Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 36. (1983)
SCHÖDL, Günter: Zur Forschungsdiskussion über alldeutsch-deutschnationale Politik in der Habsburgermonarchie und im Deutschen Reich
478 Literaturberichte from one of his superiors warning of his anti-Hungarian bias). More recently T. has turned to the institutional history of the period of Transylvania’s quasi-sovereign status. His exemplary study of the diet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Az erdélyi fejedelemség korának országgyűlései [Budapest 1976]) demonstrates the dominance of that body by the prince and the comparative feebleness of estates’ resistance to his authority. Their only real initiatives accompanied changes of ruler, and were always doomed to failure. The present volume complements and develops that theme. It offers a minute account of the workings of central government from the inception of the autonomous principality to the point of Habsburg takeover, far superseding the only previous investigation, a much briefer survey which appeared in Győző Ember’s pioneering general administrative history of early modem Hungary, published in 1946. T. has reconstructed both the business and the personnel of the whole executive: the princely Council and its dependencies, the Chancery, the Treasury, and the various regalian matters which were shared between the last two bodies. He includes short sections on the army and judiciary, and a few pages on the diet summarize the book already mentioned. This represents an immense labour, primarily archival. It yields, on the one hand, knowledge as complete as we can probably ever possess about how the government of independent Transylvania in its various sections actually functioned; on the other hand, a record of about 1500 state servants, some merely names, other with careers which we can follow over several decades. All but the highly specialist reader will find this material formidable, even forbidding. The notes are more than half as long as the text — one chapter has over 1300 of them — and some heavyweight descriptions of everyday business (especially the activities of the Deputation in the 1680s) could surely have been condensed. The main worth of T’s study lies in his much terser reflections on two broad issues. The first of these is the nature of Transylvanian absolutism. Essentially Transylvania was a late-medieval polity called into being in the mid-sixteenth century by a particular set of foreign-political circumstances, maintaining continuity with the pre-Mohács Hungarian state from which it inherited its institutions and administrative structure. Yet in order to survive, its princely régime had to modernize in some directions. At its best, under Gabriel Bethlen (Bethlen Gábor) and George I Rákóczi, i. e. between 1613 and 1648, Transylvania enjoyed a cost-effective and speedy conduct of government business, necessitated by the precarious international situation. The Chancery frequently answered important communications by return of post, and wayward messengers risked a beating. At the same time the princes, building on their extensive crown lands and regalian rights, were able to introduce some quite advanced financial and commercial measures, in areas such as tax-collecting and monopolies.
