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# The Saxons

The Királyföld retained its privileged status as it entered the 17th century. Thus, while Saxon villeins shared in the tightening up of the feudal system, the Saxon nation remained unaffected by the {2-172.} emergence of a second serfdom and of absolute princely power until the mid-1600s. Social change in the Saxon regions did not follow the same two-stage process as elsewhere.

By the end of the 16th century, the Saxons' urban life and the urban-rural nexus had come to resemble the general pattern found east of the Elbe. Local government was dominated by merchant patricians and the wealthiest craftsmen. The common craftsmen were, despite the protection offered by their guilds, largely at the mercy of this elite. Although the legal equality of all burghers was never disputed, an unbridgeable social and economic gulf came to divide the leading families from the poorer craftsmen. A similarly unequal relationship existed between the prosperous towns and the villages in their neighbourhood. In the villages, the magistrates came from the towns, and the guilds were under the supervision of their urban counterparts. The authority of the municipal senates was enhanced by the fact that, since the Middle Ages, the Saxons had been paying a set community tax.

At first, this global tax had been set by royal decree. Then, in the era of the principality, it came to be based on a nominal number of gates that, since 1609, stood at two thousand. The diet periodically set the actual rate of taxation, but it had no control over the distribution of this burden among the Saxons. The mayor of Szeben, also known as the Saxon count, chaired a national assembly which decided on this allocation among the towns and villages. In these circumstances, the Szeben senate became for all practical purposes the dominant governing organization of the entire Saxon society.

This social system was fully developed by the end of the 1500s, and it was carried over without fundamental alteration into the next century. The structure became more rigid: mobility was reduced between certain urban strata, and the status of different types of settlements was confirmed. The poor had less chance to prosper, and the economic predominance of Szeben and Brassó {2-173.} became unchallengeable. Urbanization and the middle class apparently reached a steady state.

Up to this point, social change had followed a standard pattern, with the consolidation of villeinage producing similar results. In the next phase, the middle class could be expected to adapt itself to the feudal system, as happened in other regions proximate to Hungary. In royal Hungary itself, the urban middle class had already shifted to a dual lifestyle by acquiring country estates. Since the market for manufactured goods had tended to weaken, they tried to exploit the potential of agriculture for market production. Meanwhile, more and more nobles moved into the towns, disrupting the social order of the urban middle class. The relationship between the towns and their hinterland underwent a similar change. The towns also acquired estates and became corporate landowners intent on the feudal exploitation of the countryside.

The Saxons did not follow this pattern, and their situation became as paradoxical as that of the Székelys. Among the latter, the villeins would the most advantage from their 'nation's' feudal privileges. Similarly, it was the Saxons' essentially feudal privileges that preserved their middle-class social order from the renewed pressures of feudalism. In the Királyföld, where a separate legal order reigned and feudal dependence was unknown, the Saxons were like a gigantic urban community. There was no nobiliary entitlement to land. Indeed, there was no Saxon nobility per se; if someone of Saxon origin had other claim to nobility and owned land in the Saxon district, he bore the same tax burden as burghers of similar financial means, and he was equally subject to Saxon law. In other words, a noble Saxon could claim the privileges of his rank only outside the confines of Saxon autonomy. There was no immigration, for non-Saxons were not allowed to purchase land. The system was thus impervious to feudalism.

Much as in the case of urban society, wide socioeconomic differences marked the relationship between Saxon towns and villages. {2-174.} Although the more prosperous settlements took advantage of the poorer ones, the civic order prevailed, and there were no feudal obligations. Only Romanian-inhabited settlements were linked in feudal dependence to the towns. The wealthy exploited the poor in various ways. Everything was done to exclude village craftsmen from the export trade; the towns' unfinished products — leather, cloth, iron — were withheld from them or offered only at a substantial premium. The urban guilds effectively barred goods made by village craftsmen from sale in their market halls.

Although the towns failed to directly exploit Saxon villages, it was not for want of trying. They were certainly tempted to collect more than the prescribed level of state tax. There were two reasons why such a practice did not become generalized. First, it was proscribed by the central authorities, which was ready to curb abuses in the Saxon districts. Second, and more importantly, the towns were not needy enough to resort to such grubby methods. The general weakening of the market for industrial goods in eastern Europe had only a lesser effect on the Saxons, for the latter could rely on their traditional markets in the Romanian voivodeships.

These trade links had been nurtured since the Middle Ages. To be sure, by the early 1500s, merchants in the voivodeships had squeezed out the Transylvanians and taken over as middlemen in one important economic sphere, trade with the Levant. But Transylvanian manufactured goods still found good markets in the countries lying to the south and east. This trade survived much turbulence, notably the Fifteen Years' War, and it enjoyed a surge in the 1630s, when political conditions became more settled in the voivodeships.

Transylvanian Saxons profited disproportionately from the construction boom, and the general rise in spending, during the peaceful rule of Vasile Lupu and Matei Basarab in Moldavia and Wallachia. When the occasional political dispute erupted between Transylvania and the voivodeships, access roads were commonly {2-175.} blocked by felled trees (unless they were used by the marching troops), but the interruptions to trade were never of long duration. As soon as the crisis passed, the Romanians would send messages to Brassó or Szeben requesting the reopening of roads and the shipment of shingle nails. The two voivodes regularly ordered that item, and other building material as well, for their numerous construction projects, including castles and churches. The Romanian markets readily absorbed a wide variety of products, ranging from surgical instruments to boots.

Thus trade with the voivodeships contributed along with traditional privileges to the consolidation of the autonomous Saxon districts. The Saxons' distress was all the greater when, coincidentally, both this trade and the privileges suffered a setback in the mid-1600s. Political instability returned to the voivodeships in the 1650s, halting many construction projects, but this was not the main cause of a slackening in demand for Transylvanian goods. That decline had set in earlier, and owed more to the emergence of local producers who, backed by the voivodes, endeavoured to exclude Transylvanian goods from their markets.

If the Saxons were affected by the economic upswing in Moldavia and Wallachia, the impact of the policies adopted by György Rákóczi II was just as great. Previously, Gabriel Bethlen had attempted to eliminate the Saxons' privileges by the uniting the three 'nations'; when this failed, he avoided further confrontation and merely tried to strengthen the Saxons' rivals. Gábor Báthori and György Rákóczi I, for their part, concentrated on accumulating wealth. To this end, they seized every opportunity to exploit the towns, if necessary by imposing heavy fines. Although these princes drained the Saxons' wealth, they made no attempt to curtail the latter's feudal autonomy. György Rákóczi I twice extracted a tribute from the Saxons, in 1637 and 1646; yet he confirmed the Saxons' privileges on three occasions. He resorted to threats in order to obtain from them an oath of allegiance, but he also expressly acknowledged the validity of the Saxons' distinctive legal order.

{2-176.} György Rákóczi II did not concern himself with the Saxons' economic resources. When, in 1650, he conducted a reorganization of treasury estates, he could have taken over Törcsvár, a key gate between Brassó to Wallachia, which his predecessor György Rákóczi I had already planned to confiscate. But he held his hand, leaving the Saxons in control of the trade that passed through Törcsvár. Nor were any law suits launched against the Saxons during the reign of the young prince.

However, in 1651, the Saxons were confronted with an important development. The diet passed a bill (article 24) that abrogated the right of Saxons to be judged exclusively by their own magistrates, and not by the central princely court. The measure undermined a key feature of their feudal autonomy: the protection offered by their own legal order. They became individually subjected to the jurisdiction of the princely courts. The next blow was just as painful. When, in 1653, the diet consolidated Transylvania's legal code, it not only reaffirmed the above provision but also ruled that outsiders had the right to purchase real estate in Saxon towns. To all appearances, the two measures dealt a fatal blow to the institution of Saxon autonomy. It seemed only a matter of time before the Saxon community would emulate the decline of the Székelys.

Time proved otherwise. As he prepared for his Polish campaign, György Rákóczi II felt compelled to make concessions. In 1656, Saxons regained the right to their own judicial administration. But this, like other reforms achieved over the previous decades by the efficient application of princely power, was swept away in the disaster that began to unfold in 1658.