László
Péter
Under the Holy Crown
Pál Engel: The Realm of St Stephen. A History of Medieval
Hungary 895-1526. London, New York, I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2001, 452 pp.
Pál Engel's recent premature death is
a serious blow to Hungarian scholarship. His book breaks new ground. It is
the first comprehensive critical history in English of the Danubian kingdom
of St Stephen, a leading power of central Europe in the late Middle Ages.
Hitherto medieval Hungary has been discussed in English mostly by generalists
in one-volume abridged national histories. Even László Kontler's recently
published Millennium in Central Europe (Atlantis, 1999) undoubtedly the best,
devoted only some hundred and twenty pages to medieval Hungary. Engel's text,
well over three times longer, packed with a wealth of material economically
presented, elevates the subject to a new level. Written in Hungarian, the
book reads well in Tamás Pálosfalvi's translation and has been edited by the
English medievalist Andrew Ayton. The book is arranged in twenty well-organized,
conveniently subdivided chapters; it comes with a proper general index, end
notes, maps and bibliography (an appparatus of this order is still absent
in most Hungarian historical works). There are no short-cuts in Engel's work.
The author, a leading medievalist, the authority on the Angevin and the Sigismund
periods, does not lack self-confidence: he is ready to show the wide gaps
in our knowledge of the early doings of the Hungarians, he satisfies the scholar's
thirst for alternative explanations at some critical junctures in the story
and lays bare the sinews of different historical perspectives by bringing
in the evidence.
The problem of the sources for early Hungarian history is of long standing
and is fundamental: evidence from the language, the narrative sources and
archaeology lead to conflicting conclusions. It is clear from their language
that Hungarians were of Finno-Ugrian stock (no established scholar has challenged
this view of the Hungarians' origin for well over a century). Yet Arabic,
Byzantine and Frankish sources invariably describe the Hungarians as a nomadic
"Turkic" people. Furthermore, according to the traditional view (attested
by contemporary foreign sources), Hungarians migrated through the Eurasian
steppelands, and under Árpád, conquered the middle Danube basin between 895
and 900. Yet archeological evidence does not quite support this view. It is
just possible that the Onogur (late Avar?) cemeteries of the 8th and the 9th
centuries were in fact Hungarian: if so, they arrived in the Carpathian basin
in two waves at least.
As Engel points out, an important part of these puzzles is the dearth of native
narrative sources. In contrast to most parts of Eastern Europe, the history
of medieval Hungary can be properly studied because some 300,000 royal charters
and other documents survived-even though, as Martyn Rady has recently reminded
us in his work on the Hungarian nobility, almost the entire medieval royal
archive now lies at the bottom of the Danube. This huge collection was put
on barges to save it from Suleyman's advancing army on the last day of August
1526, and the barges sank near Esztergom. Equally importantly, as Engel observes,
Hungarian history is "poorly endowed with narrative sources. Even those that
we have are not very informative". The very first source is rather late and
its status is, to put it politely, problematic. The so called 'Primaeval gesta'
(oýsgeszta), assumed to be written around 1090 is, as C.A. Macartney convincingly
argued some seventy years ago, an imaginative "reconstruction" from later
gestć by modern speculative scholarship. A fair number of thirteenth century
chronicles survive but they offer only brief accounts of earlier events.
Bearing all this in mind, not surprisingly, early history is burdened with
several unanswered questions concerning continuity. To what extent were the
institutions and social arrangements, created under King Stephen and his immediate
successors during the eleventh century, rooted in the Hungarian pagan traditions
of the steppe, and to what extent were they based on civilizations that had
predated the arrival of the Hungarians? One thing we can be certain of: no
continuity existed with the Roman past. Western Hungary was conquered by the
Emperor Augustus and held as the province of Pannonia for nearly four centuries.
But that flourishing civilization was destroyed by the invading Huns who were,
in turn, replaced by the Gepids and other nomadic tribes, and eventually,
by the Avars. The Slavs migrated into the whole region during the seventh
century, and Western Hungary went under Frankish control at the end of the
eighth. By that time settled populations must have lived in many parts of
the country.
The social organization of the Hungarian kingdom, as Engel suggests, could
not have been "created ex nihilo after the conquest". Taking the possible
connections in turn, the national tradition, based on the chronicles, identified
the Hungarians with Attila's Huns-a view that no serious scholar would hold
today. Continuity with the late Avars, as a possibility, has already been
mentioned. It cannot be an accident that in all western languages 'Hungarian'
has been derived from the late Avar 'Onogur'. There exist close analogies
(without, however, much direct evidence) between Stephen's and the Frankish
political institutions. Significantly, the Slavonic language left its mark
all over the new order associated with St Stephen. These include the basic
terms of the political organization, like king (király), comes (ispán), county
(megye), as well as those of the Christian religion, like the names for bishop,
priest, monk, and a host of others. Even the names of four days of the week
are of Slavonic origin.
After a brief informative account of the Hungarian plundering raids in Western
Europe and the Byzantine Empire, the author gets down to the age of Prince
Géza (972-997 AD), the great-grandson of Árpád, and his son Vajk, baptized
Stephen (997-1038), king from 1000. These were the two leaders who turned
Hungary around in a fundamental way that no other ruler or politician has
done since. Within two or three generations, nomadic tribes changed their
lifestyle: settled in villages (villa), each with a church (built of wood,
occasionally stone). Géza stopped the raids and sent ambassadors to the Emperor
Otto I's court. He reduced the power of the tribal leaders, organized that
of the prince, invited Christian missionaries and Bavarian knights to Hungary.
Stephen crusaded against paganism, married a Bavarian princess, endowed (by
charter) the Benedictine Order with huge tracts of land, established the Church
under two arch- bishops in ten dioceses, organized the royal demesne and some forty counties each headed by a comes. The new order
was enforced by the enactment of the ruler's two law-books. Stephen was crowned
king with the support of the Emperor and the Pope in December 1000; he was
canonized in 1083. All in all, Hungary emerged from this transformation as
a recognized Christian regnum, whose first king was venerated for centuries
as the law-giver. Property, privileges, liberties and obligations were derived from his
authority.
Stephen's achievement is a major theme of Engel's book. It is rather odd,
however, that the subject is broken up into fragments. In chapter 3 Engel
first describes the political events under the rule of Géza and Stephen. This
is then followed by the story of Stephen's immediate successors. After that
comes a section on King Ladislas I and another on King Coloman, taking the
story down to 1116. Only then do we have sections on Stephen's monarchy, government
and the Church.
The triumph of Christianity, as Engel demonstrates, did not obliterate all
traces of pagan beliefs and customs which Stephen and his immediate successors
ruthlessly suppressed. By the time of King Coloman, however, the reduction
of penalties indicate that society had become solidly Christian. Hungarian
society gradually changed in the twelfth century. Premonstratensian and Cistercian
monastic orders moved in, Hungarian clerics (from around 1150) having studied
in Paris, were given important posts in the kingdom and, as elsewhere in Eastern
Europe, Western settlers began to move in greater numbers to Hungary, where
market places became more numerous and the first towns appeared with German
hospites. Royal revenues were considerable. Court policy was volatile, and
wars with neighbours, who frequently supported rival claimants to the throne,
became a royal pastime. Hungary expanded southward. Croatia was attached to
the kingdom under Coloman, and conflicts ensued with Venice and the Byzantine
Empire over the Dalmatian towns. All this, as well as the intricate dynastic
connections and conflicts with Byzantium, are well described in the book.
Engel describes the social hierarchy from the top, the king's tenants-in-chief,
the 'counts' (comes, holding honor regis) through the wider groups of liber
(iobagionis castri and 'castle folk') down to the unfree population (servus
and 'slaves'), paying attention to intermediary groups like the udvornici
and conditionarii (as they were called later). The central problem of social
transformation was the establishment and protection of landed property. The
reader would like to know more about a distinction that Engel, in apparent
disagreement with other historians, insists on between the "castle land" of
the megye and the royal demesne.
The sudden proliferation of the charters after 1200 disperses the mist that
shrouds early Hungarian society. From the thirteenth century alone ten thousand
documents survived. The growing political influence of the Church and the
close connections with the Holy See, i.e., regular papal interference in Hungarian
internal affairs, also generated rich, reliable written sources. Society went
through profound changes in the thirteenth century: the
nobility as a social class and an active
political force emerged: it comprised all those who possessed an allodium.
A noble lived on his own land, in contrast to the serf, who lived on someone
else's. The servientes regis formed the hard core of this "more or less homogeneous
class"', bound together by the "liberties" recognized in the Golden Bull of
1222. Most nobles possessed only a small property, while the over one hundred
high-born kindred, families which normally claimed descendance from the pagan
chieftains, possessed large allodia cultivated by serfs. This group emerged
as barones regni under Andrew II (1205-1235), who gave away castle lands with
castle-folk on a very large scale as royal favours to members of his entourage.
The allodium was held as an unconditional gift rather than as a fief, although
the beneficiary was expected to be at the king's disposal in future military
campaigns. As a reaction against baronial power, the servientes regis forced
the king to issue the Golden Bull of 1222, which prohibited the granting away
of whole counties and listed the privileges "conferred on them by the holy
king" (i.e. St Stephen): exemption from tax, subjection to the king alone,
the right to be arrested by valid indictment only, and even the right of resistance.
Engel makes clear that the old chestnut of possible "connections" (literal
or spiritual) between the Bull of 1222 and England's Magna Carta of 1217 are
without any foundation. Not long after the first issue of the Golden Bull,
the corporate character of the nobility was strengthened at the local level
by the emergence of the autonomous county with its elected judges (iudices
nobilium) and also by the admission of the nobility's elected representatives
into the royal council to complement the prelates et barones. Having described
the changes at the centre of the kingdom, Engel does not neglect the outlying
areas. He well explains in several sections Transylvania's puzzling diversity
of distinct ethnic groups, each endowed with entrenched local rights: the
Hungarian, Székely, Saxon, Romanian, and others.
The Mongol invasion was the great calamity that Andrew II's son, Béla IV (1235-1270)
had to face in 1240-1241. Engel is more successful in describing the antecedents
than the consequences. Béla, a conservative leader, did his best to restore
royal power: he punished severely officials held responsible for frittering
away royal castles and rescinded enough of Andrew's donations to alienate
most barons from the court just before the Mongol attack. The king's army
suffered a terrible defeat and Béla barely escaped with his life. The invaders
ravaged the country; its centre was particularly devastated: hundreds of villages
and some forty monasteries disappeared for ever. Engel describes the king's
changed policies after the Mongols' withdrawal. Now Béla, like his father,
also made large donations and he even encouraged the building of "private"
castles. By the end of his reign, about a hundred new stone fortifications
defended the kingdom from any possible invasion. Engel also accounts for Béla's
military reforms. What is missing is a general assessment of the king who
had been rightly dubbed by posterity as the "second founder" of the kingdom.
Engel's summary of the messy politics under the last Árpáds is excellent.
Through the armed conflict between King Béla and his son, the Cuman intermezzo
under Ladislaus IV and, above all, because of the factional strife among the
barons, the hitherto stable kingdom slipped into anarchy. On the death of
the last Árpád king, Andrew III in 1301, the kingdom was in the hands of provincial
"oligarchs" and their armed retinues: noblemen who entered the service of
a baron (familiares).
After a turbulent decade, the Angevin
kings re-established order. Charles I Robert (Caroberto) of Anjou, the first
of the "four outstanding rulers" in late medieval Hungary, had a long uphill
struggle. Although supported by the Pope and the Hungarian hierarchy, he did
not have much backing in the country. He did not even possess the regalia,
yet managed to rid himself of his rivals by 1307 and was properly crowned
with the Holy Crown in 1310. Still, as the king observed, he was able to take
"full possession" of the kingdom only by 1323.
Caroberto and his son, Louis I (1342-1382) whose international triumphs earned
him the sobriquet the 'Great', resumed the Hungarian rulers' traditional policy
of southward and eastward expansion. This course was, at least in the short
run, successful in the fourteenth century because of the strong position of
the king and the absence of comparable rival powers in the region. Caroberto
managed to replace the old baronial class with a new set loyal to him and
his son. Also, he and Louis personally led the royal army in the battlefield
where Caroberto was not particularly adept. His bellicose son took to the
field habitually: "It seems that it was war itself that gave him pleasure",
observes Engel, adding that "his expeditions often lacked a realistic goal".
An obvious example is the Neapolitan adventure which undoubtedly showed Hungary
to be a European power, but Louis' expensive campaigns in Italy did not have
a clear strategic aim. However, Louis' acquisition of the crown of Poland
in 1370 enabled him to mediate between Bohemia and Poland, from which Hungary
benefited owing to the improvement of stability in central Europe. The Angevin
kings did not experience internal political conflicts that put limitations
on their active foreign policies and wars. The royal household, the barons
and their leading retainers, bound together by their loyalty to the king,
formed the narrow circle of the court nobility whose lifestyle was very different
from that of the "country gentry". The knightly way of life at the court,
the royal tournaments, the Order of Saint George established in 1326, were
all manifestations of the new west European spirit, if not quite the culture,
of chivalry. The royal domain was still immense. Notwithstanding Caroberto's
and Louis' extensive donations, the king in Hungary still held nearly a quarter
of all land, and if we add all the mining towns and other lands with special
privileges, the king's direct lordship extended to a third of the kingdom.
Over 150 castles were in royal hands at the end of Louis' rule in 1382. The
great secret of Angevin success was probably the lion's share of the gold
mines that Hungary possessed in late medieval Europe. Royal revenues were
collected by a network of ten chambers, each directed by a "chamber count"
(comes camerć)-usually a foreign entrepreneur (!). Engel emphasizes that
The chambers and royal finances in general formed part of the
king's private sphere of activity and lay outside the competence of the royal
council. That such matters were beyond the reach of the barons was perhaps
fortunate since these men appear to have had difficulty with elementary arithmetic.
The chamber counts had genuine expertise in financial affairs, but due to
their particular situation they were private employees of the king of an inferior
social status and they were, of course, excluded from the council. Only two
of the barons had any involvement in finance. The magister tavarnicorum traditionally
acted as the supreme judge of all people belonging to the chamber, including
its count with his staff and the burghers of the royal towns. The archbishop
of Esztergom had the right to control, in the name of the realm, the quality
of coins and in return could collect the pisetum which was one tenth of the
income deriving from the coinage (p. 154).
Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387-1437), King of Bohemia and Hungary was the author's
third "outstanding ruler"-an assessment that involves a refreshingly new way
of looking at this "foreign" king. Hitherto Hungarian historians (perhaps
relying too much on Thuróczhy's 15th-century Chronicle, written from the perspective
of the Hunyadi party) looked on Sigismund as an ineffective "absentee" king
who was at the mercy of powerful baronial cliques, a puppet of the "Garai-Cillei
league". Also, there were far too many foreigners in the king's entourage
to make him popular in the country. At any rate, his main interest was to
fulfil his life's ambition to become Holy Roman emperor, which he eventually
did, to the detriment of Hungarian interests.
It is true that when Sigismund was elected to the throne he was at the beck
and call of the baronial "league" in office, which he himself was forced to
join, and that he was later even imprisoned by them for a while. Also he was
the first Hungarian king whose government, throughout his long tenure, suffered
from a serious cash shortage.
There is, however, another side to the story. Shortage of cash to finance
government policy was a serious problem that, without exception, all of Sigismund's
successors had to face. As to being in the clutches of a baronial clique,
Sigismund, as a king, had a career rather similar to Caroberto's: through
compromise and effort he succeeded in replacing a large part of the baronial
class with his own men, who served him faithfully. At the end of his reign,
as Engel points out, half of the forty wealthiest landowners were homines
novi, and most of them were Hungarian. The fact that Sigismund could be away
for long periods on imperial affairs without endangering political stability
at home is evidence of the extent to which he became master in his kingdom.
Also, Sigismund was an innovative ruler, more so than Louis the Great, and
with a better record in putting through reforms that survived. He introduced
the militia portalis for the poor nobility and the peasantry. He improved
on the administration of justice, reorganized taxation, and strengthened the
autonomy of the towns. There were about forty "'free royal" and other privileged
towns, most of them fortified by thick stone walls, in the kingdom. Not as
many as in Western Europe and, as Engel emphasises, they were much smaller.
The largest one, splendid Buda "was smaller than Cracow, not to mention Prague
or Vienna" (p. 245). Sigismund tried hard and failed to establish a university
in Hungary (there was not much interest in learning where even the wealthiest
were illiterate).
From 1380 Hungary lived under the permanent threat of Ottoman invasion and
raids. After the major defeat inflicted on Sigismund's crusading international
army at Nicopolis in 1396, the king gave up the idea of offensive campaigns.
Defence of the southern borders by a chain of well-built fortresses became
the centrepiece of his strategy. Also by trying to build a cordon sanitaire
between his kingdom and the Ottoman, he had a flexible policy towards Wallachia,
Serbia and Bosnia. In return for Hungarian overlordship, the rulers of these
buffer states were offered large estates in Hungary and became Sigismund's
barons, while it was left to them what modus vivendi they might reach with
the Ottomans for their own countries. As the policy was not working well it
did not make Sigismund popular at home. Worst of all, the Hussite wars and
his long absences in the West, especially after 1410, contributed to the aversion
felt for the monarch who was in his time the leading statesman of Europe and,
from a wider perspective, "an outstanding figure in history".
On the death of Sigismund, Hungary followed the by then familiar pattern:
central authority collapsed. This time it took over twenty years before Matthias
Corvinus (1458-1490) could start on restoring royal power. During the conditions
of civil war over the succession, Hungary developed into a Standesstaat. Political
power was now shared between the king, the competing baronial cliques in the
control of the council, and the Diet, in which, in addition to the magnates
and the Church, all landowners, the county nobility (or gentry) in particular,
had a say.
Anarchy was reduced by János Hunyadi, governor of the kingdom, father of King
Matthias and Hungary's greatest soldier in the Middle Ages. However, he died
in 1456, after a decisive victory over the Ottomans at Belgrade. Civil war
once more flared up until Matthias was acclaimed king by the adherents of
Hunyadi at a Diet held on the frozen Danube, a choice that the barons of the
council up in Buda castle wisely accepted. Once more the new king had to slog
it out with the barons to restore political stability. Once more, and for
the last time in medieval Hungary, a talented leader through compromises and
stealth replenished the baronial class by bringing in new blood and, once
more, the king carried out necessary reforms (some helped the county nobility)
to finance his expensive foreign campaigns. And, not unlike Sigismund, Matthias,
in the disposal of his limited resources, had to face the conflicting policy
interests of different theatres of war. Engel takes the strong view that Matthias'
military campaigns in Bohemia and Austria to attain hegemony in Central Europe
"permanently relegated to the background" the kingdom's defence against the
Ottomans. Not that Matthias underrated the Ottoman danger. In letters to the
Pope his rhetoric was bellicose, frequently boasting that Hungary was "the
bulwark of Christendom". Yet he could have done more to repair the damage
that the Ottoman caused to the defence system in the south over the years.
Vigorous, autocratic, brilliant as a soldier and a great patron of Renaissance
culture (his 2000 books, the Corvinć, ranked, after the Vatican's, as the
largest library in Europe), Matthias died in 1490. His empire immediately
fell apart. Without a legitimate successor who might have retained the loyalty
of the new barons and the court, power immediately slipped under the sway
of rival baronial cliques. They elected Wladislas II of Bohemia (1490- 1516),
a decent and most pliable character. Neither he nor his ten-year-old son,
who succeeded him as Louis II, had any chance to restore royal power. Indeed,
government paralysis prevailed: royal finances broke down, leading to the
collapse of
the kingdom's defences. After Wladislas' death, chaos set in. "Hungary was
no longer a major power but merely Europe's sick man". When in 1526, at Mohács,
Suleyman the Magnificent destroyed the realm of St Stephen, it was a pushover.
A reader can expect only so much and
no more from a good book. There are excellent concise summaries of political
events in Engel's book, yet it is not primarily a narrative history. Nor is
it a work from which we expect portraits of the principal actors. As Engel
observes, because of the nature of the surviving sources, Louis the Great
is the first ruler "for whom something of a portrait has come down to
us". A major strength of the book is what it has to say on Hungarian
society, its transformation and the effects of its property system on political
organization.
Within a few generations St Stephen's kingdom joined the mainstream of western
Christian civilization; its social organization, however, possessed some distinct
features that we would not find in the western parts of Europe. It clearly
emerges from Engel's account that the allodial character of land property
had far-reaching consequences. After all, the possession of land appears to
have been the foundation of political stability. The king's authority was
unquestioned as long as the royal demesne was intact. That could not last
long. As elsewhere in Europe, a baronial class emerged from those who, by
loyally serving the king, acquired meritum, which was then rewarded by the
donation of large estates. The critical feature of this system was that the
estate was treated as an allodium, a free gift for services rendered already,
without any specific obligations underwritten for the future. The
beneficiary was, of course, expected to be loyal to the incumbent king and
even to his successor son. But that was all. Elements of a contractual relationship
involving rights and duties laid down between the donor king and the grantee
were totally absent (at any rate, the barons were illiterate even at the end
of the fifteenth century).
Allodial property led (inevitably?) to an underinstitutionalized political
system; a system in which institutional continuity was precarious. Far too
much depended on the personality of the ruler. Stability, the authority of
the centre, depended on the ruthlessness, cunning and good luck of the incoming
king (unless he was fortunate enough to be the son of a successful predecessor,
like Louis the Great), who had created a new loyal aristocracy by replacing
a sufficient number of large allodia owners. Although this was a long, laborious
process of manoeuvrings and internal strife, the death of the successful incumbent
put the game of Snakes and Ladders right back to square one. Anarchy and barbarity
set in after the rule of Béla IV in 1270, that of Louis I in 1382, of Sigismund
in 1437, and of Matthias in 1490. The problem is arguably much wider than
"the unsolved problem of the succession" (p. 280). The reader forms the impression
that there is a procedural poverty as regards the kingdom's political arrangements.
The position of law may shed light on this question. Consuetudo regni rather
than written law (decreta enacted by the king with the consent of the Diet)
was the dominant legal source. Law is jus, right, which exists as the approved
habits and usages of the community. Jus in this system is not judge-made law.
Arbitration in court merely expresses tacitus consensus populi of an (illiterate)
group of large landowners. Apparently, the Chief Justice (országbíró), even
in the fifteenth century, was not literate.
There were few redeeming features that, in one way or another, mitigated the
consequences of the missing political arrangements conducive to order and
stability. In the first place, the Christian religion, which was predicated
on peace and the precept "love thy neighbour", had growing authority and influence
in the kingdom. The regular intervention of the Holy See in Hungarian affairs
was also an indispensable factor of restraint. The Hungarian hierarchy gave
reliable and effective support to the annointed king against fractious barons
under the Árpád dynasty-but less so afterwards, when the need would have been
greater. At any rate, the Church, as elsewhere, lost much of its authority
in Hungary in the late Middle Ages. The pope was apparently in despair when
Matthias insisted on appointing the six-year-old nephew of his wife as Archbishop
of Esztergom (p. 313). The institution that came about to counterbalance baronial
power was, of course, the Diet which from 1490 became a significant player.
In the periods after Mohács the Diet acted increasingly as an agent of political
stability and soon became the central organ of the ancient constitution. Dietalis
coronation, preceded by the drafting of the diploma inaugurale through free
bargaining between the Habsburg court and the Hungarian nobility, sustained
a constitutional balance of sorts. In the years before Mohács, however, the
Diet accentuated anarchy rather than reducing it. It gave vent to anti-German
outbursts when Hungary badly needed German help against the Ottoman. The Diet
demanded that Lutherans be punished by death
(Art. 54 of 1528), later "elected" a new Archbishop of Esztergom and "appointed"
Werboýczy as palatine, only to "convict" him for high treason in the following
year (the two Diets were called by rival factions; "decisions" were hardly
ever enforced).
Arguably, in the realm of St Stephen the Crown of St Stephen paved the way
to institutional continuity. We can safely leave the so called "doctrine
of the Holy Crown" (but see p. 351), being a product of nineteenth-century
politics, out of consideration. The sanctity of the Holy Crown, the visible
crown attributed to the first king, however, must have acted as a factor making
for political stability at least in resolving crises of succession. After
the extinction of the Árpád dynasty in the male line, succession crises became
a regular feature. Possession of the Holy Crown was vital in the struggle
for the royal office, because coronation with it was constitutive. More than
that, as the papal legate complained in 1309, Hungarians attributed to the
(visible) crown such authority quasi in eo sit ius regium constitutum. While
in Western Europe the king's coronation became largely ceremonial, in Hungary
coronation with the Holy Crown possessed an enduring role in legitimizing
the incumbent. As Palatine Guti Országh remarked, even an ox, once crowned
with the Holy Crown, must be treated as inviolate king. The strength of the
crown tradition was recognized by historians in Hungary and elsewhere. E.H.
Kantorowicz even suggested that the tradition created continuous political
authority and obliterated the need for abstractions like the theories that
"'the king never dies" or possesses "two bodies" . There
is no question that the efficacy of the crown tradition was robust in the
periods after 1526. However, the tradition does not seem to have halted the
rapid decay and disintegration of the body politic that set in after the death
of King Matthias. The precept that the crown should be left in the hands of
the lords temporal and spiritual (as for instance Art. 3 of 1492 stipulated),
was not at all sufficient to provide continuity and political stability. After
the disaster at Mohács, the Diet elected two kings, in succession János Zápolya
and Ferdinand I. The Bishop of Nyitra placed the Holy Crown on the heads of
both kings, within a year at Székesfehérvár, and Palatine Mihály Guti Országh
was probably turning in his grave. Engel opined that
Hungary like Poland could have survived in its
traditional form for centuries had it not been exposed to an ever increasing
external threat (p. 364)
Could she? These and hosts of other questions can now be looked at afresh
because of the new perspectives that Engel's work has opened up. The publication
of his book is a red-letter day in the historiography of East Central Europe.
László Péter
BA (Budapest), DPhil (Oxon). Emeritus Professor of History,
University of London. External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He taught history of the Habsburg Monarchy and the history of European political
ideas at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London.
He has published extensively on modern Hungarian political and constitutional
history.
