Special Aspects of Hungarian
Nobility
Nobility
as a hereditary rank in society with special privileges was a universal finding
in medieval
(1)
It is ethnically heterogenous, constituting a multiethnic elite. Hungarian
nobility has been formed from the clans of free warriors of the Magyars, of
foreign nobles who came to
(2)
It is homogenous in privileges and thus without having a structured hierarchy.
In Hungary there was a "democracy of nobles" as all nobles had equal
rights and without regard to power or land owned no allegiance to other nobles
only to the legally crowned King, or more precisely to the Crown itself.
The
relationship between the king and the nobles and of these and the law of the
land were determined by two legal documents. The first of these, considered as
the first written Hungarian constitution, is the "Golden Bull"
(Aranybulla in Hungarian). It was issued in 1222 by King Endre II. at the
insistence of the nobility to safeguard the rights of nobles. The last item of
the Golden Bull, point 31, which assures the right of the nobles to
disobedience in case the king acts in nonconformance with the law, has been
used, contested, suspended and replaced during the following centuries.
The other document is the "Tripartitum
Opus" which represented a summation of the common low
("szokasjog") and was prepared by Palatine Stephen Werboczi in 1517.
This document contained, among others, the "Tenet of the Holy Crown"
("szentkoronatan"). In this it is pointed out that the nobles and the
king cannot exist without each other as the nobles elect the kings and the
kings confer nobility, and that at the same time they both existed and functioned
under the protection of and in accordance with the rule of the Holy Crown, i.e.
the law of the land. Translated into modern terminology the Holy Crown
represented constitutionality ("jogallam") whereby both the king and
the nobles were bound by the rule of law ("joguralom").
In
contrast to the pyramid system of other countries Hungary's system has been
likened to a wheel "where the King is the focal point (the hub) and all
nobleman are ranged at the perimeter, at an equal distance from the sovereign
who is attached to every one of them directly by an individual spoke"
(Vajay, page 8).
(3)
(4)
Another distinguishing characteristic of Hungarian nobility is its rule of
inheritance. The laws of inheritance were influenced by the original tribal
system, by the rules of King Stephan I., the Golden Bull of 1222 and by the
"Law of Ancestry" ("Osiseg Torvenye" in Hungarian) issued
in 1351 by King Lajos the Great. According to the finally developed custom, the
right of inheritance was based on a system of ancestry whereby biological
children, both male and female, inherited in equal share from their parents
while half-siblings inherited in equal share from their parents only. If
children were acquired by marriage and were legally adapted, they shared in the
inheritance equally with the biological children of the deceased. In case of
the family's total demise the estate was returned to the legal ruler as
representative of the Holy Crown. (Fugedi, E.: The Elefanthy. The Hungarian
Nobleman and his Kindred.
It
follows from the above: Many nobles, poor or otherwise, preserved attachment to
the ethnic group from which they originated and often shared their life style.
As they gained awareness of the woes of the people around them they took part
and often were leaders of movements for change invoking and, often, paid for it
with their life. (Examples: Ban Bank, Gyorgy Dozsa, Istvan Bocskay, Miklos
Zrinyi, Viceroy Ferenc Wesselenyi, Imre Thokoly, Prince Ferenc Rakoczi II,
Professor Ignac Martinovics, Count Istvan Szechenyi, Lajos Kossuth, Count
Mihaly Karolyi). On such occasions they often invoked their "right to
resist" - the "ius resistendi", as the 31st point of the Golden
Bulla of 1222 was referred to - mostly without success. To quote Vajay (1973,
page 11): "This harmony between the people and the nobility culminated in
1848 when the noblemen spontaneously renounced their privileges not because of
pressure from a people in revolt, but on their own initiative, thus making
available to the whole nation the previously exclusive domain of Common Rights
and thereby creating modern Hungary in its political and primarily sociological
sense."
Due
to equal inheritance by the offspring many respected noble families became poor
for reasons which were not their fault. Since, in such cases, both privileges
and reputations remained intact, and since nobility was never defined by or
depended upon wealth, and since nobles were, in general, not perceived as a
distant suppressive body but rather as leaders of both a revolt against the
absolutism of foreign sovereigns and for economic progress, nobility in Hungary
became defined less as a societal status and more as a moral category. Nobility
in
A
good source of information in English on Hungarian nobility in the Middle Ages
is Erik Fugedi’s “The Elefanthy, The Hungarian Nobleman and His Kindred”,
published by the Central European University Press in Budapest in 1998. It is
available from Amazon.com.