A Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár évkönyve 3. 1976 (Debrecen, 1976)

Tanulmányok - Makkai László: Adatok és kérdések Debrecen törökkori agrártörténetéhez

A Supplement to the Agrarian History of Debrecen at the Time of the Turkish Conquest

by László Makkai

Debrecen used to be the most populated and industrialized town in Hungary in the 16th-17th centuries. In the middle of the 17th century 51 per cent of the population were craftsmen and 18 per cent tradesmen. In spite of this, the town is still referred to as “agrarian city” or even as “giant village”, since mostly small, single storied houses with large gardens dominated the scenery almost up to the present day, and a 133 thousand hectares of pasture, arable land and wood surrounded her, with 25 isolated and 1,500 deserted settlements. A large territory like this must have had a significant agrarian output, and though thanks to scattered sources we are familiar with some of its aspects, the structure and the different branches of production on the whole have not yet been disclosed. The author, trying to promote a desirable synthesis, draws his conclusion partly from already published partly from first printed data, namely that the main branch of production in Debrecen was cattle breeding in the 16th-17th centuries, and the Debrecen tradesmen drove their cattle by ten thousands to Italian, Moravian, German and Austrian markets. This sort of cattle was a lot bigger than the contemporary European small stock, belonged to the “primigenius” species and resembled the prehistoric bullock. This species, as the author newly proves it, was introduced by the immigrant Cumanians who brought it from the Pontus steppe in the middle of the 13th century and Hungarian (including Debrecen) citizens raised into a special beef-producing animal. Owing to the dicrease in demand for beef in West-Europe, vineyards and arable lands took the place of pastures near Debrecen in the 17th century, and though a hundred years earlier they were unable to supply the town with wine and corn, by the end of the 17th century they spread so much that predicted the birth of land- workers’ farms in the place of previous shepherds’ abodes, which, as a matter of fact did follow by the end of the 18th century.

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