ip.
Through the privilege granted by Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1405, the city
opted out from the jurisdiction of voivodes, vice-voivodes and royal judges,
and obtained the right to elect a twelve-member jury every year. In 1488, King Matthias
Corvinus (born in Klausenburg in 1440) ordered that the centumvirate—the city
council, consisting of one hundred men—be half composed from the homines bone conditions (the wealthy people), with craftsmen supplying the other half;
together they would elect the chief judge and the jury. Meanwhile, an agreement
was reached providing that half of the representatives on this city council
were to be drawn from the Hungarian, half from the Saxon population, and that
judicial offices were to be held on a rotating basis. In 1541, Klausenburg
became part of the independent Principality of Transylvania after the Ottoman
Turks occupied the central part of the Kingdom of Hungary; a period of economic
and cultural prosperity followed. Although Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár) served as
a political capital for the princes of Transylvania, Klausenburg enjoyed the
support of the princes to a greater extent, thus establishing connections with
the most important centres of Eastern Europe at that time, along with Košice (Kassa),
Kraków, Prague and Vienna.
16th–18th centuries
In terms of religion, Protestant ideas
first appeared in the middle of the 16th century. During Gáspár Heltai's
service as preacher, Lutheranism grew in importance, as did the Swiss doctrine
of Calvinism. By 1571, the Turda (Torda) Diet had adopted a more radical
religion, Ferenc Dávid's Unitarianism, characterised by the free interpretation
of the Bible and denial of the dogma of the Trinity. Stephen Báthory founded a
Catholic Jesuit academy in Klausenburg in order to promote an anti-Reform
movement; however, it did not
