by Tony Thorne
A former nation defeated and paralysed by internal rivalries allowed the Ottomans to consolidate their position for a planned penetration further west. Their ultimate prize was the city of Vienna, from which they could dominate most of Christian Europe, but to ensure their supply-lines from Constantinople they had to pacify the entire turbulent region in between, a task they never fully completed.
Louis II was succeeded by King John Zápolya and there was a standoff until his death in 1541, whereupon the Habsburgs by dynastic agreement inherited the crown and took control of the west and north of the country. The Turks under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent laid waste the central zone and fifteen years later retook the capital Buda. They occupied the whole of the south-central territories of Hungary, splitting off the eastern region, in which they installed Zápolya’s son as puppet prince. This disputed zone, known as Transylvania, was formally constituted in 1568 as a semi-autonomous principality owing allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople. The defeat at Mohács was not only a psychic wound that stayed fresh for nearly two centuries, it was a strategic catastrophe which allowed the Austrian Habsburgs and the Turks to carve up the ancient Kingdom of Hungary. It is an interesting question whether, had Dózsa’s followers been given back their rights and incentives to honour their national heritage, the army facing the Turks at Mohács might have been 300,000 strong and united, instead of 27,000 and indecisive.
For 150 years after this, Hungary remained a divided and unstable entity, under constant threat of invasion from the Turks and from the Habsburgs, who needed Hungary (and coveted Transylvania) as a buffer against the Ottomans, but resented the independence of its powerful aristocracy. With open war or undeclared raids a constant threat in the south and east, the aristocrats of the Kingdom of Hungary remained west of Lake Balaton, on which their fleet rode at anchor beneath the castle of Szigliget, in permanent standoff against the Turkish ships whose topsails and pennants could be seen at the other end of the lake. The great families (sixteen of them owned more than half the surface of Hungary) fortified their palaces and moved in summer from the hot dry flatlands of the little Hungarian plain to the cooler uplands just south of the Danube, or across the river where Čachtice and Bytča can be found in present–day Slovakia.
The political manoeuvring inside the country throughout the years which followed defeat and partition was based on a tension between the ‘Habsburg Party’ – a faction within the aristocracy who thought that the power of the Austrian empire offered the best chance of reuniting Hungary, and the ‘Transylvanian Party’ – those who sided with the Transylvanian Prince and sometimes even with the Turks in the hope that this would bring about a new independence. These distinctions were never clear-cut, especially in that everyone concerned was aware of the tactical and emotional importance of Transylvania to the Magyar peoples. Even Count George Thurzó – known all his life as a Habsburg man – secretly nursed an ambition to rule there.
The sense of post-Mohács Hungary as a land deserted by God and good fortune was shared by foreign observers and Hungarians alike. The sixteenth century was a turbulent time for most European countries, with the religious upheaval of the Reformation and the fragmenting into competing beliefs and sects that followed. Then at the end of the century on the continent the Counter-Reformation began to build up momentum. The certainties and structures of mediaeval society were transformed under the influence of humanist intellectuals, and, while the European mind was struggling to cope with these changes, the European body was prey to epidemics. The age was brutal, but full of contrasts; feuds were commonplace, though mediated by codes. There was near-anarchy at times in the political sphere and economic and social progress stopped completely, but poetry flourished.
All of Europe was infected with cruelty, conspiracy and neurosis, but Hungary was in a more dangerously ambiguous state. Its traditions and institutions were still seemingly intact, but operating in an amputated portion of the old nation, threatened on the frontiers by anarchy, beyond the frontiers by hostile aliens, and alternately mocked, threatened and enchanted by the ‘fairy garden’ of Transylvania, with its febrile vitality and its own geographical integrity. Within the remains of the Kingdom loyalties were divided and allegiances uncertain and shifting: as the people lamented, the Protestant and Catholic propagandists each blamed the other for the tragedies which afflicted their nation.
In the occupied zone, the Turkish Vilayat, ruled from Buda, the Magyar peasants who had not fled their villages were forced to pay tithes to the local agents of Constantinople, but in some ways they were better off than those who lived in ‘free’ Hungary, who were bound to their masters’ land and had to submit to the hated robot system of forced labour. As rights and conditions for commoners slowly improved in England, the Low Countries and Germany, the lot of the three and a half million Hungarians and the 600,000 in Transylvania became worse. The manor estates of the great noble families were enlarged and the aristocracy took up trading in cattle, horses, wheat, wine, cloth and even metals, hoarding when prices were low and virtually crippling the peasant markets and the economies of the towns. Although the senior nobility could have nearly all necessities made on the estates – furniture, clothing, weapons, ornaments and jewellery – and to command their local economies, forcing innkeepers to sell only their wines, for example, the smaller feudal landlords often ran short of cash, and had to resort to moneylenders or pawnbrokers. The senior nobles oppressed the lesser nobles by using litigation, trickery or force to take over their properties and at the same time they enclosed common land: the local records show how the family of Count Thomas Nádasdy (later to be Elisabeth Báthory’s father-in-law), who already owned nearly a score of farms in the region, forcibly attached to their estates land belonging to peasants around Čachtice in 1569. To make matters worse for the great majority who depended on the earth for their livelihood, there was a series of poor harvests in the years after 1570 and some landowners reacted by increasing their demand for forced labour from their serfs from one to two or three days in every week; others like Countess Báthory herself later excused her villagers from the labour requirement, but replaced it with high taxes to be collected in the form of cash or wine. Many poor communities, after protesting to the authorities that their lives had become intolerable, staged local insurrections and suffered the terrible consequences. The peasants of Čachtice did not take up arms against their landlord, but did later lodge two formal complaints in Vienna against Count Francis Nádasdy and his wife which were, like all the others, listened to impassively by Rudolf II’s officials and then forgotten.12
Hungarian did not mean Magyar, but a citizen of the ancient territory of Hungaria or Pannonia, which had first been delineated by the Romans. Hungary and its offshoot, Transylvania, were said to be two patriae and one nation. This is because they had been constituted on the same legal basis and had the same common law, judicial traditions and rights towards the King. Legal and religious identity always took precedence over ethnic identity. The other feature of early modern Hungary that is difficult for citizens of modern western nation-states to grasp is its multilingual and multinational nature. In this the Kingdom of Hungary resembled the Habsburg Empire, which was made up of over a thousand separate territories, and in which the emperors themselves never explicitly identified with any particular nationality. Within Hungary there were cities and towns where the German language and customs predominated – among them modern Bratislava (then known as Pressburg in German, Pozsony in Hungarian and Prešporok to the Slovaks living around it), Sopron and Szepesség – and villages where the main language spoken was Slovak or Croatian, not to mention the mobile population of an unknown number of Romany-speaking gypsies.
The senior aristocracy who served the Austrian court were themselves of mixed origins: the Wallensteins and Zerotins were from Bohemia, the Zrínyis, the Pethös, the Keglevichs and the Kollonichs were Croatian; the Drágffys, to whom Elisabeth Báthory was related, were probably of Romanian blood.
The Drágffys’ name means ‘sons of the dragon’, referring to the order of knighthood formed to fight the Turks from which Vlad Tepes, the historical Dracula (‘little dragon’), took his nickname. Elisabeth Báthory’s son-in-law Nicholas Zrínyi was the scion of the Croatian Zrinski warlords, and the Thurzó and Drugeth families likewise bore non-Magyar names. The lords and sometimes the ladies were fluent in several languages; George Thurzó wrote in Latin and classical Greek and, as well as his Hungarian mother tongue, spoke German and Slovak.
It is normal today in a spirit of rapprochement to gloss over the ethnic tensions between the Hungarians, those who oppressed them and those who they in turn oppressed. In the past these divisions were rarely referred to, and such matters are difficult to investigate, since most correspondence was carried on in Hungarian or in the Latin lingua franca, whatever language was spoken privately. Nevertheless, tensions were undoubtedly present, particularly in those parts of the kingdom such as the Nádasdy–Báthory territories in Nitra county where Magyars ruled over native Slavs, just as the Norman barons in England had ruled over their Saxon serfs, whose language they disdained and whose thoughts were hidden to them. Elisabeth Báthory was highly educated and knew Latin, some Greek and some German, but had been brought up in the parts of the Kingdom where only Hungarian was spoken. Whether or not one should learn the Tót (Slovak) or Horvát (Croatian) languages of the subject peoples was a matter debated in handbooks of aristocratic etiquette; the consensus among sophisticates was that it was not necessary.13 So, unlike the priests who preached in the church beside her mansion, the Countess could not communicate with the humbler inhabitants of her Čachtice estates and surrounded herself with Hungarian-speaking servants brought from the western parts of the country.
The ethnic mix in Transylvania was more complicated and more volatile: officially the principality was said to consist of the three nationes, Magyars, Saxons and Székelys. The Székelys were the descendants of a warrior caste who were ethnically identical to the Magyars, but who had been settled in those regions hundreds of years before to guard its frontiers. The German-speaking Saxons were farmers and merchants who had migrated east in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and now lived according to their own laws in a number of autonomous cities. They had the right to forbid the Prince from entering their territories. Of the Romanians almost nothing is written, and some Hungarian historians claim that there were few of them living within Transylvania at that time. (It was not until 1918 that the region became part of Romania.) But there were certainly serfs of Romanian, Wallachian and Moldavian origin, following the Orthodox faith, which was not officially recognised – the faiths that were accepted were Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism and Unitarianism – as well as the gypsies, living without a voice under Magyar rule and Turkish suzerainty.
In the English language ‘Transylvania’ has come to signify one thing only: the home of the Vampire of popular repute. The real Transylvania – the Romans’ ‘land beyond the forest’, the Germans’ and Slavs’ Siebenburgen or Sedmohrádsky, ‘land of the seven castles’ – in those regions a byword for enchantment, bloody intrigue and almost permanent political chaos, was in Elisabeth Báthory’s day a nominal vassal of the Turkish Sultan. Transylvania’s instability extended across its mutable borders: between eastern Hungary and Transylvania was a disputed strip, the Partium, whose borders changed according to the tides of war: the townsfolk of Debrecen in the Partium had to pay taxes simultaneously to the Habsburg Emperor, the Hungarian crown and the Turkish Pasha of Buda, and to keep a wary eye on the tactics of whoever had managed to secure the Transylvanian throne. It was just west of the Partium, still within the Kingdom of Hungary, that the Báthorys’ ancestral seats of Nyirbátor and Ecsed were to be found. Modern guidebooks in English have followed the American author McNally in referring to Elisabeth as the Blood Countess ‘of Transylvania’ and asserting that her palace at Ecsed and the castle of Čachtice once lay within that principality’s borders, an idea that any citizen of the region will see as ludicrous – the old frontier at its closest was well to the east of the former and hundreds of kilometres from the latter. Despite her dynasty’s long links with Transylvania, there is no proof that Elisabeth ever set foot inside the country; indeed, she discouraged her husband from accepting office there.
For all of its troubled existence, Transylvania played a crucial role in the history – and the psyche – of Hungarians. When it was created, this last remnant of old Hungary had no clear political status. At first it went unrecognised by other nations, but eventually the former voivodeship where the Báthorys, although they possessed very little land there, had traditionally held sway, imprinted itself on the minds of early modern Europe as a real political entity.14 In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries many Hungarian aristocrats secretly looked to the Prince of Transylvania to re-create a Greater Hungary free of Habsburg and Turkish domination, while the lesser nobility in Hungary welcomed the Prince’s support in their resistance to the Habsburgs and their attempts to escape the oppression of their own social superiors. The princely succession which the Turks had intended to be hereditary became elective with the end of the Zápolya line, and every change of ruler meant a new outbreak of conspiracies and attempted coups. In fact any real attempts to reunite Transylvania with the mother-country would certainly have been scuppered by Constantinople, which later rebuffed Prince Gábor Bethlen with the assurance, ‘We shall never cede Transylvania to Hungary, for Transylvania was invented by Sultan Suleyman.’15
As for the Turks, they were characterised as lions or devils by their Christian foes, and Turkish domestic culture had little effect on the Protestant aristocracy’s habits. When Turks sent dresses as gifts, they were not worn, but made into bedcovers or sheets, even in Transylvania; only the cultivation and arrangement of flowers and fruit and the making of coffee, for example, were openly adopted. The fact that Turks were infidels precluded any serious attention to their way of life, although among some of those who saw the Turks at close quarters, on the battlefied or on diplomatic missions, there was a sort of mutual respect which even developed into friendship in the case of refugees like Bocskai and Bethlen, who were given sanctuary in the Ottoman court. Long after the Ottomans had been expelled, many Hungarian patriots admitted to a ‘Turkish-nostalgia’). If the Hungarian knights wore green into battle to mock their enemy’s sacred colour, they did not desecrate the Turkish graves on Hungarian territory. In the truces between battles, tournaments were organised in which the two sides jousted and duelled according to chivalrous rules; this did not prevent both armies from using terror tactics against one another during the many sieges; the exhibiting of heads and displays of mass-impaling beneath the walls of the besieged castle or city were common.
Where the values of the battlefield prevailed, it is not surprising that the adversaries came to mirror one another, each adapting the other’s accoutrements, especially weapons and horse-furniture. The Hungarians were resolutely, bravely Christian, but when today we look at the decorated ivory sabre-handles displayed in Sárvár castle which depict the Hungarian light horse soldiers, the Hussars, fighting with their counterparts, the Turkish Janissaries, it is difficult for us to tell one from the other. The German-speaking soldiers who periodically occupied parts of Hungary during the territorial struggles showed the same wilful ignorance and were hated by the natives for their chauvinism as well as their habitual cruelty. They considered that the Hungarians and Turks were one and the same, and when they reconquered a piece of land and were petitioned by the Magyar owners for its return, dismissed them with the stock response, ‘Go back to Scythia!’ (In classical writings Scythia was the homeland, north of the Black Sea, of warlike barbarian nomads known for their savagery.) Many many years before, during their nomadic wanderings on the plains of western Asia, the Magyar and the Turkic cultures had indeed come into intimate contact; there were still affinities between the two languages which made the learning easy. A number of Hunga
rian officers (possibly including Countess Báthory’s husband, Lord Francis Nádasdy) spoke some Turkish, and Turkish officers wrote letters in Hungarian. Not only did the nobles vie to mount recitals by captured Turkish musicians, but Hungary’s foremost romantic poet, Bálint Balassi, had his verses arranged for Turkish music.
After more than a decade of uneasy standoff punctuated by local raids, sieges of border strongholds, advances and withdrawals, full-scale war between Christians and Moslems broke out again in 1591. The fifteen-year conflict, known as the Great Turkish War, was sparked by the Serbs, specifically the lawless uskok refugees who haunted the border areas; on the Turkish side, illicit raids were launched across the frontier by marauders known as akinci. But the fighting soon became generalised, the eastern and western powers locked into an inconclusive but bloody series of campaigns, and war became the raison d’être for another generation of men and boys.16 The picture of the period of the Turkish wars which has been sustained by Hungarian fiction since the nineteenth century is typified by Géza Gárdonyi’s novel, Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, first published in 1899, in which the dusty summer landscapes are crisscrossed by soldiers, their beards waxed and white with badger grease, travelling as best they can on one or even two wooden legs, missing an arm, a nose, ears. The whole book is pervaded by a kind of jauntiness in the midst of carnage.