This diet, or congress, was a peculiar body.  Originally it consisted of the whole body of nobles, who assembled annually on horseback on the vast plain of Rakoz, near Buda.  Eighty thousand nobles, many of them with powerful revenues, were frequently convened at these tumultuous gatherings.  The people were thought to have no rights which a noble was bound to respect.  They lived in hovels, hardly superior to those which a humane farmer now prepares for his swine.  The only function they fulfilled was, by a life of exhausting toil and suffering, to raise the funds which the nobles expended in their wars and their pleasure; and to march to the field of blood when summoned by the bugle.  In fact history has hardly condescended to allude to the people.  We have minutely detailed the intrigues and the conflicts of kings and nobles, when generation after generation of the masses of the people have passed away, as little thought of as billows upon the beach.

These immense gatherings of the nobles were found to be so unwieldy, and so inconvenient for the transaction of any efficient business, that Sigismond, at the commencement of the fifteenth century, introduced a limited kind of representation.  The bishops, who stood first in wealth, power and rank, and the highest dukes, attended in person.  The nobles of less exalted rank sent their delegates, and the assembly, much diminished in number, was transferred from the open plain to the city of Presburg.  The diet, at the time of which we write, was assembled once in three years, and at such other times as the sovereign thought it necessary to convene it.  The diet controlled the king, unless he chanced to be a man of such commanding character, that by moral power he could bring the diet to his feet.  A clause had been inserted in the coronation oath, that the nobles, without guilt, could oppose the authority of the king, whenever he transgressed their privileges; it was also declared that no foreign troops could be introduced into the kingdom without the consent of the diet.

Under such a government, it was inevitable that the king should be involved in a continued conflict with the nobles.  The nobles wished for aid to repel the Turks; and yet they were unwilling that an Austrian army should be introduced into Hungary, lest it should enable the king to enlarge those prerogatives which he was ever seeking to extend, and which they were ever endeavoring to curtail.

Leopold convened the diet at Presburg.  They had a stormy session.  Leopold had commenced some persecution of the Protestants in the States of Austria.  This excited the alarm of the Protestant nobles of Hungary; and they had reason to dread the intolerance of the Roman Catholics, more than the cimeter of the Turk.  They openly accused Leopold of commencing persecution, and declared that it was his intention to reduce Hungary to the state to which Ferdinand II. had reduced Bohemia.  They met all the suggestions of Leopold, for decisive action, with so many provisos and precautions, that nothing could be done.  It is dangerous to surrender one’s arms to a highway robber, or one whom we fear may prove such, even if he does promise with them to aid in repelling a foe.  The Catholics and the Protestants became involved in altercation, and the diet was abruptly dissolved.