Volume 1 Issue 1-2 CONTENTS

Gábor Czoch

The Transformation of Urban Space in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century in Hungary and in the City of Kassa

 

The two most important changes in the urban spaces of the walled cities of Hungary in the period between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth were the growth of the outer cities and the demolition of the city walls. This essay examines the consequences of these changes from the perspective of the social and political consequences of the shifts that took place in the concept of the city and the borders of the urban space, considering a specific case on the one hand, the city of Kassa (or Košice), and national tendencies on the other. The physical growth of the city and the gradual urbanization of the outer cities not only led to changes in the prevailing understanding of the “city” (which earlier had been identified as the area within the city walls), but made increasingly inevitable the creation, in a space that had been fragmented by the various privileges enjoyed by some of its inhabitants, of a legally unified city, as well as the incorporation of the outer cities, which had varying statuses, into the jurisdiction of the municipality. This, however, conflicted with the prevailing system of noble privileges, and the situation went unresolved until 1848, when the revolution made possible the transformation of the political structure of the entire country.

 

This essay examines the problems that arose with the transformation of urban spaces inherited from earlier centuries, urban spaces which were once clearly demarcated by city walls, but which with the passage of time became increasingly amorphous and fluid. The focus of analysis is Kassa (in Slovakian: Košice, its German name is Kaschau), a city lying on the banks of the Hernád River, where the northeastern range of the Carpathian mountains meets the lowlands, the region known in Hungarian as the Alföld. Today Kassa is the second largest city of the Slovak Republic. Throughout the period under discussion, it was a real multiethnic city, mostly with German, Hungarian and Slovakian speaking inhabitants. The growth of the city, which was founded in the second half of the thirteenth century by settlers (for the most part German speakers – hospes), was influenced in part by its advantageous geographical location, but also to a significant extent by the fact that it fell on an important trade route that crossed the Carpathians, linking the Kingdom of Hungary with Poland, Silesia, and the city of Krakow. Kassa profited considerably from trade with territories in Poland, in particular the trade in wines made from the vineyards in the nearby region of Tokaj.

During the period under examination, in other words from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Kassa was the regional center of the northeastern territories of the Hungarian Kingdom. (Figure 1). In its role as a regional center it was one of the most important cities in Hungary, though from the perspective of its population it was only a medium-sized city in comparison with other settlements in Hungary, and was small in comparison with urban centers in the rest of Europe. According to the census taken under Joseph II in 1784 its population numbered only 7,590. According to the census carried out by the city itself in 1847, this number had grown to 14,959. The census taken in 1850 by the Austrian authorities indicates a decline in the population to 13,034. It is worth noting, however, that contemporaries did not consider this census reliable. According to the census taken in 1857, which was taken in part as corrective measure for the previous one, the population of the city was 16,417.1 In the case of Kassa, indices of population growth fall far behind similar indicators for the most rapidly growing cities in Hungary, which were found primarily in the lowland grain-producing regions, not to mention the city of Pest, which at that time was becoming the capital of the country and bore witness to an almost fivefold growth in its population.2

Figure 1. Commercial centers in Hungary, c. 1828

 

As the above-cited indices of demographic change demonstrate, the various transformations in the structures of urban space did not take place suddenly in the city of Kassa, nor were the consequences they brought abrupt. As an explanation of the relevance of the city from the perspective of a discussion of urban change, however, one could borrow from the reasoning of Jean-Claude Perrot. In Perrot’s study (now regarded as a classic) of the development of the city of Caen in the eighteenth century, a medium sized regional center in comparison with other cities in France at the time, Perrot sought to capture the birth of a modern city. He justified his choice of Caen as the subject of his inquiry with the argument that in Caen the elements of the process under scrutiny appeared in a kind of “rural hibernation,” and so in his view individual aspects of the changes in question were particularly accessible to analysis.3

The processes of urbanization took place at varying paces in the countries and regions of Europe, and indeed in some cases the rate of change varied even on the level of different settlements. These processes differed not simply in their chronology, but also in the consequences they bore.4 Not surprisingly, in the case of individual cities local and regional peculiarities and the features of the narrow political, social and cultural context played prominent roles, but in addition to these characteristics there were also numerous common elements and trends the explanation for which lies in the similarities in the character and nature of the challenges brought about by urbanization. Whether an examination presents rather the differences or the similarities, the individual and distinctive or the general and shared characteristics depends to a great extent on the level of the analysis one adopts in the course of one’s research. In this essay I examine the transformation of the structures of urban space (the growth of city outskirts, the demolition of city walls, and the consequences these changes had for urban life), on several levels. Thus I endeavor to situate the various changes that took place in the city of Kassa in the larger national context. Of the many questions that arise, I analyze the shift that occurred in the understanding and representation of urban space, as well as some of the social and political implications of the transformation of this space.

Figure 2. Anton Svajcer’s map and sketch of Kassa from the 1780s.
Source: Hungarian National Archives, Maps Collection,
Cameralistic Maps S section–Arcanum Database

 

Shifts in the Understanding of the Concept of the City, as Reflected in Maps and Written Accounts

 

Of the old depictions of the city of Kassa, unquestionably one of the most beautiful is the one done by engineer Anton Svajcer. It was included, no doubt in part because of its fine execution, in Magyarország régi térképeken [Hungary on old Maps], an album intended to offer a representative sample (Figure 2).5 The editors of the album date the map to roughly 1780, though they note that we know nothing regarding the person who commissioned the map and little regarding its actual execution or the motives for its creation. Nor do we know much of the life of Anton Svajcer. The depiction consists of two parts. In the larger, more dominant section of the portrayal one sees the ground-plan for the fortified city, including the ramparts, the ring of multiple walls and bastions, the lines of the streets, and the long main street that runs north-south and broadens towards the southern end, serving also as the main square and giving the city its distinctive shape. The marketplace was here, as were (and are today) two of the most extraordinary examples of gothic architecture in Hungary, the Cathedral of Saint Elizabeth and the Chapel of Saint Michael (which predates the cathedral), not to mention the coffeehouse, the covered market, and the pillory. This broadened section of the main street was in fact a small island in the middle of the city between two branches of the Csermely stream, which ran north-south through the city. Using letters that corresponded to a list on the side of the drawing, Svajcer designated the parts of the city that he considered the most important (indicating first and foremost the four quarters of the city, an administrative division of the urban space that had existed since the Middle Ages) and the public buildings. Naturally he made mention of the two old gates to the city, one on the northern end, the other on the southern, and the newer third gate, a side-door to the southwest that had been named after Joseph II on the occasion of his visit to the city.6

The smaller section of the depiction, which almost resembles an offhand addition, is comprised of a sketch of the city beneath the map. Bearing the title Prospectus Civitatis Cassoviensis versus Occidenterri, it depicts the city from the west. In the foreground one can see the line of a meandering street bordered by trees and in the distance the tall ramparts and the strong walls and bastions. Beyond this, one sees only the upper sections of the city houses and rooftops crowded together in rows, as well as seven buildings that rise above the city walls. Svajcer lists these separately: six churches and the Rubra Turris, in other words the tower next to the cathedral, which served both as a bell tower and a fire lookout tower.

From the perspective of the questions raised here, Svajcer’s map and his depiction of the city is important for what it fails to show. At the time at which the map was presumably being done, the city of Kassa already had three outlying districts the population of which, according to the census taken in 1788 (Conscriptio Animarum), was only a few-hundred short of the population of the inner city (meaning inside the city walls). The population of the outer city numbered 3,520, compared to 3,917 people living within the city walls.7 On the map-section of a survey (1764–1787) prepared with the intention of laying the groundwork for a precise military map of the Habsburg Empire and taken about the region of Kassa at roughly the same time that Svajcer’s map was being done (1782–1785), the outlying districts of the city can be clearly seen on the northern and southern sides of the city, around the two old gates, and along the western city walls (Figure 3). The Hernád River forms the eastern border of the city, thus limiting the further growth of the outlying districts. The depiction also shows that at the end of the eighteenth century the city walls and the outlying districts were not quite adjacent. There was a broad, empty strip of land between them. The cartographer Svajcer did a sketch of the city from the perspective of an imaginary observer who is standing somewhere in the middle of this strip of land, between the city walls and the buildings of the western outlying districts, with his back to the outer city.

Figure 3. Kassa on the basis of the map-section of the first military survey (1782–1785).
Source: Maps Collection of the Ministry of Defense Museum and Institute of Military
History–Arcanum Database. Papers of the First and Second Military Surveys of Abaúj County

 

The figure for the population of the city of Kassa in the census taken in 1784 by the order of Joseph II includes the population of the outlying districts, as does the series of annual surveys that were taken by the city council as of 1788. There was a practical explanation for the decision to include the parts of the city lying beyond the city walls, since the outlying districts were under the direct administration of the city council. (This was not true in the case of every city, and I will return to this later.) The sovereign sought not simply to have a survey taken of the entire population of the country according to settlement, but also to have a registry assembled of all the men fit for military service, though of course the census was also intended to determine questions of taxation. Joseph II also wanted to compel the local administrative bodies to keep continuous records of demographic data concerning the people under their jurisdiction.8 The council used the local censuses for their own purposes, such as the assessment of taxes. The city administration collected taxes from the population of the outer city, so from the perspective of jurisdiction, political belonging, and taxation, the city of Kassa included the outlying districts.

Regarding the depiction of the city on Svajcer’s map, since we know nothing about the reasons for which the map was created, one can venture little more than hypotheses. As noted above, in his portrayal of the city the dominant features of the urban space are depicted the most prominently, first and foremost the city walls with the bastions and the gates, the main square and main street with the attached side streets, the churches, the towers, and the houses crowded against one another. Together these elements of urban space form the profile of a settlement that essentially corresponds to the concept of an urban municipality familiar from earlier times all over Europe, a concept of which one can read in Tripartitum, a summary of medieval legal customs in Hungary by the humanist legal scholar István Werbőczy. According to Werbőczy, “The city is a multitude of houses and streets, surrounded by the necessary walls and fortifications, that possesses the qualities conducive to good and upright living.”9 It is worth emphasizing, from the perspective of the discussion here, that while this book was never elevated to the status of law in the Hungarian Kingdom, after its publication in 1517 it nonetheless served as a fundamental reference work for three centuries, and therefore continued to be held in considerable esteem at the time the map was made. Thus it is also quite possible that Svajcer—assuming his task was to depict the city of Kassa—never even considered including the outer city, since according to the definition of the city given in the Tripartitum, the outlying districts did not constitute part of the city proper.

Based on the available sources, it is difficult to offer much in the way of substantiation for the hypotheses above regarding Svajcer’s intentions. However, other sources concerning the city of Kassa do offer confirmation of details considerably more important from the perspective of the questions at hand here. Svajcer’s depiction suggests a conception of the city that was shared by many of his contemporaries. In other words, at the end of the eighteenth century the “city” was still considered commonly to mean the parts of a settlement lying within the city walls. This is clearly illustrated by a 1789 description of the city by Ferenc Kazinczy, one of the most influential writers of the time, not to mention an entry on Kassa by scholar and statistician András Vályi that was included in a description of Hungary published in 1796. The two authors, both of whom knew the city well, draw a clear distinction between the outer city and the intra muros, and both consider the latter to be the city proper.10 Some of the provisions of the 1798 city statute also indicate the prevalence of this conception of the city. One could cite several relevant examples: “a burgher who owns a house here in the city and outside in the Hóstát [a term that referred to the area beyond the walls of the historical city center].”11 Or with regards to the provisions concerning fire safety: “Here in the city and outside in the Hóstát in each house or at least in every third house […] there will be ladders and pots filled with water.”

Decades later, one continues to find references to the city proper as the area surrounded by the city walls, for instance, the 1837 description of Kassa by Elek Fényes, who is considered the father of the science of statistics in Hungary. Regarding Kassa he writes, “The city itself, which was strongly fortified long ago, is small, as its length is no more than 380 fathoms, and its breadth at the widest point is no more than 330.”12

In texts dating from the 1840s, however, the earlier dichotomie of the terms “city” versus “outer city” (in Hungarian város and külváros) are increasingly replaced by the terms “inner city” versus “outer city” (belváros and külváros). This change in terminology can be regarded as a sign that what had at one time been considered the outer city was no longer seen as a separate entity, but rather had come to be regarded as a constituent part of the urban community. It is worth noting that the Hungarian word “belváros” [“inner city”] was a product of this era. According to the dictionary of the words that were created as part of the movement to modernize the Hungarian language, the first, deliberate use of the word can be found in a text on Vienna that dates from roughly the end of the 1780s.13 With regards to Kassa, in the indexes of the records of the meetings of the city council the designation “belváros” first appears as a separate heading in 1845, though it can also be found in some of the decisions of the council dating from 1844.14 In descriptions I know of the city it was first used by the Kassa-born Imre Henszlmann, the founding father of the art history in Hungary, in an 1846 article written for the periodical Magyar Föld és Népei [Hungarian Lands and its Peoples]:

Between the exterior entrenchments that once stood and the city outskirts on the northern, western, and southern sides there is a large, wide slope (Galcis) around which the outer parts of the city, as in the case of Vienna, extend in a three-quarter circle along the inner city, because on the fourth side, the eastern side, there is nothing resembling an outlying city, but rather only a few mills, gardens, and a bath near a millstream.15

In the series of censuses Conscriptio Animarum which were taken by the administrative territorial division of the urban territory the term “belváros” appeared in 1847, though it refers not simply to the four traditional quarters of the city surrounded by the earlier walls, but also to the parts that were built either at the base of the walls or where they had stood.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, parallel with the increasing use of the term “belváros,” the meanings of the terms “inside” and “outside” the city also changed. At the end of the eighteenth century they had been used unambiguously to refer to areas either inside or, respectively, outside the city walls. However, in an article on Kassa published anonymously in a periodical in January 1848 one reads the following: “The territory of the city stands thusly, according to sections. The inner territory of the city is 500 hold [a term used to measure land], the vineyards are 540 hold, the meadowlands 23,000, cabbage gardens 200, and arable land 7,000. The forests only on the border of the city are 10,000 hold; rivers, ditches, streams, crags, gullies, roads and other unusable areas are 5,700 hold.”16 Thus the author, who on the basis of this detailed description must have known the city well, clearly considered the outlying parts of the city constituent as inner parts of the city proper and regarded only the cultivated lands surrounding Kassa, which belonged to the city, as lying beyond its borders.

 

The Demolition of the City Walls

 

The shift in the meaning of the notion of urban space discernible in the sources mentioned above was related fundamentally to the accelerating growth of the outer city and the increasingly tight fusion of the outer city with the intra muros. The gradual demolition of the city walls, a process illustrated by contemporary maps and depictions, shows this process quite clearly from another point of view. In addition to the military map made at the beginnings of the 1780s (drawn just in the same time as Svajcer’s map), a second military map dating from 1806 also clearly depicts the fortifications of the city (Figures 3 and 4). The map depicting the city as it looked in 1830 and another done in 1856, however, show the disappearance of the major parts of the city walls (Figures 5 and 6). The maps also clearly show the growth of the outer city.

Figure 4. Kassa on the basis of the map-section of the second military survey (1819).
Source: Maps Collection of the Ministry of Defense Museum and Institute of Military History–Arcanum Database. Papers of the First and Second Military Surveys of Abaúj County

 

Two nineteenth century chroniclers, one who wrote in German, the other in Hungarian, also make mention of the demolition of the city walls, Johannes Plath in 1860 and József Tutkó in 1861. On the basis of their descriptions, the demolition of the walls took place roughly as follows.17 According to Tutkó, in 1706 the prince Ferenc Rákóczi II, who led an uprising against the Habsburgs, ordered the fortification of the city, which sided with him against Vienna. “[O]n the basis of the plans of French engineers, [Rákóczi] had the outermost entrenchments surrounding the city erected, the better part of which were still standing in the third decade of the nineteenth century.” In Plath’s account one reads the following: “until 1827 the hillocks around the city walls and the ramparts enticed the inhabitants of the city to take pleasant strolls, and also provided a place for the mirthful youth to play ball games and fly kites.”

According to the Hungarian chronicle, in 1802 the people of Kassa requested permission from the chancellery of the Hungarian royal court for the construction of a new gate, in addition to the existing city gates. The so-called “mill gate” was completed in 1805. The chronicler also notes that in 1803 at the site of the lower gate “the last remains of the castle that had once stood were also hauled away and a straight road through the gate was being built.” According to Plath, “the side city gates, as the Joseph and Mill gates were demolished” in 1827. He wrote that also in 1830 “the lower city gate was completely demolished and the main street was lengthened, creating a beautiful view from the cathedral of the road leading to Pest and Eperjes.” (Eperjes is today the city of Prešov in Slovakia, which lies some 30 kilometers to the north of Kassa.) The Hungarian chronicle dates the next step in the demolition of the city walls to 1840, when the process of removing the entrenchments surrounding the city on its western side and leveling the ground was begun. In his aforementioned 1846 description of Kassa, which gives a sense of the city before the upheavals of the 1848 revolution, Imre Henszlmann writes:

Figure 5. Joseph Ott’s map of Kassa, from roughly 1830.
Source:  “Plan der königl. Freistadt Kaschau” (Joseph Ott).
Hungarian National Archives, Maps Collection S 11. no 490: 2 – Arcanum Database

 

The center of the city is elliptical, a shape given by the one-time fortifications that surrounded the inner city. These fortifications consisted of double stone walls and entrenchments that were filled with the waters of the Csermely stream. Over the past several years the entrenchments have been filled and gardens have been built on them. The walls have been partly demolished. The entrenchments now only remain in the northern part of the city, the walls however still stand in other areas as well. The southern side has been completely leveled. And the gates too, having long lost their function as fortifications, have recently been completely torn down.18

Jean-Luc Pinol and François Walter date the largest wave in the process of the demolition of city walls in Europe to the period between 1790 and 1825.19 In the case of the city of Kassa, however, the process began only at this time, as the requests for the construction of new gates and the reconstruction and enlargement of the existing gates indicate. The more rapid demolition of the walls occurred in the 1830s and lasted into the 1840s and indeed even later. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the better part of the fortifications separating the outer city and the inner city had been demolished.

Figure 6. Kassa in 1856. Source: Hungarian National Archives, Maps Collection S 12. Div. X. No. 29.

 

New Construction in the Area of the Entrenchments and the Promenade

 

The German chronicler’s above-cited comment, which makes reference to denizens of the city strolling and playing around the fortifications (which had lost their military significance), suggests that the people of Kassa took possession of the area spontaneously. However, the leaders of the city sought to address the question of how to use this area within a larger framework of urban planning. The inscription on the map dating from roughly 1830 illustrates this clearly: “Plätze zu projektirten Gebäude” [sites for the projected buildings] (Figure 5). According to all signs, however, the plans progressed only slowly at best, and oftentimes the aims and intentions of the city planners came into conflict with the unplanned use of the area by the people of the city. There are few detailed sources on this, however, little more than a handful of notes of cases that were heard at sittings of the city council. The decisions of the council suggest that the leaders of the city had two ideas regarding how to put the area of the ramparts, which they had resolved to demolish, to practical use. They first measured out plots of land for residents of the city who were interested in acquiring lots and later entertained the idea of creating a promenade.

Inhabitants of the city who were interested in acquiring land in the area of the ramparts were able to take possession of a lot in accordance with the conditions accepted by the Hungarian Royal Chamber (Magyar Udvari Kamara) (4594/1843).20 References in available sources suggest that one could come into possession of a lot free of charge, or at least with tax exemptions stretching over several years. At the same time, the owner had to accept responsibility for the considerable labor of leveling and evening the ground. Many of the people of the city who accepted this task, however, postponed the work for a long time, as noted by a city engineer in the course of a survey of the city taken in August 1843. In his report he refers to a resolution of 1833, which apparently stipulated the responsibilities of the owner, but in vain. Thus earlier the leaders of the city had not concerned themselves much with the matter. The Hungarian chronicle indicates that on the western side of the city the demolition and removal of the ramparts began to take place at a more rapid pace in 1840, at which time the idea of creating a promenade increasingly came to the fore. As of 1843 the city council began to issue increasingly numerous resolutions regarding the use of the area of the ramparts, and in May 1844 the leaders of the city again considered the cases of lot owners who had neglected to meet their obligations. The council issued a warning to the property owners and gave them another year to complete the work (2615/1844).

A case that was discussed in July 1845 offers a clear illustration of the prevailing circumstances and the various problems that arose. The question of the territory of the ramparts created two significant problems. The first of these was the task of leveling the ground, the second of drying it out, in other words draining it. The council therefore ordered drainage ditches to be dug, a task for which it also made use of the villeins of the surrounding villages, who belonged to the lords of the city. During the course of the work that had been ordered by the city council damage was done to the vegetable garden of one of the lot owners. The owner lodged a complaint and requested compensation from the council (4316/1845). The council considered the case and determined that the lot in question had come into the possession of its previous owner at auction. As one of the conditions of the sale of the property, the council stipulated that the owner level the “swampy lot” and build the necessary drainage ditch with stone arches, in precise accordance with the instructions of the city engineer, and that the owner also keep it in a state of permanent repair. With the passing of time, however, these conditions and obligations were gradually forgotten, in part because of changes in ownership but also simply because the council earlier had failed to enforce them in the first place. Given the circumstances, the council rejected the request for compensation, explaining its decision with the contention that the obligations of the owner did not change simply because of a change in ownership. The new owner, however, could not have known much of this. The report indicates that he had driven the workers who had gathered by the order of the city leaders from his lot, and indeed his wife too had helped. Thus they not only hampered the construction of proper drainage, but also caused an affront to the council. The husband and wife therefore not only were ordered to tend to the tasks the completion of which they had hindered, but also to appear before the council at its next sitting, where they were personally reprimanded.

A case from three years later offers an illustrative example of how the city leaders faced considerable difficulties in their attempts to realize their plans regarding the uses of the area where the ramparts had stood. A report from August 1848 (4794/1848) states that the owners of the local porcelain works had dumped manure “harmful to health and the air” in the ditch on the western site of the city barracks. The council allowed the owners of the porcelain works to use the drainage ditch on the condition that within ten years they fill the ditch and build a house on it. According to the report this condition had not been met even long after the deadline had expired, so the council ordered an inquiry.

It is worth noting, however, that at least as far as one can know on the basis of available sources there was no consensus among the citizens regarding the council’s project to use this land. At the beginning of 1848, for example, “several inhabitants of the city who kept cattle” submitted a request to the council (3143/1848) to allow them to graze their livestock on the northwestern area of the land where the ramparts had stood. The council rejected the request, explaining that given the need to maintain order they could not permit livestock to graze either in the inner city or in the outer city.

The goal of the leaders of the city was to create an elegant promenade, which they wished to enclose and plant with trees. According to the sources, however, they faced several difficulties. For instance, they had to have the saplings and the stakes with which they were held guarded in order to prevent theft (3736/1848). Some of the denizens of the city, however, wholeheartedly supported the plans for the promenade. A separate society was formed in order to facilitate the work, and donations were collected, significant sums that were turned over to the council in order to support its efforts (960/1844 and 2619/1845). On the basis of the resolutions of the council, the society was headed by two counts, so it is reasonable to conclude that the plans for the creation of the promenade reflected rather the wishes of the elite of the city.

In any event, at the time the promenade began to be built there were already three other pedestrian areas in Kassa. According to the chronicle of the city the first had been built in the heart of the city, on the main square near the cathedral, in 1805.21 The aforementioned description of the city from the periodical Hetilap [Weekly] offers a glimpse of the situation in 1848:

In addition to the abovementioned promenade in the center of the city, there is another at the lower end of the main street and another that was planted with trees last year on the eastern side of the city alongside the ditch of the mill. The western rampart area is also being turned into a promenade, the ground has already been leveled, one part has already been planted with trees, and in this respect in the future we can expect even more, as the council and the selected members of the citizenry of the city have resolved to employ a paid gardener who will plant saplings in a seedling nursery to be established and plant trees along every street and walkway of the city, according to the plans being drawn up, and in the public gardens, and also tend to the trees that have already been planted and see to any problems that arise.22

The creation of the pedestrian areas gave the public spaces of the city a new and distinctive social function, though the sources available in the case of the city of Kassa are not sufficient to enable any kind of thorough analysis of this. The cases that have been mentioned here suffice perhaps at least to illustrate the ways in which the new uses of these spaces diverged from earlier practices. Similarly, one can do little more than venture hypotheses regarding the conflicts that arose when attempts were made to put the various principles of urban planning, which were based on the expertise of engineers, into practice. In any case, the houses and pedestrian areas that gradually came to take the place of the city walls clearly furthered communication and everyday contact between the inner and outer city.

 

The Construction and Growth of the Outer City

 

The available sources yield little information regarding the changes that took place in the architectural appearance of the buildings of the outer city. The various sketches of the city and the travelogues in which one finds descriptions of its buildings understandably dwell first and foremost on the public buildings, churches, and mansions of the aristocrats that opened onto the main street of the inner city. For many aristocratic families Kassa was a popular place in which to spend the winter. In 1789 Ferenc Kazinczy wrote: “the outer city is built in an ample space, but consists of pitiful hovels.”23 András Vályi was a bit more generous in the comments he penned in 1797: “the outer city of this royal town is also spacious.” He notes that there was a reformed church in the outer city, as well as two Lutheran churches. In the larger of the two Lutheran churches services were held in German, in the smaller they were held in Slovak. Vályi adds, “in addition to these buildings the outer city is also graced with splendid gardens.” 24

In 1846 Imre Henszlmann also made a few sparse comments regarding the outer city of Kassa: “with the exception of the farmsteads of the well-to-do burghers and the gardens of the nobility, the outer city consists of miserable thatch-roofed houses made of clay; they are inhabited by Slavs, who represent the largest part of the population of Kassa.”25 A description of the city from 1848, however, offers a picture that is a touch more favorable: “as is the case in the inner city, in the outer city there are also many large houses that were built in fine taste.” The anonymous author, a denizen of Kassa, does add, however, that most of the houses in the outer city were small and many of them had “thatched roofs.”26 The descriptions of the city thus suggest that between the beginning and the middle of the nineteenth century there had been small changes in the appearance of the outer city, but essentially it continued to consist predominantly of ramshackle, rustic houses.

The picture is a bit more nuanced and varied, however, if one considers the changes that took place in the outer city in the period between 1788 and 1847 on the basis of the city censuses, almost all of which have been preserved. As noted earlier, the censuses were done according to the subunits of the city’s administrative districts.27 First the four quarters of the inner city, or intra muros, were taken into consideration. Then as a kind of transitional area came the so-called Submurales, and the outer city was referred to by the sort of umbrella term Suburbium, at first as of 1788 according to individual street names. This simple listing of street names was replaced from 1802 with the division of the areas outside the city walls into the lower, middle, and upper outer city (initially in Latin, and as of 1840 in Hungarian), a process that can be seen as a clear sign of the gradual growth of the outer city. In 1819 the census was expanded to include two new, distinct areas in the outer city, the Aedificiorum post suburba and the Externa civitas. As of 1822 the latter was referred to as Nova Civitas. The names that were given to these areas betoken the territorial growth of the city. Finally, as we have seen, in 1847 the general term “belváros” was used, which included the four quarters of the inner city (intra muros) and the area referred to initially as Submurales and the Nova Civitas.

According to the censuses, in 1806 the population of the outer city exceeded the population of the intra muros for the first time (4,581 residents in the inner city, compared to 4,904 living in the outer city). Over the course of the subsequent decade the patterns of population growth in the two parts of the city were essentially similar, with the population of the outer city sometimes slightly exceeding and sometimes falling just short of the population of the inner city. As of 1817, however, the population of the outer city always exceeded the population of the inner city. According to the 1847 census, it was roughly one-and-a-half times the size of the inner city (6,024 residents in the inner city compared to 8,935 in the outer city).

With the growth of the population the number of houses in the city also grew in the period under examination, but only in the outer city. For instance, in 1801 there were 375 houses in the intra muros, and by 1842 this number had actually dropped slightly to 372. In the outer city, by contrast, the number of houses grew from 789 to 990. It is worth noting that according to the 1760 and 1767 censuses there were 369 and then 378 houses and lots in the inner city. These numbers clearly demonstrate the strong divergence between the topographical continuity (or more simply put, lack of change) in the inner city on the one hand and the rapid growth in the outer city on the other. Furthermore, the average number of people living in a single dwelling also grew in the outer city over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, in contrast with the inner city, where this number hardly changed at all. While from this perspective the difference between the two parts of the city remained significant in the middle of the century, it had however declined in comparison with the early 1800s (see Table 1).28

 

Table 1. The number of people living in a single dwelling, according to the censuses

1801		1842
Inner city	Outer city	Inner city	Outer city
11.8	5.2	12	6.7

 Source: Calculated from my own database.

 

The data from the city censuses suggest that in the first half of the nineteenth century the outer city retained much of its village-like character, but the picture is considerably more nuanced if one also takes into consideration the occupations of the people living in the outer city29 (see Table 2).

 

Table 2. Division of the population according to occupation

	1801		1842
	Inner city	Outer city	Inner city	Outer city
Artisan	86.3	42.9	70.5	51
Merchant	8	0.6	13	1.4
Intellectual occupation	2.6	1.2	5.0	2.7
Day laborer, agricultural laborer	0.5	46	3.8	29.5
Other	2.6	9.3	7.7	15.4
Total	100	100	100	100

Source: Calculated from my own database.

 

In the early years of the nineteenth century there were still significant differences between the two parts of the city from the perspective of the professional occupations of the population. In the inner city the number of artisans vastly outnumbered the number of people pursuing other occupations. They constituted the clear majority of the population, followed in a distant second place by the merchants, and then, again with a significant drop, people engaged in an intellectual profession or pursuing “other” occupations (such as carriers, musicians, restaurant keepers, retired army officers, etc.). Field and day laborers were only rarely recorded as living within the city walls. In contrast, in the outer city the field workers and agricultural laborers constituted the single largest group at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the proportion of artisans living in the outer city was only a few percentage points less than the proportion of agricultural workers. Thus from the perspective of the composition of the population on the basis of occupation the community of the outer city cannot really be considered rural or provincial even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, though it is true that there were almost no merchants and inhabitants of the outer city who were engaged in so-called intellectual professions. The outer city was also distinct in part because compared to the inner city a fairly high percentage of its population was engaged in “other” occupations. This is due primarily to the fact that for the most part carriers and restaurant keepers were found in the outer city.

By the middle of the nineteenth century significant changes had taken place in the occupational repartition of the two parts of the city. While in the inner city the percentage of artisans dropped from 86 percent to 70 percent in the outer city this figure grew to 51 percent. Thus artisans constituted a majority of the population in the outer city as well, with agricultural workers comprising the second largest group at 29 percent of the total population. While merchants and people engaged in intellectual professions still were found primarily in the inner city, their number grew in the outer city as well, thus indicating a decline in the differences between the two parts of the city. Furthermore, with the growth in the number of artisans in the first half of the nineteenth century there was a corresponding diversification in the artisanal crafts found in the outer city. At the beginning of the century most of the artisans in the outer city—a decisive majority—were either stonemasons or carpenters. By the middle of the century they had been joined by boot makers, potters, cobblers, and butchers, but also people pursuing comparatively rare trades, such as hatters, turners, and even “spectacle makers.”

 

Political Debates Regarding the Outer City

 

As the discussion of the various changes that took place in the city of Kassa makes clear, by the middle of the nineteenth century the concept of urban space had undergone a transformation. In contrast with earlier notions of the “city,” the newer concept of urban space also included the areas outside the city walls. I have outlined the various processes this involved: the demolition of the city walls, the growth in the population and physical space of the outer city, and the gradual but continuous urbanization of the outer city from the perspective of the occupations of its population. Legal regulations, however, did not keep pace with these changes, and therefore by the middle of the nineteenth century the actual, everyday use of urban space and the prevailing legal system increasingly came into conflict with each other. Naturally Kassa was by no means the only city of which this was true. One could enumerate other cities in which similar transformations had taken place and comparable conflicts had arisen, but perhaps the best indication of the nationwide nature of these changes is the simple fact that the Diet (the legislative assembly of the Hungarian estates) of 1843/44 had this very question as an item on its agenda.

The debates concerning the outer cities began with the discussion of an extremely detailed bill (numbering more than 400 paragraphs) the goal of which was to implement a thorough reform of the local administrative systems and the national political status of the cities.30 In the contemporary press and in various political treatises the focus was essentially on the political situation. This included the relationship between the cities and the organs of the central government, questions concerning the extent of legal authority, and perhaps most importantly, the question of how many votes representatives of the cities should have in the Diet. Questions of considerable importance regarding the local administration of the cities were also on the agenda, including the question of the status of the outer cities. The bill had been drafted by politicians of the nobility and intelligentsia who sought to implement urban reform. In the spirit of the liberal principles of the age, they hoped to transform the political and social structures of the country and make the prevailing legal order more rational and modern. To this end, they were prepared to accept the consequences of political conflict with the court in Vienna and conservative circles, but they sought to achieve their aims through dialogue and negotiation. The Diet was the most important battleground of their efforts, and their weapon of choice was proposals for legal reform such as the one they presented to the legislative assembly (and therefore also to the sovereign) regarding the cities.31

When preparing the proposal, supporters of the liberal reforms appealed to the principle of “territorial” authority (to use their term).32 Their concept of urban space differed radically from the notion of urban space that essentially identified the “city” as the space within the city walls. According to the proposal for reform, the definition of the space of the city was “the area in which the city exercises its authority.” This definition, of course, made it necessary to designate precisely the exact limits of city authority. This question was particularly significant, and also particularly complex, because the actual physical space of the city was legally quite fragmented. The authors of the proposal strove to minimize this fragmentation, at least to the greatest extent possible. In other words their intention was to make the territorial jurisdiction of the city authorities cover the geographical space of the city as closely as possible, a reform which would have the practical consequence of reducing or eliminating the legal distinctions between the different parts of the city and which would also bring the population of the city directly under the jurisdiction of the city authorities by abolishing various territorial and individual privileges.

Their efforts created two serious sets of problems, the first of which involved urban plots of land that were owned by members of the nobility, the second of which concerned the status of the outer cities. In the case of the plots of land owned by the nobility, the problems arose because, in accordance with the privileges enjoyed by the nobility, these plots were not under the jurisdiction of the city administration and were not subject to taxation. This question was the subject of fierce debates, since the prospect of placing the lands of nobleman under the jurisdiction of the city was fundamentally at odds with the centuries-old privileges of the nobility. In the end the Diet reached a compromise according to which the plots owned by members of the nobility were put under the jurisdiction of the city from the perspective of matters relating to the police and criminal law on the one hand, a measure that constituted a restriction of the privileges of the nobility, while on the other these lands retained their exemption from taxation.

One of the problems that affected the denizens of the outer city the most dramatically and seemed to call for urgent political resolution was the discrimination they suffered in comparison with residents of the inner city (who earlier had been considered the “actual” inhabitants of the city) as a consequence of the prevailing laws. One of the regulations of the city of Kassa regarding fire safety offers a vivid example. According to the regulation, which was issued in 1798 but remained in effect until 1848, people were forbidden to smoke pipes in the streets near the houses, stables, or barns (primarily because of the risks posed by the flammable materials with which the roofs had been built). The punishment for a denizen of the inner city was a fine, but for the same infraction residents of the outer city or people who did not enjoy the civic rights of the burghers were caned.33 In the spirit of the “territorial principle,” the authors of the 1843 urban reform law insisted that “the community of the city is one; the divisions of the city on the basis of inner city or outer city, or from any other perspective, do not form separate communities” (45. §). Thus the concept according to which the outer city forms an integral part of the city as a whole was made law. The Diet accepted this part of the proposal without much debate. However, this individual provision hardly resolved the larger question of the legal status of the outer cities.

Further problems arose in the case of cities around which urban areas (or areas resembling the urban community) had been built that lay not on lands in the possession of the city (as was the case in Kassa), but rather on the estates of members of the nobility. Pozsony (or Pressburg, as it was called in German, and Bratislava by its name as the present-day capital of Slovakia) was one such city. According to a description by Elek Fényes, “Pozsony has essentially one outer city, Blumenthal, though one could also consider Váralja or the Schlossberg and Zuckermandl part of this, because they are separated from the city only by a wooden fence, but these outskirts are either under the authority of the castellany of Pozsony or the comitat of Pozsony.”34 By that time the city of Pozsony and these settlements had grown together to such an extent that according to all signs the authors of the law did not distinguish them from one another. This is why, by their count, the city of Pozsony was home to more than 30,000 people, a figure on the basis of which they suggested that the city be given two votes in the Diet. In the course of the debates, however, some of the representatives in the Diet contended that the census results were misleading since they included areas of the outskirts of Pozsony that legally did not belong to the city proper. The debate went unresolved because of a simple lack of reliable data, although the people responsible for the proposal insisted that they were using the most reliable figures of the time. In any event, if the objection was well founded, the fact that it was raised suggests that the statisticians also considered the outer city an integral part of Pozsony.

In the interests of addressing the problems that arose, for instance, as a consequence of the geographical growth of cities, the bill was intended to make it possible for the cities to incorporate neighboring areas that were directly adjacent with their borders. According to the bill, the annexed area would be entirely under the jurisdiction of the city, and it would lose any privileges it had enjoyed before its annexation. Administrative considerations and everyday use of the areas would have provided adequate justification for application of the “territorial principle,” in other words the creation of a single, unified jurisdiction over areas that in practical terms had merged entirely with the city but from a legal perspective still belonged to other proprietaries. As Baron József Eötvös, one of the leading figures of the liberal political circles, emphasized, for instance, in such cases annexation facilitated “the organization of effective public administration.” In support of his argument he cited the examples of Pozsony and Buda and the areas that had merged with these two cities on a practical level, but still belonged to other proprietaries. As he explained, in the case of these two cities it was impossible to maintain regulations relating to public order because of the prevailing administrative situation.

The aristocrats of the Upper House of the Diet, however, did not agree to this solution. The objection raised by the bishop of Kassa summarizes the reasons for their opposition: if the city of Pozsony were to include Váralja, then not only would Váralja be removed from the authority of the county and placed under the authority of the city, but—an even more disastrous consequence—the territories that comprised the estates of the Pállfy family would cease to be a nobleman’s lands. They would lose the privileges they had enjoyed and become simply the holdings of burghers, subject, for instance, to taxation.

Thus according to the objection that was raised by the majority of the Upper House, such an annexation threatened to weaken not only the foundations of civil law, but also the possessory rights of the nobility, and this was clearly unacceptable. The members of the Upper House therefore suggested that the law make possible, in cases in which it was justified, the expansion of the authority of the city to the areas that fell in its vicinity, but without the actual annexation of these areas. In the course of the negotiations a majority of the members of the Lower House were persuaded to accept this proposal. Thus here too a compromise was reached that was in its essence similar to the one that was reached concerning the properties owned by members of the nobility in the city.

The debates regarding the regulations concerning the territory of the city lasted for several months, but in the end the contending political sides came to an agreement. The bill, however, never became law because of the opposition of the Viennese court. The reform failed because of the question of central supervision over the city authorities. The Viennese court sought, through the members of the Upper House, to create a kind of inspector general who essentially would be given control over the entire municipal government. The Lower House of the Diet did not pass this proposal, and thus the question of the status of the outer city was left to the next gathering of the Diet.

The transformation that took place in the physical structures and conceptual notions of urban space by the middle of the nineteenth century made administrative and political changes inevitable. The various compromises that were reached in the course of the debates concerning these changes reflect the shifting power relations of liberal and conservative political groups. The acceptance of the 1843 bill, which meant the assertion of the “territorial principle,” would have been a significant step from a legal perspective towards the creation of a unified urban area. It would have allowed for the creation of an appropriate legal framework for the changes that had taken place in the structures and uses of urban spaces. The political debates regarding the regulation of urban space and the status of outlying districts, however, touched on the problems of the entire political establishment, which was founded on the privileges of the estates. Thus a comprehensive solution was only possible following the transformation of the entire political system.

 

 

Archival Sources

 

Conscriptio Animarum in gremio Liberaquae Civitatis Cassoviensis (as of 1840: Kassa város keblében létező lelkeknek összeírása [A Registry of the People Living in the City of Kassa]), Archív Mesta Košice, Zbierky, Súpisy domov, obyvateľov [Municipal Archives of the City of Košice, Collections, Registries of Houses and Population].

Statuta Liberae Regiae Civitatis Cassoviensis – Actum sub sessione Magistratuali atque Electa Communitatis die... January 1798. [Provisions of city statue in 1798] Archív Mesta Košice, Zbierky [Municipal Archives of the City of Košice, Collections].

Tanácsülések Jegyzőkönyve [Minutes of the Council Sittings], Archív Mesta Košice, Stredná Manipulácia, Magistrátny súd (J) [Municipal Archives of the City of Košice, Central Archival Order, Documents of the Municipal Assembly].

 

Bibliography

 

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Czoch, Gábor, Gábor Szabó, and László Zsinka. “Változások a magyar város- és településrendszerben 1784 és 1910 között” [Changes in the System of Settlements and Cities in Hungary]. Aetas no. 4 (1993): 113–33.

Czoch, Gábor. “Lakóhely és társadalmi helyzet. A reformkori külvárosok problematikája Kassa példáján keresztül” [Place of Residence and Social Standing. The Problematics of the Outer Cities of the Reform Era on the Basis of the Example of the City of Kassa]. In Kötőerők. Az identitás történetének térbeli keretei [Ties that Bind. The Spatial Frames of the History of Identity], edited by Cieger, András, 237–56. Budapest: Atelier, 2009.

Czoch, Gábor. “A városok szíverek.” Tanulmányok Kassáról és a reformkori városokról [“Cities are Arteries.” Studies on Kassa and Other Towns in the Age of Reforms]. Pozsony: Kalligram, 2009.

Fényes, Elek. Magyar Országnak s a’ hozzá csatolt tartományoknak mostani állapotja statistikai és geographiai tekintetben [The State of Affairs in Hungary and the Lands Attached to it from the Perspectives of Statistics and Geography]. Pest: Trattner, 1836–1840.

Gyimesi, Sándor. A városok a feudalizmusból a kapitalizmusba való átmenet időszakában. (Funkcionális és strukturális változások Nyugat- és Közép-Kelet-Európa városhálózatában, különös tekintettel Magyarországra) [Cities in the Transitional Period between Feudalism and Capitalism. (Functional and Structural Changes in the Network of Cities in Western and Eastern Europe, Particularly with Regard to Hungary)]. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1975.

Henszlmann, Imre. “Kassa sz. kir. város” [The Royal Free City of Kassa]. Magyarföld és népei, Föld- és népismei, statistikai és történeti folyóirat [Hungarian Lands and Peoples, Statistical and Historical Periodical of Lands and Customs] 1 (1846): 15-20.

Hohenberg, Paul M. and Lynn Hollen Lees. The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1995.

Kazinczy, Ferenc. “Magyarországi utak. Miskolcról Kassára” [Travels in Hungary. From Miskolc to Kassa]. In Kazinczy Ferenc művei [The Works of Ferenc Kazinczy] vol. 1 Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1979.

Kecskeméti, Károly. La Hongrie et le réformisme libéral. Problèmes politiques et sociaux (1790–1848). Roma: Il Centro di Ricerca, 1989.

Kovács, Alajos. “Kassa népességének fejlődése és összetétele” [The Development and Composition of the Population of Kassa]. Magyar Statisztikai Szemle [Hungarian Statistical Review] 17 (1939): 519–42.

Papp-Váry, Árpád and Pál Hrenkó. Magyarország régi térképeken [Hungary on Old Maps]. Budapest: Gondolat–Officina Nova, 1990.

Plath, Johannes. Kaschauer Kronik. Kassa: Werfer, 1860.

Perrot, Jean-Claude. Genèse d’une ville moderne. Caen au XVIIIème siècle. Paris–La Haye: Mouton et École des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales, 1975.

Pinol, Jean Luc, ed. Histoire de l’Europe Urbaine vol. 2. De l’ancien régime à nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 2003.

“Sz. kir. Kassa város leírása” [Description of the Royal Free City of Kassa]. Hetilap 5 (1848): 66-70.

Thirring, Gusztáv. Magyarország népessége II. József korában [The Population of Hungary in the Time of Joseph II]. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1938.

Törvény Czikkely. A királyi Városokról [Article of Law. On the Royal Cities]. Pozsony: Wéber, 1843.

Tutkó, József. Szabad királyi Kassa városának történelmi évkönyve [The Historical Almanac of the Royal Free City of Kassa]. Kassa: Werfer Nyomda, 1861.

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Werbőczy, István. Tripartitum. A dicsőséges Magyar Királyság szokásjogának hármaskönyve [Tripartitum. The Customary Law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Parts]. Budapest: Téka, 1990 [1517].

Translated by Thomas Cooper.

Volume 1 Issue 1-2 CONTENTS

István H. Németh

Venerable Senators or Municipal Bureaucrats? The Beginnings of the Transformation of the Estate of Burghers at the Turn of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries*

 

This essay offers a socio-historical analysis of the urban elite of the city of Sopron in Western Hungary as a paradigmatic example of the changes that were implemented in municipal administration at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries to meet the demands of the centralized state. It examines the process whereby the centralized state began to assert its influence in municipal affairs in the interests of reestablishing and strengthening the cities as sources of tax revenue and furthering the reinstatement of Catholicism. Alongside the confessional shifts that took place, the distinctive social characteristics of the leading urban elite also changed: because of the small number of educated Catholics among the burgesses, an increasing number of state officials and educated servants who earlier had been in the service of owners of large estates rose to prominent positions in municipal administration. Because of the expectations of the state regarding professional qualifications and the dependence on the central offices, the roles of the municipal officials were increasingly intertwined with the affairs of public administration. They came to be the precursors to the so-called “honorácior” stratum, a social class of intellectuals and civil servants who played a prominent role in the growth of a new bureaucracy in the nineteenth century.

Public Administration and Municipal Politics: European Trends

 

The consolidation of the state and the spread of public administration were both fundamental features of the early modern era in Europe. The machinery of the state increasingly strove to extend its reach into the everyday lives of an ever broader social spectrum and to exert an ever larger influence. This tendency involved the introduction by the centralized and later absolutist state of regulations regarding questions that earlier had been decided by the feudal estates and their representatives. One thinks perhaps first and foremost of questions concerning the relationship between serfs and feudal lords or even issues related to religion, medicine, the poor, etc., all of which came increasingly under the purview of the state in the eighteenth century. Military affairs and the financing of national defense, which increasingly became the prerogative of the state, developed under the authority of the absolute monarch, and a process of centralization was underway in other areas of state power that was part and parcel of the new exercise of state control.1 Taxation, the administration of justice, the tasks entrusted to various administrative bodies, etc. became the prerogative of the administration of the centralized state, which was invested with legitimacy and authority. Economic history designates this phenomenon as the rise of the fiscal state, a term that nicely indicates the purely economic, financial relationship between the primary motivations and the solutions that were adopted. These changes exerted an influence on the cities that were under the control of the monarch. The income of the residents of cities (which included ever increasing tax revenues, income from commerce and trade, etc.) constituted an ever larger share of state revenues. Thus the state and the middle class burgesses were bound by ever more common interests.2 According to Fernand Braudel, the large urban communities came into being specifically because of this: “this belated, sudden development would have been unimaginable without the emergence of the states [as legal entities].” The large urban communities played the role of “producers” of the modern state, but the state was at the same time the political body that brought them into being.3

Municipal governments, which were founded on the feudal orders, underwent significant changes as a consequence of these developments. Since the cities in almost every country of feudal Europe were considerably more dependant on the sovereigns than the other feudal orders (which may have derived from their belated formation of an estate), at the outset these measures affected them the most. The secondary literature speaks of the bureaucratization of the cities of the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century and their incorporation into the administrative systems of the centralized state, even (and here the terminology may be a bit overstated) their “nationalization.”4 In the urban communities of the Kingdom of France, by the seventeenth century the municipal leaders rather appeared as the representatives of the centralized state than freely elected officers of the cities themselves. Thus as a consequence of the changes that took place in state administration and municipal politics, by the eighteenth century insular city life was a thing of the past, displaced by a new form of urban community that was an integral part of the modern state and was growing with stunning speed.5

 

New Features of City Politics in Hungary

 

The changes that took place in municipal politics in Hungary were strongly dependent on the relationships between the cities and the central government and feudal estates, as well as the relationship between the feudal estates and the Habsburg government. In this respect dramatic shifts took place over the course of the sixteenth century. True, the medieval Hungarian Kingdom had fallen and from the perspectives of the military and finance the country had become a strongly centralized part of the Habsburg Monarchy, but it nonetheless remained a feudal monarchy with an influential and sizeable political elite. Following the defeat of the Hungarian army at the battle of Mohács in 1526, the Habsburg political, military, and economic leaders and the Hungarian estates realized that in the interests of defending the monarchy and the Hungarian Kingdom they would be compelled to arrive at compromises. This is why the Hungarian estates in Hungary enjoyed considerably more political power, at least within the country, than the estates in the other provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy. The feudal governments in Hungary (the counties or boroughs and the free royal cities) became stronger and more rigid in the exercise of their authorities, and domestic political life and the oversight of the administration of justice remained in the hands of the estates. As a result, the feudal estates in Hungary remained more autonomous and powerful than the estates of the rest of the Habsburg lands.6

Under these political circumstances, settlements that had the status of so-called free royal cities were able to assert their rights and pursue endeavors that promoted their political interests. These cities were completely independent, and as early as the fifteenth century possessed rights of local government and administration independent of the court.7 As of the early decades of the sixteenth century the free royal cities enjoyed increasingly strong feudal rights. They were always invited to national assemblies and they were able to vote individually in the lower house. Their local administrative bodies remained unimpaired in spite of the fact that members of the nobility and, in the case of some cities, the military were moving into the cities and putting tension on this remnant of medieval governance.8 For the centralizing state, however, as of the first decades of the seventeenth century, of the feudal orders it was precisely the free royal cities that represented the first rung on the ladder of intervention in municipal administration. The cities had feudal rights, but they did not have any significant political influence. From the perspective of jurisdiction and authority, the monarch had considerably more direct say in the affairs of the free royal cities. Acting very much like a feudal lord, as of the early seventeenth century the monarch demanded the cities pay yearly property taxes (census). The special military tax (taxa), on which votes were held in the national assemblies, was not imposed on the basis of the taxation quota agreed to by the estates, but rather was determined by the organs of central finance. Indeed as of the 1630s the centralized government was able to increase the number of years in which such taxes were to be paid without the consent of the national assembly.9

Figure 1. Free royal cities in the Kingdom of Hungary, 17–18th centuries

The difference in the relationship between the Hungarian Kingdom and the Habsburg Monarchy on the one hand and the Monarchy and the other Austrian realms on the other was typified by the relationship between the centralized state administration and the cities. As early as the Middle Ages, in the cities of the Austrian lands the magistrates were people representing the interests of the Austrian princes. Commissioners who had been named by the monarch participated in the municipal elections in the Austrian provinces, initially in order to ensure that a municipal officer (a so-called Eidkommissar) took an oath of allegiance. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and later, following a brief interlude, as of 1625), the role of the commissioners changed. Their primary task became to exercise their influence on the municipal officers and to oversee the administration of city (a so-called Wahlkommissar).10 In contrast, the monarch did not begin to intervene in the local administration of the free royal cities of Hungary until the last third of the seventeenth century. The last third of the seventeenth century constituted a turning point from the perspective of city politics in Hungary. Following the defeat of an uprising by the estates against the Habsburg rulers (1670–1671), the monarchy began to keep a more watchful eye on the cities and implement measures to oversee their administration. The steps that were taken were by no means unfamiliar in other states of Europe, but the ideology and methods that had prevailed in the Austrian lands served as a kind of model, methods that first were introduced in 1672 on a somewhat sporadic basis, but later, after 1690, were adopted in (or rather forced on) each of the free royal cities of Hungary.

There were various reasons underlying the efforts on the part of the centralized state to intervene in municipal affairs. One of the factors, a movement that has often been the subject of study, was the Counter-Reformation, one of the goals of which was to ensure that the leaders of the cities were Catholic, if not exclusively then at least for the most part.11 This was part of the religious policies adopted by the Habsburg government in the Czech and Austrian hereditary provinces, just as it was part of the policies pursued by states across Europe at the time. In the seventeenth century the notion of “one state, one religion” was essentially a uniformly accepted principle in all the states of Europe in which there were efforts to establish a centralized or absolutist government.12 Until this point, however, the measures that had been adopted by the Habsburgs in order to reassert Catholicism had not affected the municipal governments directly. Among the aristocracy, the number of converts grew. As of the second decade of the century positions in state offices were given almost exclusively to Catholics, but forceful measures to compel conversion to Catholicism as part of an effort spearheaded by the state and implemented with the use of organs of public administration only began to be adopted after 1670.13 The election commissioners were charged with the task of ensuring that in local elections Catholics win positions in the municipal governments, but as was the case in the Austrian provinces, they also had to oversee other spheres more closely connected with local administration.14 On the occasion of the annual elections of new officers, the commissioners had to prepare detailed surveys of the cities that touched on almost every aspect of public life. They had to inspect the municipal account books and had to be familiar with the general conditions prevailing in the cities. Their reports included descriptions of the composition of the cities from a religious (confessional) perspective, the states of the churches, and the religious lives of the churchgoers, but also general descriptions of the burgesses of the cities, the municipal administration, the state of the public buildings, the ordinances regarding taxation, and in general every aspect of the local administration.15

The considerations that influenced the commissioners in their decisions to delegate new members to the city councils would have improved the local economies and local administration, rendering them more transparent, since knowledge of economics and law was one of the qualifications that was given particular emphasis in their instructions (alongside belonging to the Catholic Church, of course).16 There was a simple reason to make local administration more effective: the state, which was assuming more and more responsibilities, needed more income, but as of roughly 1625 the cities not only did not provide the central state with more revenues, but even accrued enormous debts in unpaid taxes. The ability of the city burgesses in Hungary to pay taxes dropped dramatically in the seventeenth century, presumably at least in part as a consequence of the European war. The pressures on the state to collect taxes, however, were growing because of the increasing costs of war. As a result, the cities were compelled to take out loans. By the end of the century the cities had accrued debts of more than 10,000 to 15,000 forint, and by the early eighteenth century these debts had doubled and in some cases quadrupled. Sopron, for instance, had remarkably high debts. The 200,000 forint debt it had accrued by the end of the seventeenth century was ten times the city’s income.17

The centralized state was able to exercise continuous control over two important areas of municipal government that earlier had been essentially free of exterior influence, namely the composition of the municipal council and state supervision and reform of the local economy. The surrender of these two aspects of local governance, the two most important privileges enjoyed by the cities, meant the end of city life as it had been known from the Middle Ages. The first step in this process came with the efforts of the monarchs to change the religious (confessional) composition of the councils (which for the most part were Lutherans) and the community of elected officials and as of the second half of the seventeenth century to delegate as many trustworthy Catholics as possible to the bodies of municipal government.18 Twenty-five years later the cameralistic commissioners who had been delegated to the cities ensured that at least half of the people to be elected to positions in the leading elite were Catholic. They also saw to it that the positions of magistrate and notary were filled by people they considered trustworthy. The system by which the leading officers and governing bodies were assured their legitimacy changed as well. Earlier, legitimacy had derived directly from the votes of the burgesses, but by the last third of the seventeenth-century officers were invested in their offices by a commissioner representing the monarch.19

It was not always easy, however, to find the right person for the goals set by the state. Certainly the letters sent by the king on the occasion of a local election stipulated that city officers belong to the Catholic Church, own property (benepossessionatus), and possess the necessary qualifications (qualificatus).20 However, because of the pace with which the state sought to implement changes, often someone without the necessary training or social status found himself serving as an officer in a position of no small importance.21 We have very little in the way of reliable sources, however, regarding the actual competence of the people who were elected to public offices in the last two-and-a-half decades of the seventeenth century or the changes that took place in municipal administration as a consequence of the shifts. In what follows, I attempt to offer a rough picture of these changes and the consequences they had for city politics and society. Taking prevailing trends across Europe into consideration, I present these processes through an analysis of the urban elite of the city of Sopron in western Hungary. I compare tendencies in Sopron with social phenomena in other cities.22 This social-historical analysis is intended to offer an answer to the following question: what changes did the new goals and aspirations of the state bring about in the composition of the urban elites? I also consider the question of whether the elite that developed over the course of this period can be considered a precursor to the new “honorácior” social stratum that evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a new class of intellectuals and civil servants.

 

Expertise, Competence, and Stable Social Roots: the Leading Lutheran Elite

 

Even the royal commissioners, who clearly could be accused of bias in favor of Catholics, could not have questioned the expertise and qualifications of the Lutheran elite of the cities. Before the abovementioned changes in urban policy took place, the vast majority of the city leaders were Lutheran, and there were no Catholic members of the municipal councils virtually anywhere. A detailed study of the leading elite confirms their competency, which was acknowledged and recognized by the cameralistic commissioners as well. The majority of the leaders either had been university students at one point or had completed university studies.23 In addition to their education, they also belonged to the upper classes of the city burgesses. They were connected by a very strong network of family relationships. In this essay I focus primarily on the elite of the city of Sopron, since the data regarding the composition of the population of this city are accurate and detailed. An analysis of their social networks reveals that two or three families became the center of a larger network. It would not be an overstatement to say that almost all of the Lutheran town leaders were related to these families in some way. The families forming the core center were stable and secure members of the narrow circle of burgesses who occupied the most important official positions. The homes of the members of the Lutheran elite were found on the most important streets of the city, a sign of their social prestige.

In the case of the Lutherans who came to power after 1670 one notes a shift in the physical focal point of the community, as they began to assemble around the Lutheran school, but this did not exert much influence on the main tendencies. In general, members of the Lutheran community who held public office owned homes within the city walls.24 Almost all of them had acquired the status of nobleman, a clear sign of their prominence and also an indication that as burgesses who held noble titles they were among the most recognized people of the urban community. In addition to the title of nobility, most of them also obtained the rank of court “familiáris” (in Latin, familiaris aulicae; “familiáris” is a social rank specific to Hungarian feudalism). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this title was given primarily to those who performed official, intellectual or economic roles. The goal was to bring the Hungarian gentry, burgesses and the emerging class of civil servants (which thanks to the reforms that had been implemented was increasingly influential) into the group that enjoyed the patronage of the monarch and effectively governed the Hungarian Kingdom in coordination with the court. It is therefore no surprise that some of the Lutheran citizens who obtained the title of familiaris had proof of having obtained a doctorate in law.25 The recipients were members of the group that undertook a wide range of tasks in central finance management offices, thereby putting their education to use. Their presence in government bodies also proves that members of the intellectual class (which was small in number) were very sought after, which far from decreasing the role of the cities in the counties or the state on the contrary increased the prestige of the burgesses and the importance of the urban communities.26

Figure 2. The coat of arms of the Poch family.

Figure 3. The coat of arms on the tombstone of Ferdinand Dobner.
Source: Lutheran Cemetery, Museum of Sopron
 

The above characteristics were as typical of the Lutheran municipal elite that controlled urban administrations following the shift in city politics at the end of the seventeenth century as they had been of their predecessors. It is important to note, however, that qualifications and expertise had been given more emphasis by that time (in part in order to ensure that needs of the state be met).27 The Lutherans who occupied the most important positions in cites (in Sopron this meant the Preiniger, Poch, Dobner, and Wohlmuth families) had completed studies at schools of law (for example at the universities of Strassburg or Jena).28 Many members of the next two generations were given noble titles and more prominent positions.

This raises the question, if the state considered members of the Lutheran communities enemies, why did it bestow on them not only noble titles, but also the ranks of court familiaris and even baron? The vast majority of those who were elevated to noble rank got their titles following the uprisings, when the government was attempting to take steps in order to promote consolidation. The siege of Vienna (1683) and the reoccupation campaigns that followed (1683–1699) accelerated the process. During this period, many members of the urban Lutheran elite were raised to noble rank, and received special privileges, including immunity to state taxes and the burdens of war. Leopold Natl was the first burgess to be given the title of baron. In the official municipal records tenure of office in the municipal administrations is indicated as a merit, an indication of the shift in the relationship between the state and the city offices. Municipal officers had become servants of the centralized state.29

It would be rash to draw far-reaching conclusions on the basis of the data below, but two tendencies merit mention, the ennobling of the Lutheran city elite and the legal education so many of the members of this elite had. As of the last decades of the seventeenth century the royal commissioners almost always preferred to choose municipal leaders on the basis of their qualifications instead of selecting Catholics who lacked the necessary education, in spite of the fact that they (the commissioners) had been charged with the task of ensuring that Catholics rise to positions of prominence in city administration. Was this process analogous to the one mentioned earlier in the presentation of the European tendencies of the period? Did the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bear witness to the initial stages of the process of the creation of an educated, professional municipal leadership in Hungary, a new municipal leadership that had the necessary knowledge of law and economics (in part because this was one of the goals of the Vienna court) and that therefore made it possible to govern the cities more effectively and more “bureaucratically”? One can only confirm the causal interrelationships I have sketched here, however, if one also considers the backgrounds of the Catholic members of the municipal administrations, the people who were helped to positions of influence by the cameralistic commissioners.

 

Strangers at the Forefront of Municipal Administration

 

In the first few years following their arrival in the cities, the royal commissioners (mostly cameralistic civil servants) who were sent to the urban settlements in the last three decades of the seventeenth century installed their civil servant colleagues, the postmaster and custom-house officer of the given city, in their offices. This took place in all of the free royal cities in which there was a Lutheran majority, cities in which it was impossible to find suitable Catholics in order to fill these important positions. Where there were not enough cameralistic officers, they had reliable propertied Catholic noblemen elected to the council.30 This is how the local toll-collector became the mayor and magistrate of Sopron (and two years later a member of the nobility). The local chronicler simply referred to him as a “stranger.”31 In the case of the city of Kassa (present-day Košice in Slovakia, known as Kaschau in German), which was the seat of the police force of Upper Hungary, János Fodor, the toll-collector of the city of Újhely and the judge advocate of the police of Upper Hungary, and then later János Kinisy, a former soldier and later himself toll-collector, were the guarantee in the eyes of the commissioners of the Szepes Chamber that the measures they sought to implement would be executed in accordance with their original intentions.32 The fact that they were given these positions is remarkable, because they were strangers with no local family or economic ties. The new government officers usually did not even have the status of burgess. They obtained it only after having been elected to their positions.33 Despite the fact that Hungarian noblemen often chose to move to free royal cities and even went so far as to become burgesses,34 the majority of the people who as strangers to the communities rose to prominence in the cities did not own property in the inner city (unlike the Lutherans), but lived rather in the outer city, beyond the city walls.35 Indeed in some cases they owned nothing whatsoever within the boundaries of the city. This is a clear indication that these people did not belong to the elite layer of the Sopron burgesses, neither from a social nor an economic perspective.36

While the cameralistic civil servants who rose to the fore in the cities had barely any relationship with the local burgesses and therefore governed the towns as complete strangers, their professional competence could not be thrown into question, for they had a solid knowledge of economics and law. Their role, however, was passing. After a transitional period, the cameralistic commissioners strove to find new leaders for the cities who were tied to the given community, but who as Catholics had been excluded from power.

 

A New Leading Urban Elite?

 

By the last decades of the seventeenth century the election commissioners had come to hold in deep contempt the practice of their predecessors of replacing trained and qualified Lutherans on the inner city councils with unqualified Catholics. In the assessment of the commissioners who came to the cities towards the end of the seventeenth century, these people, the majority of whom were decidedly unqualified, did nothing to improve life in the cities. On the contrary, because of their ignorance of public affairs they did considerable harm to the city and the management of finances.37 In the case of the city of Sopron, Georg Waxman, a soap maker and also the first Catholic to serve on the city council, constitutes a paradigmatic example. He was granted the status of burgess only in 1671, and had owned no property in the city prior to this. In spite of the fact that even the cameralistic commissioners themselves reported that Waxman was a “homo scripturae ignarus,” in other words someone who was unable to write, they nonetheless nominated him for the position of magistrate and mayor (though he was never chosen for either post). He was once even forced to resign because of his unsuitability for the position, a clear sign of his lack of qualifications. In spite of his basic incompetence, he was nevertheless entrusted with the financial affairs and statements of account of the city for six years, even though the commissioners may well have realized the risks of doing this. In subsequent years they were compelled to continue to push Waxman into the forefront of public affairs because there were so few Catholics suitable for such roles in the city that they sooner supported him than the other, generally uneducated Catholics of Sopron, most of whom earned their livelihoods as artisans and tradesmen.38 One comes across similar cases in other cities. In the case of the cities of northern Hungary, for instance, in 1677 the cameralistic administration of the Szepes region (or Spiš by its Slovak name) reported to the monarch that it had had to overcome considerable difficulties in its efforts to help Catholic senators first obtain the status of burgess and then become members of the council, due primarily to their lack of education.39 These problems, however, were transitional. The measures that were adopted and the efforts that were made according to the reports of the cameralistic commissioners suggest that after the initial difficulties had been overcome genuinely qualified people were elected to the important city offices, and when someone was found to be unqualified, he was dismissed.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century significant changes took place among the Catholic municipal leaders as well. The commissioners managed to solve the problem that stemmed from a dearth of qualified individuals among the Catholic residents of the city by finding qualified Catholics for the most important positions who earlier had established a relationship with the city and were already bound by many ties to its inhabitants. As thorough studies of the individual cities reveal, these people were already held in high esteem, in part because of family ties and in part because of their social and economic connections. Some of these “half outsiders” had been officers on the large estates in the area, which were tightly bound to the cities by economic ties. Many of them had already settled permanently in the city and owned dwellings within the city walls. In general they were members of the nobility of the city (in other words people from noble families who did not pursue any occupation)40 who had belonged to the one-time economic elite. It was common for their progeny to remain among the leaders of the city, either in the service of the state in the case of sons or as the wives of civil servants in the case of daughters.41 However, as Hungarians, some of the members of the nobility who had thus come to positions of power did not have the necessary knowledge of languages, and this complicated and hampered their advancement in the cities, most of which were run by German speakers. They too belonged to the nobility and the elite that had knowledge of law and jurisprudence, as indicated, for instance, by the fact that their sons generally also completed university studies and their reports offer testimony of their knowledge of the law.42

From the perspective of the changes that took place in city politics and the efforts that were undertaken to re-Catholicize the urban communities, the best candidates were naturally people who belonged to the older generations of urban inhabitants who had achieved the status of burgess but who also had the necessary qualifications and, of course, belonged to the Catholic Church. Even in this period there were some such people in the cities, a fact that indicates the effects of earlier efforts to reassert Catholicism in Hungary.43 In some cases their place of birth was the city in which they later filled important positions, but in others they were immigrants from predominantly Catholic provinces. One might well ask whether they had perhaps made earlier attempts to acquire positions of influence in municipal offices but had failed precisely because they were Catholic, but the available sources yield no answer to this question. Their circumstances improved dramatically as they came to understand that their abilities and the recognition they enjoyed among the people of the city made them invaluable to the cameralistic commissioners, who were charged with the task of finding Catholics suitable for positions in municipal affairs. The sources suggest that they took advantage of the circumstances in their struggles against one another as well. If an election did not turn out as they had hoped it would, they would attempt to intimidate the commissioner, who found himself in a precarious position, by threatening to resign. According to the commissioners’ reports, it was almost impossible to replace such people without putting unqualified and unsuitable artisans in the positions they would have left vacant.44

Some of these Catholics were relatives of some of the more important Lutheran families of the cities. Mihály Kersnarits, a Catholic who played a prominent role as one of the leaders of the city (for many years he served either as mayor or magistrate), was related through his step-mother to the Artner and Dobner families, two influential families in the Lutheran community. For the commissioners, he was a trustworthy Catholic who enjoyed widespread recognition among the people of the city, in other words an ideal leader in the municipal government and someone on whose behalf even the civil servants of the treasury used their influence. Under the system that had evolved, these people rose to fill prominent positions alongside their Lutheran counterparts, winning the local elections either with only a small minority voting against them or by unanimous consent, something that was remarkable to say the least in the cities, in which Lutherans still constituted a majority.45 Often a Catholic who was also part of the local intelligentsia became a family member not of one of the leading families of the city, but rather of one of the civil servants of the local treasury. These were people who had the status of burgesses and were part of the civic life of the city, but who also became part of the public administration thanks to their relationships with state officers. This gave them many advantages, of course, since as burgesses and members of the elite and the intelligentsia (primarily people with training as physicians and apothecaries) they were esteemed members of the community. And naturally their close ties to the representatives of state power clearly put them in a favorable position. If they happened to be dissatisfied with their circumstances, they immediately could profit from their relatives’ relationships with people in positions of power and could turn with their complaints directly to the Hungarian chancellery, which functioned as the highest forum for interchange between the monarch and his subjects.46 With the help of the cameralistic commissioners educated Catholic burgesses were able to secure positions as notaries, councilors, and even magistrates and mayors if they had moved to cities where the process of re-Catholicization had already taken place. Of the cities of the Hungarian Kingdom, Eisenstadt (Kismarton by its Hungarian name) and Rust (Ruszt), which earlier had been part of Lower Austria, were perhaps the first two places where according to the election commissioners the population was entirely Catholic.47

These examples cast light on how only some of the Catholics who came to displace the Lutheran elite were actually unsuitable for the positions for which they had been selected by the treasury or the cameralistic commissioners. In the first phase of the introduction of the measures regarding city politics in the last third of the seventeenth century a great number of people did indeed rise to positions of prominence in the municipal administration, either as city leaders or members of the inner council, who were essentially strangers to the city. They were primarily civil servants of the treasury, but given their earlier responsibilities they could be considered qualified to tend to the tasks of administration. At the time, there were many Catholics in the high-level offices of the municipal governments who had very little competence in the affairs of civic governance. By the end of the century, most of them had lost their positions, but in some cases they remained the best (Catholic) candidates for the job, given the dearth of qualified Catholic burgesses. By the last two decades of the century there were some Catholic burgesses who had the necessary qualifications, though not many. They rose to positions of importance as individuals with the appropriate social status and background who from the perspective of their family relations had something of a dual identity: they had become relatives of the leading burgess families as people occupying state offices. Thus they can be considered the predecessors of the new leading municipal elite that began to come to power in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and eventually the forerunners (from the perspective of their attitudes) of the so-called “honorácior” class of the nineteenth century. The latter played a prominent role in the spread of the burgess class and lifestyle in Hungary. Thus the processes under discussion here and in the subsequent section of this essay can be seen as important initial steps in the rise of a middle (bourgeois) class in Hungary.48

 

New Tendencies in City Politics at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

 

The changes that took place over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus played an important role in the virtual transformation over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of municipal officers into officers of the centralized state. Their family relations linked them not only to the burgesses of the cities, but also to members of this elite working in other offices of the state. They thereby strengthened the “honorácior” intelligentsia, which was emerging as an increasingly unified modern social group founded on technical and bureaucratic expertise. In the case of the urban elite that rose to power at the end of the seventeenth century, these tendencies grew stronger and incorporated new elements. Intervention into municipal affairs by the state altered the political relationships. A Catholic with the necessary knowledge and skills was increasingly valued, particularly if he nurtured political ambitions. This had been the state of affairs for some two decades by the time Catholics obtained offices in the treasury.49 Since the centralized state was coming to regard the municipal officers more as agents of its own interests, this expectation played a considerable role in the conversion of many of the city burgesses to Catholicism. Undoubtedly from the perspective of the commissioners, who had very little choice when it came to Catholic candidates for public office with the necessary qualifications, this represented a considerable change for the better, and the burgesses who converted were easily able to obtain positions of influence. In the initial stages, however, members of the Lutheran elite were reluctant to convert.50 Nonetheless, there were counterexamples. In the second half of the seventeenth century, fearing the influence of the city magistrate, Hans Weber of Eperjes (Prešov by its Slovak name, and Preschau in German) converted to Catholicism, for instance.51 The only other example one can mention with all certainty is that of Leopold Natl of Sopron, but he only converted at the age of sixty-two (in 1692), when he had already achieved essentially everything that a citizen of the city could have hoped to achieve at the time. He served for years as the leader of the municipal council of Sopron. In 1685 he was given the rank of baron in recognition of his services to the state and county as mayor, magistrate, and noble burgess, and in 1689 he was made a Knight of the Golden Spur.52 In contrast, among the municipal officers who were becoming councilors at the beginning of the eighteenth century there were proportionally far more recently converted Catholics whose parents had been Lutherans and in some cases even Lutheran pastors. Their family relations brought them into close contact with and even made them part of the Lutheran elite of the city, but—and this is a sign of the importance of conversion—of the people who belonged to families who earlier had enjoyed significant influence, only those who had converted managed to attain positions of importance in municipal affairs.53 As they progressed in their careers, they were able to count on the support of the cameralistic commissioners and even the most important high offices of the country. Leopold Kampel of Sopron, for instance, had the support of palatine Pál Esterházy.54 With the assistance of Leopold Karl von Kollonich, bishop of Wiener Neustadt, Friedrich Weber (the son of Hans Weber of Eperjes) attained the position of notary of Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica in Slovak, Neusohl in German).55 István Kőszegi of Pozsony (Bratislava, Pressburg) submitted a request to Leopold I (acting as if he considered himself an officer in direct contact with the monarch) in which he asked to be appointed municipal attorney.56

One discerns traces, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, of a tendency among the members of the municipal elite in Hungary that was widespread across Europe. Education and in particular knowledge of law and economics played an important role in the selection of municipal leaders. As a kind of antecedent to this, one notes that over the course of the seventeenth century schooling was an increasingly significant factor in the selection of candidates for positions in government office in nearby Vienna. A decree issued in Vienna in 1656 offers clear evidence of the rise in the importance of the education of an officer. According to the decree, only someone with significant education could be a member of the city council. Indeed gradually education came to be a more important factor than property. Between 1671 and 1705 half of the councilors in Vienna enrolled in one of the universities, and almost all of them were lawyers.57 In the cities of the Holy Roman Empire this tendency had become widespread much sooner. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lawyers in the German cities played a far more important role than they once had. They also made up an ever larger proportion of the inner councils. At the beginning of the seventeenth century most of the members of the council of the city of Frankfurt were lawyers. As of 1669 only a trained lawyer could serve as mayor.58 In the eighteenth century in most of the Habsburg provinces one could not obtain the position of councilor without having passed a local test in law or completed university studies, and candidates also had to complete a preliminary exam that had to be submitted to the central government authorities.59

In the latter half of the seventeenth century many of the Lutheran city elite in Hungary also had some education or even a doctorate in law. At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and for the first two decades of the eighteenth century this tendency grew more and more pronounced, in part because of the expectations of the centralized state. At the time almost every member of the Lutheran elite had had some education in law and was active as a lawyer or jurist.60

Figure 4. Ferdinand Dobner, the Lutheran mayor of Sopron wearing the necklace received from Leopold I.

Source: Nineteenth-century copy, Museum of Sopron

The commissioners only took Catholics who had the necessary qualifications into consideration. By the early eighteenth century there were still not enough such Catholics to meet the demand, so the commissioners sought out servants of the treasury or a landowner who were acceptable to the inhabitants of the city. The political circumstances at the time no longer favored the commissioners (who represented the cities, the state and the monarch) as they once had. One comes across indications in the available sources of concerted resistance, and if a commissioner hoped to arrive at a long-term solution, he was compelled to take the desires of the (for the most part Lutheran) people of the city into consideration and make compromises. The Lutherans accepted the practice of allowing only a Catholic to replace a Catholic on the council, but only if the candidate had already been given the status of burgess at the time of his selection and had already had ties to the freemen of the city. In general the people who were selected for such roles were members of the propertied nobility of the region who had settled in the cities,61 or when it was simply impossible to find a suitable burgess of the city, the commissioners would nominate some civil servant of the treasury. But even in such cases they strove to find someone who was related in some way to the members of the city elite (and they sought Catholics first and foremost, of course). Sometimes they would choose an officer who had married the widow of a servant of the treasury who had been chosen for want of a better candidate.62 Their offspring in general would be able to continue in their parents’ footsteps as denizens of the city invested with the full rights of the burgess class and as the children of families of civil servants and intellectuals, and the members of the next generation were able to assume many of the most important positions in the city. They had far more familial ties to the new leading Catholic elite. The children of Catholic municipal leaders very often intermarried, thereby strengthening their positions through the creation of a strong network of family and economic links. As the steward of the estates of the bishop of Rákos, Johann Michael Schilson, for instance, was made a member of the inner council of Sopron by the order of the monarch. As a member of the council, he married the daughter of Mihály Kersnarits, who served many times both as mayor and magistrate.63 Qualified converts who as Lutherans had acquired knowledge of administration and who, because of their family ties, can be seen as elite members of the urban community were also able to become members of the municipal council.64 As of the end of the seventeenth century, the Catholic members of the city elite began to become a part of the old city elite, as indicated both by the relationships they began to establish with other families of the city and their acquisition of dwellings within the city walls. Those who came into possession of properties in the inner cities already had completed university studies in law and administration and therefore were able to join the municipal leaders as trained city officers. They tended to purchase homes in the innermost quarters of the city and as close as possible to the main squares, where the town hall was located.65

In some cases Catholics were able to take advantage of the available opportunities and launch what turned out to be impressive careers. Some of the officers and intellectuals who arrived from other areas were given opportunities in new places. In these cases, however, we are dealing with the development of individual intellectual-elite families. According to the cameralistic commissioners, Georg Waxman, the aforementioned soap maker, was almost illiterate. His sons, however, were not. Their father was able to learn from his own shortcomings and therefore ensured that each of his two sons receive some education. His older son, also Georg, thus became the city notary and in 1722 a member of the inner council, then magistrate for two years, and in 1734 he became mayor. While the elder Waxman was related to the burgesses of Sopron by marriage, his son Georg took another path. His first wife was not the child of one of the burgess families of the city, but his second wife was the widow of Johann Strauss, the son of Sopron custom-house officer Mathias Strauss. In other words the younger Georg set his sights on the “honorácior” circle of the city elite, a class that held state office and owned property in the city. A further indication of this was his decision to allow his daughter to marry Ferenc Petrák, the son of former mayor János Petrák and a man who was also pursuing a career in state affairs. With the help of a municipal foundation, Ferenc Petrák completed his university studies and later became a member of the inner council and then served as mayor and magistrate.66 His other son, Johann Georg, completed his studies in law with the assistance of this foundation and earned his livelihood as an attorney. He was not able to become a member of the council in Sopron, but in the nearby city of Rust (Ruszt) he served as notary and council member.67 At the beginning of his career the elder Waxman owned only a house in the part of the city lying outside the city walls. In 1699 he purchased a home across from the Church of Saint George, in other words in one of the important parts of the city, which he later left to his older son. In the meantime, in 1719, as his career progressed, his older son was able to purchase a house on the main square of the city in close proximity to the town hall.68 The Waxman family of Sopron offers a clear example of how state intervention in municipal affairs at the end of the seventeenth century created opportunities for families that in earlier times would have faced considerable difficulties had they attempted to become part of the municipal political leadership or the intellectual elite. For them, the changes that were introduced in municipal affairs constituted advantages and opportunities for social advancement, making it easier for them to become part of the increasingly influential circle of officers and intellectuals and later the so-called “honorácior” class of civil servants.

 

Conclusion

 

At the beginning of this essay I raised the following two questions: was it the goal of the central government to develop well-trained, bureaucratic municipal administrations that resembled the administrative municipal bodies in other parts of Europe, and if so, did the central government succeed in this goal? As the cases presented above clearly demonstrate, the answer to both questions is yes. While at the end of the seventeenth century, in its efforts to reassert Catholicism in the cities the centralized state found itself compelled, given the dearth of qualified or educated Catholics, to select people for positions in the municipal councils who lacked the appropriate training, with the passing of a single generation fundamental changes took place. The people who were in positions of power at the time, both Lutherans and Catholics, had an education in law and economics, for the most part were bound to the community by strong family ties and owned property in parts of the city that were important from the perspective of municipal affairs. The emergence of this social group (or class) and the assumption by its members of positions in municipal leadership ushered in a new era, the era of the emergence of a new social layer of bureaucrats and intellectuals, also the era of the rise of the middle class and the “honorácior” layer of civil servants. They had family ties not only to families prominent in city affairs on the local and regional level, but also to families active in the administration of the centralized state. Because of these ties, their interests played a clear role in state administration, and they defended both their personal interests and the needs of their cities, at times even in opposition to the goals and strivings of the centralized state.

 

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Translated by Thomas Cooper.

Volume 1 Issue 1-2 CONTENTS

Béla Vilmos Mihalik

Sacred Urban Spaces in Seventeenth-Century Upper Hungary

 

This essay examines the changes that took place in the functions of sacred spaces towards the end of the seventeenth century, at the time of the upheavals of the Counter-Reformation in Upper Hungary. After having come under the control of the Catholic Church, the Protestant churches underwent a symbolic transformation characteristic of Catholic practice and belief. This transformation included changes to the furnishings and the inner spaces of the churches. At the time of the uprising led by Imre Thököly and Protestant refugees, along with the Catholic vicarage, these buildings, which were expressions of confessional belonging, became the primary targets of ritual violence. Through similar transformations and renovations, churches which since the Reformation had performed secular functions regained their status as religious buildings. In both cases, the participation of the community in Catholic rituals, such as re-consecration, mass, and procession, played a decisive role, since these rituals strengthened and helped to institutionalize (from the perspective of Catholic rites) the sacral function of the building.

 

Introduction: The Sacred Space

 

“Repair the cathedral church of Eger immediately, Your Excellency, and do begin it at once by the grace of God, because if not, I know that others will do it from Your Excellency’s income.” These lines were written in November 1692 by György Széchenyi, Archbishop of Esztergom, to György Fenessy, Bishop of Eger.1 Even this short quote provides a clear glimpse into the thinking that accompanied such sacred spaces in that era. The repair of the cathedral in Eger—that key northern Hungarian city that served as the seat of an ancient diocese and was recaptured from the Turks in 1687, marking the end of ninety-one years of Ottoman rule—would have been the responsibility of the bishop, but his failure to do so directly would mean others would do so instead, at the episcopate’s expense. Alongside the religious functions of this space, then, others now also appeared—concerns from the financial to those involving church politics. The reputation of the Catholic Church could ride on the question of renovating the cathedral, which had to be defended against those unnamed “others” who could claim a right to use of the cathedral’s space for themselves. The “others” constitute a constructed image of the enemy within society at large; a foe preparing to break into the space under the jurisdiction of the Church—and thus able to commandeer and seize its functions and furnishing. The renovation called for by the archbishop would renew and reinforce the sacral function and the Church jurisdiction of this space, and in doing so would also symbolize the dominance of the Catholic Church, which had returned to the city after a century-long hiatus.

The present essay examines the shifting functions of urban sacred spaces in the final third of seventeenth-century Upper Hungary. This region comprises the northeast of the historical Hungary—thirteen counties that include much of present-day eastern Slovakia, eastern Hungary, the Subcarpathian region of Ukraine, and northern Romania. With the advance of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent splitting of the Kingdom of Hungary into three parts in the mid-sixteenth century, “Upper Hungary” at the time referred to the region bordered by the Ottoman Empire, the Principality of Transylvania, and Poland. It then came under the rule of the Habsburgs, but from the start of the seventeenth century parts of it (by turns smaller and larger) or sometimes all of it came for shorter and longer periods into the possession of the princes of Transylvania, a vassal state of the Ottomans.

Since the region’s center was Kassa (present-day Košice in Slovakia), that city is among those examined in this essay. Kassa was a free royal city that from the Middle Ages onward enjoyed numerous privileges. The city’s central role in Upper Hungary was further reinforced by the fact that in the second half of the sixteenth century it became the seat of the Szepes Chamber, a regional government organ with financial and economic functions, while also being a captaincy general in the Kingdom’s military hierarchy.2 After Eger fell into the Ottomans’ hands in 1596, its bishop and chapter fled to Jászó (Jasov, Slovakia), near Kassa, where it established its headquarters, and from the mid-seventeenth century it moved to Kassa.3 Beside Kassa’s role as the regional administrative, military, and economic center, its importance as a Catholic center also grew, helped along by the founding one after another of a Jesuit college and secondary school, then an academy, and finally, a seminary.4 Kassa thus became a key base of Catholic expansion in Upper Hungary notwithstanding that the city’s population and its leadership were overwhelmingly Lutheran.

The other major urban center examined by this essay is Nagybánya (Baia Mare in Romania). Upper Hungary’s border city with the Principality of Transylvania, Nagybánya over the course of the seventeenth century came under the control of Transylvania’s princes on several occasions. The last time this occurred was during the reign of György II Rákóczi, and these circumstances held firm until 1661. Although, even in the 1670s the Rákóczi family tried reacquiring Nagybánya, a key mining center, the city nominally came under Habsburg rule by the 1660s. Besides the proximity of Transylvania, its mines and its mint accounted for its significance. By around 1667 Chamber employees appeared in town, but only in 1672 did imperial troops manage to march their way in. In contrast with Kassa, Nagybánya had no Catholic tradition, its population was mostly Calvinist, though the city was also home to a small Lutheran community. Even the city’s leaders were primarily from the ranks of the Reformed. In fact, during the Reformation, by the mid-sixteenth century the Catholic Church’s institutional structure had collapsed in Nagybánya, to reappear only in 1674, when a Jesuit mission first comprising just one person, then two, arrived and got to work. In this city the rebuilding of Catholic institutions thus came hand in hand with the recatholicization of urban spaces.

While other examples besides Kassa and Nagybánya will naturally be raised in this essay, these two cities are particularly suitable for an examination of numerous characteristics of the shifting functions of sacred buildings during the conditions of conflict that defined this era, which were tantamount to a religious civil war. The period at issue starts with the collapse in 1670 of the Wesselényi Conspiracy by Hungarian nobles against the Habsburgs—in the wake of which the Habsburg imperial army occupied Upper Hungary, and those who had taken part in the conspiracy or were suspected of having done so were subjected to prosecution and seizure of their estates. Hungary’s constitution was suspended, and in 1673 a governor was appointed in the person of Johann Kaspar Ampringen, grand master of the Teutonic Order, along with a governing council (Gubernium). Coming hand in hand with the political transition was a violent attempt at a counter-reformation; which is to say, an attempt by the Catholic Church to restore the position it had lost in the Reformation. The period under scrutiny in this essay closes with 1699, which marked not only the end of the war against the Ottomans, but also the year in which—following the death of Eger Bishop György Fenessy— both the episcopate and Fenessy’s successor, István Telekessy, returned formally to Eger, their old headquarters, which had been recaptured from the Ottomans in 1687.

Just what do we mean by “sacred space”? Two fundamental processes are requisite to the creation of the social, and thus the sacred, space. The first is spacing—that is, creating the space in its general, physical, palpable sense; the furnishing of its physical details; and adorning it with representative, symbolic value to readily enable its identification as affiliated with a particular confession. The second, synthesizing process is one that enables perception and memory formation—a process that yields the “institutionalization” of the space. The creation and institutionalization of such a space can be well understood through the example of confessionalization. Developing both an external and internal, confession-specific architectural space and furnishing it with appropriate symbols serves to create the physical framework of the sacred space. Hence the possibility of contrasting a richly ornamented, baroque Catholic church with its simpler, more puritan Protestant counterpart. And yet a social space is invariably filled by—and literally brought to life by—social activity. In the case of a Catholic church, this is manifested in the course of its consecration rituals, holy masses, and processions; and in Protestant churches through services and congregational life. All these factors also contributed to the institutionalization of these confessions in the early modern period.5

Above all, it was the church itself, and the space delimited by its walls, that counted as a sacred space—standing out as it did amid the overall fabric of the city, in which it played a central role even in the early modern period. Alongside religious rituals and other such activities, the sacral function of this space was reinforced by canon law, whose rules and regulations aimed in part to restrict its secular use considered as inappropriate, albeit often in vain.6 The key role of the physical church was further bolstered by the numerous social functions that complemented its sacred character. Besides its being a space organizing society, it conveyed a sense of social hierarchy, the hierarchy of estates; for example, in seating arrangements in its pews at regular services, in church weddings, and in funerals. As for its legal and political function, the church could be the setting for court proceedings both secular and canonical, as well as inauguration ceremonies for city officials. A church could likewise fulfill military purposes: its relatively fortified construction was suitable for the protection of not only body and soul but also assets. In sum, then, a church represented a central, urban, social space whose role was not limited merely to sacral functions.7

The Reformation brought about a major change in this respect, for the emergent Protestant confessions were less bound to the physical church itself: services could be held even in the open air, while the abandonment of the cult of the saints and their relics further meant that the church no longer had quite the same sacrality as it had in the Catholic sense. Later, though, in the interest of better organizing congregational life they too prioritized use of the church space itself, albeit with a new approach to the look of the interior. Comparable research in other countries of Europe has suggested that the central role of the church as physical space diminished despite this in the early modern age, since the Catholic Church sought to limit the other functions associated with the physical church.8 As this essay will show, this was not at all the case in late-seventeenth-century Upper Hungary, and indeed, whether it applied to the Kingdom of Hungary even in the eighteenth century is in doubt.

And yet the sacred space extended beyond the physical walls of the church itself. In this respect, the square out front was paramount, as it served architecturally to further distinguish the church from the city’s surrounding structure. This space in front of the church is perhaps best conceived of as a secular space dominated by a sacred presence; it was where people entered and left the church, where crowds gathered, and where illustrious guests were welcomed before stepping inside. At the same time, this space also expanded the realm of priestly activity, as it effectively speaking broadened the church’s interior, sacred space.9 At the same, given that it marked the border of the secular and the sacred, it was particularly vulnerable to transgressions, as was often manifested in criminal or other illicit activity—including theft, begging, brawls, and prostitution.10

The most vigorous expansion of the sacred space into the world outside itself occurred in the form of the religious procession, which bestowed secular spaces with a temporary sacrality. According to this understanding of space, the conveyance of relics and the sacrament of the altar, around a city served to purify such otherwise secular spaces of heresy. Of particular importance in this regard was the procession of Corpus Christi, whose holding or not holding allowed one confession to demonstrate its dominance over another and, consequently, often led to confessional strife.11 The structure that such processions assumed made evident the shifting power relationships between various confessions, making it clear to all, for example, that a city’s Catholicized leadership held a stronger role than earlier had been the case.12

In Hungary, it was folklorists who first began to address the matter of sacred spaces. Róbert Keményfi, who summed up his research on this front in a monograph published in 2004, has been the most prominent among them. Examining from various perspectives the means by which confessional spaces can be analyzed, he has devoted special focus to the manifestation of mental space; which is to say, to the use of space and the perception of space as a coded, mental experience.13

In the realm of historical scholarship, meanwhile, recent years have seen a theoretical essay by Veronika Novák and another by András Szekeres likewise assessing the possibilities by which to examine the use of space14—with Szekeres doing so through the lens of works of Edoardo Grendi, which accorded prominence to the spatial analysis of the religious structuring of society and of religious confraternities. Szekeres, too, has emphasized that research into social space vis-à-vis Catholicism in the early modern period presents an opportunity for a “localized reading that can compare the elements of religiosity in the Baroque period and the political structuring of local communities in a more coherent manner than ever before.”15

Veronika Novák, meanwhile, opened the door to new avenues of research by widening the range of possible questions. For example, examining source materials on competing confessions facilitates a comparative analysis of their spatial perspectives. By examining borders and how these borders were crossed, she argues we can shed new light both on how these confessions stood apart from each other and on their interrelationships. The joint analysis of new counterconcepts—private and public space, sacred and secular, closed and open spaces—shall bring new results. As for the present essay, its key starting point is the premise of a sacred space that was ever shifting and used in varying ways both in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, as well as the issue of desacralization.16

And yet the examples of sacred spaces in the early modern age are few and far between in the latest Hungarian historical scholarship. Worthy of note is György Granasztói’s research in the city of Nagyszombat (Trnava in Slovakia), which examined the victory of the Catholic Church through changes in the city’s structure—yielding the same local reading in the case of Nagyszombat as András Szekeres did in regard to Catholicization in the early modern age.17

A similarly forward-looking piece of scholarship was Éva Knapp and Gábor Tüskés’s research into the sacral spatial structure of pilgrimage sites, which is also worthy of note for its in-depth analysis of social rituals that engendered sacred spaces—rituals that rendered such pilgrimage sites the cultic, sacral centers of their communities, with significant regional or even far wider geographic implications.18

This essay first examines the recatholicization of Protestant churches and the re-establishment of Catholic sacrality, then addresses the question of spaces desacralized during the Reformation. Next it analyzes ritual violence against churches. Finally it looks at the factors that reinforced or weakened spaces’ sacral characteristics. All in all, it seeks to answer this question: how did the violent Counter-Reformation of the late-seventeenth century reshape the social use of cities’ central space, that of churches?

Making Catholic Churches out of Protestant Ones

 

The seizure of Protestant churches and their handover to Catholics got underway in Upper Hungary in the spring of 1671—with the old Franciscan monasteries in Bártfa and Eperjes (Bardejov and Prešov in Slovakia, respectively) and the Slovak church in Lőcse (Levoča, Slovakia) among the first.19 Plans were already set for these actions by the fall of 1670, which is when János Gubasóczy, Bishop of Pécs20, wrote to Esztergom Archbishop György Szelepcsényi that in Lőcse, “some empty monasteries are already being shrewdly cleaned out, so there should be constant petitions over this.”21 “Cleaning out” here presumably meant that the city leadership had placed these churches’ most valuable furnishings and other items under its own supervision to keep them from falling into the hands of the Catholics.

Church seizures followed a tried and tested procedure. That of the church in Szendrő in 1672 saw the Szepes Chamber provide a strikingly detailed account for its local official, István Pethő. As a representative of the governing administration, Pethő had to proceed in sync with Szendrő’s Franciscan father superior, who represented the Catholic Church. The seizure of this particular church was carried out by the German soldiers stationed there under the command of Captain Georg Wilhelm Schöning. As a sacred space, the church had to be formally reappropriated by the local Roman Catholic representative, in this case the Franciscan, albeit with the support of the Chamber representative acting on behalf of the civil administration—who was authorized to banish the Protestant pastor from the city, which itself was under the management of the Chamber as the representative of its owner, the Hungarian royal treasury. Hence, the act of retaking the church symbolized cooperation between the Catholic Church and the state, further facilitated by the German army, which in turn represented the imperial royal power.22

Difficulties were often encountered in reappropriating churches. In the case of Szendrő, the Chamber signaled its willingness to order the church’s seizure by force: it was made clear that if a key did not turn up, a locksmith would open the door. On November 24, 1671, the door to the cathedral in Kassa, the de facto capital of Upper Hungary, was opened with the help of an axe—as the locksmith had not been succesful.23 In Nagybánya in 1674, local townspeople not only took up arms against the Chamber committee that arrived to seize Saint Stephen Church but also summoned the help of anti-Habsburg bujdosók (fugitives)—resistance that proved effective until put down by imperial troops arriving from Szatmár (Satu Mare in Romania).24

In the wake of a seizure, it was reconsecration that ensured a church’s sacral function in the Catholic sense. On November 25, 1671, a day after the reappropriation of Saint Elizabeth Cathedral in Kassa, the chapter of the Eger cathedral, with Bishop Ferenc Lénárd Szegedy in the lead, entered Saint Elizabeth Cathedral in a procession. Once the bishop had reconsecrated the church, they sang the Te Deum; meanwhile, German guards stationed outside welcomed the cathedral’s reappropriation with canon- and gunfire.25 On the occasion of the seizure of the church in Jolsva (Jelšava in Slovakia) in 1672, the parish priest led a procession into the church while singing the Litany of Loreto. The next day—the first day of Easter—the local organist was on hand to provide music for a holy mass, as were bugle players provided by a contingent of German troops from nearby Murány (Muráň, Slovakia).26 This procession—culminating with the grand entry into the church and accompanied by the music and indeed the thunder of ceremonial canon fire—ensured an audiovisual sensation that simultaneously symbolized the religious mission and the power of the Catholic Church.

A church’s sacrality was likewise symbolized by its furnishings, not least its array of liturgical objects. As for the latter, in the wake of reappropriation the most salient challenge to refurnishing churches was that Protestant city leaders often delayed the return of such objects or outright hid them. In the market town of Gönc (present-day northern Hungary) the new parish priest demanded that city officials return the church’s liturgical objects, but the officials turned over only the chalices, vestments, and rugs in their official inventory, claiming that the rest of the objects being sought had either been previously taken from them or that they didn’t know about them to begin with.27 In Kassa in 1672, the city’s new, Catholic judge, János Fodor, ordered an investigation to determine whether the silver-gilt chalices local Lutheran ministers used in communions had perhaps originated in the treasury of the cathedral that had been reappropriated in the fall of 1671.28 For his part, the parish priest in Eperjes, Augustin Langner, complained that city officials disregarded the Chamber’s decree and ignored the matter of the missing monstrance. In their defense, city officials denied that neglect accounted for their lack of attention to the matter, citing instead the dire poverty they were meanwhile dealing with.29

Chamber records provide but fragmentary data on how churches were furnished or redesigned. In January 1675, Protestants in Szatmár penned a letter requesting permission to keep their wooden church, explaining that it had never been in Catholic hands to begin with. This was evident from its architectural style and its foundations, they insisted, noting that it looked much more like a simple, modest home than a church. They observed that while it was suitable for preaching, for sermons, it was hardly a place to construct an elaborate altar.30 This letter amply reflects one key difference between Protestant and Catholic conceptions of sacred space. As previously noted, early Protestant confessions were not firmly bound to specific spaces. They gave interior makeovers to those churches they appropriated from Catholics, and diverged markedly from the architectural features of Catholic religious buildings when constructing new churches for themselves. The relative simplicity and modest nature of Protestant church buildings stemmed in part from a difference in religious outlook, and perhaps also in part from disparities in material wealth.

The number and design of altars comprised yet another fundamental distinction of Catholic sacred spaces. In Gönc, the parish priest György Horváth sought to have the town fund a new altar, requesting money to purchase boards and nails, as well as compensation for a carver and painter. The city denied the request, advising him to instead devote the sexton’s salary to this end, to which Horváth replied that the sexton didn’t have any salary to begin with.31 In the Jesuit church in Eperjes, in the presence of Ferenc Lénárd Szegedy, bishop of Eger, the main altar was dedicated to the Immaculate Virgin Mary; and as for the two side altars, one was dedicated to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and the other to Saint Francis Borgia.32 By 1686, meanwhile, two new altars were all but complete in the Jesuits’ church in Kassa—the Holy Trinity Altar and an altar dedicated to the Assumption of Mary—thanks mainly to the support of Chamber councilor Zsigmond Holló.33

Notwithstanding the dearth of information as to the specifics of churches’ interior redesign in the territory of the Eger diocese during the period, what we do know about—dedication ceremonies, the reacquisition of necessary liturgical objects, and the building of altars—points unequivocally to the re-establishment of the sacrality of the church space in the Catholic sense. This serves also to explain why these elements keep recurring in historical source materials—sources from which it is further clear that not only the Catholic Church, but also government organs devoted considerable efforts to ensuring the recatholicization of sacred spaces by such means. And yet crude violations of sacred spaces accompanied flare-ups of religious strife at the end of the seventeenth century, as the destruction of devotional objects, altars, paintings, icons, and statues, as well as the ransacking of churches came increasingly to symbolize victory over the competing confession. The next section thus briefly addresses the ritual desecration of churches.

Ritual Desecration of Churches

 

The onslaught of attacks carried out by Kuruc rebels after the collapse of the Wesselényi Conspiracy only exacerbated the poorly furnished condition of churches. (The rebels’ ranks comprised members of the lower nobility who had turned fugitives after the conspiracy’s end and organized an army. They were called bujdosók or “fugitives,” and later on Kuruc.) These attacks originated from territories bordering Upper Hungary that were under the control of Transylvania and of the Ottomans. Starting with the first major incursion, in the fall of 1672,34 conditions that amounted to an ongoing civil war prevailed in Upper Hungary for nearly a decade-and-a-half. The most serious and sustained such episode was represented by the anti-Habsburg uprising led by Count Imre Thököly, which peaked from 1682 to 1685 with his recognition by the Ottomans as vassal king of Upper Hungary.

In the course of these attacks there occurred numerous instances of what can best be understood as the ritual desecration of churches. In early October 1672, the Calvinists attacked the Franciscan monastery in Homonna (Humenné in Slovakia), chasing down and robbing the fleeing priests.35 In the fall of 1677, forces led by Pál Wesselényi occupied Nagybánya, forcing the Jesuit priests to escape with little but the skin on their backs. Residents of Nagybánya then defiled the images of saints, broke the cross, and smashed in the windows. Amid scornful remarks and swearing, locals also tore the new altars out of the Saint Martin Church, tossing them onto the square out front before publicly burning them.36 In Kisszeben (Sabinov, Slovakia), locals scattered the consecrated hosts, broke the holy water font, and cut the priest’s vestments to pieces.37 These actions, too, were punctuated by verbal insults, and the Catholics of Nagymihály (Michalovce, Slovakia) were taunted by the rebels thus: “Mary’s fled to Homonna, leaving the papists of Nagymihály with no one to save them.”38

When troops led by Imre Thököly captured Kassa on August 15, 1682, they took chalices, patens, and other valuable objects, including silver, from the Jesuits, whom they chased out of town. The priests left behind their entire library and a well equipped apothecary, not to mention the church containing seven chalices with accompanying patens, two ciboriums for holding wafers, a monstrance, and four silver candleholders; the statue of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, which had been a gift from Ferenc I Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania; the prince’s silver epitaph; and the gilded main altar adorned with paintings.39 Thököly’s troops plundered the treasury of Kassa’s main cathedral in similar fashion—cashing in a portion of the silver, pearls, and ornaments. They had a goldsmith melt down a large silver monstrance into tiny silver sheets, and they removed the inlaid gems from a gold cross. They returned a portion of the remaining valuables to the main cathedral during the siege by the imperial forces, while entrusting the rest to the sexton. In similar fashion they began to disburse the contents of the library in Saint Elizabeth Cathedral. It was from there, for example, that Lutheran minister János Asbóth borrowed an eleven-volume concordance of the Holy Scripture.40

Such aggressive actions were not limited to the churches themselves, but also targeted the priesthood. In the village of Jernye (Jarovnice, Slovakia), the fugitives stripped the parish priest naked, flogged him, and dragged him down the main road before then taking him away. His counterpart in Kisszeben tried hiding, but in vain: on finding him the fugitives beat him until he lost consciousness, cut off his hair, and to really rub in the ridicule, led him naked into the cathedral, where he was forced to renounce the Catholic faith.41

Pillaging and ritual violence were equally part and parcel of these attacks. The burning of altars signified holy purification, and the desecration of religious objects reinforced the border between the sacred and the secular, with defiled objects winding up outside the sacred space of the given confession. Participants in the ritual desecration of churches assumed the role of church and secular officials when, in defense of given religious doctrines, they acted in what they perceived as in the interest of religious purification.42 These ritual actions targeted those fundamental elements of Catholicism that most saliently distinguished that confession from its Protestant counterparts: saints, images of the Virgin Mary, and altars. And yet among Catholics, memories of such violent acts gradually faded as rituals on their other side of the divide, from consecration to masses, gathered pace anew. The situation was similar in the case of spaces previously ascribed with sacral functions that, since the Reformation, had been used for secular purposes, and which the next section will examine.

Restoring the Sacral Functions of Desacralized Spaces

 

Particularly striking are those instances in which attempts were made to bestow sacral functions to those spaces that had lost them in the wake of the Reformation. Now back on the scene, the Catholic Church demanded the return of such buildings, and it sought to restore their earlier functions by both rearranging the spaces and re-establishing the rituals held within them. Let us consider two examples that illuminate this process.

The reappropriation of Saint Nicholas Church in Nagybánya and the restoration of its sacral functions occurred in a relatively short span of time. The church had presumably been built at the start of the fifteenth century as part of Nagybánya burgher János Omechin’s undertaking to create a foundation to establish a city hospital. By the end of the seventeenth century this foundation also came into the possession of Giródtótfalu (Tăuţii de Sus in Romania), a mill close to Nagybánya, as well as a vineyard hill. The lavish benefice must have been a key factor in the decision in 1674 by the Jesuit mission in Nagybánya to acquire Saint Nicholas Church first even though it was the smallest among the three churches in town. Historical records repeatedly refer to it as a “chapel,” in fact. Another reason may have been that this Protestant city had not used the building for religious functions. The larger Protestant confession locally, the Reformed Church, had long before come into possession of Saint Stephen Cathedral, while the Lutherans had gotten Saint Martin’s Church. All three churches were located in the city center—Saint Martin’s and Saint Stephen’s beside the main square, and Saint Nicholas near Little Market Square (Kispiac tér) not far from the other two.

Until 1674, Saint Nicholas Church had been used as the city stables, and in vain had the Szepes Chamber’s local representatives asked for its return; for city officials did not want to hand over the associated hospital and relinquish their claim to the funds that came with it. Hence they even sabotaged the cleaning of the church: On June 23, 1674, city bailiff István Jarossy informed the Chamber that the locals had even left their billy goats in there.43 And yet the Chamber had already ordered a month earlier that the church’s roof be repaired.44 István Jarossy and officials from the mint in the city had even looked into getting the suitable shingles for the job, but only in August did the church again come into the Catholics’ possession.45

The Chamber demanded that since the city had previously allowed those from Giródtótfalu to raze the church’s sacristy, it should now be rebuilt at city expense and that the church itself be renovated. They practically ordered city leaders to account for and return the church’s onetime collection of devotional and liturgical objects.46 The city in turn denied having authorized the sacristy’s destruction; its officials claimed ignorance as to the fate of liturgical objects, which, they said, had been lost in the conflict between János Szapolyai (1487–1540) and Archduke Ferdinand I (1503–1564), both of whom had claimed the title of King of Hungary.47 Even at the end of December 1674, the city denied having neglected the renovation of the church.48 In its letter to the Chamber of Hungary, the Szepes Chamber emphasized that Saint Nicholas Church, the hospital, and the foundation had been appropriated because the city had used them not in accord with its onetime privileges but for secular purposes.49

Renovation of Saint Nicholas Church dragged on for months, since “purifying” it—removing the traces of its secular uses, that is—took time. In September 1674 the Chamber asked Habsburg general Paris von Spankau to have the armaments stored there moved to Szatmár.50 More details about the renovation are to be had from a letter sent in 1677 by the Jesuit parish priest, Péter Gödy, to the Austrian provincial superior of the order who oversaw the region. According to this letter, the roof had been replaced, a new steeple had been built, a gilded cross had been placed on the church, and the vaulted sacristy had been rebuilt from the ground up. Inside, a new choir box had been built, as had a new pulpit, and the walls had been whitewashed and otherwise renovated. The cost came to a hefty sum, 671 forints. Four months after his induction Gödy could finally hold mass in the church; this, after doing so in a private home up to that point.51

Hence, this space—this church that had been used as a stables in this overwhelmingly Protestant city—now reassumed its sacral functions. Not only had it been renovated and furnished with clearly visible Catholic symbols (a gilded cross, a new steeple, and a redesigned interior), but from December 1674 this space also became newly sacred by the social activity that took place there—namely, Catholic ceremonies.

A similar process unfolded in the case of the Dominican Church in Kassa. A huge fire broke out in that city on August 22, 1674, destroying 155 houses and the city granary.52 The granary buildings had been none other than those comprising the earlier Dominican monastery and church. The Dominican order had left Kassa in 1556, likewise after a fire. In 1578, King Rudolph I had granted the abandoned church to the city for use as a granary on the condition that it be given back to the monks if they return.53 For the next century the church was thus used as a granary, while apartments, houses, and stables, were built on the monastery ruins. But in 1649 the Dominicans’ generalis commissarius in Hungary, Eustachius de Brixia, issued a formal protest that the city was using the buildings and the attendant property for its own ends.54

After the fire of 1674, the buildings were placed under the management of the treasury and a ban was imposed on all private construction there. The church had been desecrated by a most unusual means: the apartments that had been built from the ruins of the adjoining monastery had long seen their sewage diverted into the church.55 On September 12, 1674, Count Otto Ferdinand Volkra, administrator of the Szepes Chamber, signed a contract with master builder Alessandro Canneval, and a couple of days later, another contract with carpenter Paul Hornstein. While the fire had collapsed the church’s main interior wall and weakened its arches to the point where building on top of them was no longer feasible, the exterior walls remained in relatively good condition. Plans called for the nave to be turned into a granary, while the sanctuary was to be rebuilt as a smaller church. Even Ferenc Lénárd Szegedy, Bishop of Eger, agreed to this; General Paris von Spankau likewise approved.56 As for the royal court in Vienna, it assented not only to the building of the new church but also to turning the former monastery into a hospital or else for rebuilding it in line with another religious use.57 The granary was completed, but it is unclear whether the church was indeed rebuilt.

In December 1674 the Dominican order signaled its interest in reacquiring the church and monastery in Kassa, but to no avail.58 In 1680, even a royal decree to this effect proved to be in vain, almost certainly on account of the attack by the forces led by Imre Thököly.59 The Dominican order finally returned to Kassa only at the end of the century when, on December 16, 1697, Leopold I—Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary, and King of Bohemia—authorized its return along with that of its benefices (including the property and income deriving from them) and their estates.60 The Chamber’s support was also vital to restoring the religious function of the Dominican church, though it is worthy of note that the proposal was to divide the church space into a church on the one hand and a granary on the other, which would have preserved a secular use of the space.

The situation was similar in the case of the Franciscan church in Kassa, which had been used partly as an arsenal while the monks were compelled to live under one roof in the adjoining monastery with imperial troops. Add to this that pending the reappropriation of Saint Elizabeth Cathedral, the members of the cathedral chapter of Eger meanwhile held mass there.61

The shifting use of such spaces in the course of the Counter-Reformation therefore manifested itself not only in the recatholicization of Protestant churches, but also in the restoration of the earlier functions of spaces desacralized in the Reformation and since used for secular purposes. It was in the course of Catholic ceremonies and liturgy that these spaces reacquired their genuine sacrality and thus wove their way back into the fabric of a given city’s religious life.

Social Practices that Engendered Sacred Spaces

 

This section provides an overview of those practices and rituals (including ones rooted in Catholic worship) on the part of the broader urban society that helped to further “institutionalize” the sacred. While available sources tend to give accounts of those activities that violated the sacrality, even these reflect typical and atypical acts linked to sacred spaces.

The most important activity in this respect was participation in holy masses. A stellar example is the market town of Gönc, whose Reformed inhabitants were reluctant indeed to participate in Catholic masses. Quoting Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, “Ex auditu provenit fides”—Faith comes by hearing—the Chamber consequently ordered the local bailiff, István Berdóczy, to compel the residents to take part. Those who failed to attend masses were to be fined twelve forints. In their defense, the town’s Reformed residents explained that their neglect of masses was “the result of a change in teaching which, being old, that cannot get accustomed to anymore” To this the Chamber replied, “Hold onto that which you are happy to hear, our friends, and let pass by your ears that which you are not.”62 The Chamber regarded it as especially important that town officials should show a good example by themselves attending mass. Hence they were particularly subject to reprimands if they did not, as in the case of Gönc.63

With a dearth of concrete evidence, we are left only to assume that seventeenth-century Upper Hungary saw transgressions of the sort among the Catholics that were to occur in the mid-eighteenth century in the Jász region of present-day central Hungary. In the town of Jászapáti during that later era, parishioners were known to chatter and chortle during masses. In Jászberény, a spate of scandalous incidents persuaded the parish priest to suspend processions, while in Jászladány younger folk refused to carry the processional flag.64 Indeed, unsuitable behavior on the part of parishioners was apt to violate the sacred quality that masses and processions bestowed upon spaces.

Likewise important were the sacraments, especially baptism. For example, the authorities sought to prevent Protestants from having their own pastor or teacher baptize a child, thus circumventing the services of the parish priest. In Nagybánya in 1675, a fine of twenty imperial thalers was imposed on anyone who dared slip away to a neighboring village to have a child baptized or to get married in secret. People were instead required to have such rituals conducted by the Jesuits who led the Nagybánya parish.65

Indeed, it was common for Protestants barred from practicing their religion locally to secretly see to their religious needs in neighboring communities and suburbs. As Catholics exerted control over the central spaces of the city, in numerous bi- or multi-confessional cities and towns, minority religions became unable to remain part of the city’s landscape, with the faithful forced to mobility.66 And yet Protestants, not as bound as Catholics to the physical church as a sacred space, could maintain their congregational lives even in private homes or other secular spaces. This was particularly true after the enacting of laws on religion at the 1681 Diet of Hungary held in Sopron. In the summer of 1682, Kisszeben resident István Szirmay provided space in his own home for a minister to conduct Protestant services, and similar efforts were uncovered among Protestants in Kassa.67 In the second half of the 1680s, the tendency for Protestants to be edged out of city and town centers was reinforced more formally as the authorities granted them plots of land for church-building that were situated outside city and town walls. In Kassa, for example, 1687 saw a royal committee led by Count István Csáky designate a territory outside the city walls for the Protestants where they could build a church, a parsonage and a school.68

A less common phenomenon was the temporary conversion of a bourgeois home into a Catholic sacred space. On March 7, 1674, the first representative of the Jesuit mission in Nagybánya, Father Bálint Balogh, found accommodation only in the home of a Greek Orthodox resident in this otherwise hostile city. Soon he was able to move into a private home on the main square that the Chamber had earlier confiscated.69 This was probably the former residence of a prominent Lutheran family, the Proczners, judging from the fact that it was there that Balogh’s successor, Péter Gödy, was induced as the parish priest.70 So too it was there that Gödy presumably held mass until December 1674, after which he continued to do so in the newly renovated Saint Nicholas Church.71 The Jesuit yearbook from the time allows for a microanalysis of this shifting use of space. The city’s Protestant ministers and residents had observed even Balogh’s activities with suspicion, doing everything they could to restrict them to the Greek Orthodox home he both lived in and held mass in. And yet Balogh had held his first masses there with the windows wide open—meaning that the lovely songs accompanying the services could be heard loud and clear by many in nearby homes and on the streets alike. By Easter he was already based on the main square, and the musical mass with preaching drew a large crowd indeed—with “approving murmurs,” according to the Jesuit yearbook.72

Processions expanded the range of sacred space even more. Symbolizing the organizational might of the local community—and, depending on turnout, its unity—they were tailor-made to legitimize the pro-Catholic religious and political changes that had taken place. In 1677 Kassa judge György Hoffmann summoned the city’s guild masters. Citing a decree by the king, he urged them to take part in the upcoming Corpus Christi procession along with guild members. The guild masters resisted. Notwithstanding the fines they faced, their religion, their consciences would not allow them to participate.73 Nor were they keen on having their attendance strengthen the position of the city administration, which had been stacked with Catholics in the early 1670s.

Even the induction of new city officials underwent a makeover, with the ceremony now firmly embedded in Catholic traditions. The accompanying mayoral oath took place in a Catholic church or parsonage, with the city’s prominent Lutherans obliged to attend. A similar innovation was the procession from city hall to the church, a decidedly public demonstration of the transfer of power.74

As with Catholic religious life in general in the early modern age, religious societies played an enormous role in processions. The membership ranks of such societies embraced a wide swathe of society in general, thus serving as a key integrating force—and by virtue of this they contributed notably to the organization of the developing sacred space in cities and towns.75 In March 1678 the Kassa-based Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception of Blessed Virgin Mary invited the leaders of the Szepes Chamber to partake in a flagellant procession to be held on Good Friday, writing that they sought to convey the suffering and passion of the savior.76 The Jesuits and the Franciscans played a key role in the life of religious societies in Kassa, with confraternities even visiting each other’s celebrations. The social activities that such societies encompassed pervaded a city’s spaces; their celebrations saw churches decorated and processions held. On the main holiday of the Agoniae Christi society in Kassa, two Sundays before Easter (Black Sunday), a procession led from Saint Elizabeth cathedral to the Jesuit church replete with a processional flag, bell-ringing, trumpet-playing, and drumming. After the ceremony they returned in a festive procession to the cathedral.77

Conclusion

 

The examples of Kassa and Nagybánya, as well as those of the other communities in Upper Hungary discussed in this essay, serve to underscore the earlier point that buildings were readily identifiable as belonging to a particular confession precisely by virtue of their being suitably designed to reflect that confession’s given architectural precepts and being furnished with its symbols. And yet it was the wealth of social activity—cults of adoration and a whole array of rituals—that bestowed a space with the genuine essence of the sacral function, shaping that space in its own image. Numerous other functions could also be at work, either complementing or else working against the effect of the sacrality. Secular uses injected the economic and military dimensions of city life into spaces previously invested chiefly with a sacral function. This did not mean, however, that the sacral function was forever lost, for it could be restored in part or in whole through public authorization and confessional rituals. Yes, the sacred space could be recreated in constructed, physical reality.

And yet the sacred space was likewise the inspiration for, and the target of, ritual violence ensuing from confessional conflicts. As Catholic priests were sent packing with the Reformation, their churches underwent radical interior makeovers in line with Protestant thinking, aimed in part at erasing the marks of Catholic sacral functions. This could include the violent, ritual desecration or destruction of those furnishings perceived to be characteristic of Catholic churches—most notably, images and statues of the Virgin Mary and saints, altars, and liturgical objects.78 In my assessment such violent acts, which also “channeled” tensions, served all the more to reinforce the sacred space as synonymous with the city center, notwithstanding German research that has suggested the opposite trend in this era. In fact, our examples show that the role of city halls was on the wane as regarded the inauguration of city officials while that of parish churches was on the rise.79

Even alongside the violence, however, signs of peaceful coexistence were also in sharp relief. In Bártfa, for example, the local government’s Protestant leaders in 1686 authorized the church anniversary feast, even ringing the town bells to mark the occasion.80 In Jászberény, even after his own congregation had seen its church destroyed, the Reformed minister often had lunch with the Catholic parish priest, though Protestantism was theoretically banned.81 Beyond its interconfessional coexistence, this region was likewise characterized by ethnic diversity. After the recapture of Eger from the Ottomans in 1687, Hungarians, Rascians (Serbs), and Germans lived alongside each other in this ancient episcopal see—hence a confessional mix that included Roman Catholics, Reformed Church members, Lutherans, and Eastern Orthodox. Muslim converts to Catholicism, the so-called “new Christians” who remained behind comprised yet another major community. The monastic orders that settled here, and the ensuing development of new sacred spaces, likewise played a huge role in the integration of the city’s diverse ethnic and religious groups.

The Catholic Church became one of the major actors of consolidation in Hungary during its years of civil war, the wars to retake Hungary from the Turks, and the years that followed. It was precisely for this reason, then, that Catholic sacred spaces and, more generally, changes in the use of space came simultaneously to symbolize the “glorious” return of the Church and to serve the cause of consolidation. Although Protestant denominations were tolerated, they were squeezed out of city centers. Protestant sacrality did, then, continue to make its spatial mark on cities, only in a different form, now on the periphery.

 

 

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Translated by Paul Olchváry.

 

Ágnes Flóra

Symbols, Virtues, Representation. The Early Modern Town Hall of Kolozsvár as a Medium of Display for Municipal Government

 

A town hall, the most important public asset of the urban community, was at the same time the house of the community, the site of gatherings, and the symbol of town autonomy and privileges in the early modern period. As part of the humanist rediscovery of the antique tradition, a new wave of town hall constructions and renovations began in the second half of the sixteenth century in Transylvania. This essay seeks to determine how the new morality accompanying the Reformation influenced municipal leadership, and how the municipal elite projected its own image in the exterior and interior spaces of the town hall. This kind of civic ostentation, or, as the Protestant preacher Gáspár Heltai put it, “exhibitionism,” may also be ascribed to the emergence and development of early modern civic awareness.

“…the town is like a great house, and a house is like a little town…”
(Leon Battista Alberti: De re aedificatoria. Libr. I. 9.)

 

The display of authority at individual, community or state level has always followed well-defined, observable canons regardless whether its source was the customary law or diplomatic protocol. A study of the symbolic spaces of early modern communities, despite the sparseness of written sources, can elucidate the ideals, principles, virtues and beliefs through which the municipal leadership attempted to demonstrate its power, legitimacy and strength.

The town hall, the local government’s most important building, was at once the central building of the community, the venue for council meetings, and a symbol of the town’s privileges and autonomy.1 This symbol occupied a central position in senses that went beyond the spatial structure of the town. Vitruvius had already written of this.2 Indeed it was the influence of the rediscoverers of antiquity, the sixteenth-century humanists, which led to town halls being re-interpreted at this time. There followed a rash of town hall construction and renovation throughout Europe in the second half of the century.3 There could clearly also have been other, much more pragmatic causes behind the town hall erections, such as the rise of the urban bureaucracy and the broadening of civic rights. Substantial construction undertakings in this period are also known to have taken place in Transylvania. In 1545, the council of Nagyszeben (Sibiu, Romania) decided to purchase a house formerly belonging to Thomas Altemberger and convert it into a town hall.4 Major works were also carried out on the town hall of Brassó (Braşov, Romania) in the sixteenth century.5 We know little of the early-modern form of Kolozsvár’s (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) principal public building, but among the meager sources is some information on its decoration.

Given the prosperity of the town in the sixteenth century, it is reasonable to assume that the town hall on Kolozsvár’s main square was an imposing building designed to present the public face of the municipal elite.6 This study seeks to determine how the new morality accompanying the Reformation showed up in municipal leadership, and how the municipal elite projected its own image in the exterior and interior spaces of the town hall. Furthermore, from the very few surviving sources, I will try to work out who could have been responsible for creating the public display of which the inscriptions were a part.

The town hall on the south-east corner of Kolozsvár’s main square, reminiscent of an Italian palazzo, was built between 1843 and 1845 to plans by municipal master builder Anton Kagerbauer (1814–1872).

Figure 1. The old town hall built by Anton Kagerbauer between 1843–1845.
Photo by Melinda Mihály

 

We know little of its predecessors.7 A council building, domus consulatus, is first mentioned in a report by the Kolozsmonostor Convent in 1438.8 We know nothing, however, of its layout or character. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the institution increasingly crops up in the sources not as an administrative centre but a place of assembly, referred to as the consistorium.9 It was referred to as such in the municipal statutes of 1537, too.10 It is reasonable to infer that the building stood on the south-east corner of the market place, in the Media district, the same site as the Kagerbauer town hall. The question of whether it was a converted town house or a purpose-built town hall remains unanswered. It is unlikely that a building for the purposes of municipal affairs would have been erected immediately after the construction of the town walls on a hitherto empty part of what was by then the most important space in the town. More plausible is the conversion of a large town house, guild house or ecclesiastical building.11 It must certainly have been a spacious and suitably imposing building, with rooms capable of accommodating assemblies of the centumviri (“council of a hundred”), perhaps similar to the presbytery on the west side of the square.

In the wave of private building in what might be called the town’s golden age, the second half of the sixteenth century, the buildings in and around the main square were converted into two-storey houses.12 This induced probably an extension to the council building in 1578, too.13

The only known representation of the building is in the background of an oil painting of the south-east side of the Kolozsvár market place, by the Austrian painter Franz Jaschke.14

 

Figure 2. Franz Jaschke, The market square of Kolozsvár around 1800. Oil painting.

Source: Bruckenthal Museum, Nagyszeben (Sibiu)

 

This shows a building which differed from contemporary town houses, whose frontage was generally not more than 10 meters wide and had a 2+1 layout.15 As in most European towns, its cellar had several functions, but was primarily a jail. In 1580, at the request of the tax collectors, the centumviri16 decided to transfer the male prisoners to the tower of the Közép utca gate and to keep the women in the council cellar.17

The décor of the town hall served the function of official display, as is very clear from the inscriptions that formed part of it. We can form an impression of its scheme from a list drawn up in 1734 and appended later to the council minutes of 1624.18 This description is almost certainly in the hand of the town notary of the time, György Füzéri, and formed part of the first Latin description of Kolozsvár, written the same year.19 That is because Füzeri, co-author of Descriptio civitatis (Description of Kolozsvár in 1734), was by virtue of his post the keeper of the town archive and so was familiar with the minutes of the past council meetings. The sweeping, characteristically eighteenth-century script also points to a practiced man of letters, which proves again Füzéri’s authorship. Füzéri’s recording of the inscriptions must therefore have been carried out originally for the Descriptio book, whose authors, the town councilors of the time, stated their intention that the inscriptions on the town’s walls and buildings should be written down.20 What is more, the authors mentioned that they were omitting the long list for lack of space, and would write it in “a certain book”.21

There also exists a later description, much shorter than the first list, in a multi-volume manuscript collected under the title Egyveleg (Miscellany) from the Sándor Mike collection.22 This was written in 1826, possibly after the earthquake, and recorded inscriptions adorning the façade and the vaulted entry passage. The description does not cover the visual composition of the scheme, and it would probably be inappropriate to attempt a reconstruction. Nonetheless, the content, purpose and possible sources of the inscriptions, and above all what they reveal about the milieu responsible for them, merit careful consideration. The scope of this study does not permit discussion of all of the details.23

Figure 3. Detail from Franz Jaschke’s painting
with the renaissance town hall in the background

 

The coats of arms of the seven free royal towns were—according to our chief source, the Füzéri description—emblazoned above the windows of the main frontage of the town hall. This was a clear message that Kolozsvár was the equal of these towns in terms of rank and prestige. This kind of representation was not necessarily a “local invention” even though we know of no similar painted façade adornments elsewhere in Transylvania. The inclusion of coats of arms as decorative elements of town hall frontages and internal spaces was a widespread practice in Europe, an expression of the town’s status and loyalty to the sovereign. The addition of the royal insignia, marking the time of construction, also turned the building into a monument for future generations.

Despite the presence of two coats of arms of Transylvanian princes, there is a problem in dating the painting of the town hall frontage. This arises from the interpretation of a phrase in one of the inscriptions on the front: renovatio per pictorem.24 Was it a complete repainting or reconstruction? Since none of the surviving sources tell of any major building or painting between 1648 and 1650, we may infer that it was a renovation of, or addition to, existing decorations. Otherwise, we would have to imagine that the sixteenth-century work on the town hall, which certainly involved great emphasis on its windows and furnishings, left the façade and internal spaces without colored painted decoration. This would have been a curious departure from the prevailing custom, in the very period regarded as the town’s golden age.25

We find a clue in the coat of arms of Prince György II Rákóczi of Transylvania (1648–1660) which was almost certainly painted during the renovation, as is confirmed by the inscriptions.26 It follows logically that the other princely coat of arms dates the previous renovation, or perhaps the first painting. The notary who recorded the insciptions stated that Gábor Báthori’s arms stood beside Rákóczi’s.27 This entry requires some caution. First of all, the surviving sources do not tell of any major town hall renovation during the reign of Gábor Báthori (1608–1613), and an event of such financial and indeed symbolic consequence would inevitably have left a mark in the municipal accounts. The fact that the town had somewhat tense relations with Prince Báthori28 also casts doubt on the account by the eighteenth-century “chronicler”, whose historical perspective might have led him to attribute the dragon-tooth Báthori arms to the last reigning member of the dynasty. A much more logical inference is that the dragon’s teeth represented Kristóf Báthori (1576–1581) and were the result of the 1578 renovation. If we accept this, then the work done in 1648 and 1650 was a renovatio in the literal sense, preserving an existing tradition, which—as Füzér’s account shows—was upheld and nurtured until the eighteenth century. Indeed, most of the quotations in Sándor Mike’s manuscript appeared in the list recording the status of 1650. The word renovatio as applied to the works in the second half of the eighteenth century may thus be interpreted in the strict sense, a reconstruction of what was there before, even if inscriptions which had become damaged and illegible were replaced or substituted with new ones.

The words of wisdom for new council members above the portal of the town hall—“every councilor, upon entry to this town hall on taking up his office, leaves his personal affairs outside the door”29—evokes the fashion for mottos on Renaissance architectural sculpture. This was a trend that may be traced to the text-ribbon slogans painted or carved in medieval church interiors or to ancient Roman (grave)stone inscriptions, although it was also standard practice to greet visitors to a public building with a message conveying the values it represented and demanded. Thus the same text greeted councilors as they entered the town halls of Regensburg, Görlitz and even Tallinn.30

Another interesting element, admittedly not directly connected to the frontage, was a device for setting moral examples, a chair the chair standing in front of the building for litigants.31 A Sallust quotation on the left of the chair and a Latin proverb by an unknown author on the right exhorted the parties to recognize their errors.32 The “chair of shame” certainly stood in front of the town hall in 1612, and probably well before that, because the stewards of the town paid a builder for repairs to the chair and the stone wall in front of the town hall.33 The chair of shame was a different kind of moral contrivance from the pillory or the stocks or the cage, serving to deter rather than actually shame. The pillory was for proven transgressors, while those seated on the chair of shame could hope to clear themselves in front of the law.

Most inscriptions, as might be expected, relate to the council’s judicial competence, its chief point of contact with the citizens of the town. Impartiality,34 thoroughness,35 endeavor to reach agreement36 and—above all else—respect for the law37 were the moral precepts to be adhered to by council members as they made their judgments.

The moralizing inscriptions dealt at great length with the role and obligations of the head of the local judiciary, the judge. They stressed the general virtues demanded by the prevailing Christian value system, such as protection for paupers, orphans and widows, even-handedness, fairness and confidentiality.38 The same principles are apparent in the oath sworn by the judge and councilors at the election of the new council in December of each year. The oath was rooted in German urban law, and had come to Kolozsvár via the Buda town law.39 The inscriptions thus served to warn the town elders of what would be demanded of them when they took up their offices.

The other main category of the mottos were those referring to municipal administration. These were extracts from works by ancient authors and from Biblical allegories concerned with good and just government, highlighting the responsibilities, but also the supremacy, of persons in authority.40 Other quotations from the Bible, canon law and classical authors, allegories of strong governance, were aimed at elected or appointed holders of authority. Town elders were held to possess a primacy over other town-dwellers by virtue of their authority and wealth. This principle was stated in the basic text of Kolozsvár’s municipal government, the Buda town law, which in turn drew on various German town rights. A poor man was not suited to be a judge because he “sees need”.41

Legitimacy was based on more than just these practical principles: the medieval tradition that the town council was chosen by God unmistakably survived into the modern age. In 1592, when the councilors sought to be paid for their work, the centumviri refused their request on the grounds that if the council was a body summoned by God, it should look to God for its remuneration.42 This may look like cynicism from today’s perspective, but there was a genuine conviction in the sixteenth century that the twelve members of the highest body of municipal government were doing their duties as a mission for God. We find confirmation of this in one of the inscriptions, which states that whoever is elected for the task should not desire gold and silver, i.e. monetary returns.43

The number of councilors was also a religious symbol: the council members carried out their earthly mission as the twelve apostles. Although this religious legitimation is not substantiated by any surviving pictorial clue from Kolozsvár or anywhere else in Transylvania, it was a common phenomenon in towns elsewhere in Europe, including the Kingdom of Hungary.44 It is by this approach that the community of townspeople, the ordinum inferiorum, can best be interpreted.

It was common during the era of humanism to allude to a town as a respublica, prompted by the contemporary enthusiasm for antiquity. The ideal was the social and political regime of the independent state of classical times, the polis, even though the early modern form of the town did not correspond to the Aristotelian politeia, one of the ideal forms of state, where the public exercises the highest power.45 The early modern European town models were not true republics, even if certain elements of their governance can be traced to that type of state.46 The primacy of the public, and service to the public, the common people of the town, even if not realized in practice, were much mentioned in the sources and in the refined rhetoric of the council minutes. The classical word respublica, repeated several times on the wall of the town hall, may be interpreted in a similar context: it applied to the service which the wise men of the town rendered to the public. These virtues were fused with the concept of council membership. The aldermen’s title prudens et circumspectus advertised a kind of guarantee that these principles would be adhered to and enforced, and also signified the town elders’ distinctive status, the basis for their exercise of authority. After Kolozsvár’s privileges were curtailed,47 the word respublica lost its meaning and was dropped from official rhetoric. This phenomenon shows up in the inscriptions: only the word civitas appeared in those painted on the frontage when the town hall was refurbished in 1775.48

The inscriptions also referred to specific bodies of the municipal administration. The inscription above the entrance to the hall of the centumviri, “Odium senile, privatum commodum, juvenile consilium Republicam evertunt”, apart from its strict moralizing, is a fine allegory for the significance of old and young councilors. The elevated authority possessed by senior members of municipal bodies, particularly when it came to passing on customary law and traditions, derived chiefly from their experience. It was common for the council to solicit the elders’ opinion in regard to a major event.49

The walls of the stewards’ room were adorned with admonitions pertaining to their financial duties: “Exact no more than that which is appointed to you”50 and “Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor”.51 Inscriptions concerned with mortality formed the third major category.52 Perhaps the most interesting of these was the inscription above the judge’s head, “Sic transit gloria mundi”, not so much for the message of this old aphorism as its history: it was originally enunciated at coronations of popes, and later of kings.53 In the municipal context, written above the judge’s chair, it served to designate its occupant as the supreme holder of municipal authority.

The description concentrates on the inscriptions and only sporadically mentions carvings and sculptures on the building. The Renaissance window frames of the neighboring Wolphard-Kakas house, some Renaissance features of buildings that still stand today, and the carvings in the stonework collection of the History Museum provide some points of reference for the sculptural work on the town hall, if we consider that the houses of wealthy burghers could not have been permitted to outshine the seat of municipal government.

The description mentions only a few statues. There was a statue of naked Justitia holding sword and scales, representing pure justice, a pipe-playing cherub, and a male figure holding a sword, representing ius gladii which adorned the interior of the town hall. The latter was in all probability a statue of Roland, a customary fixture in German towns or towns with a large German population, symbolizing judicial authority and often municipal autonomy.54 Besides these, a painted representation of death reminded the councilors of their earthly mortality, and a siren symbolized earthly joys. Although the description was mainly concerned with recording the inscriptions, it would probably not have omitted to mention other pictorial or sculptural images had there been any.

Aesthetics could only have been secondary among the purposes of decoration with inscriptions, even though people of the time loved color and pomp.55 We might rather look upon such a presentation of the values of municipal government as the communication of power. Although most of the mottos of the town hall décor clearly had a moralizing aspect, alluding to good government, justice, law and harmony, they also carried a significant symbolic force as displays of authority. The quotations from classical authors inevitably raised the rank and prestige of council members of the town in the eyes of anyone entering any part of the building, be they high-ranking envoys or statesmen, or thieves, fraudsters or rogues sitting on the accused bench. The purpose in each case was the same: to present a coherent system of values to the outside world. The image they conveyed was of course an idealized one, and we should not naïvely imagine that the council and the ruling elite fully internalized this rhetoric or practiced it in their everyday administration. The artificial image-building phrases in many cases say more about the literacy of those who chose them than about the town leadership itself.

Which authors provided the texts used to adorn the chief symbol of municipal government, and what inspired their use? They were, not surprisingly, classical authors whose work was greatly in vogue in the age of humanism and was even commended by the great reformers as reading material for monarchs.56 The texts fell into three main subject areas: the Bible, classical theories of the state, and classical history. These are the main themes of the quotations on the walls of Kolozsvár town hall, among which we can identify words of wisdom by Sallust, Seneca, Plato and Cicero.

We have no reason to doubt that the person who devised the scheme had read and was familiar with these authors, because they all had a place on school and university syllabuses and their work was also collected by citizens of the town.57 The variety of the inscriptions and authors, however, suggest that rather than selecting the quotations individually, the designer of the decoration drew from a florilegium, a thematic anthology concerning good and bad government. The humanist (Germanic) canon unavoidably suggests itself as the chief inspiration for the inscriptions, acquired from the sights and experiences of peregrinations and trading journeys, even though the first person to (partially) publish the inscriptions, Elek Jakab, almost cautioned his readers against seeing in them a simple imitation of this. In fact, such a “transplant” was more of a virtue than a vice. By echoing messages commonly expressed in other European towns, inscriptions such as “This house loathes indolence, loves peace, punishes sin, observes the laws and respects the good”,58 served to display the openness of the Kolozsvár municipal government and its espousal of European municipal principles based on the Christian ethics of the time.

It is not difficult to identify the persons responsible for compiling the decorative scheme. The only municipal administrative officials who had the requisite literary, legal, theological and linguistic abilities for such a project were the notaries.59 It cannot be a coincidence that the first (1592) inventory of town privileges taken by the notary Gergely Diósy60 bears many similarities with the mottos on the town hall: quotations by Plato, Sallust and Aristotle were both allegories of good government and devices of self-display.

*

In summary, the inscriptions on the walls of the early modern town hall of Kolozsvár were both decorations and messages to citizens entering the building, informing them of the high moral standards of their local government. The decorative scheme, with sentences lifted from the Bible and works by classical authors, attests above all to the cultural background of its designer, but also reflects the demand of civic society—as in other European towns—for a building which displayed the virtues of their town in the spirit of contemporary traditions. This kind of civic ostentation or, as Gáspár Heltai, the Lutheran pastor of Kolozsvár put it, “exhibitionism”, may also be ascribed to the emergence and development of early modern civic awareness.

 

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Translated by Alan Campbell.