Századok – 2011

KÖZLEMÉNYEK - Ballabás Dániel: Főnemesi rangemelések Magyarországon a dualizmus korában V/1215

1244 BALLABÁS DÁNIEL THE DONATION OF ARISTOCRATIC TITLES IN HUNGARY IN THE AGE OF THE DUAL MONARCHY by Dániel Ballabás (Summary) Hungarian historiography has so far dealt quite harshly with the Hungarian aristocracy of the period between 1848 and 1918. Whereas in the Horthy era those who had a word in this subject mainly aimed at judging their own contemporaries, after the war the aristocracy as such was deemed to remain outside the so-called Socialist society, and thus the research of their forbears was anything but a desired topic for the historians. Consequently, we are presently not only in need of basic research, but our existing knowledge also calls for refinement and frequently reassessment. The aim and result of the present research was accordingly to establish a database, upon the basis of which it would be possible to tell with relative certainty in any given year within the period between 1848 and 1918 the number of families the Hungarian aristocracy in a legal sense consisted of, and which these families were. In the present paper we have briefly outlined the inner structure of the aristocracy at the beginning and the end of the researched period, and have also examined the donations of aristocratic titles in the course of the entire period from three different viewpoints. At first we have analysed the mechanism of title donations, then examined their chronological distribution, and finally focussed on the persons themselves who obtained aristocratic titles. Among the latter we tried to distinguish persons of old nobility with a courtly tradition from the parvenus freshly promoted during the dual Monarchy, and also the aristocrats of Jewish origins from the rest - in all cases giving the number and proportion of the persons belonging to each category, and depicting the course of their rise in titles. The present paper will hopefully contribute to the emergence of a more differentiated view of the history of the Hungarian aristocracy in the period between 1848 and 1918 than the one still at hand.