king of Bohemia, who as Wladislaus II. was elected unanimously king of Hungary on the 15th of July 1490. Wladislaus was the personification of helpless inertia. His Bohemian subjects had long since dubbed him “King All Right” because he said yes to everything. As king of Hungary he was, from first to last, the puppet of the Magyar oligarchs, who proceeded to abolish all the royal prerogatives and safeguards which had galled them under Matthias. By the compact of Farkashida (1490) Wladislaus not only confirmed all the Matthian privileges, but also repealed all the Matthian novelties, including the system of taxation which had enabled his predecessor to keep on foot an adequate national army. The virtual suppression of Wladislaus was completed at the diet of 1492, when “King All Right” consented to live on the receipts of the treasury, which were barely sufficient to maintain his court, and engaged never to impose any new taxes on his Magyar subjects. The dissolution of the standing army, including the Black Brigade, was the immediate result of these decrees. Thus, at the very time when the modernization of the means of national defence had become the first principle, in every other part of Europe, of the strongly centralized monarchies which were rising on the ruins of feudalism, the Hungarian magnates deliberately plunged their country back into the chaos of medievalism. The same diet which destroyed the national armaments and depleted the exchequer confirmed the disgraceful peace of Pressburg, concluded between Wladislaus and the emperor Maximilian on the 7th of November 1491, whereby Hungary retroceded all the Austrian conquests of Matthias, together with a long strip of Magyar territory, and paid a war indemnity equivalent to £200,000.
The thirty-six years which elapsed between the accession of Wladislaus II. and the battle of Mohács is the most melancholy and discreditable period of Hungarian history. Like Poland two centuries later, Hungary had ceased to be a civilized autonomous state because her prelates and her magnates, uncontrolled by any higher authority, and too ignorant or corrupt to look beyond their own immediate interests, abandoned themselves to the exclusive enjoyment of their inordinate privileges, while openly repudiating their primal obligation of defending the state against extraneous enemies. During these miserable years everything like patriotism or public spirit seems to have died out of the hearts of the Hungarian aristocracy. The great officers of state acted habitually on the principle that might is right. Stephen Bathóry, voivode of Transylvania and count of the Szeklers, for instance, ruled Transylvania like a Turkish pasha, and threatened to behead all who dared to complain of his exactions; “Stinking carrion,” he said, was better than living Szeklers. Thousands of Transylvanian gentlemen emigrated to Turkey to get out of his reach. Other great nobles were at perpetual feud with the towns whose wealth they coveted. Thus the Zapolyas, in 1500 and again in 1507, burnt a large part of Breznóbánya and Beszterczebánya, two of the chief industrial towns of north Hungary. Kronstadt, now the sole flourishing trade centre in the kingdom, defended itself with hired mercenaries against the robber barons. Everywhere the civic communities were declining; even Buda and Pressburg were half in ruins. In their misery the cities frequently appealed for protection to the emperor and other foreign potentates, as no redress was attainable at home. Compared even with the contemporary Polish diet the Hungarian national assembly was a tumultuous mob. The diet of 1497 passed most of its time in constructing, and then battering to pieces with axes and hammers, a huge wooden image representing the ministers of the crown, who were corrupt enough, but immovable, since they regularly appeared at the diet with thousands of retainers armed to the teeth, and openly derided the reforming endeavours of the lower gentry, who perceived that something was seriously wrong, yet were powerless to remedy it. All that the gentry could do was to depress the lower orders, and this they did at every opportunity. Thus, many of the towns, notably Visegrád, were deprived of the charters granted to them by Matthias, and a whole series of anti-civic ordinances were passed. Noblemen dwelling within the walls of the towns were especially exempted from all civic burdens, while every burgess who bought an extra-mural estate was made to pay double for the privilege.[1] Every nobleman had the right to engage in trade toll-free, to the great detriment of their competitors the burgesses. The peasant class suffered most of all. In 1496 Varady, archbishop of Kalocsa, one of the few good prelates, declared that their lot was worse than that of brute beasts. The whole burden of taxation rested on their shoulders, and so ground down were they by ingeniously multiplied exactions, that thousands of them were reduced to literal beggary.
Yet, despite this inward rottenness, Hungary, for nearly twenty years after the death of Matthias, enjoyed an undeserved prestige abroad, due entirely to the reputation which that great monarch had won for her. Circumstances, indeed, were especially favourable. The emperor Maximilian was so absorbed by German affairs, that he could do her little harm, and under Bayezid II. and Selim I. the Turkish menace gave little anxiety to the court of Buda, Bayezid being no warrior, while Selim’s energies were claimed exclusively by the East, so that he was glad to renew the triennial truce with Hungary as often as it expired. Hungary, therefore, for almost the first time in her history, was free to choose a foreign policy of her own, and had she been guided by a patriot, she might now have easily regained Dalmatia, and acquired besides a considerable seaboard. Unfortunately Tamás Bakócz, her leading diplomatist from 1499 to 1521, was as much an egotist as the other magnates, and he sacrificed the political interests of Hungary entirely to personal considerations. Primate of Hungary since 1497, he coveted the popedom—and the red hat as the first step thereto above all things,—and looked mainly to Venetian influence for both. He therefore supported Venice against her enemies, refused to enter the League of Cambray in 1508, and concluded a ten years’ alliance with the Signoria, which obliged Hungary to defend Venetian territory without any equivalent gain. Less reprehensible, though equally self-seeking, were his dealings with the emperor, which aimed at a family alliance between the Jagiellos and the Habsburgs on the basis of a double marriage between the son and daughter of Wladislaus, Louis and Anne, and an Austrian archduke and archduchess; this was concluded by the family congress at Vienna, July 22, 1515, to which Sigismund I. of Poland, the brother of Wladislaus, acceded. The Hungarian diet frantically opposed every Austrian alliance as endangering the national independence, but to any unprejudiced observer a union with the house of Habsburg, even with the contingent probability of a Habsburg king, was infinitely preferable to the condition into which Hungary, under native aristocratic misrule, was swiftly drifting. The diet itself had become as much a nullity as the king, and its decrees were systematically disregarded. Still more pitiable was the condition of the court. The penury of Wladislaus II. was by this time so extreme, that he owed his very meals to the charity of his servants. The diet, indeed, voted him aids and subsidies, but the great nobles either forbade their collection within their estates, or confiscated the amount collected. Under the circumstances, we cannot wonder if the frontier fortresses fell to pieces, and the border troops, unpaid for years, took to brigandage.
The last reserves of the national wealth and strength were dissipated by the terrible peasant rising of György Dozsa (q.v.) in 1514, of which the enslavement of the Hungarian peasantry was the immediate consequence. The “Savage Diet” which assembled on the 18th of Peasant Rising, 1514. October the same year, to punish the rebels and restore order, well deserved its name. Sixty-two of its seventy-one enactments were directed against the peasants, who were henceforth bound to the soil and committed absolutely into the hands of “their natural lords.” To this vindictive legislation, which converted the labouring population into a sullenly hostile
- ↑ It should be remembered that at this time one-third of the land belonged to the church, and the remainder was in the hands of less than a dozen great families who had also appropriated the royal domains.
