HUNGARY (1526-1655)
For earlier coins see - Hungary (997-1526)
For later coins see - Hungary (1655-1918)
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After some 150 years of wars with the Ottoman Empire in the south, the Turks conquered parts of Hungary, and continued their expansion until 1556. The Ottomans gained their first decisive victory over the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. The next decades were characterised by political chaos; the divided Hungarian nobility elected two kings simultaneously, John Zápolya (1526-1540) and Ferdinand Habsburg (1527-1540), whose armed conflicts weakened the country further. With the conquest of Buda in 1541 by the Turks, Hungary fell into three parts. The north-western part (Present-day Slovakia, western Transdanubia, present-day Burgenland, western Croatia and parts of north-eastern present-day Hungary) remained ruled by the Habsburgs, and although formally was independent, subsequently became a province of their empire under the informal name Royal Hungary. The Habsburg Emperors were crowned as Kings of Hungary. The eastern part of the kingdom (Partium and Transylvania), in turn, became an independent Principality, and a Turkish vassal state. The remaining central area (mostly present-day Hungary), including the capital of Buda, became a province of the Ottoman Empire. A large part of the area became devastated by permanent warfare. Most smaller settlements disappeared. Rural people could survive only in larger settlements owned directly and protected by the Sultan, in the so called Khaz towns. The Turks were indifferent to the type of Christian religion of their subjects and the Habsburg counter-reformation measures could not reach this area. As a result, the majority of the population of the area became Protestant (Calvinist). In 1686, Austria-led Christian forces reconquered Buda, and in the next few years, all of the country except areas near Timisoara (Temesvár). In the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz these changes were officially recognized, and in 1718 the entire Kingdom of Hungary was restored from the Ottomans. Pressburg (Pozsony, today: Bratislava) became the new capital (1536-1784), coronation town (1563-1830) and seat of the Diet (1536-1848) of Hungary. Trnava (Nagyszombat), in turn, became the religious center in 1541.

Parallelly, between 1604 and 1711, there was a series of anti-Habsburg (i.e. anti-Austrian) and anti-Catholic (requiring equal rights and freedom for all Christian religions) uprisings, which – with the exception of the last one – took place in Royal Hungary, more exactly on the territory of present-day Slovakia. The uprisings were usually organized from Transylvania. The last one was an uprising led by Francis Rákóczi (II. Ferenc Rákóczi), who was chosen by the people to be the future king. When Austrians crushed the rebellion in 1711, Rákóczi was in Poland. He later fled to France, finally Turkey, and lived to the end of his life (1735) in nearby Rodosto. Afterwards, to make further armed resistance impossible, the Austrians blew up some castles, and allowed peasants to use the stones from most of the others as building material (the végvárs among them).

The 18th century was characterized by a reconstruction of the country. The Habsburg rulers pursued a re-settlement of ravaged areas with new immigrants from present-day Austria and Germany, from the northern and eastern parts of the country (present-day Slovakia and Romania), and from Serbia. During the Enlightenment (1780 - 1848), influenced by the French revolution, and in response to attempts at Germanisation by Joseph II (ruled 1780-1790), there emerged a national revival movement in Hungary not only of the Magyars, but also of all the other non-Magyar nationalities living in the Kingdom of Hungary. During the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards, the Hungarian Diet had not convened for decades. In the 1820s, the Emperor was forced to convene the Diet, and thus a Reform Period began. Nevertheless, its progress was slow, because the nobles insisted on retaining their privileges (no taxation, exclusive voting rights, etc.). Therefore the achievements were mostly of national character (e.g. introduction of Hungarian as the official language of the country, instead of the former Latin). The other nationalities of the country protested against these measures.

The Habsburg Emperors and particularly the chancellor Metternich refused to implement reforms and this led to a national revolution. The revolution started on March 15, 1848, with bloodless events in Pest and Buda (mass demonstrations forcing the imperial governor to accept all demands) followed by various insurrections throughout the kingdom, which enabled Hungarian reformists to declare Hungary's autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, under the governor Lajos Kossuth and the first Prime minister Lajos Batthyány. During the subsequent civil war, the Magyars, and with them foreign revolutionaries that came to fight after their own revolutions were crushed, had to fight against the Austrian Army, but also against the Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, Romanians and Transylvanian Germans living on the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary, who had their own ethnic-national movements, and were unwilling to accept a Hungarian dominance. Faced with revolution at home in Vienna too, Austria first accepted Hungary's autonomy. However, after the Austrian revolution was beaten down, and Franz Joseph replaced his mentally retarded uncle Ferdinand I as Emperor, Austria again refused to accept Hungarian autonomy, and a civil war followed. Initially, the Hungarian forces (Honvédség) defeated Austrian armies. Because of the success of revolutional resistance, Franz Joseph had to ask for help from "The Gendarme of Europe", Czar Nicholas I, and Russian armies invaded Hungary, causing antagonism between the Hungarians and the Russians. Julius Freiherr von Haynau, the leader of the Austrian army who then became governor of Hungary for a few months of retribution, ordered the execution of 13 leaders of the Hungarian army (only a minority of which spoke Hungarian) in Arad and the Prime minister Batthyány in Pest. Lajos Kossuth went into exile.

Following the war of 1848-49, the whole country was in "passive resistance". Archduke Albrecht von Habsburg was appointed governor of the Kingdom of Hungary, and this time was remembered for Germanization pursued with the help of Czech officers. Due to external and internal problems, reforms seemed inevitable to secure the integrity of the Habsburg Empire. Major military defeats, like the Battle of Königgrätz (1866), forced the Emperor to concede internal reforms. To appease Hungarian separatism, the Emperor made a deal with the Hungarian nobility led by Ferenc Deák, called the Compromise of 1867, by which the dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary came into existence.

The Empire was reorganised into two entities: the mostly western half of the realm, Cisleithania, and the Kingdom of Hungary, Transleithania. The two realms were governed separately with a common ruler and common external, military, and economic policies. The first premier of the Kingdom of Hungary after the Compromise was Count Gyula Andrássy. The Hungarian Constitution was restored, and Franz Joseph was crowned as King of Hungary. The autonomy of the Kingdom was partly achieved. There was also a Hungarian-Croatian Compromise of 1868, as Croatia, an already highly autonomous part of the Kingdom, broadened its constitutional freedom. Hungarian politicians gained strong influence on the Empire's political life and successfully prevented the change of the status quo in favour of other ethnic groups, notably the Czechs and the Southern Slavs. By the turn of the century, the diverse political development of the two realms raised increasing doubts about the political framework of the Monarchy. Attempts to transform the dual monarchy to a trial state or a confederacy remained futile.

Besides the German-Magyar, Czech-Magyar conflicts about the future of the dual monarchy, ethnic problems escalated inside the Kingdom of Hungary. The intensifying Hungarian nationalism – intended to strengthen the integrity of the Kingdom – gradually alienated the non-Magyar population (see Magyarization). As a reaction, the already significant Romanian, Serbian and Slovak nationalism further escalated. In contrast to political problems, the era witnessed an impressive economic development. The formerly backward Kingdom of Hungary become a relatively modern, industrialized country by the turn of the century, although agriculture remained the dominant part of the economy. Many of the state institutions and the administrative system of modern Hungary were established during this period.

Ferdinand I, H.R.E. (1526-1564)

After Suleiman the Magnificent defeated Ferdinand's brother-in-law Louis II, King of Bohemia and of Hungary, at the battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526, Ferdinand was elected King of Bohemia in his place. The throne of Hungary became the subject of a dynastic dispute between Ferdinand and John Zápolya, voivode of Transylvania. Each was supported by different factions of the nobility in the Hungarian kingdom; Ferdinand also had the support of Charles V, and Zápolya, after defeat by Ferdinand at the Battle of Tokaj in 1527, the support of Suleiman. Ferdinand was able to win control only of western Hungary because Zápolya clung to the east and the Ottomans to the conquered south. Zápolya's widow, Isabella Jagiello, ceded Royal Hungary and Transylvania to Ferdinand in the Treaty of Weissenburg of 1551. In 1554 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq was sent to Istanbul by Ferdinand to discuss a border treaty over disputed land with the Sultan, Suleiman.

The most dangerous moment of Ferdinand's career came in 1529 when he took refuge in Bohemia from a massive but ultimately unsuccessful assault on his capital by Suleiman and the Ottoman armies at the Siege of Vienna. A further Ottoman attack on Vienna was repelled in 1533. In that year Ferdinand signed a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, splitting the Kingdom of Hungary into a Habsburg sector in the west and John Zápolya's domain in the east, the latter effectively now a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1538, by the Treaty of Nagyvárad, Ferdinand became Zápolya's successor, but he was unable to enforce this agreement during his lifetime because in 1540 John II Sigismund Zápolya, infant son of John Zápolya and Isabella Jagiello, was elected the new king of Hungary. Zápolya was initially supported by King Sigismund of Poland and Lithuania, his mother's father, but in 1543 a treaty was signed between the Habsburgs and the Polish ruler as a result of which Poland became neutral in the conflict, prince Sigismund marrying Elisabeth von Habsburg, Ferdinand's daughter.

The western rump of Hungary over which Ferdinand retained dominion became known as Royal Hungary. As the ruler of Austria, Bohemia and Royal Hungary, Ferdinand adopted a policy of centralization and, in common with other monarchs of the time, the construction of an absolute monarchy. In 1527 he published a constitution for his hereditary domains (Hofstaatsordnung) and established Austrian-style institutions in Pressburg for Hungary, in Prague for Bohemia, and in Wroclaw (Breslau) for Silesia. Opposition from the nobles in those realms forced him in 1559 to concede the independence of these institutions from supervision by the Austrian government in Vienna.

In 1547 the Bohemian Estates rebelled against Ferdinand when he ordered the Bohemian army against the German Protestants. After suppressing Prague with the help of his brother's Spanish forces, he retaliated by limiting the privileges of Bohemian cities and inserting a new bureaucracy of royal officials to control urban authorities. Ferdinand was a supporter of the Counter-Reformation and helped lead the Catholic fight-back against what he saw as the heretical tide of Protestantism. For example, in 1551 he invited the Jesuits to Vienna and in 1556 to Prague, and in 1561 he revived the Archdiocese of Prague.

Ferdinand died in Vienna and is buried in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague.

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Maximilian II, H.R.E. (1564-1576)

Born in Vienna, he was a son of his predecessor Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary (1503–1547). Anne was a daughter of King Ladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary and his wife Anne de Foix. His paternal uncle was Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. His first cousin Philip II of Spain, son of Charles V, was ahead of him in the line of succession, but under a 1553 agreement Maximilian displaced Philip as heir to the Imperial throne. He, like nearly all Habsburgs, was a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece.

Maximilian's policies of religious neutrality and peace in the Empire afforded its Roman Catholics and Protestants a breathing-space after the first struggles of the Reformation. His sympathies for Lutheranism had caused frictions in the House of Habsburg and his father had threatened him with exclusion from the succession. Officially he remained a Catholic. He disappointed the German Protestant princes by his refusal to invest Protestant administrators of bishoprics with their imperial fiefs. Yet on a personal basis he granted freedom of worship to the Protestant nobility and worked for reform in the Roman Catholic church, including the right of priests to marry. This failed because of Spanish opposition. The Turks continued to be a threat to the empire and after an unsuccessful campaign against them he had to continue paying tribute to the sultan as the price of peace in the western and northern areas of the Hungarian kingdom still under Habsburg control. His attempt (1570) to gain control over the army was rejected by the German Protestant princes, who feared that his demand for a veto over foreign forces on German soil was intended to prevent them from seeking Protestant help abroad.

In 1575, Maximilan was elected to be King of Poland in opposition to Stephan IV Bathory, but he did not manage to become widely accepted there. He died at Regensburg in October 1576.

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Note the last coin, dated 1577, minted after Maximilian II had died. Denars were struck in his name until 1578, and there is a Maximilian II goldgulden dated 1579!

Rudolf II, H.R.E. (1576-1608)

Rudolf was born in Vienna on July 18, 1552. He was the eldest son and successor of Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, King of Hungary; his mother was Maria of Spain, a daughter of Charles V and Isabella of Portugal. Rudolf spent eight formative years (1563-1571) between the ages of 11 and 19 at his mother's brother (uncle) Phillip II's court in Spain. After his return to Vienna his father was concerned about Rudolf's aloof and stiff nature, typical of the more conservative Spanish court, instead of the more relaxed and open Bohemian court; but his Spanish mother saw in him courtliness and refinement. Rudolf would remain for the rest of his life reserved, secretive and largely a homebody who did not like to travel or even partake in the daily affairs of state. He was more intrigued by occult learning, which was mainstream in the Renaissance period such as astrology and alchemy, as well as collecting, a patron of the arts, horses, clocks and a wide variety of personal hobbies. He suffered from periodic bouts of "melancholy" (depression), which was common in the Habsburg line, which became worse with age, manifested by a withdrawal from the world and its affairs into his private interests. Rudolf never married but had many mistresses and children with a retinue of 'imperial women'.

Historians have traditionally blamed Rudolf's preoccupation with the arts, occult sciences and other personal interests as the reason for the political disasters of his reign. More recently historians have re-evaluated this view and see his patronage of the arts and occult sciences as a triumph and key part of the Renaissance, while his political failures are seen as a legitimate attempt to create a unified Christian empire, but which was undermined by the realities of religious, political and intellectual disintegrations of the time. Although raised in his uncles Catholic court in Spain, Rudolf was tolerant of Protestantism and other religions including Judaism. He largely withdrew from Catholic observances, even in death denying last sacramental rites. He had little attachment to Protestants either, except as counter-weight to repressive Papal policies. He put his primary support behind conciliarists, irenicists and humanists. When the papacy instigated the Counter-Reformation, using agents sent to his court, Rudolf backed those who he thought were the most neutral in the debate, not taking a side or trying to effect restraint, thus leading to political chaos and threatening to provoke civil war.

His conflict with the Ottoman Turks was the final cause of his undoing. Unwilling to compromise with the Turks, and stubbornly determined he could unify all of Christendom with a new Crusade, he entered a long and indecisive war with the Turks between 1593 and 1606, known as "The Long War". By 1604 his Hungarian subjects were exhausted by the war and revolted, led by Stephen Bocskay. In 1605 Rudolf was forced by his other family members to cede control of the Hungarian affair to his younger brother Archduke Mathias, who by 1606 forged a difficult peace with the Hungarian rebels (Peace of Vienna), and the Turks (Peace of Zsitvatorok). Rudolf was angry with his brothers concessions, which he saw as giving away too much in order to further Matthias' hold on power, and so Rudolf prepared to start a new war with the Turks; but Matthias rallied support from the disaffected Hungarians and forced Rudolf to give up the crown of Hungary, Austria and Moravia to him. At the same time, seeing a moment of royal weakness, Bohemian Protestants demanded greater religious liberty, which Rudolf granted in the Letter of Majesty in 1609. However the Bohemians continued to press for further freedoms and Rudolf used his military to repress them. The Bohemian Protestants appealed to Matthias for help, whose army then held Rudolf prisoner in his castle in Prague, until 1611, when Rudolf was forced to cede the crown of Bohemia to his brother.

Rudolf died in 1612, nine months after he had been stripped of all effective power by his younger brother, except the empty title of Holy Roman Emperor, which Matthias would inherit five months later. In May 1618 at en event known as the Defenestrations of Prague, the Protestant Bohemians, in defense of the rights granted them in the Letter of Majesty, began the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).

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Matthias, H.R.E. (1608-1619)

Matthias (February 24, 1557 - March 20, 1619) of the House of Habsburg reigned as Holy Roman Emperor from 1612-1619, as King of Hungary from 1608-1619 (as Matthias II), and as King of Bohemia from 1611-1617. He was born in the Austrian capital of Vienna to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor and Maria of Spain. Matthias married Archduchess Anna of Austria, daughter of his uncle Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria, whose successor in Further Austria Matthias became in 1595. Their marriage did not produce surviving children.

In 1593 he was appointed governor of Austria by his brother, Emperor Rudolf II. He formed a close association there with the Bishop of Vienna, Melchior Klesl, who later became his chief adviser. In 1605 Matthias forced the ailing emperor to allow him to deal with the Hungarian Protestant rebels. The result was the Peace of Vienna of 1606, which guaranteed religious freedom in Hungary. In the same year Matthias was recognized as head of the House of Habsburg and as the future Holy Roman Emperor, as a result of Rudolf's illness. Allying himself with the estates of Hungary, Austria, and Moravia, Matthias forced his brother to yield rule of these lands to him in 1608; Rudolf later ceded Bohemia in 1611. After Matthias's accession as Holy Roman Emperor, his policy was dominated by Klesl, who hoped to bring about a compromise between Catholic and Protestant states within the Holy Roman Empire in order to strengthen it. Matthias had already been forced to grant religious concessions to Protestants in Austria and Moravia, as well as in Hungary, when he had allied with them against Rudolf. His conciliatory policies were opposed by the more intransigent Catholic Habsburgs, particularly Matthias's brother Archduke Maximilian, who hoped to secure the succession for the inflexible Catholic Archduke Ferdinand (later Emperor Ferdinand II). The start of the Bohemian Protestant revolt in 1618 provoked Maximilian to imprison Klesl and revise his policies. Matthias, old and ailing, was unable to prevent a takeover by Maximilian's faction. Ferdinand, who had already been crowned King of Bohemia (1617) and of Hungary (1618), succeeded Matthias as Holy Roman Emperor. Matthias died in Vienna.

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Ferdinand II, H.R.E. (1619-1637)

Matthias died in Vienna in March 1619. As earlier agreed, Ferdinand succeeded him on the throne. Supported by the Catholic League, which included the rulers of Poland, Spain, and Bavaria, Ferdinand sought to reclaim his Bohemian possessions and stamp out the Protestant rebellion. On November 8, 1620, Catholic forces engaged those supporting the Protestant Frederick, who had taken the Bohemian kingship, at the Battle of White Mountain. After only two hours of fighting, the Catholics emerged victorious. The now-deposed Frederick fled to the Netherlands and Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria, the leader of the Catholic League, moved to confiscate his lands in the Palatinate. The restored Ferdinand set about strengthening the Catholic church in Bohemia, reduced the authority of the Diet, and forcibly converted Austrian and Bohemian Protestants.

By 1625, despite receiving subsidies from the Spanish and the Pope, Ferdinand was strapped for cash and looking for a means to raise his own army. His solution was to charge the Bohemian soldier and "military entrepreneur" Albrecht von Wallenstein with raising and commanding an Imperial army. Wallenstein accepted the position with the proviso that the management (and possession) of the army's funds were solely his, as was the right to take and distribute loot and ransoms taken in the course of operations. Quickly raising at least 30,000 men (he would later command at least 100,000), and fighting alongside the Catholic League army under the Count of Tilly, Wallenstein defeated Protestant forces in Silesia, Anhalt, and Denmark. With his forces scoring important victories against the Protestants, Ferdinand crowned his religious policies by issuing his Edict of Restitution (1629), which was designed to restore all ecclesiastical properties which had been secularized since the Peace of Passau in 1552. This blatantly pro-Catholic policy has been widely credited with bringing the Protestant King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, into the war against Ferdinand. Despite the successes of Wallenstein, many of Ferdinand's advisors saw a genuine political threat in the general, citing his growing influence, his increasing number of estates and titles, as well as his extortionate methods of raising funds for his army. Ferdinand responded by dismissing Wallenstein in 1630. With the loss of his commander, he was once again forced to rely on the Catholic League army under Tilly, who was unable to stem the Swedish advance and was killed in 1632. As a result, Ferdinand recalled Wallenstein from retirement.

In the spring of 1632, Wallenstein raised a fresh army in a matter of weeks and drove the Protestant army out of Bohemia. In November came the great Battle of Lützen, at which the Catholics were defeated, but Gustavus Adolphus was killed. Wallenstein withdrew to winter quarters in Bohemia. Although he had lost strategically and been forced out of Saxony, the Protestants had suffered much greater casualties. The campaigning of 1633 was indecisive, partly because Wallenstein was negotiating with the enemy, thinking that the army would be loyal to him, rather than Ferdinand, and follow him if he switched sides. In early 1634, he was openly accused of treason and assassinated at Eger, probably at Ferdinand's instigation. Despite the loss of Wallenstein, Imperial forces took Regensburg and won a victory at the Battle of Nördlingen. Swedish strength was greatly weakened, but France entered the war on the side of the Protestants out of fear of Habsburg domination. Although the country was Catholic, France feared both the Germans and the Spanish, so Cardinal Richelieu convinced King Louis XIII of France to ally himself with the Dutch and the Swedes. The French were highly dissatisfied with the terms of the Peace of Prague concluded in 1635, the last important act of Ferdinand. Therefore, although a treaty was signed, peace did not come. At Ferdinand's death in 1637, his son Ferdinand III inherited an embattled empire.

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