In recent years the historians’ interest towards the problems of spatiality arose and changed in contrast to the earlier period, especially in urban history. Our earlier studies have shown that the medieval walls of Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia) provided a stage for a peculiar social practice between the 16th and 18th centuries. This can be said about any kind of social use of space, but Nagyszombat has an extraordinary set of sources that made it possible to apply statistical and cartographic methods in not less than five time frames. Based on the results of such investigations we can point out that the analysis of these fields are necessary for the understanding of social processes, because of their mutual influence on each other. The walkthrough order of the urban tax registers and the data that can thus be localised express this mutual influence in an extraordinarily intensive manner. The narration and rhetorics of the existence of the urban community is expressed through the route of the tax-collectors as a process going on at the town’s territory. This is a manifestation of a power technique that collects the data in an archaic way. Later on the same thing was done in another way, in a scientific, methodical manner. Spatiality was then expressed not through maps, but rather through the reference points used during the route. Thus, the map that mirrors the premodern situation is in this respect anachronistic. With our current methods however we are not able to reconstruct how the burghers seen their own space in the period when the source itself was produced.

Nincs absztrakt.

In anthropological sense, ‘household’ used to be the cellular comparative unit of the urban structure of towns before the demographic transition. All those who lived under the same roof as the first man of a house were considered to belong to one household. This is the conclusion of the systematic analysis of a town’s society based on tax registers or censuses prepared by townspeople. Since the registrars, to be able to assess taxes as precisely as possible, progressed from house to house asking several questions, the sixteenth-eighteenth-century tax registers of the town of Nagyszombat (present-day Trnava, Slovakia) function as quasi-surveys. Since essentially the same questions were repeated each time, we now have a unique source for the history of the town conceived at five different times (1579, 1612, 1634, 1656, 1711). These sources can be used not only to trace the stratification of the town’s society, but a transformation of the use of the social space can be detected at the same time too. The composition of urban households was diverse in Early Modern Europe. Understanding this is crucial for historians, since it makes learned conclusions about characteristics of family structure possible. The fragmentary nature of the conclusions about family demographics is counterbalanced by the fact that the sources cover five different points in time. The analysis focuses on those individuals in the tax register, who were designated by the term ibidem. In modern terms, whereas the head of the household is considered ‘primary occupant’, ibidem simply means ‘occupant’. Some of them paid taxes after themselves; some were levied taxes after their paid work. In Nagyszombat, the majority of ibidems usually lived in districts with higher house taxes. The difference in the size of households also represents social differences, which affected the way social space was structured. This function, however, changed significantly through the respective years. The indepth analysis of the composition of large households concluded that the signify cance of more complex family nuclei cannot be ignored. This view dissents from earlier scholarship of urban history. Data from the crisis-ridden years of 1634 and 1656 suggest that the ties keeping together larger households were not strong and their cohesion was usually encouraged by economic prosperity rather than anything else. Parallel to this, in some cases it seems that larger households of primary occupants with Slavic surnames stayed together even in humbler financial circumstances. Due to the changes in the circumstances of the formation of large households, the transformation of consumer habits in the seventeenth century developed a new concentration of these households near the market square of the town. From the aspect of social history, one of the general conclusions of the analysis of households was that phenomena were not linear but interrelated.

Approaches of traditional urban history and social history neither succeed in the joint description of the early modern survival of the medieval middle class community and the emerging baroque ecclesiastical–university world, nor are they capable to cope with the fact that the economic decline of Trnava went hand in hand with a matchless cultural and architectural rise. The digital maps produced on the basis of tax inventories show that the number of houses did not vary equally on the territory of the town. The western part of the town hosting the Trnava middle class elite seemed to be shifting, the emergence of eastern ecclesiastical –university centre was accompanied by social change, and the new and complex unfolding of poverty (not examinable by economic categories only), was especially spectacular after the appearance of hovel rows clinging to the town walls – while unique stability characterized the bourgeois middle class house rows along the brook. Other observable changes on the maps show the working of authority and political power mechanisms that shaped the territory of the town. Public buildings do not simply represent political power though. Ecclesiastical and worldly, middle class and church authorities strove with varying success to articulate themselves and (on real or symbolic terms) to appropriate one or the other spot of Trnava territory in the 16th–17th century. Variation gives expression to political changes occurring on the territory occupied by town dwellers. The transformation of middle class autonomy, the fall of Protestantism and the victory of the Baroque characterize these changes. From the analysis the following consequences can be drawn. Firstly, the unique process of segmentation signalled by the varying quantity of houses had been going on since the 16th century on the territory of Trnava. On practical terms this means on the one hand the increase of difference between houses of poorer and better quality, on the other the decrease of homogeneity in the distribution of houses of similar value. This resulted in a greater variety of modest and valuable houses in the townscape. The appearance of shanty houses demonstrates the loosening of the relative homogeneity of the medieval middle class community. A further consequence is that the appropriation of space by the middle class, namely the allotment system that framed urban living and gave expression to the essence of autonomy going back to the Middle Ages, did not change. This fact demonstrates persistence over ages.

Nincs absztrakt.