Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
FLOURISHING AND SCATTERING THE REFORMED COLLEGE IN THE 17TH CENTURY - The “most popular seminary of the Calvinist plague ”(1655-1671)
42 THE REFORMED CHURCH COLLEGE IN THE 17TH CENTURY classes at this time is uncertain. Although there exist certain references, their actual numbers can, at best, only be estimated. Surely, there were a large number of students and most likely most of them were local residents who lived at home and not at the College. From town documents it can be ascertained that the number of people in Sárospatak who had the adjective deák (student) tagged onto their names was ever-increasing. This tag was a reference to these individuals having completed studies at the elementary level and having made certain progress in Latin as well. There is much more documentation available concerning the students in the higher grades. There is a partial list from 1615 and from 1617 there are complete lists of all the students who signed to have read and agreed to the school regulations. Only the ones judged mature enough to be fully accountable signed this contract, but this was not tied to any particular age. It was more by the measure of progress achieved in their studies that this was determined, something which was not always easy to gauge. There were students who signed this contract at the age of fifteen (István Pataki Tóth and János Csécsi sr.) and there were those who signed it at the age of twenty-three (Pál Keresztúri Bíró). Csécsi only attended the lower secondary level classes while Keresztúri might have enrolled at the Theological Academy level. From the entries from 1617 to 1671, the names of two thousand twenty-nine students can be found in the regulations register (accessible even today), which translates into an average of thirty-eight students per year. (As a simple comparison, in the same period, there were two thousand ninety students enrolled at the school in Debrecen.) In the decade immediately preceding the persecutions of the Counter-Reformation, that is, between 1661 and 1671, four hundred thirty-five students scribed their names into the regulations register. This is worthy of note when it is known that, after the town of Nagyvárad fell in the battle against imperial forces, all the students who fled from there enrolled at the school in Debrecen and altogether there were less than four hundred subscribens (students who signed their names) in the school. The number of students who attended the school each year is still not known but, fortunately, there is a reference available. István Tolnai, the senior pastor, in a letter written to the prince in July 1637, noted the following: “There are seventy students; many of them are from noble families, thank God.” The number of students with scholarship (alumnus) was limited to forty in 1648. In 1677, Bálint Kocsi Csergő, a very reliable source, mentions the following about the students enrolled before 1672: “from the income of the College they can afford to suport one hundred students, many of them wishing to become pastors, but only forty of them have scholarships”. Kocsi Csergő must have meant the “togátus” students (the ones dressed in the uniform worn by theology students), however, he used a different word: holy ministry. From these references, it can be deduced that there were approximately two hundred students each year at the beginner, lower and upper secondary levels and the different academic levels altogether, if one takes into account that the secondary schools in market towns usually had less than fifty students, it can be concluded that Conrad Jacob Flildebrandt, Swedish Embassy Secretary (who visited many places in Flungary and Transylvania) wrote an unbiased report on Patak in 1656 when he noted: “here there was a nice secondary school as well. There are no academies in Hungary, but they have some nice secondary schools, among them the one in Patak must be the most famous and prestigious".
