György Rácz

The Congress of Visegrád in 1335: Diplomacy and Representation*

The Congress of Visegrád, held in 1335, was one of the outstanding diplomatic events in Central Europe in the fourteenth century. The present study, after outlining the general historical developments which characterized the kingdoms involved, namely Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, in the early decades of the fourteenth century, retraces the immediate preliminaries of the diplomatic summit, before all the efforts at eliminating the political and territorial conflicts which opposed Poland and Bohemia on the one hand, and Poland and the Teutonic order on the other hand, through the mediation of Charles I of Hungary, the senior ranking ruler of the region. The study examines all the chief agreements concluded during the conference, on the basis of all the available charters and the narrative sources, carefully accounting for the differences of viewpoints which characterize the narratives of chroniclers from the various countries. It comes to the conclusion that, contrary to Hungarian historiography, although the conference did have a commercial aspect, it was certainly not the main thrust of the events at Visegrád. Finally, the study makes an effort at establishing, upon the amounts of food consumed, the number of the respective retinues of the Polish and Czech rulers, and thereby determine whether the numbers involved could be regarded as average or whether they implied a conscious show of strength on the part of the two kings.

Keywords: Fourteenth-century diplomacy, Central European politics, princely retinues

 

The Congress of Visegrád was by far the biggest diplomatic event that took place in Central Europe in the first half of the fourteenth century.1 In the following pages we offer a summary of the events, based on the narrative and documentary sources, and make an effort at establishing the respective numbers of the Czech and Polish delegations.

The picturesque little town of Visegrád is located in the largest bend of the river Danube. The historical sources unanimously testify that here, in the autumn of 1335, the leaders of Central European kingdoms held an international conference, a so-called royal summit, in order to resolve international disputes. The meeting was held in the court of the Hungarian King Charles I of Anjou, the actual initiator of the conference. The upper castle on the hilltop was built during the reign of King Béla IV to provide a line of defence in the event of a new Mongol invasion. The strategic significance of this location led to the extension of the upper castle with a massive keep by the Danube, as well as the construction of a fortified wall that connected the upper and lower castles, turning the hillside into a formidable system of fortifications.

Interestingly enough, the Slavic origin of the name Visegrád (meaning “high castle”) does not refer to what is now the upper castle but to an older one built on a hill farther north. What was once a Roman fort later became an ispán’s castle, which the local Slavs called “high castle,” a name retained by the Hungarians even after the building’s dilapidation. Populated by German settlers, the village at the foot of the hill rapidly developed into a town in the second half of the fourteenth century, shortly after King Charles I of Anjou had relocated his seat from Temesvár (Timişoara, Romania) to Visegrád in 1323 and defeated his oligarchic opposition. It was here that the central court and the administration were established. The harmony of landscape and architecture that evolved at the foot of the hill inspired Charles of Anjou to envision what would become one of Central Europe’s most significant royal seats in the fourteenth century. The excavation of the buildings of the royal court destroyed under Ottoman rule has been ongoing since 1934. Archaeologists have uncovered the foundations of the palace built by the Angevins, where an assassination was attempted against Charles I in 1330. By 1335 the castle and the town were able to accommodate the Bohemian King John of Luxemburg, his son and heir Charles, Count of Moravia, Casimir III (the Great) of Poland, Prince Rudolf of Saxony and Boleslaw III, Duke of Silesia, representatives of the Order of Teutonic Knights as well as their entourage for over an entire month.2

In order to understand the reasons that led to the royal summit one needs to study the circumstances of the respective countries at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Although the spread of the Black Death and other epidemics in this period in a sense marked the closure of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, the culture of chivalry was at that time still in full bloom. The fourteenth-century history of the three Central European kingdoms, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary, features a time of progress and development reflected in similar ways in each country. At the beginning of the century all three neighboring kingdoms had been experiencing frictions and social unrest. By the second half of the century the three leaders had managed to resolve internal conflicts and build up strong countries. In Bohemia and Hungary the old dynasties had died out almost simultaneously at the beginning of the 1300s, while in Poland, Władisław Łokietek – who belonged to one of the branches of the Piast dynasty – ascended to the throne. The demanding tasks that all three countries were about to face influenced as a matter of fact their relationship to one another. Władisław Łokietek I, Prince of Krakow (1306–1320), succeeded in unifying the fractured Polish territories and made himself king upon the approval of the pope in 1320, thus re-making the Kingdom of Poland (ruled from 1320 to 1333). In Hungary, once the lineage of the Árpád dynasty ended in 1301, Charles of Anjou (1301–1342) came to the throne and, like Łokietek, commenced his reign with dedication and a gift for leadership. The rulers of Poland and Hungary supported each other in their struggles against the oligarchs in their own territories, and this alliance would remain one of the pillars of Central European politics throughout the fourteenth century.3

With the end of the Bohemian Přemyslid dynasty in 1306, the rival of the Angevins, John of Luxemburg (1310–1346), ascended to the throne of Bohemia, which brought about stability in Czech–Hungarian relations as well. One indication of this is that Charles of Anjou, having suffered the untimely loss of his first two wives, married Beatrice of Luxemburg, sister of the king of Bohemia, in 1317. The death of Beatrice in 1319, however, put an early end to this marriage. Because John did not have any more sisters to marry, Charles resorted to asking his other neighbor, the Polish king, for a fiancée. His marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of the newly crowned Władisław Łokietek, in 1320 forged a strong alliance between Hungary and Poland. At the same time, King John provided further support to Charles’s campaign against Máté Csák, his major adversary – a favor Charles did not let go unreturned. With the subsequent worsening of Hungarian–Austrian relations, the ties between the two kings strengthened, thanks to the long-standing animosity between the Luxemburgs and the Habsburgs.4

Charles’s good relations with both countries were eclipsed, however, by the enmity between the Bohemians and the Poles. One of the causes of this conflict lies in the Luxemburgs’ claim to the Polish throne, who in this regard simply stepped into the shoes of their Přemyslid predecessors. According to the rules of contemporary international relations, such a claim was legally justifiable and involved the whole heritage of Wenceslas III (1305–1306). The realization of this goal, however, was hindered by the unsuccessful campaign of the Bohemian king on the one hand, and by the diplomatic policies of the Angevins, who supported Łokietek, on the other. As a result, John of Luxemburg reduced his claim to Greater Poland and yielded Pomerania to the Teutonic Order. The Piasts had intended to lay claim to Silesia, a one-time Polish territory, but by the beginning of the fourteenth century the majority of the Silesian rulers were already under the overlordship of the Luxemburgs.

After the death of Władisław Łokietek I in 1333, his son Casimir III ascended to the throne, which breathed new life into the relations of the three countries. Once in power, Casimir launched himself into the task of sorting out matters left to him by his father. Poland was not only burdened by the feud with the Luxemburgs but also by territorial disputes with the Teutonic Order. With the new king on the Polish throne, John of Luxemburg also took an interest in improving Bohemian–Polish relations, for he was in search of an ally against his long-time enemies, the Austrians and Emperor Louis of Bavaria, with whom he had disputes over the heritage of Henry, Duke of Carinthia. In 1334, in order to settle the dispute over the Polish territories, the parties involved decided to choose arbiters: the Polish king appointed Charles of Anjou, while the Teutonic Order appointed John of Luxemburg.5 This move served as a platform for the subsequent peace process. The Hungarian king—who, after the death of Łokietek, became the ranking ruler of the region—set to the task with great zeal and mediated between the old Bohemian king and the young Polish ruler. Chief among his motives was his long-term goal to lay claim to the Polish throne for the Angevin dynasty. With Hungary in the role of mediator, the conference at Visegrád thus marked the closure of a two-year process of diplomatic negotiations between Bohemia and Poland on the one hand, and Poland and the Teutonic Order on the other. The mechanism of diplomatic preparations seems to have been engineered from Visegrád, which meant the constant coming and going of deputies to maintain contact and secure the flow of information.6

As a first step Casimir signed a one-year ceasefire with Charles, Margrave of Moravia and son of the Bohemian King John, at Sandomir on May 28, 1335. In the treaty he included King Charles of Hungary along with two Polish dukes as bails to confirm the peace treaty with their charters.7 Afterwards, on August 24, John’s and Casimir’s deputies met in the Hungarian town of Trencsén (Trenčín, Slovakia). Casimir authorized his deputies to follow the advice of the representatives of the Hungarian king throughout the peace process. The deputies also had the right to assume financial responsibilities on behalf of the king up to 30,000 silver marks. The Polish politicians were well aware that reimbursement of the financially unstable Bohemian king would be the key to the solution. After all, with the exception of the financial aspect, the other points of the peace treaty, which revolved around the Bohemian king’s claims to the Kingdom of Poland, had already been clarified. Consequently, King John, along with his son, waived his rights concerning Poland, while the Polish king gave up his claim to overlordship over Bohemian-governed Silesia and Masovia (Plock). The agreement was documented in a charter issued by the representatives of Casimir and sealed by their own seals, upon the promissory note that the Polish king would confirm it as well.8 With that, the Bohemian delegation went to the Hungarian royal court in Visegrád, where the Bohemian–Hungarian agreement was soon signed. The copy, dated September 3 and issued and sealed by the Hungarian king, has survived in the Czech royal archives.9

The time was now ripe for the commencement of the negotiations between the arbiters and for the meeting of the three kings. At the beginning of November 1335, the 47-year-old Hungarian King Charles of Anjou invited and hosted his brother-in-law and ally, the 25-year-old Polish King Casimir III, the 39-year-old Bohemian King John of Luxemburg, along with his 19-year-old son Charles, Margrave of Moravia (the future Emperor Charles IV), and a great number of Polish, Silesian, and German princes as part of their delegations, as well as the representatives of the Teutonic Order, for over three to four weeks. Contemporary chroniclers soon realized the significance of this event and reported on it in several accounts in all the countries involved. These documents typically highlight one aspect of the event while leaving others in the background.

In contemporary Czech historiography, represented by the Chronicle of Francis of Prague, compiled in the first half of the fourteenth century, the attitude is illustrated by the very title of its relevant chapter: “How the King of Bohemia Alienated Poland.” The author answered the question in the following way. The king of Bohemia, in the company of his firstborn, Charles, and several noblemen, went peacefully to Hungary and visited its king, Charles. There he spent three weeks, in the course of which they mutually preserved the fidelity and concord which existed between them, and confirmed them by oath, whereupon the king of Bohemia and his retinue returned to his kingdom, loaded with gifts. He took with him to Prague Casimir, already king of Poland, to whom he had sold Poland for twenty thousand marks in the presence of the king of Hungary. Here the Polish king spent several days, seeing many honors lavished upon him, and then returned home, where he proclaimed the happy news of having obtained the right and title to the Kingdom of Poland. While still in Hungary, these three kings had sworn a mutual alliance against all princes (contra omnes principes). Part of this alliance was a promise that the daughter of the Polish king would be given in marriage to the brother-in-law of the king of Bohemia, namely the five-year-old son of Henry, duke of Bavaria, who was called John.10

Charles of Luxemburg, Margrave of Moravia and later Holy Roman Emperor, offers an account of the congress in his autobiographies, which amounts to a contemporary report on the event, given that he attended it in person. No wonder he does not go into details about the formalities of hospitality, nor does he provide insight into the dynamics of the talks; yet it comes rather as a surprise that he emphasizes the Bohemian–Polish–Hungarian alliance only, without discussing the arbitration process. In his work he mentions that his father was already in Visegrád when he arrived; he then goes on to explicate the above-mentioned familial relationships among the rulers, and finally describes the roots of the Bohemian–Polish dispute.11 It is worth citing his text verbatim: “After this had taken place, we took the road to Hungary to our father, whom we found in Visegrád on the Danube with King Charles I. This king had earlier been married to the sister of our father, but she had died, and now he was married to the sister of King Casimir of Krakow, with whom he fathered three sons: the first was Louis, the second Andrew, the third Stephen. In that place King Charles brought about a peace between our father and the king of Krakow, by the terms of which our father renounced the rights belonging to him over Lesser Poland, namely Gniezno and Kalisz and the other provinces of Lesser Poland. To our father and the kingdom of Bohemia the king of Krakow renounced in perpetuity for himself and his successors, the kings of Lesser Poland, all his claims to all the duchies of Silesia and Opole and the city of Wrocław. There had previously been dissension between them because our grandfather, King Wenceslas II of Bohemia, held the aforementioned Lesser Poland and the duchies of Krakow and Sandomierz, having married the only daughter of Przemysł, the king of Lesser Poland and duke of Krakow and Sandomierz. On his death this Przemysł gave his kingdom along with the duchies which he possessed to our grandfather and the crown of the kingdom of Bohemia in perpetuity. But the aforementioned Casimir was the princess’s uncle and said that he held the right to the kingdom of Lesser Poland, asserting that a woman did not have the right to inherit the kingdom. And thus for a long time war had continued between the kings of Bohemia and Casimir and his deceased father Władisław, who were the kings of Krakow or Lesser Poland. It was thus that this war was brought to an end by the mediation of the aforementioned king of Hungary. In this he allied himself and promised to aid our father against the duke of Austria, who had taken the duchy of Carinthia from our brother, and against the aforementioned Louis [ie. Wittelsbach]. The following princes were allied together: our father, the king of Hungary, and Duke Henry of Bavaria, who was married to our sister.”12

The fifteenth-century Polish chronicler Jan Długosz highlights this other aspect of the congress in his account: the actual reason why the kings gathered together in Visegrád had been to settle the dispute over those Polish territories seized by the Teutonic Knights. While he thus captured the essence of the event, he provided the text of the charter of peace as well: “When the time approaches for the royal arbitrators to pronounce judgment, the two kings agree to meet in Wyszehrad (!) Castle on St. Elizabeth’s Day and there deliver judgment. King Casimir goes there to present his case in person. King John of Bohemia is there too. The Knights, who have never implemented the condition whereby the town and castle of Brześć were to be transferred to a third party, either the Duke of Mazovia or the Bishop of Włocławek, are represented by [Henry] Reuss of Plauen, the Governor of Toruń and Świecie. Each side presents its case and the documents to back it. But the King of Bohemia behaves more as an advocate for the Knights, than as an arbitrator, and is especially concerned that his sale of Pomerania to the Knights, which had brought him a very sizeable sum in coin, silver and gold, should not be invalidated. The decision, when pronounced, is that Kujawy and Dobrzyn belong to Poland, and Pomerania to the Teutonic Knights. This is a bitter blow for Casimir, for it deprives him of part of his inheritance, but, knowing how weak he is and afraid lest he become weaker still should hostilities be resumed, for he has enemies enough already and is considering declaring war on Ruthenia, he accepts even the condition that the castle of Nieszawa, though belonging to Kujawy, is to remain with the Order, thus giving the latter control of both banks of the Vistula and enabling it to use the river as a waterway. It is further decided that all liegemen, whether of King Casimir or of the Order, who have been expelled from their properties, are to be allowed to return and have their properties and the favour of their liege lord restored to them; or, should they prefer, they may sell their properties and go elsewhere. These decisions are pronounced on November 26.”13

The text of a fourteenth-century chronicle has survived in the work of the fifteenth-century Hungarian chronicler János Thuróczy, which gives a presumably contemporary account of the formal details of the meeting of 1335. Unlike Długosz’s account, this document focuses primarily on formalities; but such a description is just as valuable for us as political information. Let it be quoted here word for word, also because this will be the starting point for our attempt to establish the numbers of the retinues present: “In the 1335th year of the Lord, around the festivities of Saint Martin, King John of Bohemia, his son Charles, and the king of the Poles came to the castle of Visegrád, to the court of King Charles, to seal their alliance with a peace treaty for all time. And so it happened. Out of the generosity of the Hungarian king 2,500 loaves of bread were provided for the lunch of the Czech king, as well as a good share of the royal meals, all in abundance, while the horses’ daily share of fodder was 25 garleta. For the lunch of the Polish king 1,500 loaves of bread and other foods, as well as 180 barrels of wine were provided. The king of Hungary presented the king of Bohemia with various sorts of jewellery: 50 silver jars, two quivers, two belts, a magnificent chess board, two invaluable saddles, a knife with a belt that are worth 200 silver marks, and an elaborate pearl-oyster. Because the king of Poland was to pay homage to the king of Bohemia, and because Charles of Hungary took the sister of the Polish king as his wife, King Charles gave him 500 marks of the finest gold so as to save him from paying taxes to the Bohemian king. It was resolved that in the event of an enemy attack on any one of these countries, the others would help the one in trouble. And this has been sealed by an oath among one another.”14

The official documents issued in Visegrád in the autumn of 1335 do little to nuance the descriptions of the chroniclers. Although the chronicles do contain a kernel of truth, the events that they describe often occurred in different places, at different times, and not in the way they suggest. In the above example the Hungarian chronicler falsely asserts that Poland, as a feudal subject, had financial commitments to Bohemia and that Charles offered the required amount to “ransom” his brother-in-law. On the basis of the documents connected more immediately to the conference, it is possible to draw a more realistic picture. We have seen that at the meeting in Trencsén the “ransom” to be paid to the Bohemian king had not yet been specified. At the Visegrád meeting in November, however, Casimir, facing financial difficulties at the time, had no choice but to haggle over the amount to be paid. He finally agreed to pay 20,000 threescore Prague groschen (20,000 Bohemian silver marks) to the Bohemian king in exchange for the latter’s renunciation of his title of king of Poland. King John, in turn, issued a charter of abdication to be deposited with the Hungarian king. Should Casimir fail to produce the amount missing, the Hungarian king had the choice of giving the deposited charter back to the king of Bohemia or supplying the missing 6,000 marks himself.15 As 6,000 silver marks amount to 500 golden marks, the chronicle cited above has preserved this aspect of the event; however, it is mistaken in identifying the Hungarian king’s collateral statement with the payment itself.16

The actual celebration of the treaty of alliance took place on November 19, the nameday of Elizabeth Piast, wife of the host king.17 Many charters were dated that day, as was the Bohemian–Polish peace treaty,18 one of the most important documents of the meeting. Another charter of the same date provided for the security of the road leading from Poland to Wrocław and the demolition of the castle of Boleslauitz (Bolesławiec).19 Yet another was a marriage contract among the allied dynasties (a usual protocol on such occasions) aimed at protecting the newly forged Bohemian–Polish alliance. Due to the lack of younger sisters to marry, Casimir offered his baby daughter Elizabeth to the six-year-old grandson of the Bohemian king, the only child of Duke Henry of Bavaria and Duchess Margaret of Luxemburg (John’s daughter). Due to the untimely death of the boy in 1340, the marriage was not realized.20

The signing of the peace treaty took place on the same day as the verbal declaration of the arbitration. A thorough study of the historical sources demonstrates that this was the most important underlying reason for the meeting of the kings. The adversaries had been conscientiously preparing for the decisive event of the arbitration proceedings. On September 21, 1335, the Teutonic Order had the charters underpinning their rights transcribed in the archives of the Grand Master of the Order at Marienburg (Malbork),21 while the Polish king had already submitted a lawsuit against the Teutonic Knights to the pontifical court of law in the summer of 1335.22 In Visegrád the arbitration process had already commenced in November with an investigation into the plenipotentiary powers of the representatives of the Teutonic Order. This procedure was inevitable because the Grand Master of the Order was absent from the meeting (as appears from the charter on the peace itself). Once the authorization documents had been approved, it came to the presentation of statements and charters by the two sides. We have no information on the charters presented by the Polish deputies, but the Teutonic Knights certainly had those from the archives at Marienburg in their hands, as well as a complete draft of the peace treaty that they had composed earlier on.23 The arbitration was first declared orally, definitely before November 21, which is the date of the charter addressed by Władisław, Duke of Leczyca and Dobrzyn, to John of Luxemburg. Władisław cites the decree of the court of arbitration, which decided that the territories of Dobrzyn, hitherto under the rule of the Teutonic Order, were to revert to Casimir the Great. The duke reasserts that he had ruled over these territories until the Teutonic Knights and John of Luxemburg seized the area following the war waged against Łokietek.24 According to the charter, after the arbitration Casimir the Great would restore to him the region of Dobrzyn, and the duke would not demand war indemnities from John of Luxemburg.25 Closely connected to this charter is another document issued by Casimir the Great on November 23, in which he requested King John of Bohemia to give back the region of Dobrzyn to Duke Władisław.26

After days of negotiations between the arbiters and the barons, the arbitration was set down in a charter dated November 26. It stipulated that Casimir ruled over Kujawy and Dobrzyn, while the Teutonic Order received Pomerania.27 In his letter dated December 3 the King of Bohemia informed the Master of the Teutonic Knights of the dispositions drawn up during the meeting and of the subsequent duties at hand. He also listed the charters which the negotiating parties had to issue with regard to the case: “To the venerable Lord Theoderic, Knight, Grand Master of the Order of the Glorious Virgin Mary of the German Hospital of Jerusalem, to the beloved friend, John, by divine grace King of Bohemia, the Count of Luxemburg sends greetings, grace, and blessings. Let it be known that, during the three weeks we spent at the court of the Lord King of Hungary, we arranged your affairs and those of the Order, as we could, precisely as your knights who were with us could have reported it. First, the Lord King of Poland ought to guarantee by documents the renunciation of the lands of Culmerland (Chełmno Lands) and Pomerania (Gdansk Pomerania) as well as sincere friendship towards you in the future. Item, the Lord King of Hungary and we ought to give testimonial documents on the aforementioned renunciation of the King of Poland and on the concord and agreement between you and the King of Poland. Item, the King of Poland ought to submit a supplication to the Lord Pope in order that the Pope shall make a confirmation of the donation of the lands of Culmerland and Pomerania to you and to the Order. Item, the King of Poland ought to give documents and receive documents from archbishops and other ecclesiastical and secular persons to the fact that damages of the past war shall not be avenged, and shall not be attacked in any ecclesiastical or secular court. Item, the King of Poland ought to order documents from the King of Hungary on the renunciation of the lands of Culmerland and Pomerania in his and his successors’ names, since his wife is the sister of the King of Poland. Done under our seal on the Sunday when “Ad te levavi” is sung in the year of the Lord 1335.”28

Although there is no indication as to where the letter was written, it is quite certain that it was not written in Visegrád. According to the dates mentioned in the charters, the kings convened around All Saints’ Day, which designates November 1 as the starting date of the conference. In his letter dated December 3 King John talks about a meeting lasting three weeks; but the peace treaty between the Teutonic Order and Poland, which took place on November 26 in the presence of all those invited, indicates that the meeting lasted a bit longer. According to the Prague chronicle cited above, John and Casimir arrived in Prague on December 6. Casimir drafted another charter, addressed to the Teutonic Order and dated May 26, 1336, declaring that he accepted the arbitration.29

In addition to the two main points of the meeting’s agenda (the peace treaties between Bohemia and Poland, and between Poland and the Teutonic Order), we also have information on the follow-up discussions between the three kings that took place after the arbitration process. The lack of written documents on these discussions does not mean that questions unrelated to the arbitration were not addressed. For instance, the alliance forged between Hungary and Bohemia on September 3 was clearly designed against the Austrian dukes.30 It seems certain that the idea of a prospective campaign against them was also conceived in Visegrád. The military events of the following year, presumably also orchestrated from Visegrád, show evidence of prior arrangements, although they have not been documented. Some historians therefore regard the Visegrád meeting as a cradle of war rather than peace.31

Although the meeting received a lot of attention from all sides, as we have seen above, each party tended to highlight its own points of interest. As the event represented a turning point in fourteenth-century Polish international relations, it is not surprising that Polish historiography has addressed it in most detail, primarily focusing on Polish–Teutonic and Polish–Bohemian relations.32 Such aspects remained in the background in the writings of Hungarian chroniclers and the Visegrád meeting has instead been widely understood as a crucible of economic alliances.33 This assumption was based on a decree issued by Charles I in Visegrád on January 6, 1336, which regulated routes of commerce and the customs tariff between Hungary and Bohemia.34 The text of the decree suggests that Charles and King John had thoroughly discussed the issue beforehand – almost certainly in November in Visegrád. The commercial agreement was an important preliminary to the military campaign against the dukes of Austria. Also, the towns in the territory of present-day Slovakia may have played a role in initiating this trade agreement. The meeting in Visegrád therefore did have an economic aspect; yet this should not be generalized into the main focus of the conference.35

Finally, it is worth touching briefly upon the rather anomalous description of the conference that has come down to us as part of the Hungarian Thuróczy Chronicle, cited above, which has hitherto defied historians’ efforts at interpretation. Moreover, a closer examination of the text may probably take us nearer to establishing the size of the princely retinues that came to Visegrád, and thus provide relevant new information to both Czech and Polish historians. According to the ruling opinion of Hungarian historiography, the chapters dealing with the last years of the rule of Charles I of Anjou were probably inserted into the chronicle composition in the time of Louis I, by the hands of a Franciscan friar, thought by some scholars to have been called John Kétyi.36 It was from there that Turóczy adapted it into his own chronicle in the fifteenth century. We have seen above that the 500 marks given by the king of Hungary exactly corresponded to the 6,000 silver marks of which King Charles gave a warranty to King John on behalf of Casimir the Great. Thus, the fourteenth-century Hungarian chronicler was apparently well informed about the financial aspects of the negotiations, which increases our confidence in the reliability of his other data. For the lunch of the Czech king 2,500 loaves of bread were distributed every day, along with an ample portion of the royal victuals. The fodder (pabulum) for the horses amounted to 25 garletas per day. The relevant figure of bread for the Polish king was 1,500 loaves, plus a share in the royal victuals, while 180 barrels (tunella) of wine were also on supply.

The text makes a clear distinction between the amounts of bread due to the retinues of the kings of Bohemia and Poland respectively. As for the amount of wine, the figure given in the text should perhaps be interpreted in the sense that it represents not a daily portion but the total amount consumed by all the participants during the conference. Although fodder turns up only with reference to the retinue of the king of Bohemia, it is highly improbable that the Poles’ horses received none. While the plural form (equis suis) could also be interpreted as including the horses of both kings’ retinues, it is more probable that it refers more precisely to bohemorum, meaning that it was the amount provided for the Czech horses, as the portions supplied for the Poles are listed in a separate sentence. It is only the bread portion which figures separately on both “menus.” It makes evident that the retinue of the Polish king was much smaller than that of his colleague from Bohemia. More can be learned, however, if we can convert the figures of consumption into numbers of persons and animals, thereby gaining important information on the probable numbers of retinues attending the Visegrád summit. It is certainly worth the effort, of course without surveying the entire history of bread in the Middle Ages, especially because we do not know whether we are dealing with leavened bread or with unleavened flatbread, and nor do we have information on the size of bread in 1335.37 We should therefore count in the simplest possible way. We will surely not be too wide of the mark if we take one kilogram as the weight of one loaf of bread, and count with half a kilogram as the daily portion, taking into consideration that it was a princely conference, and thus other victuals, mainly meat, were also abundantly on the offer, as is indeed stated by the chronicler. In this case, the Czech delegation would number 5,000 persons, as opposed to 3,000 on the Polish side.

We can base sounder calculations on the amounts of fodder consumed by the horses. These amounts are given by the Latin text in garleta, a unit which has been interpreted in Hungarian historiography in various ways: it was most commonly translated as either köböl or mérő.38 Whereas the köböl contained 64 liters on average, defining the mérő is much more difficult, for its size varied, although it was generally somewhat smaller than the köböl. The amount obtained by either way of counting, however, is out of keeping with the information we have on the quantities of bread. Moreover, the Latin term for mérő is metreta, and the equivalent of köböl is cubulus, not garleta.39 Neither translation, therefore, is good.

That the garleta was a measure of grain of Italian origin has been known for a long time.40 Its exact size, and thus the meaning of the word, was established beyond doubt by Jenő Szűcs, but his results failed to raise the scholarly interest they merit.41 The number of charter references, which has grown considerably since the publication of the charters from the era of King Sigismund began, support abundantly Szűcs’s calculations.42 After a thorough examination of the sources, Szűcs came to the conclusion that “one gerla of wheat corresponded in modern measures to 13,536 (or at least 11,589) quintals, an enormous quantity, which by its sheer dimensions evokes a good cartload.” This huge number is underpinned, according to Szűcs, by the fact that in a whole series of late medieval Hungarian texts the gerla (girla) is the equivalent of corus (“cart”). Accordingly, he drew the conclusion that “when János Kétyi comments with regard to the royal summit of Visegrád in 1335 that the daily amount of fodder for the horses of the king of Bohemia was 25 garleta of oats, this piece of information is entirely in keeping with those which maintain that the retinue of that king consumed 2,500 loaves of bread and 180 barrels of wine for lunch each day…”43

Now, it is easy to calculate that the 25 cartloads of fodder which the horses belonging to the retinue of the king of Bohemia consumed corresponded to 33,900 kgs. Then we have to turn to consumption itself, however, for, as our source gives no information on either the nature of fodder or the size and type of horses, we do not know whether we are dealing with hay or oats, or a mixed fodder, and whether it was smaller or larger horses which ate it.44 Unfortunately, we have no data on the consumption of fodder by horses from medieval Hungary, but later evidence can be used for estimation.45 Thus, the need for dry matter by a full-grown horse a day would oscillate—depending, of course, on the intensity of work done and on the quality of fodder—between 8 and 12 kgs. In my view, we do not run the risk of making a big mistake if we calculate with a daily amount of 6-7 kgs in the case of horses that were not required to do any hard work during the conference. They were also probably put out to graze on the bank of the Danube, and thus had access to green fodder as well. In this way, we would come to an average of 5,000 Czech horses. However, we also have to take into consideration that a nobleman may have had several horses, and that the fodder must have been of excellent quality, and so it is unlikely for the horses to have consumed 6-7 kgs a day. Yet by reducing the daily portion, our stock of horses increases, and we may end up with as many as seven or eight thousand. However we juggle the numbers, they remain very high, and it is still only the Czechs we have counted with. If we take everything into account, a minimum of 5,000 Czech retainers and 3,000 Polish ones must have meant an onerous burden for the small town of Visegrád, especially in view of a stay there which extended for a whole month. Moreover, these persons and animals had to be not only fed but also accomodated, and the fodder of 25 cartloads a day stored somewhere on the territory of the town. If we take these numbers seriously, and we have no reason not to, as they mutually support each other, then we have to accept the fact that in 1335 the royal court at Visegrád, in the widest sense of the term, was able to host and provision an army of about 8,000 horsemen.46 This certainly indicates a fairly developed logistical ability on the part of the contemporary Hungarian royal court.

In view of this, it is almost unnecessary to engage in the interpretation of the 180 barrels (tunella) of wine. It is, indeed, almost impossible, as the tunella could range anywhere from 50 to 900 liters, which makes any estimation of its actual size illusory. Hungarian historians used to translate tunella as átalag, a barrel used around Tokaj and in the neighboring northeastern counties, which contained roughly 75 liters.47 As a matter of fact, this figure fits neatly with the amounts of bread and fodder. As our source fails to reveal whether this amount belonged to the Czechs or the Poles, we have to suppose that it was the quantity consumed by all the participants in a single day. If we count with barrels of 75 liters, we come to a minimum of 13,500 liters. In the case of a mixed Czech–Polish entourage of 8,000 men, this would yield a per capita consumption of 1.7 liters a day; not too much for just hanging around for a month.

However, wine was certainly consumed not only by the Czechs and the Poles, but also by all those present, the Hungarian hosts and the representatives of the Teutonic Order included. The Hungarian chronicler, besides passing over the fact of the arbitration itself in silence, fails to mention the presence of the representative of the Order. True, the delegation of the latter was led not by the Grand Master but by Count Henry of Plauen, governor of the province of Chulm, but even he certainly had a retinue of his own. As mentioned above, it is only natural that the chronicler limited his narrative to facts which mattered from a Hungarian point of view, as did all the other writers, each of whom framed his own account of the summit from the standpoint of his home country. Yet today we can safely break with the narrowly nationalist approach of the medieval chroniclers and state that the prime cause of the Visegrád royal summit was to provide the occasion for the two arbiters, the kings of Hungary and Bohemia, to make their judgement in the dispute between Poland and the Teutonic Order. The mere fact that the Hungarian chronicler failed to realize this and left the presence of the Order unrecorded, by no means diminishes the value of his work, for he makes several other statements which were clearly based on either the information provided by an eyewitness or some kind of contemporary account. The list of those gifts offerred to the king of Bohemia by his hosts, for instance,48 is more likely to have been taken from a contemporary notice or register than from the narrative of an eyewitness.49 In my opinion, therefore, the chronicler drew on the accounts of the royal court, then still available, in which the expenses of the Hungarian king for 1335 were recorded. This would also account for the lacunae and oddities which can be observed in the text. The author converted columns of numbers into a narrative. As for the expenses of the delegation of the Order, they were probably missing from the royal accounts. Their provision was presumably made from other (their own) sources, which is far from surprising in view of the fact that, unlike Casimir III and John of Luxemburg, the Order was not an ally but merely one of the parties in an arbitration. This may be the reason why the Order remained unmentioned in the accounts on which the chronicler drew and which put into writing the expenses of the Hungarian king in connection with the summit.

Finally, one more question must be asked. Was the enormous size of the royal retinues attending the summit an exception or the norm? The retinue of Sigismund of Luxemburg which escorted him on his well-documented travels in Western Europe amounted occasionally to 1,000 to 1,500 persons,50 and that of the guests who gathered around him at Buda in 1412 also contained several thousand people.51 Prague and Krakow were too near to Visegrád for the kings of Poland and Bohemia to resist the temptation of taking a huge entourage with them. Was their enormous retinue the part of routine representation or did it amount to an extraordinary and purposeful display of strength? In order to answer this question, one has to remember on the one hand that from Bohemia two princes came, each with his own entourage. On the other hand, the kings of Bohemia and Poland engaged not only themselves but also their most powerful subjects in making the peace, and they could not terminate the negotiations without their knowledge and consent. We know that urban delegates were also present, for some of the documents have survived in the city archives of Breslau (Wroclaw). Altogether some forty individual partners can be shown to have participated in the negotiations, the Hungarian lords included. Naturally enough, each brought a retinue of his own, which, together, constituted a mass of some 10,000 people, organized into various hierarchical structures. In all probability, its constituent parts idled away their time by memorable amusements and hunts, excursions to Fehérvár and Buda, and, of course, by chivalric tournaments on the bank of the Danube, while the kings negotiated and made peace up in the Citadel or in the Solomon Tower.

The scope of this study does not allow for a survey of the effects of the decrees passed at the meeting. Suffice it to say that the treaty forged with the Teutonic Order created a precedent and would later serve as a cornerstone of peace. The arbitration concerning Pomerania proved that the parties were willing to settle international conflicts through diplomatic means. The alliance between the three Central European countries lasted for over half a century and provided each country with the right to conduct its international relations autonomously (with the Balkans, the eastern regions, Germany, and Italy). Visegrád would also play an important role in the maintenance and renewal of the alliance in the upcoming years as well. It was here that Charles I renewed the 1335 treaty with Charles, Margrave of Moravia, heir to the throne of Bohemia. The margrave promised that he would support the Hungarian king’s claim to the Polish throne and, in turn, the Hungarian king would relinquish his claims on Silesia if he or his sons ascended to the Polish throne. Casimir and his royal delegation visited Visegrad again in 1339 with the intention of bequeathing Poland to his sister’s son Louis. This agreement ensured that Louis was elected king of Poland in 1370. These events illustrate that throughout the Middle Ages Visegrád functioned as a place for conflict resolution and rightly became an emblem for Central European cooperation over the centuries to come.

 

 

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (Hungarian National Archives – MNL OL), Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény (Collection of Photocopies – DF) Accessed September 5, 2013. http://www.mom-ca.uni-koeln.de/mom/CZ-NA/ACK/.

 

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Renáta Skorka

With a Little Help from the Cousins – Charles I and the Habsburg Dukes of Austria during the Interregnum*

With the death of King Andrew III of Hungary in January 1301 the male line of the Árpád dynasty that had ruled the Kingdom of Hungary for precisely three centuries died out. It was self-evident and natural to everyone that a ruler who was linked to the Árpáds through the female line must be elected to head the kingdom; however, opinions were divided as to who actually should wear the Hungarian crown. One of the important factors of the interregnum prevailing in Hungary in the first decade of the fourteenth century examined below is the support for royal candidates arriving from outside the country’s borders, which in many respects contributed to the coronation of the last remaining candidate in accordance with expectations and traditions in 1310.

Keywords: royal succession in Hungary, Holy Crown, Angevins, Habsburgs, Papacy

 

By the end of the Árpád era the coronation of kings already had set rules in Hungary. According to custom, the ceremony had to take place in the basilica of Székesfehérvár, founded by the first king of Hungary, (Saint) Stephen I (1001–1038) and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary; during the coronation the Holy Crown, kept in the basilica and held to be the royal diadem of Saint Stephen, had to be placed on the future ruler’s head; and the ceremony had to be performed by the archbishop of Esztergom. At the time of King Andrew’s death the title of archbishop of Esztergom was held by Gergely Bicskei; many, however, called his dignity into question, since at the time of his election a few of the members of the cathedral chapter of Esztergom, opposing the will of the majority, from the outset rejected him. For this reason the pope did not confirm the divisive archbishop in his office, but instead appointed him as procurator of the Archbishopric of Esztergom as a temporary solution.1 Bicskei’s position had been further weakened by the end of the reign of Andrew III, for the king deprived him of control over the estates that were the reigning archbishop’s due.2 All this indicates that officially he was no longer regarded as elected archbishop of Esztergom either, and this is why the author of the Illuminated Chronicle, dating from the mid-fourteenth century, could state in reference to the year 1301 that “at that time the archiepiscopal see of Esztergom was not occupied.”3

The cause of the prelate’s loss of favor essentially foreshadowed the political crisis that took place after Andrew’s death. In fact, Bicskei, abandoning his loyalty to the sovereign, had gone over to the side of the lords of Slavonia and Croatia who supported the claims of the Angevins, rulers of the Kingdom of Naples, to the throne of Hungary against Andrew. The king of Naples, Charles II (the Lame), and his wife, Queen Mary, who was the daughter of the Hungarian king Stephen V (1270–1272), not only tried to strengthen the position of their first born son, Charles Martel, by winning over adherents in Hungary, but through the marriage of Charles Martel and Clemence, the daughter of King Rudolf I of Germany, they also made the Habsburgs an interested party in the matter, which in any case reveals wise foresight. The Angevins’ claim to the throne of Hungary did not cease with the death of Charles Martel in 1295, for in August 1300 the only son of Charles Martel and Clemence of Habsburg, Charles Robert, came ashore in Dalmatia to assume his rightful paternal inheritance. The young prince, probably twelve years old at the time, was received by one of the most powerful Croatian lords, Paul Šubić, and Gergely Bicskei, who regarded himself as archbishop of Esztergom beyond any doubt.4 Andrew III was in all probability prepared to fend off the power crisis ushered in by the Angevin duke’s appearance; however, the implementation of his plans was foiled because of his death on January 14, 1301. While the country’s inhabitants, lay and ecclesiastical—at least according to a contemporary account—mourned the last male member of the House of Árpád in the manner of Rachel (more Rachelis deplorantes),5 Bicskei was not overcome by mourning, and appeared at the gates of the coronation town with the Angevin prince at his side in February 1301. Because the people of Székesfehérvár, who were moved much rather by dismissal of the archbishop than by antipathy towards Charles Robert, refused to allow the prelate and his protégé into their town, the determined archbishop crowned the prince with an occasional diadem of unknown origin in Esztergom, probably in early April. The new king of Hungary, the grandson of Queen Mary of Naples, and great-grandson of Stephen V of the Árpád dynasty, bore the name of Charles.6 If we take into account the reservations concerning Bicskei’s archiepiscopal dignity, we may state that the ceremony accorded with the coronation customs established in the Kingdom of Hungary in virtually no respect whatsoever, and this, in turn, made the legitimacy of the newly crowned king’s rule questionable and disputable.

To Charles’s misfortune, apart from Gergely Bicskei he had another supporter whose person and ambition aroused antipathy in many. Pope Boniface VIII, who could thank both the pro-Angevin Orsini party of cardinals7 and his thorough knowledge of canon law for his ascension to power, had incessantly supported the claim to the Hungarian throne of the Angevin dynasty since his election in 1294. The lawyer-pope, who himself had searched out the laws needed to procure the resignation of his predecessor, Pope Celestine V,8 and had “attentively provided for” the house arrest of the ex-pontiff as well, revived the centuries-old idea of papal supremacy over secular authority.9 According to this, as he explained to the French ruler in a bull composed in 1301, it was within the rights of the reigning pontiff both to elevate kings and to deprive them of their dignity.10 Boniface in any case did not consider Europe’s most important rulers worthy of his favors (or did so only reluctantly). He became embroiled in a fateful conflict with King Philip IV (the Fair) of France,11 and he accused King Albert of Germany, who, after the defeat of Adolf of Nassau in the Battle of Göllheim in 1298, followed in the footsteps of his father Rudolf I, of treachery and regicide, and was so unwilling to recognize his election12 that he summoned even the electors to appear before the papal tribunal.13 Being close to the Angevins, the pope identified himself with the cause of Charles of Hungary, all the more so since, according to the opinion of the Holy See, which dated back to the eleventh century, King (Saint) Stephen I of Hungary had offered up his crown to Saint Peter, and thus the right to decide who should sit on the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary belonged to the head of the Holy Roman Church.14 Although both the Árpáds and tradition in Hungary rejected the papal assertion, Rome grasped every possible opportunity to assert papal supremacy over Hungary.15 In this respect the acceptance of the pope’s protégé, the Angevin prince, as king of Hungary in the eyes of the Hungarians would have been tantamount to the utterly unwelcome spread of papal influence in Hungary. Thus the Hungarian lords, according to the straightforward wording of the chronicler, “lest they lose the freedom of a free country by accepting the king given by the church,”16 chose a candidate of their own to occupy the vacant throne, namely the thirteen-year-old son of the Czech king Wenceslas II, also named Wenceslas. The young Wenceslas, who was the great-grandson of the sister of Stephen V of Hungary, and was thus tied to the Árpáds through the female line, was crowned king of Hungary with the Holy Crown on August 27, 1301 at Székesfehérvár by the archbishop of Kalocsa, János.17 Although the legality of the ceremony on this occasion, too, was questionable, as it was not performed by the archbishop of Esztergom, it appears that the majority of the country stood on the side of Wenceslas, called Ladislaus in Hungary, against Charles.

Already in May Boniface VIII had reckoned that the Czech Přemyslid dynasty could enter into the struggle for the Hungarian throne with serious chances,18 and his counter-measure was not long in coming. He addressed a letter to Wenceslas II in which he warned the Czech king, who, according to the pope, had consented to his son’s election in Hungary out of obvious error. The boy’s coronation, the pontiff continued, he considered unlawful, because the ceremony had been performed by the archbishop of Kalocsa,19 whom he summoned along with the two rulers concerned before the papal curia for the purpose of a hearing about this.20 Nor did Boniface fail to call upon the Czech king to cooperate with that same Niccolò Boccasini who, as papal emissary vested with full legatine authority, had been residing in Hungary, pushed to the brink of disaster because of internal dissension, since September 1301.21

In order to save the Kingdom of Hungary and restore its internal peace, Cardinal Boccasini, bishop of Ostia and Velletri, convoked a meeting of the prelates of Hungary for October 25 in Buda, where only a short time earlier the two kings, Charles and Ladislaus, had also conducted negotiations with one another.22 However, at the Synod of Buda, held in late October and early November, the papal legate was forced to accept that his efforts were not enough even to bring the positions closer together. Gergely Bicskei, who clung tenaciously to his office, almost completely lost the support of all the prelates of Hungary, and it was precisely in these weeks (thus before he could be called to account by the Holy See), that the archbishop of Kalocsa, János, departed this world.23 The experiences of the Synod of Buda with regard to Bicskei in any case shook papal confidence in the chosen archbishop of Esztergom, and Boniface VIII therefore instructed his emissary to inquire with proper circumspection about the person of a candidate suited for heading the Archbishopric of Esztergom.24 At the same time, with regard to the filling of the archiepiscopal see of Kalocsa, which had become vacant with the death of János, the pontiff unambiguously and firmly stated that he reserved for himself the right to decide the fate of the archbishopric.25

The papal emissary’s movements in Hungary reflect clearly how beginning in late 1301 Charles and his adherents were gradually being forced out of the central areas of the country. While the legate, who at first had resided in Esztergom and Buda, transferred his headquarters to Pressburg in December 1301,26 which was just then in Austrian hands through the widow of Andrew III, Queen Agnes of Habsburg, Charles, following an unsuccessful attack against Buda, returned to the southern areas that had supported him earlier also. Buda, the country’s capital, fell into Ladislaus’s (Wenceslas’s) hands, while the castle of Esztergom was conquered by the palatine and ispán of Sopron, the pro-Přemyslid János (or Iván) Kőszegi. In return for a significant sum of money Kőszegi handed it over to King Ladislaus, who put the family’s loyal man, Zdislav Měšec, in charge of the castle.27 The newly appointed castellan of Esztergom was a citizen of Uherské Hradiště in Moravia,28 and his sobriquet měšec or ‘money purse’ suggests that he may have been a financial support to the Czech crown during the Hungarian adventure as well. As castellan, Měšec did not treat the church of Esztergom with kid gloves, seizing the chapter’s assets and seriously violating its economic privileges.29 King Wenceslas of Bohemia was nonetheless dissatisfied with how his son’s fate was unfolding, and the rumor spread that he regretted having intervened in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Hungary.30 The Czech king’s disappointment may have stemmed from the widely known fact that the Hungarian lords “had not granted a single castle, a single dignity or office, or a single royal prerogative whatsoever” to his son, just as they had not granted anything to Charles either; in other words, they only nominally regarded both rulers as king.31 In truth, those few families that had been able in recent decades to increase their estates at the expense of the central authority and by the time Andrew III died held sway over expansive territories were now seeking to exercise actual power. In their own provinces these lords acted in the image of the king, that is, they exercised the sovereign rights otherwise belonging to the reigning ruler, bestowed noble titles, sat in judgment, or pursued an independent foreign policy.

Nor could Pope Boniface VIII be completely satisfied with how the situation of his protégé, King Charles, was evolving. However, before he pronounced a judgment in the power crisis in Hungary, he had to decide on the legal claim of another lay ruler. On April 30, 1303, after almost five years of rigid resistance, the pontiff appeared ready to recognize the rule of the German king, Albert of Habsburg, and was not averse to the latter’s coronation as emperor either, provided the German king’s emissaries made concessions to him which would in fact amount to acknowledging that the King of the Romans was the servant and immediate subject of the Holy Father.32 Albert I accepted the (for him) humiliating conditions, and thus the last obstacle was removed from his way to the Empire, where he followed, after a short interruption, his father as the second Habsburg duke on the imperial throne. Regarding the interested parties in the dispute over the Hungarian throne the Holy Father made his decision one month later, on May 31. Queen Mary of Naples, summoned before the papal curia, appeared in person, while King Charles of Hungary was represented by István, the new, pro-Angevin archbishop of Kalocsa elected by the pope in 1302, who was accompanied by the bishops of Győr, Zagreb, and Veszprém.33 The Hungarian prelates were accompanied by the provosts of Esztergom, Vác, and Vasvár, as well as the archdeacon of Transylvania, who probably also were on Charles’s side.34 Compared to the distinguished Angevin delegation from Hungary, the delegation of the Czech side was disappointingly modest. The Czech king Wenceslas and his son through their emissaries, two priests and a lay lawyer, sent word to the pope that they did not wish to litigate regarding their rule over the kingdom of Hungary, since the Hungarians had elected the young Wenceslas as king unanimously and according to canon law.35 Knowing the previous stance of the Holy See, truly no one was surprised by the judgment of Boniface VIII and the College of Cardinals, according to which Hungarian rulers came to power through inheritance and not by election. Therefore, because Queen Mary and her grandson Charles were the closer heirs (propinquior erat successor et haeres), they had a stronger claim to the Hungarian throne.36 The papal bull issued under the terms of the decision stripped Ladislaus (Wenceslas) of the right to use the royal title and Boniface VIII released everyone from the oath taken to him, at the same time declaring that the obedience and tax of the subjects belonged to Charles, and threatened those prelates, priests, monastic orders and lay people who might turn against him with the penalty of excommunication.37 The delegation led by the archbishop of Kalocsa could depart from Anagni, not far from the pope’s seat at Rome, completely satisfied. On June 11 they were already in the vicinity of Naples when the pontiff’s letter caught up with them, in which the archbishop and the bishop of Zagreb received the instructions to make sure the judgment of the curia was promulgated in Bohemia as well.38 During their journey Charles’s emissaries naturally could also rely on the solicitous support of the Hungarian king’s grandfather, the ruler of Naples, and Charles II ensured their journey home by sea as well. The ferrymen of Apulia transporting the delegation left the shores of Italy in late June, and after a boat journey of nearly a month arrived in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary.39 Thus, Boniface’s May bull was officially published in Hungary from the penultimate day of July; upon instructions from the archbishop of Kalocsa and Bishop Mihály of Zagreb it was proclaimed first before the collegiate chapter of Csázma (Čazma, Croatia) and later before the cathedral chapters of Bosnia and Bács.40 Apart from the southern areas, which backed the Angevins in any event, the judgment of the papal curia was sent to Székesfehérvár and Transylvania only.41 Despite the papal decision and the prospective interdict for the disobedient, in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary more remained on the side of the Czech Ladislaus (Wenceslas), who continued to maintain his headquarters in Buda, regarded as the center of the country. We know that the town of Sopron continued to recognize him as the ruler of Hungary,42 just like the cathedral chapter of Eger,43 or the Kőszegis, who numbered among the most eminent oligarchs of the kingdom. It is important to emphasize, therefore, that the position of the Přemyslid dynasty did not become untenable in Hungary after the papal decision, and, with a little paternal assistance, it could even have been maintained in the long run.

Boniface VIII informed the German king, whom he had very recently readopted to his favor, of the Holy See’s decision of May 31 on that same day, then in mid-June in a separate letter he asked Albert and his son, Duke Rudolf of Austria, to render all the aid they could to the Angevin prince,44 who was Rudolf’s cousin through the maternal line.45 Thereafter Charles himself turned to his uncle for help a number of times, first through the bishop of Várad, and later the bishop of Zengg (Senj, Croatia) and other secular ambassadors.46 Assistance against the Czechs on the part of the Habsburg relatives, however, could only be realized if it was in the interest of the Empire and the Habsburgs to turn against the Kingdom of Bohemia. King Albert’s relationship with the Czech king Wenceslas II could be described as basically good, since as an elector in 1298 Wenceslas himself had supported Albert,47 and in a separate letter to the pope he admitted also that he regarded the Habsburg, at that time considered by Rome to be a traitor and a regicide, as king of Germany.48 Albert in return did not block Wenceslas’s expansionist policy towards Poland; indeed, in June 1300 he guaranteed him the Polish territories that had fallen into Czech hands.49 He also acquiesced in his imperial subject’s coronation as king of Poland in August 1300. Nor did he raise his voice when, beginning in 1301, his eastern neighbor attempted to extend his power to Hungary as well. Albert in fact needed the support of the Czech king in these years, both because Rome had not yet recognized his rule, and because the Rhenish electors had entered into an alliance against him in 1300. Albert was able to check his enemies within the Empire only through war, and the auxiliary troops of Wenceslas II of Bohemia contributed to his decisive victory in 1302.50

In 1303, however, the time seemed ripe for breaking the excessive power of the Přemyslids. Albert as king of Germany approached the Czech ruler with territorial and financial demands to which he himself knew Wenceslas could not agree and which would thus lead to the disintegration of their alliance.51 The occasion to attack the Kingdom of Bohemia was provided almost by Wenceslas II himself, when in June 1304,52 in order to “consolidate his own son’s dominion over the Hungarians,” he arrived in Hungary with a sizeable armed retinue.53 He first set up camp at the ferry of Kakat situated opposite Esztergom; then, crossing the Danube, he put the archbishop of Esztergom to flight, and reinforced the Czech-held castle of Esztergom54 and Visegrád.55 Arriving in Buda, however, Wenceslas was soon deterred from his original intention. According to the account of the Styrian (or Austrian) Rhymed Chronicle, while secretly planning for their departure with his son, he attempted to convince the Hungarian notables summoned to Buda that he was preparing to chase Charles from the country. After he had won the trust of the Hungarians, Wenceslas put forward the wish that during the next church feast day he would like to see his son entering the church for the holy mass wearing the Hungarian royal vestments. The royal insignia, hitherto kept in the sacristy, were thus produced. Donning these, Ladislaus (Wenceslas) appeared in the church, while during the mass the Czech king’s soldiers, camped near the gates, lined up in front of the building. When the mass neared its end the youth, departing with the crown on his head, was quickly put on a horse and escorted to his quarters. The ceremony complete, the Czech king hosted the lords and prelates staying in Buda in lavish fashion, after which he showered them with gifts. Following this Wenceslas, alluding to the danger threatening his country from the direction of the Austrian territories, left Buda with his travel-ready retinue and son and set out for home.56 Before entering the territory of Moravia they were overtaken by the bishop of Győr, who asked the Czech ruler not to take the Hungarian coronation regalia out of the country. To the words of the pro-Charles prelate Wenceslas angrily replied that nobody had a better right to them than the king, who was none other than his son.57

The precise date of the Czechs’ departure is not known; what is certain is that on July 7 Ladislaus (Wenceslas) was still residing in Buda, whereas on September 22 Wenceslas II was once more dating his diplomas from Prague.58 Based on the account cited above, we may consider it likely that the Czech king had indeed arrived to Buda with the intention of strengthening his son’s rule in Hungary. The circumstances of their departure, however, in any event allow us to conclude that during his stay in Hungary Wenceslas II learned of some event that imperiled not only the Kingdom of Bohemia but also his son resident in Buda, causing him to return home in haste, albeit not empty-handed. What could have been that unexpected event which thwarted his original plans? It was undoubtedly the fact that Charles, leaving the southern marches of the kingdom behind, had entered into an alliance with his cousin, Duke Rudolf of Austria, in Habsburg-held Pressburg on August 24.59 The most important prelates of Hungary adhered to the agreement,60 which was also signed by a dozen lay notables, the majority of whom had been on Charles’s side previously. In other words, it was not the news of the theft of the crown that had brought about the alliance. A few days later, the King of the Romans, Albert, who was just preparing for his campaign against Moravia, called upon the bishops and barons of Hungary to provide the Austrian duke armed assistance.61 According to the records from the Cistercian abbey at Zwettl in Lower Austria, Charles and Rudolf launched attacks against the Kingdom of Bohemia at virtually the same time: while Rudolf looted and burned the neighbouring areas of Bohemia and Moravia, his cousin, with his army that was highly overestimated in size, reached Znaim (Znojmo, Czech Republic), taking many prisoners and obtaining much booty along the way.62 With King Albert arriving in Linz on September 8, part of his imperial armies to march against Bohemia assembled at Freistadt in Upper Austria, while the remainder, including the armed force led by the Count Palatine of the Rhine, stationed at Budweis (České Budějovice, Czech Republic), where according to the plans they were to join the armies of Rudolf and Charles gathering between Weitra and Gmünd.63 However, after the army, made up of Hungarians and Cumans and allegedly numbering twenty thousand, also ravaged the northern areas of Lower Austria on its way from Znojmo to Gmünd, Albert commanded them to disband and release their prisoners. Defying the Roman king’s request, the Hungarians were dealt with by Duke Rudolf at Altenburg, near Zwettl, on October 2.64 Despite the incident we can safely state that there were still Hungarian auxiliary troops in the Roman king’s army, which lay siege to Europe’s most important silver mine, Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora, Czech Republic), on October 18.65

As a result of the anti-Czech collaboration, bolstered by Habsburg-Angevin family bonds, Charles, returning to Hungary and rid of his competitor, was finally in a position to begin to rule; at least this is what one would expect, for in reality the king completely disappears from the sources in 1305. From later references it may be concluded that he spent a long time in the northern regions of the country, in Szepes County, where the castle of Szepesvár (Spišsky Hrad, Slovakia), still held by the Czechs, was retaken,66 and the castle of Esztergom, which following the Czechs’ departure had once more fallen into the hands of Iván (János) Kőszegi, was probably also reoccupied in that year.67 Following the failed Bohemian campaign the Habsburgs did not make peace with the Czechs; indeed, in the late spring of 1305 they were preparing another campaign against them,68 which was only prevented by the death of Wenceslas II on June 21. On August 18 in Nuremberg the German king lifted the imperial ban against the Přemyslid dynasty and relinquished all his territorial demands against Wenceslas III (who succeeded his father on the throne) as well as his share deriving from the silver mines of Kuttenberg. The resulting peace emphasizes that Albert reconciled himself not just with the newly consecrated Czech ruler but with the latter’s helpers and supporters as well. First listed among these supporters were the two dukes of Lower Bavaria, Otto III and his brother, Stephen I.69

The dukes of Lower Bavaria were the sons of Duke Henry XIII of Bavaria, notorious for his hostility to the Habsburgs, and the sister of King Stephen V of Hungary, Elisabeth, which meant that they, too, were related to the Árpád dynasty of Hungary through the female line. This would account for the claim contained in the Chronica de Ducibus Bavariae that in 1301 the anti-Angevin Hungarian lords had offered the Hungarian crown first to Otto III, who, however, rejected the invitation,70 and thus did the choice fall on the Czech ruler’s son. Otto, restless and bellicose (vir strennuus et bellicosus) according to the same source, inherited his father’s policy. In the battle of Göllheim in 1298 he had fought on the side of Adolf of Nassau, and he remained a steadfast enemy of the Habsburgs even after the election of Albert I as king of Germany.71 It was thus only logical that in 1304 Otto, together with his brother, ended up on the side of Wenceslas II, who appointed him commander-in-chief of his armies. Otto did not rest even after the peace of 1305, continuously seeking the opportunity to inflict damage on his southeastern neighbors.

With the death of Wenceslas II, Wenceslas III, who inherited the Polish and Czech thrones, was ready to relinquish the weakest link of his dominions, the Kingdom of Hungary, in favor of his ally. Otto, having acquired the Hungarian coronation regalia from Prague, was ready to depart for Hungary at the first call of Wenceslas’s remaining supporters or perhaps of the German-speaking Transylvanian Saxons, and thus box the Habsburgs in from three sides, Lower Bavaria, Hungary and Bohemia. The Czech ruler used the Hungarian royal title for the last time on October 10, 1305,72 and on the basis of the narrative sources it appears that Otto was crowned as king of Hungary by the bishops of Veszprém and Csanád on December 6, 1305.73 The coronation ceremony could hardly have been more than a play acted out for the Bavarian duke, the purpose of which may have been merely to retrieve the Holy Crown and deposit it once more in the safety of the basilica in Székesfehérvár. The very identity of the prelates who performed the ceremony guaranteed that the coronation would be anything but legally valid. Moreover, Bishop Benedek of Veszprém was so much an adherent of Charles that he had been one of those representing the ruler before the papal tribunal in Anagni on May 30, 1303. Less is known about Bishop Antal of Csanád, a Franciscan friar, but what is certain is that he assisted the work of the papal legate Boccasini in Hungary.74 Probably nobody anticipated that after his coronation Otto would not wish to part with the insignia of his rule, and on feast days, according to the chronicler’s disapproving comment, he would try to win over the people of Buda, opposed to Charles in any case, by marching in the streets and squares of the town with the Holy Crown on his head.75

On August 4, 1306 Otto’s plans were jeopardized when Wenceslas III was murdered at Olmütz (Olomouc, Czech Republic) on his way to a campaign in Poland. With his death the male line of the Přemyslid dynasty became extinct, and the duke of Lower Bavaria lost his ally. In addition, it was precisely in these days that Pope Clement V took the decision that he would apply the same punishment against those who invited Duke Otto to Hungary against Charles that his predecessor, Boniface VIII, had proposed.76 The fact that the German ruler Albert I regarded the Kingdom of Bohemia as an electorate reverting to the empire, and as such he would have liked to secure it that same August for his son, Duke Rudolf of Austria, represented an additional threat to Otto. Some hope was offered by the majority of the Czech nobles supporting the aspirations of Duke Henry of Carinthia, brother-in-law of Wenceslas III, instead of the Habsburgs, to the Czech crown, who had already been appointed by the deceased king as regent for the duration of his campaign in Poland. While the German king, together with his son Rudolf, spent the second half of the year 1306 with a new campaign in Bohemia, where they attempted to exert pressure on the Czechs by laying siege to Prague itself,77 Otto, not budging from the central areas of the Kingdom of Hungary, awaited developments in Buda and the vicinity of Pest.78 By October the fears of the Bavarian prince had been justified. Duke Henry of Carinthia fled from Bohemia, and the Habsburgs acquired the Přemyslid inheritance, thereby uniting the Austrian provinces, the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Margraviate of Meissen, Eger (Cheb, Czech Republic) and Pleissen, as well as certain areas of Silesia and Poland, in their hands. By late 1306 Otto’s plan to surround the Habsburg territories had not only failed but backfired, since the southeastern and northeastern areas of Lower Bavaria now bordered on Habsburg possessions along their entire length, as did the western and northern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary. Following the acquisition of the Czech throne, the Austrian provinces passed to the younger son of Albert I, Frederick. Duke Frederick of Austria did not fail to assure the Hungarian nobles and prelates on behalf of his father and brother that the Habsburgs would continue to back Charles, and essentially hoped for the same from the Hungarians as well.79

Having been blocked by the Habsburgs from his imperial territories, the time had come for Otto to leave Buda and look for allies. It is certainly no coincidence that in the sources relating to the duke of Lower Bavaria, such as the previously mentioned chronicle of the dukes of Bavaria, it is during his stay in Hungary that the possibility of a marriage is raised,80 which in accordance with the customs of the period meant the establishment of a military and political alliance as well. In early 1307 Otto set out towards Transylvania, and we can probably accept the assumption that his purpose was marriage to the Transylvanian voevode’s daughter. The lord of Transylvania, one of Hungary’s most prominent oligarchs, whose excommunication the pope had initiated in late 1306 because of his stubborn resistance to Charles,81 could have been an ideal ally for Otto against the Habsburg-Angevin party from every possible standpoint. However, for reasons unknown, the planned alliance ran aground. Otto and the Holy Crown were imprisoned in one of the castles of the Transylvanian voevode, László Kán, though the former was freed within a short time, probably in the summer of 1307. By this time, however, Buda had fallen into Charles’s hands,82 and it had also been decided on that a new papal legate would come to Hungary in order to settle Charles’s case.83 Moreover, the Hungarian lords who appeared at the general assembly held on the Plain of Rákos in October, unanimously acknowledged Charles as their sovereign.84 The year 1307 brought about another unexpected turn in Bohemian events as well. In early July 1307 the Czech king Rudolf died; the Czech lords, breaking the oath they had previously taken (namely, that in the event of Rudolf’s death without an heir they would elect his eldest living brother as their ruler), once more went over to the side of Duke Henry of Carinthia.85 King Albert of Germany lost no time in advocating the interests of his son, Duke Frederick of Austria, launching a campaign against Bohemia, which, however, ended in failure in late 1307. While the German king returned to the Empire to gather strength over the winter for his next campaign in Bohemia, the Czechs turned to Albert’s enemies within the Empire for assistance. They first sought out Duke Otto of Lower Bavaria,86 for whom the events of the second half of 1307 promised new hope of a triumph over the Habsburgs. Probably still in late 1307, leaving Transylvania and Hungary via a circuitous eastward route, he entered into an alliance with the militarily quite active Duke Henry III of Glogau (Głogów, Poland), a descendant of the Silesian branch of the Piasts, and betrothed the latter’s daughter, Agnes. Then in February 1308 he returned to Lower Bavaria.

Otto’s departure left Charles the sole candidate in the Kingdom of Hungary, and henceforth his lawful coronation was only a matter of time, depending on the eventual reobtention of the Holy Crown from the voevode of Transylvania. In the consolidation of Charles’s power in Hungary and his getting rid of the rival pretenders, the diplomatic skill and military strength of his external supporters and at the same time his relatives, the Habsburg dukes, proved indispensable.

 

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Holzfurtner, Ludwig. Die Wittelsbacher. Staat und Dynastie in acht Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2005.

Képes Krónika. Translated by János Bollók. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2004.

Krieger, Karl-Friedrich. Die Habsburger im Mittelalter. Von Rudolf I. bis Friedrich III. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2004.

Kristó, Gyula and Ferenc Makk, eds. Károly Róbert emlékezete [The Memory of Charles Robert]. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 1988.

Lenkey, Zoltán and Attila Zsoldos. Szent István és III. András [Saint Stephen and Andrew III]. Budapest: Kossuth Kiadó, 2003.

Lichnowsky, Eduard Maria. Geschichte des Hauses Habsburg. 8 vols. Vienna: Schaumburg und Compagnie, 1836–1844.

Niederstätter, Alois. Die Herrschaft Österreich. Fürst und Land im Spätmittelalter. Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2004.

Ottokars Österreichische Reimchronik, edited by Joseph Seemüller. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1890–1893.

Regesta Diplomatica nec non Epistolaria Bohemiae et Moraviae. 4 vols, edited by Karol Jaromír Erben and Josef Emler. Pragae: Typis Grégerianis, 1855–1892.

Ullmann, Walter. A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1972.

Vaníček, Vratislav. Velké dějiny zemí koruny české III. 1250–1310. Prague: Pesaka, 2002.

Watts, John. The Making of Polities. Europe, 1300–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Wittelsbachische Regesten von der Erwerbung des Herzogtums Baiern (1180) bis zu dessen erster Wiedervereinigung (1340), edited by Johann Friedrich Böhmer. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1854.

Zsoldos, Attila. „Anjou Károly első koronázása” [The First Crowning of Charles Anjou]. In Auxilium Historiae. Tanulmányok a hetvenesztendős Bertényi Iván tiszteletére [Auxilium Historiae. Studies in Honor of Iván Bertényi on his Seventieth Birthday], edited by Tamás Körmendi and Gábor Thoroczkay, 405–13. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kara, 2009.

 

Translated by Matthew Caples

Attila Zsoldos

Kings and Oligarchs in Hungary at the Turn of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

In the decades around the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Hungarian royal authority sank into a deep crisis. While previously the king had been the exclusive supreme lord of the country, from the 1270s on some members of the nobility managed to build up powers in the possession of which they could successfully resist even the king. The present study explores the road which led to the emergence of oligarchical provinces. It presents both the common and the individual features of these provinces, defining the conceptual difference which apparently existed between the oligarchs who opposed royal power and the lords of territories who remained loyal to the ruler. Consequently, the study analyses the measures which were taken first by the last Árpáds, and then by the first member of the new, Angevin dynasty, Charles I, in order to neutralize oligarchical powers. By the end of the study it becomes apparent why it was Charles I who finally managed to break the power of the oligarchs and dismember their provinces.

Keywords: political history, royal authority, oligarchs, last Árpáds, Charles I of Anjou

 

After successfully completing his mission to conclude a mutual marriage agreement sealing the alliance between the houses of Anjou and Árpád, Abbot of Monte Cassino Bernhard Ayglerius reported enthusiastically to his lord, King Charles I of Naples: “The Hungarian royal house has incredible power, its military forces are so large that nobody in the East and the North dares even budge if the triumphant and glorious king mobilizes his army.”1 Weddings between scions of the two ruling dynasties soon took place: just a half year later, Ladislaus, the grandson of Hungarian King Béla IV (1235–1270) and son of future King Stephen V (1270–1272), married Elizabeth of Sicily, the youngest daughter of King Charles I of Naples, while the son of the latter king, the future Charles II of Naples, married Stephen’s daughter, Mary. The latter marriage established the foundation for the claim of the Angevins of Naples to the throne of Hungary following the extinction of the House of Árpád. This claim to succession was by no means uncontested: although the Angevins of Naples considered the heirless death of King Ladislaus IV (1272–1290) to represent the extinction of the House of Árpád, an alleged member of the latter dynasty, known to the Angevins merely as “some Venetian named Andrew” [quidam de Venetiis Andreatius nomine], assumed the throne and ruled Hungary as King Andrew III for more than a decade (1290–1301).2 Although nobody in Hungary questioned the extinction of the male line of the House of Árpád3 following the death of this king of disputed origins,4 Charles I (1301–1342), grandson of Mary of Hungary, Queen of Naples, struggled for more than two decades after coming to the throne to secure his rule over the country. Although reluctance to accept a prince supported by the papacy undoubtedly played a role in the difficulty which King Charles I had to face,5 it was mostly the result of a situation which was later described in a royal charter from the year 1332 in the following way:

 

When we were in a tender age and had not yet acquired total rule over the country, the faithless barons and depraved betrayers of our predecessors, the illustrious former kings, committed with a hard eye cast upon the royal throne manifold felonies of high treason against the person of the king and seized all opportunity to forcibly usurp sovereign prerogative, murdering with horrible slaughter the most distinguished nobles of the country lest they bind themselves to us and the Holy Crown with requisite zeal, destroying those of lower rank in various fashion as well.6

Developments that occurred in the half century beginning in 1269 provide an explanation for the conspicuous discrepancy between accounts in that year depicting the foreign power of the Hungarian king and reports describing the domestic weakness of the Hungarian sovereign in the first two decades of the fourteenth century.

Charles I did, indeed, inherit from his predecessors the situation described in the 1332 charter: over the last third of the thirteenth century, the king was frequently compelled to take up arms in order to force his will upon rebellious subjects, if at all he had sufficient power to do so. The significant decline in the once nearly limitless power of the Hungarian king was due to several historical factors that emerged during this period, first acting independently, then over time reinforcing one another.

The process that produced a fundamental change in relations between prominent landowners and the king began around the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the nobility possessed a relatively modest amount of personal wealth, their power and means stemming primarily from royal office and the income it provided. However, as a result of the largesse of King Emeric (1196–1204) and, to an even greater degree, King Andrew II (1205–1235), those who enjoyed royal patronage were able to accumulate a relatively vast personal fortune. The transformation of land-ownership proportions progressed inexorably in favor of the nobility to the detriment of the king throughout the thirteenth century. Moreover, the major land-owning nobility aspired to an ever-greater degree during the second half of the century to concentrate their holdings geographically, which resulted in the formation of larger, enclosed estates in place of previously scattered domains of various size.

The construction of modern stone castles, which in Hungary began in the second half of the thirteenth century, contributed significantly to the transformation of the nature of great landed estates in the kingdom. The building of such castles, a lesson learnt from the shock caused by the 1241–1242 Mongol invasion, was expressely supported by the royal power. Although royal authority was responsible for the construction of some of these stone castles, members of the kingdom’s major land-owning nobility had the majority of them erected on their estates. Although no precise data exists as to how many stone castles were built in Hungary during this period, according to a reasonable estimate their number was already around 100 at the time of the death of King Béla IV in 1270, and increased to nearly 300 by the end of the thirteenth century. The construction of castles, though officially requiring authorization from the king, soon slipped from the control of central royal authority. Fear from a castle-building neighbor, rather than the need to strengthen the kingdom’s defensive capabilities, provided the main motive for building stone castles at this time, as landowners gradually realized the equation of castle with power. A veritable castle-building race developed in Hungary during the final decades of the thirteenth century, in which it was highly advisable to participate. Moreover, during the civil war that took place in the 1260s between King Béla IV and his eldest son, the future King Stephen V, these castles proved able to withstand the siege of royal armies if their defenders possessed enough water, food and determination.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of smaller landowners placed themselves in the service of the castle-owning nobility, either in the hope of profiting from their growing power or because of the fear it caused. Those who allied themselves with more powerful landowners in this way were referred to as familiares: they belonged to the broader family of their lord (the word itself stems from the Latin word for family), and thus owed him obedience even over and against their loyalty to the king. If necessary, the familiaris went to battle alongside his lord, managed his estates in time of peace, represented him in various capacities, and acted as his deputy in some of his offices. In compensation, the familiaris received military protection and support and occasional material or monetary remuneration. It was in the paramount interest of the major landowners to turn the greatest possible number of the neighboring nobility into their familiares: this not only provided them with more soldiers, but also extended the area over which they exercised influence beyond the borders of their own estates. The large estate, the castle and the army of familiares constituted the three pillars upon which some of the most powerful nobility managed by the 1270s to construct considerable private power structures, sometimes extending over several counties within the kingdom, in which the only will in operation was that of the lord who dominated the lands and castles and commanded the familiares. The first such major landowners to establish personal power of this magnitude emerged during the reign of King Béla IV (1235–1270). Among them was Pál of the Geregye kindred, who immediately recognized the advantages to be gained from the building of castles, and accordingly constructed at least two on the western slopes of the mountains dividing Transylvania from the Great Hungarian Plain, another two being erected in the region by either himself or his sons. It soon appeared, however, that Pál was not satisfied with the fruits of the king’s grace, and already in the 1250s many landowners in the area felt the consequences of his greed. Although the king compelled Pál to return some of the territory he had seized,7 his four sons continued to expand the family’s domains until the army of King Ladislaus IV defeated them in battle at the end of the 1270s.8 During the latter conflict, local nobles who had not previously dared to resist the Geregye, including some members of the distinguished, though not particularly wealthy Borsa family, allied themselves with the king. The significant contribution of Tamás Borsa and his six sons, who had not previously played a role in the kingdom’s politics, to defeat of the Geregye, did not go unrecognized: King Ladislaus IV not only granted them almost all of the defeated family’s estates and castles, but offered them positions within his royal administration, appointing the eldest Borsa son, Roland, as voevode of Transylvania, while his younger brother Jakab, most often referred to simply as “Kopasz” [Bald], entered the royal council as Master of the Horse.9 King Ladislaus IV felt that he may have found in the Borsa family allies “whose loyalty, bravery and industry—as enunciated in one of his diplomas—successfully governed and defended Hungary during the time of our forefathers.”10 The king was not initially disappointed: Roland and his brothers proved to be brave and successful commanders of royal armies on several occasions.11 However, the Borsa family found the taste of power to its liking, prompting them to seek independent authority and turn against their king. In the spring of 1287, the Borsas and their confederates routed the forces of King Ladislaus IV in a relatively small-scale engagement.12 From this time on, relations were hostile between the Borsa family and the king, whose control over Transylvania and the central portion of the Trans-Tisza region became scarcely more than nominal.

The Borsa family supported the claim of King Andrew III, the grandson of King Andrew II, to the throne of Hungary following the death of King Ladislaus IV in 1290, thus laying the foundation for several years of smooth relations with the Venetian-born monarch. In the middle of 1294, however, Roland Borsa, voevode of Transylvania, decided to expand his estate to the detriment of the Bishop of Várad (Oradea, Romania), and lay siege to one of the castles belonging to the bishopric. The defenders finally decided to surrender the fortification to Roland and his brothers on terms.13 In response, King Andrew III retaliated by taking the castle of Adorján, the Borsa family’s headquarters, following a siege, though it is not known whether the king’s armies launched campaigns against the Borsas elsewhere in Transylvania or eastern Hungary. The Borsa family submitted to royal authority following the fall of their castle, and the king deprived Roland of his office as voevode of Transylvania. However, both Roland and his brothers continued to exercise authority over a large portion of the Trans-Tisza region for decades thereafter.14

King Andrew III appointed László of the Kán kindred to replace Roland as voevode of Transylvania. László was also the member of a great and powerful noble family that possessed large estates in southern Transylvania and southeastern Transdanubia and whose members had belonged to the political elite of the kingdom for generations. László governed Transylvania for more than two decades following the king’s suppression of the Borsa uprising.15

The “Kőszegi” branch of the Héder family, known as such because the center of its estates was the town of Kőszeg, represented another early example of the establishment of oligarchical power in the Kingdom of Hungary. The ancestors of the family migrated to the kingdom from Styria in the middle of the twelfth century. The foundations for the power of the kindred’s Kőszegi branch were laid by Henrik, who, characteristically, later came to be known as “the Great”.16 Henrik, just as Pál Geregye, was one of the most trusted followers of King Béla IV. His family estates were located in Vas County, where he built his first castles, receiving at least two more as grants from the king. In this way, Henrik gained control over the county located in western Transdanubia, making it possible for his descendants to extend their authority over a large portion of the region.17 Unlike Pál Geregye, Henrik Kőszegi was able to build his personal power without coming into conflict with his king, Béla IV. He did oppose Béla’s successors, Stephen V and Ladislaus IV, however. Following the death of Henrik “the Great” two years later in battle against a rival,18 his sons Miklós, Iván (or János) and Henrik Jr. assumed control over their father’s estates, while another son, Péter, became Bishop of Veszprém.19 The two eldest sons, Miklós and Iván, took possession of Henrik’s most valuable Transdanubian domains, dividing his Vas County castles between themselves and apparently striking an agreement regarding further expansion of the family holdings. Miklós extended his authority in a southeasterly direction, over Zala County, while Iván did so in a northerly direction, over the entire northwestern part of Transdanubia. Miklós disappears from the historical records after 1299, presumably due to his death,20 while his son “Kakas” Miklós appears in the year 1314,21 thus producing a gap of a decade and a half in the known history of this branch of the Kőszegi family. In the meantime, Henrik Jr. used his base in castles located on the southwestern corner of the kingdom to expand his power south of the Drava river in the region of Slavonia. Though the stages and first results of this expansion are unknown, sources show that he possessed the title of ban of Slavonia from 1301 until his death in 1310, and together with it the greatest part of the province. Henrik Jr. chose southeastern Transdanubia as the area for his further territorial expansion, in all certainty in order to avoid encroaching upon the spheres of interest of his older brothers and their descendants. The sons of Henrik Jr, János and Péter, the latter known as “Herceg,” continued to extend their zone of influence in southeastern Transdanubia. Thus, two of the sons of Henrik “the Great,” namely Henrik Jr. and Iván (and their scions) managed to carve out real provinces of their own, which virtually dwarfed the territory over which the third son of Henrik, Miklós (and his son, “Kakas” Miklós) exerted authority.22

Over time, local potentates emerged in the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary as well—one in the east and one in the west. One of them was Finta, son of Dávid of the Aba kindred, which descended from King Samuel Aba, ruler of the kingdom for some years in the middle of the eleventh century (1041–1044). Finta served as palatine, the highest-ranking official in the Kingdom of Hungary, for a brief period during the reign of King Ladislaus IV before coming into conflict with the monarch. Although Finta disappears from sight in the middle of the 1280s, his younger brother, Amadé, took the leadership and emerged as the unrivaled lord of the northeastern regions by the last years of king Ladislaus IV’s reign. His power extended gradually and almost unpercieved to the territory between the river Tisza and the northeastern marches of the kingdom, where his remained the dominant authority until his death in the year 1311.23

The northwestern part of the Kingdom of Hungary was brought by Máté of the Csák kindred under his control in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The Csák, one of the most illustrious kindreds in the Kingdom of Hungary, had split into a dozen branches by the thirteenth century. There were few regions of the kingdom in which members of one of the offshoots of the kindred did not possess bigger or smaller estates. Máté began to make his voice heard in the politics of the kingdom in 1291. In 1293 he was appointed by King Andrew III as Master of the Horse, and as palatine three years later. However, after establishing his power base around his inherited estate of Tapolcsány (Topolčany, Slovakia), in Nyitra County, Máté Csák broke with King Andrew and entered into armed conflict with forces loyal to the king in the second half of 1297.24 King Andrew III proved unable to subjugate Máté, who by the first years of the fourteenth century had extended his influence all the way to the Danube in the south and the Garam and beyond in the east.25

Hungarian historiography most often refers to those listed above and others who exercised similar local power within the Kingdom of Hungary as “provincial lords” [tartományúr] or “oligarchs” [oligarcha]. (In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term “petty king” [kiskirály] was also used, but by now has become obsolete.) However, due mostly to the lack of clarity surrounding these very terms, it is difficult to determine precisely who among the kingdom’s more powerful landowners belonged to these categories in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The confusion becomes even greater if one approaches the question from the perspective of the institution of the province. The existence of institutionalized authority over a portion of the Kingdom of Hungary as the sole representative of the royal will there had certainly not been unknown since at least the beginning of the thirteenth century, as this was the very essence of both the voevodship of Transylvania and the banate of Slavonia. Transylvania and Slavonia can therefore legitimately be qualified as provinces, just as the voevode and the ban, with their extensive official authority, as lords of their respective provinces.26 The system of governing parts of the kingdom at the provincial level proved to be so successful that King Charles I (1301–1342) decided to extend this system to other parts of the realm where, contrary to Transylvania and Slavonia, it had never previously existed. Thus emerged from the mid-1310s a province of ever growing extension in the northeastern part of the kingdom under the Apulian Fülöp Druget, who had arrived to Hungary together with Charles I himself27 in the year 1300.28 In the western marches of Transylvania Charles entrusted a considerable stretch of territory to the government of Dózsa Debreceni,29 and he built up the southern province of the ban of Macsó (Mačva, Serbia) between 1319 and 1333.30 The provincial status of these territories was secured by the fact that the barons who headed them governed their counties with palatinal authority even when the office of palatine was held by someone else.31 Dózsa Debreceni’s province survived for the shortest period of time among the three, gradually declining after his death in late 1322 or early 1323.32 Fülöp Druget’s province existed until 1342, enduring for 15 years under his son Vilmos until King Louis I, the successor of King Charles I, decided to abolish it for unknown reasons.33 The province of the Ban of Macsó persisted for the longest period of time, expanding in size even in the late fourteenth century, long after the death of its founder.34

There must obviously have existed conspicuous differences, perceptible even at the time, between the various locally governed provincial territories in the kingdom if King Charles I chose to eliminate some of them at the cost of more than two decades of war, while founding others himself.

The reason for this contrast may seem obvious: because King Charles I had put Dózsa Debreceni, the Drugets and the Bans of Macsó in charge of their provinces, the authority they exercised over these regions sprang directly from royal power, thus ensuring that they would faithfully provide their lord with the military support and strategic counsel expected of loyal barons in the Middle Ages. Amadé Aba’s power rested upon this same foundation, however. At the beginning of his reign in 1290, King Andrew III confirmed Amadé in all of his estates,35 and he remained steadfastly loyal to both King Andrew III and his successor, Charles I, never rising in rebellion against them as one might expect from an oligarch.36 But if Amadé did not rebel against royal power, why then did his sons do so?

The answer can be sought in distinguishing between the concepts of “provincial lord” and “oligarch.” Hungarian historiography has until now used these terms as synonyms, though it would be more accurate to use them according to the well-defined differences in their meaning as demonstrated clearly in the example of the Treaty of Kassa (Košice, Slovakia).

The burghers of Kassa murdered Amadé of the Aba kindred while he was staying in their town in early September 1311.37 Representatives of Charles I mediated an agreement between the burghers of Kassa and the widow and sons of Amadé in order to assuage the resulting discord. However, this agreement38 represented a de facto dictate aimed at liquidating the deceased magnate’s power.39 It is therefore not surprising that Amadé’s sons accepted the agreement only under the weight of temporary compulsion, rising against the king at the first available opportunity. The Treaty of Kassa, drafted in the name of Amadé’s wife and sons, regulated the future relationship between the king and the sons of Amadé, stipulating that the latter should cede Újvár and Zemplén counties to the king and permit the nobles residing in the counties that remained under their authority (nobiles quoscunque in quibuscunque comitatibus et terris sub potestate nostra constitutis) to freely serve the king or anybody else. These provisions make it clear that King Charles I, while aiming to reduce the size of the province dominated by the Amadé sons, did nevertheless reckon that there would continue to be some areas “subjected to their authority.” The further conditions imposed on the sons of Amadé in the agreement constitute an itemized list of criteria defining the “oligarch” as opposed to the “provincial lord”: they should return the unlawfully acquired royal lands to the king; suppress customs levied arbitrarily and promise not to establish new ones; obtain royal permission to build new castles; let the royal judges try the nobility instead of compelling them to appear before their own tribunals; promise to remain loyal to the king.40 At the same time these stipulations indicate that King Charles I, while clearly determined to suppress the sons of Amadé as oligarchs, was willing to tolerate their continued existence in the kingdom as provincial lords. They also provide clear evidence of the difference in the definition of “provincial lord” and “oligarch” that made itself felt on a practical, everyday basis in the fourteenth century: an oligarch was a provincial lord who excluded the power of the king from his domains and engaged in the arbitrary exercise of royal authority.

The essential difference between the provincial lord and the oligarch did not, therefore, lie in their degree of loyalty toward the king,41 an issue that characteristically represents only a minor element in the Treaty of Kassa. The main distinction between the provincial lord who supported the king and the loyal oligarch becomes evident if one compares the measures that King Charles I took between 1301 and 1311 affecting the lands, on the one hand, of the Borsa clan and, on the other hand, those of Ugrin Csák, the latter located in the southern portion of the kingdom between the towns of Pozsega (Požega, Croatia) and Temesvár (Timişoara, Romania). King Charles held the counties located in the latter region firmly under his jurisdiction,42 bestowing property and the right to impose customs duties,43 granting judicial44 and tax exemptions45 as well as maintaining the prerogative to assume control over estates whose owners died without heirs.46 The king also made donations in the Borsa-held territories, though in this instance to the benefit of only one of the Borsa brothers, Beke,47 and a powerful Borsa familiaris.48 Royal mandates of inquiry were directed exclusively at resolving legal infringements committed to the detriment of the Borsa family.49 When the king ordered the Bishop of Várad to transfer litigation to the royal court, the prelate refused to comply,50 presumably, as other sources explicitly state, because the Borsas were directly implicated in the matter51 and he thought it unwise to raise their ire. It is thus clear that whereas Charles I was able to exercise the full array of established royal prerogatives on the estates of Ugrin Csák, the Borsas, though staunchly loyal to the throne—one of the Borsa brothers, “Kopasz” Jakab, in fact served as the king’s palatine52—allowed the king to intervene in the affairs of their dominions only if it was to their advantage.

The difference between the provincial lord and the oligarch becomes evident from another perspective in connection to the issue of inheritance. Although Ugrin Csák had a son,53 royally appointed ispáns appear at the head of the counties which belonged to his province following his death.54 Although in the case of the Drugets, Fülöp’s nephew, Vilmos, became the heir to his estates, his inheritance was preceded by and conditional on a special royal order,55 and when Louis the Great decided to eliminate the Druget province, the heirs of Vilmos, his two younger brothers, acknowledged the king’s will without protest even though it entailed the loss of a significant portion of the family’s private property.56 Conversely, the descendants of the oligarchs regarded the inheritance of their father’s power as a self-evident right, as is reflected in a charter issued by the oligarch András Kőszegi, grandson of Iván, in which he explicitly stated that he had lawfully inherited the governance, i.e. the province, of his ancestors.57 The exclusion of royal authority from the province and the claim to inheritance which necessarily stemmed therefrom provides an explanation for the as yet largely unexamined fact that on some occasions it was not the oligarchs themselves but their sons who rose up in revolt against the king, and precisely right after the death of their father.

Based on the considerations outlined above, one can identify six oligarchical provinces in the Kingdom of Hungary, those under the control of the following oligarchs: Iván Kőszegi (and his successors); Henrik Kőszegi Jr. (and his successors); Máté Csák; Amadé Aba; László Kán; and the Borsa brothers. Pál Šubić and the Babonić family also controlled oligarchical provinces that developed under significantly different circumstances along the Adriatic coast of Croatia, which had become part of the Kingdom of Hungary only at the end of the eleventh century, and extended into Slavonia and Dalmatia, respectively.

Little is known about the internal political relations within the oligarchical provinces. However, the sporadic sources and data that exist make it possible to determine some of the common and unique traits regarding the exercise and distribution of power within these regions. It is clear that a single person typically held total control over provinces within the kingdom. In the case of Amadé Aba, László Kán and Máté Csák, their exclusive authority stemmed from the early deaths of brothers who also possessed legitimate claims to power within the given province, whereas the Kőszegi, as previously mentioned, divided the family-held province into individually controled territories and thereafter refrained from encroaching upon one another’s domains. Only the province of the Borsa family represents an exception from this standpoint. The six sons of Tamás Borsa—Roland, István, Jakab (or “Kopasz”), László, Benedek (or “Beke”) and János—worked in close cooperation with one another to establish the province, yet even in this case the evidence suggests that the brothers divided the castles located in the territory among themselves. Naturally, this situation changed over time: among the sons of Tamás Borsa, István was no longer living in May 1294,58 Roland last appears in historical sources at the beginning of 1301,59 and is proclaimed dead by October 16, 1303,60 while János fell in battle during the 1304 Bohemian campaign of King Charles I,61 and the last evidence indicating that László was still alive comes from the year 1307.62 Among the sons of Tamás Borsa, only Kopasz and Beke lived to see the collapse of the family’s province, whereas their nephews all survived until that time: Roland’s sons István, János and László; István’s son István Jr.; László’s son János; to whom the son of Kopasz himself, called Bekcs, can be added.63 Governing the Borsa province essentially required the coordination of the interests and ambitions of all these members of the family. However, cooperation between two members of the province’s founding generation—Kopasz and Beke—was occasionally far from harmonious: the latter, subverting the family solidarity, sometimes seized the opportunity to challenge the authority that his older brother exercised over the family province in accordance with the established order among Hungarian noble families, treating the lands he had acquired in the northern section of the territory as his exclusive property over which his brothers could have no claim. Serious conflict erupted between Kopasz and Beke as a result of this situation at the end of 1308, which, however, was resolved through the mediation of prominent Borsa familiares. There is vague evidence to suggest that the accord between Kopasz and Beke was based on the division of territory within the province, similar to that which occurred within the Kőszegi family.64

The immediate examples for the organisation of administration in the oligarchical provinces should be looked for in the governmental peculiarities of the two royally established provinces of the kingdom, Transylvania and Slavonia. It was by the middle of the thirteenth century, that is, shortly before the process of establishing oligarchical provinces began in the kingdom, that the situation obtained in which the voevode of Transylvania and the ban of Slavonia could appoint the ispáns who governed the counties under their jurisdiction. These ispáns, then, unlike those at the head of counties to the west of Transylvania and north of the Drava river, did not receive direct appointment from the king, whereas the royal castles in the latter provinces were also under the control of the voevode and the ban.65 Fitting squarely into this arrangement was the general circumstance that the emergence of provinces based on oligarchical personal power affected the historical institution of the counties only in as much as it was the lord of the province who appointed his familiares as deputy ispáns of the individual counties. These persons, who sometimes bore the title of ispán (comes), were also, in some cases demonstrably, in others presumably, the castellans of the oligarch’s castles in the province. This phenomenon can be observed in the territories under the control of Aba Amadé,66 Máté Csák,67 the Borsa family68 and even László Kán.69 Although the oligarchs exercised the authority of ispán as a matter of course, they bore the title of county ispán itself with conspicuous infrequency. And even if they did use the title in their charters, they named only one county at a time, apparently without any recognisable underlying logic.

As previously mentioned, the Treaty of Kassa, imposed upon the sons of Amadé Aba following their father’s murder in 1311, prohibited them from forcing local nobles to appear in their courts.70 Although there is no concrete evidence indicating that Amadé forced nobles living on his territory to appear in his courts, it is a fact that from the mid-1290s the head of the Aba kindred maintained in Vizsoly, one of the more important settlements of his province, a regularly functioning court,71 where his deputy judges (viceiudex) bearing the title of court judge (iudex curie) sat in judgement.72 The court judges of Máté Csák,73 János Kőszegi,74 László Kán75 and probably the castellan at Adorján of Kopasz Borsa performed similar functions.76 Máté Csák,77 the son of Henrik Kőszegi Jr., János,78 and perhaps the others79 entrusted the economic affairs of their provinces to their magistri tavernicorum, obviously imitating the established distribution of duties within the royal court.

The majority of the oligarchs attempted to bring the churches existing on the territory of their provinces under their control. The means of achieving this objective varied significantly. In case a bishopric became vacant in their zone of influence, they might exert pressure in order to fill it with a person who would most conveniently fit their expectations. It was thus that László Kán attempted to have his son appointed bishop of Transylvania, though he finally settled for his secondary candidate for the office.80 The election of Iván Kőszegi’s illegitimate son, Miklós, as bishop of Győr in 1308 could scarcely have been unrelated to the fact that the bishopric was located on Iván’s territory,81 whereas Henrik Jr., the younger brother of Iván, forced upon the bishopric of Pécs a follower of his own, who openly declared his dependence from the oligarch.82 Máté Csák, on the other hand, was apparently not interested in such methods, preferring to exploit the economic potential of church property to strengthen his own power.83 As for Amadé Aba and the Borsa family, they maintained friendly relations with the bishops of Eger and Várad respectively, while Kopasz Borsa even went as far as to provide merchants transporting goods to the latter prelate with an armed escort on at least one occasion.84

The oligarchs often assumed the titles of traditional high-ranking officials within the Kingdom of Hungary: János Kőszegi, Máté Csák, Amadé Aba and Kopasz Borsa referred to themselves as palatine, Henrik Kőszegi Jr. as ban of Slavonia and László Kán as voevode of Transylvania in their charters. However, it was clear to contemporaries that the power of these oligarchs was much greater and of different quality than that of their predecessors, and accordingly often referred to them as “prince” (fejedelem).85 That the oligarchs themselves had no doubts as to the extent of their authority is proved by the fact that they maintained diverse and multiple relations with foreign aristocrats, and even rulers, on the principle of equality. Máté Csák, for example, first sought for his son, also named Máté,86 a bride from the ducal family of Austria,87 before eventually opting for a noble Silesian wife.88 László Kán betrothed his daughter to the son of King Stefan of Serbia despite the opposition of papal legate Gentilis.89 The sons of Henrik Kőszegi Sr. fought a war against Duke Albert of Austria in 1288–1289,90 while Máté Csák came into conflict with King John of Bohemia in the year 1315.91

The quality of relations among the oligarchs themselves was equally as heterogeneous in nature. Initially these relations entailed a significant degree of antagonism: serious confrontations took place between the sons of Henrik Kőszegi Sr. and the Babonić family during the second half of the 1270s, lasting until the two sides concluded an agreement clearly defining their spheres of interest.92 Iván and Miklós Kőszegi probably came to a similar accord with Máté Csák, who had begun his career by waging a successful war precisely against the Kőszegi brothers in the service of King Andrew III.93 The lack of evidence that the Borsas attempted to regain their power in Transylvania from László Kán is also conspicuous. However, examples of cooperation also emerge over time: the Kőszegis and the Borsas fought in alliance against Ladislaus IV in 1287,94 while evidence suggests that the latter family cooperated with Amadé Aba to defeat a rival family in the northern Trans-Tisza region.95 Máté Csák carried such cooperation to the greatest degree, dispatching significant military forces to assist the sons of Amadé Aba in their rebellion against King Charles I. 96

The battle in which the armies of Máté Csák and those of the Amadé brothers fought alongside one another took place on the outskirts of the village of Rozgony (Rozhanovce, Slovakia) on June 15, 1312. As the fourteenth-century chronicler reported, “ …a combat of such ferocity ensued as had not occurred in Hungary since the time of the Mongol invasion.”97 Strife between King Charles I and the oligarchs was nearly incessant between 1311 and 1323. Sources indicate that several battles of similar intensity to that which took place near Rozgony were fought in the kingdom during the decade, while even professional historians must work hard to compile a comprehensive list of the total number of castle sieges that occurred during this period. The decision of the aforementioned chronicler to make reference only to the Battle of Rozgony in his account of the conflict between Charles I and the oligarchs has exercised a profound influence on the modern understanding of this struggle, generating the impression that the royal victory at Rozgony decided its outcome in the king’s favor.

In truth, the best part of the struggle was still ahead. King Charles I was not devoid of experience, as by then the confrontation had been going on for decades with varying intensity. The initial attempts of the future oligarchs to build bases of personal power in the kingdom had begun, as previously mentioned, during the reign of King Béla IV, who, along with his successor, Stephen V, proved able to thwart this challenge to their authority. However, the accession of Ladislaus IV to the throne at the age of ten in the year 1272 provided favorable opportunities for “the disruptors […] of the order of the kingdom” (status regni […] disturbatores), “the treacherous […] trouble makers and fomenters of discord” (infidelis […] tanquam zyaniarum et guerrarum suscitator) and “the deceitful tyrants” (dolosus tyrannus).98 Much of the early years of the child king’s reign was spent with fighting between various groups within the aristocracy for the major baronial offices. Consequently, these changed hands no less than eleven times between 1272 and 1277. The Hungarian churches suffered significant hardship during these years of anarchy, it was therefore no coincidence that high-ranking clergymen led those interest groups which wanted to put an end to the disorder within the kingdom. Ladislaus IV was declared of age “at a general assembly” (in generali congregatione)99 in 1277,100 and made to swear an oath to subdue the “disturbers of the peace” (pacis turbatores). King Ladislaus directed the previously mentioned defeat of the Geregye family soon thereafter.

The “general assembly” and the military campaign against the Geregyes constituted two aspects of the strategy aimed at reasserting royal authority over the oligarchs. The latter strategy—responding to force through force—was an established procedure in the Middle Ages and therefore does not require any special explanation. Radical response of this type offered the prospect of quick results, but required a degree of power that Hungarian royal authority sorely lacked during these years. Nevertheles, Ladislaus IV attempted repeatedly with stubborn consistency to bring the oligarchs to their knees, generally to no avail.

Hungarian prelates thought to have found a more effective means with which to curb the ambitions of the aristocrats who monopolized the baronial offices and abused the advantages which these offerred. It was the introduction of the political system most commonly known as the “regime of estates” (Hung. rendiség). Although certain facets of this system clearly served to restrict royal authority, it was established primarily in order to create the political conditions necessary to bring the realm’s oligarchs under the control of the king. This transformation of state governance affected the most powerful political decision-making institutions in the kingdom. Representatives of the nobility received appointment to the royal council, which was responsible for making operative decisions, in addition to the prelates and barons who had previously constituted this body to the exclusion of others. Congregations of a governmental or judicial nature had already been held previously; these, however, were basically sessions of the royal council, to the discussions of which some of the magnates without formal office were occasionally also invited. Under the new system, nobles could take part in the council meetings, either personally or by proxy, and participate actively in the decision-making process. Following the death of Ladislaus IV in 1290, high-ranking Church officials expected Andrew III, whom they had helped to the throne,101 to maintain these policies even though it had become clear that they were not effective in terms of imposing royal authority upon the oligarchs. In 1298, Andrew III concluded regular treaties with five barons, a clear indication that the king was already looking for a new method of dealing with the oligarchs. These pacts defined the mutual rights and obligations of both sides and as such were decidedly contractual in nature, thus representing an unprecedented element in relations between the king and his subordinates, no matter how strong the latter were.

These treaties clearly reflect the political conception of King Andrew III: to cooperate with those among the magnates who are inclined to do so. Among the five barons who concluded treaties with the king, Amadé Aba was an oligarch, while the others aspired to attain this status. This alliance between the king and the barons was therefore based not on solid foundations of principle, but on a temporary convergence of interests. King Andrew needed to exploit every opportunity to increase his power and manifestly regarded the potential military assistance of the loyal barons to be of greater significance than even the most elevated of principles.102 The king’s enemies did not fail to respond to the new royal policy: Hungarian chronicles indicate that in 1299 a group of powerful landowners asked Pope Boniface VIII to provide the realm with a new king in place of Andrew III.103 In the court of Naples, which did not recognize the royal accession of King Andrew III, the decision was taken in the spring of 1300 to send Prince Charles, the thirteen-year-old son of Charles Martel of Anjou, to the Kingdom of Hungary in order to press his claim to the throne. However, by the time Charles disembarked on the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia in August 1300, the political situation in the kingdom had undergone a profound change.

The essence of this transformation is revealed in a letter dated September 18 from Petrus de Bonzano, whom King Andrew III had sent to the Papal Court presumably with the aim of obtaining there the appointment of Antal, Bishop of Csanád, as Archbishop of Esztergom.104 In the letter to Venetian nobles, the diplomat wrote that, while he was still staying in Hungary, “the sons of Henrik” (that is, the Kőszegi brothers, Iván, Miklós and Henrik Jr.) had come to the king and made a general agreement with him, while Máté Csák and many other barons who had previously rebelled against Andrew III had submitted to royal authority.105

Thus it is possible to know what happened, but not why it happened. One can exclude the possibility that Andrew III compelled the most formidable oligarchs to recognize his supremacy by force of arms: not only would a military campaign of the magnitude required to achieve this objective have left its mark in contemporary sources, but it also had become clear over the previous years that the king’s armies were not capable of defeating those of Máté Csák and the Kőszegi family. One must therefore postulate that the king struck an agreement with his powerful adversaries, offering them conditions that they deemed more valuable than anything they could have hoped to receive from the Angevins.

One can surmise with a great degree of certainty the nature of the proposal that King Andrew III made to Iván Kőszegi and Máté Csák in the summer of 1300: in exchange for their loyalty, he would recognize their lordship over lands under their actual control and grant them the title of palatine. One may also presume that Henrik Kőszegi Jr. became ban of Slavonia and László Kán voevode of Transylvania in the same way. At the same time, Andrew III accorded the same privileges to four members of his inner circle—Roland Rátót, Apor Péc, Amadé Aba and István Ákos. Although the king’s strategy may appear novel, it did not, in fact, represent a significant departure from the established system of governance. The status of a loyal palatine possessing authority over a stipulated territory was in practice not significantly different from that of a subservient voevode of Transylvania or ban of Slavonia. The example of László Kán, who, while governing Transylvania, never once came into conflict with Andrew III, may have convinced the king that such a system could be effective, even in the case of lords with oligarchic ambitions. This was, therefore, the response of Andrew III to the political crisis caused by the arrival of the Angevin pretender to the Kingdom of Hungary.

All this explains not only why several people held the title of palatine simultaneously in the first decade of the fourteenth century—those privileged by Andrew III were joined as seventh by Kopasz Borsa, appointed as palatine by Charles I —,106 but also why the oligarchs opposed Charles I so vehemently even in the most hopeless situations: they were defending what they believed to be theirs, and that from a foreign king.

During the first decade and a half of his reign, Charles I tried, as had done Andrew III before, to compel the oligarchs to cooperate with him, going as far as to recognize the palatinal titles granted by his predecessor. In 1314, however, Charles abandoned this policy of compromise,107 and set his mind on suppressing the oligarchical provinces in a war which was to draw on for a decade, sometimes simultaneously in several regions of the country. The Angevin ruler conquered the northern part of the Borsa-controlled territory at the end of 1314, and forced the sons of the deceased László Kán to make peace with the crown at the beginning of 1315. He then abolished the authority of János Kőszegi, the son of Henrik Kőszegi Jr., over the southern portion of Transdanubia in 1316, reestablishing royal control over a part of Slavonia in that year as well. In 1317, the king completed his conquest of the Borsa province, suppressed that of András Kőszegi, the grandson of Iván, in the northwestern section of Transdanubia, and put down the second rebellion of the Amadé sons as well. In 1318, fighting erupted again in Transylvania, where the Borsas, already ousted from their province, rose together with their allies in rebellion against royal authority. András Kőszegi launched a new attack against Charles I in 1319, though not even the help of Austrian knights could save him from defeat. Rebellion broke out again in Transylvania during the years 1320–1321. In the meantime, Charles had gradually reduced the territory under the control of Máté Csák as a result of military victories gained in 1314, 1317 and 1320, eliminating his province altogether following the oligarch’s death in the spring of 1321.108

Several circumstances enabled King Charles I to achieve the objective of abolishing the power of the oligarchs that had eluded his predecessors from the dynasty of Árpád. The most significant of these factors was probably that, with the exception of Máté Csák prior to the Battle of Rozgony, the oligarchs did not attempt to join forces in alliance against the king.109 The reason for this lack of cooperation among the oligarchs may have been the fact that their provinces had reached the limits of their expanding potential by the second decade of the fourteenth century. From this time on, the oligarchs could only have increased their territories by encroaching on each other’s spheres of interest, something they wanted to avoid. Consequently, nor were they in a position to offer anything in exchange for help.

The foreign political options of the oligarchs had also been profoundly modified. During the reign of Ladislaus IV, they could support the claim of Andrew to the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary, as the Kőszegis did on at least two occasions,110 while they could play the Angevin card against Andrew after he had become king, a means which again it was the Kőszegis who used most consciously.111 By the beginning of the fourteenth century, only the Borsas considered the use of foreign powers to promote their political objectives, contriving to support the claim of a Russian prince to the throne of Hungary against Charles I.112 However, this idea apparently never advanced beyond the planning stages. Charles, for his part, concluded an alliance with Duke Rudolf of Austria as early as 1304,113 renewing it with Rudolf’s successor, Frederick,114 and also established friendly relations with John of Luxemburg, crowned in 1311 as King of Bohemia.115 Thus the oligarchs could expect support neither from one another, nor from potential allies abroad. In the event of attack from royal forces, they were compelled to rely solely on the strength of their own armies.

However, this strength was fading. As long as the star of the oligarchs was on the rise, their power exerted very great attraction over the nobility living on their territories. But this attraction decreased remarkably over time: even the most powerful oligarch, Máté Csák, had to confront a rebellion of local nobles in 1316.116 Other members of the nobility preferred emigration from the oligarchical provinces to outright revolt, and such emigrees swelled as a matter of fact the ranks of Charles’s armed supporters.117 There is much evidence to suggest that King Charles was aware of the possibilities thus offerred: the king’s defeat of the Borsas was, in fact, due in great part to his success in winning over many of the leading Borsa familiares already before the armed conflict started.118 Similarly, in the reconquest of Southern Transdanubia, controlled by Henrik Jr and then by his sons, a key role was played by the switching of some of the Kőszegi familiares to the king’s side.119 This phenomenon can be shown to have been common among the familiares of other oligarchs as well.120 That the tide had turned is proved by the fact that some two decades before, in 1296–1297, it was still the opposite case when the castellan of King Andrew III helped Máté Csák gain control of a royal castle in Trencsén.121

The decision of any familiaris to transfer his loyalty from an oligarch to the king was obviously conditioned by several considerations, most of which are impossible to discern today. Two conjectures can safely be risked in this respect, however. First, the military successes that Charles I began to achieve in 1312 made it obvious to all nobles that there was an alternative power to serve in case one wanted to quit his lord; it is in this, but only this, that the decisive importance of the battle of Rozgony resided. Second, loyalty tied the familiares to their original lord and not to their sons, and it was the latter with whom Charles came into conflict for the most part.122 A conspicuous example is that of the leading familiares of the late Amadé Aba, roughly half of whom already fought at Charles I’s side at Rozgony, whereas many of those who had remained faithful to Aba’s sons transferred their allegiance to the king after the battle, thereby further accelerating the decline of the familia that had begun with the death of Amadé.123

The ambition of Charles I to win the allegiance of the familiares of the oligarchs was the result of a learning process. Charles initially followed the example of the last two Árpád kings, Ladislaus IV and Andrew III, who had attempted to reach accord with the oligarchs if they saw no other means of curbing their power. Cardinal Gentilis, who had been sent by pope Clement V to Hungary in 1307, negotiated personally with Máté Csák in order to convince him to recognize Charles I as his legitimate ruler.124 The result of the effort was identical to that following similar such episodes at the time of Ladislaus IV and Andrew III: the oligarch appeared willing to cooperate with the king for a certain period of time before again electing to pursue a course of open conflict with royal authority.125 Charles I drew the appropriate conclusion from this, when, contrary to his Árpád predecessors, he sought thereafter to gain the support of the familiares of the oligarchs rather than that of the oligarchs themselves. This strategy proved to be effective and contributed significantly to the final success of the Angevin king.

Finally, the impact of personal abilities on the outcome of events cannot be ignored. Poor decisions on the part of King Ladislaus IV gradually turned his potential supporters against him. The close relations Ladislaus IV maintained with the Cumans living in the Kingdom of Hungary produced particularly strong aversion among many of his subjects. The open affinity that Ladislaus displayed toward the Cumans—his mother was a Cuman princess—was considered to be so subversive that Pope Nicholas IV launched an investigation following the king’s death to find out if at all he had died as a Christian.126 Andrew III was a much more judicious king than Ladislaus IV. The mere fact that he managed to sustain his reign for ten years within a foreign environment and, for many years, without foreign allies, bears witness to his prudence. However, Andrew’s political oeuvre remained incomplete because of his unexpected death. In comparison to Andrew III, Charles I enjoyed the significant advantage of having grown into adulthood in Hungary, allowing him to become familiar with local conditions. The resolution of Charles I not to resort to military support from the Cumans, who according to a 1301 memorandum supported his rule (dicitur, quod Cumani sunt cum eo),127 in his fight against the oligarchs provides evidence of this familiarity.128 Charles was obviously aware of the political consequences that such military assistance from the Cumans against the oligarchs would have entailed. The Angevin king’s political acumen is also proved by the ability with which he chose confidentials who then would remain faithful to him for several decades.129

The decision that King Charles I made in 1314 to abolish the power of the oligarchs by force rather than make further attempts to come to agreement with them was directed not at the elimination of the provinces, some of which he had established himself. Instead, it signified a return to the Árpád-era model of governing the kingdom according to which the right to exercise power belonged exclusively to the king and to those with whom he voluntarily decided to share it.

 

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (Hungarian National Archives – MNL OL), Diplomatikai Levéltár (Medieval Charters – DL).

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (Hungarian National Archives – MNL OL), Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény (Collection of Photocopies – DF).

Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (Vienna), Erdődy család levéltára [The Archives of the Erdődy Family].

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Kristó, Gyula. A feudális széttagolódás Magyarországon [Feudal Fragmentation in Hungary]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1979.

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Kristó, Gyula. A rozgonyi csata [The Battle of Rozgony]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1978.

Kristó, Gyula. Csák Máté tartományúri hatalma [The Oligarchical Lordship of Máté Csák]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1973.

Kristó, Gyula. “I. Károly király harcai a tartományurak ellen (1310–1323)” [The Struggles of Charles I against the Oligarchs (1310–1323)]. Századok 137 (2003): 297–347.

Kristó, Gyula. “Kán László és Erdély” [László Kán and Transylvania]. Valóság 21 (1978): 83–96.

Kristó, Gyula. Tájszemlélet és térszervezés a középkori Magyarországon [Regional Perspective and Spatial Organization in Medieval Hungary]. Szeged: Szegedi Középkorász Műhely, 2003.

Lenkey, Zoltán and Attila Zsoldos. Szent István és III. András [Saint Stephen and Andrew III]. Budapest: Kossuth, 2003.

Magyar diplomacziai emlékek az Anjou-korból [Hungarian Diplomatic Records from the Angevin Era]. 3 vols, edited by Gusztáv Wenzel. Budapest: MTA, 1874–1876.

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Monumenta ecclesiae Strigoniensis. 3 vols, edited by Ferdinand Knauz and Lajos Dedek Crescens. Strigonii: n.p., 1874–1924.

Oklevelek Hontvármegyei magán-levéltárakból. Első rész: 1256–1399 [Documents from private archives in Hont County], edited by Ferenc Kubínyi. Budapest: n.p., 1888.

Piti, Ferenc. “Az 1342. évi nádorváltás” [The 1342 Change of Palatines]. Századok 140 (2006): 435–41.

Pór, Antal. “László erdélyi vajda (1291–1315): rajzok Erdély múltjából a középkorban” [László Voevode of Transylvania (1291–1315): Sketches from the History of Transylvania in the Middle Ages]. Erdélyi Múzeum 8 (1891): 433–81.

Pór, Antal. Trencsényi Csák Máté 1260–1321 [Máté Csák of Trencsény]. Budapest: Méhner Vilmos, 1888.

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Translated by Sean Lambert

Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Gábor Tüskés

Narrative Literature and the Reformation: Focal Points of an Interdisciplinary Discussion of the Scholarship

The roots of the current discussion of the scholarship on narrative literature and the Reformation stretch back into the last third of the twentieth century. This discussion has been ongoing in several disciplines, often working independently of one another and to some extent on different levels of inquiry, and sometimes with only minimal exchange of findings and conclusions. These studies are significant first and foremost because the operative terms themselves denote a field of inquiry in which one can trace processes of the history of science that are not sufficiently understood, processes the further mapping of which can lead to a better understanding of events in literary history and the history of ideas in the early modern era. The goal of my survey here is to examine the conceptual formation of the relevant terms and shed light on their development within the history of science. I also identify some lacunae in the scholarship and formulate several hypotheses. I have concentrated in my inquiry on German speaking areas, with some consideration of the situation in Hungary.

keywords: narrative literature, impact of the Reformation, interdisciplinarity, comparative approaches

Clarification of Terminology

The term “narrative literature” presents both literary studies and the historical study of narrative with a daunting challenge. The origins of the term itself (“Erzählliteratur”) do not lie in German scholarship on literary history as associated with names like Paul Böckmann or Eberhard Lämmert.1 The term refers first and foremost to narratives within existing printed literature that could be regarded as “popular,” collections of short entertaining or moralizing stories that are widely dispersed or disseminated and longer prose narratives that recently have come to be grouped under the term “prose novel.”2 Other kinds of text that often contain narratives are also taken into consideration.

In the historical background of this term there was a debate, now long past but nonetheless rich with implications, between philologists and researchers of popular literature regarding the problem of oral traditions and the epithets “folkish” and “popular.” The difference of opinions concerned first and foremost the question of the actual possibilities of spreading oral tradition among broad layers of the population and the role of literature in the process of mediating narrative. In the wake of the work of the Brothers Grimm, for a long time the direction of inquiry was determined by targeted investigations and selective practices of inclusion.3 Didactic narratives were neglected, both by literary scholarship and scholars of folklore. The desire to achieve, as a precondition to any study of narrative, a precise knowledge of literarily discernible narrative motifs could only begin to be realized in the 1960s. Indeed to this day there is no real consensus regarding the definition of narrative, neither in literary studies nor in the study of narrative. The historical study of narrative4 as a multidisciplinary, comparative field of scholarly inquiry5 has developed primarily out of the study of German literature and the folklore research since the 1950s.6

The central tasks of the historical and comparative study of narrative involve first and foremost questions regarding the age, mediation, dissemination, and functions of narrative types and motifs, as well as the question of continuity and the interdependence and penetration of literary and oral transmission and the problems of genres of popular narrative. The hypothesis of unbroken continuity in oral transmission is actually discarded through the study of sources and exact analyses of literary interconnections, and cross-linkages are exposed. Since the mid-1960s a discussion of comprehensive theory and methodology that would provide a coherent foundation for the discipline has been sought in narratology, in which efforts have been made first and foremost to arrive at theories of narrative that transcend genre.

At roughly the same time there was a dawning realization in the study of literature of how inappropriate it was to separate from the outset so-called popular texts (in other words the texts addressed to all social groups) from rhetorics, which suggests the conclusion that one cannot arrive at an adequate interpretation of the narrative literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without the study of rhetoric. The scholarly use of apophthegms led to studies that allegedly discerned the point of origin not only of all history writing, but also of the epic genres in this gnomic form. Modern narrative theory, in the meantime, developed from a form of inquiry rooted in the older approaches of the humanities into a field of study based on modern, structuralist, textual-linguistic or communication-theory foundations.7 The terminology deals first and foremost with the analysis of the narrative instance, the narrative event, and the narrative perspective. In more recent scholarship, affinities between speech and fictional narrative were emphasized. In the attempts to apply textual-linguistic and semiological terms to the restructuring of the rhetorical study of figures one sees a revamping of the relationship between rhetoric and narrative.

Only in the 1990s did the realization gradually emerge that since its beginnings in the Romantic era German literary history has been shaped by the Protestant views of its most prominent figures.8 One of the consequences of this was that, as Wolfgang Harms has so aptly put it, “[t]he idea of a new commencement, a caesura, a revival of literature with and since the Reformation […] [could lead to] a forfeiture of Tradition […] in the sense of […] a devaluation of anything older.”9 This forfeiture or repudiation of tradition, a consequence of value laden designations of epochs, is characteristic not of the period of transition into the early modern era, but rather of the assessment of this period in the literary history of the nineteenth century. The study of German literary history has only recently begun to free itself from the normative views that were given firm foundation by the hypothesis concerning a historical break in the transition into the modern era. As Klaus Schreiner noted in 1981, the notion of a discrete border alleged in the study of German literature and language between historical epochs at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has increasingly been thrown into question in light of new research on the culture of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. This has raised new doubts in literary and historical scholarship regarding the dialectical foundations of the historiography of the early modern era.10 Now we are better able to observe in widely scattered areas the actual proximity or combinations of uses of tradition and shifts in position and function.11

Recently there have been efforts not simply to identify lacunae in the history of the literary production in the early modern era of territories in Middle Europe (Mitteleuropa) that had once been Catholic, but also to go beyond the skewed perspective of this denominational approach in general. The notion of “oberdeutsche Literatur” (or “upper German,” referring German spoken essentially in what today is Austria and the southern parts of Germany), which has gained currency largely due to the writings of Dieter Breuer12 und Hans Pörnbacher,13 refers neither exclusively to Catholic literature nor simply to the Baroque. Rather one notes today the political-social commonalities and exchanges in the cultural self-conception of the leadership of the various denominations who invoked the “old order of the estates” of Middle Europe. The concept of unity in German national literature also began to seem questionable from non-denominational approaches, and it became increasingly clear that a revision of earlier views of (literary) history was unavoidable.14 The new thesis, according to which first the artistic and literary doctrines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed upper German literature and culture out of national consciousness and thereby consigned it to oblivion, is widely accepted.

Over the course of the past few decades a concept of literature has emerged in the study of literary history that is open with regards to the whole literary production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the oral tradition, which was always in a relationship of mutual influence with written culture.15 This concept places emphasis on the process of literary communication and rejects the distinction between “literary” and “non-literary.” Modern inductive-descriptive poetics defines the literary genres as pragmatic groupings of the diversity of actual texts. According to this definition, the genres are variations of mediation or systems of communication that prevail under specific historic, social, and cultural conditions. By now this concept of literature and genre has gained widespread acceptance, even among scholars of the history of narrative.

One of the difficulties (one that has not yet been overcome) of the endeavor to arrive at a common theory, definition, and systematization of narrative literature lies in the fact that both the collective criteria of narrative and the corpus of narrative texts elude precise definition. The traditional generic designations of narrative texts remain in use, however, both in the study of literature and in the study of narrative, in spite of the fact that they have been and are being subjected to critical interrogation and are increasingly seen as retrospective constructions that are unsuitable for an adequate description of both the innumerable sub-types and transitional forms and various genres and kinds of texts.

In the folk-narrative research a canon of motifs, genres, types, and topics was constructed over the course of the past century that is increasingly recognized as a pure construct.16 The constructed nature of this canon exhibits numerous assumptions rooted in the history of ideas, society, and scholarship that continue to exert an influence on research.17 The notion of the denominational origins of the scholars and most prominent figures of German literature, which was widespread in the international folklore research (and in particular the scholarship of the nineteenth century), defined the dominant canon of folk narrative genres in accordance with the German-Protestant national conception of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian traditions.18 But the ultramontane bias of Catholic authors, which was a persistent assumption in the scholarship, also led to a kind of reciprocal culture war which in turn distorted perceptions of the historical reality.

The romantic-patriotic heritage and ideological sympathies have also influenced the methodologies in and conclusions of the scholarship on the Reformation for far too long.19 Protestant biblical exegesis, beginning with the work of Hermann Gunkel and his functional understanding of narrative genres through the question regarding their “real-life setting” (“Sitz im Leben”), led to the articulation in the first third of the twentieth century of a unique philological genre theory, so-called “Formgeschichte” (or what has come to known today in English as form criticism), the most prominent representative of which was Martin Dibeulius.20 The presuppositions of the ethnographical and folklore research discourses were therefore based for a long time on conceptions of folk culture and tradition that today would be characterized as secularized evangelical theologoumena. Seen from the perspective of this insight, the Reformation and its ideological aftermath have a constitutive significance for the scholarship on narrative.

But alongside terms such as “narrative literature,” even the word “Reformation” is used differently and sometimes even in contradictory ways in the various disciplines. In literary history it is a term borrowed in the second half of the nineteenth century from the history of the church for a literary era which in the larger sense spans the whole of the sixteenth century and in the more narrow sense refers to the period between 1517 and the Peace of Augsburg. There are many sound reasons to speak of a “Reformation” era in the history of literature, but one is increasingly unable to ignore the fact that the roots of the notion of the “Reformation” as a designation of an epoch lie primarily in the conservative or liberal-Protestant national science of history of the nineteenth century. The overemphasis on the Wittenberg Reformation (which was most influential in Germany) led until recently to a neglect not only of counter-Reformation alternatives, but also the reform ideas of Huldrych Zwingli, not to mention Calvinist trends, which while they may have been more limited geographically and temporally, nonetheless remained more significant in certain regions.21 The European foundations of Latin academic culture were underestimated. The European interconnections of the literature of the Reformation became a subject of inquiry only thanks to the study of the Baroque. The notion of a “Lutheran pause,” which was introduced by Wolfgang Stammler, was also recognized recently as a misconception. Increasingly there is agreement that the written culture of the Reformation should be taken seriously as literature, and aspects in the literature that seem to have been less influenced by Reformation thinking also are given more attentive consideration in more recent works.

For the scholarship on the history of rhetoric, the rhetoric of the “Reformation,” defined by Peter Blickle as “a disputation with almost no social boundaries regarding the correct understanding of the Gospels” and by Peter Matheson as “a paradigmatic shift of religious imagination” and a “rhetorical event through and through,”22 creates a relatively new field of inquiry. Scholarship on the Reformation and rhetoric were both called upon to consider the “common man” (in other words the addressee) not simply as an object of a linear process, but rather as a participant in an interactive process.23 In one of his articles Robert W. Scribner established the “totality of the communication process” of the Reformation as a field of inquiry that included not only texts, but also deeds and oral, visual, and symbolic forms of communication.24

From the perspective of the study of narrative it is important, first and foremost, that the representatives of the Reformation put rhetoric in the service of textual and Biblical exegesis while also putting history as a rhetorical store of exempla in the service of rhetoric.25 The relationship between Protestant sermon-exempla and theological training has been made a topic of inquiry, but the rhetorical praxis of functional literature (“Gebrauchsliteratur”) has hardly been studied. According to recent research, book printing did not mark a new shift in media, but rather merely accelerated a development of handwritten mass production that had been ongoing since the late Middle Ages, only then to be given new impetus and temporarily dominated by the Reformation.26 The success of the Reformation is not simply a consequence of book printing. Given widespread illiteracy, the early phase of the communication process known as the “Reformation” must be understood as a process that was dominated more than 95 percent by unwritten forms of semi-oral “reading.” The effectiveness in the spread of ideas of fliers and pamphlets, with their diverse forms of texts, was in fact a result of uses of the spoken word. Until roughly 1700 the dominant medium remained the sermon, in which the various themes and forms of narrative were ascribed a fundamental meaning.27

For the historical study of narrative, the “Reformation” is no longer merely a term referring to an epoch, but rather is in a larger sense the starting basis for denominational cultural development from the early modern era to the present.28 The entire complex of the “evangelical” minting of so-called popular literature is at the center of scholarly attention. Included in this is the promotion of narrative traditions through the reform movements and their aftermath, both in the realm of ideas and institutions. Source use that is specific to denomination has only emerged in recent decades, first and foremost through the discovery of the sermon and catechism as social sites of the mediation of stories.29 Only in the last third of the twentieth century did the study of narrative begin to become open to literary history and textual exegesis and, in accordance with philologists’ broader notion of literature, take seriously their study of rhetoric as a means with which to arrive at a more nuanced grasp of means of mediation and narrative strategies. This involved taking into consideration, beyond knowledge of medieval functional literature, the entire production in the early modern era of homiletic handbooks and histories by all of the denominations.

Ever since the publication in 1974 of Volkserzählung und Reformation by Wolfgang Brückner, a handbook on the transmission and function of folk narrative material and narrative literature in Protestantism,30 interest in Luther has been limited not simply to (for instance) his use of proverbs, his collections of fables and folk superstitions,31 but also to the literary origins of his knowledge, his use of narrative genres, forms, and motifs, his theoretical position in the establishment of “histories” (in the sense given the word by Melanchthon) and the phenomenon of the “narrated” Luther, who himself became a figure of literary tradition. Brückner also proposed a comparable handbook on the narrative literature of the Catholic reform movement, but this still awaits realization.32 The intellectual preconditions of the emergence of a literature of exempla that was to some extent peculiar to specific denominations, the calendar and reform martyrology have only begun to be studied in recent decades. This is also true of drolleries and so-called devil’s literature (“Teufelsliteratur,” which refers to didactic, satirical treatises against sin and indulgences), which have only recently been studied in their theological context. Sermons, catecheses, and catechisms have been recognized as important fields of study, and the collections of tales of curiosities, wonders, portents,33 monsters and murder are understood in the context of the Reformation notion of the end of days.

New Directions in the Scholarship

Brückner’s handbook proved programmatic for the new scholarship on the history of narrative and can indeed be seen as a culmination of the ascertainments regarding Protestant authors and works specifically. In Frankfurt and Würzburg Brückner’s work inspired a series of dissertations that focused on previously overlooked authors and narrative forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examined narrative literature first and foremost as a medium of education, transcending denominational, political, and national boundaries.34 These works expose mutual relationships of influence between the literary establishment as a cultural construct and its popular reception. Furthermore, they yield narrative catalogues and check both theological and homiletical sources for their credibility and usefulness in the reconstruction of the culture of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. One finds attempts at a theory of exemplary subject matter in Brückner’s own essays, in which he alludes to the complexity of the notion of history in the early modern era and the modus excerpendi,35 as well as in the work of Christoph Daxelmüller, who analyses exempla as a form of scholarly discourse and a factor that contributes to percipience (Daxelmüller also provides an extensive bibliography of the research on exempla).36

In 1987 Rudolf Schenda, another prominent figure in the study of the history of narrative, offered an overview of the new tendencies in this discipline in German-speaking areas.37 He catalogued the systematic work on the narrative sources of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, whereby thousands of confirmations of the written mediation of narratives from the sixteenth century until the eighteenth century were discovered, but at the same time also evinces a strong inclination towards recent scholarship and the decline in the number of the few university chairs dedicated to the historical study of narrative. This tendency is far more pronounced today as a consequence of the university reforms that have been implemented. With the reestablishment of a commission for the historical study of narrative in 1997 on the occasion of the congress of the German Society for Ethnography in Marburg this area of study got a boost in German speaking countries, though no commission can compensate entirely for the absence of an institutional basis. The primary task of the study of narrative was redefined to extend beyond philology and the study of motifs and include the study of stereotypes and conflict. Narrative types are interpreted as cultural constructs, as a means of coming to terms, through narrative, with difference and estrangement and as a discursive manner of handling otherness.38 The forfeiture here of the historical perspective is quite apparent. The sources from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, which are the basis of the majority of the so-called folk narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are largely neglected.

The outlook of the more recent historical study of narrative is determined first and foremost by book genres and source texts on the transmission of narrative content, as well as the work of prominent authors of so-called pastor-literature and the polyhistors of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.39 The methods of the searches for Loci communes, which led to the sought-after memorabilia, are fundamentally reconsidered. The extensive literature of compilations, peculiarities, and magical wonders is consulted primarily in order to facilitate the exploration of literary sources of narratives from the oral tradition. The dispute between the evangelical theologian Hieronymus Rauscher and the Catholic Johannes Nas regarding legends, revelations of miracles, and exempla was identified as a highpoint in the denominational polemics on short narrative prose.40 Regarding the newer narrative genres and narrative content of Pietism and the Enlightenment, in addition to the notion of a break with so-called pastor-literature (as collections of stories), a constant catechetical-pedagogical use function of the continuously developing objectives of the reformers was alleged. The various kinds of texts of the so-called moralistic stories written by evangelical pastors and teachers, which as of roughly 1760 began to give rise to the canon of virtue of the Enlightenment and the new code of behavior for the modern civil religion, was made the subject of inquiry only a few years ago.41 Similarly, scholars have only recently begun to study the evangelical catechisms with exempla of the nineteenth century.42

Religious autobiographies and biographies have been recognized as the primary genre of pietistic narrative literature, meaning a distinctive version of hagiography with the leitmotifs of conversion or rebirth.43 Narratives of wondrous rescues of copies of the Bible and of devotional books were used by the Pietists since the middle of the seventeenth century. The extensive pietist literature of edification (or “Erbauungsliteratur,” a term that was used first in the fourteenth century and refers essentially writings that are not strictly speaking theological, as they are not bound by scholarly discourses or dogma, but which are nonetheless motivated by religious aims, for instance providing examples of virtuous life), which enjoyed considerable international influence because of numerous translations, has not so far been studied in detail.44 The compilation of a systematic catalogue of motifs from written sources with parabolic stories also remains a desideratum, as does a thorough examination of the regional differences in narrative contents and the study of the relationships between written and oral forms of communication among the Pietists.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies, classical philology, theology, the history of rhetoric and the historical study of narrative have all focused in particular on exempla. But only since the work of Rudolf Schenda,45 Hermann Bausinger,46 Wolfgang Brückner,47 Frederic C. Tubach,48 Peter Assion,49 Christoph Daxelmüller,50 Jacques Berlioz,51 Walter Haug,52 Peter von Moos53 and others54 has there been consensus regarding the fact that the term “exempla” does not designate a genre so much as a function. A text becomes an “exemplum” only through its application. In the earlier scholarship, the term “Predigtmärlein,” or “sermon-tale,” was used as a synonym for exemplum, although it is not immediately apparent that this is justified, since the former refers to a narrative text. The use of exempla of individual authors can only be fruitfully studied according to a complex methodology and with simultaneous consideration of content, genre-specific and functional aspects, the socio-cultural context, and principles of text generation that are determined in accordance with these aspects (the so-called para-textual constellation of characteristics).

In 1977 Ernst Heinrich Rehermann published an important book on the exempla in Protestant collections of exempla and sermons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a source which until then had gone largely unnoticed) from the Low German region.55 The work contains an examination of sources, sermon styles and spiritual intentions of the exempla, as well as selected and annotated texts of exempla and sermon books. The first catalogue of exempla of Protestant authors from Hungary was published by Ákos Dömötör in 1992.56 As a comparison of the Catholic and Protestant exempla tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals, there are significant correlations and differences in the use of exempla in the two confessions.57 Luther essentially followed the medieval tradition of conveying problems by interspersed exemplary stories, but given his demand for historic factuality, only events that actually had taken place could serve as exempla. Together with Melanchthon he attributed particular importance to the extraordinary occurrences of the present, the so-called wonders, as a source of exempla. In his Homiletics (1553),58 the standard work for the compilation of sermons for the Lutheran orthodoxy, Andreas Hyperius reduced the permitted number of exempla for medieval preachers from three to one (a stipulation that was seldom enforced in practice). According to the recent work of Gábor Kecskeméti, the Homiletics of Hyperius also had an effect on the sermon and communication theory of Calvinist preachers in Hungary.59

In particular, the aforementioned works focused on individual exempla and their reception history, providing important preparatory work for the topical corpus and the commentary on narratives of the early modern era. The book types, which functioned as vehicles of exempla (including systematically organized collections of exempla), gained widespread recognition only gradually.60 Concerning the denomination-specific themes, here and there a kind of basic stock of exempla evolved. In the end the use and elaboration of the texts depended on the handbooks that were consulted, as well as the preferences for exempla and the narrative skills of the individual authors. For Protestant authors, the most important function of exempla was to convey the new value system and ideal of life, as well as the new conception of personality and piety, a task they sought to achieve first and foremost by modifying interpretations, the focal points of the story, and the textually immanent accents. In general biblical examples predominated, in particular examples from the Old Testament and exempla that touched on mythological and historical themes and themes from Antiquity, as well as fables, fairy tales, and devil’s tales. In contrast, legends regarding the lives of saints were rarely used. Parallel to the decline and devaluation of hagiographical elements, the Protestant martyrology became a frequent theme of the exempla.61

Research also focused on earlier Protestant collections of exempla the structural model of which was provided first and foremost by the sayings of Luther from the Tischreden (1566) ordered alphabetically after Loci communes and Melanchthon’s collection of sayings, which was published by Johannens Manlius in the Collectanea locorum communium in 1563 (it consisted of examples of the Ten Commandments, a Calendarium historicum, and a Libellus medicus). The first collection of Protestant exempla (which was also by far the most influential over the course of the sixteenth century) was Andreas Hondorff’s Promptuarium exemplorum (1568), which was also divided according to the Ten Commandments. As Heidemarie Schade has demonstrated, Hondorff’s sources included, in addition to the Bible, the church fathers and the old church historians, secular authors of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, chronicles and historical works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Catholic collections of sermons, exempla, and legends, Protestant devotional works, and the devil’s literature and tales of wonders.62 Among Hondorff’s exempla, one finds, alongside widespread international narrative themes, numerous narratives that can be regarded as legends without wonders. They give accounts of devotion and persecution, the sufferings and deaths of Protestant witnesses of the faith. The work was republished in supplemented editions roughly forty times over the course of the next century. A Latin translation (1575), which by 1633 had been republished thirteen times, ensured that it would be read well beyond the German speaking territories, for instance in Hungary.63 After Hondorff, the exemplum was adopted quite deliberately as an additional device in Protestant sermons and literature.

Following the research of Burghart Wachinger, the collections of exempla not only constitute important sources regarding the transmission of narratives, but also bear witness to the history of moral indoctrination and ethical consciousness.64 Wachinger was able to demonstrate, by comparing three collections from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that while in the Middle Ages virtue and vice dominated as criteria for the categorization of collections of exempla, for the Protestant collections the Ten Commandments provided one of the most important ordering schemes. He makes a welcome call for further special studies on the typology and history of collections of exempla, whereby the various findings that have been reached would merit a consistent synopsis transcending epochal and denominational boundaries. In order to facilitate further study of the sources, in 2006 Hans Jörg Uther made many collections of curiosities and exempla of the early modern era available on CD-ROM.65

Two postils by Johann Jacob Otho offer a revealing example of the wealth of exempla in the evangelical sermons of the seventeenth century. According to a catalogue of regesta by Wolfgang Beck both books contained a total of 1,081 historical narratives and dictums taken from contemporary historical, theological, and humanist literature.66 In Othos Kranckentrost (1665), which was reissued many times up until the middle of the nineteenth century, the “last words” of respected and influential figures (which resemble the Apophthegmata) occupy a place of central importance. Beck draws a distinction between textual levels and scopes of function, and he suggests that one keep the following analytical aspects in mind: 1) the context of an exemplum; 2) the quantitative use; 3) the functionality and its relationship to 1); 4) the narrative tendency; and 5) the relationship of mutual influence between intention and content.

In a collection published in 2007 the focus is placed on the epistemology of exempla, in other words on forms, dynamics, and functions of the production of parables.67 Andreas Pečar, for instance, studies biblical exempla as a medium of polemical exchange in the political discourse of the early Stuart era in Scotland and England.68 He comes to the conclusion that the exempla were useful not only as rhetorically persuasive devices or references to divine law, but also as bearers of revelatory knowledge and as a guide to God’s eternal will. A comparison by Maximilian Bergengruen of the various ways in which the Magdalena exemplum was used by Jean Bodin, François Rosset and Georg Philipp Harsdörffer reveals that Harsdörffer’s goal in Grosser Schau-Platz jämmerlicher Mord-Geschichte was to stage in the exemplum what is paradoxical and contradictory to the original argumentation until it comes to seem the opposite of this.69

Collections of narratives from the sixteenth century have always been part of the canon of German literature, but a discussion of the collections of narrative from the seventeenth century was first held in 1999 in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel.70 At the moment very few of these source works have been appended with indexes of motifs and exempla. Most of them are self-standing literary works with a broad spectrum of artistic potentials, which must be examined within the frameworks of genre and organizational forms and also with consideration of the individual personality of the author.71 The significance of these sources is also emphasized by the fact that Grimmelshausen, Harsdörffer, Bidermann and other canonized authors of the seventeenth century made use of diverse collections of histories and narratives as sources. Johann Anselm Steiger studies the exemplum hermeneutics of Luther and the narrative collections of the Lutheran orthodoxy and comes to the conclusion that the collections of exempla are not merely intended for the preacher and the patresfamilias, but also constitute an important component of the Lutheran-Orthodox church historiography.72

The tales and exempla used in sermons became a self-standing subject of study in Hungary only in the 1980s.73 At the center of inquiry one finds first and foremost the exempla in Calvinist sermons and polemical writings, the thematic focal points, the diffusion and contamination of various types of story lines, the narrative characteristics of the exempla, and their relationship to Protestant ideals and oral narrative traditions.74 Gábor Kecskeméti has studied the interconnections of the exempla over history.75 János L. Győri has analyzed the typology of exempla based on form, function, and content in the homiletic interpretations of psalms.76 Idikó Bárczi has written a monograph on the sources of the Latin homiletic handbooks from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. She notes the need for a comparative study of the analytical indexes of the collections of Protestant exempla and collections of Loci communes as significant intertextual systems in the early modern era.77

Luther’s demand for historical factuality was directed first and foremost against the “miraculous” details of the lives of saints.78 He considered such “lies” and fabulae fictae unsuitable for educational goals (in the sense of a humanist education).79 However, he also did not want to forgo the use of edifying histories and therefore urged the adaptation of legends, as Annemarie and Wolfgang Brückner have shown, beginning with the “old fathers” (one thinks for instance of the Vitae partum of Georg Major, 1534) and historical calendars and soon collections of evangelical martyrologies, “truthful histories” of apostles, martyrs, confessors, participants in confessional polemics and other evangelical testimonies.80 In his criticisms of medieval legends Luther regards some of the motifs in the miraculous narratives of saints as valuable fictions, because they are useful in catechistic allegorical interpretation. Luther’s critique of legends did not prevent the emergence, soon after his death, of an idealized vision of him that gave rise to a tendentious formation of histories, legends, and myths regarding him as the figure around whom so many ideas crystalized, a tradition that persisted into the twentieth century.81

In an illuminating study Rudolf Schenda examined Catholic and Protestant collections of legends in their dialectical interdependency. He concluded that legends have functions in legitimization, stabilization, and indoctrination regardless of denominational affiliation.82 Only recently has scholarship on narrative recognized the so-called devil’s literature of the sixteenth century, which ultimately went back to Luther’s demonological histories and tales, as a specifically Protestant literary genre that was structurally related to older and younger allegorical versions of the type of the fool.83 These moralistic writings, which were prevalent in orthodox Lutheran areas, contained series of legendary exempla and were one of the vehicles of the spread of Protestant social critiques of the early modern era. Their stylization in the early study of German literary history as texts of a “German” image of the devil was influenced by a national mentality and therefore should be subjected to critical reflection.

One should also note, in connection with this, that problems concerning the stories of witchcraft have attracted the attention of scholars today. The first comprehensive treatise on witchcraft (Malleus maleficarum, 1485/87), with its narrative accounts, was seen as valuable by Protestant compilators of the sixteenth century. There were no differences between denominations when it came to the narrative aspersions against witches. The genre of tales of magic, wonders and portents may not go directly back to Luther, but they were first exploited as modern omens of divine justice through his notion of the coming of the end of days. Wunderzeichen (1556-1562), a three-volume work by Job(us) Fincel(ius), represented a new kind of compilation in which the portent literature of the humanist revival of augury culminates as an expression of the Lutheran view of the coming of the end of days, while also functioning as historical testament to the first decades of the Reformation.84 It contains a total of 47 stories of the devil or events that can be interpreted as the work of the devil, and it was read, interpreted, and for a long time passed on as a work of historical-theological revelation.

The influence of the vogue of devil’s literature went far beyond the borders of the German speaking territories. For instance, the fourth volume of Ördögi kísírtetekről, or “On devilish apparitions” (1578), a Hungarian-language collection of postils of evangelical pastor Péter Bornemisza, led to the condemnation and banishment of the author by the competent Protestant Church court. Sometime around 1556 Bornemisza studied with Melanchthon in Wittenberg. The primary sources for his devil’s takes were Melanchthon’s anecdotes (as reported by Manlius), Chronicon Carionis, Cyriakus Spangenberg, and the Vitae patrum of Georg Major.85 The sources have not yet been fully exploited. A new historical-critical edition of the work would be useful. Bornemisza organized the narratives thematically, and in the sixth part the grouping of the histories follows that of Manlius. This collection also contains the first traces of the Faust legend in Hungary.

Luther’s aversion to idle tales and fables and his fondness for Aesopian animal fables and proverbs have long been noted.86 Less familiar, however, is the fact that his interest in Aesop made an impression on his companions at table and moved some of them, such as Johannes Mathesius, to include this narrative matter in homilies. Luther’s adaptation of 13 of Aesop’s fables was first printed in 1557 and gave further impetus to the collection of fables and the rich fable poetry of the sixteenth century. In contrast with research on the goals and functions of fables, only isolated studies of their morphology and poetological status have been done. Unlike the study of New Testament parables in the nineteenth century, recent attempts gave rise to a systematic approach to narrative forms of non-actual speech whereby there is also an attempt to determine the status of the fable. A few years ago Reinhard Dithmar published a chronologically ordered collection of texts on the theoretical statements regarding fables, parables, and allegories from Antiquity to the twentieth century. He devotes a separate chapter to fable theory from Luther to Mathesius.87

Between 1536 and 1592 three different translations and adaptations of Aesop were published in Hungary. From the perspective of the development of Hungarian prose narratives, the most significant of these was Száz fabula, or “One-hundred fables” (from before 1566), by Gáspár Heltai.88 In 1543, Heltai, a late evangelical preacher, author, and printer of books and other written materials, had visited Luther and Melanchthon and studied at the university in Wittenberg. His collection constitutes a free adaptation of the Steinhövel–Brant version (which was in widespread use) with the use of additional sources. According to recent studies, one can situate the work in direct proximity to the fable theory and fable collection of Luther.89

The fact that Luther’s own collection, with almost 500 proverbs, represents only a fragment of his knowledge of proverbs is of particular significance in this context. 90 In the complete German-language works there are some 5,000 documents verifying legends and proverbial oral idioms. To my knowledge the Latin proverbs have not yet been collected systematically. Luther’s enthusiasm for Georg Major’s collection of Latin proverbs (Sententiae, 1534) is clear, but its influence remains almost entirely unexamined. New approaches to the study of proverbs that examine the language, manner of transmission and use, temporally and culturally specific appraisals, and everyday, educational, and literary functions of proverbs have yet to be adopted.91

The reciprocal influence between Reformation and so-called “Meistergesang” (a didactic or religious song composed to correspond to traditional monophonic melodies) has long been recognized. But it was not until Horst Brunner and Dieter Merzbacher published the findings of their research that historians began to realize that the narrative moment in the mastersongs of Hans Sachs played a considerably larger role after the Reformation than in the songs before the Reformation.92 He ceased to limit himself to the Bible. The index of the narrative subjects in his work includes several dozen international types of narrative.93 One finds innumerable narrative references in Protestant historiography94 that have hardly been made the subject of study, as well as in the handwritten Calvinist visions95 and the denominational polemical writings.96

Melanchthon’s significance for the transmission of narrative subject matter of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Humanism is—in contrast with that of Luther—only beginning to be recognized.97 In his works one finds the most genres of short narrative genres: exempla, medieval and early evangelical legends, dicta, facetiae, maxims, epigrams, proverbs, fables, dreams, jokes, riddles and myths. The theoretical foundation of the inclusion of such a diversity of historical narrative subject matter lies first and foremost in Melanchthon’s concept of the exemplary nature, pedagogical function, and hermeneutic nature of all things historical. As a consequence of his theological concept of history, in the sixteenth centuries the term “history” became “in an unusual way a key term in the area of narrative literature.” Collections of the narratives used by Melanchthon were intended for his contemporaries and were often mixed with narratives used by Luther, in whose Tischreden Melanchthon played his own role as narrator and narrative object. Part of this collection of exempla and histories has not yet been adequately made accessible. If perhaps not nearly to the same extent as Luther, soon after his death Melanchthon also became the subject of Reformation legends and Catholic anti-legends.

The narrative texts referred to as folk books (“Volksbuch”) and prose novels constitute a particularly fruitful subject of inquiry both for literary history and the historical study of narrative. The term prose novel first began to be used to designate long narratives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the 1970s, replacing the imprecise and misleading term “folk book,” which was inherited from Romanticism and was often used as a collective name for texts for which it was inappropriate given their literary-sociological implications.98 As Hans Joachim Kreutzer has shown, the term folk book should be reserved for a type of book from the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular publication features. According to Jan-Dirk Müller, the prose novel is “no generic term, but a term which, because it groups together a corpus of texts that are heterogeneous from the perspectives of their provenance, subject matter, and structure, can only be described as a ‘target form’ towards which common developmental tendencies move.”99 This corpus of texts, which includes for instance Melusina, Fortunatus and Faust, constitutes a kind of catch-all of narrative subject matter and motifs from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern era, not to mention narrative models. Its formidable significance for the history of the genre of the novel and its value as testimony to the development of modern individuality has only recently been recognized.

Hans Joachim Kreutzer discerns a clear break in the printing history of the prose novel in the 1620s and 1630s and suggests a connection between this and the Reformation. He does not offer an explanation of this phenomenon, however.100 The long debate regarding the question of the intention behind the creation of the figure of Faust and the problem of the role of the denominational traditions has not yet been resolved.101 The numerous adaptations (sometimes back into verse) of German prose novels in other languages should be studied collectively and systematically, on the basis of international comparisons, and with particular consideration of the structural, social and functional differences, as well as differences (and connections) in subject matter, storyline, and reception, tendencies towards rational vs. mythical explanation, and the literary work of the person responsible for the adaptation.102 Denominational structures have recently been identified in novels from the seventeenth century.103 It is high time for a history of the prose novel that sees this genre not simply from the perspective of alleged medieval forerunners.

Conclusions and Proposals

1. The terms “narrative literature and Reformation” denote an area of common inquiry for the study of literature, the history of rhetoric, the historical study of narrative, and the history of the Reformation, an area of inquiry that can be precisely defined but has not yet been satisfactorily researched. The problems that arise in these fields of study demand continuous interrogation of the usefulness of certain categories. Most of the modern terms of the science of literature and the study of narrative can only be used with considerable caution when speaking of the period in question. A functional definition of the terms “narrative literature” and “narrative” and greater openness to the findings and questions of various fields of inquiry are both unavoidable. Segmentation in (and as a consequence of) the sciences should be overcome, at least to the extent that this is possible.

2. “Narrative literature” and its subdivision into genres are shifting historical products and observational models of the history of science which in the context of the Reformation constitute fruitful objects of study. In the course of the studies mentioned above it became clear that with an approach that is based on the study of the history of transmission and circumstances of use it is possible to distinguish and specify the connection between narrative literature and the Reformation. The formula “narrative literature and Reformation” seems increasingly dispensable when one observes the texts of the narrative literature of the early modern era in the concrete circumstances of their use, thereby furthering a more discriminating understanding of historical reality.

3. In the history of the transmission of the narrative literature of the late Middle Ages and the production of the literature of the early modern era, the Reformation had considerable significance. The forms and content, but also the mindset and points of view of the literature of the late Middle Ages continued to exert an influence across the alleged threshold of the Reformation.104 Until now, the narrative traditions of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era have only been discussed separately. Comparisons that stretch beyond the borders of epochs must be ventured in order for the outlines of historical processes to become clear.

4. Less radical hermeneutical innovations as an interdisciplinary test of circumscribed questions addressing a broad array of fundamental sources may lead to progress in our knowledge of “narrative literature and the Reformation.” Narrative texts of the period of the Reformation can only be studied in clear historical context, as parts of a larger whole, with consideration of the intentions and conditions of mediation. Thoroughly researched studies that are temporally, geographically, or socially focused create a solid foundation for more general conclusions regarding the narrative literature of the Reformation.

5. There is a need for an examination (that is sensitive to historical processes) of the relationship of narratives to reality, which suggests not only narratological but also social-historical, cultural-historical, and psychological differentiations. Accepted distinctions between narrative genres, such as their claim to authenticity, are questionable, and one should always keep in mind that the borders between narrative motifs, narrative types and themes are fluid.

6. Little study has been devoted to the processes whereby individual narrative motifs are adapted to different, denomination-specific contexts and sometimes transferred from one form to another. It is often difficult to clarify whether the spread of theme and motif is due to processes of transfer, a trans-denominational or trans-cultural narrative potential, or other circumstances. We know next to nothing about narrative in the substrata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.105 The influence of Protestant rhetoric on narrative literature should be made the subject of detailed study, but one should also consider the role of Protestant students and exiles who traveled abroad in the transmission of narrative texts.

7. The hypothesis according to which for hundreds of years almost nothing was published in the “upper German” area apart from folkish reading material, while in the Protestant north and east academic writing dominated has become obsolete. Narrative literature played a significant role in the popularization of both Reformation thought and Catholic reform.

8. The disciplines still have failed to provide a clear statement of the precise uses of so-called functional literature, which includes, among other things, the printed collections of narratives, sermons, and exempla of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which often had features that were peculiar to specific denominations. The relationship between literary education and so-called folk traditions between Humanism and Historicism can only be precisely assessed when one compares the actual use value of narrative literature with the entirely different aspirations of the national historians and mythologists of the nineteenth century.

9. I urge fundamental comparative research in well definable source areas of the narrative literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the inclusion of the literature of Central Europe in the scholarship on the Reformation to a greater extent. It is increasingly important to consider the cultural and literary imprints of religious denominations.106 We still lack a comparative study of the attributes of the narrative literature of the early modern era, both those specific to individual denominations and those that transcend denominational boundaries.

10. As Jan-Dirk Müller astutely noted, “[p]rojected research should continue to dismantle denominational, linguistic, and national limitations. It should examine the effects of the factional battles of the Reformation on literature […], but first and foremost, it should dismiss the concept of a continuous denominational culture and describe the Reformation more as a symptom of the differentiation in the early modern era of social and academic discourses. The catalytic effect of the movement […] should be profiled more distinctly.” As Müller also observes, one should discuss all tendencies that eluded this movement or reach beyond it.107 Systematic collaboration among philologists, comparatists, and researchers of the Reformation from different national traditions would be essential.

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Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Réka Kiss

“The women do not want to go to church.” Church Discipline and the Control of the Public Practice of Religion in the Calvinist Diocese of Küküllő in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The Calvinist model of Church discipline introduced a considerably more intensive and elaborate system of enforcing moral rules and controlling social behavior than the one that had formerly prevailed. Its religious, cultural, and social role and the regional variants have remained subjects of debate to this day. In this essay, I examine a form of this institutional system that is unique from many perspectives, using as my sources the seventeenth and eighteenth-century visitation records and diocesan court documents from the Hungarian Reform Diocese of Küküllő (the name of which is taken from Küküllő River, in Romanian the Târnava River). In the first half of the essay I offer an overview of the peculiarities of the Transylvanian church organisation and the institutional system of church discipline, addressing in particular the question of the extent to which these institutions differed from or resembled Western European models. In the second half of the essay I survey the guiding role of the Church and the relationship between norms and actual practice as seen through the study of efforts to supervise and enforce religious conformity. By analyzing seventeenth and eighteenth- century documents pertaining to the control and sanction of participation in public Church rituals, I seek to provide a nuanced image of the religious practices of the era and further an understanding of how Church surveillance was asserted in the everyday lives of members of local communities.

keywords: Calvinist Church discipline, public Church rituals, marriage, local communities, Transylvanian Principality

One of the most significant innovations of the Protestant Reformation was a thorough transformation of the institution of Church discipline, the classic example of which one finds in Calvinist Geneva. The Calvinist model of Church discipline introduced a considerably more intensive and elaborate system of enforcing moral rules and controlling social behavior than the one that had formerly prevailed. The fundamental impact it had on society and mentality has been a focal point of social historical scholarship on the early modern era since Max Weber. Referring to the strictness of its principles, historians have until recently tended to see the Calvinist model of Church discipline as “the effective motor behind the establishment of the first Puritan society” and “an early example of an attempt at social engineering on a social scale.”1

While scholars seem to agree that the Calvinist model of Church discipline brought about profound changes, there is less agreement on the actual impact it had. Its religious, cultural, and social role, its effectiveness, and the regional variants have remained subjects of debate to this day.2

The question of Church discipline has become one of the cornerstones of confessionalization theories intended to model the construction of the early modern absolutist state and the development of confessional identities.3 In The Disciplinary Revolution. Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (2003), the American historical sociologist Philip Gorski explicitly argues that the rapid rise of modern state power in the early modern era was due in part to the impact of the military and capitalist revolutions, but primarily to the disciplinary revolution, which was spread most strikingly by the Calvinist Reformation.4

In this essay, I examine a form of this institutional system that is unique from many perspectives. My sources are from Transylvania, seventeenth and eighteenth-century manuscript documents from over thirty parishes in the Küküllő Calvinist Diocese. Some are visitation records, others are protocols of the diocesan court body. Amounting to several thousand pages in all, the documents represent a unique collection. What makes them exceptional is that they are almost the only case within the Hungarian-speaking territory where local-level church disciplinary documents have survived from the first half of the seventeenth century (from 1638) and the fact that they are more or less continuous. Thus one finds very few case studies on local operation of Church discipline in the period in question based on Hungarian-language sources.

The great advantage of the registers from Küküllő is that they offer a deep glimpse into the actual everyday reality of Church discipline in different regions. While the Church laws and synodal decisions constitute fundamental sources that enable us to investigate the normative regulations of the era, the registers from Küküllő offer insights into questions from the perspective of actual social practice. A comparative analysis of the two source types can bring us closer to the complex issue of the relationship between norms and practice. We can obtain a more detailed picture of how church governance was asserted in reality in the everyday life of the local communities. This is of particular importance because we know that in early modern Europe people experienced religion for the most part in small rural communities. Thus the sources offer us a better grasp not only of the institutions, but also of the religious mentality and religious attitudes of ordinary people.

Equally significantly, with the help of the Küküllő sources we can examine a long period of time, embracing several generations. Thus on the one hand we can describe long-term trends, while on the other we can discern peculiarities arising from the personality of the church leaders, their ideas on church governance, as well as from the given historical periods.

Hungarian Calvinism is regarded as the easternmost contiguous group of international Calvinism but at the same time as a branch that has become separated from the western Protestant bloc. Many historians have noted its distinctive organizational, dogmatic, liturgical and cultural features.5 The systematic analysis of the Küküllő sources offers us an opportunity to investigate a relatively rarely studied topic in an international context. To what extent did the system of Church discipline in Transylvania differ from or resemble models in Western Europe?

The Institutional Framework of Church Governance and Church Discipline in the Transylvanian Calvinist Church

The novelty of Calvinist Church discipline derives in part from its theological roots, but it was also accompanied by radical renewal in church organization and governance. The model of Church discipline found in the Genevan Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541) which served as a model for western Calvinist Churches, contained two significant innovations. Firstly, it involved elected local lay office-bearers in the administration of church justice, alongside the pastors, and secondly it made great efforts to separate the spheres of church and secular power and to ensure the autonomy of the new Church bodies and their independence from the state authorities. However the Hungarian and Transylvanian Church governance structure differed significantly from the Western European models. During the time of the independent Principality of Transylvania (1541–1690) Calvinism not only came to be the dominant denomination but even developed a particularly close connection between state and church.

Furthermore, in the history of the Hungarian Reformation the Transylvanian Calvinist Church came closest to achieving the status of state church, though the formal, institutional relationship between the state and the Calvinist church always remained limited.6 This close relationship between Church and state can also be observed in Church governance and jurisdiction. The Calvinist Church preserved many elements of the medieval Catholic heritage, and adjusted to the social structure of the estate system on a large scale.7 As of the sixteenth century, the institution of the Calvinist bishopric (superintency) was gradually canonized, and consistories emerged only considerably later, with functions that differed in part from their original goals. From the late sixteenth century to the early and mid-eighteenth, the Calvinist Church in Transylvania was governed to a large extent by ministers and ministerial bodies. Of these, the most important unit of Church governance was the diocese, headed by the archdeacon. Like the organizational structure of the Church in Transylvania, the system of Church discipline also differed from the classic Calvinist model. In the period under discussion, the most relevant forums for Church discipline and Church administration of justice were the annual decanal visitations and the (so-called partial) synodic court of the diocese, which consisted of ministers and was led by the archdeacon.8 The visitation covered three essential aspects of the life of the parish. A significant part of the scope of its duties involved administrative and economic surveillance. In addition, it served as the tribunal of the clergy, and they monitored the religious and moral lives of the members of the congregation. The more serious disciplinary issues on which the visitation was not able to pass a sentence on the spot were discussed by the synodic court of the diocese. This was the forum for litigation involving Church officials (pastors, instructors), and it also functioned as a court of marriage where matrimonial cases were held.

To summarize, according to the original Calvinist model decisions pertaining to Church discipline were reached 1. at weekly meetings of the consistories, 2. at the congregational level, 3. “from below,” 4. by presbyters and lay office-bearers who were acquainted with the local circumstances and had personally and thoroughly inspected them in accordance with strict stipulations. In contrast, in Transylvania decisions were reached 1. in the course of the annual visitations or the slightly more frequently held partial synods, 2. not at the congregational level, 3. by a church superior working together with pastors 4. who were less familiar with local conditions and who therefore had to rely on what was said by the pastor and the congregation.

The traces of the close linkage between Church and state that developed over the course of the seventeenth century in Transylvania can be detected in another fundamental issue raised by the Protestant Reformation, namely questions pertaining to the alteration of the relationship between Church and state. Which sphere should be responsible for determining and enforcing the rules necessary in order to ensure social concord and disciplining the church members?9 According to the theoretical essentials of the Geneva model, bodies rigorously independent of the state exercised church discipline, but in Transylvania secular and ecclesiastical administration of justice were never entirely separate. Rather they functioned in a complementary fashion. The layered governmental, administrative, and jurisdictional structure of the society of estates was reflected in the parallelism in Church and secular judicial decisions. The degree of separation or interconnection depended on the historical period, the region, and the offences in question.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, with the consolidation of the absolutist state in Transylvania, civil magistrates gradually took over the Church’s role of supervising social conduct. Following the separation of powers, cases involving criminal offences came before the secular trial courts, while the Church dealt first and foremost with issues involving the private sphere (including handling strictly Church affairs). Its most important sphere of authority remained marital jurisdiction. In practice, however, at times the Church and secular institutions still often had contradictory regulations regarding transgressions with moral aspects (such as fornication, adultery, blasphemy, failure to attend church, and breaking of the Sabbath).

Thus the two forums differed from each other first and foremost in the nature of the punishments they imposed. The range of disciplinary measures available to the Church was not broad. The punishments were usually of a spiritual nature, though spiritual and “secular” sanctions were a bit intermixed in the Church’s administration of justice. Essentially the Church had three forms of punishment at its disposal: 1. various grades of oral admonition, 2. “secular” punishments, such as fines and corporal punishment, for instance the pillory or a caning, and 3. the most severe spiritual sanction, excommunication. The sources suggest that in practice this meant “excommunicatio minor,” in other words expulsion from the church and ban from communion. In addition, people who had committed more serious offences were turned over to the secular courts, and reconciliation could only be carried out after the sentence passed by the secular authorities had been implemented.

At the same time, because of the distinctive linkage between Church and state, in accordance with state law the archdeacon was accompanied on his visitation by a representative of the secular authorities who assisted in the execution of sentences and the collection of Church taxes. The presence of secular authorities essentially meant that the visitation was not simply an internal Church matter.10 The prestige of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the implementation of punishments imposed by the church bodies were ultimately assured by the state power.

Thus, the seventeenth-century Calvinist disciplinary registers were written within the framework of a stable church organizational structure supported by a strong state. After Transylvania lost its independent statehood in 1690, fundamental changes took place in the life of the Calvinist Church. The attempt to incorporate Transylvania into the Habsburg Empire was accompanied, over the course of the eighteenth century, by intensive efforts to re-Catholicize the region, efforts that were not always free of violent incident. For the Calvinist Church in Transylvania, this was a period of continuous attack and repression. Not only did it lose the support it had had from the state, it found itself confronted with the measures of an inimical government. Not surprisingly, this influenced the formal course of Church discipline proceedings as well. At the same time, however, following the period of wars, local administrative bodies could hardly disregard, in their efforts to maintain order, the role of the Church and its established practices as a stabilizing force. Thus the Church and the secular authorities continued to be bound by common interests, which is why the civil officials in general continued to participate in the enforcement of the disciplinary decisions of the Church.

Types of Disciplinary Cases in the Seventeenth Century

On first reading of the 850 pages of seventeenth-century Küküllő protocols, one is struck by the complete absence of church disciplinary cases involving lay persons, a fundamental difference compared to Western European case studies. The written sources that have survived pertaining to the work of the visitation and the Church court of highest instance in the seventeenth century essentially involve three spheres. The decisive majority of the visitation records concern administrative affairs and matters of finance. The Church courts functioned as little more than forums for marital disputes and the court of justice for Church officials (pastors, instructors).

In the fragmentary records that survived between 1638 and 1700 there are 219 matrimonial cases in other words breaking-off of engagement or divorce. They comprise 73 percent of all the cases. Comparing the disciplinary activity of the various denominations, R. Po-chia Hsia concluded that while the various rival Christian Churches developed similar structures of Church direction, there were significant differences between the denominations concerning the spheres of life in which they strengthened their control. While in the Catholic territories emphasis was placed on conformity in religious life, the protestant and, first and foremost, Calvinist Churches focused on the development of a new ethical system of norms, the regulation of sexual life, strengthening the institution of marriage, and maintaining family cohesion. These tendencies prevailed in the case of the practices of the Küküllő diocese as well.11

In the seventeenth-century Küküllő sources the majority of the remaining cases not related to marital law involved the conduct of local clergy and instances in which they had violated social standards. These cases, of which there were far fewer than the matrimonial matters, comprised some 12.4 percent of the total. Cases involving public scandal, drunkenness, disorderliness, quarrelling and slander were only entered into the visitation records or the partial (synodic) protocols if one or both of the persons involved was a clergyman or a member of his family.12 In other words, the sources that survived from the era concerning measures taken against persons offending against the standards of social behavior involve only clergymen. The most common kind of conflict involved disputes between preachers and rectors belonging to the same congregation or preachers and members of the local nobility.

Thus there is little written trace in the seventeenth-century Küküllő records of control of the personal behavior and public conduct of members of the laity. Thus is true in spite of the fact that lengthy church articles enumerated the spheres of the lives of the parishioners to which the Church was extending its authority. Almost every contemporary canonical collection and synodical decree dealt with Sabbath breaking, and worldly amusements, such as dancing or revelry, were strictly forbidden during days of feast. However, the seventeenth-century Küküllő sources contain hardly any data of affaires involving disciplinary measures taken against members of the laity for such offences. There are no notes regarding matters of blasphemy, swearing, drunkenness, quarrelling, failure to attend church, or profanation of feast days. There is no data concerning religious behavior regarded as unusual, and only sporadic mention of attempts in real church disciplinary practice to ban games, dances or folk customs considered contrary to Church teachings. The number of cases dealing with the behavior and beliefs of the laity is trifling despite the fact that all synodic decrees contained provisions for the punishment of such transgressions and the church visitation protocols of a contemporary, István Csulyák Miskolci, archdeacon of Zemplén also preserve many such records.13 In Küküllő, however, of the extremely sporadic cases almost all came up in the context of marital conflicts, sexual offences or disciplinary matters of the local clergy. These sources do however enable us to draw indirect conclusions regarding the customs of the larger community. In the course of the visitation in 1653, for instance, it came to light that on the second day of Easter youths danced in the granary of pastor Dániel Küküllővári from the village of Dányán (Daia, Romania) and the priest had his wheat reaped and a violinist invited on Sunday. Dániel Küküllővári faced no serious punishment for the transgressions, however. The archdeacon contented himself with a mere oral admonition. As far as the names of sinners are concerned or the punishments they were given, this information was not considered important enough to record in writing. It also turned out that the pastor of Gógánvárallja (Gogan Varolea, Romania) “freely allowed dance in the congregation” and did not enforce the punishment given to those who celebrated carnival. The names of the people who were dancing and taking part in the carnival games again were not noted, nor were the specific punishments.14

It is not easy to assess the available information and compare these data with other models of Calvinist Church discipline. The protocols suggest that carnival and dancing on feastdays were banned by Church decrees in Transylvania as well, and the archdeacon attempted to enforce this to some extent. But on the other hand, it is clear that there were pastors in rural congregations who, along with the local communities, didn’t adhere to these standards. One must also take into consideration that the protocols were drawn up in a society fundamentally based on orality, and no written records at congregational level survived from the period under investigation. Thus, compared to the Western European church examples that carried out extensive administrative activity and were organised at the congregational level, we are able to form a picture of only a slice of church discipline and the level of diocesan supervision in the Küküllő region in that period. All this raises serious problems of source criticism and also imposes limitations on comparability. However, the lack of sources at the congregational level can be partly counterbalanced by the fact that (due to the broad range of the archdeacon’s jurisdiction, in particular his right to impose excommunication) the more grievous disciplinary cases were settled not on the local level, but rather at diocesan forums. This means that the rulings in the most serious cases were made in a forum that has left us written records of its operation. This serves as a guide, even if they did not keep a regular register of persons condemned to excommunication or public penance.Thus we do not know precisely how the Church forums sanctioned the profanation of feast days or indulgence in banned customs, or how widely they extended these sanctions among the parishioners. Nonetheless, the lack of written documentation concerning matters of Church discipline involving members of the laity is striking. After all, in that period more important issues and escalated conflicts were recorded in writing, yet here we find no trace of mass bans or mass conflicts. The names of members of the laity who had committed transgressions were not even recorded. Like carnival and dancing, drunkenness and swearing were not mentioned in the registers as separate offences but rather as transgressions involving other violations of norms, as “aggravating circumstances,” for instance, and it is not clear on the basis of the sources whether they were sanctioned separately at all.

Thus one cannot conclude, on the basis of the absence of written records dealing specifically with the commission of such transgressions, that the Church forums of Küküllő did not handle such cases. But if a “coordinated purification campaign”15 resembling examples in Western Europe had been waged, it would certainly have left a trace in the protocols. The Küküllő disciplinary records that have survived from the seventeenth century indicate that the emphasis in Church discipline was not placed on the regulation of the behavior or religious lives of lay persons. We can also presume that in practice Church discipline was narrower in its range of motion than the sphere of transgressions designated by Church law as meriting sanction, and also narrowed in range than the practices characteristic of numerous Calvinist communities in Western Europe.16

Why is there little or no mention of failure to attend church, the profanation of feasts, or bans on folk customs in the seventeenth-century records of the Küküllő diocese? It seems unlikely that the communities of the valley of the Küküllő River were unusually devout in the practice of their religion. The causes in part arise from the nature of the sources. Many disciplinary cases were simply not recorded in writing. It is also probable that, because of the almost continuous military conflicts and the prevailing uncertainty, religion constituted a more powerful force for the communities, and perhaps they were more conscientious in their adherence to social norms and the expectations of the Church. However, one can also venture an explanation that is from a certain point of view contradictory, namely that in spite of the norms dictated by contemporary church and state laws, in reality the church expectations of the churchgoers did not cover a very broad spectrum and were largely adapted to local customs. Furthermore, given the prevailing instability and the recurring warfare, Church leadership only asserted its disciplinary authority in cases of severe transgressions. The fundamental question was the maintenance of basic social order, first and foremost strengthening the stability of the institution of marriage and the respect of norms by church office-bearers. And finally, there may have been significant regional differences in the matters of Church discipline. The predispositions of Church leaders and the customs regarding the maintenance of records both may well have determined the contents of the protocols and the types of cases that were regarded as important enough to merit written mention.

Changes That Took Place in the Eighteenth Century

Towards the end of the seventeenth century István Gönczi (1689–1712) arrived in the Küküllő diocese as archdeacon. The new archdeacon, who was unfamiliar with local conditions, became head of the diocese at an extremely challenging moment in the history of Transylvanian Calvinism, as the Habsburgs were endeavoring to assert their control and reassert the influence of the Catholic Church. As soon as he was able, Gönczi made a thorough assessment of the conditions. In consequence, he left historians with comparatively detailed written records. Records were drawn up regarding the relationship between the preacher and the congregation, and questions were raised concerning unsettled, sensitive issues in the interactions between the preachers, instructors, and churchgoers. As is eminently clear on the basis of the registers, one of the primary subjects of controversy between the Church and the members of the congregation was the issue of Church taxes. Notes regarding conflicts between the Aediles, who were responsible for overseeing the collection of Church taxes, and the members of the congregation (first and foremost the local nobility) became increasingly common, as did records regarding the imposition of fines for failure to assume the obligation of an office. In addition, in the course of the visitations increasing attention was paid to those who failed to attend church, and the names of individuals notorious for not going to church or not having taken the Lord’s Supper for a long time were registered. Also, parents were instructed to send their children to school. The last decade of Gönczi’s service as archdeacon was coincidental with the uprising against Habsburg dynasty led by Ferenc II Rákóczi. Regrettably very few written records survive from this period, a time of considerable devastation because of the constant military conflicts. The reorganization of diocesan government was undertaken by the next archdeacon, Simon György Bonyhai, who assumed the position as head of the diocese in 1712, under similarly difficult circumstances.

Bonyhai brought several innovations to the proceedings of visitations. For instance, he introduced the custom of a catalogue-type registering of church disciplinary matters in writing in the course of the annual visitations. In his first tour of inspection, between December 1712 and February 1713 he registered 183 more or less serious disciplinary affaires in the 36 congregations to which he paid visits. 13 of these concerned cases involving clergymen and their family, while the other 170 involved members of lay people. It was a relevant novelty compared to the previous visitation activity that a significant focus has been brought to the conduct of the laity besides the behavior of pastors and instructors.

The figures of disciplinary cases concerning lay people (Table 1) reveals that the new visitational practice of frequently and systematically registering various transgressions became an accepted custom in the diocese over the course of the eighteenth century. And as the changes in the items of the table indicate, after the first visitation (1712–1713) following the uprising led by Rákóczi the “most intensive decade of registering” was the period between 1721 and 1730. The number of disciplinary cases between 1731 and 1740 was barely more than two-thirds of the previous decade (69.9 percent). Between 1741 and 1750, this number dropped again to just over one-third (37.9 percent) and in the period between 1760 and 1770 it fell below one-third. Thus the figures suggest that the first third of the eighteenth century was the period of the most intense activity in the Küküllő diocese from the perspective of Church discipline conducted by the archdeacon.

In the context of individual settlements, while in the first third of the eighteenth century the visitation handled on average between two and four cases a year in an individual village or market-town, in the period between 1741 and 1750 this number dropped to an average of one or two. After 1750 it dropped again to one. These averages conceal significant differences, however. In extreme years seven or eight people were summoned by the visitation officials in a single settlement. There were also striking differences in the course of a single visitation. While in some villages there was not a single case of Church discipline, in others the number of the affairs discussed was extraordinarily high. In 1713, for instance, twelve people were convicted in Küküllővár (Cetatea-de-Balta, Romania), eleven in Kóródszentmárton (Coroisânmartin, Romania), nineteen in Marosbogát (Bogata, Romania), and twenty-one in Radnót (Iernut, Romania), all in the course of a single visitation.

Clearly these divergences are due in part to the size of the individual settlements and the differences in its confessional composition. Moreover, sometimes there were cases of local scandals that affected many of the members of the community and received considerable publicity, a detail not reflected in the mere numbers. But one of the most influential factors in the differences between the various congregations was the role of the pastor and noble patron and their attitudes towards Church discipline, not to mention the manner in which the local community adapted the institution of Church discipline into the prevailing system of customary law.

Controlling Public Religious Behavior

Considering the various categories of transgressions examined by the visitation in the period in question (Table 2), one notices that the second focal point of discipline of the period after efforts intended to ensure enforcement of sexual norms, was participation in Church rituals and communion. This was hardly incidental, since external signs of religious practice, and in particular participation in public services, were the most measurable and most easily verified indications of religious conformity. It is therefore not surprising that from the beginning of the eighteenth century almost all of the visitation protocols and Church court proceedings contained a wealth of information regarding observance of religious services by members of the local communities and the personal and public customs pertaining to church attendance. Below I examine disciplinary cases involving the offences against standards related to public religious conduct and the means with which the Church attempted to assert its authority and maintain control.

In that period violation of religious conformity, including the failure to attend Church services counted as a crime punishable not only under Church laws but also under state laws. Beginning with the first disciplinary Church rules in the sixteenth century, one of the recurring punishments for failure to attend church was exclusion from communion and the denial of funeral rites. The canon collection assembled by Superintendent István Geleji Katona in 1649, which served as the Church lawbook for Transylvania at the time, included this ruling.17 Contemporary state laws imposed typical secular punishments. According to the notable Act of 1619, however, which were points of reference in the secular jurisdiction in Transylvania, those who profaned feast days or broke the Sabbath were to pay fines. The Act of 1664 added the stipulation that peasants should be put in the stocks if they failed to attend church three times without justification.

In spite of the strict Church and state laws, one finds only a single case in the Küküllő disciplinary sources for the whole of the seventeenth century that can be tied to the public practice of religion and transgressions of religious standards and conduct. In 1668 a woman and her daughter were punished by the ecclesiastical court for disorderly conduct in the church. They were punished, however, with little more than a trifling fine (4 forint), half of which was dropped as they were able to provide bond.18 Apart from this case, there are no written records from the period before the end of the century regarding the control or supervision of the religious conformity and convictions of the members of the congregation, or for that matter their knowledge of religious dogma. The visitation registers began to deal with the religious conduct of the laity towards the end of the seventeenth century. It is worth noting that the first visitation records of that kind were still exclusively concerned with public praxis of religiosity and referred to the communities as a whole. But as of the 1720s, attention gradually shifted to the level of the individual. They began to enter the names of notorious absentees from church and of persons who failed to take communion for a long time.

While the first notes concerning the transgression of religious norms were made at the end of the seventeenth century, the maintenance of regular records of participation in public religious ceremonies can be regarded as one of the novelties of the eighteenth century. The complaint that members of the community were not attending church regularly arose in only three of the thirty-six congregations visited in 1713, and in addition twelve of the sinners were listed by name in the pages of the protocol. In contrast, over the course of the visitation in 1726 pastors in one out of every four (seven out of twenty-seven) parishes made the general complaint that “people do not [feel that they] need the church,” and the names of fifteen “negligents” living in the diocese were recorded. In 1731 some kind of critical remark was made regarding church attendance in every other parish, and the names of thirty-four persons were recorded in the documents regarding disciplinary measures. Of the thirty-one congregations visited by the archdeacon, he found only six in which not a single complaint was made regarding regular religious practices. In other words, in 80 percent of the congregations offenses against standards involving the public practice of religion were recorded. In 1734 the intensity of the supervision of religious regulations on the communal level dropped significantly, but the proportion of matters regarding individuals who failed to attend Church services did not change. While the general complaint that Church attendance was not satisfactory was made of only three of the twenty-seven communities, twenty-one people were summoned individually to appear before the archdeacon. One notices a similar though less pronounced tendency two years later. In 1736 complaints were made regarding two congregations and the names of sixteen people who had committed transgressions were recorded in the visitation protocols.

Thus as of the beginning of the eighteenth century the Church gradually devoted increasing attention to regular church attendance and taking of the Communion. In the 1720s, the number of entries regarding disciplinary measures taken against those who failed to attend services rose dramatically in the Küküllő diocese, reaching a peak in the 1730s. After this, although registers continued to be kept up until the end of the century regarding violations of religious norms, but as of the 1740s the number of written comments concerning participation in public ceremonies became sporadic. Although the number of individuals whose names were included in the records grew in the 1720s and the first years of the 1730s, the average number in the diocese still did not exceed one or two persons per congregation.

While in general the entries did not give details on the nature of the transgressions, a few references can serve as an indication of the causes of the absence and the nature of the religious behavior expected by the church. It becomes clear, for instance, that in some of the cases the entire congregation failed to attend weekday services. However, it is worth keeping in mind that at least in principle the Church decrees required quite frequent attendance at church. According to the Geleji canon, Church services were to be held four times a week. Sermons were supposed to be held twice every Sunday, morning and afternoon, and according to the Church statutes two services were to be held on weekdays as well. Furthermore, on days when there were no services, in principle the pastor held prayers twice a day and read passages of Scripture.19 In practice, however, these regulations were rarely met. For instance, according to the 1721 visitation notes, in the village of Bethlenszentmiklós (Sânmiclăus, Romania) no services were held on weekdays whatsoever.20 In many cases the religious zeal of the members of filial congregations in which there was no permanent pastor were found wanting. For instance, according to the records of the 1721 visitation, in Egrestő (Agrişteu, Romania), the “filial” village of Balavásár (Bălăuşeri, Romania), when the instructor rang the church bells, sometimes no one went to the service.21 Furthermore, failure to attend church was often more common in the summer, when members of the congregation saw to seasonal agricultural work instead of meeting the expectations of the Church.

In addition, the first signs appeared in the records referring not simply to the impious behavior of individuals, but to the irreligious, profane conduct of whole communities. Failure to attend church services began to be associated with profanation of a feast day, in other words the indulgence in secular forms of entertainment in sacred time. For instance, in 1722 the complaint was made that the parishioners of the community of Csávás (Ceuaş, Romania) failed to attend services and preferred instead to carouse. According to the 1728 visitation many of the members of the congregation of Erzsébetváros (Dumbrăveni, Romania), including many of the elderly, profaned the Sabbath by dancing and drinking.22 In certain cases the difficulties encountered in introducing the new religious regulations can be sensed; in a number of cases, for example, local resistance to schooling and the catechism of girls can be observed. In these cases, complaints regarding poor church attendance were made as part of the larger endeavor of the Church to promote new religious teachings and change the religious mentality.

The division of the complaints according to gender is also interesting. Complaints against men usually involved agricultural work or indulgence in worldly pleasures, such us spending time at the inn. More surprising, however, were the frequent complaints concerning the habits of women with regards to church attendance, such as the laments that “the women do not want to go to church,” “the women do not really go to church,” and “both the men and the women are admonished, but primarily the women, not to neglect to attend church.”23 The very brief entries in the protocols reveal little concerning possible explanations for what lay behind the phenomenon. One might venture the hypothesis that in this case there was tension between a traditional conception of religious representation and a new approach. The feudal world tended to think in terms of households, not individuals, and thus earlier it may well have been considered sufficient if only the head of the household attended services. The records from the early eighteenth century may well indicate that the Church had begun to call this custom into question and had aspired to insist that women also attend services. It hardly seems mere coincidence that these records appeared, if sporadically, precisely at the time that the Church increased its efforts to supervise the catechism of girls more closely.

Another important note pertaining to the religious conduct of women concerned a debate regarding Church seating order and the behavior of the congregation during the service. For instance, the women were admonished not to converse on the benches beside the church building during the service, but rather to sit in the pew that had been assigned to them and listen to the sermon. Seating order in the church mirrored the local social hierarchy. Matters in which someone failed to attend a service because of a debate concerning seating order reflected veiled communal conflicts and tensions in the local social hierarchy. The Church court dealt with these cases individually and accurately specified seats in the pews for the litigants according to their social positions, and these decisions were attentively recorded in writing by the visitation officials.

Many entries can be read from the period in question that drew distinctions between the sinners on the basis of their social status. However, these data lead to different conclusions. For instance, among the villagers of Bernád (Bernadea, Romania), particularly the peasants were accused of negligence about attending Church services, while in Csávás the local pastor complained about the habits of the well-to-do husbandmen. With regards to the people of Egrestő, the visitation noted that “the members of the nobility are particularly cold in their service of the Lord.”24

Thus in the early eighteenth century we see the appearance of a new dimension of disciplinary activity focusing on the intensity or laxity of public religious practice. Since data from Küküllő on the earlier periods of religious practice at local level enabling a comparison has not survived, it is difficult to assess the religious, social, or cultural factors that lay in the background. Have we really detected a shift in the models of communal religious behavior and a drop in participation in religious services? Do the sources suggest that a system of rules that more or less had prevailed was weakening? What lies in the background of this phenomenon? The slackening of communal norms as a consequence of armed conflicts? Unfavorable shifts in political circumstances in the wake of efforts by the Habsburg Court to reassert Catholicism? Or were there other factors? Or perhaps the attitude of the Church leadership changed, devoting greater attention than in the previous periods to the perception of transgressions of the law regarding church presence and recording them in writing. And of this was so, can this be interpreted in the larger framework of the endeavor to change the religious mentality of communities?

In order to offer a nuanced answer to this obviously complex question, one would need additional sources. But even in this stage, it is nonetheless worth considering a few possibilities on the basis of the available sources. Religious prescriptions for individuals and communities and actual religious practice coincide only in exceptional cases, to use Max Weber’s expression, only in the case of religious virtuosi. For this reason the tension between norm and practice can always emerge in conflicts, regardless of the historical era in question. As described above, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Church and secular laws often specified the punishments for transgressions involving the public practice of religion.

The familiar topos of the moral decline of the community that is turning away from God and the church and has become forgetful of divine punishment already figured prominently in the famous laws passed by Prince Gábor Bethlen in 1619. However, in actual church disciplinary practice, on the basis of the written sources in the Küküllő diocese, failure to attend church only began to be treated as a serious transgression in the eighteenth century. Although the brief, formalized language of the protocols offers few insights into the actual circumstances, it is nevertheless a fact that as they moved from one congregation to another they named various social groups and divergent circumstances in their catalogues of transgressions (women, men, smallholders, nobles, old people, young people, weekdays, Sundays, feast days, etc.), suggesting that what lay in the background was not simply the revival of the old stereotype of decline, but rather departures from religious norms at the level of concrete, individual realities. At the same time it is worth keeping another phenomenon in mind. The texts of a few of the judgements suggests that in addition to adopting increasingly strict expectations concerning religious conduct, the Church was striving to find a balance between the liturgical requirements and real life. This led to subtle compromises between communal customs and the church’s expectations. This can clearly be seen in the wording of a judgement made during the visitation in 1734, stating that the members of the congregation of Királyfalva (Crăieşti, Romania) were expected to attend church on weekdays too whenever they could. In 1736 a ruling was issued in Teremi (Teremia Mare, Romania) admonishing the members of the congregation to be more conscientious about attending church. Otherwise, those who failed to attend the services would be buried without a church ceremony.25 Thus the expectations of the Church were by no means absolutely categorical. Only those who did not attend the services with due frequency were threatened with spiritual punishment. In 1728 the visitation warned the pastor of Kóródszentmárton, instructing him, “when there are believers present [on Sunday], to deliver a sermon twice.”26 In this case, the preacher had neglected to hold the afternoon Sunday sermon. Some members of the congregation, however, presumably continued to call for the second Sunday ceremony. Notably, the visitation did not reprimand the members of the congregation who had failed to attend the second service, but rather, making allowances for local conditions, admonished the pastor. In any case, the surviving written records indicate slow changes in habits pertaining to church attendance and a gradual decline in participation in church services other than the Sunday morning sermon.

Matters revealing, the brevity of the sources notwithstanding, some kind of personal conflict constitute another important group of violations of religious conformity. In general one has the impression that when people’s names were included in the written records, this was because of some kind of personal motive. One of the reasons for failure to attend services may have been a personal conflict with a family member or a member of the larger community or an unresolved family dispute. A further reason may simply have been the desire to avoid the public penance and reconciliation before the assembled community. Failure to attend services in certain cases stretched over long periods of time, even years. However, most frequently the refusal to attend church could be traced back to a personal conflict with the minister. Indeed, in certain cases even the brief texts reveal that absence from church was interpreted as a public gesture of open opposition to the minister that was clearly understood as such by the community. The case of Mihály Nagy of Bernád offers a clear example of this. While the instructor was dictating the first hymn of the service, he remained in the church, but when the pastor began to preach, he left the building.27

The sources offer few insights into the conflicts. Some of the entries referring to the causes indicate a difference of views regarding church services. Frequently the disciplinary activity of the minister or the instructor was the cause of the anger. Other conflicts were due to economic considerations. People failed to attend services because of disputes arising over provision of the minister’s payment in the form of produce, or refusal to do the required work led to absence from religious services. In certain cases the minister’s behavior seems to have been the cause of the resistance. This seems to bee true in the case of the pastor of Kerelőszentpál (Sânpaul, Romania), who was accused of family quarrels, frequently neglecting to hold services, failing to announce Communion at the proper time and squabbling with members of the congregation. Given his conduct, people “didn’t even go to church.”

Thus when someone failed to take part in the religious life of the community, the most common reason was a personal conflict with the local clergyman. Failure to attend church, however, did not necessarily mean failure to participate in all religious rituals. The case of Mrs. István Szabó of Kutyfalva (Cuci, Romania) is one example of this. She was angry at the local pastor and so had her child baptized by the minister in another village. Her example indicates a phenomenon that has not yet been made the subject of thorough study. Because of her conflict with the local priest, she turned for assistance to the minister of another congregation to administer the sacrament. Historians have been familiar with this phenomenon, but most often with regards to weddings. In such cases, the bride and groom would turn to another pastor, often (Church and secular prohibitions notwithstanding) a pastor belonging to a different denomination, if in the course of the proceedings some obstacle were to arise, for instance if one of the two families happened to oppose the marriage or the prevailing Church laws for some reason prevented the two from marrying. In the case of Mrs. Szabó, however, her decision to have her child baptized by another pastor was due not to some external hindrance, but rather her personal conflict with the local priest. The records from Küküllő indicate that her case was by no means unique.

The 1738 visitation forbade the members of the congregation in general from taking Communion in another parish. This prohibition was made without mention of any specific individual case, suggesting that in fact the practice was widespread.28 In Búzásbesnyő (Valea Izvoarelor, Romania), the Church body that performed the visitation threatened the ex-churchwarden and another man, both of whom were embroiled in a conflict with the local pastor over the collection of taxes, with exclusion from the churches in the neighboring villages. It is an indication of the limits of church control that despite the general ban, the visitation was unable to take any effective action against the two men. In 1754, after a good ten years had passed, the two men, who regularly took Lord’s Supper in another congregation, were again admonished to attend services and take Communion in the church in their village.29 The sources thus indicate that there existed a pattern in the religious practice of the period that overstepped the local parochial order, and members of local congregations would attend services in other communities as a consequence of conflicts with local pastors.

While the citations above suggest that it was not unheard of for churchgoers to attend the Calvinist church of a neighboring village instead of the one in their own communities, references have survived in the Küküllő sources to examples of persons crossing denominational borders on occasion in areas with a mixed population. The people of Balavásár who attended services at the evangelical Saxon church and the people of Harangláb (Hărănglab, Romania) and Ádámos (Adămuş, Romania) who attended the Unitarian church raise another important question, namely the nature of the borders of individual and communal confessional consciousness and identity in the early modern era. The Church leadership made repeated efforts to strengthen confessional identity, reinforce the borders between different denominations, and forbid members of one congregation from participating in services held by other denominations. For instance, women who attended services at the Unitarian church were admonished: “Do not disgrace our sacred faith by attending the churches of other faiths. If you consider yourselves Calvinists, attend our church and provide the pastor and instructor with their pay.”30 The sources, however, reveal that some of the members of local communities overstepped these borders. In order to be able to assess the actual frequency of this phenomenon, however, we would need additional sources.

The sources yield further insights if the surviving remarks are considered from the perspective of the individuals involved. In many of these cases one can sense that the persons who were summoned to appear before the Church disciplinary bodies had violated the moral standards of both the village community and the Church with their conduct in a number of ways. In most cases the various conflicts and violations of individual and communal norms were intertwined, as for instance in the case of István Vas of Csávás. In the three decades between 1712 and 1744 Vas was summoned to appear before the visitation on ten different occasions. His transgressions included blasphemy, swearing, bearing false witness, mistreating his wife, and refusing to pay Church taxes. Furthermore, he was repeatedly admonished for having failed to attend church or take Communion. In addition to numerous oral admonitions and threats of excommunication, he was in fact excommunicated three times, twice for blasphemy and once for having born false witness. His case was by no means unique. If one examines the cases of individuals who were summoned to appear before the visitation more closely, one notes that many of the names recur frequently. In Bonyha and its filial church, Bernád, between 1721 and 1741, of the 74 people listed by name in the protocols 20 recur more than once (27 percent). In Kóródszentmárton 40 names were recorded once, but 30 were registered at least twice (43 percent), and it was not at all uncommon for one name to figure more than three times in the visitation records (there were twelve such cases). In the villages of Balavásár and Egrestő, over the course of the two decades in question 56 people were summoned to appear before the visitation. 24 of them (40 percent) were summoned at least twice. Nine people were summoned more than three times.

Refusal to Take the Lord’s Supper

One of the most powerful symbols of conflict, both for the community and for the Church superiors, was refusal to take Communion. According to Church teachings, as a ritual the sacrament of Communion bore the essence of all of the articles of Christian faith, reminding churchgoers of the crucifixion, forgiveness, and the promise of redemption and also enabling them to express their submission to the will of the Lord. The Lord’s Supper also served as a symbolic manifestation of the unity of the congregation. It made the group of churchgoers a sacred community of believers. Thus it was both sacrament and public ritual expressing communal cohesion. The refusal to take Communion thus represented rejection of the sacrament but also of the larger community.

Thus alongside participation in church services, the Lord’s Supper was the other emblematic element of the public, communal practice of religion. The regular taking of Communion has therefore been considered by scholars as a good measure of religious conformity.31 In many cases, however, refusal to take Communion was due to personal conflicts, as was the case with failure to attend church services. This was true in the case in a dispute between two men from Kóródszentmárton, both of whom were admonished by the visitation not to bear anger towards each other, which causes them not to partake in the sacrament of Lord’s Supper.32

In his study of the protocols of the visitation of the Württemberg Lutheran Church David Warren Sabean examines the conflicts that arose regarding Communion and the refusal to attend the Lord’s Supper. He contends that behind the cases of refusals among the peasantry to take part in the celebration of Communion in the sixteenth century one can detect internal communal conflicts and ritual expressions of dissension. According to the teachings of the Church and the local communal norms, the attending of Communion had to be preceded by a show of repentance of the sins and reconciliation. The Württemberg peasants who lived in a state of conflict, restlessness, and ultimately sin, were, according to their convictions, in a ritually endangered state. If they were to take Communion unworthily, they would face the Lord’s judgment and would endanger not only themselves, but the entire congregation.33 According to Sabean’s analysis, in contrast with the Church leaders, who sought to reconcile the parties to disputes and urged them to take Communion as quickly as possible, the villagers saw the conflict as a secular affair that the individual’s conscience and inner spiritual relief could not remedy. Such disputes, in their view, could only be dealt with by the secular juridical institutions, in a well-ordered, legal manner.

The judgements of the Küküllő diocese in the eighteenth century reveal signs of this conception as well. If a Church forum found someone guilty of a transgression, the person in question first had to settle the case in the secular court. The offender first had to suffer the penalty issued by the secular court and only then came the ritualized form of repentance, public penance. The religious community only then could re-integrate him or her into the fold, and only then could a penitent offender take Communion as part of the congregation. The conflict could be solved with the assistance of formal juridical institutions. One finds an example of the acceptance of this approach by the Church in the case of the elder Mrs. Beregi of Boldogfalva, who according to the visitation was embroiled in a conflict with Mrs. György Molnár and so did not take Communion. Her case was heard by the village court. She appealed the decision of the court, but she did not take the other necessary steps and she did not demonstrate to the visitation officials any willingness to make peace. Thus she did not move her case forward. She did not do everything to settle the conflict legally and restore peace. The visitation threatened her with excommunication if she did not resolve the case within two weeks.34 Thus the Church officials in Küküllő in the eighteenth century—in contrast with officials in Württemberg in the sixteenth century—accepted that litigation held before the secular tribunal excluded contestants from taking Communion. The litigants were obliged to resolve the legal situation, which meant temporary exclusion from the community of the faithful, as soon as possible in order to restore the peace. Since Mrs. Beregi was unwilling to do this, she herself was seen as culpable.

If, however, the Church did not find a reason to ban someone from taking Communion, neither a crime awaiting the punishment of the secular court nor a litigious matter, it required the believers to attend the Lord’s Supper. This attitude was reflected in the case of Mrs. Márton Székely. The Church warned her “not to neglect Communion just because of base household quarrels, but rather take the Lord’s Supper more often.”35 Mrs. Székely, demonstrating her lay interpretation of Communion, understood refusal to take Communion as a ritual expression of a tense situation that represented a direct physical and spiritual danger. The local church leaders, in contrast, did not consider the “base household quarrels” as a matter to be addressed by the criminal forums, nor did it see them as transgressions that would endanger the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. They interpreted the conduct of members of the congregations who failed to take Communion “without real reason” as a challenge to the orthodox ritual religious practices and a sign of resistance to Church authority, since refusal to take Communion constituted a withdrawal from the community of the faithful.

In an essay on the practice of attending Communion in the village communities of Wiltshire, Donald A. Spaeth examines another reason for refusal to participate in the fundamental ritual. He analyzes cases from the Anglican Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the parishioners were unwilling to take Holy Communion if they saw the minister as immoral. According to Spaeth, in their view a pastor who led an unholy life was not fit to administer the sacrament. To accept Holy Communion from such a pastor would be to violate the sacrament itself. This folk interpretation may explain a case noted by the Küküllő visitation in 1722, when members of the congregation in the town of Radnót indicated that they were unwilling to take Communion if the sacrament were administered by the local pastor.

These examples all suggest that, given the ambiguous popular attitude of lay people towards Communion, an attitude marked both by awe and respect, and their fear of the Lord’s wrath should they violate the ritual, one cannot interpret failure to take Communion simply as a sign of a lack of interest in the ritual or a decline in religious commitment or piety. Indeed in certain cases it may well indicate a more strict interpretation of and adherence to the spiritual importance of religious ritual. Thus (to echo Spaeth’s conclusion) failure to attend the Lord’s Supper cannot be seen as an index of piety or religious zeal.36

Punishments

In the period under investigation violations of religious conformity, including failure to attend church services, were seen as crimes that were punished by Church and state alike. The sixteenth and seventeenth-century state laws sanctioned failure to attend church with characteristically secular penalties. However, the Church strove increasingly to enforce religious conformity by referring to the spiritual dangers that awaited offenders. Indeed in the 1720s and 1730s these kinds of transgressions were punished exclusively with spiritual sanctions.

As the visitation records reveal, however, the continuous admonitions notwithstanding, no one was ever actually excommunicated for having failed to attend sermons. In contrast, those who were found guilty of swearing or having broken oaths or committed sexual transgressions comprised the overwhelming majority of people sentenced to excommunication or reconciliation; persons who failed to attend church and lived without taking communion were ordered again and again to appear before the visitation, their names were recorded, they were admonished and threatened with the most severe spiritual sanctions, but in no case were they condemned to excommunication or public penance.

Summary

The period in which the greatest emphasis was placed on the enforcement of religious conformity coincided with the period when maintenance of written records regarding transgressions committed by members of the laity became far more widespread than previously.

The requirement of a more intensive presence arose from the same aspiration as the efforts to ensure control of schooling and catechism and efforts to spread Christian teachings more effectively. Moreover, this process began in a political context that had undergone a fundamental shift. The Principality of Transylvania lost its independence, becoming part of the Habsburg Empire. The Transylvanian Church, which had enjoyed the status of a quasi-state Church, found itself the target of the Habsburg’s recatholicization efforts.

Within a short while its most urgent problem became the struggle against the occupation of its churches, conversions and cuts in ministers’ benefits. In a hostile environment in which it was increasingly difficult to have sanctions against members of the community carried out by the secular authorities, increased emphasis must have been placed on the ritual strengthening of denominational community bonds. Church membership could be defined most clearly through participation in the rites, and for this reason the church leadership also interpreted church attendance and taking communion as a sign of belonging to the community.

However, the more extensive, comprehensive control did not at the same time mean that punishments became more intensive or severe. We cannot speak in this diocese of an all-embracing, strict disciplinary campaign, of a systematic, consistent endeavor to change religious mentality, in the words of the American sociologist Philip Gorski of a “disciplinary revolution” in the control of public religious practice. The expectations of the Church were not that high.There is no indication that the church strove to impose regular attendance on all members of the community. It did not really have the means to have done so. The list of recurring names of notorious offenders does suggest that there was a clearly identifiable stratum impervious to the efforts of the visitation, against whom the instruments of church discipline proved inadequate.

Archival sources

KükEhmLvt prot. I/1: A Küküllői Református Egyházmegye levéltára. Parciális zsinati jegyzőkönyv [Archive of the Küküllő Calvinist Church. Partial Synodic Protocols]. 1639–1673. OSZK Filmtári dsz: MF/1. 3713.

KükEhmLvt prot. II/1. Vizitációs jegyzőkönyv 1648–1658 [Visitation Protocols 1648–1658]. OSZK Filmtári dsz: MF/1. 3710.

KükEhmLvt prot. I/2. Vegyes vizitációs és parciális zsinati jegyzőkönyvek 1677–1713 [Visitation and Partial Synodic Protocols 1677–1713]. OSZK Filmtári dsz: MF/1. 3711.

KükEhmLvt prot. II/2. Vizitációs jegyzőkönyv 1713–1725 [Visitation Protocols 1713–1725]. OSZK Filmtári dsz. MF/1. 3712.

KükEhmLvt prot. II/3. Vizitációs jegyzőkönyv 1725–1761 [Visitation Protocols 1725–1761]. OSZK Filmtári dsz. MF/1. 3718.

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Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Mihály Balázs

Tolerant Country – Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion1

In this essay, I offer a new interpretation of the religious laws that were passed in Transylvania between 1568 and 1571. I conclude that the interpretations that have been ventured so far in the secondary literature have failed to provide a concrete analysis of the relationships between different confessions, either because of national prejudice or because of general ignorance of prevailing conditions at the time. As a consequence, a view has gained acceptance in several comprehensive works according to which, by recognizing the four confessions in Transylvania, lawmakers sought to ensure the survival of the newly emerged principality. I offer a thorough study of the texts of the laws in support of my contention that this is not the case. The laws include no specific list of the four confessions. The first such list dates from 1595, the year after which the laws make mention of the Orthodox religion of the Romanian speaking population as a tolerated religion. As my analysis clearly demonstrates, up until the end of the century the most important goal of the laws was the continuous assertion of the Protestant identity of the Principality, and paradoxically this did not even change in 1571, when the Roman Catholic István Báthory came to the Transylvanian throne. Until the middle of the 1570s this Protestant identity was essentially undivided due to the unparalleled slowness (in comparison with the rest of Europe) of the spread of confessionalism. It is worth noting that until the early 1570s the prince and those closest to him saw the restoration of Protestant unity in Europe as the mission of Transylvanian Protestantism, and this meant attempting to spread Protestantism among the Orthodox communities of the country. At the same time, the estates in Transylvania, a principality that saw itself as fundamentally Protestant, sought to ensure the preservation of conditions necessary for the survival of the religious lives of the dwindling number of Catholics.

keywords: Principality of Transylvania, religious plurality, confessionalization, tolerance

Introduction: Legislation in 1568 and 1571

The process that eventually led to the formulation of a new state, the Transylvanian principality, in the eastern region of medieval Hungary gained additional momentum in the mid-1550s. In addition to new institutions of statehood, the new organizational forms of religious life also had to be established. Probably the most important step, which in the long run determined the limits of this process, was a claim by Queen Isabel, the widow of János Szapolyai, who returned from Poland. At the diet of Torda (today Turda, Romania), held in February 1557, she declared that according to her office and her royal dignity (pro functione et dignitate nostra regali) she regarded it as her duty to protect all religious denominations within her country. Various explanations suggest that her son, who considered himself the King of Hungary at the end of his life (Johannes secundus electus rex Hungariae), followed the same principle, as did his sixteenth and seventeenth-century followers, whose titles were restricted to Princeps Transylvaniae. This law (ius patronatus) meant that until the end of the seventeenth century the bishops of the emerging denominations could only begin their endeavors after they had acquired the necessary royal warrant.

At the same time, the actual ruler always proclaimed his religious orders after having heard the Diet. Therefore, the Diets were probably the most important forum for the discussion of such orders, although these discussions might have been instrumental to some extent because of the superiority of the royal power. For alongside representatives of the three nations who participated in the operation of the state (Hungarians, Saxons, Székelys), it was the actual ruler who made decisions about the participants of any given diet. The Prince and the Council operating alongside him were also responsible for selecting the topics to be discussed, so it was ultimately the Prince who decided when and in whose presence religious questions would be put on the agenda. Because of the later destruction in the archives of the Principality, no documents from the preparatory phase of decision-making remain, so historians have little more than the texts of the legal articles themselves on which to base conclusions. From the 1560s on, these were written in Hungarian, although the introductory formulas, which declare that the ruler vouchsafes to confirm the text of the law in question on the request of the citizens of the country, remained in Latin until the end of the sixteenth century. Under these circumstances, the laws are of profound importance to any attempt to study the boundaries of contemporary religious life, and they tend to include more elaborate, developed arguments as of the second half of the 1560s. There is consensus among historians that in this respect as well, the highest standards are represented by the texts composed in the last phase of the reign of Zsigmond János, between 1568 and 1571. Yet the assessments made by Hungarian scholars differ in tone and content from the international secondary literature on the topic.

Hungarian scholars frequently claim that these laws turned Transylvania into an exceptionally tolerant country, the pioneer of legislated religious freedom, an example that was followed by other European countries only centuries later.2 Foreign scholars, when placing the Transylvanian phenomena on the map of early modern Europe, seem completely ignorant of these claims, or they tacitly dismiss them as exaggerations.3 Both approaches are based on topoi instead of a precise and detailed discussion of the individual characteristics. In the first case, the topos of national bias is obvious. In the second instance, the topos is linked to the borderline position of the principality (which became a buffer zone between two world empires) and to its varied ethnic and religious landscape. (As early as the Middle Ages, several ethnic groups lived in Transylvania, and the presence of the Eastern Orthodox Church ab ovo assured confessional pluralism.4) Recent works by Gábor Barta and Ágnes Várkonyi, although providing a more refined historical background, give no concrete analysis of confessional relationships; they offer a picture that is already widely accepted in Hungary because of popular accounts and summaries.5

According to this concept, the important laws conceived during the second part of the 1560s were the result of a fascinating confessional pluralism caused by the unique situation of the Principality. With these laws, the leaders of Transylvanian political life were able to secure internal order and peace. For a country wedged between two world powers, this was a basic precondition of survival; the already ethnically fragmented new political construction could not afford to become the site of bloody confessional struggles and religious wars. This led to a unique event in European history, namely the institutionalization of the four received religions (Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian), with the further addition of tolerance for the Orthodox Church.

In what follows, I attempt to draft a new model. The most important claim is that the purpose of the famous laws created in the final period of Zsigmond János’s reign was to establish the Protestant religious identity of the newly created country, and the rights of other non-Protestant denominations were acknowledged only in the last decade of the century. In the course of this inquiry, I concentrate on the texts of two laws to which the representatives of the aforementioned concept frequently refer. Below is the text of the laws enacted in Torda in January, 1568, then in Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureș, Romania) in January, 1571, both originally written in Hungarian.

January 1568, Torda

According to agreements reached at previous sittings of the Diet between His Majesty and the people of his realm concerning matters of religion, it is once again confirmed by this present sitting that pastors shall be free to preach and teach the Gospel wherever they may be and according to their own interpretation. If a parish chooses to accept this interpretation, well and good; if not, the parish shall not be forced to accept it against its will and shall be free to insist upon the maintenance of a preacher whose teachings suit its requirements. Following former constitutions, none of the superintendents, nor any other person shall have the right to offend a pastor or abuse anyone on the basis of his religion, nor shall anyone be threatened with imprisonment or removal from office for his preaching. Faith is a gift of God received through hearing, the vehicle of God’s word.6

January 1571, Marosvásárhely

It has been decided concerning the preaching of God’s word that, just as Your Majesty earlier decided with the Diet, the word of God shall be preached freely everywhere. No one, neither preacher nor listener, shall come to harm on account of his confession, but if a minister should fall into criminal excess, he shall be condemned and deprived of all his functions by the superintendent, and then shall be banished from the realm.7

However, it is equally important from the perspective of this inquiry to emphasize the importance of two other laws which many representatives of the aforementioned concept treat only superficially, if at all. Thus, in another part of the previously cited text of the law from Torda one reads the following:

We humbly report to your Majesty that there are many in your Majesty’s country who disobey the Wallachian bishop, who was appointed to this position by your grace; they prefer to follow the former priests and their heresies, and prevent the bishop from properly fulfilling his duties; therefore we beg your Majesty to graciously grant the advancement of the Gospel according to your Majesty’s earlier decree concerning the country, and to punish those who dare oppose it.

The Limits of Tolerance

The enactment in Medgyes (today Mediaș, Romania) of the following law in January 1570 is also highly relevant:

January 1570, Medgyes

We will carry out Your Majesty’s order concerning the newly emerging heresies and their initiators; that Your Majesty considers honoring God and respecting his royal dignity of foremost importance, therefore he does not tolerate such blasphemy and heresy in his realm, but rather scrutinizes them and punishes both their authors and propagators in order to avoid an even greater divine wrath upon us.

If, as a first step, one interprets this latter passage, it becomes obvious that in contrast to the passages cited from 1568 and 1571, there are serious restrictions here, and those who propagated ideas deemed heretical or blasphemous had to face the prospect of retribution.

More serious historians, however, did not ignore these laws. Rather they attempted to arrive at an explanation for the restrictive character of the last one cited here and for its vast difference from the first two. There are two common types of explanations regarding this. According to one, those who drafted this law had long-term considerations in mind. The extremely influential historian, Gyula Szekfű, offered the most suggestive explanation: in his view, the reason for introducing these restrictions was that unconstrained freedom in religious matters following the edict of 1568 was visibly leading to liberalism and anarchy.8 Another version of this interpretation is Márta Fata’s recent extensive summary, published in Germany. In Fata’s view, the resulting “individuelle Konfessionswahl bedrohte jedoch die bestehene Ordnung, so 1570 das Gesetz auf Ersuchen der Stände zurückgezogen werden musste. Individuelle Religionsfreiheit konnte im ethnisch–ständisch organisierten Siebenbürgen des 16. Jahrhunderts noch nicht funktionieren” (“individual choice of confession, however, threatened established order, so in 1570 the law had to be withdrawn given the conditions. Individual freedom of religion could not yet function in the ethnically-corporative Transylvania of the sixteenth century”).9

Given the significance of this interpretation, I wish to make it clear that I consider the modernizing attitude palpable in this quotation highly suspect. In line with Axel Gotthard10 and others, I believe that there is no reason to project twentieth-century notions of individual religious freedom and human rights onto sixteenth-century documents. The sixteenth-century laws deal not with individuals but with groups of people, communities, and confessions, as well as the territories in which they lived all over Europe. Only as the result of a long process could freedom of conscience emerge as a problem of the individual. Returning to the topic at hand, Szekfű and his followers obviously made the mistake of failing to provide an answer to the following question: after the 1570 restrictive law, why did the Diet of January 1571 in Marosvásárhely once again accept a law much like the one in 1568, that is, a tolerant one?

I share the view of the second group of historians, who think that in 1570 the short-term measure was directed against a newly emerging group or phenomenon. This view can be supported by the following consideration: it had been customary even in the case of religious laws that the introduction to the core content also makes reference to the earlier, related law. This is not the case here; the article does not refer to any antecedents. More importantly, the text refers not to customary “matters of religion” or confession, but rather heresies, moreover, “recently emerging heresies.” It is highly probable that this was related to the sudden appearance of a representative of anabaptist-spiritualist ideas. The information comes from a letter that Samuil Goldenberg found in the archives in Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania).

The German-language letter, written in Krakow, Poland in February 1570, was sent to Gaspar Helt (Gáspár Heltai), one of the ministers and most important men of the Saxon congregation. The author of the letter was a preacher named Elias Gczmidele, who had earlier been expelled from Kolozsvár. The letter, which is full of reproaches, reports that Gczmidele, a sort of wandering preacher, was spreading pacifism and communitarianism in the city of Kolozsvár. Because of this activity, some kind of church court of justice sentenced him to be expelled from the city.11 Heltai’s prayer book (Gebetbuch) is a rich source of additional information. It turned out that Heltai re-wrote Johann Habermann’s prayers and added his own commentaries to bring them up-to-date. The commentaries written during these months reflect Heltai’s overwhelming concern with similar views, which were even being spread among the Hungarian speaking population. He passionately condemns those who viewed prayer and churchgoing as entirely futile.12 If one also considers that Gczmidele admittedly interpreted Luther’s much-debated ideas concerning the Turks to suggest that taking any action against the Turks would be a great mistake, one can understand why both religious and secular leaders of the city had to register the spread of ideas that were extremely dangerous in a political sense as well. Therefore, it seemed reasonable for the Diet to take measures. One should remember that this view concerning the Turkish problem in Kolozsvár had a very different meaning than in other places within the empire. In support of upcoming reflections we can at least state that when circumstances dictated, freedom in preaching the gospel was also restricted in Kolozsvár.

Protestant Universalism in Sixteenth-Century Transylvania

If one considers Olivier Christin13 and Eike Wolgast’s14 attempt to arrive at a complete typology, or other comparisons15 when examining these long-term laws, one realizes that, despite the remarkable presence of theological argumentation, the taxonomy of the relevant confessions is missing. This omission is hardly compatible with the popular view cited earlier. If these laws reflected an inter-confessional peace among the established churches, a careful listing of them would be inevitable. How can such an enumeration be missing when the condition for the creation of these laws was precisely the balance of forces among the four established confessions in Transylvania—the Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian? I think we blur the essential characteristics of these laws if we downplay the importance of this fact, and instead, based on our historical knowledge, consider the list simply implied. Furthermore, it is not the list alone that is missing, but also the overview and evaluation of events during the previous years—the supporting arguments for establishing this inter-confessional peace. To exaggerate somewhat, these laws were intended not to bring something to a close, but rather, quite the opposite, to drive a scarcely begun process to full victory. This process, in the end, was supposed to abolish all confessions.

In order to substantiate my contentions, I should offer a detailed presentation of the distinctive history of the Transylvanian Reformation, but I restrict myself to the most important moments.16 First, this peculiar history was essentially influenced by the fact that a new country was coming into existence. This country was developing in the Eastern parts of Medieval Hungary, split apart by the Turkish invasion. It relied on certain pre-existent historical events, yet lacked a significant institutional background. As a consequence, following the fall of Buda, the royal family, escaping to the East, moved into the Bishop’s residence at Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia, Romania), which was turned into a royal, then a princely palace. Moreover, most of the Bishop’s incomes also went into the hands of this new secular power. Consequently, even before the Reformation’s more intense development, the newly formed secular power had already weakened the Roman Catholic Church’s institutional system. Later, with the advances of the Reformation in the 1550-60s, Catholicism essentially lost its followers. As the end of this process, the Diet in 1566 made arrangements about the remnants of the Catholic hierarchy by ordering that “those priests who insist upon the papal teachings and upon what was made up by humans, and refuse to convert, should be ousted from His Majesty’s realm.”17

Historians have always suspected that the Roman Catholic Church suffered great losses, but the drastic nature of these losses has only recently become clear with the publication of many documents from the archives of the Vatican. These selected documents attempt to describe the situation during the last third of the sixteenth century in an objective way, hoping for the possible return of the Catholics. Recent research on this period claims that by mid-1560 the number of Roman Catholics still living within the principality was insignificant. They lived primarily on the estates of Catholic members of the nobility who had not converted and also in certain settlements of the so-called Székely Land.

This explains why the Protestant prince and the Protestant estates did not consider indispensable the mention of this insignificant minority in the laws of a country in which Protestantism became increasingly part of self-identity, and which was continuously forced to take up arms in self-defense against the Habsburgs, who had the support of the Papacy. Not even incidental sources from the era help one decide whether there had been disputes about the necessity to regulate their legal status. When in the 1580s this matter came up for debate, documents attest that the Diet repeatedly declared that no one limited the ancient right by which every noble man was free to keep a clergyman of his choice on his estate. From the majority Protestant viewpoint, a 1588 document offers the clearest assessment of their status.18 In 1588, the estates insisted on expelling the Jesuits, whom had been brought into the Principality in the meantime by the Roman Catholic Prince, István Báthory. Their representatives, however, insistently separated their demand for the ban from the question of the rights of the small number of Catholics. The document states that even at the time of the introduction of the “true faith,” that is, Protestantism, there had been a certain number of Catholics; it then declares that only the greatest majority can constitute a universality. Therefore, the Diet may legislate universally only in their case, but it guarantees freedom of conscience for the Catholic minority. We have no documentation regarding the manner in which this freedom of conscience was practiced, but this lack of elaboration could have meant more than a meticulous staking out of the rights of the minority, as we read in the Edict of Nantes. For this framework allowed the inclusion of the religious life naturally surviving on the estates of the Catholic aristocracy, as well as the practice of allowing the use of the church building and the performance of Mass in settlements in which there was a recognized Catholic majority.19 This document therefore clearly demonstrates that until the end of the sixteenth century, although Catholicism was not a legally recognized religion in Transylvania, there were no excessive restrictions limiting its religious practice.

The reason that the laws of the 1560s omitted any list of other confessions must then lie elsewhere. The simple cause for a confession going unnamed is that in the period they still lacked church structures organized along lines of dogma. One can discern no more than an incipient process tending towards their formation. I wish to emphasize that I am not simply speaking about a delayed development of certain processes in East-Central Europe, but about the fact that the emerging solutions are original and particular in character. One notes this during the formation of the church’s organizational framework. The extinct Catholic bishopric was replaced by Protestant bishoprics, which were organized for a long time not on a confessional basis but on territorial and national bases in a medieval sense. Thus, all Protestant residents living in Saxon territories (cities and villages)—whether they or the larger community had accepted the Augsburg Confession, adopted some of the Helvetic beliefs, or already become followers of the Antitrinitarians or not—belonged under the supervision of the Saxon Bishop residing in Hermannstadt (Sibiu, Romania; Nagyszeben in Hungarian). The same is true of the so-called “Hungarian” Bishop who resided in Kolozsvár; that is, each Protestant community formed in a dominantly Hungarian county fell under the jurisdiction of the Hungarian Bishop, whether the community remained Evangelical Lutheran or—as the majority did—became Calvinist or Antitrinitarian. The dogmatic homogenization was no doubt more advanced in the Saxon territories, where the Hermannstadt headquarters and their circles successfully fought for the Saxon settlements to become dogmatically and organizationally perfectly unified and loyal to the Augsburg Confession. However, this process was still in the making.

This is even truer of the later Calvinist and Unitarian churches. All one can assert regarding this period is that the predominantly Hungarian-populated territories of contemporary Transylvania fell under the supervision of the bishop residing in Kolozsvár, that is, Ferenc Dávid. And after 1564, the majority of the congregations accepted a Helvetic type of the doctrine of communion. Therefore, one cannot speak of the existence of a Unitarian denomination, and it is an especially troubling anachronism to assign even the date of its beginning to the time of the “first” law, that is, to 1568 January. Antitrinitarianism, which only stepped on the stage in 1566, was still considered a fresh and novel phenomenon within the religious life of the principality. Moreover, the idea of establishing an independent Unitarian church by quickly breaking away from the Calvinists was completely alien to the program presented by the Antitrinitarians. Their objective was not simply one more church among many, but significantly more. Building upon the Apostolic Creed, they wanted to win over the population of all of Transylvania—which, of course, would (they hoped) have been a mere prelude to the victory of their teachings all over Europe. They viewed this as the fulfillment of the process that had begun with Martin Luther. They believed that they were the people capable of restoring the unity of Protestantism.

This concept might provoke a smile today; but its stubborn representation can be witnessed not only in the religious debates held between 1568 and 1570 with the participation of the Prince, but also in a persistent striving to win over leading theologians or politicians of other Protestant states. Several signs suggest that they considered it the mission of the Principality to establish Protestant unity by consistently applying Biblicism as its dogmatic foundation. They assumed that since they had successfully eliminated the supposedly biblical foundation of the Trinity, they would be able to persuade everybody of the truth of their theological teachings.

According to a recently surfaced document, this program is delineated in the inscription of one of the publications that they sent to Queen Elisabeth of England in the early days of 1570.20 The Latin letter draws a parallel between King Eduard VI and his successor, Queen Elisabeth, and Johannes secundus electus rex Hungariae, that is, John Sigismund. Obsessed by this mission, Unitarians obviously did not rush any organizational break away from the Calvinists. Although by 1571 it might have become clear that they would be incapable of winning over even the entire population of the Principality, the organizational consequences would not yet become clear during John Sigismund’s rule. Ferenc Dávid remained the bishop of all Protestant Hungarians in the territory of Transylvania.

So, just as no Unitarian church existed at the beginning of the 1570s, according to the explanation above, one cannot speak of an independently organized Calvinist church either. All one can say is that there existed congregations unwilling to step on the path of religious innovation offered by Italian Giorgio Blandrata and his fellows, but Ferenc Dávid still remained their bishop, whose teachings concerning several theological questions obviously differed from the ideas of the Swiss reformers.

The Spirit of Protestant Proselytizing

This universal Protestant character, which also included the Antitrinitarians, can be recognized in the distinctive nature of the laws, as well as in the character of the theological argumentation. The very presence of theological argumentation is also exceptional, and we can consider it symbolic that the 1568 law quotes Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans 10:17, one of Luther’s favorite biblical passages: “Ergo fides ex auditu, auditus autem per verbum Christi.” It is remarkable that during the religious debates of the time the Antitrinitarians held Luther in high regard, naturally thinking of themselves as the authentic fulfillers of his unfinished work. All this is probably not entirely unrelated to the fact that in the tolerance-debate following Servet’s death, the Basel representatives of heterodoxy made the young Luther speak once again. It was their reminder of the exceptionally close relationship between Transylvanian Antitrinitarians and Basel. They read, copied and revised the works of Castelio, Aconcio and Celio Secundo Curione, and even rewrote and republished the most important parts of De hereticis non sint persequendi.21

Returning to the practical level, in the 1568 law the biblical argumentation of the early Reformation is revitalized with the help of the humanists from Basel, and this textual tradition is reminiscent of the early period of the Reformation. This careful theological argumentation might compel one to attribute a great role to theologians in formulating the laws. This has a great tradition in the Unitarian church, where this is basically an axiom, and even the title of a highly revered painting refers to the proclamation by Ferenc Dávid of religious freedom. In reality, we do not know anything about this, for at the end of the sixteenth century the royal library was destroyed, and nothing survived from the Diets other than the texts of laws already passed.

The laws written in Protestant theological language thus ascribe an exclusive role to the sermon, which stands in an obvious opposition not only to Catholicism, but also to the Orthodox Church, where icons have pivotal importance in the genesis of faith. And all Romanians, who represented one-third of the population, belonged to this church. Concerning this issue, Hungarian and Saxon historians correctly emphasize that Romanians were not included in the early sixteenth-century state and church documents indicate that politically they were not a so-called “state-creating” nation. Since the Romanian population was comprised almost entirely of shepherds and peasants, their rights were limited according to the prevalent European practice that regulated the life of these social groups. According to another accurate scholarly statement, this was not the result of national discrimination, for neither Hungarian nor Saxon serfs were granted any rights not enjoyed by members of the Romanian speaking peasantry.

Another issue, however, requires explanation: why does the handling of the matters of faith among the Romanians change during the period of inquiry, that is, in the mid-1560s? The most spectacular documentation of this change is in the first part of the 1568 law, not yet discussed here. For the sake of simplicity, I cite it again:

We humbly report to your Majesty that there are many in your Majesty’s country who disobey the Wallachian bishop, who was appointed to this position by your grace; they prefer to follow the former priests and their heresies, and prevent the bishop from properly fulfilling his duties; therefore we beg your Majesty to graciously grant the advancement of the Gospel according to your Majesty’s earlier decree concerning the country, and to punish those who dare oppose it.22

This makes it obvious that the political establishment of the time set the goal of spreading Protestant teachings among the entirety of the Romanian population. The Wallachian bishop of the text is obviously the Romanian Protestant bishop, appointed by the Prince, and we even have some data about his life. So, the law calls the Romanians to account because of their obedience to this bishop, and reiterates an article of the 1566 law that calls on the Romanians to come forward and challenge him on biblical matters in order “to get to know the truth this way.”23

Hungarian historians traditionally remain silent on this, while Romanian historiography tends to view it as an early manifestation of national prejudice. But the context does not support this. It is obvious that the aforementioned Protestant proselytizing tendencies are at work in the measures taken on behalf of the Orthodox population, which explains why they urge that the spread of the Gospel must be granted. It is the fervor of the Protestant preacher that bursts forth in that particular decision, which first appears in the 1566 legislation. As noted, it was ruled that the Orthodox priests should be persuaded to engage in debate with the Protestant bishop whom the Prince would appoint, and the debate would be based on the Bible. The 1566 text clearly indicates that they declared war against idolatry, which was seen as having gained ground both among Catholics and Orthodox; they even proclaim that “this kind of idolatry must be erased from all generations of this land.”24 Both laws, that of 1566 and that of 1568, concern the propagation of the Protestant faith. The reason for the separate mention of the Orthodox in 1568 is that, unlike the Catholics, they were still significant numbers of them living in the Principality. Catholics were no longer mentioned, since they were seen essentially as having already vanished, and the few remaining representatives or groups could be managed according to local conditions.

Obviously one can have lengthy discussions about how the events in Transylvania fit into the Protestant experiment of winning over the Orthodox world, and there is a rich, continuous (if somewhat fluctuating in its intensity) secondary literature on this topic. Concerning these discussions, I wish to put one single issue on record: this Protestant proselytizing zeal also meant that, parallel to the creation of the law, in the spirit of the universal ideas of the Reformation, serious efforts were made to promote literacy among Romanians. Romanian translations of excerpts from the Bible, catechisms, and sermons were published. I do not think that the culture that was intended to be spread was superior to the one already present in the Orthodox world, but I also find unacceptable the position of some Romanian historians, who suggest that this introduction of literacy, in fact, was intended to annihilate Romanian national character. They argue that, as the reverence of Romanians for icons was under attack, their culture and the core of their spirituality were also violated, and in this sense, the events of the sixteenth century form part of centuries of actions of denationalization.25

A Protestant Political Theology?

I return now to the characteristics of the text of the laws. Without exception each of the laws instituted in Europe, from the religious peace of Augsburg, the confederation of Warsaw and the union of Utrecht to the edict of Nantes, expresses, whether briefly or at length, the goal of avoiding turmoil and wars and preserving the peace of the country. These exordiums are occasionally extremely significant. For example, in the interpretation of the edict of Nantes, the question of who is responsible for drafting the preamble of the political reasoning is crucially important, as is the question of how it is to be understood. The Transylvanian laws created at the end of the 1560s completely lack this secular and political argumentation. This cannot be explained simply with reference to formal reasons. While these European laws were festive documents, dealing exclusively with religious matters, the articles on religious matters in Transylvania were embedded in the most mundane affairs. The formal explanation is insufficient, because up to the beginning of 1560s, all other documents were similar to this, and each contained a similar secular explanation, so we read that “pro quiete regnicolarum,” that is, the measures are taken for the sake of the peace of the population. Laws instituted in the 1560s are just the opposite, as if they explicitly wanted to avoid secular reasoning. Moreover, the one in 1571 begins with the statement that, in their decision, lawmakers focused on the most important matter, God’s kingdom: “Because our Lord Jesus commands that we first should seek God’s kingdom and its truth…”26 I believe that this is also connected to the strong theological character of the laws. Since the measures taken by the prince and the estates nevertheless concerned secular-political interests, this polity must have been intended precisely to emphasize this Protestant character, deemed universal. Therefore, a Protestant country proclaims its ideal of making the reformed faith universal by means of continuous preaching and evangelizing.

In this context, it seems appropriate to interpret the exceptional manner in which these laws delineated the authority of the bishops. According to the aforementioned ecclesiastical organization, they do not allow the bishops to interfere with the content of the sermons preached by the ministers. Their role is only to watch over the moral conduct of the ministers. The 1568 law, however, fails to formulate expressis verbis even this right of the bishops. So the 1571 law seems to clarify the situation, specifying that if a minister should commit a criminal offense or fall into criminal excess, the bishop has the right to punish him. Perhaps I am not mistaken when I consider the strikingly balanced and thorough nature of the 1568 law as extremely significant. We can see that it is intended to avoid coercion and despotism on several fronts. It seeks to protect the congregation from this, which is reminiscent of the early period of the German reformation, but it also protects the preachers from intimidation by the bishop or anyone else.

We do not know, of course, what the consequent practice was once the law was accepted. Since almost all of the documents that might have yielded answers to this question perished in the seventeenth century, we do not know whether it was really the community, the communitas, that decided what kind of minister to choose from the Protestant offer. Katalin Péter has collected enough data to assert that noble patrons of Transylvania and Hungary, observing the medieval practice, did not care at all about the confessional affiliation of their subjects. They refrained from forcing their own religion on their subjects living in the villages and market-towns. Thus these communities enjoyed a degree of autonomy in this decision. 27 This statement seems too bold, and there are data that contradict it. It is clear, of course, that in the big cities the final word belonged to the magistrates, but there is no way of knowing exactly what happened in the market towns (Marktflecken) and in the villages. The few case-studies offer a varied picture. There were places where the forceful patron did not tolerate interference in the selection of the minister. In other places, the actual communitas successfully asserted its will.

Of course, it is logical to assume that the nobility, operating inside the Diet, as well as the cities thus created an opportunity for themselves to enforce their will. Another objective that cannot be excluded was to moderate the disputes and animosities on the higher level. This must have been relevant for a country forced repeatedly to take up arms against the Habsburgs.

According to the above, the practice of tolerance, far from being unlimited, developed within a unique and peculiar ecclesiastical framework that understandably made sixteenth-century Transylvania famous. Contrary to popular views, institutionalization of the one tolerated and four received religions had not yet taken place, but paradoxically it would come about as a result of the increasingly strained religious and political hostilities in 1595. Here I can only highlight the most important stages of the process leading up to it.

Aftermath: Catholicism as a Received Religion in 1595

The transformation began with the death of the Unitarian prince, whose successor on the throne was the Roman Catholic István Báthory. After the events described above, it may seem surprising that a Catholic ruler came to the throne, but the country was so unequivocally Protestant that this did not seem to pose a risk. Báthory was favored because of his extensive estates and the high political prestige he had acquired partly through his extraordinary talents, but also because of his committed work on behalf of an anti-Habsburg political movement—despite his being a Catholic. During an important diplomatic mission, he was even imprisoned in Vienna. The zealous Catholic prince respected the Protestant nature of the country. He chose an Evangelical Lutheran court preacher, and, following the tradition of his predecessors, he viewed himself as a religious patron of all his subjects. However, he continuously discriminated among them and did not make it a secret that among the Protestant confessions, he considered only the Augsburg confession somewhat acceptable. Obviously, his measures mostly affected the Unitarians, whose presence he considered politically harmful because it forced the principality into total isolation. For this reason, he pushed through a law that prohibited further religious innovations. Furthermore, he introduced a decree of censorship, the obvious goal of which was to obstruct the printing of Unitarian works. It resulted in an accelerated process of confessional crystallization. By the mid-seventies, Protestant confessions were totally separated in all respects, for both Calvinist and Unitarian congregations came into existence, each with its own bishop. It is highly revealing that the laws dealing with the libertas religionis of this period explicitly name them: Evangelical Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian. As is well-known, Báthory was elected king of Poland in 1576, and he used his increasing prestige to begin rebuilding the Catholic Church. Based on a distinct royal privilege, he settled the Jesuits in Gyulafehérvár and Kolozsvár.28 His choice was highly circumspect when he brought in an order without precedence, thus establishing that their institutions required no legal disputes. The other extraordinary wisdom in this solution was that the Jesuits arrived from Poland, so they were subordinated to that province (Provinz), not to the Austrians. The justification given for bringing them to Transylvania was the exclusive task of teaching the youth, and in 1582 Báthory made his first attempt to found a Catholic university. However, it is important to point out that these measures did not mean the legitimization in law of what the sources refer to as the pontificia religio; Jesuit activity and its regulation gave birth to successive, separate articles.

It would be wrong to think that the legitimization of the Catholics happened as the achievement of an initially slow and calm process. On the one hand, the situation was complicated by the king’s death and the resulting power vacuum, because the king entrusted the Transylvanian Principality to a minor cousin. The reason for the grave conflicts was not even the Jesuits’ striving to evade the restrictions, propagate the religion they considered the only true faith, and continue to organize their successors. As their reports published during the last decades indicate, they were unable to keep themselves out of high politics, and, from the very beginning, they aroused suspicion by not letting the education of the minor prince elect out of their hands. The result of this evolving political struggle was an ultimatum issued by the estates: they would be willing to elect Zsigmond Báthory, who was coming of age, as prince if he agreed to expel the Jesuits. This would indeed happen, only to force the Diet in 1593 to resettle many of them. This resettlement took place within the framework of a political struggle that would decisively influence the future history of the principality. The essence of this was the following. The Transylvanian Principality was established as a Turkish vassal state, the princes of which exercised power with the approval of the sultan. They paid the sultan large taxes, and they depended on the sultan in their external affairs. The more talented princes successfully attempted to create some space for themselves. They, however, were allowed to manage their internal affairs independently. Based on the sad experiences of the first years following the establishment of the Principality, it became an axiom for the Transylvanian politicians to strictly avoid any engagement in risky political adventures that threatened their relative independence. This position had to be maintained even if Vienna or Habsburg-Hungary offered adequate forces to oust the Turks from the country and reestablish Medieval Hungary. This was also the rule if one of the Popes called for a crusade and made promises to reestablish the kingdom, or even if all of Europe offered its support for the Principality. The Transylvanian rulers had learned in the first years that such support usually failed to materialize, and they stood to lose more than anyone else. This politics required great wisdom and cautious realism. Of course, they never intended to give up their ambition of reestablishing the unity of Hungary in some distant future. They considered themselves Christian, even if many of them were mocked as “Turk-friendly lords.”

At the encouragement of the Jesuits, Zsigmond Báthory drastically broke away from this politics. He thought he would become the hero of a great crusade that would liberate Europe. This, however, was not easy, for the old political positions proved to be extraordinarily strong. In 1594, in this evolving political fight, in order to break their resistance, he had the most prestigious representatives arrested and cruelly executed. Among them were several humanists who had studied in Padua, men of great erudition, Catholics, Evangelical Lutherans, Calvinists and Unitarians alike.29

It is thus not a minor paradox that Catholicism became a received religion at the Diet held in April 1595 in the royal palace, which was surrounded by the royal army. The Diet began with an offer of thanks to the prince by the intimidated estates for having graciously put the pacifist philosophers to death. Following this event, the Diet invalidated the expulsion decree of the Jesuits, adopting the following text: “Concerning the matter of religion, we decree on behalf of the country that the received religions, that is, Catholic, sive romana, Lutheran, Calvinist and Ariana, should everywhere be upheld with no restriction.”30 It was then, therefore, that the well-known legal text, which historians and popular opinion date back to 1568, was composed. At the beginning of the seventeenth century several amendments mention that there was another religion in the country, that of the Romanians, professed by many, but not a received religion, only a tolerated one. And this formulation also found its way into the law book compiled in the first years of the seventeenth century.

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Translated by Judit Gellérd and Thomas Cooper