Download PDF | Beatrix F. Romhanyi - Pauline Economy in the Middle Ages ''The Spiritual Cannot Be Maintained Without The Temporal'' -Brill (2020)
242 Pages
Preface
Most medieval charters that were preserved in the territory of medieval Hungary concern estates and deal with issues connected to possession rights. This is also true for charters of monastic institutions. As there is no medieval institution whose archive survived completely, writing the history of the orders in Hungary has always been in a way one-sided, researchers dealt much more with secular issues than with spiritual.
But, as one of the charters quoted the canon law on monastic orders, “the spiritual cannot be maintained without the temporal” (MNL OL DL 16912), and the economy and management of the various orders were certainly intimately intertwined their spirituality. The present volume is the result of extensive research. Studying the history of the religious orders in medieval Hungary made it abundantly clear that surviving sources about the Paulines offer an exceptionally good range of materials to analyse monastic estate structure and management.
On the one hand, a relatively large number of charters have been preserved; on the other hand, their interpretation is facilitated by two early modern sources: the historical work Vitae fratrum of the prior general, Gregorius Gyöngyösi, and the Formularium maius used under the rule of his successor, Valentine Hadnagy. Thirdly, the order’s centralized organization allows the underlying assumption that the estates and the management of individual monasteries fit into a coherent system and thus can be used to contribute to our understanding of the whole. At the same time, the limitations of the work are also obvious: despite their relative abundance, the archives of the monasteries are incomplete, the distribution of sources is uneven.
Furthermore, the comparable evidence from Hungary, i.e. the analysis of the economy of other orders, has only been partially completed, and Western European parallels should be used with caution because of the different social and economic environment. Thus, my primary aim is to analyse the available sources concerning Pauline economy and to refer to similar phenomena in Hungary and Western Europe where possible. I wish to express my gratitude to all those who helped my work.
First, Professor András Kubinyi, who supported me from the beginning and reviewed the first versions of the text. I also thank the kindness of József Laszlovszky, Gábor Sarbak, László Solymosi and István Tringli who were always keen to offer their helpful advice at various stages of the analyses and called my attention to new data. Last, but not least, I am grateful for Zsuzsanna Reed’s help in proofreading the English text, and to my daughter Réka Fülöpp for the drawings. Besides them, many colleagues in Hungary and abroad, whom I cannot list by name in a short preface, shared valuable information with me, read parts of the text, and corrected mistakes.
Introduction
Sources concerning the medieval history of the Pauline order were preserved in an exceptionally large number compared to other religious communities. Among others, they include archives of larger monasteries, the inventory of important charters prepared by Gregorius Gyöngyösi, as well as a formulary used in the 1530s.1 Another work by Gregorius Gyöngyösi, the Vitae fratrum also contains valuable data and some of the anecdotes recorded by Gyöngyösi shed light on the spiritual background of the rules and of contemporary practices. Some aspects of the Pauline economy are also explained in the Epitoma and in the Directorium, the first being a spiritual guideline for the monks on the way of perfection, while the second contains the detailed description of the tasks of every official in the order, beginning with the prior general and concluding with the steward.
The late medieval—or, in European terms, early modern—sources about the order’s history, compiled in the first decades of the sixteenth century by leading Pauline monks, mainly Gregorius Gyöngyösi, are exceptional in Hungarian history. No other order has surviving written evidence, which gives a similarly comprehensive insight not only into estates and privileges, but also into the contemporary understanding and interpretation of rules and practices. Although the Vitae fratrum is usually regarded as the history of the Pauline Order, which is true to some extent, the author’s aim was to instruct his fellow-members in the order by recounting the lives of outstanding leaders or—especially around 1500—of famous artists, poets, and even simple friars.
Although it was not Gyöngyösi’s primary focus of interest, the stories feature good and bad ways of using the temporalia several times. The Inventarium and the Formularium preserve documents concerning the estates, estate management, and everyday life. Gyöngyösi did not record all the charters he found in the monasteries he visited, but he registered only those which were necessary for proving the order’s ownership of certain landed estates or their privileges.2
The Inventarium captured the estate structure of the Pauline Order a few years before the Reformation and the Ottoman occupation of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, while the Formularium preserves the most frequent or difficult issues connected to estate management as well as information about the social network around the monastic community. Since the case-specific details were not always completely omitted from the charters copied into the formulary, they offer valuable bits of information about the estates of individual monasteries. Most of the original charters are available in the volumes of the Documenta Artis Paulinorum. A huge quantity of excerpts concerning the Slavonian monasteries was published by Elemér Mályusz in the 1920s and 1930s.
After World War II, Zsuzsa Bándi published charters of the monasteries in north-eastern Hungary and of the monastery of Szakácsi, while Iván Borsa put out charters of Szerdahely and some other monasteries in Transdanubia. Many documents in connection with the order’s history can also be found in the volumes of the Anjou-kori Oklevéltár and of the Zsigmond-kori Oklevéltár. Excerpts of unpublished charters are accessible on the website of the Hungarian National Archives.3 Just like all other monastic source material in medieval Hungary, these sources deal primarily with economic issues. Their analysis has been hitherto rather superficial: most researchers contented to say that Paulines usually had small estates, managed in a feudal system and in a natural economy. There are, however, a handful of articles which are indeed relevant here as they contain analyses of the estate management of the monasteries in smaller regions. The charters concerning the economy of the Pauline monasteries in Baranya County were studied by Éva Knapp who demonstrates the close economic connection of these monasteries with the bishopric of Pécs.4
The sources about the monasteries of the Zemplén region—mainly published by Zsuzsa Bándi— were used by Károly Belényesy for the reconstruction of the economy and land use of the monasteries in Abaúj County.5 Tamás Guzsik summarised the estate types in tables, although his interpretation remains brief and perfunctory.6 I have presented a similarly short overview in a conference poster,7 and in the short history of the Paulines in medieval Hungary.8 Although not directly connected to the research on the Pauline order, András Végh’s monograph on the medieval topography of Buda contains useful data both in the analysis and in the documentation.9 The present volume focuses on the published and unpublished charters, and the early modern formularium. The Pauline inventory published in the DAP, charter-based data of the Vitae fratrum by Gregorius Gyöngyösi, and some other, partly non-Hungarian written evidence are also included.
There are about five thousand charters preserved in the Pauline archives and several hundred are kept in other archives. However, the number of documents that can be examined in the context of Pauline economy is considerably lower, partly because some charters, usually dealing with the history of certain estates before they were given to the monks, are only loosely connected to the Paulines, and partly because some came down to us in several copies, usually due to legal procedures. Also, some charters in the Pauline archives have nothing to do with the order, they were simply entrusted to the monks provisionally but were never returned to the owners. Finally, there is a group of charters which are not connected to the economy, for example, confraternity charters,10 papal and royal privileges, and different documents concerning legal acts, such as subpoenas, postponements, mandates for solicitors, and so on.
The number of charters varies across individual monasteries. Slavonian monasteries are the best documented among all the regions of the kingdom: about 35–40% of all available material is connected to them. The distribution of the sources is so uneven that statistical methods cannot be applied. In all, more than a thousand charters can be used for analysis, and approximately 800 of them are directly connected to economic issues. The rest deal with personal and social relations, or the privileges of the monasteries and of the order itself.
In some cases, it is possible to reconstruct a longer series of events but most of the evidence is isolated. A comprehensive description of Pauline economy is not possible because of the lack of comparative material. Although the economy of the mendicant orders has been analysed, the analysis of the late medieval economy of monastic orders is still missing. In the absence of more complete source material, modern comparative evaluation is necessary. This kind of research will also be needed for the reconstruction of land use and estate management of late medieval monastic institutions.11
After the papal approval in 1308, the Pauline Order spread quickly and became one of the most popular religious communities in medieval Hungary. Importantly, the community had to prove its economic stability in order to secure the canonical approval.12 Despite the indisputable support, the network of the Pauline monasteries could never achieve the level of stability that characterized the Franciscan and Dominican networks. While Pauline monasteries were founded in an uninterrupted succession until the early sixteenth century, certain sites were at the same time abandoned for various reasons. This may also have contributed to the fact that the order never became international.
There were about 65–70 monasteries in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but most of them were much smaller than the contemporary Franciscan or Dominican friaries. The average number of monks was between eight and twelve, and their estates were sufficient only to maintain a monastic community of that size. Regarding the estates, it is important to point out that the order adopted various aspects of other orders’ operation during the period of its formation. Their first hermitages tried to join the emerging order of the Austin Hermits and they had some sort of mutual sympathy with the Dominicans. However, they always emphasized that the monks should live off their own work, and their regulation forbade both mendication and the possession of villages and tenant plots. However, in the later Middle Ages, both rules were observed with restrictions: certain types of alms and the income paid by tenants were part of their economic “portfolio.”13
These early rules more or less defined the early structure of Pauline estates. The basic elements were types of possession which needed few labourers, hiring extra workforce only occasionally. These include small plough lands, vineyards, fruit-gardens, fishponds, mills, forests, and animals. The management of the growing estates also caused tensions within the order, which remained a constant problem throughout their existence. Gregorius Gyöngyösi, for example, recorded that the prior general, Nicholas, always reminded himself that he was elected superior not to govern animals and the estates, thus he was more concerned with correcting their faults than with enriching the greedy monks. He did not care much for collecting money because he knew that greed is the root of all sins and evil.
Therefore, he used to say to those who ran after money: You should remain in the monastery, go to church, and mourn your sins day and night. You need not wait long if you like soil, you will soon have enough of it. It will be beneath you, above you, and in you for you are but ashes and you will return to ashes. Sometimes he answered those who contradicted him: I am not the shepherd of cattle and of sheep, but of the souls which had been entrusted to me, I have to account for them when Doomsday comes.14 As noted above, most Pauline monasteries in rural areas had diverse types of landed estates: plough lands, meadows and pastures, vineyards, fruit-gardens, forests, fishponds, and mills. Some monasteries managed to accumulate small but contiguous estates, whose final shape and size, as they are known from the charters, had been shaped either by the intentions of the donators or by the efforts of the monks themselves.
The size of the estates varied; there were rather well-off monasteries, as well as poor ones which could hardly sustain themselves from their income. The largest part of the estates served as selfsustenance and their income was in kind. In certain regions of the kingdom, this traditional type of estate management was prevalent or, for example in Slavonia, it was the only type there was. However, it is clear that some part of the estates produced monetary income. Based on their estates, the major monasteries of the order could capitalize their earnings and were able to participate in trade and finance. The present study offers an analysis of this “capitalistic” estate management, while the “feudal elements” of the estates will be briefly touched upon where relevant.15 In addition, even though they are neither essential for the approach in the present study, nor a specialty of the Pauline economy, the role of different types of estates, especially of forests, in the economy of better-documented monasteries will be discussed.
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