Category Archives: nationalism

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 | 8 December 2023 · 2:24 am

Hungary’s Crown of St. Stephen

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 33-34:

Every 20 August, the date of St Stephen’s canonization and a national holiday in Hungary, a casket containing what is believed to be the king’s mummified right hand is carried in solemn procession around the basilica which bears his name in central Budapest. This grisly celebration, followed by a Mass, took place even in the darkest days of the Soviet era when the Communists tried to suppress religion. Yet the holiest relic associated with Stephen is not a skeletal hand. One of the most popular tourist sights in Budapest – all Hungarian schoolchildren are encouraged to see it once in their lives – is the Holy Crown of St Stephen. It was for a long time the central symbol of royal legitimacy and has been venerated for centuries. The validity of a King of Hungary was coronation with the use of this crown, and no other, in the ceremony. The crown is shrouded in myth, like so much of ancient Magyar history.

It is certain that the crown on display in modern Budapest was never worn by King Stephen. The original was lost or stolen soon after the king’s death and there are many theories about its fate. It is said that in 1044 it was found by soldiers loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III, and he returned it to the Vatican. The lower half of the crown on display now, the so-called ‘Greek part’, made in 1074, nearly forty years after King Stephen’s death, was a gift from the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII to the Hungarian King Géza I. The upper ‘Latin’ part was made in Hungary, probably at some point in the late twelfth century, to replace the lost original. The two halves were welded together around 1330, in order to make a solid base for a gold cross that surmounts the crown.

Lost again and found in a series of centuries-long dramas and adventures, the crown was taken to Austria towards the end of the Second World War by Hungarian fascists – either, as one group said, to sell it on the black market or, as others claimed, to preserve it from the clutches of the Communists. Somehow it fell into the hands of the US army in Vienna in 1945. The Americans kept it in Fort Knox, to ensure its safety, until 1978 when it was ceremoniously returned to Hungary. The crown and other royal regalia thought to have belonged to Stephen or his immediate successors were then installed by a Communist regime aiming for national respectability in a large shrine in Budapest’s National Museum under permanent armed guard. To mark the millennium of the Hungarian state, the first of Viktor Orbán’s governments in 2000 transferred all the royal jewels, amid great solemnity and fanfare, to the Parliament building. In a republic, it seemed at first sight an odd place to move the crown jewels, but in the Hungarian context there was logic to it. For a nation that has been occupied by other powers for so many periods in its history, the crown has always been the symbol of independence and freedom, rather than of royalty. And besides, the crown jewels are magnificently presented in inspiring surroundings.

Stephen brought order out of chaos, stability and the beginning of a legal code. He is, rightly, one of the most revered figures in Hungary’s history.

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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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by | 26 November 2023 · 3:30 pm

Hagi Castle in Choshu Domain

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1800ff:

Hagi Castle was built between 1604 and 1606 by the Mori Clan, lords of Choshu fief. Before the battle of Sekigahara, the Mori fief was the second largest in all Japan, but after that epic struggle, in which the Mori were on the losing side, their fief was reduced to about one-fourth its original size. Even with this reduction it was still one of the 10 largest in the country. The castle was laid out so that the five-story donjon was situated at the edge of the inner moat. It measured, on the ground floor, 65 feet east to west and 53½ feet north to south. The top floor was 20½ feet by 17½ feet, and the total height was about 47 feet. Fourteen generations of Moris lived in a mansion on the castle grounds, which were practically on an island, with a bay on one side and a river and moat on the others. An observation tower was placed on a hill behind the castle overlooking the sea.

Choshu fief was a hotbed of anti-Tokugawa feeling after Sekigahara. Children were put to bed at night with their feet toward Edo as a form of insult to the shogunate, and they were told never to forget the defeat of their ancestors at Sekigahara. Dislike for the Tokugawas also may have stemmed from Tokugawa disrespect of the Imperial House; the Mori Clan claimed direct lineage to the imperial family and therefore had strong feelings of loyalty toward the emperor.

Hagi was the birthplace of Yoshida Shoin, the imperial patriot who advocated the overthrow of shogunate rule and a return of power to the emperor. At his school in Hagi he preached this philosophy until his death at the hands of the shogunate a few years before the Restoration took place. Many of Shoin’s pupils became leaders of the Restoration era.

The leaders of Choshu were also resentful of the shogun’s relations with foreign countries, and in 1863 their shore batteries fired on an American ship off the Choshu coast and effectively blocked the Shimonoseki Straits to foreign shipping. The following year a combined force of Dutch, American, British, and French warships put an end to the harassment, and Choshu agreed to pay an indemnity. After this incident the Choshu leaders came to friendly terms with the foreigners.

During the revolt against the shogunate, Choshu, along with most of the clans in western Japan, firmly supported the imperial cause. To show their complete loyalty to the emperor, the Choshu leaders were the first to tear down their castle (1874). The samurai were now without employment, but the head of the Mori Clan encouraged them to become peaceful farmers and raise fruit. This enterprise is still carried on today by their descendants.

Only the stone walls of the inner court and the inner moat of the castle remain. The base of the donjon can also be seen, and the huge stones used for pillar supports are still imbedded within the foundation. Steep stone steps running the entire length of several of the inner walls, overlooking the moat, provided a means of rapid troop deployment when immediate defense was imperative.

It is interesting to note that time has not touched Hagi as heavily as it has most other castle towns, and some descendants of samurai families still reside at their ancestral home sites behind old walls in the samurai quarters of the town.

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by | 26 October 2023 · 6:50 am

Status of Moldova, 2006

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 363-364:

To this day, the Republic of Moldova, with its population of about 4.5 million people, remains the poorest of European countries. In 2002 it still ranked behind Albania, which, however, received four times the international monetary aid. In 2006 the per capita gross domestic product was a 991 US dollars (the comparative figure for Germany was at 34,433 US dollars). The world’s largest steel mill on the Dniester that once employed ten thousand workers has virtually fallen silent. The once-flourishing “vegetable and fruit garden and vineyard of Russia” lies fallow in many places. Its rich soils are depleted and overfertilized, its water polluted. As always, Moldova belongs to the ten largest wine producers in the world but has tried in vain to gain a foothold in the international market. Until recently, more than 90 percent of Moldovan wine production was exported to Russia. For that reason, Russia’s 2006 declared import ban has hit the Moldovan wine industry quite hard. The Republic of Moldova is therefore trying even more to intensify relations with the European Union; it strives for integration into the European structure as an independent partner. Germany is one of Moldova’s most important trade partners. Several German firms have already become successfully engaged in the region.

Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of young people still seek employment abroad. In recent years, almost 300,000 Moldovans have obtained Romanian passports, giving them freedom of travel. More than anyone, the elite (e.g., academics and physicians) are moving away. Hospital conditions are a catastrophe; tuberculosis and hepatitis are rampant. On the other hand, one finds a considerable number of Western luxury limousines and sports cars on Chișinău’s boulevards. Apparently a stratum of the nouveau riches is doing profitable business, e.g., in smuggling cigarettes, gasoline or with weapons out of Transnistria. Until early March 2006, there was no customs check between Transnistria and Moldova, allowing goods from Ukraine to flow into the country unhindered. As a result, the country lost an immense amount of tax collections. An especially lucrative business for the criminal circle—here subsumed under the name “Mafia”—is apparently white slave trade. Ostensibly, according to press reports, up to thirty thousand young women and girls have been placed in western and central European brothels in recent years.

The capital Chișinău has changed its appearance. Old Jewish residential districts on the city center’s edge were torn down over large areas from the close of the 1980s through the early 1990s and replaced by apartment buildings and arterial roads. Many large-scale projects ventured earlier now stand as abandoned ruins. Meanwhile, one can observe how with American support a new beginning of Jewish life is developing in the city. American youth groups of the Jewish movement Chabad assisted in the revival of a small district with Jewish facilities around a synagogue, which is conducted by the Lubavitch Hassidic school of thought.

In the heart of the old city Chișinău, behind high walls and relatively unnoticed by city dwellers and tourists, there is the house that Russian poet Alexander Pushkin occupied from 1820 to 1823 during his banishment to Kishinev. Here today is a small, lovingly appointed museum that houses witness to all phases of the poet’s life. Within sight of the building resided his protector, Governor of Bessarabia, General Inzov, of whose palace not a single trace remains today.

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