Читать книгу The Evolution of Hungary and its place In European History - Pálengó Teleki - Страница 9

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LAST time we went into a good deal of geographical detail, and you will understand why, for American history proves to you sufficiently the need of geographical knowledge. Let me remind you of the important rôle the Appalachians played in the consolidation of the Thirteen Colonies and the forming of the nation; also of the rôle the Cumberland Gap, leading to Kentucky and Tennessee, played in the winning of the West. Or shall I mention here the rôle of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers in the formation of the Empire State; or of the Mississippi—which reminds me so much in appearance of our Tisza (Theiss) River—in the Civil War, or in the economic development of the country before the time of the railways? Geographical knowledge is indispensable for dealing with all political and economic questions.

Today we shall turn to history.

It is not necessary to explain why I go back in the illustration of present conditions to former and even to very remote times. In this country, you are well acquainted with the fact that your history and the forming of the nation can only be understood if looked upon in the light of its origin. Likewise with us, if one wishes to study the racial question in Hungary, it is not enough to go back fifteen or twenty years and look at what our immediate predecessors have done. We must go back to the eighteenth century, to the settlement of Hungary after the Turkish rule, and to the end of the sixteenth century, when the Turks came in with all force; we must even go back as far as the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries to understand the manner of this first colonization. Because all these things have a very great influence on the situation which existed before the war and on all that took place during the war.

Fig. 7. Comparison of area of the United States of America with present Kingdom of Hungary and the “succession states,” which share in and extend outside the territories of former Austria-Hungary. Dotted line represents pre-war Hungary; 1, Poland; 2, Czechoslovakia; 3, territories of Tyrol and Trentino, ceded by Austria to Italy; 4, Austrian republic; 5, Eastern Galicia; 6, Roumania; 7, Yugoslavia; 8, Free State of Fiume, formerly Hungarian; present Kingdom of Hungary has solid black boundary and printed name Hungary.

Or, another example: If you wish, for instance, to understand the economic conditions in Hungary, especially that of our great industry, you must go back to the eighteenth century and see that at the time of the highest development of mercantilism in Europe, when other states were constructing the basis of their economic wealth, Hungary was practically a colony of the Austrian Empire. These are just two examples of why I have to go back in history. In this historical review only those main facts will be touched upon which are of great importance in their effect on life and labor and on political evolution in modern times.

In my first lecture I said that before some one power took into its possession all the Basin of the Middle Danube up to the crest of the protecting mountains, there was no stable political organization. The situation of the territory as a point of convergence from east, south, and west now came to full significance.

It was at the end of the ninth century that the Magyars entered and occupied the land. Even earlier, while living in what is now Moldavia and Bessarabia (provinces of Roumania today) they seem to have been acquainted with the plains of the Danube and the Tisza. It was probably by the northeastern passes, across Ruthenia of today, that they entered the country—the extreme western part of the steppe-belt, similar to the continuous plain of southern Russia. The way they came was that of all the migrating peoples. The migration movement, a consequence of climatical changes and of the destruction of irrigation works in Asia, pressed them, wave by wave, from home to home, westward.

A prominent American geographer, Mr. Ellsworth Huntington, wrote a splendid book on the subject, “The Pulse of Asia.” May I call your attention also to an article which a Hungarian colleague of mine, Professor Cholnoky, wrote in the excellent volume which the American Geographical Society published in memory of the Transcontinental Excursion in 1912? My colleague compared the situation in Asia, the desiccation and the importance of irrigation works, with the situation in the southwestern states of America before Europeans came there, i.e., the situation of the Pueblo Indians, who were very much dependent upon the amount of rainfall.

We have no precise knowledge of the origin of all the tribes which constituted the Magyar people at the time they entered their future home. But we see that in a moment of great danger, in one of those moments of hot struggle which gave a new impulse to migration, there arises the man, the man whom Asia’s races needed to form peoples from the related but scattered ranks and to lead them to new conquests. The great peoples of Asia—Huns, Hiungnŭs, Yuë-Tchis, Mongols, and others—were all more or less collected from the same or related tribes. It was the will of the great chiefs, of the Attilas, Kublai Khans, and Tamerlanes, who raided the plains and put the stamp of the chief’s own clan on all the peoples they touched. The man of the Magyars arose in the person of Árpád. He probably led his people across the passes of modern Ruthenia, but perhaps also along the lower Danube—that is not quite determined by historians.

As to the origin of the tribes, the Finnish and Turkish affinities of our language lead to two different theories, studied at an early date by highly developed schools of Hungarian etymologists. There is much controversy between those advocating the Turkish and those believing in the Finnish origin. But the most probable truth is that Turkish warriors subjugated a greater mass of Finnish fishermen and farmers. Our language is more like Finnish; our national utensils, weapons, clothing, ornaments, and other objects are more akin to the Turkish. That is only natural. The master took over the language of the greater mass, language not being a question of pride in those days of changing and mingling communities. The servant imitated the dress of the master and must have been proud of it. How things happened is easy to understand. Turkish shepherds and warriors were driven by drought from their pasture-lands in Asia. They fell upon peasants acquainted with irrigation, destroyed their works, and conquerors and conquered went forth to seek a new home. This may have happened in that part of Asia nearest Europe, e.g., in Turkestan. Through the Uralo-Caspian gap, between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, these waves inundated Europe on the great Ukrainian Steppe. Here they probably met the remnants of an indigenous population, which had been all but drowned in the first waves of the great migration of peoples and which were mixed with various elements of all the peoples who had passed that way for centuries. They also found Finns, and subsequently Slavs. These Finnish and Slavic people had filtered slowly southward from the forest-belt of central Russia to the steppe-belt. The forest-belt was rather quiet territory and migrations did not take place en masse. When the people of the forest-belt came into the steppe-belt the waves of the migrating warrior peoples swept them away, picked them up and carried them on into Europe. All these peoples together made a conglomerate mass, rolling continuously westward, sometimes as a coherent people governed by a warrior-prince, sometimes as a disintegrated mass of quarreling tribes. It is my opinion that Magyars and Bulgars, Avars and Huns, Scythians and others were composed of similar elements, only the percentage of the various elements in each tribe being different.

The Magyars belonged to this group of peoples, very much mixed by migration. Still they were different in character from the Huns and Avars, who entered our plains before them, over the same route. This is proved by the difference in the choice of their headquarters and settlements. Whereas the center of gravity of the real nomad peoples of the Hun-Avar type had always been somewhere among the marshes, pastures, and woods of the banks of the Tisza, where they were protected against surprise by enemies, the Magyars first occupied and settled those territories which are most suitable for the cultivation of cereals. You see these territories in Figure 8, an adaptation of a map from Lavisse’s “History of France,” a map drawn by our illustrious master of the University of Paris, Professor Paul Vidal de la Blache. Stippled areas indicate the forest land. The loess (black) is the land which was best for the growing of cereals.

The fact that the Magyars, when entering the country, did not settle in the marshes and woods but in this last-mentioned part proves that the Hungarians were much more farmers, much more agriculturists, and a little more settled people than their migratory predecessors.

Fig. 8. Forest land and loess-covered land in Hungary (after Vidal de la Blache).

When the Magyars entered these lands they found in Transdanubia, the former Roman province of Pannonia, remnants and marks of a very high civilization, especially of the cultivation of vineyards. The Hungarians settled in this region and continued the work of farming and vine-growing. There is another proof of the Hungarians having been farmers to a much greater extent than the other migrating tribes. The words for wheat, barley, and rape, for sheaf, sickle, and plough, for vineyard and wine, the words for plowing and reaping, are of Magyar origin, proving that the Magyars brought agriculture with them from their former eastern homes. They raised a great many pigs.

There must have been many more Finnish fishermen among them than in former throngs, for the art of fishing was highly developed among them. But this was surely not the only cause of their more advanced civilization. They had not only warlike but also peaceful intercourse with the Byzantines, when, in the eighth and ninth centuries, they lived in those regions which are now western Ukraine, Moldavia, and Bessarabia, in the neighborhood of the then flourishing Bulgarian Empire and fairly near to the Byzantine Empire.

This trend toward more settled occupations was happily fused with the high political sense of the nomad Turks. It enabled them to solve the dilemma which inevitably led every nomadic people, venturing so far into Europe, either to ultimate extinction or to adjustment and assimilation with the civilization of Europe. Very few of these migrating peoples chose the latter and those who sprang from the same group as the Hungarians—Huns and Avars—were swept away by the reaction of the European nations. But the Hungarians chose the other way and the nomad people solidified into a nation and formed a state. This was an important step not only for us but for the history of Europe, which would have taken quite another course if the Hungarians had been swept away from the territory they then occupied.

Not less important was it that our ancestors, when they had to choose between Byzantine and Western civilization and connections, chose the latter.

The third remarkable fact in this line was that our first king did not ask help and recognition from the Emperor, but from the Pope, preserving freedom and independence when he accepted civilization. Still the neighboring German or Holy Roman Empire, as it was called, and its evolution, exercised the greatest influence upon the new political body. This influence of German institutions is quite natural because of the proximity of the two nations and on account of the ease of communication through the open gap of the Danube valley towards Vienna. We can follow this influence through all the centuries. But it was always strongly counterbalanced by the resistance offered by ancestral traditions and by the trend of national evolution. I call your attention to this double line of evolution, to this struggle which is characteristic of our history in the twentieth century as it was in the eighth century. The preservation of the ancestral traditions kept the Magyars from making an unnatural leap from the nomadic stage immediately into feudalism of the type of the late Carolingian times and directed them towards the forms of a patriarchal kingdom.

The political consolidation of the country, the strengthening of the central royal power, is coupled with the name of our first king, St. Stephen. Still, St. Stephen was not the first to introduce Western civilization and Christianity into Hungary; his father had done this before him. His father had remained a pagan, however, and it may perhaps interest you that when he was asked by the missionaries, who came into the country at his request, how it was possible that he, the Chief (he was not yet a king, but a chief), who had asked them to come and to spread Christian truth among the pagan Magyars, continued himself the sacrifice of the white horse (this was the great religious ceremony of the pagan Magyars and was done before and after every great enterprise), he replied: “The great chief of Hungary is a chief great enough to have two religions at the same time.”

St. Stephen was the man who broke the power of the pagan chieftains, and with this he broke down paganism and also the clan system. But this last was broken down only politically. Economically it persisted; it survived in the form of common holding of land. The struggle which St. Stephen began for the right of private property lasted far down into the reigns of his successors. Great properties were given by St. Stephen to the bishops, and the religious orders, and to his partisans in the struggles against the great pagan chiefs. They all in return became dependent upon the king, bound to serve him with their arms. So a central, royal force was formed, apart from and opposed to the old clan system, with its trend towards separatism and segregation.

Still, the Hungarian royal system was not feudal, as was England under King John. The proud nomad chief or warrior did not know the “Ich dien” (I serve) of the medieval German knight. He saw in his king the chief of his newly united clan; and much of the intimacy of the nomad clan was preserved, especially its political body.

I want to point this out because there is no gap between this primitive political body and our constitution of today. The right of the nomad warrior to take his part in great decisions concerning the doings and the fate of the clan was never quite suppressed by even our strongest kings.

All of you are familiar with the Magna Charta of King John as the keystone of constitutional freedom in England. You may be less familiar with the fact that among the continental nations Hungary was first to obtain a similar solemn pledge for the respect of civic liberties. I speak of the Golden Bull of King Andrew, given in 1222. Here begins a very marked analogy in the development of Hungarian constitutional life with that of England, though entirely independently, and most likely in ignorance of the latter. This parallel lasted as long as Hungary remained master of her destiny.

If we can speak of democracy in those remote times, and we surely find there the origins of the most inspiring ideals of our own times, it is worthy of note that the great charter of Hungarian liberties, in some respects, went even beyond the Magna Charta. Thus, the Golden Bull explicitly grants to the nation the right of armed resistance against the king, should the latter disregard his solemn pledges. This right to resort to arms against the king proved most precious and was frequently resorted to in succeeding centuries by a nation imbued with an indomitable love of freedom.

While the privileged class of freemen was, of course, practically the only one to enjoy the rights and privileges granted by the constitution, a situation to which you find an analogy in this country up to the time of the Civil War, the Hungarian constitution explicitly declared the full equality of all freemen or yeomen in the exercise of constitutional liberties. This equality in rights and privileges was most jealously guarded against the encroachments of the wealthiest landowners.

A German witness of the twelfth century, Bishop Otto von Greysing, tells us about the kingdom of our national dynasty. He says:

“The king’s power was far stronger than that of any German prince or even the Emperor. The administration was strongly centralized. The king named and deposed his own barons and lord lieutenants, and everyone obeyed him. Still, he was no despot, like the Byzantine or Russian rulers, and in all great decisions he asked the opinion of the great nobles or captains, and there were assemblies held at all times.”

I have traced the history of the migration of the Magyar race, of the clan system, and of the foundation of the kingdom. At the same time a parallel evolution took place, constituting an important coincidence.

I speak of the national amalgamation of, first, the already fairly well amalgamated Turk and Finn conquerors; second, the scattered old inhabitants, for the most part Slavs; third, the kindred nomad peoples coming later from the East; and fourth, all those, knights and serving people, Franks, Germans, Italians, Slavs, and even Greeks—who, at the hospitable call of our king, came from the west and settled in Hungary. This took place during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries; in the last-named it was practically carried to completion.

This absorption of foreign elements itself contributed to the dying out of the clan organization and worked hand in hand with the intention of the king to form a new order of society, organized on the ruins of the tribal system. In the struggles of this movement warriors were reduced to serfdom and serfs raised to freedom, and all elements of the nation were mingled and shaken together. The classes of medieval Hungary were formed regardless of nationality and origin. The ancestors of the Bocskays and Báthorys, who were later ruling princes of Transylvania, and other great families seem to have been German; those of the Rákóczis, princes of Transylvania and the great heroes of our struggles for freedom, were probably Slav; those of the Lórándffys, another very great family in former times, were Italian. But in the whole territory where the Magyars settled, all these peoples soon became one in language and formed a single nation, just as racially mixed, but also just as strongly united as the French in France.

We have now reviewed the political evolution of the nation and the social and racial amalgamation, and may turn to a third evolution which ran parallel with those and which was of very great influence upon the fate of the country. The Árpáds—that is the name of our first national dynasty—created a peculiar mechanism to protect the frontier of the land, which they, with happy foresight, recognized to lie in the Carpathians. From the center, where the Magyars had settled, they pushed in every direction towards the crests of the surrounding mountains. They developed a system common to eastern Slavs and also common to Turanian races, as far east as China, i.e., the system of “march-belts” or “Clausæ.” The Hungarians left a broad belt of land, wild and uncultivated, surrounding the whole country. Inside this belt were the villages of the frontiersmen. This duty of protection was entrusted chiefly to Magyars or kindred tribes, Jazyges, Petchenegs, and partly also to German settlers.

If we were to draw a map of the settlements in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we should find the southern lowlands and Transdanubia densely, the northeastern part of the lowlands less densely populated; we should see the smaller basins near the Carpathian boundary settled, but the great woodland between these border settlements and the lowlands uninhabited. Only in some valleys do we see the population of the lowlands entering slowly into the mountain regions.

The occupation of the intermediate regions between the border-belts and the lowlands, especially large in the north and east, was a much slower process. This early pioneer work was carried out for military reasons, the wood-clearing going hand in hand with the building of royal fortresses. The way into the virgin forests of the northwestern highlands was not opened until the thirteenth century, when our kings brought in Slav tribesmen, the white Croats, the ancestors of the Slovaks of today. They came in small groups, as workmen, organized according to a German system of forest-clearing under the command of Schultheissen, or village mayors, practically contractors.

After the devastation of Hungary by the Mongols in 1244, a danger which menaced the whole of Europe, Roumanians began to filter into the eastern mountains, filling those parts of the land which had been left uninhabited, between the German and Magyar frontier territories and the main group of Magyars. If you look at the country today where Magyars and Roumanians live together, you will still find the mountain portions, and especially the tops, settled by Roumanians, and the lowlands settled by Magyars, who also enter the mouths of the valleys; because the one has always been fond of the mountains and the other has always been fond of the plain.

You see here also an explanation of the fact that Magyars, Széklers—which name is not that of a separate nation, but means in Turkish simply “frontiersmen”—are to be found on the borders and are separated from the main mass of their kinsmen by hordes of alien people. Therefore, in the east, in Transylvania, Roumanian settlements and Magyar settlements are dovetailed into one another, I should like to say resembling the emblem of the Northern Pacific Railway, which some of you may know.

Thus, a measure taken a thousand years ago caused headache in the Peace Conference and will probably continue to produce sleepless nights in the League of Nations.

Magyars have never been enthusiastic over town life. Our first towns were founded by German settlers. These Germans, as well as those who settled on the borders, the Saxons in the south and east of Transylvania and those who settled in the northern part of the country, in the Zips, were granted great privileges. The frontiersmen had a wide autonomy. In the towns no one, not even a Magyar nobleman, could settle without the burghers’ permission, and this was seldom granted.

In 1405 the towns acquired the right of representation in parliament. They had great influence on the development of our commerce and system of economics. They were the first to pay a part of their tribute in money. This kind of payment increased and so laid the real foundations of the money system, introduced into economic life in place of exchange and barter. The king, of course, had the coins made in his own mint, but only the life of the town and the market could make money the real and effective vehicle of economic life.

As a result the king was no longer the only link between his land and the west. It was a great contrast to his position in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when he introduced the Christian religion and was the patron of missionaries; he called in the western settlers and created the first intercourse with foreign powers.

This trend of economic development and the growth of great fortunes, which I have mentioned, finally weakened the power of the king, a consequence which becomes strongly apparent in the early part of the thirteenth century. Large grants in return for help against rebellious pagan chiefs and later against rival pretenders to the throne, and on the other hand, the development of the money system of economics, encouraged the growth of great private properties and independence of central royal authority.

I mentioned pretenders to the throne. The usual and acknowledged right of succession during the reign of our old national dynasty was based on blood relationship. The conflict of primogeniture and seniority led to a struggle which was never decided in principle, though in practice succession of the son prevailed. I should like to call attention to the fact that here you see the result of Western European influence, where succession of the son was the tradition as opposed to the Asiatic tradition of seniority. When the male line of the national dynasty died out the nation elected its kings freely, but there practically was no divergence from the principle of electing them from among the descendants of female branches of the old dynasty.

As long as the national kings reigned, the strength of blood and tradition held in check the centrifugal forces of an infiltering German feudalism. As soon as the dynasty died out, the power of oligarchy raised its head, very late in comparison with Germany and the West in general. The Hungarian oligarchs were no separate class. The freemen or nobles, who were the successors of the warriors of olden days, all had the same rights, and were equal before the law. There was “one and only one nobility” (una eademque nobilitas), as we say in our law. The rights of this class were extensive! These were handed down, as I have said, from those of the nomad warrior. The nobility, the freemen, jealously guarded their rights and strove to enlarge them. The political sense of some great kings and the weakness of others, as in England, contributed to enlarge these rights and to create a strong system of national control.

The following are the main characteristics of the Hungarian constitutional life at the very end of the Middle Ages: Elective kingship, oath and diploma of coronation, both confirming the rights of the nation; the rights of the nobles to resist their king, laid down in general terms of written law; a representative parliamentary assembly of the nobility and towns; the duty of the Estates, the body of all nobles or freemen, to render military service, and as a reward their exemption from taxes; and finally, the County, again very much as in England, a decentralized, special organization of the main body of the nobility, meaning in those times the whole nation (from Szekfü).

To this I must add a few words to enable you to understand to what extent Hungary from the very beginning was a constitutional monarchy, where every freeman, without distinction of origin and race, took part in directing the affairs of his land.

No detail of Hungarian history, from the Middle Ages to our own days, can be understood without knowledge of the County, which has been of the highest importance in our history.

This institution was founded in the eleventh century by our first king, St. Stephen. It meant the royal castles and their environs, with jurisdiction only over the common people who were not freemen. In the beginning of the thirteenth century the freemen of the Counties, old tribesmen as well as freed descendants of the conquered races, began to rally and to hold their assemblies with royal permission in order to protect themselves against the encroachments of the great landowners. The freemen, the king’s warriors, became transformed into the landed nobility of the kingdom.

Development continued along these lines until in the fifteenth century we see that the County has become a complete political body. The nobility of each county sends deputies to Parliament, provided with strict instructions; laws and decrees are promulgated at the County Assembly and executed by County officials; the County enacts regulations, and it exercises jurisdiction through its courts. From the sixteenth century the County becomes the stronghold of constitutionalism against the absolute and centralistic efforts of the foreign dynasty, the Hapsburgs. The County’s weapons were the right of refusal to collect taxes and to call recruits not voted by the Parliament, and the right to refuse to execute unlawful decrees and ordinances. These rights are substantially still in force and were last exercised with effect in 1904. Here you may perhaps allow me to mention a personal experience.

In 1904 the Government tried to govern the country by ordinances lacking the sanction of Parliament. The Counties replied by making use of their right of resistance. Our County Assembly was called together by the Second Lord Lieutenant, who is an elected county official, but when we wanted to enter the County House the First Lord Lieutenant, who is appointed a representative of the Government, forbade our going in. He enforced this order by pickets of gendarmes, corresponding to your state troops. This body of men is paid and officered by the central government but is nominally under the orders of the county officials. In these days of constitutional conflict, however, I, who was at that time an elected county official, was faced by the bayonet of the gendarme of my own district, whose chief I was in the administration. Of course, the soldier himself laughed at the curious situation which, by the way, was by no means dangerous. But it shows you the possibility of the struggle between Government and County, and how far these troubles can go.

The military and the financial administration passed from royal officials to those elected by the County Assembly, as we have seen, and it remained thus until 1870. It was the military organization of the Counties which fought the long and heroic struggle in self-defense and for the protection of Europe against the Turks. But before I come to this warfare which had such direful consequences, let me tell you something more about the factors in whom power within the state was vested. One of these, as you have seen, was the small landed nobility, which rallied in a body in the Counties. The second was the bishops of the church and the monks, enjoying privileges bestowed by the kings, and endowed with rich estates. The third group was the great landowners, the oligarchs, a power which rose suddenly when the national dynasty died out in 1301. Still, the glory of the oligarchs did not last much longer than half a century. It was destroyed by the great Anjous of Naples, Robert-Charles and Louis, elected to the throne of Hungary in the fourteenth century. As trained politicians they wisely judged the real situation and concealed the interests of the state in concessions to the landowners, giving them special rights but also imposing on them special duties. Thus the nobility became divided in the fourteenth century. A class of high nobles, of peers—though without titles—was created, with the privilege of having their own soldiers, but with the duty of providing a certain force at the king’s command. In all other respects the rights of all the nobles remained the same. The institution was undoubtedly feudal, but the power of the king and the State being founded also on the existence of the small nobility and its County system, and such factors as the Magyar and German frontiersmen, Széklers and Saxons, with their large territorial autonomies, on the towns, and on the Church—feudalism in Hungary never became paramount and the unity of the State was always preserved intact. The nation herself kept watch over this unity, feeling that it involved her own vital interests. The nation disliked to see these interests exposed to doubtful enterprises and conquests.

I told you that only a few of our kings passed the Carpathians. When in the twelfth century they participated in the struggles of the Russo-Polish principalities, and became the arbitrators, and when in the thirteenth century the King of Hungary helped the first Hapsburg Rudolph against the King of Bohemia, their enterprises remained without consequences. And when Louis the Great, of the Anjou dynasty, gained Poland’s crown by peaceful means, and extended his power to the Baltic marshlands, Hungary remained absolutely disinterested.

Greater interest was directed towards the west and south, where the continuation of the Great Plain invited advance. In each direction we had to defend our independence,—against the German and Byzantine Empires. Frederick Barbarossa and Manuel Comnenos both attempted the conquest of Hungary—the latter fought sixteen years for it—but neither was successful. A much greater danger to the country arose when for the first time it had to defend Europe against a new terrible and mighty foe. It is proof of Hungary’s fame and strength at that time, however, that the whole strength of the Mongolian forces invading Europe was directed against Hungary, the main force in a mass against the Ruthenian passes, the left wing in three groups against the Transylvanian borders, the right one in three groups through Poland, turning southwards against our northern mountain-land. Hungary succumbed, but the Mongols soon retired and the country recovered.

The direction in which the national dynasty made a consistent fight was for access to the sea, which was attained in the beginning of the twelfth century by Koloman the Bibliophile, the wise king, who also prohibited the burning of witches. The triune kingdom of later centuries, Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia, was for a time the heritage of the younger sons of the kings of Hungary.

Towards the west, there was a continual struggle, but it was marked by no great actions and enterprises. Whenever there was a moment of weakness, as after the death of the great reformer, St. Stephen, or after the death of the last king of Árpád’s and Stephen’s dynasty, the German neighbors tried to interfere.

The fate of the Balkans, towards which the lowland country is most open, affected the country’s history most of all. Three times a union with the Byzantine Empire threatened. In the thirteenth century the reviving power of the Bulgarian Empire threatened Hungary. Actions, of course, brought reactions, and twice the Hungarian kingdom reached the main divide of the Balkans, once in the twelfth century and again under its great king, Louis of Anjou.

Under Louis of Anjou, Hungary became one of the Great Powers of Europe. The lands of this king extended over an area three times that of pre-war Hungary. After having balanced for centuries between the German and Byzantine Empires, Hungary passed into the sphere of French influence and of French-Italian culture. The great king’s court became a meeting-place for the scholars and artists of his native land. Hungarians visited the west; the king’s Hungarian troops conquered for him the land of his origin, Naples, and fought his Italian wars against Venice and Genoa. King Louis forced these states to recognize freedom of trade and navigation on the Adriatic and Hungarian shipping took its place on the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, King Louis had no son and his son-in-law, Sigismund of Luxemburg, dragged Hungary again into the German sphere of influence. Such sudden changes were, of course, very unfortunate politically.

During the long reigns of these two kings in the fourteenth century, the Turkish danger began to threaten Europe. The troops of the mighty King Louis went cheerfully to cross swords in the Balkans with the new enemy, the Turk. Sigismund, whose attention was much more absorbed by the affairs of his Western Empire, missed the opportunity afforded him as ruler of so many nations, and never tried to inflict a decisive blow upon the Turk. After his death dynastic struggles and other difficulties in the weakly governed land made such a blow impossible. Our great national hero, John Hunyadi, fought indefatigably with changing fortunes against the Turk, but the power of Hungary had become weakened and Europe could not find its way to act with the necessary unity. Even the Balkan peoples did not help Hunyadi with unswerving fidelity. Perhaps it would not have been possible to expel the Turk, who had the advantages of a fresh warrior spirit and of being governed by the will of one man, from Europe, even if the German Emperor had been less engrossed with western affairs; or the great Magyar landowners had not always sought for weak personalities on the occasion of a new king’s election; or the Genoese had not lent their ships to Murad, when Venice tried to bar his way over the narrow seas; and even if the Serbian despot had not communicated Hunyadi’s first plan of attack to the Sultan, who then surrounded the Polish-Hungarian army at Varna. Even if all this had not happened, perhaps the Turk would not have been driven back, but he would at least have been checked, and the fate of Hungary, of the Christian Balkan States, and of Europe would have been changed. In the fifteenth century Hungary already felt the greatness of the danger, and the County nobles, seeing the land weakening in the hands of oligarchs and foreign kings, elected a national king, Matthias, the son of Hunyadi.

His reign of thirty-two years is the last age of happy prosperity and national greatness. Matthias was the great Renaissance King of Hungary. His court was a meeting-place for the world’s great scholars; such as Regiomontanus, the great astronomer of the fifteenth century, and of Italian artists and poets. According to the testimony of the papal legates, the artistic splendors of his castles surpassed anything the Medicis by that time had created in Florence. His library, the Corvina, was and is of world-wide fame. At the same time he was beloved by the people, because of his great love of justice and the freedom of his intercourse with his subjects, as surely was no other monarch of the Renaissance epoch. He lacked the aggressive spirit of his father, however, and theoretical, strategical studies confirmed him in his aversion to the business of war. He was a keen diplomat and trained his barons to his own bent. He liked to solve questions by establishing a good strategical position along diplomatic lines. His reign was filled with less significant struggles for the Czech throne and against his covetous Austrian neighbor; but he neglected to make a definite attack on the Turk, with the regular army he had organized, the first standing army in Europe.

It is the weak side of the system of free election of the king that the slackening of the strong hand always frees the powers which have been held down and have desired a change. After Matthias’ death, in the time of greatest danger, the Estates brought their king from Poland, where the absolute freedom of the landed nobles seemed to them a desirable condition of things. Thirty-six years after Matthias’ death the small forces of the King of Hungary were annihilated at Mohács; the king himself was drowned and the Turks, meeting with no further resistance, overran a great part of Hungary, the whole of the plain.

In the next lecture you will see the tremendous influence of the Turkish occupation on the fate of Hungary. Its effects we have felt ever since, especially at the outbreak of the World War and in its consequences. It will never cease to be the greatest causal element in the determination of our fate.

Let us now cast a glance at the political, cultural, and economic state of Hungary at the time when the Turkish conqueror dealt his blow.

Politically a new period of evolution had just begun. The greatest achievement of the Renaissance King Matthias was perhaps the systematic breaking down of feudalism. He prepared a strong military and administrative system for the unification of the powers of state.

Culturally we were in a period of great advancement. Still limited to the higher classes, science, architecture, painting, sculpture, and especially the goldsmith’s craft were developed to a high degree and would probably soon have filtered into the broader layers of the population.

Economically the development of capitalism had begun and all the nationalities shared in this development.

This would normally have contributed to a further unification and strengthening of the country, which from the national point of view was never so strong and united as in this period. At the time of King Matthias the land was more than eighty-five per cent Magyar.

All this unity was destroyed, all this development stopped by the Turkish invasion.

I shall try to summarize those main facts of our history which have had a decisive influence on the course of the history of the European continent.

These facts may well be placed in four groups.

The first is that the Carpathians proved to be a most formidable barrier. As soon as the power holding the central part of the basin came to hold their whole length, these mountains proved absolutely effective as a frontier. Only a tremendous difference between the forces of the attacking and of the defending powers made it possible in one single instance for the attacking powers to cross the Carpathians. So the basin they surround formed a bulwark of Western civilization, with easy means of communication to the west, a dividing barrier to the northeast and southeast, and a weak frontier to the south.

Our second conclusion may be that by accepting Western civilization and religion instead of eastern, by consolidating the state, by strengthening the central government and so making it possible that they should remain in Europe, the Magyars definitely wedged off the southern from the northern Slavs. Without expressing an opinion I shall state only the fact that if a Slav Power had developed in the Basin of the Middle Danube, connecting Bohemia, Poland, and the Balkans, and extending to the doors of Vienna, European history would have taken another course.

The third fact to be recognized is that the Hungarian State developed into a strong and well-defined individuality among the Powers of Europe. It successfully amalgamated Asiatic nomad, west European, and Slav elements. It created a strong national and central organization, filling out the country to its natural frontiers. With sound political reserve it kept its independence free from both the German and Byzantine Empires and from mighty temporary nomad Powers. Hungary’s fame made the Mongols concentrate their main attack on her and she imposed respect and caution on the advancing Turk for more than a century and a half. She saved the flourishing but politically divided Italy of the Renaissance, the pride of our civilization, and perhaps we could even say that there would have been no room for theological discussions in Switzerland or Germany if the Turkish avalanche had not been stopped.

The fourth and last conclusion we may draw is that the country reached a high degree of civilization. We find the kings of the national dynasty in close cultural and family relations with all the great Western courts. We find Hungarians at the universities of Italy and Paris. We see Hungary forestalling England and Italy with her first Gothic church. Remarkably enough it was the French Gothic that was copied and not the German Gothic, which was so much nearer at hand. Out of the influence exercised early on the surrounding peoples of the Balkans and the Roumanian plains by intercourse and rivalry with Byzantium and by missionary work a political hegemony began to develop. Through this privileged position of Hungary and by means of steady work, Western civilization had hopes of rescuing the Balkan peoples from a stagnant and weakening Eastern culture.

The horoscope of Hungary, notwithstanding the struggles and dangers of weak periods, would have been very favorable, if a new and terrible foe had not arisen on the weak southern side. The Turkish blow cut this line of evolution and thereby changed the course of Hungarian, and with it, the course of European history.