To this day, Colonel Josip Jelačić is a big celebrity in the Croatian capital. He was the governor, or ban in Hungarian, of Croatia in the Nineteenth Century under the Hungarian and Austro-Hungarian rule. More important, he is now considered a patriot of renown in these parts. The main square in Zagreb is named after no-one but him. It sports his hefty equestrian statue, as well. And so I am rather curious about his place in history as I plough through Bryan Cartledge’s The Will to Survive: A History of Hungary.[1] During the so-called Hungarian revolution in 1848, which followed the revolution in libertarian Paris, he led a combined delegation of Croats and Serbs to Innsbruck, where the Habsburg emperor happened to be at the time, “in a bid to secure royal blessing for the two new self-proclaimed autonomous provinces and for the alliance between them.”[2] So far, so good. “Jelačić’s primary commitment was not to Croatia per se, but to the emperor and the dynasty,” I am surprised to read.[3] “His first demand had been that Hungary should surrender its Ministries of War and Finance to Vienna.”[4] Thus he led a Croatian army across the Drava River in September of that year, plunging Hungary into war for the next twelve months.[5] “Although outnumbered by nearly ten to one, the defending force of regular and irregular Hungarian troops prevailed in a pitched battle forty-five kilometers south of Pest-Buda.”[6] In short, Jelačić was far from successful at his own game. In the end, the Habsburg emperor’s many generals crushed the Hungarian rebellion. “Ironically,” Cartledge concludes, “the nationalities which had made a contribution to Hungarian defeat, and especially the Croatians, received no reward for their efforts.”[7] Puzzled, I look the great patriot up on the World Wide Web. The equestrian statue was placed in the main square of the Croatian capital in 1866 by no-one else but the thankful Austrians. A year later they signed a compromise pact with Hungary that lasted through the end of World War II. Long live Josip Jelačić! And long live Austria!

Footnotes

1. London: Hurst & Company, 2011 (first published in 2006).

2. Op. cit., p. 201.

3. Op. cit., p. 204.

4. Loc. cit.

5. Op. cit., p. 205.

6. Op. cit., p. 207.

7. Op. cit., p. 220.