The Wine and the Soldiers A Microhistory of Hungary, 1761–1799

List of Figures

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Currency and measures

 

Chapter 1: ‘Fit to be a Soldier’: The Fiscal-Military State and the Local Community

The Gloomy Widow

Noblemen and Peasants

The Squire’s Wine and the Miller’s Wife

Subjects: Useful and Disposable

Macaroni and Community

 

Chapter 2: The Wanderings of Panna Rósa

Mobility in the Ancien Régime

The Mobility of Peasants, the Freedom of Women

Question Marks and Parallels

To Ladakh or to Zagreb

 

Chapter 3: ‘Let them cane you!’

Babócsa and its Squires

Wine, Money, and the Postal Service

The Attorney’s Career and the Postmaster’s Honour

Noblemen with and without Charters

Michael Kolhaas in Transylvania and in Babócsa

 

Chapter 4: Who’s Afraid of Anna Rósa?

Women’s Afflictions

Women’s Rights

Women in Court and on Tax Lists

Women in Last Wills and Divisions of Property

Women Proprietors in Judicial Practice and Jurisprudence

The Return of Panna Rósa?

Murder in Rigács

The Noble Family

 

Chapter 5: The Miller’s Fortune

Robbery, Murder, and Criminal Justice

A Jesuit in the Bakony Hills?

Menocchio in Inota

The Squire, the Bishop, and the Accumulation of Capital

Jura regalia minora

 

Chapter 6: Enlightenment in the Melon Field?

The Responsibility of Sowing Melon Seeds

The Background of a Conflict

Back to the ‘Black Lands’

Enlightenment in Vienna and Bercel

György Bessenyei, Pierre-Simon de Laplace and a Nineteenth-Century Enlightenment

 

Epilogue: A Toothless Crocodile?

The Uses of Microhistory and Hungary in the Ancien Régime

The Economic System I: Grains and Mills

The Economic System II: The Army as Consumer and the Peasants’ Money

The Army I: Recruits and Deserters

The Army II: The Return of János Koszer

Society I: Pitchfork, Sword, Pickaxe

Society II: Herrschaft mit Bauern

 

Bibliography

Index

Biography

István M. Szijártó is Professor of History at Eötvös University, Budapest. His research focuses on the history of the Hungarian Diet in the eighteenth century and on microhistory. His publications in English include Estates and Constitution. The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (2020) and, with Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (2013). Together with Wim Blockmans and László Kontler, he co-edited Parliamentarism in Northern and East-Central Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century. Volume I: Representative Institutions and Political Motivation (2023) and Volume II: Practices of Representation (2025).