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Hungarian nobility

October 15, 2023

The Kingdom of Hungary held a noble class of individuals, most of whom owned landed property, from the 11th century until the mid-20th century. Initially, a diverse body of people were described as noblemen, but from the late 12th century only high-ranking royal officials were regarded as noble. Most aristocrats claimed ancestry from chieftains of the period preceding the establishment of the kingdom around 1000; others were descended from western European knights who settled in Hungary. The lower-ranking castle warriors also held landed property and served in the royal army. From the 1170s, most privileged laymen called themselves royal servants to emphasize their direct connection to the monarchs. The Golden Bull of 1222 established their liberties, especially tax exemption and the limitation of military obligations. From the 1220s, royal servants were associated with the nobility and the highest-ranking officials were known as barons of the realm. Only those who owned allods – lands free of obligations – were regarded as true noblemen, but other privileged groups of landowners, known as conditional nobles, also existed.

In the 1280s, Simon of Kéza was the first to claim that noblemen held authority in the kingdom. The counties developed into institutions of noble autonomy, and the nobles' delegates attended the Diets (parliaments). The wealthiest barons built stone castles allowing them to control vast territories, but royal authority was restored in the early 14th century. In 1351, King Louis I introduced an entail system and enacted the principle of "one and the selfsame liberty" of all noblemen, but legal distinctions between true noblemen and conditional nobles prevailed. The most powerful nobles employed lesser noblemen as their familiares (retainers) but this private link did not sever the familiaris' direct subjection to the monarch. According to customary law, only males inherited noble estates, but under the Hungarian royal prerogative of prefection the kings could promote "a daughter to a son", allowing her to inherit her father's lands. Noblewomen who had married a commoner could also claim their inheritance – the daughters' quarter (that is one-quarter of their father's possessions) – in land.

Although the Tripartitum – a frequently cited compilation of customary law published in 1514 – reinforced the idea that all noblemen were equal, the monarchs granted hereditary titles to powerful aristocrats, and the poorest nobles lost their tax exemption from the mid-16th century. In the early modern period, because of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, Hungary was divided into three parts: Royal Hungary, Transylvania and Ottoman Hungary. The princes of Transylvania supported the noblemen's fight against the Habsburg dynasty in Royal Hungary, but prevented the Transylvanian noblemen from challenging their own authority. Ennoblement of whole groups of people was not unusual in the 17th century. Examples include the 10,000 hajdú who received nobility as a group in 1605. After the Diet was divided into two chambers in Royal Hungary in 1608, noblemen with a hereditary title had a seat in the upper house, other nobles sent delegates to the lower house.

After the Ottomans' defeat in the Great Turkish War in the late 17th century, Transylvania and Ottoman Hungary were integrated into the Habsburg monarchy. The Habsburgs confirmed the nobles' privileges several times, but their attempts to strengthen royal authority regularly brought them into conflicts with the nobility, who represented nearly five percent of the population. Reformist noblemen demanded the abolition of noble privileges from the 1790s, but their program was enacted only during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Most noblemen lost their estates after the emancipation of their serfs, but the aristocrats preserved their distinguished social status. State administration employed thousands of impoverished noblemen in Austria-Hungary. Prominent (mainly Jewish) bankers and industrialists were awarded with nobility, but their social status remained inferior to traditional aristocrats. Noble titles were abolished only in 1947, months after Hungary was proclaimed a republic.

Origins Edit

See also: Hungarian prehistory and Principality of Hungary
 
The Magyars conquering the Carpathian Basin (from the 14th-century Illuminated Chronicle)

The Magyars (or Hungarians) lived in the Pontic steppes when they first appear in written sources from the mid-9th century.[1] Muslim merchants described them as wealthy nomadic warriors, but they also noticed the Magyars had extensive arable lands.[2][3] The Magyars crossed the Carpathian Mountains after the Pechenegs invaded their lands in 894 or 895.[4] They settled in the lowlands along the Middle Danube, annihilated Moravia and defeated the Bavarians in the 900s.[5][6] According to some scholarly theories, at least three Hungarian noble clans[note 1] were descended from Moravian aristocrats who survived the Magyar conquest.[8] Historians who are convinced that the Vlachs (or Romanians) were already present in the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century propose that the Vlach knezes (or chieftains) also endured.[9][10] Neither of these hypotheses are universally accepted.[11][12]

Around 950, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (r. 913–959) wrote that the Hungarians were organized into "tribes", and each had its own "prince".[13][14] The tribal leaders most probably bore the title úr (now "lord"), as it is suggested by Hungarian terms deriving from this word, such as ország (now "realm") and uralkodni ("to rule").[15] The Emperor noted the Magyars spoke both Hungarian and "the tongue of the Chazars"[16] (a powerful steppe people), showing that at least their leaders were bilingual.[17]

The Magyars lived a nomadic or semi-nomadic life but archaeological research shows that most settlements consisted of small pit-houses and log cabins in the 10th century. Tents in use are only mentioned in 12th-century literary sources.[18] No archeological finds evidence fortresses in the Carpathian Basin in the 10th century, but fortresses were also rare in Western Europe during the same period.[19][20] A larger log cabin – measuring five by five metres (16 ft × 16 ft) – which was built on a foundation of stones in Borsod was tentatively identified as the local leader's household.[19]

More than a 1,000 graves yielding sabres, arrow-heads and bones of horses show that mounted warriors formed a significant group in the 10th century.[21] The highest-ranking Hungarians were buried either in large cemeteries (where hundreds of their men were buried without weapons around their leader's burial place), or in small cemeteries with 25–30 graves.[22] The wealthy warriors' burial sites yielded richly decorated horse harness, and sabretaches ornamented with precious metal plaques.[23] Rich women's graves contained their braid ornaments and rings made of silver or gold and decorated with precious stones.[23] The most widespread decorative motifs which can be regarded as tribal totems – the griffin, wolf and hind – were rarely applied in Hungarian heraldry in the following centuries.[24] Defeats during the Hungarian invasions of Europe and clashes with the paramount rulers from the Árpád dynasty had decimated the leading families by the end of the 10th century.[25] The Gesta Hungarorum, a chronicle written around 1200, claimed that dozens of noble kindred flourishing in the late 12th century[note 2] had been descended from tribal leaders, but most modern scholars do not regard this list as a reliable source.[27][26]

Middle Ages Edit

See also: Kingdom of Hungary (1000–1301) and Kingdom of Hungary (1301–1526)

Development Edit

Stephen I (r. 997–1038), who was crowned the first king of Hungary in 1000 or 1001, defeated the last resisting tribal chieftains.[28][29] Earthen forts were built throughout the kingdom and most of them developed into centers of royal administration.[30] About 30 administrative units, known as counties, were established before 1040; more than 40 new counties were organized during the next centuries.[31][32][33] Each county was headed by a royal official, the ispán.[34] The royal court provided further career opportunities.[35] As the historian Martyn Rady noted, the "royal household was the greatest provider of largesse in the kingdom" where the royal family owned more than two thirds of all lands.[36] The palatine – the head of the royal household – was the highest-ranking royal official.[37]

 
The Kingdom of Hungary in the 1090s

The kings from the Árpád dynasty appointed their officials from among the members of about 110 aristocratic clans.[37][38] These aristocrats were descended either from native (that is, Magyar, Kabar, Pecheneg or Slavic) chiefs, or from foreign knights who had migrated to the country in the 11th and 12th centuries.[39][40] The foreign knights had been trained in the Western European art of war, which contributed to the development of heavy cavalry in Hungary.[41][42] Their descendants were labelled as newcomers for centuries,[43] but intermarriage between natives and newcomers was not rare, which enabled their integration in two or three generations.[44] The monarchs pursued an expansionist policy from the late 11th century.[45] Ladislaus I (r. 1077–1095) seized Slavonia – the plains between the river Drava and the Dinaric Alps – in the 1090s.[46][47] His successor, Coloman (r. 1095–1116), was crowned king of Croatia in 1102.[48] Both realms retained their own customs, and Hungarians rarely received land grants in Croatia.[48] According to customary law, Croatians could not be obliged to cross the river Drava to fight in the royal army at their own expense.[49]

The earliest royal decrees authorized landowners to dispose freely of their private estates, but customary law prescribed that inherited lands could only be transferred with the consent of the owner's kinsmen who could potentially inherit them.[50][51] From the early 12th century, only family lands traceable back to a grant made by Stephen I could be inherited by the deceased owner's distant relatives; other estates escheated to the Crown if their owner did not have offspring or brothers.[51][52] Aristocratic families held their inherited domains in common for generations before the 13th century.[41] Thereafter the division of inherited property became the standard practice.[41] Even families descended from wealthy clans could become impoverished through the regular divisions of their estates.[53]

Medieval documents mention the basic unit of estate organization as praedium or allodium.[54][55] A praedium was a piece of land (either a whole village or part of it) with well-marked borders.[54][55] Archaeologist Mária Wolf identifies the small motte forts, built on artificial mounds and protected by a ditch and a palisade that appeared in the 12th century, as the centers of private estates.[56] Most wealthy landowners' domains consisted of scattered praedia, in several villages.[57] Due to the scarcity of documentary evidence, the size of the private estates cannot be determined.[58] The descendants of Otto Győr, the ispán of Somogy County remained wealthy landowners even after he donated 360 households to the newly established Zselicszentjakab Abbey in 1061.[59] The establishment of monasteries by wealthy individuals was common.[41] Such proprietary monasteries served as burial places for their founders and the founders' descendants, who were regarded as the co-owners, or from the 13th century, co-patrons, of the monastery.[41] Serfs cultivated part of the praedium, but other plots were hired out in return for in-kind taxes.[55]

The term "noble" was rarely used and poorly defined before the 13th century: it could refer to a courtier, a landowner with judicial powers, or even to a common warrior.[38] The existence of a diverse group of warriors, who were subjected to the monarch, royal officials or prelates is well documented.[60] The castle warriors, who were exempt from taxation, held hereditary landed property around the royal castles.[61][62] Lightly armored horsemen, known as lövők (or archers), and armed castle folk, mentioned as őrök (or guards), defended the borderlands.[63]

Golden Bulls Edit

 
Hunt, an early 11th-century ancestor of the aristocratic Hont-Pázmány kindred (from the 14th-century Illuminated Chronicle)

Official documents from the end of the 12th century only mentioned court dignitaries and ispáns as noblemen.[38] This group had adopted most elements of chivalric culture.[64][65] They regularly named their children after Paris of Troy, Hector, Tristan, Lancelot and other heroes of Western European chivalric romances.[64] The first tournaments were held around the same time.[66]

The regular alienation of royal estates is well-documented from the 1170s.[67] The monarchs granted immunities, exempting the grantee's estates from the jurisdiction of the ispáns, or even renouncing royal revenues that had been collected there.[67] Béla III (r. 1172–1196) was the first Hungarian monarch to give away a whole county to a nobleman: he granted Modrus in Croatia to Bartholomew of Krk in 1193, stipulating that the grantee was to equip warriors for the royal army.[68] Béla's son, Andrew II (r. 1205–1235), decided to "alter the conditions" of his realm and "distribute castles, counties, lands and other revenues" to his officials, as he narrated in a document in 1217.[69] Instead of granting the estates in fief, with an obligation to render future services, he gave them as allods, in reward for the grantee's previous acts.[70] The great officers who were the principal beneficiaries of his grants were mentioned as barons of the realm from the late 1210s.[71][72]

Donations of such a large scale accelerated the development of a wealthy group of landowners, most descending from a high-ranking kindred.[71][72] Some wealthy landowners[note 3] could afford to build stone castles.[73] Closely related aristocrats were distinguished from other lineages through a reference to their (actual or presumed) common ancestor with the words de genere ("from the kindred").[74] Families descending from the same kindred adopted similar insignia.[note 4][75] The author of the Gesta Hungarorum fabricated genealogies for them and emphasized that they could never be excluded from "the honor of the realm",[76] that is from state administration.[53]

The new owners of the transferred royal estates wanted to subjugate the freemen, castle warriors and other privileged groups of people living in or around their domains.[77] The threatened groups wanted to achieve confirmation of their status as royal servants, emphasizing that they were only to serve the king.[78][79] Béla III issued the first extant royal charter about the grant of this rank to a castle warrior.[80] Andrew II's Golden Bull of 1222 enacted royal servants' privileges.[81] They were exempt from taxation; they were to fight in the royal army without proper compensation only if enemy forces invaded the kingdom; only the monarch or the palatine could judge their cases.[82][83][84] According to the Golden Bull, only royal servants who died without a son could freely will their estates, but even in this case, their daughters were entitled to the daughters' quarter.[82][85] The final article of the Golden Bull authorized the bishops, barons and other nobles to resist the monarch if he ignored its provisions.[86] Most provisions of the Golden Bull were first confirmed in 1231.[87]

 
Golden Bull of 1222, the first royal charter summarizing the privileges of the royal servants

The clear definition of the royal servants' liberties distinguished them from all other privileged groups, whose military obligations remained theoretically unlimited.[81] From the 1220s, the royal servants were regularly called noblemen and started to develop their own corporate institutions at the county level.[88] In 1232, the royal servants of Zala County asked Andrew II to authorize them "to judge and do justice", stating that the county had slipped into anarchy.[89] The king granted their request and Bartholomew, Bishop of Veszprém, sued one Ban Oguz for properties before their community.[89]

The first Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241 proved the importance of well-fortified locations and heavily armored cavalry.[90][91] In the following decades, Béla IV of Hungary (r. 1235–1270) gave away large parcels of the royal demesne, expecting that the new owners would build stone castles there.[92][93] Béla's burdensome castle-building program was unpopular, but achieved his aim: almost 70 castles were built or reconstructed during his reign.[94] More than half of the new or reconstructed castles were in noblemen's domains.[95] Most new castles were erected on rocky peaks, mainly along the western and northern borderlands.[96] The spread of stone castles profoundly changed the structure of landholding, because castles could not be maintained without proper income.[97] Lands and villages were legally attached to each castle, and castles were thereafter always transferred and inherited along with these "appurtenances".[98]

The royal servants were legally identified as nobles in 1267.[99] That year "the nobles of all Hungary, called royal servants" persuaded Béla IV and his son, Stephen V (r. 1270–1272), to hold an assembly and confirm their collective privileges.[99] Other groups of land-holding warriors could also be called nobles, but they were always distinguished from the true noblemen.[100][101] They held their estates conditionally, as they were required to provide well-defined services to another lord, hence their groups are now collectively known as conditional nobles.[102] The noble Vlach knezes who had landed property in the Banate of Severin were obliged to fight in the army of the ban (or royal governor).[103] Most warriors known as the "noble sons of servants" were descended from freemen or liberated serfs who received estates from Béla IV in Upper Hungary on the condition that they were to equip jointly a fixed number of knights.[100][104] The nobles of the Church formed the armed retinue of the wealthiest prelates.[101][105] The nobles of Turopolje in Slavonia were required to provide food and fodder to high-ranking royal officials.[106] Two privileged groups, the Székelys and Saxons firmly protected their communal liberties, which prevented their leaders from exercising noble privileges in the Székely and Saxon territories in Transylvania.[107] Székelys and Saxons could only enjoy the liberties of noblemen if they held estates outside the lands of the two privileged communities.[107]

Most noble families failed to adopt a strategy to avoid the division of their inherited estates into dwarf-holdings through generations.[108] Daughters could only demand the cash equivalent of the quarter of their father's estates,[109] but younger sons rarely remained unmarried.[108] Impoverished noblemen had little chance to receive land grants from the kings, because they were unable to participate in the monarchs' military campaigns,[110] but commoners who bravely fought in the royal army were regularly ennobled.[111]

Self-government and oligarchs Edit

 
Léka Castle (now Burg Lockenhaus in Austria), built before 1300

The historian Erik Fügedi noted that "castle bred castle" in the second half of the 13th century: if a landowner erected a fortress, his neighbors would also build one to defend their own estates.[112] Between 1271 and 1320, noblemen or prelates built at least 155 new fortresses. In comparison, only about a dozen castles were erected on the royal demesne.[113] Most castles consisted of a tower, surrounded by a fortified courtyard, but the tower could also be built into the walls.[114] Noblemen who could not erect fortresses were occasionally forced to abandon their inherited estates or seek the protection of more powerful lords, even through renouncing their liberties.[note 5][116]

The lords of the castles had to hire a professional staff for the defence of the castle and the management of its appurtenances.[117] They primarily employed nobles who held nearby estates, which gave rise to the development of a new institution, known as familiaritas.[118][119] A familiaris was a nobleman who entered into the service of a wealthier landowner in exchange for a fixed salary or a portion of revenue, or rarely for the ownership or usufruct (right to enjoyment) of a piece of land.[119] Unlike a conditional noble, a familiaris remained de jure an independent landholder, only subject to the monarch.[115][120]

From the 1270s, the monarchs' coronation oath included a promise to respect the noblemen's liberties.[121] The counties gradually transformed into an institution of the noblemen's local autonomy.[122] Noblemen regularly discussed local matters at the counties' general assemblies.[123][124] The sedria (the counties' law courts) became important elements in the administration of justice.[89] They were headed by the ispáns or their deputies, but they consisted of four (in Slavonia and Transylvania, two) elected local noblemen, known as judges of the nobles.[89][99]

Hungary fell into a state of anarchy because of the minority of Ladislaus IV (r. 1272–1290) in the early 1270s. To restore public order, the prelates convoked the barons and the delegates of the noblemen and the nomadic Cumans who had settled in Hungary to a general assembly near Pest in 1277. This first Diet (or parliament) declared the fifteen-year-old monarch to be of age in an attempt to put en end to the anarchy.[125] In the early 1280s, Simon of Kéza associated the Hungarian nation with the nobility in his Deeds of the Hungarians, emphasizing that the community of noblemen held real authority.[121][126]

The barons took advantage of the weakening of royal authority and seized large, contiguous territories.[127] The monarchs could not appoint and dismiss their officials at will anymore.[127] The most powerful barons – known as oligarchs in modern historiography – appropriated royal prerogatives, combining private lordship with their administrative powers.[128] When Andrew III (r. 1290–1301), the last male member of the Árpád dynasty, died in 1301, about a dozen lords[note 6] held sway over most parts of the kingdom.[130]

Age of the Angevins Edit

 
Insignia of the Order of Saint George, the first European chivalric order

Ladislaus IV's great-nephew, Charles I (r. 1301–1342), who was a scion of the Capetian House of Anjou, restored royal power in the 1310s and 1320s.[131] He seized the oligarchs' castles mainly by force, which again secured the preponderance of the royal demesne.[132] He refuted the Golden Bull in 1318 and claimed that noblemen had to fight in his army at their own expense.[133] He ignored customary law and regularly "promoted a daughter to a son", granting her the right to inherit her father's estates.[134][135][136] The King reorganized the royal household, appointing pages and knights to form his permanent retinue.[137] He established the Order of Saint George, which was the first chivalric order in Europe.[132][66] Charles I was the first Hungarian monarch to grant coats of arms (or rather crests) to his subjects.[138] He based royal administration on honors (or office fiefs), distributing most counties and royal castles among his highest-ranking officials.[131][132][139] These "baronies", as the historian Matteo Villani (d. 1363) recorded it in about 1350, were "neither hereditary nor lifelong", but Charles rarely dismissed his most trusted barons.[140][141] Each baron was required to hold his own banderium (or armed retinue), distinguished by his own banner.[142]

In 1351, Charles's son and successor, Louis I (r. 1342–1382) confirmed all provisions of the Golden Bull, save the one that authorized childless noblemen to freely will their estates.[143][144] Instead, he introduced an entail system, prescribing that childless noblemen's landed property "should descend to their brothers, cousins and kinsmen".[145] This new concept of aviticitas also protected the Crown's interests: only kin within the third degree could inherit a nobleman's property and noblemen who had only more distant relatives could not dispose of their property without the king's consent.[146] Louis I emphasized all noblemen enjoyed "one and the selfsame liberty" in his realms[143] and secured all privileges that nobles owned in Hungary proper to their Slavonian and Transylvanian peers.[147] He rewarded dozens of Vlach knezes with true nobility for military merits.[148] The vast majority of the Upper Hungarian "noble sons of servants" achieved the status of true noblemen without a formal royal act, because the memory of their conditional landholding fell into oblivion.[149] Most of them preferred Slavic names even in the 14th century, showing that they spoke the local Slavic vernacular.[150] Other groups of conditional nobles remained distinguished from true noblemen.[151] They developed their own institutions of self-government, known as seats or districts.[152] Louis decreed that only Catholic noblemen and knezes could hold landed property in the district of Karánsebes (now Caransebeș in Romania) in 1366, but Eastern Orthodox landowners were not forced to convert to Catholicism in other territories of the kingdom.[153] Even the Catholic bishop of Várad (now Oradea in Romania) authorized his Vlach voivodes (leaders) to employ Orthodox priests.[154] The king granted the Transylvanian district of Fogaras (around present-day Făgăraș in Romania) to Vladislav I of Wallachia (r. 1364–1377) in fief in 1366.[155] In his new duchy, Vladislaus I donated estates to Wallachian boyars; their legal status was similar to the position of the knezes in other regions of Hungary.[156]

Royal charters customarily identified noblemen and landowners from the second half of the 14th century.[157] A man who lived in his own house on his own estates was described as living "in the way of nobles", in contrast with those who did not own landed property and lived "in the way of peasants".[147] A verdict of 1346 declared that a noble woman who was given in marriage to a commoner should receive her inheritance "in the form of an estate in order to preserve the nobility of the descendants born of the ignoble marriage".[158] According to the local customs of certain counties, her husband was also regarded as a nobleman – a noble by his wife.[159]

The peasants' legal position had been standardized in almost the entire kingdom by the 1350s.[144][160] The free peasant tenants were to pay seigneurial taxes, but were rarely obliged to provide labour service.[144] In 1351, the king ordered that the ninth – a tax payable to the landowners – was to be collected from all tenants, thus preventing landowners from offering lower taxes to persuade tenants to move from other lords' lands to their estates.[145] In 1328, all landowners were authorized to administer justice on their estates "in all cases except cases of theft, robbery, assault or arson" which remained under the jurisdiction of the sedria.[161] The kings started to grant noblemen the right to execute or mutilate criminals who were captured in their estates.[162] The most influential noblemen's estates were also exempted of the jurisdiction of the counties' law courts.[163]

Emerging Estates Edit

See also: Ottoman–Hungarian wars
 
Galambóc Fortress (now Golubac Fortress in Serbia), granted to Stefan Lazarević, Despot of Serbia (r. 1389–1427) by King Sigismund (r. 1387–1437)

Royal power quickly declined after Louis I died in 1382.[164] His son-in-law, Sigismund of Luxembourg (r. 1387–1437), entered into a formal league with the aristocrats who had elected him king in early 1387.[165] Initially, when his position was weak, he gave away more than half of the 150 royal castles to his supporters, although this abated when he strengthened his authority in the early 15th century.[166] His favorites were foreigners,[note 7] but old Hungarian families[note 8] also took advantage of his magnanimity.[169] The wealthiest noblemen, known as magnates, built comfortable castles in the countryside which became important centers of social life.[170] These fortified manor houses always contained a hall for representative purposes and a private chapel.[171] Sigismund regularly invited the magnates to the royal council, even if they did not hold higher offices.[172] He founded a new chivalric order, the Order of the Dragon, in 1408 to reward his most loyal supporters.[173]

The expansion of the Ottoman Empire reached the southern frontiers in the 1390s.[174] A large anti-Ottoman crusade ended with a catastrophic defeat near Nicopolis in 1396.[175] Next year, Sigismund held a Diet in Temesvár (now Timișoara in Romania) to strengthen the defence system.[175][176] He confirmed the Golden Bull, but without the two provisions that limited the noblemen's military obligations and established their right to resist the monarchs.[175] The Diet obliged all landowners to equip one archer for every 20 peasant plots on their domains to serve in the royal army.[177][178] Sigismund granted large estates in Hungary to neighboring Orthodox rulers[note 9] to secure their alliance.[180] They established Basilite monasteries on their estates.[181]

Sigismund's son-in-law, Albert of Habsburg (r. 1438–1439), was elected king in early 1438, but only after he promised always to make important decisions with the consent of the royal council.[182][183] After he died in 1439, a civil war broke out between the partisans of his son, Ladislaus the Posthumous (r. 1440–1457), and the supporters of the child king's rival, Vladislaus III of Poland (r. 1440–1444).[184] Ladislaus the Posthumous was crowned without election with the Holy Crown of Hungary, but the Diet proclaimed the coronation invalid, stating that "the crowning of kings is always dependent on the will of the kingdom's inhabitants, in whose consent both the effectiveness and the force of the crown reside".[185] Vladislaus died fighting the Ottomans during the Crusade of Varna in 1444 and the Diet elected seven captains in chief to administer the kingdom. The talented military commander, John Hunyadi (d. 1456), was elected the sole regent in 1446.[186]

The Diet developed from a consultative body into an important institution of law making in the 1440s.[186] The magnates were always invited to attend it in person.[185] Lesser noblemen were also entitled to attend the Diet, but in most cases they were represented by delegates, who were almost always the magnates' familiares.[187]

Birth of titled nobility and the Tripartitum Edit

 
The Croatian version of the Tripartitum by István Werbőczy (published in 1574)

Hunyadi was the first noble to receive a hereditary title from a Hungarian king, when Ladislaus the Posthumous granted him the Saxon district of Bistritz (now Bistrița in Romania) with the title perpetual count in 1453.[188][189] Hunyadi's son, Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458–1490), who was elected king in 1458, rewarded further noblemen with the same title.[190] Fügedi states that 16 December 1487 was the "birthday of the estate of magnates in Hungary",[191] because an armistice signed on this day listed 23 Hungarian "natural barons", contrasting them with the high officers of state, who were mentioned as "barons of office".[172][191] Corvinus' successor, Vladislaus II (r. 1490–1516), and Vladislaus' son, Louis II (r. 1516–1526), formally began to reward important persons of their government with the hereditary title of baron.[192]

Differences in the nobles' wealth increased in the second half of the 15th century.[193] About 30 families owned more than a quarter of the territory of the kingdom when Corvinus died in 1490.[193] A further tenth of all lands in the kingdom was in the possession of about 55 wealthy noble families.[193] Other nobles held almost one third of the lands, but this group included 12–13,000 peasant-nobles who owned a single plot (or a part of it) and had no tenants. The Diets regularly compelled the peasant-nobles to pay tax on their plots.[194] Average magnates held about 50 villages, but the regular division of inherited landed property could lead to the impoverishment of aristocratic families.[note 10][196] Strategies applied to avoid this – family planning and celibacy – led to the extinction of most aristocratic families after a few generations.[note 11][195]

The Diet ordered the compilation of customary law in 1498.[197] The jurist István Werbőczy (d. 1541) completed the task, presenting a law-book at the Diet in 1514.[197][198] His Tripartitum – The Customary Law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Parts – was never enacted, but it was consulted at the law courts for centuries.[199][200] It summarized the noblemen's fundamental privileges in four points:[201] noblemen were only subject to the monarch's authority and could only be arrested in a due legal process; furthermore, they were exempt from all taxes and were entitled to resist the king if he attempted to interfere with their privileges.[202] Werbőczy also implied that Hungary was actually a republic of nobles headed by a monarch, stating that all noblemen "are members of the Holy Crown"[203] of Hungary.[201] Quite anachronistically, he emphasized the idea of all noblemen's legal equality, but he had to admit that the high officers of the realm, whom he mentioned as "true barons", were legally distinguished from other nobles.[204] He also mentioned the existence of a distinct group, who were barons "in name only", but without specifying their peculiar status.[143]

The Tripartitum regarded the kindred as the basic unit of nobility.[205] A noble father exercised almost autocratic authority over his sons, because he could imprison them or offer them as a hostage for himself. His authority ended only if he divided his estates with his sons, but the division could rarely be enforced.[206] The "betrayal of fraternal blood" (that is, a kinsman's "deceitful, sly, and fraudulent ... disinheritance")[207] was a serious crime, which was punished by loss of honor and the confiscation of all property.[208] Although the Tripartitum did not explicitly mention it, a nobleman's wife was also subject to his authority. She received her dower from her husband at the consummation of their marriage.[209] If her husband died, she inherited his best coach-horses and clothes.[210]

Demand for foodstuffs grew rapidly in Western Europe in the 1490s.[211] The landowners wanted to take advantage of the growing prices.[212] They demanded labour service from their peasant tenants and started to collect the seigneurial taxes in kind.[213] The Diets passed decrees that restricted the peasants' right to free movement and increased their burdens.[211] The peasants' grievances unexpectedly culminated in a rebellion in May 1514.[211][214] The rebels captured manor houses and murdered dozens of noblemen, especially on the Great Hungarian Plain.[215] The voivode of Transylvania, John Zápolya, annihilated their main army at Temesvár on 15 July. György Dózsa and other leaders of the peasant war were tortured and executed, but most rebels received a pardon.[216] The Diet punished the peasantry as a group, condemning them to perpetual servitude and depriving them of the right of free movement.[216][217] The Diet also enacted the serfs' obligation to provide one day's labour service for their lords each week.[217]

Early modern and modern times Edit

See also: Kingdom of Hungary

Tripartite Hungary Edit

Further information: Kingdom of Hungary (1526–1867), Ottoman Hungary, and Eastern Hungarian Kingdom

The Ottomans annihilated the royal army at the Battle of Mohács.[218] Louis II died fleeing from the battlefield and two claimants, John Zápolya (r. 1526–1540) and Ferdinand of Habsburg (r. 1526–1564), were elected kings.[219] Ferdinand tried to reunite Hungary after Zápolya died in 1540, but the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566), intervened and captured Buda in 1541.[220] The sultan allowed Zápolya's widow, Isabella Jagiellon (d. 1559), to rule the lands east of the river Tisza on behalf of her infant son, John Sigismund (r. 1540–1571), in return for a yearly tribute.[221] His decision divided Hungary into three parts: the Ottomans occupied the central territories; John Sigismund's eastern Hungarian Kingdom developed into the autonomous Principality of Transylvania; and the Habsburg monarchs preserved the northern and western territories (or Royal Hungary).[222]

Most noblemen fled from the central regions to the unoccupied territories.[223] Peasants who lived along the borders paid taxes both to the Ottomans and their former lords.[224] Commoners were regularly recruited to serve in the royal army or in the magnates' retinues to replace the noblemen who had perished during fights.[225] The irregular hajdú foot-soldiers – mainly runaway serfs and dispossessed noblemen – became important elements of the defence forces.[225][226] Stephen Bocskai, Prince of Transylvania (r. 1605–1606), settled 10,000 hajdús in seven villages and exempted them from taxation in 1605, which was the "largest collective ennoblement" in the history of Hungary.[227][228]

In addition to the Székely and Saxon leaders, the noblemen formed one of the three nations (or Estates of the realm) in Transylvania, but they could rarely challenge the princes' authority.[229] In Royal Hungary, the magnates successfully protected the noble privileges, because their vast domains were almost completely exempt from royal officials' authority.[230] Their manors were fortified in the "Hungarian manner" (with walls made of earth and timber) in the 1540s.[231] Noblemen in Royal Hungary could also count on the support of the Transylvanian princes against the Habsburg monarchs.[230] Intermarriages among Austrian, Czech and Hungarian aristocrats[note 12] gave rise to the development of a "supranational aristocracy" in the Habsburg monarchy.[233] Foreign aristocrats regularly received Hungarian citizenship, and Hungarian noblemen were often naturalized in the Habsburgs' other realms.[note 13][235] The Habsburg kings rewarded the most powerful magnates with hereditary titles such as baron from the 1530s.[192]

The aristocrats supported the spread of the Reformation.[236] Most noblemen adhered to Lutheranism in the western regions of Royal Hungary, but Calvinism was the dominant religion in Transylvania and other regions.[237] John Sigismund promoted Unitarian views,[238] but most Unitarian noblemen perished in battles in the early 1600s.[239] The Habsburgs remained staunch supporters of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the most prominent aristocratic families[note 14] converted to Catholicism in Royal Hungary in the 1630s.[240][241] The Calvinist princes of Transylvania supported their co-religionists.[240] Gabriel Bethlen granted nobility to all Calvinist pastors.[242]

The kings and the Transylvanian princes regularly ennobled commoners, but often without granting landed property to them.[243] Jurisprudence maintained that only those who owned land cultivated by serfs could be regarded as fully fledged noblemen.[244] Armalists – noblemen who held a charter of ennoblement, but not a single plot of land – and peasant-nobles continued to pay taxes, for which they were collectively known as taxed nobility.[244] Nobility could be purchased from the kings who were often in need of funds. Landowners also benefitted from the ennoblement of their serfs, because they could demand a fee for their consent.[245]

The Diet was officially divided into two chambers in Royal Hungary in 1608.[246][247] All adult male members of the titled noble families had a seat in the Upper House.[247] The lesser noblemen elected two or three delegates at the general assemblies of the counties to represent them in the Lower House. The Croatian and Slavonian magnates also had seats at the Upper House, and the sabor (or Diet) of Croatia and Slavonia sent delegates to the Lower House.[246]

Liberation and war of independence Edit

Further information: Great Turkish War
 
Countess Ilona Zrinyi (d. 1703), mother of Prince Francis II Rákóczi (d. 1735)

Forces from the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683.[248] The Ottomans were expelled from Buda in 1686. Michael I Apafi, the prince of Transylvania (r. 1661–1690), acknowledged the suzerainty of Emperor Leopold I, who was also king of Hungary (r. 1657–1705), in 1687.[249] Grateful for the liberation of Buda, the Diet abolished the noblemen's right to resist the monarch for the defense of their liberties.[250] In 1688, the Diet authorized the aristocrats to establish a special trust, known as fideicommissum, with royal consent to prevent the distribution of their landed wealth among their descendants. In accordance with the traditional concept of aviticitas, inherited estates could not be subject to the trust. Estates in fideicommissum were always held by one person, but he was responsible for the proper boarding of his relatives.[251]

The liberation of central Hungary continued, and the Ottomans were forced to acknowledge the loss of the territory in 1699.[250] Leopold set up a special committee to distribute the lands in the reconquered territories.[252] The descendants of the noblemen who had held estates there before the Ottoman conquest were required to provide documentary evidence to substantiate their claims to the ancestral lands.[252] Even if they could present documents, they were to pay a fee – a tenth of the value of the claimed property – as compensation for the costs of the liberation war.[252][253] Few noblemen could meet the criteria and more than half of the recovered lands were distributed among foreigners.[254] They were naturalized, but most of them never visited Hungary.[255]

The Habsburg administration doubled the amount of the taxes to be collected in Hungary and demanded almost one third of the taxes (1.25 million florins) from the clergy and the nobility. The palatine, Prince Paul Esterházy (d. 1713), convinced the monarch to reduce the noblemen's tax burden to 0.25 million florins, but the difference was to be paid by the peasantry.[256] Leopold did not trust the Hungarians, because a group of magnates had conspired against him in the 1670s.[250] Mercenaries replaced the Hungarian garrisons, and they frequently plundered the countryside.[250][256] The monarch also supported Cardinal Leopold Karl von Kollonitsch's attempts to restrict the Protestants' rights. Tens of thousands of Catholic Germans and Orthodox Serbs were settled in the reconquered territories.[253]

The outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1715) provided an opportunity for the discontented Hungarians to rise against Leopold. They regarded one of the wealthiest aristocrats, Prince Francis II Rákóczi (d. 1735), as their leader.[256] Rákóczi's War of Independence lasted from 1703 to 1711.[250] Although the rebels were forced to yield, the Treaty of Szatmár granted a general amnesty for them and the new Habsburg monarch, Charles III (r. 1711–1740), promised to respect the privileges of the Estates of the realm.[257]

Cooperation and absolutism Edit

Further information: Hungarian nationalism
 
Eszterháza, a palace of the Esterházys at Fertőd

Charles III again confirmed the privileges of the Estates of the "Kingdom of Hungary, and the Parts, Kingdoms and Provinces thereto annexed" in 1723 in return for the enactment of the Pragmatic Sanction which established his daughters' right to succeed him.[258][259] Montesquieu, who visited Hungary in 1728, regarded the relationship between the king and the Diet as a good example of the separation of powers.[260] The magnates almost monopolized the highest offices, but both the Hungarian Court Chancellery – the supreme body of royal administration – and the Lieutenancy Council – the most important administrative office – also employed lesser noblemen.[261] In practice, Protestants were excluded from public offices after a royal decree, the Carolina Resolutio, obliged all candidates to take an oath on the Virgin Mary.[262]

The Peace of Szatmár and the Pragmatic Sanction maintained that the Hungarian nation consisted of the privileged groups, independent of their ethnicity,[263] but the first debates along ethnic lines occurred in the early 18th century.[264] The jurist Mihály Bencsik claimed that the burghers of Trencsén (now Trenčín in Slovakia) should not send delegates to the Diet because their ancestors had been forced to yield to the conquering Magyars in the 890s.[265] A priest, Ján B. Magin, wrote a response, arguing that ethnic Slovaks and Hungarians enjoyed the same rights.[266] In Transylvania, a bishop of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church, Baron Inocențiu Micu-Klein (d. 1768), tried to speak "on behalf of the whole Romanian nation in Transylvania" at the Diet in 1737 but he could not finish the speech because other delegates stated that he could refer only to the Romanians or to the Romanian people for the Romanian Nation did not exist. Five years later, he unsuccessfully demanded the recognition of the Romanians as the fourth Nation on ethnic grounds.[267]

Maria Theresa (r. 1740–1780) succeeded Charles III in 1740, which gave rise to the War of the Austrian Succession.[268] The noble delegates offered their "lives and blood" for their new "king" and the declaration of the general levy of the nobility was crucial at the beginning of the war.[258] Grateful for their support, Maria Theresa strengthened the links between the Hungarian nobility and the monarch.[269][270] She established the Theresian Academy and the Royal Hungarian Bodyguard for young Hungarian noblemen.[271] Both institutions enabled the spread of the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment.[note 15][272][273] Freemasonry became popular, especially among the magnates, but masonic lodges were also open to untitled noblemen and professionals.[273]

 
Tivadar Kubinyi (d. 1880), a member of the Royal Hungarian Bodyguard

Cultural differences between the magnates and lesser noblemen grew. The magnates adopted the lifestyle of the imperial aristocracy, moving between their summer palaces in Vienna and their newly built splendid residences in Hungary.[274] Prince Miklós Esterházy (d. 1790) employed the celebrated composer Joseph Haydn. Count János Fekete (d. 1803), a fierce protector of noble privileges, bombarded the French philosopher Voltaire with letters and dilettante poems.[275] Count Miklós Pálffy (d. 1773) proposed to tax the nobles to finance a standing army.[276] Most noblemen were unwilling to renounce their privileges.[277] Lesser noblemen also insisted on their traditional way of life and lived in simple houses, made of timber or packed clay.[278]

Maria Theresa did not hold Diets after 1764.[276] She regulated the relationship of landowners and their serfs in a royal decree in 1767.[279] Her son and successor, Joseph II (r. 1780–1790), mocked as the "king in hat", was never crowned, because he wanted to avoid the coronation oath.[280] He introduced reforms which clearly contradicted local customs.[281] He replaced the counties with districts and appointed royal officials to administer them. He also abolished serfdom, securing all peasants the right to free movement after the revolt of Romanian serfs in Transylvania.[282] He ordered the first census in Hungary in 1784.[283] According to its records, the nobility made up about 4.5 percent of the male population in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown (with 155,519 noblemen in Hungary proper, and 42,098 noblemen in Transylvania, Croatia and Slavonia).[284][285] The nobles' proportion was significantly higher (six–sixteen percent) in the northeastern and eastern counties, and less (three percent) in Croatia and Slavonia.[284] Poor noblemen, who were mocked as "nobles of the seven plum trees" or "sandal-wearing nobles", made up almost 90 percent of the nobility.[286] Previous investigations of nobility show that more than half of the noble families received their rank after 1550.[245]

National awakening Edit

 
Countess Claudine Rhédey (d. 1841), an ancestress of the British royal family through the marriage of her granddaughter Mary of Teck (d. 1953) to King George V (r. 1910–1936)

The few reformist noblemen greeted the news of the French Revolution with enthusiasm. József Hajnóczy [eo] (d. 1795) translated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen into Latin, and János Laczkovics [hu] (d. 1795) published its Hungarian translation.[287] To appease the Hungarian nobility, Joseph II revoked almost all his reforms on his deathbed in 1790.[288] His successor, Leopold II (r. 1790–1792), convoked the Diet and confirmed the liberties of the Estates of the realm, emphasizing Hungary was a "free and independent" realm, governed by its own laws.[282][289] News about the Jacobin terror in France strengthened royal power.[290] Hajnóczy and other radical (or "Jacobin") noblemen, who had discussed the possibility of the abolition of all privileges in secret societies, were captured and executed or imprisoned in 1795.[291] The Diets voted in favor of the taxes and the recruits that Leopold's successor, Francis (r. 1792–1835), demanded between 1792 and 1811.[292]

The last general levy of the nobility was declared in 1809, but Napoleon easily defeated the noble troops near Győr.[292] Agricultural bloom encouraged the landowners to borrow money and to buy new estates or to establish mills during the war, but most of them went bankrupt after peace was restored in 1814.[293] The concept of aviticitas prevented both the creditors from collecting their money and the debtors from selling their estates.[294] Radical nobles played a crucial role in the reform movements of the early 19th century.[295] Gergely Berzeviczy (d. 1822) attributed the backwardness of the local economy to the peasants' serfdom already around 1800.[296] Ferenc Kazinczy (d. 1831) and János Batsányi (d. 1845) initiated language reform, fearing the disappearance of the Hungarian language.[295] The poet Sándor Petőfi (d. 1849), who was a commoner, ridiculed the conservative noblemen in his poem The Magyar Noble, contrasting their anachronistic pride and their idle way of life.[297]

From the 1820s, a new generation of reformist noblemen dominated political life.[298] Count István Széchenyi (d. 1860) demanded the abolition of the serfs' labour service and the entail system, stating that, "We, well-to-do landowners are the main obstacles to the progress and greater development of our fatherland".[299] He established clubs in Pressburg and Pest and promoted horse racing, because he wanted to encourage the regular meetings of magnates, lesser noblemen and burghers.[300] Széchenyi's friend, Baron Miklós Wesselényi (d. 1850), demanded the creation of a constitutional monarchy and the protection of civil rights.[301] A lesser nobleman, Lajos Kossuth (d. 1894), became the leader of the most radical politicians in the 1840s.[300] He declared that the Diets and the counties were the privileged groups' institutions, and that only a wider social movement could secure the development of Hungary.[302]

Since the end of the Age of Enlightenment, nationality was more and more associated with the vernacular. Predictions by the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (d. 1803) about the inevitable assimilation of small peoples to a large linguistic group fanned the flames of linguistic nationalism.[303] Although ethnic Hungarians made up only about 38 percent of the population,[304] the official use of the Hungarian language spread from the late 18th century.[305] Kossuth declared that all who wanted to enjoy the liberties of the nation should learn Hungarian.[306] In contrast, the Slovak Ľudovít Štúr (d. 1856) stated that the Hungarian nation consisted of many nationalities and their loyalty could be strengthened by the official use of their languages.[307] Count Janko Drašković (d. 1856) recommended that Croatian should replace Latin as the official language in Croatia and Slavonia.[308]

Revolution and neo-absolutism Edit

See also: Hungarian Revolution of 1848
 
Count Lajos Batthyány (d. 1849), the first Prime Minister of Hungary in 1848

News of the Revolutions of 1848 reached Pest on 15 March 1848.[309] Young intellectuals proclaimed a radical program, known as the Twelve Points, demanding equal civil rights to all citizens.[310] Count Lajos Batthyány (d. 1849) was appointed the first prime minister of Hungary.[311] The Diet quickly enacted the majority of the Twelve Points, and Ferdinand V (r. 1835–1848) sanctioned them in April.[309]

The April Laws abolished the nobles' tax-exemption and the aviticitas,[312] but the magnates' 31 fideicommissa remained intact.[313] Although the peasant tenants received the ownership of their plots, a compensation was promised to the landowners.[312][314] Adult men who owned more than 0.032 km2 (7.9 acres) of arable lands or urban estates with a value of at least 300 florins – about one quarter of the adult male population – were granted the right to vote in the parliamentary elections.[312] The noblemen's exclusive franchise in county elections was confirmed, otherwise ethnic minorities could have easily dominated the general assemblies in many counties.[312] Noblemen made up about one quarter of the members of the new parliament, which assembled after the general elections on 5 July.[315]

The Slovak delegates demanded autonomy for all ethnic minorities at their assembly in May.[316][317] Similar demands were adopted at the Romanian delegates' meeting.[318][319] Ferdinand V's advisors persuaded the ban (or governor) of Croatia, Baron Josip Jelačić (d. 1859), to invade Hungary proper in September.[320][321] A new war of independence broke out and the Hungarian parliament dethroned the Habsburg dynasty on 14 April 1849.[322] Nicholas I of Russia (r. 1825–1855) intervened on the legitimist side and Russian troops overpowered the Hungarian army, forcing it to surrender on 13 August.[322][323]

Hungary, Croatia (and Slavonia) and Transylvania were incorporated as separate realms in the Austrian Empire.[324] The advisors of the young emperor, Franz Joseph (r. 1848–1916), declared that Hungary had lost its historic rights and the conservative Hungarian aristocrats[note 16] could not persuade him to restore the old constitution.[325] Noblemen who had remained loyal to the Habsburgs were appointed to high offices,[note 17] but most new officials came from other provinces of the empire.[326][327] The vast majority of noblemen opted for a passive resistance: they did not hold offices in state administration and tacitly obstructed the implementation of imperial decrees.[328][329] An untitled nobleman from Zala County, Ferenc Deák (d. 1876), became their leader around 1854.[325][329] They tried to preserve an air of superiority, but their vast majority was assimilated to the local peasantry or petty bourgeoisie during the following decades.[330] In contrast to them, the magnates, who retained about one quarter of all lands, could easily raise funds from the developing banking sector to modernize their estates.[330]

Austria-Hungary Edit

See also: Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen
 
Coronation of Franz Joseph I as king of Hungary after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867

Deák and his followers knew the great powers did not support the disintegration of the Austrian Empire.[331] Austria's defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 accelerated the rapprochement between the king and the Deák Party, which led to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.[332] Hungary proper and Transylvania were united[333] and the autonomy of Hungary was restored within the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.[334] Next year, the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement restored the union of Hungary proper and Croatia, but secured the competence of the Croatian sabor in internal affairs, education and justice.[335]

The Compromise strengthened the position of the traditional political elite.[336] Only about six percent of the population could vote in the general elections.[336] More than half of the prime ministers and one third of the ministers were appointed from among the magnates from 1867 to 1918.[337] Landowners made up the majority of the members of parliament.[336] Half of the seats in municipal assemblies were preserved for the greatest taxpayers.[338] Noblemen also dominated the state administration, because tens of thousands of impoverished nobles took jobs at the ministries, or at the state-owned railways and post offices.[339][340] They were ardent supporters of Magyarization, denying the use of minority languages.[341] An emigrant aristocrat Baroness Emma Orczy (d. 1947) wrote her novels in English in the United Kingdom. She had left Hungary with her parents when farm workers fearing of losing their job set the Orczy manor on fire at Abádszalók in 1868. Her first novel featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel – "the first character who could be called a superhero" (Stan Lee) – was published in 1905.[342]

Only nobleman who owned an estate of at least 1.15 km2 (280 acres) were regarded as prosperous, but the number of estates of that size quickly decreased.[note 18][340] The magnates took advantage of lesser noblemen's bankruptcies and bought new estates during the same period.[343] New fideicommissa were created which enabled the magnates to preserve the entailment of their landed wealth.[343] Aristocrats were regularly appointed to the boards of directors of banks and companies.[note 19][344]

Jews were the prime movers of the development of the financial and industrial sectors.[345] Jewish businessmen owned more than half of the companies and more than four-fifths of the banks in 1910.[345] They also bought landed property and had acquired almost one-fifth of the estates of between 1.15–5.75 km2 (280–1,420 acres) by 1913.[345] The most prominent Jewish burghers were awarded with nobility[note 20] and there were 26 aristocratic families and 320 noble families of Jewish origin in 1918.[347] Many of them converted to Christianity, but other nobles did not regard them as their peers.[297]

Revolutions and counter-revolution Edit

See also: Revolutions and interventions in Hungary (1918–1920) and Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)

The First World War brought about the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918.[348] The Aster Revolution – a movement of the left-liberal Party of Independence, the Social Democratic Party and the Radical Citizens' Party – persuaded Charles IV (r. 1916–1918), to appoint the radical Count Mihály Károlyi (d. 1955), prime minister on 31 October.[349][350] After the Lower House dissolved itself, Hungary was proclaimed a republic on 16 November.[351] The Hungarian National Council adopted a land reform setting the maximum size of the estates at 1.15 square kilometres (280 acres) and ordering the distribution of any excess among the local peasantry.[352] Károlyi, whose inherited domains had been mortgaged to banks, was the first to implement the reform.[352]

The Allied Powers authorized Romania to occupy new territories and ordered the withdrawal of the Royal Hungarian Army almost as far as the Tisza on 26 February 1919.[353][354] Károlyi resigned and the Hungarian Communist Party leader Béla Kun (d. 1938) announced the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 21 March.[355] All estates of over 0.43 km2 (110 acres) and all private companies employing more than 20 workers were nationalized.[356] The Bolsheviks could not stop the Romanian invasion and their leaders fled from Hungary on 1 August.[357] After a short-lived temporary government, the industrialist István Friedrich (d. 1951) formed a coalition government with the support of the Allied Powers on 6 August.[358] The Bolsheviks' nationalization program was abolished.[358] The Hungarian Social Democratic Party boycotted the general elections in early 1920.[358] The new one-chamber Diet of Hungary restored the Hungarian monarchy, but without restoring the Habsburgs.[358] Instead, a Calvinist nobleman, Miklós Horthy (d. 1957), was elected regent on 1 March 1920.[359][360] Hungary had to acknowledge the loss of more than two thirds of its territory and more than 60 percent of its population (including one third of the ethnic Hungarians) in the Treaty of Trianon on 4 June.[358]

Horthy was never crowned king, and therefore could not grant nobility, but he established a new order of merit, the Order of Gallantry.[361] Its members received the hereditary title of vitéz ("brave").[361] They were also granted parcels of land, which renewed the "medieval link between land tenure and service to the crown" (Bryan Cartledge).[361] Two Transylvanian aristocrats, Counts Pál Teleki (d. 1941) and István Bethlen (d. 1946), were the most influential politicians in the interwar period.[362] The events of 1918–19 convinced them that only a "conservative democracy", dominated by the landed nobility, could secure stability.[363] Most ministers and the majority of the members of the parliament were nobles.[364] A conservative agrarian reform – limited to 8.5 percent of all arable lands – was introduced, but almost one third of the lands remained in the possession of about 400 magnate families.[365] The two-chamber parliament was restored in 1926, with an Upper House dominated by the aristocrats, prelates and high-ranking officials.[366][367]

Antisemitism was a leading ideology in the 1920s and 1930s.[368] A numerus clausus law limited the admission of Jewish students in the universities.[369][370] Count Fidél Pálffy (d. 1946) was one of the leading figures of the national socialist movements, but most aristocrats disdained the radicalism of "petty officers and housekeepers".[371] Hungary participated in the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and joined the war against the Soviet Union after the bombing of Kassa in late June.[372] Fearing the defection of Hungary from the war, Nazi Germany occupied the country in Operation Margarethe on 19 March 1944.[373] Hundreds of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Romani were transferred to Nazi concentration camps with the local authorities' assistance.[374][375] The wealthiest business magnates of Jewish origin were forced to renounce their companies and banks to redeem their own and their relatives' lives.[note 21][374]

The fall of the Hungarian nobility Edit

See also: Second Hungarian Republic and Soviet occupation of Hungary
 
Bernstein Castle (Borostyánkő vára) in Austria, still held by the Almásy family

The Soviet Red Army reached the Hungarian borders and took possession of the Great Hungarian Plain by 6 December 1944.[376] Delegates from the region's towns and villages established the Provisional National Assembly in Debrecen, which elected a new government on 22 December.[376][377] Three prominent Anti-Nazi aristocrats[note 22] had a seat in the assembly.[378] The Provisional National Government soon promised land reform, along with the abolishment of all "anti-democratic" laws.[379] The last German Wehrmacht troops left Hungary on 4 April 1945.[380]

Imre Nagy (d. 1958), the Communist Minister of Agriculture, announced land reform on 17 March 1945.[381] All domains of more than 5.75 km2 (1,420 acres) were confiscated and the owners of smaller estates could retain a maximum 0.58–1.73 km2 (140–430 acres) of land.[381][382] The land reform, as Cartledge noted, destroyed the nobility and eliminated the "elements of feudalism, which had persisted for longer in Hungary than anywhere else in Europe".[381] Similar land reforms were introduced in Romania and Czechoslovakia.[383] In both countries, ethnic Hungarian aristocrats were sentenced to death or prison as alleged war criminals.[note 23][383] Hungarian aristocrats[note 24] could retain their estates only in Burgenland (in Austria) after 1945.[384]

Soviet military authorities controlled the general elections and the formation of a coalition government in late 1945.[385] The new parliament declared the Second Hungarian Republic on 1 February 1946.[386] An opinion poll showed that more than 75 percent of men and 66 percent of women were opposed to the use of noble titles in 1946.[387] The parliament adopted an act that abolished all noble ranks and related styles, also banning their use.[388] The new act came into force on 14 February 1947.[389]

Unofficial nobility Edit

See also: Hungarian People's Republic and Goulash Communism
 
Ruined aristocratic mansion at Lovasberény

The Communists took full control of the government between 1947 and 1949, and Hungary was proclaimed a "people's republic" on 20 August 1949.[390] The aristocrats were declared as "class enemies", and most of them interned to "social camps" – actually, forced labour camps – to work in the fields in the Great Hungarian Plain.[391] Mass internal deportations occurred in 1950 and 1951. Almost all aristocrats were interned from Budapest to under-populated villages in eastern Hungary, primarily in Hortobágy region within two months in May–July 1951. Figures of a final report shows that 9 dukes, 163 counts, 121 barons and 8 knighted noblemen – altogether 301 aristocrats – and their families were deported from the capital during this period. The deportees were prohibited to leave the boundary of their assigned village and were under constant police surveillance. They were deprived of their belongings, properties and civil rights – they were prohibited to take part in elections. Most of them could work as manual workers in agriculture at state farms on a limited basis, but their deprivation was constant.[392]

Some leftist aristocrats tried to cooperate with the new regime but the Communist leaders did not trust them.[note 25][393] As a consequence of the Khrushchev Thaw, those who had been interned were allowed to leave the labour camps, but their former homes were not restored to them.[394] Although Communist historians did their utmost to prove the aristocrats' preeminent role during the failed anti-Communist Hungarian revolution of 1956, few aristocrats took an active part.[note 26][396] Many aristocrats left the country following the suppression of the 1956 revolt.[397] During the 1960s and 1970s, people of aristocratic descent were mainly employed as blue-collar workers,[391] and their children needed a special permit for studying at universities until 1962.[398][399] Although official discrimination was abolished, former aristocrats were rarely appointed to higher positions.[note 27][400] Péter Esterházy (d. 2016) became a celebrated writer during the last decades of the Communist regime.[401]

The Communist one-party system collapsed in the late 1980s, and Hungary was proclaimed a republic in 1989.[402] The first prime minister of the democratic era, József Antall (d. 1993) offered positions in state administration to aristocrats who returned to Hungary, but the aristocracy did not regain its former position.[399] The restitution of former property was an important political issue in most new democracies in the early 1990s. In Hungary, in kind restitution was excluded because many pieces of formerly confiscated property had already been privatized during the last years of the Communist regime. Instead, monetary compensation was made available to the original owners and their descendants but its amount was limited to about US$70,000. In contrast, in kind restitution was the preferred method of restitution in Czechoslovakia, and the original owners could also claim in kind restitution in Romania and Poland.[403] Hungarian aristocrats regained part of their former properties in Romania, and at least one Hungarian noble family also seized property in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia during the restitution process.[note 28][404]

The Hungarian act banning the use of noble ranks and styles has not been abolished, and the Constitutional Court of Hungary declared, in 2009 and 2010, that the ban was fully in line with the revised Hungarian Constitution of 1949. In December 2010, two members of the rightist Jobbik Group submitted a draft for the abolition of the ban but they withdrew it in two weeks.[405] On the initiative of the former aristocrat János Nyáry, a private club, the Association of Hungarian Noble Families, was established for people of noble descent in Budapest in 1994. The association became a member of the European Commission of the Nobility in 2007.[406]

See also Edit

Notes Edit

  1. ^ Historian Ján Lukačka lists the Hont-Pázmány, Miskolc and Bogát-Radvány clans among the noble kindred of Moravian descent.[7]
  2. ^ Among them, the Bár-Kalán, Csák, Kán, Lád and Szemere clans regarded themselves as descendants of one of the legendary seven leaders of the conquering Magyars.[26]
  3. ^ Andronicus Aba built a stone castle at Füzér, and the stone castle at Kabold (now Kobersdorf in Austria) was erected by Pousa Szák.[73]
  4. ^ For instance, the families from the Aba clan had an eagle on their coat-of-arms, and the Csáks adopted the lion.[43]
  5. ^ According to a 15th-century land-register, many ecclesiastic nobles in the Bishopric of Veszprém were descended from true noblemen who had sought the bishops' protection.[115]
  6. ^ The most powerful oligarch, Matthew Csák, dominated more than a dozen counties in northwestern Hungary; Ladislaus Kán was the actual ruler of Translyvania; and Paul Šubić ruled Croatia and Dalmatia.[129]
  7. ^ The Styrian Hermann of Celje (d. 1435) became the greatest landowner in Slavonia; the Pole Stibor of Stiboricz (d. 1414) held nine castles and 140 villages in northeastern Hungary; and Frederick of Hohenzollern (d. 1440) was appointed to administer counties.[167]
  8. ^ The Báthory, Perényi and Rozgonyi families were among the native beneficiaries of Sigismund's grants.[168]
  9. ^ Mircea I of Wallachia (r. 1386–1418) was awarded with Fogaras; Stefan Lazarević, Despot of Serbia (r. 1389–1427), received more than a dozen of castles.[179]
  10. ^ For instance, Stephen Bánffy of Losonc (d. 1459) held 68 villages in 1459, but the same villages were divided among his 14 descendants in 1526.[195]
  11. ^ From among the 36 wealthiest families of the late 1430s, 27 families survived until 1490, and only eight families until 1570.[195]
  12. ^ The marriages of the children and grandchildren of Magdolna Székely (d. 1556) by her three husbands established close family links between the Hungarian Széchy and Thurzó, the Croatian-Hungarian Zrinski, the Czech Kolowrat, Lobkowicz, Pernštejn, and Rožmberk, and the Austrian or German Arco, Salm and Ungnad families.[232]
  13. ^ The Tyrolian Count Pyrcho von Arco (who married the Hungarian Margit Széchy) was naturalized in Hungary in 1559; the Hungarian Baron Simon Forgách (who married the Austrian Ursula Pemfflinger) received citizenship in Lower Austria in 1568 and in Moravia in 1581.[234]
  14. ^ The Batthyány, Illésházy, Nádasdy and Thurzó families were the first converts to Catholicism.[240]
  15. ^ The former royal bodyguard, György Bessenyei (d. 1811), wrote pamphlets about the importance of education and the cultivation of the Hungarian language in the 1770s.[272]
  16. ^ Counts Emil Dessewffy (d. 1866), Antal Szécsen (d. 1896) and György Apponyi (d. 1899) were the leading conservative aristocrats.[325]
  17. ^ Count Ferenc Zichy (d. 1900) had a seat in the Imperial Council, Count Ferenc Nádasdy was made the Imperial Minister of Justice.[325]
  18. ^ The number of estates of between 1.15–5.75 km2 (280–1,420 acres) decreased from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1867 to 1900.[340]
  19. ^ In 1905, 88 counts and 66 barons had a seat in boards of directors.[344]
  20. ^ Henrik Lévay (d. 1901), who established the first Hungarian insurance company, was ennobled in 1868 and received the title baron in 1897; Zsigmond Kornfeld (d. 1909), who was the "Hungarian financial and industrial giant of the age", was created baron.[346]
  21. ^ The Chorins, Weisses and Kornfelds granted twenty-five-year leases to the German authorities on their properties in return for a free pass to Portugal.[374]
  22. ^ Counts Gyula Dessewffy (d. 2000), Mihály Károlyi and Géza Teleki (d. 1983).[378]
  23. ^ Baron Zsigmond Kemény was imprisoned for initiating the execution of 191 Jews in Romania, although he had actually brought food to them.[383]
  24. ^ The Batthyány, Batthyány–Strattman, Erdődy, Esterházy and Zichy families.[384]
  25. ^ Known as the "Red Duchess", Margit Odescalchi (d. 1982) completed the school of the Hungarian Communist Party but she was called back from the Hungarian Embassy in Washington. Born into the Pallavicini family, Antal Pálinkás (d. 1957) was sentenced to death on trumped-up charges and executed although he had served as a high-ranking officer in the Communist army.[393]
  26. ^ Károly Khuen-Héderváry (d. 1960) initiated the re-organization of the Catholic People's Party; Maximilian Königsegg-Rottenfels (d. 1997) was elected a member of a council of workers at a repair shop by his co-workers. In Romania, at least five former aristocrats were sentenced to prison for "conspiracy against the state" in connection with demonstrations organized to express sympathy for the Hungarian revolution.[395]
  27. ^ The conductor Miklós Lukács (d. 1980) was appointed the director of the Hungarian State Opera House, and János Merán became the head of an industrial cooperative at Körösladány.[400]
  28. ^ Examples include, Farkas Bánffy who regained the Bánffys' former castle at Fugad (Ciuguzel, Romania), and Tibor Kálnoky who seized his ancestors' castles at Miklósvár and Sepsiköröspatak (Micloșoara and Valea Crișului, Romania). The Kálnokys also regained formerly confiscated property in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.[404]

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Sources Edit

Primary sources Edit

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  • Némethy, Zsolt (2016). "Rang nélkül: rehabilitálatlan magyar arisztokraták, 1945–? [Without a rank: unrehabilitated Hungarian aristocrats, 1945–?]" (PDF). Turul (in Hungarian). Magyar Törtnelmi Társulat. 89 (1): 35–38. ISSN 1216-7258. Retrieved 15 March 2023.
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  • Patai, Raphael (2015). The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-2561-2.
  • Pop, Ioan-Aurel (2013). "De manibus Valachorum scismaticorum...": Romanians and Power in the Mediaeval Kingdom of Hungary: The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Peter Lang Edition. ISBN 978-3-631-64866-7.
  • Prodan, David (1971). Supplex Libellus Valachorum or The Political Struggle of the Romanians in Transylvania during the 18th century. Publishing House of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania. OCLC 955936263.
  • Rady, Martyn (2000). Nobility, Land and Service in Medieval Hungary. Palgrave. ISBN 0-333-80085-0.
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  • Schimert, Peter (1995). "The Hungarian Nobility in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries". In Scott, H. M. (ed.). The European Nobilites in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Volume Two: Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. Longman. pp. 144–182. ISBN 0-582-08071-1.
  • Szakály, Ferenc (1994). "The Early Ottoman Period, Including Royal Hungary, 1526–1606". In Sugar, Peter F.; Hanák, Péter; Frank, Tibor (eds.). A History of Hungary. Indiana University Press. pp. 83–99. ISBN 963-7081-01-1.
  • Széchenyi, Kinga (2023). "Deportations and Hungarian Aristocracy during the Communist Period". In Botos, Máté; Fejérdy, Gergely (eds.). Honore et Virtute. A közép-európai arisztokrácia sorsa a XX. században. L'Harmattan. pp. 211–219. ISBN 978-963-414-829-6.
  • Taylor, A. J. P. (1976). The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria–Hungary. The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-79145-9.
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  • Wolf, Mária (2003). "10th–11th century settlements; Earthen forts". In Visy, Zsolt (ed.). Hungarian Archaeology at the Turn of the Millenium. Ministry of National Cultural Heritage, Teleki László Foundation. pp. 326–331. ISBN 963-86291-8-5.
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Further reading Edit

  • Neumann, Tibor (2016). "Hercegek a középkorvégi Magyarországon [Dukes in Hungary in the Late Middle Ages]". In Zsoldos, Attila (ed.). Hercegek és hercegségek a középkori Magyarországon [Dukes and Duchies in Medieval Hungary] (in Hungarian). Városi Levéltár és Kutatóintézet. pp. 95–112. ISBN 978-963-8406-13-2.
  • Thompson, Wayne C. (2014). Nordic, Central, and Southeastern Europe 2014. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781475812244.
  • Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven (2010). "Nobilitashungariae: List of Historical Surnames of the Hungarian Nobility / A magyar történelmi nemesség családneveinek listája". Clcweb Library. Purdue University Press. ISSN 1923-9580.
  • Zsoldos, Attila (2020). The Árpáds and Their People. An Introduction to the History of Hungary from cca. 900 to 1301. Arpadiana IV., Research Centre for the Humanities. ISBN 978-963-416-226-1.

October 15, 2023
hungarian, nobility, kingdom, hungary, held, noble, class, individuals, most, whom, owned, landed, property, from, 11th, century, until, 20th, century, initially, diverse, body, people, were, described, noblemen, from, late, 12th, century, only, high, ranking,. The Kingdom of Hungary held a noble class of individuals most of whom owned landed property from the 11th century until the mid 20th century Initially a diverse body of people were described as noblemen but from the late 12th century only high ranking royal officials were regarded as noble Most aristocrats claimed ancestry from chieftains of the period preceding the establishment of the kingdom around 1000 others were descended from western European knights who settled in Hungary The lower ranking castle warriors also held landed property and served in the royal army From the 1170s most privileged laymen called themselves royal servants to emphasize their direct connection to the monarchs The Golden Bull of 1222 established their liberties especially tax exemption and the limitation of military obligations From the 1220s royal servants were associated with the nobility and the highest ranking officials were known as barons of the realm Only those who owned allods lands free of obligations were regarded as true noblemen but other privileged groups of landowners known as conditional nobles also existed In the 1280s Simon of Keza was the first to claim that noblemen held authority in the kingdom The counties developed into institutions of noble autonomy and the nobles delegates attended the Diets parliaments The wealthiest barons built stone castles allowing them to control vast territories but royal authority was restored in the early 14th century In 1351 King Louis I introduced an entail system and enacted the principle of one and the selfsame liberty of all noblemen but legal distinctions between true noblemen and conditional nobles prevailed The most powerful nobles employed lesser noblemen as their familiares retainers but this private link did not sever the familiaris direct subjection to the monarch According to customary law only males inherited noble estates but under the Hungarian royal prerogative of prefection the kings could promote a daughter to a son allowing her to inherit her father s lands Noblewomen who had married a commoner could also claim their inheritance the daughters quarter that is one quarter of their father s possessions in land Although the Tripartitum a frequently cited compilation of customary law published in 1514 reinforced the idea that all noblemen were equal the monarchs granted hereditary titles to powerful aristocrats and the poorest nobles lost their tax exemption from the mid 16th century In the early modern period because of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire Hungary was divided into three parts Royal Hungary Transylvania and Ottoman Hungary The princes of Transylvania supported the noblemen s fight against the Habsburg dynasty in Royal Hungary but prevented the Transylvanian noblemen from challenging their own authority Ennoblement of whole groups of people was not unusual in the 17th century Examples include the 10 000 hajdu who received nobility as a group in 1605 After the Diet was divided into two chambers in Royal Hungary in 1608 noblemen with a hereditary title had a seat in the upper house other nobles sent delegates to the lower house After the Ottomans defeat in the Great Turkish War in the late 17th century Transylvania and Ottoman Hungary were integrated into the Habsburg monarchy The Habsburgs confirmed the nobles privileges several times but their attempts to strengthen royal authority regularly brought them into conflicts with the nobility who represented nearly five percent of the population Reformist noblemen demanded the abolition of noble privileges from the 1790s but their program was enacted only during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 Most noblemen lost their estates after the emancipation of their serfs but the aristocrats preserved their distinguished social status State administration employed thousands of impoverished noblemen in Austria Hungary Prominent mainly Jewish bankers and industrialists were awarded with nobility but their social status remained inferior to traditional aristocrats Noble titles were abolished only in 1947 months after Hungary was proclaimed a republic Contents 1 Origins 2 Middle Ages 2 1 Development 2 2 Golden Bulls 2 3 Self government and oligarchs 2 4 Age of the Angevins 2 5 Emerging Estates 2 6 Birth of titled nobility and the Tripartitum 3 Early modern and modern times 3 1 Tripartite Hungary 3 2 Liberation and war of independence 3 3 Cooperation and absolutism 3 4 National awakening 3 5 Revolution and neo absolutism 3 6 Austria Hungary 3 7 Revolutions and counter revolution 3 8 The fall of the Hungarian nobility 4 Unofficial nobility 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 Sources 8 1 Primary sources 8 2 Secondary sources 9 Further readingOrigins EditSee also Hungarian prehistory and Principality of Hungary nbsp The Magyars conquering the Carpathian Basin from the 14th century Illuminated Chronicle The Magyars or Hungarians lived in the Pontic steppes when they first appear in written sources from the mid 9th century 1 Muslim merchants described them as wealthy nomadic warriors but they also noticed the Magyars had extensive arable lands 2 3 The Magyars crossed the Carpathian Mountains after the Pechenegs invaded their lands in 894 or 895 4 They settled in the lowlands along the Middle Danube annihilated Moravia and defeated the Bavarians in the 900s 5 6 According to some scholarly theories at least three Hungarian noble clans note 1 were descended from Moravian aristocrats who survived the Magyar conquest 8 Historians who are convinced that the Vlachs or Romanians were already present in the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century propose that the Vlach knezes or chieftains also endured 9 10 Neither of these hypotheses are universally accepted 11 12 Around 950 the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus r 913 959 wrote that the Hungarians were organized into tribes and each had its own prince 13 14 The tribal leaders most probably bore the title ur now lord as it is suggested by Hungarian terms deriving from this word such as orszag now realm and uralkodni to rule 15 The Emperor noted the Magyars spoke both Hungarian and the tongue of the Chazars 16 a powerful steppe people showing that at least their leaders were bilingual 17 The Magyars lived a nomadic or semi nomadic life but archaeological research shows that most settlements consisted of small pit houses and log cabins in the 10th century Tents in use are only mentioned in 12th century literary sources 18 No archeological finds evidence fortresses in the Carpathian Basin in the 10th century but fortresses were also rare in Western Europe during the same period 19 20 A larger log cabin measuring five by five metres 16 ft 16 ft which was built on a foundation of stones in Borsod was tentatively identified as the local leader s household 19 More than a 1 000 graves yielding sabres arrow heads and bones of horses show that mounted warriors formed a significant group in the 10th century 21 The highest ranking Hungarians were buried either in large cemeteries where hundreds of their men were buried without weapons around their leader s burial place or in small cemeteries with 25 30 graves 22 The wealthy warriors burial sites yielded richly decorated horse harness and sabretaches ornamented with precious metal plaques 23 Rich women s graves contained their braid ornaments and rings made of silver or gold and decorated with precious stones 23 The most widespread decorative motifs which can be regarded as tribal totems the griffin wolf and hind were rarely applied in Hungarian heraldry in the following centuries 24 Defeats during the Hungarian invasions of Europe and clashes with the paramount rulers from the Arpad dynasty had decimated the leading families by the end of the 10th century 25 The Gesta Hungarorum a chronicle written around 1200 claimed that dozens of noble kindred flourishing in the late 12th century note 2 had been descended from tribal leaders but most modern scholars do not regard this list as a reliable source 27 26 Middle Ages EditSee also Kingdom of Hungary 1000 1301 and Kingdom of Hungary 1301 1526 Development Edit Stephen I r 997 1038 who was crowned the first king of Hungary in 1000 or 1001 defeated the last resisting tribal chieftains 28 29 Earthen forts were built throughout the kingdom and most of them developed into centers of royal administration 30 About 30 administrative units known as counties were established before 1040 more than 40 new counties were organized during the next centuries 31 32 33 Each county was headed by a royal official the ispan 34 The royal court provided further career opportunities 35 As the historian Martyn Rady noted the royal household was the greatest provider of largesse in the kingdom where the royal family owned more than two thirds of all lands 36 The palatine the head of the royal household was the highest ranking royal official 37 nbsp The Kingdom of Hungary in the 1090sThe kings from the Arpad dynasty appointed their officials from among the members of about 110 aristocratic clans 37 38 These aristocrats were descended either from native that is Magyar Kabar Pecheneg or Slavic chiefs or from foreign knights who had migrated to the country in the 11th and 12th centuries 39 40 The foreign knights had been trained in the Western European art of war which contributed to the development of heavy cavalry in Hungary 41 42 Their descendants were labelled as newcomers for centuries 43 but intermarriage between natives and newcomers was not rare which enabled their integration in two or three generations 44 The monarchs pursued an expansionist policy from the late 11th century 45 Ladislaus I r 1077 1095 seized Slavonia the plains between the river Drava and the Dinaric Alps in the 1090s 46 47 His successor Coloman r 1095 1116 was crowned king of Croatia in 1102 48 Both realms retained their own customs and Hungarians rarely received land grants in Croatia 48 According to customary law Croatians could not be obliged to cross the river Drava to fight in the royal army at their own expense 49 The earliest royal decrees authorized landowners to dispose freely of their private estates but customary law prescribed that inherited lands could only be transferred with the consent of the owner s kinsmen who could potentially inherit them 50 51 From the early 12th century only family lands traceable back to a grant made by Stephen I could be inherited by the deceased owner s distant relatives other estates escheated to the Crown if their owner did not have offspring or brothers 51 52 Aristocratic families held their inherited domains in common for generations before the 13th century 41 Thereafter the division of inherited property became the standard practice 41 Even families descended from wealthy clans could become impoverished through the regular divisions of their estates 53 Medieval documents mention the basic unit of estate organization as praedium or allodium 54 55 A praedium was a piece of land either a whole village or part of it with well marked borders 54 55 Archaeologist Maria Wolf identifies the small motte forts built on artificial mounds and protected by a ditch and a palisade that appeared in the 12th century as the centers of private estates 56 Most wealthy landowners domains consisted of scattered praedia in several villages 57 Due to the scarcity of documentary evidence the size of the private estates cannot be determined 58 The descendants of Otto Gyor the ispan of Somogy County remained wealthy landowners even after he donated 360 households to the newly established Zselicszentjakab Abbey in 1061 59 The establishment of monasteries by wealthy individuals was common 41 Such proprietary monasteries served as burial places for their founders and the founders descendants who were regarded as the co owners or from the 13th century co patrons of the monastery 41 Serfs cultivated part of the praedium but other plots were hired out in return for in kind taxes 55 The term noble was rarely used and poorly defined before the 13th century it could refer to a courtier a landowner with judicial powers or even to a common warrior 38 The existence of a diverse group of warriors who were subjected to the monarch royal officials or prelates is well documented 60 The castle warriors who were exempt from taxation held hereditary landed property around the royal castles 61 62 Lightly armored horsemen known as lovok or archers and armed castle folk mentioned as orok or guards defended the borderlands 63 Golden Bulls Edit nbsp Hunt an early 11th century ancestor of the aristocratic Hont Pazmany kindred from the 14th century Illuminated Chronicle Official documents from the end of the 12th century only mentioned court dignitaries and ispans as noblemen 38 This group had adopted most elements of chivalric culture 64 65 They regularly named their children after Paris of Troy Hector Tristan Lancelot and other heroes of Western European chivalric romances 64 The first tournaments were held around the same time 66 The regular alienation of royal estates is well documented from the 1170s 67 The monarchs granted immunities exempting the grantee s estates from the jurisdiction of the ispans or even renouncing royal revenues that had been collected there 67 Bela III r 1172 1196 was the first Hungarian monarch to give away a whole county to a nobleman he granted Modrus in Croatia to Bartholomew of Krk in 1193 stipulating that the grantee was to equip warriors for the royal army 68 Bela s son Andrew II r 1205 1235 decided to alter the conditions of his realm and distribute castles counties lands and other revenues to his officials as he narrated in a document in 1217 69 Instead of granting the estates in fief with an obligation to render future services he gave them as allods in reward for the grantee s previous acts 70 The great officers who were the principal beneficiaries of his grants were mentioned as barons of the realm from the late 1210s 71 72 Donations of such a large scale accelerated the development of a wealthy group of landowners most descending from a high ranking kindred 71 72 Some wealthy landowners note 3 could afford to build stone castles 73 Closely related aristocrats were distinguished from other lineages through a reference to their actual or presumed common ancestor with the words de genere from the kindred 74 Families descending from the same kindred adopted similar insignia note 4 75 The author of the Gesta Hungarorum fabricated genealogies for them and emphasized that they could never be excluded from the honor of the realm 76 that is from state administration 53 The new owners of the transferred royal estates wanted to subjugate the freemen castle warriors and other privileged groups of people living in or around their domains 77 The threatened groups wanted to achieve confirmation of their status as royal servants emphasizing that they were only to serve the king 78 79 Bela III issued the first extant royal charter about the grant of this rank to a castle warrior 80 Andrew II s Golden Bull of 1222 enacted royal servants privileges 81 They were exempt from taxation they were to fight in the royal army without proper compensation only if enemy forces invaded the kingdom only the monarch or the palatine could judge their cases 82 83 84 According to the Golden Bull only royal servants who died without a son could freely will their estates but even in this case their daughters were entitled to the daughters quarter 82 85 The final article of the Golden Bull authorized the bishops barons and other nobles to resist the monarch if he ignored its provisions 86 Most provisions of the Golden Bull were first confirmed in 1231 87 nbsp Golden Bull of 1222 the first royal charter summarizing the privileges of the royal servantsThe clear definition of the royal servants liberties distinguished them from all other privileged groups whose military obligations remained theoretically unlimited 81 From the 1220s the royal servants were regularly called noblemen and started to develop their own corporate institutions at the county level 88 In 1232 the royal servants of Zala County asked Andrew II to authorize them to judge and do justice stating that the county had slipped into anarchy 89 The king granted their request and Bartholomew Bishop of Veszprem sued one Ban Oguz for properties before their community 89 The first Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241 proved the importance of well fortified locations and heavily armored cavalry 90 91 In the following decades Bela IV of Hungary r 1235 1270 gave away large parcels of the royal demesne expecting that the new owners would build stone castles there 92 93 Bela s burdensome castle building program was unpopular but achieved his aim almost 70 castles were built or reconstructed during his reign 94 More than half of the new or reconstructed castles were in noblemen s domains 95 Most new castles were erected on rocky peaks mainly along the western and northern borderlands 96 The spread of stone castles profoundly changed the structure of landholding because castles could not be maintained without proper income 97 Lands and villages were legally attached to each castle and castles were thereafter always transferred and inherited along with these appurtenances 98 The royal servants were legally identified as nobles in 1267 99 That year the nobles of all Hungary called royal servants persuaded Bela IV and his son Stephen V r 1270 1272 to hold an assembly and confirm their collective privileges 99 Other groups of land holding warriors could also be called nobles but they were always distinguished from the true noblemen 100 101 They held their estates conditionally as they were required to provide well defined services to another lord hence their groups are now collectively known as conditional nobles 102 The noble Vlach knezes who had landed property in the Banate of Severin were obliged to fight in the army of the ban or royal governor 103 Most warriors known as the noble sons of servants were descended from freemen or liberated serfs who received estates from Bela IV in Upper Hungary on the condition that they were to equip jointly a fixed number of knights 100 104 The nobles of the Church formed the armed retinue of the wealthiest prelates 101 105 The nobles of Turopolje in Slavonia were required to provide food and fodder to high ranking royal officials 106 Two privileged groups the Szekelys and Saxons firmly protected their communal liberties which prevented their leaders from exercising noble privileges in the Szekely and Saxon territories in Transylvania 107 Szekelys and Saxons could only enjoy the liberties of noblemen if they held estates outside the lands of the two privileged communities 107 Most noble families failed to adopt a strategy to avoid the division of their inherited estates into dwarf holdings through generations 108 Daughters could only demand the cash equivalent of the quarter of their father s estates 109 but younger sons rarely remained unmarried 108 Impoverished noblemen had little chance to receive land grants from the kings because they were unable to participate in the monarchs military campaigns 110 but commoners who bravely fought in the royal army were regularly ennobled 111 Self government and oligarchs Edit nbsp Leka Castle now Burg Lockenhaus in Austria built before 1300The historian Erik Fugedi noted that castle bred castle in the second half of the 13th century if a landowner erected a fortress his neighbors would also build one to defend their own estates 112 Between 1271 and 1320 noblemen or prelates built at least 155 new fortresses In comparison only about a dozen castles were erected on the royal demesne 113 Most castles consisted of a tower surrounded by a fortified courtyard but the tower could also be built into the walls 114 Noblemen who could not erect fortresses were occasionally forced to abandon their inherited estates or seek the protection of more powerful lords even through renouncing their liberties note 5 116 The lords of the castles had to hire a professional staff for the defence of the castle and the management of its appurtenances 117 They primarily employed nobles who held nearby estates which gave rise to the development of a new institution known as familiaritas 118 119 A familiaris was a nobleman who entered into the service of a wealthier landowner in exchange for a fixed salary or a portion of revenue or rarely for the ownership or usufruct right to enjoyment of a piece of land 119 Unlike a conditional noble a familiaris remained de jure an independent landholder only subject to the monarch 115 120 From the 1270s the monarchs coronation oath included a promise to respect the noblemen s liberties 121 The counties gradually transformed into an institution of the noblemen s local autonomy 122 Noblemen regularly discussed local matters at the counties general assemblies 123 124 The sedria the counties law courts became important elements in the administration of justice 89 They were headed by the ispans or their deputies but they consisted of four in Slavonia and Transylvania two elected local noblemen known as judges of the nobles 89 99 Hungary fell into a state of anarchy because of the minority of Ladislaus IV r 1272 1290 in the early 1270s To restore public order the prelates convoked the barons and the delegates of the noblemen and the nomadic Cumans who had settled in Hungary to a general assembly near Pest in 1277 This first Diet or parliament declared the fifteen year old monarch to be of age in an attempt to put en end to the anarchy 125 In the early 1280s Simon of Keza associated the Hungarian nation with the nobility in his Deeds of the Hungarians emphasizing that the community of noblemen held real authority 121 126 The barons took advantage of the weakening of royal authority and seized large contiguous territories 127 The monarchs could not appoint and dismiss their officials at will anymore 127 The most powerful barons known as oligarchs in modern historiography appropriated royal prerogatives combining private lordship with their administrative powers 128 When Andrew III r 1290 1301 the last male member of the Arpad dynasty died in 1301 about a dozen lords note 6 held sway over most parts of the kingdom 130 Age of the Angevins Edit nbsp Insignia of the Order of Saint George the first European chivalric orderLadislaus IV s great nephew Charles I r 1301 1342 who was a scion of the Capetian House of Anjou restored royal power in the 1310s and 1320s 131 He seized the oligarchs castles mainly by force which again secured the preponderance of the royal demesne 132 He refuted the Golden Bull in 1318 and claimed that noblemen had to fight in his army at their own expense 133 He ignored customary law and regularly promoted a daughter to a son granting her the right to inherit her father s estates 134 135 136 The King reorganized the royal household appointing pages and knights to form his permanent retinue 137 He established the Order of Saint George which was the first chivalric order in Europe 132 66 Charles I was the first Hungarian monarch to grant coats of arms or rather crests to his subjects 138 He based royal administration on honors or office fiefs distributing most counties and royal castles among his highest ranking officials 131 132 139 These baronies as the historian Matteo Villani d 1363 recorded it in about 1350 were neither hereditary nor lifelong but Charles rarely dismissed his most trusted barons 140 141 Each baron was required to hold his own banderium or armed retinue distinguished by his own banner 142 In 1351 Charles s son and successor Louis I r 1342 1382 confirmed all provisions of the Golden Bull save the one that authorized childless noblemen to freely will their estates 143 144 Instead he introduced an entail system prescribing that childless noblemen s landed property should descend to their brothers cousins and kinsmen 145 This new concept of aviticitas also protected the Crown s interests only kin within the third degree could inherit a nobleman s property and noblemen who had only more distant relatives could not dispose of their property without the king s consent 146 Louis I emphasized all noblemen enjoyed one and the selfsame liberty in his realms 143 and secured all privileges that nobles owned in Hungary proper to their Slavonian and Transylvanian peers 147 He rewarded dozens of Vlach knezes with true nobility for military merits 148 The vast majority of the Upper Hungarian noble sons of servants achieved the status of true noblemen without a formal royal act because the memory of their conditional landholding fell into oblivion 149 Most of them preferred Slavic names even in the 14th century showing that they spoke the local Slavic vernacular 150 Other groups of conditional nobles remained distinguished from true noblemen 151 They developed their own institutions of self government known as seats or districts 152 Louis decreed that only Catholic noblemen and knezes could hold landed property in the district of Karansebes now Caransebeș in Romania in 1366 but Eastern Orthodox landowners were not forced to convert to Catholicism in other territories of the kingdom 153 Even the Catholic bishop of Varad now Oradea in Romania authorized his Vlach voivodes leaders to employ Orthodox priests 154 The king granted the Transylvanian district of Fogaras around present day Făgăraș in Romania to Vladislav I of Wallachia r 1364 1377 in fief in 1366 155 In his new duchy Vladislaus I donated estates to Wallachian boyars their legal status was similar to the position of the knezes in other regions of Hungary 156 Royal charters customarily identified noblemen and landowners from the second half of the 14th century 157 A man who lived in his own house on his own estates was described as living in the way of nobles in contrast with those who did not own landed property and lived in the way of peasants 147 A verdict of 1346 declared that a noble woman who was given in marriage to a commoner should receive her inheritance in the form of an estate in order to preserve the nobility of the descendants born of the ignoble marriage 158 According to the local customs of certain counties her husband was also regarded as a nobleman a noble by his wife 159 The peasants legal position had been standardized in almost the entire kingdom by the 1350s 144 160 The free peasant tenants were to pay seigneurial taxes but were rarely obliged to provide labour service 144 In 1351 the king ordered that the ninth a tax payable to the landowners was to be collected from all tenants thus preventing landowners from offering lower taxes to persuade tenants to move from other lords lands to their estates 145 In 1328 all landowners were authorized to administer justice on their estates in all cases except cases of theft robbery assault or arson which remained under the jurisdiction of the sedria 161 The kings started to grant noblemen the right to execute or mutilate criminals who were captured in their estates 162 The most influential noblemen s estates were also exempted of the jurisdiction of the counties law courts 163 Emerging Estates Edit See also Ottoman Hungarian wars nbsp Galamboc Fortress now Golubac Fortress in Serbia granted to Stefan Lazarevic Despot of Serbia r 1389 1427 by King Sigismund r 1387 1437 Royal power quickly declined after Louis I died in 1382 164 His son in law Sigismund of Luxembourg r 1387 1437 entered into a formal league with the aristocrats who had elected him king in early 1387 165 Initially when his position was weak he gave away more than half of the 150 royal castles to his supporters although this abated when he strengthened his authority in the early 15th century 166 His favorites were foreigners note 7 but old Hungarian families note 8 also took advantage of his magnanimity 169 The wealthiest noblemen known as magnates built comfortable castles in the countryside which became important centers of social life 170 These fortified manor houses always contained a hall for representative purposes and a private chapel 171 Sigismund regularly invited the magnates to the royal council even if they did not hold higher offices 172 He founded a new chivalric order the Order of the Dragon in 1408 to reward his most loyal supporters 173 The expansion of the Ottoman Empire reached the southern frontiers in the 1390s 174 A large anti Ottoman crusade ended with a catastrophic defeat near Nicopolis in 1396 175 Next year Sigismund held a Diet in Temesvar now Timișoara in Romania to strengthen the defence system 175 176 He confirmed the Golden Bull but without the two provisions that limited the noblemen s military obligations and established their right to resist the monarchs 175 The Diet obliged all landowners to equip one archer for every 20 peasant plots on their domains to serve in the royal army 177 178 Sigismund granted large estates in Hungary to neighboring Orthodox rulers note 9 to secure their alliance 180 They established Basilite monasteries on their estates 181 Sigismund s son in law Albert of Habsburg r 1438 1439 was elected king in early 1438 but only after he promised always to make important decisions with the consent of the royal council 182 183 After he died in 1439 a civil war broke out between the partisans of his son Ladislaus the Posthumous r 1440 1457 and the supporters of the child king s rival Vladislaus III of Poland r 1440 1444 184 Ladislaus the Posthumous was crowned without election with the Holy Crown of Hungary but the Diet proclaimed the coronation invalid stating that the crowning of kings is always dependent on the will of the kingdom s inhabitants in whose consent both the effectiveness and the force of the crown reside 185 Vladislaus died fighting the Ottomans during the Crusade of Varna in 1444 and the Diet elected seven captains in chief to administer the kingdom The talented military commander John Hunyadi d 1456 was elected the sole regent in 1446 186 The Diet developed from a consultative body into an important institution of law making in the 1440s 186 The magnates were always invited to attend it in person 185 Lesser noblemen were also entitled to attend the Diet but in most cases they were represented by delegates who were almost always the magnates familiares 187 Birth of titled nobility and the Tripartitum Edit nbsp The Croatian version of the Tripartitum by Istvan Werboczy published in 1574 Hunyadi was the first noble to receive a hereditary title from a Hungarian king when Ladislaus the Posthumous granted him the Saxon district of Bistritz now Bistrița in Romania with the title perpetual count in 1453 188 189 Hunyadi s son Matthias Corvinus r 1458 1490 who was elected king in 1458 rewarded further noblemen with the same title 190 Fugedi states that 16 December 1487 was the birthday of the estate of magnates in Hungary 191 because an armistice signed on this day listed 23 Hungarian natural barons contrasting them with the high officers of state who were mentioned as barons of office 172 191 Corvinus successor Vladislaus II r 1490 1516 and Vladislaus son Louis II r 1516 1526 formally began to reward important persons of their government with the hereditary title of baron 192 Differences in the nobles wealth increased in the second half of the 15th century 193 About 30 families owned more than a quarter of the territory of the kingdom when Corvinus died in 1490 193 A further tenth of all lands in the kingdom was in the possession of about 55 wealthy noble families 193 Other nobles held almost one third of the lands but this group included 12 13 000 peasant nobles who owned a single plot or a part of it and had no tenants The Diets regularly compelled the peasant nobles to pay tax on their plots 194 Average magnates held about 50 villages but the regular division of inherited landed property could lead to the impoverishment of aristocratic families note 10 196 Strategies applied to avoid this family planning and celibacy led to the extinction of most aristocratic families after a few generations note 11 195 The Diet ordered the compilation of customary law in 1498 197 The jurist Istvan Werboczy d 1541 completed the task presenting a law book at the Diet in 1514 197 198 His Tripartitum The Customary Law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Parts was never enacted but it was consulted at the law courts for centuries 199 200 It summarized the noblemen s fundamental privileges in four points 201 noblemen were only subject to the monarch s authority and could only be arrested in a due legal process furthermore they were exempt from all taxes and were entitled to resist the king if he attempted to interfere with their privileges 202 Werboczy also implied that Hungary was actually a republic of nobles headed by a monarch stating that all noblemen are members of the Holy Crown 203 of Hungary 201 Quite anachronistically he emphasized the idea of all noblemen s legal equality but he had to admit that the high officers of the realm whom he mentioned as true barons were legally distinguished from other nobles 204 He also mentioned the existence of a distinct group who were barons in name only but without specifying their peculiar status 143 The Tripartitum regarded the kindred as the basic unit of nobility 205 A noble father exercised almost autocratic authority over his sons because he could imprison them or offer them as a hostage for himself His authority ended only if he divided his estates with his sons but the division could rarely be enforced 206 The betrayal of fraternal blood that is a kinsman s deceitful sly and fraudulent disinheritance 207 was a serious crime which was punished by loss of honor and the confiscation of all property 208 Although the Tripartitum did not explicitly mention it a nobleman s wife was also subject to his authority She received her dower from her husband at the consummation of their marriage 209 If her husband died she inherited his best coach horses and clothes 210 Demand for foodstuffs grew rapidly in Western Europe in the 1490s 211 The landowners wanted to take advantage of the growing prices 212 They demanded labour service from their peasant tenants and started to collect the seigneurial taxes in kind 213 The Diets passed decrees that restricted the peasants right to free movement and increased their burdens 211 The peasants grievances unexpectedly culminated in a rebellion in May 1514 211 214 The rebels captured manor houses and murdered dozens of noblemen especially on the Great Hungarian Plain 215 The voivode of Transylvania John Zapolya annihilated their main army at Temesvar on 15 July Gyorgy Dozsa and other leaders of the peasant war were tortured and executed but most rebels received a pardon 216 The Diet punished the peasantry as a group condemning them to perpetual servitude and depriving them of the right of free movement 216 217 The Diet also enacted the serfs obligation to provide one day s labour service for their lords each week 217 Early modern and modern times EditSee also Kingdom of Hungary Tripartite Hungary Edit Further information Kingdom of Hungary 1526 1867 Ottoman Hungary and Eastern Hungarian Kingdom The Ottomans annihilated the royal army at the Battle of Mohacs 218 Louis II died fleeing from the battlefield and two claimants John Zapolya r 1526 1540 and Ferdinand of Habsburg r 1526 1564 were elected kings 219 Ferdinand tried to reunite Hungary after Zapolya died in 1540 but the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent r 1520 1566 intervened and captured Buda in 1541 220 The sultan allowed Zapolya s widow Isabella Jagiellon d 1559 to rule the lands east of the river Tisza on behalf of her infant son John Sigismund r 1540 1571 in return for a yearly tribute 221 His decision divided Hungary into three parts the Ottomans occupied the central territories John Sigismund s eastern Hungarian Kingdom developed into the autonomous Principality of Transylvania and the Habsburg monarchs preserved the northern and western territories or Royal Hungary 222 Most noblemen fled from the central regions to the unoccupied territories 223 Peasants who lived along the borders paid taxes both to the Ottomans and their former lords 224 Commoners were regularly recruited to serve in the royal army or in the magnates retinues to replace the noblemen who had perished during fights 225 The irregular hajdu foot soldiers mainly runaway serfs and dispossessed noblemen became important elements of the defence forces 225 226 Stephen Bocskai Prince of Transylvania r 1605 1606 settled 10 000 hajdus in seven villages and exempted them from taxation in 1605 which was the largest collective ennoblement in the history of Hungary 227 228 In addition to the Szekely and Saxon leaders the noblemen formed one of the three nations or Estates of the realm in Transylvania but they could rarely challenge the princes authority 229 In Royal Hungary the magnates successfully protected the noble privileges because their vast domains were almost completely exempt from royal officials authority 230 Their manors were fortified in the Hungarian manner with walls made of earth and timber in the 1540s 231 Noblemen in Royal Hungary could also count on the support of the Transylvanian princes against the Habsburg monarchs 230 Intermarriages among Austrian Czech and Hungarian aristocrats note 12 gave rise to the development of a supranational aristocracy in the Habsburg monarchy 233 Foreign aristocrats regularly received Hungarian citizenship and Hungarian noblemen were often naturalized in the Habsburgs other realms note 13 235 The Habsburg kings rewarded the most powerful magnates with hereditary titles such as baron from the 1530s 192 The aristocrats supported the spread of the Reformation 236 Most noblemen adhered to Lutheranism in the western regions of Royal Hungary but Calvinism was the dominant religion in Transylvania and other regions 237 John Sigismund promoted Unitarian views 238 but most Unitarian noblemen perished in battles in the early 1600s 239 The Habsburgs remained staunch supporters of the Catholic Counter Reformation and the most prominent aristocratic families note 14 converted to Catholicism in Royal Hungary in the 1630s 240 241 The Calvinist princes of Transylvania supported their co religionists 240 Gabriel Bethlen granted nobility to all Calvinist pastors 242 The kings and the Transylvanian princes regularly ennobled commoners but often without granting landed property to them 243 Jurisprudence maintained that only those who owned land cultivated by serfs could be regarded as fully fledged noblemen 244 Armalists noblemen who held a charter of ennoblement but not a single plot of land and peasant nobles continued to pay taxes for which they were collectively known as taxed nobility 244 Nobility could be purchased from the kings who were often in need of funds Landowners also benefitted from the ennoblement of their serfs because they could demand a fee for their consent 245 The Diet was officially divided into two chambers in Royal Hungary in 1608 246 247 All adult male members of the titled noble families had a seat in the Upper House 247 The lesser noblemen elected two or three delegates at the general assemblies of the counties to represent them in the Lower House The Croatian and Slavonian magnates also had seats at the Upper House and the sabor or Diet of Croatia and Slavonia sent delegates to the Lower House 246 Liberation and war of independence Edit Further information Great Turkish War nbsp Countess Ilona Zrinyi d 1703 mother of Prince Francis II Rakoczi d 1735 Forces from the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683 248 The Ottomans were expelled from Buda in 1686 Michael I Apafi the prince of Transylvania r 1661 1690 acknowledged the suzerainty of Emperor Leopold I who was also king of Hungary r 1657 1705 in 1687 249 Grateful for the liberation of Buda the Diet abolished the noblemen s right to resist the monarch for the defense of their liberties 250 In 1688 the Diet authorized the aristocrats to establish a special trust known as fideicommissum with royal consent to prevent the distribution of their landed wealth among their descendants In accordance with the traditional concept of aviticitas inherited estates could not be subject to the trust Estates in fideicommissum were always held by one person but he was responsible for the proper boarding of his relatives 251 The liberation of central Hungary continued and the Ottomans were forced to acknowledge the loss of the territory in 1699 250 Leopold set up a special committee to distribute the lands in the reconquered territories 252 The descendants of the noblemen who had held estates there before the Ottoman conquest were required to provide documentary evidence to substantiate their claims to the ancestral lands 252 Even if they could present documents they were to pay a fee a tenth of the value of the claimed property as compensation for the costs of the liberation war 252 253 Few noblemen could meet the criteria and more than half of the recovered lands were distributed among foreigners 254 They were naturalized but most of them never visited Hungary 255 The Habsburg administration doubled the amount of the taxes to be collected in Hungary and demanded almost one third of the taxes 1 25 million florins from the clergy and the nobility The palatine Prince Paul Esterhazy d 1713 convinced the monarch to reduce the noblemen s tax burden to 0 25 million florins but the difference was to be paid by the peasantry 256 Leopold did not trust the Hungarians because a group of magnates had conspired against him in the 1670s 250 Mercenaries replaced the Hungarian garrisons and they frequently plundered the countryside 250 256 The monarch also supported Cardinal Leopold Karl von Kollonitsch s attempts to restrict the Protestants rights Tens of thousands of Catholic Germans and Orthodox Serbs were settled in the reconquered territories 253 The outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession 1701 1715 provided an opportunity for the discontented Hungarians to rise against Leopold They regarded one of the wealthiest aristocrats Prince Francis II Rakoczi d 1735 as their leader 256 Rakoczi s War of Independence lasted from 1703 to 1711 250 Although the rebels were forced to yield the Treaty of Szatmar granted a general amnesty for them and the new Habsburg monarch Charles III r 1711 1740 promised to respect the privileges of the Estates of the realm 257 Cooperation and absolutism Edit Further information Hungarian nationalism nbsp Eszterhaza a palace of the Esterhazys at FertodCharles III again confirmed the privileges of the Estates of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Parts Kingdoms and Provinces thereto annexed in 1723 in return for the enactment of the Pragmatic Sanction which established his daughters right to succeed him 258 259 Montesquieu who visited Hungary in 1728 regarded the relationship between the king and the Diet as a good example of the separation of powers 260 The magnates almost monopolized the highest offices but both the Hungarian Court Chancellery the supreme body of royal administration and the Lieutenancy Council the most important administrative office also employed lesser noblemen 261 In practice Protestants were excluded from public offices after a royal decree the Carolina Resolutio obliged all candidates to take an oath on the Virgin Mary 262 The Peace of Szatmar and the Pragmatic Sanction maintained that the Hungarian nation consisted of the privileged groups independent of their ethnicity 263 but the first debates along ethnic lines occurred in the early 18th century 264 The jurist Mihaly Bencsik claimed that the burghers of Trencsen now Trencin in Slovakia should not send delegates to the Diet because their ancestors had been forced to yield to the conquering Magyars in the 890s 265 A priest Jan B Magin wrote a response arguing that ethnic Slovaks and Hungarians enjoyed the same rights 266 In Transylvania a bishop of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church Baron Inocențiu Micu Klein d 1768 tried to speak on behalf of the whole Romanian nation in Transylvania at the Diet in 1737 but he could not finish the speech because other delegates stated that he could refer only to the Romanians or to the Romanian people for the Romanian Nation did not exist Five years later he unsuccessfully demanded the recognition of the Romanians as the fourth Nation on ethnic grounds 267 Maria Theresa r 1740 1780 succeeded Charles III in 1740 which gave rise to the War of the Austrian Succession 268 The noble delegates offered their lives and blood for their new king and the declaration of the general levy of the nobility was crucial at the beginning of the war 258 Grateful for their support Maria Theresa strengthened the links between the Hungarian nobility and the monarch 269 270 She established the Theresian Academy and the Royal Hungarian Bodyguard for young Hungarian noblemen 271 Both institutions enabled the spread of the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment note 15 272 273 Freemasonry became popular especially among the magnates but masonic lodges were also open to untitled noblemen and professionals 273 nbsp Tivadar Kubinyi d 1880 a member of the Royal Hungarian BodyguardCultural differences between the magnates and lesser noblemen grew The magnates adopted the lifestyle of the imperial aristocracy moving between their summer palaces in Vienna and their newly built splendid residences in Hungary 274 Prince Miklos Esterhazy d 1790 employed the celebrated composer Joseph Haydn Count Janos Fekete d 1803 a fierce protector of noble privileges bombarded the French philosopher Voltaire with letters and dilettante poems 275 Count Miklos Palffy d 1773 proposed to tax the nobles to finance a standing army 276 Most noblemen were unwilling to renounce their privileges 277 Lesser noblemen also insisted on their traditional way of life and lived in simple houses made of timber or packed clay 278 Maria Theresa did not hold Diets after 1764 276 She regulated the relationship of landowners and their serfs in a royal decree in 1767 279 Her son and successor Joseph II r 1780 1790 mocked as the king in hat was never crowned because he wanted to avoid the coronation oath 280 He introduced reforms which clearly contradicted local customs 281 He replaced the counties with districts and appointed royal officials to administer them He also abolished serfdom securing all peasants the right to free movement after the revolt of Romanian serfs in Transylvania 282 He ordered the first census in Hungary in 1784 283 According to its records the nobility made up about 4 5 percent of the male population in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown with 155 519 noblemen in Hungary proper and 42 098 noblemen in Transylvania Croatia and Slavonia 284 285 The nobles proportion was significantly higher six sixteen percent in the northeastern and eastern counties and less three percent in Croatia and Slavonia 284 Poor noblemen who were mocked as nobles of the seven plum trees or sandal wearing nobles made up almost 90 percent of the nobility 286 Previous investigations of nobility show that more than half of the noble families received their rank after 1550 245 National awakening Edit nbsp Countess Claudine Rhedey d 1841 an ancestress of the British royal family through the marriage of her granddaughter Mary of Teck d 1953 to King George V r 1910 1936 The few reformist noblemen greeted the news of the French Revolution with enthusiasm Jozsef Hajnoczy eo d 1795 translated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen into Latin and Janos Laczkovics hu d 1795 published its Hungarian translation 287 To appease the Hungarian nobility Joseph II revoked almost all his reforms on his deathbed in 1790 288 His successor Leopold II r 1790 1792 convoked the Diet and confirmed the liberties of the Estates of the realm emphasizing Hungary was a free and independent realm governed by its own laws 282 289 News about the Jacobin terror in France strengthened royal power 290 Hajnoczy and other radical or Jacobin noblemen who had discussed the possibility of the abolition of all privileges in secret societies were captured and executed or imprisoned in 1795 291 The Diets voted in favor of the taxes and the recruits that Leopold s successor Francis r 1792 1835 demanded between 1792 and 1811 292 The last general levy of the nobility was declared in 1809 but Napoleon easily defeated the noble troops near Gyor 292 Agricultural bloom encouraged the landowners to borrow money and to buy new estates or to establish mills during the war but most of them went bankrupt after peace was restored in 1814 293 The concept of aviticitas prevented both the creditors from collecting their money and the debtors from selling their estates 294 Radical nobles played a crucial role in the reform movements of the early 19th century 295 Gergely Berzeviczy d 1822 attributed the backwardness of the local economy to the peasants serfdom already around 1800 296 Ferenc Kazinczy d 1831 and Janos Batsanyi d 1845 initiated language reform fearing the disappearance of the Hungarian language 295 The poet Sandor Petofi d 1849 who was a commoner ridiculed the conservative noblemen in his poem The Magyar Noble contrasting their anachronistic pride and their idle way of life 297 From the 1820s a new generation of reformist noblemen dominated political life 298 Count Istvan Szechenyi d 1860 demanded the abolition of the serfs labour service and the entail system stating that We well to do landowners are the main obstacles to the progress and greater development of our fatherland 299 He established clubs in Pressburg and Pest and promoted horse racing because he wanted to encourage the regular meetings of magnates lesser noblemen and burghers 300 Szechenyi s friend Baron Miklos Wesselenyi d 1850 demanded the creation of a constitutional monarchy and the protection of civil rights 301 A lesser nobleman Lajos Kossuth d 1894 became the leader of the most radical politicians in the 1840s 300 He declared that the Diets and the counties were the privileged groups institutions and that only a wider social movement could secure the development of Hungary 302 Since the end of the Age of Enlightenment nationality was more and more associated with the vernacular Predictions by the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder d 1803 about the inevitable assimilation of small peoples to a large linguistic group fanned the flames of linguistic nationalism 303 Although ethnic Hungarians made up only about 38 percent of the population 304 the official use of the Hungarian language spread from the late 18th century 305 Kossuth declared that all who wanted to enjoy the liberties of the nation should learn Hungarian 306 In contrast the Slovak Ľudovit Stur d 1856 stated that the Hungarian nation consisted of many nationalities and their loyalty could be strengthened by the official use of their languages 307 Count Janko Draskovic d 1856 recommended that Croatian should replace Latin as the official language in Croatia and Slavonia 308 Revolution and neo absolutism Edit See also Hungarian Revolution of 1848 nbsp Count Lajos Batthyany d 1849 the first Prime Minister of Hungary in 1848News of the Revolutions of 1848 reached Pest on 15 March 1848 309 Young intellectuals proclaimed a radical program known as the Twelve Points demanding equal civil rights to all citizens 310 Count Lajos Batthyany d 1849 was appointed the first prime minister of Hungary 311 The Diet quickly enacted the majority of the Twelve Points and Ferdinand V r 1835 1848 sanctioned them in April 309 The April Laws abolished the nobles tax exemption and the aviticitas 312 but the magnates 31 fideicommissa remained intact 313 Although the peasant tenants received the ownership of their plots a compensation was promised to the landowners 312 314 Adult men who owned more than 0 032 km2 7 9 acres of arable lands or urban estates with a value of at least 300 florins about one quarter of the adult male population were granted the right to vote in the parliamentary elections 312 The noblemen s exclusive franchise in county elections was confirmed otherwise ethnic minorities could have easily dominated the general assemblies in many counties 312 Noblemen made up about one quarter of the members of the new parliament which assembled after the general elections on 5 July 315 The Slovak delegates demanded autonomy for all ethnic minorities at their assembly in May 316 317 Similar demands were adopted at the Romanian delegates meeting 318 319 Ferdinand V s advisors persuaded the ban or governor of Croatia Baron Josip Jelacic d 1859 to invade Hungary proper in September 320 321 A new war of independence broke out and the Hungarian parliament dethroned the Habsburg dynasty on 14 April 1849 322 Nicholas I of Russia r 1825 1855 intervened on the legitimist side and Russian troops overpowered the Hungarian army forcing it to surrender on 13 August 322 323 Hungary Croatia and Slavonia and Transylvania were incorporated as separate realms in the Austrian Empire 324 The advisors of the young emperor Franz Joseph r 1848 1916 declared that Hungary had lost its historic rights and the conservative Hungarian aristocrats note 16 could not persuade him to restore the old constitution 325 Noblemen who had remained loyal to the Habsburgs were appointed to high offices note 17 but most new officials came from other provinces of the empire 326 327 The vast majority of noblemen opted for a passive resistance they did not hold offices in state administration and tacitly obstructed the implementation of imperial decrees 328 329 An untitled nobleman from Zala County Ferenc Deak d 1876 became their leader around 1854 325 329 They tried to preserve an air of superiority but their vast majority was assimilated to the local peasantry or petty bourgeoisie during the following decades 330 In contrast to them the magnates who retained about one quarter of all lands could easily raise funds from the developing banking sector to modernize their estates 330 Austria Hungary Edit See also Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen nbsp Coronation of Franz Joseph I as king of Hungary after the Austro Hungarian Compromise of 1867Deak and his followers knew the great powers did not support the disintegration of the Austrian Empire 331 Austria s defeat in the Austro Prussian War of 1866 accelerated the rapprochement between the king and the Deak Party which led to the Austro Hungarian Compromise of 1867 332 Hungary proper and Transylvania were united 333 and the autonomy of Hungary was restored within the Dual Monarchy of Austria Hungary 334 Next year the Croatian Hungarian Settlement restored the union of Hungary proper and Croatia but secured the competence of the Croatian sabor in internal affairs education and justice 335 The Compromise strengthened the position of the traditional political elite 336 Only about six percent of the population could vote in the general elections 336 More than half of the prime ministers and one third of the ministers were appointed from among the magnates from 1867 to 1918 337 Landowners made up the majority of the members of parliament 336 Half of the seats in municipal assemblies were preserved for the greatest taxpayers 338 Noblemen also dominated the state administration because tens of thousands of impoverished nobles took jobs at the ministries or at the state owned railways and post offices 339 340 They were ardent supporters of Magyarization denying the use of minority languages 341 An emigrant aristocrat Baroness Emma Orczy d 1947 wrote her novels in English in the United Kingdom She had left Hungary with her parents when farm workers fearing of losing their job set the Orczy manor on fire at Abadszalok in 1868 Her first novel featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel the first character who could be called a superhero Stan Lee was published in 1905 342 Only nobleman who owned an estate of at least 1 15 km2 280 acres were regarded as prosperous but the number of estates of that size quickly decreased note 18 340 The magnates took advantage of lesser noblemen s bankruptcies and bought new estates during the same period 343 New fideicommissa were created which enabled the magnates to preserve the entailment of their landed wealth 343 Aristocrats were regularly appointed to the boards of directors of banks and companies note 19 344 Jews were the prime movers of the development of the financial and industrial sectors 345 Jewish businessmen owned more than half of the companies and more than four fifths of the banks in 1910 345 They also bought landed property and had acquired almost one fifth of the estates of between 1 15 5 75 km2 280 1 420 acres by 1913 345 The most prominent Jewish burghers were awarded with nobility note 20 and there were 26 aristocratic families and 320 noble families of Jewish origin in 1918 347 Many of them converted to Christianity but other nobles did not regard them as their peers 297 Revolutions and counter revolution Edit See also Revolutions and interventions in Hungary 1918 1920 and Kingdom of Hungary 1920 1946 The First World War brought about the dissolution of Austria Hungary in 1918 348 The Aster Revolution a movement of the left liberal Party of Independence the Social Democratic Party and the Radical Citizens Party persuaded Charles IV r 1916 1918 to appoint the radical Count Mihaly Karolyi d 1955 prime minister on 31 October 349 350 After the Lower House dissolved itself Hungary was proclaimed a republic on 16 November 351 The Hungarian National Council adopted a land reform setting the maximum size of the estates at 1 15 square kilometres 280 acres and ordering the distribution of any excess among the local peasantry 352 Karolyi whose inherited domains had been mortgaged to banks was the first to implement the reform 352 The Allied Powers authorized Romania to occupy new territories and ordered the withdrawal of the Royal Hungarian Army almost as far as the Tisza on 26 February 1919 353 354 Karolyi resigned and the Hungarian Communist Party leader Bela Kun d 1938 announced the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 21 March 355 All estates of over 0 43 km2 110 acres and all private companies employing more than 20 workers were nationalized 356 The Bolsheviks could not stop the Romanian invasion and their leaders fled from Hungary on 1 August 357 After a short lived temporary government the industrialist Istvan Friedrich d 1951 formed a coalition government with the support of the Allied Powers on 6 August 358 The Bolsheviks nationalization program was abolished 358 The Hungarian Social Democratic Party boycotted the general elections in early 1920 358 The new one chamber Diet of Hungary restored the Hungarian monarchy but without restoring the Habsburgs 358 Instead a Calvinist nobleman Miklos Horthy d 1957 was elected regent on 1 March 1920 359 360 Hungary had to acknowledge the loss of more than two thirds of its territory and more than 60 percent of its population including one third of the ethnic Hungarians in the Treaty of Trianon on 4 June 358 Horthy was never crowned king and therefore could not grant nobility but he established a new order of merit the Order of Gallantry 361 Its members received the hereditary title of vitez brave 361 They were also granted parcels of land which renewed the medieval link between land tenure and service to the crown Bryan Cartledge 361 Two Transylvanian aristocrats Counts Pal Teleki d 1941 and Istvan Bethlen d 1946 were the most influential politicians in the interwar period 362 The events of 1918 19 convinced them that only a conservative democracy dominated by the landed nobility could secure stability 363 Most ministers and the majority of the members of the parliament were nobles 364 A conservative agrarian reform limited to 8 5 percent of all arable lands was introduced but almost one third of the lands remained in the possession of about 400 magnate families 365 The two chamber parliament was restored in 1926 with an Upper House dominated by the aristocrats prelates and high ranking officials 366 367 Antisemitism was a leading ideology in the 1920s and 1930s 368 A numerus clausus law limited the admission of Jewish students in the universities 369 370 Count Fidel Palffy d 1946 was one of the leading figures of the national socialist movements but most aristocrats disdained the radicalism of petty officers and housekeepers 371 Hungary participated in the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and joined the war against the Soviet Union after the bombing of Kassa in late June 372 Fearing the defection of Hungary from the war Nazi Germany occupied the country in Operation Margarethe on 19 March 1944 373 Hundreds of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Romani were transferred to Nazi concentration camps with the local authorities assistance 374 375 The wealthiest business magnates of Jewish origin were forced to renounce their companies and banks to redeem their own and their relatives lives note 21 374 The fall of the Hungarian nobility Edit See also Second Hungarian Republic and Soviet occupation of Hungary nbsp Bernstein Castle Borostyanko vara in Austria still held by the Almasy familyThe Soviet Red Army reached the Hungarian borders and took possession of the Great Hungarian Plain by 6 December 1944 376 Delegates from the region s towns and villages established the Provisional National Assembly in Debrecen which elected a new government on 22 December 376 377 Three prominent Anti Nazi aristocrats note 22 had a seat in the assembly 378 The Provisional National Government soon promised land reform along with the abolishment of all anti democratic laws 379 The last German Wehrmacht troops left Hungary on 4 April 1945 380 Imre Nagy d 1958 the Communist Minister of Agriculture announced land reform on 17 March 1945 381 All domains of more than 5 75 km2 1 420 acres were confiscated and the owners of smaller estates could retain a maximum 0 58 1 73 km2 140 430 acres of land 381 382 The land reform as Cartledge noted destroyed the nobility and eliminated the elements of feudalism which had persisted for longer in Hungary than anywhere else in Europe 381 Similar land reforms were introduced in Romania and Czechoslovakia 383 In both countries ethnic Hungarian aristocrats were sentenced to death or prison as alleged war criminals note 23 383 Hungarian aristocrats note 24 could retain their estates only in Burgenland in Austria after 1945 384 Soviet military authorities controlled the general elections and the formation of a coalition government in late 1945 385 The new parliament declared the Second Hungarian Republic on 1 February 1946 386 An opinion poll showed that more than 75 percent of men and 66 percent of women were opposed to the use of noble titles in 1946 387 The parliament adopted an act that abolished all noble ranks and related styles also banning their use 388 The new act came into force on 14 February 1947 389 Unofficial nobility EditSee also Hungarian People s Republic and Goulash Communism nbsp Ruined aristocratic mansion at LovasberenyThe Communists took full control of the government between 1947 and 1949 and Hungary was proclaimed a people s republic on 20 August 1949 390 The aristocrats were declared as class enemies and most of them interned to social camps actually forced labour camps to work in the fields in the Great Hungarian Plain 391 Mass internal deportations occurred in 1950 and 1951 Almost all aristocrats were interned from Budapest to under populated villages in eastern Hungary primarily in Hortobagy region within two months in May July 1951 Figures of a final report shows that 9 dukes 163 counts 121 barons and 8 knighted noblemen altogether 301 aristocrats and their families were deported from the capital during this period The deportees were prohibited to leave the boundary of their assigned village and were under constant police surveillance They were deprived of their belongings properties and civil rights they were prohibited to take part in elections Most of them could work as manual workers in agriculture at state farms on a limited basis but their deprivation was constant 392 Some leftist aristocrats tried to cooperate with the new regime but the Communist leaders did not trust them note 25 393 As a consequence of the Khrushchev Thaw those who had been interned were allowed to leave the labour camps but their former homes were not restored to them 394 Although Communist historians did their utmost to prove the aristocrats preeminent role during the failed anti Communist Hungarian revolution of 1956 few aristocrats took an active part note 26 396 Many aristocrats left the country following the suppression of the 1956 revolt 397 During the 1960s and 1970s people of aristocratic descent were mainly employed as blue collar workers 391 and their children needed a special permit for studying at universities until 1962 398 399 Although official discrimination was abolished former aristocrats were rarely appointed to higher positions note 27 400 Peter Esterhazy d 2016 became a celebrated writer during the last decades of the Communist regime 401 The Communist one party system collapsed in the late 1980s and Hungary was proclaimed a republic in 1989 402 The first prime minister of the democratic era Jozsef Antall d 1993 offered positions in state administration to aristocrats who returned to Hungary but the aristocracy did not regain its former position 399 The restitution of former property was an important political issue in most new democracies in the early 1990s In Hungary in kind restitution was excluded because many pieces of formerly confiscated property had already been privatized during the last years of the Communist regime Instead monetary compensation was made available to the original owners and their descendants but its amount was limited to about US 70 000 In contrast in kind restitution was the preferred method of restitution in Czechoslovakia and the original owners could also claim in kind restitution in Romania and Poland 403 Hungarian aristocrats regained part of their former properties in Romania and at least one Hungarian noble family also seized property in the Czech Republic Poland and Slovakia during the restitution process note 28 404 The Hungarian act banning the use of noble ranks and styles has not been abolished and the Constitutional Court of Hungary declared in 2009 and 2010 that the ban was fully in line with the revised Hungarian Constitution of 1949 In December 2010 two members of the rightist Jobbik Group submitted a draft for the abolition of the ban but they withdrew it in two weeks 405 On the initiative of the former aristocrat Janos Nyary a private club the Association of Hungarian Noble Families was established for people of noble descent in Budapest in 1994 The association became a member of the European Commission of the Nobility in 2007 406 See also EditList of titled noble families in the Kingdom of HungaryNotes Edit Historian Jan Lukacka lists the Hont Pazmany Miskolc and Bogat Radvany clans among the noble kindred of Moravian descent 7 Among them the Bar Kalan Csak Kan Lad and Szemere clans regarded themselves as descendants of one of the legendary seven leaders of the conquering Magyars 26 Andronicus Aba built a stone castle at Fuzer and the stone castle at Kabold now Kobersdorf in Austria was erected by Pousa Szak 73 For instance the families from the Aba clan had an eagle on their coat of arms and the Csaks adopted the lion 43 According to a 15th century land register many ecclesiastic nobles in the Bishopric of Veszprem were descended from true noblemen who had sought the bishops protection 115 The most powerful oligarch Matthew Csak dominated more than a dozen counties in northwestern Hungary Ladislaus Kan was the actual ruler of Translyvania and Paul Subic ruled Croatia and Dalmatia 129 The Styrian Hermann of Celje d 1435 became the greatest landowner in Slavonia the Pole Stibor of Stiboricz d 1414 held nine castles and 140 villages in northeastern Hungary and Frederick of Hohenzollern d 1440 was appointed to administer counties 167 The Bathory Perenyi and Rozgonyi families were among the native beneficiaries of Sigismund s grants 168 Mircea I of Wallachia r 1386 1418 was awarded with Fogaras Stefan Lazarevic Despot of Serbia r 1389 1427 received more than a dozen of castles 179 For instance Stephen Banffy of Losonc d 1459 held 68 villages in 1459 but the same villages were divided among his 14 descendants in 1526 195 From among the 36 wealthiest families of the late 1430s 27 families survived until 1490 and only eight families until 1570 195 The marriages of the children and grandchildren of Magdolna Szekely d 1556 by her three husbands established close family links between the Hungarian Szechy and Thurzo the Croatian Hungarian Zrinski the Czech Kolowrat Lobkowicz Pernstejn and Rozmberk and the Austrian or German Arco Salm and Ungnad families 232 The Tyrolian Count Pyrcho von Arco who married the Hungarian Margit Szechy was naturalized in Hungary in 1559 the Hungarian Baron Simon Forgach who married the Austrian Ursula Pemfflinger received citizenship in Lower Austria in 1568 and in Moravia in 1581 234 The Batthyany Illeshazy Nadasdy and Thurzo families were the first converts to Catholicism 240 The former royal bodyguard Gyorgy Bessenyei d 1811 wrote pamphlets about the importance of education and the cultivation of the Hungarian language in the 1770s 272 Counts Emil Dessewffy d 1866 Antal Szecsen d 1896 and Gyorgy Apponyi d 1899 were the leading conservative aristocrats 325 Count Ferenc Zichy d 1900 had a seat in the Imperial Council Count Ferenc Nadasdy was made the Imperial Minister of Justice 325 The number of estates of between 1 15 5 75 km2 280 1 420 acres decreased from 20 000 to 10 000 from 1867 to 1900 340 In 1905 88 counts and 66 barons had a seat in boards of directors 344 Henrik Levay d 1901 who established the first Hungarian insurance company was ennobled in 1868 and received the title baron in 1897 Zsigmond Kornfeld d 1909 who was the Hungarian financial and industrial giant of the age was created baron 346 The Chorins Weisses and Kornfelds granted twenty five year leases to the German authorities on their properties in return for a free pass to Portugal 374 Counts Gyula Dessewffy d 2000 Mihaly Karolyi and Geza Teleki d 1983 378 Baron Zsigmond Kemeny was imprisoned for initiating the execution of 191 Jews in Romania although he had actually brought food to them 383 The Batthyany Batthyany Strattman Erdody Esterhazy and Zichy families 384 Known as the Red Duchess Margit Odescalchi d 1982 completed the school of the Hungarian Communist Party but she was called back from the Hungarian Embassy in Washington Born into the Pallavicini family Antal Palinkas d 1957 was sentenced to death on trumped up charges and executed although he had served as a high ranking officer in the Communist army 393 Karoly Khuen Hedervary d 1960 initiated the re organization of the Catholic People s Party Maximilian Konigsegg Rottenfels d 1997 was elected a member of a council of workers at a repair shop by his co workers In Romania at least five former aristocrats were sentenced to prison for conspiracy against the state in connection with demonstrations organized to express sympathy for the Hungarian revolution 395 The conductor Miklos Lukacs d 1980 was appointed the director of the Hungarian State Opera House and Janos Meran became the head of an industrial cooperative at Korosladany 400 Examples include Farkas Banffy who regained the Banffys former castle at Fugad Ciuguzel Romania and Tibor Kalnoky who seized his ancestors castles at Miklosvar and Sepsikorospatak Micloșoara and Valea Crișului Romania The Kalnokys also regained formerly confiscated property in the Czech Republic Poland and Slovakia 404 References Edit Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 71 73 Engel 2001 pp 8 17 Zimonyi 2016 pp 160 306 308 359 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 76 77 Engel 2001 pp 12 13 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 76 78 Lukacka 2011 pp 33 36 Lukacka 2011 pp 31 33 36 Georgescu 1991 p 40 Pop 2013 p 40 Wolf 2003 p 329 Engel 2001 pp 117 118 Engel 2001 pp 8 20 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 105 Engel 2001 p 20 Constantine Porphyrogenitus De Administrando Imperio ch 39 p 175 Bak 1993 p 273 Wolf 2003 pp 326 327 a b Wolf 2003 p 327 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 107 Engel 2001 p 16 Engel 2001 p 17 a b Revesz 2003 p 341 Rady 2000 p 12 Rady 2000 pp 12 13 a b Engel 2001 p 85 Rady 2000 pp 12 13 185 notes 7 8 Cartledge 2011 p 11 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 148 150 Wolf 2003 p 330 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 149 207 208 Engel 2001 p 73 Rady 2000 pp 18 19 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 149 210 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 193 Rady 2000 pp 16 17 a b Engel 2001 p 40 a b c Rady 2000 p 28 Engel 2001 pp 85 86 Rady 2000 pp 28 29 a b c d e Rady 2000 p 29 Fugedi amp Bak 2012 p 324 a b Engel 2001 p 86 Fugedi amp Bak 2012 p 326 Curta 2006 p 267 Engel 2001 p 33 Magas 2007 p 48 a b Curta 2006 p 266 Magas 2007 p 51 Engel 2001 pp 76 77 a b Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 298 Rady 2000 pp 25 26 a b Engel 2001 p 87 a b Engel 2001 p 80 a b c Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 299 Wolf 2003 p 331 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 297 Engel 2001 p 81 Engel 2001 pp 81 87 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 201 Engel 2001 pp 71 72 Curta 2006 p 401 Engel 2001 pp 73 74 a b Rady 2000 pp 128 129 Fugedi amp Bak 2012 p 328 a b Rady 2000 p 129 a b Rady 2000 p 31 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 286 Cartledge 2011 p 20 Engel 2001 p 93 a b Engel 2001 p 92 a b Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 426 427 a b Fugedi 1986a p 48 Rady 2000 p 23 Engel 2001 pp 86 87 Anonymus Notary of King Bela The Deeds of the Hungarians ch 6 p 19 Rady 2000 p 35 Rady 2000 p 36 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 426 Fugedi 1998 p 35 a b Engel 2001 p 94 a b Cartledge 2011 p 21 Engel 2001 p 95 Rady 2000 pp 40 103 Engel 2001 p 177 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 429 Engel 2001 p 96 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 431 a b c d Rady 2000 p 41 Kontler 1999 pp 78 80 Engel 2001 pp 103 105 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 430 Fugedi 1986a p 51 Fugedi 1986a pp 52 56 Fugedi 1986a p 56 Fugedi 1986a p 60 Fugedi 1986a pp 65 73 74 Fugedi 1986a p 74 a b c Engel 2001 p 120 a b Rady 2000 p 86 a b Engel 2001 p 84 Rady 2000 p 79 Rady 2000 p 91 Engel 2001 pp 104 105 Rady 2000 p 83 Rady 2000 p 81 a b Makkai 1994 pp 208 209 a b Rady 2000 p 46 Fugedi 1998 p 28 Rady 2000 p 48 Fugedi 1998 pp 41 42 Fugedi 1986a pp 72 73 Fugedi 1986a pp 54 82 Fugedi 1986a p 87 a b Rady 2000 p 112 Rady 2000 pp 112 113 200 Fugedi 1986a pp 77 78 Fugedi 1986a p 78 a b Rady 2000 p 110 Kontler 1999 p 76 a b Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 432 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 pp 431 432 Rady 2000 p 42 Berend Urbanczyk amp Wiszewski 2013 p 273 Engel 2001 p 108 Engel 2001 p 122 a b Engel 2001 p 124 Engel 2001 p 125 Engel 2001 p 126 Engel 2001 pp 126 127 a b Cartledge 2011 p 34 a b c Kontler 1999 p 89 Engel 2001 pp 141 142 Fugedi 1998 p 52 Rady 2000 p 108 Engel 2001 pp 178 179 Engel 2001 p 146 Engel 2001 p 147 Engel 2001 p 151 Rady 2000 p 137 Engel 2001 pp 151 153 342 Rady 2000 pp 146 147 a b c Fugedi 1998 p 34 a b c Kontler 1999 p 97 a b Cartledge 2011 p 40 Engel 2001 p 178 a b Engel 2001 p 175 Pop 2013 pp 198 212 Rady 2000 p 89 Lukacka 2011 p 37 Rady 2000 pp 84 89 93 Rady 2000 pp 89 93 Pop 2013 pp 470 471 475 Pop 2013 pp 256 257 Engel 2001 p 165 Makkai 1994 pp 191 192 230 Rady 2000 pp 59 60 Fugedi 1998 p 45 Fugedi 1998 p 47 Engel 2001 pp 174 175 Rady 2000 p 57 Engel 2001 p 180 Engel 2001 pp 179 180 Cartledge 2011 p 42 Engel 2001 p 199 Kontler 1999 pp 102 104 105 Engel 2001 pp 201 204 212 Engel 2001 p 213 Engel 2001 pp 204 205 211 213 Engel 2001 pp 343 344 Fugedi 1986a p 143 a b Engel 2001 p 342 Fugedi 1986a p 123 Cartledge 2011 p 44 a b c Kontler 1999 p 103 Engel 2001 p 205 Kontler 1999 p 104 Rady 2000 p 150 Engel 2001 pp 232 233 Engel 2001 pp 232 233 337 Engel 2001 pp 337 338 Engel 2001 p 279 Kontler 1999 p 112 Kontler 1999 p 113 a b Engel 2001 p 281 a b Cartledge 2011 p 57 Kontler 1999 p 116 Kontler 1999 p 117 Engel 2001 pp 288 293 Engel 2001 p 311 a b Fugedi 1986b p IV 14 a b Palffy 2009 pp 109 110 a b c Engel 2001 p 338 Engel 2001 p 339 a b c Engel 2001 p 341 Engel 2001 pp 338 340 341 a b Kontler 1999 p 134 Engel 2001 pp 349 350 Engel 2001 p 350 Kontler 1999 p 135 a b Engel 2001 p 351 Cartledge 2011 p 70 The Customary Law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Parts 1517 1 4 p 53 Fugedi 1998 pp 32 34 Fugedi 1998 p 20 Fugedi 1998 pp 21 22 The Customary Law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Parts 1517 1 39 p 105 Fugedi 1998 p 26 Fugedi 1998 p 24 Fugedi 1998 p 25 a b c Cartledge 2011 p 71 Kontler 1999 p 129 Engel 2001 p 357 Engel 2001 p 362 Engel 2001 p 363 a b Engel 2001 p 364 a b Cartledge 2011 p 72 Engel 2001 p 370 Kontler 1999 p 139 Szakaly 1994 p 85 Cartledge 2011 p 83 Cartledge 2011 pp 83 94 Szakaly 1994 p 88 Szakaly 1994 pp 88 89 a b Szakaly 1994 p 92 Schimert 1995 p 161 Palffy 2009 p 231 Schimert 1995 p 162 Cartledge 2011 p 91 a b Kontler 1999 p 167 Szakaly 1994 p 89 Palffy 2009 pp 86 87 366 Palffy 2009 pp 72 86 88 Palffy 2009 pp 85 366 Palffy 2009 pp 86 88 366 Kontler 1999 p 151 Murdock 2000 p 12 Kontler 1999 p 152 Murdock 2000 p 20 a b c Murdock 2000 p 34 Kontler 1999 p 156 Schimert 1995 p 166 Schimert 1995 p 158 a b Rady 2000 p 155 a b Schimert 1995 p 167 a b Palffy 2009 p 178 a b Cartledge 2011 p 95 Cartledge 2011 p 113 Kontler 1999 p 183 a b c d e Kontler 1999 p 184 A Varga 1989 p 188 a b c Kontler 1999 p 185 a b Cartledge 2011 p 115 Schimert 1995 p 170 Schimert 1995 pp 170 171 a b c Cartledge 2011 p 116 Cartledge 2011 p 123 a b Cartledge 2011 p 127 Magas 2007 pp 187 188 Vermes 2014 p 135 Schimert 1995 pp 127 152 154 Kontler 1999 pp 196 197 Nakazawa 2007 p 2007 Kovac 2011 p 121 Kovac 2011 pp 121 122 Kovac 2011 p 122 Prodan 1971 pp 143 155 Kontler 1999 p 197 Cartledge 2011 p 130 Vermes 2014 p 33 Vermes 2014 pp 33 61 a b Schimert 1995 p 176 a b Cartledge 2011 p 151 Schimert 1995 p 174 Vermes 2014 pp 94 136 a b Kontler 1999 p 206 Kontler 1999 p 218 Schimert 1995 pp 175 176 Kontler 1999 p 210 Cartledge 2011 p 139 Cartledge 2011 p 140 a b Kontler 1999 p 217 Schimert 1995 p 148 a b Schimert 1995 p 149 Vermes 2014 p 31 Vermes 2014 p 32 Kontler 1999 p 220 Cartledge 2011 p 143 Cartledge 2011 pp 144 145 Kontler 1999 p 221 Kontler 1999 pp 221 222 a b Kontler 1999 p 223 Cartledge 2011 p 159 Cartledge 2011 pp 159 160 a b Kontler 1999 p 226 Kontler 1999 p 228 a b Patai 2015 p 373 Cartledge 2011 p 162 Cartledge 2011 p 164 a b Cartledge 2011 pp 166 167 Kontler 1999 p 235 Cartledge 2011 p 168 Cartledge 2011 p 153 Kontler 1999 p 242 Cartledge 2011 p 179 Kontler 1999 p 179 Nakazawa 2007 p 160 Magas 2007 p 202 a b Kontler 1999 p 247 Cartledge 2011 p 191 Cartledge 2011 p 194 a b c d Cartledge 2011 p 196 A Varga 1989 p 189 Kontler 1999 p 248 Kontler 1999 p 251 Nakazawa 2007 p 163 Kovac 2011 p 126 Georgescu 1991 p 155 Kontler 1999 p 250 Magas 2007 p 230 Kontler 1999 p 253 a b Kontler 1999 p 257 Cartledge 2011 p 217 Cartledge 2011 p 219 a b c d Cartledge 2011 p 221 Cartledge 2011 pp 220 221 Kontler 1999 p 266 Cartledge 2011 p 222 a b Kontler 1999 p 270 a b Kontler 1999 p 268 Kontler 1999 pp 270 271 Cartledge 2011 p 231 Georgescu 1991 p 158 Cartledge 2011 p 232 Magas 2007 pp 297 298 a b c Kontler 1999 p 281 Kontler 1999 p 305 Kontler 1999 p 285 Taylor 1976 p 185 a b c Cartledge 2011 p 257 Taylor 1976 p 186 Hodgkinson Thomas W 9 March 2022 Beat it Batman this foppish baronet was the world s first superhero The Guardian Retrieved 27 March 2023 a b Cartledge 2011 p 255 a b Cartledge 2011 p 256 a b c Cartledge 2011 p 258 Patai 2015 pp 290 292 369 370 Cartledge 2011 p 259 Taylor 1976 pp 244 251 Kontler 1999 pp 328 329 Cartledge 2011 pp 303 304 Cartledge 2011 p 304 a b Cartledge 2011 p 305 Kontler 1999 pp 333 334 Cartledge 2011 p 307 Cartledge 2011 p 308 Cartledge 2011 p 309 Kontler 1999 p 338 a b c d e Kontler 1999 p 339 Kontler 1999 pp 339 345 Cartledge 2011 p 334 a b c Cartledge 2011 p 352 Kontler 1999 p 345 Kontler 1999 pp 345 346 Cartledge 2011 p 351 Kontler 1999 p 347 Kontler 1999 p 353 Cartledge 2011 p 340 Cartledge 2011 p 353 Kontler 1999 p 348 Cartledge 2011 p 354 Kontler 1999 pp 347 348 365 Kontler 1999 pp 377 378 Cartledge 2011 pp 395 396 a b c Cartledge 2011 p 398 Kontler 1999 p 386 a b Cartledge 2011 p 409 Kontler 1999 p 391 a b Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 p 43 Cartledge 2011 p 411 Cartledge 2011 p 412 a b c Cartledge 2011 p 414 Kontler 1999 p 394 a b c Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 p 75 a b Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 p 73 Cartledge 2011 pp 417 418 Cartledge 2011 p 421 Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 p 28 Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 pp 27 28 Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 p 27 Cartledge 2011 p 423 a b Bano 2004 p 7 Szechenyi 2023 pp 214 216 a b Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 pp 97 100 Cartledge 2011 p 435 Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 pp 116 119 Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 pp 76 116 119 Szechenyi 2023 p 218 Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 p 138 a b Nemethy 2016 p 36 a b Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 pp 143 145 Gudenus amp Szentirmay 1989 p 145 Cartledge 2011 pp 490 501 Kozminski 1997 pp 97 104 a b Zavaros korok aldozatai hazatert nemesi csaladok Victims of troubled times returning noble families Kronika in Hungarian Prima Press Kft 19 August 2020 Retrieved 15 March 2023 Andras Sereg 19 April 2013 Barok grofok hercegek Barons counts dukes Jogi Forum in Hungarian Jogaszoknak Kft Retrieved 15 March 2023 Nemethy 2016 pp 36 37 Sources EditPrimary sources Edit Anonymus Notary of King Bela The Deeds of the Hungarians Edited Translated and Annotated by Martyn Rady and Laszlo Veszpremy 2010 In Rady Martyn Veszpremy Laszlo Bak Janos M 2010 Anonymus and Master Roger CEU Press ISBN 978 963 9776 95 1 Constantine Porphyrogenitus De Administrando Imperio Greek text edited by Gyula Moravcsik English translation by Romilly J H Jenkins 1967 Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies ISBN 0 88402 021 5 Simon of Keza The Deeds of the Hungarians Edited and translated by Laszlo Veszpremy and Frank Schaer with a study by Jeno Szucs 1999 CEU Press ISBN 963 9116 31 9 The Customary Law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Parts 1517 Edited and translated by Janos M Bak Peter Banyo and Martyn Rady with an introductory study by Laszlo Peter 2005 Charles Schlacks Jr Department of Medieval Studies Central European University ISBN 1 884445 40 3 The Laws of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary 1000 1301 Translated and edited by Janos M Bak Gyorgy Bonis James Ross Sweeney with an essay on previous editions by Andor Czizmadia Second revised edition In collaboration with Leslie S Domonkos 1999 Charles Schlacks Jr Publishers Secondary sources Edit A Varga Laszlo 1989 hitbizomany fideicommissum In Ban Peter ed Magyar tortenelmi fogalomtar A L Thesaurus of Hungarian History in Hungarian Gondolat pp 188 189 ISBN 963 282 203 X Bak Janos 1993 Linguistic pluralism in Medieval Hungary In Meyer Marc A ed The Culture of Christendom Essays in Medieval History in Memory of Denis L T Bethel The Hambledon Press pp 269 280 ISBN 1 85285 064 7 Bano Attila 2004 Regi magyar csaladok Old Hungarian Families in Hungarian Atheneum ISBN 963 9471 47 X Berend Nora Urbanczyk Przemyslaw Wiszewski Przemyslaw 2013 Central Europe in the High Middle Ages Bohemia Hungary and Poland c 900 c 1300 Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 78156 5 Cartledge Bryan 2011 The Will to Survive A History of Hungary C Hurst amp Co ISBN 978 1 84904 112 6 Curta Florin 2006 Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages 500 1250 Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 89452 4 Engel Pal 2001 The Realm of St Stephen A History of Medieval Hungary 895 1526 I B Tauris Publishers ISBN 1 86064 061 3 Fugedi Erik 1986a Castle and Society in Medieval Hungary 1000 1437 Akademiai Kiado ISBN 963 05 3802 4 Fugedi Erik 1986b The aristocracy in medieval Hungary theses In Bak J M ed Kings Bishops Nobles and Burghers in Medieval Hungary Variorum Reprints pp IV 1 IV 14 ISBN 0 86078 177 1 Fugedi Erik 1998 The Elefanthy The Hungarian Nobleman and His Kindred Edited by Damir Karbic with a foreword by Janos M Bak Central European University Press ISBN 963 9116 20 3 Fugedi Erik Bak Janos M 2012 Foreign Knights and Clerks in Early Medieval Hungary In Berend Nora ed The Expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages Ashgate Publishing pp 319 331 ISBN 978 1 4094 2245 7 Georgescu Vlad 1991 The Romanians A History Ohio State University Press ISBN 0 8142 0511 9 Gudenus Janos Szentirmay Laszlo 1989 Osszetort cimerek a magyar arisztokracia sorsa es az 1945 utani megprobaltatasok Broken Coats of Arms The Hungarian Aristocrats Fate and the Scourge after 1945 in Hungarian Mozaik ISBN 963 02 6114 6 Kontler Laszlo 1999 Millennium in Central Europe A History of Hungary Atlantisz Publishing House ISBN 963 9165 37 9 Kovac Dusan 2011 The Slovak political programme from Hungarian patriotism to the Czecho Slovak State In Teich Mikulas Kovac Dusan Brown Martin D eds Slovakia in History Cambridge University Press pp 120 136 ISBN 978 0 521 80253 6 Kozminski Andrzej K March 1997 Restitution of Private Property Re privatization in Central and Eastern Europe Communist and Post Communist Studies University of California Press 30 1 95 106 doi 10 1016 S0967 067X 96 00025 6 ISSN 0967 067X JSTOR 45302002 Lukacka Jan 2011 The Beginnings of the Nobility in Slovakia In Teich Mikulas Kovac Dusan Brown Martin D eds Slovakia in History Cambridge University Press pp 30 37 ISBN 978 0 521 80253 6 Magas Branka 2007 Croatia Through History SAQI ISBN 978 0 86356 775 9 Makkai Laszlo 1994 The Emergence of the Estates 1172 1526 In Kopeczi Bela Barta Gabor Bona Istvan Makkai Laszlo Szasz Zoltan Borus Judit eds History of Transylvania Akademiai Kiado pp 178 243 ISBN 963 05 6703 2 Murdock Graeme 2000 Calvinism on the Frontier 1600 1660 International Calvinims and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania Clarendon Press ISBN 0 19 820859 6 Nakazawa Tatsuya 2007 Slovak Nation as a Corporate Body The Process of the Conceptual Transformation of a Nation without History into a Constitutional Subject during the Revolutions of 1848 49 In Hayashi Tadayuki Fukuda Hiroshi eds Regions in Central and Eastern Europe Past and Present Slavic Research Center Hokkaido University pp 155 181 ISBN 978 4 938637 43 9 Nemethy Zsolt 2016 Rang nelkul rehabilitalatlan magyar arisztokratak 1945 Without a rank unrehabilitated Hungarian aristocrats 1945 PDF Turul in Hungarian Magyar Tortnelmi Tarsulat 89 1 35 38 ISSN 1216 7258 Retrieved 15 March 2023 Palffy Geza 2009 The Kingdom of Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy in the Sixteenth Century Center for Hungarian Studies and Publications ISBN 978 0 88033 633 8 Patai Raphael 2015 The Jews of Hungary History Culture Psychology Wayne State University Press ISBN 978 0 8143 2561 2 Pop Ioan Aurel 2013 De manibus Valachorum scismaticorum Romanians and Power in the Mediaeval Kingdom of Hungary The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Peter Lang Edition ISBN 978 3 631 64866 7 Prodan David 1971 Supplex Libellus Valachorum or The Political Struggle of the Romanians in Transylvania during the 18th century Publishing House of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania OCLC 955936263 Rady Martyn 2000 Nobility Land and Service in Medieval Hungary Palgrave ISBN 0 333 80085 0 Revesz Laszlo 2003 The cemeteries of the Conquest period In Zsolt Visy ed Hungarian Archaeology at the Turn of the Millenium Ministry of National Cultural Heritage Teleki Laszlo Foundation pp 338 343 ISBN 963 86291 8 5 Schimert Peter 1995 The Hungarian Nobility in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries In Scott H M ed The European Nobilites in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Volume Two Northern Central and Eastern Europe Longman pp 144 182 ISBN 0 582 08071 1 Szakaly Ferenc 1994 The Early Ottoman Period Including Royal Hungary 1526 1606 In Sugar Peter F Hanak Peter Frank Tibor eds A History of Hungary Indiana University Press pp 83 99 ISBN 963 7081 01 1 Szechenyi Kinga 2023 Deportations and Hungarian Aristocracy during the Communist Period In Botos Mate Fejerdy Gergely eds Honore et Virtute A kozep europai arisztokracia sorsa a XX szazadban L Harmattan pp 211 219 ISBN 978 963 414 829 6 Taylor A J P 1976 The Habsburg Monarchy 1809 1918 A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria Hungary The University of Chicago Press ISBN 0 226 79145 9 Vermes Gabor 2014 Hungarian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy 1711 1848 CEU Press ISBN 978 963 386 019 9 Wolf Maria 2003 10th 11th century settlements Earthen forts In Visy Zsolt ed Hungarian Archaeology at the Turn of the Millenium Ministry of National Cultural Heritage Teleki Laszlo Foundation pp 326 331 ISBN 963 86291 8 5 Zimonyi Istvan 2016 Muslim Sources on the Magyars in the Second Half of the 9th Century The Magyar Chapter of the Jayhani Tradition BRILL ISBN 978 90 04 21437 8 Further reading EditNeumann Tibor 2016 Hercegek a kozepkorvegi Magyarorszagon Dukes in Hungary in the Late Middle Ages In Zsoldos Attila ed Hercegek es hercegsegek a kozepkori Magyarorszagon Dukes and Duchies in Medieval Hungary in Hungarian Varosi Leveltar es Kutatointezet pp 95 112 ISBN 978 963 8406 13 2 Thompson Wayne C 2014 Nordic Central and Southeastern Europe 2014 Rowman amp Littlefield ISBN 9781475812244 Totosy de Zepetnek Steven 2010 Nobilitashungariae List of Historical Surnames of the Hungarian Nobility A magyar tortenelmi nemesseg csaladneveinek listaja Clcweb Library Purdue University Press ISSN 1923 9580 Zsoldos Attila 2020 The Arpads and Their People An Introduction to the History of Hungary from cca 900 to 1301 Arpadiana IV Research Centre for the Humanities ISBN 978 963 416 226 1 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Hungarian nobility amp oldid 1169171938, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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