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# The Romanians

By the mid-1600s, the joint efforts of the landowning classes had reduced migration by villeins to normal feudal levels. These efforts and their consequences highlighted the problems specific to {2-177.} Transylvania's Romanians. To be sure, the latter were already a natural and integral part of Transylvanian society. Ennobled Romanians blended into the Hungarian nobility, as was the case with Székelys and Saxons, or, in Hungary proper, with Slovaks and Croatians. The social integration of Romanian villeins, on the other hand, proceeded in almost imperceptible fashion; although most of them retained their Orthodox faith and distinctive cultural features, this did not give rise to any social conflict.

The pattern began to change in the mid-1500s. Some of the Romanians persisted in their accustomed lifestyle. The Kendeffy and Macskási families remained part of the Transylvanian social elite in the 17th century. The vajda Markó served as one of Bethlen's diplomats and became a familiar figure all over Europe. Two princely officials, the vajda Jónás and the boyar István Lészai, were as authoritarian and efficient as any Hungarian prefect. The Romanian background of these officials was neither overlooked, nor of particular advantage to them. When, in fall 1657, the diet debated the candidacy of Barcsai for the office of prince, it did not give more weight to his alleged Romanian origin than to the fact that he was impecunious ('though not reputed to be a beggar'!) or that he was childless. And there was nothing particularly exceptional about the choice of the widowed Erzsébet Zólyomi, to marry the Romanian Gavrilă Movilă. At their home in Hátszeg, they frequently hosted emigrants from the voivodeships.

The situation of Romanian villeins was another matter. They essentially divided into two groups. The first group, consisting of settled Romanians, mostly on the Fogaras domain, assimilated to the bulk of Transylvania's peasantry much as Romanian noblemen did to the corresponding social strata. Their lifestyle did not differ much from that of other villeins; it was conditioned more by such factors as geographical location and manorial organization than by their mother tongue. Nor were they necessarily distinguished by religion; although the Orthodox Church acquired an organized {2-178.} presence in Transylvania in the 15th and 16th centuries, Protestant tracts in the Romanian language had begun to appear in the mid 1500s, and Romanian Calvinist congregations — which had been formed more or less spontaneously — were gathered under a separate bishopric around 1566.

However, only a small fraction of the Romanian peasantry in Transylvania had adopted a settled way of life by the end of the 16th century. The majority maintained a semi-nomadic existence devoted to shepherding and stock-breeding. This turned out to be to their advantage in the later stage of the imposition of a second serfdom. The landed villeins, whether Hungarian, Saxon, Székely, or Romanian, had to assume an ever greater burden of feudal obligations and restrictions on their freedom; but this was only a remote threat for most Romanians, whose lifestyle kept them beyond the reach of the landowners.

The landed villeins — including some Romanians — had long borne the burden of compulsory deliveries, socage service, and regular taxes, yet the Romanian shepherds continued to pay only the sheep thirtieths. A sort of land tax was imposed in 1578 on the more prosperous of these Romanians, but their semi-nomadic lifestyle allowed them to avoid most constraints. The boundaries of domains or of the state represented no impediment for them.

These peripatetic and culturally distinctive communities of shepherds constituted the bulk of Transylvania's Romanians in the 17th century. To be sure, the turmoil of war had uprooted many ordinary peasants, but these formerly landed villeins tried to live by tilling the land even in the midst of the disruption. As the prewar conditions were progressively restored, the distinction between the lifestyles of shepherds and cultivators became sharper. Earlier, the two lifestyles tended to be geographically segregated; now, the lands left deserted by the war drew the shepherds into Transylvania's interior, closer to the settled agricultural communities.

{2-179.} Although migrant Romanians enjoyed some advantages, the other villeins were — presumably for emotional reasons — not drawn to their way of life. The shepherds' communities preserved a social organization more archaic than that of the landed villeins. The latter were repelled by the shepherds' 'disorderly' family life (polygamy was frequently cited), their cavalier attitude to private property, and by their spiritual world, which was untouched by the Reformation and even by formal Orthodoxy. The uneducated Orthodox monks, or caloyers, who did work among these Romanians were equally daunted by the forces of nature and the trials of everyday existence. These itinerant caloyers propagated a peculiar eastern mysticism that focused on the hereafter at the expense of present-day reality. They evoked an afterlife full of exotic horrors and claimed, by their prayers, to obtain the intercession of mysterious supernatural forces. All this horrified the members of established denominations. That is not to say that the congregations led by normally-trained priests could look down on the Romanian shepherds from great theological heights; they scarcely understood the teachings of their own Church. But their spiritual life was buttressed by a settled lifestyle, by clear social rules that had been handed down through many generations; the village structure and organized religion governed their earthly life. Living in communities of mutual dependence, the settled cultivators recoiled from the unfathomable belief system of the shepherds, who were exposed to the vagaries of nature and invoked a multiplicity of capricious spirits.

The settled villeins had another conscious reason for rejecting the Romanians' lifestyle: the stockbreeding monoculture was clearly inferior to the villagers' agriculture for the purpose of generating life's necessities. Thus it offered neither social advancement nor an acceptable escape from villeinage. To be sure, some Hungarians, Székelys, and even Saxons did adopt a pastoral existence on the margin of society, but they were a small minority. In this respect, {2-180.} the occasional flight by village villeins 'into the alps' was revealing: when driven by some immediate danger to abandon their lands, they tried to take along the diverse livestock necessary for cultivation. Sources record that when such refugees returned from the mountains, they brought back their beehives, pigs, cows, and fowl. Thus if they provisionally joined the alpine shepherds, they did so as a last and temporary recourse.

Although Romanian shepherd communities presented neither a direct nor an indirect threat to the integrity of the feudal system, both the state and landowners made some effort to assimilate them in the course developing the second serfdom. As early as the 16th century, some Romanians were forced to settle on the land. In the aftermath of the Fifteen Years' War, there appeared a second campaign to draw these quasi-independent folk into settled villeinage and under the authority of state and landlords.

The first measures aimed at restricting the Romanians' freedom to practice their pastoral pursuits. In 1628, the diet codified the basic thrust of these measures: 'With regard to the Vlachs and Russians who lurk on our properties, have no masters, live like drones, and refuse to give service, the landlord should have no fear but be free to seize and domesticate them.'[92]92. EOE 10, p. 484. In all likelihood, the landowners had not been waiting around for the diet's permission. The law's reference to 'no fear' suggests as much; it may be that some landlords tried to block others' access to this valuable manpower. Legislation pertaining to villeinage commonly codified what was already customary practice.

Supported by the state, these tentative efforts of the landowners brought tangible results: there was a significant drop in nomadic shepherding during the first half of the 17th century. In 1623, Romanians in the Fogarasföld were made subject to the grain tax; this was extended thirty years later to Romanians in the rest of Transylvania. The nomadic shepherd communities survived, and this despite repeated attempts in the latter half of the century to curtail {2-181.} their freedom. The attacks, which coincided with the second wave in the reimposition of serfdom, succeeded in detaching only a fragment from this group of nomadic Romanians.