19: Habsburg Repression
<< 18: Rise of Transylvania || 20: Hungarian Revival >>
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 about 1601, when the great Jesuit preacher
and controversialist, Péter Pázmány, 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.¹ Their success, due partly to their whole-hearted zeal,
and partly to their superior educational 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 Nagyszombat (1635), and
publishing a Hungarian translation of the Bible to counteract the influence of Gáspár
Károli's widely spread Protestant version. Pázmány was certainly the great civilizing
factor of Hungary in the 17th 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 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
¹ The jobbágyok, or under-tenants, had to follow
the example of their lords; they were, by this time, mere serfs with no privileges either
political or religious.
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 (163l-1707), whose domination represents the high-water mark of the
anti-national regimen. The stupid and abortive conspiracy of Péter Zrínyi 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 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 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. 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 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,
the peace of Karlowitz left in the emperors' 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 Habsburg 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 delapidation.¹
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-acquista 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 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 Rákóczy II., 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. Rákóczy
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 Rákóczy 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
Rákóczians 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 Rákóczian
diets even went so far as formally to depose the Habsburgs and form an interim government
with Rákóczy at its head, till a national king could be legally elected. The Maritime
Powers, too, fearful lest Louis XIV. should materially assist the Rákóczians and thus
divert 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 Rákóczians 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 m Spain, a peace congress met at Szatmár 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 Szatmár 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 Szatmár 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 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.² 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,
¹ E.g., in Esztergom, the primatial city, there were
only two buildings still standing.
² Charles VI. as emperor.
his executive 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 l)art 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 Pálffy, 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 bánát 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 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 statue, 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
Batthyánis, the Nádasdys, the Pálffys, 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 bodyguard 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 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.
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 Turhish 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 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 credentials¹ 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 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. Ignáz József 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 Vörösmarty, 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.
¹ Litterae credentiales, nearly equivalent to a coronation
oath.
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