"They Have Become Turks" (Sie Seindt Tuerkhen Worden): Anti Habsburg Resistance and Turkification in Seventeenth Century Hungary (original) (raw)
Related papers
Enlightenment from Below: German-Hungarian Patriots in Eighteenth-Century Hungary
Austrian History Yearbook, 2003
ARADOX AND CONTRADICTION often characterized the formation and evolution of national identity in the Hungarian Kingdom. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, an explosion occurred in efforts to recover supposedly ancient "ethnic" memory as historians, linguists, and archeologists produced one great breakthrough after another, revolutionizing their conceptions of the past. At the same time, an equally strong forgetting of the complex multicultural and multiethnic reality of the region also transpired. 1 The parallel processes of recovering and forgetting intensified after the end of World War I. By the 1930s and 1940s, Slovak historians had reconstructed their history on the foundations of the Great Moravian Empire, Romanian textbooks became dominated by the Daco-Roman continuity thesis, and Hungarian historical narratives were almost exclusively concerned with the history of the Magyars. While historians did occasionally write books that were not biased in favor of their respective ethnic-national groups, they remained marginalized and, most importantly, the mass of students learning history at the middle, high school, and university levels were only superficially introduced to the role other ethnic groups played in their history.
A Divided Hungary in Europe: Exchanges, Networks and Representations, 1541–1699, eds. G. Almási, S. Brzeziński, I. Horn, K. Teszelszky, Á. Zarnóczki, vol. 2: Diplomacy, Information Flow and Cultural Exchange, eds. S. Brzeziński, Á. Zarnóczki, Newcastle upon Tyne 2014.
Despite fragmentation, heterogeneity and the continuous pressure of the Ottoman Empire, early modern “divided Hungary” witnessed a surprising cultural flourishing in the sixteenth century, and maintained its common cultural identity in the seventeenth century. This could hardly have been possible without intense exchange with the rest of Europe. This three-volume series about early modern Hungary divided by Ottoman presence approaches themes of exchange of information and knowledge from two perspectives, namely, exchange through traditional channels provided by religious/educational institutions and the system of European study tours (Volume 1 – Study Tours and Intellectual-Religious Relationships), and the less regular channels and improvised networks of political diplomacy (Volume 2 – Diplomacy, Information Flow and Cultural Exchange). A by-product of this exchange of information was the changing image of early modern Hungary and Transylvania, which is presented in the third and in some aspects concluding volume of essays (Volume 3 – The Making and Uses of the Image of Hungary and Transylvania). Unlike earlier approaches to the same questions, these volumes draw an alternative map of early modern Hungary. On this map, the centre-periphery conceptions of European early modern culture are replaced by new narratives written from the perspective of historical actors, and the dominance of Western-Hungarian relationships is kept in balance due to the significance of Hungary’s direct neighbours, most importantly the Ottoman Empire. The editors of the volumes—Gábor Almási, Szymon Brzeziński, Ildikó Horn, Kees Teszelszky and Áron Zarnóczki—are based at Hungarian, Polish and Dutch institutions of historical research. Their collaboration is the result of a joint research programme generously financed by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund and carried out at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest.
2014
Despite fragmentation, heterogeneity and the continuous pressure of the Ottoman Empire, early modern “divided Hungary” witnessed a surprising cultural flourishing in the sixteenth century, and maintained its common cultural identity in the seventeenth century. This could hardly have been possible without intense exchange with the rest of Europe. This three-volume series about early modern Hungary divided by Ottoman presence approaches themes of exchange of information and knowledge from two perspectives, namely, exchange through traditional channels provided by religious/educational institutions and the system of European study tours (Volume 1 – Study Tours and Intellectual-Religious Relationships), and the less regular channels and improvised networks of political diplomacy (Volume 2 – Diplomacy, Information Flow and Cultural Exchange). A by-product of this exchange of information was the changing image of early modern Hungary and Transylvania, which is presented in the third and i...
2014
Despite fragmentation, heterogeneity and the continuous pressure of the Ottoman Empire, early modern "divided Hungary" witnessed a surprising cultural flourishing in the sixteenth century, and maintained this common cultural identity in the seventeenth century. This could hardly have been possible without intense exchange with the rest of Europe. This three-volume series about early modern Hungary divided by Ottoman presence approaches themes of exchange of information and knowledge from two perspectives: namely, exchange through traditional channels provided by religious/educational institutions and the system of European study tours (Volume 1: Study Tours and Intellectual-Religious Relationships), and the less-regular channels and improvised networks of political diplomacy (Volume 2: Diplomacy, Information Flow and Cultural Exchange). A by-product of this exchange of information was the changing image of early modern Hungary and Transylvania, which is presented in the th...
In Search of Hungary in Europe: An Introduction
A Divided Hungary in Europe: Exhanges, Networks and Representations, 1541-1699. Volume 3: The Making and Uses of the Image of Hungary and Transylvania, Edited by Kees Teszelszky, 2014
This volume investigates how the exchange of knowledge and information influenced the development of the early modern image of divided Hungary in Europe. Divided Hungary must be understood as the composition of political communities which existed on the territory of the former medieval Kingdom of Hungary (which included Croatia and Transylva-nia) between 1541 and 1699. However, the making of this image was not just a by-product of cultural exchange in Europe; it was a “product” extensively used and negotiated in the developing “public sphere.” Treated as information, news or the subject of public opinion, the image was utilized in the political communication in different European states to legitimate certain goals or to convince the audience of the rightness of a specific message.
2014
Despite fragmentation, heterogeneity and the continuous pressure of the Ottoman Empire, early modern “divided Hungary” witnessed a surprising cultural flourishing in the sixteenth century, and maintained its common cultural identity in the seventeenth century. This could hardly have been possible without intense exchange with the rest of Europe. This three-volume series about early modern Hungary divided by Ottoman presence approaches themes of exchange of information and knowledge from two perspectives, namely, exchange through traditional channels provided by religious/educational institutions and the system of European study tours (Volume 1 – Study Tours and Intellectual-Religious Relationships), and the less regular channels and improvised networks of political diplomacy (Volume 2 – Diplomacy, Information Flow and Cultural Exchange). A by-product of this exchange of information was the changing image of early modern Hungary and Transylvania, which is presented in the third and i...
During the Middle Ages the majority of people in Western Europe never met any Hungarians. They didn’t even hear about them, as news about Hungary only reached Western Europe in times of extraordinary historical events– such as the adoption of Christianity at the turn of the 11th century, or the devastating Tatar invasion in 1241-1242. Obtaining information about the Hungarians from books was also difficult, as medieval Europe, even as late as in the 15th-16th centuries, lacked libraries that would have offered greater numbers of works on Hungary or on Hungarian topics. On top of it all, works that contained the most detailed and accurate information remained unknown, in their own period; posterity only found them in rare manuscript copies discovered much later. Yet once collected, we find that these sources, originating from distant parts of the continent and written for different purposes, contain information about Hungary and the Hungarians that most often reaffirm one another. This work examines these sources and sets out to answer four major questions: What did people in medieval Western Europe know, think, and believe about the Hungarians and Hungary? To what degree was this knowledge constant or fluid over the centuries that made up the medieval era, and were changes in knowledge followed by any changes in appreciation? Where was the country located in the hierarchy of European countries on the basis of the knowledge, suppositions, and beliefs relating to it? What were the most important elements in this image of the Hungarians and of Hungary, and which of them became the most enduring stereotypes?