1848 (23 page)

Among the first to stake their claims were the Slovaks, who lived entirely within the Kingdom of Hungary and were backed by Czech nationalists, who saw them as fellow countrymen. This relationship was itself problematic. Some older Slovak patriots, such as the poet Jan Kollár, believed that the two peoples should draw closer together, with the Slovaks adopting Czech as their own language. A younger generation disagreed. They were led by the writer L'udovít Štúr, who had worked hard to promote Slovak as a literary language in its own right. The small Slovak national movement held its first meeting on 28 March and presented its demands to the Hungarian government, asking only that Slovak be taught in schools and used as an official language in Slovakia, and that the Slovak colours be displayed alongside the Hungarian. The government rejected these modest demands out of hand as a ‘manifestation of pan-Slavic activity'. Understanding that the Slovak peasants still cared little for questions of nationality, Štúr and his associates organised a larger meeting at Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš in May, drafting a more comprehensive programme, including the right for peasants to own land and greater political autonomy within the Kingdom of Hungary. Budapest reacted by ordering the arrest of three Slovak leaders, including Štúr, who fled to Prague. Slovak volunteers would later join the Habsburg campaigns against Hungary, supporting the Austrians with a guerrilla war, but they failed to raise the peasantry, who listened quizzically to the patriotic appeals of Slovak nationalists.

The Romanians posed a far greater challenge to the Magyars. The 2.5 million Romanians who lived in Transylvania, in Bukovina to the north and in the Banat to the south, had strong commercial and cultural ties with those who lived beyond the frontier, in the Romanian Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were theoretically under Turkish sovereignty but were actually governed by the restrictive ‘Organic Statutes' imposed by Tsar Nicholas I in 1832. The Grand Principality of Transylvania had long enjoyed a separate status within the Habsburg Empire: it had its own governor in Kolozsvár (or Kluj-Napoca in Romanian), its own chancellery in Vienna and a diet - albeit one dominated by the Magyar landlords. The nucleus of an army existed in the form of the Romanian border regiments, but these were drawn customarily from ethnic Magyars known as Székelys. Romanians were divided religiously between Uniate Catholics, who fell under the authority of the Hungarian bishops, and Orthodox Christians, who were subject to the Serb Orthodox hierarchy. As conditions for the union of Transylvania with Hungary, Romanian nationalists demanded, at the very least, a separate status for their two churches and legal recognition of their language and culture. Yet a more radical form of Romanian nationalism had been fostered by contacts and the cross-border smuggling of books and pamphlets among Romanian intellectuals, schoolteachers, students and journalists in Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia. In May 1848 a Banat priest named Daniel Roth published a tract that envisaged a new Romanian kingdom based on ‘Dacia', an old province of the Roman Empire.
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In Transylvania the idea of Romanian national unity naturally meant rejection of the union with Hungary altogether, while in the principalities it meant shaking off Russian dominance and Turkish suzerainty.

At first, Magyars and Romanians alike in Transylvania enthusiastically celebrated the March revolution. The only people who felt threatened were the Hungarian and Saxon (ethnic German) magnates who feared for their privileges. The Magyar gentry of Transylvania embraced the idea of full union with the Hungarian kingdom, but they bitterly resented the Hungarian Diet's abolition of serfdom. As most Romanians in Transylvania were peasants, the nobles fretted that Romanian nationalists might stoke up their hatred against the Magyars. Otherwise, in the revolutionary fraternity of the March days, Transylvanian Romanians went so far as to agree that union with Hungary would be a step in the right direction, because it would bind them more closely to their co-nationals in the Banat. The editor of the influential
Gazeta de Transilvania
, George Bariţiu, argued that union with Hungary could be fruitful if the Romanians were allowed to use their own language in local government, church and education, while establishing cultural organisations that would lay firm foundations for their own sense of national identity.
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Yet therein lay the rub, for it ran counter to the vision of Magyar liberals, who denied the legitimacy of such national aspirations within Hungary. An article in the organ of the Budapest radical movement,
March Fifteenth
, praised the Romanians for being different from the Russians and remarked that their language was beautiful, though it needed work to become as pleasant as Italian. It went on to argue implausibly that the Romanians ‘would consider it an honour to be allowed to become Magyars'.
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It was not long before Romanian nationalists woke up to the fact that it would be tough to fulfil their own dreams of nationhood in union with the Hungarians. As early as 24 March, the radical lawyer Simion Bărnuţiu told his countrymen that, instead of trusting to Magyar goodwill, the Romanian patriots should hold a congress that would draw up a national programme - and it must include representatives of the peasantry.

There then followed weeks of feverish activity, in which Romanian journalists, students, teachers and priests criss-crossed Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina to prepare for the great assembly that was to be held in Blaj, with its schools and seminaries one of Transylvania's intellectual centres. The authorities watched these movements anxiously, particularly when delegates from Moldavia and Wallachia were spotted. Yet no one, at this stage, wanted conflict with Hungary, nor to provoke an uprising of the peasantry. At a preliminary assembly of six thousand peasants held in Blaj on 30 April, Bărnuţiu urged his audience not to upset the inevitable process of reform by taking matters into their own hands: emancipation would come as surely as national freedom, but only if both were sought through legal, constitutional means. He none the less continued to reject union with Hungary, warning a committee drafting the Romanian ‘National Petition' not to trust Hungarian promises of individual rights, since this would simply turn Romanians into citizens of a ‘Greater Hungary'.
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The great congress was finally held on the Field of Liberty outside Blaj on 15-17 May and was attended by forty thousand people, mostly peasants:

 

The National Petition was intended for both the Transylvanian Diet and Emperor Ferdinand - but pointedly not for the Hungarian government. It demanded the abolition of serfdom, civil rights, Romanian representation in the Diet, as well as a separate parliament, militia and educational system for Romanians. A permanent committee was established as a provisional government, with Bărnuţiu among its membership, as well as a National Guard. There was no demand for full independence from Hungary, but it certainly looked that way to the Magyars. The Magyar governor, József Teleki, openly charged the committee with subversion and disbanded it.
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He had little trouble gaining the support of the Transylvanian Diet at Kluj, dominated as it was by the Magyar and Saxon elites, who dismissed the Blaj demands on 30 May and voted for union with Hungary regardless of Romanian sensibilities. The pill was at least sweetened by the abolition of peasant dues and labour services, but the political absorption of Transylvania into Hungary continued apace. On 10 June Emperor Ferdinand, under Hungarian pressure, ratified the act of 30 May. Batthyány could then legally insist that the National Petition had to be presented to the Hungarian parliament, not to the Emperor. Predictably, when a Romanian delegation duly presented it in Budapest, they were dismissed with the now familiar argument that, as free and equal citizens in a free country, they had no need of special national rights. This rejection left the Romanians with two options: union with the Danubian principalities or becoming a separate state within the Austrian Empire, with a direct link to the Habsburg crown. By June 1848 the first option suddenly looked possible, for, at that very moment, a revolution erupted across the Carpathians and the Transylvanian Alps.

Elsewhere, the southern border of the Kingdom of Hungary was the Military Frontier, where, in order to defend the Habsburg Empire against the Turks, since the sixteenth century the Serbs and Croats had been offered land free of seigneurial obligations between the Adriatic and the River Drava in return for military service. This system was gradually expanded until it encompassed Hungary's entire border region as far as Transylvania. The largest military contribution was made by the Croats, who supplied eight border regiments, with their headquarters at Zagreb, compared to the nine raised on the remainder of the frontier. The Croats, however, had their own grievances: when not at war, they farmed in large communes called
zadruga
, which worked well for army recruitment but struggled to provide enough food to cope with the expanding population. Western Croatia, in particular, had become desperately poor by 1848, but the people remained loyal to the Austrian crown because their freedom from manorial obligations gave them a status above that of other peasants in those parts of ‘civil Croatia' ruled by the Hungarian civilian government, who were serfs. Croatian nobles had been happy in the past to let the Hungarian Diet defend elite interests against imperial demands, but Magyar encroachments into Croatian affairs and Magyar nationalism had begun to alarm Serbian and Croatian intellectuals alike. Some Croats had begun to formulate the notion of unity of all Croatian provinces into one ‘Triune kingdom', which had been ruled in the past as one state, or, like Ljudevit Gaj, they promoted the ‘Illyrian' (later called the ‘Yugoslav') ideal, which entailed the unity of all southern Slavs.

Initially, both Serbs and Croats reacted positively to the Hungarian revolution in March 1848: those who were still serfs awaited their freedom, while those on the frontier hoped that compulsory military service might be abolished. Clinging desperately on to their privileges, the Croatian gentry declared that only the Croatian Diet, the
Sabor
- not the Hungarian National Assembly - could abolish serfdom in Croatia, so the peasants rebelled, refusing to pay their dues or to carry out their labour obligations. On 25 March a Croatian national congress met in Zagreb, abolishing serfdom and demanding the same rights that the Hungarians were extracting from Vienna - essentially, full autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. These liberal demands were dangerous to Austria, Hungary and conservative Croats alike. These last were also ‘patriotic' in so far as they wanted to defend the conservative structures of Croatian society against the revolutionary impulses emanating from the Magyars. The way to do this was to remain loyal to the Habsburg monarchy.

The beleaguered Habsburgs would find one of their champions from among these patriotic, conservative nobles: Baron Josip Jelačić. As a proud Croat who made the right ‘Illyrian' noises, he received support from the anti-Magyar liberals in the Zagreb congress, but, as a loyal monarchist, he was the preferred leader of the conservatives. He was also seen as a strongman who could control the peasant uprising that was sweeping the region. In other words, he was the Croatian nobility's best hope of both greater autonomy from Vienna and of retaining their authority over the peasantry. Jelačić was also respected as a commander among the border regiments. The Habsburg court, meanwhile, understood that if it wanted to restore its authority in Hungary, the loyalty and help of the Military Frontier would be invaluable. Jelačić, then a colonel in the 1st Banat Regiment, had been spotted as a shrewd and determined operator by an Austrian military commissioner in Zagreb, who recommended him to Vienna. To the imperial government, he seemed to be the man to harness Croatian patriotism against the Magyars, and he was duly appointed ban of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia on 23 March. He set a tone of gritty and determined defiance against Hungary with a blunt order that, until the Croatian parliament met, all districts should accept orders from no one except himself, as the Emperor's representative.
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Two weeks later he was given command of the Military Frontier. Early in May - spuriously claiming a Turkish threat - he placed some units on a war footing and refused to recognise the legality of the government in Budapest. He also asked the War Ministry in Vienna to transfer military supplies from Austria to Croatia; the new, conservative war minister, Count Theodor von Latour, willingly obliged. When the Hungarians protested against Jelačić's aggressive defiance, however, the Austrian government as a whole - which, aware as it was of its continued weakness, was still trying to keep on good relations with the Magyars - felt that Jelačić was moving too far, too fast. The Emperor yielded to the Magyar government on 7 May and placed all troops in Hungary and the Military Frontier under the command of the new War Ministry in Budapest. This allowed the Hungarian government to appoint Baron János Hrabovszky to lead the imperial forces to restore order along the southern border.
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His first targets were not the Croats but the Serbs.

The Serbs supported Jelačić's appointment as ban. On 13 May, with the backing of the independent Serbian principality centred in Belgrade, eight thousand Hungarian Serbs met at Sremski Karlovci (Karlóca in Hungarian) and proclaimed an autonomous province, Voivodina, under an elected executive committee, the Glavni Odbor, and a prince (voivoda), Stevan Šupljikac, a colonel from the border regiments. Like Croatia, Voivodina recognised the ultimate sovereignty of the Habsburg Emperor, but not the authority of the Hungarian government. Yet, when the Serbs also restored the Orthodox see of Karlovci and proclaimed Metropolitan Josip Rajačić to be its Patriarch, the imperial government refused to recognise both. The Glavni Odbor also began to enforce its authority in southern Hungary by inciting Serbian peasants against Magyar landlords and Hungarian, Romanian and Saxon farmers alike. The crisis developed into open war between Hungary and the Voivodina Serbs, with both sides claiming their loyalty to the Emperor. The Serbs, supported by their own troops from the border regiments, held their own against the Hungarians, fighting off an attack on Sremski Karlovci on 12 June. In the Banat (a mixed Serb, Romanian and German region in southern Hungary), the Serbs and the Romanians nearly came to blows since the Romanian majority struggled for recognition of their own separate Orthodox Church as against the Serbs, who recognised Rajačić as their metropolitan. Unsurprisingly, therefore (and unlike their fellow countrymen in Transylvania), the Banat Romanians, led by Eftimie Murgu, expressed their loyalty to Hungary and asked permission for their own separate congress, which the Hungarian authorities, seeking to counterbalance the Serbs, willingly granted. The Romanian Orthodox congress was held in Lugoj on 27 June, where the ten thousand delegates emphasised that the Banat was not a Serbian province, but its official language and church would be Romanian, while remaining within the Kingdom of Hungary.
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