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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 statements 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 medieval 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 importantly, 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
