Czech Anesthesiologists on Their Way to the Netherlands: Motives, Expectations, and (Dis)Engagement (1968–1970)

In 1970, the Third European Congress of Anaesthesiology was held in Prague. Paradoxically, many leading Czech and Slovak representatives of the field were absent, having emigrated to the West, predominantly to the Netherlands, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. This emigration, however, did not result in Czechoslovak anaesthesiologists being entirely disconnected from their former colleagues or losing touch with the domestic development of medicine. Despite the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, medical knowledge continued to be exchanged between the West and the East. The congress exemplified how Western anaesthesiologists could meet their Soviet bloc counterparts. Informal contacts, crucial for Czechoslovak (future) migrants, facilitated knowledge dissemination. These contacts with Dutch anaesthesiologists, who became a ‘window to the world,’ enabled them to join European or global medical-scientific networks. The study probes why a significant number of anaesthesiologists emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the Netherlands post-1968, their integration into Dutch society, and their recognition. It questions whether they engaged with the Czechoslovak expatriate community or primarily focused on their profession and relationships with Dutch colleagues. Using anaesthesiology as a lens, the study illustrates how these doctors, having emigrated during 1968–1970, established themselves professionally in Dutch society. They shared a strong professional identity, which assumed a transnational and partly denationalized form. Their medical vocation, along with the experience of living in socialist Czechoslovakia for twenty years, led to a reluctance to partake in exile activities for the ‘homeland cause,’ a sentiment not fully understood by some of the 1948 migrants.

Keywords: Czechoslovakia, Netherlands, migration, exile, anaesthesiology

Introduction

At the turn of August and September, 1970, leading European experts in the field of anesthesiology met in Prague for the Third European Congress of Anaesthesiology. Paradoxically, many important Czech and Slovak representatives of the field were absent. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, they emigrated to the West, specifically to the Netherlands, thus committing the crime of fleeing the republic from the point of view of the Czechoslovak state. This did not mean, however, that these anesthesiologists from Czechoslovakia were completely cut off from their former colleagues and lost contact with developments in medicine back home. Despite the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, there was transfer of medical knowledge between the West and the East, and this congress was one example of an occasion when anesthesiologists from the West could meet colleagues from the Soviet bloc. In addition to these official events, knowledge was also spread through informal contacts, which were crucial for Czechoslovak citizens who would later leave the country. Through their contacts with the Dutch anesthesiologists, who became a “window to the world” for them, they were able to connect to European and global medical scientific networks.1 However, being part of a global community of doctors with a particular specialization also influenced the behavior of these migrants within the Czechoslovak exile community.

Why did so many anesthesiologists from Czechoslovakia emigrate to the Netherlands after 1968? How did these doctors assimilate into Dutch society and gain recognition? Did they become involved in Czechoslovak emigrant society life, or did they concentrate rather on their profession and relations with Dutch colleagues? For this category of migrants (doctors who continued their professional work in the Netherlands), the phenomenon of “double engagement” played an important role. This term refers to the lifestyles of migrants who on the one hand were involved in activities among the community that were related to the status of this group as national exiles but who on the other hand remained active members of their professions. Thus, social and political life in the host country created a kind of “double engagement” in a national environment and a transnational one.2 How can we characterize the “double engagement” among anesthesiologists from Czechoslovakia? These are the questions that we examine in this study.

Using anesthesiology as an example, the study shows the trajectories by which doctors who left Czechoslovakia in 1968–1970 arrived in the Netherlands and how they managed to establish themselves professionally in Dutch society. First, we offer a brief overview of the general context of Czechoslovak migration to the Netherlands after 1968. The study then focuses on the migration of students and doctors to the Netherlands, with emphasis on the period after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Finally, the third part centers on a specific group of Czech physicians (anesthesiologists) in the Netherlands and their life stories from the perspective of their experiences as emigrants and exiles. The study argues that anesthesiologists shared a strong professional engagement and identity which took a transnational and partly de-nationalized, form. Their medical vocation and the experience of living in socialist Czechoslovakia made them reluctant to engage in activities in the exile community that were motivated by or centered around some attachment to the beleaguered “homeland,” and some of the migrants who had fled the country in 1948 found this difficult to understand.

Little research has been done on the Czechoslovak exiles in the Netherlands after 1948, with the exception of several publications by Sylva Sklenářová.3 However, Sklenářová’s works focus primarily on the interwar period and the diplomatic and political context of Czechoslovak-Dutch relations,4 as well as relations with the other countries of today’s Benelux (Belgium and Luxembourg).5 Émigré psychiatrist Miroslav (Mirek) Kabela (1938–2011) has offered important insights into the Czech émigré community in the Netherlands.6 The emigration of physicians is closely intertwined and has many parallels with the emigration of scientists (and in the case of medical scientists, the two topics overlap considerably).7 The materials on Czechoslovak migrants in the Netherlands, collected by Miroslav Kabela and currently held in the Libri Prohibiti Library in Prague, are also valuable. The written testimonies of the Czechoslovak migrants interviewed by Kabela are particularly useful,8 for instance, as are his experiences in psychiatric practice, during which he also helped migrants from Czechoslovakia (and which he mentions in some of his publications).9 Finally, archival sources stored in the Security Services Archives (SSA) in Prague and the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic (AMFA) are also relevant to the topic. The files originating from the activities of the communist security services stored at SSA in many cases contain information on the careers, family backgrounds, and (alleged) motivations of the emigrants. It is of course necessary, however, to remain aware of the context in which these materials were created the purposes which they served (for example, strategies in witness statements made by relatives during interrogations).

Czechoslovak Migration to the Netherlands after 1968

The composition of the Czechoslovak community in the Netherlands changed after World War II and especially after 1948, when the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia and established an authoritarian regime that persecuted its opponents. The communist coup in February 1948 was condemned by the majority of the Dutch, and soon the first Czech and Slovak refugees began to arrive. One of the first refugee groups consisted of about twenty Czech and Slovak students.10 In November 1949, the estimated number of Czechs and Slovaks in the Netherlands was about 200.11

The new migrants of the late 1960s and 1970s completely changed the composition and structure of the Czechoslovak community in the Netherlands. Moreover, the new wave of migrants from Czechoslovakia had a different experience of emigration and assimilation in their new homeland. The situation in the Netherlands in 1968 and afterwards was quite different from that just after the war. The Netherlands was no longer a country recovering from war. It was, rather, a country participating in and benefiting from the economic growth of Western Europe as well as a country in need of a workforce. Thus, the composition of the general migrant community in the Netherlands changed significantly. In addition to migrants from the former Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), the number of economic migrants (guest workers) from the Mediterranean, especially Turkey and Morocco, began to increase from the early 1960s. However, in the attitude of the Dutch towards the Czechoslovaks, some features were common. As had been the case in 1948 after the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia, there was outrage in the Netherlands over the brutal intervention by Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia twenty years later.

The influx of Czechoslovak migrants from the post-1968 wave was reflected in the numerical increase of the Czech and Slovak diaspora in the Netherlands. From June 1968 to June 1970, a total of 1,203 asylum seekers applied for asylum in the Netherlands, the majority of whom (938) came from Czechoslovakia. The second most numerous group was consisted of people from Portugal, but this group was almost ten times smaller (97 people). In comparison, 49 Poles and 32 Hungarians applied for asylum during this period.12 In 1973, the estimated number of Czechs and Slovaks in the Netherlands, according to the data of the Czechoslovak embassy in the Netherlands, was about 900 persons.13 Seven years later, this number reached 1,000.14 This was a very small number compared to, for example, the 200,000 migrants from Suriname who emigrated to the Netherlands during the migration wave related to Suriname’s declaration of independence in 1975.15 Thus, although Czechoslovakia was significant in terms of asylum requests in 1968–1970, from a numerical point of view, the Czechoslovak migrant community was not a very significant minority in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, almost half of the immigrants to the Netherlands came from either Turkey, Morocco, Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, or Indonesia.16

The new wave of migrants, however, created rifts within the Czechoslovak exile community. The post-1968 emigrants did not have much confidence in the Czech and Slovak migrants who had come to the Netherlands after 1948. The differences were not only “generational,” but also political. While most of the migrants from the post-February wave were anti-communist, in the case of those who emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1968–1970, anti-communism did not play such a fundamental role. Some of these migrants were even former members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.17 Many of the older émigrés criticized the new ones, complaining that the new wave of Czechoslovak immigrants did not have to grapple with the same material and financial challenges that they had faced in the immediate postwar years. The post-1948 emigrants had arrived in the Netherlands at a time when the country was still struggling with reconstruction after the war, whereas the “post-1968” arrivals were coming to a prosperous country with a high standard of living. The post-1968 migrants envied the “older” generation of émigrés, however, particularly their good professional positions and material standards. Some from the “new” migrant community also hoped that they would soon return home, to Czechoslovakia, and were therefore reluctant to become politically involved in exile. Many had suffered disillusionment and felt a sense of resignation after they experienced the suppression of the liberalization process in Czechoslovakia, and they therefore did not want to take an active part in social or political life abroad. They were looking for a peaceful life in a new environment.18

Kabela, for example, later recalled meeting a married couple who had emigrated to the Netherlands after 1968:

The couple (the man was a psychologist) talked only about what they had already bought and acquired, they focused only on economic matters and prosperity. I even remember that this compatriot told me that in those chaotic days right after the Soviet invasion, he still quickly returned to the Czechoslovakia to get his books or other things. Understandably, the “post-February” [post-1948] refugees did not have much confidence in these new “refugees.”19

Ivan Gaďourek, a Dutch sociologist of Czech origin who emigrated in 1948, also noted the differences between the two Czechoslovak waves of migration and saw the new generation of migrants as “motivated more by economics than by ideas.”20 According to Gaďourek, the more recent arrivals did not assimilate as much, which was why some of them, anti-communists, maintained more contact with dissent groups back home than with similarly oriented exile circles.21

Miroslav Kabela, however, also noted the view from the other side, i.e. that of an emigrant who came to the Netherlands after August 1968. The more recent emigrants complained that the older emigrants resented the newcomers because the “post-August” arrivals enjoyed more favorable material conditions. The more recent emigrant explained the differences and tensions between the generations by the changed economic situation of the Netherlands. He described the Netherlands in the 1960s as a “prosperous system during the conjuncture, where poverty no longer existed.” He also dealt with the question of unfulfilled expectations concerning the involvement of new migrants in the fight against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He explained that it wasn’t just that the new arrivals were afraid of being compromised were they to return to Czechoslovakia. According to him, the prevailing feelings were disappointment with life and a sense of resignation. The issue of consumerism and financial matters also played a significant role, because, as he said, “most people have always limited themselves to consuming what is presented to them and don’t do much activity in that which doesn’t fill the wallet.”22 A similar explanation for the disengagement of the 1968–1970 migrants was given to Kabela by another member of this “generation,” who claimed that people in communist Czechoslovakia were tired of all kinds of organizing and engagement.23

Finally, when monitoring the situation among the Czechoslovak emigrants, the Czechoslovak embassy in The Hague also registered the discord between the two waves and stated that “only a small part of the post-August emigrants passively participates in emigration actions.” And here again we find an economic explanation, because according to the aforementioned report, “the desire to save money for a new car, home furnishings and other household necessities” was particularly strong among the new migrants.24 In justifying the non-engagement of migrants, the embassy materials also include references to concerns over “side doors,” i.e. the anxiety over speaking out too vociferously against the ruling communist regime in Czechoslovakia, which could then make it impossible for them to legalize their residency abroad and thus also impossible for them to return to Czechoslovakia to visit family and friends (emigrants were prosecuted in Czechoslovakia for illegally leaving the Republic and given prison sentences by the courts in absentia). The embassy, however, interpreted the efforts to legalize their stays, which occurred in many cases, as evidence of the will of the emigrants to “return” to Czechoslovakia.25 During interrogations by the State Security Service, relatives often made similar statements, expressing their belief that their emigrant family members wanted to return. On the other hand, however, the argument that someone emigrated for professional reasons and was considering returning was more acceptable to the Czechoslovak authorities than any mention of political motives for emigration. Moreover, non-political or non-ideological explanations could prompt the courts to give more lenient sentences. The question is thus whether any of the statements made in the course of such an interrogation can be considered reliable or revealing.26

Although the testimonies of contemporaries and archival materials clearly point to the division of the Czechoslovak exile community in the Netherlands, it is also necessary to mention the efforts made to unite the community. An attempt to unite the Czechoslovak exile community in the Netherlands was made through the launch of the periodical Okno dokořán (Window Wide Open), which was intended as an open democratic platform that would appeal to the whole community. This magazine was founded in February 1969, and members of both generations of migrants contributed to it (both as authors and editors), including Miroslav Kabela, who initially headed the editorial staff.27 Another example of joint activities of both generations of Czechoslovak migrants was the establishment of the association Nederlandse Stichting Comenius in April 1969. This association was recognized by the Federation of Refugee Organizations (Federatie van Organisaties van Vluchtelingen, FOVIN) as the central organization for Czechoslovak refugees in the Netherlands.28 There were also efforts to cooperate with other emigrants from Central Europe. For example, Czechoslovak embassy staff noted the cooperation of Czechoslovak exiles with Polish and Hungarian emigrants. The latter, for example, offered the premises of the Hungarian Cultural House in Amsterdam to other exiled national groups.29

One of the ways of meeting members of the Czechoslovak exile community was through activities and events associated with the exile branch of the Sokol organization.30 The exile branch of Sokol in the Netherlands was short-lived, however. Several Czechoslovak emigrants who settled in the Netherlands after August 1968 founded the first Sokol unit in Delft in October 1973.31 But by 1982, the Sokol Delft no longer existed due to loss of members and little activity.32 Even earlier, at the beginning of 1980s, the smaller section of Sokol Utrecht, which had been established five years earlier, was also dissolved.33

Other associations played important roles in connecting Czechoslovak migrants, such as the scouts. In 1975, the “Czechoslovak Exile Scouts Holland District” was established, which was divided into three smaller sections (North, Center, and South).34 However, in 1987, this branch of exiled scouts was forced to suspend its activities due to the lack of active members.35 The main reason was the fact that the children of emigrants, mostly of those from the second wave of migration after 1968, had “grown up.” But even before that, it was already apparent that the Czechoslovak exile scouts in the Netherlands, which were nationality-oriented, were no longer appealing to the children, who had already assimilated into Dutch society. This is confirmed by the words of one daughter of post-1968 Czechoslovak emigrants, who as a child went to exile scout camps and later, as an adult, shared her feelings with Kabela:

I did not like their overly Czech feelings and often unkind attitude towards everything Dutch. These scout leaders lived perhaps mostly in a closed Czech environment and did not realize that we were already mostly Dutch children, accustomed to the Dutch way of way of life.36

The Netherlands as a Center of Czechoslovak Students and Doctors

In the first years after World War II, Dutch migration policy was characterized by a rather conservative approach and a reluctance on the part of the government and authorities to accept large numbers of refugees. The postwar economic recovery of the Netherlands was still underway, and the country was faced with an influx of migrants from former Dutch colonies.37

The exception to this approach and a key moment for future Dutch students (and future doctors) from Czechoslovakia was the founding of the University Asylum Fund (Universitair Asiel Fonds, UAF) in the Netherlands in the spring of 1948.38 The creation of the UAF was a reaction to the events of February 1948 in Czechoslovakia and the takeover of power by the communists. However, the path to establishing this fund was not easy. Although representatives of the Dutch government expressed their outrage about the developments in Czechoslovakia, they nevertheless refused to accept Czechoslovak refugees and returned illegal immigrants to West Germany. Eventually, the Dutch administration agreed to accept 100 students from Czechoslovakia at most on the condition that an organization be set up to guarantee that “undesirable persons shall be obliged to leave and to arrange for sufficient funds for the asylum seekers to actualize their stay.” Therefore, on April 9, 1948, the Dutch universities founded the UAF, the first refugee organization in the Netherlands dedicated to supporting émigré students at universities.39 In May of the same year, a committee consisting of representatives of the Dutch Student Council and the Dutch Refugee Aid Federation visited refugee camps in West Germany and selected Czechoslovak students to receive scholarships.40

Thanks to UAF scholarships, the Netherlands became one of the centers of Czechoslovak émigré students. UAF statistics show the predominance of students from Czechoslovakia in the first year of the fund’s existence. In November 1948, 56 scholarship recipient were registered, 43 of whom came from Czechoslovakia. The second largest group (Hungarians) were represented by “only” ten scholarship holders. The other students came from Poland (three), Latvia (three), and Bulgaria (two). In the early years after the UAF was founded, around 400 students applied for the few available scholarships each year. By the mid-1950s, however, the fund’s budget (which consisted mainly of donations from the Dutch) had declined significantly, as had the number of scholarships awarded. For example, in 1953, only 26 people were still studying on UAF scholarships. This trend changed after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Thanks to the UAF, more than 100 Hungarian students were given the opportunity to study at Dutch universities. This was made possible by an extra budget from the Dutch government, which was responding to the support that Hungarian refugees enjoyed in Dutch society. This was also reflected in the fact that the Netherlands accepted a total of more than 3,000 Hungarian refugees at the time.41

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, like after the coup of February 1948, the Netherlands again offered Czechoslovak students the opportunity to attend Dutch universities on UAF scholarships.42 According to Miroslav Kabela, in the 1970/1971 academic year, there were 97 Czechoslovak students (58 male and 39 female) enrolled at Dutch universities. Most of them studied in Amsterdam (22), followed by Nijmegen (19), Utrecht (16), Delft (eight), Eindhoven (eight), and in smaller numbers in other university towns as well.43 In the aftermath of 1968, however, students did not make up as high a proportion of Czechoslovak émigrés as they had in the post-February emigration wave. The language barrier, especially in the case of students, seems to have played a more significant role for this generation of migrants. According to Kabela, many students choose Slavic languages as their field of study precisely because they did not know Dutch. He even recorded the story of a student who initially decided to study medicine in the Netherlands but ended up switching to Slavic languages because of the language barrier.44

In some cases, the offers of scholarships and university educational opportunities for migrants brought students to the Netherlands who otherwise would not have chosen the country as their place of exile. This was the case for one young university student from Czechoslovakia who shared his feelings with Kabela:

I’m miserable here, but as I have a scholarship here, I am condemned to live in the Netherlands for three more years. To me, this country is unfamiliar, I feel somehow distant from everything, even objectively nice things don’t appeal to me, and nothing touches me emotionally. (...) I know that I will not find what I have lost here and that I cannot live here. Once I graduate, I will go to France or Germany. I am convinced that a Czech feels better there.45

One of the reasons the student gave for his dissatisfaction with the Netherlands was the local landscape. According to him, it was a “flat, empty, hollow country, cut into geometric rectangles by straight canals.”46

Other migrants from Czechoslovakia also found it difficult to get used to Dutch culture and habits. For example, for one young woman, Czechoslovakia remained her home and country because it was “a picturesque landscape, hills and forests, meadows and little fields where potatoes, onions, and all sorts of things grew; roads lined with fruit trees with juicy apples, plums and pears—just pick them, little villages, old houses, churches, people mowing the grass.” In the Netherlands, on the other hand, nature was understood as “a cow in a meadow,” and the last remains of “real nature” became “reserves surrounded by fences with ʻno entryʼ signs.”47 This was probably a more general trend, or at least this was suggested by the results of a survey of 105 Czech and Slovak migrants conducted by Kabela in March 1970. According to the results, 69 percent of the respondents missed the landscapes of Czechoslovakia. In this context, it is noteworthy that “only” 32 percent of the respondents mentioned a problem with the Dutch language.48

In addition to students emigrating to the Netherlands, the 1968 migration wave was also characterized by many qualified middle-aged emigrants, including doctors. As of 1977, for example, there were 108 physicians of Czechoslovak origin (or physicians who had studied medicine in Czechoslovakia) working in the Netherlands. This was the third largest number of physicians of foreign origin, after Belgians (183 physicians) and Indonesians (142).49 The proportion of doctors and particularly anesthesiologists Czechoslovak origin becomes even more remarkable given the relatively small size of the Czechoslovak exile community in the Netherlands. If we look at specializations, we find that, in addition to anesthesiologists, many psychiatrists of Czech and Slovak origin worked in the Netherlands after 1968.50 The doctors from Czechoslovakia working in the Netherlands also included surgeons, gynecologists, and other specialists.51

In the 1960s, at the time of the partial liberalization process in Czechoslovakia, many of these people in the medical profession traveled to Western countries, including the Netherlands, for internships or at least conferences. They thus became involved in international networks of their medical specialization.52 For some doctors, the foreign internship or congress, for which they left Czechoslovakia legally, then became the beginning of life as an émigré (and they were abroad illegally the moment when their permitted period of stay expired).53 This involved not only Western countries, but also Third World countries, especially Africa.54 However, some doctors also emigrated in a more common way, i.e. by not returning from permitted vacations abroad.55

Doctors usually had no problem finding employment in the Netherlands. Indeed, they often emigrated at the invitation of Dutch colleagues, having already been promised a job. As doctors, they also enjoyed social prestige, as reflected by the many Dutch newspaper articles about their fate and work in Dutch hospitals. Miroslav Kabela collected many of these articles and published some of them in the book Zdravotnictví v Holandsku (Medical Care in Netherlands).56 Not knowing Dutch was probably not a major problem for the doctors who had graduated in Czechoslovakia and were already experienced practitioners. Most of them spoke English, and knowledge of German was also widespread among them. Language skills were naturally also related to foreign experiences and stays.

Czech Anesthesiologists in the Netherlands after 1968

The Third European Congress of Anaesthesiology, mentioned in the introduction to this article, took place in Prague from August 31 to September 4, 1970 and was attended by more than 1,500 people. The decision to hold the congress in Prague was taken by the World Federation of Societies of Anesthesiologists (WFSA), which was established in the Netherlands in 1955.57 The Czechoslovak press of the time described this decision as “a great recognition of the work of Czechoslovak anesthesiologists.”58 The importance of the Congress was also underlined by the fact that its representatives were received by the then Czechoslovak President Ludvík Svoboda at Prague Castle.59 One of the anesthesiologists who contributed to the organization of the congress was prominent anaesthesiologist Bořivoj Dvořáček (1920–2014). However, at the time of the congress, Dvořáček was already living in Rotterdam.

After the suppression of the Prague Spring, when many doctors emigrated from Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands was struggling with a shortage of anesthesiologists.60 Thus, many Czechoslovak anesthesiologists emigrated to the country, knowing that they would be able to work in their field there. In several cases, these émigrés already had contacts in the Netherlands, i.e. they knew local doctors who had arranged jobs for them. The aforementioned Bořivoj Dvořáček,61 for example, who emigrated simply by not returning from his internship in a Rotterdam hospital,62 maintained contacts with Dutch anesthesiologists, including D. H. G. Keuskamp (1915–1992), who not only made Dvořáček’s internship in Rotterdam possible, but also arranged internships for other anesthesiologists from Czechoslovakia in Nijmegen and Amsterdam. This was happening before August 1968, when travel from Czechoslovakia was still relatively free.63

Zdeněk Kalenda (1927–2010), another prominent Czech anesthesiologist, was also connected to international medical networks before 1968. He maintained contact with Bob Smalhout (1927–2015), a Dutch anesthesiologist from Utrecht. After 1968, Kalenda and Smalhout continued their collaboration in Utrecht, focusing mainly on research on capnometry, and together they became “recognized worldwide as the founders of the use of capnometry in a variety of clinical settings.”64 In the field of capnography Smalhout also collaborated with other Czechoslovak experts who, unlike Kalenda, did not emigrate after 1968. One example was anesthesiologist Václav Trávníček (1924–2010), who worked at the Military University Hospital in Prague.65 Smalhout also traveled to Czechoslovakia on various occasions after 1968, and in some cases, he served as a messenger, carrying the suitcases and letters of Czechoslovak emigrants across the Iron Curtain from the Netherlands to Prague. However, he seems not to have been happy about playing this role. As Václav Trávníček reportedly said in 1970, “Professor Smalhout would very much like to visit Czechoslovakia next year, and he certainly does not want to do anything that might endanger this visit.”66 Smalhout’s involvement in the Czechoslovak exile networks thus probably had its limits, which were largely due to the connection of the Czechoslovak environment to the security services.

Something the anesthesiologists shared, as was true of doctors in general, was their experiences as recipients of foreign internships. Zdeněk Kalenda had lived in Guinea in the early 1960s, and he also traveled to France, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland. He had numerous professional contacts in an array of countries. He was in contact with the leaders of clinics in Vienna, Munich, Paris, Brussels, Montreal, and New York.67 Foreign internships were also important for the career of Bořivoj Dvořáček. He spent a year in Copenhagen at the WHO training center in the late 1950s. In Prague, he then tried to apply the Danish experience in creating the concept of anesthesiology-resuscitation departments.68 Two others Czech anesthesiologists emigrating to the Netherlands after 1968, Květoslava Malínská (1923–?) and Karel Otruba (1918–1997), had worked in Africa for some time through programs run by the Czechoslovak government.69 Květoslava Malínská, who emigrated to the Netherlands with her husband, surgeon Ladislav Malínský (1918–2005), worked in Kenya in the mid-1960s. Their friend Karel Otruba, a pediatrician and later an anesthesiologist, worked in Morocco before emigrating to the Netherlands.70

However, some anesthesiologists from Czechoslovakia came to the Netherlands without prior acquaintanceship with Dutch anesthesiologists and also without the experience of stays abroad. Miroslav Květ (1934–), for instance, reached the Netherlands by being approached by Dutch officials in an Austrian refugee camp with the offer of a job in the Netherlands. In fact, Dutch officials were deliberately looking for qualified people in the West German and Austrian camps, and anesthesiologists were in great demand at the time. As in the case of some Czechoslovak students in 1948, an offer received during a stay in a refugee camp led the emigrant to choose the Netherlands as his or her new home. The aforementioned Bob Smalhout was allegedly behind the efforts to recruit Czechoslovak anesthesiologists. Smalhout asked the Dutch embassies to conduct a survey in West Germany and Austria to find out whether there were any emigrant anesthesiologists in those countries. At least one of them (Miroslav Květ) ended up coming to the Utrecht hospital this way.71 Květ later worked in Delft, and at the end of the 1980s, he married a Polish student who was in the Netherlands on a study stay.72

The fact that anesthesiologists were in high demand in the Netherlands is evidenced by the case of Karel Otruba. He was originally a pediatrician who, before emigrating, had worked in Prague as a trainer in infectious diseases at the Institute for the Further Training of Physicians. As already mentioned, he emigrated to the Netherlands from Morocco, where he had been sent by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Health at the beginning of 1968 on condition that he return to Czechoslovakia in mid-January 1971, which he did not do.73 As Otruba’s colleague from Utrecht, the surgeon Ladislav Malínský later recalled, Otruba, as a specialist in pediatric medicine, was at first unable to find employment in Utrecht. Zdeněk Kalenda, who was already working in the anesthesiology center of the Utrecht hospital, came with an offer to Otruba to specialize in anesthesiology, with which he helped him. Thus, Karel Otruba became an anesthesiologist and continued to practice this specialty until his retirement in 1983.74 Otruba’s story is thus a case of mutual aid between Czechoslovak migrants and doctors, both of whom emigrated after 1968. However, there was also cooperation across migration waves in the Czechoslovak exile community (i.e., the earlier migrants helped the new migrants after 1968).75

Ladislav Malínský later recalled that as a surgeon it took him longer to find employment in Utrecht. His wife, anesthesiologist Květoslava Malínská, with whom he had also emigrated to the Netherlands from Africa (Kenya), got a job in Utrecht immediately.76 Thus, a large Czechoslovak anesthesiology group was formed in Utrecht.77 Malínský later recalled his colleagues and their visits: “Our flat was occupied by a group of complementary anesthesiologists, and I was condemned to the role of a non-participating listener. My attempt to return the conversation to a more general level was not even helped by a signboard that said, ʻtalking about anesthesiology is forbidden in this apartment and punishable during meals.ʼ”78 However, it should be remembered that the large group of Czechoslovak anesthesiologists worked in Utrecht only for a limited time, and the doctors gradually moved to other Dutch cities. For example, Malínský and his wife moved to Achtenhoek after about two years.79 Miroslav Květ, as mentioned above, eventually moved and worked in Delft.80

The fate of Miloš Zvonař (1937–) offers a somewhat distinctive case. Although Zvonař was younger than the anesthesiologists mentioned above, he managed to complete a foreign internship before his emigration, or rather he emigrated from this internship to the Netherlands. He first traveled to the Austrian Institute of Anesthesiology in Innsbruck in 1967 for a fellowship and then received an invitation from the University of Leiden. He thus worked there after his arrival in the Netherlands and completed his postgraduate education, which he had begun in Prague. After some time, he settled with his wife, also an anesthesiologist whom he had met during his studies in Prague, in Raamsdonksveer. For Miroslav Kabela, Miloš Zvonař was an example of a doctor who did not want to get used to the Dutch way of working. According to Kabela, some doctors exaggerated their social status as doctors and did not respect the rules at their workplaces. This was allegedly true Zvonař, who wanted to continue working according to the habits he had acquired in Czechoslovakia. This concerned, for instance, working hours. In Czechoslovakia he went skiing or shopping at three o’clock in the afternoon in the winter, but in the Netherlands, he was expected to work until six o’clock in the evening. He didn’t want to join the coffee and tea breaks with his colleagues and other employees; he preferred to go home earlier.81

Miloš Zvonař eventually made a career also in another field, however. He became a Dutch politician. He was elected to the Dutch House of Representatives in 2002 as a member of the Pim Fortuyn List.82 Zvonař retired from Dutch politics in 2003 and moved back to the Czech Republic. When he was a member of the Dutch Parliament, his past caught the interest of the Dutch media. As Kabela stated later, the media comments were not “favorable” to Zvonař in this regard. Dutch journalists, for example, described Zvonař as “a man of conflict who did not stop arguing even at the operating table.”83 The media also recalled Zvonař’s conflicts with coworkers, which had led to his firing. In December 1974, for example, thirteen of his colleagues asked the director of the hospital where Zvonař was working to dismiss him, and he was asked to leave the following June. The media also quoted the hospital’s lawyer (Zvonař unsuccessfully sued the hospital after his dismissal). According to the attorney,

he treated his colleagues in a very unpleasant manner, did not attend weekly medical conferences, not even when it came to important analyses of deceased patients, did not take enough interest in the pre-operative examination, did not know where the medical records were, did not actively participate in the post-operative treatment, did not maintain sufficient contact and cooperation with other specialists, etc.84

It seems that Zvonař had problems with other coworkers even before his emigration from Czechoslovakia, and this was not merely a problem of “adaptation” to work habits in a foreign country. In fact, his mother stated during an interrogation by the Czechoslovak State Security in 1977 that her son emigrated not only because of his desire to complete his medical education abroad and the opportunity to work in research in the field of anesthesiology and heart transplantation, but also because of “the poor working conditions at his last workplace, where he had many enemies among his co-workers—doctors—because of his political views and open behavior.”85

According to Zvonař’s mother, neither he nor his wife maintained contact with Czechoslovak emigrants in the Netherlands, and he was not active in any compatriot association. He continued to express “progressive views” abroad and did not change his beliefs as a “communist-functionary.” Zvonař and his wife expressed themselves in similar language in their application to the Czechoslovak authorities to have their residence legalized, which they eventually achieved in 1980. Thus, their prosecution for the crime of leaving the Republic was postponed.86

However, it was not true that Miloš Zvonař was not involved in emigrant associations. As Kabela later recalled, it was Zvonař who came up with the initiative to establish an association through which Czechoslovak emigrants in the Netherlands could meet regularly. Thus, he was at the foundation of the Comenius association in 1969 and even became its first chairman, if only for a short time. Zvonař was allegedly afraid of “empty politicking” and thus of creating contradictions among his compatriots. Therefore, he wanted “to keep the management of the association firmly in his own hands and only use the help of others when organizing a compatriot meeting.” That is why many people did not like his “undemocratic attitude” and therefore soon, on February 27, 1970, a new leadership of the association was formed which did not include Zvonař.87 His relatively short involvement in this association was probably also based on the fact that he was trying to legalize his stay in the Netherlands. It should also be noted that Zvonař did not see the association as politically oriented. To him, it was merely a means of socializing. In any case, Zvonař’s file from the Security Services Archives did not mention this involvement, although contemporary documents from the Czechoslovak embassy in The Hague mentioned Zvonař as the chairman of the Comenius association (or rather mentioned his replacement by Theodor Vondráček in 1970).88

In the case of anesthesiologists from Czechoslovakia, the sources reveal little about their involvement in “association life” or the Czechoslovak exile movement. It cannot be said that they were not engaged at all, however, but professional motives again seem to have prevailed. For example, Bořivoj Dvořáček maintained contacts with his colleagues in Czechoslovakia even after his emigration. He helped organize a fundraising campaign which made it possible to bring professional publications to Czechoslovakia and thus keep Czechoslovak anesthesiology at a high professional level. Moreover, thanks to his support, the Third European Congress of Anaesthesiology was held in Prague in 1970.89 Doctors also socialized and met informally, especially among themselves. However, the sources indicate no significant involvement in exile activities among members of this community. Ladislav Malínský, for example, contributed literary articles to Okno dokořán (and his texts were reportedly popular among readers),90 but this was a matter of literary activity rather than political engagement. What one can say about the post-1968 wave in general was true of doctors and anesthesiologists in particular: its involvement in the fight against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia was very small, especially compared to the generation which had emigrated after 1948. Zvonař’s involvement in the aforementioned exile association could not have been very significant, given that this involvement was not noted by the State Security and thus apparently not perceived as a threat to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. And it probably wasn’t really a threat, since it was more a meeting of compatriots than “politicking.” In other words, it was something that was commonly and informally happening among emigrant doctors.

Conclusion

The story of the Czechoslovak anesthesiologists who emigrated to the Netherlands in 1968–1970 was the story of the intersection of the histories of two countries divided by the Iron Curtain. On the one hand, there was a significant milestone in Czechoslovak history, namely 1968 and the suppression of the Prague Spring by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops and the resulting migration wave, which included a large number of experts, scientists, and doctors. On the other hand, there was the situation in the Dutch health sector, which suffered from a shortage of doctors in certain fields in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Anesthesiologists were members of a sought-after profession in the Netherlands, and this probably explains in no small part why migrants from Czechoslovakia, who probably would have ended up in another country, eventually settled in the Netherlands. The decisive moment for them was the offer of employment in their field of specialization. Many of these migrants had already had experiences with foreign internships or had established contacts with Dutch doctors. It was certainly no coincidence that many Czechoslovak anesthesiologists emigrated to the Netherlands from Africa, where they had been on missions for several years.

However, history is influenced by people, and in the case of the path of Czech anesthesiologists to the Netherlands, anesthesiologist Bob Smalhout was an important figure. He maintained contacts and helped not only Czechoslovak emigrants (doctors and specifically anesthesiologists) in the Netherlands, and he also maintained contacts with doctors in Czechoslovakia. This position between Czechoslovak experts in exile and those who did not emigrate placed him (probably unintentionally) in the role of an intermediary between Czechoslovak exiles in the Netherlands and their families and acquaintances back home.

The stories and experiences of the anesthesiologists showed that in the case of doctors, we can talk about a certain professional identity, not only in relation to other doctors in the Netherlands, but also within the expatriate community. Czech and Slovak doctors in the Netherlands formed informal networks, especially if they shared the same workplace. Thus, in terms of the concept of “double engagement” mentioned in the introduction, there was a considerable overlap of professional and national identities in this case.

The existence of a certain professional identity (shared with their Dutch colleagues) was a prerequisite for Czechoslovak doctors to integrate more easily into society in the Netherlands. In this case, however, although this may not have been the rule, political engagement as members of the exile community was usually more marginalized. If we add to this the efforts of some emigrants to avoid definitively “closing the door” to returning to or at least visiting Czechoslovakia, we can see why the migrants of 1968–1970 could not meet the expectations of those who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia 20 years earlier and who expected the new migrants to be more politically involved (more anti-communist) in the migrant community. Each generation of migrants was specific in this respect, although in some cases it was impossible to speak of two different generations in terms of age (while the time of emigration separated the two “generations” by more than 20 years, the age difference between the migrants was generally much smaller). However, belonging to the post-1968 migrant community was also a certain status that was attached to doctors from this migration wave, whether they wanted it or not.

Anesthesiologists who emigrated to the Netherlands after 1968 continued to work there. Thus, as was true for doctors from Czechoslovakia in general, the Netherlands was not a “transfer station” for them to other countries, and they did not return to Czechoslovakia (before 1989). From this point of view, we can assume that their lives in the Netherlands met their expectations or at least were such that they had no need to return or travel elsewhere. The unfulfilled vision of life in the Netherlands after 1968 concerned younger people and students more. For Czechoslovak doctors who had employment and a certain economic level in the Netherlands, further migration abroad was not on the agenda. However, as the example of anesthesiologists shows, internal migration within the Netherlands was not rare. Their professions, jobs, specializations, and work contacts all seemed to act as a kind of safety net on which they could rely to overcome the widespread mood of post-1968 migrants from Czechoslovakia, which one of them, whom we have already quoted above, defined as “life’s disappointment and resignation.”

Archival Sources

Archiv Ministerstva zahraničních věcí [Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic], Prague, (AMFA)

Nizozemsko [Netherlands] TO-O

Libri Prohibiti Library, Prague.

Archiv bezpečnostních složek [Security Services Archives], Prague (SSA)

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Challenging Systematization in Romania: Human Rights, Transnationalism, and Dissidents in Campaigns by Opérations Villages Roumains (OVR), 1989–1990

Keywords: Opérations Villages Roumains (OVR), cultural heritage preservation, human rights, transnationalism, dissidents, exiles

In the second half of the 1980s, the favorable reputation of Romania’s leader Nicolae Ceauşescu in Western Europe as an idiosyncratic leader who defied Soviet policy steadily crumbled. Notably, the juxtaposition between Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist aura and Ceauşescu’s pertinacity accentuated the authoritarian character of the Romanian regime.1 Although international condemnation of Romanian repressive state policy steadily increased following the dispersal of worker demonstrations in Brasov by Romanian military forces in 1987, the country only became front-page news in Western media after the so-called project of systematization entered a new phase in March 1988.2 Systematization was a project by the Romanian state which had been launched in 1974. The aim of the project was to transform the rural areas of the country into large agro-industrial sites, while the urban centers underwent serious infrastructural changes. The project’s international and domestic notoriety stemmed from the destructive measures accompanying the restructuring. Historical centers in Bucharest were demolished, and rural villages were essentially demolished to make way for the industrialization of the local economy.3 Additionally, Hungarian minority groups in the Western part of the country (principally Transylvania) felt that the measures and the demolition campaigns were specifically targeted against them.4 Given the ecological, cultural, and humanitarian repercussions of systematization, Romanian critics (including some Romanians living in exile) dubbed it the “ghettoization of the Romanian countryside” or “Ceaushima.”5

As the pace of demolition steadily increased in Bucharest and Ceauşescu announced the restructuring of almost 8,000 villages,6 organizations concerned with the preservation of cultural heritage, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) started to raise awareness in Western Europe of the events taking place in Romania. Both UNESCO and ICOMOS had been alerted of these events by the Association for the Protection of Historic and Artistic Monuments and members of La Ligue pour la défense de Droits de l’Homme en Roumanie (LDHR), two Romanian exile organizations based in Paris. In spring 1988, the first demonstrations against the destruction of historic buildings and neighborhoods in Bucharest were held in Paris. In parallel, with the support of the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation based in New York, Hungarian dissidents from Transylvania organized protests abroad, lobbied the United Nations, and even held a march in Budapest.7 As the news of demolished cultural heritage and violations of minority rights spread across Western Europe, a group of Belgians who were active in the media sector became dissatisfied with the lack of interest their government and international bodies had shown in the situation. They decided to take action, and they established an organization that campaigned against the project of systematization. In February 1989, they organized their first press conference in Brussels as Opérations Villages Roumains (OVR) was born. OVR was founded in a basement in Brussels, but it rapidly grew into the most important voice against systematization. By the end of 1989, more than 2,000 local committees had been established in Belgium, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the UK.8

OVR differed from other organizations condemning the project of systematization in its scope, methods, and objectives. Whereas UNESCO, ICOMOS, and the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation focused on certain aspects of systematization (cultural heritage preservation in Bucharest or minority rights in Transylvania), OVR called attention to a myriad of distressing cultural, humanitarian, and ecological repercussions of the project. In particular, OVR sought to defy Ceauşescu’s totalitarian grip on society by mobilizing a multitude of local actors in its endeavors. Hence, OVR’s operations, initially coordinated out of a small basement in Brussels, were an outspoken challenge to state socialism that developed during the last months of the Cold War.9 OVR quickly grew into a transnational organization which drew support from groups residing in countries as far as Hungary, Canada, Finland, and Poland.10 The Fédération Internationale des Droits Humains (FIDH) played a key role in this process and provided OVR with what scholars have referred to as the infrastructure of solidarity.11 For example, the FIDH mediated OVR’s first contacts with the Romanian dissidents and exiles with whom it cooperated since its inception. Most importantly, OVR did not merely differ from the other organizations condemning systematization policy but significantly stood out from earlier campaigns denouncing state socialism in Western Europe.12

The literature on Western European opposition to state socialist regimes in the 1980s has tended to focus on the development and instrumentalization of a human rights discourse entangled with the rise of dissident opposition and transnational links.13 Much scholarly attention has been devoted to Poland and Czechoslovakia, where the emergence of an internationally acclaimed human rights discourse played a determining role in Western support for Solidarity and Charter 77 members. Academics have claimed that, following the fiercely debated Helsinki Accords, human rights were established as a lingua franca that provided a basis for denouncing the repression of Solidarity and Charter 77.14 How Western activists perceived and sought to assert these human rights has fueled academic debate ever since. While some authors stressed the apolitical nature of human rights, as if these notions were derived from some broad moral consensus, others have been keen to describe Western support for Solidarity or Charter 77 and the human rights vernacular in which this support was expressed and interpreted it as a vessel for domestic or international political objectives.15 Whatever the case, Western support for the Czechoslovak and Polish opposition seems to have played an instrumental role in the historiography on human rights. Furthermore, scholars have highlighted the transnational character of support for the highly divergent Central and Eastern European oppositions, who fostered close contacts across the Iron Curtain.16 During this period, human rights became entrenched in the operations and discourse of transnational activism. Alongside a set of (apolitical) moral values, human rights offered Western activists the necessary pieces to build a global puzzle of activism in which the East was connected to the South.17 In this regard, the “transnational” was trans-European and global at the same time. Finally, scholars have underlined how dissidents and exiles benefited, if in some cases quite unevenly, from these transnational links, which were simultaneously strengthened by the incorporation of a human rights discourse. These developments went hand in hand with the attention they received in the Western media.18

This burgeoning scholarship has played a key role in shaping notions of human rights, transnationalism, and dissident and exile activity in the East-West encounters of the late Cold War period. Nevertheless, it is the product of Western attention to a few causes célèbres situated in Central Europe. This contrasts with the heterogenic nature of Central and Eastern Europe.19 Additionally, the focus on Poland and Czechoslovakia has led to analyses of events which took place within a limited timeframe, principally between 1976 and 1982. Therefore, this article focuses on the Brussels-born challenge to the project of systematization in Romania issued by OVR in 1988–1990, while also assessing the infrastructure provided by the FIDH. The Romanian case differs in several ways from the circumstances in Central Europe. Ceauşescu’s plans to transform both the urban and rural environments of Romania received plenty of criticism from the West, but systematization never appeared on the global stage with the same prominence as Solidarity or Charter 77.20 Similarly, Romania’s authoritarian regime was not immune to the rise of dissident protest, although the actual number of dissidents never grew substantially and received little media coverage in the West. According to Dragoş Petrescu, many of the Romanian dissidents, such as Doina Cornea, Gabriel Andreescu, and Dan Petrescu, experienced the loneliness of radical dissidence.21 Furthermore, Romania enjoyed comparatively friendly relations with Western European governments which were characterized by détente efforts, continuous dialogue, and reciprocal state visits.22 Many of these contacts were of an economic nature, through which the Ceauşescu regime hoped to gain more independence from the Soviet Union and thus bolster its domestic legitimacy.23 Indeed, Romania and its Conductor, had a very different place in East-West relations than the Central European countries. Hence, the question: how does the Romanian case alter our understanding of Western European challenges to the practices related to state socialism?

By investigating OVR’s philosophy, objectives, and methods of mobiliza­tion, I argue that campaigns on behalf of Romania in the late 1980s reveal the flexibility and instrumentality of human rights, the extent and limits of transnational contacts, and the varying degree to which dissidents and exiles were integrated. Moreover, the case of OVR also explores how European imaginations and anti-totalitarian ideology interconnected with a multitude of Western European Ostpolitiks in the last decade of the Cold War and shaped the organization’s political activism.24 Finally, an inspection of OVR’s operations reveals how opposition to the project of systematization evolved and gathered strength over the course of the 1980s and was co-created by the networks of the FIDH, which in its turn accentuates the importance of the so-called Helsinki effect.25 Laura Demeter has already indicated the emergence and importance of transnational networks in campaigns on behalf of Romania. She has demonstrated how organizations such as UNESCO, ICOMOS, and the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation were often informed by Romanian and Hungarian dissidents, voiced opposition against systematization, and framed the destruction of cultural heritage as a human rights violation.26 While Demeter convincingly sketched the first traces of transnational resistance, this article offers insights into the proliferation of international condemnation produced by OVR, which in contrast with earlier voices of denouncement, vociferously challenged Ceauşescu’s totalitarian grip on society, of which systematization was the most prominent symptom.27 This also strengthens Demeter’s argument that the transnational networks concerned with cultural heritage preservation laid the foundations for international delegitimization of the Ceauşescu regime. All in all, this research perspective contributes to a broader understanding of the opposition that emerged against the project of systematization.

In the discussion below, I analyze OVR’s philosophy, objectives, and methods on the basis of its archival documents held at the Mundaneum in Mons. These materials have been supplemented by interviews with the founder of the organization, Paul Hermant, and the organization’s international coordinator, Daniel Wathelet. I focus explicitly on the period beginning with OVR’s establishment in December 1988 and concluding with the accomplishment of its founding goal: the abolishment of the project of systematization in Romania, one of the first decisions taken by Petre Roman in 1989–1990.28 This period has been referred to as the “adoption phase” by OVR members, and stands in contrast with the so-called “humanitarian phase,” which began shortly after the country’s 1989 transition.29 This humanitarian phase, which was characterized by Western European aid for Romania, has received the bulk of historiographical and societal attention due to the resonance it created across Western Europe, while the period before the implosion of the Ceauşescu regime has been largely overlooked. 30

The article is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on OVR’s strategies, objectives, and methods. It assesses the role and incorporation of human rights into the organization’s communication and discourse by examining how OVR framed the project of systematization as well as the challenge to it. The second part investigates the transnational dimension of OVR’s undertaking by taking a closer look at the self-proclaimed philosophy of the organization. It reveals how trans-European connections stood at the heart of OVR, which explicitly distanced itself from other global causes. Finally, the third part assesses the integration of Romanian dissidents and exiles who interacted with one another and within the organization. This framework reveals how a focus on Romania during the final Cold War years contributes to our understanding of human rights, transnational dimensions, and dissident and exile activities and how the incorporation of these three key elements differed from earlier protest campaigns against state socialist regimes.

Opérations Villages Roumains and the Evolving Role of Notions
of Human Rights

Apart from the denunciations by UNESCO, ICOMOS, and the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation, West European reactions to the project of systematization were fairly limited. Notably, West European governments remained awkwardly silent. Many West European politicians had continued to prioritize East-West dialogue throughout the 1980s and identified Ceauşescu as a partner in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).31 In Belgium, for example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reasoned that an untimely condemnation of systematization could hinder the diplomatic talks at the CSCE in Vienna between 1986 and 1989.32 Indeed, for several years, organizations concerned with cultural heritage preservation and minority rights in Transylvania were the only voices condemning the plans of the Romanian state. This steadily changed as rural systematization plans entered a new phase in March 1988 and Ceauşescu proclaimed, “We must radically reduce the number of villages from 13,000 at present to about 5000–6000 at most.”33 When he made this statement, a few Belgian journalists and television producers, who felt indignant at the lack of any appropriate international response, decided to take matters into their own hands.34 Paul Hermant and Eric Masquellier, two Belgians who were active in the media sector, launched their own initiative in December 1988.35 Together with ten other founding members, they established Opérations Villages Roumains (OVR). What all twelve had in common was their leftist, anti-totalitarian, anti-communist, and even anarchist inspirations.36 Their initiative emerged independently from the other organizations condemning systematization. UNESCO, ICOMOS, and the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation provided key information, however. The most important difference between earlier challenges to systematization and OVR was the fact that OVR was not merely concerned with the preservation of cultural heritage in Bucharest or violations of minority rights in Transylvania, but rather unambiguously condemned urban and rural systematization across the whole country. According to the founders, OVR was an anti-totalitarian political activist movement concerned with a myriad of cultural, ecological, and humanitarian causes in Europe.37

The very practical objective of the organization was to “save all Romanian villages under threat of destruction.” Given the state of European politics, the opaque positioning of the Ceauşescu regime, and the limited societal knowledge in Belgium about humanitarian problems in Romania (at least in comparison with knowledge concerning humanitarian causes in what was then called the third world), the OVR founders came up with the idea of disseminated opposition reinforced with permanent anti-totalitarian education.38 Practically, disseminated opposition meant that the agency of opposition was installed at the level of the local community (municipality) and the citizen. Inspired by Amnesty International’s methods of adopting a prisoner, the organization set up a framework in which Western European villages or towns could adopt a Romanian village.39 Adoption installed a symbolic bond between a Western European and Romanian village. The symbolic relation between the two villages would principally be represented by the local (Western European) committees founded on behalf of the Romanian villages. These committees included aldermen, representatives of the local center for public welfare, and engaged citizens. Their main task was to raise awareness concerning the project of systematization by organizing events, exhibitions, and fundraisers. These local committees were guided by the coordination team, which consisted of the twelve founding members. They encouraged the multitude of local OVR committees to write letters to the authorities in Romania in which they condemned systematization.40 Several committees also addressed Ceauşescu, and some even wrote to international politicians like Gorbachev.41

Because the organization initially had little information concerning which of the 13,000 villages would be demolished, they decided to adopt them all. This meant they had to find an equal number of villages willing to adopt a Romanian one. Hence, during the first months of 1989, the OVR coordination team had to raise awareness about the project of systematization and its sense of urgency. In order to do this, they framed their own initiative as an “urgent intervention on a European level” against what was seen as “a crime against memory, cultural genocide and a human scandal.”42 Moreover, systematization was framed as a plan “that eradicated all traces of the Romanian past, to root out culture and tradition, to rewrite history in order to fit the coming of ‘the new man.’” The plan was described in some detail:

Most of the time, the inhabitants are warned only the day before the arrival of bulldozers. A real cultural genocide is hidden behind the official justification (a gain of 3.3 percent farming land). Trees, churches, schools, houses, historic edifices, even graveyards must disappear. An important part of the European inheritance will disappear simultaneously.43

Indeed, the severity of systematization was illustrated first and foremost by the destruction of Romanian villages. Moreover, the destruction of these villages was presented as an attack on European cultural heritage, due to the fact that “Most of these villages are older than several hundred years, they bear the markings of successive invasions that swept through the country, they are proud of a ‘Baroque’ style architecture very often decorated with fresco paintings.”44 Incorporating cultural heritage preservation as a motive and concern made sense, since systematization had always been framed in these terms by its earliest denouncers.45 This attracted the support of architectural, rural, and cultural heritage groups such as ICOMOS, Ecovast, and Europa Nostra, which had already been challenging systematization in Romania.46 Somewhat striking, in comparison, was the absence of any appeals to human and minority rights, nor was there mention of Transylvania or German Saxons. This corresponds with Demeter’s conclusions, according to which a narrative touching on human rights concerns was only gradually incorporated into the appeals based on fears concerning the destruction of the built environment. It was only in late 1988, under the impetus of human rights activists focusing on Transylvania, that human rights gradually became part of the discourse used in the campaigns.47

When OVR attempted to convince local municipalities to support their efforts during their first months of operations, they often made a few suggestions concerning how letters could be sent to Ceauşescu and other Romanian authorities. For instance, they suggested the following phrasing: “I ask you to register my vigorous opposition to the projected annihilation of the village and the thousands of others considered. I intend to do anything possible to contribute to the preservation of the rural European inheritance and to the defense of the inhabitants.” Again, the emphasis was placed on the destruction of the village and the protection of European cultural heritage.48 The framing of systematization and communication with Belgian municipalities contained no real appeals to human rights issues. This also translated to the way Belgian municipalities framed their own solidarity. The town of Mons, for example, stated that “in Hainaut and due to our recent history we know the fragility of local agriculture.” They added that their initiative contributed to “the springtime of European relations”, referring to the self-perceived watershed momentum of pan-European affairs.49 Wathelet also observed that the image of a village on the verge of destruction had a tremendous effect on the public opinion.50 Only one month after the launch of the initiative, 220 Belgian villages had adopted a Romanian village.51 Indeed, the image of a village on the verge of destruction successfully encouraged a remarkably high percentage of Belgian, notably French-speaking municipalities to adopt a Romanian village.

Nonetheless, human rights were given a prominent role when the OVR coordination team addressed the European Parliament in March 1989. In order to gain support from the European Commission (EC), OVR contended that “the Romanian government aims to annihilate the societal tissue of the Romanian population, which is a major violation of human rights and the Helsinki Accords.”52 Along with the incorporation of references to human rights in its appeals, the OVR coordination team underlined the real reason behind the project of systematization, i.e. the restructuring of rural society with the ambition of dismantling the socio-cultural networks that could possibly harbor pockets of opposition.53 This was a very different discourse than encountered in the flyers and campaign letters directed to the Belgian municipalities.

Moreover, the international success of the organization prompted it to rethink and recraft its discourse. From the beginning, OVR’s initiative, objectives, and methods attracted a lot of international attention. Notably, in France and Switzerland, two countries particularly interested in the plight of Romanian villages for several reasons, curiosity swiftly transformed into mobilization, as national branches were established during the first half of March 1989. For OVR, the question remained how to internationalize their initiative without creating an unmanageable network of towns and villages all over Europe. In order to do this, the coordination team decided to cooperate with the FIDH, which functioned as an international umbrella organization for national human rights initiatives. The OVR executive committee decided that the establishment of a national OVR branch had to be in cooperation with a national human rights organization affiliated with the FIDH. Cooperation with the FIDH boosted and coordinated the proliferation of interested towns and villages all over Europe, but it also meant a more prominent role for appeals to human rights in the discourse. A wide range of members from national human rights organizations and Helsinki committees were increasingly incorporated, and they framed the project of systematization first and foremost as a violation of human rights and the principles of the Helsinki Accords.54 For example, an OVR committee from Switzerland argued that they felt a duty to make sure human rights were respected, especially by CSCE member states.55 Their emphasis on human rights was no coincidence, since the Swiss branch had been established and supported by Le Comité d’Appui, L’union genevoise contre l’intolérence and La Ligue Suisse de Droits de l’homme.56 OVR’s connections with these kinds of organizations and its modification of its own discourse better to echo the discourses of these organizations were a result of its integration in the networks of the FIDH. The latter became a key partner for the internationalization of OVR, but it also influenced the way in which systematization was framed, perceived, and denounced.

Partly as a consequence of OVR’s cooperation with the FIDH, human rights became more visible and increasingly instrumental. Yet, the cooperation also underlined the importance and existence of human rights networks established in the aftermath of the Helsinki Accords. Over the following months, national branches were established in the United Kingdom, Flanders, Norway, and the Netherlands, and contacts were also formed with human rights organizations and social movements, peace organizations, and activists in Hungary, Canada, Spain, the USA, Italy, Poland, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Luxemburg. By late 1989, over 2,000 Western European towns and villages had adopted a Romanian village.57 In retrospect, Romanian dissidents claimed this was a pivotal moment in which the opposition against the Ceauşescu regime finally broke its traditional boundaries delineated by the critical Romanian diaspora.58

In sum, appeals to human rights were used unevenly in OVR’s communication during the first months of operations. While systematization was strategically framed as a violation of human rights when addressing international institutions such as the European parliament, Belgian municipalities were more moved by images of villages on the verge of destruction. Here, the language of human rights was conspicuously absent. Framing systematization as a threat to European cultural heritage seemed to make more sense because it stressed the European dimension of the project and corresponded with the interests and worries of rural villagers in Belgium. Only after OVR had expanded through the networks of the FIDH and human rights activists had lobbied the networks of cultural heritage groups did the OVR coordination team frame the repercussions of systematization as a violation of human rights. The emphasis on the European scale and context of the issue, which was present in many of OVR’s promotional materials, underlined Romania’s European character and its geographical proximity. What happened in Romania, OVR proclaimed, “belonged to all of us, Europeans.”59

Local, Romanian, European, but not Global Activism

As the organization gained traction all over Europe, Paul Hermant was often asked by journalists and fellow activists, “why Romania, and not Chile or South Africa?”60 He repeatedly replied by asking “why not Romania, Czechoslovakia, or Bulgaria?”61 To the OVR founding committee this question depicted the stalemate of European relations characterized by what they called “peur de la proximité.” In other words, Western Europeans were eager to intervene in human rights affairs all over the world but refrained from doing so when humanitarian problems emerged in their neighboring countries.62 OVR was an explicitly European project. It differed in this significantly from the Western supporters of Solidarity or Charter 77, who sought to globalize their support by creating connections with causes in the global south.63 Conversely, OVR did not connect with the opposition against the Pinochet regime, nor was it allied with the anti-apartheid movement. OVR rejected these global transnational connections altogether and reasoned that Western Europe should be more concerned about the state of its own geographical sphere.64 OVR was a European movement.65

For the OVR coordination team, European identity was linked to the notion of “Europe of the Regions.” According to this ideologically divergent interpretation of European structures, which geographers and political thinkers from the French speaking world found particularly entertaining in the early 1990s, regions should replace nation states as the primary political units.66 OVR also held that European identity blossomed because of its regional diversity and local specificities. Romania and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe were unambiguously incorporated in OVR’s “Europe of the Regions.”67 The safeguarding of Romanian cultural heritage, which was always described as part of European cultural heritage, was part of these visions of European structure. The inclusion of Romania in this “Europe of the Regions” not only defied Cold War logic and détente mentalities but also drew attention to the precarious conditions of minority groups in Romania. Because the notion of “Europe of the Regions” was often linked to the ideas of ideologically separatist regions, such as Brest, Corsica, Sardinia, or Catalonia, it highlighted the political impact systematization would have on the two million Hungarians living in the northwestern part of the country, around the city of Cluj, and in the so-called Székely Land, roughly in the middle of Romania. Hence, Hungarian human rights organizations were extremely eager to adopt a (Hungarian) Romanian village.68

As different branches were established in several Western European countries, the OVR founders believed that the adoption of a Romanian village should also have a reciprocal transnational dimension. They therefore came up with what they called the aller-retour principle. The logo of OVR contained two arrows. One arrow pointed to the right and represented the mobilization of Western European activists on behalf of Romania. The other arrow pointed to the left and represented the reciprocal effect of the activism. The founders of the organization aimed to achieve a kind of boomerang effect through mobilization. In this regard, a Western European municipality’s commitment to a Romanian village was at the same time a tool with which local citizens or opposition figures could contest domestic deforestation projects, the demolition of cultural heritage, or anything endangering minority interests.69 It was an instrument designed for local (opposition) groups who could argue that their local governments had spoken out against the wide range of repercussions of the project of systematization in Romania but at the same time had neglected the values within this mobilization in their actions in Belgium or France. When a local government would chop down a local forest, demolish local cultural heritage, or endanger minority interests, these groups were equipped with a tool with which to challenge these acts.70 Indeed, the adoption of a Romanian village had a practical reciprocal dimension. The OVR founders also hoped, however, that the adoption of a Romanian village would enhance critical thinking on the level of policy making and democratic structures in Western Europe.71 Challenging systematization became a means with which the political ideas of the OVR founders resonated across a multitude of local branches across Western Europe. This corresponds with Brier’s analysis of American Labor’s support for Solidarity, in which the wider instrumentality did not jeopardize the sincerity of the initiative.72

In the words of the OVR founders, the adoption of a village consisted of three levels of activism: local, Romanian, and European. Firstly, the local level of activism was introduced by the aller-retour principle. Secondly, the letter-writing campaigns fueled the Romanian level of activism. And finally, the European level of activism was created by two elements, the unambiguous inclusion of Romania in any notion of Europe and cooperation among Western European towns and villages. Romanian municipalities often consisted of four or five different villages. Each village nevertheless had to be adopted by a municipality from a different country. This means that in one Romanian municipality you would have different Western European adopters who could cooperate, share experiences, and exchange information.73 OVR founders believed this cooperation would create a stronger sense of connectedness across Western Europe. Obviously, they also wanted to include Romanian villages in these cooperative efforts, but this was not possible, since the most of the country was still isolated and the Securitate had been Argus-eyeing the OVR founders ever since the letter-writing campaigns had begun.74 Before the revolution, in the case of Romania, the only real exchanges taking place across the Iron Curtain consisted of a few Western European activists who had traveled to Romania. After the revolution, which had not been anticipated by the OVR founders, contacts proliferated as a result of the tremendous wave of solidarity and humanitarian aid with which the dramatic changes were met. Western European towns and villages sent trucks filled with humanitarian goods to the village they had adopted. In a later stage, OVR members even attempted to set up tourist networks to continue contacts with Romania.75 In this regard, one of the remarkable achievements of OVR is that, despite its reorientation towards Yugoslavia from 1992 onwards, contacts have survived to the present day. In the Belgian town of Geel, for example, the activists involved in OVR still meet with their Romanian counterparts every two years.

Configuring the Roles of Exiles and Dissidents

Through its cooperation with the FIDH, OVR came into contact with La Ligue pour la défense de Droits de l’Homme en Roumanie (LDHR). This organization, which was based in Paris, had been founded in 1977 by Romanian exiles who saw new possibilities in the political infrastructure provided by the Helsinki Accords.76 The organization raised awareness concerning human rights violations in Romania.77 Their biggest challenge was to close and condemn the gap between the positive image Romania enjoyed in the West and the actual experiences of Romanian citizens.78 The vice-president and cofounder of the LDHR, Mihnea Berindei joined the OVR coordination team in January 1989. More importantly, Berindei had been a vocal critic of systematization since the early 1980s. He predominantly focused on the infrastructural changes in Bucharest.79 His role proved essential. Berindei’s exile and dissident networks provided OVR with important information on the situation in Romania. By skimming through the official Romanian press and other propaganda materials, the team at LDHR continuously provided the latest updates on the project of systematization. Translation work, which was essential for the functioning of OVR, was done by the LDHR team. To get the job done, they even took out advertisements in a Transylvanian newspaper calling on Romanians in France to help them. They also decided which villages would be up for adoption. Each of these villages needed a designated file containing information on the location of the village, the source that mentioned its imminent destruction, details concerning churches and monuments, demographic information, and information concerning local agricultural practices.80

The second part of their job was to inform the rural villages in Romania about the moral support they had been receiving from OVR. Again, LDHR’s network was immensely useful, as OVR’s operations were announced on Radio Free Europe. To what extent these radio emissions reached their destination remains unclear. However, Radio Free Europe received one letter in the summer 1989 from a group of farmers living in Iaşi County expressing their gratitude.81 In general, while the Iron Curtain was still intact, OVR’s endeavor was largely politically symbolic. Most of the villagers in Romania had no clue they were being adopted by West European towns and villages. Moreover, during the adoption phase, the lack of a Romanian response created uncertainties about the real value of the initiative. Exiles, however, helped explain the isolation and limited infrastructure in rural Romania, which was one of the main causes of the lack of responses.82 Furthermore, the writings of exiles were frequently published by OVR. Their accounts attempted to link the experiences of Romanians with the actions of OVR. For example, someone writing under the pseudonym Dinu Flamand authored a chapter titled “Un people adopté.” Someone using the pseudonym Pe(t)re Stroïca, wrote about how OVR offered new possibilities to oppose Ceauşescu.83

Some less established exiles, such as Dan Alexe, who had only recently fled Romania, were quickly integrated into OVR’s organizational practices. Alexe became the Romanian Brussels correspondent for Radio free Europe shortly after his arrival. In retrospect, Berindei’s team was small and certainly did not represent a large group of Romanian migrants. Yet those who wanted to be involved were given a crucial task in OVR’s functioning. Moreover, the unambiguous involvement in OVR’s practices of Berindei and other exiles, such as Ariadna Combes (the daughter of Doina Cornea who lived in Paris), Mariana Celac, Dinu Zamfirescu, Lia Constantinescu, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Dan Alexe, and many others, is remarkable and shows the importance of exiles and their networks when challenging the Ceauşescu regime. This ties in with the important roles other scholars have attributed to Romanian exiles. Not only did Romanian and Hungarian exiles contribute to the incorporation of a human rights narrative into OVR’s discourses, they also filled in key positions in the organization and helped coordinate initiatives. This suggests that perhaps OVR should not be conceptualized as a solely Western initiative. Among the twelve founders, two had a Romanian background.

Unsurprisingly dissidents had a very different role in OVR’s campaigns. The writings by and interviews with dissidents were predominantly used and spread to underscore the severity of the situation in Romania. By providing a rostrum for dissidents such as Doina Cornea, Gabriel Andreescu, and Dan Petrescu, OVR furthered the struggle to destroy Ceauşescu’s positive image in the West once and for all. The British embassy in Bucharest, for example, persistently denied that villages were being demolished.84 The local branches in Belgium, France, and the UK managed to get the testimonies of dissidents broadcasted on national television.85 According to the president of OVR France, these broadcasts had an enormous impact on mobilization in France.86 Television coverage and recognition across Western Europe helped transform Doina Cornea and others into dissidents, as scholars have argued this was one of three prerequisites to be labeled a dissident.87

All in all, OVR’s relations with dissidents weren’t always easy. In the interview, Hermant clarified this by affirming that OVR was not just an organization that supported dissidents or trade unionists. What OVR envisaged was more complex, provocative, and effective. It aimed to rearrange European relations and connections starting at the most local level.88 When Ariadna Combes approached them in January 1989 and asked for humanitarian aid and financial support for Romanian dissidents, the OVR coordination team rejected this proposal and explained this was not OVR’s main objective.89 After the revolution, OVR had established contacts with Petre Roman to discuss OVR’s plans for the future. This infuriated Doina Cornea, because she felt Roman had always belonged to the Ceauşescu regime. Once again, Hermant and others explained that they had not been converted into puppets of Roman and continued to work on the local and rural level. This is remarkable, especially when juxtaposed with the ways in which exiles were incorporated into the organization.

Conclusion

By steering away from the more conventional Western European challenges to state socialism, both in chronological and geographical terms, this article highlights the very late integration and conscious incorporation of a human rights language, transnational perspectives, and dissident and exile perspectives into the opposition discourses crafted by OVR. The OVR coordination team was aware of the strategic uses of these three indispensable elements of any challenge to Ceauşescu’s totalitarian grip on society, but it also recognized their limits. Appeals to human rights were used strategically to condemn systematization in communications with the European parliament. Systematization was portrayed as the annihilation of small peaceful villages that were sites of European cultural heritage. These kinds of narratives corresponded with earlier denunciations coming from heritage preservation groups. Romanian villages were portrayed as part of a shared Europe and similar to their West European adopters. During its first months of operations, OVR specifically targeted rural Belgian villages with less than 15,000 inhabitants, or in other words, communities that could relate to the Romanian villages. Hence, a great deal of effort was put in by the LDHR to provide reliable, detailed information concerning the Romanian villages.

Secondly, the transnational dimension of OVR’s philosophy allows one to interpret the organization as a challenge to the stalemate in East-West relations characterized by détente mentalities. By decisively building links across Europe, that unambiguously included the world behind the Iron Curtain, and by not developing its support through centralized channels, OVR confronted the status quo of European relations, which had been epitomized by the persistently friendly ties towards the Ceauşescu regime. It is thus hardly surprising that OVR collided with the Belgian détente-prone government. In this sense, OVR was explicitly trans-European, but it declined to connect with causes in the global south. The OVR leaderships reasoned that the global south was already taken care of by numerous organizations with a north-south orientation. Moreover, OVR’s successful transnational development was clearly supported by a multitude of organizations that had been established in the aftermath of the Helsinki Accords. This contrasts with the tendency to deny the so-called Helsinki effect in the secondary literature. The accounts of OVR underlined how the Helsinki Accords created opportunities for activists, dissidents, and exiles who increasingly organized themselves. Notably, the crucial role played by the FIDH and its infrastructure clearly reveal the importance of these networks. Although organizations varied in size, their networks, operations, and willingness to participate all contributed to the success of OVR. Notably the unambiguous incorporation of the LDHR was remarkable. In contrast with many Western supporters of Solidarity and their exile offices abroad, OVR did not merely support or financially supply LDHR. They were given a precise task and even included at the decision making level. OVR’s relations with dissidents and exiles reveals how challenges to systematization were not merely driven by actors in the West but were also issued by Romanians themselves, which problematizes OVR’s conceptualization as Western-led.

OVR’s first year of operations reveals an unconventional challenge to a state socialist regime that was shaped by the Cold War logic of the late 1980s and characterized by elements researchers have only recently started to uncover, such as the long détente, the limited apolitical nature of human rights, and the importance of exile and dissident networks.

Archival Sources

Mundaneum, Mons

Diplomatique Archive, Brussels

Bibliography

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“The Past Must Be Given a Place”: Migration, Intergenerational Transfer, and Cultural Memory Practices in Belgian Families of Hungarian Descent

This article investigates the intergenerational effects of migration on the memories of Belgian families of Hungarian origin, focusing specifically on how these effects can prompt the second and third generations of migrant families to bring their private memories and identity constructions into the public sphere. Their social participation becomes a crucial element in their quest to uncover their families’ histories. While the memory of the migration experience was initially contained in the “archive” (the private sphere), it eventually transitions into the “canon” (the public sphere), becoming accessible to those outside the family circle. Using published biographies of second-generation members about their immigrant parents, photographic images, texts of a theatre play, group conversations on social media (Facebook), and interviews with members of the second and third generations, this article offers a varied source material to explore these questions. By pushing the boundaries of historical research and memory studies, it demonstrates that the memories of migration can have long-lasting effects that connect people and families with larger communities and the social sphere.

Keywords: migration, identity, memory, memory work, family, intergenerational relations, cultural memory, archive and canon, Hungarian child relief project, Belgium

In the course of governmental negotiations in 2019, the Flemish government under the leadership of Prime Minister Jan Jambon reached an agreement to follow the Dutch example and develop a Flemish cultural canon. An independent committee of experts worked on the Canon of Flanders for almost three years before presenting it to the general public in May 2023. From more than five hundred possible subjects, they selected sixty Flemish “windows” focusing on politics, culture, archaeology, economy, science, ecology, and sports. The purpose of the governmental agreement on the Canon is to create anchor points in Flemish culture, history, and sciences which can be used for support and inspiration in three fields: education, integration processes, and the heritage and tourism sectors.1 A wide and controversial social discussion surrounded the preparation of the Canon in the course of which historians and other experts got into heated public debates on the question of how to canonize national history and whether it is desirable or even possible to do so. The fragmented Belgian cultural and political landscape made these debates even more intriguing and created a challenging problem. As a result of the public discussions, it was also necessary to refrain from generalizing the concept of Flemish identity, and the commission responsible for the project decided to separate the Canon of Flanders from Flemish identity. Following the principles of tolerance and diversity, the heritage and memories of the different migrant communities in Belgium also got a place in the Canon. Among them there is a photo and a short note on the history of the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project, which is a very interesting fact from the perspective of this paper.2 Its mention is surprising, as the migration of Hungarian children to Belgium in the mid-1920s was a largely forgotten episode of shared Belgian-Hungarian social history a few years ago. What happened in the meantime? How did a mostly privately shared history of a now small (a couple hundred families) group of people (Belgians and Hungarians) became part of the Canon of Flanders? How did this “forgotten” history of a once widely known event in the lives of the Catholic communities of Belgium again become a noted part of the public/national/regional canon? The aim of this paper is to venture answers to these questions by looking at the private and public activities of the second and third generations of descendants of the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project and the processes by which memories have been shared in this community across generations. I consider how these activities helped dislodge family memories from the private sphere and gave them a place in public knowledge. Three specific cases of transgenerational activities will be examined to uncover how memory of migration can define generational ties and how these memories in return become public heritage.

Short History of an Old Story and Its Consequences

The Belgian-Hungarian child relief project was a humanitarian transnational initiative between Hungary and Belgium. The idea of temporarily placing Hungarian children with foreign families where they could regain their strength after the devastation of World War I came from Dutch citizens who worked during the war as volunteers in Hungary, which was in a difficult situation economically and socially.3 The project started in 1920 in the Netherlands. Other European countries, such as Switzerland, England, and Denmark joined the Netherlands shortly thereafter, and in 1923, Belgium followed suit. The project was organized along denominational lines. Therefore, as Belgium was an overwhelmingly Catholic country, the organization of the project rested in the hands of the large Catholic community and its networks. The children were transported by trains from Hungary to Belgium, and they were distributed upon arrival among the volunteer host families. The original intention of the organizers was a so-called “holiday” of six months for children who were malnourished but not sick. They were supposed to be fed well, attend the local schools together with their Belgian peers, and follow the Catholic traditions of the local community. The Hungarian organizers took care that only Catholic Hungarian children were placed in Belgium. While the various aspects of the journey to a foreign country and the placement of the children with families once they had arrived were relatively well organized, the decision of which children would return and when remained flexible. This decision was left up to the Belgian and Hungarian families. They were able to discuss and decide among themselves or sometimes even unilaterally when the child would return to Hungary or whether, in some cases, he or she would remain in Belgium. This had serious and often unforeseen consequences later, not only for the ways these children came to understand their identities but also for their children’s and grandchildren’s perceptions of themselves.

Many Hungarian children remained in the care of their Belgian families longer than six months. Some of them stayed years with their host families, and some remained in Belgium forever. Altogether approximately 21.000 Hungarian children came to stay in Belgium in the framework of this project. Due to the scarcity of contemporary administrative data, we can only make a rough estimate of 4 percent concerning the number of children who never returned to Hungary or, after having returned, decided (or had the decision made for them) to travel back to Belgium and settled there for good.4 The children who remained in Belgium for good became immigrants, whether of their own decision or not. Their migration experience was unusual, in that it was shaped in no small part by the constraints of childhood. Like adult migrants, they experienced the cultural rupture that is an inevitable part of migration. They were separated from their native culture and from the environment and people they knew and, most importantly and most formatively, from their parents and other family members. As children, they quickly learned the language and the local habits, attended school, joined youth organizations, and thus, unlike adult migrants, they were socialized in Belgium rather than in Hungary. They did not differ, from the perspectives of religion and skin color, from the local population, and this contributed to their successful structural integration.5 Although they remained Hungarian citizens until marrying a Belgian man or woman or completing the process of naturalization, because of their integration and socialization into Belgian society as children, the question of citizenship remained a minor administrative factor in their lives.6 While their structural integration seems to have been very successful, their identificational integration, how they perceived themselves vis-à-vis the rest of the society, was more complex and problematic. Very often feelings which bordered on melancholy seem to have lingered, as well as some attachment to their country and culture of origin, at least to the extent that they either knew or imagined it. If they preserved transnational connections with Hungary (for instance with their Hungarian families), the two identities, Hungarian and Belgian, intermingled. Moreover, for many of them, separation from the early childhood environment and especially from their birth parents proved a traumatic experience. They sometimes developed traumatic disorders or depression. They were often unable to form healthy relationships with their partners and incapable of performing healthy parental roles.7 In their late life-testimonies, these people often shared the difficulties they faced while growing up and establishing their own families in Belgium.8

Why Memory Matters and How It is Transferred

The secondary literature on cultural memory has persuasively shown that movement and memory are closely intertwined. Memories are on the move.9 They travel with migrants as intangible possessions that migrants cannot and will not get rid of because memories connect places and help preserve existing social ties and build new ones.10 As the process of migration involves dislocation not only from people and social connections but also from biographically important places, remembering these places and people is a way for migrants to bridge the gap between their past and future lives. These memories, however, are not stable entities. They are also on the move, not just in space but also in time. They change together with the migrants and their circumstances. In general, memories change over time. We remember different aspects of the same event at different moments of our lives.11 The concept of moving memories in time can also refer to a generational transfer, when memories in the form of family stories, tacit knowledge, mnemonic objects, and even bodily habits are passed down to the offspring of the person who migrated.

While in the past, memory was often the most important or even only possible way migrants could maintain some form of psychological and emotional connection to the social networks and family in the home country, in recent years, technology has changed communication without necessarily dislodging memory from its crucial position. One of the main reasons for this is that memory is closely connected to our identity construction. If we look at the process of migration, we can see that both memory and identity are in an endangered position. The experience of migration causes rupture and alteration in both processes. This is why migrants often struggle with the reconstruction of both. This process of recovery, however, often takes a long time and might not be completed before the migrant dies. If this is the case, another generation may inherit the incomplete reconstruction of their family history and a fragmented personal identity.12 As Leo Lucassen very aptly put it, “integration, just like assimilation, is viewed as a non-linear, long-term, and thus intergenerational process.”13 The adults who had come from Hungary to Belgium as children and later took Belgian spouses established mixed families in which their children often shared the cultural heritages, identities, and personal memories of both parents. Moreover, the children and sometimes even the grandchildren of these families regularly struggled with the unfinished projects of their parents to resolve problematic integration from the perspective of personal identity. In other words, they had to figure out the most important questions faced by people who had undergone some cultural rupture in the past caused by movement. These questions included the issue of cultural belonging, how the cultural identities of members of the second and third generations in migrant families evolved, and most importantly, where the origins of their identities as people who had inherited more than one cultural tradition lay. They often faced the challenging necessity of reconstructing the stories of their parents. These reconstructions sometimes became very painful processes. This was particularly true when the parents had shared traumas or painful memories of their migration experiences, intentionally or unintentionally. In certain cases, we can talk about the concept of postmemory, when “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”14 However, within one family not every sibling necessarily experienced the need of reconstruction and the need to resolve traumatic legacies in the same way. Some felt compelled to research their parents’ past while others were content to know only what had been shared with them.

These descendants of the people who had come as children to Belgium through the Hungarian relief project mostly shared their memories within the limited circle of family and friends. In some cases, they maintained a connection with their Hungarian families and Hungary. In the 1960s, for example, when traveling between the two countries became easier, many families spent holidays in Hungary or in Belgium visiting relatives or old host families. As a natural consequence, after the death of the parents (the original participants in the migration experience), the children slowly started to lose their connections to the other country and to the memories of their parents. This was when they often realized that they needed to know, research, and talk more about these memories and this heritage. Until recently, with very few exceptions, these private memories remained within the family.15 They were talked about and showcased in the form of photographs, artifacts, and other mnemonic objects within the private family “archive.”16

The influential theories of Aleida Assmann on cultural memory draw a distinction between active and passive remembering. Assmann calls active remembering the canon, which is accessible to the wider audience in the form of books, articles, and other publications (published by mainstream publishing houses) or in exhibitions held by museums and other cultural institutes. Assmann refers to passive remembering as the archive, to which access is limited because the objects in the archive remain within the private spheres of individuals and families. Most interestingly, the elements of the two forms of remembering can change places. Memories of events that remained in the archive thus can suddenly appear in the public canon and vice versa.17 The second and third generation of the original participants of the Belgian-Hungarian relief project are increasingly engaged in the process of bringing family memories from the archive into the public canon. They remember and reimagine their childhood memories, deconstructing and recontextualizing them in the transfer process from archive to canon. These descendants are actually engaging in “memory work.” 18 In her fascinating book, Annette Kuhn actively stages, recontextualizes, and analyzes her memories of childhood. She also demonstrates how, while processing the raw material of personal memories through memory work, she produces new memories, and she shows how potentially therapeutic this process might prove. This therapeutic effect has been observed and experienced by the descendants during their memory work. It brings an additional sense of relief not only to confront painful personal family memories but also to share them with the larger public.

Over the course of the past ten or fifteen years, there has been an upsurge in public activities in the form of publications, theater performances, interviews, films, exhibitions, and online community building.19 These activities have played a major role in how the story of the relief project is becoming better known by the Belgian general public and how it found its way into the Flemish Canon. There are key participants, however, who regularly drive this process forward with their efforts. Their active memory work is being shared with the public through their publications, performances, and social media activities, so one can follow how family memories are gradually being transferred to the public sphere.

The Hermans Family

The members of the Hermans family are among the most ardent participants in the public memory work. They have been recreating and recontextualizing the story of their mother, Magda Horváth. Magda was the mother of ten children from two marriages. She was thirteen when she arrived in Belgium as part of the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project on March 14, 1927. She was not lucky with her Belgian host family. They did not treat her well. When she first went back to Hungary in 1929 and decided a year later to return to Belgium for good, she was only sixteen years old and did not know what a hard and emotionally lonely life was waiting for her. According to her son Edgar Hermans, his mother had “a very tough and at times tragic, but also a very courageous and meaningful life.”20 When she was only 23 and pregnant with her second child, she was tragically widowed. For eight long years, including the years of World War II, Magda supported her two young children entirely on her own, as well as her elderly parents-in-laws and her young sister, who arrived from Hungary to stay with her. As she wrote in one of her letters to her family, “I tried to earn some money: I sewed, I knitted stockings, and sheared sheep so that we would have enough to eat.”21 In 1945, she made another life-altering decision. At the recommendation of the local priest, she married the local baker Eugène Hermans, who “was also widowed and had three children, while I had two. It was very difficult to start afresh, but we promised each other to be good for the children’s sake.”22 It became a difficult and complicated marriage, and Eugène and Magda had five children of their own. They thus formed a household of twelve people, in which the mother and father ran their own bakery downstairs. Eugène showed little interest in or concern for Magda’s Hungarian roots, so she had to deal with the traumas and painful memories of migration and homesickness on her own.

The events of her life had a significant influence on her children, more specifically, her two youngest sons, Edgar and Rudi, who were the most receptive to their mother’s difficulties with her private memories of migration and integration and are still processing her legacy. Rudi Hermans is a well-known Flemish writer. His oeuvre is inspired by and touches closely on his knowledge and experience of his mother’s story.23 His narratives are fictionalized versions of her story. These works are part of the public canon, as they are available to the general public in print by well-known publishers.24 These widely disseminated literary works thus offer an opportunity for rereading and re-interpretation, which are fundamental conditions for cultural memory creation.25 Rudi’s brother Edgar also wrote a book about Magda. He too took a strong interest in her history and the nature of his connection to her and to her painful past. As Judit Gera states, while Rudi’s writings are widely disseminated and thus form part of the public canon, Edgar’s book is a non-fiction story based on historical facts which was privately published as part of an archive.26 However, Edgar’s publication, which resembles a detective story27 and intertwines the story of his own research and the biographical facts he discovered about his mother’s life, was just the beginning of his process of joining Rudi in bringing the story of Magda and with it the story of the relief project into the public canon. This is how Edgar describes the beginning of his research:

Initially, the book was intended for my family. My mother was 100 years old in 2014 and I stood there at that grave, and I thought, my children remember that she is from Hungary and that’s it. My brothers, some know something, some nothing. I thought, I’m going to write down what I know. Just like that, short. I thought five pages will be enough. By chance, I ended up with you [Vera Hajtó] through an ad in the newspaper […]. And that is how it started to come to life. That was unbelievable. And that search took almost two years, a year and a half and it was something different every week.28

Edgar started a journey to collect everything in the family archive:

I started talking to my brothers, who knew a bit, but that wasn’t really much. Then you [Vera Hajtó] found everything for me in Brussels. Then I accidentally came into contact with Zsuzsanna Bálint [a historian in Törökbálint]. I sent a message to the municipality in German, French, and English asking if someone would speak to me. […] One thing led to another. Then I started talking to old people, etc., etc.29

Edgar describes how, while he was collecting information within the family (i.e. as part of the private archive), he also started to build connections with the public sphere. He contacted me, a professional historian, and also the aforementioned Zsuzsanna Bálint, who is a local historian in Törökbálint, Hungary, the town from which Edgar’s mother Magda had come. That also proves that the archive of family memories is not entirely separated from the public canon.30 They are close to each other and feed off each other. Transfer between the two can take place at almost any point.

Edgar’s research and writing had an influence on the family across generations, as he himself mentioned. “After my book was published, one of Rudi’s sons, who was 30–35 years old, called me, I have had little contact with him. [He said,] I just called to thank you for making that book. […] the idea of what is in Rudi’s book. That is very heavy stuff.... […] When they read my book, it became completely different.”31 And at a certain moment, some of them joined Edgar’s efforts to share the story of the mother and grandmother with the public in the form of a play: “Then came my brother Jean Pierre, who is an actor, and he said to Rudi, the writer, couldn’t you do anything with that [Edgar’s book], couldn’t you write a play out of that.”32 Through the cooperative efforts of the different members of the second generation, the self-published book, which was meant for the limited circle of the family, became the source on which the script of the theater play Een bijzondere vrouw (A special woman) was based. The play was first staged during the annual Heritage Day of the Flemish community in the small church Kerkje van Laak in Houthalen-Helchteren on March 14, 2018. The Hermans brothers also organized a small exhibition dedicated to their mother in the church, which helped them establish many contacts with other families who shared similar memories of the parents’ histories.

There are often silences in painful family stories, and there is one such silenced memory in the case of the Hermans family as well. 33 Magda’s return to Hungary as a young girl in 1929 and her own choice to live her life in Belgium remained hidden from her children for decades. The decision to return was a crucial choice for her, since it altered her future. It also clearly had significant consequences for her children. Edgar and Rudi believed that their mother could not return to Hungary before 1964. They thought that her troubled family circumstances had not allowed her to return earlier and that these circumstances had decided her future and that she herself had been helpless in this matter. However, in the course of his research, Edgar discovered that she had had a choice. This came as a shock to Magda’s sons. This key fact stands in the middle of the story of the play. Magda has to answer this question, posed by Saint Peter at the gates of Heaven, who was played by her actor son Jean Pierre. Curiously, the play was staged in a church. Magda speaks with Saint Peter about her wonderous journey, much as her son, Edgar, spoke about his ongoing journey in his interview:

And just keep going. Moreover, I have discovered so much in the meantime, I am still busy. […] Moreover, the last time in Budapest, the two cineastes, I find that unbelievable. When I showed my first book to my cousin in Hasselt, he said Edgar that should be made into a movie. […] And now those people just come up to us and say, we want to make a movie. Unimaginable!34

Alongside the books, the play, and the plans for a film, the activities of Edgar and his family in the public sphere also extend to a place of remembrance in Belgium. As it so happens, Magda Horváth has a lieux de memoire in Belgium. In 1956, the old farmhouse where she lived as a young widow with her small children and her parents-in-laws was dismantled and placed in the Flemish openair folklore museum of Bokrijk due to its architectural value. Edgar and his family are currently working with the heritage experts at the museum on making the family story publicly visible in the museum.

Une Petite Hongroise

Like the Hermans brothers, Betty Leruitte also wrote a biographical book about her mother, Teréz or Terry Beck.35 Betty’s book is a narrative of Terry’s life story. As she puts it, “what I told in my book, everything is true, down to the smallest anecdotes, everything is true. She told me it all, and it seems a bit like a novel.”36

Betty describes the chain of events that led to her discovery of her mother’s childhood home in Belgium, but compared to Edgar’s book, she brings a new dimension to her writing. She intentionally goes into dialogue mostly with her mother and, at the end of the book, with her father as well. Betty Leruitte is concerned not simply with learning more about her mother’s past, including how and why she came to Belgium, how she grew up there, how she found work, and when she got married, had a child, and faced many difficult choices. Betty also seems eager to learn more about her own place in her mother’s life. She confronts her own fears and childhood traumas in the dialogues in her text, which she puts in italics. In certain cases, she also uses photos as a gateway to her mother’s past.37 Betty does not always provide the information that one would usually expect from a photo in her captions, such as the names of the people depicted or the occasion of the picture. Instead, she shares her own impressions or memories, and by doing so she brings past, present and future into a very close relationship. She also interrupts her narrative at times to make comments situated in the moment of narration rather than the narrated moment:

Freeze frame: I am looking at this photo where you are looking at me. I want to tell you that much later, in eighty years exactly, your daughter will find this photo at the neighbors’. But you’re there with your doll, you don’t know yet that you’ll have a girl. Many peripeteias await you before I show up. So I can only shut up, and let you live.38

Above this text we see a group photo of nine people. The photo was made on the occasion of a trip made by Terry’s Hungarian father to Habay-la-Neuve, a small Walloon village where Terry was placed by the relief project. She lived with two sisters in the Belgian Ardennes. Unlike Magda Horváth, she had a very happy, idyllic childhood with them. The picture, at least, gives this idyllic impression. Everybody and everything that presumably was dear to the little girl can be seen on the photo. Terry is sitting in the middle of the group with her doll in her hand, and the family dog is at her feet. Her father is next to her, as is her elder sister, who was also staying with a family in the neighborhood. Next to her Hungarian relatives, we see her Belgian family as well. They are all sitting in a line in front of the house in Habay. Sometimes Betty makes mention in her narrative of memories she has of a photograph that no longer exists, or a “memory of a memory,” to borrow a phrase from poet Maria Stepanova.39

Figure 1. Terry Beck with her father, her sister and her Belgian foster family around 1930, Habay-la-Neuve (Private collection of Betty Leruitte, Louvain-la-Neuve)

The main narrative of the book is written in the second person, which emphasizes the intimate relationship between the mother and daughter. In the excerpts attached to the photograph’s, on the other hand, Betty addresses her mother directly in the first-person. She asks her questions and pleads with her, especially in the second part of the book, in which these discussions and arguments are increasingly intense due to the childhood traumas Betty suffered because of her parents’ stormy relationship:

A comedy? I don’t understand what I’m hearing, but I’ve learned everything, and the day will come when I’ll ask you questions. I know it’s none of my business, but you shouldn’t tear yourself apart in front of me. What comedy is he talking about, mom? Tell me, you didn’t play comedy to make him believe that... no! ... Yes?40

Another important feature of Betty Leruitte’s book is how she incorporates the kaleidoscopic images and impressions of the many different national and regional identities of her family. Betty is Hungarian on her mother’s side and Belgian on her father’s side. Her father had a Dutch mother and a Belgian father. Moreover, Terry grew up in the French speaking part of Belgium, in Wallonia, and she acquired from her host family a strong sense of regional Walloon identity, which she passed on to her daughter. The folklore, legends, and habits of the region are prominent features of her story. And she notes, with a specific reference to place, “among the Ardennes, the pain is discreet, feelings do not spread out in the public square, one keeps one’s grief for oneself.”41 She also mentions how her mother, “an incorrigible romantic, told me more than once the story of Louise de Lambertye, last Marquise du Pont d’Oye where, according to legend, Voltaire sometimes came to rest.”42

Betty Leruitte’s use of imaginary dialogues with her mother and her references to Walloon identity suggest a great deal about her possible intentions. After the death of her own son, Betty wrote a book about his life, which was followed by Une Petite Hongroise, the book about her mother. She contended in Une Petite Hongroise that “those two books have been like therapy for me, I felt so good after writing those two books, […] I didn’t expect it to do so much good.”43

In an interview, Betty spoke about her intention to write a story of a Hungarian girl who ended up in Wallonia and not in Flanders:

I searched for information for five years before I could write my book, and it is thanks to your [Vera Hajtó’s] book that I could find my information, […] so I wrote my book and my intention was to make the case of the Hungarian children known because no one knew anything about it among the French speakers (Walloons).”44

Indeed, due to the smaller influence of the Catholic Church in Wallonia, far more Hungarian children were placed in Flanders during the relief project. The story of the child relief project is thus also more forgotten in Wallonia than in Flanders. Betty Leruitte’s book is the first attempt in this region to make the story part of public memory. As it was published by L’Harmattan (a well-known publishing house), the book is widely available to the public, which will increase its chances of becoming part of the public canon. It is also on permanent display in the MigratieMuseumMigration in Brussels. Betty is currently working with the cultural center of Habay-le-Neuve on a play based on the story of her mother and the other fourteen Hungarian children who were welcomed in the village in the 1920s. While Betty and the Herman brothers were authors of their creative endeavors, others choose social media to share, process, re-imagine and contextualize their family memories.

Facebook – Forming an Online Community

“Dear members of this group. This group is especially intended for (grand)children and those involved with children from Hungary who went to the Netherlands after World War I. Much is still unknown. With this group, I hope to collect stories and information, which may benefit everyone in his or her own way.” – These were the first welcoming words of the founder of the Facebook group Hongaarse Kindertreinen bestemming Nederland en België. The group was formed in October 2018, and it now has 181 members. It was established by a Dutch woman whose grandmother participated in the Dutch part of the Hungarian child relief project and who remained in the host country for the rest of her life. Although in her introductory words she only mentions the Netherlands and indicates that the group is meant to be open to the descendants of the children who went there, the group was from the outset open to people whose parents or grandparents had come to Belgium. By organizing an online community, they became publicly visible, even if this Facebook group is a closed group, which means that if someone wants to join, he or she needs the permission of the host. One can only post to the page and read the comments posted by others after having obtained the permission of the host. The group is supposed to provide a safe place to share private information. Still, it remains a relatively small community the members of which are sporadically active. There are very different expectations regarding the purpose of the group among its members. For many of them, it is a forum to which they come primarily for information. They are looking for information on experts, books, genealogical sites, and other sources on the history of the relief projects. Some of them share photos and stories, but in spite of the organizers repeated requests that every new member share the history of their family and the relatively safe, private environment, many members remain reluctant. Willem Suys is the most active member of the group. He often coordinates among members and helps them find information, and he also shares his own family history as well as his own private quest for information.

I think there is still a lot of interest in the group in getting information and that people are also willing to comment in the group if the subject is not too private, but it is a bit of a difficult group. I am also in a number of other groups, mostly public, sometimes private, and there I see, if I compare it with the children’s trains, […] that this group also has a little information that would be of interest to others, or the information is too personal and they feel they cannot even share it with a private group.45

With the information he provides, Willem often triggers members to react and share more private experiences. Sometimes there are dialogues through which members of the group confront experiences of painful unresolved family memories. Anne Marie Himpe is one of the few members who very openly shares her struggles to come to terms with her mother’s past. For her, the Facebook group is a platform where she can join discussions and compare her experiences with the experiences of others who might share her struggles. She uses this public sphere to post her private family memories and confront them. In October 2016, Willem shared a Swiss online article on new research about the biological transmission of family traumas from parent to child.46 Eleven people posted comments concerning the article, including Anne Marie: “Interesting, but what can we do about it now? I really believe that acceptance of our body and those of our descendants sends good signals. Lett -ing- go.” She adds, “We cannot change or undo what happened, although we so often wish we could. I would like to believe that what was possible then would be unthinkable today. I consider it one big learning process.”

Anne Marie’s daughter Lieselotte, who is a member of the third generation, is part of the group but is not very active. She seems also to struggle with the memories of the migration experience of her mother and grandmother, but she tries to distance herself from the painful, ongoing memory reconstruction process. As she said in the course of an interview,

I understand that the past has happened and that this must be given a place […] You have been given a life, you must move forward. And I do think that people like me read messages on the Facebook page about the children’s trains. You cannot solve the pains of your mother, grandmother. You can’t, you can’t heal those wounds. I don’t want them to become my wounds.47

The Facebook group also offers Anne Marie a chance not only to see her memories echoed in other people’s work but at the same time to distance herself in order better to understand what particular memories might mean to her. As she commented in a post to the page,

Nice weather, ideal for retreating with Rudi Hermans’ De Troonpretendent. Not reading it at once, it came too close to me for that, too recognizable, which was pleasant on the one hand and quite difficult at times on the other. […] Because mother is always silent, the son interviews the mother. Come on, I did exactly the same thing, and when mother prompts him not to share her experience with strangers, then I know better than anyone what possesses the mother, but also what the son wants and needs to know. 48

Both Anne Marie and Liselotte testify that with the creation of the Facebook group, the history of the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project gained more visibility in the public space. There is one more source to which they can turn and where they have an opportunity to be heard, because, as Anne Marie commented, “that story, that story never comes up. There is no information about it. That is like it never happened.”49 And as Lieselotte puts it,

That [Facebook group] is indeed, together with you [Vera Hajtó], one of the two pillars on which we can finally relax a bit. Yes... Otherwise that’s exactly the same, I’m not going to say a secret, but an unknown piece of something that you couldn’t talk about with other people, or didn’t want to because you were convinced that no one knew anything about it anymore. […] to us that’s just a piece of family history, but it turns out to be a piece of family history for many other people as well.50

It is a family history that is being shared by many Belgian-Hungarian families so that the larger community of the country in which they live and to which they belong can acknowledge their existence and history: “I think that would be a great relief to many people. Somewhere an official recognition.”51

Conclusion

Memories of migration experiences, even if sometimes second-hand memories, are still very much part of the identities of the people who belong to the Belgian families whose parents or grandparents participated in the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project between 1923 and 1927. The transgenerational transfer of memories of migration and of the integration process and painful but healing memory work is actively being pursued by the children and grandchildren. While these children were born in and grew up in Belgium, their complete integration into Belgian society as people who identify exclusively as Belgians is an ongoing process from generation to generation. Their family stories and family heritages have found their way into the collective public memory of Belgian society as a result of the intense public activity of the descendants who belong to the second and third generations. One might think that these personal histories or elements of family heritage are relevant only in private circles, but in some cases they can become important for or interesting to the larger public as responses to external pressures. The histories and thus cultural identities of migrant communities are based on individual or family stories, and they are formed in the host society in symbiosis with mainstream histories. However, the story of migration seems to remain alive in different social forms and interactions, and it can resurface in public or in private unexpectedly. Migrant heritage, which is easily seen as fading with the arrival of younger generations, suddenly becomes visible with every new attempt to define, whether individually or collectively, who we are and where we come from.

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The Integration of Bohemian and Hungarian Aristocrats into the Spanish Habsburg System via Diplomatic Encounters, Cultural Exchange, and News Management (1608–1655)

Tibor Monostori
“Momentum” Holy Crown Research Team, Research Centre for the Humanities
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 2  (2023):3–36 DOI 10.38145/2023.2.171

The composite state of the Spanish Habsburgs had a fading military, financial and diplomatic predominance in Central Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Bohemian and Hungarian aristocracy was, to varying extents, integrated into the Spanish Habsburg system. This article presents three forms of integration and diplomatic relationship. First, it examines diplomatic and political encounters in the main governmental bodies and diets advising the emperor in decision-making, or more specifically, in the Imperial Privy Council in Vienna and during the diets of the kingdom of Hungary. Spanish Habsburg politicians and diplomats acted in many powerful ways to establish connections with Bohemian and Hungarian aristocrats so that they follow and adjust to their political agenda. Bohemian families (Slavata, Martiniz) had close relations and alliances with Spanish councilors in Vienna (who acted as ambassadors of the Spanish king), and several Hungarian aristocrats had interactions with them during the diets in order to secure the long-term interests of the dynasty in the Kingdom of Hungary. Second, the exchange, purchase, and influence of cultural goods and objects (e.g., books and gifts) and the ways in which these cultural goods were put to use, as well as the migration of people, show that the relationship went well beyond power politics and formal diplomatic relations. Personal and cultural influence and even early signs of acculturation can be clearly detected in several Bohemian and Hungarian families (e.g., the Forgách, Pázmány, and Zrínyi families), who ordered and read hundreds of books from Spanish Habsburg authors (including several books from Spanish Habsburg diplomats) and cities and exchanged diplomatic gifts with their Spanish counterparts. People, including influential figures (soldiers and nobles), also moved among Habsburg political centers, prompted by diplomatic or family relations between Spanish Habsburg politicians and Bohemian or Hungarian families. Third, information gathered in Vienna radiated to all Spanish Habsburg states in different layers of granularity, density, and confidentiality. Top Spanish diplomats could access and transmit classified documents and the texts of international contracts obtained from Central European aristocrats and events. They also sent thousands of reports to their superiors about general news in Bohemia and Hungary. At the same time, lower-ranking nobles often struggled to keep up with and understand international events and trends and failed to get information about the key results of wars and imperial diets, since they lacked access to the network and the seniority to exert adequate influence.

Keywords: Spanish Monarchy, early modern diplomacy, Habsburg Studies, Central European aristocracy, early modern Hungary, early modern Bohemia

Introduction

Scholars have made efforts to define the nature of the Spanish Habsburg Empire (as that of any other global empire) and its importance in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Is it best understood, they have asked, as a form of imperialism, a network, or a system?1 The smaller, Central European branch of the dynasty has been treated as something resembling a satellite of Madrid or a little brother.2 The intensity of relations between the center and this periphery gradually grew (though in a very uneven fashion and with setbacks) throughout the sixteenth century, reaching its peak during the Thirty Years’ War, after which it gradually faded. There is growing evidence in recent Hungarian secondary literature that the kingdom of Hungary became a substantial element of the Spanish Habsburg system to a different extent in some areas: either in diplomacy, world trade, warfare, or European power politics in general or in more than one of these.3

Much has been written about the interactions between the two main branches of the Habsburg dynasty (the Spanish Monarchy and the Central European Habsburg Monarchy) in general and in the first half of the seventeenth century in particular.4 Relations between Madrid and the Kingdom of Bohemia and Hungary, respectively, have also been the subject of inquiry,5 including, specifically, case studies on diplomatic relations.6 However, historians have not yet compared the impact of the global empire on the two states. What were the main differences and similarities? This is important, since if we look at hard metrics and the quantity and quality of relations and interactions, we can draw meaningful conclusions concerning cultural and diplomatic history. More precisely, historical patterns and human and social strategies can be detected and analyzed, as can the role and significance that the Bohemian and Hungarian aristocracy played in the Spanish Habsburg courts in Europe.

In the discussion below, I present three points. I offer a detailed comparison (the first to my knowledge in the secondary literature) of the two kingdoms when it comes to their general and diplomatic relations with the Spanish Monarchy, both in a quantitative and a qualitative fashion. I then examine the unique and different ways in which Bohemian and Hungarian aristocrats were integrated into the Spanish Habsburg system in diplomacy. Finally, I identify similar or identical patterns in the behaviors of the ruling elites of both lands. I put particular focus on diplomatic encounters, cultural exchange, and news management. I offer several cases in the course of this investigative journey based on archival sources or printed material, devoting somewhat more attention to cases from Hungary.

I selected the chronological scope of the essay for several reasons. In 1608, Guillén de San Clemente, who had served as the Spanish ambassador at the imperial court since 1581, died, and his successors witnessed a gradually growing, then fading intensity in the intra-dynastic relations after a relatively less eventful stage during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612). The most important and influential ambassadors were Baltasar de Zúñiga y Fonseca (1608–17), Iñigo Vélez de Guevara, Count of Oñate (1617–24), Francisco de Moncada, Count of Osoña, Marquess of Aytona (1624–29), Sancho de Monroy y Zúniga, Marquess of Castañeda (1633–40), and Francisco de Moura Corterreal, Marquess of Castel Rodrigo and Count of Lumiares (1648–1656). At the same time, news about the conflicts and compromise between the Habsburg dynasty and the Hungarian estates started to spread across the lands of the Spanish Monarchy.

On the other hand, 1655 was the last year in which Spanish Habsburg diplomacy made an effort to have a real, tangible, and decisive influence on a kingdom-wide political and diplomatic event: the election and coronation of the new king of Hungary, Leopold I (1657–1705), and the new palatine of Hungary, Ferenc Wesselényi (1605–67), during the Hungarian diet organized in Pozsony/Pressburg/Bratislava.

The Case of Bohemia: Integration and the Early Stages of Acculturation

The multidimensional relationship of the Bohemian and Hungarian aristocracy and nobility with the Spanish Monarchy was defined first and foremost by their geopolitical situation and their material and human resources.

Bohemia was in a unique position. Its kings were prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire. Their votes were essential to elect the King of the Romans, who became de facto Holy Roman Emperor. For the rulers of the Spanish Monarchy after the reign of Charles V (1519–56), keeping that title in the hands of the Central European branch was of the utmost importance. At the same time, the capital of the Bohemian lands hosted the imperial court between 1578 and 1618, before its move to Vienna. These facts had several consequences.

First, Bohemian magnates were eligible for the most prestigious imperial councilor roles on the Imperial Privy Council or the War Council. In those political positions, they interacted with Spanish Habsburg envoys in a business-as-usual fashion. Vilém Slavata of Chlum and Georg Adam Martinitz, for instance, were among the privy councilors (in 1637–52 and 1638–51, respectively),7 and Václav Eusebius František, prince of Lobkowicz, held the presidency of the Imperial War Council (1652–65). They established intense relations with the representatives of the Spanish Embassy in Vienna when it came to joint decision-making between the two Habsburg branches. In addition, the Spanish ambassadors were councilors of state themselves, too, in Spain, and they were regularly invited to the sessions of the Imperial Privy Council. The Bohemian magnates attended most sessions during their membership. In contrast, no Hungarian aristocrat was granted such a significant role until 1646, when Pál Pálffy (1592–1653), future palatine of Hungary (1649–53), became privy councilor. That said, neither he nor his Hungarian successors enjoyed actual and regular influence on this political body advising the emperor in imperial decision-making since they lived far from the imperial court.

Second, the presence of people of Spanish origin and, in general, the Spanish cultural milieu were much more tangible and quantifiable in Bohemia than in Hungary. When the Spanish Monarchy intervened in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the anti-Habsburg alliance of Protestant princes (which included Bohemian magnates) was defeated in 1620 (the Battle of White Mountain), many of their confiscated lands in Bohemia were given de iure to nobles and military commanders from Spain or from the Spanish Netherlands. Baltasar de Marradas y Vic, for instance, received Hluboká and Vltavou. Charles Bonaventure de Longueval, Count of Buquoy, was given the lands of Nové Hrady, Rožmberk, and Vltavou. Martin de Höef Huerta was granted Velhartice. Guillermo Verdugo received Doupov. Nothing comparable happened in Hungary in these decades.8

Marriages also made the bonds between the Spanish and the Bohemian nobility closer. Members of the Pernstein, Dietrichstein, and Popel de Lobkowicz families married Spanish damas, and their descendants maintained strong relations with Spanish diplomats. In 1603, the High Chancellor of Bohemia, Zdenko Adalbert Popel de Lobkowitz (1568–1628),9 married Polisena, the daughter of Vratislav Pernstein (1530–82, High Chancellor of Bohemia from 1567 until his death) and María Manrique de Lara (1538–1608), a Spanish noblewoman. Zdenko Adalbert had a close friendship with Ambassador Zúñiga. His palace and that of the Pernstein family were social and political centers of the Spanish imperial party or faction10 in Bohemia, lasting well into the 1620s. Spanish ambassadors sometimes visited Hungarian aristocrats in Hungary. The marquess of Castañeda traveled to visit Palatine Miklós Esterházy (1583–1645) in person, for instance, in the 1630s. But these kinds of excursions were rare and individual cases.

Third, the methods with which information was gathered and shared between Bohemian aristocrats and Spanish diplomatic envoys were also more direct and thorough, with many connections to the Spanish Habsburg information centers worldwide. After Cardinal Francis of Dietrichstein (1570–1636), who was born in Madrid and served as imperial privy councilor, returned to Moravia in the Bohemian lands, he maintained his wide network with Spain and the Spanish Netherlands through agents across Europe.11 Other Bohemian-Spanish nobles held correspondence with members of the Spanish Habsburg courts. No similar case is known for Hungary, except for Martin Somogyi, whose role I discuss later.

Fourth, Bohemian aristocrats, with the indispensable support of Spanish envoys, applied for and were granted the honor of becoming members of the Spanish military and religious orders. Several members of the Kolowrat, Beřkovský de Šebířov, Pruskovský de Pruskov, and Popel de Lobkowitz families received the order of Santiago, including the aforementioned Georg Adam Martinitz and Joachim Slavata, the son of Vilém Slavata of Chlum. Ulrich Franz Libsteinský de Kolowrat received the order of Calatrava.12 No Hungarian nobleman received this honor.

Fifth and last, many aristocrats and their family members were “hispaniolized.” They learned and used the Spanish language,13 and they deliberately dressed in Spanish clothing.14 Also, many books were printed in Spanish in Bohemian cities.15 Bohemian noblewomen entered the households of the queen consorts of Spanish origin at the imperial court.16 In Hungary, these ties were much less present, if at all. With very few exceptions (like that of Cardinal Péter Pázmány, archbishop of Esztergom17) the aristocrats did not speak, write, read, or understand Spanish.

In summary, the Bohemian aristocracy was tightly integrated into the Spanish Habsburg political and sociocultural system. Several family members born in Bohemia were partially assimilated. This was a significant change compared to the reign of Ferdinand I (1526–1664) when one in 14 members of the court came from the Spanish Habsburg lands.18 That is, imperial courtiers of Spanish Habsburg origins disappeared (except, of course, for the court of the Habsburg Empresses born in Spain). Instead, some members of the Central European aristocracy represented the interests of the Catholic King.

The Case of Hungary 1: Ottoman Wars and International Trade

In recent decades, historians have tended to take for granted that, compared to the Bohemian (and Polish) aristocracy, Hungary’s relations with the Spanish monarchy were more sporadic and accidental.19 In reality, these relations were also strong and pointed to equally important and substantial connections and structures, even if they were expressed more indirectly, many times via the imperial court or in other fields of diplomatic activities.

The Kingdom of Hungary held a unique position from the perspective of Madrid. As an antemurale Christianitatis, it constituted a bastion against the Ottoman Empire. It possessed large Protestant lands and estates, which, together with the power politics of the Principality of Transylvania, led to delicate political negotiations between the dynasty and the Hungarian aristocracy throughout the seventeenth century. In addition, Hungary had plenty of material and human resources, including copper, slaves, horses, cattle, and light cavalry units (hussars). These facts also had several consequences.

First, Madrid needed to take the Hungarian front against the Ottomans into consideration when the court designed the yearly military strategy in the Netherlands or against the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean. If needed, they sent soldiers (thousands from the Spanish Netherlands during the Long Turkish War between 1591 and 1606).20 Dozens of military engineers (many of them chief engineers) came from Spanish Italy (Milan and Naples) to be employed by the Habsburg Monarchy to strengthen the defense system. As stated constantly in the diplomatic reports in the Austrian State Archives and in the Simancas General Archives in Spain, the political situation in the east was a recurring subject. In 1639, the Marquess of Castañeda sent his language secretary, Marcos Putz, to meet with Miklós Esterházy and get the latest updates on the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania. The palatine granted him a long audience.21

Second, Spain strategically needed material and human resources. The Spanish diplomatic corps was actively involved in speeding up and facilitating international and intra-dynastic trade. More than once, the ambassador Count of Oñate intervened in the exportation of Hungarian copper, a strategic resource for the military organization of the Spanish Monarchy. Copper was a vital material in the foundries of the Spanish Monarchy for the production of bronze cannons for the navy.22 It is clear from the data from multiple European archives that at least 30 percent of copper exports from Hungary went to the Spanish Monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1622, the Count of Oñate described in detail the possible commercial routes, the status of the negotiations between the imperial court and the German merchants, and the payment alternatives.23

Galley slaves were also in high demand, and the Spanish navy needed them in significant numbers. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, Spanish diplomats facilitated the transfer of slaves captured at the Ottoman-Hungarian border towards Italy24 with the help of Hungarian aristocrats, such as Pál Pálffy.25 On the other hand, Hungarian galley slaves (captured by Ottoman troops) also filled the Mediterranean. One of them, Ferenc Egri (Francisco Egri in the Spanish sources), managed to escape and spent decades in the Spanish military service in Naples. Once he had returned to Central Europe from Naples, Pálffy helped get him a yearly pension from the emperor. His papers and biography were read by several imperial privy councilors in Vienna.26

The latter magnate, who was described and praised by Castel Rodrigo after his election to the role of palatine in 1649 as “very biased” towards both Austrian and Spanish services,27 maintained excellent relations with multiple Spanish statesmen, such as Miguel de Salamanca, secretary of state in the Spanish Netherlands in 1647.28 One decade earlier, the Count of Oñate had paid Pálffy 50,000 forints for 3,000 oxen for military purposes at the request of Heinrich von Schlick, president of the Imperial War Council.29

In the 1630s, both Oñate and the Marquess of Castañeda held multiple talks in imperial circles (including with Miklós Esterházy) about the recruitment and regular payment of several thousand Croatian-Hungarian soldiers. The Spanish Embassy in Vienna paid for these troops and managed the end-to-end financial cash flow as well, including the negotiations with Spanish and Italian asentistas and bankers. It was Castañeda who in 1637 contracted Colonel Péter Forgách and his 1,100 hussars, who moved to the Spanish Netherlands and entered Spanish service. A Croatian-Hungarian unit (after many changes) remained there for the next few decades.30

Hungarian horses were bought in significant quantities on the horse markets of Vienna and Raab/Győr in Hungary by Spanish diplomats, both for symbolic purposes as a sign of strength and for military purposes. In 1616, 30 horses were transferred to Brussels, 24 of which were for Archduke Albert, governor of the Spanish Netherlands (1598–1621).31 In 1634, at least 14 were purchased for the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, brother of Philip IV.32

The Case of Hungary 2: News Management and Political Micromanagement

The strategic importance of the Ottoman wars and the exotic nature of the Ottoman Empire as subject filled the works of art and the regular news in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.33 In the diplomatic corps, special focus needed to be put on the translations, since the texts of international treaties and alliances and the intercepted enemy letters had to be translated too.

It is not a coincidence that the aforementioned Jacques Bruneau, who at the beginning of the 1620s served as Archduke Albert’s diplomatic envoy in Vienna, sent to Brussels a copy of two Central European treaties and detailed some of their linguistic aspects. Both the Peace of Nikolsburg, between the prince of Transylvania, Gábor Bethlen (1613–29), and Emperor Ferdinand II (1619–37), and the Treaty of Khotyn, between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, were signed at the end of 1621.

Brussels and the ruling elite of the Spanish Netherlands had been eager to receive news from the eastern branch of the dynasty since the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the Dutch United Provinces had expired in April 1621, and the parties resumed hostilities at full speed. The emperor’s willingness to assist the Spanish Netherlands depended heavily on whether he remained engaged in war with the prince of Transylvania. Bruneau, like others in the Spanish Habsburg diplomatic corps, started his career as a translator (secretario de lenguas)34 and then moved up the ladder and held many prestigious positions. Since the translation activities in Brussels were less structured and sophisticated than in Madrid, he wanted to make sure that the secretariat in Brussels did not spend time unnecessarily translating texts. He sent the first text in Spanish (translated from the original Latin by the Count of Oñate), but he kept the original version in Latin to avoid any misunderstandings. Bruneau sent the text of the second treaty in Italian a bit later since the councilor of the emperor who possessed it was absent:35

Envío los artículos de la paz en Hungría así los que tocan a los estados del reino en general, como al Betlen Gabor en particular. El señor conde de Oñate los ha hecho traducir en español, […] pienso convener tenerlos también en latín como originalmente se han concebido y concluido. Falta en ellos la entrada y remate, que el embajador mismo no los ha alcanzado de otra manera. [… ] Y también espero de tener los de la paz de Polonia con el Turco, y un consejero del emperador que los tiene está ausente algunos días ha.36

In the kingdom of Bohemia, the local elite corresponded frequently in German with the emperor and his councilors and oftentimes in Spanish with the actors of the Catholic monarchy. In contrast, in Hungary, aristocrats like Palatine Miklós Esterházy exchanged letters in Latin with the Spanish ambassadors in Vienna37 and with imperial politicians and councilors.38

Even further to the east, knowledge of Latin remained crucial in relations with the Ottoman Empire. It is not a coincidence that the most formal translation service in Vienna belonged to the Imperial War Council and was responsible for the relationship with Constantinople (Hofkriegsratsdolmetscher).39 Often, double translations were needed, as was the case with a letter, a copy of which is kept in Brussels, the former capital of the Spanish Netherlands, sent by a diplomatic envoy to the archdukes, signed by the Ottoman governor of Budin (Buda), Karakaş Mehmed Pasha, to Gábor Bethlen, prince of Transylvania in 1620. It was translated first from “Turkish” into Hungarian and then from Hungarian into Latin, word for word: “ex Turcico in Ungaricum, et ex Ungarico in Latinum, de verbo ad verbum translata.”40

In 1644, the Spanish ambassador reported to his king that the archbishop of Esztergom, György Lippay (1600–1666, who served as archbishop in 1642–66) had brought some intercepted letters to Vienna which shed light on the diplomatic activities of France in Constantinople. The French, he claimed, aimed to convince the Ottomans to give license to the prince of Transylvania to attack the lands of the emperor:

Estos días ha venido aquí el arzobispo de Estrigonia con algunos otros cavalleros úngaros sin el palatino [Miklós Esterházy] por su poca salud haciendo gran ruido de que Rákóczi armaba y se entendía con Torstenson comprobándose esto con cartas intercetas deste en que ofrecia facilitar la licencia del Turco para acometer los Estados del Emperador por medio de los ministros de Francia que están en aquella Corte.41

These letters were probably the ones that another Spanish diplomat used in an anti-French pamphlet in Münster during the Westphalian peace congress the same year.42

Hungarian diets and internal politics constituted a much more complex political environment than those of Bohemia (after 1620). Both the election and coronation of the new Hungarian king and the faction politics were closely monitored by the Spanish Embassy.43

Several archival sources from Spain, Hungary, and Vienna show that a light form of political and diplomatic micromanagement on behalf of the representatives of the Catholic king still existed in 1655.

Over the course of 1654 and 1655, the Marquess of Castel Rodrigo focused on the election of the new Hungarian king, Leopold I, and the election of the new palatine. Though the secondary literature does not yet offer a nuanced picture of the full scope of his activities in Pozsony, it is evident from the sources that he made an effort to intervene decisively in the outcomes of the diet. The variety of sources across Europe also shows the nature of such interventions and the ways in which the study of the primary sources can shed light on the motivations of the principal actors from a Spanish Habsburg perspective.

Prince of Auersperg Johann Weikhard (1615–1677) was one of the most influential politicians of Leopold I. Once a privy councilor and the grand steward of the emperor and also a holder of the Order of the Golden Fleece (the most prestigious Habsburg chivalric order, granted by the king of Spain), he fell from grace in 1669. That year, he wrote an essay against the Marquess of Castel Rodrigo, his archenemy.44 He listed several points against the Spanish ambassador, starting with his aggressive interventions in Hungarian politics. Castel Rodrigo wanted Ban of Croatia Miklós Zrínyi (1620–64) to be the palatine:

Als er arbitrium in Hungaricis rebus agiren wollen, und procuriert, dass Nicolaus Sarinius Palatinus in Ungarn werden solle, da doch schon damahls suspectus de infidelitate gewest ist,45 […] [and when he learned that Ferenc Wesselényi was elected palatine of Hungary, it caused him great pain:], sumo dolore illius.

While laying the groundwork for his presence at the Hungarian diet in Pozsony, Castel Rodrigo wrote letters to Hungarian magnates46 and spent significant amounts of money on buying weapons to strengthen his household on his journey to the diet.47 He also requested and received from the Spanish Council of State around 20 thousand escudos for his extraordinary costs,48 and he wrote multiple letters and treatises about Hungarian politics, e.g., about György Lippay.49 Castel Rodrigo often played the mediator role between the Hungarian magnates and the imperial ministers to decrease the number of political and confessional conflicts at a time when Madrid desperately needed a peaceful and stable Vienna during the last years of the Spanish-French War (1635–59).

In summary, in Hungary, for geopolitical reasons, the aristocrats were physically less integrated into the Spanish Habsburg circle of news and the Spanish cultural milieu, which meant that they had less access to political favors, patronage, and political sponsorship. In other areas, however, cooperation was equally important or sometimes more important from the perspective of Spanish Habsburg strategical goals, even if this cooperation was less interpersonal and relied less on physical presence. These goals included the assurance of accessible material and human resources, reliable political allies and diplomatic contacts in the ongoing fight against the Ottoman Empire, and reliable ties to figures with influence in the Hungarian diets.

Common Patterns: Representation, Legal Matters, and Book Culture

Alongside the substantial differences between the two kingdoms in terms of their relationship with the Spanish monarchy in diplomacy, however, many common patterns can also be seen. In these cases, the ruling elites of both states performed similar activities and were engaged in these endeavors in a similar fashion.

While Hungarian noblemen did not enjoy the benefits of most of the Spanish military orders, the most influential aristocrats received yearly pensions (Péter Pázmány and members of the Forgách family, for instance), and several of them were members of the most prestigious Habsburg order, the Order of the Golden Fleece. Miklós Esterházy (1628) and Pál Pálffy (1650), for instance, were granted this honor, as was Miklós Zrínyi (though after the timeframe of the present essay, in 1664). In comparison, between 1608 and 1655, six Bohemian noblemen received it: two members of the Lobkowicz and the Dietrichstein families, one member of the Martinitz family, and one of the Slavata family.

Coronations and rights to the Hungarian and Bohemian crowns constituted common subjects. The most outstanding case was that of the Oñate treaty (1617), signed by both branches of the dynasty. By signing this document, the Spanish king waived his right to inherit the kingdom of Hungary and Bohemia in a political situation when he could have argued that (due to the childless status of several Austrian heirs) it would be logical and even beneficial if the Spanish monarch were to take over these kingdoms. The feasibility of such a claim would nevertheless have been questionable, since it failed to consider, for example, the Kingdom of Hungary’s status as an elective monarchy.50 Also, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several Spanish princes and princesses waived their rights formally, in writing, to the line of succession of Hungary. These events show and highlight the dynastic unity of the Habsburg family and testify to the fact that, theoretically, there was always a possibility for a reunion of all Habsburg territories under one dynastic ruler.

In several instances, the fate of Bohemian and Hungarian aristocrats and nobles intersected. Margarita de Cardona, the confidante of Empress and Queen Consort Maria (1528–1603), daughter of Charles V, forged a strong relationship with Martin Somogyi, a to-be gentilhombre in the court in Brussels.51 An orphan, Martin got into the household of the Dietrichstein family in Moravia, and he moved to Brussels as a page in the 1590s, where he started his career as the vice-captain of the bodyguard of the governors of the Spanish Netherlands (Archduke Albert and his wife, the Spanish infanta Isabel). Cardona (the wife of Adam von Dietrichstein and the mother of Franzis von Dietrichstein) even requested a Spanish knighthood for Somogyi, a request Archduke Albert repeated some years later, though without success. Instead, Somogyi continued to build his career in the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands. He undertook diplomatic missions and remained in close touch with Franz von Dietrichstein, and he became one of his principal informers from Brussels52 In 1620, he became a baron.53 By the 1630s, he had become a landlord (of Bothey in the province of Namur in the Spanish Netherlands and of Štáblovice in Opava/Troppau/Opawa in Moravia) and a tenant of a castle (Vichenet in Namur). Martin Somogyi made several contributions to cultural relations. In 1620, he sent a copy of the second part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote from Brussels to Franz von Dietrichstein.54 A few years later, Diego Muxet de Solís, a local writer in the Spanish Netherlands, dedicated his plays and poems to Dietrichstein at Somogyi’s suggestion.55

Instances of cooperation between Bohemian and Hungarian magnates occurred, naturally, among the Catholic prelates during the Catholic revival. As has been noted in the secondary literature in Hungarian, Philip IV and his ministers kept an eye on Péter Pázmány, archbishop of Esztergom, and later paid even more attention when Pázmány became cardinal. The literature has dealt extensively with the history of Pázmány’s most important diplomatic mission to Rome in 1632 (which has most recently been strongly linked to the Spanish Cardinal Borja’s famous protest the same year).56 New sources revealed that the aim of the Pázmány’s travels, which was to advance the establishment of a league between the Spanish king, the emperor, and the Catholic estates of the Holy Roman Empire, was a cornerstone in the foreign policy of the Count-Duke of Olivares. In 1629, Spanish Habsburg diplomacy conducted in Vienna by the Count of Castro, the Duke of Tursi, Jacques Bruneau, and the Marquis of Cadereyta had begun carefully to pave the way for the mission.57

Although no thorough comparison of Bohemian and Hungarian aristocratic libraries has been conducted yet, the first results show clearly that both groups of magnates wanted to equip themselves with knowledge of the best of Spanish Habsburg culture.

The libraries of Hungarian Catholic aristocrats were full of hispanica, mostly in Italian and Latin translations.58 In 1614, Cardinal Ferenc Forgách ordered and received 206 books from Frankfurt, 30 percent of which were by Spanish authors or writers from the Spanish Monarchy.59 In Pázmány’s private library, a similar proportion of books by Spanish authors can be found.60 The book catalogue of the Zrínyi family in 1662 included at least 91 items in the same category (out of 731).61

Studies of the Bohemian libraries have been more thorough.62 A logical next step in the research in both countries might be to attempt to grasp the influence that the wide variety of military, scientific, ecclesiastical, legal, historical, etc. treatises had on the readers and their political and private activities.

Although the interests of Bohemian and Hungarian aristocrats seemed to differ (e.g., the former group included more volumes for pure entertainment in their libraries), the most popular authors were present in the book collections of both territories: Pedro de Mejía, Luis de Granada, Antonio de Guevara, Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (a diplomat himself who spent several months in Vienna between 1634 and 1641), Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa (the count of La Roca, ambassador of Madrid in Venice between 1632 and 1642, and author of the famous 1620 treatise The Ambassador), and many others. One might reasonably assume that when Bohemian and Hungarian magnates discussed their lectures, actual political events, or their encounters with Spanish culture and persons, they could easily refer to a similar corpus of experiences and perceptions.

In conclusion, from the perspective of Hungary’s relevance to the Spanish Habsburg system, money and strategic geopolitical interests were the primary factors. Hungary was important for the Spanish Empire because of its material and human resources (copper, horses, slaves, and soldiers). As a consequence, a peace between the Ottoman Empire, the Principality of Transylvania, and the Central European branch of the dynasty helped Madrid focus on its fight against France and the Netherlands and strengthen the position of Catholicism. Since Hungary was not part of the Holy Roman Empire and the integration of Hungary’s aristocracy into the Habsburg central government organs and councils was far less advanced than in Bohemia, Spanish diplomacy made fewer efforts to build more meaningful and deep connections and interactions with them through, for instance, marriages, the migration of Hungarian noblemen to the Spanish Netherlands or Spain, or the granting of memberships in religious and military orders. Patronage, favors, and political sponsorship, as a consequence, played a smaller role. Spanish Habsburg diplomats in Prague and Vienna were well aware of the details of all these connections, and they made decisions, intervened, or facilitated solutions whenever necessary.

In contrast, Bohemia constituted a strategic land for Madrid for different reasons. As part of the Holy Roman Empire and as a territory that was historically more integrated into the Central European Habsburg lands, Bohemia needed to be more closely linked to the Spanish Habsburg system of diplomacy and favors. In addition, the Thirty Years’ War created a very specific opportunity for the Spanish Habsburg elite. The defeat of the Protestant nobility in Bohemia freed up a huge amount of land for the Catholic aristocracy, and the emperor distributed some of these lands to Spanish noblemen who were fighting and living in Central Europe. Cultural assimilation, family ties (including marriages), and joint political decision-making in the central government organs in Vienna made relations between Madrid, Spanish Habsburg diplomats, and the Bohemian elite much closer in these areas than Spanish Habsburg relations with the Hungarian aristocracy.

As Bohemia and Hungary were neighboring lands with shared interests and common goals, many similar patterns can be detected as well, however, first and foremost in matters of cultural assimilation (book culture and cooperation in the Catholic revival) and questions of dynastic inheritance (coronations and the rights to the Hungarian and Bohemian crowns).

Archival Sources

Archives Générales du Royaume, Brussels (AGRB)

Secrétairerie d’État et de Guerre

Secrétairerie d’Etat Allemand

Archivo General de Simancas, Simancas (AGS)

Archivo Histório Nacional, Madrid (AHN)

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

P 287 A Forgách család gácsi iratai

Moravský Zemský Archiv [Moravian Land Archives], Brno (MZA)

Rodinný Archiv Ditrichštejnů [Dietrichstein Family Archive]

Prímási Levéltár [Esztergom Primate Archives], Esztergom (PLE)

Archivum Ecclesiasticum Vetus

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna (ÖStA)

Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (HHStA)

Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv – Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv

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Monostori, Tibor. “Egy magyar arisztokrata Spanyol-Németalföldön a Flandriai Hadsereg szolgálatában: Forgách Péter koronaőr lovasezredének szerződtetése 1637-ben” [A Hungarian aristocrat in service of the Army of Flanders in the Spanish Low Countries: The contract of Péter Forgách’s regiment of cavalry in 1637]. Lymbus Magyarságtudományi forrásközlemények, 2019, 157–74.

Monostori, Tibor. “A besztercebányai réz a spanyol Habsburg és portugál globális hadiipar, kereskedelem és pénzügypolitika szolgálatában” [Copper from Banská Bystrica (Neusohl) in the service of Spanish Habsburg and Portuguese global military industry, trade and finance]. Fons 27, no. 1 (2020): 33–60.

Monostori, Tibor. “Az aranykori spanyol és a magyarországi irodalom: egy új, európai paradigma” [Golden Age Spanish and Hungarian literature: a new European paradigm]. Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 124, no. 4 (2020):417–51.

Monostori, Tibor. “Eger várából a Nápolyi Királyságba: Egy magyar gályarab szabadulása, szolgálatai és kérelme III. Ferdinánd császárhoz” [From Eger Castle to the Kingdom of Naples: The liberation of a Hungarian galley slave, his services and petition to Emperor Ferdinand III]. Világtörténet 11 (43), no. 4 (2021): 629–38.

Monostori, Tibor. “Hungaria Hispanica: Resilient Hungary and its integration into the Spanish Habsburg system, 1558–1648.” In Resilience and Recovery at Royal Courts, 1200–1840, edited by Fabian Persson, Munro Price, and Cinzia Recca, 21–40. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

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“Secret Correspondence” in Habsburg–Ottoman Communication in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

 

János Szabados
University of Szeged
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 2  (2023):3–36 DOI 10.38145/2023.2.194

For the Habsburg Monarchy in the seventeenth century, it was very important to collect, send to Vienna, and evaluate up-to-date information on the Ottoman Empire. Following the Long Turkish War (1591/1593–1606), it was necessary in the 1620s to organize, alongside couriers and other channels of correspondence (e. g. the Venetian post), a cost-effective and sustainable system with which to transmit news and, in part, intelligence. In this essay, I present the historiography of the “institution” known as the “Secret Correspondence” and the history of the organization and reorganizations of the system. I also establish a typology of the people involved in the correspondence, namely 1) letter forwarders, 2) letter forwarders who also wrote secret reports, and

3) spies who wrote secret reports regardless of their location (in this case, the person was more important than the information). In the first half of the seventeenth century (1624 to 1658), the system of “Secret Correspondence” had to be reorganized several times (mostly due to lack of funds). In each case, the main challenge was to find and continuously employ the right people, so the role of the recruiter was also important. The political situation in the abovementioned period had an obvious impact on the functioning of the system, too. My research is based on documents from the Viennese archives (Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv; Kriegsarchiv, Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv), which have helped me to offer a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the “Secret Correspondence” than found in the existing secondary literature.

Keywords: Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy, intelligence, flow of information, information channels, typology of the informants

Introduction

Interest among scholars in Habsburg–Ottoman diplomacy has increased in recent decades. The peaceful period of the first half of the seventeenth century (1606–1663) is of particularly strong interest.1 In this essay, I investigate a vital channel of communication between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire, namely the institution known as the “Secret Correspondence” (Geheime Korrespondenz). The continuity of the correspondence between Vienna and Constantinople had a great impact on relations between the two empires. It was of primary importance for the Habsburgs mostly, as it helped them closely monitor the policies of the Ottoman Empire and have direct and prompt access to the relevant pieces of news and information with which to shape their European policy, especially during and after the Thirty Years’ War. In the discussion below, I look at the secondary literature on this “Secret Correspondence,” outline the history of its establishment in the first half of the seventeenth century (1623–1658), look at the historical and political context, and introduce the diplomats involved in its organization. Moreover, I examine the parallel information channels and establish a typology of those involved in the transmission of letters and intelligence. I also describe the roles of these actors in the network’s operation and offer some examples of how their activity as letter forwarders or spies impacted their careers. My intention is to offer a more nuanced understanding of how the Habsburg communications and intelligence system functioned in the Ottoman Empire and to demonstrate that the “Secret Correspondence” was primarily used as a form of infrastructure, which, of course, also made espionage more effective.

Historical and Political Context

The Battle of Mohács in 1526 determined the politics of the following decades, as the Habsburg Monarchy became a direct neighbor of the Ottoman Empire, which was expanding through the Kingdom of Hungary. The longer period of peace after 1568 provided an opportunity for secret diplomacy to develop,2 but the Long Turkish War at the end of the century (1591–1606) interrupted this process. The Peace of Zsitvatorok in 1606 provided a new possibility to resume peaceful diplomatic relations, especially during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).3 Both empires were already entangled in conflicts in various theaters of war and were forced to maintain peace with each other, though this peace was fragile and had to be affirmed on several occasions (1615/1616, 1618, 1625, 1627, and 1642). After the Thirty Years’ War, the two empires did not start a new war with each other but rather extended the peace again in 1649.4 Each peace treaty was accompanied by a solemn grand embassy, but these embassies were not necessarily sent only on the occasion of a new affirmation of peace.5 The envoys (with the rank of ambassador or internuncius) also played a role in the organization and operation of the “Secret Correspondence,” but the actual operation was the responsibility of the “experts” in charge of the Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat) and the resident ambassadors in Constantinople. Nevertheless, for various reasons (for instance, the death of a member or changes in the underlying political situation), it became necessary to reorganize the system several times by the mid-seventeenth century (until 1658).

The Revolution of Communication in the Early Modern Period

The early modern period saw a revolution in communication that had less to do with the invention of printing and more with changes in infrastructure.6 The postal system developed rapidly, and this contributed to better and faster correspondence. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Thurn und Taxis family owned the post office as a fief. In the Hereditary Lands of the Habsburgs, the postal service belonged to the Paar family, although the institution of postmaster existed for a time in the Kingdom of Hungary as well.7 This system, with its very well-functioning infrastructure, enabled faster and easier communication, which also had a positive effect on European societies and cultures.8 Parallel to the official correspondence, there existed an unofficial form of communication, mostly conducted in ciphers (i.e., secret writings of various kinds) which was used to transmit important and non-public information.9 There is a very substantial literature on early modern intelligence.10 With regard to the Ottoman Empire, two works are worth highlighting. John-Paul Ghobrial has examined the complex flow of information in Constantinople, London, and Paris in the late seventeenth century,11 and Ioanna Iordanou has offered a thorough analysis of the extensive European and non-European (i.e. Ottoman Empire) intelligence network of Venice.12

In the discussion below, I examine another form of communication that was specifically established between Vienna, Constantinople, and most of the European areas of the Ottoman Empire, namely the so-called “Secret Correspondence.” Since a comprehensive reform of the postal system took place in the 1620s, it is reasonable to assume that the founding of the “Secret Correspondence” was also connected with this reform, though no sources have yet been found providing clear confirmation of this. One document makes clear the relevance of communication during the legation of envoy (internuncius) Johann Jakob Kurz von Senftenau (1623–1624), as Ferdinand II ordered the restoration of the post office in Altenburg/Mosonmagyaróvár, Raab/Győr, and Komorn/Komárom and Révkomárom/Komárno in the autumn of 1623.13 It must be added, however, that in the case of the Imperial Post and the Post of the Hereditary Lands of the Habsburgs, they were official and public structures. In contrast, the “Secret Correspondence” was in principle an unofficial channel of communication.

The Secondary Literature on and Terminology Concerning the “Secret Correspondence”

In contrast to what has been stated in the secondary literature, in my view, the network of “Secret Correspondence” primarily provided an infrastructure for more fluid communication between Vienna and Constantinople, and this infrastructure was always dynamically adapted to the circumstances. Some elements of the system have been addressed in the scholarship, but the mechanisms of its operation in the first half of the seventeenth century have not yet been explored in detail, and this has led to misunderstandings in the interpretation of certain sources. The system of “Secret Correspondence” was already known to scholars in the early twentieth century. Numismatist Carl von Peez drew attention to the work of correspondents in Buda, Belgrade, and Sofia who were active after 1665, but he did not systematically explore the function of the system in the second half of the seventeenth century.14 This applies to the earliest Hungarian scholars on the subject. Sándor Takáts and Gyula Erdélyi mentioned the actors in the system by name in their essays, and they emphasized that the appearance of foreign (i.e., non-Hungarian) participants crowded Hungarians out of the intelligence system.15 Peter Meienberger also devoted a few pages in his book to the “Secret Correspondence,” and he made important observations about the operation of the system and treated it separately from the intelligence service.16 The establishment of the system was first outlined by István Hiller, who based his conclusions on the mission of the aforementioned Johann Jakob Kurz von Senftenau. Hiller interpreted the “Secret Correspondence” as an intelligence system, but his findings prompted certain points that need further clarification, including, for instance, the function(s) of this system.17 Dóra Kerekes examined in more detail the correspondents of the second half of the seventeenth century, focusing on the role of the Orientalische Handelskompanie (Oriental Trade Company) in the “Secret Correspondence.”18 She also explored the activities of the interpreters (in her terminology, the “Secret Correspondents”) who resided in Constantinople during the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), from where they wrote and sent secret reports.19 On the basis of her research on the abovementioned period, Kerekes concluded that the “Secret Correspondence” could be regarded as an intelligence system in the modern sense.20 However, the system of “Secret Correspondence” seems to have been more complex than mere espionage and can be seen rather as an intelligence and messaging system. I will explore this in more detail below.

The Reasons for Organizing the System and the Manner in which it was Implemented

During the second campaign (1623–1624) of Transylvanian prince Gábor Bethlen (1613–1629), which he launched against the Habsburgs in the Kingdom of Hungary five years after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War,21 Johan Jakob Kurz von Senftenau, Habsburg envoy to the Ottoman Porte, was commissioned with the establishment of a new system of communication. The aim was pragmatic: to replace the flow of information, which had been weakened by Bethlen’s attacks, with a financially more optimal system of mail transmission (which could be maintained between Belgrade and Constantinople for less than 500 talers a year) that would be less dependent on Venice.22 In accordance with his instructions, the diplomat recruited suitable people, primarily merchants in Buda, Belgrade, and Sofia. They were contracted to forward letters between Vienna and Constantinople twelve times a year for a certain sum. This solution was indeed more affordable since it cost 240 talers per occasion to send couriers.23 On his return journey from Constantinople, Kurz recruited people whom he thought qualified for the task and who were willing to undertake it. Thus, Hironimo/Girolammeo Grassi (240 talers)24 in Sofia, Matteo Sturani25 (240 thalers) in Belgrade, and Giovanni Pellegrini (160 talers) in Buda took on the task of forwarding the letters, and thus the costs in Belgrade and Sofia were kept below the prescribed 500 thalers.26 They were merchants from Ragusa (see table), and Grassi and Sturani had provided their services to the Habsburgs before.27 The operation of that newly established correspondence was presumably the responsibility of war councilor Count Michael Adolf Althan,28 secretary of the Aulic War Council and later also a war councilor Gerhard von Questenberg,29 and resident ambassador of Constantinople Sebastian Lustrier (1623–1629).30

Typology of Members of the “Secret Correspondence”

Before presenting the functioning of the system, I offer first an outline of the terms used to refer to participants in the system. My intention is to clarify the roles these actors played, at least to the extent possible on the basis of the sources. The meaning of the term “correspondent” as used in the sources seems problematic. It may have referred to someone who was both a “correspondent” or “spy” and a “letter forwarder.”31 Indeed, within the system, several functions can be clearly distinguished, even if some of terms sometimes seem ambiguous. Accordingly, for those who merely forwarded letters, I suggest the term letter forwarder. Those who primarily reported on important events should be called spies. The last category, and the most difficult to define, is those who forwarded letters and wrote spy reports. In their case, two subcategories can be distinguished, namely people who primarily spied and sometimes also forwarded letters and people who were contracted primarily to forward letters, but in some cases wrote secret reports as well. These people also received a salary from the Court Chamber, unlike, for example, Marino Tudisi, who was recruited as a private servant of Count Althan.32

Attempts at Reorganization between 1628 and 1658

The “Secret Correspondence” needed to be reorganized several times in the first half of the seventeenth century. Lustrier, the Habsburg resident ambassador at the Porte who was most interested in uninterrupted communication between the two powers, frequently used the new channel, but he also warned the court of the shortage of funds due to the war.33 By the end of the 1620s, after the negotiators of the two empires had successfully agreed to extend the peace in 1627 in Szőny, the system was in dire need of reorganization.34 The task of dispatching the ratification to Constantinople was entrusted to Baron Johann Ludwig von Kuefstein, a recent convert to Catholicism, who entered the Habsburg–Ottoman diplomacy as a homo novus.35 He was also instructed, however, to reorganize the “Secret Correspondence.”36 He was prepared for his journey by Michael Starzer (1610–1622), the former agent at the Porte, and Johann Rudolf Schmid (1629–1643), a former Ottoman captive and the next resident ambassador.37 However, due to the lack of a suitable “specialist,” only the aforementioned Marino Tudisi accompanied him as an expert.38 Presumably because of his earlier studies in Italy, Kuefstein preferred the Ragusan citizens as future letter forwarders, too. He enlisted the help of Tudisi on his way to the Sublime Porte. In Belgrade, he recruited Tomaso Orsini for Buda, Francesco Vlatchy/Vlatky for Belgrade, and Marco Cavalcanti for Sofia.39 During his stay in Constantinople, however, Kuefstein preferred sending letters through his courier, Wolf Leuthkauff, which obviously had an impact on the frequency of the correspondence.40 Orsini, for example, proved unreliable,41 thus Kuefstein had to use other channels and modify previous arrangements on the return journey. As a result, he first made an agreement in Sofia with a person called Stefano Vukovicz (Vuković).42 Nevertheless, in Belgrade the aforementioned Vlatchy/Vlatky then undertook to organize the entire correspondence between Constantinople and Komárom, and he himself proved ready to write secret reports. This is probably why he received the rather high sum of 700 thalers.43 In Komárom, Kuefstein entered into a contract with János Papp to transmit letters for 100 thalers a year.44 Thus, Kuefstein succeeded in his mission to reorganize the “Secret Correspondence.”

In the years that followed, the new resident ambassador Schmid was responsible for controlling the system, which he did together with the imperial interpreter in Vienna, Michel d’Asquier (1625–1664).45 Schmid also made use of the “Secret Correspondence,” but he sometimes bribed couriers en route to Buda and used the Transylvanian and Venetian postal services as well.46 Little is known about the identity of the letter forwarders from this period (see table). Since pieces of news from the Middle East were very important for the court because of the Thirty Years’ War, Schmid also recruited Francesco Crasso/Grassi, a doctor who had previously worked in Buda and was also of Ragusan origin.
Dr. Grassi was primarily an intelligence agent (spy), and not only for the Habsburgs, of course.47 Schmid also relied on the services of Andrea Scogardi (originally Johann Andersen Skovgaard), also a doctor, who, after his resettlement, kept the resident ambassador regularly informed about Moldavian and Transylvanian affairs.48 Johann Rudolf Puchheim, the grand ambassador assigned to the Porte in 1634, also tried to recruit new people, but there are no relevant data on the long-term impact of this.49 Because of financial problems, when they submitted a report to the emperor, Schmid and d’Asquier tried to get the impression that running the network was of primary importance.50 However, by the 1640s, the system was on the verge of collapse, since there were not enough resources to run it because of the costs of the Thirty Years’ War.

After Schmid’s return from Constantinople in 1643, the task of rebuilding was inherited by his successor, Alexander Greiffenklau (1643–1648). The court was preoccupied at the time with a series of attacks (1644, 1645)51 by the Prince of Transylvania, György Rákóczi I (1630–1648), against the Kingdom of Hungary. These attacks also impeded communication between Vienna and Constantinople. Moreover, the Ottoman war against Venice for the possession of Crete (1645–1669)52 virtually eliminated the possibility of using the Venetian post service, though that passage had been favored by Greiffenklau. Since the resident ambassador was unable to relaunch the “Secret Correspondence,” Hermann Czernin von Chudenitz, the grand ambassador assigned to the Porte in 1644, was charged with the task. However, it seems that this effort was not successful either. Both Czernin and Greiffenklau endeavored to get their letters to Vienna by all possible means, mainly through couriers, embassy secretaries, the Ottoman postal service, and sometimes even through Poland. The temporary disappearance of the “Secret Correspondence” was not necessarily their fault. Indeed, the political situation at the time had a strong impact on communication and determined the options available, namely that diplomats were forced to rely on trusted confidants.53

After the campaigns, the system was revived once again. Greiffenklau was commissioned with the reorganization for the second time. However, despite the efforts of imperial courier Johann Dietz, the reorganization did not succeed because of the war against the Venetians.54 After the resident’s involvement in a political assassination, the situation was further complicated, because it had some diplomatic consequences.55 As for the intelligence, Greiffenklau primarily relied on the Hungarian-born renegade, the grand dragoman of the Sublime Porte (1629–1657), Zülfikâr Ağa.56 The unexpected death of Greiffenklau in 1648 again offered Schmid new opportunities. In 1647, he had already suggested using the services of the German-born renegade interpreter, Hüseyin Çavuş, who went by the pseudonym Hans Caspar and who subsequently became an important spy in the intelligence network of the Habsburg–Ottoman frontier.57

In 1649, Schmid was sent to the Porte as a member of the Aulic War Council to negotiate to extend the peace.58 He introduced there the new resident ambassador, Simon Reniger,59 and he reorganized the “Secret Correspondence.” During Schmid’s diplomatic mission, he recruited competent agents in Buda, Belgrade, and Sofia who were suitable as actors who would forward letters (cf. table), and after some bargaining, he was able to agree on their remuneration.60 In his secret report, he emphasized the importance of regular payments in the future to keep the system running.61 At the same time, he tried to set up the forwarding of letters via Transylvania, which seemed to be the shortest route.62 Communication channels were thus re-established for a while.

In 1650, Johann Rudolf Schmid again (as a baron and grand ambassador) took the ratified document of the peace treaty to Constantinople.63 According to the references, during his embassy, he regularly used the “Secret Correspondence” network, and he tried to replace the lost links (e.g. in Sofia) and provide the actors in the system with adequate payment for the future, thus making Reniger’s work easier.64 In his secret report, he emphasized again that salaries were to be paid regularly to facilitate the rapid flow of information. His suggestions were no doubt inspired by his previous bad experiences.65

From that point on, communication between Vienna and Constantinople seemed relatively stable. The main channels were couriers, correspondence via Transylvania, Ottoman chiauses (çavuş), and the “Secret Correspondence.” Obviously, extraordinary events could cause disruptions. The death of imperial courier Johann Dietz during his mission in the autumn of 1651 led to a serious delay of several months, as all channels were simultaneously interrupted for various reasons.66 However, the increasing number of excursions on the frontier made it essential to get the letters to their destinations as quickly as possible, and usually at least one channel was used to get the information to the right destination. In the autumn of 1652, the death of the letter forwarder of Belgrade (Baggio, recruited by Schmid) caused a further slowdown, and the position in Belgrade remained precarious for the rest of the year.67 According to one of Reniger’s reports to Schmid, between December 1653 and 1654, he sent only one letter out of nine through the “Secret Correspondence” network. This mere fact offers an indication of the seriousness of the problems outlined.68 In 1653, the death of Hungarian palatine Pál Pálffy (1649–1653) caused a disruption on the Transylvanian route, but this was soon resolved diplomatically, although the election of Ferenc Wesselényi as palatine in 1655 caused further interference.69

The main source of information in Constantinople in the early 1650s was Dr. Scogardi, who regularly reported to Schmid,70 and in Buda, mainly during the time of Kara Murad Pasha (1650–1653),71 the German renegade Hans Caspar.72

In the mid-1650s, the “Secret Correspondence” and the whole communi­cation and intelligence network entered a difficult phase. The new pasha of Buda, Sari Kenan (1653–1655),73 took a dim view of the secret transmission of information and assaulted the judge of Óbuda, who was then acting as a letter forwarder. Even the other letter forwarder in Buda, Vuichich/Vuičić (see table), did not dare carry out his duties, and consequently a general atmosphere of fear prevailed in that period.74 Since the sending of letters via Transylvania also seemed uncertain at the time, communication between Reniger and the Viennese court took place via Poland for a few months.75 Finally, the imperial courier Natal de Paulo, also of Ragusan origin, managed to restore the system by filling in the missing links. Furthermore, Hans Caspar found himself in a difficult situation during the time of Sari Kenan, and this was reflected in the low number of reports written by him.76

A completely new situation was brought about by the campaign of Prince of Transylvania György Rákóczi II (1648–1660) against Poland in 1657.77 The channels of communication were entirely changed by the absence of Leopold I (who traveled to Prague and then to Frankfurt), the campaigns, and the move of the Sultan’s court to Adrianople.78 From the available correspondence it seems that the difficulties of “Secret Correspondence” were not fully overcome in 1656, as no suitable persons could be found in Buda or Belgrade. Only the mission of the courier Natal and secretary of the Aulic War Council Peter Franz Hoffmann was crowned with success, and after that, the secret channel of communication was again in operation in 1657.79 Reniger had to follow the Sultan’s court to Adrianople at the end of 1657, and this brought about a dramatic change in the conditions of the channels of communication, because someone else had to be left in Constantinople. However, this topic is beyond the scope of this paper.80 In terms of gathering or passing on intelligence, Hans Caspar was less active than he had been in the early 1650s, and the war had a strong impact on his circumstances and his work as a spy.81

Thus, although the operation of the “Secret Correspondence” was impeded by numerous financial and personal obstacles between 1624 and 1657, efforts were made to restore this important channel of information for Vienna as soon as logistical, financial, and infrastructural circumstances allowed.

Motivation(s), Opportunities, and Risks

If one looks at the members of the system based on the typology outlined above (see table), some conclusions can be drawn about the motivations and risks of being part of the “Secret Correspondence.” As early as the 1630s, the letter forwarders were aware of the importance of their activities and tried to take advantage of them, and they sometimes blackmailed the diplomats.82 Schmid seems initially to have been rather distrustful of the Ragusans, who at that time enjoyed the support of Count Althan, as the case of the so-called “interpreter trial” shows.83 Later, Schmid changed his mind on that matter.

As the letter forwarders were mainly merchants, their main task was to forward letters from both directions (i.e., between Vienna and Constantinople). In their case, therefore, the emphasis was on the task itself rather than the person who executed it. Therefore, letter-forwarding can be regarded as a more easily replaceable function than spying. Their activities were not without risk, however. The sources reveal that in some cases they put their lives at risk. This is also indicated by the fact that Johann Rudolf Puchheim wrote the name of one of the letter forwarders in cipher in his report.84 Greiffenklau in 164585 and, later, Schmid in his 1649 mission pointed out that, due to the Ottoman war against Venice, it seemed difficult to find people among the Ragusans for the task. They were generally on good terms with Venice but were Ottoman vassals as well.86 It was thus necessary to agree on the abovementioned punctual and regular payment.87 A similar example can be found during Schmid’s mission as ambassador when he authorized Baggio, the letter forwarder in Belgrade, to trade in Moravia on behalf of the emperor to ensure the smooth flow of correspondence.88 This means, therefore, that certain letter forwarders had enough bargaining power in matters affecting their own livelihoods, although Baggio could not benefit for long from the opportunity he had won. Nevertheless, even before his death, the Belgrade transporter complained about the lack of payment and obstructed the forwarding of letters.89 The death of the aforementioned courier Dietz illustrates how the loss of a single key person could paralyze the communication system since he was also the one who would have delivered the payment to the letter forwarders. In the mid-1650s, because of the risks, the Ragusan merchant colony in Belgrade forbade their members to participate in the “Secret Correspondence.” This offered Baggio’s successor (Giorgio Cortey) the possibility of bargaining again. In the end, they solved the problem by depositing the letters from Constantinople in a certain house, where Cortey could later pick them up.90 In 1655, the magistrate of Óbuda, who had also been involved in the forwarding of letters, was badly beaten and imprisoned. This was presumably done as a warning to the Ragusans in Buda. That is why the letter forwarder in Buda (Peter Vuichich/Vuičić) decided to move to Belgrade.91 Lazaro, the letter forwarder in Belgrade, was also arrested in 1656, for which he was later compensated by the Habsburg court, as was the magistrate of Óbuda.92

According to the available data (see table), almost all the Balkan letter forwarders were Ragusans, so in their case, there was no ethnic or religious diversity. It was certainly no coincidence that the imperial couriers who recruited Balkan letter forwarders in the 1650s (Natal and Michel de Paulo) were most probably also of Ragusan origin. They were presumably more able to contact the merchants. This also confirms that the Viennese court was aware of the importance of the “Secret Correspondence.”

However, the circumstances of the spies differed from those of the letter forwarders. In their case, not only was the function they played important. The identity of the person himself and his position (e.g., physician) also mattered. Dr. Grassi seemed to be useful for intelligence purposes in Buda (in the 1630s), Constantinople (in the late 1630s), and later the Middle East during the campaign of Murad IV against the Safavids.93 The other doctor, Andrea Scogardi, also reported from both Constantinople and Iaşi.94 In both cases, there is evidence that they provided intelligence not only for the Habsburgs but Ragusa and/or Venice also enlisted their services (Scogardi was also involved in political assassinations), which offers a clear indication of their significance.95 They were also primarily engaged in their profession, so as spies, they were news sources and were not involved in the forwarding of letters. They obviously put themselves at considerable risk by engaging in espionage activities, but as they were doctors, it was quite difficult to replace them, so they did not have to fear strong reprisals. As a group, the spies were more ethnically diverse. Grassi was Ragusan, while Scogardi had been born in Denmark. As for religion, the latter had protestant (Lutheran) roots, but he converted to Catholicism during his studies in Italy.96

The situation of people belonging to the third category was also different from that of ordinary letter forwarders. In their case, the identity of the person in question and his position again played a key role. Matteo Sturani, also of Ragusan origin, was recruited as a letter forwarder in Belgrade in 1624, and he wrote secret reports from Poland in the 1630s.97 After the death of Alexander Greiffenklau, he seemed a potential candidate for the post of resident ambassador, but because of his Ragusan origins and his age, he was eventually dismissed, and Simon Reniger was chosen instead.98 One of the reasons why Simon Reniger was considered more suitable for the post was that, unlike his predecessor, he had followed Schmid’s advice.99 Francesco Vlatchy/Vlatky also reported regularly, but later he proved more unreliable, since he did not receive his regular salary.100 Thus, despite his claims to the contrary, he does not seem to have taken on the risky task out of conviction, but rather for money.

Hans Caspar in Buda was not only useful for espionage, but he also forwarded letters on several occasions. For example, he sometimes copied and forwarded letters to Vienna sent by Reniger, which had been unsealed by the Pasha of Buda. Moreover, he regularly forwarded letters sent by Ottoman chiauses.101 Later, because of the events in Transylvania, Hans Caspar had to leave Buda and those lost access to the infrastructure that had previously enabled him to transmit the information he had acquired. This event proved to be a decisive factor in his later life.102 Nevertheless, Caspar was still seen as a potential spy, as evidenced by diplomatic reports, for example, when he tried to blackmail
Dr. Johann Friedrich Metzger, who had been sent to the camp of the Pasha of Buda (Gürcü Kenan), because the Pasha was ordered to move against György Rákóczi II.103 In this third and last group of the “Secret Correspondence,” therefore, both the functions of the individuals involved and the ethnic composition of the group seem to be mixed, but at the same time, the careers of these people can be traced.

Conclusions

Several important conclusions can be drawn from the present study. First, the Christian vassals facilitated the flow of information between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire. Ragusa, through its merchants, played an important role in the communication and intelligence system built up by the Habsburgs in the first half of the seventeenth century, known as the “Secret Correspondence.” However, when they had the opportunity, the Habsburgs also used Transylvanian couriers to transmit letters. Second, the functions of acquisition and transmission of information are clearly distinct, so the term “Secret Correspondence” should be understood as referring to the infrastructure itself. Within this system, reports written by spies were also transmitted. Third, it follows that the role of the letter forwarders was merely to transmit information (hence the function itself), and the actual identity of the person who did this was almost immaterial, whereas in the case of the spies, the identity of the individuals in question was a key factor. Fourth, it is also clear from the cases presented that, although the intelligence officers were sometimes able to bargain, the spies and letter forwarder spies were better embedded in the system because of their position and therefore were less likely to rotate. Fifth, the organization of the system shows that the experience gained over the decades was accumulated and put to good use. This is illustrated by the fact that Johann Rudolf Schmid tried to offer Simon Reniger, his successor, the best conditions for the transmission of letters. Thus, Reniger, unlike his predecessor Greiffenklau, regarded Schmid as his master, who introduced him to the mysteries of Habsburg–Ottoman diplomacy. Sixth, personal skills were essential to the organization and operation of the system, as diplomats could use their Italian language skills to liaise with transporters and spies. Likewise, couriers responsible for recruiting new transporters had to rely on their personal talents and language skills to a great extent, too. In sum, talent, professionalism, and a personal network of contacts were key factors in facilitating Habsburg–Ottoman diplomacy in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Table 1. Letter forwarders and Spies in the Service of the Habsburgs between 1624 and 1658

Resident ambassadors in Constantinople	Letter forwarders, their citizenship, and religion)	Letter forwarder spies, the ircitizenship and religion	Spies, the ircitizenship and religion	Citizenship (total)	Religion (total)
Sebastian Lustrier (1623–1629)	Buda Giovanni Pellegrini (1624–1627?), Ragusan, Catholic Tomaso Orosini (Oct 1628–Jan 1629), Ragusan, Catholic	Buda –	Buda Hans Caspar(?), Ottoman Empire, Islam (orig. Catholic)	Ragusa: 2 Ottoman Empire: 1	Catholic: 2(3) Islam: 1
	Belgrade –	Belgrade Matteo Sturani (1624–1626?), Ragusan, Catholic	Belgrade –	Ragusa: 1	Catholic: 1
	Sofia –	Sofia Girolammeo Grassi (1624–?) Mario Cavalcanti (17. Oktober 1628–10. September 1629?), both Ragusan and Catholic	Sofia –	Ragusa: 2	Catholic: 2
Johann Rudolf Schmid (1629–1643)	Buda (from 1634), Ragusan, Catholic	Buda Lupo Lupino (appr. pseudonym), Ragusan, Catholic A noble Turk (appr. Hans Caspar), Ottoman Empire, Islam	Buda –	Ragusa: 2 Ottoman Empire: 1	Catholic: 1 Islam: 1
	Belgrade –	Belgrade Francesco Vlatchy/Vlatky (1628–1632?), Michael Medani (1633?) Both Ragusan and Catholic	Belgrade –	Ragusa: 2	Catholic: 2
	Sofia Stefano Vukovich (Vuković), Ragusan and Catholic	Sofia –	Sofia –	Ragusa: 1	Catholic: 1
	Iaşi –	Iaşi –	Iaşi Dr. Hans Andersen Skovgaard/Andrea Scogardi (1641–1643?), orig. Denmark and Lutheran, later Catholic	Denmark: 1	orig. Lutheran, converted to Catholic faith: 1
	Persia –	Persia –	Persia Dr. Francesco Crasso/Grassi (1637–1638), Ragusan, Catholic	Ragusa: 1	Catholic: 1
	Constantinople –	Constantinople –	Constantinople Dr. Francesco Crasso/Grassi (1640–1642), Ragusan, Catholic Zülfikâr Ağa (1629–1643), Ottoman Empire, Islam	Ragusa: 1 Ottoman Empire: 1	Catholic: 1 unknown
Alexander Greiffenklau (1643–1648)	Buda Peter Vuichich (Vuičić) (ab 1646?), Ragusan, Catholic	Buda –	Buda Hans Caspar, Ottoman Empire, Islam	Ragusa: 1 Ottoman Empire:1	Catholic: 1 Islam: 1
	Belgrade A person who sent some letters back for fear in 1645	Belgrade –	Belgrade –	Ragusa: 1	Catholic(?): 1
	Sofia –	Sofia –	Sofia –	–	–
	Constantinople	Constantinople	Constantinople Dr. Johann Hans Andersen Skovgaard/Giovanni Andrea Scogardi (1644–1645), orig. Denmark and Lutheran, later Catholic Zülfikâr Ağa (1643–1647), Ottoman Empire, Islam	Denmark: 1 Ottoman Empire: 1	orig. Lutheran, converted to Catholic faith: 1 Islam: 1
Simon Reniger (1649–1665) between 1649 and 1658	Buda Peter Vuichich (Vuičić) (1649–1655) Marco Vuichich (Vuičić) appr. brother of Peter (1655) Elias Luschick (Lušič) (1656?), all of them Ragusan and Catholic	Buda Hans Caspar, Judge of Óbuda (János Baán?), Ottoman Empire, unknown	Buda –	Ragusa: 3 Ottoman Empire: 1	Catholic(?): 3 –
	Belgrade Bagio di Simme/Drasili(?) (1649–1653) Giorgio Lamberto di Corti/Cortey/Cortrai (1653–1655) Lazaro Ginreta (1655–1657?), all of them Ragusan and Catholic	Belgrade –	Belgrade –	Ragusa: 3	Catholic: 3
	Sofia unknown	Sofia	Sofia	Ragusa(?): 1	Catholic(?): 1
	Constantinople	Constantinople	Constantinople Dr. Johann Andersen Skovgaard / Giovanni Andrea Scogardi (1653–1656), orig. Denmark and Lutheran, later Catholic Nikusios Panaiotes (Panajoti) (1649–1665), Ottoman Empire, Orthodox Zülfikâr Ağa (1649–1657), Ottoman Empire, Islam	Denmark: 1 Ottoman Empire: 2	orig. Lutheran, converted to Catholic faith: 1 Orthodox: 1 Islam: 1

Archival Sources

ELTE Egyetemi Könyvtár és Levéltár [ELTE University Library and Archives] (ELTE EKL)

G4 (Kuefstain, Acta et epistolae)

Tomus (Tom.) IV, V.

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA)

Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv (HHStA)

Staatenabteilungen

Türkei I. Kt. 109, 110, 112, 113, 124, 126

Polen I. Kt. 57.

Kriegsarchiv (KA)

Protokolle des Wiener Hofkriegsrates (HKR Prot.) Bd. 304, 313.

Alte Feldakten (AFA) Kt.

Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv (FHKA)

Hoffinanz Ungarn (HFU) Kt. 339.

Sammlungen und Selekte (SUS)

Alte Postakten (APA) Kt. 6.

Reichsakten (RA) Kt. 302 (Fasz. 185A)

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Szabados, János. “A 17. századi Habsburg-hírszerzés ‘gyöngyszeme’ – Hans Caspar budai titkos levelező (1646–1659) munkássága: Vázlat egy nagyobb összefoglaláshoz” [The ‘gem’ of seventeenth-century Habsburg intelligence – the work of Hans Caspar, the secret correspondent of Buda (1646–1659): Outline for a longer summary]. Aetas 31, no. 3 (2016): 77–92.

Szabados, János. Die Karriere des deutschen Renegaten Hans Caspar in Ofen (1627–1660) im politischen und kulturellen Kontext. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2023.

Szabados, János. “Habsburg–Ottoman Communication in the Mid-17th Century – The Death of Imperial Courier Johann Dietz. A Case Study.” The Journal of Ottoman Studies 44, no. 2 (2019): 119–40.

Szabados, János. “A Rákócziak Erdélye egy budai renegát tolmács és kém (Hans Caspar) tevékenységének tükrében (1630–1660)” [Transylvania under the Rákóczis from the perspective of the activities of a renegade interpreter and spy of buda, Hans Caspar (1630–1660)]. Századok 155, no. 4 (2021): 783–810.

Szabados, János. “The Habsburg and Transylvanian Aims related to the Campaign of the Ottomans against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1634).” Prace Historyczne 148, no. 4 (2021): 731–43.

Szabados, János. “‘...egyiket megsértvén, mástul semmit sem reménlhetvén, egyebet az veszedelemnél magára nem várhatna.’ II. Rákóczi György 1657–1658. évi politikája, avagy a fejedelmi cím és Jenő elvesztéséhez vezető út bemutatása a Habsburg Monarchia és a Magyar Királyság szemszögéből I–II” [“offending one, and hoping for nothing from the other, he could expect nothing but disaster.” The politics of György Rákóczi II in 1657–1658: The path leading to the loss of the title of prince and Jenő delineated from the perspective of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Hungary]. Hadtörténelmi Közlemények 135, no. 2 and 3 (2022): 259–89, 571–94.

Takáts, Sándor. “Kalauzok és kémek a török világban” [Guides and spies in the Ottoman World]. In Rajzok a török világból [Sketches from the Ottoman world], vol. 2, edited by Sándor Takáts, 133–212. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1915.

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Várkonyi, Gábor. “Wesselényi Ferenc nádorrá választása” [Election of Ferenc Wesselényi as palatine]. In Szerencsének elegyes forgása: II. Rákóczi György és kora [Mixed rotation of fortune: George Rákóczi II and his era], edited by Gábor Kármán, and András Péter Szabó, 301–23. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2009.

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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

In this article, I present a case study of a special form of diplomatic encounter that took place as secret negotiations between the resident ambassadors of France, England, Holland, and Venice and the Transylvanian envoys in Constantinople in 1625–1626 about a prospective alliance between Prince Gábor Bethlen and the anti-Habsburg powers during the Danish phase of the Thirty Years’ War. My analysis of this special form of negotiation offers a comprehensive overview of the practices deriving from the most characteristic circumstances and setbacks of diplomatic activity in Constantinople, i.e., what solutions (if any) were found to resolve problems of precedence, information brokerage, poor economic conditions, and bribery and corruption. I address, furthermore, the private interests of the participating Transylvanian diplomats and consider the extent to which these interests corresponded to the interests of their sending polity and especially of Gábor Bethlen. My discussion sheds light on the ways in which, in general, everyday challenges and networks of relations in Constantinople influenced the diplomacy of small states in the Ottoman orbit, specifically Transylvania in this case, when entering into an alliance with major powers outside the bonds of their Ottoman tributary status.

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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