2: The National Kingdom
<< 1: The Beginnings || 3: The Foreign Kings >>
AFTER Stephen's death in 1038 Hungary experienced a long period of fluctuating
fortunes, for which disputes for the crown were chiefly responsible. There was still no
recognised law of succession: the Árpád family tradition, following the national usage,
recognised the principle of senioratus, while the natural affection of kings
caused them repeatedly to seek to pass over a brother or an uncle in favour of a son.
While rebellion against a king recognised as legitimately crowned was rare, there were
frequent disputes between rival pretendents to the crown, these civil wars being greatly
facilitated by the custom of assigning one third of the country as his appanage to the
king's next of kin, known as the 'dux' or 'herceg',whowas thus able to raise an army from
among his own followers.
The disputes began almost immediately after Stephen's death. All his sons had died in
infancy except one, Imre, and he, too, had predeceased his father. Stephen bequeathed his
throne to a nephew, Peter, son of his sister and the Doge Otto Orseolo. Peter was an
overbearing youth who disliked his subjects and soon had them in arms against him. In 1041
they rebelled, driving him to take refuge at the court of the Emperor Henry III, and in
his place elected Samuel Aba, a 'Kun' who had married another of Stephen's sisters. Aba
proved as violent, in other directions, as Peter, who came back, assisted by Henry, in
1046. Aba, fleeing, was strangled by 'Hungarians whom he had harmed during his reign'.
Peter was reinstated, but his rule was more unpopular than ever, and the Hungarians now
bethought them of the surviving members of the House of Árpád - three brothers, Andrew,
Béla and Levente, the sons of Stephen's nephew, Vászoly, who had been living in exile in
Poland since their father had committed some offence which had caused Stephen to throw him
into prison and put out his eyes. The brothers were called back; Peter was killed in
flight, and Andrew became king (1047). He lived peaceably with his brothers until he tried
to secure the succession for his seven-year-old son, Salamon, whom he had married as an
infant to the Emperor Henry III's child daughter, Judith. Levente had renounced his rights
rather than accept Christianity, but when Andrew actually had Salamon crowned, Béla
revolted. Andrew was killed in the fighting, Salamon took refuge with his father-in-law
and Béla mounted the throne (1060). When he died in 1063, his two sons, Géza and
Ladislas, who were mutually devoted, at first accepted Salamon as the lawful king, but in
1074 the cousins quarrelled and Salamon was evicted. Géza ruled for three years (1074-7)
and Ladislas after him for eighteen (1077-95). Ladislas had only a daughter, and
designated as his successor Almus, the younger of Géza's two sons, the elder, Kálmán,
having been destined for the church. However, Kálmán seized the throne on his uncle's
death, and although Almus at first accepted the situation, the brothers ended by
quarrelling and Kálmán had both Almus and his infant son, Béla, blinded. Kálmán then
finished his rule (1095-1116) unchallenged, as did his son Stephen II (1116-31) after him.
Dying childless, Stephen was succeeded by the blind Béla II, who had been brought up in
secrecy by his father's friends. Under Béla (1131-41) and his son Géza II (1141-62)
there was no important internal discord, but the succession of Géza's son, Stephen III
(1167-72) was disputed, first by his eldest uncle, Ladislas II, who seized the throne in
1162, and after Ladislas' death, in January 1163, by his younger brother, Stephen IV.
Stephen IV's death in the spring of 1165 happily exhausted the sum of Stephen III's
uncles, and he had no sons. His brother and successor, Béla III (1172-90) had no domestic
rivals to his throne, but the short reign of his elder son, Imre (1196-1204) was spent
largely in strife with his younger brother, Andrew, who on Imre's death expelled his
infant son, Ladislas IV (who, fortunately for his country, died the next year) before
beginning his own long reign (1205 - 35).
This endemic dynastic warfare did Hungary much harm. Not only did the fighting which
accompanied it bring with it loss of blood and material devastation, but many claimants to
the throne called in foreign help - German, Polish and, in the twelfth century, Byzantine
- thus opening the way to foreign interference in the country's internal affairs and
sometimes bringing political degradation and temporary or permanent losses of territory.
Both Peter and Salamon sacrificed the independent status which St Stephen had won for
Hungary by doing homage for their thrones to the Emperor. Stephen III's uncles were
clients of Byzantium. Aba's wars against Peter's protectors lost Hungary her territory
west of the Leitha, which thereafter became the AustroHungarian frontier until 1918.
Syrmium and Dalmatia, acquired earlier, were temporarily lost in the twelfth century.
For all this, it must be said that Hungary was, on the whole, lucky in its kings.
Quarrelsome as they were, they were generally able, and often attractive. Ladislas I, who,
like Stephen and his son, Imre, was canonised after his death, was the outstanding
personality among them: a true paladin and gentle knight, a protector of his faith and his
people, and of the poor and defenceless. Kálmán, nicknamed 'the Bookman', was, in spite
of his atrocious crime against his brother and nephew, an exceptionally shrewd and
enlightened ruler (it was he who enacted a famous Law forbidding trials of witches
(strigae), quia non sunt). Several other of the Árpáds were men of ability and
of endearing nature. Of them all, only Stephen II was almost entirely bad, and Andrew II,
irremediably silly.
There were several factors favourable to Hungary's development in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries; chief among them, perhaps, the unusually peaceful conditions prevailing
during this period in the steppes. The Petchenegs, who had driven the Magyars into
Hungary, were themselves pushed into the Balkans in the eleventh century by the Cumans,
whose main power was based further east. Hungary suffered only two severe inroads from
them, in 1068 and 1091 respectively, and both were incursions of raiding parties which
returned to the steppes with their booty. After Austria grew big at the expense of
Germany, most of Hungary's other neighbours were approximately her equals in strength, and
Hungary contrived to live with most of them on reasonably friendly terms, particularly
since all the smaller countries soon came to be linked by a network of dynastic marriages.
The wars which did take place were usually family affairs, waged in support of some
claimant to a throne and not with the idea of expansion, for the local nations, including
the Hungarians, did not think in terms of national imperialism. 'Who', wrote a chronicler
once, 'ever heard of Hungarians ruling Czechs, or Czechs, Hungarians?' One of the great
virtues of the Árpáds as rulers was that, in the main, they accepted this outlook.
In these relatively peaceful conditions, the population of Hungary increased rapidly,
the natural growth being reinforced by a steady flow of immigration. By the end of the
twelfth century the cultivable parts of the Dunántúl carried a reasonably dense
population, and the Great Plain, too, was beginning to fill up, although more slowly. The
valleys of the Vág and Nyitra, the political appurtenance of which had perhaps been
doubtful in the tenth century, now came definitively under Hungarian rule, and
Transylvania was effectively occupied (probably in several stages) and incorporated. The
frontier now ran along the crest of the western Carpathians, through the Tatra, across the
upper Poprad valley, and thence along the watershed of the eastern Carpathians and the
Transylvanian Alps. Here, too, there was growth. The valleys debouching from these
mountains into the plain filled up, while the upper valleys and the basins behind the
passes were settled with semi-military communities. Hungarian expansion did not reach into
the Austrian Alps, which were now being recolonised and consolidated by the Babenbergs,
nor across the Sava and Danube in the south, but Syrmium was conquered and colonised about
1060, and in 1089-90 Ladislas I occupied (or perhaps reoccupied) 'Slavonia', between the
middle courses of the Sava and the Drava. In addition, Kálmán, in 1097 took possession
of the former kingdom of Croatia, of which he was crowned king in 1106, having meanwhile
secured possession also of the northern Dalmatian coast through a complex transaction
which included the betrothal of his cousin, Piroska, to John Comnenus, then heir to the
Byzantine throne.
Croatia was a dynastic acquisition. How far the Hungaro-Croat union was real (in later
phraseology), and how far only personal, is a question which the historians of the two
countries argue and can never resolve, since they are talking in terms to which the Middle
Ages assigned no precise and immutable meaning. It is certain that Croatia was never
treated as an integral part of Hungary. The royal title ran 'King of Hungary and Croatia'
and Croatia was administered by a viceroy ('Ban') through its own institutions.
But there were close links, even here; for instance, the Croat privileged classes seem
to have enjoyed automatically the status of their Hungarian counterparts. And the advance
to the frontiers in the north and east was a process of organic expansion from the earlier
nucleus. The normal procedure was to advance the gyepü when conditions allowed,
incorporating the former gyepü land into the county system, and forming a new gyepü
beyond it. Eventually, when the frontiers became clearly fixed, counties came into being
along the whole line. Transylvania was a partial exception. Here the colonisation was
exceptionally extensive, and carried through largely with non-Magyar elements. First a
screen of Szekels was set in front of the Magyar settlements in the west of the country,
and then the Szekels were moved forward into the valleys behind the main eastern passes,
the Magyars following behind them. Then 'Saxons' (really Germans from the Rhineland) were
settled in the gaps in the line, round Sibiu, Brassó and Beszterce. Both the Saxons and
the Szekels enjoyed extensive self-government, the former directly under the king, the
latter under a 'Count of the Szekels' representing him; and the whole area, Saxon and
Szekel districts and Hungarian counties, was, in view of its dangerous and exposed
situation and its remoteness from the capital, placed under a local governor, the 'Voivode
of Transylvania'. Unlike Croatia, however, Transylvania was not a separate Land of the
Hungarian Crown, but simply an administratively distinct part of the kingdom of Hungary.
Thus even if we leave Croatia out of the account, the effective area of Hungary had by
1200 almost doubled since the original occupation and its population had risen to the big
figure (for the time) of some two millions.
The political unity which had been the first of Stephen's great gifts to his country
had survived, and so had his second gift of Christianity. His death had, indeed, been
followed by a powerful reaction in which attachment to the old beliefs had been inflamed
by resentment against both the discipline and the economic burdens (especially that of
tithe) imposed by the new faith, and by its foreign associations, as personified in the
German and Italian clerics. The second revolt against Peter had been led by the pagan
party, who had expected the sons of Vászoly to restore the old religion. In this outburst
many monks and clerics had perished, including the saintly St Gerard (Gellért), martyred
on the hill overlooking Buda which still bears his name. A second outbreak had occurred in
1063. After this had been put down, however, Christianity had not again been in danger.
None of Stephen's successors had rested their power on the church quite so explicitly as
he, but several of them, notably Ladislas I, had been powerful protectors and generous
patrons of it. The ecclesiastical organisation of the country had been extended pari
passu with its political expansion, and the network of monasteries covering the
country had grown denser.
Many of the monks were foreigners, chiefly Germans, but some of them Italians or
Frenchmen. Their presence had helped to raise the cultural standards of the country, and
had also assisted it to make important progress in other fields. By the middle of the
twelfth century, agriculture was beginning to go over from stock-breeding to arable
farming and viticulture. There were already some towns. The gold, silver and salt-mines
were coming into fuller production, to the especial benefit of the king's treasury, into
which their yield went. Hungarian coins, and also some Hungarian products, found their way
far afield.
All this growth was, of course, gradual, but it soon enabled Hungary to meet any of her
neighbours on at least equal terms. In fact, after the accession of Ladislas I, nothing
was heard for a long time of German claims to overlordship. Later, the Emperor Manuel
Comnenus made pertinacious efforts to establish suzerainty over Hungary, which he invaded
no less than ten times in twenty-two years; but although vexatious, his attempts never
seriously threatened Hungarian independence. After 1100, indeed, it was more often the
Hungarian kings who intervened in their neighbours' affairs, than the converse. Both
Kálmán and Stephen II intervened repeatedly in various Russian principalities. Béla
III, who had been brought up at the Byzantine court and destined by Manuel, before his
marriage, for his heir, ended by turning the tables, and although he did not succeed in
acquiring the imperial crown, the lustre of his own easily outshone that of Manuel's
successors. He largely dominated the Balkans and also, for a while, exercised sovereignty
over Halics.(1) Hungary in his day was almost, or quite,
the leading power in south-eastern Europe. Symbolic of this was the fact that while his
predecessors' consorts had most often been the daughters of Polish, Russian or Balkan
prince-lets, Béla's father-in-law was the king of France himself. An interesting document
- the statement of his revenues -sent by Béla to his prospective father-in-law during the
marriage negotiations, shows that these were equal to those of his English and French
contemporaries and inferior only to those of the two Emperors.
The political form of the country during the period remained that of the absolutist
patrimonial kingship. On the very few occasions on which a revision of the laws was
undertaken, the optimates, as well as the chief prelates, were consulted, and the
king's Council seems to have evolved into a recognised permanent institution.
Nevertheless, up to the reign of Andrew II, the field of the king's prerogatives was not
restricted and his authority in matters falling within it remained as absolute.
Otto of Freising, writing in the twelfth century, notes that if any grandee committed,
or was even suspected of, an offence against the king's majesty, the king could send from
his court a servant, of however low degree, who could, single-handed, throw the offender
into chains before his
own adherents and carry him off to torture. It was only Andrew's follies and
extravagances that produced a revolt, in consequence of which he was forced, in the famous
Golden Bull of 1222, to submit to certain restrictions on his freedom of action (e.g., not
to appoint foreigners to office without the consent of the Council), and to concede that
if he or any of his successors violated these promises, he prelates and other dignitaries
and nobles of the realm hould be free to 'resist and withstand' such violation with-out
imputation of high treason. This jus resistendi remained a treasured, although
seldom invoked, right of the Hungarian nation for more than four centuries thereafter.(2)
Other clauses of this famous charter dealt with the position of the freemen - that body
which later usage knew as the 'Hungarian nation'.(3) Since
St Stephen's day the composition in terms of ancestry of this class must have changed
largely, for the limitation of 'noble' status (the term 'noble' was just coming into
usage, but may conveniently be used here) to the male line must of itself already have
greatly diminished the number of families able to claim it jure descensus a Scythia; not
to mention the high mortality rate in a class which by definition was military. Other
former freemen had lost their status through rebellion or personal crime, had had it
filched from them by powerful neighbours, or had been driven by need to take employment
out of their class. On the other and, successive kings had repeatedly carried through the
necessary replenishment of the national defence forces by promoting unfree elements or
importing foreigners.
The relative measure (it had, of course, never been more than relative) of economic
homogeneity which steppe economy had enabled the old class to preserve had also naturally
vanished apace under the new conditions, and especially with the transition to private
property in land. Foolish kings or pretendents to the Crown had accelerated the process by
buying, or rewarding, supporters with grants of land, sometimes very large, and even in
the twelfth century we find here and there magnates who own vast estates and demean
themselves on them in almost regal fashion. At the other extreme, many 'nobles' sank into
real poverty, while preserving their political status. These 'sandalled nobles', as later
generations called them, may already have outnumbered the more prosperous members of the
'nation'.
The wiser kings had, however, fought against the development of a magnate class so
Kálmán had enacted that all donations made since St Stephen's day should revert to the
Crown on the extinction of the beneficiaries' direct heirs - and had reflised to make
offices of state hereditary. The class had thus never become institutionalised, and it
had, incidentally, accelerated its own metabolism by the frequent commission of offences
which entailed confiscation of its estates. The 'nation' had thus never developed along
the hierarchical lines which characterised the societies of the contemporary western and
central Europe. The most serious threat, to date, to the freedom of its weaker members,
had come during Andrew's reign - he had been a notable offender in the matter of lavish
bestowal of estates on supporters - and they had then revolted in defence of their old
liberties. The most important clauses of the Golden Bull were those which restored their
original status, making the 'nation' once more a legally undifferentiated class, the body
politic - under and with the king - of Hungary, all of whose members had the same duty of
bearing arms when required(4) and the same privilege of
paying no taxation to the civic power.
The passage of time had, indeed, altered the social and political function of the
'nation' in another important respect. As we have said, the warriors who followed Árpád
across the Carpathians were probably nearly, if not quite as numerous as their domestic
slaves and the autochthonous populations put together: they could not unreasonably claim
to be Hungary incorporate. But the promotions to their ranks, which in any case grew much
rarer in the twelfth century,(5) probably did not even make
good the wastage; they certainly did not keep pace with the growth of the unfree
population. They dwindled to an oligarchy numbering only a comparatively small fraction of
the total population. Further, the transition to private ownership of land, which gathered
pace with the spread of arable farming, and took place equally on clan and crown land,
combined with the effects of two centuries of donation, confiscation and migration, had
altered the geographical distribution of the class. The old relatively clear-cut division
into clan and crown lands was gone. There were still substantial areas of purely crown
land, still pockets of clan land held by communities of small nobles, but by and large,
the nobles were in the thirteenth century developing into a landlord class, spread fairly
evenly over the entire country.
This change brought with it a modification of the political organisation. The county
system now covered the whole country, except for the royal free boroughs and the specially
exempted areas, such as those donated to the Transylvanian Saxons; and whatever the
position may have been before, the nobles of each county now had to recognise the
authority of the local Ispán. Towards the end of Andrew II's reign the nobles of one
county initiated the practice, which was later generalised and institutionalised, of
electing four of their own members in practice, naturally, respected and influential men -
as 'assessors' to represent their interests against encroachments by tyrannous Ispáns or
lawless magnates. By 1267 this identification of the administration with the local
nobility had gone so far that Béla IV ordered that two or three nobles from each county
should attend the Court which he promised to hold annually for the airing of grievances.
Among the other classes of the population, slavery was on its way out. Still fairly
common at the beginning of the thirteenth century, it had almost disappeared by the end of
it, except for a few non-Christian slaves. The rest of the unfree population, although
still politically non-existent, were now no longer chattels and enjoyed a measure of
security in law. Some were farm-hands or craftsmen, employed on the big estates, lay or
ecclesiastical; others in practice tenant farmers, paying a rent in labour or kind for
their holdings. Their obligations were at any rate not onerous enough to deter a steady
flow of immigrants from entering the country, and their right of free migration was, at
this period, not questioned. Some communities, such as the Transylvanian Saxons, were
personally free and paid only a nominal rent for their land.
Both the extension of the frontiers, and the immigration, had, of course, brought large
new numbers of non-Magyars into Hungary. Croatia was purely Slavonic, with an Italian
element in the sea-board towns. The political consolidation of the north-west added a
fairly substantial Slovak population, later reinforced by immigration from Moravia.
Russians filtered over the north-eastern Carpathians; Vlachs were found in, or entered,
Transylvania. There was a big organised immigration of Germans: besides the Transylvanian
Saxons, already mentioned, another large body of 'Saxons' was brought in to develop the
mines of the Szepes east of the Tatra. The towns throughout Hungary were, as throughout
most of eastern Europe, mainly German. Considerable numbers of Petchenegs and kindred
peoples entered Hungary from the east as refugees. Other, smaller, groups included Jews,
Walloon vintners, and 'Ishmaelites' (Bulgars from the Kama), men skilled in the minting of
money.
But this did not alter the essentially Magyar national character of the state. The Kuns
were no longer distinguishable from Magyars. The recruits to the noble class, at least in
the interior of the country, usually became completely Magyarised within a generation or
so.(6) But neither was the
picture of a 'ruling race' dominating 'subject peoples' any more generally true. The
peasants of the Slovak mountains, the Saxons behind their barrier of jealously-guarded
privileges, the German burghers of the towns, and the Vlachs and Jews, with their alien
religions and outlandish modes of life, kept their distinct national identities, but the
Szekels and all the eastern immigrants, with the smaller diasporae, melted in the Magyar
flood, which was also now swollen by great numbers of déclassé Magyars. Documents show
that except in the peripheral areas and the towns, the majority of the unfree populations
now bore Magyar names.
When in 1235 death ended Andrew II's long and ill-fated reign, his son, Béla IV, did
what he could to re-establish the royal authority. Several truculent aristocrats were
thrown into prison, and commissioners sent out to check the donations, a
number of which were rescinded. But before Béla could complete his reforms, they
legitimacy of recent were interrupted by the heaviest calamity which Hungary had
experienced since the foundation of the state: the terrible Mongol invasion.
The Mongols, or Tatars, had been threatening eastern Europe for half a generation. As
early as 1223 they had inflicted a terrible defeat on the combined Cuman and Russian
armies on the Kalka. This battle had not, however, decisively broken the power of the
Cumans, who continued to hold up the Tatar expansion for a long decade, but in 1239 they
were crushingly defeated again, near the mouth of the Volga. In December 1240 Kiev was
laid in ashes, and now the way to Poland and Hungary lay open.
Béla - almost the only man in his country who took the danger at its full value - had
organised a system of defences on the passes and had tried to collect an army inside
Hungary. But when the Tatars moved again, in the spring of 1241, they easily overran the
frontier posts, and on 11 April outmanoeuvered the Hungarian army which met them at Mohi,
on the Sajó, and almost destroyed it. Béla himself barely escaped with his life to the
Austrian frontier, where Frederick of Austria could find nothing better to do than to
blackmail him for an indemnity, extort three counties from him as security for the payment
of it, and even invade them himself. The Tatars ravaged central Hungary at their leisure
all summer and autumn, then, the Danube having frozen hard, crossed it on Christmas Day
and spread destruction in the Dunántúl, while Béla, pursued by their light cavalry,
fled ingloriously enough to an island off the Dalmatian coast. Hungary was saved from
complete destruction only by the death of the Great Khan Ogotai in far-away Karakorum.
Batu Khan, commander of the Tatar armies in the west, led them back to take part in the
contest for the succession, and in March 1242 the Tatars quitted Hungary as suddenly as
they had entered it just a year before.
But they left total devastation behind them. Even of Hungary's walled places, not all
had escaped. Székesfehérvár had been saved by the marshes round it, and the citadel of
Esztergom had held out. But the town had fallen, as had Buda and many another. When they
took a town the Tatars commonly reduced it to ashes and slaughtered all its inhabitants.
In the countryside they had spared the peasants until the harvest was reaped, promising
them that they would not be molested; but the harvest in, had butchered them. Finally,
while leaving the country, they had beaten it for slaves: years after, the missionaries
Plan Carpini and Rubruquis found Magyar slaves still in bondage in Tartary.
Those who survived had done so because they had escaped in time into forests or
marshes. That year, with the plague and starvation which followed it, cost Hungary
-something like half its total population, the losses ranging from 60 per cent in the
Alföld (100 per cent in certain parts of it) to 20 per cent in the Dunántúl. Only the
northwest and the Szekel areas of Transylvania had come off fairly lightly.
To the sheer physical destruction of man and his works were added, of course, political
and social disintegration and the threat of further assaults from greedy neighbours,
headed by Frederick of Austria.
King Béla, whom his country not unjustly dubbed its second founder, set himself with
courage, intelligence and tact to repair something of this damage. Drawing from experience
the lesson that only walled places ensured safety, he organised a complete new defensive
system, based on chains of fortresses. He reorganised the army, replacing the old light
archers by a small force of heavy cavalry. He repopulated the country by calling in great
new numbers of colonists from all available quarters, paying especial attention to the
foundation of new towns, which were equipped with generous charters. In a few years
Hungary was well on the way to internal recovery and its international position seemed
more potent than ever. In the west, the counties seized by Frederick were recovered and,
for a short time, Béla even took Styria away from the Austrian. In the south and east,
Hungary was surrounded by a ring of 'Bánáts' or client states embracing Bosnia and north
Serbia. Severin, Cumania (in the later Wallachia) and Galicia.
Some of this work was of permanent advantage to Hungary; in particular, the
multiplication of the towns lastingly benefited its economic structure. But many of
Béla's improvisations, although unavoidable, had dangerous consequences. To get the
fortresses built quickly he had been obliged, willy-nilly, to give great territorial
magnates, new or old, practically a free hand on their domains. Half a dozen of these
families - the Kôszegis on the Austrian frontier, the Csáks on the Moravian, the Abas
and Borsas in the north, the Káns in Transylvania, the Subiches in Croatia, made meteoric
rises to near-sovereign state; a state of things which was particularly dangerous because
with the extinction in Austria, of the Babenberg line in 1246, a scramble for its
inheritance had begun, opening up golden prospects for a powerful local magnate to rise
higher still, if he did not take his loyalty to his own monarch too seriously.
A danger of a different sort threatened from the Cumans. After the Battle of the Volga
the Great Khan of the Cumans, a certain Kötöny or Kuthen, had sought
asylum in Hungary with the broken survivors of his nation, still a large host. Béla had
received them, seeing in them a force which could defend him against the Tatars and also
help him against disloyal subjects of his own. But his hospitality had had disastrous
consequences. It had given the Tatar Khan his pretext to attack Hungary, for 'harbouring
his rebellious slaves'; meanwhile the Hungarians, for good reasons and for ill, had
violently resented the presence of the wild newcomers, and just as the Tatars were
crossing the mountain passes, had murdered Kuthen. Thereupon the enraged Cumans had left
Hungary for the Balkans, murdering and pillaging as they went, so that Béla had not even
had their help at the crucial moment.
Afterwards he called them back, with the smaller people of the Jazyges, and settled
them on empty lands on the two banks of the Tisza, and to ensure their loyalty, married
his elder son, Stephen, to a Cuman princess. The Cumans proved in fact a valuable fighting
force, but they were detested by the Hungarians, whose villages they pillaged and whose
women they raped. They were, moreover, mostly still pagans, for missionary work in which
heroic friars had engaged among them for a generation previously had so far borne little
fruit.
When Béla died, in 1270, the weak points in his work soon made themselves felt.
Stephen, who incidentally had done much to embitter his father's last years and to
undermine his work, died after a reign of only two years; no loss in himself, but his
heir, Ladislas, was only ten years old. The 'Cumanian woman', his mother, who assumed the
regency, was hated by the Hungarians, and although some of the magnates tried loyally
enough to keep the state together, others, especially a few great west Hungarian and Croat
families, made themselves into 'kinglets', who fought each other, and the king, for
control of the state or for their own independence, allying themselves without scrupie
with foreign rulers. In the confusion, many of Béla IV's foreign acquisitions were lost
again. When Ladislas came to man the estate, things were no better. He
had grown up into a wild, undisciplined youth, far more of a Cuman than a Magyar. He
favoured his mother's people so much that there seemed a danger that Hungary might revert
to paganism; in the course of repeated exchanges, one Pope laid the country under
interdict and another authorised the bishops to preach a crusade against the king. It took
all the efforts of the Christian barons to mediate a settlement under which the Cumans, in
return for the retention of their liberties and of certain national customs, undertook to
accept Christianity, to exchange their tents for fixed abodes and 'to abstain from killing
Christians and from shedding their blood'. Meanwhile, Ladislas himself neglected his wife
and took pleasure only among Cuman women. At last, in 1290, he was murdered 'by those same
Cumans whom he had loved'.
From the loyal Hungarians' point of view the most serious aspect of Ladislas' refusal
to have commerce with his wife had been the danger that this might involve the extinction
of the dynasty; for Ladislas' only brother had predeceased him, dying unmarried, as had
his only paternal uncle. One Árpád of the blood was still alive, for Andrew II's third
wife, Beatrice d'Este, had been delivered of a boy soon after her husband's death (on
which she had returned to her father's people), and this boy had in due course married
into a family of rich Venetian bankers and
although himself dying young, had left a son, another Andrew. A party in Hungary had
been supporting the claim of this boy to be regarded as heir presumptive to Ladislas, and
meanwhile, 'Duke of Slavonia'. Since a few months before Ladislas' death Andrew had,
however, been a prisoner at the court of Albrecht of Habsburg, now installed in Vienna.
Meanwhile his rivals had been impugning his father's parentage, and when Ladislas died,
claims to the succession were put forward by, or on behalf of, three descendants of the
house of Árpád in the female line: the Angevin Charles Martell of Naples, son of
Ladislas' sister Maria (the candidature supported by the Pope), the Bavarian Otto of
Wittelsbach, son of Stephen V's sister Elizabeth, and the Bohemian Wenceslas II, grandson
of Béla IV's sister Anne. In addition, the German King Rudolph of Habsburg recalled that
Béla IV, in his extremity, had done him homage and invested his son Albrecht with
Hungary.
The question was resolved by the prompt action of the Archbishop of Esztergom, Ladomer,
who got Andrew smuggled out of Vienna, disguised as a friar, and brought to Hungary, where
he was crowned amid the jubilation of by far the greater part of the country. It was a
coup which might have proved a great blessing to the country, for true Árpád or not,
Andrew showed himself to be one of the best of the Hungarian kings. He defended his
position against the foreign claimants. Leaning on the smaller nobles, he succeeded in
making headway against the unruly magnates, incidentally sanctioning a number of valuable
constitutional institutions (for the idea of constitutional rule was not strange to his
Venice-trained mind). On coronation he swore to respect the country's liberties; he
repeated and extended Andrew II's pledge to make no appointments to higher office without
the consent of the Royal Council, and even agreed to the institution of a permanent
salaried Council, its membership to include representatives of their 'prelates, barons and
nobles', whose consent was required for any major decision. 'All the barons and nobles of
the realm'(7) were to meet annually to enquire
into the state of the kingdom and the conduct of the high officials. Unhappily, he died on
14 January 1301, leaving only an infant daughter, and thus 'the last golden twig of the
generation, blood and lineage of St Stephen, the first Hungarian king', was broken.
1. Roughly equivalent to the later Galicia
2. In a second edition of the Bull this clause was whittled down to
recognition by the King that the Primate-Archbishop was entitled to excommunicate him if
he violated his oath.
3. In the following paragraphs I have adopted an old-fashioned and
probably somewhere over-simplified view of the processes described. Many modern Hungarian
historians postulate an almost total decay of the old free class and the rise of a totally
new one, the servientes regis, with a status originally inferior to that of the
old freemen. Under this interpretation, the privileges granted in the Golden Bull to the 'servientes
regis' apply only to this new class, while the older freemen are not mentioned in the
Bull at all. Those holding it explain the omission by saying that the privileges of the
older class were so obvious as to need no reaffirmation. I find this interpretation
contrary to common sense, to Hungarian psychology, and also to a number of texts. In any
case, even if a distinction existed in 1222 between the freemen by hereditary right and
the servientes regis, it disappeared soon after it. A decree issued by Béla IV
in 1247 speaks specifically of 'nobiles Hungariae universi qui et servientes regis
dicunter', who approach Béla with the request 'ut ipsos in libertate a S.
Stephano rege statuta et abtenta dignaremus conservare'.
4. A novelty in the Bull was that foreign service had to be paid.
5. This was due partly to the opposition of the existing nobles to
further dilution of their privileges, partly to the introduction as principal arm of heavy
cavalry, which made it useless to ennoble men who could not afford the new equipment.
6. This generalisation does not apply to the remote peasant
communities on the periphery who were 'ennobled' en masse, i.e., relieved of taxation in
return for guarding the frontiers. But it is true of practically all families for whom
ennoblement meant real advance in the social scale.
7. This does not, of course, mean a general assembly of all the
'nobles' of Hungary, but of their representatives, the class from which the county
'assessors' were drawn.
<< 1: The Beginnings || 3: The Foreign Kings >>
