Stephen Bocskay.
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 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
Bathory'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 Istvan
Illeshazy (1540-1609), had to fly abroad to save their heads.
Fortunately a peculiarly shameless attempt to blackmail Stephen Bocskay,
a rich and 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 Zsitvatorok (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 enlarged[32] 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 Zsitvatorok, 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 L400,000. 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 Illeshazy, now reinstated in all his possessions and
dignities, palatine of Hungary.[33] In Transylvania, meantime, Gabriel
Bathory had been elected (Nov. 11, 1608) in place of the decrepit
Sigismund Rakoczy, Bocskay's immediate successor.
Transylvanian Hegemony.
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 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. Rakoczy, 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 Rakoczy over the north Hungarian
counties. Gabriel Bethlen and George I. Rakoczy 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, Gyulafehervar, 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 Rakoczy 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.
Turkish conflict.
Peace of Vasvar, 1664.
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 Zsitvatorok (1606) to the ninth year of the
reign of George Rakoczy 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 Rakoczy 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, Rakoczy, 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 Ersekujvar (Neuhausel). In the following year, thanks to
the generalship and heroism of Miklos Zrinyi the younger (q.v.), 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 Vasvar (Aug. 10, 1664)
to obtain terms which should only have been conceded to a conqueror. The
fortress of Ersekujvar 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 Vasvar gave Hungary a respite
from regular Turkish invasions for twenty years, though the border
raiding continued uninterruptedly.
Catholic reaction.
Pazmany's work.
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, Peter Pazmany (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, Szaniszlo Thurzo, palatine. But Thurzo 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 Miklos Esterhazy
in Thurzo'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 system, was extraordinary; and they possessed the
additional advantage of having in Pazmany 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 Gaspar
Karoli's widely spread Protestant version. Pazmany 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.
Habsburg repression.
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 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, Gyorgy Szelepesenyi (1595-1685)
and Lipot (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 Pazmany 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_.
Hungarian resistance.
Liberation from the Turks.
Peace of Karlowitz.
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" 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 Tokoli (q.v.). Between 1678 and 1682 Tokoli 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 Tokoli
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 grace_ (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 Tokoli 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 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 Temeskoz, 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]
Francis Rakoczy.
Peace of Szatmar, 1711.
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 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 Rakoczy 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. Rakoczy 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 Rakoczy 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
Rakoczians 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 Rakoczian diets even went so far as formally to
depose the Habsburgs and form an interim government with Rakoczy at its
head, till a national king could be legally elected. The Maritime
Powers, too, fearful lest Louis XIV. should materially assist the
Rakoczians 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 Rakoczians 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
Szatmar 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.
Charles III.
Pragmatic Sanction, 1723.
Thus the peace of Szatmar 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 Szatmar 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.[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 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 Janos Pallfy, was terminated by the peace of
Passarowitz (July 21, 1718), by which the Temeskoz 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 Temesvar.
Maria Theresa.
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 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 Batthyanis, the
Nadasdys, the Pallfys, the Andrassys, 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 _urberi
szabalyzat_ (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.
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 (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., 1790-1792.
Francis I., 1792-1835.
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
credentials[37] 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. 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. Mihaly
Vorosmartyo, Ferencz Kolcsey, 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.
Hungarian revival.
It was a direct attack upon the constitution which, to use the words of
Istvan Szechenyi, first "startled the nation out of its sickly
drowsiness." In 1823, when the reactionary powers were meditating joint
action to suppress the revolution in Spain, the government, without
consulting the diet, imposed a war-tax and called out the recruits. The
county assemblies instantly protested against this illegal act, and
Francis I. was obliged, at the diet of 1823, to repudiate, the action of
his ministers. But the estates felt that the maintenance of their
liberties demanded more substantial guarantees than the dead letter of
ancient laws. Szechenyi, who had resided abroad and studied Western
institutions, was the recognized leader of all those who wished to
create a new Hungary out of the old. For years he and his friends
educated public opinion by issuing innumerable pamphlets in which the
new Liberalism was eloquently expounded. In particular Szechenyi
insisted that the people must not look exclusively to the government,
or even to the diet, for the necessary reforms. Society itself must
take the initiative by breaking down the barriers of class exclusiveness
and reviving a healthy public spirit. The effect of this teaching was
manifest at the diet of 1832, when the Liberals in the Lower Chamber had
a large majority, prominent among whom were Francis Deak and Odon
Beothy. In the Upper House, however, the magnates united with the
government to form a conservative party obstinately opposed to any
project of reform, which frustrated all the efforts of the Liberals.
The alarm of the government at the power and popularity of the Liberal
party induced it, soon after the accession of the new king, the emperor
Ferdinand I. (1835-1848), to attempt to crush the reform movement by
arresting and imprisoning the most active agitators among them, Louis
Kossuth and Miklos Wesselenyi. But the nation was no longer to be cowed.
The diet of 1839 refused to proceed to business till the political
prisoners had been released, and, while in the Lower Chamber the
reforming majority was larger than ever, a Liberal party was now also
formed in the Upper House under the brilliant leadership of Count Louis
Batthyany and Baron Joseph Eotvos. Two progressive measures of the
highest importance were passed by this diet, one making Magyar the
official language of Hungary, the other freeing the peasants' holdings
from all feudal obligations.
Kossuth.
The results of the diet of 1839 did not satisfy the advanced Liberals,
while the opposition of the government and of the Upper House still
further embittered the general discontent. The chief exponent of this
temper was the Pesti Hirlap, Hungary's first political newspaper,
founded in 1841 by Kossuth, whose articles, advocating armed reprisals
if necessary, inflamed the extremists but alienated Szechenyi, who
openly attacked Kossuth's opinions. The polemic on both sides was
violent; but, as usual, the extreme views prevailed, and on the
assembling of the diet of 1843 Kossuth was more popular than ever, while
the influence of Szechenyi had sensibly declined. The tone of this diet
was passionate, and the government was fiercely attacked for interfering
with the elections. Fresh triumphs were won by the Liberals. Magyar was
now declared to be the language of the schools and the law-courts as
well as of the legislature; mixed marriages were legalized; and official
positions were thrown open to non-nobles.
Revolution of 1848. The March Laws.
The interval between the diet of 1843 and that of 1847 saw a complete
disintegration and transformation of the various political parties.
Szechenyi openly joined the government, while the moderate Liberals
separated from the extremists and formed a new party, the Centralists.
Immediately before the elections, however, Deak succeeded in reuniting
all the Liberals on the common platform of "The Ten Points": (1)
Responsible ministries, (2) Popular representation, (3) The
incorporation of Transylvania, (4) Right of public meeting, (6) Absolute
religious liberty, (7) Universal equality before the law, (8) Universal
taxation, (9) The abolition of the _Aviticum_, an obsolete and anomalous
land-tenure, (10) The abolition of serfdom, with compensation to the
landlords. The ensuing elections resulted in a complete victory of the
Progressives. All efforts to bring about an understanding between the
government and the opposition were fruitless. Kossuth demanded not
merely the redress of actual grievances, but a reform which would make
grievances impossible in the future. In the highest circles a
dissolution of the diet now seemed to be the sole remedy; but, before it
could be carried out, tidings of the February revolution in Paris
reached Pressburg[38] (March 1), and on the 3rd of March Kossuth's
motion for the appointment of an independent, responsible ministry was
accepted by the Lower House. The moderates, alarmed not so much by the
motion itself as by its tone, again tried to intervene; but on the 13th
of March the Vienna revolution broke out, and the king, yielding to
pressure or panic, appointed Count Louis Batthyany premier of the first
Hungarian responsible ministry, which included Kossuth, Szechenyi and
Deak. The Ten Points, or the March Laws as they were now called, were
then adopted by the legislature and received the royal assent (April
10). Hungary had, to all intents and purposes, become an independent
state bound to Austria only by the fact that the palatine chanced to be
an Austrian archduke.
The non-Magyar races.
In the assertion of their national aspirations, confused as these were
with the new democratic ideals, the Magyars had had the support of the
German democrats who temporarily held the reins of power in Vienna. On
the other hand, they were threatened by an ominous stirring of the
subject races in Hungary itself. Croats, Vlachs, Serbs and Slovaks
resented Magyar domination--a domination which had been carefully
secured under the revolutionary constitution by a very narrow franchise,
and out of the general chaos each race hoped to create for itself a
separate national existence. The separatist movement was strongest in
the south, where the Rumans were in touch with their kinsmen in Walachia
and Moldavia, the Serbs with their brethren in Servia, and the Croats
intent on reasserting the independence of the "Tri-une Kingdom."
Jellachich.
The attitude of the distracted imperial government towards these
movements was at first openly suspicious and hostile. The emperor and
his ministers hoped that, having conceded the demands of the Magyars,
they would receive the help of the Hungarian government in crushing the
revolution elsewhere, a hope that seemed to be justified by the
readiness with which Batthyany consented to send a contingent to the
assistance of the imperialists in Italy. That the encouragement of the
Slav aspirations was soon deliberately adopted as a weapon against the
Hungarian government was due, partly to the speedy predominance at Pest
of Kossuth and the extreme party of which he was the mouthpiece, but
mainly to the calculated policy of Baron Jellachich, who on the 14th of
April was appointed ban of Croatia. Jellachich, who as a soldier was
devoted to the interests of the imperial house, realized that the best
way to break the revolutionary power of the Magyars and Germans would be
to encourage the Slav national ideas, which were equally hostile to
both; to set up against the Dualism in favour at Pest and Vienna the
federal system advocated by the Slavs, and so to restore the traditional
Habsburg principle of _Divide et impera_. This policy he pursued with
masterly skill. His first acts on taking up his office were to repudiate
the authority of the Hungarian diet, to replace the Magyar officials
with ardent "Illyrians," and to proclaim martial law. Under pressure
from the palatine of Batthyany an imperial edict was issued, on the 7th
day of May, ordering the ban to desist from his separatist plans and
take his orders from Pest. He not only refused to obey, but on the 5th
of June convoked to Agram the Croatian national diet, of which the first
act was to declare the independence of the Tri-une Kingdom. Once more,
at the instance of Batthyany, the emperor intervened; and on the 10th an
imperial edict stripped Jellachich of all his offices.
Meanwhile, however, Jellachich had himself started for Innsbruck, where
he succeeded in persuading the emperor of the loyalty of his intentions,
and whence, though not as yet formally reinstated, he was allowed to
return to Croatia with practically unfettered discretion. The Hungarian
government, in fact, had played into his hands. At a time when
everything depended on the army, they had destroyed the main tie which
bound the Austrian court to their interests by tampering with the
relation of the Hungarian army to the crown. In May a national guard had
been created, the disaffected troops being bribed by increased pay to
desert their colours and join this; and on the 1st of June the garrison
of Pest had taken an oath to the constitution. All hope of crushing
revolutionary Vienna with Magyar aid was thus at an end, and Jellachich,
who on the 20th issued a proclamation to the Croat regiments in Italy to
remain with their colours and fight for the common fatherland, was free
to carry out his policy of identifying the cause of the southern Slavs
with that of the imperial army. The alliance was cemented in July by a
military demonstration, of which Jellachich was the hero, at Vienna; as
the result of which the government mustered up courage to declare
publicly that the basis of the Austrian state was "the recognition of
the equal rights of all nationalities." This was the challenge which
the Magyars were not slow to accept.
Jellachich invades Hungary.
In the Hungarian diet, which met on the 2nd of July, the influence of
the conservative cabinet was wholly overshadowed by that of Kossuth,
whose inflammatory orations--directed against the disruptive designs of
the Slavs and the treachery of the Austrian government--precipitated the
crisis. At his instance the diet not only refused to vote supplies for
the troops of the ban of Croatia, but only consented to pass a motion
for sending reinforcements to the army in Italy on condition that the
anti-Magyar races in Hungary should be first disarmed. On the 11th, on
his motion, a decree was passed by acclamation for a levy of 200,000 men
and the raising of L4,500,000 for the defence of the independence of the
country. Desultory fighting, in which Austrian officers with the tacit
consent of the minister of war took part against the Magyars, had
already broken out in the south. It was not, however, until the victory
of Custozza (July 25) set free the army in Italy, that the Austrian
government ventured on bolder measures. On the 4th of September, after
weeks of fruitless negotiation, the king-emperor threw down the gauntlet
by reinstating Jellachich in all his honours. Seven days later the ban
declared open war on Hungary by crossing the Drave at the head of 36,000
Croatian troops (see AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: _History_). The immediate result
was to place the extreme revolutionaries in power at Pest. Szechenyi had
lost his reason some days before; Eotvos and Deak retired into private
life; of the conservative ministers only Batthyany, to his undoing,
consented to remain in office, though hardly in power. Kossuth alone was
supreme.
Fall of Vienna.
The advance of Jellachich as far as Lake Balaton had not been checked,
the Magyar troops, though--contrary to his expectation--none joined him,
offering no opposition. The palatine, the Austrian Archduke Stephen,
after fruitless attempts at negotiation, laid down his office on the
24th of September and left for Vienna. One more attempt at compromise
was made, General Count Lamberg[39] being sent to take command of all
the troops, Slav or Magyar, in Hungary, with a view to arranging an
armistice. His mission, which was a slight to Jellachich, was conceived
as a concession to the Magyars, and had the general approval of
Batthyany. Unhappily, however, when Lamberg arrived in Pest, Batthyany
had not yet returned; the diet, on Kossuth's motion, called on the army
not to obey the new commander-in-chief, on the ground that his
commission had not been countersigned by a minister at Pest. Next day,
as he was crossing the bridge of Buda, Lamberg was dragged from his
carriage by a frantic mob and torn to pieces. This made war inevitable;
though Batthyany hurried to Vienna to try and arrange a settlement.
Failing in this, he retired, and on the 2nd of October a royal
proclamation, countersigned by his successor, Recssey, placed Hungary
under martial law and appointed Jellachich viceroy and commander of all
the forces. This proclamation, together with the order given to certain
Viennese regiments to march to the assistance of Jellachich, who had
been defeated at Pakozd on the 29th of September, led to the _emeute_
(Oct. 3) which ended in the murder of the minister of war, Latour, and
the second flight of the emperor to Innsbruck. The fortunes of the
German revolutionaries in Vienna and the Magyar revolutionists in Pest
were now closely bound up together; and when, on the 11th, Prince
Windischgratz laid siege to Vienna, it was to Hungary that the democrats
of the capital looked for relief. The despatch of a large force of
militia to the assistance of the Viennese was, in fact, the first act of
open rebellion of the Hungarians. They suffered a defeat at Schwechat on
the 30th of October, which sealed the fate of the revolutionists in
Vienna and thus precipitated a conflict _a outrance_ in Hungary itself.
Francis Joseph.
In Austria the army was now supreme, and the appointment of Prince Felix
Schwarzenberg as head of the government was a guarantee that its power
would be used in a reactionary sense without weakness or scruple. The
Austrian diet was transferred on the 15th of November to Kremsier,
remote from revolutionary influences; and, though the government still
thought it prudent to proclaim its constitutional principles, it also
proclaimed its intention to preserve the unity of the monarchy. A still
further step was taken when, on the 2nd of December, the emperor
Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his nephew Francis Joseph. The new
sovereign was a lad of eighteen, who for the present was likely to be
the mere mouthpiece of Schwarzenberg's policy. Moreover, he was not
bound by the constitutional obligations unwillingly accepted by his
uncle. The Magyars at once took up the challenge. On the 7th the
Hungarian diet formally refused to acknowledge the title of the new
king, "as without the knowledge and consent of the diet no one could sit
on the Hungarian throne," and called the nation to arms.
Constitutionally, in the Magyar opinion, Ferdinand was still king of
Hungary, and this gave to the revolt an excuse of legality. Actually,
from this time until the collapse of the rising, Louis Kossuth was the
ruler of Hungary.
War of Independence.
Battle of Kapolna.
The struggle opened with a series of Austrian successes. Prince
Windischgratz, who had received orders to reduce Hungary by fire and
sword, began his advance on the 15th of December; opened up the way to
the capital by the victory of Mor (Oct. 30), and on the 5th of January
1849 occupied Pest, while the Hungarian government and diet retired
behind the Theiss and established themselves at Debreczen. A last
attempt at reconciliation, made by the more moderate members of the diet
in Windischgratz's camp at Bieske (Jan. 3), had foundered on the
uncompromising attitude of the Austrian commander, who demanded
unconditional submission; whereupon the moderates, including Deak and
Batthyany, retired into private life, leaving Kossuth to carry on the
struggle with the support of the enthusiastic extremists who constituted
the rump of the diet at Debreczen. The question now was: how far the
military would subordinate itself to the civil element of the national
government. The first symptom of dissonance was a proclamation by the
commander of the Upper Danube division, Arthur Gorgei, from his camp at
Vacz (Jan. 5) emphasizing the fact that the national defence was purely
constitutional, and menacing all who might be led astray from this
standpoint by republican aspirations. Immediately after this
proclamation Gorgei disappeared with his army among the hills of Upper
Hungary, and, despite the difficulties of a phenomenally severe winter
and the constant pursuit of vastly superior forces, fought his way down
to the valley of Hernad--and safety. This masterly winter-campaign first
revealed Gorgei's military genius, and the discipline of that terrible
month of marching and counter-marching had hardened his recruits into
veterans whom his country regarded with pride and his country's enemies
with respect. Unfortunately his success caused some jealousy in official
quarters, and when, in the middle of February 1849, a commander-in-chief
was appointed to carry out Kossuth's plan of campaign, that vital
appointment was given, not to the man who had made the army what it was,
but to a foreigner, a Polish refugee, Count Henrik Dembinski, who, after
fighting the bloody and indecisive battle of Kapolna (Feb. 26-27), was
forced to retreat. Gorgei was immediately appointed his successor, and
the new generalissimo led the Honveds from victory to victory. Ably
supported by Klapka and Damjanich he pressed forward irresistibly.
Szolnok (March 5), Isaszeg (April 6), Vacz (April 10), and Nagysarlo
(April 19) were so many milestones in his triumphal progress. On the
25th of May the Hungarian capital was once more in the hands of the
Hungarians.
Proclamation of a united empire.
Meanwhile, the earlier events of the war had so altered the political
situation that any idea which the diet at Debreczen had cherished of a
compromise with Austria was destroyed. The capture of Pest had confirmed
the Austrian court in its policy of unification, which after the
victory of Kapolna they thought it safe to proclaim. On the 7th of March
the diet of Kremsier was dissolved, and immediately afterwards a
proclamation was issued in the name of the emperor Francis Joseph
establishing a united constitution for the whole empire, of which
Hungary, cut up into half a dozen administrative districts, was
henceforth to be little more than the largest of several subject
provinces. The news of this manifesto, arriving as it did simultaneously
with that of Gorgei's successes, destroyed the last vestiges of a desire
of the Hungarian revolutionists to compromise, and on the 14th of April,
on the motion of Kossuth, the diet proclaimed the independence of
Hungary, declared the house of Habsburg as false and perjured, for ever
excluded from the throne, and elected Kossuth president of the Hungarian
Republic. This was an execrable blunder in the circumstances, and the
results were fatal to the national cause. Neither the government nor the
army could accommodate itself to the new situation. From henceforth the
military and civil authorities, as represented by Kossuth and Gorgei,
were hopelessly out of sympathy with each other, and the breach widened
till all effective co-operation became impossible.
Intervention of Russia.
Meanwhile the humiliating defeats of the imperial army and the course of
events in Hungary had compelled the court of Vienna to accept the
assistance which the emperor Nicholas I. of Russia had proffered in the
loftiest spirit of the Holy Alliance. The Austro-Russian alliance was
announced at the beginning of May, and before the end of the month the
common plan of campaign had been arranged. The Austrian
commander-in-chief, Count Haynau, was to attack Hungary from the west,
the Russian, Prince Paskevich, from the north, gradually environing the
kingdom, and then advancing to end the business by one decisive blow in
the mid-Theissian counties. They had at their disposal 375,000 men, to
which the Magyars could only oppose 160,000. The Magyars, too, were now
more than ever divided among themselves, no plan of campaign had yet
been drawn up, no commander-in-chief appointed to replace Gorgei, whom
Kossuth had deposed. Haynau's first victories (June 20-28) put an end to
their indecisions. On the 2nd of July the Hungarian government abandoned
Pest and transferred its capital first to Szeged and finally to Arad.
The Russians were by this time well on their way to the Theiss, and the
terrible girdle which was to throttle the liberties of Hungary was all
but completed. Kossuth again appointed as commander-in-chief the brave
but inefficient Dembinski, who was utterly routed at Temesvar (Aug. 9)
by Haynau. This was the last great battle of the War of Independence.
The final catastrophe was now unavoidable. On the 13th of August Gorgei,
who had been appointed dictator by the panic-stricken government two
days before, surrendered the remnant of his hardly pressed army to the
Russian General Rudiger at Vilagos. The other army corps and all the
fortresses followed his example, Komarom, heroically defended by Klapka,
being the last to capitulate (Sept. 27). Kossuth and his associates, who
had quitted Arad on the 10th of August, took refuge in Turkish
territory. By the end of the month Paskevich could write to the Emperor
Nicholas: "Hungary lies at the feet of your Imperial Majesty."