199 were donated by the Crown to various landowners, the region of Székes and the Romanians settled there, also came under seignorial authority. It was at this time that Romanian self-government began to disintegrate. In 1291, King Andrew III called a Transylvanian assembly in Gyulafehérvar, for the nobility, the Saxons, the Székelys and the Romanians were all universis nobilibus, Saxonibus, Syculis et Olachis as autonomous self-governing com- munities. This assembly was the last of its kind. After this, it was only the courts of the keneziates and voivodates in the privileged Romanian dis- tricts which met, each separately to conduct its own affairs. By contrast with the Saxons and Székelys, no united self-government of Romanians evolved perhaps because the kenézes and voivodes did not represent any striving after Romanian autonomy. 2. Nobles and Serfs in Transylvania (1241-1360) The Disintegration of the Royal Counties The royal county as a form of social organization started to decline in Hun- gary at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By that time neither the royal court nor the ispdns were satisfied with the primitive goods pro- duced in the villages surrounding the castles, as higher-quality articles were already available, both foreign import and goods made by the French and German settlers in the towns. Their acquisition, however, required money. The cultivation of land by slaves, who yielded the lord their dues in agricul- tural produce but no cash, was clearly obsolete. Free peasant settlers sup- plying tax payments in money were encouraged on both secular and cleri- cal estates, The families holding the highest offices of the realm wanted to emulate the Western European landowning nobility and possess their own demesnes instead of having only the poor returns from land worked by slaves and the income received as officials of the royal counties. At the other end of the scale, the commoners — some of them slaves on the royal, noble or church estates, others, though theoretically free, tied to the land by per- petual servitude — longed for the privileges of the settlers newly arrived from the West. Better farming methods — the horse-drawn plough, the field rotation system, the quadrupling of the yield of cereal crops instead of the doubling of it — as well as the growing number of markets all confirmed the general feeling that the time had come for change. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, there were peasant movements in the western parts of the country even against manual services which in Hungary were called the robot. By the late twelfth century, only a quarter of the royal revenue was com- ing from the payments in kind made by the royal counties. The rest was in the form of money: the taxes paid by the foreign settlers, the hospites, and the profits on the minting of coins, and on the royal monopoly over the mining of salt and precious metals. This being so, the king could afford togrant these lands along with the labour force living on it to aristocratic fami- lies eager to have their own estates. These donations of the royal counties were highly prejudicial to the interests of various social groups living there, for after the relative freedom of being under direct royal authority, they now faced subordination to some private landowner. The solution was to adopt the western European model of late feudalism, a system in which peasants had the right to move freely, cultivated the land of their lord inde- pendently, and paid him his dues in money or in kind. In most of Hungary, this change-over took place in the course of the thirteenth century. In 1298, a royal decree ruled that peasants living under the authority of a feudal lord were to be free to move. The word jobbagy, the Hungarian equivalent of iobagiones, the term once used to designate the group of armed retainers who had entered their lord’s service of their own free will — was applied to these peasants to emphasize their freeman status. Recognition of the title to nobility of the small landowners (the former serviens class) and of the offi- cials of the royal counties came even before that, in 1267. Previously, nobil- ity had been granted only to the high-ranking officials of the king, who, from then on, enjoyed the title of “barons”. At the same time, royal county as an administrative form gave way to the institution of the noble county. In the noble counties, the ispén, who was appointed by the king, adminis- tered justice jointly with judges called szolgabirés elected by the nobility. Later the ispéns of the counties were given the title foispan. In Transylvania the noble county and the rights of the nobility evolved only later and along different lines. This is due to the fact that the royal counties, the administrative units centred around the royal castles, disinte- grated at a slower pace in Transylvania. Things were still in a state of flux in the second half of the thirteenth century, and thus the iobagiones of yore, the soldiering small landowner and royal official class, received titles of nobil- ity only ata later stage. But the main impediment to more rapid change was the oppressive authority of the voivodes. From the beginning of the thir- teenth century, the ispan of Gyulafehérvar (who had the title voivode of Transylvania) appointed the ispans of the other five Transylvanian counties — Doboka, Kolozs, Torda, Kitkiill6 and Hunyad ~ from among his per- sonal supporters. Between 1263 and 1441, the voivode of Transylvania was also the ispdn of Szolnok county which then spread from northern Transyl- vania to the Tisza River, and thus the voivode was the chief administrator, chief justice and military leader of all of Transylvania, except for the Székely, Saxon and Romanian autonomous territories. The voivode’s income derived from the estates around the castles reserved for his benefit; the king’s taxes, tolls and mining revenues, however, were collected by royal officials. Al- though the voivodes were eager to obtain grants of land from the king, they hardly ever became big landowners in Transylvania, since the kings changed their voivodes often, and always appointed them from aristocratic families outside Transylvania. The first voivode to obtain estates in Transylvania was Gyula Kan from Transdanubia at the beginning of the thirteenth century. He was granted a few villages, but lost them after he left office, and it was only in 1268 that one of his descendants who was also voivode was able to recover a part of his estate. Before that, at the very end of the twelfth century, the ancestors 200201 of the Was family had been given grants of land. A bigger, but uninhabited area near the upper reaches of the Maros River was granted to Mihdly Kacsik of northern Hungary during his term as voivode (1209-1212), and to his brother, Ban Simon. However, because of the latter's rebellion, in 1228 the king confiscated the estate and gave it to Dénes Losonci Tomaj. Tomaj, later voivode himself, established what was to become the wealthiest landown- ing family in Transylvania, and which broke into three branches in 1319 forming the Losonci, Banffy and Dezs6fi clans. Smaragd Zsamboki, who was voivode for only a brief period (1206-1207), was able to obtain only a few villages in Hunyad county, which were later inherited by a poorer branch of his family, the Barcsais, who settled in Transylvania. A member of the Kokényes-Radnot family was granted the sizeable domain of Teke near the Tomaj estates before 1228, but his family had died out by the end of the century. In the first half of the thirteenth century, the Becse-Gergely family, who were likewise not of local origin, had an estate in the north, near the Nagy-Szamos River; their descendants, the Transylvanian Bethlen, Apafi and Somkereki families, had a major part in the area's history right up to modern times. Quite distinct from these big continuous latifundia consisting of several villages peripheral located at the foot of the mountains were those discon- tinuous estates of two to ten villages lying on both sides of the Kis-Szamos and in the Mezéség which were owned by different families of the same clan. At the end of the twelfth century, it became a nation-wide custom for these clans to call themselves the descendants (de genere) of their first known ancestor, someone regarded as one of the original conquerors. Five such clans are known in Transylvania from early thirteenth-century sources. Ano- nymus mentions the Zsombor clan — along with their village, Eskiill6 — as the descendants of tenth-century conquerors; later, too, they were land- owners in Doboka county. The other family he speaks of is the Agmand clan of Bels6-Szolnok county. In the early thirteenth-century Doomsday Book of Varad, we find the names of members of the Kalocsa (later called Szil, then Tyukod) clan who owned lands in the counties of Kolozs and Torda, together with those of a clan named “ Mikola” after its first known ancestor. A similar pattern of discontinuous landowning is revealed by documents concerning the Borsa clan who were patrons of the monastery at Almas in the first half of the thirteenth century, and later acquired land in Bihar county. The five clans listed above, who lived in the four northern Transylvanian counties, held lands outside Transylvania only in neighbouring Bihar county, and even there only from the second half of the thirteenth century. They can, therefore, be regarded as “first settlers”, that is, as Transylvanian land- owners continuously from the time of the Hungarian Conquest. From all five clans there descended a number of families, most of which survived to the present day, and it was these families that produced the core of Transyl- vania’s Hungarian nobility. In the second half of the thirteenth century, social changes not only speeded up, but involved more and more of Transylvanian society. The old castles (Dés, Doboka, Kolozsvar, Torda, Gyulafehérvar, Ktikiill6var and per- haps even Hunyad) were sacked by the Mongols. Although King Béla IV supplemented their surviving population with new elements and reorgan-