force within the state, it is mainly due that a healthy political life in Hungary became henceforth impossible. The same The Tripartitum. spirit of hostility to the peasantry breathed through the famous condification of the Hungarian customary law known as the Tripartitum, which, though never actually formally passed into law, continued until 1845 to be the only document defining the relations of king and people, of nobles and their peasants, and of Hungary and her dependent states.[1]
Wladislaus II. died on the 13th of March 1516, two years after the “Savage Diet,” the ferocity of whose decrees he had feebly endeavoured to mitigate, leaving his two kingdoms to his son Louis, a child of ten, who was Subjection by the Turks. pronounced of age in order that his foreign guardians, the emperor Maximilian and Sigismund of Poland, might be dispensed with. The government remained in the hands of Cardinal Bakócz till his death in 1521, when the supreme authority at court was disputed between the lame palatine István Báthory, and his rival, the eminent jurist and orator István Verböczy (q.v.),—both of them incompetent, unprincipled place-hunters,—while, in the background lurked János Zapolya (see John (Zapolya), King of Hungary), voivode of Transylvania, patiently waiting till the death of the feeble and childless king (who, in 1522, married Maria of Austria) should open for him a way to the throne. Every one felt that a catastrophe was approaching. “Things cannot go on like this much longer,” wrote the Venetian ambassador to his government. The war of each against all continued; no taxes could be collected; the holders of the royal domains refused to surrender them at the command of the diet; and the boy king had very often neither clothes to wear nor food to eat. The whole atmosphere of society was one of rapine and corruption, and only on the frontier a few self-sacrificing patriots like the ban-bishop, Peter Biriszlo, the last of Matthias’s veterans, and his successor the saintly Pál Tomori, archbishop of Kalocsa, showed, in their ceaseless war against the predatory Turkish bands, that the ancient Magyar valour was not yet wholly extinct. But the number of the righteous men was too few to save the state. The first blow fell in 1521, when Sultan Suleiman appeared before the southern fortresses of Sabác and Belgrade, both of which fell into his hands during the course of the year. After this Venice openly declared that Hungary was no longer worth the saving. Yet the coup de grâce was postponed for another five years, during which time Suleiman was occupied with the conquest of Egypt and the siege of Rhodes. The Magyars fancied they were safe from attack, because the final assault was suspended; and everything went on in the old haphazard way. Every obstacle was opposed to the collection of the taxes which had been voted to put the kingdom in a state of defence. “If this realm could be saved at the expense of three florins,” exclaimed the papal envoy, Antonio Burgio, “there is not a man here willing to make the sacrifice.” Only on the southern frontier did Archbishop Tomori painfully assemble a fresh army and fleet, and succeed, by incredible efforts, in constructing at Péterwardein, on the right bank of the Danube, a new fortress which served him as a refuge and sally post in his interminable guerilla war with the Turks.
In the spring of 1526 came the tidings that Sultan Suleiman had quitted Constantinople, at the head of a countless host, to conquer Hungary. On the 28th of July Péterwardein, after a valiant resistance, was blown into the air. The diet, which met at Buda in hot haste, proclaimed the young king[2] dictator, granted him unlimited subsidies which there was no time to collect, and ordered a levée en masse of the entire male population, which could not possibly assemble within the given time. Louis at once formed a camp at Tolna, whence he issued despairing summonses to the lieges, and, by the middle of August, some 25,000 ill-equipped gentlemen had gathered around him. With these he marched southwards to the plain of Mohács, where, on the 29th of August, the Hungarians, after a two hours’ fight, were annihilated, the king, both the archbishops, five bishops and 24,000 men perishing on the field. The sultan refused to believe that the pitiful array he had so easily overcome could be the national army of Hungary. Advancing with extreme caution, he occupied Buda on the 12th of September, but speedily returned to his own dominions, carrying off with him 105,000 captives, and an amount of spoil which filled the bazaars of the East for months to come. By the end of October the last Turkish regular had quitted Magyar soil, and, to use the words of a contemporary observer, one quarter of Hungary was as utterly destroyed as if a flood had passed over it.
The Turks had no sooner quitted the land than John Zapolya,
voivode of Transylvania, assembled a diet at Tokaj (Oct. 14,
1526) at which the towns were represented as well as
John Zapolya elected King.
the counties. The tone of the assembly being violently
anti-German, and John being the only conceivable
national candidate, his election was a matter of course;
but his misgivings were so great that it was not till the beginning
of November that he very reluctantly allowed himself to be
crowned at a second diet, held at Székesfehérvár. By this
time a competitor had entered the field. This was the archduke
Ferdinand, who claimed the Hungarian crown by right of
Ferdinand
of Austria elected.
inheritance in the name of his wife, Anne, sister of the late king.
Ferdinand was elected (Dec. 16) by a scratch assembly
consisting of deputies from Croatia and the towns
of Pressburg and Sopron; but he speedily improved
his position in the course of 1527, by driving King
John first from Buda and then from Hungary. In November
the same year he was elected and crowned by a properly constituted
diet at Székesfehérvár (Stuhlweissenburg). In 1529
Zapolya was reinstated in Buda by Suleiman the Magnificent
in person, who, at this period, preferred setting up a
Rival kings.
rival to “the king of Vienna” to conquering Hungary
outright. Thus the Magyars were saddled with two
rival kings with equally valid titles, which proved an even worse
disaster than the Mohács catastrophe; for in most of the
counties of the unhappy kingdom desperadoes of every description
plundered the estates of the gentry, and oppressed the common
people, under the pretext that they were fighting the battles
of the contending monarchs. The determination of Ferdinand
to partition Hungary rather than drive the Turks out, which
he might easily have done after Suleiman’s unsuccessful attempts
on Vienna in 1529–1530, led to a prolongation of the struggle
till the 24th of February 1538, when, by the secret peace of
Nagyvárad,[3] Hungary was divided between the two competitors.
By this treaty Ferdinand retained Croatia-Slavonia and the
five western counties with Pressburg and Esztergom (Gran),
while Zapolya kept the remaining two-thirds with the royal
title. He was indeed the last national king of Hungary till
modern times. His court at Buda was maintained according
to the ancient traditions, and his gyüles, at which 67 of the 73
counties were generally represented, was the true national diet,
the phantom assembly occasionally convened at Pressburg by
Ferdinand scarcely deserving the title. Indeed, Ferdinand
regarded his narrow strip of Hungarian territory as simply
a barrier behind which he could better defend the hereditary
states. During the last six years (1534–1540) of John’s reign, his
kingdom, beneath the guidance of the Paulician monk, Frater
György, or George Martinuzzi (q.v.), the last great statesman
of old Hungary, enjoyed a stability and prosperity marvellous
in the difficult circumstances of the period, Martinuzzi holding
the balance exactly between the emperor and the Porte with
- ↑ The Opus tripartitum juris consuetudinarii regni Hungariae was drawn up by Verböczy at the instance of the diet in 1507. It was approved by a committee of the diet and received the royal imprimatur in 1514, but was never published. In the constitutional history of Hungary the Tripartitum is of great importance as reasserting the fundamental equality of all the members of the populus (i.e. the whole body of the nobles) and, more especially, as defining the co-ordinate power of the king and “people” in legislation: i.e. the king may propose laws, but they had no force without the consent of the people, and vice versa. See Knatchbull-Hugessen, i. 64.
- ↑ He was just twenty.
- ↑ It was kept secret for some years for fear of Turkish intervention.
