Pole and Hungarian brothers be

Polish Soldier and Hungarian Ladies, by Georg Haufnagel (Czartoryski Museum, Kraków)

The saying addresses the long, special relationship between Poland and Hungary. Poles and Hungarians consider themselves brothers in war and peace, and the saying was a 16th (or 18th)-century creation of the Polish middle and minor nobility. They recognized that the countries had the same political structure: a nobles' republic (Polish Rzeczpospolita, Hungarian natio Hungarica), a democratic parliamentary system in which the state and king were controlled by a non-aristocratic noble class. The Polish word rokosz (a gathering to resist royal authority) derives Hungary's Rákos, a field near Pest which was the medieval venue for mass meetings of Hungarian middle and minor nobility.

The Poles recognized that both countries' noble classes employed similar military tactics, weaponry, lifestyles and share common history, making them "brothers". When the Poles elected the Hungarian Stephen Báthory (prince of Transylvania) king of Poland in 1576, he introduced military reforms: creating Poland's hussars and importing from Transylvania Poland's first saber-makers, promoting the superior sword. In Poland, the szabla became known as the szabla węgierska ("Hungarian saber") or batorówka after King Stephen Báthory; it was subsequently called the zygmuntówka after Poland's King Sigismund III Vasa and the augustówka after King Augustus III.

The nobility of both countries enjoyed wine (imported to Poland primarily from Hungary during the Middle Ages), resulting in a similar temperament and lifestyle. In Hungary, the saying became widely known outside noble circles in the late 19th century. According to one source, the proverb's original Polish version was Węgier, Polak dwa bratanki i do szabli i do szklanki. Oba zuchy, oba żwawi, niech im Pan Bóg błogosławi.[1]

The saying probably originated after the 1772 collapse of the Bar Confederation (1768–72), which had been formed to defend the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from aggression by the Russian Empire. According to Julian Krzyżanowski, the saying was inspired by the political asylum in Szepesség, Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Spiš, Slovakia), of the confederation's leaders.[2] According to another source, it "comes from the period when the Generality of the Bar Confederation [the Confederation's supreme authority] took up residence in Eperjes (now Prešov in eastern Slovakia) between 1769 and 1772".[3][4]

Grave of a Hungarian Honvéd captain and six of his men, who fell fighting on the Polish side in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising

Future Polish King Władysław I the Elbow-high, fighting the Teutonic Order, found shelter at the courts of the Aba and Záh (Nógrád Castle) clans in Hungary. Záh knights guarded Władysław's family. Władysław married a Polish-Byzantine-Hungarian princess, Jadwiga of Kalisz. The daughter of Władysław and of Maria of Bytom, Elżbieta, became queen of Hungary. Her son, king of Hungary, Louis the Great was also king of Poland 1370–1382, after the death of his uncle, Polish king Casimir III the Great. After the death of Louis the Great, his daughter Jadwiga became the ruler of Poland, crowned "king" in Poland's capital, Kraków, on 16 October 1384. In the 15th century, the two countries briefly shared a king: Poland's Władysław III of Varna, who died at age twenty, fighting the Turks at Varna, Bulgaria. During the 16th century, Poland elected as its king the Hungarian nobleman Stephen Báthory. In the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, the Polish General Józef Bem became a national hero of both countries.[5]

During the Polish–Soviet War (1919–21), Hungary offered to send 30,000 cavalry to Poland's aid; however, the Czechoslovak government refused to allow them passage through the demilitarized zone which had existed between Czechoslovakia and Hungary since the Czechoslovak-Hungarian war several months earlier. The Romanian government took a similar stance, also refusing passage. When the Hungarians tried to send ammunition trains, Czechoslovakia again refused but Romania agreed if the Hungarians used their own trains.[6]

From the Middle Ages into the 18th century, Poland and Hungary shared a border between Poland and Carpathian Ruthenia (also known as Carpathian Rus, were part of several Hungarian states). After World War I, the Allies transferred Carpathian Ruthenia from Hungary to Czechoslovakia. Poland never ratified the Treaty of Trianon. The treaty with Hungary was not signed until 4 June 1920, did not become effective until 26 July 1921, and was never published in Poland's Journal of Laws.[7]

After the 30 September 1938 Munich Agreement (which fatally wounded Czechoslovakia and, after the proclamation of the First Slovak Republic, led to the remainder of the country being taken over by Germany), Poland and Hungary worked through diplomatic and paramilitary means to restore their common border by engineering the return of Carpathian Ruthenia to Hungary.[8] A step toward this goal was realized with the 2 November 1938 First Vienna Award.

Until mid-March 1939, Germany had considered a restored Hungarian-Polish frontier, for military reasons, undesirable. In March 1939, however, in response to Hungary's lobbying, Hitler changed his mind about a common Hungarian-Polish frontier and decided instead to betray Germany's ally, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who had begun organizing Ukrainian military units in 1938 in a sich outside Uzhhorod, the capital of Subcarpathian Rus', which had been restyled Carpatho-Ukraine. Hitler had been concerned that if a Ukrainian army, organized there, accompanied German forces invading the Soviet Union, Ukrainian nationalists would insist on an independent Ukraine.[9] Polish political and military authorities, for their part, had seen the sich as an imminent danger to adjacent southeastern Poland, with its majority-Ukrainian population, and in November 1938 had launched paramilitary operations to assist Hungary in taking over the region, which Hungary had governed to the end of World War I.[10] Consequently, in March 1939, Hungary took over the remainder of Carpathian Ruthenia.

In September 1939, Hitler asked Hungary to allow German forces to transit Hungarian territory in order to speed the German attack on eastern Poland; Hungary's Admiral Miklós Horthy declined permission, on the ground that it would be incompatible with Hungarian honor.[11] On 17 September 1939, pursuant to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Gestapo–NKVD conferences, the Soviet Union seized eastern and southeastern Poland and incorporated them into western Ukraine. Upon the Soviet invasion, Poland evacuated its government and substantial army and air units into allied Romania; considerable Polish military were simultaneously evacuated into Hungary, to the west of Romania. The evacuated Polish forces quickly, eluding or escaping internment, made their way west to France, there to regroup and continue the war alongside Poland's western allies.[12]

During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, many Hungarian soldiers, sympathetic to the Polish cause, gave munitions, medical supplies, and rations for the Polish Underground, and some even defected to the join their Polish brothers. Hungarian soldiers assisted in the evacuation of civilian families during the Uprising.[13]

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Poles demonstrated their support for the Hungarians by donating blood; by 12 November, 11,196 Poles had donated. The Polish Red Cross sent 44 tons of medical supplies to Hungary by air, and larger amounts were sent by road and rail.