The Phoenix Land

by Miklos Banffy

  Contact was retained with the kingdom of Hungary and at the same time Turkish suzerainty was acknowledged, with the result that Transylvania obtained from the Porte far greater autonomy than was experienced by Moldavia or the Havasaföld, where the rulers had been nominated by Istanbul.

  In Europe a new era of absolutism dawned after the Peace of Westphalia75. Constitutional government ceased to exist and was replaced by the absolute power of the ruler, and this brought with it a pronounced improvement in statesmanship, a new respect for the national interest, a keener appreciation of the need for sound economic policy, the development of industry and the exploitation of customs levies. Commerce was developed and experiments made with taxation policies. At this time countries where the national monarch had absolute power achieved real progress from the stagnation of the past.

  The Habsburgs also tried the absolutist approach, and this worked well in their hereditary lands. Now was the beginning of the industrial prosperity of the Czechs, for there the tax burden was extended to include the nobility and the clergy. The dynasty here achieved its undoubted autocracy without difficulty, since Bohemia had no constitution since the Battle of the White Mountain (1620)76. Here, as in the hereditary lands, the Habsburgs imposed direct rule from Vienna, and so effective was the wide influence and power of the court that the transition to absolutism was achieved without opposition, since popular opinion saw nothing but advantages to be gained from the victory of state power over the diverse interests of class and race. Clearly this meant the simplification of government, the unification of the laws and increased security for all. The imperial government was Germanic, and most of the territories, or at least their governing classes, were Germanic too. In this way every vital force was on the side of the court. Members of the nobility were drawn to leading posts in the national administration, the clergy were united by the re-imposition of Catholicism, while the petty nobility, the middle classes and the leaders of industry found themselves united by a common interest in supporting the system. Harmony was thus achieved between the policies of the ruler and the interests of the ruled.

  But in Hungary this harmony could never be realized, for the simple reason that harmony between the monarch and people could only be built upon mutual confidence, and here confidence was lacking on both sides.

  The emperor was unable to forget that while he was engaged in the fierce battles of the Thirty Years’ War, and even before this when he was defending his power in western Europe, his Hungarian subjects had not only failed to come to his aid but had also on numerous occasions sided with his enemies, be they Turks, Swedes, the French, or even Transylvanians. The insurrections led by Bocskai, Bethlen and Rákóczi77 were supported by the whole kingdom to the point that few Hungarians stood by the legal ruler.

  On their side, the Hungarians could not forget that their own king seemed to hold them in small consideration, neither honouring his promises nor providing for their defence – or only doing so in a derisory fashion – and that consequently between the capture of Budapest by the Turks (1541) and its liberation (1686) their country had declined into a state of decay. The imperial government seemed not only incompetent but also unscrupulous in everything that concerned the well being of Hungary, and this was compounded by the undoubted fact that in this government the last word came always from foreigners.

  After the defeat of the Turks at the battle of St Gothard (1686)78 a twenty-year peace treaty was signed with the Ottoman empire but, instead of profiting by this success, the Hungarian king left the Turks in control of a large part of Hungarian territory so as to have a free hand in his western wars, thereby once again breaking the promise to which he owed his throne, namely to defend the country.

  Not only did he fail to exploit this victory over the Turks but also he used it to abolish Hungary’s constitution. Gathering a parliament together was a slow and complicated business: how much quicker and more modern was a system of absolutism by which government was effected by decree. So this is what Vienna did. The last vestige of parliamentary control, the voting of the taxes, was also bypassed by placing the maintenance of the armed forces stationed in the country on the shoulders of each territory. Parliament did not have to meet for that: a simple decree sufficed – this city or country, had to pay this or that sum. Who needed parliament for that?

  Cities became poorer. Entire villages faced destitution, and their populations moved to the Turkish-occupied territories to escape the blackmail imposed by Flemish, Serb or German mercenaries. The re-imposition of Roman Catholicism was also achieved by force, especially where the majority had long been Protestant.

  The castles of the nobility were garrisoned by foreign troops. There was no place for Hungarians in the central government, where everything was decided by Czechs and Germans. Sometimes it would happen that the voices of the native palatine, chief justice or treasurer would be heard, but they had no authority in the Council. Every decision taken was based upon whether or not it was to the advantage of the hereditary Habsburg lands and whether their defence or economy would benefit.

  As more and more conspiracies provoked more and more unrest, so this was punished in the courts, usually by confiscation of property. Many of those who suffered in this way took refuge in Poland, Transylvania or with the Turks; and when war was declared between the empire and France, there was open rebellion in Hungary led by Thököly.

  This was the state of relations between the king and his Hungarian people when, after a few years, the war of liberation from the Turks was started with the formation of a new Holy league by the Pope, the emperor, the king of Poland and the Venetian Republic79.

  Liberation and its Consequences

  Liberation from Turkish domination proved to be a new turning point in Hungarian history, for it had a decisive effect upon the development of the role of Hungary in relation to the Habsburg monarchy.

  It was here that the standpoint of the leading Hungarians proved crucial, for they found themselves not on the side of the liberators but on that of the Turks; and in this their example was freely followed by the mass of the people.

  Why Thököly remained in hiding with his Turkish allies was understandable, for the position and power he had gained had been through insurrection against Vienna. Although many of the grievances which had led to his uprising had been settled by the meeting of parliament in 1681 – a moment when he could have made his peace with Vienna – one can sympathize with his reluctance to abandon a patron to whom he had owed his previous success. He was not a man to change allegiance from one day to the next.

  Less understandable was the attitude then adopted by the men of Transylvania. Mihály Apaffy and his all-powerful chancellor Teleki had no such moral obligations, and both hated Thököly; yet they adopted a similar attitude to his. It was possible they were inspired by a spirit of rivalry, for the last thing they wanted was that a ‘kuruc’ king should be on better terms with the Porte than they. So they remained on the Turkish side even though they had witnessed the terrible defeat of the grand vizier before the walls of Vienna and the humiliation inflicted upon his army. They even persevered in this when Buda had already been liberated and Thököly had fled. It was almost as if they had been hypnotized by the power of the Turkish hegemony.

  Teleki, however, to save his own skin, secretly made his own peace with Vienna; although he still reiterated his allegiance to the Porte in council and in parliament. Worse than this, he then proved sufficiently two-faced publicly to denounce Miklós Bethlen, who had proposed that Transylvania should now join the liberating power.

  That this would not have been easily achieved is clear, for the oppression of the previous decades, the inquisition and religious persecutions were still fresh in everyone’s memories. The Austrian armies, composed of Flemings, Germans and Prussians, tormented the people no less than had the Turks. Yet if on the king’s side there had been a commander like the soldier and poet Zrínyi, or like the great Palatine, Miklós Esterházy80, or even better
if at the head of Transylvanian affairs had stood statesmen of the quality of Gábor Bethlen or of the much earlier Friar George, things would have taken a different turn. These men, with their highly developed political sense, would have grasped that the western coalition represented a far more powerful force than had ever previously been brought to combat the power of the Ottomans, and they would have seen that this was the moment when they could – and indeed should – have broken with the Porte and so put Transylvania at the head of the Hungarian offensive against the Turkish Empire. There is little doubt that Apaffy and Teleki could then have achieved this, just as Zsigmond Báthory, facing far stronger opposition, had done a century before.

  But this historical opportunity was missed, and in the event the majority of the Hungarian people – some still in the Turkish camp and not many more on the side of the liberators – as well as the Transylvanians, remained passive spectators while their Habsburg king with his foreign mercenaries liberated the country. Hungarian help was largely limited to furnishing some light cavalry patrols and some auxiliary troops.

  These circumstances had a fatal effect on later developments.

  The government in Vienna – not without reason – decided that as it was their troops that had brought about the liberation of Hungary, so the country was theirs to dispose of as they wished.

  The constitution was maintained, but for form’s sake alone, only to be invoked if necessary, and everything was decided by the central government in Vienna without any reference to Hungarian opinion. Even so, the Palatine, Pál Esterházy, did his best to establish a government with jurisdiction only within the borders of Hungary (including the re-conquered territories), but which would have control over the two most important national responsibilities: defence and economic development.

  He had no chance of succeeding, since the government in Vienna held a very different view of how things should be done in Hungary. In no way would it consider relinquishing control of the armed forces, nor was it prepared to give any power to the Hungarians, whom it had never trusted before and now, after the proof of Apaffy’s and Thököly’s allegiance to the Turks, trusted even less. This was retaliation for Apaffy’s sin of omission. If a sizable Hungarian force with a Transylvanian leader had helped in chasing out the Ottomans, Transylvania and the Hungarians might have had their say in establishing a new order in the kingdom. As it was, they were excluded, and direct rule from Vienna was immediately imposed.

  In these circumstances it was natural that the country felt it could defend itself only by strict insistence on the rule of law. The Hungarians’ sole shields against the forces of absolutism were found to reside in the ancient laws of the country and in the king’s coronation oath. These were the only defences left to them. In this they were not mistaken. The central government was to find itself in need of help from the Hungarian people, as, for example, when scared by the widespread growth of unrest in 1681, or when their cooperation was essential, as in matters of succession to the throne. It was such occasions as these, when a new oath or proclamation was to be made – even if it was not to last for long – that proved to the nation the strength and importance of adherence to its constitution and how important it was that they should not allow it to be changed in any way. It became deeply ingrained in the national conscience that if they should permit any modification, any alloy to be inserted – even were it only in respect of some ancient patriotic feeling – then the Tripartitum, that tightly stretched chain, would fall to pieces the day even one small link was allowed to fall from it. It stood as read that one of the most important factors in this defensive battle with Vienna was the understanding that, as both Emperor Leopold and his sons were deeply religious men, so they could be trusted not to break their oath.

  The conviction that the written word always triumphed in the end became the cornerstone of Hungarian political thinking.

  During the eighteenth century this feeling became ever stronger, while other political realities paled beside it. The earlier insurrections led by Bocskai, Bethlen and György Rákóczi had been started in defence of the national constitution, and they had resulted in the re-establishment of the ancient Hungarian laws. It was the same with Thököly and Ferenc Rákóczi. That those first successes in re-establishing the common law of the land were in great measure due to the Thirty Years War and later to the war between Austria and France – and that these victories were brought about by the political realities following the peace treaty of Szatmár and the assembly of the parliament at Sopron – may have been grasped by the leaders of the day but was never understood by the Hungarian people.

  The same could be said of the parliamentary successes in 1790 even though Emperor Joseph II had already found himself obliged to withdraw many of his decrees. At this time, although the stubborn resistance of the counties had carried some weight, the deciding factors had been economic chaos and the problems of foreign policy. The loss of the Belgian provinces, the unsuccessful war with Turkey and the growing tension with Prussia broke the will of the dying emperor. His successor, Leopold II, found it necessary to re-establish national government in Hungary but only so as to have a free hand to make order in the growing confusion of the empire. The revolutionary ideas percolating from France posed little threaten to Hungary but were spreading their poison in the Belgian and Italian provinces as well as those that bordered the Rhine. This threat of revolution and its possible effects were clear enough to Leopold who, as grand duke of Tuscany, had ruled as an enlightened reformer with methods very different from those of his older brother. But now, although as king of Hungary he might formerly have followed his brother’s less enlightened example, he promptly offered plans of reform to the Hungarian parliament and allowed the old popular constitution to be restored without demanding any changes at all.

  In this way the great things that were happening in Europe played a decisive part in the development of Hungary’s political destiny. The country’s subsequent successes, disasters, movements and sins of omission cannot be understood unless this is fully understood too.

  This was hardly noticed either by the average Hungarian or by the national historians. They saw only that the written law was ultimately successful, and the lesson they learned from this was that nothing was stronger than the law.

  The 1848 crisis and its solution in 1867 seemed to prove the same argument, and even Ferenc Deák81 constantly referred to the law as existing in 1848 in his 1867 negotiations. For him this was the most sensible tactic, as he was dealing with an emperor anxious to secure his throne by winning the sympathy of the Hungarian people. The signatories to the 1867 agreement knew this well, even if the Hungarian public neither grasped this nor the fact that there would have been no negotiations if Austria had not just lost two wars, one in 1859 and the other in 1866, both of which had gravely shaken her economy as well as diminishing her standing with the other Great Powers.

  Hungarians still saw only the triumph of law over violence, and this is the origin of all dependence on legalistic thought in Hungary.

  And national historians continued to interpret the story of Hungary from 1867 to the end of the century from the same point of view.

  In human terms it is not difficult to sympathize with those historians who had themselves lived through the era of absolute despotism and witnessed the never-ending executions and imprisonments of the oppressive Bach regime82. Their entire lives had been lived with these memories, as had those whose only experiences of being harassed by the Austrian police had taken place in their childhood. Here is an example. It happened to my father in 1850.

  My grandparents had a house in Budapest in what was later called Széchenyi Square. There was a narrow strip of garden by the house where my father, then aged seven, often played. He wore a grey linen suit with braids instead of buttons, and he was extremely proud of it thinking it very Hungarian indeed. A passing policeman caught sight of the boy and as he too thought the suit Hungarian, took out a pair of scissors and threatene
d to cut off the offending braids. My father ran away, the policeman ran after him. Luckily the door of the house was not far away, and my father was nimble enough to dash up the stairs before the officer of the law could catch him. All the same the catchpoll yelled after him: ‘Rebellhund! Sau-magyar!’ – ‘Rebel dog! Hungarian swine!’ Even in old age my father would swell up with anger as he told the tale.

  Other children must have had similar experiences, and so it is natural that the generation of historians who had seen what had happened in Hungary after 1867 would tend to write in extreme terms, praising anyone who opposed the rule of Vienna and casting the blame for the failures of patriotic heroes not on the shifting balance of European power but rather on intrigue and treason. Eminent and sensible men, good Hungarians all of them, such as Palatine Miklós Esterházy, Pázmány, General János Pálffy, Ferenc Széchenyi, and György Festetics – realists who understood when it was fruitless to fight the decrees of Vienna – were either ignored or vilified. Those of them who, after the failure of a struggle against the government in Vienna found themselves obliged to accept the situation and do what they could to salvage what still remained to them, were branded as traitors. This is why Sándor Károlyi was called a traitor: he who had come to such an agreement with Pálffy in the peace of Szatmár that not only was there no possibility of retaliation but also that Rákóczi, had he so wished, could have remained in the country and retained all his possessions. This is why Görgey was also called a traitor even though it was obvious that Kossuth, while himself fleeing abroad, had appointed him governor at a time when the military situation was hopeless. Surrounded and with his army cut to shreds, Görgey had no alternative but to surrender. His decision to give himself up to the Russians and not to the Austrians showed that he hoped the Russians would treat as prisoners of war the Hungarian soldiers who had been fighting for their freedom. In this he was not mistaken, and it was not his fault that they were later handed over to Haynau by order of the tsar. Nevertheless, history has branded Görgey a traitor and so he has remained to this day.