promising to protect the Hunyadis on condition that they first surrendered all the royal castles entrusted to them. A beginning was to be made with the fortress of Belgrade, of which László was commandant, Cillei intending to take the king with him to Belgrade and assassinate László within its walls. But Hunyadi was warned betimes, and while admitting Ladislaus V. and Cillei, he excluded their army of mercenaries. On the following morning (9th of November 1456) Cillei, during a private interview, suddenly drew upon László, but was himself cut down by the commandant’s friends, who rushed in on hearing the clash of weapons. The terrified young king, who had been privy to the plot, thereupon pardoned Hunyadi, and at a subsequent interview with his mother at Temesvár swore that he would protect the whole family. As a pledge of his sincerity he appointed László lord treasurer and captain-general of the kingdom. Suspecting no evil, Hunyadi accompanied the king to Buda, but on arriving there was arrested on a charge of compassing Ladislaus’s ruin, condemned to death without the observance of any legal formalities, and beheaded on the 16th of March 1457.
See I. Acsady, History of the Hungarian Realm (Hung.), vol. i. (Budapest, 1904). (R. N. B.)
HUNZA (also known as Kanjut) and NAGAR, two small
states on the North-west frontier of Kashmir, formerly under
the administration of the Gilgit agency. The two states, which
are divided by a river which runs in a bed 600 ft. wide between
cliffs 300 ft. high, are inhabited generally by people of the same
stock, speaking the same language, professing the same form
of the Mahommedan religion, and ruled by princes sprung from
the same family. Nevertheless they have been for centuries
persistent rivals, and frequently at war with each other.
Formerly Hunza was the more prominent of the two, because
it held possession of the passes leading to the Pamirs, and could
plunder the caravans on their way between Turkestan and
India. But they are both shut up in a recess of the mountains,
and were of no importance until about 1889, when the advance
of Russia up to the frontiers of Afghanistan, and the great
development of her military sources in Asia, increased the
necessity for strengthening the British line of defence. This
led to the establishment of the Gilgit agency, the occupation
of Chitral, and the Hunza expedition of 1891, which asserted
British authority over Hunza and Nagar. The country is
inhabited by a Dard race of the Yeshkun caste speaking Burishki.
For a description of the people see Gilgit. The Hunza-Nagar
Expedition of 1891, under Colonel A. Durand, was due to the
defiant attitude of the Hunza and Nagar chiefs towards the
British agent at Gilgit. The fort at Nilt was stormed, and after
a fortnight’s delay the cliffs (1000 ft. high) beyond it were also
carried by assault. Hunza and Nagar were occupied, the chief
of Nagar was reinstated on making his submission, and the
half-brother of the raja of Hunza was installed as chief in the
place of his brother.
HUON OF BORDEAUX, hero of romance. The French
chanson de geste of Huon de Bordeaux dates from the first half of
the 13th century, and marks the transition between the epic
chanson founded on national history and the roman d’aventures.
Huon, son of Seguin of Bordeaux, kills Charlot, the emperor’s son,
who had laid an ambush for him, without being aware of the rank
of his assailant. He is condemned to be hanged by Charlemagne,
but reprieved on condition that he visits the court of Gaudisse,
the amir of Babylon, and brings back a handful of hair from the
amir’s beard and four of his back teeth, after having slain the
greatest of his knights and three times kissed his daughter
Esclarmonde. By the help of the fairy dwarf Oberon, Huon
succeeds in this errand, in the course of which he meets with
further adventures. The Charlot of the story has been identified
by A. Longnon (Romania viii. 1-11) with Charles l’Enfant, one
of the sons of Charles the Bald and Irmintrude, who died in 866 in
consequence of wounds inflicted by a certain Aubouin in precisely
similar circumstances to those related in the romance. The epic
father of Huon may safely be identified with Seguin, who was
count of Bordeaux under Louis the Pious in 839, and died
fighting against the Normans six years later. A Turin manuscript
of the romance contains a prologue in the shape of a
separate romance of Auberon, and four sequels, the Chanson
d’Esclarmonde, the Chanson de Clarisse et Florent, the Chanson
d’Ide et d’Olive and the Chanson de Godin. The same MS. contains
in the romance of Les Lorrains a summary in seventeen
lines of another version of the story, according to which Huon’s
exile is due to his having slain a count in the emperor’s palace.
The poem exists in a later version in alexandrines, and, with its
continuations, was put into prose in 1454 and printed by Michel
le Noir in 1516, since when it has appeared in many forms,
notably in a beautifully printed and illustrated adaptation
(1898) in modern French by Gaston Paris. The romance had a
great vogue in England through the translation (c. 1540) of John
Bourchier, Lord Berners, as Huon of Burdeuxe. The tale was
dramatized and produced in Paris by the Confrérie de la Passion
in 1557, and in Philip Henslowe’s diary there is a note of a
performance of a play, Hewen of Burdoche, on the 28th of
December 1593. For the literary fortune of the fairy part of the
romance see Oberon.
The Chanson de geste of Huon de Bordeaux was edited by MM F. Guessard and C. Grandmaison for the Anciens poètes de la France in 1860; Lord Berners’s translation was edited for the E.E.T.S. by S. L. Lee in 1883–1885. See also L. Gautier, Les Épopées françaises (2nd ed. vol. iii. pp. 719–773); A. Graf, I complementi della Chanson de Huon de Bordeaux (Halle, 1878); “Esclarmonde, &c.,” by Max Schweigel, in Ausg. u. Abhandl. . . .der roman. phil. (Marburg, 1889); C. Voretzsch, Epische Studien (vol. i., Halle, 1900); Hist. litt. de la France (vol. xxvi., 1873).
HUON PINE, botanical name Dacrydium Franklinii, the most
valuable timber tree of Tasmania, a member of the order Coniferae
(see Gymnosperms). It is a fine tree of pyramidal outline
80 to 100 ft. high, and 10 to 20 ft. in girth at the base, with
slender pendulous much-divided branchlets densely covered
with the minute scale-like sharply-keeled bright green leaves.
It occurs in swampy localities from the upper Huon river to Port
Davey and Macquarie Harbour, but is less abundant than
formerly owing to the demand for its timber, especially for
ship- and boat-building. The wood is close-grained and easily
worked.
HU-PEH, a central province of China, bounded N. by Ho-nan,
E. by Ngan-hui, S. by Hu-nan, and W. by Shen-si and Szechʽuen.
It has an area of 70,450 sq. m. and contains a population of
34,000,000. Han-kow, Ichʽang and Shasi are the three open
ports of the province, besides which it contains ten other prefectural
cities. The greater part of the province forms a plain,
and its most noticeable feature is the Han river, which runs in a
south-easterly direction across the province from its north-westerly
corner to its junction with the Yangtsze Kiang at Han-kow.
The products of the Han valley are exclusively agricultural,
consisting of cotton, wheat, rape seed, tobacco and
various kinds of beans. Vegetable tallow is also exported in
large quantities from this part of Hu-peh. Gold is found in the
Han, but not in sufficient quantities to make working it more
than barely remunerative. It is washed every winter from
banks of coarse gravel, a little above I-chʽêng Hien, on which it
is deposited by the river. Every winter the supply is exhausted
by the washers, and every summer it is renewed by the river.
Baron von Richthofen reckoned that the digger earned from
50 to 150 cash (i.e. about 112d. to 414d.) a day. Only one waggon
road leads northwards from Hu-peh, and that is to Nan-yang Fu
in Ho-nan, where it forks, one branch going to Peking by way of
Kʽai-fêng Fu, and the other into Shan-si by Ho-nan Fu.
HUPFELD, HERMANN (1796–1866), German Orientalist and
Biblical commentator, was born on the 31st of March 1796 at
Marburg, where he studied philosophy and theology from 1813
to 1817; in 1819 he became a teacher in the gymnasium at
Hanau, but in 1822 resigned that appointment. After studying
for some time at Halle, he in 1824 settled as Privatdocent in
philosophy at that university, and in the following year was
appointed extraordinary professor of theology at Marburg.
There he received the ordinary professorships of Oriental
languages and of theology in 1827 and 1830 respectively;
thirteen years later he removed as successor of Wilhelm Gesenius
