MAGYAR CONQUEST OF HUNGARY
WHEN Árpád, the semi-mythical founder of the Magyar monarchy,
at the end of A.D. 895 led his
savage hordes through the Vereczke pass into the regions of the Upper
Theiss, the land, now called
Hungary, was, for the most part, in the possession of Slavs, or semi-Slavs.
From the Riesengebirge to
the Vistula, and from the Moldau to the Drave, extended the shadowy
empire of Moravia, founded by
Moimir and Svatopluk (c. 850-890), which collapsed so completely at
the first impact of the Magyars
that, ten years after their arrival, not a trace of it remained. The
Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats and Avars in
the southern provinces were subdued with equal ease. Details are wanting,
but the traditional decisive
battle was fought at Alpár on the Theiss, whereupon the victors
pressed on to Orsova, and the
conquest was completed by Árpád about the year 906. This
forcible intrusion of a non-Aryan race
altered the whole history of Europe; but its peculiar significance
lay in the fact that it permanently
divided the northern from the southern and the eastern from the western
Slavs. The inevitable
consequence of this rupture was the Teutonizing of the western branch
of the great Slav family, which,
no longer able to stand alone, and cut off from both Rome and Constantinople,
was forced, in
self-defence, to take Christianity, and civilization along with it,
from Germany.
During the following seventy years we know next to nothing of the internal
history of the Magyars.
Árpád died in 907, and his immediate successors, Zsolt
(907-947) and Taksony (947-972), are little
more than chronological landmarks. This was the period of those devastating
raids which made the
savage Magyar horsemen the scourge and the terror of Europe. We have
an interesting description of
their tactics from the pen of the emperor Leo VI., whose account of
them is confirmed by the
contemporary Russian annals. Trained riders, archers and javelin-throwers
from infancy, they
advanced to the attack in numerous companies following hard upon each
other, avoiding close quarters,
but wearing out their antagonists by the persistency of their onslaughts.
Scarce a corner of Europe was
safe from them. First (908-910) they ravaged Thüringia, Swabia
and Bavaria, and defeated the
Germans on the Lechfeld, whereupon the German king Henry l. bought
them off for nine years,
employing the respite in reorganizing his army and training cavalry,
which henceforth became the
principal military arm of the Empire. In 933 the war was resumed, and
Henry, at the head of what was
really the first national German army, defeated the Magyars at Gotha
and at Reid (933). The only
effect of these reverses was to divert them elsewhere. Already, in
926, they had crossed the Rhine
and ravaged Lotharingia, In 934 and 942 they raided the Eastern Empire,
and were bought off under
the very walls of Constantinople. In 943 Taksony led them into Italy,
when they penetrated as far as
Otranto. In 955 they ravaged Burgundy. The same year the emperor Otto
I. proclaimed them the
enemies of God and humanity, refused to receive their ambassadors,
and finally, at the famous battle of
the Lechfeld, overwhelmed them on the very scene of their first victory,
near Augsburg, which they
were besieging (August 10, 955). Only seven of the Magyars escaped,
and these were sold as slaves
on their return home.
The catastrophe of the Lechfeld convinced the leading Magyars of the
necessity of accommodating
themselves as far as possible to the Empire, especially in the matter
of religion. Christianity had already
begun to percolate Hungary. A large proportion of the captives of the
Magyars had been settled all
over the country to teach their conquerors the arts of peace, and close
contact with this civilizing
element was of itself an enlightenment. The moral superiority of Christianity
to paganism was speedily
obvious. The only question was which form of Christianity were the
Magyars to adopt, the Eastern or
the Western ? Constantinople was the first in the field. The splendour
of the imperial city profoundly
impressed all the northern barbarians, and the Magyars, during the
10th century, saw a great deal of
the Greeks, One Transylvanian raider, Gyula, brought back with him
from Constantinople a Greek
monk, Hierothus (c. 950), who was consecrated "first bishop of Turkia."
Simultaneously a brisk border
trade was springing up between the Greeks and the Magyars, and the
Greek chapmen brought with
them their religion as well as their wares. Everything at first tended
to favour the propaganda of the
Greek Church. But ultimately political prevailed over religious considerations.
Alarmed at the sudden
revival of the Eastern Empire, which under the Macedonian dynasty extended
once more to the
Danube, and thus became the immediate neighbour of Hungary, Duke Géza,
who succeeded Taksony
in 972, shrewdly resolved to accept Christianity from the more distant
and therefore less dangerous
emperor of the West. Accordingly, an embassy was sent to Otto II. at
Quedlinburg in 973, and in 975
Géza and his whole family were baptized. During his reign, however,
Hungarian Christianity did not
extend much beyond the limits of his court. The nation at large was
resolutely pagan, and Géza, for his
own sake, was obliged to act warily. Moreover, by accepting Christianity
from Germany he ran the risk
of imperilling the independence of Hungary. Hence his cautious, dilatory
tactics: the encouragement of
Italian propagandists, who were few, the discouragement of German propagandist,
who were many.
Géza, in short, regarded the whole matter from a statesman's
point of view, and was content to leave
the solution to time and his successor.
That successor, Stephen I., was one of the great constructive statesmen
of history. His long and
strenuous reign (997-1038) resulted in the firm establishment of the
Hungarian church and the
Hungarian state. The great work may be said to have begun in 1001,
when Pope Silvester II.
recognized Magyar nationality by endowing the young Magyar prince with
a kingly crown. Less
fortunate than his great exemplar, Charlemagne, Stephen had to depend
entirely upon foreigners - men
like the Saxon Asztrikš (c. 976-1010), the first Hungarian primate;
the Lombard St Gellért (c.
977-1046); the Bosomanns, a German family, better known under the Magyarized
form of their name
Pázmány, and many others who came to Hungary in the suite
of his enlightened consort Gisela of
Bavaria. By these men Hungary was divided into dioceses, with a metropolitan
see at Esztergom
(Gran), a city originally founded by Géza, but richly embellished
by Stephen, whose Italian architects
built for him there the first Hungarian cathedral dedicated to St Adalbert.
Towns, most of them also the
sees of bishops, now sprang up everywhere, including Székesfehérvár
(Stuhlweissenburg), Veszprém,
Pécs (Fünfkirchen) and Győr (Raab). Esztergom, Stephen's
favourite residence, was the capital, and
continued to be so for the next two centuries. But the Benedictines,
whose settlement in Hungary dates
from the establishment of their monastery at Pannonhalma (c. 1001),
were the chief pioneers. Every
monastery erected in the Magyar wildernesses was not only a centre
of religion, but a focus of
civilization. The monks cleared the forests, cultivated the recovered
land, and built villages for the
colonists who flocked to them, teaching the people western methods
of agriculture and western arts
and handicraft. But conversion, after all, was the chief aim of these
devoted missionaries, and when
some Venetian priests had invented a Latin alphabet for the Magyar
language a great step had been
taken towards its accomplishment.
The monks were soon followed by foreign husbandmen, artificers and handicraftsmen,
who were
encouraged to come to Hungary by reports of the abundance of good land
there and the promise of
privileges. This immigration was also stimulated by the terrible condition
of western Europe between
987 and 1060, when it was visited by an endless succession of bad harvests
and epidemics.˛ Hungary,
now better known to Europe, came to be regarded as a Promised Land,
and, by the end of Stephen's
reign, Catholics of all nationalities, Greeks, Pagans, Jews and Mahommedans
were living securely
together within her borders. For, inexorable as Stephen ever was towards
fanatical pagans, renegades
and rebels, he was too good a statesman to inquire too closely into
the private religious opinions of
useful and quiet citizens.
In endeavouring, with the aid of the church, to establish his kingship
on the Western model Stephen had
the immense advantage of building on unencumbered ground, the greater
part of the soil of the country
being at his absolute disposal. His authority too, was absolute, being
tempered by the shadowy right of
the Magyar nation to meet in general assembly; and this authority he
was careful not to compromise by
any slavish imitation of that feudal polity by which in the West the
royal power was becoming
obscured. Although he broke off the Magyar tribal system, encouraged
the private ownership of land,
and even made grants of land on condition of military service - in
order to secure an armed force
independent of the national levy - he based his new principle of government,
not on feudalism, but on
the organization of the Frankish empire, which he adapted to suit the
peculiar
š Ger. Ottrik, in religion Anastasius.
˛ At its worst, c. 1030-1033, cannibalism was common.
exigencies of his realm. Of the institutions thus borrowed and adapted
the most notable was the
famous county system which still plays so conspicuous a part in Hungarian
national life. Central and
western Hungary (the south and north-east still being desolate) were
divided into forty-six counties
(vármegyék, Lat. comitatus). At the head of each county
was placed a count, or lord-lieutenantš
(Főispán, Lat. comes), who nominated his subordinate
officials: the castellan (várnagy), chief captain
(hadnagy) and "hundredor" (százados Lat. centurio). The lord-lieutenant
was nominated by the king,
whom he was bound to follow to battle at the first summons. Two-thirds
of the revenue of the county
went into the royal treasury, the remaining third the lord-lieutenant
retained for administrative purposes.
In the county system were included all the inhabitants of the country
save two classes: the still
numerous pagan clans, and those nobles who were attached to the king's
person, from whom he
selected his chief officers of state and the members of his council,
of which we now hear for the first
time.
It is significant for the whole future of Hungary that no effort was
or could be made by Stephen to
weld the heterogeneous races under his crown into a united nation.
The body politic consisted, after as
before, of the king and the whole mass of Magyar freemen or nobles,
descendants of Árpád's warriors,
theoretically all equal in spite of growing inequalities of wealth
and power, who constituted the
populus; privileges were granted by the king to foreign immigrants
in the cities, and the rights of
nobility were granted to non-Magyars for special services; but, in
general, the non-Magyars were ruled
by the royal governors as subject races, forming-in contradistinction
to the "nobles" - the mass of the
peasants, the misera contribuens plebs upon whom until 1848 nearly
the whole burden of taxation
fell. The right, not often exercised, of the Magyar nobles to meet
in general assembly and the elective
character of the crown Stephen also did not venture to touch. On the
other hand, his example in
manumitting most of his slaves, together with the precepts of the church,
practically put an end to
slavery in the course of the 13th century, the slaves becoming for
the most part serfs, who differed
from the free peasants only in the fact that they were attached to
the soil (adscripti glebae).
At this time all the conditions of life in Hungary were simple and primitive.
The court itself was
perambulatory. In summer the king dispensed justice in the open air,
under a large tree. Only in the
short winter months did he dwell in the house built for him at Esztergom
by his Italian architects. The
most valuable part of his property still consisted of flocks and herds,
or the products of the labours of
his serfs, a large proportion of whom were bee-keepers, hunters and
fishers employed in and around
the interminable virgin-forests of the rough-hewn young monarchy.
A troubled forty years (1038-1077) divides the age of St Stephen from
the age of St Ladislaus. Of the
six kings who reigned in Hungary during that period three died violent
deaths, and the other three were
fighting incessantly against foreign and domestic foes. In 1046, and
again in 1061, two dangerous pagan
risings shook the very foundations of the infant church and state;
the western provinces were in
constant danger from the attacks of the acquisitive emperors, and from
the south and southeast two
separate hordes of fierce barbarians (the Petchenegs in 1067-1068,
and the Kumanians in 1071-1072)
burst over the land. It was the general opinion abroad that the Magyars
would either relapse into
heathendom or become the vassals of the Holy Roman Empire, and this
opinion was reflected in the
increasingly hostile attitude of the popes towards the Árpád
kings. The political independence of
Hungary was ultimately secured by the outbreak of the quarrel about
investiture (1076), when Géza I.
(1074-1077) shrewdly applied to Pope Gregory VII. for assistance, and
submitted to accept his
kingdom from him as a fief of the Holy See. The immediate result of
the papal alliance was to enable
Hungary, under both Ladislaus and his capable successor Coloman [Kálmán]
(1095-1116), to hold her
own against all her enemies, and extend her dominion abroad by conquering
Croatia and a portion of
the Dalmatian coast. As an incipient great power, she was beginning
to feel the need of a seaboard.
In the internal administration both Ladislaus I. and Coloman approved
themselves worthy followers of
St Stephen. Ladislaus planted large Petcheneg colonies in Transylvania
and the trans-Dravian
provinces, and established military cordons along the constantly threatened
south-eastern boundary, the
germs of the future banates˛ (bánságok) which were
to play such an important part in the national
defence in the following century. Law and order were enforced with
the utmost rigour. In that rough
age crimes of violence predominated, and the king's justiciars regularly
perambulated the land in search
of offenders, and decimated every village which refused to surrender
fugitive criminals. On the other
hand, both the Jews and the "Ishmaelites" (Mahommedans) enjoyed complete
civil and religious liberty
in Hungary, where, indeed, they were too valuable to be persecuted,
The Ishmaelites, the financial
experts of the day, were the official mint-masters,
š The English title of lord-lieutenant is generally used as the
best translation of Főispán or comes (in
this connexion). The title of count (gróf) was assumed later
(15th century) by those nobles who had
succeeded, in spite of the Golden Bull, in making their authority over
whole counties independent and
hereditary.
˛ The bán is equivalent to the margrave, or count of the
marches.
treasurers and bankers. The clergy, the only other educated class, supplied
the king with his lawyers,
secretaries and ambassadors. The Magyar clergy was still a married
clergy and their connubial
privileges were solemnly confirmed by the synod of Szabolcs, presided
over by the king, in 1092. So
firmly rooted in the land was this practice, that Coloman, much as
he needed the assistance of the Holy
See in his foreign policy, was only with the utmost difficulty induced,
in 1106, to bring the Hungarian
church into line with the rest of the Catholic world by enforcing clerical
celibacy. Coloman was
especially remarkable as an administrative reformer, and Hungary, during
his reign, is said to have been
the best-governed state in Europe. He regulated and simplified the
whole system of taxation,
encouraged agriculture by differential duties in favour of the farmers,
and promoted trade by a
systematic improvement of the ways of communication. The Magna via
Colomanni Regis was in use
for centuries after his death. Another important reform was the law
permitting the free disposal of
landed estate, which gave the holders an increased interest in their
property, and an inducement to
improve it. During the reign of Coloman, moreover, the number of freemen
was increased by the
frequent manumission of serfs. The lot of the slaves was also somewhat
ameliorated by the law
forbidding their exportation.
Throughout the greater part of the 12th century the chief impediment
in the way of the external
development of the Hungarian monarchy was the Eastern Empire, which
under the first three princes
of the Comnenian dynasty, dominated south-eastern Europe. During the
earlier part of that period the
Magyars competed on fairly equal terms with their imperial rivals for
the possession of Dalmatia,
Rascia (the original home of the Servians, situated between Bosnia,
Dalmatia and Albania) and Ráma
or northern Bosnia (acquired by Hungary in 1135): but on the accession
of Manuel Comnenus in 1143
the struggle became acute. As the grandson of St Ladislaus, Manuel
had Hungarian blood in his veins;
his court was the ready and constant refuge of the numerous Magyar
malcontents, and he aimed not so
much at the conquest as at the suzerainty of Hungary, by placing one
of his Magyar kinsmen on the
throne of St Stephen. He successfully supported the claims of no fewer
than three pretenders to the
Magyar throne, and finally made Béla III. (1173-1196) king of
Hungary, on condition that he left him,
Manuel, a free hand in Dalmatia. The intervention of the Greek emperors
had important consequences
for Hungary. Politically it increased the power of the nobility at
the expense of the crown, every
competing pretender naturally endeavouring to win adherents by distributing
largess in the shape of
crownlands. Ecclesiastically it weakened the influence of the Catholic
Church in Hungary, the Greek
Orthodox Church, which permitted a married clergy and did not impose
the detested tithe (the principal
cause of nearly every pagan revolt) attracting thousands of adherents
even among the higher clergy.
At one time, indeed, a Magyar archbishop and four or five bishops openly
joined the Orthodox
communion and willingly crowned Manuel's nominees despite the anathemas
of their Catholic brethren.
The Eastern Empire ceased to be formidable on the death of Manuel (1080),
and Hungary was free
once more to pursue a policy of aggrandizement. In Dalmatia the Venetians
were too strong for her;
but she helped materially to break up the Byzantine rule in the Balkan
peninsula by assisting Stephen
Nemanya to establish an independent Servian kingdom, originally under
nominal Hungarian suzerainty.
Béla endeavoured to strengthen his own monarchy by introducing
the hereditary principle, crowning his
infant son Emerich as his successor during his own lifetime, a practice
followed by most of the later
Árpáds; he also held a brilliant court on the Byzantine
model, and replenished the treasury by his wise
economies.
Unfortunately the fruits of his diligence and foresight were dissipated
by the follies of his two
immediate successors, Emerich (1196-1204) and Andrew II., who weakened
the royal power in
attempting to win support by lavish grants of the crown domains on
the already over-influential
magnates, a policy from which dates the supremacy of the semisavage
Magyar oligarchs, that insolent
and self-seeking class which would obey no superior and trampled ruthlessly
on every inferior. The
most conspicuous event of Andrew's reign was the promulgation in 1222
of the so-called Golden Bull,
which has aptly been called the Magna Carta of Hungary, and is in some
of its provisions strikingly
reminiscent of that signed seven years previously by the English king
John.
The Golden Bull has been described as consecrating the humiliation of
the crown by the great barons,
whose usurpations it legalized; the more usually accepted view, however
is that it was directed not so
much to weakening as to strengthening the crown by uniting its interests
with those of the mass of the
Magyar nobility, equally threatened by the encroachments of the great
barons. The preamble, indeed,
speaks of the curtailment of the liberties of the nobles by the power
of certain of the kings, and at the
end the right of armed resistance to any attempt to infringe the charter
is conceded to "the bishops and
the higher and lower nobles" of the realm; but, for the rest, its contents
clearly show that it was
intended to strengthen the monarchy by ensuring"that the momentary
folly or weakness of the king
should not endanger the institution itself." This is especially clear
from clause xvi., which decrees that
the title and estates of the lords-lieutenant of counties should not
be hereditary, thus attacking feudalism
at its very roots, while clause xiv. provides for the degradation of
any lord-lieutenant who should abuse
his office. On the other hand, the principle of the exemption of all
the nobles from taxation is confirmed
as well as their right to refuse military service abroad, the defence
of the realm being their sole
obligation. All nobles were also to have the right to appear at the
court which was to be held once a
year at Székesfehérvár, by the king, or in his
absence by the palatine, for the purpose of hearing
causes. A clause also guarantees all nobles against arbitrary arrest
and punishment at the instance of
any powerful person.
This famous charter, which was amplified, under the influence of the
clergy, in 1231 when its articles
were placed under the guardianship of the archbishop of Esztergom (who
was authorized to punish
their violation by the king with excommunication), is generally regarded
as the foundation of Hungarian
constitutional liberty, though like Magna Carta it purported only to
confirm immemorial rights; and as
such it was expressly ratified as a whole in the coronation oaths of
all the Habsburg kings from
Ferdinand to Leopold I. Its actual effect in the period succeeding
its issue was, however, practically
nugatory, if indeed it did not actually give a new handle to the subversive
claims of the powerful
barons.
Béla IV. (1235-1270), the last man of genius whom the Árpáds
produced, did something to curb the
aristocratic misrule which was to be one of the determining causes
of the collapse of his dynasty. But
he is best known as the regenerator of the realm after the cataclysm
of 1241-1242. On his return from
exile, after the subsidence of the Tatár deluge, he found his
kingdom in ashes; and his two great
remedies, wholesale immigration and castle-building only sowed the
seeds of fresh disasters. Thus the
Kumanian colonists, mostly pagans whom he settled in vast numbers on
the waste lands, threatened to
overwhelm the Christian population; while the numerous strongholds,
which he encouraged his nobles
to build as a protection against future Tatár invasions, subsequently
became so many centres of
disloyalty. To bind the Kumanian still more closely to his dynasty,
Béla married his son Stephen V.
(1270-1272) to a Kumanian girl, and during the reign of her son Ladislaus
IV. (1272-1290) the court
was certainly more pagan than Christian. Valiant and enterprising as
both these princes were (Stephen
successfully resisted the aggressions of the brilliant "golden King,"
Ottakar II. of Bohemia, and
Ladislaus materially contributed to his utter overthrow at Durnkrüt
in 1278), neither of them was strong
enough to make head against the disintegrating influences all around
them. Stephen contrived to hold
his own by adroitly contracting an alliance with the powerful Neapolitan
Angevins who had the ear of
the pope but Ladislaus was so completely caught in the toils of the
Kumanians, that the Holy See the
suzerain of Hungary, was forced to intervene to prevent the relapse
of the kingdom into barbarism, and
the unfortunate Ladislaus perished in the crusade that was preached
against him. An attempt of a
patriotic party to keep the last Árpád, Andrew III. (1290-1301),
on the throne was only temporarily
successful, and after a horrible eight years' civil war (1301-1308)
the crown of St Stephen finally
passed into the capable hands of Charles Robert of Naples.
During the four hundred years of the Árpád dominion the
nomadic Magyar race had established itself
permanently m central Europe, adopted western Christianity and founded
a national monarchy on the
western model. Hastily and violently converted, driven like a wedge
between the Eastern and the
Western Empires, the young kingdom was exposed from the first to extraordinary
perils. But, under the
guidance of a series of eminent rulers, it successfully asserted itself
alike against pagan reaction from
within, and aggressive pressure from without, and, as it grew in strength
and skill, expanded territorially
at the expense of all its neighbours. These triumphs were achieved
while the monarchy was absolute
and thus able to concentrate in its hands all the resources of the
state, but towards the end of the
period a political revolution began. The weakness and prodigality of
the later Árpáds the depopulation
of the realm during the Tatár invasion, the infiltration of
western feudalism and, finally the endless civil
discords of the 13th century, brought to the front a powerful and predacious
class of barons who
ultimately overshadowed the throne. The ancient county system was gradually
absorbed by this new
governing element. The ancient royal tenants became the feudatories
of the great nobles, and fell
naturally into two classes the nobiles bene possessionati, and the
nobiles unius sessionis, in other
words the richer and the poorer gentry. We cannot trace the gradations
of this political revolution, but
we know that it met with determined opposition from the crown, which
resulted in the utter destruction
of the Árpáds, who, while retaining to the last their
splendid physical qualities, now exhibited
unmistakable signs of moral deterioration, partly due perhaps to their
too frequent marriages with
semi-Oriental Greeks and semi-savage Kumanians. On the other hand the
great nobles were the only
class who won for themselves a recognized political position. The tendency
towards a representative
system of government had begun but the almost uninterrupted anarchy
which marked the last thirty
years of the Árpád rule was no favourable time for constitutional
development. The kings were fighting
for their lives, the great nobles were indistinguishable from brigands
and the whole nation seemed to be
relapsing into savagery.
