CHAPTER X.

HUNGARY AND THE SLAVONIC KINGDOMS.

IN the generation preceding the rise of the Reformation, the Magyar and Bohemian kingdoms underwent an internal decay that finally, in 1526, led to their incorporation with the empire of the Habsburgs, while Poland, although far from being sound or strongly organised, continued to maintain her imposing position against Turks and Tartars on the one hand, and Muscovites and Germans on the other. The decay of Hungary and Bohemia was unexpected and has always offered one of the most perplexing problems of modern history. About the middle, and still more during the sixth and seventh decades of the fifteenth century, both kingdoms seemed firmly established, the one (Hungary) in the immense basin of the middle Danube; the other (Bohemia, together with Moravia and Silesia) on the vast plateau of the great watershed of central Europe. Their rulers had real international importance ; their armies were numerous and well disciplined; and their administration and revenues furnished them with ample means for making war or securing peace. Yet within a comparatively short period the prospects of the two kingdoms were blighted, their independence as national States was lost, and both were made to swell the rising imperial power of a dynasty that, a few years previously, had seemed to have lost the last vestige of its pretensions to greatness, and that had moreover repeatedly been worsted in the field and in diplomacy by both Bohemia and Hungary.

Europe, no less than four serious aspirants for a comprehensive monarchy, which should comprise all the fertile countries of the middle Danube, the upper Elbe, and the upper Oder. The Dukes of Bavaria, the Archdukes of Austria, the Kings of Bohemia, and the Kings of Hungary, had long been bidding, intriguing, and warring for the great prize. The spoils went to the House of Habsburg. The burden of the narrative to be attempted in this chapter is implied in this one historic result; and only by a comprehension of its gradual accomplishment can the more or less incoherent events which passed over the scene of south- . eastern Europe before the advent of Luther, Charles V, and the great Popes of the Counter-Reformation, be made really intelligible.

Thus a clear solution, one might almost say a technical answer, may be found for the problem, why Austria, and not Bavaria, Bohemia, or Hungary, was to become, in 1526, the political centre of gravity of a part of Europe, where for geographical and historical reasons small independent States could not well hope for enduring existence, and out of which Poland was to retreat behind the Oder, leaving central Europe unaffected by her influence. All personal or accidental events and causes were overruled by one potent general cause, working on behalf of the Habsburgs. However bad the tactics of the Austrian rulers, however insufficient or dishonourable their means, they surpassed their rivals in respect of political strategy, more particularly in the strategy of foreign or international policy, and thus carried the day in a period when, all over Europe, international forces had a decided ascendancy over local or national influences. To this remarkable result the shortcomings of their rivals contributed perhaps more than their own superiority in political insight. The glaring and fatal mismanagement, or rather neglect, of foreign policy by Austria's three rivals rendered fruitless all their efforts for the consolidation of their States.

Yet notwithstanding all these differences there is, in historical antecedents and in institutions, an unmistakable similarity between Bohemia and Hungary. Until the beginning of the fourteenth century both these countries were under native Kings, Hungary till 1301, Bohemia till 1306. Then followed in 'both of them foreign dynasties,- in Hungary the Angevins, in Bohemia the Luxemburgs; and so it came about that in both the Crown was made elective. In both countries, during the latter half of the fourteenth and the former half of the fifteenth century, the Estates won political ascendancy, and in both the protectorate of successful leaders in war or politics led to the throne,-in Hungary in the person of Matthias Corvinus, in Bohemia in that of George Podiebrad. Neither of these very able princes was, however, fortunate enough to found a new dynasty; and both were succeeded by two princes of the Polish House of the Jagellos, Wladislav and his son Louis, each of whom, though incapable and unworthy of his position, became King of Bohemia and of Hungary at the same time.

This profound parallelism, indicated by the mere external sequence and form of rule, becomes still more striking and symptomatic of deeper analogies when we turn to the social and political structure of the two kingdoms.

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century Bohemia consisted legally of Bohemia proper, together with the margravate of Moravia, the duchy of Silesia, and Lower Lusatia. Since the Peace of Olmiitz in 1477, most of Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia were under Hungarian sovereignty, Matthias Corvinus having forced Wladislav of Bohemia to cede these territories. The population of Bohemia was not over 400,000; and then, as now, it was made up of German and of Slav-speaking inhabitants. The Bohemians were settled in the centre, and the " Germans" around them.

The common gentry, about 15,000 families, consisted of persons forming the populus as distinguished from the plebs. They alone possessed real political rights; they alone enjoyed the active and passive franchise; their estates could not be taken away from them (a right called Ssiseg); they were exempt from taxation; they alone were the leading officials of the county-government, and their chief duty lay in their obligation to defend the country against any enemy attacking it. Even in point of common law they were, unlike Roman patricii or English gentry, in a position very much more advantageous than that allowed either to the urban population, called hospites, or to the rest of the unfree peasantry (jobbagyok).

On this stock of privileged nobility was grafted a system of local and national self-government closely resembling that of England, although the similarity holds good far more with regard to the Hungarian county-system than in respect of the Diet. In the former the local nobility managed all the public affairs with complete autonomy, and there was, especially in the fifteenth century, a strong tendency to differentiate each county as a province, unconcerned in the interests of the neighbouring counties, if not positively hostile to them. Inter-municipal objects, such as the common regulation of the unbridled Tisza river, proved as impossible of achievement as was the uniform assertion in all counties of recent legislative acts. Yet it was the county organisation, itself the outcome of the rapid conquest of all Hungary by one victorious people in the last decade of the ninth century, which preserved the unity of the Magyar kingdom.

Diets, although very frequent, very busy and very noisy, remained in a rudimentary state.

This short sketch of the political constitution of pre-Reformation Hungary would, however, be incomplete without laying special stress on the fact that there was no trace of Western feudalism either in the social or the political institutions of the country. Medieval no doubt the structure of Hungary was, even in the opening period of modern history; it was, however, a type of early, almost pre-feudal times, tempered by strong and wholesome elements of the modern national State. The adherence of Hungary to this medieval type rendered her less capable of progressing by the side of the far advanced and modernised States of the West with anything like equal rapidity; the factors of national life, on the other hand, afforded her the possibilities of a greater, if belated, future. Thus the Magyar kingdom stood in point of time between the Middle Ages and modern times; just as in point of space it lay between the Orient and the Occident.

In Bohemia, again, only noblemen enjoyed the actual rights of full citizenship. However, owing to the constant intercourse between Bohemia and Germany, German feudal ideas penetrated into the Cech kingdom; and in the fifteenth century Cech noblemen were divided, not merely de facto, as in Hungary, but de lege, as in Germany, into two classes-the Vladyks or magnates (in Cech also: pani, slechtici), and the knights (in Cech, rytierstvo, meaning the Estate or Order of the knights). The most important gentes of the Bohemian magnates were the Vitkovici, Hronovici, Busici, Markwartici (to whom belonged in the seventeenth century the famous Wallenstein), Kounici, each branching off' into a number of noble families, frequently with German names (Kiesenburg, Schellenberg, etc.). The tendency to make of the Vladyks or magnates a real caste, differing in rights, power, and prestige not only from the burgesses and unfree classes, but also from the knights, was so strong, and was so much aided by the terrible Hussite movement, from which the magnates contrived to derive more benefit than any other section of the population, that by the end of the fifteenth century they had in Bohemia proper monopolised the whole government of the country, and were possessed of most valuable and almost regal rights as lords on their estates. The Moravian high gentry, by a convention of 1480, entered on the statute-book, actually went so far as to restrict the number of Vladyks to fifteen, and thus practically established themselves as a closed caste. In Hungary, as we have seen, the magnates were never able to assert similar privileges at the expense of the ordinary gentry.

From 1458 to 1490 Hungary had been ruled by King Matthias Corvinus, son of John Hunyadi, the great warrior and crusader. Matthias was in many ways the counterpart of his contemporary Louis XI of France, except that he surpassed the French ruler in military gifts. Both of them were, like so many of their fellow-monarchs of that time, historical illustrations of Machiavelli's Prince:-unscrupulous, cold, untiringly at work, filled with great ambitions, orderly, systematic, and patrons of learning. Matthias, whom the popular legend in Hungary has raised to the heights of an ideally just ruler ("King Matthias is dead, justice has disappeared" said the common people) had, as a matter of fact, made short work of many of the liberties and rights of his subjects. He controlled and checked the turbulent oligarchs with an iron hand; and his " black legion" of Hussite and other mercenaries,-his standing army, in a word, and as such an illegal institution in Hungary,-was employed by him with the same relentless vigour against refractory Magyars as against Turks or Austrians. In his wars he was particularly fortunate. On the Turks he inflicted severe punishment, and his Herculean general Paul Kinizsi, aided by Stephen Batori, completely routed them at Kenyermezci near Szaszvaros (Broos) on the Maros river in Transylvania, October 13, 1479.

The oligarchs decided to confer the Crown upon Wladislav of Bohemia, a prince of the Polish House of the Jagellos, whose indolent character promised well for their ardent desire of retrieving the ascendancy which they had long since lost under Matthias1 stern rule. The campaign of his competitor Maximilian, the Emperor's son, broke down, while Wladislav's other competitor, his brother Albert, since 1492 King of Poland, was persuaded by him to withdraw. Thus began the period of Wladislav IPs reign over Hungary (1490-1516) during which the country, both at home and abroad, was rapidly falling into ruin. The King, commonly called "Dobzse Ldszlo" from his habit of saying " dobzse " (" all right") to everything, was a mere plaything in the hands of Thomas Bakdcz, the all-powerful Primate, of George Szakmary, the Bishop of Pecs, and of Emericus Perenyi, the Palatine. This Primate is the Hungarian Cardinal Wolsey. Like the great English prelate he commanded all the resources of clerical subtlety, and knew how to humiliate himself for a season. Like Wolsey, he aimed at the highest object of ecclesiastic ambition, the Papacy, and because of the same fatal conflict within him of two contradictory ambitions failed alike to render good service to his country, and to fulfil his hierarchical aspirations.

All through these years the achievements in arms of the kingdom, if not of the King, were by no means altogether unsatisfactory. In the early years of Wladislav's reign, the old hero Paul Kinizsi still continued to inflict heavy losses on the ever aggressive Turk; and John Zapolyai, too, earned some military glory. Ujlaky's rebellion was put down by the King's general Dragfy in 1495. The internal dissensions, however, were sapping the very foundation of the kingdom; and in 1514 Hungary was afflicted with one of the terrible peasant revolts then not infrequent in Austria and Germany, which invariably led to the most inhuman as well as illegal treatment of the defeated peasants. A crusade against the infidel Turk, announced by Bakdcz as legate of the Pope, gave rise to vast gatherings of peasants and other poor people who, on finding that the nobles refrained from joining them, took umbrage at this refusal, and speedily turned their pikes on the nobility as their oppressors. A large number of noble families were cruelly and infamously murdered by the Hungarian Jacquerie led by George Udzsa. The untrained masses of the insurgents, however, fell an easy prey to John Zapolyars soldiers. Ddzsa was roasted alive, and the peasants were by a special statute degraded to everlasting serfdom.

Passing now to events in Bohemia, we find them full of similar perturbations. Here, since 1476, the Vladyks were involved in interminable struggles with the towns. The common people, especially the German settlers, had suffered exceedingly at the hands of the Hussites who, by impoverishing or massacring the industrial population of their own country, paved the way for an uncontrolled oligarchy. Of these class-wars, the cruel, not to say inhuman, campaign waged by the Vladyk Kopidlansky of Kopidlno against the city of Prague, from 1507 onwards, is perhaps the most remarkable. It was not until October 24, 1517, that the higher gentry and the towns arrived at an arrangement in the so-called Treaty of St Venceslas. The leading politicians and generals of those internecine troubles were John Pashek of Wrat, William of Pernstein, Zdenko Lew of Rozmital, and Peter of Rosen-berg. After 1520 the old religious dissensions, now intensified by the introduction of Luther's ideas, were resuscitated. The Kings, Wladislav and Louis, were quite unable, and it is doubtful whether they were willing, to stem the tide of internal strife. At any rate, they appear to have counted for nothing, and Bohemia as well as Moravia was practically handed over to a very limited number of aristocrats, uncontrolled either by the small gentry, as was the case in contemporary Hungary, or by the towns or peasants. Even without a battle of Mohacs Bohemia had reached the stage when any bold and able foreign prince might very well hope to possess himself of a country important alike by its situation and its resources. The Habsburgs were not slow to see and appreciate their opportunity.

The existence of an ample stock of public and private virtues even in those dark times becomes, however, more evident still when we study the collective actions of the Diets. After making all due allowance for their ultimate barrenness, one cannot but acknowledge that the public of that time, that is to say, the bulk of the magnates and common gentry, were at least very anxious to bring about in the government of the country a tolerable equilibrium between the powers possessed by the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities respectively. As to the legislative, they carried two great principles which in any other age would have been considered a distinct gain for any liberal constitution. One was the law that taxes can be levied by decree of the Diet alone; the other was the equally important law contained in the decrees of 1495, 1498, and especially 1507, by virtue of which the common gentry (not knights, there being no such Order in Hungary) were always to have an equal share with the magnates in the government of the nation, particularly in the Privy Council. Other important laws, salutary in themselves though still-born, were passed in great number; and immediately before the disastrous campaign of Mohacs the gentry of their own accord temporarily abandoned their exemption from taxation. Highly commendable from the same point of view are the motives discoverable in numerous measures of the time, endeavouring to regulate the working of the county organisation; and the very high reputation of Verb6czy, who was rewarded by a national gift for his codification, tends to show the genuine interest taken by the commonalty in the important work of legal reform.

Kings; and Bakdcz embellished the great cathedral of Esztergom with much exquisite work. Nor were the seats of the nobles neglected, and the pleasant manor-style of fifteenth century Italy may still be admired in the northern counties of Zemplen and Abauj, whither the Turk seldom extended his ravaging expeditions.

But if, as will be noted below in connexion with other equally deplorable facts, the Renaissance proper can scarcely be regarded as having attained to any national importance in Hungary, the Reformation soon penetrated into the various regions and social strata of the country. Already in 1518 traces appear of the influence of the teachings of Luther and Melanchthon in Bartfa, Eperjes, Lcicse, and other towns of northern Hungary. Even among the magnates we find several adherents or patrons of the new creed, such as Peter Perenyi, Th. Nadasdi, Valentine Torok. The bulk of the population, however, remained faithful to the old religion, and in 1523, 1524, and 1525 very stringent laws were passed against the " Lutherani?

In Bohemia the Hussite movement and the aspirations of the Utra-quists, which were not appeased before the Diet of Kuttenberg in 1485, paved the way for the Reformation. Gallus Cahera, a butcher's son, who became vicar of the great Teyn-church at Prague, and John Hlawsa of Libocan were the chief leaders of a religious revival in the sense of Lutheranism.

In the latter half of the fifteenth century the whole tenor and nature of state-craft and policy changed from what it had been in the preceding centuries. The Middle Ages knew only of two " universals"" in politics, the Empire proper, that is, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Catholic Church; the Byzantine Empire having little if anything to say in questions of Western policy since the days of Charlemagne. Of those two empires that of the Church alone possessed adequate organisation and means for the purpose of efficient government. The Holy Roman Empire was a fiction, or at best an ideal, lacking all the realities of power. In the face of that vague "Empire," the less ambitious but more practical smaller sovereigns and lords in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, and likewise those of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, endeavoured during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, to build up well-knit and well-organised smaller realms. In this some of them succeeded but too well; and by about 1475 Europe was again divided into two groups,-but groups of a character totally different from the medieval classification.

To this singularly disjoined state of the territory in all the sovereignties west of the Oder and March rivers (with the solitary exception of Bohemia), the realms east of that boundary, such as Poland and Hungary, offer a remarkable and suggestive contrast. Whether Hungary extended, as it did under Louis the Great in the fourteenth century, from Pomerania to Bulgaria, or as under Matthias, from Saxony to Servia, the Magyar kingdom always had an unbroken continuity of territory such as is in our own times possessed only by the several great States of Europe. The same remark applies to Poland, with a few insignificant allowances, and also to the kingdom of Bohemia.

This then is the chief difference between the States of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary as they are found at the end of the fifteenth century, and the rest of the western States of Europe. The unbroken continuity of those eastern States might have seemed to imply a greater unity, and thus greater strength. In reality, however, the effect was entirely different. The western sovereigns, from a natural desire to round off their far outlying possessions, and the western peoples from an equally natural desire to render their nationality coextensive with their land, were constantly anxious to improve and strengthen their organisation at home, while at the same time taking a deep, practical, and incessant interest in the affairs of their neighbours and rivals. The very fact of the situation of their States, and of the fundamental desires and needs to which it gave rise, thus made the western monarchs of the fifteenth century at the same time better or at any rate more efficient rulers at home, and trained diplomatists abroad. They soon learned the lesson, so indispensable in all foreign policy, that no dependence can be placed on any alliance unless it is based on substantial and mutual " consideration,"-to use a lawyer's term. To render themselves valuable, that is, eventually dangerous, was their first and most pressing object, and their subjects could not but feel that at a time when a consistent treatment of foreign policy was the supreme need of their country, the monarch and his counsellors justly claimed absolute power.

Bohemia at the end of the fifteenth century, in spite of their brilliant beginnings fifty years before. Precisely at the times when the western States, even England, practically abandoned their faith in parliamentary institutions, and fell into more and more complete subjection to an efficient absolutism, the eastern countries were intent upon weakening the central power and drifted into a quite modern system of Diets and Parliaments. Their territory being continuous and large, neither their Kings nor the peoples underwent any pressure from the outside urging them to undertake the consolidation of their political fabric at home with any degree of superior efficiency, or to devote careful study and effort to the cultivation of foreign policy. Without such pressure from the outside no nation has ever persisted in the arduous work of reform for any lengthy period. In the times of Matthias, it is true, we notice that foreign policy was made a subject of constant and rigorous attention on the part of the King, who even tried to bring up a trained body of diplomatists, such as Balthasar Batthyanyi, Peter Ddczi, Gregory Labatlan, Benedictus Turoczi, and others. These were, however, mere beginnings, and very inferior indeed to the systematic work of the foreign representatives of Burgundy, or Austria, not to speak of Venice and the Pope. Under the Jagellos even these feeble attempts were abandoned, and Hungary and Bohemia were from 1490 to 1526 quite outside the main current of the international policy of Europe; alien to all the great interests then at issue ; neither valued as allies, nor dangerous to any one except to minor countries in their immediate neighbourhood. When therefore the Turk in 1526 invaded Hungary with overwhelming forces, no serious attempt whatever was made to save Hungary on the part of any of the Powers, and the Turk, instead of meeting a European coalition, like that which he was to encounter at Lepanto in 1571, when he planned the ruin of Venice, was only confronted by a tiny Magyar army which he easily destroyed.

With a country three times as large as modern France, and territorially unbroken, besides possessing a fair outlet to the sea, the Poles were in possession of many of the factors that contribute to establish a State, and to give an assured balance to its position. That pressure from the outside, however, which has probably done more for the good of nations than most of their virtuous and patriotic qualities, was wanting. In proverbial prodigality and pleasure-seeking, the nobility of Poland spent the intervals of war on their neglected estates, leaving the great sea commerce to the German patricians of Danzig, the internal trade to the Jews, what little industry there was to the German burgesses, and the schools to the priests. Although most Polish noblemen of the wealthier classes had received a careful education at the universities of Italy, and many of them were imbued with the spirit of the classics, and fired by the ideals of true patriotism, yet all these and many other fine qualities of this most distinguished of Slavonic nations, were rendered useless and barren by the apathy and indolence of the great body of the nobles. Surely in a nation which could produce a Copernicus and so many great poets, there must have been much natural endowment even for the highest spheres of thought. In the midst of general indifference, however, the richest soil must lie fallow. The Poles, like the Hungarians, were utterly without any power of self-orientation in matters to the west of their vast country; they neglected European interests-both the Renaissance, the new international movement in the realm of intellect, and the new international policy of contemporary monarchs. In return, Europe, indifferent to Poland, as she was to the Magyars, suffered her to sink slowly but surely into inevitable dissolution.