Hungary

HUNGARY. - An inland state of Danubian Europe, enclosed between Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Romania, Yugoslavia and Austria.

I. GEOGRAPHY

The present territory (93,011 sq. km.) is less than 1/3 of that of the Kingdom of H. before the First World War and represents the area where Hungarians live compactly, a population of eastern origin (Magyars, Ugro-Finnic, mixed with Turco-Mongols), originally nomadic, which first appeared in Europe in the 9th century, then settled in the steppe, was converted to Christianity and decisively won over to European civilization; it nevertheless remains even today well differentiated from the neighboring populations, if for no other reason than its language (agglutinative).

The country corresponds to the basin of the middle Danube and of its tributary the Tisza, and consists of a vast plain (Alföld = low country), between the Danube and Transylvania, the bottom of an ancient lake basin over which the rivers wander in lazy meanders and which passes over toward the E., through increasing aridity, into a veritable steppe, the puszta. On the right bank of the river, on the other hand, there extends a rolling region (Selva Baconia), which likewise opens out into valleys and depressions, one of which is occupied by Lake Balaton; a region not very rich in water, but fertile and with an agricultural vocation.

H. is a country of rich and varied agriculture (cereals, potatoes, sugar beets, tobacco, vines, oil-bearing plants), with a flourishing livestock raising (2 million head of cattle, 3 million pigs and 631 thousand horses, the latter known for speed and endurance). The products of the one and the other serve as the basis for an industry, to which the scarcity of energy sources has in the past set iron limits. But an intense utilization of the already known reserves (petroleum and coal) and even more the recent discovery of methane-bearing ones have permitted a further expansion, despite the limited extent and variety of the raw materials available (besides foodstuffs, only bauxite and iron ores). Today, this industry is not lacking in importance, especially in certain branches (textile, chemical, metallurgical, rubber, etc.) which allow a surplus for export.

The population (9.3 million inhabitants, 10 per sq. km., as in 1941) lives in agricultural centers: the large urban agglomerations are few. Of these the largest is the capital Budapest (1.1 million inhabitants, with its suburbs) on the Danube, Szeged (135 thousand inhabitants) and Debrecen (126 thousand inhabitants), near the Yugoslav and Romanian borders.

H. has been since 1946 a "people's" Republic, by now under direct Soviet control.

II. CIVIL HISTORY

The Danubian provinces of the ancient Roman Empire, first torn apart by the Goths, traversed by the Huns in the 5th century, then by the Avars in the 7th-8th centuries, and partly dominated by the Carolingians in their western portion, seemed toward the end of the 9th century to be able to offer the Slavs a field on which to establish a permanent dominion, when there burst in from the Carpathians a group of Hungarian tribes (Magyars of Ugro-Finnic origin [v.]) that divided the northern Slavs from the southern ones. It wedged itself in among them, destroyed the Moravian kingdom of Svatopluk, routed the German resistance in the western Alpine region and, through the southern Karst, penetrated into Italy in 899 and, profiting from the weakness and the discords of the Kingdom of Italy, was able, on several occasions, to cross the entire Po Valley and even penetrate into central Italy as far as Tuscia and reach southern France.

Terrible are the accounts left by contemporaries of the ferocity of these barbarians, who fought on horseback and in their raids cared for nothing but plunder. They did the same in Germany, until King Henry I and then Otto I succeeded in confronting them and definitively driving them back toward the middle of the 10th century into the Danubian territories. In Italy too they were no longer seen. For their part those tribes, led at first by occasional chiefs, without unity and without restraint, immersed in a rudimentary paganism that kept them far from any civilization, could not but undergo, as the years progressed, the influence of the Slavs they dominated, of the Byzantine Empire and of the religious and feudal organization of Germany and Italy. At their head there appears a descendant of Arpad, Prince Géza (973-97), who succeeded in giving unity to his people and in orienting it toward Western civilization, keeping at peace with the Saxon House, then the arbiter of Europe, after its victories over the northern Slavs and over the Kingdom of Italy. But it is to St. Stephen (v.), son of Géza, that the merit belongs of having given laws and organization to the people. By marrying Gisela, daughter of Emperor Henry II, he was able to obtain a stable peace in the West, to overcome tenacious internal resistance and to receive missionaries who assisted him in bringing about the conversion of his people to Christianity and in giving it a constitution that continued through the following centuries in its essential lines; as a pledge of its independence from other nations he subjected his kingdom to the Apostolic See.

At his death (1038) a fierce reaction of the rigidly pagan party endangered the institutions of St. Stephen and gave rise to a period of internal discords, until with St. Ladislaus ([v.] 1077-95) there came a revival in the civil life of the kingdom, whereby, having overcome internal dangers, it was able to secure dominion between the Drava and the Sava and the Danube in 1089 and then Croatia, torn by internal strife, in 1091. From that time this kingdom followed the fortunes of Hungary. It was also to Ladislaus's credit that he defended the fortunes of his people in the fighting in the East against the Pechenegs and the Cumans, barbarians and pagans. Coloman his successor completed Ladislaus's work by subjugating the Dalmatian cities and islands, and this exposed his kingdom to the wars continually resumed over three centuries with Venice, with alternating fortunes. His concern was also to improve the institutions of the kingdom, which only slowly, owing to recurring internal difficulties and defensive wars, evolved toward a higher form of civilization. Nor were relations with the Church always easy, in connection with the great struggles between Papacy and Empire. There is record of national Councils at Esztergom in 1103-1104 in defense of ecclesiastical power. Another Council was held in 1111 in the presence of the King and the nobles by the archbishop of Split for the division of the dioceses and to prevent laymen from conferring ecclesiastical offices. At the Council of Esztergom of 1114 the archbishop Lawrence still had to tolerate married priests, prohibit pagan customs, prevent Christians from becoming servants of the Jews, and prevent churches from being sold and bought. He further recommended to the clergy the familiar use of the Latin language, which, until 1848, was also that of the court and the tribunals. A little later, in 1169, the archbishop Luke had to admonish Stephen III not to confer ecclesiastical offices through simony and not to usurp the goods of the churches. It was in the second half of that century that the struggle against the Byzantine Empire, which claimed to enslave Hungary, flared up more violently and came to an end only with the momentary establishment there of the Latin Empire. Meanwhile the new vicissitudes of the Magyar people were ripening. King Andrew II (1205-35), who had led a crusading expedition to Egypt (1217) in defense of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, had to provide for the new internal needs of his kingdom, provoked by social difficulties and by the movement of the classes. The strong immigrations of French, Saxons, Bohemians, Poles on the one hand, and Croats on the other, had led to the colonization of new lands and to a change in the relations between the classes; the King in 1222 with a golden bull established the rights of the new nobles as against the old nobility, and introduced a royal finance, to make up for the goods widely distributed among the supporters of the monarchy. But the progress of civil life seemed this time destined to be annihilated by the great Tatar invasion of 1241 under King Béla IV (1235-70), when the King himself, unable to resist, had to fall back into Dalmatia, leaving the country at the mercy of the invader. Fortunately the Tatars withdrew the following year, and it was a hard task for the king to reorganize the kingdom and repair the damage suffered. German, Flemish and Italian immigrants contributed to repopulating the kingdom; Saxons settled in Transylvania.

With the death of Andrew III the dynasty of the Arpads came to an end (1301) and there was created a troubled period of interregnum in which factions had free rein to overpower one another, and the internal weakness of the country became manifest, dominated as it was by an oligarchy of nobles who by then had long aimed at making themselves almost independent of the sovereign power, waging war on their own account among themselves and with the foreign princes their neighbors; until Cardinal legate Gentile of Montefiore succeeded in having Charles Robert of Anjou recognized in 1308 as sovereign, the son of Charles Martel, who was in turn the son of Charles II king of Naples (cf. Dante, Parad., VIII, 58 ff.). Indeed the Arpads had repeatedly concluded matrimonial relations with the various ruling houses of the neighboring countries, and Charles II of Anjou had married a Magyar princess, Mary, sister of Ladislaus IV (d. 1290).

The reign of Charles Robert (1308-42) and that of his son Louis (1342-82) mark a glorious period in the history of H. The former knew how, with great skill and energy, to tame the unruly nobility and re-establish sovereign authority, to reorganize the army and to maintain Hungarian hegemony against the Habsburgs of Austria and against Serbia; the latter, whom the Hungarians called the Great and who was proclaimed in 1370 also king of Poland, continued the reforms begun by his father, regulating internal law on the basis of a feudal system of landholding distributed among the Orders which, together with the sovereign, constituted the Holy Crown of H. He concerned himself with the development of culture in the kingdom and founded in 1367 the University of Fünfkirchen (Pécs), imposed the sovereignty of H. upon Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Wallachia and Moldavia, and subdued Halych and Lodomeria. With the expeditions against the kingdom of Naples he avenged the death of his younger brother Andrew, killed in 1345 with the complicity of Queen Joanna, whose husband he was; he later intervened in the discords of the Veneto and took part together with Genoa in the struggle against Venice to secure the contested dominion over Dalmatia. But his death rekindled internal controversies: his daughter Mary succeeded to the kingdom under the government of her mother Elizabeth: an attempt by Charles III of Durazzo (also an Angevin) in 1385 to conquer the throne of H. ended with his being killed at Buda (27 Feb. 1386); until in 1387 the government of the kingdom passed into the hands of Mary's husband, Sigismund of Luxembourg, who on 21 July 1410 was elected king of Germany and then succeeded, in 1410, his brother Wenceslaus in the kingdom of Bohemia. These events and furthermore the wars in northern Italy at the beginning of the 15th century and the subsequent concerns for the Council of Constance and the extinction of the schism and the ensuing war against the Hussites distracted Sigismund from the direct government of H., precisely at a decisive moment for its history. The Turks, having crossed the Bosphorus and left Constantinople behind, penetrated into the Balkans, settled in 1363 at Philippopolis and then at Adrianople, constituting a new and very grave danger on the southern flank to Magyar supremacy. In fact Sigismund, who marched against them with the aid of the best European knights, was defeated at Nicopolis in 1396 and, although he nonetheless re-established his authority in Bosnia and other southern provinces, was forced around 1420 to leave to Venice the possession of the Dalmatian cities and was never able to prevent Turks and renegade Christians from repeating raids along the Drava and the Sava as far as into the Austrian duchies and against Bosnia.

On the death of Sigismund and after the brief reign of Albert of Austria (1437-39), H. fell to Ladislaus Jagiellon, king of Poland, in 1440. Meanwhile one of the most deserving Hungarian lords, John Hunyadi, from 1439 led victorious expeditions against the Turks, but in 1444 on the field of Varna King Ladislaus fell together with Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, papal legate, and the flower of the Hungarian militias, a defeat repeated in 1448 at Kosovo. But the papal intervention in aid of Hunyadi, by then regent of the kingdom, led to the victories of 1454 in Serbian territory and in 1456 beneath Belgrade. The death of Hunyadi and of King Ladislaus the Posthumous in 1457 decided the Hungarian nobility to offer in 1458 the crown to Matthias Corvinus (v.), son of Hunyadi, and under him Hungary had a long period of splendor marked above all by the progress of humanistic culture, by the favor shown to books and the arts, by the contacts of the most distinguished minds with the Italian humanists, to which the King's marriage to Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Naples, was not unrelated. But in the end Matthias was induced to declare war against Poland, against George Poděbrady, the Hussite king of Bohemia, and finally against Emperor Frederick III, which led him in 1485 to occupy Vienna. So that after his death in 1490, Ladislaus II of Poland, who succeeded him, was forced to renounce the conquests of Matthias, being incapable of overcoming the disorganization of the kingdom once again provoked by the disputes between the greater and lesser nobility, to which was added in 1514 the revolt, with a social background as well, of the Crusaders, who were supposed to provide for the defense of the kingdom against the Turks. Louis II, who succeeded his father in 1516, could not prevent the Turks from conquering Belgrade in 1521, and in 1526 he himself fell, together with a great part of the nobility and the clergy, on the plains of Mohács, and this marked the end of Hungarian independence, the Turkish predominance in the Danubian plain, and the humiliation and servitude of the people, abandoned to its fate. Louis had married Mary, granddaughter of Maximilian, King of the Romans; therefore the kingdom would have fallen to his grandson Ferdinand of Habsburg; but there was no willingness to renounce the right of free election of the king, and the anti-German party, never extinguished, supported John Zápolya, prince of Transylvania (1526-40), who hastened to place himself under the protection of the Turks. These thus had a good opportunity to move against Vienna in 1529 and 1532; they succeeded in taking Buda in 1541 and in definitively dominating the conquered country, governing it harshly. Hungary was thus divided under three dominations: that of the Turks, that of the Habsburgs, and Transylvania. This last region, reorganized by the Pauline friar George Martinuzzi, created cardinal in 1551, then governed from 1571 by the Báthory, under Stephen Bocskay resumed its alliance with the Turks, waging war against Emperor Rudolf, who was forced to come to peace treaties (1606). Such discords, favored by religious dissensions, made relations more difficult during the Thirty Years' War, when the uprisings of the Transylvanian princes Gabriel Bethlen and George Rákóczi I, allied with the powers hostile to the Empire, prevented the Habsburg sovereigns from providing for their kingdom of Hungary, which, on the other hand, was being reduced to utter ruin by the extortionate tyranny of the Turks. A first sign of recovery came when the Austrian general Montecuccoli defeated the Turks on the Raab in 1664; but once again the nobility's jealousy of Austrian absolutism and the revolts in Transylvania favored the new Turkish assault against Vienna in 1683. Once this had been repelled with the help of Poland, with the favor of Pope Innocent XI the Habsburgs resumed those wars that finally led to the liberation of H.: in 1686 Budapest was reconquered, wherefore in 1687 the Hungarian Diet renounced the right of electing the king in favor of the Habsburgs. Then in Sept. 1697 came the great victory of Zenta, which led to the peace of Karlowitz (1699). The rebellion of Francis Rákóczi (1703-11), supported by Louis XIV of France, delayed the complete victory, which was achieved only after the victory of Peterwardein (1716) and the capture of Temesvár, of Belgrade (1718) and of other places, and the peace of Passarowitz. The reconquered national unity brought the nation closer to the Habsburgs; it fought in the war of the Austrian Succession in favor of Maria Theresa, and later alongside Austria in the struggle against Napoleon. But the colonization that had developed extensively in the territories subject to the Hungarians, as a consequence of the security and the progress of the kingdom, made the internal national problems more pressing.

Within the borders of the State, in fact, besides the German immigrants and the Slovaks, two different nationalities were by then in ferment against the exclusive power held by the Magyar nation, which was nevertheless a strong numerical minority: the Romanian nation, which had begun to claim its rights in Transylvania as early as 1744 through the work of Bishop Micu (v.), and the Croatian nation, which even before the emergence of the Pan-Slavist movement (v. PAN-SLAVISM; SLAVOPHILIA) asserted itself with anti-Magyar tendencies. It was the Croatian ban G. Jelačić who put himself at the head of this movement, with an initially pro-Austrian tendency.

On the other hand, H. was by then evolving toward higher national manifestations, especially through the work of Count Stephen Széchenyi, and with its Diet (1833-36) aspired to carry out internal reforms more in keeping with the new times; not least among them that of the use of the Magyar language instead of Latin in the administration, entering into conflict with the Croats over this. The democratic national agitations of Lajos Kossuth (v.) led in 1848 to greater reforms, to the demand for greater independence by creating a Hungarian parliament, and finally to breaking the bond with Austria, declaring the Austrian dynasty forfeited. But in 1849 the insurrection was suppressed by Austro-Russian troops and the concessions just granted were withdrawn; Croatia was separated from H. and subjected directly to the Empire of Austria, like Dalmatia. But after the defeat of Sadová in 1866, Austria felt the need to draw closer to H., and through negotiations with the Hungarian liberal leader Francis Deák there came about the constitution of what was called the dualist monarchy, with two distinct States and two parliaments under a single sovereign, the ministries for Foreign Affairs, for War and for Common Affairs, especially concerning the apportionment of expenses, also remaining common. Transylvania remained incorporated into H. without any special arrangement; while with Croatia, a quasi-autonomous State, particular agreements were established. After this, Francis Joseph was able to be crowned king of H. according to the ancient ceremonial on 8 June 1867. The peace that followed offered H. the possibility of a truly remarkable cultural and economic development, but not of resolving the question of the nationalities; at the end of the war of 1914-18 H. was constituted as a republic (31 Oct. 1918), which was followed on 21 March 1919 by the Bolshevik revolution led by the Jew Béla Kun, which brought everything to ruin, but lasted only until 31 July.

Admiral Nicholas Horthy in fact succeeded, with the help of the peasants, in reconstituting the kingdom, of which he himself was proclaimed regent, from which however the victors wanted the Habsburgs excluded. The treaty of Trianon of 4 July 1920 sealed the fate of H., deprived of 71.5% of its territory and of two-thirds of its former population.

At the outbreak of the war of 1939 the Regent found himself on the side of the Axis with Germany and Italy in order to have their support in the Hungarian territorial claims; but when in the spring of 1944 the Soviet troops were at the gates of Romania, the regent was summoned on 19 March to Hitler's headquarters, and the latter on the 21st had H. occupied by German troops; on 31 Oct., after an attempt at an armistice, accused of treason by the Germans, he was interned in Bavaria; H., invaded by Soviet troops, was subjected to the worst vexations and, included in the Soviet sphere of influence according to the pacts concluded among the Allies, was therefore forced to submit to a communist government.

III. ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND RELATIONS WITH THE HOLY SEE

The Hungarian Church traces its origins back to King St. Stephen, because nothing remained in the country of the institutions of Christian antiquity, nor had those sketched out by St. Methodius withstood the invasion; his disciples had in fact interrupted his work by departing toward Bulgaria.

The hierarchical organization remained substantially as the King, aided by German and Italian missionaries, had constituted and generously endowed it; while an, so to speak, integral part of it was formed by the Benedictine monasteries that were then founded, and particularly that of St. Martin on Mount Pannonia (Pannonhalma), the homeland of St. Martin, not far from Győr, which rose to become the head of Hungarian monasticism; the archbishop of Esztergom always held within the nation an effective primacy, even when the metropolis of Kalocsa was established. It is no wonder, given these premises, that there arose in the Hungarian episcopate a sense of particular dependence toward the sovereign, as toward a patron from whom appointments to the various offices came, and that this episcopate formed a compact body with the nation, in which it formed the first Estate together with the abbots and the provosts of the collegiate churches. Religious legislation conformed to the ancient canons of the Church and to those prescriptions that had been added through the work of the Frankish capitularies and the German councils. There never was in Hungary, however, investiture with ring and pastoral staff; yet through the centuries there was no lack of complaints about the excessive interference of the sovereigns in ecclesiastical affairs. It is certain in any case that the frequent discords over the succession to the Kingdom during the rule of the Árpáds and the many wars against external enemies often had a baleful influence on religious life and ecclesiastical discipline. The very conversion of the Cumans, repeatedly attempted, was hindered as a result, so that only under King Louis could it be considered complete. In the 13th century Ugron, bishop of Kalocsa, led a crusade against the Bogomils who wanted to spread from Bosnia into Hungary.

To develop the work of the first Benedictines there were added, in the 2nd half of the 12th century, the Cistercians and the Premonstratensian Canons Regular, for the most part of French. During the 13th century, and particularly after the Tatar invasion, Dominicans and Franciscans carried out an effective apostolate. The monks of St. Paul the First Hermit (v.) were of directly Hungarian origin; during the 14th century they came to have more than 50 monasteries and spread also outside H., especially in Poland. In Rome they had a church and monastery at S. Stefano Rotondo. The Knights of St. John also had commanderies and possessions in the Kingdom of H.

During the great Western Schism H. sided with Pope Urban VI; it was King Sigismund who, having embraced the cause of John XXIII and then of the Council of Constance, also drew H. along with him.

From the German wars stirred up by Lutheranism and from the Turkish invasions, Protestant penetration in Transylvania had the opportunity to profit. This happened with the complicity of the prince, in opposition to the religious policy of the Habsburgs, allowing that in 1542 a true organized Lutheran Church be established there, particularly among the immigrant Germans, followed by a Calvinist Church which held its synods at Csenger in 1557 and at Debrecen in 1567. A third, less widespread confession was established there by the Unitarian Socinians through the work of Giorgio Biandrata.

Calvinism also took deep root among the Magyar nobility, facilitated by the sad religious conditions of the country, so much so that for a certain time few noble families remained Catholic. And the fanaticism proper to the Reformed, of which the martyrs of Cassovia (v.) in 1619 give proof, together with their collusion of political interests with the Turk, who was eager to keep Christians divided, well explain such successes; while the Catholic hierarchy had lost its best elements in the wars of resistance (the primate Ladislao Szalkái had fallen at Mohács on 29 Aug. 1526) and with them also the possibility of providing for the education of the clergy and the assistance of the regular clergy. Meanwhile the Treaties of Vienna of 1606 and 1608 assured the dissidents full freedom of worship and organization, which they took advantage of for violence against Catholics, sustained as they felt themselves to be by princes or foreign powers.

The Turkish occupation prevented the archbishop primate prepared the recovery of Hungarian Catholicism in opposition to the fierce Calvinist propaganda that was repeated with greater or lesser intensity according to political circumstances. Conversions to Islam in H. were few, however.

The progressive reconquest of the territory restored the Church's circumscriptions within their former boundaries, bringing the ancient religious orders back to the area and at the same time introducing the Jesuits and the Piarists there. This also provoked the reactions of the dissidents, who, feeling themselves in a minority also as a result of the numerous conversions, feared that the violence by means of which they had made themselves strong in the past would be turned against themselves. With the Peace of Szatmár in 1711, following the suppression of the disturbances, religious freedom was granted to them; but that propaganda which political circumstances had made almost unchallenged was no longer possible for them. The Resolutio Carolina of 1731 made these relations more precise, especially with regard to change of religion, mixed marriages and the education of offspring. Questions that were then repeatedly agitated thereafter.

The recovery of Catholicism was rapid and imposing, thanks also to the broad movement toward union with Rome on the part of the communities of the Byzantine rite, particularly among the Ruthenians and Romanians of Transylvania, favored by Archbishop Leopold Karl Kollonicz (1695-1707); this led in 1721 to the erection of the bishopric of Fágáras. Thanks to the interest of Queen Maria Theresa, the bishoprics of Mukačevo (Munkács) in Subcarpathia were instituted in 1771 and, for the Romanians of Transylvania, that of Nagyvárad (Oradea Mare, Nagy-Várad) in 1777, and for the Croats that of Križevci (Krizevci, Kreutz) also in 1777. From the territory of Strigonium in 1776 the new sees of Roznava (Roznava), Scepusium (Spiš, Zips) and Neosolium (Banska-Bystrica), now in Czechoslovakia, were separated. The need was also felt to increase the number of Hungarian dioceses by constituting in 1777, in the territory of Győr and Veszprém, the new dioceses of Sabaria (Szombathely) and Alba Regia (Székesfehérvár). Francis I in 1804 erected the two new dioceses of Cassovia (Kosice, Kassa), now in Czechoslovakia, and of Satu Mare (Szatmár), now in Romania, subjecting them to the new metropolis of Agria (Erlau, Eger); in 1818 he erected for the Ruthenians the diocese of Fragopolitana (Presov, Pijašev), now in Czechoslovakia. Two other dioceses of the Eastern rite were erected under Franz Joseph in 1853: those of Lugos and of Claudiopolis-Armenopolis (Cluj), and subjected to the new metropolis of Fágáras (Alba Julia, Blaj). There followed Haidudorog in 1912 and Timisoara (Temesvár) in 1930.

The Concordat stipulated in 1855 between Austria and the Holy See was held to be valid also for H.; but with the of Strigonium to remain in his see and together with the Chapter to find refuge at Tirnovo (Nagyszombat) in Slovakia. Moreover the see itself remained vacant for 23 years, from June 1573 to June 1596. The other sees of H. found themselves in similar conditions. At Tirnovo, meanwhile, the Jesuits worked effectively in the college entrusted to them for the preservation of culture and the formation of the Hungarian clergy: and already Archbishop Ferenc Forgách (1607-16), then above all Péter Pázmány (v.)

1868, when political freedom was obtained for H., the restrictive policy to the detriment of the Church's freedom also began, in obedience precisely to that false liberalism that was infesting Europe. It began with the school and with the children of mixed marriages, then it passed to the introduction of civil marriage (1869), to the prohibition of publishing the bull of pontifical infallibility and to the placet in 1870. In this they followed the dominant moods in the Chancellery of Vienna, the influences deriving from the propaganda of the German Kulturkampf. The minister Sándor Wekerle made himself famous by accentuating, in 1894-95, the previous oppressive laws, introducing divorce, the official recognition of the Jews in the Kingdom and the favoring of the Protestant Churches. The Church responded with a more effective organization of its forces through suitable popular and youth organizations and by demanding greater autonomy in the scholastic and administrative field.

A new adjustment of the ecclesiastical circumscriptions, obtained following the Vienna Award of Nov. 1939 and of Aug. 1940, did not last long because of the Russian invasion of 1945. The apostolic nuncio was expelled and the Hungarian Church in 1946 was again reduced within the boundaries assigned to H. in 1920. The communist government installed in H. soon demonstrated its ill will against the Church and attempted to enslave it to its own interests: it professed not to want to recognize prelates not nominated with its approval, that is, those whom the Holy See nominated; it condemned to life imprisonment Cardinal Mindszenty, Archbishop of Strigonium, and Msgr. Grósz, Archbishop of Colocza; it had priests of its confidence appointed to the offices of vicar general and chancellor in the episcopal Curias, imposing a lay commissioner in each, appointed by the state office for ecclesiastical affairs; under the pretext of agrarian reform it took from the Church the forest properties and almost entirely the agricultural ones, dissolved the religious Orders and Congregations, with a few exceptions, confiscating all their goods; it suppressed almost all Catholic schools run by religious, also limiting the number of seminaries and religious academies and stifling the Catholic press. An ecclesiastical regime was thus established practically aimed at the annihilation of every religious freedom and activity for the benefit of atheistic communism.

Ecclesiastical circumscriptions. - The Hungarian territory in 1953 was divided into the archdioceses of AGRIA (Eger, Erlau), which has its suffragan dioceses in Czechoslovakia; of COLOCZA (Kalocsa) with the suffragan of CSANAD; of STRIGONIA (Esztergom, Gran) with the suffragans of ALBAREALE (Székesfehérvár), CINQUICHIESE (Pécs, Fünfkirchen), GIAVARINO (Győr), HAIDUDOROG (of the Byzantine rite), SABARIA (Szombathely, Steinamanger), VACIA (Vác), VESZPRIMIA (Veszprém); the ABBEY NULLIUS OF ST. MARTIN IN MONTE PANNONIAE (Pannonhalma) at the head of the Hungarian Benedictine congregation, and the apostolic exarchate for the parishes of the Ruthenians of the Byzantine rite at Miskolc.

IV. HUNGARIAN RITE

It is an ethnic branch of the Byzantine rite according to its Ruthenian form. Its only distinctive feature is the liturgical language which, despite the apostolic constitution Christifidelium of 8 June 1912 (AAS, 4 [1912], pp. 432-33), is in fact Hungarian.

The following editions of the liturgical books are known: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Ungvár 1795; Debreczen 1882); Book of prayers and hymns (ibid. 1862 and others); Selected Epistles and Gospels (Eger 1882; Ungvár 1902, more complete ed.); Euchologion (Debreczen 1883; Ungvár 1907; Nyíregyháza 1927); Liturgy of St. Basil and of the Presanctified (ibid. 1889); Liturgicon (complete, Nyíregyháza 1920); Calendar with rubrical notes (ibid. 1917); Anthologion for the feasts of September and October (Szatmár-Nemesti 1905); Horologion (the Great; 2 vols., Miskolc 1938); I. Boksay and F. Malinis, Collection of liturgical hymns with musical notation (Ungvár 1906).

SE.; S. Congregation for the Oriental Churches, Statistica con cenni storici..., Vatican City 1932, pp. 221-226.

V. LITERATURE

1. The pagan age (up to 1000)

No written document of the poetry of the pagan period has come down to us, although the Hungarians, before the Latin alphabet, knew a script carved on staves.

Without constituting a true epic poem, heroic songs flourished about the deeds of the ancestors and the military enterprises of the great captains contemporary with the minstrels, which the latter sang in the first person, making frequent use of alliteration and of the repetition of words and ideas. These songs formed two principal cycles: the cycle of the Hun-Magyar saga and the cycle of the conquest of the homeland. There is also evidence for the existence of folk songs, and traces have come down to us of magic formulas that probably go back to shamanistic worship. These heroic songs, folk songs and magic formulas were accompanied by singing, monodic even when instrumentally accompanied, which was based on the pentatonic scale.

2. The Middle Ages (up to the end of the 1400s)

With the conversion to Christianity the Hungarians entered the Christian community of Europe with the help of the Church and more precisely of the religious orders, of the Benedictines at first, of the Dominicans and Franciscans later. Throughout the Middle Ages literature in the Latin language prevailed in Hungary, cultivated, in the 11th century, predominantly by foreign ecclesiastics. At the beginning of this literature stands the Deliberatio supra hymnum trium puerorum of the Venetian Benedictine St. Gerard, who became bishop of Csanád (d. 1046), who, taking his cue from the book of Daniel (the fate of Daniel and his companions offered him the symbol for that of the Christian missionaries among the pagan Hungarians), uses that "hymn of the creatures" to meditate on the whole of creation and to offer the neophyte Christians a complete Christian Weltanschauung.

The Deliberatio lays the foundations of that long flowering which in Hungarian literary history is called the "literature of the codices". These codices, written in Latin and bound, often in the literal sense of the word, to the chapter and convent libraries, contained the Holy Scriptures, the Sacramentaries, the lives of the saints and, later, also collections of sacred orations; there are then found in them the first traces of the vernacular language: translations often inserted into the same original codex of the sermons that the priest had to interpret for the Hungarian faithful, or of the hymns that were to be sung in the vernacular. The first Hungarian literary text goes back to the beginning of the 13th century and is a Funeral Oration. In it the language, despite certain difficulties, of spelling in the first place and less of a grammatical nature, is well understandable to the Hungarians of today. The subsequent texts from the beginning of the 14th century are a Máriastiralom inspired by the Planctus Sanctae Mariae of Godfrey of Saint Victor; the Glosses of Alba Julia, translations of sermon outlines; the Fragment of Conisberga, a prose version of a hymn to the Virgin, and others of lesser importance. The invasion of the Tartars (1241) and the Turkish domination of the 16th and 17th centuries brought too many losses to the Hungarian book heritage, but even the few known examples reveal, in comparison with the models, an expressive vigor and a constructive sagacity that surpass the originals. Limiting the examination of the Latin texts to those of specific Hungarian interest, one recalls the Institutio morum ad Emericum ducem, contemporary with the Deliberatio, attributed to St. Stephen, which contains the teaching to the heir prince on the art of government, in which political conduct proves to be entirely based on Christian morality. Around 1070, with the Legenda s. Zoerardi et s. Benedicti, owed to bishop St. Maurus, the series of the Vitae of the saints of Hungary begins. During the era of the Árpád kings (1001-1301) and Angevin kings (a good part of the 14th century) the chroniclers, official historiographers of the court, drew on the pagan saga, reworking its material according to dynastic interests and contaminating it with Western motifs. The series of chronicles opens at the end of the 12th century, with the Gesta Hungarorum of the anonymous chronicler — Magister P., a Hungarian Benedictine trained in Paris — comprising the history of the conquest of the homeland. The chronicle, with the same title, of Simon Kézai (1284) introduces into Hungarian historiography the concept of Hun-Magyar continuity. The Viennese Illuminated Chronicle, owed to Mark Kalti (1358), carries the narrative down to the reign of Charles Robert (1309-42), while John Küküllei dedicated his work (1390) to the deeds of Louis the Great (1342-82). Close to historiography stand the Epistola magistri Rogerii super destructionem regni Hungariae per Tartaros facta (1244), owed to a priest of Benevento who was an eyewitness of the Tartar invasion and their prisoner for a year, and, dedicated to the same event, a Planctus destructionis regni Ungariae per Tartaros, an elegy by an unknown author. Nor are there lacking, in the 14th century, hymns dedicated to the Hungarian saints and written by anonymous Magyar poets in Latin.

To the first half of the 15th century belongs the first entirely Hungarian codex: the Vita s. Francisci compiled from an Actus beati Francisci, from the Speculum perfectionis and from the Vita of St. Francis by St. Bonaventure. In three codices there also appear, around 1466, the first partial translations of the Bible, erroneously believed to be a Hussite initiative: Gospels, psalms, the books of Ruth, Judith, Esther, Baruch, Daniel, the twelve minor prophets, the Maccabees. In the second half of the century there also appears the first Hungarian elegy Gergely deák éneke Both Jánosról ["The song of the deák Gregory on John Both"]. Deák, from deacon, has the meaning of a scholar expert in Latin and in the art of writing. The elegy was born when Both, ambassador of Matthias Corvinus to Constantinople, was detained by the sultan and disappeared. There also appears the first poem Szabács viadala ("Szabacs captured", 1476). In the field of folk poetry the repertoire of the minstrels, which had gradually absorbed also the lives of the holy Hungarian kings and the deeds of the Árpáds, is enriched with motifs taken from the contrasts between the nation and its sovereigns of foreign origin (Sigismund, Charles Robert), or else during the glorious reign of Louis the Great, who had completely assimilated himself to the nation; thus are born the stories of the Zách, of Kont, of Lőrinc Tar and of Miklós Toldi. But it is Latin literature that makes active the first printing press set up in Buda in 1473, and its first product is a Chronica Hungarorum, a compilation by an unknown author from the preceding chronicles. Fifteen years later there issues at Brno the Chronicle of John Turóczi, the only one among the medieval Hungarian chroniclers who was not an ecclesiastic, which will later serve as a source for the humanistic Hungarian history of the Bonfini. Among the earliest products of the printing press is also the series of collections of sacred orations: in 1482 the Sermones tredecim universales magistri Michaelis de Ungaria, a Dominican; in 1497-98 the three volumes of the Biga salutis by the Franciscan Osvát Laskai and, from 1487 to 1503, the collections that were to achieve diffusion and popularity throughout all Europe, by the Franciscan Pelbartus de Temesvár: Stellarium, Pomerium, Sermones, Rosarium, Quadragesimales, etc., some of which even reached 18-20 editions. To the humanistic court of Matthias Corvinus are owed, besides the magnificent Corvina library, the elegant epistles known under the name of the sovereign himself, the Rerum Hungaricarum decades of the aforementioned Bonfini of Recanati, which carries the narrative of Hungarian history up to 1496, remaining for several centuries, in Hungary and abroad, the principal source of historiography on Hungary, a libellus elegans by Galeotto Marzio de egregie, sapienter et jocose dictis ac factis Matthiae Ungariae regis, as well as a series of political or encomiastic pamphlets by minor foreign humanists. The Hungarian humanists were no less than the king, high prelates for the most part, who with the help of Vespasiano da Bisticci assembled their own libraries: János Vitéz, archbishop of Esztergom and tutor of Matthias (1408-72), Pietro Garàzda, the bishop of Vác Miklós Bátori, the archbishop of Kalocsa Pietro Váradi, who had been trained in Italian universities and carried on an extensive epistolary and often also poetic activity in Latin. Greatest among them all was Janus Pannonius (1434-1472), bishop of Pécs, who had lived for eleven years in Ferrara, Padua and Rome, of whom have survived the elegant short poem Concentratio sentorum, 4 panegyrics, 34 elegies and more than 400 epigrams, translations from Demosthenes, Plutarch and Plotinus. The elegance of his Latin and the vigor of his poetic expression are admired especially in the short poem, in certain elegies and in several epigrams in part licentious; his Neoplatonic ideas, his interest in astrology, his predilection for classical culture are manifested instead more effectively in the compositions De rerum humanarum conditione, Ad Galeotum, De Stella, and in the panegyric for Guarino da Verona, his teacher.

3. Lutheran Reformation and Catholic Restoration

The catastrophe of Mohács (1526) and the ensuing disagreement of the nation over the person of the monarch led to schism. With this the unitary development of literature was also undermined; the spread of the Protestant Reformation only increased the division of minds, tormented also by the revolt of the serfs in 1514 and its severe repression. The sorrowful Prayer to the Virgin by András Vásárhelyi (1508) and the satirical Cantilena by Ferenc Apáti (1526) fear and foresee these evils, and even the first Hungarian hexameter, of 1521, speaks of the decline of Rome.

Meanwhile the spread of printing does not delay the activity of translators and, in the first three decades of the 16th century, numerous Marian legends, lives of saints, the legends of Barlaam and Josaphat and of St. Alexis are translated from Latin; while that of the blessed Margaret of Hungary is even composed in the Hungarian language (1510). This vast activity also enriches poetry: thus with the long legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria of more than 400 octosyllabic lines in rhymed couplets, with the hymn to the Crucifix and the hymn to St. Ladislaus king, to cite only the best-known examples. The Bible also continues to be translated; beginning with the followers of Erasmus who prepare some partial versions with the commentary of their master. Benedek Komjáti translates in 1533 the Epistles of St. Paul and Gábor Pesti in 1536 the Gospels. János Sylvester, a Lutheran, translated the entire New Testament, prefixing to it a dedication to the reader in resounding Hungarian distichs (1541). After numerous other partial translations the Calvinist Gáspár Károli offered the first complete version (1590). Great was the influence of this Hungarian Bible, especially in literature: and it is still found in certain modern poets.

In the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th, a great part of Hungarian printing concerns religious polemic; in it the Protestants prevail at first, in the three currents Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian, until 1580; the action of the bishop of Pécs, Miklós Telegdi, marks the beginning of the Catholic recovery. The polemic was not limited to the discussion of dogmas, but extended to the search for historical responsibility for the wretched conditions of the country. Through the literary reflection of such polemics, the vernacular language becomes sharper and richer, the personality of the writers differentiates itself, preparing the ground for a flowering of lyrical poetry predominantly religious. The tones of such poetry are rather dark: Calvinist predestination, the predilection of Protestant preaching for the Old Testament are the cause, together with the sad conditions of the dismembered country. Another inspirer of poetry was the continuous struggle of Hungarian soldiers, in the border territories, against the Turk. This sector found its greatest exponent in the minstrel Sebestyén Tinódi (ca. 1506-56) who published the collection of his songs under the title Chronica, in 1554. A third source was constituted by love verses, the so-called flower songs, which because of the austerity of the times could not attain the honors of print. He who knew how to unite in himself all three of these aspects, becoming the first true Hungarian lyric poet, was Baron Valentin Balassi (1551-94). A soldier poet endowed with vast culture, a connoisseur of the classical literatures, practiced in the Italian, Czech and Turkish languages, he had a very eventful life. A Lutheran by birth, he converted to Catholicism. He died from a wound received in battle against the Turk and in his last days translated the Psalms. His religious songs reached over the centuries 42 editions. His military and love songs circulated in manuscript with very great influence on the development of Hungarian poetry, also thanks to the new forms created by Balassi.

More than in the written lyric of the 16th century, the sentiment of love prevailed in narrative. The verse novellas (széphistóriák, that is, beautiful stories), were, except for two, translations particularly from Boccaccio, but through Latin versions. Likewise in narrative prose. The deeds of István Munkoczi, a kind of picaresque novella, is the only original work; all the others are translations from Latin or from German. There also appears the first translation of a classical drama: the Electra by Péter Bornemissza (1558), to whom is attributed the dialogue satire on the Treachery of Menyhárt Balassi (1569), five acts on the story of one of the most shady adventurers of the time. In pastoral drama there is only a fragment, Credulus and Julia, on an Italian model, attributed to Bálint Balassi.

The Society of Jesus, introduced into Hungary in 1561, was running a printing press at Nagyszombat in 1577; in 1635 Cardinal Péter Pázmány (v.), himself a Jesuit, founded the university there (which was later to be transferred to Budapest): these were the men and the means that, under the guidance of Pázmány's exceptional genius, made the cause of the Counter-Reformation triumph in Hungary, transforming the country once more into a Regnum Marianum. Among Pázmány's followers the Jesuit György Káldi stands out, the first among Hungarian Catholics to produce a complete translation of the Bible (1626), still in use today. The canon Mihály Veresmárti (1572-1645) gave Hungarian literature its first work in the genre of conversion narratives. The Protestants too continued their translating activity. The Psalterium Ungaricum (1607), the work of Albert Szenci Molnár, based on the French and German versions, set to music by Goudimel, is still in use in Protestant worship. János Apácai Csere, himself a Protestant, following in the footsteps of Descartes wrote the first Hungarian philosophical compendium (Magyar logikácsha), and with his Magyar Encyclopedia (1655), a vast compilation translated from Latin manuals, laid the foundations of the Hungarian scientific language. These two writers were active in the principality of Transylvania, which remained the last bulwark of Protestantism thanks also to the princes, who had the Protestant religious songs collected and published under the title of Greater Gradual (1636), completing the earlier collection, the Little Gradual, of 1592. The Transylvanian court contributed to the growth of literature with the autobiography of Prince János Kemény (1607-62) and of Chancellor Miklós Bethlen (1642-1716). On the Catholic side, in 1651 there appeared, through the work of the Jesuit Benedek Szőlősy, the collection Cantus catholici, with the finest

Catholic religious songs, setting an example that would be followed in 1674 by the collection of the same name by Bishop Ferenc Szegedi, in 1676 by the Cantonale catolicum of the Franciscan János Kájoni, in 1693 by the Psalms of the canon István Illyés and in 1695 by the Lyra coelestia of the canon György Náray. A second collection of verse was also published in 1651 by the poet-commander and statesman Miklós Zrínyi under the title: Adrial tengernek Syrenaja: "The Siren of the Adriatic," which includes the Szigeti beszedelen (Obsidio Szigetiana), the first heroic-religious poem of Hungarian literature, whose subject is the Sultan's siege in 1566 against the fortress of Szigetvár defended by an ancestor of the poet, and in which the historical element blends organically with the miraculous through the poet's living faith. Miklós Zrínyi (1620-64), a disciple of Pázmány, became ban of Croatia at the age of only 27. To complete his studies, Pázmány sent him to Italy, and there Zrínyi deepened his knowledge of literature. In his political-military works, all directed against Turkish domination, the influence of Machiavelli can be traced, in his lyrics of pastoral inspiration that of Marino, while in the Obsidio the influence of Tasso is evident. In the form (stanzas of four rhymed dodecasyllabic lines) and in the style created by him, László Listius sang the story of the battle of Mohács under the title Magyar Márs (1653). The second great poet of the seventeenth century, István Gyöngyösi (1624-1704), narrows the scope of the heroic poem: in him religious feeling clothes itself in a mythological decoration and loses intensity; historical events, instead of being national, are reduced in him to familiar proportions, and often indeed matrimonial ones; which offers him the pretext to shift poetic interest from the heroic to the amorous. Such are, for example, the poem Márssal társalkodó Murányi Vénus ("The Venus of Murány Allied with Mars") and the song on the marriage of Imre Thököly and Ilona Zrínyi, as well as a part of the Memoir of János Kemény. Even more evident is the erotic intent beneath the moralizing appearances in Csalárd Cupido ("Cupid the Betrayer"). Not free of mythological contaminations, but sincere and convincing, are his meditations on the Mysteries of the Rosary, Rózsákozór, rich in expressive means ranging from the naive popular style to crude verism. As for the technical mastery of versification, Gyöngyösi's art marks a significant advance over that of Zrínyi. In the seventeenth century narrative prose and the theater do not go beyond translations or elaborations from foreign models. Art lyric poetry finds among its devotees some continuers of the Balassian tradition; among these János Rímai, if he does not equal the model in lyrical power, is worthy to stand beside him for the variety of his inspiration. Péter Beniczky, who in his religious songs draws inspiration from Pázmány's prayer book, and István Koháry, who wrote most of his verses in prison, limit themselves instead to religious and patriotic poetry; Ferenc Barakonyi and the baroness Kata Szidónia Petrócz to amorous and religious poetry. Popular lyric poetry — or rather, poetry by unknown authors but by no means lacking in learning — still circulated in manuscript. A collection of erotic and satirical verses is the Vásárhelyi daloskönyv ("Songbook of Vásárhely"). Toward the end of the century the poetry of the kuruc then arose. The kuruc (from crux: from the peasant revolt of 1514, originally recruited for a Crusade against the Turks) were the insurgents against the Habsburgs, whether they were those persecuted after the discovery of the Wesselényi conspiracy, or the soldiers of Imre Thököly and Ferenc Rákóczi II. The themes of this poetry are hatred of the Germans, joy or sorrow for battles won or lost, concern for the fate of the homeland that often issues in ardent prayers, and, finally, the expression of a long-repressed but exuberant vitality and cheerfulness in moments of truce. The poetry of the kuruc reaches its greatest flowering in the first decade of the 18th century.

4. The Eighteenth Century

Except for its last decades, the eighteenth century is regarded as a period of decline for national literature. In reality the generating centers of literature came to be located, at the beginning of the century, in the Rákóczian emigration and, at the end of the century, in the Hungarian noble milieu of the Viennese court; while intellectual interest shifted to a certain extent into the field of scientific literature.

In 1711, the Peace of Szatmár, putting an end to the Rákóczian insurrection, marks the beginning of the emigration of Rákóczi and his followers, who after an initial Polish period (1711-13) and Parisian period (1723-17) settled definitively at Rodostó, in Turkey. The most important literary products of the emigration are the memoirs, written in Latin, of Prince Rákóczi himself, and the Letters from Turkey of his chamberlain Kelemen Mikes, published posthumously in 1794. In these, addressed to an imaginary aunt, Mikes (1690-1761) gathered all the noteworthy events, added to them a rich store of anecdotes and tales, and over them wove the delicate fabric of a long unfulfilled love of his. Mikes also left a dozen translations from the French: all works of edification and religious history.

After the first attempts in the field of the periodical press — the Ephemerides Latinae of the Jesuit Márton Szentiványi (Nagyszombat, 1675-1710) and the Mercurius of Prince Rákóczi (1705-10), both directed at foreign public opinion — and after the first, more or less ephemeral, initiatives to offer Hungarian readers newspapers written in Latin or German — such as the Nuova Posonienia (1721), the Ofnerischer Mercurius (1731) and the Pressburger Zeitung (1765) — the first Hungarian newspapers also came into being in the eighteenth century: the Magyar Hírmondó at Pozsony in 1780, which from 1787 also published a literary supplement, the Magyar Mercurius at Pest in 1787, the Magyar-kurir at Vienna in 1786, the Erdélyi Magyar Hírvevő in Transylvania in 1790, etc.

The country's three major printing houses — Nagyszombat, Budapest, Debrecen — printed a great quantity of scholarly books, most of them in Latin, which served to make Hungarian history, legal life, etc. known abroad, as well as to insert Hungary organically into the European intellectual currents of the age. Comparative linguistics and literary history arose through the work of János Sajnovics and Dávid Cvittinger respectively, while historiography continued to flourish: the Jesuit Gábor Hevenesy, with his collection of sources in 140 manuscript volumes, laid the foundations of Hungarian ecclesiastical history, while György Pray, also a Jesuit, completed, with his archival research, the drafting of the Annales veteres and Annales Regum Hungariae. The Historia critica of István Katona S.J., in 43 volumes, is the most voluminous historiographical work that Hungarian literature knows.

A bridge between scholarly and literary prose is constituted by the moral works of the Jesuit Ferenc Faludi (1704-1779), adaptations, through Italian, French and German translations, of works by the Englishman Darell, the Spaniard Gracián and others, which are so many stages of a preventive struggle against the Enlightenment. Anticipating Herder himself, Faludi is the first scholar of folk poetry. While he introduces into his lyrics numerous Western forms (among them also the sonnet and other Italian forms: a fact due to his five-year stay in Rome as confessor of the Hungarian pilgrims), with his neologisms he anticipates the linguistic renewal of the end of the century. Baron László Amadé (1703-64) is the other lyric poet who enriches the forms of Hungarian poetry with his versatility, but his output, predominantly amatory and devoid of moral seriousness, marks the first phenomenon of the secularization of literature in Hungary. Pál Rádai, on the other hand, inaugurates, in his capacity as singer of conjugal love, a lyrical tendency that would later become traditional and would find its highest expression in the lyric poetry of Sándor Kisfaludy and Sándor Petőfi.

The Enlightenment current of Hungarian literature arose at the court of Maria Theresa, among the young nobles who at Vienna were part of the Queen's special bodyguard; first in this current was György Bessenyei, who knew how to impart to it a nationalist direction, nor, on the other hand, was his Enlightenment devoid of a profound inner struggle between nationalist doubt and an intimate need for religious faith. An animator of cultural initiatives rather than a truly creative artist, Bessenyei (1747-1811) nonetheless left precious traces — in tragedy, in comedy, in epic and didactic poetry, in the political novel, etc. — which would be followed in the course of the nineteenth century by artists greater than he, just as the greater statesmen of nineteenth-century Hungary would bring to completion cultural initiatives that Bessenyei went on pointing out in his numerous pamphlets. That group of writers who took their name from Bessenyei and who worked toward the realization of his program — to make the nation progress by cultivating the national language — above all through translations from French, soon had followers in the homeland and, ever widening, preserved intact the nationalist program, losing its initial Enlightenment inspiration. The cause, however, must also be sought in the bloody repression of the Jacobin conspiracy led by the ecclesiastic Ignác Martinovics, in which numerous writers were also involved, and therefore condemned to more or less lengthy imprisonment.

From the seed sown by Bessenyei there arose various tendencies according to the Hungarian or foreign, ancient or modern models by which they were inspired. Thus there was the Latinizing tendency, the Germanizing current, the conservative national school, the Italian influence, until all the sources converged in the more complex personalities of Kazinczy and Kölcsey.

The initiators of the Latinizing tendency were the Jesuit Dávid Baróti (1739-1819), the Piarist Miklós Révai (1749-1807) and the Jesuit József Rájnis (1741-1812); its most valiant continuator the Pauline Benedek Virág; only the perfecter and last representative of this school, the Lutheran Dániel Berzsenyi (1776-1836), was a layman. The principal merit of the three precursors was to have clarified, through a heated polemic, the problems of Hungarian prosody, to have faithfully translated a series of classical authors and sometimes also humanists, and to have introduced into Hungarian poetry definitively all the classical meters, together with many forms of thought from the Greek world and from ancient and Baroque Latinity, enriching the Magyar poetic language. Virág placed the ancient meters at the service of patriotic current affairs, giving popularity to the Latinizing tendency. From Berzsenyi, Horatian forms, concision and psychology are taken up and lived with profound Christian faith. The peaks of his religious and patriotic poetry are respectively the odes Fohászkodás ("Prayer") and A magyarokhoz ("To the Hungarians").

Among the supporters of the conservative national school, the Piarist András Dugonics (1704-1818), the general József Gvadányi, of Italian origin (1725-1801), and the botanist Mihály Fazekas (1766-1828) excel. Dugonics, "the father of the Hungarian novel," translated the Homeric poems and the Aeneid into alexandrines and wrote a series of historical novels, among which Etelka was the first "bestseller" in Hungarian literature. Dugonics owed his great popularity to his ardent nationalism. Gvadányi weaves, in a satirical-moralizing short poem, Egy falusi notárius budai utazása ("The Journey to Buda of a Country Notary," 1790), the praise of the ancient national virtues and condemns the imitation of foreign fashions; in the poem Routé Pál ("Paul Fracassa") he narrates the story of a plebeian adventurer. Mihály Fazekas offers, with the comic short poem Ludas Matyi ("Matthias of the Geese"), through the tale of the triple revenge of a serf against a great landowner, one of the first social motifs in Hungarian literature.

Close to the national tendency, but surpassing its limits as a school, stand Sándor Kisfaludy and Mihály Csokonai Vitéz. S. Kisfaludy (1777-1844), an officer stationed at Milan and later a prisoner of war in Provence, came into contact with Petrarch's poetry and wrote, under the influence of the Canzoniere, the two books of Himfy szerelmei ("The Loves of Himfy: Lament of Love and Happy Love"). In the first, Kisfaludy does not go beyond Petrarchan themes; in the second, on the other hand, he sings of conjugal love. A more complex but also more tragic figure, who lived always in poverty and died prematurely, is Csokonai (1773-1805), whose poetic personality ranges from the delicacy of the songs for Lilla, the most airy and musical in Hungarian lyric poetry, through the successful humor of the heroic-comic poem Dorottya ("Dorottya, or the Ladies at Carnival"), to the philosophical penetration of A lélek halhatatlantá-gáról ("On the Immortality of the Soul"). He translated from Tasso, from Metastasio, from Guarino.

In the Germanizing trend, the most prominent writers are Gedeon Ráday (1713-92), Gábor Dává (1768-1796), the Pauline Ferenc Verseghy (1775-1822), János Batsányi (1763-1845) and József Kármán (1769-95). In the poems of Ráday and Verseghy, rhyme and meter appear paired for the first time; Dává is the first melancholy-sentimental voice; Batsányi, a revolutionary poet at first and later a bitter pessimist, is the first theorist in Hungary of artistic translation; Kármán transplants the sentimental novel into Hungarian literature with Fanni hagyományai ("The Memoirs of Fanni"). Literary life in the modern sense of the word begins in Hungary with the activity of Ferenc Kazinczy (1759-1831). Through the publication of literary journals and above all his correspondence with all Hungarian writers, poets and scholars, later collected in 21 volumes, he is the organizer of Hungarian literary life. The polemic that arose following the activity of the neologists, to which Kazinczy himself made a great contribution, especially with his translations from Sallust, Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe and Lessing, did nothing but further awaken the public's interest in literature. Even if, in the face of his organizational and innovative activity, Kazinczy's poetic creation remains in the background, it is nevertheless marked by a very lofty stylistic sense and sure taste. A companion of Kazinczy in linguistic renewal and his follower in poetic direction was Ferenc Kölcsey (1790-1838), forerunner of Hungarian literary criticism and a great political and academic orator, formed on the examples of classical rhetoric. He is the author of the Hymnus (Hungarian national anthem), in which, as in his other civic poems, lyrical inspiration is joined to a philosophical deepening of history.

5. The Nineteenth Century

It is the golden century of Hungarian literature. The initiatives of organization, of renewal of the language and of poetic creation, which had matured in the 18th century, flow into national Romanticism, which constitutes for Hungary a particularly favorable historical moment in which the political and the cultural factor inspire and strengthen each other. Nor is it possible in this period to make a clear distinction between men of letters and statesmen, so much does the fervor of the national revival engage the best intellectuals; already, for example, in the novelist and Minister of Education Eötvös the man of letters cannot be separated from the statesman. This period runs from 1820 to Petőfi's debut in 1844 and is dominated by the figures of the poet Vörösmarty, the playwright Kisfaludy and the novelist Eötvös. A new social consciousness, from which a series of economic and social reforms springs in the national assemblies, due above all to the initiative of Count Széchenyi, but felt and accepted by a public opinion favorably prepared by the activity of men of letters, under the influence of Kossuth, bursts forth indomitable toward complete national independence. While political progress, which culminated in 1848 in the complete emancipation of the serfs and then in the war of independence, won by Austria with Russian help, suffers during the period of absolutism (1849-67) a long halt, literary life continues its course dominated by the figures of the poets Arany and Tompa, the novelists Kemény and Jókai and the critic Gyulai.

Only in the last two decades of the century does the creative effort of the national genius relax into epigonism, without however softening too much in the intimist atmosphere of the fin de siècle.

The literary activity of Count István Széchenyi (1791-1860), whom posterity ranks as "the greatest Hungarian," ranges from a booklet of practical utility, A lovakrul ("On Horses"), to the hallucinated satire against the absolutism of Vienna (Blick); its most important stages are the volumes Hitel ("Credit"), Világ ("World") and Stádium and the polemic with Kossuth through the periodical press and the volume Kelet népe ("People of the East"), while his diaries constitute a document of the highest value, revealing a soul and an epoch. The literary fame of Lajos Kossuth (v.) is linked to his parliamentary and propaganda speeches.

No less a forerunner than he in matters of historical far-sightedness is Baron Miklós Wesselényi, who with his Szőzat ("Appeal") drew the world's attention as early as 1843 to the growing Slavic danger. Speeches and newspaper articles hand down the sober and rational style of Ferenc Deák, the "sage of the homeland," proponent of the Compromise with Austria. But the philosophically most profound political writing of the Hungarian nineteenth century remains Eötvös's fundamental essay on The Influence of the Dominant Ideas of the 19th Century on the State, in Hungarian and in German, in which the principles of the French Revolution and other political principles of the age (nationalism, centralism, regionalism, etc.) are dissected and presented in their historical and future realization with acumen and foresight.

The contribution that the consciousness of ancient glory can mean in the formation of a new national mentality was assured to the Hungarians by their greatest Romantic poet, Mihály Vörösmarty (1800-55). He renewed and almost recreated the Hungarian heroic poem with Zalán futása ("The Flight of Zalán") and other minor poems; with his historical dramas he immersed the dawn of national history in a Shakespearean atmosphere and reached philosophical depths in the fairy-tale drama Csongor és Tünde; he made lyrical poetry more varied and intense and above all assured the definitive triumph of the linguistic renewal. Lesser in power of language, but no less important for literary activity, was the playwright Károly Kisfaludy (1788-1830), who, while in his historical dramas and his social comedies he popularized the new aspects of national consciousness, with the founding of the journal Aurora, the first literary journal truly widespread and read in Hungary, made the capital of the kingdom also the center of literary life. A more valiant tragedian than he was József Katona (1791-1830), who created with Bánk Bán ("The Ban Bánk") the representative national tragedy, but to whom fortune smiled only posthumously.

If the historical novel owes its great nineteenth-century popularity to the happy vein of Baron Miklós Jósika

(1794-1865), it rises to a national significance in the work of Baron József Eötvös (1813-71): his four novels A karthausi ("The Carthusian"), A falu jegyzője ("The Village Notary"), Magyarország – 1514 – ben ("Hungary in 1514") and Nővérek ("The Sisters") are all thesis novels. The Carthusian, a psychological novel of the search for happiness, teaches that only egoism does not find happiness on earth. The Village Notary is a complete collection of the abuses of feudalism in administrative autonomies and has as its thesis the ineluctable necessity of centralization. In Hungary in 1514 the social man speaks in order to point out to the nation, with the example of history, the other great ineluctable task: the liberation of the serfs. The last, The Sisters, teaches through the different destinies of two identical beings the decisive importance of education: in it Eötvös is the minister of education who imparts to his compatriots the most important lesson from his lofty chair.

The happiest moment of Hungarian literature, national classicism, was born from the grafting of the populist tendency onto the trunk of Romanticism. Petőfi, Arany, Madách are universally recognized values, even if not well known. Sándor Petőfi (1823-49), the greatest Hungarian lyric poet, cultivated all genres of poetry: narrative and patriotic and domestic lyric, but he perhaps succeeds more greatly as a poet of landscape, because in this field he combines an impressionistic hypersensitivity with an almost primitive simplicity of tone. Pervaded by a lively social feeling and continually agitated by a revolutionary temperament, Petőfi is at the same time of great moral integrity, a soul naturaliter christiana. In this trait not unlike him is János Arany (1817-82), notary and teacher in a modest agricultural village, secretary general of the Hungarian Academy in the capital. He translated from Tasso, from Shakespeare and all of Aristophanes, but did not write for the theater; he was a lyric poet, but of reflection and not of passion. He reached the highest peaks of his art in narrative poetry: in the heroic-popular trilogy Toldi, in the poems on the dawn of Hun-Magyar history Buda halála ("The Death of Buda"), in numerous ballads of the Nordic type. Mihály Tompa (1817-68), an elegiac and allegorical poet, found his happiest accents in the years following the war of independence, when his poems were a consolation for many patriots: A gólyához ("To the Stork"), A madár fiaihoz ("The Bird to Its Children"). In the depressed years of absolutism there also unfolds most of the literary activity of the novelist Baron Zsigmond Kemény (1814-75). In his novels, which take as their subject episodes of Transylvanian history, he achieves a rare power in bringing back to life the animating spirits of the different epochs of the past. With his more than 100 volumes of novels and stories, Mór Jókai (1825-1904) is the most prolific, most imaginative and most gripping Hungarian narrator, even if not the most profound and most solid in moral conception. Imre Madách (1823-64) with his historical-philosophical drama Az ember tragédiája ("The Tragedy of Man") resolves the search for a meaning in history with a Christian pessimism.

The creative work of the Hungarian poets and writers was in this golden period effectively flanked by the critical work of József Bajza (1804-58) and of Pál Gyulai (1825-1909), themselves poets.

6. The Twentieth Century

The writers who appear at the threshold of our century draw their origins from the various currents: realism, naturalism, symbolism. In the 19th century Hungarian literature reached the intensity of Western literatures; with the 20th century it aligns itself with them completely in a perfect simultaneity. Poetic translation becomes a very important national literary category without detriment to the originality of Hungarian writers. Numerous literary journals arise: such as the conservative Új Idők ("New Times") and Napkelet ("East"), the Catholic Élet ("Life") and the progressive A Hét ("The Week") and Nyugat ("West"), in whose columns bitter but invigorating polemics flare up between conservatives and Westerners. The First World War does not bring too much damage to Hungarian literary life because on the one hand it rekindles through irredentism the literary forms of patriotism, while on the other, and thanks to the activity of the writers gathered around the journal Bódlyá Helikon, it gives rise to the emergence of a Transylvanian literature, marked by a particular fervor. Against the decline of taste reacts the most important literary journal, Nyugat, directed for long decades by that Mihály Babits who gave the Hungarians a very beautiful translation of the Divine Comedy and of numerous medieval sacred hymns. Amorality or immorality is found only in the mediocre; the major ones, even if more or less distant from Christianity, are religious souls who reveal their intimate travail before the Divinity: this is the case of the symbolist-Nietzschean Endre Ady (1877-1937) and of Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1937) who from a crepuscular poet grows into a modern stoic; or, in the younger generation, the case of Attila József (1905-37), who from a Marxist origin rises to become a singer of universal love, and of Sándor Weöres (b. 1913), a surrealist, whose travail between Indo-Buddhist ideologies and Christianity is still ongoing.

The important group of sociographers has become, with a patient work of survey and documentation in literary form, an advocate before national public opinion of an agrarian reform. The major personality among them is the poet Gyula Illyés, but their spiritual derivation from the realist novelist Zsigmond Móricz (1879-1941) and from Dezső Szabó (1879-1945), a verist and romantic novelist in style, is also undoubted. In the face of the gradual secularization of Hungarian literature in the 19th century, the first half of the 20th century is distinguished by an inverse process, both through the intensification of the religious spirit and through the growing participation of ecclesiastics in intellectual and literary life. The apologist Ottokár Prohászka, bishop of Székesfehérvár (1858-1927), the orator Tihamér Tóth (1889-1936) and the dogmatic theologian Antal Schütz O. P. (b. 1880) exercised a decisive influence on the spiritual formation of the new Hungarian generations. The priest-poets Lajos Harsányi (b. 1883), Sándor Sik (b. 1889) and László Mécs (b. 1893) are in the vanguard of twentieth-century Hungarian poetry. All these moral values will perhaps tomorrow serve to heal that rupture which the Second World War has produced in the development of Hungarian literature.

Paolo Ruzicka

VI. ARCHAEOLOGY

Present-day Hungary includes parts of Valeria, of Pannonia Prima and of Pannonia Secunda. In 378 the region of Sabaria was infested with Arianism (St. Ambrose, De fide, II, 140: PL 16, 613). In Valeria the cemetery of Sopianae, today Pécs, is well known. Episcopal sees existed at Sopianae, at Scarbantia and at Sabaria in Pannonia Prima. Here the whole of Pannonia will be treated, without any regard for the present political division.

At Sirmium the Syriac Martyrology marks on April 6 the bishop Irenaeus (BHG, 2nd ed., 948), commemorated on Aug. 23 in the Synaxarion of Constantinople and in the Passio Pollionis (BHL, 6869); then on April 9 Demetrius, who is perhaps the martyr of Thessalonica; on July 20 Secundus, as in the Hieronymian which also marks him on July 15; on February 23 the martyr Syneros (BHL, 7595, as Passio s. Sereni). In the cemetery of Sirmium were found the two inscriptions with "ad beatum Synerotem", and "ad domnum Synerotem" (CIL, III, 10232-33; G. B. De Rossi, in Bull. arch. crist., 4th series, 3 [1884-85], pp. 144-48). On March 26 and May 11 is indicated Montanus, who is also found in the Passio Pollionis (BHL, 6869); on March 26 some codices of the Hieronymian give instead Munatius, and the Bernensis remembers him together with his wife Maxima, making him a presbyter "de Singidionis" and adding that, thrown into the river, his body was found six miles downstream. On Dec. 25 is marked Anastasia, whose relics were brought from Sirmium to Constantinople (Theodore the Lector: PG 86, 216).

At Cibalia is venerated the martyr Pollio, primicerius of the lectors, who in the Hieronymian appears on April 28 and May 29, as in the Passio which remembers a bishop Eusebius martyred on the same day many years earlier (BHL, 6869). During the campaign of Marcus Aurelius against the Quadi near Cotim, in 174, the miracle of the rain occurred following the prayers of the Christian soldiers of the "Legio XII Fulminata" (v.). From Sabaria, where St. Martin of Tours (v.) was born, comes the martyr bishop St. Quirinus, later translated to Rome "in Catacumbas". Pannonian are the famous martyrs the Four Crowned Brothers, translated from the imperial "Comitatus" in the 5th century to the cemetery "inter duas lauros" (v.). A Christian basilica with three naves was identified at Fenéic, two at Kékkút, one with three naves, the other with a complex of rooms (L. Nagy, I ricordi cristiano-romani trovati recentemente in U., in Atti del III Congresso internaz. di arch. crist., Rome 1934, pp. 298-99, figs. 3 and 4). Besides the well-known hypogeum of Cinque Chiese (Pécs) with paintings of the end of the 4th century, a Christian cemetery was discovered at Kisdíós-puszta near Zala (L. Nagy, in Archaeologiai Értesítő, 45 [1931], pp. 29-32). "Cellae trichorae" came to light in old Buda, at Sirmium, at Sárisap, near Strigonia, at Kisdíós-puszta in the center of the aforementioned cemetery. From Sirmium there is a fragment of an inscription of a bishop (CIL, III, 14310, 2). Among the Christian inscriptions of Sabaria are remembered one that speaks of the reconstruction of a "cripta vi ignis exusta" (ibid., 3183), one of a "Nammius Quintus, custos cymiteri" (ibid., 4222), another of two Christian pilgrim painters who died at Sabaria (ibid., 7222). Again from Sabaria are remembered the Christian inscriptions of a "civis Graecus ex regione Ladicensi in Deo vivas" (ibid., 4222); two with the formulas "in Domnio bone memorie" and "bone memorie in Deo vivatis" (ibid., 4217-18); a "Florentius infans" who "requiem acceptit in Deo Petre nostro et Christo eius" (ibid., 4221); "Aspalia fidelis, Gaudentius ex praepositus Silvarum Dominicarum et Crescentia parentes fideles" made the tomb also for themselves (ibid., 4219). At Alt-Sziszeg the inscription of a Felicissima with two Aᵍo. In 1938 at Sabaria, near the garden of the Seminary, a Christian basilica came to light again, with part of its mosaic floor and an ancient Roman road on which a "cella trichora" was built (S. Paulovics, "Basilica ad Scarabatensem portam" di S. Quirino in Sawaria, in Atti del IV Congr. internaz. di Arch. crist., II, Vatican City 1948, pp. 49-63). In ancient Luglio, today Dunaszekcső, was found the bottom of a glass cup in gold with a soldier and his wife and the inscription "semper gaudestia in nomine Dei" (L. Nagy, in Theologiai Szemle, 5 [1929], pp. 158-63). Many clay lamps with the "Signum Christi" or with the letters and were found in various places. At Bonyhad a monogram of Christ was found in a bronze disc of over 23 cm. in diameter, now in the National Museum of Budapest. From Sabaria comes a clay lamp with St. Menas. Numerous are the bronze plaques with scenes intended to cover caskets; they contain pagan scenes alternating with Christian scenes, as in those of Császár, of Szentendre, the ancient "Ulcisa castra", where, for example, are Daniel among the lions, the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus, the multiplication of the loaves and then a Hercules and the inscription "Invicto Constantino felici triumphanti". In one from Intercisa, now in the Ethnographic Museum of Berlin, besides the Good Shepherd there is the Emperor on horseback (G. Supka, Frühchristliche Kästchenbeschläge aus Ungarn, in Römische Quartalschrift, 27 [1913], p. 162 ff.).

Enrico Josi

VII. ART

The artistic cultures that developed in the territories of the Danubian basin, later occupied by the Hungarians, before their arrival were those typical of the various peoples who had inhabited the region in successive phases: Huns, Scythians, Avars, Lombards; cultures that, locally, had grafted themselves onto the sediments of the one that had developed in Dacia and Pannonia at the time of Roman rule.

It was St. Stephen, the first king of the Hungarians (997-1038), who, by converting his people to the Christian faith, also oriented their taste in a Western direction, as attested by the few remains of the buildings dating from his age at Alba Regia (Székesfehérvár) and at Alba Julia (Gyulafehérvár).

Then during the Romanesque period, between the 12th and 13th centuries, important churches were built, particularly in Pannonia in the ancient capital of Strigonium (Esztergom), of which more or less reworked remains survive, testifying to the introduction into the territory of architectural elements of Lombard and French taste. But it is precisely at the beginning of the 13th century that Gothic forms also begin to appear in Hungary. They were imported above all by the Cistercian, Cluniac and Premonstratensian monks, who had great abbeys in the territory. Among the French architects then active in Hungary, particular mention should be made of Villars de Honnecourt, author of the cathedral of St. Elizabeth at Kassa (Košice). Churches in Gothic forms, always of French derivation, were also built at that time in Buda, Pozsony (Pressburg), Gyorke, Kesmark, Tyrnau, and Tranchin (13th-14th century). And Gothic forms are also seen in the cathedral of Rosenak and subsequently in the chapel of St. Michael at Kassa.

The latter is in the late Gothic (flamboyant) style and dates from the 15th century, while the beautiful episcopal palace of Kuttemberg was built between 1470 and 1506.

Meanwhile, direct artistic relations with Italy were also intensifying. They began when the Angevin princes of Naples reigned over the Hungarians during the 14th century, and then continued throughout the Renaissance. Niccolò di Tommaso, a Florentine painter, worked during the 14th century in the palatine chapel of Esztergom, while in the museum of that city are preserved panels painted by Tommaso di Kolozsvár (Cluj) — the leading exponent of Hungarian painting at the beginning of the 15th century — who shows in his works elements deriving from Italian art and particularly from Gentile da Fabriano, who had among his pupils a Hungarian named Michele. Moreover, it is well known how Masolino da Panicale worked in Hungary around 1430 and how, some time later, Michele Pannonio imported elements of Italian taste into Hungary from Ferrara. Subsequently the Hungarian master who signs his works with an M. S. clearly shows among the elements of his formation strong Umbrian influences. It is in any case evident how, during the 15th century, it was the art of the Italian Renaissance that assumed a decisive predominance in Hungary. This reflected the precise will of Matthias Corvinus, who reigned over the Hungarians from 1458 to 1490. In his time great works were carried out in every part of Hungary. And while Pellegrino da Fermo and Benedetto da Majano worked there on behalf of the King in the Castle of Buda, other Italian artists, such as Aristotele Fioravanti, Camicia Ghiemanti, Baccio Cellini, worked likewise for him, who in Florence commissioned works from Verrocchio, from the painters Filippino Lippi, from the sculptor Cristoforo Romano, from the illuminators Altavante and Gherardo.

The fashion for Renaissance forms continued in Hungary even after the death of King Matthias. This is attested by the chapel annexed to the Cathedral of Esztergom (Gran), built in 1507 for the primate Thomas Bakócz by Andrea Ferrucci da Fiesole.

By then Hungarian architects were already adapting the imported Renaissance forms to their own taste. This can be seen in buildings, even of no great importance, in the territories of Szepes and Sáros, where stylistic forms echoing precisely Italian Renaissance themes developed, in a minor key, well into the 18th century.

Moreover, the Turkish invasion (1526) had broken that migratory current of Italian Renaissance artists into Hungary. It was not resumed except in the northern regions that passed under Habsburg rule toward the end of the 16th century, and it was more intense in the 17th century, when certain Italians active in the neighboring German territories worked in Hungary, those of the Carlone dynasty, for example, of Lombard origin. Alongside them there also worked at that time Austrian artists of a more or less Italianizing culture. Thus later, when the entire Hungarian territory had been liberated from the Turks, churches and castles were rebuilt or newly constructed. Then, besides Italian architects, there worked in the region, as decorators, the Bibbiena, while numerous works were built and decorated by the Germans Lucas von Hildebrandt and Melchior Hefele, architects, and the painters Maulbertsch, Dorfmeister, Troger and Bergl, whose culture bore an essentially Italian, indeed Venetian, imprint. Among the neoclassical architects who during the early 19th century worked most extensively in Hungary, giving a new imprint to the capital of Budapest, particular mention should be made of the Viennese Michele Pollak (1773-1885), brother of that Ludovico who worked so much in Milan in the same period. Alongside him should be remembered Giuseppe Hild, Federico Feszty, Michele Péchy, Mattia Zitterbarth.

Among the Hungarian sculptors of the first half of the 19th century, particular mention should instead be made of Stefano Ferenczy (1792-1856), who in Rome had been a pupil of Thorvaldsen. Other notable Hungarian sculptors of the 19th century were Nicola Izsó (1831-75) and Giovanni Fadrusz (1858-1903), the latter the author, among other things, of the honorary statue of Matthias Corvinus at Kolozsvár (Cluj) and of Maria Theresa at Bratislava.

It should also be remembered how, while the Hungarian painters of the 19th century for the most part followed the tastes of the Austrian and Italian academies, the Hungarian Carlo Markó (1791-1860) moved during the first half of the 19th century to Florence to paint landscapes of a Romantic character not devoid of elegant refinement. And in Florence a large group of painters depended on him, among whom were also his sons and grandsons, who continued his manner until toward the end of the century.

Contemporaneously and subsequently, a local artistic current was establishing itself in Hungarian territory, in which elements of the ever-flourishing and picturesque local folk art merge with others derived from the so-called Viennese Secession and with still others linked to the most modern expressions of international taste. To it also belong the most significant and original contemporary artists active in Hungary.

Emilio Lavagnino

VIII. SCHOOL SYSTEM

As early as 1945, thought was given to a democratic reform of the Hungarian school that would embrace the entire school system, preserving from the old system what was justified by experience and filling the gaps with new methods and programs, more in keeping with communist ideology. The first step was taken in 1946 with the establishment of the General School.

1. The General School

It combines within itself the four elementary classes and the four previously separate middle-school classes, forming a new school of a single type, compulsory for all, lasting 8 years, from ages 6 to 14. The purpose of the innovation, the Minister observes in the preamble to the programs, is to give the pupil "a unified basic culture; to make him capable of further instruction and self-instruction in any direction, and to form a conscious and moral member for the life of the Hungarian community." The program, moreover, embraced compulsory subjects and optional subjects, with the aim of leaving ample possibility of choosing, alongside a unified basic culture, those disciplines that had aroused greater interest in the pupils. However, in 1949 the optional disciplines were greatly limited in hours and number; among those that then disappeared are Latin and the modern languages, and the study of the Russian language remains compulsory. In 1949 religious instruction also ceased to be compulsory in the General School.

2. Secondary education

According to the program outlined by decree of 1948, secondary education embraces three main groups of schools, two of which are subdivided into schools of various types, corresponding to the pupils' various future directions. a) The first group, or "gimnázium," has a single type of school, for boys and girls, lasting 4 years, corresponding more or less to our liceo, and divided into three parallel sections: 1) classical section, embodied by the study of Latin and one modern language; 2) modern languages section, without Latin, but with two modern languages; 3) science section, without Latin, with one modern language and a broader treatment of scientific subjects. At the end of the fourth year there is the maturity examination before an internal commission; and the diploma gives access, for the classical section, to all university Faculties; for the science section, only to the Faculties of medicine, physics and chemistry and to higher technical studies. b) The second group has the following types of school: 1) industrial middle school of 4 years, with two sections: mechanical and chemical; 2) commercial middle school, of 4 years; 3) agricultural middle school, of 4 years; 4) gardening middle school, of 4 years, with a program similar to that of the agricultural school, but with special gardening subjects; 5) male and female teachers' training middle school of 5 years; 6) middle school for the training of kindergarten teachers for nursery schools, of 3 years, plus 1 year of practice; 7) "liceum" for boys and girls of 4 years with a practical orientation: knowledge of economics, especially domestic, fundamental notions of family and school education of children.

c) The third group, with an artistic orientation, was to embrace the following types: 1) lyceum of figurative arts; 2) middle school for the training of film artists; 3) middle school for the training of theater artists; 4) middle school of music.

But already this panorama of the middle school underwent several modifications in 1949: reduction of the program, considered overloaded, intensification of the study of Marxist-Leninist ideology and of the struggle against clericalism and chauvinism. Moreover, all middle schools were to bear the name "ginnasi," and the same subjects were to be distributed differently.

Higher education. - According to the reform programs of 1950 (still subject to further partial reforms in individual branches), higher education comprises: universities and higher schools. a) Universities of technical sciences: 1) Technical Sciences of engineering in Budapest (mechanical, road, electrical, hydraulic, building, chemical engineering); 2) Technical Sciences of heavy industry in Miskolc (with 3 sections: mining, foundries, machinery); 3) Technical Sciences in Sopron (with 2 sections: forestry and surveying); 4) Technical Sciences of heavy industrial chemistry (chemical engineering). b) Hungarian University of Economic Sciences, in Budapest (with specializations: industry, commerce, agricultural economics, general economic sciences, training of subject teachers for middle schools). c) University of studies: 1) Budapest (with 3 Faculties: sciences, philosophy, law); 2) Szeged (with 4 Faculties: natural sciences, philosophy, law, medicine); 3) Pécs (with 3 Faculties: natural sciences, law, medicine); 4) Debrecen (with 3 Faculties: natural sciences, philosophy, medicine). d) University of agricultural sciences in Budapest (with 3 Faculties: veterinary medicine, agricultural economics, horticulture and fruit-growing). e) Higher schools: 1) of Business and Commerce, in Budapest (with 3 specializations: business management, domestic and foreign trade); 2) of Technology, in Budapest

(textile mechanics, coal mining, leather chemistry, etc.); 3) of Pedagogy in Budapest, Szeged, Eger, Pécs (languages, sciences, physical education, etc.); 4) of Figurative Arts, in Budapest (painting, frescoes and graphic arts, sculpture, drawing); 5) of Decorative Arts in Budapest (interior decoration, ceramics, set design, etc.); 6) of Music, in Budapest (composition, conducting, the various instruments); 7) of Dramatic Arts, in Budapest (acting, theater and film directing); 8) of Physical Education in Budapest.

Taken as a whole, universities and higher schools are valued above all for their practical purposes.

Institutions alongside them for a better performance of the school and in general of cultural formation are the Institute for Popular Culture (1946) and the Institute for Popular Culture Films (1947), to which were gradually added grants of scholarships, creation of welfare provisions for students, and study facilitations for workers. - See plates LXXVII-LXXVIII.