Reshaping the Riverine Landscape

One of the first and most enduring of the developmental tasks undertaken by the Habsburg administration was the construction of the physical landscape following the capture of the Banat. Hydraulic projects were crucial to the agricultural, commercial, and demographic development of the region. For instance, in their Geography of 1788, Anton Friedrich Büsching and Christoph Daniel Ebeling noted the swamps “dried-out and made suitable for agricultural use (urbar)” in Torontal County (Banat).Footnote ¹⁴ With fewer swamps, there would be more space for settlers and more agricultural development. In addition, although the Banat was well placed to export the agricultural goods produced there, and the rivers seemed a good way to do this, their wild nature made them unsuitable for shipping. For commerce and trade to truly improve, the rivers needed to be made into reliable, controlled waterways. In addition to their role in development, hydraulic works also acted as borders between Habsburg Europe and the Ottoman Orient. For instance, when delineating the boundaries between the empires in the vicinity of Alt-Orsova, a newly built canal was to serve as the physical border. In the end, Turkish engineers claimed they were unable to divert the Cserna River as they had planned. Due to their failure to control the river and thus divide the polities, the area around Orsova, including eleven villages, was returned to Austrian control. Thus, taming the rivers was an important political and economic task for the Habsburg administrators throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵

In 1728, one of the first major hydraulic projects involved transforming the Bega River from Facset (Făget, Romania) to Becskerek (Zrenjanin, Serbia) into a straighter, more regular waterway, designed to help move wood from the heavily forested uplands in the east to the flat, treeless west to supply the need for building material and fuel. The canal went (and still goes) through the capital and directly through the manufacturing suburb created in the 1720s, the Fabrik Vorstadt. South of Becskerek, freighter ships that used the canal could join the Theiss River and then the Danube. This allowed natural and manufactured products from the Banat to reach distant markets.Footnote ¹⁶ By 1841, canals allowed steamships passing through the Banat and Batshcka to reach Alexandria and Jerusalem in less than two weeks.Footnote ¹⁷ This assuredly helped the economic development of the region. By the nineteenth century, Banat wheat was “well known” to London's merchants.Footnote ¹⁸ Francesco Griselini, widely regarded as the first historian of the Banat, praised Graf Florimund Mercy, the Banat's first governor, for the work his administration did in draining swamps, channeling rivers, and digging canals. In addition to their role in improving commerce, the waters of the Beg River were also used to provide fresh drinking water to the capital and remove the waste it created.Footnote ¹⁹ Griselini described its construction as a “monument not unworthy of Rome!”Footnote ²⁰

The most important engineer to work in the Banat and the Habsburg lands in general was the “unforgettable” Maximilian Fremaut.Footnote ²¹ Baptized in Menen in the Austrian Netherlands in 1725, Fremaut was brought to the Banat to design canals and methods of flood control.Footnote ²² He was to transform “harmful and useless” lands into productive ones.Footnote ²³ Authorities in Vienna had written the governor of the Austrian Netherlands, Graf Johann Philipp von Cobenzl, requesting an experienced hydrologist. Though Fremaut's terms were steep, officials in Vienna agreed to them, and he arrived in the Habsburg's southeastern lands in 1757.Footnote ²⁴

In the Banat, Fremaut worked actively on a number of smaller projects, including bridges, dams, mills, and roads. He also took part in two major undertakings.Footnote ²⁵ First, he improved the Bega Canal, beginning in 1759. He created sluices and locks that allowed the Bega to remain navigable by siphoning off water from the Temes River. This had the additional benefit of helping to control floods. His second major project, begun in 1768, involved draining swamps in the southwest, long blamed for a “harmful miasma.” Eventually, Fremaut left for Triest and Aquileja. Two engineers, Steinlein and Kostka, took over his plans and brought them to completion.Footnote ²⁶ These were no small tasks. The first project cost 107,722 gulden, the second nearly 290,000. His efforts, especially in draining swamps, increased the amount of arable land and allowed for the creation of a number of settler villages.Footnote ²⁷ Fremaut's impact was felt not only in the Banat. He was also active in Hungary, Tirol, along the Elbe and Rhine (among other places), eventually receiving a noble title for his efforts.Footnote ²⁸ He died in the midst of planning a project draining marshes in Carinthia, again using his “Dutch style” in another region with “desolate lands” that the Habsburg monarchs were trying to improve.Footnote ²⁹

Organizing the Settlement in Banat

As hydraulic projects opened up large areas of formerly marginal terrain to intensive agricultural exploitation, Habsburg officials sought to understand what they possessed. The process of mapping the region was central both to establishing Habsburg control and to developing the region in a rational manner.Footnote ³⁰ Land surveying, and with it the possibility of truly accurate maps, was a product of the eighteenth century, with the French leading the way. According to historian R. J. W. Evans, maps were also crucial in creating the civic nation, in extending municipal organization to the sphere of the state.Footnote ³¹ For a region recently captured from the Ottomans, the process of surveying and mapping was a concrete act of taking possession and expansion of state control. For internal politics, mapping the Banat as part of the Austrian crownlands served to underscore Austrian Vienna's, rather than Hungarian Ofen's (Buda), control of the region and its development. For a government intent on improving and developing its lands and peoples, mapping was crucial to know both who these people were and where they lived, as in the region it was often unclear “where civilization ended and backwardness began.”Footnote ³²

Such tools were indispensable for the Habsburgs as they sought to bring order to the region by rationally developing and populating it. As a frontier facing the Ottoman Empire, maps were key to defense and in determining the placement of Contumaz or quarantine stations. Like other states, the Habsburgs used surveys and maps to locate exploitable resources and to create accurate tax rolls.Footnote ³³ Maps also served as a means to accurately parcel land among peasants.Footnote ³⁴ To do this, they needed trained engineers who could accurately measure the land.Footnote ³⁵ As one official put it, “because geometric dimensions are the ground pillar on which the entire colonial business must be built, it is above all necessary that the entire land be surveyed accurately by certain engineers or ‘earth measurers.’”Footnote ³⁶ Importantly for the Banat, authorities used maps to determine where to place new settlements, which were to house incoming German colonists who the government saw as a stable and potentially productive population in a region that, in their view, lacked both attributes.

When the Habsburgs took formal possession of the region in 1718, they saw it as depopulated and in need of both demographic and material development. Many settlements were abandoned and those that did exist were not built in a standardized fashion. These old settlements were so-called “cluster villages” (Haufendorf) and reflected the more organic growth of villages that lacked central planning.Footnote ³⁷ Habsburg officials wanted to recreate the region along rational lines and noted which villages were geometric and which were not.Footnote ³⁸ Planners and engineers then went about (re-)building villages with certain common features. For instance, many villages were built as “checkerboards” or evenly along one street. A “Land Allocation of a Suggested Ideal Village” showed one designer's understanding of village construction. The village was a square checkerboard with a central plaza. Grazing land for animals surrounded the village. Outside of this square were fields that were numbered to indicate to which house they belonged.Footnote ³⁹ Many villages built for colonists adhered to such geometric designs.Footnote ⁴⁰

The authorities intended these villages to influence the mentality and occupation of their inhabitants. The mere act of planning and building villages signaled the administration's intent to develop the region for settled agriculture. Such a move displaced herders, who had utilized the open land to graze their animals.Footnote ⁴¹ The designs of the villages themselves could also push their inhabitants toward new ways of doing. For instance, when possible, each peasant's field was to be equidistant from his residence.Footnote ⁴² These new villages also helped the “three-field system” of agriculture replace the old ley farm system (Feldgraswirtschaft). The new orderly land distribution represented an attempt to equalize holdings in terms of size, quality, and distance. The new designs were not only meant for the newly created German colonial villages; in fact, planners intended them to become the new normal for the region. By the reign of Emperor Francis (1804–35), many local villages were “checkerboard” patterned. By the mid-nineteenth century, even most of the remote mountain villages had been restructured along rational lines.Footnote ⁴³

The designs reflected the orderliness at the heart of the Habsburg Europeanizing mission on the frontier. The towns and villages brought villagers (willingly and unwillingly, wittingly and unwittingly) into the Habsburg's European sphere. Travelers and observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recognized this fact. They connected the material prosperity and ordered design with the mentality and worth of the inhabitants. In practice, this meant that travelers associated German villages and villagers with a modern, progressive, European culture, and local villages and villagers (predominantly “Wallachs” or Romanians) with a backward, degenerative culture. Joseph von Dorner noted that the German colonists’ “nice villages certify a considerable prosperity.” Both the “fertile region” and the “hardworking people [Germans]” contributed to their material wealth. Among the Wallachs, by contrast, he noted a “paltriness” (Armseligkeit) which made them conspicuous vis-à-vis German settlements. He further connected the material circumstances and the people themselves. The “paltriness of the churches and houses [and] the pallid, sick look of the inhabitants do not make a favorable impression on outsiders.” In contrast, the colonist villages were “beautiful” and populated by “busy Germans.”Footnote ⁴⁴

A. A. Paton made the connection between material circumstances and civilization in a narrative account of his travels in 1848. He described “civilisation recommenc[ing]” when entering the predominantly Banat German village of St. Miklos after traveling through southern Hungary. Houses were “well-built.” Buildings had “architectural pretensions.” The German parts of villages on the Maros River had “neat farmyards, clean white-washed walls, green-painted Venetian window-blinds.” In Csanad, the houses were covered in ornamental plaster that was “not, to be sure, in the best taste, but denot[ed] industry, order, and easy circumstances.” The Wallach and Rascian (Serbian) homes were worse, the Wallachs’ “farmyards being in a most filthy and disorderly state.” Paton saw this difference as reflective of the moral and intellectual superiority of the German colonists.Footnote ⁴⁵

Prolific German traveler Johann Kohl further elaborated the role of the government in changing people's attitudes by changing their material circumstances. After visiting the “ruinous old hovels” of the Wallach village of Pechineska near Mehadia, he related that the authorities intended to raze the village in order to rebuild. Kohl commented that “these people had to be driven by the hand of authority to care for their own convenience and their own advantage.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Although writing in the mid-nineteenth century, here Kohl is reflecting the very eighteenth-century cameralist belief that the government could and should use the power of the state to improve the material and moral condition of the subjects. This belief lay at the heart of the Habsburg projects designed to reorder the natural and material landscape and as we will see, also lay at the heart of their attempts to control the landscape of the mind.

The Landscape of the Mind: Superstition, Science, and Rationality

In the same way that the authorities and observers saw problems with the material culture of the recaptured landscape, they also identified problems with the worldview and morality of the local people. Some saw the two problems (the mental and the physical) as interconnected. Joseph II, for instance, believed that schooling and fair treatment would allow the Wallachs to develop materially.Footnote ⁴⁷ In addition, officials intended both the layout of the towns and the Germans brought in to settle many of them to have a positive impact on the culture of the region.Footnote ⁴⁸ Some in the government may have even hoped that local people would see and imitate the German settlers.Footnote ⁴⁹ German culture itself was seen as a way to uplift local people and help break the “Ottoman yoke.” Transylvanian German natural scientist and observer of the region Ignaz von Born noted that officers of the Illyrian border regiment were “habituated … to the German manners” in an effort to “humanize” them.Footnote ⁵⁰

In addition, scientific experts (among them many Germans) were to demystify natural phenomena and lay to rest the superstitious beliefs of the indigenous populace. As influential physician Gerhard Van Swieten stated, “nothing is more harmful for the domain of science than when in the same the manifold idol of superstition and prejudice becomes revered.”Footnote ⁵¹ Born argued that “the most beneficial ultimate purpose of natural sciences [Physik]” was to “discover errors, to explain [aufklären] the miraculous as much as possible, and to show that nature above all works according to the simplest laws prescribed by the Creator.”Footnote ⁵² This was important in a region where it was reported that “any phaenomenon, or effect of unknown cause, is considered by them [the Wallachs] a miracle.” For instance, Born said that “they look upon a solar eclipse as a fray of the infernal dragon with the sun.” To counteract this, they tried to make noise to scare the dragon away, fearing that if he devoured the sun, eternal night might result.Footnote ⁵³ As in the realm of the physical landscape, scientists were also on the front lines of reform in the mental one. When a certain type of mosquito tormented humans and livestock in the region, Wallachs sourced the problem to a cave where they believed St. George had buried the dragon he had slain. For them, the bugs were a revenge sent from hell. Joseph Anton Schönbauer, a doctor and science teacher, wrote a treatise on the bugs’ origins and ways to fight them.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this case, and as we shall see in others, a combination of German culture and science (the Austrian Enlightenment plus the cameral sciences) was at the heart of the Europeanization of the Banat.

The authorities and European travelers saw the local population, especially the Wallachs, as ignorant and superstitious. According to Ignaz von Born, “their manner of living is extremely rough and savage. They want [sic] religion, art and sciences.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Johann Kaspar Steube echoed this opinion.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such indictments continued into the nineteenth century. English traveler Arthur Patterson commented on the myriad of superstitions held by the Wallachs. According to one of his Hungarian interlocutors “the whole life of a Wallach is spent in devising talismans against the devil.”Footnote ⁵⁷ To what degree local people truly were superstitious is unknowable and ultimately immaterial. The crucial fact here is that outsiders perceived them to be superstitious, which in turn created a drive and justification to “better” them and their worldview.

One blatant and widespread example of superstition repeatedly attributed to Wallachs was the belief in vampires and magicians. While a number of scholars have noted the interplay between magic, religion, and the development of modern science, eighteenth-century observers had only scorn for peasants who blamed supernatural forces for their misfortunes.Footnote ⁵⁸ The attack on superstition, and in particular on vampirism, was another example of the Habsburg attempt to impose “order” on their southeastern possessions.Footnote ⁵⁹ What authorities initially feared to be signs of a contagious disease were eventually dismissed as the product of backward and superstitious locals. To wit, only local peasants were the victims of vampires, German settlers and soldiers were found to be immune.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Gerhard Van Swieten summed it up, “the like [i.e., belief in vampires] can only be found among barbarians, the ignorant, or the wicked. In all Christ-Catholic other lands this harmful opinion is unknown.” For him, vampirism represented a connection between ignorance, religion, and non-Catholic lands.Footnote ⁶¹

From the capture of the Banat well into the 1750s, local officials reported supernatural occurrences. In March 1725, the Habsburg administration in Temesvár ordered local officials in Lugos (Lugoj) to exhume and examine a suspected witch (Zauberin) in Herindiesch (Herendesch, Herendeşti) and report back. The official in charge of the investigation declared that the “witch” was instead a vampire (Blutsauger) because, despite being buried for more than three months, the body was intact and injury free. The corpse was left in the open grave and placed under watch, the official requesting further advice from his superiors.Footnote ⁶² A year later, the same official who presided over the case in Herindiesch oversaw the disinterring and decapitation of another “vampire.” There were a number of additional reports through the 1750s.Footnote ⁶³ In Arad in 1755, there were the torture, mass trials, and eventual executions of suspected witches.Footnote ⁶⁴ According to later accounts, both Hungarians and Wallachs remained quite superstitious into the later part of the eighteenth century. According to Johann Kaspar Steube, a traveler in the region in the 1780s, Hungarians believed that the Wallachs themselves were vampires. He also related that when Wallachs buried their dead, all present kissed the deceased. He noted that enemies of the deceased kissed especially forcefully to convince the dead not to come back as a vampire to torment them.Footnote ⁶⁵ There are reports that Wallachs still believed in the existence of vampires into the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote ⁶⁶

In the local mind, corporeally destroying suspected vampires was easy. One simply dug them up, decapitated them, and burned the body or drove a stake or spear through their heart. For officials, how one destroyed the idea of vampires within people's worldview was significantly more complicated. Importantly, scientists investigated the cases and made their judgment known. As the earliest cases were seen as indicative of some sort of contagion and occurred in the developing military and sanitary cordon between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, doctors and army surgeons were often on the front lines of investigation.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the 1750s, the authorities in Vienna sent a doctor, Georg Tallar, to the region to investigate reports of supernatural occurrences with an eye to debunking them. Trained in Mainz and Strasbourg, Tallar traveled the Banat and Transylvania and wrote a book detailing his experiences.Footnote ⁶⁸ He claimed that in addition to Wallachs and Rascians, other “reasonable peoples” also believed in vampires. Interestingly, Tallar claimed that both German colonists and soldiers were less susceptible to believing in vampires than were locals. Importantly, both groups represented the orderly, rational culture the Habsburgs hoped to instill in the region. Tallar explained the reports of vampirism by referencing the intense fasting in which the locals partook in observance of their Orthodox faith. Thus, Germans (who were almost exclusively Catholic) were immune from the delusions. This link between superstition and Orthodoxy, an attractive connection for the often fervently Catholic Habsburg monarchs, underlay many assumptions about local people. The court also took legal action against superstition. Around the same time as Tallar's visitations regarding vampires, Empress Maria Theresa banned prosecutions of witches.Footnote ⁶⁹ Though such beliefs could not simply be legislated away, the court intervened definitively on the side of rationality.

Even superstitions buttressed by official prejudices, for instance, Empress Maria Theresa's anti-Judaism, were called into question. A particularly interesting case involved accusations of blood libel, though this term was not explicitly used in the archival record. In January 1754, local officials in Werschetz reported a case of a six-year-old boy supposedly misused by Jews to the central government in Vienna. The complaint held that the Jews had cut the boy in order to draw blood. Such an accusation played on medieval prejudices that held that the Jews used the blood of Christian children in Satanic rites.Footnote ⁷⁰ The authorities in Vienna tasked an official with discovering the truth of the accusation and bringing the responsible parties to justice.Footnote ⁷¹

A butcher, the boy's mother, and two Jews were arrested for the act. The boy was brought to Temesvár and examined by doctors to determine the nature and origins of his wounds. They found no evidence that he had been cut by a knife or some other sharp object. In fact, the doctors speculated that the “red marks” that were at the center of the case were most likely caused by fingernails. Furthermore, the cuts were not deep enough to allow much blood to flow, undermining the ostensible reason for their existence. The evidence not being strong enough to hold anyone, the authorities released the suspects, stipulating that the boy was not to spend any more nights at the Jews’ house, and the Jews were not to host any more Christian children there.Footnote ⁷² Much as with the cases of vampirism, the authorities relied on experts with scientific knowledge to undermine local superstitious belief.Footnote ⁷³

In addition to debunking irrationality through scientific means and attempting to use the rule of law to limit its damage, education was crucial to banishing superstition and implanting rational ideas of economic and social development. The idea that Orthodox religious figures hindered the education and orderliness of the Habsburg's Rascian and Wallachian subjects lay at the base of reform efforts. Literacy among the lower clergy, not to mention the masses of peasants, was almost nonexistent.Footnote ⁷⁴ The idea that their “[pastors were] as ignorant as their flocks” continued into the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁵ Local religious authorities may have even encouraged the vampire craze in order to increase their importance in the community and to line their pockets for ceremonies to rehabilitate the vampire.Footnote ⁷⁶ One contemporary critic went so far as to say that “the thought appears therefore not to be completely exaggerated that also next to the hanged Wallach, by justice and fairness, his pastor [Pope] should hang, because he had not taught him better.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The “Eastern,” “Oriental” religion was regarded as a major hindrance to the education and “civilization” of the region and its people.Footnote ⁷⁸

The real impetus to improve the education of the monarchy's subjects occurred between 1770 and 1790, under Empress Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II. Joseph believed that schooling was a crucial factor in rooting the Wallachs to the land.Footnote ⁷⁹ Habsburg authorities also believed that schooling for indigenous people would lead to social and economic uplift. According to the Hofkammer (the treasury), schools would help lessen the criminality of the Wallachs by making them better Christians and more orderly subjects.Footnote ⁸⁰ According to this view, education would make the local Orthodox people useful (or at least less detrimental) to the state.

Like canal building and village planning, the authorities intended education to have a practical effect. Neither Maria Theresa nor Joseph advocated unrestricted higher education, though each had idiosyncratic reasons for not doing so. What they both championed was practical knowledge (reading, writing, arithmetic) taught to younger subjects.Footnote ⁸¹ The goal of improving education and increasing literacy among the people of the southern reaches of the monarchy represented “the imperial court's desire to integrate the Orthodox minorities into the polity of the realm.”Footnote ⁸² For the urban bourgeoisie and nobility, some reformers had higher goals. The plan for one experimental school in Upper Hungary had students spending one-third of the instruction time on “recent innovations in industry, horticulture, and comparative European political economy.” The schools would “inundat[e them] with advantages of middle-class culture and civilization.”Footnote ⁸³

Maria Theresa also advocated certain forms of higher education provided they produced tangible results. Thus, advances in military studies, medicine, commerce, and “Oriental studies” were encouraged. Such attempts were to improve the state, not push the boundaries of abstract knowledge.Footnote ⁸⁴ These experts in turn brought their expertise to the borderlands. Medicine was an important way in which higher education could change the manner of living and of knowing in frontiers like the Banat. Given the prevalence and threat of epidemic disease there, the study of medicine (like the draining of swamps) promised to improve living conditions and open new lands for habitation. After Joseph II saw the poor condition of German settlers in the Banat, the Hofkammer and Hofkriegsrat (military council) took steps to introduce professional practitioners of medicine and strengthened quarantine procedures there.Footnote ⁸⁵ During the last major push to colonize the region with Germans in the 1780s, hospitals and pharmacies were key institutions in every newly built town and village.Footnote ⁸⁶

Education thus had a two-pronged goal. On the one hand, it was to provide the uneducated Orthodox people of the monarchy with the mental tools to be virtuous and proficient subjects. On the other, it was to train a new class of practical professionals who would bring the fruits of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment to people throughout the Habsburg domains, Europeanizing them in the process. In the best-case scenario, these two goals would work in tandem with newly literate subjects reading newspapers and journals on the best practices in farming, manufacturing, and commerce.Footnote ⁸⁷ Such papers did exist in German, starting haphazardly in the 1770s, then more consistently in the nineteenth century. By the mid-1800s, they were being produced in Serbian and Romanian as well.