The History of the Wass de Czege Family [családfa melléklettel]

The present volume has at its base the following four studies published recently in Hungarian: 1. “A cegei Wass család a középkorban” [The Wass family of Cege in the Middle Ages], Erdélyi Múzeum 66, no. 1–2 (2004): 1–40. 2. “A cegei gr. Wass család a 16–20. században” [History of the comital family of Wass of Cege from the sixteenth to the twentieth century], Erdélyi Múzeum 66, no. 3–4 (2004): 1–56. 3. “A levéltárrendező és családtörténész Huszti András” [The family historian András Huszti], in Emlékkönyv Kiss András születésének nyolcvanadik évfordulójára [András Kiss memorial volume in honor of his 80th birthday], ed. Sándor Pál-Antal, Gábor Sipos, András W. Kovács and Rudolf Wolf (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 2004), 261–274. 4. “A cegei Wass család grófi diplomája 1744-ből” [The letter patent of countship from 1744 of the Wass family of Cege], Református Szemle. Az Erdélyi Református Egyházkerület, a Királyhágómelléki Református Egyházkerület és az Evangélikus–Lutheránus Egyház hivatalos lapja 96, no. 6 (In memoriam Tonk Sándor) (2003): 790–806. 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. My work could not have been accomplished without the possibility of consulting the material of the following archives and libraries: in Cluj/Kolozsvár: the National Archives Cluj County Branch, the University Library, the Library of the Protestant Theological Institute, the Library of the Romanian Academy and the Historical Museum of Transylvania; in Vienna: the Archival Collection of the Wass-Tarjányi Family; in Budapest: the Hungarian National Archives, the Széchényi National Library, the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the National Museum of Hungary. Hereby I thank the directorate of the Transylvanian Museum Society for making this research possible, Edmund Siemers-Stiftung and Dr. Andreas Graf Wass von Cege (Hamburg), without whom this volume could never have appeared, as well as all those colleagues and professors who contributed with their help to my work. 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.