Oldal 251 [251]
The Felsőbüki Nagy family 249
catapulted into royal office: first of all to positions held in the Hungar¬
ian Chamber in Pressburg (Pozsony, Bratislava), and in exceptional
cases to those of the Hungarian Royal Court Chancellery in Vienna,
in the seat of the emperor who was also king of Hungary. Both the
last will of György Nagy (not yet called Felsőbüki Nagy), dated in
Bük in 1663, preserved in the family archive of the Felsőbüki Nagy
family, and the careers of the later members of this family from the
late seventeenth century on, locate the family in the social stratum
of the well-to-do servitor gentry families of the Esterházy house.
While, at the time of its foundation in the early eleventh century,
the system of counties in the Kingdom of Hungary was a bulwark of
royal power, from the end of the thirteenth century, it was gradually
transformed into the organ of the self-government of the local nobil¬
ity. In the eighteenth century, the nobility exercised the bulk of ad¬
ministration and certain judicial and local legislative power through
the organization of the county. Its head, the supremus comes, was
appointed by the king, usually a lay or ecclesiastical lord, the actual
self-government of the county was directed by the elected vicecomes.
(In the eighteenth century, several members of the Felsöbüki Nagy
family filled this most prestigious county office.) Counties enjoyed
considerable autonomy from the central royal government. They even
represented the state on the local and regional levels, as — beyond the
flimsy and specialized apparatus of the Hungarian Chamber - the
ruler had no alternative agents in Hungary on these levels. As the
army could be relied on only exceptionally, the court and the central
administrative offices (the Chancellery in Vienna and from 1724 the
Council of Lieutenancy in Pressburg) were dependent on the coun¬
ties’ mostly elected official apparatus in implementing their orders.
The counties are, therefore, the clue to the political development
of Hungary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Especially
the fact that they collected taxes made them into a mighty bulwark
of the estates’ power. Differences between Hungary and the other
Habsburg provinces became especially sharp when Hungary was
left out of the earlier mentioned great administrative reforms of the
mid-eighteenth century: it continued to be run by the bene posses¬
sionati unlike the other provinces of the Monarchy, administered
by royal bureaucrats, as observed by P. G. M. Dickson.
4 Dickson 1995: 350.