Századok – 2007
TANULMÁNYOK - Pálffy Géza: A Magyar Királyság a 16. századi Habsburg Monarchiában V/1075
1120 PALFFY GÉZA policy, however, could not be pursued without the cooperation of the Hungarian estates, who continued to enjoy considerable political weight and predominated domestic policies. It must be admitted, though, that because of the court's being moved from Buda to Vienna and later to Prague, and also in consequence of strong centralisation, the Hungarian estates lost many of their late medieval positions. All in all, in the course of the half century following 1526, the Kingdom of Hungary had been degraded from an independent regional power to a mere, but important part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Consequently, it is no exaggeration to speak about one of the most important structural transformations in Hungarian history, especially because the new dualistic structure of state administration, the result of mutual concessions and compromises between the Habsburg Court of Vienna and the Hungarian estates, remained basically unaltered through the 17th and 18 th centuries. The Kingdom of Hungary, although strongly centralised, remained a Ständemonarchie boasting a very strong political elite, thus proving that these two phenomena (the strong centralisation and the strong estates) were in Hungary not mutually exclusive. Members of the Hungarian political elite played a predominant role on both territories.
