The Hungarian Parliament [antikvár]

TOWARDS THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A MODERN PARLIAMENT In the City Park of Budapest, on a small island, there can be found a blackened bronzé íigure, keeping silence in the depths of his sorrow, amidst the greenery of trees and bushes and the colourful pomp of spring flowers. His right hand, holding a pen, has been worn bright by the hands of children who have clambered up to see his hooded face. Who then was this chronicler, which this fine statue by Miklós Ligeti, has memorialized for more than 90 years? The question cannot be answered. Although many generations have learned the romantic story of the Hungárián Conquest and, with it, the history of the first national assembly and of the traditions of Hungárián constitutionalism, he has kept the secret of his name, for eight centuries. He is known simply as Anonymus, but he is not completely unknown. Modern historical research suggests that he is the chronicler of "the late King Béla of glory and fame", the third Hungárián king of this name. The age in which he lived has been reconstructed after the description of P Magister, as he reflected it to the Conquest by his imagination and skill as a story teller. It is alsó easy to recognize the ideology he served, consciously or not; so too is it easy to identify the institutions from his romantic descriptions and accounts of the structure of the early Hungárián state organisation. Thus Anonymus, in writing about the past, is speaking of his own age, adding to the problems of contemporary historians. But it is an old truth that the deeper we go into the history of Hungárián parliamentarism, the more mirrors are to be found; the beginning, the origin of our national assemblies can hardly be seen in their refraction. "Among the national assemblies held in the new homeland, the most important was the one which was gathered near to Körtvély Laké (at Szer or Pusztaszer) before completing the Conquest under the leadership of Árpád" says Gedeon Ladányi, in his 19th century work on constitutional history. "From the few words of the notary Anonymus, we may reliably conclude that the basic outlines of the state structure of the new homeland were decided upon during this meeting. But, we must remember that we are investigating how it was seen a hundred years ago, based on an account written seven hundred years ago, which purpoted to describe how Hungárián constitutionalism developed two hundred years before Anonymus. Today it has been established that, though the walls of the monastery from the Árpád Age, built on the lands of the Bár-Kalán clan, have outlasted various memorials built for the millennial festivities, an assembly of Árpád's people could hardly have been held in this site. In discussing legislation and land grants, Anonymus says: "...the place where all these things were managed, named by the Hungarians in their own language Szeri, because the szer of the whole country was done there." It is highly probable that, as in many other cases, the name of the place (here the word szer, meaning order or row in old Hungárián) inspired the chronicler's imagination in his historical reconstruction. But this is more than the play of fantasy. When reading this account about the "seven princely men" and their compact sealed in blood, we are, in fact, learning about the participation of the lords in governing the country at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Recent scholarly reconstruction shows that it is probable that the example Anonymus had in mind when he high lighted a single event which brought the Hungárián state into existence, was the compact of the Lombardian cities against Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Román Emperor. Thus careful analysis of Anonymous refutes the widespread legend of the Blood Compact "by which the basis of such a constitution was laid down, that no nation in Europe had any better" as Gedeon Ladányi says. At the same time philology shows that those Hungarians who studied at the best known universities of the West, used the re-discovered Román and canon law, to help solve various political and ideological problems. It was hardly by chance that such phrasing and vocabulary turnéd up in the rich record left by writers and charter sources in thirteenth century Hungary; all over Europe this new phrasing reflects a radical though gradually introduced change in the political relations of feudalism. The consequent use of terms, the stylistic coherence of the context, comparison of similar text-places, the chronicles, the gestae and archeological excavations along with the data derived from them, show the process of the early development of parliamentarism in Hungary - in full and in detail, on the basis of data which can be compared to the parts of a mosaic. From its beginnings, it is a well known and registered fact that parliament is an institution through which the sejf-determination of the modern citizen is assured. This institution developed from those meetings in which the privileged inhabitants of the early feudal kingdoms strove both to support and to limit the power of the king. The essential background to these struggles was that the rulers of the early feudal kingdoms, which arose from the ruins of the Román empire, had to be the embodiments of sovereign power, even though - ac-