Balázs A. Szelényi

The Dynamics of Urban Development: Towns in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Hungary

Contradiction and confusion cast their shadow over the understanding of urban development in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Hungary.¹ In textbooks on European civilization and macro-historical comparative narratives, prominent voices stress the division of Europe into two parts: East and West. According to this argument, from the early modern period these two regions of Europe followed diametrically opposite trajectories. Capitalism emerged in the western part, as the occidental city defeated the feudal countryside, bringing three-storied buildings, gas-lit cobblestone streets, tinkers, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, enterprises, coffee houses, newspapers, and factories to developing towns. East of the Elbe, in contrast, the countryside overcame the cities. There were peasants, lords, grain, forests, bears, plenty of wine, and herds of cattle, but few towns. While in Western Europe towns expanded and grew from the sixteenth century on, contributing along the way to the expansion of capitalism and democracy, east of the Elbe they were subjugated to noble rule and lost their autonomy, leading to a stunted civic society.² This macro-historical view of East European urban development has undergone little modification since Francis L. Carsten's famous summation in the English Historical Review in 1947:

The towns to the east of the Elbe, having been founded considerably later than those of western Europe, never equaled their strength and power; after a short and rapid rise, they were easily subjugated by the combined forces of nobles and princes. In none of the countries concerned, was there any longer a force which could have prevented the nobility from becoming the ruling order of society.³

Carsten understood the moment of the town's defeat during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the decisive victory of autocracy and aristocracy over the bourgeoisie. "Medieval democracy had lost its battle, and the burghers of the towns did not raise their heads again until the nineteenth century, when once more they were defeated by the forces which had vanquished them four hundred years earlier."⁴ In 1954, he further argued in his famous work The Origins of Prussia: "The decay of the eastern towns was a fact of fundamental importance for the course of German and of European history. It opened the way for the rise of the nobility, and it separated events in the east from those of the west: there the renewed rise of the towns and of the urban middle classes transformed state and society, but the east no longer participated in this development."⁵ Jerome Blum concurred, noting in the American Historical Review in 1957: "The experience of Western Europe suggests that the enserfment of the peasantry and its corollary, the economic and political supremacy of the landed nobility, might have been avoided if the burghers of the East had been as powerful as their opposite numbers in Western Europe."⁶

Challenging Carsten's thesis of noble hegemony east of the Elbe, new scholarship over the past two decades on the micro-historical sociology of seventeenth-century Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Mecklenburg has seriously questioned the thesis that in the seventeenth century West European peasants became freer and those of the East less free. William Hagen, Edgar Melton, Jan Peters, and Heidi Wunder have significantly reformulated the historical understanding of peasant-lord relations and have raised formidable points as to whether the term "second serfdom" is appropriate at all in describing the socioeconomic system of seventeenth-century East-Central Europe.⁷ As its most significant contribution, this new approach evidences less noble hegemony and significantly more peasant autonomy than previously thought. As Hagen put it, "The villages were not suffocating under the weight of feudal rents and princely taxation."⁸ Or, as Melton noted, "In Brandenburg and East Prussia, it was neither the golden age for the Junkers nor a dark age for the peasants."⁹

Interestingly, however, despite the progress made in clarifying serf-lord relations under second serfdom, the place of towns during what specialists call the manorial or the seigniorial reaction has eluded theorists. Carsten's proposition—that towns east of the Elbe were crushed, the bourgeoisie beaten, and the nobles victorious—continues to be the conventional wisdom. A good illustration of this is Hagen, who, on one page, resuscitates the life of peasants and writes of sixteenth-century Brandenburg that "seigniorial authority collapsed over wide regions, if not everywhere," on a previous page also noted: "The long sixteenth century did not smile on the towns of Brandenburg. The Junkers dealt them hard blows by setting up rival breweries in the countryside and bypassing their wholesalers in favor of merchants abroad, especially in Hamburg."¹⁰

With the preceding in mind, this work aims to make a contribution to the understanding of urban development during the transition from feudalism to capitalism by revising the notion that towns declined following the establishment of second serfdom. The argument proposed is that the struggle between towns and lords in early modern Europe was not about capitalism versus feudalism, progress versus stagnation, or the future versus the past. Instead, towns and lords coexisted within a system of shared values and norms. It is true that these two entities at times found themselves on opposite sides of the battlefield, but more frequently they were united in arms against a common enemy. A careful look at urban evolution in Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does indicate that some towns were subjugated to noble rule in the sixteenth century, but that fact did not signify urban decline. Moreover, many towns evidence maturation when they should be failing. There were, of course, foolish, self-destructive lords who, in fits of ill-tempered rage, acted irrationally. But in general, second serfdom fostered cooperation rather than antagonism. Naturally, some towns declined after they were subjugated, but interestingly that decline was the result of local conditions, such as a devastating fire, pestilence, or simply an invasion followed by decimation, and rarely a consequence of a feudal lord laboring to reduce them to poverty. Equally significant was that many towns were able to remain free of noble control in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet these independent towns were not islands of "capitalism and modernity" surrounded by a backward feudal countryside. In brief, the occidental city existed in a symbiotic relationship with feudal lords in the West as well as the East, and the origins of the divergence between Eastern and Western Europe cannot be reduced to the noble subjugation of towns following the manorial reaction.

Most important, the specific case of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries illustrates strong contradictions within the macro-historical understanding of urban development and highlights the need to reexamine what happened to towns at the onset of second serfdom across Eastern Europe. The micro-historical attention towns in the West have received in the tradition of Adriaan Verhulst also needs to be applied to Eastern Europe.¹¹ At the moment, historians constructing meta-narratives on Eastern Europe and Hungary in particular do not typically conduct research in municipal archives, while micro-historians do not engage in debates at the national or international comparative level. Macro-historians are often accused of teleology and working with false assumptions, while micro-historians are weighed down by infinite details and rarely risk commenting on what is happening outside their small locale. This essay does not aim, however, to dismiss either the macro or micro approach. Instead, its goal is to realign the two perspectives, thereby creating a new narrative and expanding our knowledge and understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in both Eastern and Western Europe.

It is noteworthy that, in the West, there is a long tradition of contrasting the "progressive" city with the "backward" country. As John Merrington wrote,

The centrality of the town-country relation in the transition to capitalism in the West and more basically the equation of urbanism with capitalism and progress were already explicitly formulated in the earliest theories of the origin of capitalism—those of 18th-century political economy. For the proponents of the new and revolutionary "conjectural" history of "civil society"—Smith, Steuart, Ferguson, Millar—the origins of the division of labour and the market in the "commercial stage" of civilization were to be sought in the separation of town and country. (The highland-lowland division in Scotland provided first-hand evidence.)¹²

It was, however, only in the late nineteenth century that the famous Belgian urban historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) expanded on the classic urban-country dichotomy as used by Adam Smith, and drew a direct line between urban growth in Western Europe and urban decline in Eastern Europe. Jerome Blum, Francis Carsten, Hans Rosenberg, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Max Weber were all deeply influenced by Pirenne's model. According to this interpretation, in the early medieval period a life-and-death struggle unfolded between towns and feudalism in Western Europe. Towns promoted the division of labor, trade, and manufacturing; they were home to homo-œconomicus, the agent of progress and the source of civil virtues such as liberty, meritocracy, and democracy. Feudalism, diametrically opposed to the values of the occidental city, was a rural-based regime—closed, hierarchical, paternalistic, and oppressive. Instead of promoting development, it was a self-contained political economic system hostile to trade, commerce, and innovation. Pirenne maintained that, during the classic period of European feudalism between the eighth and tenth centuries, European civilization declined.¹³ Europe's rise to world supremacy, therefore, began when the occidental city triumphed over feudalism. Towns contributed to the decline of feudalism because they were spaces of "free air"—stadtluft macht frei—where serfs escaped from demanding lords to gain their liberty. Feudal lords, deprived of their laborers, were thereafter forced to make compromises, contributing, in turn, to the transformation of serfs into a class of free peasants. For Pirenne and those inspired by his view of history, the victory of the occidental city was the necessary prerequisite for the expansion of European trade in the sixteenth century. Modern capitalism, liberalism, republicanism, and constitutionalism would not have emerged if not introduced by the occidental city. The rise of Western civilization could not have been possible if the city had not vanquished the feudal countryside in the late medieval period.¹⁴

Ironically, as Pirenne pointed out, while the victory of the occidental city in Western Europe led to the rise of individual liberties and progress, it was simultaneously responsible for the subjugation of towns by nobles and the decline of civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Accordingly, the causes of the seigniorial reaction were identical to the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. Namely, as the occidental city grew, demand for raw materials and vital consumption goods escalated. Sugar was imported from the Caribbean, but grain and meat were sought from Eastern Europe. To meet the demand for agricultural produce in the West, landlords in Eastern Europe consolidated their control over markets and labor, subjugating towns, enserfing free peasants, and emerging as the uncontested ruling estate. For Pirenne, landlords in Eastern Europe were like plantation owners in the Americas. Both were agents ready to destroy human liberty for the profits of exporting in bulk to Western Europe. For these reasons, Pirenne referred to the burghers and peasants of Eastern Europe as "white slaves," victims of the same world capitalist order that led to the mass enslavement of blacks in Africa. Pirenne wrote:

The descendants of the free colonists [German immigrants east] of the 13th century were systematically deprived of their land and reduced to the position of personal serfs (Leibeigene). The wholesale exploitation of estates absorbed their holdings and reduced them to a servile condition, which so closely approximated to that of slavery that it was permissible to sell the person of the serf independently of the soil. From the middle of the 16th century the whole of the region to the east of the Elbe and the Sudeten mountains became covered with Rittergüter exploited by Junkers, who may be compared, as regards the degree of humanity displayed in their treatment of their white slaves, with the planters of the West Indies. The negro in the New World, and the German peasant in the Old World, were the most typical victims of modern capitalism, and they both had to wait until the 19th century for their enfranchisement. This is a fact which must never be forgotten when considering the modern history of Germany and Austria. The enslavement of the peasantry to his noble master explains many things.¹⁵

In Hungarian historiography, the Pirennian explanation of the seigniorial reaction has been widely accepted.¹⁶ Its most famous and influential proponent was Zsigmond Pál Pach. Yet, while agreeing with Pirenne that the prime mover of modern history was the development and expansion of international trade, Pach developed a more nuanced explanation of the Hungarian experience. Pach maintained that Hungarian urban development accelerated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when trade with the Levant was especially vibrant and strong. Like Carsten, Pach argued that, up to the mid-fifteenth century, Hungary and the rest of East-Central Europe were catching up with the West. From the fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, towns with charters were multiplying, peasants were gaining their freedom, and seigniorial control over land and labor was waning. Furthermore, peasants were taking their produce directly to the market with increasing frequency, and in the small market towns a layer of enterprising small farmers was emerging, contributing to growing rural social stratification. However, Pach stressed that, from the second half of the fifteenth century, a new trend set in that counteracted the transformation of peasant entrepreneurs into a class of agricultural capitalists, and instead noble rule was reasserted. The essence of the new trend was summarized by Pach in economic terms as "the growing participation of the nobility in commerce and, subsequently, in the actual production of commercial goods."¹⁷ For Pach, therefore, the second half of the fifteenth century was the genesis of the break between East and West, because, "while the disintegration of the medieval order, the rise of capitalist relations, began and proceeded in several Western European countries ..., the feudal system survived, and even consolidated in several respects, in the countries of mid-Eastern Europe, and the rule of late feudalism was prolonged for centuries."¹⁸

Pirenne and Pach shared the belief that larger historical trends are intricately tied to international trade routes. In the fourteenth century, for instance, Pach claimed that Hungary prospered from its contact with the Levantine trade, based essentially on the import of luxury goods such as spices, silk, dyes, and jewelry that were subsequently sold in the privileged market towns to the wealthy nobles, patricians, abbots, and bishops. Pach further argued that the course of East European history underwent a profound transformation with the decline of Levantine trade and the rise of commerce with Western Europe, bringing a shift from the traditional trade in luxury goods to the export of bulk agricultural produce in return for manufactured articles. As Pach summarized, "This role of East Central Europe in international trade (exporting foodstuffs and importing industrial products) limited and hindered industrial-urban growth in the countries involved, where the level was anyway below that of Western Europe in this respect from the beginning of the period."¹⁹

Why did landlords tap into agricultural sales to the West? Pach was in agreement with Pirenne on this point. Namely, he thought that the favorable situation for agricultural exports, under the influence of the price revolution, stimulated the countries of East-Central Europe to increase agricultural market production. Lords in Eastern Europe, therefore, became eager to participate in exporting to Western Europe because of the price revolution caused by the late medieval demographic drop, increasing the prices of agricultural products to levels that exceeded those of industrial articles. A gap thereafter was created—called the price scissors—between the relative prices of industrial versus agricultural goods. Pach noted three stages in the growing participation of nobles in commerce: "First, they exploited their privileged right to sell wine. Second, they took an increasingly active part (especially the big landowners and the lesser nobility) in the trade in livestock. Third, they developed their trade in wheat and even their own wheat production."²⁰

Following these stages, the feudal land tenure system survived and became the dominant feature of the socio-political system of East-Central Europe. The peasants reacted to their growing oppression by staging a number of formidable revolts, the most serious and famous one led by György Dózsa. However, at each turn, the nobles leading the counteroffensive were able to outmaneuver the peasant resistance with their superior political coordination. Finally, in 1514, the Parliament agreed to laws proposed by Emmerich Verbőczi (sometimes spelled Werbőczi), laying the foundation for the legal imposition of second serfdom. Free peasants became serfs, and free towns were transformed into the Gutsherrschaft (estate) of lords.²¹

The theoretical starting point for this article is that urban development and feudalism are not mutually exclusive. It is important to note that this was true for Eastern as well as Western Europe during feudalism. Two points will be stressed. On the one hand, towns often lived in a symbiotic relationship with lords; while, on the other hand, it is clear that the main actors in the towns, namely merchants and artisans, were not the natural allies of serfs. It is noteworthy that evidence even from the Low Countries during the eighth and ninth centuries shows urban growth when Pirenne had predicted decline. Adriaan Verhulst highlighted a number of reasons why Pirenne was wrong. For instance, while Mediterranean trade declined following the Arab conquests, towns in the Low Countries found different sources of exchange, such as local and upriver trade. Towns also thrived in the vicinity of monasteries and other ecclesiastic seats. But, most important, towns grew if they learned how to trade with the new castle lords of feudalism. Verhulst's detailed study of the topography of Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges demonstrates that new trading posts emerged within these urban centers in the ninth and tenth centuries, a fact Pirenne did not know. Verhulst writes:

These new portus of the tenth century, in contrast to the Carolingian settlements, were furnished with market-places and owed their development, if not their origin, primarily to local trade with the non-merchant population living within the walls of the new fortifications beside their respective portus ... This sort of fortification was seldom originally built as a defense against the Vikings. Its construction was rather a manifestation of the general spread of fortifications (the "incastellamento") which initiated the feudal period all over Europe. The merchants sought its proximity not for military protection, but for trading possibilities. The castrum therefore was not, as Pirenne put it, a passive element to which towns could become attached, but an active economic factor of attraction.²²

The symbiotic relationship of towns and feudalism was, of course, a central point in the 1950s debates within English Marxism. As A. B. Hibbert bluntly put it in his 1953 article in Past and Present: "There is the simple fact that whatever area and whatever century we may choose to take as being most typically 'feudal' there is still trade and there are still merchants. Feudalism could never dispense with merchants. The very structure, technical level and economic habits of society always made some local and long-distance trade necessary."²³

The most significant contribution in the debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the origins of capitalism since the 1970s was made by Robert Brenner. Following the tradition of Maurice Dobb and Rodney Hilton, Brenner is critical of the Pirennian notion that towns were the agents corroding serfdom in the West, because "[the] actual mechanism through which the towns had their reputedly dissolving effects on landlord control over the peasantry in Western Europe have still to be precisely specified." Furthermore, "the viability of the towns as a potential alternative for the mass of unfree peasantry must [also] be called into question simply in terms of their gross demographic weight ... It is indeed far from obvious that the medieval towns housed the 'natural' allies of the unfree peasantry. For many reasons the urban patriciate would tend to align themselves with the nobility against the peasantry." In sum, "the historical record of urban support for the aspirations to freedom of the medieval European peasantry is not impressive."²⁴

Instead of focusing on towns, Brenner argues that change both east and west of the Elbe issued from class struggle between peasants and lords. Towns are understood, with their artisan guilds and privileged merchant elite, as intricately combined with the system of feudalism, and while towns do make a difference, they are not prime movers of change. Or, in other words, it was not the "weakness of towns" but the "weakness of the peasantry" in the East to organize and defend themselves that accounts for the success of the seigniorial reaction and the imposition of second serfdom. As Brenner summarized:

[E]conomic backwardness in Eastern Europe cannot be regarded as economically determined, arising from "dependence" upon trade in primary products to the West, as is sometimes asserted. Indeed, it would be more correct to state that dependence upon grain export was a result of backwardness; of the failure of the home market—the terribly reduced purchasing power of the mass of the population—which was the result of the dismal productivity and vastly unequal distribution of income in agriculture rooted, in the last analysis in the class structure of serfdom.²⁵

In other words, towns are not islands separate from the sea of feudalism. The merchants in the towns were dependent on the demand by lords for luxury products and, instead of working to establish free market economies, were interested in hoarding staple rights. Furthermore, artisans had conflicting interests with cheap rural labor and more often than not tried to limit immigration into towns by strengthening the guilds. Towns, therefore, did not try to undermine feudalism but were in fact privileged members of the feudal club. Or, as Rodney Hilton wrote in 1952, "modern capitalism derived its initial impetus from the English textile industry and does not descend directly from the principal medieval centers. Its foundations were laid in the rural domestic industry which had fled from the traditional urban centers."²⁶ And, as Maurice Dobb noted, "It was precisely in the backward north and west of England that serfdom in the direct labour services disappeared earliest, and in the more advanced south-east, with its town markets and trade routes, that labour services were more stubborn in their survival."²⁷

Several questions remain unanswered in light of the conclusions reached by the debates in English Marxism concerning the role of towns in the transition from feudalism to capitalism: If the occidental city was not the single and most important agent corroding feudalism in the West, is it logical to claim a natural correlation between the rise of second serfdom and urban decay in the East? If towns and feudal lords were symbiotic partners in the West, instead of antagonistic forces in a life-and-death struggle as Pirenne had maintained, why would landlords in Eastern Europe want to subjugate towns and reduce them to poverty in their attempts to re-strengthen feudalism? Instead of assuming urban decline under second serfdom, is it not possible that urban development and feudalism coexisted in Eastern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? In short, the need has arisen for a new understanding of towns in Eastern Europe, especially a reexamination of the relationship between towns and nobles under second serfdom.

When studying whether or not Hungarian towns attempted to undermine feudalism, the work of Jenő Szűcs provides an important alternative perspective to that of Zsigmond Pál Pach. Pach and Szűcs concurred on a number of points. They agreed that the golden age of Hungarian urban development was between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Towns with charters existed prior to the thirteenth century, yet they were few and underdeveloped, and urban growth resembling its Western counterpart began only in the thirteenth century.²⁸ They also agreed that international trade routes play a critical role in the historical dialectic. However, while Pach studied the causes of second serfdom by examining the behavior of nobles, Szűcs analyzed the internal evolution of towns. In his influential work on the town of Sopron (Ödenburg) between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Szűcs discovered that internal social developments played just as important a role in stunting urbanization as did external factors (such as noble subjugation). Specifically, Szűcs discovered that, prior to the seigniorial reaction, a growing disparity of wealth and political power was taking place within the urban commune. From the fifteenth century, some merchant families rose in spectacular fashion, buying titles of nobility and becoming owners of large vineyards near the town. Other families, mostly poor artisans, were losing ground economically and politically, and experienced difficulties acquiring membership in the town fraternity.

Szűcs was very critical toward the new merchant elite that rose to positions of power in the royal free towns of fifteenth-century Hungary. It is true that, at first, this new merchant elite contributed to the advancement of trade. Szűcs was as impressed as Gernot Nussbächer, the leading historian of early modern Bra

ov (Kronstadt/Brassó), by the reach of the new trading networks. As Nussbächer noted, in the fifteenth century: "From as far as London, Ypern, Löwen, Brügge, Köln, came textiles and luxury goods, from Nürnberg knives, from Poland and the Uplands of Hungary metal goods, and from Italian cities like Verona and Bergamo hats and textiles. From the orient carpets, spices and southern fruit." ²⁹ However, as Nussbächer also observed, profits increasingly were concentrated in a handful of families of Bra

ov, such as those of Lukas Rehner, Lucas Czeresch, Johan Groman, and Georgius Hirscher and to a lesser extent Simon Grett, Johan Kylhaw, Andreas von Rosenau, and Peter Schwarz. ³⁰ For Szűcs, the urban decline starting in the late fifteenth century was intricately tied to the emergence of these elite families. After a generation or two of hoarding profits, the new elite came to be known as Ringbürgers, because of their habit of segregating themselves from the rest of the urban commune by moving into the center of town. Following the deterioration of the Levantine trade route and increasing leisurely consumption of the new urban elite, social frictions created by the growth of inequalities stunted urbanization. Szűcs showed that the consolidation of Ringbürger rule was usually marked by the introduction of stricter laws limiting the settlement of new immigrants into the town, curtailing the number of artisans given full burgher privileges. Szűcs, therefore, argued that towns declined during the rise of second serfdom not because nobles subjugated markets to increase grain exports, but because the Levantine trade dried up and a new elite with a vested interest in land and not commerce or manufacturing rose to power.

Figure 1: The town of Sibiu in the seventeenth century (also known as Hermannstadt or Nagyszeben). Sibiu was one of the most important early modern towns of Transylvania. Copperplate etching from an anonymous artist. Reproduced courtesy of the Historical Gallery of the Hungarian National Museum (T. 6022).

It is important to note here that, despite the fact that towns and lords under the feudal political economy lived in a symbiotic relationship, this does not mean that there was no conflict between nobles and burghers. Towns and lords were privileged corporate members of the feudal political economy, and each side sought to hoard royal monopolies, often at the expense of the other. Furthermore, in Hungary, and Eastern Europe in general, there was a noteworthy ethnic component to the struggle between town and country. Feudalism, it must be stressed, was introduced late and from above in Hungary and, in contrast to the West, developed its own idiosyncrasies. Hungarian feudalism was far more fragmented along ethnic lines than its western counterpart, and, besides the classic division of those who work, those who pray, and those who fight, an eastern caste-like division of society was superimposed. The Germans, Romanians, Magyars, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Roma, Hassidic and Sephardic Jews, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Poles, Croats, and Serbs, to name some of the larger groups, each had a niche in society. Under Hungarian feudalism, therefore, the classic occidental feudal division of society mirrored ethnic-linguistic and religious differences. Furthermore, and most relevant for this study, many towns were German-dominated. In the Uplands and Transylvania, there were towns with a Magyar majority, like Košice (Kaschau/Kassa), Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg/Kolozsvár), and Alba Iulia (Weissenberg/Gyulafehérvár), but out of the thirty or more royal free towns in the seventeenth century, only seven had a Magyar-speaking majority.³¹ This special ethnic-exclusive character of towns reinforced the fact that towns were not the spaces where serfs could escape from bondage to freedom. Towns instead were often spaces of "free air" for the already privileged German burghers.

Taking the above into consideration, it remains to be answered whether 1514—when the Hungarian Parliament ratified the so-called Verbőczi Laws (sometimes spelled Werbőczi) laying the foundations for the legal imposition of second serfdom—was followed by a period of urban decline, stagnation, or growth. Formerly free peasants were transformed into serfs, their freedom of movement hindered, and lordly jurisdiction increased throughout the kingdom, but did this imply that lords also aimed to stunt urban development? How did lords behave toward towns? Was there urban development under second serfdom?

The answers to the above questions relate directly to the fact that the manorial reaction first and foremost undermined the strength and legitimacy of the king in significant ways. Royal free towns, after all, were the most important source of cash flow for the crown. When towns were subjugated either to lordly rule or a Ringbürger oligarchy, the king received less in taxes. Consequently, as a political-economic system, the early stage of second serfdom entailed the collapse of the state and the emergence of highly fragmented, decentralized local sources of power. The obvious structural limitation of such a system was its vulnerability to international military competition. And when the first serious threat of an organized and disciplined state presented itself, in the form of the army of Suleiman the Magnificent, the weak Hungarian king was unable to field significant resistance and was miserably defeated at the Battle of Mohács (1526). As the immediate consequence of the rise of second serfdom, therefore, by 1540, the entity known as the Greater Hungarian Kingdom had ceased to exist and was partitioned into three parts: the Plains coming under the direct suzerainty of the sultan, the eastern territory known as Transylvania becoming a vassal principality of the sultan, and the western and northern Uplands consolidating into the Independent Hungarian Kingdom. From the 1540s onward, the crown of the Hungarian Kingdom was inherited along the Habsburg line, although most of the judicial administrative authority lay with the two chambers of Parliament in Bratislava (Pressburg/Pozsony) and the numerous county conferences of nobles (diets).

Figure 2: The town of Košice in the seventeenth century (also known as Kaschau or Kassa). Košice was the most important town of the Hungarian Uplands (today, Slovakia) in the early modern period. Copperplate engraving from an anonymous artist. Reproduced courtesy of the Historical Gallery of the Hungarian National Museum (T. 505).

The complete collapse of central authority followed by the partition initially strengthened already strong centrifugal tendencies within the social structure. However, the military defeat at Mohács also contributed to the political-economic system of second serfdom undergoing considerable sophistication, which favored towns. Namely, the geo-political military situation forced lords into making concessions to urban growth. As the former Greater Hungarian Kingdom became a military frontier region for 150 years, over which the Muslim and Christian powers fought fiercely for supremacy, new men were invited into the towns to carry the sword in times of war, to help in the introduction of new military technology, and, last but not least, to assist in the overall modernization of urban centers ravaged by the hoarding that had followed the manorial reaction. Such a mutation of the political-economic regime of second serfdom was, of course, also a natural progression of the feudal system itself. In Western Europe, it was precisely identical factors that prompted princes and lords to bolster urban development in the ninth and tenth centuries. Occidental feudalism is an exclusively rural-based regime only in its embryonic stages. As a result of struggles between landlords and international military competition, it quickly evolves into a more complex order, including a degree of urban autonomy.

The relationship between the Zápolya family and the town of Kežmarok (Käsmarkt/Késmárk) is illustrative of the complexities involved in the evolution of towns at the onset of the manorial reaction. Kežmarok had been granted a number of royal privileges during the thirteenth century (the earliest in 1269), including the right to hold a market and to elect a judge. The town's name probably originated at this point, reflected in its spelling Kaisermarkt (meaning "emperor's market") in the earliest documents. In 1380, Kežmarok was granted royal free standing and regularly sent representatives to the king's court. Shortly thereafter, the Hussite revolutionaries invaded. The scant records that survived indicate that Czech and Polish mercenaries entered the town during the first half of the fifteenth century and formed an alliance with the urban artisans and the poor against a coalition of Ringbürgers, local Magyar nobles, and the Hungarian king. After a long, harsh, and indecisive clash of swords and ideology that spanned three decades, in 1440 victory was achieved by the Hussite leader Giskra, the homes of the merchant elite were looted and burned, and a popular republic was established with a mercenary-captain at its head. Neither the mighty János Hunyadi (vaivode of Transylvania 1441–1446 and regent of Hungary 1446–1453) nor his famous son Matthias Corvinus (king of Hungary 1465–1490) was able to bring the town and territory under royal control until Matthias sent Emmerich Zápolya to defeat Giskra. For his success against Giskra and the Hussite followers, Zápolya was granted vast estates in northern Hungary, including the office of Schloßrichter of Kežmarok (castle judge). ³²

From 1465 to 1485, the Zápolya family consolidated its rule over northern Hungary, amassing an estate spanning over four counties and a dozen towns. In 1485, Matthias Corvinus granted the land to the Zápolya family in perpetuity. Following this move, Emmerich Zápolya changed the title of his office in Kežmarok from that of castle judge to castle lord (Schloßherr) and referred to the town as his private "villa" and the burghers as his "subjects." In classic East European fashion, this newly risen magnate took a free market town and transformed it into his private Gutsherrschaft, forcing the town to pay taxes to him personally and not to the king.³³ Ironically, Matthias Corvinus, in his effort to centralize power, was instrumental in the phenomenal rise of Zápolya family members, who in turn became the leaders of the manorial reaction that was responsible for weakening royal authority while strengthening noble autonomy.

The verdict on whether the Zápolya family was able to subject Kežmarok completely to their private family authority is filled with contradictions. It is true that the rule of the Zápolyas damaged the town's royal free standing, and from a judicial-administrative standpoint it experienced noticeable regress. However, it should be mentioned that the town notary throughout the Zápolya period referred to Kežmarok as a republic (Respublica Kaisermarkt), and signs of urban dynamism were also evident. Between 1515 and 1516, a new and stronger wall was constructed with a new taller tower, a town mill was built, and—the most important symbol of urban autonomy—a town hall was erected. This urban dynamism continued into the 1520s, and in 1521 the town possessed a public bath, a curia for the common people, and a new schoolhouse; in 1523, a clock was installed in the church tower. Interestingly, in 1526, the town was able to send two ambassadors to the National Assembly to cast their vote on the next king of Hungary (the former king having died at the Battle of Mohács), a privilege the Zápolya family had suspended when they initially subjugated the town. Finally, in 1531, János Zápolya transferred the office of castle lord of Kežmarok to a Polish magnate and mercenary by the name of Hieronimus Łaski. Zápolya's ambassador to Constantinople in 1527, Łaski was an educated humanist and adventurer who had spent some time in the company of Alvisio Gritti, the rich merchant and son of the doge of Venice.³⁴ A one-time condottiere in Italy who traveled considerably in Europe, this good prince upon coming into possession of the town castle changed the title of the office back to castle judge from castle lord.³⁵

A possible explanation for the Zápolya family's behavior toward Kežmarok can be traced to the events immediately following the collapse of the Hungarian Kingdom after the Battle of Mohács (1526). At Mohács, the Hungarian king died, and János Zápolya emerged as the leading candidate to become his successor. It comes as no surprise, then, that Kežmarok—as the family's town—would be allowed to send representatives to an ad hoc meeting of the National Assembly convened quickly following the death of the king, where Zápolya was crowned king of Hungary. Yet Kežmarok had already experienced urban dynamism between 1515 and 1523, and it can be argued that János Zápolya was able to become a leading candidate in 1526 because he realized early on that his support for urban growth could help him in becoming wealthy and powerful. He had learned the secret of how to become a powerful and good prince.

János Zápolya changed his political position several times in his lifetime. In 1514, he was one of the military leaders who defeated the peasant rebellion of György Dózsa and played a leading role in the ratification of the Verbőczi Laws, which limited peasants' right to move freely. He was one of the leading figures laying the foundations for the establishment of second serfdom. After Mohács, however, he emerged as a claimant for the Hungarian crown against Ferdinand Habsburg. The House of Habsburg had the genealogical right to the crown, but Hungarian kings were elected at the time, and the office of the king was not constitutionally inheritable. When, in 1526, Zápolya convened an ad hoc National Assembly, he was elected king. Ferdinand, to counteract this bold move, summoned another National Assembly in Bratislava and had himself elected. Two kings of one kingdom quickly led to civil war. Then rumors began circulating concerning Ferdinand's plans to organize an army of disgruntled peasants against Zápolya.³⁶ Now acting as head of state, Zápolya quickly reversed his earlier position and reintroduced freedom of movement to the peasantry; he even requested that towns open their gates to migrants from rural areas. Further, after "King" Zápolya settled in the capital of Buda, in order to win over the bourgeoisie of that town he ennobled all the burghers, in a memorandum drawn up in 1531. Such a mass ennoblement, with the granting of freedom of movement to the peasantry, and the request to the towns to accept the settlement of serfs, meant the judicial end of second serfdom. Ironically, then, the same man who led the manorial reaction when he was an oligarch also brought an end to it when he became king. Zápolya's reversal, however, only applied to a small part of the Hungarian Kingdom, basically those territories that came under Ottoman occupation and administration from 1540 until 1686. Ferdinand had secured the northern Uplands, and in the principality of Transylvania the nobility maintained its control over rural labor.³⁷ Yet Zápolya is a good illustration of how the partition of the Hungarian Kingdom altered the attitudes of nobles and magnates toward towns, and how the fortunes of towns changed because of the impact of international military competition.

The Hungarian nineteenth-century novelist Kálmán Mikszáth (1847–1910) noted that the seventeenth century was one in which burghers of the royal free towns walked on eggshells. Before the town gates might stand the mercenary troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Ottoman sultan, or rebellious Magyar nobles. Each day brought its own surprises, dangers, possibilities, and adventures, and it was unclear where it would all end.³⁸ To survive, towns developed a sophisticated game of diplomacy. On different occasions, they appeared as loyal subjects of the sultan, or the Holy Roman Emperor, or Magyar noble rebels. By maneuvering through this maze of alliances, towns could maintain a degree of autonomy, and the most successful were even able to manipulate the different invading armies to consolidate their "local" power. Bribes, conspiracies, and treachery were part of everyday life. The sultan defended the town of Sibiu (Hermannstadt/Nagyszeben) when Gábor Báthory tried to subjugate it in 1610–1611, and Hieronimus Łaski defended Kežmarok when the troops of Ferdinand Habsburg tried to conquer it in the 1530s. Towns also asked for the help of the Holy Roman Emperor, and, provided they could deposit a large enough donation, he would come to their defense. Using this strategy, in 1647 Svätý Jur Sankt (Georgen/Szentgyörgy), in 1648 Eisenstadt (Kismarton), in 1649 Kőszeg (Günst), in 1647 Pezinok (Bösing/Bazin), in 1650 Kežmarok, in 1681 Rust (Ruszt), and in 1686 Pukanec (Pukkanz/Bakabánya) were granted royal free privileges.

The outcome of contested legitimacy, therefore, was that towns were able to maintain their autonomy; some even increased it. This is evident in the drawn-out struggle over the right of nobles to settle within the walls of royal free towns. These attempts intensified shortly after the military debacle at Mohács, and the fall of Szeged (1541), Pécs (1543), and Visegrád (1544). Each successive defeat forced nobles to migrate in ever-increasing numbers north and west into the Independent Hungarian Kingdom or east into the principality of Transylvania. Severed from their land and homes, these nobles were clamoring for both the security and the economic opportunities available in the royal free towns of the Uplands and Transylvania.

An important corollary to this point is the unique historical evolution of the Hungarian nobility. Unlike throughout most of Europe, with the exception of Poland and to a lesser extent Spain, in the Hungarian Kingdom the nobility accounted for approximately 4.4 percent of the total population at the turn of the fifteenth century. This contrasted greatly with the classic West European pattern, where the title-holding nobility never accounted for more than 1 percent of the populace. Possibly the most important difference in evolution lies in the large number of poor nobles in Hungary versus their relatively rich Western counterparts. Of the roughly 150,000 nobles living in the Hungarian Kingdom in 1494–1495, out of a total estimated population of 3.5 million, two-thirds (100,000) had no serfs, were in possession of only small land holdings, and lived in the villages with the peasants. The manor-holding nobility who benefited from feudal labor service (robot) numbered 50,000 at the end of the fifteenth century, and they actively distanced themselves from their poor, but noble-titled, brethren.³⁹ The one and important advantage the title of nobility held was tax exemption, and, for the majority of serfless, landless, village-dwelling impoverished nobles who could scarcely be distinguished from the peasantry, it was an advantage they clung to dearly. It was precisely because the Ottoman administration did not respect or accept the tax-exempt privilege of the occidental feudal title that the nobility living on the newly occupied lands flooded north and east, where the title could still be used to advantage.

The conflict between royal free towns and nobles in the sixteenth century was therefore multi-faceted. The actual mass of the nobles who wanted to settle within the towns is an important factor to consider. While at first, only one or two arrived at the gate, soon thereafter came a flood of impoverished noble-peasants, who possessed little of the skill and know-how required for city living. With the exception of towns like Bratislava—which became the new capital of the Independent Hungarian Kingdom—Trnava (Tyrnau/Nagyszombat), Košice, and Alba Iulia, to name some important ones, many municipal governments reacted to this mass immigration by closing their gates.

Realizing that they could not settle successfully in the royal free towns if they waged the struggle on a case-by-case basis, the shunned nobles looked increasingly toward the National Assembly, hoping that what could not be achieved at the local level might be done at the national, and that the Assembly would force the towns to open their gates. However, as Gyula Szekfű noted, in the second chamber of Parliament, problems awaited the nobility because, according to custom, "delegates from royal free towns had an equal vote to delegates sent from county diets, and there were periods, under the rule of Maximilian and Rudolph, when the number of representatives sent by the towns equaled those sent by the nobles."⁴⁰ Consequently, the nobles could not be assured of winning the battle in Parliament unless they were able to decrease the number of urban representatives. Their best strategy was to petition the king to intervene with the towns. They acted accordingly when, in 1552, they asked "your Highness to give the command to the royal free towns and the mining towns, that those nobles and others who are escaping from the war, who can no longer live in the safety of their home, be allowed to settle." In 1562, they again petitioned for the right to buy homes in the towns.⁴¹ But these and many other attempts were defeated except in a handful of places, and it was only after 1647 that nobles were able to settle within the walls of royal free towns in limited numbers.

Perhaps the boldest move by frustrated nobles to open the gates of the towns was made in 1608 when, in the second chamber of Parliament, they declared that from that time forward the number of towns that could send representatives was to be reduced from over thirty to twelve: the seven most important mining towns, and the royal free towns of Košice, Levo

a (Leutschau/Lőcse), Prešov (Preschau/Eperjes), Bardejov (Bartfeld/Bártfa), and Sibiu. Soon after, however, the towns of Bratislava, Sopron, and Kežmarok were quickly added, bringing the total to fifteen. At the same meeting (1608), the nobility further declared that those towns were only to send representatives that were serf owners, that is, landlords, in their own right. Since it was the task of the Assembly to pass legislation regarding serfs, it was argued that only those with a vested interest in serfdom should be able to participate. In short, the nobles were making their best effort to limit urban representation, and the towns that could not be excluded outright were pressured to become feudal lords and required to become serf owners. ⁴²

The Magyar nobility did not succeed. Their efforts to form a united political front at the national level failed because Emperor Rudolph used towns to counterbalance Magyar noble autonomy. For example, in 1609—one short year after the nobles had thought they had achieved hegemony in Parliament—Rudolph invited the towns of Varaždin (Warasdin/Varasd), Modra (Modern/Modor), Krupina (Karpfen/Korpona), Zvolen (Altsohl/Zólyom), and Koprivnica (Kopreinitz/Kapronca) to send ambassadors, and by 1655 Trnava, Tren

in (Trenschin/Trencsén), Senj (Zengg), and Eisenstadt were represented, so that by the mid-seventeenth century there were around thirty royal free towns, equaling the number of nobles sent by the county diets. ⁴³ At the national level, therefore, urban representation had never been stronger than during the early seventeenth century, and compromise rather than subjugation characterized the relationship between nobles and towns.

The conflict between the nobility and towns during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can also be understood as a struggle of German burghers versus Magyar nobles. In the Zipser towns of the Uplands and the Saxon towns of Transylvania, at least, this, too, was an important element of the feud. Urban representatives at Parliament would claim that they were not willing to replace their German-burgher laws with Magyar-noble laws, and nobles did not hesitate to criticize the exclusive German culture of the towns. The most ethnically exclusive laws were in place in the Transylvanian Saxon towns. These acts of legislation, in effect, produced a unique island of homogeneous Germans surrounded by an ocean of multi-ethnic heterogeneity. Interestingly, however, even in those towns that had a large Magyar urban population, such as Cluj-Napoca, Magyar nobles continued to be excluded, and so the issue of barring the entry of nobles into towns was more than simply that of ethnic antagonism. It is instructive to look, for instance, at a decree from Cluj-Napoca in 1603 that was used to exclude nobles from entering and living in the town. The decree starts by praising the wisdom of the early Hungarian kings for separating the nobles and serfs from the burghers. It goes on to say that, because within the town walls all burghers are equal before the law, allowing nobles to live in the town would upset that balance. And while members of other ethnic groups may settle in the town, they may do so only if they come from a burgher background. A noble man may not marry into the town, and if he takes a burgher woman as his wife, she forfeits her civic rights and property.⁴⁴ The point being that the legal wrangling between towns and nobles at the end of the sixteenth century was not a struggle of progressive burghers versus backward feudal lords. Towns willingly reverted to defending their autonomy by referring to the feudal division of labor established by the first kings. They were not agents corroding feudalism, and it was just as difficult for a serf as a noble to find sanctuary within their protective walls.

Some towns declined, others stagnated, and yet others stayed at the level they were before. But the manorial reaction did not logically lead to the noble subjugation of towns. It led instead to the collapse of royal power and introduced a period of contested sovereignty. There was most certainly a process of creative reconstruction that came as a natural consequence of this atmosphere of near anarchy. After being sacked and burned, towns had to rebuild. During the rebuilding, the walls were made thicker, taller, stronger, and, to avoid the fires caused by the cannons, houses were increasingly built from brick. The examples of Sibiu and Bra

ov in Transylvania are particularly interesting. As in towns across the Hungarian Kingdom, prior to the fifteenth century most buildings were constructed of wood. It was not until 1408 that Sibiu's first brick building besides the town church was completed. However, between 1408 and 1599, an architectural revolution occurred, and by 1599 only one wooden house was left on the market square. This architectural revolution was most intense during the sixteenth century: in Bra

ov, the tower to the town hall was constructed in 1528; in 1539, the first printing house was built; in 1545, the fish market in the town square was erected; and between 1539 and 1545, the most impressive building up to the current day, the Merchants' House, was constructed. ⁴⁵ In Sebastian Műnster's (1489–1552) eyewitness account, Sibiu was likened in size to Vienna, and in 1683 the Magyar Simplicissimus described the towns of Transylvania in the following way: "Transylvania is a wonderful land. It is plentiful in people, gold, silver and other metals, salt, fish, wild game, wheat and honey. The towns are beautiful and in large part Lutheran and German. The capital is Sibiu, which is the largest and in size and beauty comparable only to Wien and Breslau [today in Poland, Wroc

aw]." ⁴⁶

Sibiu and Bra

ov were not alone. Throughout towns in the Independent Hungarian Kingdom and Transylvania, everyday life was filled with energy and vitality from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth century. It is not by accident, for instance, that during this same period new words were introduced into the Hungarian language, words that were not part of the vocabulary of urban decay. Words and phrases such as iparkodik és indusztrálkodik (to be industrious), gépely (machine), órai mesterséggel forgó (clock work), magában forgó szerkezet (automat), and csinálmányok (manufactured products) made their appearance primarily in the Upland and Transylvanian mining towns. ⁴⁷

A unique and far different type of urbanization characterized the agrarian towns that came under Ottoman political administration. The most noticeable effect of the imposition of Ottoman rule on the Carpathian basin was the dramatic decline in the number of inhabited settlements. As evidenced by István Rácz, a leading Hungarian urban historian, while in 1522 there were 264 settlements in Bács-Bodrog County, by 1720 only fifty-five of them remained populated. Similarly, in the administrative district of Jászkunság, while in 1557 there were forty-nine settlements, by 1720 only twenty-three were inhabited. In the three counties of Békés, Csanád, and Csongrád combined, while at the turn of the sixteenth century there were 188 settlements, by 1720 there were only twenty-three. The most extreme case was in Csanád County, where, before the arrival of the Ottomans, seventy-six settlements were inhabited, a number that fell to a dismal three by the end of Ottoman rule, representing a 96.1 percent decline.⁴⁸ These figures have led many Hungarian historians to believe that the Ottoman period represented 150 full years of dearth and decimation. Complementing the decline thesis are the mass exodus of nobles from the occupied lands (due to their loss of tax-exempt privileges) and their extensive accounts of mass persecution, suffering, and torture at the hands of the "barbarians." Evidence is abundant in support of the claim that the Ottoman period signified the imposition of Eastern despotism on a more developed Western Christian feudal order. As László Makkai, the distinguished early modern historian of the region, noted, even though the Hungarian feudal system was significantly less developed in comparison to the rest of Europe, and the development toward capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had made only minuscule headway, nevertheless these humble beginnings were still far more advanced than the complete stagnation and immobility that the Turkish empire represented.⁴⁹

Contrary to Makkai's opinion, however, there is every reason to believe that the introduction of Ottoman civilization and administration actually represented an advance over the preceding era. It should be remembered that laws sanctioning the imposition of second serfdom had been enacted only a decade before the Ottoman arrival, and the respect for human liberty was at an all-time low in the kingdom. Furthermore, in contrast to what has been characterized as Ottoman "barbarism" stands the example of the Magyar feudal class, which punished the conspirators of the 1514 Dózsa peasant rebellion by forcing Dózsa's followers to eat their leader's burned flesh.⁵⁰ There appears to be scarce evidence to prove that Hungarian conditions were more advanced in terms of tolerance, hygiene, the sciences, urbanization, trade, manufacturing, state administration, or military technology.

It is true that the immediate impact of Ottoman rule was the decline of smaller settlements and the exit of the nobility, and even the abolishment of royal free privileges to distinguished towns. Yet this was paralleled by the growth of large settlements, the increase in individual liberty (including religious toleration), and the rise of municipal government autonomy. The decline of small villages was therefore not the product of Turkish slash-and-burn tactics but signified the aggrandizement of many small villages into larger settlements. Fear of raiding bands of Turkish warriors propelled peasants living in small hamlets to move to larger villages. The result was that the Plains became the most urbanized region of the Hungarian Kingdom, albeit in reality this represented extremely large villages rather than what would, in the classic sense, be considered cities. István Rácz has shown that the effects of this process were felt into the late eighteenth century. In 1784, while in the entire Hungarian Kingdom 58 percent of the population lived in settlements with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, in three of the largest counties of the Plains 50 percent lived in settlements with populations of over 5,000 people.⁵¹ Consequently, although many villages of fewer than 100 inhabitants declined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, large settlements such as Nagykőrös, Cegléd, Makó, Hódmezővásárhely, Békés, Kiskunhalas, and Mezőtúr doubled in their size. The largest of the agrarian towns, Debrecen, grew from 5,000 to 15,000, and Kecskemét witnessed an increase from 4,000 to 9,000.⁵²

As the most impressive aspect of Ottoman rule, noble privileges no longer had legal binding authority. That is, the arrival of the Ottomans meant that lordly jurisdiction over serfs was broken, and the peasantry was left to organize their own self-governments. This represented a strong reversal of the events leading up to the arrival of the Ottomans, whereby the imposition of second serfdom manifested itself by increasing the burden on peasants and decreasing the autonomy of agrarian towns. Notwithstanding the fact that, after the arrival of the Ottomans, bands of Magyar nobles did periodically descend on Ottoman-dominated territories from the north and east to demand taxes, without an entourage of mercenaries, they had little success. Interestingly, the troops of the sultan never settled in the agrarian towns, and if the taxes were paid in full on time, there was no interference in the internal affairs of the municipal administrations.

The collapse of lordly control did not mean that the agrarian towns of the lowlands became completely devoid of nobles. As noted previously, the Hungarian nobility had followed a different road than their West European counterparts, and their numbers were significantly inflated. Furthermore, in the fifteenth century, many of them lived inside the villages, and their fate was little better than that of the peasants. A number of these impoverished nobles did not move north or east but instead took up residence in the agrarian towns. Indeed, altogether, only two counties, Békés and Csanád, became completely free of nobles in the sixteenth century. But descending from a noble background appears to have been a disadvantage to someone applying for town citizenship. In Kecskemét, for instance, between 1564 and 1647, there were only eight families of noble descent and in Nagykőrös only ten.⁵³ Agrarian towns were definitely anti-noble, and they gave permission for nobles to settle only if they renounced their privileges and took an oath of loyalty to the municipal governments.

The largest agrarian town with a noble presence was Debrecen, where, between 1564 and 1640, 118 nobles were granted burgher rights.⁵⁴ Many of these families played a prominent role as merchants and occupied seats in the town senate. The most famous judge of the sixteenth century, Ferenc Duskás, was also a noble. The nobles' status in the town, however, did not derive from their feudal titles. Neither did it entail judicial immunity from the civic courts, nor tax exemption. It was primarily their merchants' skill and capital that accounted for their rise and lofty positions. Moreover, the advantages of "burgher rights" significantly outweighed the benefits of a noble title. Without burgher rights, a family could not receive part of the community land or use the common lands, and hence could not be in possession of their own means of subsistence. Such a disadvantage would invariably hurt one's chances of success and was the fate that befell the unfortunate class of day laborers, servants, and other individuals without burgher rights.

Towns that lay within the stretch of territory that is commonly referred to as the "military border zone" underwent a further unique urban evolution in the sixteenth century, as exemplified by Tata, Győr, Pápa, Veszprém, Keszthely, and Zalaegerszeg. A high proportion of these towns' urban dwellers were professional soldiers. In sixteenth-century Győr, for instance, 265 of the 731 houses were occupied by soldiers, and next to the 3,000 burghers lived a soldier population of 2,000.⁵⁵ Furthermore, because of the length of military conflict (the region remained a military border zone for 150 years) in these border castle towns, resembling Spartan-like urban fortresses with the core of their identity centered on the soldier-burgher ideal, a distinct military caste-like element emerged. The Kuruc Army, used by Emmerich Thököly and Ferenc Rákóczy II in their struggles for Hungarian independence against Habsburg rule in the late seventeenth century, was recruited from this soldier-burgher population.

In sum, the imposition of second serfdom was legally ratified in the year 1514. This inaugurated the introduction of its first stage, signifying a decline of state authority and a corresponding fragmentation of political power. As it first emerged, the political-economic order of early second serfdom was a highly unstable social system and contributed significantly to the partition of the Hungarian Kingdom in 1540. While the arrival of the Ottomans initially strengthened the centrifugal forces within society, shortly thereafter, lords were forced into a more conciliatory position toward towns and urban autonomy. Consequently, from the mid-sixteenth century onward, towns were making a comeback. The second stage of second serfdom was a more complex order and resembled late occidental feudalism in its social organization: towns, lords, and princes shared power. The agrarian towns in the lowlands followed a different evolution, although interestingly they, too, made a comeback. Ottoman rule on the Plains eliminated the institutional features of second serfdom and feudalism. Free from lordly control, peasants on the Plains aggrandized their small villages into large urban-like settlements, developing along the way a sophisticated form of self-government, with which the Ottomans did not interfere. Consequently, towns, both where second serfdom continued to thrive and where it was broken, made significant strides in the partitioned Hungarian Kingdom of the mid-sixteenth century, and were embarking on a robust ascent that would stumble only in the late seventeenth century.

The idea that the Central and East European bourgeoisie followed a separate and distinct road originally emerged in the works of disgruntled Central European liberals at the twilight of the nineteenth century. Born in the backdrop of the failure of the 1848 revolutions, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, and German unification by Prussia in 1871, the aristocracy and nobility of Central Europe were seemingly able to survive the threat of the French Revolution, to the detriment of civic middle-class values and institutions. Disillusioned by the course of events, liberals decried the lethargy, laziness, and gentrification of their respective national bourgeoisies. Theodore Mommsen bitterly wrote in 1899: "To be a true bourgeois is not possible in this nation."⁵⁶ In describing the frailty of an organic bourgeoisie in Germany, Friedrich Meinecke invented the term "substitute middle class," referring to the success Jewish immigrants came to enjoy in middle-class professions as arising from the corresponding powerlessness of an organic Christian German middle class.⁵⁷ Max Weber was also critical of the German middle class's gentrification after German unification:

[I]t is in keeping with the wisdom of the state ruling Prussia today, to reconcile the bourgeois purse with the minimal political influence of the bourgeoisie by granting a kind of "second class right of admission at court," and in the interested circles nothing would be more unpopular than if difficulties were created for the "nobilitation" of capital acquired in commerce, in industry, in the stock exchange by their metamorphosis into the form of the landed estate.⁵⁸

At the time Francis Carsten was formulating his ideas on medieval urban development, civil society had deteriorated even further in Central and Eastern Europe. Carsten published his first major article in 1943 under the title "Medieval Democracy in the Brandenburg Towns and Its Defeat in the Fifteenth Century." The last sentence read: "Both the historical weakness of democracy in Germany and the formation of the Prussian State are intimately connected with the subjugation of the towns at the end of the middle ages."⁵⁹ Readers did not have to be reminded of what Carsten meant. His work was intended as a contribution to understanding the victory of National Socialism in Germany. Nineteen thirty-three became the year that had to be explained, and throughout his life Carsten remained committed to the idea that stunted urbanization in the sixteenth century was the root cause of the rise of dictatorships in the twentieth. In his influential work The Origins of Prussia (1954), he wrote: "The most important factor in the social history of Brandenburg and Prussia, and of many other eastern European countries, was the decline of the towns and the subsequent rise of the nobility: it definitely separated the developments in the east from those in the west and created a boundary line between two different social systems."⁶⁰

This article challenges the traditional view of early modern urban development in Eastern Europe by showing that, in the case of Hungary, there was no direct correlation between the seigniorial reaction and urban decline. While some towns declined, others grew. Among the most fundamental changes that took place, urban constitutions were modernized, the family and the social organization of the communal brotherhood were reformed, and towns converted to Lutheranism. Many diverse factors exist to explain Hungary's widespread urban dynamism. Bratislava, for instance, with the Ottoman occupation of Buda, became the new political capital of the Independent Hungarian Kingdom. Trnava's population increased because many of the influential burghers from Buda and Pest decided to settle there. Cluj-Napoca became an important city in Transylvania, as it became the center of a unique Magyar late renaissance. Buda expanded because it became the capital of the Ottoman administration in the occupied lands and was a transshipment point between the West and the East. But even the less impressive town of Levo

a experienced growth. Between 1555 and 1667, the number of houses increased from 440 to 700, while the population of the town rose from 3,162 to 4,867. ⁶¹ Further, the populations of Košice, Bardejov, Prešov, and virtually all of the mining towns experienced a similar demographic and economic rise. ⁶² In urban centers large and small, town halls, public baths, schoolhouses, stone fortifications, and Renaissance-style homes were constructed.

How does this evidence help in understanding East European historical developments? Hungarian historians have used the urban decline thesis, in the tradition of Carsten, to explain the medieval origins of Hungary's later political backwardness: namely, the rise of right-wing dictatorship in the interwar period and communism after World War II. This was most eloquently expressed by Jenő Szűcs in his influential work "Outline of the Three Historical Regions of Europe":

The weakness of the development of a western type of autonomous urban/civic society should not be looked for in the fact that in the Hungarian Kingdom town dwellers were ethnically different from the Magyars but in the fact that the urbanization that did develop lasted only for a short time and produced but a handful of towns between 1200 and 1350; and, when this early urbanization was interrupted [with the decline of the Levantine trade route], those that did exist were dwarfed by the economics of the dominant latifundium system.⁶³

In light of the evidence presented in this article, it becomes difficult to accept Szűcs's position that Hungary's weakly developed urban/civic traditions can be traced to a stunted or interrupted urbanization in the medieval period. On this point, Geoff Eley's argument appears more convincing, that in Germany (and here Eastern Europe must be included), there is too great a reliance on the continuity from the medieval to the modern, and historians should try and "loosen the deterministic grip of the road to 1933." This is not to discard the importance of the medieval; yet, as Eley writes, "In the end both perspectives are necessary—the deep historical long-term structural one and the stress on the immediate crises. But we have to be clear about what exactly each of them may reasonably explain."⁶⁴

The critical question remains: Was the Hungarian experience unique? Or does there have to be a review of urban development across all of Central and Eastern Europe under second serfdom? Is there a need for a new meta-narrative?

Arguments for Hungary's distinctiveness could begin with the Ottoman occupation. Where the Ottomans consolidated their control, occidental feudalism and second serfdom were abolished. Further, even where second serfdom continued, namely the Uplands and Transylvania, it could be maintained that the tense international military competition was far different from that of, for instance, Poland. One of the strengths of this argument is that after the Ottomans were expelled and the Habsburgs consolidated their rule over Hungary, many royal free towns stagnated. Arguments against Hungary's distinctiveness, in contrast, would stress broader European structural developments. As Robert Brenner argued, for instance, there were three possible solutions to the crisis of the manorial economy in late medieval Europe. One, lords could expel their serfs and transform the land into their private property. Two, peasants could expel their lords and establish a system of free peasant family farming. Three, lords could chain their serfs to the land and establish second serfdom. The first option was followed in England, the second in France, and the third in Eastern Europe.⁶⁵

Within this larger European context, the military success of the Ottomans over Hungary should be understood as a symptom of the rise of second serfdom and not an end in itself. One of the structural flaws of the seigniorial reaction throughout Eastern Europe was that it weakened royal authority, because the rise of Ringbürger rule in the towns and subjugation of other towns by the nobility reduced the flow of taxes to the state. A direct line can be drawn from the borders of what today are Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, up to Lithuania, where a similar pattern was followed: rise of lords, corruption in the towns, followed by declining authority of the king, contested sovereignty, and invasion. Interestingly enough, it was precisely during the period of contested sovereignty and the growing international military competition of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century that towns flourished. The case of Zápolya is telling here. When he re-granted Kežmarok its autonomy and ennobled all the burghers of Buda, Zápolya was trying to rise from a landlord leading the manorial reaction to the king of Hungary. Some Polish nobles with similar aspirations must also have realized the advantages of this strategy. In other words, the moment sovereignty was being renegotiated following the initial imposition of second serfdom was a fortuitous one for towns, and some emerged with greater autonomy. This does not mean to imply that all towns developed under second serfdom. Sometimes, towns negotiated badly, with the wrong partner, becoming little more than villages. But when they negotiated well, with a good partner, had fortune on their side, and escaped major fires and plagues, they emerged stronger.

Contrary to the traditional view, therefore, there is no natural correlation between the seigniorial reaction and urban decay. As is accepted today, the old textbook supposition that towns existed outside and were antithetical to feudalism is an exaggeration. Towns did not lead the way for the decline of feudalism in Western Europe. Taking this into account, it must also be accepted that their decline did not seal the victory for seigniorial reaction in Eastern Europe. Towns and lords during feudalism could slug it out, snub one another, or, what was most frequent, live in a symbiotic relationship. But towns were rarely the natural allies of unfree peasants, and the chant of "city air makes free" (stadtluft macht frei) was often reserved for the already privileged. Obviously, some towns declined as a consequence of the seigniorial reaction, but many did not. The fate of towns often hinged on local factors, the course of negotiations, and fortune, but not on a set and immutable law linking second serfdom with urban decay.

Research for this text was conducted in the Eger Chapter Archive, the Hungarian National Archives, the Hungarian National Library, the Municipal and District Archives of Levoca and Košice (Slovakia), the Municipal Archive of Spišská Nová Ves (Slovakia), the Sibiu Branch of the National Archives of Romania, and the United States Library of Congress. I would like to thank the editors and readers of the AHR for their comments and suggestions. Further, the article would not have been possible without support from the Fulbright Minority Studies and Regional Program, the American Council of Learned Societies Eastern European Program, the American Council of Learned Societies Library of Congress Fellowships in International Studies, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Balázs Szelényi completed his PhD (1998) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, he holds a National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress. He is in the process of completing a book project called The Failed Bourgeoisie, based in part on the above article. His new research addresses the evolution of three German ethnic groups in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia during the interwar period.

Notes

¹ Including Slovakia and Transylvania.

² See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974); T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philip, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (New York, 1985); Ernest Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany (Chicago, 1964); Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, 3 vols. (New York, 1982–84); Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (1967; rpt. edn., New York, 1979); Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1947); Sándor Gyimesi, A városok a feudalizmusból a kapitalizmusba való átmenet időszakában [Towns during the transition from feudalism to capitalism] (Budapest, 1975); Eric Hobsbawm, "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century: I," Past and Present, no. 5 (May 1954): 33–53; and "The Crisis of the 17th Century: II," 6 (November 1954): 44–65; Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, 1985); Marion Malowist, "The Problem of the Inequality of Economic Development in Europe in the Later Middle Ages," Economic History Review 19, no. 1 (1966): 15–28; Zsigmond Pál Pach, Die ungarische Agrarentwicklung im 16–17. Jahrhundert: Abbiegung vom westeuropäischen Entwicklungsgang (Budapest, 1964); Henri Pirenne, A History of Europe from the Invasions to the XVI Century, Bernard Miall, trans. (London, 1939); Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 1958); Jenő Szűcs, "Vázlatok Európa három történeti régiójáról" [Outline of the three historical regions of Europe], in T. Iván Berend and Éva Ring, eds., Helyünk Európában [Our place in Europe], 2 vols. (Budapest, 1986); Jerzy Topolski, The Manorial Reaction in Early Modern East-Central Europe: Origins, Development and Consequences (Aldershot, 1994); Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971); Max Weber, The City, Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth, trans. and eds. (New York, 1966).

³ Francis L. Carsten, "The Origins of the Junkers," English Historical Review 62, no. 243 (April 1947): 145–78, see 164.

⁴ Francis L. Carsten, "Medieval Democracy in the Brandenburg Towns and Its Defeat in the Fifteenth Century," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser. (London, 1943): 73–92, see 90.

⁵ Francis L. Carsten, The Origins of Prussia (Oxford, 1954), 135.

⁶ Jerome Blum, "The Rise of Serfdom in Eastern Europe,"AHR 62 (July 1957): 807–36, see 833.

⁷ Often, the criticism is leveled specifically at G. F. Knapp's famous work, Die Bauern-Befreiung und der Ursprung der Landarbeiter in den älteren Theilen Preussens (Leipzig, 1887), which formed one pillar of Carsten and Rosenberg's criticism of the Junkers. William W. Hagen, "Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg: The Thirty Years' War, the Destabilization of Serfdom, and the Rise of Absolutism,"AHR 94 (April 1989): 302–35; also see Hagen, Ordinary Prussians (Cambridge, 2002); Hagen, "How Mighty the Junkers? Peasant Rents and Seigniorial Profits in Sixteenth Century Brandenburg," Past and Present, no. 108 (1985): 80–116; Peter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchants: Europe and the World Economy 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1983); also Kriedte, "Spätmittelalterische Agrarkrise oder Krise des Feudalismus?" Geschichte und Gesselschaft 7 (1981): 42–67; Edgar Melton, "Gutsherrschaft in East Elbian Germany and Livonia, 1500–1800: A Critique of the Model," Central European History 21 (December 1988): 315–49; Jan Peters, ed., Konflikt und kontrolle in Gutsherrschaftsgesellschaften (Göttingen, 1995); J. Schlumbohm, Freiheitsbegriff und Emanzipacionsprozess (Göttingen, 1973); Tom Scott, Freiburg and the Breisgau (Oxford, 1986); Heidi Wunder, "Serfdom in Later Medieval and Early Modern Germany," in T. S. Aston, ed., Social Relations and Ideas (Cambridge, 1983), 273–94.

⁸ Hagen, "Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg," 311.

⁹ Melton, "Gutsherrschaft in East Elbian Germany and Livonia," 326.

¹⁰ Hagen, "Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg," 315, 313.

¹¹ Adriaan Verhulst, "The Origins of Towns in the Low Countries," Past and Present, no. 122 (February 1989): 3–36.

¹² John Merrington, "Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism," in Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1978), 170–95, see 170.

¹³ As quoted in Merrington, "Town and Country," 173, from Pirenne's Medieval Cities (rpt. edn., New York, 1966), 31, 72, 153–58.

¹⁴ Henri Pirenne, Histoire de la constitution de la ville de Dinant au moyen-âge (Gand, 1889); also see Pirenne, Belgian Democracy, Its Early History (Manchester, 1915); Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, N.J., 1925); and Early Democracies in the Low Countries: Urban Society and Political Conflict in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York, 1963).

¹⁵ Pirenne, History of Europe from the Invasions to the XVI Century, 534.

¹⁶ On the Hungarian literature, see Zsigmond Pál Pach, Das Entwicklungsniveau der feudalen Agrarverhältnisse in Ungarn in der zweiten Hälfte des XV. Jahrhunderts (Budapest, 1960); Sándor Gyimesi, "Frühkapitalistische Entwicklung und Spätfeudalismus in 16. und 17. Jh. in Ungarn," Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftgeschichte 2 (1987): 51–64; Iván Berend, "The Historical Evolution of Eastern Europe as a Region," in Ellen Comisso and Laura D'Andrea Tyson, eds., Power, Purpose, and Collective Choice (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 153–70; Szűcs, Vázlat Európa három történeti régiójáról; György Granasztói, A középkori magyar város [The medieval Hungarian town] (Budapest, 1980). On Poland, look at Maria Bogucka, Handel zagraniczny Gdanska w pierwszej poowie XVII w. [Gdansk's foreign trade in the first half of the seventeenth century] (Wrocaw, 1970); Antoni Mączak, "Export of Grain and the Problem of Distribution of the National Income in Poland in the Years 1550–1650," Acta Poloniae historica 18 (1968): 75–98; Staniszlaw Hoszowski, "The Revolution of Prices in Poland in the 16th and 17th Centuries," Acta Poloniae historica 2 (1959): 7–16; Jerzy Topolski, "The Role of Gniezno in International Trade," Acta Poloniae historica 18 (1968): 194–204. For recent work, see Andrzej Wyrobisz, "Towns in 15th, 16th, and 17th Century Descriptions of Poland," Acta Poloniae historica 67 (1993): 79–90; Jerzy Wyrozumski, "Was Poland Affected by the Late-Medieval Crisis?" Acta Poloniae historica 78 (1998): 5–18.

¹⁷ Z. P. Pach, "Sixteenth-Century Hungary: Commercial Activity and Market Production by the Nobles," in Peter Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essays from Annales (New York, 1972), 113–33, see 114.

¹⁸ Zsigmond Pál Pach, "The Shifting of International Trade Routes in the 15th–17th Centuries," Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 14 (1968): 287–319, see 287, also printed in Pach, Hungary and the European Economy in Early Modern Times (Aldershot, 1994).

¹⁹ Zsigmond Pál Pach, "The Role of East Central Europe in International Trade," in Pach, Hungary and the European Economy, 259.

²⁰ Pach, "Sixteenth-Century Hungary," 114.

²¹ Pach, Das Entwicklungsniveau der feudalen Agrarverhältnisse; see also Zsigmond Pál Pach, The Role of East-Central Europe in International Trade, 16th and 17th Centuries (Budapest, 1970). For a shorter summary, see Pach, Levantine Trade and Hungary in the Middle Ages: Theses, Controversies, Arguments (Budapest, 1975); also see Pach, The Transylvanian Route of Levantine Trade at the Turn of the 15th and 16th Centuries (Budapest, 1980).

²² Verhulst, "Origins of Towns in the Low Countries," 32.

²³ A. B. Hibbert, "The Origins of the Medieval Town Patriciate," Past and Present, no. 3 (February 1953): 15–27, see 17.

²⁴ Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," Past and Present, no. 70 (February 1976): 30–74, see 54–55.

²⁵ Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure," 59–60.

²⁶ R. H. Hilton, "Capitalism—What's in a Name?" Past and Present, no. 1 (February 1952): 32–43, see 41.

²⁷ Maurice Dobb, "A Reply," in Hilton, Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, 57–67, see 61.

²⁸ In 1100, Kremica (Kremnitz/Körmöcbánya), in 1141, Skalica (Skalitz/Szakolcza), and in 1200, Szeged (Szegedin) were granted royal privileges, but real urban growth was more characteristic of the first half of the thirteenth century. In 1225, Banská Bystrica (Neusohl/Besztercebánya), in 1238, Trnava (Tyrnau/Nagyszombat), in 1242, Levoa (Leutschau/Lőcse), in 1244, Buda, in 1244, Banská Štiavnica (Schemnitz/Selmecbánya), and in 1244, Krupina (Karpfen/Korpona) became royal free towns. In 1291, both Bratislava (Pressburg/Pozsony) and Pest were elevated to royal free standing, but between 1250 and 1320, fewer towns received royal charters. Then in the year 1324—which is understood as the height of urban power in Hungary—seven towns were granted royal privileges, including Bardejov (Bartfeld/Bártfa), Prešov (Preschau/Eperjes), Sopron (Ödenburg), Zvolen (Altsohl/Zólyom), Nová Bana (Königsberg/Újbánya), and Baia Mare (Neustadt/Nagybánya), and were raised to royal free standing. The year 1324 is viewed as the most important year for urban development in Hungarian history. Mining, manufacturing, construction, and trade were all flourishing and expanding.

²⁹ Gernot Nussbächer, Johannes Benkner (Bucharest, 1988), 22–23.

³⁰ Nussbächer, Johannes Benkner, 22–23. The names are given as spelled in the original documents.

³¹ These were Alba Iulia, Baia Mare, Baia Sprie (Mittelstadt/Felsőbánya), Cluj-Napoca, Esztergom (Gran), Košice, and Tîrgu Mure (Neumarkt/Marosvásárhely).

³² Christian Genersich, Merkwürdigkeit der königlichen Freystadt Käisermarkt (Kaschau, 1804). Also see Ivan Chalupecký, Kežmarok (Košice, 1968); Nora Baráthová, Kezmarský hrad (Martin, Slovakia, 1989).

³³ Genersich, Merkwürdigkeit der königlichen Freystadt Käisermarkt.

³⁴ István Sinkovics, "Útkeresés Mohács után: Az ország három részre szakadása 1526–1541" [The search for order after Mohács: The partition of the kingdom into three parts 1526–1541], in Zsigmond Pál Pach, ed., Magyarország története 1526–1686, 2 vols. [History of Hungary 1526–1686] (Budapest, 1987), 1: 147–222, see 180–90. Also see Gábor Barta, et al., eds., Két tárgyalás Sztambulban: Hyeronimus Łaski tárgyalása a töröknél János király nevében, Habardanecz János jelentése 1528. Nyári sztambuli tárgyalásairól [Two conferences in Istanbul: Hieronimus Łaski's meeting with the Turks in the name of King János; and János Habardanecz's report of his Istanbul conference in the summer of 1528] (Budapest, 1996).

³⁵ Genersich, Merkwürdigkeit der königlichen Freystadt Käisermarkt. Zápolya granting estates to Łaski can be found in the Hungarian National Archives (MOL), Neo-regestrata acta, E 148, 59/20. Some of Łaski's correspondence can also be found in the Sibiu Branch of the National Archives of Romania, under the Brukenthal Index. Kežmarok's town book covering most of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is in the Poprad District Archive (Slovakia) and is in excellent condition.

³⁶ Gábor Barta, Vajon kié az ország? [To whom does the country belong?] (Budapest, 1988); Alphons Lhotsky, Das Zeitalter des Hauses österreich: Die ersten Jahre d. Regierung Ferdinand I. in österreich, 1520–1527 (Vienna, 1971).

³⁷ In 1493, the burghers of Krakow were also ennobled, and similar ennoblements took place among the burghers of Lviv (in Ukraine) and Wilno (Vilnius). András Kubinyi, "Budapest története a későbbi középkorban Buda elestéig 1541-ben" [The history of Budapest in the late medieval period to Buda's fall in 1541]; László Gerevich, ed., Budapest Története II, 2 vols. [History of Budapest] (Budapest, 1973), 2: 210–12.

³⁸ Kálmán Mikszáth, A fekete város [The black city] (Budapest, 1910). This popular novel by Mikszáth was a fictional account of the history of Levoa during the Thököly Revolt in the seventeenth century.

³⁹ István Rácz, Városlakó nemesek az Alföldön 1541–1848 között [Urbanized nobles of the Plains 1541–1848] (Budapest, 1988), 17–19.

⁴⁰ Bálint Hóman and Gyula Szekfű, Magyar történet [History of Hungary], 5 vols. (Budapest, 1935–36), 3: 554.

⁴¹ Rácz, Városlakó nemesek az Alföldön, 30.

⁴² Hóman and Szekfű, Magyar történet, 3: 555–56.

⁴³ Hóman and Szekfű, Magyar történet, 3: 555–56.

⁴⁴ Hóman and Szekfű, Magyar történet, 3: 558.

⁴⁵ Nussbächer, Johannes Benkner.

⁴⁶ Sebastian Műnster, Cosmographey oder beschreibung aller länder herschaftenn vnd fürnemesten stetten des gantzen erdbodens (Getruckt zu Basel, 1588). The Hungarian Simplicissimus appeared in print in 1683 and was an imitation of Grimmelshausen's work. Its author's identity remains a mystery. Some have attributed it to the Silesian-born Daniel Speer. He was born in Vraclav (Breslau) in 1635. However, linguists have questioned this assumption, and there remains no definite answer to the author's true identity. See József Turóczi-Trostler, ed., Magyar Simplicissimus (Budapest, 1956), 226.

⁴⁷ Ágnes Várkonyi, "Gazdaság és társadalom a 17. század második felében (1648–1686)" [Economy and society during the second half of the seventeenth century], in Pach, Magyarország története 1526–1686, 2: 1273–1424, see 1290.

⁴⁸ Rácz, Városlakó nemesek az Alföldön, 27.

⁴⁹ László Makkai, A magyar városfejlődés és városépítés történeti vázlata [A historical outline of Hungarian town development and town building] (Budapest, 1963), 62.

⁵⁰ Antal Verancsics, an eyewitness to the execution of Dózsa, described it thus: "They took György Dózsa's clothes off up to the waist and tied him to a red-hot iron chair. Then they forced his soldiers to dance the heyduck around his throne. After the completion of every round they had to take a bite out of his flesh." László Kürti, "The Ungaresca and Heyduck Music and Dance Tradition of Renaissance Europe," Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 1 (1983): 63–104, 83. Kürti is quoting from Memoria Rerum quae in Hungaria a Nato Rege Ludovico Acciderunt, in L. Szalay and G. Wenczel, eds., Monumenta Hungariae Historiae, III (Budapest, 1854–75), 11.

⁵¹ Rácz, Városlakó nemesek az Alföldön, 27–28.

⁵² Makkai, A magyar városfejlődés, 70.

⁵³ Rácz, Városlakó nemesek az Alföldön, 85–86.

⁵⁴ Elemér Mályus, A mezővárosi fejlődés [The development of agrarian towns] (Budapest, 1953); Lajos Zoltai, Debrecen a török uralom végén [Debrecen at the end of Ottoman rule] (Budapest, 1905); Zoltai, Vidékiek beköltözése Debrecenbe [The settlement from the countryside into Debrecen] (Debrecen, 1902); István Balogh, A civisek világa [The world of well-to-do peasants in the towns of Eastern Hungary] (Budapest, 1973); István Rácz, A debreceni cívisvagyon [An inventory of Debrecen's well-to-do peasants living in the town] (Budapest, 1989).

⁵⁵ Makkai, A magyar városfejlődés.

⁵⁶ Quoted in Lothar Gall, Bürgertum in Deutschland (Augsburg, 1989), 17. Mommsen also wrote: "I have never had political influence, nor aimed at it. But in my innermost self, and I believe with what is best in me, I have always been an animal politicum, and wished to be a citizen. That is not possible in our nation; even the best among us never rises above doing his duty in the ranks and treating political authority like a fetish (politischen Fetischismus). This rift between my inner self and the people to whom I belong has firmly and consistently determined me to appear as little as possible as a person before the German public, for which I have no respect." Theodore Mommsen, "Last Wishes, 1899," Past and Present, no. 1 (February 1952): 71.

⁵⁷ Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationstaat (Munich, 1908).

⁵⁸ Quoted in Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany, 50. As Don Martindale noted: "[For Weber] Prussia's policies were determined by the attempt to keep the city and its typical strata under political control while political dominance—in the state, the administration, and the higher ranks of the Army—was in the hands of the rural aristocrats (the Junkers). Thus [he thought that] while in other Western lands and the United States urban types had the major voice in the affairs of the nation, in Germany the city man was peculiarly deprived of political responsibility." Martindale, "Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City," in Weber, The City, 36. Or, as Richard Bendix noted: "[As] a member of the middle class [Weber] inquired into the sources of the collectivism and rationality that prompted English and Hanseatic stockbrokers to impose an ethic of trade upon themselves—a practice that stood in marked contrast to the aping of aristocratic ways among his compatriots." Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960; rpt. edn., Berkeley, Calif., 1977), 48.

⁵⁹ Carsten, "Medieval Democracy in the Brandenburg Towns," 90. Carsten understood his theory as applying to all of Eastern Europe, including Hungary: "In spite of wide differences of historical development between Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Prussia, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Russia, and the Baltic states, one basic fact applied to all of them: the nobility remained the ruling class, and an urban middle class did not come into being until the later nineteenth century"; Carsten, Origins of Prussia, 276.

⁶⁰ Carsten, Origins of Prussia, 276.

⁶¹ Kálmán Demkó, Lőcse története [History of Levoa] (Lőcse, 1897), 269.

⁶² Granasztói, A középkori magyar város, 158–59.

⁶³ Szűcs, "Vázlatok Európa három történeti régiójáról," 2: 515–68, see 541.

⁶⁴ Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (1986; London, 1990), 12, 276.

⁶⁵ Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure."

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