Give, Lord, good, Keep us, Magyar, always
And in battle with the enemy
Stretch out your hand to the Hungarians;
Break, fate, our oppression, Give happiness that everyone was waiting
For the people to come
And the past suffered!
(National Anthem of Hungary, approved in 1989)
Last time, getting acquainted with the history of Hungary, we stopped at the bloody events of the Mongol-Tatar invasion. Its consequences were heavy, but be that as it may, the country soon recovered from them and began to develop further. It would hardly be wise to tell in detail about all episodes of their history that are of any significance for the Hungarians. After all, this is their story, not ours. However, it is necessary to talk about some of its key points, as well as the achievements of Hungarian culture.
Polish winged hussars who stopped the advance of the Turks in Europe. It was in Hungary that the hussars first appeared, and the Poles borrowed them from the Hungarians. A still from the film "With Fire and Sword".
Briefly, the entire history of Hungary after 1241 can be represented like this.
1342-1382 - the reign of Louis I the Great (probably the most prominent ruler in the history of Hungary from the Anjou dynasty). During his reign, Hungary united a significant part of the Western Slavs and became a great Slavic power: from the Balkan Peninsula to the Baltic Sea, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic.
1521 was marked by the beginning of the next round of Turkish expansion into Europe. April 23, 1526 Suleiman the Magnificent set out on a campaign with a hundred thousandth army and 300 guns. On the swampy plain of Mogac (Mohac), he gave battle to the Hungarian king Louis II, which he lost. The Hungarians were utterly defeated, lost 25 thousand people and fled (August 29, 1526). Buda opened the city gates for him; the country was devastated by fire and sword, and tens of thousands of people were taken into slavery. After that, Hungary broke up into several relatively independent principalities and was in this sad state for almost 150 years.
Battle of Mohacs in 1526 between the Ottomans and Hungarians, artist Bertalan Shekeli, 1866 Hungarian National Gallery.
Ottoman warriors in Hungary, between 1550 - 1600 Illustration from the Hungarian 1995 edition.
1687 The rights of the Habsburgs were recognized for the Hungarian crown.
1703 - 1711 - the uprising led by the Transylvanian prince Ferenc II Rákóczi against Austrian rule, which was called the "uprising of the Kuruts".
Ferenc Rakoczi. Adam Manok, 1724 Hungarian National Gallery.
Banner of Rákóczi 1703 Illustrated History of Hungary 1998
A still from the Hungarian television series Captain Tenkesh (1963 - 1964), one of the most popular children's films in its time in the USSR. Naive, of course, he was very. The Kuruz rebels are all heroes. The Austrians are just a bunch of idiots, and their colonel is just a complete fool, it is not for nothing that Captain Tenkesh mocks him all the time and only at the very end sums up their confrontation by shooting a barrel of gunpowder that he holds in his hands, but the children were interested.
By the way, the Shiklos fortress, where the shooting took place, is a real historical monument.
1848 - 1849 Hungarian National Revolution. Suppression of the revolution by Austrian and Russian troops.
1867 Restoration of the Hungarian Constitution, granting the country full autonomy.
November 11, 1918The Austro-Hungarian Empire was liquidated, and five days later a republic was proclaimed in Hungary.
1919 A communist uprising breaks out in the country and Soviet power is established.
1920 - 1944 The period of the military dictatorship, the pro-fascist regimes of Horthy and Salash. Later, a communist government was established.
1949 - 1989 The existence of the Hungarian People's Republic.
1956 Anti-communist uprising, suppressed by the forces of the Warsaw Pact countries, which brought their troops into its territory.
1989 The country undergoes democratic reforms related to the dismantling of the socialist system. The Hungarian People's Republic was renamed the Hungarian Republic, and the communists were effectively removed from power.
1990 The country held the first free, multi-party elections in the past 40 years.
Today Hungary is a member of the UN, IMF, World Bank, Council of Europe.
These are the main milestones in the history of Hungary, although, without a doubt, their set can be easily supplemented or changed. Moreover, this chronology is significant due to a number of important circumstances associated with the impact of these events on world, or at least European history.
There is also a monument in Budapest to Eugene of Savoy, who took part in the liberation of Hungary from Turkish troops in 1684-1688. Beautiful…
The inscription on the plinth …
For example, it is Hungary that we owe the appearance of such a kind of troops as the hussars, without which none of the European armies could do, and they had to fight even in the USA. Moreover, they first appeared in Hungary during the reign of King Matthias Corvinus, who in 1458 ordered a militia to be recruited to protect against the Turks, in which the nobles should have been deployed, according to one version, one armed horseman for every 20 combat-ready slaves, and according to the other - one such rider from every 20 households. The origin, in fact, of the word "hussar" is argued to this day. They say that it is based on the word "hus" - "twenty", others argue that this is not so, but one way or another, but for us it is important that the hussars are a Hungarian invention. True, initially they did not resemble the colorful horsemen, known to us from the movie "The Hussar Ballad". Firstly, they had shields of a characteristic Hungarian shape, with an acute angle raised from the left to the top, and secondly, they had bows. The usual defensive weaponry was chain mail, a helmet on the head. The richer warriors were worn by bakhters, but in general it was the cavalry of the poor, armed and equipped according to the leftover principle. The cold weapons of these riders were a wide-bladed saber of the Hungarian model, as well as a konchar - a long sword with a sharp thrusting blade, which could well be used instead of a spear, and a straight chopping broadsword.
Helmet and characteristic shield of the Hungarian hussar. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Typical armament of the early Hungarian and Polish hussars. Museum of the Polish Army in Warsaw.
However, such weapons became characteristic, including a specific type of armor, not in Hungary, but among the Polish hussars. And in Poland they appeared because it was the hussar cavalry that proved to be very effective at that time, and everything that is effective tends to be borrowed!
It should be noted that the appearance of the first hussars coincided in time with the heyday of the knightly cavalry. 1458 is the "era of knights in Gothic armor", and then there were still no pistols, no carbines, no blunderbuss, which the hussars were later armed with. True, arquebuses have already appeared, but they were too bulky and inconvenient for use in cavalry. Only in the 16th century, with the advent of wheeled pistols, this type of weapon began to spread among the rich hussars (and the poor simply could not afford this).
After the defeat inflicted on the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohacs, the southern part of Hungary fell under the rule of the Ottoman Turkey, and the northern part came under the rule of the Holy Roman Empire. As a result, both of these empires received detachments of Hungarian hussars, who fought both on the side of the Austrians and on the side of the Turks. And … serving both those and others equally showed themselves from the best side.
And this is already a real Hungarian hussar - a sculpture not far from the Presidential Residence.
For most of the 16th century, the hussars of both Hungary and Poland resembled each other like two drops of water, however, by the end of the century, their paths diverged sharply. In Poland, they began to put on armor, turned into a hybrid of landsknechts and knights, and even received spears up to five meters long. But in Hungary, on the contrary, they completely lost their armor. As a result, in Poland, by 1700, the hussars became men at arms, while the Hungarian hussars completely lost any armor, but instead began to wear a traditional Hungarian costume decorated with cords.
The Magyar Hussars of 1762 of the Holy Roman Empire (the Empire united Austria, Hungary, southern Germany, the Czech Republic and western Ukraine in those years). Richard Knotel "Uniform" 1890
However, the hussars' uniform known to us today received only in 1751 in the Holy Roman Empire (which included Hungary at that time). Then the hussars received a single charter and a characteristic uniform, consisting of a mentic, a dolman and a headdress in the form of a fur hat with a piece of cloth hanging from the crown of the head. It was this uniform that was taken as a model by all other European countries and established in them as the classic hussar uniform. As a result, the hussars appeared in the Holy Roman Empire in 1686; in France in 1692; in Prussia in 1721; and in England in 1806. In Russia, hussars were mentioned as "regiments of a foreign system" already in 1634. Then they are mentioned in documents of 1654 and 1660. It is interesting that the Russian hussars, led in 1654 by Colonel Christopher Rylsky, had wings, that is, apparently, they were copied from the Polish winged hussars. This is also evidenced by the documents in which the hussar plate weapons are mentioned.
In the era of Peter the Great, hussars in Russia appear only in 1723. These were immigrants from Austria, whom the tsar allowed to settle in Ukraine. At the same time, the number of hussar regiments increased continuously and by 1762 reached 12. The same number were at the time of the outbreak of the Patriotic War of 1812. Well, in 1914, there were 20 hussar regiments in the Russian army - two of which belonged to the guards.
Hungarian hussars and lancers of 1848.
So it was the Hungarians who gave Europe a kind of mounted troops, which glorified itself, so to speak, forever. The hussars were Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Griboyedov, Denis Davydov and Nadezhda Durova - and these are only our illustrious compatriots, and there were many people who glorified their hussar uniform in different countries.
