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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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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Parádi, József. “A dualizmuskori Magyar Királyi Pénzügyőrség határőrizeti szolgálata” [The border guard service of the Royal Hungarian Financial Police of the Dualist era]. In Emlékkönyv Őry Károly születésének 85. évfordulója tiszteletére, edited by József Parádi, 45–59. Salutem, 6. Budapest: Szemere Bertalan Magyar Rendvédelem-történeti Tudományos Társaság, 2018.

Pénzes, János. “The impact of the Trianon Peace Treaty on the border zones – an attempt to analyse the historic territorial development pattern and its changes in Hungary.” Regional Statistics 10, no. 1 (2020): 60–81. doi: 10.15196/RS100102

Sik, Endre. “Adalékok a határ szociológiai elemzéséhez” [Data for a sociological analysis of the border]. In Határhatások, edited by Endre Sik, and Ráchel Surányi, 11–32. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Társadalomtudományi Kar–Tárki Társadalomkutatási Intézet, 2015.

Simmel, Georg. “Híd és ajtó.” [Bridge and door] Híd, February 2007, 30–36. http://epa.oszk.hu/01000/01014/00034/pdf/030.pdf Last accessed on July 1, 2022.

Somogyi, László. A tápiósülyi civil internálótábor olasz vonatkozásai (1915–1918) [Italian aspects of the civilian internment camp in Tápiósüly, 1915–1918]. Clio Műhelytanulmányok 2. Budapest: Clio Intézet, 2019.

Stelli, Giovanni. Volontari e internati fiumani nella Grande Guerra. Atti e Memorie della Societá Dalmata di Storia Patria. No. 4, 3rd ser., vol. 37. Rome: Societá Dalmata di Storia Patria, 2015.

Stelli, Giovanni. Storia di Fiume. Dalle origini ai giorni nostri. Pordenone: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 2017.

Szabó, József. “Határvadász zászlóaljak a Keleti-Kárpátok védelmi rendszerében” [Border fighting battalions in the eastern Carpathians defense system]. Rendvédelem-történeti Füzetek/Acta Historiae Preasidii Ordinis 20, no. 23 (2011): 165–77.

Szikinger, István. “Rendvédelmi jog a dualizmus korszakában” [Law enforcement in the Dualist era]. Rendvédelem-történeti Füzetek/Acta Historiae Preasidii Ordinis 22, no. 26 (2012): 141–57.

Végső, István. “Olasz áldozatok Halason?” [Italian victims in Halas?]. Nagy Háború Blog [Blog of the Great War]. https://nagyhaboru.blog.hu/2015/11/11/olasz_aldozatok_halason Last accessed on July 1, 2022.

Weigel, Sigrid. “A ‘Topographical turn’-höz: Kartográfia, topográfia és térkoncepciók a kultúratudományokban” [On the “topographical turn”: Cartography, topography, and concepts of space in the cultural sciences]. In Tér, Elmélet, Kultúra. Interdiszciplináris térelméleti szöveggyűjtemény, edited by Mónika Dánél, András Hlavacska, Hajnal Király, and Ferenc Vincze, 106–13. Budapest, ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2019.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg government had a very complicated task of inventing some form of supranational identity as an alternative to nationalist programs in Cisleithania. It sought to craft this supranational identity first and foremost as part of the self-images of schoolchildren as future citizens. One of the major ways to create and solidify a notion of a common “Austrian” identity in school history classes was to highlight the Habsburg wars, triumphal and bloody battles, and military heroes as reminders of an integrated supranational past. Official instructions obliged teachers to emphasize the “heroic times of Austria,” its “glorious battles,” and its “valiant wars,” as emphasis on these episodes of the past, it was hoped, would further the development of “the idea of the integrated statehood in Austria.” In this article, I offer an example of this cult of the Austrian wars in school education by the ways in which the wars fought during the early period of Francis Joseph’s rule, namely, the Sardinian war of 1859 and the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, were taught to later generations of schoolchildren. Ironically, the fact that Austria lost these wars was humiliating. Nevertheless, during the late period of Francis Joseph’s rule, narratives and visual depictions of the events of these wars in schoolbooks strongly contributed to the formation of a heroic image of the Austrian army and to the idea of just Habsburg rule. I focus in my discussion first on how the accounts of the wars in schoolbooks deviated from the historical facts and, second, on how these accounts nonetheless furthered the emergence of the “Austrian” identity.

Keywords: Habsburg Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, Francis Joseph, supranational identity, history of education, schoolbooks, history lessons

 

Fans of Habsburg history may well remember the story of Joseph von Trotta, “the Hero of Solferino,” from The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. Trotta was appalled by an imprecise narrative about the battle of Solferino (1859) found in a schoolbook, which grossly overstated his own actions and represented them as great heroic deeds. Trotta found the situation intolerable, although people around him, including the emperor himself, delicately explained him that the story “is for children,” and “all historic events are rewritten for school use.” Moreover, they assured him, this was the “proper” way of doing things.1

It is true that history schoolbooks represent a peculiar type of source. Like hardly any other medium, schoolbooks, which remain formative teaching aids in history instruction and civic education, convey official and quasi-official images of history to certain age groups of children and young people within the compulsory schooling setting.2 Given their broad impact, schoolbooks have long been used in the service of the prevailing ideology and rhetoric. Political elites quickly understood that national memory could be most easily constructed in history classes which presented current issues in their (alleged or constructed) historical context. They also realized that public mass schooling inculcated a sense of national unity in pupils, as well as loyalty and obedience.3 For these reasons, history schoolbooks were broadly used by European governments as early as the nineteenth century in the invention and consolidation of a previously non-existent sense of national cohesion.4

Scholarship on civic education in Europe and the United States shows that many states saw public education as an essential tool for crafting national identity and national loyalty, which were by no means innate, the claims of primordialists notwithstanding. Eugene Weber and James Lehning argued that schools were a central force in cultivation of the patriotic loyalty of future French citizens.5 Troy Paddock claims that public education in imperial Germany served as a robust tool to build loyalty to the newly founded united empire.6 Paula Fass and Christina Ziegler-McPherson show that American educators of the nineteenth century utilized English and history courses in order to Americanize a diverse population and create a sense of loyalty to the state.7 Similar efforts were made to Russify and nurture patriotic sentiment among the subjects of the polyethnic Russian Empire.8

The creation of a patriotic and loyal citizenry was likewise one of the main concerns of the Habsburg government in Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg Monarchy faced the complicated task of inventing some form of supranational identity as an alternative to the programs of national elites, who had challenged the state’s cohesion. The government identity politics exemplified an intended fabrication of history and myths to be used first and foremost to shape the self-images of schoolchildren as future citizens.9 Roth’s character was right when he complained about the “pack of lies” in his son’s reader: historical images in schoolbooks were narrated so as to foster patriotic feelings and dynastic loyalty in schoolchildren, and as part of this, exaggerations and understatements were not only permissible, but even welcome.

Habsburg identity politics and its effects on the society of the Dual Monarchy have long been the focus of academic discussion. Many prominent scholars published works on the development of Habsburg culture and civil society with a focus on the complexity of national identity.10 Their findings have led to a crucial revision of the previous assessments in the nationalist literature. The latter tended to define the Habsburg Empire as a kind of anacronism compared to the European nation states and a “prison of nations,”11 which appeared unable to address the nationality conflicts facing it in the nineteenth century. In contrast, revisionist studies offer strong evidence that the Empire and its institutions were of great importance for its population, which showed a high degree of engagement. The recent book by Pieter Judson on “how countless local societies across central Europe engaged with the Habsburg dynasty’s efforts to build a unified and unifying imperial state”12 summarizes the most important finding of the revisionist works.

Moreover, the recent studies have shown that, despite their prominence in political parties, legislative institutions, and the press, national elites largely failed to awaken passionate attachments to national identity among the larger part of the population of Cisleithania.13 During the last decades of the Dual Monarchy, nationalists had to fight against apparent indifference to the national causes, and they were met with general loyalty to Habsburg non-national institutions and an embrace of multilingualism in the public and private spheres. Many researchers have stressed the paradoxically sustainable phenomenon of massive loyalty to the emperor and the ruling dynasty, the so-called Kaisertreue, which contributed significantly to the cohesion of the Habsburg Empire and moved its peoples look for options to preserve the unified state.14 This loyalty to the multinational empire was largely due to the various measures adopted and implemented by the Habsburg government and administration. Although in the traditional (national) literature, these measures were usually assessed as too limited and backward as responses to the challenges posed in the era of nationalism15 (a view which is still shared by some recent researchers),16 the revisionists tend to attach greater value to the efforts of Habsburg officials to achieve cohesion among the population of the composite state. A number of excellent works examine commemoration and celebration practices in the Habsburg Empire as a means of fostering loyalties to the state and the dynasty, as well as “invented traditions” at the Viennese court and the complex array of symbols which were intended psychologically to consolidate the citizens of the monarchy.17

In 1849, the Habsburg government embarked on a program that would lead to the creation of the most advanced and cutting-edge state schooling system in Europe.18 The structure and core principles of this system, which included the principle of equal language rights, are discussed in detail by Helmut Engelbrecht, Gary Cohen, and Hannelore Burger.19 Other scholars consider the important issue of the certification and translation of schoolbooks in their studies, as well as the content of history textbooks that was appropriate and reliable in the view of the Viennese Ministry of Culture and Education.20 Scott Moore’s brilliant study explores how the civic education was utilized in Habsburg schools to cultivate the patriotism of its peoples and forge a complex, “layered” identity.21

One of the major themes of the patriotic version of the Habsburg past that was presented in schools was wars: narratives about the triumphal and bloody battles waged by the Austrian army and its military heroes were exploited as reminders of the shared supranational past of the Habsburg peoples. According to the Instructions for Classes in the Gymnasien of Austria (1884), emphasis was to be placed on “the heroic time of Austria” and “its glorious battles and valiant wars,” for they were “the moments through which the consciousness of common belonging to the peoples united under the scepter of Habsburgs” was awakened, and “the idea of an integral statehood in Austria” was developed.22 Stories about wars helped convey the memory of a common “glorious past under Habsburgs” through the emphasis that was placed on the triumphant battles, which had required united efforts. There was also room for mention of the bloodbaths and massacres that the the peoples of the monarchy had survived together and preserved in their collective memories as outrages and injustices inflicted by an external common enemy. Commemoration of the whole train of glorious military commanders who fought at the service of Habsburgs functioned as a means of offering narrative embodiments of the symbols of the “supranational” Austrian identity.23 Along with the military heroes Prince Eugène of Savoy and Archduke Karl (who were the figures of Habsburg military history who were the most vigorously glorified by the Viennese court), Joseph Radetzky developed into the most prominent military hero in imperial Austria as early as the mid-nineteenth century. The latter functioned, according to Laurence Cole, as “the symbol of a patriarchal, conservative, patriotic ideology that wished to subsume class and national conflicts within a discourse of loyalty.”24

In the discussion below, I focus on the narratives in Cisleithanian schoolbooks published between the 1860s and the 1910s about the wars in which the Austrian monarchy fought during the period of neo-absolutism, or in other words, the Austro-Sardinian war of 1859 and the Austro-Prussian-Italian war of 1866 (otherwise known as the Seven Weeks’ War). Both wars represented a vulnerable episode in the history of the Habsburg monarchy. The Habsburg forces failed miserably, suffering heavy losses, and the empire had to cede its vast Italian territories to Sardinia and its supremacy in the German Confederation to Prussia.25 Some researchers even consider the defeat at Königgrätz “the death of the army.”26 It is easy to exploit narratives concerning wars in which one’s country emerged victorious wars for the benefit of the image of a “Great and Powerful Fatherland” of which every citizen or subject is proud. But how did the authors of schoolbooks craft narratives about these lost wars, given that they had to reflect on the defeat but without downplaying or undermining the greatness of the Fatherland? Were there any strong deviations from historical facts? Which persons and episodes were singled out or overemphasized, and which were sidelined and obscured? And finally, did the authors managed to preserve the image of a great and glorious Austrian monarchy under the wise rule of Habsburgs?

The research on which I have based my conclusions draws largely on the collections of schoolbooks kept in the library of the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art, and Culture in Vienna. I used only schoolbooks that addressed relatively recent political events and contained narratives about the wars in question, which means that I used the schoolbooks designed for the last three years of Volksschulen and Bürgerschulen, for middle and upper classes of Gymnasien, and for the last two years of teacher training colleges. I went through roughly 60 units published with the official sanction of the imperial and royal Ministry of Culture and Education. However, in the discussion below, I cite a limited number of these sources, as most of the units appeared to be unchanged reissues of the same narratives. The fact is, the Viennese Ministry was very vigilant about the narratives included in schoolbooks. A thorough inspection by ministerial officials preceded the decree of official approval to publish or reissue a particular schoolbook or translation, and only then could the schoolbook in question be used in schools.27 Close attention was paid to the political views of the people who compiled textbooks, and the range of compilers was, therefore, relatively limited. Partly for this reason, textbooks were reissued eight to ten times on average and translated, most often from German, into the languages of the different nationalities. Translations were welcomed by the Viennese Ministry, as they offered the reassurance that textbooks in the national languages also met the political requirements of the imperial center.28

The authors of the upper level schoolbooks were professional historians who taught in Gymnasien and often held posts as university professors. Dr Theodor Tupetz, for example, the author of the schoolbooks cited in this article, had an impressive career, serving as a school inspector but eventually moving up to the position of court counselor. As professional teachers and historians, the authors of schoolbooks had their own views of historical events, which influenced the narratives they wrote, although they had to adhere to ministerial instructions and regulations. After the Compromise of 1867, some competences, including the compilation, translation, and distribution of textbooks, were transferred to the crownlands. Not all crownlands and languages were treated equally, however. While in Galicia, for example, the textbook certification system came under the control of the Polish-dominated Galician parliament,29 Slovenian-language textbooks remained completely under the supervision of the Viennese Ministry until the fall of the monarchy.30 In both cases, however, the final decision on approval was made in Vienna. Although the state publishing house in Vienna lost its monopoly to publish textbooks and schoolbooks were then published by private publishers (especially middle and upper level schoolbooks), the Ministry of Culture and Education in Vienna continued to supervise their content and language design.31

The narratives about the wars of 1859 and 1866 that I analyze in this article are mostly taken from the textbooks in German. Despite the December constitution of 1867 and the school reform of 1869, the language of instruction in many Gymnasien was still German, while the number of secondary schools with a minority language of instruction was growing slowly. In many cases, the books by German authors approved by the Viennese Ministry of Culture and Education were simply translated into the required language, and this was especially true for schools with Slovene and Italian as languages of instruction.32 Even in Galicia, where local authorities exerted a significant influence on the design of the educational system, the first Ruthenian-language history textbook that was translated not from German (but rather from Polish) was only published in 1895.33 Thus, narratives from the textbooks in German, I would argue, are representative for the whole picture of the way in which the history of the Austrian wars in question was taught in Cisleithanian secondary schools. However, I also offer a few samples of narratives in Czech and Romanian languages for comparison. I tried to compare the narratives from three perspectives: the alleged causes of the wars, the course of the wars, and the outcomes of the wars. I also focus on the style and biases of the narratives.

In the Austrian textbooks published in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the names of the wars differed from those used in contemporary literature. The Austro-Sardinian War of 1859 was most often referred to simply as the “war against Austria” or “the Italian War,” and the Seven Week’s War was called the “Prussian war.” The first mentions of the Sardinian war (1859) appeared in the schoolbooks as early as 1864. For example, in Gindely’s textbook on world history for upper classes of Gymnasien, one can read that the most important events since the 1848 revolt and Napoleon’s declaration of the French empire in 1853 were “the oriental war” (that is, the Crimean war) and “the Italian War.”34 These early mentions were very short and succinct, little more than a few unbiased sentences with simple facts. However, with every passing year, the narratives got longer and increasingly detailed. In the 1880s, narratives about “the Italian war” of 1859 reached a page and a half or two pages, and the narratives devoted to the relationship between Austria and Prussia between 1859 and 1866 were three to four pages, even in the textbooks designed for the lower and middle classes in secondary schools.35 In the schoolbooks published in the 1890s, narratives of the wars were most often blocked under the title The War Years. They also were three to four pages long and included a large portrait of the Austrian commander Archduke Albrecht, a photo of the monument to the Austrian admiral Tegetthoff, and a reproduction of a depiction of the battle of Lissa (1866). The narratives, moreover, were getting increasingly biased, vivid, and emotionally loaded.

In many schoolbooks, the narrative was also accompanied with a familiar portrait of Francis Joseph I in 1849, in which the young, good-looking emperor is wearing a military uniform with the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Military Order of Maria Theresa, and the Cross of Saint George of the fourth class, which he was awarded by the Russian tsar Nicholas I “for pacifying the Hungarian riot in 1848–1849.” Narratives often included the contention that the adolescent emperor’s accession to power took place at a “terribly serious and pressing time,” when in most of Austria’s lands there was “disorder and confusion” and “even open outrage in several lands.” But the young emperor coped with the difficult situation and managed to keep Austria’s lands together, and a short period of peace then followed during which the emperor took trips to several crown lands, and everywhere the Habsburg peoples “cheered the new ruler and gave him evidence of unfeigned love and unshakable loyalty.”36 However, a few years later, Francis Joseph “had to pick up his sword again […] despite his pronounced love of peace.”37 In some textbooks, the period of 1859–1866 was titled Emperor Franz Josef I defends his lands.38

The Causes of the Wars

In the 1890s, considerable attention began to be devoted to the issue of the causes of the wars in question and, in particular, to the characteristics of aggressors and the interests they pursued. For example, in the most widespread Gindely’s reader on history for Volksschulen, which was revised by Gustav Rusch and appeared in seven editions without any significant changes between 1898 and 1910, it is stated that in 1859, King Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia allied himself with “the ambitious French Emperor Napoleon III” and “urged Austria to go to war,” while in 1866, Prussia “seized the opportunity to declare war on Austria,” since “it had long been striving for vested interests in Germany,” and at the same time, the Danube monarchy was attacked by Italy. 39 One finds the same information in the Pennerstorfer’s textbooks on history designed for the same category and age of schoolchildren.40

For the schoolchildren going to Bürgerschulen, Pennerstorfer explains that it was the death of Radetzky in 1858 that encouraged “the Sardinian king to try his luck with arms.”41 The image of a heroic commander who was so fearsome that the enemy did not dare attack while he was alive both reflects and contributes to the official Radetzky cult, which saw a resurgence between 1880 and 1914.42 For the children in the last year of secondary school, the same author wrote even more emotionally:

Victor Emmanuel was just waiting for an opportunity to wrest the provincems of Lombardy and Veneto from Austria. As long as Radetzky was alive, of course, he did not dare attack. But no sooner had the military general closed his eyes (1858) than he was again preparing for war. His ally here was the emperor of France, Napoleon III. With his help, he succeeded in defeating the Austria and obtaining the cession of Lombardy. […] In a similar way, Victor Emmanuel came into possession of Veneto in 1866. This time, he allied himself with the king of Prussia, which threatened our Fatherland on two sides at the same time.43

 

So Sardinia was commonly represented as the aggressor and the guilty party in both conflicts, with the Sardinian king Victor Emmanuel being the main culprit and Napoleon III and Frederick William IV of Prussia serving as his accomplices. The authors of the schoolbooks normally omitted the fact that it was Austria who officially declared war on Sardinia in 1859.44 Still, there were several textbooks for secondary schools which mentioned that hardly trivial detail. For instance, Dr. Emanuel Hannak describes the casus belli more accurately in his schoolbooks and notes, “As Sardinia was arming and gaining reinforcement from France, the Austrian General Count Gyulai opened the war.”45

In his textbook on modern history, Hannak provides even more details, but he again maintains that in 1859, Austria was actually forced to go to war in response to the actions of Sardinia and France and the Sardinian government was the main aggressor in the Italian war of 1859. According to him, however, the aggressor in 1866 was not Italy, but Prussia with its unwarranted political ambitions and unjust territorial claims.46 As a matter of fact, Austria rather than Prussia was the first officially to declare war on July 17, 1866, although sophisticated intrigues of Prussia did take place and hostilities preceded the official declaration of the war.47

The interwar conflict, namely, the Austro-Prussian-Danish war of 1864, was omitted in most textbooks for Volksschulen, but it was mentioned in the textbooks for Bürgerschulen and Gymnasien. In Hannak’s textbook, for example, it is described quite accurately from a historical point of view and more or less unemotionally, although Hannak takes the opportunity to recall “the victories of the Austrians at Översee and Veile and the victory that Tegetthoff achieved at Helgoland over the Danish flotilla,” which “form a glorious leaf in the laurel wreath of the Austrian army.”48

The most detailed and biased narratives about the wars in question are in the textbooks published after 1900. The main aggressor in the 1859 conflict had changed. This time, it was the ambitious “upstart” Napoleon III, although Victor Emmanuel II is also cast in unflattering light as not particularly honest and ready “to cede without hesitation the old ancestral land of his house, Savoy, to France” in exchange for assistance to “come into possession of the royal crown over Italy as far as the Adria.”49 The change of the aggressor can be explained by the different political setting at the turn of the century: Italy, unlike France, was now an ally of Austria-Hungary within the Triple Alliance framework and could not be directly accused of wrongdoing. However, it was not as closely allied with Austria-Hungary as Germany, and this made it possible for the narratives to include some veiled criticism of its political behavior. In contrast, Prussia’s guilt for starting the war in 1866 is blurred and obscured for the same reason. The emphasis has shifted to the joint success of Austria and Prussia against the Danish king in 1864. The conflict of 1866 is exposed as an unfortunate misunderstanding between the two reputable powers defending their natural interests and leadership in the German Confederation.50

In addition to narratives in schoolbooks, students also heard the narratives and explanations given by the teachers in classroom. The versions of events told by instructors may have been clearer and more memorable for schoolchildren, as they may have sounded more like the whole truth. Those stories probably exerted a strong influence on the political orientation of schoolchildren as they grew up. Teachers in turn presumably restated the information they found in the textbooks used in the teacher training colleges. For this reason, these narratives are also of interest from the perspective of this discussion. One of the most commonly used textbooks for the future teachers was the book by Tupetz. For example, his textbook on the world history for the second-year students had eight editions that were published without any significant changes between 1890 and 1917. His textbook on world history for the third year students had eight unchanged editions, the last of which was published in 1918. For soon-to-be history teachers, Tupetz suggested a long narrative about the period of war in question, accompanied by many more details and a corresponding ideological bias.

In his discussion of the war of 1859, Tupetz depicts aggressive France and Sardinia as lands under the rule of unfair leaders, but he also stresses that “it was hoped on the Danube that an attack on a member of the German Confederation would be repulsed jointly by all German states,” and particularly Prussia. But for their disloyalty to the staunch Austrian ally, Austria would have kept her Italian possessions. Once more, Prussia employed underhanded tactics when it declined the “brilliant” proposals for a reorganization of the German Confederation by Francis Joseph, who was only seeking to maintain peace and justice among the German states. The king of Prussia did this on Bismarck’s advice, for “had the Austrian plan succeeded, Prussia would have had to give up hope of taking the lead in Germany for a long time, perhaps forever.”51 Thus, Tupetz delicately rebukes the German states, including Prussia, blaming them for the two main misfortunes that befell the Austrian monarchy in the 1860s, the loss of territories and the inability to preserve supremacy in Germany.

Tupetz also describes the conflict with the Danish king, who also proved covetous and unjust. His actions were illegitimate, and Austria could not tolerate this, as Austria remained loyal to the principles of the German Confederation and ready to defend the rights of any of its members.52 Thanks to the joint forces of Austria and Prussia, Denmark was forced to abandon its rapacious plans and cede the duchies to the victors, who soon started a dispute over the fate of the two German lands. Prussia was apparently inclined to deprive Schleswig-Holstein of its traditional independence, but Austria could not accept this. The war of 1866 “between the two great German powers” began because Prussia longed for supremacy in Germany. It concluded an alliance with Italy, and Austria saw itself attacked from two sides. “Most of the German states, on the other hand, feared the destruction of their previous independence from Prussia and sided with Austria, which had never infringed on their independence, but had always defended it.”53 Based on this narrative and similar ones from other textbooks by Tupetz,54 it can be supposed that the version most commonly heard by the Habsburg children in classrooms reiterated the information from most schoolbooks: the illegitimate ambitions of Sardinia and Prussia led to the bloody conflicts and induced Austria, under its peace-loving emperor Francis Joseph I, to wage wars.

The Course of the Wars

Most of the textbooks for Volkschulen did not contain any description of the course of the wars. The textbooks for younger children did not even contain any mention of specific battles during the Austro-Sardinian war of 1859, perhaps because none of the major battles were won by the Austrian army. These books make mention of only three battles that took place during the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866: the Battles of Lissa, Custozza, and Königgrätz. The names of the first two battles, in which the Austrian army triumphed even if these triumphs remained indecisive for the outcome of the war, are bolded in the text and described in detail, while the battle of Königgrätz, the decisive battle, in which the Austrian army suffered a crushing defeat, is referred to very briefly. One notices a clear difference between the textbooks for girls’ schools (Mädchenbürgerschulen) and the textbooks for boys’ schools (Knabenbürgerschulen). The latter, while following the same basic scheme of the narrative, contained more detailed descriptions of battles, hostilities, military maneuvers, armaments, troop numbers, etc. and more names of commanders. As soon as universal military duty was introduced by the 1867 constitution, schoolboys were obviously regarded as future soldiers and officers in the Austrian army, who needed deeper knowledge in the field of military history and warfare.

In connection with the Battles of Lissa and Custozza, the textbooks glorify Archduke Albrecht of Austria and Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff as talented commanders and Austrian military heroes. The Austrian army acquired “new and everlasting fame”55 under the leadership of Archduke Albrecht, “who had already given proof of fearlessness at Sa. Lucia in 1848 and, under Radetzky’s excellent guidance, matured into a capable warrior. Moreover, he was the son of the victor of Aspern and had inherited his father’s general virtues.” 56 On June 24, 1866, Archduke Albrecht won “a brilliant victory over Victor Emmanuel’s army at the memorable site where Radetzky had once put the troops of Karl Albert to flight, near Custozza.”57

Thus, a relatively recent hero was presented in the textbooks in close connection with the earlier military heroes Radetzky and Archduke Karl. This perfectly supports Laurence Cole’s claim that the Habsburg government sought to establish explicit continuity in terms of the representation of heroes within the military culture of the monarchy.58 The heroes of relatively recent wars were finely interwoven into the general Austrian imperial cult of military commanders who were famous for their patriotism and their loyalty to the state and dynasty. Thus, the Habsburg state undertook “a conscious effort to promote a conservative patriotic agenda in the 1890s and 1900s, which presented the army as a positive, cohesive force within the multinational state,”59 and the narratives in schoolbooks can be seen as a display of this effort.

In the same manner, compilers of schoolbooks praise the “glorious” Admiral Tegetthoff who “without hesitation” attacked “the much stronger enemy fleet and forced it to retreat,” a “heroic deed [which] will not be forgotten”:60

The young Austrian fleet also took a glorious part in the battle against Italy. Its commander, Admiral Tegetthoff, attacked the far more numerous Italian fleet off the Dalmatian island of Lissa and forced it to retreat. Not one Austrian ship was lost in this battle, while the enemy lost three ironclad ships. The sea victory at Lissa was all the more honorable for Admiral Tegetthoff, as he could only oppose the iron-armored ships of Italy with wooden ones. Unfortunately, the glorious winner died in 1871 at the age of 41. The magnificent monument which Emperor Francis Joseph had erected to him in Vienna reminds us of his heroic deed.61

 

It is true that from the 1880s onwards, the state became increasingly involved in the propagation of Austrian military heroes’ cult, for instance by unveiling monuments to them.62 Gestures of the Habsburgs’ gratitude for the services to the Fatherland and inviolable loyalty to the ruling dynasty must have been very meaningful for the politics of identity, as long as they were included in the narratives which schoolchildren not only had to read but often had to learn by heart. The narratives were normally accompanied by large images of a half-page or a whole page size, which invariably included a photo portrait of Archduke Albrecht wearing the Austrian uniform and military rewards; the painting of the battle of Lissa, depicting the Italian ship Re d’Italia sinking after being rammed by Tegetthoff’s flagship Ferdinand Max; and a photo of the monument to Tegetthoff on Vienna’s Praterstern.

However, other Austrian commanders could be portrayed in a less flattering manner. In particular, Count Ferenc Gyulai, a Hungarian nobleman who commanded the losing Austrian army at the Battle of Magenta, was often blamed for failing to attack the French before they united with the Sardinians, for which reason the Austrian army suffered defeats at Magenta and Solferino.63 Count Clam-Gallas, who commanded the right wing of the Austrian army at Magenta, was first to retreat, while the center and left wing of the army under other commanders “held each other brilliantly”: “his Hungarian regiments failed and his instructions did not prove workable. Repelled by the French, he retreated so quickly from the line of attack that he completely lost touch with the undefeated parts of the army.” At Solferino, “again it was the Hungarian regiments of the Clam-Gallas corps in the center that did not hold out.”64 It is difficult to say whether the specific blame placed on the Hungarian regiments here resulted from the personal beliefs of the compilers, but it was hardly an official practice or policy of the Viennese Ministry to generate a negative perception of Hungarians. A Hungarian aristocrat Tassilo Graf Festetics de Tolna, and Franz Graf von Thun und Hohenstein of non-Hungarian origin were also criticized for their actions at Königgrätz. The textbook claimed that, “against the orders of Benedek, [they] took part in the struggle against the Prussian center, weakened their forces, and left their basic positions,” and “the third Prussian army therefore struck the right flank of the Austrians without hindrance and stormed Chlum, and thus the battle was lost.”65

Nevertheless, the “heroic struggle” of the whole Austrian army was never subject to critique. In the victorious Battles of Custozza and Lissa, it were “the combative troops, the good spirit of the officers, the precise execution of the supreme commands, the cooperation and mutual support, and proper management” that “brought about the success.” In “the bloody but unfortunate battles of Magenta and Solferino,” the Austrian troops also “performed miracles of bravery and devotion.”66 At Königgrätz, the Austrian artillery likewise “performed miracles of bravery”:

Particular fame was earned by the “Battery of the Dead” under Captain von der Groeben, which did not leave the place until Groeben himself, a second captain, and 52 of 60 artillerymen had died. The survivors saved the only gun that still had its equipment. On the battlefield, near a grove between the villages of Chlum and Lipa, a beautiful monument has recently been erected representing Austria, with the inscription: “To the Heroes of the Battery of the Dead.” 67

An amazing and breathtaking story is also narrated about an episode of the sea battle at Lissa:

One of the Austrian wooden ships, the “Kaiser,” also performed miraculous bravery. When this ship was surrounded and attacked by four enemy ironclad ships, Commodore Petz, who was in command of the ship, fired all the cannons to the right and left, with great force against the Italian ironclad in front. The shock was terrible for the wooden ship too: one of the masts broke and smashed the engine’s chimney; the sails that had fallen on the chimney began to burn. But the crew put out the fire and the ship escaped danger. But one of the enemy ironclads with which the “Kaiser” had fought—it was called “Afondatore” and had the commander in chief of the Italian fleet on board—was so badly damaged that it sank after returning to the port of Ancona. The Austrian fleet hardly lost a ship. Hardly has world history (before the World War) recorded a case when such wonderful success would have been achieved with so little means as in this one.68

Should the schoolchildren have questions about why the Austrians were still defeated in particular battles after all their “heroic resistance,” the teacher was ready to provide reasonable explanations, which he could find in the textbooks used at the teacher training colleges:

In this war [of 1859], the French had the advantage over the Austrians that they already had “rifled” cannons, i.e. guns the barrels of which were provided with shallow indentations in the form of a helix, which gave the bullets a greater speed and enabled the French to shoot much further than was possible with “smooth” cannons. Nevertheless, the Austrians were long contesting the victories of their enemy at Magenta and Solferino; moreover, at Solferino, one Austrian wing under Field Marshal Lieutenant Benedek beat the opposing Sardinians.69

 

A similar explanation was provided for the defeat in the Prussian war of 1866: it was Austria’s defeat that was characterized as the sad consequence of the Prussian military reform (general conscription), better armaments of Prussia (the Dreyse needle-guns), and the inadequate aid given by the small German states to Austria.70 It is interesting that the author of a history schoolbook in Czech identifies additional causes of the Austrian defeat: the excellent Prussian military leader (Helmuth von Moltke the Elder) and general compulsory schooling in Prussia.71

The Outcomes and Consequences of the Wars

Although Austria’s defeats in war in the period between 1859 and 1866 were by no means obscured, but rather were accurately stated, all narratives about the wars in question end on an optimistic note. First, the war indemnity which Austria had to pay was moderate. Second, Austria did not lose any territory to Prussia. Third, in 1878, Bosnia and Herzegovina were “handed over to Austria for administration,” and as “New Austria,” they partially replaced the loss of land which Austria suffered in the war years of 1859 and 1866.”72 Fourth, with the Peace of Prague, “the antagonism which had developed between Prussia and Austria with regard to German affairs came to an end,” and “it became evident how valuable an alliance could be for both parties.”73 “In alliance with the German Empire, which was strengthened through personal meetings of the monarchs and expanded to include Italy,” Austria now asserted an influential position in the European state system.74 And last but not least, Francis Joseph “was now freed from the perpetually threatening danger of war” and “was able to devote all his energy to the internal development of Austria,” which resulted in a great progress “in all branches of popular welfare.”75 After the war against Prussia in 1866, the emperor promulgated the December Laws (1867).76 “A great boom in trade and industry, in the arts and sciences” is referred to as a direct consequence of these laws. For instance, the frigate Novara circumnavigated the earth in 1857–1859 and established trade connections with overseas cities and countries. Numerous roads and railways were built, with the Semmering, Brenner, West, Northwest, and Francis Joseph Railways being of particular importance.77 In his textbook for soon-to-be teachers, Tupetz also suggested a very encouraging summary of the war years:

Avoiding war and all bloodshed, a prince of peace in the noblest sense of the word, Emperor Francis Joseph I found himself obliged to draw the sword to protect his empire against foreign enemies; in the wars which Austria was forced to wage, the Austrian armies acquired new laurels for their imperishable wreath of glory. […] the victory which Field Marshal Archduke Albrecht, the son of the victor of Aspern, achieved at Custozza in 1866, the victory of Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, who unfortunately died early, at Lissa in the same year will live on forever in the memory of all Austrians.78

 

Narratives in Languages Other than German

The discussion above offers a good general image of the wars in which the Austrian monarchy fought during the period of neo-absolutism as these wars were narrated in history textbooks in German. I would also like to provide a few samples of narratives in Czech and Romanian for comparison. Let me note, however, that it is not my intention to present a comprehensive analysis of the peculiarities that were typical of narratives in textbooks in other languages of the monarchy. I offer only a few examples as interesting illustrations of some of the differences in these narratives.

From the textbook on the world history by professor Samuil V. Isopescul, designed for the lower classes of secondary schools and published in Romanian, the reader would similarly know that although Emperor Francis Joseph I was “not fond of wars,” he was still forced to wage many wars during his long reign. Isopescul considers Count Cavour, who was “pursuing with great energy the plan of the unification of Italy,” to have been the aggressor in the Italian war of 1859, and he claims that “King Victor Emmanuel, supported by Emperor Napoleon III, declared war on Austria in 1859.” The Austrian army was defeated near Magenta, “although it had fought with the greatest heroism.”79 Isopescul particularly stresses the personal courage of Emperor Francis Joseph, who “exposed himself to fire like every other soldier.”80 In a way similar to that in the German textbooks, Isopescul praises the glorious Austrian victors Archduke Albrecht and Admiral Tegetthoff, providing a few sentences of biography on each and describing in some detail the battles at Custozza and Lissa.81

As for the schoolbooks published in Czech, one also finds emphasis on reverence for Emperor Francis Joseph and praise for his personal courage during the war period. For example, in Šembera-Koníř’s textbook on world history, which was written for first-year students in the municipal schools, one reads that, even as a young man, he “showed special affection and dexterity for military service,” and he “went to Italy to get a vivid picture of war preparations and achievements, which were directed against the enemy by Field Marshal Count Radetzky at the head of the Austrian army.”82 In 1859 and 1866, he waged bloody wars, during which “our people gloriously defeated Italy on land at Custozza (under Archduke Albrecht) and at sea near Lissa (under Admiral Tegetthoff), but he had bad luck against the Prussians.”83 The reference to “our people” distinguishes the narrative in this textbook. It made the Bohemian children perceive the Habsburg citizens as one solidary Austrian people, which was definitely the aim of the Habsburg government. The images of shared triumph and shared defeat contributed, without doubt, to the cohesion of the residents of the Habsburg lands. In the textbook by Šembera-Koníř intended for the second-year and third-year students in the municipal schools one finds praise of the worthy emperor, who “showed great bravery and fearlessness,” accompanied by a portrait of him as a young man, as well as praise of “our” brave army.”84 The reader also finds a cautious critique of the “indecisive” General Benedek, who, unlike in the German narratives, is portrayed here as a commander lacking in bravery who was incapable of making bold decisions.85 The narrative also notes that, after the defeat at Königgrätz, the Prussians occupied Prague, a detail omitted from the German narratives. Šembera-Koníř underlines: “Although this war did not last long, it was terrible, and all the horrors took place in Bohemia. The loyalty of the Czech nation proved excellent in these difficult trials, which the noble monarch himself acknowledged when he visited Bohemia after the war.” 86 Thus, Šembera-Koníř emphasizes the outstanding loyalty and merits of the Czech people, although he regards the latter as an integral part of the whole Austrian people. “The outstanding loyalty” of the Czech nation is also stressed in the schoolbook by Š. M. Konečný.87 The narrative on the war period concludes with a comment that later Austria was compensated for the loss of the Italian territories, when it acquired Bosnia and Herzegovina.88

The cult of wars and military heroes was widely employed by the Habsburg government in its effort to forge state loyalty and patriotic thinking in imperial Austria. It was propagated through various institutions, channels, and means. History classes in schools and history schoolbooks served as ideal means of spreading this cult. Narratives about wars led by the Austrian monarchy with a relevant focus and emphasis occupied a solid place in history textbooks in the different languages of the monarchy. While it was possible to select triumphant military conflicts from the remote past to be presented to schoolchildren and ignore clashes in which Austria was defeated, this approach was hardly applicable to relatively recent wars that could not be “hushed up.” For this reason, the narratives about the Austro-Sardinian war of 1859 and the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866 found a due place on the pages of Habsburg schoolbooks, even though the Austrian army was crushingly defeated in those wars and the Austrian monarchy suffered territorial losses and the loss of its supremacy in the German Confederation.

However, the Ministry of Culture and Education in Vienna kept a stern eye on the focus of narratives about the wars to ensure that the image of the great Fatherland under its good ruler and heroic army was by no means challenged. The discussion I have offered above of the narratives in history textbooks published between 1860s and 1910s mostly in German but also in Czech and Romanian shows that no serious discrepancies between the narratives about the wars waged by Austria between 1859 and 1866 can be discovered in the textbooks designed for students at the secondary schools and teacher training colleges in Cisleithania. Although the recent literature considers the wars in question among the hardest and most humiliating for Austria, during the late period of Francis Joseph’s rule, the ways in which these wars were presented in schoolbooks strongly contributed to the cult of the brave Austrian military and the heroic image of Austrian warriors, regardless of ethnicity and language. The authors of schoolbooks did not distort historical facts and did not deny the military defeats suffered by the Austrian Empire, but their narratives are clearly biased and one-sided, and they were clearly intended to foster patriotic feelings, in accordance with the instructions of the ministry. One can find clichés such as “the miracles of bravery” performed by the Austrian soldiers and sailors and stories about glorious battles fought under the leadership of brilliant Austrian commanders, accompanied by portraits of Archduke Albrecht and photos of the monument to Admiral Tegetthoff. The latter were glorified as new heroes of the Austrian army, but in close connection with the hugely popular Radetzky and Archduke Karl. This established continuity among military heroes who were famous not only for their deeds in battle, but also for their patriotism and their loyalty to the dynasty.

Although in the conflicts in 1859 and 1866 it was Austria who officially declared war, in the narratives in question, it was claimed that the major aggressors were Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia, Napoleon III, and the Prussian government. The wars were lost because of “unfortunate” circumstances, but with modest war indemnity losses and no territorial losses. Moreover, the outcomes of the wars led to the long-awaited monarchy’s reorganization and its “finest achievement,” the Constitution of 1867. The personal bravery and achievements of Francis Joseph were particularly stressed, and a portrait of an emperor as a young man full of energy decorated most of the textbooks. The narratives in Romanian paid specific attention to the high virtues of the emperor, while those in Czech emphasized the alleged loyalty of the Bohemians to the emperor during the hostilities.

Thus, this discussion offers insights into one more episode in the Habsburg state efforts to promote a patriotic agenda and present the Austrian army as a powerful and cohesive force guarding the multinational Fatherland, a force of which every citizen should have been proud. History schoolbooks can be considered an effective means of disseminating the cult of Austrian wars, since large masses of schoolchildren absorbed their narratives under the oversight of state-certified teachers, and these narratives could certainly strengthen patriotic feelings and influence the political views of children as they grew older, much as they could also contribute to the formation of their identities as imperial Austrians. This, in its turn, may offer further insights into the phenomena of military culture, popular patriotism, and dynastic loyalty, which are widely discussed in the recent secondary literature.

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Ziegler-McPherson, Christina A. Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908–1929. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009.

 

* This study was financially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 19-59-23005 The Habsburg Monarchy: new trends in research of economic, sociopolitical and national development of the Central-European composite state.

In this essay, I examine how people with business and political interest on both sides of Austrian–Hungarian border, sometimes even in royal courts, could survive in spite of the rather capricious relationship between Hungarian kings and Habsburg rulers in the second half of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth century. Most of them sought a solution that would enable them to keep the estates and the positions they had already acquired. This “double loyalty” was practically impossible in the midst of the war between Matthias Corvinus and Frederick III, Holy Roman emperor: very few of the figures in question managed to maintain attachments to both sides. A window of opportunity opened with the Peace of Pressburg in 1491, when the two parties recognized the possibility of service in the neighboring ruler’s service. Although the peace treaty did not alter the significant shrinking of the camp supporting the Habsburg claim to the throne, which had been relatively large in the time of the 1490–91 Austro-Hungarian War, from the 1490s on and in strikingly large numbers from the mid-1510s, more and more people could be found whose activities made plainly clear that they were not exclusive in their loyalties: they were quite able to serve two masters at the same time.

Keywords: multiple loyalties, late Middle Ages, Hungarian Kingdom, Habsburg dynastic politics, cross border contacts

 “A Hungarian will always be a Hungarian, with faith and loyalty rather unstable.” Florian Waldauf made this claim in a letter written to Sigismund, archduke of Austria in October, 1490. Waldauf was informing the archduke about the recent developments of the military expedition launched by Emperor Frederick III (1440–1493) and his son, King Maximilian I (1486/1493–1519) in the autumn of the same year.1 As the imperial army entered the Kingdom of Hungary by force, several Hungarian and Croatian noblemen yielded to it, some of whom undoubtedly did so not simply out of necessity but rather as a strategic move. For those going over to the Habsburg side, the peace treaty signed in Pressburg (Bratislava, today in Slovakia) on November 7, 1491 meant relief from retaliatory actions.2 King Vladislaus II of Bohemia (1471–1516) and Hungary (1490–1516) not only had to guarantee a pardon for these subjects of his, he also acknowledged, for the future, that they had the right to join any prince in any country outside Hungary who was not an enemy of His Majesty and the country and who had not allied with such enemies, especially the Holy Roman emperor, as wished or considered convenient, but by all means remained, like the others, obedient and loyal to Vladislaus II before all else, preserving the freedom of the country and bearing the burdens deriving from their possessions and incomes at all times.3

The Peace of Pressburg in 1491 put an end to a period which had borne witness to repeated outbreaks of conflict from the late 1470s on, the roots of which went back to the 1440s. After the death of Albert, king of the Germany and Hungary (1439), there escalated a civic war of varying intensity between the parties in order to acquire possession of the Holy Crown of Hungary and conquer the Hungarian throne as an ultimate goal: some supported the posthumous-born son of King Albert, Ladislaus (1440/1453–1457), while others supported Vladislaus I, king of Poland (1434–1444). King Vladislaus I was killed in the Battle of Varna (1444), so no rivals were left for Ladislaus the Posthumous, but the civil war was not over. At this point, some estates in Western Hungary ended up in the possession of Duke Albert of Austria for a short time and his brother, King Frederick, from the 1440s onwards, some (the smaller share) by right of pledge and some (the larger share) because they were simply taken by force. Peace with Frederick was finalized in the Treaty of Wiener Neustadt (1463) in the sixth year of the reign of the next king, Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490). The most severe “compromise” in the treaty proved to be the terms regarding the right of inheritance of the Hungarian throne. Supposedly keeping the unsatisfying and frustrating conditions in mind, Matthias Corvinus started an open conflict with the emperor in 1477 which did not come to an end until December 1487 (without any significant success). The aforementioned Peace of Pressburg not only set aside the military conflict between King Wladislaus II and his Habsburg rivals after the death of Matthias Corvinus but also confirmed the main points of the Treaty of Wiener Neustadt. Wladislaus II and Maximilian I then signed a marital agreements involving their dynasties, first in March 1506 and eventually, in its final form, in July 1515.4 Finally, the elevation of Ferdinand, archduke of Austria (1521–1564) to the throne of Hungary was based neither on the treaty of Wiener Neustadt nor on the Treaty of Pressburg, but on two symbolic acts at the time: his election in 1526 and coronation in 1527, as was also true in the case of his rival, János Szapolyai (who was elected and crowned in 1526).5

The following questions arise: 1) did the Peace of Pressburg constitute a new phenomenon that had been unknown or did it merely “legalize” it on the highest level; 2) after 1491 and before the Habsburg provinces and the Jagiellonian Kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia were united by King Ferdinand (1526–64), how many people, if any, took advantage of the opportunity, created by the Treaty of Pressburg, to show dual loyalties and serve two rulers, a Jagiellon and a Habsburg at the same time? In order to answer these questions, I first examine the issue in general. I then consider, touching on its antecedents and with the help of some graphic examples, what the point included in the Peace of Pressburg, which may seem a bit unusual at first, actually meant in reality.

Multiple Loyalties

Today, we are perhaps more likely to think (or even judge) about loyalty in categorical terms, but apart from in times of war, loyalty has never been a simple question, as rulers and their counselors themselves quite pragmatically realized in the late Middle Ages. Undoubtedly there were some individuals who showed dual or multiple loyalties for a shorter or longer periods of time, or in other words who served and were loyal to two (or more) masters at the same time.6 Paul-Joachim Heinig stressed that for rather a long time, until the reign of Emperor Charles V (1519–1555), personal commitments predominantly showed a lack of regulation in the Holy Roman Empire. The phenomenon of “serving or being committed to more masters, could, at various levels, lead to one being given the status of familiaritas or being appointed to serve as a counselor. It was not only about titles and formality, but rather went hand in hand with certain functions.”7 Occasionally, however, contemporaries argued8 that “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other” (Mt 6.24).9 Similar arguments can be found in several pieces of medieval European poetry. The strict disapproval of multiple loyalties, however, may suggest that this kind of conduct was more common than poets wanted to admit.10 However, there may have been other “practical” reasons for references to multiple loyalties: conflicts, defections, and betrayals make a more exciting story line. Authors only rarely narrated something that seemed to favor avoiding conflicts and accepting compromise for the sake of realizing multiple interests.11

Multiple loyalty extended beyond borders: first and foremost, permeability was possible due to the identical or very similar social structure (the feudal system).12 Subjects coming from the Low Countries could easily belong to the Holy Roman emperor and to the French king as their liege lord at the same time.13 However, multiple loyalty became more and more conflicted by the growing French expansionism in the early modern period.14 Independently from the social system, actors sometimes performed services for several parties in the world of diplomacy, as recent analysis has shown, drawing on the examples of nuncios, legates, and clerks of the Holy See and the envoys of foreign rulers in Rome in the second half of the fifteenth century.15 Crossing borders between Christian and Muslim countries was not a privilege for traders at all, and sometimes Christian mercenaries paid by Muslim rulers represented the interests of Christian kings (or of the people who had commissioned them).16

The feudal system of Western Europe never set foot in the Hungarian Kingdom, which is why the findings of scholarship on multiple loyalties in Western Europe (a topic which is often intertwined with analysis of the local social system) can only be taken into account in a limited way. A member of the lower nobility, for example, was often “employed” as a so-called familiaris, a position which was distinctive to the world of Hungary and which meant belonging to the familia of a landlord, working in his service. This position had nothing to do with the position of the vassal in the feudal system.17 Based on the criterion of disloyalty, one sees where the limits of loyalty lay.18 However, no systematic analysis has been done on what it meant to be a “good” and “loyal” subject in the Hungarian Kingdom19 or what was done for and thought of loyalty and disloyalty in theory and practice.20 Positions which involved working in the service of the court constituted the highest, most prestigious slice of the “spectrum of loyalty.”21 In most cases, we do not know exactly what service involved or whether any services were actually performed. Receipts and accounts are available only from the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on from the court of the Holy Roman emperor, certifying that someone made it onto the list of payments, or in other words received regular income for his services, but the nature of this service remains unclear.22 The source material on matters of the medieval court of the Hungarian king is even more scattered and fragmented.23

As seen from the discussion of the differing legal systems, the Hungarian-Austrian border had very sharp contours, but this did not really prevent people from crossing it and having short-term or even long-term (business) issues on the other side of the border. If one interprets the concept of loyalty loosely, multiple loyalties might also mean that, for whatever reason, someone was a landowner in one or more provinces or countries, whether these lands were under a single, autonomous sovereign or belonged to a common composite state under one ruler. In fact, in order to maintain possession of an estate successfully over the long run, a certain degree of loyalty was needed. Otherwise, the estates would have been lost. This kind of double or multiple ownership of estates, or in other words, owning estates which were in more than one country, was not a new phenomenon in the late medieval period; it may certainly be detected, albeit in a fragmented form, in the Austrian-Hungarian borderland from the thirteenth century on. From the second half of the thirteenth century, there is more and more evidence of less significant figures settling in or relocating to and acquiring smaller estates on both sides of the border.24 The will of nobleman Wolfgang Rauschar/Rauscher of Levél or Gáta, written in 1526, offers a clear indication of the places which were decisive in his life. For instance, he designated the hospital in Pressburg as a beneficiary, but also the hospitals in Hainburg and Bruck an der Leitha, right across the border.25 Noblemen were not the only people who obtained estates. Ecclesiastical institutions also did (Heiligenkreuz, Pöllau, Vorau), as did burghers, who indeed obtained them in even higher numbers (Bruck an der Leitha, Wiener Neustadt etc.), usually with vineyards in Hungary, which “enjoyed a special status since the thirteenth century, their owner having the right to sell or bequeath them to whomever he wanted as long as he cultivated them regularly.” The burghers in particular managed to make their voices heard when they repeatedly expressed their resentment for having to pay foreign trade duties, that is, the thirtieth and the ninth (nona), the tax of landlords, for the wine they produced on their own Hungarian estates.26 The predominantly German inhabitants of Pressburg and Sopron, which were both close to the border, must certainly have had interests in the territory of the Empire (owing to their numerous family ties),27 but few details are known about this.

As a consequence of the aforementioned wars in the second half of the fifteenth century, life in the Hungarian-Austrian border region became more complicated and conflicted. The world beset by party strife was vividly captured by German poet Michael Beheim, who wrote in the mid-fifteenth century, a time at which the Hungarian, Bohemian, and Austrian territories were plagued by civil war. In one of his poems, Beheim described how a Hungarian nobleman, having noticed the coat of arms on Beheim’s shield and realized that he was in the service of Ladislaus the Posthumous drove him away, shouting imprecations at him all the while for having discouraged his king from visiting Hungary.28 In another poem, Beheim gave an account of an episode when he was verbally abused at the wedding of a prominent big landowner from the Austrian-Hungarian borderland, Count Sigismund of Szentgyörgy-Bazin, in Óvár. This time, however, the source of conflict was not anti-German sentiment but tensions within the House of Habsburg. When the poet inquired as to why he was being taunted, a jester named Christopher told him that, while Beheim was on the side of Frederick III, those hurling abuse at him supported the monarch’s brother, Albert VI, archduke of Austria.29

Waldauf’s negative view of Hungarians, cited in the first sentence of this essay, may have been indirectly fed by this tumultuous period. Bad experiences were naturally engraved more deeply in the memories of those living in the borderland than they were among the inhabitants of the Tyrol (like Waldauf himself). However, the news affected those living farther from the events as well, as they could hardly avoid hearing the flood of reports. The fear of Hungarians became so intense that it was still palpable in Habsburg territories even in the mid-sixteenth century, by which time the rulers sitting on the Hungarian throne had been from the House of Habsburg for decades.30 On the other hand, it was not only Habsburg supporters who were prejudiced against the people of the Kingdom of Hungary. Similar attitudes were also prevalent among members of the Hungarian nobility.31 Later generations were also swayed by these preconceptions. The once significant royal town of Sopron, for instance, was often accused of being “two-faced” or “false-hearted” because, due to its location near the Austrian-Hungarian border, at times of political crisis, it sometimes had to adopt a prudent policy and make shows of loyalty both to the Hungarian king and the Holy Roman emperor.32

From the Empire to the Kingdom of Hungary

If we wish to have a more subtle grasp of what being in the service of more than one ruler meant after 1491, we would do well first to examine the decades before this period. Members of the Cilli retinue, who took part in the administration of their “empire” (which included lands in Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, the Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia), which fell to pieces after the assassination of Ulrich II, count of Cilli (1456), all found their way somehow. It is a well-known fact that thanks to the influential Cilli family, a great number of imperial subjects arrived in the Kingdom of Hungary as castellans or familiares.33 Nevertheless, few of them were able to achieve anything resembling the career of Bohemian mercenary captain Jan Vitovec who, in the 1450s and 1460s accumulated a considerable size and number of estates by maneuvering between Frederick III and Matthias Corvinus.34 Yet, however prominent Jan Vitovec may have been at the beginning of Matthias Corvinus’s reign, his sons were driven away from their Hungarian estates incredibly easily, by the increasingly autocratic king’s troops in 1488.35 All their significant estates in Hungary were lost, and there was probably little left of the estates amassed and owned by the mercenary captain in the territory of the Empire either. According to the records, the two sons, William and George, were on the side of the Habsburgs in 1491,36 although at this time they also enjoyed support from Matthias Corvinus’ widow, Beatrice of Aragon.37 Presumably because of his knowledge of Slavic languages, Count William was sent as an envoy by Frederick III and Maximilian I to Poland, Mazovia, and Russia in 1493–1494,38 then he became assessor of the supreme court (Kammergericht) in Wiener Neustadt. He was given the estate of Bruck an der Leitha, on the Austrian side of the border, probably as a payment for his services.39 His elder brother, Count George, was able to remain on the Hungarian estates, which were then only a fraction of their previous size, but according to the book of accounts of 1494–1495, he may have been given a place in the court of Vladislaus II.40 Complaints concerning various properties were made in George’s name,41 but the family was unable to get back most of the former estates.

Vitovec was not the only person coming from the far side of the border and settling in Western Hungary who entered the service of the Hungarian King but also kept his interests abroad for a time. In 1472, Frederick III complained to Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) that the king of Hungary had a habit of supporting Austrian noblemen who dared to rebel against the emperor.42 Andreas Baumkircher from Carniola was one such “rebel.” Baumkircher had spent a long time in the service of the Habsburgs (as a mercenary, first of King Ladislaus the Posthumous, then of Frederick III), and he had thus obtained an estate in Western Hungary (Szalónak or Stadtschlaining, today in Austria). On the day of the treaty of Wiener Neustadt (1463), Baumkircher took an oath of loyalty to King Matthias Corvinus, and he was granted a special privilege: he was allowed to serve anyone as long as, in doing so, he caused no harm to the king of Hungary or the kingdom. Not surprisingly, Baumkircher came up as a counsellor of the emperor a few days later. He eventually turned against Frederick III, however, going over to the side of Matthias Corvinus in 1469. In 1471, the emperor had Baumkircher arrested and executed, and neither the Inner Austrian estates or Matthias Corvinus made any protest.43 Thanks to an agreement between the emperor and Baumkircher’s widow and sons in 1472, the family would receive compensation for Baumkircher’s estates on the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, though there is no clear evidence that the whole amount of money was ever actually transferred to them.44 By the end of the fifteenth century, the major part of the estates of the two sons, Wilhelm and Georg,45 consisted of Császárvár (Cesargrad, today in Croatia) and Szalónak, in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary, and Rohonc (Rechnitz, today in Austria), bought in July 1490.46 Despite the fact that the Austrian-Hungarian war of 1490–1491 probably also hit his Hungarian estates situated close to the border, Wilhelm Baumkircher did not end up among Maximilian’s troops invading the Kingdom of Hungary but rather joined the supporters of Vladislaus II, crowned king of Hungary in 1490,47 and stayed at his side until his death in 1492. He was rewarded for his loyalty with the position of treasurer for a short time.48 Probably due to considerations of property rights, his brother Georg Baumkircher kept his Austrian estate Kirchschlag49 (which he held by right of pledge) when he entered the service of the Habsburgs in 1493, though he did not choose Frederick III, his father’s executioner, but his son, Maximilian I.50 However, records from 1494 refer to Georg Baumkircher as now (or continually?) a counselor to Vladislaus II.51 Although it is not clear that he played these roles at the same time, one thing is for sure: while the father could not manage to strike a successful balance between his loyalties to the two rulers in wartime, his son managed to do so in a time of peace.

Sigmund Weispriach, a brother-in-law of Jan Vitovec, set foot first as captain of Fraknó (Forchtenstein, today in Austria) in the 1450s in Hungary, serving Frederick III at that time. In 1466, rewarding him for leaving Frederick III’s side and joining the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus donated Sigmund the estates of Fraknó and Kabold (Kobersdorf, today in Austria), and privileged Sigmund, among others, to use the arms of the former counts of Fraknó. For the following eight years, he was ispán of Sopron county in Western Hungary and, for a while, he even served as captain of the town of Sopron. Meanwhile, he was possibly able to keep his offices on the other side of the border, namely the captaincy of Pettau (Ptuj, today in Slovenia), which belonged, however, to the authority of the archbishop of Salzburg.52 The path to the Hungarian king’s service was less direct for his sons, Ulrich and Andreas.53 In January 1475, Andreas was said to be a courtier (aulicus) of Corvinus.54 In December 1479, the brothers and their widowed mother refused to open the gates of the Castle of Pettau for the troops of the Hungarian king under an agreement between Corvinus and the archbishop of Salzburg.55 It was probably due to the Hungarian invasions in Styria and Carinthia in the early 1480s as well as a financial conflict of financing mercenaries with Frederick III at the same time that Andreas went over to Matthias Corvinus’s side in 148256 and, following in his father’s footsteps, he became ispán of Sopron.57 Later, as a courtier (“unnser diener, hofgesind”) of Corvinus he was even imprisoned by the emperor for a time, against which the Hungarian king tried to take action.58 Matthias took Ulrich von Weispriach under his protection around December 1485 and made him a member of the royal court (“zu unserm diener und hofgesind”).59 In the case of the Weispriachs, too, a serious break came with the aforementioned 1488 campaign against the Vitovec.60 After that, they came to serve Frederick III and Maximilian I, participated in the aforementioned Habsburg invasion of 1490, and Andreas von Weispriach became captain of the Hungarian town of Veszprém, which was occupied by imperial troops.61 After the Peace of Pressburg, the Weispriach family remained in control of the estate of Kabold and acquired the pawned estate of Kosztel (Kostelgrad, today in Croatia).62 The sources offer no indication that they performed any services for the Hungarian royal court after 1490. They started (or kept) collecting estates in the Habsburg lands, and they were commissioned by King Maximilian to perform some services: Ulrich Weispriach, for example, became governor (Landeshauptmann) of Carinthia (1500–1503).63

The third person arriving from the territory of the empire and dominant from a political perspective was Ulrich von Grafeneck from Swabia, who obtained his first estates in 1447 in Hungary (Sopronkertes or Baumgarten, today in Austria) in the service of Frederick III. In the early 1450s, he served as the castellan of Kőszeg, which at the time was occupied by the emperor’s troops. At the turn of the 1450s and 1460s, Frederick III appointed him to serve as ispán of Sopron county. At the same time, Grafeneck got hold of the estate of Trautmansdorf on the Austrian side of the border (1459) and, gradually, further estates in the Archduchy of Austria. In addition to increasing his wealth, Grafeneck also successfully expanded his network of connections. In the late 1460s, he was often seen around Matthias Corvinus, and he even received an estate from the king (Scharfeneck, 1470). In those days, he clearly tried to achieve a balance by serving both rulers. The cracks in the relationship between Grafeneck and the emperor were probably caused by Andreas Baumkircher’s execution in 1471. Grafeneck took part in a feud (Fehde) led by several Austrian noblemen against the empire, which enjoyed the overt backing of the Hungarian king himself. Eventually, Grafeneck and the emperor reached an agreement in early 1477. In return for 50,000 Rhenish guilders, Grafeneck would give up all his estates in Austria. Not much later (before the spring of 1478), though, the Swabian nobleman went back to supporting Frederick III, then, after further unknown turns, he returned to the service of the Hungarian king. It is possible that in 1487 he was about to change sides again, but this was something the Hungarian king would not tolerate, and it is possible that Grafeneck was killed at his behest. There is no indication in the sources that any of his descendants performed any services for the court. They maintained ownership of (or at least their rights to) both their Hungarian and Austrian estates until they sold them in 1504.64

From the Kingdom of Hungary to the Empire

It was not unusual at all, in the fifteenth century, for Hungarian and Croatian nobles in the service of the Habsburgs to maintain their contacts with the Hungarian king.65 Yet the strategy of Emperor Frederick III and his son, Maximilian I, brought new elements, quite similar to the “methods” used by Matthias Corvinus: they exerted influence on the dynastic policy of their neighboring rival, made some subjects falter in their loyalty by making them various offers, and then built a group of followers who would work to further their dynastic policy, which aimed at destabilization and securing local support for possible military action. This method was particularly used in the period between 1440 and the Peace of Wiener Neustadt in 1463 and the period after 1491. After Matthias Corvinus’s death (1490), and later the Habsburg rulers continuously gave indications of their desire to do so. One of the most emphatic examples of these efforts was the funeral procession of Frederick III (December 6–7, 1493). According to the diplomatic protocol, Maximilian I, delegates of the Holy See and of Charles VIII of France were followed by two emissaries of Vladislav II: Tamás Bakóc, bishop of Eger, and Miklós Bánfi of Alsólendva. They were not the only subjects of the king of Hungary present at the funeral: Hungarian noblemen were also seen in the procession symbolizing the lands of Frederick III. Representing the Holy Roman emperor’s title as king of Hungary, they marched with the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Hungary, right in front of the people symbolizing the Empire, and were last but one (in other words, the second most important figures) in the entire procession. Four of the five delegates can be identified. Two of them were individuals who had recently risen to prominence (Jakab Székely of Kövend and János Kishorvát), and two of them were from prestigious Hungarian noble families (Miklós Szécsi of Felsőlendva and János Ellerbach of Monyorókerék).66 The fact that these noblemen represented the interests of the Holy Roman emperor in the funeral procession was probably a consequence of their serving the Habsburgs during the war of 1490–1491 and continuing to maintain their network of relationships.

In the period after the Peace of Pressburg in 1491, for Frederick III and Maximilian I, openly supporting those loyal to the Habsburgs would have meant weakening the peace treaty, which had been signed to strengthen the Habsburg claim to the throne in the first place, so their followers could only count on some informal support. At the turn of 1494–1495, the news of the ongoing military campaign ordered by Vladislav II against Duke Lőrinc Újlaki reached Maximilian I, who at the time was in Antwerp, somewhat differently: The Hungarian king and his counselors were settling accounts with Maximilian’s former and present supporters instead of dealing with the Ottoman threat. The king of the Romans did not wish to violate the peace agreement, nor did he want to let down his followers, who were “his only joy and comfort in the Kingdom of Hungary,” and who (and here he was clearly referring to his estates in the south) would “also serve as a shield against the Ottomans.” Therefore, he intended to send a delegation to the Kingdom of Hungary to address the conflicts and more soldiers to fight against the Ottomans.67 This “hesitation” probably paralyzed the supporters of the Habsburg’s claim to the throne, and in time, their numbers dropped. As time passed, the threat of the Ottoman Empire likewise diverted the attention of the inhabitants of the southern regions, including Maximilian I’s former followers. Perhaps it was despair due to the hopeless situation that motivated Ferenc Beriszló in 1511 to revive his earlier relationships with the House of Habsburg, for as former ban of Jajce (1494–1495, 1499–1503), Beriszló knew very well what the Ottoman threat entailed. In his own name and the name of his brother, Bertalan Beriszló, prior of Vrana, he offered his services to Maximilian I,68 and then to the chancellor of Tyrol, Zyprian von Serntein.69

In the former letter,70 Beriszló also mentioned his joint service he had performed earlier with János Kishorvát. He may have been referring to the civil war of 1490–91, but that he had another in mind is also possible, as he and Kishorvát had served the emperor for several years. Yet as an envoy of Matthias Corvinus in 1489 in the Ottoman Empire,71 two years later during the preparatory meetings for the Treaty of Pressburg, Kishorvát represented fellow Hungarian and Croatian noblemen finding themselves on the side of the Habsburgs,72 and in the spring of 1492, he was seen, with many others, in Habsburg service in military campaigns against the Ottomans.73 It was probably on the grounds of his military services that he lay claim to some smaller or greater sums of money, which can be traced in the documents concerning him from late 1496 on.74 At the same time, the amount owed to Kishorvát was so large that, in 1497, the Holy Roman emperor gave him Arnfels, an estate in Styria.75 Kishorvát received half of the 6,000 guilders, Maximilian’s debt, in June 1506 but the rest was considerably delayed: part of the arrears was still unpaid in 1524, years after Kishorvát’s death.76 Like Beriszló, Kishorvát had estates in southern Hungary, so it is quite possible that he was motivated to serve the emperor at least in part because of the dire necessities he faced back home. He also may have been tempted to serve the Habsburgs because he lost his Hungarian estates by the mid-1490s as a consequence of his highly aggressive, sometimes even criminal activity,77 and it became impossible for him to prosper in the political sphere. In 1503, when Kishorvát and his brother-in-law, Lőrinc Bánfi of Gara, got back a part of their estates with the help of Duke John Corvin (under the condition that, in absence of any heir, the estates would become the property of the Corvin line), Kishorvát obliged himself to serve the duke but nobody else.78 He was chosen to be one of the executors of duke’s will after the death of Corvin (1504).79 However, we can assume, given the large debt which had been incurred by the Habsburg court, that Kishorvát’s contacts with the Habsburg court were eagerly kept.80

Alongside Kishorvát, Jakab Székely of Kövend was also in the permanent service of the Habsburgs. In the 1470s, he took on military service in Matthias Corvinus’s court, and he played important roles in the king’s campaigns against the Habsburg lands in the 1480s and even obtained estates in Styria. His decision to change sides was not prompted by the Ottoman threat, but rather by the hope to protect and keep his estates in the Habsburg lands, which he had received in the 1480s. He proved successful in these efforts. The fact that certain sources in the Holy Roman Empire refer to Jakab Székely as a counselor (Rat) of Maximilian I may indicate that he held a position of some distinction but was never a real insider.81 His place of origin and the fact that he owned a considerable number of estates in the Kingdom of Hungary in the 1490s played almost no role in his services to the empire, with the exception of Frederick III’s funeral procession in 1493. The tasks he was given required loyalty and reliability, such as military missions in Italy (e.g. in 1496) and the Habsburg provinces or supporting the emperor in his disputes with the Styrian estates. Occasionally, Székely participated in negotiations and diplomatic missions. It is also possible that sometimes he was consulted in issues concerning Hungary. Perhaps the greatest achievement of his career was his triumph in ensuring that both his brother and his sons would have opportunities to move up in the ranks in the Hungarian royal court, thus considerably expanding their room for maneuver.82

Among the families permanently in the service of the Habsburgs, as opposed to the Hungarian royal court, some of the most prominent members of the Hungarian and Croatian nobility can be found. Among the counts of Szentgyörgy and Bazin, who had close connections to both the Moravian-Bohemian83 and the Austrian-South German84 nobility through kinship and estates, the most important supporters of the Habsburg court were John and Sigismund, who lived in the fifteenth century and whose political role was especially notable in the 1440–60s,85 that is, at the time when the Habsburgs were particularly active in their foreign policies towards the Kingdom of Hungary and Hungary was struggling with serious internal conflicts. And although in the end, the family returned to being loyal supporters of the Hungarian king (mainly because of their important Hungarian estates), their network of connections, the prestige they had won, and their knowledge of German were not wasted, and this sometimes made them seem suspicious in the eyes of several fellow Hungarians, who feared that they might be engaged in malicious negotiations against the Hungarian king.86 It was due to the close-knit network that, in June 1480, a few months after the third Austrian-Hungarian war broke out, Frederick III and counts Sigismund and John made an agreement that would guarantee peace between the two parties with a non-aggression pact, and protect the counts’ estates in Moson County from being taken away by the emperor.87 Count John’s and Sigismund’s orientation to the House of Habsburg was partly followed by Sigismund’s son, Thomas,88 and the half-brother, Christopher, who was in the service of the Habsburgs in 1506.89 Christopher’s ambitions may also have derived from the fact that, thanks to his wife, Elisabeth von Neidberg, he acquired quite a few estates in Styria, which Maximilian I topped up with an estate in pledge (Wachsenegg) in 1501.90

John and Sigismund of Szentgyörgy and Bazin may also have been the people who were able to gain a foothold in the Duchy of Bavaria, though for reasons yet unknown.91 It was, however not them or their lineal descendants, but Count Francis of Szentgyörgy and Bazin, who belonged to another branch of the family, who entered the service of Albert IV, duke of Bavaria (1467–1508).92 It is thus possible that, during the negotiations for the marriage between his son, William IV, duke of Bavaria (1508–1550), and the sister of King Vladislaus II of Hungary and Bavaria (1509–1510), Peter of Szentgyörgy and Bazin, voivode of Transylvania, was purposely commissioned to be the chief negotiator on behalf of the Hungarian party, as he had a good knowledge of both Bavaria and the German language owing to his relatives.93

The Croatian Frankopan family, which had huge estates in the southern regions of the Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia, was also traditionally oriented to the House of Habsburg. Except for a short period, Count Stephen Frankopan was ban of Croatia from 1434 to 1437,94 and between 1436 and 144095 and then again between 1453 and 1454 he served as governor (Landeshauptmann) of Carniola,96 a position that his brother, Duim Frankopan probably also held between 144497 and 1447.98 At the same time, the growing number of members of the Frankopan family in the service of the Habsburgs is also quite notable.99 At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Michael Frankopan (from the Slunj line) and his cousins John and Nicholas Angelo (from the Trsat line), as well as John and Nicholas from the Cetin line are noted to have been in the service of the court.100 Bernard from the Modruš line of the Frankopan family may also have had close relations with the House of Habsburg, but the details are unknown.101 In November 1509, Maximilian I reinforced Bernard’s previously granted privileges in the empire (his title as palatine) with reference to the services he had performed.102 The services rendered by Bernard Frankopan’s son Christoph for the Habsburgs in the 1510s and 1520s are among the most documented cases. In 1522–1523, he was Master of the Horse (grand escuier d’escuierie) in Archduke Ferdinand’s court, which, given his role in the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–1516), should be interpreted not as a “classical” position in the court but as a function on the battlefield.103 Presumably maintaining his remarkably good relations with the archduke,104 in 1525 Frankopan appeared as one of the familiares of Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia and then as one of his counselors.105 As in the case of the aforementioned noblemen from the south of Hungary and Croatia, fear of the Ottomans was a decisive factor among fellow Croatian noblemen. Keeping contacts with the Habsburg House and their officials, moreover, receiving financial and military support from them in the 1520s provided a partial solution to the Ottoman threat106 that could, however, give some extraordinary answers to loyalty issues. As Lajos Thallóczy puts it:

the court of Buda was not too delighted to see Christoph, Wolfgang, George and Matthias Frankopan, as well as Stephen Blagajski in the service of Ferdinand, but the same noblemen both frequented the court of Buda and accepted a soldier’s pay from Archduke Ferdinand. This could be accounted for by claiming that, as landowners at the border of Carniola, they were protecting the Austrian territories from the Ottomans too, and the payment they received from the archduke was in fact a contribution to the defense of their own country.107

Although several members of the Kanizsai family, which had estates in the Austrian-Hungarian borderland and enjoyed considerable prestige in the Kingdom of Hungary, likewise served the Habsburgs in times of crisis and civil war, despite their marriages with Austrian families, their service did not prove long-lasting. The only exception was János Kanizsai, whose demonstrable service to the Habsburg court beginning in 1498 can hardly be explained. At the same time, Kanizsai did not give up serving the King of Hungary either (as the ispán of Sopron and ban of Jajce, i.e. a holder of an important military office in the anti-Ottoman defense system), and he kept his estates in Hungary. Initially, he was probably employed as a military man with some horses, then, from the mid-1510s, when he moved to Austria, his service might have involved a permanent presence at the imperial court.108

The fact that János Kanizsai was able to have such a remarkable career may be due in no small part to the intertwining of the Jagiellonian and the Habsburg dynasties. The mutual attitude of distrust, which lasted until 1506 (i.e. until the Treaty of Vienna, which was signed after a short war between Maximilian and Vladislaus II) and, in certain respects, until 1515 (i.e. until the agreements made at the First Congress of Vienna), was obviously not too favorable for the development of such careers. From 1515 on, however, subjects had more room than ever before to find easy transit between the provinces ruled by the dynasties and their courts. The joint courts of young princesses Anna of Jagiello and Marie of Habsburg, who were brought up together in Innsbruck between 1516 and 1521, served as a king of melting pot for the elites, leading to marriages between female and male members of the court.109 It was, however, not the only place where intertwining interests can be seen. One of the master of courts of King Louis II was said to have been a counsellor to Emperor Maximilian I at the same time.110 In 1518, Maximilian I took István Hásságyi, chamberlain of Louis II, into his own service for an annual payment of 200 guilders.111 The assignment of Stefan von Zinzendorf from the Archduchy of Austria was probably partly an undercover maneuver: in February 1516, the Holy Roman emperor gave orders “secretly” to pay him 200 Rhenish guilders for his future services. Zinzendorf’s task was to espouse the issues of Emperor Maximilian I and support them at the Hungarian and Bohemian royal courts. The Austrian nobleman continued performing this task after the death of Vladislaus II in March 1516, following the emperor’s orders, in the court of the new king.112

In the 1510s and 1520s, Péter Erdődi was present in the courts of both Vladislaus II and Louis II,113 but from 1522, in parallel with his service for the latter, he was a familiaris and counselor in the court of Archduke Ferdinand as well.114 It would be difficult to deny that the decisive factor behind this career was his powerful relative, Tamás Bakóc, cardinal and archbishop of Esztergom, who also participated in the First Congress of Vienna in 1515. In 1522, Péter Erdődi obtained the estate belonging to Kőszeg (situated in Western Hungary, under Habsburg rule at the time) by right of pledge, as a result of an agreement to resolve a long financial dispute between Maximilian I and Bakóc, both deceased by then.115

Summary

In a formal or informal way, the persons discussed above all tried to balance between the Hungarian royal court and the court of the Habsburgs in the hopes of ensuring their own prosperity and the prosperity of their families. Such relationships, however, involved great risks, especially in times of war. Some of these individuals were executed (Andreas Baumkircher, for instance), while others “only” lost their estates when suspected of disloyalty to the king (such as the sons of Jan Vitovec).

While at the time of the conflicts between Frederick III and Matthias Corvinus it was primarily those who took the side of the Hungarian king who were able to pursue successful careers, after 1491, the situation reversed, and those who were on the side of the Habsburgs seemed to have more opportunities. However, this was not simply a “180-degree turn,” as the period after 1491 was not the exact opposite of the previous one. Rather, it differed in terms of its dynamics and the logic of power, as well as the ways in which one could adapt this logic. The post-1491 period was less about great changes and, for those supporting the cause of the Habsburgs, definitely more about careful maneuvering. Considerable change was only brought about by turns in the dynasty in 1506 and 1515. Perhaps it is not only the wealth of sources which allows us to identify so many instances of dual loyalties to different rulers and ties to the courts from the mid-1510s, or in other words precisely the time when Anna Jagiellon and Mary of Austria were brought up together on Habsburg soil.

The section of the Peace of Pressburg quoted at the beginning of this essay indeed makes mention of a kind of career which may not have been widespread but which was not completely unknown, neither in the borderlands nor in the royal courts. Including this section in the peace treaty probably served the purpose of reassuring the then numerous Habsburg supporters for many of whom the possibility of serving the House of Habsburg would become unrealistic within a few years: they could not expect any military aid from Maximilian I, as a few of the noblemen in the southern regions, who had fallen into despair because of the ever more impending threat of Ottoman encroachment, had already experienced firsthand. The winds of change could also be felt when, due to the Ottoman threat, Louis II and his brother-in-law Archduke Ferdinand were frequently forced to cooperate in the beginning of the 1520s, which was a new situation for both of them. It meant that, besides the royal courts, in which double loyalties had a place as a consequence of the Habsburg–Jagiellon dynastic agreements in 1515, serving two lords (i.e. the Habsburgs and the Jagiellons) became also possible on the Hungarian-Croatian military border for the sake of a more efficient defense system.

Archival Sources

Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich (BHStA)

Abteilung I (Ältere Bestände)

Herzogtum Bayern (HB)

Ämterrechnungen bis 1506

Kurbayern (KB)

Äußeres Archiv (ÄA)

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

Fényképgyűjtemény [Photo Collections]

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

Magyar kincstári levéltárak [The Treasury Archives of the Hungarian Kingdom]

Magyar Kamara archivuma [The Archive of the Hungarian Chamber]

Vegyes iratok, ügyviteli segédletek, pecsétnyomók [Mixed Files, Finding Aids, Seals]

A bécsi Udvari Kamarai Levéltárban őrzött segédkönyvek és iratok másolatai [Copies of Finding Aids and Files Kept in the Archive of the Treasury in Vienna] (E 239)

Mohács előtti gyűjtemény [Collection of Medieval Documents]

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

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna (ÖStA)

Allgemeine Verwaltungsarchiv (AVA)

Adelsarchiv

Reichsadelsakten (RAA)

Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv (FHKA)

Alte Hofkammer, Hoffinanz (AHK)

Gedenkbücher (GB)

Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (HHStA)

Reichsarchive

Reichskanzlei (RK)

Reichsregisterbücher (RRB)

Maximiliana

Urkundenreihen, Siegelabguß- und Typarsammlung

Urkundenreihen (UR)

Allgemeine Urkundenreihe (AUR)

Sonderbestände

Familienarchiv Erdődy (FA Erdődy)

Urkunden (D)

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár [Széchényi National Library], Budapest

Kézirattár [Manuscript Collection] (OSZKK)

Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv, Graz (StLA)

Allgemeine Urkundenreihe (AUR)

Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck (TLA)

Landesfürstliche Hofkanzleien

Sigmundiana

Mischbestände

Pestarchiv-Akten

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Béla Vilmos Mihalik
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 4  (2021):675-705 DOI 10.38145/2021.4.675

In this essay the potentials for political interaction among local communities will be examined through parish organization in the century following the expulsion of the Ottomans from the territory of Hungary, i.e. the period referred to as late confessionalization (1681–1781). Roughly 150 years of Ottoman occupation had wreaked havoc on the parish network, which was reorganized over the course of the eighteenth century. Village communities took the initiative to establish parishes, but as they did so, the clashing interests of the Catholic Church, the landlords, and the state had to be addressed and negotiated. The dynamics of this process and the ways in which the local communities were able to assert their specific needs should therefore be discussed. The complexity of often divergent interests and aims compelled the communities to devise cautious means of communicating with the competing groups, and it also helped further the internal integration of the local societies and the integration of these communities into church and secular structures. However, growing state influence made abundantly clear that the roles of the church administration and the parishes would soon undergo slow but meaningful change.

Keywords: late confessionalization, parishes, local communities, community politics, integration

Introduction

In the eighteenth century, after the Treaty of Karlowitz and the end of the Ottoman occupation (1541–1699), it was finally possible to begin reorganizing the administrative structures of the Kingdom of Hungary. At the local level, one of the most important stages in this process was the establishment of Catholic parishes, since the parish, as an institution, played a central role in the integration of smaller communities into the larger networks of secular and ecclesiastical government. Once new settlers arrived in areas which essentially had been left desolate by conflict and flight and the network of settlements had been reestablished, the country bore witness to the rapid foundation of new parishes. This essay focuses in particular on the moment of parish foundation in order to shed light on local developments in the larger process of Catholic reorganization. In the following discussion I examine how the local community was able to communicate its needs and aspirations within the web of often competing interests which emerged around the foundation of a parish.

The period under examination, which began with the religious articles of the Diet of Sopron 1681 and came to an end with the Edict of Toleration of Joseph II in 1781, is considered the century of late confessionalization in Hungary by András Forgó.1 One might well have been tempted, therefore, to analyze the aforementioned questions within the familiar theory of confessionalization presented by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling.2 However, in this article I argue that the case of Hungary provides good support for criticisms of this paradigm.3 First, the late developments of confessionalization in eighteenth-century Hungary prove the untenability of chronological definitions, which typically put the end of the confessionalization at the time of the Peace of Westphalia.4 The other principal criticism was the exaggerated role of the state. Micro-historical studies have shown the active role played by local communities, as confessionalization took place in areas where there was no strong state power. Even when the state was present, its aspirations could only be achieved when they overlapped with the expectations of local communities.5

In case of eighteenth-century Hungary, Zoltán Gőzsy and Szabolcs Varga came to similar findings in their research on the diocese of Pécs. Gőzsy and Varga demonstrated that the communities played a very active role in the consolidation of the post-Ottoman period and successfully articulated their specific local interests to the higher ecclesiastical, state, and landlord levels.6 Their research, however, relied on descriptive, often generalizing, serial sources produced by the Catholic Church, for instance, the church visitation records. Thus, they examined the communities through the lens of an external observer, the higher church authority. Although Gőzsy’s and Varga’s conclusions concerning the role of local society were convincing, I approach the topic from a different point of view. The goal of this essay to describe the internal and external dynamics of the local village communities, challenging the excessive top-down, state and church power perspective of the confessionalization thesis.

Highlighting the role of communities, one should consider the phenomena of communalism, a fruitful concept introduced by Peter Blickle.7 Although Blickle stressed the importance of both rural and urban communities in the spread of the Reformation, case studies proved again the limits of their influence and the various grades of their dependency.8 Thus, the complexity of the concept of community is a reason for caution. Instead of over-generalizing the notion, it is better to focus on the internal dynamics of the community.9 The variety of internal and external interactions and the forms of political communication used within and by communities offer the potentially different approaches. The “politics of parish,” in Keith Wrightson’s approach, could include many elements of communication: gossip, rumors, symbolic acts, forms of exclusion, inclusion, etc. The individual smaller components of the community and the interactions among them could have a major influence on the external, political space of the community.10 In the case of Hungary, Dániel Bárth focuses primarily on the conflict between the lower clergy and their communities in the early modern period. His recent studies, however, go beyond this, addressing several considerations about the local (horizontal) fields of power structures and communication with the (vertical) ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies, offering a more complex image of the functions of the parish in the lives of village communities.11

The concept and function of the parish changed a lot in the Middle Ages and early modern times in Hungary. The first king, Saint Stephen I, in addition to the establishment of the first bishoprics, placed great emphasis on the founding of parishes. In his second law-code, he ordered that every ten villages should build a church and provide these churches with various benefits in kind. The king provided the vestments and altar cloths, and the bishop provided the priests and the books.12 By the fourteenth century, parishes had often been transformed into donated benefices, where a substitute clergyman appointed by the beneficed provided the actual pastoral care.13 This was accompanied by the separation of different types of parishes. The titles of parish priest (plebanus) and parish (plebania) were reserved for a narrow, privileged part of parishes. This distinguished them from the ordinary parochial churches (ecclesia parochialis) and their priests (rector ecclesiae, sacerdos) without prerogatives. Although privileges were not lost, by the early fifteenth century, the title of parish and parish priest had been extended to all congregations and their priests.14

The exact size of the Catholic parish network in the Middle Ages is not known, but it is estimated that by the mid-sixteenth century, as much as 60–70 percent of it may have been destroyed as a result of the Reformation and the Ottoman conquest. By 1600, this figure had risen to 90 percent.15 The reorganization took around two centuries. The Catholic renewal marked by Cardinal Péter Pázmány (1570–1637), archbishop of Esztergom, in the first half of the seventeenth century built up the institutional system (seminaries, schools, university) on which the Catholic Church could rely to strengthen itself again in the territories ruled by the Habsburgs.16 However, the violent counterreformation in the last third of the century was so overwhelming that the number of the newly occupied Protestant churches exceeded the number of available Catholic parish priests. In a situation which escalated into a religious civil war, the Habsburg rulers and the Catholic prelates were forced to make concessions. Protestants were granted limited religious freedom at the Diet of Sopron in 1681. In the western part of the country, religious practice was permitted only in certain settlements, the so-called articular places, and several other restrictions were imposed. A 1691 royal decree (Explanatio Leopoldina) which explained the law in detail further restricted these rights, confirming the jurisdiction of the Catholic clergy over Protestant congregations.17

Following the expulsion of the Ottomans, the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) and the Rákóczi War of Independence (1703–1711), the parish network underwent a huge development in the eighteenth century, which is clearly reflected in the following diocesan data.18

Diocese	Early eighteenth century	Late eighteenth century
Bishopric of Eger	1715: 72 parishes	1786: 328 parishes
Archdiocese of Kalocsa	1733: 17 parishes	1763: 58 parishes
Bishopric of Veszprém	1710: 20 parishes	1777: 185 parishes

 

This process was also supported by the secular government, notably through the Royal Council of Lieutenancy, which was established in 1723. Within this government body, two committees dealt mainly with ecclesiastical matters. The Religious Affairs Committee was responsible for the observance of the Sopron Articles of Religion of 1681 and the religious practices of Protestants.19 The Clergymen’s Fund (Cassa Parochorum), on the other hand, financed the salaries of Catholic parish priests, the establishment of new parishes, and the construction of churches. When the Fund was established in 1733 by Charles III, a royal decree stipulated that the income of a parish priest had to be at least 150 forints a year, in addition to the incomes from fees and parish lands. Parish priests whose annual income did not reach this minimum received additional state subsidies from the Fund. This minimum wage provided them with a modest standard of living, but one worthy of their profession. The royal decree also encouraged the creation of new parishes, therefore a country-wide census of parishes was carried out, diocese by diocese. On the basis of the surveys and other proposals and petitions submitted by the bishops to the Fund, the Council of Lieutenancy had to make suggestions concerning the construction of new churches and parishes or the renovation of old ones.20

As an institution, the parish was more than a simple, geographically defined, territorial ecclesiastical administrative unit. It was also a community of believers living in a defined area and headed by a priest, the parish priest. At the center of the parish, in the mother church (mater), was the parish church, where the parish priest lived, but the parish could also include one or more daughter churches (filia). The choice of the parish priest was determined by the practice of patron’s right, which had been developed and refined over the course of the centuries. The landlord-patron suggested his own candidate or, if he didn’t have a candidate, a person recommended by the bishop (recommendatio) was presented by the landlord to the same prelate in writing (praesentatio). The bishop ordered the investiture, which was performed by the dean of the area (investitura and installatio).21

Although many municipalities in the Middle Ages won the right to elect their own parish priests,22 this was limited by the time of the Catholic Revival in the early modern period. Unlike in Carinthia and southern Germany,23 however, the community was not completely excluded from controlling the parish. This was due to a complex economy based on a system of allowances paid by the community for the pastoral work of the parish priest. In the eighteenth century, this was supplemented by the parish’s lending function.24 Typically, the churchwarden (aedituus; egyházbíró) was chosen from among the village aldermen, and he played an important role in overseeing the management of the church’s finances and in preparing the annual accounts. These accounts were also audited by the village magistrate. Churchwardens also had a role in collecting and administering parish revenues. The schoolmaster, who was often also the cantor and organist, was under the supervision of the parish priest, but as an educated man, he very often became the village notary and thus a member of the local lay council.25

The study focuses less on conflicts and more on the tools of the struggle for the parish. Therefore, three key factors, specifically competing interests, local integration, and possible hindrances and interference will be discussed. The foundation of parishes will be discussed through examples from the dioceses of Veszprém and Eger. The two dioceses bore important similarities. A significant part of both had fallen under Ottoman occupation in the sixteenth century and, after some initial events, it was only with the expulsion of the Ottomans that the reorganization of the church became possible in the eighteenth century. In both dioceses, there were significant population movements. New communities were created, and in parallel with this, there was an explosion in the creation of new parishes. In addition to the vast body of secondary literature on the history of both dioceses, the essay uses as sources parish documents preserved in the diocesan archives, primarily petitions submitted by the communities and testimonies.

Interests

Below, I consider the interests which lay behind the foundation of parishes from the perspectives of the different actors involved. Clearly, one should consider first the needs of the local community. As Christine Tropper has pointed out in her study of parishes in Carinthia, one of the most common reasons given in petitions for the establishment of a new parish was the physical distance of the community from the mother church, i.e. from the site where church services were held.26 Poor roads, bad weather, and geographical obstacles made it difficult to maintain contact between daughter churches and parishes. One finds frequent reference to precisely these reasons in the Hungarian examples. The inhabitants of Alattyán, which belonged to the diocese of Eger and was pastored by the Premonstratensian monastery of Jánoshida, on the far side of the Zagyva River, offered a vivid description of the difficulties they faced. It was difficult to maintain ties between the two communities, because “when there are floods, which are sometimes frequent, sometimes occasional, it can take five or six days to get there.” This was an obstacle to the work of the local pastor, of course, and the people of Alattyán experienced “many shortages in spiritual things” because of the difficulties posed simply by transportation. Finally, in 1748, when Easter mass was almost cancelled due to a flood, the village asked the Bishop of Eger to establish an independent parish.27

Alongside geographical distance, the apparent indifference of a parish priest to the members of his fold could also be a factor. The parish priest in Dorogháza, for example, kept to himself so much that the local community found it difficult to get him to baptize their children or go to the bedside of the dying, which in the case of members of the fold who lived in more distant communities was almost impossible.28 The difficulties faced by people living in villages distant from a mother church in getting the pastoral services often prompted members of these communities to seek to establish separate parishes and obtain their own parish priests.

Apart from the parishes that were created when discontent daughter churches sought to break away from the mother parishes, new parishes were often very quickly founded on recently resettled areas. After the Ottoman occupation, new settlements were established, and new parishes were organized on the sites of villages which had been destroyed. This is striking because the establishment of parishes put a heavy burden on the community. A church and a parish house had to be built, money had to be found to cover the annual salary and maintenance costs of the priest, the salaries of the parish staff (cantor, sacristan) had to be paid, and a building had to be provided for the school and the schoolmaster’s house. Most of these buildings were available in a filiate parish that wanted to break away from the mother church. In the newly founded villages, however, they often had to be built. Even if the remains of a medieval church which had been destroyed during the period of Ottoman occupation survived, the ruined edifice needed almost complete renovation and rebuilding.

The fact that so many parishes were founded (and as noted above, this required a significant financial sacrifice from the new community) is also striking in part because many of the population movements were motivated by the economic challenges faced in the original settlements. Towards the end of the 1710s, the economic situation in Jászapáti was becoming increasingly difficult “because of the growth of the population and the scarcity of land,” and this led to social tensions.29 In 1719, to resolve the growing tensions, farmers from Jászapáti began to settle in Kunszentmárton, a town in the region to the east of the Tisza River that had been destroyed by the Ottomans. The new community was able to establish a parish in only two years, i.e. very quickly. It was very important because Kunszentmárton became the first Catholic parish in a region in which the Calvinist Church held sway, and thus the Catholic Church managed to break into what before had been essentially a homogeneous Protestant block. The importance of this parish became clear in the second half of the century, when the Catholic community in Kunszentmárton became the basis for the establishment of Catholic institutions in the surrounding Calvinist settlements.30

The church authorities thus had a fundamental interest in the establishment of the parish. In most cases, if the local circumstances were considered appropriate, they supported and initiated the process of founding the new parish. For the diocese, the most important prerequisite was that the community have adequate resources to meet the requirements listed above (to provide a salary and housing for the parish priest and wages for the parish staff). In addition, if a former daughter church wanted to become an independent parish, the church authorities also had to consider the consequences this would have for the financial situation of the former mother parish and parish priest and whether the new parish could be established without endangering the old parish. Thus, even if the ecclesiastical authorities had an interest in expanding the parish network, they had to take into account an array of complex considerations affecting several communities.31

For the church leadership, the establishment of parishes could also be an issue which touched on denominational interests. Although the Sopron Articles of Religion of 1681 and the subsequent royal decrees allowed only limited religious practice among Protestant communities, these measures also constituted a hindrance to the Catholic counterreformation.32 The Catholic Church was only able to break up Protestant communities and establish Catholic institutions locally if it was able to work in cooperation with the landlords and the secular authorities. The Lutheran village of Iharosberény in the southern part of the diocese of Veszprém offers a good example. The Franciscans of Kanizsa provided pastoral services for the small number of Catholics in the settlement in a small chapel next to the manor house of the local landlord, Boldizsár Inkey. As early as 1746, Bishop of Veszprém Márton Biró Padányi contacted Inkey in order to inquire about the possibility of bringing the local Lutheran religious services to an end. This took place during the canonical visitation of 1748, and in order to strengthen the position it had gained, the Catholic Church founded a parish in the village the following year.33

The aforementioned resettlement of the lands which had been left devasted by the Ottoman occupation was unquestionably one of the most significant processes of post-Turkish reconstruction. The landlords, who were eager to see their estates resettled and their lands tilled, realized that the foundation of parishes would facilitate the peaceful development, growth, and strengthening of the community. In the region of southern Transdanubia, for example, the reestablishment of the network of settlements and the revitalization of the church went almost hand in hand. The landlords gave priority to the centers of their estates, and where necessary, they used their manorial administration to quicken the foundation of new parishes. The Esterházy family, for example, instructed their officers to supervise the parish priests and the management of the parishes in order to ensure their smooth development, while at the same time insisting that they cooperate with the clergy.34

In some cases, the interests identified above intertwined. Balatoncsicsó was home to Calvinist members of the petty nobility who rented the land around the village from the landlord, the Bishop of Veszprém. The establishment of a new Catholic parish in that village was a direct consequence of the economic reform of the bishopric’s estates, the aim of which was to restructure individual contracts in order to increase the incomes. The bishopric probably hoped to achieve several goals at once in Balatoncsicsó. In 1753, the aforementioned Márton Biró Padányi, as bishop of the area, lord lieutenant of Veszprém county and landlord, forbade the Calvinists of Balatoncsicsó from practicing their religion, adding that if they disobeyed, the lease would be terminated and the petty nobles living in the village would have to move. The community appealed to the Royal Council of Lieutenancy, which also investigated the matter from an economic point of view. In other words, the Council sought to determine whether the eviction of the noble tenants and the arrival of new settlers would reduce or increase the state tax incomes. In 1754, the Calvinist nobles of Balatoncsicsó were finally forced to leave the village, and the bishop soon concluded a contract with the new Catholic settlers. As a result, the bishop’s income as landlord increased considerably. When the new settlers arrived, a Catholic parish was established.35 Two decades later, the parish of Balatoncsicsó included eleven surrounding villages as daughter churches.36

One comes across many other cases on church estates of events very similar to the developments in Balatoncsicsó.37 The bishop-landlords often achieved several aims. They were able to assert the denominational interests of the diocese in opposition to Protestant congregations and to extend their institutional system by establishing stable Catholic parishes in areas which they had previously been unable to reach. Furthermore, although they were largely unable to retain and convert the Calvinist populations, they were able to emerge from the situation with considerable economic advantages by bringing in new settlers and signing new landlord contracts.

We see that the Royal Council of Lieutenancy played an important role in the case of Balatoncsicsó, and this indicates that the state, i.e. the secular authority, was also concerned with the issues surrounding the establishment of parishes. Through the council, the secular authorities provided sustained and assured support for the expansion and strengthening of the parish network. The Clergymen’s Fund, mentioned in the introduction, was responsible for these matters within the organization of the Royal Council of Lieutenancy. Thus, through the Clergymen’s Fund, the state entered the reorganization of the parish network. The aim was clearly to create stable parishes with well-educated and well-paid parish priests. In 1732, one year before the creation of the Fund, the community of Jászladány petitioned their landlord and the Council of Lieutenancy to support the foundation of a local parish. It only succeeded two years later in 1734, with the financial support of the Clergymen’s Fund.

In contrast to the paradigm of confessionalization, the initiative seems to have been taken by the communities. The intention to found a parish easily met with the approval of the landlord, the church, and the state. Although all from different points of view, they supported the process and the local needs. However, none of the actors, including the community, would have been sufficient to establish the parish on its own. The internal need of the community was based on easier access to better pastoral services and, consequently, the provision of salvation. In the external communication with the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, this need was most often complemented by the need to overcome geographical barriers and distances.38 There were significant differences, however, in the envisioned roles of the parish in the lives of the local communities.

Integration

One can approach the question of parish renewal as a process of integration from several points of view. The individual and group relationships which were an intricately interwoven part of local society were constantly evolving through internal processes, as these relations had to be constantly molded depending on the specific situations that arose. At the same time, integration was also a matter of how and to what extent individuals or a small group of individuals could become part of the larger whole. This can be examined within the local community, of course, but also in the context of the relationship between local communities on the one hand and the secular or ecclesiastical authorities on the other. Thus, integration implies a kind of political communication, not only between the community and the representatives of the power above it, but also between the key actors within the community.39

These multi-directional interactions were crucial from the perspective of the foundation of new parishes, but the organizational processes hardly came to an end at the moment of the foundation of a new parish. With the creation of the new institution and the entry of the parish priest into the community, the relationship between the institution and the individual on the one hand and the community on the other had to be defined. The following discussion offers insights into this process of integration by drawing on some of the examples mentioned in the previous section and considering the main nodes of intersecting (and colliding) interests in parish organization.

The first of these nodes is the decision of the community itself. The initiative was usually taken by the community leaders. In the aforementioned village of Alattyán, after an Easter mass which had almost been cancelled, “the magistrates and several inhabitants, coming out of the church, gathered at the master’s house.” Thus, the leaders of the community appeared, or in other words, the magistrate and the aldermen, as well as the schoolmaster, who was probably also the local notary. These individuals were essentially the local elite. Later, however, a popular assembly was held at which “the people, gathered together, cried out the same thing, that yes, they too wanted a parish priest.” Thus, the idea of founding a parish was suggested by the community leaders, but they also had the support of the local population.40

Tarnaszentmiklós in Heves County was founded in 1751 by the farmers who were leaving the neighboring settlement of Pély, but Tarnaszentmiklós remained a daughter church of the parish of Pély for nearly thirty years. The people of Tarnaszentmiklós submitted their first application in the spring of 1779, which shows that they tried to lay the proper foundations for the establishment of the parish. They seem to have had a sense of community awareness and the necessary knowledge of the background of the parish.41 A building which would serve as the parish house had been built with the help of the landlord, i.e. the Eger Chapter, and efforts had already been made to generate parish income. They visited the neighboring settlement of Hevesvezekény for precisely this reason. Hevesvezekény was a daughter church of the market town of Heves, and it had a completely different social makeup. While Tarnaszentmiklós was a village of serfs, Hevesvezekény was a settlement of manorial servants. Thus, the Tarnaszentmiklós aldermen ended up “holding conference with the compossessor [landlord] of the neighboring Vezekény.” The serfs of Tarnaszentmiklós had to persuade the landlords of Hevesvezekény to join forces and support the establishment of a parish, with Hevesvezekény as the daughter church and Tarnaszentmiklós as the parish. This meant that the local community had to step out of its own social circle and had to negotiate with a socially superior stratum in the interests of achieving a common goal.

This brings us to the second node, which concerned the ways in which a local community communicated with the outside world on the issues surround the foundation of a new parish. A given community had to interact with higher levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In the case of Tarnaszentmiklós, there is no precise information as to whether the lower ecclesiastical dignitary in the area, such as the dean or archdeacon, was contacted. It is true that the landlord of Tarnaszentmiklós was the Eger Chapter, and it appears from the petition submitted for the foundation of the parish that the community, by helping to build the parish house, had the support of the ecclesiastical body as landlord. This was emphasized in their petition to the bishop, but they also mentioned their discussion with the noble landlords of Hevesvezekény as an important element. The community of Tarnaszentmiklós may also have thought that their negotiations with the nobles would strengthen the validity of their request in the eyes of the bishop.

This was more difficult in the case of Alattyán, where the local community did not have the support of the landlord (i.e. the Premonstratensian monastery of Jánoshida), and indeed the parish was established against his wishes. However, even in this case, the most prestigious representatives of the community were asked to communicate with the bishopric. One of them was the schoolmaster, who was also the notary of the village, thus he was a key intellectual figure in the community. Another was Gergely Ivanics, head of the local noble family, who had lived in the village since birth and was one of the people who best knew the recent history of the village community, since he remembered, for example, the first parish in Alattyán, which had existed in the 1690s. Both his father and he were local churchwardens at one time, so this added to the prestige and, thus, authority he enjoyed. Their selection was symbolic, and it seems to have been a shrewd decision, because they did not go to the bishop’s court in Eger immediately, but rather went to the district dean in Jászapáti, and only after having obtained his support did they take their request to the bishop. This was a symbolic communicative gesture: the most respected members of the community, supported by the territorial mid-level church authority, personally took the village’s humble petition to the bishop.

Thus, they brought the petition before one of the highest possible ecclesiastical authorities, the diocesan bishop. As noted in the previous section, the diocese was seeking to expand the parish network, but it wanted to do so by founding stable, adequately prepared parishes. At the instructions of the bishop, the territorially competent deans therefore held inquiries in both Alattyán and Tarnaszentmiklós. It is telling and indeed reveals a great deal about the interests of the ecclesiastical authorities in ensuring stability that “my Lord the Vice Deacon came [to Alattyán] and summoned all the farmers, especially the better-off, together with all the judges and aldermen,” and had them sign a contract concerning the parish priest’s salary. In other words, he asked for a guarantee from the leaders of the parish and the wealthiest farmers, i.e. the local “elite,” on behalf of the church.

For this very reason, the dean’s first investigation in Tarnaszentmiklós was unsuccessful. In today’s terms, it could be referred to as an “impact assessment.” The dean contacted the parish priests of Heves and Pély to ask them whether their parishes would actually continue to function properly if the daughter churches (i.e. Hevesvezekény and Tarnaszentmiklós) were to be separated from them. He then also visited the villages which would be made part of the envisioned parish, the future mother parish (Tarnaszentmiklós) and its planned daughter parish (Hevesvezekény). For example, he accurately assessed the different social composition of Hevesvezekény: the community consisted of four serfs who worked the land and otherwise only manorial servants, and the local members of the nobility. These nobles shared commonly managed estates, and they were only part of the petty nobility (kurta nemesek), thus, they would be unable to provide support for the parish.

The dean’s negative assessment delayed the foundation of the parish, but it did not discourage the people of Tarnaszentmiklós. They seem to have resolved to make better and more strategic use of the community’s communication network. This meant, in part, more intensive discussions with the community in Hevesvezekény, but also with the community in Pély, which had already yielded some results. The people of Pély agreed to increase the salary of their own parish priest, and the poorer residents and nobles of Hevesvezekény also made more serious and concrete commitments. As a result, in the summer and autumn of 1780, a precise financial and economic plan was drawn up for each village, detailing where and how much agricultural land and what cash and in-kind commitments could be made to cover the costs of the priest’s salary. The successful work was probably facilitated by the fact that the community of Tarnaszentmiklós, which was made up of farmers from Pély, had close family ties in Pély. Furthermore, they had been in contact with the parish priest of Pély for 20 years, which, according to the documents that have survived, made it possible for the village to separate from Pély amicably.

At the other end of the country, in the diocese of Veszprém, the ecclesiastical authorities were conducting similar investigations concerning the possible establishment of the parish of Kővágóörs. Here, the situation was different (and involved different competing interests) because the parish had to be established in opposition to the local Protestant community, with a large number of filia. This may explain why, although the dean had already concluded his investigation in 1750, it took another five years for the parish to be founded.42 In these cases the Catholic Church was assessing the potential economic consequences of the establishment of a parish not as landlord, but from the perspective of an ecclesiastical authority. Its main aim was both to expand and stabilize the parish network.

The construction of the parish house in Alattyán, which was an important prerequisite for the establishment of a parish, also sheds light on the forms of internal cooperation within the community. However, since events in the village unfolded relatively quickly and the parish had to be established in the spite of the opposition of the landlord, the building was only erected after the parish priest had arrived. Pending the completion of the house, at the request of the people of Alattyán, the Heves County authorities agreed to provide accommodations for the parish priest in the county building in the village. The population of Alattyán consisted essentially of three major groups: the serfs of the Premonstratensian monastery of Jánoshida (they were the majority), the serfs of the Calvinist Recsky family, and the local nobles. The Premonstratensians opposed the establishment of the parish. The Calvinist landlord was indifferent to the issue. The only concrete step he had taken was to forbid his serfs from transporting the Premonstratensian canons from Jánoshida to Alattyán across the Zagyva River at their own expense and in their carts. The leader of the community was the aforementioned elderly nobleman Gergely Ivanics, who even remembered where the house of the parish priest had stood in the 1690s. The building had been destroyed, but the cellar had survived. The community started to build the new parish house here, but the Premonstratensian administrator, as landlord, forbade his serfs from Alattyán from taking part in the construction. The community therefore decided that the peasants and the serfs on the Recsky lands would start building the house, with the Premonstratensian serfs helping out in the evenings or on days when it was very unlikely that the landlord would take any steps to check on them. The establishment of the parish was a matter for the ecclesiastical authority, and the community had the support of the bishop in this respect. The serfs of the Premonstratensian monastery had to deal with the consequences they might face for having provoked the antipathies of the landlord, but in practice, the other two larger groups in the community provided them with protection.

Thus, with the establishment of the parish, a new institution appeared in these villages which was also a new factor in the cohesion and identity of the communities. The primary expectation of these communities is captured in the request made by the people of Tarnaszentmiklós that the Bishop “be merciful in creating a parish priest to comfort our souls.” In their request, the people of Alattyán noted that the parish priest would “be our consolation in secular and spiritual matters,” or in other words, they made specific reference to the role the parish priest would play in secular affairs. At the time, the parish priest was treated essentially as a member of the community. It was only at the end of the early modern era that the parish priest began to emerge and rise above the community due to the efforts of the church and the secular government.43 The community valued their parish priest and expected him to be both their spiritual (and even lay) leader, but also not to lose touch with the community and to abide by its “norms.” In a 1726 letter sent on behalf of their first parish priest, the parishioners of Pély, for instance, noted that “he lived with endurance among us, quietly and in peace.” The community knew full well that the stability of the parish was always fragile under the difficult local conditions, and they appreciated the fact that the parish priest was willing to live alongside them under modest circumstances and serve them.44

The parish was the crucible for a number of initiatives in the first period after its creation, and these initiatives further contributed to the internal and external integration of the local community. The religious confraternities that emerged in the village environment could become the primary form of community organization for local society. In Alattyán, by the 1740s, i.e. before the establishment of the parish, a local Confraternity of the Cord was set up by the Franciscans of Szolnok, which, in addition to overseeing various liturgical occasions (monthly mass, processions, etc.), also provided for the care of sick members of the society.45 In addition to strengthening the internal community networks, it also provided the locals with another external link to a nearby major settlement, Szolnok, and its important ecclesiastical institution, the Franciscan monastery. A local branch of the Society of Holy Mary, which had been founded in the neighboring market town of Jászapáti around 1700, was established in Pély in 1736, a good ten years after the local parish was created in the village.46

Integration, of course, was not simply an inclusive process. It was also an exclusive one, whereby elements deemed dangerous or alien to the community were pushed out, if this was considered necessary. These people were usually individuals who had come from other settlements and who did not adhere to the community’s norms. In some cases, this person was the parish priest himself or a member of the household which had come to the community with him. As noted above, in 1726, the people of Pély spoke highly of their parish priest, who kept a low profile among them. It was necessary for the people to speak out on his behalf because the maid at the parish house had claimed that she was bearing his child. The leaders of the community were united in standing up for the beleaguered priest on behalf of the community. The local magistrate, the cantor, the aldermen, and the head of the local petty nobility family signed the petition. Thus, the same key figures in the community played the crucial roles in this communicative process as had initiated the establishment of a parish in the case of Alattyán. It is clear from the letter that the maid who had made the accusation was not a member of the community, and the people of Pély emphasized that she was from Héhalom, and thus from another county and diocese. The parish priest allegedly had admonished the woman in vain, sometimes with quiet words, sometimes with harsher reprimands, but she did not forsake her “many regularly bad ethics,” and “there was a time when for a whole month she went to and for in rakish disgrace.”47 The case ended up coming before the bishop’s court, however, and the parish priest ultimately broke down and admitted that he had indeed had an immoral affair with the woman and was thus unworthy of his priestly vocation, but he insisted that he had not impregnated her. With the removal of the parish priest, Pély was briefly returned to its former mother church, Heves, and the community was right to fear that the unpleasant affair might result in the loss of their parish. This presumably was why they had been willing to overlook the priest’s conduct.

A similar incident took place twenty years later in nearby Jászladány. As was mentioned above, the local parish was established in 1734 at the initiative of the local community, with the financial support of the Clergymen’s Fund. Mihály Árvay, a highly qualified priest, was appointed to serve as the second parish priest in 1743, but he quickly ended up in conflict with the community. He embezzled from the church treasury, bought luxury goods, and behaved boorishly with the parish leadership and the parishioners. His most serious transgressions, however, were of a sexual nature. The testimony of the witnesses reveals that one of the parish priest’s first lovers was a local Roma woman, who was driven from the village under this pretext. The woman had cursed the village, saying, “rot in hell for driving me out, for the whole village knows that the priest does the same.” However, it was easier for the community to expel the Roma woman, who was on the periphery of local society, than to start a long process of ecclesiastical proceedings that would imperil the very existence of the parish and would have implications far beyond the local community. The moment the parish priest tried to take advantage of a prominent member of the community (the midwife) or of individuals related to the local leaders, however, the village reacted and informed the ecclesiastical authorities, using the channels of communication discussed above. The community took these measures in spite of the fact that the parish itself was relatively new. In Jászladány, the parish did not cease to exist, but the bishop appointed only a deputy parish priest, who was only installed three years later.48

As the examples above show, the communities were aware of the prerequisites for the establishment of a parish, and they used the related communication channels carefully and strategically. This of course meant going beyond the internal space of the community itself, i.e. the space of local politics. When necessary, they responded by sharing tasks within the community, and they stood up against individuals who potentially threatened their efforts and against other exterior hindrances to their goals through the actors who embodied the unity of the community itself. This indicates that the community was very much aware of its strengths and possibilities, and it was also well-informed about the procedures before ecclesiastical and secular authorities. This enabled the village community to achieve its goals and made it possible for grassroots initiatives to succeed. To this end, they were ready to engage in internal discussions and negotiations, which could mean both exclusion and inclusion. Through internal community integration and external integration into the secular and ecclesiastical structures, they were also able to solve the problems that hindered the establishment of the parish.

Hindrances and Interference

As the discussion above shows, the process of establishing a parish depended on a number of issues, and in order for a parish to be founded, several factors had to come together. The process was made all the more complex by the fact that in many cases various hindrances arose, sometimes from unexpected sources of opposition. In the discussion below I will examine a few of the most important phenomena which either made the creation of a parish additionally complex or hindered it altogether.

One of the most common sources of opposition was the entirely predictable resistance from Protestant communities. The above examples show that even in the best cases (when the community enjoyed the support of the ecclesiastical authorities and the landlord and there was an existing local Catholic minority), it was difficult to establish parishes in Protestant or mixed communities. Jászkisér, the only Calvinist settlement in the Jászság region, offers a good example of this. Several successive bishops tried to establish a parish in Jászkisér using different means. In 1701, a parish priest was installed in cooperation with the secular authority (the administration under the palatine) and the ecclesiastical authority (the Bishop of Eger), but less than half a year later, the local women chased the priest from the village, loading him and his household on a cart and sending him to the neighboring Catholic town of Jászapáti. Almost four decades later, in the wake of the plague epidemic of 1739–1740, the authorities wanted to settle Catholics on plots of land which had been left vacant so that the larger Catholic community could be used as a justification for founding a parish in the village. The Calvinists of the settlement, however, poured water mixed with cow manure into grape-picking buckets and used them to block the village street so that they would be able to pour the contents on any Catholics who were to arrive in the village. It was only in 1769 that a parish was finally established in the village, but the diocese of Eger was unable to rid the settlement of Calvinists.49

In the case of the secular landlords, as noted above, following the expulsion of the Ottomans, they were mainly interested in the settlement of their estates and the rapid launch of production in the fields, and they usually established Catholic parishes in central settlements of their estates. At the same time, if the settlement consisted exclusively of Protestants, they were also careful to ensure that the Protestants could continue to practice their religion, and they were willing to confront both the ecclesiastical and secular authorities in order to do this.50 This is striking because in the seventeenth century the Catholic nobility was still the main driving force behind counterreformation efforts in Hungary. Furthermore, agricultural production was the primary consideration for the ecclesiastical landlords too, the examples cited above of the bishoprics of Eger and Veszprém notwithstanding. The administrator of the Teutonic Order that held the landlord’s rights of the Jászság region, noted with incisive mockery about Bishop Gábor Antal Erdődy of Eger that the bishop was more than happy to tolerate Calvinism when it was in his own private interests (i.e. when it was in his interests as a landlord), while at the same time he would stand up in fervent opposition to Calvinists on other estates, completely ignoring the interests of other landlords.51

Much as in the case of the Teutonic Knights in Jászság, in Alattyán (a case to which I have now referred several times as an example), the Premonstratensian order was also an ecclesiastical landlord. Although the village was Catholic, the Premonstratensian canons of Jánoshida did not support the establishment of a parish there. This was presumably because there was little or no separation between the functions of the landlord and the church in the case of the Premonstratensian monks of Jánoshida. Obviously, the loss of ecclesiastical income from Alattyán affected them, even if they maintained their power as landlords. Nevertheless, they opposed the parish establishment of 1748 so vigorously that the Bishop of Eger was forced to bring the matter before the Primate-Archbishop of Esztergom, and in 1754, a decision was made in favor of the diocese and the community of Alattyán.52 This example also shows that, in principle, even in the face of strong opposition (in this case, from the landlord), people pursuing a local initiative from within the community could prevail even when their case was brought before the highest ecclesiastical forums if they could win the support of the right parties (in this case, the diocesan bishop).

A similar conflict arose between the bishop of Veszprém and the Cistercian abbot of Zirc over the establishment of the parish of Magyarpolány. This case was made distinctive by the fact that before the establishment of the parish, the church authorities and the ecclesiastical landlord had to take coordinated action against the religious practices of the local Calvinist congregation. Once the parish had been established, however, a dispute broke out as to whether it was under the jurisdiction of the diocese or the Cistercian abbey. The local Calvinist community, furthermore, tried to take advantage of the tension between the two former allies and appealed to the Royal Council of Lieutenancy to ensure their right to practice their faith. Thus, the Cistercian abbot had to defend his acts even before the secular authorities.53

As the examples above illustrate, the most important thing for the dioceses was the creation of stable parishes. However, in the eighteenth century, after the expulsion of the Ottomans, the dioceses had to take many other factors concerning the reorganization of the Church and church life into consideration. The synods and visitations, which were the cornerstones of internal renewal, consumed a great deal of energy, time, and resources, as did the reform of instruction for the priesthood, the reorganization of education, the maintenance of social institutions, the construction of the episcopal seat, and the restoration of episcopal estates. The establishment of parishes was sometimes relegated to the background, not because it was unimportant, but because the diocese had to ensure the necessary conditions (including, for instance, a sufficient number of adequately trained priests). In the diocese of Veszprém, for example, in the 1730s, the bishop was compelled to exercise caution, since he recognized the complications that would arise as a consequence of the poverty of the parishes. He also recognized that the church was facing a shortage of priests in part because of the comparatively rapid foundation of new parishes in the earlier period and in part because many of the members of the priesthood had aged. The process of parish establishment gathered momentum in the 1740s, and by the early 1760s, the diocese’s parish network was so thick that only a few areas were still in need of further development. The bishop’s attitude may also have changed. There were periods when the emphasis was on areas closer to the bishopric seat, while at other times, attempts were made to build up the parish network in areas more densely populated by Protestants.54

These kinds of considerations, which varied from diocese to diocese and from bishop to bishop, may well also have influenced the intensity of the process of parish creation. Thus, even if there was a demand from the community for the establishment of a local parish and even if the necessary preparations had been made, the bishop at the head of the diocese could hamper or block these local initiatives, depending on his ecclesiastical policy objectives and the more general, broader picture of the situation in the diocese.

Conclusions

The process of parish establishment in the eighteenth century forms a different picture than the Catholic renewal in the seventeenth century, a picture in which the growing importance of communities is vividly clear. Earlier, the church, the state, and the landlords had essentially cooperated against Protestant communities (if admittedly at times with tensions and hiccups). After 1681 and particularly in the eighteenth century, these actors were pursuing a much more diverse range of objectives. This led to increasingly frequent clashes of interests, which, while not necessarily preventing or interrupting the general process of the establishment of new parishes, did at times slow it down or break it up into several successive phases of greater and lesser intensity. It was also an era in which the initiative taken by village communities became more visible. The period of peace that followed the end of the Rákóczi War of Independence (1711) helped strengthen local society, and the consolidation of ecclesiastical and secular government structures enabled proactive communication.

The dramatic growth in the numbers of new parishes is striking in part because in nearby areas which could be seen as parallels from other perspectives one finds a very different trend. Studies show stable parish numbers in Carinthia and the territory of the diocese of Constance, with rare instances in which new local parishes were founded (and this process was hampered by considerable difficulties). In the Hereditary Provinces under Habsburg rule, a new wave of parish foundation began only in the last third of the eighteenth century as a consequence of the aims of Josephine ecclesiastical policy.55 Clearly, the explanation for the dramatic rise in the number of new parishes in Hungary may well lie in the large-scale destruction of the parish network during the period of Ottoman occupation and the delayed recreation and reorganization of the parish network.

While the process of parish foundation may have been considerably more restrained in the German-speaking areas than it was in Hungary, there were still some significant similarities in the initiatives that were taken. Communities in the German lands were also proactive, even if they had to use different strategies and methods to achieve their goals. The distribution of ecclesiastical jurisdictions was very different from the development of the church in Hungary, with monastic orders and ecclesiastical institutions in many places annexing beneficies on which the local communities could have founded their parishes. Thus, they often had to restructure their finances in a manner that would allow them to free up at least enough income from each local ecclesiastical benefice to create a position for a chaplain or a curate. In order to do this, of course, they had to use their network of contacts and gain the support of individuals in the various institutional structures, or in other words, they had to mobilize their political toolbox.56 The Hungarian communities were not lacking in these tools, and the examples presented above show how shrewdly and strategically they were able to use them.

In exceptional cases, such as the foundation of a parish in Alattyán or the accusations brought against the parish priest in Jászladány, one discerns indications of the use of the more elusive tools of local politics, such as gossip, threats, public gestures, and symbols. Catholic communities fighting to persuade the church to establish a parish had to use other means of communication with the authorities, of course, such as petitions, envoys, and the mobilization of supporters from higher and more influential social strata.57 The foundation of a new parish sheds light on the interactions among different small subgroups within a community and the construction of elements of collective identity (e.g. the memory of the old parish).58 It is also clear that the existence of a local parish constituted a source prestige for a village. Further examination of these experiences will foster a more subtle understanding of what a parish meant to a given community, in addition to the functions it served for the state and the church.

If we consider the individual local cases from a slightly more distant perspective, even over a longer time span and in a comparative context with other cases, we get a sense not only of the political-communication tools used by the community but also the wider field of “parish politics.” The ongoing changes in local social relations can be further grasped if we embed them in the structures of the world defined by the triad of landlord, the church, and secular power. Tropper, for example, suggests that the spread of literacy and administration strengthened the role of the power of the landlord in the lives of local communities to such a dramatic extent that these communities began to be excluded from the control of their parish.59 Although the social order in Hungary may have developed differently in this respect, Zoltán Gőzsy has also convincingly outlined how the state attempted to redefine the role of church administration and, within it, the roles of parishes in terms of social policy objectives.60 However, Keith Wrightson has argued, considering precisely these kinds of changes and what came in their wake, that although the higher powers (state or church) had incomparably greater means to impose their will, even this seemingly overwhelming power had its local limits. The local power structure was able to adapt to the efforts of the state and church to assert their will, since even strong power from above required the cooperation of key local actors. This in turn made it possible for communities to maintain local spaces of power where they could continue to use their own specific political tools.61

In the eighteenth century, following initials shifts in the seventeenth century, the influence of the state on parish organization became more and more pronounced in Hungary. This was due in no small part to the various efforts of the Clergymen’s Fund in the foundation of new parishes. Due to the parish census of 1733, which covered the whole country, the richness of the records of the Fund’s activities is unprecedented. A longer-term aim could be to examine the history and the registry of the Council of Lieutenancy over a longer period of time to shed light on the growth of state influence through parish organization and the reactions of local communities to these measures. By taking into account regional changes in landlord and church power, this kind of research would provide deeper insight into the changing political opportunities for the communities within ever shifting frameworks.

Archival Sources

Egri Főegyházmegyei Levéltár [Archdiocesal Archive of Eger] (EFL)

Archivum Vetus

nr. 14. Alattyániensis ecclesia

nr. 764. Árvay Michaelem respicientia

nr. 1097. Ferenczfy Franciscum respicientia

nr. 1746. Pélyiensis parochiae divisionem

Visitationes Canonicae

nr. 3414. Districtus Heves 1746

Veszprémi Főegyházmegyei Levéltár [Archdiocesal Archive of Veszprém] (VFL)

I.1.8. Visitationes Canonicae

Districtus Zaladiensis 1778

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