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their property were reported to the king and archbishop: indeed, the latter granted
indulgences to anybody who would take up arms against those peasants who refused to
disperse to their homes. The insurgents were denounced as traitors and pseudo-
crucesignati, their atrocities regarded as the more abominable because of the crosses
which they wore and displayed on their banners. If this message made any impact on the
rebels it has left no mark in the sources. The peasant crusaders believed that they were
an Elect group, favoured above others by the Christ whose cross they wore and whose
cause they served. From this they derived much of their cohesion, confidence and sense
of purpose. And they claimed, in defiance of their own king, that they were acting in
defence of his kingdom whose interests were being betrayed by the nobles indolence. In
the only document left by Dózsa, the so-called Cegléd proclamation, the nobles were
denounced as infideles: they were effectively on the Turkish side.
Nothing like this had happened before either in the long history of the crusades or in
the somewhat shorter history of medieval peasant rebellions. David Nirenberg has
recently reinterpreted the 1320 pastoureaux movement in France, which also took the
form of a crusade, as a rebellion against royal fiscality, camouflaged with the very
language of sacred monarchy and Crusade that had helped to legitimize the fiscality
under attack .4 But the case is much less clear-cut than the Dózsa rebellion. There is no
evidence, for example, of crusading ideas being mediated to participants by a group like
the Observants. More convincing precedents are the peasant unions of 1469 and 1478 in
Styria, where a similar pattern can be traced: failure on the part of the landed nobility to
provide defence against Turkish incursions, and consequential measures of self-defence
by the peasants which included the rejection of noble privileges forfeited through this
inactivity.5 There was therefore a specific regional context in the form of the pressing
3
See most recently my Crusading as social revolt: The Hungarian peasant uprising of 1514 , Journal of
ecclesiastical history, 49 (1998), 1 28. Much of my analysis forms a critique of Jenö Szücs s excellent Die
Ideologie des Bauernkrieges , in his Nation und Geschichte: Studien (Gyoma, 1981), 329 78. A revival of
interest in Dózsa occurred in 1972, when the (largely hypothetical) quincentennial of his birth was marked
with a big symposium at Budapest. See Aus der Geschichte der ostmitteleuropäischen Bauernbewegungen
im 16. 17. Jahrhundert, ed. G. Heckenast (Budapest, 1977).
4
D. Nirenberg, Communities of violence: Persecution of minorities in the middle ages (Princeton, NJ, 1996),
ch. 2, with quote on 50.
5
There are good studies of the role played by dereliction of duty in bringing about the 1514 revolt by Janos
Bak, Delinquent lords and forsaken serfs: thoughts on war and society during the crisis of feudalism , in:
Society in change: Studies in honour of Bela K. Király, ed. S.B. Vardy (Boulder, Col., 1983), 291 304, and
Paul Freedman, The Hungarian peasant revolt of 1514 , in: Grafenauerjev Zbornik, ed. V. Rajsp (Ljubljana,
1996), 433 46.
Insurrection as religious war, 1400 1536 143
Ottoman menace and resistance to any centralised form of defence mounted by a
particularist aristocracy. And this is where the causality becomes complex. For the same
basic self-interest which led the Hungarian aristocracy to prioritise its own concerns
when the defence of the realm was being promoted had caused it to respond to
unfavourable economic conditions by maximising its seigneurial profits at the expense of
the peasants. This created serious social unrest, especially in the market towns (oppida)
where the seigneurial clamp-down was having the worst effect on standards of living.
It is doubtful whether any modern historian of the Dózsa uprising would view it as
Nirenberg does the 1320 pastoureaux, arguing that peasants took the cross as
camouflage for what they always intended to be a revolt against their nobles. Even
Peter Gunst, whose analysis of the insurrection was couched largely in terms of
economic causes, accepted that die Kreuzzugsideologie dominierte .6 However, as
Gunst and others have noted, there were strong causal links between this dominant
ideology of crusade and underlying economic grievances. They included the lively
response to crusade preaching of the herdsmen (Heiducken), many of whom faced
unemployment in the spring of 1514 due to the poor commercial outlook; the fact that
the residents of the oppida generally provided many recruits (although there could be
other reasons for this, such as a concentration of preaching efforts there); and the
congruence between the impoverishment of many peasants and the ideological elevation
of poverty which lay at the heart of Observant christology (although there seems to be an
inconsistency between the theological elevation of poverty and attempting to end it by
rebellion). According to this reasoning the Dózsa revolt was in essence an uprising
against the nobility. True, it began life as a crusade against the Turks, but from the start,
thanks to the volatile atmosphere in which preaching took place and the sympathy
shown by the Observants towards the peasants economic plight, a transformation into
revolt was likely. Other commentators, including the present writer, have viewed the
insurrection as a crusade, which came to incorporate a programme of social upheaval but
never shed its crusading persona. The enemy alone changed, from the external infideles
who desired (as the peasants were told) to extinguish the Hungarian kingdom, to the
domestic infideles whose nefarious activity (or inactivity) was leading to the same
outcome by a more roundabout route.
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