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# The Székelys in Transylvania

Among the many works dealing with the origins of the Székelys, the following have retained their utility: György GYÖRFFY, 'A székelyek eredete és településük története', in Erdély és népei, ed. by E. MÁLYUSZ (Budapest, 1941), and Tanulmányok, pp. 64-74; and Hansgerd GÖCKENJAN, Hilfsvölker und Grenzwächter im mittelalterlichen Ungarn (Wiesbaden, 1972), pp. 114-15.

There is general agreement that the Székelys moved from Bihar to Transylvania, where they settled south of the Maros River, and, by 1100, along the Olt River. Their presence in the latter region is confirmed by earthworks, eight of which have been excavated, stretching from Hortobágyfalva through Halmágy to Földvár. In 'Die Grenzburgen der Altlinie' (KBVSL, 1918), A.SCHULLERUS concludes that these fortifications were defended by Székelys and were already standing when the Saxon settlers arrived in the mid-1100s; the forts remained as enclaves of Fehér county in the newly-constituted Szászföld. In the southwest, Székely settlements extended to the present-day Szászváros, and those who eventually moved to the Háromszék remained in contact with Székelys along the Olt through the centres of Sebes, Orbó and Kézd. According to Th. NÄGLER, the earthwork recently uncovered near Orlát (a toponym derived from Váralatt) belongs to the archaeological culture identified by the Hungarian (and not Pecheneg) ceramic cauldron, which he predictably but mistakenly regards the find as the legacy of an autochthonous Vlach-Romanian population ('Cetăţile feudale de la Orlat', SC 20: 1977). Since the earthwork dates from the 11th-12th centuries, it indicates that Székely settlement extended in that period to the south of Nagyszeben. Thus Nägler is correct in observing that when the Saxons reached the Olt region in the mid-1100s, they settled on empty land ('desertum') only in so far as the king had resettled its former inhabitants, and that 'those who left the area were Székelys' (Die Ansiedlung der Siebenbürger Sachsen [Bucharest, 1979], p. 119).