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THE REALM
OF ST STEPHEN
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THE REALM
OF ST STEPHEN
A HISTORY OF
MEDIEVAL HUNGARY, 895–1526
PÁL ENGEL
Translated by Tamás Pálosfalvi
English edition edited by
ANDREW AYTON
I.B.Tauris Publishers
LONDON • NEW YORK
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Published in 2001 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States and Canada distributed by St. Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY10010
Copyright © Pál Engel, 2001
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or other-
wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 1-86064-591-7
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset by The Midlands Book Typesetting Co, Loughborough, Leicestershire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
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Contents
Foreword vii
Preface xi
Introduction xiii
Chapter 1. The Carpathian Basin Before the Hungarians 1
Chapter 2. The Pagan Hungarians 8
Chapter 3. The First Century of the Christian Kingdom 25
Chapter 4. The Twelfth Century 49
Chapter 5. Early Hungarian Society 66
Chapter 6. The Age of the Golden Bulls 83
Chapter 7. The Last Árpádians 101
Chapter 8. Charles I of Anjou (1301–1342) 124
Chapter 9. The New Monarchy 140
Chapter 10. Louis the Great (1342–1382) 157
Chapter 11. The Monarchy of Louis the Great 174
Chapter 12. The Years of Crises (1382–1403) 195
Chapter 13. Sigismund’s Consolidation 209
Chapter 14. Sigismund’s Foreign Policy (1403–1437) 229
Chapter 15. Trade and Towns 244
Chapter 16. The Rural Landscape 267
Chapter 17. The Age of John Hunyadi (1437–1457) 278
Chapter 18. King Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490) 298
Chapter 19. Hungary at the End of the Middle Ages 323
Chapter 20. The Age of the Jagiellonian Kings (1490–1526) 345
Maps 372
Genealogical Tables 380
Abbreviations 385
Endnotes 387
Bibliography 396
Index 431
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Foreword
In 1993 I approached Pál Engel with an ambitious publication
proposal: that he should write a new history of medieval Hungary for
an English-language readership and that I could provide substantial
assistance in bringing the project to realisation. Just how substantial
my role was to be was only to become apparent some years later, when
portions of the draft text began to appear on my desk; but from the
outset it was clear what sort of book was needed. It was to be the first
comprehensive survey of its subject in English, and rather than being
merely a translation of an existing work, it was to be written afresh by
one of Hungary’s leading medievalists and with the non-Hungarian
reader in mind.
As someone who had recently become interested in the medieval
history of east-central Europe – seeking to develop a research interest
for myself as well as endeavouring to introduce medieval Hungary to
undergraduate students – I was only too well aware of the serious
shortage of historical literature on the subject in English. (There was a
good deal more in German, but a reading knowledge of that language
is not possessed by many history undergraduates in Britain, nor I
suspect in the USA.) There were, of course, general surveys of
Hungarian history, from the classic volume by C.A. Macartney to the
then recently published A History of Hungary, edited by Peter Sugar and
Péter Hanák; but treatment of the Middle Ages in these books, though
expertly handled, is necessarily brief and selective. Also available was a
range of specialised works (now more numerous), some translated from
Hungarian, some written by scholars based in the West; and a useful
selection of primary sources in modern editions. I can well remember
the excitement with which I read these works, and the genuine enthu-
siasm with which my students took to the subject, despite the
difficulties involved in bridging the chasm between concise historical
surveys and demanding monographs and articles. It was, however,
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THE REALM OF ST STEPHEN
undoubtedly the case that, for newcomers to this field, the accessible
historical literature was patchy in coverage and uneven in quality. The
bulk of the most important writing on medieval Hungary was available
only to those able to read Hungarian. What was urgently needed was a
volume conceived on a large scale that combined a detailed narrative
with a broad-based thematic coverage; which synthesised the most up-
to-date research by Hungarian (and other) scholars; and which
presented it in an accessible, readable fashion for a non-Hungarian
audience. It was with these needs in mind that this book was written.
Naturally, we hope that the publication of this book, happily coin-
ciding as it does with the thousandth anniversary of St Stephen’s
coronation, will serve also to bring the medieval history of the
Carpathian basin to the attention of a wider academic and general
readership. The importance and distinctiveness of this region’s history
are matched only by the degree to which it has been neglected by the
academic community of western Europe and the USA. Yet the region,
and the realm of St Stephen within it, that bore the brunt of the
Mongols’ onslaught on Europe in the 1240s, that became Europe’s
leading producer of gold in the fourteenth century and that stoutly
resisted the advance of the Ottoman Turks (whilst, under Matthias
Corvinus, witnessing the first flowering of the Renaissance north of the
Alps) in the fifteenth, surely deserves more attention than it has hith-
erto received. Such attention would be amply rewarded. For beyond
gaining an understanding of the internal life and external relations of
one of the major kingdoms of Christendom, an examination of medi-
eval Hungarian history presents opportunities for fruitful comparisons
with the familiar themes, social groups and institutions of western
Europe. For example, while an English medievalist may be as intrigued
by the ‘honours’ of Angevin Hungary as the Florentine chronicler
Matteo Villani appears to have been, he will also find in familiaritas, the
relationship between lord and retainer (familiaris), a close resemblance
to ‘bastard feudalism’.
What tends to emerge from such comparisons is the strong impres-
sion that St Stephen’s realm was at once part of the mainstream of
Christendom, yet in some respects different, enduringly influenced by
the cultural and social legacies of its pagan past and by its geographical
location on the frontier of Christian Europe. This is an impression that
is vividly conveyed by the numerous miniatures, nearly 150 of them,
which decorate the text of the Illuminated Chronicle of c. 1360. Most
striking in this respect is the symbolic depiction of Louis the Great’s
cosmopolitan court, but also notable are the miniatures that offer
glimpses of Louis’s armies, which are shown as consisting of western-
style knightly warriors, supported by lightly equipped mounted
archers, apparently of Cumanian or Iasian origin, wielding composite
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FOREWORD
bows. And this is surely the impression of Angevin Hungary that would
have been carried home by western-European visitors – by men like the
Dominican friar, Walter atte More, who in April 1346 arrived in
Hungary on a diplomatic mission from England. His expenses account
shows that he met the queen-mother at Visegrád, then travelled to
Zagreb, where the royal army was mobilising, for discussions with King
Louis himself. The English Dominican would, therefore, have seen at
first hand the workings of the royal court and the distinctive features of
Hungarian military organisation; and he may well have formed judge-
ments about the character of the political elite and the capabilities of
the king’s army. Like other travellers in the region, he would no doubt
have been struck by the comparative sparseness of the population. And
he may also have gained some appreciation of the mineral wealth of
Hungary and the advantages that it gave a young king with military
ambitions. Thus, whatever the outcome of his negotiations, we can be
fairly certain that the Dominican friar would have conveyed to his
political masters in England a view of mid-fourteenth-century Hungary
likely to arouse both intense interest and a certain amount of envy.
Whilst further specialist works on particular aspects of the
Hungarian Middle Ages written in western-European languages are
greatly to be welcomed (as, for example, Martyn Rady’s forthcoming
study of the Nobility, Land and Service in Medieval Hungary), what we
may also hope for in the future are, on the one hand, comparative
works involving Hungarian history and, on the other, the integration
of the medieval experience of the peoples of the Carpathian basin into
studies with a coverage that is truly European – studies of, for example,
kingship and representative assemblies, the nobility and peasantry, the
ecclesiastical hierarchy and monastic orders, or warfare and military
institutions. To take the last subject as an example, imagine a work like
Philippe Contamine’s magisterial La guerre au moyen âge, yet with a
purview stretching as far as eastern Europe and the Balkans. In this
respect, there have indeed been some promising publications in recent
years: witness, for example, the scope of David Nicolle’s Arms and
Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050–1350, 2 vols (White Plains, New York,
1988). But a good deal more comparative work needs to be done in the
field of medieval military institutions. As the present volume shows, the
military role of the nobility – their theoretical obligations as well as the
role they actually performed – is one of the central threads of
Hungarian history; but how does this role compare with the martial
activities of the nobility elsewhere in Christendom? The study of
Hungarian armies needs also to be set within a wider context. For
example, it would be appropriate, indeed illuminating, to view the
armies raised by the Angevin kings as but one further facet of the
general development of contractual military service in medieval
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THE REALM OF ST STEPHEN
Europe, whilst any study of the emergence of standing armies in the
fifteenth century should not fail to take account of Matthias Corvinus’s
mercenary army, not to mention the permanent garrisons installed in
Hungary’s southern frontier fortresses.
It is, therefore, my hope that this book, which itself is the result of
Anglo-Hungarian collaboration, may contribute in some small measure
to the broadening of medievalists’ horizons, and to the further integra-
tion of St Stephen’s realm into the mainstream of historical research
and teaching in western Europe and the USA.
Andrew Ayton
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