Page - 381 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

381Coping with Enlightenments prince of Moravia ruling substantial parts of the western Carpathian Basin be- fore the late ninth-century Magyar conquest. It was as a result of his demise that they (“Tóts”) are now regarded, according to Orczy, as “diligent serfs.” He gave Sajnovics a further piece of advice: “You see, if servitude no longer pleases you / […] / lordship may be your lot over there / as freedom does not accrue to serfs over here.”135 While Sajnovics himself possessed a patent of nobility, his embracing—at Hell’s instigation—the Sámi theory amounted to a disavowal of this status on his part, and a general assault on the entire system of social exclusiveness forming the basis of the ancient Hungarian polity. This leads us to the political context. As mentioned above, just a few years earlier, the diet of 1764–65 ended in bitter estrangement between the Hungarian nobility and the Viennese government because of the latter’s pursuit of measures circumscrib- ing the former’s privileges. During the debates of the diet and afterward, court propaganda in support of the proposed policies received a boost from a trea- tise by Kollár, De originibus et usu perpetuo potestatis legislatoriae circa sacra apostolicorum regum Ungariae (The origin and the perpetual use of legislative power among the apostolic kings of Hungary [1764]). In this treatise, the commoner136 and ethnic Slovak Hungarus Kollár called into question many of the political and social privileges of the Hungarian ec- clesiastical and secular elites, criticizing Werbőczy in especially sharp terms, and causing great consternation among the clergy and the nobility.137 Characteristically, Kollár’s anti-feudal polemics was readily associated by this constituency with anti-Hungarian sentiment, identified in his commentary on Hungaria et Atila, sive de originibus gentis Hungariae, a work by the sixteenth- century humanist Miklós Oláh (Nicolaus Olahus [1493–1568]), which Kollár edited and published in 1763.138 These comments, which refer to the statistical minority of Hungarians in the Kingdom of Hungary and predict the gradual demise of the language as well as the nation itself, became European currency through being quoted in von Schlözer’s Allgemeine nordische Geschichte, which in turn seems to have inspired Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) famous “prophecy” to the same effect. The latter’s prediction that the Hungarian na- tion, amid the “ocean” of Slavic peoples, will inevitably perish, was under- pinned by his theory (available in publication for the first time in the late 1760s 135 Révai, Két nagyságos. 136 Until his ennoblement in recognition of his services by Maria Theresa in 1776. 137 Andor Csizmadia, “Egy kétszáz év előtti országgyűlés évfordulójára: ‘Kollár contra Status et Ordines,’” Jogtudományi Közlöny 19, no. 4 (1964): 214–27. 138 Cf. Dezső Dümmerth, “Herder jóslata és forrásai,” Filológiai Közlöny 9, nos. 1–2 (1963): 181–83; Dümmerth, “Kollár Ádám problémája,” Filológiai Közlöny 13, nos. 3–4 (1967): 442–44.