Villages, Actors of Local Cartography? The Cadastral Maps of the Banat (1772–1779)

Abstract

After the successful work of the military survey of the Banat in 1769–72, the Habsburg monarchy took on an even more demanding task: the systematic division of land into family plots in a huge territory representing an area of almost 28,000 km² with approximately half a million inhabitants. The cartographers found themselves in a new position vis-à-vis the rural society and had to face the institutions of the village communities. The surveying and mapping of the land was indeed tied with a new mission: imposing on the farmers the geometric and final definition of their plots. The few cadastral maps that have been preserved in Vienna and in Budapest can be studied as the result of a complex social process involving peasant-farmers, local worthies, rural communities and cartographers over a rather long period of time. The different actors usually made arrangements between themselves, although mutual misunderstandings and conflicts occurred too. The current—and almost classical—approach to the cadastral and estates maps, whether ordered by States or private landowners, provide an interesting analytical framework. They point out the influence of the rationalising tendencies of the estates’ management and the tax system in the early modern period on this type of mapping and describe maps as a form of communication. But identifying signs of peasants’ and villages’ participation in creating the maps is more difficult than understanding the logic of power. Fortunately, the possibility of combining an analysis of iconographic sources and of the detailed reports about the local activity of the cartographers-engineers in Banat, allows overcoming this difficulty.