Kuruc

The kuruc (also spelled kurutz;Hungarian: kurucok [sg. kuruc]) were the armed anti-Habsburg rebels in Royal Hungary between 1671 and 1711.

The kuruc army was mostly made up of serfs, including Hungarian Protestant peasants, but also many Slavs.

According to Matthias Bel, an 18th-century scholar, the word was first used in 1514 for the armed peasants led by György Dózsa. Bel supposed that the word kuruc is derived from the Latin word "cruciatus" (crusader), ultimately from "crux" (cross); and Dózsa's followers were called "crusaders" because the peasant rebellion started as an official crusade against the Ottomans.

Today etymologists do not accept Bel's theory and consider the word—emerging in the 1660s in the forms "kurus", "kuroc" or "kurudsch"—to be of unknown origin. Its original meaning was understood as rebel, partisan, dissident.

In 1671 the name was used by Meni, the beglerbeg pasha of Eger in what is today Hungary, to denote the predominantly noble refugees from Royal Hungary. Afterwards the name became quickly popular and was used from 1671 to 1711 in texts written in Hungarian, Slovak and Turkish to denote the rebels of Royal Hungary and northern Transylvania, fighting against the Habsburgs and their policies.

The rebels of the first kuruc uprising called themselves bújdosók (i.e. fugitives) or in official long form: "different fugitive orders—barons, nobles, cavalry and infantry soldiers—who fight for the material and spiritual liberty of the Hungarian motherland".

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