THE HUNGARIAN CONNECTION 87907, seven tribes under the warlord Arpad took possession of the plains between
the Tisza (Theiss) and Danube rivers. For the next half-century till their defeat
at the Lechfeld at the hands of Otto the Great, they lived by annual raids which
penetrated deep into the western lands. In 915, 924, and 933, they were in
Saxony; in 921 and 947 in Tuscany; in 924 and 951 in Provence and Aquitaine;
and in 926 in Burgundy. In 937, their most adventurous sortie took them in a
wide arc through Mainz, Orleans, and Rome. After their defeat, however, they
turned to more stationary pursuits. Their settlements stretched from the
German Oesterreich or 'East Mark' on the one side, to the Transylvanian Alps
on the other. Their conquests reached from the ridge of the Carpathians in the
north to the coast of the Adriatic in the south. Their territory cut right through
the middle of the former area of Slavonic settlement, engulfing a number of
Slavonic peoples such as the Slovaks and the Croats, and completing the sepa-
ration of the West and South Slavs.
Despite their different origins, the subsequent history of the Magyars was
surprisingly similar to that of the Poles. They accepted Roman Christianity at
the same moment and under the same auspices. The coronation of Steven I at
Estergom (Gran) in 1001, and the creation of the Hungarian See, coincided
almost exactly with the proceedings at Gniezno several weeks earlier.
Henceforth, both Hungary and Poland formed the easternmost outposts of the
Roman Church, regarding themselves with equal fervour as the twin bastions
of the antemurale Cbristianitatis. They both experienced the same ambivalent
relationship with the German Emperor - sometimes overlord, sometimes
enemy, sometimes ally. They both grew into multinational kingdoms, where
the native cultures of the composite elements were subordinated to the Latin
culture of Church and State. Although the Hungarian Crown did not disinte-
grate into separate principalities to the same degree as the primitive Polish
kingdom, it was rent by exactly the same sort of dynastic feuds, heathen
revolts, and foreign incursions. The control of the centre was always weak, the
centrifugal forces of the regions always strong. In the thirteenth century,
German colonization in Slovakia and Transylvania matched parallel move-
ments into Silesia, Pomerania, and Prussia. In 1224, the Saxons of
Transylvania, the 'children of the Pied Piper', with their city of Hermannstadt
(Kolozsvar), were granted local autonomy. Two years earlier, the Golden Bull
of Andreas II had granted far-reaching privileges to the high nobility - the
right to voice grievances in their Assembly and to resist a king who breaks the
law; freedom from arrest or confiscation without trial by their peers; and free-
dom from taxation without consent. These were privileges which the nobility
of Poland was to emulate in the period of Angevin rule. Most importantly,
whilst sharing an undisputed frontier in the Carpathians, Poles and Magyars
shared common enemies - the German Empire and Bohemia in the east, the
Orthodox Church, Moldavians, and Wallachians, and eventually Turks and
Tartars in the east. There were few points of friction, and many sound reasons
for close understanding.