Surse istorice din secolele XVI-XVIII privind oraşul Sebeş
Historical Sources about Sebeş Town from the 16th-18th Centuries

Summary/Abstract: Information regarding the past and monuments of Sebeş town are provided by varied historical sources, among which the descriptions made by foreign travellers and the chronicles have a significant weight. If the town appearance and the look of some important buildings at that time may be intuited from the foreign travellers’ descriptions, the chronicles also register important events that may explain a certain evolution of the town at a certain time. The third type of sources is represented by the work Topographie der Stadt Mühlbach, written by Georg Marienburger (1751-1827) and published in Hermannstädter Zeitung in 1785. It is part of the statistic literature that arose in Transylvania in the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. The first descriptions of Sebeş town also date from the 16th century, thanks to the interest the humanists of the Western Europe had upon the Romanian Countries, regarding the pressure exerted here by the Turkish people. They were ample or concise descriptions effected by foreign travellers, often political emissaries, who made a halt and visited the town in their way. Georg Reicherstorffer (1550), Giovan Andrea Gromo (1566-1567) and Antonio Possevino (1583) carried out short descriptions of Sebeş town, confirming the fact that the town was on a marked economic and demographic decline that manifested itself after the short period of prosperity of the 14th century. This literary genre manifests itself in the 18th century, too, through the descriptions effected by Conrad Iacob Hiltebrandt (1656) and Evliya Čelebi (1661) – the details registered by the last one are in major part incorrect. The first information about Sebeş dates from the same period of time and is provided by theTransylvanian chronicler Johann Tröster (1666). Information regarding the past of Sebeş came in from the 18th century and was transmitted by chroniclers such as: Georg Soterius (1735), Laurentius Weidenfelder (1745) and Georg Dietrich or Michael Conrad (1784). The drawing ups of foreigner travellers’s descriptions goes on with Johann Conrad von Weiss (1736), Johann Lehmanns (1782 and 1790) and Joseph-Gabriel Monnier (1786). The most valuable work is Topographie der Stadt Mühlbach, written by Georg Marienburger, the royal leader and rector of the Evangelic Gymnasium of the town, and it was published in Hermannstädter Zeitung in 1785. It is the most minute description of the town preserved up to present and allows the identifcation and clearing up of some elements of the medieval fortification appaearance from Sebeş.

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