CHURCH IN TOWN: URBAN RELIGIOUS LIFE IN LATE MEDIEVAL PRESSBURG
IN THE MIRROR OF LAST WILLS
Judit Majorossy
Dissertation Summary
In historical scholarship there is a need for comparative as well as synthetic works. Originally,
my research project was also intended as a comparative investigation carried out on
testamentary material from five urban communities in the medieval kingdom of Hungary.
However, when confronted with the problems of old historiography already with the first
town where the research began, namely Pressburg (Posonium, Pozsony, today Bratislava), and
also confronted by the very different number of surviving wills in the five towns a very
different methodology would have been required, I therefore decided to concentrate only on
one town but carry out a detailed analysis. My decision was further supported by my
conviction that individual case studies needed to be carried out first for the ecclesiastical
history of late medieval urban communities in Hungary whether synthetic or comparative
work was involved. This research situation is partially due to the fact that after the second
World War until basically 1990, church history was not at all in the focus of historical
research in the region. Nowadays one cannot base a synthetic study entirely on those old
works without revisiting their sources and counting on the appearance of new ones and also
without applying new approaches and methods.
The Main Research Question
The main issue behind the case study on the religious life of the burghers of medieval
Pressburg, is connected to various historiographic approaches concerning the religiosity of
late medieval people. In the view of certain scholars, pious considerations and devotion
dominated and overwhelmed all segments of everyday life towards the end of the fifteenth
century. At the same time, others have stressed the corruptness of the age. The Church was
stated to have become cynical, materialistic, manipulative and calculating. Thus, people
sought purity and the whole atmosphere of late fifteenth and early sixteenth century cried out
for religious reforms and paved the way for the Reformation. Was it as simple as that? My
intention was to investigate what religiosity actually looked like in the chosen urban
community of Pressburg. From this point of view, those of my readings proved inspiring
which suggested in one form or another that religiosity is not necessarily equivalent to
overwhelming piety or all-out devotion, and that medieval piety was many things at the same
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time: "excitable, lazy, repressive, accepting, gendered, hierarchical, socially levelling, deeply
devout and deeply sceptical". Thus, one can accept the general concept that late medieval
people were actively religious but then one has to try to investigate how this religiosity
manifested itself in the everyday life of a given community.
Sources and Methodological Questions
Despite the formulaic and legal character as well as the limited nature of last wills which
formed the main corpus of sources for the dissertation, they are still suitable for getting closer
to the manifestations of community religiosity. Among western scholars this type of source
material was exploited and several methods were applied to provide answers for the issues of
religious life in different urban communities chosen as subjects for analysis. However, such
investigations could not be supported in the Carpathian Basin because there were an
insufficient number of surviving wills in certain towns. However, the medieval royal town of
Pressburg is an exception and this why it was finally chosen for such a study. For a period of
approximately one hundred years (mainly after 1400 and until 1529), nine hundred wills were
preserved. Eight hundred forty-four were available in a completely uniform town protocol
(Protocollum Testamentorum) with the remainder appearing as individual charters.
The question of methodology necessarily emerged in the face of such a large source
material. Should these wills be approached quantitatively? This method has the disadvantage
that certain nuances in behaviour will be lost or, at least, neutralised. Or, should these wills be
treated qualitatively? In this case, taken to be the last and determining act of a person's life,
one needs to make clear all possible motives held by each testator and understand all the
influencing factors behind their individual bequests. Thus, such sources need to be interpreted
within the framework of case studies. The final decision was to combine the two methods.
The choice was essentially determined by two factors. First, due to the unreliable assumptions
of the earlier historiography on the town (basically Tivadar Ortvay's main monograph written
on the history of Pressburg) where a selective number of individual cases were elevated above
the micro level to the macro level and were generalised without contrasting the micro level to
the material as a whole. Thus, the decision was made to chose quantitative methodology.
Determining norms with such a method allows one to still go back to the micro level and
judge how individual cases differed from the general trend. An exclusively qualitative
approach would not have allowed to detect temporal changes and preferences on a general
level to be detected. The systematic survey itself was undertaken using a complex database.
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Second, I also decided to revisit those sources which had already been used but not
completely exploited (sometimes even on the level of an individual charter) in order to clear
up certain issues and questions which had been the subject of earlier misinterpretations. A
more thorough treatment of the various sources was necessitated by the fact that in the light of
certain statements within the older literature, I was not able to interpret some of the bequests
in the wills and thus, in order to clarify contexts, I finally had to go back all to the same
sources. These were the issues, for example, in relation to the hospitals, several
confraternities, and some of the altars.
On a third level, to place my results gained through 'counting piety' into a broader
context, I tried to integrate other sources besides the wills (church inventories, confraternity
regulations, accounts and membership lists, hospital accounts, mass foundation charters,
indulgence letters) as much as the surviving material of the town allowed it. At certain points,
especially concerning the ecclesiastical institutions, I also tried to incorporate results from
archaeology, art history and urban topography. I attempted a new method where the support
of the testators was contrasted on a time scale with phases in the life of given institutions
(mainly parishes and monasteries) known from other sources and from archaeology and art
history in order to reveal what could the wills together with the other related sources add to
the picture already known by scholars or how one can gain indirect information about
buildings no longer in existence.
About the Structure of the Dissertation
All the pious deeds of a dying person were very much interrelated since all the stipulations
were to be fulfilled for the salvation and commemoration of the testator's soul. However, by
investigating the palette of choices separately, more can be disclosed about certain aspects of
religiosity and thus, conventions as well as certain elements of individuality are also revealed.
The range of choices provided the structure for my study of Pressburg wills.
In the first chapter the context of Pressburg (its urbanisation, demography and
economic position) was presented together with the ecclesiastical institutions serving the
religious needs of its inhabitants. The source material was described along with the created
database itself. The two main chapters were organised according to the different acts and
considerations found in the wills and then those of the institutions themselves.
In the second chapter the acts and actors were placed at the centre of the study through
discussing the different types of pious deeds and focusing on who and in which ways were
involved by the testators in the preservation of their memories. The motives and
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circumstances surrounding the preparation of wills were exhibited, parallelly investigating
what these last arrangements revealed about the religious rituals associated with dying itself.
After the acts around the death-bed, several aspects of the funerary process and burial as well
as the performance of different types of masses together with bequests for their performers
(priests) and places of performance (altars) were thoroughly examined. Finally, different
forms of charity and post-mortem pilgrimages end the discussion.
Various institutions lie at the centre of the third main chapter. Through a combination
of the systematic analysis of wills and reconstruction of the history of the parishes,
monasteries and confraternities, the chapter aimed at defining their place and their relation to
each other on the ecclesiastical map of Pressburg from the point of view of commemorational
activity. Alongside measuring the extent and character of the donations given to the parish
churches of Pressburg, the rank and size of the parishes was also defined, together with their
estimated territories. Then, a similar analysis of the patronage provided for the monastic
communities and the chapels of the town was carried out. Finally, the confraternities were
presented separately and the intensity and character of their support compared.
Strategies for the Salvation of the Soul in Late Medieval Pressburg
The religious ethos of medieval people revolved around a serious concern about the fate of
one's soul after death. However, beyond general strategies for reaching the desired 'eternal
heavenly peace', several factors and considerations at work in a given community could affect
the tools chosen by its members to reach this happy spiritual end. For this reason, the
practices found in one town do not necessarily apply in all respects to another. The systematic
analysis of the last wills of the citizens of Pressburg highlighted their preferred deeds to insure
the salvation of their souls as well as the ups and downs, temporal changes and social
affordabilities of the various pious acts.
Wills, due to their character, are only limited mirrors of the religiosity of a whole
urban community. This is partly because their surviving number represents a confined circle
(those who could afford to leave behind written legacies). On the other hand, one of the
reasons to record a will was to diverge from the usual system of inheritance. And frequently,
besides family reasons, it was exactly the intended pious bequests which necessitated
production of a written document. The question is whether and to what extent did these pious
considerations represent individual intentions as reflections of social status and family
circumstances and to what extent were they the reflections of community standards and
expectations. Naturally, it is hard to provide adequate answers for such issues where personal
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motivations were so much involved. Yet, with the combinations of the quantitative and
qualitative analysis I attempted and I hope that I convincingly managed, to reveal
representative patterns, helping to reconstruct some of the religious norms operating within
the fifteenth century secular community of Pressburg.
Though the percentage of testators in Pressburg was relatively high and the majority
contained some kind of religious considerations, relatively few of them included a meticulous
description of their pious acts. Most of the texts, even if detailed, seem to reveal certain
elements of the normal practice. From the analysed corpus of the wills it seems that, beyond
ensuring the future of the family members, the other main target of the majority of the
testators was to meet the religious norms and community expectations. In many cases it was
far more important for the testators to act according to these norms in their wills than to set
their individual forms for personal representation and commemoration.
In order to shortly summarise the way in which various acts and choices incorporated
within the legacies related to each other, the following should be emphasised: it became a
norm in the wills, especially after the 1480s, to explicitly bequeath for the burial ceremony or,
at least, request the survivors to arrange an appropriate funeral. From the comparison of the
funerary investments with the overall financial status of the testators it was possible to
conclude that they put special emphasis on ensuring a decent funeral for themselves, even
beyond their financial capacities. The funerary liturgy in the church with all its accessories
(vigil, candles, office for the dead) was normally included within the concept of appropriate
arrangements, and thus, was rarely mentioned separately. At the same time, the minimum
standard was to order at least one trental at the place of burial or additionally also in a
monastic community. Especially around the turn of the fifteenth century, the Franciscan
nunnery also became involved. The nuns were requested to recite the psalms after the
testator's departure from this life. An anniversary commemoration (Jartag) was an additional
option chosen by some, whereas, due to its high cost, a foundation for eternal masses to be
held was aimed at by members of the elite. The costs of such an arrangement were so high
that some testators focused their legacies exclusively on an eternal foundation and its
supplements. The support of the priests was usually considered part of such mass foundations,
especially if a relative of the deceased became the beneficiary priest. More often such
assignment was intended as a final 'payment' to the confessor whose intercession was thus
strengthened. Some of the testators chose to financially aid a future priest and consequently
expanded the time limits for heavenly mediation. Similarly to mass foundations, bequeathing
funds for a specified altar was limited to a small group within the testators. Usually it was
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connected to ones’ own foundations, to burial arrangements, to a relative holding the prebend,
or to the testator's role as the secular altar patron (ius patronus). The investments for the
various devices of the liturgy (liturgical books, vessels, clothes) were more often really forms
of support for one's own parish or one's own confraternity.
Care for the poor was the object of bequests in one quarter of the wills. However, the
donations for the poor were not necessarily, indeed quite rarely, connected to their presence at
the funeral. The norm was to pay a sum sufficient for at least one prandium or a bath. At the
same time, the special forms of care for the poor (dowry for poor maidens, money for poor
students or priests) appeared to be less in the focus of the bequests, and again usually had
personal connections in the background. Unlike the stricto sensu charitable donations, the
proportion of post-mortem pilgrimages was high both in relation to the other alternatives and
to some extent also in relation to other urban communities. This phenomenon may be an
indicator of a rather mobile society. Finally, as to the support for ecclesiastical institutions,
pride of place was taken by the parishes, whose subvention took many different forms. At the
same time, the bequests to the monasteries were rather functional. The role of the
confraternities became significant especially after the 1480s. The dominance of parish-related
confraternities can also be observed. Most probably as a consequence of plague epidemics in
the town, however, the brotherhoods established in the Franciscan Friary (especially that of
Saint Sebastian) became the most popular.
These norms seem to be relatively standard throughout the investigated period, even in
the decades before the 1520s when the first waves of the Reformation reached the town. In
other words, the proportion of the preferences apparently does not undergo significant
alterations. The smaller ups and downs concerning certain choices such as the support for
altars, chapels, confraternities or post-mortem pilgrimages – as demonstrated in the relevant
chapters – may have had practical reasons as well. At the same time, a certain temporal
stratification can be observed concerning the ecclesiastical institutions. At the beginning of
the fifteenth century, the dominance of the parishes (especially that of Saint Martin's) was
significant. The mendicant communities lined up around the middle of the century and with
the later establishment of several new religious confraternities by the end of the century the
institutional palette was further enriched and adjusted to the extended needs of urban piety.
Judging from the distribution of certain types of legacies, the general attitude towards
the ecclesiastical institutions – be it an altar prebend, a chapel, a monastery or a church –
reflects to a great extent the practical thinking of the testators on how to supply the basic
necessities for these institutions. Investing vast amounts of wealth just for the sake of pure
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representation, the norm among the nobility or even certain other European urban
communities, was alien to the concerns of the Pressburg people. Apparently, from the point of
view of the testators it was important to contribute to the basic operation of their ecclesiastical
institutions and thus enable them to satisfy their religious demands.
This norm-following attitude and pragmatism among the testators as shown in their
pious donations can also be observed in the intended sums for such purposes. On the one
hand, the dominance of the same amounts invested in one means or another for the salvation
of the soul together with moderate expenditure was a characteristic feature of the majority of
the wills. Many times, those institutions in need at a given moment, were pushed into the
foreground.
Another observation was the recurrence in the wills of the average prices found within
the various types of donations. This cannot be exclusively attributed to the formulaic
character of the wills or to the 'suggestions' of the notary or the witnesses who were present.
In my opinion this phenomenon was rather related to norms and practices that had been
internalised by the living and the dying members of the community. Namely, there existed an
accepted average customary sum for the different acts and actions needed for the
commemoration and this was aimed at as a minimum by each self-conscious testator. The fact
that each 'service' had its 'set' price can be taken as a reflection of the materialistic or
calculating character of the pre-Reformation Church. But examining the issue from the side of
the burghers as testators the picture according to my reading is more subtle. The uniformity of
donations could also be the result of a social convention between the benefactors and the
executive institutions. The existence of such norms made it possible for the members of the
urban community to calculate the costs of their eternal life. For a dominantly trading
bourgeoisie such an attitude would not have been alien.
It is also apparent from the analysis that considerations of visibility prevailed over or
operated together with such practical motivations. It was not so much the desire to make
visible their own donations (through signs of personal identification), but much more the
visibility of the institutions to receive the bequests or the intended pious acts. Therefore,
places or people hidden from the point of view of the urban community as a whole did not
attract bequests apart from a few individual cases.
The wealthier members of the community in most cases raised the level of investments
(more of everything). They ordered multiples of the average standard prices. They extended
their 'visibility' in the community in both time and space in order to express their social status.
Nevertheless, even these testators were for the most part relatively moderate. It might well be
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concluded that Pressburg testators generally invested in their eternal life to the extent required
from their social status.
The above-mentioned pragmatism and 'calculated piety' does not call into question the
religiosity and piety of these people or the fact that faith and religious practices were woven
into their everyday life and acts. These two phenomena may be indicators of the way the
burghers of Pressburg adapted general practice onto 'their self-image' and how they embedded
the practice into their everyday thinking and the preparations they made for their own death.
These community strategies actually manifested themselves in membership in smaller
communities. The roles and functions of the various ecclesiastical institutions (small
communities) have been shaped by their members. The believers' considerations,
contributions and attention modified the way the institutions adapted themselves to the
demands that arose with regard to the liturgies around death. As a consequence, during the
fifteenth century certain institutions lost their significance while new ones were founded,
earlier churches and chapels were pushed into the background and instead new altars, and
especially new confraternities were established. Temporal trends show that, if we simplify the
question, what one can see is that parishes (and hospitals) are dominant in the earlier wills.
Later, testators started including the monastic communities in their wills along with new altar
foundations and by the end of the fifteenth century a series of new brotherhoods were founded
to satisfactorily widen the set of usable institutions.
The moderation exercised by the testators in their testamentary donations might also
have been connected to the indigenous nature of membership and its consequences. Since the
self-conscious parishioners or brothers/sisters already granted support to their own parish and
confraternity community during their lifetimes, partially granting donations to them in
advance and in exchange they would be commemorated and remembered in their afterlife as
well. Therefore, the testamentary contribution to this act essentially served to assure their own
and their surviving family position in their community.
The third level, discussed in the conclusion was the family (the individual) level.
Certainly, on this personal level there were several individual factors at work – most of the
time unidentifiable due to the nature and lack of sources – which actually determined the
individual testator's choices and decisions. Though these individual choices should be the
subject of micro-historical case studies, which for the fifteenth century is not always possible,
some possible general conclusions can still be drawn. First, among the predominately pious
testators and members of the elite whose wills contained all-inclusive, meticulous, and
generous donations, one finds almost exclusively individuals without close relatives living in
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the town: either widows and widowers without offspring or tradesmen without local family in
Pressburg. Among those with direct heirs, pious considerations were usually indicative in
nature. In practice, it was purely the choice that was defined along with the financial backing.
For family members it was not only an obligation but instinctive to preserve the memory of
the deceased in all possible forms. Thus, it was not necessary to fully shift the
commemorational function to an ecclesiastical institution.
At the same time, the choice of a particular form of piety was often encouraged and
determined by family history. As can be partly concluded from the analysis, similar
considerations within families could usually be found in the wills of husband and wife, or
sometime when the wills were written close in time then in the wills of son/daughters and
parents. Where there was a longer time between the wills of members of the same family, the
preferences were more likely to change through time. Thus, in Pressburg it seems that one
cannot really speak of long-run family strategies in the sense of long-lasting, intergenerational patterns.
Approaching the personal strategies from the viewpoint of gender, there was also a
slight shift concerning certain considerations and preferences. Naturally, several pious acts
were equally chosen and exercised by both sexes, that is to say, based on the gender
distribution of the testators (various forms of masses, bequests for liturgical equipment, or
post-mortem pilgrimages and others). However, other deeds showed higher proportions in the
direction of either women or men. Concerning, for example, the gender content of the
different forms of care for the poor, it was apparent that the female testators preferred to make
donations to the poor outside the institution, and within that context, their share in supporting
young maidens with dowries or providing assistance for the household poor was much higher
than that of men. Both forms were more connected to the household of which women were
anyway in charge. In this way they were able to express their sympathy. For the male
testators, on the other hand, it was more profitable to donate to the institution, the hospital(s)
or the confraternity of the poor and among the other manifestations of poverty, poor students.
At the same time, the greater male preference for 'institution' was also manifested in other
ways. Men more frequently than women bequeathed donations to other institutions beside
their own parishes. In particular, their contribution to the building funds (zum paw donations)
was higher than that from women. Consequently, the practical approach to piety was, to some
extent, more characteristic for men.
Late Medieval Religiosity at the Dawn of Transition
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The analysis hopefully has shown that the ecclesiastical system of the Pressburg community
was sufficiently differentiated to meet the religious needs of its burghers. The Church in the
town adapted itself to the demands of its members. Simultaneously, due to the mutual
character of this interaction, the burghers actively took part in the formation of certain
practices, in the establishment of new institutions and invested in creating the conditions for
the accomplishment of the religious and liturgical needs surrounding their dying and death. In
fact, it seems that at least in case of Pressburg, the burghers found ways to form their own
ecclesiastical network, thus levelling off the 'demands and supplies'.
Late medieval piety in Pressburg was not necessarily overwhelming, exorbitant or
ostentatious, but was much more practical and 'earth-bound'. Religion and its everyday
practices determined and were intertwined with the daily life of the burghers. Certain
elements of devotion were further amplified by calamities, especially the plague epidemics
around the turn of the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, this devotion manifested itself in
concrete acts, and often took the form of efficient and utilitarian thinking. This became
visible, for example, through the support for reconstruction work after fires, bequests to needy
beneficiaries or insufficiently furnished prebends, or donations affecting the daily operation of
the hospitals or similar other such deeds. The example of Pressburg fully supports some of the
observations about religiosity at the dawn of the Reformation in Hungary. Devotion and the
relationship between the faithful and the Church was, no doubt, active and living through
actions. Apparently, people did not completely turn away from the institutions of the Church
but managed to find those forms within these institutions or those institutions within the
ecclesiastical network which served their religious needs.
The most interesting period in Pressburg is the 1520s with its dichotomies and with the
simultaneous presence of the 'old' and 'new' faiths. The 'heretic views of Luther' soon found
their way into the upper strata of society. In 1526, the mayor commissioned the town scribe to
copy the articles of Luther at public expense and announced them publicly several times in the
town. In the same year, Lutheran books were also publicly burnt. Some friars in 1528, known
to be active in disseminating reformed teachings in the town, were then executed. In the
testamentary arrangements, however, one cannot yet detect any trace of this transitional
ambivalence. Some of the most elaborate mass foundations were laid down around the same
years. Were these donations aimed at demonstrating against the nascent innovations, or were
they still part of the same normal practice from the previous period? To answer this question,
one would have to expand the temporal limits of the investigation into the following decades.
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In the last year of the 1520s, on the other hand, the ecclesiastical network of the town
out of political necessity and imposed defensive strategies was significantly transformed by
the destruction of the two suburban parishes (Saint Michael's and Saint Lawrence's), the Saint
Nicholas church, and even the two hospitals. Under other circumstances, the destruction and
consequently the desacralisation of sacred places would have caused ardent opposition within
the religious community. Though it must have represented a fault-line of sorts and generated
several problems, the burghers apparently accepted its necessity without any major shocks.
Did this attitude represent the victory of practical thinking over pious feelings or was it
facilitated by the same dichotomy of piety and worldliness which characterised the religious
life of late medieval Pressburg and explains why the 'new faith' found its way so easily among
its burghers? Nevertheless, as part the history of the Reformation in Pressburg these questions
extend beyond the limits of this dissertation.
Let me finish in the hope that my study of urban wills helps to create a refined picture
of various aspects of religious life in Pressburg in the pre-Reformation period. To judge
whether the normal practice and the community and personal strategies for salvation as
expressed in wills in Pressburg were typical or atypical compared to other towns in the late
medieval Kingdom of Hungary, it will be necessary to conduct similar analyses elsewhere and
compare results. Since these wills are universal sources and they have been widely researched
by Western scholars from the particular point of religiosity, they represent perfect vehicles for
comparing different regions in medieval Europe, revealing particular similarities or
dissimilarities and placing medieval Pressburg firmly within the wider European religious
landscape.
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