294 Chapter XII
from two districts actually reached the city, where of course they could accomplish
nothing.
In Transylvania, the eastern part of the kingdom of Hungary, the same basic
problem presented itself with national complications. The Transylvanians did not
attend the Hungarian diet; their estates met at Klausenburg, or CIuj. The Transyl-
vanian constitution put heavy emphasis on Protestant liberties and on the rights of
the three Transylvanian “nations”—the Magyars, the Székelys, who were like
Magyars, and the Germans, who were called Saxons. The mass of the population,
however, and hence of the agricultural workers, was of a kind of Rumanian then
called Vlach. With the help of two bishops they submitted a petition called the
Suppler Libellus Valachorum, requesting equality with the three dominant Transyl-
vanian nations, and hence representation in the diet. Leopold referred the petition
to the diet itself, where it caused a sensation, of which the outcome could be pre-
dicted. The diet concluded that, though a few Vlachs were nobles, they were gener-
ally not a landowning class and so had no basis on which to claim political rights,
and that they were in any case too crude and uneducated to be given a share in
public business. No more was heard of the Vlach petition.^16
It was Hungary, of all Hapsburg lands except Belgium, that came closest to
revolution in 1789 and 1790. In their counties and in the two houses of their par-
liament the Hungarians were used to a good deal of political action. County as-
semblies formed committees of correspondence, and extorted the summoning of
the estates from the dying Joseph, with much exclamation over the French Revo-
lution, and much talk of the Belgian Revolution as an uprising of fellow Hapsburg
subjects; nor was the “convention of Philadelphia” overlooked in the search for
analogies. The meeting of the diet at Pest instead of Pressburg was itself a revolu-
tionary departure. Spectators, including women, were admitted to the galleries,
and people wore cockades to demonstrate their zeal.
It had long been the custom, at the accession of each King, to issue an agreement
between the King and the diet, called a Diploma, usually adapted from the Diplo-
mas of preceding reigns. Now, however, the radical group in the diet maintained
that an entirely new social contract was necessary before Leopold could reign. They
held that, since Joseph had never been crowned, no monarchy really existed in Hun-
gary at all, and that Hungary was at the moment in a state of natural liberty, free to
contrive an entirely new Diploma in which new and different institutions of gov-
ernment should be set up. The Hungarians thus acted out both their own constitu-
tional principles and the little stage play of European political theorists, by which
man in a state of nature sat down to bargain with his future ruler.
Meanwhile, offstage, quite apart from parliamentary life, the peasant insurrec-
tion raged, the worst in Hungary since 1514. Though the first disturbances were
among the Rumanian peasants to the east, they soon spread to the Magyar-
speaking peasants of the central plain. Class barriers were greater than language
16 See N. Iorga, Études roumanes: Idées et formes litteraires françaises dans le Sud- est de l ’Europe
(Paris, 1924), 57; E. Pascu, “Memoires et protestations des Roumains de Transylvanie et de Hongrie
de 1791 à 1892,” in Revue de Transylvanie (1939), 330–36; H. Marczali, Magyarország Tortenete III
Károlytól a bécsi Congressusig (History of Hungary from Charles III to the Congress of Vienna) (Buda-
pest, 1898), 541 ff., for knowledge of whose contents I am indebted to Mr. Peter F. Sugar.