Zsolt K. Horváth

The Metapolitics of Reality: Documentary Film, Social Science Research and Cognitive Realism in Twentieth-Century Hungary1

The article explores how, given the absence of a proper public sphere, twentieth-century Hungarian social research began to use the notion of “reality” in populist socio-reports, the documentary films of the 1970s, and sociological debates. These discussions all shared the assumption that contemporary political elites ignored the “real” conditions of society. Thus it was the duty of social research (socio-reports or sociology proper) to reveal these facts in a manner that was free of ideology. Whereas in North America and Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s the notion of a directly accessible “reality” had been thrown into question, in Hungary scholarship insisted on this kind of cognitive realism because of social and political reasons. As they argued, “reality” was to be interpreted not as a universal epistemological category, but according to particular terms of the sociology of knowledge. This article explores how the detection of “reality” and “facts” became an ethical vocation within these interrogatory frameworks.

Keywords: social research, sociology, social report, documentary film, Eastern Europe, epistemology, sociology of knowledge, ethical vocation

Introduction

Nullius in verba. The Royal Society of London, established in 1660, adopted this motto (an adaptation of a quote from Horace) to express the learned society’s view that knowledge must be based on empirical research and rational cognition rather than an appeal to authority and a humble trust in someone’s words. Bacon held that science must be based on purely empirical methods, therefore: hypotheses non fingo. Science, in this case natural science, “has condemned for centuries any view expressing merely personal faith. By contrast, science itself is often viewed even now as being founded on solid facts.”2 The social sciences, which emerged, evolved, and became professionalized in the nineteenth century and which do not limit themselves to hard data and facts, may be an awkward fit for the above motto for two reasons. First, the disciplines emerging at the time suffered from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the natural sciences and their remarkable achievements, which had made substantial contributions to the technological conditions of modernity. Second, the subject of the social sciences seemed for a long time too directly accessible, tangible and therefore subject to influence (by direct or indirect interests). The Royal Society has always been independent of government, and its motto signals an unqualified disregard for and even rejection of dependence and commitment: their only commitment is to the search for objective, scientific truth.

Clearly, the social sciences and humanities have always lacked this type of independence, and this has been of great consequence, not only for the sociology of science, but also for epistemology. In the case of history, most markedly in the countries in which its nineteenth-century professionalization was the most rapid (Germany) or the most expansive (France), this process was thoroughly intertwined with the cultivation of a cohesive idea of the nation state and, in the latter case, the creation of a new elite of the Third Republic, a cohort of intellectuals who supported the republican government.3 However, what looked like an advantage in the nineteenth century became a serious loss of moral and scientific credibility after the then unprecedented devastation caused by World War I. This was particularly the case for history, which had supplied much of the fodder for the cultural logic of nationalism, the ideology under the banner of which so many had marched into battle. War in this case needs to be understood not only in the context of eventual history, but rather in the longue durée of intellectual history, more or less the way Jan Patočka came to view it much later: “a vast event conducted by people, yet growing larger than humanity,” “a cosmic occurrence.”4 In a famous essay written roughly around the time in question, Paul Valéry makes a point of making the following harsh comment:

History is the most dangerous concoction the chemistry of the mind has produced. Its properties are well known. It sets people dreaming, intoxicates them, engenders false memories, exaggerates their reflexes, keeps old wounds open, torments their leisure, inspires them with megalomania or persecution complex, and makes nations bitter, proud, insufferable and vain.5

Valéry thereby radically redraws the relationship between science and the surrounding world, as he claims that this discipline is inexorably a social practice as well, so the knowledge it creates is related to power through the binding force of identity-shaping memory. The very science that, in the spirit of its scientific function and calling, busied itself throughout the nineteenth century with the establishment of “the” methodology (the identification and critical analysis of written documents, etc.) suddenly became an “accomplice” in the devastation of the World War in the eyes of critical intellectuals on account of the social functions it had played. This moral culpability, of course, raises the question of humble trust in words once again and assigns the sphere of cognition as the sole appropriate domain of the sciences.

Over the course of the past several decades, however, the achievements of the social sciences have not been particularly encouraging with regards to the noble challenge of “nullius in verba.” The trends in intellectual inquiry that took hold in the decades following World War II, particularly structuralism and various other schools in its wake, have posed countless challenges to Western empirical social sciences that they have not been entirely able to surmount: the linguistic turn, cultural turn, epistemology, etc. Of these, the most complex issue was the often vexing yet in many ways productive emphasis on epistemological perspective. In history, the earliest experiments in this respect took place in France led first and foremost by Paul Veyne and Michel de Certeau among others. In contrast with the American Hayden White, these two French historians critiqued the profession from the perspective of the historian’s practice of empirical work and its crisis (Veyne’s period was antiquity, while de Certeau studied seventeenth-century ecclesiastic history and mysticism). Moreover their historical-critical work went far beyond a merely linguistic, narrative critique of history as a discipline.6 A Jesuit with a Marxist background, de Certeau was one of the first to probe reality and fiction as irreconcilably distinct qualities for the discipline of history.7 From the vantage point of the current Western scientific canon, the significance of the interrogation of concepts such as fact, reality, fiction, and narrative may not seem immensely significant, but in the 1970s these propositions were enough to upset the discipline of history, a discipline that, according to Gérard Noiriel, was always in crisis.8 It was essentially a questioning of the former naïve attitude in history according to which reality could be taken for granted as something “out there,” a given that the historian accesses through the discovery and analysis of original sources and documents. Epistemological critique countered this by the proposition that reality, including the reality of the past, is not given and accessible in any such direct way, for while we are studying it through contemporary documents, we are also extracting, selecting, and editing it. In other words, the shift consisted in the historian’s constructive relationship to the past, which required a distinction between “data” found and identified, and “facts” selected and analyzed. History has thus given up the positivist legacy of the illusory recapturing of past reality as it really happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist).

However, the relationship between general public opinion, critical reflection, and the practices of the social sciences obviously cannot be described solely on the basis of Western European and American experiences, especially because these experiences are contingent on the context in which they occur and in which their practice is regulated. The political system, the public sphere, and the conditions of the practices of scientific inquiry are interrelated concepts, and it is no wonder that, given the remarkably tumultuous and discontinuous twentieth-century history of Eastern Europe, the cognitive role of the social sciences and especially history in the region was severely limited. Following the political transition, when new generations attempted to bring the new post-Structuralist, text-centered, interpretive etc. theories to the region, the older generation tended to respond with a blanket rejection. This rejection was motivated not by an exaggerated skepticism regarding the content of “recent” theories, but rather by the conviction that after the political transition one could finally “speak one’s mind.” Researchers no longer had to subordinate their ideas to official ideologies, so why would one need these obscurely worded new theories? Reality, in the primary and somewhat naïve sense of the word, is there, waiting to be discovered without any constraint from political goals and administrative or bureaucratic obstacles. The days of tricky metapolitics were over, so why use a critical metalanguage?

It would be incorrect to draw the tempting conclusion that Hungarian social sciences are eo ipso rigid and thus unable to adopt trends from elsewhere. This is merely a symptom, the real causes of which lie in the deep structure of Hungarian political and academic culture, namely the way in which the structure of the concept of the public sphere was shifting in relation to the powers that be. In order for this investigation to be truly productive, it has to engage with the concept of reality in the form of a conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). According to Reinhart Koselleck, any study of the social history of cultural forms and practices has to take account of changes in the linguistic-conceptual universe used to refer to a constantly changing social reality. If the world around us is constantly changing, so are the linguistic elements and their corresponding meanings and connotations, and the study of the two in their interrelatedness can open up new avenues of knowledge.9 I propose that by placing the word “reality” (along with the entire system of references to it) into the conceptual plane of the Hungarian history of ideas, one can yield insights into the function of documentary film and its place in the history of ideas. Moreover, this will also yield insights, in the long term, into the recurring efforts and workshops outside the realm of the social sciences that are devoted to discovering reality. This is all the more crucial because, as Wolf Lepenies pointed out in his analysis of British, French, and German examples, literature, film, and journalism (one would do well to update this list with new media today) play as vital a role in a society’s self-representations, as does scientific discourse.10 Ultimately, one could ask the remarkably simple yet acute question: if there was in fact some social science thinking in Hungary, why were its workshops outside the spheres of the social sciences that had reality, fact-finding, and the discovery of reality (whether on paper or celluloid) as their rallying cries?

Critical Social Research and the Idea of Reality

This is actually a product of the relationship between the political plane and those wielding power on the one hand and a (theoretically) independent field of scientific inquiry subject only to the goal of cognition. Dénes Némedi astutely observed that despite the quick, if sporadic, reception of the social sciences in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Hungary, there is no history of Hungarian sociology in any proper sense (not even a history of the social sciences for that matter), because there was no cohesive, continuous social research in Hungary. In this part of Europe, these forms of learning have had an episodic structure. Though various experiments provisionally have served this function, they lack cohesion and a continuity of persons, institutions, and content. The thoroughly modern program of social research was not merely belated, but as a result of its belatedness it took a rather peculiar shape from the moment of its inception, as the journal Huszadik Század [Twentieth Century] and its social science studies were taking an initially tacit and veiled but then increasingly outspoken political stance.11 “Sociology! This was the word,” wrote Oszkár Jászi in 1910, “that synthesized our endeavors: our faith in the glorious power of natural sciences, a social science research built on this power, and a politics for the benefit of the people developed on this foundation,” a credo that signals the Eastern-European specificity of their calling by articulating a commitment to the avowedly political goals of cognition.12

Although it became impossible to pursue serious sociological inquiry after 1918–1919 in the wake of failed revolutions and the subsequent emigration of those involved in radical politics and progressive sciences, sociology did find a new forum in sociography, a path between empirical social research and literature, where it could once again speak of social reality, even if its specific subjects were perhaps different from the interests of Huszadik Század. This brought a discovery and new prominence of the “people,” a time of the exploration and empirical study of a populist thematics. Despite representing a heterogeneous assortment of genres, tones, and methodologies, populist sociography emerged as a sort of master narrative, and it covered a multitude of problems specific to peasants and sharecroppers (the tendency to have a single child, emigration, postwar sects, and life on the Hungarian plain). To sum up, the challenge of discovering reality compensates for the lack of professional sociology and an appropriate public sphere by finding a genre outside institutionalized science. This genre, sociography, attempted to be both “scientific” (methodical, systematic) and something more, namely a representative of the voiceless (the “people”), whose living conditions these sociographers set out to improve therapeutically by giving them voice. Their zeal is once again animated by the watchword of social reality to be discovered and revealed. As Miklós Lackó points out, youths in the 1930s were disenchanted with grand ideas for saving the world. Their attitudes were informed by “a common sense that could be reconciled with conservatism, a demand for realism that could accommodate the diversity of modern thought, and on the basis of the former, a demand for reforms.” According to many, including Imre Kovács, Gyula Szekfű, and István Bibó, it was this demand for and sense of reality that became a key motivating force in the ideas and deeds of this generation.13

The empirical discovery and study of social conditions was of great interest not only to the interwar generation; the “attraction of reality”14 (to quote Ernő Gondos) had a hold on those born in the interwar years as well. Their efforts were pooled in the people’s college movement established in 1939 (Bolyai College until 1942, subsequently Györffy College) and expanded after World War II. This existed under the name Nékosz (National Association of People’s Colleges) until 1949.15 Granted, youth movements had previously played their part in the empirical study of reality (the Scout movement, Pro Christo Students, etc.), but the people’s colleges were something new in that they gave an organizational framework to this inquiry as a specific program, and in fact made knowledge of the country a cornerstone of their pedagogy. For lack of space, instead of an exposition and evaluation of Nékosz’s collective experience, communality, social responsibility, support for the gifted, and important role in fostering social mobility, I will merely note that the issue of reality was fundamental to its pedagogical theory. Ferenc Pataki has identified the greatest virtue of the people’s colleges as “their ability to transform” postwar social dynamism and actions aimed at changing society into a “pedagogical movement and educational practice: they were able to ride the wave of social changes, and they were also able translate them into everyday acts of pedagogical practice.”16 This is why the one-time secretary of Nékosz (later an esteemed psychologist) gave his edited book the emphatic title A valóság pedagógiája [The Pedagogy of Reality], noting that “the pedagogy of changing reality” would have been an even more fitting title, as the movement was driven not only by the desire to discover but also to change reality. The National Pedagogical Conference held on 3-6 January, 1947, as part of which both political leaders (László Rajk, József Révai, Ferenc Erdei, József Darvas, and Péter Veres) and professionals (Ferenc Mérei and Ernő Béki) lauded the movement’s role in social politics and its community building and psychological aspirations, was a milestone in the process of the movement’s institutionalization and in the consolidation of its pedagogy.17 Ferenc Mérei, who played an important role in both politics and pedagogy between 1945–1950, expressed the following view of pedagogical realism in a letter he wrote as director of the National Institute of Pedagogy to Árpád Kiss:

What I gather from your words is that you understand it as the need to adapt previously gained experience and knowledge to the given reality. What I mean by this is rather […] the need to mine the given reality. To this you retort by asking why should one rediscover what others have discovered before. My response is that this is not about ignoring knowledge and experience gained by others, but rather that instead of adapting that knowledge to my reality, it has to be measured against my reality. […] You become doubtful when a given experience contradicts old wise men, whereas I deferentially move said wise men into the museum and follow the thread of the given experience. Naturally, all of this gains its meaning from concrete matters. I do believe that, no doubt through many errors and corrections, our people’s colleges will bring about the realization of an educational system and methodology that both you and I can only attempt to imagine today.18

Mérei’s letter is worth quoting at length because it demonstrates an active, formative concept of reality. In this sense, social reality is both an inherited tradition and something that can be shaped by its tension with a present ready for action. Whether intentionally or not, this brings one back to the 1920s avant-garde notion, expressed most succinctly perhaps by Andor Németh, “reality is not a concept: if you want to get closer to it, you need to touch it, you need to act.”19 This attitude posits social reality not as a final, fossilized moment, but a process that can be shaped.

Why did this active attitude to the concept of reality change, and why did social scientists settle with a more traditional, positivist, nineteenth-century notion in the 1960s and 1970s? The claim to shape reality is not an intellectual pastime in a vacuum, as this claim is surrounded by all the norms of the surrounding political, social world. In brief, Mérei’s notion of “active experience” (which goes back to Andor Németh) or the attempts of the “bright winds” of the people’s college movement to overturn the world can operate if and only if the conditions for action are established. These conditions, however, are not guaranteed unless there is a positive public sphere in which aims, plans, and ambitions can be debated and considered. As I previously noted, the lack of a public sphere is a structural characteristic of modern Hungarian political culture, and the period between 1949 and 1956 shows an exceptionally grave deficit in this respect. Though there was no “democratic” turn after the failed uprising of 1956. Melinda Kalmár has rightly shown that the legitimacy-deficient Kádár regime, which rose to power under the shadow of Soviet weapons, made the establishment of a “simulated public sphere” one of its key strategic goals.20 This peculiar, characteristically Kádár-style contrivance served both to condemn the prior fundamental ideological repression of public discourse and to enable the controlled normalization of slightly freer speech. Over the course of a few decades, public sphere became clearly segmented, and this segmentation became a phenomenon. It included the first plane, which was the official, the semi-official plane, and the hidden, samizdat plane. This indirectly created a half public, half hidden plane on which certain particularly important problems that were concealed and repressed in the first public sphere could still be debated.

This is why Tibor Kuczi could write in the introduction to Valóság ’70 (Reality ’70) that the public sphere sprang forth after 1989 “fully armed” and began to operate in a self-evident manner. If this was indeed the case, he speculates, the public sphere must have had not only forums, media, and places, but also a language, even if this type of publicity (as proven by several examples) tended to “overlay” itself on the concept of the private. In his analysis of the content of the journal Valóság, Attila Becskeházi shows that sociological interpretation meant reality to the users of its language, a reality “distorted,” “concealed,” “falsified,” and “silenced” by ideology. This interpretation was popular because of its emphasis on an alternative understanding and structure of reality. […] So much so […] that the sociological literature of the 1970s rarely includes reflections on its constructive nature. The reality created as a result of sociological interpretation gains credibility not simply by opposing the other [that is ideology], but by revealing a completely different Hungary through the language it uses.21

The realities suggested by official ideology and revealed by social science research were therefore incommensurable. The latter had a surplus that was a consequence not only of its scientific nature, but also its moral stance as a commitment to truth undistorted by ideological clichés. It is a wonderful paradox that such a notion of ideology vs. reality tacitly brings one back to the young Marx’s notion that what one must oppose to ideology is reality as a practice. (This changes with the publication of Capital, partly under Engels’s influence, and ideology will be opposed by science rather than reality.) To put it differently, the critique of ideology, like the reversed image in a camera obscura, results in a species of cognitive realism, insofar as it attempts to turn the Hegelian system upside down.22

Documentary Film

In one of his essays, Ferenc Hammer offers a detailed analysis of the intellectual environment in which, the stylistic and generic diversity of their compositions notwithstanding, the documentary efforts of the Balázs Béla Studio were connected with social science efforts to discover reality. The Studio, an avant-garde, leftist group of artists with a program of social emancipation, played a crucial role in twentieth-century film in Hungary, often in opposition to official socialism during the 1960s and 1980s. To quote Clifford Geertz, documentary film is a “blurred genre.”23 Its definition is vague and ambivalent even with respect to its relationship to reality, not to mention the fraught issues of fiction, emplotment, and other methodological and stylistic characteristics, not to mention rhetoric and metaphor.24 What documentary films do have in common is the emphatic social energy and usefulness, Geertz’s “being there,” a commitment to a professionally and ethically authentic “being there, being present.”25 Responding to a question about the documentary film’s function, Judit Ember affirms this, saying “we must answer in speech, in writing, and on film too, so as to leave some kind of imprint to our children and grandchildren of how we lived and thought and how we imagined how we were living and thinking.”26 Sociologist Ágnes Losonczi identifies the same attitude in the center of Ember’s oeuvre:

What makes her work so important? You have to see and hear her talk and ask questions. You have to know her exceptional skill in establishing relationships, see how she addresses people, watch how they begin to speak sincerely to her and only to her. Her attention opens up fearfully guarded, ossified memories, loosens the speaker’s tongue, and that exceptional relationship that marks a true documentary filmmaker is being formed.27

Gábor Bódy states in his Filmiskola [Film School] that “film is one mode of thinking, which can emerge in a variety of social functions.”28 These functions can include business, art, journalism, popular science, science (sociology, psychology), and they can also be documentation, history, and research. One could say that the documentary film’s relationship to reality (like that of sociology earlier on) is important not so much because of its epistemology or rhetoric as it is because of its functional, pragmatic, and even ethical aspects; its creative relationship within social thought.

One finds all the keywords of the notion of direct cognition, on which cognitive realism rests, in a conversation between Gyula Gazdag, Ferenc Grünwalsky, László Mihályfy and György Szomjas entitled A társadalmi folyamatok láthatóvá tétele [Making Social Processes Visible]. They assert that the processes of reality are graspable “as they are positioned in the structure.”

What documentary film means to us is not a style, not a method of expression, but the visual cognition of reality. […] Our aim is to make reality “play,” that is expose itself in the film […] We have false views of simple facts of reality. The facts themselves are in principle known, but what is unknown is their visual face, which is objective in the manner of data.29

The noble idea of reality playing, i. e. exposing itself, and thereby making itself accessible to the “objective” camera, is probably laughable to the contemporary reader in the wake of the umpteenth epistemological turn of the social sciences. However, if one views the past without the glasses of our present-day omniscience and instead tries to reconstruct the aim of documentarism to discover reality in a more long term context, one can once again reveal the distinctive historical-structural characteristics of cognitive realism.

When directors Ferenc Grünwalsky, Dezső Magyar, László Mihályfy, György Pintér, and István Sipos and writers Árpád Ajtony, Gábor Bódy, Péter Dobai, and Csaba Kardos, the authors of the manifesto Szociológiai filmcsoportot! [For a Sociological Film Group!] say, if only parenthetically, that “we want to reinvent the wheel,” they seem to be tacitly referring to the sociographic tradition of discovering reality outlined above.30 They identify a “field of research” (a telling phrase!), mention the problem of Hungarian villages and small towns, inadequate knowledge of facts, the terms “information aggregator, data collector,” and the method of participatory observation, all of which underscores the primary objective of direct cognition of social reality, to which all formal experiments in the category of “artistic cognition” are secondary. “Collectors provide the studios with the systematically categorized factual material either in raw, unprocessed form or in the form of ‘literary short story’ or sociography,” they say, while emphasizing that processing is collective and requires collaboration with researchers.31 It appears, therefore, that “sociological” or rather sociographic filmmaking, while never explicitly positioning itself as heir to this particular tradition, fits well into the long-term historical structure of Hungarian social studies. Furthermore, it accomplishes the almost obvious medial shift that replaces pen and paper with “camera-pen” and celluloid in the discovery of reality. Of course, the camera’s supplanting of pen and paper was not without consequence; in fact, this is the theoretical juncture where the paths of documentarism proper and the formal experimentation of feature films begin to diverge. One side involves an ethical commitment, which compels the discovery of an unknown reality concealed by ideology to compensate for the lack of a “positive public sphere.”32 Film and documentary film have indeed played an important, if not exclusive, role in debates regarding certain highly significant social issues. Although the documentary filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s can hardly be equated in terms of their formal language, one can justifiably make the claim that both typically attempted to answer questions neglected by history and sociology that could not be broached in other ways. It was at this time that the notion according to which the camera simply replicates the world began to take hold (a notion that persists to this day, despite its shaky foundations). In the words of Gábor Bódy:

Many looked to sociology and a new type of documentarism, from which they expected direct social effectiveness. This did not eliminate all doubts: what is the relationship between a “reality” addressed by the camera with untroubled informality and the sequence of images rolling on the big or small screen?33

Clearly, one of the forces driving the greater demand for documentariness was people’s acute loss of trust in the version of reality depicted in the information-deprived world of the official, first public sphere of socialism.34 Documentary films no doubt had a significant ethical role in revealing particular problems and showing that this concealed reality in fact existed. This, however, seems to have somewhat simplified the epistemological relationship between camera and reality. The latter is amply illustrated by the claim that documentary film allegedly had no raison d’être after the political transition: what was the point of its existence now that “everything could be said?”35 If revealing particular problems of the present or past is no longer a matter of conflict, does the documentary commitment of a filmmaker make any sense? If one’s relationship to reality were indeed so simple, the political transition and a democratic public sphere theoretically would have made the documentary film genre pointless. With the benefit of twenty years of hindsight, one can clearly see this has not been the case.36

As I mentioned in the introduction, this type of realism in the discipline of history has undergone substantial changes in Western Europe since the early 1970s. A (historical) document is no longer regarded as an unproblematic representation of reality, but is seen rather as part of a selective account of it, informed by a particular value structure and power status. Similarly, the frames photographed by the cinematographer and projected onto the big or small screen (after having been edited) represent not reality, but rather a set of moving images of reality selected by the director and cinematographer. This composition includes an imprint of the creators’ political, cultural, ethical and aesthetic attitudes, and the images are often determined by the camera. Its relationship to reality is by no means merely that of a recording. On the contrary, it is highly constitutive. This sheds light on the meaning of Gábor Bódy’s statement according to which “‘documentary film’ is the philosophy of film.” Documentary film illuminates the complex intellectual relationship between the author and external reality, a relationship that the author maintains through his or her work.37 The epistemological level and ethical commitment are not necessarily tied to each other, something made abundantly clear by the divergent paths of Hungarian documentary and feature films from the early 1980s after their near symbiosis in terms of film language. While the former “increasingly made use of historical interviews,” according to András Bálint Kovács, “new feature films give center stage to the creation of subtle narrative and visual effects.”38 The most fitting example is the later film theory and feature film oeuvre of Bódy, who earlier had been a signatory of the manifesto For a Sociological Film Group!. He became the most effective representative of the deconstructive approach to the former linear, realist relationship between film and reality.

Up to this point, in this discussion of the conceptual history of reality my emphasis has been on documentary films with sociological and social history ambitions. It is also worth examining “historical” documentaries and their notions of reality and the manners in which it can be revealed and presented. If one tries to establish ideal types in the kinds of relationships with reality fostered by historical documentaries, again a number of significant differences emerge. Though it may seem paradoxical at first glance, methodologically it is Péter Forgács’s experimental documentary series Privát Magyarország [Private Hungary], inspired by Gábor Bódy’s experiment Privát történelem [Private History; 1978], that is the closest to a classic historical method because he uses contemporary documents. Granted, it is a rather significant difference that while historians rely primarily on written records (“traces” in the terminology of Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos) in their work, Forgács works with amateur and archival newsreel footage, in other words moving images. His work, however, is significantly distinct from fundamentally interview-based “historical documentary films” (also based on the notion of direct cognition) that record the perspective of the present through the social relationships of remembrance.39 Instead of relying on traces, Forgács prefers to learn of the past directly, from the narratives of participants. This is obviously not a qualitative difference, but rather one of cognition, which is nevertheless a highly significant difference in the process of constructing historical reality. Forgács tends to use visual documents as “traces,” even if his visual rhetoric and attribution are exciting precisely because of his constitutive use of the material. His work is always based on accurate research (archives, interviews, etc.), and the phase of execution is naturally governed by artistic goals.

Presented as experimental documentary in 1998 and in 2005 as a multimedia exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, The Danube Exodus shows captain Nándor Andrásovits’s amateur film footage taken at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s. On his ship named “Erzsébet Királyné” [Queen Consort Elizabeth], footage from 1939 records the emigration of Jews escaping from Austria after the Anschluss and from Tiso’s Slovakia. The destination is Palestine. The trip will take them down on Danube and through the Black Sea. One year later, the Soviet Union occupies Bessarabia following the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, as a result of which German settlers of this region have to leave for the territory of the Third Reich. They travel upstream on the Danube until they reach Zimony (today Zemun in Serbia, it is part of the city of Belgrade), and eventually captain Andrásovits’s ship, the “Erzsébet Királyné” delivers them. History is presented on a human scale, while in the background the clashes between the great powers create the context. The footage records the experiences from the perspectives of fugitives escaping downstream and upstream on the Danube, i. e. the everyday lives at the time of Austrian, Slovakian, and Hungarian Jews and German citizens.

As mentioned above, the methodology of Péter Forgács’s documentary film differs from the traditional procedure significantly, in as much as he makes use of contemporary traces, i. e. amateur footage and contemporary photographs, and re-contextualizes them (vis-à-vis the so-called historical documentary that constructs the notion of history retrospectively on the basis of interviews). Forgács’s artistic approach, which is based on pictorial thinking, fundamentally differs from the conventional writing of history. It turns the principle of source criticism, which is dear to traditional historiography, up-side-down using the footage as a document on the one hand and as the object of pictorial rhetoric on the other.40 What is decisive about the film as a conventional historical narrative is that it really happened, while as a visual composition it freely uses found footage, sorts it out, repeats various episodes, modulates, i. e. attributes meaning to the document. These two different uses of historical document create the duality of the series. In preparing the film, the director conducts interviews and selects archival documents. In other words, he pursues regular scientific work preceding the fictionalizing phase of the documents. This is why the play with pictures is not a “simple play,” not the result of daring chance, but deliberate pictorial attribution: enhancement and accentuation, and in the case of Forgács, it is often the deceleration of footage.41 Beyond this, the pieces of the series Privát Magyarország communicate on many levels: the meaning is produced by the found footage, the inscription and the voiceover narration, but at the same time the filmic atmosphere is conjured by the musical inter-medium. Generally, captions of the pictures of The Danube Exodus provide the necessary historical background knowledge, while the voice-over narration (mostly the voice of the well-known actor Andor Lukáts) creates an impression of authenticity and the repetitive music by Tibor Szemző conjures the emotional atmosphere. Doubtlessly, Forgács’s use of documents differs from the manner in which traditional historians would treat sources. Nonetheless, his composition remains very historical in the sense of Siegfried Kracauer’s notion of the multiscopic level of historical understanding. The German philosopher recommends the cognitive and reality producing techniques of motion pictures to historians, that is to say the alternate usage of close-ups and long shots.42

Nowadays, of course, historians also use oral sources (oral history, narrative interviews, etc.), but let us not forget that what appeared self-evident in documentary films (including the “historical” subcategory), namely someone recounting an event, a moment, or his or her own life, was not recognized as legitimate scientific practice in Western Europe until as late as the 1970s.43 The legitimacy of this form of historical narrative was, in fact, undermined by the tacit acceptance of “nullius in verba” in the scientific tradition, which regarded all verbal communications as steeped in ambitions and power interests and therefore as something to be minimized in the interests of scientific objectivity.44 In Hungary, however, a high-minded ideal of science was far from the sole motivation for documentary filmmakers. They were motivated once again by the conditions of the public sphere outlined above. This is why the Holocaust, the Don catastrophe (the losses of the Second Hungarian Army on the Russian front in World War II), virtually any detail of the 1956 uprising, or the labor camps established in the Rákosi era were all off limits for discussion in front of a wider audience.45 The beginning of oral history research and the recording of documentary films was thus not merely a means of disclosing reality and representing a past previously repressed in the official public sphere; it became a moral mission to retrieve the memory of the repressed past for the future. “The guarantee for his [the interviewee – editor] sincerity,” says Gyula Kozák of this ambiguous situation, “is that he has promised to tell everything he knows’ (ha ha!) at the beginning of the conversation, and I accepted—what else could I have done? —that everything will be as much as he deems fit.”46

Conclusions

In the construction of historical knowledge and reality, these epistemological problems are very real. The same difficulties plagued “talking heads” type documentaries as well, and before the political transition the only way of testing the veracity of a statement was to ask several people the same question whenever possible (and this is hardly a reassuring method). There is, however, a major difference between the audiences of the two: the video interview, which constitutes a form of oral history, remains in the status of document (accessible to researchers in the archives), whereas the documentary film is a product made for a prospective broader public sphere (even if the film about the uprising in 1956 could not be screened until 1988). It is something that is usually considered not to be shown in its raw, unedited, dramatically unstructured form.47 After the political transition, when new social science ideas and trends trickled into Hungary and the deficiencies of the public sphere were corrected, sociologists and historians were quick to criticize unquestioning faith in the credibility of oral history and documentary film. It seems symptomatic of the encounter between documentary film and critical theories that, of all possible works, sociologist András Kovács picked Judit Ember’s Menedékjog [Right of Asylum; 1988] as an example to demonstrate how cognitive realism is eroded by the constitutive social process of remembrance. Focusing on the factual inconsistencies between individual interviews and adapting Frederic Bartlett’s theory, Kovács proved that instead of reconstructing the reality of the past, oral narrative constructs it. The reality of the past comes to exist for historical thought through the narrative.48

It would not be appropriate, however, to apply retroactively the currently fashionable critical trends as the sole acceptable ones on the basis of which to assess excellent documentary works and oeuvres. This is not my point. What I have tried to show is that sociography and documentary film shared a motivation: a demand for reality and realism in thinking about Hungarian society and history, driven in part by the structural lack of a positive public sphere and in part by the tension of social (and social history) traumas. This problem was not restricted to state socialism, but was present in the long term of Hungarian political culture. “Rebellious” sociography attempted to reveal a set of repressed problems, much like the documentaries of the 1970s, with their sociological and social history ambitions, and the historical documentaries of the 1980s strived to record distorted, concealed fates and events for the future in order to prevent their planned erasure from cultural memory. In this context, Judit Ember’s documentaries, which represent attempts to salvage the silent tradition of the crushed 1956 uprising, resonate perfectly with Imre Kovács’s Néma forradalom [Silent Revolution], which explores the subject of emigration and the single child phenomenon. In this cross section of conceptual history, one can see that the concept of reality is not constant and absolute; at times the system of references to it and the dynamic relationship with it can tell us more about the period in question than any number of archival documents. Ever since Karl Mannheim introduced his concept of incongruence, we know that individuals relate to social reality not merely through participation, but also through the desire to be separate, to be incompatible.49 If one is willing to consider cognitive realism as a morally motivated act aimed at counterbalancing and pressuring official ideology, a genre- and medium-blind group language of intellectuals unwilling to fit in, then the changing status of reality is suddenly not an epistemological issue, but one of the sociology of science. In the Hungarian history of thought, the constant, emphatic reference to the direct (i.e. non-ideological) cognition of empirical reality could well be construed as a symbolic act, after Geertz and Kenneth Burke, which however cannot help but be saturated by tropes, like all public discourse.50 Recognizing this trope-laden rhetoric of reality, one can grasp the morally charged moments of value creation that aimed to counterbalance political distortion and silencing at any given time. In this sense the status of reality is political. The language and methodology of the revelation of reality was emphatically empirical precisely because reality had to be above any suspicion of ideology; this is why it never became a counter-ideology. The aspiration towards an objectivity above political interests made this pursuit of “reality” a metapolitics (to borrow Miklós Lackó’s term) that consciously ignored and rejected ideological distortions.

Archival Sources

Politikatörténeti és Szakszervezeti Levéltár [Archive of the Institute of Political History], fond 302. 1/ 221. A Népi Kollégiumok Országos Szövetsége első országos nevelésügyi konferenciájának programja, 1947. január 3–9. [The Program of the First Conference regarding Education of the National Alliance of People’s Colleges, January 3–9, 1947].

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [National Archives of Hungary], fond XXVI. I–1–b, box 1, unit 2. Mérei Ferenc levele Kiss Árpádnak [Ferenc Mérei’s Letter to Árpád Kiss] (May 24, 1948).

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Translated by Katalin Orbán

Péter Apor

Spectacular History: Photography, Film and Exhibitions in Representations of the Hungarian Soviet Republic after 1956

The article explores the implications of communist representations of history as it relates to representation and evidence in historical theory. It investigates the attempts of the party historians to establish a historical connection between the “counterrevolutions” of 1919 and 1956: as they argued, the counterrevolution that had been born in 1919 and ruled the country until 1945 and, subsequently, been forced “underground” by the Soviet Red Army and the new communist power, was able to “resurrect itself” once again in 1956. It examines how they attempted to authenticate this historical abstraction through various historical, mostly visual, records: photography, film and exhibitions. The article argues that an unusual attitude towards evidence prevailed in these historical works. Although communist historians boasted of referring to an abundance of original source material, their narrative frames of representation proved to be fictitious: sources were selected not in order to draw conclusions regarding historical processes, but instead to illustrate various pre-figured abstract constructions of history. The aim of this method was to maintain the separation of the empirical source base and the philosophical-theological imagination surrounding the meanings of history in order to unbind the latter from evidence and tie it to political ideologies and commitments.

Keywords: communist historiography, visual representation, authenticity

Introduction

What makes abstract historical interpretations authentic? What types of techniques, evidence and procedures come to the fore in establishing the authenticity, realism or credibility of various historical representations? What is the role of the historian in producing and making these means available? The following article discusses a special case connected to these broader questions. It examines how communist historical-ideologists, propagandists and historians proper used various visual representations, photographs, films and museum exhibitions as evidence for their historical narrative based on the alleged continuity of the “counterrevolutions” in 1919 following the fall of Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic and in 1956 following the anti-Stalinist uprising that overthrew the Rákosi dictatorship. The article explores those intellectual and political contexts prevailing in János Kádár’s post-1956 restoration régime that caused the creators of communist history to believe in the authenticity of their abstract historical construction.1

The problem of evidence and proof present in the historiography of communist historical writings is due to a remarkably significant extent to typical rather than specific ideological and intellectual backgrounds. During the Cold War, non-communist interpreters of communist historical production were largely interested in deconstructing and dismantling scholarship on the past by authors from Eastern Bloc states that critical historiography had with some justification—though probably too easily—disqualified as falsification and ideological distortion of evidence; consequently it had very little stake in conducting analysis of the modes of dealing with original documents and authentic historical records. As a consequence, this tendency of scholarship could not make sense of the admiration of original historical documents that was so typical of most of official historical production during the period of Eastern European communist dictatorship.2 Contrary to the mainstream Cold War inquiries, post-1989 analyses tend to regard communist historiography predominantly as a means of constructing narrative legitimacy. In this perspective, the association of modes of emplotment and generic structures with political and cultural implications seems sufficient to understand the characteristics of communist historical representation. As a consequence, these interpretations risk equating the production of communist historical propaganda with normal historical scholarship and therefore hardly provide any means of carrying out a critical assessment of the ways and extent to which ideological historiography deviates from proper historical investigation.3 This article suggests a different path and examines a case in which the appropriation of original historical records, the burden of proof and authenticity played an important role. Through demonstration of the mode of visual narrative emplotment, its moral implications and political context, I will seek to answer how the ideological prescriptions shaped the use and function of evidence in these representations. As a conclusion, I will argue that the eventual failure of party historians to establish a proper evidential paradigm rendered their narrative pre-figurations ineffective and their moral-political implications inauthentic.4

Revelations of Photography

The crucial component of the Kádárist myth of political legitimacy was the argument that the revolt in 1956 had represented a “counterrevolution” aimed at overthrowing the popular democracy established in Hungary, restoring capitalist exploitation, leading the country to colonial dependence on Western imperialism and restoring counterrevolutionary White Terror against all democratic and anti-Fascist forces, particularly the communists. Interpretations of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic became the crucial and decisive factor in transforming the anti-Stalinist insurrection in October 1956 into a genuine counterrevolution in communist terms. For communists the most shocking occurrence of 1956 was the siege of the Budapest party headquarters on Köztársaság tér (“Republic Square”), where the insurgents mercilessly massacred captured defenders of the building. The communists realized that these radicals had been present as an element of the rebellion from the very beginning, claiming that they had, in fact, organized the uprising and following the occupation of the party headquarters had openly called for the restoration of capitalist dictatorship and the annihilation of the defenders of the communist régime.5 The conclusion that the massacre of communists must be interpreted as a sign of counterrevolution was confirmed by the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, when paramilitaries who called themselves counterrevolutionaries and who aimed to restore the pre-1914 social and political order persecuted, tortured and executed communists, leftists and Jews. For party leaders the two events were strikingly similar. From the communist perspective, the revolution in October 1956 was none other than the revival of the White Terror that took place following the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the second coming of the counterrevolutionaries of 1919.

In this respect, the history of the Kádár era is that of a constant historiographical project focused on the documentation of the counterrevolution and its transformation into an intelligible narrative. The new communist government presented its official interpretation of the 1956 revolution in the so-called “White Books.” This series of five volumes was prepared by the government Information Office in 1956–58 with the purpose of publishing evidence on the “counterrevolutionary nature” of the events that had taken place in Hungary in the fall of 1956. The series was aimed at a broad public: the second edition in 1958 was planned to number 100,000 copies.6 The evidence included photographs of the lynching of party members and security officers, alleged biographies of participants linking them to the interwar élite and reports about atrocities or capitalist political programs that were supposedly taken from documents of post-1956 trials. The level of evidence, in reality, was rather uneven: photos documented real events, but they were not immune to various techniques of manipulation and many of the reports were distorted and in some cases simply fictitious. The first volume was issued in December 1956, shortly after the suppression of the revolution.

The evidence that the White Books accumulated soon after the end of the armed revolt contained a large number of photographs among the numerous testimonies and articles. A sizable proportion of them were shot by Western reporters who were in Budapest during the revolution and were published in leading journals such as Time, Life, Paris Match or Der Spiegel.7 The photos, which generally followed the generic features of photographic war documentation, concentrated on the crowd, violence, armed groups and the ruins of the city. These photographic images played a great role in constructing for the Western public a revolution, meaning a collective social deed, out of the events of October and November 1956.8 The way in which the communist observers who compiled the history of the counterrevolution regarded this documentation is eloquently reflected by the first volume of the White Books.9 What dominates the volume even at first sight is the terrifying spectacle of physical violence. Photographs of bodies, beaten, tortured, executed and dismembered, appear one after another. Undoubtedly, one which depicts a young member of the communist political police stripped to the waist and hanged upside down has become one of the most telling.10 The gaze of the viewer is drawn immediately to the body situated in the vertical axis of the photograph, occupying it completely from top to bottom. Subsequently one notices the figures standing in the background of the illustration. A few people are watching the victim, while others are talking to each other or paying attention to something outside the frame. The chief element of the story is clearly the tortured and hanged body. The event the photograph wants portray is not the action of lynching, but rather the result, frozen in time: the dismembered body. The cruelty that is made impersonal and atemporal in this way is transformed into a depiction of the barbarity concealed in the depths of human soul, but which on this horrific occasion has erupted onto the surface.

The image of the corpses of fallen political-police officers laid down in a row inflicts similar effects on the observer.11 No other human figure can be seen besides the dead, so the cause of death remains hidden. The subject is not human activity in this case, only its outcome. The photography that depicts the corpses of the executed in a perspectival point of view evokes the image of parallels leading to infinity: the viewer can imagine this spectacle of the dead to continue beyond the frame. The photo represents the impersonal nature of mass devastation and murderous cruelty. The stories told by the images attempt to depict violence in an abstract, allegorical manner, as illustrated by the photograph of a group assaulting a woman lying on the ground.12 The gaze of the viewer is drawn to the center by the white blouse of the woman, which stands out of the gray-black background. Thus the viewer first encounters the fact of cruelty: the woman’s body is surrounded by legs kicking her and hands twisting her arms. The image nonetheless remains impersonal: the faces of neither the woman nor the attackers are visible. In fact, the members of the group committing the atrocity appear below the waist, merely as a mass of bodily appendages directly carrying out the violence. At the same time, the composition is loaded with symbolic meaning related to gender: the woman’s white dress evokes concepts of defenseless innocence, whereas the darkly dressed male figures surrounding her represent images of the untamed violence hidden in man. The spectacle of pure cruelty dominates the publication: within its 62 pages, the thin volume features 27 photographs of corpses, executions and other atrocities. Any logic among the photographs besides repetition is hard to detect: each illustration depicts a new instance of cruelty. The recurrent images of violence strengthen the impression of a flood of arbitrary mercilessness; the purposeless, unhindered violence evokes the notion of uncivilized barbarity. The crowd, raging wildly, showed no mercy and “bestially dismembered” its victims: one of the photographs shows a naked upper body with its head and arms removed.13

Following the June 1958 trial of Imre Nagy, who served as prime minister during the 1956 revolution, the shocking photographs of the bloodbath on Republic Square published in the first volume of the White Books come into a peculiar relationship with images of other anti-communist violence. The fifth volume of the White Books, which aimed to prove the guilt of the former prime minister, published a few such images. The first examples are placed on adjoining pages: the first page contains photographs from 1919, the second from 1956.14 The photos from 1919 depict when “one of the leaders from the district of Tab was hanged in the main street of the village after the downfall of the Soviet Republic in 1919” and when “White Terrorist officers executed a peasant on the outskirts of the village of Kőröshegy.” The photos taken in 1956 show when “the counterrevolutionaries carried off József Stefkó, a border-guard lieutenant who was lying ill in the hospital, and beat him to death then hanged him upside down.” The photographs taken in 1919 focus on hanged victims placed in the vertical axis of the composition. Framing the images one can see counterrevolutionary officers either posing proudly by their victim or carefully observing the result of their activity. Both compositions thus emphasize the cold, merciless character of the counterrevolutionaries. The picture from 1956, placed next to the earlier ones, creates the impression of similarity by the commensurable composition, highlighting the hanged person in its vertical axis. The center of the image is likewise juxtaposed by a raging crowd, thereby highlighting the contrast between the defenseless victim and the cruel counterrevolutionaries.

The second examples are printed on one page: the upper one depicts the “Communists of Szekszárd in 1919,” who are “awaiting the fatal bullets of Horthy’s White Terrorists with their hands bound behind their back,” whereas the photograph below shows when “the counterrevolutionary bandits shot the surrendered soldiers from behind on Republic Square in October 1956.” Whereas the first photograph focuses on the victims of the forthcoming execution, the second one places the executioners at its center. Nonetheless, the differing compositions have a similar visual effect. The first image shows those awaiting execution—depicted as average ordinary people from all classes of society—in two rows, silently and calmly awaiting death. These two rows occupy the entire photograph, the depicted individuals facing the viewer with no visible sign of the firing squad. This photo thereby manages to emphasize the unarmed, non-violent, defenseless state of the victims, giving also an impression of innocence. The second image taken in 1956 places a group of armed insurgents on the right-hand half of the composition, while the other half is occupied by two figures: a body lying on the ground, apparently dead, and a person seemingly trying to move away with his hands held up and showing his back to the group of insurgents. The gesture of this figure creates the impression that the armed group has already shot the surrendered combatants, which, as in the previous photograph, builds its visual message on the contrast of innocence and mercilessness.15

The photos in the White Books are not illustrations—that is to say, they are not additions to or the direct representations of events described in the texts. They are presented independently, in themselves, even for themselves. Their role is to mediate the allegedly purified reality. Photography was endowed with the particular concept of objectivity during the second half of the nineteenth century. During these years, scientists started to look for methods of observation that could be made independent of the subjective points of view determined by individual value judgment, faith or conviction, and were able to record the phenomena of the world in their pure reality. The mechanical recording of data appeared free of the fallibility of the human subject: machines do not tire, they are able to work continually without breaks and they do not make moral decisions and aesthetic judgments. Images recorded by photographic machines became the authentic representations of reality, free of subjective intervention and independent of human individuality. Photography, hence, is taken as the unquestioned evidence of objective reality: the imprint of truth beyond the human limits of perception.16 Photographs are thus believed to be able to reveal those aspects of reality that sometimes remain hidden from human eyes.17 The similarity of the violence revealed something essential about historical continuity for the communist editors.

The cruel, bloodthirsty White Terror in 1956 was preceded by the White Terror of Horthy and his associates. Fascists allied with criminals, former village leaders, gendarme officers, Horthy officers and Arrow Cross men attempted to attack the freedom of the Hungarian people and many brave sons of the Hungarian people. Although they felt in 1956 that they were just at the very beginning, the supporters of the fallen Horthy regime could not restrain themselves and tried to “imitate” 1919 with open White Terror.18

Communist observers thus claimed that the images of similar violence revealed an unbroken historical continuity ranging from 1919 to 1956, as if one could foresee on the photos taken after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic what would occur in 1956.19 The impressive photos taken as evidence of reality, free of human subjectivity, suggested the inherent homogeneity of the counterrevolution and, thereby, blurred and diminished its actual historical transformation from the White Terror through consolidation, crisis and war, to its eventual collapse and the coming to power of the Arrow Cross. In this context, a strange but largely forgotten history of 1919 obtained new relevance.

History on Propaganda Films

The physical connection between images of 1919 and 1956 directly contributed to the emergence of a genre that represented history in a particular visual way, which was turned into continuous flow of images mostly due to military propaganda movies. The Political Department of the Hungarian People’s Army regularly ordered propaganda films to boost the ethos of military duty by the means of evoking patriotic traditions throughout the entire socialist period. The canonical scheme of these films was the historical tableau that depicted in recurrent chapters the freedom fights of the Hungarian people, such as the peasant rebellion of 1514, Rákóczi’s insurrection in 1703, the war for independence in 1848–49, the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and the victory of Soviet troops in 1945. This concept of history, which was most of all the visual display of Aladár Mód’s history book 400 év küzdelem az önálló Magyarországért (400 Years of Struggle for an Independent Hungary),20 was easily recognizable in works recorded after 1956. The message of the film Szabadságharcos elődeink (“Our Freedom Fighter Predecessors”) from 1958 was to highlight German imperialism as the main threat against Hungarian freedom. The directors contrasted this menace with the longing for freedom of the people which they supported by showing recurrent episodes of freedom fights. The film focused on the crucial role the people played in these struggles, which it intended to illustrate from historical costume dramas and mass spectacles taken from documentaries recorded in 1919 and 1945.21

This tradition was continued by the film titled Az eskü (“The Oath”), which was shot in 1962.22 This work is a feature film about the oaths taken by an army unit. The main character in the movie is a captain who has to take over the duty of managing the procedure due to the abrupt departure of his superior. After the commander leaves the barracks, the captain is left to meditate alone in the commander’s office. The camera centers on the officer’s face from a close distance, emphasizing his concentration and his uncertainty about what to say to the troops. The camera moves slowly around the captain, suggesting his state of mind, while the audience hears his thoughts: should he talk about his own life, his childhood, about the bitterness of day labor and privation? The camera then shows the captain from behind, positioning him in the bottom right of the frame, whereas the gaze of the audience is attracted to the portrait of Lenin fixed in the top left. The visual relationship of the soldier turning to Lenin and the Bolshevik leader looking down on the officer evokes the image of the believer asking for help from the source of knowledge.

During this scene, the captain meditates on the importance of the oath for a soldier left to his own devices. The significance of the oath is confirmed by his own example: in the next cut the officer remembers his personal experiences from October 1956. His task was to deliver a freight train to a barracks, however it seems impossible due to the railway workers’ strike. Meanwhile, armed “counterrevolutionaries” gather around the train. While the main character negotiates with the railway workers, the armed men try to get a hold of the train’s load. Nonetheless, the soldiers guarding the wagons defend the train, following the command of their oath, even in the absence of their actual commander.

Memories from 1956 provide the moment of enlightenment: in one stroke they elucidate the meaning of the oath—to be faithful to the idea—while at the same time they also reveal the sense of Hungarian history—a continuous struggle between the tyranny of the masters and the oppressed people. The retrospective of 1956 evokes, one after the other, the memories of the historical past. The scene of 1956, by the means of a quick cut, imitating the rhythm of abruptly flashing memories, is followed by a series of graphics from the well-known Hungarian Communist artist Gyula Derkovits depicting György Dózsa, leader of the great peasant revolt in 1514. The film generates the impression of a story occurring in time by the means of images merging into each other and panning the camera within individual frames. The captain’s interpretive commentary—as if it is the voice of the person who is remembering —qualifies this visual movement as instances of the antagonism between master and peasant. The process of recollection connects the individual historical events: following the meditation of the officer the spectator learns that Dózsa’s downfall in reality represented an alarm signal for Rákóczi’s cavalry (anti-Habsburg rebels in the early eighteenth century). The scene depicting Rákóczi’s war of independence emphasizes the common descent of the rebels, their reluctance to fight in the service of noble commanders and enthusiasm in the camp for the popular leader Bottyán.

By evoking these memories of history, the captain draws the conclusion that the Hungarian Jacobin conspirators (a small republican conspiracy influenced by the French revolution), although they followed Rákóczi’s rebels in the series of popular freedom fights, made one step forward and pursued this struggle for the republic. Memories of Habsburg oppression follow the execution of the Jacobins in the film. Historical scenes depict the sufferings of the people, then the revolutionary crowd in Pest taking an oath of freedom in 1848. The Hungarian Soviet Republic appears in the film as a chapter in these popular freedom fights. Images evoking the event show a popular festival, thus emphasizing the joy felt by the proclamation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which are succeeded by images of battle and speeches exhorting the people to fight. The part that represents the dictatorship of the proletariat corresponds to the tension reflecting the state of mind of the captain: the scene continues with a quick cut to the officer stepping up to the speaker’s platform. The period subsequent to the Hungarian Soviet Republic appears as the age of darkness and suffering in the film. The images depicting the Horthy era show the execution of two captive men accompanied by gendarmes. The captain’s voice, occupying position of narrator, calls attention to the idea that during this dark age the power of the people was defended by the communists, who then guaranteed its victory after the Second World War. The concluding message of the film is that it is the task of future generations to defend this power.

Az eskü consists of long scenes and a limited number of cuts: the slow, relaxed tempo of nostalgic recollection provides the rhythm of the film. The captain’s role as narrator renders the contemporary perspective of 1956 in order to guarantee the abstract historical framework for memories. The practice of the film in evoking the past apparently follows the method of the historian: following the gathering of data concerning the event under scrutiny, the interpretation of the entire occurrence begins. The apparent purpose of historical investigation is Marxist analysis: to investigate the meaning of history in general based on individual events. The documentary-like moving pictures are meant to guarantee the authenticity of the historical account. These frames provide recognizably distinct spectacles to the visual settings of the overall story: whereas the scenes showing the hesitation of the captain are based on fluid shots typical of the 1960s and a relatively low-key acting performance, the images evoking the past consist of fragmented shots which bring the archaic impressions and expressive acting style to the foreground. Clearly, the film is designed for impact, as if the past has been reconstructed from contemporary sources, like a documentary. In fact, the authorities encouraged the production of films on the period that applied documentary techniques.

The guiding light of the 1963 historical documentary film Elárult ország (“Country Betrayed”), which aimed to depict the political élite of the interwar Horthy administration, is provided by portraits of Regent Miklós Horthy and Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös situated next to each other.23 The narrator explains these images, calling Gömbös the catalyst for the German imperial alliance who subsequently led the country into disaster. Following an abrupt cut, the film continues with Mihály Francia Kiss’s trial in 1957. The appearance of this judicial process secures the function of 1956, similarly to Az eskü, as the point of departure for historical reconstruction and the fixing of the fall of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic as the turning point in history. The historical conception is similar as well: according to the film, the Hungarian ruling classes had been pursuing opportunistic policies due to their fear of the people since 1849, which resulted in the service to German imperialism.

The Hungarian Soviet Republic was depicted as a significant episode of this historical struggle conceived in terms of social conflicts. The documentary titled Landler Jenő: A forradalom jogásza (“Jenő Landler: The Lawyer of the Revolution”) attempted to render this statement plausible.24 The work represents Landler’s activity in the labor movement, the culmination of which was his rise to the command of the Hungarian Red Army in 1919, using various photographs instead of contemporary moving images. The film is composed of slowly panning camera movements, which imitate the slow, contemplating gaze of an observer immersed in the surrounding social world. The movement of the camera represents the meticulous scrutiny of society, making it clear that the represented historical processes are to be understood as the result of various social components. According to the film, this societal surrounding is marked by tension and social conflict, illustrated by images of light and darkness. The documentary describes the story of society hastening into revolution by means of photographs depicting striking and demonstrating crowds, making the Hungarian Soviet Republic tangible as a social revolution.

The film Elárult ország tries to integrate this narrow historical interpretation into a broader context. The work clearly meets the formal criterion for documentaries to use cuts from various contemporary films. The logic of the visual display evokes the perspective of an objective observer, thereby putting the cinematic documents forward as evidence for investigation.25 The shaping of the Austro–Hungarian and German militarist political alliance is represented by images of military inspection and units from the end of the nineteenth century. The filmmakers believe they have detected the real purpose of war, depicted by images of cavalry troops put into action against workers on strike. This method is featured throughout the entire documentary: images of formal dances and hunting excursions representing the luxurious lifestyle and irresponsible behavior of the political élite and ruling classes are juxtaposed by visual displays of privation and oppression. Shots taken of birth and death registers, intended to demonstrate mortality by means of evoking the concepts of archives and statistics, reinforce the aura of documentary-like historical authenticity.

At first sight, there is nothing extraordinary in this practice. As if communist propagandist-historians are interested in the same questions as every other historian: how was the state of his or her point of view formed? What were the historical processes that led to the conditions of the present?26 Communists saw their present determined by the conflict of revolution and counterrevolution. Historians hence behaved as if they were searching for the historical origins of this struggle, believing that they had discovered its archetypal event in the history of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In order to find answers to the question, partisan scholars imitated the method of investigation: they pretended to look for sources that would answer their questions and might reveal the secrets of the past. During their investigation these propagandist-historians acted as if they had been exploiting their sources as clues: based upon these clues researchers pretended to deduce what past occurrences the remnants reflected, creating the impression that it had been the reading of evidence that shaped the narrative.

The ideological framing of the narratives, however, confined historical sources to a curious role in representations of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The editing techniques of Elárult ország are marked by rapid shifts of sharply cut frames, which make the profound encounter and working with the presented documents barely possible. In fact, by applying this method the film specifically attempts to hinder a comprehensive and profound understanding of history. The short, rapidly changing images and simple narration following this rhythm are aimed at stirring emotions: contrapuntal frames quickly follow each other, leading the audience towards emotional identification with the oppressed. The film is ostensibly a documentary, though is in fact a propaganda work, the primary goal of which is the deconstruction of critical distance from the message, suppressing the voice of contradictory evidence. The real purpose of the procession of images is actually nothing less than to justify emotional proximity and to simultaneously suspend critical distance.

Elárult ország tells the story of the interwar period by means of corresponding frames on Hungarian politics and German military preparations succeeding one another, which makes it possible to represent these historical events, otherwise lacking sufficient narrative explanation, as being parallel occurrences. A typical example of this practice is the quick, sharp cuts between scenes that depict recordings of the Nuremberg NS Party days and Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös of Hungary in national-style festive costume. The Hungarian foreign policy of the 1930s thereby entered into a direct relationship with the goals of Nazi politics without any particular explanation or justification. Another scene that juxtaposes the Hungarian rearmament program of the 1930s with the German–Austrian Anschluß plays a similar role. Corresponding parallel images, thus, integrate contemporary Hungarian politics into the context of German imperial expansion without any profound historical investigation. Images edited next to each other in these Hungarian military propaganda films summon a sense of affinity and elicit particular historical associations. The similarity of spectacle connects the historical events, persons and data depicted by these pictures, while the temporal succession of moving images transforms them into a narrative.

The spectacle of this historical continuity features the memorial exhibition opened on the 40th anniversary of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was organized by the Trade Union of Railway Workers. The workers wanted to install a genuine historical exhibition representing the past by means of original documents. According to this intention, clearly visible on preserved photographs, some boards did not simply show copies of contemporary historical sources, but the actual documents themselves stuck to the boards in their physical entirety. The volume titled The Establishment of Organizations, which describes the history of the railway workers’ trade unions in between the wars, was put on display to be opened and browsed through by the visitors (Fig. 1).

This direct encounter with the traces of the past, however, concealed the fact that, rather than being an accurate descriptive explanation, the sequence of the display defined the nature of the relationship among these historical documents. The exposition made its objects available for the public in a montage-like arrangement (Fig. 2). Documents of the counterrevolution following the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic can be seen on a background made of graphical works of art. This background is dominated by a gallows tree and the figures of a gendarme and a village notary grasping a whip. These iconic images attempt to establish the existence of a deeper, profound historical continuity, though remains barely explicated. The inscription “Year 1932,” visible on boards representing the history of the interwar period, is succeeded by an image of the German imperial eagle, and the visual series is completed by a depiction of a Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross armband. The portrait of Hitler situated above the series of images, in turn, appears to reveal the essence of the power dominating the events in reality.27 The exhibition in this way actually represented the historical allegory of counterrevolution, of downfall and continuity replacing genuine historical explanation.

A Look at the Evidence

Apparently, historical representations of the Hungarian Soviet Republic that followed the party line put very little emphasis on the establishment of critical relationships between historical evidence and narrative claims regarding the past. Documentary films commissioned by the authorities in general were not interested in creating particular indexical relationships with reality, where images mediate the authentic sense of being there and of direct experience by means of accurate references to the represented actions and events.28 In a similar vein, historical works in printed media seem to disregard the traditional function of the footnote as a method of critical reflection on the sources of knowledge on the past. Historians ordinarily are expected to go to the archives, dig up sources and reveal their findings, together with the process of investigation, to the public. Hungarian communist-party historians ignored the fact that footnotes does not simply claim that the evidence exists, but also prove that the historian was there, meeting and working with the records, and has drawn conclusions from the direct experience with them. These works on 1919 had no concern for turning footnotes into tools for demonstrating the outcomes of obligatory critical work and testifying to the ability of the historian.29 All these expectations, however, place a peculiar status of uncertainty upon the historian: he or she is required to reach conclusions, make claims and arguments, end the narrative and construct the ending of the plot structure together with its broader moral, political and cultural implications after meticulous engagement with the evidence. Since no pool of sources is entire and no interpretations are final, there is always a certain level of uncertainty in the historian’s work. Historians are inherently dependent on the contingent collection of archives and the uncertainty of evidence. Historical authenticity rests on the certainty of uncertainty: an accurate description of inaccuracy and absences of evidence and a sincere declaration of the reasons why a particular interpretation is preferred. The intention of demonstrating evidence in these historical representations was not to reflect uncertainty by answering questions: on the contrary, the use of historical records was aimed at illustration of the given certainty of abstract prescribed statements on the past.

In fact, the manipulation of historical authenticity is detectable behind the appearance of authentic historical representation: the evocation of the past in works which call themselves historical documentaries aims to create effects similar to those in historical costume dramas. Obviously, the majority of historical scenes represented by moving images could not be produced according to original documents. In Az eskü, the peasant rebellion of 1514 is depicted by art graphics, while the Rákóczi insurrection of 1703–11 and the war for independence in 1848–49 are shown by frames from a feature film produced in the 1950s.30 The proclamation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the struggles of the Red Army are illustrated by contemporary documentary shots; however, the fall of the dictatorship is depicted by images from a feature film. Historical feature film, however, is a particular genre: it represents the events of the past overwhelmingly via individual fates and trajectories. Individual deeds stand in the focus of historical processes, while social conflicts and ruptures are conceived through individual mental and emotional reactions.31 Historical dramas do not present historical evidence for the spectators in order to drive them to consider, come to terms with and perform interpretive work with these proofs. The ability of historical feature films is to encourage emotional identification with abstract, positively depicted forces and values symbolized by the events of the past by means of establishing particular relationships to individual characters.

It is as if the construction of narratives about the past, namely historical interpretation, was the result of an imagination independent of reading the sources. Apparently, historians willing to meet the official expectations of the party considered historical research to be the value- and interpretation-free activity of selecting and collecting facts from an unprocessed historical field that had nothing to do with genuine historical understanding. As if evidence could automatically establish, by the mere virtue of its existence, a relationship with reality. As if historical evidence constituted a positive store of facts, independent of and unchanged by the interpreter, but which was at the historian’s disposal to be selected freely according to the needs of demonstration.32

The most important criterion determining the authenticity of historical interpretations, as György Lukács claims in his treatise on the historical novel published in Russian in 1937 and in Hungarian in 1947, is that they are able to represent the tendencies of development shaping the present. The Marxist philosopher expects historical novels to demonstrate how society developed into its contemporary form and which historical processes determined its contemporary state:

Without a felt relationship to the present, a portrayal of history is impossible. But this relationship, in the case of really great historical art, does not consist in alluding to contemporary events, but in bringing the past to life as the prehistory of the present, in giving poetic life to those historical, social and human forces which, in the course of a long evolution, have made our present-day life what it is and as we experience it.33

Lukács believes that precisely because the purpose of historical representations is to detect processes leading to the present, many historically relevant tendencies reveal themselves only for the retrospective gaze into the past. Numerous components of the historical development remained hidden for contemporaries, which, nonetheless, became recognizable for succeeding observers. Lukács, however, is searching for more than the relevance of historical explorations as tools to understand the present. The Marxist philosopher is arguing that since the genuine essence of historical reality is made of those processes which lead towards the present, this reality becomes accessible through an adequate assessment of the present. The appropriate understanding of the historical process is dependent on the correct moral-political commitment and cultural-ideological consciousness of the observer-interpreter of the past. The purpose of authentic historical representation, thus, is to document the process of historical necessity as understood retrospectively:

Measured against this authentic reproduction of the real components of historical necessity, it matters little whether individual details, individual facts are historically correct or not. […] Detail is only a means for achieving the historical faithfulness here described, for making concretely clear the historical necessity of a concrete situation.34

To be a faithful representation of reality, one must depict the hidden essence of things, the theory of socialist realism teaches. As its philosophy claims, the hidden, but real essence and meaning of History or Reality reveals itself in its typical manifestations. However, to recognize and understand the typical, one must practice a certain form of self-discipline: one must learn not to trust his or her eyes, since the eyes, according to socialist realist criticism, reflect only objects as they visibly appear, but tell little about the truly important factors of human consciousness and cognition, which is accessible only by thought. For the philosophy of socialist realism, the visible observable qualities of objects—facts—are only part of the truth, more precisely, these are raw material which genuine representation must learn to use and even use creatively in order to discern the inessential and the typical. But how to establish what is important and what is not? The typical, according to the theory of socialist realism, is not marked by its regular appearance or majority. The typical is rather the crucial process which is just emerging to determine the further course and meaning of History. Therefore, reality is to be recognized not by considering the visible and the observable, but by contemplating the yet invisible and hidden. A certain element of prediction and fortune-telling is involved in this process, which could make faithful representation impossible if there was no guiding light in seeing the future. If it is the political center, the party that shapes the future, launches the processes to emerge and defines what the typical is, then true representation must understand, depict and follow political visions and objectives.35

Conclusions

Propagandist-historians regarded the form of historical representation that they constructed as having incorporated evidence into a comprehensive and comprehensible narrative, and thus they saw it as being capable of supporting their political project, effectively representing the “truth” of communism.36 Communist propagandist-historians seemed to consider the authenticity of historical accounts to be the result of the success of representing cultural-philosophical concepts by means of various forms of art. The artificial division of the interpretation of sources and the creative narrative process had convinced them that the validity and credibility of historical interpretation was bound to coherent narratives embedded in a cultural context of narrative tradition. Communist authorities shaping the politics of history tended to believe that the credibility of historical representations was grounded if they acquired meaning as narratives. The validity of historical interpretation was well-founded if it was related to a culturally accessible set of narratives. They expected readers to perceive the correspondence between narrative forms and genres, whereas the form of the particular historical account was to remind them of those kinds of story structures which generally were already available in society.37

Nonetheless, the effectiveness of the abstract history of the Hungarian Soviet Republic remained deeply doubtful. Instead of accurate references to particular individual phenomena, these works referred to general moral and cultural positions in order to draw (political) lessons and provide judgment. As a consequence of this use of evidence to invoke moral judgment, political commitment or ideological notions, the abstract narrative of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was conceived as it really was: a means to cover and conceal the fact that the communist fighters of 1919 had directly or indirectly contributed to the suffering of those people who were opponents or obstructions to their program of political and social transformation.38 These representations of the past appeared to be tools of a particular “rhetoric against the evidence”: the rhetorical means of suppressing evidence.39 Communist representations of the Hungarian Soviet Republic represented no evidential paradigm, no mode of reading the evidence, but realized an artistic modality: fiction that transformed the evocation of reality into aesthetic quality to reflect abstract world views, moral structures or ideological constructions. The mode of uploading evidence into prefigured narrative constructs made the representations of the Hungarian Soviet Republic appear as they really were: fictions exploiting original documents to illustrate the abstract fictive concept of the counterrevolution.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MNL OL – National Archives of Hungary). Records of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Secretariat M-KS 288. fond 7/2. ő.e.

Historical Photographic Records of the Hungarian National Museum 48. ME/II/B, Box: Culture: Exhibitions 1957–1962. Registry no.: 59.523, 59.524, 59.525.

Open Society Archives (OSA)

Az eskü [The Oath], 1962. Collection of military propaganda films of the Museum of Military History. HL 10038. OSA VHS no. 39.

Elárult ország [Country Betrayed], 1963, dir.: László Bokor. Collection of military propaganda films of the Museum of Military History. HL 3058–3060. OSA VHS no. 64.

Landler Jenő: A forradalom jogásza [Jenő Landler: Lawyer of the Revolution], dir.: János Lestár. Collection of military propaganda films of the Museum of Military History. HL 3204–3205. OSA VHS no. 66.

Szabadságharcos elődeink [Our Freedom Fighter Predecessors] (1958). Collection of military propaganda films of the Museum of Military History. HL 10010. OSA VHS no. 66.

Bibliography

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Martina Baleva

Revolution in the Darkroom: Nineteenth-Century Portrait Photography as a Visual Discourse of Authenticity in Historiography

Historical photography has always played a crucial role in historiography, in the creation of collective memory, and in the perpetuation of historical traditions. Of all the photographic genres, portrait photography is the most prevalent genre and remains the “vera icon” of illustrated histories. The significance of portrait photography in historiography is amply illustrated by its use in the creation of so-called “Bulgarian national heroes,” historical figures that acquired an almost mythic significance largely through their depictions in photographic portraits. In this article I examine the specific use of this particular photographic genre in Bulgarian illustrated histories and provide analyses of the motifs and symbols of the portraits themselves, both as historical primary sources and as epistemological instruments that have had a decisive and continuous influence on the historical process of the creation of “true” national heroes. My aim is to outline the genesis of these photographic portraits in order to shed light on the process of their framing within the historical imagination as authentic representations.

Keywords: visual history, illustrated histories, April uprising, portrait photography, carte-de-visite, national heroes

In his essay on the constitutive role of photography in the construction of ethnic identity in the nineteenth century, historian of photography Adrian-Silvan Ionescu identifies a genre of photographic portraits as representations of “Bulgarian national heroes”.1 While Ionescu leaves open the question of whether this category of images can be explained by the ever growing number of photographs of Ottoman Bulgarians in a diverse array of military uniforms, the large number of portrait photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century suggests that this may well have been the case. They are today an integral part of the historical tradition and have become deeply imprinted in the visual memories of generations as “authentic” photographic testimony to and documentation of the national revolution. Not a single history book has failed to include reproductions, and they hang in every school and public building, almost as if an obligatory adornment. Even the uniforms of the National Guard today are influenced by this tradition.

The enormous influence of historical photographs on our conception of history is not a Bulgarian peculiarity, but rather a fundamental phenomenon, for which the photographs of “Bulgarian national heroes” are simply revealing specimens. The example of Bulgaria is particularly appropriate, however, in a discussion of the question of the construction of historical “authenticity” through visual representations, in particular through the use of photography. In spite of or specifically because of the postulated convergence of photography and history,2 I would like here to examine their intricate interrelationships with regards to discourses of visual authenticity in the writing of history. In a comparative analysis of both of the subject-specific perspectives on visual “truth”, the historical and the photographic, I would like to discuss the conflicting interpretations of pictures in order to draw attention to the displacements, reallocations, reconfigurations, and new configurations of historical knowledge in photographic images.

Historical Remarks

Most of the national movements of the nineteenth century took place at roughly the same time as the general and rapid spread of portrait photography.3 In the case of Bulgaria, one can in fact date the convergence of national ideology and photographic technique to the year 1867. In the 1860s the global mass production of portrait photographs reached its first historical zenith. At the same time, in the Balkans an anti-Ottoman coalition came into being in the European part of the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of the Serbian Prince Mihailo Obrenović III. This was to become a decisive impetus for many national movements in the region.

One of the long-term goals of the Serbian Coalition with the Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Montenegrins, and Romanians was to create an alliance and wage war against the Ottomans, the end result of which was to be a confederation of the Balkan peoples. One of the most important parts of the military tactic of the anti-Ottoman coalition was the recruitment and military training of the Christian subjects of the Sultan. They were assembled into armed units that were supposed to launch regular incursions into the Ottoman Empire from the outside (from Serb controlled territories) in order to provoke the Ottomans not simply to react, but to overreact, and in doing so to draw the attention of the rest of Europe to the Balkans and prompt an attack by the European great powers.4

In the 1860s, the Serbian government formed a Bulgarian legion in Belgrade, alongside the Bosnian and Herzegovinian legions. It consisted of Bulgarians who had been recruited with the goal of creating armed groups of soldiers with military training which would support the Serbian struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. The first Bulgarian legion was created in 1862 with the agreement of the Serbian government. The formation of this Bulgarian legion marked the birth of the radical political movement for the creation of a Bulgarian national state. Many of the Bulgarian recruits had been guerrilla fighters before joining the legion. Prominent figures like Ilyo Markov and Panayot Hitov, for instance, who today are two of the best-known persons of the Bulgarian national movement, had been compelled to flee the Ottoman territories because they were wanted for murder, robbery, and armed assault.5

Most of the legionaries of 1862, including Vasil Levski (1837–1873), the emblematic Bulgarian national hero, were also part of the Second Legion of 1867. It was formed on the basis of the first legion and under the aegis of Mihailo Obrenović III. Most of the first photographic portraits of “Bulgarian national heroes” were photographs of members of this legion, and most of them were taken in Belgrade. The photographic portraits of many of the Bulgarian legionaries were taken by Anastas Stojanović and Anastas Jovanović, who were Obrenović’s court photographers, as well as Pante Ristić.

However, at pressure from the great powers, the Second Bulgarian Legion was quickly dissolved without ever having been involved in any military engagement. The dissolution of the legion led to mass expulsions of the recruits from Serbia. Many of them emigrated to Romania in order to be able to continue to agitate against the Ottoman authorities. The armed bands (“cheta”, from which the word chetnik is derived) led by Hadzhi Dimitar (1840–1868) and Stefan Karadzha (1840–1868) consisted exclusively of recruits who had been part of the former legions. These bands became legendary in no small part because of the use of images in the creation of memory and historical narrative.6 Before coming to Belgrade, both Hadzhi Dimitar and Karadzha had had careers as outlaws in the Ottoman territories.7 In 1868, they led a group of guerilla soldiers for the last time on an incursion from Romania into what today is the northern region of Bulgaria. Hadzhi Dimitar died in the fighting and Karadzha later died of his wounds as a prisoner of war. Like many other Bulgarian emigrants, both had photographs taken of themselves while in Romania by, for instance, Romanian court photographer Carol Popp de Szathmari (in Hungarian, Károly Szathmáry Papp), Franz Duschek, and Babet Engels.

Following the mass emigration to Romania, the former Bulgarian legionnaires of Belgrade founded a revolutionary organization dedicated to Bulgarian national liberation based on the Italian and Polish political coalitions for national independence. Vasil Levski and Lyuben Karavelov (1834–1879) were both prominent leaders in the foundation of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee (BRCC). The goal of the committee, which functioned in the Romanian capital from 1869 to 1876, was to create a network of secret revolutionary committees in territories of the Ottoman Empire that would prepare the people for a mass uprising against the Ottoman government. After the arrest by the Ottoman police in 1872 of Vasil Levski and other prominent members of the committee, who were identified not least by the photographic portraits that had been taken of them, the organization soon was disbanded.8 (Levski was hanged on 18 February, 1873.)

The Bucharest committee was reorganized under the leadership of Hristo Botev in 1875. In the autumn of that year a small-scale uprising against the Ottomans was rapidly crushed. A second uprising in the spring of 1876, referred to in Bulgarian historiography as the April Uprising, was brutally suppressed by irregular Ottoman troops. This reaction of the Ottomans was precisely the “overreaction” that had been hoped for. The “Turkish atrocities” met with public outcry all over the world and led to one of the biggest diplomatic crises of the nineteenth century. The massacre of civilians, which was widely reported in the Western press, was a welcome pretext for Russia to declare war on the Ottoman Empire. At the end of the conflict not only Bulgaria, but also Serbia and Romania were to achieve national independence.

The photographic portraits of “Bulgarian national heroes” that were taken in Belgrade in 1867 had just been published in the press reports on the Bulgarian uprising of 1876. They were first circulated as wood engravings in Illustrirte Zeitung, which used the images prominently on the title pages of two issues published in immediate succession. The portraits are of Ilyo Markov und Panayot Hitov, and both were taken in the Belgrade studio of Anastas Stojanović at the time of the Second Bulgarian Legion of 1867. Since the techniques with which images were reproduced did not enable the direct printing of photographs in newspapers at the time, the portraits of both leaders were recreated using wood engravings which were remarkably lifelike. But details of the area around the two figures, such as the carpet and the painted coulisse of the photography studio, were left out and replaced with an imaginary “Balkan” coulisse nature.9

Portrait Photography in Historiography

The use of photographic portraits in historiography can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The photographic portraits that a century later were characterized by Adrian-Silvan Ionescu as representations of “Bulgarian national heroes” were among the first photographs (half-tone prints, so-called autotypes10) that were reproduced in histories of Bulgaria. Dimitar Strashimirov’s 1907 Istoriya na Aprilskoto vastanie (History of the April Uprising), one of the first history books in Bulgarian, which used a rich selection of illustrations, is a good example.11 The three-volume work contains a total of 59 portraits of figures (all of whom are male) of the national movement. They were reproduced using lithographs, wood engravings, and autotypes. The captions contain only the names of the people depicted. The text contains nothing concerning the images themselves. Only in the appendix to the third volume does one find an index of the “artists who made some of the published portraits (on the basis of the photographs).”12 This index of artists is a rarity in the historiography, as is the remark according to which the images were selected by a jury (the names of the members of which are given). At the same time, the index contains no information regarding the photographic portraits, the places where they were taken, or the dates on which they were taken. In this regard, little has changed since.

Illustrated Histories and the Use of Portrait Photography in Historiography

Since the 1950s, illustrated history albums have become an established genre in Bulgarian historiography. They offer excellent examples of the ways in which photographs came to be used in historiography in general. Full-body portraits and group pictures are found alongside portraits of people’s faces, depictions of various historical sites, pictures of significant buildings, facsimiles of handwritten and printed documents, and images of military items, such as flags, weapons, and similar objects. These pictures were taken in very different periods of time and their quality is also very uneven. They include photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century as well as photographs that were taken more recently. Usually the older photographs are studio portraits, while the newer ones are images of important lieux de mémoire, such as the homes in which significant figures of history were born, architectural monuments, and landscapes. The formats of the pictures are as mixed as the motifs and the dates of their creation. Photographs that took up an entire page, half of a page, or quarter of a page are found alongside photographic portraits the size of a stamp or photographs of landscapes that take up two adjacent pages. Sometimes the same photograph is put to several uses in a single volume, for instance first as a full-body image and later as a detail of the person’s face. However, the photographic portrait remained the dominant genre, and most of the images were full-figure images of men.

In the second half of the 1970s the use of photographs in historiography reached a kind of momentary high point, not so much from the perspective of any qualitative assessment as simply in the quantitative accumulation of visual materials. A few dozen illustrated scholarly works were published, including a series of lavishly designed picture albums published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the April Uprising of 1876 against the Ottomans and the foundation of the Bulgarian state in 1878. The jubilee album Aprilskoto vastanie 1876 (The April-Uprising 1876), an elaborately designed work which included a preface by Todor Zhivkov, the First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, is an excellent example of the insatiable interest of historians for historical photographs.13 The album, which is a bit more than 260 pages long, includes 359 photographs, among them the whole spectrum of the photographs of “Bulgarian national heroes”.

The textual commentary of the book, which spans some 30 pages, concerns not so much the pictures themselves as it does the events of history. However, the narrative does contain some general reflections on historical photography that give some insight into the perceived function of images in historiography:

The task of this album is to provide the reader with a different kind of documentation and record of this extraordinary national event [the April Uprising]–the documentary photographs of the leaders and the insurgents. […] The documentary photographic material […], although limited as a vessel of scholarly information in comparison with archival documents, has its own scholarly significance and value. The photographs record certain aspects of the conditions, they show the place and time of a deed or a sojourn, they give an impression of attire, weaponry, etc. Their emotional value, however, is far more important. They reveal the physical characteristics of our forebears and in doing so complement their psychological characteristics and allow us to return to the atmosphere of the epoch, bringing us into more direct and real communication with the historical facts.14

Texts First

From the perspective of historiography, photography has a more “limited” scholarly worth than text, but it nonetheless possesses a documentary-like character and quality. This has a kind of authenticity that is different from the authenticity of the archival document. Namely, it is “pure” recording, since the photograph captures the moment, detached from the flow of events, and in doing so records only external circumstances, such as place, clothing and physiognomy. The advantage of the photographic document over text, however, lies in its power to prompt an emotional response, due to the immediacy of the image and its closeness to the “reality” of the past. Indeed photography makes it possible for one to return or immerse oneself in historical reality. While a textual narrative is, according to this view, a matter-of-fact document, the photograph is an emotional testimony that gives the rational, scholarly narrative a sensual quality and thereby also greater authenticity.

This conception of the role of photography in historiography is evident in the handling of images in illustrated publications. The structure of visual material always follows the chronology of the historical events, with no consideration of the history of the individual pictures themselves. Photographs that were taken at completely different times and under completely different circumstances, or for completely different purposes are presented alongside one another, creating a “relationship between representational objects that otherwise were very distant.”15 Images are always organized according to the historical narrative, and this in turn creates groupings according to chronological periods. This division of images according to historical episodes not only generates a specific structure for the heterogeneous images themselves, but also gives them a chronological and therefore historical coherence. This organization of photographs according to episodes of history created groupings through which a particular historical genealogy was fashioned. A glance at several of illustrated works of history, encyclopedias, school books or even publicly exhibited portraits suffices to reveal that the arrangements and sequences of photographs according to the chronology of historical events created a rigid “image order,” with its own iconography, visual hierarchy, and system of interrelationships.

The portraits of Hadzhi Dimitar and Stefan Karadzha, in which both men are heavily armed, constitute one such rigid, unquestionable iconographical unity. The portraits are always reproduced as a pair, although from the perspective of the circumstances of their creation they have nothing to do with each other, since the one of Hadzhi Dimitar was taken in Bucharest in 1866 and the one of Karadzha in Belgrade in 1868.16 In the jubilee album published in commemoration of the April Uprising the portraits are included as black-and-white, full-page images on two facing pages and the captions indicate only the names of the men.17 One finds the images set in the same way in every historiographical publication, including the fourteen-volume Istoriya na Balgariya (History of Bulgaria), which is richly illustrated with images in color. The famous photographs of the Bulgarian insurgents, however, were deliberately reproduced in black and white and, as always, placed on two facing pages.18

In the maintenance of the iconographical hierarchy of the ensembles of historical photographs, the reproduction techniques and, more specifically, the use of black and white continues even today to play an important role. The use of black and white lends the images a historicity in order to cast a homogenizing veil over photographs of very different provenance and also in a very different state of conservation, thereby concealing any visible differences. Thanks to the monochrome nature of the black-and-white images, the gaze of the reader glides over the images from page to page with no surprises and without ever stumbling across any irregularities. Differences in date of creation, aesthetics, motifs, color, format, size and the state of original image are all concealed with the use of black and white and transformed into a homogenous, generalized photographic ensemble. The images thereby seem all to have come from the same cast. Any specific qualities, such as distinctive aesthetic features, stylistic differences, or the varying states of preservation of the images are rendered indiscernible in order to create a visual impression of the forward flow of history, merging through the use of shades of black and white the many visual differences into a harmonious, “authentic” historical whole.

Transcendent Images

In spite of or perhaps precisely because of the avid thirst of historiography for photography, regarding the titles of photographic images the historiography is sparse. When portrait photography in the historiography is accompanied by title, it usually contains only the name of the person depicted. Sometimes it includes brief descriptions of the historical role and concrete mission of the person or explanatory or suggestive formulas, such as “Kaiser Napoleon III with his family” or “Hajduk Todor and his sons, who fought heroically in the uprising.” Brief narrative elements underline the documentary quality of the photographs and emphasize the historical objectivity and objectifying force of a photographic image. It is therefore hardly surprising that the captions only rarely include information regarding the date or the place of creation, and even more rarely include the name of the photographer, the dimensions of the picture, the technique, or the place where the original is held. This is why, in general, illustrated works of Bulgarian history have no picture credits.

The absence of information on the origins or the sources of images that are used alongside the textual narratives turns historical photographs into almost transcendent images, regardless of their alleged documentary value and historical accuracy. The people and objects depicted in historical photographs seem to have been captured only because of the natural laws of chemistry on which photography is based. Photographs are presented as pure technical images, which exist independent of time and place. Nor does the historical narrative, which usually lends the visual material its temporal structure, change this abstract character of photographs as timeless images. And the lack of information on the photographers implies that photographic portraits are not the works of individual artists, but rather merely the products of a purely mechanical process involving only the technical apparatus and the lantern slide. Thus the impression is created that historical photographs were taken without any intervention at all, with a natural delayed release and according to a natural and entirely self-evident approach to portrayal, i.e. purely natural images. The almost incessant reproduction of the same photographic portraits with the same titles helps the apparently “natural” image acquire an incontestable status. Thus the reader of an illustrated historical narrative usually does not put any question regarding the actual circumstances of the creation of the image. One thus has the impression that the historical photographs were intended specifically for later generations, and that they were taken with no other purpose than later to become part of the eventual picture gallery of historical narrative.

Historiography of Portrait Photography

Let us invert this logic, and let the pictures determine the historical narrative, which does not only change the historiographical understanding of historical photographic portraits as natural pictures, but also the conception of historical “truth”. Thus we should analyze the frequently reproduced portraits of “Bulgarian national heroes” from the perspective of the history of images. One important question is whether and how knowledge of the pictures structured historical “truth.” Any reorganization or critical reordering of the material is beset with preconditions, so this critical inquiry is done on two levels. The first involves the creation of the photographic portraits, in other words the conditions under which they were produced. The second examines the circulation of the images and their social use, as well as the communicative potential of historical photographic portraits. Thus I consider two aspects of the “fabrication” of historical “truth” that historiography usually overlooks, namely the technology involved in the creation of the images and the social functions of historical photographic portraits.

Carte-de-visite: Early History of Portrait Photography

The photographs of “Bulgarian national heroes” are all so-called carte-de-visite photographs. The original images all have the same modest dimensions, on average 9 × 5.5 centimeters, mounted on cardboards that are 10 × 6.5 centimeters. Usually underneath the portrait the name of the photographer and the site of the studio are written on the cardboard, but this is almost always omitted from the reproductions. The spread of the use of carte-de-visite photographs began in the late 1850s and constituted a worldwide phenomenon. An inexpensive method of creating series of photographic portraits, the carte-de-visit made it possible for the first time in history for simple men and women to have portraits made of themselves.19 Photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri, who patented the carte-de-visite in Paris in 1854, found a way of taking eight images on a single plate, thereby drastically reducing the cost. From then on painting, drawing, sculpture, and the daguerreotype, the techniques with which the social elites had had their likenesses immortalized, competed with a new, more widely available method of creating portraits. We have this photographic technique to thank for the rise in the visibility of the common man and the common woman. As Helmut Gernsheim comments, the carte-de-visite photographs created the first “picture gallery of the small man.”20

This invention, even if referred to pejoratively as the “proletarian form of portraiture,”21 triggered a momentous mass phenomenon known as “cardomania,” which spread throughout Europe and then America and the world.22 The influence of cardomania crossed social, cultural, and linguistic borders. Napoleon III, African American slaves in the United States, and Hajduks in the Balkans all found their way, sooner or later, into the ateliers of the photographers and thereby became part of a massive and entirely new business in photographs of human subjects.23 This historically novel method of “seeing oneself”24 in pictures had far-reaching consequences for culture and a decisive influence on our concept of historical images.

The standardized format of the carte-de-visite photograph, which made possible the rationalized and optimized production of portraits, and the standardized poses and accoutrements of the photographic portrait had a homogenizing effect on the social circles in which they circulated. The portraits, which were passed down innumerable times, articulated a unified formula of depiction that was rapidly institutionalized, regardless of place. This is why carte-de-visite photographs from all over the world are so strikingly similar that they can be easily confused. Apart from minor dissimilarities in national motifs, clothing, or symbols, carte-de-visite portraits from even the most far-flung regions of the world hardly differ from one another. It is hardly by chance that the invention of the carte-de-visite photograph and its rapid spread coincided with the rise of national movements. Deborah Poole draws parallels between the market in carte-de-visite portraits as a part of visual capitalism and the role of “print capitalism,” as it is referred to by Benedict Anderson, who characterizes the print media as the motor of national ideology.25 According to Poole, the market in carte-de-visite images strengthened the sense of community among the middle classes and their identity (“sameness”) all over the world, from the bourgeoisie of large urban centers to the ambitious merchants of the provinces and the upper and middle classes of the colonies.26 She writes, “[t]he worldwide rush to purchase carte-de-visite photographs […] reflects the extent to which these small, circulating images of self answered the shared desires and sentiments of what was rapidly emerging as a global class.”27

Images on the March

Within a short period of time, the carte-de-visite photograph had become a constitutive part and expression of the modern lifestyle, progressive thinking, and social prestige. Anyone who regarded himself or herself as part of modern life and “with the times” could not do without the obligatory dozen carte-de-visite with his or her likeness. The possession of one’s own portrait was “a legitimization of identity and proof of a certain social standing.”28 Portraits of family members, relatives, acquaintances, and friends were hung on the wall or placed on chests of drawers or in albums, becoming objects of private devotion. Portraits of family members, friends, or influential visitors were not only dutifully kept, but were also shown to guests as evidence of the prestige of the family and its social contacts.29

The ideal of earlier photography had been “vérité,”30 in other words truth. The truth of the carte-de-visite photograph was closely intertwined with self-showmanship, theater, and the fashion plate,31 in other words with all the areas of life that involved spectacles and staging, and had little to do with the everyday. It is hardly coincidental that Roland Barthes derives a constitutive part of photographic practice, which he designates with the term spectrum, from “spectacles.”32 Like the fashion plate, the carte-de-visite was made “to sell a figure’s good looks and publicly display him to an anonymous viewer.”33 Finally, this was the epoch in which Gottfried Keller wrote his story “Kleider machen Leute”34 (“Clothes Make the Man”), an epoch “in which clothes were the man, and character was evaluated on the basis of external appearances.”35 This display of the self and the act of posing prompted Barthes to characterize photographic portraits as “imposture.”36

Staged Images

Early photographic portraiture was an important part of everyday life, but the actual act of having oneself photographed was an unusual and even bothersome, wearying experience. In the nineteenth century, the photographer’s atelier was more than a mere commercial undertaking. In many respects it was comparable to the theater. The place where the subject posed resembled a stage, the photographer was the director, and the act of taking the photograph was momentous, almost something of a ritual. In a studio in which carte-de-visite photographs were taken, one found all the accoutrements of the theater, including coulisses and various accessories for a wide array of tastes, such as rugs, consoles, balustrades, furniture, rocks made of papier mâché, painted backgrounds, bookshelves, musical instruments, weapons, and so on. These were not actual furnishings, but rather elements of décor made specifically for the photographic portrait industry. They had to be light and easy to use, so that the photographer would be able to rearrange them quickly if necessary. The studios also had a wide array of costumes to choose from in order to suit the tastes of their customers.37

From the technical perspective the photographic studio resembled a torture chamber, to borrow a comparison made by Honoré Daumier in his caricature of contemporary photographic portraiture. The many problems of early photography included long exposure times and the lower sensitivity of the photographic plates to light. The ateliers were therefore vitreous for the most part, like green houses, and photographs could only be taken when the sun was shining, which meant that, as Barthes notes, “the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight.”38 In order to provide some assistance for the person posing, who sometimes had to remain completely motionless for several seconds to a minute, so called head or body rests were invented.39 This photographic “prosthetic”40 was a stand with movable poles that could be adjusted with the use of screws and clamps for the waist and neck. The customer was placed into these clamps and adjustments were made for size and pose. Although the clamps were not supposed to be visible in the photograph, in most of them (and in particular in the depictions of men) the lower poles and the heavy base of the head rest can almost always be seen between the legs of the person posing. But this is merely one, if perhaps the most amusing, of many of the visible signs of the historical “truth” of the photographic portrait of the nineteenth century.

Revolution in the Darkroom

The depictions of “Bulgarian national heroes” provide examples of visible signs of the circumstances of the actual creation of the carte-de-visite portraits. Their notorious passion for striking “heroic” poses in front of the camera was brought into connection with theatrical practice only on the margins, but was therefore understood all the more as a national drive.41 According to historian Christo Yonkov, author and photo editor of most of the Bulgarian-language historical picture albums, “the apostles of Bulgarian freedom,” in their “heroic poses, garbed in the most unusual, ‘insurrectionary’ uniforms of the theatrical props in studios […], their theatrical poses and attired with an array of weapons,” merit our sincerest adoration, as most of them would have given “their heads without hesitation for the liberation” of the country.42 A critical glance at the portraits, however, suffices to reveal that the often extolled national revolution of the Bulgarian nation that we know from the picture albums had little to do with the realities of everyday life. The revolution presented in pictures took place primarily in the darkrooms of the photographers’ studios.

Disguise

Lyuben Karavelov and Vasil Levski, intellectual leaders of the Bulgarian revolutionary movement who were clearly happy to be photographed in “European” suits and not as “military men,” did on occasion pose in those military-style and “national hero” costumes. Karavelov, a publicist and the initiator of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee, had his picture taken by Belgrade court photographer Anastas Stojanović wearing an otherwise indefinable uniform of caftan, boots, and white Ottoman fez.43 Levski, who was indisputably the first and greatest national hero of the Bulgarians,44 was also the first and greatest poser for the camera. A wider array of photographic portraits was taken of him than of any other “Bulgarian national hero.” In works of Bulgarian history, the caption next to his best-known portrait usually says, “Vasil Levski in the uniform of the First Bulgarian Legion in Belgrade, 1862.”45

In the photograph, Levski is wearing a uniform that has come to be seen, both in the historiography and in popular imagination, as the uniform of the First Bulgarian legion in Belgrade (Fig. 1). Levski had his photograph taken not in the Serbian capital, but rather in Bucharest in the studio of the most famous photographer in Romania at the time, Carol Popp de Szathmari.46 Thus the photograph could have been taken at the earliest in 1868, six years after the First Bulgarian Legion in Belgrade. The white uniform, with dark linings on the collar and the sleeves and lace fastenings on the chest, sleeves, and pants, is an imitation of Hungarian alterations to the uniforms of the Hussars of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy. Complete with leather boots and the Hussar’s fur cap, to which a feather has been added, on the balustrade against which leans a rifle, it looks deceptively authentic.

Other, less well-known men, for instance Branislav Veleshki (1934–1919), had photographs taken of themselves wearing the same uniform as the one seen in the photograph of Levski, though they used different attributes and coulisses and were ultimately less convincing.47 Veleshki had himself photographed in the same “Hussar’s” uniform, but as an infantryman with all the accoutrements, including a knapsack and of course the obligatory opanci (traditional peasant shoes commonly worn at the time in southeastern Europe), with a painted landscape in the background and a seemingly misplaced balustrade (Fig. 2). Dimitar Nikolov (1833–1868) also had himself photographed by Szathmari, but he chose a more “Ottoman” uniform, though with a painting of a somber landscape (a park) in the background, identical with the one in the portrait of Veleshki, and the same saber and rifle that figure in the depiction of Levski as a “Legionnaire.”48

Pose

Along with garb and various props, pose was another crucial element of the staging of the subject for the camera. The poses were determined to a large extent by the head rest, which was used in order to enable the subject to remain still for the exposure, and the subject had to adjust himself to it. This explains why, from the perspective of the poses, there is hardly any difference between the various carte-de-visite portraits. The only surviving portrait of Nikola Vojvodov (1842–1867) depicts the young man (who was killed by the Ottoman police) in a Hussar uniform in front of a painted coulisse and grandiose draperies (Fig. 3). Vojvodov is facing the camera, his gaze is somber and earnest, his right arm is leaning on a console over which a heavy curtain has been thrown. He ostentatiously shows the rings on the fingers of his right hand, in which he is holding a telescope, while in his left hand he is holding a saber. The cockade on his cap is disproportionately large, and the boots are not real, rather spats have been put over the shoes in order to make them resemble riding boots. The lush ornamentation of the curtain, with the two heavy tassels, clashes a bit with the painted landscape in the background, but at the same time harmonizes aesthetically with the richly decorated hussar uniform, which is also adorned with tassels. The bare wooden floor and the stiff pose stand in sharp contrast to the landscape, the draperies, and the fancy clothing. The picture seems to strive to take its place in the tradition of depictions of the ruling class as a portrayal of a great commander, but given the theatricalness of the image the composition leans towards the kitschy and the trivial.

Karadzha also had himself photographed in the same pose and wearing the same uniform (Fig. 4). Unlike Voyvodov, however, Karadzha dispensed with the gaudy drapery, the telescope, the rings, and the additional ornamental clothing and spats. The other details of the portrayal, however, are identical, including the console, the landscape-coulisse, and the wooden floor, not to mention the uniform and the pose. Karadzha faces the camera, his right hand is placed on the console, and his fist is clenched. In his left hand he is holding the same ceremonial saber as that of his compatriot, and his left leg (like Voyvodov’s left leg) is placed a little bit in front and to the side of his right leg in order to hide the apparatus that is helping him maintain his pose for the duration of the exposure. Only the differing states of the two photographs prompt one to discern the differences, instead of the similarities, between them. They were made in the atelier of photographer Franz Duschek in Bucharest. On the basis of the clothing and the fact that both men died in 1868, they must have been taken either in 1867 or 1868. Both men must have gone to the atelier in preparation for the armed acts of resistance in order to have themselves immortalized in their future role as commanders.

Uniform Series

Thus entire uniform series came into being. These portrayal series offer insights not only into the theatrical modes of portrait photography, but also into the preferences and the self-conceptions, ambitions, and agenda of an entire social group. If one thinks of Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis regarding the social uses of photography, the series of photographs of the Bulgarian national heroes garbed in uniforms constitutes a “veritable sociogram”49 of an entire milieu, together with the visual culture that created it. A glance at the carte-de-visite portraits of some of the more popular “Bulgarian national heroes” who all had themselves photographed in the same uniform in the atelier of Theodorovits & Hitrow in Bucharest suffices to give one an impression of the “revolutionary” tastes of the Bulgarians of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century (Fig. 5). In the 1970s, Christo Yonkov identified a highly pertinent problem, “The April revolutionaries listed here had themselves photographed in the same uniform, which looks different on each of them depending on the sizes of their bodies. […]”50 The three portraits of figures wearing an officer’s uniform are convincing because of the cavalry boots, which give the staging a touch of elegance, even if the embellishments on the pant-legs were added later as drawings by hand. In contrast, the three men who are posing in opanci are a bit comic, since the jackets and pants are visibly too big for them. Also, in almost all of the photographs in this series the foot of the apparatus used to hold the body motionless is clearly visible.51

The observation that a group of “Bulgarian national heroes” had photographs taken of themselves wearing the same uniform and in the same pose should prompt even the most patriotic historian to question the “truth” of historical photographic portraits. In this case, the series of portrayals of “heroes” wearing the same uniform makes it clear that the military garb of the Romanian border soldiers was particularly popular among the men who belonged to the clientele of Theodorovits & Hitrow in Bucharest in the 1870s, as were the weapons. At least this is indicated by a remark written on the back of one of the photographs.52 Whether or not they went on their own or as a group to have themselves immortalized in the role of a Romanian border soldier remains an open question.

We do know, however, that the carte-de-visite portraits should be understood as a pictorial expression and indeed assertion of a certain social prestige that the person depicted had achieved, or at least so the portrayal would suggest. The most visible sign of this prestige in the petty bourgeois circles of the cities in the European territories of the Ottoman Empire was the military uniform. “Sabers, epaulette, and feather caps”53 were among the signs of modern statehood, a rational social system, and discipline and order. The “foreign” uniforms gave the figures in the portraits, who were subjects of the Ottoman Empire, an air of importance, and they ensured that the people wearing them would be admired, attracting the gaze of the viewer with their shimmer. Zahari Stoyanov, the first chronicler of the April Uprising, offers a lovely description of the enchanting charm of even the simplest school uniform: “The heroes of the day were the people who returned from the school of medicine in Bucharest or Constantinople, or the School of Commerce in Vienna, or any kind of school that had a uniform, two or three gold buttons, a cap with flourishes.”54 A uniform was a clear sign of success and social advancement. The uniform filled the person who wore it with pride and won him the respect of others. It was a symbol of power and a forward-looking attitude, a sign of a “new era [and a new] time, in which even a Bulgarian carries a saber.”55 The carte-de-visite portrait was the perfect representation of the vision of a subject of the Ottoman Empire who sought to portray himself as a modern man. It provided a visual delineation of this masculine fantasy and, because of the apparent reliability of the photograph as a documentary image, invested it with authenticity.

The Facebook of Nineteenth Century or an Attempt at a Conclusion

The carte-de-visite portraits represented an important implement in modern communication and social networking. The relatively inexpensive photographs were referred to as carte-de-visite for a reason. They served as useful tools when people sought to present themselves and establish their places in various social contexts and hierarchies. In addition to this practical use, they also had what could be referred to as an exchange value. As they fit easily into someone’s pocket, carte-de-visite portraits were predestined to be traded, and they thereby acquired an important social function and an equally important role in the expression and communication of status. The portraits circulated through a wide array of channels. They were sent by mail, exchanged, given as gifts, and even collected. People used them to introduce themselves or to court a beloved, or they simply dedicated them to friends. The circulation of a portrait guaranteed recognition and membership in certain social circles and groups. The carte-de-visite rapidly became a meaningful social medium, without which one could hardly hope to participate in the social life of the time. It was the precursor to the social networking tool of our time, a kind of Facebook of the nineteenth century.

In addition to their function as representations of uniformed masculinity, the portraits of the “Bulgarian national heroes” had significance as a medium of communication that must not be underestimated. This is indicated by the dedications on the backs of the portraits, elegant calligraphy written in ink with a quill. Like many of his contemporaries, Toma Kardzhiev (1850–1887), a teacher and the organizer of a local revolutionary committee, wrote a dedication on his portrait to Dimitar Gorov, a Bulgarian entrepreneur in Romania and a patron of radical Bulgarian national circles: “To my friend D. Gorov as a sign of truthfulness.”56 From the perspective of elegance and imagination, Kardzhiev’s portrait could hardly have been outdone. He is garbed in a hussar’s uniform, with saber and gun, and is standing on a checkered rug in front of a neutral background. The dedication is dated 14 May, 1876, just after the bloody suppression of the April Uprising, in which Kardzhiev participated only indirectly. He was photographed in Bucharest by Babet Engels.

The function of the portraits of “Bulgarian national heroes” was certainly by no means limited to their role as a mediator to the social network of radical nationalistic circles or a tool in the maintenance of ties to people who shared their ideas. The portraits were clearly also central components of the logistics of insurgency. The circulation of the portraits went far beyond the private sphere or the narrow social network. As Poole observes, “As a form of social currency […] the carte de visite circulated through channels much broader than the immediate network of friends and acquaintances […].”57 The photographs of “Bulgarian national heroes” were intended to saturate all the layers of society with the ideology that they embodied in a manner that, at the time, was entirely new. Vasil Levski, who had considerable experience in the art of self-invention through photography, recognized the potential of the carte-de-visite portrait, which could be easily and inexpensively reproduced, in the efforts to kindle agitation. He put the carte-de-visite portrait to use in order to attract and recruit comrades-in-arms. In his letters he often instructed his fellow-fighters to have portraits of him wearing “legionnaire” uniform circulated among the people.58 Clearly he assumed that the everyday “man on the street” could be convinced to join the armed uprising by the depictions of “Bulgarian national heroes.” Finally, the carte-de-visite enabled the national revolutionaries to widen their spheres of influence and extend the revolutionary network beyond cultural, social and linguistic borders.

Once set in motion, the circulation of the portraits of the “Bulgarian national heroes” did not necessarily prompt the observer to take action, but it did prompt many observers to follow suit. This explains the striking rise in the number of photographic portraits that were done in the widest array of military uniforms, photographs that are stored by the hundreds in the Bulgarian archives. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, the photograph invests the subject, depicted in a military uniform, with at least a metaphorical existence as a “national hero.” And it was the uniform that allowed the historical portraits to become part of historiography, and through historiography they became part of culture, immortalized one more time in photograph albums, this time as “genuine” national heroes.59 In the end, the iconographic and aesthetic similarities of the portraits, for instance the ubiquitous uniform, created a welcome occasion for historiography to craft a homogenous collective image in order to create the impression today of a self-contained, unified military movement for national liberation. The pictures were dislodged from their original “authentic” context in order to ascribe a different “truth” to them, and thereby also a different interpretation that in the end integrated these innumerable uniform portraits in a homogenous image of history as the embodiements of an “authentic” national body.

Bibliography

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Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Baleva, Martina. Bulgarien im Bild. Die Erfindung von Nationen auf dem Balkan in der Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts. Vienna: Böhlau, 2012.

Barthes, Roland. Die helle Kammer. Bemerkungen zur Photographie. Translated by Dietrich Leube. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuchverlag, 1989.

Boev, Petar. Fotografskoto izkustvo v Balgariya (1856–1944) [The Art of Photography in Bulgaria (1856–1944)]. Sofia: Septemvri, 1983.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Kult der Einheit und kultivierte Unterschied.” In Eine illegitime Kunst. Die sozialen Gebrauchsweisen der Photographie, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, et al., 25–84. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983.

Buehler, Otto. Atelier und Apparat des Photographen. Weimar: Voigt, 1869.

Darrah, William C. Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth-Century Photography. Gettysburg, PA: W. C. Darrah, 1981.

Doynov, Doyno, and Christo Yonkov. Aprilskoto vastanie 1876 [The April-Uprising 1876]. Sofia: Septemvri, 1976.

Gernsheim, Helmut. Geschichte der Photographie. Die ersten hundert Jahre. Translated by Matthias Fienbork. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein–Propyläen, 1983.

Ionescu, Adrian-Silvan. “Fotografie und Folklore. Zur Ethnografie im Rumänien des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 27 (2007): 47–60.

Kaser, Karl. Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden. Ursprünge und Gegenwart des balkanischen Patriarchats. Vienna: Böhlau, 1992.

Keller, Gottfried. “Kleider machen Leute.” In idem, Die Leute von Seldwyla. Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1873–1875.

Kolev, Peyo. “Mustacite na Levski narisuvani” [Levski’s Moustache was Painted]. 24 chasa, February 16, 2013. Accessed February 13, 2014. http://www.24chasa.bg/Article.asp?ArticleId=1775136.

Malraux, André. Das imaginäre Museum. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1987.

McCauley, Elizabeth A. A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Poole, Deborah. Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Rosen, Georg. Die Balkan-Haiduken. Ein Beitrag zur inneren Geschichte des Slawenthums. Leipzig: F. U. Brockhaus, 1878.

Scheffler, Thomas. “‘Wenn hinten weit in der Türkei die Völker aufeinander schlagen...’. Zum Funktionswandel ‘orientalischer’ Gewalt in europäischen Öffentlichkeiten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Europäische Öffentlichkeit. Transnationale Kommunikation seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Jörg Requate und Martin Schulze Wessel, 205–30. Frankfurt am Main–New York: Campus, 2000.

Sharova, Krumka, and Kirila Vazvazova-Karateodorova, ed. Vasil Levski. Dokumenti, avtografi, diktuvani tekstove i dokumenti, sastaveni s uchastieto na Levski, prepisi, fotokopiya, publikatsii i snimki [Vasil Levski. Documents, Autographs, Texts and Documents Dictated by or Compiled in Collaboration with Levski, Transcriptions, Photocopies, Publications and Photographs], 2 vols. Sofia: Obshtobalgarski komitet “Vasil Levski”/Narodna Biblioteka “Sv. Sv. Kiril i Metodij”, 2000–2009.

Sharova, Krumka et al. ed. Balgarsko vazrazhdane 1856–1878. Vol. 6 of Istoriya na Balgariya [History of Bulgaria, vol. 6, The Bulgarian National Revival]. Sofia: Balgarska Akademiya na Naukite, 1987.

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Yonkov, Christo. “Kade se e snimal balgarinat prez Vazrazhdaneto” [Where Did Bulgarians Have Themselves Photographed in the Time of National Revival]. Balgarsko Foto 5 (1978): 7–11.

Zaimov, Stoyan. Vasil Levski Dyakonat. Kratka biografiya, napisana po povod otkrivanie pametnika [Vasil Levski. A Short Biography, Written on the Occasion of the Dedication of his Monument]. Sofia: Hr. Olchevata Knizharnica, 1895.

List of Illustrations

Sharova et al., Levski, 658, document number 250 Figure 1

Sofia, Photo Archives of the National Library “Kiril i Metodij” Figure 2–5

Translated from German by Thomas Cooper

Figure 3: Franz Duschek: Full-body portrait of Nikola Voyvodov, Bucharest, before 1867, Carte-de-visite (10.5 × 6.5 сm), Copy of the original, Photo Archives of the National Library “Kiril i Metodij”, Sofia, Signature НБКМ-БИА С 75.

Figure 4: Franz Duschek: Full-body portrait of Stefan Karadzha, Bucharest, before 1868, Carte-de-visite (10.5 × 6.5 сm), later colorized, Photo Archives of the National Library “Kiril i Metodij”, Sofia, Signature НБКМ-БИА С 657.

Łukasz Sommer

Historical Linguistics Applied: Finno-Ugric Narratives in Finland and Estonia

Finno-Ugricity is one of the linguistic concepts whose meaning and usage have been extended beyond the boundaries of linguistics and applied in identity-building projects. The geographically and historically related cases of Finland and Estonia provide a good illustration of the uses of linguistic scholarship in the service of nationalism. More elusive than ties of “Slavic kinship” and not as easily translatable into a pan-ethnic ideology, the concept of Finno-Ugric kinship has nevertheless had a steady presence in the development of Finnish and Estonian identities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, entangling the two countries’ linguistic traditions in a web of national engagements. In both cases, the original idea of linguistic kinship was subject to non-linguistic interpretations so as to highlight and contextualize various aspects of the Finnish and Estonian self-images, notions of collective past, and cultural heritage. In both cases, the concept proved highly flexible.

Keywords: Finland, Estonia, Finno-Ugric studies, historical linguistics, ethnicity, nationalism

What is Finno-Ugric?

In an article published in 2009, Stefan Troebst notices the problematic nature of “Slavic studies” as a unitary field of research. As he points out, there are two academically institutionalized areas of study with strong links to the “Slavic world”; however, he goes on, “while the historical field of East European history has […] emancipated itself from the ‘Slavic world’ as a framework of reference, Slavic philology remains chained to it.” He then quotes German Slavicist Norbert Franz, who suggests that one sensible way of integrating the field would be to focus on the “discourse of Slavicity” [Slawen-Diskurs].1

That philology’s connection to its titular language(s) should be perceived as “enchainment” is not obvious. After all, language affiliation is what defines a philology in the academic taxonomy of departmentalized fields. If anything, it seems that Slavic philology lends itself to this kind of criticism particularly easily because of the relative geographical consistency of its titular language area. The overlapping of “Slavic” and “East European” is extensive and easy to take for granted, while the discrepancies (i.e. the non-Slavic-speaking parts of Eastern Europe) may easily come to be seen as proof of the insufficiency of the “Slavic” label, a notion reflected by the frequent use of the combination “Slavic and East European.” Originally, however, it results from the assumption that the language-based concept of “Slavicity” encompasses so much more than language that it should work just as fine as a name for a whole region.

Paradoxically, in the case of “Slavicity” this assumption is perhaps more accurate or usefully descriptive than in most other cases. The problem discussed by Troebst, it seems, does not concern Slavic studies in particular, but the very notion of “philology”: an area of study defined by language and therefore expected to combine linguistics and literary studies as parts of one field; expected, at the same time, to focus on language and/or literature, and yet somehow to transcend them, covering other spheres of knowledge concerning a geographical or cultural area. It rests on the old Humboldtian idea that language, in all its diversity, is so central to “mankind’s spiritual development” that it should form the fundamental criterion in the classification of the human world—cultures, ethnicities, nations, parts of the world or trends in world history. The Slavic case is relatively unproblematic in this respect; there are other philologically defined areas of study whose linguistic foundations have a much more limiting effect than in the Slavic case.

Finno-Ugric studies is a case of an institutionalized field in which the Humboldtian glottocetrism (i.e. the notion of language as the ultimate core of human nature and linguistics as the ultimate core of any human science) proves poignantly inadequate in providing extralinguistic frameworks. The name refers to a family of languages, divided into several subgroups and scattered across Northeastern Europe (parts of Scandinavia, the east-Baltic coast, Russia between the Volga and the Urals), Central Europe and Western Siberia. They are geographically dispersed and their mutual affinity is close only within particular branches, especially when it coincides with territorial proximity—as in the case of Finnish and Estonian. The same pattern applies to communities of speakers, who represent a variety of ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations. Even the oldest elements of their cultural heritage tend neither to cover the entire language group nor be exclusively “Finno-Ugric.” The distant nature of linguistic kinship combined with the lack of any non-linguistic bonds that would encompass all speaker communities arguably make the Finno-Ugric family more like the Indo-European, another broad, highly diverse group that includes e.g. German, Rumanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Greek, Welsh, Sanskrit and Persian, all bound by a reconstructed proto-language. In fact, the linguistic concept of Finno-Ugric kinship was established at about the same time as the notion of an Indo-European proto-language, i.e. late in the eighteenth century, along with the rise of comparative and historical linguistics. This parallelism, however, is not reflected in the two groups’ institutional academic status. Indo-European studies have a distinct identity: they belong to the field of historical linguistics, devoted to the study of the common origins of the Indo-European language family. The academic position of Finno-Ugric studies as a field with departments of its own makes it more of a traditional “philology,” parallel to Slavic, Germanic or Romance studies. The proto-Finno-Ugric linguistic heritage may be the core area of interests, but the name is also used as an umbrella term that covers the study of particular languages of the group, as well as Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian literatures, and, to some extent, the ethnography of Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples. The linguistic connection thus serves as the basis for lumping together a number of largely unrelated research areas, suggesting an extralinguistic community that in fact hardly exists.2

There is one aspect of “Finno-Ugricity,” however, where the concept convincingly transcends linguistics and acquires a historical and cultural dimension. Compared with the periods of time involved in the inquiries of historical linguists, it is a relatively recent phenomenon, because it has to do with the emergence of modern nationalism and the growth of linguistics as a science. Starting in the eighteenth century, the discovery of a linguistic affinity between Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Sámi (Lapp) and a number of indigenous languages of Russia3 has been elaborated upon by nationalist-minded intellectuals of the three countries in order to develop and reinforce concepts of pan-ethnic kinship. Constructed as they may have been, these concepts did affect collective self-images and, to some extent, actual policies of the emergent national movements. The ways in which the notion of Finno-Ugric kinship stimulated the collective imagination bears some resemblance to the better known and more effectively politicized ideologies of Slavicity. The direction proposed by Franz and Troebst for Slavic studies, focusing on the “discourse of Slavicity,” seems at least as sensible for the Finno-Ugric equivalent.

Origins of the Concept

The Pan-Slavic movement was in fact a point of reference for the early Finnish proponents of Finno-Ugricity. In 1844 the young intellectual Zacharias Topelius, later known as one of the grand old men of the “Fennoman” movement and the person who introduced the notion of “national history” to the wider public, published an essay on “Finnish Literature and its Future,” in which he made the following remark:

Two hundred years ago few would have believed that the Slavic tribe would attain the prominent (and constantly growing) position it enjoys nowadays in the history of culture. What if one day the Finnish tribe, which occupies a territory almost as vast, were to play a greater role on the world scene than one could expect nowadays? […] Today people speak of Pan-Slavism; one day they may talk of Pan-Fennicism, or Pan-Suomism. Within such a Pan-Finnic community, the Finnish nation should hold the leading position because of its cultural seniority […].4

The boldness of the Pan-Slavic parallel makes Topelius’ statement rather unprecedented, but as it so happens it sprung from a tradition that was about a quarter of a century old at the time, i.e. about as old as Finnish nationalism and national discourse.

The linguistic kinship itself had been recognized somewhat longer. The idea formed gradually in the course of the eighteenth century and came to be solidly established by its last third. According to most of the early concepts, Finnish was a central point of reference for other related languages, and the family was usually referred to as “Finnic.” This terminological tradition continues in today’s term “Finno-Ugric,” which has been in use since the 1860s and reflects the fact that the foundations of modern Finno-Ugric studies were laid by demonstrating the common origins of the already recognized “Finnic” language group and Hungarian.

Despite the Finno-centric terminology, the early period of Finno-Ugric language studies was marked by the absence of Finnish scholars. For a long time, due to the peripheral position of the country and of its only academic center, the Royal Academy of Åbo (Turku), Finns played virtually no role in the field. Throughout the eighteenth century, most significant works were published in Stockholm, Göttingen and St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, some Finnish scholars still produced old-fashioned studies based on supposed affinities between Finnish and Hebrew or Finnish and Greek. Outside the academia, there had always been some popular awareness of linguistic affinities between the closely related Baltic Finnic dialects spoken in Finland, Estonia, Russian Karelia or Ingria, especially in the border regions, where language contact was frequent. The scientific concept of linguistic kinship, however, had to be brought from abroad. Until 1883, when the Helsinki-based Finno-Ugric Society was founded, the most important center of Finno-Ugric research was the Imperial Academy in Petersburg. The polyhistor H. G. Porthan, the most distinguished figure of the Finnish Enlightenment, was a useful source of knowledge about Finland and its language for foreign scholars, particularly A. L. Schlözer. His contribution to Finno-Ugric studies, however, was of local importance. It consisted of making use of the knowledge of the Finno-Ugric language family in his historical works and thus making it accessible to the local educated public. This in itself was not without significance. Through Porthan’s works, the notion of Finno-Ugric kinship played a role in shaping the early Finnish historiography, serving as a point of reference in the reconstruction of the country’s distant past before Swedish rule.5

After 1809, when Finland became part of the Russian Empire as an autonomous Grand Duchy, a national movement began to emerge and language acquired new significance. Spoken by the majority but marginalized by Swedish in the spheres of high culture, administration, science and education (beyond the most elementary), Finnish was now endorsed as a foundation of national identity. Starting in the second decade of the century, the Fennomen, many of whom spoke Swedish as their mother tongue, stressed the symbolic value of Finnish and strived to elevate its social and cultural position. The growing importance of Finnish stimulated the development of linguistic studies in Finland, including the study of languages related to Finnish.

The trend was characteristic of its time: the political relevance of language and comparative and historical linguistics were intellectually backed and stimulated by the Herderian concept of language as organically interwoven with the mind, simultaneously reflecting and affecting the speaker’s perceptions and thoughts, both individually and collectively. This concept made language the most reliable marker of nationhood, and it was easily extended into the belief that the common origins of two or more languages establish a natural bond between the nations who speak them. The discovery of the relationship of most European languages to Sanskrit gave powerful impetus to the emergent Indo-European studies and the whole field of comparative and historical linguistics. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it also stimulated the imagination of many European intellectuals, giving rise to new ways of thinking about history, cultural and spiritual heritage, national identity and race. Finnish nationalism was quick to follow the trend, integrating linguistics into its agenda. With the eastern border open, the Russian interior became accessible to Finnish scholars, allowing field studies on Finno-Ugric languages and their speakers. The authorities in St. Petersburg were eager to support scientific exploration of the Empire’s vast but still largely unexplored natural and cultural resources. The Finns’ interest in Finno-Ugricity was also a welcome trend in that it seemed to strengthen Finland’s eastern bond, while distancing it from Sweden. With financial and organizational support from the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Finnish expeditions into Russia were undertaken starting in the 1820s. The pioneers Anders Johan Sjögren (1794–1855), Matthias Alexander Castrén (1813–1852) and August Ahlqvist (1826–1889) established a research tradition before it was fully institutionalized with the founding of the Finno-Ugric Society in Helsinki in 1883. By that time, Finno-Ugric studies were tightly interwoven with the Finnish national project, and the concepts of “kindred languages” and “kindred peoples” were part of its discourse.

The Pros and Cons of the Eastern Connection

What was the attraction of Finno-Ugricity to the aspiring national movement? To a large degree, it was welcome as a linguistic, cultural and historical alternative to the Swedish heritage. Having decided, as the popular slogan has it, to be Finns rather than remain Swedes or turn into Russians, and having chosen language as the common denominator to consolidate Finnishness in statu nascendi, Finland’s patriots had to face the challenge of evaluating the Swedish legacy. The 1809 treaty kept most of it intact, with Swedish as the official language, though now, within the new borders, it clearly had become a minority language, spoken by little more than 10 percent of the population. Before 1809, its usage had been steadily rising for several centuries, but it was a slow process that involved some migration from “Sweden proper” and the very limited upward mobility of pre-modern society. It is not clear how the language situation in Finland would have developed had the country not been cut off from Sweden. Some scholars believe the nineteenth century would have brought top-down linguistic assimilation of the Finnish-speaking majority.6 By 1809, in any case, no coordinated top-down attempts at assimilation had yet begun, but sociolinguistic hierarchies had solidified and Finland’s cultural and intellectual life were nearly monopolized by Swedish. Even in the changed political situation, it took a century to reverse this trend. In 1844, when Topelius was formulating his Pan-Finnic vision, Finnish was just beginning to transcend its traditional position of a spoken vernacular which was seldom used in written form which beyond the church. National literature written in Finnish was still a theoretical postulate rather than a cultural fact, and it would remain so for another quarter of a century, despite all the symbolic significance of the national epos Kalevala (first edition in 1835, second in 1849). The first Finnish-language high school was opened in 1858. Five years later, an imperial decree stated that Finnish would be raised to the status of state language alongside Swedish within two decades. In practice, overcoming the social and cultural supremacy of Swedish took about twice that time. The Finno-Ugric kinship was thus a useful emblem of the Finns’ distinct identity: a unique, ancient heritage that was neither Swedish nor Russian. At the same time, it was a suitably eastern connection, linking the Finns with other peoples of the Empire, and therefore acceptable to the Russian authorities.

One might argue there was also a distinct attraction inherent in the very idea of belonging to a greater family of nations. Early in the nineteenth century, it provided Finno-Ugricity with some prestigious parallels. First and foremost, there was the Indo-European language family, a discovery still relatively fresh that fascinated some of the greatest minds of the European academies and made linguistics a trendy, rapidly developing, intellectually dynamic branch of science. There were also the increasingly visible Pan-Slavic and Scandinavist trends, a sign that linguistic affinity can acquire more direct political relevance. The link between academic linguistics and the national cause can be seen in a letter written by M. A. Castrén in 1844 to Johan Vilhelm Snellman, philosopher, journalist, statesman, and probably the most influential theoretician of the Fennoman movement. Convinced as he was that Finnish had to be studied, standardized and developed as a language of high culture, Snellman had serious doubts about the relevance of Castrén’s far-ranging comparative research to the objectives of the national movement. Reproached for his supposed escapism, Castrén replied:

I am determined to show the Finnish nation that we are not a solitary people from the bog, living in isolation from the world and from universal history, but are in fact related to at least one-sixth of mankind. Writing grammars is not my main goal, but without the grammars that goal cannot be attained.7

Castrén classified the Finno-Ugric group as part of an even broader Ural-Altaic family, together with the Mongol, Turkic (e.g. Turkish, Tatar, Kirghiz) and Tungusic (e.g. Manchu, Evenki) languages, a popular notion among nineteenth-century linguists, supported by Rasmus Rask, Wilhelm Schott and Max Müller.8 In a public lecture made in 1849, he pointed to the Altai as “the cradle of the Finnish people,” elaborating on the alleged cultural affinities between the peoples of this great family.9 By placing the Finns’ uniqueness in a supranational constellation, language kinship lent itself to a somewhat Hegelian reading and could be seen as a means of gaining legitimate access to “universal history.”

Historicity was indeed a challenge for the theoreticians of Finnish nationalism. Attempts to create a glorious image of the Finnish past dated back to earlier times. As early as 1700 the local patriot Daniel Juslenius adapted some concepts of Swedish antiquarianism in order to craft an image of the Finns as an ethnic group that was related to a number of renowned ancient tribes (i.e. the Vandals), claiming they had once created a great civilization that had been destroyed by the Swedes. He went so far as to produce a list of Finnish kings who had ruled before the Swedish conquest. Over a century later, when the need for a historical self-image became much more urgent than it had been in Juslenius’ times, this kind of uncritical attitude was no longer an option. In his controversial lecture of 1843, Zacharias Topelius stated that before 1809, the Finns had had no history of their own, but had been part of Swedish history. Starting with Yrjö Koskinen, a new ethnocentric Finnish historiography was born, in which Suomen kansa, “the Finnish people” (meaning nation), was presented as an independent historical subject rather than part of Swedish history. Indeed, its distinctly non-Swedish, “Turanian” origins were mentioned at the outset.10 To claim the status of a historically distinct entity, a nation which had only recently won some degree of political independence needed other criteria of historicity than the political. The search for a past of one’s own affected the making and the early readings of the Kalevala. Consciously hovering between the roles of an erudite folklorist and self-styled national poet, Elias Lönnrot, heir to the illiterate epic singers, produced a monument of the oral poetic tradition that was simultaneously genuine and forged. He selected, reworked and rearranged his primary material into a national mythology that could be referred to as a vision of the Finnish past—prehistoric, pre-political, but nevertheless distinctly Finnish in its splendor.11 The nationalist message that he labored to convey in the epic lacked a specific Finno-Ugric dimension, but the archaic nature of the poetry and the ancient setting suggested a heritage going all the way back to the common origins of the Finno-Ugric peoples and thus transcending “Finnishness” defined by political borders. Indeed, much of the material was collected in the White Sea Karelia, outside the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the form and style of the songs itself was not exclusively Finnish, but part of the cultural heritage of most Baltic Finnic peoples: the Karelians, the Estonians, the Votes. The Finno-Ugric kinship was part of the linguistic-ethnographic packet that provided the Finnish claims to historicity with handy references.

On the other hand, the concept had its drawbacks. Unlike the Indo-European heritage, which had links to the ancient traditions of India, Persia, Greece and Rome, Finno-Ugricity had very little to offer in terms of cultural and historical prestige. To some degree the comparative-historical linguistic approach could be seen as emancipatory: with the philosophical foundations provided by Herder, the Schlegels, Humboldt et al., it seemed to liberate the perspectives on Finnish from traditional cultural hierarchies, allowing it to be analyzed and described in strictly linguistic terms as a language among other languages, on equal grounds with Latin, Greek or Hebrew. However, even the strictly linguistic perspective was not judgment-free, and in particular, it was not free from Indo-Euro-centric bias. The concept of language and thought as an inseparable whole was elaborated into hierarchic typologies in which certain types of grammatical structures were seen as particularly effective in stimulating intellectual development, and therefore superior. Abundant in organic metaphors, the linguistic discourse of the period showed a strong tendency to favor the “organic” over the “mechanical”: internal transformation of stems over suffixation, inflection as a whole over agglutination, synthetic structures over analytical. Finnish had some allies among the comparativist greats: Rask praised the aesthetic quality of its structures and sounds, and Schott spoke with great reverence about all “Tataric” (i.e. Altaic and Finno-Ugric) languages. The dominant tendency, however, was to situate the heavily inflected Indo-European languages as the highest language-making achievement in the history of mankind. Sanskrit, Greek and Latin featured particularly high in this scheme, closely followed by German, while the characteristically agglutinative Finno-Ugric structures were deemed intellectually and/or aesthetically inferior, a result of the mechanical assembly of separate elements, a poorly made mosaic,12 a failed attempt at inflection, indicating weaknesses of the nation’s “inwardly organizing sense of language.”13

On the whole, it was not a very favorable approach to Finnish, especially given that the criteria of evaluation were not free of extra-linguistic considerations. Despite all the internal rigors of the comparative method, one of its main attractions was that linguistic genealogies and reconstructed proto-language forms promised to offer new analytical perspectives on the history of peoples. The development of linguistics was closely followed by that of physical anthropology, and it was common for linguistic classifications to be interpreted as simultaneously ethnic or, indeed, racial. Already in the previous centuries, scholars had tended to associate the Finns with (depending on the currently dominant spatial images of Europe) the barbarian North or the barbarian East. In the growingly racialized nineteenth-century scientific discourse this “Scythian” image of the Finns was acquiring “Mongol” features, and this called their European credentials into question.14 Some Finnish scholars were painfully aware of this unfavorable bias inherent in the intellectual school which inspired them so profoundly as linguists and patriots. The Orientalist Herman Kellgren, very Fennoman-minded and at the same time a follower of Humboldt’s language philosophy, addressed some of the sensitive issues head-on, analyzing Finnish from a Humboldtian perspective and arguing that Finnish was in fact an inflected language and therefore perfectly able to meet the requirements of the Humboldtian language ideal.15 Castrén, though convinced of the importance of linguistic bonds, was aware that the emphasis on allegedly kinships carried some inconvenient implications. In his lecture about the Altaic “cradle,” he mentions the chilly reception of the Finno-Ugric idea in Hungary:

This is hardly surprising, for the idea of being related to the Lapps and the Samoyeds stirs us up, too. That same feeling—the commendable desire to have distinguished and splendid ancestors—has driven some of our scholars to seek our cradle in Greece or in the Holy Land. We must, however, give up all possible kinship with the Hellenes, with the ten tribes of Israel, with great and privileged nations in general, and console ourselves with the notion that “everyone is heir to his own deeds” and that real nobility has to be achieved with one’s own skill. Whether the Finnish nation will manage to make itself a name in history is uncertain; what is certain is that the generations to come will judge us by our own achievements and not by those of our ancestors.16

In a letter to Snellman, he also argued that linguistic kinship does not imply racial affiliation:

As the results of my current expedition are going to prove that the Finnic languages are related to the Samoyedic and that the Finns are evidently related to the Turks and the Tatars, the next task for linguistics will be to demonstrate, through the Samoyedic languages, the Finns’ affinity with the Tunguses. From the Tunguses we are led all the way to the Manchu, and all roads lead us to the Mongols, because they are believed to be related to the Turks, the Samoyed, the Tunguses and the Manchu. We should then start getting used to the idea that we are descendants of those despised Mongols, but with the view to the future we can also ask ourselves: is there really a noticeable difference between the Caucasian and the Mongolic race? I think not. The naturalists may say all they like about the differences between Caucasian and Mongolic skulls, but what matters is that a European Finn has Caucasian features while an Asiatic Finn has Mongolic features; that Turks look European in Europe and Asiatic in Asia.17

Behind these issues of historical, linguistic or racial prestige, there was also the question of civilizational affiliation. Finnish nationalism owed its initial impetus to the great transition of 1809; it was separation from Sweden and autonomy within Russia that made Finland a sharply delineated territory and a single administrative unit, stimulating the development of Finnishness as a cultural and political concept. On the other hand, there was the Swedish legacy of self-definitions, in which Russia figured as the political archenemy and the cultural other. Embracing autonomy, Finland’s elites accepted the new political loyalties, but the cultural estrangement was harder to overcome. A poem written in 1809, dedicated and recited to Alexander I at the Diet of Porvoo by the poet and history professor Frans Michael Franzén, can be seen as an early symbolic attempt to tackle this confusion. The Emperor is welcomed and thanked as a benefactor of the “orphaned” Finns, while Finland is referred to as a “child of the East,” who has spent its childhood years under Sweden’s civilizing rule, but now is returning home.18 Franzén was a disciple and close collaborator of Porthan’s, and indeed the whole formula seems to be an adaptation of Porthanian concepts on Finnish history—those of Finns as a people with eastern origins (as demonstrated by linguistic evidence), who owe their enlightenment to their contact with Scandinavians. The language kinship, though unmentioned in the poem, is an important part of this concept; thus already in 1809, it was referred to with the aim of helping the Finns accept the new situation and open up to the east.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Finnish nationalism struggled to keep equal distance from Sweden and Russia, and much of its focus was on overcoming the cultural domination of Swedish. At the same time, however—the debt of the Finnish nationalists to Russia and their anti-Swedish stance notwithstanding—the Finnish national movement remained deeply conditioned by the pre-nationalist identity of Finland’s elites and by the long durée legacy of Swedish rule. This included public institutions, traditions of social order, the relatively strong position of peasants, Lutheranism as the official religion, and, last but not least, the high literacy rate in Swedish and in Finnish.19 All this contributed to a social landscape very different from Russian, which had formed the pre-nationalist identities of Finland’s elites and which was on the whole favorable to the development of the national movement. For all the urgency of the new tasks, such as linguistic emancipation or the recreation of the historical narrative, the emergent notions of Finnishness remained culturally tied to Scandinavia, and this fundamental orientation was ultimately something the Fennomen had no intention of abandoning, even if some of the anti-Swedish rhetoric would suggest otherwise.

The concept of Finno-Ugricity did little to change this orientation, and indeed sometimes it had the opposite effect, as it brought cultural contradictions to the surface. In 1844, Snellman wrote to Castrén, “It is a great fortune in our misfortune that the power which is suppressing the Finns’ national awareness is not the same as that which blocks them from political independence.” As Finno-Ugric studies in Finland developed, more scholars had the opportunity to travel to East Karelia, the Urals or Siberia, and encounter the “kindred peoples” whose political and cultural lives were determined by one and the same power—and their impressions were not always enticing or encouraging. Facing Finno-Ugricity in the field had an alienating effect.

One of the more characteristic examples was August Ahlqvist, who started his career as an enthusiast of romanticized Finno-Ugricity, but soon turned into a hard-headed Scandinavian Occidentalist, despite his unchanged commitment to the Finnish language. He made his debut in 1847 with “Fairy Tale, or an Ethnographic Dream,” in which the Castrénian concept of the Altaic cradle becomes a folk legend, which the narrator, an ethnographer, hears from an old Karelian. The sisters’ names allude to Finno-Ugric peoples. Their initials, if put together, spell the word VAPAUS “freedom,” and, as in Topelius’ Pan-Finnic vision, the sister representing Finland plays the leading role.20 In the 1850s, after several research expeditions to East Karelia, the Volga Region and Siberia, Ahlqvist’s attitude began to change. The poverty, backwardness, low social position and weak sense of ethnic identity among the Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples of Russia are recurrent themes in his travel reports. Over time, he increasingly perceived the Finns’ position within the Finno-Ugric family as unique and privileged because of their close ties to the cultural heritage of Western Europe, Northern, Germanic and Protestant in particular.21 In one of his best known linguistic works, he argued that much of the Finnish “cultural vocabulary” consists of old Germanic and Baltic loanwords.22 In 1875, in a speech delivered at the quadricentennial celebration of the (Swedish-made) fortress of Olavilinna, he spoke of a Finnish “debt of gratitude” towards Sweden, whose rule had saved the Finns from the misfortune of their linguistic relatives who ended up in Russia. This phrase antagonized much of the Fennoman millieu.23 From an unreserved enthusiasm regarding panethnic kinship anchored in language, his views evolved towards an appreciation of cultural bonds. The Occidentalist development can also be traced in some of Ahlqvist’s poems (published under the penname Oksanen). In Suomen valta (“The Finnish Realm”), which was published in 1860, he presented the image of a Finland that transcended the boundaries of the Grand Duchy, one defined by the community of “Finnish speech and Finnish mind” and encompassing the territory between Äänisjärvi, Pohjanlahti/Auran rannat, Vienan suu (Onega Lake, The Gulf of Bothnia, Aura’s shores, Viena’s delta), i.e. all of Karelia.24 By 1868, his concept of Finnishness had shifted westward, as shown in the poem “Meidän vieraissa-käynnit” (“Our visit-making”), in which the Finns’ neighbors are characterized as peoples one might visit. The kind-hearted Lapp is dismissed as too uncivilized, the Ingrian is in fact Russian and therefore alien, and the food they both serve (the Lapp’s reindeer hearts and kidneys, the Ingrian’s sauerkraut) scare the Finn off. The Estonian, a close kinsman, is an object of pity: enslaved in his own country, he does not even get to speak in the poem. The “German knight” speaks instead, telling the Finn to back off from the shore. Only Sweden remains a proper place to visit, praised as “Finland’s source of light” and, indeed, “Finland’s great mother.” 25

Panfennicism – Finnocentricism – Greater Finland

One element that remains stable in Ahlqvist’s thought, from the romantic visions of 1847 to his late praise of the Swedish legacy, is his view of the Finns’ special position within the Finno-Ugric family. This conviction formed the core of his changing notions of Finno-Ugricity, which he shared with Topelius and many other Fennomen, and indeed, it indicates one of the main attractions of the Finno-Ugric idea. Unprestigious as a source of historical and cultural references, it nevertheless provided Finnish ascendant nationalism with a context in which the Finns could see themselves as a civilizational avant-garde, the best educated, most thoroughly modernized, most “European” member of the family, as well as the one with the most thoroughly developed national culture. It was not so much Ahlqvist’s disdain for the less fortunate kindred peoples which made his statements controversial as his growingly outspoken view of Finland as having been civilized by external force. The idea that the Finns themselves would naturally qualify as civilizers and awakeners of other Finno-Ugrians was not contested; on the contrary, the notion of language kinship was consistently used to construct an imagined community in which the Finns were naturally predestined to lead. Ahlqvist’s youthful tale of the five sisters is one of those acts of construction, as was Topelius’ prediction of Pan-Fennicism under Finnish leadership. The concept found additional support in the traditional ethnolinguistic nomenclature, which favored the Finns and their language. The contemporary term “Finno-Ugric” became widespread only in the second half of the nineteenth century, “Ugric” being the new element, whereas in most of the earlier taxonomies the group figured as “Finnish” or “Finnic” (even if it was classified as a branch of a larger “Turanian” or “Altaic” family). The basic terminology used by the Fennomen thus seemed to legitimize their claims to tribal eldership. Thirty years after his Pan-Finnic vision, Topelius published the famous Boken om vårt land or Maamme kirja (“The Book of our Country”), a school textbook of Finland’s geography, history and cultural traditions. There, he stated that “the Finnish language does not belong to any of those (i.e. Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages), but stands in the forefront of its own great department of Finnic languages (italics mine – ŁS).”26 The perception of eastern Finno-Ugrians as poor relatives endangered by Russification rather than material for Pan-Fennicism did not weaken the Fennomen’s sense of mission: the founders of the Finno-Ugric Society in 1883 were strongly motivated by the notion of Finns being naturally predisposed and in fact obliged to form the main center of Finno-Ugric research; voices were raised that emphasized the national responsibility of Finnish scholars to support and educate kindred peoples and helpd save their languages from extinction. According to some, the imminent assimilation of Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia would make Finns the rightful heirs of their cultural legacy.27

The Fennomen’s belief in the Finns’ special position in the Finno-Ugric group was particularly suggestive and politically potent when it involved the areas near Finland where Baltic Finnic languages or dialects were spoken. In this case, proximity, border changes and long traditions of cross-border contacts coincided with close linguistic affinity, comparable to Slavic or Scandinavian linguistic bonds. However, unlike in the cases of the Slavic and Scandanavian languages, Finnish nationalism had no serious rivals in the area. This, combined with the Finno-centric terminological tradition mentioned above, made the area prone to be included in the still forming and therefore expandable spatial images of Finland and Finnishness. The line between Finnish dialects and closely related Finnic languages was fuzzy, much like the one between a regional branch of the Finnish nation and a separate kindred people. This was particularly true of Karelia, which for centuries had been divided, culturally as well as politically, between Russian and Swedish zones of influence. The religious divide (Lutheran vs. Orthodox) reinforced the political, giving a double meaning to the word “Karelian”: in the Swedish part, Karelians became one of the ethnic subgroups of the Finns (along with the Finns Proper from the southwest and the Tavastians from the center of the country), while in Russia they remained more of a separate people. There were also linguistic divisions with various degrees of similarity to Finnish. After 1812, the once Swedish part of Karelia became a province of Finland, but the Russian part also became an object of interest to some of the Fennomen. As a distant and backward periphery, it was a gold mine for folklorists, including Elias Lönnrot, who created the Kalevala. The high status of the Kalevala in the canons of Finnish culture strengthened the perception of all Karelia, and its eastern parts in particular, as an ur-Finnish land of ancient songs. Ahlqvist’s broad outline of Finland’s “spiritual” borders in Suomen valta was a reflection of this concept.

Other linguistic and national borderlines in the Baltic Finnic area also proved flexible. Several years before Suomen valta, in one of his travel reports from Russian Karelia Ahlqvist characterized Ingrian Finns, all Karelians, Votians, Estonians, Livonians and Vepsians as “Finns living in Russia, outside the borders of Finland,” and this broad definition of Finnishness was not without political overtones:

Most of these Finns, together making up about one-million people, live in territorial continuity with Finland, and even separate from Finland (or better still together with it) they could form a small state (italics mine - ŁS), although one must note that there is a gulf of several centuries between most of these peoples and the Finns from Finland in terms of education and culture.28

The notion of all Karelians being part of the greater Finnish nation was not left uncultivated. Throughout the nineteenth century, Karelia was an object of growing fascination to many Finnish intellectuals and artists; it occupied a special place in the Finnish self-image as a territory that was somewhat exotic and different from mainstream Finnishness yet at the same time represented its ancient source. In the twentieth century, cultural Karelianism acquired a political dimension, and in the first years of independence Finland made a number of unsuccessful attemtps to annex Russian Karelia. Despite interwar Finland’s policy of restoring ties with Scandinavia and reaffirming its position as part of the emergent Nordic community, the idea of a Greater Finland lingered on in politically influential milieus, e.g. the Academic Karelian Society, and it was briefly realized during World War II, when Finnish troops advanced all the way to Petrozavodsk.29 Following the military defeat in 1944, the notion of Greater Finland collapsed, as did the entire culture of politicized Pan-Fennicism; Finno-Ugric studies retreated to the academia and kept a rather low profile throughout the Cold War.

The Unequal Brotherhood

More complex was Finland’s relation with Estonia, a territory clearly distinct from Finland and the only Finno-Ugric nation in the region with a well developed national movement. In this case, Pan-Finnic aspirations met a dynamic national ideology with its own self-images and its own readings of the linguistic bond. Separated from Finland by the sea, Estonia in the nineteenth century was in many ways culturally closer to Finland than Russian Karelia. It was predominantly Lutheran, relatively modern and economically more developed than most of the Russian Empire, with high literacy and an old, if feeble, literary tradition in the local language. Unlike the Orthodox Karelians, Vepsians or Votes, the Estonians were not exposed to massive assimilatory trends. In the nineteenth century, they became one of the three Finno-Ugric communities to be integrated and mobilized by the nationalist message. Estonian nationalism emerged later than Finnish nationalism, and its development was slowed down by unfavorable socio-historical circumstances. Finnish nationalism was launched by members of the Swedish-speaking elite, who were determined to “be Finns” and attempted to appeal to the Finnish-speaking majority, while in Estonia the local German elite was not motivated to embrace Estonian identity or support the national movement. From on the outset, Estonian activists were keen to watch their more succesful “linguistic relatives,” and Finland was present in the Estonian-language press as early as the 1820s. Starting in the 1840s, Finnish activists began to visit Estonia, and prominent representatives of the two national millieus were in regular contact.30 The interest was thus mutual, but not symmetrical. The Finns were perceived as more advanced in the pursuit of their national goals, but also as more successful in retaining their original national uniqueness. Meanwhile, Finnish reports and comments on Estonian affairs, though generally sympathetic towards the kindred nation and its struggle for its cause, were not free from patronizing accents. Ahlqvist’s Meidän vieraissa-käynnit is a good example. Some Fennomen were skeptical about the Estonians’ potential as an aspiring nation, finding them too small and the dominant German culture too powerful.31 Even linguistic works were affected by this attitude. One example is the frequent classification of Estonian as genetically or otherwise subordinate to Finnish.32 In Finland this was a tradition going back to the eighteenth century,33 but now it was adopted on both shores of the Gulf of Finland and reflected in language planning policies. Some Finnish scholars suggested linguistic cooperation to bring the two literary languages closer to each other. In 1822, the journal Beiträge zur genauern Kenntniss der estnischen Sprache published an article by the influential Finnish activist I. A. Arwidsson in which he advised Estonians to reform their orthography according to the Finnish model,34 while August Ahlqvist considered, as a young man, the possibility of creating one common literary language for Finns and Estonians. The idea was rather eccentric and Ahlqvist abandoned it as soon as he learned more about Estonia’s linguistic realities.35 Otherwise, cooperation did develop, but the results were unilateral. Estonian language planners were keen to follow inspirations from Finland, but Estonian influence in Finnish was hardly noticeable. This trend continued for well over a century.36 In 1917–1919, when Estonia was struggling for political independence, the ephemeric concept of political integration with Finland had supporters among influential statesmen of both countries.37

Among many other aspects of national image-building, this tradition of unequal brotherhood affected Estonian perspectives on the Finno-Ugric heritage. Finnish nationalism made Finno-Ugricity part of its message early on, whereas in the case of Estonian nationalism it was adopted at a later stage and, again, the Finnish model played an important role. The Estonians’ role in the nineteenth-century development of Finno-Ugric research was insignificant. Before independence, they carried out practically no field research of their own, at least not beyond the borders of the Baltic Provinces.38 While Finnish scholars tended to perceive their nation as central to the whole concept of Finno-Ugricity, their Estonian colleagues largely adopted the Finnocentric perspective, acknowledging their own position as secondary. It took political independence and the Estonization of the University of Tartu for the Estonians to develop Finno-Ugric studies of their own and simultaneously integrate Finno-Ugricity into their canons of national self-image.39

Epilogue: Memory, Survival and Nation Branding

As the idea of Finno-Ugricity seemed to be in retreat in Finland, it began to acquire new meanings in Soviet Estonia. Apart from the fact that Estonian scholars had easier access to Finno-Ugric territories in Russia than scholars from Finland, language kinship again became a historical and cultural point of reference and provided politically acceptable forms with which to convey national-minded messages, or more acceptable, at least, than the Baltic or Scandinavian links that interwar Estonia used to highlight in its unsuccessful attempts to join the emergent Nordic community.40 The ethnographic films by Lennart Meri, which were directed between 1970 and 1988, provide an interesting example of Finno-Ugricity used to articulate politically delicate statements on the Estonian identity and its current condition. Better known to the world as the first post-Soviet president of independent Estonia (1992–2001), in the Soviet times Meri was a popular author of travel books in which he frequently transcended reportage to venture out into idiosyncratic, erudite, highly imaginative historical meditations. In his films, later collectively retitled “The Film Encyclopaedia of Finno-Ugric Peoples,” he explores the notion of Finno-Ugricity as a common spiritual heritage, reflected in the most archaic layers of language and culture. Memory is a recurrent theme, featuring alternately as a reliable safeguard of identity, operating deep beneath the conscious (e.g. through the old vocabulary or folk superstitions), and as a vulnerable resource that requires deliberate cultivation and therefore relies on individual responsibility for the collective heritage; in both variants, it is tightly bound to the no less prominent theme of survival. Meri’s narrative can be seen as a continuation of the nineteenth-century tradition of romanticized ethnography and linguistics, but it gradually shifts towards the indigenous peoples’ perspective. Through a series of cautious signals, Finno-Ugricity is reinterpreted: from a bond of an imagined ancient past it becomes a modern bond of common experiences: foreign domination, dispossession, and endangerment.41

At the same time, the Finno-Ugric bond had other meanings, too, the most tangible of which was the mass following of Finnish television, after its signals began to reach northern Estonia in 1971. This was indeed one of the rare situations when the core linguistic dimension of Finno-Ugricity became a real cultural asset for the Estonians, bringing virtual access to the physically inaccessible world on the other side of the iron curtain. The tradition of Nordic yearnings returned to Estonia’s public discourse as soon as the country reclaimed independence; the concept of Estonia as a Nordic rather than a Baltic or East European country was propagated steadily throughout the 1990s as part of the official cultural policy. President Meri himself was active in promoting this trend, but it was the Foreign Minister (and currently President) Toomas Hendrik Ilves who proved to be particularly inventive. In 1999, he proposed the concept of “Yuleland,” a region spreading across the north of Europe, from the British Isles to Finland and Estonia (but not to Latvia), a community of “Protestant, high-tech oriented countries form[ing] a Huntingtonian sub-civilization, different from both its southern and eastern neighbors” with a shared cultural heritage symbolized by the common word for winter solstice (yule, jul, jol, joulu, jõul).42

For all its focus on modernity and economic success, Ilves’ prehistoric references and his implicit belief in the political relevance of philology bring his arguments close to the rhetoric Meri employed back in the 1970s and 1980s. But the Finno-Ugric link was even more directly present in his Nordic campaign. In 1998, Ilves argued at a public forum that Finland was an example of successful national rebranding which should be just as available to Estonia: “Finland marketed itself into a Scandinavian country. (…) Why should Finland be more of a Scandinavian country than Estonia? We’re all the same Finno-Ugric sort of swamp people. But the point is that they turned themselves into Scandinavians. […] My vision of Estonia is doing the same thing.”43

In the Estonian nation branding campaign, one might argue, Finno-Ugricity has proven to be a highly rotatable category in the construction of identities and historical affiliations. Originally established to help Finnish nationalism achieve symbolic emancipation from Sweden, it became attractive to the Estonians as a link to the more successful Finland, and then, with Finland’s Nordic identity reaffirmed, as a direct passage to Scandinavia.

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Judit Gál

The Roles and Loyalties of the Bishops and Archbishops of Dalmatia (1102–1301)

This paper deals with the roles of archbishops and bishops of Dalmatia who were either Hungarian or had close connections with the Hungarian royal court. The analysis covers a relatively long period, beginning with the coronation of Coloman as king of Croatia and Dalmatia (1102) and concluding with the end of the Árpád dynasty (1301). The length of this period not only enables me to examine the general characteristics of the policies of the court and the roles of the prelates in a changing society, but also allows for an analysis of the roles of the bishopric in different spheres of social and political life. I examine the roles of bishops and archbishops in the social context of Dalmatia and clarify the importance of their activities for the royal court of Hungary. Since the archbishops and bishops had influential positions in their cities, I also highlight the contradiction between their commitments to the cities on the one hand and the royal court on the other, and I examine the ways in which they managed to negotiate these dual loyalties.

First, I describe the roles of the bishops in Dalmatian cities before the rule of the Árpád dynasty. Second, I present information regarding the careers of the bishops and archbishops in question. I also address aspects of the position of archbishop that were connected to the royal court. I focus on the role of the prelates in the royal entourage in Dalmatia, their importance in the emergence of the cult of the dynastic saints, and their role in shaping royal policy in Dalmatia. I concentrate on the aforementioned bishops, but in certain cases, such as the examination of the royal entourage or the spread of cults, I deal with other, non-Hungarian bishops of territories that were under Hungarian rule. This general analysis is important because it provides an opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of the bishopric role and helps highlight the importance of the Hungarian bishops, who constitute the main subject of this essay.

Keywords: Church history, Dalmatia, roles of bishops, Kingdom of Hungary, royal policy

Historical Context

Stephen II, the last descendant of the Croatian royal dynasty, died in 1091 without an heir. After his death, the Hungarian king Ladislas I (1077–95) attempted to acquire rule over Croatia and Dalmatia during a chaotic period in which different groups fought for the throne of Croatia. The Hungarian king had family ties to the late king of Croatia and Dalmatia, Zvonimir, as Ladislas’ sister was his wife. Ladislas managed to take hold of part of Croatia, but an attack by the Cumans against Hungary hindered his advances in Croatia and Dalmatia in 1091.1 That year, he made Álmos, his nephew, king of Croatia and Dalmatia, but Álmos’ rule was probably only titular, and his title symbolized the aspiration of the Árpád dynasty to assert its rule more than it did the Árpáds’ actual control of the territory.2

The Hungarian kings did not attempt to seize Croatia and Dalmatia in the following few years mostly because Ladislas I died (1095). Furthermore, the first crusade went through Hungary (1096) and King Coloman (1095–16) had to deal with internal affairs.3 The struggle of the Árpád dynasty to establish its rule over this region ended with the victory of King Coloman. First he led his army to Croatia, where he defeated Peter, who had claimed the throne of Croatia in 1097. After his victory, Coloman struggled with internal affairs, so he could not confront Venice. The internal and external circumstances let Coloman reassert his rule over the region, and he was crowned king of Croatia and Dalmatia in Biograd in 1102.4

Coloman seized Zadar, Šibenik, Split, Trogir, and the islands in 1105, three years after his coronation.5 The king of Hungary had to contend with Venice for control of the coastal lands, and the Italian city state attacked and a year later seized the part of Dalmatia that was under the rule of Coloman’s son, Stephen II (1116–31). The king tried to recapture the coastal territories in 1118, but he failed, compelling him to make peace with Venice for five years.6 When the five years of the peace had elapsed, the king of Hungary led an army to Dalmatia in 1124 and seized control of north and central Dalmatia, except for Zadar. The success was only temporary, because Venice retook these lands in 1125.7

King Béla II (1131–41) was active in Dalmatia, since he seized Central Dalmatia in 1135/36. He probably also captured certain Bosnian lands during this military campaign. The relationship between Dalmatia and Hungary changed significantly during the first years of Stephen III’s (1162–72) reign. He was constantly at war with Byzantium between 1162 and 1165. Manuel I Comnenos, the Byzantine emperor, seized Central Dalmatia, and his ally, Venice, captured Zadar by 1165.8 Stephen III tried to restore his rule in 1166/67, and he managed to maintain control over Šibenik and the surrounding territories for a short time. The emperor seized this land again in 1167.9

When Manuel died in 1180, King Béla III (1172–96) took control of the territory again. First, he captured Central Dalmatia in 1181. A year later, Zadar also fell under Hungarian rule. Venice tried to seize the city in 1187 and 1192/93, but the attacks were unsuccessful. After Béla III’s death, his son Emeric succeeded him. He had to struggle with his brother for rule. Duke Andrew defeated him in Mački (Slavonia) in 1197, and he maintained control over Croatia, Dalmatia and a part of Hum between 1197 and 1204.10 The fight with Venice continued in 1204 when the Italian city seized Zadar during the fourth crusade. King Béla IV (1235–70) attempted to retake the city in 1242, but he was defeated in 1244, and Zadar remained under Venetian rule throughout the rest of the period under discussion.11 After the death of Béla IV, royal power weakened in Hungary and groups of noblemen competed for rule, using the young king, Ladislas IV (1272–89). The kings of Hungary did not pay much attention to Dalmatia. After the death of Béla IV, in all likelihood no Hungarian king visited the coastal territories. The lack of royal power also let the local elites strengthen their authority, and this period was the time when the Šubić noble family took the control over a great part of North and Central Dalmatia.

The Role of the (Arch)bishops in Dalmatia before the Rule of the Árpáds

Before launching into an analysis of the role of bishops in royal policy, it is important to consider the roles that bishops had before the beginning of the rule of the Árpáds in Dalmatia. The bishops and archbishops played important roles in the cities in the tenth and eleventh centuries, since they took part both in the ecclesiastical and the secular lives of their communities. They had important positions in the secular administration of the cities and in their foreign affairs as well. The cities often sent the bishops to serve as diplomats, such as in case of the negotiations before King Coloman entered Dalmatian cities in 1105.12 Their role was based on the landholdings of the Church, which were acquired by donations and purchases.13 The charters were dated by the bishops’ tenure of office. Even as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries, in municipal documents their names were given honorary mention after the kings or princes and before the cities’ priors and other magistrates. They were members of the decision-making assemblies and witnesses to or issuers of the charters in internal affairs. The bishops seem to have taken part in the resolution of all questions that required the judgment of the magistrates. They promoted the founding and the defense of monasteries, and they were members of the city council. The Croatian royal dynasty, the Tripimirović dynasty, also maintained very close relationships with the cities’ bishops. The Croatian rulers gave donations to the Church as early as the ninth century, but with increasing intensity as of the mid-tenth century.14 The bishops had very important roles in diplomacy, especially in communication between the cities and their rulers.15

The Bishops and Archbishops

The majority of the (arch)bishops under discussion in this study belonged to the archbishopric of Split. When the city was under the rule of the kings of Hungary, the Church of Split always had Hungarian archbishops or archbishops who had close ties to the royal court. The first Hungarian archbishop of Split, Manasses (cc. 1113–16), was a nobleman. He became the archbishop of the city around 1113, and his tenure in office came to an end when Venice seized Split in 1116.16 When King Béla II recaptured Split in 1136, Gaudius (1136–53) became the archbishop of the city, and he belonged to the elite of Split.17 According to Thomas the Archdeacon, he had close ties to the kings of Hungary.18 His tenure in office ended when he consecrated the bishop of Trogir uncanonically, and Pope Eugen III removed him from the administration of his orders in 1153.19 It should be mentioned that in official documents Gaudius was referred to as the archbishop of Split until 1158.20 While Gaudius was still alive, a Hungarian prelate, Absalom (1159–61), was elected as the archbishop of the city instead of him.21 When he died, he was succeeded by Peter Lombard (1161–66), who was the former bishop of Narni.22 As Split came under the rule of Byzantium, the city had archbishops appointed by Pope Alexander III.23 When Béla III took back the city, he insisted on the former custom of the election of the archbishops.24 A certain Peter, who was a member of the Kán family (one of the most powerful families in Hungary, with close ties to the southwestern part of the country),25 became the archbishop around 1185, a position he held until 1190.26 When he left Split and became the archbishop of Kalocsa, he was succeeded by another Peter (1191–96), who was the former abbot of the monastery of Saint Martin in Pannonhalma.27

When Duke Andrew and King Emeric were fighting for the throne of Hungary, the former stayed in Dalmatia for a relatively long period in 1197 and 1198, when he seized control of part of Hum. Andrew not only exerted an influence on the secular life of the region, he also made decisions in ecclesiastical cases. While the kings of Hungary did not order the direct election of a certain bishop or archbishop in Dalmatia, Andrew intended to install loyal archbishops in Split and Zadar. He wanted to win the support of the cities against his brother, so he gave ducal grants to the Church more often than had been done in the past, and he tried to influence the cities through his own prelates.28 Andrew ordered a certain A. to be the archbishop of Split and Nicolas, the former bishop of Hvar, to be the archbishop of Zadar.29 Regarding the archbishop of Split, we know only the first letter of his name and that he was the leader of the city’s Church for a short time, because Pope Celestin III ordered Bishop Dominic of Zagreb, Archbishop Saul of Kalocsa and Bishop Hugrin of Győr to investigate the ducal elections in 1198. The results of the investigation were clear, since, following the death of Celestin, Pope Innocent III, excommunicated both of the elected archbishops.30 The archbishopric see of Split became vacant after the excommunication, and it remained so until 1200. The first document to make mention of the vacancy of the archbishopric of Zadar was a letter issued on March 2, 1201.31

Duke Andrew held Dalmatia, Croatia and a part of Hum under his rule during the fight with King Emeric,32 so when Bernard of Perugia (cc. 1200–1217), the former educator of Emeric, became the archbishop of Split in 1200, this was supposed to be a huge help and advantage for the king.33 According to Thomas the Archdeacon, Bernard was loyal to Emeric, and he was never hostile towards Duke Andrew and served his interests as well. He was a learned prelate who fought against heretics in Bosnia and Dalmatia. Bernard died in 1217, when King Andrew II was leading a crusade and staying in Split.34 The king asked the citizens and the clergy to elect his candidate for archbishop, a certain Alexander the physician, but they refused him.35 In the course of the following two years, the archbishopric see was empty in Split. There is mention in the available sources of a certain “Slavac”36 and at least six other archbishop-elects, but either they were not confirmed or they did not want to become archbishops.37 When Andrew II returned from the crusade, Guncel (1219–1242) was elected as the leader of the archbishopric in Split. He was a member of the Kán family and, more importantly, he was related to Nicholas, ban of Slavonia (1213, 1219, 1229–1235),38 who helped him become the archbishop of Split.39 Guncel died in 1242, around the time of the Mongol invasion of Hungary. The citizens and the clergy of Split elected Stephen, the bishop of Zagreb.40 He was a member of the Hahót-Buzád family, another important noble family from southwestern Hungary, and he fled from Hungary with King Béla IV and other magnates during the Mongol invasion. When he was in Split, the citizens and clergy elected him archbishop, but he was never confirmed.41 He was followed by Hugrin (1244–48), another Hungarian prelate from the rich and powerful Csák family. His uncle, also called Hugrin, was the former archbishop of Kalocsa, and the family was also connected to southwestern Hungary.42 He served both as the archbishop of Split and the count of the city, appointed by Béla IV.43 When he died, the suffragans of the archbishopric of Split elected a certain Friar John (1248–49) as archbishop.44 In the following year, Pope Innocent IV promoted Roger of Apulia (1250–66) instead of John and sent him to Split. These two prelates were exceptional, because they were elected without the Hungarian kings’ counsel or consent. Thomas the Archdeacon mentions that Béla IV was displeased by this.45 The last archbishop to serve in the period in question was John (1266–94), who was a member of Hahót-Buzád family, like Stephen, the former archbishop-elect of Split and bishop of Zagreb.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were only three consecrated archbishops and eight archbishop-elects who were elected without the kings’ participation in Split. When Split was under the rule of Byzantium, Girard of Verona and Rainer were the archbishops of the city. A certain Slavac and six unknown archbishops were elected between 1217 and 1219, when Andrew II went on a crusade. A certain John was elected by the suffragans of the archbishopric after Hugrin died in 1248, but he was never consecrated. The last exception is Roger of Apulia, who was elected through the intervention of Pope Innocent IV in 1250.

The archbishopric of Split was probably the most important ecclesiastical center for the kings of Hungary, because this archbishopric was the metropolitan see of almost all of the lands under Hungarian rule in the Eastern Adriatic. In addition to the archbishopric of Split, other ecclesiastical centers also frequently had Hungarian bishops. Samson became the bishop of Nin in 1242, and he served until his death in 1269.46 In all likelihood, King Béla IV had been able to exert some influence on his election to the position, because Nin had a strategically important position near Zadar, when the latter city fell under Venetian rule in 1244. His name is mentioned in five charters.47 Two of them were confirmations of the royal privileges of the city of Nin48 and one was a confirmation of Ban Roland about a grant to the Church.49 He was given land by King Béla IV while he was the bishop of Nin, an estate referred to as Lepled in Somogy County.50 The bishopric of Senj had two bishops of Hungarian origin in the thirteenth century. Thomas the Archdeacon mentioned John, but this is the only reference to his tenure in office. The available sources indicate only that he was appointed by Archbishop Guncel and he was Hungarian.51 The other bishop of Senj was Borislav, who is mentioned in charters from 1233 and 1234.52 The dearth of sources does not allow us to draw many conclusions regarding the lives of these bishops, but it is reasonable to assume that the important geographical position of Senj drew the attention of leaders, secular and ecclesiastical, to the Church of the city. Senj was important because one of the most important medieval roads to Dalmatia went through it, and also because the lands that were under Venetian rule were situated in Northern Dalmatia. Thomas Archdeacon also mentioned a certain John whom Archbishop Guncel of Split wanted to appoint before his death in 1242.53 Trogir had two bishops who were connected somehow to the royal court. However, it is also worth mentioning the name of Treguan (1206–1254), who followed Bernard of Perugia from Hungary to Split. Later, he was asked to be the bishop of Trogir, but he was different from the other bishops under discussion. His election was not influenced by the royal court, and while he served as the leader of the Church of Trogir, he was not given this position simply because he was close to the king. The second bishop was Stephen, a former canon from Zagreb County, who held office between 1277 and 1282.54

The Election of the Bishops and Archbishops

The dearth of sources makes it difficult to draw any far reaching conclusions regarding the process of the election of each of the bishops and archbishops in question. The diplomatic sources provide little information about the elections, especially in the twelfth century. Only Thomas the Archdeacon gave a detailed description of the process in Split during the period under examination, up until 1266. But it should be noted that he was an eyewitness to these events only between 1217 and 1249, since he was born at the beginning of the thirteenth century and died in 1268.55 I will focus primarily on the elections that took place in Split during this time.

The election of the archbishops and bishops in Dalmatia was not merely an ecclesiastical matter in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both the laity and the clergy took part in the process, because the bishops of the cities were involved in secular administration and had considerable influence on the life of the city. The election of the prelates was a communal decision which sometimes resulted in arguments between the chapter of Split and the laity.56 Split had the right to elect its own archbishop, a privilege that was confirmed by the kings of Hungary as well.57 In spite of this, the Church of Split always had an archbishop with a close relationship to Hungary when the city was under the rule of the Árpáds, and the royal court influenced the decision. How can one explain this apparent contradiction between the privilege of the city on the one hand to elect its own archbishop and the fact, on the other, that Hungarian archbishops were consistently elected? It order to arrive at an understanding of this, it is important to analyze the election of the archbishops who were contemporaries of Thomas and to whose election he himself was a witness.

Archbishop Guncel was elected in 1219 after a period of two years, during which at least seven archbishops were elected but never received the pallium (the ecclesiastical vestment that in earlier centuries was bestowed by the pope on metropolitans and primates to indicate the authorities granted them by the Holy See). Prior to his election, the chapter of Split did not agree about the new archbishop, and some of the canons led by Peter the deacon sought to elect a Hungarian archbishop to ensure the favor of the king towards the Church and the city. In spite of the protest of the other part of the chapter, which wanted to elect a prelate from amongst themselves, the citizens and the clergy elected Guncel.58 His appointment and election were supported by Ban Gyula of the Kán family, a relative of Guncel, who sent a letter to the city in support of Guncel’s election.59 This kind of support from the Hungarian elite was not unusual, or more precisely from the bans of Slavonia. When the bishopric see of Trogir was vacant in 1274, Ban Henrik wrote a letter to Trogir to attempt to convince them to elect Thomas, who was part of his retinue.60

When Guncel died, the laity and the clergy decided to elect Bishop Stephen of Zagreb, who was in Split because he had followed King Béla IV during the Mongol invasion.61 A year later, he withdrew from the election. The canons, together with Franciscan and Dominican friars, tried to elect a new archbishop, without the participation of the laity. The new archbishop was Thomas the Archdeacon himself. This was the first attempt of the chapter to hold an election in which only the canons and the clergy were allowed to take part. The whole process came to a close at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the chapter succeeded in electing the archbishops without the participation of the laity.62 The community protested against this new process. A general assembly was convened and they threatened the clergy with possible sanctions if the laity were to be excluded from the election.63 Around that time, war had broken out between Split and Trogir, and King Béla IV supported the latter. As a result of the royal support, Split sent envoys to the king, who asked them to elect Hugrin, the former provost of Čazma, as the new archbishop. Under pressure from the laity, the chapter finally elected Hugrin, who was also appointed by the king to be the count of Split.64 After the death of Hugrin, the laity did not take part in the election of a certain Friar John and Roger of Apulia. The former was elected by the chapter and the suffragans of the archbishopric, and Roger was appointed by the pope with the disapproval of the king, who later criticized the failure to obtain royal consent as part of the process of the election.65 Indications of direct royal influence in the aforementioned elections can be found only in the case of the election of Hugrin.

These elections, the diplomatic sources, and the earlier parts of Thomas’s work reveal a few major characteristics regarding influence of the Hungarian court on the processes of the elections. First, the election of an archbishop who was close to the royal court was not only in the kings’ interest. Since archbishops played a major role in the city’s diplomatic affairs, it was necessary to have someone who would be able to curry the favor of the court. Second, the election of the bishops with the participation of the clergy and the laity was not the practice in the Kingdom of Hungary, where the kings influenced the election of the prelates.66 Third, the process of the election could become customary during the period under examination. Until the mid-thirteenth century, when the archbishopric became vacant, a general assembly was convened in which the clergy and the laity decided about the archbishop.67 The role of the king during the election probably can be found in the description of Thomas the Archdeacon of King Béla IV’s second visit to Split. Thomas mentioned that King Béla IV was angry when he visited Split because of the circumstances of Roger’s election. He claimed that the city should have asked for his consent, and the archbishop should have been someone from the Hungarian Kingdom.68 The unwritten rule of the election of an archbishop from Hungary and the necessity of making a request for the king’s consent probably became a custom by the last decades of the twelfth century at the latest. Probably both were part of the process in the case of the archbishopric election at the beginning of the 1180s. In 1181, Pope Alexander III ordered King Béla III not to intervene in the election of the archbishop, because the city had the right to elect its own prelate.69 The king probably tried and later managed to enforce the royal custom, because Peter became the archbishop of Split.

Some understanding of the legal situation in Hungary also sheds light on the contradiction between the privilege of Split on the one hand and the influence exerted by the court in Hungary on the elections on the other. First, as noted, the process by which the archbishops were elected in Split was unknown in the Kingdom of Hungary. Second, the royal privilege of towns to elect their own archbishops, a privilege that was confirmed by the kings, did not exist in Hungary.70 Third, the unwritten custom law was strong during the period under examination, and it was more important than the written word in Hungary.71 These three elements and the natural interests of Split in currying the favor of the court explain the apparent (but only apparent) contradiction: the city and the royal court had common interests with regards to the office of the archbishop. The main conflict of interest existed not between the king and Split during the majority of the period, but lay rather between the aspirations of the chapter of Split (or a certain part of the chapter) and the city, because the former sought to elect a local archbishop from amongst themselves, while the city’s and kings’ political interests led to the election of the aforementioned bishops. This does not mean that the city and the kings never had arguments about the elections (indeed this probably took place in 1181 and in 1217), but at least until the mid-thirteenth century the election of a new archbishop was not merely a matter of the interests of the kings.

Moreover, the nobility which had a strong position in southwestern Hungary, was also able to influence the elections, and not merely in the case of the archbishopric of Split. Many of the archbishops of Split belonged to noble families, such as the Csák, Kán, and Hahót-Buzád families, and in two cases the bans of Slavonia tried to convince cities to elect relatives or beneficiaries of their sympathies. This took place for the first time in Split in 1219 and for the second time in Trogir in 1274. Alongside the archbishops of Split, there were other bishops in Dalmatia who were Hungarian. The election of these bishops could be influenced by the archbishopric of Split, because they all belonged to its metropolitan see. The royal court and the Hungarian magnates could also influence the events, and this may have been another factor, alongside the desire of the cities to have Hungarian bishops, that prompted the election of figures with ties to Hungary, but the dearth of sources do not allow us to draw any far-reaching conclusions.72

Dalmatian Bishops in the Royal Entourage

Regular and occasional visits to Dalmatia had several functions for the kings and dukes of Hungary. The personal presence and related representative acts could have functioned as means of securing and expressing the rule of the kings over the region symbolically.73 Their solemn presence, supported by the royal army and the entourage (including high magnates and prelates from the kingdom), was visual proof of the presence of royal power in Dalmatia. The king was surrounded by bishops and archbishops, and secular leaders were also part of his entourage.74 When the kings or the dukes of Croatia and Dalmatia visited the coastal territories, their entourages not only played practical roles, but also had representative and symbolic functions. The decisions regarding the people who accompanied the kings and dukes during their visits from the kingdom were important, as were the decisions concerning who, from the local region, joined their retinues. In this part of this essay, I examine the royal entourage, and especially the role of the Dalmatian bishops and archbishops in it.

King Coloman definitely visited Dalmatia in 1102, 1105, 1108, and 1111. During his visits, several prelates and high officials followed him to the new territory of the kingdom. In 1102, he was accompanied by, at the very least, the bishops of Eger and Zagreb.75 Three years later, in 1108, several counts, the count palatine, and the archbishop of Esztergom accompanied him.76 In 1111, the archbishops of Esztergom and Kalocsa, the bishops of Vác, Pécs, Veszprém, Győr, and Várad (Oradea), several counts, the count palatine, and other noblemen and prelates were among Coloman’s entourage from the kingdom, more precisely from the territory of the kingdom not including the recently seized lands.77 There is not much information regarding the officials and prelates who followed the king from Dalmatia during Coloman’s reign. In 1105, at the very least Archbishop Gregory of Zadar and Cesar the count of the city were with him when he entered and stayed in Zadar.78 After Coloman’s death, one can assume that Béla II and Géza II also visited Dalmatia. The latter probably traveled to Dalmatia at least once in 1142.79 The archbishops of Esztergom and Kalocsa and the bishops of Veszprém, Zagreb, Győr, Pécs, and Csanád were with Béla II in Dalmatia.

Stephen III probably also visited this territory around 1163, and he was accompanied by local bishops from Nin, Skradin, and Knin, the count of Split, and other secular officials of the region in 1163. The charter that was issued that year was the first source that provided information about the “Dalmatian” entourage of the kings. During the conflict between King Emeric and Duke Andrew, the latter spent a relatively long time in Dalmatia in 1198 and 1200. Andrew had his own court, including a ban, while the king also appointed his own officials to Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia, so the number of office-holders doubled between 1197 and 1200.80 In addition to the members of his own court, Duke Andrew was accompanied by the prelates and secular leaders of Dalmatia, including the archbishop-elect of Zadar, the archbishop of Split, the bishops of Knin and Skradin, and the count of Split and Zadar.81 When Andrew II led a crusade and visited Dalmatia in 1217, he was accompanied by the magnates from Hungary and the bishops of Dalmatia, who surrounded the king during his visits in Dalmatian towns. Later, Duke Béla and Duke Coloman were also escorted by Guncel (the archbishop of Split), the bishops of the region, and the local secular elite when they visited Dalmatia in 1225 and 1226.82 The entourages during the period in question included both the highest elite from Hungary and the Dalmatian archbishops and bishops, together with the secular leaders of the region. The role of the Church was significant during these visits. Hungarian and Dalmatian prelates surrounded the kings, and this entourage may have created a sacral atmosphere around the rulers of the land. Moreover, when the kings and dukes made solemn entries into Dalmatian cities during the period under examination, the archbishops and bishops of the coastal region played an important role in the ceremonies. Duke Andrew made ceremonious entries into Trogir in 1200 and Split in 1217 as king, and the accounts of these events are the most detailed sources regarding these solemn occasions. In both cases, the duke and the king were surrounded and escorted by the local bishops, and they led him into the cities, while the secular elite did not play any significant role comparable to that of the prelates.

The Bishops and the Cult of Saint Stephen of Hungary in Dalmatia

The cult of saints of the royal dynasty could be used to legitimize the new ruling dynasty in Croatia and symbolize royal power over the lands. One of the two sources that testify to the appearance of the cult of saints of the Árpád dynasty in Dalmatia can be connected to the archbishopric of Split. A capsella reliquiarum was found during the archeological excavations in Kaštel Gomilica between 1975 and 1977 at the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian.83 This territory is situated a few kilometers from Split, and the church was built in the mid-twelfth century. The foundation and construction of the edifice can be connected to two archbishops of Split who were connected to the royal court of Hungary. Archbishop Gaudius launched the construction and Absalom, the archbishop-elect, consecrated the church in 1160.84 The most interesting part of this church from the perspective of the focus of this essay is the aforementioned capsella reliquiarum, which contains the following inscription:

HIC SVNT RELIQUI/E · SCE MARIE VIR/GINIS SCCS MA/RTIRV · COSME · / ET DAMIANI / ET SCI STEFA/NI REGIS··85

According to this source, the cult of Saint Stephen of Hungary appeared in Split relatively soon after the coronation of Coloman. The spread of the cult of the dynastic saint was more significant in Slavonia, but it also had some influence in the coastal lands.86 Promotion of the dynastic cult was an important part of the symbolic royal policy, and the appearance of the cult of Saint Stephen was probably connected to the role of the (arch)bishops in royal policy. Saint Stephen’s relic could have been brought to Split either by Gaudius or Absalom, because according to Thomas the Archdeacon Gaudius enjoyed the favor of the king.87

The reliquary in Kaštel Gomilica is not the only piece of evidence indicating the early appearance of the cult of Saint Stephen in Dalmatia. In Knin, a bishopric that belonged to the metropolitan province of the archbishopric of Split, a church that was dedicated to Saint Stephen of Hungary was probably built during the twelfth or the thirteenth century.88 Since the first written piece of evidence regarding this church is from the fourteenth century, one can assume but not conclude with certainty that this church belonged to the early period of Hungarian rule in this territory. The construction of a church in Knin dedicated to St. Stephen, a city that had served as the center of the Croatian bishopric (episcopus Chroatensis) as of 1078, could have been a symbolic gesture of considerable importance.89 It is impossible to reconstruct the exact role of the bishops of Knin in the spread of the cult of St. Stephen, but it can be assumed that the role of the Church was significant, as it was in the case of the archbishopric of Split.

The Archbishops and Bishops of Dalmatia between the Cities and the Royal Court

Most of the Hungarian bishops in Dalmatia were connected to the archbishopric of Split, because it was the ecclesiastical center of northern and central Dalmatia and the lands under the rule of the kings of Hungary. Most of the sources can also be connected to this ecclesiastical center, and we can assume that the other bishops of Hungarian origin played similar role in their cities. The role of the archbishops of Split emerged after King Coloman of Hungary seized the city in 1105 and a new Hungarian archbishop was elected in 1113. The basis of the new (arch)bishopric role may have been connected to their previous importance in foreign cases. They were the representatives of their cities, like the bishop of Trogir, who mediated between Trogir and King Coloman in 1105. The (arch)bishops under examination here were not only the ecclesiastical leaders of their cities and played important roles in the secular life of the communities, they also became instruments in the effectuation of royal policy in Dalmatia.

According to Thomas the Archdeacon, the archbishops of Split often left their see and went to the royal court.90 I would venture the hypothesis that during these visits they served as ambassadors sent by the city to the king. The available sources reveal little regarding the details of these visits, but it seems likely that the archbishops of Split were not the only representatives of the Church to visit the court. They were probably also joined by other bishops. For example, Trogir sent Bishop Treguan to Ancona to negotiate with the city,91 and one can safely assume that cities were also able to send their bishops to the royal court if necessary. Bishop Grubče of Nin visited the mainland when he was journeying with Guncel from Hungary, but the aims of his visit are unclear.92 It can be assumed that the bishops and archbishops were the connection between the cities and the king. The archbishops of Split and possibly other bishops visited the royal court not merely as envoys of their cities, but also as participants in royal events. Archbishop Bernard of Split, for instance, was among the visitors at the coronation of King Ladislas III in 1204.93

In addition to the role played by the archbishops and bishops as mediators between the royal court and the coastal lands, the prelates also had roles of particular importance for the royal court in other cases. The bishops and archbishops of Dalmatia were not part of the royal council and the royal court. The reason for this lies in the policy of the court, which did not want to integrate Dalmatia into the Church organization of the mainland, with the exception of an attempt initiated by Duke Coloman.94 This policy notwithstanding, the bishops and archbishops in question here played important roles for the court. They served not only as ecclesiastical leaders, but in many cases also as representatives of the kings. When Venice attacked Zadar during the fourth crusade, Archbishop Bernard of Split hired ships for the defense of the city. Bernard paid with the king’s money, probably because King Emeric ordered him to do so.95 It can be assumed that Bishop Samson of Nin played a role in the foreign policy of King Béla IV. After Venice seized Zadar, by 1244 Nin had emerged as an important city, since it is situated only fifteen kilometers from Zadar. Samson, as probably the first Hungarian bishop of the city, was elected during the king’s stay in Dalmatia, and the Church of Nin received royal grants in subsequent decades.96 Archbishop Hugrin of Split was a key figure during the peace negotiations between Trogir and Split in 1245.97 Hugrin acted according to the wishes of Béla IV, and peace was made in favor of Trogir.98

The archbishops of Split played important roles in the royal policy concerning Bosnia throughout the twelfth century and at the beginning of the thirteenth. The Bishopric of Bosnia fell under the jurisdiction of the archbishopric of Split in 1192 (it had been under the jurisdiction of the metropolitan province of Dubrovnik).99 The change in ecclesiastical organization can be connected to the royal policy towards Bosnia, since the subordination connected the Kingdom of Hungary and Bosnia on the ecclesiastical level, which was an expression of royal aims in the region. According to the sources, the bishop of Bosnia tried to ignore this change and still visited the archbishop of Dubrovnik for consecration in 1195.100 The kings attempted to compel Bosnia to recognize their authority and the jurisdiction of the archbishopric of Split until the 1210s, but their lack of success led to a change in royal policy. The bishopric of Bosnia became the suffragan of the archbishopric of Kalocsa in 1247.101

The bishops and archbishops had important roles in and considerable influence on the lives of their towns, and they held office for life, while the secular leaders of the towns were usually only elected for a year.102 The kings of Hungary did not influence the election of the secular leaders of the cities until the 1240s, when King Béla IV appointed Hugrin count in Split, and until 1267 Trogir and Split had Hungarian counts, who were the bans and in certain cases dukes of Slavonia at the same time. Apart from this short period, for the rest of the period under discussion the most direct and permanent representatives of the royal court were the bishops and archbishops in Dalmatia.

The royal grants that were given by the kings of Hungary to the Church in Dalmatia also indicate the importance of the ecclesiastical centers and their prelates in the political relationship between the royal court and Dalmatian cities in the period up until the mid-thirteenth century.103 It should be noted that in the case of the archbishopric of Split the archbishops were given honorary mention and highlighted in the royal grants given to the Church of Split, while this was not the practice in Hungary or Dalmatia.104 As is clear, the most important political centers often had Hungarian archbishops and bishops, and most of the royal grants that were bestowed were given to the Church in these cities. Until communal development led to the separation of the secular and ecclesiastical powers in towns, the Church had considerable sway over the cities, and the Hungarian prelates could influence them or secure their loyalty to the royal court.105

Conclusion

The bishops and archbishops played important roles in the lives of the Dalmatian cities, and after the beginning of the rule of the Árpád dynasty in Dalmatia these roles became more significant and structured. Until the mid-thirteenth century, the (arch)bishops of Dalmatia had an important place in the royal entourage in Dalmatia. They may have played a role in the appearance of the cult of Saint Stephen, and they were representatives of the kings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, except for a short period between 1245 and 1267. The bishops and archbishops were not only representatives of the kings, they were also entrusted by their cities with important tasks and expected to maintain good relations with the king. If the interests of the court and the interests of the community in question were similar, the loyalty of the bishops and archbishops was essentially an irrelevant question. It was only an issue when the kings and the cities had quarrels or differing interests in contentious cases. During the period in question, probably the most significant example of the latter was the war and the peace negotiations between Trogir and Split in 1245, when Archbishop Hugrin did the bidding of the royal court and reached a settlement in favor of Trogir.

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Antal Molnár

A Forgotten Bridgehead between Rome, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire: Cattaro and the Balkan Missions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

A key element in the history of the missions that departed from Rome as of the middle of the sixteenth century is the functioning of the mediating structures that ensured the maintenance of the relationship between Rome as the center of the Holy Roman Empire and the territories where the missionaries did their work. On the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic Sea, Ragusa, which today is the city of Dubrovnik, was the most important bridgehead, but Cattaro, today Kotor, also played a significant role as a point of mediation between Rome and the Ottoman Empire. My intention in this essay is to present the many roles of Cattaro in the region, focusing in particular on its role in the maintenance of communication between Rome and missions to the Balkans. Cattaro never lost its Balkan orientation, even following the weakening of economic ties and the loss of its episcopal jurisdiction, which had extended over parishes in Serbia in the Middle Ages. Rather, in the sixteenth century it grew with the addition of a completely new element. From 1535 to 1786 Cattaro was the most important center of the postal service between Venice and Istanbul. As of 1578, the management of the Istanbul post became the responsibility of the Bolizza family. Thus the family came to establish a wide network of connections in the Balkans. I examine these connections and then offer an analysis of the plans concerning the settlement of the Jesuits in Cattaro. As was true in the case of Ragusa, the primary appeal of the city from the perspective of members of the Jesuit order was the promise of missions to the Balkans. In the last section of the essay I focus on the role Cattaro played in the organization of missions for a good half-century following the foundation of the Propaganda Fide Congregation in 1622. Four members of the Bolizza family worked in the Balkans as representatives of the Propaganda Congregation in the seventeenth century: Francesco, Vincenzo, Nicolo and Giovanni. I provide a detailed examination of the work of the first three, including the circumstances of their appointments, their efforts to unite the Orthodox Serbs with the Catholic Church and protect the Franciscan mission to Albania, their roles as mediators between Rome and the areas to which missionaries traveled, the services they rendered involving the coordination of missions, their influence on personal decisions and the appointments of pontiffs, and their political and military roles during the Venetian–Ottoman war.

Keywords: Cattaro, Venice, Ottoman Empire, Catholic missions, Balkan trade

A Desideratum for Research: Mediatory Structures between Rome and the Missions

One of the important and yet, at least until now, only rarely studied elements of the histories of the missions that departed from Rome as of the middle of the sixteenth century, and in particular of the missions that, after 1622, were organized by the Propaganda Fide Congregation (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) is the mechanism of the mediating structures that ensured the maintenance of the relationship between Rome and the areas to which the missionaries traveled. The maintenance of ties to the missionaries was first and foremost the task of the nuncios, but given the territorial, organizational, and functional peculiarities of papal diplomacy they were ultimately unable to perform this duty satisfactorily. As a consequence of this, the missionary system became a multi-level structure. The connection between the two most distant points, Rome and the areas in which the missionaries were stationed, was ensured by a nunciature or a representative of some other level of the diplomatic system, as well as a network of agents.

The study of this complex institution is interesting not only in the case of missions to distant lands, but also in the European context and in particular in the context of the Balkans. Anything that was sent from Rome to one of the missionary centers in the inner areas of the Balkans—whether one is speaking of letters, money, devotional objects, books, or even missionaries themselves—had to travel through many different stations. In the case of Italy, these stations were the cities along the coast of the Adriatic Sea (Venice, Ancona, Loreto, and, towards the Albanian territories, Lecce). On the Tyrrhenian coast, Naples and Livorno were the important partner cities of the Propaganda Congregation.1

The nuncios themselves comprised part of the mediators who worked in the Italian cities. After 1622, the most important pastoral duty of the nunciature was to provide assistance for the missions of the Propaganda Congregation. At the same time, the nuncios who performed traditional diplomatic and political tasks in general did not have sufficient experience with the workings of the missions, nor for that matter were they adequately committed to the task. They also lacked the appropriate infrastructural and informational background in order to ensure effective oversight and organization of the spread of the faith.2 For this reason, the papal emissaries (thus the nuncio of Venice or Naples) sought colleagues already in Italy who in practice saw to these tasks for them. In Ancona, initially the governor and later the members of the Sturani family, who had resettled from Ragusa, maintained ties with the missions in the Balkans, while in Venice Marco Ginammi, who for decades was the most important publisher of “Illyrian” books (in other words Croatian and Bosnian books), was the most important agent of the Propaganda Congregation.3

Ragusa was the most important bridgehead on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, but Cattaro and to a lesser extent Perasto (today Perast) were also significant points when it came to trade with the Ottoman Empire. Ragusa and Cattaro differed both from the perspective of the political situations of the two centers and their economic ties, and because of these differences each city participated differently in the organization of the missions. As a tributary of the Ottoman Empire, Ragusa was effectively an independent city-state with a relatively broad scope of action in foreign affairs. In contrast, after a brief period of independence, as of 1420 Cattaro was under Venetian rule, and as the capital of Venetian Albania (Albania Veneta), it became an important strategic base, situated near the Ottoman Empire and the coastal routes between the Levant and the northern Adriatic. In the case of Ragusa, commercial ties and in particular the network of colonies and mercantile settlements provided the necessary background. Cattaro was able to participate actively in the missionary work in the Balkans because of its essential role in the Venetian postal service. The geographical position and traditional political network of the two cities strongly influenced the direction and range of the mediatory roles of Ragusa and Cattaro in the Balkans. Ragusa primarily served as a mediatory with Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and to a smaller extent Albania, as well as parts of Hungary that were occupied by the Ottomans. Cattaro mainly provided support for the work of missionaries in Montenegro and Albania.4

Cattaro between Two Worlds

In the course of the history of the region, Cattaro and the surrounding area, including the bay of Cattaro (Bocche di Cattaro, Boka Kotorska), shared the fate of the other territories along the southeastern coast of the Adriatic. After almost 500 years (with some interruptions) of Byzantine rule, it recognized the authority of the Dioclea-Zeta rulers and then the Serbian Nemanjić dynasty (1186–1371).5 From the death of Stephen Dušan tsar of Serbia in 1355 to 1420, Cattaro existed essentially as an independent city-state. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the city sought the patronage of Venice (which was expanding the sphere of its influence into Dalmatia) several times, but the Venetian Republic only accepted the offer in 1420. Until the fall of the city state in 1797, it remained under Venetian authority, though it maintained complete autonomy in internal affairs.6 Venetian Albania (Albania Veneta) was created as an administrative unit in the second half of the fifteenth century. It extended from Cattaro to Alessio (Lješ, Lezhë) in Albania, but following the occupation of the cities lying on the shore of Albania and southern Montenegro by the Ottoman Empire, it essentially was limited to the territory around the bay of Cattaro.7 From a Venetian perspective, the Cattaro-bay essentially was the gate to the Levant and a tool with which to isolate Ragusa economically.8 In the course of the seventeenth century, Cattaro became increasingly significant from a military and commercial perspective, first and foremost in the course of the struggles with the pirates of Dulcigno and Castelnuovo and the Ottomans. This gave the city a great sense of self-importance. Its inhabitants were convinced (correctly) that their city ensured the position of Venice in the southern parts of the Adriatic.9

As of the Middle Ages, Cattaro was a bastion of Western Christianity in the Catholic-Orthodox and later Catholic–Muslim borderlands. It was therefore home to a rich system of sacral institutions. Given the city’s strong sense of Catholic identity, like Ragusa it also had a strong sense of commitment to the spread of the faith through the work of missionaries, which in the case of Cattaro found expression first and foremost in opposition to the Eastern Orthodox Church.10 Given the geographical position of the city and its economic and strategic position (which grew stronger under Serb rule), as of the Middle Ages it had close ties to the rest of the Balkan Peninsula. Merchants from Cattaro monitored most of the trade with Serbia, and many patricians held important offices in the Serbian royal court. Merchants from Cattaro founded their own colonies in the more important Serbian mining and trading centers, and like the merchants of Ragusa, they developed a significant trade network in the Balkans and throughout the Mediterranean Sea.11

When Serb rule came to an end, during the decades of anarchy in the southwestern Balkans the economic circumstances were nowhere near as favorable as they had been. Cattaro was largely driven out of trade in the Balkans, and the city turned to trade along and across the Adriatic Sea. However, this did not mean that the city broke its ties to the Montenegrin hinterland. Under Ottoman Occupation, Montenegro became part of the Sanjak of Scutari. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it won an increasing degree of independence within the framework of Ottoman rule.12 The wealthy merchants from Cattaro maintained close economic ties to the Montenegrin tribes. Ships from Cattaro, Perasto, and Perzagno (today Prčanj) brought agricultural produce from Montenegro and Albanian and Greek territories to Venice and other ports on the Adriatic Sea, and caravans bearing Italian textiles and industrial products departed from the coastal cities to communities in the mountains. The trade of goods constituted a significant source of wealth both for the tribal leaders and the merchants of Cattaro. During the two major wars of the seventeenth century between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, these relationships had important political and military consequences.13

The fact that Cattaro belonged to the Serbian state and that merchants from Cattaro settled in the Balkans had a consequence that was interesting from the perspective of canon law. When the city was under Serbian rule (towards the end of the thirteenth century), the bishops of Cattaro acquired jurisdiction over the Catholic parishes in Serbia. They strove to maintain this jurisdiction later, when the city became independent and when it came under the rule of Venice, but with the occupation of much of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire they lost it. The Catholic parishes continued to function with support from Ragusa and under the authority of the archbishop of Antivari, while the bishops of Cattaro found compensation for the loss of their positions in the Balkans in efforts to convert the local and the Montenegrin-Serb Orthodox communities.14

The Center of Postal Service between Venice and Istanbul

Cattaro did not lose its Balkan orientation, even following the weakening of economic ties and the loss of its episcopal jurisdiction. Rather, in the sixteenth century it grew with the addition of a completely new element. The city served as a natural point of departure for Venice towards the Balkans, and because of this, from 1535 to 1786 Cattaro became the center of Venice’s postal service to Istanbul and the center of Venice’s ties to its baylo in Istanbul.15 In 1578, the senate concluded a contract with Zuanne (Giovanni) Bolizza, a representative of the Bolizza family, one of the most important noble families of Cattaro, and his siblings. According to the agreement, the Bolizza family was obliged to maintain four boats each of which was to be manned by a crew of eight and also an unspecified number of couriers. The boats could not be used to ship goods or merchandise, only letters. They also had to pay three Montenegrin tribal leaders, who would accompany and protect the couriers in the course of the dangerous parts of a journey.16

In the fifteenth century, the Bolizza (or Bolica) family became one of the most important mercantile and seafaring dynasties of the bay of Cattaro. The family played an important role in the exchange of goods in the Balkans and on the Adriatic Sea. In addition, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries several members of the family gained prominence as ecclesiastical writers and scholars who had completed university studies. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Zuanne’s son Francesco took over supervision of the postal service. His work met with the full approval of his Venetian commissioners. And of course he too did not fare poorly. According to a report made in 1627 by rector Pietro Morosini, Francesco set aside no small fortune by changing the money that was sent from Venice.17 He was involved in trade in the Balkans in several ways. In addition to his diplomatic post, the courier service run by him ensured continuous business correspondence, and as a representative of Venice he maintained close ties to people in the Ottoman Empire and in particular in neighboring Montenegro, ties of which he clearly made use in his business dealings.18 The fact that three members of the family, Francesco, Vincenzo, and Nicolo, became Knights of the Order of Saint Mark indicates the importance of the family and its close ties to powerful circles in Venice.19

The parameters of the postal service organized by the Bolizza family are relatively clearly documented. The stops in the trip from Cattaro to Istanbul are listed in a famous report of 1614 by Mariano Bolizza (in all likelihood he was also one of Zuanne’s sons).20 It is worth noting the details of this journey, which was of considerable importance from the perspective of Venice’s communication with the Balkans, because the monograph by Stéphane Yerasimos, which examines the travelers and the conditions of travel within the Ottoman Empire and is regarded as authoritative among historians, is rich with detail regarding the routes to Ragusa and Vienna, but hardly mentions Cattaro as an important destination.21 Shipments departed from Cattaro to Istanbul twice a month. Following the arrival of the boats from Venice, a courier delivered letters to the Montenegrin villages next to Cattaro, from where mailmen who had been taken into service took them (usually by twos) to their final destinations. In Montenegro, escorts who had been entrusted with the task by the tribal leaders took the couriers to Plav. From Plav on, the route was no longer dangerous. In general it took roughly a month for a letter to reach its final destination, some 10–12 days on the sea and 18–22 on land.

The Perspectives for the Foundation of a Jesuit College in the Balkans

The possibility of establishing missions to the Balkans first came up when plans were made to settle Jesuits in Cattaro. Local and Italian churchmen began to consider the advantages of the city as a possible center for Catholic missions departing for the inner areas of the Ottoman Empire. In spite of the fact that the Jesuit order only succeeded in establishing a permanent mission in the Ottoman Empire in 1583, the Jesuits of the sixteenth century, who regarded the question of spreading the faith in broader, even global terms, always entertained visions of sending missions to the Ottoman Empire.22 In the sixteenth century, there was little real chance of launching missions to Ottoman lands from the Hungarian Kingdom. In contrast, given its pugnacious Catholicism and good relations with the Turks, the Republic of Ragusa, a kind of southern gate opening onto the Ottoman Empire, represented a much more promising base for missions to the Balkans.23 Like Ragusa, Cattaro was appealing to the Jesuits as a possible point of departure for missions. Under the leadership of Tommaso Raggio, the first three members of the order arrived in Cattaro in 1574 at the summons of bishop Paolo Bisanti. They worked in the city until 1578, to the great satisfaction of the churchgoers and the prelate. 24

In several letters, P. Raggio, the leader of the mission, reported to his superiors on the work that was being done in Cattaro and the possibilities of establishing a monastery. The long-term goal was clear: taking advantage of Cattaro’s relations to other communities in the Balkans, to organize missions to spread the faith that would depart from the city for Balkan territories under Ottoman rule. A few months after having arrived in Cattaro, Raggio proposed founding a college of twelve people, and he emphasized the favorable welcome and the support he had been given by the bishop and the rector. At the same time, in his view the question of real importance lay in the possibility of approaching Muslims, for on the basis of his personal experience, the “Turks” of Castelnuovo (today Herceg Novi) and its surroundings belonged to the same nation as the people of Cattaro, and they had been much more amicable with them than was typical, so Raggio thought that it might be possible to win their confidence.25 A more intensive orientation in the Balkans came two years later, when Raggio, having learned of the efforts of the vladika of Cetinje (the head of the Church in Montenegro until 1852) to enter in communion with the Pope of Rome, sought to travel with Teodoro Calompsi, the recently appointed bishop of Scutari, to Ottoman lands (to Scutari, Alessio, and Skopje) to meet with the vladika and the patriarch of İpek (today Peć) and discover what for him must have seemed a kind of promised land, in other words the Balkan peninsula. Cattaro’s commitment to the Jesuits did not wane, and so Raggio again proposed the foundation of a college, in support of which he cited three (in his view decisive) arguments. First and foremost, the lively interest of the people of Cattaro in questions of religion and education gave good reason to hope that there would be numerous devoted followers in the residence who would be well-suited for missions to Serbia. Second, the city was the last bastion of the Venetian territories in the east, so it was the best-suited for maintaining relations with Istanbul and all of Asia Minor. Finally, news of such developments in Cattaro would prompt the people of Ragusa to take similar steps and found a similar college, since, given the rivalry between the two cities, Ragusa could hardly stand by and watch as Cattaro, a poorer city, overtook them.26 Raggio wrote to his superiors of his plan for an itinerary through Skopje many times. He wrote a letter to the patriarch of İpek, Gerasim, who was a member of the Sokolović clan and thus a relative of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. He sought to persuade Gerasim to enter a union with the Catholic Church. And by using his ties to the Turks of Cattaro, he sought to obtain a passport that would guarantee him complete freedom of movement.27

In 1578, the Jesuits left the city. The notion of founding a college was raised again roughly fifty years later by bishop Girolamo Bucchia, who governed the diocese for twenty-two years. In a letter addressed to Claudio Acquaviva, the new General, the prelate essentially repeated Raggio’s line of reasoning: Cattaro was distant from the other colleges of the Order, but at the same time its connections with Venice were excellent because of the role it played in the operation of the postal service, thus it could also be seen as quite nearby. In addition to the work that could be done in the city, the Jesuits would also be offered the possibility of converting the Orthodox Christians as far as Istanbul.28

From the perspective of this inquiry, the proposal that was put together by the bishop in May 1600 was the most interesting. In it, he requested the assistance, in the foundation of a Jesuit residence in Cattaro, of the short-lived Saint Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (1599–1602), which was under the direction of Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santoro.29 The memorandum clearly mirrors the exciting interconnection of the anti-Ottoman military plans that characterised the papacy of Clement VIII (1592–1605) with the missions. The bishop again emphasized the strategic position of Cattaro from the perspective of traffic in the Balkans. A Jesuit residence in Cattaro could play a key role from the perspective of missions to the Balkans. It could function as an informational center of the Holy See while at the same time, because of the common language and the routes that led to other areas of the Balkans, the Jesuits would be able to work effectively in all of the parts of the peninsula occupied by the Ottomans. According to the Bishop, the Ottoman Empire was in a state of general political and military decline. The leaders oppressed both Muslims and Christians alike, the administration of justice was inefficient and ineffective, and thus in the event of an attack by Christian armies the Turks would join them. Because of the postal service, Cattaro was in daily contact with the Ottoman capital, and according to reports coming out of Istanbul, with a well-coordinated assault Christian armies, in unison with the Janissaries, could even capture the capital, or at least so the Bishop wrote. From this perspective, as a base for missionaries Cattaro would have tremendous significance, since following the recapture of conquered territories the priests waiting in ready on the border could immediately begin their efforts to systematically reconvert the Muslim and Orthodox population. According to Bucchia, who clearly feared possible competition from Protestants, the common people would accept whichever faith they heard first.

The Congregation entrusted Cardinal Bellarmino with the task of discussing plans concerning Cattaro with the General of the Jesuit Order. However, after this there is no further mention of the issue in the sources in Rome.30 On February 10, 1601, the Venetian senate forbade the rector in Cattaro to do anything in connection with the settling of Jesuits without an explicit decree from the senate, and it requested a thorough report on any steps that had already been taken and on the supporters of the Jesuits. The explanation for this caution on the part of Venice lies in its aversion to the Jesuit order, but more importantly in its fear of a possible link between the appearance of the Jesuit priests and the anti-Turk movements.31 Given the great cataclysms of the seventeenth century and the squalor and uncertainty that came in their wake, the notion of settling Jesuits in Cattaro was dropped entirely, but the experiences of the intensive gathering of information proved useful in the efforts of missionaries in the eighteenth century.

The Bolizza Family in the Service of the Propaganda Fide Congregation

The Mandate

Following the foundation of the Propaganda Fide Congregation, the institutionalization of the missions gained new momentum, and so the role of the gateways to the Ottoman Empire also became increasingly important. Ragusa was the most important of these gateways, but Cattaro was also an important link to Montenegro and northern Albania, with which the city traditionally maintained strong ties. In Cattaro, on the basis of the experience of previous decades, Francesco Bolizza, the director of the Istanbul postal service, seemed the most suitable person for this task.

In the course of the seventeenth century, four members of the Bolizza family worked as delegates of the Propaganda Congregation to the Balkans, precisely those four individuals who had managed the Venetian postal service in Cattaro and who had been made knights by Venice: Francesco, Vincenzo, Nicolo and Giovanni. In this essay, I examine the work and careers of the agents of the missions only up until the era of the wars of reconquest. I do not examine the work of Giovanni Bolizza, who was active during the Morean war (1684–99). There are no precise data concerning when they began their service. In a note written in 1644, Francesco Ingoli, the secretary of the Congregation, praised the work of Francesco Bolizza on behalf of the missions and claimed that he had established contact with the supreme authority of the missions in Rome some seventeen years earlier.32 At the same time, his name comes up in the records of the Propaganda Congregation (which survived almost in their entirety) in the course of 1636 and 1637 in connection with a possible union of the Paštrovići population, a coastal tribe in Montenegro, with the Pope of Rome.33 In the registry of the Congregation the first letter addressed to Bolizza was dated July 25, 1637. In the letter the cardinals thank him for the assistance he provided for the Franciscan mission to Albania and the help he gave to Francesco Leonardi (de Leonardis), the archdeacon of Traù (today Trogir), who was working to promote union.34 This suggests that over the course of almost a decade he occasionally provided support for the work of the missionaries in the Balkans. Following the foundation of the reformed Franciscan mission in northern Albania and the work of Francesco Leonardi in the Paštrovići district, this mandate became official. From then on, he served as the person responsible for the Congregation in the Balkans (responsale della Congregazione per l’Illyrico). He had an extremely complex array of duties, which primarily involved maintaining relations, protecting the missions, and to some degree also overseeing them.35

In 1653, Francesco died in Cattaro.36 His brother Vincenzo took his place in the coordination of the missions and the organization of the postal service. He is the only one whose official document of appointment survived. On August 24, 1654, he was appointed to serve in his brother’s place as the Balkan liaison of the Congregation and the protector of the Albanian missions (corresponsale della Sacra Congregazione de Propaganda Fide e procuratore delle missioni di Albania). He was granted all of the privileges and exemptions usually enjoyed by the officials of the Congregation.37 Vincenzo continued in his brother’s footsteps. He regularly reported on the work of the missions and he forwarded shipments and defended the missionaries during the difficult years of the Cretan War.38 He died on August 24, 1662, after having served for eight years.39

His nephew Nicolo, the son of Antonio Bolizza, presented himself to the Congregation immediately following his uncle’s death. He took over the tasks pertaining to the missions. He was helped in this by the fact that, like his uncle, he was named by Venice to serve as the overseer of the people living in the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire (sopraintendente alle genti di questa giurisditione fuori della città). He saw to unfinished affairs, forwarding the monies and shipments that had remained in his uncle’s care and making proposals regarding priests for the missions.40 No decision was taken, however, regarding the official appointment of a new agent, so after one year he addressed an official request to the Congregationthrough the Franciscan monk fra Marco di Lucca, that like his predecessors, he too be named Balkan commissary.41 But this never actually came to pass. The Franciscans and the Venetian nuncios supported him, the latter arguing that if Venice was satisfied with his oversight of the postal service then the Congregation could also entrust him with the task of providing assistance for the missions.42 However, Andrija Zmajević, the abbot of Perasto, whose views on Balkan affairs carried considerable weight in Rome, had a very poor opinion of him. He regarded him as a man of questionable morals who sought only to further his own interests and put politics ahead of religious questions, yet he felt Nicolo had to be treated with care, since, given the prestige he commanded, he could do a great deal to harm the missions if he were to turn against them. Zmajević therefore suggested that he should be used and thanked for his service, but never given an official appointment.43 So the Congregation allowed him to serve but never appointed him to any position, and thus ensured that he was not granted the usual privileges, honoring his service only with occasional thanks and some gifts of money.44

Church Union and the Coordination of the Franciscan Mission

Francesco Bolizza created the foundation of the family’s long-term mandate from Rome by accepting two important issues related to the missions: the movement for union in the southern territories of the Balkans and the provision of protection and assistance for the Albanian reformed Franciscan mission.45 The movement for Church union in the southwestern territories of the Balkans has been thoroughly dealt with by Croatian and Serbian historians,46 so I will limit myself here to mention of only of a few of the most important details. The Serbian population of the communities that were under rule of Venice and the authority of the archbishop of Antivari and the bishop of Cattaro were continuously joining the Catholic Church. The Paštrovići district (in other words the swath of land under Venetian rule stretching from Budva to Spič) was located in the borderlands of the spheres of interest of several centers of the Eastern Orthodox Church (Istanbul, İpek, and Venice, as the seat of the Orthodox archbishop of Philadelphia). Rome’s ambitions regarding expansion and union soon reached the peripheral area, the status of which, from the perspective of its ecclesiastical jurisdiction, was uncertain. Following the foundation of the Propaganda Congregation, these strivings gathered strength. As the actual proprietor of the area, however, Venice regarded the question of the Church union as marginal. Rome had the favor of the local officials at most, who were more or less eager in their support. The expert assessments of Fulgenzio Micanzio, the Servite monk who was also a theological counsellor for Venice, offer clear evidence of this. Micanzio, who was a colleague and successor of Paolo Sarpi and also a faithful adherent to Sarpi’s anti-Rome mentality, opposed the Church union, which in his view was theologically unfounded and politically dangerous. As an heir to Sarpi’s anti-curial views, Micanzio harshly criticized any endeavors by the Holy See in this direction.47

In 1636, Vincenzo Bucchia and missionary Serafin Mizerčić managed to unite the Orthodox villages of Paštrovići to Rome with the assistance, first and foremost, of Antonio Molin, the provveditore generale of Cattaro, and Francesco Bolizza. In the same year, the Congregation sent Francesco Leonardi, the archdeacon of Traù, to Paštrovići as a missionary to work in the recently united villages and strengthen their unity.48 Francesco Bolizza provided assistance to Leonardi from the outset, drawing primarily on the system of relationships in the Balkans and cooperation with the Ottoman authorities.49

Leonardi’s ambitions went well beyond the conversion of the village population, which amounted to little more than a few thousand people. He envisioned a union that would include first Montenegro and then all of Serbia. In his plans, he found a faithful supporter in Francesco Bolizza.50 In January 1638, the knight of Cattaro paid a visit as an emissary to the pasha of Bosnia. In the course of his return trip, he met with Mardarije, the vladika of Cetinje, whom he encouraged to enter in communion with the Catholic Church. Boliza’s and Leonardi’s schemes gave rise to the idea of Montenegrin Church union and the founding of a Montenegrin Franciscan mission.51 One year later, they invited Mardarije to Cattaro. They managed to convince him of the necessity of union. They hoped, by gaining his confidence and support, to influence Pajsije Janjevac, the patriarch of İpek (and thus all of Serbia) to unify with the Catholic Church. In 1639, Mardarije departed for Rome in order to convert to Catholicism, but because of the growing suspicions of the Ottomans, Bolizza persuaded him to abandon his travels, and so in 1640 instead of making the journey to Rome himself, he sent two Serbian monks, one of whom, Vizarion, was to become his successor, to the Eternal City under the guidance of Leonardi.52 Eventually Mardarije made his profession of faith in the Mahine (Majine) monastery (which was in Venetian territory), to which he retreated after having endured several months in Turkish captivity. In July, 1641, Bolizza and Leonardi traveled to Cetinje in order to settle the details of the trip to İpek with Mardarije and his assistant, Vizarion. After Leonardi made several unsuccessful attempts, in 1642 he managed to gain an audience with the patriarch (under the auspices of Bolizza and in the company of two monks), whom for months he attempted to convince of the need for union, though not surprisingly his efforts were in vain.53

Alongside the efforts to promote the Church union, the other primary front of the missions in the southwestern parts of the Balkans was the mission of reformed Franciscans in Albania. Francesco Bolizza played a key role in the organization and defense of this mission as well.54 In 1632, Giorgio Bianchi, the bishop of Sappa, met with Bonaventura Palazzolo, a reformed Franciscan missionary, in Rome. Earlier Palazzolo had worked in the Lucerne valley. Bianchi convinced him to continue his missionary work in Albania. At Bianchi’s request, in 1634 the Congregation founded the Albanian reformed Franciscan mission. The first missionaries arrived in Ragusa in early October. In December they continued to Albania. One year later, the Congregation named Palazzolo the prefect of the mission. By the end of the decade they had established two houses of worship on the territory of northern Albania.55 The creation of the legal and financial foundations of the mission were clearly the work of Francesco Bolizza. Taking advantage of his good relations with the Ottoman authorities, he managed to obtain a letter from the pasha of Bosnia guaranteeing the inviolability of the missionaries.56 He corresponded a great deal with the Congregation in order to obtain appropriate funding for the Franciscans. When necessary, he took them food, clothing, and other supplies at his own expense.57 The letters of the Ottoman military leaders of Scutari to Francesco Bolizza reveal that he regularly used his political and mercantile ties to intercede with the Ottoman officers in Albania in order to ensure the safety of the Franciscans.58 These letters also make clear that he was in close and regular contact with the captains, the sanjak-beys, the aghas, and the janissaries of Scutari, not only because of his role in the postal service but also because he was a mediating figure in the trade between the Ottoman officers and Venetian merchants.59

Nonetheless, the mission was one of the most dangerous in the parts of the Balkan Peninsula that were under Ottoman rule. Several Franciscans were martyred. In 1644, two highwaymen killed two friars, and over the course of the next few years the storms of the Cretan War swept away the achievements of the mission. Because of the anti-Turkish machinations of the Albanian Catholics and in particular the bishops, in February 1648 two missionaries and their assistant Giorgio Jubani (a secular priest) were impaled on the stake. With the exception of one friar, the others escaped to Cattaro with the help of Bolizza. Their residences of worship were destroyed by the Turks.60 They soon returned, however, and they not only rebuilt their former settlements, they also founded new residences.61 In 1675, there were eleven missionaries working at four different sites in Albania. In Cattaro they had theirs own hospitium, which provided lodging for traveling missionaries and a place of rest for the sick. The superior of the hospitium helped ensure the smooth operation of the missions.62 Following Francesco’s death, his two successors provided continuous support for the work of the Albanian Franciscans.63 Nicolo wrote a recommendatory letter in the interests of helping the Franciscans to the Ottoman commander of Alessio, Sinan Bey, who, in response to Nicolo’s prompting, provided them with protection and made it possible to renovate the missionary settlement of Pedena and found a settlement in Pulati.64 In 1663, he freed the missionary Francesco da Pedaccoli from Turkish captivity using his own money.65 Of the many services Francesco Bolizza rendered for the Propaganda Congregation, it was clearly the provision of assistance for the Albanian Franciscan mission that was valued most. As of 1637, every year Rome sent him a letter of thanks in which the cardinals expressed their gratitude for his support of this important cause.66

The Transmission of Correspondence and Shipments

One of the most important functions of the agent of the missions was to ensure that the various consignments were forwarded to the center in Rome and the territories where missionaries were active, which in the case of Cattaro meant Montenegro and Albania. The forwarding of letters between Rome and places in the interior of the Balkan Peninsula was a recurring topic of the agents’ correspondence (clearly this task fell on their shoulders because of the work they did with the organization of the postal service).67 By studying circles who sent and received these letters in the Balkans, we can gain some sense of the territorial range of the influence of the agents of the Cattaro missions. Missionaries who were active around the city and along the southern seashore (in the areas around Grbalj, Luštica, Paštrovići, Budva and Antivari) turned as a matter of fact to the Bolizza family for assistance,68 but sometimes even letters from or to distant parts of Dalmatia, such as Traù, went through Cattaro.69 Most often the letters were sent to the reformed Franciscans in Albania and the Albanian bishops. Almost all of their correspondence went through Cattaro.70 The Bolizza family also handled correspondence between the Orthodox monks of Montenegro, Catholic missionaries, and Rome. 71

Letters to destinations in the inner parts of the Balkan Peninsula were sent on in part with couriers or occasional messengers who took postal deliveries to Istanbul and in part with the missionaries themselves.72 The Venetian nuncio had relatively little influence over the organization of the Balkan missions,73 but given Cattaro’s strategic position, he played an important role as a link to the former territories of Albania Veneta.74 He had a say in the selection of the bishops who served in the missions and the organization of the apostolic visitations, and he provided missionaries who were passing through with lodging. He also gathered information regarding the territories where the missionaries were active and had letters, provisions, and devotional objects forwarded to the Balkans.75 The other route was between Ragusa and Ancona. The trip to Venice involved a significant detour, so the Cattaro agents often explicitly requested that mail from Rome be sent by the shorter and therefore frequently more secure route from Ancona.76

In addition to letters, the agents often sent money to the missionaries and bishops. Giovanni Domenico Verusio, the procurator of the Balkan missionaries, accepted the provisions that were sent by the Propaganda Congregation and sent a receipt to Cattaro via Venice or Ancona and Ragusa. The Cattaro agents paid the missionaries directly on the basis of bills of exchange using the monies that had been entrusted to them by the Congregation or they forwarded the sums to the places where the missionaries were active. They then sent the receipts confirming payment back to Rome.77 In 1659, Vincenzo Bolizza sent the Propaganda Congregation the statements of accounts concerning the payments that had been made to the Albanian Franciscans between 1650 and 1658.78 The statements indicate the nature of the payments. Most of the receipts concern the general supplies that were provided for the missionaries, but monies were sent to the missions for many other purposes as well, including payment of ransoms for people who had been taken captive and wages for the captains who accompanied the missionaries on their travels, the people who carried their baggage, and their armed escorts. One could also mention the costs of travel on the open seas and the purchase of Turkish clothes for the missionaries.79

Information, Proposals, and Recommendations Concerning the Missions

In addition to the roles they played in the delivery of both goods and people, the most important task of the agents was to provide information regarding the missions. In general they did this continuously, but at times they also responded to concrete requests of the Congregation. In almost all of their letters, the members of the Bolizza family included reports on the work of the missions, including details regarding the arrival of missionaries, their travels, their achievements, and their failures. They also mentioned the dangers that threatened the missions and, in some cases, the liquidation of a mission. Clearly no one in the area had more knowledge of the Albanian and Montenegrin missions than their “father,” Francesco Bolizza. Francesco not only sent information to Rome regarding individual cases, in 1649 he submitted a comprehensive report in which he described the undertakings that were under the supervision of the city of Cattaro.80 In this report he clearly outlines his vision concerning the possibilities for spreading the faith in the southern parts of the Balkans. He regarded the work of the reformed Franciscans in Albania as the most valuable enterprise, and he was saddened that the mission had been temporarily liquidated. He also considered the efforts that had been made in the interests of Church union important, but he clearly recognized the limitations: the priests who had been sent by the Congregation worked to great effect in the city and the surrounding Venetian territories, but given the threats of conflict and war they were unable to make headway into the Ottoman Empire. He regarded the idea of appointing the priests of Cattaro missionaries as similarly nonsensical, since they were obliged, as recipients of prebendal and parochial remuneration, to reside in the city and therefore could not go on missions. And indeed they did not go on missions, but rather merely regarded commissions given by the Propaganda Congregation as supplementary pay. On the basis of his first-hand knowledge of the area, Francesco Bolizza described the areas where the missionaries were active, and he included a sketch of the area that he himself had done and also a map of the missions in the southern Balkans that had been made by a cartographer from Ragusa.81

The protection and administration of the missions, the continuous need to address tasks pertaining to life within the missions and questions of subordination and discipline, and the importance of providing information for the supreme authorities of the missions and in some cases cooperating in the enforcement of decisions were all factors that significantly increased the importance of the roles of the agents in the life of the missions. Many times the question of the extension of the mandate of a missionary depended on them, as did the appointment or transfer of a bishop. Because of the prestige he commanded in the eyes of important figures of power in the Balkans (the heads of tribes and Ottoman leaders), Francesco Bolizza in a sense became the leader and coordinator of the missions for which Cattaro was the center. He strove to ease the rivalry between local figures of the Church in Albania and the Italian Franciscans, and he attempted to mollify the strife between the Albanian bishops.82 He saw the unlimited rise in the number of bishops and missionaries as one of the causes of discord, and he believed that a smaller number of priests would be able to work more effectively and with less conflict.83 The career of a missionary in the southern part of the Balkans depended to a great extent on his relationship with the Bolizza family, and the recommendations of the agents were always regarded with favor in Rome.84

The supreme authority of the missions often sought Francesco Bolizza’s advice when it was time to choose someone to serve as bishop in the region. His greatest triumph in this regard was the appointment of his close colleague Francesco Leonardi. Thanks in large part to his influence, in 1644 the Propaganda Congregation transferred Giorgio Bianchi, the archbishop of Antivari, to the bishopric of Sappa and appointed Leonardi in his place.85 After Leonardi’s death, Francesco recommended fra Gregorio Romano, who was working in Albania, for the post, first and foremost because of his familiarity with the local conditions.86 This time, however, he did not prevail. The pope appointed Giuseppe Maria Buonaldi, a Dalmatian Dominican, instead. Buonaldi proved a poor choice, however, in part because he did not speak the local language nor was he familiar with local customs. Francesco Bolizza repeatedly informed the Congregation of the details of Buonaldi’s failures. A foreigner to the area, he was hated by his followers and eventually had to leave the diocese. He died in Budva in 1652.87 Francesco Bolizza recommended other people who enjoyed his favor for various positions in the Church hierarchy. For instance, he suggested Andrea Bogdani and Giorgio Vladagni as candidates for the Ochrida archbishopric,88 Giorgio Uscovich for the bishopric of Sappa,89 and Giovanni Battuta for the position as vicar of Budva.90

Francesco’s successors, Vincenzo and Nicolo, played considerably smaller roles in the formation of the Church hierarchy in the Balkans and the organization of the missions. Following in his brother’s footsteps, Nicolo fought primarily against attempts to make missionaries out of the canons of Cattaro. In the wake of the Cretan War, Giovanni Antonio Sborovacio, the bishop of Cattaro, sent two of his canons, Luca Bolizza and Giovanni Pasquali, to work as missionaries among the Serbs who were flooding into the territory of the diocese.91 According to Nicolo, however, the canons were interested only in the allowance provided to missionaries, and only in their imaginations did they journey to territories where there was need of missionaries.92 In October 1662, he recommended Miho Bratošević, a priest from Ragusa who had excellent command of the local language, as a candidate to serve as a missionary among the Orthodox of Luštica and Kartoli. He asked that the Congregation provide an annual income of 25 scudo.93 According to Andrija Zmajević, however, Nicolo supported Bratošević only because it was in his own interests, for Bratošević dwelt in Nicolo’s home and helped him write letters in Serbian, and Nicolo hoped simply to use the funds given by the Congregation in order to provide wages for his own personal translator.94

Advantages for the Agents

Finally, one might well raise the question, of what use was all this to the agents? Why did they accept these tasks, which required a great deal of work and put considerable responsibilities on their shoulders? Clearly this position, like the service of a cardinal or of the Holy Office, gave one influence in a network of connections.95 The political and social prestige of the position alone made it worthwhile to serve as a representative of the Propaganda Congregation in the Balkans, for it added Rome to the Venetian and Balkan network, and this drastically increased the influence and importance of the Bolizza family. It is no coincidence that all three of the Bolizza brothers clung tenaciously to the position, and they strove to ensure the favor of the men they had to thank for it, primarily cardinal-prefect Antonio Barberini, by rendering faithful service and offering gifts, first and foremost fine caviar (bottarga) from the Scutari lake.96 In return, Barberini gave them medals and pictures.97

Francesco Bolizza strove to take advantage of his privileged position not only in the interests of the missions, but also in his own personal interests. In 1647, he requested exemption from the prohibition of marriage among relatives for the children of patricians of Cattaro, including his own daughter. On the basis of a city decree, a member of the nobility could only marry another member of the nobility, but of the forty families that had been in the city at the time of the passage of the law in 1412, only twelve remained.98 Bolizza sought to win admittance to the Collegio Urbano for his illegitimate child, but as the boy had not reached the required age, he had to send him to a boarding school, but the Congregation paid the costs as an expression of gratitude for Bolizza’s service.99 He also turned to the Congregation on several occasions for church indulgences. In 1638, he was granted the grace of a privileged altar, though at the same time the cardinals suggested that he rethink the plans for the construction of a church in the Cattaro garden. They felt he should found a seminary in the palace instead for 24 Dalmatian pupils, thereby solving serious problems that were arising because of the lack of a theological institute in Dalmatia. Had he done this, the pope would have granted the seminary and its church every necessary privilege.100

Because of their dual mandates, by the middle of the seventeenth century the members of the Bolizza family had become the most important political figures in Cattaro. During the Cretan War they played roles that were of decisive importance from military and diplomatic perspectives, and the leaders of the Montenegrin, Hercegovinian, and northern Albanian tribes considered Francesco and Vincenzo Bolizza their most important negotiating partners on the side of Venice (with the exception of the Cattaro rector).101 As early as the late 1630s, Francesco Bolizza had established contact with the leaders of the Montenegrin and Albanian tribes, which were rising up against the Ottoman authorities because of extraordinary taxes. These leaders offered to help Venice in the event of an attack launched by Christian forces against the Ottoman empire.102 As of the early seventeenth century, the military leader of the Montenegrin tribes was the vladika. During the prelacy of Ruvim II. Boljević (1593–1636), the monastery of Cetinje became the center of the struggle against the Turks in Montenegro. His successor, Mardarije, continued in his footsteps, as he was a strong supporter of Church union.103 Following the outbreak of the Cretan War, Francesco Bolizza was the number-one mediator between Venice and the Balkan tribal leaders. The initial fervor of anti-Ottoman sentiment among the tribes soon began to flag after they gained first-hand experience of Venice’s defensive strategy and modest military presence, so they did not risk openly turning against the Ottomans. An excellent example of this is the undertaking in 1649 that targeted the taking of Podgorica. The some 300 Venetian troops who marched against the city under the leadership of the Ochrida archbishop, the bishop of Sappa, and Vincenzo Bolizza, were joined only by a small group of people from the Kuçi tribe, and the undertaking accordingly failed. It became clear that Venice was not able to achieve any lasting military victories in Montenegrin territories. The leaders of the tribes continuously urged Francesco Bolizza to induce Venice to play a more active military role, in vain.104 Influenced by their disappointments, in the 1650s the Montenegrin tribes temporarily drew closer to the Ottomans.105 But instances of minor tensions notwithstanding, Francesco and Vincenzo Bolizza maintained the trust of the tribal leaders and in particular the leaders of the Kuči and the Klimenti (Këlmëndi) tribes, who regularly informed them about Ottoman troop movements and continuously complained about the increasing tax burdens and the destruction wreaked by the Ottomans. The tribal leaders also repeatedly assured them of their faithfulness to Venice, and sometimes they even prevented incursions by Turkish troops into Venetian territories.106

The Bolizza brothers were in constant contact with the two most prominent Ottoman leaders of the region, Çengizade (Čengić) Ali, sanjak-bey of Hercegovina, and Jusufbegović, sanjak-bey of Scutari. Both were Bosnian aristocrats typical of the Venetian–Ottoman borderlands who kept their own dynastic interests in mind and maintained good relations with Venice, executing the orders of the Porte with measured enthusiasm and generally more concerned about their profits from trade with Venice than the glories of military conquest.107 These relations were sometimes important sources of a wealth of information. Vincenzo Bolizza was almost a “spy-master” for Venice in the southern territories of the Balkans.108 For instance, in 1657 he acquired knowledge of the plans for a Turkish attack against Cattaro months before the actual assault.109 Following the attacks against the coastal regions and primarily the siege of Cattaro in 1657, the Venetian authorities expelled the Montenegrin tradesmen (and in particular the tradesmen from Podgorica) from the cities under their rule, first and foremost from Cattaro. Again Bolizza interceded on their behalf. Following the fiasco in Cattaro, the Montenegrin tribes no longer joined forces with the Ottomans. Instead, largely as a consequence of Vincenzo Bolizza’s mediation, in 1600 they entered a formal alliance with Venice.110 In the last years of the war, the biggest problems were caused by the ravages of marauding pirates, Hajduks, and Uskoks. Vincenzo and Nicolo Bolizza labored tirelessly to try to mitigate their impact on the lives of the people of Cattaro.111

Conclusion

This overview demonstrates quite clearly that alongside Ragusa, Cattaro was the most important bridgehead on the east coast of the Adriatic, looking towards the Ottoman Empire. This had important economic and political consequences, but it was also important from the perspective of the Church. In the Middle Ages, Cattaro developed important ties with the communities in the interior of the peninsula. In the early Modern Era, its strategic importance grew primarily because of the role it played in the organization of the postal service. For the missions that departed from Rome for the southern territories of the Balkans, as of the end of the sixteenth century Cattaro, which was under Venetian rule, was the primary base, as is clearly illustrated by the attempt (in the end unsuccessful) to settle Jesuits and the mandates of the Bolizza family, which oversaw the functioning of the postal service.

The basic tasks of the members of the Bolizza family who served as commissaries of the missions remained essentially the same over the course of decades, as did their geographical range. However, their significance changed dramatically, depending on shifts in the emphasis on the practice of spreading the faith and the prevailing political and military situation. Clearly Francesco was the most influential and striking figure, in part simply because of his personality and in part because of the enormity of the tasks that awaited him and the economic trend caused by the Cretan War. Vincenzo was given a role in the organization of relations in the Balkans, even while his brother was still alive, and in his work as an agent in the second period of the war he followed closely in his brother’s footsteps, although in all likelihood he was not as resolved a personality. Nicolo, in contrast, was only given a role towards the end of the war, when the family no longer enjoyed quite the same wealth of connections as it once had. The critical accusations made by abbot Zmajević can perhaps be explained not only as perceptions of actual moral failings but as part of an effort to force laymen out of the organization of missions. The turning point came after the outbreak of the Morean War: Nicolo’s brother and successor, Giovanni di Antonio Bolizza, again was given an important military and political role, first and foremost in the organization of anti-Turkish movements. As a consequence of this, the Propaganda Congregation came to value his services more highly.112

Archival Sources

Archivio Segreto Vaticano (Città del Vaticano)

Archivum Arcis, Armaria I–XVIII

Congregazione del Concilio, Relationes Dioecesium

Archivio storico della Sacra Congregazione per l’Evangelizzazione dei Popoli o de “Propaganda Fide” (Rome)

Acta Sacrae Congregationis

Lettere e Decreti della Sacra Congregazione

Scritture Originali riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali

Scritture riferite nei Congressi

Albania

Ministri

Fondo di Vienna

Miscellanee Diverse

Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Rome)

Italia

Epistulae Externorum

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Translated by Thomas Cooper

The postal route between Venice and Istanbul in the early 17th century