The Landed Estates of the Esterhazy Princes: Hungary during the Reforms of Maria Theresia and Joseph II

The Landed Estates of the Esterhazy Princes: Hungary during the Reforms of Maria Theresia and Joseph II by Rebecca Gates-Coon. Baltimore, Maryland, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xxi, 312 pp.

One of the most significant developments in the complex central European political condominium presided over by the Habsburg dynasty during the early modern period was the emergence of a relatively small magnate elite of some two hundred families which dominated the public and economic life of the monarchy. In that portion of the Habsburg commonwealth which comprised the ancient Kingdom of Hungary, one family rose from relative obscurity to primus inter pares within only two generations in the course of the seventeenth century: the Esterhazys (sometimes also spelled as Eszterhizy in Hungarian). The military, administrative and political talents and nuptial acuity of Count Miklos [Nicholaus] (1583-1645) and his son Prince Pal [Paul] (1635-1713) brought the fame and fortune from which it could preserve its status to the last days of the Habsburg empire and beyond. The Esterhazy family consisted of many branches, but it was the princely branch which thereafter was the wealthiest magnate family in Hungary. Yet ironically, by the eighteenth century the Esterhazys had already become military and political mediocrities, who no longer belonged to the inner circle of the monarchy's key decision makers. The two successive heads of the house through most of that century, Prince Pal Antal [Paul Anton] (1711-62) and his brother, Prince Miklos [Nicholaus] "the Magnificent" (1714-90), are remembered outside central Europe nowadays primarily as the patrons of that musical giant, the composer Franz Joseph Haydn.

It is the era of these last two magnates that form the subject matter of Rebecca Gates-Coon's admirable new study. The fact that neither played a particularly prominent role in the political or military history of the Habsburg Monarchy can be regarded as an analytical asset, for the focus of the volume at hand is less the princes themselves than the entire social hierarchy of the princely estates. In this larger social analysis the relatively pedestrian apices of the local social pyramid in fact serve better as prototypal models than might any individual deeply enmeshed in the high politics of the court. Thus Gates-Coon is able to paint a broad and vivid picture of Hungarian estate life in the period from the 1740s to the 1780s and to focus with considerable clarity on the variegated layers of that society, from the symbolically ostentatious life of the princes themselves, through the network of associates, clients, and employees, to the exploited peasantry and other marginal groups such as protected Jewish communities (the so-called Schutzjuden) and unprotected mendicants vagabonds and Gypsies "beyond the pale."

• ISBN 0801847850