14: Magyar Conquest of Hungary
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WHEN Árpád, the semi-mythical founder of the Magyar
monarchy, at the end of A.D. 895 led his savage hordes through the Vereczke pass into the
regions of the Upper Theiss, the land, now called Hungary, was, for the most part, in the
possession of Slavs, or semi-Slavs. From the Riesengebirge to the Vistula, and from the
Moldau to the Drave, extended the shadowy empire of Moravia, founded by Moimir and
Svatopluk (c. 850-890), which collapsed so completely at the first impact of the
Magyars that, ten years after their arrival, not a trace of it remained. The Bulgarians,
Serbs, Croats and Avars in the southern provinces were subdued with equal ease. Details
are wanting, but the traditional decisive battle was fought at Alpár on the Theiss,
whereupon the victors pressed on to Orsova, and the conquest was completed by Árpád
about the year 906. This forcible intrusion of a non-Aryan race altered the whole history
of Europe; but its peculiar significance lay in the fact that it permanently divided the
northern from the southern and the eastern from the western Slavs. The inevitable
consequence of this rupture was the Teutonizing of the western branch of the great Slav
family, which, no longer able to stand alone, and cut off from both Rome and
Constantinople, was forced, in self-defence, to take Christianity, and civilization along
with it, from Germany.
During the following seventy years we know next to nothing of the
internal history of the Magyars. Árpád died in 907, and his immediate successors, Zsolt
(907-947) and Taksony (947-972), are little more than chronological landmarks. This was
the period of those devastating raids which made the savage Magyar horsemen the scourge
and the terror of Europe. We have an interesting description of their tactics from the pen
of the emperor Leo VI., whose account of them is confirmed by the contemporary Russian
annals. Trained riders, archers and javelin-throwers from infancy, they advanced to the
attack in numerous companies following hard upon each other, avoiding close quarters, but
wearing out their antagonists by the persistency of their onslaughts. Scarce a corner of
Europe was safe from them. First (908-910) they ravaged Thüringia, Swabia and Bavaria,
and defeated the Germans on the Lechfeld, whereupon the German king Henry l. bought them
off for nine years, employing the respite in reorganizing his army and training cavalry,
which henceforth became the principal military arm of the Empire. In 933 the war was
resumed, and Henry, at the head of what was really the first national German army,
defeated the Magyars at Gotha and at Reid (933). The only effect of these reverses was to
divert them elsewhere. Already, in 926, they had crossed the Rhine and ravaged
Lotharingia, In 934 and 942 they raided the Eastern Empire, and were bought off under the
very walls of Constantinople. In 943 Taksony led them into Italy, when they penetrated as
far as Otranto. In 955 they ravaged Burgundy. The same year the emperor Otto I. proclaimed
them the enemies of God and humanity, refused to receive their ambassadors, and finally,
at the famous battle of the Lechfeld, overwhelmed them on the very scene of their first
victory, near Augsburg, which they were besieging (August 10, 955). Only seven of the
Magyars escaped, and these were sold as slaves on their return home.
The catastrophe of the Lechfeld convinced the leading Magyars of
the necessity of accommodating themselves as far as possible to the Empire, especially in
the matter of religion. Christianity had already begun to percolate Hungary. A large
proportion of the captives of the Magyars had been settled all over the country to teach
their conquerors the arts of peace, and close contact with this civilizing element was of
itself an enlightenment. The moral superiority of Christianity to paganism was speedily
obvious. The only question was which form of Christianity were the Magyars to adopt, the
Eastern or the Western ? Constantinople was the first in the field. The splendour of the
imperial city profoundly impressed all the northern barbarians, and the Magyars, during
the 10th century, saw a great deal of the Greeks, One Transylvanian raider, Gyula, brought
back with him from Constantinople a Greek monk, Hierothus (c. 950), who was
consecrated "first bishop of Turkia." Simultaneously a brisk border trade was
springing up between the Greeks and the Magyars, and the Greek chapmen brought with them
their religion as well as their wares. Everything at first tended to favour the propaganda
of the Greek Church. But ultimately political prevailed over religious considerations.
Alarmed at the sudden revival of the Eastern Empire, which under the Macedonian dynasty
extended once more to the Danube, and thus became the immediate neighbour of Hungary, Duke
Géza, who succeeded Taksony in 972, shrewdly resolved to accept Christianity from the
more distant and therefore less dangerous emperor of the West. Accordingly, an embassy was
sent to Otto II. at Quedlinburg in 973, and in 975 Géza and his whole family were
baptized. During his reign, however, Hungarian Christianity did not extend much beyond the
limits of his court. The nation at large was resolutely pagan, and Géza, for his own
sake, was obliged to act warily. Moreover, by accepting Christianity from Germany he ran
the risk of imperilling the independence of Hungary. Hence his cautious, dilatory tactics:
the encouragement of Italian propagandists, who were few, the discouragement of German
propagandist, who were many. Géza, in short, regarded the whole matter from a statesman's
point of view, and was content to leave the solution to time and his successor.
That successor, Stephen I., was one of the great constructive
statesmen of history. His long and strenuous reign (997-1038) resulted in the firm
establishment of the Hungarian church and the Hungarian state. The great work may be said
to have begun in 1001, when Pope Silvester II. recognized Magyar nationality by endowing
the young Magyar prince with a kingly crown. Less fortunate than his great exemplar,
Charlemagne, Stephen had to depend entirely upon foreigners - men like the Saxon Asztrik¹
(c. 976-1010), the first Hungarian primate; the Lombard St Gellért (c.
977-1046); the Bosomanns, a German family, better known under the Magyarized form of their
name Pázmány, and many others who came to Hungary in the suite of his enlightened
consort Gisela of Bavaria. By these men Hungary was divided into dioceses, with a
metropolitan see at Esztergom (Gran), a city originally founded by Géza, but richly
embellished by Stephen, whose Italian architects built for him there the first Hungarian
cathedral dedicated to St Adalbert. Towns, most of them also the sees of bishops, now
sprang up everywhere, including Székesfehérvár (Stuhlweissenburg), Veszprém, Pécs
(Fünfkirchen) and Gyõr (Raab). Esztergom, Stephen's favourite residence, was the
capital, and continued to be so for the next two centuries. But the Benedictines, whose
settlement in Hungary dates from the establishment of their monastery at Pannonhalma (c.
1001), were the chief pioneers. Every monastery erected in the Magyar wildernesses was not
only a centre of religion, but a focus of civilization. The monks cleared the forests,
cultivated the recovered land, and built villages for the colonists who flocked to them,
teaching the people western methods of agriculture and western arts and handicraft. But
conversion, after all, was the chief aim of these devoted missionaries, and when some
Venetian priests had invented a Latin alphabet for the Magyar language a great step had
been taken towards its accomplishment.
The monks were soon followed by foreign husbandmen, artificers and
handicraftsmen, who were encouraged to come to Hungary by reports of the abundance of good
land there and the promise of privileges. This immigration was also stimulated by the
terrible condition of western Europe between 987 and 1060, when it was visited by an
endless succession of bad harvests and epidemics.² Hungary, now better known to
Europe, came to be regarded as a Promised Land, and, by the end of Stephen's reign,
Catholics of all nationalities, Greeks, Pagans, Jews and Mahommedans were living securely
together within her borders. For, inexorable as Stephen ever was towards fanatical pagans,
renegades and rebels, he was too good a statesman to inquire too closely into the private
religious opinions of useful and quiet citizens.
In endeavouring, with the aid of the church, to establish his
kingship on the Western model Stephen had the immense advantage of building on
unencumbered ground, the greater part of the soil of the country being at his absolute
disposal. His authority too, was absolute, being tempered by the shadowy right of the
Magyar nation to meet in general assembly; and this authority he was careful not to
compromise by any slavish imitation of that feudal polity by which in the West the royal
power was becoming obscured. Although he broke off the Magyar tribal system, encouraged
the private ownership of land, and even made grants of land on condition of military
service - in order to secure an armed force independent of the national levy - he based
his new principle of government, not on feudalism, but on the organization of the Frankish
empire, which he adapted to suit the peculiar
¹ Ger. Ottrik, in religion Anastasius.
² At its worst, c. 1030-1033, cannibalism was
common.
exigencies of his realm. Of the institutions thus borrowed and
adapted the most notable was the famous county system which still plays so conspicuous a
part in Hungarian national life. Central and western Hungary (the south and north-east
still being desolate) were divided into forty-six counties (vármegyék, Lat. comitatus).
At the head of each county was placed a count, or lord-lieutenant¹ (Fõispán,
Lat. comes), who nominated his subordinate officials: the castellan (várnagy),
chief captain (hadnagy) and "hundredor" (százados Lat. centurio).
The lord-lieutenant was nominated by the king, whom he was bound to follow to battle at
the first summons. Two-thirds of the revenue of the county went into the royal treasury,
the remaining third the lord-lieutenant retained for administrative purposes. In the
county system were included all the inhabitants of the country save two classes: the still
numerous pagan clans, and those nobles who were attached to the king's person, from whom
he selected his chief officers of state and the members of his council, of which we now
hear for the first time.
It is significant for the whole future of Hungary that no effort
was or could be made by Stephen to weld the heterogeneous races under his crown into a
united nation. The body politic consisted, after as before, of the king and the whole mass
of Magyar freemen or nobles, descendants of Árpád's warriors, theoretically all equal in
spite of growing inequalities of wealth and power, who constituted the populus;
privileges were granted by the king to foreign immigrants in the cities, and the rights of
nobility were granted to non-Magyars for special services; but, in general, the
non-Magyars were ruled by the royal governors as subject races, forming-in
contradistinction to the "nobles" - the mass of the peasants, the misera
contribuens plebs upon whom until 1848 nearly the whole burden of taxation fell. The
right, not often exercised, of the Magyar nobles to meet in general assembly and the
elective character of the crown Stephen also did not venture to touch. On the other hand,
his example in manumitting most of his slaves, together with the precepts of the church,
practically put an end to slavery in the course of the 13th century, the slaves becoming
for the most part serfs, who differed from the free peasants only in the fact that they
were attached to the soil (adscripti glebae).
At this time all the conditions of life in Hungary were simple and
primitive. The court itself was perambulatory. In summer the king dispensed justice in the
open air, under a large tree. Only in the short winter months did he dwell in the house
built for him at Esztergom by his Italian architects. The most valuable part of his
property still consisted of flocks and herds, or the products of the labours of his serfs,
a large proportion of whom were bee-keepers, hunters and fishers employed in and around
the interminable virgin-forests of the rough-hewn young monarchy.
A troubled forty years (1038-1077) divides the age of St Stephen
from the age of St Ladislaus. Of the six kings who reigned in Hungary during that period
three died violent deaths, and the other three were fighting incessantly against foreign
and domestic foes. In 1046, and again in 1061, two dangerous pagan risings shook the very
foundations of the infant church and state; the western provinces were in constant danger
from the attacks of the acquisitive emperors, and from the south and southeast two
separate hordes of fierce barbarians (the Petchenegs in 1067-1068, and the Kumanians in
1071-1072) burst over the land. It was the general opinion abroad that the Magyars would
either relapse into heathendom or become the vassals of the Holy Roman Empire, and this
opinion was reflected in the increasingly hostile attitude of the popes towards the
Árpád kings. The political independence of Hungary was ultimately secured by the
outbreak of the quarrel about investiture (1076), when Géza I. (1074-1077) shrewdly
applied to Pope Gregory VII. for assistance, and submitted to accept his kingdom from him
as a fief of the Holy See. The immediate result of the papal alliance was to enable
Hungary, under both Ladislaus and his capable successor Coloman [Kálmán] (1095-1116), to
hold her own against all her enemies, and extend her dominion abroad by conquering Croatia
and a portion of the Dalmatian coast. As an incipient great power, she was beginning to
feel the need of a seaboard.
In the internal administration both Ladislaus I. and Coloman
approved themselves worthy followers of St Stephen. Ladislaus planted large Petcheneg
colonies in Transylvania and the trans-Dravian provinces, and established military cordons
along the constantly threatened south-eastern boundary, the germs of the future banates²
(bánságok) which were to play such an important part in the national defence in
the following century. Law and order were enforced with the utmost rigour. In that rough
age crimes of violence predominated, and the king's justiciars regularly perambulated the
land in search of offenders, and decimated every village which refused to surrender
fugitive criminals. On the other hand, both the Jews and the "Ishmaelites"
(Mahommedans) enjoyed complete civil and religious liberty in Hungary, where, indeed, they
were too valuable to be persecuted, The Ishmaelites, the financial experts of the day,
were the official mint-masters,
¹ The English title of lord-lieutenant is generally used as
the best translation of Fõispán or comes (in this connexion). The title of
count (gróf) was assumed later (15th century) by those nobles who had succeeded,
in spite of the Golden Bull, in making their authority over whole counties independent and
hereditary.
² The bán is equivalent to the margrave, or count of the
marches.
treasurers and bankers. The clergy, the only other educated class,
supplied the king with his lawyers, secretaries and ambassadors. The Magyar clergy was
still a married clergy and their connubial privileges were solemnly confirmed by the synod
of Szabolcs, presided over by the king, in 1092. So firmly rooted in the land was this
practice, that Coloman, much as he needed the assistance of the Holy See in his foreign
policy, was only with the utmost difficulty induced, in 1106, to bring the Hungarian
church into line with the rest of the Catholic world by enforcing clerical celibacy.
Coloman was especially remarkable as an administrative reformer, and Hungary, during his
reign, is said to have been the best-governed state in Europe. He regulated and simplified
the whole system of taxation, encouraged agriculture by differential duties in favour of
the farmers, and promoted trade by a systematic improvement of the ways of communication.
The Magna via Colomanni Regis was in use for centuries after his death. Another
important reform was the law permitting the free disposal of landed estate, which gave the
holders an increased interest in their property, and an inducement to improve it. During
the reign of Coloman, moreover, the number of freemen was increased by the frequent
manumission of serfs. The lot of the slaves was also somewhat ameliorated by the law
forbidding their exportation.
Throughout the greater part of the 12th century the chief
impediment in the way of the external development of the Hungarian monarchy was the
Eastern Empire, which under the first three princes of the Comnenian dynasty, dominated
south-eastern Europe. During the earlier part of that period the Magyars competed on
fairly equal terms with their imperial rivals for the possession of Dalmatia, Rascia (the
original home of the Servians, situated between Bosnia, Dalmatia and Albania) and Ráma or
northern Bosnia (acquired by Hungary in 1135): but on the accession of Manuel Comnenus in
1143 the struggle became acute. As the grandson of St Ladislaus, Manuel had Hungarian
blood in his veins; his court was the ready and constant refuge of the numerous Magyar
malcontents, and he aimed not so much at the conquest as at the suzerainty of Hungary, by
placing one of his Magyar kinsmen on the throne of St Stephen. He successfully supported
the claims of no fewer than three pretenders to the Magyar throne, and finally made Béla
III. (1173-1196) king of Hungary, on condition that he left him, Manuel, a free hand in
Dalmatia. The intervention of the Greek emperors had important consequences for Hungary.
Politically it increased the power of the nobility at the expense of the crown, every
competing pretender naturally endeavouring to win adherents by distributing largess in the
shape of crownlands. Ecclesiastically it weakened the influence of the Catholic Church in
Hungary, the Greek Orthodox Church, which permitted a married clergy and did not impose
the detested tithe (the principal cause of nearly every pagan revolt) attracting thousands
of adherents even among the higher clergy. At one time, indeed, a Magyar archbishop and
four or five bishops openly joined the Orthodox communion and willingly crowned Manuel's
nominees despite the anathemas of their Catholic brethren.
The Eastern Empire ceased to be formidable on the death of Manuel
(1080), and Hungary was free once more to pursue a policy of aggrandizement. In Dalmatia
the Venetians were too strong for her; but she helped materially to break up the Byzantine
rule in the Balkan peninsula by assisting Stephen Nemanya to establish an independent
Servian kingdom, originally under nominal Hungarian suzerainty. Béla endeavoured to
strengthen his own monarchy by introducing the hereditary principle, crowning his infant
son Emerich as his successor during his own lifetime, a practice followed by most of the
later Árpáds; he also held a brilliant court on the Byzantine model, and replenished the
treasury by his wise economies.
Unfortunately the fruits of his diligence and foresight were
dissipated by the follies of his two immediate successors, Emerich (1196-1204) and Andrew
II., who weakened the royal power in attempting to win support by lavish grants of the
crown domains on the already over-influential magnates, a policy from which dates the
supremacy of the semisavage Magyar oligarchs, that insolent and self-seeking class which
would obey no superior and trampled ruthlessly on every inferior. The most conspicuous
event of Andrew's reign was the promulgation in 1222 of the so-called Golden Bull, which
has aptly been called the Magna Carta of Hungary, and is in some of its provisions
strikingly reminiscent of that signed seven years previously by the English king John.
The Golden Bull has been described as consecrating the humiliation
of the crown by the great barons, whose usurpations it legalized; the more usually
accepted view, however is that it was directed not so much to weakening as to
strengthening the crown by uniting its interests with those of the mass of the Magyar
nobility, equally threatened by the encroachments of the great barons. The preamble,
indeed, speaks of the curtailment of the liberties of the nobles by the power of certain
of the kings, and at the end the right of armed resistance to any attempt to infringe the
charter is conceded to "the bishops and the higher and lower nobles" of the
realm; but, for the rest, its contents clearly show that it was intended to strengthen the
monarchy by ensuring"that the momentary folly or weakness of the king should not
endanger the institution itself." This is especially clear from clause xvi., which
decrees that the title and estates of the lords-lieutenant of counties should not be
hereditary, thus attacking feudalism at its very roots, while clause xiv. provides for the
degradation of any lord-lieutenant who should abuse his office. On the other hand, the
principle of the exemption of all the nobles from taxation is confirmed as well as their
right to refuse military service abroad, the defence of the realm being their sole
obligation. All nobles were also to have the right to appear at the court which was to be
held once a year at Székesfehérvár, by the king, or in his absence by the palatine, for
the purpose of hearing causes. A clause also guarantees all nobles against arbitrary
arrest and punishment at the instance of any powerful person.
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
of the realm after the cataclysm of 1241-1242. On his return from exile, after the
subsidence of the Tatár 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 Tatár
invasions, subsequently became so many centres of disloyalty. To bind the Kumanian still
more 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
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 m 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 Tatár 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 unmistakable 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.
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