Kocs

Kocs () is a village in Komárom-Esztergom county, Hungary. It lies south of Komárom and west of Budapest.

History

Kocs is best known internationally as giving rise to the English word coach and its equivalents in nearly all European languages, for example: Czech koč, German kutsche, Dutch koets, Spanish, Portuguese, and French coche.

During the reign of King Matthias Corvinus in the 15th century, the wheelwrights of Kocs began to build a horse-drawn vehicle with steel-spring suspension. This "cart of Kocs" as the Hungarians called it (kocsi szekér) soon became popular all over Europe. The spread of the kocsi szekér has been linked by some theories personally to the king of Hungary Ferdinand III, the younger brother of Charles V who became the king of Spain, Emperor of Germany, and lord of the Burgundian Netherlands, in the 16th century, and who promoted the comfortable, spring-suspended wagons among the wealthy European nobility. A 16th century German depiction of a kocsi without springs puts this theory in doubt, however, and it is uncertain whether the springs or some other feature were responsible for the spread of the word throughout Europe. Thurn and Taxis, the imperial post service, employed the first horse-drawn mail coaches in Europe since Roman times in 1650 –, as they started in the town of...
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