Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 3. (Budapest, 2008)
Abstracts
jurors, compared to most Transylvanian and Hungarian towns of the era, was rather closed, and it had a very strict hierarchy. At the same time, the office of the Chief Judge was appropriated for a long time by a certain kind of duumvirate, the members of which lead the town in an alternating manner. It seems that a number of families succeeded in remaining in the local elite consisting of mostly craftsmen during the whole early modern era. Our main sources as regards the town governance of Beszterce was the Protocol preserved from 1542, and as regards the members of the internal and external councils the Protocol preserved from 1605, the data of which we have significantly complemented with the contents of the accounting books (Rechnungsbuch) . ISTVÁN BARISKA The elite of Kőszeg between 1568-1648 The author first analyses the sixteenth century private law situation of Kőszeg. Here he analyses the model in the framework of which the West Hungarian towns (Kőszeg, Kismarton) mortgaged to the Habsburgs lived till 1647. This was the model of the Lower-Austrian Chamber Mortgaged Town. Kőszeg freed from under the rule of the landlords operated under a double-chamber local governmental structure. The study separately explains the economic and social historical background of this development. Thus, it covers the participation of the town in the transit trade of live animals, and the dependant situation of the local craftsmen industries from the Austrian raw materials. Moreover, it also analyses the ethnical relations of the town discovering an over-representation of the Germans in the local governmental positions and offices. Subsequently the study qualifies the stability of the double chamber structure of the leading bodies and offices of the local government of Kőszeg that was established between 1568—1648, it explores the reasons of the collision of the authority scopes of the town judge and the town captain, and it presents the ratios of the elite by ethnicity, in a town that has moved to the Lutheran and Calvinist branches of reformation by the second half of the 16th century. The second part of the study examines the Lower-Austrian governmental influence on the election of the judge, the mobility of the members of the body, based on territorial, wealth-based and ethnical selection. It introduces the consequences of the first re-catholicisation effort of the Hapsburg government (1631-1635), and it introduces the conditions of the role and operation of the intellectual elite (notary, priest and teacher), together with the interdependence of the economic and intellectual capital of the town. The study interprets all the above in between the Austrian and Hungarian mortgage landlord land
