IDENTITĂŢI PREMODERNE BĂNĂŢENE: O FAMILIE DE DEMNITARI AI BANATULUI DE CARANSEBEŞ ŞI LUGOJ.

The history of the family Simon of Caransebeş we plan to write on within this article from a genealogic point of view, presents an interesting variant of the Banat social elites picture. The article is meant to round the image of the Romanian social elites within the Principality of Transylvania era, an ever more abundant one in the historical literature the last years. There was a series of difficulties to reconstitute that family history on a genealogic basis -similarly to other cases we have studied -, as a result of the reference material unsubstantiality and inconsistency. Under such a perspective and within the radius of information we possess now we have tried to reconstitute the profile of each of the family's members as fitted in his generation. An unequal construction was drawn up, strictly accorded to what the acts of that time had registered and to what the passed time preserved. The genealogic image corresponds to that of a noble family from the 16th-17th centuries Caransebeş, a Romanian family in our opinion, on the ground of a majority Romanian milieu the family lived in, of their matrimonial alliances exclusively concluded with other Romanian noble families from the Banat or Haţeg, or the fact that the family onomatology, with a certain conservative line by an obstinate reiteration of some Christian names, does not show any proclivity to Magyar language even if the Romanian elites in the Banat passed the anterior centuries from Orthodoxy to Catholicism. As a result of the reference data we have gone over, we have the profile of a well knocked together family, with obvious relations and affinities, with an evolutionary development of two centuries within which the family's members concerned themselves both with the family advancement and the community they lived in serving up. The family was also an exponent of the "new" nobility of position which had proliferated in the eastern Banat since the end of the 15th century, a series of its members having repeatedly held for castellan (castellanus), mayor (judex primarius), nobiliary magistrate judge (judex nobilium) or jury man (juratus) in Caransebeş, so to say an almost complete palette of the local dignities. It is an eloquent proof concerning that family active involvement in the social-economic and political-juridical current life of the city, a fact that also pleads for its privileged status, its obvious honor, education, and an intrinsic assumed welfare when holding such dignities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]