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PASTURES

CHAPTER I

From the Earliest Times till the Reformation

THE northern Carpathians, now the home of the Slovaks, were once claimed as the cradle of the entire Slav race; to-day this claim has been abandoned, and it is gener­ally agreed that the seat of the aboriginal Slavs must be looked for in the region bounded by the Vistula and the Dnieper. Where all scientific proof is definitely impossible, the most probable theory is that the Slavs first entered Hungary from the North some time before the fourth or fifth centuries, and seized the land once held by the Gepidáé and Heruli. It would be unprofitable, even were it practicable, to follow the fortunes of the Slavs in those obscure centuries of nomad and internecine warfare; nor need we waste time over the derivations of their name from " slovo " (word) and " sláva " (glory). Suffice it to say, that the Slavs have throughout history shown a fissile and centrifugal tendency; and thus the mysterious figures of Samo and Svatopluk are the only Slav empire-builders until we reach the days of Peter the Great.[1] During the later period of the barbarian invasions, the wide plains between the Danube and the Styrian Alps formed a cockpit for the Avars and other wild hordes whose names were destined to vanish from history. The Avars met with a crushing defeat at the hands of Charles the Great during his invasion of Pannónia (796), and were finally annihi­lated by the Bulgars (807), whose sway at that date extended far westward from the Iron Gates. The gaps in the depopu­lated land were filled by the Slavs, who moved southwards from the Carpathians and Moravia. The Bulgars reached almost as far as the future city of Pest, while the west bank of the lake of Balaton formed the linguistic watershed between the Northern Slavs and the Chorvats, from whom the modern Croats descend.[2]

The chief Slavonic event of the ninth century was the rise of what is somewhat pompously known as the Great Moravian Empire. Its boundaries and extent have been, and are likely to remain, a matter of lively dispute, the more so as they were probably subject to frequent alterations. Some would limit it to the districts peopled to-day by the Slovaks, others would extend it as far as Lusatia on the north and Dalmatia on the south; but for our present purpose it is sufficient to note that it included the present Moravia, part of the Duchy of Austria, and the Slovak dis­tricts of Hungary from the March to the Theiss, and as far as the Mátra Hills and the neighbourhood of Vácz on the Danube. Moimir I, who is referred to in a Papal Bull of the year 826 as " Prince of Moravia," acknowledged the over­lordship of the Franks, and became the founder of the two Bishoprics of Olmütz and Nitrava, the modern Nyitra. The latter see apparently corresponded with a more or less auto­nomous principality, the ruler of which when banished by Moimir, fled to the court of the Emperor Louis, adopted Chris­tianity, and was invested with territory between the Eastern Mark and the Lake of Balaton. Not long after Moimir became involved in war with Louis, who deposed him in favour of the former's nephew Rastislav (846).[3] The greater part of this prince's reign was passed in war with the Germans; but even the scanty record of these events cannot conceal the greatness of Rastislav, who definitely annexed Nyitra to his crown, set King Louis at defiance, and successfully resisted the joint attack of three powerful German armies. What foreign invasion had failed to effect was wrought by the treachery of his own nephew; and Svatopluk, the greatest of early Slav monarchs and the hero of modern epic and romance, opened his career in intrigue, dishonour and defeat. Moravia was occupied by the Germans, who sent Svatopluk in chains to the court of Regensburg. Released by Carlo­man, and burning with resentment at such ignoble treatment, Svatopluk returned to place himself at the head of the revolted Moravians. Not merely were his arms crowned with com­plete success, but in 873 he even invaded Germany, and in the following year wrested terms of peace from the Emperor Louis II, then full of schemes for the pacification of Italy. The reign of Svatopluk received an added splendour from the presence of the great Apostle of the Slavs, St. Methodius, who in 868 was created by the Pope Archbishop of Moravia and Pannónia. Cyril and Methodius first appeared among the Slavs in response to an appeal of Rastislav to the Byzantine Emperor; and to their labours is due the spread of the Slav liturgy, whose language may be said to form the basis of all the Slav dialects of the modern world. Some writers, more patriotic than critical, have endeavoured to prove that Slovak is the original dialect of the Slav apostles; but Safafik, the author of an epochmaking book on Slav Antiquities and one of the many distinguished Slovaks whom Magyar rule has driven to Prague, was constrained to admit that it originated in Bulgaria arid was only brought to Moravia by the apostolic brothers.[4] Many were the attacks directed against this liturgy by the German prelates of Salzburg and Passau, and Methodius was twice summoned to Rome (867 and 880) to defend it against the calumnies of his opponents; but on each occasion he emerged triumphant, and before his death in 885 the entire clergy of Svatopluk's dominions had acknowledged his juris­diction. Political misfortunes checked the spread of the Slav liturgy, but the national traditions lived on, and the writings of Hus formed a new link in the chain which connects modern Czech and Slovak nationalism with the great apostle of the Western Slavonic Church.

In a reign of twenty-three years (871-894) the redoubtable' Svatopluk held his own against all comers; but even during his lifetime signs of impending peril might have been observed, when Arnulf, the German King, invited the support of the Magyars, at that time fighting in Dacia for the cause of the Eastern Empire. The death of Svatopluk plunged his country into civil discord, which was fanned by Arnulfs emissaries. When, however, in the closing years of the century the Magyars resumed their wanderings and advanced across the Carpathian passes, Arnulf, who in the words of Gibbon ”has been justly reproached as a traitor to the civil and ecclesiastical society of the Christians," had already passed from the scene; and the defence of Moravia and of Germany rested in the feeble hands of Moimir II and Louis the Child. In August, 907, a great battle on the March, near Pressburg, ended in the rout of the combined Slav and German armies. King Louis escaped with difficulty from the stricken field, and the short-lived Moravian Empire fell an easy prey to the Magyar hordes.

The Magyar conquest has been described[5] as "the greatest misfortune which the Slav world has suffered throughout the centuries." The kingdom of Rastislav and Svatopluk, which had so valiantly repelled the continuous onslaughts of the Germans, formed virtually the centre of gravity for all the Slav peoples which in the ninth century stretched from the frontier of Holstein to the coasts of the Peloponnese. The force of circumstances would have gradually driven "all Slav people to range themselves round this centre; from it they would have received, if not political institutions, at any rate Christianity, and with it an European and national culture, art and industry, unity in language and writing. As in the West under Roman influences the Frankish Monarchy grew great, so a similar Slav Empire would have developed in the East, under the dominant influence of Constantinople; and Eastern Europe would have won a thousand years ago an importance wholly different from that which it actually acquired." Other writers, however, have argued that the Magyar conquest, so far from being a misfortune to the Slavs, was really a blessing in disguise, and that the Czechs in particular owe their survival as a nation to the appearance on their Southern frontier of a race capable of resisting the mediaeval Drang nach Osten of the Germans.[6] Each view is coloured by the national pride of its supporters, and foreign students will be disposed to steer a middle course between the Bohemian Scylla and the Magyar Charybdis. Whether Moravia could ever have formed the nucleus of an enduring Slav Empire, is at least open to doubt; yet it is diffi­cult to resist the conclusion that the presence of the Magyars arrested during many centuries the development of the Slavs, just as it still supplies to-day the chief obstacle of the realiza­tion of the Panslav ideal.

During the first half of the ninth century the Magyars re­tained their old nomadic instincts, and were the terror of Europe from the gates of Pavia on the south as far as the frontier of Champagne and the mouth of the Elbe. Nor was it until their crushing defeat at the hands of Otto the Great (955) that they definitely settled in the great Danubian plain, which was destined to remain the limit of their racial

CSORBA (IN THE TATRA MOUNTAINS)

though not of their political expansion. Such born horsemen were naturally more at home in the limitless pusztas of Central Hungary than in the mountainous and woodland country through which they passed on their first entry; and hence the latter became a kind of " debatable country " between the still elastic territories of the Magyars, the Czechs and the Poles. What is now known as Moravia undoubtedly fell under the sway of the Princes of Bohemia; how much of the present Slovak districts of Hungary remained with Moravia in these centuries, it is quite impossible to say with certainty. The modern historian, even though he may not affect the truly regal contempt displayed by Gibbon for the details of so barbaric an age, can hardly be expected to devote much research to so essentially academic a question. When called upon to weigh the evidence, he can at best supply its absence by vague generalities; and any rash pronouncement on his part might seem to implicate him as upholding the absurd theories of modern politicians. The present-day claims which centre round the names of Zvonomir, Dushan and Svatopluk, are as ridiculous as if the present writer, inspired by Celtic traditions, were to urge the revival of the kingdoms of Kenneth Macalpine and Brian Boroimhe. Few things are more sacred than historic tradition; but to select the ninth or the twelth century as an ideal for the twentieth, suggests a striking contempt for historic evolution, coupled with an even bolder neglect of the laws of common sense.

Without venturing to define the western frontier of Hungary as early as the reign of St. Stephen, we may safely assert that the valleys of the Vág, Gran and Nyitra were better peopled than the districts farther east, where according to such evidence as has survived, there were only a few royal hunting-lodges, surrounded by extensive forests. It is probable that the northern borders remained in a condition of neglect and anarchy until St. Stephen, in his wars with Mieceslav of Poland, reduced them at least to nominal vassalage. The Magyars, unlike the Germans, never made any attempt to colonize. They settled in a more or less compact mass in the wide alluvial territories of the Danube and the Theiss, preferring the boundless plains which reminded them of their Asiatic home to the impenetrable forests and beetling crags of the northern Carpathians; and therefore the Slavs, when once they had survived the dangers of pillage and invasion, and had done homage to the conqueror, were long left practically undisturbed in their ancestral homes.

St. Stephen, under the influence of his Bavarian wife, was the first Magyar to throw Hungary open to Western influences, and under him many important offices at court were assigned to German strangers. Above all, the introduction of Chris­tianity, which had been commenced by Prince Géza, but was definitely completed under his son King Stephen I., flooded the country with German monks and clergy; and there can be little doubt that it was their nationality quite as much as their religion, which induced the remnants of the old pagan party to make their last despairing efforts at upheaval. While everything around the person of the mon­arch betrayed the paramount influence of the Germans, while Stephen was knighted, anointed, crowned wholly after German fashion, while more than one of the great offices of state be­trays its German origin, and even the far-famed Hungarian Constitution is deeply tinged with German colours; there are on the other hand not a few traces of Slav influence upon the early development of Hungarian institutions. Indeed the system of county government introduced by King Stephen was to a large extent based upon existing Slav institutions[7]; and it is possible to argue from the number of counties bear­ing names of Slav origin, that the old pre-Magyar local boun­daries have in many cases been preserved. Certain it is that the chief county official, the Ispán, or High Sheriff, is the successor of the ancient Slav Župan; while the highest dignitary of the land, the Palatine or King's vicegerent, derived his Mag­yar title of Nádorispán from the Slav Nadvorni Župan, and even Király, the Magyar word for king, betrays its derivation from the Slavonic " Krai." As Šafařik once wrote to Palacky, "the most ancient repository of Old Slav is to found in Mag­yar."[8] In this connection it is at least highly interesting to note that the Magyar word for "free" (szabad), is also derived from the Slav "svoboda" or "slobod."[9]

One fact at any rate is beyond all dispute. St. Stephen was firmly convinced of the necessity for inoculating his subjects with Western ideas; and that he wished his own efforts in this direction to become the fixed policy of his dynasty, is apparent from the famous passage in his letter of advice to his son Emmerich. "Treat the newcomers (hospites) well," writes the great king, "and hold them in honour, for they bring fresh knowledge and arms into the country; they are an ornament and support of the throne, for a country where only one language and one custom pre­vails, is weak and fragile." Regnum unius linguae uniusque moris imbecille et fragile est. The consistency with which his successors acted upon his advice, has led more than one modern writer to reproach St. Stephen as the cause of Hun­gary's racial divisions and of the alien colours which time has imparted to many of her institutions. But this argument is surely out of place in the mouths of men who are never tired of holding up Hungary as an example of a wild Eastern race worthily assimilating the highest culture of the West. Either this culture must be regarded as detrimental to the true Magyar character, and the merits of modern Hungary must be based on other grounds, or else full justice must be done to the great services of the West.

The virile and fiery character of the Magyars has enabled them to survive the hostile movements of a thousand years; but they still retain too many qualities betraying their Asi­atic origin, to justify us in regretting the Germanic and Slavonic influences upon their race and country.

The two centuries preceding the Mongol invasion (1241) are really a complete blank, so far as the Slovaks are con­cerned. But the fearful ravages wrought by the hordes of Zenghis Khan form a turning-point in the history of Northern Hungary. To fill the depopulated territory, Béla IV and his successors invited fresh German settlers into the country. Extensive grants of land and the most ample privileges of local government were not without their effect, and within little more than a century the northern counties, where hitherto the royal hunting-lodges had been almost the only signs of civilization, were studded with prosperous German townships. That the Slovak population must have been not only backward but scanty, is shown by the rapid progress made by the German element in the thirteenth and four­teenth centuries. As early as 1244 Karpfen, in 1254 Altsohl, and in 1255 Neusohl obtained the concession of German municipal law (Deutsches Stadtrecht); and in the fourteenth century, if not earlier, this was also enjoyed by Schemnitz, while the country round the latter town was almost entirely German.[10] This was the golden age of the twenty-four Zips towns (notably Leutschau, Käsmarck, Kirchdorf, Iglau[11]). Holding direct from the King, they formed a vanguard of German culture and commerce, a little world of their own amid the Magyar and Slav nobility and peasantry. The first inroad upon their power was dealt by the spendthrift Sigismund, who pawned thirteen of the Zips towns to Poland; and their decay was consummated under the sad influence of religious dissensions.

Nothing illustrates more strikingly the polyglot character of Hungary's population, than a study of the fortunes of these German towns and their surrounding districts. More than one place which enjoyed German Stadtrecht in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries is to-day purely Slovak or Magyar; there are quite as many instances of Magyar villages which are now Slovak, and vice versa; while others have changed their language more than once in the course of the centuries.

trencsén.                                                        `                leutschau (LÖCSE).

When early in the fourteenth century the male line of the House of Árpád became extinct, Hungary was for some years threatened with anarchy. Three rival claimants aspired to the vacant throne; and the Angevin, Charles Robert, had to defend his rights against Wenceslas of Bohemia. Amid the ensuing disorders a mysterious figure arose in North Hungary, who has in recent times been unwisely claimed as a Slovak national hero.[12] Matthew Csák of Trencsén, some­times described as " dominus Vagi et Tatrae," set the An­gevin king at defiance, used his geographical position to intrigue with Bohemia, and himself assumed a semi-regal magnificence. At the height of his power, he owned some thirty fortified castles, among them the mighty fortress of Trencsén, which occupies a superb and almost impregnable position on a steep spur above the river Vág. Csák held out longer than any of the other oligarchs who resisted the author­ity of Charles Robert; but in 1321 the royal cause had suffi­ciently recovered to make a campaign against the great rebel possible. On the field of Rozgony, near the river Hernád, the power of Csák was utterly broken, and all hope of an autonomous principality in the north vanished for ever. But it would be entirely mistaken to imagine that Matthew Csák had any aspirations beyond those of tyrannous self-interest. He was merely one of those turbulent and powerful robber­barons in whom mediaeval chronicles are so rich; and it is Götz or Franz von Sickingen, not Robert Bruce or George Podiebrad, with whom he must be compared. The mists of racial prejudice cling around his figure, and blind his ad­mirers to the probability that he was as self-seeking and ruthless as any other feudal lord.

The foolish Slovak myth which makes of Matthew Csák a national hero, has been met by the Magyar countercharge that the modern Slovaks are immigrants of the fifteenth century — a charge which can be traced to a similar racial bias and is equally incapable of proof.

The fall of Matthew Csák placed Northern Hungary at the mercy of the King, who rewarded his loyal followers with grants of the rebel's lands. Under Charles Robert the first Hungarian mint was erected in Kremnitz (Körmöczbánya),and the mineral wealth of the Slovak districts was utilized for the first time. The reign of his son and successor, Louis the Great (1340-82), raised Hungary to a leading position among the Great Powers of Europe. His victorious cam­paigns against Naples and Venice, his conquests in Dalmatia, the recognition of his suzerainty over Bosnia and Wallachia, his union of the Crowns of Hungary and Poland, are events which belong to general European history and do not concern us here. Suffice it to say that Louis the Great's lack of a male heir is one of those personal factors which have influenced the whole course of history; for the union of Hungary and Poland under a strong ruler at the close of the fourteenth century might have arrested the Turkish advance and even saved the decrepit Eastern Empire from its fate.

While the Saxons of the Zips and of the Königsboden re­tained their self-government, and Transylvania was adminis­tered by a royal Voivode, the Slav population of Northern Hungary relapsed once more into the obscurity of feudal rule. For feudalism, while it never acquired in Hungary the same disintegrating strength as in France or Germany, vented upon its dependents the lawlessness which it could not safely direct against the person of the monarch, and lingered later than in western countries. The anarchy which prevailed in Hungary strengthened the hold of the feudal lords upon the land, and not even the Hussite wars and the new influences which they introduced were able to destroy the taint.

The Hussite wars were quite as much national as religious in character, and there can be little doubt that the sympathy of the Slovaks was on the side of their Czech kinsmen, though no record has survived of their share in the campaigns of Žižka and Procopius. The Emperor Sigismund, who was King of both Bohemia and Hungary, had come to terms with the rebellious Czechs the year before his death: but the premature death of his son-in-law and successor, the able Albert of Habs­burg, kindled fresh trouble in the sister kingdoms. The Slovak and German districts of North Hungary sided with the widowed queen Elizabeth and her posthumous infant Ladislas; the Magyars, who felt the need of a strong ruler capable of leading them against the Turks, elected Vladislav of Poland.

Civil war was the result. The party of Elizabeth crowned the baby king, and carried off the regalia of St. Stephen beyond the frontier. While Vladislav and the heroic Hunyády were preparing for their great Balkan campaign, the Hussite leaders, Giskra of Brandys and Pongracz, occupied the whole north of Hungary from Pressburg to Eperjes, in the name of Elizabeth. Never had the dream of a middle Danubian Kingdom been nearer fulfilment than under Vladislav the Pole; but the fatal field of Varna (1444) made its realization finally impossible and at the same time sealed the fate of the Eastern Empire. King and Legate paid with their lives for perfidy towards the infidel: Poland and Hungary again fell apart; and nine years later the Crescent gainedanentranceinto Constantinople. The Hungarian Diet recognized Ladislas as Vladislav's successor, but, justly suspicious of Elizabeth and her evil counsellor the Count of Cilli, proclaimed John Hunyády as Regent. This decision Giskra and Pongracz refused to acknowledge, and for almost twenty years the northern districts remained in Hussite occupation, especially the counties of Gömör, Hont, Zólyom, Zips, Trencsén and Nyitra. The number of immigrants from Bohemia must have been considerable, and traces of their influence still sur­vive in the architecture of North Hungary. Above all, they brought with them Hussite doctrines and the Hussite Bible; and their success was so marked that Cardinal Julian won a promise from King Vladislav to extirpate the Hussites from Hungary. Fortunately his death at Varna prevented the fulfilment of the threat, and the alliance which the two parvenu kings, Matthias Corvinus and George Podiebrad, concluded between Hungary and Bohemia, secured for the Slovak heretics a further respite. It is true that Matthias at a later date (1468) posed as the champion of orthodoxy and waged war upon the power which he should have enlisted as his chief ally against the Turk; but the great king was too convinced a supporter of civil authority to permit any wholesale onslaught upon those whose heresy did not rob them of the title of subjects. His campaigns against Bohemia were crowned with temporary success; and the treaty of 1475 recognized Moravia and part of Silesia as belonging to the Crown of St. Stephen. Ten years later Matthias overran the Austrian Duchies and during the closing years of his reign Vienna became the capital of the King of Hungary. But the greatness of Matthias died with him, and the hatred or distrust of Hungary's chief neighbours — Bohemia, Poland and the Empire — was the chief legacy which he left to indolent and worthless successors. His own fair fame has lingered on in the significant proverb, " King Matthias is dead, and with him justice," while his Roumanian origin and Slav sympathies have not deterred modern writers from claiming him as a Magyar of the Magyars.

Under Vladislav II (1490-1516) of the Polish House of Jagel­lon, Slav influences grew stronger, and the King, himself of course a Slav, employed the Czech language in opening more than one Hungarian Diet. Racial sympathies did not, how­ever, prevent him from introducing repressive measures against the Slovak heretics. In 1501 they were disqualified from holding any public office, and became liable to imprison­ment, or death in the event of refusing to recant. In 1508 the persecution was renewed; but Vladislav is said to have been so impressed by reading the Hussite confession of faith, that he ordered them to be left in peace. The Reformation, when it came, found a fertile soil in Hungary, and Lutheran doctrines spread rapidly throughout the Slovak districts.