Download PDF | Pal Engel - The Realm of St. Stephen_ A History of Medieval Hungary, 895-1526-I. B. Tauris (2001).
472 Pages
Foreword
In 1993 I approached Pal Engel with an ambitious publication proposal: that he should write a new history of medieval Hungary for an English-language readership and that I could provide substantial assistance in bringing the project to realisation. Just how substantial my role was to be was only to become apparent some years later, when portions of the draft text began to appear on my desk; but from the outset it was clear what sort of book was needed. It was to be the first comprehensive survey of its subject in English, and rather than being merely a translation of an existing work, it was to be written afresh by one of Hungary’s leading medievalists and with the non-Hungarian reader in mind.
As someone who had recently become interested in the medieval history of east-central Europe — seeking to develop a research interest for myself as well as endeavouring to introduce medieval Hungary to undergraduate students — I was only too well aware of the serious shortage of historical literature on the subject in English. (There was a good deal more in German, but a reading knowledge of that language is not possessed by many history undergraduates in Britain, nor I suspect in the USA.) There were, of course, general surveys of Hungarian history, from the classic volume by C.A. Macartney to the then recently published A History of Hungary, edited by Peter Sugar and Péter Hanak; but treatment of the Middle Ages in these books, though expertly handled, is necessarily brief and selective.
Also available was a range of specialised works (now more numerous), some translated from Hungarian, some written by scholars based in the West; and a useful selection of primary sources in modern editions. I can well remember the excitement with which I read these works, and the genuine enthusiasm with which my students took to the subject, despite the difficulties involved in bridging the chasm between concise historical surveys and demanding monographs and articles. It was, however, undoubtedly the case that, for newcomers to this field, the accessible historical literature was patchy in coverage and uneven in quality. The bulk of the most important writing on medieval Hungary was available only to those able to read Hungarian. What was urgently needed was a volume conceived on a large scale that combined a detailed narrative with a broad-based thematic coverage; which synthesised the most upto-date research by Hungarian (and other) scholars; and which presented it in an accessible, readable fashion for a non-Hungarian audience. It was with these needs in mind that this book was written.
Naturally, we hope that the publication of this book, happily coinciding as it does with the thousandth anniversary of St Stephen’s coronation, will serve also to bring the medieval history of the Carpathian basin to the attention of a wider academic and general readership. The importance and distinctiveness of this region’s history are matched only by the degree to which it has been neglected by the academic community of western Europe and the USA. Yet the region, and the realm of St Stephen within it, that bore the brunt of the Mongols’ onslaught on Europe in the 1240s, that became Europe’s leading producer of gold in the fourteenth century and that stoutly resisted the advance of the Ottoman Turks (whilst, under Matthias Corvinus, witnessing the first flowering of the Renaissance north of the Alps) in the fifteenth, surely deserves more attention than it has hitherto received.
Such attention would be amply rewarded. For beyond gaining an understanding of the internal life and external relations of one of the major kingdoms of Christendom, an examination of medieval Hungarian history presents opportunities for fruitful comparisons with the familiar themes, social groups and institutions of western Europe. For example, while an English medievalist may be as intrigued by the ‘honours’ of Angevin Hungary as the Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani appears to have been, he will also find in familiaritas, the relationship between lord and retainer (familiaris), a close resemblance to ‘bastard feudalism’.
What tends to emerge from such comparisons is the strong impression that St Stephen’s realm was at once part of the mainstream of Christendom, yet in some respects different, enduringly influenced by the cultural and social legacies of its pagan past and by its geographical location on the frontier of Christian Europe. This is an impression that is vividly conveyed by the numerous miniatures, nearly 150 of them, which decorate the text of the Illuminated Chronicle of c. 1360. Most striking in this respect is the symbolic depiction of Louis the Great’s cosmopolitan court, but also notable are the miniatures that offer glimpses of Louis’s armies, which are shown as consisting of westernstyle knightly warriors, supported by lightly equipped mounted archers, apparently of Cumanian or Jasian origin, wielding composite bows.
And this is surely the impression of Angevin Hungary that would have been carried home by western-European visitors — by men like the Dominican friar, Walter atte More, who in April 1346 arrived in Hungary on a diplomatic mission from England. His expenses account shows that he met the queen-mother at Visegrad, then travelled to Zagreb, where the royal army was mobilising, for discussions with King Louis himself. The English Dominican would, therefore, have seen at first hand the workings of the royal court and the distinctive features of Hungarian military organisation; and he may well have formed judgements about the character of the political elite and the capabilities of the king’s army.
Like other travellers in the region, he would no doubt have been struck by the comparative sparseness of the population. And he may also have gained some appreciation of the mineral wealth of Hungary and the advantages that it gave a young king with military ambitions. Thus, whatever the outcome of his negotiations, we can be fairly certain that the Dominican friar would have conveyed to his political masters in England a view of mid-fourteenth-century Hungary likely to arouse both intense interest and a certain amount of envy.
Whilst further specialist works on particular aspects of the Hungarian Middle Ages written in western-European languages are greatly to be welcomed (as, for example, Martyn Rady’s forthcoming study of the Nobility, Land and Service in Medieval Hungary), what we may also hope for in the future are, on the one hand, comparative works involving Hungarian history and, on the other, the integration of the medieval experience of the peoples of the Carpathian basin into studies with a coverage that is truly European - studies of, for example, kingship and representative assemblies, the nobility and peasantry, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and monastic orders, or warfare and military institutions.
To take the last subject as an example, imagine a work like Philippe Contamine’s magisterial La guerre au moyen dge, yet with a purview stretching as far as eastern Europe and the Balkans. In this respect, there have indeed been some promising publications in recent years: witness, for example, the scope of David Nicolle’s Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050-1350, 2 vols (White Plains, New York, 1988). But a good deal more comparative work needs to be done in the field of medieval military institutions. As the present volume shows, the military role of the nobility — their theoretical obligations as well as the role they actually performed - is one of the central threads of Hungarian history; but how does this role compare with the martial activities of the nobility elsewhere in Christendom? The study of Hungarian armies needs also to be set within a wider context. For example, it would be appropriate, indeed illuminating, to view the armies raised by the Angevin kings as but one further facet of the general development of contractual military service in medieval Europe, whilst any study of the emergence of standing armies in the fifteenth century should not fail to take account of Matthias Corvinus’s mercenary army, not to mention the permanent garrisons installed in Hungary’s southern frontier fortresses.
It is, therefore, my hope that this book, which itself is the result of Anglo-Hungarian collaboration, may contribute in some small measure to the broadening of medievalists’ horizons, and to the further integration of St Stephen’s realm into the mainstream of historical research and teaching in western Europe and the USA.
Andrew Ayton
Preface
This book was written for the non-Hungarian reader who wishes to discover what happened in the Carpathian basin during the Middle Ages. It is to be hoped that nobody living in that region who has strong national feelings will find comfort in it. Each of the nations of the region has its own vision of the past, incompatible with that of the others, and it was my firm intention that none of these visions should be represented in this volume.
Throughout this book are to be found topics which do not sit comfortably with particular national perspectives on the past. Many Slovakians do not like to read, for instance, that their country was once merely part of Hungary. Similarly, many Romanians prefer not to be reminded that in the Middle Ages ‘Transylvania was a Hungarian province, for they would like to believe that it was in fact a Romanian principality, only loosely attached to a foreign power. All Croatians know well that Croatia as a kingdom was older than Hungary, but many of them would prefer to forget that this kingdom was much smaller than modern Croatia and that their modern capital, Zagreb, lay in Hungary. As for Hungarians, they still cling on to the fiction that there has only ever been one Hungary: the one that was founded by St Stephen in 1000 AD, and which still survives after a thousand years, even if it happens to be much smaller now than it once was. They will never accept the obvious fact that the republic of Hungary is not identical to the ancient kingdom of Hungary; that, as political entities, these are as different as are Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.
A particular area of sensitivity where national feelings are concerned is the use of personal names and place names. There are as many name forms as there are languages in the region, but there is no rule to determine which form is correct when the language of communication is English. KoSice in modern Slovakia can be called Kassa, for it was, after all, a town in Hungary; but it was also known as Kaschau, for at that time it was inhabited by Germans, and also Cassovia, for this was the Latinised name of the town, used in contemporary records. ‘To make things easier, and also for the convenience of the reader, the modern names of localities, the names which can be found on a modern map, have been used in this book. (References to other names can be found in the index.) The only exceptions to this rule are recently created names, use of which would have involved obvious anachronisms. One should not refer to Budapest before 1873 when the three cities of Buda, Obuda and Pest were administratively united to form the modern capital. Also inappropriate in this book would be Bratislava or Cluj-Napoca, since both names were created in recent times.
Most persons who appear in this book have also had different names in the vernacular languages of the region, while bearing a Latinised name in contemporary records. It is often impossible to say which of these names is historically ‘correct’. Johannes de Hunyad may equally be called Iancu de Hunedoara (Romanian) or Janos Hunyadi (Hungarian), because he was born a Romanian, but became a Hungarian nobleman and also regent of Hungary. The lords de Gara were Hungarian lords and can be referred to as Garai (Hungarian); but they had many Croatian subjects who probably called them Gorjanski (Croatian). However, it would have been nonsensical to differentiate between Hungarian lords according to their ‘modern nationality’; nor would it have been meaningful to use their Latinised names, for these people were not Romans. ‘They were or became Hungarians, so in each case the name that has been accepted in Hungarian historiography has been used in this book, apart from their Christian names, which are always given in the English form.
In preparing the manuscript I have very much profited from the comments of Jérg K. Hoensch (Saarbriicken), Martyn Rady (London), Janos M. Bak, Eniké Csukovits, Zsuzsanna Hermann, Andras Kubinyi, Istvan Tringli and Attila Zsoldos (Budapest). I am peculiarly indebted to Tamas Palosfalvi for the vast amount of work that he put into preparing the rough English version of my Hungarian text; and to Andrew Ayton, who expended no less effort going through the text meticulously word by word, making many suggestions and reworking the prose extensively, thereby shaping the text into its now readable form. I am also grateful to Béla Nagy for drawing the maps. But, in the first place, I am indebted to my wife for supporting me with infinite patience while I was writing this book.
Pal Engel
Introduction
Hungary is now one of the smallest countries of Europe. This book, however, is concerned with the medieval period, and here the name ‘Hungary’ will refer to the former kingdom of Hungary, which (even without the kingdom of Croatia which was once united with it) was more than three times larger than the present-day republic, and also somewhat larger than the combined area of Great Britain and Ireland. It extended over the whole of the Carpathian basin, including not only present-day Slovakia, but also considerable parts of Romania, Ukraine, Austria, Yugoslavia and Croatia. Although the kingdom of Hungary ceased to exist as an independent country at the end of the Middle Ages, politically it survived as an autonomous part of the Habsburg Empire until the end of the First World War in 1918.
LANDSCAPE AND HISTORY
The medieval kingdom of Hungary was born in a geographically welldefined region that is usually called the Carpathian basin. This is the drainage-area of the middle Danube valley, and is named after those mountain ranges with 2000 metre peaks that border it to the north, the east and the south. It is divided by the Danube into two parts of unequal proportions, and its centre is surrounded by mountain ranges of medium height.
The region to the west of the Danube has been called Transdanubia since the period of the Ottoman occupation when the capital of the country was temporarily moved from Buda to Pressburg, on the northern bank of the river. The climate here is predominantly temperate, with a relatively heavy rainfall. This is a fertile landscape with hills of modest elevation interrupted by valleys and basins, and with the Balaton, the largest warm-water lake in Europe, at its heart. There are also mountain ranges — the Mecsek in the south-east, the Bakony and the Vértes north of the Balaton — but none rises higher than 600 metres. The landscape east of the Danube is profoundly different.
The Great Hungarian Plain, which stretches without a single hill from Budapest to Oradea in the east and Belgrade in the south, can be regarded as a kind of appendix to the Eurasian steppe. The climate is rather more extreme here, with hot, dry summers, but the region is abundantly supplied with water by its main river, the Tisza, and its tributaries, which, before the nineteenthcentury regulation works, meandered across the Great Plain. These rivers were flanked by marshlands, swamps and inundation forests, and also by fertile pastures and meadows, offering favourable conditions for fishing and livestock breeding. ‘Io the north, east and south-east of the Great Plain, in present-day Slovakia and Romania, there are mountain ranges that become progressively higher as one travels outwards from the Plain. They were formerly extremely rich in minerals; but, with the exception of the valleys, they have never been propitious to human settlement. Consequently, until the late Middle Ages these mountains were covered by forests and largely uninhabited, and colonization of them continued into the early modern period.
When, in the ninth century, the Hungarians emerged from the obscurity of prehistoric times they were living as nomadic horsemen on the steppe along the Black Sea. They spoke a language of Finno-Ugric origin, but their culture in general resembled that of the Turkic peoples of the steppe. In 895 they moved into the Carpathian basin under the leadership of their pagan prince, Arpad. Here they soon became notorious through their plundering raids into Western Europe in the tenth century. But Hungary as a political unit can only be spoken of from the year 1000, when Stephen I, a descendant of Arpad and later to be known as Saint Stephen, converted to Christianity and was crowned king.
The kingdom founded by him became one of the great powers of the region and remained so for 500 years, until the sixteenth century, when it was crushed by the expanding Ottoman Empire. 1526, the year of the battle of Mohacs, where King Louis I himself was killed, constitutes the traditional closing date of the history of medieval Hungary. The central part of the kingdom, including Buda, the capital, was soon overrun by the Turks and incorporated into their empire. In the east, ‘Transylvania became an autonomous principality under Ottoman control, while the rest of the kingdom, which was defensible against the Turks, was to be governed by kings from the Habsburg dynasty until 1918.
The latter, who were at the same time rulers of Austria and Bohemia and also Holy Roman Emperors, consistently regarded Hungary as one of their hereditary dominions. Between 1683 and 1699 they finally expelled the Turks from Hungary, annexing ‘Transylvania in 1690, but the integrity of medieval Hungary was only restored in 1867, when the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was founded. However, the end of the First World War brought about the total dismemberment of this short-lived empire, and the Treaties of Trianon and Versailles allotted more than two thirds of the former kingdom of Hungary to the newly born national states of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Romania and Yugoslavia.
The medieval history of Hungary can be divided into three periods. The age of the rulers of Arpad’s dynasty (1000-1301), at least during the first two centuries, still recalls in some respects the barbarian kingdoms of the Dark Ages. The thirteenth century, when Hungary had to face, if only for a moment, the invasion of Dzinghis Khan’s successors (1241), witnessed spectacular changes in the structure of both society and the economy. From this time on, by its outlook as well as by the nature of its institutions, Hungary increasingly resembled the older kingdoms of Christian Europe, although, lying on the periphery of Christendom, it quite naturally preserved a number of features peculiar to itself. The period of the Angevin rulers (1301-1382) and King Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387-1437) can be described as the apogee of medieval Hungary.
It is marked by strong royal power, an aggressive foreign policy and, somewhat in contrast to the manifold crisis that was then gripping the West, dynamic economic development. The main feature of the last century of medieval Hungary (1437-1526) was the defence against the increasing Ottoman threat. This was accompanied by the decline of royal power, which was naturally not unconnected with the growing importance of the Estates. The two personalities who dominated this period were the regent, John Hunyadi (d. 1456), hero of the Ottoman wars, and his son, King Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490), who is remembered less as the conqueror of Vienna than as a generous patron of Renaissance art and humanism. The union with Bohemia under the feeble Jagiellonian kings (1490-1526) was merely a prelude to the fall of the medieval kingdom.
SOURCES
The history of Hungary is poorly endowed with narrative sources. Even those that we have are not very informative. There are almost no monastic annals and no family chronicles. Diaries, memoirs and other genres of historical literature are also unavailable. Up to the end of the fifteenth century, no period is illuminated by more than a single account, with the exception of one decade (1345-1355), which is covered by two works. Moreover, there are certain periods, such as that between 1150 and 1270, for which there is no narrative source at all, but only short chronological notices marking the dates of accession and death of successive rulers. The oldest texts can only be reconstructed from later redactions, and there will always remain a good deal of uncertainty around them. An example is the putative ‘Primeval gesta’, now lost but usually dated to the eleventh century. ‘Those works that have survived, like the Gesta of Simon Kézai (c. 1285), the Hluminated Chronicle (c. 1360) or the Chronicle of John Thuréczy (1488) give only a brief and fairly terse report of events. The longest, Thuréczy’s Chronicle, which covers the period from Attila to Corvinus, could be published quite comfortably in a single volume of modest size.
The Hungarian narrative sources do not, therefore, provide sufficient detail for the proper reconstruction of events, a fact that explains why contemporary foreign sources are often of great importance. For the first centuries of Hungarian history the annals of certain German and Russian monasteries, as well as Byzantine, Dalmatian, Austrian and Bohemian chronicles, are especially rich in information concerning Hungary. Equally indispensable are the writings of some later authors, like the chronicle of the Florentine Villani brothers for the Angevin period or that of the Polish Jan Dtugosz for the age of the Hunyadis. As regards the political situation in the decades immediately preceding the battle of Mohacs, particularly informative are the diplomatic correspondence and reports of foreign (Venetian, Papal, Austrian, and Polish) envoys. From the beginning of the thirteenth century the relative insignificance of the narrative sources is somewhat counterbalanced by a distinctively Hungarian type of source, namely the narratives incorporated in royal grants of privileges. These documents provide valuable information on the ‘meritorious deeds’ performed by the grantee in the campaigns of the king. Some of these accounts are quite lengthy, covering several years, and often illuminate events for which no other sources are available.
Unlike the narrative sources, the archival material of medieval Hungary is, with the exception of the earliest period, relatively extensive. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, apart from some important collections of laws, only a handful of charters, issued in favour of ecclesiastical institutions, have been preserved; but the number of documents increases rapidly from around 1200 when the laity began to feel the necessity of putting down their property (and other) rights in a written form. As a result, roughly 10,000 documents have survived from the thirteenth century and about 300,000 from the period between 1301 and 1526. About half of this corpus is now preserved in the Hungarian National Archives at Budapest, the rest being scattered in collections within Hungary and abroad, mostly in Vienna, Bratislava, Cluj and Zagreb. (Photographic copies of all of them are available in the Hungarian National Archives.) Most of these documents are unpublished, and at least half have not been inventoried. Of the other archives where sources concerning the history of medieval Hungary are to be found, the most important are those of the Vatican, which still cannot be said to have been fully exploited.
The documents in question were partly the products of central administration and jurisdiction, and partly records of legal transactions between private persons and institutions. The use of written administrative documents, in the first place the issue of royal writs, began sporadically under the last Arpadians and became a daily routine under the Angevins. By that time the central courts had also adopted the methods employed by the chancellery and began to produce thousands of letters ordering inquiries, prorogations and compensations, or pronouncing final decisions for the interested parties. The orders issued by the chancellery and the courts were carried out by local ecclesiastical institutions, called ‘places of authentication’ (loca credibilia), which at the same time performed a notary office function, drawing up contracts between individual parties.
The documents that have come down to us represent only one or two per cent of those that were once issued. Private collections that had never been accessible to scholars were destroyed as late as the Second World War. Many documents, judged irrelevant for one reason or another, have been thrown away during the course of the centuries, among them the bulk of private letters and papers concerning manorial administration. But the greatest destruction of all seems to have been caused by the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century. All the archives that were not removed in time from the path of the invading army disappeared without trace. This is what happened to the most important and probably greatest collection of the realm, namely the documents of central administration that had previously been preserved at Buda. This lost collection included the private and diplomatic correspondence of kings (only some letters of Matthias Corvinus have survived in a codex), the volumes in which charters and writs issued by the chancellery had been registered since the Angevin period (the Hungarian equivalent of the English chancery rolls), and the whole of the chamber’s administrative records, including tax assessment lists. (Although certain sections of the archives were probably only burned during the siege of Buda in 1686, they had remained inaccessible under Ottoman rule.) Most of the material that has survived, therefore, consists of the private archives of magnate and gentry families, and, to a certain extent, those of ecclesiastical institutions and municipalities. The majority of the documents concern western and northern Hungary, Slavonia (part of modern Croatia) and ‘Transylvania. They are for the most part legal documents issued by places of authentication, the chancellery or the courts, and are generally written in Latin, the official language of multinational Hungary until 1844. It was only in a few cities, like Sopron or Pressburg (Bratislava), that German was used for internal affairs from the fourteenth century. As for Hungarian, it did not emerge as an instrument of written communication before the early modern period, and even then only as the language of private correspondence and local administration.
LIMITS OF MODERN RESEARCH
The possibilities of modern historical research are, therefore, fairly limited. It is as if the history of medieval England had to be written without access to the Public Record Office or the archives of the southern counties. Compared to Russia or the Balkan states, however, where medieval documents are counted in hundreds, Hungary is well endowed with records and the predicament of a historian unquestionably advantageous. The source material is particularly suitable for historical research focusing on government or the land-owning classes. We have relatively abundant chronological, archontological and prosopographical information from the thirteenth century onwards, and the picture we can draw becomes still more detailed from the Angevin period, when the great majority of documents were already being dated by the day of issue. (Between 1308 and 1323, for example, only one document in fourteen was issued without indication of the day.) Lists of prelates and principal lay officeholders can be established relatively fully from 1190 onwards with the help of the names of dignitaries included in royal grants. The reconstruction of royal itineraries, the main source of late medieval political history, is only made possible from 1310 by the increasing number of royal charters. The genealogy of many noble families can be pieced together from the thirteenth century, but only in the male line, since daughters are rarely mentioned before the fifteenth century. From the late medieval period we have scattered biographical data concerning several thousand people belonging to the elite, but exact dates of birth and death can rarely be established outside the royal family before the end of the Middle Ages.
In contrast to the history of administration and of the nobility, the economic and demographic conditions of the medieval period remain obscure. No comprehensive register of the taxpayers or the settlements of the medieval kingdom is known to exist. The only surviving source of this kind are the lists, drawn up by the papal tax collectors sent from Avignon between 1332 and 1337, of the parishes of the Hungarian bishoprics and of the tax paid by them. However, the historical importance of these lists lies primarily in the sphere of ecclesiastical geography. Moreover, they do not cover all bishoprics. Rolls enumerating all the landowners of the country and their peasant households by counties and villages are supposed to have been drawn up regularly for military or fiscal purposes since the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg (13871437), but only a few pieces have survived before 1531. As for the revenues of the kingdom, a rough estimate can be made for the last years of Sigismund’s reign, but the earliest detailed evidence comes from the accounts of the treasurer Sigismund Ernuszt, bishop of Pécs, concerning the years 1494-95. They contain, among other things, the number of peasant holdings in the kingdom and their distribution by counties. What of local economic conditions? The recording of seigneurial revenues in written form was exceptional before the end of the fifteenth century, and even thereafter few lords kept regular accounts. This fact enhances the value of the accounts that were prepared for Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, archbishop of Esztergom and bishop of Eger (d. 1520), by his Italian stewards in Hungary. For the everyday life of the peasantry we have innumerable allusions scattered among the archives of noble families, due to the fact that every lord went to law personally in cases of damage done to, or caused by, his peasants. What we lack in this respect is documentary evidence of a more coherent nature, such as records of lawsuits pursued before the seigneurial courts. Records of this kind do not seem to have been produced. Much more is known about urban life, thanks to some carefully preserved archives. From the reign of Louis the Great (1342-1382) onwards, municipal tax assessment lists, accounts, wills and other documents have survived in increasing numbers and for the most part remain unpublished.
Given the particular nature of the written sources, the evidence provided by other disciplines is indispensable, especially for the tenth to twelfth centuries. Archaeology has developed rapidly since the 1940s, producing important results, despite being forced until the end of the Communist era to dispense with its most effective tool, aerial photography, because of its political and military implications. Another related discipline is linguistics, or more exactly toponymy, whose evidence is simply indispensable for the reconstruction of the topography and ethnic structure of medieval Hungary. The memory of thousands of vanished settlements and other place names has been preserved in medieval and early modern documents, and most of them can be localised by reference to modern maps and by collecting still surviving toponyms. Although the ancient network of settlement in the southern regions had been practically destroyed by the end of the Ottoman occupation, the tax assessments from the first period of Ottoman rule (1540-1590) help us to reconstruct late medieval conditions.
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