Geographical and Economic Influences on The Colonisation
of the Banat
Bruce Mitchell, BA(Hons.), MA
(SSEES, Univ. of London)
Key Concepts
In the following paper, the influence of selected factors on the developing
settlement of the Banat is examined. These include the historical river
network and marshes, the availability of building materials, fuel and drinking
water, and the variety, location and extractability of raw materials. Mention
is also made of the influence of some of these factors on the general state
of health of the population. This is followed by a brief account of processes
of colonisation in the Banat during the 18th and 19th centuries. The motivations
of the colonists themselves, and of their rulers, the context in which
they were operating, and a brief appreciation of the contributions of the
various ethnic groups involved.
The Banat is a conventional label for a territorial entity whose
existence, despite a remarkably chequered administrative history, is acknowledged
by Serb, Romanian, German and Hungarian, and there is close agreement on
its geographical bounds. The courses of the Danube, Tisa and Maros embrace
the Banat on three sides: divided from the Backa on the west by the southward
flow of the Tisa (Hungarian, Tisza), the Banat is separated 'naturally'
from Srem and Serbia, and Wallachia by the broad stripe of the Danube as
far as Orsova. From here, the Banat's boundary runs northeastward along
the Cerna valley, then among the Poiana-Rusca mountains towards the Transylvanian
Iron Gates Pass near Bistra and thereafter northwards to Pojoga on the
Maros. The Banat's northern border follows the river Maros from Pojoga
downstream to Arad and on to its confluence with the Tisa by Szeged. Thus
defined by Tisa, Danube, Cerna and Maros rivers, and Poiana-Rusca Mountains,
the Banat covers 28,500 km2, an area slightly smaller than Belgium.
A common error, even in specialist texts, is to write of the Banat
as though it were a single, indivisible unit, across the whole of which
specific, similar, conditions obtained. In reality, it comprises several
sub-units, each with their own distinguishing features, and which are in
some instances sharply differentiated from one another. Many of these sub-units
embrace parts of the Banat and continue beyond its borders into neighbouring
regions. Topographically, the Banat may be divided into five basic land-types:
the Lower Plain, the Upper Plain, the 'Deliblatska Pescara' sand zone,
a hilly zone and, lastly, the Banat Highlands.
1. The lower plain (about 80 to 100 metres above sea level),
which runs mainly alongside the Maros, Tisa and Danube, also extends inland
along and outward from the Temes and Bega rivers as far as Faget and Caransebes
respectively. Most of the lower plain was formerly a confusion of marshes
and choked watercourses. The majority of the land is extraordinarily featureless
- Kohl, a nineteenth-century traveller remarked that 'all is smooth, unruffled,
and flat as the ocean during a dead calm'. A small 'bubble' in this landscape
just south of Zrenjanin (Beckerek), lies in the path of the Temes and Bega
rivers and, before effective canalisation, used to form a significant barrier
to drainage, an added cause of inundation in times past.
2. From north of Zrenjanin, a barely perceptible rise (to an altitude
of ca. 90 - 120 metres) brings one to the beginning of the Upper Plain,
known in German as the Banater Heide (heathland). This zone, which runs
in a broad crescent north-eastwards via Kikinda towards Lugoj is almost
equally featureless, but is famed for the great fertility of its black
soil, which permits of several harvests a year, and commands a high price
per hectare. Not by chance, most of this land ended up in the hands of
German colonist-farmers. Successive Habsburg regulations reserved much
of this region for the settlement of German colonists, whose loyalty to
the crown was not in doubt, and who were deemed likely to bring the best
return from the high fertility of the land. Sometimes a pre-existing non-German
population was resettled to make room for the colonists, which did little
for harmony among the nationalities.
3. Just west of Vrsac in the southwest Banat is the only distinctly
elevated part of the western Banat. The Deliblatska Pescara, a thinly inhabited
region of sandy desert formed during 18th century by 'irrational exploitation'
of the forests, rises to a height of 249 m. Attempts to reforest the region
have not been entirely successful, though nowadays sand can only drift
when a strong and persistent wind (the Kosava) blows from the south. The
dryness and infertility of this district contrast sharply with the loess
plateau to its north. (Bugar, in Abonyine-Palotas, Ahmetovic-Tomka et al.,
91-2).
4. A narrow hilly belt in the central Banat, with its own distinct settlement-pattern,
is succeeded by densely wooded low mountains, rising quickly towards the
south-east. The slopes around the southern towns of Vrsac and Bela Crkva
(Yugoslavia) are cultivated with vines and herald the fringe of the higher
ground to the east. 5. The mineral-rich Banat Highlands (Banater Bergland)
climb to their highest point (1446 m.) at Semenic, near Garîna (Wolfsberg),
Brebu Nou (Weidenthal) and Valiug (Franzdorf). The valleys of the Temes
and Cerna rivers separate the Banat highlands from the Southern Carpathians
proper. On the borders of the Banat and Transylvania, the latter approach
2,200 m in height. Considerable precipitation is generated here, the runoff
rapidly gathering in the plain, but draining only slowly onward. The combination
of high precipitation in the mountain-districts and the broad inland extent
of the lower plain, with its very gradual gradient, exposes wide areas
to the constant danger of inundation.
The massive Danube and Tisa, and their main local tributaries (Drava,
Sava, Maros, Temes, Bega, Berzava etc.) have had a decisive effect upon
the settlement-patterns in the Banat.
Approaching Szeged from the north, the Tisa already carries
almost the entire runoff from the Slovak and Sub-Carpathian Ukrainian
valleys, having subsumed the Somes (Szamos, Samosch) from northern
Transylvania and the Cris (Körös, Kreisch) rivers from the Bihar
Mountains. Just before it marches through the centre of Szeged, it
links arms with the Maros, which drains all Southern Transylvania
(except the Olt valley). The further course of the Tisa between here
and the confluence with the Danube is subject to practically no natural
constraints: the land either side of the Tisa is very flat, the only
distinctly elevated area being around Titel, just before the
confluence.
By this point, the Danube is already huge, having passed
through Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary absorbing such major
tributaries as the Inn and the runoff from Croatia and Slovenia via the
river Drava. Before the Danube breaks through the Iron Gates and leaves
the Banat behind, it will have been joined, not only by the Tisa, but
also by the the great Sava at Belgrade, and the smaller Temes and
Morava. Thus within the space of a few dozens of miles, between Apatin
and the Iron Gates, the Danube combines the precipitation from almost
all of the Carpathian Basin, as well as from the deep Balkans.
Yet within that distance, its bed falls only by 23 metres. When
it enters the Backa at Baja, its elevation is 89m, 75m at its junction
with the Tisza, and before the building of the Iron Gates Dam, the
river at Svinita was still at a level of 66 metres. Only here did the
gradient began to drop more markedly.
In contrast, the average level of the Tisza falls only 4 metres over
the 150 km from Martonos (79m) to the Danube (75m) (Petersen, Scheel, Ruth,
Schwalm (Hrsg.) 1933 293). Until recent times, therefore, a rise in the
level of the Danube at the confluence meant almost inescapably inundation
along its course. The Tisa's waters, unable to run off downstream, would
back up as far as Csongrád, rise out of the river's bed and submerge
a huge area. In 1889, 8,369,387 hectares were inundated. (Somesan 1939
17). This made life near to the rivers very hazardous (see 'vereinte Kraft
gegen die Theiß', Fassel and Schmidt, 138-40) and confined settlement
to the more elevated land. Some areas have remained practically uninhabitable
up until recent times.
Around Temesvar, between Szeged and Kikinda, and between Versec and
Alibunar, there had been extensive marshes since ancient times. During
the latter years of the Turkish occupation, war damage and population decline
resulted in wide expanses of fertile land being simply abandoned. When
the Habsburg armies captured Temesvar in 1716, the imperial administration
extended to the Banat a policy of colonisation and economic development
already begun in the Backa. The Bega and Temes rivers, which, above Temesvar,
had degenerated into an incoherent amalgam of marshland and watercourse,
were separated from one another, controlled and canalised. The Bega now
flowed through Temesvar; the Temischel, which had given the city its name,
disappeared, while several miles to the south, a new river, the Temes,
was created. It was later found necessary to dig two small canals to reconnect
the two: one to permit flood waters from the Bega to be diverted into the
Temes to preserve the city from flood, the other to divert the Temes into
the Bega when the latter - Temesvar's primary trade route to the Empire
- was running low. By 1776, the extent of the flooding had been considerably
reduced, but much remained to be done. Progressively more modern maps show
the long process of river-control in operation, with the river-courses
becoming increasingly well defined (See especially: Temesy 1939). A 1:75,000
k.u.k. military mapsheet of the Apatin area (Backa) shows, besides dead
arms, ox-bow lakes and marshes, the Danube proper, the Vemelzer Donau,
the Petreser Alte Donau and the Stille Donau.
Habsburgs, Hungarians, Yugoslavs and Romanians have each in their turn
struggled against the rivers, erecting massive flood-banks alongside rivers
major and minor, and digging thousands of kilometres of canals. Yet modern
maps are still characterised by the great lurches of the Danube and Tisa,
and even the smaller Maros, after its plunge from the heart of the Székely
country, still weaves its drunken way when it reaches the lowlands above
Szeged. Approaching Szeged from the north, the once tyrannically meandering
Tisa (over the period 1850 to 1875, under the auspices of Count István
Szécheny, regulation shortened the river's course by 463 kilometres
(32%, from 1,429 km to 966 km). By the end of the 19th century, 110 'shortcut'
canals had been built, along with 3,000 km of embankments, 5,300 km of
drainage canals and 50 pumping stations (Munteanu, in Abonyine-Palotas,
Ahmetovic-Tomka et al., 29) already carries almost the entire runoff from
the Slovak and Sub-Carpathian Ukrainian valleys, and has subsumed the Somes
(Szamos, Samosch) from northern Transylvania and the Cris (Körös,
Kreisch) rivers from the Bihar Mountains. A few minutes before it marches
through the centre of Szeged, it links arms with the Maros, which drains
all Southern Transylvania (except the Olt valley). The further course of
the Tisa between here and the confluence with the Danube is subject to
practically no natural constraints: the land either side of the Tisa is
very flat, the only distinctly elevated area being around Titel, just before
the confluence. When it reaches the Danube, the waters of the Drava have
already swelled that river and the great Sava and smaller Temes soon join
in at Belgrade. Thus within the space of a few dozens of miles, between
Apatin and Belgrade, the Danube gathers into itself the precipitation from
Croatia, Slovenia and almost the entire Carpathian Basin. Until the late
19th century, there was a serious risk of extensive flooding every spring.
The great fertility of the river valleys nevertheless still attracts, and
much of the population of the western Banat and the Backa congregates as
close as considerations of safety allow to the banks of the rivers. Martonos
and Becej, for example, were built within tight meanders of the Tisa, probably
to aid both communications and defence.
As the drainage of the wetlands proceeded, so colonisation was extended
into the lowest-lying lands, principally between Temesvar and Beckerek.
Johannisfeld (at 81 metres), founded in 1806, was situated in the narrow
corridor between the Temes and Bega rivers and, 'like all other communities
in the Banat has had to struggle against natural catastrophes and epidemics'.
In 1854, the Bega overflowed its banks and inundated all the fields. 1863,
in contrast, brought a drought. 1869 brought a renewed inundation and in
that year the villagers harvested from canoes and rafts! To make up for
this, however, fish could be caught 'by the basketful'. Inundation and
drought have 'often recurred to the present day'.1 In some cases settlements
proved untenable, and had to be abandoned or relocated on higher ground.
The most striking example is perhaps offered by a group of seven communities
(Marienfeld, Elisenheim (Belo Blato, Nagyerzsébetlak), Königsdorf,
Albrechtsdorf, Giselahein,  Ivanovo
and Gyurgyevo) founded by the Deutsch-Banater Infanterie Grenzregiment
in 1868 in the Pantschower Ried (Danube marshes near Pantschowa (Pancevo)).
A series of devastating floods, beginning in 1867 and recurring almost
every year for a decade, practically destroyed this last officially backed
colonisation of the Habsburg period (Ausschuß der Gemeinde Woilowitz,
1981) Despite great progress towards controlling the Tisa and Maros within
Hungary from 1846 onward, the rivers were able to rise over their banks
above Szeged in 1879 and practically destroy that city. In 1889, according
to Somesan (1939 17), a massive 8,369,387 hectares were inundated.
Kübekháza, now an inconsequential village in the Hungarian
Banat facing Baba Veche (Romania) and Rabe (Yugoslavia) may serve as an
illustration of the gradual taming of the hydrography.  At
the time of the Habsburg conquest, most of this corner of the Banat was
under water. When Germans were settled in the village in the late 19th
century, a minor watercourse (the Pogány ér) still determined
its outline, and acted as a drainage channel (illustration), and had saved
the village in 1855 when floods had surrounded the village. An inspection
today reveals only the vaguest depression in the ground to suggest where
this may have been. The Maros river, a few miles to the north, and the
Tisa to the west are now so effectively controlled that it has been deemed
safe for the people of Kübekháza to fill in and even cultivate
their "moat". For miles around the land is perfectly flat, and, apart from
the roadside ditches, there is no longer any hint of local protection from
flooding. Despite extensive river regulation, the danger of inundation
has even today still not been completely banished. In early January 1996,
the Maros once again rose over its constraining banks. Estimates of the
total cost of the inundations in Judetul Arad alone ran to 30 billion Lei
(Banater Zeitung: 10th January 1996).
This propensity to flooding was however the making of Temesvar, the
chief city of the Banat. An important staging-post between Buda and the
Balkans, astride one of the easier north-south transit routes across the
huge marshes, it was nevertheless very inaccessible. During the Turkish
period, Temesvar, protected by its belt of marshes, served as a jumping-off
point for campaigns and a secure base. Evliya Celebi, who visited in 1660-64,
aptly described the fortress-city as a 'tortoise in the swamp', and pronounced
it 'conquerable only by famine. Indeed, in 1597, the city - then in Turkish
hands - was saved from such a fate by a timely inundation.
Settlement along the major rivers has long been constrained by extensive
and regular flooding, while inhospitable mountains constrain settlement
in the eastern Banat. Until the rivers were controlled in the eighteenth
century, huge areas of the Banat were perpetually submerged by immense
marshes, which gave rise to 'pernicious exhalations' and marsh-fever, apparently
endemic even in the mountains. The debilitating climate continued to discourage
colonists at least into the 1950s. By contrast, the great fertility of
the soil - once drained - and the considerable mineral wealth of the Banat
mountains nevertheless ensured that colonists could always be found.
One of the peculiarities of the lower Banat and Backa - and here
the distinction between lower lying ground and the Banat highlands must
be emphasised - is a great scarcity of stone. Celebi states that all streets
and lanes in Turkish Temesvar were built from wood, as 'in this fertile
... land there was not a stone to be found, not even the size of a bean!'
Only the old Hunyadi citadel - the tortoise's 'head' - was built of stone.
The rest of the fortress and city, including the streets, were built entirely
of wood (Evliya, S e y h Q a t n k m e V 385 ff.).. A Habsburg bombardment
of the timber-built city in 1716 appears to have been sufficient in itself
to bring about its surrender. The suburbs had been burned down, and the
interior of the fortress reduced to matchwood (Szentkláray, 117).
The building norm among the Serb and Vlach majority of the population,
as reported by the Habsburg Graf Hamilton in 1734, was for a poor roof
of straw or tree-bark to be erected over a framework of stakes thrust into
the ground, the walls formed by a coating of mud. Some, he claimed, lived
simply in holes in the ground. Such dwellings could have no permanence,
unlike the stone-built Saxon towns of rocky Transylvania, and the population
was consequently 'zum Transmigriren sehr geneigt', (Hamilton's Chorographia
Bannatus Temessiensis, 65). Some elements in the population long retained
this mobility, presenting landowners and tax collectors with recurrent
problems and leading to regular abandonment of settlements. The deficiency
in stone is confirmed by JG Kohl, a nineteenth-century traveller, who records
the frustration of travelling in the Banat after rain in the early 1840's.
Warned against the sticky condition of the main road northwest from Temesvar,
his coachman made the mistake of taking a minor road. Very soon, they were
struggling: their wheels were '...no longer distinguishable as wheels,
but appeared four thick, solid balls of heavy mud, in which, literally,
no trace of a spoke was discoverable!' All around was 'one thick
pudding of mud' and Kohl regretted the complete absence of any stones
one could use instead. He reproduces an anonymous other's characterisation
of roads in the Banat as 'strips of bog enclosed between two ditches'.
He then noted, however, that 'the tough slime of a Banat plain soon
dries, and then becomes hard as stone' (Kohl, 328-9). A British military
map from 1944 notes that along the Temes and Bega, movement is still 'restricted
by marshes and watercourses', and that their lower courses were 'impassable
in winter except when frozen'. All but one road passing through Velika
Kikinda were in 1945 termed passable only in dry weather (NID, III, 517).
Indeed, the botched evacuation of Germans from the Yugoslav Banat in September
1944 was badly hampered by a few days' heavy rain.
Despite an apparent abundance of wooden buildings, it is also true that
the lower-lying parts of the Banat and, after an initially generous resource
was depleted, the Temesvar area, soon suffered from a severe lack of timber.
Graf Hamilton's report to Vienna makes this clear, describing it as a 'defect'
of the Banat on the lower land, and especially pronounced towards the Tisa.
The city's predatory demand for building timber and fuel had to be satisfied
by recourse to the forests further east. In the boggy west, the population
made do by using peat for fuel and could not be induced to use more costly
timber brought down river from the densely wooded Banat mountains.
In addition to stone and wood, another item in deficit in the lowlands
of the Banat, despite the superabundance of moisture, was water fit to
drink. On the lower ground, the extent and age of the stagnant marshes
meant that deep wells had to be dug before a clean water supply could be
secured. Ebendorf, (R., Stuica), south-east of Lugos, at 196 metres above
sea level, and therefore above the worst of the contamination of the wetlands,
nevertheless had to be supplied by two wells sunk to depths of 54 and 57
metres. Before pumps were installed in the 19th century, these had to be
pulled by hand. They remained the principal source of water until Stuica
was linked to the main water supply in 1970 (Banater Post, 5th October
1996). Until this century, the bad water was a constant source of cholera:
epidemics were a regular occurrence, often arising as a consequence of
floods. Johannisfeld (1,646 inhabitants in 1851 (Handbuch der Wojwodschaft
Serbien und des Temeser Banats 1854.)), lying between the Temes and Bega
rivers downstream from Temesvar, suffered both inundation and cholera in
1831, and a second epidemic in 1836 claimed 64 lives within four weeks
(Banater Ortschaften stellen sich vor (57). Johannisfeld. Banater Post,
20 Feb 1997). Floods in Judetul Arad in January 1996, in which the village
of Pescari (Commune Gurahont), suffered the contamination of 20 of its
23 wells, gave rise to renewed concern that an outbreak of cholera or typhus
- which was last encountered in the Banat twenty years ago - might ensue.
Pescari was but one of many villages still reliant for its drinking water
on wells rather than on mains supply.
The combination of regular, devastating floods, the marshes and
the shortage of solid building materials locally (to the consequent detriment
of the quality of housing), with the poor quality of drinking-water, induced
a poor general standard of health among the population, amply reflected
by the widely-quoted colonist saying: 'dem Ersten den Tod, dem Zweiten
die Not, dem Dritten das Brot'. Kohl reported that 'The stench of the stagnating
waters, combined with the sultry, heavy air of a hot Banat summer ('for
weeks together there is sometimes a perfect calm...') could become overpowering,
particularly in Temesvar. During his visit to the city in about 1840, 'the
inner fortress of the town felt like a baker's oven... there was not a
breath of air to be had. Of the two thousand soldiers of the garrison,
nine hundred were in hospital in one week...' (Kohl, 278). In the wake
of the disastrous Turkish war of 1738-41, the plague entered the Banat,
provoking widespread fear if not large numbers of deaths. The effect of
the epidemic on the morale of the colonists was underlined by the habit
of the boggy ground to give up its dead, which simply could not be buried
at an adequate depth. It was eventually decreed that the corpses of plague
victims must be cremated. Subsequently, the Habsburgs introduced a Sanitätskordon
along the Danube, restricting passage into the Empire of goods and persons
deemed to be plague-carriers. This was observed in action by Kohl during
his passage through Orsova in the 1840s. 'Nowhere had I heard the subject
of health so constantly discussed as at Orsova, and indeed throughout the
Banat'. By 1853, the Preyer, Mayor of Temesvar (whose father's first wife
and five children had died during an epidemic in the Banat during the 1790s),
was able to state confidently that the city of Temesvar had outgrown its
reputation by virtue of Habsburg river-control and land reclamation, but
these tasks were far from complete (Preyer, 1995, 124) The Banat and Backa
have remained difficult environments. A series of villages founded in the
1820s in the Semenic mountains of the Southern Banat, where timber and
fresh water did not present problems were soon abandoned and, when re-established,
barely survived, because of harsh winters and an exceedingly short growing
season (Schmidt, 1991). One of the villages (Lindenfeld) presently has
a population of one. More recently, Montenegrin colonists to the Yugoslav
Backa after the end of the Second World War were exposed to the harsher
side of that region. Among all the post-war colonists, these mountain-dwellers
used to adequate supplies of wood, stone and fresh water, suffered the
most heavily from contagious diseases, tuberculosis and gastric ailments.
Many of the Montenegrins died before the colonisation succeeded, and several
of the survivors returned to their homes in the south. (Vasovic, p, 167).
The Banat does, however, have some redeeming features, and these
are of such magnitude as to have encouraged large-scale state programmes
of colonisation and a constant stream of fortune-hunters. The fertility
of the lower-lying land is such that two or even three harvests a year
can be made without recourse to fertiliser, and an occasional disaster
due to storm, flood, drought or frost can thus be more readily borne. The
production-level of Banat and Backa wheat became gradually more significant
during the 19th century and was priced highly due to having had a higher
gluten content than that grown in Germany. Its importance was undermined
by the opening of the Canadian and US prairies, although a high yield meant
that it still remained competitive. The region also supported significant
oats, maize and pork production in addition to the traditionally important
raising of horses and cattle. The lower Banat suffered from an almost total
lack of mineral ores. The Banat mountains, in contrast, were a veritable
treasure-house. Mining had been done in these mountains since the time
of the Romans - perhaps the Dacians. Bavarian and Styrian miners were operating
in the 'Banater Bergland' of the Hungarian kingdom as early as the 13th
century, and the Turks had continued the tradition, though production was
not great. After the Habsburg conquest of the Banat, General Mercy's Banater
Bergeinrichtungs-Kommission (1717) revived mining activity in the mineral-rich
highlands by introducing skilled Tirolean, Styrian and Bohemian labour.
By 1733, half of the Habsburg Empire's copper production came from the
Banat. While the disastrous Turkish war of 1738-41 forced the substantial
abandonment of mining in the Banat, the discovery of massive hard-coal
deposits later in the century again boosted the region's importance. By
the nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Staatseisenbahngesellschaft
(STEG) had acquired from the crown virtual monopoly in area of 25 square
miles, stretching from Bogschan (Bocsa) in the north to Neu-Moldova (Moldova
Nouă) by the Danube. The overwhelming majority of the population
was Romanian: the capital and profit however, were firmly in German hands.
By the First World War, the Banater Bergland had become the most significant
heavy industry zone in south-east Europe, with important centres at Resica
(Resita), Oravica (Oravita), Steierdorf, and Újmoldóva (Moldova
Nouâ). The most important mineral deposits locally were coal, iron,
sulphur, copper, and lead, gold and silver. A late 19th century STEG document
lists 25 other minerals that were extracted commercially (Beschreibung
der Banater Domäne...). Population growth in the industrial towns
was powerfully stimulated by the discovery of new deposits, and by advances
in technology which it possible to extract known deposits profitably. Oravita
boomed early in the eighteenth century but was soon overtaken by Resita,
and subsequently by Steierdorf in the mountains, once a tortuous mountain
railway had been built there and it became possible to exploit and transport
its enormous hard coal deposits.
The Banat and the neighbouring Backa have, at least since the Habsburg
conquest, been lands of almost perpetual colonisation. Regular change has
been one of the few constant factors. Colonists have been brought from
every part of Europe, even from today's France, Spain and Italy, but the
demand for new blood has never been satisfied. In the eighteenth century,
the Banat in particular became infamous for the toll it extracted from
the colonists. Plague, malaria, recurrent war with Turkey - all hit the
newly arrived colonists perhaps more heavily than the more established
locals, already inured to the hardships of life in the region. Yet colonists
still came.
What impelled such massive population movements? Perhaps at the top
of the list comes dissatisfaction with conditions at home, followed by
a perception of better opportunities elsewhere. Emigration and the abandonment
of the familiar are themes, which arouses strong emotion and is not undertaken
lightly. But unemployment, lack of future prospects, high taxation when
in employment, religious persecution and the hazards of warfare all too
often contributed to loosen the individual's bonds to the homeland and,
coupled with the illusory freedom of the frontiersman, impelled him and
often his family to move abroad. In southwestern Germany, as in Ireland,
the traditional sub-division of estates contributed to the alienation of
a proportion of the rural population and to the drift to the towns. The
surplus British, Irish, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch urban populations
were drawn off to the New World and other colonial possessions. For the
citizens of the Habsburg Empire, after the split with Spain, and of Prussia,
there was no such extra-European outlet, but for that a relatively thinly
populated east. From the late 17th century, Habsburg Kaisers, newly possessed
of extensive, but thinly inhabited and therefore vulnerable territories
in the south-east, being aware of social imbalance and land-famine in south-western
Germany and, constrained by economic and military imperatives, themselves
issued invitations of varying generosity for colonists. The embroidered
versions of these invitations broadcast by the Kaisers' agents, coupled
with misery at home and supposedly greater opportunities for land, farming
and trade, persuaded would-be colonists to leave home in their thousands.
It is worth noting that the greater part of the 18th century German emigration
came not from the smaller kingdoms and the petty principalities of the
central German space, but from the medium-sized territories of Baden, Württemberg
and the Rhineland Palatinate, where life was continually threatened by
the encroaching French Kingdom. This was particularly true during the predatory
reign of Louis XIV - and from Bavaria, which had been a major victim of
the Thirty Years' War. The impossible confusion of Thüringen, which
might be expected to have produced great numbers of colonists due to the
impotence of the numerous petty princes, barely figures in the list of
source territories for Banat colonists.
The colonisation of the Banat was however far from mono-ethnic in nature:
although Hungarians were initially held at arm's length for political and
partly confessional reasons, Romanians and Serbs were major beneficiaries
of Habsburg policy besides the Germans and both played central roles in
the Banat economy. Bulgars, Gypsies and other more minor groups were also
welcomed. This does not mean that there were not frictions between the
various ethnic groups. In German literature, one often comes across recriminations
against the major population-groups - principally the Serbs and Romanians
- for a lack of enthusiasm for the major construction and mining works.
But the Habsburg way of life was in conflict with their pastoral ways,
so they could not be realistically expected to contribute to their own
demise. Friction between German and Serb would strongly influence the process
of colonisation throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
The settlement geography of the Banat is dominated by water, mainly
because there is too much of it. Until the mid eighteenth century, about
a third of the western Banat was permanently flooded, due to the coincidence
of very gentle gradients and the confluence of many of Europe's major rivers
within a few miles of the Banat's borders. Settlement near the rivers has
thus historically been extremely hazardous. Temesvar, the capital of the
Banat, grew up at a convenient and well-protected river-crossing, but being
surrounded by marshes and suffering from a dearth of fresh water and solid
building materials, was home to a sickly population. These conditions were
widespread throughout the lower Banat and reached even into the mountains.
The Banat, however, also has a tremendous wealth of mineral resources,
and these inspired the Habsburgs to invest heavily in the province and
even subordinate it directly to the crown for over half a century. The
mineral deposits, and the rich agricultural land towards the northwestern
corner of the Banat, became magnets for successive waves of colonists.
The settlements they swelled themselves later went on to provide further
colonists to other parts of the Banat. While Germans were the chief beneficiaries
of the Habsburg policies, acquiring along the way the richest lands and
the greatest capital assets, the Banat was not colonised by Germans alone.
Indeed, without the contributions of Serbs and Romanians, among others,
the Germans' remarkable feats of river control and economic organisation
would certainly have been far harder to achieve.
1 'Banater Ortschaften stellen sich vor' (57), Johannisfeld. Banater
Post 20th Feb. 1997. 8 5
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Last updated on 15th July 2010
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