Cluj

Cluj, Kolozsvár to the Hungarians and Klausenburg to its Saxon settlers, lies on the Someșul Mic in the hills of northern Transylvania, on the site of the Roman town of Napoca. By the fourteenth century it was a walled Hungarian free royal town, whose guilds, especially furriers and butchers, displaced the older landed elite in governing it. Louis I approved its arms of three towers over a wall in 1377, and in 1405 Sigismund confirmed its right to build walls and to answer directly to the king rather than the voivode of Transylvania. Matthias Corvinus was born here in 1443.

The poor of Cluj took part in the Bobâlna revolt of 1437 and the Doja uprising of 1514, seizing the town both times. The Reformation arrived in 1544 with the Lutheran preacher Gáspár Heltai, who opened the first printing press in 1550; by 1571 Ferenc Dávid's Unitarianism, which denied the Trinity, was among the faiths the Diet of Torda recognised. Stephen Báthory founded a Jesuit college in 1581. Plague and fires wore Cluj down in the seventeenth century. Austrian troops occupied it in 1686, and the Habsburgs built the Cetățuia citadel above the river between 1715 and 1735. The government and Diet of Transylvania met here for long periods in the eighteenth century. In 1791 Romanian intellectuals drew up the petition Supplex Libellus Valachorum for the emperor.