1848
Page 18
There then followed weeks of feverish activity, in which Romanian journalists, students, teachers and priests criss-crossed Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina to prepare for the great assembly that was to be held in Blaj, with its schools and seminaries one of Transylvania’s intellectual centres. The authorities watched these movements anxiously, particularly when delegates from Moldavia and Wallachia were spotted. Yet no one, at this stage, wanted conflict with Hungary, nor to provoke an uprising of the peasantry. At a preliminary assembly of six thousand peasants held in Blaj on 30 April, Bărnuţiu urged his audience not to upset the inevitable process of reform by taking matters into their own hands: emancipation would come as surely as national freedom, but only if both were sought through legal, constitutional means. He none the less continued to reject union with Hungary, warning a committee drafting the Romanian ‘National Petition’ not to trust Hungarian promises of individual rights, since this would simply turn Romanians into citizens of a ‘Greater Hungary’.77 The great congress was finally held on the Field of Liberty outside Blaj on 15-17 May and was attended by forty thousand people, mostly peasants:
An entire people, wearing the same national dress and speaking the same language as our people at home, stood there, magnificent, bathed in sunshine; and among the peasant frocks one could notice, here and there, people clad in town clothes. These town clothes were worn by young intellectuals . . . a young generation of great courage and deep love for the Romanian people.78
The National Petition was intended for both the Transylvanian Diet and Emperor Ferdinand - but pointedly not for the Hungarian government. It demanded the abolition of serfdom, civil rights, Romanian representation in the Diet, as well as a separate parliament, militia and educational system for Romanians. A permanent committee was established as a provisional government, with Bărnuţiu among its membership, as well as a National Guard. There was no demand for full independence from Hungary, but it certainly looked that way to the Magyars. The Magyar governor, József Teleki, openly charged the committee with subversion and disbanded it.79 He had little trouble gaining the support of the Transylvanian Diet at Kluj, dominated as it was by the Magyar and Saxon elites, who dismissed the Blaj demands on 30 May and voted for union with Hungary regardless of Romanian sensibilities. The pill was at least sweetened by the abolition of peasant dues and labour services, but the political absorption of Transylvania into Hungary continued apace. On 10 June Emperor Ferdinand, under Hungarian pressure, ratified the act of 30 May. Batthyány could then legally insist that the National Petition had to be presented to the Hungarian parliament, not to the Emperor. Predictably, when a Romanian delegation duly presented it in Budapest, they were dismissed with the now familiar argument that, as free and equal citizens in a free country, they had no need of special national rights. This rejection left the Romanians with two options: union with the Danubian principalities or becoming a separate state within the Austrian Empire, with a direct link to the Habsburg crown. By June 1848 the first option suddenly looked possible, for, at that very moment, a revolution erupted across the Carpathians and the Transylvanian Alps.
Elsewhere, the southern border of the Kingdom of Hungary was the Military Frontier, where, in order to defend the Habsburg Empire against the Turks, since the sixteenth century the Serbs and Croats had been offered land free of seigneurial obligations between the Adriatic and the River Drava in return for military service. This system was gradually expanded until it encompassed Hungary’s entire border region as far as Transylvania. The largest military contribution was made by the Croats, who supplied eight border regiments, with their headquarters at Zagreb, compared to the nine raised on the remainder of the frontier. The Croats, however, had their own grievances: when not at war, they farmed in large communes called zadruga, which worked well for army recruitment but struggled to provide enough food to cope with the expanding population. Western Croatia, in particular, had become desperately poor by 1848, but the people remained loyal to the Austrian crown because their freedom from manorial obligations gave them a status above that of other peasants in those parts of ‘civil Croatia’ ruled by the Hungarian civilian government, who were serfs. Croatian nobles had been happy in the past to let the Hungarian Diet defend elite interests against imperial demands, but Magyar encroachments into Croatian affairs and Magyar nationalism had begun to alarm Serbian and Croatian intellectuals alike. Some Croats had begun to formulate the notion of unity of all Croatian provinces into one ‘Triune kingdom’, which had been ruled in the past as one state, or, like Ljudevit Gaj, they promoted the ‘Illyrian’ (later called the ‘Yugoslav’) ideal, which entailed the unity of all southern Slavs.
Initially, both Serbs and Croats reacted positively to the Hungarian revolution in March 1848: those who were still serfs awaited their freedom, while those on the frontier hoped that compulsory military service might be abolished. Clinging desperately on to their privileges, the Croatian gentry declared that only the Croatian Diet, the Sabor - not the Hungarian National Assembly - could abolish serfdom in Croatia, so the peasants rebelled, refusing to pay their dues or to carry out their labour obligations. On 25 March a Croatian national congress met in Zagreb, abolishing serfdom and demanding the same rights that the Hungarians were extracting from Vienna - essentially, full autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. These liberal demands were dangerous to Austria, Hungary and conservative Croats alike. These last were also ‘patriotic’ in so far as they wanted to defend the conservative structures of Croatian society against the revolutionary impulses emanating from the Magyars. The way to do this was to remain loyal to the Habsburg monarchy.
The beleaguered Habsburgs would find one of their champions from among these patriotic, conservative nobles: Baron Josip Jelačić. As a proud Croat who made the right ‘Illyrian’ noises, he received support from the anti-Magyar liberals in the Zagreb congress, but, as a loyal monarchist, he was the preferred leader of the conservatives. He was also seen as a strongman who could control the peasant uprising that was sweeping the region. In other words, he was the Croatian nobility’s best hope of both greater autonomy from Vienna and of retaining their authority over the peasantry. Jelačić was also respected as a commander among the border regiments. The Habsburg court, meanwhile, understood that if it wanted to restore its authority in Hungary, the loyalty and help of the Military Frontier would be invaluable. Jelačić, then a colonel in the 1st Banat Regiment, had been spotted as a shrewd and determined operator by an Austrian military commissioner in Zagreb, who recommended him to Vienna. To the imperial government, he seemed to be the man to harness Croatian patriotism against the Magyars, and he was duly appointed ban of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia on 23 March. He set a tone of gritty and determined defiance against Hungary with a blunt order that, until the Croatian parliament met, all districts should accept orders from no one except himself, as the Emperor’s representative.80 Two weeks later he was given command of the Military Frontier. Early in May - spuriously claiming a Turkish threat - he placed some units on a war footing and refused to recognise the legality of the government in Budapest. He also asked the War Ministry in Vienna to transfer military supplies from Austria to Croatia; the new, conservative war minister, Count Theodor von Latour, willingly obliged. When the Hungarians protested against Jelačić’s aggressive defiance, however, the Austrian government as a whole - which, aware as it was of its continued weakness, was still trying to keep on good relations with the Magyars - felt that Jelačić was moving too far, too fast. The Emperor yielded to the Magyar government on 7 May and placed all troops in Hungary and the Military Frontier under the command of the new War Ministry in Budapest. This allowed the Hungarian government to appoint Baron János Hrabovszky to lead the imperial forces to restore order along the southern border.81 His first targets were not the Croats but the Serbs.
The Serbs supported Jelačić’s appointment as ban. On 13 May, with the backing of the independent Serbian principality centred in Belgrade, eight thousand H
ungarian Serbs met at Sremski Karlovci (Karlóca in Hungarian) and proclaimed an autonomous province, Voivodina, under an elected executive committee, the Glavni Odbor, and a prince (voivoda), Stevan Šupljikac, a colonel from the border regiments. Like Croatia, Voivodina recognised the ultimate sovereignty of the Habsburg Emperor, but not the authority of the Hungarian government. Yet, when the Serbs also restored the Orthodox see of Karlovci and proclaimed Metropolitan Josip Rajačić to be its Patriarch, the imperial government refused to recognise both. The Glavni Odbor also began to enforce its authority in southern Hungary by inciting Serbian peasants against Magyar landlords and Hungarian, Romanian and Saxon farmers alike. The crisis developed into open war between Hungary and the Voivodina Serbs, with both sides claiming their loyalty to the Emperor. The Serbs, supported by their own troops from the border regiments, held their own against the Hungarians, fighting off an attack on Sremski Karlovci on 12 June. In the Banat (a mixed Serb, Romanian and German region in southern Hungary), the Serbs and the Romanians nearly came to blows since the Romanian majority struggled for recognition of their own separate Orthodox Church as against the Serbs, who recognised Rajačić as their metropolitan. Unsurprisingly, therefore (and unlike their fellow countrymen in Transylvania), the Banat Romanians, led by Eftimie Murgu, expressed their loyalty to Hungary and asked permission for their own separate congress, which the Hungarian authorities, seeking to counterbalance the Serbs, willingly granted. The Romanian Orthodox congress was held in Lugoj on 27 June, where the ten thousand delegates emphasised that the Banat was not a Serbian province, but its official language and church would be Romanian, while remaining within the Kingdom of Hungary.82
For Jelačić, the challenge was how to extend his authority over Serbian insurgents and then harness their energies for his purposes. Some of the Serbian border regiments certainly rallied to the ban, but others preferred to back the Glavni Odbor. Meanwhile, the Hungarian war minister, Hrabovszky, armed with formal military authority, was urging the borderers back to obedience. Consequently, the Serbian section of the Military Frontier was torn between three centres of power. The waters were muddied further when the Croatian Sabor opened in Zagreb on 5 June and, in deference to the Illyrian ideal, voted to invite a delegation from Voivodina. It was a move that could only provoke the Hungarians, which was precisely why Jelačić himself encouraged such behaviour. At the opening of the parliament, he took his oath from none other than Metropolitan Rajačić. As a Croat, Jelačić then took Catholic Mass, but he also held a service of thanksgiving in Zagreb’s Orthodox church. All this publicly underlined his support for the idea that the Serbs and Croats were a ‘single-blooded nation of two faiths’.83
Both sides - Magyar and south Slav - now dashed to gain the imperial blessing for their conflicting claims. When the Sabor sent a deputation to Emperor Ferdinand, they arrived at Innsbruck to find that Batthyány had beaten them to it. On 10 June an imperial decree deposed Jelačić, confirmed Hrabovszky’s powers, and gave Latour a slap on the wrist, reminding the Austrian war minister that control of the Military Frontier fell to Budapest, not Vienna. None the less, through the summer, Latour continued to send money quite openly to the Military Frontier’s treasury. He may have had good reasons to do so, since the Hungarians were understandably reluctant to provide the Croats with money and supplies, while Austrians needed the Croats not necessarily against Hungary, but as reliable recruits for the war in Italy.84 In any case, the dismissal of Jelačić did nothing to curb the resistance of the southern Slavs: Jelačić, determined to prove his loyalty to the Habsburgs, had begun to concentrate his forces on the Drava and, already aroused by Magyar pressure, the Sabor closed ranks in support of the ban. The Magyars now faced the very real possibility of a full-blown invasion from Croatia.85 Yet the imperial government was still unwilling to countenance such a drastic means of restoring Habsburg authority because it was already fighting in northern Italy.
IV
The early days of the Italian revolutions were dark for the Austrians, but exhilarating for Italian liberals. By April the Austrians had been pushed back to the four fortresses of the Quadrilateral in the north, while further south Pope Pius IX still seemed to be fulfilling his early liberal promise and offering his leadership to a rejuvenating Italy. Having proposed a customs union in November 1847, Pius now suggested some form of defensive league for the Italian states, to which Tuscany and Naples immediately subscribed. Meanwhile, there was a widespread popular movement across Italy to join the war against Austria, putting Pius under intense pressure to commit to the anti-Austrian conflict. The moderate liberal Pellegrino Rossi, who shared Vincenzo Gioberti’s vision of an Italian confederation under the Pope, but no supporter of the war, declared that ‘the national sentiment and the enthusiasm for war are a sword, a weapon, a powerful force; either Pius IX will grasp it firmly in his hand, or the hostile factions will take it and turn it against him and against the Papacy’.86 Alexander Herzen, in Rome with his family at the time, was even blunter: Pius, he remarked, ‘must either withdraw from rising events or ingloriously hit the ground and be crushed or be dragged along against his will’.87 In fact, privately Pius viewed the early defeats of the Austrians as providential, but the papacy had a moral and religious obligation not to go to war unless in self-defence. So he hedged his bets, hoping that Austria would be thoroughly defeated before he had to commit any papal troops into action against what was, after all, a Catholic monarchy.88 The Pope’s dilemma explains the ambiguity of his orders to the Piedmontese general Giacomo Durando, whom he had invited to command his soldiers. These men - seven thousand in all - were marched to the northern frontier of the Papal States, from where they were to offer the Piedmontese invasion under King Charles Albert their support - but to what extent and how were left deliberately unclear.
Patriotic enthusiasm in Rome was kept on the boil by a popular radical leader, the wholesale merchant Angelo Brunetti, better known by his moniker Ciceruacchio, and by the tall, dark and fiery figure of Father Alessandro Gavazzi. A Barnabite monk, the latter had been criss-crossing the country like a medieval mendicant friar, electrifying his audiences with his rallying cry: ‘Fuori i barbari! ’ (‘Out with the barbarians!’). When the news of Milan’s Five Glorious Days arrived in Rome, Gavazzi and Ciceruacchio presided over a ceremony in the Colosseum, in a scene described by Herzen: ‘the setting sun came through the arches in bright strips. The innumerable crowd filled the centre; on the arches, on the walls, in the half-ruined loges people crowded - people sat, stood, or lay everywhere. In one of the prominent loges was Pater Gavazzi, tired, pouring sweat, but ready to speak again.’ Gavazzi, who offered his services as chaplain to the Roman legion that was now being formed, declared that the Christian cross and the Italian tricolour stood side by side in this struggle: it was a holy war. Below one of the arches bedecked with the Italian and Lombard flags, young men signed up to join the legion. ‘It grew dark in the courtyard, and torches burned near this strange recruits’ levy ; the people remained in semi-darkness, the wind shook the flags, and frightened birds, unaccustomed to such visitors, circled overhead, and all this was embraced by the gigantic frame of the Colosseum.’ Two days later Herzen saw the first volunteer detachments setting out and, revolutionary though he was, wondered how many of these fresh-faced young men would not return: ‘War is a savage, disgusting proof of human folly, generalized brigandage, justified murder, the apotheosis of violence - and mankind still has to fight before there is a possibility of peace!’89
The Roman volunteers, nicknamed crociati (crusaders) left Rome on 25-6 March: comprising ten thousand raw recruits and civic guards under the republican Colonel Andrea Ferrari, they boosted the papacy’s contribution to the war to seventeen thousand men.90 In Tuscany moderates like Baron Bettino Ricasoli joined the Florentine democrats in criticising Grand Duke Leopold’s premier, the Marchese Ridolfi, for his lukewarm attitude towards the war. At a great public meeting in Florence on 26 March, watched by Leopold himself, Rica
soli whipped up popular passions for the ‘crusade’ and Leopold had to cool tempers by agreeing to send a force of some 7,770 men to join the Piedmontese campaign in Lombardy.91 Southern Italy made a contribution, too: even the fractious Sicilians, who wanted independence from Naples before they wanted to be any part of a unified Italy, sent a symbolic force of a hundred men northwards.92 In Naples the patriotic Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso, herself from Lombardy, hired a steamer to carry her back to northern Italy, but found her lodgings besieged by Neapolitans clamouring to go with her to join the fighting. On 29 March, with the princess bearing the Italian tricolour, her ship steamed out of port, passing through waters crammed with smaller craft saluting her and the 184 volunteers bound for the war.93 They were to be joined by a much larger, regular Neapolitan force under the command of the Napoleonic veteran and former revolutionary exile General Guglielmo Pepe. Now sixty-eight years old, Pepe wore a cocked hat topped with a towering white feather and at his side clanked an enormous sabre that was a relic of his younger days. 94 Amnestied by King Ferdinand of Naples, he returned from exile on the day of Belgiojoso’s departure and was initially invited to form a government by the monarch, keen to quiet liberal demands by appointing one of their own. Pepe, however, made demands that were far too radical for the King’s taste, including the immediate departure of the army for Lombardy.
Ferdinand managed to force Pepe to resign, but he could not withstand the popular pressure to go to war against Austria. On 7 April he formally joined the conflict, now asking Pepe to command his forty-thousand-strong army. Pepe accepted, but found his efforts to organise his forces hampered at every turn: the foot-dragging King, he claimed later, ‘was determined to do all he could to ensure that the army remained numerically weak, lacking in everything, and incapable, in all, of lending powerful support to the Italian cause’. Ferdinand was certainly reluctant to commit troops to a war that, for one, would primarily help to aggrandise his great rival, Charles Albert, while also diverting Neapolitan energies from the more urgent task of destroying Sicilian separatism. These troops none the less sailed three weeks later, disembarking at Ancona for the march northwards. 95 Having accomplished this task, the Neapolitan squadron, consisting of seven frigates, five of steam and two of sail, and two brigs, then set course for Venice to help raise the Austrian naval blockade. The vessels dropped anchor in the lagoon on 16 May, to a rapturous welcome.96 Yet on land progress was less promising. On 3 May, the day he joined his troops, the exasperated Pepe received an order from the King’s new war minister telling him that when he reached the south bank of the River Po, which marked the northern frontier of the Papal States, he was to wait for further orders. Pepe exploded with rage: what sort of general, he asked, could possibly sit on one side of a river while, on the other, the Piedmontese and Venetians were sacrificing themselves for Italy’s honour? Worse was to come, for when Pepe’s troops reached the Po, they numbered only fourteen thousand, not the full forty thousand he had expected.97