CHAPTER X. HUNGARY AND THE SLAVONIC KINGDOMS, by Emil Reich
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.
The power of the Habsburgs during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is intimately connected with, and conditioned by, their acquisition of the Crowns of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526; and, since that central fact of Austrian history has at the same time also told on most of the international currents of European history, its cause, that is to say the decay of Hungary and Bohemia during the last years of the fifteenth and the first twenty-six years of the sixteenth century, must necessarily be viewed as possessing a more than local or temporary importance. A glance at the map of Europe in the period just indicated will suffice to show that there were, in central and east-central 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.
In approaching the melancholy history of Hungary and Bohemia from 1490 to 1526, one cannot but be struck with the analogies, amounting to complete resemblance, both in the circumstances and in the institutions of the Cech and Magyar kingdoms in the fifteenth century. In natural conditions, in number and quality of population, and in the conjuncture of circumstances historical and historico-geo-graphical, there is indeed a great difference between the two countries. The Magyars are a Turanian, the Cechs an Aryan people. In their languages, their customs, their music, they have little in common. The Cechs have always been, and were especially in the earlier half of the fifteenth century, profoundly troubled by religious movements of their own; while we can detect no parallel in Hungary to the rise and progress of the Bohemian Hussites. The international position of Bohemia was centred in a close, if latently hostile relation to the Holy Roman Empire, the King of Bohemia being one of the seven Electors. The claims to overlordship over Hungary put forward by earlier Emperors were mere pretences. Bohemia, after the fashion of small States hard pressed on all sides by an overpowering empire, was naturally led to intensify her powers of resistance by fanatic nonconformity, and her religious warriors (Ziska, the two Procops) held large parts of central Germany in terror for several years (1419-34). In Hungary there were no such motives for religious isolation and fanaticism, and the relations of the Kings of Hungary to the German Emperors were purely international or political.
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.
Hungary was in 1490 a very large kingdom, stretching from the eastern portion of the modern kingdom of Saxony through Silesia and Moravia, to Hungary proper, occupying wide tracts of fortified lands on the Drave, Save, Una, Bosna and Drina, as far as the Aluta or Olt river, thus comprising large portions of modern Bosnia, Servia and of western Rumania. The population of Hungary amounted towards the end of the sixteenth century to about 1,100,000; we maytherefore assume that at the end of the fifteenth it had reached about 800,000. Venetian diplomatic agents were, it is true, repeatedly assured by the Magyars of the time of Wladislav (1490-1516) that Hungary could muster an army of no less than 200,000 men. This assurance, however, cannot be taken as a basis for serious computations of the population, and undoubtedly possesses patriotic and political interest rather than any statistical value. Hungary was then, as it is now, the meeting-ground of a very large number of nationalities. The towns were mostly inhabited by Germans who, as a rule, could not even speak the language of their masters. The mountainous regions in the north were thinly inhabited by Slav peoples, those in the south-east by Romance-speaking Rumanians, by Dalmatians, Servians, Armenians, Cumanians, etc. All social and political prestige and power was with the Magyars-or, to speak more correctly, with the Magyar noblemen.
The political structure of either country was likewise analogous