VOLUME XIII SLICE VIII Hudson River to Hurstmonceaux (continued 6)

This famous charter, which was amplified, under the influence of the clergy, in 1231, when its articles were placed under the guardianship of the archbishop of Esztergom (who was authorized to punish their violation by the king with excommunication), is generally regarded as the foundation of Hungarian constitutional liberty, though like Magna Carta it purported only to confirm immemorial rights; and as such it was expressly ratified as a whole in the coronation oaths of all the Habsburg kings from Ferdinand to Leopold I. Its actual effect in the period succeeding its issue was, however, practically nugatory; if indeed it did not actually give a new handle to the subversive claims of the powerful barons.

Béla IV. (1235-1270), the last man of genius whom the Árpáds produced, did something to curb the aristocratic misrule which was to be one of the determining causes of the collapse of his dynasty. But he is best known as the regenerator Béla IV. of the realm after the cataclysm of 1241-1242 (see Béla IV.). On his return from exile, after the subsidence of the Tatar deluge, he found his kingdom in ashes; and his two great remedies, wholesale immigration and castle-building, only sowed the seeds of fresh disasters. Thus the Kumanian colonists, mostly pagans, whom he settled in vast numbers on the waste lands, threatened to overwhelm the Christian population; while the numerous strongholds, which he encouraged his nobles to build as a protection against future Tatar invasions, subsequently became so many centres of disloyalty. To bind the Kumanian still more Stephen V. and Ladislaus IV. closely to his dynasty, Béla married his son Stephen V. (1270-1272) to a Kumanian girl, and during the reign of her son Ladislaus IV. (1272-1290) the court was certainly more pagan than Christian. Valiant and enterprising as both these princes were (Stephen successfully resisted the aggressions of the brilliant “golden King,” Ottakar II. of Bohemia, and Ladislaus materially contributed to his utter overthrow at Durnkrüt in 1278), neither of them was strong enough to make head against the disintegrating influences all around them. Stephen contrived to hold his own by adroitly contracting an alliance with the powerful Neapolitan Angevins who had the ear of the pope; but Ladislaus (q.v.) End of the Árpád Dynasty. was so completely caught in the toils of the Kumanians, that the Holy See, the suzerain of Hungary, was forced to intervene to prevent the relapse of the kingdom into barbarism, and the unfortunate Ladislaus perished in the crusade that was preached against him. An attempt of a patriotic party to keep the last Árpád, Andrew III. (1290-1301), on the throne was only temporarily successful, and after a horrible eight years’ civil war (1301-1308) the crown of St Stephen finally passed into the capable hands of Charles Robert of Naples.

During the four hundred years of the Árpád dominion the nomadic Magyar race had established itself permanently in central Europe, adopted western Christianity and founded a national monarchy on the western model. Hastily and violently converted, driven like a wedge between the Eastern and the Western Empires, the young kingdom was exposed from the first to extraordinary perils. But, under the guidance of a series of eminent rulers, it successfully asserted itself alike against pagan reaction from within, and aggressive pressure from without, and, as it grew in strength and skill, expanded territorially at the expense of all its neighbours. These triumphs were achieved while the monarchy was absolute, and thus able to concentrate in its hands all the resources of the state, but towards the end of the period a political revolution began. The weakness and prodigality of the later Árpáds, the depopulation of the realm during the Tatar invasion, the infiltration of western feudalism and, finally, the endless civil discords of the 13th century, brought to the front a powerful and predacious class of barons who ultimately overshadowed the throne. The ancient county system was gradually absorbed by this new governing element. The ancient royal tenants became the feudatories of the great nobles, and fell naturally into two classes, the nobiles bene possessionati, and the nobiles unius sessionis, in other words the richer and the poorer gentry. We cannot trace the gradations of this political revolution, but we know that it met with determined opposition from the crown, which resulted in the utter destruction of the Árpáds, who, while retaining to the last their splendid physical qualities, now exhibited unmistakeable signs of moral deterioration, partly due perhaps to their too frequent marriages with semi-Oriental Greeks and semi-savage Kumanians. On the other hand the great nobles were the only class who won for themselves a recognized political position. The tendency towards a representative system of government had begun, but the almost uninterrupted anarchy which marked the last thirty years of the Árpád rule was no favourable time for constitutional development. The kings were fighting for their lives, the great nobles were indistinguishable from brigands and the whole nation seemed to be relapsing into savagery.

It was reserved for the two great princes of the house of Anjou, Charles I. (1310-1342) and Louis I. (1342-1382), to rebuild the Hungarian state, and lead the Magyars back to civilization. Both by character and education they House of Anjou. were eminently fitted for the task, and all the circumstances were in their favour. They brought from their native Italy a thorough knowledge of the science of government as the middle ages understood it, and the decimation of the Hungarian magnates during the civil wars enabled them to re-create the noble hierarchy on a feudal basis, in which full allowance was made for Magyar idiosyncracies. Both these monarchs were absolute. The national assembly (Országgyülés) was still summoned occasionally, but at very irregular intervals, the Reforms of Louis I. real business of the state being transacted in the royal council, where able men of the middle class, principally Italians, held confidential positions. The lesser gentry were protected against the tyranny of the magnates, encouraged to appear at court and taxed for military service by the royal treasury direct—so as to draw them closer to the crown. Scores of towns, too, owe their origin and enlargement to the care of the Angevin princes, who were lavish of privileges and charters, and saw to it that the high-roads were clear of robbers. Charles, moreover, was a born financier, and his reform of the currency and of the whole fiscal system greatly contributed to enrich both the merchant class and the treasury. Louis encouraged the cities to surround themselves with strong walls. He himself erected a whole cordon of forts round the flourishing mining towns of northern Hungary. He also appointed Hungarian consuls in foreign trade centres, and established a system of protective tariffs. More important in its ulterior consequences to Hungary was the law of 1351 which, while confirming the Golden Bull in general, abrogated the clause (iv.) by which the nobles had the right to alienate their lands. Henceforward their possessions were to descend directly and as of right to their brothers and their issue, whose claim was to be absolute. This “principle of aviticity” (ösiség, aviticum), which survived till 1848, was intended to preserve the large feudal estates as part of the new military system, but its ultimate effect was to hamper the development of the country by preventing the alienation, and therefore the mortgaging of lands, so long as any, however distant, scion of the original owning family survived.19 Louis’s efforts to increase the national wealth were also largely frustrated by the Black Death, which ravaged Hungary from 1347 to 1360, and again during 1380-1381, carrying off at least one-fourth of the population.

Externally Hungary, under the Angevin kings, occupied a commanding position. Both Charles and Louis were diplomatists as well as soldiers, and their foreign policy, largely based on family alliances, was almost invariably successful. Charles married Elizabeth, the sister of Casimir the Great of Poland, with whom he was connected by ties of close friendship, and Louis, by virtue of a compact made by his father thirty-one years previously, added the Polish crown to that of Hungary in 1370. Thus, during the last twelve years of his reign, the dominions of Louis the Great included the greater part of central Europe, from Pomerania to the Danube, and from the Adriatic to the steppes of the Dnieper.

The Angevins were less successful towards the south, where the first signs were appearing of that storm which ultimately swept away the Hungarian monarchy. In 1353 the Ottoman Turks crossed the Hellespont from Asia Minor and Turkish invasions. began that career of conquest which made them the terror of Europe for the next three centuries. In 1360 they conquered southern Bulgaria. In 1365 they transferred their capital from Brusa to Adrianople. In 1371 they overwhelmed the Servian tsar Vukashin at the battle of Taenarus and penetrated to the heart of old Servia. In 1380 they threatened Croatia and Dalmatia. Hungary herself was now directly menaced, and the very circumstances which had facilitated the advance of the Turks, enfeebled the potential resistance of the Magyars. The Árpád kings had succeeded in encircling their whole southern frontier with half a dozen military colonies or banates, comprising, roughly speaking, Little Walachia,20 and the northern parts of Bulgaria, Servia and Bosnia. But during this period a redistribution of territory had occurred in these parts, which converted most of the old banates into semi-independent and violently anti-Magyar principalities. This was due partly to the excessive proselytizing energy of the Angevins, which provoked rebellion on the part of their Greek-Orthodox subjects, partly to the natural dynastic competition of the Servian and Bulgarian The Vlachs. tsars, and partly to the emergence of a new nationality, the Walachian. Previously to 1320, what is now called Walachia was regarded by the Magyars as part of the banate of Szörény. The base of the very mixed and ever-shifting population in these parts were the Vlachs (Rumanians), perhaps the descendants of Trajan’s colonists, who, under their voivode, Bazarad, led King Charles into an ambuscade from which he barely escaped with his life (Nov. 9-12, 1330). From this disaster are to be dated the beginnings of Walachia as an independent state. Moldavia, again, ever since the 11th century, had been claimed by the Magyars as forming, along with Bessarabia and the Bukowina, a portion of the semi-mythical Etélköz, the original seat of the Magyars before they occupied modern Hungary. This desolate region was subsequently peopled by Vlachs, whom the religious persecutions of Louis the Great had driven thither from other parts of his domains, and, between 1350 and 1360, their voivode Bogdan threw off the Hungarian yoke altogether. In Bosnia the persistent attempts of the Magyar princes to root out the stubborn, crazy and poisonous sect of the Bogomils had alienated the originally amicable Bosnians, and in 1353 Louis was compelled to buy the friendship of their Bar Tvrtko by acknowledging him as king of Bosnia. Both Servia and Bulgaria were by this time split up into half a dozen principalities which, as much for religious as for political reasons, preferred paying tribute to the Turks to acknowledging the hegemony of Hungary. Thus, towards the end of his reign, Louis found himself cut off from the Greek emperor, his sole ally in the Balkans, by a chain of bitterly hostile Greek-Orthodox states, extending from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. The commercial greed of the Venetians, who refused to aid him with a fleet to cut off the Turks in Europe from the Turks in Asia Minor, nullified Louis’ last practical endeavour to cope with a danger which from the first he had estimated at its true value.

Louis the Great left two infant daughters: Maria, who was to share the throne of Poland with her betrothed, Sigismund of Pomerania, and Hedwig, better known by her Polish name of Jadwiga, who was to reign over Hungary with her young bridegroom, William of Austria. This plan was upset by the queen-dowager Elizabeth, who determined to rule both kingdoms during the minority of her children. Maria, her favourite, with whom she refused to part, was crowned queen of Hungary a week after her father’s death (Sept. 17, 1382). Two years later Jadwiga, reluctantly transferred to the Poles instead of her sister, was crowned queen of Poland at Cracow (Oct. 15, 1384) and subsequently compelled to marry Jagiello, grand-duke of Lithuania. In Hungary, meanwhile, impatience at the rule of women induced the great family of the Horváthys to offer the crown of St Stephen to Charles III. of Naples, who, despite the oath of loyalty he had sworn to his benefactor, Louis the Great, accepted the offer, landed in Dalmatia with a small Italian army, and, after occupying Buda, was crowned king of Hungary on the 31st of December, 1385, as Charles II. His reign lasted thirty-eight days. On the 7th of February, 1386, he was treacherously attacked in the queen-dowager’s own apartments, at her instigation, and died of his injuries a few days later. But Elizabeth did not profit long by this atrocity. In July the same year, while on a pleasure trip with her daughter, she was captured by the Horváthys, and tortured to death in her daughter’s presence. Maria herself would doubtless have shared the same fate, but for the speedy intervention of her fiancé, whom a diet, by the advice of the Venetians, had elected to rule the headless realm on the 31st of March 1387. He married Maria in June the same year, and she shared the sceptre with him till her sudden death by accident on the 17th of May 1395.

During the long reign of Sigismund (1387-1437) Hungary was brought face to face with the Turkish peril in its most threatening shape, and all the efforts of the king were directed towards combating or averting it. However sorry a Sigismund. figure Sigismund may have cut as emperor in Germany, as king of Hungary he claims our respect, and as king of Hungary he should be judged, for he ruled her, not unsuccessfully, for fifty years during one of the most difficult crises of her history, whereas his connexion with Germany was at best but casual and transient.21 From the first he recognized that his chief duty was to drive the Turks from Europe, or, at least, keep them out of Hungary, and this noble ambition was the pivot of his whole policy. A domestic rebellion (1387-1395) prevented him at the outset from executing his design till 1396, and if the hopes of Christendom were shattered at Nicopolis, the failure was due to no fault of his, but to the haughty insubordination of the feudal levies. Again, his inaction during those memorable twelve years (1401-1413) when the Turkish empire, after the collapse at Angora (1402), seemed about to be swallowed up by “the great wolf” Tamerlane, was due entirely to the malice of the Holy See, which, enraged at his endeavours to maintain the independence of the Magyar church against papal aggression (the diet of 1404, on Sigismund’s initiative, had declared bulls bestowing Magyar benefices on foreigners, without the royal consent, pernicious and illegal), saddled him with a fresh rebellion and two wars with Venice, resulting ultimately in the total loss of Dalmatia (c. 1430). Not till 1409 could Sigismund be said to be king in his own realm, yet in 1413 we find him traversing Europe in his endeavour to terminate the Great Schism, as the first step towards uniting Christendom once more against the Turk. Hence the council of Constance to depose three rival popes; hence the council of Basel to pacify the Hussites, and promote another anti-Moslem league. But by this time the Turkish empire had been raised again from its ruins by Mahommed I. (1402-1421), and resumed its triumphal progress under Murad II. (1421-1451). Yet even now Sigismund, at the head of his Magyars, thrice (1422-1424, 1426-1427, and 1430-1431) encountered the Turks, not ingloriously, in the open field, till, recognizing that Hungary must thenceforth rely entirely on her own resources in any future struggle with Islam, he elaborately fortified the whole southern frontier, and converted the little fort of Nándorfehérvár, later Belgrade, at the junction of the Danube and Save, into an enormous first-class fortress, which proved strong enough to repel all the attacks of the Turks for more than a century. It argued no ordinary foresight thus to recognize that Hungary’s strategy in her contest with the Turks must be strictly defensive, and the wisdom of Sigismund was justified by the disasters which almost invariably overcame the later Magyar kings whenever they ventured upon aggressive warfare with the sultans.

A monarch so overburdened with cares was naturally always in need of money,22 and thus obliged to lean heavily upon the support of the estates of the realm. The importance and influence of the diet increased proportionately. It met every year, sometimes twice a year, during Sigismund’s reign, and was no longer, as in the days of Louis the Great, merely a consultative council, but a legislative body in partnership with the king. It was still, however, essentially an assembly of notables, lay and clerical, at which the gentry, though technically eligible, do not seem to have been directly represented. At Sigismund’s first diet (1397) it was declared that the king might choose his counsellors where he listed, and at the diet of 1397 he invited the free and royal towns to send their deputies to the parliament. Subsequently this privilege was apparently erected into a statute, but how far it was acted upon we know not. Sigismund, more fortunate than the Polish kings, seems to have had little trouble with his diets. This was largely due to his friendly intimacy with the majority of the Magyar notables, from among whom he chose his chief counsellors. The estates loyally supported him against the attempted exactions of the popes, and do not seem to have objected to any of his reforms, chief among which was the army-reform project of 1435, to provide for the better defence of the land against the Turks. This measure obliged all the great dignitaries, and the principal towns also, according to their means, to maintain a banderium of five hundred horsemen, or a proportional part thereof, and hold it ready, at the first summons, thus supplying the crown with a standing army 76,875 strong. In addition to this, a reserve force called the telekkatonaság was recruited from among the lesser gentry according to their teleks or holdings, every thirty-three teleks being held responsible for a mounted and fully equipped archer. Moreover, river fleets, built by Genoese masters and manned by Servians, were constructed to patrol and defend the great rivers of Hungary, especially on the Turkish frontier. Much as he owed to them, however, Sigismund was no mere nobles’ king. His care for the common people was sincere and constant, but his beneficial efforts in this direction were thwarted by the Feudal system. curious interaction of two totally dissimilar social factors, feudalism and Hussitism. In Sigismund’s reign the feudal system, for the first time, became deeply rooted in Magyar soil, and it is a lamentable fact that in 15th-century Hungary it is to be seen at its very worst, especially in those wild tracts, and they were many, in which the king’s writ could hardly be said to run. Simultaneously from the west came the Hussite propagandists teaching Hussites. that all men were equal, and that all property should be held in common. The suffering Magyar multitudes eagerly responded to these seductive teachings, and the result was a series of dangerous popular risings (the worst in 1433 and 1436) in which heresy and communism were inextricably intermingled. With the aid of inquisitors from Rome, the evil was literally burnt out, but not before provinces, especially in the south and south-east, had been utterly depopulated. They were repeopled by Vlachs.

Yet despite the interminable wars and rebellions which darken the history of Hungary in the reign of Sigismund, the country, on the whole, was progressing. Its ready response to the king’s heavy demands for the purpose of the national defence points to the existence of a healthy and self-sacrificing public spirit, and the eagerness with which the youth of all classes now began to flock to the foreign universities is another satisfactory feature of the age. Between 1362 and 1450 no fewer than 4151 Magyar students frequented the university of Vienna, nearly as many went by preference to Prague, and this, too, despite the fact that there were now two universities in Hungary itself, the old foundation of Louis the Great at Pécs, and a new one established at Buda by Sigismund.

Like Louis the Great before him, Sigismund had failed to found a dynasty, but, fifteen years before his death, he had succeeded in providing his only daughter Elizabeth with a consort apparently well able to protect both her and her inheritance in the person of Albert V., duke of Austria. Albert, a sturdy soldier, who had given brilliant proofs of valour and generalship in the Hussite wars, was crowned king of Hungary at Székesfehérvar (Stuhlweissenburg) on the 1st of January 1438, elected king of the Romans at Frankfort on the 18th of March 1438, and crowned king of Bohemia at Prague on the 29th of June 1438. On returning to Buda in 1439, he at once plunged into a war with the Turks, who had, in the meantime, captured the important Servian fortress of Semendria and subjugated the greater part of Bosnia. But the king got no farther than Servia, and was carried off by dysentery (Oct. 27, 1439), in the forty-second year of his age, in the course of the campaign.

Albert left behind him two infant daughters only, but his consort was big with child, and, in the event of that child proving to be an heir male, his father’s will bequeathed to him the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, under the regency of his mother. Thus, with the succession uncertain, with the Turk at the very door, with the prospect, dismal at the best, of a long minority, the political outlook was both embarrassing and perilous. Obviously a warrior-king was preferable to a regimen of women and children, and the eyes of the wiser Magyars turned involuntarily towards Wladislaus III. of Poland, who, though only in his nineteenth year, was already renowned for his martial disposition. Wladislaus accepted the proffered throne from the Magyar delegates at Cracow on the 8th of March 1440; but in the meantime (Feb. 22) the queen-widow gave birth to a son who, six weeks later, as Ladislaus V. (q.v.) was crowned king of Hungary (May 15) at Székesfehérvár. On the 22nd of May the Polish monarch appeared at Buda, was unanimously elected king of Hungary under the title of Wladislaus I. (June 24) and crowned on the 17th of July. This duoregnum proved even more injurious to Hungary than the dreaded interregnum. Queen Elizabeth, aided by her kinsmen, the emperor Frederick III. and the counts of Cilli, flooded northern and western Hungary with Hussite mercenaries, one of whom, Jan Giszkra, she made her captain-general, while Wladislaus held the central and south-eastern parts of the realm. The resulting civil war was terminated only by the death of Elizabeth on the 13th of December 1443.

All this time the pressure of the Turks upon the southern provinces of Hungary had been continuous, but fortunately all their efforts had so far been frustrated by the valour and generalship of the ban of Szörény, John John Hunyadi. Hunyadi, the fame of whose victories, notably in 1442 and 1443, encouraged the Holy See to place Hungary for the third time at the head of a general crusade against the infidel. The experienced diplomatist Cardinal Cesarini was accordingly sent to Hungary to reconcile Wladislaus with the emperor. The king, who had just returned from the famous “long campaign” of 1443, willingly accepted the leadership of the Christian League. At the diet of Buda, early in 1444, supplies were voted for the enterprise, and Wladislaus was on the point of quitting his camp at Szeged for the seat of war, when envoys from Sultan Murad arrived with the offer of a ten years’ truce on such favourable conditions (they included the relinquishment of Servia, Walachia and Moldavia, and the payment of an indemnity) that Hunyadi persuaded the king to conclude (in July) a peace which gave him more than could reasonably be anticipated from the most successful campaign. Unfortunately, two days later, Cardinal Cesarini absolved the king from the oath whereby he had sworn to observe the peace of Szeged, and was thus mainly responsible for the catastrophe of Varna, when four months later (Nov. 10) the young monarch and the flower of the Magyar chivalry were overwhelmed by fourfold odds on Turkish soil. (See Hunyadi, János; and Wladislaus III.)

The next fourteen years form one of the most interesting and pregnant periods of Hungarian history. It marks the dawn of a public spirit as represented by the gentry, who, alarmed at the national peril and justly suspicious of the ruling magnates, unhesitatingly placed their destinies in the hands of Hunyadi, the one honest man who by sheer merit had risen within the last ten years from the humble position of a country squire to a leading position in the state. This feeling of confidence found due expression at the diet of 1446, which deliberately passing over the palatine László Garai elected Hunyadi governor of Hungary, and passed a whole series of popular measures intended to be remedial, e.g. the decree ordering the demolition of the new castles, most of them little better than robber-strongholds; the decree compelling the great officers of state to suspend their functions during the session of the diet; the decree declaring illegal the new fashion of forming confederations on the Polish model, all of which measures were obviously directed against the tyranny and the lawlessness of the oligarchy. Unfortunately this salutary legislation remained a dead letter. It was as much as the governor could do to save the state from destruction, let alone reform it. At this very time northern Hungary, including the wealthy mining towns, was in the possession of the Hussite mercenary Jan Giszkra, who held them nominally for the infant king Ladislaus V., still detained at Vienna by his kinsman the emperor. The western provinces were held by Frederick himself. Invaluable time was wasted in negotiating with these intruders before the governor could safely devote himself to the task of expelling the Turk from the southern provinces. He had to be content with armistices, reconciliations and matrimonial contracts, because the great dignitaries of the state, men like the palatine László Garai, Count Ulrich of Cilli, and the voivode of Transylvania, Mihály Ujlaky, thwarted in every way the novus homo whom they hated and envied. From them, the official guardians of Hungary’s safety, he received no help, either during his governorship (1446-1453), or when, in 1454, on the eve of his departure for his last and most glorious campaign, the diet commanded a levée en masse of the whole population in his support. At that critical hour it was at his own expense that Hunyadi fortified Belgrade, now the sole obstacle between Hungary and destruction, with the sole assistance of the Franciscan friar Giovanni da Capistrano, equipped the fleet and the army which relieved the beleaguered fortress and overthrew Mahommed II. But the nation at least was grateful, and after his death (Aug. 11, 1456) it freely transferred its allegiance to his family as represented by his two sons, László, now in his 23rd, and Matthias, now in his 16th year. The judicial murder of László Hunyadi (q.v.) by the enemies of his house (March 16, 1457) was therefore a stupid blunder as well as the foulest of crimes, and on the death of his chief assassin, Ladislaus V., six months later (Nov. 23, 1457), the diet which assembled on the banks of the Rákos, in defiance of the magnates and all foreign competitors, unanimously and enthusiastically elected Matthias Hunyadi king of Hungary (Jan. 24, 1458).

In less than three years the young king had justified their confidence, and delivered his country from its worst embarrassments. (See Matthias I., king of Hungary.) This prodigy was accomplished in the face of every Matthias I. conceivable obstacle. His first diet grudgingly granted him supplies and soldiers for the Turkish war, on condition that under no circumstances whatever should they henceforth be called upon to contribute towards the national defence, and he was practically deprived of the control of the banderia or mounted militia. It was with a small force of mercenaries, raised at his own expense, that the young king won his first Turkish victories, and expelled the Czechs from his northern and the Habsburgs from his western provinces. But his limited resources, and, above all, the proved incapacity of the militia in the field, compelled him instantly to take in hand the vital question of army reform. In the second year of his reign he undertook personally the gigantic task of providing Hungary with an army adequate to her various needs on the model of the best military science of the day. The landless younger sons of the gentry and the Servian and Vlach immigrants provided him with excellent and practically inexhaustible military material. The old feudal levies he put aside. Brave enough personally, as soldiers they were distinctly inferior both to the Janissaries and the Hussites, with both of whom Matthias had constantly to contend. It was a trained regular army in his pay and consequently at his disposal that he wanted. The nucleus of the new army he found in the Czech mercenaries, seasoned veterans who readily transferred their services to the best payer. This force, formed in 1459, was generally known as the Fekete Sereg, or “Black Brigade,” from the colour of its armour. From 1465 the pick of the Magyars and Croatians were enlisted in the same way every year, till, towards the end of his reign, Matthias could count upon 20,000 horse and 8000 foot, besides 6000 black brigaders. The cavalry consisted of the famous Hussars, or light horse, of which he may be said to have been the creator, and the heavily armed mounted musketeers on the Czech-German model. The infantry, in like manner, was divided into light and heavy. This army was provided with a regular commissariat, cannon23 and ballistic machines, and, being constantly on active service, was always in a high state of efficiency. The land forces were supported by a river fleet consisting (in 1479) of 360 vessels, mostly sloops and corvettes, manned by 2600 sailors, generally Croats, and carrying 10,000 soldiers. Eight large military stations were also built at the chief strategic points on the Danube, Save and Theiss. These armaments, which cost Matthias 1,000,000 florins per annum, equivalent to £200,000, did not include the auxiliary troops of the hospodars of Walachia and Moldavia, or the feudal levies of the barons and prelates.

The army of Matthias was not only a military machine of first-rate efficiency, but an indispensable civilizing medium. It enabled the king to curb the lawlessness of the Magyar nobility, and explains why none of the numerous rebellions against him ever succeeded. Again and again, during his absence on the public service, the barons and prelates would assemble to compass his ruin or dispose of his crown, when, suddenly, “like a tempest,” from the depths of Silesia or of Bosnia, he would himself appear among them, confounding and scattering them, often without resistance, always without bloodshed. He also frequently employed his soldiers in collecting the taxes from the estates of those magnates who refused to contribute to the public burdens, in protecting the towns from the depredations of the robber barons, or in convoying the caravans of the merchants. In fact, they were a police force as well as an army.

Despite the enormous expense of maintaining the army, Matthias, after the first ten years of his reign, was never in want of money. This miracle was achieved by tact and management. No Hungarian king had so little trouble with the turbulent diet as Matthias. By this time the gentry, as well as the barons and prelates, took part in the legislature. But attendance at the diet was regarded by the bulk of the poorer deputies as an intolerable burden, and they frequently agreed to grant the taxes for two or three years in advance, so as to be saved the expense of attending every year. Moreover, to promote their own convenience, they readily allowed the king to assess as well as to collect the taxes, which consequently tended to become regular and permanent, while Matthias’ reform of the treasury, which was now administered by specialists with separate functions, was economically of great benefit to the state. Yet Matthias never dispensed with the diet. During the thirty-two years of his reign he held at least fifteen diets,24 at which no fewer than 450 statutes were passed. He re-codified the Hungarian common law; strictly defined the jurisdiction of the whole official hierarchy from the palatine to the humblest village judge; cheapened and accelerated legal procedure, and in an age when might was right did his utmost to protect the weak from the strong. There is not a single branch of the law which he did not simplify and amend, and the iron firmness with which he caused justice to be administered, irrespective of persons, if it exposed him to the charge of tyranny from the nobles, also won for him from the common people the epithet of “the Just.” To Matthias is also due the credit of creating an efficient official class. Merit was with him the sole qualification for advancement. One of his best generals, Pál Kinizsy, was a miller’s son, and his capable chancellor, Péter Várady, whom he made archbishop of Kálocsa, came of a family of small squires. For education so scholarly a monarch as Matthias naturally did what he could. He founded the university of Pressburg (Academia Istropolitana, 1467), revived the declining university of Pécs, and, at the time of his death, was meditating the establishment of a third university at Buda.

Unfortunately the civilizing efforts of Matthias made but little impression on society at large. The bulk of the Magyar nobility was still semi-barbaric. Immensely wealthy (it is estimated that most of the land, at this time, was in the hands of 25 great families, the Zapolyas alone holding an eighth of it), it was a point of honour with them to appear in public in costly raiment ablaze with silver, gold and precious stones, followed at every step by armies of retainers scarcely less gorgeous. At the same time their ignorance was profound. Many of the highest dignitaries of state did not know their alphabet. Signatures to documents of the period are rare; seals served instead of signatures, because most of the nobles were unable to sign their names. Learning, indeed, was often ridiculed as pedantry in a gentleman of good family.

The clergy, the chief official class, were naturally less ignorant than the gentry. Some of the prelates—notably János Csezmeczey, better known as Janus Pannonius (1433-1472)—had a European reputation for learning. The primate Cardinal, János Vitez (1408-1472), at the beginning, and the primate, Cardinal Tamas Bakócz (q.v.), at the end of the reign were men of eminent ability and the highest culture. But the moral tone of the Magyar church at this period was very low. The bishops prided themselves on being great statesmen, great scholars, great financiers, great diplomatists—anything, in fact, but good Christians. Most of them, except when actually celebrating mass, were indistinguishable alike in costume and conduct from the temporal magnates. Of twelve of them it is said that foreigners took them at first for independent temporal princes, so vast were their estates, so splendid their courts, so numerous their armed retainers. Under such guides as these the lower clergy erred deplorably, and drunkenness, gross immorality, brawling and manslaughter were common occurrences in the lives of the parish priests. The regular clergy were if possible worse than the secular, with the exception of the Paulicians, the sole religious order which steadily resisted the general corruption, of whose abbot, the saintly Gregory, was the personal friend of Matthias.

What little culture there was outside the court, the capital and the palaces of a few prelates, was to be found in the towns, most of them of German origin. Matthias laboured strenuously to develop and protect the towns, multiplied municipal charters, and materially improved the means of communication, especially in Transylvania. His Silesian and Austrian acquisitions were also very beneficial to trade, throwing open as they did the western markets to Hungarian produce. Wine and meat were the chief exports. The wines of Hungary were already renowned throughout Europe, and cattle breeding was conducted on a great scale. Of agricultural produce there was barely sufficient for home consumption, but the mining industries had reached a very high level of excellence, and iron, tin and copper were very largely exported from the northern counties to Danzig and other Baltic ports. So highly developed indeed were the Magyar methods of smelting, that Louis XI. of France took the Hungarian mining system as the model for his metallurgical reforms, and Hungarian master-miners were also in great demand at the court of Ivan the Terrible. Moreover, the keen artistic instincts of Matthias led him to embellish his cities as well as fortify them. Debreczen was practically rebuilt by him, and dates its prosperity from his reign. Breslau, his favourite town, he endowed with many fine public buildings. Buda he endeavoured to make the worthy capital of a great realm, and the palace which he built there was pronounced by the papal legates to be superior to any in Italy.

Politically Matthias raised Hungary to the rank of the greatest power in central Europe, her influence extending into Asia and Africa. Poland was restrained by his alliances with the Teutonic Knights and the tsardom of Muscovy, Power in Europe. and his envoys appeared in Persia and in Egypt to combat the diplomacy of the Porte. He never, indeed, jeopardized the position of the Moslems in Europe as his father had done, and thus the peace of Szeged (1444), which regained the line of the Danube and drove the Turk behind the Balkans, must always be reckoned as the high-water mark of Hungary’s Turkish triumphs. But Matthias at least taught the sultan to respect the territorial integrity of Hungary, and throughout his reign the Eastern Question, though often vexatious, was never acute. Only after his death did the Ottoman empire become a menace to Christendom. Besides, his hands were tied by the unappeasable enmity of the emperor and the emperor’s allies, and he could never count upon any material help from the West against the East. The age of the crusades had gone. Throughout his reign the Czechs and the Germans were every whit as dangerous to Hungary as the Turks, and the political necessity which finally compelled Matthias to partition Austria and Bohemia, in order to secure Hungary, committed him to a policy of extreme circumspection. He has sometimes been blamed for not crushing his incurably disloyal and rebellious nobles, instead of cajoling them, after the example of his contemporary, Louis XI., who laid the foundations of the greatness of France on the ruin of the vassals. But Louis XI. had a relatively civilized and politically developed middle class behind him, whereas Matthias had not. It was as much as Matthias could do to keep the civic life of Hungary from expiring altogether, and nine-tenths of his burgesses were foreigners with no political interest in the country of their adoption. Never was any dominion so purely personal, and therefore so artificial as his. His astounding energy and resource curbed all his enemies during his lifetime, but they were content to wait patiently for his death, well aware that the collapse of his empire would immediately follow.

All that human foresight could devise for the consolidation and perpetuation of the newly established Hungarian empire had been done by Matthias in the last years of his reign. He had designated as his successor his natural son, Period of decline. the highly gifted János (John) Corvinus, a youth of seventeen. He had raised him to princely rank, endowed him with property which made him the greatest territorial magnate in the kingdom, placed in his hands the sacred crown and half-a-dozen of the strongest fortresses, and won over to his cause the majority of the royal council. How János was cajoled out of an almost impregnable position, and gradually reduced to insignificance, is told elsewhere (see Corvinus, János). The nobles Wladislaus II. and prelates, who detested the severe and strenuous Matthian system, desired, as they expressed it, “a king whose beard they could hold in their fists,” and they found a monarch after their own heart in Wladislaus Jagiello, since 1471 king of Bohemia, who as Wladislaus II. was elected unanimously king of Hungary on the 15th of July 1490. Wladislaus was the personification of helpless inertia. His Bohemian subjects had long since dubbed him “King All Right” because he said yes to everything. As king of Hungary he was, from first to last, the puppet of the Magyar oligarchs, who proceeded to abolish all the royal prerogatives and safeguards which had galled them under Matthias. By the compact of Farkashida (1490) Wladislaus not only confirmed all the Matthian privileges, but also repealed all the Matthian novelties, including the system of taxation which had enabled his predecessor to keep on foot an adequate national army. The virtual suppression of Wladislaus was completed at the diet of 1492, when “King All Right” consented to live on the receipts of the treasury, which were barely sufficient to maintain his court, and engaged never to impose any new taxes on his Magyar subjects. The dissolution of the standing army, including the Black Brigade, was the immediate result of these decrees. Thus, at the very time when the modernization of the means of national defence had become the first principle, in every other part of Europe, of the strongly centralized monarchies which were rising on the ruins of feudalism, the Hungarian magnates deliberately plunged their country back into the chaos of medievalism. The same diet which destroyed the national armaments and depleted the exchequer confirmed the disgraceful peace of Pressburg, concluded between Wladislaus and the emperor Maximilian on the 7th of November 1491, whereby Hungary retroceded all the Austrian conquests of Matthias, together with a long strip of Magyar territory, and paid a war indemnity equivalent to £200,000.

The thirty-six years which elapsed between the accession of Wladislaus II. and the battle of Mohács is the most melancholy and discreditable period of Hungarian history. Like Poland two centuries later, Hungary had ceased to be a civilized autonomous state because her prelates and her magnates, uncontrolled by any higher authority, and too ignorant or corrupt to look beyond their own immediate interests, abandoned themselves to the exclusive enjoyment of their inordinate privileges, while openly repudiating their primal obligation of defending the state against extraneous enemies. During these miserable years everything like patriotism or public spirit seems to have died out of the hearts of the Hungarian aristocracy. The great officers of state acted habitually on the principle that might is right. Stephen Bathóry, voivode of Transylvania and count of the Szeklers, for instance, ruled Transylvania like a Turkish pasha, and threatened to behead all who dared to complain of his exactions; “Stinking carrion,” he said, was better than living Szeklers. Thousands of Transylvanian gentlemen emigrated to Turkey to get out of his reach. Other great nobles were at perpetual feud with the towns whose wealth they coveted. Thus the Zapolyas, in 1500 and again in 1507, burnt a large part of Breznóbánya and Beszterczebánya, two of the chief industrial towns of north Hungary. Kronstadt, now the sole flourishing trade centre in the kingdom, defended itself with hired mercenaries against the robber barons. Everywhere the civic communities were declining; even Buda and Pressburg were half in ruins. In their misery the cities frequently appealed for protection to the emperor and other foreign potentates, as no redress was attainable at home. Compared even with the contemporary Polish diet the Hungarian national assembly was a tumultuous mob. The diet of 1497 passed most of its time in constructing, and then battering to pieces with axes and hammers, a huge wooden image representing the ministers of the crown, who were corrupt enough, but immovable, since they regularly appeared at the diet with thousands of retainers armed to the teeth, and openly derided the reforming endeavours of the lower gentry, who perceived that something was seriously wrong, yet were powerless to remedy it. All that the gentry could do was to depress the lower orders, and this they did at every opportunity. Thus, many of the towns, notably Visegrád, were deprived of the charters granted to them by Matthias, and a whole series of anti-civic ordinances were passed. Noblemen dwelling within the walls of the towns were especially exempted from all civic burdens, while every burgess who bought an extra-mural estate was made to pay double for the privilege.25 Every nobleman had the right to engage in trade toll-free, to the great detriment of their competitors the burgesses. The peasant class suffered most of all. In 1496 Varady, archbishop of Kalocsa, one of the few good prelates, declared that their lot was worse than that of brute beasts. The whole burden of taxation rested on their shoulders, and so ground down were they by ingeniously multiplied exactions, that thousands of them were reduced to literal beggary.

Yet, despite this inward rottenness, Hungary, for nearly twenty years after the death of Matthias, enjoyed an undeserved prestige abroad, due entirely to the reputation which that great monarch had won for her. Circumstances, indeed, were especially favourable. The emperor Maximilian was so absorbed by German affairs, that he could do her little harm, and under Bayezid II. and Selim I. the Turkish menace gave little anxiety to the court of Buda, Bayezid being no warrior, while Selim’s energies were claimed exclusively by the East, so that he was glad to renew the triennial truce with Hungary as often as it expired. Hungary, therefore, for almost the first time in her history, was free to choose a foreign policy of her own, and had she been guided by a patriot, she might now have easily regained Dalmatia, and acquired besides a considerable seaboard. Unfortunately Tamás Bakócz, her leading diplomatist from 1499 to 1521, was as much an egotist as the other magnates, and he sacrificed the political interests of Hungary entirely to personal considerations. Primate of Hungary since 1497, he coveted the popedom—and the red hat as the first step thereto above all things,—and looked mainly to Venetian influence for both. He therefore supported Venice against her enemies, refused to enter the League of Cambray in 1508, and concluded a ten years’ alliance with the Signoria, which obliged Hungary to defend Venetian territory without any equivalent gain. Less reprehensible, though equally self-seeking, were his dealings with the emperor, which aimed at a family alliance between the Jagiellos and the Habsburgs on the basis of a double marriage between the son and daughter of Wladislaus, Louis and Anne, and an Austrian archduke and archduchess; this was concluded by the family congress at Vienna, July 22, 1515, to which Sigismund I. of Poland, the brother of Wladislaus, acceded. The Hungarian diet frantically opposed every Austrian alliance as endangering the national independence, but to any unprejudiced observer a union with the house of Habsburg, even with the contingent probability of a Habsburg king, was infinitely preferable to the condition into which Hungary, under native aristocratic misrule, was swiftly drifting. The diet itself had become as much a nullity as the king, and its decrees were systematically disregarded. Still more pitiable was the condition of the court. The penury of Wladislaus II. was by this time so extreme, that he owed his very meals to the charity of his servants. The diet, indeed, voted him aids and subsidies, but the great nobles either forbade their collection within their estates, or confiscated the amount collected. Under the circumstances, we cannot wonder if the frontier fortresses fell to pieces, and the border troops, unpaid for years, took to brigandage.

The last reserves of the national wealth and strength were dissipated by the terrible peasant rising of György Dozsa (q.v.) in 1514, of which the enslavement of the Hungarian peasantry was the immediate consequence. The Peasant Rising, 1514. “Savage Diet” which assembled on the 18th of October the same year, to punish the rebels and restore order, well deserved its name. Sixty-two of its seventy-one enactments were directed against the peasants, who were henceforth bound to the soil and committed absolutely into the hands of “their natural lords.” To this vindictive legislation, which converted the labouring population into a sullenly hostile force within the state, it is mainly due that a healthy political life in Hungary became henceforth impossible. The same The Tripartitum. spirit of hostility to the peasantry breathed through the famous condification of the Hungarian customary law known as the Tripartitum, which, though never actually formally passed into law, continued until 1845 to be the only document defining the relations of king and people, of nobles and their peasants, and of Hungary and her dependent states.26

Wladislaus II. died on the 13th of March 1516, two years after the “Savage Diet,” the ferocity of whose decrees he had feebly endeavoured to mitigate, leaving his two kingdoms to his son Louis, a child of ten, who was Subjection by the Turks. pronounced of age in order that his foreign guardians, the emperor Maximilian and Sigismund of Poland, might be dispensed with. The government remained in the hands of Cardinal Bakócz till his death in 1521, when the supreme authority at court was disputed between the lame palatine István Báthory, and his rival, the eminent jurist and orator István Verböczy (q.v.),—both of them incompetent, unprincipled place-hunters,—while, in the background lurked János Zapolya (see John (Zapolya), King of Hungary), voivode of Transylvania, patiently waiting till the death of the feeble and childless king (who, in 1522, married Maria of Austria) should open for him a way to the throne. Every one felt that a catastrophe was approaching. “Things cannot go on like this much longer,” wrote the Venetian ambassador to his government. The war of each against all continued; no taxes could be collected; the holders of the royal domains refused to surrender them at the command of the diet; and the boy king had very often neither clothes to wear nor food to eat. The whole atmosphere of society was one of rapine and corruption, and only on the frontier a few self-sacrificing patriots like the ban-bishop, Peter Biriszlo, the last of Matthias’s veterans, and his successor the saintly Pál Tomori, archbishop of Kalocsa, showed, in their ceaseless war against the predatory Turkish bands, that the ancient Magyar valour was not yet wholly extinct. But the number of the righteous men was too few to save the state. The first blow fell in 1521, when Sultan Suleiman appeared before the southern fortresses of Sabác and Belgrade, both of which fell into his hands during the course of the year. After this Venice openly declared that Hungary was no longer worth the saving. Yet the coup de grâce was postponed for another five years, during which time Suleiman was occupied with the conquest of Egypt and the siege of Rhodes. The Magyars fancied they were safe from attack, because the final assault was suspended; and everything went on in the old haphazard way. Every obstacle was opposed to the collection of the taxes which had been voted to put the kingdom in a state of defence. “If this realm could be saved at the expense of three florins,” exclaimed the papal envoy, Antonio Burgio, “there is not a man here willing to make the sacrifice.” Only on the southern frontier did Archbishop Tomori painfully assemble a fresh army and fleet, and succeed, by incredible efforts, in constructing at Péterwardein, on the right bank of the Danube, a new fortress which served him as a refuge and sally post in his interminable guerilla war with the Turks.

In the spring of 1526 came the tidings that Sultan Suleiman had quitted Constantinople, at the head of a countless host, to conquer Hungary. On the 28th of July Péterwardein, after a valiant resistance, was blown into the air. The diet, which met at Buda in hot haste, proclaimed the young king27 dictator, granted him unlimited subsidies which there was no time to collect, and ordered a levée en masse of the entire male population, which could not possibly assemble within the given time. Louis at once formed a camp at Tolna, whence he issued despairing summonses to the lieges, and, by the middle of August, some 25,000 ill-equipped gentlemen had gathered around him. With these he marched southwards to the plain of Mohács, where, on the 29th of August, the Hungarians, after a two hours’ fight, were annihilated, the king, both the archbishops, five bishops and 24,000 men perishing on the field. The sultan refused to believe that the pitiful array he had so easily overcome could be the national army of Hungary. Advancing with extreme caution, he occupied Buda on the 12th of September, but speedily returned to his own dominions, carrying off with him 105,000 captives, and an amount of spoil which filled the bazaars of the East for months to come. By the end of October the last Turkish regular had quitted Magyar soil, and, to use the words of a contemporary observer, one quarter of Hungary was as utterly destroyed as if a flood had passed over it.

The Turks had no sooner quitted the land than John Zapolya, voivode of Transylvania, assembled a diet at Tokaj (Oct. 14, 1526) at which the towns were represented as well as John Zapolya elected King. the counties. The tone of the assembly being violently anti-German, and John being the only conceivable national candidate, his election was a matter of course; but his misgivings were so great that it was not till the beginning of November that he very reluctantly allowed himself to be crowned at a second diet, held at Székesfehérvár. By this time a competitor had entered the field. This was the archduke Ferdinand, who claimed the Hungarian crown by right of Ferdinand of Austria elected. inheritance in the name of his wife, Anne, sister of the late king. Ferdinand was elected (Dec. 16) by a scratch assembly consisting of deputies from Croatia and the towns of Pressburg and Sopron; but he speedily improved his position in the course of 1527, by driving King John first from Buda and then from Hungary. In November the same year he was elected and crowned by a properly constituted diet at Székesfehérvár (Stuhlweissenburg). In 1529 Zapolya was reinstated in Buda by Suleiman the Magnificent in person, who, at this period, preferred setting up a Rival kings. rival to “the king of Vienna” to conquering Hungary outright. Thus the Magyars were saddled with two rival kings with equally valid titles, which proved an even worse disaster than the Mohács catastrophe; for in most of the counties of the unhappy kingdom desperadoes of every description plundered the estates of the gentry, and oppressed the common people, under the pretext that they were fighting the battles of the contending monarchs. The determination of Ferdinand to partition Hungary rather than drive the Turks out, which he might easily have done after Suleiman’s unsuccessful attempts on Vienna in 1529-1530, led to a prolongation of the struggle till the 24th of February 1538, when, by the secret peace of Nagyvárad,28 Hungary was divided between the two competitors. By this treaty Ferdinand retained Croatia-Slavonia and the five western counties with Pressburg and Esztergom (Gran), while Zapolya kept the remaining two-thirds with the royal title. He was indeed the last national king of Hungary till modern times. His court at Buda was maintained according to the ancient traditions, and his gyüles, at which 67 of the 73 counties were generally represented, was the true national diet, the phantom assembly occasionally convened at Pressburg by Ferdinand scarcely deserving the title. Indeed, Ferdinand regarded his narrow strip of Hungarian territory as simply a barrier behind which he could better defend the hereditary states. During the last six years (1534-1540) of John’s reign, his kingdom, beneath the guidance of the Paulician monk, Frater György, or George Martinuzzi (q.v.), the last great statesman of old Hungary, enjoyed a stability and prosperity marvellous in the difficult circumstances of the period, Martinuzzi holding the balance exactly between the emperor and the Porte with astounding diplomatic dexterity, and at the same time introducing several important domestic reforms. Zapolya died on the 18th of July 1540, whereupon the estates of Hungary elected his baby son John Sigismund king, in direct violation of the peace of Grosswardein which had formally acknowledged Ferdinand as John’s successor, whether he left male issue or not. Ferdinand at once asserted his rights by force of arms, and attacked Buda in May 1541, despite the urgent remonstrances of Martinuzzi, who knew that the Turk would never suffer the emperor to reign at Buda. His fears were instantly justified. In August 1541, Suleiman, at the head of a vast army, invaded Hungary, and on the 30th of August, Buda was in his hands. During the six following years the sultan still further improved his position, capturing, amongst many other places, Pécs, and the primatial city of Esztergom; but, in 1547, the exigencies Partition of Hungary. of the Persian war induced him to sell a truce of five years to Ferdinand for £100,000, on a uti possidetis basis, Ferdinand holding thirty-five counties (including Croatia and Slavonia) for which he was to pay an annual tribute of £60,000; John Sigismund retaining Transylvania and sixteen adjacent counties with the title of prince, while the rest of the land, comprising most of the central counties, was annexed to the Turkish empire. Thus the ancient kingdom was divided into three separate states with divergent aims and interests, a condition of things which, with frequent rearrangements, continued for more than 150 years.

A period of infinite confusion and extreme misery now ensued, of which only the salient points can here be noted. The attempts of the Habsburgs to conquer Transylvania drew down upon them two fresh Turkish invasions, the first in Siege of Szigetvár. 1552, when the sultan’s generals captured Temesvár and fifty-four lesser forts or fortresses, and the second in 1566, memorable as Suleiman’s last descent upon Hungary, and also for the heroic defence of Szigetvár by Miklós Zrinyi (q.v.), one of the classical sieges of history. The truce of Adrianople in 1568, nominally for eight years, but prolonged from time to time till 1593, finally suspended regular hostilities, and introduced the epoch known as “The Long Peace,” though, throughout these twenty-five years, the guerilla warfare on the frontier never ceased for more than a few months at a time, and the relations between the Habsburgs and Transylvania were persistently hostile.

Probably no other country ever suffered so much from its rulers as Hungary suffered during the second half of the 16th century. This was due partly to political and partly to religious causes. To begin with, there can be no doubt that from 1558, when the German imperial crown was transferred from the Spanish to the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family, royal Hungary29 was regarded by the emperors as an insignificant barrier province yielding far more trouble than profit. The visible signs of this contemptuous point of view were (1) the suspension of the august dignity of palatine, which, after the death of Tamás Nádasdy, “the great palatine,” in 1562, was left vacant for many years; (2) the abolition or attenuation of all the ancient Hungarian court dignitaries; (3) the degradation of the capital, Pressburg, into a mere provincial town; and (4) the more and more openly expressed determination to govern Hungary from Vienna by means of foreigners, principally German or Czech. During the reign of Ferdinand, whose consort, Anne, was a Hungarian princess, things were at least tolerable; but under Maximilian (1564-1576) and Rudolph (1576-1612) the antagonism of the Habsburgs towards their Magyar subjects was only too apparent. The diet, which had the power of the purse, could not be absolutely dispensed with; but it was summoned as seldom as possible, the king often preferring to forego his subsidies rather than listen to the unanswerable remonstrances of the estates against the illegalities of his government. In the days of the semi-insane recluse Rudolph things went from bad to worse. The Magyar nobles were now systematically spoliated on trumped-up charges of treason; hundreds of them were ruined. At last they either durst not attend the diet, or “sat like dumb dogs” during its session, allowing the king to alter and interpret the statutes at his good pleasure. Presently religious was superadded to political persecution.

The Reformation had at first produced little effect on Hungary. Except in the towns, mostly of German origin, it was generally detested, just because it came from Germany. The battle of Mohács, however, severely shook the faith Effect of Reformation. of the Hungarians. “Where are the old Magyar saints? Why do they not defend the realm against the Turks?” was the general cry. Moreover, the corrupt church had lost its hold on the affections of the people. Zapolya, a devout Catholic, is lauded by Archbishop Frangipan in 1533 for arresting the spread of the new doctrines, though he would not allow Martinuzzi to take the extreme step of burning perverts at the stake. These perverts were mostly to be found among nobles desirous of amassing church property, or among those of the clergy who clamoured for communion in both kinds. So long, however, as the old national kingdom survived, the majority of the people still clung to the old faith. Under Ferdinand the parochial clergy were tempted to become Lutherans by the prospect of matrimony, and, in reply to the remonstrances of their bishops, declared that they would rather give up their cures than their wives. In Transylvania matters were at first ordered more peaceably. In 1552 the new doctrines obtained complete recognition there, the diet of Torda (1557) going so far as to permit every one to worship in his own way so long as he did not molest his neighbour. Yet, in the following year, the whole of the property of the Catholic Church there was diverted to secular uses, and the Calvinists were simultaneously banished, though they regained complete tolerance in 1564, a privilege at the same time extended to the Unitarians, who were now very influential at court and converted Prince John Sigismund to their views. In Turkish Hungary all the confessions enjoyed liberty of worship, though the Catholics, as possible partisans of the “king of Vienna,” were liked the least. It was only when the Jesuits obtained a footing both at Prague30 and Klausenburg that persecution began, but then it was very violent. In Transylvania the princes of the Báthory family (1571-1604) were ardent disciples of the Jesuit fathers, and Sigismund Báthory in particular persecuted fiercely, his fury being especially directed against the queer judaizing sect known as the Sabbatarians, whose tenets were adopted by the Szeklers, the most savage of “the three nations” of Transylvania, many thousands of whom were, after a bloody struggle, forced to emigrate. In royal Hungary also the Jesuits were the chief persecutors. The extirpation of Protestantism was a deliberate prearranged programme, and as Protestantism was by this time identical with Magyarism31 the extirpation of the one was tantamount to the extirpation of the other. The method generally adopted was to deprive the preachers in the towns of their churches by force, Italian mercenaries being preferably employed for the purpose. It was assumed that the Protestant nobles’ jealousy of the burgesses would prevent them from interfering; but religious sympathy proved stronger than caste prejudice, and the diets protested against the persecution of their fellow citizens so vehemently that religious matters were withdrawn from their jurisdiction.

This persecution raged most fiercely towards the end of what is generally called “The Long War,” which began in 1593, and lasted till 1606. It was a confused four-cornered struggle between the emperor and the Turks, the The “Long War.” Turks and Transylvania, Michael of Moldavia and Transylvania, and Transylvania and the emperor, desultory and languishing as regards the Turks (the one notable battle being Sigismund Báthory’s brilliant victory over the grand vizier in Walachia in 1595, when the Magyar army penetrated as far as Giurgevo), but very bitter as between the emperor and Transylvania, the principality being finally subdued by the imperial general, George Basta, in August 1604. A reign of terror ensued, during which the unfortunate principality was well-nigh ruined. Basta was authorized to Germanize and Catholicize without delay, and he began by dividing the property of most of the nobles among his officers, appropriating the lion’s share himself. In royal Hungary the same object was aimed at by innumerable indictments against the richer landowners, indictments supported by false title-deeds and carried through by forged or purchased judgments of the courts. At last the estates of even the most devoted adherents of the Habsburgs were not safe, and some of them, like the wealthy István Illesházy (1540-1609), had to fly abroad to save their heads. Fortunately a peculiarly shameless attempt to blackmail Stephen Bocskay, a rich and Stephen Bocskay. powerful Transylvanian nobleman, converted a long-suffering friend of the emperor into a national deliverer. Bocskay (q.v.), a quiet but resolute man, having once made up his mind to rebel, never paused till he had established satisfactory relations between the Austrian court and the Hungarians. The two great achievements of his brief reign (he was elected prince of Transylvania on the 5th of April 1605, and died on the 29th of December 1606) were the peace of Vienna (June 23, 1606) and the truce of Zsitvatörök (November 1606). By the peace of Vienna, Bocskay obtained religious liberty and political autonomy, the restoration of all confiscated estates, the repeal of all unrighteous judgments and a complete retrospective amnesty for all the Magyars in royal Hungary, besides his own recognition as independent sovereign prince of an enlarged32 Transylvania. This treaty is remarkable as being the first constitutional compact between the ruling dynasty and the Hungarian nation. Almost equally important was the twenty years’ truce of Zsitvatörök, negotiated by Bocskay between the emperor and the sultan, which established for the first time a working equilibrium between the three parts of Hungary, with a distinct political preponderance in favour of Transylvania. Of the 5163 sq. m. of Hungarian territory, Transylvania now possessed 2082, Turkish Hungary 1859, and royal Hungary only 1222. The emperor, on the other hand, was freed from the humiliating annual tribute to the Porte on payment of a war indemnity of £400,000. The position of royal Hungary was still further improved when the popular and patriotic Archduke Matthias was elected king of Hungary on the 16th of November 1608. He had previously confirmed the treaty of Vienna, and the day after his election he appointed Illesházy, now reinstated in all his possessions and dignities, palatine of Hungary.33 In Transylvania, meantime, Gabriel Bathóry had been elected (Nov. 11, 1608) in place of the decrepit Sigismund Rákoczy, Bocskay’s immediate successor.

For more than fifty years after the peace of Vienna the principality of Transylvania continued to be the bulwark of the liberties of the Magyars. It owed its ascendancy in the first place to the abilities of the two princes who Transylvanian Hegemony. ruled it from 1613 to 1648. The first and most famous of these rulers was Gabriel Bethlen (q.v.), who reigned from 1613 to 1629, perpetually thwarted all the efforts of the emperor to oppress or circumvent his Hungarian subjects, and won some reputation abroad by adroitly pretending to champion the Protestant cause. Three times he waged war on the emperor, twice he was proclaimed king of Hungary, and by the peace of Nikolsburg (Dec. 31, 1621) he obtained for the Protestants a confirmation of the treaty of Vienna, and for himself seven additional counties in northern Hungary besides other substantial advantages. Bethlen’s successor, George I. Rákoczy, was equally successful. His principal achievement was the peace of Linz (Sept. 16, 1645), the last political triumph of Hungarian Protestantism, whereby the emperor was forced to confirm once more the oft-broken articles of the peace of Vienna, to restore nearly a hundred churches to the sects and to acknowledge the sway of Rákoczy over the north Hungarian counties. Gabriel Bethlen and George I. Rákoczy also did much for education and civilization generally, and their era has justly been called the golden era of Transylvania. They lavished money on the embellishment of their capital, Gyulafehérvár, which became a sort of Protestant Mecca, whither scholars and divines of every anti-Roman denomination flocked to bask in the favour of princes who were as liberal as they were pious. Yet both Bethlen and Rákoczy owed far more to favourable circumstances than to their own cunning. Their reigns synchronized with the Thirty Years’ War, during which the emperors were never in a position seriously to withstand the attacks of the malcontent Magyars, the vast majority of whom were still Protestants, who naturally looked upon the Transylvanian princes as their protectors and joined them in thousands whenever they raided Moravia or Lower Austria, or threatened to advance upon Vienna. In all these risings no battle of importance was fought. Generally speaking, the Transylvanians had only to appear, to have their demands promptly complied with; for these marauders had to be bought off because the emperor had more pressing business elsewhere. Yet their military efficiency must have been small, for their allies the Swedes invariably allude to them as wild and ragged semi-barbarians.

Another fortunate accident which favoured the hegemony of Transylvania was the temporary collapse of Hungary’s most formidable adversary, the Turk. From the peace of Zsitvatörök (1606) to the ninth year of the reign of Turkish conflict. George Rákoczy II., who succeeded his father in 1648, the Turkish empire, misruled by a series of incompetent sultans and distracted by internal dissensions, was unable to intervene in Hungarian politics. But in the autumn of 1656 a great statesman, Mahommed Kuprili (q.v.), obtained the supreme control of affairs at Constantinople, and all Europe instantly felt the pressure of the Turk once more. It was George Rákoczy II. (q.v.) who gave the new grand vizier a pretext for interference. Against the advice of all his counsellors, and without the knowledge of the estates, Rákoczy, in 1657, plunged into the troubled sea of Polish politics, in the hope of winning the Polish throne, and not only failed miserably but overwhelmed Transylvania in his own ruin. Kuprili, who had forbidden the Polish enterprise, at once occupied Transylvania, and, in the course of the next five years, no fewer than four princes, three of whom died violent deaths, were forced to accept the kaftan and kalpag of investiture in the camp of the grand vizier. When, at the end of 1661, a more stable administration was set up with Michael Apaffy (1661-1690) as prince, Transylvania had descended to the rank of a feudatory of the Turkish empire. On the death of Mahommed Kuprili (Oct. 11, 1661) his son Fazil Ahmed succeeded him as grand vizier, and pursued his father’s policy with equal genius and determination. In 1663 he invaded royal Hungary, with the intention of uniting all the Magyars against the emperor, but, the Magyars steadily refusing to attend any diet summoned under Turkish influence, his plan fell through, and his only notable military success was the capture of the fortress of Érsekujvár (Neuhäusel). In the following year, thanks to the generalship and heroism of Miklós Zrinyi the younger (q.v.), Peace of Vasvár, 1664. Kuprili was still less successful. Zrinyi captured fortress after fortress, and interrupted the Turkish communications by destroying the famous bridge of Esseg, while Montecuculi defeated the grand vizier at the battle of St Gothard (Aug. 1, 1664). Yet, despite these reverses, Kuprili’s superior diplomacy enabled him, at the peace of Vasvár (Aug. 10, 1664) to obtain terms which should only have been conceded to a conqueror. The fortress of Érsekujvár and surrounding territory were now ceded to the Turks, with the result that royal Hungary was not only still further diminished, but its northern practically separated from its southern portion. On the other hand the treaty of Vasvár gave Hungary a respite from regular Turkish invasions for twenty years, though the border raiding continued uninterruptedly.

Of far more political importance than these fluctuating wars of invasion and conquest was the simultaneous Catholic reaction in Hungary. The movement may be said to have begun Catholic reaction. about 1601, when the great Jesuit preacher and controversialist, Péter Pázmány (q.v.), first devoted himself to the task of reconverting his countrymen. Progress was necessarily retarded by the influence of the independent Protestant princes of Transylvania in the northern counties of Hungary. Even as late as 1622 the Protestants at the diet of Pressburg were strong enough to elect their candidate, Szaniszló Thurzó, palatine. But Thurzó was the last Protestant palatine, and, on his death, the Catholics, at the diet of Sopron (1625), where they dominated the Upper Chamber, and had a large minority in the Lower, were able to elect Count Miklós Esterházy in Thurzó’s stead. The Jesuit programme in Hungary was the same as it had been in Poland a generation earlier, and may be summed up thus: convert the great families and all the rest will follow.34 Their success, due partly to their whole-hearted zeal, and partly to their superior educational Pázmány’s work. system, was extraordinary; and they possessed the additional advantage of having in Pázmány a leader of commanding genius. During his primacy (1616-1637), when he had the whole influence of the court, and the sympathy and the assistance of the Catholic world behind him, he put the finishing touches to his life’s labour by founding a great Catholic university at Nagyszombát (1635), and publishing a Hungarian translation of the Bible to counteract the influence of Gaspar Károli’s widely spread Protestant version. Pázmány was certainly the great civilizing factor of Hungary in the seventeenth century, and indirectly he did as much for the native language as for the native church. His successors had only to build on his foundations. One most striking instance of how completely he changed the current of the national mind may here be given. From 1526 to 1625 the usual jubilee pilgrimages from Hungary to Rome had entirely ceased. During his primacy they were revived, and in 1650, only seventeen years after his death, they were as numerous as ever they had been. Five years later there remained but four noble Protestant families in royal Hungary. The Catholicization of the land was complete.

Unfortunately the court of Vienna was not content with winning back the Magyars to the Church. The Habsburg kings were as jealous of the political as of the religious liberties of their Hungarian subjects. This was partly Habsburg repression. owing to the fact that national aspirations of any sort were contrary to the imperial system, which claimed to rule by right divine, and partly to an inveterate distrust of the Magyars, who were regarded at court as rebels by nature, and therefore as enemies far more troublesome than the Turks. The conduct of the Hungarian nobles in the past, indeed, somewhat justified this estimate, for the fall of the ancient monarchy was entirely due to their persistent disregard of authority, to their refusal to bear their share of the public burdens. They were now to suffer severely for their past misdoings, but unfortunately the innocent nation was forced to suffer with them. Throughout the latter part of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, the Hungarian gentry underwent a cruel discipline at the hands of their Habsburg kings. Their privileges were overridden, their petitions were disregarded, their diets were degraded into mere registries of the royal decrees. They were never fairly represented in the royal council, they were excluded as far as possible from commands in Hungarian regiments, and were treated, generally, as the members of an inferior and guilty race. This era of repression corresponds roughly with the reign of Leopold I. (1657-1705), who left the government of the country to two bigoted Magyar prelates, György Szelepesényi (1595-1685) and Lipót (Leopold) Kollonich (1631-1707), whose domination represents the high-water mark of the anti-national regimen. The stupid and abortive conspiracy of Peter Zrinyi and three other magnates, who were publicly executed (April 30, 1671), was followed by wholesale arrests and confiscations, and for a time the legal government of Hungary was superseded (Patent of March 3, 1673) by a committee of eight persons, four Magyars and four Germans, presided over by a German governor; but the most influential person in this committee was Bishop Kollonich, of whom it was said that, while Pázmány hated the heretic in the Magyar, Kollonich hated the Magyar in the heretic. A gigantic process against leading Protestant ministers for alleged conspiracy was the first act of this committee. It began at Pressburg in March 1674, when 236 of the ministers were “converted” or confessed to acts of rebellion. But the remaining 93 stood firm and were condemned to death, a punishment commuted to slavery in the Neapolitan galleys. Sweden, as one of the guarantors of the peace of Westphalia, and several north German states, protested against the injury thus done to their coreligionists. It was replied that Hungary was outside the operation of the treaty of Westphalia, and that the Protestants had been condemned not ex odio religionis but crimine rebellionis.

But a high-spirited nation cannot be extinguished by any number of patents and persecutions. So long as the Magyar people had any life left, it was bound to fight in self-defence, it was bound to produce “malcontents” Hungarian resistance. who looked abroad for help to the enemies of the house of Habsburg. The first and most famous of the malcontent leaders was Count Imre Tököli (q.v.). Between 1678 and 1682 Tököli waged three wars with Leopold, and, in September 1682, was acknowledged both by the emperor and the sultan as prince of North Hungary as far as the river Garam, to the great relief of the Magyar Protestants. The success of Tököli rekindled the martial ardour of the Turks, and a war party, under the grand vizier Kara Mustafa, determined to wrest from Leopold his twelve remaining Hungarian counties, gained the ascendancy at Constantinople in the course of 1682. Leopold, intent on the doings of his perennial rival Louis XIV., was loth to engage in an eastern war even for the liberation of Hungary, which he regarded as of far less importance than a strip or two of German territory on the Rhine. But, stimulated by the representations of Pope Innocent XI., who, well aware of the internal weakness of the Turk, was bent upon forming a Holy League to drive them out of Europe, and alarmed, besides, by the danger of Vienna and the hereditary states, Leopold reluctantly contracted an alliance with John III. of Poland, and gave the command of the army which, mainly through the efforts of the pope he had been able to assemble, to Prince Charles of Lorraine. The war, which lasted for 16 years and put an end to the Turkish dominion in Hungary, began with the world-renowned siege of Vienna (July 14-Sept. 12, 1683). There is no need to recount the oft-told victories of Sobieski (see John III. Sobieski, King of Poland). What is not quite so generally known is the fact that Leopold slackened at once and would have been quite content with the results of these earlier victories had not the pope stiffened his resistance by forming a Holy League between the Emperor, Poland, Venice, Muscovy and the papacy, with the avowed object of dealing the Turk the coup de grâce (March 5, 1684). This statesmanlike persistence was rewarded by an uninterrupted series of triumphs, culminating in the recapture of Buda (1686) and Belgrade (1688), and the recovery of Bosnia (1689). But, in 1690, the third of the famous Kuprilis, Mustafa, brother of Fazil Ahmed, became grand vizier, and the Turk, still further encouraged by the death of Innocent XI., rallied once more. In the course of that year Kuprili regained Servia and Bulgaria, placed Tököli on the throne of Transylvania, and on the 6th of October took Belgrade Liberation from the Turks. by assault. Once more the road to Vienna lay open, but the grand vizier wasted the remainder of the year in fortifying Belgrade, and on August 18th, 1691, he was defeated and slain at Slankamen by the margrave of Baden. For the next six years the war languished owing to the timidity of the emperor, the incompetence of his generals and the exhaustion of the Porte; but on the 11th of September 1697 Prince Eugene of Savoy routed the Turks at Zenta and on the 13th of November 1698 a peace-congress was opened at Karlowitz which resulted in the peace of that name (Jan. 26, 1699). Nominally a truce for 25 years on the uti possidetis basis, Peace of Karlowitz. the peace of Karlowitz left in the emperor’s hands the whole of Hungary except Syrmia and the territory lying between the rivers Maros, Theiss, Danube and the mountains of Transylvania, the so-called Temesköz, or about one-eleventh of the modern kingdom. The peace of Karlowitz marks the term of the Magyar’s secular struggle with Mahommedanism and finally reunited her long-separated provinces beneath a common sceptre.

But the liberation of Hungary from the Turks brought no relief to the Hungarians. The ruthless suppression of the Magyar malcontents, in which there was little discrimination between the innocent and the guilty, had so crushed the spirit of the country that Leopold considered the time ripe for realizing a long-cherished ideal of the Habsburgs and changing Hungary from an elective into an hereditary monarchy. For this purpose a diet was assembled at Pressburg in the autumn of 1687. It was a mere rump, for wholesale executions had thinned its numbers and the reconquered countries were not represented in it. To this weakened and terrorized assembly the emperor-king explained that he had the right to treat Hungary as a conquered country, but that he was prepared to confirm its constitutional liberties under three conditions: the inaugural diploma was to be in the form signed by Ferdinand I., the crown was to be declared hereditary in the house of Habsburg, and the 31st clause of the Golden Bull, authorizing armed resistance to unconstitutional acts of the sovereign, was to be abrogated. These conditions the diet had no choice but to accept, and, in October 1687, the elective monarchy of Hungary, which had been in existence for nearly seven hundred years, ceased to exist. The immediate effect of the peace of Karlowitz was thus only to strengthen despotism in Hungary. Kollonich, who had been created a cardinal in 1685, archbishop of Kalocsa in 1691 and archbishop of Esztergom (Gran) and primate of Hungary in 1695, was now at the head of affairs, and his plan was to germanize Hungary as speedily as possible by promoting a wholesale immigration into the recovered provinces, all of which were in a terrible state of dilapidation.35

The border counties, now formed into a military zone, were planted exclusively with Croatian colonists as being more trustworthy defenders of the Hungarian frontier than the Hungarians themselves. Moreover, a neo-acquisita commissio was constituted to inquire into the title-deeds of the Magyar landowners in the old Turkish provinces, and hundreds of estates were transferred, on the flimsiest of pretexts, to naturalized foreigners. Transylvania since 1690 had been administered from Vienna, and though the farce of assembling a diet there was still kept up, even the promise of religious liberty, conceded to it on its surrender in 1687, was not kept. No wonder then if the whole country was now seething with discontent and only Francis Rakóczy. awaiting an opportunity to burst forth in open rebellion. This opportunity came when the emperor, involved in the War of the Spanish Succession, withdrew all his troops from Hungary except some 1600 men. In 1703 the malcontents found a leader in Francis Rakóczy II. (q.v.), who was elected prince by the Hungarian estates on the 6th of July 1704, and during the next six years gave the emperor Joseph I., who had succeeded Leopold in May 1705, considerable anxiety. Rakóczy had often as many as 100,000 men under him, and his bands penetrated as far as Moravia and even approached within a few miles of Vienna. But they were guerillas, not regulars; they had no good officers, no serviceable artillery, and very little money; and all the foreign powers to whom Rakóczy turned for assistance (excepting France, who fed them occasionally with paltry subsidies) would not commit themselves to a formal alliance with rebels who were defeated in every pitched battle they fought. On the other hand, if the Rakóczians were easily dispersed, they as quickly reassembled, and at one time they held all Transylvania and the greater part of Hungary. In the course of 1707 two Rakóczian diets even went so far as formally to depose the Habsburgs and form an interim government with Rakóczy at its head, till a national king could be legally elected. The Maritime Powers, too, fearful lest Louis XIV. should materially assist the Rakóczians and thus divert Peace of Szátmár, 1711. part of the emperor’s forces at the very crisis of the War of the Spanish Succession, intervened, repeatedly and energetically, to bring about a compromise between the court and the insurgents, whose claims they considered to be just and fair. But the obstinate refusal of Joseph to admit that the Rakóczians were anything but rebels was always the insurmountable object in all such negotiations. But when, on the 7th of April 1711, Joseph died without issue, leaving the crown to his brother the Archduke Charles, then fighting the battles of the Allies in Spain, a peace-congress met at Szátmár on the 27th of April, and, two days later, an understanding was arrived at on the basis of a general amnesty, full religious liberty and the recognition of the inviolability of the ancient rights and privileges of the Magyars.

Thus the peace of Szátmár assured to the Hungarian nation all that it had won by former compacts with the Habsburgs; but whereas hitherto the Transylvanian principality had been the permanent guardian of all such compacts, and the authority of the reigning house had been counterpoised by the Turk, the effect and validity of the peace of Szátmár depended entirely upon the support it might derive from the nation itself. It was a fortunate thing for Hungary that the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession introduced a new period, in which, at last, the interests of the dynasty and the nation were identical, thus rendering a reconciliation between them desirable. Moreover, the next century and a half was a period of domestic tranquillity, during which Hungary was able to repair the ruin of the long Turkish wars, nurse her material resources, and take Charles III. the first steps in the direction of social and political reform. The first reforms, however, were dynastic rather than national. Thus, in 1715, King Charles III.36 persuaded the diet to consent to the establishment of a standing army, which—though the diet reserved the right to fix the number of recruits and vote the necessary subsidies from time to time—was placed under the control of the Austrian council of war. The same centralizing tendency was shown in the administrative and judicial reforms taken in hand by the diet of 1722. A Hungarian court chancery was now established at Vienna, while the government of Hungary proper was committed to a royal stadholdership at Pressburg. Both the chancery and the stadholdership were independent of the diet and responsible to the king alone, being, in fact, his executive Pragmatic Sanction, 1723. instruments. It was this diet also which accepted the Pragmatic Sanction, first issued in 1713, by which the emperor Charles VI., in default of his leaving male heirs, settled the succession to his hereditary dominions on his daughter Maria Theresa and her heirs. By the laws of 1723, which gave effect to the resolution of the diet in favour of accepting the principle of female succession, the Habsburg king entered into a fresh contract with his Hungarian subjects, a contract which remained the basis of the relations of the crown and nation until 1848. On the one hand it was declared that the kingdom of Hungary was an integral part of the Habsburg dominions and inseparable from these so long as a male or female heir of the kings Charles, Joseph and Leopold should be found to succeed to them. On the other hand, Charles swore, on behalf of himself and his heirs, to preserve the Hungarian constitution intact, with all the rights, privileges, customs, laws, &c., of the kingdom and its dependencies. Moreover, in the event of the failure of a Habsburg heir, the diet reserved the right to revive the “ancient, approved and accepted custom and prerogative of the estates and orders in the matter of the election and coronation of their king.”

The reign of Charles III. is also memorable for two Turkish wars, the first of which, beginning in 1716, and made glorious by the victories of Prince Eugene and János Pállfy, was terminated by the peace of Passarowitz (July 21, 1718), by which the Temesköz was also freed from the Turks, and Servia, Northern Bosnia and Little Walachia, all of them ancient conquests of Hungary, were once more incorporated with the territories of the crown of St Stephen. The second war, though undertaken in league with Russia, proved unlucky, and, at the peace of Belgrade (Sept. 1, 1739), all the conquests of the peace of Passarowitz, including Belgrade itself, were lost, except the banat of Temesvár.

With Maria Theresa (1740-1780) began the age of enlightened despotism. Deeply grateful to the Magyars for their sacrifices and services during the War of the Austrian Succession, she dedicated her whole authority to the good of the Maria Theresa. nation, but she was very unwilling to share that authority with the people. Only in the first stormy years of her reign did she summon the diet; after 1764 she dispensed with it altogether. She did not fill up the dignity of palatine, vacant since the 26th of October 1765, and governed Hungary through her son-in-law, Albert of Saxe-Teschen. She did not attack the Hungarian constitution; she simply put it on one side. Her reforms were made not by statute, but by royal decree. Yet the nation patiently endured the mild yoke of the great queen, because it felt and knew that its welfare was safe in her motherly hands. Her greatest achievement lay in the direction of educational reform. She employed the proceeds of the vast sums coming to her from the confiscation of the property of the suppressed Jesuit order in founding schools and colleges all over Hungary. The kingdom was divided into ten educational districts for the purpose, with a university at Buda. Towards all her Magyars, especially the Catholics, she was ever most gracious; but the magnates, the Bátthyanis, the Nadásdys, the Pállfys, the Andrássys, who had chased her enemies from Bohemia and routed them in Bavaria, enjoyed the lion’s share of her benefactions. In fact, most of them became professional courtiers, and lived habitually at Vienna. She also attracted the gentry to her capital by forming a Magyar body-guard from the cadets of noble families. But she was good to all, not even forgetting the serfs. The úrbéri szabályzat (feudal prescription) of 1767 restored to the peasants the right of transmigration and, in some respects, protected them against the exactions of their landlords.

Joseph II. (1780-1790) was as true to the principles of enlightened despotism and family politics as his mother; but he had none of the common sense which had led her to realize the limits of her power. Joseph was an Joseph II. idealist and a doctrinaire, whose dream was to build up his ideal body politic; the first step toward which was to be the amalgamation of all his dominions into a common state under an absolute sovereign (see Austria-Hungary; and Joseph II., Emperor). Unfortunately, the Hungarian constitution stood in the way of this political paradise, so Joseph resolved that the Hungarian constitution must be sacrificed. Refusing to be crowned, or even to take the usual oaths of observance, he simply announced his accession to the Hungarian counties, and then deliberately proceeded to break down all the ancient Magyar institutions. In 1784 the Language Edict made German the official language of the common state. The same year he ordered a census and a land-survey to be taken, to enable him to tax every one irrespective of birth or wealth. Protests came in from every quarter and a dangerous rebellion broke out in Transylvania; but opposition only made Joseph more obstinate, and he endeavoured to anticipate any further resistance by abolishing the ancient county assemblies and dividing the kingdom into two districts administered by German officials.

In taking this course Joseph made the capital mistake of neglecting the Machiavellian maxim that in changing the substance of cherished institutions the prince should be careful to preserve the semblance. In substance the county assemblies were worse than ineffective: mere turbulent gatherings of country squires and peasants, corrupt and prejudiced, representing nothing but their own pride of race and class; and to try and govern without them, or to administer in spite of them, may have been the only expedient possible to statesmen. But to the Magyars they were the immemorial strongholds of their liberties, the last defences of their constitution; and the attempt to suppress them, which made every county a centre of disaffection and resistance, was the action not of a statesman, but of a visionary. The failure of Joseph’s “enlightened” policy in Hungary was inevitable in any case; it was hastened by the disastrous Turkish war of 1787-92, which withdrew Joseph altogether from domestic affairs; and on his death-bed (Feb. 22, 1790) he felt it to be his duty to annul all his principal reforms, so as to lighten the difficulties of his successor.

Leopold II. found the country on the verge of revolution; but the wisdom of the new monarch saved the situation and won back the Magyars. At the diet of 1790-1791 laws were passed not only confirming the royal prerogatives Leopold II., 1790-1792. and the national liberties, but leaving the way open for future developments. Hungary was declared to be a free, independent and unsubjected kingdom governed by its own laws and customs. The legislative functions were to be exercised by the king and the diet conjointly and by them alone. The diets were henceforth to be triennial, and every new king was to pledge himself to be crowned and issue his credentials37 within six months of the death of his predecessor. Latin was still to be the official language, but Magyar was now introduced into the university and all the schools. Leopold’s successor Francis I. (1792-1835) received a declaration of war from the Francis I., 1792-1835. French Legislative Assembly immediately on ascending the throne. For the next quarter of a century he, as the champion of legitimacy, was fighting the Revolution on countless battle-fields, and the fearful struggle only bound the Magyar nation closer to the Habsburg dynasty. Ignaz Jozsef Martinovics (1755-1795) and his associates, the Hungarian Jacobins, vainly attempted a revolutionary propaganda (1795), and Napoleon’s mutilations of the ancient kingdom of St Stephen did not predispose the Hungarian gentry in his favour. Politically, indeed, the whole period was one of retrogression and stagnation. The frequent diets held in the earlier part of the reign occupied themselves with little else but war subsidies; after 1811 they ceased to be summoned. In the latter years of Francis I. the dark shadow of Metternich’s policy of “stability” fell across the kingdom, and the forces of reactionary absolutism were everywhere supreme. But beneath the surface a strong popular current was beginning to run in a contrary direction. Hungarian society, not unaffected by western Liberalism, but without any direct help from abroad, was preparing for the future emancipation. Writers, savants, poets, artists, noble and plebeian, layman and cleric, without any previous concert, or obvious connexion, were working towards that ideal of political liberty which was to unite all the Magyars. Mihály Vörösmartyo, Ferencz Kölcsey, Ferencz Kazinczy and his associates, to mention but a few of many great names, were, consciously or unconsciously, as the representatives of the renascent national literature, accomplishing a political mission, and their pens proved no less efficacious than the swords of their ancestors.