Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Today, we tackle a subject about which I must admit my total ignorance about until I began this series on the Revolutions of 1848, the Kingdom of Hungary. Now, I have plenty of natural background in most of European and American history and have now spent years moving slowly and methodically through this great age of revolutions that got started at the end of the Seven Years’ War, but I realized when I cracked my first book on Hungary, appropriately A Concise History of Hungary, I realized that I knew none of it. And when I got deeper into the Hungarian reform era that led into the Revolution of 1848, I found myself confronted by Hungarian intellectuals who were very peeved at me. Because one fact acutely felt by all those Hungarian intellectuals in the 1820s and 1830s is that while they knew a great deal about the history, culture, trends, and ideas of the rest of Europe, the rest of Europe knew basically nothing about them. Hungary was merely a strange land on the periphery of the continent, and more than anything else, simply another vassal state of Austria. So anyone turning their attention to central Europe would simply run into this wall that was Austria, and I too never looked past that wall.

So Hungary was, yes, a subsidiary part of the Austrian Empire, but it was more than that too. I mean, there is a reason the Austrians capitulated to a co-equal union with Hungary in 1867. That is what created the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So today, I hope to do some measure of justice to the history of Hungary, though due to the specific focus of our show, that is I’m trying to set up 1848, I will dwell on the political and constitutional developments of Hungary at the expense of other interesting rabbit holes we might fall into.

So the first thing I have to say is that the Hungarians do not call themselves Hungarians. They are more properly styled Magyars. And they do not speak Hungarian, they speak Magyar. Hungarian is just the butchered, anglified label we’ve slapped onto them. Magyars, Hungarians, same thing. Although not exactly. A Hungarian today does not have to be ethnically a Magyar. That is, the state of Hungary was and is pretty multi-ethnic. There are plenty of Slavs and Poles and Germans. And in fact, the complicated relationship between the majority Magyar population and the minority ethnic groups will play a big role in the story of 1848. So a Magyar is always a Hungarian, but the people living in Hungary are not necessarily Magyars. You got it? Okay.

And then of course now is a perfect time to remind you that whether you call it Hungarian or Magyar, I will be mispronouncing the heck out of it. I mean, I’m doing it right now because I’m not even going to attempt a proper Hungarian pronunciation of Magyar.

Okay, so to get this started, sometime between AD 500 and 800, the Magyars, the Hungarians, moved down out of the Ural Mountains, way off in Russia, and began a long migration west. They were not a part of the great barbarian migrations that put so much pressure on the later Roman Empire, but instead were one of the newer groups that formed a second wave of migration that hit the post-Roman west.

In the late 800s, they were led into the Carpathian Basin by their first great ruler, Árpád. And of critical importance, Arpad was an elected ruler. That’s how the Hungarians did things. So from the very beginning, the Hungarians have a tradition of not accepting mere birth as the means of succession. The nobility had to come together and elect the next leader, though for 400 years, they simply elected the descendants of Árpád.

For a couple of generations after their arrival in Europe, the Hungarians were a formidable roaming military force, mostly causing trouble for the Frankish kingdom and their new-fangled Holy Roman Empire. This was an era that the Hungarians themselves delightfully call the Age of Adventures, and they adventured as far west as Spain. But then in 955, they were defeated by Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor. This was not a catastrophic defeat, but it did put an end to the Age of Adventures, and the Magyars decided to settle down in the relatively unpopulated Carpathian Basin that surrounds that section of the Danube, where the great river makes its abrupt turn south.

Settled down by the 900s, the Hungarians occupied territory between the Catholic Holy Roman Empire to the west and the Orthodox Byzantine Empire to the south and east. The official founding of the Kingdom of Hungary was marked by the ascension of István, who we in the west call Stephen. At some point, either in AD 1000 or 1001, Stephen had himself crowned king as a way to put himself on equal footing with the other sovereigns of Europe. And when he donned the crown, he made a momentous decision. After a round of diplomatic negotiations, he accepted his royal crown from the Pope, converting both himself and his people to Catholicism. This had the effect of orienting Hungary away from the Orthodox East and towards the Catholic West.

Stephen’s coronation and the Romanization of Hungary is considered the founding moment of the Kingdom of Hungary. He was later canonized for all of this. He’s called St. Stephen of Hungary.

Over the next 200 years, the Kingdom of Hungary not only survived, it thrived and was able to lord it over weaker neighbors. By the middle of the 12th century, they had gobbled up the Kingdom of Croatia, among other smaller units, and had pushed their dominions all the way to the Adriatic coast, all the while carefully dancing in, around, between, for, and against both the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantines. Now allies, now opponents, now in the service of one, now in the service of the other, but always looking out for themselves.

But as I said, for our purposes, I want to focus specifically on the unique constitutional developments of Hungary. And for that, our next stop is 1222, and the Golden Bull of King András II, a Golden Bull being a momentous imperial or royal decree. The topic of the Golden Bull was the composition of the nobility and their relationship with the King. Unlike in Western Europe, the Hungarians never developed a rigid feudal hierarchy where a lower noble was bound to a higher noble, who was bound to a higher noble, and on up to the King. All nobles received their nobility from the sovereign and pledged themselves directly to the sovereign. And over the years, the Hungarian Kings ennobled a lot of people, from great landowning magnates all the way down to regular old warriors who happened to have performed some signal service.

Because this nobility was hereditary, by the 1200s, something like five to eight percent of the total population was noble. Middle and lower class Hungarian nobles might be indistinguishable economically from their non-noble neighbors, but yet they held this special social and political status. Now, as you might expect, the truly rich and powerful magnates threw their weight around and bullied the common nobility, to the point where the common nobility took their complaints to the King, who decreed in the Golden Bull of 1222 that all nobles were equal. The wealthiest landlord and the lowliest knight had the same legal rights, property rights, and political rights. Now, this noble leveling, of course, did nothing for the other 95% of the population who were just straight up subjects, but it did stamp Hungarian politics early with a tradition of equalitarianism.

But that is not all we have to say about the Golden Bull. Oh no, sir, it is not. Because the Golden Bull can also be considered something of a Hungarian Magna Carta. Not only did it say all nobles are equal, it also put specific limits on what the King could compel a noble to do, and what rights, privileges, and powers the nobility held.

So for example, nobles were exempt from all taxes. They could not be compelled to fight outside of Hungary if they did not want to. They could not be arbitrarily arrested. To prevent their influence from being diluted by the King, say, going outside of the kingdom for support, the Golden Bull also stipulated that the King was not allowed to give away Hungarian land to a foreigner. So the effect of the Golden Bull was to formally organize the Kingdom of Hungary into a sort of constitutional aristocracy. Real power lay in the hands of this 5% or so of the noble population who, despite differences in wealth, were all considered equal to each other and who enjoyed rights and privileges beyond the reach of the monarchs.

Though not specifically established by the Golden Bull, this trend towards constitutional aristocracy was reinforced by the entrenchment of local diets, that is, assemblies of the local nobility in the 50 or so counties that made up the Kingdom of Hungary. A huge amount of local administration and justice was handled directly by these local diets without any interference at all from the central government. And thanks to the equalitarian decree of the Golden Bull, these local diets actually skewed in favor of the common nobility, whose voice and vote counted just as much as the richest landlord.

Now in terms of greater Hungarian history, the next big moment is the devastating Mongol invasion, which hit Hungary hard in 1241 and 1242. Now though the Mongols did not destroy the kingdom outright, and historians still wrestle over how bad it really was, it was really bad. But the kingdom recovered, and since we’ve got 600 more years of history to get through, let’s just take a moment of silence to honor the memory of the poor souls who had to bear the brunt of the Mongol invasion and move on.

Okay, great. As they recovered from the Mongol invasion, the constitutional aristocracy continued to entrench itself. In 1267, the first national diet composed of representatives elected by the local diets was called, with each noble county sending two delegates to the national diet. Now, this was not by any means the first national diet of nobles, but it was the first composed of representatives elected by the local diets. Now sidestepping a bit the principle of noble equality, there was an upper and lower house to the national diet, with the richest magnates designated to sit in an upper and more exclusive chamber. The national diets were, and then continued to be, a regular feature of Hungarian politics, and the chambers asserted a claim to nearly every important matter of state. New laws, new taxes, the raising, equipping, and directing of armies. You know, the big stuff. All of it needed the approval of the national diet. And it goes without saying that the national diet was the body who would elect the new King when the old King died.

Now, if we just take a minute here to compare this to the liberal victors of the July Revolution, recall that after 1830, there were maybe 250,000 men qualified to vote in France, and that’s a kingdom of 30 million. So, we’re talking not even 1% of the population. And here we are in the 1200s in Hungary with more than 5% of the population voting representatives to go serve in a participatory body that has real say in the weightiest matters of state. Now, of course, the other 95% of the population are still powerless subjects, but still, 5% is more than not quite 1%.

So, all of this was pretty firmly established by the 1290s, which was just in time for the original Árpád dynasty to die off. The death of the last Árpád king marked the end of native Hungarian Kings. From here on out, with one or two exceptions, foreign Kings would rule Hungary. Having become a player in central European politics, the Hungarians had married their princes and princesses into neighboring courts, and so when the Árpád died off, it was these European cousins who had the strongest claim to the throne. Though they were not necessarily on board with this whole constitutional aristocracy thing.

Now Hungary fairly well flourished for the next 150 years under quote unquote foreign Kings, and they reached their greatest territorial extent in the late 1400s under Louis the Great, but these Kings, often born and raised outside of Hungary, did their best to avoid putting things to the diet, and ruled as much by royal decrees as they could get away with. And in keeping with western feudal strategy, they smoothed potentially ruffled feathers by sucking up to the great magnates, and ignoring the common nobility.

So the next big moment in Hungarian history comes with the rise of the Ottomans, and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the east. After the Ottomans took Constantinople, they started pressing up into the Balkans. But the Hungarians rallied under national hero, János Hunyadi, who beat the Ottomans at Belgrade in 1456, earning Hunyadi plaudits as the savior of Christendom, even if he didn’t have much time to celebrate his victory. He died just a couple months later of some unspecified disease.

Now Hunyadi himself was just a powerful noble, he was not a King. But when he died, his lingering influence was enough that his 15-year-old son Mathias was elected king in 1458, Mathias being the first quote-unquote national King in 150 years.

Raised by the most advanced humanist tutors of the day, King Mathias quickly established himself as the great Renaissance king of Hungary. His reign saw flourishing of art and literature and science and architecture, you know, all that good Renaissance stuff. He was also, as I mentioned, one of the few ethnically Hungarian Kings in a sea of foreign monarchs.

He was born and raised in Hungary, and he was sympathetic to the common nobles and tended to favor them over the great magnates, as both his predecessors and successors would tend to do. But Mathias was not just some passive scholar King. He led the Hungarian armies west into Bohemia during Bohemia’s Hussite period, the Hussites being one of the great precursors to the Lutherans in the Reformation. Mathias went to bat on behalf of the Catholics in Bohemia, and mostly successful, he wound up controlling Moravia and Silesia, among other territories.

Now, when the Bohemians themselves elected a new Catholic King in 1471, named Vladislaus, Mathias was unwilling to give up the land he had conquered, and after a great deal of wrangling, the two Kings agreed to divvy up Bohemia between them.

Now, you might think this is the beginning of a Hungarian takeover of Bohemia, but it actually went the other way around. When King Mathias died in 1490, the aforementioned Vladislaus used a blood tie through his grandmother to stand for the vacant Hungarian throne, and he managed to secure election, and this is the moment the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns become permanently linked. So how did Vladislaus manage to secure election? Well, it was by basically promising the Hungarian nobles, and especially the great magnates, that they would have free run of the kingdom. In Hungarian history, King Vladislaus is nicknamed King Very Well, or King Yes Do It, because whatever the nobles wanted, he said yes.

After nearly 200 years of foreign Kings trying to govern around the national diet, the constitutional aristocracy was back in a big way. Once again, it was established that the local diets had huge latitude in local affairs, and the national diets had the right to approve all taxation, that they could elect and had the right to remove all high officers of the kingdom. They also went so far as to claim the right to ratify peace treaties.

In 1514, the Hungarians produced a massive collection of written laws that compiled and codified all this, and this collection of laws would still be in active use right down to 1848. This period also saw the establishment of an abstract legal entity called the Crown of Hungary, a joint sovereign unit that combined the King, the powers of the national diet, and the territory claimed by both, which still included, for example, the old Kingdom of Croatia, and now included Bohemia.

To all of this, King Vladislaus said, Very well. So King Very Well died in 1516 and was succeeded by his young son, Lajos II, who we call Louis II. But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Hey, I remember from the episode on the Austrian Empire that somewhere around in here in the early 1500s, the Habsburgs married their way into the Hungarian royal family, and that’s how they got their hands on the kingdom, right? And yes, indeed, it is happening right here. It was actually a double marriage, arranged when all the kids were still just kids. The future King Louis married Mary of Austria, while her brother Ferdinand married Louis’ older sister Anne of Hungary. Does that make sense? Probably not, but just roll with it.

The thing to take away from all these arrangements is that it was agreed by all the parties that Ferdinand Habsburg of Austria would become King of Hungary if Louis died. But since Louis was still just a teenager at this point, that was no big deal, right? Right?

Well, it turned out to be a very big deal, because just as these marriages were taking place, the Ottomans came back with a massive vengeance, this time led by Suleiman the Magnificent. After a generation of being allowed to revel in their own petty privileges, the Hungarian nobility was inert and unresponsive to this threat, even after the Ottomans took Belgrade in 1521. The nobles continued to blow off King Louis II’s demand that they mobilize for war, and it wasn’t until July of 1526, with the Ottomans right on their doorstep, that the Hungarian nobility finally got off their collective dust, and by then it was too late. Hastily cobbling together an army maybe 25,000 to 30,000 strong, they faced off against an Ottoman army that outnumbered them 2 to 1 minimum, and some sources put it as high as 4 to 1.

As I briefly mentioned in Episode 7.4, the two sides met at Mohács and the Hungarians were slaughtered. Most of the great magnates were killed in the battle, and King Louis II, all of 20 years old, drowned in a river during the chaotic retreat. The cataclysmic Battle of Mohács marked the beginning of a whole new era of Hungarian history, the Habsburg era.

But it was not quite that simple. After the Battle of Mohács, the Kingdom of Hungary was divided in thirds. In the south and east, the Ottomans annexed the Great Hungarian Plain and would hold on to it for the next 150 years. In the west and north, a rump of the old kingdom was held together, and a diet of nobles followed through on the marriage contract and duly elected the Habsburg Ferdinand, King of Hungary.

But in the north east, a whole separate diet of Hungarian nobles rejected the Habsburg claim and instead elected one of their own, a guy named Szapolyai János to be the real King of Hungary. János and the Ottomans then allied with each other against Ferdinand, but the failure of the Ottomans to take Vienna in 1529 led to a stalemate setting in. Eventually, high international politics led to a settlement between the two Kings of Hungary. János’ son renounced his claim to be King of Hungary and agreed instead to make himself Prince of Transylvania. Transylvania now being defined basically as the territory outside the control of either the Ottomans or the Habsburgs.

Now on paper, this settlement was an admission that the Principality of Transylvania was a subset of the Crown of Hungary. But in reality, the Princes of Transylvania would continue with their independent rule and alliance with the Ottomans.

Now this era of the collapse and partition of Hungary also happens to coincide with the Reformation, which is not a can of worms I plan to open, except to say that Lutheranism made pretty good inroads into non-Ottoman Hungary, but the areas under Habsburg control were then subject to pretty thorough counter-Reformation tactics that turned most everyone back into Catholics. Independent Transylvania, meanwhile, became a haven for Protestants of various dissenting sects. The upshot being that when Hungary was eventually knit back together, it was going to have quite a grab bag of religions. And religious toleration is going to become a fiercely defended principle of the Hungarian national character. A principle that had to be most fiercely defended against the fiercely Catholic Habsburgs.

Now fast forward a hundred years, and Hungary is still divided in thirds. Though it is about to get put back together, thanks to the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire waging a war on two fronts. To the west, they battled the France of King Louis XIV, and to the east, they set their sights on pushing back the infidel Turks. Hungary would find itself on the front line of both wars.

Plenty of Hungarians were not happy with the Habsburgs, especially in and around the Principality of Transylvania. The most active of these anti-Habsburg nobles was Imre Thököly, who believed he was on the road to becoming King of something he was calling Upper Hungary, basically all non-Ottoman Hungary. Thököly led an active rebellion from 1678 to 1682 and then continued to harbor royal dreams until slowly but surely the Habsburg-led Holy League pushed his Ottoman allies backwards in the late 1680s and early 1690s.

Thököly’s dream of being king of Upper Hungary was destined to remain just a dream, because while the Holy League advanced and pushed the Turks out of Hungary, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I made all kinds of grand proclamations about respecting the old constitutional aristocracy once he had reclaimed and reunited the kingdom. That all sounded pretty good to the Hungarians. And in 1699, the war with the Turks was over. Everyone signed the Treaty of Karlowitz, and the Kingdom of Hungary was officially liberated and reunited.

But that is not the end of this particular saga, because once they pushed the Ottomans out, the Habsburgs decided to treat all the reclaimed territory as essentially virgin land. And this did not sit well with all the family still holding claims to land that had been lost after the Battle of Mohács. Now if you had meticulously preserved stacks of deeds and provided a hefty processing fee, you could maybe get your land back. Maybe. But mostly, the Habsburg plan was to seize all that land and redistribute it to migrants invited in to settle, particularly Slavic groups running away from the retreating Ottomans. This was both to give the Slavs a home, but also to intentionally weaken the power of the Magyars, power which had been so fiercely resistant to the kind of absolutist rule favored by the Habsburgs.

Now this was also the period when the Habsburgs established those military zones I briefly touched on during our tour of the Austrian Empire, which were, yes, meant to form a military wall against the Turks, but they were also meant to set up imperial garrisons on the frontiers of Hungary, in case, you know, they needed to be turned around to deal with internal affairs.

All of this touched off the last great anti-Habsburg insurrection prior to the Revolution of 1848. Now not to get too deep into this, but a young noble named Ferenc Rákóczi was dragged into leading what became something of a war for independence. The stepson of Imre Thököly and descendant of multiple princes of Transylvania, Rákóczi was dragged by the rebellious inhabitants of his own ancestral estates into an anti-Habsburg insurrection that found ready backing from the French, because this is all happening right at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession. At the height of the rebellion at the end of 1703, Rákóczi controlled half the kingdom, but after that his fortune slowly reversed thanks to defeat suffered by his French allies.

But it was a soft landing for him because Austria’s allies, the British and the Dutch, urged them to cut a deal with the Hungarian rebels so that the Austrians could focus on the real enemy, France. A bunch of negotiations later, the Habsburg settled and agreed to respect the old constitutional aristocracy. The conclusion of the Rákóczi rebellion though opens up, for the first time ever mind you, complete Habsburg hegemony over Hungary. The Ottomans were gone, the Principality of Transylvania remained an independent administrative unit of the Crown of Hungary, but it too was now under the Habsburg umbrella. All was finally well with the world, except that as the war of the Spanish Succession was winding down, Habsburg suddenly faced a terrible reality. There might not be a male heir to their line.

Now, when the territories under direct Habsburg rule, the fact that there was no male to inherit all their titles was no big deal. Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI simply decreed the pragmatic sanction, and said a daughter could inherit Austrian hereditary possessions. But in Hungary it took negotiations with the national diet to get them to accept the change, which they finally did in 1723. In return, Charles VI again reconfirmed all the traditions of the constitutional aristocracy, and that the Crown of Hungary would forever remain unified and intact. Thus it was that in 1740 Hungary got its first queen. When Charles VI died, his 23-year-old daughter, the great Empress Maria Theresa, was elected Queen of Hungary. Now though, as I’ve mentioned, she could not become Holy Roman Emperor, she had to rule with her husband as a front. In Hungary, Maria Theresa was sovereign in her own right.

The reign of Maria Theresa began a love-hate relationship between her family and Hungary. First during her own reign, which ran from 1740 to 1780, then under her sons Joseph and Leopold, then her grandson Francis, who would hold the crown until 1835. This brood, remember, was at the epicenter of the movement towards enlightened absolutism, which was predicated on breaking exactly the kind of constitutional aristocracy the Hungarians held so dear.

And it’s not like that constitutional aristocracy was immediately rebellious. Maria Theresa’s succession in 1740 kicked off the War of the Austrian Succession, which saw Europe and the Habsburg realms plunged into chaos, as old enemies and former friends tried to take advantage of the elevation of this 23-year-old woman. In this dangerous mess, Hungary proved to be a rock-solid base of support for their new queen, the national diet voted her money, troops, and material that could honestly be said to have saved her from disaster in the opening days of her reign.

Once truly stable on the throne though, Maria Theresa did her best to rule without the national diets. As her medieval predecessors had done, she ruled through royal decrees and cultivated the loyalty mostly of the wealthy magnates, who she invited to join fully in imperial Viennese society. After the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, Maria Theresa only called two national diets. And on top of that, she was giving the Hungarians plenty to complain about.

She created a free trade zone in the 1750s that included all her hereditary realms, but excluded Hungary. She said it was because the Hungarians paid so little in taxes, but the tariff line that was erected between them and everyone else would be a complaint all the way down to 1848. But that said, it’s not like Maria Theresa didn’t have her complaints too.

After the end of the Seven Years’ War, she called a national diet in 1764 to help re-stabilize the Empire’s finances and could not get the Hungarian nobility to kick in so much as a nickel, even though it was said that two or three of the great magnates, still legally untaxable, remember, could have made up the sum she asked from their pocket change. After the Diet of 1764, it would be 25 years before a Habsburg ruler called another one.

If the Hungarians took the good with the bad with Maria Theresa, it all seemed bad under her son Joseph. Holy Roman Emperor since 1765, he became King of Hungary upon his mother’s death in 1780 and came charging in with every aggressively absolutist reform he could think of. He refused even coronation as King of Hungary, preferring instead to try to become the single ruler of a single unified empire rather than the man with 182 hats. Seizing administrative and financial control of the kingdom, Joseph went so far as to make German the official state language.

The response from Hungary was fierce resistance and a demand that Joseph respect the old constitutional order. When he refused, the magnates started quietly raising forces and talking seditiously with Hungarian officers in the imperial army. They even took meetings with Prussian envoys about possibly ejecting the Habsburgs in favor of a Prussian monarch.

But Joseph conveniently died in 1790 before all of this got out of hand and his more sensible brother Leopold took over. And he came in promising to respect the old constitution and then pretty much undid all of Joseph’s programs. You can bet that the Hungarians are not going to be among those pining for the old Josephist program.

In a diet that met from 1790 to 1791, Leopold’s concessions were all written down, codifying once again the constitutional aristocracy and its tradition that dated all the way back to the Golden Bull of 1222.

But then, inconveniently, Leopold died in 1792 and his son Francis took over. And this is the Francis I, who would be the last Holy Roman Emperor. Francis was as stubbornly absolutist as his uncle Joseph, which was annoying, but by the time of his ascension, the French Revolution was now blotting out everything else. With war on, Francis called annual diets, and with the threat of France looming, the diets gave their new King all the money and men he asked for, though they got very tired of his habit of demanding that they vote first for whatever he asked for before he heard whatever complaints they had and then dissolving the diet the minute he got what he asked for.

As the French Revolutionary Wars became the Napoleonic Wars, the Hungarians were mostly opposed to Napoleon, even if they maybe enjoyed just a little bit watching the Habsburgs get their heads stomped in. The era of the Napoleonic Wars was actually something of a boom time. Not on the front lines, Hungarian grain and cattle were sought after exports and helped turn the landowners away from their traditional conservative modes of life towards more commercially oriented arrangements. Napoleon did his best to remind the Hungarians how much they hated the Habsburgs, but the Hungarians mostly stayed loyal to the Habsburgs, and they were not at all happy when Napoleon peeled off the Kingdom of Croatia and added it to the Illyrian provinces, breaking the old Crown of Hungary.

But all that said, life under the defeated Emperor Francis was becoming intolerable. In clear violation of the Constitution, he jacked up a salt tax without the diet’s permission and then went in for an anti-deflationary paper currency policy that left many in Hungary forced to convert paper for much less than they believed it should have been worth. He also doubled the Hungarian contribution to the state debt without asking their permission. When Francis finally called a new diet in 1811, the Assembly was consumed by angry protests at his conduct, whereupon Francis dissolved them, and refused to call another diet for the next 13 years.

So the fall of Napoleon and the subsequent Congress of Vienna was a mixed bag for Hungary. The wartime boom was over, and they were now solidly in this new Austrian Empire under an emperor who showed little respect for their traditional political constitution and rights that had supposedly been confirmed over and over again by members of his own family.

This led to what we will end this week’s episode on, which is the Reform Era, which properly dates from about 1832, but which started building all through the 1810s and 1820s. Just like every other nationality in Europe, the Hungarians, the Magyars, that is, had been exploring and celebrating their own national heritage, and this really started up when Joseph tried to impose German as the national language on them. They wanted the Magyar language to be the official language of justice and administration. They wanted their ancient privileges restored. Now, very few of these guys spoke of independence from the Habsburgs. Mostly what the Hungarians wanted was to be elevated to a place of proper dignity inside the Austrian Empire, which for them meant political equality with Austria itself.

This all would burst out into the open in the mid-1830s as reformers and patriotic Hungarian nationalists started challenging the insulting pretensions of the Habsburgs. And it did not help that Metternich’s spies were now in their midst, reporting, it seemed, their every thought. None of them shed a tear when Emperor Francis died in 1835, and when he was succeeded by the unfortunate Ferdinand, more than a few Hungarian patriots spied an opportunity to fully restore Hungarian dignity.

So I’m going to leave it off there for now, because I think that’s quite enough to chew on. But this episode wraps up our long circuit of preliminary background that needed to be in place before we could sit back and watch the volcano explode. So next week, or I suppose five days from now, we will tie all these threads back together with a look at the economic and social crisis of the mid-1840s, which included, among other things, the horrifying results of the potato famine.

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