Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 1. (Budapest, 2006)

Abstracts

VERA BÁCSKAI "... Countries Are Cultivated by Royal Towns.

.." The study surveys the changes of the role played by the free royal towns in the feudal society and in the Hungarian urban network in the 150 years between the beginning of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries. The analysis is centred around the comparison of the characteristics of free royal towns and market towns (oppida). The fonncr were towns in the legal sense of the word, the latter were bestowed by privileges and autonomies of different degrees, performed certain urban functions, and were mostly under manorial rule. The favourable situation of the free royal towns is unequivocal in the analyzed period, as only these settlements were considered proper towns and solely their citizens constituted the fourth estate. The fundamental question is, however, what was their real place in the urban network and the economic life of the country? How much did they preserve of their autonomy, which was thought to bc the security of their previous favourable position? To what extent did their privileged situation remain the driving force of their development in the later period? The nobility opposed the multiplication of free royal towns; the number of these could therefore rise in Hungary from thirty at the end of the seventeenth century only to 44 until the end of the period. Even together with the 17 Transylvanian and Croatian-Slavonian towns this can be considered a small number. This slight growth, nevertheless, brought along fundamental changes in the composition of this town-group. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the number of "market town-like" settlements living mainly of production and exchange of agrarian commodities made up almost one third of the free royal towns. This resulted in a series of more heterogeneous townscapes. Several settlements, elevated to town rank newly or without a town privilege at all got into the 10 largest towns according to their population. The level of the population concentration alone cannot be considered a measure of urbanization especially not in Hungary in the surveyed period; however it indicates the weakening of the prominent situation of free royal towns. Moreover, the growth of the population in market-towns that played a real urban role was also slightly faster than in the free royal towns. Only 23 privileged royal towns could keep their role as central places, and an additional 12 could fulfil a more restricted central function as market-places. The smaller ones entirely lost their urban role by the end of the surveyed period; this shows the ever-growing separation of the urban role and the legally defined concept of towns. The membership of the Estates of the Realm was not enough to preserve the real urban role of a settlement, although in the case of existing favourable transport and economic conditions, an existing privilege also contributed to its development. Nevertheless, the free royal towns as a group lost their leading role in the Hungarian urban network. The growth of the power of the king as landowner also diminished the differences in the grade of autonomy between the group of privileged towns and other urban settlements.