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Magyar Habsburg Military History

In Royal Hungary, the Habsburgs constructed a system of fortifications along the border with Ottoman Hungary during the seventeenth century. Many Hungarian nobles, having fled the Turkish zone of occupation, assumed military leadership of important sectors of this border zone. Their serfs were obliged to work twelve days annually on border fortifications, to perform military service, and to pay a military tax. Several Hungarian military leaders during this time achieved fame for their exploits. Miklos Zrinyi's heroic stand against the Turks in 1564 and Istvan Bocskay's victory over the Habsburgs in Transylvania in 1604-05 were bright spots in the otherwise dismal military history of the Hungarians during the period of Ottoman occupation.

The failed Turkish attack on Vienna in 1683 began a process of retreat that led to the Ottomans' being driven out of Buda in 1686 and most of Hungary by the end of the century. The subsequent Habsburg rule, however, proved to be just as cruel as that of the Turks, and resulted in an eight-year rebellion led by Ferenc Rakoczi. The Treaty of Szatmar (1711) ended this war, during which half a million Hungarians died.

During the eighteenth century, the Habsburg Hofkriegsrat (the central organ for all military matters in the Habsburg lands) in Vienna directly controlled the Hungarian army, which was created in 1715. The Palatine (the highest officeholder in Hungary in the eighteenth century) was commander in chief of the armed forces in Hungary, but the Habsburgs deliberately left the office vacant. Responsibility for recruitment and supply was assumed by the Hungarian Viceregal Council, located in Pozsony, the capitol of Royal Hungary, (present-day Bratislava in Czechoslovakia), until 1785 and then transferred to Buda.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs established a Hungarian standing army made up of six high commands: one for Hungary proper and the others for Croatia, Slavonia, Transylvania, the Banat (in southern Hungary), and the Military Frontier Zones (located in Croatia). The Hungarian standing army was supported by war taxes paid by the counties and towns. Soldiers were supposed to serve for life but were usually discharged after twenty years of service. This term was reduced to ten years in 1830. Until 1840 soldiers were forced into service by press gangs; later they were selected by lot.

In 1790 the Hungarian nobility revolted against the Habsburgs in an attempt to restore former feudal privileges and Hungarian autonomy. A separate Hungarian army was formed from the banderia, but it was dissolved when the Habsburgs managed to avoid war with Prussia and thus were able to redirect their imperial forces toward Hungary. Hungarian soldiers fought in the Habsburg army during the wars against France from 1792 to 1815. Except for a small battle at Györ in 1808 -- which the French won -- no military action took place on Hungarian soil. Nevertheless, the Hungarian troops suffered more than 150,000 casualties during these wars.

The revolution that broke out in Vienna in 1848 -- part of a wave of revolts that swept across Europe that year -- caused enough disruption in the imperial government to allow the Hungarian nobility to seize more political autonomy for Hungary. After quelling the revolt in other parts of the empire, the Habsburg government in September 1848 sent forces into Hungary under Josip Jelacic, the Habsburg governor of Croatia. Jelacic's army was met by a hastily formed Hungarian army and was driven out of the country. The government in Vienna attacked again in the late fall and even occupied Pest in early December. In the spring, however, these Habsburg forces were driven out by a Hungarian army under a young major, Artur Gorgei, while another Hungarian army, under General Jozef Bem, drove the Habsburg forces out of Transylvania. Nevertheless, in June 1849 the Russian army came to the rescue of the Habsburgs and invaded Hungary through the Carpathian Mountains. Outnumbered and outgunned, Bem's small army was defeated in August, and Gorgei surrendered his forces to the Russians shortly afterward. The revolt was crushed and its leaders hanged, although Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the revolutionary government, escaped to the Ottoman Empire.

Although the Compromise of 1867 establishing the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary gave each country separate parliaments and separate governments, the Hungarian military forces remained under centralized Habsburg control.

Since 1526, when Hungary was crushed by the Turks at Mohacs, there had never existed a "Hungarian army" save during the revolution of 1848-49, when the Kossuthist forces were fighting against Austria. The words "Hungarian army" employed in the Statute of 1867 are an echo of the expression exercitus hungaricus employed in the Hungarian Law I. of 1802, in which it was used in the sense of " Hungarian Regiments" or legiones.

In the Hungarian Chamber in 1868 Deak insisted that though the Law of 1802 and a Law of 1846 refer in this sense to a " Hungarian army" they make no allusion to it as a separate or independent force ; and he added, "I remind the members of the House that an independent and special Hungarian army came into existence in 1848 when our troops were not fighting in the sense of the Pragmatic Sanction by the side of His Majesty's troops, but against them ; and, if any one cares to inquire why the Estates of the Realm did not press for a separate and independent army, he would probably find that they omitted to do so because they were convinced that it would have been impossible to defend either the Fatherland, or the Throne, or the other Lands of His Majesty as required by the Pragmatic Sanction, had there been two separate, special, and independent armies."

Deak, who well knew that the Settlement of 1867 embodied the most generous conditions Hungary could hope to obtain without risking her very existence, realized the danger of provoking in Austria and in the mind of the Monarch a reaction against the constitutional liberties then so recently restored. The developments of the last ten years, and the growth in Austria of a feeling that accounts will sooner or later have to be settled afresh with the Magyars, have shown how far-sighted was Deak's view of the position of Hungary, and how clear his perception of the inevitable consequences of attempts to encroach upon the military rights of the Crown.

Before the reorganization in 1867 the regiments of the Austro-Hungarian army recruited themselves from two or three different districts, thus bringing together members of various nationalities, promoting the knowledge of German, eradicating national differences, and assimilating the population. The success of the German army in 1870 led to the imitation of the Prussian system of recruiting from one centralized district. When the Austro-German Alliance was formed in 1879 Prince Bismarck insisted upon Austria adopting the German method of mobilization and the regiments being garrisoned in their home districts.

By 1900 an Austro-Hungarian army no longer existed. The monarchy possessed merely German, Czech, Polish, Magyar, etc., regiments. The service regiments are officered chiefly by centralist and German officers, but these would not prove strong enough to stem the tide of national and popular feeling in their men. The commissioned and non-commissioned officers of the reserve and Landwehr (second reserve) belonged mostly to the better-educated classes, who, with few exceptions, might set their political and national principles above their army rules, and would lead the willing bulk of the soldiers even against the will of the commanders. Thus, during a revolution in any province it would be very difficult to find regiments who would be willing to shoot down their co-nationalists, and in case of war - be it against Germany, Russia, or Italy - some regiments, either the German, Czech, or Italian, would be found utterly unreliable. The government had sown the wind of national autonomy; it must reap the whirlwind of radical centrifugalism.

The danger involved in Magyar attacks upon the unitary character of the joint Army was rather a danger for the Magyars themselves than for the institution they have sought to undermine. Thus, Hungarian soldiers, together with the other troops of nations under the Habsburg monarchy, found themselves mobilizing for war in the summer of 1914, first against Serbia and then against Serbia's ally, Russia. The largest Hungarian army in history fought under the imperial flag on the side of the Central Powers.