The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Arriving in the Middle Danube Basin as late as the end of the ninth century AD, the ‘Hungarians’ (who were themselves a mixed body, which included certain Turki and other elements besides the Magyars proper) had naturally found other peoples there before them: Moravian Slavs or proto-Slovaks183 in the North-West, Slovenes in the West and South-West, outposts of the Croats across the Drave, the mysterious people of the Szekels184 in the central plains, and in Transylvania, a people described as Vlachs.185 Furthermore, the pagan Magyars were a slave-owning people: they presumably brought non-Magyar slaves with them and certainly kept up the supply for nearly a century after by raiding their neighbours. These raids stopped with the national conversion to Christianity, but were replaced by a constant flow of immigration into the chronically under-populated country. More steppe peoples came in from the East, one body, that of the Cumans and Jazyges, who arrived in the thirteenth century, being a very large one. Germans were invited in, again in large numbers, to develop the country’s economy as the burghers of the towns which now began to dot its surface, and to undertake special tasks; two of these latter groups were very large and important, the ‘Transylvanian Saxons’186 who were given extensive lands in Southern and North-Eastern Transylvania, as guardians of the passes, and another body of ‘Saxons’ imported to develop the mines of the Szepes area south-east of the Tatras. The Slavonic population of the north-west, now a distinguishably individual ‘Slovak’ people, was reinforced by further immigration from Moravia, Galicia and Silesia; Russians appeared in the north-east; more ‘Vlachs’ – these indubitably Roumanian-speaking – in Transylvania, and at least from the fifteenth century onward, Serbian refugees before the increasing Turkish pressure in the Balkans. By this time, moreover, yet other elements had been introduced by the attachment to the Holy Crown of Croatia, with a population Italian on the sea-board and otherwise Croat.

  It is true that by the sixteenth century much natural assimilation had taken place. All the peoples of steppe origin – the Magyars’ original fellow-immigrants, the Szekels (who had been transferred to Eastern Transylvania, to guard its passes)187 and the later arrivals alike – had Magyarized, as had nearly all the unfree populations of the central plains. These areas had become purely Magyar, and there were substantial pockets of Magyar settlement even in the periphery. Hungarian historians have calculated that around AD 1500 seventy-five to eighty per cent of the total population of Hungary (Croatia excluded) was Magyar-speaking. But the population of the north-west was still mainly Slovak; that of the north-east, such as it was (it was still very sparse), Russian, or, as these peoples were called, ‘Ruthene’.188 In Transylvania the Vlachs were now numerous, and the Saxons holding their own, and the Serbian immigration into South Hungary was growing extensive. And in Hungary, unlike any other of the Habsburg dominions, further very important ethnic changes had taken place between their acquisition of it, and Joseph II’s accession. First the Turkish invasion and occupation, then the wars of liberation at the close of the seventeenth century, inflicted enormous damage on Hungary, and this was not evenly distributed. The brunt of it fell on the central plains, the strongholds of the Magyars. The population of the southern parts of these areas was practically wiped out – slaughtered or carried off into slavery – that of their central portions was grievously diminished, while the northern Carpathians – the national homes of the Slovaks and Ruthenes – and Transylvania escaped relatively lightly. Meanwhile, even under the Turkish occupation, a further immigration of Balkan elements had taken place, including a considerable movement of Croats north into that part of Hungary which was still under the Habsburgs. In the turbulent years round the turn of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries there had been many fresh arrivals from the Balkans, including a large organized immigration of Serbs, perhaps two hundred thousand strong,189 who arrived in South Hungary, led by their spiritual chief, the Patriarch of Ipek, in 1692, and many other, smaller contingents, including the Catholic Southern Slav peoples known as the Sokci and Bunyevci.190

  These movements had slackened off (although they had not ceased altogether) by the time that more peaceful conditions returned; but the foreign element had been reinforced by the great process known as the impopulatio, or colonization of the empty spaces of Hungary with further settlers brought from abroad, these being chiefly Germans.191

  Meanwhile, further changes in the distribution of the earlier populations had been going on. Many Magyars had returned to the plains from the mountains where they or their ancestors had taken refuge, while Slovaks, Ruthenes and Roumanians filled the empty spaces vacated by the Magyars and followed on their heels into the open areas adjacent to the mountains. A considerable number of Slovaks and a few Ruthenes were settled by landlords in the heart of the country.

  By the end of the impopulatio, which coincided nearly enough with the end of Maria Theresa’s reign, an ethnic map of Hungary which did not take account of the density of population would have looked very like one drawn in 1910, except that it would have been dotted more abundantly with small islets of local minorities. To begin with Hungary proper, the majority populations of the Northern Carpathians were Slovak in the west, Ruthene in the east, the line between these two running roughly southward from the Dukla Pass, although the Ruthene area of settlement extended west of this line in the higher mountains, and the Slovak, east of it further south. In these areas the Magyars were found chiefly in the towns and in a few of the more open basins. The ‘Zipser Saxons’ of the Szepes were dwindling, losing their identity to the Magyars or (more rarely) to the Slovaks.

  The main dividing line between the Slavs of North Hungary and the Magyars followed, closely enough, the line where the foothills of the Carpathians melt into the plain, and from this line southward to one running roughly Pécs-Szabadka-Szeged-Arad the majority rural population was Magyar, but the fringe bordering the Austrian frontier was mainly German,192 and there were many colonies of Germans (especially west of Buda), and some of Slovaks, and a chain of Croat settlements reaching right up to the Moravian frontier. The towns, except those between the Danube and the Tisza, were chiefly German, but many of them contained Serbian quarters. A surprising number of ‘Greeks’ (Hellenes, Serbs and Balkan Vlachs) were established throughout the country in one-man businesses.

  The German fringe in the west ended below Szent Gotthard. Below it came a wedge of Slovenes, down to the Mur. The ‘Muraköz’ between the Mur and the Drave was now solidly Croat. There were other big German settlements north of Pécs and below the Pécs-Arad line the Magyars dwindled to a small minority. Here, in the great colonization area, were intermingled, Germans, Serbs and Catholic Slavs (Sokci round Mohács, Bunyevci round Szabadka). The colonists of the Bánát included Germans, Serbs, Bulgars, and even Frenchmen, Catalans and Cossacks. Its mountainous eastern end was chiefly Roumanian.

  Civilian Croatia was solidly Croat outside the few towns, which were largely German, and the sea-board, where there were some Italians, but most of the Slavonian Counties were now Serb.

  In Transylvania, the Roumanians were now indisputably the largest element: they had the higher land practically to themselves (except for the Hungarian landlords) and were even emerging into the plains. The Szekels, now completely Magyarized, formed a solid bloc of Magyar-speakers in the south-eastern corner of the Principality, and chains, not quite continuous, of Magyar settlement ran up the main valleys towards them. The biggest Magyar area, outside the Szekel Counties, was that encircling Kolozsvár. The Saxons were dwindling, not through assimilation, but because of their small families, but still strong in the south (round Nagyszeben), with small outposts at Brassó and Besztercze). Among the more interesting smaller ethnic fragments in the Principality may be mentioned the Armenians, descendants of a mass immigration which took place in 1672 to Transylvania and Galicia.

  Finally, the gypsies of all Hungary were too numerous to be passed over in silence.

  The approximate figures were as follows:

  Inner Hung
ary: Magyars, 2,960,000; Germans, 775,000; Slovaks, 1,220,000; Ruthenes, 290,000; Roumanians, 635,000; Croats, 65,000; Serbs, 250,000; Sokci and Bunyevci, 40,000; Slovenes, 40,000; Jews, 85,000; gypsies, 75,000.

  Civilian Croatia: Croats, 460,000; Serbs, 165,000; Italians, 15,000; Germans, 5,000.

  Military Frontier: Croats, 360,000; Serbs, 240,000; Roumanians, 80,000; Germans, 30,000.

  Transylvania: Roumanians, 850,000; Magyars, 400,000; Germans, 135,000; gypsies, 40,000; Jews, 5,000; others,193 10,000.

  Total for the Lands of the Hungarian Crown: Magyars, 3,360,000; Germans, 945,000; Slovaks, 1,220,000; Ruthenes, 290,000; Roumanians, 1,565,000; Croats, 885,000; Serbs, 655,000; Jews, 90,000; gypsies, 135,000; others, 25,000.

  *

  Statistics for Galicia are very uncertain, but broadly, the Western half, as far as the San, was predominantly Polish, the large German colonies settled there in earlier centuries having Polonized. The East was Ruthene by majority, but contained large Polish islets of population. Jews were very numerous in all Galicia, especially in the East. In the Bukovina, the northern half was Ukrainian, the southern, Roumanian. Here, too, there were many Jews. The total figures for Galicia-Bukovina were approximately 1,000,000 Poles, 1,500,000 Ruthenes-Ukrainians, 210,000 Jews, 50,000 Roumanians, and 10,000 Armenians.

  *

  If, then, we add in the 250,000 Germans of the Vorlande, the 1,500,000 Italians of the Milanese and the 2,000,000 Flemish and Walloons of the Netherlands, we get a grand total for the Monarchy of 5,650,000 Germans, 3,360,000 Magyars, 2,550,000 Czechs, 2,000,000 Flemish and Walloons, 1,800,000 Italians, 1,800,000 Ukrainians and Ruthenes, 1,600,000 Roumanians, 1,225,000 Slovaks, 1,000,000 Poles, 900,000 Croats, 700,000 Serbs, 350,000 Jews, 120,000 gypsies, with small numbers of Ladins, Armenians, Bulgars and other nationalities.

  *

  At later stages in this history, the population of the Netherlands will drop out, as will that of the Vorlande, but in place of the latter will come approximately the same number of Germans in Salzburg and the Innviertel of Upper Austria. The sees of Trent and Brixen will become integral parts of the Tirol. Venice, with 1·5–2 million Italians, comes in in 1797 and drops out finally in 1866. Dalmatia, when definitively acquired in 1815, had a population of a few thousand Italians and perhaps a quarter of a million Slavs, of whom about four-fifths were Croats (contemporary sources habitually describe them as ‘Morlaks’) and the remainder Serbs. The annexation of the Free City of Cracow in 1846 brought in another hundred thousand or so Poles, with the usual Galician leavening of Jews. Finally, the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, when annexed by the Monarchy in 1908, consisted of about 1,600,000 persons, all of the same or kindred Southern Slav or Slavicized Morlak stocks, and speaking the same Slavonic language, with dialectical variants, but divided by religion into three elements, each with its own ‘national’ attachment: the members of the Orthodox Church, who regarded themselves as Serbs, the Catholics, who ranked as Croats, and the Moslems. The authorities never got down to taking a proper census, but authorities give the numbers as approximately 800,000 ‘Serbs’, 600,000 Moslems and 400,000 ‘Croats’.194

  *

  A mere counting of heads would, however, give no adequate idea of the positions held by the different peoples in the political, social and economic life of the Monarchy of 1780. These differed very widely indeed. The crude picture so often drawn by publicists of ‘ruling races’ lording it over ‘subject races’ is, indeed, totally false so far as the Monarchy of the eighteenth century (and also that of the nineteenth and twentieth) is concerned. A certain master-subject relationship based on ethnic origin had indeed come into being in certain parts of the Monarchy, at certain earlier stages of their history; in the Alpine Lands when the Germans moved into them, on the Middle Danube when the Magyars first settled there. But even then the relationship had not been complete – not every German or Magyar had been a lord ranking above every Slav – and later centuries had blurred, where they had not entirely obliterated, the earlier ethnic dividing-lines between the privileged and the non-privileged. The social hierarchy which had developed since those early times took no account at all of ethnic origin in theory, and only accidentally, in practice. On the one hand, the vast majority of the eighteenth-century representatives of the old ‘master races’ now belonged to the non-privileged masses; on the other, the privileged classes now contained many men whose efforts, or their ancestors’, had lifted them out of the servitude which had once been the general lot of their peoples.

  It was, however, true that the start given to the national cultures of certain peoples by the military, political and (in some cases) cultural or economic superiority of their members over those of other peoples when contact between them first took place, had attracted to them those members of the weaker peoples who entered the ruling or propertied classes, or immigrants. There had thus really evolved hierarchies of national cultures, not, be it repeated, in the sense that any people lacked its unprivileged masses, but that some national cultures stopped short at the peasant-village priest level, while others continued upward through some or all of the higher grades of bourgeoisie, professional classes and lower or higher aristocracy.195

  The special complexity of the pattern thus evoked in the Monarchy is due to the fact that the developments proceeded differently in the various Lands, or groups of Lands, before these came under Habsburg rule, while after that event, a new factor entered in the shape of Gesammtmonarchisch influences, these, again, being much stronger in some parts of the Monarchy than in others.

  The national hierarchy in the Hereditary Lands very early assumed a shape which it was to retain into the nineteenth century. Here the Germans, of course, got off to a flying start. ‘Austria’ and Styria, on their foundation, were in every respect German principalities like any other in the Reich; the entire social hierarchies, from the princes through the nobility and educated classes, down to the peasantry, were nationally homogeneous. The extension of the Habsburg Hausmacht to its 1526 limits did not alter its political character, since practically all the additions had come into being as fiefs of the Reich, and most of the sub-fiefs had been distributed to German barons, knights or prelates, and in the Slovene areas, the social-national pattern soon adapted itself to the political. Where native nobles had been allowed to keep their estates, they or their descendants succumbed to the pull of the politically dominant and socially superior German element, and Germanized themselves. The same process took place also on the middle levels, for the Slovenes, then a very primitive people, had possessed neither towns deserving the name, nor a strong national Church. The local towns were founded or developed, the local Churches organized, by the Germans, and Slovenes entered them Germanized, like the nobles.196 In these areas, therefore, the German national culture (although not the race, since many of the ‘Germans’ were of Slovene origin) did establish itself over the Slovene in a master-subject relationship, and the Slovenes remained a people of peasants and woodsmen, with no higher national culture of their own.

  ‘Germandom’ did not, it is true, acquire the same dominating position in the Italian-speaking Littoral and Trentino, for the Italians met the Germans, in most respects, on equal terms. Their language was one in which instruction could be, and was, given, and, not being averse to urban and middle-class occupations, they had their own national culture in their own strongholds,197 and even imposed the same cultural and economic domination over the Slovenes of Gorizia and Istria (as they were doing under Venetian rule, over the Slavs and Morlaks of Dalmatia) as the Germans exercised further north. Even politically, most of them had been governed by members of their own people, except on the very highest levels of all, until the great centralizing reforms of the eighteenth century.

  *

  The national evolution in the Lands of the Bohemian and Hungarian Crowns, up to their coming under Habsburg rule, was, of course, quite different. While due allowance must naturally be made for the differences between the mediaeval and modern outlo
oks on the question, yet it is fair to describe Bohemia-Moravia, at least up to the extinction of the national dynasty in 1311, as a Czech national state – Czech in its institutions, its spirit and its policy. The word ‘national’ could no longer be used of the policy of most of the foreign kings who ruled it from 1311 to 1458, but even under them, the Czech people had retained its near-monopoly of the nobility (whose non-Czech recruits Czechized) and thus constituted a genuine Staatsvolk, less solid than its German counterpart in the Historic Lands in the one respect that the towns and industries were mainly in the hands of the local Germans, but none the less, dominant; and if the Germans’ charters and their economic and cultural standards, which were higher than those of the Czechs, preserved them from denationalization, except on the highest level, and even enabled them at times to play an important political role (especially in view of the political link between Bohemia and the Reich), they were still a minority.

  The Czech national character of the Bohemian State had grown stronger again in the last half-century before the coming of the Habsburgs. From 1458 to 1471 the Czechs had been ruled by one of their own number, Georg Podiebrad; after him, until 1526, by the weak Jagiellon kings, under whom the native aristocracy completely dominated affairs. In that half-century the officieux compendium of Bohemian law, Victorin Cornelius Wscherd’s Nine Books on the Law of Bohemia, laid down the principle that the Czechs were the only lawful inhabitants of the land; the Germans were ‘foreigners’. In fact, all non-Czechs were so treated for many purposes, including the acquisition of noble estates and the holding of public office. Both German and Latin were almost completely banned from both administration and justice.

  *

  The political thought of mediaeval Hungary (excluding Croatia) simply equated the Hungarian ‘political nation’, the King’s counterpart in the polity, notionally with the descendants of the original Magyar invaders, allowing no other element in the country a positive role or status in it. This theory, of course, no longer corresponded to the ethnic facts. The proposition that a Magyar was a free man had ceased to be true very soon after the Conquest with the growth of a Magyar or Magyarized unfree population, which by a very early date far outnumbered the freemen, and the converse proposition that a free man was a Magyar had also lost such anthropological truth as it had ever had with the large-scale ennoblement of non-Magyars, many of whom did not even speak Magyar. But the polity continued to regard itself as notionally Magyar in spirit and tradition, and its nobles as Magyars in the light of the higher truth, even if their names and their language itself might sometimes refute the claim.