On 4 October 1948, József Cardinal Mindszenty preached a sermon for the rosary feast in front of 35,000 Catholic faithful. He began by reminding his congregation of the origins of the feast day that they were celebrating: the victory of Europe's Christian states over the Ottoman Turkish fleet at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. This great victory in the struggle of universal Christendom against the infidel enemy recalled to Mindszenty a second, more particularly Hungarian parallel: the victory of Habsburg forces over the Ottoman Turkish enemy at the battle of Temesvár in 1716. “Hungarian history recalls too such a rosary victory—the Hungarian Christians won it over the Turks in 1716 at Temesvár.” Both military victories represented moments when Europeans had repelled a force seen at the time, and ever after, as hostile to Christian civilization.
But Mindszenty did not intend his sermon to be simply a history lesson about famous victories over the Ottoman Empire. These victories were, first and foremost, victories of faith. For Mindszenty, they recalled a time when Europeans had consciously embraced and defended Europe's Christian identity. In his sermon, the Cardinal reminded his audience that Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great Habsburg general who had won the victory at Temesvár, had been “a man of prayer” and that “praying Hungary was a stronghold of Christianity in those days.” In their centuries-long struggle against the Ottoman Empire, Europe's nations had found cultural unity and clear moral purpose in the face of a powerful enemy.Footnote 1
In 1948, the enemy was, of course, Communism. As Hungary's Communist Party began to consolidate its power, its leaders targeted the Roman Catholic Church as its greatest ideological enemy.Footnote 2 Party propagandists denounced the church as an instrument of Fascism. Priests and lay church leaders were arrested on trumped-up charges of conspiracy. (Mindszenty himself would be arrested and imprisoned on false charges in 1949.) The police also took steps to destroy the church's civic associations. In 1948, the Party trained its eyes on the country's broad network of church-run primary and secondary schools, a crucial source of the Catholic Church's cultural power. Mindszenty responded by mobilizing Catholic Hungarians with a symbolic weapon. He declared the months between August 1947 and December 1948 the Year of the Blessed Virgin. Under the banner of the Marian year, Hungarian Catholics planned mass sermons, parades, marches, and festivities—all to demonstrate opposition to the Communist assault on religion and religious institutions. Cardinal Mindszenty's sermon for the rosary feast was one event in this larger symbolic campaign, which he described as “…not a warlike force directed against man—no! it is a force for man's welfare and sanctification.” Disingenuous protestations aside, Mindszenty's purpose was clear. In the face of Communist efforts to claim total control over public space in Hungary, the Catholic Church would be a bastion that stood, resolutely and defiantly, in defense of the Christian moral order in Hungary.
It was no accident that Cardinal Mindszenty turned to the Ottoman Empire and to Islam for a symbol powerful enough to convey the sense of threat that he felt. In a very real and literal sense, Cardinal Mindszenty understood himself to be at the center of a clash of civilizations. As Talal Asad has argued, Islam has symbolized (and continues to symbolize) a clear line between ideas of “European civilization” and that civilization's Other. Islam represents an “attempt to destroy Europe's civilization from outside.” But it also suggests the “corrupting moral environment that Europe must continuously struggle to overcome from within.”Footnote 3 Invoking past battles with the Ottoman Empire, Mindszenty associated Communism with this well-established rhetoric of a civilization besieged. To Mindszenty, it was clear that Communism was a foreign ideology. That Communism enjoyed an undeniable place within European intellectual history was irrelevant. Communism as a political system returned to Hungary with the Red Army in the last months of World War II and had been imposed by commissars of Jewish origin (Mátyás Rákosi, etc.) whose Hungarian identity Mindszenty certainly doubted. Invoking the Ottoman threat also gave political significance to Mindszenty's call for moral renewal and a Marian year. After 1945, the Catholic Church throughout Europe maintained that Europeans were so vulnerable to totalitarian ideologies because they had abandoned Christianity in favor of a modern faith in materialism and individualism.Footnote 4 Secularization had corrupted Europe's moral environment and had left it vulnerable to an ideological attack. Unless they clearly affirmed their Christian identity as their forebears had in battle against the Ottomans and Islam, Europeans would be too demoralized to withstand the Communist assault.
Cardinal Mindszenty did not invent these associations. The ideological links among Communism, Islam, and the decline of European civilization had already been forged during the years after World War I. Across Europe, these anxieties found a rich variety of expression, not all of them so explicitly Christian as Cardinal Mindszenty's sermon. However, Catholic fears for European civilization were especially influential and politically powerful, precisely because many Europeans found in Catholicism and in the Catholic Church a potent blend of national and transnational identities so suited to an age of ideological extremes. This essay will examine these issues in one particular national context: Hungary. In the years after 1918, Hungarians began to equate historical Islam with a modern political religion: Communism. They did this by interpreting the Ottoman Empire as an ideological threat to their nation and to Europe.
Turks, Turanism, and the Problem with Islam
At the decisive battle of Mohács (1526), Ottoman forces routed the Hungarian armies and broke apart the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. During the fighting, the Hungarian king, Lajos II, was killed. Because he died childless, the Hungarian crown passed (after some dispute) to the Habsburg dynasty, a fact of tremendous importance later. In the decades following the battle, however, the victorious Ottomans occupied central and southern Hungary and divided the region into administrative units. In the east, the Ottomans granted a large measure of autonomy to Transylvania, a historic province in eastern Hungary, and allowed Hungarian princes to rule there. In the north and west, the Austrian Habsburgs held on to a tiny sliver of Hungarian Crownlands. For more than 150 years, Hungary was hence divided into three parts. Ottoman control in East Central Europe only began to erode in the 1680s. In 1683, a Christian alliance commanded by the Polish King Jan III Sobieski turned back an Ottoman invasion of Central Europe at the gates of Vienna. In the years that followed, Habsburg forces began to push south and east. They captured Buda (the capital of Hungary) in 1686 and pushed Ottoman forces all the way to Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci, in present-day Serbia) before signing a treaty with the Ottoman Empire in 1699. The historic Kingdom of Hungary was again free of Ottoman domination. But it was also firmly within the orbit of the Habsburg dynasty in Vienna, a fact formally acknowledged in 1687 when the Hungarian diet granted the Habsburgs the right of male succession.
Ever after, Hungarians lamented Mohács as a national catastrophe, not least because it marked the loss of Hungarian sovereignty for centuries. At the same time, exploits of anti-Ottoman resistance were held up as examples of exceptional national heroism. The seventeenth-century epic poem, The Peril of Sziget (Szigeti veszedelem) is one outstanding example. In it, Miklós Zrinyi celebrated his great-grandfather (also named Miklós Zrinyi), who defended the southern Hungarian city of Szigetvár against the onslaught of a much larger Ottoman army commanded by the sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. The siege inevitably ended with complete Hungarian defeat, but not before Zrinyi led a doomed but stirring charge out of the city gates and into the face of the Ottoman army. Only seven Hungarians survived, and the charge became legend, an iconic moment celebrated again and again in nationalist art and literature. During the nineteenth century, nationalists mined the Ottoman past even more deeply for rousing stories of great deeds, triumphant national heroes, and tragic stories of great national sacrifice. Géza Gárdonyi's stirring novel, The Stars of Eger (Egri csillagok), published in 1899, is perhaps the most widely known effort, read by schoolchildren in Hungary (and nonnative speakers of any age trying to learn Hungarian). Gyula Benczur's monumental 1896 painting, The Recapture of Buda Castle from the Turks, which hangs in Hungary's National Gallery, is another well-known example.
However, the clash between East and West and the memory of the Ottoman occupation in Hungary was no straightforward case of Orientalism. Hungarians celebrated their ancestors' heroic resistance against the Ottoman armies of the Orient. But most also accepted the existence of a common heritage with, and distant ethnic ties to, Turkic peoples in Anatolia and Central Asia. As a group, the Magyars (ethnic Hungarians) had arrived in Europe from the Central Asian steppes sometime in the 800s CE. This late arrival into the Eastern European Carpathian Basin explains the utter dissimilarity between Hungarian and any other language spoken in the region. Throughout the nineteenth century, linguists, ethnographers, and archaeologists studied the pre-European Magyar past. They confirmed and documented the connections between Magyars and the other Finno-Ugric communities (Finns, Estonians, and a number of less well-known ethnic groups in Siberia, such as the Komi and the Udmurt). But many also insisted that the Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples were related within an even larger category: the Turanic linguistic group. (Historical linguists no longer find this theory credible, although early ethnocultural links between ethnic Magyars and other Turkic tribes are accepted.) Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, many Hungarians believed that they, along with the Turks, were prominent members of a huge family of ethnicities that spanned Eurasia and numbered in the many millions.
This idea was known as Turanism (from the ancient Persian name for Central Asia—Tūrān), and it gave a particular flavor to Hungarian Orientalist art in the late nineteenth century. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Hungarian architects and artists experimented with Near Eastern styles and motifs in building design, historical commemoration, and literature as a way to capture the exotic, the strange, and the sensual. At the same time, however, Turanism made these experiments a means by which Hungarian artists could also—paradoxically—explore that which was most familiar: the deeply rooted ethnocultural memory lying at the heart of the national “self.”Footnote 5 No one did more to popularize the idea that the origins of the Magyar self were to be found in the East than the renowned linguist and Orientalist, Ármin Vámbéry. Born into a poor Jewish family, Vámbéry became an exceptional linguist, a widely read author of Central Asian travelogues, and an international expert on the East. In numerous books, he developed the idea that Magyars shared common ancestors with a number of fierce nomadic warrior tribes in Asia, including the Turks.Footnote 6
Vámbéry also joined a diverse group of scholars, public intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians who wanted to bring Turanism into the mainstream of Hungarian politics. In the early years of the twentieth century, enthusiasts for Turanism formed a number of cultural organizations to promote the connections among Magyars, Turks, and other Central Asian, supposedly Turanian, peoples. The most important was the Turanian Society, established in 1910. Some of its leading members were serious intellects, like Vámbéry or Ignác Goldziher, the Jewish Hungarian scholar of Islam, whose books still stand among the foundational works of Islamic studies as a field. Others were economists and businessmen, who saw in Turanism a rationale for the vigorous promotion of Hungarian business interests in the Near East. Still others took chauvinistic pride in an idea that placed ethnic Magyars at the head of a family of peoples who numbered in the millions.
During World War I, scholarly curiosity took a backseat to political and economic ambitions. In these years, members of the Turanian Society invoked the idea of a Eurasian community of peoples that included Magyars, Turks, Albanians, Bulgars, and many Central Asians as a kind of counterweight to German imperialist dreams of Mitteleuropa. These ambitions did produce real attempts at Hungarian–Turkish cultural exchange, however modest they may have been in practice. In 1916, some two hundred Turkish students received scholarships to study in Hungary. There were also Hungarian-Turkish friendship societies in Budapest and Istanbul that organized a variety of cultural programs.Footnote 7
Although some of its first and best proponents were Hungarian Jews, the Turanian idea became increasingly associated with radical right-wing nationalism during World War I.Footnote 8 After 1918, key figures in the Turanist societies embraced counterrevolutionary politics. Because the French, British, and U.S. governments had agreed to partition Hungary in 1920, despite vehement Hungarian protests, many Turanists, as well as other radical nationalists, saw the search for ethnic origins in the East—on the steppes of Central Asia—as a way to reject Western liberalism completely. Turanism easily became an argument for racism and racial purity, as well. Throughout the interwar years, Turanic symbols—pagan warriors on horseback, roaming the Asian steppes in search of helpless villages to conquer—were constant elements in the symbolism and rhetoric that extreme right-wing groups employed. By the late 1930s, the most vocal enthusiasts for Turanism were also Fascists.
However, the Turanian idea never led any Hungarian nationalist, whether conservative or radical, to find inspiration in the grandeur or military exploits of Suleiman the Magnificent or any other Ottoman Turkish figure. Many Hungarians saw Turks as some sort of ethnic cousin. Some prominent Hungarians also thought well of Kemal Ataturk's newly established Turkish state because of its modernizing zeal and strongly nationalist politics. Hungary and Turkey enjoyed excellent diplomatic relations throughout the interwar years. But these affinities lay in the ancient past or in the post-World War I present. Islam—the religion of the Ottoman Empire for centuries—remained ever and always the faith that had inspired the nation's enemies at Mohács. On this point, conservatives and right-wing radicals in Hungary could agree.
To clarify the difference between Turks as a people and Islam as a religion, Catholic intellectuals promoted a vision of Islam as an ideology. This fit into a pattern, already well established at the turn of the twentieth century, of seeing European society torn between competing worldviews like faith and disbelief or Christianity and socialism. For example, one of the most prominent Hungarian Catholics, Bishop Ottokár Prohászka, wrote a 1903 book in which he compared Catholicism to socialism; in the title of his book, he called Catholicism the “triumphant worldview.”Footnote 9 He developed his ideological critique of socialism in 1918 in a book he called Culture and Terror. There he denounced socialists for permitting no debate about core issues such as secularism or materialism. So incensed was Prohászka by the thought of dogmatic socialists (fundamentalists?) coercing people to submit to certain beliefs that he condemned socialism itself as a “new Islam.”Footnote 10
Catholic writers popularized this view throughout the interwar years, presenting Islam, like socialism, as a set of mobilizing doctrines that are imposed on a society, rather than a shifting set of meanings and practices that are interpreted and lived by each believer. One journalist put it this way: “Public opinion . . . identifies Turks and Mohammedans without analysis, but the two are not the same and already at the beginning of the century the emerging Young Turk movement recognized that Mohammedanism was an alien force that corrupted and poisoned to the marrow the whole of the Turkish soul and ancient ethnicity…”Footnote 11 In other words, Turks had succumbed to Islam (here, Mohammedanism) as a “force” because they had been too weak to resist it. The consequences for their ethnic identity had been disastrous. This interpretation of Islam made the Ottoman conquest a powerful symbol in interwar Hungary.
Ottoman Occupation, Demographic Crisis, and the Demoralization of a Civilization
Interwar Hungary was a society haunted by the specter of national death. At the end of World War I, vast areas of Hungarian territory were occupied by the armies of Romania and the newly formed states of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of the South Slavs (Yugoslavia). Despite the frantic pleas of Hungarian diplomats at the peace talks in Paris, this de facto partition of Hungary became international law. In 1920, the Hungarian government was forced to sign the Treaty of Trianon, which formally assigned nearly 70 percent of the prewar Kingdom of Hungary to neighboring states. In addition, revolution shook a society already destabilized by the tremendous flood of refugees fleeing the occupied territories. In March 1919, a Bolshevik regime took power in Hungary. Although the Bolsheviks ruled for only 133 days, they nonetheless frightened Hungary's social elites by calling for radical social and cultural transformation. After Hungary's Republic of Soviets collapsed, a counterrevolutionary government demanded a radical change of course. Hungary, it became commonplace to say, had grown morally and culturally weak, which had made it defenseless against the depredations of foreign powers without and Communist subversives within. In the aftermath of war, revolution, and territorial dismemberment, Hungary had to embrace an ideology of “Christian nationalism,” or else face national extinction.Footnote 12
Historical memories of Ottoman occupation brought these fears into focus. As Hungarians struggled to understand what had happened to their country, historians studied the legacy of the only catastrophe that seemed comparable. The picture that they painted was devastating. When the Ottomans had advanced in the 1500s, whole communities abandoned their homes and fields to flee northwards. For more than a century, empty villages and empty parishes dotted the region south of Budapest. Historians argued that the collapse of agriculture in the region changed the ecology, as the grasslands of the great plain spread south and west. They also argued that the occupation changed the demographic makeup of the region permanently, with decisive negative consequences for twentieth-century Hungary. When inhabitants finally began to trickle back into the zone of occupation, Magyar-speakers, once the overwhelming majority, were joined by Orthodox Christians (understood in the twentieth century as ethnic Serbs) from the south. After the expulsion of the Turks from Hungary, German-speaking settlers from other parts of the Habsburg lands also came. To interwar scholars, the result was clear: an area of core ethnic habitation had become an ethnically mixed border region. In addition, they concluded that Ottoman occupation had disrupted the normal growth of Hungary's population. Migration, dislocation, and economic uncertainty had taken its toll on the size of the Magyar nation, and demographers tried to calculate just how many more ethnic Magyars—eight million? ten million? even more?—there would have been without the Ottoman catastrophe.
It is not my intention here to assess the state of current scholarship about the impact of Ottoman rule on Hungary, nor to offer suggestions about how this interpretation might be modified or revised.Footnote 13 I am interested instead in the uses to which this particular historical understanding was put. In a society consumed by fears of national death, the fantastic sums of unborn Hungarians, unverifiable though they were, exerted a powerful talismanic force.
Even before World War I, national ethnographers had observed with alarm the declining birthrates among ethnic Magyars in Hungary. After 1918, when millions of ethnic Hungarians became embattled minorities in neighboring states, anxieties about ethnic collapse intensified. Nationalist groups of all varieties called for the Hungarian state to adopt dramatic and sweeping pronatalist policies. At the same time, declining birthrates were widely interpreted as signs that Hungarian society had become demoralized, that Hungarian women had abandoned all social responsibility, and that the nation had, quite literally, lost its will to live. During the 1930s, debates about how to make good this ethnic loss and how to arrest further declines in the size of the Hungarian nation centered on southern Transdanubia, part of the region that the Ottomans had occupied four hundred years earlier. Discussion focused, in particular, on the custom of Magyar peasants in this region to limit the size of their families and the ethnopolitical impact this would have on the future. Writers and sociographers “discovered” the Magyar village in these years, travelling into the countryside to bring back firsthand accounts of the nation's fortunes in the most isolated parts of southern Hungary. The tales they told of empty Hungarian churches and aging Hungarian families were taken as hair-raising signs of national self-destruction. How could this trend be reversed and this crucial region be saved for Hungary? Throughout the 1930s, Hungarian journals and newspapers were filled with analyses of these issues.Footnote 14
Catholic priests and intellectuals laid special claim to these issues. They insisted that the local ethnic crisis was not simply the result of patterns of property ownership or inheritance laws as social scientists claimed. Instead, they linked the local ethnic crisis to an international moral and ideological struggle for the survival of Christian culture in Europe. The Hungarian village was dying because timeless Christian moral values were eroding. The arrival of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in Hungarian lands had led to catastrophe before. Now, in the twentieth century, the spread of modern creeds such as liberalism, individualism, and, above all, Communism, were leading inexorably to a second national collapse. For this reason, the Counter Reformation that followed the end of Ottoman rule was exemplary because it represented an era when Hungary had been reconquered, re-Christianized, and hence brought back into Europe in a very real sense.
Armed with such a clear historical precedent, Catholic clergy tackled their missionary work in Hungary's poorest and most isolated villages with renewed zeal. During the 1930s, a young generation of Catholic priests and lay activists turned “toward the people,” as the rallying cry of the time put it. They tried especially hard to organize rural youth, especially young men, into Catholic civic associations that could combine religious and moral instruction with practical and technical education.Footnote 15 The Catholic young men's educational association (KALOT) established popular high schools, which became an important educational opportunity for rural Hungarians who had previously been denied access to any but the most rudimentary instruction. As a social program, these schools were designed to transform Hungary's peasants into a modern national society. But Catholic activists also hoped to keep Hungary's poorest rural laborers from turning to social movements or embracing cultural trends whose moral vision was dramatically at odds with that of the Catholic Church.
In the handbook that they distributed to the members, the leaders of KALOT explained the connections between the post-Ottoman Counter Reformation and their own missionary activities in some detail:
Without a doubt, the last great cultural influence, which decisively shaped the life-form of the Magyar village and which re-founded the culture of our villages after centuries of Turkish devastation: the spirit of the Hungarian baroque. Since the middle ages there has been no trend which would play a greater role in the formation of the spiritual picture of our Catholic villages, than the baroque culture of the 17th-18th centuries. The idea of mission, which is the basis of any kind of village work, has not burnt as brightly since then in any another cultural movement than it had in the current of the Catholic restoration.Footnote 16
Expelling the Turks from the land had been only the start of a much deeper campaign to purge Hungarian society of the influences of Islamic rule and to reestablish Hungary's place within Christendom. Elsewhere, the Counter Reformation may have been part of an intra-European war of religion. In Hungary, on the border of Christendom, it was a necessary battle to restore Christian civilization.
Islam, Communism, and Christian Civilization
Hungarian Catholics interpreted the Counter Reformation in their country as a time when Christian civilization was both restored from within and defended against hostile outside forces. Their idea of “Christian civilization” should be understood in several ways. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, Hungarian Catholics had taken part in the construction of a transnational (Catholic) Christian European identity, centered on a diverse set of practices, habits, and beliefs—from the new habit of going on pilgrimages to a renewed reverence for the figure of the Virgin Mary to a commitment to ultramontanism.Footnote 17 Taken together, these initiatives had “the broader goal of reanchoring Roman Catholicism as the preeminent transnational religion of continental Europe,” a “civilization” of which Catholics across Europe knew themselves to be members.Footnote 18 But history compelled Catholics in parts of East Central Europe (and also in Spain) to see their place not only squarely within, but also at the edge or limit of, Europe's Christian civilization. During the intensely ideological 1930s, historical memories of a mission to protect Christendom against anti-Christian belief resonated powerfully in many different national contexts. Hungary was one important example, especially since the idea that Hungarian society stood on the edge between East and West and looked both ways was so deeply ingrained in debates about national identity.Footnote 19
It is important to remember, however, that placing Hungary within the Christian West did not mean that Hungarian Catholics were necessarily associating themselves with any idea of Western political modernity. Catholics in interwar Hungary, like many Catholics throughout Europe at the time, remained suspicious of liberalism and the even greater dangers that it could breed. Instead, they extolled the Occident as the place where essential cultural traditions—a core European identity—had come into being. Hungarians, they argued, belonged to the West in this sense. The long struggle against Ottoman Islam had left Hungarians with a strong sense of their role as a bulwark on the marches of Europe. This feeling strongly colored historical writing on the Ottoman period and the Counter Reformation that followed.
A 1940 essay about Péter Pázmány by Sándor Sík, the Catholic intellectual (and Piarist father), captures these several meanings of civilization well. Cardinal Pázmány was the towering figure of the Hungarian Counter Reformation. During his life, he worked tirelessly to reestablish Catholicism as the preeminent Christian faith in Hungary, persuading many noble families to abandon Protestantism and founding important schools and universities to help propagate the faith. For this, as Sík noted, Pázmány gained a reputation, especially in the nineteenth century, as the “blind tool” of the Habsburgs. But Sík argued that Pázmány had, in fact, been more a more complex figure. Throughout his life, Pázmány's efforts to reconstruct Catholic culture had been driven by one goal: to rescue Hungary for European (Roman Catholic) Christendom. Pázmány had known that the Islamic Ottomans had always posed the greatest threat to Hungary:
The great, the fatal, the ever-returning nightmare was still the Turkish danger. The fact of occupation, the fate of the poor Hungarians who had fallen under Turkish rule, who were exploited, who were deprived of their priests and their churches: this was the thing that Pázmány could not resign himself to. The pagan power always lurking in military readiness across the borders, which could strike the country at any minute, to seize new cities, to subjugate new Magyar masses, this was the constant danger, which cast a shadow on the Hungarian horizon.Footnote 20
Faced with this menace, Pázmány may have been zealous. But it was missionary zeal in the service of Christian civilization.
The great Catholic historian, Gyula Szekfű, also interpreted the Counter Reformation as a chapter in the story of Hungary's national mission on the borderlands of Christendom. In his grand syntheses and historiographical essays, he was always willing to concede the many contributions that Protestants had made. But he nonetheless suggested that Catholicism had kept Hungary anchored within Europe in ways and to a degree that Protestantism had not:
Old Hungarian memories and impressions of the miseries of the Turkish campaigns, refreshed daily, together produced the historical philosophy of the Regnum Marianum (i.e., Hungary as a kingdom dedicated to the Virgin Mary), which alongside its Catholic character, postulated an integral Great Hungary led back to its old borders, under the leadership of the crowned king and his ancient patron, the Virgin of the Hungarians.Footnote 21
By dedicating their nation to the Virgin Mary, Hungarians had received the spiritual strength to endure the sufferings of Ottoman occupation and then to reconquer their home for Christianity. Under Ottoman rule, Hungary had been a divided and vanquished kingdom. Under the banner of (Catholic) Christendom, Hungary had been liberated and reunified. The implications for the post-World War I/post-Trianon present were obvious.
But returning Hungary to Christendom was always about more than national restoration. The Jesuit father László Vargha made the ideological connections between the past and present more pointedly in a speech to the 1936 Hungarian Catholic Congress, which was dedicated to the theme of church and village. In his address, Vargha also invoked the post-Ottoman restoration, while being even more explicit about the connections between that past disaster and the moral and spiritual dangers facing Hungarians in the present. “As the Church justifiably [and] with proud self-confidence remembers how powerfully it did its share long ago in the work of restoring our country, we must not forget that a new occupation [hódoltság—the word generally used to describe the period of Turkish rule] burdens us.” He went on, “the pagan revolution that rages all around us denies redemption and poses as the only messiah.”Footnote 22 Bolshevism, which Vargha described in the same speech as “our greatest enemy,” was a threat to Christian civilization in Hungary in the 1930s every bit as great as the Ottoman occupation had been centuries earlier. Only the Catholic Church could confidently oppose a false political religion with true faith.
As the ideological climate in 1930s Europe grew more heated, the Vatican embraced Father Vargha's reading of Hungary's Ottoman past. The Ottomans had threatened Hungary and all Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; now, however, the threat to Christendom came from a different anti-Christian faith—Communism. In 1938, Europe's Catholics made this argument explicitly. In that year, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli represented the Vatican at the thirty-fourth International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest. For several days, Catholics from all over the world gathered in the Hungarian capital city to take part in mass confessions, listen to inspirational addresses, march in parades, see the sights, and, it was hoped, renew their faith.
As the official representative of Pope Pius XI (whom he would succeed as pontiff within twelve months), Cardinal Pacelli enjoyed center stage at the festivities. In his address to the assembled faithful, Pacelli searched for words and symbols to capture both the international and national dimension of the occasion. He found them in the history of the Hungarian Church's struggle against the Ottoman Turkish armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He suggested that the struggle of the church against paganism in the seventeenth century held symbolic value for Europe today. Pacelli spoke passionately about the “invincible courage of the Hungarian armies” that defended Christian civilization against the “proud crescent” of Islam. Their deeds might inspire the present generation to “defend the [Catholic] church and Christian civilization against the leaders of religious negation and of social revolution by opposing them, as did Hungary of the seventeenth century ‘acies ordinata,’ a united front resolved that no force should break it.”Footnote 23
By the late 1930s, some European Catholics had begun to ask whether this language of civilizational defense could not be more broadly anti-totalitarian (and hence anti-Nazi). During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, calls to defend the Christian Occident and its values were fundamental to Western Europe's (and especially West Germany's) political culture. But the main thrust of this rhetoric was always anti-Communist, both before and after World War II. The future Pope Pius XII's address to the faithful assembled in Hungary in 1938 repeated themes of Catholic anti-Communist politics that were articulated in other national contexts across 1930s Europe. In Spain, the poet José María Pemán explained the Catholic nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War in a 1936 radio broadcast over Radio Sevilla. He also linked the Communist threat to the Islamic menace of an earlier age:
Spain's providential and historical mission has always been this: to redeem the civilized world from all its perils: to expel Arabs, arrest Turks, baptize Indians, turn its energies toward East and West, towards Lepanto or the New World. . . . Now new Turks and new Red, cruel Asiatics are threatening Europe again. . . . Spain . . . again stands up to them and saves and redeems civilization. One day the world will understand this and thank Spain for it.Footnote 24
And in Austria, Catholics invoked the same connection between Islam and Communism to warn their compatriots of the danger that interwar Austria's strong Socialist Party and its Austro-Marxist leaders like Otto Bauer posed to European civilization. Austrian Catholics raised the specter of a “new storm from the East” with special emphasis at festivals to commemorate the defeat of the Ottoman armies at the gates of Vienna in 1683. At the 1933 Catholic Congress in Vienna, organizers published a ceremonial hymn to Mary that read in part: “From the East, a new storm threatens the holiest treasures of the Occident. And so Austria's people prays to you . . . Mary the Protector . . . defend your Catholic Austria.”Footnote 25 Given this context, Pacelli's comments to Catholics in Hungary gave Hungarians a clear and important role in a battle being fought across Europe for the definition of European civilization.
This “clash of civilizations” rhetoric inspired young priests like József Pehm (after 1945, József Mindszenty) to see their local parish work within a global defense of the West. In his memoirs, Cardinal Mindszenty recalled that, when he was a young priest, he had studied the history of the Counter Reformation in his own diocese extensively and had even written a biography of Bishop Márton Padányi Biró, one of the more intransigent defenders of the church in that period.Footnote 26 “What I learned in the course of my research about the reconstruction after the Turkish occupation proved highly suggestive to me in my own work. I felt I had been summoned, after one hundred and fifty years, to launch a comparable campaign of reconstruction, first in Zalaegerszeg; and then … in Zala County.”Footnote 27 This inspiration stayed with him throughout his career and helped him to find meaning in the harsh anticlerical policies of the post-1945 Communist Party.
The church faced martyrdom, Mindszenty maintained, just as it had under the Ottomans. “We are compelled to descend into the catacombs and to speak to you as the Church did four hundred and fifty years ago, during the Turkish oppression. We do not, however, give up the struggle for freedom and the independence of the church.”Footnote 28 Mindszenty, like Eugenio Pacelli who was now Pope Pius XII, believed that anti-Christian forces threatened European civilization with destruction. Communism and Christian Europe were irreconcilable systems of faith. In a dark time, Mindszenty found comfort in the history of Hungary's struggle against the Ottoman menace, much as Cardinal Pacelli had done at the Eucharistic Congress. Hungary, and with it Western Christendom, had survived Islam. For that very reason, he believed that it would survive Communism too.
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On 4 October 1948, József Cardinal Mindszenty preached a sermon for the rosary feast in front of 35,000 Catholic faithful. He began by reminding his congregation of the origins of the feast day that they were celebrating: the victory of Europe's Christian states over the Ottoman Turkish fleet at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. This great victory in the struggle of universal Christendom against the infidel enemy recalled to Mindszenty a second, more particularly Hungarian parallel: the victory of Habsburg forces over the Ottoman Turkish enemy at the battle of Temesvár in 1716. “Hungarian history recalls too such a rosary victory—the Hungarian Christians won it over the Turks in 1716 at Temesvár.” Both military victories represented moments when Europeans had repelled a force seen at the time, and ever after, as hostile to Christian civilization.
But Mindszenty did not intend his sermon to be simply a history lesson about famous victories over the Ottoman Empire. These victories were, first and foremost, victories of faith. For Mindszenty, they recalled a time when Europeans had consciously embraced and defended Europe's Christian identity. In his sermon, the Cardinal reminded his audience that Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great Habsburg general who had won the victory at Temesvár, had been “a man of prayer” and that “praying Hungary was a stronghold of Christianity in those days.” In their centuries-long struggle against the Ottoman Empire, Europe's nations had found cultural unity and clear moral purpose in the face of a powerful enemy.Footnote 1
In 1948, the enemy was, of course, Communism. As Hungary's Communist Party began to consolidate its power, its leaders targeted the Roman Catholic Church as its greatest ideological enemy.Footnote 2 Party propagandists denounced the church as an instrument of Fascism. Priests and lay church leaders were arrested on trumped-up charges of conspiracy. (Mindszenty himself would be arrested and imprisoned on false charges in 1949.) The police also took steps to destroy the church's civic associations. In 1948, the Party trained its eyes on the country's broad network of church-run primary and secondary schools, a crucial source of the Catholic Church's cultural power. Mindszenty responded by mobilizing Catholic Hungarians with a symbolic weapon. He declared the months between August 1947 and December 1948 the Year of the Blessed Virgin. Under the banner of the Marian year, Hungarian Catholics planned mass sermons, parades, marches, and festivities—all to demonstrate opposition to the Communist assault on religion and religious institutions. Cardinal Mindszenty's sermon for the rosary feast was one event in this larger symbolic campaign, which he described as “…not a warlike force directed against man—no! it is a force for man's welfare and sanctification.” Disingenuous protestations aside, Mindszenty's purpose was clear. In the face of Communist efforts to claim total control over public space in Hungary, the Catholic Church would be a bastion that stood, resolutely and defiantly, in defense of the Christian moral order in Hungary.
It was no accident that Cardinal Mindszenty turned to the Ottoman Empire and to Islam for a symbol powerful enough to convey the sense of threat that he felt. In a very real and literal sense, Cardinal Mindszenty understood himself to be at the center of a clash of civilizations. As Talal Asad has argued, Islam has symbolized (and continues to symbolize) a clear line between ideas of “European civilization” and that civilization's Other. Islam represents an “attempt to destroy Europe's civilization from outside.” But it also suggests the “corrupting moral environment that Europe must continuously struggle to overcome from within.”Footnote 3 Invoking past battles with the Ottoman Empire, Mindszenty associated Communism with this well-established rhetoric of a civilization besieged. To Mindszenty, it was clear that Communism was a foreign ideology. That Communism enjoyed an undeniable place within European intellectual history was irrelevant. Communism as a political system returned to Hungary with the Red Army in the last months of World War II and had been imposed by commissars of Jewish origin (Mátyás Rákosi, etc.) whose Hungarian identity Mindszenty certainly doubted. Invoking the Ottoman threat also gave political significance to Mindszenty's call for moral renewal and a Marian year. After 1945, the Catholic Church throughout Europe maintained that Europeans were so vulnerable to totalitarian ideologies because they had abandoned Christianity in favor of a modern faith in materialism and individualism.Footnote 4 Secularization had corrupted Europe's moral environment and had left it vulnerable to an ideological attack. Unless they clearly affirmed their Christian identity as their forebears had in battle against the Ottomans and Islam, Europeans would be too demoralized to withstand the Communist assault.
Cardinal Mindszenty did not invent these associations. The ideological links among Communism, Islam, and the decline of European civilization had already been forged during the years after World War I. Across Europe, these anxieties found a rich variety of expression, not all of them so explicitly Christian as Cardinal Mindszenty's sermon. However, Catholic fears for European civilization were especially influential and politically powerful, precisely because many Europeans found in Catholicism and in the Catholic Church a potent blend of national and transnational identities so suited to an age of ideological extremes. This essay will examine these issues in one particular national context: Hungary. In the years after 1918, Hungarians began to equate historical Islam with a modern political religion: Communism. They did this by interpreting the Ottoman Empire as an ideological threat to their nation and to Europe.
Turks, Turanism, and the Problem with Islam
At the decisive battle of Mohács (1526), Ottoman forces routed the Hungarian armies and broke apart the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. During the fighting, the Hungarian king, Lajos II, was killed. Because he died childless, the Hungarian crown passed (after some dispute) to the Habsburg dynasty, a fact of tremendous importance later. In the decades following the battle, however, the victorious Ottomans occupied central and southern Hungary and divided the region into administrative units. In the east, the Ottomans granted a large measure of autonomy to Transylvania, a historic province in eastern Hungary, and allowed Hungarian princes to rule there. In the north and west, the Austrian Habsburgs held on to a tiny sliver of Hungarian Crownlands. For more than 150 years, Hungary was hence divided into three parts. Ottoman control in East Central Europe only began to erode in the 1680s. In 1683, a Christian alliance commanded by the Polish King Jan III Sobieski turned back an Ottoman invasion of Central Europe at the gates of Vienna. In the years that followed, Habsburg forces began to push south and east. They captured Buda (the capital of Hungary) in 1686 and pushed Ottoman forces all the way to Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci, in present-day Serbia) before signing a treaty with the Ottoman Empire in 1699. The historic Kingdom of Hungary was again free of Ottoman domination. But it was also firmly within the orbit of the Habsburg dynasty in Vienna, a fact formally acknowledged in 1687 when the Hungarian diet granted the Habsburgs the right of male succession.
Ever after, Hungarians lamented Mohács as a national catastrophe, not least because it marked the loss of Hungarian sovereignty for centuries. At the same time, exploits of anti-Ottoman resistance were held up as examples of exceptional national heroism. The seventeenth-century epic poem, The Peril of Sziget (Szigeti veszedelem) is one outstanding example. In it, Miklós Zrinyi celebrated his great-grandfather (also named Miklós Zrinyi), who defended the southern Hungarian city of Szigetvár against the onslaught of a much larger Ottoman army commanded by the sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. The siege inevitably ended with complete Hungarian defeat, but not before Zrinyi led a doomed but stirring charge out of the city gates and into the face of the Ottoman army. Only seven Hungarians survived, and the charge became legend, an iconic moment celebrated again and again in nationalist art and literature. During the nineteenth century, nationalists mined the Ottoman past even more deeply for rousing stories of great deeds, triumphant national heroes, and tragic stories of great national sacrifice. Géza Gárdonyi's stirring novel, The Stars of Eger (Egri csillagok), published in 1899, is perhaps the most widely known effort, read by schoolchildren in Hungary (and nonnative speakers of any age trying to learn Hungarian). Gyula Benczur's monumental 1896 painting, The Recapture of Buda Castle from the Turks, which hangs in Hungary's National Gallery, is another well-known example.
However, the clash between East and West and the memory of the Ottoman occupation in Hungary was no straightforward case of Orientalism. Hungarians celebrated their ancestors' heroic resistance against the Ottoman armies of the Orient. But most also accepted the existence of a common heritage with, and distant ethnic ties to, Turkic peoples in Anatolia and Central Asia. As a group, the Magyars (ethnic Hungarians) had arrived in Europe from the Central Asian steppes sometime in the 800s CE. This late arrival into the Eastern European Carpathian Basin explains the utter dissimilarity between Hungarian and any other language spoken in the region. Throughout the nineteenth century, linguists, ethnographers, and archaeologists studied the pre-European Magyar past. They confirmed and documented the connections between Magyars and the other Finno-Ugric communities (Finns, Estonians, and a number of less well-known ethnic groups in Siberia, such as the Komi and the Udmurt). But many also insisted that the Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples were related within an even larger category: the Turanic linguistic group. (Historical linguists no longer find this theory credible, although early ethnocultural links between ethnic Magyars and other Turkic tribes are accepted.) Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, many Hungarians believed that they, along with the Turks, were prominent members of a huge family of ethnicities that spanned Eurasia and numbered in the many millions.
This idea was known as Turanism (from the ancient Persian name for Central Asia—Tūrān), and it gave a particular flavor to Hungarian Orientalist art in the late nineteenth century. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Hungarian architects and artists experimented with Near Eastern styles and motifs in building design, historical commemoration, and literature as a way to capture the exotic, the strange, and the sensual. At the same time, however, Turanism made these experiments a means by which Hungarian artists could also—paradoxically—explore that which was most familiar: the deeply rooted ethnocultural memory lying at the heart of the national “self.”Footnote 5 No one did more to popularize the idea that the origins of the Magyar self were to be found in the East than the renowned linguist and Orientalist, Ármin Vámbéry. Born into a poor Jewish family, Vámbéry became an exceptional linguist, a widely read author of Central Asian travelogues, and an international expert on the East. In numerous books, he developed the idea that Magyars shared common ancestors with a number of fierce nomadic warrior tribes in Asia, including the Turks.Footnote 6
Vámbéry also joined a diverse group of scholars, public intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians who wanted to bring Turanism into the mainstream of Hungarian politics. In the early years of the twentieth century, enthusiasts for Turanism formed a number of cultural organizations to promote the connections among Magyars, Turks, and other Central Asian, supposedly Turanian, peoples. The most important was the Turanian Society, established in 1910. Some of its leading members were serious intellects, like Vámbéry or Ignác Goldziher, the Jewish Hungarian scholar of Islam, whose books still stand among the foundational works of Islamic studies as a field. Others were economists and businessmen, who saw in Turanism a rationale for the vigorous promotion of Hungarian business interests in the Near East. Still others took chauvinistic pride in an idea that placed ethnic Magyars at the head of a family of peoples who numbered in the millions.
During World War I, scholarly curiosity took a backseat to political and economic ambitions. In these years, members of the Turanian Society invoked the idea of a Eurasian community of peoples that included Magyars, Turks, Albanians, Bulgars, and many Central Asians as a kind of counterweight to German imperialist dreams of Mitteleuropa. These ambitions did produce real attempts at Hungarian–Turkish cultural exchange, however modest they may have been in practice. In 1916, some two hundred Turkish students received scholarships to study in Hungary. There were also Hungarian-Turkish friendship societies in Budapest and Istanbul that organized a variety of cultural programs.Footnote 7
Although some of its first and best proponents were Hungarian Jews, the Turanian idea became increasingly associated with radical right-wing nationalism during World War I.Footnote 8 After 1918, key figures in the Turanist societies embraced counterrevolutionary politics. Because the French, British, and U.S. governments had agreed to partition Hungary in 1920, despite vehement Hungarian protests, many Turanists, as well as other radical nationalists, saw the search for ethnic origins in the East—on the steppes of Central Asia—as a way to reject Western liberalism completely. Turanism easily became an argument for racism and racial purity, as well. Throughout the interwar years, Turanic symbols—pagan warriors on horseback, roaming the Asian steppes in search of helpless villages to conquer—were constant elements in the symbolism and rhetoric that extreme right-wing groups employed. By the late 1930s, the most vocal enthusiasts for Turanism were also Fascists.
However, the Turanian idea never led any Hungarian nationalist, whether conservative or radical, to find inspiration in the grandeur or military exploits of Suleiman the Magnificent or any other Ottoman Turkish figure. Many Hungarians saw Turks as some sort of ethnic cousin. Some prominent Hungarians also thought well of Kemal Ataturk's newly established Turkish state because of its modernizing zeal and strongly nationalist politics. Hungary and Turkey enjoyed excellent diplomatic relations throughout the interwar years. But these affinities lay in the ancient past or in the post-World War I present. Islam—the religion of the Ottoman Empire for centuries—remained ever and always the faith that had inspired the nation's enemies at Mohács. On this point, conservatives and right-wing radicals in Hungary could agree.
To clarify the difference between Turks as a people and Islam as a religion, Catholic intellectuals promoted a vision of Islam as an ideology. This fit into a pattern, already well established at the turn of the twentieth century, of seeing European society torn between competing worldviews like faith and disbelief or Christianity and socialism. For example, one of the most prominent Hungarian Catholics, Bishop Ottokár Prohászka, wrote a 1903 book in which he compared Catholicism to socialism; in the title of his book, he called Catholicism the “triumphant worldview.”Footnote 9 He developed his ideological critique of socialism in 1918 in a book he called Culture and Terror. There he denounced socialists for permitting no debate about core issues such as secularism or materialism. So incensed was Prohászka by the thought of dogmatic socialists (fundamentalists?) coercing people to submit to certain beliefs that he condemned socialism itself as a “new Islam.”Footnote 10
Catholic writers popularized this view throughout the interwar years, presenting Islam, like socialism, as a set of mobilizing doctrines that are imposed on a society, rather than a shifting set of meanings and practices that are interpreted and lived by each believer. One journalist put it this way: “Public opinion . . . identifies Turks and Mohammedans without analysis, but the two are not the same and already at the beginning of the century the emerging Young Turk movement recognized that Mohammedanism was an alien force that corrupted and poisoned to the marrow the whole of the Turkish soul and ancient ethnicity…”Footnote 11 In other words, Turks had succumbed to Islam (here, Mohammedanism) as a “force” because they had been too weak to resist it. The consequences for their ethnic identity had been disastrous. This interpretation of Islam made the Ottoman conquest a powerful symbol in interwar Hungary.
Ottoman Occupation, Demographic Crisis, and the Demoralization of a Civilization
Interwar Hungary was a society haunted by the specter of national death. At the end of World War I, vast areas of Hungarian territory were occupied by the armies of Romania and the newly formed states of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of the South Slavs (Yugoslavia). Despite the frantic pleas of Hungarian diplomats at the peace talks in Paris, this de facto partition of Hungary became international law. In 1920, the Hungarian government was forced to sign the Treaty of Trianon, which formally assigned nearly 70 percent of the prewar Kingdom of Hungary to neighboring states. In addition, revolution shook a society already destabilized by the tremendous flood of refugees fleeing the occupied territories. In March 1919, a Bolshevik regime took power in Hungary. Although the Bolsheviks ruled for only 133 days, they nonetheless frightened Hungary's social elites by calling for radical social and cultural transformation. After Hungary's Republic of Soviets collapsed, a counterrevolutionary government demanded a radical change of course. Hungary, it became commonplace to say, had grown morally and culturally weak, which had made it defenseless against the depredations of foreign powers without and Communist subversives within. In the aftermath of war, revolution, and territorial dismemberment, Hungary had to embrace an ideology of “Christian nationalism,” or else face national extinction.Footnote 12
Historical memories of Ottoman occupation brought these fears into focus. As Hungarians struggled to understand what had happened to their country, historians studied the legacy of the only catastrophe that seemed comparable. The picture that they painted was devastating. When the Ottomans had advanced in the 1500s, whole communities abandoned their homes and fields to flee northwards. For more than a century, empty villages and empty parishes dotted the region south of Budapest. Historians argued that the collapse of agriculture in the region changed the ecology, as the grasslands of the great plain spread south and west. They also argued that the occupation changed the demographic makeup of the region permanently, with decisive negative consequences for twentieth-century Hungary. When inhabitants finally began to trickle back into the zone of occupation, Magyar-speakers, once the overwhelming majority, were joined by Orthodox Christians (understood in the twentieth century as ethnic Serbs) from the south. After the expulsion of the Turks from Hungary, German-speaking settlers from other parts of the Habsburg lands also came. To interwar scholars, the result was clear: an area of core ethnic habitation had become an ethnically mixed border region. In addition, they concluded that Ottoman occupation had disrupted the normal growth of Hungary's population. Migration, dislocation, and economic uncertainty had taken its toll on the size of the Magyar nation, and demographers tried to calculate just how many more ethnic Magyars—eight million? ten million? even more?—there would have been without the Ottoman catastrophe.
It is not my intention here to assess the state of current scholarship about the impact of Ottoman rule on Hungary, nor to offer suggestions about how this interpretation might be modified or revised.Footnote 13 I am interested instead in the uses to which this particular historical understanding was put. In a society consumed by fears of national death, the fantastic sums of unborn Hungarians, unverifiable though they were, exerted a powerful talismanic force.
Even before World War I, national ethnographers had observed with alarm the declining birthrates among ethnic Magyars in Hungary. After 1918, when millions of ethnic Hungarians became embattled minorities in neighboring states, anxieties about ethnic collapse intensified. Nationalist groups of all varieties called for the Hungarian state to adopt dramatic and sweeping pronatalist policies. At the same time, declining birthrates were widely interpreted as signs that Hungarian society had become demoralized, that Hungarian women had abandoned all social responsibility, and that the nation had, quite literally, lost its will to live. During the 1930s, debates about how to make good this ethnic loss and how to arrest further declines in the size of the Hungarian nation centered on southern Transdanubia, part of the region that the Ottomans had occupied four hundred years earlier. Discussion focused, in particular, on the custom of Magyar peasants in this region to limit the size of their families and the ethnopolitical impact this would have on the future. Writers and sociographers “discovered” the Magyar village in these years, travelling into the countryside to bring back firsthand accounts of the nation's fortunes in the most isolated parts of southern Hungary. The tales they told of empty Hungarian churches and aging Hungarian families were taken as hair-raising signs of national self-destruction. How could this trend be reversed and this crucial region be saved for Hungary? Throughout the 1930s, Hungarian journals and newspapers were filled with analyses of these issues.Footnote 14
Catholic priests and intellectuals laid special claim to these issues. They insisted that the local ethnic crisis was not simply the result of patterns of property ownership or inheritance laws as social scientists claimed. Instead, they linked the local ethnic crisis to an international moral and ideological struggle for the survival of Christian culture in Europe. The Hungarian village was dying because timeless Christian moral values were eroding. The arrival of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in Hungarian lands had led to catastrophe before. Now, in the twentieth century, the spread of modern creeds such as liberalism, individualism, and, above all, Communism, were leading inexorably to a second national collapse. For this reason, the Counter Reformation that followed the end of Ottoman rule was exemplary because it represented an era when Hungary had been reconquered, re-Christianized, and hence brought back into Europe in a very real sense.
Armed with such a clear historical precedent, Catholic clergy tackled their missionary work in Hungary's poorest and most isolated villages with renewed zeal. During the 1930s, a young generation of Catholic priests and lay activists turned “toward the people,” as the rallying cry of the time put it. They tried especially hard to organize rural youth, especially young men, into Catholic civic associations that could combine religious and moral instruction with practical and technical education.Footnote 15 The Catholic young men's educational association (KALOT) established popular high schools, which became an important educational opportunity for rural Hungarians who had previously been denied access to any but the most rudimentary instruction. As a social program, these schools were designed to transform Hungary's peasants into a modern national society. But Catholic activists also hoped to keep Hungary's poorest rural laborers from turning to social movements or embracing cultural trends whose moral vision was dramatically at odds with that of the Catholic Church.
In the handbook that they distributed to the members, the leaders of KALOT explained the connections between the post-Ottoman Counter Reformation and their own missionary activities in some detail:
Without a doubt, the last great cultural influence, which decisively shaped the life-form of the Magyar village and which re-founded the culture of our villages after centuries of Turkish devastation: the spirit of the Hungarian baroque. Since the middle ages there has been no trend which would play a greater role in the formation of the spiritual picture of our Catholic villages, than the baroque culture of the 17th-18th centuries. The idea of mission, which is the basis of any kind of village work, has not burnt as brightly since then in any another cultural movement than it had in the current of the Catholic restoration.Footnote 16
Expelling the Turks from the land had been only the start of a much deeper campaign to purge Hungarian society of the influences of Islamic rule and to reestablish Hungary's place within Christendom. Elsewhere, the Counter Reformation may have been part of an intra-European war of religion. In Hungary, on the border of Christendom, it was a necessary battle to restore Christian civilization.
Islam, Communism, and Christian Civilization
Hungarian Catholics interpreted the Counter Reformation in their country as a time when Christian civilization was both restored from within and defended against hostile outside forces. Their idea of “Christian civilization” should be understood in several ways. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, Hungarian Catholics had taken part in the construction of a transnational (Catholic) Christian European identity, centered on a diverse set of practices, habits, and beliefs—from the new habit of going on pilgrimages to a renewed reverence for the figure of the Virgin Mary to a commitment to ultramontanism.Footnote 17 Taken together, these initiatives had “the broader goal of reanchoring Roman Catholicism as the preeminent transnational religion of continental Europe,” a “civilization” of which Catholics across Europe knew themselves to be members.Footnote 18 But history compelled Catholics in parts of East Central Europe (and also in Spain) to see their place not only squarely within, but also at the edge or limit of, Europe's Christian civilization. During the intensely ideological 1930s, historical memories of a mission to protect Christendom against anti-Christian belief resonated powerfully in many different national contexts. Hungary was one important example, especially since the idea that Hungarian society stood on the edge between East and West and looked both ways was so deeply ingrained in debates about national identity.Footnote 19
It is important to remember, however, that placing Hungary within the Christian West did not mean that Hungarian Catholics were necessarily associating themselves with any idea of Western political modernity. Catholics in interwar Hungary, like many Catholics throughout Europe at the time, remained suspicious of liberalism and the even greater dangers that it could breed. Instead, they extolled the Occident as the place where essential cultural traditions—a core European identity—had come into being. Hungarians, they argued, belonged to the West in this sense. The long struggle against Ottoman Islam had left Hungarians with a strong sense of their role as a bulwark on the marches of Europe. This feeling strongly colored historical writing on the Ottoman period and the Counter Reformation that followed.
A 1940 essay about Péter Pázmány by Sándor Sík, the Catholic intellectual (and Piarist father), captures these several meanings of civilization well. Cardinal Pázmány was the towering figure of the Hungarian Counter Reformation. During his life, he worked tirelessly to reestablish Catholicism as the preeminent Christian faith in Hungary, persuading many noble families to abandon Protestantism and founding important schools and universities to help propagate the faith. For this, as Sík noted, Pázmány gained a reputation, especially in the nineteenth century, as the “blind tool” of the Habsburgs. But Sík argued that Pázmány had, in fact, been more a more complex figure. Throughout his life, Pázmány's efforts to reconstruct Catholic culture had been driven by one goal: to rescue Hungary for European (Roman Catholic) Christendom. Pázmány had known that the Islamic Ottomans had always posed the greatest threat to Hungary:
The great, the fatal, the ever-returning nightmare was still the Turkish danger. The fact of occupation, the fate of the poor Hungarians who had fallen under Turkish rule, who were exploited, who were deprived of their priests and their churches: this was the thing that Pázmány could not resign himself to. The pagan power always lurking in military readiness across the borders, which could strike the country at any minute, to seize new cities, to subjugate new Magyar masses, this was the constant danger, which cast a shadow on the Hungarian horizon.Footnote 20
Faced with this menace, Pázmány may have been zealous. But it was missionary zeal in the service of Christian civilization.
The great Catholic historian, Gyula Szekfű, also interpreted the Counter Reformation as a chapter in the story of Hungary's national mission on the borderlands of Christendom. In his grand syntheses and historiographical essays, he was always willing to concede the many contributions that Protestants had made. But he nonetheless suggested that Catholicism had kept Hungary anchored within Europe in ways and to a degree that Protestantism had not:
Old Hungarian memories and impressions of the miseries of the Turkish campaigns, refreshed daily, together produced the historical philosophy of the Regnum Marianum (i.e., Hungary as a kingdom dedicated to the Virgin Mary), which alongside its Catholic character, postulated an integral Great Hungary led back to its old borders, under the leadership of the crowned king and his ancient patron, the Virgin of the Hungarians.Footnote 21
By dedicating their nation to the Virgin Mary, Hungarians had received the spiritual strength to endure the sufferings of Ottoman occupation and then to reconquer their home for Christianity. Under Ottoman rule, Hungary had been a divided and vanquished kingdom. Under the banner of (Catholic) Christendom, Hungary had been liberated and reunified. The implications for the post-World War I/post-Trianon present were obvious.
But returning Hungary to Christendom was always about more than national restoration. The Jesuit father László Vargha made the ideological connections between the past and present more pointedly in a speech to the 1936 Hungarian Catholic Congress, which was dedicated to the theme of church and village. In his address, Vargha also invoked the post-Ottoman restoration, while being even more explicit about the connections between that past disaster and the moral and spiritual dangers facing Hungarians in the present. “As the Church justifiably [and] with proud self-confidence remembers how powerfully it did its share long ago in the work of restoring our country, we must not forget that a new occupation [hódoltság—the word generally used to describe the period of Turkish rule] burdens us.” He went on, “the pagan revolution that rages all around us denies redemption and poses as the only messiah.”Footnote 22 Bolshevism, which Vargha described in the same speech as “our greatest enemy,” was a threat to Christian civilization in Hungary in the 1930s every bit as great as the Ottoman occupation had been centuries earlier. Only the Catholic Church could confidently oppose a false political religion with true faith.
As the ideological climate in 1930s Europe grew more heated, the Vatican embraced Father Vargha's reading of Hungary's Ottoman past. The Ottomans had threatened Hungary and all Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; now, however, the threat to Christendom came from a different anti-Christian faith—Communism. In 1938, Europe's Catholics made this argument explicitly. In that year, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli represented the Vatican at the thirty-fourth International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest. For several days, Catholics from all over the world gathered in the Hungarian capital city to take part in mass confessions, listen to inspirational addresses, march in parades, see the sights, and, it was hoped, renew their faith.
As the official representative of Pope Pius XI (whom he would succeed as pontiff within twelve months), Cardinal Pacelli enjoyed center stage at the festivities. In his address to the assembled faithful, Pacelli searched for words and symbols to capture both the international and national dimension of the occasion. He found them in the history of the Hungarian Church's struggle against the Ottoman Turkish armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He suggested that the struggle of the church against paganism in the seventeenth century held symbolic value for Europe today. Pacelli spoke passionately about the “invincible courage of the Hungarian armies” that defended Christian civilization against the “proud crescent” of Islam. Their deeds might inspire the present generation to “defend the [Catholic] church and Christian civilization against the leaders of religious negation and of social revolution by opposing them, as did Hungary of the seventeenth century ‘acies ordinata,’ a united front resolved that no force should break it.”Footnote 23
By the late 1930s, some European Catholics had begun to ask whether this language of civilizational defense could not be more broadly anti-totalitarian (and hence anti-Nazi). During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, calls to defend the Christian Occident and its values were fundamental to Western Europe's (and especially West Germany's) political culture. But the main thrust of this rhetoric was always anti-Communist, both before and after World War II. The future Pope Pius XII's address to the faithful assembled in Hungary in 1938 repeated themes of Catholic anti-Communist politics that were articulated in other national contexts across 1930s Europe. In Spain, the poet José María Pemán explained the Catholic nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War in a 1936 radio broadcast over Radio Sevilla. He also linked the Communist threat to the Islamic menace of an earlier age:
Spain's providential and historical mission has always been this: to redeem the civilized world from all its perils: to expel Arabs, arrest Turks, baptize Indians, turn its energies toward East and West, towards Lepanto or the New World. . . . Now new Turks and new Red, cruel Asiatics are threatening Europe again. . . . Spain . . . again stands up to them and saves and redeems civilization. One day the world will understand this and thank Spain for it.Footnote 24
And in Austria, Catholics invoked the same connection between Islam and Communism to warn their compatriots of the danger that interwar Austria's strong Socialist Party and its Austro-Marxist leaders like Otto Bauer posed to European civilization. Austrian Catholics raised the specter of a “new storm from the East” with special emphasis at festivals to commemorate the defeat of the Ottoman armies at the gates of Vienna in 1683. At the 1933 Catholic Congress in Vienna, organizers published a ceremonial hymn to Mary that read in part: “From the East, a new storm threatens the holiest treasures of the Occident. And so Austria's people prays to you . . . Mary the Protector . . . defend your Catholic Austria.”Footnote 25 Given this context, Pacelli's comments to Catholics in Hungary gave Hungarians a clear and important role in a battle being fought across Europe for the definition of European civilization.
This “clash of civilizations” rhetoric inspired young priests like József Pehm (after 1945, József Mindszenty) to see their local parish work within a global defense of the West. In his memoirs, Cardinal Mindszenty recalled that, when he was a young priest, he had studied the history of the Counter Reformation in his own diocese extensively and had even written a biography of Bishop Márton Padányi Biró, one of the more intransigent defenders of the church in that period.Footnote 26 “What I learned in the course of my research about the reconstruction after the Turkish occupation proved highly suggestive to me in my own work. I felt I had been summoned, after one hundred and fifty years, to launch a comparable campaign of reconstruction, first in Zalaegerszeg; and then … in Zala County.”Footnote 27 This inspiration stayed with him throughout his career and helped him to find meaning in the harsh anticlerical policies of the post-1945 Communist Party.
The church faced martyrdom, Mindszenty maintained, just as it had under the Ottomans. “We are compelled to descend into the catacombs and to speak to you as the Church did four hundred and fifty years ago, during the Turkish oppression. We do not, however, give up the struggle for freedom and the independence of the church.”Footnote 28 Mindszenty, like Eugenio Pacelli who was now Pope Pius XII, believed that anti-Christian forces threatened European civilization with destruction. Communism and Christian Europe were irreconcilable systems of faith. In a dark time, Mindszenty found comfort in the history of Hungary's struggle against the Ottoman menace, much as Cardinal Pacelli had done at the Eucharistic Congress. Hungary, and with it Western Christendom, had survived Islam. For that very reason, he believed that it would survive Communism too.
Paul Hanebrink is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2007 AAASS conference in New Orleans and at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA) as part of an ongoing project on “The Question of the West.” I am grateful to my fellow panel members in New Orleans, and to the participants in the RCHA project, for their many helpful comments. I would also like to thank Melissa Feinberg and Samuel Moyn for reading and commenting on an early draft of this essay.