Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
The Medieval Sister Cities
the fourteenth century the Taschental suburb arose inside the suburban city wall (approximately in the neighbourhood of what is today Varsányi Irén Street); simultaneously with the wall. This was probably a new German settlement. This is supported by the fact that the friars of the Mater Misericordiae built by the Carmelites in this suburb in 1372 were exclusively Germans, unlike the friars of the other three monasteries. In 1441 Tótfalu and Taschental were nevertheless joined to the Hungarian Mary Magdalene Parish. Logod and Felhévíz on the western slopes of Castle Hill were not part of the Buda administration, although the Whitsun fairs of Buda were held in Felhévíz, and the hospital of the Order of the Holy Ghost under the patronage of the city commune was also built there. Social Conditions For a period after the foundation of the city only the burghers of Castle Hill enjoyed any civic rights, the inhabitants of the suburbs did not acquire them before the end of the thirteenth century at the earliest. The leading burghers were the rich merchant patricians coming from Pest or other German towns in Hungary, and from Vienna. The merchant patricians of Buda were, as might be expected, similar to the palatine burghers of Vienna, seeing that members of the Viennese Preussel and Greif families played the same leading role in Buda as their kinsfolk did in Vienna. Up to 1264 the town was governed by an elected magistrate and a council of twelve aldermen drawn from the wealthiest citizen families. The magistrate was then replaced by a rector appointed by the king, though the citizens still retained the right to elect the council. They only regained the right to elect their chief magistrate (mayor) in 1347, although the sovereign had already recognized this right in principle in 1276. Voting was limited in practice to the wealthy burghers, known as the “patricians”. These men owned most of the city land and the vineyards in the suburbs. The chief among them either by royal grant or by purchase became the owners of serf villages, owed military service as nobles, but remained merchants, and helped to manage the royal finances or farmed ecclesiastical benefices. Their social position was the same as that of the Hungarian ruling class, and this is clear from the marriages between the families of Buda patricians and Hungarian noblemen. Nor can conflicts along national lines be detected. Wealthy Hungarians—in certain cases demonstrably nobles—and even burghers of Slav extraction could join the ranks of the patricians, especially if they intermarried with the Germans. This is how the Egry family or the SlavStojan family had become German ized by the second generation. The leading burghers of the city faced two ways. On the one hand they themselves belonged to the feudal ruling class, and on the other—as merchants—they found themselves in conflict with the forces of feudalism, especially as exemplified by the church and the great ecclesiastical foundations. The market toll of Buda and the ferry toll on the Danube had been granted by the crown to ecclesiastical foundations, and as a result, clashes occurred between the citizens of Buda and these foundations, as for example the nunnery founded by Béla IV (1235-1270) on Nyulak szigete (Rabbit Island, today Margaret Island), or the Óbuda Collegiate Chapter. There was a lawsuit between the Óbuda Chapter and the boatmen of Pest over the Danube toll as early as 1268; the first surviving document on Buda 16
