The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  177 A few remnants of Romantsch or Ladin populations still survived in some valleys of the Tirol and Vorarlberg. The later Austrian censuses, which are based on language, count Ladin in with Italian, but the political historian should not follow this example, for most of the Ladins remained to the last kaisertreu: only a minority associated themselves politically with the Italians.

  178 South Styria also contained one island of German peasant population, in and around Göttschee, and Carniola, a few Croats, whose ancestors had taken refuge there from the Turks.

  179 Mainly Croats.

  180 Some German writers prefer to call the Italianate population of Gorizia-Gradisca ‘Friulian’ and there were indeed dialectal and other differences, still recognizable today, between the languages of these peoples and those of the Po valley. For all practical purposes, however, they may be counted as Italians.

  181 This figure includes the populations of the Sees of Trent and Brixen, which in 1780 did not, strictly speaking, belong to Austria.

  182 Ladins.

  183 This term glosses over another controversy on which the present writer does not feel himself competent to take sides. While most Czech writers maintain that the Slavonic inhabitants of Bohemia-Moravia and Northern Hungary originated as one people, which only later became differentiated into Czechs on the one hand and Slovaks on the other, the former including most of the Slavs of Moravia, most Slovaks claim that the Czechs and Slovaks were always distinct, although kindred, peoples. The Slovaks had, indeed, formed part of the ninth-century ‘Empire of Great Moravia’, but the centre of gravity of that formation, in spite of its name, had lain east of the March (Morava).

  184 The ethnic origin of the Szekels is uncertain; they may have been of Turki stock. Within a century or so, however, their language was indubitably Magyar. Later they came to regard themselves, on the strength of a mistaken mediaeval Chronicle, as descendants of the Huns, and as the Magyars were at the time (again mistakenly) believed to be Huns, the Szekels looked on themselves as ethnically identical with the Magyars, but of older and purer lineage.

  185 When the documentary history of Transylvania begins (which is not until the thirteenth century), the only people mentioned in the documents, outside the Magyars themselves and others whose arrival there can be traced, is that of the ‘Vlachs’. These ‘Vlachs’ are undoubtedly to be equated with the later Roumanians, but Hungarian and Roumanian scholars are not agreed whether they were descendants of the Roman settlers of the province of Dacia (or alternatively, of Romanized Dacians), who had survived the Dark Ages in their homes, or whether they were comparatively recent immigrants from the Balkans. In favour of the former view are the a priori probabilities, in favour of the latter, the fact that all the pre-Magyar place-names of Transylvania are Slav, except the names of four rivers, which are neither Dacian, nor Latin; and that the Roumanian language, while basically Latin, contains certain peculiarities which seem to indicate a formative period spent in the Western Balkans. If, however, the non-Magyar inhabitants of Transylvania in the Dark Ages were not Roumanian, they certainly Roumanized later, for no Slavs are recorded in Transylvania in historic times, except settlers whose provenance can be traced.

  186 In reality, most of these ‘Saxons’ came from the Rhineland or Luxemburg.

  187 Some Szekels were settled also on the Austrian frontier, but these soon lost their separate identity altogether.

  188 ‘Ruthenus’ was originally simply a Latin form of the word ‘Russian’. Re-translated into other languages it then appeared as the special name for the persons of Russian descent living in Poland or Hungary. Meanwhile the centre of Russian national life had shifted north to Surdal and Moscow, whose peoples were recognizably distinct from the ‘Ruthenes’. The ethnic and linguistic cousins, and geographical neighbours, of the Ruthenes were the peoples now called Ukrainians.

  189 This was for long the customary estimate. Later writers believe the figure to be an exaggeration, but many other, unrecorded, immigrations took place at about the same time, and the total of Orthodox immigrants was probably little, if at all, under 200,000.

  190 The Sokci came from Dalmatia, the Bunyevci from Bosnia. They were Serbs by origin, but had been converted to Catholicism by Franciscan friars, who then led them into Hungary. They seem to have arrived in 1682. See Macartney, Hungary and her Successors, p. 382 and n.

  191 These were generically known as ‘Swabians’, and Hungarian usage always distinguished rigidly between ‘Swabians’ and ‘Saxons’. Only the older-established burghers of the towns were known as ‘Germans’.

  192 Some of these populations, especially those of the extreme north-west, may have been pre-Magyar.

  193 Including about 5,000 Armenians.

  194 When, in the ninth century AD, the Slavs who had established themselves in the Balkans a couple of centuries earlier accepted Christianity, they did so roughly along the line already dividing the Eastern and Western Churches. This line ran through Bosnia, whose inhabitants west of the line accepted Roman Catholicism, and those east of it, the Orthodox Church. Bosnia seems at the time to have been chiefly Croat – the heart of the mediaeval Kingdom of Croatia lay, indeed, in Western Bosnia. These remote valleys, however, afterwards became a stronghold of Bogomilism, which was so persecuted by the Catholic Church that on the arrival of the Turks, most of the Bogomils, with some others, to a total of perhaps a quarter of the then population, accepted Islam. Later Turkish Governments established more Moslem colonists in Bosnia, and the proportion of Serbs to Croats was further changed, to the advantage of the former, by immigration of Croats into Hungarian Croatia, or even further, and by immigration from the South of Serbs, through which the so-called Lika district, far in the North-West of Bosnia, became almost purely Serb. The figures given above are those given by Südland (p. 585) and accepted by Hantsch (Gesch., II. 568). R. W. Seton-Watson (Southern Slav Question) gives the Serbs and Moslems another 50,000 each.

  195 This brief sketch will not take account of the three peoples of the Monarchy whose position was quite peculiar: the Jews, the gypsies and the Armenians.

  196 Cf. the circumstance, mentioned elsewhere (p. 111, n. 5), that as late as 1770 there were no Slovene schools at all in Styria, because the only purpose for which a Slovene ever sent his son to school was to learn German.

  197 Many of the 220,000 Italians listed above as inhabiting the South Tirol were politically only half in Austria up to the nineteenth century, being subjects of the medialized sees of Trent and Brixen. The independence of these sees from Habsburg rule was somewhat nominal, but sufficient to shield them against much interference from the lesser authorities. The administration of Trieste was purely Italian up to the eighteenth century.

  198 It should, however, be emphasized that the fashionable picture of a ruling Magyar ‘race’ dominating a subject Roumanian ‘race’ is incorrect. The three ‘nations’ of Transylvania were the Hungarian nobles, the Szekels and the Saxons. A substantial number of men of Roumanian stock enjoyed Hungarian nobility, and conversely, the great majority of the Magyars were non-nobles. But it is true that the Roumanian nobles were nearly all small men of the sandalled noble class, qualified to vote in elections but seldom or never standing as candidates unless they sloughed their Roumanianism.

  199 See below, p. 107.

  200 It is true that from the day of his coronation Ferdinand was at war with that party of Hungarians who had elected Zápolya king, but he had no early ‘national’ difficulties with his own supporters.

  201 Under his reign German did, however, largely replace Czech as the official language in Silesia, the Lusatias, and some German areas of Bohemia.

  202 Only eight of the old great Czech families survived the change: the Czernins, Kinskys, Kolowrats, Lobkowitzes, Waldsteins, Schlicks, Sternbergs and Kaunitzes. That the names of three of the eight are German is due to the fact that the places from which they took their titles had German names.

  203 See below, p. 113.

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bsp; 204 The following paragraphs do not apply to the Bánát or the Military Frontier, which, being under central administration, were being subjected to the same Germanization as the Western Lands.

  205 When the Constitution was suspended in 1673, Hungary was placed under a Directorate with a Council composed half of Germans. The official languages were proclaimed to be Latin and German, and officials were required to know German and ‘Sclavonian’, but not Magyar. But tthes measures had to be revoked in 1681.

  206 See above, p. 55.

  207 Prince Rákóczi, leader of the great Hungarian rebellion (or national war) at the beginning of the eighteenth century, who had started his campaigns in North-Eastern Hungary, had conferred common nobility very freely on his adherents, who included many Ruthenes, and also Slovaks and Roumanians. In 1787 the largely Roumanian County of Máramaros contained the highest proportion of nobles (16·6%) in all Hungary.

  208 Joseph II’s censuses did not record language, but Fényes, in his statistical work published in 1842, states that when he wrote, there were in Hungary-Croatia (excluding, that is, Transylvania and the Frontier), 544, 372 noble persons, of whom 464, 705 were linguistic Magyars, about 58,000 Slavs and 21,000 Germans and Roumanians. Quite 35,000 of the ‘Slavs’ must have been Croats, leaving the Magyars a majority of something like ninety per cent in Inner Hungary.

  209 See below, p. 108.

  210 This was due to a lucky fluke. North-Eastern Hungary provided the bulk of Rákóczi’s followers, whom he ennobled right and left. The Roumanians of Máramaros had accepted the Union just in time.

  211 Known alternatively by either of these names (both of which mean ‘small’) or by the two in combination.

  212 He had been consecrated Bishop in 1728, but was then still very young, and began officiating only in 1732.

  213 Petru’s history, which was in the main an extract from Sinkay’s, was completed in 1815 but printed only (at Iasi) in 1851.

  214 Once, however, in 1745, they were allowed to hold a ‘National Congress’.

  215 The adjective is operative, for the Serbian trading communities further north (such existed in nearly all towns on the Danube, including Buda; the ‘national centre’ was in Szent Endre, a few miles north of Buda) lived in perfect amity with their Magyar and German neighbours.

  216 It is all too common to accuse Austrian monarchs of applying the principle of ‘divide et impera’ when more often they were genuinely trying to unite incurably centrifugal peoples; but Kaunitz did write: ‘the more obvious and disquieting the intention’ (sc. of the Hungarians) ‘becomes apparent of making a vim unitam out of Hungary, Transylvania, and the Illyrian nation, the more advisable and necessary does the principle of divide et impera become.’

  217 The officers in these regiments were Serb up to the rank of battalion commander inclusive: above that, they were drawn from the general professional pool, and thus were usually Germans.

  218 Meynert, op. cit., pp. 321–2 writes that ‘hardly a single landowner’ in the Bukovina was not residing in Iaşi, where they had Court or administrative jobs. Prokopowitsch writes (op. cit., p. 36) that when the Bukovinian nobles were required, in 1779, to take the oath of loyalty to Austria, only twenty-one Boyars and 354 lesser nobles did so; all the rest preferred to emigrate.

  219 More the latter; surnames, both in Dalmatia and in Venice itself, reveal that a surprisingly large number of ‘Venetian’ nobles came from Croat families. The Dalmatian towns themselves were far more Croat, even in speech, than is often realized.

  220 Gypsies were regularly used by the Turks as hangmen at least up to the 1870s.

  221 Op. cit. II. 44. According to Damian, Joseph II tried to extend these obligations to them, but the restoration of the Transylvanian Constitution in 1791 ‘gave them back their reluctantly renounced right to be degraded’.

  222 Travels in Hungary, p. 12.

  223 Id., p. 49. Damian has taken this from a little anonymous work entitled Ueber den National-charakter der in Siebenbürgen befindlichen Nationen (Vienna, 1792).

  224 Op. cit., pp. 7–8.

  225 As late as the 1930s, the Ruthenes south of the Carpathians could not be induced to give their houses chimneys, because they took the noise of the wind howling in them for the voice of a malignant ghost.

  226 Damian II. 27.

  227 Brawer, op. cit., p. 43. According to him, the records of the Lemberg Gubernium contain no complaints by peasants against the Jews, whom, on the contrary, they regarded as their allies and advisers against the landlords. For the propinatio, see above, p. 63, n. 3.

  228 Risbeck, op. cit., II. 241.

  229 Russell, op. cit., II. 187.

  230 Travels in Hungary, p. 116.

  231 Id., p. 355.

  232 Hain, I. 189.

  233 See below, p. 497.

  234 Id., p. 300.

  235 Id., II. 16.

  236 Joseph II afterwards greatly strengthened the German element in Galicia, the Bukovina and Hungary.

  237 In this connection we may draw attention to the fallacies and exaggerations in the claim made by some Germans that their ancestors had carried out a mission for which the world should thank them in civilizing the barbarous peoples round them, and had exhausted themselves in doing so. There is much truth in the first half of this claim: the work of the German missionaries (in the early days) and of German burghers and peasant colonists, down to the nineteenth century, bears witness to it. But it was rather the non-Germans who ‘exhausted’ themselves, in ceding to the upper stratum of the Monarchy their own more progressive and ambitious elements, who thereafter figured on the roll of honour of ‘German’ culture.

  238 That is, leaving out the Vorlande, the Netherlands and Lombardy-Venetia (which was also homogeneous), but including, for convenience’ sake, Salzburg and Dalmatia.

  239 Vienna was always a great cosmopolitan city, and as it grew in the nineteenth century, it received many non-German immigrants from all parts of the Monarchy of which it was the capital, but these were generally irrelevant from the point of view of the national struggle. Only the Czechs were numerous enough to make their presence felt, and they could not constitute any genuine national problem. When Czechs tried to magnify, or Germans to minimize, the importance of this honest army of tailors, cobblers and maidservants, both were doing so with an eye on Bohemia, or on the Gesammtmonarchie.

  240 It is true that the south-eastern corner of Moravia contained some Slovaks. The family of President Masaryk was among these.

  241 See below, p. 113.

  242 This was secured under the Treaty of Kutna Hora, 1485.

  243 The concession here applied to nobles and their peasants.

  244 It should be said that this draconic provision was partly prompted by political considerations, for Frederick of Prussia was trying to stir up Protestantism in Bohemia and use its adherents as his agents.

  245 In Salzburg, which was then not part of the Monarchy, twenty per cent of the population was driven out of the country. Most of the expellees went to Prussia, a few to Russia, whence their descendants moved later to Canada. Later in her life, Maria Theresa grew more tolerant and ordered ‘little tolerance, but no spirit of persecution’ when, in 1778, 10,000 Moravians in the Kreis of Hradcin reverted to Hussitism, although even then, she was prevented only by Joseph’s opposition from having obstinate heretics pressed into the Army, if male, or sent to prison, if female, and finally transported to Transylvania. For all her devout Catholicism, she never boggled at employing Protestants, and even Jews, in special positions when she thought it conducive to the interests of the State. Protestant officers were admitted freely into the Army, numerous individual Protestants were licensed to practise trades or establish manufactures, and after 1778 Protestants were even promoted to Doctorates at the University of Vienna.

  246 This had been the rule in the Hereditary Lands since the inception of Estates in them. In Bohemia and Moravia the Prelates had been deposed from this position in the fifteenth cent
ury, but restored to it under Ferdinand’s Vernewerte Landesordnung.

  247 According to M.K.P., II. 320, the Monarchy in 1770 contained 2,163 monastic Houses (114 in Lower Austria alone) with 45,000 monks or nuns. Many of the Houses were extremely small.

  248 Mitranov op. cit., p. 691.

  249 The Hungarian Church had throughout the ages prudently reserved its right to appoint titular bishops in sees in certain areas, such as Bosnia, which had been under its authority at one or another period in the Middle Ages.

  250 After certain preliminaries, this had been established between the Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and Unitarians in 1572.

  251 The Treaties of Vienna (1606) and Nikolsburg (1621) had guaranteed equal rights to Catholics and Protestants but this had applied only to nobles, whose right to impose their own religion on their ‘subjects’ was assumed. The Treaty of Linz (1645) had extended freedom of religion to ‘subjects’.

  252 There are no exact figures, since the census of the time did not count the religions of Transylvania, but the Saxons, who then numbered about 135,000, were all Lutherans (to be a Saxon was to be a Lutheran, and vice-versa), and of the 400,000 or so Magyars, probably some 350,000 were Calvinists and 50,000 Unitarians.

  253 Union normally meant that the Uniates accepted the following four points of principle: the supreme authority of the Pope, the existence of purgatory, the use of unleavened bread for the Sacrament and the dogma that the Holy Ghost proceeds also from the Son. In return, they were allowed to retain their own ritual with certain other concessions (e.g. their lower priests might marry) and were admitted to the full civic and political rights enjoyed by members of the Roman Catholic Church.

  254 This is a very summary description of an exceedingly complex process, which had begun much before 1596 and was not finally completed until long after that date.

  255 From Styria in 1496; from Carinthia and Carniola in 1513; from the Tirol in 1518; from Upper Austria in 1596.