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246 István M. Szijártó
to the political elite of Hungary in different periods between the
end of the seventeenth century and the first half of the nineteenth.
Thus, this volume is making an attempt at proposing valid state¬
ments about the Hungarian political elite of this ‘long eighteenth
century’ in general through a concentration on certain members of
a particular gentry family. This way, the chapters of this volume
present the history of the Hungarian office-holding elite from the late
seventeenth-century beginnings to the climax of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, certain details
from the history of the Felsöbüki Nagy family serve as pretext for
more general investigations, and general conclusions are built upon
these; on the other, such details themselves give rise to hypotheses
that aim at a more general validity.
HUNGARY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
With the expulsion of the Ottomans from the territory of the medi¬
eval Kingdom of Hungary in the late seventeenth century and with
the related acceptance of hereditary Habsburg rule (enacted in 1687
in the male, in 1723, in the female line), the political situation in
eighteenth-century Hungary was fundamentally different from that
characterizing the earlier two centuries. Although, as part of the
Habsburg Monarchy, Hungary took part in European wars, and
certain wars even affected her territory, this was an unusually long
peaceful period in her history - at least from 1711 on, since the war
of independence led by Prince Ferenc II Räköczi. In this last one in
the succession of Hungarian rebellions against the Habsburgs, the
self-defence of Protestants against the Counter-Reformation was
not any more its determining feature. It was rather the result of an
overall dissatisfaction resulting from the protracted war expelling
the Turks (1683-1699) as liberating imperial troops meant hardly
bearable burdens for the population. To this, we can add that the
political rights of the estates of Hungary were curtailed: most im¬
portantly, the rights of levying taxes were lost by them in 1670, and
also nobility was taxed.
Albeit the Räköczi war of independence (1703-1711) ended in a
military defeat, it forced both parties to accept political realities;
on the one hand, a dissatisfied Hungary could cause significant
problems for the Habsburgs pursuing their dynastic interests in the