Eger: Urban development

Eger and its Defence Works

Due to the absence of archaeological data, we can only assume that the Episcopal seat of the castle hill and the small settlement in its service were surrounded by some kind of a protecting wall. This, however, did not provide substantial protection for the inhabitants, since in 1241 Tartar (Mongol) forces flooding into Hungary could easily ravage the town, which proves that the alleged early defence works probably consisted of a simple wooden palisade.
The development of the Hungarian castle architecture started after the terrible experiences of the Tartar attack. The Bishop of Eger receives a permission from the king to build a stone castle. During the 14th and 15th centuries the Episcopal castle, encompassing the entire castle hill, is built gradually. The next step is to surround the neighbouring settlement on the eastern slope of the castle hill with a protecting wall in the second half of the 15th century. Eger and the Eger castle had an insignificant military role during the middle ages. The town in the valley of the stream did not have any defence works until the middle of the 16th century, although castle walls were one of the crucial characteristics of a town’s legal status in Hungary as early as the 15th century.
Eger’s situation has changed by the middle of the 16th century. The Turkish invasion and the direct military threat resulted in the more intensive fortification and modernisation of the castle. The town underneath the castle was surrounded by a palisade (with a wooden frame), four gates and a moat. The previously peaceful Episcopal seat was taken into royal administration in 1548 and became a fortress of key importance within the border castle system in the protection of Hungarian (Habsburg) territories. An agreement was made between the king and the bishop, in accordance to which two-thirds of the proceeds of the Eger diocese had to be spent for the castle’s maintenance costs and the remaining one-third was given to the bishop.
With the construction of the palisade the dual structure of Eger’s settlement form, comprising of the strongly built castle and the poorly surrounded town, prevailed for centuries. Although this form of settlement and defence in Eger was due to relief characteristics, the fact that during a siege the castle’s defence justified abandoning the town to be the enemy’s spoil of war, symbolised the distortion of Hungarian urban development and the over-estimation of the military aspect.
The palisade and later the castle wall around the town surrounded a notably larger territory than the built-in area itself. The enclosed town included houses, gardens, vine cellars and farm-buildings. The town with its surrounding wall did not have the close and built-in structure that was characteristic of medieval towns in Transdanubia, Upper-Hungary or Western Europe. This structure comprising of smaller built-in and larger vacant territories, surrounded by a town wall was only known in another Hungarian town, Pécs. While in European cities urban development required the construction of new rings of castle walls for the protection of built-in areas and the town structure was characterised by relatively confined urban areas, narrow streets, small plots and multi-level buildings for the maximum use of available territories, no trace of this structure can be found in Eger, where the town surrounded by a wall in the middle of the 16th century only started to outgrow its area in the early 17th century.
Following the large Turkish siege of 1552 the palisade did not provide sufficient protection. We can assume that the palisade either burnt down when Hungarian troops moved into the castle right before the siege and set fire to the town or was destroyed by the Turks. After the siege the palisade around the town was never restored completely.
The restoration and fortification of the severely damaged castle was started as soon as 1553. The Viennese Court Chamber (Hofkammer) and the Army Council (Wiener Hofkriegsrates) sent Italian military engineers to Eger to design the refurbishing of the strategically important fortress, rebuilt into a bastion structure.
This is when strong connections between the defence potentials of the castle and the town came into focus. Therefore the fortification of the castle was followed by replacing the palisade around the town with a more modern stonewall, in order to provide sufficient protection for the castle and the town. Due the absence of data we do not know when these works were started, but it is a fact that the stone wall (“Ringmauer”) surrounding Eger was half-completed by the spring of 1583. After 1596 the construction of the stone wall was continued by the Turks, with a focus on the bastions, but some fortified palisades also remained.
Following the expulsion of the Turks and Rákóczi’s war of independence the town’s defence works lost their military importance. However, it was the military authorities that insisted on their maintenance. When the Court Chamber ordered in 1702 that certain Hungarian castles, including the Eger castle, must be demolished, it specifically commanded that only the castle was to be destroyed, but the walls surrounding the town must be preserved. Eventually only the eastern side, the so-called outer castle was knocked down, keeping the western part, the inner castle, under he management of the military. Castle troops resumed the common practice before the Turkish invasion, to guard and protect the gates of the town.
In the 18th century the town wall was nothing but an extra burden on the episcopate and it only benefited the town through custom tariffs and its legal status. After the expulsion of the Turks, tariffs were collected at the town gates by not only the toll-keepers of the king, but also those of the town. According to the 1695 agreement, the wall represented the borderline of the areas with certain privileges, but the interpretation of this borderline led to serious legal disputes between the town and the episcopate. According to the dual land-ownership, town walls were the “inner” stone walls, but the town argued that they were the “outer walls” (the rampart surrounding the outer side of the moat, beyond the stone wall), therefore the town demanded the ownership of areas between the “two walls”. The outlines of this strip were not parallel everywhere, in many areas they were of irregular shape with varying width. This width ranged from 7.5 to 37 metres between the walls and even reached 66 metres in front of the gates. The size of this area was more than 30,000 square metres. There were no disputes after the signing of the agreement, but as the town developed and expanded, cellars, gardens and houses were created in the disputed areas, which the town and the landlords wanted to include in their own taxing authorities. The lengthy argument was ended in 1769, when the bishop-landowner gave the area over to the town.
The town walls were under constant decay during the 18th century. The town was encumbered with the maintenance costs from 1695. The magistrate however, referring to the lack of funds, tried to shift these costs to others, and chose to do nothing but watch the crumbling walls being dismantled and carried away by everyone from the public or the landlord’s people. In 1765 the Hungarian commander-in-chief ordered the walls to be restored immediately, but the town and the episcopate refused to do so. After three years of fruitless dispute the Viennese military authorities agreed to take down the entire town wall.
By this time some parts of the wall were already destroyed as the result of the episcopate’s extensive restructuring and refurbishing efforts. The town’s magistrate was afraid to loose all their legal and financial privileges if the entire wall was to be removed, therefore petitioned to the bishop to keep the existing parts. The bishop insisted that all related costs should be met by the town and the magistrate had to give in.
Demolishing ordered by the episcopate did not include the entire wall system. Maps from 1786 and 1800 show most of the northeastern sections. The gates were demolished in the 19th century. The most important Hatvani gate was knocked down first in 1837 during the landscape building of the new cathedral. This was followed by the Rác and Maklári gates. The last remaining Cifra gate was dismantled after the great flood of 1878. With the disappearance of the gates, most of the remaining wall segments were also pulled down by the middle of the century. Some sections, however, survived longer and served as walls for fences or buildings.