CÍMLAP
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CONTENTS, PREFACE |
Contents
Acknowledgements
Symbols and Abbrevitions
Part I. The Family Archive
Part II. The Family Historian András Huszti
Part III. The Wass Family of Cege in the Middle Ages
The fourteenth century
The Transdanubian branch
Development of landed property
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
Material heritage
The coat of arms of the Wass in the Middle Ages
The Wass in Transylvanian society
The evolution of the family name
Descendants of György Wass until the end of the seventeenth century
The diarists: György Wass and his son László
The acquisition of countship (1744)
The nobility's way of life in the first part of the nineteenth century
Dániel's line
Szentgothárd
Miklós's line
Birth and death in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Evolution of landed property
Appendix
Gazetteer of Geographical Names
Illustrations
Family Trees
Preface
The aim of this book is to contribute further information to the studies on the development throughout the centuries of the Transylvanian political élite, that is, the Transylvanian nobility, by tracing and presenting the history of one family, the Wass. This would also mean a contribution to Transylvanian social history writing, as modern social historiography tends to form general conclusions based on the cluster of individual cases; thus individual examples and case studies serve not as mere illustrations but as the starting point, and at the same time the data base of the analysis. The archive of the Wass family, which has been continually developing throughout eight centuries, offers a great opportunity for the writing of a historical case study. According to the evidence of historical demography, it is rather infrequent for a family not to die out in the male line after this many centuries, and what occurs even more rarely is that its archival documents survive as well, in spite of a certain amount of damage on several occasions. In consequence, these documents deserve our attention, as they span such an extended period of time; furthermore, the archive stands out from among all the other Transylvanian family archives by having preserved a considerable amount of medieval (pre-1542) charters. It is mainly from this latter feature that the specific character of the Wass family archive results.
[...]
I launch this book with ardent hopes that it will serve for the benefit of Romanian, Hungarian and German historiography, all engaged in the exploration of Transylvania's history.
Cluj-Kolozsvár, Christmas, 2004
András W. Kovács