Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/yk3jwh75l9
Reflections on the Impossible. The Political Programme of the "Conspiracy" of 1665
Sándor Bene
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Croatian Language and Literature,
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
The paper presents a source in Hungarian, by an unknown author, from the early years of the Zrínyi-Frangepan Conspiracy: The Education for a Good Reflection on Hungary's Ruined State.
The text describes the situation after the Treaty of Vasvár (1664), and then turns to the prospects for possible alliances with nations nearer and further afield (especially the French and the Turks) against the Habsburg oppression. It lists the arguments for and against, and leaves it to the reader to decide which way to go. However, the order in which the questions are posed does suggest an orientation. The only one that does not receive any counter-arguments is the search for a relationship with the German Protestant states.
The first edition of The Education for a Good Reflection, published in 1868, may be seen mainly as an action of the Hungarian opposition of the time. The opposition politician and historian behind the publication, Kálmán Thaly, wanted to warn of the dangers of the Austrian hegemony. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Ágnes R. Várkonyi, disputing the earlier reception, described the document as a new chapter in the Hungarian political culture, which, in addition to religious tolerance, raised the horizon of an anti-Habsburg alliance of the Central European peoples. The Croatian part of The Reflections, mediated by Tadija Smičiklas and Eugen Kumičić, became known to the Croatian public too.
The present study dates the document to the end of the first phase of the Hungarian-Croatian political organisation, at the end of 1665. It concludes that the German political orientation of the Treatise and the German (Lutheran) sources of the religious tolerance ideas also point to István Vitnyédy as a possible author (or at least editor).
Keywords
Wesselényi-Zrínyi-Frangepan Conspiracy; Hungarian-Croatian cooperation; religious tolerance; 19th-century historiography; Eugen Kumičić; ideology of the Party of Right.
Hrčak ID:
316735
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2023.
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