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been available before. It is enough to mention a few career paths here, Karoly
Batthyány (1697-1772) became the Crown Prince’s Ayo (grand court master,
Obersthofmeister) and Conference Minister, Andräs Hadik (1710-1790) the
President of the Court Military Council (Hofkriegsrat), Käroly Pälffy (1735¬
1816) and later József György Batthyäny (1737-1806) became Vice-Presidents
of the Court Chamber (Hofkammer), but the process of integration was not
only felt at the personal level, but the weight of the members of Hungarian
society of estates also increased spectacularly in the political and representa¬
tional dimension of the court.
The ending segment of the volume is the year 1765, which in many aspects
is a symbolic boundary. On the one hand, this year marked a turning point
in the history of Viennese Baroque court culture - a point of view on which
there is a consensus in the currents of international literature (among others,
we need only refer to the works of Irene Kubiska-Scharl, Martin Scheutz,
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger or Jakob Wuhrer). Following the loss of her hus¬
band, Maria Theresa was plunged into deep mourning, as a result of which
court expenditure was rationalised and the number and scale of various en¬
tertainments reduced. On the other hand, the year 1765, when Joseph II be¬
came co-regent, can also be interpreted as a turning point in the history of
government, as Éva H. Balázs and Domokos Kosáry have already pointed
out, who considered this year as the symbolic beginning of Habsburg en¬
lightened absolutism. This year also marked the beginning of a new chapter
in the relationship between the Habsburg government and the Hungarian
society of estates, as from that time onwards no Diet had been convened for
two and a half decades. However, in the monograph I have tried to ,,loosen”
the chronological boundaries of the study in a less restrictive way, in order
to reconstruct certain processes more accurately that started before 1711 and
continued after 1765.
The central problem of the monograph is to examine the integration of
the Hungarian aristocracy in Vienna, focusing on the presence, activities
and expansion of the Hungarian elite in Vienna in the broad sense. I use
the adjective ,, Hungarian” not to denote nationality, but here and in the fol¬
lowing I refer to a heterogeneous group of people from the countries of the
Holy Crown belonging to the natio Hungarica. Thus, the study also includes
Transylvanian and Croatian aristocrats, whom I have tried to highlight as a
separate group in each chapter, and to briefly describe their specific positions
where was it possible. The volume examines the most important institutions
and scenes of the integration of the Hungarian elite in Vienna, which re¬
quires a complex methodological approach and an approach that also draws
on the results of other disciplines (especially literature and art history). In
presenting the topic, I have tried not only to use the overlapping narratives