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CHAPTER II

Reformation and Counter-Reformation

THE reign of Matthias Corvinus was the golden era of Hungary's history. But the strength which his father had concentrated upon a defence of Europe against the Ottoman hordes was squandered by Matthias in reckless expansion to the north and west; and after thus overtaxing instead of husbanding her strength, Hungary sank through the stages of exhaustion and lethargy to defeat and utter ruin. The same country whose repeated triumphs under Hunyády had won her the title of bulwark of the Christian West, was under the feeble Louis II almost wiped out of existence by the issue of a single battle. The defeat of Mohács (1526) is the most decisive event in Hungarian history. A triple partition was the result, lasting for 160 years. The central Danubian plains, forming the real Magyar kern of the country, were as much a province of the Sultan as Servia or Bosnia, and Buda became the capital of a Turkish pasha. Transylvania, where native princes ruled over the three equal " nations " of Magyars, Saxons, and Szekels, and where an example of religious tolerance was set to the rest of Europe, secured its independence by owning the suzerainty of the Sultan. North Hungary, coinciding almost exactly with the Slovak districts of to-day, was at first contested by John Zápolya, a Slovak magnate whom the Diet and most of the Hungarian nobility recognized as their King, and after his death was held against all rivals by successive Habsburg rulers. The native Magyar princes who ruled Transylvania from 1540 onwards, were led into dependence upon the Sultan by the same train of cir­cumstances which induced Francis I to welcome the pirate Admiral Khaireddin as an ally of "the most Christian King"; the Balance of Power, so clearly foreseen by Wolsey, was beginning to be recognized as an European necessity. But the constant relations with the Turks maintained by every Transylvanian prince and by every leader of a revolt in Hungary, rob the Magyars of the right to pose as the deliverers of Europe from the menace of the Crescent. That is an honour which must be shared by Magyar, German and Slav alike. Hunyády, Sobieski, and Prince Eugene are equally noble representatives of the three races; but the chief glory is due to the House of Habsburg, which, despite its narrow bigotry and despotic sympathies, remained for centuries true to its mission as outpost of Western civilization.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Hungarian history is narrowed down to two issues — the struggle against the Turks, and religious persecution. In the case of the Slovaks, who have no history in the stricter sense of the term, their very existence was bound up with their religious fortunes, and this must be my excuse for devoting more space to ecclesias­tical than to civil affairs during the period in question.

The sentiment of nationality in its modern sense is aproduct of the French Revolution; but it would be absurd to deny its decisive influence upon many of the greatest struggles of the Middle Ages. Above all, it was one of the determining factors in the Reformation, alike in the England of Wycliffe, the Bohemia of Hus and the Germany of Luther. Just as the chief strength of Hussitism lay in the national resistance to the Germans, just as dislike of Italian methods and ideas lay at the root of much of the German opposition to Rome, so too racial sympathies contributed to the ease with which the Slovaks and Germans of North Hungary fell under the spell of Hussite and afterwards of Lutheran doctrine; while the Magyars, perhaps partly for that very reason, eventually declared almost to a man for Calvinism. In North Hungary the Reformation found a specially fertile soil. Between the years 1522 and 1564 something like 200 Slovaks are said to have studied at Wittenberg University, and among the leading Lutheran divines of that period in North Hungary occur fully more Slovak than German names. Luther's frank admission of the extent to which the writings of Hus had influenced his spiritual development, was doubtless not without its effect upon the Czechs and Slovaks, and the close commercial rela­tions which existed between the German colonists of Hungary and the great markets of Silesia and Saxony (especially Breslau and Leipzig) aided the dissemination of Lutheran doctrines. The Diets of 1523 and 1525 passed stringent laws against the new heresy, but though two Lutherans were burnt for their faith at Neusohl (1527), the movement spread far too rapidly to be suppressed in a time of such political weakness as that immediately following Mohács. The comparative liberalism which has so frequently characterized the Hungarian episcopate, led some of the Bishops at this period to sympathize with the Augsburg Confession, and to concentrate their efforts against the more radical followers of Zwingli. This circumstance doubtless prompted the Lutherans of Hungary to define their religious position, and towards the middle of the century they drew up two distinct confessions of faith, which, based upon that of Augsburg, still form the foundations of their belief.[1] Many of the great nobles adopted the new faith, notably the families of Thurzó, Illesházy, Révay and Nádasdy, and their support was naturally a source of great strength to the Protes­tant cause in Hungary, until a century later the famous Primate, Cardinal Pázmány, succeeded in inducing most of the magnates to revert to the ancient faith.

With the accession of the Emperor Rudolf (1576) the counter­Reformation made its entry into the Habsburg dominions, and ere long Jesuit influences were supreme at court, and the first mutterings of the storm of persecution were to be heard. The unconstitutional acts of Rudolf against the Hungarian Protestants was one of the prime causes of the revolt of Stephen Bocskay (1604). Rudolf was driven to make concessions, and foremost in the ensuing treaty of Vienna (1606) was a clause guaranteeing liberty of conscience. Two years later the incapable monarch surrendered the crowns of the Empire and of Hungary to his brother Matthias, reserving only his favourite Bohemia to himself. Matthias was received in Hungary with enthusiasm, and his first Diet conceded to every town and village the right to choose its own confession. Though later in the seventeenth century this provision gave the Jesuits an opening for applying the principle" cuius regio eius religio " to the reconverted magnates as owners of the soil, for the time being it seemed to promise a new lease of life to 'Protestantism, under the tolerant rule of Matthias II. The Lutheran Church was not slow to take advantage of the improved situation; and in 1610 the Synod of Sillein, under Count George Thurzó, undertook the task of reorganization, reducing the districts (or synods) from seven to three and sub­dividing each into three seniorates (or presbyteries).[2]

But the tide was already turning in favour of Catholicism, and Cardinal Pázmány was winning back to the ancient faith many of the leading families of Hungary. For the present the Emperor and his Jesuit advisers concentrated their efforts upon Bohemia; and the prowess and diplomacy of Gabriel Bethlen, the celebrated Prince of Transylvania, stood the Protestants in good stead. But the Treaty of Linz (1645) which his successor George Rákóczy concluded with the House of Habsburg, and which assured not merely Tran­sylvanian autonomy, but also the absolute equality of the Catholic and Protestant religions throughout Hungary, con­cludes the series of concessions to the Protestants. Before many years had elapsed, it had become a worthless parch­ment, which merely served to prove the perfidy of the monarch, and so identified the cause of national freedom and the Pro­testant faith, as to inspire the proverb, "the Calvinist faith is the Magyar faith."[3]

At the very moment when the Protestants were first threat­ened with persecution, a decisive breach was made in the old exclusive privileges of the German free towns of North Hungary. Holding direct from the King, they had hitherto restricted citizenship to men of German birth, and often went the length of insisting that no one could become judge or councillor unless he could prove all four grandparents to have been German[4]; nor would they tolerate that a noble should so much as own property within their walls. The extreme jealousy with which the nobles had always regarded these special privileges of the German burghers, prompted the Diet in 1542 to forbid the acquisition of noble land by the towns; and in 1553 the towns were compelled to admit the fugitive nobles from the south, and to allow them to buy town houses, though without thereby acquiring the rights of citizenship. At length in 1608 and 1609[5] further laws

the casti.e of árva.

were enacted, which gave the nobles the right to acquire property or build houses in the towns, and admitted them to all the privileges and liberties which such possession con­ferred. Most momentous of all, the Germans were obliged to admit the Magyars and Slovaks to municipal offices, which in many cases came to be held alternately by each of the three races. These innovations proved fatal to the German character of the towns, and the good burghers followed a true instinct when they stubbornly refused to comply. But resistance was hopeless,. and merely brought upon them the infliction of heavy fines. Neusohl, one of the refractory towns, was in 1613 fined 2,000 florins and compelled to admit the Slovaks to its council; by the eighteenth century the Slovaks formed a majority in the town, and the only privileges still retained by the Germans were the right of selling wine and of owning a house on the Ring, or central square.[6] In Karpfen, which admitted the first Magyar in 1611 and the first Slovak a year later, the German language had almost disappeared in the eighteenth century; and Deutsch-Lipcse, which had received German Stadtrecht in 1260, had by 1750 become entirely Slovak. In Csetnek from 1328 to 1623 proceedings were conducted in German, but since then in Slav, and even a century ago Csetnek was regarded as the best place for acquiring a proper knowledge of Slovak. To-day there are many Slovak villages and families, which have re­tained their original German names.[7]

The nobles, though pledged by the law of 1608 to share in the burdens of the other citizens, soon endeavoured to assert within the walls the same exemption from taxation which they enjoyed outside; and they successively vindi­cated the free right of entry of wine, and then of corn, for their own use, and finally refused to pay the town tolls. More­over, confusion arose regarding the rival jurisdictions of townsmen and nobles. In 1635 the latter were made answer­able to the town courts so far as their town property was concerned; but in 1647 they succeeded in enforcing their claim that all their legal disputes should henceforth be decided not by town law, but by the general laws of the country. Thus the county judge, or Vice Sheriff (Alispán) effected an entrance into the free towns, some of them became the seats of the county courts of justice, and the county officials began to play a part in town affairs. The onslaught of the nobles upon the towns corresponded with the revival of religious persecution, and was used by the central authorities as a means towards the extirpation of heresy. It is necessary that emphasis should be laid upon this struggle in a book which attempts to trace the history of the Slovaks; for although the inroads thus made upon German monopoly seemed at first to bring advantages to the Slovaks, their ultimate effect was to pave the way for the Magyar hegemony in its modern sense, by paralysing the only non-Magyar race which might have been capable of effective resistance. If the northern towns instead of a mere vague consciousness of their German origin, had preserved into the nineteenth century the strong national sentiment of the Transylvanian Saxons, and the organization which made it possible, then the events of 1848 might have taken a very different course.

The reign of Leopold I (1657-1703), at once the least able and most bigoted of Habsburg rulers, is disfigured by more than one ferocious persecution of the Protestants. In 1673 the orders of a clerical dictator were enforced by a brutal soldiery, special tribunals were erected in the north and east of Hungary for the trial of heretics, and sixty Protestant pastors and teachers were sold as galley-slaves to the Viceroy of Naples.[8] These atrocities goaded Hungary into revolt, and the national leader, Emerich Tököli, did not hesitate to form an alliance with the Turks on the occasion of their final siege of Vienna (1683). Even the cruel provocation which drove Tököli to such a step, cannot wipe out the stain which attaches to an otherwise honourable name; the most that can be said is that his opponents in their turn disgraced a splendid cause by their cruelty and intolerance. For while the Imperialist armies in a series of brilliant campaigns were driving the Turks from Hungary, the Blood-Tribunal of Eperjes — an institution worthy of the Killing Time in con­temporary Scotland — was spreading fresh terror among the Lutherans of the north. When the Hungarian Diet met in 1687, not even the news of the recovery of Buda could induce the delegates to discuss the royal proposals until orders had been issued putting a stop to these barbarous executions. The worst of the persecution was now over, but although the Magyar Calvinists held their own in Debreczen and the great plain of the Theiss (Tisza), the Lutheran Church in North Hungary never recovered its former position. It had been deprived of many hundred churches and almost all its schools: large numbers of its adherents had been for­cibly driven to mass, and the Jesuits skilfully used the ancient trade guilds as an instrument of proselytism. The fatal Slav trait of submissive surrender to authority asserted itself once more; and persecutions such as fired the Celtic blood of Scotland and Ireland to undying resistance, drove the majority of the Slovaks to forget the glorious traditions of their Hussite ancestors, and to submit meekly to the commands of Rome,

The Diet of 1687 opens a new epoch in Hungarian history. The monarchy is no longer elective but hereditary; and the celebrated clause of the Golden Bull, which by legalizing insurrection under certain conditions gave a singular bias to Hungary's constitutional development, is now solemnly abrogated. Strangely enough, the most brilliant and determined of all Hungarian risings was reserved for the period immediately following this renunciation. For eight years, from 1703 to 1711, Francis Rákóczy held his own against the Austrian arms, conducted elaborate intrigues with the courts of St. Petersburg and Paris, and even went the length of proclaiming the deposition of the Habsburg dynasty.[9] But independence lay beyond the powers of Rákóczy, and the Treaty of Szatmár (1711) drove him into exile and left the Habsburgs free to pursue their triumphant mission against the Turks.

To us Prince Eugene is best known as the comrade of Marl­borough in the great French wars; but his noblest victories were won upon the Middle Danube as the champion of Western Christendom. The recovery of Temesvár (1716) and the conquest of Belgrad (1717) removed the last traces of the Turkish occupation: the conquering generals organized the "Military Confines" as a permanent bulwark against fresh invasion, and took up the task of reclaiming the rich alluvial soil which the ravages of war had converted into a malarious desert. Leopold I had already repeopled part of the south with Serb refugees under their Patriarch Arsenius and had guaran­teed to them a special privileged position; now Charles III and Maria Theresa introduced many thousands of German settlers from Swabia and Alsace into the plains on either side of the Danube. Even the Slovaks were represented in this racial mosaic which was forming in the south, and to-day their descendants number 15,000 in the county of Torontál and 28,000 in the county of Bács.

For the Habsburg dominions as a whole, the eighteenth century was a period of consolidation and increased prestige, since the geographical laws which prescribe the existence of a powerful Danubian state asserted themselves with signal effect. For Hungary, however, it was a period of stagnation, of slow recovery from the wounds inflicted by the Turkish conquest. The failure of Rákóczy marked the close of a long era of discord, perfidy and foreign rule, and led by mutual consent to a constitutional settlement. Easily roused to passionate resistance, the true Magyar is generous to a degree in consigning past injuries to oblivion: the countless infringe­ments of the constitution were forgotten, and the dynasty's great services in the deliverance of Hungary from the infidel were frankly recognized as a title to lasting gratitude. The Pragmatic Sanction, confirmed in 1723 by the Hungarian Diet, forms the real basis of the Dual System as elaborated under Deák in 1867. Hungary emerges once more from the ex-lex condition to which the battle of Mohács had reduced her; but while restored to a footing of full legal equality with her Cisleithan sister, she deliberately restricts her free­dom of action in certain directions, and in doing so imposes similar restrictions upon her neighbour. The Crown of St. Stephen remains a hereditary possession of the House of Habsburg so long as male descendants of Maria Theresa survive; and the significance of this fact is in no way affected, when we admit that the Hungarian Pragmatic Sanction is a compact between crown and nation, and that the sovereign undertakes on his part corresponding obligations. So long as two states have one and the same sovereign, neither can claim for itself that absolute freedom of action and that mutual irresponsibility which the two jointly exercise against a third state. A state has been created on the Middle Danube which forms a distinct category of its own; for though neither of its two component parts is subject to the other, yet they are interdependent rather than independent, since they form a single unit in the European commonwealth and since the dynastic link is indissoluble and rests upon unity in defence in representation and in credit.[10]

The Pragmatic Sanction bore practical fruit when Maria Theresa, threatened on all sides by a hostile European coali­tion, won the hearts of the Hungarian Diet by her beauty and her tears. History has reduced to its just proportions the famous scene when the assembled nobles greeted their young Queen with the impassioned cry, "Vitam et sanguinem pro rege nostro Maria Theresa." That this display of loyalty was preceded by a rigorous bargain and in particular by the remission of taxes to the noble classes of Hungary, throws an interesting light upon the strange blend of chivalry and legálisra in the Magyar character, but cannot obscure the sterling services rendered by Hungary in the wars against Frederick the Great. Maria Theresa preserved throughout life a warm sympathy for the Hungarian nation, and suc­cessfully employed all the wiles of a great ruler and a fascinating woman to preserve her popularity. None the less the Prag­matic Sanction was violated in more than one respect during her reign, and the way was prepared for that assimilating process, which her successor sought to carry out.

Joseph II combined the temperament of the French Revo­lution[11] and the enlightened austerity of the ancient Greeks with those prosaic and pedantic qualities which are unjustly regarded as typical of the average German. Born out of due time, he imagined that the traditions of the Middle Ages could be banished by a stroke of the pen; and in his eager desire to reorganize his dominions as a modern state and to weld its polyglot races into a single people, he set law and custom alike at defiance. Too conscientious to take an oath which ran counter to his convictions, he refused to be crowned King of Hungary. Determined not to be hampered by refractory nobles, he ceased to convoke the Diets of the various kingdoms and provinces. Not content with dispensing with the constitution, he introduced German as the official lan­guage of his entire dominions, abolished the ancient county autonomy of Hungary, and divided the country into ten circles or provinces, each under a German official. Universal opposition was the result of these proceedings, and almost on his deathbed he was compelled to revoke the reforms to which he had devoted his life. His failure was due not merely to the illegality of his methods but to the fact that his self­imposed task far exceeded the powers of a single man. Joseph II is one of the most tragic figures in the history of his cen­tury. If integrity and lofty idealism were the sole qualities requisite in a monarch, none would dare to challenge his pre-eminence: but nature had cruelly denied to him the essential gift of tact without which in the modern world even the most gifted ruler is foredoomed to failure. None the less, the impartial historian cannot fail to recognize the bene­ficial results of Joseph's reforms, even while he condemns the methods adopted to enforce them. Over sixty years were to elapse before the emancipation of the peasants, which he sought to achieve by arbitrary decree, was adopted by the Hungarian Diet. The barbaric administration which is still the curse of the country, would long have been a thing of the past, had his reforming measures survived in legal form; while all subsequent judicial reforms in Hungary have been based upon the Josephan system. His firm policy towards the Papal Curia has left its mark upon the relations of Vienna and the Vatican, and even in the most reactionary moments his successors have never abandoned the claim which Joseph II first enforced, that all new Bishops should swear allegiance to their temporal rather than to their spiritual master.

The immediate result of the Josephan era was a great revival of national feeling among the Magyars. The spirit of nationality was in the air, and was encouraged by the appearance of more than one poet of ability, and of philologists who did much to adapt the Magyar language to modern requirements. But the movement could never have assumed such serious dimensions unless Joseph had alienated the great nobles of Hungary and driven them into the arms of the opposition. What the imposition of the German language merely began, was completed by the abolition of the county assemblies (then even more than now the preserve of a few powerful families) and still more by the emancipation of the peasants. Pride and pocket were equally affected, and the price which Joseph's brother and successor Leopold II had to pay for reconciliation with the outraged nation, was the revival of feudal dues and bondage. Despite this unhappy blemish on its character, the great Diet of 1790-1 deserves a place of honour in the annals of Hungary. Here the con­stitutional rights of the nation are for the first time restated in modern phraseology. The king must be crowned within six months of his accession, and until the ceremony has taken place, he cannot exercise his full sovereign rights. The Diet is to be summoned every three years, and without its con­sent no tax or loan may be raised and no soldiers may be levied. The legislative power rests jointly in the hands of the lawfully crowned king and of the Estates assembled in a lawful Diet, and cannot be exercised save through the latter. Above all, the famous Article X reasserts Hungary's free and independent position, and expressly declares that it is to be governed " according to its own laws and customs and not after the manner of the other provinces."[12] As the latest historian of the Ausgleich has aptly remarked, this formula is a résumé of historic Dualism.[13] All the essential points which the Compromise of Deák contains, are already to be found in the laws of 1790-1. Here, as in all Hungarian affairs, the difference lies not in the theory but in the practice. In 1867 the political constellation of Europe was favourable to the Magyars, and they were left free to translate the words of the Compromise into action; in 1791 Europe was on the brink of a catastrophe, and the desperate struggle of the Habs­burgs against Napoleon absorbed all those energies which might have been devoted to constitutional development. Once more Hungary contented herself with the legal asser­tion of her rights, and allowed them to remain a dead letter for the next generation. When forty years ago she became in fact as well as in theory her own mistress, the evil practice had become ingrained in her constitution, and to-day a whole series of vitally important laws adorn the statute book without any serious attempt being made to enforce a number of their chief provisions.