This persecution raged most fiercely towards the end of what is generally called “The Long War,” which began in 1593, and lasted till 1606. It was a confused four-cornered struggle between the emperor and the Turks, the The “Long War.” Turks and Transylvania, Michael of Moldavia and Transylvania, and Transylvania and the emperor, desultory and languishing as regards the Turks (the one notable battle being Sigismund Báthory’s brilliant victory over the grand vizier in Walachia in 1595, when the Magyar army penetrated as far as Giurgevo), but very bitter as between the emperor and Transylvania, the principality being finally subdued by the imperial general, George Basta, in August 1604. A reign of terror ensued, during which the unfortunate principality was well-nigh ruined. Basta was authorized to Germanize and Catholicize without delay, and he began by dividing the property of most of the nobles among his officers, appropriating the lion’s share himself. In royal Hungary the same object was aimed at by innumerable indictments against the richer landowners, indictments supported by false title-deeds and carried through by forged or purchased judgments of the courts. At last the estates of even the most devoted adherents of the Habsburgs were not safe, and some of them, like the wealthy István Illesházy (1540-1609), had to fly abroad to save their heads. Fortunately a peculiarly shameless attempt to blackmail Stephen Bocskay, a rich and Stephen Bocskay. powerful Transylvanian nobleman, converted a long-suffering friend of the emperor into a national deliverer. Bocskay (q.v.), a quiet but resolute man, having once made up his mind to rebel, never paused till he had established satisfactory relations between the Austrian court and the Hungarians. The two great achievements of his brief reign (he was elected prince of Transylvania on the 5th of April 1605, and died on the 29th of December 1606) were the peace of Vienna (June 23, 1606) and the truce of Zsitvatörök (November 1606). By the peace of Vienna, Bocskay obtained religious liberty and political autonomy, the restoration of all confiscated estates, the repeal of all unrighteous judgments and a complete retrospective amnesty for all the Magyars in royal Hungary, besides his own recognition as independent sovereign prince of an enlarged[32] Transylvania. This treaty is remarkable as being the first constitutional compact between the ruling dynasty and the Hungarian nation. Almost equally important was the twenty years’ truce of Zsitvatörök, negotiated by Bocskay between the emperor and the sultan, which established for the first time a working equilibrium between the three parts of Hungary, with a distinct political preponderance in favour of Transylvania. Of the 5163 sq. m. of Hungarian territory, Transylvania now possessed 2082, Turkish Hungary 1859, and royal Hungary only 1222. The emperor, on the other hand, was freed from the humiliating annual tribute to the Porte on payment of a war indemnity of £400,000. The position of royal Hungary was still further improved when the popular and patriotic Archduke Matthias was elected king of Hungary on the 16th of November 1608. He had previously confirmed the treaty of Vienna, and the day after his election he appointed Illesházy, now reinstated in all his possessions and dignities, palatine of Hungary.[33] In Transylvania, meantime, Gabriel Bathóry had been elected (Nov. 11, 1608) in place of the decrepit Sigismund Rákoczy, Bocskay’s immediate successor.
For more than fifty years after the peace of Vienna the principality of Transylvania continued to be the bulwark of the liberties of the Magyars. It owed its ascendancy in the first place to the abilities of the two princes who Transylvanian Hegemony. ruled it from 1613 to 1648. The first and most famous of these rulers was Gabriel Bethlen (q.v.), who reigned from 1613 to 1629, perpetually thwarted all the efforts of the emperor to oppress or circumvent his Hungarian subjects, and won some reputation abroad by adroitly pretending to champion the Protestant cause. Three times he waged war on the emperor, twice he was proclaimed king of Hungary, and by the peace of Nikolsburg (Dec. 31, 1621) he obtained for the Protestants a confirmation of the treaty of Vienna, and for himself seven additional counties in northern Hungary besides other substantial advantages. Bethlen’s successor, George I. Rákoczy, was equally successful. His principal achievement was the peace of Linz (Sept. 16, 1645), the last political triumph of Hungarian Protestantism, whereby the emperor was forced to confirm once more the oft-broken articles of the peace of Vienna, to restore nearly a hundred churches to the sects and to acknowledge the sway of Rákoczy over the north Hungarian counties. Gabriel Bethlen and George I. Rákoczy also did much for education and civilization generally, and their era has justly been called the golden era of Transylvania. They lavished money on the embellishment of their capital, Gyulafehérvár, which became a sort of Protestant Mecca, whither scholars and divines of every anti-Roman denomination flocked to bask in the favour of princes who were as liberal as they were pious. Yet both Bethlen and Rákoczy owed far more to favourable circumstances than to their own cunning. Their reigns synchronized with the Thirty Years’ War, during which the emperors were never in a position seriously to withstand the attacks of the malcontent Magyars, the vast majority of whom were still Protestants, who naturally looked upon the Transylvanian princes as their protectors and joined them in thousands whenever they raided Moravia or Lower Austria, or threatened to advance upon Vienna. In all these risings no battle of importance was fought. Generally speaking, the Transylvanians had only to appear, to have their demands promptly complied with; for these marauders had to be bought off because the emperor had more pressing business elsewhere. Yet their military efficiency must have been small, for their allies the Swedes invariably allude to them as wild and ragged semi-barbarians.
Another fortunate accident which favoured the hegemony of Transylvania was the temporary collapse of Hungary’s most formidable adversary, the Turk. From the peace of Zsitvatörök (1606) to the ninth year of the reign of Turkish conflict. George Rákoczy II., who succeeded his father in 1648, the Turkish empire, misruled by a series of incompetent sultans and distracted by internal dissensions, was unable to intervene in Hungarian politics. But in the autumn of 1656 a great statesman, Mahommed Kuprili (q.v.), obtained the supreme control of affairs at Constantinople, and all Europe instantly felt the pressure of the Turk once more. It was George Rákoczy II. (q.v.) who gave the new grand vizier a pretext for interference. Against the advice of all his counsellors, and without the knowledge of the estates, Rákoczy, in 1657, plunged into the troubled sea of Polish politics, in the hope of winning the Polish throne, and not only failed miserably but overwhelmed Transylvania in his own ruin. Kuprili, who had forbidden the Polish enterprise, at once occupied Transylvania, and, in the course of the next five years, no fewer than four princes, three of whom died violent deaths, were forced to accept the kaftan and kalpag of investiture in the camp of the grand vizier. When, at the end of 1661, a more stable administration was set up with Michael Apaffy (1661-1690) as prince, Transylvania had descended to the rank of a feudatory of the Turkish empire. On the death of Mahommed Kuprili (Oct. 11, 1661) his son Fazil Ahmed succeeded him as grand vizier, and pursued his father’s policy with equal genius and determination. In 1663 he invaded royal Hungary, with the intention of uniting all the Magyars against the emperor, but, the Magyars steadily refusing to attend any diet summoned under Turkish influence, his plan fell through, and his only notable military success was the capture of the fortress of Érsekujvár (Neuhäusel). In the following year, thanks to the generalship and heroism of Miklós Zrinyi the younger (q.v.), Peace of Vasvár, 1664. Kuprili was still less successful. Zrinyi captured fortress after fortress, and interrupted the Turkish communications by destroying the famous bridge of Esseg, while Montecuculi defeated the grand vizier at the battle of St Gothard (Aug. 1, 1664). Yet, despite these reverses, Kuprili’s superior diplomacy enabled him, at the peace of Vasvár (Aug. 10, 1664) to obtain terms which should only have been conceded to a conqueror. The fortress of Érsekujvár and surrounding territory were now ceded to the Turks, with the result that royal Hungary was not only still further diminished, but its northern practically separated from its southern portion. On the other hand the treaty of Vasvár gave Hungary a respite from regular Turkish invasions for twenty years, though the border raiding continued uninterruptedly.
Of far more political importance than these fluctuating wars of invasion and conquest was the simultaneous Catholic reaction in Hungary. The movement may be said to have begun Catholic reaction. about 1601, when the great Jesuit preacher and controversialist, Péter Pázmány (q.v.), first devoted himself to the task of reconverting his countrymen. Progress was necessarily retarded by the influence of the independent Protestant princes of Transylvania in the northern counties of Hungary. Even as late as 1622 the Protestants at the diet of Pressburg were strong enough to elect their candidate, Szaniszló Thurzó, palatine. But Thurzó was the last Protestant palatine, and, on his death, the Catholics, at the diet of Sopron (1625), where they dominated the Upper Chamber, and had a large minority in the Lower, were able to elect Count Miklós Esterházy in Thurzó’s stead. The Jesuit programme in Hungary was the same as it had been in Poland a generation earlier, and may be summed up thus: convert the great families and all the rest will follow.[34] Their success, due partly to their whole-hearted zeal, and partly to their superior educational Pázmány’s work. system, was extraordinary; and they possessed the additional advantage of having in Pázmány a leader of commanding genius. During his primacy (1616-1637), when he had the whole influence of the court, and the sympathy and the assistance of the Catholic world behind him, he put the finishing touches to his life’s labour by founding a great Catholic university at Nagyszombát (1635), and publishing a Hungarian translation of the Bible to counteract the influence of Gaspar Károli’s widely spread Protestant version. Pázmány was certainly the great civilizing factor of Hungary in the seventeenth century, and indirectly he did as much for the native language as for the native church. His successors had only to build on his foundations. One most striking instance of how completely he changed the current of the national mind may here be given. From 1526 to 1625 the usual jubilee pilgrimages from Hungary to Rome had entirely ceased. During his primacy they were revived, and in 1650, only seventeen years after his death, they were as numerous as ever they had been. Five years later there remained but four noble Protestant families in royal Hungary. The Catholicization of the land was complete.
Unfortunately the court of Vienna was not content with winning back the Magyars to the Church. The Habsburg kings were as jealous of the political as of the religious liberties of their Hungarian subjects. This was partly Habsburg repression. owing to the fact that national aspirations of any sort were contrary to the imperial system, which claimed to rule by right divine, and partly to an inveterate distrust of the Magyars, who were regarded at court as rebels by nature, and therefore as enemies far more troublesome than the Turks. The conduct of the Hungarian nobles in the past, indeed, somewhat justified this estimate, for the fall of the ancient monarchy was entirely due to their persistent disregard of authority, to their refusal to bear their share of the public burdens. They were now to suffer severely for their past misdoings, but unfortunately the innocent nation was forced to suffer with them. Throughout the latter part of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, the Hungarian gentry underwent a cruel discipline at the hands of their Habsburg kings. Their privileges were overridden, their petitions were disregarded, their diets were degraded into mere registries of the royal decrees. They were never fairly represented in the royal council, they were excluded as far as possible from commands in Hungarian regiments, and were treated, generally, as the members of an inferior and guilty race. This era of repression corresponds roughly with the reign of Leopold I. (1657-1705), who left the government of the country to two bigoted Magyar prelates, György Szelepesényi (1595-1685) and Lipót (Leopold) Kollonich (1631-1707), whose domination represents the high-water mark of the anti-national regimen. The stupid and abortive conspiracy of Peter Zrinyi and three other magnates, who were publicly executed (April 30, 1671), was followed by wholesale arrests and confiscations, and for a time the legal government of Hungary was superseded (Patent of March 3, 1673) by a committee of eight persons, four Magyars and four Germans, presided over by a German governor; but the most influential person in this committee was Bishop Kollonich, of whom it was said that, while Pázmány hated the heretic in the Magyar, Kollonich hated the Magyar in the heretic. A gigantic process against leading Protestant ministers for alleged conspiracy was the first act of this committee. It began at Pressburg in March 1674, when 236 of the ministers were “converted” or confessed to acts of rebellion. But the remaining 93 stood firm and were condemned to death, a punishment commuted to slavery in the Neapolitan galleys. Sweden, as one of the guarantors of the peace of Westphalia, and several north German states, protested against the injury thus done to their coreligionists. It was replied that Hungary was outside the operation of the treaty of Westphalia, and that the Protestants had been condemned not ex odio religionis but crimine rebellionis.
But a high-spirited nation cannot be extinguished by any number of patents and persecutions. So long as the Magyar people had any life left, it was bound to fight in self-defence, it was bound to produce “malcontents” Hungarian resistance. who looked abroad for help to the enemies of the house of Habsburg. The first and most famous of the malcontent leaders was Count Imre Tököli (q.v.). Between 1678 and 1682 Tököli waged three wars with Leopold, and, in September 1682, was acknowledged both by the emperor and the sultan as prince of North Hungary as far as the river Garam, to the great relief of the Magyar Protestants. The success of Tököli rekindled the martial ardour of the Turks, and a war party, under the grand vizier Kara Mustafa, determined to wrest from Leopold his twelve remaining Hungarian counties, gained the ascendancy at Constantinople in the course of 1682. Leopold, intent on the doings of his perennial rival Louis XIV., was loth to engage in an eastern war even for the liberation of Hungary, which he regarded as of far less importance than a strip or two of German territory on the Rhine. But, stimulated by the representations of Pope Innocent XI., who, well aware of the internal weakness of the Turk, was bent upon forming a Holy League to drive them out of Europe, and alarmed, besides, by the danger of Vienna and the hereditary states, Leopold reluctantly contracted an alliance with John III. of Poland, and gave the command of the army which, mainly through the efforts of the pope he had been able to assemble, to Prince Charles of Lorraine. The war, which lasted for 16 years and put an end to the Turkish dominion in Hungary, began with the world-renowned siege of Vienna (July 14-Sept. 12, 1683). There is no need to recount the oft-told victories of Sobieski (see John III. Sobieski, King of Poland). What is not quite so generally known is the fact that Leopold slackened at once and would have been quite content with the results of these earlier victories had not the pope stiffened his resistance by forming a Holy League between the Emperor, Poland, Venice, Muscovy and the papacy, with the avowed object of dealing the Turk the coup de grâce (March 5, 1684). This statesmanlike persistence was rewarded by an uninterrupted series of triumphs, culminating in the recapture of Buda (1686) and Belgrade (1688), and the recovery of Bosnia (1689). But, in 1690, the third of the famous Kuprilis, Mustafa, brother of Fazil Ahmed, became grand vizier, and the Turk, still further encouraged by the death of Innocent XI., rallied once more. In the course of that year Kuprili regained Servia and Bulgaria, placed Tököli on the throne of Transylvania, and on the 6th of October took Belgrade Liberation from the Turks. by assault. Once more the road to Vienna lay open, but the grand vizier wasted the remainder of the year in fortifying Belgrade, and on August 18th, 1691, he was defeated and slain at Slankamen by the margrave of Baden. For the next six years the war languished owing to the timidity of the emperor, the incompetence of his generals and the exhaustion of the Porte; but on the 11th of September 1697 Prince Eugene of Savoy routed the Turks at Zenta and on the 13th of November 1698 a peace-congress was opened at Karlowitz which resulted in the peace of that name (Jan. 26, 1699). Nominally a truce for 25 years on the uti possidetis basis, Peace of Karlowitz. the peace of Karlowitz left in the emperor’s hands the whole of Hungary except Syrmia and the territory lying between the rivers Maros, Theiss, Danube and the mountains of Transylvania, the so-called Temesköz, or about one-eleventh of the modern kingdom. The peace of Karlowitz marks the term of the Magyar’s secular struggle with Mahommedanism and finally reunited her long-separated provinces beneath a common sceptre.
But the liberation of Hungary from the Turks brought no relief to the Hungarians. The ruthless suppression of the Magyar malcontents, in which there was little discrimination between the innocent and the guilty, had so crushed the spirit of the country that Leopold considered the time ripe for realizing a long-cherished ideal of the Habsburgs and changing Hungary from an elective into an hereditary monarchy. For this purpose a diet was assembled at Pressburg in the autumn of 1687. It was a mere rump, for wholesale executions had thinned its numbers and the reconquered countries were not represented in it. To this weakened and terrorized assembly the emperor-king explained that he had the right to treat Hungary as a conquered country, but that he was prepared to confirm its constitutional liberties under three conditions: the inaugural diploma was to be in the form signed by Ferdinand I., the crown was to be declared hereditary in the house of Habsburg, and the 31st clause of the Golden Bull, authorizing armed resistance to unconstitutional acts of the sovereign, was to be abrogated. These conditions the diet had no choice but to accept, and, in October 1687, the elective monarchy of Hungary, which had been in existence for nearly seven hundred years, ceased to exist. The immediate effect of the peace of Karlowitz was thus only to strengthen despotism in Hungary. Kollonich, who had been created a cardinal in 1685, archbishop of Kalocsa in 1691 and archbishop of Esztergom (Gran) and primate of Hungary in 1695, was now at the head of affairs, and his plan was to germanize Hungary as speedily as possible by promoting a wholesale immigration into the recovered provinces, all of which were in a terrible state of dilapidation.[35]
The border counties, now formed into a military zone, were planted exclusively with Croatian colonists as being more trustworthy defenders of the Hungarian frontier than the Hungarians themselves. Moreover, a neo-acquisita commissio was constituted to inquire into the title-deeds of the Magyar landowners in the old Turkish provinces, and hundreds of estates were transferred, on the flimsiest of pretexts, to naturalized foreigners. Transylvania since 1690 had been administered from Vienna, and though the farce of assembling a diet there was still kept up, even the promise of religious liberty, conceded to it on its surrender in 1687, was not kept. No wonder then if the whole country was now seething with discontent and only Francis Rakóczy. awaiting an opportunity to burst forth in open rebellion. This opportunity came when the emperor, involved in the War of the Spanish Succession, withdrew all his troops from Hungary except some 1600 men. In 1703 the malcontents found a leader in Francis Rakóczy II. (q.v.), who was elected prince by the Hungarian estates on the 6th of July 1704, and during the next six years gave the emperor Joseph I., who had succeeded Leopold in May 1705, considerable anxiety. Rakóczy had often as many as 100,000 men under him, and his bands penetrated as far as Moravia and even approached within a few miles of Vienna. But they were guerillas, not regulars; they had no good officers, no serviceable artillery, and very little money; and all the foreign powers to whom Rakóczy turned for assistance (excepting France, who fed them occasionally with paltry subsidies) would not commit themselves to a formal alliance with rebels who were defeated in every pitched battle they fought. On the other hand, if the Rakóczians were easily dispersed, they as quickly reassembled, and at one time they held all Transylvania and the greater part of Hungary. In the course of 1707 two Rakóczian diets even went so far as formally to depose the Habsburgs and form an interim government with Rakóczy at its head, till a national king could be legally elected. The Maritime Powers, too, fearful lest Louis XIV. should materially assist the Rakóczians and thus divert Peace of Szátmár, 1711. part of the emperor’s forces at the very crisis of the War of the Spanish Succession, intervened, repeatedly and energetically, to bring about a compromise between the court and the insurgents, whose claims they considered to be just and fair. But the obstinate refusal of Joseph to admit that the Rakóczians were anything but rebels was always the insurmountable object in all such negotiations. But when, on the 7th of April 1711, Joseph died without issue, leaving the crown to his brother the Archduke Charles, then fighting the battles of the Allies in Spain, a peace-congress met at Szátmár on the 27th of April, and, two days later, an understanding was arrived at on the basis of a general amnesty, full religious liberty and the recognition of the inviolability of the ancient rights and privileges of the Magyars.
Thus the peace of Szátmár assured to the Hungarian nation all that it had won by former compacts with the Habsburgs; but whereas hitherto the Transylvanian principality had been the permanent guardian of all such compacts, and the authority of the reigning house had been counterpoised by the Turk, the effect and validity of the peace of Szátmár depended entirely upon the support it might derive from the nation itself. It was a fortunate thing for Hungary that the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession introduced a new period, in which, at last, the interests of the dynasty and the nation were identical, thus rendering a reconciliation between them desirable. Moreover, the next century and a half was a period of domestic tranquillity, during which Hungary was able to repair the ruin of the long Turkish wars, nurse her material resources, and take Charles III. the first steps in the direction of social and political reform. The first reforms, however, were dynastic rather than national. Thus, in 1715, King Charles III.[36] persuaded the diet to consent to the establishment of a standing army, which—though the diet reserved the right to fix the number of recruits and vote the necessary subsidies from time to time—was placed under the control of the Austrian council of war. The same centralizing tendency was shown in the administrative and judicial reforms taken in hand by the diet of 1722. A Hungarian court chancery was now established at Vienna, while the government of Hungary proper was committed to a royal stadholdership at Pressburg. Both the chancery and the stadholdership were independent of the diet and responsible to the king alone, being, in fact, his executive Pragmatic Sanction, 1723. instruments. It was this diet also which accepted the Pragmatic Sanction, first issued in 1713, by which the emperor Charles VI., in default of his leaving male heirs, settled the succession to his hereditary dominions on his daughter Maria Theresa and her heirs. By the laws of 1723, which gave effect to the resolution of the diet in favour of accepting the principle of female succession, the Habsburg king entered into a fresh contract with his Hungarian subjects, a contract which remained the basis of the relations of the crown and nation until 1848. On the one hand it was declared that the kingdom of Hungary was an integral part of the Habsburg dominions and inseparable from these so long as a male or female heir of the kings Charles, Joseph and Leopold should be found to succeed to them. On the other hand, Charles swore, on behalf of himself and his heirs, to preserve the Hungarian constitution intact, with all the rights, privileges, customs, laws, &c., of the kingdom and its dependencies. Moreover, in the event of the failure of a Habsburg heir, the diet reserved the right to revive the “ancient, approved and accepted custom and prerogative of the estates and orders in the matter of the election and coronation of their king.”
The reign of Charles III. is also memorable for two Turkish wars, the first of which, beginning in 1716, and made glorious by the victories of Prince Eugene and János Pállfy, was terminated by the peace of Passarowitz (July 21, 1718), by which the Temesköz was also freed from the Turks, and Servia, Northern Bosnia and Little Walachia, all of them ancient conquests of Hungary, were once more incorporated with the territories of the crown of St Stephen. The second war, though undertaken in league with Russia, proved unlucky, and, at the peace of Belgrade (Sept. 1, 1739), all the conquests of the peace of Passarowitz, including Belgrade itself, were lost, except the banat of Temesvár.