sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 6

Kees Teszelszky: The Holy Crown and the Hungarian Estates

The Holy Crown of Hungary is one of the oldest royal insignia of Europe and it is also the one with the most fascinating implications for the political thought of the country where it was used. According to the Doctrine of the Holy Crown - described by legal scholars for the first time in the nineteenth century, but gaining particular importance in the interwar period in order to support claims for the territories of the pre-Trianon kingdom - the object had not only been a symbol of the Hungarian state throughout the centuries, but also an actual source of sovereignty in it. Accordingly, kings and privileged elites involved in political decision-making (first only the nobility and the clergy, later on burghers, and after 1848 the entire nation) were members (membra) of the Crown, which can thus be regarded not only as a physical object, but also a mystical body, the embodiment of a system of public law. The primordialist assumptions of this doctrine were already questioned in the first half of the twentieth century in a thorough analysis by Ferenc Eckhart in 1941, and later on by László Péter. [1] Both concluded that the early-sixteenth-century summary of common law, István Werbőczy's Tripartitum, which served as a fundamental reference point for the doctrine, shows no traces of an organic concept of the state. Kees Teszelszky's work follows in their footsteps by giving a close analysis of the concept of the Holy Crown in the great upheavals of the early seventeenth century in Hungary, when due to various crises royal power and the weight of the Estates in making politics underwent important changes.

After a decade of anti-Ottoman war in the Hungarian territories, in 1604 a significant part of the Hungarian Estates turned against their king, Rudolph (as emperor, Rudolph II). Due to widespread discontent with the ruler's policies, as well as the support received from the sultan's representatives, this movement, led by István Bocskai, achieved major successes. The Peace of Vienna in 1606 secured hitherto unseen benefits for the Estates, and their position was further strengthened by the so-called Bruderzwist: in 1608 Archduke Matthias needed their support to remove his older brother, less and less capable to act as a monarch and prone to hard-to-explain political moves, from the thrones of Hungary and Moravia. A model seemed to have been created in which the Estates could exert a much more significant influence upon political decision-making than ever before. Parallel to this, a significant number of works were written in which the Holy Crown of Hungary gained new facets of interpretation; these are duly analyzed in Teszelszky's monograph.

Eckhart and Péter claimed that the most important element of the doctrine, which was missing in the medieval period, was to see the Crown not only as a symbol of royal power, but also as a political body which would have also included the privileged elites. Although the corona gained a spatial meaning and any territorial losses were routinely referred to as injuries to the Crown, the Estates were not yet regarded as members of its body politic in the sixteenth century. The turning point came with the Bocskai uprising that produced several texts in which the vindications of the Estates' rights were expressed through repeated references to the Holy Crown. As argued by Teszelszky, Johannes Bocatius, the Lusatian-born judge of Kassa (Košice) and an extremely prolific author of pamphlets, played an outstanding role in this process, especially through his recently discovered Hungaroteutomachia. [2] The fact that the Holy Crown received competition in the form of the coronation jewel granted to Bocskai by the sultan must have also contributed to the process of attributing a growing amount of importance to the traditional insignia.

After the 1606 peace settlement and its codification in 1608, the return of the Holy Crown from Vienna was one of the most important symbols of the compromise reached between the Habsburg dynasty and the Hungarian Estates, and various authors discussed by Teszelszky (such as István Illésházy, Elias Berger or János Jessenius) added new aspects to the Holy Crown's interpretation in their works. The most important author was, nevertheless, Péter Révay, elected one of the two "Guardians of the Crown" in 1608. Apart from experiencing many vicissitudes in this function, he also wrote the first treatise specifically dedicated to the royal insignia in 1613. He not only created the first detailed (albeit imprecise) description of the object, but also a narrative in which the Holy Crown had guarded over Hungary under the country's troubled history. He also suggested that concord between the ruler and the Hungarian Estates, the most important fruit of the arrangements in 1608, could best be reached through a common respect for its symbol, the Crown. His work, according to Teszelszky, was much more decisive for the further developments of the Holy Crown's interpretation in political thought, than that of Werbőczy, as had traditionally been assumed.

In his work, Teszelszky introduces a variety of hitherto little studied sources in the debate concerning the most important political symbol of Hungary and perhaps the most peculiar element of Hungarian political thought. Discovering their relevance to the debate around the doctrine helps us take an important step forward, and, as he also points out, further interesting results could be expected from similar studies concerning critical periods in the relationship between the rulers and the Estates in Hungary.

Notes:

[1] Ferenc Eckhart: A szentkorona-eszme története [History of the Idea of the Holy Crown], Budapest 1941; László Péter: The Antecedents of the Nineteenth Century Hungarian State Concept: A Historical Analysis. The Background of the Creation of the Doctrine of the Holy Crown, PhD Diss., Oxford University, 1966.

[2] Johannes Bocatius: Hungaroteutomachia vel colloquium de bello nunc inter Caesareos et Hungaros excitato / Magyarnémetharc, avagy beszélgetés a császáriak és a magyarok között most fellángolt háborúról, ed. by Kees Teszelszky and Gergely Tóth, Budapest 2014.