Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 3. (Budapest, 2008)

Abstracts

Studying the public records of Nürnberg revealed that the families in question belong to the second order of the burghership of Nürnberg - who were second to the patricians. In the case of the traders that belong among the kinship and economic group of the Göswein and Flück families that are included in the Bratislava source, and the Seldner family one may see an improvement in the era examined as regards their social status. We have to remark it as an important result that on the basis of the information of the Nürnberg sources it can be shown that in a number of cases kinship and business relationships existed between those Nürnberg people, who appeared in Bratislava. It is possible to separate two large groups: the Lang Göswein Rotenburger people and the group of the Seldners (the Flück family was in contact with both groups). Therefore in respect of the persons that apparently appear independently of each other in the Hungarian source, the picture that can be outlined on the basis of the public records of their own town makes it unambiguous that these Nürnberg people co-operated in the area of East oriented trade, and it is quite certain that they harmonised their deals made with the Bratislava people as well. ZSOLT SIMON The economic elite of Brasov (Brassó). A study based on the town one-twentieth customs duty register of the year of 1503 In our study we analysed the wholesalers of Brasov, a town that was one of the most important towns in the late Middle Ages in Hungary, on the basis of one of the preserved two foreign trade customs logs of Middle Ages. The decisive majority of Brasov traders, 69.5% were retailers (the value of whose freight was less than 100), 28% of them were medium size traders with a turnover between 100 and 1000 florins, and only 2.5% of them were wholesalers with turnovers greater than 1000 florins. Most likely eight persons traded in a value above one thousand florins (the uncertainty is due to the fact that we do not know the share of the individuals within the partnerships), who were responsible for 64% of the complete turnover of the Brasov people. From among them the first four are sharply separated, each of whom had a turnover that was greater than 5000 florins, and who may be considered to be significant traders even on country level. The group of people who were registered as wholesalers in the customs log (mercatores magni seu grandi) differed to some extent from the persons, who had a turnover above 1000 florins. The majority of the former ones traded abroad relatively rarely on 1-3 occasions annually, most of them, eight people, dealt with both export and import. With the exception of one person the mixed traders executed the largest