The Revolution of 1848--49 was the most complex and tragic episode in
Transylvania's recent history.
It was also the most exhilarating. It was a time when romantic poets
and bombastic politicians heralded
the coming of equality and fraternity; a time when priests of various
denominations beseeched the God
of their nationality for special consideration; a time when national
flags fluttered over the heads of
teeming, exultant mobs; a time when thousands were killed in the name
of equality, fraternity, and
nationality. Not since the Turkish and Tartar invasions of the seventeenth
century had Transylvania
known so much suffering; nor would it suffer worse agony until the
end of the Second World War.
The historic outlines of this extraordinary year have been treated extensively
in other studies; therefore,
this author will not try to narrate the actual course of events but
will attempt to ask and to answer a
number of questions that are on the minds of all those interested in
the fate of this fascinating province.
With the possible exception of the Horea-Closca revolt in the late eighteenth
century, Transylvania had
known no ethnic conflict before 1848; in other words, people were not
attacked and harmed because
of their nationality. Why then did such a terrible development take
place during the Springtime of the
Peoples? Could the nationality conflict have been avoided? What were
the major forces operating
during the civil war, and to what ends was the war fought? Who profited
from the struggle, and who
were its true losers? How did the revolutionary year affect later Transylvanian
developments? These
are the questions that the author will try to answer here, but first
it may be worthwhile to enumerate a
few facts.
Not to be confused with that much larger area that is today commonly
referred to as Transylvania, the
historic Transylvanian province had been for many centuries one of
the most important possessions of
the Hungarian crown. Over these centuries, Transylvania had known
long periods of political greatness and virtual independence, as well
as long periods of abject
subservience to a foreign power, yet her constitutional affiliation
with the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen
remained uncontested. But, and this is an important "but," ever since
the end of the seventeenth
century the Habsburg monarchs had treated Transylvania as an administrative
entity completely
separate from the kingdom of Hungary, also known as Inner Hungary.
The Habsburg emperor-king
was also grand duke of Transylvania and, as such, he was served by
a Transylvanian Chancellery in
Vienna and a Vice-Royal Council, or Gubernium, in Transylvania. Compare
this with the status of
Croatia-Slavonia, which, although legally a sovereign kingdom, was
in reality governed by the
Hungarian Chancellery in Vienna and the Hungarian Vice-Regal Council
in Budapest. Croatian and
Slavonian deputies attended the Hungarian Diet at Pozsony (Pressburg,
Bratislava); Transylvanian
deputies sat in their own diet at Kolozsvár (Cluj, Klausenburg).
Unlike Croatia, Transylvania had its
own administration, its own legal and judicial systems, and its own
very peculiar society and economy.
This separateness, under the constitutional umbrella of oneness with
Inner Hungary, constituted a
fundamental contradiction in the status of Transylvania before 1848
--- a contradiction that the
reforming leaders of Hungary and Transylvania attempted but failed
to resolve either before or during
the revolutionary year.[1]
Territorial unification was, of course, not only a Hungarian goal; it
was also the goal of Germans,
Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Serbs and Croats, Czechs and
Slovaks, Greeks, and others in
nineteenth-century Europe. Still, a sharp distinction must be made
here between those peoples, such as
the Italians, who aimed at unification on the basis of nationality,
and those peoples, such as the
Germans, the Poles, or the Hungarians, who combined their claim for
national self-determination with
their insistence on constitutional-historical rights. What complicated
matters enormously was that the
liberal reformers, those contemporary champions of national unification,
saw nothing incompatible in
the two different claims. They viewed territorial unification as a
God-given right, as the sine qua non of
national survival, and as the starting point for modernization and
prosperity. They conceived of
territorial disunity as inherently harmful and reactionary and of territorial
unity as universally beneficial
and progressive.
The Hungarian claim for national self-determination was clearly inadequate
in reference to
Transylvania. No one on the Hungarian side denied that Transylvania
was a multinational province with
an absolute majority of Romanians. Juggling statistical data was to
be a privilege
of later generations. Contemporary Hungarian statistics showed that
in Transylvania 830,000
Hungarians (more than half of whom belonged to the Székely nation)
shared the province with
1,200,000 Romanians, 200,000 Saxons, and some 70,000 Gypsies, Armenians,
Serbs, and Greeks.[2]
Yet these demographic data in no way disturbed the Hungarian liberals
in their drive for Hungary's
unification with Transylvania. They believed, as did liberals all over
Europe, that an enlightened nation
had the right --- nay, it had the obligation --- to lead other, less
enlightened nationalities on the path of
reform and prosperity. In turn, the liberals asserted, the less enlightened
nationalities had the duty to
recognize the dominant political position of their guide and savior.
This was the view that the German
liberals held toward the Poles, the Polish liberals toward the Ukrainians,
the Czech liberals toward the
Slovaks, and the Hungarian liberals toward their own Slavs and Romanians.
In all of Louis Kossuth's
pre-1848 writing and speeches on Transylvania, there is no mention
of the problem of nationalities, only
of the problem of Transylvania being a backward province. Kossuth worried
about the possible harmful
effect that unification with politically, socially, and economically
undeveloped Transylvania would have
on the more progressive institutions of Hungary; he did not fear the
possible opposition of Romanians
and Saxons to the union.[3] As for the radicals to the left of Kossuth,
they were even more firmly
convinced that the Magyar nation was entitled to guide other nations
on the path to democracy. This
was the position of Petőfi, Táncsics, and Vasvári
toward the Slavs and Romanians in Hungary and
Transylvania, as it was, incidentally, of Marx and Engels toward the
Czechs and Poles in Germany.
The universal rise of liberal nationalism did not alone insure the coming
of a civil war in Transylvania;
other factors worked toward that end also. As it is well known, only
the Hungarian nobility in that
province, plus the Székely and the Saxon nations, enjoyed full
political rights; ennobled Romanians
simply assumed membership in the Hungarian nobility. Moreover, severe
legal distinctions separated
the religious denominations of the above-named three political nations
from the religious denominations
of the other nationalities. The new Romanian middle class of priests,
merchants, and intellectuals
possessed the money and the know-how, but not the legal authorization,
to exercise full political rights.
Székelys in Saxon territory or Saxons in Hungarian Transylvanian
territory remained second-class
citizens, because Transylvanian law distinguished not only between
estates, denominations, and nations,
but also between national territories; the law offered each political
nation considerable privileges within,
but not outside, its own territory. Finally, Transylvania was one of
the poorest
provinces in the Habsburg Monarchy, where industrial development had
barely begun before 1848,
where landowners lacked capital for investment, and where Maria Theresa's
urbarial ordinances had
never been fully implemented. The distinction between the lord's demesne
and the peasant's own
allotment remained obscure; the serfs' labor obligation increased significantly
before 1848, and seizure
of servile lands by the landowning nobility was a far more common occurrence
than in the Hungarian
kingdom. All this led to a series of peasant disturbances that had
to be forcibly suppressed. It is a
historical truism that before 1848 Transylvania was a gravely troubled
province with unsettled political,
social, and economic conditions.
Small wonder, therefore, that when the news of the European Spring revolutions
arrived in
Transylvania it created both enthusiasm and consternation. At first,
all seemed to go well as youthful
Hungarian and Romanian demonstrators marched arm in arm in the streets
of Transylvanian cities,
hailing fraternity and reform. But then all the old problems came to
the fore, together with a host of
new problems. It soon occurred that the landowners of the province
were as reluctant to emancipate
the peasants, whose robot labor they could not possibly spare, as the
peasants were anxious to end
forced labor, to recuperate their lost allotment, and to stop paying
taxes and dues. The idea of union
with Hungary, so strongly demanded by the radicals in Budapest on March
15 and more cautiously
pursued by the Diet at Pozsony, was accepted by most of the educated
Transylvanians; but while the
Magyar nobles wanted union first and domestic reform later --- under
the tutelage of the Hungarian
state --- the Romanian political leaders wanted domestic reform first
and union only at an unspecified
later date. The Saxons wanted no union at all, because it would have
inevitably put an end to their
extensive privileges. Here, then, were the seeds of civil war, and
civil war came all too soon.[4]
Would it have been possible to avoid the bloody conflict? Yes, if moderation
had been exercised by all.
But moderation was not a respected virtue in 1848, and the few moderates
were soon shunted aside.
Within a short time, there arose in Transylvania a number of power
centers, each very active and each
expressing the interests and desires of a particular group. Let us
now attempt to categorize these
power centers according to their beliefs and the methods they employed.
From right to left on the political spectrum, the first category was
made up of remnants of the Ancien
Regime: conservative landowning magnates, high functionaries of the
Gubernium, and commanders of
the Imperial-Royal Army stationed in the province. These men, best
represented by the head of the
Transylvanian Army General-Commando,
General Baron Anton Puchner, were opposed to all the national and social
movements then agitating
Transylvania and, as a consequence, were soon reduced to almost total
political impotence. But these
conservatives were made of resilient stock. They did not give up; rather,
they slowly came to
understand the need to go to the masses in revolutionary times. In
order to save the old social order
and the Habsburg Monarchy, they concluded the most unlikely alliances
with, among others, such
people as the Saxon burghers and the Romanian revolutionary peasants.
As a result, the conservatives
emerged victorious at the end of the war.
A second category was made up of such moderate nationalists as Hungarian
Royal Commissioner
Baron Miklós Vay and the Romanian bishop Andreiu saguna, who,
although they pursued opposite
political goals, were united in their hostility to radicalism and their
loyalty to the throne. It was such
moderates who could have done the most to prevent a civil war, but,
as they lacked the strength and
the courage to prevail over the militants of their own nationality,
they failed completely.
A third category was formed of such true liberal nationalists as the
Kossuthist government
commissioner László Csányi and the Romanian newspaper
editor Simion Barnutiu, who feared social
unrest no less than the conservatives but whose national enthusiasm
caused them to mobilize the very
peasants they feared. These politicians bore a main responsibility
for the bitterness of the civil war.
In a fourth category could be classed such democratic popular leaders
as the Romanian guerrilla chief
Avram Iancu[5] and the Hungarian free-corps commander Imre Hatvani,
who knew little restraint in
the pursuance of their radical political and social goals and who,
although ideologically almost identical,
ended up as bitter enemies of one another. When, in the spring of 1849,
Avram Iancu finally consented
to negotiate with the Hungarians, it was his fellow democrat Imre Hatvani
who launched a sudden
attack on Iancu's forces, thereby causing the end of the negotiations
and the Romanian murder of
Kossuth's Romanian delegate to Iancu.
Aside from these easily identifiable groups of people, we find many
other groups or important
individuals who pursued particular interests during the conflict. There
was the Polish General Józef
Bem, who led the Hungarian army in many victorious campaigns, but who
willingly offered amnesty to
his Saxon and Romanian opponents in the hope of mobilizing all the
Transylvanians for the liberation of
his Polish fatherland. Or there was Ioan Dragos, the Romanian political
leader from Inner Hungary,
who tried conciliation between Iancu and Kossuth
in order to ameliorate the lot of Inner Hungary's 900,000 Romanians
and who was murdered by Iancu's
partisans for his pains. Or we can turn to Nicolae Balcescu, the revolutionary
liberal from Wallachia,
who attempted to arrange a truce in Transylvania so that Romanians
and Hungarians together would
fight his enemies, the Russians. Finally, we must mention the peasants,
who, whether Magyars,
Székelys, or Romanians, had almost identical economic interests,
but who nevertheless ended up
fighting and dying for national goals they barely perceived themselves.[6]
In the final analysis, there were only two camps: the camp of Kossuth
and that of Kossuth's enemies.
In the first camp were Hungarian noblemen, burghers, and peasants,
almost the entire Székely nation,
Polish legionnaires, a remarkable number of Romanians, and such soldiers
of the Habsburg army who
had chosen or had been compelled to fight on the Hungarian side. The
other camp was made up of
Romanian border guards, burghers, and peasants, Saxon merchants and
artisans, as well as
imperial-royal soldiers of every conceivable nationality, including
many Hungarians. It would be useless
to ask which camp had justice on its side, or which was more progressive.
Such a question might make
sense in the context of Inner Hungary's struggle against the Austrians;
in the context of Transylvania,
both sides were right and wrong at the same time. The Kossuth camp
upheld the great liberal reform
ideas of the period; it also upheld the interests of the Hungarian
noble landowners. The other camp
upheld the right of oppressed nationalities to a free development;
it also upheld the right of the
Habsburg Monarchy to dominate all the nationalities. On the Austrian
side, conservative generals and
old-world aristocrats incited illiterate Romanian peasants to rape
and murder Hungarian families. On
the Hungarian side, liberals and democrats incited Székely soldiers
to burn down prosperous Saxon
towns and to hang Romanian peasants. In the course of this mad war,
the original noble goals of the
Springtime of the Peoples were gradually forgotten. National unification,
civil and political rights,
emancipation, and national autonomy became empty slogans. Instead,
Habsburg officers fought for a
Great Austria, Hungarian politicians for a Great Hungary, and Romanian
leaders for a Great Romania.
The imperialist struggle came to an end when the Russian army intervened
and restored order in the
province. Now, finally, began the work of painful restoration.
If one asks who were the real winners in the conflict, one could hardly
point to the militarily victorious
Russians or Austrians. The Russians went home immediately after the
war, having gained nothing
for their effort but international hostility and Austrian ingratitude.
The Austrian empire was allowed to
continue, but with somewhat impaired prestige and without the ability
either to restore the Ancien
Régime or to create a lasting new construct. The Saxons had
fought a war of self-defense in 1848;
they remained on the defensive until 1867, when they lost the last
remnants of their historical
autonomy. Paradoxically, it was the Transylvanian Hungarians who had
won the war. Militarily they
had been defeated in 1849; but, as the victorious Russians and Austrians
had failed to make a
revolution from above, the Hungarian nobles were able to keep their
extensive possessions and, hence,
in the long run, also their political influence. It would not be wrong
to say that the Russian and Austrian
armies had saved the Hungarian nobility. Within a few years, the Transylvanian
administration fell back
into Hungarian hands and, in 1867, Transylvania was reunited with then
triumphant Hungary. The real
losers of the civil war were the Romanians. They had suffered enormously
in 1848--49, and politically
they had gained nothing from the conflict. Under Francis Joseph there
was to be neither a Great
Romanian Empire, nor a sovereign Romanian Duchy under the Habsburg
crown as the Romanian
National Committee had planned. There was not even to be a Romanian
autonomous territory in
Transylvania.
Yet, ultimately, even the Romanians profited from the revolutionary
upheaval, if not politically, then
socially and economically. Without the great Hungarian reforms of March,
1848, without civil rights,
extended suffrage, religious equality, and peasant emancipation, modernization
would have come even
later to the province. Transylvanian progress and prosperity in the
second half of the nineteenth
century and the rise of the organized Romanian political movement were
the direct consequences of
the laws that the Hungarian Diet had adopted at Pozsony. Thus, even
though ethnic antagonisms and
mutual fear continued, the Transylvanian balance sheet was not entirely
bleak.
4. From Horea-Closca to 1867: Some Observations
by EDSEL WALTER STROUP
A great deal of gratitude is due to the authors of the foregoing essays
for their clear, concise, and
thought-provoking presentations dealing with a topic that is generally
acknowledged to be extremely
difficult and complex. Indeed, the objectives of each essay are carried
out so well within the brief
formats established by their authors that the bulk of the following
remarks are of a supplementary or
alternative nature enlivened only occasionally by differences and reservations.
The most pronounced reservations and suggested modifications center
on Professor Held's article on
the 1784 Rumanian peasant revolt in Transylvania, which consequently
receives the lion's share of the
attention in the ensuing pages. Professor Held rightly notes the "tentative
nature" of his conclusions, for
he has necessarily touched on some of the most difficult problems in
modern Hungarian history.
Moreover, he has done so in a straightforward, admirable, and even
courageous fashion. However,
although his statements provide truth and insight, the reader is left
with two general impressions that
are too extreme. First, there is the impression of Joseph II working
to liberate the serfs and being
opposed by the Hungarian nobles who "sabotaged every and all attempts
at reform," and who were
presumably motivated solely by a reactionary desire to preserve their
privileged position. Second, there
is the impression that the Rumanian peasant revolt was a rather reasonable
affair whose participants
eventually demanded well-thought-out objectives compatible with Joseph's
Enlightenment rationalism
--- "political equality," "land reform," and "equitable taxation."
In order to present some very necessary
modifications of these impressions via additional information and views,
it is perhaps logical to deal at
some length, first, with Joseph's "peasant policy" in Hungary in general
and, second, with the unique,
even bizarre, nature of the 1784 Transylvanian rebellion.
When Professor Held states that Joseph II "was determined to end serfdom
as an institution
altogether," he joins some eighteenth-century contemporaries and a
subsequent line of historiography
that
very likely far overestimated what Joseph did and what he intended to
do for the peasant.[1] In his
famous Serfdom and Buying-In Patents of November 1, 1781, which were
applied to Transylvania in
1783 and to Inner Hungary, in unified form, in 1785, Joseph did prohibit
the use of the term "serf." But
since serfdom in its extreme form of being bound ad personam to a lord
generally existed neither in
Hungary nor elsewhere in the monarchy, and since contemporaries were
objecting to the term
"serfdom" as too onerous, Joseph's prohibition was more psychological
and symbolic than substantive.
Actually, "subject" rather than "serf" more accurately reflected contemporary
conditions, and the
Patents were largely an updating of his mother's urbarial regulations
of 1767. Moreover, the contents
of the Patents and of his preparatory edict to the central administrative
authorities in Buda in August,
1783, were for Inner Hungary mostly rights that were well-grounded
in earlier and constitutionally
formulated Hungarian laws,[2] viz., the facilitation of the subject
peasant's free migration, marriage,
apprenticeship, and, above all, land tenure, together with the ability
to defend it at law. The factor that
Joseph had hit upon as constituting his abolition of serfdom, namely,
his striking down of the necessity
of the lord's permission for a subject to migrate, could in practice
only be exercised by subject peasants
who were solvent and had fulfilled all their obligations. Indeed, those
who have been so struck by
Joseph's abolition of serfdom as to assume he intended to turn the
subjects into free men have
overlooked paragraph five of his Serfdom Patent, which restated the
subject's obligation to perform
robot, to make payments in cash and produce in return for the use of
his holding, along with the
concluding phrase: "subjects are bound to render obedience to their
lords in virtue of the existing
laws."[3]
As some of Joseph's later actions in Hungary show, he was hardly a social
revolutionary. Rather, his
object was, as he himself wrote, to establish throughout the monarchy
a uniform and efficient system
of hereditary subjection.[4] His desire for increased revenues led
him to advocate reenforcing the
subject peasant's legal land tenure and to support the prosperous peasant's
legal status vis-ŕ-vis his
lord. Yet, though it was unknown among the peasantry who helped historians
create the legend of "the
Good Emperor," Joseph's Enlightened Absolutism had greater interest
in the prosperity of the
well-to-do peasant than in promoting the landless or poor peasant who
cultivated only a few hold (1
hold = 1.43 acres). It is often overlooked that most of Joseph's Patents
restate the rights of the lord as
well as those of the subject. Paragraph 47 of a 1786 edict provided
heavy penalties for subjects who
migrated illegally to escape the traditional urbarial obligations
or more modern contracts.[5] In October, 1786, Joseph wrote that the
well-to-do peasant was the most
useful to the state, and he differentiated between the good, landholding
peasant and the poorer cotter.
In 1788, he issued a proclamation that made the granting of credit
to a subject dependent upon the
landlord's permission and prohibited the easy exchange of holdings
among subjects from one village or
county to another, and he expressed notable concern that harvest, wine,
and livestock records be
secured in the interest of tax collection. In a decision of 1786, which
was of lasting importance to a
healthy agrarian economy but did little for the poorer peasantry, he
opted for the "inalienable and
indivisible" inheritance of peasant holdings by one heir.[6]
To support our case further --- without subscribing to the overdone
hostility of much of recent
Hungarian Marxist historiography toward the Habsburgs --- let us point
to an excellent study by É. H.ázs, upon which we have relied
for the above information and which reveals in some detail a whole
series of petitions by poor Hungarian peasants in 1782. It records
the negative responses by Joseph
and his bureaucracy in favor of the revenue-generating holdings of
the richer peasants. Given this
knowledge of the forward-looking but essentially conservative nature
of Joseph II's peasant policy, it
will subsequently be seen that it was far less likely to be compatible
with the demands of the Rumanian
peasants in the 1784 Transylvanian rebellion than Professor Held's
study indicates.
The only really revolutionary innovation of Joseph's peasant policy
was a tax plan and Hungarian land
survey announced on February 10, 1789, subsequently postponed, and
finally dropped entirely.[7] This
tax, mentioned by Professor Held as "an imposed tax of thirty percent
on peasant incomes in lieu of
former feudal obligations," proposed raising the entire contributio,
or war tax, on the basis of a
uniform levy on all land. The rate was to be fifteen percent of the
gross yield with no deduction for
seed or expenses, plus an additional eighteen percent from the urbarial
peasant to the lord for church,
school, and community maintenance. Joseph claimed that it would help
the peasant, but an increased
revenue was surely his major objective. Moreover, there is some question
if it would have lightened the
peasant's burdens; in some areas it may have meant his retrogression.[8]
Joseph's plan to impose unilaterally such an important tax on Hungary
actually threatened the country's
independence. It attacked the constitutional principle that fundamental
change --- in effect the exercise
of sovereignty --- in Hungary could only be introduced by agreement
between the monarch and the
noble political nation in a legally convoked diet.[9] The nobility
had protested heartily enough at the
issuance
of the earlier peasant Patents but had perforce accepted them. However,
presented with the tax plan,
the county assemblies redoubled their demands for a Diet to negotiate
the matter. Joseph replied that
as absolute ruler he had no desire to discuss a tax at any diet. Instead,
he pushed the land survey and
tightened the screws of the imperial tariff system that kept Hungary
an economic colony. The nobility
argued that even if they acquiesced and their cooperation brought an
end to discriminatory tariffs the
nation would still have no control over the assessment and expenditure
of taxation controlled by an
absolute monarch.[10]
One may be inclined to condemn the Hungarian nobility's opposition to
Joseph's efforts to modify and
perhaps improve the subject peasant's condition. But it would be both
inaccurate and unjust to overlook
his coeval attempts to seize, on the back of the peasant, so to speak,
unrestricted power in Hungary.
The Hungarian noble nation was aroused at least as much by his unconstitutional
methods as by the
substance of his reforms. In opposing him, the nobles preserved not
only their own privileges but also
the nation's rights, constitutional structure, and separate existence.
As is well known, Joseph's policies brought the nation to the edge of
a "feudal revolt," and he was
stopped on all fronts prior to his death at 5:30 A.M. on February 2,
1790. The nobility could barely
refrain from rejoicing, but in the compromise with his successor, reestablishing
the status quo, the
Hungarian Diet did legalize his Serfdom Patent in the form of Laws
XXXV and XXXVI of 1791,
though pointedly basing them on earlier Hungarian laws.[11]
In retrospect, one is inclined to agree with Friedrich Walter's negative
view of Joseph's "all or nothing"
tactics,[12] and with the judgment that Joseph's peasant policy was
"a mere gesture and not very
promising in its realization."[13] In Hungary as well as Transylvania,
where paradoxically the influence
of the Habsburg bureaucracy was the strongest, his policy failed most
miserably. Whether under the
Serfdom Patent of 1781 or the laws of 1791, it was rare in that age
to find a subject peasant who was
both solvent and motivated to exercise the right of migration. This
right had little meaning or appeal as
long as economic diversification and opportunities were limited by
Vienna's discriminatory tariff toward
Hungary. The great majority of subject peasants stuck tenaciously to
their holdings even when their
lord tried to move them. Similarly, the authorization of free apprenticeship
and marriage had little effect
in Hungary, where the lords' intervention in such matters was never
a major issue. In all probability,
Joseph II's Enlightened Absolutism never intended to raise the subject
peasant to
complete equality before the law or to give him legal title to his former
urbarial holding as true
landowner. In contrast to impressions that might be derived from Professor
Held's essay, these were to
be the accomplishments of the Reform Era and the Hungarian April Laws
of 1848 --- both in Inner
Hungary and in Transylvania.
In searching for the origins of the 1784 Rumanian peasant revolt in
Transylvania, Professor Held is
correct in pointing to the arbitrary nature of lord-subject relations
and to the increasing demands on the
subjects by the petty nobility. This phenomenon occurred in Inner Hungary
as well during the
eighteenth century, but it was more intense in Transylvania, whose
socioeconomic condition was
habitually fifty years behind that of central Hungary. But there were
additional causes for the revolt,
perhaps equally significant, which Professor Held left undeveloped
or omitted altogether.
The actual source of the revolt was on the Habsburg Imperial Treasury
estates of Zalatna (Zlatna) and
Felsőbánya (Baia Sprie) in Zaránd County in the
southwestern corner of Transylvania. On these
estates nearly 10,000 Rumanian serf families held only 10,500 hold
(15,000 acres) of very poor hillside
ploughland that was subject to erosion and early frosts that devastated
their corn crops. In addition, the
eighteenth-century interest in the improvement of agricultural methods,
then affecting Inner Hungary,
was as yet unknown on these estates, and the subjects' holdings produced
barely enough to feed a third
of the total of about 45,000 individuals. They supplemented their income
with wood handicrafts and,
especially, by working in the Imperial Mines. Yet frequently they had
only scraps to eat.[14]
As state serfs, they were very much under the thumb of the imperial
bureaucracy, which extended
from estate and mine officials through the central Transylvanian governmental
institutions to Vienna
itself. Their direct petitions for relief to Vienna date from 1778
in accordance with a practice
authorized by Maria Theresa, much to the annoyance of landowners in
general and of the Imperial
Chancellery itself. Horea's name first appears among these Zalatna
petitioners in 1780, and again in
1783, and then in the spring of 1784 when he apparently spoke before
Joseph. At least Joseph
mentioned him by name in a subsequent letter, though Henrik Marczali
states that the future leader of
the rebellion made no greater impression on the emperor than numerous
other petitioners.[15]
The imperial bureaucracy was notoriously slow to act on anything, but
it excelled in the languor with
which it treated peasant petitions. On October 6, 1784, the Imperial
Treasury referred what was
apparently
the original 1780 petition back to the central administrative institutions
in Transylvania. In his
correspondence with his brother, Leopold, Joseph himself blamed the
Imperial Treasury for delay in the
Zalatna case. He complained that even after his personal intervention
and appointment of a special
committee, a report arriving in March did not come before the Treasury
until November, and that "the
Zalatna Treasury Lands, which are under the Mines, Treasury, have officials
who especially excel in
all sorts of abuses and oppression."[16] Here, in Joseph's own words,
is a significant underlying cause
of the revolt. In the same vein, historian László Makkai
laconically observed that the Imperial Treasury
"had never been a kinder lord to the serfs than the Hungarian or Saxon
landlords."[17] He further
observed that the restriction of liquor licensing, referred to by Professor
Held as innkeeping rights,
raised the cost of a drink. This resulted in a mob attack on two Armenian
licensees at the Topánfalva
(Cîmpeni) market fair on May 24, 1782. Apparently Horea was one
of the leaders of the rioters. But
he escaped arrest, and his 1783 trip to Vienna was prompted on behalf
of those who were still
incarcerated. The disposition of this case also was still hanging fire
within the Viennese bureaucracy as
of 1784.
Hence, just as Transylvanian conditions were generally somewhat worse
for the subject peasant than
those existing in Inner Hungary, so it seems that the condition of
the state serfs in Zaránd County may
have been worse than that of the subjects of Hungarian and Saxon lords
in Transylvania at large.
Henrik Marczali even stated that blaming the Hungarian nobility in
Transylvania for the Rumanian
eruption "would not be just" since "the greatest abuses which directly
caused the outbreak were not
carried out under the power of the Hungarian lords, but on the lands
of the Imperial Royal Mines," the
German officialdom of which lacked the patriarchal nature of the private
estates, and made the system
"unbearable."[18]
László Makkai, rather than finding the chief cause of
the revolt in lord-subject relations of any type,
saw the causes in the more general context of "injuries to the Orthodox
religion, social misery, and a
primitive race hatred."[19] And perhaps modern historians do overlook
the strong religious feelings in
this revolt too easily. Transylvania led all Europe in 1571 by establishing
legal equality among Catholics,
Calvinists, Lutherans, and Unitarians within a single political structure.
However, the Greek Orthodox
faith continued to be a "tolerated" rather than a "received" religion,
albeit with a bishopric at
Gyulafehérvár (Karlsburg, Alba-Iulia). Under Habsburg
pressure, this see accepted the essentials of
Catholicism in 1698, thus creating the Uniate or Greek Catholic, church,
but it failed to attract the
majority of Rumanians,
who remained Orthodox. Maria Theresa relented in 1761, and, although
retaining the Uniate bishopric,
which continued to be favored by the state, she appointed an autonomous
Rumanian Orthodox bishop
for Transylvania only. Not only did the state continue to discriminate
officially against the Orthodox
church, but members of this faith by definition did not have legal
access to offices or certain trades.
Religion was habitually regarded as a virtually interchangeable badge
of nationality, and the other
peoples of Transylvania regarded the Orthodox Rumanians as alien and
suspect, a reaction reinforced
by the uneducated lower Orthodox clergy who lived on the level of the
lowest ranks of the
peasantry.[20] In sum, religious feeling explains part of the fury
of the revolt, especially if one
considers that the application of Joseph's 1781 Toleration Patent to
Transylvania was more or less
sabotaged by his own appointees. This situation was actually worsened
by the tone of his imperial
orders.[21]
Transylvania - The Roots of Ethnic Conflic