Câteva considerații privind istoricul cercetării și topografia ordinelor mendicante în orașe medievale din Transilvania
Some considerations regarding the historiography and topography of mendicant orders in medieval Transylvanian towns

Summary/Abstract: The 13th century urban European development had opened the gates of medieval towns to members of the mendicant orders. The friars received some of the cloisters, while others had to build them in time and develop them in sincronicity with the towns themselves. In the Hungarian kingdom the royal urban policy was emphasized especially after the Mongol invasion of 1241–1242 and one is able to observe the rise of urban communities together with their insitutions, churches, chapels and mendicant cloisters. Every so often, rebuilding meant also reshaping the urban landscape and thus the topography of a town was influenced by several so called “central places”, the mendicant convents turning quickly into such centers of attraction for all social strata.The present paper aims to provide a general perspective upon the topography of mendicant places in Transylvanian medieval towns based upon the historiographic resources of German, Hungarian and Romanian historians and archaeologist by showing how the mendicant topography has almost managed to turn into a research direction in the past years, deriving from interest areas such as town history, urban medieval topography or urban archaeology and slowly starting to establish its own field literature. In this sense, we have chosen some of the most relevant and offering examples within the field literature, namely those towns where more than one mendicant cloister had functioned or more than one mendicant order resided, developing thus into a mendicant cluster.

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