Horváth M. Ferenc (szerk.): Vác The heart of the Danube Bend. A historical guide for residents and globetrotters (Vác, 2009)
Tartalom
VÁC IN THE OTTOMAN ERA 93 most of them moving from the nearby villages of the Danube Bend and Nógrád county into the safer town. However, many of them did not turn up in the next register, so they must have moved on or back home. Still there were others coming; in the last two registers we can find family names formed of place names whose bearers came from faraway counties like Somogy or Szabolcs. The lowest number of the tax-paying households in 1590 reflects either a real decrease in the population or the result ofa new tax unit introduced by the Turks at the time. All in all, in the second half of the 16th century the Hungarian inhabitants of Vác could have been about 200-250 families, which probably meant 1200-1500 people, provided we accept the calculating methods of the registrars and the demographers. In this era family names had not become steady yet: a person having moved from Bicske was called Bicskei, however his son, who became a butcher was called Butcher, the smith was called Smith, while his overweight child was called Bigbottom. For this reason it is difficult to say how constant the population was. What we can claim with certainty is that there was a stable core loyal to their town: the families called Bak, Bese, Bicskei, Bíró, Csőri, Dobos, Farkas, Ferenci, Fóris, Gönci, Göncöl, Jakab, Király, Konc, Kónya, Kuti, László, Lökös, Madaras, Makrai, Orosz, Vasvári, not to mention the heads of families making up the majority in the registers: Kis (Small), Nagy (Big),Tót (of Slovak origin), Halász (Fisherman), Kovács (Smith), Mészáros (Butcher), Molnár (Miller), Ötvös (Goldsmith), Szabó (Tailor), Szűcs (Furrier), Takács (Weaver), Varga (Shoemaker). Some of them must have been permanent inhabitants ofVác. The Ottoman registrars listed pure Hungarian family and forenames, with the exceptions of some Stollars and later some Stobers; Német (meaning German) as a family name was very rare. It is difficult to say what had happened to the large German population of medieval Vác. The example of Buda suggests that they had either been removed or fled, not necessarily from the Turks but during the reign of the Hungarian King János. However, in contrast to Buda there were some settlements in the registers that were full of Hungarian names, of which Ottoman depiction of Danube we know for sure that their German inhabitants did not leave. One example would be the village of Nagybörzsöny. Here we find three cases that are not examples of assimilation, such a familiar phenomenon in our modern age; we assume that the names were simply translated by the registrars. In 1559 the clerk registered the name of Bernát Stollar, then he crossed out his surname and corrected it to Sziklai. Then in 1562 and 1570 three brothers had the family name Újmester (“new master") whose ancestor must have been János Neumeister, who had had a court case in 1503. Some members of the Stober family retained their name in the original format until 1580, others changed it to Lakos. In all three examples above the German name was translated into Hungarian in a strange way as neither Újmester nor Sziklai were used as family names in the Hungarian language at the time We do not know for sure, but assume that the bearers of the names Halász (Fisherman), Szabó (Tailor) and Mészáros (Butcher) used to be called Fischer, Schneider and Fleischer. The native Christian inhabitants had retained their urban character. In 1546 one third of them had family names referring to some kind of job, including 19 trades and four merchants, while the names often heads of families referred to some agricultural
