the center of the prince’s lands and the seat of the Transylvanian principality.

In his study of the venues for the Transylvanian General Assemblies, Zsolt Trócsányi has noted the growth in the significance of the town of Gyulafehérvár (Karlsburg in German, today Alba Iulia in Romania) parallel to the rise in the power of the prince, first under the rule of the Báthory family and later in the era of the Bethlen and Rákóczi families.1 In both periods of consolidation one can clearly discern efforts to make the former seat of the Bishopric a town suited to its new role. The available seventeenth-century sources make the study and analysis of these efforts considerably simpler than research on endeavors in the sixteenth century, so in this article I offer an overview of the most important measures taken under the rule of Prince Gábor Bethlen with the aim of transforming Gyulafehérvár into the effective seat of the princedom.

The Place of Gyulafehérvár among the Cities of Transylvania

Gyulafehérvár was hardly an ideal capital. Formerly the seat of a bishopric and its chapter, its economic and legal framework, adapted primarily to satisfying the needs of its lords, could not compete with the towns of Szászsebes (Mühlbach in German, today Sebeş in Romania) or Szászváros (Broos in German, today Orăştie in Romania), for instance, both of which were in the same market district, nor could it rival Nagyenyed (Straßburg am Mieresch in German, today Aiud in Romania), another market (agricultural) town (oppidum). The new lords of the town occupied the houses of the canons and prebendaries, which had been left empty, and divided the tenants of the bishopric and chapter amongst themselves. In the second half of the sixteenth century they began to transform the town to meet their demands. Contemporaries must have perceived more clearly than we do that the medieval castle, originally developed from a Roman castrum, with its obsolete fortifications and lack of a supply of fresh water, could offer little protection in the event of a well-prepared siege.2 In the middle of the sixteenth century it was fortified at the initiative of Giambattista Castaldo with the addition of four defensive trenches, four bastions, and four artillery platforms. According to Giovanandrea Gromo, “it would have been able to withstand any large-scale attack for a time.”3

In the last three decades of the sixteenth century the first water-supply network was constructed in Gyulafehérvár, a canon foundry was created, work on the palace and churches, symbols of princely representation, was resumed, and the first residences of the municipalities appeared. It is nonetheless striking that, at least as far as we know now, little was done in these decades to strengthen the castle’s defenses.4

The most striking record of the vulnerability of the castle is perhaps the description written by István Szamosközy (Stephanus Zamosius) about the two sieges of the town in 1603. Szamosközy may have clad his narrative in a classical mantle, but hardly exaggerated the horrors he had witnessed. The state of affairs after the sieges is apparent from the attempt—doomed to failure from the outset—by Gábor Báthory to move his seat to the middle of the Saxon Lands of Transylvania, the well-fortified town of Szeben (Hermannstadt in German, today Sibiu in Romania). Immediately after assuming the throne, prince Gábor Bethlen had to promise to leave the town of Nagyszeben, not the least in order to consolidate his own situation, and the very fact that he managed to obtain a few months’ reprieve indicates that the seat of the principality was for all practical purposes uninhabitable, and even the Saxons, who were impatiently pressing for the reassertion of their privileges, had to recognize this.5

The Building Operations of Gábor Bethlen

As early as the spring of 1614 the prince made a proposal at the General Assembly in the town of Medgyes (Mediasch in German, today Mediaş in Romania) on the construction of the castle of Gyulafehérvár.6 The positive response of the estates, who offered one florin and one day-labourer per gate and one wagon with four oxen for every five gates for the building of the princely seat,7 may have been prompted by the response that the Saxon community gave to the proposal: “as regards the construction of Gyulafehérvár, we wish to shoulder a third of it, though we have suffered great losses, but only if the two nations undertake the construction work.”8

Only some of the resolutions were implemented, and when the question of the public work came up again at the assembly in Gyulafehérvár in the spring of 1615, the sixth article of the new decrees indicated that it was precisely the Saxons who had not honored the commitment they had made a year earlier. The estates decided that they should make up for the missing public work, while, on account of political situation, they postponed the affair to the autumn,9 and in October at the assembly in Kolozsvár (Klausenburg in German, today Cluj in Romania) they did adopt the resolution regarding new support for the construction.10 The work was further delayed the following spring because of the complications involving the transfer of the castle of Lippa (today Lipova in Romania). In accordance with the resolutions of the two General Assemblies held in 1616, the public work first of Zaránd county and later of all the counties, which originally had been intended for use in the construction work in Gyulafehérvár, were redirected to reinforce Borosjenő (today Ineu in Romania), which had assumed the defensive role of the castle in Lippa .11 Thus as was the case in Nagyvárad (Großwardein in German, today Oradea in Romania), the prince was only able to begin work on the construction project in the spring of 1618, still relying on the resolution of 1616, as mandates addressed to the councils of Kolozsvár and Beszterce (Bistritz in German, today Bistriţa in Romania) indicate.12 At the General Assembly held in the autumn of 1618 in Kolozsvár a resolution was again passed regarding the “construction in Gyulafehérvár” and a pledge was made to begin work by the spring of 1619.13 Data from 1619 suggest that the work had progressed significantly, if perhaps with some delays.14 The lines of a panegyric composed in December 1619 by Pál Háportoni Forró describe the prevailing circumstances before the first military campaign into Northern Hungary: “Over the past summer in the princes’ residence, Gyulafehérvár, something wondrous, having started building reinforcements for two large bastions, with these large defensive bastions in many places at the same time and all simultaneously they built with such diligence that it seemed to grow not by the work of hands, but on its own.”15

The construction work in the town lost considerable momentum at the time of the military campaign into Northern Hungary (1619–1621). At the General Assembly in Gyulafehérvár in 1620 the issue of the bastions was again on the agenda and the estates decided at the time to continue the construction work, “that we not be seen as having left our work half-completed in the case of such a grand and good, praiseworthy issue.”16 As is made clear by decisions reached in May 1622 regarding the completion of the communal work and its yearly accomplishments, construction continued the following year, in spite of the fact that the National Assembly requested a temporary suspension of the work on account of the increased tax to be paid to the Porte.17 This decision settled the question of the construction work until the end of the prince’s reign.18 Records that can be dated to 1623 indicate that the Chapel of Saint Nicholas, which was not far from the southwest corner of the castle, was demolished by then, as was part of the old castle wall.19 The Chronicon Fuchsio–Lupino–Oltardinum, a source written in Saxon that is sprinkled with numerous details (which given the contemporary nature of the source are in all likelihood authentic), reports on the construction of the two bastions.20 Under the year 1627 a passage that was written not long after 1629 summarizing the virtues of the prince gives an account of the events in Gyulafehérvár. This section contains lifelike descriptions that could not be familiar either to the nineteenth-century editor Joseph Trausch or to the authors of the texts on which he drew. They make it possible for us to understand the essence of the 1614 decision of the Diet, namely that the prince assumed responsibility for the task of building the southwest corner bastion (which contained his palace) and the Saxons undertook to build the southeast bastion, known as Kendervár, which surrounded the foundry where canons would be cast. The construction of the two northern bastions of the castle was made the task of the counties and the seats of the Székely Land.

The prince did a “laudable” job discharging his responsibility, as did the Saxons, who in 1627 left a monument to the task they had performed, a composition consisting of an inscription and a suit of coats of arms on the Kendervár bastion. The authenticity of the records is confirmed by the description of the shields in the coats of arms and by the names: Valentinus Laurentii alias Pfaff (a senator from Szeben and the foreman who oversaw the construction of the bastion), Michael Lutsch (the royal judge of Nagyszeben), and Colomann Gotzmeister (the Saxon count). The coats of arms allude to a seal21 used at the Saxon University as early as 1372 and even after 1659, with the significant difference that according to the description, quite possibly at the whim or even involuntary reflex of the nineteenth-century editor, the eagle, which looked to the right and thus was a symbol of Louis I of the House of Anjou (king of Hungary from 1342 to 1382) as king of Poland (from 1370 to 1382), was modified to form an Aquila Biceps, the two-headed eagle who looks both left and right. Also the crown above the composition was omitted, probably from the original as well. After 1714 these adornments were demolished and therefore were no longer available for view.

Also underpinning the authenticy of our source is the anecdote cited, whose explicitly Saxon point of view, the keen censure of the county nobility, and the emphasis on the financial burdens shouldered by the Saxon community all seem to stem from a contemporary experience. The anecdote also sheds light on the resolutions of the General Assembly regarding the project: the prince and the three nations had agreed to made additions and fortifications to the castle, but the resolutions had not addressed the construction of palace at the expense of the prince or the reconstruction of the towers of the cathedral, which was also launched at the initiative of Gábor Bethlen. The coats of arms on the bastion built by the Saxon nation and the content of the inscription demonstrate that this was indeed a shared undertaking. The skilled workers (masons, brick-makers, people who worked the lime-kilns and carpenters) were paid out of the financial contributions and the wains and unskilled workers worked under their oversight.22

As skilled craftsmen could usually only be found in the towns where the guilds were located, their participation in the construction project hit the communities in which they lived hard. The loss of time that came with travel and poor organization, and the limited payment in the 1620s, hardly made the work attractive to them, although it was included as an obligation in their charters of incorporation and was considered one of their obligations to the prince. This explains the desertions and the “ruses” mentioned in letters by the prince and Simon Pécsi. The prince was able to build his own bastion, as was the Saxon nation, but there was hardly any workforce with which to construct the bastions of the counties and the Székely seats. Much of the edifices, which resemble the bastions in Várad, still stand today. They were incorporated into the eighteenth-century ring of fortifications, thus allowing us to draw approximate conclusions regarding the extent of the construction efforts. The face of the western (“prince’s”) bastion, which is between the two bastions that were added to the southern corners of the 340×340 meter square of the former Roman castle, is 119.5 meters high. It is joined to the castle wall by a 21 meter gorge with casemate. A 76 meter long part of the face of the partially destroyed Saxon bastion on the eastern corner is still standing today.

At the same time, the distance between the two southern bastions, roughly 435 meters, indicates that on the southern side a third of the curtain wall was covered by the bastions, so the firepower of the castle grew dramatically. The mantle of the bastions, which were edged with ashlar, were built of brick, except for a strip in the middle third of the prince’s bastion, which was built of blocks of unhewn stone. The beveled base of the bastions were separated from the upper band of the wall face by a semicircular string-course built of brick. The bastions were only later filled with pebbles and dirt, probably during the reign of György Rákóczi (who ruled from 1630 to 1648). The princess Zsuzsanna Lorántffy’s hanging garden was made at that time in the southwest bastion.23 The flora and structure changed with the fashions in gardening, but to this day it still retains something of its spirit of a bygone age, with its winding paths and their Roman inscriptions and its quiet nooks, which invite one to meditate and reflect.

Figure 1. The Fortifications of the Castle of Gyulafehérvár. 1687. Sketch by an Italian Military Engineer.
Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, Magyar Történelmi Képcsarnok. T. 8913.

The next step in the project, however, the complete construction of the defensive ring, was not continued under Gábor Bethlen, and one finds no reference to it in later sources either.24 In spite of the fact that in other places György I. Rákóczi sedulously continued the work of building castles begun by his predecessor, no further fortifications were made to the town of Gyulafehérvár. We can do little more than venture tentative hypotheses as to the underlying reasons. The aforementioned difficulty of procuring the necessary skilled craftsmen might well have been one significant factor, but one might also consider the possibility that in the meantime the builders themselves had noticed, perhaps with some astonishment, the indefensibility of the castle, the inadequacy of its corner fortifications, and the vulnerability of the walls—which were surrounded by little more than dry ditches—to mines, and their observations would have been all the more keen given the growth in the role of artillery at the time.25

This explanation for the dwindling interest in the fortifications of Gyulafehérvár is also supported by indirect observations. The resolutions of the General Assemblies make clear that the estates made financial contributions in order to meet their obligations with regards to support for the construction instead of actually contributing to the workforce.26 In all certainty György Rákóczi did not use these sums to compensate for the work left undone by sending the tenants from his estates, thus one can conclude that the construction of the castle was simply not resumed. Instead of continuing work on the Gyulafehérvár castle, the prince had to search for other solutions in the event of an attack against him and his court.27 The castle of the town of Fogaras (in German Fugreschmarkt, today Făgăraş in Romania), which belonged to the princess, seemed the perfect place to take refuge. It had wide moats and as of the end of the late sixteenth century an external ring of defensive fortifications with four bastions, three of which had been built between 1619 and 1626 and perfected during the reign of György I Rákóczi. What is more, in 1638 in a profession of allegiance to György I. Rákóczi the people of Szeben pledged to allow the prince and his escort entry into the well-fortified town “in a time of need.”28 This pledge constituted a recognition of the fact that, considering the prevailing circumstances in Transylvania in the middle of the seventeenth century, Gyulafehérvár could not be effectively defended from potential threats. It is therefore hardly surprising that a “Lusthaus” was built to fill the southwest bastion and the castle walls that formed the southern front of the prince’s palace contain a row of Renaissance windows, indicating that by the late years of the reign of Gábor Bethlen, who had initiated the transformation of the structure, any thought of preparing the castle to endure a serious siege had been abandoned. Parallel to the fortification of the castle of Gyulafehérvár, work also began on projects to beautify the seat of the principality. Under his rule, which lasted barely fifteen years, a two-storied block consisting of three courtyards began to take form in the southwest corner of the castle the floor plan of which was 195×69 meters. It was intended to fulfill a symbolic function as a representation of the ruling house and an example for all of the construction work taking place across Transylvania of new technical and ornamental innovations. In the early years of the prince’s rule, parallel to work done on the palace in order to make it a livable dwelling place, the cathedral, which had been badly damaged in the upheavals of the turn of the century, was restored and later continuously embellished and beautified.

The revivification of the town as the seat of the principality constituted a more difficult task. The sieges, the abuses of the military administration, the flight that took place in 1603, the absence of the prince’s court (which was the foundation of the economy of the town) for a prolonged period of time doomed the people of the town to a state of stagnation or prompted them to leave and seek their fortunes elsewhere. In January 1614 the prince saw to it that Gyulafehérvár regain its privileges (which it had lost in the course of the wars), and he granted the people of the town exemption from taxation.29 The letter of privilege that was issued in 1625 helped populate and revive the town. With this letter, Gábor Bethlen exempted his subjects in Gyulafehérvár from taxation and service, with the exception of the construction of Kendervár, the cultivation of the prince’s garden, and maintenance of the Gálffy house (which was used to receive foreign emissaries) and the water-supply network, which was still under construction. The letter of privilege also enabled new arrivals to the town, regardless of their origins, to purchase any vacant lot at the appraisal value if they undertook to build on it.30 The new water-supply network, the construction of which had begun in the 1620s, also helped further the reconstruction of the castle and the town. By the end of the prince’s rule the network reached the wells in front of his palace,31 and in the following decade the water that came from the springs in the western vineyard, which flowed into the town through underground tile pipes four kilometers long, was fed into the palace, the hanging garden in the southwest bastion, and the prince’s garden along the southern side of the castle.32

In the last years of Gábor Bethlen’s rule the area around the palace (which in the meantime had grown) and the town behind the castle walls were also renovated and restored. Ever since the era of the Báthory family it had been customary for the counties, towns, and county seats within the borders of the principality to procure housing in the town for the representatives they sent to Gyulafehérvár. According to the earliest relevant sources, the towns of Szeben,33 Brassó34 (Kronstadt in German, today Braşov in Romania), and Kolozsvár35 all had houses in Gyulafehérvár.36 Later sources dating from the end of the seventeenth century indicate that in practice every municipality had a house in the seat of the principality. These buildings varied significantly. Alongside the prestigious houses found within the castle walls there were more modest houses in the outskirts that were used solely as lodgings for emissaries to the General Assemblies, who came to address questions that had arisen at the court. In the last years of the prince’s rule the owners of these houses and their households were obligated by a decree of the General Assembly to rebuild their homes and to replace the wood tiles of the roofs with earthenware tiles in order to prevent the spread of fire.37

The work began, as we can conclude on the basis of information pertaining to the Kolozsvár house,38 though in all likelihood not all of the buildings were completed by the new target date, the autumn of 1629.39 The prince had another, more ambitious plan for the town as well, though one finds only one modest (but all the more valuable) reference to it in the sources. In the middle of September 1627 György Sükösd, the builder of the manor house in Alsórákos (Ratsch in German, today Racoş in Romania) sent a letter to the magistrate and council of Beszterce regarding the town’s house in Gyulafehérvár. The letter indicates that in the early fall the prince himself had attempted to transform the town according to his own visions.40 He had designated sites where each of the counties, towns, and “other posts” would build houses for their emissaries to the town, without, however, giving any consideration to the question of who owned the houses that already existed. According to the letter he also ordered the servants of his court to purchase the houses in the street in which the house for the town of Beszterce was found at appraisal value, regardless of their location or distinctive features or the demands of the market, i.e. for much less than the actual value of the buildings and the plots of land. The author of the letter asked the council to allow him to purchase the house that was in the possession of the town of Beszterce.

What is surprising about the letter is not that Sükösd wanted to obtain permission to purchase the Beszterce house, but rather that the prince hoped to take advantage of a decades-old tradition of purchasing homes in order to transform the town of Gyulafehérvár, and he sought to do so in the spirit of the early representatives of Renaissance attitudes to architecture and the visions of Utopian thinkers regarding social engineering by separating topographically, within the town, the political representatives of the estates, counties and towns. There is no trace in the letter of any kind of solidarity among the estates. The author seeks simply to obtain more comfortable lodgings in the town by presenting himself as a supporter of the prince’s will.

The prince’s vision for the town was an impossible Utopia. Not surprisingly, the owners protested against his plans to dispossess them and turn over buildings they had owned and maintained for years as representative edifices, in particular the towns that stood to lose their houses. Nonetheless the plan itself clearly fits into the series of measures described above, measures that were undertaken by the prince with the intention of transforming Gyulafehérvár into a genuine capital. It offers a sense of the bustle and haste that were characteristic of the last years of his rule. One discerns no trace whatsoever of his attempt in the 1711 drawing by Visconti, which essentially depicts the town much as it stood in 1658, after the changes that had been made under the rule of Gábor Bethlen. Szász street (which was also known as Szeben street), where the town of Beszterce purchased a house in 1624 for 110 florins (the very house György Sükösd had hoped to acquire), was probably the street that ran between the college and the eastern castle wall, continuing from there along the northern wall of the castle, the street in which the house purchased by the town of Beszterce in 1624 was found, in a prestigious neighborhood, near the home of scribe András Tordai and the houses owned by Segesvár (Schäßburg in German, today Sighişoara in Romanian), Medgyes, Brassó, and Szeben.41

The plan for the edifice of the “upright” college also fits, both chronologically and from the perspective of its ambitiousness, into the prince’s plans to transform the town. This plan began to take form at the same time as the abovementioned initiatives, i.e. 1627–1628. In the spring of 1622 the General Assembly decided on the construction of the college. The site was to be the buildings—which lay in ruins—of the Franciscan and later Jesuit cloister in Farkas street in Kolozsvár. However, this resolution notwithstanding, the college began to function that year in Gyulafehérvár in the former Jesuit cloister and school42 that had been used decades earlier, in all likelihood as a gift of Gábor Báthory, by the Calvinist school, which had been given the title of college by the Jesuit priest István Szini. In response to the changes that took place after 1622 (primarily in 1623) following the departure of Martin Opitz and his adherents, in the fall of 1624 István Szini may have told his superiors that Gábor Bethlen was building something in Gyulafehérvár similar to what had been destroyed by Tilly in 1622: “Heidelbergensem Academiam hic erigere conatur, accersitis undique professoribus, inter quos est Molnar et Gallus quidam Rupensis professor.”43 The prince’s plans, however, were realized only very slowly. This is indicated, for instance, by the failure of the plans to invite Albert Szenczi Molnár, which corroborates Szini’s contentions.44 The turn came in 1627–1628, when at the command of the prince the construction of the new college began. According to the Saxon source cited earlier, while the craftsmen and artisans were at work on the construction project, the prince sent Gáspár Bojthi Veres to Germany to bring professors to the college. He returned from this “fact finding” trip, from the German village of Herborn, in December 1628 and recommended Alstedt, Bisterfeld and Piscator to the prince. In May 1629 he traveled back to Germany with letters of invitation from the prince, and the younger and more mobile Bisterfeld returned with him to Transylvania in August.

In the meantime work on the college had progressed, and according to our source by the time of the death of the prince roughly a third of it had been completed.45 As is the case with the previous citation, this contention is retrospective, and in later rewritings and variants the history of the college included events of the eighteenth century as well, but the source offers a precise account of the information that is relevant here, namely the travels of Gáspár Bojthi Veres, as is evident if one compares it with other sources.46 The return of the court historian to Segesvár with “certain Calvinist books” again appears to be based on personal experience, so the information regarding the dimensions and unfinished state of the construction seems credible, and it is confirmed by József Benkő’s Transylvania specialis, written entirely independently of the source mentioned here.47

Two texts that were only recently discovered and have not yet been consulted with regards to the history of the college offer further significant information. Both of them date from 1716 and both are the work of András Zilahi, a professor at the college who was writing on the history of the school, the legal status of the disputed properties of the Church in Gyulafehérvár, and the status of the Calvinist Church in general.48 Writing on the college,49 he contends that the Jesuit college, which had been in the possession of the Calvinist Church until 1702 and had provided lodgings for “private” students from Gyulafehérvár whose board was paid for out of tax revenues, might have been given to the school by Gábor Báthory. The college, he claims, was built by the prince himself on his own hereditary noble plot.50 Work was begun on the unfinished wing of the building in the middle of the courtyard on the model of the German academies to serve as an auditorium, hostel, classroom, and a library. The other source reveals that there were some thirty rooms in the eastern and southern wings of the eastern courtyard (including the rooms on the upper floor, of which the author of the letter makes no specific mention). One can discern these rooms, with their more antiquated vaulting, in the floor plan of the ground floor today, thus the division of the space has not changed much with the passage of time. The cross-wing (the base of which can be seen in the floor plans dating from 1711), which divides the two irregular courtyards, was not destroyed in the catastrophe of 1658–1661. On the contrary it had not even been built. It was intended to house the building’s lecture rooms and library, which in the end were built on the ground floor of the southern wing.

Figure 4. The floor plan of the building of the former college in the 1960s.

A later change, as a consequence of the transformation of the building of the college into barracks, the four almost symmetrically arranged gateways and the 1711 outlines of the courtyard were filled in with the wings that were built or rebuilt before 1736. The arcaded loggia of the western courtyard was cemented to the wall face later, presumably in the second half of the eighteenth century, because its ceiling covers the keystone of the baroque stone frame of the barracks gate. The rows of rooms on the northern side also were built in the course of later transformations, as was the present-day main front, which after the demolition of the Saint George’s Gate looks out on the west side onto a new little street. The question of the locations of the two bakeries mentioned in the text still awaits further research, as does the question of the number and location of the cellars, which from the perspective of preliminary architectural structures is of decisive importance. It is quite certain, however, that the outlines of the floor plans of the ensemble of buildings are in concurrence with the outlines on the survey of 1711. Thus the survey offers a credible image of the Collegium Academicum, visions of which Gábor Bethlen and his advisors based on the Heidelberg University destroyed by Tilly.51

Some of the primary sources on the construction have not yet been found. One could perhaps draw conclusions on the basis of references to the gratuitus labor in the resolutions of the 1629 General Assembly, since some of the information available regarding the construction of the college later, under the rule of György I. Rákóczi, includes mention of construction work done as part of a communal project52 that was interrupted (and brought to an end) in 1638–1639, when, again in the wake of a decision of the General Assembly, the reconstruction of the Kolozsvár church and school in Farkas street began.

Archival Sources

Arhivele Naţionale ale României, Direcţia Judeţeană Cluj

Archives of the Town of Beszterce

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára, Erdélyi Kormányhatósági Levéltárak, [National Archives of Hungary, Archives of the National Governmental Authorities of Transylvania]

Budapest F 49 Archivum Gubernii Transilvanici (in Politicis)

Erdélyi Református Egyházkerület Központi Gyűjtőlevéltára [Central Archives of the Transylvanian Calvinist Diocese], Az Erdélyi Református Főkonzisztórium Levéltára [Archives of the Transylvanian Calvinist Consistory] Cluj-Napoca

Akadémiai Könyvtár [Library of the Academy] Erdélyi Nemzeti Múzeum Levéltára [Archives of the Transylvanian National Museum] Cluj-Napoca

Collection of Sámuel Kemény: Chartophylatium Transsilvanicum, Mss. 3/X. (Religiosa)

Bibliography

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Benkő, Josephus. Pars posterior sive specialis Magni Principatus Transylvaniae cognition. Vol. 1. Egyetemi Könyvtár [University Library] (Cluj-Napoca), Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület Könyvtára [Library of the Transylvanian Museum Society, Manuscripts], Mss 217.

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Herepei, János. “Adatok Szenczi Molnár Albert életéhez. Az 1624. esztendei útról.” In Adattár XVII. századi szellemi mozgalmaink történetéhez, vol. 1, edited by Bálint Keserű, 11–13. Budapest–Szeged: Szegedi József Attila Tudományegyetem Magyar Irodalomtörténeti Intézet, 1965.

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Szamosközy, István. Történeti maradványai [Historical Remnants]. Vol. 3. Published by Sándor Szilágyi. Budapest: MTA, 1877.

EOE = Szilágyi, Sándor, ed. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek [Documents of Transylvanian Assemblies]. 21 vols. (1540–1699). Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1875–1898.

Szilágyi, Sándor. A két Rákóczi György fejedelem családi levelezése [The Family Correspondence of the Two György Rákóczi Princes]. Budapest: MTA, 1875.

Trausch, Josephus. Chronicon Fuchsio–Lupino–Oltardinum sive annales hungarici et transilvanici. Vol. 1. Coronae: Gött, 1847.

Veress, Andrei. Documente privitoare la istoria Ardealului, Moldovei şi Ţării Româneşti [Documents Concerning the History of Transylvania, Moldova, and Romanian Lands]. Vol. 2. Bukarest: Cartea Romaneasca, 1930.

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Balogh, Jolán. Kolozsvári kőfaragó műhelyek. XVI. század [Stone-Cutters Workshops of Kolozsvár. Seventeenth Century]. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Science, Research Group for Art History, 1986.

Cserni, Béla. “A Bethlen Gábor-féle vízvezeték Gyulafehérvárt” [The Gábor Bethlen Water-Supply Network of Gyulafehérvár]. Az Alsófehérmegyei Történelmi, Régészeti és Természettudományi Társulat Évkönyve [Yearbook of the Historical, Archeological, and Natural Sciences Society of Alsófehér County] 11 (1908): 53–61.

Jakó, Sigismund. “Sigilografia cu referire la Transilvania (Pînă la sfîrşitul secolului al XV-lea).” In Documente privind istoria Romîniei. Introducere, vol. 2, 561–619. Bukarest: Editura Academiei, 1956.

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Kovács, András. “Gyulafehérvár, az erdélyi püspökök középkori székhelye” [Gyulafehérvár, the Medieval Seat of the Transylvanian Bishoprics]. In Márton Áron-emlékkönyv születésének 100. évfordulóján [Áron Márton – Commemorative Volume on the 100th Anniversary of his Birth], edited by József Marton, 191–201. Kolozsvár: Gloria, 1996.

Kovács, András. “Humanista epigráfusok adalékai Gyulafehérvár közép- és koraújkori helyrajzához” [Additional Data on the Humanist Epigraphists and the Medieval and Early Modern Topography of Gyulafehérvár]. In Szamosközy, István. Analecta Lapidum. 1593. Inscriptiones romanae. 1598, edited by Bálint Keserű, 25–36. Szeged: Scriptum, 1992.

Kovács, Andrei and Mircea Ţoca. “Arhitecţi italieni în Transilvania în cursul secolelor al XVI-lea şi al XVII-lea” [Italian Architecture in Transylvania in the Source of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries]. Studia Universitatis “Babeş–Bolyai”. Series Historica 18 (1973): 22–30.

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Trócsányi, Zsolt. Az erdélyi fejedelemség korának országgyűlései (Adalék az erdélyi rendiség történetéhez) [The National Assemblies of the Transylvanian Princedom (Additional Data on the History of the Transylvanian Estates)]. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1976.

Veszely, Károly. “Képek Gyulafehérvár múltjából” [Pictures from Gyulafehérvár’s Past]. Az Alsófehérmegyei Történelmi, Régészeti és Természettudományi Társulat Évkönyve [Yearbook of the Historical, Archeological, and Natural Sciences Society of Alsófehér County] 6 (1894): 40–44.

Translated by Thomas Cooper

Volume 2 Issue 4 CONTENTS

Zsuzsanna Cziráki

Prince Gábor Bethlen’s Visits to Brassó as Reflected in the Town Account Books*

This study deals with one of the most remarkable periods in the history of the Principality of Transylvania, the reign of Gábor Bethlen. At the center of the study is an occurrence during Bethlen’s reign that might be described as ordinary: the reception of the Transylvanian prince in Brassó, one of the most important towns of his land and of the territorially autonomous Saxon Universitas (Saxon Land). As an organic part of the princely services encumbering the Saxon towns, hosting the prince was a basic component of the relationship between the Saxon communities and the prince. Accordingly, a more thorough understanding of these events also sheds light on the prevailing relationship between princely power and the Saxon communities. The basis for the analysis is provided by a distinctive group of sources, the account books of the chief economic official of Brassó, the Stadthann (also villicus, quaestor). The entries and comments contained in the account books help to familiarize us with the ceremonial framework for the distinguished guest’s stay in Brassó, the organizational tasks performed by the town as well as the mechanisms of town administration behind them. At the same time, they also offer a glimpse into the eating habits of contemporary Brassó and the lifestyle of the locals, thereby bringing into proximity the everyday life of a seventeenth-century East Central European urban community.

Keywords: Brassó (Kronstadt, Braşov), Gábor Bethlen, Saxon Land, Court of the Princes of the Principality of Transylvania

Sources and Aims

Examining the rich documentary materials of the state and ecclesiastical archives in Brassó (Kronstadt, Braşov), we are assured time and again of the great treasures hidden in the town’s collections (not to mention those of the other Saxon towns in Transylvania), which span almost eight centuries. Stepping beyond the bounds of local historiography, and touching upon numerous scholarly areas relating to the history of Transylvania and the entire region, we can increase our knowledge here, whether dealing with diplomatic history or even the history of everyday life. The following study focuses attention on the era of the principality and on one of its clearly delimited, and in many aspects remarkable, slices: the reign of Gábor Bethlen. Exceptionally, however, at the center of the investigation are not questions of event, military or diplomatic history but merely an event from the era of the Transylvanian princes that could be labeled ordinary: the hosting of the prince, Gábor Bethlen, by one of his country’s major towns, Brassó. As an organic part of the services owed by the Saxon towns,1 the prince’s reception was one of the fundamental components of his relationship with the Saxon communities; accordingly, a more thorough understanding of the event sheds light on the prevailing relationship between the princely regime and the Saxon communities as well. Moreover, on numerous points it complements our knowledge about the event-history of the era, its economic situation, the workings of Saxon autonomy, and even the structure of the town and the princely court.

A distinctive group of sources forms the basis of the research: the collection of the account books of Brassó,2 covering the period of Gábor Bethlen’s reign between the years 1613–1617 and 1620–1629. Even despite the interrupted sequence of events, they are extremely well-suited for familiarizing us with conditions in Brassó, the Barcaság region3 and, from a number of aspects, Transylvania. The inherent possibilities were already discovered in the nineteenth century by Saxon archivists and historians, who even set about publishing the various town account reports as part of the series Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Kronstadt.4 However, this project only took the analysis of this immense quantity of materials up to the end of the sixteenth century, and thus the account books of the seventeenth century remained unmapped, occasionally cropping up only as supplementary sources in one study or another. They have yet to be systematically explored, nor have the possibilities inherent in the collection yet been completely exploited. In the course of my research I have supplemented the richly detailed information of the account books with additional data from extant chronicles and archival materials.

The Transylvanian Princes in the Saxon Towns

Receiving and hosting the prince, that is, the ruler’s right to descensus, had been included among the obligations of the Saxon urban communities from the very beginning; at most only the extent of obligation changed.5 The princely visits of the early seventeenth century are interesting from a number of angles. On the one hand, in the Principality of Transylvania, too, we can observe the phenomenon, medieval in origin, of the “itinerant household,” in other words, in spite of Gyulafehérvár turning gradually into a princely capital, the household frequently visited one or another of the country’s major towns. Most of the time these occasions were prompted by some reason of national importance (a partial or full diet, diplomatic negotiations, the administration of justice), with the chosen urban community bearing the brunt of the financial burdens.6 On the other hand, it should not be overlooked either that the burden of hosting the guests and the associated expenses, which could amount to several thousand forints, fell upon the wealthier towns that were amply protected by privileges: the tax-paying towns (those paying the annual tax to the princely treasury in one lump sum) and those of the Saxon Land. In Transylvania the urban communities equipped for receiving the sovereign—particularly the Saxons, who formed the country’s third estate—possessed a wide-ranging autonomy. In many cases they construed the obligation to receive the court as a violation of their privileges and as a rude and unlawful intrusion into the life of the community—not always without reason. Thus, accommodating the ruler represented a constant topic of debate, in everyday life and in the diets. It was the Saxons in particular who led the way in disputing the ruler’s right to descensus, since the overwhelming majority of the major towns were located in the autonomous Saxon Land. 7

Hosting the prince, therefore, met with great resistance on the part of the selected party. Even according to modest estimates the expenses amounted to several hundred, and not infrequently several thousand, forints, which is by no means surprising if we take into account how many servitors belonged to the court of the prince and his wife. Based on the instructions sent by Gábor Bethlen to his seneschal (hopmester), Gáspár Csúti, the persons belonging to the prince’s court consisted of the following groups: those engaged in the preparation and serving of food and drink (master cooks, stewards, dapifers, cup-bearers, wine-pourers, attending servants and other kitchen servants without specific descriptions); the guards of the rooms used by the prince; the retainers of the prince and his wife and other courtiers, who according to the custom of the aristocratic courts were chosen from among the young members of noble families; and the princely guardsmen overseeing the task of maintaining order.8 To them we must add further the councilors and “principal men of the court”9 participating in the prince’s daily activity, who themselves were most often present with their families and personal households and who, depending on their affairs of state, stayed by the prince’s side during his journey as well. The representatives of the court’s religious life, scholarship and entertainment (preachers, doctors, scholars, students, musicians) as well as the armed members of the princely bodyguard also belonged to the entourage. We have no certain data at our disposal about the number of “courtiers,” nor do we know how many of them the prince took with him during his journeys. Allowing for all of this, however, it may be taken for certain that the size of a given company could reach sizes as large as several hundred people. This is supported by a request made by the Saxons in 1613, in which they attempted to cap the size of the prince’s party at 400 persons.10

It is generally known that in 1613 the accession of Gábor Bethlen for the first time in many years brought to the throne of Transylvania a ruler who sought to remedy the tension between the princely authority and the Saxon nation through negotiation.11 It is also evident that the Saxons had played no small role in Bethlen’s election.12 Despite this, the Saxons were unable to impose their will on the new prince, and on numerous points (including with regard to hosting the prince) they were forced to compromise. During Bethlen’s reign the customs regulating the reception of the ruler in the Saxon Land and all of Transylvania, medieval in origin but nonetheless evolving to completion over the course of the early modern era, became fixed. The question of accommodating the ruler also sheds light on Bethlen’s ambition to break the Saxon estate resistance in the interests of strengthening the central authority. But how was all this realized in practice?

The Prince and His Retinue in Brassó

When preparing for a princely visit to Brassó,13 Gábor Bethlen used the ancient southern Transylvanian road connecting Gyulafehérvár with the Barcaság, the successor of which remains to the present day one of the busiest routes of the Transylvanian railway and road network. This is no wonder, since the road arrives from the direction of the Hungarian Great Plain, passing by important economic centers and ensuring numerous points of contact to territories of both commercial and strategic importance, Wallachia, Moldavia and, via these, the Ottoman Empire and Poland. Located along the route is one of the most significant princely estates, Fogaras, which often served as Bethlen’s place of residence and, as we shall see below, was of especial importance in connection with his journeys to Brassó as well.

In addition to the route, the direction of travel may also be called typical. Gábor Bethlen’s visits to Brassó were regularly preceded by stays of varying length in Fogaras. He would enter the Barcaság region with his entourage from the Fogarasföld area, along the course of the river Olt, most often at Feketehalom.14 Following a brief stay in Brassó—leaving the Barcaság at Prázsmár15—he set out for the Szeklerland (Székelyföld). He deviated from this custom only a few times (1616, 1619, 1628 and 1629), when he approached the town from the direction of the Szeklerland and departed in the direction of Fogaras.16 The reason for the change is to be found in the handling of affairs, as a rule military ones, connected to the Szeklerland, as well as in the fact that the prince, suffering from serious complaints stemming from his advanced illness at the end of his reign, would have himself treated at the medicinal baths17 located at the border of the Szeklerland and the Barcaság prior to his stay in Brassó. Theoretically, the prince could request entry into any town of the land on an unlimited number of occasions. Because he went to war in person as well, Bethlen naturally was frequently on the road, though in peacetime, too, he often exited the walls of the princely seat of Gyulafehérvár. His visit to Brassó nevertheless did not mean more than once a year, with only the year 1627 forming an exception to this, when he with his court visited out the town twice, in April and August. The duration of his stay was not long if we take into consideration that elsewhere (Fogaras, the Szeklerland) he might spend even weeks: the number of days spent in Brassó in general lasted four to five days,18 deviating from this in 1616 (six days), 1622 (eleven) and 1628 (eight).

In every case the princely visit took place according to the same timetable. Gábor Bethlen in a letter or through his quartermaster informed the magistrates of Brassó of his intended arrival as well as the expected date of entry. We have already mentioned that he and his household as a rule stayed in Fogaras before leaving for the Barcaság. Based on the chroniclers of Brassó and the Stadthann’s account books it appears that a lively traffic between the prince and the town leadership already existed before Bethlen set foot in the Barcaság: the princely and town post flowed back and forth between Brassó and Fogaras, and the town’s magistrates also often paid their respects at the court in Fogaras in wagons loaded with gifts. A high-ranking official of Brassó awaited the prince at Feketehalom and escorted him into the town with all solemnity.19 It is perhaps not an exaggeration to interpret all this as the diplomatic maneuvering between the town and the princely regime having already begun outside the town walls: the ruler’s personal and not infrequently oppressive presence (between 1613 and 1616, for example, the people of Brassó, secretly in league with the Habsburgs, strove to overthrow Gábor Bethlen’s rule20) included the possibility of settling the town’s affairs directly before the highest forum of power, the prince. In March 1614 councilor Michael Forgatsch hastened to Fogaras to present the prince the overdue Saxon tax.21 Two other councilors also spent ten days there: Johannes Benkner, who had previously acted as Bethlen’s legate in Vienna, and the universally respected elderly Andreas Hegyes. The hasty delivery of the tax arrears was incidentally a recurring element of the princely visits: on February 13, 1616 councilors Christianus Hirscher and Stephan Filstich traveled to meet Bethlen for the same reason.22

Also aiming to win the prince’s goodwill were those gifts with which the people of Brassó paid their respects to the prince already prior to his arrival in the town. Especially eye-catching is the zeal with which the people of Brassó attempted to actively seek out their prince when the price limitations were decreed in Transylvania. Brassó in fact regularly exceeded the centrally imposed limitations on goods production and trade, and it tried to mitigate the consequences stemming from this with circumspect courting.23 The gifts typically were food items considered delicacies: choice salted and fresh fish, eastern luxury items (lemons, lemon juice, oranges, figs, pomegranates, sherbet, raisins), as well as local fruits appropriate to the season (apples, pears, plums, cherries and walnuts). Because of the varying quantity and composition of the goods presented, although it is difficult to generalize, it still can be established that total value hovered somewhere around ten forints—a trifling item in the budget for the princely party that came to several hundred or several thousand forints.24 In addition to the gifts of respect, providing room and board for several days and the per diem of the magistrates attending to town business and the personnel assigned to them (cook, doorward or manservant, and additionally one or more town messengers and carters) represented an additional expense. For not only was the prince entitled to first-rank hospitality, as the data of the account books reveal, but also the lords of Brassó assigned to him. Tenderloin, eye of round, fowl, bacon, vinegar, bread and rolls, parsley, spices, salted fish, fruit, wine and candles were included in the package provided as provisions for their onward journey, the value of which ranged from 1.11 to 4.5 forints depending on the number of travelers and days spent away—generally 3-5 days. To this was added the travelers’ per diem, recorded under trinkgeld (literally “drinking money”), which in the period under examination did not change, amounting to 25 denars a day in the case of magistrates, and 4 denars for their staff.25

Gábor Bethlen’s visit counted as a relatively rare event in the town of Brassó, albeit one demanding great efforts. In propitious cases it also offered the opportunity to further influence “His Excellency” in Brassó’s favor, and thus it is no wonder that the reception of the prince’s court was accompanied by feverish preparations in the town. The prince’s arrival, which in addition often coincided with the stay of foreign envoys in Brassó and the sendoff of Transylvanian envoys, demanded the precise organization needed for housing, feeding and moving a large-sized group, and this could be carried out only through careful preparations. It appears the coordination of the work was concentrated in the hands of the Stadthann, the town official who was also responsible for handling the town’s monetary resources. It was he who controlled and coordinated the work of those entrusted26 with partial tasks, and paid the costs of the purchased products or service against receipts.

Needless to say, the most important question was the lodging and feeding of the guests. We know that the town had its own inn, which is mentioned in the sources by the name Stadthoff. The earliest mention of it dates from the early sixteenth century, at this time still referred to one of the buildings on Saint John’s Street (Szent János utca).27 The inn must soon have proven too cramped, for according to the testimony of the town account books in 1573 the Brassó council purchased two other buildings for a similar purpose, one on Kolostor utca28 for 975 forints, and one on the Rose Market Square (Rózsapiac)29 for 100 forints. An additional costly remodeling, amounting to 568.77 forints, was carried out in order to make the buildings better suited for the purpose. Lacking other data, we may assume that it was here that the town’s official guests were housed in the period under examination.30 For Gábor Bethlen and those around him, however, these two buildings must not have offered satisfactory accommodations, in terms of either the number of rooms or their quality.31 In examining the demands we may rely on the prince’s very own words as well, since—in connection with his anticipated stay in Segesvár in early 1614—he himself articulated to his quartermaster32 the kinds of rooms he needed: a dining hall, a stately reception room, a council chamber, along with numerous rooms for himself and his wife. He requested a large wooden structure for the kitchen, while he had his household placed in separate lodgings befitting their rank and office.33

The Brassó sources make only scattered mention of the assignment of quarters. What can be concluded, however, is that the townspeople could satisfy the demands relating to the various functions of the princely household only if they divided the venues among themselves, i.e. the wealthier citizens who were capable of accommodating guests. It was the town patricians, most frequently the town judge himself, who assumed the responsibility for receiving the prince and his closest companions. The court dignitaries accompanying the prince and their retinue (chancellor, governor, members of the princely council) were accorded lodgings appropriate to their social standing likewise in the homes of the rich citizens, while the court figures of lower status were lodged with the town homeowners in groups. Because the town, ringed with massive walls and bastions, had a limited capacity to receive guests, the field outside the town walls and the outer farms of the wealthy citizens offered the possibility of accommodating larger groups—even in tents.34

To ensure the princely court was served without incident, beyond the advance assignment of lodgings numerous other everyday demands had to be taken care of well in advance. The complicated process of replenishing stocks encompassed numerous products, and for this reason only items used in major quantities will be examined here. The firewood necessary for cooking and, in cold seasons, heating, was purchased from the locals or was brought from the forests under the Brassó town management; in the latter case a separate woodcutting team was employed to cut and process them.35 The town also had to make certain that an adequate quantity of wood was available at every lodging place, since in the event of a shortage the lodgers used up the host’s own supply. If abuse of this kind happened to occur, the town reimbursed them for the damage done by the guests.36 Care of the horses arriving with the guest party also presented the townsfolk with a challenge, since a great quantity of hay, straw and oats needed to be obtained. The account books, which reveal the preparations for the princely visit in all their details, record dozens of those suppliers from whom the aforementioned articles were purchased in bulk.37 Over and above this, a considerable quantity of hay was brought into town from the town’s own hayfields and mowed by day laborers recruited from among the local commoner lads, girls, Romanians and Gypsies. Similar procedures were followed when it came to harvesting the town’s oat supply.38 If even this proved insufficient, those citizens possessing the more substantial supplies hastened to the town’s aid. This is what happened during the prince’s visit in 1627, when the town judge made up for the needed quantity out of his own inventory.39 The prince and his retinue used lighting devices in likewise substantial quantities: lanterns, torches, and the most important article, candles, which were produced locally from tallow and wax.40 Preparations for the princely company extended to the prior acquisition and processing of kitchen spices as well. As a rule, spices arrived at the town warehouse from the tollhouses, and the missing quantity was obtained from the citizens of Brassó with the more substantial stocks.41 In similar fashion to candle-dipping, town women were employed to process them, and the necessary means of storage, chests and spice sacks were also seen to.42 Treated in the same category as spices were refined sugar (received either measured or in the form of a sugar-loaf) and rock salt, which was crushed by wage-workers prior to use.43 To the extent that the storage possibilities of perishable foodstuffs made it possible,44 attempts were made to secure meat in advance as well. Prior to the prince’s arrival live poultry (hens, chickens, ducks and geese) was obtained by the hundreds, while red meat was purchased from the local butchers. Fish, either prepared fresh or preserved salted in barrels, was consumed in proportions equal to that of meat. The fish was obtained from the Barcaság (which had a substantially richer hydrography in the seventeenth century than today—Brassó itself was interwoven by streams, while extensive fish ponds were located outside the town walls) and Wallachia. The town was supplied with fish typically by Romanians, who fished in the town’s own waters either on their own initiative or directly commissioned by the town. In the latter case Brassó paid them for their time even if they did not happen to catch anything.45

Following the prince’s arrival the most important tasks connected to food supplies were overseen by a central kitchen. In Brassó the equivalent of the wooden kitchen structure mentioned in the prince’s letter quoted above was a building referred to in the sources as Kochhaus, or “cookhouse,”46 which was erected in the middle of the town on the market square47 for the duration of the prince’s stay in Brassó. The meals were prepared in this kitchen, well equipped with a hearth and devices needed for cooking and preparing foods, and distributed according to Herbergen, that is, the host lodgings. The production of bread and braided challah bread occurred independently of this in the bakehouses of Brassó. Although it is not the purpose of this article to discuss in detail the food consumption of the princely court in Brassó, by a simple enumeration I would nonetheless like to allude to the level of provisioning while at the same time allowing a glimpse into the eating habits of the age.

In accordance with seventeenth-century customs, bread, meat, possibly fish, and vegetables formed the basis of the lavish meals, and in Brassó, too, it was these that were consumed in the largest quantity. Among baked goods, white and brown bread, rolls and braided bread were consumed. Meats included great quantities of fowl, beef and veal, mutton, goat meat, and pork, as well as old and new bacon, and also wild duck, venison, deer and rabbit meat. For fish we find sturgeon, carp, pike, trout, and crayfish on the lists of victuals.48 Among dairy products, in addition to raw milk, products such as the distinctive Transylvanian cheeses and butter, and occasionally cream, represented the major articles. Consumed in significant quantities were vinegar, lard and oil (linseed oil, more rarely olive oil), honey and eggs. Vegetables and fruits appearing on the tables included fresh or pickled cabbage, peas, onions, garlic, mushrooms, apples, pears, plums, gooseberries, cherries, walnuts and hazelnuts. Besides the locally grown parsley and dill, the spices in use were pepper, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace flower, ginger and saffron imported from the east. Being illustrious guests, they consumed ample amounts of the eastern luxury foods always available in Brassó: raisins, citrus fruits, figs, almonds and even rice, which based on its origin was included here. The list of delicacies was rounded out by the marzipan placed on the prince’s Sunday table.49

The varying accounting practices of each town and community leave plenty of questions open if we strive for a full depiction of events. Thus, for example, based on the rich, though often undifferentiated, system of enumeration of the Brassó account books, we cannot reconstruct to the letter precisely what the hosts served to the lords gathered for a shared meal in the town. At the same time, the entries made by Kolozsvár’s citizen administrators, who preserved the precise details of the princely meals for posterity, may serve as a point of comparison. To single out just one example, let us cast a glance at what could be called an average dinner that Gábor Bethlen spent in the company of the lords of Kolozsvár on November 26, 1613! The food was brought in for those gathered on several large platters, which contained the following: on the first platter pike in its own juices, with pepper, saffron, ginger, parsley and onions; on the second, “cow meat” with red cabbage; on the third, lemon hen with pepper, saffron and ginger; and on the fourth platter roasts of hen and of pork, sausage, with pickles and bread on the side. The meal was rounded out with fruit, cheese, walnuts and pretzels, and the delicious morsels were washed down with 28 Achtels50 of wine.51

The data contained in the account books make it possible to reconstruct the process of how the goods were obtained, particularly interesting from the point of view of urban history. Brassó, where the grandiose display of hospitality was a constant phenomenon, maintained its own inventory of the basic articles used while entertaining guests. This supply, however, was always in need of supplementation if a large and distinguished embassy or the prince himself was expected in the town. The town leadership had several means of making up for the missing quantity at its disposal. First they could directly take it out of Brassó’s customs revenues delivered in the form of goods; this applied first and foremost to commercial goods, especially spices. As far as local products were concerned, these could be obtained from the townsfolk, or possibly from the inhabitants of the surrounding villages and market towns, either through direct purchase or the so-called “receipt-slip method” widespread all across Transylvania. The essence of the latter was that the town official charged with procurement issued a numbered receipt—Zettel or slip—for the product delivered by the suppliers, who could ask for reimbursement in cash afterwards from the Stadthann. The significance of the collected receipt-slips may be discerned also in the fact that it was on the basis of these that the town notary compiled the annual accounts. The system was not perfect, since even Brassó, considered one of the country’s wealthiest towns, frequently struggled with a shortage of money, which incidentally was generally typical in seventeenth-century Transylvania. The solution was to schedule payments,52 though deducting the cost of the product from the supplier’s tax could also be considered.53 It happened also that the necessary quantity of the given product could not be secured even through purchase. In such cases the town itself initiated the importation of the item or—as in the case of candle-making—its production. It was also a frequent phenomenon for the wealthy townsfolk to advance various products to the town out of their own stocks. This was not bad as an investment either, since the town afterwards reimbursed assistance arriving at just the right moment at steep prices.

The situation was similar in the case of drinks, which formed a separate category among the foodstuffs. In Brassó wine was consumed in the greatest quantity (typically local new and vintage wines, Wallachian wines, and for the most distinguished guests’ table, Malvasia), though plenty of beer, and in smaller quantities mead54 and spirits,55 was also consumed. The details of the wine delivery for a princely visit in 1616 have been preserved in the town account books and clearly demonstrate Brassó’s procurement system outlined above in practice. According to the entries for February, in preparation for the prince’s expected visit and with the approval of the Hundred Elders (Hundred Men),56 1,793 Achtels (“eighths”)57 of the town’s own wine, in barrels authenticated by the Weinherrs58 and valued at 107.58 forints were deposited in the town’s cellar. Because this still proved too little, an additional 112 Achtels59 of wine was subsequently brought in from the town’s external cellars valued at 15 forints. However, this was still not enough, and therefore, in order to ensure the uninterrupted supply to the princely court, the Stadthann assisted the town on several occasions, having Wallachian wine from his own cellar delivered to the guests’ lodgings, a total of 157 Achtels60 valued at 94.26 forints. The judge, the notary and one additional town councilor, Lucas Greissing, took similar action. All this was supplemented by the wine deliveries of those citizens61 who used this to pay off their remaining debt62 from the previous year’s wine tax.63

Receiving the prince’s court also presented the town with the enormous task of securing the necessary labor force. For the improvements and construction carried out during the preparations, and later the dismantling of the temporary buildings, beyond the costs of the basic materials, carpenters, stone masons and day laborers had to be paid. As far as meals were concerned, we know that, although the prince had the food prepared by his own cooks64 and served by his own court stewards, serving a party of several hundred guests demanded the employment of numerous local helpers in the kitchen.65 During a princely visit the duties of the town guardsmen, doorwards and toll house attendants in the town’s regular employ also expanded. According to ancient custom, when a distinguished guest was hosted the town’s leading officials stood guard in front of his house, though they were entrusted with less exalted tasks as well: essentially they could be deployed wherever physical strength was needed, from hauling away earth to processing poultry.66 In addition to the bakers and butchers, the most impacted on account of the great quantity of goods they had to deliver, Brassó’s other artisans were also allotted numerous tasks. The residency of the princely court in Brassó directly impacted the blacksmiths, harness-makers, rope-layers, and coopers, since it went without saying that the town would serve the needs related to shoeing the horses of the prince and his retinue and repairing their wagons, coach and sledges. In fact, in 1628 the prince even had one of his valuable horses kept in Brassó for weeks, with the town providing for its feeding and care.67 The prince also had his personal effects that were damaged during the visit repaired by the locals.68 It was also necessary to fulfill occasional demands by the prince as well, the appropriate handling and packaging of which was also seen to locally.69

Based on the available sources we can form a clear picture of the composition of the princely retinue arriving in Brassó as well; the number of guests, however, remains obscure. It has already been mentioned that the visiting party in Brassó was recorded according to place of lodging, which were distinguished from one another by the name of the principal figure housed there. This also included the persons belonging to the latter’s own household, from immediate relatives to the simple maid. Accordingly, the number of those served at the various lodgings could range from the four- to six-member entourage of lower-ranking court figures, to the small households of higher dignitaries numbering several dozen people.70 Added to all this also were the courtiers referred to by the people of Brassó simply by the name Gesindel, whose number was not given in precise figures but rather characterized merely as “many” or “a great many.”

Gábor Bethlen’s stay in Brassó was often connected to a diplomatic event of countrywide importance. For this reason, beyond the prevailing size of the princely household we must reckon with a substantial contingent of guests. It happened often that Bethlen sent his prominent guests to Brassó in advance, who were then forced to wait idly for a few days before the prince himself reached the town. This was how Mehmet Aga and his thirty-nine-member entourage arrived in the town on April 1, 1614—two days before the prince—in the company of Benedek Suky, István Szalánczy, and György Székely, who had been assigned to them; they left Brassó only days after the prince’s departure (April 7). The situation was similar in August 1622, when a few days before Gábor Bethlen’s entry on the fourth, the town began putting up the Turkish embassy coming from the prince: Mustafa Aga, Mehmet Chiaus and Yusuf Chiaus, escorted by the scribe János; a few servants of the pasha of Buda; and the members of the embassy to the Porte formed around Pál Keresztesi. Moreover, only rarely did the entertaining come to an end with Gábor Bethlen’s departure. There are ample instances when, for one reason or another (most often because of illness or a personal matter), the departing prince left one or more of his courtiers behind in Brassó.

The account books also reveal that those arriving in Bethlen’s retinue “wandered daily in and out”71 of the town. Under such circumstances it is understandable that, learning of the prince’s prospective arrival, the Brassó town leadership’s primary ambition was to keep the size and expenses of the guest party down. Fierce debates between the prince and the townspeople over the number of guests were typical particularly of the first years of Gábor Bethlen’s rule. As has already been mentioned, the Saxons believed Bethlen’s reign as prince hung in the balance between 1613 and 1616 and considered his time in power a brief transitional period; the memory of the town-occupier, Gábor Báthory, however, lived all the more vividly in every Saxon subject.72 During the first princely visit in April 1614 Brassó allowed two hundred people into the town,73 and on the next occasion, in 1616, three hundred.74 These numbers are even stricter than the demands contained in the Saxon ultimatum of December 1613,75 issued regarding the return of Szeben—four hundred people at most. If we add to all this the fact that in 1614 even the gun salute due the arriving prince was not even fired,76 we can clearly picture the outward manifestations of the frosty atmosphere between the prince and the people of Brassó. From the point of view of the prince’s reception, too, the year 1616 counted as exceptional, when the people of Brassó once again tried to restrict the size of Gábor Bethlen’s retinue. According to the reports of the contemporary chroniclers of Brassó, the prince took offense to this and in fact postponed his stay in Brassó, thereby causing no small amount of turmoil in the town.77

Since the town’s obligations as host included the presentation of gifts to the visiting officials befitting their rank, the Stadthann prepared a precise balance sheet of the gifts and the recipients in connection with the costs of the visit. The gift lists in fact record a concise image of the Transylvanian state dignitaries and the princely court, since in addition to the prince and his wife they feature numerous important and less important court personages, from the governor to the court attendant.78 The importance of a given office or rank gained expression in the value of the gifts presented as well. Whereas the princely couple received silver Nuremberg chalices, and wash basins and kettles valued at 100–200 forints, the highest-ranking (the chancellor and prince’s brother, István Bethlen, regardless of his current position, and Dávid Zólyomi, commensurate to the office he occupied in the given period) received one or two Persian rugs valued at 25–60 forints, and those on the lower rungs of the ladder (court captains, retainers) were presented gifts of Brassó broadcloth, furs or boots. Among the servitors of minor importance in the princely retinue (in the source lumpen gesindel, that is, “good-for-nothing rabble”) cash was distributed, amounting to a total value of between 40–50 forints.79 Thus, during each princely visit, depending on the number of those present, the costs of gifts alone represented an amount on the order of 1,000 forints.80 Despite this, there were also instances where the prince found the valuables he received to be wanting. This is what happened during the memorable visit of 1616, when, apart from the dispute over the size of the prince’s company, the paltry number of gifts also contributed to a further deterioration of the mood, which was in any case not uncloudy.81

At Gábor Bethlen’s court the master representatives of the arts and sciences enjoyed particular attention. Along with the other narrative sources of the era, the Saxon chroniclers also report on this. Particularly interesting are the notes of Georg Kraus, the notary of Segesvár, concerning those musicians employed at the princely court who married into the Saxon elite and settled in Beszterce, Nagyszeben, and Brassó.82 Apart from them we know of numerous other court musicians from the fields of instrumental music and singing; in addition to the German territories, they arrived in Transylvania from Poland, Bohemia, France and Italy.83

Just how the abovementioned artists and scholars fit into the court hierarchy constitutes a question which research on court history had yet to resolve. The Brassó sources may help to decide the question, since we may conclude from them that the persons in question made up a completely separate group among the courtiers. The account books make particular mention of the prince’s doctors, students and various musicians, and quite precisely about the exceptional treatment the locals afforded them by order of the prince. It is a revealing piece of data that the gift lists do not mention them, and nor do we witness that they were housed with a separate small household, like the leading dignitaries of the princely court. The account books nevertheless allow us to conclude that the prince took particular care of them, since by his orders they were treated in way that clearly distinguished from the other figures of the court. The considerate treatment accorded to them by the grace of the prince distinguishes them sharply from the mass of court servants—Gesindel. It is indisputable, however, that artists and scholars, even despite their honored position at court, stood apart from the men of the Transylvanian court. The reason for their striking outsider status, besides a social status differing from that of the “aristocratic entourage,” is perhaps also to be sought in their foreign origin—the linguistic and cultural obstacles in the majority of cases proved to be so unbridgeable that many of them did not even remain in Transylvania after their princely commission expired. Those native German-speaking masters who found a home among their Saxon “relations” happened to form an exception to this. Also indicative of the special status of artists and retainers is the fact that Gábor Bethlen also kept with him two young lute-players, Konrad and Dietrich, who presumably had arrived in the country with Catherine of Brandenburg and were, in addition to their musical profession, also retainers of the consort’s household.84 Unfortunately the Brassó sources remain silent about the number of musicians belonging to Bethlen’s court. We know of similar information only from the reign of Gábor Báthory, whose entourage may have included approximately 17 persons in such a capacity,85 and we can probably find a similar number of master musicians by his successor’s side as well.

Gábor Bethlen’s patronage of the sciences and the arts is a well-known fact. The educating and sponsoring of talented youth appear from the very beginning in the prince’s cultural policy. At the start of his rule Bethlen had two students educated at foreign academies each year; by the end of his reign this number had multiplied.86 Occasionally they, too, represented guests Brassó had to feed. In connection with Bethlen’s reign, the town account books first record the “king’s students” in Brassó in 1621, when they were provided a meagre amount of food on August 4. On September 7 they make mention of two additional foreign students rescued from the captivity of plundering soldiers. Unfortunately, the Stadthann only rarely considered it worthwhile to record their names, and his attention usually extended only to the services fulfilled on the ruler’s orders and their costs.87

Scholars, musicians and students were recurring guests at the prince’s side. In July 1623 Brassó housed a part of the prince’s court staying in Fogaras, including his court physician and musicians, Tamás Kobzos and the four persons under his direction.88 A similar situation prevailed in March 1625, when, in addition to his physician, the prince also lodged his trumpeters in Brassó, while in September a recommendation letter from the prince assured provisions and transport in Brassó for a few students.89 In April 1626 students traveling to meet the prince, then residing in the Szeklerland, were given provisions, as was his Jewish doctor traveling back in May.90 Beginning in 1627 we encounter throughout Hungarian and German musicians as well as physicians on the guest list during the prince’s visits to Brassó;91 in June 1629 we even find an instance of the prince having his aged, ailing musician treated in Brassó.92 The newly employed Italian physician who stayed in Brassó between March 12 and 15, 1629 on the prince’s authority represents a historiographical curiosity. The doctor must have been held in high esteem, since he arrived on the prince’s own coach, and concerning him the prince commanded that he be “treated respectfully in the town.”93 Perhaps this person corresponds to Doctor Jacobus Carlo, who spent time in Brassó on the prince’s authority in June. At this date the prince’s bath attendant and musicians were also put up there, once again connected to Gábor Bethlen’s stay in Fogaras.94

Comparing the data, we arrive at the surprising conclusion that, similar to the per diem of the town officials, the provisioning of the students was also tied to a certain scale. In general 20-25, at most 26 denars of wine and bread were spent on each of them, which essentially corresponded to the allowance of a common servitor (footman or doorward). The musicians were treated on a similar scale; with respect to the physicians, however, the town was substantially more generous: a sum of around one and a half to two forints was spent on them daily, demonstrating thereby also the weight of that position in the princely court.

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that the obligations connected to the prince’s visit did not come to an end when Gábor Bethlen exited the walls of Brassó. There is no year in the period under examination when some subsequent assignment of the prince did not have to be fulfilled. Aside from entertaining the court figures left behind, the town had to attend mainly to the transportation and escorting of the prince and his retinue as needed.95 Depending on the standards of the local supplies, the prince often ordered food, personal items or even master craftsmen (goldsmiths, blacksmiths and tailors) for himself.96 A similar situation also arose when, though the prince did not stay overnight in Brassó, he resided in the vicinity (in the Szeklerland or Fogaras). This could take place up to several times a year, depending on what part of Transylvania his duties called him to. In such cases—even if at reduced expense—in addition to putting up the prince’s innermost circle, the services expected of Brassó involved the same duties. Even at this time the prince was in constant contact with Brassó through the town leaders assigned to him, and his own men also made frequent appearances in the town, if only to communicate the prince’s demands. During his stays in Fogaras or the Szeklerland Gábor Bethlen also ordered food and personal articles in large quantities and often availed himself of the work of the tradesmen of Brassó. In certain instances he even demanded that the town put up the lords and servants belonging to his retinue. The types of services and their quality did not differ substantially from that of those the prince made use of during his visits to Brassó. Their costs appear in the town account books sporadically, and their value ranged along an extremely wide scale, from a few barrels of pears to silver collars prepared for the greyhounds of Catherine of Brandenburg to large quantities of food conveyed to the princely retinue on kitchen wagons. All these circumstances make a complete and systematic depiction of the services provided to the prince while he resided in the area of Brassó almost impossible. Thus, when it comes to the serving of Gábor Bethlen himself and his court, the data directly linked to the prince’s personal presence in Brassó is of primary importance on account of its completeness.

All of the above raises the question of how much the town spent during each of Gábor Bethlen’s visits. Because of the sporadic recording of the expenses, we can only estimate the magnitude of the total cost incurred: including the gifts of respect, Brassó spent approximately 1000–1600 forints on provisioning the prince and his court per occasion.97 We may also observe that towards the end of the period examined here this sum showed a tendency to increase, the explanation for which may lie in the improving economic situation, the stabilization of Brassó’s position, and the maximal exploitation of its resources; this last circumstance was due not least to the bargains struck with Gábor Bethlen.98 At the same time, for lack of sources it remains an open question whether the prince reimbursed the town for the incurred expenses, and if so, to what extent. Based on the characteristics of Bethlen’s reign the reimbursements must have been minimal, although it must be taken into account that the Saxons could avail themselves of the opportunity to have their incurred expenses deducted from their annual tax. Whether this happened, and which items, if any, the prince’s agents accepted, we do not know. The likelihood of reimbursement is in any case lessened by the fact that, starting from the Middle Ages, hosting the ruler was interpreted as an obligation of high importance in the Saxon Land, since the Saxon communities, Brassó included, enjoyed significant privileges that offset other similar burdens. It would be superfluous to emphasize just how significant this system, resting on this dual pillar, was in the life of the Saxon Land, which clung to its medieval autonomy tooth and nail.

Summary

During the reign of Gábor Bethlen significant changes can be observed in the relations between the ruler and the privileged Saxon community. The prince frequently stayed in the Saxon towns, generally at the time of diets, for the purposes of receiving envoys or rendering justice. Bethlen and his court retinue expected the town to provide lodging, supplies and gifts, which the local government attempted to keep within still feasible bounds. Each instance of hosting the prince in Brassó provides a particularly good illustration of how the central authority attempted to tear apart the obsolete framework of the Saxon feudal privileges, or at least fill it with new content while maintaining external appearances, in early modern Transylvania.

The prince’s stays in Brassó also direct our attention to the fact that through rational compromises and measured decisions Gábor Bethlen successfully breached the feudal bastions of the Saxon nation, and although in this area he was perhaps less successful publicly (recall the failure of negotiations aimed at a union of the three feudal nations99), behind the scenes he was able to impose his will against even the most determined Saxon communities. Finally, it should not be forgotten either that, beyond an understanding of the relationship between the princely regime and Brassó, a member of the Saxon Universitas, the chronicle of princely visits provides useful knowledge about the life of this distinctive Transylvanian community. The realities of the seventeenth-century characters, urban life, consumption, and weekdays and holidays, which come to life on the pages of the account books and can captivate people even today, all contribute to an ever fuller understanding of this unique era.

Archival Sources

Arhivele Naţionale ale României Filială Braşov [Romanian National Archives, Brassó Branch Archive]

Fondul Primăria Braşov. Seria socoteli alodiale—socoteli vilicale—Stadt­hannen­rechnungen, V/19–23.

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [National Archives of Hungary]

Microfilm Collection. Kolozsvár város levéltára. Roll No: 28962. Kolozsvár város számadáskönyvei (Fond primăria municipiului Cluj-Napoca socotelile orasului Cluj-Napoca).

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Márkus, Dezső, ed. Magyar Törvénytár. 1540–1848. évi erdélyi törvények. Approbata Constitutiones [Hungarian Legal Corpus. Transylvanian Laws from the Years 1540–1848]. Budapest: Franklin Társulat, 1900.

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N.e., Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Kronstadt in Siebenbürgen. Vol. 5. Chroniken und Tagebücher 2. Brassó: Commission bei H. Zeidner, 1909.

Sebestyén, Mihály, ed., introduction, and notes. Bethlen Gábor – Levelek [Gábor Bethlen – Letters]. Bukarest: Kriterion, 1980.

Szilády, Áron and Sándor Szilágyi. Török–magyarkori állam-okmánytár [State Papers from the Turkish Era in Hungary]. Vol. 1. Budapest: Eggenberger, 1875.

Szilágyi, Sándor. Bethlen Gábor és a kassai pap [Gábor Bethlen and the Priest of Kassa]. Magyar Protestáns Egyháztörténelmi Monográfiák XIII. Budapest: Magyarországi Protestansegylet, 1880.

Szilágyi, Sándor. Bethlen Gábor fejedelem kiadatlan politikai levelei [Prince Gábor Bethlen’s Unpublished Political Letters]. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1879.

Szilágyi, Sándor. Bethlen Gábor fejedelem levelezése [The Correspondence of Prince Gábor Bethlen]. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1887.

Szilágyi, Sándor, ed. Erdélyi országgyűlési emlékek [Documents of Transylvanian Assemblies]. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia–Athenaeum Ny., 1880.

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Bogdán, István. Magyarországi űr-, térfogat-, súly- és darabmértékek 1874-ig [Measures of Volume, Capacity, Weight and Count in Hungary up to 1874]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1991.

Cziráki, Zsuzsanna. “Brassó és az erdélyi szászok szerepe Bethlen Gábor fejedelem trónfoglalásában (1611–1613)” [The Role of Brassó and the Transylvanian Saxons in Prince Gábor Bethlen’s Accession to the Throne]. Századok 145, no. 4 (2011): 847–76.

Cziráki, Zsuzsanna. “Megjegyzések Erich Lassota zu Steblau 1614. évi titkos erdélyi megbízatásához” [Notes on the Secret Transylvanian Mission of Erich Lassota zu Steblau in 1614]. Fons – Forráskutatás és Történeti Segédtudományok 19, no. 3 (2012): 321–61.

Gündisch, Konrad. Siebenbürgen und die Siebenbürger Sachsen. Studienbuchreihe der Stiftung Ostdeutscher Kulturrat, Band 8. Munich: Langen Müller, 1998.

Jekelius, Erich, ed. Das Burzenland. I. Kronstadt. Kronstadt: Verlag Burzenländer Sächs. Museum, 1928.

Jeney-Tóth, Annamária. “Báthory Gábor udvara 1612-ben Kolozsvárott” [Gábor Báthory’s Court in Kolozsvár in 1612]. In A Báthoriak kora. (A Báthoriak és Európa) [The Age of the Báthoris (The Báthoris and Europe)], edited by László Dám, 137–57. A Báthori István Múzeum füzetei, Új sorozat, 3. Nyírbátor: Báthori István Múzeum és Baráti Köre, 2008.

Kerekes, György. Bethlen Gábor fejedelem Kassán. 1619–1629 [Prince Gábor Bethlen in Kassa, 1619–1629]. Kassa: Wiko, 1943.

Király, Péter. “Külföldi zenészek a XVII. századi fejedelmi udvarban és hatásuk” [Foreign Musicians in the Princely Court of the Seventeenth Century and Their Impact]. Erdélyi Múzeum 56, no. 1–2 (1994): 1–16. Accessed September 10, 2009. http://erdelyimuzeumfolyoirat.adatbank.transindex.ro.

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Translated by Matthew Caples

Volume 3 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Volume 3 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Volume 3 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Mikołaj Szołtysek, Siegfried Gruber

Living Arrangements of the Elderly in Two Eastern European Joint-Family Societies: Poland–Lithuania around 1800 and Albania in 1918

 

This paper re-addresses the nature of joint-family systems in historic Eastern Europe. It identifies two “hotspot” areas of family complexity and uses census microdata to shed light on attributes of household organization and living arrangements of the elderly in a comparative perspective. A detailed examination of various demographic components of the joint-family systems under discussion reveals important inter-societal differences and suggests that “de-essentialization” of the notion of the “joint-family system” might be necessary when discussing the geography of family patterns in this part of the continent.

 

Keywords: historical demography, household structure, living arrangements, co-residence, joint-family, Eastern Europe

Clarifying the Question

The joint family has long been seen as one of the most peculiar living arrangements in historic Europe. While a preference for residential independence in adulthood (i.e. for residing in small, conjugal groups),1 has long been viewed as the norm in Europe, the underlying principles of joint-family coresidence centered on extensive family solidarity, a high degree of parental control over adolescent children, and the subordination of some groups of individuals to others within the domestic space. It therefore comes as no surprise that historians have commonly assumed that the appearance of joint families in a given area, society, or culture must have resulted from economic, demographic, and cultural constraints which prevented people from indulging in the (allegedly) universal preference for small and simple households. In their explanations of the economics of joint-family arrangements, historians assert that the landholding patterns typical of sharecroppers and some serfs and the demands of the pastoral economy in mountainous settings fostered the formation of big, laterally extended multiple-family residence groups.2 When seeking to explain the cultural factors underlying these family arrangements, scholars argue that patrilinealism, closely linked with corporate (joint) ownership structures that negate individual property rights, probably created mental structures that favored family solidarity, cohabitation, and obedience.3 It was generally assumed that in the absence of these two constraining forces, the “aversion” to joint-family living arrangements4 would find expression and the “instinctive wishes” of the population could be realized.

Despite a lack of clarity about the exact meaning of the term,5 “joint family” (or extended family) has often been used to describe laterally extended multiple-family domestic groups in societies widely dispersed across historic Eurasia.6 Early scholars of historical family patterns argued that joint families could be found in many different societies of Eurasia, from the nomadic tribes of the Middle East to the Slavic serf agriculturalists and the ancient civilizations of the Far East.7 Indeed, more recent research has revealed that legal and residential arrangements that followed joint-family rules existed in many parts of historic Europe, including in early medieval Germanic societies,8 fifteenth-century Tuscany, early modern France,9 nineteenth-century northern Italy,10 Finland,11 Russia,12 and parts of the Balkans.13 Until quite recently, the joint-household system was the most prevalent family arrangement in the world’s most populous agricultural societies, China and India. Referring to such diverse cultural areas, Berkner and Shaffer14 argue that anyone reading ethnographic descriptions of joint-family living “cannot help but be struck by the broad similarities.” These common features include the following: the coresidence of two or more nuclear families; the patrilineal succession of family titles and property; a tendency to keep the sons on the patrimony and virilocal household formation; a tendency to unify the joint domestic group around some common economic project; a tendency toward fission at some point in the developmental cycle; a marginal position of female siblings; and a tendency to recruit workers from among kin rather than from among wage laborers.15

Demographers have been fond of making such essentialist claims and have often used the concept of the extended family to explain worldwide demographic differentials. Accordingly, demographers have contrasted stylized versions of the joint-family system with nuclear or stem-family systems in order to establish a theoretical foundation on the basis of which to link different family types to various demographic outcomes. Since the work of Lorimer,16 Davis,17 and Davis and Blake18 there has been broad acceptance among scholars of the assumption that extended or joint families encourage high fertility.19 Hajnal pushed the analysis toward a specification of the rules of household formation and distinguished two main family forms. He also emphasized an East–West divide, contrasting the “joint-household (formation) system” of the major Eurasian societies with the Northwestern European system.20 To exemplify the characteristics of the joint-family pattern, Hajnal cited data from various historical periods from a wide range of countries with very different conditions, including India, Nepal, China, Italy, Croatia, Russia, and Hungary.21 More recently, Das Gupta drew “a stylized contrast between the stem-family systems of Northern Europe and the joint family of North India” in order to highlight their essential features as determinants of divergent health behaviors and health outcomes.22

While the stereotypical belief that in past centuries the elderly lived out their twilight years nestled in the bosom of their families has generally been refuted over the course of the last two decades,23 the perception that complex family societies performed welfare functions better than Western nuclear family based societies has been particularly resistant to change. Reflecting views that have been prevalent since the nineteenth-century writings of Le Play,24 family historians and demographers have continued to assert that nuclear-, stem-, and joint-family societies performed certain welfare functions for their members and coped with economic hardships in particular ways.25 The residential patterns of the elderly in joint-family societies were seen as representing a combined effect of the authority structure (with elderly males at the apex) and the associated family and kin-based approach to welfare provision.26 Regardless of when and where they lived, most joint families were portrayed as private institutions that encouraged solidarity and support for the elderly and other vulnerable individuals.27 Culture-specific values supported that system, especially those stressing family solidarity and a greater sense of obligation towards members of the kinship group.28

It is in this context that the concept of patriarchy has often been evoked, becoming a convenient shorthand for the presumed distinguishing trait of joint-family relations. The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage, power relations that favour the dominance of men over women and the older generation over the younger generation, customary laws that sanctioned these patterns, the absence of an interfering state that could mitigate their influence, and an inert traditional society that emanated from these conditions.29 Combinations of these elements have been used to explain the peculiarity of the joint-family residence patterns in the East and Southeast of Europe relative to the West.30

Although many of these claims are no doubt accurate, the assumption that all joint-family societies are basically the same is, in our view, a gross oversimplification. Why would we think that societies that differ in terms of their cultural metrics, environmental characteristics, and place-specific historical trajectories adhere to the same rules of joint-family living, or that these rules would apply to the same extent in the everyday lives of their members? Without denying that it is possible to identify some essential and generally accepted features of extended families, this paper re-addresses the nature of joint-family systems in Europe by looking at the differences between two exemplary joint-family societies. Instead of treating them as inherently similar, we argue that a detailed examination of various demographic components of the joint-family systems under discussion may uncover important differences and hence suggest the extent to which a “de-essentialization” of the notion of the joint family might be necessary.31

Methodological Issues

This paper identifies two “hot spot” areas of family complexity in historical Eastern Europe and uses census and census-like microdata to describe the residential situations of the elderly in two populations governed by a joint-household formation regime. To compare the living arrangements of the elderly, we used measures commonly applied in demographic and family history studies of aging populations.32 However, we also proposed several indicators which have, to our knowledge, never or only rarely been used in the literature. As our focus is on the comparative morphology of residence patterns in joint-family systems, issues related to the origins of the joint family in the regions under examination or to the factors that contributed to the system’s persistence are not discussed.33

However, because our investigation of the situation of the elderly was based solely on the observation of their residential units registered in the listings, our analysis has certain limitations. The coresident family members may have represented only a small fraction of the kin to whom an elderly individual could turn for economic, physical, or emotional support, and coresidence as such may have been an imperfect proxy for the actual sharing of resources within domestic groups.34 In most developed countries, as well as in some historical societies, the coresidence of the elderly with their kin is just one of many transfer flows involving the aged. The other sources of support are generally in the form of social transfers (pensions, health payments, home care, etc.).35 While we do not wish to ignore these problems, some reservations regarding their implications for our study should be stated. In joint-family societies, household membership strategies were conventionally oriented toward an extensive recruitment of kin, which meant that many (if not most) domestic groups retained their complex structure through a continuous sequence of generations.36 Although it is unlikely that even highly complex domestic groups would encompass all of the kin available to an average “ego,” the accretion of relatives was normally substantial enough in such an environment that we can be certain that, in most cases, coresident kin would have been the most significant “others” from the perspective of an individual. Moreover, in joint-family societies in which domestic units act as property and labor cooperatives, the sharing of physical space was highly related to having the right to the use and ownership of a concrete part of the communal property. Although coresidence may not have always indicated the flow of support from the younger to the older generations, the economic and physical assistance derived from relatives who coresided was likely to have been more beneficial to the aged than the assistance provided by kin who lived close by.37 The coresidence of the elderly with kin had an even greater social and economic significance for pre-industrial rural populations, among which institutionalized social transfers were precarious and investments in human capital were low.

Our analysis relies on two additional operational assumptions. First, we assume there was a hierarchy of caring contexts within domestic groups, with different categories of relatives providing different types of support.38 Second, we assume that the more dense the environment of coresident kin surrounding the elderly—i.e. the larger the group of coresident immediate kin—the greater the potential benefits that could flow to the aged.

In this paper, we only deal with the population living in family (“private”) households. Unlike in historic western Poland, institutional households (often misleadingly called “hospitals”) were largely nonexistent in the eastern part of the country in the eighteenth century. Institutional households were equally scarce in Albania, and the few that existed were omitted from the analysis that follows.

Societies and Data39

To investigate the residential situations of the aged in the two exemplary joint-family societies, we used historical census microdata from two different regions of Eastern Europe: the eastern borderlands of the Polish–-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century and Albania in 1918. The Albanian population census of 1918 and the Polish–Lithuanian database are currently the only existing databases that are large enough to allow us to investigate the demographic conditions and household composition in historical Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

 

Regions	House- holds	Population	No. of parishes (estates)	No. of settlements
Eastern Poland–-Lithuania, 1791–95	13,885	83,727	143	511
Albania 1918	14,937	82,646	n/a	850
Albania 1918 (weighted)	67,056	390,428	n/a

 

Table 1. Basic data distribution. Source: Karl Kaser, Siegfried Gruber, Gentiana Kera, Enriketa Pandelejmoni (2011) 1918 census of Albania, Version 0.1 [SPSS file]. Graz.; Mikołaj Szołtysek, CEURFAMFORM database, Version 0.1 [SPSS file]. Rostock, 2011.

 

On the Polish side, the present study makes use of data for 13,885 peasant households from the eastern territories of historical Poland–Lithuania (Table 1).40 These data were derived from two types of population listings enumerating individuals by residential units.41 The first group of listings (37 percent) comes from the surviving remnants of the censuses carried out by the Polish Diet (Sejm) between 1790 and 1791. The second group of census microdata for the Commonwealth came from the so-called 5th Russian “soul revision.” Designed as periodic tax censuses to be used by the central government to assess the poll tax (which all male peasants in Russia were liable to pay), the “revision” was taken in the Belarusian heartland of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania after the third partition of Poland in 1795. Despite being ordered by an alien administration for the Polish territories, the 1795 revision in Poland–Lithuania followed the traditional Polish concepts of census-taking, rather than the official Russian principles of taxation.

Map 1. Spatial distribution of Polish–Lithuanian data. Map design: J. Suproniuk for CEURFAMFORM Database.

The area enumerated in the listings are clustered into four territorial groupings located on either side of the historical Polish–Lithuanian border of the Commonwealth (Map 1). To the north of this border, there are two regions that stretch over the central and southern parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (regions 1 and 2). The second of these, region 2, constitutes one of the largest European swamplands, known as Poles’ya. To the southwest, region 3 covers a portion of the historic territory of Red Ruthenia, which today is at the intersection of Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. Region 4 consists of the Żytomierski district in the former Kiev Voivodship on the southeastern fringes of the Commonwealth, now in Ukraine. However, for the purposes of this study, the four regions are treated jointly for socioeconomic, demographic, cultural reasons. All of the listings discussed here precede the abolition of serfdom in the territories in question. The serf population under consideration was essentially non-Polish and non-Catholic, and was mainly comprised of Uniates (Greek Catholics). Ethnically, the population was mainly Ruthenian (which meant they spoke various dialects typical of “proto-Ukrainians” and “proto-Belarusians”).42 All of the regions also had lower population densities and less stringent forms of the manorial economy based on the forced labor of the peasantry than the western and southernmost territories of Poland.

From January 1916 onward, northern and central Albania was occupied by the Austro–Hungarian army, and a population census was taken on March 1, 1918. The checking and the processing of the data had to be stopped due to the planned withdrawal of the army in October. The order to destroy all of the census material was ignored except in some areas in the south of the occupied territory. The surviving material, which covers the major part of the country, therefore includes people who lived in roughly 1,800 villages, towns, and cities in the territory administered by Austria–Hungary during World War I (see Table 1 and Map 2). The census director published basic tables in 1922 with funds provided by the Albanian government.

Map 2. Territory of Albania covered by the 1918 census.

 

The population in the Albanian census was predominantly Muslim (78.2 percent), with a Catholic minority in the north (18.6 percent) and an Orthodox minority in the south (3.1 percent). The ethnicity of the population was almost exclusively Albanian. The economy was dominated by agriculture and the urban population made up only 13.2 percent of the total. Very few Albanian adults who lived outside of the cities were literate.

The majority of individuals in our collection were listed by domestic groups comprising all of the people occupying separate residential units, consisting not only of the core family of the head of the household, but also his immediate and more distant relatives, as well as coresident servants and inmates or lodgers.

We recognize, of course, that a comparison of a phenomenon in Albania in 1918 with phenomena in Poland–Lithuania in the course of the eighteenth century may raise some questions. Sklar has noted that marriage behaviors among the populations of the Czech, Baltic, and Polish regions differed markedly from those of people in the Balkans during the demographic transition.43 However, while our country-specific data span long periods of time, from a demographic perspective both of these populations are pre-transitional. While the Belarusian population exhibited the highest fertility levels in Eastern Europe well into the 1920s, Albania was the last country in Europe to enter the demographic transition (i.e. after the World War II).44 The age-standardized marital fertility ratios of both the Polish eastern borderlands at the end of eighteenth century and early twentieth-century Albania were very similar (60–61).45 Female nuptiality patterns were also very similar (female SMAM of 18.4–18.6), although there were significant differences between the male nuptiality patterns in the two locations (the male SMAM was 27.2 in Albania and 22 in eastern Poland). Apart from the age gaps between spouses, the major difference between the two populations appears to have been the share of elderly people aged 60 and older, which was higher in Albania than in Poland (nine percent in comparison with six percent).46

The populations covered by our listings were joint-family societies per se, with a large share of individuals living in joint-family constellations at some point in their lives. Data from the Polish borderlands and Albania displayed some of the highest indicators of joint-family coresidence out of more than one-hundred census populations from around the globe.47 Further proof of the prevalence of joint-family coresidence in the areas under examination is found in ethnographic accounts and historic-anthropological research. According to Kaser, Albania historically belonged to the area of the Balkans where patrilocal household cycle complexity was prevalent.48 The area covered by Albania was characterized by a distinctive patriarchal cultural background that has been called the Balkan patriarchy.49 The basic elements of this cultural pattern were strong blood ties, ancestor worship, patrilocality, patrilineal kinship structures, the levying of a bride price, and the waging of blood feuds.50

The eastern lands of historical Poland were also characterized by the longevity of archaic forms of communal social organization based on male ancestral kinship. These familial-ancestral communes were believed to resemble closely the well-known South Slavic institution of zadruga.51 The patriarchal model of intra-familial relations prevailed, with full economic power being held by the commune’s head, usually the oldest male. When a head died, the position was passed on to the next-oldest male in the group.52 In the period under investigation, large agnatic descent groups were already at different stages of disintegration, mainly due to frequent efforts by landlords to split up large groups and create individual families.53 Nevertheless, archaic extended family patterns were still going strong in the Polish eastern borderlands, although the patriarchal family group at the time was confined primarily to individuals who jointly inhabited one domestic group (“dym”). Despite increasing tendencies toward household division, even in the second half of the nineteenth century large, multigenerational families had not yet disappeared from the Polish eastern territories.54

 

	Rural Albania, 1918		Poland–Lithuania, 1791–95
Category	Frequency	Percent	Frequency	Percent
Solitaries	2,590	3.9	78	0.6
No family	2,274	3.4	79	0.6
Simple family household	26,177	39.0	6,644	47.9
Extended family household	12,619	18.8	1,841	13.3
Stem family household	7,630	11.4	2,705	19.5
Joint family household	15,763	23.5	2,515	18.1
Indeterminate	3	0	23	0.2
Total households	67,056	100	13,885	100

 

Table 2. Household structure in Albania and Poland–Lithuania. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Hammel–Laslett scheme slightly modified. All lineally extended multiple-family households with more than two conjugal family units are treated as “joint families’.”

 

To further illustrate the widespread character of joint-family coresidence in the societies under examination, three measures of joint-family coresidence were applied to our data and presented in tabulated or graphical form.55 The first measure applies a slightly modified Hammel–Laslett scheme to the populations under investigation, while the other two move away from a sole concentration on the household and focus instead on the distribution of individuals and CFUs among different types of domestic groups.56

In Table 2 a canonical Hammel–Laslett scheme was used to present a distribution of households by type in Albania and Poland–Lithuania. The scheme was modified in order to give a better representation of the domestic group structures that fall into the category of joint families. All of the households that belong to Laslett category 5 were divided into two groups (stem versus joint).57 Both datasets show a high prevalence of non-nuclear residence groups. Extended, stem, and joint domestic groups account for more than half of all of the units in both Albania and Poland–Lithuania. While the overall share of multiple-family units was larger in the Polish borderlands than in Albania (38 percent and 35 percent, respectively), the number of domestic groups displaying joint structure according to our definition was slightly higher in the Balkans. The proportions of joint-family households in both datasets were very high compared to other sites in historic Europe, although they are smaller than in the Russian paradigmatic case of the joint family studied by Czap.58 Among Tuscan households in 1427—which have long been regarded as exemplifying joint-family structures in late medieval Europe—only 15 percent were multiple-family households, and only eight percent of those were composed either of two married brothers or three or more couples. Among the Indian rural households in the mid-twentieth century, no more than 12 to 13 percent would have been classified as joint families according to our definition.59 Before Mishino’s data were published in the early 1980s, the highest overall incidence of joint families in historic Europe was found for an estate in eighteenth-century Kurland, where the incidence was about 17 percent.60

 

Figure 1a. Household structure by age of household head (male heads only) Poland–Lithuania 1791–1795. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

Figure 1b. Household structure by age of household head (male heads only) Albania 1918. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”.

It is generally understood that the distribution of households by structure can obscure the actual fluctuation over the developmental cycles of domestic groups.61 A number of scholars have asserted that these Eastern European domestic groups underwent no cyclical changes from one household form to another, but rather maintained the multiple-family form over the entire life-cycle of the group.62 However, neither the Albanian nor the Polish–Lithuanian data confirm this assumption. When all of the households are ordered by the age of the male household head (Figures 1a and 1b), then a clear upward-trend in the propensity to form joint domestic groups over the family lifecycle becomes visible, with much higher proportions of joint families found among older heads. Some differences between Albania and Poland–Lithuania are also discernable. The accretion of additional family units in Albania occurred earlier in the lifecycle of domestic groups than in the Polish borderlands. Among Polish–Lithuanians, a factor that also contributed to a sharp decline in the share of simple families among middle-aged heads was the increasing tendency to form households composed of only two conjugal-family units, some of which then obviously turned into joint-family households. It appears, however, that the number of joint families in both societies was significant enough that we can conclude that joint-household formation rules were well-integrated into the social norms regarding domestic group recruitment and membership.

Figure 2b. Population by household type membership (sexes combined), Albania 1918. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”.

Figure 2a. Population by household type membership (sexes combined), Poland–Lithuania 1791–95. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Notes: Categories ‘No family’ and ‘Solitaries’ omitted (below 0.5 percent across all age groups).

While a substantial fraction of the population spent most of their lives in joint-family environments in both societies (Figures 2a–2b and 3a–3b), the percentage of people in this category was consistently higher in Albania than in eighteenth-century Eastern Poland, where the share tended to fluctuate. But in order to understand better the differences between these two joint-family societies, we need to look at the distribution of conjugal-family units (CFUs) among the different types of domestic group structures based on the age of the family unit head.63 The proportion of CFUs living in joint-family households in Albania generally held steady at around 40 to 50 percent, with only very negligible changes occurring as the CFU head grew older (Figure 3b). Household divisions were obviously occurring less frequently in this society. By contrast, a clear lifecycle pattern of joint-family coresidence can be seen in Poland–Lithuania (Figure 3a). There, the proportion of CFUs residing in joint groups decreased substantially as the head progressed from early adulthood to his mid-fifties.64 While a reverse pattern could be observed after that age, joint coresidence was never as common among units with older heads as it was among family groups with younger heads. Household divisions must have occurred at a very rapid pace among adult Polish–Lithuanians, with a large number of conjugal units gaining residential independence before their heads had reached their late forties. Then, after the head reached the age of 55, the living arrangements of a CFU often shifted again, with many of these groups moving from residing in simple units to living in stem or joint families. These differences in lifecycle developments in Albania and historic Poland may have had important implications for the living arrangements of the elderly in these two societies. It is likely that the delayed division of households in Albania resulted in a considerably higher number and wider range of relatives living in domestic groups that included older people than in Poland.

Figure 3a. Conjugal family units (CFUs) by household type membership, Poland–Lithuania 1791–95. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Notes: Categories ‘No family’ and ‘Solitaries’ omitted (below 0.3 percent across all age groups).

Figure 3b. Conjugal family units (CFUs) by household type membership, Albania 1918. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania.”

Living Arrangements of the Aged

Demographers and family historians have devoted considerable attention to measures of living arrangements among the elderly.65 The most common approaches take into account household headship rates among the elderly, the relationship of the older person to the household head, the older person’s coresidence with married or unmarried children, and/or whether the household in which the elderly person lives has a simple or an extended structure.66 In the analysis that follows, we merge these approaches67 and propose a wider palette of quantified indicators for investigating the position of the elderly. After discussing the results we obtained using these standard measures, we consider some additional tools that may provide us with more insights into the morphology of the residence patterns of the elderly in truly complex family systems like the ones we are dealing with here.

When we look at the living arrangements of the elderly, kin availability plays an important role. The patterns of kin availability are determined by age- and sex-specific mortality, fertility, marriage and remarriage rates, and the age differences between spouses.68 To capture the demographic effects of the availability of kin on the residence patterns of the aged in the populations under examination we use a very simple measure that can be calculated on the basis of the age structures of our populations. The so-called “availability ratio” (AR)69 is the ratio of members of the population aged 15–59 to members of the population aged 60 and over. The former population represents the pool of available individuals with whom the elderly could co-reside. The AR was 10.1 for Poland–Lithuania, but it was only 5.8 for Albania. Assuming this finding is not entirely an artifact caused by the under-registration of certain groups of individuals or a consequence of the age heaping and age exaggeration in the Albanian population, it appears that in Albania there were fewer younger people available for potential coresidence with the elderly.

We begin our analysis by classifying elderly individuals by their relationship to the household head (Table 3). The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to look at the percentage of older people who head a household in conjunction with other features of the living arrangements of the elderly.

The headship rates were uniformly high for men in both locations, but they were much lower for women. In addition, in both datasets far more women lived as parents (or as parents-in-law) in the households of children or children-in-law than men. At this point, however, the similarities between the patterns in historic Poland and in Albania come to an end. While one-sixth of the older women in Poland–Lithuania still held a headship, the corresponding share was drastically smaller in Albania. This seems to indicate that due to a “patriarchal bias,” women in Albania had fewer chances of heading a household as widows. The fewer household divisions also explain why elderly Albanian men were found more frequently in the other household membership categories—particularly those of other relatives and siblings of the head or the head’s spouse—than elderly eighteenth-century Ruthenian men. Moreover, relative to their counterparts in Albania, both elderly men and women in Poland–Lithuania were more likely to reside in a household headed by a non-relative, even though this arrangement was still rare.

 

Relationship to household head	Poland–Lithuania 1791–95		Albania 1918
	Males	Females	Males	Females
Head	88.6	16.1	79.3	1.7
Spouse	0	34.3	0.1	16.1
Parent or parent-in-law	4.9	39.0	5.2	58.6
Sibling or sibling-in-law	1.5	1.9	5.8	5.8
Other relative	1.2	1.9	6.9	14.2
Non-relative	3.8	6.7	1.4	2.3
Lives alone	0.1	0.1	1.3	1.4
Total	100 (N=2639)	100 (N=1853)	100 (N=16391)	100 (N=17913)

 

Table 3. Elderly (60+) relationship to head of household by sex. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”. Note: Albania: weighted population.

 

The major patterns shown in Table 3 allow an initial, tentative hypothesis regarding gender-based differences in the well-being of the elderly in the populations under examination. Assuming the domestic groups in the societies in question were structured hierarchically—and that the household head was the key decision-maker regarding access to resources and used his or her power to ensure that other household members acted in accordance with his or her wishes—it appears that old age was much more advantageous for men than for women in both societies. As only a minority of women were entitled to head households at older ages, relatively few of them were able to exert direct control over decision-making in their domestic group, and this happened much more often in Poland–Lithuania than in Albania. Thus, the well-being of women was dependent on the nature of their membership in a household; i.e., on their placement in the overall web of intra-household relationships.

Before we attempt to deepen our understanding of this issue, we should categorize the elderly householders by sex and the structure of their domestic group (Table 4). Our goal is to determine whether female-headed households were structurally different from male-headed households and whether these structural differences translated into potential vulnerability for older women.

 

	Poland–Lithuania 1791–95		Albania 1918
Household category	Male heads (%)	Female heads (%)	Male heads (%)	Female heads (%)
Solitaries	0.2	0.7	1.7	48.6
No family	0.2	0.3	1.2	14.4
Simple family	25.3	19.0	31.8	20.2
Extended family	9.9	29.0	10.8	12.1
Stem family	36.0	20.0	21.9	2.3
Joint family	27.9	31.0	32.6	2.3
Indeterminate	0.5	0	0	0
Total	100 (N=2340)	100 N=300)	100 (N=13211)	100 (N=555)

 

Table 4. Household structure of elderly heads (60+) by sex of householder. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

 

The figures in Table 4 show significant differences between male- and female-headed households in both datasets; however, these differences are manifested in a very specific way. In Poland–Lithuania, female householders were much more likely than male ones to head extended domestic groups and were less likely to head stem families. The first gap is largely attributable to the combined effects of higher rates of remarriage among men and the excess male mortality at older ages, but it points to the relatively strong position of widowed women in the joint-family societies of historic Poland–Lithuania. It is particularly striking that, in Poland, the relative shares of heads living in solitary and joint-family households were similar among men and women. Again, the rather high number of female heads of extended and joint-family units in eastern Poland–Lithuania suggests that the widowed “matriarch” occupied a relatively strong position in the joint-family societies of historic Poland.

The Albanian patterns were quite different. Male-headed households in Albania were far more likely than female-headed households to have been extended and multiple-family arrangements. However, the most striking gender difference in terms of household structure is that women headed almost all of the solitary and “no-family” domestic groups (which represented three-quarters of all of the units headed by women). Thus, unlike in Poland–Lithuania, most of the elderly female heads in Albania were not co-residing with relatives, and they might have been detached from wider kin groups in several important respects.70 However, before we attempt to explain this phenomenon, we should point out an interesting interplay between the figures presented in Tables 3 and 4. Whereas women in Poland–Lithuania were much more prone to head independent households than women in the Balkans, women in Albania—a strictly patriarchal society at the time—were much more likely to have lived alone than their Polish counterparts.71 This issue definitely requires further investigation, but the most obvious explanation is that women were only able to act as household head in Albania in cases in which no male person was available in the household, and such households were rather negligible in number.

While they are easy to calculate and are potentially informative, the research approaches that focus on the household position of the elderly (based on the relationship to the head) and on the composition of older people’s households are obviously insufficient for a description of the entire spectrum of intra-household relationships among elderly people. Although the connection to the household head is definitely the most important principle structuring relationships within domestic groups, it is not the only one in which the coresidents were involved. To explore these issues more fully, we need a classification scheme that takes into account relationships that were not tied to the head and allows us to consider the relationships between older individuals and other members of the domestic group in which they live,72 at least in a dyadic form. For this purpose, we have used a classification scheme that allocates individuals according to whether they were members of a core-family group, which may include unmarried children living with at least one parent, married couples, and lone parents. People who were not members of families are classified in three ways, according to whether they lived with relatives, with non-relatives only, or alone. It should be emphasized that, in this classification, the category of relative is not defined by a specific relationship to the household head, but by the existence of a relationship between the elderly person and members of the household other than his or her children or spouse. The focus is therefore on the individual and not on the household, and relatives are identified not by their relationship to the head of the household, but by their relationship to any household member in the absence of closer family ties.73 The comparison of Polish–Lithuanian and Albanian populations is presented in Table 5.

 

	Poland–Lithuania 1791–95		Albania 1918
Type of relationship (“lives as”)	Males	Females	Males	Females
Child	0	0.1	0.4	0.2
Spouse	69.5	36.8	77.7	19.0
Lone parent	26.8	56.3	15.8	68.4
Other kin	1.6	2.5	3.4	8.7
Other non-kin	2.0	4.3	1.4	2.3
Lives alone	0.1	0.1	1.3	1.4
Total	100 (N=2639)	100 (N=1853)	100 (N=16,391)	100 (N=17,913)

 

Table 5. Dyadic relationships in the households by sex and region. Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

 

The allocation patterns of older persons to different categories represented in Table 5 are generally very similar in both societies, with more elderly men living with spouses and more women being classified as “lone parents.” However, the differences in the numeric intensity of these patterns are probably more important. First, it should be noted that in Albania, over 80 percent of older women were living without a spouse (potentially the most important source of support, at least in old age), compared with 63 percent in Poland–Lithuania; which again represents a clear effect of the age gap between spouses in Albania. Both men and women in Albania were more likely to live without coresident children than their counterparts in Poland–Lithuania, although the trend was stronger among women than men (14.4 percent of women versus 6.9 percent of men).

 

 

Poland–Lithuania 1791–95
Females living with/as	N (=100%)	% living with adult child (16+)	% living with married child	% living with unmarried or widowed child
Spouse	681	87.7	72.1	54.9
Lone parent	1044	95.4	84.5	40.3
Albania 1918
Females living with/as	N (=100%)	% living with adult child (16+)	% living with married child	% living with unmarried or widowed child
Spouse	691	73.2	55.9	62.0
Lone parent	2343	86.6	70.0	42.5

 

Table 6. Selected dyadic relationships by category of coresident offspring (female population only). Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

 

To better assess the potential vulnerability of older Albanian and Polish–Lithuanian women, it is useful to distinguish between the different types of children coresiding with elderly females in the two settings. For the calculations presented in Table 6, two categories of women who could have lived with children in the same premises (“spouses” and “lone parents” in Table 5) were further subdivided into those who lived with adult children, at least one married child, and unmarried and widowed children (as these categories partly overlap, the given percentages do not sum up to 100). It thus appears that, relative to their counterparts in Albania, women in Poland–Lithuania were more likely to have been living with a husband and were more likely to have been coresiding with adult and married children. The difference between these two sites is equally revealing when coresidence with adult and married children is examined for women classified as lone parents. In Poland–Lithuania, women in this category co-resided with adult and married offspring 10 to 15 percent more often than in Albania.

 

Lives as	Relationship to the household head							N (=100%)
	Head	Spouse	Parent or parent-in-law	Sibling or sibling-in-law	Other relative	Non-relative	Lives alone
	Poland–Lithuania 1791–95
Child	0	0	0	100	0	0	0	1
Spouse	0	93	2	1	1	3	0	681
Lone parent	28	0	68	1	0	2	0	1044
Other kin	7	0	0	30	52	11	0	46
Other non-kin	0	0	0	0	0	100	0	79
Lives alone	0	0	0	0	0	0	100	2
	Albania 1918
Child	0	0	0	28	72	0	0	43
Spouse	0	84	7	3	5	0	0	3400
Lone parent	2	0	83	4	11	0	0	12,261
Other kin	5	1	5	23	64	1	0	1553
Other non-kin	6	0	0	0	0	94	0	409
Lives alone	0	0	0	0	0	0	100	247

 

Table 7. Dyadic relationships of elderly women by individual household position. Source: Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”; Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”.

 

We can perform an even more detailed accounting of the living arrangements of the elderly if we combine the information provided above in Table 5 with the pattern of relationships to the head of household. This approach is based on the assumption that dyadic relationships between individuals within domestic groups can also be structured hierarchically. In other words, it might be assumed that lone parenting, for example, may be framed differently in terms of the flow of resources and support depending on whether a lone parent is a household head, a head’s relative, or a stranger.

Again, the cross-classifications of the various relationships of older people in the two societies are generally similar, particularly among men. However, among women, some interesting differences can be observed (Table 7). The share of women who were lone parents in Poland–Lithuania was highly concentrated among two household statuses: the head and the parental generation (including the parents-in-law). At the same time, the share of female lone parents who headed a household was almost six times lower in the Balkans, and lone mothers in Albania were predominantly clustered around the head’s parents. One possible interpretation of these findings is that Polish lone mothers were receiving more resources from the younger generation; i.e., they were receiving intra-household support. It is important to note, however, that in the Balkans, the authority of the female spouse of the head normally increased only with the age of the woman, and often culminated in the woman achieving the position of the respected mother of the new “patriarch.” This does not fit in with the image of the subordinated, vulnerable, and fully dependent elderly woman.74 Nevertheless, even if we accept that the underrepresentation of Albanian widowed mothers among household heads was counterbalanced by their equally strong position after stepping down from co-headship, we still have to explain the finding that some 10 to 15 percent of lone parents among Albanian women were not mothers or even siblings of the heads, but were more distant relatives of the head couple. It is not entirely unrealistic to argue that a widow’s relationship with her children and the flow of resources between her and her children would have been framed by the status of their respective family units with respect to the core family of the head and his close relatives. Inequality and mistreatment may have arisen in such contexts, especially given that Albanian women often were not surrounded by their adult offspring.

We have already noted that divergences in the life-cycle patterns of domestic groups in Albania and Poland–Lithuania probably had an effect on the number of coresident kin to the elderly. Unless excess mortality took a toll, older Albanians should have had a considerably higher number and a wider range of relatives present in their households. Is it possible to find hard evidence that confirms this assumption?

For the purpose of exploring this issue, the unweighted average of the distribution of households by size commonly labeled “mean household size” needs to be distinguished from another related measure, the “size of household of the average member of the population” (“mean experienced household size”) (Table 8).75

 

Region	Sex	M(E)HS	No. Of adults	All relatives	Spouse	Children	Sibling	Nephew	Cousin	Grand-children
Poland–Lithuania 1791–95	males	7.07	4,60	3,36	0.68	1.36	0.07	0.04	0.00	0.05
	females	7.13	4.67	3.37	0.36	1.47	0.01	n.a.	n.a.	0.09
Albania 1918	males	8.49	5.26	4.13	0.83	0.97	0.28	0.26	0.16	0.04
	females	7.88	5.06	3.96	0.19	1.25	0.07	n.a.	n.a.	0.15

 

Table 8. Elderly population by sex, mean experienced household size, and mean number of adult coresident relatives (16+). Source: Kaser, Gruber, Kera, Pandelejmoni, “1918 census of Albania”; Szołtysek, “CEURFAMFORM database”.

 

The figures in Table 8 show that the experienced household size was higher in Albania for both males and females, although for older men the difference was substantially larger. Interestingly, unlike in Albania, the size of the household of the average elderly woman in Poland–Lithuania was very close to that of the average man. Once again, this provides some additional evidence that elderly women in historic Poland had a better standing than women in Albania. In both societies, most adults who co-resided with an elderly person were the person’s relatives by blood or marriage. Far more elderly men than elderly women were living with a spouse. However, whereas men in Poland were less likely to have been living with a spouse than men in Albania, the pattern for women was reversed. These results are attributable to the higher remarriage rates of men relative to women in both societies, and to the large age gap at marriage in Albania.76 Older people in Poland–Lithuania generally had more adult children in their household, though we do not yet have enough information to determine whether this was simply an outcome of less favorable demographic conditions in Albania.77 Overall, however, we can see that in Albania, the proportion of elderly people who lived with relatives other than spouses and children was higher than in Poland–Lithuania (figures for men only). In both datasets, the mean number of adult, coresiding grandchildren was negligible.

Conclusions

Although it is still not fully acknowledged in the historical and sociological literature, a significant degree of variation has been shown to have existed within Northwestern Europe with regards to household organization. Richard Wall was among the first to tackle the problem of inter-regional differences in familial organization within areas traditionally subsumed under the label of simple (and neolocal) household systems.78 Referring to the substantial range of variation between individual settlements in England, he warned that it would be incorrect “to see English households as variations on one basic type.”79 Meanwhile, the considerable degree of variation in household structures Wall found within the confines of Northern and Central Europe led him to point out rather boldly that “so great is the degree of variation that it must be doubtful whether Hajnal’s generalization captures much of the reality of family and household patterns of Northwest European societies in the past.”80

Following this thread, in this paper, we have attempted to demonstrate that, even though eastern Poland–Lithuania and Albania both followed joint-household formation rules (i.e., the pattern antithetical to the neolocal one according to Hajnal) and can both be seen as examples of societies with long traditions of the ownership of joint property rights, the family systems in the two settings were not entirely the same. Throughout this exercise, Wall’s argument that family and household systems should not be defined solely on the basis of variations in the proportions of extended and multiple-family households81 has proven particularly valuable, and we have taken a large number of factors into consideration to demonstrate the validity of our approach.

The paper demonstrates several differences between the two Eastern European regions, however, the most convincing findings are related to the distinctly different role of females in households of Poland–Lithuania and Albania. It is in this regard that the patterns detected in the regions of eastern Poland–Lithuania deviate most significantly from many of the tendencies found in Albania. The distinctiveness of female position in the two societies, in turn, suggests that their patriarchal underpinnings may not have been the same. This disparity stemmed from the interplay of various socioeconomic, institutional, and ecological factors that are too complex to be fully discussed here.82 Here, it must suffice to say that manorialism, demesne lordship83 and the associated interventions by landlords in the lives of peasants created a political-economic framework within which historical tendencies to form corporate family groups in eastern Poland–Lithuania were to some extent constrained and the power of lineage groups was partly mitigated.84 In Albania, on the other hand, rather extreme environmental conditions in alpine or highland areas far from communication and trade routes appear to have facilitated the continuity of patriarchal cultures barely subject to state surveillance or socio-cultural currents of the Early Modern and Modern Eras.85

The different interactions among the microprocesses of elderly household membership recruitment discussed in this paper—all within a broad geographical area traditionally associated with family complexity—not only raise the question of how, ultimately, the area as a whole should be characterized, i.e. as pertaining to the operation of different household systems, or, alternatively, variations of one basic system. They also point to the more substantial question of the extent to which the term “joint family” should be used to describe a distinct family system. Further research along the lines proposed here, but extended over other areas of traditional Europe, could help us resolve this problem.86 In fact, the most recent studies suggest that the residential patterns of the elderly are but one element of a much wider “package” of dissimilarities between Polish–Lithuanian joint families and their counterparts in the Black Earth region in nineteenth-century Russia and Albania.87 One solution to the problem could be to abandon the idea that one country or region belongs to one rigid “pattern” and another country to another “pattern,” and instead to use a set of different variables to compare countries, regions, or subpopulations within them. Such a set of variables can be used to analyse similarities and differences between two or more populations and see which ones are closer to or more distant from each other; thus, to approach the Eastern European joint families as various “scalar types.”

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

 

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1 For the argument see: Daniel S. Smith, “The Curious History of Theorizing about the History of the Western Nuclear Family,” Social Science History 17 (1993): 325–53; Michel Verdon, “Rethinking Complex Households: the Case of the Western Pyrenean »Houses«”, Continuity and Change 11, no. 2 (1996): 191–215; Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History. A Subversive View of the Western Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

2 Lutz K. Berkner and John W. Shaffer, “The Joint Family in the Nivernais,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 150–62; David I. Kertzer, “The Joint Family Revisited: Demographic Constraints and Complex Family Households in the European Past,” Journal of Family History 14 (1989): 1–15; Ulf Brunnbauer, Gebirgsgesellschaften auf dem Balkan. Wirtschaft und Familienstrukturen im Rhodopengebirge (19./20. Jahrhundert) (Vienna–Cologne–Weimar: Böhlau, 2004); Pier Paolo Viazzo, “Pastoral and peasant family systems in mountain environment,” in Pratiques familiales et sociétés de montagne, XVIe – XXe siècle, ed. Bernard Derouet, Luigi Lorenzetti, and Jon Mathieu (Basel: Schwabe, 2010), 245–64.

3 Mark O. Kosven, Semeinaia obshchina i patronimiia (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1963); Karl Kaser, Familie und Verwandtschaft auf dem Balkan. Analyse einer untergehenden Kultur (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995); Michael Mitterauer, “A Patriarchal Culture? Functions and Forms of Family in the Balkans,” Beiträge zur historischen Sozialkunde. Special Issue 1999: The Balkans: Traditional Patterns of Life (1999): 4–20.

4 Steven Ruggles, “Stem Families and Joint Families in Comparative Historical Perspective,” Population and Development Review 36, no. 3 (2010): 563–77.

5 Triloki N. Madan, “The Joint Family: A Terminological Clarification,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 3 (1962): 7–10.

6 For the sake of convenience, throughout this paper the terms “domestic groups,” households, or “housefuls” are used interchangeably, despite some clear qualitative distinctions between them.

7 Frédéric Le Play, “Le Réforme Sociale,” in Frederic Le Play on Family, Work, and Social Change, ed. C. Bodard Silver (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 259; Frédéric Le Play, L’organisation de la famille selon le vrai modèle signalé par l’histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps, 3rd edition (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1871), § 12, 94; Charles S. Devas, Studies of Family Life: A Contribution to Social Science (London: Burns and Oates, 1886); M. F. Nimkoff and Russell Middleton, “Types of Family and Types of Economy,” American Journal of Sociology 66, no. 3 (1960): 215–25.

8 Milovan Gavazzi, “Die Mehrfamilien der Europäischen Völker,” Ethnologia Europaea 11 (1980): 167–68.

9 Berkner and Shaffer, “Joint Family.”

10 Kertzer, “Joint Family.”

11 Elina Waris, “Komplexe Familienformen. Neue Forschungen zu Familie und Arbeitsorganisation im finnischen Karelien und in Estland,” Historische Anthropologie 10, no. 1 (2002): 31–51.

12 Peter Czap, “The Perennial Multiple Family Household, Mishino, Russia, 1782–1858,” Journal of Family History 7 (1982): 5–26.

13 Karl Kaser, “Introduction: Household and Family Contexts in the Balkans,” The History of the Family 1, no. 4 (1996): 375–86; Robert Wheaton, “Family and Kinship in Western Europe: The Problem of the Joint Family Household,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5, no. 4 (1975): 601–28; Gavazzi, “Mehrfamilien”; Milovan Gavazzi, “The Extended Family in Southeastern Europe,” Journal of Family History 7, no. 1 (1982): 89–102; Michael. Mitterauer, “Komplexe Familienformen in sozialhistorischer Sicht,” Ethnologia Europaea 12 (1981): 213–71.

14 Berkner and Shaffer, “Joint Family,” 150.

15 Wheaton, “Family.”

16 Frank Lorimer, Culture and Human Fertility (Paris: UNESCO, 1954).

17 Kingsley Davis, “Institutional Patterns Favouring High Fertility in Underdeveloped Areas,” Eugenics Quarterly 2 (1955): 33–9.

18 Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake, “Social Structure and Fertility: an Analytic Framework,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 4 (1956): 211–35.

19 John C. Caldwell, “A Theory of Fertility: From High Plateau to Destabilization,” Population and Development Review (1978): 553–77; Thomas K. Burch and Murray Gendell, “Extended Family Structure and Fertility: Some Conceptual and Methodological Issues,” Journal of Marriage and Family 32, no. 2 (1970): 227–36 for counterarguments; also the discussion in Monica Das Gupta, “Lifeboat Versus Corporate Ethic: Social and Demographic Implications of Stem and Joint Families,” Social Science and Medicine 49, no. 2 (1999): 181–82.

20 John Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System,” Population and Development Review 8 (1982): 449–94.

21 Hajnal, “Two kinds,” 455.

22 Das Gupta, “Lifeboat”; also George W. Skinner, “Family Systems and Demographic Processes,” in Anthropological Demography: Toward A New Synthesis, ed. David I. Kertzer and Tom Fricke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 53–95.

23 Richard Wall, “Relationships between the generations in British families past and present,” in Families and households: division and change, ed. Cathie Marsh and Sara Arber (London: Macmillan, 1992), 63–85; Peregrine Horden and Richard M. Smith, eds., The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1998).

24 Le Play, “Réforme.”

25 Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 1–89; Peter Laslett, “Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Preindustrial Europe: a Consideration of the »Nuclear-hardship« Hypothesis,” Continuity and Change 3, no. 2 (1988): 152–75; Mead Cain, “Welfare Institutions in Comparative Perspective: The Fate of the Elderly in Contemporary South Asia and Pre-Industrial Western Europe,” in Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives, ed. Margareth Pelling and Richard M. Smith (London: Routledge, 1991), 222–43; Das Gupta, “Lifeboat”; Skinner, “Family systems.”

26 Cain, “Welfare Institutions,” 241.

27 Laslett, “Family.”

28 Laslett, “Family”; Roger Schofield, “Family Structure, Demographic Behaviour and Economic Growth,” in Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. John Walter and Roger Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 282–95; Cain, “Welfare Institutions”; Hartman, “Household”; critically Sandra Cavallo, “Family Obligations and Inequalities in Access to Care in Northern Italy seventeenth to eighteenth centuries,” in The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity, ed. Peregrine Horden and Richard M. Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 90–110; Peregrine Horden, “Household Care and Informal Networks: Comparisons and Continuities from Antiquity to the Present,” in The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity, ed. Peregrine Horden and Richard M. Smith (London: Routledge, 1998).

29 Vera St. Erlich, Family in Transition: A Study of 300 Yugoslav Villages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966): 32; Joel M. Halpern, Karl Kaser, and Richard A. Wagner, “Patriarchy in the Balkans: Temporal and Cross-Cultural Approaches,” The History of the Family 1, no. 4 (1996): 425–42; Karl Kaser, Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden. Ursprünge und Gegenwart des balkanischen Patriarchats (Vienna–Cologne–Weimar: Böhlau, 1992); Kaser, “Introduction”; Mitterauer, “Patriarchal Culture.”

30 Siegfried Gruber and Mikołaj Szołtysek, Quantifying Patriarchy: an Explorative Comparison of Two Joint Family Societies, MPIDR Working Paper WP-2012-017 (Rostock: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, 2012).

31 Strangely enough, the existence of intra-regional differences within the specific types of family household systems has been endorsed only recently in the family history literature. Richard Wall, in particular, argued that many distinctive patterns could be identified within an area in which Hajnal’s Northwest European household system was allegedly dominant (see Richard Wall, “European family and household systems,” in Historiens et populations. Liber Amicorum Etienne Helin (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia, 1991), 617–36; Richard Wall, “Historical Development of the Household in Europe,” in Household Demography and Household Modeling, ed. Evert van Imhoff et al. (New York: Plenum Press, 1995), 19–52; Richard Wall, “Transformation of the European family across the centuries,” in Family History Revisited. Comparative Perspectives, ed. Richard Wall et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 217–41; see also discussion in Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Spatial Construction of European Family and Household Systems: Promising Path or Blind Alley? An Eastern European perspective,” Continuity and Change 27, no. 1 (2012): 11–52. However, Wall’s claims remain largely unheard or unacknowledged, cf. Alter’s recent statement about the pervasiveness of the Northwest European family model: George C. Alter, “Generation to Generation: Life Course, Family, and Community,” Social Science History 37, no. 1 (2013): 1–26.

32 See Susan De Vos and Karen Holden, “Measures Comparing the Living Arrangements of the Elderly,” Population and Development Review 14, no. 4 (1988): 688–704; Eugene Hammel and Peter Laslett, “Comparing Household Structure Over Time and Between Cultures,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1974): 73–109; Steven Ruggles, “Availability of Kin and the Demography of Historical Family Structure,” Historical Methods 19 (1986): 94; Steven Ruggles, “Family Demography and Family History: Problems and Prospects,” Historical Methods 23 (1990): 22–30; Miriam King and Samuel H. Preston, “Who Lives with Whom? Individual versus Household Measures,” Journal of Family History 15, no. 2 (1990): 117–32; also Lutz K. Berkner, “Household Arithmetic: a Note,” Journal of Family History 2, no. 2 (1977): 159–63.

33 See, however Karl Kaser, “The Balkan Joint Family Household: Seeking Its Origins,” Continuity and Change 9 (1994): 45–68; Mikołaj Szołtysek, “The Genealogy of Eastern European Difference: An Insider’s View,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 43, no. 3 (2012): 335–71.

34 Ruggles, “Availability”; also Douglas A. Wolf, “The Elderly and Their Kin: Patterns of Availability and Access,” in The Demography of Aging, ed. Linda Martin and Samuel Preston (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994), 146–94; Wall, “Relationships,” 70–76.

35 Alberto Palloni, “Living Arrangements of Older Persons,” Population Bulletin of the United Nations, Special Issue 42/43 (2001): 64ff; Smith, “Structured Dependence.”

36 Czap, “Perennial Multiple Family Household.”

37 Wall, “Relationships,” 63.

38 Sara Arber and Jay Ginn, “In Sickness and in Health: Care Giving, Gender and the Independence of Elderly People,” in Families and Households: Divisions and Change, ed. Catherine Marsh and Sara Arber (London: Macmillan, 1992), 92–93.

39 For the purposes of this exposition, the discussion of data-related issues was reduced to a minimum. See more in Siegfried Gruber and Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Stem Families, Joint Families and the ‘European Pattern’: How Much of Reconsideration Do We Need?” Journal of Family History 37, no. 1 (2012): 105–25.

40 Various parts of this data collection have already been analyzed: e.g., Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Three Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System in Historical Eastern Europe: A Challenge to Spatial Patterns of the European Family,” The History of the Family 13, no. 3 (2008): 223–57; Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Rethinking Eastern Europe: Household Formation Patterns in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and European Family Systems,” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 389–427; Mikołaj Szołtysek and Barbara Zuber Goldstein, “Historical Family Systems and the Great European Divide: the Invention of the Slavic East,” Demográfia: English Edition 52, no. 5 (2009): 5–47.

41 The database development was supported by the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship project (FP6-2002-Mobility-5, Proposal No. 515065) at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Cambridge, UK, 2006–2008. More details in Szołtysek, “Three kinds,” “Rethinking.”

42 Not to be confused with Carpatho-Russians or Rusnaks from the Subcarpathian areas in Eastern Central Europe.

43 June L. Sklar, “The role of marriage behaviour in the demographic transition: the case of Eastern Europe around 1900,” Population Studies 28, no. 2 (1974): 231–47; cf. also Kaser, “Balkan joint family household,” 45–46, who contended that “the Balkan joint family came into being independently from other East European joint-family-household organizations.” However, there is an abundant nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature that claims that the “Balkan zadruga” was a relic of ancient all-Slavic forms of ancestral organisation which can be traced back to the era of first settlement (see below; also reviewed in Szołtysek, “Spatial,” 26–28). Although asynchronic comparisons of the elderly population in eastern Poland–Lithuania and Albania yield important lessons for specific areas of family history research, these lessons are hardly applicable to the broader social history of these regions, because the social, economic, and institutional environment have diverged in the meantime.

44 Samuel Fogelson, “Z badań nad demografią Polesia i Wołynia,” Prace Wydziału Populacyjno-Migracyjnego 6 (Warsaw, Instytut badań Spraw Narodowościowych, 1938).

45 Age-standardized number of own children under age five per 100 married women aged 15–49. Total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman is expected to bear if she survives through the end of her reproductive life span and experiences a particular set of age-specific fertility rates at each age), among the inhabitants of Poland’s eastern borderlands was estimated to have ranged between 5.1 and 5.6 at the end of the eighteenth century. Mikołaj Szołtysek, Rethinking East-Central Europe: Family Systems and Co-residence in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Bern: Peter Lang, forthcoming). 150 years later in Albania, TFR averaged more than six births per woman: Jane Falkingham and Arjan Gjonça, “Fertility Transition in Communist Albania, 1950–90,” Population Studies 55 (2001): 309–18.

46 See also Gruber Szołtysek, “Stem Families.” Unfortunately there is no reliable data about life expectancy at birth available for Albania prior to 1950 (at which time it was 51 years for males and 61 years for females), so we cannot be sure whether that feature is an effect of enhanced survival chances or partly an outcome of exaggerated ages later in life. On the other hand, it is rather unlikely that life expectancy at birth on Belarussian and Ukrainian territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century was much higher than 27 years for a man and 30 years for a woman (Szołtysek, Rethinking East-Central Europe).

47 Gruber and Szołtysek, “Stem Families.”

48 Kaser, “Introduction,” 383; Siegfried Gruber, “Household Composition and Marriage Patterns in Albania around 1900,” Balkanistic Forum 1 (2012): 101–22.

49 Kaser, “Familie,” 61–165.

50 Karl Kaser, Patriarchy after Patriarchy: Gender Relations in Turkey and in the Balkans, 1500–2000 (Vienna: Lit-Verlag, 2008).

51 Maxime Kovalevskii, “Obscinnoe zemlevladenie v Malorossii v XVIII veke,” Juridiceskij vestnik 1 (1885): 36–37, 54–55; Fedor I. Leontovich, “Krestianskij dvor v litovsko-russkom gosudarstve,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnago Prosvescenija (1896): 341–82; Aleksandra Efimenko, “Dvoriščnoe zemlevladenie v južnoj Rusi” Russkaja Mysl’ 5–6 (1892): 370–412; Kosven, “Semeinaia obshchina,” 168–69; Marija Gimbutas, The Slavs (New York: Praeger, 1971), 133; Ivan V. Lutchitsky, “Zur Geschichte der Grundeigentumsformen in Kleinrussland,” Schmoller’s Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 20 (1896): 165–96; also Oswald Balzer, “O zadrudze słowiańskiej. Uwagi i polemika,” Kwartalnik Historyczny 13, no. 2 (1899): 183–256; Henryk Łowmiański, Z dziejów Słowian w I tysiącleciu n.e. (Warsaw: PWN, 1967), 344–72.

52 Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky, “Očerki semejnogo obyčnogo prava krest’jan Minskoj gub,” in Issledovanija i stat’i. T. 1. Ètnografija i sociologija, obyčnoe pravo, statistika, belorusskaja pis’mennost’, ed. Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky (Kiev: A. P. Sapunov, 1909), 9–12.

53 Szołtysek, “Three Kinds.”

54 Dovnar-Zapolsky, “Očerki.”

55 Yet another feature bridging the two regional societies was a pastoral or agro-pastoral mode of agrarian production that has dominated both. The cultivation of land in Albania was decisively constrained by the mountainous environment due to the climatic effects of altitude and the scarcity of productive land, hence the emergence of mountain pastoralism or the combination of animal husbandry and the cultivation of small plots of land (see Kaser, Patriarchy, 236–69). In eastern Poland–Lithuania, on the other hand, the generally low soil quality (and extensive swamp areas in southern Belarus) and the extensive chessboard of arable plots often implied a tendency to switch to non-farming activities (such as cattle breeding) (see Szołtysek, Rethinking East-Central Europe). On the long tradition of postulating links between pastoral economies and a prevalence of extended family forms, see Viazzo, “Pastoral and peasant family systems”.

56 Berkner, “Household Arithmetic”; Steven Ruggles, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System: Living Arrangements of the Aged in Comparative Historical Perspective,” Population and Development Review 35, no. 2 (2009): 249–73.

57 Ruggles, “Stem Families”; On the sometimes fluid distinctions between stem- and joint-family systems, see Osamu Saito, “Two Kinds of Stem Family System? Traditional Japan and Europe Compared,” Continuity and Change 13, no. 1 (1998): 167–86.

58 Peter Czap, “A Large Family: the Peasant’s Greatest Wealth: Serf Households in Mishino, Russia, 1814–1858,” in Family Forms in Historic Europe, ed. Richard Wall, Jean Robin, and Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 128–29.

59 John Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System,” in Family Forms in Historic Europe, ed. Richard Wall, Jean Robin, and Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 88.

60 Wheaton, “Family,” 615–16; Andrejs Plakans, “Seigneurial Authority and Peasant Family Life: The Baltic Area in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5, no. 4 (1975): 629–54.

61 Lutz K. Berkner, “The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: an Eighteenth-century Austrian Example,” The American Historical Review 77, no. 2 (1972): 398–418.

62 Czap, “Perennial Multiple Family Household,” 18; Czap, “Large Family,” 143–44.

63 The “head” of a CFU was considered to be the oldest person within it.

64 These are, of course, hypothetical life-courses constructed from synthetic cohorts based on cross-sectional data.

65 For a review see: De Vos and Holden, “Measures”; Susan De Vos, “Revisiting the Classification of Household Composition Among Elderly People,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 19, no. 2 (2004): 135–52; also United Nations, Population Division, Living Arrangements of Older Persons. Special issue of Population Bulletin of the United Nations 42/43 (New York: United Nations Reproduction Section, 2001); Wall, “Historical Development”; Steven Ruggles, “Living Arrangements and Well-Being of Older Persons in the Past,” Population Bulletin of the United Nations 42/43 (2001): 111–61.

66 De Vos and Holden, “Measures”; De Vos, “Revisiting.”

67 Cf. Steven Ruggles, Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Wall, “Relationships”; Richard Wall, “Characteristics of European Family and Household Systems,” Historical Social Research 23, no. 1–2 (1998): 44–66.

68 Wolf, “Elderly”; also Ruggles, “Availability”; Palloni, “Living Arrangements,” 88–91.

69 Palloni, “Living Arrangements.”

70 As remarked above, in reality the exact kinship network or the network of supporting family members is not known in this type of analysis; it can be independent of co-residence. For arguments about a close correspondence between the structure of the co-resident kin group and the overall importance of kinship in Polish–Lithuanian reality, see Szołtysek, Rethinking East-Central Europe, ch. 10.

71 In economic demography, living in single-person households in old age is sometimes taken as a manifestation of the desire for privacy and autonomy, which is most likely to be realized when the income of the population increases (see the discussion in Fred C. Pampel “Changes in the Propensity to Live Alone: Evidence from Consecutive Cross- Sectional Surveys, 1960–1976,” Demography 20, no. 4 (1983): 433–47. Another perspective stresses the negative consequences of living alone; namely, the limited potential for assistance from family members, indicated by the presence of others in the same household.

72 De Vos and Holden, “Measures,” 694.

73 Wall, “Characteristics.”

74 This holds true even though in general women are structurally less advantaged in the patrilineal joint-family system than in nuclear- or stem-family societies. According to Das Gupta, “Liveboat,” 178, 180: “This is because the primary unit is the corporate group which consists of male patrikin. Women are at the bottom of two hierarchies: the gender hierarchy as well as the age hierarchy. A young bride enters her husband’s family as a marginal person with little autonomy (…). The powerlessness of women in the patrilineal joint family system (…) is at its peak during the early phases of a woman’s marriage, which are the peak childbearing years (…). In the joint family system, old people are likely to obtain greater emotional and physical support, and also perhaps greater access to financial support in an emergency than might have been forthcoming for retired parents in the stem family system.”

75 See Joel M. Halpern, “Town and countryside in Serbia in the nineteenth-century, social and household structure as reflected in the census of 1863,” in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 401–27; Thomas K. Burch, “Household and Family Demography: A Bibliographic Essay,” Population Index 45, no. 2 (1979): 173–95.

76 Larger age gaps between spouses in Albania may have resulted in better chances of remarrying for widows, as they were younger. However, differing household structure, as well as the differing household position of the women could counterbalance that advantage, as the presence of married adult sons could diminish the probability of remarriage.

77 A similar number of children-in-law should be present in these households (most of these adult children were married), although we have not yet been able to calculate their exact numbers. It is worth pointing out that early twentieth-century observers of demographic conditions in southern Belarus were equally struck by the extremely high fertility of the local population and the surprisingly low mortality (Fogelson, “Z badań”).

78 Wall, “Household systems”; Wall, “Transformation.”

79 Richard Wall, “Regional and Temporal Variations in English Household Structure from 1650,” in Regional Demographic Development, ed. John Hobcraft and Philip Rees (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 109.

80 Wall, “Household Systems,” 625.

81 Wall, “Household Systems”; Wall, “Transformation.”

82 See, however, Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Residence Patterns and the Human-ecological Setting in Historical Eastern Europe: a Challenge of Compositional (Re)analysis,” in Population in the Human Sciences: Concepts, Models, Evidence, ed. Philip Kreager (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

83 See Markus Cerman, Villagers and Lords in Eastern Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

84 Cf. also Michael Mitterauer, “Ostkolonisation und Familienverfassung. Zur Diskussion um die Hajnal-Linie,” In Vilfanov zbornik. Pravo-zgodovina-narod. In memoriam Sergij Vilfan, ed. Vincenc Rajšp and Ernst Bruckmüller (Ljubljana: ZRC, 1999), 203–21.

85 Cf. Mitterauer, “Komplexe Familienformen,” 67–68; Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland Communities: Environment, Population and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ulf Brunnbauer, “The Mountains and the Households. Household Structures in the Rhodopi Mountains in a Comparative Perspective.” Paper presented at the 2010 SSHA Convention, Chicago, Ill., October 17–21, 2010.

86 See the agenda for the research and data collection project recently launched by MPIDR, called Mosaic at www.censusmosaic.org.

87 Szołtysek, Rethinking East-Central Europe; and Gruber and Szołtysek, “Quantifying Patriarchy.”