Incidentally, the second or third generation of recruits to the upper strata of the nobility almost always Magyarized, even linguistically. Most of those ‘nobles’ who did not speak Magyar were really no more than free peasants who had been relieved of taxation in compensation for being required to bear arms.
Those inhabitants of mediaeval Hungary who remained non-Magyars in every sense of the term thus stood outside the community of the Staatsvolk in a relationship which was hardly the same in any two cases. Some of the Germans, notably the Transylvanian Saxons, maintained themselves as closely-knit national communities which on occasions even took up attitudes which were influenced by German national feeling, although they were usually content to live their own lives in a system which did not demand from them uniformity in non-essentials. The evolution of the Slovaks was more like that of the Austrian Slovenes, although the Magyar national culture being less penetrative than the German, they retained a fuller spiritual and intellectual life of their own than the Slovenes were able to do. Like them, however, they lost their most successful members, usually to Magyardom, and failed to develop any considerable nationally conscious aristocracy or bourgeoisie.
Assimilation to Magyardom was easy enough for either the local Germans or the Slovaks (or, once they had accepted Christianity, the immigrants from the steppes). It was more difficult for those peoples who were members of the Greek Orthodox Church, since while there was no linguistic test for the enjoyment of Hungarian nobility, there was a religious one: a noble had to be a Catholic, or, after their numbers had compelled the concession, a Protestant (Calvinist or Lutheran). The Serbs who entered Hungary in mediaeval times seem to have worn their religion very lightly, and to have accepted conversion and assimilation freely enough. Among the Roumanians of the day, the handicap of their Orthodox faith was reinforced by that of their vagrant habits, which made them look little better than gypsies to the lordly Magyars and smug Saxons. In their case too, conversion and assimilation skimmed off those members of the people who rose in the world, but such success stories were relatively few, and the position of most Roumanians could really be called that of a subject race. The mediaeval Constitution of Transylvania allowed them no separate representation qua Roumanians and little voice in practice in the affairs of the Grand Principality,198 and the Orthodox Church, to which at that time practically all of them belonged, did not rank as a ‘received’ religion.199
Croatia had its own nobility, which enjoyed the status and privileges of Hungarian nobility.
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A new chapter opened with the unification of the three groups of Lands in 1526; although the changes which this initiated took place only gradually, and in a fashion which was far from simple.
The fashionable idea that the unification inaugurated an era of German domination is far from the mark. The Habsburgs of that day were not German-minded, nor even German. Ferdinand I came to Austria from Spain, and was himself unable, when he arrived, to speak German, bringing his courtiers and advisers with him, and his first violent clashes with his new subjects took place, not in Bohemia or Hungary, but in German Austria.200 He insisted, indeed, from the first that the language of top-level administration must, in the interests of efficiency, be German, and employed some Germans even outside the capital in the offices through which he exercised his own functions (e.g. in the Camera), but did not attempt to restrict seriously the use of other languages outside those limits. Czech, for instance, was reaffirmed as the official language of all law-Courts in Bohemia as late as 1579.201 Ferdinand’s successors were born in Austria, and the usage which after the death of Charles v virtually vested the Imperial crown in the cadet branch of the family, restored the German element to the leading place among their subjects, direct or indirect, but the renewed division of the family property made the German lands ruled directly by the head of the House for many years less important than the non-German. The Emperor Rudolph made Prague his residence, and in the struggle between him and his brother Matthias at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Moravian Estates extracted from Matthias recognition of Czech as the official language of Moravia, and in 1615 the Diet of Bohemia was able to secure inarticulation of a law that no one unacquainted with Czech might acquire noble incolat or burgher rights in Bohemia. Indeed, if any of the Habsburgs’ subjects in the sixteenth century had to complain of denationalization, in any sense, it was the Germans of the Hereditary Lands. No one attempted to take away their German speech or mores, but their loyalty had now to be directed towards a supra-national dynasty.
But the Counter-Reformation was, in the main, carried through earliest in the German lands, and after that German nationalism was not identified with political resistance to Habsburg rule. Czech and Magyar nationalism were so identified, directly, or indirectly, through their continued association with Protestantism, and the consequence of the Czech rebellion of 1619 was that the Czech people fell from its position of a near-integrated Staatsvolk. Almost all the Czech nobility, higher and lower, perished or was driven into exile, their estates being confiscated and sold to or bestowed on a new set of Imperial servants (two-thirds of the land in Bohemia changed hands during the process). As the Czechs had possessed only a small urban middle-class, and even very few artisans, the effect was to reduce the nation, at one blow, to the peasant level, except in so far as any surviving aristocrats still acknowledged membership of it. They did not entirely fail to do so: they went on speaking Czech to their servants and their peasants (it was bad Czech, but their German was notoriously bad too) and their souls had room for a touch of Czech national consciousness, which was less an attachment to the Czech people than a romantic yearning for the ancient glories of the Kingdom of Bohemia, in which their ancestors had played such fine roles. A day was to come when, in a revived movement for the restoration of at least part of their old historic rights, a party among the Bohemian nobility found it worth while to protect and place themselves at the head of a wider Czech national revival, to which their patronage gave a weight not possessed by the parallel Slovene movement. But that day had not yet dawned when Joseph II ascended the throne. Meanwhile, the important families among whom a national tradition survived were only a handful.202
The downfall of the Czech aristocracy brought with it the first advance of the Germans to a leading position outside the Hereditary Lands. This still did not put the Germans of Bohemia quite into the position of those of the Slovene areas, for the new men on whom the lands confiscated from rebellious Czechs were bestowed were an extraordinarily miscellaneous set, drawn from all over Catholic Europe. They included Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen and Irishmen. Some were ‘Germans’ by origin, but even they were not Germans by national feeling. At least in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Bohemian aristocracy, as a class, constituted the most perfect representatives in the entire Monarchy of that special nationalism (there is no other word for it) which resided purely in attachment to the Monarch. Nevertheless, the real German element in Bohemia-Moravia took a step up. More colonists from the Alpine provinces or the Reich entered the country, and the new industrialisation brought the local Germandom further gains, since Czechs moving into towns or industrial centres usually Germanized. Meanwhile, the Vernewerte Landesordnung had already placed the German language on an equality with the Czech in the Courts, while in the administration it was now the sole language, and a further important change was brought in the Western half of the Monarchy by the administrative reforms of Maria Theresa’s ‘first reform period’. Before their introduction, the language of top-level administration here had been partly Latin, partly German, while local administration and justice, which were largely conducted orally, were carried on, naturally and of necessity, in the language of the ‘parties’. With the reforms, first the language of the Ministries became German, and then the change was extended right down to the lower levels, to satisfy the new and fussy insistence of the bureaucrats that everything possible must be in writing, so that it could be che
cked centrally. Thus the entire ‘inner language’ of the administration became German, and any person wishing to enter the State service had to be, or to make himself, a German-speaker.
The Germanization of the schools in Bohemia, described elsewhere,203 was really only a logical and necessary consequence of the Germanization of the administration, but the two naturally worked together to produce a master-subject relationship of the two national cultures which was fairly complete, although time was to prove the impossibility of maintaining it in its entirety.
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These changes had not reached Hungary204 by 1780. Hardly any attempts had been made to Germanize that country before the series of conflicts between nation and Crown which opened with the ‘Wesselényi conspiracy’ of 1670. For a generation, then, strong efforts had been made to denationalize the administration205 and aristocracy, but these had been abandoned under the Peace of Szatmár of 1711, having in the meantime met with only very partial success: the beneficiaries (unlike those in Bohemia, who had struck root and prospered there) had often found Hungarian conditions too outlandish for them and sold their estates, which had eventually found their way back into Magyar hands.
As has been said elsewhere,206 Maria Theresa, using gentler methods, had, indeed, succeeded in largely denationalizing the magnates. But even less than their Bohemian counterparts did these men become German; in so far as they ceased to be Hungarian (and few of them were entirely exempt from occasional relapses) it was to become Habsburgists, pure and simple. And the Queen’s blandishments hardly touched the great mass of medium and small-medium nobles. If it was true that what interested them chiefly was the retention of their class privileges, political and economic, yet the national traditions and national culture were for them at once symbols and guarantees of their status, and they had not only maintained them themselves, but had been able to compel acceptance of the national tradition of the State even outside its frontiers.
It was true that the language of legislation and administration in Hungary, down to the County level, was Latin, as was that of practically all higher and secondary education, and of most of such literary products as the age could boast. Thanks to this, it was perfectly possible for an individual to rise to a high position in society, and even in the State apparatus, without knowing a word of Magyar; the Magyar character of the noble tradition was largely fictional. But this very quasi-fictional element in it made it the easier for the ‘Magyar’ national culture to maintain its priority in, and identification with, the State, and for the Catholic and Protestant non-Magyars to accept the position. They did not need their own national upper classes, because they could share in the Hungarian. Thus the Slovaks, in particular, were able to evolve a not inconsiderable intelligentsia which, if it found Slovak insufficient for self-expression, resorted happily enough to Magyar. If they rose a little higher still, they became trilingual (Slovak, Latin and Magyar). As nearly all of their neighbours who called themselves Magyars were trilingual also (they spoke Slovak, if only to make themselves understood locally, and most of them had picked up the language in infancy from their nursemaids, who, except in the snob families, were always Slovak peasant girls), it was really difficult for many of the inhabitants of North Hungary to say what they were ‘nationally’.
In fact, the great majority of the Hungarian nobles were even now Magyar, by adoption if not by origin. The successful Slovaks, Ruthenes and even Swabians Magyarized in the second or third generation. Most of the non-Magyar speaking ‘nobles’ were sandalled nobles, whose ‘nobility’ amounted simply to exemption from taxation, and even they, although fairly numerous in certain outlying areas207 constituted only a small proportion of the whole class,208 and an infinitesimal one of its effective members. The reduction in the proportion of Magyars to non-Magyars in the total population, fateful as it was to prove to Hungary in the nineteenth century, had thus had hardly any perceptible political effects in the eighteenth, since the only class that mattered was the effective fraction of the nobility.
Two of the peoples now inhabiting Lands of the Hungarian Crown remained, however, obstinately apart. The Roumanians (Vlachs) were one. When Leopold I confirmed the Transylvanian Constitution, he did so without amending it, so that the Roumanians, as such, remained unrepresented in the Diet and the Orthodox religion remained only ‘tolerated’.
It is true that when the Uniate Church was introduced into Transylvania209 the Roumanian representation in the ‘Hungarian nation’ was greatly increased, for all Greek Catholic priests, like all Roman Catholic, ranked as ‘common nobles’, and there were also an exceptionally large number of Roumanian sandalled nobles in Máramaros.210 Thanks in part to this, a real Roumanian national renaissance had set in in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its inspirer was a certain Innocentius Klein-Micu,211 who began to work as a Roumanian Uniate Bishop in 1732.212 An exceptionally able and energetic man, Klein-Micu developed his see of Balázsfalva into a real centre of Roumanian national life, establishing there a primary and a secondary school, a seminary and a Basilite Monastery and further obtaining permission for some students to attend the College De Propaganda Fidei in Rome. He had strong ambitions for his nation, and besieged both the Transylvanian Gubernium and Vienna with petitions, not only for ecclesiastical facilities, but also for political concessions, asking that the Roumanian nobles should be admitted as a fourth political ‘nation’, with representation, in that capacity, in the Transylvanian Diet, a share in public office, etc. These requests were always justified by the theory of ‘Daco-Roumanian continuity’, which in his hands became a political weapon, never again to be laid aside by the Roumanians.
Eventually the Court got tired of him and when he went to Rome to ask the Holy See to intercede for him, persuaded the Pope to keep him there for the rest of his life. He had, however, left behind a considerable educated class, the product of his seminary, and an elite of men who had studied in Rome. Three of the latter, in particular, known as the ‘Transylvanian Triade’, carried on his work: his own nephew Samuel Klein-Micu (1745–1816) a grammarian and linguist; George Sinkay (1756–1816) author of a ‘Chronicle of the Roumanians’, a vast although ill-digested work strongly nationalist in tone; and Petru Maior, a slightly younger man who carried on Sinkay’s work.213
Meanwhile the Orthodox Church, although not so well-endowed as the Uniate, was coming to represent another centre around which Roumanian national feeling could crystallize. At the same time, the social conditions of the Roumanians had become less tolerable than ever for them. In 1769 the Transylvanian Gubernium had issued an order, known as the Gewisse Punkte, the effect of which was to compel a large number of mountain shepherds to settle under landlords as peasant cultivators. This brought them within range of some more of the accepted trappings of civilization, but also forced them to work much harder, and the next decade was one of growing discontent.
This movement was genuinely national in a sense in which the word could not be used of any other in the Monarchy, except that of the Poles, because the Roumanians were, as has been said above, a semi-nomadic people, or at least, exceptionally lightly attached to the soil. Even in times of peace, the shepherds who formed a large part of the people were accustomed to drive their flocks to summer and winter pasturages which took little account of frontiers; when war harried them or social conditions became particularly onerous, either in Transylvania, or in the Principalities, whole communities would cheerfully transfer their habitats from one side of the Carpathians to the other. Consequently, an awareness of the identity of the whole Roumanian people always existed among them and any national movement among any part of them spoke for the people as a whole.
And in another respect, the Roumanian movement was more national even than that of the Poles, because the latter was identified with the noble class, and left the peasants untouched. The Roumanian people was socially almost homogeneous, for the few members of it who had climbed into the ranks of the higher Hungarian aristocracy had discarded their Rou
manian feeling. No social gulf separated such Roumanian ‘nobles’ as there were – the Uniate priests and the inhabitants of various villages which had been enobled en bloc – from the rest of the people; at any rate, nothing to compare with that which separated any Roumanian from any Magyar or Saxon.
The Serbs were the other distinctive people. While the mediaeval Serbian immigrants into Hungary seem, as we have said, to have abandoned their faith and their language easily enough, it was otherwise with the large group led into Hungary by their Patriarch in 1692. Leopold I issued the newcomers with Privileges guaranteeing them the enjoyment of their customary rights, including the right of electing their own Voivode, or military leader. Meanwhile, they were to remain ‘nothing other than an Austro-Politicum, and the nation itself a patrimony of the House of Austria and not of the Kingdom of Hungary, under the sole jurisdiction of His Imperial-Royal Majesty’. It was in the Balkans, after their return thither, when the Austrian armies should have conquered the Northern Balkans, that the Serbs were to enjoy these privileges in perpetuity, but as the Austrian armies failed to accomplish this task, the Serbs perforce remained in Hungary. The Hungarians objected bitterly to the suggestion that the Serbs should receive a separate territory or ‘national’ organization, and in the end, they received neither: they lived, indeed, under a number of dispensations, some in Hungarian Counties, others in the Military Frontier, others in the Bánát, and they were never allowed to elect a Voivode, and only once a Vice-Voivode,214 nor to extend their political organization to cover all the Serbs in Hungary. Nor were they given, as they had wished, their own Court Chancellery in Vienna, although they were allowed for a time a less imposing body (which gradually faded out and was abolished in 1777) called the Hofdeputatio in Banaticis, Transylvanicis et Illyricis to look after their cultural interests (‘quoad religiosa et spiritualia’). Their religious liberties, however, were confirmed; a Serb Metropolitan See was established in Karlóca, and although the Orthodox Church was not ‘received’ in the constitutional sense, it yet enjoyed complete internal autonomy.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 12
