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The Felsőbüki Nagy family 249 catapulted into royal office: first of all to positions held in the Hungarian 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 nobility. In the eighteenth century, the nobility exercised the bulk of administration 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 counties’ 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 possessionati unlike the other provinces of the Monarchy, administered by royal bureaucrats, as observed by P. G. M. Dickson. 4 Dickson 1995: 350.
