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The Realm of St. Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895-1526 PDF

472 Pages·2001·11.969 MB·English
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Engel.book Pagei Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM THE REALM OF ST STEPHEN Engel.book Pageii Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM Engel.book Pageiii Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM THE REALM OF ST STEPHEN A HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL HUNGARY, 895–1526 PÁL ENGEL Translated by Tamás Pálosfalvi English edition edited by ANDREW AYTON I.B.Tauris Publishers LONDON • NEW YORK Engel.book Pageiv Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM Published in 2001 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States and Canada distributed by St. Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY10010 Copyright © Pál Engel, 2001 All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or other- wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 1-86064-591-7 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset by The Midlands Book Typesetting Co, Loughborough, Leicestershire Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin Engel.book Pagev Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM Contents Foreword vii Preface xi Introduction xiii Chapter 1. The Carpathian Basin Before the Hungarians 1 Chapter 2. The Pagan Hungarians 8 Chapter 3. The First Century of the Christian Kingdom 25 Chapter 4. The Twelfth Century 49 Chapter 5. Early Hungarian Society 66 Chapter 6. The Age of the Golden Bulls 83 Chapter 7. The Last Árpádians 101 Chapter 8. Charles I of Anjou (1301–1342) 124 Chapter 9. The New Monarchy 140 Chapter 10. Louis the Great (1342–1382) 157 Chapter 11. The Monarchy of Louis the Great 174 Chapter 12. The Years of Crises (1382–1403) 195 Chapter 13. Sigismund’s Consolidation 209 Chapter 14. Sigismund’s Foreign Policy (1403–1437) 229 Chapter 15. Trade and Towns 244 Chapter 16. The Rural Landscape 267 Chapter 17. The Age of John Hunyadi (1437–1457) 278 Chapter 18. King Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490) 298 Chapter 19. Hungary at the End of the Middle Ages 323 Chapter 20. The Age of the Jagiellonian Kings (1490–1526) 345 Maps 372 Genealogical Tables 380 Abbreviations 385 Endnotes 387 Bibliography 396 Index 431 Engel.book Pagevi Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM Engel.book Pagevii Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM Foreword In 1993 I approached Pál Engel with an ambitious publication proposal: that he should write a new history of medieval Hungary for an English-language readership and that I could provide substantial assistance in bringing the project to realisation. Just how substantial my role was to be was only to become apparent some years later, when portions of the draft text began to appear on my desk; but from the outset it was clear what sort of book was needed. It was to be the first comprehensive survey of its subject in English, and rather than being merely a translation of an existing work, it was to be written afresh by one of Hungary’s leading medievalists and with the non-Hungarian reader in mind. As someone who had recently become interested in the medieval history of east-central Europe – seeking to develop a research interest for myself as well as endeavouring to introduce medieval Hungary to undergraduate students – I was only too well aware of the serious shortage of historical literature on the subject in English. (There was a good deal more in German, but a reading knowledge of that language is not possessed by many history undergraduates in Britain, nor I suspect in the USA.) There were, of course, general surveys of Hungarian history, from the classic volume by C.A. Macartney to the then recently published A History of Hungary, edited by Peter Sugar and Péter Hanák; but treatment of the Middle Ages in these books, though expertly handled, is necessarily brief and selective. Also available was a range of specialised works (now more numerous), some translated from Hungarian, some written by scholars based in the West; and a useful selection of primary sources in modern editions. I can well remember the excitement with which I read these works, and the genuine enthu- siasm with which my students took to the subject, despite the difficulties involved in bridging the chasm between concise historical surveys and demanding monographs and articles. It was, however, vii Engel.book Pageviii Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM THE REALM OF ST STEPHEN undoubtedly the case that, for newcomers to this field, the accessible historical literature was patchy in coverage and uneven in quality. The bulk of the most important writing on medieval Hungary was available only to those able to read Hungarian. What was urgently needed was a volume conceived on a large scale that combined a detailed narrative with a broad-based thematic coverage; which synthesised the most up- to-date research by Hungarian (and other) scholars; and which presented it in an accessible, readable fashion for a non-Hungarian audience. It was with these needs in mind that this book was written. Naturally, we hope that the publication of this book, happily coin- ciding as it does with the thousandth anniversary of St Stephen’s coronation, will serve also to bring the medieval history of the Carpathian basin to the attention of a wider academic and general readership. The importance and distinctiveness of this region’s history are matched only by the degree to which it has been neglected by the academic community of western Europe and the USA. Yet the region, and the realm of St Stephen within it, that bore the brunt of the Mongols’ onslaught on Europe in the 1240s, that became Europe’s leading producer of gold in the fourteenth century and that stoutly resisted the advance of the Ottoman Turks (whilst, under Matthias Corvinus, witnessing the first flowering of the Renaissance north of the Alps) in the fifteenth, surely deserves more attention than it has hith- erto received. Such attention would be amply rewarded. For beyond gaining an understanding of the internal life and external relations of one of the major kingdoms of Christendom, an examination of medi- eval Hungarian history presents opportunities for fruitful comparisons with the familiar themes, social groups and institutions of western Europe. For example, while an English medievalist may be as intrigued by the ‘honours’ of Angevin Hungary as the Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani appears to have been, he will also find in familiaritas, the relationship between lord and retainer (familiaris), a close resemblance to ‘bastard feudalism’. What tends to emerge from such comparisons is the strong impres- sion that St Stephen’s realm was at once part of the mainstream of Christendom, yet in some respects different, enduringly influenced by the cultural and social legacies of its pagan past and by its geographical location on the frontier of Christian Europe. This is an impression that is vividly conveyed by the numerous miniatures, nearly 150 of them, which decorate the text of the Illuminated Chronicle of c. 1360. Most striking in this respect is the symbolic depiction of Louis the Great’s cosmopolitan court, but also notable are the miniatures that offer glimpses of Louis’s armies, which are shown as consisting of western- style knightly warriors, supported by lightly equipped mounted archers, apparently of Cumanian or Iasian origin, wielding composite viii Engel.book Pageix Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM FOREWORD bows. And this is surely the impression of Angevin Hungary that would have been carried home by western-European visitors – by men like the Dominican friar, Walter atte More, who in April 1346 arrived in Hungary on a diplomatic mission from England. His expenses account shows that he met the queen-mother at Visegrád, then travelled to Zagreb, where the royal army was mobilising, for discussions with King Louis himself. The English Dominican would, therefore, have seen at first hand the workings of the royal court and the distinctive features of Hungarian military organisation; and he may well have formed judge- ments about the character of the political elite and the capabilities of the king’s army. Like other travellers in the region, he would no doubt have been struck by the comparative sparseness of the population. And he may also have gained some appreciation of the mineral wealth of Hungary and the advantages that it gave a young king with military ambitions. Thus, whatever the outcome of his negotiations, we can be fairly certain that the Dominican friar would have conveyed to his political masters in England a view of mid-fourteenth-century Hungary likely to arouse both intense interest and a certain amount of envy. Whilst further specialist works on particular aspects of the Hungarian Middle Ages written in western-European languages are greatly to be welcomed (as, for example, Martyn Rady’s forthcoming study of the Nobility, Land and Service in Medieval Hungary), what we may also hope for in the future are, on the one hand, comparative works involving Hungarian history and, on the other, the integration of the medieval experience of the peoples of the Carpathian basin into studies with a coverage that is truly European – studies of, for example, kingship and representative assemblies, the nobility and peasantry, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and monastic orders, or warfare and military institutions. To take the last subject as an example, imagine a work like Philippe Contamine’s magisterial La guerre au moyen âge, yet with a purview stretching as far as eastern Europe and the Balkans. In this respect, there have indeed been some promising publications in recent years: witness, for example, the scope of David Nicolle’s Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050–1350, 2 vols (White Plains, New York, 1988). But a good deal more comparative work needs to be done in the field of medieval military institutions. As the present volume shows, the military role of the nobility – their theoretical obligations as well as the role they actually performed – is one of the central threads of Hungarian history; but how does this role compare with the martial activities of the nobility elsewhere in Christendom? The study of Hungarian armies needs also to be set within a wider context. For example, it would be appropriate, indeed illuminating, to view the armies raised by the Angevin kings as but one further facet of the general development of contractual military service in medieval ix Engel.book Pagex Thursday,January11,2001 1:49PM THE REALM OF ST STEPHEN Europe, whilst any study of the emergence of standing armies in the fifteenth century should not fail to take account of Matthias Corvinus’s mercenary army, not to mention the permanent garrisons installed in Hungary’s southern frontier fortresses. It is, therefore, my hope that this book, which itself is the result of Anglo-Hungarian collaboration, may contribute in some small measure to the broadening of medievalists’ horizons, and to the further integra- tion of St Stephen’s realm into the mainstream of historical research and teaching in western Europe and the USA. Andrew Ayton x

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