Three Days in Budapest

Isabella (1519-1559), Queen of Hungary, attributed to workshop of Lucas Cranach

        This month, I attended a conference in Budapest, to mark the 500^th anniversary of the birth of Isabella (1519-59), a Polish-Italian princess and Queen of Hungary. In spite of the tsunami of books and novels on Renaissance queens in recent years, Isabella’s dramatic life is still surprisingly little-known outside Hungary itself. Raised at the Cracow court at the height of the Polish Renaissance, Isabella travelled south in 1539 to marry King John of Hungary: only to find herself, just 18 months later, widowed, with a new-born son, and an Ottoman army led by Sultan Suleiman I surrounding her capital of Buda. Via many twists and turns, she came to rule the new principality of Transylvania for her son, as the Sultan’s vassal.

 

            Isabella was a highly international 16^th-century figure, continually crossing borders, and this conference, organised by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, also involved much border crossing, with speakers from Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Finland and the UK. Isabella has fallen between the cracks of different national scholarships, but an international conference like this can start to put the pieces back together. Attending the conference programme put together by Dr. Terez Oborni and Dr. Agnes Mate was like watching a new biography of Isabella write itself in real time – as chapter after chapter of her life unfolded before us, reconstructed by experts from sources and archives all over Europe. In the ornate halls of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences headquarters, a 19C academic palace on the banks of the Danube, we spent two days conjuring up Isabella’s Hungary, where great geopolitical and cultural forces clashed in the mid-16C – surrounded by paintings of medieval castles, and listening to a performance of 16C Central European music on period instruments by the Musica Historia group.

It was hard, during this wonderful conference, not to notice also the modern-day political forces at work around us. The conference coincided with an international dispute over a new poster-campaign by the Hungarian government: the posters in question, showing George Soros with Jean-Claude Juncker, were prominent all over Budapest during our stay. The conference also took place during a serious crisis for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, our hosts – the Hungarian government is poised to close or take direct control of its network of excellent research institutes, a move which has drawn international protest, including from the UK’s British Academy, as an assault on the fundamental principle of academic freedom. Staff of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have appealed for international support. Hungarian historian colleagues and friends now find themselves on the front line of this dispute, their research projects, jobs and careers suddenly uncertain. Historians are a tellingly early focus for populist regimes – as we see in clashes over the Poland’s Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the Polish Jewish Museum (Polin) in Warsaw, and now in Hungary.

In the 30 years since 1989, we have made real progress in integrating the rich history of Central Europe into our wider histories of Europe, after decades of intellectual separation in the Cold War. Scholars working in Budapest have been key to this – both those at the Central European University (also now under sustained and grave governmental attack), and at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who have written reams of excellent work, opening up their country’s past to international audiences. Back in Oxford tutorials, my students sat grim-faced as I explained how historians were under government pressure in Hungary, certain areas of teaching banned, and that we should seize in both hands the intellectual freedoms we have. EU expansion, migration and the Brexit crisis have, I hope, by now given the lie to Chamberlains’ infamous words of British indifference to Central Europe in 1939:  we can no longer say that this is ‘a faraway country of [whose people] we know nothing’. As Isabella, the half-Italian queen of Hungary shows, the history of Central Europe is the history of Western Europe, in the Renaissance, 20C, and today alike.