The story of Hungary

by Ármin Vámbéry

But while he was thus guarding the interests of the country with a watchful eye, an unmoved heart, and a strong arm, he still found time and opportunity for increasing the territory of the realm. He completed in Croatia the conquests begun by Ladislaus, and added to the new acquisition Dalmatia, which he wrested from the grasp of the Venetian republic. Coloman was the first Hungarian king who styled himself King of Croatia and Dalmatia.

Coloman won the admiration of his contemporaries and posterity, not merely as a leader of armies, but as a ruler whose great erudition and wise laws served to perpetuate his memory. These qualities obtained for him the epithet “Könyves” (bookish) or learned King Coloman. The chronicles extol him for putting a stop by process of law to the prosecution of witches, and for declaring in one of his laws: “Of witches who do not exist at all no mention shall be made.” He bestowed great care upon the administration of justice, and among his laws occurs the following admirable direction given to the judges: “Every thing must be so cautiously and anxiously weighed on the scale of justice, that innocence, on the one hand, shall not be condemned from hatred, and, on the other, sin shall not be protected through friendship.”

The last years of Coloman’s reign were embittered by the ambition of his brother Álmos, who coveted the throne. The energetic and erudite king, who had spent his whole life in consolidating the glorious work begun by Stephen, saw with a sorrowing heart how the restless ambition of single individuals was uprooting the plants he had so carefully nursed. Duke Álmos rose three times in rebellion against his royal brother, nor did he reject, on these occasions, foreign aid. Coloman defeated him each time, and pardoned him each time. But seeing that the incorrigible duke could not be restrained by either his power or his magnanimity, and that he was again collecting an army against him, Coloman caused Álmos and his young son Béla to be thrown into prison, where both were deprived of their sight. This dark and cruel deed, the ferocity of which can be palliated only by the rudeness of the age, was Coloman’s last act, and, in thinking of the retribution of the life to come, it could not fail to disturb his peaceful descent into the grave.

The risings of Álmos initiated that period of civil strife which continued for two hundred years, until the house of the Árpáds became extinct, and which, on the one hand, afforded the Greek emperors an opportunity to meddle with the affairs of the country, and to attempt the extension of their supremacy over the kingdom; and, on the other hand, undermined the authority of royalty, lifted the oligarchs into power, and sapped the foundations of the institutions established by Stephen.

Álmos, the blinded duke, planned again a rising against Coloman’s son and successor, Stephen II. (1114-1131), but the plot having been discovered he fled to the Greek court for protection and aid. The Hungarian and Greek armies were already confronting each other on the banks of the lower Danube, but the shedding of blood was prevented on this occasion by the sudden death of Duke Álmos.

His son Béla II. (1131-1141), who had also been made blind, ascended the throne after the death of Stephen II., but he gave no thought to pacifying the restlessness of the people or to restoring peace to the country. One feeling alone held the mastery over his soul, shrouded in darkness—that of vindictiveness against those who had robbed him and his father of the light of day. His revengeful feelings were still more fanned by his masculine queen, Ilona, the daughter of the prince of Servia, by whose advice he summoned the diet to meet in Arad, on the southern confines of the country, for the sole purpose of avenging himself on this occasion. The lords, anticipating no evil, assembled in large numbers, although there were many among them who might have had good reasons for dreading the king’s wrath. They came, however, confiding in the forgiveness of Béla, which had been publicly proclaimed by him. According to the information gleaned from the chronicles, the diet was opened by Queen Ilona herself, who, after describing in a passionate strain the sad fate of her blinded husband, and inveighing against the crime of those who were the causers of his affliction, herself gave the signal for the awful work of vengeance. A dreadful struggle ensued between the adherents of the king and those who had been singled out by the court as victims. Many remained dead in the hall of the diet which had thus been changed into a battle-field, but many others, who succeeded in escaping, took away with their wounds feelings of undying hatred against their king. These bloody proceedings gave the disaffected a fresh cause for placing their hopes in the Greek court, and expecting from that quarter relief from the tyranny which oppressed them.

But when open hostilities finally broke out between the two nations, Béla II. was no more among the living. When the war commenced, Geyza II. (1141-1161), the son of Béla, sat on the Hungarian throne, which the Emperor Manuel, the most powerful of the Comneni, ruled in Constantinople. The war was a protracted one, and its scene was chiefly on the southern frontier, along the course of the Danube and the country near the Save, but Manuel, with all his power and wariness, was unable to obtain an advantage over the younger and more energetic neighbor. After the death of Geyza, his son Stephen III. succeeded to the throne. The Greek emperor refused to recognize him as the king of Hungary, and attempted to place upon the throne as his vassals, successively, the two brothers of Geyza who had found a refuge at his court, but he did not succeed with either of the pretenders. One of his protégés died young, while the other was driven from the country by the lawfully elected king, Stephen III.

Manuel, seeing all his schemes overthrown, and perceiving that, as an enemy, he had utterly failed, pretended now to feelings of friendship, and offered peace to the Hungarians. As a further pledge of peace he requested King Stephen III. to permit his brother Béla to reside with him at Constantinople, promising that he would adopt him as his son and heir. Manuel, having no sons to whom he might leave the imperial throne, in all probability secretly cherished the hope that his adopted son would at some future day succeed to the Greek throne, and would also inherit the crown of St. Stephen, and that by this means the two neighboring countries, which he did not succeed in uniting by force of arms, would, in the course of time, become one. Fate, however, seemed to have conspired to frustrate the best laid plans of the Greek emperor. He carried Duke Béla with him to Constantinople, adopted him as his son, declared him his heir, and every thing appeared to point to a happy realization of his ambitious dreams, when unexpectedly a son was born to him, an event which completely upset his calculations. It became now impossible for Manuel to continue to keep the young Hungarian duke at his court, unless, indeed, he wanted to raise a rival to his own son; he, therefore, deprived him of all the distinctions he had heaped upon him, and sent him hurriedly back to his native country, where the throne had just become vacant by the death of Stephen III. Manuel, however, made the young duke take a solemn oath before he allowed him to depart that he would never attack the Greek empire, and this empty formality was all that he was able to achieve in furtherance of his scheme to impose his supremacy upon Hungary. The same duke, however, who had been nurtured in the culture of Greece, and became King of Hungary as Béla III., completely banished Greek influence from the country, and secured its independence for a long time to come.

Béla III. (1173-1196) was one of the most powerful and respected rulers of Hungary. He possessed great kingly qualities, and his character commanded universal respect. He had a great deal to contend with, after his return from Constantinople, before he succeeded in being firmly seated on his throne. He was received with feelings of suspicion by the powerful nobility, the chief dignitaries of the church, and by the queen-mother herself, who all looked upon him as a partisan of the eastern despotism, and as an enemy to the Roman Catholic Church, and who were anxious to place his brother Geyza upon the throne. Béla triumphed before long over all his enemies. He had his brother thrown into prison, sent his mother into exile, restrained and humiliated the powerful oligarchs, and conciliated the friendship of the high prelacy by his munificence and liberality towards the church of the country. Having restored order at home, he devoted himself to the task of obtaining again possession of the territory Manuel had seized. The reconquering of the Dalmatian seashore involved him in a war with Venice, the envious rival of the Hungarian kingdom, in the course of which Béla had occasion to give proof of his military power on a new scene of action, where the valor of his ancestors had never had an opportunity of shining, by achieving over the proud republic a great triumph on the sea. Béla had learned a great deal at the Greek court, but all his valuable acquirements he employed for the advantage of his country. He did not exactly open new avenues for the development of the nation; his chief merit consisted rather in leading her back to the road marked out by Stephen, and successfully pursued by King Ladislaus and King Coloman. His every effort tended to bring the nation closer to that western civilization which had fostered her tender beginnings, and the rejection of which all this time would have amounted to a stultification of her past, and a certain risk of her future. Two things, however, were of paramount necessity to enable the people to prosper by the king’s judicious exertions in this direction: to restore to the country the needful rest she had not now enjoyed for half a century, and to reëstablish order within the kingdom, torn by the partisanship of the last fifty years. Béla resolutely set to the task of establishing peace and order. He relentlessly pursued the thieves and robbers who rendered life and property insecure and had increased to a frightful extent since Coloman’s time, and, in order to do it more effectually, he appointed special officers in every county for that purpose, establishing, at the same time, a royal chancery at the court with a view to giving greater effect to the government of the country and the administration of justice. The proceedings in important affairs of state or private law-suits taken before the king—which hitherto had been oral—now had to be carried on in writing. The country, under Béla’s well-ordered government, became more prosperous, and the nation more polished. Béla’s first wife was a Greek princess, and his second a French princess. Both the queens, with the retinues following them to the court, introduced there the good taste, culture, and manners of the Greeks and French, so that a German chronicler happening to visit the court at that time, could not find adequate words to extol its magnificent splendors. Culture was not confined to the court; it spread to the nation itself, for we find that the university, recently established in Paris, was attended by a number of Hungarian youths. All the acts of Béla indicate that he had selected for his model in government one of his most distinguished ancestors, Ladislaus, for whom, as an expression of his own and the nation’s piety, he had also, in 1192, secured a place on the list of saints recognized by the Church of Rome.

Béla, while thus advancing the interests of the kingdom and the nation, did not lose sight of the claims of the age upon kings and rulers to support the holy wars waged by Christendom against the infidels. He followed with sympathy the movements of the crusaders, and upon Jerusalem’s falling into the hands of the infidels in 1187, he planned himself to lead an army for the purpose of reconquering the holy city. The third crusade was begun in 1189, and the German forces, under the lead of the emperor, Frederic Barbarossa, passed on their way to the Holy Land through Hungary. Béla received his distinguished guest with royal pomp, abundantly provided the German troops with every thing necessary, but he himself did not join the crusaders. What the circumstances were that prevented the king from taking part in the crusades it would be difficult now to determine, but that they must have been weighty ones is amply proved by the fact that he had been long preparing for a crusading campaign, and had for that purpose collected a great deal of treasure. The idea was present before his mind at the time of his death, for he directed that his elder son, Emeric, should succeed him on the throne, and the younger, Duke Andrew, should inherit the treasure collected for the pious object, and employ it in the carrying out of the paternal intentions. Béla’s fate had that in common with the fate of the most conspicuous kings of Hungary—that posterity praised his grand achievements, while his own children failed to respect and preserve the inheritance left to them by a distinguished sire.