ABSTRACT
When the Society arrived in an organized fashion in Cluj in 1693, it found a city that had changed little from the late Middle Ages, one that had been little affected by the transformation of the Principality from sometime Ottoman ally to Habsburg possession.1 Below the walls of a decaying fortress were hundreds of dwellings stretched along roads leading into the countryside, housing perhaps more than half of the town’s population by the middle of the eighteenth century. Many of Cluj’s houses, reflecting German influence in their construction, dated from the sixteenth century, before the later influx of Magyars, when the majority of its inhabitants had been Saxons. As with many Transylvanian cities, the Renaissance left little mark on the residential or public architecture of Cluj, and instead, a late medieval aesthetic would persist until the arrival of the Baroque. By the end of the seventeenth century, Cluj was viewed as a Hungarian city.2 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a scant few dozen of the residents of Cluj may have been Romanian,3 a number that did not increase for several decades. About a thousand households were counted both within and beyond the town walls, many living in dwellings centuries old.4 The town was closely tied to the surrounding countryside. The region around Cluj was not dominated by “magnates,” the owners of vast tracts of land, who played a decisive role in the local politics in other Hungarian-speaking territories, although a
1 A mid-eighteenth-century description of Cluj survives in Johann Hubner’s Neu=vermehrtes und verbessertes Reales Staats=Zeitungs und Converations Lexicon … (Regenspurg und Wien, 1759), p. 272.
