Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hung.

Volume 61 (1 – 2), 15 – 26 (2008)

DOI: 10.1556/AOrient.61.2008.1 – 2.3

THE IMAGE OF THE OTTOMANS

IN HUNGARIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
GÁBOR ÁGOSTON

Department of History, Georgetown University

Intercultural Center 600, 3700 O St., NW, Washington D.C. 20057-1035, USA
e-mail: agostong@georgetown.edu

This short essay overviews the changing image of the Ottomans in Hungarian historiography from
the late 19th century to the 1990s. It maintains that whereas the Ottoman Empire had received a gen-
erally negative treatment from the nationalist historiographies of the empire’s successor states in
the Balkans and the Middle East, Hungarian historiography has been more divided and has offered
a more diverse view with regard to the country’s Ottoman centuries. As in the case of the biased
treatment of the new nation-states of the Balkans and the Middle East, the more balanced Hungar-
ian attitude has its political and cultural-historiographical background, which is briefly addressed in
the paper.
Key words: The image of the Ottomans in Hungary, Ottoman studies in Hungary, politics and his-
toriography, Turkology, impact of Ottoman rule.

I. The 19th-century Background1

From the mid-15th century onward, Hungarian diplomats, travellers, interpreters

(dragomans) and scholars have contributed considerably to the so-called Turcica-
literature (that is to say, to the literature on the history, religion, customs, etc. of the
Ottoman Turks) and have produced valuable works on the culture and history of the
Ottomans. While the early works were published in Latin, the first Hungarian-lan-
guage history of the Ottoman Empire, Sámuel Decsy’s (1742–1816) three-volume
“Osmanographia” appeared in 1788–1789. In addition to the military and political
history of the Ottomans and the Hungarian–Ottoman wars, Decsy gave due attention

1
The present article deals only with the changing image of the Ottomans in Hungarian his-
toriography. For overviews of Turkish and Ottoman studies in Hungary see Hóvári (1987); Ágoston
(2002) and Dávid – Fodor (2002)
0001-6446 / $ 20.00 © 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
16 G. ÁGOSTON

to the empire’s geography and administration, and its religious affairs (Decsy 1788–
1789).
Although 19th-century Hungarian historiography followed the German and
Austrian tradition, it had its local colour as far as works on the Ottomans, and Turk-
ish studies in general, were concerned. The warm welcome of the Hungarian émigrés
of the 1848–1849 revolution by the Ottoman government created a pro-Turkish
atmosphere in Hungary. By that time, the hostis naturalis of the 16th century, i.e., the
Ottoman Turks – who in 1526 destroyed the mediaeval Hungarian Kingdom and in
the mid-16th century incorporated her central parts into their empire –, had become
the generous supporters of the Hungarians and offered protection for the Magyar
émigrés after the defeat of their War of Independence against the Habsburgs. On the
other hand, the Habsburgs, who in the 16th and 17th centuries played an important
role in establishing and maintaining the Hungarian border defence system that con-
tained further Ottoman expansion, were construed as enemies who recently sup-
pressed the War of Independence of the Magyars. Not surprisingly, after 1848–1849
the Habsburgs often received hostile press in Hungarian popular literature and his-
toriography. In short, Hungarian nationalist historiography of the 19th century made
the same mistakes in relation to the Habsburgs, as did the Balkan historiographical
tradition in regards to the Ottomans, i.e., both projected 19th-century images back to
earlier centuries.
Hungarian political thinking and historiography in the late 19th century were
also influenced by the growing fear of the political aspirations of Hungary’s stronger
neighbour, Czarist Russia, in the Balkans, as well as by fears of Pan-Slavism and the
nationalist-separatist movements of the Slavic people within the borders of the Austro-
Hungarian Monarchy. In the early 1870s, during Gyula Andrássy’s ministry of foreign
affairs, anti-Slav friendship with Istanbul and the defence of the Ottoman Empire’s
integrity (in order to counter-balance Russian influence in the Balkan Peninsula and
to maintain the status quo there) became an official policy of Austria-Hungary. All
these circumstances produced a strong pro-Turkish political climate, which was rein-
forced by the belief, at least in certain intellectual circles, of the Hungarians’ Turkic
origin, a hot topic of scholarly debates and the popular press of the late 19th century,
when the country and its historians were preparing for the millennium celebrations
of Hungary’s foundation. The so-called “Ugor–Turkish war” (i.e., the Ugor-contra-
Turkish debate) about the Finno-Ugric or Turkic origins of the Magyars or Hungari-
ans, which reached far beyond the scholarly community, raised the interest of the
public in studies related to the Turks and their history (Pusztay 1977).
This general pro-Turkish atmosphere generated strong institutional support for
Turkish studies. In 1850 János Repiczky (1817–1855), who was among the first
scholars devoting great efforts to the study and translation of Ottoman archival docu-
ments preserved in Hungary, was given the right to give courses in Oriental languages
at the University of Pest. The Institute of Turkish Philology and Hungarian Pre-
history, established in 1870 at the same university, was the first institute or chair in
Europe devoted to the study of Turkology. It was held for almost four decades by
Ármin Vámbéry (1832–1913), the most fervent advocate of the Turkish origin of the

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 THE IMAGE OF THE OTTOMANS IN HUNGARIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 17

Magyars. Besides the university, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences became one of
the main supporters of Turkish studies. József Thúry’s (1861–1906) and Imre Kará-
cson’s (1863–1911) abridged translations of 15th–17th-century Ottoman chronicles
and other narrative sources (Tursun Bey, Aşıkpaşazade, Neşri, Ferdi, Lutfi Paşa, Ke-
malpaşazade, Celalzade Mustafa, Saadeddin, Selaniki Mustafa, Peçevi, Koçibeg,
Evliya Çelebi), and the campaign journals of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent
(r. 1520–1566), along with Antal Velics’s (1855–1915) translations of Ottoman tax
registers, revenue surveys, pay registers, and cash books were all sponsored and pub-
lished by the Academy (Thúry 1893, 1896; Karácson 1916; Velics – Kammerer 1886,
1890).
Parallel to the activity of Turkologists, historians working in the Hungarian
and Viennese archives also had their say about the country’s Ottoman past. Ferenc
Salamon’s (1825–1892) Magyarország a török hódítás korában (Hungary in the
Age of Turkish Conquest) (also published in German translation as Ungarn im Zeit-
alter der Türkenherrschaft in 1887) was the first monograph that attempted to give
a concise history of Ottoman rule in Hungary with chapters on Ottoman and Hungar-
ian administration, jurisdiction, taxation, warfare, defence and diplomacy (Salamon
1864, 1885; 1887). Sándor Takáts (1860–1932), the archivist-historian of the Aus-
trian Hofkammerarchiv (1898–1903) and a member of the famous group of Viennese
Hungarian historians, and an indefatigable researcher in the Viennese and Hungarian
archives over thirty years, devoted a great deal of his thirty volumes and some six
hundred articles to the study of life on the Ottoman–Hungarian frontier. Driven by
his dissatisfaction of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise or Ausgleich of 1867, he
projected his anti-Habsburg sentiment back to the 16th and 17th centuries and under-
took a total re-evaluation of Hungary’s Ottoman past, presenting a colourful and
strongly anti-Habsburg and pro-Turkish picture. Besides the traditional military,
financial, and administrative aspects of the Ottoman– Hungarian frontier, Takáts
studied with equal enthusiasm the life of the conquerors and the conquered. In
Takáts’ essays, Ottoman provincial and district governors (pashas and begs), road
guides (kılavuzes), militiamen (martoloses), merchants, captives, diplomats, inter-
preters, scribes, renegades, and musicians of the Ottoman garrisons got as much at-
tention as did the generals, soldiers, captives, peasants, shepherds, horse dealers, city
and village officials, artisans, coopers, merchants and millers on the Hungarian side.
Though his idealised views of the Ottoman rule of Hungary ought to be handled with
caution, his archive-based research articles on topics such as fishing, gardening, bee-
keeping, wine-growing, brewery, salt-production, mining, glassworks, ship-building,
construction of fortresses, eating and drinking habits, weddings, etc., are still valu-
able contributions to what one might call the history of everyday life of the frontier
(see, e.g., Takáts 1915; 1928; 1956; 1958; see also Vardy 1985a). Although Takáts
was widely read, his influence on Hungarian historiography was limited, for he never
established a school. The person who dominated Hungarian historiography in the
first part of the 20th century, and who had a rather different view on the Ottomans,
was Gyula Szekfű (1883–1955). Szekfű was the omnipotent history professor at the
University of Budapest, the country’s most influential university until today, and co-

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18 G. ÁGOSTON

author – with his noted Hungarian mediaevalist colleague and future minister of
culture Bálint Hóman (1885–1951) – of the best-selling, multi-volume Magyar tör-
ténet (Magyar History), the standard survey of Hungarian history during the interwar
period.

II. The Interwar Period

An ardent Catholic and pro-Habsburg historian, the father of the Hungarian Geistes-
geschichte school, Szekfű “made his readers believe that wherever the Turkish horse-
men appeared, not even the grass would ever grow again” (Káldy-Nagy 1970a, p. 5,
quoted in English by Vardy 1985b, p. 150). In the relevant volumes of the Magyar
történet (Magyar History), Szekfű blamed “the Turks” for the general dislocation of
the country’s historical evolution, her economic and social decay, as well as for her
semi-arid “puszta-climate”, and the Great Hungarian Plain’s deforestation and puszta-
vegetation. Moreover, Szekfű saw the “Turkish era”, with its decreasing Hungarian
population, as primarily responsible for the tragic Trianon Peace Treaty (June 4,
1920), which deprived Hungary of more than two thirds of its territory and one third
of its Hungarian-speaking population (Hóman – Szekfű 1935–1936, and see Vardy
1976, pp. 62–71; 82–89; 1985b). Szekfű’s Magyar történet (Magyar History), pub-
lished originally in the mid-1930s, soon became a standard history handbook and, de-
spite the political changes after World War II, had tremendous influence on genera-
tions of historians: it was still an “unofficial” textbook in my university years in the
early 1980s (at least at the University of Budapest), and was reprinted in 1990.
Szekfű’s theses in regards to the Ottomans did not remain unchallenged, al-
though his opponents never had an influence comparable with Szekfű’s. Sándor Do-
manovszky (1877–1955), the most influential student of the rival Kulturgeschichte
School, and co-editor of this school’s five-volume Magyar művelődéstörténet (Magyar
Cultural History), for instance, blamed the 18th-century Habsburg-initiated settlement
policy for the changed ratio of Magyar and non-Magyar population of the country
which, together with the Habsburg’s policy of divide et impera, eventually led to the
separatist movements of the nationalities (Domanovszky et al. 1939–1942, reprint
1990, 1993). Jolán Majláth, another exponent of the same school, argued that whereas
in the Habsburg-ruled territories villages and market towns (oppida) were under the
strict economic and legal control of the landed nobility, which hindered their eco-
nomic and social development, in Ottoman-held territories the absence of the Hun-
garian nobility gave birth to the emergence of flourishing market towns with a rela-
tively free and rich bourgeoisie, who accumulated significant capital and developed
their own civic attitudes. According to Majláth, Ottoman rule created an opportunity
for large strata of society to escape from serfdom (Majláth 1943).
Szekfű’s biased views were also challenged by the works of Lajos Fekete
(1891–1969), the father of Ottoman archival studies and palaeography. However,
being a professor of Turkology at a very small department, Fekete never had much
influence on the larger student population. In the long run, however, it was he who

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 THE IMAGE OF THE OTTOMANS IN HUNGARIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 19

provided the first corrective studies. While his pioneering German-language studies
on Ottoman palaeography and diplomatics are well known outside the borders of
Hungary (Fekete 1926; 1955), it is less known that Fekete also published the first de-
tailed revenue survey (mufassal tahrir defteri) of an Ottoman sub-province (sancak);
a rare Ottoman house-register of an Ottoman-held Hungarian town; and a probate
inventory of a 16th-century Ottoman financial bureaucrat from Buda (Fekete 1942;
1943; 1960). Moreover, he also published a series of short Hungarian summaries of
hundreds of Ottoman documents relating to Ottoman rule in Hungary (many of these
were reprinted in Fekete 1993). In doing so, he considerably broadened the evidence
concerning Ottoman taxation and administration, as well as the economic and social
life of the conquered territories. These sources seriously questioned some of the biased
views on these subjects previously existing in Hungarian historiography. His studies
on Ottoman land tenure, central and provincial bureaucracy, the geographical knowl-
edge of the Ottomans, and especially his magisterial synthesis of Ottoman rule in
Hungary in the form of an impressive 460-page monograph on the history of Otto-
man-held Buda and Pest, published in 1944, offered a sophisticated and balanced view
of the country’s Ottoman past.2

III. Marxist and non-Marxist Historiography until the Late 1980s

Political change after World War II created a very different situation for historical
studies in Hungary. Although the most prominent professors of the interwar period
were dismissed from universities, some of them, along with a few of their disciples
who either accepted the new Marxist ideology and methodology or acted as if they
did, were allowed to teach. Those who refused the new vulgar-Marxist ideology were
forced to leave the universities and research institutes. By the second decade of the
soft dictatorship of the Kádár era (1956–1988) that followed the 1956 Hungarian
revolution, many were allowed to return to their disciplines and take jobs in archives
and libraries. Thus, most of them were able to continue their research, and, provided
their results did not threaten the prevailing ideology, were able to publish them.
Another escape from joining the low-standard vulgar-Marxist trend of the
1950s was source-publication and the field of Hilfwissenschaften (palaeography, his-
torical geography, chronology etc.) a traditional discipline of the training of Hungar-
ian historians, which was tolerated and continued to be taught at the major universi-
ties. In Turkish studies, it was philology and the Quellenkundliche orientation of the
Hungarian school that saved the field from decay. Dealing with linguistics, palaeog-
raphy and source publication was considered harmless by the ideologues of the new
regime. Thus, it is hardly incidental that it was the time when Lajos Fekete, and his
student and successor at the Department of Turkish Studies of the University of Buda-
pest, Gyula Káldy-Nagy, published their translations of the Buda treasury registers,

2
The 1976 abridged English version of this monograph is only one-fifth of the original one
in length. See Fekete (1976).
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20 G. ÁGOSTON

along with their seminal specialised studies on Ottoman taxation, administration,

land-tenure, and trade (Fekete – Káldy-Nagy 1962a; 1962b; see also the bibliography
of the works of Gyula Káldy-Nagy in this volume).
Following his mentor’s pioneering tahrir defteri translation, Gyula Káldy-Nagy
also made available in Hungarian translation numerous detailed revenue surveys
(tahrirs) of various Ottoman sancaks or sub-provinces in Hungary (Káldy-Nagy
1960; 1971; 1977; 1982; 1985; 2000). When later generations too hastily judge the
Hungarian defterology school for its narrowness, they should take into consideration
the confining political-cultural climate in the country, under which our predecessors
had to labour. This is not to say that it was only constricting political circumstances
that favoured the continuation of the Quellenkundliche orientation. Outside Hungary,
disciples of this school similarly devoted a great deal of their efforts to defterology
(Tibor Halasi-Kun and Gustav Bayerle in the United States, or Josef Matuz in Ger-
many come to mind). In Hungary, however, besides tradition and training, political
circumstances determined the way Ottomanists could work. The Quellenkundliche
orientation ensured that accumulated knowledge, techniques and methodology were
transmitted to new generations of Ottomanists and historians, a non-negligible achieve-
ment in Eastern Europe during the 1950s through the 1970s, when important disci-
plines with great traditions were destroyed or silenced.
As far as the image of the Ottomans was concerned, the 1950s and 1960s wit-
nessed, in Marxist disguise and phraseology, the revival of many of the clichés of
19th-century nationalist historiography. Following the terminology of the anti-Habs-
burg sentiment of the late 19th century, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs were the
“two pagans”, a term known from the early 18th century, under whose rule the Ma-
gyars suffered almost equally. In the works of this early Marxist historiography, the
16th century was the heroic struggle for freedom of the Magyars against the Turkish
conquerors, led by soldiers of peasant origin serving in the Hungarian border for-
tresses. The 17th century witnessed an equally heroic series of anti-Habsburg wars of
independence led again by the garrison soldiers. By the late 1960s, however, the pic-
ture, especially in scholarly research monographs and, to a lesser degree in university
textbooks, became more sophisticated. Ottoman rule, however, received but modest
attention: the relevant volume of the official university textbook, which covered the
period between 1526 and 1780 and had been in use until the mid-1980s, for instance
devoted only 24 pages out of the 625 pages to “Turkish rule”, and briefly discussed
questions such as Ottoman administration and taxation, depopulation and economic
decay (H. Balázs – Makkai 1972, pp. 42–53, 266–277).
Influenced heavily by the findings of Ottomanists, Hungarian historiography
during the 1970s and 1980s became more balanced with regard to the country’s Otto-
man past. Historians working with Hungarian and Habsburg documents and Otto-
manists alike produced seminal works on the history of trade, agriculture, the market
towns, peasantry, and the Habsburg and Hungarian military, favoured topics of Marx-
ist historiography of the time. Especially important are the works of Zsigmond Pál
Pach (1919–2001), Győző Ember (1909–1993), László Makkai (1914–1989), Fe-
renc Maksay (1916–1984), Imre Wellmann (1909–1994), and Vera Zimányi (1930–)

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 THE IMAGE OF THE OTTOMANS IN HUNGARIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 21

on trade, agriculture, and peasantry; Gusztáv Heckenast’s (1922–1999) and Oszkár

Paulinyi’s (1899–1982) studies on mining; Ferenc Szakály’s (1942–1999) mono-
graphs on the Hungarian–Ottoman condominium; István Sinkovits’s (1910–1990),
Kálmán Benda’s (1913–1994), Domokos Kosáry’s (1913–2007), Gábor Barta’s
(1943–1995), and Ágnes Várkonyi’s (1928–) works on political history; as well as
Géza Perjés’s (1917–2003), Imre Szántó’s (1920–1993), and Gyula Rázsó’s (1930–
2007) studies on military history. Except for Ferenc Szakály, however, the Ottoman-
held territories usually remained outside the interest of these studies. It was Szakály
who not only devoted much of his time to the study of the economic and social his-
tory of the Ottoman-held territories on the basis of Hungarian sources, but also incor-
porated the results of his Ottomanist colleagues into his works, though not necessar-
ily always agreeing with them. While his general assessment of the Ottoman rule is
negative, he appreciated the achievements of the Ottoman bureaucracy and military.
He not only read the studies of his Ottomanist colleagues with great enthusiasm but
also tried to direct their research towards topics he believed were important in order
to better understand Hungary’s Ottoman centuries. Similarly, he did not necessarily
blame the Ottomans for all the negative trends that he witnessed in his Hungarian and
Habsburg sources concerning the Ottoman-held territories, and was ready to revise
his views in light of the research of his Ottomanist colleagues. While Szakály stressed
the negative trends of Ottoman rule (e.g. the impact of the Turkish wars on the econ-
omy and population), he also noticed, especially in his latest works, the strength of
the Hungarian institutions and society under Ottoman rule (Szakály 1994; 1995, es-
pecially pp. 413–426; 1997). He devoted two monographs to the study of the condo-
minium or joint Hungarian–Ottoman rule, in which he examined Hungarian taxation
and the functioning of Hungarian governmental and judicial institutions in Ottoman
Hungary (Szakály 1981; 1997).
Using both Ottoman and Hungarian documents, Klára Hegyi, one of Lajos
Fekete’s last disciples has also shown the limits of Ottoman rule in the empire’s Hun-
garian provinces, and provided further examples with regard to the role and function-
ing of Hungarian institutions in Ottoman Hungary (Hegyi 1976; 1995; Hegyi – Zimá-
nyi 1989). Her latest work on Ottoman garrisons in Hungary, offers the most detailed
monograph ever published on the military organisation of an Ottoman frontier (Hegyi
2007).

IV. Recent Developments: the 1990s

By the 1980s, the third generation of Ottomanists, almost all the students of Gyula
Káldy-Nagy, has emerged. The distinctive feature of this group lays in the fact that
almost all were trained as historians and Ottomanists, and work as historians and not
as Turkologists. This means that, perhaps for the first time since the 19th century,
Ottomanists have a wider audience and greater influence on Hungarian historical
studies. As university lecturers they write university textbooks and teach Ottoman his-
tory to hundreds of students compared with the handful of students taught usually at

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22 G. ÁGOSTON

Turkology departments. Those who work in research institutes are also active partici-
pants in all the major history projects and publications. What is equally important,
the members of this informal group of some ten to fifteen Ottomanists and Hungarian
historians are in good terms with each other and often work together on joint projects,
a welcome development, especially considering the more isolated and much less
friendly scholarly climate of the previous generation. Some of these projects, such as
the ones financed by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) and the His-
torical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, were launched with the aim
to make available the results of recent research of Hungarian historians and Ottoman-
ists in English for a broader scholarly audience (see Dávid – Fodor 1994; 2000; 2007).
The research interests of this generation are more diverse and are no longer
restricted to the study of Ottoman Hungary. Recent research projects range from the
administrative, economic, social and cultural history of Ottoman Hungary (Dávid
1997; 2005; Gerelyes – Kovács 2003; Gerelyes 2005a; 2005b; Ágoston – Sudár 2002;
Sudár 2005) to the comparative study of the Habsburg and Ottoman military frontier
(Dávid – Fodor 2000; Ágoston 1998; 2003; Pálffy 1999); from Ottoman policy, impe-
rial ideology, and information-gathering to the role of the Crimean Tatars in Hungary
and the relationship between Istanbul and its vassal Principality of Transylvania (Fo-
dor 1991; 2000; 2001; Ágoston 2007; Ivanics 1994; Papp 2003); from Ottoman his-
torical demography and prosopography to Ottoman warfare and arms industry (Dávid
1997; 2005; Ágoston 1999; 2005; see also Dávid – Fodor 2002, and the bibliography
in Dávid – Fodor 2000). As far as the image of the Ottomans: let me mention but two
examples that have already challenged many aspects of the traditional negative image
concerning Hungary’s Ottoman centuries. The studies of Gyula Káldy-Nagy (1970a;
1970b) and Géza Dávid (who not only continues his mentor’s demographical studies
but combines traditional defterology with the methodology of European historical de-
mography), as well as the works of Erik Fügedi and András Kubinyi, who explored
sources regarding population movements in pre-Ottoman Hungary, helped to revise
the old view concerning the 16th-century depopulation of the country. Géza Dávid’s
studies based on series of detailed and summary cadastral surveys (mufassal and
icmal tahrir defteris), as well as on Hungarian documents, argue that contrary to what
had been held before, the population of Hungary did not decline in the 16th century
(Dávid 2007, pp. 142–148). Similarly, the rate of migration (average annual 0.6%),
at least in the 1540s and 1550s, was much less than previously thought (Dávid 1997,
especially pp. 37–77).
This coincides with Ferenc Szakály’s and my own results concerning the eco-
nomic consolidation of the Hungarian provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1570s
and 1580s. While Szakály witnessed the consolidation of Hungarian taxation in the
Ottoman-held territories in the 1570s and 1580s (Szakály 1994), my own findings
suggest that the Ottomans too consolidated their financial situation in this faraway
province during the same decades. The unpublished annual balance sheets of the pro-
vincial treasury of Buda demonstrate that while in 1559/1560 local revenues covered
only one third of expenditures, in the 1570s and early 1580s local revenues met more
than 90% of expenses. In other words, the province, if only for a short period, be-

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 THE IMAGE OF THE OTTOMANS IN HUNGARIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 23

came almost self-sufficient. Hungarian and Ottoman financial and taxation data, to-
gether with those concerning population movements and cattle-trade all suggest eco-
nomic recovery during the latter part of the 16th century, following the Ottoman–
Habsburg peace treaty in 1568. In other words, despite wars and Ottoman conquest,
Hungary more or less followed an economic trend familiar in much of 16th-century
Europe, even though such a picture seemed unthinkable for Szekfű and for the disci-
ples of the biased anti-Turkish historical school (Ágoston 1992; 2000; Ágoston –
Oborni 2000).
Recent developments in our field in Hungary coincide with the ones that are
taking place in many of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, and are in line
with developments in the field in Europe and the United States. Unlike Ottomanists
in the United States, however, Ottomanists and historians in the successor states of
the empire do not seem to have problems with regard to the relevance of Ottoman
studies. The Ottomans are an integral part of Hungarian history, just like they are part
of the history of the Balkans, the Black Sea littoral, the Mediterranean and the Middle
East. Consequently, Ottoman studies are part of Hungarian and European historiogra-
phy, and taught for all history majors at most universities. A considerable number of
history majors in Hungary are familiar with the studies of our Turkish, European and
American fellow-Ottomanists, and for them the Ottoman timar (land tenure) system,
devşirme (child levy), or divan (Imperial Council) are as familiar terms as the feu-
dum, knight, or the Venetian Senate. This seemingly handy situation in Hungary, and
in many of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, however, has its pitfalls. It is
too tempting to view the empire from its Hungarian, Bulgarian, Syrian, or Iraqi prov-
inces and make hasty generalisation, or present the peculiarities and unique situations
of these provinces as general trends in Ottoman history. A useful corrective might be
to view the particular province as one of many regions of this multiethnic, multi-
religious, multi-lingual empire, which besides the peculiarities of the given region at
a given time-period had its usual features common with other regions. There are more
and more new studies available in Hungarian that view the Ottoman-held territories
in Hungary as one of the empire’s many frontier provinces, and devote due attention
to the empire as a whole. Due to the “publication-revolution” of the 1990s, several
new and old publishing houses decided to come up with their own new syntheses of
Hungarian and European history. Thus, Ottomanists of all generations have bound-
less opportunities to communicate the results of their field with an ever wider audi-
ence, especially since some of these books are sold in tens of thousands of copies.
Another welcome recent development in Hungary, as in Europe and the United
States, is the training of some young Ottomanist historians with either wider skills
within the profession or with interdisciplinary skills. There is a growing number of
young historians with the necessary linguistic, palaeographical, methodological skills
in both Ottoman and European history. These scholars are (or will soon be) able to
do research in one or more of the major European archives (Vienna, Venice, Siman-
cas, St. Petersburg, Moscow, etc.) as well as in those in Istanbul. In Hungary, these
welcome developments own much to our mentor, Professor Káldy-Nagy, to whom
the essays in this volume are dedicated.

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24 G. ÁGOSTON

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Ágoston, G. (1999): Ottoman Warfare, 1453 – 1826. In: Black, J. (ed.): European Warfare, 1453 –
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