Balázs Illényi
The Adventures of
the Holy Crown of Hungary
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Not that this means that in this early period Hungarian kings were wearing the Holy Crown of today: historians are still not fully agreed on when it took its final form. The most likely answer is that it was sometime in the 12th century, almost two hundred years after the coronation of Stephen (1000), presumably during the rule of King Emeric (1196–1204), who is represented on his coins with a crown like the present one. Incidentally, Emeric’s reign may be important not only because it was then that the lower and upper parts of the Holy Crown were united, but also for the fact that under the Árpád dynasty (which died out in 1301) it only once went abroad, directly after Emeric’s death. What happened was that the queen mother fled to escape a pretender to the throne with Emeric’s infant son, Ladislas III, to Austria, and took, naturally, the crown with them. The pretender was so incensed that he almost started a war against the Austrian Duke Leopold for the return of the crown. However, Ladislas died soon after and his body together with the crown was brought back to Székesfehérvár. There the crown was kept in the tower of the basilica. But only some years later, the Holy Crown again had to be removed, this time because of the Tatar invasion of Central Europe (1241–1242). On this incursion the Tartars ravaged the regions to the west of the Danube; accordingly Béla IV (1235–1269) had the crown taken to Dalmatia, then part of the kingdom of Hungary.
But the crown’s real adventures only started after the House of Árpád died out in 1301. In the power vacuum that arose, there were three claimants to the throne; each of them had, through dynastic relationships, some connection with the kingdom of Hungary. The Bohemian prince Wenceslas (from 1305 Wenceslas III, King of Bohemia) succeeded first in having himself crowned king at Székesfehérvár; in 1304 Caroberto of the Neapolitan Angevins forced him to leave the country. This he did, together with the Holy Crown. Against Caroberto __ who had already been crowned in 1301 in Esztergom with an occasional crown __ there soon appeared a fresh contender, in the person of a relative of Wenceslas, the Bavarian Prince Otto, who had obtained the Holy Crown from his Bohemian ally and set out for Hungary with it. This was when the crown suffered its first, and almost final, accident: Otto had hidden the crown in a gourd hung to a saddle and one night somewhere on the road between Vienna and the Hungarian border, they lost the precious relic. Only the next day did they notice what had happened, and the contemporary chronicles ascribe it to a miracle that the soldiers succeeded in finding the gourd and its precious contents on this busy highway. In 1305 Otto was crowned at Székesfehérvár; not long after, he was taken captive by a Transylvanian magnate, László Kán, who took the symbol of power into his own possession. Meanwhile, Caroberto defeated, in succession, the insurgent barons who had been as dangerous as the pretenders to the crown; by then he also had the Pope’s support and consolidated his position through the assistance of Cardinal Gentilis, the emissary of Pope Clement V. Gentilis (again) crowned him in 1309, and this time at Buda, with another crown. This was when the spiritual authority of the Holy Crown of the Árpáds became clear: this latter crowning at Buda was not held to be valid. Every diplomatic skill of Cardinal Gentilis was needed to wrest the Holy Crown from László Kán, so as __ for the third time __ to perform at Székesfehérvár in 1310 Caroberto’s "true and valid" coronation. A new principle was put into words, that only coronation at Fehérvár, with the Holy Crown, made for a legitimate King of Hungary.
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The Holy Crown, now firmly in the possession of the Habsburgs, travelled much in the next two hundred years, almost always to escape some external or internal threat. At the times of the various anti-Habsburg uprisings led by Transylvanian princes it had to be secured: for example in 1644 it was taken to Győr, away from György I Rákóczi, to Vienna in 1703, during the War of Independence led by Ferenc II Rákóczi. In 1683, during an especially vigorous Turkish attack, the crown’s keepers fled as far as Passau, and during the Napoleonic wars, it was taken eastwards twice (in the direction of Munkács and of Eger) away from the French armies. In 1784, for a completely different reason, the crown travelled to Vienna, for reasons of state: Joseph II (1780–1790), son of Maria Theresa, was Holy Roman Emperor as well as King of Hungary, but, as an enlightened absolutist, he did not have himself crowned. This was because he did not wish to take an oath to respect the privileges of the Hungarian estates, which he saw as an obstacle to his desire to centralize power in his own hands. (He is known to Hungarian history as "the hatted king.") Joseph deposited the crown in the Vienna treasury and no request by the Hungarian magnates could sway him. His generosity was proven, on the other hand, by the fact that a few days before his death he ceded, after all, to the request of the country, and the Holy Crown was taken home with true Baroque pomp, this time to Buda.
After half a century in the capital city, in 1848 new travails began for the crown. During the Revolution and the War of Independence, it first had to be taken to Debrecen, to secure it from the advancing imperial armies at the end of 1848; after its return to Buda in the spring, with the shadow of the final surrender looming, it was taken for safekeeping towards Transylvania in the summer of 1849. Bertalan Szemere, the Prime Minister of the revolutionary Hungarian government, escorted the crown on its route through Szeged, Arad, Nagyvárad, Lugos, and Orsova, farther and farther from the capital city. Here, more than a week after the laying down of arms to the imperial army and their Russian allies, Szemere and his associates buried an iron chest with the coronation regalia. This was no simple matter either: at first they hid the treasures under a floor of an unoccupied house, only to find the very next day that somebody had already attempted to tamper with the hiding place. They removed the chest and buried it in the fields, between two easily recognizable willow trees, taking an oath of silence. After a few years, one of the young soldiers who had been party to this, and who had gone into exile in London, spat out the secret for some gold to an imperial police informer. He, in turn, immediately notified his superiors who had been desperately looking for the crown. This was how, in September 1853, the Austrians found the chest and the untouched regalia. Whatever one thinks of the betrayal, it did, however, happen in the nick of time: the notes taken at the disinterring make it clear that, in these four short years in the damp soil, the sword was already completely corroded by rust, the robes were disintegrating, so too was the leather case of the crown, and its lining had completely rotted away. Still, no irreparable damage had occurred.
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Many people consider it an act of Providence that the Holy Crown survived untouched, in the vaults of the Royal Castle of Buda, during the revolutions following the First World War, the passing through of the armies of intervention, the Red and the White Terrors, and that, all the way to the end of the Second World War __ since the country was a monarchy without a king __ there was no need to touch it. But a few months before the end of the fighting the symbolic power of the crown was again in play. On October 15, 1945 the Regent Miklós Horthy attempted to take Hungary out of the war; the Nazi troops stationed in the country succeeded in stopping him, and the next day the regent had to appoint as Prime Minister Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the fanatically extreme Arrow Cross Party, who followed Hitler to the bitter end. Szálasi had the crown, which had been buried by its keepers a few days earlier in the cellar of the castle, brought out on November 6 and took on it an oath as "leader of the nation". The fighting was coming closer and closer to Budapest; the coronation regalia was, upon Szálasi’s command, taken to the town of Veszprém in Western Hungary. Here the crown keepers discussed the idea of securing the precious relics in the Benedictine abbey at Pannonhalma. They only succeeded, however, in getting the robe there; Arrow Cross men retained control over the other coronation insignia.
At the beginning of December the crown was transferred to the town of Koýszeg, and at the end of that month to the small village of Velem near the Austrian border, where it remained until early in 1945. By then, however, the strategic situation had become so bad that the keepers themselves also had to leave the country. On March 27, the crown started on its way to Austria escorted by Ernoý Pajtás, the last commander of the Crown Guard, and six of his soldiers. This journey lasted until the beginning of April, when they found themselves in Mattsee, 25 kilometres from Salzburg. The journey had to be made under continual air attacks; at one time the van with the regalia slid into a shell-hole from which it was only towed out with difficulty. At the Mattsee station, Ernoý Pajtás decided that, on account of the perils of the situation, the relics had to be buried. One night, towards the end of the month, he put the treasures in a military petrol barrel cut in half and buried this several metres into the ground. While they were engaged in this, with Arrow Cross men also present, including the Arrow Cross Deputy Prime Minister Jenoý Szölloýsi, the crown keepers were digging with cocked guns in their pockets: they feared being killed by the Arrow Cross men after the work had been done. A few days later, they were taken prisoner by the American Army. Pajtás had given the keys to the chest they had taken with them, which contained only the sword, to the Arrow Cross men. The American officers therefore believed right until the keys were found, at the end of July, that they had taken possession of the Hungarian coronation regalia. Much was their astonishment when, upon opening the chest, they only found the sword. Pajtás informed them that the ruse had been necessary so that the buried treasures could be, until the keys were available, in the American and not in the Soviet occupation zone. The regalia were found just in the nick of time, because the petrol barrel had become completely impermeated by the clayey soil and the lining of the crown had rotted away __ it had to be removed later.
The Americans promised to Pajtás to return the crown to the Hungarian people only when Hungary was completely liberated. During the harsh Communist dictatorship there could be no hope of this, at least not before and immediately after the 1956 Revolution. Kept in Fort Knox, the regalia were only to become the subject of serious discussion from the middle of the seventies, although the Hungarian authorities tried to raise the subject at just about every diplomatic meeting. A role was probably played in this by the fact that the case of the Prince Primate, Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, who had taken refuge since 1956 in the American embassy in Budapest, was finally resolved in 1971: he was allowed, after lengthy discussions, to leave for the Vatican. By about 1976 the Kádár regime, which had put down the revolution ferociously, was so strongly consolidated that, according to the latest research, the US presidents had begun to consider improving relations and, thus, also the return of the crown. At the same time, they also had to quell the opposition of Hungarian exiles in America, most of whom were opposed from the very beginning to the government of the United States "crowning Kádár", as they said at the time. Although the US did not succeed in completely dampening this opposition, there was an attempt to work out a formula acceptable to everyone. According to this, the crown "is being returned to the Hungarian people" __ and not to the Communist leadership __ by the United States government, and it was to be exhibited in a public place. In addition, and this was, perhaps, the severest condition, János Kádár, the First Secretary of the party, could not be present at the handing-over ceremony. Since the Hungarian government very badly needed this international recognition and, especially, the financial help they assumed would follow, the American conditions were complied with. On January 6, 1978, in the building of the Hungarian Parliament, the American delegation officially handed over to the Hungarian people their coronation regalia, which had been out of the country for 33 years.
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Balázs Illényi
a historian by training, is on the staff of Heti Világgazdaság, an economic weekly.
