The historical term Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen was used to denote a group of territories connected to the Kingdom of Hungary within Austria-Hungary.[1][2][3] This system of states is sometimes named Archiregnum Hungaricum ("High Kingdom of Hungary") using a medieval terminology.
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| Principality of Hungary (896–1000) |
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The term of Transleithania (Hungarian: Lajtántúl, German: Transleithanien, Czech: Zalitavsko, Polish: Zalitawia) was an unofficial term for the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, the Dual monarchy created in 1867 and dissolved in 1918. The Transleithanian lands were officially known as the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen (or of the Holy Crown of Hungary).
The Latin name Transleithania derives from the Leitha (Lajta) river as most of its territory lay east of it — or "beyond", from an Austrian perspective. Cisleithania, i.e. the Habsburg lands of the Dual Monarchy that formerly were part of the Holy Roman Empire with Galicia and Dalmatia, lay to the west — on this side — of the Leitha river.
The territory reached from the arc of the Carpathian Mountains in present-day Slovakia to the Croatian coast of the Adriatic Sea. The capital of Transleithania was Budapest.[4]
After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 Transleithania consisted of the Kingdom of Hungary including Hungary proper, the former Principality of Transylvania (Erdélyi Fejedelemség) as well as the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar, furthermore the internally self-governed Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia with the Military Frontier, and the free port of Fiume.
| State | Hungarian name | Capital |
|---|---|---|
| Kingdom of Hungary | Magyar Királyság | Buda Budapest from 1873 |
| Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia | Horvát-Szlavónia Királyság | Zagreb (Zágráb) |
| City of Fiume with territory | Fiume város és területe | Rijeka (Fiume) |
The term was widely used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to distinguish the Transleithanian or Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy (later Austria-Hungary) from the Cisleithanian territories. It meant three main administrative districts:
While the Diet of Hungary opposed the separation of Transylvania (being an integral part of medieval Hungary), they unsuccessfully demanded to reestablish the historical connections with Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Galicia and Lodomeria . These Cisleithanian provinces were theoretically part of the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, according to the historical right . The Habsburg rulers occupied these territories as "Hungarian kings" alluding to the Árpád-dynasty, but these provinces were attached to Austria not to Hungary.
After the union with Transylvania in 1848 and 1867, the term denoted only the Hungary proper and Croatia-Slavonia.
On 29 October 1918 the Croatian Parliament joined the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). The kingdom of Hungary ceased on 16 November 1918 and the first republic of Hungary was proclaimed.[6] At that point the term lost its meaning and its use ceased.
The Compromise of 1867, which created the Dual Monarchy, gave the Hungarian government more control of its domestic affairs than it had possessed at any time since the Battle of Mohács (see fig. 4). However, the new government faced severe economic problems and the growing restiveness of ethnic minorities. The First World War led to the disintegration of Austria-Hungary, and in the aftermath of the war, a series of governments—including a communist regime—assumed power in Buda and Pest (in 1872 the cities of Buda and Pest united to become Budapest).
Once again a Habsburg emperor became king of Hungary, but the compromise strictly limited his power over the country's internal affairs, and the Hungarian government assumed control over its domestic affairs. The Hungarian government consisted of a prime minister and cabinet appointed by the emperor but responsible to a bicameral parliament elected by a narrow franchise. Joint Austro-Hungarian affairs were managed through "common" ministries of foreign affairs, defense, and finance. The respective ministers were responsible to delegations representing separate Austrian and Hungarian parliaments. Although the "common" ministry of defense administered the imperial and royal armies, the emperor acted as their commander in chief, and German remained the language of command in the military as a whole. The compromise designated that commercial and monetary policy, tariffs, the railroad, and indirect taxation were "common" concerns to be negotiated every ten years. The compromise also returned Transylvania, Vojvodina, and the Military Frontier to Hungary's jurisdiction.
At Franz Joseph's insistence, Hungary and Croatia reached a similar compromise in 1868, giving the Croats a special status in Hungary. The agreement recognized the Croat autonomy and granted the Croats autonomy over their internal affairs. In practice, however, this autonomy was fairly limited.[7] The Croatian Ban would now be nominated by the Hungarian prime minister and appointed by the king. Areas of common policies included finance, currency matters, commercial policy, the post office, and the railroad. Croatian became the official language of Croatia's government, and Croatian representatives discussing "common" affairs before the Hungarian diet were permitted to speak Croatian.
The Nationalities Law enacted in 1868 defined Hungary as a single Hungarian nation[8] comprising different nationalities whose members enjoyed equal rights in all areas except language. Although non-Hungarian languages could be used in local government, churches, and schools, Hungarian became the official language of the central government and universities. Many Hungarians thought the act too generous, while minority-group leaders rejected it as inadequate. Slovaks in northern Hungary, Romanians in Transylvania, and Serbs in Vojvodina all wanted more autonomy, and unrest followed the act's passage. The government took no further action concerning nationalities, and discontent fermented.
Anti-Semitism appeared in Hungary early in the century as a result of fear of economic competition. In 1840 a partial emancipation of the Jews allowed them to live anywhere except certain depressed mining cities. The Jewish Emancipation Act of 1868 gave Jews equality before the law and effectively eliminated all bars to their participation in the economy; nevertheless, informal barriers kept Jews from careers in politics and public life.
Franz Joseph appointed Gyula Andrássy--a member of Deák's party—prime minister in 1867. His government strongly favored the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and followed a laissez-faire economic policy. Guilds were abolished, workers were permitted to bargain for wages, and the government attempted to improve education and construct roads and railroads. Between 1850 and 1875, Hungary's farms prospered: grain prices were high, and exports tripled. But Hungary's economy accumulated capital too slowly, and the government relied heavily on foreign credits. In addition, the national and local bureaucracies began to grow immediately after the compromise became effective. Soon the cost of the bureaucracy outpaced the country's tax revenues, and the national debt soared. After an economic downturn in the mid-1870s, Deák's party succumbed to charges of financial mismanagement and scandal.
As a result of these economic problems, Kálmán Tisza's Liberal Party, created in 1875, gained power in 1875. Tisza assembled a bureaucratic political machine that maintained control through corruption and manipulation of a woefully unrepresentative electoral system. In addition, Tisza's government had to withstand both dissatisfied nationalities and Hungarians who thought Tisza too submissive to the Austrians. The Liberals argued that the Dual Monarchy improved Hungary's economic position and enhanced its influence in European politics.
Tisza's government raised taxes, balanced the budget within several years of coming to power, and completed large road, railroad, and waterway projects. Commerce and industry expanded quickly. After 1880 the government abandoned its laissez-faire economic policies and encouraged industry with loans, subsidies, government contracts, tax exemptions, and other measures. The number of Hungarians who earned their living in industry doubled to 24.2 percent of the population between 1890 and 1910, while the number dependent on agriculture dropped from 82 to 62 percent. However, the 1880s and 1890s were depression years for the peasantry. Rail and steamship transport gave North American farmers access to European markets, and Europe's grain prices fell by 50 percent. Large landowners fought the downturn by seeking trade protection and other political remedies; the lesser nobles, whose farms failed in great numbers, sought positions in the still-burgeoning bureaucracy. By contrast, the peasantry resorted to subsistence farming and worked as laborers to earn money.
Hungary's population rose from 13 million to 20 million between 1850 and 1910. After 1867 Hungary's feudal society gave way to a more complex society that included the magnates, lesser nobles, middle class, working class, and peasantry. However, the magnates continued to wield great influence through several conservative parties because of their massive wealth and dominant position in the upper chamber of the diet. They fought modernization and sought both closer ties with Vienna and a restoration of Hungary's traditional social structure and institutions, arguing that agriculture should remain the mission of the nobility. They won protection from the market by reestablishment of a system of entail and also pushed for restriction of middle-class profiteering and restoration of corporal punishment. The Roman Catholic Church was a major ally of the magnates.
Some lesser-noble landowners survived the agrarian depression of the late 19th century and continued farming. Many others turned to the bureaucracy or to the professions.
In the mid-19th century, Hungary's middle class consisted of a small number of German and Jewish merchants and workshop owners who employed a few craftsmen. By the turn of the 20th century, however, the middle class had grown in size and complexity and had become predominantly Jewish. In fact, Jews created the modern economy that supported Tisza's bureaucratic machine. In return, Tisza not only denounced anti-Semitism but also used his political machine to check the growth of an anti-Semitic party. In 1896 his successors passed legislation securing the Jews' final emancipation. By 1910 about 900,000 Jews made up approximately 5 percent of the population and about 23 percent of Budapest's citizenry. Jews accounted for 54 percent of commercial business owners, 85 percent of financial institution directors and owners, and 62 percent of all employees in commerce.
The rise of a working class came naturally with industrial development. By 1900 Hungary's mines and industries employed nearly 1.2 million people, representing 13 percent of the population. The government favored low wages to keep Hungarian products competitive on foreign markets and to prevent impoverished peasants from flocking to the city to find work. The government recognized the right to strike in 1884, but labor came under strong political pressure. In 1890 the Social Democratic Party was established and secretly formed alliances with the trade unions. The party soon enlisted one-third of Budapest's workers. By 1900 the party and union rolls listed more than 200,000 hard-core members, making it the largest secular organization the country had ever known. The diet passed laws to improve the lives of industrial workers, including providing medical and accident insurance, but it refused to extend them voting rights, arguing that broadening the franchise would give too many non-Hungarians the vote and threaten Hungarian domination. After the Compromise of 1867, the Hungarian government also launched an education reform in an effort to create a skilled, literate labor force. As a result, the literacy rate had climbed to 80 percent by 1910. Literacy raised the expectations of workers in agriculture and industry and made them ripe for participation in movements for political and social change.
The plight of the peasantry worsened drastically during the depression at the end of the 19th century. The rural population grew, and the size of the peasants' farm plots shrank as land was divided up by successive generations. By 1900 almost half of the country's landowners were scratching out a living from plots too small to meet basic needs, and many farm workers had no land at all. Many peasants chose to emigrate, and their departure rate reached approximately 50,000 annually in the 1870s and about 200,000 annually by 1907. The peasantry's share of the population dropped from 72.5 percent in 1890 to 68.4 percent in 1900. The countryside also was characterized by unrest, to which the government reacted by sending in troops, banning all farm-labor organizations, and passing other repressive legislation.
In the late 19th century, the Liberal Party passed laws that enhanced the government's power at the expense of the Roman Catholic Church. The parliament won the right to veto clerical appointments, and it reduced the church's nearly total domination of Hungary's education institutions. Additional laws eliminated the church's authority over a number of civil matters and, in the process, introduced civil marriage and divorce procedures.
The Liberal Party also worked with some success to create a unified, Magyarized state. Ignoring the Nationalities Law, they enacted laws that required the Hungarian language to be used in local government and increased the number of school subjects taught in that language. After 1890 the government succeeded in Magyarizing educated Slovaks, Germans, Croats, and Romanians and co-opting them into the bureaucracy, thus robbing the minority nationalities of an educated elite. Most minorities never learned to speak Hungarian, but the education system made them aware of their political rights, and their discontent with Magyarization mounted. Bureaucratic pressures and heightened fears of territorial claims against Hungary after the creation of new nation-states in the Balkans forced Tisza to outlaw "national agitation" and to use electoral legerdemain to deprive the minorities of representation. Nevertheless, in 1901 Romanian and Slovak national parties emerged undaunted by incidents of electoral violence and police repression.
Tisza directed the Liberal government until 1890, and for fourteen years thereafter a number of Liberal prime ministers held office. Agricultural decline continued, and the bureaucracy could no longer absorb all of the pauperized lesser nobles and educated people who could not find work elsewhere. This group gave its political support to the Party of Independence and the Party of Forty-Eight, which became part of the "national" opposition that forced a coalition with the Liberals in 1905. The Party of Independence resigned itself to the existence of the Dual Monarchy and sought to enhance Hungary's position within it; the Party of Forty-Eight, however, deplored the Compromise of 1867, argued that Hungary remained an Austrian colony, and pushed for formation of a Hungarian national bank and an independent customs zone.
Franz Joseph refused to appoint members of the coalition to the government until they renounced their demands for concessions from Austria concerning the military. When the coalition finally gained power in 1906, the leaders retreated from their opposition to the compromise of 1867 and followed the Liberal Party's economic policies. Istvan Tisza—Kalman Tisza's son and prime minister from 1903 to 1905—formed the new Party of Work, which in 1910 won a large majority in the parliament. Tisza became prime minister for a second time in 1912 after labor strife erupted over an unsuccessful attempt to expand voting rights.
On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. Within days Austria-Hungary presented Serbia with an ultimatum that made war inevitable. Prime Minister István Tisza initially opposed the ultimatum but changed his mind when Germany supported Austria-Hungary. By late August, all the great European powers were at war. Bands playing military music and patriotic demonstrators expecting a quick, easy victory took to Budapest's streets after the declaration of war. However, Hungary, was ill prepared for war. The country's armaments were obsolete, and its industries were not prepared for a war economy. By 1915 and 1916, Hungary started to feel the full impact of the war. Inflation ran rampant, wages were frozen, food shortages developed, and the government banned the export of grain even to Austria. Franz Joseph died in 1916, and Charles IV (1916–18) became Hungary's new king. Before being crowned, however, Charles insisted that voting rights be extended to a larger proportion of the Hungarian population. Tisza resigned in response. By 1917 the Hungarian government was slowly losing domestic control in the face of mounting popular dissatisfaction caused by the war. Of the 3.6 million soldiers Hungary sent to war, 2.1 million were wounded or killed. By late 1918, Hungary's farms and factories were producing only half of what they did in 1913, and the war-weary people had abandoned hope of victory.
On October 31, 1918, smouldering unrest developed into revolution in Budapest, and roving soldiers assassinated István Tisza. Pressured by the popular uprising and the refusal of Hungarian troops to quell the disturbances, King Charles was compelled to appoint the "Red Count" Mihály Károlyi, a pro-Entente liberal and leader of the Party of Independence, to the post of prime minister. Chrysanthemum-waving crowds poured into the streets shouting their approval. Károlyi formed a new cabinet, whose members were drawn from the new National Council, composed of representatives of the Party of Independence, the Social Democratic Party, and a group of radical bourgeois. After suing for a separate peace, the new government dissolved Parliament, declared Hungary to be an independent republic with Károlyi as provisional president, and proclaimed universal suffrage and the freedom of the press and assembly. The government launched preparations for land reform and promised elections, but neither goal was achieved. On November 13, 1918, Charles IV surrendered his powers as king of Hungary. However, he did not abdicate, a technicality that made a return to the throne possible.
The Károlyi government's measures failed to stem popular discontent, especially when the Entente powers began distributing slices of Hungary's traditional territory to Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (colloquially Yugoslavia until the name became formal in 1929), and Czechoslovakia. The new government and its supporters had pinned their hopes for maintaining Hungary's territorial integrity on the abandonment of Austria and Germany, the securing of a separate peace, and exploiting Károlyi's close connections in France. The Entente, however, chose to consider Hungary a partner in the defeated Dual Monarchy and dashed the Hungarians' hopes with the delivery of successive diplomatic notes, each demanding the surrender of more land. On March 19, 1919, the French head of the Entente mission in Budapest handed Károlyi a note delineating final postwar boundaries, which were unacceptable to the Hungarians. Károlyi resigned and turned power over to a coalition of Social Democrats and communists, who promised that Soviet Russia would help Hungary to restore its original borders. Although the Social Democrats held a majority in the coalition, the communists led by Béla Kun immediately seized control and announced the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.