Egy új együttműködés kezdete; Az 1622. évi soproni koronázó országgyűlés - Annales Archivi Soproniensis 1. (Sopron-Budapest, 2014)

Az uralkodó és a rendek - Pálffy Géza: Egy elfelejtett kiegyezés a 17. századi magyar történelemben. Az 1622. évi koronázódiéta Sopronban

pálf]y Géza

len’s military campaigns split the estates into two camps, and plunged Hungary into civil war.

After the peace of Nikolsburg (today Mikulov, Czech Republic) between the emperor and the prince in late 1621 the internal and civil war in Hungary was concluded by the compromise at Sopron. After 1608 the leadership of the Habsburg Monarchy and Ferdinand II himself once more made additional significant concessions to the Hungarian estates at the Diet of Sopron in the summer of 1622. These confirmed first and foremost Protestant religious freedom and the positions of the estates in the leadership of the country. In the meantime, the estate structure and administration of the Kingdom of Hungary was also reorganized. Moreover, this occurred in such a way that those who had maintained their loyalty to the ruler and had thus suffered damages at the hands of the prince’s armies were compensated with ranks, offices, lands and other goods. Yet the most influential aristocrats who had gone over to the prince did not endure great losses either. The main sign of this was that the estates elected Szaniszló Thurzó, captain general of the Transylvanian prince attacking the Habsburg Monarchy, as the leading secular high dignitary of the kingdom, the palatine. This demonstrates that Emperor Ferdinand II took a legalistic rather than simply confessional line on constitutional disputes in Hungary in order to secure the dynasty’s rule there.

As a result of several months of negotiations, peace in the Hungarian theatre of war and Hungary’s administration was thus secured in Sopron. Symbolically, even the coronation of Emperor Ferdinand’s second wife, Eleonora Anna Gonzaga, as queen of Hungary in the Franciscan church on the day of St. Anne (July 26) attested to the reconciliation between the court and the estates. The event itself clearly indicated that, compared to July 1618 and August 1620, the world had taken a great turn in Hungary. After the coronation of Ferdinand II in Pozsony, and then Gábor Bethlen’s election as king in Besztercebánya, the wife of the emperor and Hungarian king was accepted by the Hungarian estates as their queen in Sopron. This in itself clearly symbolized that in spite of the substantial loss of territory, the balance between the Viennese court and the Hungarian estates had nevertheless been restored; the overwhelming majority of the estates that had elected Bethlen as their ruler was also present at the event. For the political and military leadership of the Habsburg Monarchy this was of decisive significance, since the loyalty of the estates of the Kingdom of Hungary had been successfully recovered and the peace of the Hungarian bulwark and larder ensured.

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