Middle Ages
After the departure of the Romans to the southern banks of the Danube in the 3rd century, nothing is certain about the site's history as a settlement until the Hungarians (Magyars) arrived in Pannonia in the 9th Century. The modern city of Cluj-Napoca was founded by German settlers as Klausenburg in the 13th Century. The name "Napoca" was added to the traditional Romanian city name "Cluj" by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1974 as a means of asserting Romanian claims to the region on the basis of the theory of Daco-Roman Continutity. Although the precise date of the conquest of Transylvania by the Hungarians is not known, the earliest Hungarian artifacts found in the region are dated to the first half of the 10th century. After the conquest, the city became part of the Kingdom of Hungary.
King Stephen I made the city the seat of the castle county of Kolozs, and King Saint Ladislaus I of Hungary founded the abbey of Cluj-Mănăştur (Kolozsmonostor), destroyed during the Tatar invasions in 1241 and 1285. As for the civilian colony, a castle and a village were built to the northwest of the ancient Napoca no later than the late 12th century. This new village was settled by large groups of Transylvanian Saxons, encouraged during the reign of Crown Prince Stephen, Duke of Transylvania.
The first reliable mention of the settlement dates from 1275, in a document of King Ladislaus IV of Hungary, when the village (Villa Kulusvar) was granted to the Bishop of Transylvania. On August 19, 1316, during the rule of the new king, Charles I of Hungary, Cluj was granted the status of a city (Latin: civitas), as a reward for the Saxons' contribution to the defeat of the rebellious Transylvanian voivode, Ladislaus Kán. In memory of this event, the Saint Michael Church started to be built.
In 1331 the voivode of Transylvania lost his supremacy over Kuluzsvar. Kolozsvar-Klausenburg became a royal free city in 1405. By this time the number of Saxon and Hungarian inhabitants was equal, and King Matthias Corvinus (born in Klausenburg in 1440) ordered that the office of the chief judge should alternate between Hungarians and Saxons.
Read more about this topic: History Of Cluj-Napoca
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