User:Samofi/Natio Hungarica

Natio Hungarica

Middle ages
The Clergy, the Nobility and the Counties and Cities formed the so-called "Hungarian nation" or Natio Hungarica in the political sense in Kingdom of Hungary, irrespective of their ethnic background. The Latin term, Natio Hungarica referred only to those groups with the right to representation in the diet: the nobility, the Catholic clergy, and a few enfranchised burghers. The term included only the land-owning nobility and not the peasantry. The Hungarian Kingdom was not a nation state in the modern sense of the word, but a multiethnic country, inhabited by Hungarians, Croats, Germans, Romanians, Ruthenes, Serbs and Slovaks, in which the Nobility of the Kingdom of Hungary held the dominant position. This situation was not unique as the medieval period does not offer examples of nation states. An individual belonged to the "Hungarian Nation" if he or she resided under the authority of the King of Hungary, in the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen.

Modern ages
Natio Hungarica began to mean the privileged group that had corporate political rights of parliamentary representation, i.e. the prelates, the magnates and the nobles. The Natio Hungarica made no ethnic distinctions. This conception was accepted in Szatmar Treaty of 1711 and in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1722; it remained valid until 1848. Ľudovít Štúr indirectly demanded that all people (including peasants) living in the Kingdom of Hungary have their own representatives in the Diet. He indicated thenew constitutional subjectthat is all the peoples in the Kingdom of Hungary should become the Natio Hungarica. This involved the amendment of the meaning of the traditional class concept Natio Hungarica and the extension of its frame to all the peoples in the Hungarian Kingdom. His attempt at the transformation of all the peoples in kingdom into Natio Hungarica constituted an attempt at the transformation of all ethnic groups in Hungarian Kingdom into Natio Hungarica. Thus, the extension of its frame to all the nationalities involved the notion that a Hungarian political nation should consist of the Magyars, the Romanians, the Croats, the Serbs, the Ruthenians, the Germans and the Slovaks as nationalities.Štúr initiated the formation of a Hungarian political nation consisting of many nationalities, which was different from the Hungarian nation formed only by Magyars through magyarisation. Lajos Kossuth had already identified the historical-political rights of king and corporations in the Kingdom of Hungary with the national rights of the Magyars.