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.
The intimate connexion, then, which existed in the case of the western monarchies between the discontinuity of their territories, and absolutism on the one hand, and their spirited foreign policy on the other,. goes far to explain the political failure of Hungary and 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.
One has only to compare the incessant activity in foreign policy of Maximilian, or Ferdinand I of Austria, with that of Wladislav II and Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia, in order to see how utterly inferior Magyar political strategy was to that of the House of Habsburg. Maximilian’s great wars with Venice, France, and Switzerland, his incessant diplomatic campaigns with the Curia of Rome, with the princes of Germany, with Venice, are all discussed in other parts of this work. It will be sufficient here to limit our attention to Maximilian’s eastern policy. In addition to his repeated action in favour of the Teutonic Knights in what was afterwards known as East Prussia, he made several treaties with the “White Czar,” such as those of 1490, 1491, and especially that of August 9, 1514, concluded at Gmunden with Czar Wasiliei Ivanovic, through an embassy previously sent to Russia and intended to bring pressure upon Sigismund, King of Poland, who tried to thwart Maximilian’s plans in Hungary. With the Jagellos of Hungary he carried on several wars, all of them being in point of fact designed on one pretext or another to renew and improve upon the original treaty, dated July 19, 1463, between the Emperor Frederick III and King Matthias, in virtue of which the Habsburgs were eventually entitled to claim the crown of St Stephen. The Treaty of Pozsony (Nov. 7, 1491) as well as the negotiations of March, 1506, leading to the Treaty of July 19, 1506, and the “Congress” of Vienna (July, 1515), all terminated at the last-named date in an arrangement according to which Wladislav’s daughter Anne was to marry Ferdinand, Maximilian’s grandson, and Wladislav’s son Louis was to become the husband of Maximilian’s grand-daughter Mary. By these double marriages the Habsburg claim to the kingdom of Hungary was brought within measurable distance of consummation. It is impossible here to do more than indicate the immense diplomatic activity of Maximilian in this the most lasting of his achievements. All the levers of the international policy then in operation were put in motion by him. His policy towards Louis XII of France, and that towards the Dukes of Milan; his European league against Venice (the so-called League of Cambray), all and everything was utilised by him to flatter, threaten, bribe or cajole Hungary into accepting his House as the eventual heir of the Jagellos. In July, 1510, his ambassadors, together with those of France and Venice, pleaded before the Hungarian Diet at Tata, pretending to be very anxious for the participation of Hungary in the league against Venice.
As against this business-like and powerful policy of the ingenious Habsburg, what do we find in Hungary? Nothing. Hungary had neither standing ambassadors at the various Courts, nor any class of trained diplomatists. At Tata the assembled gentry listened with self-complacency to the eloquent foreign orators, but as usual the noblemen soon lost patience and dispersed. Venice rightly judged the nullity of Hungary’s international position, when even in the midst of her danger she refused to make any concessions whatever to the “Venetian” party amongst the Magyar nobles. The Popes, whose still very valuable countenance Hungary might have secured by a more aggressive policy against Venice in Dalmatia, or in Friuli, likewise dropped Hungary. Ignorant of what passed beyond the Carpathian Mountains; unable to avail themselves of the currents and counter-currents of the international policy; rendering no service to the chief Powers of the day,—the Hungarians were left in the hour of their greatest danger to their own slender resources as against the most formidable military Power of the time. The Habsburgs, both from having worn the imperial dignity for ages, and because their countless enclaves brought them into incessant conflicts with nearly all the Powers of Europe, had by long and patient study learned the priceless value of a sound and sustained foreign policy. In that vital point neither the Bavarian Dukes, from the exiguity of their domain, nor the Bohemian or Hungarian Kings, from their totally different habits of political thought, could vie with them. Even Matthias could not, in the end, have prevailed against Maximilian, inasmuch as the Hungarians from the very nature of their unbroken, self-sustaining territory would neither have understood, nor have readily followed a Habsburg policy carried out by a Magyar King. Mohacs, then, was the necessary outcome of the neglect of foreign policy at a time when it was most needed; and this neglect again cannot but be ascribed chiefly to habits of political thought inevitable in a nation which lacked all those geographical and economic