W ith the exception of Gyulafeherv&r and perhaps Biharvar, little is known about tenth-century settlements either in the eastern part of the Great H un
garian Plain or in Transylvania; in the eleventh century, however, life con
tinued in castles and other places of habitation whose names are preserved in place-nam es that are still in use to this day.
The most spectacular monuments of the new era are the fortifications, those large-scale defensive earth-and-tim ber castles which around 1200 Anonymus saw as the unrivalled foci of all power. He claimed that some of these had already been in existence when the Hungarians arrived and took them by force (i.e. Szatm&rvkr, Biharv&r, Alp^rvar and Gyaluv&r) while others he explicitly says were built by the conquering Hungarian com m and
ers (i.e. Szabolcsvkr and Csongr&dv&r). Of course, today it is clear that the problem w ith Anonymus is that he let his story run away with him; his sense for the essence of the matter, however, was quite keen. Fortresses were, indeed, indispensable to the "m odem " state in his time. Several tenth- and eleventh-century Hungarian fortresses had, in fact, antecedents. Some had been prehistoric (Bronze or Iron Age) earthworks of various sizes, usu
ally placed at geographically and strategically important points, while a few others had been built upon the crumbling walls of Roman towns. The Hungarians, however, only rarely resorted to the rebuilding or the taking over of fortresses from potentates immediately preceding them in the re
gion (Bresalauspurc = Pozsonyv&r; Mosapurc = Zalav&r, but only at the end of the eleventh century; of Belgrad = Gyulafehervar, and the Bulgar earth
work of Cernigrad = Csongr&d). Of all these fortresses, Anonym us only mentioned the last one and even that as a newly-built Hungarian fortress.
The Arpadian castles of Alpkrv&r, Zemplenvar and TitelvSr were all built directly on prehistoric foundations during the course of the eleventh cen
tury or even later. Not one was standing as a fortification in the ninth cen
tury, even though these were the supposed centres of Anonym us's local potentates. M odem excavations have demonstrated that the earth-and-tim ber fortresses of Szabolcsv&r, Abaujvkr, PatavSr, 6-A radvkr, 6-K olozsvkr (Kolozsmonostor), 6-Tordavkr (Virfalva), Dobokavar, Saj6s3rv5r and oth
ers were built without antecedents either at the turn of the tenth and elev
enth centuries, or in the course of the eleventh century.
A few decades ago even Hungarian historians could not imagine that the "nom adic" or "sem i-nom adic" Hungarians were capable of building fortresses. The fortress-castles that served as the centres of local govern
ment by ispans from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, while m en
tioned in the w ritten sources, were archaeologically unexplored, so that nothing was known of their size or structure. In this way, the old historical school brought up on Anonymus nonchalantly "attributed" to the local in
habitants these supposedly insignificant fortifications.
By now, historians in general have accepted the view that no state or
ganization could be maintained without castles, and especially not in the
Middle Ages. Thus, a m odem — costly and exhausting — "figh t" for these
158
castles has begun. Outside Hungary's present borders, and depending on the country, searches have been initiated for Anonym us's Slavic, Vlach, Bulgar or "R om an" (Frank) fortresses, respectively. The current upswing in these excavations is due, in no small measure, precisely to a "state archaeol
ogy" of sorts. This prejudice has also brought about distortions in scientific methods, since the point of departure in dating the various layers is usually not archaeological stratigraphic evidence, but rather Anonym us's "facts", to which the finds are adjusted. The excavations at Dobokavdr, Kolozs- monostor and Gyaluv&r in Transylvania, and at O-Aradvdr by the Maros w ere inspired by A nonym us's Vlach com m anders, Gelu and G lad, re
spectively. Unfortunately, this same approach has also borne other fruit, namely, that the results from these excavations have not been published.
For not only did these (and several other) excavations fail to produce a single find from the ninth century, but hardly any tenth-century material cam e to light either. The construction of the castles can be placed at the time of the establishing of the Hungarian state while the fifteenth- to seventeenth- century episcopal castle still standing in Gyalu was built directly on a layer of third-century Roman ruins, and not even on the territory of the Roman castellum.
The origins of the early Hungarian fort-building techniques are not clear.
It is only in certain structural aspects that the Hungarian castles bear any resem blance to the tenth to thirteenth century earth-and-timber fortresses of central and eastern Europe. In size and function, they are thoroughly different. As to their purpose and role, they probably followed the Khazar model but this still remains to be verified by future study. Sunk panels and timbers were embedded in the high and extended ramparts comprising these fortresses. Hontvar, Sopronvar, MosonvSr, Abaujvar, Borsodv^r, and Sza- bolcsv£r are their representatives in present-day Hungary. Having once dried out, how ever, they becam e rather inflam m able and burned down very quickly in sieges or even by accident. Because the ramparts turned red after such fires, these fortresses are often (and mistakenly) called "bu rn ed " or
"sh erd " forts. W hen people rebuilt them, they had to increase the height of the ram part out of structural considerations and sometimes this happened even twice in the lifetime of some of these fortifications. Nevertheless, it did not save them from the Mongols, who successfully sacked them in Russia, Poland and Hungary. It was mostly at that time that these fortifications were finally deserted for good. Only those fortresses did not bum easily w h ere ston e w alls had been raised to rep lace the w ooden ones (e.g.
Dobokav&r and Biharvar). In any case, by the thirteenth century this type of fortification was considered out of date on all counts.
Of the forty to fifty early castles, only a few (Sopronvar/Scarabantia, G y6rv£r/Arrabona, the Slavic-named Visegrfd and Gyulafehervar/Apu
lum) had Roman antecedents, and only the first two were constructed on Roman wall ruins. From this point of view, Gyulafehervar is quite unique in the Carpathian Basin. According to the oldest military maps (1687 and 1711), its 474 m etres by 474 metres layout preserved the regular square shape of the Roman legionary fortresses, with towers at two of its corners, on the axis of the Roman highway (cardo) and gates and gate-towers on
159
both ends built on Roman foundations. The survival of some parts of thewalls, recognized as Roman already in 1574, was probably due, in addition to the excellent workmanship, to the fact that the Roman town, built under the mountain on a plateau that spread along the right-hand side of the Maros River, lost its im portance after the Rom an gold and iron m ines in the Erchegys6g were closed, and remained ignored until the conquest of the Danubian Bulgars. Of the other Roman forts of similar size and shape in Dacia (Ulpia Traiana, Potaissa, Napoca and Porolissum), three failed to be
come the location of future settlements. These sites remained deserted, in spite of the fact that the walls of Potaissa outside Uj-Torda, together with one of its large, gate-towers decorated with reliefs, stood intact until m od
ern times. During the Middle Ages, it was not even known that the city had form erly been Roman. The German inhabitants of 6-T o rd a called it the
"Saxoniaburg" (Fortress of Saxonia). It was the humanist Bonfini w ho first identified the city as Roman, but wrongly as "Salinum " (Salt City). In Kolozs- v&r, only parts of the northern and western walls of Napoca seem to have been made later use of. With the exception of the decumanus, the track of the highway running parallel with the Szamos River, the mediaeval town lay
out owes nothing to that of the Roman city.
The earliest finds reflecting the settlement of the Hungarians in the cas- tle-forts and villages of Transylvania from the time of the Conquest are grooved rim vessels of eastern — Saltovo — origin and type found at Dobo- kavar, Gyulafeherv£r, O-Kolozsv&r, Betlenszentmikl6s, Malomfalva and Al- vinc; the early earthen cauldrons at C sanidvar, Biharvcir and V&rtelek re
spectively; and the metal finds from the time of the last "p h ase" of the Conquest. The earliest finds uncovered within the castles and in the new cem eteries surrounding them all reflect the Hungarian rites and style of dressing implanted in the tenth century. The earliest burials reflect no defi
nite Christian traits, except for the burial of the dead facing east. The hair rings, finger-rings, torques, bracelets, two-piece pendants and the buttons exhibited no or very few changes in fashion among these people, who have often been linked to their conquering forefathers through the specifically oriental Hungarian surgical method of true and false trepanation against various diseases.
M odem scholarship assigns the late tenth and eleventh century cem eter
ies to a half-pagan half-Christian population, although this is only true in connection with the nature of the cemeteries. The Legenda maior of Saint Gerald reveals that priests were sent out to consecrate the existing cem eter
ies of all the communities that contributed to the building of churches — after 1030, statute II/ l of King Stephen obliged every ten villages to build one church — and this, temporarily, permitted the Christian to bury their dead on the old sites. This is the reason that the "pagan" cemeteries of the com m oners are found to have been in use throughout the country even after the founding of the Christian state (e.g. Deva and Varfalva, both until the time of Ladislas I).
A significant change occurs after the eleventh century in that the graves becom e easy to date when the custom of placing an obolus in the dead m an's spread to Transylvania and the Temes region. In this way, coins of Stephen I and other Hungarian kings up to the end of the twelfth century,
the time of Bela III, have been uncovered, in just the same way as anywhere
160
else in the lands of the House of Arp£d. From the twelfth century on as the clothing became somewhat simpler it also became more uniform. Beside hair and finger-rings, metal veil pins appear in women's fashion (Gyulafe- herv&r, Kolozsv^r, Csittfalva, Marosv^sarhely).
As in other parts of the country, the miles, the new armed strata based largely on western models and derived largely from the form er military escort, emerged in Transylvania, the eastern Great Hungarian Plain and in the Temes region in the early phase of the establishing of the new state, during the sixty-six years that Grand Duke Geza and King Stephen I reigned.
Double-edged "Carolingian" swords have been found in the graves (Deva) and the fortresses (Des, Doboka, Nagyem ye, Biharvdr, etc.) of this period in no smaller proportions than elsewhere. After the eleventh century, bronze and iron spurs came into common use, reflecting the spread of the new
"knightly" way of fighting. It is in this period that pottery, one of the most im portant artifact of daily life became uniform in the land of the House of Arpad. So m uch so, that in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, there was no appreciable difference between the pottery of, for exam ple, the Fehervar in Transylvania and the Fehervar in Transdanubia. Saltovo type vessels turned on potter's wheels and decorated with close-set horizontal grooves running in spirals predominated in both places. This technique had been carried in by the Hungarians from the east. Local pottery traditions rooted in the pre-Conquest era and still evident in the tenth century were either overwhelm ed by the new style, or vanished. Present-day archaeolo
gists trying to demonstrate the survival of these traditions in Transylvania have succeeded in coining terms such as Dridu culture or Csiiged/Ciugud ceramics, but have yet to come up with the finds to which the terms are supposed to apply.