Category Archives: military

by | 26 December 2023 · 5:08 am

The Bishop and the Navajo “Long Walk”

From Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (Project Gutenberg, 2023; Knopf, 1927), Book 9, Chapter 7:

THE Bishop’s middle years in New Mexico had been clouded by the persecution of the Navajos and their expulsion from their own country. Through his friendship with Eusabio he had become interested in the Navajos soon after he first came to his new diocese, and he admired them; they stirred his imagination. Though this nomad people were much slower to adopt white man’s ways than the homestaying Indians who dwelt in pueblos, and were much more indifferent to missionaries and the white man’s religion, Father Latour felt a superior strength in them. There was purpose and conviction behind their inscrutable reserve; something active and quick, something with an edge. The expulsion of the Navajos from their country, which had been theirs no man knew how long, had seemed to him an injustice that cried to Heaven. Never could he forget that terrible winter when they were being hunted down and driven by thousands from their own reservation to the Bosque Redondo, three hundred miles away on the Pecos River. Hundreds of them, men, women, and children, perished from hunger and cold on the way; their sheep and horses died from exhaustion crossing the mountains. None ever went willingly; they were driven by starvation and the bayonet; captured in isolated bands, and brutally deported.

It was his own misguided friend, Kit Carson, who finally subdued the last unconquered remnant of that people; who followed them into the depths of the Canyon de Chelly, whither they had fled from their grazing plains and pine forests to make their last stand. They were shepherds, with no property but their live-stock, encumbered by their women and children, poorly armed and with scanty ammunition. But this canyon had always before proved impenetrable to white troops. The Navajos believed it could not be taken. They believed that their old gods dwelt in the fastnesses of that canyon; like their Shiprock, it was an inviolate place, the very heart and centre of their life.

Carson followed them down into the hidden world between those towering walls of red sandstone, spoiled their stores, destroyed their deep-sheltered corn-fields, cut down the terraced peach orchards so dear to them. When they saw all that was sacred to them laid waste, the Navajos lost heart. They did not surrender; they simply ceased to fight, and were taken. Carson was a soldier under orders, and he did a soldier’s brutal work. But the bravest of the Navajo chiefs he did not capture. Even after the crushing defeat of his people in the Canyon de Chelly, Manuelito was still at large. It was then that Eusabio came to Santa Fé to ask Bishop Latour to meet Manuelito at Zuñi. As a priest, the Bishop knew that it was indiscreet to consent to a meeting with this outlawed chief; but he was a man, too, and a lover of justice. The request came to him in such a way that he could not refuse it. He went with Eusabio.

Though the Government was offering a heavy reward for his person, living or dead, Manuelito rode off his own reservation down into Zuñi in broad daylight, attended by some dozen followers, all on wretched, half-starved horses. He had been in hiding out in Eusabio’s country on the Colorado Chiquito.

It was Manuelito’s hope that the Bishop would go to Washington and plead his people’s cause before they were utterly destroyed. They asked nothing of the Government, he told Father Latour, but their religion, and their own land where they had lived from immemorial times. Their country, he explained, was a part of their religion; the two were inseparable. The Canyon de Chelly the Padre knew; in that canyon his people had lived when they were a small weak tribe; it had nourished and protected them; it was their mother. Moreover, their gods dwelt there—in those inaccessible white houses set in caverns up in the face of the cliffs, which were older than the white man’s world, and which no living man had ever entered. Their gods were there, just as the Padre’s God was in his church.

And north of the Canyon de Chelly was the Shiprock, a slender crag rising to a dizzy height, all alone out on a flat desert. Seen at a distance of fifty miles or so, that crag presents the figure of a one-masted fishing-boat under full sail, and the white man named it accordingly. But the Indian has another name; he believes that rock was once a ship of the air. Ages ago, Manuelito told the Bishop, that crag had moved through the air, bearing upon its summit the parents of the Navajo race from the place in the far north where all peoples were made,—and wherever it sank to earth was to be their land. It sank in a desert country, where it was hard for men to live. But they had found the Canyon de Chelly, where there was shelter and unfailing water. That canyon and the Shiprock were like kind parents to his people, places more sacred to them than churches, more sacred than any place is to the white man. How, then, could they go three hundred miles away and live in a strange land?

Moreover, the Bosque Redondo was down on the Pecos, far east of the Rio Grande. Manuelito drew a map in the sand, and explained to the Bishop how, from the very beginning, it had been enjoined that his people must never cross the Rio Grande on the east, or the Rio San Juan on the north, or the Rio Colorado on the west; if they did, the tribe would perish. If a great priest, like Father Latour, were to go to Washington and explain these things, perhaps the Government would listen.

Father Latour tried to tell the Indian that in a Protestant country the one thing a Roman priest could not do was to interfere in matters of Government. Manuelito listened respectfully, but the Bishop saw that he did not believe him. When he had finished, the Navajo rose and said:

“You are the friend of Cristobal, who hunts my people and drives them over the mountains to the Bosque Redondo. Tell your friend that he will never take me alive. He can come and kill me when he pleases. Two years ago I could not count my flocks; now I have thirty sheep and a few starving horses. My children are eating roots, and I do not care for my life. But my mother and my gods are in the West, and I will never cross the Rio Grande.”

He never did cross it. He lived in hiding until the return of his exiled people. For an unforeseen thing happened:

The Bosque Redondo proved an utterly unsuitable country for the Navajos. It could have been farmed by irrigation, but they were nomad shepherds, not farmers. There was no pasture for their flocks. There was no firewood; they dug mesquite roots and dried them for fuel. It was an alkaline country, and hundreds of Indians died from bad water. At last the Government at Washington admitted its mistake—which governments seldom do. After five years of exile, the remnant of the Navajo people were permitted to go back to their sacred places.

In 1875 the Bishop took his French architect on a pack trip into Arizona to show him something of the country before he returned to France, and he had the pleasure of seeing the Navajo horsemen riding free over their great plains again. The two Frenchmen went as far as the Canyon de Chelly to behold the strange cliff ruins; once more crops were growing down at the bottom of the world between the towering sandstone walls; sheep were grazing under the magnificent cottonwoods and drinking at the streams of sweet water; it was like an Indian Garden of Eden.

Now, when he was an old man and ill, scenes from those bygone times, dark and bright, flashed back to the Bishop: the terrible faces of the Navajos waiting at the place on the Rio Grande where they were being ferried across into exile; the long streams of survivors going back to their own country, driving their scanty flocks, carrying their old men and their children. Memories, too, of that time he had spent with Eusabio on the Little Colorado, in the early spring, when the lambing season was not yet over,—dark horsemen riding across the sands with orphan lambs in their arms—a young Navajo woman, giving a lamb her breast until a ewe was found for it.

“Bernard,” the old Bishop would murmur, “God has been very good to let me live to see a happy issue to those old wrongs. I do not believe, as I once did, that the Indian will perish. I believe that God will preserve him.”

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by | 24 December 2023 · 8:50 am

Bishop and Vicar in Navajo Country

From Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (Project Gutenberg, 2023; Knopf, 1927), Book 7, Chapter 3:

Although Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant were born in neighbouring parishes in the Puy-de-Dôm, as children they had not known each other. The Latours were an old family of scholars and professional men, while the Vaillants were people of a much humbler station in the provincial world. Besides, little Joseph had been away from home much of the time, up on the farm in the Volvic mountains with his grandfather, where the air was especially pure, and the country quiet salutary for a child of nervous temperament. The two boys had not come together until they were Seminarians at Montferrand, in Clermont.

When Jean Marie was in his second year at the Seminary, he was standing on the recreation ground one day at the opening of the term, looking with curiosity at the new students. In the group, he noticed one of peculiarly unpromising appearance; a boy of nineteen who was undersized, very pale, homely in feature, with a wart on his chin and tow-coloured hair that made him look like a German. This boy seemed to feel his glance, and came up at once, as if he had been called. He was apparently quite unconscious of his homeliness, was not at all shy, but intensely interested in his new surroundings. He asked Jean Latour his name, where he came from, and his father’s occupation. Then he said with great simplicity:

“My father is a baker, the best in Riom. In fact, he’s a remarkable baker.”

Young Latour was amused, but expressed polite appreciation of this confidence. The queer lad went on to tell him about his brother and his aunt, and his clever little sister, Philomène. He asked how long Latour had been at the Seminary.

“Have you always intended to take orders? So have I, but I very nearly went into the army instead.”

The year previous, after the surrender of Algiers, there had been a military review at Clermont, a great display of uniforms and military bands, and stirring speeches about the glory of French arms. Young Joseph Vaillant had lost his head in the excitement, and had signed up for a volunteer without consulting his father. He gave Latour a vivid account of his patriotic emotions, of his father’s displeasure, and his own subsequent remorse. His mother had wished him to become a priest. She died when he was thirteen, and ever since then he had meant to carry out her wish and to dedicate his life to the service of the Divine Mother. But that one day, among the bands and the uniforms, he had forgotten everything but his desire to serve France.

Suddenly young Vaillant broke off, saying that he must write a letter before the hour was over, and tucking up his gown he ran away at full speed. Latour stood looking after him, resolved that he would take this new boy under his protection. There was something about the baker’s son that had given their meeting the colour of an adventure; he meant to repeat it. In that first encounter, he chose the lively, ugly boy for his friend. It was instantaneous. Latour himself was much cooler and more critical in temper; hard to please, and often a little grey in mood.

During their Seminary years he had easily surpassed his friend in scholarship, but he always realized that Joseph excelled him in the fervour of his faith. After they became missionaries, Joseph had learned to speak English, and later, Spanish, more readily than he. To be sure, he spoke both languages very incorrectly at first, but he had no vanity about grammar or refinement of phrase. To communicate with peons, he was quite willing to speak like a peon.

Though the Bishop had worked with Father Joseph for twenty-five years now, he could not reconcile the contradictions of his nature. He simply accepted them, and, when Joseph had been away for a long while, realized that he loved them all. His Vicar was one of the most truly spiritual men he had ever known, though he was so passionately attached to many of the things of this world. Fond as he was of good eating and drinking, he not only rigidly observed all the fasts of the Church, but he never complained about the hardness and scantiness of the fare on his long missionary journeys. Father Joseph’s relish for good wine might have been a fault in another man. But always frail in body, he seemed to need some quick physical stimulant to support his sudden flights of purpose and imagination. Time and again the Bishop had seen a good dinner, a bottle of claret, transformed into spiritual energy under his very eyes. From a little feast that would make other men heavy and desirous of repose, Father Vaillant would rise up revived, and work for ten or twelve hours with that ardour and thoroughness which accomplished such lasting results.

The Bishop had often been embarrassed by his Vicar’s persistence in begging for the parish, for the Cathedral fund and the distant missions. Yet for himself, Father Joseph was scarcely acquisitive to the point of decency. He owned nothing in the world but his mule, Contento. Though he received rich vestments from his sister in Riom, his daily apparel was rough and shabby. The Bishop had a large and valuable library, at least, and many comforts for his house. There were his beautiful skins and blankets—presents from Eusabio and his other Indian friends. The Mexican women, skilled in needlework and lace-making and hem-stitching, presented him with fine linen for his person, his bed, and his table. He had silver plate, given him by the Olivares and others of his rich parishioners. But Father Vaillant was like the saints of the early Church, literally without personal possessions.

In his youth, Joseph had wished to lead a life of seclusion and solitary devotion; but the truth was, he could not be happy for long without human intercourse. And he liked almost everyone. In Ohio, when they used to travel together in stagecoaches, Father Latour had noticed that every time a new passenger pushed his way into the already crowded stage, Joseph would look pleased and interested, as if this were an agreeable addition—whereas he himself felt annoyed, even if he concealed it. The ugly conditions of life in Ohio had never troubled Joseph. The hideous houses and churches, the ill-kept farms and gardens, the slovenly, sordid aspect of the towns and country-side, which continually depressed Father Latour, he seemed scarcely to perceive. One would have said he had no feeling for comeliness or grace. Yet music was a passion with him. In Sandusky it had been his delight to spend evening after evening with his German choir-master, training the young people to sing Bach oratorios.

Nothing one could say of Father Vaillant explained him. The man was much greater than the sum of his qualities. He added a glow to whatever kind of human society he was dropped down into. A Navajo hogan, some abjectly poor little huddle of Mexican huts, or a company of Monsignori and Cardinals at Rome—it was all the same.

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by | 18 December 2023 · 10:58 am

Habsburg Revenge on Hungary, 1849

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 159-160:

Tsar Nicholas I – at least in public – urged the teenage Austrian emperor to show magnanimity to the defeated ‘rebels’. But Franz Jozsef, or his chief adviser, Prince Schwarzenberg, was in no mood for leniency. The savagery of Habsburg retribution against Hungary shocked Europe.

At dawn on 6 October 1849 Lajos Batthyány, the first Prime Minister of revolutionary Hungary, was dragged to the courtyard of the main military barracks in Pest. He had been held prisoner since the end of July and was sentenced to hang for treason by a court martial – even though it was established at his trial that he had argued against Hungary declaring independence precisely on the grounds that it could be seen as treasonous. He was too weak to stand or walk so he had to be carried from his cell to the place of execution; three days earlier he had tried to cut his throat with a knife smuggled into the jail by his wife. It was seen as a dishonour for a nobleman to die by hanging, therefore he had done what he could to avoid the shame. The prison infirmary had saved his life so that he was fit enough to be killed. In what was described as an act of leniency, the court changed its sentence to death by firing squad. He was shot sitting on a chair. He refused to have his eyes covered by a blindfold – and he himself gave the order for the execution squad to fire. Like a true Hungarian aristocrat, he spoke in words from three languages ‘Allez Jäger, eljén a Haza’ (Long Live the Fatherland). His body lay in public at the scene of the execution for a day and a half – in what is now Szabadság tér (Liberty Square) in the heart of Budapest opposite the US Embassy, almost exactly on the spot where a more than life-size, awkward-looking statue of President Ronald Reagan has stood since the 1990s. On the same morning in Arad, Transylvania, now part of Romania, twelve Honvédség generals and a colonel were hanged. The date is one of the most important public holidays in Hungary.

General Baron Ludwig von Haynau was despatched to Budapest by the emperor and Schwarzenberg to teach ‘the Hungarians a lesson they will never forget’. He took up the challenge with alacrity. ‘I am the man who will restore order. I shall have hundreds shot, with a clear conscience,’ he told the General Staff in Vienna. The illegitimate son of Elector Wilhelm I of Hesse-Kassel, he was more widely known as the ‘Butcher of Brescia’ for the atrocities he had carried out in Lombardy, including the public flogging of women and girls he had accused of sedition, and the execution of a priest who was dragged from the altar of his church by soldiers directly to the gallows.

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by | 12 December 2023 · 5:15 am

Royal Hungary, Religious Battleground

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 72-74:

After the Battle of Mohács, the old Hungary split into three. The Turks kept direct control of Buda, the other fortress towns downriver along the Danube, and a broad swathe of central and southern Hungary (Transdanubia) that gave them an unimpeded route back through the Balkans to Constantinople. Transylvania – then comprising a vast area much bigger than Hungary now – was semi-independent, but the Ottomans demanded ultimate authority and large amounts of money and goods every year as tribute. If the Ottomans received those, they left the Transylvanians alone to govern themselves. The third part, so-called Royal Hungary, was Habsburg-ruled and comprised most of western Hungary, Slavonia, around two-thirds of Croatia, Slovakia and part of eastern Hungary, including the ancient city of Debrecen – altogether about 1.2 million people.

…

Life was no better for most of the people in Royal Hungary. Under both the rival empires survival was a struggle, as ‘Habsburg mercenaries and their Turkish adversaries marched and counter-marched through the borderlands, leaving devastation in their wake’, as a contemporary historian recorded. In some ways it was worse in Royal Hungary than in Buda, where at least the Turks left people to worship as they pleased: all Christians were infidel, though as ‘people of the book’ they were tolerated. But Hungary became one of the chief battlegrounds in the series of religious wars that split Christian Europe apart during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Reformation had gained ground in Hungary with astonishing speed – for obvious spiritual reasons, and liturgical ones because of the use of the vernacular language in worship and especially as an expression of resentment against foreign domination, whether Habsburg or Turkish. By 1600 more than three-quarters of the Hungarian population had embraced one or other of the reformist Churches – mostly Lutheran in Royal Hungary and in Transylvania a version of Calvinism, though not quite as rigorous. After Geneva the Transylvanian town of Kolozsvár (now Cluj in Romania) had the earliest Calvinist university in the world.

The Habsburgs saw themselves, in the words of Emperor Charles V, as the ‘spear point of the faith’ and they led the fight for the true Church: the Counter-Reformation. For the Austrians, the Holy Roman Empire, unity in Christendom under the papacy (and of course the Habsburgs) was more important than crusades against the Ottomans.

The Hungarians were regarded not only as heretics but as rebels against the Empire who needed to be put in their place. The prelate placed in charge of re-Catholicizing the troublemakers, Péter Pázmány, boasted of how he ‘would make of the Hungarian first a slave, then a beggar and finally a Roman Catholic’. The soldier put in charge of pacifying them was a famous Italian mercenary and Imperial general, Raimondo Montecuccoli, who loathed the Hungarians: ‘It is impossible to keep these ungrateful, unbending and rebellious people within bounds by reasoning with them, nor can they be won over by tolerance or ruled by law. One must fear a nation that knows no fear. That is why its will must be broken with a rod of iron and the people sternly kept in their place….’ It was a view shared by the majority of the Austrian Habsburgs and all the members of the Imperial council.

All of the wealthiest Hungarian magnates, who owned most of the land, abandoned Turkish-controlled Hungary and threw in their lot with the Habsburgs. In reward for staying loyal and Catholic they were given more lavish Imperial titles and allowed to keep their feudal prerogatives. The emperor made around sixty of them counts and turned some into super-magnates with the title ‘hereditary prince’, like the Pálffy, Nádasdy, Esterházy, Wesselényi, Forgách and Csáky families. This new upper class would be in charge in Hungary, apart from a very brief interlude of revolution, into the twentieth century. They paid no taxes, continued to own serfs and some increased their wealth vastly during the division of Hungary. The emperor gave the nobles rights to claim increased labour dues, or robot.

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by | 10 December 2023 · 6:09 am

Ottoman Rule in Budun

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 64, 67-69:

Almost every time I visit Budapest, the first place I go is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of old cobbled streets, halfway up Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) on the Buda side of the river. Here is the graceful white mausoleum of Gül Baba, a Dervish Muslim holy man of the sixteenth century, a favourite of Suleiman the Magnificent, who oversaw the Bektashi order of monks entrusted with the spiritual welfare of the Janissaries. Mid-morning there is usually nobody about in the surrounding lanes – Ankara utca, Mecset (mosque) utca, Török (Turk) utca, Gül Baba utca – one of the most expensive residential neighbourhoods in Budapest. In April, after the frosts have melted away, the graceful stone tomb is surrounded by the scent of violets. A month or so later come the roses of Rózsadomb, pink damascenas mainly, said to have been brought to Buda by Gül Baba. Whether that is true or not, the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy when you consider the ways other imperial masters who conquered Hungary have left their mark on Budapest – Hitler’s Nazis, say, or Stalin’s commissars. Sitting on a bench at Rózsadomb gazing at the sweep of the Danube is a healthy place for a historian to loaf and think.

…

Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well. In the market, pork and wine were sold in the Christian-owned stalls, lamb, sherbet and coffee in the Turkish ones. The latter was one of the few things that the ‘infidel’ non-Muslims took a liking to straight away, though at first it was expensive; this was the birth of the Middle European coffee house that later would become so supremely important in the culture of Budapest.

In general, trade in everything was poor, for demand was so low. Vineyards in the Buda Hills rotted, so locals learned to use varieties of vegetable, for example corn, which flourished from the sixteenth century on. The main problem was that Buda’s population fell continuously over the 150 years of Ottoman occupation: the birth rate went down sharply, and over generations families left in order to better themselves, whether to Royal Hungary or to Transylvania. The drop was dramatic immediately after Mohács, and continued. Turkish figures registered a fall in tax-paying households throughout their Hungarian domains from 58,742 in 1577 to only 12,527 in 1663. At one point in the 1620s the German and Magyar population of Budun was not much more than 2,000. The Turkish garrison rose and fell depending on military operations in the Balkans, but the average was around 4,000. There were never more than 1,000 Turkish officials, traders and craftsmen living in the town. Besides the pashas, who were army commanders, magistrates and chief executives rolled into one, the most important Turkish official was the defter – the tax collector. As time went on, during the occupation they learned to be flexible. They did not wish to destroy the westernmost and most prosperous colony in Europe, but wanted to profit from it. They had no interest in overturning habits and customs.

One group benefited greatly from Ottoman rule. The Turkish occupation brought benefits for the Jews. Many sought refuge from the neighbouring Habsburg lands, where pogroms were common – or Transylvania, where Calvinism grew strong and the Jews were treated equally badly, if not worse. Many families had come from much further away in the Balkans, which were even poorer. In the 1580s the Jews formed around 20 per cent of Buda’s ‘Hungarian’ population. By the 1680s there were more than 1,000 Jews in Buda. The Turks allowed them freedom to worship – there were three synagogues in Buda by the middle of the seventeenth century – freedom to form communal groups and a measure of legal autonomy. The Ottomans, though, demanded high taxes, even higher than the Christian rulers had imposed. The Turks used the Jews for commerce; they ran the lucrative trade routes along the Danube eastwards from Buda across Turkish domains. The pashas of Buda often intervened on the side of Jews in cases where they had been wronged by Hungarian Christians. Jews would repay the Turks by aiding their defence of Buda against the Habsburgs in sporadic attempts to retake the town. And when the Austrians eventually succeeded, the Jews would pay a heavy price.

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by | 9 December 2023 · 5:55 am

Hungary’s Largest Peasant Revolt, 1514

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 59-60:

Finally, in 1514, after Ottoman troop movements into Serbia, the Pope, Leo X, and Tamás Bakócz, the Archbishop of Esztergom, declared a crusade against the Ottomans and money was raised from most of the European capitals to finance an army to halt the Turks’ advance. King Louis II of Hungary [incl. Croatia] raised a force reported to be 40,000-strong, mostly peasants untrained in warfare, under an experienced soldier from the lesser nobility, György Dózsa. He was joined by a number of evangelical priests and friars. Most of the Hungarian barons had no appetite for the campaign, resented the loss of the serfs’ labour on their land at harvest time and were deeply suspicious about permitting a peasant army to roam around Hungary. Rightly so as it turned out.

The majority of the peers in the royal council pressed the archbishop and the Vatican to call off the crusade even before it had properly begun. But Dózsa’s army refused to disband and the crusade against the infidels turned into the biggest peasants’ revolt in Hungarian history.

There had occasionally been eruptions of unrest among peasants, but Hungary’s feudalism was among the most entrenched anywhere. In the sixteenth century, when in most of Western Europe serfdom had all but disappeared, it remained strong in Hungary. Dózsa was a skilful soldier and titular leader of the rebellion. But the real inspiration that under Catholic dogma would condemn the rebels’ souls to eternal perdition were revolutionary priests, the best known of whom was a fiery preacher, Lőrinc Mészáros. After months of savage fighting, burning and looting on the way, Dózsa’s army seized control of the Great Hungarian Plain and a few towns in south-eastern Hungary and in Transylvania. For months they lay siege to Temesvár (present-day Timișoara in Romania), but never managed to capture and hold the town. That was the high point of their success. They were finally beaten in the autumn of 1514 by an army led by János Zápolya, the voivode (chieftain) of Transylvania.

The magnates, safely back in untrammelled power, exacted vicious revenge. Dózsa was hauled to Buda in chains, enthroned on a flaming stake and a red-hot crown was placed on his head – as ‘King’ of the peasants. Several of his leading supporters were forced to eat his roasting flesh before they too were executed, as a warning to any others who might want to ‘destroy the natural order’, as the Archbishop of Esztergom put it. Several of the priests who took part in the rebellion were hanged, including Mészáros.

The direct consequences of Dózsa’s revolt lasted well into the nineteenth century. Extreme measures were taken by the landlords and gentry against the peasantry ‘to punish them for their faithlessness’. They were condemned to ‘perpetual servitude’, banned from any right to migration, any access to legal rights and denied the right to own land. A new tax was imposed of one gold florin, twelve chickens and two geese a year as compensation for the damage the rebellion had caused. Landlords were given the right to claim one day a week’s unpaid labour. Serfdom continued in Hungary until 1848.

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by | 7 December 2023 · 6:01 am

Budapest in 1896

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 12-14:

In 1896 Budapest was the largest city of mills in the world (rivalled at that time only by Minneapolis). Wheat from the great plains of Hungary and other parts of the Balkans was turned into flour in the mills of Budapest. Many of the successful entrepreneurs who began their business lives as grain traders became mill owners and then diversified. Budapest was by far the busiest port on the Danube. The (mostly nationalized) Hungarian river transport company, MFTR, had overtaken the Austrian equivalent more than thirty years earlier and was thriving. A pleasant daily Budapest–Vienna overnight journey on white paddle steamers was highly popular until the 1920s. Trains between the two cities were fast – four and a quarter hours in 1896. In 2022 it was three hours and thirty-five minutes.

Budapest finance caught up and surpassed the growth of agricultural and industrial production. By 1900 Budapest became the banking centre of Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1867, the date of the ‘Compromise’ which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and 1914 the number of Hungarian banks grew from eleven to 160 and their capitalization increased fivefold. A few of them – the First Hungarian Commercial Bank and the Hungarian Credit Bank – rivalled the biggest Viennese and German banks in size and prestige, as their palatial headquarter buildings in downtown Budapest, designed by the most renowned European and Hungarian architects, showed. Their owners, such as the Wolianders, the Wahrmanns, Hatvany-Deutsch and Chorins, joined the European super-rich.

Sixty per cent of the Hungarian manufacturing industry was based in Budapest, from small enterprises to the giant Manfréd Weiss works, which employed more than 5,000 workers by 1913 in a vast factory complex on Csepel Island in the Danube, just north of the city. The factory exported munitions to Spain, Mexico and Britain, whose forces would soon be using them in a war against Austria-Hungary.

Little suggested that the unprecedented boom would not continue. Tekla Szilard, the mother of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leo Szilard, who would later flee Budapest from fascism and work on the Manhattan Project that designed and built the first nuclear bomb, described her mood on her wedding day, 25 April 1897, and ‘the boundless optimism we all feel…The city was growing by leaps and bounds. I felt as though this was my progress…my development.’ But some prescient people were more wary about the pace of change and thought of what was left behind. Krúdy wrote in 1900 about his beloved Budapest: ‘They kept on building every day, palaces topped by towers rising towards the sun; and at night it seemed there were endless burials…of the town’s broken matter, of old people and old houses, of old streets and old customs.’

Within a generation much of this new wealth, optimism and confidence would disappear. In the millennium year Hungary was nearly three times the size it would be just twenty-five years later and its population around 50 per cent higher. Most of present-day Croatia and Slovakia, a third of Romania and a large slice of Serbia were all part of Greater Hungary. It possessed a busy seaport [Trieste] on the Adriatic with a busy merchant navy. Then the disaster of the First World War struck and Zweig’s World of Yesterday came to an end. Hungary has never recovered from the shock.

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by | 5 December 2023 · 7:31 am

The Restoration’s Brutal Repressions

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 334-335:

The success of [Samuel Butler’s] Hudibras reminds us that Restoration culture, in its fun-loving hedonism, was also about the defeat of Puritanism. As much as Charles talked about forgetting the past, there were plenty who were quite willing to rake up the radicalism of the Republic and remind people of the days when Christmas was banned and the theatres were shut, and soldiers stomped up and down the country closing horse races and fining people for their loyalty to the king. Hudibras was a way of crowing about this. The culture war, that we saw at the start of the century in events like the Cartmel wedding, had been won. Puritanism had been cast out. Momus’s day had come and gone. Merry England was back.

But Pepys is a reminder that there was more to it than this. We think of Charles as a ‘Merry Monarch’, given over to celebration and parties, to theatre and pleasures of the flesh. It’s not a false view as such, but it obscures a lot. For Dissenters, especially Quakers, his reign was one of brutal oppression, harder than anything experienced by the Puritans under his father. In its controls on the press, his government tried to stop the mouths of the English people once more.

The legacy of the Republic remained. Puritanism may have been defeated politically, but it lived on in the dissenting tradition which became such an important element to English religion – and indeed eventually political – culture. Meanwhile, the degree to which the constitutional issues of the earlier seventeenth century had been resolved was quite unclear. Technically, now, the vast majority of revenue came from Parliament, though the king might try and circumvent this by seeking other sources. Taxes on trade, for example, specifically the customs and excise, were increasingly lucrative, and yet were subject to less Parliamentary control than direct taxes because they tended to be granted for the life of the monarch.

The idea of a standing army was now, thanks to the Civil Wars and to Cromwell and his Protectorate, even more anathema to English sensibilities. Yet the realities of European geopolitics, in which armies were generally becoming much bigger and more professional, meant that it would be hard to maintain the country’s clout without one. The press and public opinion were not going away. The world of pamphlets and coffeehouse politics was here to stay. Finally, the country’s religion remained unsettled. The apparent supremacy of Anglicanism masked the resilience of Dissent. More to the point, while in exile both Charles and his brother James had been surrounded by Catholic influences. The nightmare scenario, perhaps, was a king trying to use his prerogative powers to promote Catholicism and to build a standing army that he could use to cow opposition, all funded by indirect taxes – or even a pension from a foreign monarch – while Parliament lay sidelined.

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by | 4 December 2023 · 9:54 am

Military and Religious Reconciliation, 1661

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 327-328:

The Army was mostly all pensioned off: a poll tax and a new assessment ordered in the summer saw to that. The king was provided with apparently bounteous revenue of £1.2 million a year from customs and excise, allowing him to retain Monck’s regiment of foot, now named the Coldstream Guards after his base while he waited on the Border the previous year, and still wearing the old red coats of the New Model. The old lands of Crown and Church were clawed back, though often with due compensation given. Meanwhile, Royalists who’d seen their lands confiscated during the last regime had them restored, although the decision to ratify all legal proceedings during the Republic meant that any lands they’d had to sell – for example, to pay the decimation tax – were now probably gone for good. It was a point that generated much bitterness among the old Cavaliers.

Meanwhile, the old episcopal church was reinstated. In the immediate months following the Restoration, many parishes went back to the old liturgy, buying copies of the Book of Common Prayer even though there was widespread expectation that a new version would soon be produced. Returning bishops were cheered and copies of the Solemn League and Covenant, which had been a key reason for their abolition, were enthusiastically burned. The cathedrals were in a parlous state: Durham had seen use as a prison, St Paul’s as a stable and a marketplace. Bishops’ palaces at Chester, Salisbury and Exeter had been converted into (respectively) a gaol, a tavern and a sugar factory. But funds were found, and within a couple of years, the old cathedrals were resplendent once more.

Initially there were moves towards a compromise with Presbyterians, potentially ‘comprehending’ them within the Church of England, i.e. granting enough latitude within official Church practice to allow them to worship within it. But Parliament voted comprehension down. In fact, England was about to take a dramatic swing towards a more restrictive Church. Perhaps this was always going to happen. But partly, too, it was a reaction to the events of January 1661, when, the same month in which the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were dug up, a quixotic rising by Fifth Monarchists broke out in London, with shouts for ‘King Jesus, and the Heads upon the Gates!’ It was led by one Thomas Venner, and ended in a brief occupation of St Paul’s, a clampdown by the Coldstream Guards and 14 executions. A new round-up of Quakers and other undesirables followed, prompting – incidentally – George Fox to write a stirring tract declaring that his Quakers would utterly renounce war and violence. Given they had made up many of the ranks of the Republic’s army, this was some about-turn, though the principle has since become one that defines the movement.

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by | 3 December 2023 · 5:31 am

Rejoicing and Reprisals, 1660

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 323-325:

The month of May 1660 would be remembered as one of the most joyous in English history. ‘[A]ll the world,’ wrote Pepys, was ‘in a merry mood because of the King’s coming.’ The return of Charles, brought back by Monck’s fleet, was celebrated with maypoles, church bells and bonfires. From his landing at Dover on the 25th to his entrance to London on the 29th, the restored king was met by cheering crowds. Some 120,000 were said to have greeted him at Blackheath. In London, his entourage took seven hours to pass through. The streets became a kaleidoscope of tapestries and flowers; there were fountains flowing with wine. Oliver Cromwell, and his widow Elizabeth, were burned in effigy on a Westminster bonfire. After the austerity of the Puritan republic, it was a time for riotous celebration. According to Marchamont Nedham, seething at what he saw as the credulousness of the people, the return of the king was widely expected to bring ‘peace and no taxes’.

The rejoicing, though, was stained with reprisals. Within a day, the king was forced to issue a proclamation against ‘debauched and profane persons, who, on pretence of regard to the King, revile and threaten others’ (or simply sat in taverns and tippling houses drinking endless healths). Independent congregations suffered abuse, as did those ministers who’d taken the place of clergy ejected by the Republic. Quakers were attacked in at least 15 counties.

…

The immediate priority was a Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, which sought to draw a line under the previous troubles. But there were debates about how far forgiveness should go. William Prynne, for example, thirsty for revenge, specifically argued that Francis Thorpe, the lawyer whose speech at York had set out the case for the Republic back in 1649, should be executed. Thorpe had already petitioned the king for a pardon on the grounds that he had opposed the regicide, had not bought any Crown lands and had been gentle on the Royalist rebels of 1655. He had allies in the Commons, too, and Prynne’s vindictiveness found little support. In the end, though, some of the more egregious republicans were exempted from pardon, with some 33 men specifically singled out for punishment. The 33 were mostly regicides who had sought to evade capture, particularly those who were not lucky enough to have powerful friends. Eleven were already in custody.

Thus, finally, things were set for the third and final act. After the April elections and the return of the king came the revenge.

In October, during Parliamentary recess, all 11 were tried. Only one witness was considered necessary for each act of supposed treason, but then, with the evidence there in plain sight, maybe such niceties didn’t matter. Six signatories to the death warrant, together with the lawyer John Cooke and the preacher Hugh Peter, suffered hanging, drawing and quartering at Charing Cross (two of Charles’s guards, Daniel Axtell and Francis Hacker, were executed at Tyburn). The butchered men were defiant to the end: one of them even managed to land a punch on his executioner. Thomas Harrison, when the crowd taunted him asking, ‘where is your Good Old Cause now?’ replied it was ‘Here, in my bosom, and I shall seal it with my blood.’ But the jeering crowd had its way, and their remains were duly displayed on the City gates. Such was the smell at Charing Cross that local inhabitants petitioned the king to stop the executions, ‘for the stench of their burnt bowels had so putrefied the air’. When Parliament returned, their fugitive colleagues were subject to Attainder, which meant they lost their property. Then, in January 1661 – on the anniversary of the regicide – the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and John Bradshaw (the king’s trial judge) were dug up and hanged. John Evelyn thought this was one of the ‘stupendous and inscrutable judgements of God’. Those other republicans who’d been buried at Westminster Abbey were also disinterred on orders of the Dean, and their bodies cast into a nearby pit.

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