Even centuries after there had ceased to be an emperor in Rome, Latin’s reach continued to expand far beyond the bounds of its old empire. Into the forests of Scandinavia, the highlands of Scotland, and the plains of north-east Europe, Latin was brought and sustained by priests, and then embraced in the realms of law, politics, education, philosophy and more. For centuries it was the lingua franca of Europe’s educated classes.

And yet, from the late Middle Ages, Latin came under a sustained, centuries-long siege by the proponents of vernacular languages. Complex or beautiful thoughts, written, transmitted, and understood through the written word would not remain a Latin monopoly forever. Nor would linguistic pride. The Académie Française proclaimed in 1694 that French had reached its own classical era akin to the Latin of Cicero, the implication being that modern French culture was as good a model to follow as Ancient Rome had been.

Many Europeans embraced French with glee, throwing powdered wigs on their heads and Voltaire onto their shelves. Others grumbled, like one anonymous German, that: ‘Hardly have children emerged from their mothers’ wombs than people think of giving them a French teacher.’ So many Germans followed Johann Gottfried Herder’s invective to ‘spew out the ugly slime of the Seine’ and picked up their own vernacular instead. Latin lost out once again, becoming precisely the ‘dead’ language those abandoning it accused it of being.

Not everyone got the message. In the mid-18th century, the Italian writer Giacomo Casanova encountered a mysterious foreign traveller who had been shocked by a visit to Rome. ‘I did not entertain any doubt that the Latin language was spoken there in good society’, he lamented, ‘but I was indeed greatly mistaken, for nobody can speak it, not even the priests, who only pretend to write it.’ Though, he commented sarcastically, ‘it is true that some of them do so with great purity’. He moved on after an ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘tedious’ month in the Latinless home of Latin.

His disappointment was understandable. In the vast kingdom he called home, Latin still served proudly as the official language. It was used in law, education, state administration, and even everyday communication. Foreign travellers noted with bewilderment the coachmen and innkeepers that brought the dead language to life. It was Latin’s final European redoubt, where it would survive long enough to see construction begin on the kingdom’s first railway in 1844.

Regnum Hungariae – or the Kingdom of Hungary as it was known in English – also went by another name. Since the late Middle Ages this realm stretched across the Danube valley, buttressed by the dramatic peaks of the Carpathians to the north and east and the Dinaric Alps to the south, had also been known as Regnum Marianum – the Kingdom of Mary. It was a Latin, Christian, a fundamentally European kingdom, but one that was entering an age that was defined by vernacular, secular, and national concerns.

Latin’s prestige had never been greater than during the Renaissance and never lower than during the Enlightenment. Indeed, it was precisely the Renaissance humanist approach to Latin that by the latter epoch had convinced Europeans it was a useless language. What was the point of rote-learning dead Latin through ancient texts when it was the modern states of France and England that were turning the wheel of history?

As both showed, a fundamental prerequisite of Enlightenment was the embrace of a standardised vernacular as the national language. While Latin was the preserve of a select caste of educated elites, poring over antiquated ancient texts, the vernacular promised the spread of education and knowledge among the broad masses of society.

This presented a conundrum for Maria Theresa, Hungary’s ruler from 1740 to 1780. Her House of Habsburg presided over a sprawling mess of territories across Europe. Austria, with the courtly city of Vienna at its heart, was in a way the centre of their monarchy, but the (Holy) Roman imperial title, Italian lands to the south-west, Bohemian lands to the north, and the Hungarian kingdom to the east were no less central to the family’s power and prestige. Indeed, without Hungary she would not have had much of an inheritance left to her name.

Upon her father’s death a multi-pronged assault on her patrimony followed: the War of the Austrian Succession. Minor princes salivated at the thought of carving up the rich Habsburg inheritance once they fell into the lap of an inexperienced young woman who – unlike all her male predecessors – could not inherit the prestigious imperial title.

The upstart Prussian King Frederick II struck first, not even a year into his own reign. His armies rapidly conquered the rich province of Silesia before Bavaria and Saxony moved in on the rest of the monarchy with French backing, hoping to partition the remainder of her inheritance with the sole exception of Hungary. One French general predicted ‘an occupation rather than a war’.

Her realm on the brink of collapse, Maria Theresa begged the Hungarian nobility for their assistance in an impassioned Latin speech. It was a success. They pledged their undying support with drawn swords and cries of: Vitam et sanguinem pro rege nostro Maria Theresia! –‘Blood and life for our King Maria Theresa.’ The new ‘king’ of Hungary was crowned soon after.

After a largely successful defence of what one historian of the Habsburg Monarchy memorably called a ‘mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogeneous elements’, the rest of her reign would be spent attempting to transform it into a model enlightened state. Latin, it seemed, would have to go. French was deployed in Belgium, Italian in Lombardy, and German in the core imperial territories. But what was to be done with Hungary?

Latin was and had been its official language effectively since its Christianisation. Its fiercely patriotic nobility saw it as nothing less than the country’s mother tongue. Indeed, it was essential to their functioning as a noble estate as it was the language through which they administered their counties. These were akin to their own mini-noble republics, occasionally gathering in a general noble diet at which great nobles were represented in the upper house and counties through representatives in the lower house. The language of all these institutions, of the laws, rights, and privileges that underpinned them, was Latin.

It was also a language that allowed someone like the Hungarian polymath Matthias Bel to describe himself as lingua Slavus, nationae Hungarus, eruditione Germanus –‘by language a Slav, by nation a Hungarian, by education a German.’ Hungary was a bewilderingly diverse country even by the standards of the time. German dominated the cities, high aristocrats spoke French and Italian, the gentry largely Magyar, and peasants a huge variety of Germanic, Magyar, Slavic, and Romance dialects. It was not clear what vernacular could unite in speech these ‘wild, quarrelsome tongues’.

Its other languages unstandardised and ‘unrefined’, German was the only real alternative to Latin. But after consulting with her subordinates in Hungary and being warned that German decrees may lack legal force in a Latin country, Maria Theresa demurred. Nonetheless, the issue came to a head in 1773 when the pope banned the Jesuit order. The Jesuits had controlled all Catholic education in Hungary, which was long the object of scorn and derision for nobles hoping for their sons to learn more useful things than reading ancient Latin texts.

If German was unfeasible, but Latin as it had been taught untenable, then a new approach had to be found. Maria Theresa and her advisors therefore decided not to abandon Latin but to repurpose it as a tool of Enlightenment. In 1777 she published her Ratio educationis, establishing the first state-run educational system in Hungarian history. Not only did it retain Latin as the language of education, but it even set out in over 32 pages how it was to be taught for use as a living language.

For some, it was too little too late. At the same time that the Habsburg court was reforming Latin education in the kingdom, a small group of Hungarians living in Vienna began arguing that the language had outlived its purpose. At its head stood György Bessenyei, a member of Maria Theresa’s Hungarian Guard. Watching the German vernacular flourish in Vienna, at a time when it was in its own golden age, he embraced the arguments laid out by French and German enlighteners before him that true Enlightenment could only be brought to a nation through its own native tongue.

His Viennese circle began writing in and ‘cultivating’ Magyar, which would culminate in the founding of the first Magyar newspaper in 1780, Magyar Hírmondó. The language was spoken by the plurality of the country, and by a majority of its nobility, giving it an enormous advantage. Notoriously difficult and unrelated to any other language in Europe, it was a linguistic island at the heart of Europe that many at the time treated as a fading curiosity. Johann Gottfried Herder notoriously predicted that it would even soon die out in a sea of Slavs, a prediction that added a sense of urgency to the burgeoning linguistic revival.

With impressive speed this small movement would capture the attention of a patriotic nobility keen to show its opposition to a monarch that had overstepped his bounds. Maria Theresa’s son Joseph II sought to be a radical enlightened reformer, refusing even to be crowned in Hungary to avoid swearing any oaths to uphold the nobility’s rights and privileges. As if to rub salt in the wound, he even removed the ‘holy crown’ of St Stephen to Vienna.

Already drawing the ire of the noble Hungarian Nation, he provoked unprecedented outrage when in 1784 he unilaterally imposed German as the country’s official language. ‘The use of a dead language, like Latin, in all public affairs shows sufficiently that the nation has not yet reached a certain degree of enlightenment,’ he noted. In one fell swoop the Regnum Marianum was swept from the face of the earth.

Protests from the counties and their noble assemblies – which were also to be ditched – flooded into Vienna. Zagreb County praised the ‘uniform purity of the Latin idiom’ and condemned the fact that ‘the Hungarian youth was being prohibited from learning liberal arts in their mother tongue’. Petitions contrasted ‘foreign’ German with ‘indigenous’ Latin. They were ‘overloaded with grief… lost for words’, one petition read; another that ‘we are so terrified that we can hardly express the gravity of the hurt we have suffered’.

Finally bowing to the unrelenting pressure, Joseph II repealed many of his reforms on his deathbed in 1790. An anonymous pamphlet celebrated that ‘the Senate and the People of Latium congratulate themselves that the famous, heroic kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia now again speak their language, and rejoice with them that the Latin language has come back from exile and, declared dead, returned to life’. But it would soon become clear that there could be no return to the world of 1780.

Joseph had left his brother Leopold II a realm in crisis. War with the Ottomans saw Habsburg armies bogged down in the Balkans. Inspired by revolution in France, Belgium was revolting. Now Hungary was on the brink of its own revolution, with Prussian sabre-rattling suggesting they may even find foreign backing.

Also on his deathbed, Joseph II had called the Hungarian Diet for the first time in 25 years. It met with a revolutionary atmosphere. Nobles sported colourful national dress, sung seditious songs, and elaborated a concrete plan to ensure such an absolutist assault on their rights and privileges would never happen again. Because Joseph II had refused to be crowned, he was widely derided as the ‘kalapos király’ – the hatted king – and, according to the doctrine of filum interruptum successionis, he had not been king at all. Instead, the right to choose a new king had supposedly reverted to the diet.

Driven by a reformist patriotic faction in the lower house, fertilised by the general revolutionary atmosphere, the diet pushed for de facto Hungarian independence. Convinced by a passionate campaign by proponents of the linguistic revival, it was to be accompanied by the introduction of Magyar as the country’s official language. Joseph II had already killed Latin in Hungary, the proponents of ‘Magyarisation’ reasoned, a dead language everywhere else in Europe, too. If Latin was reinstated it would mean the end of the Hungarian nation itself.

The Croatian delegates to the diet were outraged by this development. For centuries their kingdom had been subordinate to Hungary, but it maintained its own privileged position with its own noble assembly – the Sabor – which sent a special delegation to the Hungarian diet. There were almost no Magyar speakers in Croatia at all, and without a common conception of a noble, Latin-speaking Hungarian Nation there would be little left to unite them. In a particularly heated exchange, one Croatian delegate exclaimed in the upper house: Regnum regno non praescribit leges! –‘A kingdom does not prescribe laws to a kingdom.’

Leopold II, strengthened by a rapprochement with Prussia, eventually managed to subdue Hungary’s belligerent diet, but a new era had dawned. Latin would remain the official language, but Magyar crept piecemeal into administration and education over the following decades. The large gentry and ever-growing movement for Magyar linguistic revival pushed it forward in spite of resistance from the church, the high aristocracy, and the Croatian nobility, none of which had any power over feudal institutions dominated by lower and middling Hungarian nobles.

Nonetheless, into the first decades of the 19th century there remained a class of educated commoners that rejected the new linguistic nationalism and clung to the kingdom’s Latin identity. Some even accepted that Magyar could play a role in the country’s public life but were adamant that Latin was the country’s true mother tongue. It was the ‘main source of every culture, of good taste and the real Enlightenment’, argued one such ‘Hungarus’ intellectual. Another optimistically commented that the fashion for Magyar was ‘a fad, and so it should remain’.

Their understanding of the Hungarian nation was fundamentally historical, legal, and territorial, in stark contrast to the ethno-linguistic view put forward by proponents of Magyarisation. This was the premodern understanding of nationhood, one that was effectively corporate and included anyone who enjoyed certain rights and privileges owing to their estate. The new conception of nationhood was much broader and for the first time embraced the masses. Hungarian nationalists hoped that the two would fuse together and seamlessly transition the old provincial Latin kingdom into a modern Magyar nation-state.

But to the question of Should we become Magyars?, many from non-Magyar backgrounds emphatically answered no. This was the title of a German-language pamphlet written by a Slavic author in 1833, part of a much wider debate that erupted around Magyarisation. It played out in newspapers, books, and pamphlets, mostly in German, where rival Slavic and Magyar nationalists laid out their own visions of Hungary for the European public.

Proponents of Magyarisation pointed out that they were only following in the footsteps of western nations like France or England, which embraced their vernaculars and assimilated their linguistic minorities in the name of progress. Magyars were, in any case, the founding and rightful ruling nation of the kingdom, so they argued.

Their opponents instead differentiated between the political Hungarian nation and the ethnic Magyar nationality, which was just one among many that had no greater claim to dominate the kingdom than any other. If Latin was to be abandoned then only equality between nations could follow, not domination of one over others. Some even argued that it was the minorities themselves that were the autochthonous nation, not the invading Magyars.

Ultimately, all the ink spilled over the language question in Hungary was irrelevant if it could not be matched with political influence. In this regard, the Croatian parliament was one of the few institutions that could oppose the kingdom’s incipient Magyarisation. But while Magyar marched through the kingdom’s institutions it put up a meek defence of the storied Latin tongue.

Count Franjo Vojkffy did his best in an 1832 pamphlet, in which he pointed out that there was nothing strange about using a different language to one’s native one in matters of education, law, religion, and general erudition. He pointed to Sanskrit in India, Mandarin in China, and Arabic and Persian in the Muslim world.

But he could not compete with a far more influential movement that was developing that aimed to allow the Magyarisation of Hungary proper but see Croatian elevated to the point where it could take over from Latin in Croatia itself. This movement allied itself with other Slavic national movements in the Habsburg Monarchy under the banner of what one Latinate Hungarian author had dubbed Panslavismus – Pan-Slavism.

If German burghers would generally reconcile themselves to the Magyarisation of the kingdom, Slavs and Romanian intellectuals remained steadfastly opposed. Nonetheless, Croatian delegates to the Hungarian Diet constantly defended Latin as the kingdom’s official language until the bitter end. This was a political tactic rather than a genuine attachment to the language. The vast majority had accepted by 1844 that Regnum Marianum was becoming something else entirely.

At the diet of 1843/44 the use of Latin speeches was banned altogether due to the irritating insistence of Croatian delegates that they should speak Latin. Three years later they took their linguistic fate into their own hands and declared Croatia’s official language to be ‘the national language’, which was ‘the greatest treasure of any nation’. Europe’s last Latin kingdom had been laid to rest.