Page 258 [258]
OCR
256 Istvan M. Szijarto the 1790s to recover as much of his inheritance as possible. He claimed that certain landholdings should have been reserved for the male branch of the family, but the female branch expropriated the male. As these estates ended up in the hands of vicecomes Sandor Fels6buki Nagy who helped Lajos Jr. and his son with loans, he finally withdrew his legal claims. Another example of conflicts within the family is the case of the Csuzy inheritance. Gaspar Csuzy lost most of his paternal inheritance to his stepfather, Gyorgy Fekete Sr., and to his half-brother Gyorgy Fekete. Other chunks of the Csuzy inheritance were cut by his sister, Krisztina and his brother-in-law, Péter Végh. Péter Végh’s son, with the same name, was promoted to the high dignity of the lord chief justice (judex curiae regiae) in 1795, second to the palatine only, by this time a Habsburg archduke. When Végh was promoted, his son-in-law, clearly enjoying his full support, got an appointment as personalis. He was no one other than Jözsef Felsöbüki Nagy. Not only Végh was appointed to the highest position available for a Hungarian of his time, but one of his predecessors in office was Gyorgy Fekete, Gaspar Csuzy’s half brother, lord chief justice between 1773 and 1783. Fekete could build on the support of his father-in-law, Gyorgy Niczky, causarum reagalium director, that is, chief crown prosecutor, who actually preferred Fekete to his son, Kristóf Niczky, and gave him most of his support. Fekete clashed with Gaspar Csuzy in the diet, the first being at that time personalis, chairman of the lower house of the parliament and leading the loyalist MPs in the lower house, the latter a county deputy leading the opposition. Similarly to this conflict, also Fekete and Kristóf Niczky were rivals — in this case, among the professional officeholders. Also Kristóf Niczky could climb to the highest available position in Hungary, that of the lord chief justice, which he filled between 1786 and 1787. As these cases demonstrate clearly, in gentry families we can often meet signs of not just cooperation but also rivalry, even hostility. The gentry family was held together by the fact and the hope of a common inheritance — which could easily turn the members of the family against each other.
