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The Great Hungarian Plain: a European Frontier Area (II)*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
When the Habsburg dynasty had finally driven back the Turks, repopulation of the Alföld (the Great Hungarian Plain) began. The policies that were adopted reshaped the whole ethnic structure of the region. Under Turkish rule the Hungarians had become not only impoverished but greatly depleted in numbers. In Slavonia there were no Hungarians left at all and very few were left in the southern hahf of de Bácska, between the Franz Joseph Canal and the Danube, or in the Bánát, or in the counties of Tolna and Baranya in Transdanubia, or in the north.
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1961
References
1 See Schimscha, E., Technik und Methoden der Theresianischen Besiedlung des Banats (Baden b. Wien, 1938Google Scholar), and Kahlbrunner, J., Deutsche Erschliessung des Südostens seit 1683 (Jena, 1938Google Scholar).
2 On the locations of the tanya pattern of settlement see part I of this article, CSSH, III, p. 74Google Scholar.
3 On these maps, Ibid., pp. 85–87.
4 Travellers from Western Europe often commented on the backwardness of Hungarian agricultural methods, e.g., Townson, D. R., Voyage en Hongrie, translated from the English (London, 1797) (Paris, Year 7), II, pp. 78–79Google Scholar.
5 Data from the Danube region referring to the period about 1800 indicate that 4 to 9 hectares of steppe pasture were required per head of cattle or horses; this gives a concentration of 11 to 25 head per sq. km. For the Alföld as a whole in the period when it was used primarily for grazing the normal concentration per sq. km. was from 30 to 40 head of cattle (or two thirds that number of horses, or four times that number of pigs or ten times that number with sheep). The heavy mortality in lean years suggests that the limit of grazing capacity had been reached. See Treiber, Kurt, Wirtschajtsgeographie des ungarischen grossen Alfölds (Kiel, 1943), pp. 20, 42Google Scholar. Townson's evidence, of the year 1797 (see n. 4, above, I, pp. 122–24) represents horses as driven to market unbroken to the rein or saddle. According to him (II, pp. 80–81), Hungarian horses enjoyed a high reputation throughout Europe because of the fame of the Hungarian cavalry but undeservedly, since the cavalry mounts and the aristocracy's horses in general were bred from imported stock. The native horses, he said, were very small. Similarly the mustang of the North American prairies was traditionally glorified although it was inferior to the Spanish cavalry mounts from which it was descended.
6 Townson (op. cit., I, p. 136) reports the inhabitants of Pest as much troubled by sand storms. This suggests that the environs were not yet completely cultivated.
7 Milleker, R., “Die Puszta”, A Földrajzi Közlemények, LXVII (1939), p. 235Google Scholar.
8 On the figure of the bandit see Dömotö, Alex, “Le romantisme du brigandage en Hongrie”, Nouvelle Revue de Hongrie (06 1937)Google Scholar.
9 See Mendol, T., “Szarvas földrajza”, Mitt, der Kommission füir Heimatkunde (1926–1927)Google Scholar.
10 Seignorial rights could restrict livestock–holding; see above, part I of this article,CSSH, III, p. 86Google Scholar.
11 Travellers testify to the insecurity. See Maurer, Franz, Eine Reise durch Bosnīen, die Saveländer und Ungarn (Berlin, 1870), pp. 425–26Google Scholar; Tissot, Victor, Voyage au Pays des Tziganes, 5me éd. (Paris, 1880), pp. 236–51Google Scholar; Richter, Wilhelm, Wanderungen in Ungarn und unter seinen Bewohnern (Berlin, 1844), pp. 71–76Google Scholar.
12 Typical of this romantic interest is the description by the German botanist Woenig, Franz, Hei, die Puszta! (1847)Google Scholar, reprinted in Reclams' Universal Bibliothek, no. 3633.
13 Széchenyi organized the first steamboat service on the Danube and was the first Deputy in the Upper House to give a speech in Hungarian instead of Latin. He established and generously endowed the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, built the first flour mill in Budapest, wrote extensively on finance and on horse-breeding, and popularized horse–racing. He is commemorated in the names of buildings, squares, parks, baths, in every Hungarian city and town.
14 The larger towns had been attempting to improve local roads, but the nature of the difficulties may be seen in Ditz's account of the one state road, the so’called Viennese road from Pest to Hermannstadt: he says it was in some places over a kilometer wide, because people constantly preferred to move at the side of the road, on ground not yet churned up by traffic. See citation in K. Treiber, op. cit., p. 49. Dr. Edith Fel told me that the emancipation of the unfree peasants in 1848 slightly speeded up transport by encouraging the use of horses for hauling in place of oxen. Seignorial rights had hitherto penalized the peasant who hitched horses to his wagons by demanding transport services.
15 The English traveller Quin, M. J. described a journey by steamboat on the Danube in 1834 in Reize met een stoomboot op de Donau, 3rd. ed., translated (Amsterdam, 1838Google Scholar). His experiences remind one of accounts of steamboat travel on the Mississippi at this period. On the Tisza, as in early days on American rivers, goods used to be shipped downstream by raft. The raft would be sold with the goods at their destination, the return trip being made on foot. See Wilhelm Richter (n. 11, above), p. 90.
16 Richter, op. cit., p. 115. The same author likens the mounted herders (csikós) of the Hungarian steppe to the cowboys of the New World (pp. 167–68).
17 Matlekovits, Von, Das Königreich Ungarn, volkswirtschaftlich und statistisch dargestellt, 2 vols., (Leipzig, 1900), I, p. 196Google Scholar.
18 Few tanyas were established in the northern counties of Bórsod and Héves, wheremuch of the village population worked on the large estates. Nor were there many in eastern Nyàrség where the villages had not been destroyed by the Turks; communal lands here were not of large extent, and traditional communal controls over their cultivation persisted. The social advantages of living in the village appear to compensate for the loss of time and energy in going out to the fields and back every day. Finally, there are few tanyas on recently reclaimed valley flood land belonging to great estates. The tanyas are however found on older agricultural land that formerly belonged to great estates, where the peasants before the Emancipation were share-croppers. The Emancipation made such holdings the unencumbered property of the tenants. For large-scale operations the great estates thus became more or less restricted to the reclaimed valley lands.
19 It is interesting to recall that public lands thrown open to colonization in Hungary have always been called határ, a term referring to a boundary or “frontier”. Town lands known in Germany as Weichbild or Stadtbann are known in Hungary as város határ.
20 Of course in newly occupied lands there were no buildings from which tanyas could start; the colonist put up completely new farm buildings. Laborers renting land on large estates did the same, especially after the agrarian reform laws of 1920 and 1924. See Beynon, E. D., “Migrations of Hungarian Peasants”, Geographical Review (10 1937), pp. 211–222Google Scholar. Nor was t he stable enclosure at the edge of a town (the ó1 kert) everywhere the prototype of the tanya, for in the Nagykúnság (Greater Cumania) it was not in existence at the time the tanyas were established. Here and in some other regions there were however winter stables out in the country which were converted to the purposes of tanya agriculture. See Györffy, I., “A Nagykún Tanya”, Néprajzi Ertesitö, XI (1910), pp. 129–148Google Scholar.
21 But see Fél, Edith's study of the village of Martos, A Nagycsalád és Jogszokásai a Komárommegyei Martoson (Budapest, 1944), summary in GermanGoogle Scholar.
22 See n. 20, above. The tangle of roads and dead-end lanes which always marked the “garden” zone of the “garden” towns is repeated on a larger scale in the tangle of roads leading from the town to the tanyas in the vicinity. In Hajdunánás, Nagy-Körös, Békés, the similarity is striking.
23 For illustrations see Fél, Edith, “Adatok Dunapataj néprajzáhos”, Küilonlenyomat a Néprajzi Ertesítö (1937), summary in GermanGoogle Scholar. Dr. Fél made the discovery of this almost contemporary kertes város.
24 See part I of this article, CSSH, III, pp. 78–79Google Scholar.
25 Travellers in Hungary often described scenes like those of the great drives in t he American West. Pardoe, Julia, in The City of the Magyar, 3 vols. (London, 1840), II, p. 220Google Scholar, found the half wild cattle she saw being driven through Hungary to Vienna “small and lean, a fact easily accounted for by the perpetual exercise necessitated by the extensive nature of their pastures and the paucity of vegetation”.
26 At the end of the 19th century the peasants' methods of farming were in general still far behind those of Western Europe. The large estates were ahead of the peasants but were often from 30% to 60% steppe.
27 Erdei, Ferenc, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia II. Társadalmi — Történeti Tudományok Ostályának Közleményei. Āltáianos társadalomtudományi sorozat I kötet 2 szám (Budapest, 1951), pp. 133–146Google Scholar.
28 For a map see Földrajzi Ertesitö (1956), p. 73Google Scholar.
30 Erdei, loc. cit., pp. 413–14. Béla, Halmos offers a local study of these changes in the country east of the Tisza and in Békéscsaba and its neighborhood: “Békéscsaba és Kornyéke tarületrende zésének települési Kérdései”, Földrajzi Ertesítö; (1957), pp. 181–98Google Scholar.