Hello all,
Morten - I've just read your progress run down, and it looks great! I'm especially impressed with the governments.
Henrik:
From Henrik's post:
I wasn't saying that they should get thier own civ (i don't know that much about early Austria) but they shouldn't be grouped together whit the Hungarians, Transylvanians, etc, etc.
Austria/Oesterreich is a relative newcomer to Europe. Wien/Vienna is much younger than Praha, Krakow or Buda-Pest. While its German population derives from Charlemagne's Ostmark wars, an Austrian "state" really only began to form as a Catholic, Habsburg counter-weight to the rise of Prussia in the 18th century. The name Austria was only officially used after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Hungary wasn't joined to the Habsburg empire until 1526 (when the northern part not conquered by the Turks reverted to Habsburg rule), but really not til the late 1680s when the Habsburg (and Polish) armies cleared the northern Balkans of the Turks. The Habsburgs didn't enter into the power-sharing agreement with the Austrians until the 'Ausgleich' of 1867, after they lost the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.
From Ptolomy:
Also there was a really great hungarian king, I think his name was Matthyas or something like that, he built a beautiful castle this could be a wonder which would allow Absolutism. Because Mathyas was able to build it because that he was an absolut king. I'll find out what this king was named and what the castle's name is.
King Mattyas ruled Hungary with an iron fist from 1458-1490. He is better known in the West by his Latin name, Matthias - and because his family had a raven on their coat-of-arms, he is known as Matthias Corvinus (Corvin = raven). Matthias maintained one of the largest libraries in Renaissance Europe, so today one of Hungary's best publishing houses is called Corvina.
Matthias' family, in Hungarian known as Hunyadi, were the result of a combined Hungarian-Romanian marriage; "Hunyadi" is the Magyarized form of the Romanian "Hunedoara" from current-day Cluj-Napoca (old Hungarian "Kolozsvar", German "Klausenburg") in Transylvania.
Matthias' father, Janos (John), was famous for his wars against the Turks. He also built the powerful castle in Transylvania you probably are writing about, called Vajdahunyadvar. It was Janos who defeated the Turks at Nandorfehervar/Belgrade in 1456, for which the church bells across Christendom were ordered to ring at noon (which they still do) by Pope Calixtus III. Matthias was not supposed to become king in 1458, but he usurped the throne and became a kind of Hungarian David - remember David's Biblical parable about splitting the baby in two? Mattias made up for political illegitimacy by building huge monuments and engaging in foreign adventures. He built a beautiful Renaissance court at Buda castle and invited the great architects and artists from Italy. (Buda was a series of royal hilltop castle-fortresses on the left bank of the Danube/Duna River dating back to pre-Roman times, with over time a small market-town for the beourgoisie across the river called Pest. When western Hungary was the Roman province of Pannonia, Buda was known as Aquincum. The two were united in 1873 to form Budapest...) After some initial victories over the Turks in Bosnia, Matthias turned towards a dream: to create a Danubian empire. He fought a series of wars against Bohemia, Poland-Lithuania and the Holy Roman Empire over his last 20 years. He did not succeed in creating the empire, but he did manage to seize Vienna and make it his capital - where he was likely murdered by poison in 1490, by one of his own court. Ironically, his Danubian empire was realized by one of his rivals, a Jagiellonian from Poland, a few decades after Matthias' death. The new king of Hungary then, Wladyslaw II (Hungarian - "Ulaszlo") was a Polish Jagiellonian who ruled Hungary and Bohemia, but was incompetent. Hungary was conquered by the Turks at the battle of Mohacs shortly after his death....
Note: Hungary was not an absolutist monarchy. I've already blistered here about Western stereotypes of non-Atlantic Europe. Before the Hunyadis took over Hungary, it was ruled (from the early 14th century) by the Anjou family (of Burgundy and Napoli fame). When the Hungarian nobility elected the first Anjou, Charles Robert, to the throne, they forced him to sign guarantees of their freedoms that guaranteed there would never be an absolute monarchy. It worked; there never was until the Sultan Mehmet II seized Hungary in 1526.
In fact, as Henrik has already alluded to, Poland had a similar situation - and this was not a coincidence. It's a little complicated, but essentially Poland in the mid-1300s was ruled by one of the Hungarian Anjou kings, Ludwik (Hungarian: Lajos). When the Polish nobility elected him, a deal was struck guaranteeing noble freedoms in Poland perpetually - and they are known in Polish history as the Hungarian freedoms. The Jagiellonians were able to balance their power with these freedoms during their dynasty (1386-1572), but when the last Jagiellonian died the nobility elected weak kings (like the Catholic Swedish Vasas) and ruined the country through their selfish exploitation.
To illustrate this, in 1572 Polish envoys were sent to France to convince the French Prince Henri de Valois to become king of Poland. After accidentally witnessing the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, they brought Henri back to the royal capital at Krakow (January, 1574). Charles IX, king of France, died in May. By June, Henri practically escaped from Poland back to France to become king of France. To quote the British historian Norman Davies, "It is hard to see how the untried, republican constitution of Poland-Lithuania could ever have been smoothly operated by a youthful prince whose meagre experience was confined to an absolutist court and to sectarian warfare." (Davies, 1982: pg. 420)
Poland, Hungary and Bohemia belong to a region identified as "Eastern Central Europe", an extension of the West; poorer and less developed, but nonetheless societies whose basic values were shaped by the common experience of the West. They parttook in the Renaissance, built universities, and developed socially much like Germany, France, etc. Their great tragedy was being overrun by Eastern empires; the Turks, the Russians, and the reactionary Habsburgs. I would like to remind the readers here that Prague is many kilometers west of Vienna, and indeed in the late Middle Ages Vienna was less culturally (and economically) developed than Prague, Krakow or Buda-Pest.
Sorry for lecturing again, but I was provoked... <IMG SRC="http://forums.civfanatics.com/ubb/rolleyes.gif" border=0>
And with the above, you can see my 4 years in a Hungarian university now...
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"...über den Bergen sind auch Leute..."
[This message has been edited by Vrylakas (edited June 15, 2001).]
