[...]
The Middle Ages spiritualized her, and she became Universitas Christiana. The Renaissance crowned her with a diadem of humanism and renewal, the jewels thought most expressive of her essence, and declared her to have been called to a future of dialogue, unity, and peace. When did Europe first stray from this path? The discovery of the New World brought her a boundless surge of self-confidence, but destroyed her old sense of proportion. She became a law unto herself, and exterminated the Indians. Torrents of gold and silver from the New World filled her coffers to overflowing, and yet her streets swarmed with the poor. She considered her own culture to be the only one worthy of the name, and rode roughshod over all other cultures. She was the only part of the world to enjoy all the advantages of science, maritime trade and early industrialization, and yet the Ottoman Empire was able to get a stranglehold on her, hemming her in from the south and east, having seized huge chunks of territory in the Mediterranean, and much of the area east of the Danube. Suffering and carnage were the lot of all the peoples of Europe, who groaned under the weight of a seemingly endless series of religious and dynastic wars, and the conflicts that attended the formation of the first nation-states.
Still, the dialogue that was of her essence continued, and louder than ever. Though the Balkans and the Danube region had come under Ottoman rule, those living there continued to consider Europe "our dear abode". There were well-trod paths leading from the scorched fringes of Europe to the universities in her western parts, and new avenues of exchanging information were forging a new set of strong links between her severed parts. For instance, Constantinople was one of the places through which news travelled from Transylvania to London, and back.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thought of the future in terms of pairs of alternatives. It is an alternative that we find expressed in an allegorical picture of Rubens's, painted during the Thirty Years' War, one which he himself explained in detail. The principal figures of the picture are Mars, the God of War and Venus, the Goddess of Love, and to me they seem to be vying with one another for the attention of that "lugubrious Matron clad in black and with her veil torn, despoiled of her jewels and every other ornament, […] unhappy Europe, afflicted for so many years by rapine, outrage and misery..." They are competing with one another for her soul. Which of them would rule Europe? Aggression, militarism, permanent warfare, brute force? Or humanism, the spirit, the spirit of understanding?
In 1648, it seemed that Venus had emerged victorious. After three decades of butchery, the nations of Europe sat down with each other to negotiate peace treaties in Münster and Osnabrück. The Europe that signed the Peace of Westphalia looked to the future with confidence, secure in the belief that she had established a balance of power, the chief guarantor of peace. But it did not take long before the mad dogs of war were once more on the loose. Still, Europe survived the wars waged for the trading posts in the colonies, defeated the Ottoman Empire, and fought its revolutions, preserving all the while her commitment to dialogue, and marching through the centuries of enlightenment and the rise of the middle classes under the proud banner of pluralism.
The dialogue between her disconnected parts continued even when The Wall cleft her in two, and she was divided by ideologies and force of arms. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the struggle against Ottoman rule had also been the expression of the occupied territories' sense of belonging to Christian Europe. The history of this struggle became a parable for those living east of the Iron Curtain, it was a code for the fight for national independence and against Soviet influence.
At the first postwar French-Hungarian conference of historians, held in Budapest in the 1960s, which focused on certain neglected aspects of centuries past, it came as a joyful revelation to realize how much the West and the eastern peripheries of Central Europe had had in common: the figures for births and deaths added up to the same demographic trends, and borders appeared to have had the power to confine neither epidemics, nor eating habits, nor beliefs, nor learning. The impact of certain universities, shown to have been Europe-wide, the cultural trends, the sameness of the metacommunicative message that a particular symbol was understood to convey in the most distant parts of Europe were all evidence of how far the divided regions shared a common history. Researchers presented convincing proof that the "Eastern bloc" of countries within the Ottoman sphere of influence - Hungary among them - was part of a flourishing international trade network. It had implications that went beyond the realm of economic history when it was proven that all three countries under Ottoman rule showed a trade surplus after the lost Battle of Mohács (1526).
Obviously, it bore out the claim that it was Hungary which supplied the meat consumed by the burghers of all the towns in the wide belt stretching from Venice to Augsburg, a claim made by the humanist Miklós Oláh (1493-1568), a friend of Erasmus's and secretary to "Mary of Hungary" (1505-1558), Regent of The Netherlands, the widow of Louis II, King of Hungary and Bohemia (1505-1526), who had been slain at Mohács. But the finding did more than that. The fact that post-Mohács Eastern Europe had a trade surplus with the West called attention to the economic interdependence of "East and West" at a time when newspapers there were still extolling the superiority of an autarchic socialist economy, though in fact these economies were already proving inoperative.
[...]
[...]
Geographically, naturally, Europe is defined as stretching all the way to the Urals. Austrians, Poles, and Romanians are included in the illustration of her peoples, and Hungarian is mentioned among her languages. Still, for a book that promised an all-European perspective, it treats the nations of East Central Europe as if these countries had no past to speak of.
The word "European" stands for a set of positive values: Christianity, statehood, humanism, scholarship, art, literature, tolerance, culture, the rise of the middle classes, democracy, and environmentalism. "Europe" is the evolution of these values through the centuries, and their triumph, in recent times, over Fascism, and then Bolshevism. Reading Duroselle's book, however, one would think that the countries of East Central Europe had had no part in any of this.
All things considered, the first and last time that Hungary is discussed in a meaningful way in the entire hefty volume is in the "Europe Under Siege" section, under "The Magyars and Their Incursions" heading of the chapter entitled "The Slavs". The French original gives a short and objective account; the Hungarian edition has a number of additional particulars. "Though they are not Slavs but, like the Finns and the Estonians, belong to the Finno-Ugrian family of languages, this is the place to say a few words about the Magyars as well. Between 900 and 950, this amazing (étonnant) people managed to pillage the entire eastern part of continental Europe; they then gave up their nomad ways and settled down to farming, keeping their own language all the while." Here the Hungarian text has some romantic details about the fighting style of the Magyars and the destruction they wrought, with their final defeat at the battle of Lechfeld being mentioned twice within a few lines. The French original dates Vajk's baptism to 985; the Hungarian edition has "corrected" this to 975. Obviously, mistakenly. According to György Györffy, Vajk, Géza's son, was born in 975, or later. "...Vajk, who, in 985, at the age of ten, took the name Stephen, succeeded [his father] in 997... A remarkable statesman and a pious man whom the Church would canonize, he established 'the Crown of St. Stephen', along with a wholly autonomous Church, and, in 1001, had himself crowned with a crown blessed by Pope Sylvester II." Then comes a sentence that is to be found only in the Hungarian edition: "A stable Christian kingdom was the legacy he left behind; Hungary had become an organic part of Europe". And the sequel? For centuries, Hungary figures as but a shadowy figure among the "extras" on the European stage, or not even that: it is as if she had fallen down the trap opening. Not even the Hungarian edition follows up the idea of her being "an organic part of Europe"; apparently, it was just a manner of speaking.
Judging by the French original, humanism, "that uniquely European phenomenon", bypassed Hungary. In the Hungarian translation, the relevant passages have been padded with an interpolation: "Of all the states beyond the Alps, it was, perhaps, the Hungary of Mátyás Hunyadi [Matthias Corvinus], parts of Poland, and what today is Austria that were most touched by its emanations before 1500." In the French original, however, Matthias Corvinus appears only in a chronological table; it is the Jagiellos who figure as the principal political factors of fifteenth-century Central Europe; and Hungary is a blank on the map illustrating - among other things - the centers of humanist learning.
Hungary comes up again in the chapter dealing with the Reformation and its aftermath. Calvinism, which had "pronounced social and democratic aspirations", though "it did not, by any means, condemn capitalism", "spread throughout Scotland, The Netherlands, Bohemia, Hungary, Transylvania [only in the Hungarian edition], and Poland." But Hungary, Bohemia and Poland are also mentioned under the subtitle "The Catholic Countries", as places where the majority of the population - in Poland, the vast majority - was Catholic. In subsequent pages, one comes across Hungary only here and there, either as the helpless victim of the enemies of Europeanism, or as their accomplice.
[...]
The chapter entitled "Europe Faces the Turks" quotes one contemporary opinion after another to the effect that the Ottoman expansion meant no less than that the very fate of Europe was at stake. Duroselle cites Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pius II: The fact that the Turks were in Constantinople meant that "they were in Europe, in our country, so to speak, in our own house, on our own land". It is amazing to find that Duroselle, who is so thoroughly at home in this subject, too, reduces the three hundred years of struggle to preserve the Europeanness of Europe in Hungary to three dates and three place names of lost battles: 1526 and Mohács, 1541 and Buda, and 1543 and Esztergom. And yet, at the time, Charles V had called the slain King Louis II the hero of Christendom: the Western powers of Europe had a just appreciation of what would ensue if the Kingdom of Hungary, one of the main pillars of stability in the region for five hundred years, were to collapse. When Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Szigetvár in the summer of 1566, prayers were said in the churches of the Western world three times a week, commending to God's protection each defender of the castle by name, and in the streets of Rome, Brussels and Paris, spry vendors hawked accounts of the determined resistance put up by not just the Hungarians, but also the Moravians, Bohemians, Croats, and other peoples of the region. And the courts of Western Europe were deluged by letters dictated by one Hungarian Palatine, Ban of Croatia and Prince of Transylvania after the other, by diplomats and cardinals, all with the same message: Europe must unite against the Turks in her own interest. There is no mention in Duroselle's history of Europe of the substantial Türkenhilfe that the German Electors sent to the defenders of her eastern fringes, monies that made an enormous difference at the time, nor of the administrative help offered by the Hereditary Provinces, or the diplomatic and financial aid given by the papal state. Miklós Zrínyi (1620-1664), Ban of Croatia, military leader and poet, has also disappeared from European history. And yet, in 1664, when he joined forces with the League of the Rhine to organize an international army against the Turks, a biography of his published in London - The Conduct and Character of Count Nicholas Serini - characterized him as follows: "The Excellent Count Serini seems to be the Heroe, upon whom Providence hath devolved the Fate of Europe", and promised the reader a thorough acquaintance with this "Heroe... upon whose success or overthrow the Western world seems to stand or fall".
Duroselle's beautifully presented history of Europe, on the other hand, dismisses a hundred and fifty years of local struggle to keep Europe's eastern periphery European in the following words: "...Ferdinand, the Austrian Habsburg, and Philip II, the Spanish Habsburg ... were the ones who led the relentless fight along the Danube and the Save, as they did in the Mediterranean".
[...]
Historical alternatives unfold in the long term. The rebirth of Europe hinges on our ability to give a contemporary expression to its erstwhile unity.
Since the future must build on the past, Hungary must first of all come to terms with its European heritage, and make it manifest to others. A look through any archive abroad will make it clear how little has been done to exploit this kind of priceless evidence of Hungary's involvement in Europe. The research results that have been arrived at seldom get beyond the country's borders; or if they do, they do so untranslated, and so lie useless, gathering dust on the bookshelves of the world. Just in the past few years several works have appeared which should be made available in a scholarly translation in one of the world languages.
When I looked a year ago, the open shelf of the reading room in the British Library had three books dealing with Hungary. The one was a fat tome in Hungarian, A magyar történet kútfõi (Hungarian Historical Sources, 1901) by Henrik Marczali. Considered very modern at the time, it has, to say the least, become obsolete. The second was a slim volume published in 1958 by Denis Sinor, a History of Hungary. The third was the hefty volume, Information Hungary. On the spine, there's the coat of arms the world saw being cut out of the flag in 1956. Of the over a thousand pages, a hundred and fifteen deal with the history of Hungary. In the spirit of 1968, the year it appeared. Next to it on the shelf, the nations of Europe - the English, the French, the Romanians, the Poles - offer their histories to the readers of the world in series of several volumes. Shall we be a people without a history in the European Union? Not just we ourselves, all of Europe will be the losers, whether they know it or not. Europe's full identity depends on an appreciation of Hungary's history, too, no less than that of any other nation's. A scholarly, objective broadcasting of the part we have played in Europe's history is more than our national interest: it is in the interest of European unity.