HUNGARY

HUNGARY. Hungary's history from 1450 through 1790 can be divided into three periods. The century from 1450 was the last phase of the independent Hungarian Kingdom, whose major political concern was the Ottoman advance. Hungary lost her long struggle at the battle of Mohács in 1526 and was divided into three parts by the mid-sixteenth century. The second period (1541–1699) is often labeled as the era of the tripartite division of the country. Royal Hungary in the west was under Habsburg rule and Ottoman Hungary in the middle was ruled, at least partly, from Constantinople (Istanbul), whereas the Principality of Transylvania in the east, although an Ottoman satellite state, had considerable autonomy, especially in its domestic affairs. While hostilities and rivalries often divided the Hungarian political elite, with regard to socioeconomic, religious, cultural, and even political developments, the three parts were connected on many levels. The next era can be described as the integration of Hungary into the Habsburg Monarchy that reconquered the country from the Ottomans by the end of the 17th century. This period witnessed a new political compromise between Vienna and the Hungarian estates, as well as visible economic and demographic growth and cultural flourishing.

In the mid-fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary was a regional power in Central Europe. It had an estimated territory of 300,000 square kilometers, a population of 3.1–3.5 million, and annual revenues of 500,000 gold florins under King Matthias (Mátyás) Corvinus of the Hunyadi family (1458–1490). Protected by the natural boundaries of the Carpathian Mountains in the north and in the east, Hungary was bordered by Poland in the north, Bohemia in the northwest, and Habsburg Austria in the west. In the south, the Danube and Sava Rivers—and the southern border defense system built along those rivers—separated the country from the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman threat fostered military reforms and centralization in Hungary. Relying on the towns and the lesser nobility, a reformed tax system, a secular bureaucracy, and a mercenary army of thirty thousand strong, King Matthias curtailed the influence of the aristocracy. Although the king strengthened and reorganized the country's southern defenses, vast resources were spent on his wars against Austria and Bohemia in pursuit of a Danubian monarchy, as well as on the king's lavish court and patronage of the arts and sciences.

During the rules of King Matthias's Jagiello successors (1490–1526), the power-hungry nobility strengthened its position vis-à-vis both the crown and the rest of the society. An influential compilation of Hungarian customary law, called the Tripartitum (1514), codified the rights and privileges of the nobility, including the right to resist the king. The book perceived the nobility, whose members supposedly enjoyed equal rights (una et aedem nobilitas), as "the mystical body" of the "holy crown" that is, the sole representatives of the "political nation." Following the rebellion of 1514, the nobility subjected the peasants to "eternal servitude." Although the Tripartitum was never promulgated and the decrees of the Diet of 1514 were often suspended, they provided the nobility with a legal framework until 1848 and were largely responsible for Hungary's unhealthy social structure.

The annihilation of the Hungarian army at the battle of Mohács (1526) not only meant the end of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary but also marked the beginning of Habsburg-Ottoman military confrontation in Central Europe. Following the Ottomans' withdrawal from Hungary in 1526, competing factions of the nobility elected two kings, János Szapolyai (John Zapolya, 1526–1540), the royal Hungarian governor (or vajda) of Transylvania, and Ferdinand of Habsburg (1526–1564). With Ottoman military assistance, Szapolyai controlled the eastern parts of the country, while Ferdinand ruled the northern and western parts of Hungary. When the death of Szapolyai (1540) upset the military equilibrium between the Habsburgs and Ottomans, Sultan Suleiman I annexed central Hungary to his empire (1541). Hungary's strategically less significant eastern territories were left in the hands of Szapolyai's widow and were soon to become the Principality of Transylvania, an Ottoman vassal state. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Habsburgs, who remained on the Hungarian throne until 1918, had to content themselves with northern and western Hungary, known as Royal Hungary.

Although the Ottomans launched multiple campaigns against Hungary and the Habsburgs (1529, 1532, 1541, 1543, 1551–1552, 1566, 1663–1564) and the two empires waged two exhausting wars in Hungary (1593–1606 and 1683–1699), the buffer-zone-turned-country saved Habsburg central Europe from Ottoman conquest. Successive peace treaties (1547, 1568, 1606, and 1664) maintained the tripartite division of the country, which ended only in 1699, when, in the treaty of Karlowitz, the Ottomans ceded most of Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburgs. The country's unity was only partially restored, however, for Vienna administered Transylvania as a separate imperial territory until 1848.

The price of being the "bastion of Christendom" was the dismemberment of the country and constant warfare along the Muslim-Christian divide with severe economic and social consequences. However, the endurance of Hungarian society and its economy proved to be much stronger than expected. Despite continuous skirmishes and protracted wars, famine, and epidemics, Hungary's population had increased from 3.1 million in the 1490s to 4 million by the early 1680s. In spite of double taxation (Hungarian and Ottoman), many towns in the Great Plain (Alföld) under Ottoman rule profited from the Hungaro-Ottoman condominium and succeeded in strengthening their privileges and self-government. The sixteenth century was the golden age of manorial agriculture and cattle trade. From the 1570s, Hungary exported some eighty thousand to one hundred thousand head of cattle annually to Vienna and to the German and Italian cities through an elaborate chain of cattle keepers and merchants. While defending the border was a major burden on the society, many profited from feeding and supplying imperial armies and Ottoman and Hungarian garrisons.

The tripartite division of the country and the limits of Habsburg authority also fostered the spread of Protestant Reformation. In Transylvania, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism were declared accepted denominations (recepta religio) in 1568. In the 1580s, half of Hungary's population was Calvinist, another quarter followed the Augsburg Confession, and the remaining 25 percent belonged to the Unitarian, Catholic, and Orthodox churches.

Angered by Vienna's lukewarm Turkish policy and aggressive Counter-Reformation, Protestant Magyar nobles rebelled repeatedly against the Catholic Habsburgs in the seventeenth century. They were aided by the princes of Transylvania, which, under the able rule of Gábor Bethlen (1613–1629) and György Rákóczi I (1630–1648) flourished economically and culturally. Allied with the Protestant states in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the princes launched several campaigns against the Habsburgs and extended the principality's territories at the expense of Royal Hungary. When the Habsburgs conceded further Hungarian territories to the Ottomans in the treaty of Vasvár in 1664 in spite of the former's victory at St. Gotthard, even the loyal Catholic magnates of Royal Hungary were outraged and many joined the anti-Austrian "magnate conspiracy" of 1670–1671. The severe punishment of the members of the plot and Emperor Leopold's "confessional absolutism" triggered new waves of anti-Habsburg rebellions, of which the most serious was the revolt of Imre Thököly's kurucs (a group of Hungarian "national crusaders" or insurgents) in 1681–1683. Thököly's war led to the creation of yet another pro-Ottoman vassal state in Upper Hungary at a critical moment when the Ottomans' failed siege of Vienna (1683) set off an international counteroffensive, which, by the end of the century, had reconquered most of Hungary from the Ottomans.

After 1699, the Habsburgs treated Hungary as a conquered and subjugated province, thus provoking another revolt of the Magyars. The peace treaty of Szatmár (1711), which ended Ferenc Rákóczi's defeated War of Independence (1703–1711), was a wise compromise for both parties. It altered initial Habsburg designs regarding Hungary's incorporation into the monarchy, leaving the county-level administration and jurisdiction in the hands of the Hungarian nobility, which also retained many of its former privileges including tax exemption. On the other hand, Charles VI (Charles III as king of Hungary, 1711–1740) restored Habsburg rule over Hungary, whose Estates recognized his daughter's succession (the Pragmatic Sanction) in the Diet of 1722/23, making Hungary a hereditary Habsburg kingdom.

Within two generations, the population of the country (including Croatia and Transylvania) had doubled, reaching nine million by the late 1780s. This was partly due to voluntary immigration and state-organized settlement policy through which hundreds of thousands of Romanians, Croatians, Slovaks, and Germans arrived in Hungary. This significantly changed the ethnic composition of the country, where the Hungarians lost their absolute majority and comprised less than 40 percent of the inhabitants in the end of the century.

Led by ideas reflecting the Enlightenment and by absolutistic and physiocratic principles, Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) and Joseph II (ruled 1780–1790) initiated important administrative, economic, legal, and cultural reforms, issued as royal patents and carried out by royal commissioners to avoid their blocking by the Estates in the Diet. Many of these reforms were beneficial for Hungary. The Urbarial Patent of 1767 regulated the size of peasant holdings and obligations in order to eliminate inequalities and overtaxation, whereas the Ratio educationis of 1777 reformed the educational system. Joseph II's Edict of Tolerance (1781) permitted the "free practice" of religion for all denominations, enabling their members to become guild masters, earn university diplomas in Hungary, and serve in state offices. However, Maria Theresa's discriminatory tariff regulations (1754), which separated Hungary from the rest of the monarchy and its traditional German and Italian markets, negatively affected Hungary, reinforcing the country's agrarian supplier status and hindering the development of domestic industries. Joseph II's decision to replace Latin with German as the official language of administration was perceived as "Germanization" and, along with his patents that abolished Hungary's old administrative structure, infuriated the Estates. By the end of Joseph II's rule, the country, which was feeling overwhelmed by the severe burden of a new Turkish war (1787–1790), was again on the brink of an insurrection. Facing possible armed rebellion in Hungary, growing Prussian pressure, a changing international order because of the French Revolution, and military defeat in his Turkish war, Joseph II decided to appease his Magyar nobility. In January 1790, the emperor revoked all his reforms, except for his Edict of Toleration and his decrees that benefited the peasantry and parishes.

After the compromise in 1711, loyal Hungarian magnates and the Catholic hierarchy were among the richest people in the monarchy. They were also instrumental in the cultural life of the country. The palaces built by the Esterházy, Károlyi, Pálffy, and Festetics families at Fertõd, Erdõd, Királyfalva, and Keszthely respectively are, along with magnificent churches, the best examples of Hungarian baroque. Many of the magnates were not only patrons of the arts and of literature, but were themselves active writers spreading the ideas of Enlightenment, the most radical of which were discussed in the twenty-some lodges of the Freemasons. While the eighteenth century saw spectacular population growth, solid, though uneven, economic development, and cultural revival, it also witnessed the preservation of the country's medieval and anachronistic "constitution" and social structure. All this, along with the radically changed ethnic composition of Hungary, would considerably complicate the country's history in the nineteenth century.

HUNGARY

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