Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0160/01606.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 34KB | 539 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01606}
$Pretitle{365}
$Title{Hungary
Chapter 2A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Eugene K. Keefe}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{hungarian
hungary
hungarians
national
king
power
control
country
political
new}
$Date{1973}
$Log{Fountain at Spa*0160601.scf
}
Country:     Hungary
Book:        Hungary, A Country Study
Author:      Eugene K. Keefe
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1973

Chapter 2A.   Historical Setting

[See Fountain at Spa: Courtesy Embassy of Hungary, Washington DC]

     For long periods in their history the Hungarians have been an oppressed
people trying to escape imperial power and foreign control. On the other hand,
their efforts to control the Carpathian Basin have expressed a determination
to impose a type of Hungarian imperial control. The Hungarians have been
ethnically and linguistically isolated in a region coveted by more powerful
peoples, often in conflict with one another. Before World War II the most
serious and concrete political, cultural, and military threat was posed by the
Germans, but fear of Soviet ambitions led to an accommodation to German
ambitions. Since World War II Hungarian national interests have been affected
by the Soviet military presence and the strong Soviet influence throughout
Eastern Europe.

     Ever since the Hungarians came from the east to the Carpathian Basin
roughly 1,100 years ago, some tension has existed between the original Eastern
cultural heritage and the new Western cultural accretions. The Eastern
heritage is seen most clearly in the national folklore, in the special ways
and means of maintaining life among the rural people, and in the structure of
local communities. The Hungarian amalgam of Eastern and Western traditions and
cultures showed a powerful capacity to bring new peoples into the Hungarian
fold until the rise of counternationalism in the late nineteenth century.

     The problem of national groups or minorities has been a recurrent factor,
especially since the latter part of the nineteenth century. During much of the
past, other peoples had been assimilated into Magyar culture, but in recent
decades the ambition of the Magyars to continue this process in the face of
competing nationalisms has been labeled "chauvinism" or "irredentism." Under
the Communists, efforts have been made to counter such nationalism in the
interest of safeguarding a status quo patterned according to their own
concepts and interests.

     Long periods of the nation's history have been marked by religious
conflict. The politics of the very early period revolved around the conflict
of the original paganism and the acquired Christianity. Paganism was defeated,
but its remnants were preserved in local culture. Later, after the emergence
of Protestantism during the Reformation, a conflict between the Roman Catholic
Church and the new, more national Christianity also developed. The struggle
quickly took on political implications. Since World War II the conflict has
been between the teachings of Christianity and those of communism.

Early History

     The Hungarians, or Magyars, arrived in the Carpathian Basin, that is, the
general area of modern Hungary, at the end of the ninth century A.D. The date
usually ascribed by historians to this migration is 896, but it is likely that
Magyar raiding parties were already familiar with the region from previous
incursions. Before moving into the area that eventually became their new
homeland, the Magyars had lived in the Khazar state, north of the Black Sea,
to which they had earlier migrated, probably from the region between the great
bend of the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. Little is known about the
Magyars before they began the migration that took them south to the Black Sea
and eventually west to the middle Danube River. Their language, which became
modern Hungarian, is of the Finno-Ugric language group and has strong
influences from the Turkic languages with which it came in contact during the
Magyars' indeterminate stay in the Black Sea area. These early Magyars were a
seminomadic pastoral people, who associated in a loose tribal confederation
for offense as well as defense.

     The Finno-Ugric family of languages had over 19 million speakers in 1970,
the majority of whom-over 13 million-were Hungarian. Although Finnish is a
very distant relative of Hungarian, the two languages are not mutually
understandable; neither are the nearest Ugric relatives, such as Vogul (Mansi)
and Ostyak (Khanty), which are spoken by a few thousand herdsmen and fishermen
living in Siberia. During the migrations of the early Magyars, their language
was influenced by contacts with Turkic peoples and later incorporated
loanwords from the Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages.

     The Magyars were merely one among many of the warlike, nomadic hordes
that swept into Europe from the East, bent on conquest and plunder. Their
warriors were as competent at fighting from horseback as were the Huns who
preceded them or the Mongols who came later; but the Magyars were not as
numerous as these other hordes nor, it would seem, did their leaders entertain
the grandiose schemes of conquest that motivated such men as Attila the Hun or
Genghis Khan. The seven tribes that easily and rapidly defeated the Slavs and
other peoples living around the middle course of the Danube River in A.D. 896
were led by Arpad, an elected chieftain. Although Arpad was a tribal chieftain
rather than a king, his successors later became kings of Hungary, and the
Arpad dynasty lasted until the male line died out at the beginning of the
fourteenth century.

     For the first few decades after settling along the Danube, the Hungarian
tribes seemed to consider the area more as a base of operations than a new
homeland. The majority of the people maintained the seminomadic existence they
had known in the East-moving with their herds from mountain pastures in summer
to milder lowlands in winter. In the meantime, marauding armies of the tribes
swept from Constantinople to the North Sea and from southern Italy to the
Pyrenees Mountains, returning with booty and slaves but instilling fear and
incurring wrath in the countries they invaded. Finally, the Hungarians
suffered a catastrophic defeat by a coalition of forces of the Holy Roman
Empire. The defeat at Augsburg proved to be a turning point in Hungarian
history as the tribes ceased their depredations and became more sedentary
along the waterways of the Carpathian Basin. After giving up their incursions
into the territories of other peoples, the Hungarians themselves endured
centuries of invasions and incursions as their adopted land proved to be a
crossroads for Eastern hordes moving into Europe as well as for Germanic
forces raiding the Balkans.

     In A.D. 972 Prince Geza, great-grandson of Arpad, became the leader of
the entire Hungarian confederation and succeeded in curbing the power of the
individual tribal chieftains. Geza, recognizing that a pagan nation surrounded
by the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity would be in constant danger
and fearing domination from the East, admitted missionaries from the West and
permitted his son, Istvan (Stephen), to be baptized a Roman Catholic.
Stephen's later marriage to a Bavarian princess, the conversion to Roman
Catholicism of the Hungarian people, and the development of a Latin alphabet
for the Magyar language solidified the Western orientation of the country.

     When Geza died, Stephen became ruling chieftain and worked strenuously to
erase paganism among his people, to convert them to Roman Catholicism, and to
resist any encroachment by the Eastern Orthodox Church. As a reward Stephen
received a crown from the pope (a story doubted by some modern historians but
indelibly inscribed in Hungarian tradition) and, about the year A.D. 1000,
became the first king of Hungary. Stephen was later canonized by the Roman
Catholic Church and, as Saint Stephen, became the most famous king in
Hungarian his