Gábor Klaniczay
Rex iustus: The Saintly Institutor
of Christian Kingship
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The Canonisation of Five Hungarian Saints in 1083
The late-twelfth-century Annales Posonienses, one of the most valuable of our sources on early Hungarian history, has the following laconic entry for the year 1083: "In carcere missus et dominus rex Stephanus et Henricus filius eius et Gerardus episcopus revelantur et Salomon rex fugit". The "incarcerated" individual—as we know from the context, and from other historical sources—was the legitimate ruler, King Solomon (1063-1074), who fled the country after the canonisations of the new saints. This brings us to the central question that I should like to address in connection with these proceedings, namely, how the episcopal canonisations of the new Hungarian saints strengthened the position of King Ladislas (1077–1095), Solomon's cousin, who had, by then, been ruling, uncrowned, for seven years. The question, in short, centers on how Ladislas introduced to Hungarian politics the use of this form of sacral legitimation, i.e. the creation of new cults of saints to strengthen his claim to the Hungarian throne.
Hungarian historians have keenly debated certain unclarified details of the legends, for instance, whether these canonisations took place with papal endorsement or without (a problem we, too, shall discuss below), the fact that Ladislas should initiate these proceedings at all was taken to be in the natural course of things, being treated, at most, as a sign and/or consequence of his consolidating his hold on the country, or as indicative of his unique religious sensibilities (Ladislas himself would be canonised in 1192). My own research has placed the event in a different light. Ladislas's initiative fit into the arsenal of ideological weapons that were deployed in the eleventh-century struggles for succession to the Hungarian throne, with precedents elsewhere in Europe.
If we go on the assumption that all the canonisations took place in the year 1083, then—based on the chronological order of the various feast days—the following "timetable" emerges: On July 16-17, the relics of two saintly hermits, Zoerard-Andrew and Benedict, contemporaries of St. Stephen's (who had had their legends written fifteen years earlier by Bishop Maurice of Pécs), were elevated and translated to new tombs in the church of St. Emmeram in Nyitra. On July 25, King Ladislas and Laurence, Bishop of Csanád attended the elevation of the relics of Bishop Gerard (known as Gellért in Hungarian), the first martyr of the Church in Hungary. But by far the most spectacular event was the elevation of King Stephen's relics from the tomb where he had been laid to rest forty-five years earlier in Székesfehérvár (Alba Regia). A sort of Diet was convened to meet at his tomb on August 15, the anniversary of his death. After three days of fasting and prayers, they found that the gravestone could not be moved until King Solomon had been freed from his prison in Visegrád; this effected, a series of miraculous healings followed on the night of August 19. On August 20, the stone casket was opened, Stephen's "balsam-scented" remains were removed from the rose-colored water that filled the casket, and placed with due ceremony into a silver chest. (It was not until May 30 of the following year that St. Stephen's Right Hand, which had been appropriated sometime earlier by a cleric named Mercurius, was discovered in Bihar; a new church was soon raised there to house the precious relic.) Finally, on November 4, another synod meeting in Székesfehérvár elevated the relics of Stephen's son, Emeric.
Bishop Hartvic's legend of St. Stephen, written quite a few decades after the above events, tells us that this impressive series of canonisations was prompted by the fact that "the Roman See sent out an apostolic letter ordering the canonisation of the remains of all those who had, with their preaching or their injunctions, sowed the seeds of Christianity in Pannonia, and had converted it to faith in God." The Major and Minor Legends of St. Gerard speak of a papal legate come to Hungary to see that the directive was carried out, with the latter even mentioning that what initiated these canonisations had been a decision of a papal synod.
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The formation of dynastic cults of saints was often reflected in the names given in baptism. On reviewing these, however, we find no indication that the Árpáds had any such thing in mind before 1083. Though Andrew I (1046–1060) had broken with the family tradition, and sought names of Christian connotation for his sons—Solomon and David—these were names from the Old Testament (mediated, perhaps, by the Exhortations attributed to St. Stephen). Béla I (1060–1063), who, at baptism, had received the name of the Bohemian and Polish national saint, Adalbert, gave one of his sons—Lambert—a name that called to mind the Lotharingian upbringing of his Polish wife, Richeza; the names of his other two sons, Géza and László (Ladislas), were reminiscent of the dynasty's pagan ancestors (St. Stephen's father and his cousin). The names that Géza I (1073–1077) gave his sons reflect the influence of two diametrically opposite value systems: Coloman, obviously, was named after the Scottish pilgrim saint; but the name Álmos recalls the dynasty's pagan founding father, with a hint, perhaps, at a possible renaissance of his memory. Coloman "the Learned" (1095–1116) would be the first—nearly two decades after the year of the canonisations—to give one of his sons the name Stephen.
The fact that there is no evidence of a spontaneous cult either of Gerard, or Stephen, or Emeric makes it quite obvious that the canonisations of 1083 were a deliberate innovation on Ladislas's part. Ladislas's throne and the Christian Church and state were to be shored up with not one, but five domestic saints. That this series of canonisations had been carefully planned is apparent from the Legenda maior of St. Stephen—presumably completed before 1083—which contains direct references to the other candidates for sainthood. Zoerard-Andrew, we read, "has merited, by his confession of faith, to join the choir of angels"; Benedict "has spilled his blood for Christ, and has wondrously won his crown"; Emeric was "of a saintly nature"; while Gerard, "through the gift of spiritual grace, has been made worthy of the fellowship of martyrs".
Though the conspicuously political motivation of the canonisations has been pointed out by several historians, it needs stressing yet again. Ladislas descend-ed from the Vazul branch of the Árpáds. Vazul was a cousin of St. Stephen's, who, as the senior male of the ruling house, had a fair chance of succeeding him. He was blinded around 1031 to secure the succession for Stephen's son, Emeric (who, however, died shortly thereafter). Vazul's three exiled sons, Andrew, Béla and Levente, were called back to Hungary in the wake of the ensuing succession conflicts and the pagan uprising of 1046, and became the immediate ancestors of the Árpádian kings of the following three centuries. Their relationship to St. Stephen, however, and his institutional legacy, the Christian state, was more than ambivalent. The struggle between the heirs of Andrew I and Béla I was reminiscent of the rivalry between St. Stephen and Vazul; ultimately, the princes Géza I and Ladislas I defeated and deposed Solomon, the legitimately crowned and anointed king of Hungary. It was after succeeding his brother Géza as king of Hungary in 1077 that Ladislas initiated the cult of St. Stephen, the founder of the Christian monarchy, as an astute strategic move calculated to offset the multiple illegitimacy of his own position.
Prince Emeric's inclusion amongst the new Hungarian saints was probably similarly motivated. In Chapter 69 of the Gesta Ungarorum, we find an impressive characterisation of St. Stephen's designed heir, invested, like his father, with the full catalogue of Christian princely virtues: justice, prudence, fortitude, temperance, wisdom, knowledge, gentleness, mercy, benignity, largesse, humility and patience. The chroniclers tell us that these same virtues were, for the most part, lacking in St. Stephen's successors, up to the appearance of St. Ladislas, who was said to be the very embodiment of the full array of these virtues. Clearly, he had to be St. Stephen's sole true heir. The implication was that Stephen himself, the presumed author of the Exhortations (whence the list of virtues in the Gesta was derived) would have chosen Ladislas to succeed him. The importance of being able to claim Emeric as a saintly forebear is underscored by the fact that just before the canonisations, Ladislas had taken Adelaide, the counter-Emperor Rudolf's daughter, for his second wife, and had thus established tiesÊto the family of Giselle, Emeric's mother, of the same order as those of his rival, King Solomon, who had married Judith, the daughter of Emperor Henry III.
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In addition to ideological and political motives, the introduction of a new cult always owed a great deal to cultural transmission, to borrowing mediated by dynastic contacts and contacts between churchmen.
Ruling families used these cults of saints not just to consolidate their power at home, but also to boost their standing abroad. A saint in the family was an envied treasure, and fostering his cult was considered something to emulate in eleventh-century Europe. This being so, we can assume that Ladislas, too, came by the idea of the canonisations of 1083 through his extended family ties.
It is possible that news of the Anglo-Saxon royal saints reached Hungary as early as the first half of the century, through the sons of Edmund Ironside, Edmund and Edward, who, to escape their father's murderer, Canute the Great, first fled to Kiev, and then (presumably travelling on with Andrew) were educated in Hungary from 1046 on. Certain English sources have held Edward's wife, Agatha, to have been St. Stephen's daughter, but this can be ruled out on the basis of more recent genealogical research. (Subsequent to their return to the British Isles in 1057, their daughter Margaret became Queen of Scotland, and later still, one of Scotland's most important national saints.)
What probably served Ladislas as a more immediate example were the Bohemian and Moravian national cults. For Otto I, Duke of Moravia, was his brother-in-law; they fought on the same side against King Solomon in the battle of Mogyoród. Presumably Ladislas noticed the counterfeit of Wenceslas on the Bohemian and Moravian coins, and might have heard that the Bohemians attributed their victory over the Polish army to his miraculous intervention. He might have heard Wenceslas spoken of as the country's patron saint, and seen churches dedicated to him.
But probably the most decisive influence came from Kiev. The dynastic ties between the two countries are well known: in the tenth century already, Ladislas Szár got himself a wife from Kiev; Vladimir I's son, Svyatoslav, in turn, took a Hungarian princess for his wife. He was killed trying to cross the Carpathians to get back into Hungary, pursued by Svyatopolk, after he had done away with Boris and Gleb. Stephen had been on good terms with Yaroslav the Wise; and Andrew I had married his daughter, Anastasia. All these ties of kinship and alliance, the Gesta tells us, were what led Ladislas to seek help in the court of Kiev prior to the battle of Mogyoród (1074), i.e., precisely at the time of Boris and Gleb's ceremonial canonisation, or just after. We will, thus, not be far wrong if we conclude that the secret weapon that Ladislas brought home with him from Kiev was the idea of instituting cults of Hungarian saints.
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The New Image of the Royal Saint
Stephen was the first saint-king to earn his title not through martyrdom, but simply by virtue of his having converted his people to Christianity, and having ruled as a Christian prince. What is novel in the Legenda Maior framed for the occasion of Stephen's canonisation is precisely this focal fact. The mage of the Christianising king that had already figured in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian models, and the pious, charitable rex iustus archetype are given a new twist, with Stephen being presented as the apostolic organiser of the Hungarian Church. For Stephen, "though he did not himself assume the duty of evangelizing, was the leader and overseer of the preachers of the faith". It was not just that he supported, and supervised, the priests' and monks' missionary work; the Legenda Maior sets Stephen before us at the head of an entire troop of familiar saints and saints-to-be. Mention is made of the other saintly men who would be canonised in 1083: Zoerard-Andrew and Benedict, the two hermits of Zobor, Bishop Gerard, and Prince Emeric. Bishop Adalbert figures emphatically in the story. But the Legenda Maior also speaks of Blessed Gunther, the "nearly-martyred" Astrik, Emperor Henry II (whose cult, by that time, was definitely on the rise), and does not forget to mention the virtues of the pious Gisella, King Stephen's wife. We learn that the saintly king enjoyed the protection of St. Martin and St. George, and had the Blessed Virgin on his side, so much so that on his deathbed, he left the country in her charge. Stephen's apostolic function is made evident not just in his patient winning of converts, and his supervision of the holy men working for the good of the Church, but also in his readiness to crush the internal opposition to his new policies with an iron hand. This militant feature adumbrates the new type of holy king: in contradistinction to the other holy kings before him, Stephen is the victorious miles Christi.
It is in this regard that the Legenda Minor supplements the Maior with a great deal of graphic detail: surprisingly realistic, and, for a work of hagiography, singularly ruthless descriptions of Stephen's forced conversions and his eradication of those in his inner circle who dared oppose him. We read that Stephen "razed to the ground the scum of wickedness"; "bent the mass of his assailants under the yoke of his rule"; and condemned his recalcitrant, in-hospitable servants—the scene described in the epigraph to this chapter—to be "hanged two by two along the roads", so that his subjects might be "filled with fear". The Minor Legend recounts the particulars of Vazul's conspiracy, and tells of how the conspirators were blinded, and "their destructive hands cut off".
But how authentic are these self-styled "chroniclers", who cite "credible individuals" as their informants? János Horváth is inclined to see in these legends King Coloman's warning to Álmos, his brother (whom he had blinded, along with his son Béla, in 1115, for much the same reasons as St. Stephen had blinded Vazul); György Györffy, for his part, finds that the modes of punishment listed in the legend are more characteristic of Ladislas's rule, than of Stephen's time. From our point of view, what is most noteworthy in the Minor Legend is that its author, bypassing the early-medieval model of the saint-king who would rather pray than rule, has arrived at the other extreme: there is, as he sees it, no incongruity between sanctity and the "rightful" use of force.
Naturally, the new saint-king paradigm was in need of further refinement. It was to this end that Bishop Hartvic combined the Major Legend with the Minor Legend at the beginning of the twelfth century. Not surprisingly, the ruthless punishment of Vazul and his fellow conspirators is one of the passages that he chose to leave out of the new version; as for the roadside execution of the inhospitable servants, he found it necessary to add the following commentary: "We believe that he did this out of a love of justice, so as to put fear into the hearts of the others; for he wanted his country to be an open place of refuge to every visitor, so that everyone might enter freely; he wanted that whoever entered, no one should dare injure or molest him in any way".
But Hartvic also made an important contribution of his own to the new paradigm: he added the liturgical-sacral dimension, a form of the ruler's divine legitimation that went back to the Imperial Holy Roman traditions of the Ottonians and the Carolingians. This was the dimension introduced by his story of the Pope himself having sent Stephen his crown and the "apostolic cross"; and by the liturgical-sounding description of the ultimate parallel to Stephen's ritual coronation, his public—i.e., ritual—death, complete with his dedication of the country to the Virgin Mary with his last breath.
The St. Stephen legends opened a new chapter in the legends of holy rulers as a genre, formulating with an unprecedented single-mindedness an approach to royal sanctity which saw it not as something that one might acquire despite one's royal status, but as something that one comes by as its logical consequence. It was an approach that would acquire a special place in the ideological climate of late eleventh-century Europe, divided as it was by power struggles between the Church and the secular rulers. Essentially, it provided both sides with some new ammunition. To kings and princes, it offered the potential for holiness in the very exercise of secular power; to the Church, it offered an opportunity to define the terms of this holiness.
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But the appearance of the "Miles Christi" ideal as a hagiographic type is not the only thing that "dates" the legends of St. Stephen. Two other ideals of the age, an age replete with the reformist spirit of Cluny, come through the text no less clearly. In the Major Legend we read: "And so that the peace with which Christ has conjoined the world might have a progeny that appears in writing forever binding, he strictly enjoined upon his posterity that no one should ever invade another land with hostile intent; that no one should harm his enemy without a judicial inquiry; and that no one should oppress widows and orphans". It is not just the peace-loving tradition of the early saint-king legends and Mirrors of Princes that we see imprinted here, but also the very contemporary stamp of the Treuga Dei movement. It needs no saying how timely the ideal of the patronage of pilgrims was that Stephen was embracing. In the Legenda Maior, we find it conjoined to exhortations to succor "Christ's poor", the catchword of the new evangelical religiousness of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The other contemporary ideal that we see reflected is that of the wise and learned ruler (at the beginning of the eleventh century, Otto III had no lesser a tutor than Gerbert of Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester II). St. Stephen, the Legenda Minor tells us, learned to read and write, like St. Wenceslas; "as a boy already, he was thoroughly imbued with the science of grammar". "Heeding the words of Solomon, he had judiciousness and justice before his mind's eye", and "was highly esteemed among men for his wisdom".
Apropos of how far the St. Stephen legends mirrored the intellectual climate of contemporary Europe, it is instructive to consider a semi-hagiographic parallel dating to some forty years before the canonisations: Helgaud of Fleury's Life of Robert the Pious. Though no attempt was ever made to have Robert—the second of the Capetians—declared a saint (the new French dynasty preferred to be known for the hereditary ability of its members to cure scrofula by their "royal touch"), Helgaud's portrait of him not only follows the traditional hagiographic model of the royal saint, but also presages the modes of sanctity specific to "confessor" kings—to which, as we have seen, the St. Stephen legends owe their novelty. In France, of course, the apostolic-Christianiser role belonged to a bygone age. But Robert's involvement in the minutia of the liturgy, his attempts to moderate the excesses of ordeals, the details we get of his coronation, his ritualistic almsgiving (Robert had twelve paupers in his immediate entourage, in memory of the twelve apostles), his willing forgiveness of those of the poor who took unfair advantage of his munificence, and his generous endowment of the Church and supervision of the new Church institutions are all elements which make Helgaud's biography very similar in tone to the St. Stephen legends, particularly the Major Legend.
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How, then, can we place the three legends of St. Stephen in the European hagiographic context? As a final analysis, we can see them as marking a turning-point in the development of the royal saint model (a resolution, of sorts, of the centuries of incongruity): from the eleventh century on, the criterion of sanctity in the case of royalty would be the Christian prince's performance qua ruler. But the rex iustus—founding father, legislator, patron of the Church, and paragon of Christian virtue—would be more than just a new hagiographic model. Though there is no way that St. Stephen could have foreseen this, his prestige as a royal saint would become the secure underpinning on which the code of law that he promulgated would rest. Conversely, the king's functioning as a legislator would become a prerequisite of the holy king model (adding a radically new dimension to the paradigm). But more than this: in virtue of his Exhortations, Stephen—the new model holy king—appears before us as the paragon who also makes a theoretical contribution to defining the new principles of Christian rulership.
The legends of St. Stephen document the major role that hagiography played in the elaboration of the new model of the Christian ruler, and in establishing this model as one that the princes of Europe could aspire to.
But the Legenda Maior offers more than just a paragon, the holy king in action; time and again we are told that Stephen expressly strove to achieve sanctity. Proceeding on the do ut des principle, he offered "everything he had to Christ", so that he would "deign to admit him among the blessed in heaven". With a bluntness that strikes the modern ear as odd, the author of the legend makes clear that Stephen's almsgiving was a long-term investment: he was, in fact, laying up for himself "treasures in heaven".
The new holy king, thus, insisted on the trappings of power even in heaven. This power-orientation followed not just from the dynastic/political motivation of the cult of St. Stephen, but was also consistent with the evolution of the royal saint model as such, and the dominant trends of eleventh-century Christianity. But the rather anemic religious thrust of the St. Stephen legends and the meagerness of their folklore motifs would have lasting repercussions for the cult as a whole. St. Stephen, whose canonisation was occasioned by state policy considerations, continues to be a saint for state and political occasions to this day.
Gábor Klaniczay
is Rector of Collegium Budapest, an institute for advanced study, and professor of medieval
history at the Central European University and at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
This is the abbreviated text of a chapter in his Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Central
European Dynastic Cults in a European Context, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
