Grantville Gazette, Volume 67

by Bjorn Hasseler

  Unorthodox experts point out that Hungarian culture has many things in common with the Scythians and the Parthians, later with the Huns and their descendants, especially the Avars who had been found in the Carpathian Basin when our native Magyar tribe arrived here in 895 AD, led by Prince Arpad.

  By now even Finnish scientists doubt that we would be so closely related; the Finno-Ugric theory is bleeding from a hundred wounds. Recent studies indicate that the Hungarian DNA, food, music, and folklore is strongly connected with those of the white-skinned Uigurs of north China. All agree that our vocabulary and grammar is clearly alien to the Indo-European systems, with many striking similarities in grammar and vocabulary to Irish Gaelic. Some say that the Celtic languages are also not of Indo-European origin.

  As even the sound of Hungarian is as similar to German or to Slavic languages as Welsh is to English, the arriving immigrants were not able to mix well with the neighboring nations. The huge differences in every single thing, beginning from language on up to warfare and other habits made this very hard.

  Both the Mongols and the Turks claim that they considered the Hungarians to be "brothers" from the historical past and that before attacking they had offered to join forces with them against the western Christian kingdoms. Yet the Hungarian language is not part of the Turkish language family, even though there are similarities. Some linguists say the Turks had taken lots of things from the Hungarians and not vice-versa. Turks could always learn our tongue easily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and most Hungarian frontier soldiers could speak good Turkish. (Many nobles and town people had some German and Latin, too.) Truly, the Turks in the early twentieth century modernized their language (and writing), and they used Hungarian grammar as a basis to build up their modern grammatical system. Besides, these are only two countries in Europe where people use "Attila" as a first name, using it in a positive sense. These similarities don't mean that these nations weren't lethal enemies for three hundred years.

  The Hungarians are the only nomadic peoples in Europe that both came from the East and were able to integrate—after their conversion to Christianity in 1000 AD—into the Roman Catholic part of Europe. Thus Hungary has become the outermost border of the western Catholic cultural sphere. On the other side of the Carpathian Mountains everybody is Orthodox—there are no Catholics there (except for some isolated--and oppressed--indigenous ethnic islands of Hungarians). Hungary and Poland are the borderline countries in a religious sense. Similar history and said faith made them good friends. Some fifty years before the RoF, Stephen Báthory, a Hungarian prince of Transylvania, became the crowned king of Poland. He was the one who had beaten the infamous Russian Ivan the Terrible three times during his wars between 1579 and 1581.

  Interesting enough, some Polish historians believe that Poles were the descendants of Sarmatian Huns—that Hungarians are their relatives. Aside from their friendship, Hungarians remain the orphans of Europe.

  ****

  Medieval History of Hungary Before the RoF

  Early manuscripts indicate that Arpad the Land Taker and his dynasty descended from King Attila the Hun. Attila was not the monster his enemies portrayed him as. After he was poisoned by his new German wife, Ildico, in 453 AD, his empire collapsed. His headquarters was in the Carpathian Basin. After them another nomadic tribe remained in Pannonia: the Huns' descendants, the Avars. A nomadic people, their cultural and ornamental heritage was identical with those of Arpad's Magyars who followed them in the ninth century AD. Frankish king Carolus the Great, also known as Charlemagne, led wars against the Avars, and he vanquished them between 791-799 AD. Whether they were all slain or not, Charlemagne certainly returned home with vast quantities of treasures. Allegedly, even Attila's famous crown was among them, although some say it was the Holy Crown of Hungary. The pious king gifted many of these treasures to churches and monasteries. The crown mentioned was sent to the Pope in Rome as a gift.

  Following the arrival of Arpad's Magyars in 895 AD, there were many Hungarian raids into Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. Legend says that these campaigns' secret aim was to find and take the stolen Hun treasures back. The nomadic warfare took Europe by surprise and only two or three attacks were successfully defeated—the Hungarian threat was equal to the Vikings' attacks of the time.

  It was Hungary's first Christian king, Saint István (Stephen) I, who demanded the Holy Crown back from Rome and by receiving it he brought Hungary into the Catholic faith in 1000 AD.

  It is rather characteristic of Hungarians' attitude towards colonists coming into the country that King St. István wrote to his son in his Admonitions: "The kingdom with one language and one custom is frail and fallible. Therefore I order you, my son, to honor the guests and the foreigners with good heart so as they should stay here more willingly, rather than at another place." Hungary embraced colonists coming from all over Europe.

  King St. István decided to lead his people to the Roman Catholic church instead of siding with the Orthodox Byzantium. King Attila's Holy Crown has always had a supernatural character among the Hungarians. No king was accepted without being crowned with it: the Holy Crown was a "person" and the kings and the nobility swore fealty to Him. Hungary was described as the Country of the Holy Crown. The Hungarian feudal system and law was attached to the crown rather than to the king. This law obligated the Hungarian nobles and gave them certain liberties and rights. Later, the Habsburgs also had to make an oath on this crown in order to be accepted as long as they themselves kept the crown's laws. A great part of the Hungarian population called themselves "noble" or was privileged in this or that way. The petty nobles—sometimes owning altogether as many as seven plum trees—had the right to go to the nobles' convocation and elect a king. It was a right that later Habsburg rulers didn't like that much. The non-Hungarian residents of the country called themselves Wlachus Hungaricus or Germanus Hungaricus, meaning Germans or Romanians who considered Hungary their homeland.

  Hungarians' success and survival depended on blending their eastern heritage with the western civilization to isolate the hungry West (i.e., the Holy Roman Empire) from the greedy East (i.e., the Byzantine Empire and later the Ottoman Empire). It was not much liked for this, but the kingdom withstood all attempts to bring it down. Their special half-eastern and half-western military style made them the perfect bastion against the nomads from the east and the Germans from the west.

  The Battle of Pressburg (Pozsony, now Bratislava) in 907 AD was a great example of the Hungarians winning over the greatest allied western armies of the age who wanted to deal with the intruding "barbarians" for once and for all.

  The Arpad Dynasty ruled for three centuries until 1300 AD and Hungary was a considerable middle-power in Europe.

  ****

  King Könyves Kálmán (Coloman the Learned or the Bookish King), 1074-96, was the first in Europe who declared in his laws that witches did not exist, saying: "De strigis vero quae non sunt, nulla questio fiat," meaning "Witches do not exist so they are out of question."

  The Golden Bull of 1222 was an edict issued by King András (Andrew) II of Hungary. King Andrew II was forced by his nobles to accept the Golden Bull which was one of first examples of constitutional limits being placed on the powers of a European monarch. The Magna Carta in England had been issued just seven years earlier than that.

  King Béla IV, son of Andrew II, was the monarch who resisted the Mongol invasion in 1241-1242 and afterwards rebuilt the country. In Europe, only Hungary was partly successful in resisting the Mongols: in the second year of the war the invaders withdrew from the country when Khan Ögedej died. It is remarkable because they hadn't withdrawn from any other of their already conquered territories. [There are questions as to the actual reason for the withdrawal, since it is considered problematic that Subodei knew that Ögedej had died when he began the withdrawal. Hungary got beaten badly at Mohi, with Béla losing 80% of his men. -Ed.] King Béla IV still had enough military power right after the Mongol
s' exit that he could seize those western Hungarian counties back that had been taken by the Austrians while the king was fighting the Mongols. (A nice example of how their western neighbors "helped" when they were attacked from the East, it was repeated often enough during the following centuries.)

  The Habsburg family should have been grateful to the Hungarian kings. It was László the Fourth who helped them win the battle of Morvamezö (Dürnkrut) in 1278 which led the first Habsburg to become emperor.

  During the Middle Ages Hungary was a country that was compared to France and England both in economic and military strength. Hungary provided vast quantities of salt, silver, and gold to Europe, all coming from the Carpathian Mountains' many mines. Beside the fall of Constantinople in 1453, part of the reason why Cristopher Columbus set sail to seek an oceanic route to India was that the productivity of these mines had decreased by the late 15th century.

  Hungary's first clash with the Turks was in the fourteenth century. Before the RoF the many wars with the Turks contributed to the development of the character and the quality of Hungarian warfare to such an extent that by in the seventeenth century they were a strong barrier against all Ottoman attacks aimed at Vienna. These wars are worth mentioning briefly since many Hungarians paid with their lives against the Muslim jihads against Europe.

  The Hungarian-Turkish wars began at the reign of King Lajos (Louis) I, the Great, an Anjou king who ruled between 1342-1382 and was also King of Poland from 1370. He is acclaimed as the first European ruler who fought the Ottomans and beat them. The ongoing Turkish raids in southern Hungary began at this time as King Louis I got into a conflict with Venice in 1372 and the Venetians allied themselves with the Turks. Together they defeated the Hungarian and the Paduan army at Treviso, although the Hungarians were able to retain the Dalmatian seaside. King Louis' attention then turned against the Turks. He moved into Wallachia where he was ambushed in the hills by the Romanians who were allied with the Turks. Fortunately he was able to defeat the raiding Turks invading Transylvania. During his Bulgarian campaign he defeated the Turks in a major battle in 1377. The victory gained Europe ten years before the Turks tried again; this time the Muslims attacked Serbia and defeated it at Rigómező (now Kosovo) in 1389.

  The Turks took the first Hungarian frontier castle of Galambóc (Golubac, Taubenberg ) in 1391. Five years later the Hungarian King Zsigmond (Sigismund) of Luxembourg set out against the Turks in 1396. In his army there were many European knights and soldiers— Czechs, Spanish, Italian, and French. They were utterly defeated at the large-scale Battle of Nicopolis in 1396. Regrouping afterwards, the king decided to focus on building out his lines of defense in Hungary. He made a law that demanded the financing of one horse-archer per twenty houses. As a result of this, Hungary could maintain an eighty thousand-strong army to defend the country and was able to send forty thousand men campaigning abroad, according to a report from Venice in 1423.

  When Mehmed I reunited the sultanate between 1413-1422, he allied with Bosnia and together they attacked Hungary and Croatia in 1415. Mehmed was able to make Bosnia a Sanjak—an administrative division within the Ottoman Empire—and kept sending armies against Wallachia and Hungary, without success. In the end it was he who asked for peace in 1419.

  The next series of wars belong to the "Wars of Lower-Danube" period, the time of Turkish wars on the Balkans. Sultan Murad II tried to conquer the whole Balkans but was pushed back by the Hungarian General Pipo of Ozora in 1423. Pipo had two more successful campaigns against the Ottomans before he died in 1426.

  Following some smaller raids, the Turks broke into Transylvania with a mighty army in 1432. It turned out to be the fifth Hungarian-Turkish war. The Turks crushed King Zsigmond's two-thousand strong unit which was guarding the mountain passes and pillaged all over southern Transylvania, taking thousands of slaves to the Balkans.

  There were many raids into Transylvania in 1435 and 1436 but the main Ottoman army tried to take the castle of Szendrő (Smederevo) in 1438, but the Hungarian-Serbian-Czech reinforcement chased them away. The Turks returned a year later, though, broke into Transylvania, and took Szendrő by surprise. They could do so because the Hungarian armies were weakened and held up by fighting a major peasant uprising which started in 1437. In 1441 Hungary's greatest Turkish-fighter hero, János Hunyadi, began his career, campaigning deep into Serbia. The following year he defeated the Begler-Bey of Rumelia in Transylvania. Encouraged by Pope Eugenius IV, János Hunyadi led his "Long Campaign" against the Ottoman Empire, taking advantage of his enemies' wars in Persia. In addition to his Hungarian armies, he was reinforced by Polish, Serbian, and Bulgarian soldiers, and he had German and Czech mercenaries as well. He almost reached Edirne, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan was forced to plead for peace, and so it was made in 1444 at Várad, Transylvania.

  Unfortunately, the Italian Archbishop Cesarini absolved the Hungarian King Ulaszlo I (Wladyslaw III) from his oath in order to continue the Turkish war. János Hunyadi had advised the king not to attack the Janissaries headlong, but the advice was ignored. Thus this war of 1444 ended in a disaster at the Battle of Várna when the great European coalition was crushed in an open battle by the Turks. The king himself was slain in it, some say as a penalty for breaking his oath. After the battle it became obvious that the traditional knightly warfare was of little use against the Ottomans. Indeed, the main army of the Sultan could not be defeated anywhere in Europe in open battle until the seventeenth century. After the death of the king, Hunyadi—being the strongest aristocrat—was elected the Governor of Hungary. He tried to join the Albanian Skanderbeg in Macedonia, but was defeated again by Murad II at Kosovo in 1448.

  When Constantinople fell in 1453, Hunyadi achieved new military victories on the Balkans. Despite this, Sultan Mehmed II led a huge army against Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade), the southernmost frontier castle of Hungary, in 1456. After a long and fierce siege, Hunyadi—with his peasant crusaders and heavy cavalry—broke out from the castle, took the enemy's cannons and turned them against the Turks. This was such an outstanding victory over the "invincible" Turkish army that all Europe celebrated it. Hearing the good news, Pope Callixtus III proclaimed a new Catholic holiday and ordered that all the bells in Christendom should toll at mid-day in order to commemorate the fight. János Hunyadi died from the plague soon after the siege, but the bells still ring all over Europe every day at twelve o'clock, and the Pope introduced a new holiday known as "The Configuration of Jesus," all of which proclaim that it is not Muslim land yet.

  Hunyadi's son was elected as King Matthias Corvinus. He had been fighting the Turks for almost ten years, taking back the castle of Galambóc (Golubac). He also took Jajca back in 1463 and controlled the rest of Bosnia. He could clearly see that however strong Hungary can be, its strength would not be enough against the Ottoman Empire—which is why he wanted to become the head of the Holy Roman Empire. This was the reason why Matthias led his campaigns against the Austrians and the Czechs, but in spite of his campaign's western plans, King Matthias also continued to support the wars against the Turks. The king had a constant regular army made up of mercenaries called the Black Army. He adopted the most modern artillery units and tactics of the age, using armored wagons with musketeers on them in the Czech Hussite fashion.

  He sent his troops to aid Prince Stephen III, ruler of Moldavia, who didn't want to accept the Sultan as his overlord and turned against him. The Romanian prince finally defeated the Turks with the help of Hungarian-Polish armies.

  The Turks attacked Hungary in 1475 and reached into the country as far as Nagyvárad (Oradea) but were driven out. The Muslims lost the castle of Szabács on the southern border the next year and suffered a sobering open defeat at Kenyérmező, Transylvania, in 1479. General Pál Kinizsi scattered their superior army during this tenth Hungarian-Turkish war. Kinizsi chased them deep into Serbia, gaining back territory again and again.

  A Turkish army took the city of Otranto from Naples in 1480 and
they began building out a beachhead against Italy. When asked, Matthias sent his brother-in-law, Neapolitan King Ferdinand II, two thousand one hundred soldiers at this time and they successfully recaptured Otranto. Very few of these soldiers, led by his General Balázs Magyar, returned home, and King Matthias was not even thanked for this help.

  In 1490, five years after he successfully invaded Vienna, and when he seemed close to achieving his goal of becoming Holy Roman Emperor, King Matthias died, allegedly after eating a rotten fig, although poison wasn't ruled out. At his death the kingdom fell into a severe economic crisis and a proverb was born: "Matthias died, so did justice." The role of saving Christendom from the Turks later went to the Habsburgs who wanted to take Hungary into their possession rather than defending it from the Ottoman Empire.

  Vladislaus II, the king after Matthias, sent the Black Army against the Turks. He wasn't careful enough about financing his wars so the mercenaries rebelled after they were not paid. Their leader, General Kinizsi, ended up having to fight and defeat his formerly faithful men. Taking advantage of the death of Matthias and the weakness of the new king, the Turks made an attempt to take Nándorfehérvár (Belgrád) in 1492 but General Kinizsi routed them and led his army to Serbia. He repeatedly beat the intruding enemy back in the following years and succeeded in keeping Nándorfehérvár (Belgrád) again in 1494 when its defenders wanted to surrender the fort. He led one more campaign against the Ottoman Empire that year but he died soon afterward. His efforts had been rewarded in the peace treaty of 1495 that was sealed between the King and a Sultan for the next three years.

  János (John) Corvinus, King Matthias' illegitimate son and Duke of Slavonia, defeated the Turks in 1499 in Bosnia. It was at the time when Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia Lanzol, the father of Cesare and Lucretia) organized an anti-Turkish alliance between Hungary, France, Poland and Venice in the year 1500. The Hungarian army was able to reach Bulgaria but it was fruitless, except for the capture of the city of Vidin. This war was ended with a peace treaty in 1504 that was extended in 1510.