Volume 1 Issue 1-2 CONTENTS

A tiszaeszlári dráma. Társadalomtörténeti látószögek
[The Tiszaeszlár Drama. Social History Aspects].
By György Kövér. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2011. 749 pp.

The history of anti-Semitism in Hungary occupies a relatively small part of the extensive international literature on anti-Semitism. Although Hungarian workers in psychoanalysis and social psychology have done much to explore the psychological background to prejudiced thinking, and empirical sociological studies offer an insight into the motifs of contemporary anti-Jewishness, there has been little work on the historical-cultural components, particularly as regards the nineteenth century. Indeed, it seems that interest waned in the 1990s, just when studies of the history of Hungarian Jewry started on a broad front. This is also true of the story of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel. On Saturday before the Passover of 1882 (1 April), in a village in eastern Hungary, the disappearance of a Christian housemaid, Eszter Solymosi, prompted the village inhabitants and the authorities to make an accusation of ritual murder against the local and some other Jews who were visiting for the election of the cantor and the kosher butcher. The events swelled into a criminal case that elicited national and international attention, and finally the case ended with the acquittal of those accused. The protagonists on each side of the barricade developed their own narratives after the trial, and the subject has inspired works of literature and film, however György Kövér’s monograph is the first attempt to research the extensive and diverse sources and produce a comprehensive historical treatment of the contemporary discourses and subsequent narratives.

The book breaks from the tradition of blood-libel studies by lifting the affair from the context of Jewish-Christian antagonism.1 In a way unique in the international literature of the subject, he attempts to reconstruct the events using the tools of microhistory and mentality history, analyzing the fault lines of society in this village by the river Tisza to build up a picture of the hostilities against the Jews as one of many disruptive local conflicts.

The aim of elucidating psychological situations alluded to in the title shows up in the use of some elements of social drama theory methodology.2 The author takes the approach of Victor Turner and distinguishes from formalized structures the social-conflict-generated “temporary structures” which “emerge in the minds of the actors as the purpose of actions and efforts and carry with them alternatives. These may be identified by analysis of “psychological factors” and are “recognizable to observers retrospectively, after the event” (pp.10–11). He elaborates the great drama as an “extended case history” from the multitude of small dramatic situations, set against the formalized structures explored in a monographic treatment of the village.

Although the two main parts of the book—the social history of the village and the micro-analysis of the case—are set on different timescales, they interweave at several levels. The social history, which covers changes over a period of about a century, provides the wider context always present behind current problems, while the analysis of the case, defining the history a very short period, frequently refers the reader to the first part, thus filling out the social background and character of the protagonists. Kövér also informs us of the driving forces behind the protagonists’ role and their actions in the affair. It is the longer of the two timescales which dominates, however, because it is the setting for the chronicle of the shorter period.

What makes the local social history special is that the author has gone beyond the hard sources (censuses, registers of births and deaths, tax registers, cadastral documents, etc.) and drawn on the publicity generated by the case itself, using documentation, press material and the narratives of the protagonists. We get a clear view of the village through his account of the settlement structure, major sections of society, social classes, families, individual mobility routes and local conflicts. In the course of this “perambulation”, he develops a picture of a village on the periphery, a place which has remained isolated despite geographical and structural changes. Tiszaeszlár emerges as being distant from almost everything, a situation aggravated by loss of internal centre of gravity as its territory expanded, coupled with the constant threat posed by the Tisza and the rapid growth of the Catholic and Jewish communities alongside the majority Reformed Church population.

In his examination of the dynamics of the social structure, the author has used censuses and reports produced at different times, and based on different criteria, to describe the structural changes of the nineteenth century, the persisting elements of feudal society, and the tangible features of class society. This empirical approach challenges at several points the validity of the theoretical categories assigned to different sections of society. The analysis of the “nobility” shows above all a decline in wealth of large landowners. Of the three landed noble families who owned the fields around the village, only Pál Ónody had prospered after the freedom of the bonded peasants, and even his son was obliged to sell and take a lease on his part of the Tiszaeszlár estate. Gusztáv Kállay was also forced to sell his estate, and the new owner, the Dessewffy family, did not even live in Tiszaeszlár. The history of the local lesser nobility directly refutes the view that they formed a homogeneous group: by 1870 only the Farkas clan could boast of a viable estate, and many of the landless nobles had been assimilated into peasant society even before the emancipation of the serfs.

The central phenomenon among the peasantry in Tiszaeszlár was the swelling of the landless peasant (zsellér) population to twice its size within the space of fifty years. Beyond differences within the basic feudal/landless divide, inside of the latter category, beside distinction between those with, and those without their own households separate groups of craftsmen and servants can be seen, too. The analysis of the social structure also shows up the gradual settlement and spatial differentiation of Jews, a group which is difficult to describe in feudal terms. In the part of the village called Ófalu [old village], they occupied the traditional traffic intersections, but in Újfalu [new village], resettled after the 1855 flood, they were not segregated, and their houses lay on the farmers’ street and the outer landless peasants’ street. Kövér directs attention to the least-known section of the Jews in Hungary, the village-farmer Jews, finding little local evidence for the system proposed by the macro-theories: domination by the trading network all the way from the Jewish peddler to the great merchant, a functional unit without a fixed community-organizational structure.

The classification of the population according to election rights, property and taxation tells us about conditions after the emancipation of the serfs. The author’s terminology is close to the class definitions of Max Weber, who considered class-based society to have been interwoven with, rather than displaced, feudal society. This classification is refined by a cluster analysis demonstrating the extreme compartmentalization of Tiszaeszlár society in a more differentiated structure. The landholding structure was uneven even by national comparison. There was a negligible proportion of rich peasants, and three great landowners held 80 percent of the land, while the 86 percent of peasants in the lower category, owning 0–5 cadastral holds, owned only 2 percent. The tax burden was also highly unequal by national and even county comparison: in 1864, taxpayers paying between 1 and 5 forints (“osztrák értékű forint”) formed the majority, there was a complete absence of the middle category (those paying between 50 and 100 forints) a substantial group elsewhere in the county, and a strong representation of the upper category (payers of between 200 and 1000 forints) which was very small in national terms.

The study of the social structure gives a static picture, if in multiple time frames, but is followed by an investigation of three channels of mobility between and within classes and generations. We see the parallels of spatial mobility and social differentiation in Újfalu, newly built after the 1855 flood, where the households of the farmers and landless peasants were separated after the relocation of the village. An exceptional source, the Reformed Church’s poor list, illuminates the elusive phenomenon of poverty, and case studies embedded in family histories mark out the various routes to impoverishment. A third type of movement, indicating the recruitment of incomers, is the rapid turnover and multiple generation-changes of educated people in the village.

According to the basic thesis of the book Eszter Solymosi’s disappearance was not an isolated event, but fitted into a series of traumatic local conflicts. Kövér thus devotes a whole chapter to the complex interrelationships of a community fraught with local squabbles and clashes, and the personal and communal aspects of the nineteenth-century structural changes. We get a glimpse into the landowning Kállay family’s legal actions over their estates, antagonism between landlords and tenants, and quarrels among tenants. The author traces the origins of the term zsidó bérlet [Jewish landlease] and examines how the resentments against Jewish tenant farmers actually reflected on the whole system of landleasing. The activities of the Christian tenants on the Kállay lands and the Jewish tenants on the Bánffy lands do not bear out the claim that Jewish tenants moved on faster than their Christian counterparts, or that they did not cultivate the land and, having acquired a lease at “robbery price” in the middle of the century, sold it on at the highest price at the end. The Tisza flood of 1876 divided the village between those who wanted to relocate and those who wanted to rebuild the levee. The conflicts between congregations and priests give an insight into quarrels within Christian denominations. The brawling which accompanied the local authority elections of 1881 betrays the uncertain position of the local leadership. Names of the protagonists become familiar as they periodically recur, the same members of the local community giving voice in different disputes, their roles varying accordingly. Through the networks of kin and neighborhood, we see who had a dominant presence and acquired experience in the local and county techniques of conflict management.

In the chapters up to this point, the protagonists appear as small components of the social structure, cropping up apparently randomly as participants in the conflict. By contrast, the multi-generation family reconstructions focus on the principal figures in the story. The story of the Ónodys, and particularly Géza Ónody, gives an alternative explanation for the noble family’s impoverishment. Kövér considers the possibility that the second generation changed over from accumulating to dissipating its wealth, although the opposite may also be true. The story of a prominent Jewish tenant, Mór Lichtmann, and his sons, gives new insights into tenant farming based on royal usufruct and the anti-Semitic stereotypes attaching to it. The Farkas family is an exceptional case of a prospering “peasant-noble” family and its ascent in the leading bodies of the village. An indication of the local influence of Gábor Farkas, elected magistrate in 1882, is that several people, including Károly Eötvös, saw in him the architect of the blood libel. An example of a family rising from the ranks of the peasants to be the village judge, was that of József Papp, while the condition of the poor peasants is illustrated by the story of the Solymosi family. In characterizing the Scharf family, the author breaks with a historiographic tradition of ignoring the adult memoirs of one of the key witnesses at the trial, Móric Scharf (because of doubts about its credibility). Through careful textual analysis of this unique source, he sifts out the details of childhood, loss of mother, schooling and relations with his step-mother. The author is inclined to treat the contradictions as factors which humanize the narrative rather than undermine its credibility.

Whereas the social history, spanning a long period and written in a loose, fragmented structure of self-contained stories in main chapters and smaller sections, forms a coherent whole, the description of the micro-world of the trial results in the narrowing-down of timescales. The key sources are: the investigation records and the trial transcripts; the hitherto unexplored legacy of manuscripts and later reports by the examining magistrate, József Bary, and the defense attorney, Károly Eötvös; the local and national press; and every other document with useful information, such as pictures of the protagonists. This great bulk of material, much of which recorded events on the basis of the contemporary logic of the two opposing sides—i.e. those who accepted and those who rejected the guilt of the Jews—presents a strong demand for contextualization of the sources. Kövér softens up the rigid divide by constantly contrasting reports and witness statements. The story of the trial ventures beyond the constraints of historiography, and the author had called on the aid of ethnography, criminology, cartography, pathology, forensic medicine, psychoanalysis, social psychology and legal history.

In reconstructing the blood libel, Kövér takes frequent recourse to changes of scale in time and space. He gives a minute-by-minute, step-by-step account of the day the servant girl disappeared, 1 April, 1882, in the parallel contexts of the Saturday before Passover and Palm Sunday, and then approaches from two directions the events in the month between the disappearance and the start of the investigation. When the official procedure starts, he returns to the longer timescale, following the story of the dead body found in Csonkafüzes and the clothing in a separate strand that runs right up to the final trial. In the meantime, we are removed in space from the world of the village towards county and national publicity, and the detective story, through the narrative of corpse smuggling and corpse flotation, takes us right up the eastern border of the country. We never actually find out what happened to Eszter Solymosi, but we gain an insight into the workings of public opinion in the village and beyond, the opinion-forming role of local personages and occasional women’s coalitions, and the complex system of neighborhood and kin networks. The confessions extracted from the accused show how a suspicion incubated in village opinion set off institutional mechanisms and made the activities of the investigating and prosecuting authorities increasingly biased and absurd. We see an informal network which operated in parallel with the official procedure, passing news of the case from local personages to the national public. The mutually contradictory and withdrawn confessions reveal a “determination to lie” rather than pursuit of the truth. We also see the failure of conspiracy theory-based constructions of the trial on both the prosecution and defense sides.

Although the analysis points out that the dangers inherent in using sources for purposes removed from their original functions present historians with a serious methodological problem, the information gained from the confessions yields interesting anthropological descriptions on the local inhabitants’ day-to-day lives and feast-day activities. In the reconstruction of Eszter’s journey, we have a glimpse into Passover preparations and pre-Easter spring cleaning, and even the details of local wine pricing. We learn about how the rhythm of work regulated peasant people’s sense of time. The well-organized world of the river raftsmen is revealed to us, and we find out about the differences among various types and generations of Jews in north-eastern Hungary.

The author has passionately researched the driving forces behind the protagonists’ behavior and taken into account the cultural dimensions and mentalities behind their decisions. He very subtly demonstrates the operation of centuries-old reflexes in the way the church servant József Scharf casts suspicion on his co-religionists. He puts in a new light the confession of Móric Scharf in Nagyfalu, regarding it as the result as a plea bargain to save himself and his father. He reveals the petty personal squabbles that lay behind the action of the enraged farmers’ wives who took up the cudgels in accusing their Jewish neighbors and defending Christianity. In analyzing the conduct of Eszter Solymosi’s mother when she did not identify her child in the corpse raised from the river Tisza, the author asks—in contrast to Eötvös, who stressed the widow’s financial interests—whether she was actually driven by the desire to free the memory of her daughter from the moral burden of elopement or suicide.

We are introduced to several individual- and group-psychological aspects of the investigation and the trial situations, and at several points, the micro-history becomes a veritable psychohistory. The author draws on psychoanalysis to explain the behavior of the two Scharf boys. Using the ideas of Teréz Virág, he ascribes the words of five year-old Samu—who accuses the kosher butcher, his father and his brother—to castration anxiety. He also delves into the subconscious in search of an explanation for the greatest psychological mystery of the trial: what caused Móric to deny his identity and turn against his father. In contrast with Eötvös, who stressed the promises and threats, he explains the change in the child’s personality to the isolation in the prison, the threats inherent in anti-Semitism and the desire for release from tensions within his own family.

No less interesting is the discussion of the role of the contemporary media. The analysis shows how press publicity interacted with the case itself: the newspapers attempted to shape the trial in their own image, resulting in the fateful polarization of press coverage. It also renders understandable the summary judgments of press history and the claim that the case opened a new chapter in the history of Hungarian journalism. The newspapers went beyond reporting and commenting, and became protagonists and determinants of events. A newspaper’s position could affect its circulation and thus its own future, and indeed open it up to the threat of litigation. A legal action was taken out against the Szabolcs County newspaper Közlöny for publishing the Eszlári népballada [Tiszaeszlár Folk Ballad]. Kövér identifies as the author of this gruesomely anti-Semitic verse the daughter of village magistrate Gábor Farkas, thus seriously challenging the alleged impartiality of the magistrate and his family during the investigation. The analysis subjects the enormous press material to diligent philological study, approach some details from different angles by setting newspaper reports against each other. Thus we find out about the cooperation between the Catholic priest in Tiszaeszlár and the Catholic daily newspaper Magyar Állam in making the disappearance public. It is also via press reports that an event mysteriously omitted from reports of the time, the “popular disturbance” of Whit Monday, is reconstructed.

A sub-chapter entitled “performers” adds new protagonists to the already long cast list. Seven small sections included in the chronology continue the personal threads of the family-history part of the social history, but now introduces the leaders of the investigation, the defenders, the public and private accusers, and the priests, journalists, doctors and stenographers. Presented with all of these career histories, the reader may be astonished at the number and diversity of professional people engaged in the case. We find out the individual and social motivations of the participants and perceive the effects of the trial on personal careers.

The history of the origin of the autopsy report on the body recovered from the Tisza is an excellent example of contextualized analysis of sources. Working from the original wording of the autopsy report found in the notes of examining magistrate Bary, Kövér finds more than contradictions arising from medical and legal logic, and concludes that “the descriptive parts were retrospectively adjusted to what was later concluded to be the required opinion” (p.486). A philological comparison of the various text variants shows which protagonists “attempted to influence and manipulate identifiability in which direction” (p.503). We find out that opinions were probably formed collectively during the local investigation, while the exhumation report did not provide the positive evidence of the identity of the corpse which would have been needed for a conviction.

The last section of the main monograph analyzes the after-effects of the trial, the complex interrelationships of blood libel and collective violence in the context of the wave of violence that followed the acquittal, the election of county officials, and the 1884 parliamentary elections. He subtly reassesses the political historians’ picture of relative calm during the 1880s, and challenges at several points the theses of “Jewish provocation” and “ab ovo anti-Semitism” by pointing out the absence of high-ranking organizers in the acts of violence, the presence of popular-culture folklore elements, and the effects of antagonisms lurking in the deep strata of society. He also places Hungarian events and contemporary anti-Semitic movements and blood libels in the international context, but ascribes at most an indirect effect on local occurrences to events outside Tiszaeszlár and outside Hungary.

Although the author states in the introduction—perhaps to the disappointment of some readers—that he was not trying to solve the mystery surrounding Eszter Solymosi’s disappearance, the book does not leave us unsatisfied. Instead of clearing up the disappearance, he brings to light much more important connections: we see the Tiszaeszlár drama unfolding at the intersection of several lines of force, and the story subtly elaborates the scapegoat-creating mechanisms of an “average” eastern Hungarian village. The blood libel thus started life as only one of many local conflicts but was formed by national attention into the focus point of local antagonisms. The analysis is a textbook example of how to use tiny clues to built up all of the causal relationships and contexts of an individual case. It is an excellent example of a researcher’s ingenuity in using the same sources to bring out different points of view. For the micro-historian, there are no trivial details. Source criticism and continuous contextualization of sources clearly delineate the limits within which a document can be used. The author’s analysis occasionally turns to irony, lighting up moments of comedy in the drama, but he refrains from neat judgments, and leaves the readers to draw their own conclusions.

Seeing the complex interrelationships within the story, we should not be surprised that both contemporaries and subsequent narratives reached for long-established myths as handles on the events. Building on an analysis of local society, Kövér has attempted to identify the mythological elements in the smallest of details, and indirectly challenges the liberal canon which “solves” the Jewish question and dismisses anti-Semitism. Having been touched by the deep strata of the drama, we are left with no illusions that the deeply-rooted prejudices and fixed cultural codes ceased with the acquittal of those accused. It is also doubtful whether the blood libel succeeded in repairing the village’s “disintegrated group cohesion”. A knowledge of the structural tensions rather implies that the metaphor of the atmosphere of the local community as a “seething, bubbling swamp” did not lose any of its validity. The book has the particular merit of leaving a story which attracted so much national and international attention in its own medium, the “mud of Tiszaeszlár”, and thereby weakening the established contemporary and retrospective myths and the identities that feed on them.

Translated by Alan Campbell.

Anikó Prepuk

Volume 1 Issue 1-2 CONTENTS

Hungary’s Long Nineteenth Century. Constitutional and Democratic Traditions in a European Perspective. Collected Studies. By László Péter. Ed. Miklós Lojkó. (Central and Eastern Europe. Regional Perspectives in Global Context, vol. 1) Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2012. xxi + 477 pp.

Historian László Péter, who from the defeat of the 1956 Revolution until his death in 2008 lived and taught in London, was an active participant in British and Hungarian professional life. He organized numerous conferences, the papers of which also appeared in volumes (e.g., in connection with the 200th anniversary of Lajos Kossuth’s birth and the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution),1 collaborated on the definitive publication in English of the medieval laws of Hungary and through his book reviews helped to make the results of Hungarian research better known abroad. In addition to all this he taught the history of Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy in the nineteenth century to generations of students at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.2

This posthumous volume of studies contains the essays written during the last decade and a half of his life. The essays for the volume were chosen by László Péter himself, but the task of editing was carried out by Miklós Lojkó. Unfortunately the volume does not include a bibliography of the late author’s scholarly oeuvre, and thus it is not always clear when certain chapters in the book were written.

László Péter calls into question several elements in the myths of Hungarian public law or—to put it more loosely—constitutional consciousness which had taken root by the nineteenth century. He initiates a debate with the practitioners of political and constitutional history in Hungary when he scrutinizes legal and political conceptual clichés used in scholarly life in minute detail. The author’s intention can be unmistakably demonstrated, for instance, by the title of one of his essays that appeared in Hungarian: “Why Is Hungarian Constitutional History in Need of Radical Revision?”3 At the same time in this article he stated from the outset that he did not expect significant change because researchers belonging to the mainstream had up until then received his views rather dismissively, if they devoted any attention to them at all. Here Péter was thinking first and foremost of those researching the 1848–49 Revolution and constitutional transformation, whom in another one of his essays he divided into two camps: “old hats” and “closet revisionists.”4 Nor does it appear that Hungarian researchers of this period have been really receptive to Péter’s conclusions and methodological proposals since then. It is a welcome development, however, that more and more historians dealing with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are relying on his results.5

The purpose of László Péter’s book is to demonstrate the imprecise and obscure usage of older and modern legal and historical works, as well as to trace the deliberate reinterpretation of certain basic concepts (constitution, sovereignty, revolution, country, crown, etc.). He hastens to declare that these concepts must be cleansed of the interpretations later accreted to them and must be examined in their original context. Through analysis of the contemporary political and scholarly discourses László Péter reconstructs the meaning of the aforementioned concepts, as well as the original political conceptions forming the country’s fundamental laws.

Nineteenth-century legal texts and constitutional works form the book’s basic sources, which the author occasionally supplements with quotations from contemporary parliamentary papers and newspaper articles.

The work encompasses a significantly longer time period than its title indicates. László Péter discusses historical problems from the Middle Ages right up to the recent past: his studies equally address the revival of the cult of the Holy Crown as well as the country’s evolution as a society and a Rechtsstaat following the change of regime in 1990, including, for example, the reconsideration of the relationship between church and state in the first half of the 1990s. Despite the book’s subtitle and the declared aims of the series the European outlook, the aim to provide a more in-depth comparison, is for the most part missing from the volume (this occurs to the author more as an idea for research only).

The fourteen studies of Péter’s volume touch upon essentially three major themes. In my review I shall attempt to present the central ideas of each of these topics.

The first essay, running to more than one hundred pages, deals with the cult of the visible and invisible crown and is accompanied by two shorter analyses: one on the role of the right of resistance in Hungarian political life (from the Middle Ages to the 1956 Revolution), and another on the significance of István Werbőczy and his Tripartitum in native legal and political thought.6

The basic idea of Péter’s opening study, one which he seeks to prove with perceptible vehemence across many pages, is that the doctrine of the Holy Crown is nothing more than an artificially created, so-called “invented tradition,”7 its history can be traced back only to the late nineteenth century. The elaboration of this tradition is linked to several figures of the era’s scholarly and political life, who shaped it partly independently of one another and not always consciously. The professed organizers of its rites are substantially easier to identify: they were the ones who used the relic and the doctrine connected to it for the sake of quite palpable, current governmental goals (e.g., at the 1000th anniversary of the Magyar conquest of Hungary in 1896, as well as the celebration of the millennium of the founding of the state in 2000).

The author is quite perceptibly fascinated much more by the modern tradition of the invisible crown, that is, the development of conceptions tied not to the physical object but rather to its spirit. For this reason he discusses the cult and sacral veneration of the visible crown, which has existed since the eleventh century, only briefly. Avowedly following in Ferenc Eckhart’s footsteps,8 he presents in chronological order those political situations when the concept of the Holy Crown was enriched with further and further layers of meaning: how the concepts of king and crown became separated from one another; the way in which the expression “members of the Holy Crown” began, under the influence of Werbőczy’s work, to mean not just the landed gentry but also the landless nobility. Finally, the concept of the political community symbolized by the Holy Crown was extended, under the nineteenth-century Liberal program of legal emancipation, to the country’s entire population. Nevertheless, the traditional interpretation, according to which the crown is the synonym for royal power, remained in use throughout.

Allusion to the country’s territorial unity also appears among the meanings from the eighteenth century on, when the expression “Lands of the Hungarian Crown” begin to be used in legal and political texts, obviously in the interests of integrating the hitherto separately governed territories. After the Treaty of Trianon (1920) this semantic content was particularly strengthened in political discourse because of the detached areas of the country. During the period of the kingdom without a king in the 1930s the courts even announced their judgments in the name of the Hungarian Holy Crown.

Péter examines at length the role that specialist literature on public law played in the modern evolution and rapid dissemination of the doctrine of the Holy Crown. It is particularly interesting to observe how the professors of the Law Faculty of the University in Budapest—the main scene for the training of the political elite—(e.g., Győző Concha, Ákos Timon) in their textbooks canonized the “correct” reading of the concept, which condensed the competing interpretations bearing these numerous meanings. According to the public-law explanation that crystalized by the turn of the century the Holy Crown expressed the sovereignty of the Hungarian state, which was jointly held by the king and the nation, or the parliament representing it, as the head and body of the Holy Crown (organic state concept).

The myth of the Holy Crown in constitutional law was associated in Hungarian public thought with several “supplementary” myths. Among these Péter separately discusses the unshakable faith in Hungarian exceptionalism: the “thousand-year-old Hungarian constitutionalism” with respect to its rank and age may be compared at best to British legal development. The myth of the glorious kinship appeared in political and subsequently public thought in the early eighteenth century. Paradoxically the theory of the British-Hungarian parallel flourished most precisely at the time when in the early twentieth century the opinion of the English press about Hungary had begun to change in a negative direction.

The second major theme of László Péter’s book deals with the country’s evolution as a Rechtsstaat and the state of civil society. According to his opening assertion, which he details in some five studies, the reason the Communist takeover of power after the Second World War could be carried out relatively rapidly in the country and the region as a whole was that civil society was weak vis-à-vis the central will. This weakness is not a twentieth-century development, however, but rather in a peculiar way stems from centuries-old native political culture and constitutional traditions. The persistent political dialogue with the (foreign) ruler, the parliamentary negotiations between the king and the estates (diaetalis tractatus) on the one hand resulted in a limited autonomy in domestic politics, which at the same time formed an obstacle to the incorporating aspirations of Habsburg absolutism as well, while on the other hand it shaped a strong attitude to public law and constitutional self-consciousness. Thanks to the enduring defense of the country’s rights, “Hungary’s constitution may have been the most effective in Central and Eastern Europe after the partition of Poland” (p.159). However, constitutional freedom of the country did not also mean the freedom of the citizen. Péter in one of his studies calls this “Montesquieu’s Paradox,” referring to the French thinker’s work The Spirit of the Laws. Hungarian constitutionalism was in fact quite limited in scope; successive parliaments could make their voices heard in only a couple of issues, and most matters affecting the lives of the state and the citizenry came under the exclusive authority of the ruler. This changed in 1848 and 1867 only in that, under the pressure of negotiation and later external compulsion, the king entrusted the exercise of some of his rights to responsible governments.

Only a handful of laws extended the liberty of the citizen with general validity and in a declarative manner. The later laws granted additional rights to certain groups of citizens only on an ad hoc basis and to a limited degree: see, for example, the cause of religious freedom or nationality rights. The Hungarian (and—according to Péter—the region’s) legal order was not on the side of the citizen but instead ensured greater freedom to the state. In the event of a legal dispute the burden was on the subject to prove his case against the state, by citing laws. According to Péter, in Western Europe the state could do only what the law permitted, while to the east of the Elbe only a few laws set boundaries to the state’s unrestricted action. But nor did the state’s scope for action have an identical extent everywhere in this region: in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire liberal forces attempted to entrench the citizen’s freedom through the passage of several laws after 1867. By contrast, the Hungarian political elite believed that the state had to be strengthened in the interests of maintaining the leading role of the Hungarians, and precisely to replace the weak civil society. The Hungarian governments regulated questions affecting fundamental rights at best in decrees that could be amended at any time, and thus it was the logic of virtually unlimited power that was able to mold the country’s legal system. Péter calls this the assertion of the autocratic principle of the law.

Several elements of this sweeping historical conception have received justifiable criticism earlier as well, and it is also true that Péter produces only scant evidence to support his claims.9 Yet his raising of the problem and his characterization of Hungarian legal development and constitutional conditions still strike one as novel and are an inducement for further thought.

Examination of the constitutional system established by the so-called Compromise of 1867 (“Settlement” in Péter’s terminology) forms the volume’s third major theme. The author above all attempts to cleanse the creation of Ferenc Deák and Gyula Andrássy of the interpretations by politicians and historians that were deposited on it during the past century and a half or more, in order to be able to present the reality of the program, which resulted in the solution of the political crisis and lasting stability, as well as the positive role it played in the process of embourgeoisement. According to Péter, the Compromise cannot be explained as a surrendering of rights or a creative reinterpretation of a previous constitutional situation (e.g., the Pragmatic Sanction, 1723). The creation of the political system in 1848 can be regarded much rather as a deviation from the centuries-old tradition of Hungarian constitutional development and political culture: legislation crystallizing through protracted parliamentary negotiations. The settlement that seemingly came about under duress between the king and the country in the spring of 1848 very likely would have resulted in conflict-prone political functioning even without armed battles. It is precisely for this reason that the author disapproves of the use of the expression “lawful revolution” widespread in native historical works—taken from István Deák’s book—to describe the constitutional turning point of 1848.10

One by one László Péter takes a number of those moments in Dualist-era domestic politics when Ferenc Deák’s work, the text of Law XII of 1867 (Compromise), was deliberately reinterpreted or distorted under the impact of current political aims. Such, for example, was the recurring (and increasingly poisoned) debate that unfolded around the royal prerogative with respect to the army. At the turn of the century the opposition now emphasized that the Compromise was not a bilateral contract but rather a law which could be amended unilaterally by the will of the parliamentary majority. The legally unrestricted legislature shared complete sovereignty with the king, which meant a denial of the ruler’s reserved rights. Thus, instead of constitutional monarchy the model of parliamentary governance came to be seen in Law XII of 1867. It was essentially at this time that the text of the Compromise became obscure. In politicians’ speeches, and later in legal texts, the word “state,” which became the expression of Hungarians’ claims to supremacy and sovereignty, cropped up more and more frequently. At the same time, a debate on the interpretation of the constitutional system commenced in Austria as well. Lurking behind the animated theoretical discourse was in reality the permanent cessation of the willingness of the various political forces to cooperate.

And yet, according to Péter, it was not the deepening crisis of public law that proved the greatest failure of the last two decades of Dualism; rather, it was the inability of a new social group, a bourgeoisie independent of state power, to develop as a replacement for the discredited traditional elite and which could have been the engine of modernization. In the twentieth century it was “the hivatalállam, the East European authoritarian state,” that attempted to fill the void (p.342).

Reviewing László Péter’s interwoven ideas it becomes understandable why the historian once declared of his research that “I have always considered the state itself to be the main protagonist, at least in Central and Eastern Europe.”11 In his opinion the state was a sort of replacement for elements such as social cohesion, an autonomous citizenry, the legitimacy of the political system(s) and the actual leading role of the Magyars.

By Péter’s own admission, as a doctoral student at Oxford he once excoriated “the sins of Hungarian etatism” with such vehemence during a conversation that he was struck by a car when he carelessly stepped off the sidewalk.12 It can be clearly seen that he clung to the main pillars of his historical conception in almost unaltered form until his death. The ideas he wrote down in England for a long time did not resonate in Hungary. Twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain the time has come for historians of Hungary and the surrounding countries to reflect on the conclusions of this thoughtful life’s work in their own research. An edition of the author’s collected essays could provide help in this project.

Translated by Matthew W. Caples.

András Cieger

Books on the history of single towns or villages in Hungary have proliferated in the last twenty years. Szabolcs Varga’s monograph on the history of Pécs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, published as part of the Pécs European City of Culture 2010 program, stands out among these. It is structured around five main subjects. He examines how the city became a defensive fort and the role it played in the border defense systems first of Hungary and then of the Ottoman Empire. This leads in to a discussion of the changes in its internal administration and ethnic composition. The author also convincingly demonstrates how Pécs retained its old regional economic role in the sixteenth century, making a credible argument that there were more complex causes of Pécs’s seventeenth-century economic decline than the financial difficulties of the Ottoman Empire. Varga then gives an exposition of how Pécs became one of the regional centers of Islamic culture, leaving a substantial architectural and cultural heritage. His coverage of the city’s Catholic institutions also substantiates the apparently paradoxical finding that Pécs managed to remain a prominent center of Catholicism in the occupied territory throughout the period.

The two years following the fall of Buda in 1541 brought a fundamental change in the life of Pécs. It became the main South Transdanubian outpost of the Kingdom of Hungary, but the state of its fortifications and its geographical position made the city very difficult to defend and incapable of withstanding a sustained siege. A further hindrance to the organization of the city’s defenses was its status as a feudal possession. Even though its strategic role was such that there were forces stationed there belonging to the bishop, the captain-general of the border defenses and the landed nobles, all of them were incapable of replacing their losses. On the other side, the Ottoman Empire set up the Mohács sanjak no later than the beginning of 1542, and its leader, Kasim bey, was charged with the duty of steadily extending the occupied area of Transdanubia, which he did with great success. Overall, then, it is not surprising that Pécs, despite its large garrison, surrendered some time before the fall of Siklós, and not later than 5 July 1543.

Now under Ottoman control, the city was, by order of the Sultan, made the center of the Mohács sanjak (the Pécs sanjak only being set up in 1570), to be led—apparently with due heed to the opinion of the inhabitants—by its conqueror, Kasim bey. Pécs had a large garrison at that time, and for a while it retained its military significance as the most important South Transdanubian outpost of the occupied territory. Its place in the Hungarian border defense system was taken over by Szigetvár, to where the surviving officer corps of Baranya County moved. The fall of the latter in 1566, and of Kanizsa in 1600, also had consequences for the history of Pécs. Varga correctly highlights the Ottoman military doctrine that forts not in the direct front line were of lesser significance, so that their garrisons were reduced to the minimum necessary. This process is evident in Pécs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From being a “solitary fortress,” the military and civil center of South Transdanubia, it increasingly became part of the hinterland, and its garrison shrank accordingly. The fortifications, weak and difficult to defend at the outset, were left as they were until an attempt was made to reinforce them in the 1680s. That is why it was only lack of satisfactory artillery that prevented the forces led by Miklós Zrínyi and Wolfgang Julius von Hohenlohe from taking the episcopal castle in January 1664. In autumn 1686, when Margrave Louis of Baden led his column to Pécs, he waited for the arrival of the siege guns, and on 21 October, after two days of intensive bombardment, the garrison had no choice but to surrender the castle unconditionally. The author leads the reader through all of the stations between these two termini, as the city transformed from episcopal seat to key defensive fort to strategically-secondary sanjak.

In the late medieval period, Pécs belonged to the estate of the bishop and chapter, and was legally classified as a market town (oppidum). During the Ottoman era, the city was one of those Hungarian towns (the others being Szeged, Buda, Szolnok, Székesfehérvár and Gyula) in which, as the author points out, the incoming Muslim and south Slav populations lived in a peculiar coexistence with a substantial native population. Muslim judicial institutions had a much more prominent role there than in the militarily almost worthless market towns of the Great Plain, and the office of the Kadı operated throughout the period. There was also a customs officer, chief architect and town administrator in Pécs. The author claims that this may have been a factor behind the immigration by Balkan craftspeople and traders, whose affairs were looked after by the Kadı ex officio. For a long time, the Hungarian inhabitants of the city retained their own government, at least in religious affairs, if with varying powers as conditions changed. It was headed by a magistrate, whose rights were conferred by the community. He was assisted by a mayor, whose legal status was uncertain, and the council. The powers of the Hungarian self-government did not expand in the seventeenth century, and the position of the local Christian community further declined. For that period, as the author points out, there are no records of the town’s autonomy, and Turkish officials took every decision and administrative action in Pécs. The only remaining channel whereby citizens could pursue their interests was bribery, a practice sharply at odds with European legal philosophy, and one which lent the city a peculiarly Balkan nature. It would be interesting to find out further details on the special coexistence of Christian and Muslim culture in Pécs, and possibly to compare it with other towns of mixed culture in the Balkans, the Iberian peninsula or elsewhere, but Varga only makes brief references to the principal phenomena. These include the gradual displacement of the Hungarian inhabitants from the walled city to the surrounding villages or the Malomszeg district. Varga also mentions that, in 1622, the Jesuit monk Máté Vodopia was evicted from the house he had built beside the Church of All Saints by the neighboring Turks, because they thought he had done so to mock them. The book twice covers interdenominational conflicts among the Hungarians in Pécs. The first was generated by the arrival of Unitarians in the second half of the sixteenth century and the second when the Jesuits came in the early seventeenth century. Varga stresses, however, that difference in the available sources means that the conditions prevailing in Pécs society during the Ottoman era are much more difficult to study than those in the late medieval period.

Late medieval Pécs dominated the South Transdanubian economy and was its main beneficiary. Its goldsmiths, tanners and tailors even received orders from the royal court. King Wladislaw II allowed Bulgarian Gypsies to move to the town to make weapons, musket balls and other military equipment. Major contributions to the citizens’ prosperity came from the viniculture and milling industry, both benefiting from the natural features of the area. These combined with the geographical situation of the city and the purchasing power of the populous episcopal seat to make Pécs the commercial center of South Transdanubia. Varga highlights the city’s retention of its leading economic role in the region during the Ottoman occupation, despite the flight, in 1543, of the city’s wealthy burghers (most of them German) to parts of the country considered safer, or abroad. The opportunities presented by the profitable cattle trade and the healthy local demand attracted both merchants and craftspeople. In consequence, a large south Slav population moved in from the Balkans, and not only as soldiers. Although—stresses Varga—the incomers were unable to play a major role in commerce, and always remained economically dependent on the conquered population, they contributed by bringing new trades to Pécs to replace those which had declined. Alongside them came Ragusan and Jewish merchants with interests in long-distance trade, and the Gypsies, known as Kipti. Pécs’s economic decline started with the ravages of the Long War and the detrimental effects of Ottoman “economic policy,” and was worsened by economic trends in seventeenth-century Europe which reduced the demand for hitherto-profitable cattle.

Varga shows that the customs and way of life of the incomers played an important part in the administration of the town and in changes to the urban landscape and spatial structure, giving rise to a special European culture interspersed with Balkan features. Late medieval Pécs had a much more urban appearance than most oppida. We know from Miklós Oláh’s notes that in addition to St Peter’s Cathedral in the episcopal castle, the town was adorned by many churches, the palace which Bishop György Szatmári erected in Tettye, and friaries and convents belonging to the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, Dominican nuns and Augustines. Their locations were dominated the townscape and street layout. To serve Pécs’s new function, there was military construction work (such as the conversion of churches to gunpowder stores or warehouses) and the erection of new religious and welfare buildings to serve everyday needs (mosques, minarets, madrases, monasteries), which were also, in several cases, built on the sites of Christian predecessors. The incomers were generous in supporting these, but spent little on the houses, which were left to steadily deteriorate. This is how Pécs came to have a richer Ottoman architectural heritage than almost any other Hungarian town. To make a living, the newcomers built rows of little shops and kiosks tacked together out of wood, reeds and mud, making a further impression on the streetscape.

Varga also discusses changes in spatial structure that accompanied changes to the townscape during the Ottoman era. European and Ottoman towns had a fundamentally different structure. In the former, the community was arranged by streets, while the representatives of the new regime usually divided the town into districts, called mahalles, arranged on the basis of denominations, each with a religious building complex at its center. The old and new spatial structures for a long time coexisted, as is very clear from their names. The street layout of the city did not fundamentally change during the Ottoman era, although the way of life of incomers from the Ottoman Empire probably made Pécs better resemble the center of some Balkan province than its medieval self. The Hungarian population, gradually displaced from the city, lived in the Malomszeg district to the east and north-east, where they set up what they needed for their community life. This suburb, which might be regarded as the “industrial area” of Pécs, was not solely inhabited by Hungarians. Turks—some of them quite wealthy—and southern Slavs converted to Islam also appeared there. This led to a change in the face of the Tettye area.

It was not only in architecture that Pécs bore the marks of Islamic culture. The Mevlev monastery there had a strong cultural influence, and there were more people who could speak Persian in south-eastern Transdanubia than elsewhere in the occupied territory. Standing out among the sons of the city are the historian Ibrahim Pecsevi and the less well-known Jafer Ilyani, an outstanding representative of distinctive Ottoman prose.

Although the city lost much of its autonomy, its former population fled or was displaced to Malomszeg, and its spatial structure also transformed, the late medieval traditions lived on, and it did not lose its cultural significance. Citing recent research, the author stresses that the city might be regarded as one of the centers of Catholicism in the occupied territory. Despite the rapid spread of the Reformation, Pécs was not lost to Rome. It received constant reinforcements through the settlement of Catholic Bosnians, and the arrival of the Jesuits in the early seventeenth century gave new momentum to the process. It is also important to mention that many members of reformed denominations also lived in Pécs, and Unitarian evangelists migrating from Transylvania also found refuge there. This confessional diversity made the city at the foot of the Mecsek Hills one of the centers of education in the occupied territory and furnished it with a prominent role in the preservation of the Hungarian population’s identity in the region.

Overall, Varga does not regard the history of Pécs during the Ottoman era as a process of decline. The city retained its regional significance and, in the course of time, built up a substantial architectural and cultural heritage. A related question, the threat of Balkanization, gives pause for thought. Had the wars of reconquest started only a decade later, Hungary could have gone the same way as Bosnia. Szabolcs Varga has attempted to systematize and explain existing knowledge, and has successfully accomplished his objective. His book will serve as a sound base for future research in a wider context, determining the place of Pécs in the urban structure of the occupied territory and Hungary as a whole, and will also be used as a case study in the stimulating issue of Muslim-Christian coexistence.

Translated by Alan Campbell.

Zoltán Bagi