ered Hungary, and laid siege to Great Wardein.

Leopold immediately dispatched ten thousand men to succor the besieged
town and to garrison other important fortresses. His succors arrived too
late. Great Wardein fell into the hands of the Turks, and they commenced
their merciless ravages. Hungary was in a wretched condition. The king,
residing in Vienna, was merely a nominal sovereign. Chosen by nobles
proud of their independence, and jealous of each other and of their
feudal rights, they were unwilling to delegate to the sovereign any
efficient power. They would crown him with great splendor of gold and
jewelry, and crowd his court in their magnificent display, but they
would not grant him the prerogative to make war or peace, to levy taxes,
or to exercise any other of the peculiar attributes of sovereignty. The
king, with all his sounding titles and gorgeous parade, was in reality
but the chairman of a committee of nobles. The real power was with the
Hungarian diet.

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