A History of Hungary (Barta István, Berend Iván, Hanák Péter, Lackó Miklós, Makkai László, Nagy Zsuzsa, Ránki György)

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A History of Hungary
Author	Barta István, Berend Iván, Hanák Péter, Lackó Miklós, Makkai László, Nagy Zsuzsa, Ránki György
Publisher	Zrínyi Printing House
First published	1973 Budapest
Source	https://archive.org/details/HistoryHungary/mode/1up

The Origins of the Hungarian People and State

From Primitive Society to Feudalism

Ugrian Prehistory

The origin of the Hungarian people is, to this day, a matter of dispute. The most reliable clue is the linguistic evidence that Hungarian is one of the Finno-Ugrian languages. The bulk of its vocabulary, as well as its grammatical structure, is common to all Finno-Ugrian languages, particularly to the eastern, Ugrian branch. The present-day distribu¬ tion of Finno-Ugrian peoples and the occurrence of words in the Finno- Ugrian languages for botanical and zoological features that can be geographically localized has convinced philologists that the ancestors of these peoples inhabited the area between the middle Volga and the Urals, probably in the neighbourhood of the Kama river. This Finno- Ugrian community eventually split into the Finnish and Ugrian branches. Later the Ugrian branch divided into the present-day Ug- rians of the Ob valley—the Voguls and Ostyaks (Man'shi and Chanti) —and into the ancestors of the Hungarians. The division, according to the philologists, took place around 500 B.C. The fact that the Hun¬ garians belong to the Finno-Ugrian family of peoples is indisputable. The exact location of the original Finno-Ugrian homeland, as well as the process leading to the separation of the peoples, is still a matter of controversy. All the theories, however, agree on one point: during the first millennium B.C. the majority of the Finno-Ugrian peoples lived somewhere in the European part of what is today the U.S.S.R. The Ugrians lived further east than the Finns, very probably below the Volga bend and on both banks of the river. This area was still in the belt of deciduous forests but very close to the steppes.

The Finno-Ugrian peoples were already at the time skilled in pot¬ tery making, weaving and spinning. They bred livestock and tilled the land with hoes. Influenced by their neighbours, the nomadic pastoral communities of the steppes, the Ugrians learned to breed horses and, around the fifth century B.C., they began to use bronze, and later iron. Primitive agriculture and livestock breeding did not replace hunting and fishing, however, particularly as the forest region abounded in fur-bearing animals.

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The nucleus of these empires was the armed retinue of a wealthy chieftain. His retainers, recruited both from impoverished members of the clan and from outsiders, enabled him to gain control first over his own clan and then over others, sometimes speaking different lan¬ guages, until he eventually formed a tribe comprising all the clans he controlled. Finally, he became overlord of a confederation of tribes. A man of rank in the conqueror’s retinue was appointed head of each tribe. These tribal chiefs, in their turn, had their own armed retainers who enforced the obedience of the clan leaders. The ruler of the con¬ federation of tribes, or empire, ‘the king of kings’ (the khagan), sat enthroned above his subjects. He maintained his position with myths concerning his divine origin. He nominated his kinsmen as viceroys over these groups of tribes or ‘peoples’. These nomadic empires rose swiftly to power and their disintegration was no less sudden and dramatic.

From the fifth century A.D. onwards, historical evidence proves that the Hungarians were subjects of the successive empires of the Huns, the Avars, the Tu-kines, the Onogur-Bulgars and the Khazars. They were part of the Onogur-Bulgar tribal federation which was formed about the middle of the fifth century, and which during the seventh century constituted an independent, if short-lived, empire. At the end of the century, the federation was reduced to dependence upon the Khazars, who were descendants of Huns, intermingled with Alano-Sarmatian elements. Some of the Onogurs fled before the Kha- zar conquerors to the lower reaches of the Danube river, where they subsequently established an independent state. Another group of Onogurs founded the Bulgarian state of the Volga region. The name of the disintegrating Onogur federation of tribes was preserved by the Hungarian tribes, which stayed on and came under Khazar rule.

The status of the Hungarians within the Onogur tribal federation and their political organization are not known. But some information is available, from Arabic and Byzantine sources, about their life under Khazar rule. The Khazar conquerors appointed chiefs to head the Hungarian tribes; the foremost of them, the paramount chief or kende, was the third highest dignitary in the Khazar imperial hierarchy. The other chiefs, too, held office in a strictly hierarchical order. The gyula and horka were next to the kende in the hierarchy. The names of other office-bearers survived in Hungarian tribal names (e.g. Tarjan, Jeno). Each of the chiefs had an armed retinue, recruited from outside the clans. These armed retainers were called jobbagy, a term which in later feudal times came to mean ‘vassal’.

The leaders of the tribes and clans claimed hereditary rights to military and judicial offices: hence the beginnings of a hereditary aristocracy. Men of rank recruited into their service poor or impover¬ ished freemen and also made use of slaves, who had been bought or taken captive in war. The internal structure of the clan was thus transformed. In addition to the kinship-based families—of which the clan had previously consisted exclusively—there arose a new type of family: a wealthy one to which blood relations as well as some de¬ pendent freemen and slaves or bondsmen belonged (the latter two with a lower status than the kin). This wealthy family became the leader of the clan. Within the framework of the primitive community a division into classes gradually emerged.

The Hungarian Tribal Federation

In the seventh and eighth centuries the Hungarians’ neighbours, the Khazars and the Bulgars of the Volga region, gradually developed agriculture, thus laying the foundations for the transition from the tribal framework to the social and political patterns of feudalism. These changes in neighbouring territories did not fail to make an im¬ pact upon the Hungarian community.

The last group of words of Bulgar-Turkish origin incorporated into the Hungarian language are all agricultural terms, including some relat¬ ed to wine growing. The Hungarians’ gradual change-over to agri¬ culture is attested, inter alia, by Dzhaihani’s remark that they ‘have plenty of crops’. Their leaders sold furs, exacted as taxes from the peoples of the forest belt, and slaves, brought back from their cam¬ paigns, to Arabic and Byzantine traders, from whom they purchased silk fabrics, swords, armour, ornamental vessels, harness and orna¬ ments for their dress. It was noted by Dzhaihani’s informant that the latter were worn by Hungarian dignitaries, and many of these objects have been unearthed in tenth-century burial places in present-day Hungary. Although the Hungarians of the steppe remained predomi¬ nantly nomads and failed to establish towns, there is little doubt that their economy grew stronger and that the disintegration of their old social system continued unabated. They adopted the Turkish runic alphabet and adapted it to their Finno-Ugrian language. With the loosening of the bonds of the clan system, there began the process which ultimately led to the transformation of the federation of seven tribes (Nyek, Megyer, Kiirt-Gyarmat, Tarjan, Jeno, Ker and Keszi) into a united people calling themselves Magyar or Hungarian.

fhe leaders of the Hungarians, although of Khazar descent, no longer had any feeling of community with the Khazar empire, and in the early ninth century they shook off Khazar rule. Once a dignitary of the Khazar khagan, the kende now became the paramount chief of the Hungarians. Following the pattern of the dual kingship system that existed in both the Khazar and the Avar empires, he shared his rule with the gyula, who was second in rank. Although the Khazar ruling class never accepted the desertion of the Hungarians, the latter repulsed every Khazar attempt to re-establish their overlordship and even counter-attacked to such an extent that around the year 830 the Khazars were compelled to build the fortress of Sarkel in the region between the Don and Volga rivers in order to secure their communica¬ tions. The Khazars also encouraged the nomadic Pechenegs to attack the Hungarians. This device proved more effective in keeping the Hun¬ garians at bay—although in the end it proved to have been a two- edged weapon as, by enlisting the Pechenegs, the Khazars themselves opened the door to a fresh barbarian invasion, which led to the early destruction of their young steppe civilization. But a Pecheneg attack in 889 dislodged most of the Hungarians from the Volga bend and they moved to the region stretching from the Don to the lower reaches of the Danube.

Conflicting information from the available sources has inspired a variety of theories about the Hungarian migration. There have been attempts to locate Levedia and Etelkoz, mentioned in thirteenth-cen¬ tury chronicles as the homelands of the migrating Hungarians at va¬ rious dates before their conquest of present-day Hungary, at various places between the Volga and the Danube. The territory bordered by the Kuban river and the Caucasus is also believed by some historians to have been a dwelling place of the Hungarians for a while. However, the available evidence on the route that the Hungarians took from the Volga bend does not satisfactorily bear out any of the theories men¬ tioned. All that is certain is that the majority of the Hungarians did not leave the Volga before the second half of the ninth century. Here, on the banks of the Volga, a Hungarian Dominican friar called Julian, on an expedition to the East in the first half of the thirteenth century, found a few Hungarians who had been left behind when the majority began their westward trek.

When the Hungarians had already reached the region of the Dnieper river (the Etelkoz or ‘land between rivers’ of the chronicles), they met with the Slavs and became embroiled in the political struggles over the hegemony of the Middle Danube Basin. The year 892 saw them fight¬ ing, in alliance with Arnulf, king of the East Franks, against Prince Svatopluk of Moravia, while in 895, instigated by Byzantium, they attacked Czar Symeon of Bulgaria but were defeated. The Pechenegs seized this opportunity to occupy the Hungarian settlements along the Dnieper. In the absence of their best warriors the Hungarians were unable to defend themselves, and so, led by their two chiefs, Kursz&n, the kende, and Arpad, the gyula, they moved to the Carpathian Basin which they had come to know during earlier raids.

The Conquest of the Carpathian Basin

When the Hungarians invaded the Carpathian Basin, they found there no well-established state capable of offering effective resistance. At the end to the eighth century, Charlemagne had crushed the Avars who inhabited this area. The Slavic tribes, now that they were free from Avar domination, began their independent political organiza¬ tion, but these young states were compelled to defend themselves against the expansionist policy of the East Frankish Kingdom. The Slovenian principality which had been established on the territory of the former Frankish margravate, in what is today Western Hungary, had failed to attain independence, while by the later part of the, nin th century the Moravian Empire, whose control extended east of the Western Carpathians to the region of Nyitra, was on the point of disintegration, a process accelerated by the Hungarian invasion, rhe territories east of the Danube came under Bulgarian influence after the collapse of the Avar Empire, but the Bulgarians, who were locked in a struggle with Byzantium, lacked the power to establish effective control over any part of this area. Feudal anarchy was rampant in the East Frankish Kingdom under the last of the Carol- ingians; thus the Hungarians were able to conquer the Basin quickly and with comparative ease. First they subdued the vicinity of Nyitra, then, after 900, they extended their rule over Pannonia (Western Hungary), and very probably to large areas of Transylvania. Archaeo¬ logical finds indicate the early arrival of the Hungarians in these areas. In the south, the Hungarians reached the Save-Danube line.

Historical sources available contain no reliable information con¬ cerning the details of the Hungarian conquest. The Hungarian chroni¬ cles of later periods, drawing on the sagas of the tenth-century war- leaders and somewhat naive etymologies of place names, speak of Moravian and Bulgarian ‘dukes’ in parts of Hungary which were undoubtedly inhabited by Slavs during the tenth century. Some of these ‘dukes’ surrendered to the conquerors; others perished in battle and their people were subjected to the rule of the Hungarian leaders.

The Slavs living in the Basin—or at least some of them—practised relatively advanced stock farming and tillage and pursued various handicrafts. Words in Hungarian of Slavic origin dating from this period testify to this. The Slavs also had an advanced social organiza¬ tion. The clan and tribal chiefs (zhupans and voivodes) already formed a ruling class which had subjected part of the population to feudal exploitation and had built strongholds to safeguard its rule. These strongholds were in the centre of the area controlled, and the sur¬ rounding lands were tilled by slaves and dependent freemen.

After the conquest, the Hungarian chieftains with their armed retainers and bondsmen moved into the fortresses of the Slavic zhupans or else they built strongholds of their own. Those Slavic leaders who surrendered to the Hungarians were probably allowed to retain their property but the land of those who resisted passed into the hands of the Hungarian chieftains. These developments quickened the pace of Hungarian feudal evolution. Agriculture, thanks to the influence of the subject Slavs, became an increasingly important sector of the economy on the domains of the Hungarian chieftains, but the free Hungarians of the clans usually remained herdsmen.

Toponymical evidence suggests that the Hungarian conquerors occupied the Carpathian Basin as far as the beech and fir-tree belt, because the forests, lacking undergrowth, offered no grazing for their herds. The Slavs, on the other hand, kept away from the grassy plains and settled in the oak forests of the western and south-western parts of Pannonia and around the Basin, on the wooded slopes of the Carpathians, and they also penetrated the beech forests along the river valleys. The Slavs who did not live in the oak and beech forests were slowly absorbed by the Hungarians after the conquest. Recent research suggests that the number of the Hungarian newcomers was about 400,000, while the indigenous population is estimated at half that number. Until about the mid-twelfth century when the moun¬ tainous regions began to be populated, some 200,000 square kilo¬ metres (77,200 sq. miles) of the country’s area may be assumed to have been inhabited. With a population density of 3 per square kilo¬ metre, the Basin was therefore rather sparsely inhabited at that time —this estimate accords with the occupational pattern of the Hun¬ garian community, a pattern characterized by the predominance of stock breeding.

The Hungarians presumably settled in clans and tribal groups. However, as the primary function of the tribe was military, it gradual¬ ly dwindled in importance and the basic unit in society remained the clan. But the clan had by now ceased to be primarily a community of free herdsmen descending from a common ancestor. In place of kinship ties, the clan was held together by the wealth of the chief and his family, and by his power to maintain a large retinue containing both slaves and free herdsmen. The majority of the native Slavs, who were engaged in agriculture, were subjected to the Hungarian chief¬ tains, a fact which was decisive in the final transformation of the clan from an organization based on kinship into a social organization based on territory.

The leaders of the tribal federation, the tribal chiefs, were all recruit¬ ed from 40 or 50 powerful families. About the middle of the tenth century, Constantine Porphvrogenetos describes the Hungarian feder¬ ation of tribes as a loose association for the purpose of defence against outsiders. Inter-tribal relationships as well as the very structure of tribalism began to lose their importance, as, after the settlement, the most efficient fighting force was no longer the arms-bearing free tribesmen but the armed bands of the most influential chiefs. This process of tribal disintegration was so rapid that not even the names of the tribes were preserved in tradition, and the story of the military adventures of the tenth century was remembered as a series of exploits carried out by some distinguished chiefs and their armed retinues rather than as joint enterprises of some tribes.

"De sagittis Hungarorum..."

The half century following the conquest offered the Hungarian chief¬ tains unique opportunities for achieving glory and enriching them¬ selves. The anarchy prevalent in the disintegrating Carolingian empire was an open invitation to marauders. The fleet Hungarian horsemen were able to make surprise attacks on villages and cities, sack and burn them before the slowly moving armies of Carolingian armoured knights were ready to move into action against them. The Hungarians developed certain tactics for use in battle. They would make a surprise charge, then turn tail and pretend to flee. When the serried ranks of knights had broken up in pursuit, they would turn about, shower a hail of arrows upon their confused enemies, and slaughter them in hand-to-hand fighting. As early as 899-900, a large Hungarian army ravaged Lombardy for a whole year. During the following decade, the Hungarians attacked Bavaria in order to strengthen their hold on Pannonia and also to extend its western frontiers. During these cam¬ paigns, in 904, the kende Kurszan fell a victim to a stratagem planned by the Bavarian lords, who invited him to a feast and there murdered him and his retinue. The death of the kende enabled the gyula, Arpad, to seize the office of paramount chief. In 907, when the Margrave Luitpold was killed in a battle near the Enns, the Hungarians were able to seize the territory of the defunct Ostmark to the banks of the river. From this base, over the next few years, their mounted bands invaded Germany, often as allies of the Oder and Elbe Slavs in the latter’s struggle against their Saxon conquerors. They were helped by Arnulf of Bavaria, who had bought his peace from them and supported their enterprises against his great adversary, Henry I, the Fowler, King of Germany. King Berengar I, too, enlisted the services of the Hungarians to fight against his rivals and several times from 919 to 926 the Hungarians went ravaging and destroying through Italy. By this time, even the German king was reduced to paying annual tribute in return for immunity for his country from the attacks of the Hungarians.

The annual tribute received from the German and Italian rulers, together with the lion’s share of the spoils taken in treasure, cattle and slaves on the marauding campaigns, greatly increased the wealth of the chiefs. Some of this booty went to their armed retainers, who made up the bulk of the raiding armies.

According to some historians impoverished herdsmen who had lost their livelihood took part en masse in these campaigns, but it is more likely that only those who possessed the necessary horses and arms could afford to join in the campaigns and raids and thus have a chance of getting a share of the booty. The Hungarian warrior was buried together with his sabre and horse, but in a great number of tenth-century burial places so far excavated no sabres have been found. At this stage of the disintegration of the primitive community system, the abandonment of military duties was the first step along the road to loss of freedom, which was the fate of an increasing number of impoverished Hungarians at this time. Besides the subjected Slavic peasants and the imported slaves, these impoverished Hungarians swelled the ranks of servants who tended the growing herds of the wealthy chiefs and cultivated the latter’s farmlands, which were being augmented at the expense of the common land.

However, the once abundant flow of the spoils of war. which further increased the distinctions in wealth amongst the members of the clan and tribe, soon began to dwindle. The need for defence in the face of recurring Hungarian attacks helped to bring to an end the state of anarchy in Germany, which had been the prime factor in making possible the Hungarians’ initial successes. Henry the Fowler’s policy of strengthening the royal power in Germany bore its first fruit on the battlefield of Merseburg. Here, in 933, a reorganized army of German knights routed a Hungarian force that was attacking because of German refusal to continue payment of the annual tribute. For years afterwards, the Hungarian chiefs left Germany alone, taking advantage, instead, of Bulgarian-Bvzantine tension to plunder the Balkans.

Henry’s death, however, was followed by a return to anarchy and Western Europe was again open to attack by the Hungarians. The military campaigns were placed under the command of the horka Bulcsu, who for nearly two more decades made the name Hungarian a word of terror. Once again, in the churches of Christendom, terrified congregations repeated the prayer ‘De sagittis Hungarorum libera nos Domine (‘From the arrows of the Hungarians, save us, O Lord’). Hungarian armies crossed the Alps and the Pyrenees. They reached the Atlantic seaboard, the Mediterranean coast and the Bosphorus. The Byzantine emperor, as well as the German and Italian princes, now paid annual tribute to the Hungarians to gain immunity from their attacks. The horka Bulcsu went to Byzantium in 948 for peace negotiations and was converted to Christianity. He was raised to the status of patrician by the emperor. But the ‘man of blood’, as his contemporaries referred to him, was denied the chance of becoming a Hungarian Clovis. In 955 he was routed at Augsburg by an army of the German princes under the leadership of Otto I. He was taken prisoner, and hanged along with his fellow commanders. The descend¬ ants of Arpad, who still bore the title of paramount chief, although for a while eclipsed by Bulcsu, were destined to lead the Hungarians in the transformation of their society through changes in their social organization and foreign policy.

The Independent Hungarian Monarchy to the Battle of Mohács (1000–1526)

The Rise of Feudal Hungary

Conditions during the Transition to Feudalism

The disaster of Augsburg put an end to the marauding campaigns in the West. For the next ten to fifteen years Hungarian raiding parties continued their attacks on the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans, in alliance with Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev. But from 970 onwards then- way to the south too was blocked when the Byzantines succeeded in extending their frontiers to the Danube.

The political situation in the territories around the Hungarians now well established in the Carpathian Basin began to change. The power of the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, already weakened by the at¬ tacks of the Pechenegs, was crushed by Svyatoslav’s campaigns. The Pontic steppe was once again overrun by warlike nomadic tribes, who threatened the existence of the young Kievan state. The economic and cultural ties that had linked the Hungarians, even after they moved to the Basin, to the Iranian Moslems were finally severed: burial finds dating from after the middle of the tenth century contain no Arab coins (dirhems), so frequently found in graves dating from earlier years. This indicates that the Moslem slave traders found little to interest them in this region once the Hungarians slackened off their forays for slaves. The Khazar and Volga Bulgarian towns also began to decay. Volga Bulgars and Khorezmian (kdliz) refugees and traders as well as clans of nomadic Pechenegs who moved into Hungary were to remind Hungarians for centuries to come of their one-time links with the world of the Pontic steppe. But the future of the Hungarians was to be closely linked with that of their neighbours in the south and the west.

The borders of the Byzantine Empire stretched as far as the Danube. The Holy Roman Empire had succeeded in restoring the Ostmark and, by bringing a Christianized Bohemia and Poland into feudal vassalage, was making its presence felt from the north. The Hungarian leaders realized that they would have to place their relations with their neighbours on a different footing.

The internal development of Hungarian society likewise called for a political change. The chief of the clan, now well on the way towards becoming a feudal lord, rose to be head of a province and lord over warriors who were bound to him by personal ties. He exacted a variety of sendees from impoverished freemen and slaves and from independ¬ ent cultivators who were members of his clan. Relationships based on kinship were thus replaced by a local unit whose centre was the castle inhabited by the chief of the clan.

The increasing power of the clan chiefs further weakened Hun¬ garian tribal organization; it also became the foundation of the new form of government which was evolving inevitably as a result of the development of a feudal state. A struggle for supremacy amongst the tribal chiefs ensued, which was won ultimately by the paramount chief, a descendant of Arpad. This was owing to the consistent policy of expansion initiated by Arpad himself when he seized the opportuni¬ ty of Kurszan’s death to secure for himself and his descendants the office of paramount chief and to take possession of Kursz£n’s dwell¬ ing area (situated in the vicinity of present-day Budapest). Villages named after Arpdd’s sons and grandsons are evidence that by the middle of the tenth century the lands bordering on the banks of the Danube south of the Danube bend (a little way to the north of the present capital) as well as the eastern and southern parts of Trans- danubia (the area lying west of the river) were directly controlled by the paramount chiefs family. This probably arose as die result of the practice of appropriating the possessions and offices of commanders and chiefs who were killed in campaigns abroad. The death of Bulcsu and of his fellow commanders brought the western parts of Trans- danubia under the paramount chief’s authority, and put an end to the other chiefs’ control of the middle reaches of the Danube and the area west of the river.

A similar process of expansion was taking place in the East. The gyula, second to the paramount chief in the hierarchy of the tribal federation, whose residence was in Transylvania, followed Bulcsu’s example by going to Byzantium in 950. He, too, was baptized, receiv¬ ing the rank of patrician. Greek monks carried through successful missionary work in the land of the gyula, a region which as far as can be deduced from the evidence, extended westward as far as the Tisza river, around the middle of the tenth century. The federation of Hun¬ garian tribes therefore, centred as it ivas around two seats of power, was on the point of pulling apart. This may be the reason for the practice, traceable to nomadic Turkish tradition, of distinguishing between ‘white Hungarians’ and ‘black Hungarians’—terms used in German and Russian records dating from the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries to distinguish between western and eastern Hun¬ garians

The Struggle for Power by Géza and Stephen

Geza (970-997) continued the expansionist policy of his ancestors, with its tendency to disrupt the tribal organization. He compelled the clan chiefs, by now independent heads of provinces and mostly related to him, to recognize his overlordship. A ruthless, iron-handed ruler, he brought them to heel; he appropriated for himself two- thirds of the territory controlled by them, and more if they put up resistance. He placed his own officials (called ispan, meaning sheriff or count, derived from the Slavic zkupan) in their castles and settled the area around them with warriors from various tribes (called job- bdgy, iobagiones in Latin). According to a chronicler, this ruler, who was ruthless towards his own people, but generous towards strangers, found only meagre support among the Hungarian tribal aristocracy for his efforts to organize a feudal state. The majority of clan chiefs naturally clung to their independence and only yielded to force. For this reason, the hard core of Geza’s armed force consisted of a band of retainers, whose members were recruited abroad. At first, these were Russian warriors, but in later years G&za relied more and more on German and Italian knights.

With their assistance, Geza made use of the experience gained else¬ where in organizing a feudal state. He sought to establish even closer ties with his feudal neighbours. In 973, he sent an embassy to the Emperor Otto I, offering him an alliance and asking him to send missionaries into Hungary. He thought that conversion to Christianity would strengthen the new social order and government. Moreover, this move would demonstrate to his neighbours his determination to discontinue his people’s earlier aggressive foreign policy and his desire for peace. He hoped thereby to head off a probable German attack. It was a natural course of action for Geza to seek to establish contact with the German emperor, since his rival, the gyula, was allied to Byzantium. The missionaries did arrive, but they made slow progress in their work, for the paramount chief, although he and his family were baptized, still tolerated paganism. In this respect, as in others, he did no more than prepare the ground for the transformation of his country. In the same way he took only the initial steps towards reducing the Hungarian tribes of the east to submission by taking a wife from the family of the gyula of Transylvania and by marrying one of his daughters to a tribal chief of the Upper Tisza region, a chief who owed no allegiance to the gyula. He was the first Hungarian ruler to carry his dynastic policy beyond his borders: his three other daughters were married to the doge of Venice, a prince of Poland and the son of the Czar of Bulgaria. For his son Vajk, who was baptized Stephen, he sued for the hand of Princess Gisela of Bavaria.

Stephen received his education from Adalbert, Bishop of Prague, who lived briefly in Hungary, and from Adalbert’s disciples who settled there and founded the local ecclesiastical organization.

The Hungarian chiefs, who resented Geza’s policies and clung to paganism and the old order, supported Koppdny’s succession to the throne. Kopp&ny, who ruled over the possessions of Arpfid’s family south of Lake Balaton, was the eldest male member of the family, and his accession would have been in keeping with the old nomadic order of succession. Stephen sent his German knights to subdue his ambitious kinsman. Koppdny was killed in battle, his body was quar¬ tered, and the victorious young prince caused parts of it to be nailed to the gates of three castles in the west of the country as a warning to those who opposed his rule. He sent the fourth quarter to his uncle, the gyula, in Transylvania. Stephen, having consolidated his power by force, wanted the sanction of a royal crown. Tradition has it that on Christmas Day in the year 1000, with the consent of the Emperor Otto III, he was crowned king of Hungary, with a crown received from the pope.

Kingship involved the claim to rule over the whole of the Hungarian federation of tribes, including ‘Black’ Hungary. The assertion of such a claim was made easier by the fact that the gyula of Transylvania no longer completely controlled the eastern parts of the country. In the southern part of the region east of the Tisza, on the banks of the Maros, a powerful clan chief, Ajtony, had established his rule. He was the lord of a castle built on the site where the town of Csandd was later built. He relied on the power of the Bulgars, then temporarily in the ascendant in the Balkans. He had invited Christian monks from Vidin to his lands but he himself persisted in his heathen faith and polygamous ways.

Stephen, securing the alliance of Byzantium, which had for many years been locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Bulgarians, cut off the gyula of Transylvania from his only possible supporter, thereby forcing the gyula recognize him as his superior. He then launched an attack upon Ajtony. Ajtony was killed in the ensuing battle, and his province was annexed to the Kingdom of Hungary. His clan, like the descendants of earlier rivals of the Arpads, carried on as lords over a modest region that comprised but a few villages. A German monk, writing about 1006, recorded the event: ‘King Stephen of Hungary attacked Black Hungary with his forces and, with coercion, intimida¬ tion and charity, was pleased to convert that entire land to the true faith.’ Thus the feudal Kingdom of Hungary was established and com¬ prised all the Hungarian tribes and clans. An attack launched by the Czar of Bulgaria was defeated by Stephen in alliance with Byzantium and the war was carried into Bulgarian territory. This campaign helped to hasten the eclipse of the Bulgarian state.

The Organization of State and Church under Stephen

The land formerly controlled by the clan chiefs had already become royal domain as the result of the expropriations started by the para¬ mount chief Geza. Stephen continued and completed the organizing work begun by his father: he turned the regions inhabited by the clans into the basic administrative unit of royal power, i.e. the megye or county. Two-thirds of the county’s population of freemen, villeins and slaves were placed, along with the area they inhabited, under direct royal authority. The population of Hungarian and Slavic freemen were divided into companies of tens and hundreds, under the command of jobbagys, that is, the vassals of the king. Part of this population was employed by the ispans (sheriffs or counts) now installed in command of the castles formerly owned by the clan chiefs, for services in and about the castle. Another section of the population was put to work under the charge of udvarispdns (stewards of the royal household) serv¬ ing to provision the royal household. Grants from the crown lands were made to bishoprics and monasteries which were founded in large numbers, and to high-ranking members of the king’s armed retinue. When these grants of land were added to properties taken earlier into private ownership, large feudal estates were formed. The owners of these estates formed the feudal ruling class whose members were bound to give military service and allegiance to their sovereign. In the be¬ ginning, the lands held by the lords were dwarfed by those of the king and the Church; they received, however, princely remuneration from the royal revenues in return for their services as ispans.

The laws and institutions of the feudal state thus ensured for the royal power that degree of concentration of forces, economic as well as military, without which the young Hungarian state would never have been able to develop the fabric of feudal class rule or resist its neighbours’ territorial ambitions.

The king’s efforts to consolidate law and order and to secure his frontiers, found an ideological justification in the concept of the Christian feudal kingdom. The Hungarian heathen world of beliefs had been rooted in the social conditions of tribal society, and, to¬ gether with the epic poems eulogizing the exploits of military leaders whose very names struck terror in the hearts of people throughout Christendom, helped to preserve an outlook that was diametrically opposed to the new social and political order. King Stephen did not shrink from taking ruthless measures to spread Christianity, whose doctrines preached obedience to feudal superiors and favoured a settled way of life based on agriculture rather than a nomadic pastoral life. Although the influence of native Slavic Christianity, as well as the work of Byzantine and, later on, Bavarian missionaries had paved the way for the massive conversion of the Hungarians, pagan resistance was still very strong. Those who in the process of feudal transforma¬ tion had been deprived of their power or of their freedom demonstrat¬ ed their protest by clinging to old beliefs. However, the leaders of the resistance were punished with a savagery that was meant to serve as a deterrent: for instance, Tanuzaba, a Pecheneg clan chief, was buried alive. The ispdns sent soldiers to drive the people en masse to christen¬ ing ceremonies. Royal ordinances obliged the people to build churches, provide for the sustenance of priests, attend divine services regularly, and pay tithes. The king made grants of land to the ever-increasing number of bishoprics and Benedictine monasteries, and built and fur¬ nished their churches.

The clergy and monks, whose ranks were soon swollen by local recruits, spread the culture of feudal Europe all over Hungary. The first ecclesiastical schools were founded. Gerard (Gell6rt) of Venice, tutor of King Stephen’s son and, subsequently, Bishop of Csanad, was a noted ecclesiastical author of his time. Nor did the Hungarian ruling class, in these early years, ignore the Greek culture of Byzan¬ tium. The old Basilian monasteries of the eastern parts of the country were permitted to carry on their work undisturbed until the latiniza- tion of the thirteenth century. What is more, kings, even at later dates, founded monasteries of the Eastern rite for their Byzantine or Russian queens. The first was founded by King Stephen himself, on the oc¬ casion of his son’s marriage to a Byzantine princess. Thus, the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity, which was deepening at this period, was not reflected in Hungary until many years later.

The Early Period of Feudalism (11th and 12th Centuries)

The main characteristics of the first two centuries of feudalism in Hungary were the same as those found in other European countries at that stage of development. They were a subsistence economy based on agriculture; the absence of towns and towns artisans; only limited and mainly local trade; survivals of slavery among serfs farming with tools owned by the feudal lord; and, lastly, the predominance of crown lands (together with ecclesiastical lands, which were closely bound up with the king’s domain) over other feudal holdings.

Extensive Farming

Stock breeding, a legacy of the nomadic past, continued to be the Hungarians’ chief source of livelihood, although crop growing made steady advances. Foreign travellers, even as late as the twelfth century, described the country as one vast grazing-ground broken only by scattered patches of cultivated land. However, stock breeding had by now become closely linked with agriculture. The fields, dressed with manure, were cultivated until the soil was exhausted. When this hap¬ pened another area of pasture would be tilled. The population shifted its quarters as the ploughs moved on to other parts of the land. This system of agriculture is dependent on an abundance of land being avail¬ able for farming and on huge stocks of animals. Millet was a major crop at first, although both wheat and barley, which had been known to the Hungarians in the Pontic steppe, were increasingly cultivated.

The plough had also been used in the steppe, and had since been adapted to local conditions by modelling it on that used by the native Slavic population. The Slavic names of some parts of the plough are evidence of this. The plough was usually drawn by a team of eight oxen. These were little, small-horned, thin-boned beasts, and, judging from the evidence of bone finds, they belonged to the breed indigenous to Central Europe. Horses, huge stocks of which were bred, had on the other hand been brought in from the steppe. They were not employed for ploughing and were used only to draw wagons or for riding, but their meat was eaten. They were still a small breed in the tenth century, but by the eleventh century attained the height of the Euro¬ pean thoroughbred horses. There were also large stocks of sheep and swine.

The level of farming was above average on the lord’s demesne (the telek, Latin praedium ). On this farm, a permanent area was marked off for agriculture. It was divided into two parts, which were grazed and ploughed alternately, but the change was not made each year and exhausted land was grazed for several years until it had regained its fertility. This was a step towards the time when stock breeding w'ould become subordinate to crop farming. The centre of the lord’s demesne was the manor-house (the ‘court’); all around it were fields, which were worked by slaves (servi) with close-cropped hair, using the lord’s plough and oxen. The more remote farms belonging to the lord were worked by semi-free slaves (i liberti ), who were attached to the lord. They were obliged to deliver a part (usually two-thirds) of their crops to their lord. In the same way, the slaves who tended the lord’s vine¬ yards were permitted to work on their own. The harvested crop was stacked in the fields and there the grain was threshed by the trampling of stock animals. Guibert, a French abbot travelling with an army of crusaders through Hungary, admired the tower-high stacks of grain along the Danube, containing the harvests of several years. The peasant hand-mill of early times was gradually replaced by watermills, which were mentioned in records as early as the middle of the eleventh cen¬ tury as appurtenances of manors.

Slaves, Serfs, Freemen

In essence, this system of farming corresponded to the one, then in a state of disintegration in the West, under which slaves settled on the land gradually became serfs. However, in Hungary as elsewhere, their slave origin was never forgotten. They had no right of ownership over the land they tilled or the animals they tended, and their lord was free to move them elsewhere, if he so desired. They were bought and sold together with their farm implements and draught animals, and were not allowed to leave their lord. Their condition of servitude did not change even if they were required to perform some special service, such as carting, fishing or working at a craft, instead of tilling the land.

Their services became considerably less oppressive as a result of a

gradual fusion with the class of freemen. The latter lived in villages which, as a result of the administrative division of the country into counties, became royal domain and were subsequently enfeoffed to lords spiritual or temporal, or which were formed by communities of free settlers on land in feudal tenure.

The freemen {liberi, the vulgares of King Stephen’s laws), by now forming a clearly distinct class, held shares in common fields but were required to perform various services for the king or for their lord. Their status as freemen, which distinguished them from slaves and serfs, rested on the fact that no services could be exacted from them other than those agreed upon with their lord. Freemen were employed, as a rule, as overseers of slaves and serfs, mounted messengers or as wagoners, and were required to deliver to the lord a fixed quantity, instead of a percentage, of their crops.

The lords distorted the freeman’s right to leave his holding by driv¬ ing off their land any freemen who refused to undertake ‘voluntarily’ to perform the services they demanded, however oppressive. Legal sentences and unpaid debts also reduced numerous freemen to servi¬ tude. In spite of these hardships, a large number of communities of free peasants survived on both royal and baronial or ecclesiastical lands. Their freedom was protected by the king, who exacted military service from them or made it possible for them to commute their lia¬ bility to military service into money payments.

The holdings from which freemen had been driven, sometimes entire villages, were added to the lord’s domain. Sometimes serfs were settled amongst freemen, and attempts were made to extend the services re¬ quired of them to the freemen. Mostly, however, it was the serfs who were assimilated by the freemen as the steady advance of agriculture, the improvement of its techniques, and the growth of population meant that the lord’s manor became more and more obsolete.

Menials of county castles and manors serving the provision of the royal household were better off than other classes of common folk. The jobbagys, originally armed retainers, were mostly bailiffs, stewards or other lower-ranking' officers, and were freemen. In time, some of these acquired free holdings. The more lowly castle servants ( cives, castrenses), who were bound to the royal court, lived in village com¬ munities. The vastness of the estates belonging to the castles and the court made possible an extensive differentiation of services. Certain families, often entire villages, were assigned special tasks. The in¬ habitants of one village worked as wagoners, those of another engaged in fishing, other again pursued bee-keeping for the king. Certain vil¬ lages were required to provide food, or wine, or products of domestic crafts. There were villages whose inhabitants were obliged to serve in turn at regular intervals in castles or royal households as cooks, bakers, stablemen, hunters, messengers, watchmen, armour-bearers and other house-servants. This system of domestic service evolved on the estates of the Arpad family during the first half of the tenth century and subsequently became universally adopted in the organization of county castles. Some of the inhabitants of the villages attached to the county castles, however, were only obliged to give military service. These services and dues devolved from father to son and were from time to time recorded in registers, a practice which gave these people far-reaching protection against a lowering of their status and con¬ ditions.

Handicrafts and Market Places

There was no place for towns in the economic and social system of early feudalism. With the primitive farming methods current at the time, agriculture could not produce' sufficient surpluses to support a class of full-time craftsmen. In general, towns could not develop be¬ cause comparatively large areas of land could only support a few people. Even members of the ruling class were unable to keep their personal servants, such as cooks and armour-bearers, under their roofs all the time, since the latter, if concentrated in a small area, would have found it impossible to make a living by their chief occupation of farming. The lords’ solution was to summon their servants from their distant homes for periodic spells of service. Difficulties of transport restricted the movement of farm produce to the lord and those around him from the place where it was grown. Supplying food for the large royal household was particularly difficult, so eleventh and twelfth- century monarchs used to spend only part of the year at their favourite residences (Esztergom and SztSkesfehervar). For the rest of the year, they and their household would stay at country houses (courts) on their domains, or they would pitch their tents on the crown lands and consume the food and drink that had been collected from the neigh¬ bouring villages.

The vast majority of the population lived on food they produced themselves. None but the ruling class could afford imported goods, such as spices and fine cloths. These commodities were imported by foreign merchants. Goods were traded at fairs. Although coins had been minted ever since the days of Stephen, cattle were still the princi¬ pal means of payment during the eleventh century. Market-places were designated by royal decree, for the king provided for their protection and took customs revenue from them. As a rule, fairs were held at important crossroads, often uninhabited places.

A number of foreign merchants settled in Hungary at this time. In the tenth century, some Volga Bulgars settled at Pest and, later on, Walloons and Italians (both called ‘Latins’) near the royal residences at Esztergom and Szekesfehervar. The business activity of these mer¬ chants was confined to meeting the needs of the ruling class for luxury goods, and this alone, in the absence of a class of artisans, could not lead to the growth of towns.

The first stimulus leading to the development of handicrafts separate from the peasant economy came from the system of deliveries on royal and church lands. Under the system of organization followed on the king’s domain (similar to the practice evolved in neighbouring Bohe¬ mia and Poland), specific handicraft services and mining were exacted from certain villages (or from certain families of craftsmen in those villages). These services were continued from father to son. Contempo¬ rary records tell of the existence in the tenth to twelfth centuries of communities of royal or church iron-founders, blacksmiths, armour¬ ers, potters, wood-turners, carpenters, tanners, spinners and weavers. The name of various trades and tools leads us to believe that, in the early days at least, the majority of craftsmen serfs came from the native Slavic population. As the Slavs became absorbed into the Hun¬ garian population, the techniques of peasant crafts spread. The re¬ mains of a perpendicular treadle-loom, for instance, were found in two weaving cottages during the excavations of the ruins of a twelfth- century Hungarian village along the Tisza river.

By the middle of the eleventh century, therefore, Hungarian pastoral society had become assimilated in essentials to the feudal societies of contemporary Central Europe, inasmuch as primitive agriculture and handicrafts, occupations complementary to the all-important stock breeding, had been improved through contact with the local Slavic (and, in part, Western European) skills. These more advanced tech¬ niques received a powerful stimulus for continued specialization by the division of services practised on crown and church lands.

For the time being, however, this development, which represented an outstanding improvement over the productive forces of pastoral society, was not yet considerable enough to strain the framework of a natural economy. The feudal state was capable of maintaining public order and defending itself only by concentrating its meagre surplus, and by binding the bulk of rural manpower to the castles and the royal domains.

The German Attack and the Domestic Crisis

After a long period of peace which facilitated the consolidation of the young feudal state of Hungary, it became apparent towards the close of the reign of King Stephen that the Holy Roman Empire, after bringing Bohemia and Poland into vassalage, was planning to extend its suzerainty over Hungary. An attack launched in 1030 by Conrad II, however, ended in a crushing defeat for the emperor, who was even compelled to cede part of the Ostmark to the king of Hungary.

The last years of Stephen’s reign were made difficult for him by the problem of succession. After the untimely death of his only son, Eme- ric, his nephew, Vaszoly, was in a position to lay claim to the throne. But V&szoly became the leader of those Hungarian lords who resented Stephen’s strong rule and were jealous of the king’s foreign knights. They plotted to overthrow the king but failed. Vaszoly received a horrible punishment for his part in the conspiracy: he was blinded and had molten lead poured into his ears. His sons, still minors, fled to Polish and Russian territories.

Stephen designated Peter Orseolo, the son born of the marriage of his sister and the doge of Venice, as his successor. On Stephen’s death, in 1038, Peter’s accession to the throne proceeded smoothly. The events which had preceded his accession, however, made Peter sus¬ picious of the Hungarian lords, and for this reason he tilled his en¬ tourage with Germans and Italians. Among the leading members of his household guard were two English princes, Edmund and Edward, the banished sons of Edmund Ironside; in all probability this is the first documented instance of a Hungarian-English connection. The constant influx of foreign knights contributed to the strengthening of feudalism in Hungary on the one hand, but on the other created tension between the native and foreign elements of the ruling class. This time it was King Stephen’s brother-in-law, Samuel Aba, who assumed leadership of the malcontents: in 1041, he drove out Peter and had himself crowned king of Hungary. Peter fled to the Emperor Henry III, who considered the factional struggles in Hungary an ex¬ cellent opportunity for intervention. The fear of a German attack made some of the Hungarian lords pause and consider, but Samuel Aba carried out bloody reprisals on those whose loyalty to him wavered. He sought to win the support of the freemen, who resented feudal subjection by promising to release them from feudal services. This move encouraged the adherents of the old pagan ways, until then re¬ luctant to rise in open revolt. Many dispossessed clan chiefs and free¬ men, who had been reduced to conditions of servitude, united by their hatred of the Christian Church and by their resentment of the domi¬ nance of foreigners. joined Aba. The feudal lords, Hungarians as well as foreigners, became alarmed at the mass proportion this movement began to assume. They deserted Samuel Aba, and he was routed in 1044 by the Emperor and assassinated in flight. Peter reoccupied the throne and took an oath of fealty to Henry III. The king and lords, however, weakened by conflict and with their ranks decimated by feuds, were not strong enough to prevent the outbreak of a pagan uprising.

This rebellion was organized and led by Vata, one of the dispossessed clan chiefs of Black Hungary. After the ransacking and burning of Christian churches and the massacre of priests (one of the victims was Bishop Gerard [Gellert], who was later canonized), the rebels turned against the Christian feudal lords. The lords, much afraid, left Peter to his fate and appealed to the Arpad princes, V6szoly’s exiled sons, for support. Andrew was living in Kiev, where he had married a daughter of Yaroslav the Wise; Bela had married a Polish princess, while Levente, the third son, persisted in his pagan faith. Vata and his associates also pinned their hopes on the Arp&d princes, and offered them their support against Peter in return for permission to extermi¬ nate the priests and foreigners and a pledge that tithes and feudal taxes would be abolished and the pagan faith restored. The princes returned to Hungary at the head of a Russian force but were careful not to commit themselves before Peter was decisively routed. However, after Peter was overthrown, Andrew proclaimed himself king (1046- 1060), and then proceeded to crush the Vata uprising and consolidate feudalism. He also fought himself out of German vassalage. Henry III made two attempts to assert his suzerainty by force, but the attacks were repelled thanks to Prince Bela’s military ability and to the ef¬ ficient system of castles.

These events were recorded in the Gesta Ungarorum, the first history of Hungary, written by an anonymous monk. Although this chronicle is not extant, it has been possible to piece it together, owing to the fact that it was incorporated in several other chronicles written at later dates. The author of the Gesta, who is deeply contemptuous of the pagan, nomadic past of the Hungarians, eulogizes unreservedly King Stephen’s work as founder of the Christian Kingdom of Hungary, and is full of hatred for the German expansionist ambitions which aimed to destroy the independence of the Hungarian state. German-Hunga- rian tension was reflected even in Hungary’s spiritual and cultural life. Andrew I, in his effort to repair the serious damage inflicted upon the Hungarian Church by the pagan revolt, ignored the nearby German provinces, which ought to have been the most obvious source of assistance, and enlisted instead the co-operation of the French-speaking clergy of distant Lorraine, a province that had been causing Henry III serious problems through its disobedience. Direct Lotharingian in¬ fluence can be seen in the beginnings of manuscript illumination in Hungary and in the final form of the liturgy of the Hungarian Church. Monastery libraries came to be filled with manuscripts from Lorraine.

Andrew I, continuing in the tradition of the nomadic past, or, per¬ haps, adopting the practice followed by the Slavic princes of Eastern Europe, shared his rule with his younger brother, Bela, and ceded part of the country to him along with the right of succession. After a son had been born to him, however, he changed his mind and wanted to secure the throne for his heir, Salomon. This led to an armed conflict, and in the battle Andrew was mortally wounded. Salomon sought refuge with his brother-in-law, the Emperor Henry IV. This dynastic feud provided an opportunity for the outbreak of a fresh pagan rebellion, under the leadership of Vata’s son, J&nos, who had been baptized only for appearances’ sake. A vast multitude of people assembled for the occasion of Bela’s enthronement and the old demands of fifteen years before were voiced once again. But the rising failed to find any response among the ruling class: according to the chron¬ icler’s record, only ‘villeins and servants’joined the pagan leader. The pagan ideology was now merely a cloak for spontaneous protest against oppression, and the king’s soldiers had no difficulty in dispers¬ ing the poorly armed rebels. In this the last flare-up of pagan resist¬ ance there was already a flicker of the fire of the peasant revolts of later centuries.

The Investiture Struggle and Expansion in the Balkans

The accession of Bela I (1060-1063) led to fresh fears of a German attack, but the outbreak of war was averted by the sudden death of the king, which made possible the peaceful return of Salomon from exile. Bela’s sons, Geza and Ladislas, were invested with their father’s princedom by way of compensation, an act which led inevitably to the resumption of the dynastic feud. The struggle between Salomon and his cousins, however, took place against the background of a totally new international situation—the investiture struggle—with which it inevitably became interwoven. In 1074, King Salomon was defeated and fled to Henry IV. Prince Geza, on the other hand, appealed to the Pope for assistance. Pope Gregory VII saw this as an auspicious oc¬

casion for the reduction of Hungary to papal vassalage. He hoped for the same success as he had recently achieved with the Norman principality in southern Italy and the Kingdom of Croatia. Thus re¬ ferring to an alleged offer of homage by King Stephen (an offer which had, in effect, never been made), he promised the victorious Prince Geza that he would recognize his title to the crown in return for Geza’s acceptance of papal suzerainty. But Geza thought the loss of inde¬ pendence too great a price to pay for papal recognition, and he had himself crowned king with a crown that had been sent him by the Emperor of Byzantium.

After Henry IV had done penance to Pope Gregory at Canossa, Germany was torn by internal strife, and as far as Hungary was con¬ cerned the menace of a German attack was removed. Thus G6za’s successor, Ladislas I (1077-1095), was able to make up his own mind as to which faction it was in his interest to join in the great struggle. At first he favoured an alliance with the Pope as he was interested in weakening the power of the Emperor, who was claiming the allegiance of Hungary. Ladislas, a deeply religious man, in order to enhance the prestige of the kingship and of the Church, obtained from the Holy See the canonization of King Stephen and of his son Emeric, and was himself revered as a saint shortly after his death. However, in develop¬ ing his foreign policy, he was guided by political interests rather than religious feelings; and as soon as his interests came into conflict with papal policies, he changed sides without a moment’s hesitation. This change was due to the Croatian question.

During the latter half of the eleventh century, Croatia was torn by internal strife. The mountain tribes rose to assert their independence from the feudal kingdom that had been established in the economically more developed maritime provinces. In this conflict, the king relied on the support of the wealthy merchant cities of the coastal region : Zara, Trau, Spalato and the smaller towns of Dalmatia. Although these were the last remaining islands of Roman civilization in the Balkans, where Slavic influence was rapidly increasing, they tended to offer their allegiance to the Kingdom of Croatia rather than to Venice, whose monopolistic trade policies threatened their very exist¬ ence. In 1075, Venice conquered the towns of Dalmatia; and in order to recover them. King Zvonimir of Croatia was compelled, in 1076, to place his country under papal suzerainty. Following his death, in 1089, the Croatian lords invited King Ladislas I of Hungary, brother of the widowed queen, to extend his power to Croatia and Dalmatia by right of inheritance. Ladislas accepted the invitation and occupied Slavonia, the northern part of Croatia stretching as far as the Kapela mountain range. In 1091, he extended his power over the rest of Croa¬ tia and Dalmatia. For the next three hundred years, Hungary was embroiled in a succession of wars and campaigns for the possession of Dalmatia and in related Balkan problems which became of prime importance in Hungarian foreign policy.

Hungary’s conquest of Croatia and Dalmatia incurred the hostility of Byzantium and Venice, and, as a result, Ladislas soon lost the towns of Dalmatia. It also marred his relations with Pope Urban II, who energetically pursued the investiture struggle, and refused to agree to Ladislas’s occupation of Croatia on grounds of inheritance: he wanted to confer it on him as a vacant papal fief. But Ladislas would not accept such limitation of his power, and so recognized the anti¬ pope Clement III. Ladislas was succeeded by the ecclesiastically-mind¬ ed Koloman (1095-1116), and Urban took the first step towards re¬ conciliation, as he realized that, rather than obtaining a forced oath of fealty, it would be to his advantage to have the king of Hungary as an ally by helping him to conquer Dalmatia. An alliance to serve this end was concluded with the Norman prince of Sicily, and cemented by Koloman’s marriage to a Norman princess. By the time the bride arrived on the Dalmatian coast, in 1097, the Hungarian army had captured the greater part of Dalmatia in a surprise attack, and only the cities still remained under Venetian rule.

At this time Venice was occupied with the First Crusade: she was busy providing sea transport for the crusader forces and organizing her eastern trade. Byzantium, also, became involved in wars that were to go on for centuries with the newly established crusader states. Hungary was affected by the Crusade as unruly armies made their way across the country, but Koloman was more than compensated for the damage they did by the fact that he had a free hand in Croatia. In 1102, he obtained homage from the maritime regions and, in 1105, from the towns of Dalmatia. He appointed a ban or viceroy at the head of each of the three provinces of Slavonia, Croatia and Dalmatia, and intro¬ duced into these territories a pattern of local government based on counties. His title of King of Croatia and Dalmatia was also recog¬ nized by the Pope. The Dalmatian cities on their own initiative invited Koloman to protect them from Venice, and for the next three hundred years they remained loyal to the king of Hungary. The pro-Venetian and pro-Byzantine factions remained minorities all this time and only managed to seize power briefly on a few occasions by relying on ex¬ ternal armed assistance. Koloman’s successor, Stephen 11 (1116-1131), lost Dalmatia for a decade, but Bela II (1131-1141) reconquered it and Zara alone remained under Venetian rule. Hungary’s frontiers in the Balkans were extended during this period by the annexation of Bosnia and Serbia. These territories were also organized into districts under the rule of a ban.

Hungarian-Byzantine Rivalry in the Balkans

Hungary maintained relations that were, on the whole, peaceful with the Slavic states on her northern border, that is to say the principalities of Bohemia, Poland and Russia. Marriages between members of the ruling houses were frequent and helped to strengthen the ties between the states. Kinsmen would come to one another’s assistance in the course of the frequent struggles for the thrones; thus, Bela I and his sons received assistance from the Polish princes, while successive kings of Hungary intervened in the struggles among the Russian princes. In the eleventh century marauding raids of nomadic peoples, the Pechenegs and the Cumans, presented a temporary menace. This men¬ ace was, however, averted finally by Ladislas I, whose legendary campaigns appealed to popular imagination and generated a whole cycle of sagas.

The fresh outbreak of the struggle between the Pope and the Em¬ peror which occurred about the middle of the twelfth century put Hungary in a difficult position. This time she was faced with a threat, not from Germany, but from Byzantium, which was enjoying a tem¬ porary revival under the Emperor Manuel I. Manuel was determined to recapture the Balkan provinces, which Byzantium had lost to the kings of Hungary. He even hoped to extend his influence over Hungary itself in order to safeguard Byzantine hegemony in the Balkans. Faced with this threat, Geza II (1141-1162) wanted to secure as his ally against Byzantium the Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), but the clash in 1159 between Frederick and Pope Alexander III faced him with a difficult choice. His alignment was ultimately decided by the influence of the head of the Hungarian clergy. Archbishop Lucas of Esztergom.

Archbishop Lucas had brought home from the University of Paris ideas of a universal papal power. On his return to Hungary, he spared no effort to keep the Hungarian Church, and through it the whole country, in obedience to the Pope. From the Church’s point of view there were good reasons for his policy. During the twelfth century the power and influence of the great temporal lords greatly increased. They sought to extend their possessions at the expense of the crown and church lands. Koloman had already made a law for the recovery of alienated royal estates. The clergy saw that they would only be able to retain their traditional property and political influence if the royal power was strengthened at the expense of the temporal lords, and if this was accompanied by an increase in papal influence which would force the king to respect the interests of the Church. This policy found a gifted and determined supporter in the person of Archbishop Lucas. Geza ITs eventual decision to recognize Alexander III as the legitimate pope, and, if need be, to back him by military force against Frederick, was taken under the influence of his arguments. Hungarian assistance stood the papal faction in good stead; but as the latter failed to make recompense for such assistance, Hungary was left to her own devices in her struggle with the Emperor Manuel.

The Emperor, after the death of Geza II, was able to foment fac¬ tional strife in Hungary by encouraging pretenders to the throne. Geza’s successor, Stephen III (1162-1172), was not yet of age and the country’s forces were paralysed. After securing the co-operation of Venice, the Emperor occupied Dalmatia, Croatia, Sirmium, a prov¬ ince between the Danube and the Save rivers, and the provinces of Bosnia and Serbia. Resistance was organized by Archbishop Lucas, but the danger of Byzantine conquest was not averted until 1171, when Venice, having quarrelled with Manuel, began to subject the cities of Dalmatia to her own rule. The defeat of Manuel’s ambitious designs put an end to Byzantine hegemony in the Balkans. Venice and Hun¬ gary were preparing, in rivalry with each other, to take her place in the peninsula. Manuel had to content himself with having Prince Bela of Hungary, the heir apparent, living at his court. He designated B61a as his successor, hoping to attain by this expedient his stubbornly pursued objective: the incorporation of Hungary in the Byzantine Empire. However, a son was born to him in the meantime, and in 1172 he gave Bela leave to return to his native land, as in the spring of the same year Stephen III died, and an embassy came from Hungary to take the new king home to be crowned.

B61a III (1172-1196) did not serve Byzantine policies. He gained the backing of the Pope and the Hungarian clergy, put an end to factional strife, and managed to win the loyalty of the ruling class. In 1180, on Manuel’s death, he recaptured Croatia and the Dalmatian cities. The city of Zara took this opportunity to shake off Venetian rule and put itself under the protection of the king of Hungary, which it greatly desired. In 1182, Sirmium, Bosnia and Serbia came, once again, under Hungarian rule. In 1188, Bela III, taking advantage of the internal disputes of the Russian principalities, occupied Halicz and continued to hold it for some time. His campaigns of conquest in territories within the zone of influence of the Eastern Church coincided with the ex- pansionist policies of the Papacy, then at the zenith of its power, and here, as in his domestic policies, Bela made clever use of papal support. The early feudal monarchy appeared to have attained the height of its internal and external power under Bela III. In reality, however, in¬ ternal stability was by now undermined and territorial expansion served merely as a safety valve, albeit a temporary one, for tensions generated by the domestic crisis.

Disintegration of the Early Feudal System (1196–1241)

During the second half of the twelfth century, the secular element of the Hungarian ruling class was becoming increasingly discontented with the existing arrangement under which, as ispans (counts) or castle officials, they drew only indirect benefit from the concentration of peasant manpower and feudal property within the system of castles and royal estates. Like feudal lords throughout Europe, they wanted to become fief holders and the seigneurs of the serfs settled on the lands whose management was entrusted to them. The king’s ability to resist these desires was undermined by the failure of the economic and military organization of the castles and crown lands to keep up with the development of the country. Consequently, they failed to continue to provide an adequate basis for royal power.

The slow process, which, by the middle of the thirteenth century, culminated in the disintegration of the castle system and of the royal estates, and in a complete reorganization of the social structure of their population, was set in motion by the development of agriculture, handicrafts and commerce.

The Development of Agriculture, Handicrafts and Commerce

During the twelfth century, the area of agricultural land increased. Little-used woodlands and marshy areas were now converted into arable land; and more valuable cereals, such as wheat, rye, barley and oats, were gaining ground at the expense of millet. These advances were made possible by the widespread use of heavy ploughs, drawn by teams of eight to ten oxen, that were suited to tilling hard soils. Owing to the growing need for draught animals, cattle breeding caught up with, then outstripped, the formerly predominant horse breeding. This resulted in a considerable improvement in the fertility of the soil due to increased use of manure. This was one of several conditions that made possible the introduction on the villages’ common lands, through the serfs settled on the land, of the same system of crop- pasture rotation as that used on the lord’s demesne. Wine growing, presumably of Roman origin in the country west of the Danube (Transdanubia), spread to areas north and east of the river. In the wine-producing districts of Tokaj, Eger and Nagyvarad, which became so famous in later years, viticulture was established by French settlers.

The surplus population began to spread out from earlier centres to other parts of the country. They were joined by immigrants—mainly French and German settlers ( hospites ) from the Rhineland—in intro¬ ducing new technique. The wooded, hilly border regions were settled and were organized into counties. The population of these regions to the north and east consisted of Slovaks, German immigrants, Ruthen- ian and Rumanian shepherds (the last two groups are first mentioned in thirteenth-century records). The ruling class of the areas inhabited by non-Hungarians was formed of Hungarian feudal lords enfeoffed from royal lands, free Hungarian soldiers and local leaders rising into the land-holding ruling class. About the turn of the thirteenth century, the inhabited area of Hungary was about 220,000 square kilometres (85,000 sq. miles), and the total population was around two millions, giving a population density of 9 per sq. km.

By now the rural population was producing large enough surpluses to leave substantial margins for the market after meeting the deliveries due to the lord. These surpluses were exchanged for handicrafts. Peasants possessing the skills for making commodities such as iron implements, carts, saddles and pottery, all of which were much sought after, became separated from the farming population. Villages whose population had long before begun to discharge their obligations for service in handicrafts were at a distinct advantage. They were the cen¬ tres where different crafts gradually evolved; they became settlements of craftsmen specializing in one particular product. These early crafts¬ men did not, of course, detach themselves from agriculture altogether; they only devoted part of their working hours to handicrafts.

Other centres of the emergent class of craftsmen were found in the royal, episcopal and county residences, where craftsmen supplying the upper stratum of the ruling class with certain simple products were able to trade their own handicrafts in exchange for other goods they needed. In notes on their travels made by Arabic merchants who visited Hungary about the middle of the twelfth century, several county seats are described as populous towns in whose markets slaves, cereals, animals and domestic handicrafts, as well as imported goods, were on sale. In a report that was discovered recently, an Arab merchant named Abu Hamid likened the ‘towns’ of Hungary to Baghdad and Isfahan—obviously implying a busy centre of local trade. From these documents, from the striking increase in the number of fairs held in places other than county seats, and from the increasing importance of money in the economy, it would appear that the division of labour between agriculture and craft industry had already begun in the course of the twelfth century, and that the preliminary conditions for urban development were ripening. The same Abu Hamid writes of the mining of precious metals in Hungary. Evidence of its rising output is shown in the growing improvement of the standard of coinage and the sub¬ stantial royal revenues from money exchange. During the second half of the twelfth century, this revenue nearly equalled in value the entire income from the royal lands.

The Decline of the Castle System

The organization of the royal household and court became an increas¬ ingly complex task. The Royal Council became a permanent institu¬ tion, and the duties of its members became clearly defined; new offices were also created. The nddorispdn (comes Palatinus) or Count Palatine advanced his position from the head of the royal household to the king’s deputy in juridical and military matters. His successor, the udvarbird (comes curiae) or Steward of the Royal Household, was, in his turn, soon invested with juridical duties. The Lord Chief Treasurer, Master of the Horse, Cupbearer to the King and Warden of the But¬ teries—the officers in charge of running the royal household—dele¬ gated the strictly administrative duties to some of their attendants, while they acted as political advisers to the king. The highest court dignitaries, the ispdns, the bans (viceroys) of Slavonia, Croatia, Dal¬ matia, Bosnia and Serbia, the voivode of Transylvania, as well as the Archbishops of Esztergom and Kalocsa and the bishops constituted the body that governed the country—a body which, owing to the social background of its members, represented the interests of the large land-owning class at least as whole-heartedly as those of the king. In 1181, Bela III made it obligatory for administrative matters to be put in writing and, in 1185, set up the Chancery, the office which took care of the official records.

The royal household, enlarged and increasing in pomp and splen¬ dour, now demanded more refined articles than the crude products of the peasant-craftsmen living on the crown lands, and required services more skilful than the clumsy bustling of peasant servants taking weekly turns at the court under socage. Imported luxury articles and a per¬ manent household staff of servants made the continuance of whole groups of services unnecessary. Owing to the hereditary nature of these services, however, the number of families (and even villages) whose members were obliged to perform duties by now outdated or redundant —such as cooks, scuttle-men and armour-bearers—or to supply prod¬ ucts the royal household no longer needed, had greatly increased.

The castle force of armed peasants was of little use in campaigns of conquest. What the king now needed for his wars were professional men-at-arms rather than these peasant soldiers, and Koloman did, indeed, oblige the big landlords to muster such men. However, his successors could not rely on such baronial private armies, as there had been a precedent, in the early twelfth century, of such private forces refusing to obey the king’s orders. Gradually, armed men quit the castle forces and enrolled directly in the king’s own armed following, the so-called royal servientes, which came to constitute the nucleus of the royal army. These soldiers, because of the high cost of knightly weapons and the difficulty of handling them, could not possibly con¬ tinue to live the fife of peasant soldiers and in practice became the lords of the castle bondsmen who were assigned to provide for their maintenance. The officers of the castle force also quietly turned the lands they held into fiefs, cither driving away or reducing to serfdom the freemen living there.

The widespread growth of a class of minor feudal landowners meant that large areas of land and many people were no longer under the king’s direct seignorial authority. Despite the resulting decline in the royal revenues, the ispdns carved an ever larger share of these re¬ venues to provide for their own maintenance as well as that of the castle organizations under them, that is, to swell their own power.

Meanwhile, on the large estates, secular as well as ecclesiastical, the process was completed which fused slaves and freemen into a homo¬ geneous class of serfs, who were obliged to work and to make payments in kind to their lords. At the same time, the amounts of produce due were increased. A similar process took place on the small feudal hold¬ ings that came into being on castle and crown lands, while the castle and crown lands proper, where the traditional services were preserved, yielded low incomes compared with the properties in ecclesiastic or secular tenure. Here, payments in kind were not required for the simple reason that the royal household did not need large quantities of produce. The royal household officials sought to obtain, even from the serfs living on the royal demesne, payments of money in place of farm produce, which was difficult to market, or the products of do¬ mestic crafts. As this endeavour, owing to the limited development of trade, was bound to produce unsatisfactory results, they strove to in¬ crease other cash revenues. An inventory of Bela Ill’s revenues may safely be accepted as reliable with regard to the breakdown of the various items. According to this, only half of the royal revenues came from the counties and the crown lands (and only a third of this was paid in cash); the other half was accounted for by minting profits, customs duties and tolls, the mining monopolies and the taxes paid in cash by the royal hospites. For the central power, therefore, direct control of landed property had ceased to be the only—and even the principal—source of revenue. This made it all the easier for the king to give large areas of his demesne to the land-hungry barons and lesser lords as soon as they felt strong enough to demand more than small grants of land and launched a concerted attack aimed at the destruc¬ tion of the castle system and royal estates.

Alienation of the Royal Estates

The fate of the castle system and royal estates was of interest to the Church as well. If the crown lands were to pass into the hands of the barons, the Church would be unable to acquire any more possessions. Moreover, the land-hungry temporal lords might then be encouraged to lay claim to church lands as well. But even more was at stake—the status of the Church as a political force. The Hungarian clergy made desperate efforts to assert their interests amid the economic and social changes taking place, and in these efforts they were able to rely on assist¬ ance from the papal power, then at its zenith. The two empires—the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium—had declined, and the rise of England and France was only just beginning. In this period of tran¬ sition, the papacy was the dominant political authority in Europe. The papal writ ran in Hungary; and if the kings did not always prove readily submissive, they were careful to express their objections in none but the humblest way.

B61a Ill’s sons’ struggle over the succession provided the Pope with a welcome opportunity to intervene in Hungary. Prince Andrew mis¬ appropriated the fund his father had left for a crusade by using it for financing an army against his elder brother, King Emeric (1196-1204). In 1198, he conquered the provinces of Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Serbia and organized them into a principality. His sup¬ porters began plotting in an attempt to secure for him the crown of Hungary. But the king dealt with the plotters in good time; Bishop Boleszlo of V6c, who handled the rebels’ correspondence and funds.

was dragged from the altar of his cathedral and sent into captivity. Then the king confronted Andrew’s army, which was moving against him, and routed it in the summer of 1199. The brothers were recon¬ ciled, but Andrew’s adherents paid the penalty for their part in the con¬ spiracy. The rebellious prelates were divested of their office by the Pope, and so were the secular lords. In exchange for support from the Pope,Emeric took up the cross;but before setting out for the Holy Land, he was directed by a papal command to the Balkans, in a campaign against the Bogomil heretics.

While Emeric was busying himself in Bosnia on the Pope’s behalf, French crusaders, at the instigation of the doge, captured Zara in 1202; then, in 1204, they took Byzantium and founded the Latin Empire of Constantinople. This scandalous miscarriage of the Fourth Crusade threw cold water on Emeric’s zeal. Although the crusaders, threatened by the Pope, did evacuate Zara, a Venetian garrison stayed in the town until 1204. Before the fate of Zara was settled, Emeric could not possibly think of leaving for the Holy Land, especially as Andrew had once again taken up arms against him. In 1203 the two brothers met on the banks of the Drave. The king walked into the rebel camp, unarmed, to take his younger brother into captivity. Peace, however, was not restored, and only his untimely death saved Emeric from further bitter disappointment.

Andrew II’s reign (1205-1235) was in part taken up with a stubborn but hopeless effort to secure the Russian principality of Halicz. This campaign, costly both in human lives and money, ended in utter failure, yielding him nothing but the hollow title of King of Galicia and Lodomeria. Andrew embarked upon another senseless adventure when, in 1217, after much procrastination, he resigned himself to accepting the leadership of the crusade which the Pope had been pressing with dogged persistence. Even now it was not the desire to recapture Jerusalem for Christianity which fired him with enthusiasm, but the vacant throne of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. He plan¬ ned to win the Pope’s goodwill by first leading a crusade to the Holy Land; but because of the ineffective way he conducted the campaign he incurred the displeasure of the Holy See, which slighted him by elevating first his father-in-law, Pierre de Courtenay, then the latter’s son, Robert, to the imperial throne. The enterprise consumed huge amounts of money and also led to the loss of Zara, for Andrew was compelled to cede the town to Venice in return for the naval transport provided by the Venetians for his army. Disheartened, he returned at the end of 1218 to Hungary, where he found the situation chaotic.

The struggle for the succession between Emeric and Andrew, and their campaigns, led to the collapse of the castle system and royal demesne, already undermined from within. At first huge portions of land, later on whole counties were given as fiefs to office-holding barons and their relatives. These lords sought to introduce on their newly acquired fiefs those more exacting forms of exploitation which had been evolved on baronial demesnes—an innovation that was fiercely resisted by the peasants of the former crown lands, who clung to the traditional services. The king’s knights or servientes and the officers of the castle forces, too, sought to ensure their established rights in the face of the new fief-holders, who were trying to incorporate them in their own armed retinue. Seething revolt spread to the population of the large estates of the Church and of temporal lords alike. The courts were flooded with lawsuits to define rights; but even though a plaintiff might be able to make a good case for himself he found it difficult to enforce his right in the face of the mighty barons. Baronial factions fought one another over the disintegrating royal demesne. In 1213, during one of Andrew’s Halicz campaigns, Queen Gertrude herself fell victim to a conspiracy of the ousted palatine, the ban Bank, and his followers. The king dared not even punish the majority of the culprits, so firmly was he in the power of the rising oligarchy.

Social Struggles. The 'Golden Bull'

The king’s economic policies, intended to make up for the loss of the crown lands, did nothing but make the existing muddle still worse. Andrew IIlevied emergency taxes; as he was anxious to raise money quickly, he passed over the feudal financial machinery—too clumsy for the royal court’s needs—and adopted the practice of farming out minting and taxes, customs and mines to Moslem and Jewish money¬ lenders, who recovered their capital with interest from the population. This prelude to the introduction of a money economy permitted plenty of abuse and, under conditions of an emerging, undeveloped com¬ modity economy, imposed on the tax-payers a greater burden than they could bear. The landlords also protested at the taxes imposed upon the population of their estates, which siphoned off money on which they themselves could otherwise have laid their hands. The clergy, while they hastened to adjust themselves to the new conditions of the time by insisting on tithes being paid in cash, protested at the salt monopoly—until recently the Church’s privilege—being farmed out to moneylenders.

Open resistance was started by the servientes and the officers of the

castle forces. Like the great barons, they too claimed areas of the dis¬ integrating crown lands for themselves, oppressing the peasants they subjected; nevertheless they, like their peasants, were interested in slowing down the rapid disintegration of the old order and in curbing the great lords’ lust for land. For this reason, confident of popular support, and relying on countrywide discontent, they started a move¬ ment in defence of their threatened liberties. Their movement was taken advantage of by a group of disgruntled barons to further their own plans for seizing power. As a result of the action of this group, Andrew had to issue an edict in 1222—known from the gold seal appended to it as the Golden Bull—under which the servientes were exempted from taxation and assured protection against harassment from the great lords. Apart from these articles, the ‘Golden Bull’ furthered the barons’ effort to curtail the powers of king and Church. It extended the powers of the Count Palatine and accorded the ‘nobles’ (i.e. the barons) the right of armed resistance, should the king break his pledges. The edict banned the collection of tithes in cash and set a ceiling on the amount of money the Church could make through its salt monopoly.

The clergy were shocked at such a show of submissiveness on the part of the king and at once became alarmed at the mass movement. The Pope and the Hungarian prelates wanted to have a king who was tough in his dealings with the lay lords but obedient to the Church. They thought they had found such a monarch in the heir apparent, Prince B6la, who had already been invested with the title of ‘junior king’ and was known to be dissatisfied with his father’s policies.

Prince B6Ia was convinced by his ecclesiastical advisers of the importance of bolstering the royal power, recovering the lost crown lands and, also, taking back the leases which had been granted on various taxes. His advisers hoped thus to be able to oust the great lay lords, who had grown rich on royal grants of land, and the Moslem and Jewish moneylenders, who had acquired leases and other com¬ mercial benefits, and so recapture their former position of strength. With the help of the Pope they prevailed upon Andrew to issue, in 1231, a revised version of the‘Golden Bull’, from which the clauses the Church had found prejudicial to its interests were omitted. Included in it, however, was a provision under which the jurisdiction of church courts was extended to cover certain types of lay lav/suits. Furthermore, the resistance clause of the original edict was deleted and replaced by another one threatening excommunication of the king by the Arch¬ bishop of Esztergom for any breach of the terms of the agreement.

At the beginning of 1232, Archbishop Robert, with the authorization of the Pope, did in fact excommunicate Andrew for the latter’s continued employment of Moslem and Jewish moneylenders and for restricting the Church’s salt monopoly. The king was compelled to conclude with the Pope’s envoy the Treaty of Bereg, in which he conceded the demands of the Church.

The Hungarian clergy, under the protection of the papacy, managed to retain their power—at least for the time being—during the great social upheavals of this period.

The Invasion of the Mongols

Bela IV succeeded to the throne in 1235 and reigned until 1270. His life was one stubborn yet unsuccessful struggle to restore and pre¬ serve the royal authority in an age when economic and social develop¬ ment had already undermined the traditional basis of central power while a new basis had not yet been formed. Nearly a century had yet to pass before such a development took place; by then commodity production and a money economy would advance sufficiently for taxes, customs and other revenues to make up for the loss of income from the crown lands, and for armed retinues of lords loyal to the king to replace the soldiers from the castles. But in this period of transition, B61a IV saw no other solution to his difficulties than the restoration of the former economic basis of royal power. He set up commissions charged with the task of revising grants of land and recovering alienated castle and crown lands. In an attempt to curb the oligarchy, he went as far as to remove the chairs from the royal council hall and burned them to prevent the leading dignitaries from sitting down in his presence. His efforts to recover the crown lands, however, met with universal resistance. They not only failed to produce the desired result, but also poisoned relations between the king and the majority of the ruling class—the grave consequences of which became evident during the ensuing Mongol invasion.

In 1237, the Mongols attacked the Cuman tribes, which inhabited the area between the Dnieper and Dniester rivers. Some of the Cumans led by their King Kotony fled westwards and asked for permission to enter Hungary. B61a IV marked out a district in the region between the Danube and the Tisza for them, in the hope that the Cuman warriors would be loyal to him in his struggle with the barons. However, the Cuman herdsmen soon clashed with the neighbouring farmers, as their herds trampled over the crops. The resulting animosity provided food for agitation and the barons were quick to turn it to good advan¬ tage in their struggle against the king. They clamoured for the expulsion of the Cumans in order to remove the mainstay of the monarchy. The king, however, was increasingly reluctant to let the Cumans be expelled as he had received fresh news of the approach of the Mongols.

A few years before, a Dominican friar named Julian had travelled east to find the Hungarians who had stayed in the ancient homeland. He did, indeed, find them along the Volga river; but when he set out for a second time to make contact with them, he learnt that Mongol hordes were advancing west. Soon the news that Kiev had fallen reached Hungary. A Mongol invasion of Hungary looked imminent.

At the last moment, Bela lost even the Cumans; a mob, incited by the barons, murdered King Kotony, and the Cumans left Hungary for the Balkans, killing and ravaging on their way. A large number of barons looked on indifferently, even with hostility, at the king’s efforts to rally resistance when the Mongol hordes reached the frontiers of Hungary. Apart from the prelates, only a few barons led their soldiers to the king’s standard.

The Mongols entered Hungary at three points in the spring of 1241. From the north came hordes that had ravaged Poland and Silesia, another army advanced from the direction of Transylvania; while the main body of the Mongol force, led by Batu Khan, entered from the north-east, through the Verecke Pass, where the Hungarian horsemen had come many years before on their western migration. King Bela made an attempt to halt the enemy at Mohi, on the banks of the Sajo, a tributary of the Tisza, but was routed and fled westwards, crossing the Danube into Western Hungary and from there on to Austria, to Duke Frederick of Babenberg. Frederick, however, took him prisoner and released him only for a large ransom. Fleeing his Mongol pursuers, the king finally found refuge on the Dalmatian coast, on the offshore island of Trau.

Only a few castles were able to put up a successful resistance and the whole of the country east of the Danube fell to the Mongols. The invaders, of course, slew those who attempted resistance; but, in order to intimidate the population, they went further than that and mas¬ sacred defenceless people. No one was able to save himself except those who had hidden in good time in the forests or marshes or fled to the hills. Here, their numbers were decimated by starvation. As the Mongols had failed to take Hungary in a single assault, they were compelled to stop and to make preparations for the winter and for the conquest of the country west of the Danube. Survivors were, therefore, lured out of their hiding-places through promises of immunity so that they would work to produce the supply of food needed by the invaders.

But when the harvest was over, the unfortunate folk were ruthlessly massacred or taken into captivity by the Mongols, who were careful not to leave potential enemies in their rear when they resumed their westward march. Crossing the frozen Danube, they invaded Trans- danubia. Here, however, they found themselves faced with better organized resistance. They did not bother to break it by mustering their superior force, since their main objective was the capture of the king. This they failed to do before their withdrawal from Hungary in the summer of 1242. The reason for their sudden departure was probably the Mongol practice of contenting themselves with terrorizing the population of a country during their first visit, and leaving the final conquest to a later date. In this case, however, that final conquest never took place, owing to the disintegration of the Mongol Empire.

The Mongol invasion inflicted on Hungary serious losses in terms of human lives as well as material resources. It dealt an even heavier blow to the castle system and the royal estates, bringing nearer their inevitable disintegration. The defeat sustained by the royal army was also a defeat for the king’s policies; in this acute crisis of a devastated country, Bela was forced to reconcile himself to sharing his land and power with the barons.

The Dawn of Chivalry

Some signs of the growing self-assurance and increasing demands of the great landowners became apparent about the turn of the thirteenth century even in the sphere of culture. In earlier years, art and literature had been confined to the royal court and the Church. The earliest monasteries founded and built by baronial families date from the middle of the twelfth century; the monarchy continued to lead the way in architecture even to the end of the century: the most significant pieces of contemporary architecture—the cathedral and the royal palace at Esztergom—were built by French architects for Bela III.

French influence in Hungary reached its highest point during this period. Bela III married twice and both his queens were French prin¬ cesses, who brought with them their knights, priests and architects from France, while growing numbers of Hungarian students went to Paris to study at the university. Graduates of the University of Paris became clerks who staffed the Chancery.

One of the notaries of the royal chancery was ‘Magister P.’ (com¬ monly referred to as Anonymus), a historian who was not content to write a mere continuation of the eleventh-century Gesta Ungarorum, bringing it up to date, but brushed it aside and proceeded to write a fresh History of Hungary. He made no secret of his aim to write a genealogia nobilium which he set in the story of the Conquest of the new homeland by the Hungarians. His work embodied a wholly novel approach. Unlike earlier writers of Hungarian history, he rehabilitat¬ ed the pagan past and, by drawing liberally on popular epics and sagas, glorified the tenth-century ancestors of the baronial families of his time, stressing emphatically that they had acquired their properties by force of arms. In an attempt to justify the efforts of the aristocracy of the late twelfth century to confine the power of the king, he traced kingship back to a decision taken by the nomadic tribes to elect a prince and not to King Stephen’s triumphal subduing of the tribal chiefs. By writing a History of the Trojan War, a story much favoured by French chivalry, ‘Magister P.’ catered to the budding literary in¬ terest evinced by the upper stratum of the contemporary ruling class. He may also have been the author of a romance of Alexander the Great, parts of which exist in the body of Hungarian letters of later years. Both stories were thus available in Hungarian translations, and their influence can be seen by the popularity in Hungarian baronial families of the early thirteenth century of such classical first names as Achilles, Priam, Hector, Helen and Alexander. The earliest record of vernacular sacred literature—a funeral oration—also dates from tliis period.

Vernacular literature and a secular outlook were new to Hungarian culture; both of them were connected with the cultural and political aspirations of the secular lords. The literary education of the Western European age of chivalry also began to exert an influence upon the upper stratum of the Hungarian ruling class. Two Provencal trouba¬ dours—Peire Vidal and Gaucelm Faidit—turned up in King Emeric’s court, and Andrew II was accompanied on his crusade by two eminent German minnesingers, Neidhart von Reuenthal and Tann- hauser. About this time, too. King Ladislas I began to be regarded as an embodiment of chivalric ideals, and Bela III pressed for his canoniza¬ tion.

For some years during the first half of the thirteenth century, the secular lords set the trend in the field of architecture. The finest pieces of Late Romanesque architecture in Hungary, already showing some elements of Gothic, are the family monasteries of some of the great feudal lords—in particular those of Jdk, Leb6ny and Zsambek.

The Emergence of the Towns and the Nobility (1241–1308)

After the Mongol invasion it was imperative for Bela IV to reconsider the question of defence. In most of Europe the feudal landlords usually contributed armoured knights for this purpose. In Hungary, however, Bela’s attempts to reclaim alienated castle lands had greatly hampered a move in this direction. B61a IV was, therefore, obliged to give the Hungarian feudal|lords a free hand on their estates. In the course of reconstruction after the Mongol invasion, he granted estates to his barons with the stipulation that they erect fortresses and garrison them. The old county castles had been earthen structures, fortified by a stockade; stone castles had been the exception apart from the royal residences such as Esztergom and Szekesfehervar, which escaped capture by the Mongol invaders. B61a IV launched a campaign to build new stone castles—the Red Tower of Sarospatak and Salomon’s Tower at Visegrdd are well-known remains from this period. These castles consisted of a single keep of several storeys. The feudal barons, following the royal example, erected similar castles throughout the country during the following decades. These strongholds are examples of growing baronial power on one hand, and, on the other, of the sub¬ stantial strengthening of the country’s defences.

The final dissolution of the old order based on the county castles and royal estates was brought about not only by the emergence of a landed oligarchy, but also by the development of the middle layers of feudal society: the burghers of the towns and the smaller landowners (the so-called ‘nobility’).

The Growth of Towns

The earliest traces of urban life go back to the end of the twelfth century, when trade and agriculture began to separate and commodity production for the market began. The legal separation of the burghers from the peasantry also began through the granting of charters to towns freeing them from feudal obligations and specifying their privileges. The earliest of these charters was obtained by the citizens of Szekesfeherv&r in the middle of the twelfth century, and granted them the freedom to elect justices, market rights and immunity from customs duties.

The rights given to towns in Hungary were derived from those given to groups of foreign settlers, known as hospites. The latter had obtained the privileges of choosing their own justices, living according to their own customs, and paying taxes in money based on their holdings of land instead of a poll-tax in kind.

From the thirteenth century onwards, not only foreign settlers were called hospites, but the term was applied also to those serfs who had either escaped from their landlords or left them legally, and had become established settlers elsewhere, obtaining the privileges of the hospites.

Most of these had been peasants, with a fair number of craftsmen among them. It was in their settlements beside royal castles and the bishops’ residences that viticulture was first developed. The foreign trading settlements were also engaged in handicrafts. The Hungarians serving in the households of royal castles and episcopal estates carried on similar activities. Economic conditions were thus ripe for their assimilation with the foreign settlers when the social and political conditions were ready for such a development. This happened during the reorganization of the county castles.

B6Ia IV planned to transform the county castles into up-to-date fortresses by offering refuge to the unprotected inhabitants of the neighbouring settlements in exchange for their help in the defence and upkeep of the fortifications. Bela himself ceded his former seat, Esztergom, to the archbishopric, selecting Buda as the royal residence. The reconstruction of the city was also due to his efforts: after the Mongol invasion, he settled the surviving inhabitants of the destroyed settlements of Pest and Buda, along with a number of new settlers, on the Castle Hill, where new city walls were built and a new royal palace erected. The new settlement was given the name of Buda, while the reorganized old one was henceforth called O-Buda, i.e. Old Buda. With the reconstructed and newly populated Pest, the three settlements form the nucleus of present-day Budapest. Bela IV endeavoured to move other trading settlements into the reorganized county castles—e.g. Esztergom, Szekesfehervar, Pozsony, Sopron, Gyor and Kolozsvdr. Their populations were thus united into one community, comprising both the foreign settlers and the original castle-dwellers (cives), who were given the benefit of the formers’ privileges. The twofold social origin of the Hungarian town is clearly seen by the term cives et hospites in contemporary documents. Aside from the towns which developed from castles, other new towns grew up throughout the thirteenth century from German settlements, e.g. Nagyszeben, Brasso, Beszterce in Transylvania and Kassa, Locse, Kesmark and Bdrtfa in the north.

The Hungarian town, like its Western European counterpart, owed its freedom directly to the ruler. It was liberated from the juris¬ diction of the county and its inhabitants could dispose freely of their possessions. They no longer paid taxes on their individual holdings of land, but each town paid a lump sum to the king with each burgher contributing his share. Within the confines of the town all burghers were equal and had full rights, subject only to the jurisdiction of the town council (in matters of town property even the Church and feudal lords were subject to the town council). The town’s dignitaries assumed the hereditary title of count (comes), and were the local landlords, merchants and mine owners. They governed a population of peasants, who cultivated the land attached to the town and worked in their spare time in handicrafts or in the mines.

The development of towns in Hungary was only partly the result of local conditions: European economic development contributed to it in equal measure. In llie thirteenth century Western Europe began its economic expansion towards the east. In the north, the Hanse towns and the Teutonic Knights penetrated into the Baltic; in tire south Venice and Genoa expanded their trade into the eastern Mediter¬ ranean lands and the coastal regions of the Black Sea. Somewhat later in the same century the territory in between began to participate to a greater extent in European trade. The reasons for this expansion of trade can be explained by Western Europe’s need for precious metals, and the yearning of Eastern Europe’s ruling classes for the luxuries of life. In the second half of the thirteenth century mining for precious ores started on a large scale in the Czech, Polish and Hungarian mountains, followed by copper production in Hungary and lead mining in Poland. This contributed to an increase in trade with other coun¬ tries, including trade in agricultural products as well. Prague, Breslau, Cracow, Lemberg, Buda and other commercial centres on Hungary’s northern border were engaged in exchanging by barter mining and agricultural products and commodities, mainly for textiles from Western countries. In mining, Western capital, to a large extent Ger¬ man, shared with the Hungarian ruling classes in exploiting the country’s mineral resources. German capital helped mining towns in Eastern Europe obtain charters from their rulers for the exploitation of silver and copper. In the second half of the thirteenth century Selmecbanya, Besztercebanya, Golnicbanya and Rozsnyobanya were granted charters. Part of the ore and smelted metal obtained went as revenue into the royal treasuries, and part was used to close the gap between the value of commodities coming from the West and the limited amount of agricultural products available in exchange. Side by side with mining for copper and precious metals, a superior method of producing iron was introduced by the citizens of the new towns, who, by the end of the thirteenth century, were exceeding the output of the king’s servants with their backward methods. In the second half of the fourteenth century Hungarian iron became a well-known export commodity, especially in northern countries.

County Administration and Autonomy of the Nobility

Royal castles were rapidly turning into towns, and their inhabitants into free citizens; on the other hand, the problem of the great number of castle retainers (jobbdgy) and royal knights (servientes) living in scattered villages remained unsolved. These small feudal landlords had exercised their rights in the area around the castles and on the royal estates. But the great feudal landlords, who had obtained these lands as royal grants, had no respect for the rights of their inferiors in rank. The small landlords had to join forces to defend their inde¬ pendence. The institution of the county justice, a remnant of the castle system, seemed to them inadequate. They tried to win local autonomy by electing from their ranks their own judges who, jointly with the ispein, should have jurisdiction over the whole county, including the feudal estate population. But the first step was to establish that the small landlords had equal rights with the great feudal landlords.

After the Mongol invasion, Bela IV, in order to exercise control over the feudal oligarchy, encouraged these activities. On the one hand, he confirmed the rights of the smaller landlords by recognizing their ‘nobility’; on the other, he accepted the new county organization by issuing a decree in 1267, ordering that two or three ‘noblemen’ of each county attend the Szekesfehervar assizes which were about to develop into a national assembly or diet. By that time the great feudal landlords had come to be called ‘barons’, whereas the title ‘nobleman’ was applied to former royal soldiers who had become small and middle landlords.

By the end of the thirteenth century the new county organization was legally recognized. It was headed by a baron, appointed by the king as ispan, and under him judges and jurymen chosen from the nobility. In this way the small landlords could in the majority of cases keep their land free, and participate in the political and judicial rights of the feudal ruling class, but they could not keep themselves free from the influence of the growing power of the feudal oligarchy. Not wanting to suffer from their whims, and eager to obtain more land, the nobility offered their services to the barons as familiares , i.e. vassals, serving as administrative officers on the baronial estates or as retainers in the baronial armies. No wonder that in the course of time, county autonomy became a mere illusion, or else the tool of the feudal oligarchy.

Feudal Oligarchy versus Royal Power

Besides supporting the citizens of the towns and the autonomy of the counties, Bela IV tried to secure the help of the Cumans in order to check the expansion of baronial power. The Cumans were called back from the Balkans, given land in the region between the Danube and the Tisza, and, in order to cement their ties to the king, the crown prince, Stephen, married the daughter of their chieftain. The king also tried to obtain the assistance of the friars. From the early thirteenth century onwards, the Dominicans and Franciscans had been extremely popular in Hungary because of their eloquent preaching. The rulers of Hungary used them for converting the heretical Bogomils and the pagan Cumans, and Bdla IV tried to counterbalance the higher clergy with them.

Baronial ambitions could, for the moment, be satisfied abroad. Bela IV intervened in the dynastic struggles following the extinction of the Austrian Babenberg family. According to an agreement made with Ottokar II, King of Bohemia, Bela obtained Styria, to be governed as a duchy by Prince Stephen. Styrian lords, however, dissatisfied with Hungarian rule, expelled the Hungarians at the end of 1259, offering the duchy to Ottokar, who, after the victory of Marchfeld in 1260, took possession of the territory together with the rest of the Babenberg heritage.

For two decades at least, the forces of feudal anarchy had been tied down in rebuilding the country, sharing in the spoils of the royal estates and fighting abroad. Yet anarchy was ready to break out as soon as the feud of B61a IV and his son, Stephen, ‘the younger king’, provided the opportunity. The ruling class broke into two factions, and in the course of the struggle it soon became evident that the real masters of the country were the barons with their huge estates, and the power given them by their control of the county administration. The Pope offered to arbitrate between the two sides, hoping thereby to obtain the suzerainty so far repeatedly denied to him. Bela refused once again and in his last letters to the Pope he declared that he never had and did not expect to have help from the Holy See.

At the time of his death in 1270, papal intervention reached its highest point; while formerly pretending to support royal power, the Pope now openly joined the forces of feudal anarchy.

During the brief reign of Stephen V (1270-1272), the baronial fac¬ tions no longer endeavoured to hide behind dynastic struggles. Some of the barons managed to detach parts of the country, placing them under foreign rulers, in order to secure their support against the king. After the death of Bdla IV, the ban, Henrik Koszegi, offered his castles to Ottokar II, King of Bohemia. In the war which followed, the Bohemian army was defeated in a battle fought beside the Rdba river.

Ottokar II made his peace with Stephen, forgetting about Henrik Koszegi, who was obliged to ask his king’s pardon. He was unrepent¬ ant, however, and with the help of the queen’s favourite, the ban Joachim, carried off the young crown prince, Ladislas, in order to blackmail the king. While pursuing the traitor, Stephen V died sud¬ denly, and power passed into the hands of the queen, Joachim and Henrik Koszegi. The Csdk family organized a faction for their over¬ throw. In 1274, they succeeded in carrying away the young king and attacking their rivals. Henrik Koszegi died on the battlefield and the ban Joachim followed him in 1277. The sons of Henrik Koszegi continued the fight, and following their father’s example, asked the help of Ottokar II. This action encouraged the Csdk faction to support Rudolf of Habsburg in his fight against Ottokar for the possession of the Austrian provinces. Hungarian support secured Rudolf’s victory in the battle on the Marchfeld (1278) which also paved the way for the establishment of the future Habsburg dynasty.

When Ladislas IV (1272-1290), surnamed ‘the Cuman’, reached his adolescence, he tried to throw off the protection of the barons and establish his power with the support of the Cumans, from whom his mother descended.

The nomadic Cumans were a considerable military force. They still lived in a tribal society and observed pagan ritual, while each free member of the community performed military service. The Hungarian feudal lords tried to subject them and therefore the Cumans allied with the king against them. The feudal lords then suspended their factional struggles and joined forces against the king and the Cumans.

Their leader was Lodomer, the energetic and erudite Archbishop of Esztergom, who, considering the king’s alliance with the pagan Cu- mans a threat to the Church, appealed for papal intervention. With the help of the papal legate, the barons and high churchmen forced the king to agree to a law introducing Christianity among the Cumans and terminating their nomadic customs.

The king, however, was not willing to enforce the law extorted from him, and was excommunicated by the papal legate. Ladislas, in reply, delivered the legate into the hands of the Cumans, and went to live among them. He renounced his wife and married according to pagan ritual a Cuman woman called Edua. He was captured by the barons, who forced him to join in their warfare against the Cumans. In 1280, in the battle of H6dto, the Cumans were defeated, but Ladislas’s determination remained unbroken. In 1285, he called in the Mongols, who, joined by the Cumans, devastated the country. Only a small number of Hungarian lords remained loyal to the king, who surround¬ ed himself with Cumans, Mongols and Moslems. After sending his wife into a nunnery, he made Edua his lawful queen. Lodomer an¬ nounced a crusade against him, but before this took place, Ladislas was murdered by Cuman assassins hired by the barons to rid them of the young king, who fought for his power to the last.

The Feudal Anarchy

The grandson of Andrew II who was at that time in Venice was chosen by the barons to succeed the childless Ladislas IV. Andrew 111 (1290-1301) was just as helpless against the flourishing feudal anarchy as his predecessor had been. The country was divided into regions independent of the king, each in the hands of a baronial faction. Under their auspices neither royal nor church property was spared; they confiscated estates, and put their relatives and supporters into vacated church offices. The Church protested, seeking protection from the king, but owing to the lack of papal support Andrew was unable to intervene. At the death of Ladislas IV, the Holy See had declared Hungary a papal fief, and had granted it to the young Neapolitan Prince Charles, a member of the House of Anjou, who was related to the Hungarian royal family. Charles soon found supporters among the Hungarian barons.

Internal strife and threats from without forced Andrew III to rely upon the county administration and the diet, which had a considerable majority of rank and file nobility. The assembly of 1298 excluded the

barons. Power was taken away from the ispan, appointed from the ranks of the barons, and county administration was entrusted to the justices, representing the nobility.

This early attempt at a monarchy controlled by a diet failed, but showed that the nobility was in the ascendant. Their political con¬ sciousness was expressed by Ladislas IV’s chaplain, Simon Kezai, who confirmed that the community of the nobility was the real represen¬ tative of the country, both by Roman law and scholastic teaching. With this view in mind, he wrote a history of the Hungarian con¬ quest, adding to it the history of the Huns, as the ancestors of the Hun¬ garians. It was not the saintly King Stephen who was put before his king as a paragon, but the pagan Attila, known as ‘the scourge of God’, a defiant gesture referring to Ladislas’s attitude to the Church. K6zai openly declared himself a partisan of the nobility, and approved of the king’s alliance with them against the barons. The alliance, however, was still too feeble to contain the forces of feudal anarchy, which reached its climax in the contests after the death of Andrew III, the last Hungarian king of the fine of Arpad.

A baronial party declared the Bohemian Prince Wenceslas, Ottokar II’s grandchild, a descendant of the Arpads on the female line, king of Hungary; but he, not being able to consolidate his power, resigned and handed over the crown to his relative, Otto, prince of Bavaria. Otto was captured by the voivode of Transylvania, deprived of the crown and forced to depart in shame. Rumours spread that kingless Hungary would be divided between the duke of Austria and the king of Bohemia.

Among the claimants to the throne, Charles of Anjou seemed the most powerful. He secured for himself the support of the Hungarian high clergy, due mainly to papal protection and a substantial loan from Italian bankers. Because of the devastation caused by the baro¬ nial struggle, the country was on the brink of disaster, and the clergy, afraid to lose their possessions, were ready to support a potential protector with foreign support.

In 1308, the Pope sent Cardinal Gentile to Hungary and his surviv¬ ing correspondence gives an idea of the prevailing state of corruption. In Transylvania, the all-powerful voivode tried to force the clergy to make his son a bishop. The bishopric of Pecs was occupied by the ban, Henrik Koszegi, lord of Transdanubia; the consecrated bishop was set aside, and the clergy, after announcing Henrik Koszegi’s excommunication, were expelled. The title of ‘palatine’ was wrongly used by three barons. The southern provinces were held by Slavonic barons, each assuming the title of ban. The latter were supporters of Charles of Anjou, wanting him more as a party leader than a ruler. These barons assumed the offices of ispans —they lived in princely style, coining their own money, ravaging and pillaging the countryside and forming alliance with foreign powers. The papal legate succeeded, after prolonged negotiations, in obtaining formal recognition of Charles I (1308-1342) by the barons. Seeing, however, that papal authority was no longer sufficient to stem the anarchy, the legate withdrew in 1311, after first excommunicating the most formidable of the barons, Mate Cs&k. In reply, the latter declared himself an in¬ dependent ruler and waged war for the possessions of the Archbishop of Esztergom. As a result Charles was forced to withdraw into the southern parts of the country.

The Transformation of the Hungarian Peasantry

Feudal anarchy accelerated the gradual amalgamation of the serf and free elements of the peasantry. Growing productivity in agriculture and the ensuing development of barter trade swept away the last impediments. In the course of time, landlords came to see clearly that the lands cultivated by serfs yielded much less than those of the free peasants or hospites cultivating their communal possessions. The constant complaints of the population of the former castle lands and royal estates because of heavy taxes made the whole peasantry into a revolutionary force. In the second half of the thirteenth century there were continuous revolts, dues left undelivered, and mass escapes, growing into large-scale movements from one lord’s land to another.

The landlords who first profited from these movements were those who needed new hands for their newly granted lands. The loss in population owing to the Mongol invasion had made labour increasing¬ ly scarce. Thus it was not difficult for the escaped peasant to find better labour conditions with a new landlord. It would have been in the in¬ terests of the ruling class as a whole to stop this trend, which reduced the level of exploitation of the peasant, but they failed to halt the movement because the new barons in need of labour were ready to grant protection to the escapees. Naturally, it was first of all the serfs who tried to improve their lot, and were ready to leave at once if not granted the same privileges as enjoyed by the free peasants. As a matter of course, landlords proved willing to reduce labour services and dues in kind and institute a hereditary system of land leasing. In many cases this was equivalent to freedom of socage and of movement. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, slaves employed as domestic servants were the last to be freed. The former slave settlements became villages based on communal cultivation, but if the landlord proved too severe, no one would work on his demesne. By the first half of the fourteenth century, the former demesnes were mostly deserted and the term praedium came to denote an uninhabited place.

At the end of the thirteenth century the ruling class was obliged to recognize the peasant’s freedom to move, as well as his hereditary lease and communal use of his land. His obligations, like those of the foreign settlers, were no longer determined according to his personal status, but according to the amount of land leased from the landlord; one part of the dues owed could be paid in money, the rest in a defined quantity of goods. Some labour services remained as a legacy of serfdom, but owing to the decay of the demesne they were negligible compared with payments in money and kind. The position of the peasantry changed considerably. They were more and more generally called jobbagy. This actually meant the application to the formerly unfree peasantry of the name which in early feudalism designated freemen acting as officials in royal castles, who in the meantime had merged partly into the nobility and partly into the urban burgher population. This by itself shows that the distinction between bonds¬ men and freemen existing before feudalism ultimately disappeared, and a uniform class of tenants emerged.

Attempt at Adriatic Hegemony (1308–1437)

The Development of a New Aristocracy

The outcome of the peasants’ migration and the development of the towns was to concentrate the smaller landlords and some of the greater feudal lords around the central power in order to defend their common interests. The advantages of allying with the king were first recognized by that section of the ruling class which was unable to hold its own against the most powerful barons. The most fervent supporters of Charles of Anjou belonged to the poorer branches of the baronial families who had been pushed into the background, robbed and ex¬ pelled from their family properties by the richer members. In his first years King Charles was supported by members of these families, such as the Sz6c$enyi, Szdcsi, Bebek, Nekcsei, Garai, Lackfi and others. They and their retainers, together with other victims of the feudal oligarchy, made up the king’s armed forces. Willi this army Charles was able to fight against the overlords of the provinces. By 1321, with the death of Mate Csak, the feudal anarchy came to an end after ten years of fighting. Charles’s power was at last estab¬ lished, and he could move his seat from Temesvar to Visegrad.

After the fall of the great feudal barons, Charles regained the illegally alienated castle lands and royal estates, but still held only a small portion of what had been indiscriminately given away by his predecessors. The old castle system had been decaying, and Charles had no intention of restoring an antiquated institution. He organized the remaining royal estates around castles, and made them independ¬ ent of the county administration. The)' were governed by castellans, whose duties were more economic than military, as the latter had become more and more the right and obligation of the feudal ruling class and, to some extent, of the bourgeoisie. The royal castle was garrisoned by a small number of armed guards; the country’s stand¬ ing army consisted of a few thousand soldiers paid by the king, to¬ gether with the companies of the county militia, and secular and ecclesiastical private armies. The county and baronial armies fighting under their own banners were called banderia.

The new type of army was the logical outcome of the strengthening of the feudal system. Several hundred castles and several thousand villages were owned by a few aristocratic families who also became the temporal and ecclesiastical dignitaries of the country. A great part of the small and middle nobility who owed them fealty as familia- res (vassals) served in their armies and managed their estates.

The crushing of the great barons prevented the creation of new feudal provinces, but could not prevent the feudal disintegration into large estates. The feudal lord enjoyed not merely the dues and services of the peasantry of his estate, but also held jurisdiction over them. He collected royal taxes on his own estate and his soldiers fought under his leadership in the royal army. As voivodes, bans and ispans the barons and their officials administered the affairs of large areas not immediately under their feudal jurisdiction. In these circumstances no direct political role was left open for the nobility with small and middle-sized estates. In the fourteenth century the king held diets only on rare occasions.

Economic Policy of Charles I

Charles I tried to base his power on direct and indirect royal revenue called regalia (i.e. on taxes, customs, mine and coinage monopolies) and not on his holdings of land. His chief adviser, his childhood friend from Naples, Palatine Fiilop Druget and the second man on whom he relied, Domotor Nekcsei, Lord Chief Treasurer, were inspired by foreign example, especially by that of the more advanced Bohemia. They tried to take advantage of the demand in Western Europe for precious metal. In the second half of the thirteenth century, Hun¬ garian silver production had increased rapidly, and in the early four¬ teenth century, a more important event, the discovery of gold, had led to the founding of mining towns. Free trade in these metals lured a great number of merchants to Hungary, especially from Italy and Germany. In exchange for gold and silver, the Hungarian market was inundated by foreign luxury articles. In 1325, a monopoly was introduced as in Bohemia which made it compulsory to exchange silver and gold ore at the royal mint. In spite of the low rate of exchange it brought a good income to the mine-owners, at the same time supplying the mint with sufficient metal for coining money at yearly intervals. Foreign merchants were compelled to accept gold florins and silver denarii, instead of unminted metal, however, it was good business, because the Hungarian florin was one of Europe’s best currencies.

In order to increase his income from his metal monopoly and moneta¬ ry reforms, King Charles changed the mining law passed by Bela IV. The law had provided free mining even for foreign miners in exchange for a certain portion to be delivered to the royal treasury. The owner of the ground, should it not be the king, received nothing, but was even obliged to offer the land to the monarch. No wonder that the landlords were not eager to report finding metal ores, and prevented any attempt at mining. King Charles reversed this situation and by allowing the owner of the ground to take a share of the profit, he encouraged landowners to promote mining. The so-called ‘chambers’, offices founded during the Arpad dynasty for the administration of precious metal mining, the coining of money, the salt mines and the collection of customs revenue (the so-called thirtieth) were farmed out to foreign and Hungarian merchants.

The feudal ruling class, because of their military service, were excused from payment of taxes. The king, therefore, could obtain revenue only from the peasantry and bourgeoisie, and, occasionally, from the clergy. As money was no longer reminted yearly, the extra renewal tax was not available. To recompense himself, the king levied a new tax, called ‘chamber profit’ (lucrum camerae), and, in spite of frequent protests from the landlords, extra taxes were levied on the peasantry. The towns were also frequently overburdened by extra taxation, but they enjoyed the privilege of paying lump sums at long intervals. The towns had chiefly a financial interest for the king, and legally they were controlled by the treasurer responsible for royal revenues. Charles was also more daring than his predecessors in taxing the Church. The higher clergy were expected to pay consecra¬ tion charges, give New Year presents and send soldiers into the royal army. After the death of an ecclesiastical dignitary, his estate remained tied to the crown until a new appointment was made. The king also claimed one-third of papal tithes collected for the crusades. During the Avignon period, the popes were too weak to defend the rights of the clergy and compromised on this point.

Foreign Affairs

The foreign policy of Charles was closely connected with his plans for the economic reconstruction of the country. He did not wage war for conquest. His attempt to bring the former Cumania, in the Wal- lachian plain, formerly part of Hungary, under his control failed owing to the resistance of Bazarab, the Rumanian voivode, who during the days of feudal anarchy had made it into an independent province. Charles acquiesced, and recognized the Rumanian state. He then concentrated his attention on events of decisive importance to the future of Hungary beyond the western and northern borders.

From the second half of the thirteenth century onwards there were dynastic contests between the Austrian dukes and the Hungarian and Bohemian kings in order to unite East-Central Europe under their hegemony. Bela IV as well as Ottokar II and his successors had vainly attempted conquests. The Habsburgs who had secured the Austrian provinces and the Luxemburgs who, following the ex¬ tinction of the Premysl family, had ascended the Bohemian throne, tried to extend their powers over the German Empire by the renewal of their expansive designs against Hungary and Poland.

Charles wisely saw that it was to his interest to hinder the expansion of both German dynasties. Wladislaw Lokietek, King of Poland, was in agreement with him as he was threatened by an attack from John of Luxemburg who already held Silesia in subjection and aspired to the Polish throne. The friendly relations between Hungary and Poland were sealed by the marriage of Charles with Wladislaw’s daughter, Elizabeth. This was followed by a settlement of the Polish-Bohemian conflict at the meeting of the kings at Visegr&d in 1335, which was brought about through the mediation of the king of Hungary. John of Luxemburg was to resign his claim to the throne of Poland, and Casimir, Wladislaw Lokietek’s successor, surrendered Silesia to the king of Bohemia. Simultaneously, a treaty w^as signed between Casimir and the Teutonic Knights. The main advantage for Charles was the Hungarian-Bohemian-Polish-Bavarian alliance against the Habs¬ burgs, which enabled him to regain from them the Hungarian border territories lost during the period of anarchy. The alliance also had economic aims: Hungarian, Bohemian and Polish trade with Germany and Italy had suffered greatly from the staple right of Vienna. To circumvent this impediment, new trade routes were devised through Moravia to Buda, and to Cracow. Thereby a new road to Eastern and Central Europe was opened to South German merchants, principal¬ ly from Nuremberg, who succeeded in gaining control of the pre¬ cious metal trade through a series of privileges granted them in the following decades. Partly by squeezing out the Italians, and partly by compelling the Viennese traders to act as their agents, the South German merchants paved the way for their economic hegemony over East-Central Europe, which to a large degree contributed to the weak¬ ening of Hungary’s orientation towards the Adriatic and its gradual incorporation into the Central European system of states.

Charles had succeeded in obtaining peace and normal relations on the western and northern borders. However, he did not manage to secure the southern provinces which had been in the possession of the Arpad kings. The Croatian, Slavonian and Dalmatian areas remained in the hands of the local baronial leaders, who offered the Dalmatian towns to Venice in return for support against the king of Hungary. In order to hold Venice and its ally, Stephan Dushan, King of Serbia, in check, Charles tried to form closer ties with his Nea¬ politan relatives. His younger son, Andrew, married Joanna, the grand¬ daughter of King Robert, and successor to the throne of Naples. His elder son, Louis, inherited the crown of Hungary.

The Adventure in Naples and Expansion in the Balkans

Louis (1342-1382) was not hampered by unfavourable conditions in his efforts to build up the edifice begun by his father. He inherited a full treasury and secure western and northern borders. He himself was filled with ambition for conquest—his heroes were Alexander the Great and St. Ladislas of Hungary, who had launched the first expansion towards the South.

With the death of King Robert in 1343, the question of the succes¬ sion to the throne of Naples became acute. According to the contract made with Charles, Prince Andrew with his wife were jointly to hold the throne; but Joanna, greedy for power and detesting her husband, did not want to accept this situation. The Pope, the liege-lord of Naples, was not pleased with the idea that the Hungarian Anjous, with their claim to the Dalmatian coast, should get a foothold in Naples.

Prince Andrew was murdered with the complicity of his wife in 1345. As Joanna had been involved in her husband’s murder, Louis demanded from the Pope that she should be deprived of the throne, and Naples be ceded to him according to the family law of the Anjous. With his army reinforced by Italian and German mer¬ cenaries he invaded Italy in 1347. He occupied Naples, but the Pope, reluctant to grant it to him as his fief, turned the king of France and Charles IV, Emperor of Germany, against him. The diplomatic discus¬ sions took years, and Louis’s army in Naples crumbled in the mean¬ time. His second personal appearance on the scene in 1350 did little to help matters. Seeing that his plans for an Adriatic empire were unrealistic, Louis resigned his claim to Naples in 1352, but never recognized the legality of Joanna’s rule.

Despite his failure in Naples, Louis did not give up his attempts to secure supremacy in the Balkans and the Adriatic. The only positive feature of his policy was its connection with the Dalmatian towns’ struggles for independence. In the course of the wars with Venice which began in 1356, he not only liberated those Dalmatian towns which had once belonged to Hungary, but also extended his supre¬ macy to the hitherto independent Ragusa. In the treaty of Zara, signed in 1353, Venice resigned its rights over the Dalmatian towns.

This was the last phase in the completion of his father’s policy. In the course of centuries, the Hungarian-Croatian-Dalmatian union had grown into a political reality, its existence and security being equally desirable to the Hungarian and Dalmatian ruling class. The situation was not the same beyond the Save and in the provinces along the Lower Danube, where the interests of the Hungarian rulers clashed with those of the Serbian, Bulgarian and Rumanian ruling class, who desired political independence. After ten years of useless warfare, Louis had to accept merely formal vows of allegiance from the Serbian, Bulgarian and Rumanian rulers. Hungary’s Balkan expansion would have been justified if Louis had accepted leadership against the Turkish menace. He failed to do so and, in the seventies, the Turks subjected his Balkan vassals one by one.

In addition to the marriage settlement of Naples, Charles left his son a claim to the throne of Poland, which cost Louis substantial sacrifices. More than once, he had to render military assistance to his uncle, Casimir the Great, in his, wars against the Lithuanians. At the death of Casimir in 1370, Louis inherited the throne, adding greatly to his worries. He was unable to stem the feudal anarchy and so the Polish barons succeeded in extorting from him the first substan¬ tial concessions limiting royal powers.

The aging king again turned his attention towards the dream of his early days, Naples. He had willingly resigned the throne of his ancestors, but he could not forget the wickedness of Joanna. He adopted his cousin, Charles, Prince of Durazzo, to serve as an instru¬ ment of his revenge, and sent him with a Hungarian army to Italy to win Naples from Joanna. This was in 1378, when Louis’s diplomacy managed to bring about a coalition of Genoa, Padua, Verona and the Austrian dukes against Joanna and Venice. His fleet joined that of Genoa to besiege Venice, but they proved powerless against the deter¬ mined defence of the Venetians. In 1381, the treaty of Turin reiterated that Dalmatia was a Hungarian possession. By then Charles of Durazzo was master of Naples, and Louis, shortly before his death, had his re¬ venge, as Joanna was strangled by Hungarian mercenaries.

Seeming victories had gained for Louis the surname ‘Great’; but he had to pay dearly for it. Wars had increased feudal disintegration, and baronial power had been strengthened by the spoils of war and new royal grants. New alliances were made and new baronial families became dominant. Three factions under the Lackli, Garai and Hor- vati families struggled for power at the end of the reign of Louis.

The Loss of the Hungarian Possessions in the Adriatic

Louis I died without male issue and he desired his daughter Mary to inherit both the Hungarian and Polish crowns. She was to marry Sigismund of Luxemburg, the younger son of Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor. The planned marriage was the symbol of long-standing political aspirations in Central Europe: the union of Hungary, Poland and Bohemia. For the Polish ruling class, however, the connection with Hungary and Bohemia was not desirable, as the Luxemburg dynasty did not conceal its sympathies with the Teutonic Knights. Mary’s succession to the Polish throne had to be abandoned, and her sister Hedwig (Jadwiga) inherited the crown.

The Hungarian ruling class was no less antagonistic with regard to the new foreign policy. From among the baronial factions only that led by the Lackfis approved of the marriage of Mary and Sigismund. The Garais and Horvatis, resident in the southern parts, regarded the scrapping of the Adriatic policy as disastrous. Profiting from the baronial factional struggles, Charles of Durazzo, now King of Naples, at the invitation of the Horvatis returned to Hungary with Italian mercenaries in 1385, and was crowned king. A few weeks later, how¬ ever, he was murdered by the Palatine, Miklds Garai, who was jealous of his power. Ladislas, the young son of Charles, was declared king by the Horvatis. In order to seek peace talks, Queen Mary, her mother Queen Elizabeth, and the Palatine Garai took themselves to the south, but they were attacked, the Palatine and his retainers slaughtered, the queens captured, and Elizabeth smothered in prison. After these events the Lackfis and the younger Miklos Garai, seeking to forget past enmities, gathered around Sigismund, offering him a hard bargain. He was to make a bond with the barons: they were ready to recognize him as joint ruler with Mary, provided he promised to rule in con¬ junction with them, a promise which could be enforced by arms. This was the price he had to pay for the release of his wife, and subsequently he was crowned king in 1387.

The Turks were advancing on Hungary and a few raiders had al¬ ready crossed the frontiers by that time. King Sigismund was fully conscious that his forces were inadequate, and called for international support to help defend Hungary against the Turks. Crusades were a thing of the past, and the appeal of 1396 could only mobilize a couple of thousand adventurous Western European knights, who joined the Hungarian forces and penetrated into parts of the Balkans al¬ ready under Turkish rule. The battle of Nicopolis, a resounding vic¬ tory for the Turks, helped to renew old differences. Istvan Lackfi and his relatives considered the time ripe for seizing power, and or¬ ganized support for Ladislas of Naples, but fell victim to the snares set by Garai and his Styrian friend, Hermann Cilli, in 1397. Another baronial faction declared Ladislas of Naples king in 1403, and he was recognized by the Pope. This faction was soon crushed by Sigis¬ mund, and though he granted a universal pardon, subsequently his officials were all chosen from the Garai faction. Revenge for the papal intervention was exacted by the statute of 1404, according to which no papal edicts could be made public without royal consent (placetum regium) 4 , in practice this meant that the Pope was deprived of his right to appoint the higher clergy in Hungary. In 1417, the Pope formally recognized the Hungarian sovereign’s right to designate archbishops and bishops.

Sigismund’s rule was no longer threatened by dissenting factions and pretenders, but he greatly depended oil the Garai faction’s sup¬ port. The Order of the Dragon, founded in 1408 under the auspices of the king, comprised the members of the Garai faction and other barons who joined them. According to its rules, the king was merely the first among the knights, primus inter pares. During the thirty- odd years of Garai’s uninterrupted palatineship, the 24 barons who were members of the Dragon Order, shared the high political and military offices with the highest going to the Garai-Cilli families. A new aristocracy was recruited from the rising nobility and care was taken to see they fitted closely into the existing political structure.

The strengthening of the baronial administration was not unwel¬ come to Sigismund, as it gave him a free hand for the realization of his dreams in foreign affairs. Turkish expansion had been stopped for well over a decade by Tamerlane’s victory at Ankara and internal troubles within the Turkish Empire. The Hungarian ruling class enjoyed apparent security, and Sigismund turned all his energies to trying to solve the problems of the Holy Roman Empire and the schism in the Church. In 1410, he was elected emperor, and he did his best to rid himself of Hungarian affairs. The first result was the loss of Dalmatia. Venice bought Dalmatia from Ladislas of Naples and waged war in its cause in 1411. Sigismund pledged 13 towns in the district of Szepes to the king of Poland to pay for their defence, but (14th Century)

he cared more about being crowned emperor, so he made terms for an armistice and ceded to Venice what had been conquered. For six years he was away from Hungary, but after he had achieved the great aim of his life, mending the schism in the Church, he found himself confronted with the Hussite uprising of 1419. He thought his Bohe¬ mian throne more important than Dalmatia, and in 1420 Dalmatia was formally ceded to Venice.

More than three hundred years of involvement in Adriatic affairs

had ended for Hungary. Both political and economic affairs had The serf and the free peasant of early feudalism developed into the

tended to make Hungary give up its relatively independent position unified class of tenants and the town bourgeoisie in the fourteenth

between the Adriatic and Central Europe and become instead a part- century. These social developments were accompanied by the swift

ner in the Central European political system which was developing. growth of the forces of production and a considerable rise in the

economic and cultural level.

Mature Feudal Society (14th Century)

Beginnings of Agricultural Commodity Production

The loosening of peasant obligations in the early fourteenth century led to a considerable agricultural development. It was about this time that the three-field system of cultivation began to spread. Each of the tenants was allotted a plot of land in the open fields and could keep his animals on the common pasture. His house with garden, farmyard and plots were together called a ‘tenure* (sessio). The peasant had a hereditary right to his tenure provided he fulfilled his obligations. If he moved on, or if he died without an heir, the tenure returned to the landlord. The tenure was the basis of the peasant’s obligations to his landlord; he usually paid dues in money (census) and in kind (corn or wine), sent enforced gifts on holidays (munera) and offered labour services (at that time mostly one day a week.)

This method of cultivation aimed at self-sufficiency, but with com¬ modity production becoming more widespread, freer methods were introduced. Viticulture, which needs a lot of labour, was the first to emerge from the tenure system; once his dues in wine had been delivered to the landlord, the peasant was able to dispose freely of his vineyard by selling it or pawning it. He could also obtain extra plots for cultivation, in addition to his hereditary holding. With serfs escaping, and obtaining their freedom in ever greater numbers, the landlords were left with many untenanted holdings. These could be easily acquired by peasants with draught animals, some of whom even used hired labour. In return for extra holdings of land or vine- yards, the landlords demanded the second tithe, the first being due to the Church. The second tithe was called the ‘ninth’ (none).

The greater productivity of peasant labour made the landlords yearn to exploit the peasants more fully by obliging them to pay the ninth on their hereditary tenures as well. This would have deprived the peasant of the greatest achievement in his struggles: payment of fixed rents and dues independent of the volume of production. The payment of the ninth could only be enforced if the peasantry was deprived of its right to move where better labour conditions prevail¬ ed. Such a law was attempted after the failure of the Naples campaign and the great plague of 1349 which followed.

Nobility versus Peasants

The higher clergy and the aristocracy increased their wealth and power as the primary beneficiaries of the Naples adventure. Their noble retainers also shared in the spoils, but the nobility at home was left to bear the brunt of the expensive warfare. King Louis had managed to spend his father’s enormous wealth, and was obliged to have re¬ course to heavier taxation. The biggest burden was placed on the peas¬ antry, but affected also the yield of the feudal landlords’ estates be¬ cause the overburdened tenants were unable to render adequate service. The barons were compensated by more and more grants of land, but the nobility of small and medium means could only try to manage by raising the level of peasant services, but this was rendered more or less impossible because of the free movement of the peasants. The ravages of the plague—although much less serious than in West¬ ern Europe—also caused great movement among the peasants towards landlords offering better conditions. This meant, in effect, that the barons were the only landlords who could offer the newcomers more advantageous conditions, as only they remained unaffected by tem¬ porary fluctuations in their incomes. Moreover, the barons were pre¬ pared shamelessly to abduct peasants by force from the unarmed nobility. The nobility protested en masse and demanded equal chances in the exploitation of the peasantry, eventually forcing the king to call the long-silent diet.

The diet of 1351 extorted a number of favourable concessions from the king. With reference to their ancient rights, codified in Andrew II’s ‘Golden Bull’, the nobility demanded equal privileges (una eademque libertas) with the barons; first, that with the death of the male heir their estates should not become crown properties, but pass to their next of kin by right of descent; and, secondly, that they should be authorized to sit in judgement over their tenants, in all except criminal cases and that, in criminal cases, the county court including their representatives should pass judgement. The nobility also tacitly included among their privileges the barons’ right to be exempted from taxation. Thus, the rights of the nobility were codified, entitling them to become the future legislators of the country.

Yet the main difference between the baronage and the nobility had not been obliterated, because the barons were still able to offer more favourable terms to the peasantry. Forceful abduction was explicitly forbidden, but this did not prevent the peasant from moving himself to the landlord offering better conditions. At that time, free movement was not yet explicitly forbidden. The ruling class unani¬ mously demanded that permission to move should be withheld if the peasant had not paid his dues. This was agreed and codified by King Charles. It was not in the interest of the barons to check completely the movement of the peasant. All the nobility could achieve was that the king and the barons were obliged to collect the ninth on their estates, too, so that no peasant could be won over to another lord by remitting this burden.

It was primarily the Sekels (szekely) on the eastern border of Transylvania who succeeded in preventing the intrusion of feudal relations. The Sekels were a Hungarianized Bulgarian-Turkish tribe who had joined the Hungarians before the Conquest. Up to the end of the fifteenth century they kept up their military organization, grant¬ ed to them at the time of Geza and Stephen I, as the duty of freemen. The Sekels remained free peasants cultivating communal lands in exchange for military service. Throughout the fourteenth century their leaders were regarded as equal in rank with the nobility, but they could not subject the rank and file Sekels, and so employed prisoners of war or hired labour on their lands, and could obtain new posses¬ sions only outside the area occupied by the Sekels. The old order began to be broken up only in the fifteenth century, when the poor Sekel, not capable of rendering military service, had to work for the rich. But the majority of the Sekels remained free peasants obliged to render military service.

A similar, but quicker development may be observed among the Cumans who settled in an area surrounded by feudal estates, and the Alans (Hungarian jasz), a tribe of Caucasian origin, who had come with them. After their conversion to Christianity they gradually mingled with the Hungarians, becoming the tenants of either the king, their own chieftains, or Hungarian landlords.

The nomadic Rumanian and Ruthenian shepherds, who lived in the northern and eastern mountainous parts, had no strong organiza¬ tion like those of the Cuman and Alan tribes; thus their resistance to the internal and external forces of feudalism was weaker. The Ruma¬ nians had originally served as border guards and, in the thirteenth century, were organized into autonomous districts. At the head of their settlements stood the kenez, and at the head of the districts stood the voivodes. The majority of the voivodes and the kenez obtained noble status in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and subjected the free shepherds. The Rumanian districts were transformed into counties under the local nobility. The leaders of the Ruthenian shepherds themselves became tenants of Hungarian barons and no proper feudal ruling class could develop amongst them.

The German settlers in Transylvania and the Szepesseg (Zips, at the foot of the Northern Carpathians), called Saxons, developed the highest forms of local autonomy. Many of their village settlements grew into towns during the thirteenth century. These German towns, with the surrounding German villages, did not form part of a county administration, but came directly under royal jurisdiction. Political leadership was in the hands of town patricians, who could levy taxes but could not turn the free German peasants into their tenants.

The Growth of Boroughs

The statutes of 1351 exempted only fortified towns from the payment of the ninth. The provision seemed to be favourable to the towns but was actually weighted against them, because there were few towns fortified by walls, as most had not been rich enough to provide them.

Throughout the early fourteenth century, the king continued to issue charters to towns. The landlords, on the other hand, tried to counteract the flood of population moving into them by granting the same privileges to their own villages, provided they remained under their supremacy. More and more townships developed which were subject to landlords. Some reached a high standard of develop¬ ment (e.g. Debrecen in the fourteenth century, with its prosperous trade and commerce), but they were far behind the royal towns as far as legal and economic independence was concerned. Their own justices could not pass sentences except in minor cases; in criminal cases the landlord and his officials sat in judgement. These towns had no right of appeal to the king, the landlord being their highest judge. In addition to the legal system, the citizens were at a disadvan¬ tage because they did not pay them taxes in one sum, but were liable for taxation individually to both landlord and state.

Limited though the autonomy of these towns was, it granted their inhabitants greater freedom than in the villages, where the peasants were constantly harassed by the officers of the landlord. In addition, the landlords also granted market rights to their towns, which always acted as an incentive to agricultural production and trade. These towns generally developed within the baronial estates, because only the barons were able to turn to their own advantage the movement of the population. They could also obtain trading privileges from the king, and extend their protection to subjects trading outside the boundaries of their estates. The landlords with small and medium estates wanted to prevent the king and great landlords from exempting their unfortified towns from the ninth tax, which would encourage even greater movement among the peasantry. The ninth tax became a stumbling block to town development, and created a distinction between two types of town in Hungary: one with full autonomy (royal town), the other subjected to a landlord. In the eyes of contem¬ poraries, the town wall became the symbol of its status, which was reflected in the title given to the two types. The fortified town became known as a city (civitas), and the unfortified one was called a borough (oppidum).

The statutes of 1351 were a victory for the nobility, but in point of fact they still remained far behind the baronage. The nobleman could not oppose the baron, as he himself was usually the baron’s vassal. The nobility did not succeed either in fully exploiting the peasantry. Constant improvements in the technique of agriculture and increases in output meant that despite the higher level of taxation, the well-to-do peasant was left with a considerable surplus to sell. Increased taxes forced even the poorest peasant to consume as little as possible and take his goods to market. The right of free movement, in spite of illegal attempts to break it, made it possible for him to move into the towns. Many availed themselves of this opportunity, thus leaving more and more uncultivated strips in the village fields. The nobility’s antagonistic attitude towards the towns may have weakened, but could not prevent this development which, about the middle of the fourteenth century, intensified even in the more backward, cattle¬ raising Great Plain.

Boroughs developed in the Plain under specific circumstances. Archaeological research, examining old bones, discovered that the small cattle with fine bones and small horns indigenous to Central Europe had been reared to be 15 per cent bigger by the middle of the fourteenth century; they became the ancestor of the large, beautiful animal with enormous horns, the pride of Hungarian agriculture, and the best export commodity alongside wine for centuries to come. Although written records speak of cattle export at the end of the eleventh century, its development was connected with the rise of the flourishing South German towns in the fourteenth century, which were ready to buy any number of cattle from Hungary. Owing to geographical factors, and the relative backwardness of agriculture in the Great Plain, the demand for cattle brought new economic oppor¬ tunities which influenced the development of boroughs. During the fourteenth century the new boroughs in the Great Plain developed out of rich villages with enormous grazing lands (e.g. Debrecen, Kecske¬ met, Cegled, Nagykoros, Hodmezovasdrhely, etc.). Their peasant leaders took up the proud rank of civis or burgher and grew rich from their export of cattle.

Trade and Industry in the Royal Towns

During the second half of the fourteenth century, agricultural com¬ modity production gave impetus to the development of handicrafts. After 1370, the first guilds were formed, and by the beginning of the fifteenth century they were found in practically all of the larger towns and boroughs. The agricultural production of a great many towns had decreased, and the relative share of handicrafts had increased. In about two dozen towns, numbering over 3,000-5,000 inhabitants, 25-30 per cent were artisans, and from two-thirds to three-quarters of them were full-time craftsmen engaged in 50 to 60 trades. In the fifteenth century, handicrafts became increasingly differentiated from agriculture. A new marketing region emerged around these towns, with a radius of 50-60 kilometres. On the weekly market-days com¬ modities produced by the towns and foodstuffs produced by the villagers were exchanged. The rapid development of handicrafts threatened even the strict organization of the guilds; there were local attempts by rich merchants at organizing industrial production. The patricians of Bartfa, benefiting from the town’s privileges in linen bleaching and the output of handicrafts by urban and rural domestic workers, developed a large-scale linen industry, which, by the middle of the fifteenth century, had created its own market, producing more than the imports from abroad. By the end of the fourteenth century, merchant capital was penetrating even the copper mines of the country.

With the development of wholesale markets in certain commodities, the internal struggles of the bourgeoisie intensified. The leadership of the towns by wealthy landowners was more and more questioned by the rich merchants, one-time craftsmen themselves, who engaged in the export of agricultural goods and the import of textiles. In Buda, Pozsony, Sopron and Kolozsvar their agitations won them representa¬ tion on the councils. The artisans, who had backed these agitations, tried to seize power themselves, but the new patricians held them in check, at times invoking the help of the feudal ruling class; so the artisa ns had to be satisfied with forming ‘outer’ councils, as an appar ent check to the ‘inner’ councils of the patricians.

King Sigismund relied on the rising merchants in his policy toward the towns and supported them, approving their accession to power within the towns. In 1405, an assembly of the royal towns was called together, along with the representatives of boroughs and privileged villages, making altogether 250 settlements. As a result of the discus¬ sions, a royal decree granted freedom to towns and other settlements able to fortify themselves by walls; autonomous jurisdiction was introduced, taxes were united and town merchants exempted from payment of tolls, foreign merchants were excluded from wholesale markets. The Buda system of measures was to be adopted throughout, and the free movement of peasants into towns was confirmed. The weaving of cotton cloth was concentrated by royal decree in Kassa, and linen bleaching in Kassa and B&rtfa. These regulations, although inspired by the example of the more developed Italian and South German towns, answered the needs of local development.

Sigismund was the first, and also the last Hungarian king to re¬ cognize fully the importance of the towns, and consciously try to further their industrial growth. Contrary to the custom of the Anjou kings living in the fortified castles ofVisegr&d and Diosgyor, he moved his seat to the largest Hungarian city, Buda, making it into the capital of the country. But he expected for too much from the measures he took, and when he saw that his revenues from the towns were not increasing sufficiently he soon withdrew his support. After 1410, boroughs were granted and pledged to the barons in great numbers. Not more than 30-35 towns out of those originally receiving the priv¬ ileges of a free royal city were able to maintain their status, the rest had to accept the restricted autonomy of boroughs subjected to land¬ lords. Subsequently, only a few boroughs were granted the status of a royal town, such as Pest and Szeged, two outstanding trading centres in the Great Plain. In these circumstances the bourgeoisie had to wait a long time before it could become a distinct class. Sigismund himself gave up the idea of basing his central power on the towns, and by 1428 he had only bitter recollections of his experiment. After one abortive attempt to collect taxation he is reputed to have said: ‘I wish there were no towns at all in my empire!’

The Peasantry and the Hussite Movement

The development of craft industry and of a money economy induced the landlords to increase the burdens of the peasantry, especially their monetary obligations. The unbalanced economic policy of Sigismund, and his constant need of money resulted in the deterioration of the currency, which again hit the peasantry hardest. In answer to the new forms of exploitation, many peasants gave up their tenure, hired out their services to other land-owning peasants, or else moved into the towns. The villages abounded in untenanted land and the landlords, contrary to the royal decree, tried to force the peasants to stay.

The southern provinces, devastated during the dynastic struggles, suffered again owing to the renewal of the Turkish wars in 1416. The Turkish raiders plundered Transylvania and the southern areas year after year. The oppression of the landlords and the unceasing Turkish raids paved the way for the Hussite movement. Village and town clergy who had studied at the University of Prague began to preach the revolutionary doctrine. In 1432, peasant revolts started in the areas adjacent to Bohemia. The subsequent rising in Nagyszombat and the neighbouring countryside was organized by a Bohemian Hussite. Revolts soon broke out in the south and also in Transylvania.

At the request of the frightened ruling class, the Pope sent the Fran¬ ciscan friar James of the Marches as inquisitor to Hungary, to stem the Hussite heresy. The inquisition dealt with Hussites and members of the Greek Orthodox Church alike, as the inquisitor wanted to bring the Serbs and Transylvanian Rumanians under the Church of Rome. With the help of the feudal lords, the inquisitor succeeded in extirpating the southern Hussite movement. The Hussites, with their priests, moved into Moldavia. The first translation of the Bible into Hungarian was made there by them. In Transylvania, on the other hand, oppression and the inquisition gave rise to a large-scale peasant uprising.

From both an economic and social point of view, Transylvania was the least developed province of Hungary. Consequently, the raising of feudal obligations was doubly grievous to the peasantry there. The clergy expected the tithe to be paid in money, and in a good currency too, at a time of primitive economic conditions and deteriorating currencies. The Orthodox Rumanian peasantry were embittered because they were also expected to pay the tithe, even though strictly it was due only from Roman Catholics. It was the last straw when the Bishop of Transylvania stipulated that arrears of tithes were to be paid in a currency worth more than the previous one. Those who refused were excommunicated. In 1437, the Hungarian and Rumanian peasants of Transylvania rose in several places in protest. Antal Budai Nagy, an impecunious Hungarian nobleman, assumed lead¬ ership. An unprepared feudal army sent against them was routed, and the treaty of Kolozsmonostor laid down that there should be free movement for the peasants, changes in the system of tithes, an end to the ninth and a reduction in money obligations. The peasants were also given the right to meet yearly to check whether the landlords had kept to their promises.

The r ulin g class, on the other hand, was unwilling to see its privileges curtailed. The Transylvanian nobility, the Sekel military leaders and the German or ‘Saxon’ patricians made an agreement called the ‘Union of the Three Nations’, a treaty of the privileged classes against the peasantry. The bishop tried to separate the petty nobility from the peasantry by recognizing their exemption from tithes. In fact, many of the lesser nobles betrayed the peasants. So, too, did the citizens of the towns, who at first had sympathized with the uprising. The counter¬ attack of the nobility, however, was not wholly successful. The previous concessions to the peasantry were renewed, although with less favour¬ able conditions, and the right to arbitrate was left to the king. Sigis¬ mund had died in the meantime, and the nobility, seeing that owing to the long period of delay and uncertainty, the peasant army was beginning to disintegrate, launched a new attack. Antal Budai Nagy died in the battle of Kolozsvar, the city which sided with the uprising throughout. The other [leaders were executed and the movement ruthlessly crushed.

Gothic Art in Hungary

Economic development, increasing agricultural commodity produc¬ tion, mining and an expanding foreign trade all contributed during the fourteenth century to promote a flourishing cultural life under the influence of Late Gothic art. Cultural life in that period was still under ecclesiastical influence, mainly under that of the mendicant friars. The greatest historical work of the period, the Illuminated Chronicle, a summary and continuation of earlier historical writings, was inspired by scholastic learning, especially by that of St. Thomas Aquinas. The thirteenth-century chroniclers had mainly been interested in social conflicts, while the historians of the fourteenth century sang the praises of the alliance between king and feudal society, of established order inside, and foreign conquest outside the realm. In these works the king is presented as an absolute ruler, and also the first among the knights, enjoying the devotion and respect of his loyal barons. The first original Hungarian courdy epics known to us (which are extant only in sixteenth-century variants) recount the adventures of the knights who toured Europe as retainers of Louis I and Sigismund. A late offspring of the French chanson de geste is the story of Miklos Toldi, a warrior of great physical strength who showed his bravery in the Neapolitan campaigns, while the history of Lorinc Tar, who in 1411 visited the cave in Ireland known as the Purgatory of St. Patrick, attests to the growing interest shown by Hungarian noblemen in travels abroad.

Over and above the chronicles and songs of chivalry that were often not set down in writing but passed on orally, sermons and the legends of Hungarian saints, there were no original works of note in Hun¬ garian in the literature of the fourteenth century. The early promise of vernacular poetry developed no further. The steady hold of the Latin tongue can be explained by the fact that no lay intellectual stratum had developed as in the Western European countries. The writing necessary to administration also contributed to the cultural monopoly of the Church. The clerks of the royal chancery were recruited from the clergy, and authoritative documents were issued not by a public notary but by authorized ecclesiastic institutions, such as chapters and convents (loci credibiles).

Ecclesiastical officials were educated abroad, no longer only in Paris and Italy, but, since the middle of the century, also in the newly established Central European universities of Vienna, Prague and Cracow. Louis I established a university at Pecs in 1367, but it soon ceased to exist. The stadium generale started at Veszprem in the thir¬ teenth century, and the university of 6buda founded later by Sigis¬ mund, suffered the same fate.

Secular tendencies are more obvious in the arts. The king and the Church were responsible for the greatest number of buildings, and, after them, the feudal lords. The narrow, grim residential tower or keep was superseded by a more sumptuous building. The lord’s castle and the auxiliary buildings were defended by a surrounding wall, with small turrets. Where space permitted, the main building was rectan- gular, with a turret on each corner, and the dwelling quarters alongside the walls enclosed a large yard, which served for tournaments, very popular at the time. The castle of Didsgyor, Louis I’s favourite resort, was built on this plan, and imitated by Istvan Lackfi, the most powerful aristocrat of the fourteenth century, when he built the castle of Tata.

The burghers, too, played their part in ecclesiastical building, as a great number of Gothic parish churches were erected through their efforts. At the same time, in the larger towns there were already stone houses with storeys, built in Gothic style, with small recesses in the vaulted doorways which were used for wine-selling. Present research suggests that the style of the Hungarian peasant house as it survives today took shape in this period. The peasant cottage of the twelfth century consisted of a single room, with an open fire-place dug into the earth. It was low and sooty, and remained the dwelling of the poor after the fourteenth century, while in the new houses of the well-to-do peasants the open fire used for cooking was in a separate room and the tile stove of the ‘clean room’ was fed from the kitchen to keep the former smokeless. The country nobility occupied similar houses, built occasionally of stone instead of earth and sometimes having many rooms.

As the style of dwelling improved, furnishings and clothing became more luxurious. The upper ruling class had silk hangings round the walls and the same covering on their carved wood furniture, which replaced the old stone furniture. They had settees, chairs, beds and carpets on the floor. The clothing of the Western European knight was not entirely adopted; the country nobility continued to wear the long tunic. It was obvious that there was plenty of gold and silver in the country from the trimming on clothes; silver buttons and buckles have been recovered, even from peasant graves.

The flourishing craft of silversmiths and coppersmiths produced conditions which enabled sculpture, independent of decoration on buildings, to be developed early in Hungary. None of the life-size statues of kings by Mdrton and Gy orgy Kolozsv&ri in Nagyvarad have come down to us, but from their other surviving cast bronze works, the herma of St. Ladislas in GyoT and the statue of St. George now in Prague, we can form an estimate of the realistic art of these two gifted pioneers of the early Renaissance. Hungarian art must have had close connections with the Italian Trecento, as evidenced both in the sumptuous buildings of the Hungarian ruling class, and the paintings of the humblest parish churches, with their passionate expression of human emotions. Although none of the paintings with secular subjects that embellished the royal and feudal palaces have come down to us, their style is preserved in the miniatures of Miklos Meggyesi, the heraldic painter of Louis I, who illustrated the Illuminat¬ ed Chronicle. The artistic trends of this period created conditions which enabled Hungary to become later one of the first centres of Renaissance art in Europe north of the Alps.

From the Battle of Mohács to 1711

Habsburg Absolutism and Hungary (1711–1760)

Towards Bourgeois Transformation, Revolution and War of Independence (1790–1849)

The Period of Neo-Absolutism (1849–1867)

The Dual Monarchy (1867–1918)

Revolution in Hungary (1918–1919)

The Horthy Regime

People's Democracy in Hungary