Pál Engel
The House of Árpád and its Times

Around the year 1000, in keeping with others in Eastern and Northern Europe, they converted to Christianity and founded a kingdom. Their first King, Stephen I, was the grandson of Prince Árpád’s grandson. He was crowned on Christmas Day 1000 -- or, according to others, New Year’s Day 1001, the fons et origo of the Kingdom of Hungary. The early rulers were all descendants of Prince Árpád and the last of them, Andrew III, died on January 14th 1301. These three centuries and two (or three) weeks, from the coronation of Stephen I to the death of Andrew III are called the Age of the Árpáds by historians.

It should be noted the above designation is the product of modern times. In the Middle Ages they preferred to forget Árpád or the pagan origins of the dynasty. Speaking of the "clan of the saintly kings" seemed more appropriate, two of its ruling members having been canonized by the Church: the founder Stephen I in 1083 and Ladislas I (1077-1095) in 1192. The medieval name sounded good but was not really accurate, since neither Stephen nor Ladislas continued the line, being succeeded by collaterals. Stephen’s son -- Prince Emeric, (later also canonized) predeceased him in 1031. Saint Ladislas was survived by a daughter, Piroska, who assumed the name Irene as the wife of the future Byzantine Emperor John II Comnenos. A mosaic in the Agia Sophia in Constantinople shows her portrait.

According to the official myth, the Hungarian Republic is a direct descendant of the state founded by Saint Stephen. Unfortunately, the country was truncated and lately the form of government was changed too but -- and this is insistently stressed -- it has been the same Hungary throughout. The emphasis on continuity explains the no doubt surprising fact that the Holy Crown of the medieval kings of Hungary figures on the republic’s arms. One might imagine that there is scant connection between a republic and a crown, but it is the business of the crown in the arms to symbolize political continuity, "the thousand-year-old Hungarian state."

Such historical fictions are thick on the ground in Central Europe. Should an objective observer compare a pre-1914 and a post-1920 political map of this part of the world, it would strike him immediately that the Hungarian Republic is as little identical with the Kingdom of Hungary as modern Turkey is with the Ottoman Empire or the Federal Republic of Austria with the Austrian Empire. Quite obviously new political identities had come into existence in all three cases. These were all new states born of the dissolution of empires after the Great War. The difference is only that the Turks and the Austrians are aware of this but the Hungarians are not, or rather they prefer to turn a blind eye to some facts. Perhaps understandably, as the medieval Kingdom of Hungary was a power to be reckoned with, more than three times the size of the present Republic. It covered the whole of the Carpathian Basin, including all of what is Slovakia today, much of Romania, Yugoslavia and Croatia and a bit of Austria and Slovenia too, reaching down to the Adriatic cost. After 1102 the kingdom of Croatia -- the south of the present Republic of Croatia -- also belonged to Hungary since the kings of Hungary were kings of Croatia as well. It is not easy to renounce such a respectable estate. It is difficult to accept that the Hungarian Republic is no longer the Kingdom of Hungary of yore, but just one of its successor states, like Slovakia.
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Foreign authors, however, tell us a fair bit about conditions at the time. The most interesting, perhaps, are two eye-witness reports, by Bishop Otto of Freising, who travelled through Hungary in 1147 as a member of the Second Crusade,¹ and by Abu Hamid, a wealthy Muslim merchant from Spain, who lived in Hungary between 1150 and 1153.²

Abu Hamid, a widely travelled man, described Hungary as a country where you could live well and life was easy. He was prompted to this judgement by the fertility of the land, which every traveller remarked on. Wheat, being plentiful, was cheap, the Sicilian Arab geographer Idris reported, having got his information from merchants.³ A Frenchman who was in Hungary somewhat later, in 1308, opined that the name Pannonia was due to the plentifulness of bread (panis).⁴ This Frenchman also reported that Norway alone boasted of more fish than Hungary did in its ample waters. Much later too it was said that only half the rivers and lakes were water, the other half were fish. Everyone also noted the size of the flocks, praising the rich and lush pastures and the fertile soil where innumerable horses and cattle grazed.⁵ Right up to the end of the Middle Ages even peasants ate a great deal of meat, and none of the sources ever mention famine amongst the plagues which struck Hungary.

Bishop Otto was not as fond of the Hungarians as Abu Hamid but even he had to recognize the advantages of the country. The fertility of the soil and the splendour of the view reminded him of the Garden of Eden. But, he said, "the inhabitants were ugly, their eyes were deep-set, they were small in stature, and their manners and speech were savage and barbarian. Was blind fate to blame, or must we marvel at the patience of the Lord that such a magnificent country was the lot of these barely human monsters?" It would seem that the Bishop was somewhat prejudiced against Hungarians. Around 2100, 11th- to 13th-century skeletons have been anthropologically examined and this survey shows that 95-97 per cent of the population at the time were Europoid.

This does not, of course, mean that Hungary was a truly European country at the time. Perhaps "developing country" is the mot juste, except that this term now refers to something far from what I have in mind. Since Stephen I the country had continuously developed, though not very rapidly in the beginning. Christian ecclesiastic institutions soon covered the country. After the last pagan revolt was suppressed in 1061 the domination of the Church was absolutely firm. The Benedictines were the first monastic order to be established in Hungary. Stephen II (1116-1131) brought in the Praemonstratensians, Geiza II (1141- 1162) the Cistercians, Templars and the Order of St John. The magnates also founded monasteries in quick succession; by 1200 there were at least a hundred in the country. Immigrants from the West, at first French, then German, moved in growing numbers, bringing new institutions and skills. The populous community of Transylvanian Saxons, which was recently brought to ruin by Ceausescu, was established by Flemings from Bruges at the time of Geiza II. "Latin", that is Wallon merchants settled in Esztergom and Székesfehérvár, the two royal seats, sometime in the 12th century. They were accorded considerable autonomies. They soon raised walls to protect their homes. These were the first cities of a Western type in Hungary. Starting around 1150, students from Hungary studied in Paris. One of them, Lucas, was later Archbishop of Esztergom. Like Thomas ŕ Beckett, his fellow student at the Sorbonne, he proved himself a devoted son of Rome. Another was a notary in the chancery of King Béla III (1172-1196). In his old age he wrote the story of the conquest of the pagan Hungarians as he imagined it, in the manner of a fashionable knightly romance. Many must have been familiar with these at the time, since the Hungarian versions of Tristan, Yseult, Lancelot, Alexander, Paris and Hector were fashionable names given in baptism. They must have known the stories but they were not likely to have read them. Right up to around 1500 it was held in Hungary that reading was a passtime unworthy of a gentleman.
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Such facts and the dimensions of the country implied that medieval Hungary was reckoned as a regional great power. The Holy Roman Empire last tried to subject Hungary in 1051 but after that it tended to show respect. Of the other powerful neighbour, Abu Hamid argued that the imperium of the King of Hungary was several times more powerful than that of the ruler of Byzantium. That was an exaggeration. In a long war lasting from 1149 to 1167, Manuel Comnenos had proved more powerful than the kings of Hungary. It is a fact, however, that Hungarian foreign policy was aggressive throughout, even in relation to Byzantium. Hungarian hosts regulary invaded the territory of their neighbours, they marched or rode to Kiev, through Galicia, the Balkans and Austria. Foreign forces, however, were rarely able to intrude into Hungary. There is no doubt that, apart from the two empires, the Kingdom of Hungary was at the time the strongest and most aggressive power in the region. According to Abu Hamid, the host of the King could not be counted, and every people was afraid of the number of his warriors and of the King’s great courage.

Progress suddenly accelerated around the year 1200. The most tangible evidence is the multiplication of documents. More have survived from the reign of King Andrew II (1205-1235) than from the previous two centuries. His son,

Béla IV (1235-1270) already put his orders in the form of writs and demanded written reports on their execution. In time the courts too abandoned pure verbality and following the 1280s, written summons and adjoinments and many other kinds of court documents became common. Béla IV was a great one for granting municipal privileges. He furthered the building of modern fortifications, raising the Castle of Buda, the later capital of the country. His queen, the Greek Maria, built the Castle of Visegrád in the great bend of the Danube. By the end of the century, stone Gothic churches stood in their thousands, and stone castles in their hundreds. Muslims and Greeks were successfully weeded out and mendicant friars had erected their houses in at least a hundred towns and villages. From 1290 on diets were regularly held. Bit by bit the country began to look like any other monarchy in Europe.

The 1241 Mongol invasion played a considerable role in the way things shaped. Prior to the 16th century Ottoman conquest, this was the greatest political and economic catastrophe. Western Europe has not experienced anything like that since they managed to contain the Hungarians. Compared to such an Asian nomad invasion, a Viking plunder raid was no more than a visit by friends.

Mongol horsemen, led by Batu Khan, the grandson of Chingiz Khan, flooded Hungary in March 1241. Béla IV’s host was no match for their archers, the King himself was chased to the Adriatic litoral. Then, in 1242, the Mongols withdrew as unexpectedly as they had arrived. Mounds of corpses and burnt villages were the signposts of their route. It passes human understanding how they managed to kill as many in a single year but the fact is that large areas turned uninhabited in their wake. Their departure, naturally, was followed by an epidemic and then by an unprecedented but explicable famine. After all, there had been no sowing for two years. According to some demographers, the population declined by 50 per cent but even the most cautious speak of a decline of 15 to 20 per cent at the very least.

"In that year," an Austrian annalist recorded for 1241, "Hungary that had existed for three hundred and fifty years was ravaged by the Tartar host."⁶ Demographically the Mongol invasion can be compared to the Black Death elsewhere in Europe. The effects were similar: like the Black Death, the Mongol invasion too accelerated social change and irreversibly altered the economic structure. That, however, will have to be the subject of another tale.

  Notes

1. Otto Frisingensis, Gesta Friderici, lib. I, c. 31; in: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, vol. 20 (Hannover, 1869) p. 368.[back]
2. Ivan Hrbek, "Ein arabischer Bericht über Ungarn (Abu Hamid al-Andalusi al-Garnati, 1080–1170)", Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. 5 (1955) pp. 205–230.[back]
3. Géographie d’Édrisi, trad. Pierre-Amédée Jaubert, vol. 2 (Recueil de voyages et de mémoires publié par la Société de Géographie, vol. 6; Paris, 1840; reprint: Amsterdam, 1975) p. 377.[back]
4. Olgierd Górka (ed), Anonymi Descriptio Europae Orientalis anno MCCCVIII (Cracow, 1916) p. 43.[back]
5. Gyula Moravcsik (ed.), Fontes Byzantini historiae Hungaricae aevo ducum et regum ex stirpe Árpád descendentium (Budapest, 1948) p. 158.[back]
6. Hermannus Altahensis, Annales in: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, vol. 17 (Hannover, 1861) p. 394.[back]

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Pál Engel
is Head of the Medieval Department of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and President of the Medieval History Society. His publications include Beilleszkedés Európába a kezdetektől 1440-ig (Adaptation to Europe from the Beginnings to 1440, 1990).