Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Pest-Buda from 1686 to 1849
the Turkish Empire and possessed advantageous business contacts through their family connections, were enterprising, quickly acquired wealth, and played a very important role in the development of Pest as a commercial centre. The two cities were jointly administered by a magistrate and a twelve-member city council headed by a mayor. The growth of the population and the increasing variety of trades and commercial enterprises soon made the extension of the administration necessary. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the joint External Council consisting of 24 members in Pest and 30 members in Buda, was already established, and shortly afterwards came the introduction of the “hundreds” or “elected citizens”, led by their spokesman, who was called upon to interpret the wishes of the citizens. Although the prime task of these two bodies, representing the townsfolk, should have been to supervise and control the activities of the Council, in point of fact their powers were so limited that their activities were exhausted in carrying out the Council’s instructions. Even their complaints were mostly ignored by the Council. The role of the elected citizens was thus all but restricted, beside the supervision of the economic affairs of the city, to organizing the election of officials. Nor was this of any particular importance, since the councillors exercised their office for life, and the elections of officials, which took place every two or three years, amounted to no more than filling one or two vacancies from among the elected members of the citizens. The “elected citizens” were also chosen for life, and they themselves nominated new members to places falling vacant. This electoral system, which remained in force until 1848, guaranteed the unbroken power of the craftsmen and merchants for over a hundred and fifty years. Separate offices were set up to deal with the economy of the city, to handle questions connected with land, the property of orphans, etc. The officials in the expanding administration often used their powers to promote their individual or family interests, or those of the propertied class in general, and these abuses frequently created open discontent among the population. This sketch of eighteenth-century life in Buda and Pest may create the impression that the capital was progressing at the same slow, almost medieval rate as the other Hungarian towns. But this seemingly uneventful, monochrome everyday life cloaked very important changes and a rapidly growing prosperity; for why otherwise would men have flocked into the two cities in great numbers, both from the Hungarian countryside and from neighbouring countries? Compared to other Hungarian towns, the increase in the population of the capital was unusually rapid: the number of inhabitants grew approximately fivefold within fifty years, the increase being especially remarkable in Pest. In 1720 this city, as far as the number of its inhabitants was concerned, stood in somewhere between the eighteenth and twentieth places among Hungarian cities and towns. By 1787 it had climbed to the fifth place with 21,000 inhabitants, with Buda, with 24,000 inhabitants, standing in the third place. As the population grew, the cities expanded. By the middle of the eighteenth century in Pest it had overflowed the medieval walls of the Inner City. The developing suburbs took up an ever-growing area of arable land and nursery gardens surrounding the town. Buda possessed suburbs as early as the Middle Ages, and in the eighteenth century these suburbs were more populated, and extended further, than in medieval times. And at the end of the eighteenth century a new suburb came into being, climbing up the mountainside. Houses of any architectural merit at that time were only to be found in the Buda Castle 27
