Itt-Ott, 1990 (23. évfolyam, 114-117. szám)
1990 / 117. szám
1 Akadémia Louis J. Éltető (Portland State University): John Honter, the Saxon Luther Presented at the Conference on Religious Freedom and Human Rights —Unitarians and Transylvania, University of Toledo, Ohio, October 3-6,1990. The 12th and 13th century settlement of Germans into certain parts of Transylvania, the eastern portion of the Hungarian kingdom was, in large measure, a kind of capitalist undertaking. In return for compensation, namely, extra grants of farmland, and certain privileges, including the exclusive and perpetual right to operate mills and to keep taverns, German entrepreneurs, called Gräve, recruited settlers to come to villages and towns of their founding in the valleys of the Carpathians. The immigrants, for their part, were given free title to land, land that could only be sold to and bought by other Germans, as well as individual and collective liberties that they had not enjoyed in the feudal oppression of their former habitat close to the Rhine. In Transylvania they were to elect their own leaders, even their own priests, and they would be protected not only from the interference of the feudal Hungarian counties, but for the most part also from the ecclesiastic rule of the Bishopric of Transylvania, under the loose and remote supervision of the Bishop of Esztergom. What was to evolve into the Transylvanian Saxon nation was a creature of the Hungarian kings. Their name derives from the fact that the rulers granted them privileges under statutes patterned after the socalled old Saxon laws; for ethnically the settlers were not Saxons. It was the Hungarian court that decreed them collectively one people, who owed allegiance only and directly to the Crown; in this they shared some provisions of the law with their closest neighbors, the Hungarian-speaking Székelys, who were similarly exempt from fealty to feudal overlords (Köpeczy and Barta 1989, 159-161). Indeed, the development of the three so-called historic “nations” of Transylvania, the Magyar, the Székely and the Saxon, is due, in addition to providing for the defense of the easternmost frontier, to the need and the desire of the Hungarian kings to check the power of the first nation with the strength of the latter two. Although small both in absolute and in relative terms — some 90,000 strong at the end of the 16th century, and accounting only for around 10% of the total Transylvanian population —, the Saxon colony had become disproportionately prosperous and culturally influential by the time of the Reformation. This was particularly true of three Saxon cities: Hermannstadt (Nagyszeben, Sibiu), Bistritz (Beszterce, Bistrita), and Kronstadt (Brassó, Brasov), with populations of around 2500, 4,000 and 9,000, respectively; and of Klausenburg (Kolozsvár, Cluj), originally Saxon but by now with a mixed German-Hungarian population of around 6,000 (Otetea 1962, 564). These cities, and their bourgeoisie, owed their wealth to the excellence of their industry, and to their control of trade routes: the former three into the Romanian principalities, the latter toward Hungary and the West (Köpeczy and Barta 1989, 204). That the Reformation in Transylvania should have started in just exactly these four cities is hardly surprising. In spite of a very strong local patriotism and loyalty to the Hungarian Crown, the Saxons remained Germans in language, culture, and identity. Had these cities not developed, however, it is likely that their Bauerntum, no matter how diligent and thrifty, would have lived on for centuries without contact with the outside world, in a state of vegetative isolation similar to that of the Volga Germans, or perhaps that of the various Mennonite groups in America. Indeed, all the signs were there in Transylvania’s Sachsenland of the tendency for cultural involution and isolationism that seems to be so deeply rooted in the soul of the German peasant. The Saxon farmers kept to themselves and tolerated no strangers in their midst. They sold and bought land only among themselves. They seldom married outside their own village or the one just down the road, and then only other Saxons. Most learned no language besides their own German dialect, not even the German lingua franca of the West. Even their insistence on electing their own village leaders and priests probably had much more to do with a deep mistrust of outsiders than with any enlightened desire for self-government. But their cities became rich, thanks to the importation of German guilds. The Saxon artisans learned their craft in Germany; their tradesmen were in constant contact with the outside world; they had enough money to demand, and to establish a western, German, urban culture in the remoteness of the East. And they had the ambition to educate their sons. That there is a connection between the increase in higher education and the advent of the Reformation in Germany needs little discussion. Similarly, in Saxon Transylvania, the number of young men sent to study at universities abroad increased dramatically in the era of the Reformation. Records are scant, but we do know certain facts: thus, in the years 1402-1522, at least 110 Transylvanian Saxons studied at the University of Krakow alone, and we can assume that many more did so in Vienna, to which they had closer ties. But during the first quarter of the 16th century, there were 265 Transylvanians enrolled at Vienna, of whom 219 were certainly Saxons. Many of these students earned a higher degree, the magister artium or even the doctorate. In the 15th century already, we know of at least seventeen Saxons who taught at various universities outside of Hungary (Teutsch 1925, 195). The relatively large number of educated young men returning to Transylvania had an overall positive ITT-OTT 23. évf. (1990), téli (117.) szám 23
