A Special Form of Diplomatic Encounter: Negotiations in Constantinople (1625–1626)

Zsuzsanna Hámori Nagy
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 2  (2023):3–36 DOI 10.38145/2023.2.224

Keywords: diplomacy, Constantinople, Gábor Bethlen, Principality of Transylvania, Ottoman Empire

An Ottoman Tributary State in the Thirty Years’ War

The princes of Transylvania participated1 in the Thirty Years’ War on four occasions, belonging to different anti-Habsburg coalitions. Three of these interventions came about under the reign of Prince Gábor Bethlen (1580–1629, ruled from 1613), who from the first moment engaged in the conflict on the side of the Winter King, Frederick of the Palatinate.2 In his first military campaign, he entered the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary in September 1619, and in November, he participated in the unsuccessful siege of Vienna. By January 1620, the estates of the Kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia had entered into an alliance with those of Austria. Bethlen was elected king of Hungary in August 1620, but due to his allies’ defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in November of the same year, he started negotiations with Ferdinand II and concluded peace by January 1622, renouncing his royal title. His second intervention was of a much smaller scale: although he constantly negotiated with Frederick through emigrants from the Palatinate, it was not possible to join his army with those of Frederick’s generals after he reached as far as Moravia during his second military campaign of autumn 1623. Therefore, in May 1624, he concluded peace with Ferdinand II again.

His last effort to join an anti-Habsburg coalition was made in 1626, and this time the preparations seemed more fruitful than they had been three years earlier. An international coalition of Protestant powers to help the Winter King regain his throne and title was created in the form of the League of The Hague in December 1625 with the participation of England, Denmark, and Holland. The participants invited other interested states to join their coalition, such as the Principality of Transylvania and France. As for Transylvania, Prince Gábor Bethlen made a great step to become a member of the anti-Habsburg league by marrying Catherine, sister of the Elector of Brandenburg, in the spring of 1626.3 He started military maneuvers against Ferdinand II shortly afterward, in the summer of 1626, but joined the alliance officially only later, between November 1626 and February 1627 by the signature of the Treaty of Westminster and its ratification by Holland and Denmark.4 By this time, however, much to the disdain of his new allies, he had already concluded the peace of Pozsony/Bratislava with the emperor. As for France, despite the support it gave in the form of indirect warfare against the Habsburgs and the dynastic connection with England,5 both confessional and internal political tensions, which reached their climax with the Huguenot uprising starting in 1625, prevented its adherence to the League of The Hague.6

Direct contacts between Transylvania and interested parties such as England, France, Venice, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark were maintained during the 1620s through formal and informal channels with the help of public and secret envoys. However, the Principality of Transylvania as a small state in the Ottoman orbit was not able to build anything resembling the networks of permanent embassies throughout Europe that the main players in international diplomacy had started to build. The only exception was Constantinople where, following from Transylvania’s status as an Ottoman tributary, a resident envoy called a kapitiha was always present beside the occasional, more solemn embassies discussing current affairs or bringing the yearly tribute to the Porte.7 Constantinople had a special status in European and Transylvanian diplomacy as a center for information exchange,8 which in practice meant the permanent diplomatic presence of all major and minor powers. It is thus hardly surprising that, from the middle of the sixteenth century, negotiations at the Porte played a crucial role in maintaining contacts between the Western states and Transylvania.9 From the perspective of the historian, this means that, in contrast with the negotiations conducted sporadically through direct contacts, the practices and methods used during these negotiations and the personal interests of the individuals and polities involved can be more easily reconstructed and analyzed, since the negotiations themselves were continuous and some of the parties left behind a well-preserved corpus of diplomatic correspondence.

Negotiating in Constantinople: Challenges and Solutions

Constantinople was the primary scene to reach one of Gábor Bethlen’s main foreign political goals in the mid-1620s: the granting of permission by his Ottoman overlord to enter an alliance with anti-Habsburg European partners and engage in military actions within these frames. The resident ambassadors at the Porte were Philippe de Harlay, count of Césy10 of France, Sir Thomas Roe11 of England, Cornelis Haga12 of Holland, Zorzi Giustiniani13 of Venice, and László Balásházy14 of Transylvania. They worked together closely to this end in the summer of 1625. The participants worked diligently at the requests of their sovereigns, whose political interests happened to coincide with those of the prince of Transylvania for a short time. However, their collaboration was made difficult by problems of diplomatic precedence and questions of bribery and treason, and they ended with dubious results.

An investigation of the first factor (disputes over precedence and especially the competition between the French and English resident ambassadors) prompts reconsideration of the widely accepted view in the Hungarian secondary literature concerning the primary role of Thomas Roe in supporting Bethlen’s efforts at the Porte. As it is well known, in addition to the diplomatic ranks of different envoys, the order in which Western powers established diplomatic contacts with the Ottoman Empire also had an informal impact on encounters among diplomats in Constantinople.15 It was the task of the permanent French ambassador to guard his own declared precedence, which was constantly challenged by the others. Césy was accused by his successor at the post of resident ambassador, Henry de Gournay, Count of Marcheville, of having allowed the Venetian bailo to proceed at his right and having let the ambassador of Holland to represent Transylvanian, Moldavian, Wallachian, Swedish, and Polish interests.16 On the eve of the negotiations with the Transylvanian resident, Césy was outraged by the cooperation never seen before of the Venetian bailo and Thomas Roe in some ecclesiastical appointments, which caused further disappointment when Giustiniani was not willing to pay him a visit together with the newly arrived Venetian ambassador, Simone Contarini, in April 1625.17

Temporary enmities and conflicts of interest gave rise to short-lived coalitions among the diplomatic players in Constantinople, while political confrontation was sometimes overridden by confessional interests. One of the most typical dividing lines was of a denominational nature. Over the course of the 1620s and 1630s, the opposing parties formed by the French and Habsburg resident ambassadors against those of England and Holland were trying to outbid one another in their negotiations with the Ottoman authorities in order to remove or keep in position the Greek patriarch of Constantinople, who was known to have accepted Protestant doctrines.18 In contrast, the long-lasting conflict between French and Habsburg interests on the European political scene made the ambassadors of the rival powers enemies, a situation in which English support was not always provided to the French despite the dynastic ties formed in 1625. Thomas Roe was equally missing personally from the coalition of the French, Venetian, and Dutch ambassadors, who conspired against the Spanish agent arriving at the Porte in the summer of 1625, as well as from their conferences with the Transylvanian resident during the same period.19 Roe’s personal absence was not the consequence of the plague raging in Constantinople that summer but rather was part of a practice he followed to avoid Césy and thus answer the problem of rivalry. Césy also adopted this practice from the very beginning of Roe’s mission: although he ordered twelve torchbearers to accompany Roe when entering Constantinople, they both avoided public encounters and met only on private occasions.20

This throws into question Roe’s primary role in the negotiations of 1625, which he contended was “the main motive and actor of the present affair.”21 While Roe was constantly informed through the other residents’ letters and acted in Bethlen’s favor separately from the others, it is important to note that Césy was also frequently absent due to illness in the summer of 1625. For the most part, it was Haga, Giustiniani, and Balásházy, together with different interpreters (more on them later), who were present at the negotiations. Gábor Bethlen had already asked Ottoman permission to seek protection from the friends of the Porte and ally with them against the Habsburgs, but this first license was given only “by word of mouth.”22 The aim of the meetings of summer 1625 was to redact the text of a document granting this permission in line with the interests of the involved parties, who insisted that their sovereigns could not be explicitly named therein. Balásházy showed the others a draft that would have licensed Bethlen’s alliance with them, encouraged him to wage war on the emperor, and offered military aid for such an enterprise.23 The final draft was redacted by the bailo of Venice.24 Despite the joint efforts, all the resident ambassadors were left dissatisfied, as the document that was sent to the prince of Transylvania mentioned the kings of France and England, the Republic of Venice, and the Netherlands as friends of the Porte with whom the prince of Transylvania was allowed to unite, but it made no reference to him waging war on the emperor.25

The solution to this failure lay in the combination of two characteristics of Ottoman diplomacy. The first was the prevalent tendency for the Ottoman power to include something different in the documents it issued than had been previously agreed on. The second can simply be called the practice of bribery when it came to any political decision in Constantinople, which meant various sums of money and gifts26 for officeholders of every rank, from interpreters to scribes at the chancellery. In the particular case of Bethlen’s license, the meaning was not lost in translation, but the ambassadors’ refusal to pay the sums demanded by the Ottoman interpreter and head of scribes for the correct formulation of the text might have contributed to the problem. The direct approach of the chancellery would not necessarily have resulted in the right formulation of any document, however. For example, bribes paid to scribes resulted in only slight changes in the text of the ’ahdname sent from the Porte to Poland in October 1623.27 No less could have been expected in the much smaller case of redacting a letter of permission, even if the sums requested had been paid.

When discussing the details of the text of the license, the resident ambassadors could count on their interpreters and to some extent themselves. Césy was sometimes represented by an interpreter named Olivier.28 Balásházy, who spoke Latin (and probably Italian as well) translated some letters himself. Indeed, he considered it a dire mistake that Cornelis Haga “involved those beys” whose ignorance he blamed for the questionable outcome.29 He must have been referring to Grand Dragoman Zülfikâr Ağa,30 the Hungarian-born Ottoman interpreter employed by the Transylvanian embassy permanently during the first half of the seventeenth century, and Yusuf Ağa,31 who as chiaus served as an intermediary between Transylvania and the Porte. It was the kaymakam who ordered Zülfikâr to translate all documents brought by the Transylvanian envoy32 and thus it seems that the dragoman’s presence in Transylvanian affairs could not be ignored in this case, as he emerged as some kind of expert on the region at the Porte.33 Haga wrote to Roe upon first hearing Bethlen’s demand about the license that the three of them (himself, Giustiniani, and Césy) thought it appropriate to entrust Zülfikâr with the negotiations concerning the license and gave their word to pay him one hundred thalers each if the business was finished according to the expectations of the prince. Still, they did not find him trustworthy. Balásházy, however, convinced them that Bethlen had already rewarded him with a carriage and horses for his services.34 After the fiasco, by emphasizing Haga’s role in requesting Zülfikâr’s help, Balásházy, as a representative of the Transylvanian embassy, probably wanted to dilute the blame for the disastrous outcome, which he saw as a consequence of having involved the grand dragoman.

Further complications arose from the fact that Zülfikâr and Yusuf, with Olivier as a witness, promised the head of scribes (reisulkuttab), who was acquaintance of theirs, another four hundred thalers in August 1625 when visiting him at his house. Balásházy offered to pay this latter sum in the name of his master, with the ambassadors paying their share of the other four hundred.35 However, the Venetian and Dutch ambassadors informed Roe about their decision that they would only pay Zülfikâr once the business of the permission had been completed to their satisfaction. They explained their refusal with the contention that they had not been authorized by their sovereigns to make such payments.36 The resident ambassadors do not seem to have had much faith in Zülfikâr’s good intentions concerning the second four hundred thalers either, and they seem to have thought that he wanted it for himself. Sooner or later, however, and against their better judgment,37 they all paid their original share of one hundred each in exchange for what they called the services of Zülfikâr in general.38 The first one to pay was Roe, and Balásházy was clever enough to play on the sentiments of competition among the ambassadors when praising him as the one who “not only superseded but defeated the others.” Upon hearing of Roe’s contribution, the others also started to pay, first, some smaller portions to Zülfikâr, and some money was even offered to Yusuf to compensate for his journey to present the letter of license to the prince.39

As noted above, Haga, Giustiniani, and Césy originally insisted on waiting until the business had been successfully conducted in a manner that would meet the expectations of the prince of Transylvania before making any payments. Ultimately, the matter was indeed resolved and met the prince’s expectations. No matter how much the ambassadors complained that the finalized document lacked any encouragement to Bethlen to wage war on the emperor but mentioned their masters,40 Balásházy argued that Gábor Bethlen was pleased with the letter of license. All the more so, as he indicated that Bethlen had not made the request for permission “out of necessity but for his wellbeing,”41 which corresponded to his original request mentioning “security and caution.”42 It can also be said that the original draft was provided by Bethlen to Balásházy, and the Ottoman chancellery returned to this version from the one that the ambassadors presented.43 This suggests that the aim of Bethlen in the summer of 1625 was to be permitted by his Ottoman overlord to adhere to the League of The Hague in formation, without actually starting any military maneuvers yet, for which he first needed to have his conditions fulfilled by his future allies.

Without elaborating on the details of the preliminaries of such a treaty, it is clear that they were discussed primarily by envoys who were sent directly to the involved parties, of which the ambassadors at the Porte knew very little. In this respect, Constantinople was a scene of secondary importance, as none of the resident ambassadors at the Porte had received any authorization to conclude a treaty of alliance with the Transylvanian envoys. Although Bethlen informed his emissaries in Constantinople about the preliminaries and sent them copies of his main stipulations to be discussed with the representatives of the anti-Habsburg party, several factors hindered the development of such negotiations at the Porte. Apart from the great distances to be covered and the slow pace at which anything could be delivered using postal services (of which the ambassadors continuously complained), the presence of a traitor among the members of the Transylvanian delegation also caused many a problem during the crucial year of 1625.

The suspicion that there was a traitor in their midst arose first among the envoys in March 1625, when Césy, Roe, and Haga noticed the close contact between Balásházy and the imperial resident. Roe suspected that Balásházy was influenced in this not by any duplicity on Bethlen’s part, but rather because of his own status as a member of the Catholic fold. They also heard rumors according to which Balásházy had displeased his lord and would be replaced. To answer the challenge of possible information leakage, they decided to write separately to the prince and forwarded the copy of the sultan’s letter written to him by their own secret courier.44 At the beginning of 1626, Césy wrote about Balásházy’s treason as a fact and used it as a pretext to send his other interpreter, Tomaso Fornetti,45 to Transylvania with instructions he believed to be in accordance with the direction of French foreign politics. I discuss this in more detail later in the essay, but is worth quoting Césy’s complaint that he could not communicate with the ambassador of the prince without the resident being present; and when he was not there, the ambassador, who spoke neither Latin nor Italian, turned for help to the kaymakam’s domestic interpreters, which had even more disastrous consequences from the point of view of information leakage.46 Roe had a more balanced opinion and admitted that he had not managed, with his inquiries, to discover the identity of the traitor. Indeed, he stood by Balásházy, saying that he “hath suffered much affliction,” but nothing had been proven against him, and he might well have been wrongly accused.47

Balásházy’s perspective can be reconstructed with the help of his letters. In August 1625, the ambassadors confronted him with their finding that either he or the interpreter of the Transylvanian embassy was a traitor, as one of them had passed on all the secrets to the imperial party. In order to prove that he always spoke the truth, Balásházy offered to have Olivier translate all the documents that the prince had recently sent to the Porte and that had been read to the kaymakam, as well as the reply that was going to be sent in a few days. He also offered to investigate the possibility that perhaps a domestic servant or the interpreter was the traitor.48 It is worth considering who this interpreter (not to be confused with the Dragoman Zülfikâr) might have been. The sources reveal that he was a man by the name of István Futó (referred to as “Stephanus alumnus” by Balásházy), who had studied at Bethlen’s expense in Constantinople to become a Turkish scribe. Although there exists no information concerning when he entered into service, he might have taken up some tasks of interpretation during the pourparlers of the resident ambassadors. Habsburg diplomatic correspondence reveals that Futó was able to transfer information about Transylvanian affairs to the Habsburg embassy for years before 1626 when he finally left the Porte.49

It is hard to determine the extent to which Balásházy was involved in this affair, but his silence could be interpreted as telling. There is no sign of any further mention of the issue of treason or of any investigation in his letters for about half a year, which suggests that he did not really launch any inquisitions or if he did, he concealed the findings. By December 1625, it was too late. He had lost all credit in the eyes of the resident ambassadors except for Roe, whose trust he especially held dear. A letter written to Roe reveals that both of them considered Yusuf Ağa the source of rumors concerning Balásházy’s treason. When the resident confronted him with this in the presence of the Transylvanian ambassador Pál Keresztesi and the agent Bornemisza, Yusuf denied ever having said anything against him, but he said he had heard talk of István Futó having given Transylvanian letters to the Habsburg resident.50 After this letter was written to Roe, Balásházy disappeared almost entirely from the sources, but he remained for eight more months at the Porte, probably hiding in shame. It was only in June 1626 that the prince appointed Tamás Borsos as a new resident and dismissed Balásházy for “certain reasons.”51 For the last time, Roe stood by his colleague (or possibly friend) when he wrote a letter of testimony to Gábor Bethlen calling Balásházy the prince’s “true and faythfull servant,” whose abilities he found exceptional. Roe’s letter also reveals that the suspicions that fell on Balásházy “proceeded from an enemye” and that “Stephano” finally fled, for which Balásházy accused himself.52

Contrary to Roe’s testimony, Borsos, Balásházy’s successor at the post of resident, reported that Balásházy, who had been condemned by everyone, “was not His Highness’ orator but that of the German emperor.” Furthermore, against Balásházy’s objections, he was only willing to take over the building of the Transylvanian embassy with an inventory, as he claimed to have found at least two hundred thalers worth of damage caused by his predecessor.53 Balásházy was indeed imprisoned in the summer of 1627, and the amounts of money promised by him to several officers (including one hundred thalers for the head of scribes and a carriage to someone unknown) were ordered by the prince to be paid from his own holdings.54 Incidents of residents at the Porte going bankrupt were not uncommon. Césy was also accused by his successor, Marcheville, of causing damage to the building of the ambassadorial residence,55 and when Marcheville himself went into bankruptcy and fell into disgrace, Césy was still present in Constantinople and ready to continue his mission as resident ambassador, as he had not been able to leave the city between 1631 and 1634 because of his unpaid debts.56

Harsh financial conditions, accumulation of debts, and unpaid salaries in the middle of the monetary crisis of the era affected larger and smaller players alike,57 while definitely posing greater problems for such minor characters as Balásházy or even the Turkish scribe Futó. One cannot help but suspect this is what may have driven them to sell the property of the embassy or even some precious information. In a letter written by Futó in 1624, he desperately begged for money from his relative, the secretary of the prince, as he had none left. He was afraid of an approaching peril and said that if he did not get help soon, his soul would be corrupted.58 This suggests a connection between his financial crisis and his passing on diplomatic documents to the imperial resident, which started in late 1624 or early 1625. As for Balásházy, no indications of any such correlation have been found in the sources so far, but he also might have been involved in the scheme to some extent. He otherwise seems to have been a talented diplomat who spoke languages, could argue convincingly, and navigated comfortably among the authorities and officials at the Porte, but his last effort to defend himself from the charges he faced was unsuccessful. In the long run, however, this incident did not break his career as a diplomat entirely, as he represented Prince György Rákóczi I as a member of his delegation at the negotiations concerning the Treaty of Eperjes/Prešov with Ferdinand II in 1633.59

The Impact of Networks of Relations on Negotiating in Constantinople

The discussion so far has touched on several practices used in negotiations in Constantinople and the circumstances surrounding the negotiations. In the last section of this essay, I concentrate on how the resident ambassadors at the Porte reflected on the fact that the negotiations of a treaty of alliance with the prince of Transylvania were basically impossible in Constantinople. I also consider why, if they were aware of this fact, some of them still pursued these efforts without any authorization from home. As I will show, apart from practical reasons, this might have been due to interpersonal relationships similar to the apparent friendship between Roe and Balásházy. Césy’s friendship with the Transylvanian nobleman Ferenc Bornemisza, Bethlen’s agent at the Porte accompanying Transylvanian ambassadors to Constantinople three times in 1625–1626, can also be traced as a factor in the background.

There is a difference between the opinions of the representatives of the two greatest powers involved, that is the resident ambassadors of England and France, about maintaining contacts with Bethlen through Constantinople. Roe, though having spent less time in Constantinople than Césy, warned the Transylvanian ambassador János Gáspár in May 1625 that a treaty should not be concluded at the Porte, as the sole ambassador of England or France could not take upon himself the diverse interests of so many contracting parties, while the grand signor himself might have wanted to be admitted to such a league.60 He also sensed that Bethlen “did only enterteyne us, and that his resolutions depended upon some other place.”61 Nevertheless, he was well aware of the significance of Bethlen’s prospective joining the anti-Habsburg coalition with respect to Frederick of the Palatinate and his wife, Elisabeth Stuart, so he related everything in connection with his moves and underlined the importance of winning him for the common cause. Both James I and Charles I were, however, unwilling to take up diplomatic relationships with the prince of Transylvania directly before the end of 1625, when the English party, partly at Roe’s urging, ultimately considered Constantinople quite a detour for correspondence with the prince.62

As for Césy, a change of attitude can be noticed when considering his negotiations with Transylvanian envoys about the preliminaries of a future treaty. When giving an audience to Gáspár in May 1625, he showed a reserve similar to Roe’s and suggested that these matters should directly be discussed with the French court through the envoy who had already visited the prince.63 The ambiguity of his instructions of October 1625, together with the delay caused by slow delivery by the post services and the information leakage to the Habsburg resident, however, pushed Césy to get in touch with Bethlen directly through his interpreter. In a letter of October 5 which Césy received in early 1626, Louis XIII wanted a confident person, i.e., Césy, to communicate his intentions regarding the preliminaries with the Transylvanian resident at the Porte. On October 30, he warned his ambassador to accept all propositions of a league from the other interested parties or from the Transylvanian resident but only to inform the sovereign and give an opinion about it.64 By the time this latter message reached Césy at the beginning of February 1626, he had already sent Fornetti to Transylvania with the king’s propositions, as he did not dare share them either with the resident Balásházy or the ambassador Keresztesi in December 1625, as the imperial party had already learned of some of the details.

As mentioned in his letter to Louis XIII, Césy’s other reason for sending his own courier to Transylvania was his close connection with his friend and confidant Ferenc Bornemisza who, according to his instructions given to Fornetti, was the only person the interpreter should open up to when arriving at the princely court. Césy told Fornetti to let Bornemisza and Bornemisza only translate his instructions and to deal with Bethlen secretly, solely in Bornemisza’s presence.65 Ferenc, the Francophile scion of the wealthy Bornemisza family of Kolozsvár/Cluj most probably stayed for some time in France after studying in Olmütz/Olomouc and Freiburg. He and his brother László were employed in diplomatic missions under the reign of Gábor Bethlen, and they both traveled to the Porte several times, László in the 1610s and Ferenc in the 1620s.66 Ferenc Bornemisza stayed by the side of János Gáspár in April–June 1625, when Bethlen’s demands concerning the letter of permission and the first version of the preliminaries were declared to the resident ambassadors.67 He is also mentioned together with Keresztesi in Balásházy’s letter to Roe about Yusuf’s allegations, which suggests that he was also present at the Porte in December 1625.68 He returned as Bethlen’s special emissary in May–June 1626 with the prince’s approval of the conditions sent by Césy through Fornetti.69

This last mission means that Bethlen granted what Césy had requested through Fornetti. Conforming to his demand, he delegated Bornemisza with credentials to the Porte to address the preliminaries of the treaty. The prince did so even though he had reservations about and expressed his distrust in Bornemisza to the ambassador of Brandenburg present at his court in April 1626.70 The reasons behind Bethlen’s distrust are yet unknown. He may have thought that Bornemisza was involved in the scandalous case of Futó and Balásházy, who were still at the Porte at the time. In any case, by assigning Bornemisza the task of negotiating in Constantinople, Bethlen was able to remove someone he did not trust from his court. All the more so, as the Porte was a scene of only secondary importance with regard to the preliminaries of an anti-Habsburg treaty, and the prince continued to discuss the details through agents sent directly to the powers involved. When the direct negotiations reached a dead end with France in the middle of 1626 (just before Bethlen entered into war against Ferdinand II), Bornemisza was withdrawn from Constantinople. This, together with the news that Bethlen had directly sent his courier to France without informing his emissary in Constantinople earlier,71 was as much of a surprise for Bornemisza as for Césy and Fornetti, and it must have contributed to the development of feelings of mutual dissatisfaction. The Bornemisza family’s hatred of Bethlen culminated in 1629 when they “no longer wanted the race of the prince.”72 Still, their real loss of influence came about under the reign of György Rákóczi I, as a result of which Ferenc moved from Transylvania to the Kingdom of Hungary in the second half of the 1630s.73 As for the relationship between the Bornemiszas and the dragoman family Fornetti, it survived until at least 1629, when Francesco Fornetti was involved in the correspondence and financial transactions between the Transylvanian brothers and the merchant Jean Scaich of Galata.74

After Fornetti’s fruitless mission in Transylvania in the spring of 1626, Césy also felt deceived and frustrated to see that the negotiations of a treaty of alliance were going on, but not through his mediation, and his role had been limited to that of an informant.75 The fact that he had been personally misled probably contributed to his loss of faith in Bethlen’s good will. When he learned of the instructions of the direct envoy sent by Bethlen to France, Césy considered some of the points lies. Furthermore, by judging the permission acquired in 1625 as adequate, he was willing to obtain Bethlen’s next license of summer 1626 to wage war on the emperor only half-heartedly, as he did not trust that Bethlen really wanted to attack Ferdinand II.76 This time it was indeed Thomas Roe who played the primary role in convincing Ottoman dignitaries to give Bethlen permission to enter into war and in appointing auxiliary troops for him.77 From the perspective of French diplomacy, it was right before the beginning of the military campaign of the prince of Transylvania that the court also questioned Bethlen’s sincerity, but Louis XIII insisted that Césy continue to keep in touch with him in the most polite way.78

Conclusions

As a comparison of the relevant diplomatic correspondence reveals, the negotiations over procurement from the Ottomans of permission for Gábor Bethlen to join the anti-Habsburg powers and the preliminary discussions of the details of a future treaty were marked by unique collaboration among otherwise unfriendly participants. This comparison also reveals, however, that this initially fruitful collaboration, which essentially resulted from a temporary overlap of the political interest of the participating powers, was limited by several down-to-earth factors, such as the sums demanded by the Ottoman interpreter and head of scribes and the information leakage to the Habsburg resident. European ambassadors in Constantinople relied mainly on information coming from the prince of Transylvania when intervening on his behalf at the Porte. This is probably why Gábor Bethlen was content with the resulting document of license, even though the resident ambassadors who had worked to obtain it were not, as their rulers were mentioned in the text redacted in the autumn of 1625. French diplomatic circles became definitively estranged from Transylvania by the summer of 1626 because of the recurring question of the permission given by the Ottomans, which, however, did not mean the end of collaboration with the English and Dutch resident ambassadors.

From the perspective of Transylvanian diplomacy, Constantinople was a scene of primary importance concerning issues related to its status as an Ottoman tributary state, which in this case was the question of obtaining the aforementioned permission. Although the resident ambassadors tried to help get such documents, they were mostly unaware of their real importance from the point of view of Bethlen as vassal of the sultan. As a scene of secondary importance, the Porte emerged merely as a place to exchange information on the preliminaries of a future treaty of alliance, but one that made it impossible to conclude anything due to the lack of detailed instructions and the information leakage to the imperial party. While negotiating his joining the anti-Habsburg coalition created in the form of the League of the Hague in December 1625, Gábor Bethlen paid attention and formally demanded the permission of his Ottoman overlord. His rhetoric during the Constantinople negotiations presented him as an influential player in international politics but also made it quite clear that his wellbeing depended upon the permission of his Ottoman suzerain. It was partly this ambiguity that can be blamed for the loss of trust among French diplomats in the Transylvanian prince’s goodwill and the termination of their negotiations. Finally, this was complemented by the fact that the personal initiatives of the resident ambassadors, which were in part responses to practical challenges and derived in part from their rivalry, their sense of self-importance, and their personal relationships, were doomed to fail, which might have also contributed to their loss of faith in Bethlen’s sincerity regarding his proposed aims.

Funded by the European Union (ERC, SMALLST, 101043451). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Archival Sources

Archivele Naţionale ale Românei, Direcţia Judeţeana Cluj [National Archives of Romania, Department of Cluj/Kolozsvár]

Colecţia Sándor Mike

Archives diplomatiques, Paris (Ad)

Correspondance politique Turquie, 133CP3, Correspondance et

documents divers, 1620–1628.

Correspondance politique Turquie, 133CP4, Le Comte de Césy, le Comte de Marcheville, ambassadeurs, 1629–1637.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (BnF)

Ms fr. 15584, Recueil de lettres, pour la plupart originales, et autres pièces, relatives à l’histoire de France, principalement sous les règnes de Charles IX, Henri III, Henri IV et Louis XIII (1477–1657). XLV Règnes de Louis XIII et de Louis XIV (1628–1657).

Ms. fr. 16150, Papiers de l’ambassade de Philippe de Harlay, comte de Césy, à Constantinople.

Ms. fr. 16156, Lettres du Roy, des secrétaires d’Estat et principaux ministres à Mr de Césy, 1619–1625.

The National Archives, London (TNA)

SP 97/11.

SP 97/12.

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The Instrumentalization of Courtly Privacy in the Context of the Wedding Celebrations of Emperor Leopold I in 1676

Claudia Curcuruto
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 2  (2023):3–36 DOI 10.38145/2023.2.279

Keywords: Pope Innocent XI Odescalchi, Francesco Buonvisi, Eleonora Magdalena of Palatinate-Neuburg, Apostolic Nunciature of Vienna, imperial court, Leopold I, marriage in early modern period, privacy

Introduction

“[…] ammettendo la scusa che lo sposalizio habbia da esser totalmente priva­to.”1 On November 1, 1676, Francesco Buonvisi (1626–1700),2 the apostolic nuncio at the imperial court,3 wrote a letter to Pope Innocent XI Odescal­-

chi’s4 cardinal secretary of the state,5 Alderano Cybo (1613–1700),6 about the planned private wedding celebrations of Emperor Leopold I7 to Eleonora Magdalena of Palatinate-Neuburg8 in Passau in December 1676.9 Privacy became the subject of argumentative directives during this dynastic feast at the Viennese imperial court, and the participation of resident diplomats, including the papal nuncio, became a question of diplomatic-ceremonial action. Why was the wedding kept private? Why could the representatives of the crowns, princes, and republics not attend the celebrations? What did the actors understand by “privacy” in the context of wedding ceremonies in 1676, and how was the concept of “privacy” instrumentalized by the actors in this context? What strategies did Buonvisi, in particular, develop to counteract his “exclusion” from the wedding ceremony in Passau?

The matter of the emperor’s wedding (and his choice of bride)10 represented a political issue of the first rank. After the death of Claudia Felicitas of Tyrol (1653–1676),11 Leopold I’s second wife, on April 8, 1676, tough marriage negotiations took place between April and October 1676 for the speedy remarriage of the 36-year-old sovereign. His first two marriages had been childless, so marriage negotiations were initiated after the death of Claudia Felicitas to secure a successor and the property of the Casa d’Austria.12 In addition to the 21-year-old Eleonora Magdalena of Palatinate-Neuburg (whom Leopold I ultimately chose as his new bride), the Protestant princess Ulrike Eleonore of Denmark (1656–1693), daughter of the Danish king Frederick III and later wife of Charles XI (1655–1697) and from 1680 queen of Sweden, was one of the favorites.13 On October 4, 1676, the emperor decided in favor of Eleonora Magdalena of Palatinate-Neuburg.14 His decision was influenced in no small part by the insistence of the negotiators representing Rome,15 as Pope Innocent XI reminded Emperor Leopold in his congratulatory letter of December 1, 1676.16 On December 14, 1676, the wedding between Emperor Leopold I and the Neuburg princess was celebrated in Passau by the arch- and prince-bishop of Passau Sebastian von Pötting (1673–1689).17 In general, these central events in the early modern period were always a public act and were not considered private affairs or private celebrations of the Casa d’Austria. With the wedding in Passau in 1676, however, there was an extraordinary fusion of the public sphere and the private sphere on the part of the Austrian Habsburgs,18 as I show in the discussion below.

Courtly Privacy and Incognito as New Categories of Diplomatic-Ceremonial Practice in the Early Modern Period

This particular Passau event of 1676 marked a decisive turn in the Theatrum caeremoniale19 and initiated a trend for future celebrations at the Viennese imperial court, where the complex categories of private and incognito were to play an increasingly important role in ceremonial activities from 1676 onwards. Following Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s studies on “Ceremonial as Political Procedure,” I understand ceremonial action as a larger category of social acts that are precisely standardized in their external form, that depict a social order, and that are therefore always related to participants and/or spectators who perceive and understand these signs.20

According to this definition, ceremonial action is part of the public activity of ruler and court and is directed equally at both participants and spectators, who had to perceive and interpret a given act and communicate its message further, for instance as envoys. The court ceremonial21 as a system of norms binding on all participants is related to the ranks of the persons involved and made visible and recognizable for all participants.22 What happens when the public activities of the imperial dynasty are shifted to the private sphere? First, the imperial court instrumentalized the categories of “courtly privacy,” and second, the apostolic nuncio introduced the field of action of “incognito” in the events in Passau in 1676, both in order to avoid ceremonial-diplomatic conflicts between the resident envoys at the imperial court and the father of the bride, Philip William, count of Palatinate-Neuburg.23

The words “private” and “court” in the conceptual pair of “courtly privacy” represent a counter-pair of privacy and publicity,24 which, however, are not separable for the early modern period and especially for the court.25 It can thus be stated that the dialectical quality of the conceptual pair was not to be adhered to, but rather, as inseparable categories at court, a more or less limited public sphere to be defined stabilized from case to case or a performance of the private occurred in a public setting. The people involved thus organized a supposed privacy while at the same time maintaining publicity by excluding diplomats to avoid conflict at the wedding ceremony and the subsequent banquet through the instrumentalization of courtly privacy.

Thus, in this context, courtly privacy means the claim to be protected from unwanted diplomatic-ceremonial conflicts in decisions and actions in representations and enactments of the private in public space and the claim to be protected from the entry of others into spaces and areas. The representation of the private creates forms of expression that transform existing spaces in the public sphere. Processes of dissolving the boundaries of the public in private staging modify the traditional role model and require differentiated approaches to solutions, such as the use of the concept of incognito on the ceremonial level.26 It should be emphasized, however, that the situational character of the events in the diplomatic-political ceremonial was always preserved, in which the category “private” is not to be regarded as a stable continuum, but was subject to the fluctuations of the actors involved in this complex relational dynamic and was subject to practices at the Viennese court that were always open to being redefined.

The meaning of the term incognito, usually understood to mean “unknown” to a particular person or several persons until the mid-sixteenth century, changed as the term came instead to be understood as “unknown” to the people involved in a ceremonial practice. Following Volker Barth, incognito is a practice that indicates the temporary relinquishment of ceremonial duties, that is, a temporary change of identity. This change of identity, which is as temporary as it is specifically individual, is carried out publicly and, for example, helped “make interaction possible” at conflict-laden meetings of high-ranking personalities without the ceremonial aspects of the meeting being suspended. In this way, forms of incognito emerged that shaped the court culture of the early modern period.27

The introduction of courtly privacy and the practice of going incognito opened up (new) possibilities for action in diplomacy and new ways of taking part in ceremonies for the actors involved in these processes, and this had an impact on subsequent events at the imperial court (including, for example, the introduction of a “private chapel” for the empress dowager Eleonora of Gonzaga-Nevers28 and the [private] wedding celebrations that took place in 1678).29 However, by shifting the “public” to a “private” setting, the apostolic nuncio created a novel situation in which he now could take part incognito.

This is precisely where the great potential for conflict lies: the required absence from the wedding celebrations in Passau in 1676 because of the demand for privacy, and the disputes that were going on over ceremony and rank, in which the nuncio insisted on his claim also to the ecclesiastical functions as papal representative. This established an “invented tradition”30 in the ceremonial practices of the Viennese imperial court and was ultimately noticed at other courts in Europe. We are thus speaking, in this case, of a tradition that was formally established with great speed. Moreover, the notion of “invented tradition” encompasses a set of practices, usually based on openly or tacitly accepted rules, which have a ritual or symbolic character and aim to transmit certain values and norms of behavior through repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.31 The essence and function of traditions, even invented ones, is invariance.32 The invention of traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization characterized by reference to the past, even if only through the imposition of repetition.33 Accordingly, the possibilities for action by the actors could become visible via the invented tradition, that is, via the instrumentalization of the private in a public event.

In this discussion, I focus on how the Apostolic Nuncio Francesco Buonvisi operated in the spheres of public and private and how his ability to act was demonstrated in the ceremonial performance of the wedding celebrations in Passau in 1676. In his regular correspondence with the Secretariat of the State Buonvisi drew a detailed picture of the emperor’s marriage negotiations, and his daily reports to Rome prove an important source of information and knowledge34 in this context. The nunciature’s correspondence35 reveals that the private was also possible in the courtly public domain.36 As the example I offer shows, considerable political tensions between the courts of Europe could be mollified by limiting ceremonies performed in the public sphere and preferring instead the private sphere. Participation by the public meant pre-programmed conflicts of precedence37 as a result of the “incompatibility of divergent status hierarchies”38 and the claimed “plurality of ceremonial claims,” as can be demonstrated in the conflict between the Nuncio Buonvisi and the count of Palatinate-Neuburg. In this regard, there is an important area of research which, as noted by Elisabeth Garms-Cornides in her discussion of the role of apostolic nuncio in ceremonial events, “can by no means yet be considered to have been adequately dealt with in recent historiography.”39

Basic Constants of the Passau Wedding of Emperor Leopold I to Eleonora Magdalena of Palatinate-Neuburg in 1676: Context

The wedding celebrations for Emperor Leopold I and Eleonora Magdalena of Palatinate-Neuburg deviated significantly from the customary. First, the ceremony did not take place in Vienna but was held in Passau on December 14, 1676. Second, the usual per procuram wedding ceremony was dispensed with in advance. Third, the Advent season was not (and is not) traditionally a time for weddings. What motivated the Viennese court to make these changes remains an open question. That they wanted to avoid excessive splendor in view of the ongoing year of mourning was understandable, but why the diplomats residing at the Viennese imperial court and even the papal nuncio, Francesco Buonvisi, who had played a major role in the establishment of the alliance, were explicitly excluded was less so. These conspicuous features appear all the more strange against the background of the public staging of the Habsburg emperor’s two previous weddings.40 While Leopold’s first two brides had experienced all the pomp and splendor of publicly staged weddings, Eleonora Magdalena had to content herself with a poem of praise, Il Giudice di Paride,41 and a “private” staging of her wedding festivities.

Buonvisi did not attend the events as a private individual. As “servants of the pope,” the apostolic nuncios were representatives of the head of the Catholic Church and princes of the Papal States, far superior in rank to a simple duke or count. Furthermore, at the beginning of the reign of Emperor Leopold I, the ceremonial-liturgical role of the nuncio at the imperial court42 was laid down in detail. The nuncios seem already to have consolidated their ceremonial and liturgical positions at the court, so they were able to invoke deftly acquired ancient privileges. The privileges and functions of the papal minister included, for example, access to all gala days and events of festivals, as well as private chamber comedies. At the same time, the nuncio held supreme jurisdiction over court liturgies (baptisms, confirmation, the churching of the empress and weddings) and events at which the queen’s presence was guaranteed (solemn cappella, hereditary coronations, coronations and wedding banquets).43 Other prominent occasions on which the nuncio was at the center of liturgical events were the Maundy Thursday services in the Augustinian church, at which the imperial family and court publicly received communion from the hands of the nuncio, or processions of various kinds, especially processions held on the occasion of Corpus Christi,44 the laying of foundation stones, and the dedication of newly built churches. The numerous cappellae and the public services that the papal representative and the other diplomats had to attend were added to the many occasions on which the nuncio was liturgically active. Francesco Buonvisi was definitely of great importance in the court ceremonies of the Viennese imperial court, but in his daily life as nuncio, he had to grapple with disputes over rank with regard to the German imperial princes,45 and this caused the pope’s representative incessant discomfort precisely because of his special privileges in the liturgy.46 While Buonvisi had been prominently involved in the ceremonies surrounding the death and funeral of Empress Claudia, the ambassadors and thus also the nuncio were excluded from the wedding of the emperor to the Palatine princess in Passau. Clearly, the court preferred a private wedding ceremony,47 since one had to fear conflicts of precedence with the bride’s family. The wedding ceremony was performed by the bishop of Vienna and the archbishop of Gran/Esztergom respectively specifically to avoid ceremonial disputes at the table. The choice of venue was due to the ceremonial problems that arose between the diplomatic representatives of royal powers and the German princes. Instead, the diplomats were assured that they would not be expected to make the long journey. In an analogous way, the concept of courtly privacy was also applied to the two Habsburg weddings in 1678. Much as in the case of the emperor’s wedding to Eleonora of Palatinate-Neuburg (1676), which was held in Passau in a private manner, in 1678 the wedding of Eleonora Maria Josefa, the widowed queen of Poland and half-sister of the emperor to the duke of Lorraine and the wedding of Archduchess Maria Anna Josepha to the count of Palatinate-Neuburg, John William, were both held in Wiener Neustadt. Furthermore, both were considered private to avoid conflicts of precedence. Nevertheless, Buonvisi and his Venetian colleague paid a courtesy visit to the emperor’s sister Eleonora, the widow of the Polish king, incognito, but not to her husband, the duke of Lorraine; this happens analogously also in the case of Eleonora’s younger sister, Maria Anna. It can thus be stated that the Passau wedding can be regarded as a prime example of the introduction of courtly privacy and the concept of incognito, which also had its effects on subsequent weddings at the imperial court.48

After Emperor Leopold decided on October 4, 1676 to marry Princess Eleonora Magdalena Theresia,49 the daughter of Count Palatine Philip William,50 the following became quite clear: fertility and health were the most important considerations in a princely marriage, as well as the propagation of the Catholic faith (which was not guaranteed despite the announced conversion of the Danish princess) and the securing of the dynasty through offspring.51 In fact, the 23-year-old Catholic Neuburg princess had a head start over all her competitors because of her mother’s many children, which led to the conclusion, whether justified or not, that she too would prove fertile. After the choice was made, Rome congratulated the emperor on decision.52 The questions of the “provedimenti necessarii” were still unresolved, above all the date of the wedding festivities, which at that time were to be held before the first Advent, and the place for the wedding, which was thought to be around Linz.53 As of October 18, there was still no talk of possible conflicts or, better, disputes over precedence.54 After the election of the future empress, correspondence between Rome and Vienna between October 18 and December 14 revolved around the celebration of the wedding and the avoidance of precedence disputes with Count Philip William of Palatinate-Neuburg. In a total of twelve letters and 5 notifications (avvisi), matters between Rome and Vienna were clarified.55

The Incognito Project of the Papal Diplomat Buonvisi

After Buonvisi officially communicated the emperor’s official announcement regarding his future empress in his letter to the secretary of state on October 18, Buonvisi wrote a ciphered letter to Alderano Cybo on October 25, 1676. In this ciphered letter the apostolic nuncio presented a project revolving around the possible wedding festivities in Passau. He reflected on one point in particular: the session disputes at the table between the envoys and Count Philip William of Palatinate-Neuburg. Were the wedding to be held in Linz, the ambassadors of the princes would follow the imperial court and subsequently claim to be admitted to his table on the first day, as had been the case at the weddings of the last two empresses. This would create a conflict between the representatives and the father of the bride, as they would not agree on precedence at the table and elsewhere. Buonvisi therefore proposed the following solution to the Court Chancellor Johann Paul Hocher56 (which Buonvisi reported to Rome): Buonvisi thought of going to Linz at the beginning of December and then going “almost incognito” (portarsi quasi incognito) to Passau to visit the Madonna on her feast day. Subsequently, the sposalizio by Buonvisi should then take place privately (“per farvi privatemente lo sposalizio”). Under the excuse of an indisposition, Buonvisi then intended to leave immediately without taking part in the festivities after the blessing of the marriage in order to avoid disputes over the ceremony. For the secular envoys in general, the “lontananza del luogo, e dalla forma dell’andarvi, di dire a gl’Ambasciatori, che non lo seguitino”57 was considered a decorative, not valid argument (pretesto). Thus, the diplomats were not to be expected to make the arduous journey and the wedding was to take place in a “private form.” In this way, conflicts of precedence between the envoys and the count of Palatinate-Neuburg were to be circumvented.

Unlike his “colleghi secolari,” who somewhat regretted being prevented from attending the solemn occasion, the apostolic nuncio could not simply accept his absence: “ma io vi considero il pregiudizio della Nunziatura, se sotto qualsivoglia pretesto lo sposalizio si haverà da fare, o dal Vescovo di Passavia, o da altri.”58 Buonvisi considers exclusion from the celebration of the wedding or the wedding ceremony made private as damaging to the Apostolic Nunciature, especially if the wedding were to be performed under any pretext by the archbishop of Passau or by others. Buonvisi was concerned with safeguarding his prerogative (“il mio ius”) and his function of celebrating the sposalizio through the apostolic nuncio (“per conservare il possesso di fare lo sposalizio”). On the other hand, Buonvisi considered it very difficult to be present at the imperial table due to the disputes with the count. For this reason, Buonvisi proposed the following solution to Court Chancellor Hocher:

I did not want to disturb Your Majesty’s satisfaction, nor alter the enjoyment that you will have with your relatives, but that at the same time I would like to conserve my privilege, and that I could offer Your Majesty to take me incognito to the place of the wedding, I thought I could offer to take myself to the church at the time of the function, and leave immediately afterwards, but as I was alone without the others, it seemed to me that I could, without prejudice to our prerogatives, refrain from appearing at the other functions, especially as His Majesty wanted to hold them in an almost incognito form.59

Buonvisi proposed the idea of going incognito60 to the emperor at this point as the necessary solution. He thus believed that “aggiustamento” (agreement, rectification) could be reached by dissimulation rather than by approval (“dissimulando, che approvando”). Due to the positions Philip William of Palatinate-Neuburg and Charles V of Lorraine came to occupy within the hierarchy of rank and title in Europe, they were no longer willing to grant the apostolic nuncio the ceremonial precedence without objection from 1676 onwards. For Buonvisi, this ultimately meant coexistence, but without consent (“convivendo, e non consentendo”).61

Buonvisi therefore suggested that he might like to travel to Passau incognito and leave again after the marriage had been solemnized. Thus, according to Buonvisi, the nuncio’s ius for the sposalizio would be preserved, and the emperor would be able to celebrate his wedding at the imperial table with joy and satisfaction without fear of a conflict of precedence. 62 Hocher liked Buonvisi’s proposal and wanted to report it to the emperor.63 Buonvisi’s incognito project was invented as a ceremonial mode, according to Rohr, “to avoid many a precedence dispute’ (“zu Vermeidung mancherley Praecedenz-Streitigkeiten”).64 It was based on a separation of the person from his ceremonial function and created spaces for individual arrangements, which could be instrumentalized, especially by ruling monarchs, to avoid possible political complications specific to the situation. Once again, the act of going incognito opened a way out. In the incognito mode, it was possible to escape the invariable order of a ceremony, which ultimately created an architectural scenery of movable and immovable backdrops.

Once Buonvisi had been informed on October 25 about the location of the celebration,65 he revised his submitted proposal on the same day. Since it was still unclear whether Buonvisi would celebrate the sposalizio and whether the envoys would attend the wedding, Buonvisi wanted to go to the court chancellor the next day, i.e. October 26, 1676, and find out more about “che cosa hanno risoluta in questa materia” and whether “se spediranno il corriero per domandare la dispensa.”66 It is interesting that the avviso announces the form of the wedding in such an impressive way: “[…] e si crede che sarà in forma molto privata.” Previously, the same avviso alluded already to the private nature of the ceremony in a simpler form: “[…] et ivi farà privatamente le nozze.”67 There is thus an increase in the emphasis on privacy in the celebration in Passau from “privatamente” to “molto private” due to the presence of new information.

On October 27, Buonvisi sent a letter by express post to Rome requesting a quick reply to the letters he had already sent (which he presented again as duplicates)68 and asking for instructions on the funzione dello sposalizio. Since, as Buonvisi informed Cybo, Hocher had not yet been able to give him an answer as to who should hold it, he concluded “che habbino gran difficultà a consentire alla mia proposizione.” Buonvisi therefore submitted a modified proposal to Cybo, which he communicated to him in his letter of October 27:

and perhaps it will be better for me to remain in Vienna with all the others, because it would be better not to go to Passau if not incognito, since some people might interpret that I have actually yielded to the pretended precedence; with all this I thought it best to do that reason for not yielding at all to my jurisdiction, since it is true that they will at least tell me that they are not prejudiced by this act.69

Buonvisi thus considered it better to remain in Vienna with the other envoys during the wedding celebration. If the apostolic nuncio were to go to Passau, this could only be done if he traveled incognito. It might be interpreted by “some” (alcuni) that Buonvisi had indeed yielded to his “alleged” precedence (alle pretese precedenze). Buonvisi did not give up “affatto” his ius, and so he asked for instructions.

While Buonvisi was still waiting for a reply to his letters of October 25 and 27, he reported new events to Rome on November 1.70 Between October 27 and November 1, Hocher came to Buonvisi to inform him of the emperor’s decision: “Sua Maestà gradiva molto la mia moderazione, ma che haverebbe havuto più proprio sarebbe il ritrovarsi a Lintz, al ritorno di Sua Maestà.”71 Emperor Leopold I’s order was unmistakable: Buonvisi should not celebrate the wedding and neither should he undertake the journey to Passau, not even incognito. The emperor considered it “more appropriate” for Buonvisi to wait in Linz for his return.

How did Buonvisi deal with this problem? In a case of conflict or precedence disputes, one could either not appear at all or go to Passau incognito. The emperor, however, had expressed his explicit objection to the latter. The idea of traveling incognito was ultimately discarded in order to prevent a possible prejudicial effect and to avoid, as it were, a ritualization of the conflicts through the practice of traveling incognito. If one did not want it to come to that, the only way was an explicit (public/private) protest against the “invented tradition” adopted in connection with the privately held wedding ceremony, or one demanded a reversal in written form. As a rule, Buonvisi had his reservation of rights explicitly specified and affirmed in the declaration in question in order to prevent any precedent-setting effect. 72

Buonvisi did not insist further on his incognito project, mainly because he had not yet received any instructions from Rome. Instead, he demanded from the court chancellor or Emperor Leopold “che si preservasse la prerogativa della Nunziatura, con qualche dichiarazione in scritto, che esprimesse toccare questa funzione al Nunzio, ma essersi intermessa senza pregiudicare, solo perché Sua Maestà ha desiderato di far la funzione privatamente, e senza l’intervento dei publici rappresentanti.”73

Buonvisi therefore demanded that his liturgical privileges as apostolic nuncio be set down in writing, which he wanted to see safeguarded.74 Only in this case should his legal claim be suspended, because the emperor wanted to hold the function privately and without interference from public representatives. For Buonvisi, the documentation of this specific case and the affirmation in writing of his ius praecedentiae were decisive. Without this, the nunciature remained prejudiced. But due to the circumstances, the nuncio could not contradict the emperor without outraging him and without coming into conflict with the count of Palatinate-Neuburg. Buonvisi expressed his hope to the pope “that our Lord will approve of the reasons for having recalled the nunciature without then insisting on adhering to them, using the excuse that the wedding has to be totally private.”75 The question of the nuncio’s privileges was thus closely intertwined with the problems of precedence regarding German princes. Hocher then promised to convey the demand to the emperor and to present this declaration to him as righteous (“di rappresentarli per giusta questa dichiarazione”). The codification of Buonvisi’s ius gained a new dimension of public recognition and survived for a comparatively long time. If he tolerated an infringement on his right, he could eventually lose this privilege.76 As for Buonvisi’s request to be allowed to travel to Linz, the nuncio refused it. He considered this an escape from the dispute over precedence with the count of Palatinate-Neuburg (“mostrare di haver sfuggito la concorrenza”).

The Concept of “Private” in the Nunciature Correspondence

In the discussion below, I offer a detailed explanation of the meanings of the category of privacy. In Italian, the central term used by Buonvisi to designate the private is privato, in contrast to the category of the public (publico). In Italian, the adjective privato and the adverb privatamente are used primarily to characterize non-official, non-public places, persons, and acts. The reader comes across the term in correspondence mainly in adjectival form. In Buonvisi, one can observe two forms of use of the lexeme “privat.” Thus, we find the phrases such as “in forma privata/da esser totalmente privato” where the term is used as an adjective, or other sentences with “privatamente” as an adverb. In the difference between the public and the private, however, the imperial court valorized the concept of the private ceremonial sphere of action around the wedding ceremony. This instrumentalization of the private sphere was reported by the papal representative in partibus to the Cardinal Secretary of the State Alderano Cybo. He consistently alludes to the sphere of the “private” or the private form of the event. The concepts of rights form a frame of reference, and the associated field of words includes ius, prerogativa, privilegio, and giusto. Buonvisi attributes more influence to this frame of reference around his prerogatives than to any sense of regret over not being allowed to perform the liturgical celebration of the wedding in private. This makes it clear that an isolated consideration of the categories of public and private in the correspondence is not possible due to their discursive embedding. The private is bound to the public and vice versa, even if one or the other lexeme has not been explicitly nominated. This sheds light on the relationship between the public and private spheres of the wedding ceremony, which are always more or less clearly related to each other or reconciled and conceptually related.

On November 7, 1676, Pope Innocent XI and Alderano Cybo respectively replied to the Viennese nuncio via priority dispatch to his letters of 25 and 27 October 1676. The secretariat of the state gave Buonvisi the longed-for instructions concerning the ius of the nunciature and the function of the sposalizio:

Your Holiness, however, judges it right and proper that you should disengage yourself from the matter, as you yourself seem to have thought; since the wedding being celebrated privately, in a remote place, and far from the eyes of the ministers of the princes, it seems that no harm can be done to the dignity and prerogatives of the apostolic nuncio. [...] Nevertheless, for the greater caution of the future, Your Illustrious Lordship may leave a note in the registers of this Chancery of the reason why you have not been able to exercise this function this time, so that it may not be held up as an example in cases where [this function] may be exercised by the apostolic nuncio.77

Thus, Rome assured the papal representative residing in Vienna that with the wedding ceremony taking place privately in Passau there was no violation of the dignity (dignità) and prerogatives (prerogative) of the apostolic nuncio. As a matter of prudence, Buonvisi should describe the case in the registers of the chancery and explain why he was not in a position to exercise this funzione dello sposalizio in this specific case.78 Rome also assured the nuncio that the function of the sposalizio “without doubt” (indubitatamente) fell to the Viennese nuncio and to no one else.79 This concluded the case for Rome. In addition to the instructions, the extraordinary courier consignment contained the dispensation granted by Pope Innocent XI on account of consanguinity in the third degree, which was required by canon law for the marriage of Emperor Leopold to Eleonora,80 and at the same time the marriage license for the bishop of Passau.81 Leopold I had requested both on October 27, 1676.82 The dispensation and license reached Nuncio Buonvisi in Vienna on November 22, 1676, and one day later, on November 23, 1676, the emperor set off from Vienna to Passau.83

Avoidance as a Diplomatic Solution to Conflicts of Precedence

Francesco Buonvisi, reassured of the correctness of his actions by Rome, justified himself once more to make clear the aim of his whole undertaking:

my purpose was only to show that I was responsible for this function, and that I was anxious to serve His Majesty in any way, but in the extreme, I thought it better to avoid it, and I was only determined to procure a declaration that would preserve the reasons for the Nunciature, and perhaps I would have obtained it by now, if Hocher had not fallen ill; However, I will not fail to procure it on the return of Your Majesty, and if I do not obtain it, I will put in the Registers of the Chancery a separate report of the causes for which you omitted to go, so that the memory of it may remain, in order to protect us from the injuries in the future, as I am commanded by Your Eminence.84

“Avoidance” (lo sfuggire) and “excuse” (ammettendo la scusa) were two sides of the same coin in this process of avoiding disputes over precedence in ceremony. Buonvisi considered lo sfuggire more appropriate, while the imperial court advanced the scusa of not wanting the numerous envoys represented at the imperial court to make the long journey to Passau. It was obvious that the emperor’s third marriage was deliberately moved to Passau to spare the emperor unpleasant disputes over matters of ceremony. This in order to ensure that his new relatives would not suffer any insulting treatment at the hands of the diplomatic representatives at the imperial court during the ceremonial dinner where the newly wed emperor, his new wife and her parents (only counts) were supposed to sit at the same table as the diverse high ranking ambassadors,

…so that either the one or the other would have to leave the table, and the ambassadors (when they had moved from Vienna, and had not taken a seat at the table) would have been disgusted. In order to avoid such disconcert, it was arranged that the emperor let the ambassadors know that he was going to Passau to celebrate his wedding and that he did not wish the ambassadors to be inconvenienced, but to remain in Vienna, where he would shortly return with his bride. The ambassadors were indeed displeased with this request, but considering that it could not be otherwise, they concurred in His Majestys pleasure.85

The conflict therefore arose not only in the religious celebration of the wedding but also in the subsequent order of sitting at the table. In order to preserve the positions of the count and the envoys and to avoid conflicts, all the diplomats were, so to speak, disinvited. But in addition to that, in the register of graces in the archive of the Vienna Nunciature during Buonvisi’s term of office, there is no note of the substitution of the blessing of the marriage between Emperor Leopold I and Eleonora Magdalena of Palatinate-Neuburg with the archbishop and prince-bishop of Passau.86 This is probably because the wedding was celebrated “privately” in Passau and, as Cybo himself wrote to Buonvisi, the ius was not affected.87 The affirmation of the ius and prerogatives of the Apostolic Nunciature was a consequence in the avoidance of a precedent and the avoidance of a scandal in Europe over matters of ceremony and thus politics. The nuncio’s prerogatives had not changed since Ferdinand II’s accession to power.

Conclusions

The emperor’s wedding in Passau 1676 was only the beginning of further disputes over ceremony that sharpened the papal representative’s sensitivity to potential threats to his ceremonial position. Thus, privacy and participating incognito in events became important forms of instrumentalization and offered a way to avoid conflicts over precedence in ceremony at the early modern imperial court. On the one hand, the categories should not be understood as referring to retreat from the public eye. Ceremony, rather, was given a performative flexibility and adaptability. On the other hand, strict adherence to established tradition was observable at the imperial court. Leopold I was not free in his definition of ceremonial behavior. Rather, he had to orchestrate his acts on the basis of ceremonial practices in use at other European courts. These imperial responses showed that in matters of ceremony, the emperor always decided according to custom, demonstrating a conservative approach to ceremonial norms, especially towards the numerous envoys represented at the imperial court. This in turn suggests that incognito participation and privacy offered a way out of the dilemma and were seen as suitable means to avoid conflicts around ceremonial performances at the imperial court. However, if the ceremonial really “does what it depicts,”88 then incognito participation and privacy in the Theatrum ceremoniale constituted elements that were to be performed on stage, whereas the true reasons remained concealed behind the scenes.

Table 1. Rhythm of communication between Francesco Buonvisi and Alderano Cybo (October 17 to December 20, 1676)

Archival Sources

Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (AAV)

Segreteria di Stato (Segr. Stato), Germania 36, 195, 196, 198, 208

Archivio della Nunziatura di Vienna (Arch. Nunz. Vienna) 29, 73, 500

Archivio di Stato di Lucca (ASL)

Archivio Buonvisi II/11; II/30

Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien (HHStA)

Obersthofmeisteramt, Zeremonielprotokolle (OMeAZA-Protokoll) 3

Obersthofmeisteramt, Ältere Zeremonialakten (OMeA ÄZA) 10, 11

Urkundenreihen, Habsburg-Lothringische Familienurkunden (UR FUK) 1757

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Changes in the Diplomatic Measures of the Russian Empire in the Balkans after the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji (1774)

Katalin Schrek
University of Debrecen
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 2  (2023):3–36 DOI 10.38145/2023.2.310

The establishment of permanent embassies and the creation of the necessary political and infrastructural background became a decisive segment in the development of European diplomacy from the Peace of Westphalia to the Napoleonic Wars. The steps taken by the government in St. Petersburg with the creation of permanent embassies in the leading European courts were in line with the abovementioned trend, but while this kind of “catching up” process gradually moved towards Central and Western Europe, Russia applied a completely different set of conditions to maintain diplomatic relations in the case of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman diplomacy operated as a “one-sided diplomatic relation”: there were permanent Russian envoys at the Constantinople court, but no representatives were delegated by the Porte to St. Petersburg. Russia had to adapt to this special situation in the eighteenth century. This closed system was broken by the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, which closed the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 and included a clause according to which Russia had the right to establish consulates in the Ottoman Empire and thus in the Balkans, a key area.
The other key element of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji was the right of the reigning Russian tsar to be the protector of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, which was also fixed in this agreement. The “authority” acquired at this time was not unprecedented, as the Porte had acceded to such requests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through capitulations with other states (such as France, Austria, or the Venetian Republic), thus establishing the “protégé” system. At the same time, the Russian government took the protection of Christians under the jurisdiction of the Porte to a new level and made it an integral part of its foreign policy. In my study, I examine how the Russian Empire applied the results of the Peace of Kuchuk Kainardji to diplomatic advocacy in the Balkans.

Keywords: Russian diplomacy, Ottoman Empire, eighteenth century, Balkan relations, Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, diplomatic service

In the history of Russian diplomacy, the eighteenth century brought several new elements which fundamentally determined the way in which the state operated in the field of foreign relations. European diplomatic trends served as a model for the development of Russia’s foreign missions and, perhaps more importantly, its institutional system. In this, as in so many other things, the reign of Peter the Great was the starting point, with the adoption of Western (i.e. European) customs, rules of sending and receiving ambassadors,1 protocols, and the abolition (or, more precisely, the transformation) of the prikaz system, which created a system of colleges within which foreign affairs functioned as a separate unit. Building up the institutional system, developing diplomatic practice in line with international trends, organizing the apparatus, and the coordination of all these segments was a difficult and complex process. As part of the latter, the Russian government also paid attention to building up its foreign representations. After the Peace of Westphalia (1648), it became a priority for the European states to maintain constant communication with one another, obtain information more efficiently and monitor the internal and external activities of other (usually rival) countries, which also served to keep one another mutually under control.2 The most effective way to do this was to establish permanent embassies, a process in which the Russian Empire was also involved, although at a somewhat slower pace. The measures adopted by the government in St. Petersburg to establish permanent embassies in the leading European courts were in line with the abovementioned policy. One of the first steps taken by Russia was to establish diplomatic connections with the courts of Central and Western Europe through its envoys delegated to London, Paris, and Vienna,3 though the geopolitical interests of the Russian Empire gradually shifted in the eighteenth century towards the eastern and southeastern regions of the continent.

The Balkan Peninsula, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea region occupied a special place in Russian foreign political thinking, and several foreign policy concepts were formulated which made these territories (all of which were under the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Empire) a specific target of Russian expansion and influence gaining. These ambitions, motivated by economic and strategic considerations, placed the official relations with the Porte on a pedestal, together with the establishment and, if necessary, the strengthening of Russian ties with the Balkan peoples. But establishing a Russian diplomatic presence on the peninsula was far from easy. The process was slowed down (and heavily burdened) by a series of conflicts between St. Petersburg and Constantinople which flared up at times in the Russo-Turkish wars of the eighteenth century (1710–1711, 1736–1739, 1768–1774, and 1788–1792) and the peculiar and in many respects closed foreign political system that characterized the Ottoman Empire. St. Petersburg’s efforts to build official relations with the Balkan provinces and the strategies adopted and tools used in the pursuit of this aim must be analyzed and interpreted in this context. Russia delegated envoys to the Ottoman capital as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the Ottomans had no official representatives in Russia until 1857.4

The question of Russian foreign policy and Russia’s great power status is a popular topic among Hungarian and international historians of Russian studies, and the process of Russia’s transformation into an empire has been studied from many perspectives in recent decades. Russian diplomacy, territorial expansion, and the aspiration to gain influence over specific regions (including the Balkans) are evident components of the works focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Almost without exception, every work (whether at the level of mention or deeper analysis) devotes attention to the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, which is considered a starting point in the breakdown of parity between Russia and the Porte and also in the expansion of Russia’s regional influence (whether in the Balkans or the Caucasus). The treaty signed on July 21, 1774 between Russia and the Porte after the war of 1768–1774 was literally a triumph of Russian diplomacy. The negotiations were led by Pyotr Alexandrovich Rumyantsev, and it took almost two years from the armistice for Russia and the Porte to reach a final agreement.5 The historiographical overview of the subject is a difficult task due to its complexity, since the topic of the peace itself and Russia’s presence in the Balkans is mostly treated as one comprehensive thread, i.e. in the study of the history of the Eastern Question in general. In order to bypass this problem, I provide a narrow interpretation of the most significant literature directly related to the subject of this paper chronologically, thematically, and in terms of theoretical methodology.

One of the main directions of research concerning the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji is the traditional political history approach, which for decades has dominated the work of historians on the subject. Part of this is essentially the traditional historiographical approach, based on the thorough processing of archival sources, in which the representatives of Russian historiography have been at the forefront. The monograph by E. I. Druzhinina can be considered a basic work, as well as the works of diplomatic historians (including I. S. Dostyan, G. L. Arsh, V. N. Vinogradov, and V. V. Degoev) that focus on issues less partial than the former, dealing rather with the Eastern Question and the Balkans at the turn of the century and during the first half of the nineteenth century.6 Among the works with new perspectives on Russia’s international relations, in addition to N. S. Kinyapina’s Russia’s foreign policy in the first half of the 19th century,7 I would also like to highlight О. V. Orlik’s monographs, in which Orlik examines regional aspects of Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth century.8 Most of these works do not deal specifically with the subject or the period covered here, but they typically present the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji as an important of reference point.

In Hungary, research on the historical background of the Eastern Question in the eighteenth century has been carried out by Erzsébet Bodnár, who in her monograph and numerous studies addresses the earliest issues of the Eastern Question (in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century). She has devoted particular attention to the study of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji and the Turkish straits.9

One finds the same trend in the Western historiography, which tends to interpret the 1774 treaty and Russia’s Balkan expansion in a broader perspective, such as the context of great power rivalries (Anglo-Russian competition or the Crimean War for instance)10, rather than in terms of practical diplomacy or the tools of diplomacy. The main proponent of the geopolitical approach is John P. LeDonne, who has analyzed Russia’s role as an international political factor, including economic and military aspects.11 In some cases, the geopolitical perspective is combined with an economic approach, as in the publications of Vernon Puryear, and detailed diplomatic histories have also been published telling the story of an individual or a diplomatic mission.12

In addition, studies focusing on the impact of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji have tended to focus on the ideological and political background of the Orthodoxy and the Russian protectorate and its manifestations in a particular area. These include Viktor Taki’s analysis of the Russian protectorate as a “soft power” and Endre Sashalmi’s discussion of the religious roots and political culture of Russian politics in the Balkans, highlighting the importance of the peace that brought the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 to an end.13

As seen from the above, the historical literature on the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji and the subsequent period tends to focus on the territorial achievements and the rights acquired or the economic aspects, but no attention is paid to the specific changes that took place within practical diplomacy. At this point, it is important to make clear the main aspects and objectives of my inquiry. In any analysis and interpretation of large-scale political processes, it is important to map and present the less spectacular methods that are used on lower levels of diplomacy, such as the decade-long practice of establishing diplomatic representation and the instruments associated with it.

This, in my opinion, is the most important achievement of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji: the gradual transformation of the tools and methods used in Russian diplomacy until its emergence at the level of practical diplomacy, which would create the preconditions for Russian diplomatic representation in the Balkan provinces under Ottoman rule (which previously had not been possible).

I therefore do not aim in this essay to reassess the diplomatic history or geopolitical background of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji. My main objective is to define and interpret, in the context of the new foreign policy perspectives offered by the peace treaty, the new methods and instruments used by Russian foreign policy in the Balkans, such as the diplomatic representation, the establishment of consulates, and the use of the protégé system. Furthermore, I present the mechanisms that were directly applied in everyday diplomatic practice.

The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji14 was significant for a number of reasons, but from the perspective of the discussion here, it was important because it offered an opportunity to change the diplomatic toolbox, and in the end, the Russian court took advantage of this opportunity. From a diplomatic point of view, in addition to providing Russia with a number of political advantages, the peace was a milestone in establishing formal (official) relations with the Balkan provinces and in raising diplomatic ties with the Ottoman Porte to a new level. The peace treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji resulted in significant achievements for Russia in three fields: 1) territorial; 2) economic; 3) political-diplomatic-cultural. In terms of territorial gains, Russia extended its borders to the Bug/Dnieper River.15 It finally acquired the fortress of Azov and strengthened its position in the North Caucasus. However, the second and third areas represented the real change in diplomatic terms, which were, to some extent, related to each other. A constant and key issue in the Russian concept of foreign policy was the economic consideration of more active involvement in maritime trade and thus in trade all over Europe, which would put the Eastern European state in a genuinely competitive position economically. The economic provisions of the treaty, which were advantageous for Russia and essentially opened the way for unrestricted Russian commercial shipping on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, were closely linked to the establishment of consulates and the development of a network of Russian agents.

As noted above, the peace of 1774 opened up a rather closed Ottoman system from a diplomatic point of view, and this allowed Russia to make three important advances. The first of these advances was the establishment, in accordance with Article 5, of a permanent embassy in the Ottoman capital. Diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire were different from the traditional European model, and even in the eighteenth century, they were largely unilateral. This did not mean, of course, that the Porte did not maintain diplomatic relations with other states, but the difference can be grasped in the method according to which envoys were sent. The government of the Sultan received the representatives of other countries, as had been the case in previous periods, but the Porte did not delegate permanent envoys even to the main European courts. Hence, much of the mutual communication was conducted through the foreign envoys stationed in Constantinople.16 Representation in Constantinople had long been a priority for Russia, as is evidenced by the fact that, from Pyotr Tolstoi’s mission as resident ambassador in 1702 onwards, Russian representatives came to the Ottoman capital quite frequently, but they came as part of temporary missions and not as officials of permanent embassies with an uninterrupted presence. Sometimes there was a gap of several years before a new Russian envoy was sent, and their titles varied widely (resident, envoy, charge d’affaire).17 This was the period when Russian diplomacy and foreign affairs began to professionalize on the basis of European standards.18 Thus, the peace treaty confirmed something that had essentially been in existence for decades, and the significance of the relevant article lies rather in the fact that the provision precisely defines the rank of the Russian representative in Constantinople. In this respect, Russian diplomacy took a serious step forward, because from the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji onwards, the Russian government was represented at the Sublime Porte by an envoy who was “ranked second”:

the Imperial Court of Russia will always have with the Sublime Porte a Minister of the second order, that is to say an Envoy or a Minister Plenipotentiary, and the Sublime Porte will have for his character all the consideration and all the attentions that it has for the Ministers of the most distinguished Powers (…).19

It was an important condition that the Russian envoy would follow the Austrian imperial envoy in the diplomatic ranking.20 This was linked to the fact that, under the same treaty, the Sultan recognized the Russian tsar as a padishah,21 and the Russian envoy was therefore to be treated with the utmost respect.22 The treaty was also clear on diplomatic protocol, and it regulated what was to be done if the Russian diplomat and the imperial envoy did not hold the same rank. In this case, “ if this Minister of the Emperor has a different one, that is to say higher or lower, the minister or envoy of Russia will walk (…) after the ambassador of Holland, or, in his absence, after the ambassador of Venice.”23

1774 was a turning point, but not only for Russian diplomacy. On the Ottoman side, it was also a stimulus for change in diplomacy, although this change was somewhat delayed. It was precisely this Russo-Turkish confrontation, i.e. the constant geopolitical threat from the tsarist court, that gave the incentive for the idea that the diplomatic behavior of the Porte had to change, and Constantinople had to find lasting allies to counter Russia.24

At the same time, alongside the change in foreign political strategy, there were also tangible, almost modern elements of this shift: the establishment of the first permanent embassies (usually in exceptional cases and in the capitals of exceptionally friendly countries, for example London, Berlin, and Paris25) and the associated restructuring of the internal Ottoman administrative system.26

The second important advance for Russia in the field of diplomatic representation was found in provision 2), according to which the Russian envoy could represent Moldavia and Wallachia (Article 12, point 10) at the Porte, which in practice meant that after 1774, the Russian envoy in Constantinople could officially represent the affairs of the Danubian Principalities in the negotiations with the Ottoman government.27 This provision, in turn, created a kind of dependency between the Eastern Balkan provinces and Russia. Previously, the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia had had their own envoys in Constantinople, the so-called capu-kihayas, who were removed from their positions during the war. Pending the peace negotiations, Russia paid attention to this case and agreed with the Porte in the same passage of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji to reinstate the representatives of the hospodars.28 This measure was provided for in point 9 of the same article of the treaty, which also indicates that the two issues (the representation of the affairs of the Danubian Principalities and the reinstatement of the provincial delegates) were treated by Russian diplomacy as an integrated whole. This custom continued, and the only change was the addition of Russian diplomatic representation in Constantinople.

And finally, the third significant advance for Russia was the newly acquired right to establish consulates in the Ottoman Empire (Article 11) and thus in the Balkan Peninsula, which was of particular importance to the government of St. Petersburg and which was an important milestone in the establishment of formal (official) diplomatic relations with the Balkan provinces. The provision reads as follows:

And as it is in every respect indispensable to establish consuls and vice-consuls in all places where the Russian Empire deems them necessary, they shall be regarded and respected in the same way as other consuls of friendly powers; these consuls and vice-consuls shall be allowed to retain dragomans by the name of Beratlı, that is to say, by granting them imperial patents, and by granting them the same privileges as other consuls in the service of England, France, and other nations.29

This led to the establishment of consulates not only in the Balkans but also in the Danubian Principalities (Bucharest and Iaşi) and later on the Greek mainland and islands (Athens, Patras, and Thessaloniki), in the Belgrade Pashalik (Belgrade), in Montenegro (Kotor), and in several cities in the Middle East.30 The development of the Russian consular system in the Ottoman Empire, which meant the creation of a continuous Russian diplomatic presence in the Balkans, was by no means a rapid process, but rather a systematic one, which took roughly 20 to 30 years for the Russian foreign service, which gradually building this system up along the lines of its original objectives, but always in accordance with the political situation. This reflected in the fact that the first Russian consul started his work in the Danubian Principalities, which was the most important Balkan region for Russia at the time, after the Porte had affirmed Russia’s right in this respect in an auxiliary treaty, in addition to the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji.31

The first Russian diplomat to arrive in this capacity was Sergei L. Lashkov, who served as consul in Bucharest between 1780 and 1782.32 Lashkov had previous diplomatic experience in Constantinople. He presumably learned the diplomatic service here and was chosen as the first Russian consul to the Danube Principalities on the basis of his experience in the Ottoman Empire.33 After 1774, the Dniester River became the newly acquired natural border, and the Russian Empire became the immediate neighbor of the Moldavian Principality. From a geopolitical point of view, this implied a strong Russian presence. The acquired territory was of great importance for Russia’s southwestern border defense, especially because of the frontier nature of the region.34 The term frontier needs to be explained, as the legal status of the Danubian Principalities was completely settled during the period under study, and they were not part of the territories the status of which (i.e. to what state did they belong) was the subject of dispute. On the other hand, frontier areas are generally understood to be territories that act as intermediate areas or transitional zones,35 which a neighboring state is unable to subordinate fully or integrate into its own territory.36 But this was not, essentially, the case with the Danubian Principalities, as they were parts of the Ottoman Empire (as tributary states with their own internal policies), and there was no dispute between the Porte and Russia on this point. At the same time, the region met two criteria that nevertheless gave the Eastern Balkan principalities a kind of frontier character for Russia. The first of these two criteria was the cultural overlap and the second was the fact that Moldavia and Wallachia were usually used as military staging areas in Russo-Turkish conflicts. Thus, in essence, Russia’s southern border zones or frontier zones included the Danubian Principalities37 as well, and this geopolitical role also enhanced the diplomatic importance of Moldavia and Wallachia.

The Russian consulate was very effective through its many connections, but soon other states also began to show interest in the region.38 In addition to Bucharest, a consulate was opened in Iaşi, followed by diplomatic missions to the Greek territories, with Russian consulates being established in Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and the Aegean islands.39 This also shows that, regarding the Balkans, the Greek region was given high priority, alongside the Danubian Principalities. In contrast to Russian-Greek relations, Russian-Bulgarian connections remained stagnant in the period after 1774.

The large Greek and Slavic populations that had settled in Russia after the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774 and the already existing Russo-Greek connections played a decisive role. One of the most important bridgeheads of the St. Petersburg government in this area was the consulate in Thessaloniki, founded in 1785, which had a special role as one of the paramount ports in the Eastern Mediterranean area, which also served as an information-distribution center. Local connections and transit traffic provided valuable economic and military information for the Russian consuls, who forwarded this information in their reports to the relevant department of the College of Foreign Affairs.40 In addition, the consulate helped the Russian government strengthen the ties to the Orthodox through cooperation with the Greek community, which also ensuring that Christians could make pilgrimages to Mount Athos.41 Among the examples of effective consular activity in the region is the career of Angelo Mustoxidi, who was based in Thessaloniki for several decades, but Sergei Bogdanov42 in the Ionian Islands and Ioannis N. Vlassopoulos, who became consul in Preveza in 1804, were also prominent figures of the Russian diplomatic presence.43 The functioning of the consulates, however, depended heavily on the political conditions in the region. In peacetime and in times of conflict, the role of the consulates was more appreciated, but there are also examples of the diplomatic presence being terminated due to tensions between the Sublime Porte and Russia or because of a war, for instance in 1821.44

Consuls in the Russian service were mostly of Greek descent, sometimes with Phanariot roots. The Phanariotes, who were an influential elite, assisted the Russian government throughout the Balkans, but the Danubian Principalities and Greece were the main areas of cooperation. The Phanariotes had a special position within the Ottoman Empire. This social group of Greek origin, which had extensive international connections and generally excellent language skills, was characterized by a kind of duality. While they were strongly linked to the Ottoman political and administrative system, in which they played leading roles (for example in the leadership of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia),45 they also developed deep ties with Russian political and cultural circles, thus predestinating the Orthodox-Russian orientation of the Greek elite, which the St. Petersburg cabinet sought to turn to its advantage.46 In addition, the Russian government also had ambitious plans to create an independent Greek state. The concept of Catherine the Great and Chancellor Bezborodko was based on the revival of the Byzantine Empire. This would have created a geopolitical entity in the eastern Mediterranean that would have been committed to Russia and could have provided new support for the Russian Empire. The draft also envisaged the partition of the Balkans, with Austria receiving parts of the western Balkans and Russia acquiring the eastern provinces of the peninsula.47

Another important means of cooperation with the Greeks was their involvement in Russian economic activity. In addition to the obvious diplomatic representation of Russia, the consular posts established in the Greek territories were given commercial tasks as well. They were given the task of exploring and observing local social, political, and, last but not least, economic conditions.48 The opening of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles to Russian commercial shipping created new perspectives in the cooperation with the Greeks, who were experienced in Levantine trade and commerce. The use of the straits gave Russia a strategic advantage, as the Sublime Porte did not guarantee the freedom of navigation on the straits for all states. It was only a prerogative of the leading European powers (i.e. France and Great Britain). Through capitulations, countries with a permit of passage could allow merchants belonging to other nations to sail under their flags. This was the typical case in the Russian-Greek relationship, as the economic advantages that Russia had gained could be used in a spirit of mutual cooperation. It was a tool in the hands of Russian diplomacy that provided St. Petersburg a stable backdrop to shape the volume of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia considered the rights set out in article 11 of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji as obvious, but as a result of negotiations with the Porte, it requested the confirmation of these rights in two conventions over the years. The first such document was the Treaty of Aynalıkavak in 1779, which guaranteed free passage on the Black Sea and through the straits.49 The other was a Russian-Turkish trade agreement in 1783, which guaranteed the unrestricted commercial use of the straits to the Russian Empire.50 These two documents solidified the conditions of Russian trade in the Mediterranean and the results of the peace treaty of 1774. On this basis, it was common practice from the 1780s onwards for Greek merchant ships to transport their cargo under the Russian flag on the routes linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.51 Information on local conditions and economic developments was not only relayed by the consuls, but also by the embassy in Constantinople, which had its own department on trade.52 The Russian trade network built up in the Mediterranean through the involvement of people of Balkan origin (mostly Greeks) could not have functioned without the consular network.53 This is where the importance of Russia’s right to establish consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire comes into play, and alongside the Balkans and the Black Sea area, which were immensely important because of their geopolitical proximity, the Middle East (Alexandria, Beirut, Aleppo) also had a prominent place in this process. In economic terms, this Mediterranean network extended as far as Marseilles.54 Russian diplomacy usually employed people who were fluent in the languages of the Mediterranean and well-versed in Ottoman social culture and the workings of Ottoman institutions.55 This also led to closer relations between St. Petersburg and the Greeks.

The development of cultural and political ties with the Serbs, which had a tradition dating back to the decades before the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, was another key point in Russian-Balkan relations. Among the Balkan nations, the Serbs had the strongest connection to the Russians. This connection was based on common faith and their Slavic origins. In the 1790s, national resistance among the Serbs suggested to the Porte that there was a need to reform the internal relations of the Belgrade Pashalik. This growing attachment to notions of national independence among the Serbs led to the first Serbian uprising at the turn of the century as a result of the inaction (or rather inertia) of the Ottoman central government. In this context, the attitude of Russian foreign policy is of great interest, as they maintained their commitment to the Serb cause in principle and their solidarity with the movement, but they refrained from providing any specific political or military support.56 Russian foreign policy was strongly influenced by its involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars from 1798 (and the Napoleonic wars from 1800), and the method that was applied after 1774 changed in many respects. After the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, Russian foreign policy towards the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire was divided into two main strands, each of which had different objectives.

The aim of the first was to maximize territorial gains while increasing political and economic influence. This phase lasted until 1774–1792, when the Treaty of Iaşi ended the Second Turkish War of Catherine II. From this point onwards, the original objective (rational but intensive expansion) was transformed, and the aim then was to consolidate the acquired positions and create stability there. Thus, after Iaşi, the Russian government concentrated on the pacification of the newly acquired territories and their incorporation into the empire. This Russian policy of consolidation was disrupted by the emergence of Girondean France in the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, which posed a direct threat to Ottoman integrity and Russian influence in the area. This became especially clear after the invasion of the Ionian Islands and the advance of French forces into Montenegro. Hence, the role of Serbia and Montenegro increased greatly.

Regarding Serbian-Russian relations, the government of St. Petersburg sought to preserve good relations and avoid the French orientation of the Belgrade Pashalik, while it was unable to provide any genuine diplomatic or military support to the provisional government led by Karadjordje (George Petrović), since, precisely because of the French threat in the Balkans, Russia had to maintain peace with the Porte. As a result, Russian-Serbian relations were unstable in the late 1790s and early 1800s, and no permanent diplomatic presence was established. In Serbia, this happened much later, although it is true that the Russian protectorate in the strict political sense was guaranteed for St. Petersburg by the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), and the consulate was opened in Belgrade in 1838. 57

However, there were Russian missions and delegations to Serbia,58 which temporarily fulfilled this role, and during the uprising, the Russian Foreign Ministry59 received delegations representing the Serbian provisional government. Thus, official contacts between the two sides did exist, but there was no permanent Russian presence on Serbian territory during the period under examination. This may have been due to the fact that, economically, the Serbian region was a peripheral area compared to the Danubian Principalities and the Greek islands, and the use of periodic missions that had been customary in the past was sufficient for political contacts.60 Furthermore, the lack of consular representation may also have been justified by the fact that, in the unstable European political climate, Russia did not want to make such a serious gesture to a Balkan province that had rebelled against the Porte, since it would be interference in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire and could lead to an open confrontation between the governments of St. Petersburg and Constantinople (and even Vienna, which considered this region its own “frontier”) at a time when Russia’s main priority was to hold its ground on the European front.

The situation was different in Montenegro, where Russian foreign policy had other scopes and priorities. Relations with the Western Balkans were not particularly at the forefront of Russia’s concerns anyway, and Austria also had a strong influence in the region. On the whole, however, the Western Balkans were not excluded from the process of building a consular system, as Russia established a consulate in Kotor in 1804. Relations between Russia and Montenegro were complicated before 1774. The Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774 was also associated with the need for closer cooperation with Montenegro, which simultaneously created a curious situation between the current prince, Šćepan Mali, and the Russian government. The figure of Šćepan Mali was problematic for St. Petersburg, since he had managed to gain support in Montenegro by impersonating Peter III. Although the phenomenon of the “false tsar” was not uncommon in Russian history, it was a particularly sensitive moment for Catherine II, who had come to power through a palace revolution against her husband Peter III. At the same time, cooperation with Šćepan Mali could have provided a new ally in the war against the Porte, so the Russian government initiated negotiations headed by Prince Dolgorukiy in Cetinje.61 Although there were uncertainties about Russian-Montenegrin relations in this period, Russian diplomacy viewed Montenegro as a serious strategic partner in the Western Balkans, capable of counterbalancing the power of Venice and the Ottoman Empire.62

Even so, the Russian presence was more moderate here than in the Eastern Balkan provinces, although the St. Petersburg cabinet considered it important to establish its political and cultural influence in the region. Moreover, the attitude of the Principality of Montenegro towards the Russian Empire was basically positive (especially in the ecclesiastical sphere). There was always some form of contact between the two nations, and information on the situation in the Western Balkans was regularly received from Montenegro and used by Russian diplomacy.63 Russia usually represented itself in the Principality through temporary diplomatic and military missions.64 This was also true in the 1780s and 1800s, when the Adriatic coast underwent several changes as the region became the target of French foreign political ambitions. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792, Russia sent several envoys to the region to forge an anti-Turkish alliance between northern Albania and Montenegro to support the Austro-Russian alliance in the Balkans.65 The situation was quite complex, since the principality itself was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the smaller coastal part (and the Bay of Kotor) was under the jurisdiction of the Venetian Republic. However, the French Revolutionary Wars led to a change of authority. Venetian power was replaced by Austria in 1797, while Russia began to attach greater importance to the Western Balkans, which by the early nineteenth century was considered part of the Mediterranean sphere of influence of the Russian Empire.66 The Russian Foreign Ministry decided in this milieu to open a diplomatic mission in Kotor that year. However, there are some differences from previous consulate openings. The newest Balkan consulate, for example, was not opened in Ottoman territory. This was a distinctive situation because, as already noted, the Russian consuls adapted to the challenges of the Ottoman political and administrative system by involving and making use of the knowledge of the local people. The same principle would of course have been justified in the case of Montenegro, but the city chosen for the consulate (the strategic and commercial importance of which was undeniable) was in Austrian hands after 1797 (the collapse of the Venetian rule), so it was not enough for Russian diplomacy to adapt to the Ottoman system of relations in the case of Montenegro. Russia also had to communicate with the Austrian Empire about the establishment of a diplomatic representation. Besides the special situation of Montenegro, it also had a strong leader, Petar Njegoš, who was able to build up his power partly with the help of Russian subsidies67 and whose official approval was important for the opening of the Russian Consular Office. In May 1804, under the leadership of A. Mazurevsky, the diplomatic mission was finally opened.68

Another key element of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji was the right of the Russian tsar to protect the Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire, which was also laid down in this agreement. The “authority” acquired at this time was not unprecedented, as the Porte had already conceded to such requests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through capitulations concluded with other states,69 thus allowing for the development of the so-called protégé system. At the same time, the Russian government took the protection of Christians under the jurisdiction of the Porte to a new level and made it an integral part of its foreign policy towards the Balkans.

During the eighteenth century, the protégé system became an integral part of the European diplomatic missions established in the Ottoman Empire. However, it is important to draw a distinction between the protection needs and rights that applied to individuals and communities. The representatives of the leading European states delegated to the Porte had diplomatic prerogatives granted by international law from the outset, which were supplemented over time in their dealings with the Porte by the privileges granted in the capitulations mentioned earlier.70 Residents with a diverse local network of contacts and a wide range of language skills were given a prominent role in the activities of the missions, helping diplomats, consuls, and other Foreign Service representatives in other statuses. The diplomats could give local residents a mandate which allowed the transfer of privileges that came with the diplomatic service. In general, the persons concerned were non-Muslim residents of the Ottoman Empire who were also engaged in trade and were granted these privileges71 in the form of a specific type of document, the so-called berat.72 It is important, however, to clarify the definition with regard to the protégé system. A distinction must be drawn between the terms protégé and protectorate, which are similar and, in a sense, related but not entirely overlapping. In essence, the protection or rather the exceptional circumstances outlined above (as protégé) emerged at the level of practical diplomacy as a key instrument with which to gain local influence. Therefore, it is not the same as the ideological role of protection at the level of great politics. However, these concepts were not separable, since the protégé was an early, individualized and extended form of the protectorate, which did not think in terms of communities but in terms of protecting individuals. Of course, from a diplomatic point of view, the question of who was worthy of receiving a berat and what that person had to accomplish in order to get one from a foreign country was very subjective, and the individualized protégé system created many opportunities for misuse. In addition to diplomatic immunity, the persons who held the berat (the “beratlı”) also enjoyed customs exemptions, which again opened the door to misuse and corruption.73 Most of the dragomans and agents employed by the consuls were engaged in commercial activities and bought the documents guaranteeing national tax exemption for large sums of money. These merchants carried out a significant part of the trade in the Mediterranean, and so the use of the protégé system was of particular importance for the great powers, including Russia, as it was the basis for the most important economic links of Russian diplomacy.74 However, the method was not only important with regard to maritime and inland trade with the Middle East and Anatolia, but also for the Eastern Balkan region, as the use of berats was also common in the Danubian Principalities, although we have no information on the extent to which Russia used the method there.75

Nevertheless, the claim of protection over individuals evolved into a right over collectives. Although Russia was not the only power to entertain this ambition, it was Russia that used the idea and “institution” of the protectorate most deliberately to shape its relations with the Ottoman Empire. A key rhetorical and political element of the rapprochement towards the nations in the Balkans was the emphasis on belonging together on the basis of denominational and cultural ties.76 Peter the Great had already taken upon himself the role of defender of the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans in the Russo-Turkish War (1710–1711), which was part of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). In April 1711, the tsar issued an appeal in which, based on the Orthodox religious community, he sought to establish cooperation with the nations in the Balkans, in this case the Danubian Principalities. But a similar methodology can also be observed in the same period in the case of the Western Balkan province of Montenegro, where a Russian delegation arrived in July 1711 in the hopes of organizing joint action against the Ottomans.77 The two appeals were successful, yet both ended in failure against the Ottoman army. Nevertheless, the use of this method was an important element in relations between the Balkan nations and Russia, as it essentially set a precedent in the methodology of building alliances with the Balkans. The call on (Balkan) Christians in the Ottoman Empire for a joint action became a motif used frequently in the subsequent Russo-Turkish wars.78 At the same time, in the conflicts between the two empires (Russia and the Porte), which were competing in a common geopolitical space, Russian diplomacy consistently sought to gain protectorate rights over the Christians. This was also the case during the Niš/Belgrade peace negotiations, which brought the Russo-Turkish War of 1736–1739 to a close and which were unsuccessful in this respect. The Russian government, which saw the end of the war as a failure, was unsatisfied with the results. The Porte had not given the tsar the authority he had aspired to establish, and the Habsburg Emperor was able to assume the role of protector of Christians (non-Orthodox Christians) in the Ottoman Empire.79 Similar rights were also enjoyed by other European states in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century, but the other states were typically less likely to take advantage of this in practice.80 Russia finally gained this right in 1774 and, combined with the right to build Orthodox churches, it resulted in a well-constructed cultural diplomacy.

The pursuit of a protective role, territorial gains, and the extension of power/political influence against the Ottoman Empire in the Black Sea region (and the Balkan Peninsula, especially in the Eastern Balkans) became a permanent feature of Russian foreign policy. The Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774, which in itself determined these Russian ambitions, also fit into this pattern. The emphasis on religious cooperation, solidarity, and protection was the foundation, in principle and in practice, of Russian foreign policy after 1774.

In conclusion, the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji was a real turning point in Russian foreign policy, providing the St. Petersburg government with several advantages in asserting its geopolitical interests in general. The treaty also introduced a new approach to diplomacy and, more importantly, to the practice of diplomacy, ushering in a new era in Russia’s relations with the Porte and the Balkan provinces. I have highlighted in this essay the new measures that the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji provided for Russia. The establishment and development of foreign missions (i.e. official representations in Constantinople) and the formation of cooperation with the Balkan territories (i.e. consulates in the Ottoman provinces) were the most important part of the expansion of the diplomatic toolbox. A change in diplomatic protocol occurred in 1774 in the case of the Russian envoy in Constantinople, and the possibility of establishing a Russian consulate system in the Ottoman lands became a reality. The diplomatic networks established in the Balkans (especially in the Eastern Balkan region) and the opening of consulates in the Danubian Principalities and Greece were examples of this. The results of the formal diplomatic missions were slow and gradual, but their main significance lay in the fact that Russia was able to raise its political and cultural relations with the Balkan nations to a new (now official instead of informal) level. In the long term, this made it possible for Russia to integrate itself into the Mediterranean political and economic structure.

The so-called protégé system also played a decisive role in the transformation of Russian diplomatic practice, the main purpose of which was to provide a network of contacts to support the work of the diplomatic missions and to create a kind of information background through the diplomatic privileges granted to members of the local population by the berats. This was followed by the right of the Russian tsar to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Although the protectorate acquired in 1774 did not gain significance until the nineteenth century, when nationalist movements began to flourish in the Balkans, its acquisition was of the utmost importance, as it fulfilled an aspiration that Russian diplomacy had had since the early eighteenth century and provided a kind of continuity between the ideals and goals of Russian foreign policy before and after 1774. Indeed, the hitherto fervently-sought right of patronage became an effective diplomatic instrument after the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, the value and importance of which are reflected in the new European order after the Congress of Vienna (1815), in an international system in which the Russian Empire repositioned itself as the leading power not only in Eastern and Southeastern Europe but on the entire continent.

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A Professor as Diplomat: Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld and the Foreign Policy of the Principality of Transylvania, 1638–1643

Gábor Kármán
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 2  (2023):3–36 DOI 10.38145/2023.2.248

Keywords: diplomacy, Transylvania, international Calvinism, Gyulafehérvár academy, pansophia

“Mister Bisterfeld showed such benevolence towards the allied lords and specifically towards Your Excellency in promoting the negotiations and assisted us to such a degree that I cannot give ample praise for his good will towards the common cause and his loyal services.”1 With these words, Colonel Lieutenant Jacob Rebenstock, the representative of the Swedish Crown at the Transylvanian court, summarized his impressions to his superior, Lennart Torstensson, the chief commander of the Swedish armies in the Holy Roman Empire. Rebenstock was writing about the services provided by Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld, a professor at the Gyulafehérvár academy, in the creation of the freshly concluded treaty of alliance. The surviving documentation indeed shows that Bisterfeld not only helped Prince György Rákóczi I from the background with good advice but also had been in fervent correspondence with prominent personalities of the anti-Habsburg side of the Thirty Years’ War for years, thus apparently masterminding a much wider network in the principality’s western sphere of contacts than the prince himself. As has been noted in several recent monographs, in the seventeenth century, a network of pastors and scholars, often labelled “international Calvinism,” attempted to influence high politics between courts.2 Nevertheless, in the early modern period, it was still rare at best for diplomats, who officially represented various rulers, to have regarded a theologian as a negotiating partner for a longer period. Suffice it to quote the reaction of a clergyman, István Tolnai, the parson of Sárospatak in Hungary, to the news that, in the summer of 1637, Heinrich Meerbott, a churchman from Hanau, was heading for the court of György Rákóczi I allegedly as a representative of various German princes. “I am surprised,” Tolnai wrote, “that those princes (if this is indeed the case) trusted the embassy to a preacher.”3

Although Bisterfeld kept his role as a political advisor at the side of György Rákóczi I and, later, his son, György Rákóczi II, for a long time, he held such a key position in Transylvanian diplomacy only between 1638 (his mission to Western Europe) and 1643 (the conclusion of the Gyulafehérvár [Alba Iulia/ Weissenburg] agreement). In a recent study, I examined the negotiations leading to Transylvania’s reentry into the Thirty Years’ War in the 1640s, but I had occasion to make only cursory remarks on the special position Bisterfeld enjoyed in covering the thousands of kilometers between the principality and its potential allies. In this paper, I focus my attention on why the Gyulafehérvár professor seemed to offer a solution to the practical problems of Transylvanian diplomacy in the first half of the seventeenth century and how his political role interfered with his other ambitions as a scholar. The analysis I offer of the overlaps between the two sides in Bisterfeld’s biography furthers a more nuanced understanding of the workings of “international Calvinism,” and in particular of the group from Johann Heinrich Alsted to Jan Amos Comenius which aimed at continuing Reformation, uniting the knowledge on the universe and making the world a better place through learning – but repeatedly had to face serious political repressions.4

Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld’s Mission in Western Europe, 1638–1639

Bisterfeld became a professor at the Academy of Gyulafehérvár at the end of 1629.5 He came to Transylvania with two elder colleagues, Johann Heinrich Alsted and Philipp Ludwig Piscator, at the invitation of Gábor Bethlen, but he arrived only after the death of this prince, who had set up an ambitious plan to provide the Reformed college in his capital with the higher classes of philosophy and theology. By this time, Alsted had already become a renowned scholar whose name was widely known due to his program, which relied on faith in pansophia and a commitment to continuing the Reformation, as well as his encyclopedia, which was built on the same principles.6 He probably would not have left his cathedra at the University of Herborn in Nassau had the Restitutionsedikt, issued by Emperor Ferdinand II in 1629, not made the position of the Calvinist confession extremely vulnerable in the Holy Roman Empire. The imperial edict, however, seemed to have finally brought to an end the debate whether the stipulations of the Peace of Augsburg related to the rights for religious practices concerned only the Lutheran confession (which was explicitly mentioned by the document) or also the Reformed one (with the argument that their faith was based on a modified version of the same creed). This loophole had been maintained with the active support of prominent political actors in the Empire, and by closing it, the edict forced many important personalities in Calvinist higher education in Germany to leave the empire. Alsted received an invitation from Deventer, but he chose Gábor Bethlen’s offer instead. In this, he was certainly motivated – apart from the salary he was offered, which was decent even by Western European standards – by a certain sense of mission and the opportunity to bring his knowledge to faraway lands.7

There is virtually no secondary literature on the role of Johann Heinrich Alsted as Prince György Rákóczi’s political advisor. Limited but relevant evidence shows that Alsted was not only active as a scholar in Gyulafehérvár but also interfered in questions of the prince’s foreign policy. A statement made by an unknown correspondent from Rákóczi’s court, according to which the prince discussed each issue of importance with Alsted, finds confirmation in other sources. It was not just that the prince seems to have turned to Alsted for help with newsletters in German in order to receive clarification and guidance on news from the Western part of Europe, but the professor himself also maintained some channels of communication with political relevance.8 In 1637, when trying to convince Wilhelm V, landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, of the potential of cooperation with Transylvania, Heinrich Meerbott referred to his correspondence with Alsted, and we also know that in 1638 the Gyulafehérvár professor contacted Cornelis Haga, the ambassador of the United Provinces in Constantinople, to whom he sent letters with the princely couriers, presumably to mediate in the conflict between the two political actors.9 Since such activities are not known from Alsted’s earlier career, he must have been motivated to accept the role of a political advisor by Rákóczi’s openness to counsel offered by his well-versed guests as well as the radical changes in his living conditions due to political repression. His experience of being exiled from his earlier home was made more severe by the fact that a significant share of the three theologians’ belongings, which had been deposited in Regensburg during their journey, was confiscated by the emperor’s administration. In 1635, György Rákóczi I tried to recover these belongings, but even he labored in vain.10

In the early 1630s Bisterfeld’s career was closely connected to Alsted’s: he was the professor’s faithful disciple and also his son-in-law. When Gábor Bethlen’s invitation reached Alsted, Bisterfeld was working as a tutor in Grave (Brabant). It must have been at the invitation of his father-in-law that he came to Herborn, where he taught a course in the spring of 1629 and left with the two others late that summer. Bisterfeld, who was only twenty-four years old at the time, had to refuse an invitation from Groningen (which admittedly seemed somewhat uncertain). Some sources suggest that in 1631 he was not planning to remain in Transylvania for long.11 It is hardly surprising that the young theologian, who at the time had nothing resembling the reputation or network that Alsted had managed to gain, was not terribly motivated to spend his most active years in a land far away from the center of European scholarly life in an environment which must have been quite foreign to him. Also, the year following their arrival proved extremely chaotic in Transylvanian politics. Catherine of Brandenburg, Bethlen’s widow and successor, secretly converted to Catholicism and then resigned. She was replaced first by her brother-in-law, István Bethlen, and then by Rákóczi, one of the mightiest landowners in eastern Hungary and someone who had been a staunch follower of Gábor Bethlen’s policies in the previous decade. These troubles must have added to the fact that Gyulafehérvár hardly offered a comparably lively intellectual life or the proximity of fellow-minded scholars that a Dutch university could have provided for Bisterfeld.12 He clearly had good reasons to agree to a visit to Western Europe, where he was entrusted with the task of using his scholarly activities as a disguise for political negotiations in the service of his prince.

Since the early years of the Thirty Years’ War, the Principality of Transylvania recurrently participated in the endeavors of the party opposing the Habsburgs. Gábor Bethlen was allied to Friedrich of the Palatinate, and he was later accepted as a member of the League of The Hague between the United Provinces, as well as the kings of Denmark and England. He led three campaigns to Hungary (in 1619–1621, 1623–1624, and 1626), and in the consecutive peace treaties he secured substantial gains with respect to territory and prestige.13 Shortly after having secured his throne, György Rákóczi I continued Bethlen’s policies and sought contact with Gustav II Adolph, who had just accomplished the first successes of his German campaign. The Swedish king, however, found the costs of Transylvanian intervention too high, and communication problems made it difficult for the two parties to reach any sort of compromise. Although in 1632–1633 there was even a Swedish resident by the name of Paul Strassburg at the Transylvanian court, for over a year he received no instructions from his king, and thus his presence did little more than create more tension for the Transylvanian prince.14

When György Rákóczi I signed the Peace of Eperjes/Prešov/Eperies on September 28, 1633 with Emperor Ferdinand II, many observers concluded that, by doing so, he had abandoned any plan for cooperation with Sweden. This was not the case, however. Transylvanian envoys traveled to meet Axel Oxenstierna on various occasions over the course of the next two years, but they failed to attract the attention of the head of the Swedish Regency Government. In 1637, then, the aforementioned Heinrich Meerbott took the initiative to motivate the Transylvanian prince to take action again. He was sent to Stockholm in secret, but this insistence on the secrecy of the mission backfired. It was very important to Rákóczi that the plans for an anti-Habsburg alliance not be revealed too early. This, however, meant that he had to come up with creative ways to ensure that his envoy would secure accreditation, and the methods that were devised proved so unusual that they ultimately hindered the creation of any political alliance. The members of the Swedish State Council were presented with a letter in which Rákóczi entrusted Meerbott with the task of recruiting artisans (“artifices mechanici”), as well as a ciphered note which presented the prince’s proposal and reached Danzig/Gdańsk hidden in a pistol barrel, on a route separate from the pastor’s. Meerbott explained that the “artifices” the prince was looking for were actually parties in the intrigue (“artificium”), i.e. the kings of France and Sweden, as well as the landgrave of Hessen. However, after giving the proposal short consideration, the Swedish government decided not to sign anything at the exhortation of someone who lacked clear proof of having been granted plenipotentiary powers.15

Meerbott’s account of the developments did not survive, but it must have reached Transylvania, because the next envoy, Bisterfeld, received credentials which seem to have followed the Swedish State Council’s suggestion to speak in general terms but be addressed to a specific person in the court. The addressees were not the royal persons but the leading policymakers of the Swedish and French court, Cardinal Richelieu and Axel Oxenstierna, and the credentials did not include Bisterfeld’s name.16 It seems that they must have been penned only after Bisterfeld’s departure from Transylvania in mid-April 1638, and they were surely given to him at a later point of time, thus ensuring that the true nature of the professor’s journey could not be revealed as long as he was passing through the Habsburg-friendly territories of Hungary and Poland.17

Although the credentials only revealed that the envoy was supposed to discuss “certain issues” with the addressees, this proved enough for Richelieu and his administration to enter into a serious conversation with Bisterfeld. After having met Karl Ludwig, the heir of Friedrich of the Palatinate, in The Hague, Bisterfeld reached Paris on July 10, where he was welcomed with enthusiasm according to the account of Hugo Grotius, who was serving there as a Swedish resident envoy.18 The administration of Louis XIII almost immediately sent forth the king’s own envoy to Transylvania (using the sea route through the Mediterranean), and in November, Charles du Bois, Baron of Avaugour, agreed with Rákóczi that he would soon return with full credentials to conclude their alliance (though this never actually happened).19

While d’Avauguor traveled across half of Europe (eventually arriving in Danzig, where he remained as one of the most important points of contact for Transylvanian foreign policy over the course of the next few years), Bisterfeld also reached his new station, Hamburg. The central location of this harbor city and its professed neutrality had made it an important diplomatic hub as early as the first half of the 1630s, but from 1638 on, it is legitimate to speak of a diplomatic congress of the powers interested in the developments in Germany there. Negotiations concerning the possibilities for peacemaking between the Swedish and imperial envoys were running parallel to parleys among the ambassadors of the Danish, English, and French kings, as well as the United Provinces about creating an anti-Habsburg alliance. The representatives of Swedish and French foreign policy were the same persons who would later act as head commissioners at the Westphalian peace congress: Johan Salvius and Claude de Mesmes, Count of Avaux.20 It seemed obvious that Bisterfeld would join this “congress,” even if he arrived somewhat late, because by this time the high spirits caused by the Anglo–French and Swedish–French treaties of February 1637 and February 1638 as potential foundations for an anti-Habsburg alliance had already dissipated.

In Hamburg, Bisterfeld met Sir Thomas Roe, one of the most experienced English diplomats, who was happy to hear the Transylvanian offer (which was similar to offers he had often received from Gábor Bethlen in the 1620s as his ruler’s representative in Constantinople). Roe informed Bisterfeld, however, that it would be futile for him to travel to England, since it had become clear by that time that King Charles I did not have the financial means necessary to join the coalition.21 It also turned out that the Dutch were not ready to give up their neutrality towards the emperor, and although Johann Joachim Rusdorf, the diplomat of the exiled Palatinate court (and also Bethlen’s correspondent from the previous decade) was enthusiastic to have met Bisterfeld, it was Salvius who became his most important negotiating partner.22

On his way to Paris, Bisterfeld also informed the Swedish government about his mission. Axel Oxenstierna and his colleagues were eager to bring him to Stockholm.23 Bisterfeld declined the offer, most probably because, in Hamburg he was closest to each potential negotiation partner and also to prominent members of the European academic network. He nevertheless informed Salvius about the developments and suggested that if the Swedish resident envoy received plenipotentiary powers, he would also make sure that his prince would send him one so that the parleys on the details could start.24 In early January 1639, the Swedish plenipotentia to Salvius was sent from Stockholm, but a letter by György Rákóczi I reached Hamburg at the same time in which he ordered Bisterfeld to return to Gyulafehérvár. The prince also wrote letters to the French and Swedish diplomats in which he did not even mention the planned alliance and only asked for their support in finding a successor to Alsted, who died on November 9, 1638.25

This unexpected development, which seems to have seriously damaged Rákóczi’s credibility among his potential allies, was the result of the problems of communication and the Transylvanian prince’s efforts to secure the secrecy of his negotiations. As Bisterfeld explained to Salvius in a note, György Rákóczi I was expecting d’Avaugour to return to his court with the necessary accreditation by April 1639, so he did not need to risk the potential discovery of his intentions were his correspondence to fall into the wrong hands. As the prince expected the final parleys to take place at his court, there was no need to mention the issue to the diplomats in Hamburg, and Bisterfeld’s further stay in the western part of Europe also seemed unnecessary. On the other hand, Bisterfeld’s request for plenipotentiary powers to be sent to Hamburg did not reach György Rákóczi I in time. For the sake of secrecy, the German scholar did not correspond directly with the prince, but rather sent his messages to Alsted – but since the elder professor was dying, Bisterfeld’s messages were only forwarded with delays, and Rákóczi acted before having received the most recent news from Hamburg.26

The professor listened to the prince’s summon, but he clearly was not in a hurry. In late March 1639, Grotius already knew that Bisterfeld was going to go to Paris again, but it was early May when the professor actually arrived. In the meantime, he visited the United Provinces again: in March he sent a letter to Rákóczi from Amsterdam, and in April he met Karl Ludwig in The Hague.27 When already in Paris, he had long conversations with Jean de la Barde, a secretary of the Chancellery, and he had the impression that the French court was still ready to conclude the alliance, although, rather surprisingly he did not reflect on why d’Avaugour never returned to Transylvania.28 He also made sure to keep the interest of Swedish diplomacy alive, and he shared the contents of his parleys with Grotius, and also, by letter, with Ludwig Camerarius, the Swedish resident envoy in The Hague, whom he must have met during one of his stays in the Dutch capital.29 Bisterfeld then returned to Transylvania across the Mediterranean. In mid-July, he was already in Venice, but we do not know exactly when he arrived in the principality. Rákóczi’s envoys in Constantinople were still forwarding his letters to Transylvania in late August. He put his final report for the prince on paper November 1639 in Medgyes/Mediaş/Mediasch.30

Bisterfeld as a Diplomatic Correspondent

Bisterfeld and György Rákóczi I’s expectations were proven overly optimistic in the months and years to come. The professor’s impressions in Paris did not deceive him: the French were positive about the chances of cooperation with the Transylvanians, d’Avaux received an order to discuss the articles of the future treaty with Salvius, and a plenipotentia was signed for Louis Fleutot, the envoy to be sent to the principality.31 Rákóczi was already exchanging messages with d’Avaugour about the best possible route for Fleutot, and he started laying the ground at the Sublime Porte to gain the sultan’s consent for his campaign in Hungary. During the summer and autumn of 1639, Transylvanian ambassadors visited Constantinople and consulted frequently with the French ambassador there about the possible ways to win the support of the sultanic administration. Their preliminary inquiries with the Ottoman dignitaries yielded no success, but this was not the primary reason why there was no Transylvanian intervention in the Thirty Years’ War immediately after Bisterfeld’s journey in Western Europe.32

Contrary to the French court, the Swedish administration lost all interest in any kind of cooperation with György Rákóczi I. In March 1639, shortly after having received the news that Bisterfeld had been summoned back to Gyulafehérvár, the State Council announced that in the future it would not take the Transylvanians seriously, and no further development could move them from this position.33 Neither the repeated inquiries of the French diplomats nor the incoming messages from Transylvania could convince Axel Oxenstierna to dedicate attention to the issue again, and even the complaints of Johan Banér, the chief commander of the Swedish army in Germany, fell on deaf ears. Salvius dropped various remarks in his letters to the Regency Government according to which the involvement of more allies in the war, such as the prince of Transylvania, would further Swedish success, but to no avail. The Swedish government’s reaction, which involved several irrational elements, did not change. Even when Banér’s successor, Lennart Torstensson took matters into his own hands and arranged a treaty of alliance with György Rákóczi I (the agreement of Gyulafehérvár, signed on November 16, 1643), Axel Oxenstierna’s government refused to ratify it. They rightfully pointed out the formal shortcomings of the text, but did nothing to address them, and thus the Swedish–Transylvanian cooperation in 1644–1645 was never formalized by a fully legitimate international treaty.34

The tension due to the Swedish reluctance eventually poisoned Rákóczi’s contacts with the leaders of French diplomacy as well. In d’Avaux’s correspondence with his colleagues in 1640 we find a growing number of ironic and, later, sarcastic remarks on the Transylvanian prince, and after a while, Rákóczi also did not conceal his frustration that the promises he had been made were not kept. The prince stopped answering the letters from Jean de la Haye, the representative of the French Crown at the Sublime Porte, and he told Bisterfeld to ask d’Avaugour whether the French considered the Hungarians simpletons who would not start to wonder after such a long time whether they were merely being mocked by their partners.35 This formulation, which is so foreign to Bisterfeld’s usually moderate style and suggests the direct interference of the prince in composition of his letters, directs our attention to the latter’s function as a mediator between the Transylvanian court and its potential allies.

Bisterfeld was a good choice to serve as the bearer of György Rákóczi I’s message to the court of his potential allies, as only rarely in the seventeenth century was a political mission entrusted to scholars of his kind. Some surviving letters prove that Rákóczi’s adversaries knew about Bisterfeld’s journey, and it clearly raised suspicion among them, but none of these sources suggest that the Catholic elite of the Kingdom of Hungary would have come to any direct conclusions concerning the politics of the Transylvanian prince based upon the fact that Bisterfeld, a professor from the Gyulafehérvár academy, was traveling to Western Europe.36 Bisterfeld’s academic activities during the journey (to which I will return) seem to have served as an excellent pretext. As noted before, the secrecy of the mission was also secured by the fact that Bisterfeld sent his letters to Alsted, thus creating an illusion of a politically neutral (or at least politically irrelevant) exchange between scholars.37

Of course, after his return to Transylvania, Bisterfeld’s position as a scholar ceased to be an asset for political communication. If any of his letters had fallen into enemy hands, the adversaries of the Transylvanian prince would have been just as eager to know why a professor from Gyulafehérvár was sending ciphered messages to French and Swedish diplomats as they would have been in the case of any other person. In this period, Bisterfeld’s involvement had other advantages. For György Rákóczi I, the developments caused serious embarrassment. It was humiliating that he was bombarding his potential allies with new offers, to which they replied with little more than noncommittal words. After a while, it would have been an immense loss of prestige for him to continue knocking on their doors with further suggestions, especially seeing as how d’Avaugour, d’Avaux, and Salvius were not his equals in the seventeenth-century “society of princes.” It would have been unbecoming for him as a prince to refer again and again to how long he had been waiting for a definite answer and to mention how much frustration this had caused for him. As a princely counselor, Bisterfeld did not need to have such scruples, and in his accounts, he could paint the fury of György Rákóczi I in dark colors, much as he could also claim that, if the prince did not soon receive a positive answer to his proposals, he would give up his heroic plan to assist the common cause.38 Before Bisterfeld’s return to Transylvania, János Kemény, another personality from the prince’s court, had already served this function of an “alternative correspondent,” since he had acted as d’Avaugour’s guide during the French diplomat’s stay in the principality. Bisterfeld’s reputation as a professor, however, made him better fit for the task than the young Transylvanian aristocrat. Also, he personally knew many more of the diplomats involved.39

For a while, the prince and the professor maintained a parallel correspondence with the French and Swedish diplomats. In the letters addressed to d’Avagour during the winter of 1639, however, we can already trace a duality. György Rákóczi I limited his messages to news, whereas it fell upon Bisterfeld to urge the figures of French diplomacy to continue negotiations.40 Then, in 1640, the prince stopped writing to d’Avaugour and the envoys in Hamburg. The entire correspondence with d’Avaux and Salvius went through the Gyulafehérvár professor, who could be regarded being of the same rank as they were. In February 1640, Jean de la Haye wrote to Bisterfeld from Constantinople (parallel to his letter to György Rákóczi I), but we do not have any further evidence that they established a more or less continuous correspondence in the same manner as the diplomats in Hamburg did. The resident embassy of the prince in Constantinople could take care of this connection (whenever Rákóczi was ready to communicate), and since the French diplomat and Bisterfeld were not personally acquainted, maintaining contact with the professor would not have brought any specific advantages.41 In any case, in the autumn of 1643, we again have evidence that De la Haye sent news to Bisterfeld from the Sublime Porte.42

After György Rákóczi I’s decision to abandon the diplomatic exchange with the French and Swedish representatives, he was involved again only when a new correspondent appeared on the horizon. In the summer of 1641, when Count Zdenko von Hoditz, a Bohemian exile and colonel in Swedish service, contacted him, Rákóczi answered the letter in his own name, as he did again when Lennart Torstensson initiated contact in July 1642.43 The Swedish field marshall maintained parallel correspondence with the prince and the professor during the negotiations leading to the agreement of Gyulafehérvár, and the separate contact with Bisterfeld also proved useful in this. The French disapproved of two points in the agreement of Gyulafehérvár (which theoretically bound them as well). They therefore sent their plenipotentiary to sign a separate treaty with György Rákóczi I (the so-called treaty of Munkács/Mukačevo on April 22, 1645). It would have been beneath the prince’s dignity to ask directly for Torstensson’s approval for this move, but this could be easily arranged by having Bisterfeld write to the field marshall about Rákóczi’s concerns, even if it only took place after the treaty had been signed.44

Upon his return to Transylvania, the professor requested the cipher which had been in use during earlier Swedish-Transylvanian contacts and also a list of the people to whom he should write.45 Nevertheless, as one would have expected, he did not write anything he wanted. The sources suggest that Rákóczi controlled the content of the letters that Bisterfeld sent to the diplomats in his own name. Some of the drafts which survived were written in the professor’s hand, but they have a number of corrections by the prince.46 At the same time, it would be a mistake to see Bisterfeld only as a medium through which György Rákóczi I could express his wishes. The prince counted on the professor’s expertise and judgment. Bisterfeld played an important role during the negotiations directly preceding the conclusion of the agreement of Gyulafehérvár and the treaty of Munkács. He himself drafted several of the articles, and he also made corrections to the text in the final round of revisions.47

Although we do not know of any opinion papers from Bisterfeld in which he would have given direct advice to the prince on political issues, the lines penned by Jacob Rebenstock, quoted in the introduction to this essay, testify that the professor (who seems to have befriended the lieutenant colonel representing the Swedish Crown at the Transylvanian court) was one of the most important lobbyists in support of a united stand for the Protestant cause in Rákóczi’s circles.48 In all likelihood, it was Bisterfeld who helped the prince keep his spirits high and convinced him that he should keep the importance of the task in the forefront of his mind instead of the recurrent frustrations he faced when offering his services to the Protestant cause. Shortly before making the final decision, Rákóczi had serious doubts as to whether he indeed had a divine calling to take up arms and thus serve the confessional cause. It was again Bisterfeld who assisted him and counterbalanced the counsel of István Kassai, the prince’s other intimate advisor, who was urging the prince to pursue peace instead.49

Last but not least, Bisterfeld not only provided services for the prince himself. He also mobilized some family connections. Several people maintained contacts between the court at Gyulafehérvár and d’Avaugour’s residence in Danzig at the turn of the 1640s. Prominent among them was a young Scot, Andrew Gawdy, who later had a spectacular career as a high-ranking officer in the Transylvanian army (and thus is known in the secondary literature in Hungarian as András Gaudi). Gawdy helped transmit Bisterfeld’s letters in 1639, 1641, and 1643, whereas in 1639 and 1640, this role was played by Pál Göcs and Ferenc Jármi, Rákóczi’s Transylvanian clients, who had good connections in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Jármi later was also the envoy of his prince at the congress of Westphalia).50 In the late summer of 1642, however, a new person knocked on d’Avagour’s door. Peter Wiederstein, who had brought the professor’s letters this time, was Bisterfeld’s nephew (the son of his half-brother). He had settled in Transylvania, and he later inherited his uncle’s house and part of his library.51 His involvement in Bisterfeld’s political endeavors can be seen as a logical extension of his uncle’s position and further proof that the illusion of scholars being relatively harmless in the field of power politics could prove both convincing and useful in these turbulent years.

Political Role and Academic Career

Even before his mission to Western Europe, Bisterfeld was involved in parleys concerning György Rákóczi I’s potential involvement in the Thirty Years’ War. A letter from November 1637 testifies that he maintained a network of correspondents and supplied the prince with current news concerning developments in the German theaters of war and the related Protestant courts.52 Heinrich Meerbott told the Swedish State Council in the autumn of 1637 that his mission was so secret that, apart from the prince, only Alsted “and another theologian” knew about it.53 On the basis of Bisterfeld’s letter to the prince, it is easy to identify this other person as Alsted’s son-in-law and faithful follower.

Bisterfeld was unquestionably eager to accept the 1638 mission, which made it possible for him to travel as far as Paris. As noted earlier, at that time, he did not yet have anything comparable to Alsted’s network or reputation, and while he was waiting for answers from the various courts, he was able to visit many of his fellow scholars and make acquaintances with useful contacts. In a friendly letter written in the early phase of the mission to Samuel Hartlib, who was one of the most important figures in the international Protestant network, Bisterfeld expressed his joy over the possibility to meet a number of great scholars if, as he hoped, he would be able to travel to England.54 Although he had visited Britain in the 1620s, the connection to Hartlib’s circle was most likely made during John Dury’s journey to Transylvania. Bisterfeld was one of the signees of the position paper on the union of Protestant churches compiled by prominent Transylvanian church authorities at the request of the Scottish irenicist theologian in 1634.55

As mentioned earlier, Sir Thomas Roe dampened Bisterfeld’s enthusiasm when he declared the journey to England pointless from a political perspective, and thus the German theologian had no excuse to cross the Channel. He nonetheless remained active as a scholar. While making arrangements regarding the creation of an anti-Habsburg coalition in the interest of the Protestant cause, he also defended his church on another battlefield. As a response to the Antitrinitarian treatise of Johann Crell, published in Raków (Poland) in 1631, he published his De uno Deo … mysterium pietatis in Leiden, with the renowned Elsevier publishing house. The work was a logical link in the chain of theological attacks upon the Transylvanian Anti-Trinitarians (who, known as Unitarians, were one of the four accepted confessional groups in the principality) in the second half of the 1630s. The Mysterium pietatis was a success (it was rereleased three times), and Bisterfeld made important contacts in Hamburg and the Netherlands which he later maintained. In the long run, Andreas Rivetus and Johann Rulitius proved his most important correspondents, but he also established (or renewed) contact with Johann Adolf Tassius, Joachim Jungius, Gisbert Voetius, Johann Moriaen, and Marin Mersenne.56 Hugo Grotius, who often complained about being overburdened by his tasks as a Swedish resident envoy in Paris instead of being able to dedicate himself to his research on the law of nations, wrote with noticeable envy in April 1639 that, according to news he had heard, Bisterfeld was trying to secure a tranquil academic position for himself.57 As noted before, this accusation was quite unjust. While the publication of his book and his introduction to the scholarly networks unquestionably furthered Bisterfeld’s career ambitions, they also served the interests of Rákóczi’s foreign policy by providing credible camouflage for political negotiations.

Bisterfeld made a very good impression in the Western European Calvinist academic world. At the recommendation of Rivetus, in 1639 he received an offer from Leiden University to serve as a substitute for a regular professor and teach for a semester, and in May 1640 the curators invited him to take over the position of Antonius Walaeus, a professor of theology who had passed away the previous year. The invitation letter also noted that another professor, Antonius Thysius, was mortally ill (he died a year later), thus it is clear that Bisterfeld would have been very welcome in Leiden if he had decided to leave Transylvania.58 This widely respected institution of higher education (which a Hungarian visiting student, Márton Szepsi Csombor, had labeled “Paradisus terrestris” only a few years earlier) clearly would have opened an entirely different career path for Bisterfeld than what awaited him in Transylvania, even if his salary would have been smaller.59 In addition to Leiden’s prominent rank in the academic world, the work environment offered by the university also made it an attractive option. Suffice it to mention the famous library, in contrast to all the problems and enormous costs Bisterfeld had to face when trying to transport the books he had purchased during the 1638–1639 mission to Transylvania.60 Furthermore, István Geleji Katona, the Reformed bishop of Transylvania, informed György Rákóczi I that Bisterfeld was not only attracted by Leiden’s prestige but also by other motivations: the professor had been recently widowed, and he was planning to marry the daughter of Ludwig Camerarius. The bishop feared that the ambitious plans concerning the Gyulafehérvár academy were collapsing, and he left no stone unturned to please Bisterfeld and Piscator (who had just recovered from a serious illness) while at the same time making scathing remarks and insisting that Bisterfeld and Piscator start meeting the obligations of their office in more than just name only.61

In the spring of 1641, it seemed that the endeavors of Geleji Katona were bound to fail and that Bisterfeld was going to return to Western Europe; he even informed Salvius of his plan. However, during the summer the letter by Count Hoditz arrived in Transylvania, and with new hopes on the horizon concerning military assistance for the Protestant cause, György Rákóczi I managed to convince the professor to stay.62 The prince also informed the curators in Leiden that the Gyulafehérvár academy needed Bisterfeld’s services.63 Nevertheless, in 1642 the issue of the invitation from Leiden was still on the table. Furthermore, Jan Amos Comenius thought that Bisterfeld had already arrived in the Netherlands, and he was looking forward to meeting him there.64 The Leiden curators eventually became frustrated with the long delay of the project, and they blamed György Rákóczi I for hindering communication. As the prince seems already to have given permission for Bisterfeld to leave in the previous year, however, it is more likely that the Gyulafehérvár professor gave up his plans concerning the position in the Netherlands because of the new wave of negotiations, initiated by Torstensson that year.65

Bisterfeld’s plans to reestablish his family with an offspring of a prominent member of the international Calvinist network also failed. The forty-one-year-old Anna Katherina Camerarius married none other than Paul Strassburg, the former resident envoy of Gustav Adolph II in Transylvania.66 All in all, we can say that the German professor paid a huge price for the position he acquired among the prince’s political counselors. His marriage to Anna Stenczel, a Saxon burgher’s daughter from Kolozsvár/Cluj/Klausenburg, in June 1643 offers a fairly clear indication that he had finally resolved to remain in Transylvania. He and his wife acquired land and a mansion in Tövis/Teiuş Alba/Dreikirchennot far from Gyulafehérvár, and in 1644, they bought a house in Nagyszeben/Sibiu/Hermannstadt, the center of the Saxon communities of Transylvania.67 His decision to settle in the principality for good, however, must have left a bad taste in Bisterfeld’s mouth. Otherwise, he hardly would have told Comenius (whom he finally met in the early 1650s) that “scholars and artisans summoned to Hungary receive an invitation to perpetual imprisonment.”68

Various factors contributed to Bisterfeld’s decision to stay in Transylvania. The salary may have played a part, albeit not a prominent one. Although the sum (500 talers annually) was competitive on an international level, payment was often delayed. Geleji Katona mentioned such problems as early as 1640, and in 1649, the Transylvanian treasury already owed the professor 600 talers.69 Bisterfeld’s fellow scholars in Western Europe believed that György Rákóczi I simply refused to let him go. This interpretation, however, seems unconvincing for two reasons. First, in 1641, Bisterfeld was already preparing to depart with the prince’s knowledge. Second, had Rákóczi been exerting pressure to limit his mobility, Bisterfeld hardly would have pursued work in his field of expertise with the fervor that he showed in the 1640s. He continued, for instance, to nurture Alsted’s legacy, even at the expense of his own research. In 1641, he published an index for the late professor’s magnum opus, the Prodomus religionis triumphantis, which was published in Transylvania. Over the course of the following years, he fulfilled the wishes of István Geleji Katona and served as a professor not only in name. He continued the program of publishing new schoolbooks, which had been launched by the three Herborn scholars in the previous decade to elevate the educational standards of the Gyulafehérvár academy.70 His achievements were praiseworthy and not at all obvious: his fellow professor, the aforementioned Philipp Ludwig Piscator, could not boast half as many publications. For Bisterfeld, who remained a dedicated supporter of the idea of continuing Reformation, the move to Gyulafehérvár was a sacred mission (as he put it in one of his letters when he accepted the Transylvanian invitation),71 and he tried to live up to his commitment to this mission to the best of his abilities.

It would be quite logical to think of the role Bisterfeld played in Transylvanian foreign policy as a part of this program. We find relatively few references to the fight against the Antichrist in his accounts of current political events (especially if we compare these to Meerbott’s), but these accounts nevertheless show that he was influenced by Alsted’s attempt to unite the Ramist encyclopedist approach with Millenarist thought. He was, after all, one of the contributors to his master’s Diatribe de mille annis apocalypticis, a rational attempt to interpret the Bible’s account of the Apocalypse and calculate the end of times.72 Everything was in place, therefore, for Bisterfeld to feel that serving the fight against the Antichrist and assisting the cause of the empire’s German Protestants in distress was a personal duty; back in 1629, he had presided over several disputations in Herborn on the right of resistance.73 This attitude also explains why Bisterfeld was not satisfied when György Rákóczi I concluded the Peace of Linz in the summer of 1645. Although the documents secured the liberty to practice religion in Hungary with unprecedented precision, they did not fulfil the professor’s expectations, whose aim was to assist Protestantism in a much wider circle. Of course, in his letters to the Catholic d’Avaux and Abel Servien, the other representative of the French Crown at the peace congress of Westphalia, Bisterfeld did not refer to the fight against the Antichrist, but he did give voice to his fear that the Peace of Linz might become a hotbed for even worse conflicts.74

Bisterfeld’s understanding of his task as a multi-faceted sacred mission must have played an important role in his decision in the early 1640s to forfeit the offer of a professor’s position at a renowned Western university and a wife who, through her family and her family’s connections, would place him in the center of the international Calvinist network. He did not have many opportunities to formulate his stance clearly in writing, but the few occasions when he did are revealing. In a letter to Cardinal Mazarin after the conclusion of the Treaty of Munkács in 1645, he made only a modest remark on how God had called him to the light of public service from the tranquility of the school,75 but to Lennart Torstensson he had more to say. Having read the aforementioned lines penned by Jacob Rebenstock, the Swedish Field Marshall assured the professor of his gratitude for his earlier deeds, at which Bisterfeld wrote the following: “Although I am unworthy of the great praise Your Excellence showers on me so graciously, I can state as much with good conscience that I am almost a martyr of the common cause. It is not only our enemies who want to destroy me, but also those who place their private interest before the public good and the welfare of the motherland. But even so, I am faithfully serving God, all of Christianity, my gracious lord, Hungary, and Transylvania.”76

The mention of martyrdom in the passage cited above was not a general reference to Bisterfeld’s willingness to make sacrifices. It was, rather, a hint at a direct threat upon his life. Other evidence also suggests that Bisterfeld felt that several people around him were reacting with malice to his involvement in the world of politics, and he was afraid that he might be assassinated. He was especially suspicious of the reactions of the Catholic members of the Transylvanian elite.77 We do not know whether these fears were well-founded, but Bisterfeld’s role in the principality’s political decision-making network was unquestionably unique, even compared to the prominent personalities of the Transylvanian Calvinist church. In the early autumn of 1643, when György Rákóczi I sought counsel as to whether the planned war followed divine will, Bishop István Geleji Katona and Pál Medgyesi, his court preacher, noted in their opinion (signed together with Bisterfeld) that, unlike the professor, they had very little knowledge of the diplomatic backdrop. The position paper mirrored a very cautious position, and although (in line with the prince’s wishes) it proclaimed the planned military intervention a heroic deed which served God’s plan, it repeatedly called Rákóczi’s attention to the contention that it was not the duty of members of the clergy to make such political decisions, and from a tactical perspective it was even unfortunate to ask them to do so.78

Bisterfeld’s involvement in Transylvanian politics made him stand out not only among the leading personalities of the local church but also among most of the intellectuals from the west who stayed in the principality for a time. Martin Opitz, one of the most important poets of German Baroque literature, who had taught in Transylvania for a short while in 1622 at the invitation of Gábor Bethlen, informed Axel Oxenstierna from Danzig in the 1630s about developments in the principality. According to his letters, he continued to maintain contacts with Transylvanians, but there is no evidence that he ever would have tried to influence György Rákóczi I’s foreign policy.79 Simiarly, one finds no indication in the sources that Philipp Ludwig Piscator made any effort to influence Transylvanian foreign policy, and the same is true of Isaac Basire, who as an exiled Anglican pastor spent some time at the Gyulafehérvár academy before it was destroyed by the invading Tatar armies in 1658.80 It was only Comenius, who tried to convince the Rákóczi family of the need to assist the international Protestant cause by political and even military means, but his plans, supported with contemporary prophecies, fell upon deaf ears. The dynasty turned to Bisterfeld for advice, and it was the Gyulafehérvár professor, who deemed it unlikely that the visions were of divine origin (much to the disappointment of his Moravian colleague).81

This development in the 1650s may seem to be in direct contradiction with Bisterfeld’s earlier attitude. However, if the professor’s radical program of military intervention indeed had its foundations in the dire position of Calvinism in the Holy Roman Empire, this changed with the Peace of Westphalia. It is easy to imagine that, after the Reformed creed had secured recognition in German territories, Bisterfeld – who had settled in Transylvania in the meantime and enjoyed a prestigious reputation among the members of the ruling family – had no desire to see more decades of bloodshed. Comenius’ position was profoundly different, since as bishop of the Bohemian Brethren, he saw with despair that the peace treaties signed in Münster and Osnabrück delegated the treatment of religious issues in his homeland to the hands of the Habsburg dynasty.82 Although his opinion on various political questions was still sought (such as the choice of Zsigmond Rákóczi’s bride in 1649 and the Cossack request for support against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1651), Bisterfeld’s position in the Rákóczi family’s foreign policy changed after 1648. As a teacher, he was still an ardent supporter of the idea of the continuing Reformation, and the princes could make use of his network of correspondents (which no longer seems to have included the Swedish and French diplomats) in the pursuit of their diplomatic aims, but there is no indication in any of the sources that he was still playing a role as someone who initiated policies.83 His unique, prominent role in György Rákóczi I’s diplomatic efforts, which parallelly assisted the policy-making of the prince with advice and masterminding the communication, was no longer necessary after the Peace of Westphalia.

Funded by the European Union (ERC, SMALLST, 101043451). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Archival Sources

Arhivele Naţionale ale României Direcţia Judeţeană Sibiu [National Archives of Romania: County Directorate, Sibiu] (ANR DJS)

Colecţia de acte fasciculare

Colecţia de documente medievale

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich) (BSB)

Clm 10359.

Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Marburg (HStAM)

Rep. 4f Siebenbürgen

Koninklijk Huisarchief [Royal House Archives], The Hague (KH)

G 015 Collectie Handschriften, 1e serie

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian National Archives State Archives] (Budapest) (MNL OL)

A 98 Magyar Kancellária Archívuma: Transylvanica

E 190 Magyar Kamara Archívuma: Archivum familiae Rákóczi de Felsővadász

E 204 Magyar Kamara Archívuma: Missiles

X 1904 Mikrofilmtár: Mike Sándor gyűjtemény

Prímási Levéltár [The Primate’s Archives] (Esztergom) (PL)

Archivum Saeculare Acta Radicalia (AS AR)

Riksarkivet [State Archives] (Stockholm) (RA)

Diplomatica, Turcica bihang Transylvanica

Oxenstiernasamlingen

Salvius samling

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Time in Villages: Timekeeping and Modernization in Rural Communities in the Long Nineteenth Century in Hungary

Gábor Koloh
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 1  (2023):66–86 DOI 10.38145/2023.1.66

The study explores the changing perception of time through the records of a multi-generational peasant family. By comparing several rural manuscripts from different times and places, the study traces the refinement of the way time is thought, its new meanings, and its emergence in farming and family life. The appearance of the clock plays an important role in the analysis. The clock, first as a prestige object in the household, gradually becomes a tool for the modern use of time. The replacement of calendars by newspapers in the first decades of the 20th century is also a decisive factor in the perception of time. The world expands and information about more and more distant lands is brought into peasant households. The study places important emphasis on the idea that rural households are the last base for the spread of globalization phenomena. What is already occurring at this level within each country is where the spread of the phenomenon has come to an end.

Keywords: rural history, globalization, family history, use of time, peasant traditions

Background and Proposition

Concepts and understandings of time are a research problem on which spans generations of historians have touched. This is hardly surprising, since the passage of time itself sets the coordinates, to use a metaphor, of a historian’s propositions. As a straining dual system of cognition, the narrowness or vastness of space and time determine our everyday lives, just as they did for those living in times past. This is one of the reasons why the endeavor to arrive at a grasp of time has become a fundamental human undertaking. Of the relevant examples, it is worth highlighting the abstraction already indicated in the subtitle: the arrangement of time in a framework defined by centuries. A century is not in itself an abstract period of time developed organically from the use of calendars.1 It is, rather, a solution that stems from the need of the human mind to organize and structure. It is a clue which has provided a more precise demarcation and nuance to an earlier approach, which was based on massive blocks of epochs in the professionalization of historiography.2 And this is precisely why its use should not be regarded merely as a factor of “convenience,”3 but rather as a logical necessity, much like historians’ narrative constructions and deconstructions over the past half century or so are also logical necessities. The difficulty lies in further abstracting the century as a clue, since the adaptation of the century (for instance, stretching it to cover a set of allegedly epoch-making events and thus reducing the time and, by implication, significance of other centuries) is a practice that partly forms the coherence of an epoch, and it generates problems.4 The use of Koselleck’s Sattelzeit or the fin de siècle is scale-specific and thus is at best a point of reference for the time concept of a micro-level study rather than a framework for interpretation. The concept of the “prolonged turn of the century,” as proposed by German historians and dated to the period between 1880 and 1930, may be a wiser choice. For Central and Eastern Europe, however, this is true only because this was also a major period of demographic change, which is interpreted as an important indicator of economic and cultural changes. Indeed, the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth were times of demographic transition, even if it is clear that the people living at these times were not aware of this. Attempts to grasp traditional life-worlds and document the transition have given rise to several methodological approaches, of which microhistory, born out of disillusionment in the wake of the quantitative revolution, serves only as an illustration of the one extreme. However, even with its exceptionally normal objective, microhistory has led to a kind of loss of hope, to which first postmodern historiography and then, more recently, globalization history have been trying to provide an adequate answer. The increasingly greater availability of sources as historians find themselves closer in time to the periods they are studying increases the number of problem-oriented questions. So the continuous return to the individual and her everyday life and experience provides inexhaustible opportunities. Pushing the peasant into the spotlight thus also implies the masses (or the statistical majority), and we can boldly hope to grasp this peasant as an individual while also getting a broader picture of the general population and the world in which this population lives.5

The foregoing justifies an attempt to outline the conceptual journey of the peasant approaching the regime of time from the perspective of everyday life, using a multi-generational chronicle, or the so-called Gyüker Chronicle. For this chronicle provides a tangible point in the source material where the variability of individual and social perceptions of time are clearly expressed in contrast to the constancy of physical or natural time.6 According to the entry made by József Gyüker (1862–1932),

they started in [19]28 to fly over the sea from Europe to America or from one country to another, and travel under water and powered cars and powered ploughs that had no horses in front of them were not new by then, and bicycle riders were also abundant; and the wireless telegraphs, they talked from one country to another as if they were sitting in front of each other.7

In my view, this is the point where the chronicler becomes aware that his own time is no longer the same time as his father, grandfather, and earlier ancestors had lived it (presentism), so this is where he begins to reflect consciously on the fact that his life is different from the lives of his predecessors.8 The quote, taken out of context, is the result of a longer process of inquiry, a continuous opening to the events of the world. It also implies thinking in a global perspective. It is a summary in which production conditions, weather, and trade also play important roles textually, but the mentions of world events become increasingly frequent and detailed. The significance of the passage lies in its concentration on emblematic events.9 The documentation of change seems relevant from multiple angles. As a basis for the comparison, in order to formulate the question, it seems appropriate to include another quote, this time from the grandfather, József Gyüker the Elder (1799–1874): “István Kovács the Elder was the first to buy a clock. He did so in Bőcs around 1840. Nobody had had one before. I bought mine around 1850.” By 1860, after a year of a bountiful harvest, he continued, it had become common to own a clock in the village. In Gyüker’s writing, the clock first appeared as an object of prestige.

By comparing the entries written by the grandfather with those written by the grandson and also with other entries written by other villages, one can examine the impact of modernization across generations. But how can we grasp the changes in the prevailing understanding of time in a peasant family? How does acceleration appear? To what extent did technological progress and in particular the spread of the clock as a device play a role in the transformation of the understanding and structuring of time in a peasant world? In the chain of influence, the strong natural determination of the agricultural world, marked by the seasons, and the important feast days of Christian culture are present at the same time. Alignment with these appears regularly from generation to generation in the chronicle, dating back to the end of the eighteenth century and lasting until the min-twentieth century. In addition, however, to the cyclical nature of seasons, feasts, agricultural tasks, and rites, as well as life events,10 new points of time were slowly appearing too. József Gyüker the Younger records three different times when recording the birth of his daughter: “Zsófi Gyüker was born on the third day of August 1890, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, under the sign of the Pisces.”11 When specifying the time of birth, Gyüker makes no mention of Christian feast days. Rather, he refers very specifically to the moment of time as specified by the calendar and the clock. In 1887, Gyüker the Younger also recorded a moment in time with reference to a clock when there was a fire in the village. References to the signs of the zodiac also became recurrent elements in the chronicle as a means of indicating the date of a birth. Taking these references to new methods of specifying and structuring time as my point of departure, I seek an answer to the following questions: what role did different aspects of the understanding of time have, and how did this vary across generations? And on the basis of this, what can we say about prevailing perceptions of time among peasants in light of the Gyüker Chronicle?

Source, Data, Method

To begin venturing answers to the questions raised above, it is worth considering the understanding of time and methods of managing time from a bottom-up perspective. Historical time is considered personal time when the individual interprets the age in which he lives in light of her own circumstances. Changing concepts of time in peasant communities are the last stage in the spread of modernity.12 Given the scarcity of intermediary channels, it is in these communities that we can hope to find the endpoint. This approach is more exciting when analysis is possible across generations. From the viewpoint of the availability of sources, however, we must consider ourselves lucky to have even a single source on which to rely. So far, only one such source is known in Hungary.13 A peasant chronicle, written by multiple generations, has survived from the village of Bőcs, more specifically a part of this village called Külsőbőcs, near Miskolc in northern Hungary. József Gyüker is thought to have begun recording his memories and what he had been told of the decade or so preceding his birth in 1863. In the late 1880s, his grandson, also named József Gyüker, wrote his notes in chronological order as a convenient means of linear narration.14 His son and grandson later wrote a few entries of their own. In the absence of a comparable source spanning multiple generations and a century and a half, I find it worthwhile to compare this chronicle with records that cover the same period and the roughly same territory of the country and relate to rural, specifically village communities. The selection was based on two data banks. In addition to the database of more than 600 items compiled by György Kövér, Zsuzsanna Kiss, and Anikó Lukács, I browsed the nearly 250 annotated first-person accounts written by peasants and published by the Lendület Ten Generations Research Group at the Research Centre for the Humanities.15 In the selection process, territorial representativeness and the connection to the periods were important criteria. The main parameters of the selected sources are summarized in Table 1.

Reliable records produced by members of the peasantry and suitable for deeper analysis began to be kept in greater quantities in the mid-twentieth century. The stratum-specific nature of literacy means that there are relatively few sources available from earlier periods. In any case, the diversity of village life justifies the need to focus not only on serfs and peasants, but also on the local intellectuals, clergymen, and schoolmasters, who were also an integral part of this life.

Table 1. The source material providing the basis for the analysis

Source: Mándoki, Ormánság népéletéből; S. Püski, “Kátai”; “Gyüker család feljegyzései”; MMgMK IV. 456. Helle János feljegyzései; Szeghalmi Könyvtár és Közérdekű Muzeális Gyűjtemény T.86.84.1. id. Arató Lajos visszaemlékezése.

In terms of geography, the sources are from the northern region of Hungary, the Great Plain, and the southern parts of Transdanubia. In terms of farming opportunities, arable farming and animal husbandry predominate, especially as, in addition to Karcag and Szeghalom, which belong to the Great Hungarian Plain, Alsónyék and Vajszló, although Transdanubian villages, belong to the same lowland landscape structure (the former as part of the microregion known as Sárköz, the latter as part of the microregion known as Ormánság). Their economic profiles included trade, which is emphasized in all the sources except Arató’s recollections, and also trade to distant commercial posts, such as market towns in Hungary and abroad. A further direction for research could include discussion of sources from northern Transdanubia.

Findings

The multi-generational Gyüker Chronicle of the peasant family that forms the backbone of the analysis here starts with an entry which is relevant to the life in the village and the local church and which and which touches on events which predated the birth of the author by more than a decade and thus were clearly descriptions offered by him based on second-hand information, presumably accounts given by his older family or community members.16 Among the comparable nineteenth-century chronicles, the Vajszló Chronicle by Dániel Kis Tóth, which was written in 1830, and the chronicle by Gábor Kátai of Karcag, which was written in 1860, precisely define 1700 as the starting point of the narratives they offer. For these narratives, this year is presumably a reference point, namely a year which, in the perception of the authors, had been a very specific watershed moment for their own age. If interpreted in a flexible way, 1700 in Hungary means the post-Turkish period, which meant the reorganization of economic and social life. In the areas depopulated during the period of Turkish occupation, such as Karcag in the Great Plain, this was also a difficult period of resettlement. Kátai starts with this:

In the year 1700, Karcag was captured by the Tatars; those who escaped went to Rakamaz and lived there for nine years, and the town was burned and destroyed by the Tatars; in the year 1710, those who were in Rakamaz came home […]. And the Church was finished in 1797, it was consecrated on All Saints’ Day in the same year.17

For Dániel Kis Tóth, who lived in Vajszló in southern Transdanubia, where the Turkish occupation affected the lives of the locals but did force the continuity to flee, this year was notable in other ways: “I begin to count the origin and history of this clan from 1700; it was then when our forefather István Kis Tóth was born; his two sons were György and János.” The Tatar armies devastated Karcag a few years earlier, in 1697,18 while the exact date of the birth of Dániel Kis Tóth’s forefather cannot be determined due to the lack of birth records, although it can be assumed that it dates back somewhat earlier.19 Their concept of time is thus strongly based on the memories (if second-hand in some cases) of the life and history of the settlement or the family, but the fact that the local residence was also decisive for Dániel Kis Tóth is indicated by his remark about the place of his ancestor’s birth. He notes that István Kis Tóth was born in Haraszti, which was already part of Vajszló when he was writing his narrative in 1830. An important difference between the two is that Dániel Kis Tóth wrote a family chronicle, the basic organizational principle of which is the succession of generations, while Kátai followed a chronological order in his chronicle. The generational narrative is only present in Kis Tóth’s writing. Reflections on the lives of ancestors is at most a minor element in the other narratives. József Gyüker the Elder, like Kátai, starts his chronicle with an event relevant to the settlement:

The writing of Stories Worthy of Memory; the order of priests and schoolmasters was established in 1787 by the venerable Ecclesiastical See; in 1788, the reign of Emperor Francis I of Austria began, the first French war started with his reign, lasting four and a half years […], 1793 was the great lean year, which some of the old may remember, it is said, that 1794 was also such a year, until the harvest came.

The events mentioned by Gyüker can be interpreted in several ways. The determination of the order of priests and schoolteachers meant the determination of salaries, presumably due to the lack of extra-parish minutes, especially the presbyter’s minutes. The income of Calvinist priests and schoolteachers depended to a considerable extent on the number and financial situation of the members of the church community. However, this was before his birth, so his source must build either on the accounts of members of the community in which he lived or the local historical sources already mentioned. The latter seems more likely. Gyüker relies, presumably, on inherited oral accounts to date the “Great Tribulation,” a difficult period that left a deep imprint on the memories of older people. However, the definition of the pastoral and teaching order would not have been a similarly traumatic event and thus was unlikely to have survived as part of the recollections of members of the older generations. Gyüker was presumably drawing on information found in a written source, which may have been a late eighteenth-century record. As the village’s magistrate as of 1836 and therefore a lay magistrate, he would have had the opportunity to consult this kind of source, since he had access to the village’s official records. Either then or later, but knowing the source, he learned of the event which had taken place in 1787. We can assume that his source may have been a contemporary record since, in the case of a village history or similar compilation, medieval or early modern references would presumably not have been missed. In connection with Bőcs, there are no surviving accounts of tragic events resembling the accounts of events that had taken place in Karcag. There are no indications that the inhabitants were driven away or that those who remained at home were deported at the end of the seventeenth century. In Kátai’s writing, this is a traumatic point, which was of great importance and also stood out in the chronological narrative, since the account of the period of resettlement is followed by a mention of 1772 as the year in which the three-field system was established, followed by the consecration of the church in 1797. From this point of view, there is no significant interval in the historical time as seen by Kátai and Gyüker the Elder, which undoubtedly focused on important events in the life of the settlement and reflected the division of time into periods in the accounts handed down from one generation to another in oral narratives.20

In Gyüker’s entry, however, the monarch is also named. In this respect, of course, his memory is not flawless. In 1788, Joseph II was still on the throne, but even Leopold II, who reigned for two years, was no longer remembered. Although Francis was the first emperor of Austria, he began his reign as Holy Roman Emperor, numbered Francis II. And the French War which Gyüker called the first, began not in 1788 but in 1792. But for Gyüker, who was 64 years old in 1863, the beginning of his personal time was marked by Emperor Francis (emphatically not named as king of Hungary) and the war with the French, which meant that Gyüker placed himself in both local and, in his conception, global history. The latter, that is, a concept of time that goes beyond the local as global, should not be mistaken for a sign of the global impact of the French War, even if one can argue from the perspective of later events that this war did have a significant impact, but rather is better understood as an indication of the size of the world conceivable by Gyüker. The period during which Emperor Francis sat on the throne, who was also King of Hungary between 1792 and 1835, may have been an early time for him because of the length of Francis’ reign. The memory of Francis as a ruler was also deeply imprinted in public consciousness visually because of his portrait on coins, where for much of this time the following inscription was running around his head: FRANCISCUS I D G AUST IMPERATOR. In Gyüker’s entry, therefore, only the “by the grace of God” part was omitted with regard to the monarch. In Helle’s case, the beginning is in medias res:

In 1821, towards the end of August, the water, which had already prevailed, flooded so much that, as travelers from Pest said, the whole Pest market, the part towards Pest, Óbuda, the lower part of Buda, the “water city” was completely submerged; consequently, it also took the embankment of Nyék, and entered Déllő and the courtyard of the school house. The cattle have also been displaced from the inner pasture, from the forest. According to residents, the last time the water was this high was eight years ago.21

Helle’s opening does not create a historical context. He was the village pastor, and he had come to this village from far away (his birthplace, Nagyharsány, is half a day’s walk from Alsónyék). He may have made these notes not only because the events described seemed worth remembering to him but also perhaps as a way of identifying a possible explanation for any shortfall in the benefits he was given by the congregation. Compared to the first passages of Helle’s notes, Arató’s recollections tell of experiences. He was associated with several municipalities, and these associations indicate the places where he served in addition to his place of birth. For him, too, regional and personal time takes on a different reading, as in Helle’s case.22 Arató spent most of his time in Szeghalom, but his municipal history cannot be compared to that of Gyüker or Kátai. He presented the years and events in which he personally played a part or had a particularly formative role (such as the improvement of the May Day celebrations or the unveiling of the statue of Kossuth). The temporal structure of his narrative is therefore peculiar compared to the temporal structures of the previous ones, because he focuses on turning points, on the “outliers” of memory. Kis Tóth saw his life as a parallel to that of the biblical Job:

It is true (says Solomon the Wise) that the light is sweet, and it is delightful for the eyes to see the Sun; but I can write for myself what Job the patriarch says in Job 3:11. Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb; you will find in this Book all the great details of my life, my condition, my sufferings, and my complaints; each epistle is numbered and can be found on the index table; (though it is too late for the remnant, that if God hath pleased me to be).

Arató’s stories, however, seem more to follow the Solomonic approach, as the motto introducing the manuscript makes clear: “Joyful years and happy days. Oh, when I think of you! You have drifted away like the waves of spring!” In contrast, the two Gyükers (especially the elder) and Kátai do not discuss the events of each year from an emotional perspective. Rather, they focus on the circumstances that provide the framework for peasant and everyday life.

In the entries composed by Gyüker the Elder, the interplay of family, local, national, and sometimes European events are sometimes captured, even when these events all took place in a single year:

In 1809, my elder sister married András Bényei, who was with us until Saint Michael’s Day, when he was drafted as a soldier and served for a year and a half. As a child, I was so shy, and we managed to make do with the help of others. In the same year, in anticipation of the fourth French war, the emperor ordered military mobilization for the nobles, which they did, and they assembled in camp near Komárom; France broke through the greater part of Hungary at Győr, and here the armies and nobles engaged them, but fortune favored the French; and then having made peace, the German emperor suffered a great loss; the nobility dispersed in the same year, each to his own place.

The close temporal connection also suggests causal links, which may well have been one of the principal aims of the author. András Bényei, who had recently married into the family, demonstrates the labor organization in extended families, and the war primarily represented damage and loss (as was later the case for his grandson with the outbreak of World War I), as was evident in the corruption of the family labor organization. In addition to the indirect mention of Napoleon as a historical figure of global significance, the reference to the Battle of Győr also reveals the violation of the foundations of the feudal order and a gradual awareness of this. After half a century, the disgraceful flight of the nobility at Győr, who were doing military service instead of paying taxes, remained an integral part of memory even after the dismantling of the legal framework of the feudal order. Of course, the comparatively small town of Bőcs found itself on the stage of global history not only because of the French wars but also because of the arrival of the potato, which originated in South America. This was also a significant event that transformed the culture of consumption.

Festivals and saints’ feast days are regularly mentioned by the authors of the sources under study. In fact, mentions of these occasions can be seen as indications of moments of normality, whereas everything else that happened was a representation of the extraordinary. It is not my aim to describe the festivals and the rites associated with them, which have been thoroughly studied by scholars of ethnography,23 but only to give a brief overview of the significant days that the authors whose recollections I am using as sources chose as recurring points. The chronological order is not linked to the start and end dates of the agricultural year (traditionally the feast days of Saint George in April and Saint Michael in September), which is why the year-start entries in the Gyüker Chronicle were linked less frequently to the Epiphany or to the feast days of Saint Vincent and Saint Paul (if not to a specific day). The two feast days are mentioned only in Gyüker the Younger’s entries, while the Epiphany or Russian Christmas was used by his grandfather. Saint Vincent’s Day (January 22) is recorded as being consistently foggy, while Saint Paul’s Day (January 25) was sunny. The saints’ feast days at the end of January were followed by the feast of Candlemas (February 2) and the feast of Saint Gregory (March 12), which marked the beginning of plowing for both the older and the younger generation. On Saint Joseph’s Day (March 19), still in keeping with tradition, sowing began so that it would be finished by Saint George’s Day.24 In the records composed by János Helle, Saint Joseph’s Day is mentioned as a recurring event because of the fairs in Pest. The Easter holidays were mentioned less frequently, not appearing at all in the case of Gyüker the Elder, but mentions of Saint George’s Day (April 24) were all the more prominent, for the reasons indicated and not merely because of its role in the agricultural order. According to the recollections of József Gyüker the Elder, in 1814, his brother was taken away as a soldier under orders. The importance of the feast day is underlined by the fact that it still had its gravitational force from the Middle Ages:25 the events before and after it were related to this day. For example, in 1863, “[a]fter good weather in March, April came with cold winds, which didn’t grow but rather spoiled everything, the vines were worked in the weeks before Saint George’s Day, in cold winds.” Saint John’s Day (June 24) was also, if not to the same extent, an important part of the task-oriented annual rhythm.26 In 1831, it was the spread of cholera that made this feast day memorable for the Gyüker the Elder:

On Saint John’s Day, we started to hoe on Batka, but already then cholera had appeared in many places; it started in Lucs sooner than in Bőcs, it was impossible to go straight to the fields, there were guards, but one had to go a roundabout way to the wild waters; it appeared in our village too after a short time, and in two months, 65 people died, not children, but men and women; one was not allowed to go from one village to another, there were guards everywhere.

The prominence of the feast day as a marker of the passage of time is evident in several entries, not only in the case of Gyüker the Elder but also in the case of Gyüker the Younger, for instance in one entry writes, “starting on the day of Saint John, it was very hot for three days.” The fact that József Gyüker the Elder’s records may have been based on almanacs or other earlier records is, however, suggested by the passages in which the days before or after the feast day are not necessarily mentioned in the context of the feast but as independent days.27 Saint Martin’s Day, in contrast to Saint Michael’s Day (which brought the agricultural year to a close), seems to be more significant for the chronicle and was observed by both generations in their lives. After Saint Martin’s Day, only Christmas appears, with Saint Andrew’s Day (November 30) going essentially unmentioned (except in 1928). The special days of the agricultural year were major events in the lives of members of both the older and the younger generations, or at least these days are frequently mentioned in the source. Particular feast days remained points of reference even for the grandson, even though by the time he was writing the use of the month and the day was a more widespread method of indicating a date. A noticeable change, however, took place in the naming of the feasts. References to Saint Martin’s feast in the entries composed by Gyükér the Elder always included the word “saint,” while this word is found in this context in entries by his grandson only until 1889, and from 1910 to 1927 he simply called it Martin’s Day (in 1927, he again referred to it as Saint Martin’s Day). Saint Andrew’s Day, only mentioned in 1903, is also given without the word “saint.” Mentions of Saint George’s Day and Saint John’s Day consistently include the word “saint,” while Saint Paul’s Day is called by various names, but again only by Gyüker the Younger. Obviously, this might suggest a slight degree of laicization, but given the frequent expressions of gratitude to “God Almighty” and assurance of trust in God, this seems unlikely.

The accounts of individuals’ lives included mention of major events, namely marriage, birth, and death. Women and girls were mostly mentioned in these contexts and less often in connection with a vacancy in the family labor organization. There is a marked difference in the recording of births between Gyüker the Elder and Gyüker the Younger. József Gyüker the Elder considered it important to record his and his wife’s birth dates (although he never referred to his wife, Erzsébet Makláry, by name), and so did his grandson (but he referred to his wife, Julianna Almási, by name). Gyüker the Elder did not record the dates of the births of any of his children, while Gyüker the Younger wrote them down one by one: József in 1885, Julcsa in 1888, Zsófi in 1890, and Julianna in 1894. Death in the family played a more important role for Gyüker the Elder. He noted that his father died in 1802, his paternal uncle, the bell founder János Gyüker, in 1831, his brother, István, in 1849, and his son, Samu, in 1850. Apparently, József Gyüker the Elder’s attention was essentially directed towards the older members of the family, and his son was an exception only due to his tragically premature death. In the case of his grandson, József Gyüker the Younger, the deaths of his parents, his wife, and his younger brother are listed, as well as the deaths of his daughters Julcsa in 1889 and Zsófi in 1893. In his case, even the children were given more attention. Their births and deaths were milestones in his understanding of personal time. This tendency to devote greater attention to the fates of his offspring may be reflected in the practice (also only observed by József Gyüker the Younger) of indicating the astrological sign of his children at birth. When it came to this, however, his references were inaccurate. He thought that his son József, who was born on November 8, was a Sagittarius, his daughter Julcsa (born on February 8) a Capricorn, Zsófi (born on August 3) a Pisces, and Julianna (born on December 29) an Aquarius. Not only was he consistently wrong, his blunders were sometimes quite notable (for instance, the notion that someone born in August is a Pisces), so it is different to imagine that he drew on the almanacs. Regardless of this, however, his interest in the signs of the Zodiac as a means of structuring time offers some indication of his interest in the eventual fates of his offspring, since he presumably hoped to learn something of his children’s futures from these signs, for instance, whether they were born under a so-called lucky star.28

Although astrology emerged as a new marker in the concept of time among peasants, the spread of the clock brought about a more significant change. According to an entry by József Gyüker the Elder, the clock first appeared in Bőcs around 1840, he himself bought one around 1850, and then, “in 1860, as there was a very abundant harvest, everyone could afford anything, so others bought them too, as the price was not much. One could be bought for five or six silver coins, whatever kind the poor farmer needed; thus began the clock in Bőcs.” What could he have meant by the phrase “whatever kind the poor farmer needed?” In his 1864 entries, he repeatedly describes events to the nearest hour. For instance, he notes that on March 13, at 4 p.m., there was a strong, cold wind and sleet, and on June 11, around 5 or 6 o’clock, there was a strong wind with little rain. On October 24, 1866, at 11 p.m., there was an earthquake. It is unlikely that it was some need to record these kinds of events that made the clock important to the farmers. Beyond the fact that it was obviously a prestige object, the clock may have had a more practical use as well. Gyüker the Elder began his account of the events of 1859 with the construction of the railway, which played an important role in the life of the village in the development of both trade and employment. And keeping up with the train now required the precise measurement of time to the minute.29 In the case of József Gyüker the Younger, documentation up to the hour is, understandably, much more frequent. In addition to the weather events, he also recorded family events mostly to the hour. For example, his daughter Zsófi is known to have been born on August 3, 1890, at 2 p.m. and to have died on March 19, 1893, at 10 p.m., and his mother, Zsuzsanna Nagy, died at 10 p.m. on June 7, 1913. Consequently, the emergence of the clock had not only an economic role, either as a prestige object or as a means of keeping up with the train schedule. It was also a means of experiencing certain events, especially family events, in a deeper way. In 1830, the clock is mentioned in the Vajszló Chronicle more as a hoarded prestige object,30 while in the case of Arató’s narrative, the exact or approximate time of certain important events was kept rather as part of the flashbulb memory. In Helle’s records, an indication of the time of an event that was precise to the hour was exceptional, but in these cases, one can assume that Helle used the time signals of the church. Gábor Kátai gives the first exact time when recording the earthquake of July 1, 1829 (8 p.m.). He writes, “at the town hall the bell rang and the sheep bells on the nail rang.” It can be assumed that here, as in the case of the fire at noon on May 23, 1831, the tolling of the bells drew attention to the clock tower, if there was one (further research is needed to determine this).31 The clock was also a sign of modernity in contemporary society. The clock represented both the figurative and the concrete sense of the passage of time in the home. More abstract units of time than the hour itself, such as the minute and the second, become part of life in rural homes. They were given form and sound by their structural carrier, or in other words, modernity itself became a tangible, rapidly running, ticking experience for rural society.

Conclusions

József Gyüker the Younger learned of the events described in the proposition, such as the possibility of flying in 1928, the spread of the bicycle and the powered plough, and many other pieces of information from the newspaper rather than from the almanacs.32 He had access to more information and apparently thought it important to write down more things than his grandfather had. Price statistics appear in his entries more and more frequently, which must have become increasingly important for him because of purchasing and especially selling. The question is whether this greater amount of information, which took more time to absorb and process, was worth the time spent. I believe that Gyüker the Younger’s aim by following price movements was to make more money by selling and to get a higher return on the time invested. This was probably facilitated by local rail transport, but it required keeping up with rail transport. Exposure to the natural environment continued to play a significant role in the perception of time for members of Gyüker the Younger’s generation, but more efficient management also required more efficient time management. The spread of the clock and the way it became an integral part of the main areas of life definitely furthered this. Regardless of this, however, the regular use of references to exact years, months, and days and the occasional use of the clock as ways of marking the time of an event indicates a modern concept of time in the case of József Gyüker the Elder. Not only is this practice refined in his case of his grandson, who notably indicated the very hour of an important event, but there are also more frequent moments, in his narrative, of retrospection. While József Gyüker the Elder looks back on the events of the past by writing the chronicle itself, his grandson repeatedly reflects on earlier events even within the very text. Indeed, this becomes quite common in entries written after World War I. We do not know why József Gyüker (1836–1897) (the son of Gyüker Elder and the father of Gyüker the Younger) did not continue his father’s chronicle, but we do have information about why the youngest József Gyüker (1909–?) abandoned it: “he has no time to write.” In other words, for Gyüker the Elder, the time he spent writing was understood as leisure time, not work time, while for his grandson, Gyüker the Younger, this time was work time, as it facilitated work and productivity. From this point of view, this time lost its purely leisure-time character. Instead, the importance of time as a means of keeping accounts became more and more important. In time, Gyüker the Younger devoted even this time spent on writing to work, which is one more indication of the disappearance of traditional peasant life.33

Acknowledgments

The study of larger-scale processes of modernization and globalization at the local level has been a long-standing interest for me. For a long time, however, I had had trouble finding suitable source materials. György Kövér, My Ph.D. supervisor, helped me overcome this when he recalled a seminar he held more than ten years ago in which we also studied the Gyüker Chronicle. For the scanned copy of the original manuscript, I would like to thank the staff of the Scientific Collections of the Reformed College of Sárospatak. I would also like to thank the director of the Szeghalom Library and Museum Collection of Public Interest, Klára Hajdú, for providing the transcription of Lajos Arató’s memoirs. I am grateful to Gábor Gyáni and Veronika Eszik for their suggestions and comments regarding the manuscript.

Archival Sources

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DGS 004704131–32: Belsőbőcs (Borsod). Calvinist registers, 1714–1895.

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Magyar Mezőgazdasági Múzeum és Könyvtár [Hungarian Agricultural Museum and Library] (MMgMK)

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Szeghalmi Könyvtár és Közérdekű Muzeális Gyűjtemény [Szeghalom Library and Museum Collection of Public Interest]

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Hobsbawm, Eric J. Das imperiale Zeitalter. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1989.

Hoppál, Mihály. “Horoszkóp” [Horoscope]. In Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon, vol. 2, (F–Ka), edited by Gyula Ortutay, 579. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1979.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Elmúlt jövő: A történeti idők szemantikája [Futures past: On the semantics of historical time]. Budapest: Atlantisz Könyvkiadó, 2003.

Kovács, I. Gábor. Kis magyar kalendáriumtörténet 1880-ig: A magyar kalendáriumok történeti és művelődés-szociológiai vizsgálata [A brief history of Hungarian almanacs until 1880: A historical and sociological study of Hungarian almanacs.] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1989.

Kövér, György. Biográfia és társadalomtörténet [Bibliography and social history]. Budapest: Osiris, 2014.

Küllős, Imola. “Parasztkrónika” [Peasant chronicle]. In Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon, vol. 4, N–Szé, edited by Gyula Ortutay, 186. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1981.

Mitterauer, Michael, and Richard Sieder. Vom Patriarchat zur Partnerschaft: Zum Strukturwandel der Familie. Munich: Beck, 1977.

Nolte, Paul. “Gibt es noch eine Einheit der neueren Geschichte?” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 24, no. 3 (1997): 377–99.

Osterhammel, Jürgen, and Patrick Camiller. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Paládi-Kovács, Attila chief ed. Magyar Néprajz. Vol. 2, Gazdálkodás: A vetés idejének meghatározása [Hungarian ethnography. Vol. 2, Farming: Determining the time of sowing]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2001.

Roberts, John M. Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901–2000. New York: Viking, 1999.

Romsics, Ignác. “A gazdagparasztság és a forradalmak kora (Két forrás a XX. századi magyar parasztság politikai tudatához)” [The rich peasantry and the age of revolutions: Two sources for the political consciousness of the twentieth-century Hungarian peasantry]. Történelmi Szemle 22, no. 1 (1979): 127–44.

Takács, József Péter. “A toronyórák története” [The history of tower clocks]. Theologiai Szemle 33, no. 6 (1990): 352–56.

Tátrai, Zsuzsanna. “Jeles napok – ünnepi szokások” [Special days – festive customs]. In Magyar Néprajz, vol. 7 [Hungarian ethnography], edited by Attila Paládi-Kovács, 102–264. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990.

Thompson, Edward P. “Az idő, a munkafegyelem és az ipari kapitalizmus” [Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism]. In Időben élni: Történelmi–szociológiai tanulmányok [Living in time: Historical and sociological studies], edited by Márta Gellériné Lázár, 60–116. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990.

Tóth, István György. “Harangkongás és óraketyegés: A parasztok és kisnemesek időfogalma a 17–18. században” [Tolling of bells and ticking of clocks: Peasants’ and lesser nobles’ concept of time in the 17th and eighteenth centuries]. In “Atyám megkívánta a pontosságot”: Ember és idő viszonya a történelemben, edited by Zoltán Fónagy, 51–74. Budapest: Hungarian Historical Society–Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, 2016 [1993].

Varga, János. “Öreg Gyüker József krónikája 1787–1866” [The chronicle of József Gyüker the Elder, 1787–1866]. Agrártörténeti Szemle 6, no. 3–4 (1964): 453–54.

How to Study Early Popular Engagement with Nationalism: Sources, Strategies, Research Traditions

Ágoston Berecz
Central European University
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 1  (2023):3–36 DOI 10.38145/2023.1.3

The article combines methodological considerations with an overview of the literature on early popular nationalism, in which studies on Central and Eastern Europe occupy pride of place. Within these thematic confines, my aim is to give a broad sense of the methodological challenges of writing history from below. After a brief sketch of the problem area, I pass to the question of demarcating and contextualizing modern nationalism and discuss a few conventionally used indicators of national allegiances (tax discipline, draft evasion, turnout at national festivals, abidance by linguistic standards). Subsequently, the major part of the paper is organized according to the source types that historians have utilized to explore the relationship of the lower classes to the national paradigm: archival sources, folklore and ethnographic material, various kinds of egodocuments, press reportage, readers’ columns, and non-narrative sources. I address the interpretive issues that each source type raises, citing abundant examples from the literature, including my own research.

Keywords: bottom-up history, Central and Eastern Europe, egodocuments, long nineteenth century, popular nationalism

The social history of nationhood has been a busy and innovative field since the late 1990s, and a significant chunk of it has dealt with early popular responses to modern nationalism. “Early,” in this case, could embrace several generations. The spread of national loyalties and national mindsets was less straightforward, more elusive, and perhaps lengthier than initially thought, and the sources often present contradictory evidence on how far national frames mattered to people in the past. The question of when people began to feel and behave as conscious nationals has remained relevant for the specific nations, but historians are now also interested in how and in what contexts they did so and how far the nationalisms they embraced were the same as the nationalisms of the elites.

The adoption of bottom-up perspectives has been the most consequential thing in the historiography of nationalism, as it has opened up the field for anthropological approaches and reclaiming agency for the people. Whereas intellectual and political histories of elites and counter-elites had dominated research until the 1990s, today’s historical accounts of nationalism also feature middle-class and lower-class men and women as full actors and often give prominence to their everyday culture, practices, and perceptions. And conversely, engaging with the question of what sense ordinary people made of nationalist messages and how these messages resonated with them has been among the most prominent uses of the bottom-up perspective. My article provides an overview of the field from a methodological angle, focusing on scholarship about the lower classes and incorporating relevant work from other research agendas. My goal is to give a broad sense of the methodological challenges of writing history “from below” within the narrow thematic confines of my survey.

I give pride of place to the literature on Central and Eastern Europe, which I know best and which has been one of the powerhouses of innovative research, and I limit myself to the long nineteenth century, ending with the First World War—a convenient time limit for the early phase of most nationalisms in the region. Therefore, peasants—understood in the minimalist way as people doing agricultural labor for a living—will be my main protagonists. Some would argue, and with good reason, that state-backed and minority, oppositional national projects marked out two separate pathways to nationhood; the two had different channels at their disposal, and the latter could better exploit social and other grievances. I will cover both types. The distinction between the two is often lost on historians from other parts of the world, who may even associate nationalism with independent statehood. More importantly, a closer look at nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe also shows that this distinction was not always a sharp one, and national projects are better placed on a continuum according to the state power they could wield.

Ordinary people’s adherence to (or rejection of) state nationalisms and national movements in this early stage is a subject bound up with the question of their involvement in high politics, which creates a close affinity with the research paradigm sometimes referred to as “the politicization of the countryside,” harking back to Maurice Agulhon. Another conceptual framework with overlapping interests, focusing on “political cultures,” is also relevant here, because András Cieger sketched out a survey of source types on the political culture of Dualist Hungary (although largely disregarding the peasantry).1 On the other hand, the bundle of problems described here stands distinctly apart from the field marked by such diverse names as Hermann Bausinger, Orvar Löfgren, Arjun Appadurai, and Claude Karnoouh, which explores how national cultures were canonized and everyday cultures were nationalized by drawing on elements from folklore and folk life.

At the foundation of all histories of becoming national stands Eugen Weber’s magisterial Peasants into Frenchmen from 1976, the story of how peasants in the backwaters of France came to feel and think of themselves as French and, indeed, learned French between 1870 and 1914. The book met with instant criticism for its narrow and late dating of the process, propped on Weber’s foregrounding of the most backward regions.2 This was a legitimate objection, but the book also came too early and did not have much influence in continental Europe until the 1990s. Only after seminal intellectual and macrohistories of nationalism had prepared the way did historians truly appreciate its focus on the nationalization of the masses, which offered a corrective to the reigning elite-centered view.3 Then, as Weber’s book had started to inspire research on nineteenth-century national integration, the same impetus towards bottom-up perspectives ended up challenging it from a new angle.

New social histories of nationhood built on history-writing from below, a trend popular since the 1960s.4 The representatives of this trend—British Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson, the Alltagsgeschichte movement, and the Subaltern Studies group—were interested in retrieving popular agency and showing that ordinary people played an active role in shaping their world.5 From their perspective, then, Weber’s book portrayed peasants as pawns of forces beyond their control. In line with modernization theories, Weber understood nationalization as a top-down process, with peasants soaking up readymade ideology and culture transmitted to them through the agencies of change around which he structured his book: compulsory schooling, military service, economic progress, centralized administration, better communications, and cheap reading material. Studies in the 1990s and 2000s gradually transformed this explanatory model of one-way indoctrination and trickle-down into one in which the non-elites negotiated their national membership. In more recent understandings, people could appropriate nationalist messages on their own terms, turn them to their own ends, and even reinterpret them, upending upper-class meanings. In concert with the new focus on how the nationalist paradigm had been received and reproduced, there has also been a shift towards sources that can illuminate people’s experiences. Weber based his tableau of a modernizing countryside on external accounts and statistics. Newer scholarship has sought to complement such sources with egodocuments, long exploited in social histories from below.6

Since nationalism was originally constructed by the elites, the top-down view has not lost its legitimacy. In this vein, some research traditions that rose to prominence in the 1990s set out to unpack the nationalist discourses encoded in textbooks, monuments, architecture, pageants, etc. These subjects are still popular today, but rather than tacitly assume that people interpreted them according to the deciphered meanings, historians have realized the need to capture people’s reactions.

This task requires a focus on the micro scale. Although the books in this category can span several decades, they often consist of a string of local-based stories interspersed with analyses and narrative passages written from a bird’s eye view. At the same time, microhistories confined entirely to specific localities are rare, mainly because the body of high-quality or eloquent evidence needs to be pieced together from various places. Another popular strategy is the complex analysis of text corpora, and there have also been sporadic studies analyzing datasets.

In the last 15 years, two new approaches have emerged. Drawing on theories proposed by Rogers Brubaker and Michael Billig, the paradigm referred to as everyday nationalism emphasizes the contextual, dynamic, and contingent nature of nationhood. Membership in a national category does not matter equally across social domains and roles. Further, nationhood “happens”: national frames are recreated in specific situations; this aspect was arguably even more relevant as long as national categories and symbols could not be taken for granted. The other trend is to look for instances of “national indifference.” In Tara Zahra’s formulation, this concept is built around the idea that in the era of clamoring nationalism, the lack of national allegiances was necessarily a reaction against nationalist agitation. In practice, however, the label refers rather freely to non-national behavior or any behavior that did not comply with upper-class creeds of national orthodoxy. To some extent, it applies the reverse of everyday nationalism’s interpretive matrix, but it holds more appeal for historians interested in demystifying nationalist narratives.7

Following a section on a few conventional indicators of national allegiances, the central part of this paper will be organized according to the source types that historians of the long nineteenth century have utilized to explore the changing relationship of the lower classes to the national paradigm: archival sources, folklore and ethnographic material, various sorts of egodocuments, press reportage, readers’ columns, and non-narrative sources. I will address the interpretive issues that each source types raises, featuring methodological reflections by other historians and giving abundant examples from the literature, including my own research.

Identifying Nationalism

No matter what sources are being studied, their significance for the field lies in what they reveal about people’s actions, thoughts, and emotions. Historians have privileged certain kinds of behaviors, thought patterns, and symbols as signs of national allegiances, many of them now contested or fallen out of favor. Before I move on to the sources, let me dwell on some of these customary indicators. Since they tend to go together with specific source types, it often makes better sense to postpone discussion of others for a later section. Voting for nationalist parties, for example, will be discussed together with electoral data among non-narrative sources.

Short of further evidence, popular support for nationalist discourse or politics does not necessarily imply national feelings or thinking. Especially where class, status, or religious boundaries concurred with the ascriptive national categories, it is hard to disentangle the exact role that the various factors played in collective action.8 However, some forms of action seem more straightforward. For instance, the fact that most Volga German emigrants headed to the Americas between 1870 and 1917 and few settled in the German Empire speaks to the weakness of sentimental ties to their aspiring kin state.9

The study of rumors furthers an interpretation of this kind of collective action by placing it in context and offers a rewarding view of vernacular political imaginaries, as well as people’s fears, hopes, and expectations. The local grapevine is of particular importance in the lives of communities with very low literacy or scarce access to reliable news, where strangers are regularly debriefed on what they heard elsewhere and the scraps of information about designs of “the lords” often change beyond recognition as people try to reassemble them. The rumors British officials in the Raj had heard were a staple part of their reports, and they are also found in administrative reports from nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, particularly in moments of tension.10 Such references in the archives help Irina Marin depict Romanian peasants’ knowledge of the outside world at the time of the 1907 peasant revolt in amusing and disturbing detail, and Andriy Zayarnyuk also uncovers the reasons why Greek Catholic peasants from the Sambir District stayed away from the 1846 Galician uprising by studying sources containing alleged rumors among the members of this community.11 (Rumors are foregrounded in Veronika Eszik’s contribution to this thematic bloc.)

Devotion to the homeland may stand behind titular majorities’ voluntary compliance with the state’s requirements, but the relationship is too messy to be used as a measure. For Bourdieu, “the progressive development of the recognition of the legitimacy of official taxation is bound up with the rise of a form of nationalism.”12 Eugen Weber indeed utilized tax dodging as a negative indicator of patriotism, but later authors did not make much of it.13 On the other hand, Weber’s recourse to draft evasion figures was picked up in similar studies of the 1990s, even though they are of questionable value: self-mutilation and escape from the draft were old strategies mostly without political motives, and compliance certainly should not be taken as a sign of patriotic devotion.14

Until recently, turnout at national festivals counted among historians as another favorite indicator of national affinities, and with better justification. Alon Confino dedicated a large portion of his book on Württemberg under the Second Empire to exploring what groups celebrated Sedan Day and the meanings they attached to it.15 Some studies even focus on peasants. Thus, Patrice Dabrowski gives an insightful account of the religion-imbued Sobieski bicentennial in 1883, which attracted to Cracow over twelve thousand peasants with Polish cockades from all corners of Galicia.16 The initiative still came from above. By 1903, Polish peasant activists were organizing reenactments of a 1794 battle to highlight the role of peasant insurgents in the Kościuszko uprising.17

Xenophobia is by no means unique to the national paradigm. Indeed, strangers to be feared or held in contempt could appear more numerous until the national paradigm imposed at least a modicum of solidarity with millions of personally unknown fellow-nationals and blurred some dividing lines. In his nationalist chef-d’oeuvre, Gandhi described the hatred between Hindus and Muslims as an evil to be cured for the good of the nation, but he nevertheless urged his readers to “go into the interior that has yet not been polluted by the railways, and to live there for six months” in order to learn Indian patriotism.18 And yet, peasants in the back country were more likely to harbor deep aversions to the opposite religion than to share Gandhi’s vision of an Indian nation.

Likewise, confessional endogamy does not have anything inherently national about it. The same goes for language loyalty, but it gained in importance as literacy boosted exposure to nationalist content, and the withdrawal of public recognition from the standard language that people could handle stoked frustrations.19 Depending on the context, the domain, and one’s language repertoire, language choices can signal nationalist dispositions. Martyn Lyons’ idea of considering conformity with abstract linguistic authorities a benchmark of national solidarity is also not without some worth, given the alliance between nationalism and standard language ideology. Nevertheless, it is easier to explain the difference between French and Italian soldiers’ facility with the linguistic standards, which Lyons noted, by the French Third Republic’s relative success at mass schooling over prewar Italy.20 Moreover, some other, typically Lutheran regions had already achieved high literacy rates by the time the age of nationalism set in, which loosened the association between nationalism and the standard language. Finally, it is also not uncommon for standard languages and linguistic authorities to straddle national lines (e.g., English in Ireland, German in Switzerland).

The criteria of nationalism must be contextualized on a case-by-case basis, and ethnonyms highlight this fact more than any other subject. Some ethnonyms on which modern nationalists seized as national epithets had already enjoyed a wide currency for centuries, despite the occasional ambiguities and regional differences. For instance, the “Romanian lads” and “Romanian girls” that turn up in Romanian folk songs from Transylvania are nothing unusual or unexpected.21 Other new or reinvented ethnonyms, on the other hand, index engagement with the modern nation. Such is the case with calling oneself ellin (“Hellene”) in the nineteenth-century Balkans, an identity label that radically rebranded Greekness and inadvertently redefined membership in it. Another example is polák (“Pole”), until the nineteenth-century a status-exclusive category largely referring to nobles. Catholic, Polish-speaking former serfs of Galicia called themselves mazur (“Masurian”), and in his own words, the future Dzików mayor Jan Słomka did not know he was a Pole until he started to read books.22

But even national ethnonyms that had been applied to commoners for centuries may have mattered only to make some contrasts and coexisted with sundry regional labels. Regional self-identifications were more common in a world in which the boundaries of a district often marked one’s widest circle of solidarity, and regional labels also hinted at alternative paths. According to Fred Stambrook, for example, the survival of Bukovinan identity in the Canadian diaspora indicates the distance that Orthodox Ukrainians in Bukovina felt from Galician Uniate Ukrainians.23

Archives

Despite the appreciation for egodocuments in the field and the premium on exploring new source types, historical work on nationalism and the masses still most often draws on archival material and the local press. Whether they derive from government or minority agencies, archives are home to secondhand sources that typically cover ordinary people “from above” in one of three ways: they report on their actions, quote them, and assess their mood, feelings, and ideas. Significantly, archival sources on national minorities can provide key evidence on the forms that state policies took on the ground beyond the information they contain on minoritized people’s reactions to these policies. Finally, in the minutes of local governments, parishes, and associations, ordinary people also come to the fore as empowered agents.

The Subaltern Studies Group’s famous appeal to read government sources about the people “against the grain” boils down to interpreting such sources within the ideology and communicative situations in which they were grounded.24 Government administrators’ views on minorities were influenced by contradictory and situational tropes. On the one hand, the self-legitimizing vision of the state made them prone to depict minorities as peaceful and immune to the siren calls of national movements. On the other hand, law-enforcers often attributed deep-seated, formidable national solidarity to minoritized people in order to raise moral panic, buttress lobbying efforts for resources, or justify harsh measures. The categories they used in that regard can detract from the value of their reporting. A case in point might be the insistence of Dualist Hungarian authorities on labeling Slovak cultural and political initiatives misleadingly as “Pan-Slavic” and thus obscuring important differences.25 Further, it should also matter whether the narrators related firsthand experiences and whether their stakes are identifiable.

Historians may find government officials’ views sufficiently convincing to quote or embrace them. Andrei Cuşco contends, on the basis of secret memos by Russian officials, that Romanian nationalist or separatist resistance was insignificant in Bessarabia before 1905, although at the same time he cautions that one can only draw tentative conclusions from this corpus.26 In another typical example, Nenad Stefanov quotes the Serbian governor from 1878 on the confusion and opportunism that reigned over questions of nationality in the Pirot region.27

Most of the relevant government files, however, do not pass such judgments but deal with ongoing or looming conflicts. His archival finds on the conflicts between the Bosnian population and the Habsburg authorities convinced a reluctant Siniša Malešević, who a few years earlier had still found “no evidence” that Serbian nationalism “was widespread among Serbs living outside the Serb state,”28 that popular resistance to government policies had “attained proto-nationalist and in some cases fully fledged nationalist contours.”29 Contested linguistic attributions in censuses and the ensuing recounts are the topic of Emil Brix’s monograph from 1982, which paved the way for a slew of research on how ethnic classification used in censuses inadvertently reinforced self-identification with the categories on offer.30

Interrogations and witness testimonies are privileged places of reported speech in the archives and have been a popular hunting ground for historical anthropologists. They require caution and must be read in context, since people, especially peasants, could go to great lengths to dissimulate, feign ignorance, and find out what the interviewer wanted to hear. Zayarnyuk retrieves the rumors circulating among Galician Greek Catholic peasants in 1846 from what they later told investigators.31 Confidential administrative and police reports often informed higher authorities about the general mood, the rumors that were circulating, and the popularity of national movements. In early twentieth-century Hungary, the police officers overseeing minority political rallies often wrote down the speeches in shorthand and described the audience’s reactions, which elevates the surviving reports to the status of first-rate sources.32

Historians of oppositional nationalisms, in particular those biased towards them, have tended to underplay the sources coming down from antagonistic governments and rely on the self-documentation of national movements: the nationalist press, accounts by activists, and the paper trails left by ethnic associations, churches, and parties. Of these, activists’ correspondence is especially worth revisiting in a critical light for the references these activists make to their claimed constituencies. In a confidential letter to the Greek consul of Philippopolis/Plovdiv from 1862, a Greek nationalist from Stanimaka (today Asenovgrad in Bulgaria) recalled unsentimentally and perceptively how local people had received Hellenism twenty years earlier, after a Greek school had opened in the town:

The first ideas about Greek nationality were, so to say, romantic, they were pleasant to hear, but they were immediately considered mere ideas, theories of teachers not having any weight (…) any idea of a close relation of the local population to Independent Greece, of a real kinship and familiarity, was either absent at all or it was a misty and indiscernible one.33

In their letters, nationalists often aired frustration over the alleged lack of responses from the people. Such complaints, however, should be read in their psychological and rhetorical context. Moreover, as Laurence Cole warns, even if the people in question truly felt indifferent to the given aims and efforts, this does not mean that they were simply “non-national.”34

To the extent that local councils were autonomous, democratic bodies, the minutes of their meetings can represent voices from below. Florencia Mallon makes use of such sources to reconstruct alternative, “subaltern” forms of nationalism in two regions of nineteenth-century Peru and Mexico.35 I studied local protests against the Magyarization of locality names in the 1900s partly based on the transcripts of council meetings. Since the dust had long settled over the renaming law, the actual measures caught ethnic Romanian local councils off guard. They did not try to hide their outrage, but their protests were improvised and seldom drew on nationalist (pre-)historical narratives or etymologies.36

Folklore

Apart from government officials, occasional visitors like travel writers and academics also commented on the national consciousness of specific local communities, and sociologically-minded intellectuals increasingly made it an object of scholarly investigation. In particular, historians can tap into a rich source base of ethnographic writing. Early ethnographic descriptions, of which Eugen Weber already made abundant use, raise other problems than the interwar trend of village monographs. While the former frequently arose from or were based on accounts of local priests and schoolteachers—participant observers but not full members of their subject groups—the latter were typically the work of outsiders with a more systematic approach, not shy of interviewing all grownup members of a community in the space of a few weeks. The Gusti school’s 1934 fieldwork in Clopotiva provided the most tangible piece of evidence of status-based Hungarian national loyalty among the Byzantine-rite, Romanian-speaking former nobles of the Haţeg Basin.37 Around the same time in Transdanubia, a collective of young “village researchers” documented how the Calvinists of Kemse felt superior to their Croat neighbors but had neither an appreciation for Hungarian state nationalism nor respect for national holidays, which they believed were a stratagem invented by the “lords” for an unknown purpose.38

Past identifications and attitudes are not a subject where oral history can yield valid results beyond the informants’ lifetime. Even so, Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer’s participatory fieldwork in the 1950s and 60s managed to recreate a plausible picture of political culture in Átány around 1900, one decidedly more in line with upper-class trends than that of interwar Kemse. Locals had been avid supporters of the so-called forty-eighter Independentist party, which they considered the patriotic choice. Átány peasants, however, for the most part prosperous smallholders from the most Independentist-leaning county of Dualist Hungary and many of them with noble titles, were not necessarily representative of the Magyar peasantry, all the less so as they lived near a prominent lieu de mémoire, the site of an important battle from 1849.39

E. P. Thompson advocated the use of folklore collections to probe oral worlds of “customary culture.” But the extent to which folklore material can and should be used to study social imaginaries is a question dividing historians working on different contexts. Thomson himself quotes second-rate poetry and church hymns more often than anonymous, orally transmitted lower-class creations in his Making of the English Working Class.40 For Ranajit Guha, ostensible folkloric evidence presents insurmountable interpretive problems in a thoroughly illiterate culture, where whatever survives in written form is by definition privileged and tainted by an elitist point of view.41 His blanket skepticism, however, already met with an objection in James C. Scott’s preface to his book.42

While some folklore genres, such as dance shouts, better reflect actuality, others are more refractory to change, can preserve pre-national patterns, and are slow to herald peasants’ engagement with the national paradigm.43 Both Jaroslav Hrytsak’s analysis of Ivan Franko’s folklore collection from Nahuievychi and Sorin Mitu and Elena Bărbulescu’s cursory analysis of Romanian folk lyrics from Transylvania reconstruct pre-national mental maps, symbolic geographies, and ethnic labels.44 When it comes to the inroads of nationalism, however, the problem of source criticism risks becoming circular, since it is precisely the occurrence of national motifs that raises a red flag.

The main problem is how closely what collectors recorded reflects what lower-class people consumed and reproduced for their own purposes. From the perspective of the discussion here, the age of the folklore material and the question of peasant or “bookish” origins are irrelevant, but these were not irrelevant details for the collectors, who chased a different kind of authenticity and thought that external accretions could be separated from genuine folklore. Early, Romantic collections, notorious for their authorial interferences and mystifications, are the hardest nut to crack.45 They sneaked national or prehistoric content into folklore texts or created the sense that national history deeply mattered for the people, as Vuk Stefanović Karadžić did, for instance, by transferring to Herzegovina the epic songs he collected about Prince Lazar near his burial site much farther north.46 If the goal is to spot the early emergence of nationalist themes, comparing different variants to filter out such interventions can be of little help, since it is precisely the eccentric variants that are the most likely to turn up evidence.

These issues do not devalue the testimony of folklore, especially if taken in a loose sense. Some relevant folk creations can be dated with more or less precision. For instance, one song recorded from Volga German transatlantic migrants in the 1870s praises Russia as the “dear, dear Fatherland.”47 Then, there are observations made on the margins of folklore. At the end of the nineteenth century, one historian from Mostar noted that the same stories told by the surrounding Orthodox population about Saint Sava had been attributed to Saint Martin, Saint Nicholas, or even Archangel Michael a couple of generations earlier. This statement is significant for what it tells about the penetration of the nationalist cult of Saint Sava.48 Finally, there is the testimony of local communal memory and mnemonic cues, such as minor place names. Investigating Frigyes Pesty’s toponymic survey from 1864, I found that the learned Romanian tradition of descent from Trajan’s legions had only entered local memory where people could attach it to nearby ruins.49 This chimes in with the opinions of some rural intellectuals, according to whom what they called history (strictly chronological history in national frames) had little place in the world of Romanian peasants.50 However, local tradition could no doubt sustain the memory of battles or military campaigns at a distance of a hundred years or more, as Guy Beiner shows in his analysis of the “folk history” of the 1798 Irish rebellion and French military intervention.51

Egodocuments

As the rise of history from below and Alltagsgeschichte revalued lower-class egodocuments, several collections and archives of popular writing came into being in Western and Southern Europe.52 With the exception of Poland, the situation is worse in the states of Eastern Europe, not only because historians have paid less attention but also because, until late, fewer people knew how to write. Entire genres that Western European historians have used prominently to inquire about lower-class loyalties (pauper letters, nationalization applications) are missing or hard to come by, and the surviving material mostly comes from males. The task of finding relevant egodocuments becomes especially hard with a half-illiterate peasantry. The volume of eyewitness accounts written about nineteenth-century peasants dwarves that of the surviving material written by them. The voices of peasant communities were for a long time mediated by the priests, teachers, village notaries, and clerks who wrote requests on their behalf, recasting their utterances in a middle-class language and logic. But even in the rare cases when they wrote personal letters, they did so because of a disruption in their everyday world. Pervasive illiteracy or half-literacy also raise an important but ultimately unsolvable dilemma: to what extent can the literate few, who had readier access to reading matter, be assumed to represent an illiterate majority?

Collective petitions in support of oppositional nationalist causes, drafted by priests or other rural notables and signed on behalf of the illiterate locals, linger somewhere on the margins of egodocuments.53 They reveal little about their signatories’ worldviews or values, even of those who signed them themselves but under pressure from religious authority. At a minimum, however, they probably imply some knowledge of the cause, and their language is often suggestive of the framing that the priests used to promote it. Parish diaries (historiæ domus), supposedly also representative of their communities, reflect the priests’ viewpoint but often chronicle local events and rumors, with varying depth and regularity. Testing the established narrative about the tug of war over Old Slavonic liturgy that unfolded between the Ricmanje parish (near Trieste) and the Trieste bishopric in the 1900s, Péter Techet turns to the historia domus. He shows the limitations of the nationalist interpretation but suggests that, as the fight for Old Slavonic liturgy escalated, it transformed local mindsets.54 In a 1991 edited volume on “national differentiation processes,” the study of the parish and school diaries in two Carinthian market towns affords a close view of the sudden breakup among the locals into Catholic Slovenes and anticlerical Germans.55

The revaluation of egodocuments has entailed revisiting lower-class memoirs that had already achieved the status of classics in their national historiographies. Tara Zahra and Jakub Beneš, for example, draw conflicting conclusions about the brick factory worker and poet Heinrich/Jindřich Holek’s and his father Wenzel/Václav’s linguistic identities from their oft-quoted memoirs.56 A masterpiece of Polish autobiographical writing, also available in English, is Jan Słomka’s gripping and wonderfully detailed portrayal of peasant life in nineteenth-century Galicia. His organizing principle is the contrast between past and present, including an opposition to the bygone times of national apathy, when peasants harbored dislike for the idea of Polish independence.57 Słomka’s memoir fits into a large body of peasant autobiographies from interwar Poland, more than 1,500 of them written in response to a call.58 Alongside readers’ correspondence, these autobiographies provide the material for Jan Molenda’s monograph on the nationalization of the Polish peasantry.59

Egodocuments are not unmediated sources. Between the historian and the remembered, external or inner experiences stand the autobiographer’s memory, their permanent quest to reproduce an integral self, and the rhetorical devices required for storytelling. Quite independently from self-fashioning, autobiographers cannot escape making sense of, interpreting, and imposing coherence on their lived experience. In addition, the political and communicative context also influences what kinds of selves they want to present to themselves and their audiences. Since most surviving egodocuments originate from the elite, for example, descriptions of childhoods spent in peasant milieus increase the value of social risers’ autobiographies. In the new or newly enlarged interwar states, however, this comes at the price that the authors often owed their careers to the change of sovereignty, and thus were particularly likely to emplot their life stories in the master narrative of national suffering and fulfillment. At any rate, interwar memoirists had to reposition themselves with regard to a changed category of the nation, a process that Stefan Berger analyzes in the published autobiographies of nine prominent German and seven British Socialist activists.60 Evaluating the details in the context of the whole and looking for content that deviates from the master narrative can help bypass the resulting interpretive dilemma. Besides, social historians seldom study such sources in isolation for what they reveal about past experiences.

The narrative (re)production of the self necessarily relies on the prop of authorized discourses, but peasant and working-class writers sometimes adapted the language of the authorities or their superiors, even when they otherwise remained strangers to it. Although it is not a foolproof measure, historians are then on solid ground to prefer more elaborate formulations or ones that suggest personal involvement against ritualized, formulaic writing that rehashes clichés from above. Clear contextualization thus entails an interpolation with upper-class discourses.

Distance from the recalled past presents problems of its own. In oral interviews conducted between the 1950s and 1970s, some former British working-class volunteers in the First World War apparently projected their experiences of the Second World War.61 David Silbey probes a total of 1,702 egodocuments in search of reasons why working-class men rushed to colors in 1914, combining this set of egodocuments with statistical evidence. Silbey acknowledges that patriotism could serve as a justification for other reasons or a convenient gap-filler for memory, but he insists that dismissing these accounts as false patriotism is like fitting them to a paternalistic preconceived theory.62

Historians sometimes fall back on recollections compromised by the immediate purpose they were meant to serve. Among the 110 autobiographies investigated by Wiktor Marzec from the perspective of the politicization and nationalization of the Polish industrial working class before and during the 1905 revolution, there are semiofficial autobiographies of party cadres, including some written in Soviet exile. In the latter case, however, Marzec argues that the early, “‘Polish’ part of the memoir was relatively free from the direct constraints put on writing.”63 To investigate the life world of rural Macedonians around 1893–1903, Keith Brown draws on a sample of 350 pension applications that self-claimed participants in the Ilinden Uprising filed between 1948–54. Although these applications were written with an obvious agenda, Brown justifies his choice with reference to the lack of a canonical narrative about the uprising at the time and the diversity of the recollections. Moreover, he uses entire dossiers complete with witness testimonies, rejection letters, appeals, and reviews.64

Alongside autobiographies and interviews, letters and diaries are also widely used types of egodocuments. Diaries were a largely middle-class genre, but literate peasants in nineteenth-century Western and Central Europe (including Banat Germans) kept livres de famille. These served the chief function of recording loans and borrowings but were interspersed with notes on the harvest, natural catastrophes, and occasionally political news.65 Peasants also left miscellaneous manuscripts. A local musician’s manuscript from 1858–1869, for example, testifies to the “Romaic” (pre-national Greek) identity in Arbanasi above Veliko Tirnovo.66 Rarely conceived as diaries in the strict sense, these manuscripts often mix in borrowed texts alongside chronicles and personal utterances, and not everything copied into them necessarily reflects their creators’ beliefs. One Romanian manuscript history of Transylvania from 1836 mentions Romans without linking them to Romanians, laments the depredations wrought by Wallachian armies, and does not feature Transylvanian Romanians until 1763. All this may sound unexpected, as it was written by a Uniate village schoolmaster, were it not clear from the consistently applied Transylvanian Saxon viewpoint that he copied or compiled Saxon sources.67

Very little of ordinary people’s epistolary activity has come down to us. Illustrated postcards (on the market since the 1890s) had a better chance of surviving, and Karin Almasy shows that they offered novel ways to index self-identifications.68 However, aside from the problem of disentangling contemporary markings from the later additions of collectors or traders, most peacetime postcard senders were also members of the middle class.

Work migration and military service provided occasions to sit down and write private letters, with or without recourse to a collection of letter samples. William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki purchased a corpus of Polish peasant letters written during the First World War and addressed to transatlantic migrants, and they wove these sources into their monumental narrative about the breakup of old solidarities and the transformation of social norms. This five-volume classic also includes a chapter on the integration of peasants into national life.69

An unusual number of egodocuments from World War I have survived thanks to censorship bureaus and POW camps. Since the front experience, war economy, and special measures on the home front heightened the relevance of national frames, wartime egodocuments are not necessarily indicative of prevailing attitudes in earlier decades. The correspondence between soldiers and their families went through open censorship, which imposed conformism, meaning alignment with official patriotism and the avoidance of oppositional nationalist statements. On the other hand, intercepted letters show an obvious bias towards politically subversive content, although many letters were withheld for other reasons, most notably for data on the positions of troops.

Investigating a vast body of intercepted letters and censorship records from the later years of the war, Péter Hanák found that by a long shot, Serbs, Italians, Romanians, and Czechs were the most likely among the Austria-Hungarian nationalities to air secessionist views and approve of desertion. Nationally subversive Italian letters stand out from the rest for the high percentage of middle-class senders. Hanák compares intercepted letters in Czech, more than three quarters of which expressed sympathy for Czech independence, with the hundreds of letters that Czech POWs sent to destinations outside of the Monarchy but that were misdirected and landed in the hands of the K.u.K. military censorship. Among these latter, 40 percent contained Czech nationalist views and 13.5 percent voiced support for Czech independence.70 At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian POWs in Russia who wrote home were more likely to manifest what Alon Rachamimov calls “civic spirit” and criticize “specific practices and specific policies of the Habsburg state.”71

Andriy Zayarnyuk explores a rare and serendipitous find from Austria-Hungary, namely a deposit of letters by soldiers on the frontlines and POWs that were actually delivered to the village of Zibolky, to the north of Lemberg. The authors had clearly paid deference to the censors, but also to the priest, who read the letters out to their illiterate families. According to Zayarnyuk, they expressed little anti-Russian sentiment and tended to define themselves as Galicians and members of the local community.72

The Italian front was best studied from this point of view. Scholarship on letters written by Italian soldiers in the First World War started in real-time, as the Graz philologist Leo Spitzer, employed as a military censor, utilized them to reconstruct the Italian “national psyche.”73 More critical of national categories, historians since the 1970s have drawn on this example many times to show how little ordinary Italians had assimilated the ideals of the Risorgimento.74 Compared to the letters that the French intercepted from their troops in Alsace, who seem to have imbibed the lesson of revanchism, Martyn Lyons finds that soldiers of the Kingdom of Italy were quite confused about their country’s war aims, their allegiances lay firmly with their home towns, valleys, and regions, and their patriotic slogans often appear insincere.75 The situation was none too different among the Italian-speaking Tyrolese. The Archivio della Scrittura Popolare in Trento stores a large collection of war memoirs-cum-diaries written in the Kirsanov POW camp in Russia. Although Italians from the Tyrol spontaneously separated in the camp from other nationalities of the Dual Monarchy and later developed a new national attachment thanks to the cultural activities organized in an Irredentist spirit, this attachment remained utilitarian. It expressed POWs’ need for strong solidarity under extreme living conditions and was conditional on the better treatment and provision one could receive as an Italian and the prospect of returning home, while POWs also feared for the safety of their families from the retaliation of Habsburg authorities.76

Press Coverage and Readers’ Correspondence

In his discussion of how German and Czech journals in late Habsburg Bohemia blew up mundane conflicts and twisted them into national frames, Pieter Judson discreetly cautions against historians’ all-too-convenient reliance on newspaper reporting. Rather than first-order sources, he suggests, press reports should be seen as propaganda tools aimed at nationalizing a-national populations: “complicated, messy events were reduced to their most recognizable elements and compressed into intelligible stories about battling nations.”77 A piece of news run in 1908 in two German nationalist papers (Deutsche Volkszeitung from Reichenberg and Bohemia from Prague) alleged that German gymnast-activists had faced aggression crossing Czech-speaking Stachy:

Attack on German gymnasts. As the Bergreichenstein [Kašperské Hory] gymnasts returned from their Easter excursion to Eleonorenhain through the Czech Stachau, the Czechs attacked them. Only the gymnasts’ levelheadedness prevented a bloody brawl from breaking out.78

After the Ministry of the Interior launched an investigation into the affair, the local authorities cut this story down to size. They found that the gymnasts had been drunk and had picked a quarrel with passers-by shouting anti-Czech slogans. Furthermore, only a few children and one adult had run after their wagon throwing pebbles at them, without actually hitting anyone.

I need not dwell on Judson’s choice of an example where the two renditions do not contradict each other in substance. The German informant may have fancied that the Stachy people should have swallowed their pride and let them get off scot-free with their affronts, but he certainly did not cross “the line between strategic exaggeration and outright lying.”79 It would not be difficult to quote similar, more egregious bending of the truth by the contemporary press. We know this because, although Judson is right that the German and Czech press could reinforce each other’s nationalist framing, journals of opposing ideological stripes sometimes carried conflicting descriptions of the same event. There is often little way of knowing which account was closer to the truth, but the gap between them could be quite big. The catch is that when a story emerged from various sources in a single version, this could also cast a shadow of doubt on its authenticity, especially when there was a high chance that no eyewitness from the supposed scene of the incident would read the coverage.

More problematic is Judson’s assumption that the contrasting accounts can be verified against an objective benchmark to be found in the archives; as if the local authorities conducting the investigations had been impervious to national and other biases or, should the question be whether an incident took place at all as if they could have no interest in hushing it up. To the extent that the imperial authorities were involved, this belief may have some basis regarding Dualist Cisleithania. But it becomes untenable where, as in most contexts, the authorities had an ideological axe to grind in nationalist incidents or were typically involved in them. In 1910, for instance, one Romanian newspaper from Hungary published an official press release on an incidence of bloodshed in a Transylvanian village only to rebut it with a different, purportedly the local, narrative.80 Despite the differences between the two accounts, both boiled down to gendarmes killing two peasant boys who wore belts with the Romanian colors, hence there is no reason why Judson would not extend his skepticism of nationalism from below to the official account, which reproduced the gendarmes’ side. In fact, reports on gendarmes seizing “foreign symbols” in the villages were a regular feature in both Hungarian and minority papers, often with mention of the fines levied on the offenders and references to the administrative officials in command.

Press coverage should be compared with archival evidence whenever it is accessible, not losing sight of the ideological positions and power interests behind both types of sources and the censorship that occasionally restricted press coverage. In practice, and not just since the advent of searchable online collections, news items lead researchers to archival files more often than the other way around. Measured in the sheer number of references, the local and regional press is the bread and butter of the field. This also holds true for Jeremy King’s seminal book on late Habsburg Budweis/Budějovice, which relies mostly on local German and Czech papers to craft a narrative akin to Judson’s about an ethnically ambiguous middle class that separated into Germans and Czechs over the span of two generations.81

Readers’ correspondence, sometimes published in a separate column, is hardly safer terrain for the unwary historian. Ideally, it contains genuine first-person utterances by ordinary people, but ostensible readers’ letters were at times cut out of whole cloth. Between these two extremes, editors probably interfered with the content and the style in most cases. It is hard to make guesses about their procedures in the absence of the original documents. At best, the context of the given journal might offer clues.

According to Ostap Sereda, the editors of Galician Polish and Ukrainian papers routinely fabricated letters under peasant-sounding names in the 1860s and 70s to lure literate peasants to their fold until real peasant correspondents turned up on the horizon.82 In later decades, the Polish peasant movement of Galicia produced its own crop of populist journals under the editorship of peasant-born activists. With these, the question becomes the representativeness of the peasant correspondents’ views. Aside from manuscript memoirs, Keely Stauter-Halsted’s splendid The Nation in the Village uses the testimony of such journals, especially readers’ correspondence, to explore how Polish-speaking Roman Catholic peasants emancipated themselves by subverting nationalist discourses about peasant values and constructed a peasant identity in parallel with a national one.83 Against the background of similar developments in the Galician Ruthenian political field, Andriy Zayarnyuk foregrounds one regular peasant correspondent, also making use of his letters surviving in manuscript collections.84

For his monograph on Flemish workers’ political loyalties between 1880 and the First World War, Maarten Van Ginderachter unearthed a rare format that transmits readers’ voices in an unaltered form and thus comes closest to an egodocument. In exchange for donations beyond membership dues, Belgian Labor Party members from Ghent could place so-called “propaganda pence” in a dedicated column of the local party newspaper: short messages of unrestricted content which came out anonymously. Ginderachter calls them “proletarian tweets.” It is well-known that the Socialist movement provided alternative forms of sociability beyond and perhaps even above ideology. It can be nonetheless surprising to learn that the abstract political values touted on the first pages did not find much echo in these tweets. Even fewer workers thought to share their views related to Flemish or Belgian identity, the center of Ginderachter’s interest, with their comrades. Only 305 in Ginderachter’s sample of 27,500 “tweets” made references to a national, linguistic, or ethnic category. The overwhelming majority engaged in promoting identity as organized Socialist workers (what Ginderachter calls Organisationspatriotismus), confirming their authors’ solidarity with the movement and slamming class enemies and Catholics.85

Propaganda pence offer a unique angle on the views of their authors, and one can only wish for similar sources in other research contexts. Like so many other kinds of sources, however, they do not provide an unmediated view. Genre constraints appear loose at first glance, but a consensus had clearly formed that this column was to be used as a site for “grooming talk,” communication with a primarily bonding function. The fact that patriotism and ethnicity were not themes that Dutch-speaking organized Ghent workers would often bring up at leisurely party meetings may be significant, but that does not necessarily imply they had no feelings and (admittedly less articulate) ideas on the matter. To identify these feelings and ideas, Ginderachter complements the testimony of propaganda pence with more conventional sources.

Non-narrative Sources

Quantitative evidence can be broad in its sweep but tends to be reticent and vague. The print runs of newspapers and magazines, for instance, have long been used as indicators to assess the spread of nationalist ideas. As much as the evidence they provide is extensive, however, it is also circumstantial and shallow, primarily because people may not have read a certain paper for its nationalist content, and even when they did, the size of a readership reveals nothing about its reactions to specific messages. To the extent that reliable circulation figures are available, they gain a real significance when compared across multiple press organs in the same market.86 But circulation figures are often elusive and inconsistent, based as they were on the editors’ own reporting. State regulation and technological aspects also need to be taken into account. The fact that minority papers were not sold at newsstands in Dualist Hungary, for example, limited their outreach. On the other hand, Linotype machines drove down production costs around the turn of the century, which led to skyrocketing print runs and the mushrooming of “penny papers.” Most significantly, newspapers reached a much broader audience than the number of copies sold, as people passed them on and, in the countryside, read them aloud to others in evening gatherings.87

Membership counts of associations, which scholars have often used as a means of gauging the followings of national movements, are perhaps even more ambiguous. High enrollment figures in the Polish cooperatives of Prussia on the eve of the First World War suggest that a large segment of the peasantry had recognized the economic benefits these cooperatives offered and that the Polish minority elite had established one massive channel to communicate with the masses. Taken by themselves, however, it is doubtful how far they can demonstrate the popularity of national ideas.88

The extension of male suffrage in nineteenth-century Europe coincided with the rise of nationalist politics, making electoral data an easily accessible gauge of the support that nationalist ideas received from large populations. On this basis, Abigail Green concludes that no more than one-quarter of the German male population shared the enthusiasm for unification under Prussian auspices in the immediate aftermath of the victory over France, since of the 50 percent who bothered to vote at the first Reichstag election, only half voted for parties aligned with this solution.89

The fact that electoral data are available in successive and often comparable data series invites longitudinal treatment of such data. Reconstructing the failed Polish attempt at national mobilization in Upper Silesia, James E. Bjork regularly revisits electoral outcomes.90 In most contexts, however, some parties with pronounced nationalist profiles came to enjoy massive popular support, which is very hard to disregard. In southern Bukovina, for instance, 95 percent of Romanians voted for a Romanian nationalist (although typically not irredentist) ticket on the eve of the First World War. In his doctoral dissertation, political scholar Ionaş Rus follows the spread of national consciousness among them with the help of electoral results, but he complements these with “qualitative” data.91 Recently, a cross-sectional analysis of the 1907 Reichsrat election results in the Czech lands has challenged revisionist accounts of Czech and German nationalization campaigns. Looking at the strategies used by nationalist parties to attract voters, a team of political scientists established a correlation between the share of peasants and the nationalist vote, with rural districts being the most likely to vote for nationalist parties. This suggests that by 1907, nationalist ideas had resonated widely with the peasantry.92

This said, engagement with nationalist politics must be differentiated from nationhood understood as a habitus, i.e., the tacit and routine acceptance of national categories. The latter crystallized more linearly through the succession of life cycles, an incremental change that built up the possibility for national frames to congeal into action.93 Engagement with nationalist politics, on the other hand, could undergo sudden surges, breaks, and relapses. Moreover, the perceived stakes of an election, the availability of potent non-nationalist alternatives, and the messaging of the given party must also be taken into consideration. The nationalist outlook of a party or a candidate was not their only potential appeal; nationalist parties often adopted leftist or pro-smallholder economic platforms, defended traditional religious values, etc. Local developments could also favor their popularity, and it would be instructive to juxtapose voting behavior with communal action, social trends, and civil society in small sets of well-documented localities.

Most national movements introduced a string of historical or invented given names to index their vision of national history. The spread of such names among the people can thus serve as a rough proxy for the gradual embrace of this vision, at least in the first couple of generations, until their novelty value wore off and they became normalized or discarded. Choosing such a “national” name for one’s child, with cultural allusions graspable only for the initiated, entailed a radical break with local custom and could expose the family to ridicule. Such names typically lacked patron saints, a big hindrance in contexts where peasants baptized their children according to the day they were born. Worse still, Ruthenians of Galicia attached a stigma to rare first names, which were traditionally reserved for illegitimate children.94

Jürgen Gerhards compared trends in baby naming in selected Protestant and Catholic German towns from the nineteenth century down to the Nazi times by occupational categories.95 Stefano Pivato studied the frequency of republican versus dynastic first names in northern Italian towns of the liberal era to gain a general picture of the population’s political sympathies.96 Jaroslav Hrytsak dealt more specifically with new names of nationalist inspiration, charting the popularity of given names taken from the Rurik dynasty and the Cossack hetmanate in the families of nineteenth-century Ruthenian (Ukrainian) national awakeners and in a few parish registers. Judging by his sample, such names did not catch on in the Galician countryside before the First World War, apart from in one village, where they received a boost from the local landlord and the priest.97

I analyzed the diffusion of Latinate Romanian, medieval (including “pagan”) Hungarian, and reinvented Germanic male given names in Transylvania and eastern Hungary between the 1840s and the 1900s based on a near-complete database of grammar school graduates and a massive collection of birth registers. I confirmed that peasants started to adopt the new names decades after the elites in all three contexts. Among Romanians, the first non-elite adopters were people who lived side by side with Magyars: craftspeople in small market centers, miners, and the personnel on aristocratic manors. In contrast, several Romanian-inhabited valleys located far in the outback registered no Latinate names until after the First World War. This finding highlights the role of boundary maintenance in the appropriation of nationalist content.98

Two exhibitions at the Hungarian Ethnographic Museum (from 1989 and 2016) displayed datable objects of known provenience featuring patriotic or national symbols and inscriptions, most of them fashioned or decorated by their lower-class owners.99 The Hungarian colors and other patriotic imagery seem to have picked up in popularity after the defeat of the 1848–49 revolution, and a wooden cupboard from 1861 even had a Slovak inscription asking for God’s blessing on the homeland around a carved and painted Hungarian coat of arms.100 Such visual clues, as well as the many early-twentieth-century references to peasant women who wore ribbons with the Romanian colors, suggest that the spaces on garments, accessories, and household objects that had been traditionally decorated, and likely with changing motifs, were also an obvious site to introduce national marking.

In Lieu of a Conclusion

This panorama may have left readers with a giddy feeling of uncertainty. The sources are ambiguous, each source type comes with a proviso about its limitations, and, to restate, they often contradict one another. The same people seem to have been drawn to the call of the nation on the basis of one kind of source but were oblivious to it according to another. What does all this add up to? The name of the game is, as always, contextualizing, juxtaposing various kinds of sources and different perspectives, and comparing the same source types across contexts. This article has taken conceptual clarity and terminological precision somewhat lightly (let me offer as an excuse the explanation that I tried to avoid imposing my theoretical preferences on other people’s works). But beyond familiarity with the historical setting under study, we, researchers, must also untangle, in light of our favorite theories, what the given evidence is supposed to reveal, and we must be specific about our assumptions. The dilemmas of interpreting early responses to nationalism force us not only to refine our methodological toolkit, but also to ground our analyses in a theory of social behavior, beliefs, and emotions and rethink what we are talking about when we talk about nationhood and nationalism.

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