Mining in Medieval Hungary

Chapter 6 Mining in Medieval Hungary

Zoltán Batizi

A Brief History of Mining in Medieval Hungary

Mined goods were an integral part of medieval economies.1 Mining was the only source of various precious, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, and a good part of salt production also came from mines. All these materials were essential for medieval artisanship and industrial production, while salt was essential in human nutrition. Besides these factors, medieval mining influences social change and settlement structure in several other ways. In Central Europe, mining was a major factor in attracting foreign settlers, who brought with them their technical expertise, but also their legal customs and various traditions. Mining across the region contributed to the formation of special mining towns, some of which become the focal points of economic prosperity in mining regions.

The Early Middle Ages There is clear evidence of mining by the Romans in the territory of medieval Hungary. In the province of Dacia, the Romans mined gold around Abrud, Roşia Montană and Zlatna in the Transylvanian Ore Mountains. Tacitus, in his account of the Germanic tribes, mentioned gold mining by the Quades and Marcomans, peoples who at that time (the first and second century AD) lived in the northwestern part of the Carpathian Basin, areas of the modern-day Czech Republic, and southwest Poland. It is possible that these mines were located in the goldfields of northwest medieval Hungary. It is highly probable, however, that peoples of the Carpathian Basin had been extracting gold, per- haps not by mining, but by panning and on the surface, or collecting native gold from outcrops, for a long time before then. Archaeologists have also found evidence of iron being made from surface bog ore as far back as the early Iron Age.2

1 The most important work as concerns medieval mining: Wenzel 1880. More recent summa- ries of mining in chapters about the Middle Ages mostly repeat Wenzel’s points (e.g. Benke 1996). For a further important overview: Zsámboki 1982a, 13–48. 2 Benke 1996, 30 and Zsámboki 1982a, 14–15 and 24–26.

It is also from archaeology that we know of the high-quality gold and other metal work brought by the conquering Hungarians from the Black Sea region. The Hungarians may have obtained some of the raw material for their jewelry directly from the ground. Since they lived along rivers in Eastern Europe until 895, this would almost certainly have been gathered by paning. When they arrived in the Carpathian Basin in the late ninth century, the Hungarians found working salt mines in Transylvania. There were also peo- ple in the west of Transdanubia who to some extent specialized in making iron. Their number was subsequently augmented by miners taken captive in German areas during the plundering expeditions of the tenth century.3 The meager written sources concerning Hungary between the tenth and twelfth centuries contain no direct references to mining, and anything we know comes from archaeological finds, ethnographic analogies and toponyms in charters dating from between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The clearest evidence of iron production comes from excavated bloomeries. The large number of metal objects commonly found at excavations – metal parts of tools used for farming and household purposes, weapons and other personal objects – also suggests that the majority of these were made from domestic iron, smelted from local ore, and were not imported. There are settlements called Vasvár (“iron castle”) both in western and northern Hungary, and the many early Árpádian-age ironworks reveal the presence of an iron industry, probably under the control of a chieftain, as early as the tenth century. It was common for the inhabitants of a village to specialize in a single trade in the tenth and eleventh centuries, leading to the village becoming known by the name of that trade. Some of the settlements whose names preserve the memory of metalwork trades (and the mixed Slavic–Hungarian population of the time) are grouped around the two Vasvárs; the rest are scattered through- out the kingdom. The old Slavic word ruda (“ore”) is the origin of the Ruda in Rudabánya (bánya means mine in Hungarian), where metal ore was mined, and the related toponyms. Rednek, Rendek and Rudnok, as well as Vigne and Kovácsi (the Hungarianized version of another Slavic word meaning smith) refer to iron-ore mining and metal trades. Several other toponyms also ap- pear to belong to this group: the Slavic-origin Rudna, Radna and Kazinc, the Hungarian Vasas (“iron”) and Verő (“hammer”), and the Turkish-origin Tömörd and Tárkány. Some of the iron produced from the ore in the bloomeries must have been processed in the villages called Csitár and Csatár (from a Slavic word meaning shield-maker). The paucity of written sources has caused some historians of the tenth and eleventh centuries to ascribe great significance to

3 See the contributions of Beatrix F. Romhányi and István Draskóczy in the present volume.