Habsburg Revenge on Hungary, 1849

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 159-160:

Tsar Nicholas I – at least in public – urged the teenage Austrian emperor to show magnanimity to the defeated ‘rebels’. But Franz Jozsef, or his chief adviser, Prince Schwarzenberg, was in no mood for leniency. The savagery of Habsburg retribution against Hungary shocked Europe.

At dawn on 6 October 1849 Lajos Batthyány, the first Prime Minister of revolutionary Hungary, was dragged to the courtyard of the main military barracks in Pest. He had been held prisoner since the end of July and was sentenced to hang for treason by a court martial – even though it was established at his trial that he had argued against Hungary declaring independence precisely on the grounds that it could be seen as treasonous. He was too weak to stand or walk so he had to be carried from his cell to the place of execution; three days earlier he had tried to cut his throat with a knife smuggled into the jail by his wife. It was seen as a dishonour for a nobleman to die by hanging, therefore he had done what he could to avoid the shame. The prison infirmary had saved his life so that he was fit enough to be killed. In what was described as an act of leniency, the court changed its sentence to death by firing squad. He was shot sitting on a chair. He refused to have his eyes covered by a blindfold – and he himself gave the order for the execution squad to fire. Like a true Hungarian aristocrat, he spoke in words from three languages ‘Allez Jäger, eljén a Haza’ (Long Live the Fatherland). His body lay in public at the scene of the execution for a day and a half – in what is now Szabadság tér (Liberty Square) in the heart of Budapest opposite the US Embassy, almost exactly on the spot where a more than life-size, awkward-looking statue of President Ronald Reagan has stood since the 1990s. On the same morning in Arad, Transylvania, now part of Romania, twelve Honvédség generals and a colonel were hanged. The date is one of the most important public holidays in Hungary.

General Baron Ludwig von Haynau was despatched to Budapest by the emperor and Schwarzenberg to teach ‘the Hungarians a lesson they will never forget’. He took up the challenge with alacrity. ‘I am the man who will restore order. I shall have hundreds shot, with a clear conscience,’ he told the General Staff in Vienna. The illegitimate son of Elector Wilhelm I of Hesse-Kassel, he was more widely known as the ‘Butcher of Brescia’ for the atrocities he had carried out in Lombardy, including the public flogging of women and girls he had accused of sedition, and the execution of a priest who was dragged from the altar of his church by soldiers directly to the gallows.

Liszt's Languages

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 130-131:

The concert at the Pesti Vigadó (House of Merriment), a splendid Baroque building that had miraculously survived the [1838] flood, on 12 February 1839 was a huge success; tickets changed hands for fantastical prices and an enormous sum was raised for flood victims. Liszt played for an hour and a half without a break – Beethoven, Schumann, some of his own pieces – and then conducted the orchestra until late into the night....

From then on he returned frequently to Hungary and eventually he was made the first head of the Hungarian Academy of Music, where for years he wielded vast influence in music and the arts generally in Hungary. He was given a grand mansion on Pest’s principal avenue, Andrássy út, where he lived for around three months of the year during the winter. The civic authorities and ambitious politicians from the Reform Movement were using him cynically, and Liszt was willing to be used. The height of his national acclaim – or of absurd hypocrisy, depending on one’s view – was a ceremony in January 1840 when he was made an honorary citizen of Pest and with great solemnity ‘was presented with a sword [a sabre] of honour: a souvenir from the martial race to its noble-hearted and world-famous son’, as the official programme for the event portentously declared. Many people had not yet realized it – neither his admirers nor his few critics – but Liszt could barely speak a word of Hungarian. This became obvious to everyone during the sword ceremony. He could have spoken German, which would at least have been understood by almost everyone in the Pest of those days. But the point about the event – and the National Theatre itself, where at that time German was not allowed to be spoken on stage during a performance – was to emphasize the critical importance of Hungarians speaking Hungarian. He ended up making an impassioned Hungarian nationalist speech in French. ‘At the very climax of his Hungarianization…his alien reality was revealed most fully,’ one of his critics wrote angrily.

Liszt had tried a few times to learn Hungarian and employed as language tutor a young academic reputed to be a brilliant teacher who had managed to get several dignitaries from the court in Vienna to at least utter a few sentences in Magyar. But, as he once admitted, he gave up the effort after five lessons when he encountered the word for unshakeability – tántorithatatlanság. Many of those trying to learn the language would have lost the will to carry on well before then. Liszt wrote to a newspaper after the National Theatre debacle: ‘Notwithstanding my lamentable ignorance of the Hungarian language, I am and shall remain until my end, a Magyar heart and soul.’

And he meant it. To a Hungarian friend in 1842, while on a Europe-wide concert tour, he wrote: ‘Sometimes my heart beats faster even at the sight of a postal stamp from Pest. It gives me such pleasure to be in your company. What is loud applause and endless acclaim worth compared to what all of you give me? Everywhere else I play for the audience, but in Hungary I play for the nation. And this is a noble and great thing, to make emotional contact in this manner with a nation such as ours.’

Magyar's Main Modernizer

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 109-111, 115:

In 1801, after serving 2,387 days in jail for a minor walk-on part in the Jacobin movement, Ferenc Kazinczy was released from prison. He felt no bitterness. ‘Examples had to be made to frighten the people,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he was freed. He was forty-one, an erudite polyglot – translator of, among others, Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière and Schiller – and proprietor of a modest estate close to Buda. He still burned with a zeal for radical change in Hungary, but during his years of incarceration he abandoned an overtly political programme and any ideas of rebellion against the Habsburgs as impractical gestures that were bound to fail. From prison he had been corresponding with a group of like-minded Enlightenment figures, who came to the conclusion that the way to modernize Hungary, to create a new nation, was through its language and culture. Out of prison, he withdrew to his estate, Széphalom, and for the thirty years up to his death he devoted himself to a single passion: the renewal of the Hungarian language and literature. There were many others involved in what amounted to a cultural revolution, but Kazinczy was the practical genius and chief organizer of the so-called ‘Revival Movement’. Antal Szerb in his magnificent History of Hungarian Literature described him as ‘a dictator of literary life’ – though another twentieth-century admirer, the writer László Németh, called Kazinczy ‘the telephone switchboard’.

The revival of the language was the focus of his life. Kazinczy was the leader of the ‘neologists’ who invented modern Hungarian. They transformed the grammar, standardized the syntax, enriched the vocabulary, produced dictionaries and lexicons, and gave new life to a moribund tongue. A twenty-first-century Hungarian would be hard-pressed to understand the archaic, formal and inflexible Magyar used in the eighteenth century – they would feel it was almost entirely foreign, rather as though Chaucer’s English were still being used today. ‘Magyar is half dead, atrophied…worn out. It has lost all vigour and freshness of the centuries long gone,’ he said when he embarked on his undertaking.

There had been a few brilliant exceptions from the Early Middle Ages onwards, but Kazinczy and his collaborators knew that in reality, at this point, there was very little literature in Hungarian. The literary language was German. Few in the poorer classes were literate. Most of the nobles and the tiny middle class, those who were literate, read in German and spoke in German within their family or social circle – and governed in Latin. Alone in Europe, Latin was the official language in Hungary, used in the courts and the bureaucracy. In the rest of the Habsburg Empire, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the official language was German – ‘We don’t govern the Empire, we administer it, and we do so in German,’ said Metternich. In Buda and Pest, Hungarian was the language of the poor and of some townsfolk – which gave them access, if they could read at all, only to a limited and largely folkloric literature.[See Note.] Hungarian was also the language of the minority of the 8.5 million people living in Hungary; only about 37 per cent of the population, according to the first census conducted in Hungary in 1787, were ethnic Magyars.

Kazinczy and his collaborators created new words based on Hungarian roots, borrowed foreign words and ‘Magyarized’ them, or used image association. For example, the word secretary (tiktár or titoknok) was derived from an existing word for secret: titok. The Hungarian word for theatre was taken from two existing ancient words for ‘colour’ and ‘house’. The word for revolution came from the existing word to boil, ‘forr’, so revolution – a rather useful word in Hungarian as the country lived through so many of them – became forradalom, which translates as ‘on the boil’. The Hungarian word for isolation is taken from the ancient Magyar word for island. A beautiful Hungarian word for wife or female partner was invented: feleség, which literally means ‘my halfness’ – a noun, not an adjective. More than 8,000 new words came into common usage in colloquial and literary Hungarian within a generation.

NOTE: One language reformer, the writer Izidor Guzmics, was a well-known salon wit in Pest and sent a note to the palatine, reminding him of one of his distinguished Habsburg forebears, the sixteenth-century Emperor Charles V, who according to legend spoke French to his friends, German to his horse, Italian to his mistress, Spanish to God and English to the birds. ‘Had he known Magyar doubtless he would have spoken Hungarian to his enemies,’ Guzmics wrote.

Buda and Pest Under Maria Theresa

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

The relative peace and stability of Maria Theresa’s reign brought growing prosperity, and living conditions in the twin towns improved, though slowly. Some municipal services began running fairly well. From the 1770s the water supply in large parts of both Buda and Pest were built – first with wooden and then lead pipes. The first postmark in Buda dates from 1752 and the first post office opened in 1762, opposite the Matthias Church in Buda. A music conservatory, a veterinary school and a botanical gardens opened in Buda in the 1780s. In the 1730s in Pest there were very few stone buildings; most were made of puddled clay with thatched roofs. By 1765 453 of the 1,146 known buildings on the Pest side of the river were made of stone, and by 1790 around three-quarters of the 2,250 buildings were.

But there was no boom for business, and no lines of credit available to start one. The Hungarian nobles – the lesser and higher – had a disdain for commerce and trade that the British gentry had lost sometime in the seventeenth century. The few financiers, manufacturers, large-scale traders and better-off artisans of both Buda and Pest invariably came from non-Magyar families, which in any case formed the majority of the twin towns’ population. The earliest, almost immediately after the siege of Buda ended, were a number of Greek families who saw an opportunity – as well as escape from Turkish rule – and established businesses in Pest. Their names, Magyarized from around the 1730s onwards, became well known: Haris, Sina and Nákó for milling and foodstuffs, Sacelláry, Lyca and Mannó for textiles, leather and timber, Agorasztó and Muráthy for the wine trade. Then more came from further afield: Gregerson (Norwegian) and Ganz (Swiss) for clothes; the Swiss traders Aebly, Haggenmacher and several Serbs – Petrovics, Vrányi, Grabowski, Bogosich, Mosconyi – for assorted trades from metalwork to carpentry. Few Magyars were setting up businesses. The real problem, in Buda especially, was that comparatively few people engaged in any kind of trade or industry – according to contemporary economists who studied census figures, just one in eighty-nine people in Hungary at the end of the eighteenth century, compared to one in fourteen in Austria and one in nine in the Lombardy region.

The British naturalist Robert Townson visited Budapest in 1790, as few of his compatriots did then. Pest and Buda were definitely not on the Grand Tour at that time. The Turkish baths of Buda fascinated him; they were not strictly segregated as they would be from the middle of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, but were more gender-neutral.

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The animal fights in Pest, involving bears, cocks and dogs, horrified him. His journal mentions many times how diverse the towns were, with Greek, Balkan and Jewish traders crowding the marketplace. He mentioned one type of business that as much as any other was the defining feature of the Habsburg lands, and crucial to the culture of the city that would become Budapest. Kemnitzer’s was the progenitor of all the coffee houses in the golden age of Budapest and it became an instant success. It was the creation of Johann Kemnitzer, a master tanner, who had done well in his trade and built a large, three-storey house at the Pest side of the pontoon bridge, where Vigadó Square meets Deák Street today. In 1789 he opened the ground floor as a café and within a few months it was the most famous coffee house east of Vienna, with spacious rooms, marble columns, stucco on the arched ceilings, four crystal chandeliers, ornately gilded fireplaces and a fine kitchen.

Townson went there every day during his stay to listen and watch, surprised at the varied clientele who frequented the place: ‘All ranks and both sexes may come; hairdressers in their powdered coats, and old market-women come here and take their coffee or drink their rosolio as well as Counts and Barons…it is an elegant house and very comfortable dinners may be had.’

Another thing that surprised him was that the main language he heard on both sides of the river was German, spoken by Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Jews on the streets. He almost never heard the sound of Magyar.

Royal Hungary, Religious Battleground

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 72-74:

After the Battle of Mohács, the old Hungary split into three. The Turks kept direct control of Buda, the other fortress towns downriver along the Danube, and a broad swathe of central and southern Hungary (Transdanubia) that gave them an unimpeded route back through the Balkans to Constantinople. Transylvania – then comprising a vast area much bigger than Hungary now – was semi-independent, but the Ottomans demanded ultimate authority and large amounts of money and goods every year as tribute. If the Ottomans received those, they left the Transylvanians alone to govern themselves. The third part, so-called Royal Hungary, was Habsburg-ruled and comprised most of western Hungary, Slavonia, around two-thirds of Croatia, Slovakia and part of eastern Hungary, including the ancient city of Debrecen – altogether about 1.2 million people.

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Life was no better for most of the people in Royal Hungary. Under both the rival empires survival was a struggle, as ‘Habsburg mercenaries and their Turkish adversaries marched and counter-marched through the borderlands, leaving devastation in their wake’, as a contemporary historian recorded. In some ways it was worse in Royal Hungary than in Buda, where at least the Turks left people to worship as they pleased: all Christians were infidel, though as ‘people of the book’ they were tolerated. But Hungary became one of the chief battlegrounds in the series of religious wars that split Christian Europe apart during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Reformation had gained ground in Hungary with astonishing speed – for obvious spiritual reasons, and liturgical ones because of the use of the vernacular language in worship and especially as an expression of resentment against foreign domination, whether Habsburg or Turkish. By 1600 more than three-quarters of the Hungarian population had embraced one or other of the reformist Churches – mostly Lutheran in Royal Hungary and in Transylvania a version of Calvinism, though not quite as rigorous. After Geneva the Transylvanian town of Kolozsvár (now Cluj in Romania) had the earliest Calvinist university in the world.

The Habsburgs saw themselves, in the words of Emperor Charles V, as the ‘spear point of the faith’ and they led the fight for the true Church: the Counter-Reformation. For the Austrians, the Holy Roman Empire, unity in Christendom under the papacy (and of course the Habsburgs) was more important than crusades against the Ottomans.

The Hungarians were regarded not only as heretics but as rebels against the Empire who needed to be put in their place. The prelate placed in charge of re-Catholicizing the troublemakers, Péter Pázmány, boasted of how he ‘would make of the Hungarian first a slave, then a beggar and finally a Roman Catholic’. The soldier put in charge of pacifying them was a famous Italian mercenary and Imperial general, Raimondo Montecuccoli, who loathed the Hungarians: ‘It is impossible to keep these ungrateful, unbending and rebellious people within bounds by reasoning with them, nor can they be won over by tolerance or ruled by law. One must fear a nation that knows no fear. That is why its will must be broken with a rod of iron and the people sternly kept in their place….’ It was a view shared by the majority of the Austrian Habsburgs and all the members of the Imperial council.

All of the wealthiest Hungarian magnates, who owned most of the land, abandoned Turkish-controlled Hungary and threw in their lot with the Habsburgs. In reward for staying loyal and Catholic they were given more lavish Imperial titles and allowed to keep their feudal prerogatives. The emperor made around sixty of them counts and turned some into super-magnates with the title ‘hereditary prince’, like the Pálffy, Nádasdy, Esterházy, Wesselényi, Forgách and Csáky families. This new upper class would be in charge in Hungary, apart from a very brief interlude of revolution, into the twentieth century. They paid no taxes, continued to own serfs and some increased their wealth vastly during the division of Hungary. The emperor gave the nobles rights to claim increased labour dues, or robot.

Ottoman Rule in Budun

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 64, 67-69:

Almost every time I visit Budapest, the first place I go is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of old cobbled streets, halfway up Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) on the Buda side of the river. Here is the graceful white mausoleum of Gül Baba, a Dervish Muslim holy man of the sixteenth century, a favourite of Suleiman the Magnificent, who oversaw the Bektashi order of monks entrusted with the spiritual welfare of the Janissaries. Mid-morning there is usually nobody about in the surrounding lanes – Ankara utca, Mecset (mosque) utca, Török (Turk) utca, Gül Baba utca – one of the most expensive residential neighbourhoods in Budapest. In April, after the frosts have melted away, the graceful stone tomb is surrounded by the scent of violets. A month or so later come the roses of Rózsadomb, pink damascenas mainly, said to have been brought to Buda by Gül Baba. Whether that is true or not, the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy when you consider the ways other imperial masters who conquered Hungary have left their mark on Budapest – Hitler’s Nazis, say, or Stalin’s commissars. Sitting on a bench at Rózsadomb gazing at the sweep of the Danube is a healthy place for a historian to loaf and think.

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Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well. In the market, pork and wine were sold in the Christian-owned stalls, lamb, sherbet and coffee in the Turkish ones. The latter was one of the few things that the ‘infidel’ non-Muslims took a liking to straight away, though at first it was expensive; this was the birth of the Middle European coffee house that later would become so supremely important in the culture of Budapest.

In general, trade in everything was poor, for demand was so low. Vineyards in the Buda Hills rotted, so locals learned to use varieties of vegetable, for example corn, which flourished from the sixteenth century on. The main problem was that Buda’s population fell continuously over the 150 years of Ottoman occupation: the birth rate went down sharply, and over generations families left in order to better themselves, whether to Royal Hungary or to Transylvania. The drop was dramatic immediately after Mohács, and continued. Turkish figures registered a fall in tax-paying households throughout their Hungarian domains from 58,742 in 1577 to only 12,527 in 1663. At one point in the 1620s the German and Magyar population of Budun was not much more than 2,000. The Turkish garrison rose and fell depending on military operations in the Balkans, but the average was around 4,000. There were never more than 1,000 Turkish officials, traders and craftsmen living in the town. Besides the pashas, who were army commanders, magistrates and chief executives rolled into one, the most important Turkish official was the defter – the tax collector. As time went on, during the occupation they learned to be flexible. They did not wish to destroy the westernmost and most prosperous colony in Europe, but wanted to profit from it. They had no interest in overturning habits and customs.

One group benefited greatly from Ottoman rule. The Turkish occupation brought benefits for the Jews. Many sought refuge from the neighbouring Habsburg lands, where pogroms were common – or Transylvania, where Calvinism grew strong and the Jews were treated equally badly, if not worse. Many families had come from much further away in the Balkans, which were even poorer. In the 1580s the Jews formed around 20 per cent of Buda’s ‘Hungarian’ population. By the 1680s there were more than 1,000 Jews in Buda. The Turks allowed them freedom to worship – there were three synagogues in Buda by the middle of the seventeenth century – freedom to form communal groups and a measure of legal autonomy. The Ottomans, though, demanded high taxes, even higher than the Christian rulers had imposed. The Turks used the Jews for commerce; they ran the lucrative trade routes along the Danube eastwards from Buda across Turkish domains. The pashas of Buda often intervened on the side of Jews in cases where they had been wronged by Hungarian Christians. Jews would repay the Turks by aiding their defence of Buda against the Habsburgs in sporadic attempts to retake the town. And when the Austrians eventually succeeded, the Jews would pay a heavy price.

Hungary's Largest Peasant Revolt, 1514

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 59-60:

Finally, in 1514, after Ottoman troop movements into Serbia, the Pope, Leo X, and Tamás Bakócz, the Archbishop of Esztergom, declared a crusade against the Ottomans and money was raised from most of the European capitals to finance an army to halt the Turks’ advance. King Louis II of Hungary [incl. Croatia] raised a force reported to be 40,000-strong, mostly peasants untrained in warfare, under an experienced soldier from the lesser nobility, György Dózsa. He was joined by a number of evangelical priests and friars. Most of the Hungarian barons had no appetite for the campaign, resented the loss of the serfs’ labour on their land at harvest time and were deeply suspicious about permitting a peasant army to roam around Hungary. Rightly so as it turned out.

The majority of the peers in the royal council pressed the archbishop and the Vatican to call off the crusade even before it had properly begun. But Dózsa’s army refused to disband and the crusade against the infidels turned into the biggest peasants’ revolt in Hungarian history.

There had occasionally been eruptions of unrest among peasants, but Hungary’s feudalism was among the most entrenched anywhere. In the sixteenth century, when in most of Western Europe serfdom had all but disappeared, it remained strong in Hungary. Dózsa was a skilful soldier and titular leader of the rebellion. But the real inspiration that under Catholic dogma would condemn the rebels’ souls to eternal perdition were revolutionary priests, the best known of whom was a fiery preacher, Lőrinc Mészáros. After months of savage fighting, burning and looting on the way, Dózsa’s army seized control of the Great Hungarian Plain and a few towns in south-eastern Hungary and in Transylvania. For months they lay siege to Temesvár (present-day Timișoara in Romania), but never managed to capture and hold the town. That was the high point of their success. They were finally beaten in the autumn of 1514 by an army led by János Zápolya, the voivode (chieftain) of Transylvania.

The magnates, safely back in untrammelled power, exacted vicious revenge. Dózsa was hauled to Buda in chains, enthroned on a flaming stake and a red-hot crown was placed on his head – as ‘King’ of the peasants. Several of his leading supporters were forced to eat his roasting flesh before they too were executed, as a warning to any others who might want to ‘destroy the natural order’, as the Archbishop of Esztergom put it. Several of the priests who took part in the rebellion were hanged, including Mészáros.

The direct consequences of Dózsa’s revolt lasted well into the nineteenth century. Extreme measures were taken by the landlords and gentry against the peasantry ‘to punish them for their faithlessness’. They were condemned to ‘perpetual servitude’, banned from any right to migration, any access to legal rights and denied the right to own land. A new tax was imposed of one gold florin, twelve chickens and two geese a year as compensation for the damage the rebellion had caused. Landlords were given the right to claim one day a week’s unpaid labour. Serfdom continued in Hungary until 1848.

Hungary's Crown of St. Stephen

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 33-34:

Every 20 August, the date of St Stephen’s canonization and a national holiday in Hungary, a casket containing what is believed to be the king’s mummified right hand is carried in solemn procession around the basilica which bears his name in central Budapest. This grisly celebration, followed by a Mass, took place even in the darkest days of the Soviet era when the Communists tried to suppress religion. Yet the holiest relic associated with Stephen is not a skeletal hand. One of the most popular tourist sights in Budapest – all Hungarian schoolchildren are encouraged to see it once in their lives – is the Holy Crown of St Stephen. It was for a long time the central symbol of royal legitimacy and has been venerated for centuries. The validity of a King of Hungary was coronation with the use of this crown, and no other, in the ceremony. The crown is shrouded in myth, like so much of ancient Magyar history.

It is certain that the crown on display in modern Budapest was never worn by King Stephen. The original was lost or stolen soon after the king’s death and there are many theories about its fate. It is said that in 1044 it was found by soldiers loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III, and he returned it to the Vatican. The lower half of the crown on display now, the so-called ‘Greek part’, made in 1074, nearly forty years after King Stephen’s death, was a gift from the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII to the Hungarian King Géza I. The upper ‘Latin’ part was made in Hungary, probably at some point in the late twelfth century, to replace the lost original. The two halves were welded together around 1330, in order to make a solid base for a gold cross that surmounts the crown.

Lost again and found in a series of centuries-long dramas and adventures, the crown was taken to Austria towards the end of the Second World War by Hungarian fascists – either, as one group said, to sell it on the black market or, as others claimed, to preserve it from the clutches of the Communists. Somehow it fell into the hands of the US army in Vienna in 1945. The Americans kept it in Fort Knox, to ensure its safety, until 1978 when it was ceremoniously returned to Hungary. The crown and other royal regalia thought to have belonged to Stephen or his immediate successors were then installed by a Communist regime aiming for national respectability in a large shrine in Budapest’s National Museum under permanent armed guard. To mark the millennium of the Hungarian state, the first of Viktor Orbán’s governments in 2000 transferred all the royal jewels, amid great solemnity and fanfare, to the Parliament building. In a republic, it seemed at first sight an odd place to move the crown jewels, but in the Hungarian context there was logic to it. For a nation that has been occupied by other powers for so many periods in its history, the crown has always been the symbol of independence and freedom, rather than of royalty. And besides, the crown jewels are magnificently presented in inspiring surroundings.

Stephen brought order out of chaos, stability and the beginning of a legal code. He is, rightly, one of the most revered figures in Hungary’s history.

Budapest in 1896

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 12-14:

In 1896 Budapest was the largest city of mills in the world (rivalled at that time only by Minneapolis). Wheat from the great plains of Hungary and other parts of the Balkans was turned into flour in the mills of Budapest. Many of the successful entrepreneurs who began their business lives as grain traders became mill owners and then diversified. Budapest was by far the busiest port on the Danube. The (mostly nationalized) Hungarian river transport company, MFTR, had overtaken the Austrian equivalent more than thirty years earlier and was thriving. A pleasant daily Budapest–Vienna overnight journey on white paddle steamers was highly popular until the 1920s. Trains between the two cities were fast – four and a quarter hours in 1896. In 2022 it was three hours and thirty-five minutes.

Budapest finance caught up and surpassed the growth of agricultural and industrial production. By 1900 Budapest became the banking centre of Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1867, the date of the ‘Compromise’ which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and 1914 the number of Hungarian banks grew from eleven to 160 and their capitalization increased fivefold. A few of them – the First Hungarian Commercial Bank and the Hungarian Credit Bank – rivalled the biggest Viennese and German banks in size and prestige, as their palatial headquarter buildings in downtown Budapest, designed by the most renowned European and Hungarian architects, showed. Their owners, such as the Wolianders, the Wahrmanns, Hatvany-Deutsch and Chorins, joined the European super-rich.

Sixty per cent of the Hungarian manufacturing industry was based in Budapest, from small enterprises to the giant Manfréd Weiss works, which employed more than 5,000 workers by 1913 in a vast factory complex on Csepel Island in the Danube, just north of the city. The factory exported munitions to Spain, Mexico and Britain, whose forces would soon be using them in a war against Austria-Hungary.

Little suggested that the unprecedented boom would not continue. Tekla Szilard, the mother of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leo Szilard, who would later flee Budapest from fascism and work on the Manhattan Project that designed and built the first nuclear bomb, described her mood on her wedding day, 25 April 1897, and ‘the boundless optimism we all feel…The city was growing by leaps and bounds. I felt as though this was my progress…my development.’ But some prescient people were more wary about the pace of change and thought of what was left behind. Krúdy wrote in 1900 about his beloved Budapest: ‘They kept on building every day, palaces topped by towers rising towards the sun; and at night it seemed there were endless burials…of the town’s broken matter, of old people and old houses, of old streets and old customs.’

Within a generation much of this new wealth, optimism and confidence would disappear. In the millennium year Hungary was nearly three times the size it would be just twenty-five years later and its population around 50 per cent higher. Most of present-day Croatia and Slovakia, a third of Romania and a large slice of Serbia were all part of Greater Hungary. It possessed a busy seaport [Trieste] on the Adriatic with a busy merchant navy. Then the disaster of the First World War struck and Zweig’s World of Yesterday came to an end. Hungary has never recovered from the shock.

East of Vienna, West of the Balkans

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen, (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle p. 1:

Towards the end of the Congress of Vienna in the spring of 1815, Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, took a young British visitor in his carriage to the eastern edge of the city. As the pair descended the steps, the eminent Habsburg statesman pointed his finger to the road towards Hungary and declared: ‘Look, that’s where Europe ends…out there, [Hungary] is the Orient.’

Half a century later William H. Seward, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, went on a journey around the world immediately after his term of office ended. In summer 1869 he arrived in Pest [on the east bank of the Danube] from an unaccustomed direction, sailing from the Black Sea up the Danube through the Balkans. Most visitors came then, as they do now, from the west. He was surprised by what he saw. ‘How striking is the contrast of European and Asiatic civilization,’ he wrote later in his diary. ‘Though Buda-Pesth [sic] is an inland provincial town…the tonnage in its port, altogether of steam, is greater than that of Cairo, Alexandria or Constantinople. We were not prepared for a scene of such activity…Here we feel, for the first time, that we have left the East behind, and have only Western civilization before us.’ This is a constant theme, as alive in the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth.

The Restoration's Brutal Repressions

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 334-335:

The success of [Samuel Butler's] Hudibras reminds us that Restoration culture, in its fun-loving hedonism, was also about the defeat of Puritanism. As much as Charles talked about forgetting the past, there were plenty who were quite willing to rake up the radicalism of the Republic and remind people of the days when Christmas was banned and the theatres were shut, and soldiers stomped up and down the country closing horse races and fining people for their loyalty to the king. Hudibras was a way of crowing about this. The culture war, that we saw at the start of the century in events like the Cartmel wedding, had been won. Puritanism had been cast out. Momus’s day had come and gone. Merry England was back.

But Pepys is a reminder that there was more to it than this. We think of Charles as a ‘Merry Monarch’, given over to celebration and parties, to theatre and pleasures of the flesh. It’s not a false view as such, but it obscures a lot. For Dissenters, especially Quakers, his reign was one of brutal oppression, harder than anything experienced by the Puritans under his father. In its controls on the press, his government tried to stop the mouths of the English people once more.

The legacy of the Republic remained. Puritanism may have been defeated politically, but it lived on in the dissenting tradition which became such an important element to English religion – and indeed eventually political – culture. Meanwhile, the degree to which the constitutional issues of the earlier seventeenth century had been resolved was quite unclear. Technically, now, the vast majority of revenue came from Parliament, though the king might try and circumvent this by seeking other sources. Taxes on trade, for example, specifically the customs and excise, were increasingly lucrative, and yet were subject to less Parliamentary control than direct taxes because they tended to be granted for the life of the monarch.

The idea of a standing army was now, thanks to the Civil Wars and to Cromwell and his Protectorate, even more anathema to English sensibilities. Yet the realities of European geopolitics, in which armies were generally becoming much bigger and more professional, meant that it would be hard to maintain the country’s clout without one. The press and public opinion were not going away. The world of pamphlets and coffeehouse politics was here to stay. Finally, the country’s religion remained unsettled. The apparent supremacy of Anglicanism masked the resilience of Dissent. More to the point, while in exile both Charles and his brother James had been surrounded by Catholic influences. The nightmare scenario, perhaps, was a king trying to use his prerogative powers to promote Catholicism and to build a standing army that he could use to cow opposition, all funded by indirect taxes – or even a pension from a foreign monarch – while Parliament lay sidelined.

Military and Religious Reconciliation, 1661

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 327-328:

The Army was mostly all pensioned off: a poll tax and a new assessment ordered in the summer saw to that. The king was provided with apparently bounteous revenue of £1.2 million a year from customs and excise, allowing him to retain Monck’s regiment of foot, now named the Coldstream Guards after his base while he waited on the Border the previous year, and still wearing the old red coats of the New Model. The old lands of Crown and Church were clawed back, though often with due compensation given. Meanwhile, Royalists who’d seen their lands confiscated during the last regime had them restored, although the decision to ratify all legal proceedings during the Republic meant that any lands they’d had to sell – for example, to pay the decimation tax – were now probably gone for good. It was a point that generated much bitterness among the old Cavaliers.

Meanwhile, the old episcopal church was reinstated. In the immediate months following the Restoration, many parishes went back to the old liturgy, buying copies of the Book of Common Prayer even though there was widespread expectation that a new version would soon be produced. Returning bishops were cheered and copies of the Solemn League and Covenant, which had been a key reason for their abolition, were enthusiastically burned. The cathedrals were in a parlous state: Durham had seen use as a prison, St Paul’s as a stable and a marketplace. Bishops’ palaces at Chester, Salisbury and Exeter had been converted into (respectively) a gaol, a tavern and a sugar factory. But funds were found, and within a couple of years, the old cathedrals were resplendent once more.

Initially there were moves towards a compromise with Presbyterians, potentially ‘comprehending’ them within the Church of England, i.e. granting enough latitude within official Church practice to allow them to worship within it. But Parliament voted comprehension down. In fact, England was about to take a dramatic swing towards a more restrictive Church. Perhaps this was always going to happen. But partly, too, it was a reaction to the events of January 1661, when, the same month in which the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were dug up, a quixotic rising by Fifth Monarchists broke out in London, with shouts for ‘King Jesus, and the Heads upon the Gates!’ It was led by one Thomas Venner, and ended in a brief occupation of St Paul’s, a clampdown by the Coldstream Guards and 14 executions. A new round-up of Quakers and other undesirables followed, prompting – incidentally – George Fox to write a stirring tract declaring that his Quakers would utterly renounce war and violence. Given they had made up many of the ranks of the Republic’s army, this was some about-turn, though the principle has since become one that defines the movement.

Rejoicing and Reprisals, 1660

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 323-325:

The month of May 1660 would be remembered as one of the most joyous in English history. ‘[A]ll the world,’ wrote Pepys, was ‘in a merry mood because of the King’s coming.’ The return of Charles, brought back by Monck’s fleet, was celebrated with maypoles, church bells and bonfires. From his landing at Dover on the 25th to his entrance to London on the 29th, the restored king was met by cheering crowds. Some 120,000 were said to have greeted him at Blackheath. In London, his entourage took seven hours to pass through. The streets became a kaleidoscope of tapestries and flowers; there were fountains flowing with wine. Oliver Cromwell, and his widow Elizabeth, were burned in effigy on a Westminster bonfire. After the austerity of the Puritan republic, it was a time for riotous celebration. According to Marchamont Nedham, seething at what he saw as the credulousness of the people, the return of the king was widely expected to bring ‘peace and no taxes’.

The rejoicing, though, was stained with reprisals. Within a day, the king was forced to issue a proclamation against ‘debauched and profane persons, who, on pretence of regard to the King, revile and threaten others’ (or simply sat in taverns and tippling houses drinking endless healths). Independent congregations suffered abuse, as did those ministers who’d taken the place of clergy ejected by the Republic. Quakers were attacked in at least 15 counties.

...

The immediate priority was a Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, which sought to draw a line under the previous troubles. But there were debates about how far forgiveness should go. William Prynne, for example, thirsty for revenge, specifically argued that Francis Thorpe, the lawyer whose speech at York had set out the case for the Republic back in 1649, should be executed. Thorpe had already petitioned the king for a pardon on the grounds that he had opposed the regicide, had not bought any Crown lands and had been gentle on the Royalist rebels of 1655. He had allies in the Commons, too, and Prynne’s vindictiveness found little support. In the end, though, some of the more egregious republicans were exempted from pardon, with some 33 men specifically singled out for punishment. The 33 were mostly regicides who had sought to evade capture, particularly those who were not lucky enough to have powerful friends. Eleven were already in custody.

Thus, finally, things were set for the third and final act. After the April elections and the return of the king came the revenge.

In October, during Parliamentary recess, all 11 were tried. Only one witness was considered necessary for each act of supposed treason, but then, with the evidence there in plain sight, maybe such niceties didn’t matter. Six signatories to the death warrant, together with the lawyer John Cooke and the preacher Hugh Peter, suffered hanging, drawing and quartering at Charing Cross (two of Charles’s guards, Daniel Axtell and Francis Hacker, were executed at Tyburn). The butchered men were defiant to the end: one of them even managed to land a punch on his executioner. Thomas Harrison, when the crowd taunted him asking, ‘where is your Good Old Cause now?’ replied it was ‘Here, in my bosom, and I shall seal it with my blood.’ But the jeering crowd had its way, and their remains were duly displayed on the City gates. Such was the smell at Charing Cross that local inhabitants petitioned the king to stop the executions, ‘for the stench of their burnt bowels had so putrefied the air’. When Parliament returned, their fugitive colleagues were subject to Attainder, which meant they lost their property. Then, in January 1661 – on the anniversary of the regicide – the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and John Bradshaw (the king’s trial judge) were dug up and hanged. John Evelyn thought this was one of the ‘stupendous and inscrutable judgements of God’. Those other republicans who’d been buried at Westminster Abbey were also disinterred on orders of the Dean, and their bodies cast into a nearby pit.

Re-electing the Monarchy, 1660

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 321-323:

Parliament, a body now much less dominated by republicans, quickly set new elections in motion, selecting a new Council and installing a raft of new militia commissioners in the counties, including none other than Sir George Booth who by that time had been released from the Tower (and, it was to be hoped, had found a razor). Baptists, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers were attacked and plundered in Wales, Bristol and Gloucester. On the 27th, while Pepys was visiting Audley End in Saffron Walden, he was ushered into a cellar where the housekeeper offered him ‘a most admirable drink, a health to the King’. Everywhere the talk was of government by a single person: George Monck, perhaps, or Richard Cromwell, or Charles Stuart.

The last piece of the jigsaw was the army: Monck faced down much of the opposition in a tense meeting on 7 March; some of the key hardliners were cashiered and John Lambert was sent off to the Tower. By this time, Charles Stuart was being openly toasted across town. There was another bonfire and people cried out, ‘God Bless King Charles the Second’. Parliament, meanwhile, on the 16th, finally agreed to dissolve itself.

The stage was set.

The final drama was played out in three acts. The first, in April, came in the form of elections to the new Parliament (technically, because not summoned by royal writ it would be known as a ‘Convention’). In theory, active Royalists were excluded, but no one really cared. There was an avalanche of pamphlets: many pro-Royalist, but some arguing against the restoration of the Stuarts, like Marchamont Nedham’s News from Brussels, which alleged Charles was plotting brutal reprisals on all who’d opposed his father. Then there were the rhymes, scurrilous as ever. They attacked the Rump, bearing titles like Arsy Versy, and they attacked religious ‘fanatics’.... The elections, meanwhile, saw the highest number of prospective candidates so far in English history. Even Lambert managed to stand while still in prison (he lost). The question had become not whether there would be a restoration, but what kind of restoration it would be: at the hustings, the critical issue was whether candidates were in favour of imposing conditions on Charles. The harder line Royalists, i.e. those generally against conditions, tended to win.

By now, Monck and the king were finally in communication. Charles moved his court to the town of Breda near the Dutch coast. The English fleet stood ready off the coast of Kent, the old Cromwellian Edward Montagu in command as General at Sea, Pepys on board as his employee, spending pleasant evenings supping, drinking wine, conversing, playing music and singing songs. Rather embarrassingly, Lambert escaped from the Tower (dressed in woman’s clothes, having swapped places with Joan, the lady who made his bed), and drew some support from disgruntled soldiers and old radicals. It looked as if there could be a general uprising in the army: ‘the agitators and Lambert’s agents are all over England,’ warned one of Monck’s captains, ‘privately creeping amongst us & tempting our men from us’. It was rumoured that 7,000 Quakers and Anabaptists would join. But in the end, humiliation fell on the old army man, who declared for Richard Cromwell, staged a desultory muster on the old battle site of Edgehill and was promptly arrested by the turncoat Richard Ingoldsby. After that there was little trouble from the old republicans....

The new Parliament, complete with a House of Lords, met on 25 April. It was an overwhelmingly Royalist body in what was still, technically, a republic. And so Parliament ushered in the second act: the return of the king. On 1 May, a declaration from Charles was read in Parliament. It had been penned at Breda on 4 April. It offered a pardon for everyone who gave allegiance to the king within 40 days (although Parliament, it allowed, could make exceptions). It promised ‘liberty to tender consciences’, and that Parliament would be allowed to sort out disputes over property created during the revolution. It promised, naturally, that Monck’s army would get their arrears and be retained under the new regime.

That afternoon, Parliament voted that ‘the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons’. They voted, in other words, for the restoration of the Stuarts.

London rejoiced, as did the rest of the country. At last, people thought, the return of the king might bring stability, an end to upheaval. In Boston, Lincolnshire, young men took down the arms of the Republic, had the town beadle whip them, then – taking turns – ‘pissed and shitted on them’. Even in Dorchester, long a Puritan stronghold, the town clerk celebrated the deliverance from a ‘world of confusions’ and ‘unheard of governments’. On 9 May, almost as an afterthought, Richard Cromwell, who was still somehow Chancellor of Oxford University, hung up his robes and disappeared into obscurity.

On the 14th, Monck’s ships were in sight of The Hague, where, in a moment that looked both back to the past and forward to the future, they made rendezvous with Elizabeth, James I’s daughter, once queen of Bohemia, and paid due respects to the nine-year-old William, the late king’s grandson, son of Princess Mary, now Prince of Orange.

Hiroshima Castle

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1850ff:

In 1589 Mori Terumoto began what would be an eight-year project: he built a castle on an island in the delta of the Ota River, calling this part of his domain "Hiroshima," which means "wide island." At the beginning of the 17th century, the Mori fief was given to the Asano Clan, who held the castle until 1871. During the Restoration all of the buildings were torn down except the keep.

The castle is noted for the fact that the Emperor Meiji resided there for seven months during the war with China (1894-95). When Japan became involved in the war of 1904-5 with Russia, the castle was used as a troop garrison.

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Hiroshima Castle, along with a large portion of the city, was completely demolished in the historic first atomic attack. Reconstruction of the castle donjon was begun in 1958. It is built on the original foundation and is an exact replica of the former keep in exterior appearance. The structure is five stories, 117 feet high, and is in the style of the early Momoyama period. The donjon houses a museum and a lookout.

Hagi Castle in Choshu Domain

 From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1800ff:

Hagi Castle was built between 1604 and 1606 by the Mori Clan, lords of Choshu fief. Before the battle of Sekigahara, the Mori fief was the second largest in all Japan, but after that epic struggle, in which the Mori were on the losing side, their fief was reduced to about one-fourth its original size. Even with this reduction it was still one of the 10 largest in the country. The castle was laid out so that the five-story donjon was situated at the edge of the inner moat. It measured, on the ground floor, 65 feet east to west and 53½ feet north to south. The top floor was 20½ feet by 17½ feet, and the total height was about 47 feet. Fourteen generations of Moris lived in a mansion on the castle grounds, which were practically on an island, with a bay on one side and a river and moat on the others. An observation tower was placed on a hill behind the castle overlooking the sea.

Choshu fief was a hotbed of anti-Tokugawa feeling after Sekigahara. Children were put to bed at night with their feet toward Edo as a form of insult to the shogunate, and they were told never to forget the defeat of their ancestors at Sekigahara. Dislike for the Tokugawas also may have stemmed from Tokugawa disrespect of the Imperial House; the Mori Clan claimed direct lineage to the imperial family and therefore had strong feelings of loyalty toward the emperor.

Hagi was the birthplace of Yoshida Shoin, the imperial patriot who advocated the overthrow of shogunate rule and a return of power to the emperor. At his school in Hagi he preached this philosophy until his death at the hands of the shogunate a few years before the Restoration took place. Many of Shoin's pupils became leaders of the Restoration era.

The leaders of Choshu were also resentful of the shogun's relations with foreign countries, and in 1863 their shore batteries fired on an American ship off the Choshu coast and effectively blocked the Shimonoseki Straits to foreign shipping. The following year a combined force of Dutch, American, British, and French warships put an end to the harassment, and Choshu agreed to pay an indemnity. After this incident the Choshu leaders came to friendly terms with the foreigners.

During the revolt against the shogunate, Choshu, along with most of the clans in western Japan, firmly supported the imperial cause. To show their complete loyalty to the emperor, the Choshu leaders were the first to tear down their castle (1874). The samurai were now without employment, but the head of the Mori Clan encouraged them to become peaceful farmers and raise fruit. This enterprise is still carried on today by their descendants.

Only the stone walls of the inner court and the inner moat of the castle remain. The base of the donjon can also be seen, and the huge stones used for pillar supports are still imbedded within the foundation. Steep stone steps running the entire length of several of the inner walls, overlooking the moat, provided a means of rapid troop deployment when immediate defense was imperative.

It is interesting to note that time has not touched Hagi as heavily as it has most other castle towns, and some descendants of samurai families still reside at their ancestral home sites behind old walls in the samurai quarters of the town.

Osaka: From Castle to Commerce

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1017ff:

After 1615, Osaka was no longer an important military center, but became one of the three chief cities under direct control of the shogunate. (Note: The others were Edo and Kyoto.) A 10-year restoration of the castle was begun in 1620, but the donjon was struck by lightning and destroyed in 1665, During the remainder of the feudal period the castle grounds served as the seat of local government and for the garrisoning of troops.

As time went on, Osaka became the most important commercial center in the country. Hideyoshi had encouraged merchants from the fortified city of Sakai to move to Osaka and supply the castle and the town, which was rapidly growing. After Ieyasu took over, more merchants came in from Fushimi. Although the daimyo of the Ou and Kanto districts built warehouses in Edo to store and distribute their revenues of rice, most of the feudal lords converted rice into cash at Osaka. Soon there were some 500 to 600 warehouses in the city which not only processed food, but many other forms of merchandise as well.

During most of the Tokugawa period the city remained a peaceful but busy commercial center. In 1837, however, the peace was broken by a riot led by one Oshio Heihachiro. Many fires were started, and homes and buildings (especially of the rich) were destroyed before troops garrisoned at the castle could bring the situation under control. This riot was an overt expression of national dissatisfaction with the government, a malcontent feeling that eventually led to the downfall of the Tokugawa regime. During the 1850's and '60's the castle was used to receive foreign diplomats when the shogun was in residence there.

In September 1868 part of the castle was burned by Tokugawa troops as they retreated before troops loyal to the emperor during the civil war that brought about the Restoration. In 1931 a donjon of ferro-concrete material was constructed atop the 45-foot foundation of the former keep, and the castle grounds were opened as a public park. During the Pacific War troops were again garrisoned on the castle grounds. Although the new donjon was not touched by the war, four turrets were destroyed. Today the castle grounds are again used as a public park, and the donjon contains exhibits relating to the history of old Osaka including a display of archeological interest and a model of the castle showing what it was like at its prime.

Azuchi Castle Innovations

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~830ff:

Azuchi Castle had several distinct features that differentiated it from its predecessors. Its massive proportions and the use of stone as a major building material, as noted in an earlier chapter, were to provide protection from the most destructive firearms available at that time. Other innovations such as the use of high towers and the location of the castle on a hill rather than in mountains with dense vegetation, were also related to a change in the tactics of warfare. These changes made guns an extremely effective defense because the enemy could be seen a long way off and met by gunfire precisely directed from the height of the donjon.

Just as Azuchi Castle was the prototype of the present-day relics of feudal times, the castle town created by [Oda] Nobunaga outside the castle walls was the prototype of a new kind of castle town in general. He had built quarters for his various soldiers and retainers but they were slow to occupy them, and it was two or three years before the town became fairly well settled. (Note: By 1582 the population had reached about 5,000.) At the same time, he made conditions attractive for tradesmen and artisans so that the town would be supplied with the necessary commodities to make it prosper. In 1577 Nobunaga issued a town charter stating that Azuchi was to be a free-market town with no taxes levied on sales or purchases. All merchants traveling along the Nakasendo had to seek lodging in the town when passing through, there were to be no taxes on building or transportation (except in time of war), and in the event of cancellation of debts in the province, debts owed to the town's residents would not be included. These concessions to tradesmen were made to attract money to the town, but the motive was more political than economic. With free trade, goods flowed from all parts of the country to the population and market centers, thus increasing the wealth of the cities and in turn the lord of the area. At the same time, the roads were improved to facilitate the movement of goods, and in time of war the same roads could be used to move troops. Free-trade practices also attracted skilled artisans whose talents could be used to make the tools of war.

It was during this period that Jesuit missionaries arrived in Japan and received encouragement from Nobunaga, who regarded them as a rival to Buddhism for which he had little use. When Father Gnecchi Organtino and some other priests visited Nobunaga at Azuchi, Nobunaga was so flattered that he offered the Jesuits a building site for both a church and a house; the missionaries were only too happy to accept.

After Akechi Mitsuhide killed Nobunaga at Kyoto on June 21, 1582 he marched to Azuchi, took over the castle, and distributed gifts from Nobunaga's treasury to likely supporters. (Note: Akechi is said to have treated the missionaries well.) He did no harm to the castle, but Azuchi nevertheless met its downfall shortly thereafter. It is known for certain that the fortress burned to the ground, but by whom is open to controversy. One popular and often repeated story is that Nobunaga's son, in a fit of rage, grief, or perhaps both, put the castle to the torch. Sansom acknowledges the story, but indicates that looting townspeople probably were responsible for the fire. Still another version says that the tower was destroyed by Nobunaga's adversaries. In any case, the castle burned, leaving only the stone walls, moats, earthworks, and tower foundation (Fig. 23).

The town of Azuchi is now a country village populated by people (some of whom are direct descendants of Nobunaga) who till the land, fish in Lake Biwa, and are proud of their history. At one time they wanted to rebuild the castle donjon but the idea was abandoned for several reasons including lack of funds. Also, the remains of the castle have been declared a special historical relic, and the Committee for the Preservation of Cultural Assets is reluctant to allow construction of a new donjon because of possible damage to the ruins. In addition there is some question whether reliable plans and drawings exist from which a reasonable facsimile could be built. Proponents of the project claim that drawings of the original castle exist and are the property of a temple at the foot of Azuchiyama, but the only known evidence of drawings is a sketch of the exterior on a scroll hanging in the temple.

Japan's Golden Age of Castle-building

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~460ff:

In December 1614, [Tokugawa] Ieyasu gathered together a large host and laid siege to the castle in what is known as the Winter Campaign. In less than a month the two sides came to terms in which [Toyotomi] Hideyori agreed to allow the outer defenses of the castle to be destroyed as a gesture of his good faith. The Tokugawa forces went a bit further, however, and also filled in the inner moat.

Soon after the besieging army left, Hideyori again began to gather troops at the castle. When he ignored Ieyasu's command to cease this activity, the Tokugawa forces again descended on Osaka. This was the opening of the Summer Campaign, which began in May 1615 and ended early in June when the besieging forces fought their way into the castle. Hideyori committed suicide, bringing an end to the Toyotomi Clan. The Tokugawa were now supreme. Ieyasu died about a year later, but he had laid a foundation that gave his descendants rule of Japan for over 250 years.

The period of history just discussed might be referred to as the golden age of castle building, starting with Nobunaga's Azuchi Castle, which was designed as a fortification to resist forces armed with the matchlock. Its high stone walls, deep wide moats, corner towers, and tall donjon were intended to cope with this new weapon. At the same time the castle's design enabled defenders to use firearms to best advantage. Next came Hideyoshi's castle at Osaka, even more formidable and impregnable. These two structures set the pattern for later castle construction. (Note: It is thought that the Portuguese helped with the design of these two fortresses.) Most castles and castle ruins extant today were built in the short three-decade period from 1580 to 1610, employing the architectural design of the Azuchi-Momoyama period. It was then that Kato built his fortress at Kumamoto with its high, imposing walls, Ikeda greatly improved and enlarged the small castle at Himeji, and Ieyasu took the small castle at Edo and developed it into one of the largest fortresses in the world.

Shortly after Sekigahara, Ieyasu called upon the tozama ["outsider"] lords to contribute heavily to the building of Edo Castle. These lords were those who were not related to, or had no hereditary tie with, the Tokugawa family and had remained neutral during Sekigahara or submitted to Ieyasu thereafter.7 In addition to Edo Castle, they were also compelled to build other castles including those of Nijo, Hikone, Nagoya, and Sumpu [in Shizuoka], and to enlarge and remodel still others. Most of these castles were located in strategic areas between Kyoto and Edo and were built on the pretext of providing for national defense. Most, however, were never used in the kind of warfare for which they were designed. The building program was undertaken to reduce the resources of the tozama daimyo, whom Ieyasu did not trust, and to keep them under control.

Policies were also laid down by the Tokugawa government to control the tozama daimyo in ways other than financial. Castles were not to be built, remodeled, or repaired without permission from the shogunate. Men of the samurai class were obligated to live in the castle town. This requirement, an extension of Hideyoshi's sword hunt, tended to strengthen the feudal system. Marriages between the daimyo families had to be approved by the shogunate to prevent hostile alliances from developing, Tokugawa vassals were placed in fiefs where they could observe the activities of their tozama neighbors and report any evidence of conspiracy to Edo. They were moved frequently to prevent them from becoming too well established and forming alliances.

The daimyo were permitted to govern their fiefs without much interference from Edo, but they were obliged to observe the regulations imposed by the shogunate. Although they were allowed this freedom, they were required to alternate residence between their fiefs and Edo. This policy, known as sankin-kotai, was designed to prevent them from conspiring against the Edo government. While they were away from Edo, they left their families there as hostages. The traveling to and from Edo was another form of control, for the daimyo were expected to travel with a huge retinue, thereby incurring expenses that sapped their resources.

Japanese Castles and Castle Towns

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~172ff:

The castles of Japan are an integral part of both feudal and modern Japanese history. During the 14th and 15th centuries the petty feudal barons built defensive castles to serve as or to protect their residences. These fortifications also became the seats of government for the domains over which the barons ruled, and they became the social centers for the areas as well. It was also during this period that domestic and foreign trade began to flourish, thus adding increased status to the castle town as an economic center.

As the 16th century opened, the struggle between the feudal barons intensified with each one attempting to spread his influence over a wider territory. During this struggle the castles assumed greater importance as more people moved to the castle towns. The result was that these economic centers became increasingly vital. About 1542 the first firearms were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese, an event that radically changed the course of warfare. Defenses were substantially reinforced to offset the new weapons, and those barons who were not fortunate enough to have acquired them were defeated. By the end of the century almost all of Japan had been brought under the unified control of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was made shogun (military ruler of the country) in 1603. Ieyasu set up his seat of government at Edo (present-day Tokyo) and from there administered the country as one feudal fief. The daimyo, or lords of the various fiefs, generally ran their domains much as the shogun ran the country. Similarly, the provincial castle towns began to resemble Edo, to the point where street names were identical.

Under Tokugawa rule, each fief was allowed to have only one castle; so all subsidiary strongholds were torn down, and the samurai who had manned them were transferred to the remaining castle and its town. This shift in population attracted merchants and artisans, and it was not long before the castle town was the commercial center of the fief. The samurai, who had little to do because there were no longer battles to be fought, became administrators, and many took up scholarly pursuits while others interested themselves in the arts. Thus castle towns evolved into commercial and cultural centers.

When the feudal period ended in the mid-19th century, the importance of the castle town did not diminish. Many such towns continued to flourish as population centers, and today half of the 60 or so cities with populations over 100,000 are former castle towns. That these feudal towns continue to be important administrative centers is indicated by the fact that 34 of the 46 prefectural capitals were once castle towns.

But the importance of the castle in Japan does not end with its relationship to modern urbanization. The architectural style employed in castle construction is one of the forms that is most truly Japanese in that it was relatively little influenced by Chinese design. This architectural style is called Azuchi-Momoyama after the period of history in which it developed. The amazing fact about this period was its short duration, for it lasted only from 1568 to 1603.