By the mid fourteenth century, the three holy kings of Hungary ad come to forma a harmonious iconographic scheme
- Klaniczay,
Gabor, Holy Rulers
and Blessed Princesses – Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe,
translated by Éva Pálmai
Taken from Veszprémy 2006
The above frontispiece from the Missal
of Esztergom, printed in Lyon in 1501, is a summary of Hungarian
sainthood. Here we see the Virgin Mary as Patrona Hungariae together
with the kingdom's three royal saints, Stephen, Ladislas and Emeric
respectively, each carrying his main attribute while supported by a
shield depicting the Hungarian emblem which also can be found in the
modern flag. In this blogpost, I intend to take this frontispiece as
a point of departure for a brief introduction to the cults of the
three king-saints of Hungary.
Miniature of St. Stephen from Chronicon Pictum. 14th century
Courtesy of Wikimedia
Background
The
medieval kingdom of Hungary was founded by King Stephen, or Istvan
(c.975-1038). He became duke on the death of his father Geza in 997,
and his accession as followed by a series of insurrections against
his authority, which he successfully repelled. Having vanquished his
rivals of power, Stephen asked for Pope Silvester II to acknowledge
him as king of Hungary and to send him a royal crown. This was done,
and Stephen was crowned in 1000/1001. By this time, Stephen had
already established a number of monasteries, as part of his
implementation of Christianity in the kingdom. During Stephen's
reign, the dichotomy between pagans and Christians was upheld by law,
since intermarriage between these groups were forbidden, and pagan
customs were forbidden. The royal acts of Stephen fit the pattern of
a founding Christian father, which was an important aspect of the
cult of royal saints as it came to be formulated in the course of the
12th
century. Stephen was a church-builder, an alms-giver, a just king and
a soldier of the faith.
Following
Stephen's death in 1038, the kingdom of Hungary descended into chaos
as rival factions within the dynasty vied each other for power, and
this unrest continued throughout the 11th
century. It was not, however, a struggle between pagans and
Christians, but rather between various members of the royal family.
In 1074, King Solomon was ousted from his position after he was
defeated in battle against his cousin Geza and then incarcerated.
Geza's brother Ladislas (or Lázló) succeeded his brother to the
throne in 1077.
King Ladislas' position was not very secure. His cousin had been the
legitimate king of Hungary, and was furthermore married to the
daughter of Emperor Heinrich III of Germany. To strengthen his
position, Ladislas orchestrated the canonisations of five saints
throughout the year 1083 – by which time he was still not crowned,
a fact that made his position presumably more precarious – and
these canonisations must be seen, as pointed out by Gabor Klaniczay,
as political means to strengthen Ladislas' position. This perspective
is strengthened by the fact that the imprisoned Solomon was set free
following the canonisations, whereupon he fled the country.
Three of the five saints of 1083 were bishops and missionaries, the
fathers of the Hungarian church who all had important positions in
the conversion narrative of Hungary. These ecclesiastical saints were
Andrew (Zoerard) and Benedict, both hermits, and Bishop Gerard.
According to Klaniczay, only the latter can be said to have served
political purposes, since, unlike the two others, he was a symbol of
the struggle against the pagans. The remaining two saints were both
royal saints, and their canonisations had strong political
dimensions. These saints were King Stephen and his son Emeric (Imre),
who had died before his father and had therefore never become king.
Stephen and Gisela founding a church
From Chronicon Pictum. 14th century
Courtesy of Wikimedia
The Cult of Stephen
King
Stephen was of course the most important of the Hungarian saints. He
was the founder of the kingdom and he was the apostolic king who
implemented the Christian religion, thus concluding the work of the
ecclesiastical saints mentioned above. There is, however, no evidence
of a spontaneous cult following Stephen's death, nor is it likely
that the canonisations were carried out after an exhortation from the
pope, as it has been claimed in the Legenda
maior
of St. Gerard, written most likely in the 14th
century.
The
liturgical cult of Stephen came into being shortly after the
canonisation and relied in the first stage on mass and office
material from the Commune
Sanctorum.
A 13th-century liturgical fragment shows that the common material was
to some extent replaced by rhymed antiphons during Lauds. These
antiphons were most likely composed in the late 12th
century, and it is likely that there were rhymed antiphons composed
for the other hours as well, at least Matins, the central point of
the office cycle. In the liturgical material, Stephen's role as the
apostolic king is emphasised through his namesake Stephen
Protomartyr, who allegedly comes to his mother in a dream and exhorts
her to give his name to his unborn son, a sequence clearly modelled
on the episodes from the Gospels concerned with the births of John
the Baptist and Christ.
The liturgical material proper to Stephen was to a great extent
based on the Legend of St. Stephen written by Bishop Hartvic/Hartvik
during the reign of King Coloman (1095-1116), and in this legend we
encounter the claims of an early cult centered around the place of
Stephen's burial, Székesfehérvár, where numerous sick and
afflicted sought and found a cure for their sundry pains. As
mentioned, such a cult can not be ascertained, and it is more likely
that Hartvic projected the topoi of saints and their miracles onto
history because since Stephen was a saint, it was logical to expect
such thaumaturgical preludes to a canonisation.
Stephen's
apostolic place in the Christian history of Hungary ensured him an
elevated position in the country's religious observance.
Interestingly, following a period of unrest in the 13th-century,
Stephen was also recast as not only a founder of the Christian
kingdom, but as a liberator of his people from the oppression of the
pagans. This recasting of Stephen strengthened the existing
characteristics and emphasised his role as a champion of Christ
against the heathen descendants of Attila. The liturgical texts
construed him as a new Samson who fought the lion of paganry, and
whose faithfulness (credulitas) was superior to the cruelty
(crudelitas) of the Hunnic tyranny.
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Scenes from the Life of Emeric
From the Angevine Legendary, 1330s
Courtesy of Wikimedia
The Cult of Emeric
Emeric
was set out to be his father's successor, but died in 1031 by which
time he was in his late twenties. According to later legends, he was
well-educated and the alleged addressee of Libellus
de institutione morum,
a prince's mirror ascribed to King Stephen. Of the five saints
canonised in 1083, Emeric was perhaps the one who was most important
to King Ladislas personally. The reason for this was that Emeric was
said to embody all the virtues expected of a Christian prince –
mercy, largesse, humility, justice, etc. - and according to the
chroniclers, no other Hungarian king could display such a wealth of
virtues except Ladislas himself. Emeric became, in a way, Ladislas
saintly forebear. Another reason why Emeric was of great importance
to Ladislas personally, was the fact that that he was the son of
Stephen and Gisela. Gisela was a German noblewoman who belonged to
the house of King Ladislas' father-in-law, Rudolf, who was at that
time a rival of the German Emperor Heinrich III. By proclaiming
Emeric's sanctity, the family of Ladislas' wife was given a saintly
member, and this would strengthen both Ladislas' own position, and
the position of his father-in-law. This need was all the more
pronounced by the fact that Solomon, the king Ladislas had deposed,
was the son-in-law of Emperor Heinrich.
The cult of Emeric was also important to the church. Through Emeric
it transmitted the ideal of the virtuous prince, who was chaste even
in marriage and who was educated in religion. As Gabor Klaniczay
points out, the Hungarian church used Emeric to emphasise the
didactic and moralistic aspect of sacral rulership. Because Emeric
had died before he became king, it was easy for later chroniclers and
hagiographers to emphasise his chastity and proclaim him, as the
earliest 12th-century legend did, a scorner of the corruptible flesh
and – similar to the beatus vir of Psalm 1 – a man meditating on
the word of God.
Scenes from the Life of Emeric
From the Angevine Legendary, 1330s
Courtesy of Wikimedia
Miniature of Ladislas, from Chronicon Pictum (14th century)
Courtesy of Wikimedia
The Cult of Ladislas
Ladislas was canonised under the auspices of King Bela III in 1192,
and must be seen in light of two important aspects of the political
scene of 12th-century Hungary. The first aspect is King Bela's
Byzantine background. He had been educated at the court of Emperor
Manuel Comnenons, and it is likely that it was here Bela became
exposed to devotion of Ladislas, especially since the Hungarian king
had been the father of Emperor Manuel's mother. The sanctity of
Ladislas thus provided an important link to the Byzantine royal
family, as well as the Hungarian throne.
Another important aspect might be seen in the circumstances in which
both Bela and Ladislas ascended to the throne. Like Ladislas, Bela
had to fight for his position, and since Ladislas's brother had
ousted his cousin Solomon in 1174 and thus given way to Ladislas
himself, he was a natural model for King Bela who had been brought up
in Byzantium and was something of an outsider. King Ladislas himself,
introduced the idea that the right to rule should be founded upon a
king's likeness to previous kings – an idea known as ius
idoneitatis or the right of likeness – instead of the right of
blood known as ius legitimum which looked at family ties,
bloodline and proximity. It is not stated expressly to what extent
this concern informed Bela in his devotion of Ladislas, but it is an
interesting connection between the two kings.
While Stephen was an apostolic king and Emeric was a virtuous prince,
Ladislas was cast as a chivalric king, a knight-king, which was a
figure of increased popularity in the 12th century,
following the dissemination of the legend of St. Alexis and the
crusader movement. This popularity also found its expression in
reformulations of saints like Olaf of Norway and St. George. The
extent to which Ladislas was formulated as a knight, can be seen in
the early-13th-century legend's claim that he participated
in the first crusade. Since Ladislas died in 1095, the very year in
which the crusades first were preached, we know this to be a fiction,
but it is an important piece of evidence to the importance of the
chivalric aspect in the cult of Ladislas.
Ladislas fighting a Cuman warrior, similar to St. George killing the dragon
Fresco from the Matyas Church in Budapest, date uncertain
Courtesy of Wikimedia
Concluding Remarks: The Later
Middle Ages
Towards
the end of the 13th
century, these three king-saints had become an integral part of the
history of Hungary, and from the end of the century they were often
depicted as a saintly collective, appearing together as a joint force
of sanctity interceding for the sake of Hungary. The first such
depiction can be found in a diptych from the late 13th
century commissioned by King Andrew III. Here the three holy kings,
together with Elizabeth of Hungary (d.1031) who had been the queen of
the German Emperor, appear as a collective of saints. This collective
was further cultivated in the iconography of Hungarian Christianity
throughout the 14th
century, as witnessed by joint altar dedications – such as in the
Chapel of the Virgin in 1355 – and a set of bronze statues erected
in the 1360s by the cathedral o Nagyvárad.
That
these three saints were grouped together into a unit appears to be a
current of religious iconography common in 14th-century Europe.
Similar triads could be found in Scandinavia and France, and in
England we encounter frequent pairings of the saints Edmund and
Edward the Confessor from the same period.
Literature
Dobszay,
László, "From 'crudelitas' to 'credulitas': Comments on Saint
Stephen's Historia Rhythmica", printed in Hankeln, Roman (ed.),
Political
Plainchant? Music, Text and Historical Context of Medieval Saints'
Offices,
The Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2009
Farmer,
David, The Oxford
Dictionary of Saints,
Oxford University Press, 2004
Klaniczay,
Gabor, Holy Rulers
and Blessed Princesses – Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe,
translated by Éva Pálmai, Cambridge University Press, 2002
Veszprémy,
László, "Royal Saints in Hungarian Chronicles, Legends and
Liturgy", printed in Mortensen, Lars Boje (ed.), The
Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom
(c.1000-1300),
Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006
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