The Town of Gölnicbánya in the Árpád Era

Péter Galambosi
Research Centre for the Humanities
galambosi.peter@abtk.hu

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 3  (2022):545–569 DOI 10.38145/2022.3.545

In this article, I describe the emergence and early development of Gölnicbánya (today Gelnica, Slovakia) from a settlement-historical and historical-geographical approach, mainly based on the diploma material of the Árpád and the early Angevin Eras concerning the settlement and its region. I examine the origin of the town in the context of the northern expansion of the royal forest-estate of Torna and the economical upgrading of Szepes, which dates to the beginning of the thirteenth century. I show how Gölnicbánya became the primary center of the county’s southern part in the second half of the thirteenth century thanks to mining and holding markets. I offer a detailed analysis of the provisions of the privilege charter from 1287, emphasizing that the border description covered a larger area far beyond the original extent of the settlement. I contend that although the charter refers the donations of two predecessor kings, the points set new provisions. Finally, I show how the economic importance of Gölnicbánya became apparent during the internal wars following the extinction of the Árpád dynasty and the consolidation that was underway in the early fourteenth century.

Keywords: Settlement history, urban history, historical geography, regional social history, economic history.

The formation and early history of Gölnicbánya (today Gelnica, Slovakia) is a critical point in Hungarian urban historical research on the Middle Ages. The early history of the settlement is obscure, but at the end of the thirteenth century, the town appears as an important regional economical center. Gölnicbánya was mentioned for the first time in 1278, when Ladislaus IV (also known as Ladislas the Cuman), laid down the customs tariffs for the town’s markets.1 In 1280, the king offered 100 marks a year from the income of the Gölnicbánya silver mine to the papal legate Philipp, Bishop of Fermo, because he had tried to impede the convocation of the synod of Buda.2 The town obtained its first known privilege charter in 1287, which refers to the privileges donated by Béla IV and Stephen V. However, no mention of these donations is found in other sources.3 A few decades later, these privileges became an example, as in 1317 Charles I granted the people of Zsidópataka the freedoms that the citizens of Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia) and Gölnicbánya had already been enjoying.4

From this short overview, it is clear that the development of Gölnicbánya was based on mining and holding markets. Moreover, both had reached and maintained a significant level of advancement through the course of the decades before the town was mentioned in the sources. The rise of Gölnicbánya can be described in detail through the tried and tested methods of the Hungarian settlement-historical and historical-geographical research. However, it is not adequate solely to gather the sources concerning Gölnicbánya. We must also consider the wider context in which the town became increasingly important, including the surrounding lands and settlements.5

The Beginnings

The source of the Gölnic (Hnilec) River, from which the town took its name, lies on the eastern side of Low Tatras at the foot of Mount King (Kráľova hoľa, 1946m). The river flows southeastwards through the narrow valleys in the Slovak Ore Mountains. It turns to the northeast between Svedlér (today Švedlár, Slovakia) and Remete (today Mníšek nad Hnilcom, Slovakia) and then takes the Szomolnok (Smolník) Stream from the right, finally joining the Hernád River at Szentmargit (today Margecany, Slovakia). The Slavonic name of the river, which means rotten water, took its place in the Hungarian language through German transmission. According to a view widespread among linguists, the term came into Hungarian at the latest at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the g turned into an h in the Slavonic at that time.6 According to a popular view based on this observation, Gölnicbánya was founded by German settlers in the second half of the twelfth century. Gusztáv Heckenast questioned this contention and drew attention to the fact that the archaic Slavonic forms appear in the written sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the surrounding region. Based on this, he argued that the town had been founded only after the 1241–1242 Mongol invasion.7 Although he emphasized correctly the unreliability of the linguistic-based chronology, he could not cite any data about the river or the town. If one examines all the available sources and, in particular, the border descriptions, however, it is clear that the name of the river already appeared with a g at its first contemporary mention (1255), and this form was in use in the period under discussion.8

It is worth noting that Hungarian vernacular geographical names often appear in the sources from the area surrounding the town at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A source from 1282 mentions the “Hársmező” (Linden Meadow) in the forests that belonged to Gölnicbánya. The “Ökör-hegy” (Mount Bullock) and the “Szénkő” (Coal Stone) are also mentioned in the border description of the 1287 privilege charter. The place “Jakóréte” (Meadow of Jacob) is mentioned in 1325, also on the town’s periphery.9 These data reveal that a significant Hungarian-speaking population lived in the region that was able to preserve its cultural identity. This is also proven by the settlement’s name, in which the Hungarian word “bánya” (mine) appeared even in the earliest sources.10

Based on these data, the early history of Gölnicbánya cannot be explored through a comparison of the linguistic concepts regarding the etymology of the river’s name and the historical conclusions based on the written sources. Due to the presence of the archaic Slavonic forms in the toponymy of the region, no time limits can be determined. The linguistic-ethnical diversity and the use of vernacular names, seen in sources from the late thirteenth century, prove that the various ethnic groups had been living together for a long time. From my point of view, given the lack of direct data, the context of public history offers the most reliable framework within which to describe the emergence of Gölnicbánya.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Gölnic region was annexed by the royal forest estate of Torna. This is mentioned in the 1243 privilege charter of Olaszi (today Spišské Vlachy, Slovakia), which notes that the village was founded by German and (as the name of the settlement shows) Valloon royal mining people resettled from Torna. According to the source, the villagers’ taxes were specified by Prince Coloman, the younger brother of Béla IV, who had held dominion over Szepes from the 1210s to 1226, when he became the duke of Slavonia.11 Shifting economic trends prompted the mining people to be resettled. At the turn of twelfth and thirteenth centuries, iron mining ceased in Galyaság and the Bódva region. The exploitation of the Slovak Ore Mountains then began in the Gömör and Szepes regions.12 Two important conclusions can be drawn from the mention of Coloman. First, the development of the mining region may have prospered under the governance of Coloman and his escort. Second, his presence in Szepes gives the temporal framework of these economic and social tendencies. Olaszi’s location proves that the Torna forest estate expanded northwards at least to the Hernád River, which means that the villages of the Gölnic region were also founded by the royal mining people. This in turn implies that the beginnings of Gölnicbánya date back to the first third of the thirteenth century, when the Germans settled in lands occupied by indigenous Slavonic groups.

The German-speaking population of medieval Szepes was not homogenous.13 After the Mongol invasion, Saxon settlers came to the region, and they were granted collective privileges by Stephen V in 1271. Their privilege charter was confirmed by Charles I in 1317, who supplemented the rewritten text with a list of the settlements that formed the Saxon community. These villages all came into existence north of the Hernád River. Alcnó is the only settlement that was founded on the right bank of the river, however it was an external part of Olaszi. The Hernád River determined the settlement system of Szepes and clearly separated the German-speaking groups of the land, as the 1299 record about the foundation of the Carthusian monastery of Létán Hill (Klástorisko, 760m) proves. According to the source, the mountain, which rises on the right bank of the river, was located along the border of the Saxon province (“situm in terminis nostre provincie”).14 This makes clear that the privileged Saxons didn’t expand southwards from the Hernád River. These tendencies can be explained by the aftermath of the Mongol invasion. The villages in the Hernád basin were exposed to the destructive invading forces, while the settlements of the Gölnic region were defended by the mountains, which were difficult to cross, so the mining people could survive the invasion without significant losses.15 As a consequence of the different structures of their settlements, the Gründers of the Gölnic region and the Zipsers of Szepes spoke different dialects, and the differences between these two dialects still constitute a cultural difference between these two groups today.16

While the kingdom was being rebuilt in the wake of the Mongol invasion, Béla IV reorganized the royal forest estates in Northern Hungary, which led to the creation of new counties. It is worth noting that the king dealt directly with this region in May and June 1243, as he released three charters arranged for the surrounding territories. On May 31, the privilege charter of Olaszi was released. On June 2, the king donated the royal estate of Pelsőc (today Plešivec, Slovakia). Finally, on June 7, he gave collective privileges to the lancers of Szepes.17 These tendencies show that the county system of Szepes was also formed after the Mongol invasion, from the northern parts of the Torna forest estate and the lands along the banks of the Poprad and Hernád Rivers, which were referred to as the Szepes Forest (Silva Zepus) by Anonymus, who was Béla III’s notary.18

After these territorial reorganizations, the estate of Pelsőc was attached to Gömör County. According to the 1243 charter, the borders started from the mouth of the Szomolnok Stream and then followed the stream to its source. The last section extended from the source of the Gölnic River to the mouth of the Szomolnok Stream.19 The territories east of the Szomolnok belonged to the premonstratensian provostry of Jászó (today Jasov, Slovakia). As the 1255 privilege charter of the monastery reveals, the border of its properties ran northwards from the Bódva River to the source of the Szomolnok Stream and then continued along the stream to the Gölnic River, which separated the ecclesiastical estate from parts of Szepes, at last in the tributary streams of Gölnic southeastwards among the mountains to the Ida River.20 Thus, the original territory of Gölnicbánya did not extend farther than the Galmus Mountains north of the river and the land between the Hernád River and the Gölnic River east of the town.

The Early Privileges

Although this territory wasn’t as large as the borders described in the 1287 charter, the town’s agglomeration already covered the southern part of the county, south of the Hernád River. Thanks to this, the importance of Gölnicbánya rose in the administrative system that emerged immediately after the Mongol invasion. Since Béla IV had dealt directly with this region in May and June 1243, the first privilege charter might also have been released at this time to support the development of the mining region attached to Szepes County.21

It is more difficult to determine the topicality of the privileges given by Stephen V. After Béla and his son had divided the kingdom in the 1260s, Szepes belonged to the part under Béla’s rule, but Stephen was also interested in this region, as indicated by many sources.22 In 1265, he rewrote and confirmed the privilege charter of Olaszi as iunior rex. Later, in 1271, acting as the king of Hungary, Stephen gave collective privileges to the Saxons of Szepes.23 Unfortunately, his donation politics do not give any insight into when he turned his eyes to the Gölnic region.24

The content of these privileges is unknown, but the sources from the late thirteenth century contain clear indications of the direction of the town’s economic development. In the 1270s and 1280s, Gölnicbánya appeared as a mining town and a commercial center with high incomes, which confirms that these sectors were supported by the original privileges.

According to the tradition that was registered in the 1487 statutes of the seven mining towns of Upper Hungary, Gölnicbánya was the oldest mining town. Although this category of settlement became clearly distinct only in the Angevin Era, they had started developing in the middle of thirteenth century.25 The Mongol conquest had broken the eastern economic relations of Hungary, and in the following decades, the Hungarian Kingdom gradually integrated into the economical and mercantile system of the West. Thanks to this, Hungarian mining, especially silver mining, reached a significant level of development, which is clearly shown by the fact that a quarter of the silver mined in Europe came from the Hungarian mines at the end of the thirteenth century.26 Gölnicbánya and the surrounding region were the center of this development, as is clearly shown by the offering of Ladislaus IV in 1280 to give 100 marks a year from the income of the Gölnicbánya silver mine to the papal legate. The 1278 customs tariffs also offer an indication of the mining development, as it determined in detail the value of gold, silver, lead, iron, and the timber used in the mining process.

It is worth noting that the 1278 ordinance was based on the 1255 customs tariffs of Buda, and the king just tailored several points to the local needs. The regulations show diversity not only in the scale of products but also in the measurement units in use. Both local products, for example metals, timber and fish, and imported goods, for example cloths, can be found in the regulations. Although the measurement units were arranged to the concrete products, most of the items were measured in wagons. The text mentions the great wagon named quintal (“de curro magno… quod vulgo masa dicitur”), which was the typical transport vehicle for long-distance trade in the thirteenth century.27 This makes clear that the town’s markets had not only a local but also a regional importance. The first known marketplace of Szepes was Szombathely (today Spíšská Sobota, Slovakia), which appeared under this name (Forum Sabati) in 1256, but it had lost its importance to Késmárk (today Kežmarok, Slovakia) by the late 1260s, and the settlement’s name “Szentgyörgyhegy” (Mount St. George) became permanent. Késmárk obtained customs-free status on its markets in 1269, which guaranteed the town’s leading role in the economy. The seat of the ten-lancers, Szentlászló (today Spišský Štvrtok, Slovakia), appeared as Csütörtökhely (Quintum Forum) for the first time in 1292, which shows that the market acquired greater importance in the late thirteenth century. Other markets in Szepes were only mentioned first in sources from the fourteenth century, which means, that there were two important economic centers in the county in the middle of the thirteenth century: Késmárk in the northern parts and Gölnicbánya to the south of the Hernád River.28

The royal privilege charters released to settlements used to allow the election of the mayor and the parish priest. The council of Gölnicbánya first appeared in the 1287 privilege charter, which specifies that the confirmation of donations was requested by the mayor and the jurors, although the text does not give their names. The first mention of the town’s parish priest can be found in the 1286 verdict of Lodomer, Archbishop of Esztergom, which settled the conflict between Provost Jacob and the canons. According to the source, the provost had to pay one mark in the presence of Gölnicbánya’s parish priest and the Cistercian Abbot of Savnik (today Spišský Štiavnik, Slovakia). In 1329, the parish priest of the town appeared as the general vicar of the provost.29

The economic importance of Gölnicbánya was clear in the civil war of the 1270s. The ispán of Szepes, Roland son of Mark, rose up against Ladislaus IV in the autumn of 1274. He took hold of royal goods and harassed the people of the land. The king and his ispán were reconciled by Saint Kinga of Poland (the daughter of Béla IV of Hungary), and the king kept Roland in his favor. In 1277, Roland revolted again and joined the uprising of the Geregye kindred, who built an oligarchic lordship in the Transztisza region. After the fall of the Geregyes, the king sent his veteran warlords, Finta of the Aba kindred and George of the Baksa kindred, against Roland, and in the battle, which took place at an unknown site, the rebel count fell. According to the 1285 donation charter of George, in which his merits are listed, Roland had occupied Szepes with the town of Gölnicbánya (“unacum Gylnuchbana”).30 It seems clear that Roland invaded the town to ensure that he would be able to use the town’s economic power, its incomes from mining, and its markets to put up long-term resistance. Although other sources make no mention of the occupation of Gölnicbánya, it is almost certain that the revolt led by Roland somewhat hampered the town’s development. The rebel count probably made an attempt to found his own oligarchic territorial lordship, and the oligarchs of the age usually considered the towns as resources and tried to draw profit from them.31 It is certainly no coincidence that Ladislaus IV arranged the customs tariffs in 1278 just after the revolt in order to preclude cheating and abuses (“volentes amputare omnem calumpniam et sopire materiam iurgiorum in tributis exigendis sive persolvendis”).32 Although the source makes no mention of Roland, he probably monopolized the incomes from the customs.

In 1282, the king donated an uninhabited forest between Gölnicbánya and the Hernád River (“silvam nostram desertam et inhabitabilem a Gulnychbana incipiens usque ad Harnad”) to a citizen of the town named Jekel, who gave his name to the village Jekelfalva (today Jaklovce, Slovakia). The border description of the estate mentions Korompa (today Krompachy, Slovakia) on the right bank of the river and the silver mine of Svedlér to the west of the Szomolnok Stream, which also became a settlement in the fourteenth century.33 In 1328, the villages Szentantal and Szentmargit appeared in the same territory.34 This suggests that some settlements came into existence spontaneously, but other villages were founded consciously through royal donations. Jekel got his estate with noble rights, which made him be able to settle people on his territory and have legal authority over them. Gölnicbánya thus lost territories and, more importantly, natural and human resources.

The 1287 Privilege Charter

The oldest surviving privilege charter of Gölnicbánya was issued in 1287 by Ladislaus IV. According to the preamble, the king confirmed the privileges donated by Béla IV and Stephen V, including the estates, territories, the gold, silver and iron mines, the waters and forests, and all incomes from these resources at the request of the mayor, the jurors, and the citizens. Although the text clearly refers to the donations of two predecessor kings, the charter details only three provisions:

(1) In all litigations between the citizens and those who lived within the borders of the settlement the town was given exclusive jurisdiction. According to János Bárdossy, who commented on the source at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the privileges of the town were significantly damaged under the revolt led by ispán Roland, which necessitated the restoration of the status of the community. Bárdossy cited the arenga of the 1287 charter, according to which the king sought to ease the situation of his subjects, who suffered from harassment and oppression.35 In contrast with Bárdossy’s thesis, the 1278 customs tariffs clearly shows that the king has already arranged the case of the settlement after the revolt. Moreover, the 1280 offering to the papal legate regarding the incomes from the town’s silver mine proves that the settlement had again embarked down the path towards development. The preamble of the 1287 charter also proves that the town’s government was working, as it specifies that the confirmation was requested by the mayor, the jurors, and the citizens.

(2) The villages that emerged within the borders of the town were prohibited from holding markets, and their inhabitants were obligated to trade at the markets in Gölnicbánya. In this provision, we find an early form of the ban-mile right (Bannmeilenrecht), which was borrowed from the German legal system. This institution ensured the monopoly of a market within a determined territory, in its advanced form usually one mile, but sometimes the monopoly concerned only a few products. In this case, the prohibition concerned the territory of Gölnicbánya in order to hamper the economic and the political independence of the villages in the town’s periphery, and in this way to grant raw material and foodstuffs for the settlement.36

(3) The king ensured the citizens of Gölnicbánya the right to work undisturbed within the borders of the town, including the fishermen on the rivers and the burners and lumberjacks in the forests. Because proper silviculture was indispensable to mining, the privileges of the mining towns usually determined the rights of citizens to logging from a territorial perspective, usually within the borders of each settlement, as in the case of Gölnicbánya.37

Interestingly, the 1287 privilege charter does not touch on some questions that usually appear in the royal charters released to mining towns or dealing with mining activity.38 The provisions don’t concern mining, apart from the formal preamble, which mentions the gold, silver, and iron mines of the town. The fact that Gölnicbánya had high incomes from mining at the end of the thirteenth century indicates that the most important questions had been arranged in the previous decades, for example the right to search for ore and metal. It is also worth noting that the 1287 charter doesn’t detail the situation of the local market. Although its monopoly was ensured, the charter does not indicate its type and date. In my opinion, the arrangement of these questions was in no way urgent or pressing in 1287, because the privilege charter of Ladislaus IV essentially set new provisions necessitated by the developments of the previous decades, even if it refers to the donations of two predecessor kings. The common denominator of these provisions is the fact that they prevail within the borders of the town. Although the territorial aspect is not surprising in the case of a settlement, it is worth analyzing the border description in detail.

According to the 1287 charter, the border of Gölnicbánya started from the road to Dryn (“a via Dryn”) and then ran to the house of hermits (“ad domum heremite”) and Ökör Mountain (“ad montem bovum, qui Wkurhegh vulgariter nuncupatur”), where it turned towards the source of the Szomolnok Stream (“ad caput cuiusdam fluvii Smolnyk nominati”). It then ran to the houses where the iron that had been mined was melted and purified (“ad domos seu aedifica, in quibus ferrum flari et purgari consuevit”), from where it turned towards the source of the Kallós Stream (“ad caput cuiusdam alterius fluvii Valkensesyn nominati”), arriving at last at Szénkő Mountain, a place where customs were taken (“ad montem Scynkw nuncupatum, usque ad illum locum, ubi tributum exigi consuevit”).39 The borders cover almost the full catchment of the Gölnic River, except the territory in its eastern part, which was taken from the town and given to Jekel in 1282. This means that Gölnicbánya got hold of the southern part of Szepes County, to the south of the Hernád River. It is worth noting that the border description of the 1287 charter incorporates the territories in the western and eastern neighborhoods of the Szomolnok Stream that belonged to the estate of Pelsőc in 1243 and to the Premonstratensian provostry of Jászó in 1255. Two years later, in 1289, Wygandus, provost of Jászó, protested at the chapter of Szepes, because the king had attached a large forest estate at the Gölnic River from his monastery to Gölnicbánya (“super eo, quod serenissimus dominus noster rex Ladislaus de possessione sui monasterii porcionem possessionariam in magna quantitate iuxta fluvium Gylniych existentem, ad montana sue nove civitatis Gylniychbanya abstulisset”), but he hadn’t paid the promised compensation. The litigation ended in 1342, when the provostry came to an agreement with the governments of Gölnicbánya and Szomolnokbánya (today Smolník, Slovakia), which became independent during the first half of the fourteenth century. This meant that the citizens were allowed to cut half of the monastery’s forests between the Gölnic and Bódva Rivers. In return, they had to pay one unit of white cloth, but the territory still remained in the property of Jászó.40

The westernmost point of the border is the Szénkő (Tri kopce, 1056m), which is found in the northeastern ranges of the Ore Mountains. An important long-distance trade route ran under the mountain, which came to Szepes from Gömör County and led to Poland following the Poprad River.41 Due to its location, it seems doubtful that the market customs were paid at the Szénkő, because only those merchants could have been called to account here who came to or left the town from or to the west. In the second half of the thirteenth century, Gölnicbánya began to play a more important economic role in the region, but the sources mainly show the importance of the southern, northern, and eastern relationships. A border description from 1255 mentions the road to Jászó, which ran on the left bank of the Gölnic River, then turned southwards at Remete and followed the Szomolnok Stream. The 1284 border description of Kolcsó (today Klčov, Slovakia), a village in the eastern neighborhood of Lőcse (today Levoča, Slovakia), mentions the road, that came from Gölnicbánya. Some border descriptions from 1318, 1321, and 1325 mention the roads connecting Gölnicbánya with Szinye (today Svinia, Slovakia) and Újfalu (today Chminianska Nová Ves, Slovakia), villages in the neighborhood of Eperjes (today Prešov, Slovakia).42 The lack of the western relations could be explained simply by the fact that the southern part of the county belonged to the town. The intensity of the eastern relations is also clear, because the main trade route in the region followed the Hernád River and brought the rise of several settlements, for example Kassa in the second half of the thirteenth century.43 Due to its peripheral location, the merchants usually didn’t go around Szénkő, because they usually chose the roads that led to the important markets. The markets of Gömör and Abaúj counties were accessible by the southern and eastern roads, and the crossing points on the Hernád River provided access to the other markets of Szepes. Considering that the road under the Szénkő led to Krakow, I think that some kind of road toll was taken here, which is not mentioned in other sources.44

During the analysis of the border description, it is worth touching on the manuscript tradition of the 1287 privilege charter. The original copies of the 1287 charter and its confirmations from 1318 and 1327 by Charles I are lost. In 1359, Louis I rewrote and confirmed his father’s 1327 charter, which contained the text of the 1287 privilege charter and its 1318 confirmation, but this charter is also lost. Its text was rewritten by the chapter of Szepes in 1699, which has survived in six copies. In 1637, the chapter of Szepes rewrote the text of the 1327 charter at the order of Ferdinand III, which was confirmed by the king in the same year. The original copy of this variant is also lost, but its text is known from the 1813 rewriting by Francis I. An original charter issued by Louis I from 1367 epitomizes the provisions of the 1287 privilege charter, but its preamble makes clear that the excerpt was made of a charter issued by Louis I, probably the 1359 charter, which contained not only the original 1287 charter but also its confirmations.45 A comparison of the known variants reveals an interesting contradiction at the beginning of the border description. The sources that copy the 1699 rewriting of the 1359 charter indicate that the border description was composed using the report of a comes (“prout idem comes nobis retulerat”). However, the borders were reported by the citizens according to the 1367 extract (“prout iidem cives eidem domino Ladislao regi retulissent”), and this form is also found in the 1813 copy, which rewrote the 1637 confirmation of the 1327 charter (“prout iidem cives nobis retulerunt”). The modern source publications by Ľubomír Juck and Tibor Almási publish the text in the latter way, and Iván Borsa also published the border description in this form, following the 1367 extract.46

A comparison of the surviving copies does not give a clear answer to the question, because the variants abound in misspellings and hiatuses. However, the historical geographical analysis clearly proves that the border description of the 1287 privilege charter covers territories that had belonged to other estates in the previous decades. Thus, the citizens couldn’t refer to these territories as their own property. As the 1287 protest made by the provost of Jászó reveals, Ladislaus IV promised compensation for the forests of the monastery. Thus, it is clear that the extension of the borders was initiated by the king to ensure the development of Gölnicbánya with more raw materials.47 Given this, I am concerned that the variants mentioning the comes in the beginning of the border description stand closer to the truth, and in the usual way, the king may have delegated a homo regius to designate the borders of the settlement. The pronoun “idem” suggests that he had been mentioned in the text before, but that part could have been lost the same way, as most of the known variants do not contain the 1287 date of the charter. The mention of the citizens in the 1367 extract and in the confirmations issued by the Habsburg rulers might have been the results of a mistake in the reading of the text.

Outlook: Gölnicbánya at the Beginning of the Fourteenth Century

As distinct from modern source publications, Bárdossy published the text based on the 1699 rewriting. He thought that the comes mentioned in the beginning of the border description was Andrew, son of Polanus mine judge (iudex montanus) of Gölnicbánya.48 Andrew was one of the ancestors of the Berzeviczy family, one of the most important noble families in Szepes since the beginning of the thirteenth century. The first estates of the clan lay at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. Later, the family got donations in the forests between the Spiš Magura and the Dunajec River, and they started collecting estates in Sáros County in the thirteenth century.49 One of them, Kakas, son of Rikalf, appears as mine judge of Szomolnokbánya in 1327, and Bárdossy assumed from this data that the family might already have held this position in Gölnicbánya at the end of the thirteenth century. In the previous decades, the Slovak secondary literature assumed the origins of the mine judge’s office of Szomolnokbánya may have led back to the end of the thirteenth century and that Rikalf had it when the office still worked in Gölnicbánya.50 However, this interpretation is inconsistent with the sources, because the members of the family didn’t hold any political offices in the Árpád Era. Although most of the clan stood with Wenceslaus III after the extinction of the Árpád line, Kakas pledged himself to Charles I. After the fall of the Aba kindred in 1311–1312, the king entrusted the castle of Szepes to Kakas, who later became court judge (curialis comes) in the county and appeared as the mine judge of Szomolnokbánya under the regional lordship of the Druget family.51 The chronology based on the sources clearly shows that Kakas got supervision over mining at this time, when his political career reached its high point. The sources concerning the town and its surroundings don’t let one assume that the office of the mine judge emerged in Gölnicbánya.

After the adherents of Charles I had expelled the armies of Wenceslaus from Szepes in the autumn 1304, the region fell under the control of Amadé of the Aba kindred, the most powerful landlord of northeastern Hungary at the time. The German citizens of Kassa descended upon the escort of Amadé and murdered the warlord in the September of 1311, and the king forced his widow and sons to give the castles, settlements, and all natural and material resources to the crown. In the third point of the Treaty of Kassa they undertook to give Szepes and the towns Gölnicbánya and Kassa, with all of their thirtieths, customs, taxes, and other incomes, back to the king (“Scepus, Gylnuch et Cassa cum universis tricesimus, tributis, censibus et quibusvis obvencionibus… resignamus domino nostro regi”).52 Charles I realized the political importance of the towns, and he supported their economic development from the beginning of his reign in order to create a stable home front during his fights against the oligarchs. The success and social popularity of this politics are proven by the Georgenberger Chronik, as it tells that Louis I and his father cared for the towns and improved their lots.53 In the case of Gölnicbánya, the 1318, 1327, and 1359 confirmations of the 1287 privilege charter clearly prove that the town enjoyed the support of the Angevin kings. In 1317, Charles I granted the people of Zsidópataka the freedoms that the citizens of Kassa and Gölnicbánya had already been enjoying, which also shows the importance of the town.54

The confirmation of the privileges was requested by Mayor Perenger in 1318 and then by notary Kolin in 1327. The 1330 last will of William Druget, ispán of Szepes, indicates that Mayor Perenger was hanged for his crimes by order of the ispán, but William left 30 marks to the town (25 for the homicide and 5 for masses) for the sake of his conscience.55 It is worth noting that William became the ispán of Szepes in the summer 1327, and it was notary Kolin, who asked the king for the confirmation in October of that year. These circumstances imply that William executed the mayor just after he had become the lord of region, then the notary, who temporarily took over the government of the town, turned to the king to defend the town’s rights before the ispán could have infringed on them. The mayor’s name and the notary’s name suggest that Gölnicbánya was ruled by the German-speaking elite.

The appearance of Kolin is very valuable, because the first written document of the town’s government survived only from 1395, but the mention of the notary proves that there was already some urban literacy in Gölnicbánya in the early fourteenth century. Although the imprint of the medieval seal of Gölnicbánya is known only from 1497, the two-barred cross depicted in the coat of arms refers to the thirteenth-century origin of the seal.56

Thanks to the development which took place during these decades, new settlements came into existence on the periphery of the town, but the villages, which emerged spontaneously, couldn’t secede from the mother town. This was only possible through direct foundation or royal support. According to a 1368 charter issued by Louis I, which is known only in extract, along with the abovementioned Korompa, Jekelfalva, Szentmargit, and Svedlér, other villages, namely Abucuk, Zakárfalva (today Žakarovce, Slovakia), Folkmár (today Veľký Folkmar, Slovakia), Kojsfalva (today Kojšov, Slovakia), Prakfalva (today Prakovce, Slovakia), and Kuncfalva also emerged in the territory of Gölnicbánya. With the exception of Kuncfalva, these settlements don’t appear in the sources from the previous decades, which proves their dependent status and also indicates that they came into existence in the first half of the fourteenth century.57 Kuncfalva was founded in 1326, when Thomas castellan of Szepes arrented an estate to Kunc from Szalók to settle it.58 The village Wagendrüssel (today Nálepkovo, Slovakia) emerged in the same way, as its territory was donated to a nobleman, count Batiz, in 1290, though he sold the village to a citizen of Gölnicbánya named Pecoldus in 1315.59 Szomolnokbánya became independent through royal support. The early settlement emerged on the estate of the Premonstratensian provostry of Jászó, but the territory was attached to Gölnicbánya in 1287. In 1327, the king granted the privileges of Selmecbánya (today Baská Štiavnica, Slovakia) to the town and founded a mint in the settlement. According to a source from 1338, almost the whole northeastern part of the kingdom was under the authority of the mint of Szomolnokbánya, including Szepes, Abaúj, Sáros, Zemplén, Ung, Gömör, Borsod, and Heves Counties. Some have even suggested that the beginnings of the mint may have led back to Gölnicbánya, but the sources don’t offer any convincing evidence in support of this theory.60

Conclusions

Over the course of a century in the late Árpád Era, Gölnicbánya became an important mining town and economic center of Upper Hungary. The settlement emerged in the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the German mining people from the Torna forest estate settled in the valleys of the Gölnic River, where Slavonic indigenous groups lived. After the county organization of Szepes was founded in the 1240s, Gölnicbánya became an important center of its southern part. The privileges donated by Béla IV and Stephen V led to the rapid development of the town, which became one of the most important economical centers of the region by the 1270–1280s thanks to its mining and markets, which brought high incomes. In these decades, the population of the surroundings of the town grew, settlements came into existence and began to move towards independence. These changes made it necessary to rearrange the status of the town. Ladislaus IV issued the first known privilege charter of Gölnicbánya in 1287, which indicates strategic town planning policies. Thanks to the support of Charles I in the beginning of the fourteenth century, Gölnicbánya reached the high point of its early development.

Archival Sources

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

Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény [The Photo Collection of Medieval Documents] (DF)

Diplomatikai Levéltár [The Archive of Medieval Documents] (DL)

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“The King in the Saddle”: The Árpád Dynasty and Itinerant Kingship in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Pavol Hudáček
Slovak Academy of Sciences
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 3  (2022):505–544 DOI 10.38145/2022.3.505

The rulers of the Árpád dynasty spent a great deal of time on the road traveling from one royal castle, palace, mansion, monastery, or bishop’s seat to another. The ruler’s travel and personal presence were an important way of exercising power during this period. However, few sources have survived from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, making it difficult for historians to do much research on the travel of the Árpád kings. The Kingdom of Hungary was a large country and it is necessary to determine what was the main power center and where the periphery territories were located. For the most part, the Árpád kings stayed in the central region, where the most important royal settlements, the oldest monasteries, and the first bishoprics were located, and they visited the peripheral parts of the country only sporadically. The king met every year with his faithful magnates, bishops, abbots, and so on, and these important events was included various ceremonies, rituals, banquets, court proceedings, conferences with political elites, and gifts or donations.

Keywords: Kingdom of Hungary, house of Árpád, itinerant kingship, royal travel, royal power

Early medieval monarchs spent a great deal of time traveling from one castle, palace, mansion, monastery, or episcopal seat to another. The presence of the ruler was an important element in the use and maintenance of power in this period. Kings did not have a single main seat. The royal court was constantly on the move. Kings had several centers of power in the territories they controlled, and they frequently moved between them with their courts or entourages (iter regis). Medieval monarchs most often traveled for economic reasons, including the use of products and services from royal estates in the individual regions, and also for reasons of politics or power. Their journeys were elements of “highly ritualized” practice, whether they were the consequences of a military campaign, the negotiation of peace treaties, the reconciliation or settlement of disputes, important Christian holidays, countrywide assemblies, church synods, or hunts. When he traveled to his estates, the centers of power, or an ecclesiastical center, the king took the main royal roads and their turn-offs, which formed the “road network” of the country. The use and concentration of these roads depended on whether they were located in the central territories or in peripheral areas. The royal roads connected the monarch’s residential palaces, mansions, monasteries, and episcopal seats. Sometimes, the monarch only stopped in these places for short periods of time, but depending on his needs and material provisions, he sometimes stayed for much longer. During these travels and sojourns at individual places the king ruled, made decisions, issued judgments, and met with the political elites of the country (princes, magnates, abbots, bishops). Therefore, the royal presence was nearly always accompanied by various ceremonies and rituals.1

Itinerant Kingship

Research on royal travel is closely linked to research on medieval roads, the central and peripheral regions of the given kingdom, the favorite territories of the monarch, the reconstruction of the network of royal estates (including ecclesiastical centers and monasteries), which contained royal palaces or agricultural mansions that served as residences of the king or his family, and the monarch’s right to supplies, hospitality, and services.2 Historians who focus on the period use the terms itinerant kingship, Reisekönigtum, and peripatetic kingship to refer to the “on the road” form of rule of medieval monarchs. This manner of rule, where the king performed his practical duties and symbolic demonstrations of power by occasionally or constantly traveling around his estates, was used, for instance, by the monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire. The movement of the royal court around the country had a number of common elements, but the individual dynasties had different specific expressions that changed over time and were adapted to new circumstances. Not all monarchs traveled with the same frequency, and itinerant kingship was hardly the only manner of rule and execution of power. Unlike military campaigns or other journeys abroad, so-called itinerant kingship refers to the regular visits of the king to more or less the same places at more or less the same time of the year, for example the chief religious holidays, the holidays of the patrons of important churches, the countrywide assemblies, hunts, etc. The personal presence of the monarch during his travels to the individual parts of the country was an important channel of communication between the central power and local sites of power.3

According to historians, itinerant kingships had these common characteristic elements: a predominantly subsistence economy, the sovereign authority of the monarch, which was fostered through personal relationships, the magical or sacral perception of the ruler (or dynasty), and very often little dependence on the written word in the management of the country. It was in such societies that the ruler constantly traveled through his territory with his court. His personal presence gave legitimacy to his position, emphasized his majesty, and fostered relationships with loyal locals. The extent to which this style of the exercise of power was applied, the frequency of royal visits and the favored territories or places changed during specific periods. To a great extent, this was determined by gradual changes in the form of government, which were related to the conditions within the administrative institutions, new forms of representation of the monarch, changes of dynasties, and the monarch (some traveled more, some less).4 For instance, the Carolingians traveled the country but routinely stayed in their favorite residences for longer periods of time. From these places, they sent written instructions to surrounding parts of the country. Their arrival and meetings with important figures were accompanied by political rituals that used symbolic expressions during public events, such as important church holidays, countrywide assemblies, etc.5

According to the secondary literature, the East Frankish, Ottonian, and Salian rulers traveled much more than the Carolingians. During their reigns, they spent nearly half of their time on the road. They rarely stayed in one place for longer than a few days, though they did sometimes remain for several weeks. As part of the ways they ruled, they also sent instructions in writing and by messenger, but far less frequently than their predecessors. The power and position of these kings were based to a much greater extent on their personal presence and the sanctity of their person. For them, travel was an effective way of fostering power and winning loyalty. It was a demonstration of their exceptional position of authority. Through the regular personal appearances of the monarch, the individual parts of the large kingdom were connected. During the newly elected kings’ travels around the country (Königsumritt), the rulers won approval for their ascendance to the throne, mainly in the most important centers of power and at local assemblies of the nobility, and they also solved disputes and revolts and received honors and oaths of loyalty.6 Over the course of a year, they ceremoniously arrived on important church holidays or at important meetings in the episcopal seats, monasteries, and cities (adventus regis). They publicly demonstrated the sanctity of their royal position through their presence at masses and the symbolic wearing of the crown. In his visits to these places, the monarch executed his political and judicial duties, for example, rewarding people who were loyal to him, participating in rituals of reconciliation, and taking part in the punishment of enemies.7 The planning and organization of the journeys to the various locations particularly depended on the material possibilities along the selected route. These were provided by the royal estates and the right held by the king to hospitality, provided by the royal church institutions, such as bishoprics and monasteries.8

Iter Regis and Hungarian Medieval Sources

The aim of research on travel during an itinerant kingship is not to compile a complete itinerary of the travels of the individual Árpád kings. A reconstruction of the journeys undertaken by the king rather encompasses a description of the events, rituals, and ceremonies connected with his presence in the important ecclesiastical or worldly seats during Christian holidays or during other important events such as the conclusions of peace treaties, rituals of reconciliation, countrywide assemblies, etc. It is equally interesting to observe the changes in the preference for different seats or even whole territories and the construction of new residences or monasteries, which frequently took place during the rule of the individual kings. This text is an attempt to outline possible outcomes of research on the reigns of the Árpád kings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when some of their administrative duties and the symbolic demonstration of their power took place through continuous travel around their kingdom.

Some historians who have studied this period have only briefly stated that, like other monarchs, the Hungarian kings traveled around their kingdom with their court.9 But they have not considered the precise destinations to which the Árpád rulers traveled, when they traveled, how long they stayed, or what was the intention of their visit was. Similarly, they have also failed to consider whether the Árpád kings stayed for long periods of time only in the central territories or also took more frequent and longer sojourns to the peripheral areas of the kingdom. Although these are very important questions related to research on the journeys undertaken by the kings, in the case of the Kingdom of Hungary, it is difficult to find reliable answers.10 As far as their frequency and diversity (chronicles, legends, charters, etc.) are concerned, Hungarian sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are rather limited in comparison to the sources for other countries.11 It is difficult to find and compare information about the itinerant kingship of the Árpád kings with itinerant kingship in the surrounding countries, and one is compelled to rely on the isolated mentions from Hungarian medieval narrative and hagiographic sources or law-codes and charters. Very few documents have survived, and this prevents historians from engaging in thorough or penetrating research, so I highlight only some of the main points related to the travels of the kings of Árpád House.12

Most of the events described in the Hungarian Chronicle Composition of the fourteenth century take place in the central part of the Kingdom of Hungary. This Chronicle Composition was based on older sources that acquired a coherent textual form, known as the lost Gesta Ungarorum or Gesta Ungarorum Vetera, sometime within the second half of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century. These earliest Gesta Ungarorum, however, were heavily rewritten, supplemented and interpolated in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth century. As they were also adapted, depending on the needs of the individual Hungarian kings, a certain degree of caution is necessary when using information from this source.13 The Chronicle Composition underwent several redactions and not all the information is trustworthy, but the places visited by the Árpád kings, where they spent time and celebrated Christian holidays are certainly not made up. They took place in the real geographic space of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in localities that were important to the monarchs. Therefore, for research into iter regis, we consider the references in this source related to the journeys of the kings, princes and their courts and the information related to the localities and territories that they visited to be reliable information which was probably already included in the earliest version of the lost Gesta Ungarorum.

We know that the Hungarian kings traveled, we know some of their favorite places, where they built palaces and mansions, but the available sources only provide a rough outline of where the rulers of the Árpád dynasty traveled and where they stayed most often.14 In the Chronicle Composition or in some Hungarian medieval legends important seats are not mentioned so often (e.g. Esztergom, Székesfehérvár, Veszprém, Óbuda, Visegrád)15 and only a few references to royal palaces,16 hunting or agricultural mansions,17 monasteries and collegiate chapters appear.18 Although very few sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries have been preserved, the kings may have regularly visited other locations, as evidenced, for example, by some documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, it should not be forgotten that the topography of power changed over the centuries as individual monarchs abandoned or less frequently visited traditional seats and built new residences in other places.19

From the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century come two itineraries by Károly Ráth and Béla Sebestyén, in which they also recorded the journeys and stays of the kings of Árpád.20 Their compilers acquired information from narrative sources, royal charters (often also forged) or literature, and it is not possible to verify the credibility of some of the data without mentioning the source. Only a few royal charters have survived from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, some of which were not drawn up by the royal chancellery, but were only sealed by the monarch at a later date. Some of them are either forged or interpolated and their form is often known only from later copies. Only very rarely is the place of issue mentioned in these documents and great caution is therefore needed when using unique information from these oldest documents about the places where the Árpád rulers stayed.21

According to the register of royal charters compiled by Imre Szentpétery, 192 documents have been preserved from the period 1000–1200. Of this number, approximately 48 were forged or not very reliable, and only 17 documents (including forgeries) mention the place of issue. These were Győr, Székesfehérvár (3x), Óbuda (2x), Pécs, Szeged, Somogy, Zadar, Vác, Nitra (Nyitra), Esztergom (2x), Eger, Veszprém and Csepel-sziget.22 According to György Györffy, 73 royal charters were issued between 1000 and 1131, of which 23 were forgeries and only three of them have the place of issue. They were Sóly (near Veszprém) and the already mentioned Győr and Somogy. Of the forgeries that have been made after 1526, these were Óbuda (2x), Szeged and Zadar (Zára). 23 In the selection register of charters from 1001–1196 by the same author, only Székesfehérvár was as the place where the royal document was issued. Other non-royal charters, issued in the presence of the monarch in 1134, 1146 and 1152, mention locations such as Oradea (Nagyvárad), Szentendre (near Óbuda)24 and Şemlacu Mare (Mezősomlyó).25 In these cases the king (his chancellery) issued, confirmed or sealed the charter when he was staying in the main royal and episcopal residences, royal castles, Dalmatian towns, collegiate chapters or other favorite places near important seats.26 Because of their small numbers, these mentions are not very representative if one is seeking to learn more about how often the Árpád rulers visited individual sites during this period.27

We only have information about the movements of the royal court from rare mentions in narrative sources and charters—if they include their place of issue, which was not common practice in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. According to the precious few references, we have information that the Hungarian kings nearly always stayed in important seats, monasteries and royal castles of medium regni or in its vicinity. These sources, however, may give the impression that monarchs always spent their time in the central part of the kingdom. But these sources are not a representative sample, they only record several important events from the times of the Árpád dynasty (coronations, meetings of rulers and funerals). From the few mentions we do know where the ruler was in a particular year, month or day, but we know almost nothing about most of the trips and sojourns of the Hungarian kings. Like the majority of medieval monarchs, the Árpád rulers stayed mostly in the chief center of power of the kingdom where had the best opportunities for travel in this area - a dense road network, plenty of royal estates (palaces, mansions, castles), which provided them with accommodation and supplies for the “court on the road,” royal monasteries or episcopal seats, etc.28

The Central Region and the Peripheries

In the secondary literature on the regular journeys undertaken by the rulers of the Kingdom of Hungary, we need to indicate what should be considered the central territory and what was the periphery.29 It is also important to consider where the centers of power were and whether they underwent change. For example, with regards to the travels of rulers from the Holy Roman Empire (Ottonians) around the country, Eckhard Müller-Mertens identified four types of geopolitical regions or zones: the core/central regions, the remote regions, the transit zones, and the zones of proximity, depending on their importance and the frequency of the king’s visits.30 The central regions were those where the king spent the most time and where the greatest level of material support, in the form of royal estates, could be found. They were the most important centers of power, where people from other parts of the country gathered when they went to see the king. The central regions could change or new ones could spring up (in which new residential palaces were sometimes built), depending on the popularity of a specific area with an individual monarch or a successor.31

Hungarian medieval sources most frequently mention the presence of the kings in the medium regni or in its vicinity. The most important royal and ecclesiastical centers were located there, along with the highest number of monasteries, which led to the densest road network. This contributed to the founding of the first bishoprics in these centers. The remote regions were those where the king’s power and presence was limited (mostly border or peripheral territories). There was a lack of material resources to allow a longer stay by the monarch, and also fewer royal centers of power, so the kings only visited them sporadically and under exceptional circumstances. The deficiencies in these territories were, to a certain extent, compensated for by the royal monasteries that were gradually built in them. An example of this, in the Kingdom of Hungary, was Transylvania, which, in the narrower sense, is always considered to be a territory, an administratively distinct unit, in the available sources. They were also wooded, hilly or frontier regions (confinia),32 which had originally also served as royal forests (hunting areas).33

In the time of the Árpád dynasty, there were no changes in the central region. In other words, there was nothing that could be compared with, for instance, the case of Saxony, a marginal region, which became a central region during the reign of the Ottonians.34 The transit zones were narrow strips of territory around important roads which the kings used when traveling to other parts of the country or to other centers of power outside the central region. In the Kingdom of Hungary, these centers may have been found in the territories between the Danube River and the Tisza River, which connected the medium regni, for instance, with Bihar and Transylvania and, from the time of Ladislaus I, the territory beyond the Drava River in the direction of Dalmatia and Slavonia-Croatia. They may also have been found in the territories through which royal roads led to the episcopal seats, royal mansions, and hunting areas to the south, north, and west, outside the medium regni. And finally, the zones of proximity were the adjacent territories where the kings had their favorite haunts (in particular, the bishoprics and royal palaces) located on the margins of the central regions. In the Kingdom of Hungary, this may have been, for example, the territory between the Danube River and the Tisza River (e.g. Vác, Kalocsa, Tiszavárkony, etc.).

If the king began to travel more frequently from the center to marginal parts of the country which previously had been less often visited, the importance of the remote regions grew markedly, as did the importance of the transit and proximity zones. This is clearly shown by the more frequent donations made to the older centers of power, the construction of new royal residences, and the foundation of monasteries in these territories. For example, when King Coloman was in the Dalmatian city of Zadar in 1101, he stayed at palace, who had commissioned previously built there.35 Dalmatia became part of the Kingdom of Hungary only during his reign, and so he established a new residence in this city, which he then used when he came to Zadar.

The Árpád rulers certainly built such royal palaces at other important places within their kingdom. Within the political geography, these grand residences, which were often edifices of several stories which sometimes included a tower and fortification, were physical embodiments of royal power. Through their architecture and their external and internal decoration (paintings, tapestries, etc.), they were also symbolic expressions of the king’s authority in these parts of the country during his absence.36 According to Thomas of Split, Coloman visited the Dalmatian city of Split (Spalato), probably in 1102, where citizens received him respectfully after a time. The burghers of Split allocated a tower on the eastern edge of the city fortifications to Coloman, where the king accommodated his deputy (dux), together with the military garrison, which was in charge of the collection of the royal fee.37 Coloman and his court visited the Dalmatian cities (Trogir [Trau] and Zadar) several times, for example, in 1102, 1105, 1108, and 1111. Later, Béla II, Géza II, and Stephen III also stayed there.38

Medium Regni

The center of power for the rulers of the Árpád dynasty was in the territory of the former Roman province Pannonia, and some sources therefore continue to refer to it as Pannonia, medium Ungarie or caput regni, or sometimes just as Hungaria. In the secondary literature, one smaller part of this territory is most often referred to as medium regni.39 Grand Prince Géza, followed by his son Vajk (Stephen I) and other Hungarian kings, most often stayed here, in this center of power of the kingdom. Important royal seats existed here, along with the oldest monasteries and first bishoprics to be founded.40 In addition to these important seats, the sources sometimes mention, usually only once, places which cannot always be located and the importance of which for the kings cannot always be determined. As the monarchs spent time at these places, they may have been important sites that the Árpád kings regularly visited. In this period, the seat of the kingdom was the so-called traveling court, and the power center was wherever the monarch was staying.41

In addition to the medium regni, which formed a small territory from Esztergom through Óbuda to Székesfehérvár, the broader center of Árpád power was bounded by the Danube River in the north and west (circa partes Danubii), the Drava in the south, and the frontier areas near the borders with Margraviate of Austria and Carinthia in the east. In the early eleventh century, the Kingdom of Hungary was also comprised of territories on the left bank of the Danube River,42 between the Danube and the Tisza, and Bihar in the east.43 When Stephen I defeated the independent rulers Gyula II and Ajtony, he annexed their expansive areas in the east (Transylvania) and south to his kingdom.44 The medieval sources differentiate between Hungary in the narrower sense (Pannonia, Hungaria, including Bihar) and Transylvania (regnum or provincia), which had a specific position within the kingdom.45 During the reign of Ladislaus I and Coloman, Dalmatia and Croatia were also added to the Kingdom of Hungary.46

The power expansion of the Árpád dynasty to other parts of the country determined and gradually also changed the direction of travel and sojourns of the kings, which began to include these newly added territories more and more frequently. The planning of regular visits to these parts of the country, which were rather distant from the central part, was also adapted. During journeys to new locations undertaken by the royal court, new routes began to be used along which stood mansions or monasteries where the king could stop and replenish supplies or make longer stays.

The importance of certain sites in the central part of the kingdom is also indicated by mentions of places where individual members of the Árpád dynasty were buried. Stephen I and his son Emeric were buried in the Basilica of the Virgin Mary in Székesfehérvár.47 All the royal coronations took place at Székesfehérvár (with the exception of the coronation of Stephen I in Esztergom), and beginning with Coloman, several of the Hungarian kings and their family members were buried next to the graves of the first dynastic saints, Stephen I and his son Emeric.48 But before Coloman, all kings were buried in monasteries, episcopal or collegiate churches which they had built, completed, or richly endowed, and not in Székesfehérvár: Samuel Aba in Abasár, Peter Orseolo in Pécs, Andrew I in Tihany, Béla I in Szekszárd, Géza I in Vác, Ladislaus I either in Oradea or perhaps at the Somogyvár monastery49 (which he founded), Coloman’s son Stephen II also in Oradea, and Emeric I in Eger. Esztergom, Székesfehérvár, and Óbuda were important sites, but the Hungarian kings also built their own monasteries or churches next to the chapters where they had their palaces, and apparently they stayed there regularly. These places were of exceptional importance to the kings and their families, which is evidenced by several donations, confirmations, and gifts from individual members of the Árpád dynasty, such as those by Domoslaus to the monastery of Pécsvárad,50 by David to the Tihany monastery,51 and by Lampert to the collegiate chapter in Titel.52 These important power and sacred centers were also visited by their descendants, and within the dynasty’s sacral topography some of them became the favorite residences of the Hungarian monarchs, where the memory (memoria) of famous ancestors was preserved, as is sometimes mentioned in charters of foundation or donation.53

The Árpád Rulers on the Road

According to the Lesser Legend of St. Stephen, when his enemies were destroying royal castles, mansions, and estates, they also wanted to conquer Veszprém castle, where the king allegedly liked to stay.54 The Árpád rulers left this central territory when they traveled to their estates in the peripheral areas of the country to meet the local political elites, when on military campaigns, for synods and countrywide assemblies (Tarcal, Szabolcs),55 to hunt (Igfon, Sárospatak, Maramureş [Máramaros] or Zvolen [Zólyom]),56 or in exceptional cases, to celebrate important Christian holidays (Csanád, Ikervár, Bodrog).57 However, the sources do not reveal how often they did this, nor do they indicate where the monarchs and their entourages stayed most frequently when they traveled to the peripheral parts of the kingdom. For example, the Lesser Legend of St. Stephen mentions that at the time the Pechenegs unexpectedly invaded Hungary (sometime between 1017 and 1018), the king was hunting in remotae partes.58 This reference to a remote area suggests that Stephen was not hunting in the forests of the medium regni but somewhere in the east of the country, maybe in the popular Igfon Forest in Bihar, which was located outside the center of power of his kingdom.59

When Béla I became king, he summoned an assembly at Székesfehérvár in 1060–1061, and he issued orders according to which two elders from each village should come to an audience with the king. Székesfehérvár was the traditional location for countrywide assemblies and also the main center of power where the Árpád kings were crowned.60 The kings spent a substantial period of time in Székesfehérvár every year in order to celebrate the important holidays, including the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the death of St. Stephen, and the lifting of his remains.61 People from different parts of the country had the opportunity to see the monarch and to participate with him in royal legal courts, liturgical ceremonies, and feasts.62 The king reached judgements, solved disputes, received foreign ambassadors, and planned military campaigns, and there were also debates on the state of the kingdom. He fostered relationships with his faithful magnates, ispáns, bishops, and abbots, and he granted gifts and issued charters of donation. These events were accompanied by various ceremonies and rituals.63

The countrywide assemblies were mainly held once a year, or more frequently, if necessary, mostly out in the open, for instance on islands, in the vicinity of important castle centers, and next to episcopal or royal palaces. The times at which assemblies were convened coincided with the celebration of the important church holidays within the liturgical year, such as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.64 For example, according to The Long Life of St. Gerard, Stephen I came to Székesfehérvár every year, where abbots and bishops gathered to celebrate the Assumption of the Virgin Mary together.65 The Chronicle Composition states that King Samuel Aba was staying in Csanád during Lent in 1044. This is one of the first references to the presence of a king outside the central territory. Csanád was an episcopal seat, where the Hungarian Bishop Gerard worked at the time. Samuel Aba may have traveled there to spend time in the episcopal seat during Lent and to meet the important bishop. It is very likely that at that time, due to the presence of the king, a local assembly was convened at Csanád, with about 50 noblemen gathered there.66 This possibility is also suggested by a later reference to the meeting of Hungarian noblemen in Csanád, who were unhappy with the reign of Peter Orseolo.67 The members of the Árpád House mostly celebrated a number of Christian holidays in their main residences, episcopal seats, and monasteries in the power center of the kingdom. It is not clear, therefore, whether this was an isolated event or whether kings regularly visited outlying parts of the kingdom in this connection too. In 1046, the village of Zámoly is mentioned, where Peter Orseolo stopped on his way from the border castle of Moson to Székesfehérvár. When he realized that Prince Andrew wanted to capture him, he took refuge in a curia, where he and his men defended themselves for three days.68 It may therefore have been a fortified royal mansion in the central part of kingdom along a road that connected several important sites in its vicinity.

Among the important royal palaces was Tiszavárkony, which was mentioned at the meeting of King Andrew and Prince Béla in 1059 as a pallacium, and in 1098, King Coloman also traveled there when he was about to fight his brother Álmos.69 Tiszavárkony was strategically located because it stood on the right bank of the Tisza River, and the far side of the river was already Bihar territory. This is why rulers of the Árpád family often stopped there on their way to the Igfon Forest, Transylvania, or even to the more distant northern or southern parts of the country along the Tisza River. In 1064, King Solomon and Prince Géza were staying in Győr during the holiday of St. Fabian and Sebastian, where they concluded a peace treaty.70 The selection of Győr as the site may not have been accidental. Although Solomon had been crowned in Székesfehérvár, he did not yet have a firm grip on power, so he withdrew to the border castle of Moson for a period of time. Prince Géza also returned to the Kingdom of Hungary at that time. He had been residing in Poland.

Through the intercession of the Kalocsa Archbishop, Dezider, the cousins finally met in the seat of the Győr bishop, which was located near the border where Solomon was staying. It is probable that in order to prevent a new conflict between them, they did not choose any of the most important royal seats, such as Esztergom or Székesfehérvár, for the meeting, but preferred instead the “neutral” city of Győr.71 Several months later, Solomon and Géza visited another episcopal seat together, Pécs, on Easter Sunday.72 Maurus, the bishop of Pécs, who had contributed significantly to the peace agreement between them,73 must have known that at Easter, the king and the prince would come to his palace and he therefore had to make sufficient preparations for their arrival. When the king and prince arrived with their entourages,74 the bishop had to provide them with suitable lodging in his seat and ensure they had everything necessary for their stay.75 During this holiday, Prince Géza placed the royal crown on the head of Solomon in the presence of the noblemen of the country.76 As it was an exceptional event, it is very likely that Hungarian bishops, abbots, magnates, and ispáns also took part in this ritual, who were apparently in Pécs at that time.

The very valuable and unique information in the Chronicle Composition on royal travel during a relatively short period (1072–1075) relates to Solomon’s reign. They were not confined to the central part of the kingdom, where, for obvious reasons, he stayed most often as king, but also traveled outside this territory because of military campaigns or important meetings. First he was in Niš (Serbia), then he went to the Keve castle (on the road to Belgrade), from where he traveled to a meeting in Esztergom (where he negotiated and concluded a peace treaty with Prince Géza on the nearby Danubian island).77 He then traveled to Székesfehérvár, after which he stayed briefly in the royal village of Megyer (probably Kismegyer near Győr), from where he went to a meeting near the Rábca River. He then celebrated Christmas in the nearby Ikervár, from where he went to Zala, then to the Szekszárd Abbey, then to Kemej near the Tisza River, where fought with his cousins. He then moved to the curia of Peter’s son (probably Peterka near Pest), from where he went to nearby Rákos (near Pest). He then fought at Mogyoród, and after the military defeat, he crossed the Danube River at Szigetfő and arrived at the border castle of Moson.78

In 1073, King Solomon celebrated Christmas at a place called Geminum Castellum, which was mentioned as Ikervár, located on the right side of the Rába River. Since it is mentioned as castellum and the Hungarian name has the ending vár, it was very likely a royal fortified palace or mansion, which must have included a church or a royal chapel where Solomon could have celebrated this important Christian holiday.79 The king went from there to Zalavár, where he met with Marquard, duke of the Germans, who apparently had promised him military assistance against Géza.80 Although Zalavár was a county castle, Stephen I founded a Benedictine abbey there sometime at the beginning of the eleventh century,81 so at the end of 1073 or at the beginning of 1074, Solomon may have stayed either in this castle or in the royal monastery. The king then apparently visited Szekszárd Abbey in early 1074, and he camped near it and attended mass in the monastery church in the evening.82

When Géza, his opponent, became king, he celebrated Christmas at the Szekszárd monastery sometime between 1074 and 1076, which had been built by his father, Béla I.83 Although Vác was exceptionally important to the Árpád dynasty and was also the seat of the bishop, very little information has been preserved about its earliest history. According to the Chronicle Composition, Vác was an important seat of King Géza I, and the bishopric was probably established there during the reign of Peter Orseolo (the territory of the diocese was split off from the territory of the Eger bishopric).84 When Géza was still a prince and fought against Solomon for power, he met his brother Ladislaus and also later the Olomouc Prince Otto in Vác.85 Sometime in the beginning of March 1074, before the famous Battle of Mogyoród, Princes Géza, Ladislaus, and Otto (from Moravia) left from Vác for the manor of Cinkota (part of Budapest today), which is mentioned as allodium. This Latin term might indicate that there was also a royal mansion, similarly to Dömös (regale allodium), where the Árpád rulers had their mansion or palace in the second half of the eleventh century.86

According to the Chronicle Composition, King Ladislaus I celebrated Easter Sunday of 1093 at the county castle of Bodrog.87 Unless we count the episcopal seat of Csanád, the royal visit to Bodrog is the only reference to the celebration of an important Christian holiday at a county castle. We do not know why Ladislaus was staying at the Bodrog castle at that time. It was in a strategic position on the left bank of the Danube River, near the spot where the Drava River flows into the Danube. As Ladislaus was spending Easter there, there must have been a church. As in the case of Csanád, it is not possible to determine whether the Hungarian kings visited this site more frequently or if this was merely a one-off visit by Ladislaus. Béla II, at the suggestion of his wife Helene and the barons, convened a countrywide assembly near Arad probably sometime between 1131 and 1132.88 We do not know why this place was chosen. After Béla was blinded, some Hungarian magnates helped him find refuge at an unknown place in the kingdom so that the king would not find out about it.89

During the reign of Stephen II, Béla may have stayed in Arad or in its vicinity in secret, in other words beyond the main center of power, where the Hungarian king moved most frequently, and this might explain why the assembly was held there. For Béla II, Arad was probably a favored and important seat where he frequently stayed, as indicated by the fact that he founded a collegiate chapter there, probably in 1135.90 The countrywide assemblies over the course of a year could also take place outside of the medium regni at places which were linked to an older tradition of the holding of local assemblies, possibly in the vicinity of the favorite seats of the king or his family. The selection of a site depended to a great extent on the preferences of the monarch too. He could select a suitable place to hold a royal tribunal and meet his loyal magnates based on the political situation in the country at the time.

When traveling from one place or territory to another, the kings likely only stopped a single night in the various localities (e. g. royal agricultural mansions or villages). These stays were referred to as “one-night stops.” If need be, the king would spend a single night or several days in a tent or on the estates of his loyal magnates.91 When King Béla III, together with his notary, validated the last will of Csaba sometime around 1177, he did so on a Sunday, next to the house of comes Zenie, while he sat under an oak tree in the presence of his ispáns.92 In 1071, for example, King Solomon and Prince Géza stayed in the village of Buziás on the estate of Vid, the ispán of Bács.93

The Árpád rulers also traveled in response to invitations from loyal magnates, most often to be present for important events. Thus, in 1061 (1064), Palatine Otto invited King Solomon and Prince Géza to celebrate the consecration of his St. James’ Monastery, which he had had built in Zselic (Zselicszentjakab, part of Kaposvár today).94 The consecration of a church or monastery was an important event that the monarch had to attend. Several people from the royal court and the close vicinity of the monastery gathered for the occasion. At such a public event, the ruler presented himself as the protector of Christianity. This celebration included feasts, gifts, rituals, and ceremonies.95 On similar occasions and for other reasons (the confirmation of loyalty, creation of alliances, planning of a military campaign, etc.), the Hungarian kings visited the estates of important magnates and ispáns much more frequently than is mentioned in sources.

The king’s arrival at a place was demanding and expensive for the host, but the king’s presence also created important advantages for the host. A stay by the king was a great honor and an exceptional event for the surrounding area. During such visits, the king and his hosts exchanged gifts, and the king would be accommodated and entertained throughout the whole visit. As a reward, the host might “obtain” some donations.96 The consecration of the chapter church in Dömös in 1108 was probably similarly spectacular. Prince Álmos even invited King Coloman to this important event, despite the fact that he had a long-standing dispute with him.97 The importance of this residence is evidenced by the fact that, when the king had Álmos and his young son Béla blinded in 1113, he was then taken to his “monastery” in Dömös.98 However, there was originally a royal (hunting) mansion on the site, which is mentioned as regale allodium as early as 1063 and as curia Dimisiensi in 1079.99

Very little information has been preserved about the number of journeys and stays of the Hungarian kings in various parts of the country in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. That is why the mentions in the charters from 1134 and 1152 are exceptionally valuable. The document from 1134 related a dispute, which lasted several years, concerning the Dubrava Forest between the Zagreb bishopric and Somogy ispán, or the Somogy castle-warriors. Fáncsika, the archbishop of Kalocsa, and Macilinus, the bishop of Zagreb, and three important men from the Zagreb bishopric gave testimony in favor of the bishopric at the synod in Oradea and swore on the local altar.100 It is very likely that King Béla II was also present at this synod.

King Géza II’s charter of 1152 records the verdict of Palatine Belus, the court judge Hendrik, and three ispáns concerning the dispute brought by royal servants who were to present themselves at a divine tribunal before the Veszprém chapter. This royal decision was probably previously taken and approved under oath in the Church (of the collegiate chapter?) of St. Stephen the King next to the Şemlacu Mare royal estate. This could have happened during a countrywide assembly at which Géza II may also have been present.101

Iter Regis in the Law-Codes and Synods of the Árpád Rulers

Pursuant to King Coloman’s law-code, all payments received from the royal counties before the holiday of St. Michael were to be sent to Esztergom, and a share of them belonged to the king. The shares due to the ispáns and centuriones were to be set aside from the county’s fees in Esztergom.102 Thus, sometime before the holiday of St. Michael, the king or his deputy could stay in Esztergom in order to supervise the payment of his share. The king thus must have met with his loyal magnates, bishops, or abbots in Esztergom every year, and this important event was accompanied by various ceremonies, rituals, feasts, tribunals, agreements with political elites, bestowal of gifts, and the award of donations. The Synod of Szabolcs in 1092 forbade priests to celebrate mass outside of a church with the exception of travel that lasted for several days. and under such circumstances, they were allowed to celebrate mass in a tent. This probably also applied to the royal chaplains if they were on the road with the king for an extended period of time and there was no church in the vicinity.103

Another article of this synod mentions that if an abbot or monk were to visit the royal court, he was not to greet the monarch in the church but should to do so in either king’s residence (domus) or a tent.104 The king could thus be found at the places where he had a domus,105 thus presumably meaning the royal palace, agricultural mansion, or royal village. But if he was on the roads and there was no suitable accommodation available in the vicinity, he camped in a tent in which he received visitors. This is also proven by the Synod of Esztergom, which took place sometime in the years between 1105 and 1112/1113. According to one of its articles, mass could not to be celebrated anywhere but in a church, not even in a tent or “house” (domus), which probably meant residences in which there was no chapel. However, this did not apply to the king, for whom masses could be celebrated outside of a church, as well as to bishops, ispáns, and abbots, but only if they had a designated tent or similar specially adapted place for holding mass, and this only applied when they were traveling.106 King Coloman’s law-code also stipulates that a mass could only be held in consecrated places, but this did not hold true for journeys or pilgrimages, which probably only applied to the king, senior church dignitaries, and magnates, who were permitted to celebrate mass at a portable altar, within a tent, or at an alternative place deemed suitable. However, this exception did not apply when they were on the hunt.107

In order for the Hungarian kings to be able to exercise their power even in the more distant territories of their kingdom, they had to visit them in person from time to time. The personal presence of the monarch and his court was also often linked to the execution of royal judicial powers and the confirmation of the loyalty of the local powerful elites in these peripheral parts of the country.108 However, the Árpád kings probably did not visit these territories every year, because they spent most of their time in the medium regni. Whether they were staying in the central region or the peripheries the kingdom, in order better to deal with the necessary “administration,” they had their ispáns available at the royal castles or abbots in royal monasteries and provosts in collegiate chapters. Kings used messengers (nuntii regis) to communicate with the surrounding areas. The task of these messengers was to announce royal regulations, important changes, or exceptional events concerning the kingdom and the ruling dynasty. For example, Life of Archbishop Conrad of Salzburg mentions that the Archbishop of Esztergom sent a messenger (nuntius) with an urgent message to King Stephen II, who sometime before 1131 was staying outside the central territory in the marchia Ruthenorum.109

The Árpád rulers may also have used their messengers to announce the arrival of the royal court to individual parts of the country. Even if kings routinely visited the same places over the course of a year, sometimes their plans may have changed due to various circumstances, making it necessary to inform loyal dignitaries of these changes. Therefore, the royal messengers had to convey the plans of the monarch to the individual bailiffs of agricultural or hunting mansions, abbots, bishops, ispáns, etc., well in advance to give them sufficient time to prepare for the arrival of the king, which meant gathering supplies, ensuring available fodder for horses, and making sure that the items necessary to accommodate the royal court were on hand.110 The royal messengers had to travel to a public place in the various localities of the kingdom, where people normally gathered, usually the markets, and announce the royal regulations there. In addition to royal messengers (nuntii), who probably enjoyed royal protection and an important position, the law-code of Ladislaus I also mentions other messengers who traveled by horse (cursores).111 While it is not entirely clear how these messengers differed, cursores were apparently of lower status than the royal messengers, who seem to have been sent (also on horseback) directly from the royal court (nuntii as well as precones and veredarii).112 Cursores may have been county messengers who only traveled within their territory and were forbidden to ride a horse (probably only one) further than the third village. This may suggest that their movements were limited to a comparatively small area, and cursores were apparently subordinate to the royal messengers.113

It is very likely that stud farms were established near some royal residences, mansions, or main roads. In the medium regni, there was an important and probably large royal stud-farm in Csepel-sziget, which was close to royal residences such as Óbuda or Székesfehérvár.114 A mention from 1067 says that a royal stud-farm was also found in the frontier county of Borsod, next to the royal mansion at Szihalom and close to the main road along the Tisza River.115 Next to Alpár, at the border of Csongrád and Szolnok counties, close to the road to Szolnok castle, according to a reference from 1075, a man lived who cared for and guarded royal horses.116 These horses, which were kept only at designated places in the kingdom and were apparently a kind of network of royal stud-farms, were probably also used by royal messengers when delivering regulations from the royal court to other, often remote parts of the country.

Coloman’s law-code contains a wealth of information concerning the various laws governing the travel of members of the royal family. Should the king or a prince enter any county, he was to receive a war horse from this county.117 It is not quite clear if this provision only applied in the case of a military campaign or whether the king and prince had the right to a war horse for their entourage whenever they crossed through the territory of a royal county. Apparently, upon entry into another county, they returned the first war horse and got a new one. This practice seems to have been repeated whenever the king or prince was traveling in the country and passing through the individual counties. Another article of this law-code is related to this provision according to which, if the ispán of a border territory (marchia) received important news from the royal court, he was to send two messengers with four war horses to the king (only horses without riders?). The messengers were to cover the expenses of the journey themselves, and the expense incurred on their return to the frontier area was to be covered by the palatine. Should these horses die or be injured, financial compensation was to be paid to these messengers, but should the horses return uninjured, their journey back to the frontier territory was to be considered a military campaign.118

The meaning of this provision is not quite clear, but the ispán and the two messengers from the border territory had to know where the king was staying and what road he would take so that they could bring him the war horses. The dignitaries of the royal court therefore had to inform the (border) ispán in advance about the monarch’s journey to his territory, and it was probably the royal or county messengers who came to the frontier area to announce this important news.119 This may have been an unexpected military campaign due to the invasion by an enemy from the neighboring country, and the monarch therefore had to move to the frontier with the army. However, it is possible that this merely referred to information about the regular arrival of a royal, and it did not concern any matter of defense, but rather applied only to “annual” travel within the country. This provision in Coloman’s law-code is related to the previous regulation about the provision of a war horse by the county. While the former probably concerns the ordinary needs of the royal or princely entourage, the latter likely applies more to a military campaign. This law-code further mentions that if the king visits a (royal) village and somebody steals a (royal) horse there, the inhabitants will not be expected to provide compensation.120 Apart from traveling from one county to another and occasionally arriving in the border areas of the kingdom, Arpad’s kings apparently regularly visited their villages, which may have been hunting or agricultural mansions scattered across the countryside.

Another regulation in Coloman’s law-code concerns the royal judicial powers. If the king entered a county, two counties judges were to join him, and together they would decide local lawsuits.121 Thus, in the course of his regular travels, the ruler came to the counties, where he personally exercised his judicial authority and thereby also demonstrated his position of power (though it is not clear whether he traveled to each individual county every year). The following provision of this law-code is also very interesting. It regulates the collection of denarios from the free inhabitants of the Kingdom of Hungary. Eight denarios were originally paid by all freemen, but after the new regulation, this amount was to be paid only by the men of the castle (cives hedbomadarii), who apparently were exempt from the duties of the common “castle folk,” but as freemen, they still had to pay the king a tax for their freedom. Free of the men who usually furnished the king with horses, transport wagons and “services for pay” (servitia stipendiaria) when the king traveled through their territory were to only pay four denarios.122 The freemen who provided services to the king were favored, as they paid only half of the amount usually paid, presumably because they were expected to fulfill special duties intended to address the needs of the monarch. There also seem to have been free royal people whose services were mainly related to supplying the royal court, though it is not impossible that their duties also included providing for the needs of the king in the course of his regular travels around the country.123 The question is what, in fact, is meant by the Latin term servitia stipendiaria, which some historians translate as mercenary services. From the context of this provision, it follows that it might be more appropriate to translate stipendia as hospitality or the provision of supplies (victuals, fodder for horses, etc.).124 It probably meant duties and services similar to those provided by the specialized servants of the kings of the Holy Roman Empire, who provided supplies for rulers when they were on the road, which were referred to by the Latin terms fodrum (fodder), gistum (hospitality), and servitium regis/regale (services). Later, an “umbrella term,” hospitium, was used.125

Adventus Regis and Descensus

In Hungarian medieval narrative sources, very few references to the ceremonial arrival (adventus regis) of the individual Árpád kings to important residences in the eleventh and twelfth centuries have survived.126 The king’s arrival at a residence, town, monastery, or bishop’s seat was a ceremonial event, accompanied by liturgical-celebratory songs (laudes) and the public wearing of the crown (Festkrönung).127 We can only assume that the regular arrivals of the rulers to popular localities also involved honoring the memory of saints128 or royal ancestors or commemorating exceptional events, ceremonies which included the bestowal of gifts, public liturgical processions, and participation in church services, as we have documented, for example, in the case of kings Solomon and Géza during their visit to the Szekszárd monastery. In this context, one of the provisions of the Synod of Szabolcs is particularly important. It stipulated that, if a king or a bishop were to come to an abbey, the abbot and the monks should not welcome him or give him the kiss of peace in the monastery church. The solemn welcoming ceremony should take place, rather, in the cloister. At the same time, the abbot was to permit the king to enter the monastery with as large an entourage as he required.129 As the rules for the ceremonial entry of the king were specially regulated, this is evidence that monarchs came to the monasteries regularly and, in addition to a “proper” welcoming ritual, very probably also expected shows of hospitality. This is clearly one of the first indirect references to the fact that members of the Árpád dynasty commonly exercised the right to descensus (lodging and provisioning) in the monasteries.

Thus, the aforementioned regulation of the Synod of Szabolcs was based on the actual practice of Hungarian monarchs, as is confirmed by The Life of St. Emeric in the description of the visit of Stephen I and his son to Pannonhalma, when the honor which, upon entry to the monastery, belonged to the king was left to Emeric.130 The royal visit was an important event for the monastic community and an effective way for the monarch to control the activities, commitments, and fidelity of the leaders of his abbeys. Kings gave generous endowments to the monasteries, in return for which they expected abbots to provide financial or military support and, on their repeated arrival, the right to descensus. Although it was costly for the abbot to provide welcome and host the monarch and his entourage in the manner expected, during these visits, kings gave the abbots valuable gifts, and they confirmed estates or privileges and often granted new donations.131 The first reliable document about the obligation of the monastic populi udvornici to provide supplies for the monarch’s entourage upon arrival of the king (adventus regis) dates back to 1226 and concerns Pannonhalma Abbey.132 This common practice was apparently applied by the Árpád rulers in all the royal monasteries, as evidenced by a document from 1247 on the rights and duties of the iobagiones of the Hronský Beňadik (Garamszentbenedek) Abbey, which were, however, based on their earlier freedoms granted by King Stephen III. If the monarch came to this monastery, they were to “assist” the abbot like other monastery populi, which very probably meant supplying the royal court with foodstuffs and providing various services.133

Royal travel was closely related to the right held by the monarch to hospitality that extended to his family, court dignitaries, and servants (ius descensus regii, Hung. szállás), but Hungarian sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries do not contain any direct information related to this right. Although mentions of this right appear only in law-codes and privileges from the thirteenth century, it is nevertheless possible to assume that the members of the Árpád dynasty had exercised the descensus in the preceding centuries as well, as indirectly evidenced, for example, by the provision for the king’s arrival at the monastery according to the Synod of Szabolcs.134 Interesting in this context is Coloman’s privilege for the Dalmatian city of Trogir from 1108, in which he allowed the Trogir burghers to live according to the old customs they had previously observed. If the king visited the city (advenio), he had no right to demand hospitality in the burghers’ houses. Inhabitants of the city could welcome the ruler into their domiciles, but this was done on a completely voluntarily basis. If the kingdom were attacked by an enemy, the king, his wife, his sons, and his entourage were allowed to enter Trogir without limitation.135

Royal charters from the eleventh and twelfth centuries related directly to the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary do not regulate the king’s right to descensus in any special way. The reason why no information of concerning this has survived may be related either to the insufficient number of preserved medieval sources or the fact that the Árpád dynasty commonly exercised this right, and thus it was not necessary to make special mention of it in the individual donation documents from this period. Apparently, after the annexation of Dalmatia, the Hungarian kings could not claim the right to descensus as was their custom in the Kingdom of Hungary, and therefore in important Dalmatian cities, which were already governed by other customs, they had to respect the old rights of these communities. According to the revenues of King Béla III, every ispán entertained the king once a year and gave him financial gifts during the banquets, which may be one of the first indirect references from the second half of the twelfth century to the royal right to descensus in the Kingdom of Hungary. The queen and her sons also received gifts such as silver, fine fabrics, and horses, probably on the same occasion when the king visited his ispáns during the year.136

The first mention of this royal right is found in the Golden Bull of 1222, when Andrew II promised not to collect any collecta or freemen’s denarios from royal servientes and also pledged that he would not claim the right of descensus in their houses or villages unless they voluntarily invited him.137 One of the articles in the 1231 confirmation of the Golden Bull deals with descensus, due to the significant damage and burden caused by the obligation to welcome and host the king, the queen, the royal sons, the archbishops, the bishops, the barons, and the nobles. The king ordered that the tithe required to supply the royal kitchen (coquina nostra) and the material provisions of the royal court would only be accepted if a payment was made upon the provision of victuals, such as corn, wine, and so on.138 This provision provides evidence that in addition to the members of royal family, the ispáns, provincial dignitaries, and high church representatives also traveled the country and demanded the right of descensus.

Conclusion

The Árpád kings spent a great deal of time on the road with their court over the course of a year. Even if they had a longer stay in the same place, mostly in their favorite residences, they also seem to have moved frequently to other sites, about which very little information has survived. In all likelihood, more trips took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than are mentioned in Hungarian medieval sources, whether merely sporadic excursions or regular sojourns, as part of the movement around the country. The presence of members of the Árpád dynasty is most often associated with the central part of the kingdom (medium regni and the surrounding territories). As very few sources from this period have survived, it is not possible to state unequivocally that iter regis was confined to this area and that other parts of the country were not regularly visited by the kings. Isolated mentions suggest that royal travel outside the main power territory was related not only to military campaigns but also to the celebration of religious holidays, assemblies, the judiciary, hunting, and very probably, even the consumption of foodstuffs and the provision of services in individual palaces, mansions, and monasteries throughout the kingdom. In this period, the personal presence of the monarch, which was related to symbolic shows of power, rituals and ceremonies, the resolution of conflicts, the strengthening of relations with faithful ispáns, etc., was extremely important and could not be limited only to the main part of the kingdom. When members of the Árpád dynasty left the central territory and traveled to other parts of the kingdom, though it is not possible to determine how frequent these sojourns were or how long they lasted, the sources do indicate that they stayed in county castles, mansions, and monasteries (possibly also in tents) which formed parts of the dynasty’s network of power-sacral centers as the rulers moved around the country.

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* The research on which this article draws was supported by the [VEGA] under Grant [2/0028/22]: Stredoveká spoločnosť v Uhorsku (štruktúra, koexistencia a konfrontácia sociálnych skupín do konca 13. storočia) and by the [APVV] under Grant [19–0131]: Ars Moriendi. Fenomém smrti v stredovekom Uhorsku.

Materializing Imperial Rule? Nature, Environment, and the Middle Class in Habsburg Central Europe

Wolfgang Göderle
University of Graz
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 2  (2022):445-476 DOI 10.38145/2022.2.445

New imperial history has fundamentally transformed our understanding of empires and questioned established certainties with regard to paths of state building and state formation. This challenge has proved fruitful for historians of Austria-Hungary, as it has led to a new perception of the Dual Monarchy as a sometimes innovative and in certain regards even progressive polity.
The observation that nature and environment became more closely entangled with imperial rule and politics in the nineteenth century and had an impact on common notions of what modern empire actually was serves as a starting point for this study. Along three representative repositories of imperial knowledge—Czoernig’s Ethnographische Karte (1857), the Hungarian Czigányösszeirás eredményei (1893), and the catalogue accompanying one part (the Austrian) of the Habsburg contribution to the 1900 exposition universelle—it shows how new spheres of the non-human became entangled with imperial polities and were transformed into resources with which to further the imperial project. These three examples, I argue, are just three minor elements against a larger discursive backdrop that slowly furthered the embodiment of a notion of modern empire, which featured the improvement of the natural environment as a constitutive aspect of its exercise of power.
Consequentially, this raises the question of a cui bono, placing the focus on a considerably large body of imperial civil service, not only in charge of this operation but also functioning as the driving force behind it. I understand the middle-class officials who made up the administration as the imperial intermediaries identified by new imperial history, and I shed light on the diversity of this increasingly important social class, a diversity which resulted from the ongoing engagement and subtle participation of middle-class civil-servants in the imperial project. I also keep a close eye on the resources they could mobilize, particularly expert knowledge.
I seek to further a more nuanced understanding of the social transformation that Austria-Hungary’s imperial project underwent in the long nineteenth century as this distinctive polity (Austria-Hungary) relied on the middle classes as central imperial intermediaries who furthered the modernization of the Dual Monarchy by fostering specific sets of values and furthering the use of resources the appropriation and exploitation of which have left lasting marks in Central European mentalities.

Keywords: Habsburg Empire, environmental history, Central Europe, 19th century, central administration, middle-class, forestry, nature, landscape

In this article I show how the emergence of a centralized middle-class imperial administration in Central Europe in the long nineteenth century created at the same time a homogeneous imperial environmental sphere that this emerging administration came to consider “natural.” During this process, environment as “nature” was transformed from something local into a fundamental resource of imperial rule which, under the management of an administration that fed itself from the steady supply of members of a growing middle class, was supposed to benefit the integration of local society into the emerging imperial society and the creation of a larger, more unified imperial identity. The Habsburg Empire around 1900, I argue, was fundamentally different from its embodiments 100 or 200 years earlier insofar as it had successfully transformed from an ancien régime-style polity into a modern middle-class empire. This metamorphosis was made possible in no small part, I argue, by two processes. The first of these processes was the materialization of the knowledge necessary for power, by which I mean, throughout this article, giving concrete form to information, for instance with the creation of maps and statistics, which in the case of the Habsburg Empire gradually came to replace the individuals who had stored this information. The second process was the large-scale systematic mobilization of the Empire’s (non-human) environment.

The predominant reading of Central European history in the secondary literature (especially though not only for the long nineteenth century) has changed substantially over the course of the past decade. This took place in large part simply because the focus on national histories lost much of its explanatory purchase, while more comprehensive approaches that are striving to account for the complexity of the entanglements that characterized this region around 1900 moved to the foreground.1 The increasing absorption of newer theoretical debates and methodological innovations, such as postcolonialism, new imperial history, and the history of science, have furthered Digital History and its successive integration into the research programs and routines of historians, but the work of anthropologists and sociologists has also had a strong impact on the field.2

New imperial history has unquestionably left a significant imprint on the rewriting of Central European histories over the past decade, yet even the most recent comprehensive accounts of Central European history in the long nineteenth century are flawed with regard to certain facets.3 I would like to point out one particular aspect here, which concerns the neglect of most subjects dealt with by environmental humanists in historical accounts of Habsburg Central Europe on the macro level.4

In the following, I begin with a discussion of the methodological and theoretical aspects which could be relevant to a rethinking and rewriting of Central European history, especially with regard to the long nineteenth century, derived from some of the larger trends in the historiographical research.5 This includes new imperial history, environmental humanities, and the major terms and fields that come with this expression. Then, I offer a quick sketch of the tools from the expanding toolbox that the digital humanities (or digital history?) have to offer, and I consider how these tools could prove particularly helpful when dealing with the challenges that come with the long nineteenth century, an epoch which is unlike any other (with the exception of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries), as the historian is faced with the task of grappling with an immense and incalculable wealth of sources, both primary and secondary.6 I then offer a point of departure for an environmental humanities’ perspective on Habsburg Central Europe. First, I discuss the degree to which environmental aspects have become a central part of accounts of the history of the empire during the nineteenth century. Then, I demonstrate the degree to which interaction with natural environments on two levels—that of discourse and that of administrative action—had become part of imperial politics by the end of the long nineteenth century.

The Promises of (New) Imperial History

Several studies in the early 2000s focused on the dynamics of the emergence, expansion, and to a lesser extent decline of empires before Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper offered a programmatic reading of global history through the eyes of imperial power.7 Empires in World History provides possibly the shortest definition of what an empire is and how understanding imperial rule reduces complexity and furthers the clear identification of important processes more easily in historical research. Burbank and Cooper break empire down to only a few features, three of which I consider particularly relevant to the Habsburg case. The first is its heterogeneity in terms of its population. The second is its mode of domination, which was usually indirect and reliant of the cooperation of certain elite groups. The third is its way of building resources through a multitude of possible strategies.8

Despite its weaknesses, I argue that this concept of empire is helpful when it comes to analyzing complex political entities and structures such as Habsburg Central Europe, first and foremost since it offers an alternative to other, even more problematic terms, such as “state.”9 The concept of imperial history allows us to frame complexes of political power in a flexible, even fluid way, which helps give us a grasp on what Habsburg notions of rule in the nineteenth century encompassed. The case of the Habsburg Monarchy, which was a constitutive part of the Holy Roman Empire and at the same time stretched far beyond its limitations, has challenged historians of Central Europe for decades. The fall of the Holy Roman Empire did not exactly contribute to a clarification of the situation, since its political orientation and power interests remained bifurcated for another half-century. The Kaiserthum Oesterreich, as the Habsburg Monarchy was called between 1804 and 1848, was usually referred to as Kaiserstaat, which translates into English as the Austrian Empire, a difference in terminology (the different between “staat” or “state” and empire) which illustrates unintentionally the underdetermined character of the political entity in question, which indeed lay between a state and an empire. During the short-lived era of neo-absolutism, the Habsburg Monarchy sought for transformation into central statehood.10 In 1867, however, the Compromise turned it into a unique empire, consisting of one part openly striving towards nation-statehood and another that successfully combined the remains of decades of central state-building with resurfaced fragments of its ancien régime structure.11

This series of at least four different configurations in the imperial history of the Habsburg Monarchy in less than one century exemplifies the impossibility of the task of nailing down the narrative of a single political entity in this case. Trying to account for further central developments in nineteenth-century Central Europe, for instance the territorial extension or the constitutional genesis of Habsburg rule, further complicates the situation. New imperial history offers a chance to unravel this complex and puzzling story by narrowing the focus to just two aspects: rule and the buildup of the imperial intermediaries whose contributions finally provided for the upkeep and mediation of imperial rule.12 Imperial history has contributed to an unlearning of the dominant narratives of teleology in history by replacing the well-established focus on idealized (Western) ideas of statehood and offering instead, as critical tools or perspectives, alternative forms of political and social organization.13

Empire and Its Environments

Environments are an issue that have only lately been drawn into discussions of new imperial history.14 The entire program of the environmental humanities which has emerged in the surge of a multi-disciplinary analysis of the Anthropocene has added substantially to older and deeply rooted research traditions in the field of environmental history. This concerns, in particular, a rethinking of the strong binary opposition between nature and culture, and many (frequently implicit) basic assumptions that go with this Great Divide.15 The intensity of the debate around the Anthropocene has substantially furthered our understanding of the web of life, and it has turned out to be necessary in many places to renegotiate the relationship between “human” and “non-human” in a way that does not simply lead to another binary understanding of a complex social and material reality.16 The theoretical advance seen in the past decade leaves us in a precarious situation, as very much has been thrown into question, and with good reason. Not only have the physical limits of the human body been questioned, but human coevolution with animals has also become an important issue, and the new approaches which have emerged toward materialism now provide ways to scrutinize the influence of matters on historical processes.17 The term “human” merits reflection, as the human is in constant exchange and permanent coevolution with its environment. When it comes to an analysis of events and long-term developments, it might turn out to be necessary to look closely at the chains of translation providing for these to take place.18 Power-relations are never out of the equation, of course, and it can prove challenging to keep an eye on social configurations and resource inequalities among human and non-human actants.19

Like many other research programs rooted in the cultural history of the 1980s and sharing a theoretical heritage with the linguistic turn, imperial history tends to be uneasy with the analyses of the material foundations of societies which give no consideration of environments. Regarding Habsburg Central Europe, the situation is particularly dire, though this applies to its German-speaking areas much more than to most other regions.20 None of the large comprehensive studies on Habsburg Central Europe published in the past two decades devotes as much as a chapter to the question of environment.21 Among the older work, particularly social and economic history showed some interest in the matter, though this interest was mostly limited to agriculture. However, some sizeable studies do exist, particularly regarding Hungary.22

Habsburg Central Europe through the Lens of Imperial History

Habsburg Central Europe evades description and analysis according to the categories and terminologies of nation-state histories, as stated above. To what degree can imperial history contribute to a clearer understanding of the essence of this flexible and territorially fluid polity between c. 1800 and 1918? Or, to frame the question slightly differently, by focusing on which specific quality of Habsburg rule could historians identify the core of Habsburg rule?

Burbank and Cooper suggest separating imperial rule analytically from the institutions built to transmit the exercise of power over populations. Regarding the Habsburg Empire, this would mean looking at those on whose close collaboration Habsburg rulers depended. For several centuries, Habsburg rule over enormous territories relied on the cooperation of aristocratic elites, which took care of administration, security, and jurisdiction on the regional and local levels. Habsburg rule was an indirect one. The ruler played hardly any role in his or her subjects’ daily lives and experiences, although Supplikationen offered a way to appeal directly to the emperor.23

This complex and slow apparatus provided a surprising degree of flexibility, since the different regions worked as segregated modules. The ruler dealt primarily with his aristocratic proxies in charge of regional and local affairs, a system that allowed to keep imperial administration slim and flexible, as bureaucratic tasks were outsourced and taken over by the emperors’ imperial intermediaries. At the same time, ancien régime rule had significant disadvantages. It was relatively slow in terms of recruiting and mobilization, it was expensive from the ruler’s perspective, as his proxies had a strong interest in providing as little money and men as possible in the context of taxation and military mobilization, and it proved increasingly inefficient. It further allowed an enormous range of economic and social particularities to coexist inside one single polity. Different formations of knowledge fundamental to running an empire remained strictly separated. It was particularly the ruler’s lack of information regarding the composition of environmental resources and populations on local and regional levels, yet also his deficient understanding of the spatial configuration of the empire that put him at a severe disadvantage by the mid-eighteenth century in Central Europe, at the latest.24

The regencies of three Habsburg rulers—Charles VI, Maria Theresia, and Joseph II—saw the introduction of a number of important lines of action that connect Habsburg Central Europe in the mid-eighteenth century and Habsburgh Central Europe in the mid nineteenth century (according to Koselleck, the so-called Sattelzeit). Charles VI initiated significant infrastructure projects, such as the Reichsstrassen, and Maria Theresia created a number of centralized administrative agencies and began to tackle issues of population census. Joseph II finally went ahead with the project of imperial centralization and furthered the production of significant topographical and cadastral maps.25 These three rulers laid the foundation of a fundamentally new architecture of imperial rule. By giving material form to the transmission of rule through the construction of buildings for administrative agencies, roads, and canals and the transformation of knowledge into paper, they tried to reduce their dependance on aristocratic elites and further their own policy spaces.26

Their attempts to wrest the significant knowledge formations required for the successful exercise of imperial rule from the aristocratic elites which had been in charge of the transmission of rule for centuries proved tiresome and difficult, yet as I will show in the following pages, the long-term operations they launched and the processes they initiated constitute a crucial line of continuity for any understanding of the modernization of Habsburg Central Europe in the long nineteenth century.

Mapping Lands, Assessing Resources, Counting Animals and Subjects

As mentioned above, it is extraordinary difficult to fashion a cohesive historical narrative concerning whatever political entity the Habsburg Empire between 1804/1806 and 1918 might have been. There was a central sphere of imperial rule, but it extended rather to the northeast than to the southwest, which is not in line with the dominant historiographical narratives that try to emphasize the coherence of twentieth-century Deutsch-Österreich.27

It is probably easiest to follow the trail of successful (and failed) attempts to further imperial consolidation on the crucial level of Burbank’s and Cooper’s imperial intermediaries by identifying the outlines of the different embodiments Habsburg rule underwent during the long nineteenth century. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, Habsburg rulers invested in a growing central administration, struggling to get better control of the resources necessary for imperial rule, which included humans and animals, or so-called natural resources. Drawing on three cases, I will offer examples of how this recalibration of imperial rule can be observed.

The expansion of the central administration, which encompassed, as I argue, the civil service yet also at least to some extent the military (for instance when it came to the enormously important mapping operations), was one trail to be followed, even though it did not emerge in a linear way.28 The second trail to be followed is the long-term operations and processes that proved so resilient that they endured the regencies of two or sometimes three different rulers.29 The land survey (started in 1807) and the cadastral mapping operation (begun in 1816) were both launched by Francis II/I. The land survey was only finished in 1869 under Francis Joseph, and the cadaster was finished in 1861. Both operations yielded substantial knowledge necessary to the modernization of rule, and both required tremendous resources in an era of scarce finances and significant political, social, and economic change. The realization of these projects thus must be have been a strenuous effort.

If we try to keep these two facets in mind before we step back to look at the bigger picture and the long lines of development of Habsburg Central Europe in the long nineteenth century, the Habsburg struggle for power and rule presents itself as an ongoing negotiation between rulers and different groups competing for roles as imperial intermediaries. It makes sense to frame the two major factions involved in this altercation as the older and settled aristocracy on the one hand and well-educated though hardly established middle-class social risers on the other.30 This long and tiresome negotiation between Habsburg rulers, their established aristocratic proxies, and the well-trained middle-class experts successively seeping into the growing central administration extended over well more than a century, ebbing forth and back, before ending in the interesting situation of the post-Compromise era. I plead for an interpretation of this as a process of imperial transformation rather than a long and teleological prelude to nation-statehood. During this transformation, which was not telic but (much to the ruler’s dismay) open-ended, we observe the substitution of one group of imperial intermediaries for another, and surprisingly, we see not only the older group involved in the new arrangement in the end, but also the emergence of new opportunities for larger groups of an increasingly integrated imperial society, and we also see an increase in terms of political participation.

Redesigning an Empire, Stitching Things Together

The details of the transformation of imperial rule are particularly interesting. I argue that the engagement of well-trained experts of middle-class descent in the ranks of the relatively new imperial central administration redefined the relationship between the empire and its different actors, ranging from humans to animals to material objects and resources.

The central process during the transformation of imperial rule was the production of a knowledge formation of crucial importance by the ruler himself. As the emperor’s view concerning the details of his subjects and his lands was blocked by aristocratic proxies who were not willing to share this delicate information with him, rulers in consecutive order began the tiresome work of producing their own knowledge bases. this process began with the launch of census operations and the like, as well as land surveys. Censuses and mapping operations are difficult to carry out, and the logistics behind them are similarly complex and challenging.31

Due to the extension of the Habsburg Monarchy, a considerable number of experts was required to address this enormous task, yet at the same time, the resources of which the imperial administration disposed in terms of staff and financial means were extremely limited. The first conscriptions began in the 1760s, followed soon by the Josephinische Landesaufnahme, both of which were measures that did not immediately yield the results that were hoped for.32 Rulers and the relatively small, centralized administration that was in place by that time, however, began to understand the breadth and the difficulty of the task that lay ahead of them.

In the long run, however, the beginning of this centralized production of a massive and comprehensive knowledge resource created a core of modern imperial administration.33 In contrast to the eventful political history of the Habsburg Monarchy in the long nineteenth century, its administrative history contains persistent strands of continuous development. Mapping and the production of statistical knowledge and statistical tools were not yet tasks particularly close to the ruler’s interests. We observe, on the contrary, an interesting dynamic that was transimperially representative: middle-class experts who had joined the ranks of the imperial administration advanced these fields with significant personal engagement and sometimes even their own money.34

In the 1740s, Maria Theresia recognized the necessity of redefining her relationship with her imperial intermediaries if she sought to remain politically competitive. Once she realized that this reform was extremely unlikely to happen, she started to rebuild imperial rule by creating new institutions that were supposed to circumvent the issues she encountered in accessing information concerning the subjects and objects encompassed by her sovereignty.35 From that moment onward, the fabric of modern empire was woven from at least two sides.

Middle-class Interests and Imperial Politics in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Unlike the aristocratic intermediaries of imperial rule, the middle-class experts and bureaucrats who were supposed to provide their rulers not only with information but also comprehensive knowledge usually disposed of little financial means or other forms of valuable capital.36 Their dependence on the ruler could be considerably larger than that of aristocrats in the transmission of imperial rule. The middle classes’ lack of resources beyond education, knowledge, and expertise is an important aspect to be taken into consideration in the study of the ongoing process of imperial transformation.

On the other hand, rulers depended on middle-class experts to advance their knowledge base and to further their degree of control over the lands they ruled. The first half of the nineteenth century provides particularly interesting examples in the case of Habsburg Central Europe. Emperor Francis II/I neither discontinued nor abandoned most of the institutions and innovations inherited from Joseph II On the contrary, he hesitatingly advanced and consolidated the respective progress that had been made. While he acted only reluctantly with regard to the installation of a statistical office, he launched the land survey in 1807 and the cadastral mapping operation in 1816. Mapping in particular required a considerable workforce of men (primarily well-trained military staff) who had significant respective qualifications.

The two mapping operations launched by Francis were only finished in the 1860s, making up for a large and quite costly process running in the background. It proved sufficiently resilient to resist a revolution and two successions to the throne. Once the statistical office started in 1829, it constituted a significantly smaller operation in the first place.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, maps and statistical tables were produced in large numbers, yet when it comes to statistics, only the smaller part of this material was created by the imperial bureaucracy, which does not mean that it was not produced by imperial bureaucrats. Middle-class civil servants were among the most important contributors of statistical information beyond the official authorities. The prominent case of Karl Czoernig is illustrative here. Czoernig remains an excellent example of a well-trained expert in the Habsburg administration whose ambition regularly went beyond his professional duties. An impatient polymath with a weakness for statistics, Czoernig did in his spare-time what he was not supposed (and sometimes not allowed) to do in his service. Like other young and ambitious bureaucrats of his generation (i.e., members of the new social strata composed of well-educated social risers of middle-class descent who were filling in for ancien régime predecessors after 1815 during the slow expansion of the civil service), Czoernig appears to have had his private and his professional interests aligned. Middle-class interests and imperial politics had little in common at first sight, yet surprisingly, they often overlapped in the decades after 1830.37

The Naturalization of Imperial History: Czoernigs Ethnographische Karte, 1857

The term public-private-partnership, which came into increasingly prominent use in the late 1990s and early 2000s, turns out to be surprisingly well suited to describe a common mode of cooperation between rulers and selected middle-class civil servants. The latter engaged in large and frequently costly operations to produce stellar bodies of significant knowledge. Rulers, in turn, granted financial support, yet, crucially important, they generously authorized the use of further pieces of restricted administrative knowledge and sometimes even of bureaucratic resources.38

Among the probably most outstanding examples of this phenomenon is Karl von Czoernig’s famous Ethnographie der österreichischen Monarchie, published in 1857 and stretching over several volumes.39 The book came with an ethnographic map based on the work of Joseph von Scheda, an officer in the Habsburg army and a leading cartographer of the era. What makes Czoernig’s map so important for an inquiry into the natural history of the Habsburg Empire is its composition. In an 18-page-long preface, Czoernig relocates the Habsburg Monarchy by connecting it with several new layers of legitimacy. Prior histories of Habsburg rule had relied primarily on the illustration of the Habsburg families sovereign descendancy, its provenance in the Roman-Greek pantheon on the one hand and that of the Catholic Church on the other. Czoernig provided additional legitimacy for Habsburg rule. He mobilized further support from an unexpected side, the inhabitants of Habsburg Central Europe.40 According to him, populations and also mountains and rivers ensured that Habsburg rule was firmly rooted in a larger harmonic ensemble. The Kaiserstaat (emperor’s state) rested solidly on foundations that equally balanced the heterogeneity of European peoples (Völkerstämme), climates, landscapes, and cultures. Situated in the middle of Europe, the Austrian Empire reflected the continent’s diversity in a single entity. It reconciled the mild south and the harsh north and Europe’s industrial centers and backward peripheries.41

There is another interesting passage in the preface which describes the task with which Czoernig was entrusted: “[…] [Czoernig] war darauf bedacht, neben der gleichzeitigen Bearbeitung der Darstellung der materiellen Hilfskräfte des Staates auch die Materialien zu einer ethnographischen Karte der Monarchie zu sammeln.”42 Czoernig, who was the acting head of Direktion der administrativen Statistik, the key statistical authority of the Habsburg Empire since 1841, refers to the twofold task he was supposed to perform. First, he was charged with assessing the material resources of which the empire disposed. Then, he was to gather the information required for the production of an ethnographic map. In the German original, there are two references to matter: once as a resource and once as a representation of knowledge. Czoernig was one man in a long line of Habsburg bureaucrats who were charged with putting the knowledge required to run an empire into material form. Tables and maps were material representations of the large quantities of information that was of fundamental importance to effective rule. In the era of the ancien régime, this information had not been accessible to the ruler nor to anyone else apart from the imperial intermediaries who were charged with its production and administration. This kind of knowledge was stored socially rather than physically. The transformation, by middle-class civil servants, of this knowledge into material form meant the modernization of imperial rule.

Though Czoernig’s narrative comes to no less than 712 pages and covers all matters touching Habsburg rule, it focuses primarily on what he refers to as ethnography. Czoernig refers only twice in his magnum opus to the overarching aspect of natural harmony that distinguished the Kaiserstaat, yet he does so in prominent and strategically important places—once in the preface and then on the opening page, i.e., in the two parts of the book that would have been read even by a reader who took only a short look at the enormous volume. In doing so, he slowly opened a backdoor for new actors to take their place on the stage of Central European historical discourse: mountains, forests, and streams.

Czoernig’s Ethnographie and particularly his statement concerning the challenges related to the analysis of the material foundations of imperial rule and the materialization of the knowledge necessary for rule mark a point of culmination in a process that had been underway for more than a century by the time the book was published. Czoernig and the fellow officials he mentions in his work, Scheda and von Coronini, were among the first Habsburg bureaucrats to dispose of significant knowledge on the materiality of empire. Their statistical (Czoernig) and cartographic (Scheda, von Coronini) work and that of their predecessors put them in a position to put together significant knowledge concerning the lands, vegetation, populations, livestock, and natural resources of the Habsburg Empire. They belonged to the generation of civil servants which gone past the threshold to reach reliable comparisons, and they stitched patches of data together and produced a comprehensive picture of Habsburg Central Europe as a polity. In close collaboration, they offered an image of Habsburg Central Europe as a unified and harmonic entity, presented by them as a confluence of many diverse natural features rather than as an arbitrary patchwork rug made up of territories and fiefdoms.

Czoernig and Scheda together produced a central European landscape and a population. Scheda’s spectacular map, focusing on the topography of Central Europe, created the first highly aesthetic “natural” foundation for Habsburg rule by turning its legitimacy upside down. If on looks at this map, “natural” borders immediately become visible, and the wider public clearly sees the inner coherence of the Kaiserstaat. At once, the notion that there could be no further commonality than the emperor’s person to glue this territory together becomes absurd.

Particularly to the east, the northwest, and the west, Scheda’s powerful representation of the important mountain ranges instills a sense of a nomological demarcation. The craftsmanship of this map lies in its composition, as can be seen toward the south, in northern Italy, and Dalmatia. The latter in particular lacks defining topographical features that would make it a part of the compact mass of the imperial territory. However, two legends, placed on each side of the Dalmatian coast, fill the empty space. They restore the balance of the map and provide additional information to charge the “natural” harmony of the structure with further meaning. To the left, the political structure is explained. It reproduces and further emphasizes the dominant natural features rendered visible in the map. To the right, Czoernig’s ethnographical features are described. That they do not entirely match the political and natural realities given visual form by the map is a major raison d’être of Habsburg rule. Mediation and settlement were the complex and difficult tasks to be executed precisely by the emperor.

The results of Czoernig’s ethnographic survey are plotted in no less than 14 colors, eight of which are dominant. At least visually, colors pair with distinct landscape features on more than one occasion, and Czoernig refers to this in his work as well when he describes the German-speaking groups as hardened dwellers of the Alpine regions and draws a connecting line between the Hungarian speakers, their language, and their supposed origins on the plain that formed the geographical center of the Monarchy.43

Improving Environments and Populations: The “Gypsy Census” of 1893

As has been shown in the previous section, by the 1850s, leading imperial bureaucrats of bourgeois descent had already begun to provide new sources of legitimacy for Habsburg imperial rule. According to the knowledge to which they had given material form, the Kaiserstaat reflected a natural order of things, and its environment was an essential asset with regard to the resources at the rulers’ (and their subjects’) disposal. Following this argument, its longstanding history proved that its eminent diversity in terms of the peoples, languages, and cultures it accommodated was neither anachronistic nor an anomaly. Rather, the Austrian Empire fulfilled an important function, serving as a bridge between many different peoples, landscapes, and histories that met in the very heart of Europe.

The coincidence between what were considered characteristic traits of individual tribes (Volksstämme) and respective topographies was an important argument used by Czoernig to emphasize the degree to which the shape and the structure of the Habsburg Empire and its administration harmonized with the natural conditions offered by Central Europe.

Czoernig’s book was published at the climax of neo-absolutism. The 1850s saw an enormous boost toward administrative centralization. It had been the emperor’s wish to remove the remains of the ancien régime from participation in imperial rule, which meant that the functions earlier performed by lordships and other representatives of the old regime had to be taken over immediately by a new imperial central administration.44 A major strategic aspect of this process was the finalization of the territorialization of imperial rule, which required a new settlement on the constitution and the regulation of centralized administration built entirely on territory.45 Bureaucracy worked, roughly, on four different layers: the municipalities; the layer of the Kreise (later districts); the layer of the Kronländer (provinces); and, finally, the top layer in Vienna, where all the ministries and the imperial administration were located. Each municipality covered a particular territory, each district covered a number of municipalities, each province encompassed a limited number of districts, and the empire was made up by the totality of its provinces. The totality of municipalities therefore constituted the entire territory of the Habsburg Monarchy. Each house, each tree, and each flower was attributed to the responsibility of a municipality, a district, and so on.46

This concept constituted a rupture with century-old and well-established practices and imaginations of space. It turned the ancien régimes principles of space upside-down, and it created interstices on which imperial administration could build, a process that led to a lasting transformation of the relationship between empire and its environment.47 Territorialization, however, came at a price. Maps and statistics worked slowly yet very well when it came to assessing the resources and capacities a territory had to offer if these assets remained stable and immovable. The Habsburg administration successfully operationalized an idea of space that divided the enormous area of the empire into relatively small containers, namely the municipalities. The sum of the far more than 20,000 municipalities, with all their resources, made up for the combined human and non-human resources of the empire, according to this logic. Although administrative reality soon revealed the flaws of this system and the suppositions it rested on (neither human nor livestock resources of empire were immobile), the combination of statistical information and cartographic knowledge became one of the foundations of modern empire.48

By the second half of the nineteenth century, statistics and cartography had become two branches of eminent importance in the imperial administration. Both developed autopoietic logics accordingly.49 Whereas cartography primarily produced visualizations of imperial power to be used in all branches of the bureaucracy, statistics had become a tool for the production and representation of knowledge used by many civil servants in most fields of civil administration. Beyond the central statistical services, which were mainly in charge of the census, statistical data was produced by many different branches of administration on different levels.50

Not only were maps and tables formidable tools of visualization, they also advanced planning and offered a foundation for arguments concerning what the empire should look like in the near future. Cadastral and topographic maps for the first time offered illustrations of the overwhelming proportion of “nature” in the Dual Monarchy, an impression further emphasized by statistical work concerning used and still unused “natural” resources, from livestock to forests to fields. Moreover, these representations placed “nature” in the imperial sphere of action. It rapidly became an object of imperial politics and schemes. Many principal interventions led by middle-class bureaucrats that had as an objective the “improvement” of imperial resources and populations aimed precisely at a structural modification of tendencies, activities, and habits seen, at least by the imperial administration, as natural, habits and tendencies involving both humans and their livestock and domesticated animals.

Whereas the example of Czoernig’s map shows that “natural” conditions could be used to support and emphasize legal claims and the legitimacy of rule, the case of “Czigányösszeirás eredményei,” or the “Gypsy Census” of 1893, shows that nature was also a predominant area of bureaucratic intervention. The head of the Hungarian statistical office, Dr. Antal/Anton Herrmann, compared the “Gypsy” population of the country to inarable land that requires significant improvement through structural measures. He names drainage and the construction of dams, measures that are supposed to allow agricultural land use indirectly through the improvement of the soil.51

Apart from the racist discourse of which these sentences are part, it is important to keep two aspects in mind here. The first is epistemic and emphasizes the conviction that both human and non-human dwellers of empire are basically subject to modification and improvement. The second important aspect here is the fact that an administration dominated by the middle class had little leverage for direct intervention into people’s lives. Administrative interventions therefore frequently aimed at a modification of conditions and circumstances, a strategy first put to use in controlling imperial “nature.”

Dominant imaginations of modern empire were therefore derived from a practice of imperial rule that had been developed over the course of little more than one century. This practice involved the incessant creation of new traffic and urban infrastructures, the production of new and better agricultural land and the administration of many of these projects from a top-down-perspective, and the use of the rich and detailed maps and tables produced by the statistical and cartographical services.52 The long nineteenth century saw the invention of the Habsburg Empire as a coherent natural sphere, and its ongoing improvement through imperial politics was a major aspiration for imperial politics.

Modern Empire and Its Forests on Display: Exposition Universelle, 1900

In April 1900, the exposition universelle was opened in Paris. It featured more than 76,000 exhibitors and attracted 48 million visitors, which made it an enormous success.53 The Dual Monarchy was represented by no less than three different delegations, one for Bosnia-Hercegovina, one for Hungary, and one for Austria.54

The Austrian contribution to the exposition reflected a considerable material effort on at least two levels. First, it included buildings, models, maps, samples of different products, catalogues, brochures, and a considerable delegation of high-ranking bureaucrats as well as representatives of industry, commerce, agriculture, and commodities. The General-Commissariat alone numbered two dozen members, all of them renowned experts and high-ranking members of the ministerial bureaucracy. The exposition universelle was a show of force of enormous significance. Nation states, empires, and manufacturers met in open competition in front of an enormous audience. A closer look at the exposition shows the importance of economic and technological leadership to imperial rulers and their administrations, yet it also reveals the dense fabric spun between economic, industrial, and administrative elites.55 Second, the Cisleithanian presence at the exposition universelle literally displayed the materiality of modern empire, the wide array of things, objects, and non-human life it encompassed and required for its operation, and the degree to which empire, its middle classes, and its environments were interlocked in this common effort. When referring to the material dimension of imperial rule as represented in the exposition universelle 1900 thus, we need to consider the enormous costs it involved as much as the ties it had to the material foundations of rule, which the Austrian contribution to the exposition sought to display in abundant clarity.

The exposition represented a dashing triumph of Western superiority. Its salons, displays, and promenades subtly united a rich cultural heritage (Western and Orientalized) with the mastery of modern technology, which represented the added value of the emergence of the middle classes.56 However, alongside the spectacular and exotic sights at this show of force, the exhibition also included many less flashy yet all the more remarkable displays, one of them effortfully organized and arranged by the Staats- und Fondsforste, administrated by the k.k. Ministerium des Ackerbaus. It came with a large and detailed catalogue that proudly featured its key parameters and left little doubt about the forest administration’s own assessment concerning its contribution to the modernization effort.

The catalogue displayed significant knowledge of the composition and use of the central European forests that formed part of the Staats- und Fondsforste, thus the proportion of the afforestation that was controlled by the central administration. These areas encompassed the remains of large and heterogeneous widely spread properties that were only merged under a common administration in the second half of the nineteenth century, when structured silvicultural land use under a centralized management began. To this end, the ministry of agriculture created an agency of its own, which disposed of seven regional offices, each in charge of a larger territory. The Gorizian branch of the forest and domain authority covered no less than four crownlands: Carinthia, Carniola, the Austrian Littoral, and Dalmatia. The forest and domain authorities constituted something interesting in the larger context of the imperial administration. They were fully within the ministry of agriculture and therefore the larger bureaucratic apparatus, yet they did not reproduce the larger and more general structure of central administration. The six regional offices did not fit into the overarching architecture of fifteen crownlands. The district offices of a given region (of the six) did not match the borders of the political districts. The personnel of this authority consisted of a middle-class staff made up primarily of forestry professionals with significant training and expertise. The forest and domain authority interlocked larger parts of the silvicultural environment and the imperial administration via its middle-class personnel.

The catalogue begins with a comprehensive description of the areas under control of the forest and domain authority. The properties it managed emanated from “priorly much larger [yet dispersed] possessions of Cameralgüter, Montanforsten and Fondsgüter” that originally (probably early nineteenth century) accounted for more than 13 percent of the imperial territory. These possessions shrunk over the course of most of the nineteenth century, before the establishment of said authority consolidated the situation (when these properties combined covered no more than 4.5 percent of the total territory), which finally led to a slight recovery (to around 5 percent of the territory in 1900).57 That the forest and domain authority knew its forests very well becomes clear in the next section of the catalogue, when a range of different tree species is presented in detail, including their respective preferred habitat conditions and their roles in the total population of trees owned by the state. Most important were the spruce and the European beech, which accounted for 51 and 20.5 percent of the total tree population respectively, followed by fir (18 percent), larch (4 percent), pine (3 percent), and diverse deciduous trees (2.2 percent). The authority’s impressive data on the composition of its forests came from its continued efforts concerning forest surveying. It displayed similarly impressive knowledge on the wide variety of climatic conditions occurring over the total area of the Habsburg forests.

The next section of the catalogue deals with the personnel employed in the service of silvicultural land use. The forest and domain authority disposed of a total staff of 1,474 people, predominantly specialists, including half a dozen engineers. According to the catalogue, the core mission of the authority consisted of ensuring the sustainable management of the tree population (“der Staatsforstbesitz [sollte] vornehmlich aus Gesichtspunkten der Förderung der allgemeinen Wohlfahrt bewirtschaftet werden”),58 yet this task appears to have gone markedly beyond simple forest economy. Among the three major sources of the forests administrated by the authority, particularly those emanating from the former Montanforste (forests that were exploited in the context of mining operations and sometimes early industrialization) were frequently in bad shape and required significant investment, and large scale reafforestation was necessary in many places. Soon after the ministry of agriculture had taken over control of the forests in 1873, it built large capacities to this end by creating permanent tree nurseries. As a next step, selective cutting was introduced to reduce clearcutting, though even in 1900, almost three quarters of the yearly revenue came from clearcutting and only one fifth through selective cutting, yet the areas suffering from deforestation had still become smaller. The forest and domain authority homogenized forestry across the territory of Cisleithania and developed best-practice approaches concerning the maintenance of the forests. Reafforestation was afforded in a blended procedure, mixing natural dissemination, sowing (particularly larches) and tree planting (primarily spruce), thus trying to balance ecological and economical objectives. Certain tree species were promoted regionally, for instance Swiss pine in some Alpine areas, yet in cooperation with the agricultural university of Vienna, the authority extensively experimented with tree species not native to Central Europe as well in the hopes of improving the yield of its forests.59

Further sections of the catalogue dealt with working conditions in the forests administrated by the forest and domain authority and with the general yields of these forests. The authority was very keen on presenting itself as an attractive and fair employer, particularly of the seasonal workforce required for the maintenance of the forests. The financial performance of the forests was subject to a critical assessment. In comparison with private forest properties in Cisleithania or other state-owned forest domains in the German Empire, which yielded between 6 fl. 19kr. and 29 fl. 19kr. per year and hectare, the forest and domain authority yielded only 1 fl. 54kr. per year and hectare.60 There were, however, single domains that fared significantly better in Bohemia, Lower Austria, and Western Galicia, which yielded between 17fl. 45kr. and 5 fl. 84kr. yearly per hectare.61

What were the major reasons for the overall poor performance of the forests managed by the forest and domain authority? It was, after all, an agency that claimed to be on the forefront of modern silvicultural administration and disposed of an adequate organizational structure, significant expertise, and sufficient means to render its assets profitable. This question deserves more attention than can be given here, yet servitudes and usufructs certainly were one factor. The forest and domain authority simply had no undivided claims to many of the more profitable assets it administrated. The ancien régime continued to exert influence in large patches of the modern state forest, thus surviving in a mode of coexistence with modern empire with which the latter grappled, a mode which further included grazing rights. The situation of many assets also played a role, as many forests were in exposed positions, which rendered silvicultural use in some cases impossible. The poor infrastructure added to the problem. Whereas older forest industry had relied heavily on log driving as a primary means of transport, the forest and domain authority desperately tried to move as much transport as possible to roads and tracks, but the construction of these infrastructure elements was costly and difficult.

The forest and domain authority made a proud display of its unbroken spirit of modernization and its capacities, competences, and achievements. The challenges and difficulties it dealt with, however, can also be read and understood as a larger self-description of the modern Habsburg Empire on the eve of a new century. Surely, it was the middle-class perspective that was represented here, but most scholars will agree that by 1900, larger parts of the Habsburg Monarchy should be considered an embodiment of a middle-class empire. It was a polity not only run by this growing social group, but also integrating at significant speed and to the benefit of this class. Another important feature is the slight moment of divisiveness concerning the empire’s composition, expressed by three different exhibition presences of different parts of Habsburg Central Europe. Most important, however, was the degree to which modern empire was interlocked with its environment and to which environmental resources were crucially exploited to finance further imperial integration (forestry was an eminently important branch of the Habsburg economy. The 5 percent of the Cisleithanian territory that was controlled and exploited by the forest and domain authority stretched over the entirety of Cisleithania (except for Moravia), yet it represented a very coarse-meshed net. In miniature, it realized the overall claim of the imperial administration: it successfully controlled an immense area. Yet the limitations with which it was confronted were all the more visible. The ancien régime continued to exist in many places and successfully prevented the empire from fully benefiting from what was considered modernization. The resulting weak profitability and the owner’s takeout barred important investments. And at the same time, negotiations with the quickly growing working class were not only tiresome but also costly. The middle-class empire was gaining ground, but this came at a price.

Conclusions

The analytic framework provided by new imperial history offers a good point of departure for a thorough analysis of the metamorphoses of rule that Habsburg central Europe underwent in the long nineteenth century. It provides a flexible terminology with which to identify, balance, and describe the different actors which made up for empire in this period. Though new imperial history has not emerged from a scholarly tradition with a particular focus on environmental history, this article shows that it offers sufficient opportunities to integrate such a perspective.

This article showed the degree to which the emergence of middle-class empire in Central Europe depended on a transformation of patterns of perception and exploitation of natural resources. In the beginning, the text recontextualizes the historiography of empire and statehood in nineteenth-century Central Europe, stating that the political landscape of this region was ambivalent and fluid for longer stretches of time, yet that statehood in particular provides an unsuitable terminology and little explanatory power to account sufficiently for an analysis of the political history of the region. After opting for imperial history as the most suitable analytical repertoire, the article presents its key insight: that middle-class bureaucrats successfully replaced established aristocratic elites as mediators of imperial rule in this region in a painstakingly long and slow process of transformation that began in the mid-eighteenth century.

Consequently, the text stays with the emerging middle class. It investigates the strategies that were successfully put to use and the resources that were exploited. In the main section of the article, I present three examples in order to illustrate three essential points. The first example from the 1850s shows how the Habsburg Empire rendered nature accessible to imperial politics by thoroughly integrating it into its master representations and entangling it with key parameters of imperial politics, such as the linguistic and ethnographic diversity of its peoples. The second example, from the 1890s, demonstrates the degree to which the improvement of nature in the empire had become a common and successful tool of imperial politics and a possibility to be used beyond nature. The third example finally shows how close the ties between modern empire and nature had become and the degree to which non-human actors of the imperial ensemble had to contribute to this ongoing operation. The exposition universelle left a lasting impression on the degree of modernity to which the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire lay a claim, yet it also illustrated that it was possibly less an empire as a united whole that had allied itself with a natural world it claimed to control and more one particular group within this empire, namely an interconnected middle class that benefitted from the larger European project of global imperialism.

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From Empire to Oblivion: Situating the Transformation of the Habsburg Empire in a Eurasian Context from the Eighteenth Century to the First World War

Jonathan Richard Parker
The University of Texas at Austin
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 2  (2022):422-444 DOI 10.38145/2022.2.422

In this essay, I situate the Habsburg Monarchy in the Eurasian imperial context by bringing together a variety of recent secondary literature dealing with the Habsburgs and examples of empires in world history. In doing so, I show how the Habsburgs paralleled and diverged from other polities that have been more consistently identified as empires. I also offer a schema for thinking about polities in terms of both how uniformly they are organized internally (i.e., how unitary they are) and the extent to which they can enforce the will of the center (how much like a state they are). This schema draws inspiration from a number of works, chiefly Karen Barkey’s Empire of Difference and Valerie Kivelson’s and Ronald Suny’s Russia’s Empires.

By applying this schema, I argue that the Habsburg Monarchy certainly embodied some characteristics of empire, even as its agents sought to transform it into something more similar to but still distinct from emerging nation states elsewhere. I argue that the Habsburg Empire underwent dramatic state consolidation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that many of the transformations and challenges it experienced in this period were broadly similar to those which other empires underwent or faced. I begin by defining “empire” and showing how the Habsburgs fit into that definition in the eighteenth century. I then discuss attempts to reform the Habsburg Empire into a more unitary, less structurally imperial polity, though I also keep in mind the ways in which it retained imperial characteristics. Specifically, I examine the role of nationalism in supporting and challenging imperial rule. Finally, I examine the destabilizing challenges the Habsburg Empire faced, in particular elite consensus and international legitimacy (or lack thereof).

Keywords: Habsburg Monarchy, empire, nation state, imperialism, nationalism

Doomed, anachronistic, a relic of a bygone age. Traditionally, this was how the Habsburg Empire was described by historians.1 Indeed, earlier works have tended to take for granted the triumph of the nation state over empire as the dominant political form. However, since the end of the Cold War, these views have come under growing scrutiny. While no historian is seriously advocating a return of either the Habsburg Empire in particular or empires in general, a new appreciation for the significance of both has developed. Empires have dominated so much of human history. How can we understand this history without offering accounts of imperial political forms?2 The Habsburg Empire, more specifically, has come in for a significant reevaluation, and the current consensus seems to be that it was not quite as doomed or “backward” as was once thought.

In this essay, I synthesize work on the modern Habsburg Empire3 with more comparative works on empire in general. I argue that the Habsburg Empire underwent dramatic state consolidation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that many of the transformations and challenges it experienced in this period were broadly similar to those which other empires underwent or faced. I begin by defining “empire” and showing how the Habsburgs fit into that definition in the eighteenth century. I then discuss attempts to reform the Habsburg Empire into a more unitary, less structurally imperial polity, though I also keep in mind the ways in which it retained imperial characteristics. Specifically, I examine the role of nationalism in supporting and challenging imperial rule. Finally, I examine the destabilizing challenges the Habsburg Empire faced, in particular elite consensus and international legitimacy (or lack thereof).

Defining Empire and the Habsburgs in the Eighteenth Century

Framing the Habsburg Monarchy as an empire is not just a question of terminology or convention. It is also an analytical issue. Framing the Monarchy as such helps situate it in world history and make useful comparisons between the Monarchy and other polities. There are good reasons to see it as an empire.

The most important characteristic of empire is that it is diverse. This diversity is often understood in ethnic or religious terms, but perhaps political diversity is more important. Empires are composed of several constituent units, typically territorial, each of which has a unique relationship to the imperial center. These units may interact with each other, but the most important relationship is the one between the center and these units. I avoid using the term periphery here because these constituents could actually be quite central to the imperial whole, whether geographically, politically, or economically.4 Each of these relationships is also open to renegotiation, which does not affect the other center-constituent relationships.

A useful metaphor to understand this arrangement comes from Karen Barkey’s Empire of Difference. In her study of the Ottoman Empire, Barkey characterizes empire as a “hub-and-spoke network” without a rim.5 This characterization highlights the individual relationships between the center (the hub) and the subordinate entities or constituent units (the spokes). To extend the metaphor, each spoke could be of a different character, i.e., different material, different width, even varying lengths. In an imperial structure, there is no need for each constituent entity to be identical to the others, nor is there any need for all such entities to have identical relationships with the center. This model applied rather neatly to the Habsburg case, where imperial crownlands in the nineteenth century were generally prohibited from coordinating with one another and where the imperial legal and administrative systems privileged center-constituent relationships over inter-constituent ones. This prohibition was made explicit in the 1861 regional provisions on the crownlands.6 However, this prohibition was steadily weakened over the course of the following decades, as I describe below.

This focus on diversity, whether political or cultural, resonates with many other comparative studies on empire. Jane Burbank’s and Frederick Cooper’s synthetic work Empires in World History offers a good example. Burbank and Cooper define empires as “large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people.” In the same paragraph, they note, “[t]he concept of empire presumes that different peoples within the polity will be governed differently.”7 A central feature of empire is the embrace and deliberate maintenance of difference, both horizontally (among the ruled) and vertically (between ruler and ruled). In keeping with this definition, the authors apply their comparative method to tease out various “imperial repertoires” in order to understand how diverse empires have managed and ruled over their populations. This word “repertoire” speaks to the non-systematic approach empires adopted. Imperial rule is often improvised and flexible. Imperial rulers have their habits, which shape what and how they could imagine ruling. They are constrained by circumstance and informed by past experience. This approach looks “for actions and conditions that pushed elements into and out of empires’ strategies,” rather than insisting on “false dichotomies of continuity or change, contingency or determinism.”8 Flexibility and adaptability are key features of imperial rule, and they underpin the management of political and cultural diversity, which was and is a consequence of imperial expansion.

These same themes crop up in Valerie Kivelson’s and Ronald Suny’s coauthored volume, Russia’s Empires. Kivelson and Suny identify four characteristics of empire and then focus on two key ones. These four characteristics are (i) a supreme sovereign, answerable to no one, (ii) a wide range of disparate lands and peoples, (iii) a strict hierarchy between metropole and provinces, and, most fundamentally, (iv) emphasis on differentiation rather than integration or assimilation.9 In their conclusion, the authors focus on two poles: authoritarian, even autocratic politics on the one end and diversity on the other.10 As an empire becomes more authoritarian, it suppresses diversity. Conversely, as the imperial center embraces diversity, empires become less authoritarian and more conciliatory with their constituent units.

Moving beyond Europe, William Rowe’s China’s Last Empire gives an account of the Qing dynasty, which ruled much of East Asia from about 1636 until 1912. In his introduction, Rowe succinctly summarizes the various historiographical shifts in thinking about late imperial China. One of the major “turns” he identifies is the “Inner Asian” turn, a development of cultural history. This approach emphasized representations of reality over facts, de-essentializing categories and resituating them as “culturally negotiated and historically contingent.”11 Such an approach will be familiar to scholars of the Habsburg Empire, who have witnessed the deconstruction of nationalism and nationality in the historiography of late imperial Austria in the past few decades.12 A central argument advanced by this turn in the historiography of the Qing is that the dynasty constructed a “Manchu” ethnic identity for itself after its conquest of China proper. Unlike previous dynasties, the Qing conceived of a universal empire with remit to rule over as many people as possible, i.e., a multinational polity. In this framework, China proper was simply one component alongside others, such as Tibet, Outer Mongolia, and Xinjiang. Rather than imposing a single, homogenous culture upon these various pieces, the Qing deliberately cultivated separate ethnic identities for their various constituencies. This separation extended into the self-presentation of the Qing themselves, who adopted a multitude of roles to legitimize their rule over a multitude of peoples. The Confucian “Son of Heaven” was only one among many such roles.13 Diversity thus played a critical role in shaping Qing rule and the specific form of empire which emerged in East Asia in the seventeenth century.

These understandings of empire apply to the Habsburg context. The Habsburgs were known for expansion more through strategic marriages, inheritance, and diplomacy than direct military conquest. They acquired the Kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526 by election, and these titles were legally converted into hereditary titles in the seventeenth century. While military conquest did play a role in these acquisitions, that conquest was legitimized through a legal claim based on a preexisting title or realm.14 Consequently, the Habsburgs, like other feudal monarchs, had to contend with the historical privileges and traditions peculiar to individual political units or, more specifically, with the local nobility’s legal claims based on historical precedents predating Habsburg rule. These could not easily be swept aside without undermining the imperial claim to the title itself, since these claims often entailed an obligation to uphold the rights and privileges of the local nobility. This constituted one half of the reciprocal relationship between monarch and subject, the other half being the military and financial support provided (as an obligation) by the monarch’s subjects. These issues of noble privilege and the historic rights of crownlands persisted in some form or another into the nineteenth century, even informing later nationalist discourses, particularly in the Bohemian and Hungarian crownlands. Each province brought with it its own specific history and legal traditions, forcing the imperial center in Vienna to reckon with this legal diversity long before the rise of modern popular nationalisms. In this way, the structure of the Habsburg realms was quite similar to imperial formations elsewhere.

An illuminating example of these issues comes from Galicia, the Austrian portion of the Polish partition added to the empire at the end of the eighteenth century. Despite Habsburg ambitions to impose a model of uniform, centralized rule, Vienna was forced to accept local power structures in order to rule. As Iryna Vushko demonstrates in The Politics of Cultural Retreat, the Habsburgs and their officials in Vienna initially imagined Galicia as a tabula rasa or blank slate. They imagined that they had a “civilizing mission” to improve Galicia, extirpating its “backwardness” and the “pernicious influence” of the landed nobility on the peasantry.15 The imperial bureaucrats who were sent to Galicia from all parts of the Monarchy were quite surprised by what, or rather who, they found there. They quickly sympathized with the Polish-speaking nobility thanks to a shared elite culture (i.e., they spoke French, read contemporary literature, etc.). Over time, many bureaucrats adopted Polish language and culture, married into the local nobility, and raised Polish children. This constituted a rejection of the imperial center’s designs for Galicia. The imperial authorities were forced to accommodate the local nobility and incorporate existing elites into the imperial administration.16 This inclusion paralleled the way in which the local nobilities in other crownlands had historically controlled their local administrations prior to 1740.17 This inclusion is also particularly striking, considering that Galicia was carved out of Poland and only acquired a distinct legal, cultural, and political identity as a region or crownland after having become part of the Habsburg Empire.18 The inclusion of the local nobility also throws into relief the kind of diversity which characterized the Monarchy at the beginning of the modern era. Rather than a single, unitary state, the Monarchy before the nineteenth century was composed of semi-autonomous component pieces or, to return to Barkey’s metaphor, spokes, each of varying make and length, populated by specific, local structures of power.

Making a Unitary Polity

In the eighteenth century, various actors began seeking to reform the Habsburg Empire into a more tightly knit, unitary state. I distinguish between being unitary and being a state (i.e., stateness) in order to avoid methodologically coupling the two. I use the word polity as an umbrella term to refer to any kind of constellation of political power that independently exercises authority. Thus, I conceptualize two separate axes for describing polities. One axis runs from a unitary polity toward a more decentralized, loosely constituted one. Unitary polities are characterized by uniform relationships between the center and the polity’s constituent units, i.e., all the spokes radiating out from the hub are the same. By this definition, imperial polities are only minimally unitary, if at all. Polities may also be centralized if the central government has a high degree of control over the constituent pieces, but this need not be the case. The second axis describes the degree of “stateness,” i.e., state capacity, or the extent to which a government can exert its will on the communities, individuals, and territories it claims to govern. High degrees of stateness are characterized by an extensive state apparatus (e.g. bureaucracy, law enforcement), the function of which is to carry out the will of the government. In this section of the essay, I focus on how the Habsburgs and other empires transformed themselves into more unitary polities and the challenges they encountered in this process.

As Pieter Judson has demonstrated in his synthesis of recent Habsburg historiography,19 the Habsburgs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in particular Joseph II, embarked on an ambitious program of reform. First, the imperial center sought to bolster and make more complete both its knowledge of and ability to act in the various crownlands. In doing so, the Habsburg center sought “to consolidate its control over several very different territories.” In practice, this meant bypassing “traditional local relationships of power” and “breaking the traditional political dominance exercised by regional powerbrokers, the local nobility.” This leads neatly into another of Judson’s themes: the Habsburg reconceptualization of the proper relationship between the government and both its aristocratic and common subjects. The Habsburgs and their advisers in the late eighteenth century developed and sought to implement a new notion of imperial citizenship, one which “saw the people of the empire in essentially comparable and interchangeable terms, rather than in traditional hierarchies of privilege.”20 The imperial center sought to break down the existing corporate relationships whereby individual subjects related to the center only via their local, crownland hierarchies. While Judson specifically emphasizes the development of a centralized state, it is also possible to read these changes as moves toward a unitary polity where the specificities of local legal and political history are minimized and the constituent units have a uniform relationship to the center. This does not necessarily mean that the center comes to dominate, only that each unit has the same rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis the center. At the same time, the reforms that Judson describes met with only limited success.

Despite setbacks, over the course of the nineteenth century, reformers and politicians in the Empire gradually molded it into a somewhat more cohesive polity. As John Deak has shown, after Joseph II, the imperial bureaucracy became one of the main forces pushing for change. Deak’s work focuses on Vienna and its imperial reformers from 1740 until 1914.21 Unfortunately, this means that Habsburg Hungary receives less attention, but his discussion remains quite illuminating. He argues not only that Maria Theresa and Joseph II initiated a radical program of organizing new state structures and personnel to govern the realm (in short, a bureaucracy), but also that the people who staffed this bureaucracy imbibed a specific ethos of service to and reform of the Habsburg polity. This ethos, or perhaps a professional culture, helped to animate and motivate the bureaucracy to be an agent of reform and state consolidation, even when Joseph II’s successors (particularly Francis II, who ruled first as Archduke and then as Emperor of Austria from 1792 to 1835) did not share the Josephine zeal for reform.

In addition, Deak’s account indicates that the agents of imperial consolidation were not constant. While reform began on the throne with Maria Theresa and Joseph II, in the nineteenth century, the initiative seems to have shifted toward the bureaucracy. Jana Osterkamp’s work on the concept of “cooperative empires” points to an additional shift in the early twentieth century.22 Osterkamp argues that while cooperation between the imperial crownlands in the Cisleithanian (or non-Hungarian) portion of the empire was formally forbidden,23 in practice, it became increasingly necessary in order to deal with the ballooning debt crises on both the provincial and imperial levels of government. Osterkamp links this growing cooperation to the de facto federalization or Verländerung of the empire, beginning with the delegation of administrative powers to the crownlands in the 1860s via the 1867 fundamental law of the state and the 1861 regional statutes. Essentially, the crownlands’ power to pursue modernization projects (principally building and improving infrastructure, schools, and hospitals) increased without a commensurate increase in their power to collect revenues. This led after 1880 to a massive increase in the debt of the crownland governments.24 Osterkamp argues that, in response to this crisis, a “paradigm shift” occurred in 1905, when, “for the first time in the history of the Habsburg monarchy,” representatives from the Cisleithanian crownland legislatures met for joint consultations.25

These and similar meetings continued over the following years, with the upshot that the crownlands successfully negotiated as a bloc with the imperial government to receive a portion of imperial revenues in order better to support their own finances. Further reforms to increase cooperation among the regional and imperial governments to manage debt and income were only interrupted by World War I. Osterkamp calls these developments the emergence of a “cooperative empire,” since they represent an unprecedented degree of horizontal, interregional cooperation.26 I would also argue that these developments can be read as a move away from imperial forms of government, since the relationships between the provinces and the center, as well as between the centers, became more homogenous, i.e., all these relationships were regulated together rather than separately. Additionally, the impetus for reform and consolidation came not from the imperial center, but from the regions themselves. This point highlights the way in which empires, like the Habsburg Empire, can reform into less imperial and more state-like formations and that the push for reform can come from a variety of political actors. As Osterkamp herself argues, “one must acknowledge that the process of change from empire to a nonimperial state is fluid.”27 Of course, it is also important to keep in mind that while all of this was happening, Hungary remained an entirely separate part of the empire, indicating that imperial consolidation can take place in a politically heterogenous environment.

The Habsburgs were not alone in these endeavors. As Victor Lieberman argues in his 1,500-page work Strange Parallels, polities in both Europe and Southeast Asia experienced dramatic state consolidation in the mid to late eighteenth century. He does not focus exclusively on empires, although they figure prominently in his analysis. He situates this parallel in a millennium-long cycle of political consolidation between 800 and 1830, synchronized in four cycles. A general trend toward greater political and eventually cultural consolidation was occasionally punctuated by periods of collapse and crisis, but these interregna grew gradually shorter over time. As Lieberman argues, by the nineteenth century, these trends had produced “an unprecedentedly powerful and extensive formation.”28

Lieberman makes several claims in reference to what he terms the “protected rimlands” of Eurasia, namely northwestern and northeastern Europe (he focuses on France and Russia), Japan, and mainland Southeast Asia, all of which were located on the periphery of the traditional core of settled, agrarian, Eurasian polities in South Asia, China, and the Mediterranean littoral. These “rimlands,” from the sixth century through to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, “domesticated world religions, developed unprecedentedly grand architectural complexes and/or public works,” and underwent “secondary state formation,” to borrow Barbara Price’s term. Lieberman terms the principalities founded in this era “charter states” in the sense that “their religious, dynastic, and/or territorial traditions” became normative and legitimizing for local successor states. These “charter states” disintegrated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with territorial consolidation resuming sometime between 1450 and 1590. This consolidation grew in scope and efficiency into the nineteenth century. The increased solidity of emergent states reflected the combination of three trends: first, the expansion of monetary resources, which in turn was a result of growing populations and trade; second, the greater inclusiveness of cultural identities; and third, the improvement of administrative and military technologies, which was motivated by interstate competition.29

Lieberman’s work also clearly shows how the Habsburg experience of state building fits into Eurasian, not just European, trends. He himself notes this at several points in his argument, emphasizing territorial expansion, the establishment of a professional army, and broadly the unification of administrative structures.30 These transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are covered in broad strokes in this essay. An earlier interesting moment to situate in Lieberman’s cycle is the establishment of the Habsburgs in Austria. The Habsburgs gained the duchy of Austria for the first time in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. In doing so, they supplanted the Babenberg dynasty, whose last male heir had died in 1246.31 The Babenbergs traced their rulership back to 976,32 during the “charter states” period identified by Lieberman. The Habsburgs claimed legal continuity with the Babenbergs, using forged documents purportedly from that era to attempt to cement their position in the Holy Roman Empire in 1359.33 Their use of burial sites as early as 1280 also demonstrated a claim to the Babenberg tradition, along with the grander pretension to Carolingian heritage.34 This use reinforces the idea of the Babenbergs as the Habsburgs’ normative and legitimizing charter state, although an argument could also be made for the Carolingians and even the Romans.35 The Habsburgs later experienced a period of political fragmentation at the end of the fourteenth century, beginning with the Treaty of Neuberg in 1379.36 The Habsburgs also acquired the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns in 1437, only to lose both of them again within 20 years.37 These events coincide with a period of political fragmentation in Lieberman’s schema.38 These crowns were reacquired more permanently in 1526, in the period which Lieberman identifies as state consolidation among the Eurasian rimlands.

Lieberman ends his analysis roughly in 1830–1850, but it is interesting to note the broad shift after those dates toward political disintegration, i.e., the next “cycle” in Liberman’s schema. The period after 1830 was marked by an increase in smaller polities and a weakening of imperial power, even as the imperial center in Vienna sought to hold off these forces. The 1848 revolutions in the Habsburg lands generally took on a liberal nationalist character, challenging the imperial center’s political and cultural authority (even though these revolutions failed). As Alice Freifeld has shown in Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, the failure of 1848 in Hungary was mythologized in ways which mobilized and united Hungarian-speakers behind the crownland’s elites, contributing to the growth in Hungarian nationalism over the following decades.39

While these forces did not overthrow Habsburg rule, the empire was eventually destroyed by interstate competition in the form of World War I, along with the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the German Empire to some degree. Notably, six years earlier in 1912, the Qing Empire in China had collapsed. In its place, a republic was declared under pressure from colonial powers (another form of interstate competition) and anti-colonial nationalism (challenging the cultural authority of the imperial center and its traditions). Thus, one can situate the transformations within the Habsburg Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century within Lieberman’s Eurasian framework as part of a long pattern of consolidation and disintegration. The progressive growth and intensification of state power and territorial consolidation and the challenges to imperial authority in the nineteenth century fit within the broader Eurasian trends for which Lieberman argues.

Nationalism and Empire: A False Dichotomy?

Despite these moves toward consolidation, the Habsburg Empire retained significant imperial characteristics in its final decades. Several scholars have pointed to the ways in which the empire participated in European colonialism, including its so-called “cultural mission” in Bosnia and Habsburg civil society’s engagement with colonial ideas.40 In this section, and focusing on domestic developments, I argue that empires and nationalist politics are able to coexist and even synergize. I then suggest that this is a feature of imperial diversity, or empires’ tendency to govern pluralistically. In this way, the Habsburg Empire’s ability to accommodate and even make use of nationalist politics is an important way in which it retained imperial characteristics even toward the end of the empire’s existence and after a century of political and administrative consolidation. While the empire did ultimately dissolve into nationally-defined successor states, prior to 1914, nationalists were able to work within the framework of the empire to pursue their own goals.41

Scholarship in recent years has already turned to addressing the relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Osterkamp, cited above, argues that we would do well to break down the dichotomy between empires and nation-states in order to conceptualize specific, historical states as existing along a sliding scale rather than in discreet categories.42 A more comprehensive treatment comes from Stefan Berger’s and Alexei Miller’s edited volume Nationalizing Empires. This volume focuses on the emergence of nations at imperial cores rather than throughout empires’ constituent pieces. These “imperial nationalisms” were symbiotic to the empires they occupied, seeking to reform the empire so that it could be more effective without seeking to incorporate all the lands and subjects of the empire into the nation located at the empire’s core.43 However, the Habsburgs did not fit neatly into this schema, as shown by one contribution to Nationalizing Empires, since there was no clear imperial core that emerged out of the confluence of economic, cultural, and political forces.44 In contrast to this work, I am interested not so much in the role of nationalism in the imperial core, i.e., at the center, as I am in the relationship between imperialism and nationalism throughout empires’ component parts.

One complex example of this synergy between nationalism and imperialism in the Habsburg case comes from Bosnia. In Taming Balkan Nationalism, Robin Okey argues that the Habsburgs occupied the Ottoman province of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 in an attempt to neutralize the threat posed by Yugoslav, Croatian, and Serbian nationalist movements, specifically by promoting a separate Bosnian identity that would align with imperial interests, based on existing religious communities and the history and tradition of the province. The province contained a diverse population most of which spoke a South Slavic language and practiced Catholicism, Christian Orthodoxy, or Sunni Islam. Austro-Hungarian officials (the empire having officially become Austria-Hungary in 1867 and Bosnia being occupied in 1878 as a “condominium” shared by the two halves) and Croatian and Serbian nationalists all saw in Bosnia the human material for their various political and cultural projects. The occupying Austro-Hungarian forces, primarily under the governorship of Benjamin von Kállay, sought to block Serbian and Croatian nationalist influences. They pursued this goal by building schools and infrastructure to promote a Bosnian civic identity with the Muslim population as a conservative backbone but without making religious affiliation a defining element. In doing so, von Kállay sought to foster and instrumentalize Bosnian nationalism against other South Slav nationalisms and harness it to the interests of the imperial center.45 Even if von Kállay’s project met with only limited success, it nevertheless demonstrates that imperial proponents like him could conceive of nationalism as a useful political tool.

Of course, Habsburg interactions with nationalist projects were not always so deliberate. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, specific decisions and laws at the imperial level inadvertently boosted nationalist demands, enabling nationalists to use imperial institutions to support their nation-making projects. For example, the provision in the 1867 constitution stipulated equality between the languages of the Habsburg Empire, granting citizens on an individual basis the right to conduct their affairs in a recognized language of their choosing. In spite of the intentions of the provision’s framers (who sought to ensure that German would remain the principle language of “serious” affairs while conceding “less important” matters to other languages), this quickly enabled nationalists across the empire to make demands on behalf of their claimed language, even if they still could not invoke “the nation” in a legal sense. Language became a proxy for nationality, backed up by imperial guarantees of equality. This in turn led to the 1905 Moravian Compromise, in which the imperial state sought “to defuse the national conflict in Moravia” between Czech and German nationalists by obliging citizens of the crownland to register formally as belonging to one nationality or the other. This would enable a segregation of political and administrative institutions along national lines. While no similar agreement came together for Bohemia, others were implemented in Bukovina in 1910 and Galicia in 1914.46 In this way, the empire created a legal framework which enabled and emboldened nationalist politics.

The other major imperial institution which contributed to the nationalization of politics was the census. Benedict Anderson, writing about the Southeast Asian context, argued that the census is an important tool in the imagining of national communities.47 In the Habsburg context, the census became a tool for nationalists to make claims about and on behalf of their imagined nations. The 1880 census was the first to ask respondents to indicate a “language of daily use” or “Umgangssprache.” Government officials deemed this information necessary in order to govern and communicate with their citizens. However, an international convention established in 1872 stipulated that each respondent could only list one language, erasing bilingualism in the official records at a stroke. Furthermore, while imperial officials refused to make an explicit connection between language and nationality or ask about nationality on the census, nationalists had no problem linking the two.48 This linkage, combined with the understanding of the census as a supposedly objective representation of reality, allowed nationalists to use the census to make claims about the relative strengths of their nations and in turn to demand state support for education in minority languages.49 Nationalists were thus able to use imperial institutions, such as the census, to pursue their political-cultural projects.

In other cases, nation-building projects were able to establish and develop themselves within existing imperial structures without necessarily seeking to overthrow them. This is one argument that Beno Gammerl makes in his comparison of late nineteenth-century Canada and Hungary in his work on citizenship. His comparison shows how both sub-imperial entities pursued homogenizing nationalist policies. Canada implemented exclusionary mechanisms to limit and control immigration from other parts of the British Empire (primarily to maintain a “white Canada,” excluding Asian immigrants and limiting the rights of indigenous First Nations peoples). In contrast, Hungary sought to encourage non-Magyars to adopt Magyar culture and join the ethnically defined Hungarian nation, especially after 1879.50 However, Gammerl argues against reading these nationalist tendencies as evidence of a desire on the part of these groups ultimately to secede from their respective empires.51 Rather, they are evidence of the ways in which nation-state projects could develop even within imperial frameworks. Hungary was able to pursue Magyarization thanks to the Compromise of 1867, which afforded Hungary significant autonomy in its domestic affairs. At the same time, Canada coordinated with the British imperial government to discriminate against fellow British subjects from India without damaging the prestige of British subjecthood. This was achieved by only allowing immigration by Indian subjects who had arrived directly from India (and not via another country such as the United States) and instructing shipping companies to avoid selling tickets to Indian subjects, thereby cutting off the only means of traveling directly from India to Canada. This combination of policies seems to have satisfied London’s preference for “indirect discrimination.”52 In both cases, Hungary and Canada were able to pursue nationalist policies of social engineering without seceding from their respective empires.

Work from other parts of Eurasia seems to support these conclusions. Prasenjit Duara has examined Japanese imperialism in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which was established in northeast China or Manchuria from 1932 until 1945. Recent scholarship has shown how Manchukuo was a place of paradoxes, where it was “difficult to disentangle imperialism from nationalism, modernity from tradition, frontier from heartland, and ideals of transcendence from ideologies of boundedness.” Duara sees these paradoxes not only in Manchukuo specifically, but also in the wider problems of early twentieth-century modernity. He argues that “no matter how imperialistic the intentions of its builders, Manchukuo was not developed as a colony but as a nation-state,” one which sought international legitimacy by claiming to represent the authentic culture of Manchuria and its inhabitants.53

As Duara explains, the Pan-Asianism in the Japanese civilizing mission produced a number of tensions between inclusivity and exclusivity. On the one hand, Manchukuo was an ally and sovereign partner in a regional (East Asian) anti-Western coalition. On the other, it was subordinated to Japanese interests and constrained by a neo-colonial power structure.54 Duara locates this tension between equity and hierarchy, or national sovereignty and imperial power, in the need of both nationalism and imperialism to adjust themselves to the ideological circumstances of the interwar period. On one side, imperialists were forced to accommodate demands for self-representation among their subjects. On the other, nationalism had to adapt to the “territorial imperative” that drove contemporary polities into competition and expansionism in order to achieve its goals.55 In this context, Manchukuo nationhood helped legitimate Japanese indirect rule and imperial domination. In this way, Japanese imperialism sought to accommodate itself to calls for greater self-government around the world by instrumentalizing notions of Manchukuo nationhood. Thus, the Habsburg Empire was not unusual in its ability and willingness to work with ideas of nationhood to legitimize itself.

Destabilizing Challenges in Global Context

The Habsburg Empire encountered several challenges that threatened its long-term survival, both at home and abroad. Two significant challenges were the struggle for consensus at the imperial center and the empire’s faltering international recognition and legitimacy abroad. In other words, do imperial elites at the center itself agree on what needs to be done? And do other polities, especially powerful neighbors, recognize the legitimacy of the polity in question (in this case, the Habsburg Empire)? While the answers were usually yes to both questions in the Habsburg context, there were key points when Habsburg officials struggled to reach a consensus or convince other polities of the empire’s legitimacy. They were not alone among other imperial polities in facing these challenges.

Two examples come from, first, the British Empire, as described by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher in Africa and the Victorians, and, second, the Portuguese Empire, as discussed by Sanjay Subrahmanyam in The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700. Both works focus on European maritime empires and illustrate the importance of consensus among imperial policy makers in distinct time periods. Robinson and Gallagher use the term “the official mind of imperialism” to characterize imperial decision making and explain British imperial expansion in Africa. They focus on decision making in Britain rather than factors in Africa.56 This “official mind” of imperialism centered on the machinery of imperial policymaking in London, more specifically in Whitehall. Official policy represented an accumulated mass of experience and tradition which had been passed down “unbroken from Pitt and Canning to Palmerston and Clarendon” through the “great country houses of the land.” They continue: “Most ministers had been born in the Eighteen twenties and thirties, read classics or mathematics at Oxford or Cambridge and serve their political apprenticeships in junior posts under Palmerston or Disraeli in the late Fifties and Sixties.”57 Ministers shared a certain outlook, and even as governments came and went, the general consensus on imperial policy remained the same. A united elite culture at the imperial center facilitated the implementation of imperial policy.

Subrahmanyam’s multi-layered account of the Portuguese Empire in Asia from 1500 to 1700 provides an informative counterexample. One of Subrahmanyam’s main arguments is that the Portuguese imperial center lacked a clear consensus on its maritime expansion into the Indian Ocean. Metropolitan Portugal was “riven by tensions, between different social classes, within the elite itself, and between different regions.” These tensions inhibited the formulation of a consistent policy on maritime expansion, which in turn led to several shifts in policy during the sixteenth century. These shifts included a growing elite snobbery against commerce, a reorientation from the Indian Ocean to Brazil, and an unwillingness by the Iberian Habsburgs to fund colonial expansion in Asia. These factors, along with changes in Asia itself and growing European competition, meant that Portuguese possessions in the Indian Ocean region shrank considerably.58 A lack of elite consensus and sustained focus on long-term goals contributed to Portugal’s imperial decline in Asia.

In the Habsburg case, the lack of consensus among the elites manifested not only as conflicts between the imperial center and its constituent pieces but also at the center itself, exemplified in the transition from Joseph II to Francis II. As Deak argues, the experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars caused the Habsburgs, who feared unrest and sought political stability, “to turn sharply away from their state-building project.”59 This change of direction created an ideological conflict between the court and the recently created bureaucracy.60 Francis II and his court deliberately neglected and stifled the bureaucracy wherever they could, even as they paradoxically relied on it to buttress their power, while the new caste of educated elites in the bureaucracy sought to carry on the Josephinist project.61 While the bureaucracy carried on reforms throughout the nineteenth century, it did not regain the kind of support it had had under Joseph II.

Indeed, the fissures in the Habsburg Empire only became more substantial as time passed, particularly between the upper echelons of the imperial military and other parts of both the government and wider Habsburg society. Ultimately, the military’s discontent with the direction of Habsburg society and imperial politics proved fatal for the empire. Jonathan Gumz and John Deak make this argument convincingly in their account of how the Habsburg military high command (AOK or Armeeoberkommando) tore apart the civilian administration in the first two years of World War I. Crucially, the assault on the rule of law by the military was rooted in a deep-seated disdain among the military elite for the growth of constitutional government after 1867 in the empire. A particular target was the state administration, which the military leadership regarded as complicit in what it also regarded as dangerously disloyal nationality politics. In short, where the civilian bureaucracy saw a need for compromise with nationalist politics, the military high command saw a need for repression. This difference in perception contributed to “an increasingly hostile set of oppositions between the army, the state administration, and broad swaths of the political classes.” In turn, in 1914 the military used the war and the exceptional state that military necessity provided in order radically to alter the political and legal life of the empire, suspending constitutional guarantees of rights and privileges.62 As Gumz has argued elsewhere,63 the military used this situation to attack any perceived nationalist sentiment or disloyalty to the empire, up to and including summary executions of suspected traitors.64 It is thus hardly surprisingly that, when the Austrian Reichsrat or parliament was reconvened in May 1917 for the first time since February 1914, things did not go well. Many of the deputies had become hostile to both the military and the state administration, and there was little political will for compromise. While they were not openly calling for the end of the empire, deputies demanded that the civilian and military administrators who had arbitrarily imprisoned and executed Habsburg citizens be punished.65 The legitimacy of the empire had been seriously damaged by the military’s cooptation of the bureaucracy and its effort to impose its own vision of politics. This schism between the military and civilian elites proved fatal in 1918.

The other challenge for the Habsburg Empire and emergent Habsburg state was international legitimacy. The late nineteenth century bore witness to academic delegitimizations of the Habsburg polity on the grounds that a multinational state was unnatural and undesirable. In his article “The Sociological Idea of the State,” Thomas Prendergast lays out the debates that took place among sociologists, political scientists, and legal scholars in the late 1880s, pitting Habsburg scholars primarily against their French and German counterparts. Prendergast argues that Habsburg scholars developed a useable, “sociological” concept of statehood which in turn provided a theoretical legal basis for a multinational state. These debates mattered because they informed the curricula which trained the empire’s jurists and administrators. These people were, according to proponents of “sociological” statehood, “key to propagating and entrenching a correct understanding of the Austrian state.” This conception of the state attracted the support of people like Tomáš Masaryk (future founder of Czechoslovakia) and Polish-Jewish sociologist Ludwig or Ludwik Glumpowicz. Glumpowicz in particular argued that western European and Habsburg states represented not mutually opposed modern and pre-modern political forms but, rather, analytically comparable phenomena.66 This approach opposed emerging political-legal schemata in France and Germany, as well as Italy, which took the nation state to be the natural form of modern polities and cast multiethnic polities like Russia and the Ottoman Empire as backward and antimodern. The fact that the Habsburg Empire did not always fit neatly into these schemata only lent weight to the idea that it was somehow abnormal. Austrian scholars like Masaryk and Glumpowicz repeatedly argued that the conceptual categories of German constitutional law, for example, were “weapons in the war on Austrian legitimacy in particular, and multiethnic statehood in general.”67

The Habsburg or Austrian state was not alone in this regard. As Antony Anghie has argued in Imperialism, Sovereignty, and International Law, international law in general and the concept of sovereignty in particular have deeply colonial histories. International law as a discipline grew out of the European civilizing mission, which justified colonial rule over indigenous peoples globally by defining these peoples as non-sovereign and by maintaining an increasingly refined and elaborate distinction between “civilized” and “uncivilized” or “universalizing” and “particular.” These distinctions helped undergird the colonial relationship, baking colonial attitudes into the very heart of international law. This same international law also made it virtually impossible for former colonies to take their former overlords to court for damages inflicted by colonial rule.68 While the Habsburg Empire was not itself colonized, the very form of its political organization was delegitimized by European legal theory. These arguments in turn facilitated the partition of the empire in 1918, even while Germany, its former ally, retained the majority of its pre-1914 European territory.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued that the Habsburg Empire sought to reform and consolidate itself in the period from the 1740s until World War I. In spite of these reforms, the empire did not become a unitary state but continued, rather, to function much like an empire. Besides the obvious case of Hungary separating from most Austrian institutions in 1867, the Habsburg Empire also worked with and through a number of sub-imperial nationalist projects, none of which convincingly occupied a core role in the empire’s identity. By accommodating these nationalist projects, the Habsburgs exemplified a key characteristic of empire: its ability to govern diverse populations and territories without seeking to homogenize those territories. Additionally, despite moves toward political consolidation, the empire faced several destabilizing challenges. Two key such challenges were an imperfectly united elite culture and a struggle to hold on to international legitimacy. Both factors fatally undermined the empire’s legitimacy from the inside and outside during World War I. However, I have also argued that, from all of these perspectives, the Habsburg Empire was not unusual. Many of these experiences had parallels in other empires throughout Eurasia and beyond, whether land-based or maritime-based. The Habsburg Empire therefore should be read not as an anomaly in imperial history, but as an instructive example for comparative study.

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Borderline Syndrome in Fiume: The Clash of Local and Imperial Interests

Ágnes Ordasi
National Archives of Hungary
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 2  (2022):387-421 DOI 10.38145/2022.2.387

As the only seaport city of the Hungarian Kingdom, Fiume (present day Rijeka, Croatia) was a key area for policies implemented by the central government in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It was a multi-ethnic hub, an economic, social, political and cultural center, and a highly intensive contact zone where people from various parts of world with different interests and aims met. Fiume was a border, a filter, and a frontier. Moreover, it was an important area in the Hungarian state-defense system. Three important factors deserve particular attention. First, that Fiume was physically enclosed within the Croatian Kingdom, and very much as if it had been an enclave, it did not have common borders with Hungary. Second, due to the way the Hungarian government exercised power and devised its strategies to create a support base (and also because of a fear of efforts towards expansion by Slavs), the government created an Italian-speaking political elite that ruled over Fiume. Third, Fiume enjoyed extraordinarily wide municipal autonomy which included the right to maintain public order and security in the city. The local elites wanted to preserve these rights from the encroaching state.
My study has two purposes. First, I discuss the main reasons for the establishment of the border police. Why was it such a vital question for the Hungarian state at the national and the local level, and why did Fiume became the most problematic element in this issue? I highlight how and why the problem of the border police emerged as one of the most crucial conflicts in relations between the state and its port city.

Keywords: border police, Fiume, Hungarian government

Introduction

Less than one year after the scandalous events in Fiume in connection with the parliamentary election of 1901, a clearly agitated Ferdinando Kuscher,1 a

member of the Autonomy Party,2 rose to deliver a speech to the council of local representatives, the Rappresentanza.3 The city father addressed Francesco Vio,4 the podestá5 of the city, and warned him of the dangers with regards to the border police to be organized in Fiume.6 In his somber response, Vio said that the Legal Committee was already looking into the matter.7

In their proposal submitted a few days later, the committee supported Kuscher’s opinion and also deemed the setting up of the police force problematic. The committee noted the importance of protecting Fiume’s autonomy and declared that the Budapest government should give up its plans or find another solution to achieve its goals. For example, border policing tasks and prerogatives could be assigned to the city police, which was under the supervision and control of the Rappresentanza.8 The proposal caused a great uproar among the political elite of the governing party, as it was considered unacceptable for any city in the Kingdom of Hungary to question the sovereignty of the Hungarian state and defy its will.

There were four main factors that made the relationship between the central government and the Fiume municipal administration particularly critical. First, as Fiume is located on the eastern coast of the Adriatic and was the only seaport of the Kingdom of Hungary, it played a crucial role in the economic, foreign, and domestic policy of the Hungarian governments. Second, Fiume was not directly connected to the Hungarian mainland. It existed, rather, as an enclave wedged between Austria and Croatia, and it was only as a corpus separatum adnexum9 that the city was part of the Hungarian administration.10 Third, Fiume as a multi-ethnic11 and multilingual city, required increased control and extraordinary measures on the part of the Hungarian government, since, as a logical consequence of these circumstances, it was highly exposed to changes at the local, regional, imperial, and global levels. To borrow a metaphor from Georg Simmel,12 Fiume was both a bridge and a door for Hungary to the Balkans and to the world, and it was, vice versa, a gateway for the rest of the world to Hungary.

The specific geographical location of Fiume, the heterogeneous linguistic and ethnic composition of its population, and its multiple border function were also symbolically expressed in the name of the town. The Italian word “fiume” and its Croatian version “rieka/rijeka” mean river, and the town and district borders meet the criteria of borders and barriers separating administrative areas and states, of contact zones connecting natural social, linguistic and economic features, of buffer zones, frontiers, and filter zones with permeable gates.13 That is why Fiume in the Dualist era offers a revealing case for the study of the dilemmas of the separation of roles and functions.

The unique geographical and legal situation of the city was also manifest in the fact that, in Fiume, the power of the state was represented by a governor14 appointed by the emperor in accordance with the proposal of the prime minister and the minister of commerce. The governor was also the chairman of the Maritime Authority. He played a very important role in his capacity as chairman, because the governor’s powers extended beyond Fiume to the entire Hungarian-Croatian coastal region, at least in maritime and commercial matters.15 However, the governor (and thus the Hungarian state) had no absolute power even in Fiume, because, in accordance with the 1872 city statute, Fiume enjoyed exceptionally broad administrative autonomy. The power resulting from this autonomy was mostly exercised by the podestá and, under his leadership, the Rappresentanza, or the body of representatives that not only controlled cultural and economic issues but also had administrative and policing rights.

This privileged status inevitably became a hotbed of conflicting interests between the centralizing ambitions of the state and the municipality of Fiume, which “fervently protected” its autonomy. Although the conflict eventually led to a gradual erosion of the city’s autonomy, the city fathers were able to counter the state’s ever-increasing need for control and they successfully blocked some of the state initiatives to transform local society. Furthermore, Fiume not only preserved its autonomy (if undoubtedly in a limited form), but also managed to retain it in the aftermath of the world war, when the status of the city changed radically.

What naturally follows is that the problem posed by setting up the Fiume border police, therefore, was much more than an isolated, local conflict, and it was linked to and part of the modernizing and yet Janus-faced centralizing efforts of the state. In the present paper, I therefore consider how the introduction of the institution of the border police in Fiume (specifically) was significant as an example of these centralizing efforts and the resistance with which they sometimes met. I also identify fields where the interests of the state and the city clashed and examine how these conflicts were impacted by the characteristics and the functioning of borders. In addition to presenting the main periods of the history of the border police, I also discuss why the Fiume city fathers found the idea of the state border police offensive and what means and strategies they relied on in their struggle to stifle or at least impede the centralizing efforts of the state.

State Aspirations

In December 1905, Royal Prosecutor Lajos Orosdy16 of Nagykanizsa was turning the pages of Budapesti Közlöny (Budapest Gazette) with considerable excitement every morning, hoping to spot the announcement that would mark an important milestone in his life. Finally, on Christmas Day it was communicated in the official journal of the government that he was listed in payment class VII by the minister of the interior and had been appointed captain of the newly organized border police.17

Although it remains unclear whether Orosdy considered his appointment a professional challenge or a punishment or whether he thought about the fate of his son, who had been born out of wedlock and was later legitimized, the new position required him to take a 300-kilometer journey, which was anything but comfortable. Furthermore, he had to move all his belongings and adapt to a radically different environment. The new place of service for the 45-year-old official, born in Hontbesenyőd (today Pečenice, Slovakia),18 was the border police headquarters in Fiume.19 However, the border police act (Article VIII of 1903) that served as the foundation of the appointment was yet to come into effect: Fiume had to wait more than seven years.

It was not unusual for a law to come into effect years after it had been passed, but regarding the national political significance of the border police, it is rather interesting that the executive order of the Ministry of the Interior was given no earlier than in the last days of December 1905. Some of the reasons for the procrastination may have been the weakness of the administrative system, the poor financial state of the legal authorities, and several crises faced by the government.

Yet in this transitory period, the issue remained on the agenda. The problems that necessitated setting up the border police were becoming an onerous burden for the whole Hungarian political elite, and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which was already struggling with a structural crisis, was facing new dilemmas posed by the governmental, personal, and dynastic changes in the Balkans.

The most crucial problems for the Kingdom of Hungary were that emigration and immigration rates were not decreasing, illegal labor and prostitution were on the rise, smuggling and the circulation of illicit documents and principles were out of control, individuals were appearing who posed a threat to public order and safety, and no effective methods had been put in place to protect against pandemics. This cause conflicts, uncertainty, and upheavals not only in the settlements and regions along the border but in the entire state, and this turmoil had serious social and political consequences. These consequences included, in particular, the waning of the ruling elite’s political support, a rapid decrease in the number of the working-age people and men who could be conscripted into the military, and the appearance of new groups (mainly the so-called Galician Jews) which acted as rivals of the local population. Emigration and immigration were closely related to the problems of nationality, citizenship, and place of residence, and the tensions surrounding emigration and immigration, in turn, created a new wave of conflicts. In Hungary, no citizenship other than Hungarian was recognized.20 Consequently, anyone who did not have Hungarian citizenship was considered a “foreigner” and could be expelled from the country. This mentality had much in common with the procedure applied by villages to banish individuals they deemed noxious from the community.21

Border defense and maintaining law and order were the tasks of counties and town municipalities. The model had been transformed on a number of occasions and had been gradually centralized, but it remained somewhat inefficient. As part of an effort to address this, a bill on setting up the border police was passed in 1903.22 The legislation process sparked heated debates inside and outside the parliament. Most of these debates concerned how to establish the new institution and its functions, prerogatives, and tasks. In the end, the members of parliament agreed to place the organization directly under the Ministry of the Interior and to set it up as a civilian authority. In other words, the body could not have taken on a military character, neither in its functions nor in its appearance. Behind this decision lay the principle of the primacy of parliament and government over county and city municipalities and also over the military administration. The government was also intent on establishing and operating a “Hungarian” body along the borders that was independent of Austria or, at least, separate from it.23 MEPs also agreed that, in order to make it more effective, the organization, which was seen almost as a panacea, should be deployed in as many areas as possible and should be given exceptionally broad powers.24

The border police not only checked the passports of travelers along the borders, but also participated in investigations, intelligence gathering, surveillance, and the detection, screening, and removal of enemy intelligence agents and persons deemed to be dangerous. It also provided operational support for the armed forces during the war.25 The border police (in its area of operation) had the right to judge in the first instance in cases of offences under its jurisdiction,26 and its members also had discretionary powers. In other words, they could resort to bribery, hire and pay off civilians deemed trustworthy, or even threaten them in the name of the greater public good and the interests of the state.27

The involvement of the local population in the official procedures, in addition to obtaining “insider” information and exploring social networks, was also necessary because the border police had a relatively small number of personnel,28 which cast doubts on its effectiveness due to the proliferation of its tasks and its disproportionately defined operational areas. This was true even though the function of the new organization was the surveillance and keeping of the borders rather than participation in direct operations and border defense.29

The purpose of setting up the border police was the protection of the entire country, but the measures it entailed mainly concerned the border areas. The localization of problems, however, also entailed an increase in the influence of the state government, which sharpened the conflicts of interest between the central power and local elites in the municipalities concerned. This explains why it was József Kristóffy,30 minister of the interior of Fejérváry’s Darabont government,31 who defied the power of the counties and towns, who took it upon himself to set up the border police and thus limit the powers of the counties’ and cities’ jurisdictions in December 1905.32

Local Concerns

Although Lajos Orosdy had been feverishly preparing for the trip, his expectations with regards to the new position were yet to be fulfilled. The reason for this was that Kristóffy, who had already been in the midst of a serious internal political crisis, postponed the establishment of the twelfth, Fiume precinct due to the persistent protests of the Autonomy Party. Furthermore, Kristóffy declared in his Circular no. 91 000 that he would be regulating the operation of the institution at a later, more appropriate time. Thus, Orosdy could not assume his office and was only able to move into the rented flat as a private citizen.

Kristóffy’s resignation had other, more serious consequences. For example, the unanimous outcry of the Hungarian public, which was already critical of the government, which it considered unconstitutional. It also sparked protests by the public in Fiume. The former, while complaining about the loss of their own powers, protested against the minister of the interior’s retreat and the privileged position of the port city, citing the need for maximum public safety and equal treatment. The majority of the political elite felt that the corpus separatum of Fiume did not imply that it had rights that superseded state interests or that the local council could refuse to enact national laws for any reason. This opinion was shared by the authors of Magyar Tengerpart (Hungarian Seashore),33 a newspaper published in Fiume. With its usual cynicism, the paper gave the following advice to the city fathers at the end of 1902:

Do not fear for the powers of the autonomous police, nor should Kuscher fear for the celebrated police force. The border police shall not curb their rights. Our brave city policemen will continue to escort drunk people in, they will continue to silence the shouts of the nighttime revelers, and they will remain in the position they are in now. We demand serious work from our city councilors to look after the true interests of the city and to cherish the citizens. [...] Let them work and not deal with politics!34

 

A mere five years later, Viktor B. Thoroczkay35 gave a speech in parliament in the same spirit:

Fiume is an ungrateful child of the Hungarian body, and in spite of the fact that we spend millions on it, when it comes to the interests of the Hungarian state, Fiume, this ungrateful child, joins forces with the enemies of the Hungarian nation and protests against the Hungarian nation. Let me mention one example only: the question of the border police... This Rappresentanza has so far prevented the establishment of the border police in Fiume.36

The supporters of the state power were therefore overjoyed when, in November 1906, news got out that the Fiume border police would still start its operation in January 1907 under the leadership of Orosdy.37

The enthusiasm of the press that wrote in support of the government was due to state administrative reasons. More precisely, the establishment of the Fiume border police was not intended as an ultimate goal. Rather, it was to be the first step toward the long-planned nationalization of the city police. István Tisza essentially confirmed this in an address38 before the parliament, when he argued that the border police staff needed to be increased and the resulting cost increases had to be accepted, because “as soon as the general organization of the police is done, the border police should naturally be integrated into it.”39 Yet the plan to reorganize and then expropriate the Fiume police was nothing new. In the second half of the 1870s, the central government had already identified reorganization as a long-term goal in order to remedy the problems that required greater state involvement. These problems included the Russian-Turkish war, the deluge of Bosnian refugees, the difficulties around the regulation of the customs territory, and the establishment of the financial directorates. It was at least as significant that, with the increased spatial presence of the state, instances of fraud, omissions, and the overall shortcomings of the Fiume authorities were becoming more apparent.

The state only achieved partial success in the direct reorganization of the city police. There were several reasons for this. First, according to the city statute of 1872, the organization was supervised by the Fiume council of local representatives. Second, this document contained a special legal guarantee which stipulated that the basic statutes of the city and the regulations of the power exercised by the Rappresentanza could be modified or amended only with the consent of the council of the representatives. In other words, the state could not directly eliminate the autonomous institutions and the powers of the municipality of Fiume. Therefore, the state wished to apply the same method it was using in the fields of administration and education in the city. First, the government created the state “copies” of the institutions that belonged to the autonomous jurisdiction of the Rappresentanza. Then, by taking over the functions of these institutions, it made them redundant and eliminated them.40

What made the issue of the possession and appropriation of the police force(s) even more relevant was that it affected the power competencies abilities of the Rappresentanza and its ability to defend itself. In other words, as long as they maintained control over the police, the city fathers were able to conceal certain self-serving activities in which they engaged. This consideration could not have been negligible, as the city fathers were often involved in dubious deals through their family connections or personal interests. Nicoló Gelletich,41 for instance, who was the royal notary and a member of the governing party, regularly imported wine from the taverns of the tavern keepers Sirola Udovicich and Malogna without paying excise duty. Of course, it was not he who was prosecuted for the misdemeanor, but his agent, Giuseppe Pluhars, who was tried at the Hungarian Royal Court of First Instance in Fiume.42 Furthermore, anomalies related to the questionable financial management of the Fiume police also caused something of a stir, as did fears of irredentism.43

However, Governor Sándor Nákó,44 who had been carefully balancing municipal and state interests since 1906, firmly rejected the accusation made by the joint minister of war, according to which Fiume was a hotbed of irredentism. Defending the town’s population, Nákó said that only a few people followed the extremist pro-Italian line, as the majority of the locals were not even engaged in politics. Even in February 1909, the governor considered it premature to follow the proposals made by the minister of war for the establishment of a state police force,45 and he was expressly concerned about “the introduction of a uniformed special border police.” Nákó was expecting that the new emigration law would solve the problems. He hoped that the new law would replace the city police with border police officers with the status of civil commissioners. According to him, this special border police detail, consisting of eight to ten plainclothes officers, could perform other police and political tasks in addition to their duties in the emigration house, and the Rappresentanza would have no objections to them.46 But even the governor did not deny that there were serious problems with the city police. For example, like all city or municipal police, the Fiume police was dependent on the ruling party (in this case the Autonomy Party).

Nákó also noted that it is difficult to find a sufficient number of reliable individuals to serve in Fiume anyway. On the one hand, because the official language of the municipality was Italian, only Italian-speaking Hungarian citizens could be recruited to the force or serve as non-commissioned officers. On the other hand, because of the extremely high prices in the port town and the modest salaries of the police officers, very few people applied for the jobs advertised. The governor also enclosed a list of the employees of the Fiume police, drawing the attention of the minister of war to a very important compromise. Namely, that in the previous few years, there had been so few applicants that Hungarian citizenship, which in theory was essential for the service, was not even required of them any longer.47 According to the governorate report, most of the force had to be recruited from Austria (including Dalmatia and Istria), and not from the Kingdom of Italy (!), but they had to be able to speak Italian.48

Nákó changed his mind two months after he had written a letter to the minister of war because of the so-called Steindl scandal,49 which prompted him to request the minister of the interior to set up the border police without undue delay.50

The Reactions of the City Fathers

The city fathers of Fiume responded in a particularly sensitive way to any initiative that foreshadowed increased control of their municipality by the state. No wonder, then, that they instinctively loathed any rumor about the reorganization of the police force or the introduction of the border police. It is revealing that on every such occasion, the podestá called an extraordinary meeting at which the more temperamental members of the Rappresentanza were taking turns “ringing the alarm bells.” As Magyar Tengerpart put it rather cynically,

Border police—they moaned and suffered. So much pain in these two words! And the city fathers were overcome with bitterness in the meeting room of the town hall, which has witnessed much more bitter moments in the past. As if they had come to attend a funeral. They were sad and they were many. So many as would be impossible to convene in two weeks were the circumstances different. Now they have come because the “sacred autonomy” is in danger. The state has organized an armed body against it—the border police...51

 

Indeed the members of the Rappresentanza were dismayed. This body was not a fully uniform, permanent organ of government with respect to its constitution or political agenda, but it could wield great energies to make the central government change its mind. The rhetoric of the city fathers mostly built on two arguments: that the border police were unnecessary and inefficient and that the establishment of this border police would be a violation of the city’s autonomy. The discourse that prevailed in Fiume was therefore characterized by both down-to-earth, rational arguments and the population’s outrage and resentment towards the state.52 First and foremost, the city fathers claimed that the establishment of the border police in Fiume was an unnecessary burden, because the main tasks of this border police were already being performed by the city police, 53and the existence of two institutions with overlapping prerogatives would inevitably lead to political conflicts and disagreements over their jurisdictions. Municipal representative Stanislao Dall’Asta, for instance, insisted that, although the border police were set up in order to control immigration and emigration, these services had been done perfectly well by the city police. In other words, Dall’Asta said, any complaints were nothing but “defamation, spread deliberately.”54

After Dall’Asta’s address, the Socialist Pietro Stupicich55 also rose to speak. He too warned the city fathers of the dangers of the border police: “This is a Trojan horse that they cunningly want to drag into this castle of autonomy so that they can catch us off guard and deprive us of our rights. […] The border police are nothing but the state police—din disguise.”56 He also added that when the draft bill was debated, one of the most prominent arguments concerned so-called protections against the Israelites arriving from Galicia. However, he said, this deluge of Polish Jews had never posed a risk for Fiume.57 Giovanni Ossoinack58 was similarly practical. He said before the plenum that the government should find different instruments with which to control emigration, first, because the “fixed and immobile” border police could act against agencies which operated freely in the interior of the country and enticed people to emigrate and, second, because the organization was easy to fool anyway: emigrants just had to get off the train in Buccari and cross the Austrian border via a side road.59 The fact that Ossoinack’s concerns were not unfounded is also evident from the parliament’s diaries, which contained numerous complaints about the activities of the agents and the officials and private individuals who collaborated with these agents. In one of his speeches, Ferenc Buzáth60 reported that agents (“human traffickers”) often dressed emigrating Slovaks in civilian clothes, put them on trains, and led them on foot past the major stations so that they could be handed over to the agents of the various shipping companies at the border.61

The common feature of the speeches made in defense of the autonomy of Fiume was that they did not lack exaggeration or bombastic rhetoric. More important, however, were the references made to the legal contradictions and the unalterable nature of the statute. Dall’Asta referred to this in his next address:

 

The Rappresentanza shall be liable to organize the police and the healthcare services. […] If the organization of the police is pried from our hands, so to say, then all our rights to autonomy will be gone. What is left, then, of the statute? Nothing.… And the statute cannot be altered without us and against our will. Because Article 127 stipulates that “The present statute may only be altered or amended with the consent of the Rappresentanza of the free city of Fiume and the district thereof.”62 […] We stand on the side of the law and do not shy away from protecting our rights.63

The above argument was popular among the city fathers. Andrea Bellen followed a train of thought very similar to that of Dall’Asta’s

by establishing a border police, they want to deprive Fiume of one of its most important rights. In accordance with the city statute, there is no place for any police in Fiume other than the autonomous city police. […] If the government wants to introduce border police in Fiume in any form, it shall be our obligation to protest against this with every means possible.64

La Voce del Popolo’s65 poem entitled “Let us stand in line” hits a very similar note, encouraging the city’s readership to recognize that the issue was sensitive from the perspective of the future of the city’s autonomy:

For it is poetry when we fight for our homeland and for the city we were born in, and the struggle of he who rises to protect the constitution is poetry worthy of praise and glorification: And the fight to protect the statute is poetry no less sublime and beautiful. And our statute shall remain intact. Thus spoke the Rappresentanza, but if their words do not suffice, the people will say it likewise …. We must clearly distinguish between the nation and the government. The nation is not hurting us; what is more, the nation loves us and respects us, its most prominent sons are with us, from Kossuth66 to Apponyi.67 But this government…. Was it an accountable government compelled to give an account before the parliament of its deeds and certify the abomination caused by bringing the state police to Fiume? But this government is nothing but a mob of bribed nobodies and Austrian soldiers, a government that assassinates without punishment the millennial Hungarian constitution.68

 

With regards to the reservations of the leaders of Fiume, the issue of language also needs to be mentioned. The draft bill made Hungarian the official language of the border police, which, according to the Rappresentanza’s

interpretation, contradicted the provisions of the statute that specified Italian as the language of the Fiume jurisdictional institutions. Therefore, although by 1906 the Rappresentanza had finally agreed to accept the establishment of the organization and, citing the existing practice and its redundancy (as a kind of maximum concession), had even accepted that the Fiume border police could limit the city’s right to use Italian to correspondence with local authorities, it consistently insisted that at least the phrase “and communicate verbally with Hungarian-speaking parties in Hungarian” be deleted from the draft.69 It must be noted that even the government supported the Rappresentanza in these efforts.70

As we have seen above, the city fathers were keen to put the Italian language and Italian culture, local patriotism, and the city’s autonomy at the center of their arguments, but at the same time, for moral and rational reasons, they also made room in their discourses for patriotic rhetoric and emphasized their loyalty to the state. It is another matter that for the people of Fiume, the unconstitutional exercise of power by Géza Fejérváry’s government was in fact primarily a pretext to sabotage the implementation of the law. When the issue of the border police was raised again and again under the governments of Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle and István Tisza, the members of the Rappresentanza protested with the same fervor as they had against Kristóffy and Fejérváry.

The city fathers tried to solve the problems they faced by using five main tactics. First, during the Rappresentanza meetings, they symbolically protested against the law “imposed” on them and the manner in which it was implemented. All the more so, because István Tisza’s second cabinet introduced the institution into the city without consulting the Rappresentanza.71 Second, submissions were made to the governor and his deputy offering compromises and asking for intervention.72 The central idea of these initiatives was that the Minister of the Interior should legislatively entrust the tasks of the border police to the municipal police. In return, the municipality of Fiume offered to significantly expand and modernize the organization.73 What they forget to emphasize, however, was that the city, which was already a heavy borrower of state loans, would have covered the additional costs of the developments by taking out new loans. Third, the city fathers also presented the matter to the House of Representatives and the ministers. Their aim was to draw attention to the perceived injustice and, with the help of their influential supporters, to take a stronger stand against the government’s “despotism.” Fourth, the city fathers used the local Hungarian and Italian press to air their concerns. Thus, dilemmas and criticisms concerning the police and border police were published in the local newspapers La Voce del Popolo and La Bilancia, 74 as well as in the weekly La Giovine Fiume75 and in some of the capital’s newspapers. Indeed, as the correspondence between the governor and the minister of war testifies, the news from Fiume spread beyond the borders and became increasingly resonant in Istria and the Apennines and also in the neighboring Croatian territories. Fifth, as a result of the ever-increasing tensions, marches and demonstrations were held.76

The persistent resistance of the Fiume town fathers finally bore fruit. The central government repeatedly postponed the implementation of the decree enacting the border police law, citing the prevailing local political conditions and the inopportuneness of the time. This affected the life of Lajos Orosdy, who remained idle in Fiume. In 1907, he was reassigned to Brassó (today Braşov, Romania), but he was made redundant and was temporarily retired. Orosdy went back to Fiume in the summer of 1911, when Károly Khuen-Héderváry77 appointed him to serve as administrative advisor to Governor István Wickenburg78 in the rank of councilor of the ministerial department.79 Orosdy’s second term in Fiume proved a much greater success than the previous one. In 1912, he got married and started a family, and having climbed the career ladder, he finished his life as a deputy state secretary in 1943.80 His son Róbert was also successful. In 1916, he disappeared from the lines of the Hungarian Army that was fighting on the Eastern Front. He crossed several borders in his flight, and reappeared as a certain Roberto Tartini/Bartini, but in the end he made a career in the Soviet Union as an airplane engineer by the name Robert Oros di Bartini.81

In the end, the city fathers could not fight the powerful advances or the legal expansion of the state. This was already indicated by the fact that the governor dissolved the Fiume representative body in the most critical situations and, as the municipal elections of 1911, 1914, and 1915 show, he also strongly transformed its composition by asserting his influence both formally and informally.82 The perfect moment for the central government to realize its long-delayed plan for the border police was the “state of emergency” declared in 1912 because of the Balkan wars, or in other words a situation in which a much more direct, centralized form of government was introduced to guarantee law and order and public safety. It is to be noted that this solution was based on the British model,83 which, as opposed to the Prussian military model and the Austrian one that followed the Prussian,84 made the government the holder of such exceptional wartime power. In Hungary, the army could not control the civil administration, and the High Command could not even control the border police.85

However, war preparedness also required the Hungarian government to introduce restrictive defense measures. These measures included restrictions on fundamental civil rights, the appointment of government commissioners, tighter restrictions on issuing passports, censorship of telecommunications and the press, tighter restrictions on the exercise of the rights of association and assembly, the establishment of martial law, and the extension of the scope of military jurisdiction. In a similar fashion, the minister of the interior in a circular ordered authorities to arrest and remove all aliens and/or persons who posed a threat to public order.86 Internments started, and deportations were becoming more and more frequent. Under these circumstances, the obstacles that had prevented the establishment of the border police had been overcome by the summer of 1913, though it had been evident by that time even to the MPs that the organization was too expensive and was not suitable to serve its purpose elsewhere.87

The Border Police in Fiume

When Dezső Késmárky88 learned that the minister of the interior had listed him in grade three of payment class VII and appointed him councilor of the border police,89 little could he have suspected that he would soon live the most trying years of his life. As this distinction was followed by Késmárky’s relocation to Fiume,90 it can be assumed that the new title and the higher salary were, as a kind of incentive, both a reward and a token of trust given in advance, but also a “wedge” to be presented to the locals and a “weapon” of commanding presence. The higher rank and salary entailed more rights and responsibilities and also higher social prestige, which generally was a vital condition of the successful work of state officials. Késmárky in particular seemed a promising choice for the position, as he had been born in Szekszárd, had relatives in the so-called Southern Territories,91 had received an education in law, and could speak Italian and maybe a Slavic language, and had many years of bureaucratic experience in Budapest. The government expected no less of him than to start the operations of the new border police smoothly and make the local population accept the institution. However, these expectations were rather hard to meet.

Késmárky arrived in Fiume in June 1913, a few days before the enactment of the law.92 He was accompanied by 70 border policemen, five officers, and several detectives.93 Considering that in 1913 the entire national staff of the border police consisted of 451 individuals, this was a sizeable contingent.94 This high number (which the governor still believed to be insufficient)95 was partly justified by the conflicts in the Balkans. Also, the government drew conclusions based on the events of the previous years and wanted to prepare for the resistance with which its efforts might meet from the citizens of Fiume.96

All the more so, because Icilio Baccich,97 the second vice-president of the city and someone who was very popular with the local citizens and was making a visit to Fiume, was escorted by a city policeman to the police station for no apparent reason. Only at the police station was Baccich informed by police director Saverio Derencin, who had been the target of many accusations (partly because of his alleged Croatian origins) made by the Autonomists, that he had been expelled for agitation and for propagating irredentist ideas and had to leave the city within eight hours.98 What made the expulsion of Baccich possible was his Italian citizenship, as he was considered an “alien.” He came from an aristocratic family of Croatian origin from Ragusa (or Dubrovnik by its Croatian name) and therefore was born an Austrian citizen. When he lived in Fiume, he acquired Hungarian citizenship, but he then moved to Ancona in 1912 and became an Italian citizen.99 His appearance in Fiume offered a useful pretext to Governor István Wickenburg to instrumentalize the city police and get rid of a man who was considered a threat. What Wickenburg failed to take into consideration was that the expulsion of Baccich would meet with the disapproval of his own political camp, the Lega Autonoma,100 a group that was hard to assemble, and that a municipal crisis would unfold.

The Rappresentanza protested unanimously against the steps taken by the police, which was all the more strong a cautionary sign, since after 1911 the majority of the Rappresentanza belonged to the more moderate Lega Autonoma party rather than to the Autonomists.101 The expulsion of Baccich, however, blurred the lines between the two groups. The Legists were also outraged, and they joined the solemn protest organized by the Autonomy Party. Their common stance on the issue revealed the depths of the crisis, and the city fathers forced Mayor Francesco Vito to resign.102 When Wickenburg dissolved the protesting body, the members of the substituting General Committee also gave back their mandates.103 The consequence of the new municipal scandal was that, for lack of a better solution, the minister of the interior gave the powers of the Rappresentanza to the governor, who thus became a kind of government commissioner.104 This, according to the citizens of Fiume, meant the suspension of their autonomy, even though István Tisza never for a moment ceased to deny that this had been his intention.105

Therefore, the locals were definitely hostile as they waited for the border police to take office, and the arriving force was welcomed by a crowd of protesters at the police station. If the national press reports are to be believed, the border police had to make their way with their “bayonets forward” to their quarters in the Emigration House under the protection of the municipal police and the military.106 In the meantime, the Italian press also did not cease to criticize the border police. The La Voce del Popolo sardonically called the border police members “sycophants,”107 and he sometimes also referred to them as alien conquerors put at the throats of the Fiume citizens by the two Pistas (Pista is a nickname for István).108 This is also understandable, since only two of the officers listed in the Hungarian Directory of Officers came from Fiume and had experience there. One was the son of one of the technical directors of the Rice Husking and Starch Factory, Erik Beusterien, an assistant clerk.109 The other was Mario Minach, a detective inspector from a distinguished Fiume family. Everyone else came to Fiume from the highlands well beyond the city borders, apart from Rafael Ninkovich, who came from Novi Sad.

Although the exact number, composition, and origin of the force cannot be determined due to a lack of sources, it can be reasonably assumed that some of them were local residents and/or the members of the municipal police. This raises the question as to how many of the border guards on duty spoke German, Italian, and some Slavic languages (and how well), which were essential if they were to perform their duties. After all, the most important tasks of the border guards included reconnaissance, gathering information, and effective cooperation with the border population, and each of these responsibilities required a good command of the above languages. As Governor István Wickenburg once put it, “A detective must speak at least one Slavic language and German, because without these [languages], he is of no use whatsoever when on duty.”110

Finally, with regards to the staffing of the border police, the very delicate balance of powers and financial resources among the different government bodies cannot be overlooked. The dilemma was already evident in the fact that while Wickenburg and Késmárky were striving to expand the staff, minister of the interior János Sándor111 regarded the increasingly independent and expensive organization with concern. Therefore, János Sándor, fearing for his own influence and the budget of his ministry, warned the governor to refrain from increasing public spending by recruiting new members and also from supporting the expansion of the border police’s jurisdiction.112

Everyday Problems and Extraordinary Challenges

What is certain is that on June 25, 1913, the border police started to operate in Fiume in accordance with Article 1903:VIII and at the same time, the city police lost a great deal of its powers. The city police were only able to continue temporarily with those tasks and cases that were either already in progress or for which the appropriate systems had not yet been put in place.113

The strict instructions and the obligatory modus vivendi ordered from above (out of necessity) seemed to have had their effect. Only two months later, Wickenburg was already boasting to the Minister of the Interior that the city fathers had formally recognized the new organization as a public utilities committee made up of members of the Lega Autonoma, and the Autonomy Party had agreed to allow border police to travel free on the city tram.114 However, the acceptance and the integration of the border police were far from smooth and seamless. This was true for at least three reasons. First, the various authorities were in rivalries with one another, gloating over the others’ failures and condemning one another at every turn. Second, as was the case in other parts of the country, the border police were deployed to break up mass protests, strikes, and demonstrations organized around election periods. Third, the border police often “harassed” common people or people belonging to the middle class.115

The border police often had to deal with offences such as the case of Vreja Kauzlari of Sušak. Charges had been brought against the “Croatian woman of Greater Serbian sentiments” because she allegedly had claimed that Franz Joseph I’s manifesto entitled “To my peoples!” “could not have been written by His Majesty, as the King was already old and soft in the head.”116 Aladár Molnár, a state-employed educator in Fiume who had been born in Hungary (and whose native tongue was Hungarian) and who was propagating Bolshevik ideology, must have had a similar view (he was the father of the Marxist historian Erik Molnár). He was prosecuted by the Austrian Minister of the Interior himself for high treason and the defamation of a member of the Royal House.117

In addition to insults brought against the monarch and his family, ethnic agitation and slanderous statements blaming the “other party” were also common. The case of the wife and daughter of Giovanni Kvaszt offers a revealing example. According to Késmárky, they were reported to the police by their neighbor, the wife of Jenő Ragasics, who was probably of Slavic origin. Ragasics’ wife claimed that her neighbors were “constantly vilifying Hungarians”. As Késmárky put it, “they call them disgusting Hungarians, wish for them to be hanged, they say the war was our fault and that we should go back to Hungary to die and rot there, for we are118 mere Hungarian swine.”119 Antonia Kucias, a 21-year-old resident of Fiume who spoke Italian as her mother tongue but was a Hungarian citizen, was sentenced to ten months in jail, because, as a prostitute, “in the brothel she used to praise Italians incessantly and sang songs reviling the Hungarian-Austrians.”120

A more thought-provoking and complex case was that of Teodoro Biasi, who, in the local pub owned by József Kirincich “attempted to extract military information from Mihály Horváth, István Kulcsár, Zsigmond Véghelyi, and Pál Bodai of the 19th k.u.k. Infantry Regiment, who were drinking at that location.” In order to achieve his goals, Biasi offered drinks and cigarettes to the soldiers, who not only turned down his offer but chased him off in their outrage. Biasi was apprehended when, while praising Italy and running away from the soldiers, he attempted to commit suicide. The real piquancy of the case was not its near-tragic ending, but Késmárky’s closing line: “I have to note that the abovementioned is the brother of Miklós Biasi, Deputy Head of the City Police.”121 Teodoro Biasi’s ties to someone in power probably contributed to the fact that he was acquitted by the court of Fiume.122

The border police also spent a significant amount of their time during the day confiscating politically dangerous documents, postcards, correspondence, and press products. These items included not only documents smuggled in from abroad, but also, as the press lawsuits against Novi List and La Voce del Popolo and their journalists show, papers published in the port city.123 The misdemeanors and offences related to printed materials often entailed house searches, confiscations, relatively high fines, and often even physical atrocities. Thus, these cases provided a fertile source of stories for the outraged autonomist press. What further eroded trust in the border police was the fact that several prominent public figures, such as G. T. Stipanovich, Director of the Coastal Bank and Savings Fund,124 were under surveillance, and as the example of Edmondo Manasteriotti illustrates, they were often banned from crossing the border.125

Many of the members of the border police staff had only a limited knowledge of the local conditions, and this also caused several misunderstandings. A plainclothes border policeman named János Jakab, for instance, allegedly “insulted” County Lord Lieutenant (főispán) Vinko Zmaić.126 On one occasion, patrolmen mistook one of the non-commissioned officers of the Japanese military committee staying in town for an assassin and arrested him.127

The most high-profile conflicts in which the Fiume border police were involved were linked to two bomb attacks. The first was committed in October 1913 by the members of Giovine Fiume under the leadership of Luigi Cussar128 and Francesco Drenig129 as a protest against the introduction of the border police and against the politics of Wickenburg.130 The second, in the spring of 1914, according to Riccardo Gigante’s131 pamphlet “Bomb”132 (and other documents), was allegedly staged by Italian citizens hired with the knowledge and support of the governor and the border police officer Erik Beusterien, who had wished to discredit the members of Giovine Fiume.133 Though the role of neither the governor nor of the border police can be clarified,134 the sources do indicate at least that the second bombing was committed by a bricklayer from Ancona, an Italian citizen named Arduino Bellelli, who had been commissioned by a certain Giuseppe Scipioni, a lawyer from Ancona. While Bellelli was completely unknown to the governor and the authorities, the same cannot be said about Scipioni. Scipioni had played a key role in a case involving the forgery of Albanian money or, rather, the unveiling this affair.135 Both bombings were carried out in an extremely tense foreign and domestic political situation, and they both generated considerable consternation and controversy beyond the borders of the country.136

The primary cause of the negative international reputation of the Fiume border police was not the assassinations, but the increasing number of conscriptions, expulsions, and internments, mostly to Kiskunhalas and Tápiósüly.137 Above all, the authorities took action against men of conscription age who were not citizens of the Hungary or of the port city, among whom were Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, and, of course, Italians. However, the border police also focused their attention on residents of Fiume and Hungarian citizens. Beyond public safety and health reasons in most cases,138 these steps were justified by reference to power/political considerations.

This exceptional situation created a unique opportunity for the government to filter out the social groups and individuals it considered dangerous, to break the dominance of the Autonomy Party, and, as a result, to influence the composition of the Rappresentanza in a way that was favorable to it (the government), and to minimize the body’s capacity to act in its own interests. The border police often waited for a proper pretext and opportunity to take action against the city fathers and have them removed from Fiume in one way or another. This was how Edmondo Manasteriotti, Alcide Rack, Francesco Drenig, and other members of the Giovine Fiume ended up being interned in Kiskunhalas, and it was also how Luigi Cussar was taken to Tápiósüly as a final destination.139 It was rather characteristic that Ferdinando Kuscher, who had warned of the dangers of the border police as early as 1902, only escaped internment because of his age (he was 66 years old).140

Epilogue

The establishment and operation of the border police cannot be viewed separately from the centralization politics and modernization efforts of the state. This trend was also fueled by the protracted world war and the gradually worsening daily crises which arose as a consequence of it. The problems (food and fuel shortages, influxes of Austrian refugees, epidemics, strikes, unemployment, general social tensions) needed to be addressed as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, only a well-organized and centrally controlled organization could do this. Acting on these considerations, in July 1916, minister of the interior János Sándor took a decisive step and proposed a bill concerning the nationalization of the Fiume police force, although the bill was enacted only half a year later. The new body started operations on May 1, 1917, and it essentially took over the majority of public security tasks from the city police.141 Although the border police were intended primarily to be the “antechamber” of the state police and the personnel of the two bodies constituted “a single national force” under the law, the border police did not cease to exist with the creation of the state police. Furthermore, though Fiume had to contribute 280,000 koronas to the maintenance of the state police, according to the administrative committee, only part of the city police staff could enter into the employment of the state.142

According to János Sándor’s design, only people with the necessary professional qualifications, language skills, experience, and politically and socially irreproachable behavior could be appointed to the new organization. However, it was in the governor’s discretion to decide who could be trusted. This re-selection of the staff resulted in significant changes, as shown by the list published in the Hungarian Directory of Officers. The name list includes 25 individuals for the year 1918 instead of the eight to ten people for the previous years, but many of the border police staff members who had been serving in Fiume for years were not among their numbers. One of the reasons for the staff changes was obviously the world war and the resulting compulsory military service, but a push for increased efficiency and the more rational and practical national distribution of tasks was also an important factor, as was the need to ensure the authority and integrity of the corps.

To achieve these goals, certain individuals were replaced on purpose. The much-criticized Késmárky was transferred to Szombathely as district Chief of Police, where he served until he died in 1922.143 Késmárky was probably replaced because his “past in Fiume” would have reflected badly on the new organization. In his place, the Minister of the Interior appointed and tasked with chief-of-police responsibilities István Török144 of Törökfalva, who was department councilor of the Ministry of the Interior and the son of Kálmán Török, the highly respected first director of the Csillag Prison in Szeged.145

István Török arrived in the port town on August 25, 1917, where he spent approximately as much time as Lajos Orosdy. The fate of Török and of the organization under his leadership was sealed on October 23, 1918, when the crowd from Sušak, celebrating Croatian independence, joined by soldiers from the Jelačić regiment, broke into Fiume and, wreaking havoc, raided the court. There were many accounts of acts committed by the Croatian “mob” in which the topos of the state and border police force’s unsuitability to handle the situation was a recurring element.146

Though the defense of the borders was not the task of the state police and the border police, the citizens of Fiume could never forget or forgive that the Hungarian law enforcement bodies failed to defend the town and that an even greater tragedy was prevented only because of the sobriety of the officers of the joint army. All the less so, because a few days later Governor Zoltán Jekelfalussy, as per the alleged instructions of Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle, handed over Fiume to the South Slavic Commission and traveled to Budapest with a few of his officials. According to the diary of Deputy Governor Lajos Egan, that night, the majority of the police force followed Jekelfalussy’s example. This had two consequences: The maintenance of law and order was taken over first by the Croatian military and then by the allied troops, and the border police and the state police force de facto ceased to exist as a relevant factor. Thus, any members of their staff left as soon as possible.147

The collective retreat of the police can be explained by the fact that, as members of the armed forces of a hostile and defeated state, they had no rights or authority necessary to perform their duty. Furthermore, they became the main target of the new regimes. Although István Török stayed in Fiume until as late as January 26, 1919,148 it cannot be ruled out that his relatively lengthy stay was due to his wife’s illness and that he ultimately left only when he did because of her death on January 14, 1919.149

Conclusion

The issue of the establishment of the Fiume border police fits into the context of the modernization and centralization efforts of the Hungarian state. This was also reflected in the ambitions behind the programs set out, such as the intention to maximize state oversight and control and the need to transform local society and employ the labor force more rationally and efficiently. The underlying motivation was that the Kingdom of Hungary wanted to keep and increase its economic potential and vitality, strengthen its position within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and guarantee its own security. However, emigration and immigration (which increased dramatically around the turn of the century), strikes (which were becoming more and more frequent), and the phenomena that accompanied the power shifts in the Balkans made it clear to the Hungarian political elite that such goals could not be achieved without granting the fundamental conditions of existence for the population.

The government’s desire to act was shown by the fact that the parliament was ready to approve an increasingly higher budget for the Ministry of the Interior, which was tasked with solving the problems. As a result, ambitious measures were taken to keep the prevailing social order and maintain public security and public health. Furthermore, a decision was reached according to which, in the towns and bigger villages along the border where the border traffic was higher, the border control tasks should be assigned to a civil law enforcement body rather than to the local police. According to the centralist plans, this body would have been established by the nationalizing of the municipal and court polices, but due to the resistance of the county representatives, the first step was the establishment of the border police. Thus, local interests could only be gradually subordinated to the objectives of the state.

Pursuant to the order enacting article 1903: VIII, the border police, that is, the top organization of the institution, would have been introduced in twelve settlements along the border.150 At the same time, the members of the Fiume council interpreted the initiative as another attack on the city’s exceptionally broad autonomy. The gradual removal of the powers of the municipal police, which was an armed body maintained by and at the disposal of the municipality, undeniably meant a loss of power for the Rappresentanza and the podestá who led it.

The dissonance was not only due to public law reasons, but also had serious economic, social, interpersonal, and foreign political antecedents. The economic consequences included, for example, curbing smuggling and limiting the trade in counterfeit wine and other dubious quality goods. Closely related to this were the social problems (difficulties making a living and the resulting tensions), which were challenges for social groups and individuals alike. The border police even impacted interpersonal and intergroup relationships. The majority of the local population frowned on those who joined the border police, and those who “transferred” from the city police to the border police were even more despised. Also, the organization proved a very effective means of breaking the dominance of the Autonomy Party and thus of limiting the ability of the Rappresentanza to assert its interests.

The issue of the border police became the most important source of conflicts between the state and Fiume. Although the city fathers did their best to prevent the enactment of the law, the Fiume border police finally began operations in 1913. This was mainly due to the enormous financial sacrifices the government had made to set up the border police and the “state of emergency” measures introduced in 1912, which also created an opportunity for an unprecedented extension of state power in Fiume.

However, the organization, as numerous omens had made predictable from the outset, failed to fulfil the ambitions attached to it for domestic and foreign political reasons. The antipathy of the population and the unwillingness of the denizens of the city to cooperate significantly decreased the local integration and legitimacy of the border police. Furthermore, the perception of the border police was further undermined by ambivalent legal interpretations and jurisdictional frictions, the outdated and/or incomplete technological tools at their disposal, and the conflicts that arose from the unfortunate procedures initiated by policemen who had only a superficial knowledge of local conditions.

Archival Sources

Državni arhiv u Rijeci [State Archives in Rijeka] (DAR)

JU 2 Administrative documents. The magistrate of Fiume

JU 5 Administrative documents. Governorate documents. General and presidential documents

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

Z 33 Pesti Magyar Kereskedelmi Bank [Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest] (PMKB)

K 26 Archives of the Prime Ministry, Prime Ministry’s Centrally registered and archived documents, 1913–1920

K 148 Archives of the Ministry of the Interior. General papers, 1917

K 149 Archives of the Ministry of the Interior. Reserved documents, 1909–1916

La Società di Studi Fiumani. Archivio–Museo Storico di Fiume (MFS)

FEGD Fondo Esodo Giugliano–Dalmata, 1914

 

Newspapers

Budapesti Hírlap, 1906

Budapesti Közlöny, 1905

Dunántúl, 1913–1922

La voce del Popolo, 1913

Magyar Tengerpart, 1902–1905

Magyarország, 1913

Népszava, 1913

Pécsi Napló, 1913

Pesti Hírlap, 1913–1919

Tolnamegyei Ujság, 1943

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“Let These be our Colonies: Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina!” Rezső Havass and the Outlook of Hungarian Imperialism at the Turn of the Century

Mátyás Erdélyi
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 2  (2022): 359-386 DOI 10.38145/2022.2.359

Hungarian imperial thought after the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy became a fantasy of past times, and thus the imperial propaganda of Rezső Havass was long irrelevant by the time of his death in 1927. In spite of this, Havass was called the “wholehearted devotee of Hungarian imperialism” in his obituary, a man who believed in further Hungarian expansion with the faith of prophets and whose goal was to resurrect the imperium of Louis I of Hungary. The present study analyzes the career trajectory of Rezső Havass and his multiple and overlapping identities in order to uncover the different faces of Hungarian imperialism before the Great War. Havass was a “bourgeois citizen,” a “Hungarian fanatic,” “a scholar,” and a “clerk and chairman of business companies,” or in other words, he had an array of identities which made him capable of using historic, legal, political, and economic arguments to aid the advancement of Hungarian imperialism. For Havass, the Hungarian Kingdom was undoubtedly a would-be-colonial empire with well-defined political goals (the colonization of Dalmatia), and his texts mixed and vulgarized elements of the sciences subordinated to political goals. For instance, it is relevant that the empire was a facilitating factor for geographical scholarship in the case of Havass, besides the obvious political leanings. My main research question concerns the modalities of imperial thought in Hungary through the case study of Rezső Havass. What did it consist of? How did it compare to other notions of imperialism and economic expansionism? And how widespread was it in the public sphere in Hungary?

Keywords: Habsburg Monarchy, imperialism, imperial propaganda

Other countries have overseas possessions, colonies, which provide comfortable income for those who cannot succeed at home. Let these be our colonies:
Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina!1

The idea of the Magyar imperium seemed a fantasy of old times after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, and similarly, the expansionist propaganda of Rezső Havass had become obsolete by the time of his death in 1927. Nonetheless, Havass’ work provides us a broader perspective from which to understand the nature of Magyar imperialism at the turn of the century.2 Though fantasizing about the Magyar imperium became pointless in the interwar period, Havass’ necrology described him as “a sincere devotee of Magyar imperialism”3 who believed in the expansion of the Hungarian Kingdom with the faith of prophets and whose primary aspiration was to reestablish the empire of Louis I of Hungary.4 As the necrology stated, Havass was also a “prolific writer” and a “warm-hearted scientist.” Kálmán Lambrecht, a paleontologist and researcher at the Hungarian Royal Geographical Institute (Magyar Királyi Földtani Intézet), emphasized, by contrast, Havass’ multiple affiliations and ties. Havass was a “bourgeois in the sense of the civis romanus,” “a fanatic Magyar,” “a scientist,” “the creator and promoter of new thoughts,” and also a man who worked in the management of several joint-stock companies.5 Together with his multiple and overlapping identities, Havass’ imperial prophetism, therefore, provides excellent empirical material which sheds light on the nuances and mechanisms of imperial ideology in Hungary in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy.

Havass was longtime employed at the First Hungarian General Insurance Company (Első Magyar Általános Biztosító Intézet) as the head of the mathematical department, until his retirement in 1904. He then became a supervisory board member at several joint-stock companies.6 In 1910, he was still the vice president of the Hungarian Geographical Society (Magyar Földrajzi Társaság), vice president of the Elizabeth People’s Academy (Erzsébet Népakadémia, an association to promote public education in Hungary), and an elected member of the National Council of Museums and Libraries (Muzeumok és Könyvtárak Országos Tanácsa).7 In 1902, Havass was awarded the honorary title of royal councilor (királyi tanácsos),8 and he was a long-time member of the legislative committee (törvényhatósági bizottság) in Budapest. Thus, he belonged to the Budapest bourgeoisie at the turn of the century. He was familiar with the contemporary historical, legal, political, and economic fields and he readily applied this expertise in the “practical sciences,” to use a contemporary expression, to help the cause of Magyar imperialism with regard to the question of Dalmatia.

Walter Sauer’s description of Austrian historiography and the Austrian public image concerning the colonial past is true for Transleithania. According to Sauer, there is an alleged abstention from any discussion of colonial intervention, imperialism, and expansionism when considering the common past of Austria-Hungary, in spite of the fact that Austria-Hungary was not an anti-colonial state and numerous attempts to establish formal and informal colonies have been described in the secondary literature.9 Following Sauer’s line of thought, many historians have recently addressed the past of the Habsburg Monarchy as a colonial past, particularly from the perspective of postcolonial theory.10 For instance, Habsburg rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina is no longer interpreted in the contemporary narrative of a “civilizing mission” or a “humanitarian intervention.” Instead, the province is examined as a “colony” of the Habsburg Empire and analyzed in the framework of postcolonial theories, with a focus on both cultural and economic processes.11 In this vein, the present paper looks at the work of Rezső Havass as an explicit part of Hungary’s colonial past: Havass’ objectives were not achieved (and thus remained very much imaginary), but they exemplified the conceptual framework of colonial thinking in Hungary before World War I and demonstrated wide public support for such endeavors.

Rezső Havass was trained as a geographer, but his texts under discussion here are not scientific works. In his propaganda for the re-annexation of Dalmatia, Havass vulgarized scientific arguments and provided kindling for the public image of Magyar colonial prospects. Still, the case of Havass shows that the relationships between science, politics, and empire were not hierarchical or one-way relationships.12 His travelogues retained scientific findings (in geography and history) and turned them into a political means of producing colonial propaganda, but geographical and historical research, for instance, also profited from Hungary’s colonial prospects in the Balkans. In other words, the empire used science as a means of furthering its political goals—one obvious example is the Kronprinzenwerk—yet the sciences also profited from the visions of the empire. In this case, the empire served as a “facilitating” space for researchers: the imperial space provided opportunities for mobility within and outside the empire, and the empire itself provided a large geographical area for research.

The most obvious examples with which to illustrate this relationship are Adolf Strausz and Rezső Havass. Their sphere of scientific activity was inherently connected with the very existence of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Hungary. It is quite illustrative that both suddenly halted their previous scientific and public engagements after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Adolf Strausz (1853–1944) was a professor at the Oriental Academy of Trade (Keleti Kereskedelmi Akadémia) in Budapest, and he published manifold works on the Balkans from cultural, political, and economic perspectives. The last publication by Strausz before 1914 dealt with the geopolitical situation in the Balkans and the role Turkey should play in restructuring the region.13 After the Great War, however, Strausz ceased his scientific activity in this field and, in the interwar period, he published only one monograph, a work on the history of the Jewish congregation in Rome.14 The dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy represented a sudden rupture in Strausz’s academic career on another level as well. The Oriental Academy of Trade, which provided his livelihood when he taught there as a professor between 1891 and 1918 and provided financial support for his research trips to the Balkans, was closed down and the faculty was dismissed after 1920.15 1918 thus represented a sudden halt in Strausz’s career. The same picture goes for Havass. He published over 100 articles, papers, and essays between 1878 and 1916 but only four titles in the last decade of his life, including three papers in A tenger (The sea) and a commemorative volume on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Geographical Society.

The main goal of the present paper is to look at the conceptual grounds of Hungary’s colonial objectives through the lens of Havass’ propaganda concerning the reunification of Hungary with Dalmatia. This, of course, entails a change in perspective: I look at Hungary not as a colonial power, which it was not, but as an unsuccessful would-like-to-be colonial state with well identified colonial goals. I am particularly interested in the ways in which different fields of knowledge interacted with one another, transgressed disciplinary frontiers, and were vulgarized by Havass and others. Between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the Great War, colonial ideas and concepts had become an integral part of the public imagination through continuous repetition in the daily press, commemorative books, tourist guides, and even school trips. For Havass, the Hungarian Kingdom represented a colonial empire with well-defined political goals (i.e., the colonization of Dalmatia), and his scholarship mixed elements of the sciences subordinated to political goals (and also an approach to the sciences that followed its own logic). My main research question concerns the modalities of imperial thought in Hungary through the case study of Rezső Havass. What did it consist of? How did it compare to other notions of imperialism and economic expansionism? How widespread was it in the public sphere in Hungary? I approach these questions in three smaller case studies. First, I analyze the components of Havass’s economic expansionism and the place of Dalmatia within it; then, I turn to the most important means of economic expansionism, the railways, and describe how new railways lines were meant to aid the Magyar imperium. Lastly, I analyze the cultural and historic arguments for the re-annexation of Dalmatia.

Economic and Territorial Expansionism

The most quoted article by Rezső Havass is a manifesto entitled “On Magyar imperialism,” which was published in Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest Herald) in 1902.16 Havass argues that the principal goal of Magyar imperialist politics is to revive the power and authority of the Kingdom of Hungary at the time of the Árpád dynasty and the House of Anjou. The most often repeated trope is the importance of reclaiming the territorial integrity, the political power, and the authority of the kingdom as it stood at the time of Louis I. Yet the main issue for the contemporary observer is the country’s economic dependency and under-development vis-à-vis Austria. For Havass, the solution must therefore be economic: no further expansion could be done in the port of Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia), and there was no other way to nurture the increasing flow of trade and transportation. The Hungarian economy therefore desperately needed to establish other port cities for its economic expansion, and the Hungarian re-annexation of Dalmatia could provide a solution. The coastal cities and ports of Dalmatia were mostly underdeveloped and unexploited, so their integration into Hungary’s trade network might represent the geopolitical foundations for Hungary’s greater economic expansion. In short, these ideas represented Havass’s patriotic mission and his public endeavors aimed at promoting the re-annexation and articulating the necessary geographical, cultural, and historical arguments. To quote Havass,

the advocates of Magyar imperialism do not want to create daydreams in front of the Hungarian nation, rather, they aim to profit from those factors that could be used to bring about the cultural and material improvement of the Magyar nation and to further glorify her, without engaging in adventurous undertakings, based on the legal grounds from the nation’s history, and without weakening the power status of the Monarchy.17

Havass’ stance vis-à-vis the Habsburg Monarchy is very clear: he was not searching for territorial expansion outside the Monarchy but rather was seeking to reconfigure the power balance within the monarchy. The underlying economic strategy involved active economic interventionism and industrial policy in the Balkans, the expansion of railway lines to fit the needs of Hungarian trade and industry, and the introduction of new trade policies more beneficial for Hungarian producers. Havass wrote in detail about the role of the railways, a subject to which I return in the second part of this paper.

Havass evaluated efforts at the trialist reorganization of the Dual Monarchy in view of the above programmatic article, and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy was not sought for either in this case. In a lecture at the national assembly of the Hungarian Geographical Society in Nagybecskerek (Zrenjanin, Großbetschkerek, today in Serbia) in 1909, Havass characterized the idea of trialism as a conscious effort to weaken Hungary within and outside the monarchy. With the aid of trialism, the goal of the “Austrians” was to “weaken our national forces” and “annihilate our economic independence.”18 The south-Slav state created in this way would not be sustainable as the third, “dwarf” member of the Habsburg Monarchy. In the case of the south-Slave state, national unity would be also missing, even though national unity was also missing in the case of Hungary, Havass admitted. But Hungarians formed a “cultural nation” (kultúrállam) and were well positioned to solve this problem:

The fact that Hungary geographically forms a closed area and that it has a historical past and also the numerical, material, and intellectual force of ten million Magyars ensure the leadership of the Magyar nation and rule out any competition.19

The second issue is that the planned south-Slav state would be dependent on the neighboring “Magyar Empire” from the perspective of trade and transportation. The south-Slav territories of the Habsburg Monarchy therefore belong to Hungary in a geopolitical sense: “If Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belong to the body of the Magyar Empire, came into the possession of Austria, it would be as absurd as attaching Tirol to Hungary.”20 The arguments against trialism are similar to the motifs for the re-annexation of Dalmatia. The connection between Hungary and the south-Slav states was imagined in a hierarchical way but presumed to be productive for both parties. Although Hungary had a clear economic superiority, Hungarians should share the “fruits of civilization” with the south-Slav region:

For us, who are the stronger, the bigger, it is an obligation to approach the south-Slav region in the spirit of old, traditional Magyar politics. […] We have to bring the very tissue of Magyar culture to the South-Slavs and to the Adriatic coast so that its light could gather the people in the region around us.21

The program was rather phantasmal, as was well expressed in the lack of reactions on the other side of the Leitha and in the apathy of the Hungarian political elite, but this political apathy was in contrast with infrastructural investments and trade policies in the region that attracted close attention from both Vienna and Budapest.

This points to another element in the ideology of imperialism: the civilizing mission of the colonizer and the hierarchical relationship between center and periphery, colony and colonizer. This civilizing mission was well described in the first part of a play, a trilogy by Havass entitled Fényben (In the light):

We should be all one in our singing! The rivers flow together and become a sea, a great, magnificent, and unconquerable sea. Our peoples merge in this way into a magnificent whole. My princess, to remember my visit today, I shall build a tower here which will indicate until the end of times that the Hungarian king was here, as a good friend, who is a builder and giver and not a conqueror who destroys and takes. You shall live according to your old laws and customs, no one should disturb them. But I expect from you to act with brotherly love and loyalty vis-à-vis the Hungarian king and his people.22

 

The benevolent nature of Hungarian rule in Dalmatia—which allegedly resulted in centuries of loyalty to Hungary—was emphasized by other influential figures. The historian Henrik Marczali wrote that “The cities of Dalmatia would never forget the centuries that they lived under Hungarian protection while preserving their absolute freedom.”23 Dalmatians remember these centuries as the “savor of sweet honey.” Havass found seeds for this argument in Lajos Thallóczy’s essays. Thallóczy found out that, in 1783, an anonymous writer sent a memoir to the chancellery arguing that Dalmatia legally belonged to Hungary. Although the chancellery agreed with the conclusions, they hid the memoir because it could have caused diplomatic conflict with Venice.24 Thallóczy was more candid in another publication:

[The cities of Dalmatia] welcomed Austria with joy because they were fed up with Venetian rule. The secret archives of Vienna and documents of the Council of War prove that citizens, the clergy, and the educated did not forget the rule of the “Hungarian crown,” and Austria meant Hungary for them. In Split, the esteemed party turned to the palatine to be able to rejoin the Hungarian crown. It became a considerable campaign, as the Hungarian coat of arms was set up in cities and on islands, priests proclaimed their loyalty to the Hungarian king in the pulpit. Thugut, the minister of foreign affairs at the time, however, prevented the annexation of Dalmatia to Hungary.25

This passage pleased Havass so much that he quoted it countless times in his texts on Dalmatia.26 In terms of the reference to historic rights, Havass was not alone in reclaiming the possession of Dalmatia. In a book about the public law status of Dalmatia, László Dús emphasized that Dalmatia belonged to the Hungarian crown, the main reason being that the Hungarian crown had never renounced its connection with Dalmatia.27

Another pamphlet, entitled “Dalmatia and Hungarian industry and trade,” describes in detail the essence of this Hungarian economic expansionism.28 The point of departure was that the economic stagnation and crisis in Hungary threatened Széchenyi’s prophetic famous contention that, “while many think that there once was a Hungary, I wish to believe that there will yet be a Hungary.” The remainder of the article details the advantages of the enforcement of Act XXX of 1868, which proclaimed the re-annexation of Dalmatia to Hungary.29 Mining, especially asphalt and coal production, had not yet been exploited in the province. Natural resources and infrastructure were available to establish a large-scale aluminum industry. The cement industry had promising potential and could compete with producers in the West. Unexploited natural resources were abundant in the province, such as hydropower (through the exploitation of waterfalls), viniculture, pomology, and fishing, and the local conditions could make tea production possible in the region. Dalmatia was currently at a disadvantage because, according to Havass, the Österreichischer Lloyd neglected the development of trade and transportation on the Adriatic Sea. At the time, there were only four banks and two savings banks in the province, so Hungarian financial institutions could easily establish new branches. Havass’ agenda represented an economic colonialism that proposed to exploit Dalmatia’s resources after re-annexation. This strategy was also intended to improve the economic situation of both parties. According to one of the most quoted arguments against Austrian “rule” in Dalmatia, “Vienna” had failed to care for the province since having acquired it, and it had failed to make significant cultural and infrastructural investments.

The Dalmatian ports offered the most significant potential from the perspectives of economy and trade. There were many reasons behind their growing importance. First, there were 56 cities on the Dalmatian coast, all of them potential ports unexploited by the Dual Monarchy. Second, the Suez Canal had transformed trade routes in general, and from the moment it had opened in 1869, the ports on the Mediterranean Sea became capable of engaging in trade with Asia. The monarchy, however, had failed to profit from its favorable position. In terms of the volume of transportation on the Suez Canal, English, German, French, and Dutch trade all significantly surpassed trade by the Habsburg Monarchy, in spite of the fact that Trieste and Split (Spalató) were more easily accessible. Naturally, “Austrians” refused to give up Dalmatia, because in doing so, they would have completely relinquished to Hungary control of and access to the Balkans. For Havass, the re-annexation of Dalmatia would bring about economic independence for Hungary in the long run, which was much needed after the (future) establishment of an independent customs territory. To sum up, the importance of Dalmatia lay in the abundance of natural resources, potential trade connections and developments, and the fact that Dalmatia could be a potential target for Magyar emigrants.30

The idea of economic expansionism was widespread among Hungarian economists and public figures debating Balkan politics,31 and as historian Gábor Demeter has persuasively argued, “[g]eography was already, before 1914, a promoter of economic and then territorial expansion.”32 In this regard, Havass was a typical exponent of Magyar imperial thought. The concept of economic expansionism relied on various sets of arguments, including legal arguments (such as the reference to Act XXX of 1868), references to historic rights (the conquest of Hungary by the Árpád dynasty and Louis I of Hungary), allusions to geographical cohesion or closeness, economic needs (especially as regards international trade), geopolitical considerations (vis-à-vis Vienna but also Russia, Turkey, and Italy), and cultural and humanitarian appeals. Havass differed from such figures as Dezső Szegh33 and Adolf Strausz34 in the sense that the latter two did not envision territorial expansion as part of economic expansion. The means of expansionism remained strictly economic and cultural: a railway strategy to foster and further Hungarian trade because, now, “our own favorable trade position is utilized by other countries in relation to Eastern trade.”35 Significantly, Strausz was a professor at the Oriental Academy of Trade in Budapest, and he participated in forming the next generation of tradesmen in the Balkans at the turn of the century. Havass could also find an ally in Pál Hoitsy who, as the editor of Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday Newspaper), disseminated different forms of Magyar imperial thought to the greater public. Hoitsy argued that, from the perspective of geography, Hungary, which was pressed between East and West, was forced to pursue expansionist politics ad infinitum. Romania and Serbia had to be occupied to regain Hungary’s old glory and to enable the Magyar nation to assimilate the nationalities within its borders.36

For Havass, the numerical growth of Magyars was closely connected to the economic power of Hungary, and he examined nationalist arguments from this perspective. The lecture entitled “The Slovakization of Upper Hungary” started as follows: “Who could deny that the more numerous its population becomes, the greater the power of the nation will be.”37 Following the lead of József Kőrösy’s similarly entitled study,38 Havass argued that the so-called Slovakization of some of the counties in Upper Hungary (the territory of Slovakia today) was obvious, and the Magyar nation had lost some 100,000 people in Pozsony, Nyitra, Bars, and Hont Counties. Statistical findings indicated the decrease of Magyar population and prompted immediate action. In another article, Havass addressed the phenomenon of “pseudo-Magyarization.” At the turn of the century, the spread of Hungarian as the official language and the language in everyday use took place primarily in cities and towns, as had been emphasized in the 1899 lecture. Havass argued that, in contrast to declarations made by people when the census was taken, “half of the population prefer not to use Hungarian in Budapest.”39 Havass highlighted the situation on the outskirts of the capital: he visited Pomáz, where everyone spoke Serbian and German, although they were all locals. For Havass, it is not “chauvinism to speak up against these conditions, it is rather self-defense.” He contended that, “[i]f the national spirit could permeate society in the capital, there would not be any people speaking foreign languages in Budapest.”

For Havass, the best tool with which to achieve these national goals was economic expansion, and the scientific foundation of this expansion was to come from geography. The Hungarian Geographical Society established the Department of Economic Geography in 1912. The department was intended to promote economic interests from the perspective of geography, and economic interests were to benefit the “national goals” first and foremost.40 For Havass, the “vivacity of the Magyars,” by which he meant the numerical growth of the Hungarian-speaking population, was inseparable from Hungarian economic expansion. In this way, Dalmatia as a potential target of emigration would help maintain the numerical growth of Magyars, because the future colony (Dalmatia) could preserve the migrants for the Magyar nation, in contrast to overseas migrants, who began using different languages and were thus “lost,” as it were, to the Hungarian nation.

The problem with the Tisza government, in the eyes of Havass, was that it failed to control or influence the direction of emigration. In addition, more than 30 years after the Compromise of 1867,41 the government had failed to make friends in the Balkans or among the non-Magyar nationalities in Hungary. Hungarian emigrants were left without guidance and thus were lost to the Magyar cause in the long run. In a rather condescending tone, Havass declared that “they had not even abandoned our Slovaks [tótjainkat] in such a despondent way.”42 The most important issue with the Hungarian ruling elite, however, was that it had neglected the development of the “Magyar imperium.” Past governments had not encouraged the annexation of Bosnia and Herzogovina to the Kingdom of Hungary and had not taken the opportunity to move settlers into Bosnia, especially Székelys. Havass asks a pointed question: “]d]id we work to create a situation in which Bosnians and Herzegovinians would themselves ask to get the advantages of Hungarian citizenship?”43 He concludes his article with an invitation to pursue imperial policies: “Let us raise the flag of Hungarian imperial politics. Let us give the Magyar nation ideals that fit the fight of its soul. Hungary is entitled to have Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.”44

Two issues must be emphasized concerning the economic expansionism envisioned by Havass. First, the most important difference that distinguished his views from other Magyar ideas was that it involved explicit territorial expansion, namely the incorporation of Dalmatia into Hungary. However, this territorial expansion was imagined within the framework of the Dual Monarchy and via the transformation of the power balance between the two states of the Habsburg Monarchy. Austria, thus, became Hungary’s most important “competitor” and the (only) threat to Hungary’s economic independence. Secondly, Havass mixed up nation and empire in the ideology of economic expansionism. The principal goal was to elevate the standing of the Hungarian crown and Hungarians, but by “Hungarians,” Havass understood mostly people who both spoke Hungarian as a native tongue and allegedly identified as part of the Hungarian nation. For instance, economic development in Hungary should contribute to the growth of the Magyar (Hungarian-speaking) population and not to the growth of other ethnic communities within the territories of the Hungarian crown. The goal was thus to further the growth and prosperity of the Hungarian nation. Yet, the re-annexation of Dalmatia, according to public law, could only take place with Dalmatia as part of Croatia-Dalmatia-Slavonia, thus within the framework of a Magyar empire and not the Kingdom of Hungary. The compromise between Hungary and Croatia in 1868 and specifically the passage that declared Dalmatia’s re-annexation envisaged the re-annexation to the Hungarian empire (as part of Croatia) and not to Hungary proper. The Croatian historian Ferdo Šišić emphasized this idea in his book on the Dalmatian question.45 The Croatian parliament requested several times the re-annexation of Dalmatia, but they always meant re-annexation to Croatia.

Economic Policy Instruments: Railways in the Service of Economic Expansion

The re-annexation of Dalmatia was not on the agenda of the political elite in Vienna or in Budapest, but the construction of railways was discussed and carried out in the province. In practice, Act XLVIII of 1912 regulated the construction of a railway line between Ogulin and Knin46 based on a compromise reached at the common ministerial council and the 1907 financial compromise between the two delegations. The latter stated that the two governments agreed that a railway line was going to be constructed from Rudolfswerth via Möttlingen to Karlovec, and a direct line would be built between Ogulin and Knin. The construction of the latter was to be completed by December 1911. Another important point of the 1907 compromise was that tariff policies would be set in parity between the two states of the Habsburg Monarchy regarding transit traffic to Dalmatia.47 This agreement was welcomed by Havass, but it did not meet with unanimous approval by the Hungarian public. Critics stated that the costs were excessive and the Austrian economy benefitted most from the future direct connections between Vienna and Dalmatia.

For Havass, the railway connection between Dalmatia and Hungary was a means with which to further the economic expansion of Hungary and an utterly necessary step forward: “[i]t is peculiar that other nations make war to take possession of seashores and maritime transportation is used to enhance their economic independence and development: whereas our longing for the sea consists only of rallying cries which sound nice but are never acted upon.”48 Charles Loiseau and Guiseppe Gentilizza49 were quoted to suggest that the destiny of Dalmatia was crucial for the status of Hungary as a great nation. Loiseau, however, was much more critical of the Habsburg mission in the Balkans than he seems in Havass characterization of his ideas. For instance, Loiseau called attention to the abuse of power against non-Magyars in Hungary, in particular concerning parliamentary elections. From his perspective, Hungary could only delay the political rise of Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs, and other national minorities, and the right way of state building would be federalism instead of the proclamation of a unified Hungarian political nation. The conclusion of the article was oracular: “And yet, we need it, the Slav pressure—and they [the Hungarians] know it!”50

On another occasion, Loiseau drew attention to the potential economic and political consequences of Habsburg expansion in the Balkans.51 The Habsburg Monarchy planned to construct a railway line between Sarajevo and Mitrovica that could potentially transform trade networks in the region. This railway line would also help lay the way for the construction of direct line between Vienna and Salonika and badly hurt the economic interests of Italy. Loiseau, here, gave a succinct summary of the civilizing mission:

To bring this barbaric country [Macedonia] a caress of civilization—and why would only one great power have the privilege of doing this good work?—is, first, to open schools. […] It is also to spur economic relations. […] It is to form a new generation of Italians, lay and clerks, to better know the history and language of Schkipetare. […] Finally, it is to help bring about the development of the postal services.52

Loiseau also expressed his opinion concerning Hungary’s customs policies, which in his assessment were imperial and served to further exploitation by Hungary of the import of Serbian pork: “[a]nd on this market, this great power [Hungary] dictates the law through customs tariffs, railway tariffs, and through the exercise of—often unfair—public health regulations.”53 Loiseau himself was thus far from sympathetic to the cause of Austria-Hungary.54

Contrary to Loiseau’s assumption, there was controversy between Austria and Hungary and inside Hungary as well concerning the choice of the railway line through Dalmatia. For instance, the Österreichische Rundschau55 questioned the rationale of building a line between Ogulin and Knin (the so-called Lika line) instead of a line between Novi and Knin (the so-called Una line in Bosnia), because the former heavily favored Hungarian interests and strictly Hungarian tariff policies could be applied on this line. Hungarian experts also criticized the choice of the Lika line. It was a region with limited access to water, and this significantly raised construction costs. The Lika line was 55 kilometers longer and over 100 million Kronen more expensive than the Una line. In their eyes, it was problematic that the Lika line traversed thinly populated and agriculturally unproductive regions, and, finally, it favored Austrian interests by furthering trade via Vienna and Trieste.56

Havass naturally refuted these contentions and pointed out that with the construction of the Una line, Hungary would lose its influence on tariff policies for Dalmatian transportation. The ultimate motive, though, concerned imperialism. First, the Lika line would “bring culture, at last” to Lika-Krbava County in Croatia-Slavonia. Second, “the main goal is after all to connect Budapest and Hungary with the Dalmatian coast.”57 In a significant way, Havass turns to Friedrich Ratzel to support Hungary’s imperial expansionism. The German geographer, nowadays known for laying the foundations of the concept Lebensraum, wrote in Anthropogeographie that, “Umgekehrt es ist verheissungsvoll, wenn ein eingeschlossenes Volk sich eine Lücke in den Gürtel bricht, der es umgibt, oder sonstwie seine Expansionskraft bezeugt.”58 Ratzel took the example of the political rallying cry “Tengerhez magyar, el a tengerhez” (“To the sea Hungarian, to the sea,” originally the title of an 1846 article by Hungarian politician Lajos Kossuth) to prove that such an “expansion power” can have political consequences. At least, the development of the Lika line was, according to Havass, necessary to halt the expansionism of Austrian trade, even at the expense of Hungary’s economic development.

Havass called attention to Austria’s efforts to curtail Hungary’s economic expansion. The planned construction of the “island railway” (this line would combine a steam ferry and railway lines through Istria, Pag, and so forth to Zadar) in Dalmatia would simply be a means of economic expansionism for Austria.59 Austria also aimed, according to Havass, to monopolize maritime trade through the connection between Vienna and Split. The subvention of the Österreichische Lloyd, the establishment of a port on the Istrian coast, next to Fiume, were all part of this strategy.60 Havass would repeat what had been already stated concerning the Lika line:

The railway line to Split must belong to the Hungarian railway jurisdiction and must be a Hungarian line, for it will be profitable, for it bears important political and economic interests, and it can contribute to the protection of Rijeka.61

The investment would yield remarkable profits. The port of Split was closer to the Suez Canal than Trieste, Genova, Marseille, or Hamburg, and thus it could assume an important role in trade with the East. But there were other resources in the region. The waterfalls along the Cetina River could provide industrial electricity, Brač (an Island close to Split) was a major producer of high-quality marble, there was a burgeoning cement industry in Split, as well as a spa, wine exports, and so forth.62 These assets ensured the importance of rail connections between Split and Budapest. Havass’ call did not go unnoticed. A critical review appeared in Vasuti és közlekedési közlöny (Railway and transportation gazette) claiming that it was not economically rational to oppose the construction of the Split-Vienna line. The main goal of the Austrians was to develop Split (and potentially alleviate the traffic going through Trieste) and not to create a competitor for Fiume. Hungarians, rather, should concentrate their efforts on developing Fiume, which could not become a competitor, as it lacked the appropriate infrastructure. The anonymous writer completely dismissed Havass’ contentions as propaganda and proposed a more rational approach:

We have so many things to do, more directly and more urgently, that we don’t have time to wander in a foreign land. We are deeply sorry that Dalmatia is a foreign country, but today, to think about its re-annexation and especially to plan our transportation policies in view of this idea would not be far-sighted or economically rational behavior.63

 

Dezső Szegh, an influential economist and prolific writer on economic expansionism in the Balkans,64 also opposed the establishment of the Lika line in favor of the Una line, as the latter would be shorter, cheaper, more profitable, and more efficient. In addition, the Una line better fit Hungary’s existing trade policies with regards to trade with the East. Szegh proved this statement with references to “objective facts, so to speak, on a mathematical basis.”65

In his response, Havass rejected the notion that the re-annexation of Dalmatia would be a “utopian enchantment” because all parties (including Dalmatians and Croatians) were in favor of this constitutional change. He also reiterated the need to construct the Ogulin-Knin line on the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom and make it a “Magyar” railway.66 In 1908, the Austrians suddenly got interested in Dalmatia, for they feared that Hungary would re-annex it. Like many of his contemporaries, Havass believed that it was Austria that benefitted mostly from the Dual Monarchy. Cisleithania had a positive trade balance vis-à-vis Transleithania and wanted to maintain the economic dependency of Hungary, in his assessment. The goal for Hungary, in contrast, was to free itself from this dependency through enhanced trade relations with the rest of the world. The port of Fiume was not sufficient (with its mere 20 square kilometers). The solution could be found in the ports of Dalmatia and in the training of Magyar sailors who would work for Magyar economic independence and Magyar economic expansion.67

As in the case of cultural belongingness (see below), Havass was not the only public figure to write in favor of the railway line between Ogulin and Knin. For instance, Iván Polgár, a Cistercian monk, historian, and professor at the Cistercian Gymnasium in Székesfehérvár, described the Dalmatian railways as a crucial component of Hungarian railway investments. For Polgár, railway investments should be profitable in the sense that the income generated by new lines would cover the interest on the capital and make further investments possible. The rationale behind the construction of the Ogulin-Knin line (as planned by Act XLVIII of 1912) was to direct the traffic to the lines of the Hungarian State Railways (MÁV) and open up new trade networks for Hungarian products.68 Dalmatia should belong to Hungary by “historical law,”69 yet the construction of railway connections between Hungary and Dalmatia was in the interest of Hungarian economic growth, regardless of whether Dalmatia would be annexed to Hungary as stipulated in Act XXX of 1868 or not.

Culture and History in the Service of Imperialism

One important pillar of Havass’ propaganda was the cultural and historical relations between Dalmatia and Hungary. The richly illustrated monograph, entitled Dalmatia, included all the cultural monuments and memories that illustrated Dalmatia’s earlier attachments to Hungary.70 One such case is the preservation of the remains of Katalin and Margit, daughters of Béla IV of Hungary, at the cathedral in Split. According to the report, “the royal relics were kept in garbage and dirt,” and this was a clear sign of anti-Magyar sentiments in the province. Havass rejected this claim, because the unusual condition of the tomb was due to the refurbishment of the cathedral at the time, and the Dalmatian sense of fraternal attachment to Hungary was unquestionable.71 Havass attempted to prove that Dalmatia and the Magyar nation belonged together culturally by citing cultural-historical examples that were repeated for decades, in some cases even in the interwar period. For Split, it was the royal tomb. For Zadar, the capital of Dalmatia, it was St. Mary’s Church, which had been erected partly by Coloman of Hungary and the conquest of the region by Louis I. For Trogir and Klis, the important event was Béla IV of Hungary’s escape from the Tartar invasion. These historical events served as encouragement for contemporary Hungarians to visit Dalmatia, as explained in 1901 in Vasárnapi Újság,72 and the places were the backdrop for the aforementioned drama Fényben.73 The goal of the trilogy was to draw attention to Hungary’s glorious past so that the present generation could gather strength from this example in the unfortunate age of the interwar period.

The public image of Dalmatia was very similar to what Havass recounted many times, at least from the perspective of school field trips to Dalmatia. Reports of field trips to Dalmatia specifically mentioned visits to attractions in the province that were somehow related to Hungarian culture of history. In the case of Zadar, student groups stopped at St. Mary’s Church and St. Simeon’s Church, and they would observe the Roman-style tower of the former, erected to remember the Coloman’s parade in the city, and the silver casket in the latter, offered to the city by Elizabeth of Bosnia, the wife of Louis I. A Catholic Gymnasium in Budapest issued the following report of the silver reliquary: “Seeing this invaluable piece of rare perfection gives us an understanding of the power, richness, and glory of our country at the time of Louis I.”74

Other mentions include Klis (Clissa), a small village which provided shelter for Béla IV when he fled the Tartar invasion. The teacher reports that on the visit to this stronghold, “we sang the National Anthem and our Kurutz songs with such emotion!”75 Efforts to nurture these “historical reminiscences”76 would continue in Split with visits to the tomb of the daughters of Béla IV in the cathedral and to Trogir, where Béla IV also stayed in 1242. Havass’ drama entitled Dalmáczia (Dalmatia) was also not ignored by the schools. In 1903, several schools reported to have watched the “patriotic drama” at the Urania theater following a request by the pedagogical council.77

Havass’ distinctive imperial agenda was echoed by teachers on the field trips. The stenography teacher at a trade school in Budapest rambled on about the prospects of Magyar foreign trade in his introduction to the report “Magyar world trade. A desire of all true Magyars.” This was followed by a rhetorical question: “But is Magyar world trade not a dream, a reverie or a castle in the air?”78 The answer was a firm no, as demonstrated by the school trip itself. Others gave a more explicit description of Magyar imperialism in Dalmatia. For József Andor (cited above), the goal of the trip to Dalmatia was to show students “the ancient places of the old Magyar empire.”79 The Magyar empire lost its old glory for a reason: “the decline of national virtues and the empowerment of national defects led us to lose this fairy province.”80 What remained of Magyar imperialism in the province was remarkable, however, because the material remnants of Magyar rule in Dalmatia were almost invisible, and we would look for them in vain as “a sign that Magyar rule was not violent and did not leave its mark on anything.”81 A field trip description by the Gymnasium in Trsztena (Trstená), a Slovak town at the northern border between Upper Hungary and Galicia, offered further proof of the benevolent nature of Hungary’s imperial past.

Once the wind was glowing a Hungarian tricolor on Orlando’s Column in front of St. Blaise’s Church. Under the protection of this tricolor, Dubrovnik lived in security, in wealth with privileges, and in peace. And Dubrovnik had its heyday under the protection of this tricolor.82

Other travel reports replicated these tropes without the imperialist voice. The architect János Bobula Jr. described Dubrovnik in 1911 in exactly the same way as Havass spoke about Dalmatia. The portrait of the coastal city started with a reminiscence about Magyar rule in the province. The traveler wondered, while strolling through the alleys of the old town, whether a knight of Béla IV or Ladislaus I of Hungary would come and block his way, and he imagined how Sigismund of Hungary, the Holy Roman Emperor, would watch animals and plants from the window of the monastery, just like visitors in the early twentieth century did.83 But Bobula dismisses these thoughts with a melancholy sigh:

Let’s not pass time with these reminiscences, because we can only get depressed by knowing our weakness. Knowing that we have to tolerate silently that the “pearl of the Adriatic,” which the Árpáds brilliantly put on the Holy Crown of Stephen, is today under foreign rule, without any historic rights.84

Not surprisingly, the most important landmark in the city is the cathedral that contains the relics of St. Stephen. Others were just describing Dalmatia as a touristic destination. A handbook for travelers by Sándor Paulovits, a senior clerk in Tolna County, copied most of the information from Havass’s book on Dalmatia without references to the annexation.85 Lajos Czink, a teacher at a secondary trade school, described Lissa with the necessary references to Coloman of Hungary, Béla IV, and Louis I but without any mention of Dalmatia’s re-annexation.86 Béla Dezső, a Gymnasium teacher, recalled the times of Béla IV but again did not make any contentions concerning how Dalmatia belonged Hungary.87 The linguist Béla Erődi gave a comprehensive summary of Dalmatia’s touristic destinations and only reinforced the idea that it was, now, a foreign country. The remains of Béla IV’s two daughters were mistreated in Split because of “ethnic hatred,” and the bishop refused to transport them to Hungary because the Magyars had not built a direct railway line between Split and Budapest.88

Conclusion

The case of Rezső Havass offers persuasive support for the notion that empire and nation are not binary oppositions in the case of the Habsburg Monarchy89 and they worked together well in Havass’ imperialist ideology. For the Magyar nation, economic expansionism as a form of imperialist politics was a means to develop and sustain Hungarian political and cultural influence. The idea of a Magyar imperium was thus not alien to the thinking of Havass and his contemporaries.90 On the contrary, it was shared and practiced by many. It might have seemed little more than a daydream a century after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, but it was a political program espoused by many around 1900. The imperialist ideology of Havass was present both in discussions about the establishment of new railways (namely in the case of the Ogulin-Knin railway line) and in the reconsideration of Hungary’s trade network and transportation routes. Naturally, it was also present in the image of Dalmatia from a historical and cultural perspective. School trips and tourist guides characterized Dalmatia as a former colony of the Hungarian Kingdom and were guided by the cultural and historic reminders of Hungarian rule in the province. Respected historians like Henrik Marczali and Lajos Thallóczy were equally interested in the distant past of Dalmatia as a source of historical rights for the Hungarian crown. This was, of course, the Magyar perspective. The argument concerning historic rights could support claims to the region both by Cisleithania and by Transleithania, not to mention Italy and Croatia.91 Foreign travel handbooks mentioned Hungarian relics, but they presented a much more nuanced picture of the common past and present. Maude M. Holbach’s travel book only mentions one Hungarian relic, “the marvelous silver-gilt sarcophagus said to contain the body of the Simeon of the Presentation in the Temple” offered by Queen Elisabeth of Hungary to the Church of St. Simeon.92 Another travel report bluntly criticized Hungarians:

It [Dalmatia] also suffers from imperial politics, the absolutely necessary connection of its state railway at Knin with the Austrian system being persistently vetoed by Hungary, which hopes thus to coerce it into supporting the Magyar party in the Diet.93

Hungarians might have been alone in thinking that Dalmatia should belong to their kingdom, but they imagined this settlement in the framework of the Habsburg Monarchy. Havass and others like him harshly criticized “Austria” as the main competitor with and enemy of Hungary’s economic development and the country that did the most to curtail Hungarian independence, yet they remained in the Dualist framework and envisaged only a reconfiguration of the power balance within the monarchy. Robert Musil, in The Man Whitout Qualities, might have written that Austrians were primarily nothing at all and there was no such thing as Austria in the imagination of the peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy. For Hungarians like Havass, “Austria” very much existed, and it was the country that connoted the Habsburg empire. But this empire contained in itself another empire, the Magyar imperium.

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