Introduction

Those interested in the social history of education, the size, the expansion and the internal fragmentation of educated elites, the growth of learning and literacy in various regional and confessional sectors of Hungarian society during the Dual Monarchy, are offered herewith a properly exceptional, may be unique data bank. The volume contains indeed for Transdanubia region the hitherto unexplored (in fact unknown) and detailed results of the census of 1910 as regards the level of schooling of the population, broken down concomitantly by gender, age, denomination and sub-regions (counties and towns with county-level administrative self-government). It represents the first publication of a series which should extend the disclosure of similar types of information over all major regions of the whole country with data distinguished between counties and cities.

The Transdanubian region constitutes the Western part of contemporary Hungary. Its northern and eastern borders are constituted by river Danube (east- and southbound), the historical borders of Croatia (identical mostly to river Drava) on the South and the South West, as well as the historical borders of Austria on the West. Its territory comprised 44.553 km² with 3.084.404 inhabitants according to the 1910 census. It was (especially the Northern part of it) a relatively developed region of the Hungarian Kingdom. It had belonged to the Roman empire as Pannonia Provincia. Here was the centre of the medieval Hungarian kingdom with Székesfehérvár as the coronation town of the sovereigns. The Northern part of Transdanubia (North of Lake Balaton) was never occupied by the Ottoman empire during the invasions of the 16^th and 17^th century. The region was populated mostly by Magyars though there were strong German settlements - one fifth of population being German by mother tongue in 1910. Roman Catholics made up the dominant religious cluster in the region, whichhosted also significant Calvinist (10,8%) and Lutheran (8,9%) minorities. Besides them Jews represented only 2,8% of the population with a more notable presence in the entrepreneurial middle classes and in urban environments, where their demographic share attained 6 to 12 %. Less then 20% of the population over 6 years of age was illiterate against a national average exceeding 30% at that time. Infant mortality was 27,4% as against a national average of 30,4%.

The source of these data (in hand-written form and in absolute numbers only) have been discovered and made available from the Archive of the Census Department of the Central Statistical Office in Budapest by the perspicacity and perseverance of the junior author, though the elaboration of most results was due to the long established, fraternal cooperation of both signatories of this introduction. The publication can indeed be considered as exceptional on several scores, by its mere global scope, its systematic character (conveying identical evidence on levels of schooling of all those discerned via the variables resorted to) and, most importantly, by the number of factors simultaneously mobilized for the purpose.

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