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Published by: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

2016_2_Bollók

Volume 5 Issue 2 CONTENTS

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Ádám Bollók

Excavating Early Medieval Material Culture and Writing History in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Hungarian Archaeology1

 

In this essay, I examine the initial stages in the nineteenth century of the study of material finds from the Middle Ages in the Carpathian Basin. I offer a brief overview of the history of the scientific work that led to the identification of archaeological findings from the Avar era and the era of the Hungarian Conquest, and I also shed light on some of the reasons underlying the failure to identify properly findings from the Hun era (i.e. the fifth century) and the late Avar era (i.e. the eighth century). I examine the principal considerations that shaped the research endeavors of historians and archaeologists in the nineteenth century, and I present the primary methodological approaches according to which historians drew on archaeological findings in support of their conclusions. I focus in particular on the works of Miklós Jankovich, Flóris Rómer, Ferenc Pulszky, Géza Nagy, József Hampel, Géza Supka, and Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, though I also consider the writings of less influential representatives of scholarly life.

Keywords: archaeology, late antique and early medieval history, historiography, Carpathian Basin, Avars, ancient Hungarians

 

Introduction

The founding father of ancient critical history-writing, the rightly famous Thucydides, in his celebrated narrative of the pre-history of the Greeks (the so-called “archaeology,” Greek arkheologieo), reports on a “dig”, i.e. what we today would call an “archaeological excavation”. It had been carried out by the Athenians in 426 BC at Delos in order to purify the island, which was regarded as the birth place of the gods Artemis and Apollo, and therefore both births and burials had been prohibited there. His conclusions, which were based on the results of this early “excavation,” are particularly interesting, since they shed considerable light on the thinking of “researchers,” both ancient and modern, engaged in the study of history through material remains of the past. As the fifth-century BC author concludes on the basis of his inspection of the relics discovered at Delos, before the arrival of the Greeks,

 

Carians inhabited most of the islands, as may be inferred from the fact that, when Delos was purified by the Athenians in this war [i.e. the Peloponnesian war] and the graves of all who had ever died on the island were removed, over half were discovered to be Carians, being recognized by the fashion of the armor found buried with them, and by the mode of burial, which is that still in use among them.2

Thucydides’ observation offers a very clear illustration of the fact that one of the important aspects of the interest in the material culture of the past has always been closely connected in European intellectual life to the conviction that these objects constitute sources on the basis of which conclusions concerning the past can be drawn. Furthermore, his chain of thought also clearly shows that one of the primary aims of this interest in the past was to clear up questions concerning the identity of those people who created these objects. One of the important aspects of this is referred to in contemporary scholarly discourse as the “ethnic interpretation” of the archaeological record.

This is particularly true with regards to the archaeological remains of eras from which very few or only very uninformative written sources survive. Thus, the study of material culture can acquire a role of particular prominence in the process of acquainting ourselves with this slice of the past. It is therefore hardly surprising that, since the early nineteenth century, this approach has enjoyed considerable popularity in European scholarship and, within this, in Hungary, whose academics initially was very closely tied to the pursuit of German scholarly circles. Though, in the second half of the twentieth century historical and archaeological scholarship began to express serious doubts concerning the theoretical foundations and reliability of ethnic interpretations of archaeological finds. This skepticism was no doubt prompted in part by the fact that, after World War II, experts of the history of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages became increasingly emphatic in their observation that the notion of ethnic identity in these periods could hardly be described with the conceptual frameworks that were used by representatives of the eighteenth-century idea of the modern nation, however enthusiastically these thinkers, who projected the notions of identity that prevailed in their era onto the past, attempted to do so.3 On the other hand, one still comes across heated debates in the secondary literature on the extent to which archaeological relics can be assessed and studied from the perspective of their “ethnic” attribution,4 while other scholars simply seem to ignore this question altogether.

However, in the nineteenth century, which is the period that is the most important from the perspective of my inquiry, the question of the ethnic attribution of archaeological relics (or, more precisely, the question of the grounds on which a scholar could venture an assertion on the ethnic interpretation of a relic) was hardly a concern for the majority of researchers. The notion that the various finds that were being excavated could and indeed had to be connected to some earlier ethnic group was regarded as self-evident. Naturally, this view was closely tied to political nature of the study of history and the public discourse concerning history at the time.

The Early Stage of Archaeological Research

Historians studied the history of the Carpathian Basin in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages primarily from the perspectives of political history, endeavoring to write narratives of the histories of the various gentes that for a time made the middle Danube Basin their home by collecting, critiquing, and assessing the written sources.5 The importance of this seemed self-evident at the time in part simply because for most of the gentes in question there was no simple, adequately stable chronological narrative of events that could serve as a point of departure for further inquiries. In addition to this focus on the essential need for annals of history, understandably the question of the pre-history of the peoples who lived in the Carpathian Basin was also a subject of considerable interest, including for instance the desire to determine their earlier homes and the paths they had taken in the course of their migrations. However, as noted above, scholars at the time hardly took into consideration the possibility that the peoples of the early Middle Ages were not ethnic groups in the modern sense of the term. They were even less communities that could be described using the Romantic term “nation.” Thus, one could hardly regard their “wanderings” as the migrations of coherently defined and “closed” ethnic groups or “nations” from one homeland to another.

For Hungarian scholars, the arrival of the ancient Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin was a topic of particularly keen interest, as was the question of their migrations in the times before the so-called Conquest (i.e. the ancient Hungarians’ settlement in the Carpathian Basin at the turn of the ninth century). At the same time, however, for perfectly understandable reasons from the outset scholars did not really consider archaeological finds alone as suitable sources for the study of historical questions of such importance. Clearly, one of the reasons for this was the fact that, at the time of the first excavations of finds from the period of the Conquest (from the 1830s to the 1860s), Hungarian archaeologists had no historical relics from the territories of “Scythia” (the “original homeland” mentioned in the Hungarian chronicles from the Middle Ages), the Hungarian settlements discovered in the thirteenth century by Friar Julian on the Volga River,6 or the wider area around the Ural Mountains (which on the basis of the Finno-Ugric affinities of the Magyar language was regarded as their ancient homeland). Thus, it was not possible to make comparisons. Therefore, while the scholars who were investigating the question of the previous “homelands” of the ancient Hungarians and their migration towards East-Central Europe sought answers to the inquiries first and foremost in written sources and the theories concerning the linguistic affinities of the Magyar language, from the outset archaeological finds seemed for more suitable as a means of shedding light on the culture of the ancient Hungarians of the tenth century. And this culture seemed accomplished indeed. In contrast with descriptions found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German historical literature, which concluded, on the basis of their own historical concepts and the image of the ancient Hungarians depicted in medieval Western chronicles, that the Hungarians of the tenth century were an unrefined, barbaric people, nineteenth-century Hungarian historians contended with pride and satisfaction that the surviving historical relics from the Conquest Period hardly support the image of the “uncivilized Hungarians” that had come to prevail in the historical scholarship in the West.

Nineteenth-century scholars could not easily refute this negative image of the ancient Hungarians drawn in the Middle Ages (an image of the attacker that was constructed by the attacked, who used topoi from the literature of Antiquity on the “Northern barbarians”), or, more precisely, the recurrence of this image in the Western European scholarship of the Early Modern Era, merely on the basis of the written sources. The oft-quoted description in the World History written by Regino, a late ninth-century abbot of Prüm (d. 915), for example, encapsulates this medieval Western attitude with epigrammatic conciseness. According to Regino, the Hungarians “do not desire gold and silver in the same way as other mortals. […] They know nothing about the use of wool and clothing, and although they are consistently afflicted by the cold they wear only skins of wild animals and rodents.”7

Nevertheless, although this description of the ancient Hungarians’ pre-Conquest history and visual appearance is no more than a slightly modified version of the paragraph originally written by the second- or early third-century Roman historian, Justin, about the Scythians, Regino’s markedly hostile tone is clearly apparent. While the Scythians’ simple lifestyle in Justin’s characterization harmonized well with the stereotypes of the Antiquity about the “Northern barbarians”, who were supposed to have led a refined, moderate and admirable life, “[b]y omitting this [attitude from his writing], Regino turns Justin’s celebration of the simplicity of an ancient civilization into revulsion at a backward people.”8

The images drawn of the ancient Hungarians by the majority of contemporary or near-contemporary authors correspond in their main outlines with the one delineated by Regino. More appreciative voices have not remained entirely unheard in late nineteenth-century Hungarian historiography, either. In contrast to Regino’s description, the famous Persian geographer Abū Sacīd cAbd al-Íayy ibn ŻaÎÎāk ibn MaÎmūd Gardīzī (d. ca. 1061), writing in the first half of the eleventh century, offered the following description of the ancient Hungarians: “These Hungarians are a people [that] are [possessed] of [fair] countenances. Their clothes are of brocade and their weapons are [made] of silver and are goldplated.”9 Though Gardīzī is a comparatively late author, this passage is commonly thought to have been excerpted and translated into Persian from an earlier, but now regrettably lost Arabic work, thereby preserving a later ninth- or tenth-century account.10 Given its positive depiction of Hungarians, it is hardly surprising that Gardizi’s text rapidly became familiar among Hungarian historians and figured frequently in their writings. However, considering that neither the Persian text nor the Hungarian translation was published before the very end of the nineteenth century,11 at the time when the first archaeological excavations were being done (roughly between the 1830s and the 1880s) the only available descriptions of the early Hungarians were found in the works of (medieval) historians from Western Europe, and these descriptions offered decidedly negative depictions of the Hungarians.

In light of the above, it is hardly surprising that in the nineteenth century Hungarian historians and archaeologists, in order to correct the picture bequeathed by the biased written accounts, turned to the tenth-century archaeological material that had recently been excavated from sites all over the Carpathian Basin. However, this approach hardly turned out to be without pitfalls.

With the discovery and identification in 1834 of the first ancient Hungarian grave assemblage, the famous burial of a tenth-century Hungarian in Benepuszta (today part of Ladánybene in Central Hungary),12 archaeology began to play a significant and continuously growing role in the research on the visual appearance of the ancient Hungarians in particular and the early phases of Hungarian national history in general.13 Miklós Jankovich (1772–1846), a famous art-collector and art-connoisseur of the earlier nineteenth century and the first publisher of the Benepuszta grave assemblage, proudly compared the glittering of the silver-gilt costume accessories revealed among the finds with the visual appearance of the Celtic and Germanic tribes described by Julius Caesar and Tacitus, respectively.14 Jankovich was also obviously pleased to note that the tenth-century western European coins, minted in the name of Berengar I as King of Italy (r. 887–915) and then Emperor (r. 915–924) and King Hugo of Provence (r. 924–947), evidently corroborate the contemporary chroniclers’ accounts of the western European military campaigns of tenth-century Hungarians.15

The presence of these coins among the finds of Benepuszta was doubtless of utmost importance, since these objects provided the necessary clues enabling Jankovich to identify the proper chronological position of the entire burial. On the other hand, the exploration of an ancient Hungarian assemblage prompted him to take a step further by attempting to define the main characteristics of tenth-century Hungarian national decorative style and its eastern, pre-Conquest roots. In this endeavor, Jankovich happily referred to the leaf-shaped silver-gilt mounts, which according to his supposition was attached to the deceased’s over-garment, by emphasizing that the technique of mercury gilding was introduced to Europe from Asia by the ancient Hungarians.16 The griffon portrayal on the Benepuszta strap-end, a late Carolingian product in reality, was likewise regarded by him as a typically Asian phenomenon which did not bear any resemblance to Greco-Roman or European griffon depictions.17

Of course, it would be a serious mistake to judge Jankovich’s assumptions by the standards of our today knowledge. Still, two notable tendencies were palpable in this very first assessment of the tenth-century material culture of the Carpathian Basin. The first and more understandable is the author’s national pride, which characterizes the almost hymnal tone of his entire contribution. The second, in contrast, is more closely connected with Jankovich’s and his contemporaries’ historical concept of the Hungarians’ eastern origins,18 a notion that led them to trace back all possible elements of the material record known to them at the time to an eastern, Asiatic ancestry. The equation of the Hungarians’ eastern origins, a commonsensical fact generally acknowledged from the very beginnings of medieval Hungarian historiography,19 with a specifically Asiatic ancestry, on the other hand, hardly gained universal acceptance in later decades. Needless to say, archaeology was hardly in a game-changing position in the research of Hungarian origins in the middle and late nineteenth century. The debates about the Finno-Ugrian or Turkic genealogy of the Magyar language were understandably dominated by comparative linguistics and resulted in the demonstration of the Finno-Ugrian affinities of the Magyar language.20 Historical analyses of the available written sources, conversely, repeatedly directed the researchers’ attention to the world of the steppes. Relying on the testimonies of western European Latin and Byzantine Greek authors, who often saw, in all new-coming nomadic tribes, the same “Scythians,” “Huns” or “Turks,”21 several historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth century considered the Scythians, Huns, Sabirs, Avars, Bulgars or Pechenegs as the ancestors and/or closest relatives of pre-Conquest Hungarians.

An archaeological assessment of the various historical theories was hindered for a long time by the fact that the identification of the material heritage of the abovementioned peoples was far from sufficiently advanced in these decades. In the material record as it was known at the time, the large Hun-age copper cauldrons were ascribed to different peoples, from the Scythians to an “unspecified” early medieval population.22 The first Hun-age grave assemblages were either identified as “Migration period antiquities”23 or they appeared among early and middle Avar-period, i.e. sixth- to seventh-century, finds.24 In contrast, the eighth-century cemeteries characterized by the appearance of a great number of bronze casts were thought to represent the later Sarmatian and Hunnic periods, i.e., the third to the fifth, or more broadly, the third to the sixth or seventh centuries.25 The reasons for the latter misidentification clearly exhibit the main problems faced by, and in the meantime the central interests of, later nineteenth-century Hungarian archaeology. A third- to fifth-century (perhaps sixth century) date was proposed for these eighth-century grave assemblages and cemeteries mainly on the basis of the late Roman coins and secondarily reused Roman artefacts found among the finds. The late Antique style of the ornamental vocabulary appearing on the late Avar-period bronze casts likewise seemed to strengthen this chronological attribution. Both the majority of excavators of individual sites26 and leading archaeologists performing the systemization of the finds shared these views concerning chronology.27 József Hampel (1849–1913), one of the most outstanding minds of late nineteenth-century Hungarian archaeology, attempted to carefully consider the value of late Roman coins in dating the artifacts and assemblages.28 He realized that several cemeteries containing the eighth-century casts actually continued well into the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries.29 Yet even he assumed that the griffon depictions and animal combat scenes on these casts represented a late Scythian legacy preserved by the Sarmatians.30 Finally, he presumed that the casts decorated with animal figures and vegetal ornaments went out of use only slowly around and slightly after the sixth-century arrival of the Avars.31

The rather romantic assumption, however, according to which a people of such an enormous world-historical importance as the Huns must have left significant archaeological traces, was raised only sporadically. On the contrary, considering the lack of securely dateable find assemblages from the late fourth and earlier fifth centuries (other than those assigned to the Sarmatian population), some archaeologists argued that only the Hun political center had moved from the Ukrainian steppes to the Carpathian Basin, while the bulk of the ethnically Hun population had continued to reside in the eastern European steppes throughout the Hunnic epoch.32 The main rationale behind these and many similar hypotheses was doubtless the strong belief in the ethnical and historical interpretability of the archaeological record.

Such strongly historically-minded approaches, however, may equally have led to suppositions which later proved to be more accurate, even if they were hardly more than uncertain educated guesses at the time of their formulation. I cite a single eloquent example. Ágost Sőtér (1837–1905), a landowner and lawyer in Moson County, concluded on the basis of the results of his excavation conducted at Dunacsúny (today Čunovo in Slovakia) that the abovementioned cemeteries that had been attributed to the Sarmatians by the leading experts of his time were, in fact, established and occupied by the Avars. His line of reasoning, or, more precisely, his passing remark was based solely on the extension of the Dunacsúny cemetery and his conviction that “only the Avars resided in this region” in sufficiently large numbers to leave behind hundreds of graves.33 The archaeological finds themselves may have led to similar “accurate intuitions.” The suggestion made by Ferenc Pulszky concerning the dating of finds that had characteristic cast belt adornments to the Avar period (though in the case in question the sixth and seventh centuries were meant) was similarly founded on a relatively weak argument. The idea was based on a fibula that had been found in a seventh-century grave of one of the cemeteries in Keszthely. Because of the nature of the excavations, however, Pulszky could not have known that the fibula had not been taken from the same grave as the cast mountings (for this problem, see note 39 below).34

Knowledge concerning the archaeological material connected with the Sabirs, the Bulgarians, and the Pechenegs was even more limited. The initial identifications of the first Proto-Bulgarian assemblages in present-day Bulgaria were only made in the 1930s,35 practically 100 years after the publication of the Benepuszta finds, while the pinpointing of the archaeological heritage of the Sabirs poses unsolvable problems for specialists even today. One of the few possible reliable points of departure for a comparative analysis that would have enabled archaeologists to take sides in the contemporary debates of historians and linguists was thus provided by Ferenc Pulszky’s (1814–97) identification of the material culture of the early Avar period in 1874. In the latter case, again coin finds, namely solidi minted under the Byzantine emperors Justin I (r. 518–527), Justinian I (r. 527–565), Phocas (r. 602–610), and Constantine IV Pogonatus (r. 668–685), offered the necessary starting point.36 On the basis of the main characteristics of these finds, the sixth- to seventh-century assemblages discovered over the course of the following decades were in most cases properly identified,37 even if some of the attributions were still mistaken.38

As is readily apparent from this brief overview, the accurate dating of types of artifacts and find assemblages was rarely possible without contemporary coin finds. Where these coins were not available or the available ones were not contemporary with the burials in which they were found, only stratigraphic and typological observations or securely dateable imports would have provided the necessary help. However, neither did the excavation methods employed in course of the majority of the nineteenth-century archaeological explorations supply specialists with the crucial stratigraphic data,39 nor was the archaeological research conducted on the territories from which exports that might have been accurately dated arrived in the Carpathian Basin in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages advanced enough to provide sufficiently useful assistance for experts specialized in the research of the material culture of the Middle Danube region. (Germanic finds originating from the Roman imperial and the Merovingian periods were notable exceptions, however.) Still, it would be unfair to fail to note that in a number of cases typological comparisons could and actually did play a role in establishing the proper chronological position of several assemblages. To mention only a few examples, on the basis of formal analogies—which are not entirely acceptable today, but at the time were the only available ones—Flóris Rómer (1815–89) came to the accurate conclusion that the Hun-age cauldrons were, in fact, early medieval manufactures.40 Similarly, Hampel based his dating of the finds from Adony on comparisons with artifacts from the late Roman and Merovingian periods,41 and Géza Nagy (1855–1915), an archaeologist at the Hungarian National Museum, came close to dating accurately the eighth-century assemblages on the basis of typological observations (indeed he was hindered first and foremost in this by his faith in the usefulness of coins as artifacts on which to base hypotheses concerning dating).42

Indeed it is worth mentioning, in this context, an essay by a German archaeologist, Paul Reinecke (1872–1958), that was written towards the end of the nineteenth century and remains a captivating read even today. With thorough knowledge of early medieval Western European finds and relying on proper methodologies, Reinecke used formal analogies to accurately date the eighth-century relics (i.e. of the late Avar period) found in the Carpathian Basin.43 His conclusions, however, found little echo in the Hungarian scholarship of the time.

In addition to these obstacles, mention must also be made of at least two decisive subjective factors, each of which played a significant role in the emergence of long-term misconceptions. The first was, as we have already seen, an immediate consequence of the belief of nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists that archaeological cultures constitute well-definable entities corresponding to peoples in the modern sense of the word. As a consequence of this strongly historical approach, many researchers focused on ethnic interpretations of the assemblages that had been and were being discovered, labelling them with ethnic names known from the written sources. On the other hand, the inevitable use of coin finds in course of the determination of the chronological position of a given assemblage and find horizons not only turned out to be a helpful tool for archaeologists, but, along with the written accounts of conquests and decisive battles, it also generated a sort of optical illusion. Since coins from the sixth, seventh, and tenth centuries were found primarily in graves and small cemeteries characterized by a high percentage of horse burials, rich grave furnishings, and weapon finds (and thus, one can conclude, were left behind mostly by the members of early and middle Avar and ancient Hungarian elites), scholars were inclined to regard both peoples as relatively small, but rich and militant groups.

It is therefore hardly surprising that for Ferenc Pulszky, who at the time was the director of the Hungarian National Museum, “the ancient Hungarians were conquerors and not craftsmen, and thus their jewelry was made by their servants, prisoners of war, and the local population found [inside the Carpathian Basin] in a period in which art was on the decline.”44 Following a similar line of thought, Géza Nagy attempted to make a systematic comparison of objects and burial customs from the three assemblage groups assigned to the “Hunno-Sarmatians,” the Avars and the ancient Hungarians in a series of papers published in 1893.45 Not surprisingly, more similarities were detected between the burial assemblages of the “Hun” and early Avar epochs, in large part because the material remains of the alleged “Hunno-Sarmatians” did in fact date from late seventh and eight centuries, in other words, the late Avar age, and therefore represent the archaeological heritage of the descendants of the gentes populating the Carpathian Basin in the early Avar period. On the other hand, Nagy seems to have been even more intrigued by the dissimilarities that divided his “Hunno-Sarmatian” and Avar groups from the ancient Hungarian assemblages. In his view, the middle Volga components of and the Sāsānian and early Islamic influences that left their marks on the ancient Hungarian material culture adequately explain these differences.46 Interestingly enough, Nagy further added that the material remains of the Pechenegs, the Jasz people, and the Cumans are also to be found among the burial assemblages ascribed, on the basis of Byzantine, Islamic, and western European coin finds, to the tenth-century Hungarians. This latter assumption apparently reflects Nagy’s belief that “the cultures and customs of all these peoples differed only in nuances from one another.”47

Nevertheless, not only the Hungarians, Pechenegs and Cumans were considered kin folks or essentially similar peoples in Nagy’s understanding. He also regarded the various tribes and tribal alliances—Sabirs, Utrigurs, Kutrigurs, Onogurs (or Hunugurs), Bulgars among others48—mentioned in the historical record during the century following the dissolution of the Hun Empire and often labelled “Huns” in the Byzantine sources as the direct offspring of the Huns. Moreover, according to Nagy, in all likelihood Magyar elements had been among the Bulgar tribes migrating into the Carpathian Basin in the 680s, and therefore the presence of the Magyar ethnos in the Middle Danube region might be traced back to the late seventh century at the latest.49 Perhaps not surprisingly, archaeology played virtually no role either in the construction of Nagy’s models of ethnic continuity or in his hypothesis regarding the Magyars’ settling in the Carpathian Basin before their historically attested arrival at the end of the ninth century. Accordingly, hardly any mention was made of the archaeological heritage of the “post-Hunnic” tribes enumerated above or the pre-conquest Magyars residing east of the Carpathians. The fact, therefore, that, as mentioned above, Nagy himself detected noticeable differences between the archaeological materials of his “Hunno-Sarmatian” and Avar groups on the one hand and that of the ancient Hungarians on the other and he still reckoned with a Magyar presence in the Avar-era Carpathian Basin is very telling as far as his understanding of the different values of the historical and material record is concerned. Although he shared the belief, which represented a widespread conviction and method at the time, that one could draw a relatively simple equation between ethnic entities bearing strong ethnic identities on the one hand and material cultures on the other, nonetheless, if the results of an archaeological investigation did not support the desired historical model the historical hypotheses were granted priority over the conclusions drawn from the archaeological finds.

Of course, it would be an oversimplification to claim that Nagy’s theories and approaches succeeded in convincing all of his contemporaries, whether archaeologists or historians. It was even more so when later, after the turn of the nineteenth century, he made clear steps toward demonstrating the direct historical and ethnic links between the Scythians and the early medieval steppe peoples, including the ancient Hungarians.50 Moreover, his dedicated efforts to search for the ancestors of the Hungarians led him to consider the Sumerian language one of the relatives of the Magyar tongue.51 The implausible nature of these theories was not always obvious even to the best minds of the age.52

Several of Nagy’s lesser errors were shared by Hampel as well. Although Hampel was less historically-minded than his colleague at the National Museum, he similarly believed in the necessity of identifying archaeological horizons with given peoples.53 Thus, Hampel was also convinced of the Sarmatian identification of the late Avar-age cemeteries, even if he clearly saw that on typological grounds a number of these assemblages must be dated to periods as late as the seventh and eighth centuries. Still, he dated the overwhelming majority of his “Sarmatian group” up to the sixth century.54 Nor did he recognize the genuine chronological position of the Hun-age copper cauldrons, as noted above.55 In his search for analogies of the tenth-century Hungarian archaeological relics, however, Hampel more consequently and strictly relied on the comparative methods widely employed by art-historians and archaeologists. Thus, he put less emphasis on the late antique and early medieval written accounts. It is therefore hardly surprising that the majority of the comparative materials cited in his writings originated from Eastern Europe and the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.

The Comparative Study of Archaeological Finds in the Carpathian Basin

As of the mid-1860s, archaeologists studying the history of the Carpathian Basin in the early Middle Ages were able to begin familiarizing themselves with Russian archaeological finds, which constituted an increasingly important contribution to their work. It also contributed significantly to Hampel’s comparative efforts. In 1874, Rómer was able to study museum collections in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Helsinki,56 and Hampel traveled to Moscow and Saint Petersburg in 1886 to pursue similar work.57 In the 1890s, archaeologist Mór Wosinsky was able to travel east as part of the first expedition led by Jenő Zichy,58 and archaeologist Béla Pósta was able to familiarize himself with a tremendous range of archaeological finds as part of the third Zichy expedition, which journeyed as far as the Minusinsk Basin.59 The incorporation of archaeological relics that were discovered in the course of these expeditions—relics that were from the Hun period or were in some way tied to Finno-Ugric peoples— and research ventures into the study of the relics from the Carpathian Basin represented an important step forward.60 It opened a new path for archaeological research on the ancestors of the peoples settled in the Carpathian Basin by enabling a comparison of the archaeological groups that had been established earlier on the basis of the relics found in Hungary with the relics from the territories of Eastern Europe.

On the other hand, the archaeology of further eastern territories, i.e. that of Central and Inner Asia and that of the Far East, was merely in statu nascendi in the days of Hampel and Nagy.61 Thus, it may not come as a surprise that the debates followed with more than keen interest by the leading archaeologist of the Carpathian Basin were centered on the interpretations of the late Antique and early medieval artistic cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. The most important among them, the “Orient oder Rom?” controversy, initiated and shaped for almost 40 years by the formidable Austrian art-historian Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941), had an extremely profound effect on the thinking and interpretative models of Hungarian early medieval archaeologists.62 In his later works, Hampel also swung between the sharply different images of Late Antiquity drawn by Austrian art-historians Alois Riegl (1858–1905) and Josef Strzygowski. Though he was obviously unable to take a clear stand between the arguments advocated by the Viennese art historian and the Graz-based scholar in the “ Orient oder Rom?” controversy, he essentially remained true to the principles set down by Riegl in his understanding of early medieval ornamental arts, one of the central issues of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hungarian early medieval archaeology.63

Hampel’s successors, however, were more drawn to Strzygowski’s nationalistic and ethnocentric views, thereby distracting themselves in their scholarship from Hampel’s more balanced attitude. One of the main protagonists of this process was Géza Supka (1883–1956), one of Strzygowski’s former students in Graz, who began working in the Hungarian National Museum in 1904, during Hampel’s time. In his early studies, written during the first decade of his academic career in Budapest, Supka’s focus was primarily on the Near Eastern origins and historical developments of Byzantine art and its impact on the material cultures of early medieval steppe peoples.64 In the meantime, his gradually growing interest in the latter topic quickly led him to concentrate his research efforts more and more on the questions of the archaeology of Central Asia.65 Nevertheless, he was far from alone with this commitment to making use of the then recent results of emerging Asian archaeology. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács (1880–1964), a young art historian who approached the subject from a different direction, entered the picture in 1913 with an article demonstrating the Hunnic origin of the copper cauldrons.66

The studies by Géza Supka, which concentrated on the art of Central and Inner Asia, and Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, which focused on the art of the Far East, directed attention to Asia, a region that was barely known to Pulszky, Nagy and Hampel’s generation. The “discovery” of Asia, the recourse to a host of previously unknown relics that were being brought to light almost continuously from one year to the next in the study of the early medieval archaeological assemblages of Hungary undermined the primacy of the Graeco-Roman world (and of Sāsānian and early Islamic culture) among the potential source regions from which the material cultures of the Migration period drew inspiration. Following the path paved by Strzygowski in the “ Orient oder Rom?” controversy, as of the mid-1910s Supka immersed himself in the study of Central and Inner Asian Buddhist relics and their cultural milieu, on the basis of which he constructed hypotheses concerning the nomadic peoples who migrated to the Carpathian Basin, including the ancient Hungarians.67 Pursuing a different path, Felvinczi Takács attempted to highlight the Chinese and Central Asian cultural connections of the Migration period material of the Carpathian Basin. Both scholars achieved important results: mention must be made of the final demonstration of the Hunnic affinities of the copper cauldrons by Felvinczi Takács and the proper identification of the Hun-age coins discovered in the Carpathian Basin,68 as well as of some western European Hun assemblages69 and the introduction of the new publications on the Turfan murals into the reference works regularly relied on by Hungarian archaeologists in the case of Supka.70 Conversely, the overwhelming majority of their conclusions never gained currency among specialists. To mention a single eloquent example, let me refer here to the dozens of studies published by Felvinczi Takács between the 1920s and 1960s, in which he continued to argue for the Sarmatian attribution of the eighth-century cast bronze belt ornaments by alluding to Central Asian and Chinese parallels of their decorative motives.71

Although Supka and Felvinczi Takács’s efforts to demonstrate the direct Chinese and Central and Inner Asian roots of some of the Avar and Conquest period relics did not achieve any particular prominence, their influence should by no means be underestimated. Nándor Fettich (1900–71), the leading archaeologist of the Migration period in Hungary during the 1920s and the 1930s, was, for instance, visibly influenced directly and, even more importantly, indirectly by Supka and Felvinczi Takács’s views and Strzygowski’s pan-Iranian theory, which exerted a considerable impact both through his own writings and through Supka’s studies. Consequently, Josef Strzygowski’s views became absolutely dominant in Hungarian early medieval archaeology during this period.72

Despite the mistakes and deficiencies in the main lines of archaeological interpretations, mention must also be made of several important new results achieved in the early twentieth century. The scholarship of utmost importance includes the proper identification of the material heritage of the Huns in the mid-1920s73 and the final determination in the 1930s of the dating of the cemeteries characterized by the cast bronze belt ornaments to the eighth century.74 These series of advances slowly paved the way for the final construction of the proper chronological sequence of late Antique and early medieval find horizons of the Middle Danube Basin, which was an indispensable prerequisite of the search for the formal analogies of given artefact types and burial customs at the right places and in the right periods. These progressive developments were further reinforced by several significant new discoveries and publications in Russian and then Soviet-Russian archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century, as the progress that was made in historical and linguistic research likewise helped archaeologists continually sharpen the focus of their own investigations.

Conclusion

Be that as it may, one point clearly emerges, at least in my understanding, from the overview I have offered here. Although early medieval archaeological investigations of the material remains of the Huns, Avars, and ancient Hungarians were generally regarded as part of a scholarly discipline of essential historical and national importance from the outset, archaeologists specializing in research on these periods actually rarely were in a position to construct their own narratives of the national past in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. Of course, sometimes they supported preexisting historical narratives by referring to obvious or superficial similarities between artifacts and burial customs or told their own versions of a people’s history based on their readings of the available written accounts, as Géza Nagy did, for instance. Others, like Supka and Felvinczi Takács, thought to establish historical connections by “discovering” formal parallels without considering the actual historical and chronological limits of the elements of the material record under examination. Yet, the points of departure of many ahistorical approaches and the findings that were made by the last two scholars were strongly historical in nature and actually had little if anything to do with their reading of the archaeological record. The guiding idea behind their investigations was their firm belief in the historical and, to a certain extant at least, ethnic relatedness of the ancient and early medieval nomadic peoples, from the Scythians or the Huns down to the Hungarians. On the other hand, the best minds, like Pulszky and Hampel, who rejected the ahistorical construct of the eternally unchanged “steppe peoples”, were to a great extent deterred from constructing an independent historical narrative based mainly on their own understanding of the material record by the apparent lack of necessary comparative material. Furthermore, the general Zeitgeist of their age doubtless granted priority to the information provided by the written testimonies over the lessons that could be gleaned from the archaeological record. These and other prejudices and misconceptions led to a curious situation; in the nineteenth century, the age of master-narratives, an “outstandingly national discipline,” to quote Gustav Kossina’s famous characterization of archaeology,75 could hardly construct its own master-narrative of Hungarian national history.

 

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1 The present paper was written within the research project no. K 108 670 supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund, entitled Művészetek és tudomány a nemzetépítés szolgálatában a 19. századi Magyarországon.

2 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, Ch. 8. For the Greek text and the English translation, see Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, vol. I: Book I and II, trans. Charles Forster Smith, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1956), 12–15.

3 One of the first attempts to articulate and address this problem from a modern perspective, an attempt which put the research on completely new foundations in many respects: Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen gentes (Cologne–Graz: Böhlau, 1961). Other emblematic works include Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1988); Walter Pohl, Die Awaren: Ein Steppenvolk in Mitteleuropa, 567–822 n. Chr. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988); Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). For an attempt to adopt Wenskus’s methods and observations to the research of the history of the ancient Hungarians, see Jenő Szűcs, A magyar nemzeti tudat kialakulása (Szeged: JATE, 1992). Written in 1970, this major work was published only in 1992 in its entirety and accordingly relies on literature that was available up to the 1960s.

4 For a work that recently ignited an impassioned debate in the archaeological scholarship on the early Middle Ages, which continued to adhere to European and primarily continental traditions, see Sebastian Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie: Geschichte, Grundlagen und Alternativen. Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, Ergänzungsband, 42 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). For a discussion of the most recent responses to Brather (which includes an articulation of the author’s viewpoint), see Volker Bierbrauer, “Vom Schwarzmeergebiet bis nach Pannonien: Ethnische Interpretationsprobleme am Ende des 4. und in der ersten Hälfte des 5. Jahrhunderts,” in Romania Gothica II: The Frontier World. Romans, Barbarians and Military Culture, ed. Tivadar Vida (Budapest: ELTE, 2015), 365–475. The debate is continued from another perspective in Florin Curta, “Some Remarks on Ethnicity in Medieval Archaeology,” Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007): 159–85; idem, “Medieval Archaeology and Ethnicity: Where Are We?” History Compass 9 (2001): 537–48; Sebastian Brather, “Ethnizität und Mittelalterarchäologie: Eine Antwort auf Florin Curta,” Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters 39 (2011): 161–72; Florin Curta, “The Elephant in the Room: A Reply to Sebastian Brather,” Ephemeris Napocensis 23 (2013): 163–74.

5 Cf., e.g. Károly Szabó, Magyar vezérek kora Árpádtól Szent Istvánig (Pest: Ráth Mór, 1869); Henrik Marczali, “A vezérek kora és a királyság megalapítása,” in Magyarország a királyság megalapításáig, vol. 1 of A magyar nemzet története, ed. Sándor Szilágyi (Budapest: Athenaeum 1895), 1–344; Gyula Pauler, A magyar nemzet története az Árpádházi királyok alatt, 2 vols. (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1899), 1:1–38. See also the data assembled by Géza Nagy, “Magyarország története a népvándorlás korában,” in Magyarország a királyság megalapításáig, vol. 1 of A magyar nemzet története, ed. Sándor Szilágyi (Budapest: Athenaeum 1895), CCLIII–CCCLII.

6 For a discussion of the attempts to identify the ancient homelands of the ancient Hungarians, see István Vásáry, “Mediaeval Theories Concerning the Primordial Homeland of the Hungarians,” in Popoli delle steppe: Unni, Avari, Ungari, Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 35 (Spoleto: Centro italiano de studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1988), 213–44.

7 Regino of Prüm, Chronicle, s.a 889. English translation: History and Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe: The Chronicle of Regino of Prüm and Adalbert of Magdeburg, transl. Simon Maclean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 203.

8 Simon Maclean, “Commentary,” in Ibid., 203, n. 367.

9 Arsenio P. Martinez, “Gardīzī’s Two Chapters on the Turks,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 2 (1982): 162.

10 Earlier scholarship concurred that the passage cited from Gardīzī’s was excerpted from al-Ğayhanī’s late ninth- and early tenth-century Kitāb al-masālik wcal-mamālik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms). However, István Zimonyi suggests that the passage in question may have been taken from another, unknown work. See Hansgerd Göckenjan and István Zimonyi, Orientalische Berichte über die Völker Osteuropas und Zentralasiens im Mittelalter: Die Ğayhānī-Tradition (Ibn Rusta, Gardīzī, Íudud al-Alam, al-Bakrī und al-Marwazī), Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica, 54 (Wiesbaden: Klaus Röhrborn, Ingrid Schellbach-Kopra, 2001).

11 Gardīzī’s chapters on the peoples of Eastern Europe, including the ancient Hungarians, were first published (although separately from one another, but based on the same manuscript and almost in the same year) by the Russian Vasilij Vladimirovich Bartol’d (Otchet o poezdke v Srednii Azii s nauchnoj celi 1893–1894 gg., Zapiski Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk po Istoriko-filologicheskomu otd’lenii, VIII ser., I.4, Sankt-Peterburg: n.p., 1897) and the Hungarian Géza Kuun (“Keleti kútfők” in A magyar honfoglalás kútfői, (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1900), 137–284, and see esp. 148–49, 167–73).

12 Miklós Jankovich, “Egy magyar hősnek – hihetőleg Bene vitéznek, – ki még a ’tizedik század’ elején, Solt fejedelemmel, I. Berengár császárnak diadalmas védelmében Olaszországban jelen volt, újdonnan felfedezett tetemeiről, ’s öltözetének ékességeiről,” A Magyar Tudós Társaság Évkönyvei 2 (1832–1834) [1835]: 281–96.

13 For a reading of the history of the archaeological scholarship, see Péter Langó, “Archaeological Research on the Conquering Hungarians: A Review,” in Research on the Prehistory of the Hungarians: A Review, ed. Balázs Gusztáv Mende (Budapest: Institute of Archaeology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2005), 175–340.

14 Jankovich, “Egy magyar hősnek,” 282.

15 Ibid. For these coins and the pioneering work done by Jankovich, cf. László Kovács, “Benepuszta és Vereb: az elsőként ismertté vált két honfoglalás kori sír (1834, 1853) érméinek sorsa,” Numizmatikai Közlöny 110/111 (2011/12): 51–69.

16 Jankovich, “Egy magyar hősnek,” 286. For our present state of knowledge about the introduction and early history of mercury gilding, see Kilian Anheuser, Im Feuer vergoldet: Geschichte und Technik der Feuervergoldung und der Amalgamversilberung. AdR Schriftenreihe zur Restaurierung und Grabungstechnik, 4 (Stuttgart: Thiess, 1999).

17 Jankovich, “Egy magyar hősnek,” 289.

18 For Jankovich’s views on Hungarian prehistory and early history, see István Vásáry, “Jankovich Miklós és a magyar őstörténet,” in idem., Magyar őshazák és magyar őstörténészek. Magyar Őstörténeti Könyvtár, 24 (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó 2008), 179–89. As Vásáry notes, Jankovich concluded on the basis of the secondary literature that was available to him at the time that the relatives of the Hungarians and their distinctive language were to be sought first and foremost among Asian peoples and languages. He felt that “the Huns, Cumans, Khazars, and Hungarians all had a shared language. The dialectical differences were like the dialectical differences between the Germanic languages of today. Jankovich was obviously mistaken, but most of the scholars of his time shared this mistaken belief. It was merely a hypothesis regarding ancient history, since they had no concrete data whatsoever concerning the languages of the Huns, the Cumans, and the Khazars.” Ibid., 185–86.

19 Cf. Vásáry, “Mediaeval theories.”

20 For a brief overview of the main views, see János Pusztai, Az “ugor-török” háború után (Budapest: Magvető, 1977).

21 For an unsurpassable critical overview of the Byzantine sources, see Gyula Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, vol. 2/1 of Die byzantinische Quellen der Geschichte der Türkvölker: Sprachreste der Türkvölker in den byzantinischen Quellen. Zweite durchgearbeitete Auflage, Berliner Byzantinische Arbeiten, vols. 10–11 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1958).

22 The first person to publish an article on a cauldron from the Hun period was correct in his hypothesis that it dated back to the Migration period: Flóris Rómer, “A czakói bronz-edény,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 2 (1869) [1870]: 292–92. Very soon after having published this article, Rómer enriched the literature with data concerning another cauldron which had not been fully published for a long time. Idem., “A czakói bronzedény ügyéhez,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 3 (1870): 114–15. Mór Wosinsky, the archaeologist who published data concerning the second cauldron found in the course of archaeological excavations in the Carpathian Basin, also thought that it probably dated to the Migration period. He was able to present two similar types of finds among finds known from Russia. Mór Wosinsky, “A kaposvölgyi népvándorláskori üst,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 11 (1891): 427–31. József Hampel, however, did not regard this hypothesis as persuasively founded. He hypothesized that this kind of artifact might have been used in the Scythian period, though he did not exclude the possibility (particularly in his article written in German) that the cauldrons might have been used in the early Middle Ages. József Hampel, “Skythiai emlékek Magyarországban,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 13 (1893): 400; idem., “Skythische Denkmäler aus Ungarn: Beitrag zur uralaltajischen Archäologie,” Ethnologische Mitteilungen aus Ungarn 4 (1895): 15. It was not until the twentieth century that the cauldrons were dated accurately to the Hun period, cf. n. 66 below. For a detailed examination of the history of scholarship on the question, see István Bóna, Das Hunnenreich (Budapest: Corvina, 1991), 220–21.

23 Ambró Lakner, “Csornai leletekről,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 9 (1889): 263–71. Later, Hampel classified the diadem from Csorna as “Germanic”: József Hampel, A régibb középkor (IV–X. század) emlékei Magyarghonban, 2 vols. (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1894–1897), 2:20.

24 József Hampel, “Újabb hazai leletek az avar uralom korából,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 20 (1900): 98–107, 110–11.

25 In contrast with this view, which was accepted by the majority, Wosinsky regarded the graveyard in Závod, a cemetery in which interments began in the seventh century and were continuous into the eight, but where the characteristic eighth-century bronze casts did not appear, as the heritage of a Germanic community on the basis of a pectoral cross that was found there. Mór Wosinsky, “A závodi sírmező,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 16 (1896): 30.

26 The individual argumentations varied considerably, and non-professional archaeologists were also often cautious enough not to offer precise ethnic labels. Cf., e.g., Gyula Tergina, “Az ordasi lelet,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 14 (1880) [1881]: 336–40; Zsigmond Szelle, “Régészeti ásatások a bölcskei népvándorláskori temetőben,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 11 (1891): 239–49 (by alluding to the chronological position of the Keszthely cemeteries); Vilmos Lipp, “A vasmegyei régiségtár köréből,” A vasmegyei régészeti-egylet évi jelentése 6 (1878): 31–34 (although misguided by the coins, but otherwise cautious and subtle in his analysis). Soon, however, Lipp changed his mind and suggested an eighth-century date for some of his finds, which ultimately proved correct according to later analyses. Nevertheless, unfortunately he did not specify the considerations which led him to this result. Cf. idem., “Keszthelyi leletek,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 14 (1880) [1881]: 122. Then, in his subsequent studies published after the excavation of several new Roman-era coins, he returned to the fourth- to fifth-century date, cf. idem., A keszthelyi sírmezők (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1884), 51; Idem., Die Gräberfelder von Keszthely (Budapest: Kilian, 1885), 87. For a complete survey of his works and views on this topic, see Gábor Kiss, “A Keszthely-városi avar kori temető kutatásának kezdetei,” Zalai Múzeum 9 (1999): 77–98.

27 József Hampel, “A n. múzeum érem- és régiségosztályának gyarapodása a f. évi julius-november hónapokban,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 14 (1880) [1881]: 349–51 (yet only hesitantly); Idem., “Népvándorláskori temető Mártélyon,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 12 (1892): 422; Géza Nagy, “A régi kunok temetkezése,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 13 (1893): 109–12; Idem., “Magyarország története a népvándorlás korában,” CCXCV–CCIXVI, CCCXXX–CCCXXXII.

28 Hampel, A régibb középkor, 2:22–26.

29 Ibid., 2:20, 26. The origins of this conviction appear to be twofold. On the one hand, some of his considerations seem to be of a typological nature. On the other, some of the cemeteries really were only opened in the seventh century, in other words, at a time at which the available archaeological finds had already been accurately dated by scholars.

30 Ibid., 2:26.

31 Ibid., 2:27.

32 Nagy, “A régi kunok temetkezése,” 111–12, Idem., “Magyarország története,” CCXCVI, CCCXXX–CCCXXXI.

33 Ágost Sőtér, “Csúny,” in A Mosonmegyei Történelmi és Régészeti Egylet Emlékkönyve, 1882–1898: A honfoglalás ezredéves ünnepélyének emlékére, ed. Ágost Sőtér (Magyar-Óvár: Czéh Sándor-féle könyvnyomda, 1898), 123. Though, Bóna’s judgement, according to which “Heute wissen wir, aber auch zu Zeiten Hampels wußten alle diejenige, die selbst die Gräber freigelegt hatten (M. Wosinsky, B. Pósta, Á. Sőtér, E. Kada sowie auch P. Reinecke), daß die Gruppe II die Hinterlassenschaft der späten Awarenzeit des 7. und 8. Jahrhunders umfaßte” is a bit of an exaggeration (Bóna, Das Hunnereich, 222).

34 Ferenc Pulszky, “Rekeszes ötvösség Magyarországon,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 15 (1881): 151–52.

35 For a research history, see Uwe Fiedler, Studien zu Gräberfeldern des 6. bis 9. Jahrhunderts an der unteren Donau. Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie, 11 (Bonn: Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt, 1992), 106, 319–24.

36 Ferenc Pulszky, A magyarországi avar leletekről. Értekezések a történeti tudományok köréből, III.7 (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1874), 6–10.

37 Cf., e.g., Hampel, “Újabb hazai leletek,” 97; and his “Avar group” in Joseph Hampel, Alterthümer des frühen Mittelalters in Ungarn. 3 vols. (Braunschweig: Vieweg und Sohn, 1905).

38 Cf. n. 23.

39 It is interesting to note, for example, that the overwhelming majority of hundreds of burial assemblages excavated by Vilmos Lipp at various localities in and around Keszthely remained practically undocumented. Consequently, it was impossible to know which objects might have originated from the same grave. This practice left archaeologists unable to separate, among others, the various chronological horizons of a multi-period site.

40 Rómer, “A czakói bronz-edény.”

41 Hampel, “A n. múzeum érem. és régiségosztályának gyarapodása,” 348–49; and see the assemblages collected in his “third group” in Hampel, Alterthümer.

42 In 1893, he still compared stirrups from the late Avar age with “eighth-century and ninth-century Germanic and Norman stirrups.” cf. Nagy, “A régi kunok temetkezése,” 109–10. Two years later he uncertainly explained items similar to the Germanic-type stirrups found in graves defined by him as dating from the Sarmatian period by some Germans among the buried. Cf. Idem., “Magyarország története,” CCCXXXII.

43 Paul Reinecke, “Studien über Denkmäler des frühen Mittelalters,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 29 (1899): 35–52.

44 Ferenc Pulszky, A magyar pogány sírleletek. Értekezések a történeti tudományok köréből, 14 (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1891), 3.

45 Nagy, “A régi kunok temetkezése”; Idem., “A magyarhoni lovassírok,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 13 (1893): 223–34; Idem., “A hunn-avar és magyar pogánykori sírleletek jellemzése,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 13 (1893): 313–23.

46 Idem., “A régi kunok temetkezése,” 115.

47 Ibid., 115–16.

48 Nagy, “Magyarország története,” CCCXXIX, CCCXLVIII–CCCCXLIX.

49 Ibid., CCCLII.

50 Géza Nagy, A skythák: Székfoglaló értekezés. Értekezesek a történeti tudományok köréből, 22 (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1909).

51 Géza Nagy, “Tanulmányok a szumirokról,” Ethnographia 9 (1898): 27–41.

52 For instance, Hampel did not entirely support Nagy’s theory according to which the Scythians were the ancestors of the “Turanian peoples” of the early Middle Ages. However, he also did not indicate that he found it inconceivable. He merely noted that “we cannot establish this continuity on any archaeological basis.” Cf. x.y. [József Hampel], “A skythák: székfoglaló értekezés Nagy Gézától” Archaeologiai Értesítő 29 (1909): 372–73.

53 Cf. Paul Reinecke’s personal experiences with Hampel, mentioned by Paul Reinecke, “Die archäologische Hinterlassenschaft der Awaren,” Germania 12 (1928): 87–88.

54 Cf. p. 22 above and Hampel, Alterthümer, 1:13, 17–23, 790–806.

55 Cf. n. 22 above.

56 Flóris Rómer, “Jelentés az északi tartományokba tett tudományos kirándulásról,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 9 (1875): 9–17, 39–48, 78–81.

57 József Hampel, “A honfoglalási kor hazai emlékei,” in A magyar honfoglalás kútfői, ed. Gyula Pauler and Sándor Szilágyi (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1900), 796.

58 Cf. Gábor János Ódor, “Wosinsky Mór, Tolna megye népvándorlás korának első kutatója,” in Wosisnsky Mór: “… a jeles pap, a kitűnő férfiú, a nagy tudós…” 1854–1907, ed. Attila Gaál (Szekszárd: Wosinsky Mór Megyei Múzeum, 2005), 120–21.

59 Béla Pósta, “Archaeológiai tanulmányok oroszországi gyűjteményekben,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 18 (1898): 246–53, 334–345; Idem., Archaeologische Studien auf russischem Boden, 2 vols. (Budapest–Leipzig: Hornyánszky Viktor–Karl W. Hiersemann, 1905).

60 Concerning the significance of Pósta’s work to the research on the archaeology of the Hun period, see Bóna, Das Hunnenreich, 222.

61 For more on this, see Géza Supka’s recollections from almost three decades later: Géza Supka, “Népvándorlási ötvösség Magyarországon,” A Magyar Nemesfémipar Évkönyve 6 (1930): 22.

62 Ernő Marosi, “Survival or revival? The Nagyszentmiklós treasure in Hungarian art history,” in The Gold of the Avars: The Nagyszentmiklós Treasure, ed. Éva Garam and Tibor Kovács (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2002), 134–42.

63 Cf. József Hampel, Újabb tanulmányok a honfoglalási kor emlékeiről (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1907).

64 Cf, e.g., Géza Supka, “A ΠΑΝΑΓΙΑ (Panagia) a bizánci érmeken: Adatok a bizánci Mária-típus ikonográfiai fejlődéséhez,” Numizmatika Közlemények 7 (1908): 137–63; Idem., Lehel kürtje (Budapest: Franklin, 1910); Idem., “Archaeologiai kutatások a külföldön: A «közelebbi kelet» a középkorban,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 32 (1912): 418–35.

65 Cf. Géza Supka, “Motívumvándorlás a korábbi középkorban,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 34 (1914): 1–19, 89–110, 184–203; Idem., “Streifzüge unter alttürkischer Fahne,” Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 3 (1914/1915): 112–18; Idem., “Kulturwissenschaftliche Voraussetzungen einer Orientextension Ungarns,” Österreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient 41 (1915): 77–88.

66 Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “Kölcsönhatások a távol Kelet művészetében,” Turán 1 (1913): 170–77.

67 Géza Supka, “Buddhistische Spuren in der Völkerwanderungskunst,” Monatshefte der Kunstwissenschaft 10 (1917): 217–37.

68 Idem., “A magyarországi hún-uralom néhány érememléke,” Archaeologiai Értesítő 35 (1915): 224–37.

69 Cf. Idem., “Motívumvándorlás a korábbi középkorban.”

70 For their works of ground-breaking importance, their most important and still valid findings, and their general place in the research history of the Hun-age archaeological record, see Bóna, Das Hunnenreich, 222–23.

71 Cf., e.g., Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “Chinesisch-hunnische Kunstformen,” Izvestia na Bălgarskia Arheologicheski Institut 3 (1935): 194–229; Idem., “Mittelasiatische Spätantike und ‘Keszthelykultur’,” Jahrbuch der asiatischen Kunst 2 (1925): 60–68; Idem., “Some Chinese Elements in the Art of the Early Middle Ages of the Carpathian Basin,” East and West 11 (1960): 121–34.

72 For more on this phenomenon, see Ádám Bollók, Ornamentika a 10. századi Kárpát-medencében: Formatörténeti tanulmányok a magyar honfoglalás kori díszítőművészethez (Budapest: MTA BTK Régészeti Intézet, 2015), 29–49.

73 For more on this process, see the concise summary of Bóna, Das Hunnereich, 223.

74 For an overview of the history of the research, see Ilona Kovrig, Das awarenzeitliche Gräberfeld von Alattyán, Archaeologia Hungarica, 40 (Budapest: Ungarisches Nationalmusum, 1963), 224–27.

75 Gustaf Kossina, Die deutsche Vorgeschichte, eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft (Leipzig: Curt Kabitzsch Verlag, 1912).

2016_2_Tomić

Volume 5 Issue 2 CONTENTS

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Filip Tomić

The Institutionalization of Expert Systems in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia

The Founding of the University of Zagreb as the Keystone of Historiographic Professionalization, 1867–1918

 

In this paper, I analyze the founding of the University of Zagreb as the “top of the pyramid” in an attempt to create a modern national educational system within the framework of the general process of building a modern social order in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia in the second half of the nineteenth century. I focus in particular on the founding of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb and its history chairs. The establishment of these chairs was crucial for the legitimate scientific grounding of Croatian national historiography. Through its sanctioned expert systems, these chairs then had the potential to exert a decisive influence on narratives of “Croatian” history and the creation and reproduction of discourse on the Croatian nation.

Keywords: University of Zagreb, nineteenth century, historiography, modernization, expert system

 

Introduction

The construction of the concept of a nation and its right to a given territory, a process which includes the general periodization of national history and the crafting of a shared interpretation of this history, the classification of groups of people into the categories “us,” “those close to us,” and “others,” or, put simply, the creation of nation-centric history, is doubtlessly linked to the fundamental transformation of the entire social order of the nineteenth century, which we usually call “modern.” The creation of an educational system with national characteristics is an exceptionally important component of the social order and forms of social organization, not only as a product of the prevailing order, but also as an important element of its (re)production and further symbolic construction, in which academia play an important role due to its halo of autonomy and claims of objectivity. In this paper, I consider the importance of the formation of modern national historical scholarship in Croatia (more precisely Croatia and Slavonia) in the second half of the nineteenth century, the creation of narratives of national history, and the emergence of a discourse on the Croatian nation as a pivotal element of the organization of life in the past, present, and visions of the future. In doing so, I try to identify both the peculiarities of above mentioned processes in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia within the Habsburg realm and their congruence with general international social processes. Before undertaking the latter task, I must stress some interpretative and theoretical pillars of my inquiry.

John Burrow offers a provocative analysis of the process of the professionalization of historiography as a discipline as part of the broader process of professionalization and specialization, which is an inevitable response to the rapid growth of knowledge and which was in turn both the cause and effect of the ideal of research. The natural sciences were in the lead in this context, and other disciplines sought to follow their example. Despite being an ancient intellectual discipline, history lacked a solid foundation in university education until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when its usefulness in the education of statesmen and public officials and the promotion of patriotism, national consciousness, and national unity became apparent.1 At that time, history was adapted to the growing bureaucratization of society, which also influenced the organization of education and even research. Paid education and research professionals created, as was expected of men at their positions, a consensus on the research standards of each discipline (as a qualification for attaining academic positions) and the presentation of the findings of this research, and they also stressed that maintaining a serious and neutral tone was strictly necessary.2 Most historians considered these priorities self-evident, and it seemed that history, having received professional recognition and organization, had found its identity, which was expressed through the rhetoric of “science”: history, properly applied, was an objective and aggregate form of knowledge, the sum of the results of the work of professionals. It was reasonable to expect no further revolutions, since it is impossible to be more scientific than science, especially since history lacked an all-encompassing theory, apart from a general directive for critical rigor.3 Burrow’s understanding relates to theoretical notions of Anthony Giddens, who emphasizes the distinctive and discontinuous character of modernity, its radical historicity, and the important roles of expert systems in it. In his view, with the development of modern institutions “history,” as a systematic appropriation of the past in order to form a future, gains a fundamentally new impetus, and though it is subjected to various interpretations, through recombinations of time and space it constitutes a world-history framework for action and experience. As one type of uprooting mechanism intrinsically involved in the development of modern social institutions, “the expert system” is woven into a reflexivity characteristic of modernity. It constantly revisions social practices in light of knowledge of these same practices and continuously generates systemic self-knowledge, thus changing its subject matter.4 I believe that we can legitimately speak of the modern educational system as an expert system, with the university as its primary instance, based on the symbolic authority of science and forming “an established episteme.” We can also speak of an expert system and expert knowledge in the field of historical scholarship, based at modern universities, which participates on the one hand in the production of the distinctiveness of modernity and on the other in the representation of these distinctive social forms of modernity (e.g. the political system of a nation state, the nation) as rooted in history.

With all this in mind, one is perhaps hardly surprised by the fact that the question of institutionalizing the University of Zagreb was of the utmost importance to the group of Croatian intellectual and political elite which based its legitimacy on the goal of modernizing and uniting the Triune Kingdom, especially in view of the efforts to broaden the autonomy of Croatia and Slavonia in the 1860s. But this process was not at all straightforward, as it was situated in the complex context of the political, socio-economic, and cultural restructuring of the Habsburg space in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Development of the Modern Universities in the Habsburg Realm

After the collapse of the 1848 revolution, the government in Vienna tried to reform the Habsburg Monarchy, which on a basic level was a monarchic community, into a modern, strictly centralized state, held together by unified legal norms, as well as culture and identity. These centralistic undertakings, which also had elements of Germanisation, were likewise apparent in the field of historical scholarship. In 1848, a “history commission” was founded at the Imperial Academy of Sciences (Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste), tasked with the systemic accumulation of sources that would serve as the basis for writing a “national Austrian history,” which would include the histories of parts of the unified Empire.5 Since the Academy, founded in 1847, was supposed to represent a central and supra-regional scholarly institution, the founding of local historical commissions on the level of the entire Monarchy was intended to complement it. However, the needs of the Monarchy’s leadership for historiographic legitimization of the political and social constitution of a modern state was not completely in line with the goals of provincial scientific societies, which were oriented towards the development of the sciences in national languages.6 For example, in the case of Transylvanian learned societies, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török explores how local scholarly life, organized principally along ethnic and political allegiances in the multicultural setting, at the same time encompassed adaptations of international trends and practices of scholarship to local conditions, as well as mutual communication, the circulation of ideas, and the transfer of knowledge. Yet, Török warns about the boundaries of knowledge circulation, particularly given the pressures of age of nation-state building (in the mid-nineteenth century), when patriotism and participation in more universal knowledge was reformulated with an emphasis on national cultural affiliations. In the scholarly sphere, this coincided with the reorganization of universities.7

It was precisely in the period of neo-absolutism that the impulse to make historical scholarship more scientific appeared, originating from the center of the Monarchy. In 1854, the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Austrian Institute of History Research) was founded at the University of Vienna with the goal of serving as an institutional basis of the aforementioned “national Austrian history.” With its emphasis on the study of modern criticism of sources and the auxiliary sciences of history, it became the center of education for many professional historians throughout the Monarchy and an inspiration for the pursuit of research within national frameworks. The Institute is also a good indicator of the fundamental shift in higher education policy in the Habsburg Monarchy after 1848. Social, political, and technological changes demanded a reform of higher education. The Enlightenment ideals of the free-thinking, Humanist-educated individual also made an impression, so a far-reaching reorganization of the Philosophical Faculty was initiated, elevating it to the same level as the “higher” faculties (of Law, Medicine, and Theology).8 The Humboldtian model was taken as a point of departure, and the universities were reformed from functional places for training public officials, teachers, and priests to places of synergized general education and scientific research.9 Of course, these ideal goals were adapted to the needs of political and social control by the central state authorities, and this was reflected in the efforts to make the universities remain primarily Catholic, conservative, and loyal to the Monarchy. However, according to Jan Surman, it was precisely the inclusion of the faculties of philosophy into the university on equal terms that led to their cultural particularity and the intensification of national conflicts.10 Humanist disciplines were the basis for the process of cultural revival. This also changed the character of university education, which, through the implementation of an organic cultural-educational paradigm with universities as the pivotal institutions in the educational process, paved the way to cultural conflicts. A strong Humanist commitment changed the function of universities in the public sphere and they thus became the main producers of cultural norms, which potentially led to conflicts at a time when culture was becoming increasingly nationally codified.11 Universities started adopting this orientation with the fall of neo-absolutism, which did not bring an end to the efforts to transform the Monarchy into a functional modern state, but which did compel the Monarchy’s leadership to introduce some form of decentralization.

In an account of the Monarchy’s dualist conception of 1867, Robin Okey claims that the rationale on which it was founded combined dynastic loyalty with the principle of German liberal hegemony in Austria and Magyar liberal hegemony in Hungary.12 Yet, politics in the Monarchy was tied up with the nationality question in one way or another,13 and though German economic and cultural power influenced all parts of Monarchy, it proved unable to fashion a supra-national identity. So, integration failed and the history of Dualist Austria became a study in the erosion of German liberal hegemony and the emancipation of the non-German nationalities from it, which contributed significantly to the development of fully structured and culturally cohesive Slav communities increasingly resentful of their subaltern role.14 This does not mean that a series of fluid and manifold personal and collective identifications ceased to exist; various political and social conceptions of the Monarchy were an outgrowth of this phenomenon, making the distinction between monarchic and national anything but straightforward. However, a new type of politics was emerging, in which the language of national sentiment, political rights, and culture would become more and more common,15 directed (in the terms of social stratification) in the territorial units of the empire much more from “top down.”16 This process was also reflected at the universities, which acquired the dual role of educating loyal citizens and fostering their cultural identity. This often, though not necessarily, led to contradictions.17

The process of building national cultural spaces in Cisleithania was reflected at universities first through the introduction of national languages and history, followed by the introduction of “national” languages at universities. However, only those universities with the prerequisite political and institutional basis could reach this level. For example, the universities in Cracow and L’viv in Galicia were Polonised in 1869 (though L’viv was bilingual until 1879, when Polish became the sole official language there). Both of them had a tradition stretching back to the Vormärz period and now also enjoyed the support of the factually autonomous status Galicia had within the Cisleithanian half of the Empire from the 1870s. The University of Chernivtsi was founded in 1875 with German as its official language and with the ideological goal of attracting the Ruthenians to the “political Austrian nation” and influencing education in the neighboring Romanian lands. Chairs in the Ruthenian and Romanian languages were established at this university.18 The University of Prague was, after a brief bilingual period, divided into two universities in 1882, with German being the official language of one and Czech the official language of the other.

Despite the ongoing process of concentrating on linguistic and cultural affinities as the main mechanisms of self-identification at Cisleithanian universities from the 1860s, which also resulted in more employees being drawn from the respective linguistic communities, attempts were made to maintain administrative, political, and “ideological” continuity with conservatism and Catholicism as the main ideological values within academic life.19 At the Germanophone universities (Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, Chernivtsi) this was (alongside the general emphasis placed on the importance of criticism of sources as the methodological basis of scientific historical scholarship) characteristic of the chairs in Austrian history, which were interpretatively pan-Austrian, pro-Habsburg, and pro-Catholic. Chairs in Polish history were established at Galician universities (in Cracow in 1869, in L’viv in 1881) and became rivals in their interpretations of national history. Concentrating on the neuralgic spot of Polish national history (the disintegration and division of the Polish Commonwealth in the eighteenth century), the interpretation of the “Cracow school” implied that the loyalist pro-Habsburg discourse served as a guarantee that Polish nationhood would be preserved. Thus, the Cracow school earned itself the label “clerical-conservative.” On the other hand, the “L’viv school” considered itself more “progressive,” placing a greater emphasis on the influence of imperial geopolitics on the partition of Poland and thereby implying more emphatically the need for Polish independence.20 Thus, these two “schools” expressed general uncertainty about the definition of the Polish nation and its national territory, as well as any affirmation of the possibility of building a modern Polish state. The University of Prague was also becoming the central place for the professionalization of Czech national historical scholarship, especially after 1882, developing towards rigorous critical objectivity. Yet, intra-national turmoil and discussions on the position of Czech culture and the shape of the “national idea” found expression in historiographical national narratives derived from differing interpretations of essentialities, the turning points in Czech history, and their importance for the present.21

In the other part of Dualist Monarchy, the Kingdom of Hungary, from the dominant Magyar perspective there was no denying that the nationalities were a reality or that Hungary should be a national state, not an ethnic federation.22 Eventually, successes made in the name of the unitary Hungarian “political nation” had prevented an accommodation with national minority movements, which had become more embittered. In the scholarly realm, developments after 1867 were similar, reflecting general reforms with dominant national flavor. During the period of neo-absolutism, the University of Budapest underwent reforms similar to the reforms at the Cisleithanian universities, but from 1861 Hungarian became the official language of the university (it would also become the official language of the University of Cluj/Kolozsvár, founded in 1872, and the universities in Bratislava/Pozsony and Debrecen, founded on the eve of World War I). Together with other scholarly institutions (the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, various associations of historical scholarship), they represented the pillars of the professionalization of historical science, which went from the predominantly national romantic historiographic accounts of the Vormärz period to the more specialized, scientifically elaborate and methodologically source based historical scholarship of the later nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the majority of the Hungarian historiography was anchored in a national master narrative reflecting the dominance of the Magyar conception of the Hungarian national state.23

Regarding the developments in the Transleithanian part of the Monarchy, the only exception to this general trend was the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia and the University of Zagreb. The development of its internal autonomy, scholarly institutions, and in particular historical scholarship is the topic of subsequent sections of this essay.

The Making of the First Institution of Historical Scholarship in Croatia

In Civil Croatia (Banska Hrvatska), the foundations for the construction of a Croatian nation as a modern political and cultural community were laid down in 1835–47. The basis of Croatian nationalism was broadened among various social groups (nobles, bourgeoisie, clergy, and military officers).24 This political movement managed to resolve (not without support from court policy in the 1840s) several decades-long disagreements and conflicts between the Hungarian and Croatian diets regarding Croatia’s municipal rights by adding considerations of cultural loyalties and inclinations and fashioning a program for the creation of an autonomous political entity (the Triune Kingdom of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia) based on a liberal civil social order. The most important points of this program include demands for the introduction of the “national language” on all levels of education, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, support for education, and, specifically, the founding of the University of Zagreb.25 The effects of the turbulent events of 1848/49 and the short-lived unification of the Triune Kingdom in the person of the ban (viceroy) Josip Jelačić (1801–59),26 which was effectively nullified by the introduction of Viennese centralism and the neo-absolutist system in the early 1850s, remained a useful source for visions of the nation state and the national community in the subsequent decades.

During the neo-absolutist regime, legitimation of national individuality was constrained to the cultural sphere, which was also strictly regulated and supervised by authorities. The foundation of the Society of Yugoslav History and Antiquities in 1850 represented the first systematic push towards scientific (source collection, critical approach) historical scholarship. The Society equally emphasized the need for the “pragmatic” aspect of historical scholarship, and it saw history as an ideological and scientific legitimization of Croatian national particularity and its South Slavic frame.27 As Society sponsor ban Jelačić remarked at a Society assembly in 1852, the history of each nation was to be considered its baptismal certificate and an indicator of its place among humanity. Similarly, Ivan Kukuljević (1816–89), the Society’s chairman, reminded his audience that one of the goals of the Society’s historical research was to awaken in the people a grasp of and yearning for their national heritage and, in doing so, to help them understand themselves and thus give them pointers for the future. He placed emphasis on Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia as the regions that were “closest” to the Croat nation, but he also noted the importance of the Yugoslav “homeland.”28 Therefore, the Society was forced by the authorities to make several changes to its regulations and was given final approval by the Ministry of Internal Affairs only in 1857.29

Although the conditions for professional historical scholarship in Civil Croatia began to develop in the 1850s, reflecting general trends from abroad and also impulses from within the Monarchy, it was only in the 1870s that its organizational foundations were laid through the systematic publishing of historical sources and research findings and the creation of the institutional framework necessary for the education of professional historians. The former was made possible by the foundation of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences, which provided firm logistical support for professional scholarship. The latter was made possible by the foundation of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb.

The Construction of a Croatian National Historical Narrative
and the Question of the Foundation of the University

After the collapse of neo-absolutism in the Habsburg Monarchy, the Croatian Sabor (Parliament) was convened in 1861. Many contemporaries believed it to be a continuation of the Sabor of 1848, which had laid the foundations of the legal basis of the post-feudal order. At that session, the Croatian state ideology had been systematically formulated. These formulations, with certain minor modifications, remained the ideological foundation of the right of the Croatian nation to statehood, even after the Croatian-Hungarian Compromise of 1868. This ideology was based on the notion that Croatian historical state rights had survived uninterrupted over the centuries and that the “constitution” of the Triune Kingdom had a historical continuity which could be traced to the time of the “national kings”30 in the early Middle Ages.

While the main interest of historical research in the first half of the nineteenth century was the defense of the nobility’s “municipal rights” in the kingdoms of Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, historical scholarship in the second half of the nineteenth century appeared as a modern discipline one of the goals of which was to further the efforts of Croatian politics to preserve political autonomy and encourage individuals to actively affirm Croatian identity as a modern nation.31

One of the main initiators of this new direction was Franjo Rački (1828–94), a man who was also the main formulator of the basic tenets of the ideological foundation of the Croatian nation state in 1861. In his historiographic work, Rački devoted most of his energies to research on early medieval Croatian history in order to prove the historically deep-rooted nature of Croatian statehood, the distinctness of the Croatian people, and their strong connections with other South Slavs (as was typical for nineteenth-century Croatian historians). Following European role models in regard to the scientific writing of history, he nonetheless strongly linked it to national ideology. Called the first Croatian professional historian,32 this long-time president of the Yugoslav Academy and founder of several journals and editor of compilations of historical sources as important instruments of the professionalization of humanist disciplines can be placed within the main trajectory of the development of Central European national historiographies in the mid-nineteenth century. Having received an education in the auxiliary historical sciences in Rome, Rački, in addition to placing emphasis on the criticism of historical sources and unbiased writing, believed that history should construct national narratives with the goal of righting present-day injustices and accomplishing desirable political goals. As Monika Baár determined in her comparative analysis, historians belonging to that generation in East Central Europe were involved in promoting a unified national culture, ascribed an educational purpose to history, tended to depict the nation as a victim of historical injustices, and considered progress—which was usually linked to divine providence—inseparable from national freedom, which was proved through the study of history, i.e. by showing the antiquity, unity and uniqueness of the national community and the historical continuity of its culture, including its political culture.33 For example, Rački idealized the values of the old Croatian state and its alleged democratic institutions, which stemmed from the characteristics of the Slavic family of peoples, which were distinct from the Germanic or Romanic peoples. Feudalism, which was contrary to Christian and Slavic morals, was to blame for the weakening of Croatian statehood, because it separated the nobility from the people. The nobility thus fell prey to a foreign “spirit,” while the national consciousness of the peasant masses almost completely disappeared. Rački taught Croats that their very existence would be threatened unless they maintained their Slavhood, and he was convinced that the state union of Hungary and Croatia had separated the Croats from other South Slavs and thus ruined Croatian statehood.34 By encouraging the writing of overviews of Croatian history, Rački expressed his belief that a complete Croatian history could only be written by a nationally conscious individual (i.e. not a foreigner), and that “national consciousness, criticism and science should be married in a national historian.”35 He also warned that, for the survival and future development of the Croatian nation, work should have been undertaken immediately to elevate the arts and sciences in Croatia to a level comparable to that of the most developed nations of Europe, while at the same time maintaining the characteristics of intellectual endeavor among Croatians which were an expression of the national “spirit.” Otherwise, the Croatian people, who according to Rački were exposed to the hegemonic aspirations of the culturally developed Germans and Italians, would in time disappear from the stage of history.36

The beliefs of people like Rački were strongly present among the political class, which had by then clearly defined itself as “Croatian” and had clearly expressed its political goals and influenced the efforts of the Sabor to reform many areas of social life, including education. Their goal, frequently emphasized in the Sabor, was to secure both the “material” and “spiritual” development of “our people,” and the first steps towards this were the reorganization of the absolutist educational system in a manner appropriate to the “national spirit” and the founding of the University of Zagreb as the “crown of national education.”37 The bishop of Đakovo, Josip Juraj Strossmayer (1815–1905), offered public support for the founding of the University of Zagreb through his inspired speech in the Sabor, together with a monetary donation. Strossmayer was one of the leading members of the People’s Party (Narodna Stranka) and the most important patron of cultural institutions in Croatia in the second half of the nineteenth century. His speech in the Sabor encompassed all the tropes and standard discursive motifs of the “Croatian” political, intellectual, cultural and scientific fields and their meeting points in the second half of the nineteenth century.38 Stressing the importance of enlightenment and education as “spiritual goods” more important than “material riches,” in his speech the bishop explicitly spoke of the challenges faced by the Croatian people, who found themselves in a peripheral area of a great empire which had the aspiration of casting itself as a national community. History, he said, had been unjust and merciless towards a community which had belonged to a circle of advanced nations. Its territory had been torn apart and estranged from its former cultural achievements, the Croatian nation had the historical right and spiritual capacity to restore its former glory. Its position on the periphery and crossroads of great empires gave it a chance to unite with its “brothers” and spread modern European Christian civilization to the southeast of Europe. An important role in this was to be played by education and science. The implicit tension in Strossmayer’s statement is the relationship between the “Croatian” and the “Yugoslav,” a relationship about which he offers no definitive conclusions. Also, as not surprising in the Habsburg context, he gave no clear indication of the aspirations of his “tribal” brothers “on the other side” for unity or connection, appealing merely to the tradition of the Croatian right to statehood and the potential of Zagreb as a modern cultural center of the Yugoslav world.

In the subsequent sessions of the Sabor, as the efforts to found a university became more concrete, Strossmayer’s enthusiastic words gave way to more prosaic formulations. Thus, Pavao Muhić (1811–97),39 when presenting the legal basis of the university formulated by a committee elected for that purpose, devoted most of this time to describing the inadequacy of higher education in Croatia, which was limited to the practical education of state officials, while higher education institutions would “be an instrument of all-round and thorough higher education, which is only possible at a university.”40 Muhić didn’t fail to mention how the founding of the university and the advancement of the sciences were imperatives in a world in which others had already achieved significant scientific-technological advancements, and he went on to repeat Strossmayer’s view of Zagreb’s university as a potential bridge towards the Ottoman lands, concluding that

 

[n]o matter how the legacy of the Sick Man of the Bosporus [the Ottoman Empire] is divided, whether some of the Yugoslav lands end up under the Croatian–Hungarian crown as we wish them to, or whether they are left to an uncertain fate, it shall remain our noble and most high duty to spread the culture and civilization of Europe, cleansed of the western mold, to the nations which are part of our body, blood of our blood.41

Strossmayer’s and Muhić’s geopolitical ambitions even found a place in the final address to the ruler, albeit in a somewhat humbler form.42 This also illustrates the liberal-minded nature of the 1861 Sabor, which was held at a time when the Habsburg authority had weakened, but not nearly enough to prevent it from dissolving the Sabor, which left most of the Sabor’s provisions, including those on the founding of a university, without the ruler’s sanction. The ruler’s permission for the founding of the two institutions, the Academy and the University, which the political and social elite in Croatia, particularly the part of it that advocated the unification of the Triune Kingdom and national autonomy with the characteristics of statehood, considered of special national interest and honor, had to wait until the crystallization of the new constitutional framework of the state, which appeared following the Austro–Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Apart from the Unionists, for whom this arrangement guaranteed that Croatia and Slavonia would have to define their relationship with the Kingdom of Hungary clearly on the principles of a relatively narrow provincial autonomy, the other political groups in Croatia were disappointed by this turn of events. However, it was only under these circumstances that the barriers to the founding of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences were removed. It was formally established in 1867, but, despite its name, was largely devoid of “Yugoslav” content. Its declared purpose at the 1861 Sabor was to support the arts and sciences on the “Slavic South” among Croats, Serbs, Slovenians, and Bulgarians, i.e. to offer a scientific interpretation of the state, social, and intellectual life of the “Yugoslav nations,” with the ambition of bringing together all the better “minds” of the Slavic South into a single scientific organization.43 However, the rules that eventually were sanctioned changed these aims into mere stress on the general tendency to cultivate sciences and arts, especially the “Yugoslav” language and “Yugoslav” literature, while its ordinary members were to be “impeccable Austrian citizens,” i.e. not those living in Yugoslav lands outside the Monarchy.44 Similar political occurrences delayed the sanctioning of the legal basis of the founding of the University of Zagreb. While the ruler gave his sanction to the draft of the legal basis in 1869, political infighting between the Unionists and the People’s Party delayed the sanctioning of the final document until 1874. At this time, the People’s Party and ban Ivan Mažuranić were in power, and they intensified the modernization reforms with a liberal orientation. In the numerous declarations, from the Austro–Hungarian Compromise to the founding of the University itself, one no longer finds grand plans for a “Yugoslav” university in Zagreb as the central institution of higher education of all the South Slavs that would have fulfilled the visions of Strossmayer and Muhić. The rudiments of such a goal can be seen in some of Rački’s speeches,45 but the basic tone of all these discussions had a more pragmatic character, aimed at the eventual founding of an institution of higher education within the frame of the self-governing territorial unit of Croatia and Slavonia. Eventually, even the idea of calling the University “Yugoslav” was rejected in the name of pragmatism and realism. It was named the University of Francis Joseph I, i.e. the name became an expression of loyalty, not difference.46

The Founding of the University as a Factor in the Development of Croatian Historiography

The reformist practices of Mažuranić’s government in the year in which the University was founded included the enacting of a law on primary education, which laid the foundations of the entire educational pyramid and created the conditions for the construction of an educational system which allowed functional differentiation in the field of education. It thus was an important step forward in the further creation of a modern civil society.47 Contemporaries saw the year 1874 as the final point at which “the progress of the Croatian nation was raised to such a level that, in the sense of education, they can rightly be counted not only among the first nations in the Slavic south, but among the most cultured nations in general.”48 During the opening of the University, its first rector, Matija Mesić (1826–78), who also became the first professor of Croatian history in the Faculty of Philosophy, expressed similar feelings in his long speech, in which he also spoke of the history of the Croatian people and their continued aspirations for the founding of a university.49 Mesić said that the Croats had settled in their current homeland as a national group that had already taken form, whose cultural transformation was marked by Christianization and Enlightenment in the Slavic spirit through the saints Cyril and Methodius. Slavic cooperation had been broken by the Christian schism, so “its [the nation’s] cultural life then followed two different courses: the Croats, together with their Slovenian kin, were left under the influence of the West, while their Serb neighbors stood under the influence of the Byzantine East.”50 Thereafter, Mesić limited himself to presenting the basic flow of Croatian history, which he did according to the interpretation which by then had become canonical. According to this interpretation, the Croats had been raising their level of education until the centuries-long caesura caused by the Ottoman conquests, when they were forced to devote their energies to the defense of the Christian world, neglecting the development of their education and science. The seed of institutions of higher education reappeared in the seventeenth century, but they did not reach acceptable levels of development until, “in the fourth decade of our century, the spirit of the times and the danger which threatened our homeland gave rise to a select circle of Croatia’s sons,”51 who awoke the “consciousness” and “pride” of the nation. After many decades of struggle, their efforts to found a university were fulfilled when Mesić held his speech, and now the university not only served as an institution for the education of government officials, but also was charged with the task of

 

nurturing the general educational sciences, considering science to be an end in itself, [since] science is not only the characteristic of one nation, but the common treasure of all mankind, our university shall build upon the great achievements that have been made over the ages, especially in the recent times, thanks to the activity of man’s spirit. The duty of the scholar shall, however, be to refer to the individual nature and character of his nation, to research and test its people and its views on the world and man, and the conditions in which he lives.52

 

Mesić eventually returned to Strossmayer’s visions and expressed his hope that the newly-opened University, as “the shrine of science and education,” would spread its boons throughout the Balkans and thus fulfill the mission which history had accorded the Croatian people, “to be the intermediary between the progressive West and the backward East.”53

The University of Zagreb was divided into three faculties, the Faculties of Law, Theology, and Philosophy; the latter included two sections, one for the philosophical-historical sciences and another for the mathematical-natural sciences.54 Within the Faculty of Philosophy, chairs in universal history and Croatian history (with special consideration of Austrian and Hungarian history) were established. These chairs were completed by a seminar on the auxiliary sciences of history (a separate chair was founded in 1908). The chairs in history tried to implement the modern imperatives related to the organization of the curriculum and research, basing historical inquiry methodologically on the factual and source-oriented research ideal and epistemologically on the “genealogical concept.” Burrows’s theories on the organization and institutionalization of higher education as being congruent with the tendencies of the general construction of the modern social order explain quite well how this expert system was legitimized. Faculties became a place of instituting55 (creating new academics), but also of the selection and hierarchization of cadres in the educational pyramid. The rules prescribed the enrolment and duties of the faculty and students, and the evaluation committees reviewed dissertations, habilitations, and applications to fill vacant professorial posts. Thus, in the period before 1918, 17 doctoral dissertations were written, the main topic of which was related to subjects from general or Croatian history, and numerous dissertations were written dealing primarily with the fields of philology, Slavonic studies, the history of philosophy, geography, etc. This contributed to the creation of a Croatian cultural space and Croatian history, situating it within a broader geopolitical and socio-cultural context and forming and rooting contemporary Croatian identity.56 In addition, university professors, as top-ranking experts, were also competent to serve on commissions that appointed secondary school teachers.57 It could be said that a “truly Croatian” historical scholarship was established only once it had joined the general process of scientification and experts had emerged as agents of this development.

Three Distinguished Historians

Three professors of history were particularly prominent in the 1874–1918 period due to their public activities, reputations, and influence. They were Tadija Smičiklas, Vjekoslav Klaić, and Ferdo Šišić, and they still occupy prominent positions in the Croatian historiographic canon. They are particularly significant due to their overviews of Croatian history, which had a deep impact on the approach to research, narrativisation, and interpretations of the history which was understood as the history of the “Croatian people” and the “Croatian” lands.

Through his academic path and public and political activity, Tadija Smičiklas (1843–1914) represented a sort of role model of the Croatian national bourgeoisie and scholarly elite, even to his contemporaries. Educated at the Faculty of Philosophy in Vienna and having graduated in the field of auxiliary sciences of history at the Austrian Institute of History Research, he chose the right moment to appear on the intellectual and scientific scene with his long-awaited synthesis, a two-volume History of Croatia (1879–82). Fulfilling the general wish of the intellectual elite of every “emancipator” nation (to use Baár’s term) for a “complete history of the nation,” Smičiklas also presented the narrative of this history in a widely-desired “pragmatic” tone with the goal of educating the broader strata of society and presenting an account that resonated with current events.58 The work garnered him much attention, both among valued predecessors such as Rački, who lauded both his scientific merits and his patriotic spirit, and successors such as Šišić, who emphasized that few scholarly books were as widely read as this one, which “also strongly affected consciousness-raising and the desperate resistance and struggle of the people in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”59 He also won other forms of recognition, such as honorary citizenship of Zagreb, Karlovac, and Varaždin.60 In addition, it was precisely this book that, together with his Viennese diploma, was of crucial importance for his appointment as professor at the Chair of Croatian History of the University of Zagreb in 1882.61 Until his death in 1914, Smičiklas served as a professor, president of Matica hrvatska, and president of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also the person who set in motion the publishing of important historical sources in an edition known as the Codex diplomatics regni Croatiae, Dalmatiae et Slavoniae. He also actively participated in politics as a parliamentary representative of the Independent People’s Party in the 1880s and 1890s, with the goal of opposing ban Károly Khuen-Héderváry’s Hungary-friendly regime. Smičiklas thus positioned himself among the top history experts of his time, and he became an important person for the cultural and political development of the modern Croatian nation, whose ideological outlooks on the era were in line with historiographic interpretations. Thus, in the tradition of the People’s Party of the 1860s and 1870s and led by the visions of Strossmayer and Rački, he developed a periodization of Croatian history from which the historical rights-based argumentation for the unification of the Triune Kingdom was derived on a political level and from which the distinctiveness of the Croatian people as a social whole, albeit ethnically substantially linked to other South Slavs, was derived on a cultural level. In the more down-to-earth context of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Smičiklas’s synthesis was clearly seen as an argument for granting greater autonomy to the part of Croatia under the Hungarian crown. Therefore, his narrative of the fourth epoch of Croatian history (from 1700 on) and the dangers of German centralization efforts highlighted the negative role of Hungarian nationalism.

 

The Croats, being rather weak, found strength [in opposition to Hungarian nationalism] in the Slavic idea. If the Hungarians, seeing their tribe alone among great nations, strongly and bravely gave their people the goal of spreading as far as possible, then the Croats started to feel that they were a living part of a large nation, that they had brothers. It is through the Slavic idea that Croatia was reborn.62

Smičiklas reaches the significant conclusion: “Researching the new contacts and conflicts that will be born of it, or whether we are approaching the fifth epoch of Croatian history, is not our goal.”63

Smičiklas’s main rival for the position of professor at the Chair for Croatian history in 1882 was Vjekoslav Klaić (1849–1929). Another Viennese student, Klaić became a publically respected historian and geographer as a secondary school (gymnasium) teacher. In 1878, he replaced the deceased Matija Mesić as substitute professor at the Chair for Croatian History. Although he didn’t manage to attain a permanent position as professor in 1882, he was appointed professor at the Chair for General History in 1893, and in the meantime worked as assistant professor (Privatdozent) of the Geography of South Slavs. Active both in the field of historiography and geography and authoring a range of works, from syntheses to school textbooks and works intended for the broader public,64 Klaić strove to build the foundations of the historiographic and geographic imagination of the Croatian national space, extending it to Bosnia and Herzegovina more resolutely than his other colleagues. As a university professor and member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences (1896), Klaić maintained his status of a distinguished scholar, occasionally feeling himself invited to participate in political discussions, based on his authority as a historian.65 His outlook was grounded primarily in the traditional conceptions of the Party of Rights and the real position of Croatia, and he emphasized historical state rights as the basis for securing the autonomous position of Croatia within the Monarchy. Klaić was also preoccupied with Croatian historical state rights in his scientific work, which culminated in a five-volume History of the Croats (1899–1911), but only covered the period up to 1608. Despite the fact that Klaić never completed his overview of early modern and modern history, parts of his work which concern the High Middle Ages still attract the attention of historians today, but its contemporary mass reception was even more significant. His work was republished several times, and the editions from the 1970s are a ubiquitous feature of all second-hand book shops and an almost symbolic example of Croatian historiography present in many private libraries in Croatia today. His skillful narration, which follows the chronological line of history, and his discourse, which masterfully links major socio-political group identities with past times, have ensured Klaić a place as the ideal choice for historical dilettantes who lazily seek answers to questions about the geographic and social continuities of their national affiliation. From the perspective of this paper, Klaić is not only interesting because of his clear idea of the subject and goal of historiography, but also because of his clear vision of the importance of belonging to a nation, the importance of its continuity and—inevitably in a world made of different nations which have their own interests and goals—its rivals and allies. In accordance with his general socio-political conceptions, he saw the Croats as part of the Slavic world, but he also insisted they had developed a distinct identity it. He contended that over the course of twelve centuries the Croat “remained defiant towards all that seeks to eradicate him and has through unfailing perseverance defended and maintained his name, his individuality and his territory.”66 Croats thus fought against both political and cultural invaders, preserving their independence and particularity within the framework of Christian civilization through their Cyrilomethodic heritage, while politically “[t]he Kingdom of Croatia never ceased living throughout all these centuries: they tore it apart limb by limb, trampled and stunted many of its rights, which had been guaranteed by oaths; but the core of the kingdom remained intact, so that its scattered or stolen remains would always return to it.”67 The oaths to which he referred were given by both the Hungarian and the Habsburg king. The Ottomans invaded, but Klaić actually considered the time in which he was living of crucial importance:

 

But the nineteenth century, the century of nations, pushed the Croatian nation into the fiercest struggle in its history. The struggle is persistent and decisive, since it involves not only the living but also the dead. The knot has been tightened, and God knows what would have happened had it not been cut by the sword of ban Jelačić. The Croatian language was recognized as a diplomatic one only after two wars, and now reigns not only in the peasant’s cottage, but also in the Ban’s Court. Let all those who eat Croatian bread speak and create using the Croatian language [...] The power of the Croatian people to resist was best seen in the originally bloodless, but eventually bloody struggle for nationality. Little Croatia [...] showed the entire world that it lives and is worthy of living. Croatia again refused to fall, but emerged from the struggle stronger and greater than before [...] Dalmatia also ceaselessly calls for unification, which shall come to pass sooner or later; for this is not only the wish of all Croats, but a completely legitimate goal, guaranteed by the newest laws and oaths! Then the Croatian Kingdom shall once again encompass all the territory it possessed in the time of kings Petar Krešimir and Dmitar Zvonimir [...] A great Hungarian patriot at the beginning of our century said of his country: “Hungary was not, but it will be.” And let us say: “Croatia was, it is, and it must remain until the end of time.”68

The influence of the third university professor who tried his hand at writing an extensive overview of Croatian history, Ferdo Šišić (1869–1940), has also persisted up to the present day. His work, An Overview of the History of the Croatian People, was first published in 1916, and it was reissued many times in the following decades. Šišić was already belonged to a generation which had graduated from the University of Zagreb. Although he had spent part of his time as a student in Vienna, he enrolled and graduated in Zagreb, where he also attained his PhD. He also became assistant professor there in 1902 and full professor in 1905, succeeding Smičiklas as the Chair of Croatian History. Unlike Smičiklas or Klaić, Šišić did not write school textbooks or popular history books. Rather, he made substantial contributions as an acclaimed expert in two apparently different areas: historiographic works on the period of “Croatian national rulers” in the early Middle Ages, which garnered him decades-long scientific relevance, and scientific efforts to study recent historical events focusing (with the unavoidable political implications) on Croatian-Hungarian relations, a field in which he was practically a pioneer.69 Of course, in accordance with his focus on “genetic” political history, to which Šišić had remained loyal, his research preoccupations were not contradictory and were actually skillfully combined in his synthesis,70 forming an interpretative academic and national canon that provided arguments for the continuity of the symbols of independent Croatian statehood. In doing this, Šišić followed in the path of Smičiklas, situating his contemporary political reasoning, which was based on historical arguments, within the context of the Habsburg Monarchy, but transcending its borders in a cultural sense, putting Croats in a broader South Slavic context. In the turbulent period of the crisis of Dualism, which was felt in post-Khuen-Héderváry Croatia (after 1903) and marked by political turmoil, Šišić, as a member of the Croatian-Serbian Coalition (winning four elections for Sabor in 1906–1913), remained a member of the Croatian parliament and a member of the delegation to the Hungarian Parliament where, according to the words of his contemporary, the student and later professor Viktor Novak, he spent more time working in the Budapest archives and libraries than participating in the activities of the parliament.71

Conclusion

It is precisely this statement by Novak about Šišić that gives us a characteristic picture of professional Croatian historians in the second half of the long nineteenth century. Parallel to the imperatives of building modern scholarly institutions as constituent parts of the nation-building process in a world of chronic shortages of intellectual forces capable of building a complex national institutional infrastructure (a problem faced by most of the emerging nations of Central and Eastern Europe), the intelligentsia of these regions was inevitably involved in political processes not only on an ideological level, but often also operationally. The often-present discrepancy between the scholarly habitus of individuals and their practical political activities, which left its mark on their reception both in domestic and international circles, stems precisely from these circumstances. However, even in places where conditions for the greater independence of the scholarly and political spheres existed and which for the most part spared scholars from having to “dirty their hands” by wrestling with the contradictions of political work and allowed them to reach the public status of “experts” more safely, the processes of modern nation-building and the institutionalization and professionalization of the scientific and intellectual fields were interwoven. “Croatian” historiographers, under the institutional strength and the officialized authority of the Faculty of Philosophy, legitimizing themselves according to modern standards of research, succeeded in creating an “expert” template for the interpretation of national history, demonstrating (or at least alleging) the continuity of historical political rights and revealing the distinctiveness of the Croatian nation as a political, social, and cultural entity. The devotion to exact learning and the metaphysics which stood behind it were linked by the idea that a historian does not deal in abstractions, but in unique spiritual entities and individualities embodied in the form of states and nations and the condensed texture of their mutual relations.72 The character of the nation constitutes a space of experience that explains individual practical orientation and provides a framework for individual “free choices” to become articulated and socially coherent.73 However, this could not be done in a vacuum, but only in the “Croatian space of experience,” as derived in officialized and “expert” historical scholarship and molded in accordance with international scientific trends of historical scholarship intermediated by the political context of the Habsburg realm and its political and social conflicts, collective dissatisfactions, and divergent interests, but also by the transfer and emulation of scholarly knowledge. These kind of historiographic narrative constructs received their incentive from the basic characteristics of modernity, which I have adapted from Giddens and which allowed the construction of a discourse on the nation, the imagining of its borders, and the concept of belonging to a national community, as well as the derivation of the continuity of its culture and statehood in the context of comparisons of the past and present, in the terms of a unitary, “emptied” time and space, which allowed the clear “detection,” definition, and historical situation of the identity “us” and those who are close to us, as opposed to the “others” and enemies. Regardless of historiographic disputes about certain matters and the differing ideological and political beliefs that adapted historiography to different political and social visions and plans, the template that I have striven to present in this paper has shaped the discursive constitution and institutional organization of the modern social order, into which more and more people were inevitably incorporated over time, and has remained the basis of political and social discourse and activity in the Croatian national space to this day, presenting life in the current political reality and social order as natural, normal, and historically-grounded.

 

Archival Sources

Hrvatski državni arhiv [Croatian State Archive], Fond 502

Arhiv Filozofskog fakultet u Zagrebu [Archive of Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb], Box 3

 

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1 John Burrow, A History of Histories (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 454.

2 Ibid., 455.

3 Ibid., 478.

4 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 1–54.

5 Mario Strecha, “O nastanku irazvoju moderne hrvatske historiografije u 19. stoljeću,” Povijest u nastavi 3 (2005): 106.

6 Jan Jakub Surman, “Habsburg Universities 1848–1918: Biography of a Space” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2012), 34.

7 Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, Exploring Transylvania: Geographies of Knowledge and Entangled Histories in a Multiethnic Province, 1790–1918 (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016), 1–25.

8 Margret Friedrich, Brigitte Mazohl, and Astrid von Schlachta, “Die Bildungsrevolution,” in Soziale Strukturen: Von der feudal-agrarischen zur bürgerlich-industriellen Gesellschaft, vol. 9/1 of Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, ed. Helmut Rumplerand and Peter Urbanitsch (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 92–93.

9 Christophe Charle, “Patterns,” in A History of the University in Europe, ed. Walter Rüegg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48, 51.

10 Surman, “Habsburg Universities 1848–1918,” 40.

11 Ibid., 51.

12 Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy c. 1765–1918 (Basingstoke–London: Macmilllan Press, 2001), 194.

13 Lothar Höbelt, “ ‘Well-tempered discontent’: Austrian Domestic Politics,” in The Last Years of Austria–Hungary, ed. Mark Cornwall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 49.

14 Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 195.

15 Fernando Veliz, The Politics of Croatia-Slavonia 1903–1918: Nationalism, State Allegiance and the Changing International Order (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012), 76.

16 Ibid, 84.

17 Surman, “Habsburg Universities 1848–1918,” 5.

18 Ibid, 155–57.

19 Ibid., 214.

20 Ibid., 311–12.

21 Ibid., 281–89.

22 Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 314.

23 István Deák, “Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Hungary,” American Historical Review 97, no. 4 (1992): 1041–42, 1045–50.

24 Tomislav Markus, Hrvatski politički pokret 1848.–1849. godine: Ustanove, ideje, ciljevi, politička kultura (Zagreb: Dom isvijet, 2000), 47.

25 Petar Korunić, “Hrvatski nacionalni i politički program 1848./49. godine: Prilog poznavanju porijekla hrvatske nacije i države Hrvatske,” Povijesni prilozi 11 (1992): 231–33.

26 Ban Jelačić conquered Međimurje, the Hungarian Littoral, and Rijeka in 1848. The emperor named him the governor of Rijeka and the civilian and military governor of Dalmatia. With the introduction of the so-called Imposed Constitution of 1849, Rijeka and the Croatian Littoral were united with Croatia and Slavonia, and the unification of Dalmatia with Croatia and Slavonia was also promised. However, attempts to unite the Military Frontier with civil Croatia and Slavonia proved unsuccessful. Mirjana Gross, Počeci modern Hrvatske (Zagreb: Globus, 1985), 15–16.

27 Ibid.

28 “Dodatak: Izvestje o glavnoj skupštini društva ‘za povestnicu I starine jugoslavenske’ dne 2.Veljače god. 1853,”Arkiv za povestnicu jugoslavensku 2, no. 2 (1852): 439–40.

29 Gross, Počeci modern Hrvatske, 427.

30 Mirjana Gross and Agneza Szabo, Prema hrvatskom građanskom društvu (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), 130–31.

31 Strecha, “O nastanku i razvoju modern hrvatske historiografije u 19. stoljeću,” 105–06.

32 Mirjana Gross, Vijek i djelovanje Franje Račkog (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2004), 503.

33 Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 46–74.

34 Gross and Szabo, Prema hrvatskom e građanskom društvu 290.

35 Strecha, “O nastanku i razvoju modern hrvatske historiografije u 19. stoljeću,” 107.

36 Ibid., 107.

37 Gross and Szabo, Prema hrvatskom e građanskom društvu, 147–48.

38 Spomenica na svetčano otvaranje Kralj. sveučilišta Franje Josipa I. u Zagrebu, prvoga hrvatskoga, dana 19. listopada 1874 (Zagreb: Dragutin Albrecht, 1875), 5–12.

39 Lawyer and professor of political-cameral sciences at the Zagreb Academy of Law (1850–71); member of the Sabor (1861–66).

40 Spomenica na svetčano otvaranje Kralj. sveučilišta, 13–14.

41 Ibid., 16–17.

42 Ibid., 18–20.

43 Gross and Szabo, Prema hrvatskom e građanskom društvu, 149–50.

44 Ibid., 285.

45 Spomenica na svetčano otvaranje Kralj. sveučilišta, 45–47.

46 All important discussions and acts regarding the process of founding the University can be found in: Ibid., 30–76.

47 Dinko Župan, “Pučkoškolstvo u vrijeme banovanja Ivana Mažuranića” (MA thesis, University of Zagreb, 2002), 107.

48 Spomenica o 25-godišnjem postojanju Sveučilišta Franje Josipa I. u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Tisak Kr. Zemaljske Tiskare, 1900), 2.

49 Mesić’s entire speech can be found in: Spomenica na svetčano otvaranje Kralj. sveučilišta, 80–104.

50 Ibid., 84.

51 Ibid., 94.

52 Ibid., 98–99.

53 Ibid., 101.

54 The Faculty of Medicine became active only in 1918, despite the fact that its legal basis was laid down in 1874.

55 In the sense of Bourdieu’s solemn sanctioning and sanctifying of a certain social difference, which is known and accepted by both the instituted agent and other members of the society and which permanently increases the value of the bearers of state credentials, the prevalence and intensity of the belief in its value. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 119.

56 Stjepan Damjanović, ed., Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu: Monografija (Zagreb: Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 1998), 325–29.

57 Candidates who wished to hold history lectures had to display a good grasp of chronology, the “pragmatic coherence” of the “major events,” and the “cultural-historical” value of the important periods. They also had to incorporate into “general history” a “detailed and broad” knowledge of “the history of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy with special regard to Croatian history”. Hrvatski državni arhiv [Croatian State Archive], fond 502: Ispitna komisija zapolaganje stručnih ispita za zvanje profesora srednjih škola Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu, opći spisi, 1882–1889, document No. 12.

58 Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 53.

59 Ferdo Šišić, Povijest Hrvata u vrijeme narodnih vladara (Zagreb: Tisak Narodnih novina, 1925), 20.

60 Zdenka Janeković Römer, “Vjekoslav Klaić na zagrebačkom sveučilištu,” in Vjekoslav Klaić – Život i djelo, ed. Dragan Milanović (Zagreb: Sveučilište u Zagrebu–Hrvatski institute za povijest–Podružnicaza povijest Slavonije, Srijema i Baranje, 2000), 365.

61 Arhiv Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu [Archive of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb], box 3 (1880–1882) - zapisnik IV. sjednice profesorskog zbora mudroslovnoga fakulteta Kr. Sveučilišta Franje Josipa I, držane 13. veljače 1881 [Report of the Fourth assembly of the professorial council of the Philosophical faculty held on February 13, 1881].

62 Tadija Smičiklas, Poviest Hrvatska (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1882), 1:xxxii.

63 Ibid.

64 For example Hrvati i Hrvatska (Zagreb: Dioničkatiskara, 1890); Pripovijesti iz hrvatske povijesti, 3 vols. (Zagreb: Društvo sv. Jeronima, 1886–1891).

65 Stjepan Matković, “Politički rad Vjekoslava Klaića,” in Vjekoslav Klaić–Život i djelo, ed. Dragan Milanović (Zagreb: Sveučilište u Zagrebu–Hrvatski institute za povijest–Podružnica za povijest Slavonije, Srijema i Baranje, 2000), 401–15.

66 Vjekoslav Klaić, Povijest Hrvata (Zagreb: Lav Hartman, 1899), 1:V.

67 Ibid., 1:VI–VII.

68 Ibid., 1:VIII–IX.

69 Ferdo Šišić, Hrvati i Magjari od godine 1790. do 1873. (Zadar: Matica Dalmatinska, 1913); idem., Rijeka i riječko pitanje od godine 1790. do 1870. (Zadar: Matica Dalmatinska, 1913).

70 Ferdo Šišić, Pregled povijesti hrvatskoga naroda (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1916).

71 Stjepan Antoljak, “Ferdo Šišić,” Arhivski vjesnik, 32 (1989): 127.

72 Burrow, A History of Histories, 458–61.

73 Elías José Palti, “The Nation as a Problem: Historians and the ‘National Question’,” History and Theory 40 (2001): 328–29.

2016_2_Antolović

Volume 5 Issue 2 CONTENTS

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Michael Antolović

Modern Serbian Historiography between Nation-Building and Critical Scholarship: The Case of Ilarion Ruvarac (1832–1905)

 

In the process of the construction of the Serbian nation, the discipline of history had a prominent role, as was true in the case of other European nations. Especially reinforced after recognition of the independent Principality of Serbia at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, this process led gradually to the building of a Serbian bourgeois society with all its modern institutions. A year later, an important controversy began, which was not limited to the academic circles, but strongly influenced all of Serbian culture over the course of the next 15 years. The controversy was marked by the dispute between supporters of a Romantic view of history and the supporters of the modern historical scholarship embodied in the work of Leopold von Ranke and his successors. The Romantics were ardent nationalists who, though they lacked an adequate knowledge of the relevant methods, used the past for the legitimation of their own nationalistic ideologies and were trying to demonstrate the continuity of the Serbian nation from Antiquity to modern times. Ilarion Ruvarac (1832–1905) played the key role in the refutation of this nationalistic para-historical ideology. Ruvarac accepted Ranke’s methodology, and he insisted on the “scientific character” of historical knowledge and its objectivity. He therefore insisted that “historical science” had to be based on critical assessments of archival sources, which could lead historians to the “historical truth.” According to this principle of historical scholarship, he researched different topics concerning the history of the Serbian and Balkan peoples from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the methods of philological criticism, Ruvarac focused on resolving individual chronological and factual problems, which is why “contribution” and “article” were his favorite forms for the presentation of the results of his research. From this standpoint, he often engaged in polemics with the followers of the so-called “Romantic school” in Serbian historiography, demonstrating their “unscientific practice of history” and their lack of essential knowledge. After acrimonious debates with Pantelija-Panta Srećković and his supporters, which at the same time reflected the power distribution in the Serbian academic fields, by the end of the nineteenth century Ruvarac succeeded in establishing Serbian historiography on scientific grounds.

Keywords: Serbian historiography, Ilarion Ruvarac, nationalism

 

In the informative obituary on Ilarion Ruvarac’s death in 1905, Vatroslav Jagić, a professor at the University of Vienna, wrote that Ruvarac, led by his love of scholarly work, had achieved “most magnificent results and had been recognized for decades as the most important, most critical and most learned Serbian historian and commander of Serbian historiography during the second half of the nineteenth century.”1 The illustrious Slavist’s assessment of Ruvarac as a “great critical historian in the field of Serbian history”2 was shared by scholars in Saint Petersburg, Budapest, and Zagreb, who emphasized his love of truth, his “outstanding erudition, and [his] rare methodological exactness.”3 The young generation of Serbian historians that emerged at the turn of the century considered Ruvarac their “spiritual father” and the founder of scholarly or, as was said at the time, “critical” Serbian historiography, a man who, in the age of “great national self-deception,” had managed “with great success to turn on the lights of truth […] in the darkness of ignorance.” 4 As the founder of a “scientific” approach to the past, Ruvarac was a distinctive figure in the history of modern Serbian historiography. The aim of this paper is to examine the particularities of his work and his historical scholarship in the context of the main currents of historical thought in the nineteenth century and the specific social and political circumstances which determined the development of Serbian historiography at the time.5

Serbian Historiography and National Renewal during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

The rebuilding of the Serbian state (which began with uprisings against Ottoman rule at the beginning of the nineteenth century and reached partial fulfillment with the international recognition of Serbia’s independence at the Congress of Berlin in 1878) was the main achievement of the “Serbian revolution” (1804–1830), as Leopold von Ranke called it in his work of the same name. As part of the revolution, an encompassing process of social and cultural modernization took place. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, Serbian agrarian society was thoroughly transformed, the institutions of bourgeois society were gradually established, and the foundations were laid for cultural development by the standardization of the language, the founding of the educational and cultural institutions, and the adoption of European intellectual ideas. In this process of modernization of Serbian society, the Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy, who began to establish cultural and scholarly institutions in the 1820s, had an important role. Stimulated by a series of Serbian uprisings, the Serbian intellectuals in Hungary adopted a Serbian nationalist program. The Hungarian Serbs considered the restored Serbian principality as the embryo of future national liberation and unification.

As of the middle of the nineteenth century, liberalism was the prevailing ideology among the Serbian bourgeoisie. In addition to its claims for the establishment of constitutional order and civil rights, liberalism was inseparably linked to nationalism and claims for the creation of nation states which would encompass all compatriots. Since the past constituted one of the essential elements of nationalistic ideologies,6 Serbian intellectuals shared an increasing interest in their past, trying to find legitimacy for their political projects in the traditions of the Serbian medieval kingdom.

The development of Serbian historiography in the nineteenth century was tied up with the renewal of the Serbian state and the fashioning of a nationalistic ideology, as was the case not only in the Balkans but in most of Europe.7 However, in the first half of the nineteenth century Serbian historiography did not make any significant progress. It was still marked by the work of Jovan Rajić (1726–1801). A typical representative of the Enlightenment, in his work The History of Various Slavic Peoples, Particularly the Bulgarians, Croats and Serbs, which was written in the middle of the eighteenth century and published in 1794/95, Rajić gave an overview of the history of the South Slaves from the Middle Ages till his times based on limited evidence and without drawing a clear distinction between historical and literary sources. Rajić wrote his History under the influence of Enlightenment ideas about the progress of humankind through the accumulation of rational knowledge about men and their past. At the same time, his work had a distinct didactical purpose. At a time when no Serbian state existed, Rajić aimed with his History not only to inform literate Serbs about their past, but also to help preserve and strengthen national consciousness among his compatriots by pointing out the historical continuity with the traditions of the Serbian medieval state. Rajić’s work had a very strong influence on the next generations of educated Serbs, and it remained the main source of knowledge about Serbian history.8 Jakov Ignjatović, editor of the leading Serbian literary magazine Letopis Matice srpske, pointed this out in the middle of the 1850s. Appraising the trends in Serbian historiography that were current at the time, Ignjatović concluded that it had not made any progress since Rajić’s times. He substantiated this contention with the observation that Rajić’s monumental work had not been outdone and that “we—his descendants—either imitate or simply glean” insights based on the material he had gathered.9 The very fact that Ignjatović had considered historiography part of literature indicates that Rankean methodology had not gained a foothold among Serbian intellectuals yet.

This judgment about Serbian historiography might seem pretty severe. However, it is accurate, taking into consideration that no important historical work had been published since the end of the eighteenth century and that the writers of Serbian history were Rajić’s epigones. Using the data from his voluminous History, they interpreted the Serbian past according to their national-Romantic viewpoint, and they tried to strengthen the nationalism of their compatriots with narratives about “the glorious past.” Hence, these amateur historians from the first half of the nineteenth century (Dimitrije Davidović, Aleksandar Stojačković, Danilo Medaković, Milovan Vidaković, Jovan Sterija Popović and Jovan Subotić, to mention only the most prominent among them) considered history a useful tool of “national pedagogy.” As journalists, writers and politicians, they approached history from a pragmatic standpoint. Accenting the traditions of the medieval Serbian kingdom, they were trying to give historical legitimacy to the new Serbian state and kindle aspirations for national unification.10 In this sense, the work of Danilo Medaković entitled History of the Serbian People from Ancient Times till 1850 is illustrative.11 Influenced by the idea that history is the most eloquent testimony to a nation’s character and that “only wild, unhappy and neglected people do not have their own history,” Medaković aimed to “nurture feelings for and worthy knowledge of our historical heroes and all the glorious deeds of our earliest ancestors.”12 The substantial growth of interest in the past, however, was not followed by professionalization of historical studies. In the middle of the nineteenth century, there were no educated Serbian historians who possessed the necessary professional background. Neither was there any critical editing of sources on Serbian history, nor were there specialized historical journals. Although some Serbian periodicals, such as Letopis Matice srpske, had begun to publish Serbian medieval sources unsystematically (chronicles, genealogies, and charters) and translations of works by some foreign historians, such as Ranke, František Palacký, and Pavel Jozef Šafárik, in the middle of the nineteenth century Serbian historiography was dominated by writers and journalists. Without appropriate training, they were retelling Rajić’s History and uncritically accepting information about the past preserved (or fashioned) in Serbian epic poetry.13

A change came in Serbian historiography in the 1860s with the founding of the Higher School (Velika škola) in Belgrade in 1863, the first institution of higher education in Serbia, and with the coming of a generation of Serbian intellectuals educated at universities abroad, mostly in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Heidelberg. Politically, they were liberal, and they accepted positivism as a scientific paradigm and worldview. Guided by the ideas of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Henry Thomas Buckle, John Stuart Mill, and John William Draper, Serbian intellectuals were trying to apply the “general laws” of social and historical development to narratives of the Serbian past.14 Some of them, such as Alimpije Vasiljević and Stojan Bošković, were professors at the new Higher School, and they tried to apply positivistic methods to the study of Serbian history by establishing the physical, geographical, and social laws which had shaped it. However, since they were not trained as historians, their efforts yielded only modest results, limited essentially to the interpretation of a few known facts about the Serbian past according to the principles of positivistic philosophy.15

Ruvarac’s Intellectual Formation

These social and intellectual circumstances dominated Serbian historiography when, at the end of the 1850s, Ilarion Ruvarac appeared with his first historical works. Born as Jovan Ruvarac in a Serbian clergyman’s family in 1832 in Sremska Mitrovica (then part of Slavonian Military Frontier in the Habsburg Monarchy), he grew up in Stari Slankamen and Novi Banovci, small villages in Srem, where his father served as an Orthodox priest. He attended the gymnasium in Sremski Karlovci, a small town on the hillside of the mountain of Fruška Gora, which since the time of the Great Migrations of the Serbs at the end of the seventeenth century was the religious and cultural center of Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy. Enthusiastic about the poetry of Goethe, Heine, and Schiller, Ruvarac began to read very carefully the writings of leading Serbian journals of the time, Letopis Matice srpske and Srpski narodni list, which devoted considerable attention to historical topics. Already interested in the past, Ruvarac was strongly influenced by Jakov Gerčić, his history teacher in the gymnasium. Although he did not pursue significant historical research, Gerčić was considered the best expert in general history among the very few educated Serbian citizens.16 After the turmoil caused by the revolution of 1848/49, Ruvarac continued his education in Vienna in 1850. After graduating from the gymnasium, he enrolled in the University of Vienna in 1852 and began to study law. He completed his university studies in 1856. During his time as a student in Vienna, the capital of Habsburg Monarchy was a meeting place of the intellectual elites of the South Slavs, where the leading figures of Serbian culture were Vuk Karadžić, the reformer of the Serbian language and creator of modern Serbian orthography, and his pupil, the philologist Đura Daničić. “All nationally minded Slavs” gathered regularly in the famous café Slavisches Kafeehaus,17 and Ruvarac socialized among the members of this circle.18 After having returned to his homeland, Ruvarac completed his theological studies, and he entered a monastery in early 1861. As the monk Ilarion, he was the rector of the Orthodox theological seminary in Sremski Karlovci and clerk of the Ecclesiastical Court, and he was appointed to the archimandrite of the Grgeteg monastery of Fruška Gora. Ruvarac remained there until his death on August 8, 1905.19

During his studies, Ruvarac continued to deepen his knowledge of history, attending lectures by Albert Jäger, one of the most distinguished Austrian historians, who taught Austrian history at the University of Vienna from 1851.20 At the same time, Ruvarac read a great deal of historical literature, in particular works by the German liberal historians Friedrich Christoph Schlosser and Georg Gottfried Gervinus. Finally, the most decisive influence came from Leopold von Ranke. After having been familiarized with the works of the “father of modern historiography,” Ruvarac accepted his understanding of history and of the historian’s task, summarized in the famous sentence “to show how it actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). In addition to this principle of objectivity in historical research, Ruvarac also accepted the clear difference between historical evidence and literature, as well as the insistence on the importance of documentary, i.e. “primary sources” in the reconstruction of the past. This conception Ruvarac applied to the study of Serbian history when he wrote his first article, Review of Native Sources of old Serbian History (1856), following the example of Ranke’s early work Critique of Modern Historians (Zur Kritik der neuerer Geschichtsschreiber, 1824). Accenting the importance of documentary sources21 and accepting the crucial distinction between primary and secondary sources, Ruvarac classified published sources for Serbian medieval history. In doing so, he followed the model given by the famous German source edition Monumenta Germaniae Historica. His next article, Contribution to the Examination of Serbian Epic Poems (1857/1858),22 was strongly influenced by comparative linguistics and religion which, based upon the findings of Franz Bopp and Adalbert Kuhn, had undergone extraordinary development. Ruvarac analyzed the contents of Serbian epic poetry, determined its main motifs (common to all Indo-European poetry), and concluded that it could not be used as a historical source. Recognizing the “esthetic,” i.e. artistic value of folk poetry, he rejected its usefulness for historical research. Remaining extremely critical, Ruvarac announced his “crusade” against the representation of the Serbian past on the basis of epic tradition and a historical consciousness rooted in myths and legends.23 Ruvarac’s “student’s treatise” caused a great stir in the Serbian milieu, which, influenced by the spirit of national Romanticism, approached the folk epic traditions uncritically, considering them a credible representation of the “glorious Serbian past.” The importance of this treatise is pointed out by Nikola Radojčić, undoubtedly the best expert on Ruvarac’s work, who considered it “the deepest earlier historical treatise on Serbs.”24

“Objectivity and Historical Truth:” The Fundamentals of Ruvarac’s Approach to History

In his first article, Ruvarac pointed out that Serbian historiography amounted to little more than retellings of Rajić’s History and neglect for historical evidence, “which, selected by clear eyes and clever thoughts, is the only way to arrive at the plain truth.” In his assessment, this was why it “actually has been not changed for fifty years, and it is very hard to observe signs of any progress in the examination of a people’s history.”25 Ruvarac devoted himself to the collection and careful study of historical sources over the course of the next decade (1858–1868). In addition to medieval charters and church chronicles, Ruvarac studied works by Byzantine writers published in the series of Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, and he also familiarized himself with the history of Hungary by reading István Katona’s voluminous work Historia Critica Regnum Hungariae (I–XLII, 1779–1817) and the collection of documents Codex diplomaticus Hungariae ecclesiasticus ac civilis, edited by György Fejér. Both Katona and Fejér had been representatives of the Hungarian late Enlightenment historiography and had published a great deal of primary documents. Based on such historical evidence, Ruvarac began to research the history of Serbs in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era in the vast area of the Balkans and Central Europe.

The leitmotif of Ruvarac’s methodology was the critical examination of the historical sources which constituted the basis of his scholarly work.26 He was less inclined to consider theoretical questions and instead devoted himself to the critical editing of sources, the identification of falsifications and interpolations based on philological criticism, and the establishment of historical facts. Resolving chronological, genealogical, and geographic problems, he did not go into historical processes, and this ultimately determined the character of his scholarly works. Ruvarac’s dominant form of presentation was treatises and articles. According to Nikola Radojčić, “he became a researcher of sources and a writer of treatises, contributions, and small contributions.”27 At the same time, one of the distinctive features of Ruvarac’s method is his narrative style. Almost all of his works were characterized by many digressions, frequently appeals to the reader, and signs of anxiety and mental tension. Writing in a polemical style and not hesitating to ridicule his opponents, Ruvarac led his pitched battles with “war cries” against the misapprehensions and ignorance of his contemporaries. In his polemics, he challenged not only amateurs but also some prominent scholars, such as the Croatian historian Franjo Rački and the Hungarian Lajos Thallóczy. In a polemic about the origins of Pavle Bakić, the last Serbian despot in Hungary, Ruvarac sent word that he would have fought with Thallóczy, and he concluded that “if he is a hero, he should make this heroic competition possible himself.”28 However, Ruvarac was deeply aware that he frequently was not capable of overcoming his emotions, which led him when, in his search for historical truth, he deconstructed the historical myths fashioned by his contemporaries. He himself confirmed this in his own words:

 

I have never begun to sing, and as I was 40 years ago, I am the same today: somber and dissatisfied, restless and upset; and I look for something and explore permanently, and in this eternal search I forget myself and lose my balance, so that even I do not care, and I hate soulfully the squabbles and quarrels in which I find myself, suddenly on the stormy waves of angry squabbles and in the muddy lake of heated quarrel […] and I quarrel with such vehemence, as if the solution of the Eastern Question depended on it.29

Finally, the extensiveness of his work and the many quotations he offers from numberless sources in order to prove his hypotheses make Ruvarac’s writings tiring and demanding. Hence, it has been astutely observed structure was the greatest weakness of Ruvarac’s methodology, which otherwise was distinguished by “brilliant heuristics and undeveloped hermeneutics.”30

The features of Ruvarac’s style were the results of his striving for historical truth, which, having been given a kind of religious sanctification, constituted the main aim of his historical work. Considering that only artists (“poets and painters”) do not have to follow historical truth,31 Ruvarac’s opinion was that the search for historical truth was the basic principle of “historical science.” His scholarly ideal and the meaning of historical scholarship for him meant historical truth determined by the precisely developed methodology of historical research. Sharing the conviction of his university mentors that history should be a science (in the sense of the German term Wissenschaft), Ruvarac repeatedly acknowledged that he had been “ready to die rather than to say that a lie is the truth.”32 He did not care about “what people say and what the mob will say,” and from the silence of his monastery he struggled persistently to meet his scholarly ideal. Judging the past “shortly, objectively, coldly,”33 he confronted nationalistic interpretations of the past with the principle of objectivity, arguing that “one could not write more objectively than I write, and I am not interested in persons and subjects, but in matter and objects, and my every bend and digression, every question and shout, my every touch have their cause not in me, but in the object.”34 From this scholarly standpoint, Ruvarac formulated his understanding of the aims of future Serbian historians. Stressing the substantial difference between a scholarly approach to the past and representations of the past in Serbian epic poetry, Ruvarac asserted decisively that

 

a future Serbian historian with entirely different goals from the goals of folksong singers and poets, laudators and mourners should restrain himself, and when he has written the history of the Kosovo battle, he should listen neither to these poems and stories, nor to the narratives about them, but he should ask about and study what is said on this question in the first, oldest, and best sources and historical evidences, and he should ask if the information they provide is consistent or not.35

He defined his own aim as a historian in a similar way:

 

I will explain the records and facts that I was able to discover; I will not hesitate to tell my opinion as well, if I have been able to arrive at one and answer the question … on the question; but it is not appropriate for me to present judgment, because I’m the minor among my brothers—that judgment […] I will leave to those who are more competent, more impartial and more objective than I am.36

Ruvarac’s political views were conservative. During the 1848/49 revolution, which caused interethnic conflict in the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, as a young man Ruvarac was suspicious of the nationalistic demands of his compatriots, arguing that “the entire business will remain without visible results.”37 Sharing a strong sense of loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty, he consistently rejected the liberal and democratic aspirations of Serbian citizens in Hungary.38 Hence, he was radically pessimistic about the future of the Serbian people, considering that the entire nation, addicted to a seductive ideology, “is sick.”39

The social function of nineteenth-century historiography was to legitimize the great transformation of the social and political order and establish continuity with earlier times, collecting historical material necessary for the (re)construction of the (fictional) tradition and determining a desirable value system in the form of grand narratives about the national past. In both cases, historiography endeavors either to challenge or to confirm the roots of modern institutions in the recent or distant past, thus giving scholarly legitimacy to conservative or liberal political ideology.40 Ruvarac tried to avoid value judgments and interpreting the Serbian past in the form of historical narratives, and he used neither the motif of “the golden epoch of the Serbian medieval kingdom” nor the motif of “the centuries-old Serbian struggle for liberty.” However, unlike many nineteenth-century historians all over Europe (for instance, Johann Gustav Droysen in Germany, František Palacký in Bohemia, and Mihály Horváth in Hungary), Ruvarac was not a national ideologue. Rather, he deconstructed historical myths, which were seen as the foundation of the collective consciousness by his contemporaries. Hence, it is hardly surprising that he did not pay any attention to the question of “ethnogenesis,” one of the favorite research topics of nineteenth-century historians. Finally, Ruvarac did not search in the past for the “ideal” social or political order, as he did not believe that there had ever been a “golden age of Serbian history.”

However, he did not manage to escape the Zeitgeist, which was strongly influenced by nationalism. Like most nineteenth-century historians, Ruvarac concentrated on the past of his own nation, devoting himself mainly but not exclusively to the study of Serbian history. In doing so, he was led by his governing belief that historical knowledge had an emancipatory function, i.e. that the material and cultural development of any nation would be possible only if its own past was approached objectively, without any kind of nationalistic exaggeration. In Ruvarac’s view, objective historical knowledge was a prerequisite for any progress of the nation.

The Historian as a Critic

Many of Ruvarac’s historical works are still relevant. Among them, the works in which he deconstructed misapprehensions of his contemporaries were particularly important for the development of Serbian historiography. He focused his sharp criticism on some of the most common motifs in Serbian epic poetry, which offered “a heroic picture” of the Serbian past, assigned responsibility for the downfall of the medieval Serbian empire, narrated the Great Migration of the Serbs into Hungary at the end seventeenth century, and emphasized the “centuries-old independence” of Montenegro. In the treaty Chronological Questions about the Time of the Battle of Marica, the Death of King Vukašin, and the Death of Emperor Uroš (1879),41 Ruvarac demonstrated the falsehood of the assertion that king Vukašin, the incarnation of an unfaithful lord in epic poetry, had killed emperor Uroš (1355–71), the last member of the Nemanjić “dynasty of sacred roots,” in order to usurp legitimate rule. A decade later, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, Ruvarac criticized the central idea of epic poetry, according to which the Serbian medieval empire had fallen as the result of a betrayal. Ruvarac devoted On Prince Lazar (1887), one of his most comprehensive treatises and successful monographs, to the refutation of the widespread opinion concerning Prince Lazar’s reign. He demonstrated that Lazar had never held the title of emperor (he thus contradicted the epic tradition) and that the Serbian empire came to an end with the death of the last ruler of the Nemanjić dynasty, emperor Uroš, in 1371.42

After having deconstructed these legendary views of the Serbian medieval past, Ruvarac moved to the key problems of Serbian history in the early modern period. In the book On the Patriarchs of Peć from Makarije to Arsenije III 1557–1690 (1888),43 he examined the history of the Serbian Orthodox church in the Ottoman Empire, and on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the migration of the Serbs in Hungary he published a series of articles republished later in the book Excerpts on Count Đorđe Branković and Patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević, with Three Digressions About the So-called Migration of the Serbs (1896).44 First, he established that during the migration in 1690, between 70,000 and 80,000 Serbs arrived in the territory of Hungary, while the Serbian public tended to claim that the number was more than half a million.45 Furthermore, Ruvarac challenged the view according to which the Serbian people migrated to Hungary after an official invitation by the Vienna court, and that, as a national community, they had been given a degree of autonomy, including rights and privileges, by the Habsburg emperor. Having analyzed all available sources, Ruvarac concluded that the Serbs had come as refugees, fleeing their homeland in fear of Ottoman revenge: “The Roman emperor and Hungarian king Leopold never invited the Serbian patriarch or the Serbian people to move from the Serbian lands and come to Hungary and Slavonia […] Hence, in the years 1691–1699, the Serbs were only guests, and because nobody had called on them to come to Hungary, they were uninvited guests.”46 At the same time, Ruvarac pointed out that Count Đorđe Branković, a prominent person among the Serbs in Hungary at the end of seventeenth century and the self-proclaimed “Despot od Illyricum,” was not a descendant of the family of late medieval Serbian rulers. Rather, according to Ruvarac, he was “a good-for-nothing, a liar, and an imposter, in other words, a swindler with a grand style.”47

Finally, Ruvarac also analyzed the thesis concerning the allegedly centuries-old independence of Montenegro, which played a particularly important role in Serbian nationalism in the nineteenth century. Much as Hungarian nationalists have ascribed mythic importance to Transylvania, the Serbian nationalistic-minded bourgeoisie glorified and admired Montenegro as the “homeland of liberty” and “Serbian Sparta,” famous for the bravery and rebelliousness of its inhabitants, who were considered the best representatives of “Serbianhood.”48 Ruvarac questioned these notions in his work Montenegrina: Small Contributions to the History of Montenegro. He demonstrated that Montenegro had been part of the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern age.49

The Great Dispute in Serbian Historiography

Although later research refuted some of Ruvarac’s conclusions, such as his thesis according to which the Serbs had come to Hungary as “uninvited guests,” in the abovementioned works he showed that epic poetry was not reliable and that it could not be accepted as a historical source. In doing so, he initiated the most important controversy in Serbian historiography. The controversy between the supporters of the “critical” approach and the “Romantic” approach to the folk epic tradition lasted for the next 15 years (1879–1894), and the victory of the “critical orientation” led to the making of the modern Serbian historiography. The historians of Romantic orientation considered epic poems authentic representations of Serbian history, while the historians lead by Ruvarac had a critical approach towards the folk tradition and denied its plausibility and use as a source for historical research. Romantic historians were usually amateurs without an appropriate education, who praised the Serbian past by quoting epic poetry. According to Radovan Samardžić, this “terminological confusion” in Serbian historiography was the result of the fact that the term “Romantic historians” is used to describe amateur historians who were “too seriously occupied by patriotism” and who, without actually pursuing study of or research on the past, offered interpretations which were intended to legitimize a policy of national liberation and unification.50 Accepting epic poetry as the only reliable evidence about the past and rejecting the rational core of the discipline of history, these “late and salient Romantics” presented “a dangerous regression to the beginnings of intentional and organized historical memory, which had merged with the oral tradition.”51 Having started in 1879 with Ruvarac’s article about chronological facts, the dispute involved how to deal with the past. The dispute concerned fundamental questions regarding the methodology of historical research. Furthermore, the controversy possessed a latent dimension as well regarding the function of rational knowledge. Did Serbian society need rational knowledge about its past, or should history be functionalized for the realization of desired political goals? In that sense, the erudite judgment of Stojan Novaković, who shared Ruvarac’s views, was typical. Novaković asserted that “the correction of the year and the way emperor Uroš had died is far more important for Serbian history than is usually accepted; merit for that correction is particular.”52 Hence, the debate between Ruvarac on one side and Miloš S. Milojević (1840–97) and Pantelija-Panta Srećković (1834–1903) on the other, the main supporters of the “Romantic orientation” in Serbian historiography, was extremely bitter. It went well beyond the frameworks of the historical profession and was met with considerable interest among members of the Serbian public.

A man of liberal political views and strong nationalistic feelings, Miloš Milojević took part as a volunteer in the Serbian–Ottoman wars (1876–78). After this episode he continued to work as a national propagandist, spreading the idea of national liberation among Serbs who were living in the areas of so-called Old Serbia (Kosovo, Macedonia), provinces that remained under Ottoman rule. Milojević understood the power of historical notions in the collective mobilization of the masses, so he put his entire historical work in the service of the anticipated political aims.53 In his Excerpts From the History of Serbs and Serbian-South Slavic lands in Turkey and Austria (1872) he was guided by nationalistic ideas about greatness and the distinctiveness of his people. Hence, he claimed that the history of the Serbs began in ancient times, when they had left their ancient homeland in India and settled all over the Middle and Near East, Asia Minor, Africa and Europe.54 In spite of the somnambulistic character of his conceptions, based on his nationalistic imagination and lack of historical knowledge, because of his “patriotic merits” he was made a member of the most important scholarly institution in the Principality of Serbia, the Serbian Learned Society, which also published his works. Provoked by the rise to prominence of a man whose concept of historical scholarship contrasted so radically with his, Ruvarac analyzed his works and concluded that Milojević was guided by fantasy and his own worldview in writing history.55 Ruvarac stated bluntly that Milojević was “a charlatan” who “fabricates folk poems and invents inscriptions and records.” Not without bitterness, Ruvarac emphasized that the “Serbian Learned Society in Belgrade accepted such a charlatan as a member.”56 Ruvarac’s critique gave rise to a bitter quarrel, not only about historical research, but also about his relationship to the Serbian nation. Milojević accused Ruvarac of being a “traitor of Serbian nationality” and announced that Ruvarac “should be executed.”57

The conflict between Ruvarac and Milojević indicates the passions that influenced the development of Serbian historiography. However, Ruvarac’s dispute with Pantelija-Panta Srećković was more important. As a theologian, Srećković was appointed professor at the Belgrade Lyceum (the predecessor of the Higher School) in 1859, where he taught first general and then Serbian history until his retirement in 1894. As an active politician and a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, he had been a member of the Serbian parliament for almost 20 years, during which time he had engaged in national propaganda, organizing the Serbian school system in the Ottoman Empire. His devotion to these issues was crowned by his appointment as a member of the newly established Serbian Royal Academy in 1887.58 As a professor, he published a History of Serbian People (1884), in which he attempted to give an overview of Serbian history in the early Middle Ages.59 In his review of Srećković’s work, Ruvarac noticed some crucial shortcomings, which were the result of insufficient erudition and ignorance of historical methodology.60 Since in Srećković’s work there were many errors and incorrectly translated passages from medieval sources, Ruvarac asserted that Srećković did not possess the elementary qualifications for scholarly work. He concluded that “he does not know as much Latin as even a student in the fourth grade gymnasium should know.”61 The main objection Ruvarac made to Srećković’s work was that he did not use the published collections of historical documents, but rather uncritically compiled facts contained in the Russian historical literature.62 Furthermore, Ruvarac astutely concluded that, as a “patriotic historian or historical panegyrist,” Srećković was guided in his “method” by nationalist conceptions, and thus exaggerated the size of the territory of Serbian medieval state and wrongly glorified Serbian rulers of the early Middle Ages as the “greatest Serbian patriots.”63

Srećković rejected Ruvarac’s objections, not by replying with scholarly arguments, but rather simply by describing Ruvarac as a “lunatic and ignoramus,” who “destroys Serbian nationality and helps the enemies of the Serbs.”64 Ruvarac answered with a detailed critique of Srećković’s method (1885/86), beginning with the assertion that Srećković was “a pale imitation” of Miloš Milojević, who “had looked for the Serbs and had found them in tropical Africa.”65 Furthermore, Ruvarac repeated his observation that Srećković had written his book using Russian scholarly works and that he had presented somebody else’s findings as his own. Emphasizing that Srećković “writes badly, incorrectly and confusingly,” Ruvarac accused him of plagiarism, arguing that “anything else is taken and stolen.”66 He considered Srećković a “charlatan,” unskilled in historical criticism, who interpreted the past from the viewpoint of “exaggerated patriotism, letting emotions and wishes prevail over intellect and reason.”67 Hence, Ruvarac concluded that Srećković’s History “is not valuable, in fact, it is worthless, and it is a great shame for Serbia and Serbianhood that it was published.”68 At the same time, Ruvarac claimed that, as a “Pan-Serb […] who is engaged in the propagation of the idea of Serbian unification […] [Srećković] is trying to make all Slav tribes, clans and languages Serbian,” and that “he proved that in the Slav South there have never been any Slav tribes apart from the noble Serbian tribe.”69 Noting Srećković’s bias and politically motivated approach to history, Ruvarac compared him to Ante Starčević, the founder of the nationalist Croatian Party of Rights. Ruvarac considered them both chauvinists and “offspring and emanation of the same spirit, […] which spreads the seed of discord among similar and closest brothers, among the Slav tribes in the South.”70

Assaults on Ruvarac lasted till the end of his life, and they were fundamentally ideological. Because of his critical attitude towards nationalist narratives of the Serbian past and his deconstruction of widely spread myths about “glorious Serbian history,” the propagandists of Serbian nationalism regarded Ruvarac as a destroyer of epic tradition and therefore a destroyer of “Serbian ideals.”71 The judgment of Aleksandar Protić, a colonel in Serbian army, is typical of the reception of Ruvarac and his followers in these nationalistic circles. He thought that they neglected the interests of national policy in their search for “historical truth.” Consequently, he accused Serbian historians led by Ruvarac of being “excessively skeptical in their attempt to serve the truth, and this begins to be harmful to the interests of Serbian nation.”72 However, it is obvious that some of Ruvarac’s conclusions had clear political implications, in spite of his lack of interest in political issues and his devotion to the principle of objectivity. For instance, questioning the constitutional character of the Privileges Granted to the Serbs by Emperor Leopold I, which were issued in 1690, Ruvarac denied implicitly the main argument of Serbian politicians in southern Hungary, who founded their claims for autonomous territory on this imperial legal document.73 Similarly, arguing that Montenegro was a part of the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern era, Ruvarac indirectly denied the historical legitimacy of the modern state of Montenegro, which grounded its self-understanding on precisely the deeply rooted idea of a centuries-old tradition of freedom.

With regards to the reception of his work in the Serbian nationalistic public, Ruvarac was aware that “it was dangerous to struggle against deeply rooted prejudices and folk tradition.”74 Considering himself an “element of destruction,”75 Ruvarac defined his relation to the Serbian nation and its history in the following way: “And I remain alone […] leading quarrels and wars against all the supporters of the people’s glory, even if that glory is sometimes false and futile […] [B]eing constantly at war and in quarrel, I am always longing and aspiring for peace, tranquility and truth.”76 At the same time, in spite of the fact that he had “destroyed more than he had built,” Ruvarac asserted his commitment to his nation, which found manifestation in his efforts to liberate it “from ignorance and misapprehensions”: “I know […] that I loved and I still love my Serbian people like folk poets and famous orators love their nation […] We all think that we serve and repay our nation in our own way.”77

Ruvarac’s Legacy and Modern Serbian Historiography

In the dispute between the “Romantics” on the one hand and Ruvarac and his followers on the other, there was also an intergenerational conflict. Ruvarac was supported by the younger historians, like Stanoje Stanojević (1874–1937) and Jovan Radonić (1873–1953), who both admired his work. In one of his first articles, the former praised Ruvarac as a “first rank scholar […] and the greatest Serbian historian,”78 while the latter devoted his first book to Ruvarac, considering him the “founder of the critical orientation of Serbian historiography.”79 Belgrade scholars Stojan Novaković (1842–1915) and Ljubomir Kovačević (1848–1918) shared Ruvarac’s understanding of the historical discipline. They insisted on a rational approach to the past, governed by the rules of methodological historical research. With Ruvarac, who enjoyed their professional and friendly support, they contributed decisively to the rejection of the “Romantic school” in Serbian historiography. At the same time, Franjo Rački (1828–94), a leading Croatian historian of the time, and the aforementioned highly influential Slavist Vatroslav Jagić appreciated Ruvarac’s historical work. Ruvarac’s election to the Serbian Royal Academy in Belgrade in 1888 and the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb in the same year demonstrate the recognition he was given for his scholarly work.

However, the decisive victory of Ruvarac’s concepts came up after the retirement of Pantelija Srećković in 1894, when the latter was succeeded by Ljubomir Kovačević as professor of Serbian history in the Higher School in Belgrade. The institutionalization of historical studies continued in the subsequent years, with the founding of departments of ancient, medieval, and modern history (which previously had not existed) and the appointment of the first Serbian historians who had received their professional education at European universities abroad.80 Almost all of them, for instance Stanoje Stanojević, Ljuba Jovanović, and Jovan Radonić, were followers of Ruvarac, and they were elected to serve as professors in the Higher School at the beginning of the twentieth century. This meant not only the defeat of the “Romantics” by representatives of Serbian “critical historiography,” but also the professionalization of historical studies and acceptance among Serbian historians of the dominant historiographical paradigm of the time.

In comparison with the main currents of the European historical scholarship of the nineteenth century, after a delay of a few decades Ruvarac and his followers carried out activities such as the collection and publication of critical editions of sources, establishing auxiliary historical disciplines and determining historical facts that were prerequisites for the emergence of a modern historical profession. Taking into consideration these facts, although he was not educated as a historian, Ilarion Ruvarac contributed decisively to the professionalization of Serbian historical studies and their transformation into a scholarly discipline. Accepting Rankean methodology, particularly the principle of objectivity, Ruvarac became the founder of modern Serbian “scientific” historiography and “almost a symbol of historical criticism the only aim of which is (establishing) facts.”81 This judgment is confirmed by the statement of Jovan Radonić, who observed that “Ruvarac’s merit is that he accepted completely the currents of modern German historiography, that as a young man he arrived at his own understanding of history and its tasks, that as a student he completely mastered the method of historical research, and that, starting from a Romantic [view of history], he became a representative of a new, realistic direction [in Serbia].”82 Therefore, Ruvarac’s works, including his reviews and critiques, “are important and informative documents on the dramatic development of modern [Serbian] historiography.”83 At the same time, it should be noted that the establishment of “Serbian critical historiography” had some inherent limitations. Among them, the most important was the rejection of the wider approach to the past initiated by positivistic historiography, which would have included not only political but also social and cultural questions. Therefore, this rejection determined the lasting concentration in the scholarship on individual problems, mostly from the field of political and diplomatic history.84 Unlike Ruvarac’s liberally oriented opponents, who lacked the knowledge to give a “Whig interpretation” of the Serbian past, Ruvarac did not intend to become a “great writer,” and he never wrote a complete overview of Serbian history.

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1 Vatroslav Jagić, “Ilarion Ruvarac,” Archiv für slavische Philologie 27 (1905): 634.

2 Ibid.

3 G. A. Ilinsky, “Arhimandrit Ilarion Ruvarac,” Vizantijski vremennik 13 (1906): 256; Cf. K., “Ruvarac Hilárion,” Századok 39 (1905): 783–84; Tadija Smičiklas, “Ilarion Ruvarac,” Ljetopis Jugoslavenske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti 21 (1907): 168–73.

4 Ljubomir Jovanović, “Arhimandrit Ilarion Ruvarac,” Delo: List za nauku, književnost i društveni život 36 (1905): 227–32. Cf. Jovan Radonić, “Ilarion Ruvarac (1832–1905),” Letopis Matice srpske 233 (1905): 106–20; Jovan N. Tomić, “Arhimandrit Ilarion Ruvarac,” Godišnjak Srpske kraljevske akademije 19 (1906): 348–62.

5 The most comprehensive bibliography of Ruvarac’s works is found in: Borivoje Marinković, “Ilarion Ruvarac i njegovo delo: Povodom 140-godišnjice rođenja (1832–1972),” Istraživanja 2 (1973): 453–509.

6 See: Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially 46–79.

7 Cf. Stefan Berger, Marko Donovan, and Kevin Passmore (eds.), Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1999); Stefan Berger with Christoph Conrad, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), particularly 80–139.

8 Nikola Radojčić, Srpski istoričar Jovan Rajić (Belgrade: Naučna knjiga, 1952); Zbornik radova naučnog skupa Jovan Rajić: istoričar, pesnik i crkveni velikodostojnik (Novi Sad: SANU, 2002).

9 Jakov Ignjatović, “Pogled na knjižestvo,” Letopis Matice srpske 96 (1857): 159.

10 Radovan Samardžić, Pisci srpske istorije (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1976), 1:70. Cf. Dimitrije Đorđević, “Uloga istoricizma u formiranju balkanskih država 19. veka,” Zbornik Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu 10 (1968): 309–26.

11 Danilo Medaković, Povjesnica srbskog naroda od najstarijih vremena do 1850. godine, 4 vols. (Novi Sad: 1851–1852).

12 Ibid., 1: v, xxxvii.

13 Samardžić, Pisci srpske istorije, 1:69–70 and 2:234.

14 Branko Bešlin, Evropski uticaji na srpski liberalizam u 19. veku (Novi Sad, Sremski Karlovci: IKZS, 2005).

15 Cf. Alimpije Vasiljević, Istorija narodnog obrazovanja kod Srba (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1867).

16 Nikola Radojčić, “O istoriskome metodu Ilariona Ruvarca,” in Spomenica Ilarionu Ruvarcu (Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet, 1955), 45. About Gerčić see: Nikola Radojčić, Jakov Gerčić: Prvi srpski pokušaj velike opšte istorije (Belgrade: Čupićeva zadužbina, 1928).

17 Oskar Donath, “Siegfried Kappers Leben und Wirken,” Archiv für slavische Philologie 30 (1909): 420.

18 Jovan Radonić, “O Ilarionu Ruvarcu,” in Spomenica Ilarionu Ruvarcu (Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet, 1955), 16–17.

19 In addition to the abovementioned articles of Radojčić and Radonić, for the newest and most comprehensive insight into Ruvarac’s biography see: Boško Suvajdžić, Ilarion Ruvarac i narodna književnost (Belgrade: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2007), 11–37.

20 Nikolaus Grass, “Albert Jäger,” Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974), 10:273.

21 Ilarion Ruvarac, “Pregled domaćih izvora stare srpske povesnice,” Sedmica 5 (1856): 338–40, 348–50, 353–56, 364–65.

22 Ilarion Ruvarac, “Prilog k ispitivanju srpskih junačkih pesama,” Sedmica 6 (1857): 17–19, 25–27, 33–36, 49–52, 68–69, 81–83, 89–90, 106–08, 113–14, 137–38, 161–62, 177–78, 193–94, 211–13, 243–45, 265–68; 7 (1858): 6–8, 57–60.

23 Cf. Suvajdžić, Ilarion Ruvarac i narodna književnost, 61–66.

24 Radojčić, “O istoriskome metodu Ilariona Ruvarca,” 92.

25 Ilarion Ruvarac, “Pregled domaćih izvora stare srpske povesnice,” Sedmica 5 (1856): 339.

26 Jagić, “Ilarion Ruvarac,” 635.

27 Radojčić, “O istoriskome metodu Ilariona Ruvarca,” 79.

28 Ilarion Ruvarac, “Prilošci Ilariona Ruvarca,” Stražilovo 46 (1888): 745.

29 Ilarion Ruvarac, “Na pitanje: Kad su se Srbi s patrijarhom Arsenijem III Čarnojevićem doselili u zemlje mađarske krune?” Javor 21 (1891): 330.

30 Čedomir Popov, “Ilarion Ruvarac i Jovan Ristić,” in Braća Ruvarac u srpskoj istoriografiji i kulturi (Novi Sad, Sremska Mitrovica: SANU, 1997), 182.

31 Ilarion Ruvarac, Montenegrina: Prilošci istoriji Crne Gore (Sremski Karlovci: Srpska manastirska štamparija 1898), 107.

32 Radonić, “O Ilarionu Ruvarcu,” 23. Cf. Marius Turda, “Historical Writing in the Balkans,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Vol. 4. 1800–1945, ed. Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 354.

33 Ilarion Ruvarac, Stari Slankamen (Zemun: Štamparija Sime Pajića, 1892), reprinted in Nikola Radojčić, ed., Zbornik Ilariona Ruvarca: Odabrani istoriski radovi (Belgrade: Srpska kraljevska akademija, 1934), 401.

34 Radonić, “O Ilarionu Ruvarcu,” 29.

35 Ilarion Ruvarac, O knezu Lazaru (Novi Sad: Srpska štamparija S. Miletića, 1887), 191.

36 Radojčić, “O istoriskome metodu Ilariona Ruvarca,” 98.

37 Jovan Radonić, “Ilarion Ruvarac i njegovi radovi na polju crkvene istorije,” Glasnik istoriskog društva u Novom Sadu 5 (1932): 239.

38 Cf. Jovan Grčić, Portreti s pisama (Novi Sad: Štamparija Jovanović i Bogdanov, 1939), 5:86.

39 Ibid., 12. Jovan Radonić, “O Ilarionu Ruvarcu,” 35.

40 Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

41 Ilarion Ruvarac, “Hronološka pitanja o vremenu bitke na Marici, smrti kralja Vukašina i smrti cara Uroša,” Godišnjica Nikole Čupića 3 (1879): 214–26. Reprinted in Radojčić, ed., Zbornik Ilariona Ruvarca, 68–78.

42 Ruvarac, O knezu Lazaru, 350–51. On the historiography of the battle of Kosovo see: Marko Šuica, “The Image of the Battle of Kosovo (1389) Today: A Historic Event, a Moral Pattern, or the Tool of Political Manipulation,” in The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States: History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 152–74.

43 Ilarion Ruvarac, O pećkim patrijarsima od Makarija do Arsenija III 1557–1690 (Zadar: Štamparija I. Vodicke, 1888).

44 Ilarion Ruvarac, Odlomci o grofu Đorđu Brankoviću i Arseniju Crnojeviću patrijarhu, s tri izleta o takozvanoj velikoj seobi srpskog naroda (Belgrade: Srpska kraljevska akademija, 1896).

45 Ibid., 93–103.

46 Ibid., 144–45.

47 Ilarion Ruvarac, “Otvoreno pismo,” Naše doba 35 (1885): 3–4.

48 About Montenegro see: Sima M. Ćirković, The Serbs (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 108–10.

49 Ruvarac, Montenegrina. Cf. Suvajdžić, Ilarion Ruvarac i narodna književnost, 395–414.

50 See Samardžić, Pisci srpske istorije, 2:231.

51 Ibid., 235.

52 Stojan Novaković, Istorija i tradicija (Belgrade: SKZ, 1982), 5.

53 About Milojević see: Z. R. Popović, “Miloš S. Milojević,” Brastvo 8 (1899): 379–400. Cf. Marko Šuica, “Milojević Miloš,” in Enciklopedija srpske istoriografije, ed. Sima Ćirković and Rade Mihaljčić (Belgrade: Knowledge, 1997), 507.

54 Miloš S. Milojević, Odlomci istorije Srba i srpskih – jugoslavenskih – zemalja u Turskoj i Austriji (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1872).

55 Ilarion Ruvarac, “O radu Miloša S. Milojevića u Glasniku,” Letopis Matice srpske 115 (1873): 172–78. Reprinted in Radojčić, ed., Zbornik Ilariona Ruvarca, 60–67.

56 Ibid., 67.

57 Radonić, “O Ilarionu Ruvarcu,” 26.

58 Andrija Veselinović, “Srećković Pantelija-Panta,” in Enciklopedija srpske istoriografije, ed. Sima Ćirković and Rade Mihaljčić (Belgrade: Knowledge, 1997), 644–46.

59 Pantelija S. Srećković, Istorija srpskog naroda (Belgrade: Srpsko učeno društvo, 1884).

60 Ilarion Ruvarac, Prethodni prikaz knjige Istorija srpskog naroda, napisao P. Srećković (Novi Sad: n.p., 1885.) Reprinted in Radojčić, ed., Zbornik Ilariona Ruvarca, 89–120.

61 Ibid., 95.

62 Ibid., 95–97.

63 Ibid., 98–113.

64 Excerpts from Srećković’s letter are given in: Ilarion Ruvarac, “Prelaz s prikaza na kritiku,” Naše doba (1885–1886). Reprinted in Radojčić, ed., Zbornik Ilariona Ruvarca, 126.

65 Ibid., 127, 130.

66 Ibid., 138.

67 Ibid., 158.

68 Ibid., 182.

69 Ibid., 200.

70 Ibid., 200–01.

71 Radojčić, “O istoriskome metodu Ilariona Ruvarca”, 97; Cf. Ilarion Ruvarac, “Poreklo Sibinjanin Janka,” Kolo 1 (1901). Reprinted in Radojčić, ed., Zbornik Ilariona Ruvarca, 523.

72 Aleksandar Protić, Naši moderni istoričari (Belgrade: Štamparija kod Prosvete, 1900), 9.

73 Cf. Dimitrije Djordjević, “Die Serben,” In Die Völker des Reiches, ed. Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, vol. 3 of Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1980), 1:734–74.

74 Radonić, “O Ilarionu Ruvarcu,” 28.

75 Ruvarac, Odlomci o grofu Đorđu Brankoviću, 21.

76 Ibid., vii.

77 Ibid.

78 Stanoje Stanojević, “Ilarijon Ruvarac,” Stražilovo 36 (1892): 574–75.

79 Jovan Radonić, Zapadna Evropa i balkanski narodi prema Turcima u prvoj polovini XV veka (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1905).

80 Sima Ćirković, “Javljanje ‘kritičke istoriografije’ na Velikoj školi i Univerzitetu,” in Univerzitet u Beogradu 1838–1988: Zbornik radova (Belgrade: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Savremena administracija, 1988), 645–54.

81 Samardžić, Pisci srpske istorije, 1:195.

82 Jovan Radonić, “O Ilarionu Ruvarcu,” 19.

83 Nikola Radojčić, “Uvod: O mislima i naporima oko izdavanja radova Ilariona Ruvarca,” in Radojčić, Zbornik Ilariona Ruvarca, vii.

84 Samardžić, Pisci srpske istorije, 2:242.

2016_2_Pavlović–Atanasovski

Volume 5 Issue 2 CONTENTS

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Aleksandar Pavlović and Srđan Atanasovski

From Myth to Territory: Vuk Karadžić, Kosovo Epics and the Role of Nineteenth-Century Intellectuals in Establishing National Narratives*

 

In this article, we argue that the nineteenth-century Serbian scholars had a pivotal role in establishing Kosovo as the crucial subject of Serbian literature, culture, and politics. By revisiting the formation of the Kosovo epic in the collections of Vuk Karadžić, the founder of modern Serbian culture, we trace his role in making Kosovo the foundational myth of the whole Serbian nation from the nineteenth-century surge in Romantic nationalism onwards. In particular, we scrutinize Karadžić’s editorial procedures as parts of a process of cultural inscription representing a cultural transformation that made the Kosovo epic an instance of the invention of national tradition in Eric Hobsbawm’s terms.

 

Keywords: Kosovo epic, Serbian oral tradition, Vuk Karadžić

Introduction

This article examines the role of nineteenth-century Serbian scholars, and in particular Vuk Karadžić, in establishing Kosovo as the key theme of Serbian literature, culture, and politics. The Kosovo myth was established by Serbian folklorists in the early nineteenth century. By revisiting the formation of the Kosovo epic in the collections of Vuk Karadžić, the founder of modern Serbian culture, we trace the transformation of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Weltanschauung of the Serbs of the Habsburg Empire (especially of southern Hungary, where Karadžić collected most of the Kosovo songs). In particular, we examine Karadžić’s editorial procedures as instances of a process of cultural inscription that transformed the Kosovo epic into a typical example of invented tradition in Eric Hobsbawm’s terms.

Serbian oral songs about the Kosovo battle published by Vuk Karadžić are generally still perceived as having been collected rather than invented. This long-established conviction in the secondary literature has primarily been the result of two principal underlying presumptions: that Karadžić was a reliable collector and editor who refrained from altering or adding to the texts he published and that the Kosovo songs were popular and widespread among the Serbs for centuries. This view also has the support of the glorifiers of the Serbian Kosovo epic and, more recently, those who see it as the source of conflicts in the Balkans.1 Focusing on the “universal” or “eternal” qualities of the Kosovo epic, both approaches fail to identify Karadžić’s interventions as cultural inscriptions representing a cultural transformation which makes the Kosovo epic in his edition an instance of invented national tradition in Hobsbawm’s terms. By revisiting the formation of the Kosovo epic in Karadžić’s collections, we trace his contributions to the establishment of the Kosovo epic in its present form. We make two principal arguments: first, Karadžić secured for the Kosovo epic songs a far more prominent role than the role they appeared to occupy within the oral tradition itself; and second, he shaped their published form, modeling them to fit the existing model of folk songs at the time.

Intellectuals and Nation-building

The role of intellectuals in promoting national agendas has been recognized in the existing scholarship. In the wake of the publication of the works of Benedict Anderson,2 Anthony D. Smith,3 Ernest Gellner4 and others in the early 1980s, it became a commonplace in the humanities to refer to the idea of the nation as a late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century European invention, closely related to the emergence of the modern state, grounded in popular sovereignty after the French Revolution.5 Meanwhile, the pivotal role of intellectuals as the true creators of the “imagined communities” in the nation-formation process has been systematically studied.6 What such studies reveal is that intellectuals did not merely reveal or discover facts about a nation, they also created or simply fabricated these facts and “truths,” thus “traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and often invented.”7 Specifically, in the context of East Central Europe it has been observed that the intellectuals strived to establish “national history” both as a scientific discipline and as a volume of texts marketed towards popular audiences, thus blurring the border between science and the national imagination and the border between academic and lay readers.8

In the processes of inventing (“discovering”) their national traditions, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals delegated a role of particular importance to their oral traditions and folklore. To be sure, Romantic nationalism promoted by Johann Gottfried Herder, the Grimm Brothers, and other European scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century already established folklore and folk songs in particular as the “soul of the nation” and the greatest expression of the national spirit.9 However, these ideas and publications of Herder and the Grimm Brothers had a particularly strong impact on the cultures and nations of Eastern and Northern Europe. As Guiseppe Cocchiara argues, Eastern and Northern Europeans had a relatively modest literary tradition in comparison to the French, English, or Italians, for example. Without strong roots in written literature, national intellectuals thus turned to oral literature as “a rich intellectual, moral, and social fortune, both the document of their traditions and the monument of their language.”10

Under such circumstances, the folk epic was more than likely to attain a privileged position in society. Epic songs typically focus on national heroes, battles against invaders, and the glorious deeds of ancestors, and thus often serve as confirmation of a glorious national past and a source of identity representations. As John Miles Foley reminds us, “for national identity, epic is a foundational genre.”11 According to Beissinger, Tylus and Woofford, this peculiar and complex connection of epic to national and local cultures or, as they call it, the “political explosiveness” or “political potency” of epic is most evident “in the intense reimagining of epic undertaken by most emerging European nations as a means of coming to self-knowledge as a nation.”12 Michael Branch and Vilmos Voigt also view this exceptional early nineteenth-century interest in epic poetry in Eastern Europe as a part of the process of national formation and self-affirmation. As they emphasize, oral poetry often served as “a convenient substitute for written history” for Eastern European nations, and the epic was the only proper form for this subject. Voigt describes this as “the constant urge to establish or re-establish a heroic past from and in the form of heroic songs as part of the cultural tradition and identity.”13 Branch conveniently labels this practice “the invention of national epic” and “the patriotic imperative to produce an epic,” and he follows the birth of several mystifications published as “ancient” epic poems that were “discovered” in the first half of the nineteenth century.14

Vuk Karadžić and the Making of the Kosovo Epic

The aforementioned scholars also consider Serbian epic songs collected and edited by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) throughout the nineteenth century as especially relevant and illustrative examples of the importance and exceptional role of epic poetry in these processes.15 Born in a rural family of what at the time was the Ottoman Empire, Karadžić came to Vienna in 1813 after the collapse of the first Serbian uprising against the Ottoman rule, where he played a major role in the modernization of Serbian literature and culture. He reformed the language and orthography by promoting the vernacular instead of the Slavonic-Serbian language used at the time. He also collected the folklore of Serbian peasants and herders and is considered to have been the first Serbian folklorist, ethnographer, and literary critic.16 Throughout his life, Karadžić meticulously collected Serbian oral epic and lyric songs, and he published three editions with ten volumes altogether between 1814 and 1862. In addition, through his acquaintances with leading scholars of the time, such as Jacob Grimm, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Leopold Ranke, and his many publications, Karadžić drew the attention of scholars and lay readers to Serbian folk poetry and Serbian culture in Europe. Two of his younger friends and associates, the prominent Serbian poet Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and Montenegrin ruler and writer Petar II Petrović Njegoš, soon followed Karadžić’s founding work and published their editions of epic songs, mostly collected in the territory of present-day Montenegro. Milutinović printed his A Montenegrin and Herzegovinian Songbook (Pjevanija Crnogorska i Hercegovačka) in 1833 and 1837, and Njegoš edited The Serbian Mirror (Ogledalo srbsko) in 1846. During the second half of the nineteenth century, comprehensive collections of the oral traditional poetry of other South Slavs, such as Jukić-Martić’s Bosnian and Herzegovinian Folk Songs (Narodne pjesme bosanske i hercegovačke), Kosta Hörmann’s The Folk Songs of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims (Narodne pjesme Muhamedovaca u Bosni i Hercegovini), and the first four volumes of Croatian Folk Songs (Hrvatske narodne pjesme), were published.17 The oral tradition documented by these collectors thus corresponded to their ideas about the Serbian (Croatian, Muslim, South Slav...) folk epic as a narrative that contained the national past and preserved a living memory of the former national heroes and glory. This notion of the folk epic as the expression of popular and collective views of national history was codified and canonized by Karadžić’s and Njegoš’s followers during the second half of the nineteenth century.18

The Kosovo epic published by Karadžić in the early nineteenth century had all the virtues required of a national tradition. It comprises a separate and distinct cycle of some 15 related epic songs describing the events of the Battle of Kosovo, fought in 1389 between the Serbs and the Ottomans. Over the centuries, the battle acquired mythical status and evolved into one of the central national symbols in Serbian culture, referred to as the Kosovo tradition or the Kosovo myth. These oral epic songs about Kosovo are by far the most important source of the myth, and both Karadžić himself and later scholars in particular appreciated and praised this cycle as central to the entire Serbian oral tradition.19 In these songs, the Battle of Kosovo is depicted as the decisive one that saw the downfall of Prince Lazar, the Medieval Serbian Empire, and Serbia’s independence, while at the same time it established the Ottomans as the new masters. The Kosovo epic contains various elements of literary, religious, and popular origin, such as the last supper on the eve of the battle, the treason of Lazar’s brother-in-law Vuk Branković, the heroic death of Miloš Obilić, who killed the Ottoman Sultan Murad, Lazar’s deliberate choice of death and the kingdom of heaven over earthly fame, the sorrows of mothers and maidens who lost their sons and grooms, etc.

As far as the selection of the material is concerned, it has long been established that Karadžić’s collections are anthologies rather than collections.20 His manuscripts, for example, show that he published only a small percentage of all the songs that he had at his disposal. Karadžić himself was ready to admit that his publications were not representative of the whole of Serbian oral tradition, but rather contained only its best achievements. Responding in 1833 to a comment about his exclusiveness in publishing the songs, he explained his views: “I believe it to be foolish not to choose, if one can, [and I believe] that our folk songs would not get such praise and glory if I had published them all, and without any order.”21

Karadžić’s particular interest in the songs that celebrated the heroes from the times of the Medieval Serbian Empire and the Kosovo battle forms another important aspect of his editorial approach. For instance, in his earliest (1814) songbook, he stressed the particular importance of these songs that “preserve former Serbian being and name.”22 Such an attitude had significant implications with regards to his editorial practice, since in the first decades Karadžić focused mainly on documenting these songs and heroes at the expense of other popular subjects. For example, more than half of approximately twenty-four songs that he collected from Tešan Podrugović (1783?–1820?), who was Karadžić’s favorite source for Serbian epic poetry, are about medieval heroes and subjects, and Marko Kraljević alone appears as a hero in nine of these songs.23 However, these older subjects and heroes were far less prominent if placed in the context of Podrugović’s entire repertoire, which is due to Karadžić’s selective process of collecting songs. As Karadžić himself noted, Podrugović knew “at least one hundred of songs such as this one that I wrote down from him, especially about certain highwaymen from the [Dalmatian] Coast, Bosnia and Herzegovina.”24 In accordance with his editorial preferences, however, Karadžić collected and published all Podrugović’s songs about Marko Kraljević, but very few about more recent heroes. Another similar example is his transcription of Starac Milija’s (?–after 1822) songs, who was another important source for Karadžić. For years, Karadžić persistently tried to arrange a meeting with this singer, because he had heard that Milija knew two songs about medieval Serbian aristocracy exceptionally well, The Wedding of Maksim Crnojevic (Ženidba Maksima Crnojevića) and Banović Strahinja (Banovic Strahinja). Again, it shows his special interest in the songs about subjects and heroes from the times of the Serbian Empire. In total, Karadžić managed to write down three songs about older heroes from this singer, and only one about a more recent local character, but he left testimony that Milija knew many more songs about these newer events.25 In both cases, therefore, the bulk of the singer’s repertoire consisted of songs about relatively recent local characters and events. Karadžić, however, documented and published only those describing the exploits of older heroes, thus giving the songs about the “former Serbian being and name” a more prominent position in his early collections that they appear to have had in the early nineteenth-century Serbian oral tradition.

The case of the Kosovo epic is equally telling. Karadžić appreciated these songs in particular and made efforts to collect all the songs available at the time. For instance, upon hearing that a blind female singer from Fruška Gora near Novi Sad performed a song called The Downfall of the Serbian Empire (Propast carstva Srpskoga), he immediately wrote to Lukijan Mušicki, the prior (iguman) of the nearby monastery, and asked him to collect Kosovo songs about Lazar from a particular blind singer. As Karadžić explicitly says: “we will hardly find these songs anywhere else.”26 This statement was logical, given that he had collected practically all the songs about Kosovo in this narrow region of Fruška Gora, and perhaps even suspected the tradition was not present anywhere else. Thus, in the following period, he persistently reminded Mušicki to collect three Kosovo songs from the blind woman from Grgurevci; finally, in late 1816, Mušicki informed Karadžić that the woman had been brought to the Šišatovac monastery, and that deacon Stefan had written down the songs she had sung.27 During these years, Karadžić collected several other songs of the Kosovo epic, as a rule from the blind singers whore sided and performed in the area of Fruška Gora.

Apparently, Karadžić suggests that these particular songs about Lazar were neither widely popular nor widely known. His later collections confirm the point made in this letter. Namely, although in the following decades Karadžić established a network of associates in Serbia proper, Montenegro, and Herzegovina, he later published only one more song about Lazar, which describes the building of Ravanica, a Serbian Orthodox monastery in the Kučaj Mountains that was constructed as an endowment of Prince Lazar.28 Other collectors who published songs from the mountainous regions where the Serbian oral epic tradition was practiced, such as the aforementioned Sarajlija and Njegoš, also found no instances of the Kosovo epic. Even in the early twentieth century, Slovene folklorist Matija Murko studied contemporary oral tradition in Bosnia and Herzegovina and reported that the Kosovo songs did not feature prominently among the repertoires of the local singers:

 

I was surprised that the Bosnian and Hercegovinian Orthodox did not know the magnificent songs relating to the ancient history of Serbia as well as I had expected, any more than did the Orthodox people of Montenegro. When I collected recordings in Sarajevo, the Serbian intellectuals present asked a singer from the region if he knew the poems about Prince Lazar, Miloš Obilić, and Vuk Branković. He answered: “No, I’m illiterate.”29

This indicates that, rather than being widely popular at the time, the songs about Prince Lazar were mostly confined to the Srem region surrounding the monasteries of Fruška Gora.

This is hardly surprising. After the so-called Great Migrations in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the centers of the Serbian Orthodox Church moved from Kosovo and central Serbia to the north, and Fruška Gora, with important Orthodox monasteries, became the center of Serbian religious life. Moreover, in 1697 the monks from Ravanica moved Lazar’s relics to the Vrdnik monastery in Fruška Gora. The monastery annually commemorated the day of Lazar’s death, and medieval texts, such as the aforementioned Slovo o knezu Lazaru, were read on the occasion.30 This shows both how the local cult of Lazar found its way into this local oral tradition and how Karadžić significantly contributed to the establishment of this tradition as a (and almost the) national tradition.

From the Unified Lazarica Poem to the Separate Kosovo Songs

The arrangement of the Kosovo songs in Karadžić’s collections forms another important element of his influence over the Kosovo epic. The Kosovo tradition in Fruška Gora existed in the form of one long poem about Kosovo. Karadžić’s awareness of this fact is corroborated in his Serbian Dictionary (Srpski rječnik) from 1818, in which he acknowledges the existence of a long poem sung by the blind singers who called it Lazarica and specifies that “all other Kosovo songs are only parts of Lazarica.”31 Moreover, Karadžić’s manuscripts contain one instance of such a lengthy Kosovo epic poem. In 1820, a local priest informed Karadžić that he had collected one large Kosovo song from a blind singer residing in the same area in which other Kosovo songs had been collected.32 The manuscript of the song, called About the Battle of Kosovo (O Boju Kosovskom), contains exactly 2,439 decasyllables,33 which is approximately twenty times more than an average Serbian oral song and over twice the length of The Wedding of Maksim Crnojević (Ženidba Maksima Crnojevića), by far the longest song published by Karadžić.

So, why did Karadžić publish the Kosovo epic as separate songs if he apparently knew that they form one long poem? This editorial choice may seem unlikely, even counterintuitive, if one keeps in mind the fact that the early folklorists as a rule approached their material in the opposite way. James Macpherson and Elias Lönnrot, for example, typically regarded the Iliad as the role model of an oral tradition, and they unified short Scottish and Finnish oral songs to form long, narrative poems (The Works of Ossian and Kalevala).

The rationale for Karadžić’s approach is that he wanted to accommodate the Kosovo epic into the existing model of a Serbian folk song. He had started his folkloristic career in 1814 in Vienna under the influence of the Slovene scholar Bartholomeus (Jernej) Kopitar and Jacob Grimm, who preferred the songs collected from illiterate, common people in rural areas, which they regarded as true, genuine, and authentic folk songs. Grimm, for example, recommended to his correspondents and associates that they collect songs in remote regions uncorrupted by urban civilization and education. According to Grimm, “On the high mountains and in the small villages, where there are neither paths or roads, and where the false Enlightenment has had no access and was unable to do its work, there still lies hidden in darkness a treasure: the customs of our forefathers, their sagas and their faith.”34 According to him, the creativity and imagination characteristic of folk poetry spring and originate from these deepest and most conservative parts of the peasantry.35 For him, therefore, the notion of the folk as a creator was collective and limited to a particular background and particular class, specifically the rural population living in remote areas detached from the influence of official literature and civilization.

It is precisely for this authenticity that Karadžić’s early collections, conveniently published at the peak of scholarly interest in folk poetry, almost instantly gained international repute and unanimous recognition among leading scholars of the time as great achievements of “natural poetry.” The collections offered a number of folk songs “uncorrupted” by literacy and scholarly influence, as Karadžić wrote in his first short collection from 1814.36 In his lengthy review of Karadžić’s edition of Srpske narodne pjesme in 1823, Jacob Grimm similarly emphasized that the songs had been collected directly “aus dem warmen Munde des Volkes,” and he wrote that the works were the most important and valuable epic songs for an understanding of heroic poetry since the Homeric epic, and Kopitar claimed that no European nation could match the Serbs in the quality of their folk poetry.37

The “problem” with the Kosovo epic was that it hardly met these standards. Not only was it apparently not so popular “on the high mountains and in the small villages,” but it had been sung by a professional guild of blind singers located around Fruška Gora.38 As shown by scarce bits of evidence from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, blind singers were trained to sing epic and other songs in the town of Irig at the center of Fruška Gora, and they had the assistance of the local community and nearby monasteries.39 According to the few available sources, the “school” actually consisted of a basement or an abandoned building where blind singers practiced during the winter. A report from 1826 testifies that “these blind singers form a sort of a guild among themselves, like the German Meistersingers; older singers educate the younger ones, and that is how these wonderful songs are preserved. Those blind singers perform mostly at fairs, gatherings, and other similar occasions.”40 Scholars have explained why Karadžić himself makes no mention of the “Irig School”: any emphasis on this institutional and professional manner of epic singing would compromise the idea of the collectivity of the oral tradition and its popular basis.41 The oral technique and repertoire were not the manifestations of a living oral tradition, as in Montenegro and Herzegovina, but were part of a professionalized and institutionalized procedure. Consequently, Karadžić decided to divide Lazarica into separate songs and present it as other short songs collected from the highlanders from Montenegro and Herzegovina, “where almost every house has a gusle” (the traditional one-string instrument that typically accompanies the oral epic performance).42

A detailed philological analysis would likely reveal other, less prominent forms of Karadžić’s interventions in the Kosovo epic. For instance, in his earliest collections he published some words originally performed by singers in the ekavian dialect used in Fruška Gora in the ijekavian that was spoken in Herzegovina and Montenegro, for instance using bijelo and vjerna instead of belo and verna. While this may not appear terribly significant, it was in line with his belief at the time that the songs that were of Herzegovinian origin but had been collected in southern Hungary should be published in the Herzegovinian dialect. This gave the impression that the songs had been collected from the rural mountainous parts of the central Balkans, rather than from the areas of what at the time was southern Hungary, the culture of which was strongly influenced by literacy and Serbian Orthodox church. These changes could serve as fabricated arguments in support of his view according to which hall Serbian heroic songs originated from Herzegovina, while the culture of the more urban and literate Serbs from the Habsburg Empire was not of great value. Thus, he wanted to ground new Serbian culture on an illiterate oral and epic tradition and hence presented the Kosovo epic as the highest expression of this illiterate rural population. But the high ethical values and expressions of advanced culture in the Kosovo epic were made possible precisely through combinations of oral and written, urban and rural, European and Orthodox cultures.

In addition, although Karadžić declared that the songs he published had been collected directly from the singers as part of the living oral tradition, he did occasionally use existing written sources. Thus, in his first collection he published Hasanaginica not, as he claims, on the basis of his childhood memory, but on the basis of Alberto Fortis’s book Viaggio in Dalmatia, published in Venice in 1774, and he continued to reprint it regularly in the later editions. The same applies to several other songs for which Karadžić claimed to be part of the living oral tradition, but which in fact were taken from printed sources.43

Svetozar Matić and Miodrag Maticki also suggested that several of Karadžić’s Kosovo songs and songs about older subjects from Montenegro had not been collected directly from oral singers, but rather had been taken from earlier manuscript collections.44 According to their suggestions, in addition to transforming certain ekavian dialectical forms into ijekavian, Karadžić made other changes when editing the Kosovo epic. For instance, he inserted some verses from other songs, relied on the Kosovo songs available in unpublished manuscripts of the educated Serbs of the time, and even possibly falsely attributed some fragments of the Kosovo epic which he took from the manuscripts to his father, Stefan. However, without Karadžić’s original manuscripts, these contentions remain a matter of dispute.

Finally, although Karadžić demanded that his associates write down the songs accurately, he did not always respect these high methodological demands and principles himself, and quite often he made certain changes and corrections or altered certain phrases in the texts he published. The difficulty with identifying these changes, however, lies in the fact that Karadžić did not keep the manuscripts of the songs he published. As Živomir Mladenović indicated, this might be a consequence of his intention to shrink his voluminous archive, but he also may have sought to conceal the actual amount of editorial changes he had made.45 Karadžić’s manuscripts thus consisted mostly of the songs that he received from his associates after 1832 and which remained unpublished during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his archive still contains some writings made in the earliest period of his work which enable us to create a provisional image of his overall editorial procedure. Živomir Mladenović’s comprehensive analysis of Karadžić’s manuscripts identified three basic types of changes in the texts that Karadžić had published.46 The songs that Karadžić personally wrote down from his best singers, such as Filip Višnjić, he edited practically without any changes, apart from punctuation and minor corrections. The preserved part of the manuscript of the song “Knez Ivan Knežević,” collected from Filip Višnjić in 1815, for example, contains only two slight divergences from the published texts. Karadžić published the verse Pred bijelu pred Brodačku crkvu as Pred Brodačku pred bijelu crkvu, and he changed Ni Ivanu kogodi zavali to Ni Ivanu kogodi zafali. These changes thus only affect word order or orthography in some cases, which has little to do with folklore and has relevance in the context of his efforts to reform Serbian grammar and orthography. In the songs that Karadžić himself had written down on the basis of renditions by less accomplished singers, Mladenović observes that he intervened more frequently, often changing the word order, substituting phrases, or inserting certain verses.47 Finally, in the songs that Karadžić received from his associates, Mladenović argues, he felt free to intervene aggressively and add or remove whole verses or even series of verses.48

Conclusion

In conclusion, Karadžić’s editorial method and procedure should not be judged too severely, especially when placed in the context of his time and compared with the methods used by Macpherson and Lönnrot. In general, Karadžić collected many oral songs himself, and he persistently searched for the best singers and quite successfully avoided obviously literary epic songs and poems that some of his contemporaries considered oral songs and published as examples of the purest folk poetry. Foley’s conclusion that “his editing was light in comparison with the usual practice of the time”49 thus appears justified.

Nevertheless, when talking about the Kosovo epic, we believe that the aforementioned analysis exemplifies the impact of Vuk Karadžić and the nineteenth-century conceptions of folklore and folk songs on editing, codifying, and interpreting the Kosovo epic at the time. Most importantly, Karadžić separated an existing long Kosovo poem into smaller epic songs dedicated to particular events and parts of the legend. In addition, we revisited the commonly held idea about the Kosovo songs being widely popular among the Serbs for centuries, which persists to this day in the “glorifying” and “critical” approaches to the Kosovo legend, and we suggested that Karadžić and later scholars contributed substantially to this exceptional status of the Kosovo songs. Thus, we argued that Karadžić, though his interventions are certainly not as drastic as those made by many of his contemporaries, had a distinguished and formative role in the codification of the Kosovo epic in its present form.

The impact of Karadžić’s Kosovo epic on the formation of Serbian nationalism is hard to overemphasize. Since its inception, the Kosovo myth has been one of the cornerstones of the discourse, which is due not only to its purported vernacular popularity, but primarily because of the political potency of the myth. Namely, the story of the Serbian medieval state provided an enviable legitimacy to the current political claims of Serbian nationalism, especially in order to vindicate specific territorial claims. This comes as no surprise, since European national movements of the day generally relied heavily on medieval history for legitimacy, particularly in order to define themselves in spatial terms. As Patrick J. Geary argues, the Middle Ages were in the nineteenth century seen as a time of “primary acquisition,” when the European lands were supposedly rightfully parceled out by the historic nations.50 Since the Kosovo epic made it possible to see the vast swathe of land in the hands of Ottoman Empire at the time as the “primary acquisition” of the Serbian nation, the myth served not only as a literary achievement, but also as a veritable battle cry and a trump card of Serbian expansionistic politics.51 Its popularity has been fostered through various adaptations since the mid-nineteenth century up to the recent times. One of the early and most influential was the publication in 1871 in Belgrade of the poems arranged by the “epic alignment” by Stojan Novaković, followed by an edition in Zagreb the following year, and entitled simply Kosovo, in an effort to present a comprehensive and succinct plotline.52 The Kosovo epic has won praise the world over, as during the first half of the twentieth century, the poems were typically included in the anthologies of world epics and singled out as one of the great folk epic achievements in general.53 More recently, the tale has featured prominently both in the agenda of Serbian nationalists, who saw in it the nation’s commitment to metaphysical values and heroism,54 and to Western authors, who referred to it as the source of an explanation for much of the troubles and atrocities in the Balkans.55 Perhaps shifting the focus from allegedly centennial and metaphysical features of the Kosovo myth to the contributions made by Karadžić and other nineteenth century figures to the Kosovo epic and its establishment as invented tradition will bring some welcome moderation into discussion of its present contested status.

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1 Alternatively, authors like Bakić-Hayden and Greenawalt emphasize that the national symbols of the Kosovo epic are essentially a late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century product, and that the Serbian national movement and especially the Serbian Uprising were decisive for their establishment. Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Kosovo: Reality of a Myth and Myth of Many Realities,” in Serbien und Montenegro: Raum und Bevölkerung, Geschichte, Sprache und Literatur, Kultur, Politik, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Recht, ed. Walter Lukan, Ljubinka Trgovčević, and Dragan Vukčević (Vienna–Berlin: LIT, 2006), 133–42; Alexander Greenawalt, “Kosovo Myths: Karadžić, Njegoš and the Transformation of Serb Memory,” Spaces of Identity 3 (2001): 49–65.

2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

3 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

4 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

5 Earlier scholars, such as Max Weber, already pointed out that the idea of the nation does not rest on empirical qualities but on a specific sentiment of solidarity shared by the members of community, and they emphasized the role of intellectual elites in promoting and imposing such sentiments on the wider population. See “The Nation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 171–79.

6 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Anderson, Imagined communities.

7 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1.

8 See Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 50.

9 See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, esp. Chapter I, “The Discovery of the People” (London: Temple Smith, 1978), 3–22, and Giuseppe Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe, trans. John N. McDaniel (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981), 177ff.

10 Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe, 258. It is also instructive in this respect to keep in mind that terms such as national and popular also had different connotations in various European languages. Gramsci, for example, notes that while in France the term national had a meaning in which the term popular was “politically prepared for because it was linked to the concept of sovereignty,” in Italy it had a very narrow ideological meaning, which never coincided with that of popular; and that, on the other hand, the relationship between these two terms was completely different in Russian and other Slavonic languages in general, in which national and popular were synonyms (see Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe, 257). In other words, Slavonic folklore and folk songs were additionally associated with the notion of the nation by the terminology itself.

11 John Miles Foley, “Epic as genre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. Robert Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 185.

12 Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford, eds., Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1999), 3.

13 Vilmos Voigt, “Primus Inter Pares: Why Was Vuk Karadžić the Most Influential Folklore Scholar in South-Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Uses of Tradition: A Comparative Enquiry into the Nature, Uses and Functions of Oral Poetry in the Balkans, the Baltic, and Africa, ed. Michael Branch and Celia Hawkesworth (London–Helsinki: School of Slavonic and East European Studies–Finnish Literature Society, 1994), 183.

14 See: Michael Branch, “The Invention of a National Epic,” in The Uses of Tradition, 195–211.

15 See Branch, “The Invention of a National Epic”; Voigt, “Primus Inter Pares”; Foley, Epic as Genre, 171–86; Margaret Beissinger, “Epic, Genre, and Nationalism: The Development of Nineteenth-Century Balkan Literature,” in Epic Traditions, 69–86.

16 Jovan Deretić, Istorija srpske književnosti (Belgrade: Prosveta, 2004), 553–82. For a more comprehensive account of Karadžić’s role, see: O Vuku Karadžiću: studije i eseji (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1968).

17 Narodne pjesme bosanskei hercegovačke, ed. Ivan Frano Jukić and Grga Martić (Osijek: n.p., 1858); Kosta Hörmann, Narodne pjesme Muhamedovaca u Bosnii Hercegovini, 2 vols. (Sarajevo: Zemaljska štamparija, 1888–89); Hrvatske narodne pjesme, 4 vols. (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1896–99). For a fuller list of the nineteenth- century collections see Đuro Šurmin, Povijest književnosti hrvatske i srpske (Zagreb: Lav. Hartman, 1898), 23–24.

18 See, for instance, Jovan Skerlić’s classical study Omladina i njena književnost: Izučavanja o nacionalnom i književnom romantizmu kod Srba, esp. Ch. 12 “Kult prošlosti” and Ch. 19 “Uticaj narodne poezije” (Belgrade: Srpska Kraljevska Akademija, 1906), 191–201 and 309–26.

19 Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpske narodne pjesme I, vol. 4 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, ed. Vladan Nedić (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1975), 569.

20 Deretić, Istorija srpske književnosti, 558.

21 Karadžić, Srpske narodne pjesme IV, 388.

22 Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Mala prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pjesnarica (1814); Narodna srbska pjesnarica (1815), vol. 1 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, ed. Vladan Nedić (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1965), 44.

23 See the analysis of Podrugović’s contribution in Vladan Nedić, Vukovi pevači, ed. Radmila Pešić (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1981), 31ff.

24 Karadžić, Srpske narodne pjesme IV, 394.

25 Ibid., 397.

26 Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Prepiska I (1811–1821), vol. 20 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, ed. Golub Dobrašinović (Belgrade: Prosveta 1988), 250.

27 Karadžić, Prepiska I (1811–1821), 320, 334, 353, 365, 366.

28 The term endowment in this context refers to a monastery founded by an Orthodox ruler or dignitary, erected to serve as a family chapel during the founder’s lifetime, and later as his burial place. See “Opet Zidanje Ravanice,” in Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpske narodne pjesme II, vol. 5 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, ed. Vladan Nedić (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1976), 154–60.

29 Matija Murko, “The Singers and their Epic Songs,” Oral Tradition 5 (1990): 123–24.

30 Miodrag Popović, Vidovdan i časni krst: Ogled iz književne arheologije (Belgrade: Slovo ljubve, 1976), 65.

31 Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski Rječnik 1818, vol. 2 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, ed. Pavle Ivić (Prosveta: Belgrade, 1966), 360.

32 Karadžić, Prepiska I, 794, 984.

33 See “O boju kosovskom,” in Srpske narodne pjesme iz neobjavljenih rukopisa Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, ed. Živomir Mladenović and Vladan Nedić (Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1974), 63–115.

34 Christa Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm & Тheir Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992), 66.

35 Miljan Mojašević, Jakob Grim i srpska narodna književnost: Književno istorijske i poetološke osnove (Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1983), 415.

36 Karadžić, Mala prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pjesnarica, 42.

37 See the reprint of Grimm’s review in Karadžić, Srpske narodne pjesme I, 554.

38 Aleksandar Pavlović, “Rereading the Kosovo Epic: Origins of the ‘Heavenly Serbia’ in the Oral Tradition,” Journal of Serbian Studies 23 (2009): 83–96.

39 Matija Murko, Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike: Putovanja u godinama 1930–1932 (Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, 1951), 1:212ff. Miodrag Maticki, “Jezik u jeziku slepih guslara,” in Sima Milutinović Sarajlija: Književno delo i kulturnoistorijska uloga, ed. Marta Frajnd (Belgrade: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1993), 169–74.

40 Ibid., 171.

41 Ibid.

42 Karadžić, Srpske narodne pjesme I, 559.

43 See Vladan Nedić, “O prvoj i drugoj Vukovoj Pjesnarici,” in Karadžić, Mala prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pjesnarica, 373. Cf. Svetozar Matić, Naš narodni ep i naš stih: Ogledi i studije (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1964), 7–55.

44 See Matić, Naš narodni ep, esp. 35ff; Miodrag Maticki, Istorija kao predanje (Belgrade: Rad, 1989), 38–44.

45 Živomir Mladenović, Traganja za Vukom (Tršić–Belgrade:Vukov sabor–Rad, 1987), 131, 140.

46 Ibid., 138–88.

47 Ibid., 159–60.

48 Ibid., 167.

49 John Miles Foley, “Analogues: Modern Oral Epics,” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 208.

50 Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

51 Cf.: Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens: 19.–21. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2007), 115–20.

52 Stojan Novaković, Kosovo: Srpske narodne pjesme o boju na Kosovu: pokušaj da se sastave u cjelinu kao spjev (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1871).

53 See H. Munro Chadwick, “The Battle of Kosovo in Servian Poetry,” in The Heroic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 313–19; Janko Lavrin, “Historical Preface,” in Kosovo: Heroic Songs of the Serbs, ed. Helen Rootham (Oxford: Blackwell, 1920), 9–20; Maximilian Brown, Kosovo: Die Schlacht auf dem Amselfelde in geschichtlicher und epischer Überlieferung (Leipzig: Markert und Petters, 1937). Cf. chapter “Yugoslav Poetry” in Munro Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932–1940), 2:299–456; Cecil Maurice Bowra: Heroic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1952). Mary P. Coote, “Serbocroatian Heroic Songs,” in Heroic Epic and Saga: an Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epic, ed. Felix J. Oinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 263.

54 Radovan Samardžić et al., Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj istoriji (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1989); Matija Bećković, Kosovo: Najskuplja srpska reč (Valjevo: Glascrkve, 1989); Radovan Samardžić, Kosovsko opredeljenje: Istorijski ogledi (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1990).

55 Branimir Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (London: Hurst, 1999); Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1998).

* This article is based on research that Aleksandar Pavlović conducted during his fellowship at the New Europe College in Bucharest, for which he expresses his utmost gratitude to NEC board and staff, and Srđan Atanasovski’s participation on the project Serbian Musical Identities within Local and Global Frameworks: Traditions, Changes, Challenges (no. 177004 /2011–2016/) funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Republic of Serbia.

2016_3_Sághy

Volume 5 Issue 3 CONTENTS

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Strangers to Patrons: Bishop Damasus and the Foreign Martyrs of Rome

Marianne Sághy

Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies

 

According to Christian theology, Christians are foreigners on earth. This paper focuses on the theme of foreigners and foreignness in the epigrams of Bishop Damasus of Rome. What motivated the bishop to highlight this theme at a time when Christianity was growing “respectable” in Roman society? How did the Church integrate foreign Christians into the social fabric of the Roman town? In late fourth-century Rome, not only foreign martyrs were identified as such, but entire groups of foreigners for whom “national” enclaves were created in the catacombs. I examine the Damasian epigrams in the context of their religious substrate of “alienation” and in light of the cosmopolitan heritage of Rome. As bishop of the Nicene Catholic fraction in the Vrbs, whose enterprise aimed at making Rome a new Jerusalem in part through the “importation” of holy martyrs, Damasus sought to represent his Church at its most “universal” in the teeth of his local schismatic and/or heretical opponents. Roman tradition buttressed the universalist aspirations of Catholicism. As the largest metropolis of the ancient world, Rome was a “cosmopolis,” a melting pot of peoples, and Damasus did not remain a stranger to the Catholicity of Rome’s cosmopolitan history at a time when conflicting loyalties to ciuitas, Romanitas and Christianitas were hotly debated political, religious and cultural issues.

Keywords: foreign martyrs, bishop Damasus, epigrams, Late Antique Rome

 

The notion that Christians are foreigners on earth was a prevalent idea in the ancient world, as it is today.1 “God’s people” sojourn temporarily in this world, on their way to the heavenly homeland. To be a “stranger” (peregrinus), however, was more than a religious metaphor for Christians in Antiquity: it was existential evidence. If they felt alienated, this was in large part a consequence of the fact that the world had cast them out for their allegedly outlandish beliefs. “Foreignness,” therefore, was not just a matter of Christian self-perception or identity, it was also the way in which Christians were perceived by their contemporaries, Jews and Romans alike. From metaphor to social reality, “foreignness” covered a range of experience, expressing the deepest religious core of the new faith and also exposing the socio-historical context in which Christianity grew. Christians formed a diaspora of “legal aliens” in the cities of the Roman Empire, in which the new religion spread thanks to its itinerant apostles, wandering teachers, exiled leaders, and migrant martyrs.

It comes as all the more of a surprise that, following the turn which took place under the rule of Constantine, the very “strangers” who had been thrown to the lions became the patron saints of the cities in which they had suffered martyrdom. The cult of martyrs rose parallel with Christianity’s integration into Roman society. If the sudden reversal of the urban representations of the martyrs can be explained by the fact that they had already been venerated heroes in persecuted Christianity, the question still remains as to how a stranger could stand for, and represent in heaven, the ciuitas in which s/he had not enjoyed the status of citizenship and had been tortured and executed as a dangerous criminal. How would s/he guarantee the safety, prosperity, and salvation of a city in which s/he had been treated as a suspicious outsider?

This paradox was bravely addressed by the foremost episcopal impresario of the cult of the martyrs, Damasus of Rome (366–84 A.D).2 While many Late Antique bishops made a point of excavating “local” martyrs to promote them to the status of patron saints, Damasus frankly acknowledged that the martyrs of Rome, the “new stars” of the Vrbs, were almost all foreigners. Martyrs from abroad became a major success story in Late Antique Christianity.3 I focus on Damasus’ presentation of the “alienness” of the martyrs in his epigraphical poetry.4 What did “foreigner” mean for Damasus? What motivated the bishop to highlight this theme at a time when Christianity was becoming “respectable” in Roman society?

Scholars explain Damasus’ emphasis on the foreign origins of the martyrs of Rome as part of the competition among the Churches for primacy5 and his attempts to “Romanize” the martyrs as part of the upsurge of Roman patriotism at the end of the fourth century.6 Rivalries with Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople must have been a factor in the emphasis Damasus placed on the foreign origins of the Apostles Peter and Paul. But how does this account for Damasus’ emphasis on “strangers” like Saturninus of Carthage or Hermes of Greece? “Competition-theories” fail to do justice to the rich spectrum of Damasus’ allusions to the state of being a foreigner and to the subversive hierarchies in his poetry.

In late fourth-century Rome, not only foreign martyrs were identified as such, but so were entire groups of foreigners, for whom “national” enclaves were created in the catacombs. I examine Damasian epigrams in the context of their religious substrate of “alienation,” as well as in light of the cosmopolitan heritage of Rome. As the bishop of the Nicene Catholic fraction in the Vrbs, who aimed to make Rome a new Jerusalem in part through the “importation” of holy martyrs, Damasus sought to represent his Church at its most “universal,” thus going against his local schismatic and/or heretical opponents. Roman tradition buttressed the universalist aspirations of Catholicism. The largest metropolis of the ancient world, Rome was a “cosmopolis,” a melting pot of peoples, and Damasus did not remain a stranger to the Catholicity of Rome’s cosmopolitan history at a time when conflicting loyalties to ciuitas, Romanitas and Christianitas were hotly debated political, religious, and cultural issues.7

“God’s People” as Strangers

“Hear my prayer, Lord, listen to my cry for help;

do not be deaf to my weeping.

I dwell with you as a foreigner, a stranger,

as all my ancestors were.”8

 

The idea that “God’s elect” are strangers did not originate with the Christians. In the Old Testament, the “chosen people” are strangers.9 The authors of the New Testament, particularly the Apostle Peter, expound on this theme. Peter opens his first letter by addressing his readers as “God’s elect, strangers in the world,”10 and he emphasizes the “strangeness” of the Christians.11 Does Peter refer to the social alienation of the Christians following their conversion or to the social status of Christians before their conversion? Probably both. By using the term παρεπίδημος, Peter evokes Psalm 39:12, whereas πάροικος is equal to the Latin inquilinus, meaning a free person who is not a Roman citizen. Such populations could be deported anytime from any Roman town. One such expulsion occurred during the reign of Claudius, when the Jews, including Priscilla and Aquila, were expelled from Rome.12 Peter, who may have escaped the expulsion of Jews or, like Priscilla and Aquila,13 may have returned after the death of Claudius, might have known these deported Christians. “Strangers” in 1 Peter is less a metaphor for the Christian pilgrimage on earth than a description of Christian life in pagan society. If the Jews are “strangers on earth,”14 Christians are “strangers of the Diaspora,” “foreigners in exile.” The “marvellous paradox” of Christianity in the Roman Empire is the invention and perfection of “alien citizenship,”15 being at once involved in and disengaged from society: in the words of the second-century author of the Epistle to Diognetus:

 

[Christians] dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign.16

The Constantinian turn in 313 A.D which brought an end to ancient Christianity, might have reinforced rather than subdued Christian feelings of existential alienation.17 The assimilation and acculturation of Christians in Graeco-Roman society had been on its way well before the fourth century,18 and Constantine’s privileging of the Christian Church ultimately seems to have created more problems than it solved.19 The Arian-Nicene theological debates ended in exile and persecution,20 but this time Christians persecuted Christians;21 and the soaring of the numbers of lukewarm, opportunist Christians provoked a sharp debate on Christian perfection.22 Traditional Christians felt alienated in the new Christian Empire,23 where new heresies mushroomed,24 controversies raged,25 and continuity with the past was broken26 or had to be reinvented.27 Pollutae caerimoniae, magna adulteria; plenum exiliis mare, infecti caedibus scopuli: “holy things were desecrated, adultery widespread; the sea was swarming with exiles and its rocks stained with blood.” The words of Tacitus, with which he characterized the period of upheaval that followed the death of Nero, aptly summarize the turmoil of the fourth century. Political transformation, economic interests, religious violence, and the pressures of the barbarian incursions uprooted individuals and whole populations: the late Empire was a commonwealth of displaced persons, with Italy as a “transit zone” in its center.28

By the mid-fourth century, “foreigners” constituted the majority of Rome’s population.29 To be sure, many of these foreigners had Roman citizenship and were Roman in their culture, but they had come from faraway provinces to the ancient capital of the Empire. The emperors themselves came from the Eastern provinces of Illyricum and Pannonia,30 and the imperial administration constantly shifted personnel within the boundaries of the Empire. Thus, for example, a large group of Pannonian officials worked in Rome.31 The army that patrolled the Roman world recruited soldiers from all over the provinces and increasingly from among the so-called barbarians.32 The slave trade brought various ethnic groups to Rome,33 but alongside this, intellectuals in Egypt and Syria also felt the irresistible pull of Rome,34 while Christian teachers, bishops, and ascetics, zipping through the Empire as conciliar delegates or imperial exiles, made obligatory stopovers in Rome.35 As the third-century jurist Modestinus wrote, “Roma communis nostra patria est,” yet the foreigners did not forget their homelands.36 On the contrary: they kept together and sought to memorialize the places from which they had come, thereby expressing that they were “displaced persons,” that they had come to Rome from other provinces.

One of the most interesting and moving cases involved the establishment of a “national” Pannonian cemetery within the San Sebastiano catacomb complex on the Via Appia,37 the spot where Rome’s most famous strangers, the princes of the apostles, were also celebrated. Beginning with the urban prefecture of Viventius (365–67), a Pannonian bureaucrat from Siscia (now Sisak/Sziszek in Croatia), a large number of Pannonians chose to be buried ad sanctos. Viventius’ daughter Lucceia continued to sponsor the cemetery, and she arranged the burial of a mother from Pannonia by the name of Nunita and her daughter Maximilla, a consecrated virgin (virgo ancilla Dei), in 389. Around this time, Quirinus, the martyr bishop of Siscia was buried in the Platonia mausoleum behind the apse of the Basilica of San Sebastiano, long believed to have been the temporary common (or shared) tomb of the two apostles. Quirinus’ relics in grave nr. 13 of the mausoleum were identified at the end of the nineteenth century and provoked heated scholarly debate.38

Quirinus was martyred in Savaria (now Szombathely, Hungary) during the persecutions of Diocletian after having been arrested in 309. He had attempted to flee, but was thrown to prison, where he converted his jailer, Marcellus, to Christianity. The governor of Pannonia Prima, Amantius, ordered him taken to Savaria, where, after having attempted to make Quirinus abjure his faith, he threw the bishop into the local Sibaris (Gyöngyös) Creek with a millstone around his neck. The Passio Sancti Quirini, strongly imitating the Acts of the Apostles, was probably written around 386–95.39 Quirinus’ first two miracles in Siscia and on the way to Savaria replicate the miracles of St Peter and Paul: the exemplary life and death of the bishop, successor to the apostles, is an actualization of the biblical story in the theater of Savaria and on the bridge of the Sibaris Creek. The third miracle, when Quirinus floats on the water with a millstone around his neck, spread all over the Roman Empire by the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth thanks to the Chronicle of St Jerome—himself from Pannonia—and the beautiful hymn by Prudentius, who attributed a symbolic meaning to the story. Quirinus is the only martyr in Jerome’s Chronicle from the time of the Great Persecution whose death is recounted in any detail. Another peculiarity of this text is the brief mention of Quirinus’ cult in Savaria, the first Pannonian example of a translation of relics into an intra muros basilica after 386, when a similar translation was organized by Bishop Ambrose in Milan. Archaeological research confirmed the hypothesis that Quirinus’ body was buried in the late Roman cemetery in the Eastern part of Savaria and that his relics were transferred into an intra muros basilica in the city. The translation of Quirinus’ relics provide evidence of the relationship between the cult of the saints and the pro-Nicaean bishops’ effort to eradicate Arianism in the Danubian provinces after the council of Aquileia in 381. The translation of Quirinus’ relics within Savaria and from Savaria to Rome are the first examples of relic transfer both within Pannonia and from Pannonia to Rome. Alessandro Bertolino argued that it was the presence of this Pannonian burial spot that attracted the translation and burial of St Quirinus of Siscia in the San Sebastiano catacomb sometime between 389–405, rather than the other way round.40 According to Levente Nagy, the Pannonian (or Siscian) “lobby” in Rome might not have been actively involved in the translation of Quirinus’ relics to Rome: the relics arrived in Rome due to a rescue operation after the Gothic King Radagaisus’ raid in Pannonia in 405. Be it as it may, the Pannonian martyr Quirinus of Siscia, possibly due to his assimilation both with the Roman god Quirinus as well as with the apostolic founders of Christian Rome, became one of the most venerated saints of Rome.

Did the foreigners in Rome live lives characterized by patterns of cohabitation, integration, or tension? While there must have been a great deal of assimilation,41 tension also had a long history, and it grew in intensity towards the end of the fourth century.42 Foreigners formed a heterogeneous mass of people, separated by outlook as much as by accent from one another and from the “Romans of Rome.”43 The real divide, however, ran between Roman citizens and inquilini. “Legal aliens” formed a separate legal caste subjected to exclusion.44 In 383, when famine broke out, Ammianus Marcellinus was expelled from Rome, together with thousands of people who did not have Roman citizenship. Panis was reserved for citizens only:

 

At last we have reached such a state of harshness that whereas not so very long ago, when there was fear of scarcity of food, foreigners were driven neck and crop from the city, and those who practiced their liberal arts (very few in number) were thrust out without a breathing space...45

Strangers among the Roman Martyrs

In defiance of Roman law, Christians who readily identified themselves as aliens valorized the status of the foreigner and made a policy of showing hospitality to strangers. Under the late fourth-century conditions of social and religious tension in Rome, it might have come as a relief to find a group that did not stigmatize strangers. The Church of Rome venerated the founders of the faith, none of whom were Romans, even less Latins. Moreover, a large percentage of Rome’s many martyrs also had been foreigners. Some of them had had Roman citizenship, others had not.

Remarkably, the earliest Roman martyr list (depositio martyrum)46 preserved by the Chronograph of 354 included the feasts of three non-Roman (Carthaginian) martyrs: St Perpetua, St Felicitas and St Cyprian. The depositio martyrum, compiled before 336, is the oldest extant document about the cult of the Christian martyrs venerated in the Church of Rome. The list records the burial date (day, month, year) of forty-seven martyrs. In the cases of people who were martyred in Rome, it also mentions their burial places in the cemeteries and catacombs situated along the great roads leading out from Rome. The presence of the three great saints of Carthage in the liturgical calendar of the Church of Rome was taken as a sign by scholars that the cult of the saints spread from Africa to Italy.47

The martyrs were the stars of early Christianity. They followed Christ and conquered death. Their deaths were their birthdays (natales martyrum) in heaven: this explains the joyous commemoration and cheerful celebration of their heroic passing away among Christians to the present day. The annual celebration of the martyr’s heavenly birthday included the reading of the story of the martyrdom from the acts or from the passio, and the Eucharistic ritual. By including the Carthaginian martyrs, whose tombs and relics were in Africa, in the liturgical cycle of the martyrs venerated in Rome, the depositio martyrum indicates that the passions of these martyrs were regularly read in the churches of the Vrbs and that a local Roman veneration evolved if not around their relics, then around their memory. Thus, St Cyprian of Carthage had his own Roman cult center in the Cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia. This is important because it shows that in fourth-century Rome a “spiritualized” commemoration of the martyr ran parallel to the increasingly “material” veneration of the holy martyrs at the holy tombs. 48 That the tomb of the martyr was no longer a simple site of commemoration but a source of supernatural aid is attested by the note in the list according to which the martyr Silanus’ corpse was stolen by the schismatic Novatians (hunc Silvanum martyrem Novatiani furati sunt). Despite this development, foreign martyrs whose bodily presence could not be secured in Rome still enjoyed spiritualized veneration in the liturgy.

Star Strangers: St Peter and St Paul

Bishop Damasus of Rome drew on this martyr list when establishing the monumental commemoration of the saints in Rome.49 Some scholars claim that Damasus wrote the depositio martyrum in stone.50 Remarkably, Damasus chose to stress that the apostles Peter and Paul were not Romans:

You should know that holy men once dwelt here,

Whoever you are who seek at the same time the names of Peter and Paul.

The East sent its apostles, a fact we freely acknowledge.

By virtue of their martyrdom – having followed Christ through the stars

they reached the heavenly asylum and the realms of the righteous –

Rome has earned the right to claim them as her own citizens.

These things Damasus wishes to relate in your praise, O new stars.51

 

The message of this highly subversive epigram seems rather straightforward: the apostles were Easterners (discipulos Oriens misit), but earned Roman citizenship by shedding their blood for Christ in Rome. The idea that martyrs acquire Roman citizenship through blood is a literal presentation of the Roman law of ius sanguinis (right of blood): the abstract concept of the law is fulfilled by the martyrs word-by-word. Damasus, however, subverts the Roman concepts, merges ius sanguinis with another Roman legal term, the ius soli (right of soil), as well as with the Christian understanding of death as a new birth. The martyrs earn citizenship by dying in the Vrbs. Ius sanguinis and ius soli alike, however, define rights acquired at birth (rather than at death) in Roman law.52 Death, however, is a (re)birth in Christianity and life expands beyond death. The apostles, now Roman citizens, continue to live on in the “realms of the righteous.”53

It is worth mentioning that the “foreignness” of the apostles is an abstract “uprootedness” in this epigram. They come from the distant Orient: in this statement, there is nothing about the lack of Roman citizenship. The apostles, people who came from an unspecified East (nothing is said about Jerusalem or the Holy Land), became naturalized Roman citizens. This is a religious message: one is at “home” nowhere but with Christ. Damasus evokes Christian and Jewish religious traditions of “being foreign” to and in the world, and the artistry of this evocation lies in the fact that any allusion to “foreignness” is liable to echo, for Christians, the teaching of the Apostle Peter quoted above. It also recalls Rome’s failure to show hospitality to strangers, behavior squarely opposed to the teachings of Jesus: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.”54 An existential foreignness pervades the epigram. Christians are strangers on earth longing for their true home: “For you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”55

The Eastern martyrs were Romanized thanks to their heroism. Yet again, Damasus draws on and subverts a Roman concept: the idea that Romanitas equals heroism.56 Pious Aeneas was another Oriental stranger whose heroism led him to find a new country for his gods.57 Damasus’ cruelly executed martyrs are the founding heroes of Christianity in Rome.58 Damasus’ Romanization of the Christian martyrs negotiates identity and difference on various levels, from the aristocratic, Virgilian language of the epigrams to the emphasis on the martyrs’ “otherness” and the attribution of Roman citizenship. Romanitas for Damasus is a spiritual virtue: it is the strength of the soul that makes man Roman. The notion of Roman victory is internalized: it refers no longer to military might, but to inner endurance. Romanitas is not a legal identity, but a spiritual disposition. The Romanness of the apostles becomes an obverse “martyrdom in exile.” The bishop integrates foreign martyrs into the history of Rome—no small achievement in a city so self-consciously proud of its past!59 It might have been Damasus’ tongue-in-cheek answer to the promotion of the prestige of the “Romans of Rome” by the pagan prefect Symmachus.60 More importantly, it reveals shifting notions of Romanitas in the late fourth century.61 Damasus gave to Christian “Romans of Rome” their own heroes, foreigners praised in elegant Latin elogia in the language of the most Roman of all Roman poets, Virgil.62 In the catacombs’ meandering “halls of fame,” the martyrs became Roman patriots who mark themselves out with their heroic behavior. It is essential to note in this context that the virtue Damasus extols most in the martyrs of Rome is peacefulness and peacemaking, not bravery. As opposed to martyrial poetry that indulges in graphic descriptions of the martyrs’ defiance of death and endurance of torture and suffering,63 Damasus has little to say about physical pain: for him, the martyrs are the quintessential peacemakers. Peace, incidentally, happens to be the most Roman of Roman virtues. Damasus’ message of peace thus conveys a political message of unity.

Peter and Paul did not come to Rome for Roman citizenship (one of them had it already). They came for something higher. The bishop subversively turns established hierarchies upside down, first by stating that it is not the martyrs that are honored by the bestowal Roman citizenship, but rather the Vrbs is honored by the presence of the martyrs, citizens of heaven; secondly, by asserting that there is something higher than Roman citizenship: citizenship in the heavenly Kingdom.

Rome saw the apostles die and thus earned the right to call them its citizens (Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives). The competition, particularly with Antioch, is transparent: the two apostles resided in Antioch before coming to Rome, and Antioch developed a special Petrine tradition celebrating the apostle’s presence in the city.64 Remarkably, there is no mention of the foundation of the Church of Rome by Peter in Damasus’ epigrams. As opposed to the Liberian catalogue of 354, Damasus does not present Peter as the first bishop of Rome, but echoes the traditional view of the apostle’s Roman activity as recorded by Irenaeus of Lyons and Eusebius of Caesarea.65 The topography of this epigraphy is symbolic: it is placed neither in the Vatican nor on the Via Ostiensis, but rather in the ancient Roman cult place of the basilica Apostolorum in the San Sebastiano catacomb on the Via Appia (that would soon become, as we have seen, the national cemetery of other “Easterners,” this time from Pannonia). Damasus’ return to the concelebration of the apostles is triggered less by traditionalism than by the need for unity in a time of division: the synergy of the two apostles offers an actual, ever valid model of collaboration between churchmen of very different temperaments. The concordia apostolorum, as presented by Damasus, is promoted as a political model in the Church of Rome and also as a useful model of Christian civic behavior.66

The new citizens of Rome, however, do not reside in the Vrbs: after their martyrdom, they soar to the palace of Heaven. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.”67 Damasus exalts the “new stars” (nova sidera) of Rome in the ancient language of stellar afterlife. Becoming a star after one’s death, however, was a privilege reserved for emperors in Rome.68 The subversive twist makes the Oriental strangers equal and even superior to the emperors: St Peter and Paul do not idly light the night sky, as imperial constellations do, but rather actively care for Rome’s inhabitants.

From Citizens to Brothers in Christ

The idea that martyrdom leads to the acquisition of Roman citizenship emerges in two other Damasian epigrams dedicated to foreign martyrs who similarly assure intercession between the faithful and God. Saturninus of Carthage died in Rome and thus became Roman. In the epigram placed above Saturninus’ tomb in the catacomb of Thraso on the Via Salaria Nova, Damasus contrasts the religious conception of the heavenly abode (incola Christi) and Roman citizenship (Romanum civem) with the Carthaginian origins of the martyr:

 

Dwelling now with Christ, he was an inhabitant of Carthage before.

At the time when the persecution’s sword cut at our mother’s holy innards,

he changed his homeland and his name and race by means of his blood.

His martyrdom made him a Roman citizen.

Wonder of wonders: his remarkable end was afterwards a lesson.

While he tears at your holy limbs, Gratianus howls like the Enemy;

As he spewed out his poisons saturated with bile,

He was unable to compel you, saint, to deny Christ:

He himself merited to depart converted by your prayers.

This is the admonition of Damasus the suppliant: venerate the tomb. 69

The confrontation of Carthage with Rome is interesting. Carthage was a prestigious Christian city with universally acclaimed martyrs, such as St Cyprian, and with a sophisticated martyr piety that hardly found anything in Rome to envy.70 The topic of changing homelands and acquiring Roman citizenship at the price of blood is enriched with the graphic representation of the martyr’s confrontation with his persecutor. Suffering for Christ optimizes the powers of the martyr. His virtue makes Saturninus Roman, while his Roman opponent loses his humanity.71 In his interaction with the Roman authorities, the alien Saturninus proves to be a true Roman, and Gratian, the prefect of Rome, a sub-human monster. He can be saved by the martyr alone: thanks to Saturninus’ powerful intercession, Gratian converts to Christianity.

A martyr of Greek origin, Hermes was buried on the Via Salaria Vetus in the catacomb of Basilla. He too changed his country through his act of self-sacrifice:

 

A long time ago, as rumor has it, Greece sent you;

You changed your fatherland by shedding your blood, love of the law

made you a citizen and brother; having suffered for the holy name,

resident now with the Lord, you serve the altars of Christ.

I ask, renowned martyr, that you favor the prayers of Damasus.72

Hermes’ suffering for the “holy name” makes him not only a citizen, but a “brother,” on whose intercession with God Damasus can count. The martyr is a well-known human face in the world to come. The epigram affirms the rise of the dead to the heavenly court, a fundamental component of the cult of the saints, and radiates the warmth and joy that the faithful experience in finding a “brother” in the other world who extends a helping hand over the believer, both in this world and in the afterlife.73

From praise for the peregrini Peter and Paul and the heroism of Saturninus of Carthage, Damasus comes to extol Hermes of Greece the patronus. These foreigners are not just examples of faithful perseverance and heroic love from ancient times, but also are unceasingly active patron saints of the Church of Rome. The Roman citizenship that they gained enables them to act as intercessors in heaven for the faithful, both before and after death. By making clear reference to the foreign origins of the martyrs, the epigrams of Bishop Damasus of Rome evoke an impressive range of religious, cultural, and political issues that preoccupied the society of fourth-century Rome. Some were new questions. How could tradition be preserved? How could changes be adopted? Others belonged to the oldest layer of the Christian faith. How could one live as a “stranger on earth”? The unique blend of these traditions makes Damasus’ poetry intriguing and powerful. The bishop’s chief enterprise consisted of identifying the martyrs of Rome, and this amounted essentially to the compilation of a collective history of the Church of Rome.74 Damasus not only integrated foreign martyrs into this story, he also chose to be vocal about the foreignness of the martyrs. To write the history of the “church of the martyrs” and to enlist alien martyrs into one’s own faction can be interpreted as an indication of the practical urgency of community building in Rome. Damasus brought home with extraordinary confidence and purposefulness the Nicene belief that the local church is the Body of Christ. By including all believers, past and present, foreign and homegrown, in his commemoration, Damasus made tangible the communio sanctorum, the Eucharistic fellowship of all believers and their participation in the Resurrection Body.

Damasus’ sophisticated combination of orthodoxy and Christian tradition, universalism and local aristocratic interests, and religious mystique and concrete politics inscribed a remarkably high-caliber Catholic Christianity into the history of Rome and fashioned a Roman Catholic self-perception that left the door wide open to strangers, now venerated as Rome’s own patron saints.75 The evocation of the foreign origins of the martyrs was a compliment to the history of the Church of Rome by a bishop who did so much to Romanize it.76 “Romanization” in Damasus, however, did not mean closeting oneself in the tradition of Roman patriotism, but rather opening up Roman traditions to a Christian future.

 

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1 Greer, “Alien Citizens.”

2 Reutter, Damasus, Bischof von Rom; Trout, Damasus of Rome.

3 The list of foreign martyrs venerated at the place of their martyrdom is endless. To name a few: Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome, the forty martyrs (of Sebaste) in Constantinople, St Irenaeus (of Smyrna) in Lyon, St Martialis (of Jerusalem) in Limoges, St Vitalis (of Milan) in Ravenna, St Demetrius (of Sirmium?) in Thessaloniki, St Quirinus (of Siscia) in Savaria (Szombathely) and Rome. Scholarship, however, is scarce on this issue: Fux, “Les patries des martyrs”; Tóth, “Sirmian martyrs in exile”; for a later period, see Efthymiadis, “D’Orient en Occident”; Lequeux, “Hélène d’Athyra,”; Maskarinec, “Foreign Saints at Home”. Scholars focused on the translation and importation of relics, not on the veneration of foreign martyrs in the places where they died. On Holy Land relics: Clark, “Translating Relics”; for translations: Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte; Caroli, “Bringing Saints to Cities”. On medieval thefts, see the classic work of Geary, Furta sacra.

4 On the rise of martyr cults in Late Antiquity, see Brown, The Cult of the Saints; Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs; Lamberigts and Van Deun, Martyrium; Grig, Making Martyrs.

5 Shotwell and Ropes Loomis, The See of Peter; Meyendorff, The Primacy of Peter; Daley, “Position and Patronage.”

6 Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus; Fux, “Les patries des martyrs,” 371.

7 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture; Boer, Romanitas et Christianitas; Martin and Cox Miller, The Cultural Turn; Sághy, “Fido recubans.”

8 Psalm 39:12.

9 Gen. 23:4; Leviticus 19:34; Psalms 39:12.

10 1 Peter 1:1.

11 1 Peter 1:17; 1 Peter 2:11.

12 Acts 18:2.

13 Romans 16:3.

14 Psalm 119:19.

15 Greer, “Alien Citizens.”

16 Epistle to Diognetus 5:5.

17 Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity; Cameron, Christianity.

18 Brakke, Deliyannis and Watts, Shifting Cultural Frontiers; Mitchell and Nuffelen, Monotheism; Salzman, Sághy, and Lizzi Testa, Pagans and Christians. For the debate on pagan-Christian assimilation, see Herrero de Jáuregui, “Christian Assimilation”; Roessli, “Assimilation chrétienne.”

19 Brown and Lizzi Testa, Pagans and Christians.

20 Vallejo Girvés, “L’Europe des exilés.”

21 Meyendorff, Imperial Unity.

22 Wimbush and Valantasis, Asceticism; Vogüé, Histoire littéraire.

23 Guinot and Richard, Empire chrétien.

24 Pourkier, L’hérésiologie.

25 Galvão-Sobrinho, Doctrine and Power; Clark, The Origenist Controversy; Berndt and Steinacher, Arianism; Shaw, Sacred Violence.

26 Tronzo, The Via Latina Catacomb.

27 Johnson and Schott, Eusebius of Caesarea.

28 Gennaccari, “L’Italia come luogo di transito.”

29 Curran, Pagan City; Grig and Kelly, Two Romes; Twine, “The City in Decline.”

30 Lenski, Failure of Empire; Alföldi, Az utolsó nagy pannon császár.

31 Matthews, Western Aristocracies; Kovács, “A sopianaei születésű Maximinus.”

32 Jones, The Later Roman Empire; Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops.

33 Harper, Slavery.

34 Schall, “Plotinus”; DePalma Digeser, “Lactantius, Porphyry”; Kelly, “The New Rome and the Old”; Ross, “Ammianus.”

35 Pietri, “La question d’Athanase”; Duval, Jérôme entre l’Occident et l’Orient; Kaufman, “Augustine, Martyrs.”

36 For an interesting parallel of imperial alienation in the sixteenth century see Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness.

37 Bertolino, “Pannonia terra creat.” The Pannonian martyr St Quirinus is celebrated by Prudentius, Peristephanon 7, probably in relation to Pannonian and “Damasian” circles. I thank Pierre-Yves Fux for this reference.

38 De Waal, Die Apostelgruft ad Catacumbas an der via Appia.

39 Nagy, Pannoniai városok, mártírok, ereklyék, ch. 4.

40 Bertolino, “Pannonia terra creat.”

41 Andrade, “Assyrians, Syrians”; Goffart, “Rome, Constantinople.”

42 Auerbach, “The Arrest of Petrus Valvomeres.” Auerbach does not refer to this, but the redhead Petrus’ surname strongly suggests that he was a Christian.

43 Augustine, for example, had a strong African accent: Augustine, Confessions 5, 23.

44 Mathisen, “Peregrini, Barbari.”

45 Ammianus, Res Gestae 14, 6, 19.

46 Mommsen, Chronica minora, 1:71–2; Divjak and Wischmeyer, Das Kalenderhandbuch; Burgess, “The Chronograph of 354.”

47 Saxer, Morts, martyrs, 17.

48 See Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination.

49 Saxer, “Damase,” 67.

50 Pietri, Roma christiana, 1:673.

51 Damasus, Epigram 20 (English translation by Dennis E. Trout, see Trout, Damasus of Rome):

Hic habitasse prius sanctos cognoscere debes,

nomina quisque Petri pariter Paulique requiris.

Discipulos Oriens misit, quod sponte fatemur;

sanguinis ob meritum Christumque per astra secuti

aetherios petiere sinus regnaque piorum:

Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives.

Haec Damasus vestras referat nova sidera laudes.

52 Marotta, “Ius sanguinis.”

53 The relationship between life and death is shown by the late fourth-century “city gate” and “columnar” sarcophagi’s micro-architecture, reflecting the heavenly abode in the world to come. Thomas, “‘Houses of the dead’,” 387.

54 Matthew 25:35.

55 Augustine, Confessions, 1, 3.

56 Toll, “Making Roman-Ness”; Efrossini Spentzou, “Eluding ’Romanitas’.”

57 Gibson, “Aeneas as hospes.”

58 Trout, “Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome.” By the fifth century, Romulus and Remus had come to be regarded as criminals, and Peter and Paul, the spiritual brothers, as the true founders of Rome in Leo Magnus, In Natali apostolorum Petri et Pauli, Tractatus 69 / LXXXII: “Isti sunt sancti patres tui verique pastores, qui te regnis caelestibus inserendam multo melius multoque felicius condiderunt, quam illi quorum studio prima moenium tuorum fundamenta locata sunt: ex quibus is qui tibi nomen dedit fraternal te caede foedavit.”

59 Cracco Ruggini, “Intolerance.”

60 Salzman, “Reflections on Symmachus’ Idea of Tradition”; Ebbeler, “Religious Identity.”

61 Maskarinec, “Who were the Romans?”

62 Trout, “Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome.”

63 Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs.

64 Brown and Meier, Antioch and Rome; Zwierlein, Petrus und Paulus; competition for primacy remained a hot topic for centuries to come. For visual evidence see Van Dijk, “Jerusalem.”

65 Sághy, “Codex to Catacomb.”

66 Pietri, “Concordia Apostolorum.”

67 2 Timothy 4:7.

68 Cannadine and Price, Rituals of Royalty; Gradel, Emperor Worship.

69 Damasus, Epigram 46: Incola nunc Christi, fuerat Carthaginis ante.

Tempore quo gladius secuit pia viscera matris,

sanguine mutavit patriam, vitamque, genusque

Romanum civem sanctorum fecit origo.

Mira fides rerum: docuit post exitus ingens.

Cum lacerat pia membra, fremit Gratianus ut hostis,

postea quam fellis vomuit concepta venena,

cogere non potuit Christum te, sancte, negare,

ipse tuis precibus meruit confessus abire.

Supplicis haec Damasi vox est: venerare sepulcrum.

70 The Roman cult of the martyrs is often derived from North African practice: Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs; Saxer, Morts, martyrs.

71 On the making of “otherness” see Smith, “What a Difference a Difference Makes,” 15.

72 Damasus, Epigram 48: Iam dudum, quod fama refert, te Graecia misit.

Sanguine mutasti patriam, civemque fratremque

fecit amor legis. sancto pro nomine passus,

incola nunc Domini, servas qui altaria Christi,

ut Damasi precibus faevas, precor, inclyte martyr.

73 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, chapter 1.

74 Sághy, “Poems as Church History.”

75 Brown, “Enjoying the Saints.”

76 Shepherd, “The Liturgical Reform of Damasus I,” 861–63; Lafferty, “Translating Faith,” 21.

2016_3_Seláf

Volume 5 Issue 3 CONTENTS

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Saint Martin of Tours, the Honorary Hungarian1

Levente Seláf

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

 

St Martin was one of the most important hagiographical figures of France in the Middle Ages. Because of his Pannonian origins, he was also an important saint for the Hungarian kings and for the monks of the abbey of Pannonhalma, Martin’s supposed birthplace in medieval times, where his cult was the strongest in Hungary. Martin’s connection to Pannonia, which became part of Hungary after the settlement of Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, was not totally ignored in France, where Martin’s cult took root. In the late twelfth century, the Historia septem sanctorum dormientium, a curious hagiographical story invented to support a new cult of the seven hermit saints of the abbey of Marmoutier, claimed that St Martin of Tours descended from the royal family of the Huns or Hungarians. Hungarian scholars investigated the origins and the spread of this motif in the early twentieth century, but on the basis of a mistaken, much earlier dating of the Historia.
In this essay, I establish the exact relationship and chronology of the known texts containing the motif of St Martin’s royal and Hungarian origins. Moreover, I offer a systematic survey of the saint’s medieval French biographies, showing how limited knowledge of this motif was outside the texts descending directly from the Historia. At the same time, I examine a hitherto unedited Old French legend contained in a single manuscript (Paris, BNF fr. 1534), a legend which constitutes an addition to the corpus of texts referring to Martin as a Hungarian prince.

Keywords: St Martin, hagiography, Hungarian-French cultural connections, Historia septem sanctorum dormientium, Conte de Floire et Blanchefleur, dynastic sainthood.

St Martin and Hungary

St Martin of Tours was one of the most popular holy figures of France in the Middle Ages, and his cult was widespread in the Christian world. Thanks to his first biographer, Sulpicius Severus, one of Martin’s disciples, we know a great deal about the major milestones of his life. Born in Pannonia in 316 as the son of an officer of the Roman army, he was converted in his early youth to Christianity. After serving as a soldier, he became a monk and a disciple of St Hilary of Poitiers. Elected bishop of Tours in 371, Martin died in the fame of sanctity in 397. Sulpicius Severus’ Martinian writings saw several adaptations from the fifth century on in Latin and later in Old French, frequently with numerous additions concerning his deeds and miracles in vitam and post mortem.

Because of his birthplace, St Martin of Tours was linked to Hungary in medieval France. One thus could say that Martin was the first historically attested saint who was represented in some religious texts, even if in a legendary way, as Hungarian.

The imaginary Hungarian or Hun origins of the saint appear in several texts related to his cult. Of course, for chronological reasons this kinship is impossible: the nomadic Huns arrived in Pannonia almost a century after Martin had been born and had left his birthplace, while the Hungarians only arrived at the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century. Nevertheless, it is possible that this element contributed to the popularity of St Martin in Hungary. The cult of Martin was extremely important for the Hungarian rulers from the beginnings of the creation of the state; he was useful in the creation of an ideological basis of the kingdom as a major argument for the consolidation of Christianity in the country.2 In 997, prince Stephen (crowned king of Hungary only three years later) prayed to Martin before going to battle near Veszprém against the pagan Koppány, and Stephen remained faithful to him after his victory.3 In 1001, as a king he enriched with an important donation the Benedictine abbey of Pannonhalma, dedicated to the saint. Pannonhalma played an important role in later Hungarian history, and the abbey’s long-lasting prestige was certainly related to the preservation of the importance of the cult of St Martin for the Hungarian rulers. The chronicles of the first crusade have preserved the memory of the negotiations between king Coloman and the crusaders of Godfrey of Bouillon in Pannonhalma, considered at the time as Martin’s place of birth.4 Even later, during the twelfth-fifteenth centuries, Martin complemented very well the cult of the dynastic saints of Hungary.

The imaginary Hun or Hungarian descent of the saint acquired special importance in the eyes of scholars dealing with medieval French and Hungarian cultural relations,5 and it has even piqued the interest of people working in the field of cultural politics in the twenty-first century. Via Sancti Martini was created in 2005 on the image of the medieval pilgrimage routes, leading from Szombathely, built on the ruins of the ancient Roman city Savaria (considered today the birthplace of the saint), via Italy to Tours, following the stages of Martin’s life from the Orient to the Occident.6

I explore the representation of St Martin as a Hungarian through a systematic analysis of medieval French vitae of Martin. My intention is to examine the importance and the expansion of this information about Martin’s Hungarian origins in the cult of St Martin in France and to determine the extent to which it influenced the image of Hungary and the Hungarians in medieval France. After briefly presenting the medieval texts containing mention of the Hungarian origins of St Martin that were familiar to twentieth-century scholarship and the popular fictitious biography of St Martin created in the chanson de geste Belle Hélène de Constantinople (according to which he was of Greek and English origin), I present the results of a systematic overview of Martin’s many, hitherto mostly unpublished Old French vitae. I provide this overview in part with the intention of finding additional texts asserting the saint’s hypothetical Hungarian origins.

The Creation of a Fabulous Genealogy

The earliest document that contains a fictitious genealogy of St Martin connecting him to the royal dynasty of the Huns or, in other manuscripts, directly to the Hungarians is the twelfth-century Legend of the Seven Sleepers, or in Latin Historia septem sanctorum dormientium, which I cite as Historia (BHL 2320).7 The Historia narrates the story of the Seven Sleepers of Marmoutier, allegedly Martin’s cousins, who allegedly were living as hermits in the monastery founded by Martin, where he himself lived as a hermit, like his nephews. The function of this rewriting of the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus was to support the local cult of the hermits in the monastery of Marmoutier, which attracted a great number of pilgrims in the Middle Ages. It might have been construed as the “foundation charter” for the local cult of the hermits whose tombs were venerated as holy in Marmoutier, where several miracles occurred. Linking the Seven Sleepers to St Martin helped promote the fame of the abbey. The close ties between Martin and his nephews necessitated an important enlargement of the narrative about the saint’s youth: many new details had to be invented that were missing from Sulpicius Severus’ account. The anonymous author of the Historia presents Martin as a royal prince, and he describes the Hungarian kings living in Pannonia as rulers of a pagan kingdom which, after a lost battle, was conquered by the Romans and became part of the Roman Empire. The text gives a detailed genealogy of Martin’s family, listing his royal ancestors: the great-grandfather, Amnarus (Aumarus), his grandfather and father, both called Florus. While Amnarus was still an independent king, his captive son, Florus was only freed after he had renounced his crown. Florus the younger, his son, lived in the court of Emperor Constantine in Constantinople. He married Constantine’s niece and returned home to Pannonia to rule the country. Their son, also called Florus, was born in Pannonia. He went to study in Constantinople, where he was baptized by St Paul, the bishop of the city, and he changed his name to Martin. After he returned to Pannonia to join the imperial army as an officer, his life continued according to the vita of Sulpicius Severus. Martin’s nephews joined him in Marmoutier as hermits. They survived Martin, all falling asleep miraculously on the same day. They are “the Seven Sleepers” of the abbey.

It is surprising how far the compiler distanced his story from the original account of Sulpicius’ vita and its later rewritings. The dating of the Historia is obscure. Even in the earliest manuscripts, which date to roughly the end of the twelfth century, it was attributed to Gregory of Tours himself by a (false) letter supposed to have been sent by him to Sulpicius. In the nineteenth century, however, scholarship negated the Gregorian attribution on stylistic grounds and declared that it must have been composed much later. The generally accepted date was the ninth century. Ilona Király and Sándor Eckhardt, Hungarian scholars who studied the text in the first half of the twentieth century, dated it to the Carolingian period. This dating was questioned in the 1980s, when Guy-Marie Oury argued for a date in the second half of the twelfth century.8 The chief argument against the earlier dating is the absence of the cult of the Seven Sleepers in the Liber de miraculis of Marmoutier, which was composed in 1137. Their veneration must have begun only later. Oury suggested that the goal of the Historia was to consolidate the authority of the Abbey of Marmoutier by linking it to St Martin’s family and the newly discovered relics of his nephews. Hervé de Villepreux (1177–87), the abbot of Marmoutier, must have sponsored the compilation of the Historia: renouncing his position, he retired to the place where the Seven Sleepers died to live as a hermit for sixteen years. Oury rightly assumes that the cult of the Seven Sleepers was extremely important for the abbot personally.

The hypothesis of the late dating is somewhat weakened by Hervé de Villepreux’s letter to Philip, Archbishop of Cologne, written in 1181, in which he mentions the origins of St Martin and the history of the Seven Sleepers, referring to their legend, written by St Gregory of Tours. Is this a voluntary falsification by Hervé de Villepreux, who is then the inventor and the first witness of the cult of the Seven Sleepers? The cult, by all means, spread very rapidly between 1137 and 1180. Hervé refers to it as a popular and well-attested cult, also supported by the authority of St Gregory of Tours.

Sharon Farmer gave further proof in support of the contention that the Historia can be dated to the twelfth century.9 She connected the text to the rise of the “chivalric saint” in the twelfth century: as opposed to the holy crusader fighting the enemies of the faith, a new image of the virtuous prince, a young member of a royal dynasty who gives up his earthly kingdom to serve God as a hermit or a monk, became the model to follow. The figure of Martin as a knightly confessor and a young Hungarian royal prince is the most important innovation of the Historia. Dynastic holiness was on the rise in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the confessor kings were beatified at this time.10 Martin’s Christian name also reinforces the twelfth-century dating: born as Florus, he is given his new name in baptism after one of his uncles, a Christian bishop named Martin. This practice of name-giving only became widespread in this period. Remarkably, while Martin’s father remains pagan in both Sulpicius Severus’ text and the Historia, Martin converts much of the family in the later text.

Ilona Király focuses on Martin’s childhood and his royal descent as the son of the king of Hungary. Király pointes out that another Old French text also mentions Martin’s Hungarian origins: Maurice of Sully’s sermon to the feast of St Martin.11 No reliable critical edition of the sermons exists, this one might be also an apocryphon and it is impossible to know whether the vernacular or the Latin version was the earlier of the two. The exact dating of the sermons is debated. The earliest possible date is 1160. Király cites a half sentence from the French version: “Saint Martin fu nes de Hongrie” (“St Martin was born in Hungary”). There is no further indication of an influence of the Historia. Maurice of Sully does not refer to Martin’s royal descent in the sermon.

The “Hungarian Origins” as a Literary Motif: the Historia and the Conte de Floire et Blanchefleur

The twelfth-century dating of the Historia, makes necessary a revision of the intertextual relationship of the source text to its potential models and the texts influenced by it, a whole network of narrative sources. Király calls attention to the fact that the names of Martin’s father and great-grandfather, Florus and Aumarus, are rather frequent in the chansons de geste in their French forms (Floire and Aumer), and sometimes they even occur in the same context. An early dating of the Historia would have supposed that it exerted an influence on the vernacular texts, but in light of the new dating it is clear that it happened the other way.

There is another, even more important consequence of the late, twelfth-century invention of Martin’s fictitious genealogy. At that time, the kingdom of Hungary already existed. It is possible that the author of the Historia modeled Martin’s imaginary homeland on the shape of contemporary Hungary: his vision of the country may not have reflected merely a fabulous Hunnia-Hungaria, i.e. an exotic place-name without any direct reference, but the concrete reality, or at least the ideological construct that was Hungary in the twelfth century. At that time, St Stephen and St Emeric were both canonized, and the beata stirps of the Árpádians became the most important distinctive feature of the country. In the twelfth century, the ideal of royal sanctity was not yet very widespread in the Occidental world: the author of the Historia could have borrowed this ideological construct and may have adopted it to Martin and his family following the image of the saints of the Árpádians. If so, in his eyes it was not that Martin’s authority increased the prestige of Hungary. Rather, Martin’s fame was increased by the fact that he belonged to the dynasty of Hungarian monarchs. To maintain this hypothesis it is necessary to suppose that the author had some information about Hungary and its saints.12 There are no textual correspondences between the legends of St Stephen and Emeric on one side and the Historia on the other, but there are details in both that bear some resemblance. Florus, the father of Martin, marries Constance, the niece of the East-Roman Emperor, while Stephen married the sister “of the Roman emperor,,” as his legends claim.13 Another interesting parallel between the stories is Martin’s education in Constantinople, while it was precisely in the second half of the twelfth century, between 1165 and 1170, that a Hungarian prince, the future king Béla III, lived in the Byzantine court as the potential heir of Manuel I Komnenos. Of course, if we accept this parallel as mirroring the actual political reality, we have to date the Historia to the period after 1165.

Király draws an interesting comparison between the genealogies of Pepin the Short and that of St Martin as it is contained in the Historia. As she found several similar names, she supposed that the author of the Historia borrowed details from Pepin’s genealogy.14 Brichtildis, Martin’s grand-mother, and Blichtildis, mother of Pepin’s great-great-grandfather, have the same name, and it is important that there was a Martinus in Pepin’s family too. In my view, however, the other correspondences identified by Király are weak.15 All family trees resemble one another. I would not exclude the possibility that the writer of the Historia could have used also other models, and if he knew St Stephen’s legend, which affirms that Stephen was the fourth ruler of the Hungarians in Pannonia, we can reasonably hypothesize that the author of the Historia wanted to imitate this pattern when he suggested three ancestors of Martin as rulers of Pannonia. Incidentally, Pepin’s genealogy is much richer and more complex than the family trees of Stephen and Martin.16

I must mention a popular and relevant vernacular text, Floire et Blanchefleur, an early idyllic romance of rather controversial dating which is the oldest Old French romance starring a prince of Hungarian origins. It narrates the love of the pagan prince Floire and the Christian Blanchefleur. After many adventures, the two lovers marry and Floire converts his nation to Christianity. In the so-called aristocratic version of the text Floire is king of Hungary (in the other, he is king of Aumarie, which is a frequent name designating a Saracen kingdom of Iberia in the tradition of the chansons de geste, corresponding probably to Almería, in Spain). The most recent edition of the text dates the romance to 1150, but it is not clear whether Hungary was present in the first variant.17 Jean-Luc Leclanche, the critical editor, derives Floire’s name from the Historia, but if this derivation were accurate, Hungary would have had to have figured in the first version of the text, which is impossible if the Historia dates to the 1170s, as is suggested by Farmer and Oury. Huguette Legros has another hypothesis concerning the insertion of the reference to Hungary in Floire et Blanchefleur. She assumes that the romance was written around 1186 to please Marguerite Capet, future queen of Hungary, who married Béla III (who turned back from Constantinople some years before, as he had failed to inherit the Byzantine throne but had obtained the Hungarian crown) the following year: according to her, the loving couple of the romance, Floire and Blanchefleur, symbolically represent the alliance of the Hungarian and French rulers.18 Either the early dating of the romance is false, or it was the romance that influenced the Historia, and the author of the Historia might have borrowed the name of Martin’s father from the romance. But it is also possible that the reference to Hungary as Floire’s kingdom was effectively inserted later in the romance, reflecting already an influence of the Historia or Marguerite’s marriage to king Béla. It is important to note that the prologue of the romance claims that Bertha Broadfoot (Berthe aux grands pieds), Charlemagne’s mother, was the daughter of Floire and Blanchefleur: instead of giving St Martin Hungarian ancestors, this text gives them to Charlemagne. The motif of Bertha’s Hungarian origins appears also in Adenet le Roi’s Berte aus grans piés (after 1273–74) and other later romances of the Middle Ages.19

The Influence of the Historia on Later Martinian Literature

The earliest text outside the region of Tours that mentions the Seven Sleepers and Martin’s relationship to them is Guibert of Gembloux’s biography of St Martin. The Walloon monk wrote several vitae of the saint in verse (two versions, BHL 5637 and BHL 5636, from 1177–79 and 1181)20 and in prose (1205, BHL 5635). Guibert mentions the Seven Sleepers as Martin’s nephews, and he identifies Martin’s father as King Florus of Hungary. However, this cannot be taken as “independent evidence,” for Guibert sojourned several times in the Abbey of Marmoutier, and he wrote these texts upon his return to his monastery from Marmoutier. He must have acquainted himself with the legend of the Seven Sleepers during his stay in Martin’s monastery.

The earliest vernacular text that bears clear signs of the Historia’s influence is the Vie de monseignor saint Martin de Tors by Péan Gatineau, canon of St Martin in Tours.21 The date of this verse legend is debated, as is the identity of the author. Most probably it was written in the first half or second quarter of the thirteenth century by a canon of the Cathedral of St Martin in Tours. Péan Gatineau draws on several sources when compiling his long legend, most of them identified in the rubrics of the single surviving manuscript. Although the source of Martin’s youth is not indicated, it is clear that Péan draws his information from Sulpicius Severus and the Historia. He repeats the complicated genealogy, describes Martin’s education in Constantinople, his baptism by the holy bishop of the city, and his conflicts after his return to Hungary (while Sulpicius Severus does not say clearly where Martin’s family lived while he was a soldier, the Historia claims that they stayed in Hungary, instead of moving to Italy). An important addition to the source is the mention of the monastery founded on the birthplace of the saint, where pious monks honor his memory: all scholars considered it a reference to the Benedictine abbey of Pannonhalma, but no one knows where Péan Gatineau got this information.

Péan Gatineau’s verse legend was rewritten in prose in the fifteenth century, faithfully following the original. Preserved only in a fragmented manuscript (Tours, BM ms. 1025), from which unfortunately the first part, dealing with Martin’s youth, is missing, it was printed twice (in Tours in 1496 and in Paris in 1516). One exemplar of each printed text survives, allowing the reconstruction of the text. At the end of the manuscript there is a long notice in which the composer of the prose version affirms that he simply translated Péan Gatineau’s work and prays for peace and the success of the French kingdom against their enemies, evidently the English. Thanks to this text a rather precise dating of the version is possible:

 

A ce derrain miracle cy se taist Payen Gastineau qui ce livre fist et ceste hystoyre mist en rime. Et pource qu’il n’en parle plus fault que je me taise moy comme non saichant qui ay translaté et mys de ryme en prose ce que Paien Gastineau avoit fait. Si prenez en gré et s’il y a faulte de langaige ou d’escripture si vueillez supplier a mon nom seus et a ma simplesse et icelluy corriger le plus gracieusement que pourrez. […] [N]ostre doulx saulveur Jhesucrist qui doint bonne santé et bonne vie et longue a nostre bon roy Charles et la royne, a monseigneur le daulphin, a leur lignee et a tous ceulx du sang royal aiant bonne voulenté et ceulx qui mauvaise sont dieu les vuelle amander tellement qu’ilz recongnoissent leur droicturier seignieur. Aussi vueille delivrer tous prisonniers du sang real qui sont es mains de noz ennemys. Aussi que nous puissons avoir bonne paix et vivon en ce reaulme a l’onneur et au prouffit du roy et de la chose publique a la confusion et deshonneur de ces anciens ennemys estranges et privez.22

(At this last miracle keeps silent Payen Gastineau, who made this book, and put in rhymes this story. And as he says nothing more, I have to keep silence myself as an ignorant man who translated from rhyme to prose what Paien Gastineau had made. Accept it benevolently, and if there is any fault of language or writing in it, you have to attribute it only to my name and my simplicity, and I ask you to correct it with as much gracefulness as you can. [We must pray to Martin to intercede on our behalf to] Our Saviour Jesus Christ to give good health and long and good life to our good king Charles and to the queen and the dauphin, their lineage and everyone of the royal blood who is of goodwill, and may God punish those who are bad so that they recognize who is their legitimate lord. Might He liberate all prisoners of royal blood who are in the hands of our enemies, that we might have good peace and live in this kingdom to the honor and profit of the king and the community, but to the confusion and dishonor of the ancient enemies, whether they are distant or close.)

 

The prose version must have been written after the battle of Azincourt in 1415 but before the release of Charles of Orléans and his brother from the captivity in 1440, and in all likelihood after the promotion of Charles, count of Ponthieu (the future Charles VII), to the dignity of dauphin (1417) and before the death of Charles VI (1422). The author must have been a fervent supporter of the Valois dynasty, and it is possible that the prose version of Péan Gatineau’s legend is a sign of the renewal of interest in St Martin’s cult in this period, which was difficult for the French monarchy.

The Hungarian origins of St Martin receive the greatest attention in another text, a mystery play composed by an anonymous author at the end of the fifteenth century.23 It was preserved in a now lost sixteenth century printed edition, and it is known only from an edition published in 1841. About half of the text is devoted to Martin’s youth. His father, the pagan king of Hungary, entrusts Martin to his cousin, the duke of Acherance, to give him the courtly and knightly education necessary to become a good sovereign. Martin’s sister is married to the pagan prince of Milan: their son is Brice, who will succeed Martin as bishop of Tours. Martin is converted by a hermit, and after the death of his father, when he is crowned king, he renounces the throne in favor of the prince of Milan, whom he had converted. While Martin leaves Hungary in secret to dedicate his life to Christ and become a monk in Marmoutier with his nephew Brice so as to accomplish the career known from his vita, the duke of Milan and the pagan prince of Acherance fight for the Hungarian throne. With the blessing of God, the duke of Milan triumphs in the battle and becomes the legal heir to Martin as king of Hungary.

In this play, there is no mention of the Seven Sleepers, no direct borrowing from the Historia or Péan Gastineau’s legend. Certain episodes suggest that the author might have known one of these texts, but his goals were not related to the cult of the Seven Sleepers in Marmoutier or in Tours. Was this mystery play ever performed? For what occasion was it written? These questions remain unsolved. Nevertheless, it is clear that the conversion of Hungary to Christianity is an important topic in the play.24

In the fifteenth century, another text telling the story of Martin’s birth became much more popular than the Historia. It was the famous fourteenth-century chanson de geste Belle Hélène de Constantinople, in which St Martin and St Brice, his successor as bishop of Tours, are represented as brothers, sons of the Byzantine princess Helene and King Henry of England. The great number of manuscripts and two fifteenth-century prose versions of this poem prove that this alternative genealogy of the saint was much more popular than the earlier Historia at that time.25 The first, mid-fourteenth-century verse text, a variant of the “tale of Constance” is preserved in five manuscripts, and it was translated into prose twice in the fifteenth century: the first, anonymous one is conserved in three manuscripts and several incunabula and early prints, while that of Jean Wauquelin26 is preserved in only one copy. The amount of surviving evidence attests to the greater popularity and wider spread of the Belle Hélène compared to the tradition of the Historia. The reasons are multiple: the complicated, romantic story of the text written later better fit the needs of a large public, while the sober narration of Martin’s life and miracles could serve as an inspiration for literary works of several genres as we have seen, but could not obtain a similar effect. St Martin has a secondary role in the romance. His presence strengthens the authority and reliability of a text filled with several of the miraculous adventures of his legendary family. It seems that the anonymous author of the mystery play on St Martin knew not only the Historia but the chanson de geste too, which is why he proposes a kinship between Brice and Martin, even though in his text Brice and Martin are not brothers. Rather, Martin is Brice’s uncle.

A non-literary document attesting to the influence of both the Historia and the Belle Hélène de Constantinople is a family tree of the saint, preserved on a double folio manuscript compiled sometime at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century.27 The family tree is traditionally attributed to Ambroise de Cambrai (d. 1496), counsellor to King Louis XI and the holder of several important ecclesiastical and lay dignities.28 Among Martin’s ancestors and relatives we find all of the important, legendary rulers of the early medieval world, including not only his father, the Hungarian King Florus, but the emperors of Constantinople and kings of England as well, including Arthur and Uther. The compiler used all available sources to create a glorious and mighty lineage for St Martin. He drew on the Historia septem dormientium and the Belle Hélène de Constantinople, since he regarded these texts as authentic and true.

­Further Traces of the Historia’s Influence on Medieval Hagiographical Literature

To summarize my observations thus far, in addition to the Latin sources (the Historia, Guibert of Gembloux’s vitae, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines chronicle), there are four known vernacular texts containing references to the Hungarian origins of the saint. We can measure the real impact of these scarce data only if we compare them to other vernacular texts dealing with St Martin’s origins. For this reason, I carried out a systematic analysis of all medieval French biographies of St Martin in search of his link to Hungary, and I present the results of this survey in the following.

The medieval French legends of Martin were thoroughly gathered and enumerated in the JONAS database of the IRHT, in the framework of a research program aiming to collect all Old and Middle French hagiographical texts.29 At the moment, 36 items are registered concerning St Martin, 20 of which are legends. Some of them were translated from the same Latin source, but most of them are preserved in more than one manuscript, and the textual testimonies sometimes differ significantly, so these high numbers confirm that Martin was one of the most popular saints in medieval France, and his legend was widely read and rewritten in vernacular throughout the Middle Ages.

An overview of all of the medieval French legends of Martin (and of their Latin sources) shows that the motif of his Hungarian origins invented by the Historia had very little impact on the strictly hagiographical texts.30 Most of them constantly use Sulpicius Severus’ account, directly or indirectly, which includes only a half-sentence on Martin’s place of birth:

 

Igitur Martinus Sabaria Pannoniarum oppido oriundus fuit, sed intra Italiam Ticini altus est. Parentibus secundum saeculi dignitatem non infimis, gentilibus tamen.

(Martin was born in Sabaria, the city of the Pannonians, but he grew up in Italy, in Pavia. His parents were, according to the judgement of the world, of no mean rank, but they were pagans.)

 

This sentence was translated in all the legends I know of, but the interpretation of Sabaria and the “city of the Pannonians” appears in a great variety in them. The oldest French legend of Martin is attributed to Wauchier of Denain, one of the most prolific French translators and authors of the early thirteenth century. In a cycle of legends dedicated to eight confessors, he prepares an entire hagiographical dossier about Martin, including not only the vita made by Sulpicius Severus but also the history of the translatio of the saint and the dialogues of Sulpicius.31 The 17 surviving manuscripts mention “Sabaria” and talk about “Pannonia” instead of the “city of the Pannonians,” but in very different forms in the sentence translated from Sulpicius. For instance, in the manuscript Paris, BNF fr. 23112 we find the following: “Sains Martins fu ne de la contree de Pannonie d’un castel qui avoit a non Isapharie.” (St Martin was born in the region of Pannonie in a castle called Isapharie.)32

The later Old French legends either omit one or two of these strange names or modify them totally. We find “Sabaire” in the French translation of John of Mailly’s legend (Abbreviatio in gestis et miraculis Sanctorum, c. 1243, translated in the thirteenth century), while the manuscripts of the translation of the Legenda aurea made by John of Vignay (before 1348) propose “Salune” or “Salurie.” The tribe of the Pannoniens is also altered in various ways. Sometimes Pannonia is used, the correct name of the Roman province, but only rarely. The people living there are referred to as “Pononiens, Pannoniers, Panoniens,” while the geographical name occurs in forms like “Pannonie, Pannonye, Pannone, Pamo,” or even “Patmos,” probably under the influence of the Visions of St John. None of these sources insert a digression explaining the identification of the antique Pannonia with medieval Hungary, and the localization of Sabaria or its contemporary, medieval equivalent remains totally obscure. The French readers of these legends could hardly have even suspected that the remnants of this city are found in Hungary.

There is one exception that clearly shows the influence of the Historia. One of St Martin’s French legends, preserved in a single manuscript (Paris, BNF fr. 1534) and totally neglected by scholars and still unedited, narrates the origins of the saint in the following way:

 

Saint Martin fust de mont noble ligniee et de saincte vie. Il fu né de Pannonie qui ore est appellée Hongrie. Et fu filz Floires qui fu filz Eaumer Roy de Hongrie. Mauximien et Hercules cachierent Eaumer de Hongrie et cachierent hors de la terre, et Floires qui plus ne fu mies subget a l’empiere, puis prist Brigide nieche au roy d’Esoigne dont saint Martin fust, qui out deulx freres Hilgius et Floires le mendre qui fu mont saint homme. Saint Martin fu sy aumosnier, que de son enffance il donnoit pour dieu et sy ne savoit qui dieu estoit. Hilgius ot vii. filz. Aucuns dient que ce furent lez sains sept dormans qui sont a Tours en une eglise. Saint Martin lessa pere et mere et vint a Paiani l’evesque de Costentin noble qui le baptiza, a trois cens et lxiiij ans de la nativité. Puis revint a son pere qui le mena a Constant emperie de Romme qui le fist chevalier et fust chevalier .v ans puis vint en France et ung vallet a lui a qui mainte fois terdy ses soulles. Or adonc que Julien cesar ot besong de chevalier, sy manda Martin qui estoit nouvel chevalier qu’il venist a luy et il y vint. Et ly dist l’empeuere qu’il convenoit que il allast en la bataille. Et Martin ly dist: A moy n’est mie de combatre et se je vois je n’y porteroy escu, ne lances mes quant j’auroy feste la crois en mont front je les ire envaie.33

(St Martin descended from a very noble lineage, and he lived a very holy life. He was born in Pannonia, today called Hungary. He was son of Floire who was son of Eaumer, king of Hungary. Maximianus and Hercules deposed Eaumer and expelled him from his land, and Floire, who was no longer a subject of the empire, married Brigide, niece of the king of Saxonia. Martin was their son. He had two brothers, Hilgius and Floires the younger, who was a very holy person. St Martin was so charitable that he gave alms for God even before he knew of His existence. Hilgius had seven sons. Some people say they were the seven sleepers who are in Tours in a church. St Martin left his father and mother and came to Paiani, bishop of Constantinople, who baptized him in 364 AD. After that, he went back to his father, who brought him to Constant, emperor of Rome, who dubbed him knight, and he remained a knight for five years. After that, he came to France with a servant, to whom he cleaned several times the shoes. After that, when the Caesar Julien needed knights, he sent people for Martin, who was a newly dubbed knight, to order him to come, and he came. And the emperor told him that he was supposed to go to the battle. And Martin answered: “I am not willing to fight, and if I go there, I will bring neither shield nor lance, but when I make the sign of the cross on my forehead, I will conquer them.)

 

Probably the origin of this legend is not closely related to Tours, but the compiler must have read or heard the fabulous story of Martin’s royal birth. He could have read either the Historia or one of the texts reflecting its influence. The link between Martin and the seven sleepers is a clear sign that the Historia was at least the indirect source for him. Compared to the Historia, the genealogy of Hungarian kings has one element less, and there are some other slight changes in the data, but this may be simply an alteration that was made to the unique conserved manuscript. It is worth noting that the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesos is also contained in the same manuscript, moreover in a unique variant. This is not the text of the Historia, but again it shows some knowledge of the cult of Marmoutier, because at the end the legend states that the relics of the sleepers were moved from Ephesos to the abbey: “... jusques au temps a une roigne de France Constance qui les fist porter a Mermonstier jouxte Tours l’an IX cens et VIII ans ou ilz repposent.”34 (...till the time of a queen of France, called Constance, who brought them to Marmoutier near Tours in 908, and from that time on they remain there.)

There are two potential candidates for the queen of France mentioned in the legend, but for chronological reasons neither one is her. She cannot have been Constance of Arles, who married Robert II in 1003 and died in 1032, or Constance of Castille, Louis VII’s second wife (1154–60), as their lifetimes do not correspond to the date indicated in the legend, and I am not aware of any transfer of relics from Ephesus to Arles during the period of their reign. But despite the contradictory and confused data of the text (maybe due to a negligent copyist), this version of the Seven Sleepers is further evidence that the author of the compilation, who must be responsible for Martin’s legend and that of the Seven Sleepers, knew some of the local traditions of Tours and Marmoutier, and he was aware of the role of the abbey in the cult of the Seven Sleepers, and probably this is why he tried to reconcile the data of the Historia and the vita composed by Sulpicius Severus. If not from an oral source, the author may have taken his information either directly from the Historia or from Péan Gatineau’s Vie de Monseignor saint Martin, or possibly from a vita written by Guibert of Gembloux, and he completed with it his translation of the Legenda aurea, based on Sulpicius’ account.

Conclusion

Apparently, in the huge hagiographical material dedicated to St Martin, the question of his origins was not of high importance. As in the case of many other saints, the laconic narrative of the original legend was enlarged in some texts written in the twelfth century, but the circulation of the enlarged version as we find it in the Historia and its textual family remained limited. There are different reasons for the rarity of this motif in later hagiographical material. First, the Historia septem dormientium was never so widespread and never obtained the fame of Sulpicius’ legend: probably because an eye-witness of Martin’s life was more reliable than an anonymous text that bore the signs of its primary goal (to support the abbey of Marmoutier) and contained some evidently spurious data. Martin’s popularity based on Sulpicius Severus was very high before the twelfth century. The Historia did not become an alternative legend of St Martin: it remained the main document of the cult of the Seven Sleepers of Marmoutier, and the scarce testimonies of this local cult prompted few new texts. The most popular hagiographers of the thirteenth century, like Jacobus de Voragine, did not use the Historia for their compilations, so its impact could not be strengthened by them as intermediaries. But it is important to note that not only the Historia but Péan Gastineau’s legend and its prose version also contained mention of the alleged Hungarian origins of the saint: they had a somewhat larger impact, and on different types of texts (Guibert of Gembloux’s Latin legend, Alberic’s chronicle, the anonymous mystery play, Ambroise de Cambrai’s genealogical table, and the newly discovered Old French legend). Nevertheless, neither in the mystery plays nor in the historical compilations are Martin and Hungary more strongly connected than in the vitae: for instance Andrieu de la Vigne’s Mistère de saint Martin (1496) or Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale (1246–63) did not mention Hungary as his birthplace.

Independently of the Historia, Old French legends rarely identified Pannonia with Hungary. Maurice of Sully’s above mentioned sermon, if it is authentic, might be an exception, as we do not know whether it was textually related to the Historia or was independent of it. The identification of the ancient Roman province and Hungary required a certain cultural knowledge from the scribes and compilers of medieval legends, and they did not always have this knowledge. The wish to remain faithful to Sulpicius Severus’ text or to its translators was stronger than the wish to update the information about the saint’s birthplace. Names and toponyms are the most fragile data in medieval texts, in which misspellings, autonomous interpretation, and false etymologization are very frequent: this is why “Sabaria Pannoniarum oppido” appears in such a wide variety in the sources.

When a text written in medieval France identifies Hungary as the birthplace of St Martin, one can reasonably suspect that this is due to the influence of the Historia and its textual network. The notion of St Martin as royal offspring, however, appears in other texts, such as the Belle Hélène and its prose versions. In this case, Constantinople and England supplemented Hungary, as the wandering Byzantine princess married the English king. There is a slight hesitation in the vernacular translations of the position held by St Martin’s father in the army, in the Old French legends independent of the Historia and the Belle Hélène. Sometimes they give him a very high rank, but none of them refers to him as a prince or a king. However, I think that this idea was not totally alien to the medieval compilers who considered that St Martin must have had an important status and a promising future as a layman in order to give greater weight to his renouncement of both. An interesting example is found in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the French version of Vincent de Beauvais’ Speculum historiale, translated by John of Vignay (Paris, BNF fr. 51, fol. 250), a miniature representing St Martin’s baptism. This is highly unusual in the saint’s iconography. It might reflect the impact of the frequently mentioned scene of the “baptism of a pagan or Saracen king.”35 The baptism of the king is connected to the conversion of Clovis in the iconography of the French chronicles. The pictorial cycles in the manuscripts of the chansons de geste also include similar images. For me, this clearly denotes the fact that the designer of the manuscript sought to illustrate the noble descent of St Martin and thus associate him with the Merovingians and the later French kings, even if the text does not mention Martin’s royal ancestors.

It seems almost certain that St Martin’s genealogy as outlined in the Historia was created in the last quarter of the twelfth century in order to buttress the importance of Tours and Marmoutier. The invention of the cult of the Seven Sleepers was intended to reinforce the cult of St Martin by creating a new local ritual of worship. The chronology of the spread of the Historia shows that the text did not remain as popular after the first half of the thirteenth century. Its importance was limited geographically and temporally as well: we can see it as a tool in a campaign to promote St Martin (somewhat neglected by the French kings in the twelfth century in favor of St Denis).36 The rise of the Kingdom of Hungary and the consolidation of its international prestige at the end of the twelfth century (thanks to the recently canonized dynastic saints of the House of Árpád) might also have contributed to the formation of the new image of St Martin: the pagan prince converted to Christianity, who renounced his earthly glory and crown to serve God.37 From this point of view, the Historia might be seen as the first piece of evidence of the international acknowledgement of the beata stirps of the Árpádian dynasty. We can thank this text and the subsequent texts that drew on it for the prefiguration of the pious Hungarian prince in the image of St Martin, and the limited but long-lasting influence of the Historia indicates the presence of the idea of “holy Hungary” in France, at least until the end of the fifteenth century.

 

Manuscripts

Archives Indre-et-Loire, Liasse G. 365.

Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) fr. 1534

Tours: Bibliothèque Municipale (BM) MS 1025

Bibliography

Adenet le Roi, Berte as grans piés, edited by Albert Henry. Textes littéraires français, 305. Geneva: Droz, 1982.

Beaune, Colette. Naissance de la nation française. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.

Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, 2 vols, Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1898–1901. (BHL)

Csernus, Sándor. “La Hongrie, les Français et les premières croisades.” In Les Hongrois et l’Europe: Conquête et intégration, edited by Sándor Csernus, Klára Korompay, 411–26. Paris–Szeged: Université de Szeged (JATE)–Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle (CIEH)–Institut Hongrois de Paris, 1999.

Eckhardt, Alexandre. De Sicambria à Sans-Souci: Histoires et légendes franco-hongroises. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1943.

Érszegi, Géza, ed. “Szent István király nagy legendája” [The Great Legend of King St Stephen]. In Árpád-kori legendák és intelmek [Legends and exhortations of the Árpád Era], Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1983.

Farmer, Sharon. Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Folz, Robert. Les Saints rois du Moyen Âge en Occident (VIe–XIIe siècles). Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1984.

Hartvic. “Life of King Stephen of Hungary.” Translated by Nóra Berend. In Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, edited by Thomas Head, 378–98. London: Routledge, 2001.

Király, Ilona. Szent Márton magyar király legendája. [The Legend of St Martin, king of Hungary]. Bibliothèque de l’Institut Français à l’Université de Budapest 8. Budapest, Eggenberger, 1929.

Klaniczay, Gábor. Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Knutsen, Katharine Anne, ed. Mystere de la vie et hystoire de monseigneur sainct Martin: édition critique. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Massachusets, 1976.

Koszta, László. “Szent Márton tiszteletének magyarországi kezdete: Megjegyzések Pannonhalma alapításához” [The beginnings of St Martin’s cult in Hungary: Remarks on the foundation of Pannonhalma]. In Tiszatáj 55 (2001): 79–84.

Lecoy de la Marche, Albert. Vie de saint Martin: évêque de Tours, apôtre des Gaules. Tours: A. Mame et fils, 1895.

Legros, Huguette. La rose et le lys: étude littéraire du „Conte de Floire et Blancheflor.” Aix-en-Provence: Publications du CUERMA, 1992.

Leurquin, Anne-Françoise and Savoye, Marie-Laure. “Notice de Vie de saint Martin de Tours, anonyme.” Jonas-IRHT/CNRS database. Accessed March 19, 2016. http://jonas.irht.cnrs.fr/oeuvre/7230

Oury, Guy-Marie. “Les sept dormants de Marmoutier: La vocation à la réclusion,” Analecta Bollandiana 99 (1981): 315–27.

Pitra, J. B., ed. Analecta sanctae Hildegardis opera Spicilegio Solesmensi parata. Monte Cassino: n.p., 1882. [Reprint: Farnborough, 1966.] Accessed February 25, 2016. https://archive.org/stream/analectasanctae00hildgoog#page/n630/mode/2up.

Robert d’Orbigny. Le conte de Floire et Blancheflor, edited by Jean-Luc Leclanche. Paris: Champion, 2003.

Roussel, Claude, ed. La Belle Hélène de Constantinople: Chanson de geste du XIVe siècle. Textes littéraires français 454. Geneva: Droz, 1995.

Seláf, Levente. “Egy exemplum változatai: A magyar királyfi mint Mária jegyese és aquileiai pátriárka.” [Variants of an exemplum: The prince of Hungary as bridegroom of the Virgin and patriarch of Aquileia]. In Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 113, no. 5–6 (2008): 582–98.

Seláf, Levente. “Párhuzamos életrajzok: Szent Erzsébet és Ysabelle de France legendái” [Parallel lives: Legends of St Elizabeth of Hungary and Isabelle de France]. In Árpád-házi Szent Erzsébet kultusza a 13–16. században [The cult of St Elizabeth in the thirteenth–sixteenth centuries], edited by Dávid Falvay, 141–51. Studia Franciscana Hungarica 2. Budapest, Magyarok Nagyasszonya Ferences Rendtartomány, 2009.

Söderhjelm, Werner. Das altfranzösische Martinsleben des Péan Gatineau aus Tours. Tübingen, 1896.

Thompson, John Jay. “Introduction to Wauchier de Denain.” In La vie mon signeur seint Nicholas le beneoit confessor, 11–47. Geneva: Droz, 1999.

Tolan, John. “Le baptême du roi « païen » dans les épopées de la Croisade.” Revue de l’histoire des religions, 217, no. 4 (2000): 707–31.

Wauquelin, Jean. La Belle Hélène de Constantinople: Mise en prose d’une chanson de geste, edited by Marie-Claude de Crécy. Geneva: Droz, 2002.

Website

JONAS database http://jonas.irht.cnrs.fr/

1 In parallel with the redaction of this study I prepared an article in Hungarian on Old French legends about St Martin, containing more citations of medieval sources and adopting a somewhat different approach. It will be published in a volume dedicated to the 1700th anniversary of St Martin. The main arguments of the two texts are the same, but they are not identical.

2 Koszta, “Szent Márton,” 79–84.

3 According to St Gregory of Tours, Clovis was also helped by St Martin before a battle, so his role as a helper in military affairs was well attested for a long time.

4 Csernus, “La Hongrie,” 411–26.

5 The best documented and even today still most influential overview of the French tradition of St Martin’s Hungarian origins is a study published in Hungarian by Ilona Király in 1929, see Király, Szent Márton. A point of reference in Hungarian scholarship, it is practically unknown outside the country, except for some references given by Sándor Eckhardt, who refers to it in his book dedicated to the Hungarian–French cultural relations of the Middle Ages. See Eckhardt, Sicambria. Király collected with great competence and engagement numerous records of medieval French and Hungarian ecclesiastical relations in French archives and libraries before World War II, when, in 1940, the municipal library of Tours was bombed, resulting in the disappearance of several documents. For this reason, her work remains an important source collection, but several minor faults and misunderstandings in it make it necessary to revise her overview.

6 Accessed October 11, 2016, http://www.viasanctimartini.eu/.

7 Bibliotheca hagiographica latina (BHL). The only modern edition of the Historia is in the Patrologia Latina vol. 71, c. 1106–08. It is not reliable and does not really help clarify the original form of the text. I could not collate the surviving manuscripts, so I take these data from the PL-edition of the text. For a list of the manuscripts see Oury, “Les sept dormants,” 319.

8 Oury, “Les sept dormants.”

9 Farmer, Communities of Saint Martin.

10 See Klaniczay, Holy Rulers; Folz, Les saints rois.

11 He was bishop of Paris, 1160–96, see Király, Szent Márton, 39.

12 This knowledge of the lives of Hungarian saints would not be exceptional, as the anonymous author of the oldest French legend (circa 1243–62) of St Elisabeth of Hungary claims to have read the legend of St Stephen, see Seláf, “Párhuzamos életrajzok,” 141–51.

13 Hartvic, “Life of King Stephen,” 378–98; Érszegi, “Szent István király nagy legendája,” 27.

14 Király, Szent Márton, 32–33.

15 Király considered Amnarus as equivalent with Arnaldus, Florus with Flodulfus, Hilgrinus with Galechisus, see Király, Szent Márton, 33.

16 I remark very prudently that to my ears the name Aumarus/Amnarus (Martin’s great-grandfather) is more similar to the Hungarian Álmos (Almus/Aumus) than to Arnaldus, Pepin’s great-grandfather, an analogy proposed by Király. Of course, such a precise knowledge of the names of Hungarian leaders by the author of the Historia is not probable at all.

17 Robert d’Orbigny, Le conte de Floire et Blancheflor.

18 Legros, La rose et le lys, 14–35.

19 Adenet le Roi, Berte as grans piés.

20 Pitra, Analecta sanctae Hildegardis, 582–91.

21 Söderhjelm, Das altfranzösische Martinsleben.

22 MS 1025, fol. 117r-v. This is my transcription. I am very grateful to Régis Rech, director of the Bibliothèque Municipale of Tours, for providing me with the digital reproduction of some folios of the manuscript, which enabled me to transcribe this passage.

23 Knutsen, Mystere, 29 sq.

24 Although there is no evidence in support of it, the notion that the mystery play could have been composed for or performed on the occasion of the alliance of the French, Polish and Hungarian crowns in 1500, sealed by the marriage of Anne de Foix-Candale and King Wladislaus II of Hungary in 1502, is a charming hypothesis.

25 Roussel, La Belle Hélène de Constantinople.

26 Wauquelin, La Belle Hélène de Constantinople.

27 Archives Indre-et-Loire, Liasse G. 365. I am very grateful to the personnel of the archive, who sent me some high-quality digital reproductions of the document.

28 The attribution comes from Lecoy de la Marche, who at the end of the nineteenth century could still read the title of the table. The photos I received from the Archives Indre-et-Loire do not enable one to read the title of the text, which is badly damaged. Lecoy de la Marche’s reading is the following: “Généalogye du tres glorieux confesseur et amy de Nostre Syeur monsieur S. Martin, évesque de Tours, extraicte de diverses escriptures aucthenticques, composée a la dévotion du tres chrestyen roy de France Louys, unziesme de ce nom, et par son commendement mise en cest ordre par messire Ambroys de Cambray, docteur es droictz, conseiller et maistre des requestes ordinaire de l’hotel dudit seigneur,” see Lecoy de la Marche, Vie de saint Martin, 72. Ambroise was “maître des Requêtes de l’Hôtel du roi” from 1473; Louis XI died in 1483, so one can date the document between these two dates. It is not clear how or when the chart landed in the Archives Indre-et-Loire in Tours, and we do not know if the document was commissioned by the royal family, proving the interest of the dynasty in the patronage of St Martin, or by someone else related to Tours or Marmoutier.

29 Accessed October 11, 2016, http://jonas.irht.cnrs.fr/.

30 In the followings all transcriptions of the manuscripts are mine on the basis of the originals or digital copies available on Gallica (Accessed October 11, 2016, www.gallica.bnf.fr) or in the library of the IRHT in Paris. Exceptions are indicated in the footnotes.

31 Thompson, “Introduction”, 11–47. There is no critical edition of Wauchier’s Martinian dossier.

32 Some other variants: BNF fr. 185: “Sains Martins fu nez en la cité de Pannonie, d’un chastel qui Ysapharie estoit appelez.,” BNF fr. 412: “Seinz Martins fu nez de la contree de Pannone d’un chastel qi Ysabbarie avoit non.,” BNF fr. 413: “Saint Martin fut nez de Panone d’un chastel qui Ysapharie avoit non.,” BNF fr. 23117: “Sains Martins fu nez de Pavone d’un chastel qui Ysapharie avoit nom.”

33 Paris, BNF fr. 1534, fol. 74v-75r

34 Paris, BNF fr. 1534, fol. 54rb – 55rb Another version of the legend contained in the manuscript Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, 1430 (U. 093) ends with the same episode, the arrival of the seven sleepers to Tours: “…et quant il furent mors, l’emperour lour fist faire moult grant reverence et les fist canoniser et sont appeller les sept dormans, et sont apresent en lour sepultures a Tours en Touraine” (...and when they died, the emperor honoured them and beatified them. They are currently called the seven sleepers and they are buried in Tours, [a city] in Touraine.”) In this interesting legendary Martin’s life also appears in a very rare version, mentioned only in one other source. Unfortunately, I could not read the text of the Martin legend, while I had no access to the exemplar from Rouen, and the other testimony of the text was seriously damaged in a fire in 1944. I quote the incipit after the JONAS database: “Saint Martin fut de noble lignage et se convertit des son enfance moult religieusement” (St Martin descended of a noble lineage, and he converted in his childhood very piously”), see Leurquin and Savoye, “Notice.”

35 About the iconographic and literary motif see Tolan, “Le baptême du roi ‘païen’,” 707–31.

36 St Martin’s role in the ideology of the Frankish Kingdom and later in the French monarchy was constantly evolving. For the Merovingian kings St Martin was a patron saint, and Martin was seen as the apostle of the country. Later his cult was widespread in the Carolingian Empire, but from the twelfth century onwards, its importance diminished. In the times of the Capetian dynasty, Martin became, in addition to St Remy and St Denis, just one of the three major figures who converted Gaul to Christianity. During Louis the Fat’s reign (1081–1137), St Denis and the abbey dedicated to him acquired general prestige, and Denis surpassed the other two saints in the dynastic ideology. Martin’s popularity stayed intact all over France, but he had a serious rival as the main protector of the country. See Beaune, Naissance de la nation française, 80–81.

37 The topos of the pious Hungarian prince abandoning his kingdom to live as a monk has several variants. In one of them the prince becomes patriarch of Aquileia, see Seláf, “Egy exemplum változatai.”

2016_3_Burke

Volume 5 Issue 3 CONTENTS

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A Sister in the World: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in the Golden Legend 1

Linda Burke

Elmhurst College

 

I begin this essay with background information for a study of Elizabeth’s life story as disseminated throughout Western Christendom by Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend: first, her historical originality as a model of sanctity, and second, the remarkable transmission of the Legend itself, both in Latin and the vernacular. I conclude this section with a note on the larger political agenda of the Legend. The essay continues with sections on the uniqueness of Elizabeth’s example as a “sister in the world” within the context of other saints’ lives in the Legend, the author’s evidently purposeful deletions and additions to his source for her life, and Elizabeth’s legacy as perpetuated by the Golden Legend.

Keywords: Elizabeth of Hungary, thirteenth-century sainthood, Golden Legend, Franciscan spirituality, Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum

 

The story of St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31, canonized 1235) as disseminated all over western Christendom by Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend2 (completed ca. 1276), could not more perfectly fit the theme of “Hungarian saints abroad.”

Originally written in Latin for fellow Dominicans to use as a preaching aid, the Legenda Aurea (hereafter LA) was the most copied book in the Middle Ages after the Bible, with over a thousand manuscripts catalogued by Barbara Fleith in her magisterial work of scholarship.3 The entire collection is arranged in chronological order according to the liturgical year, beginning with Advent and ending in late November. Of the 178 chapters authored by Jacobus (many more were added later), the majority are saints’ lives, sequenced according to their feast days.4 The remaining chapters are mainly devoted to church holidays, with the penultimate chapter devoted (somewhat oddly) to a summary of world history with an emphasis on the author’s native Lombardy. Our Elizabeth appears twice in the LA, in a fully developed vita at the position appropriate for her feast day (then November 19),5 and again briefly noted as representing a milestone in the author’s capsule history of the church in the thirteenth century.6 Her presence in the LA is especially remarkable, and obviously purposeful on the part of the author, as Jacobus included only four thirteenth-century saints in the entire collection, preferring saints of the remote past, and only one woman among these near-contemporaries.7 As we will see, Jacobus gave special attention to her vita, crafting it as quite distinct from any other saint’s life in the entire collection, and using it to support a new model of the holy woman as “sister in the world,”8 both active as “Martha” in her works of charity, and contemplative as “Mary” in her intense piety and personal communication with Jesus.9 However, despite the foundational importance of Elizabeth’s example and the wide-reaching influence of the LA, Elizabeth’s legend as specially rendered by Jacobus has received very little focused attention, with only one sustained treatment (so far as I know) devoted to this topic alone.10

I will begin with background information for a study of Elizabeth’s legacy as spread far and wide by the Golden Legend: first, her historical originality as a model for sanctity, and second, the remarkable transmission of the Legend itself, both in Latin and the vernacular. This section concludes with a note on the larger political agenda of the Legend. I will continue with sections discussing the uniqueness of Elizabeth’s example within the context of other saints’ lives in the LA, the author’s evidently purposeful deletions and additions to his major source for her story, and Elizabeth’s legacy as carried forward (in large part) by the Legend.

Elizabeth the “Modern Saint”

Elizabeth lived at a time of renewal for the definition of sanctity in western Christendom. As explained in the foundational study by André Vauchez, the canonization of St Thomas Becket (1173) inaugurated an era in which saints who had recently died were increasingly popular with the laity and also sought after by the papacy as role models for Christians of their own day.11 These saints were actually understood and referred to as “new.”12 Beginning with St Francis (1228) and St Dominic (1234), members of the newly founded mendicant orders were quick to be canonized. Accordingly, mendicant communities were also among the strongest voices for the promotion of a new type of saint—living by rule, yet active in the world, with a new emphasis on the vita apostolica, especially zeal for the care of souls and relief of the poor.13 For our present purposes, it is important to remember that the mendicant movement provided new opportunities for women, even married women, to practice the ideals of humility, poverty, and a Christian life in the world. While some female mendicants (such as Clare of Assisi) would enter the cloister, others—with clerical support—remained in the lay estate while pioneering a life of hands-on involvement with the ill and the poor.14 Elizabeth of Hungary, as a “sister in the world,” was not unique in this regard. To give just one example, another contemporary holy woman with a similar life trajectory was the married beguine Marie d’Oignies (d. 1213), who like Elizabeth rejected personal wealth and devoted her entire life to good works in the world, especially direct treatment of the most repulsive medical conditions. Like Elizabeth and others, she was supported by a powerful male hagiographer, the bishop and crusade preacher Jacques de Vitry.15 In a striking departure from the usual misogamous tropes of medieval hagiography, both women’s husbands are described as supportive of their wives’ apostolic lifestyle, including their devotion to the poor,16 although unlike Elizabeth, Marie requested and was granted a celibate union.

Like Marie’s, Elizabeth’s example was promoted as a corrective and rebuke to heresy as it threatened the hegemony of the Catholic church. Since the leading heresy of the time, Catharism, affirmed a radical rejection of the body, Elizabeth’s unusual status—as happy wife and mother before her widowhood—was obviously welcomed as opportune.17 Elizabeth also role-modeled orthodoxy through her humble obedience to the brutal demands of her confessor, the inquisitor and crusade preacher Conrad of Marburg,18 although I will argue that (as testified by her female companions and thus partly reflected by Jacobus) she maintained her spiritual independence in crucial ways and even at times resisted his demands, as guided by her conscience.

While acknowledging that Elizabeth’s achievement did not arise in a vacuum, it is equally important to note the strikingly original elements in her self-fashioned paradigm for sanctity. As explained by André Vauchez, she surpassed other saints of the thirteenth century, both in her intimate participation in the life of the poor, and in her practical and larger-scale achievements in the provision of care for the suffering. For example, she set up a distribution center at the foot of Wartburg Castle for those too infirm to reach the elevation of the château,19 and in her widowhood she created her famous hospital in Marburg. Also highly distinctive, if not absolutely unique in her day, was Elizabeth’s Speisegebot, her refusal to partake of food obtained through oppression of the poor.20 Elizabeth’s uniqueness transcended the domain of good works; in her report of personal conversation with Jesus, she also practiced at the forefront of late medieval mystical experience.

A Legend on the Move

To understand the Golden Legend as a vector for Elizabeth’s reputation throughout the reaches of western Christendom, it is necessary first to review the textual history and transmission of the work as authored in Latin by Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1230–98), the Dominican prior provincial of Lombardy and later Archbishop of Genoa. Jacobus completed his first redaction before 1265, the date appearing on a manuscript of this family.21 No later than 1272-76, the author added ten more chapters (including Elizabeth’s) to the collection, bringing the number of chapters to 178.22 The original purpose of the work is not in doubt: the Latin Legend was created by a Dominican for Dominicans, especially future preachers23 studying at university. By the 1270s, the LA had spread through Dominican channels to the University of Paris, where it became a textbook for students who belonged to the Franciscan order and the secular clergy as well.24 As documented by Fleith, Elizabeth’s vita was included in the majority of manuscripts copied at the University of Paris,25 and from that center of influence, it spread to other universities and Europe at large. Many graduates, of course, would use their education to play a pastoral role as preachers and teachers to the laity.

While circulated widely in Latin, the LA was quickly translated into virtually every European vernacular, beginning at the turn of the fourteenth century. At least one version survives, and usually more, in French, English, Langue d’Oc, Catalan, Italian, several dialects of German, Czech, Hungarian, and other languages.26 In tandem with its emerging popularity in the languages that lay people could read, the Golden Legend was quickly recognized as an important book both about and for women. Although out of 200-plus saints named in the LA only 41 are women, and only five of these were married, this total equals dozens of female saints with a record of action and achievement27 that was obviously “relatable” to women. In at least one case, his life of St Katherine of Alexandria, Jacobus appears to have strategically enhanced the prestige of a woman saint, “[by supplying] five reasons, apparently original to him, why she was admirable ... her wisdom, eloquence, constancy, chastity, and dignity”; these “reasons” include her prowess at the philosophy and public preaching traditionally limited to men.28 Many vernacular manuscripts of the Golden Legend were commissioned, and/or owned, by influential laywomen and by houses of women religious.29 For our present purposes, the most interesting example may be the Légende dorée in its literal French translation by Jean de Vignay (ca. 1333), which includes the life of Elizabeth among the full roster of legends authored by Jacobus.30 One manuscript even displays a presentation picture from the Workshop of the Master of the Cité des Dames, showing the translator presenting a copy of the work to his patroness, Queen Jeanne de Bourgogne.31 To use as his Latin prototype, de Vignay would have doubtless had access to a manuscript of the complete LA in Latin as reproduced for students at the University of Paris, to judge from the evidence discussed above.

What kind of book was the Golden Legend, that foundational collection of exemplary Christian lives? On close inspection, it is found to be surprisingly limited in terms of “redeeming social value.” Few of the saints in the collection, the majority of them ancient martyrs, provide any kind of practical model for everyday Christian living. Although many saints are described as engaged in works of charity, I agree with Sherry Reames that the book is devoted far less to instruction in love of neighbor, than to affirming Church authority above all, praising virginity as the supreme way of life, and denigrating marriage and children as a stumbling block to salvation.32 I would add that the book is from beginning to end a justification of faith-based violence and killing, both in ancient times, and in the author’s immediate milieu. As retold in the LA, the passions of ancient saints quite often feature more pagans killed by divine intervention than Christians martyred; to give just one example, four thousand onlookers were annihilated by a shower of miraculous debris at the scene of Katherine of Alexandria’s decapitation.33 Jacobus’s contemporary Peter Martyr, one of the four “contemporary” saints included in the collection, was murdered by heretics as he was on a mission to convert or kill them.34 In the chapter on St Dominic, the saint is approvingly described as signing off on orders to have a group of heretics burned alive, sparing only one of them on a seemingly random premonition.35 Just as with the Jacobus’s own Order of Preachers and his late medieval Catholic Church, a major agenda of the Golden Legend is to shore up clerical authority and orthodoxy, even by intimidation and deadly force.

Elizabeth’s Vita as Unique within the Golden Legend

Elizabeth’s model of sanctity appears to have been just as original in the 1270s as it had been four decades earlier at the time of her death and canonization, to judge from the evidence of her vita as rendered by Jacobus de Voragine. While the historical Elizabeth was not entirely unique in her achievements, as noted above, there is simply no other life story similar to hers in the Legenda Aurea. In a variety of ways, Elizabeth’s vita stands alone, showing forth her distinctive contribution to medieval Christian spirituality despite the mediating voices of agenda-driven clerical interpreters.

Jacobus was evidently quite concerned to choose an acceptable role model for women aspiring to sanctity in his own time and place. The most striking novelty in Elizabeth’s portrayal, and one with no counterpart elsewhere in the LA, is the ambiguous religious status she adopted after the death of her husband—putting on a dingy gray habit suggesting the Minorite tradition, embracing celibacy once a widow, spinning wool with her own hands, and living in poverty with the poor, but not entering a cloister or taking formal vows. Her life transition included renunciation of earthly ties, on terms defined with precision by herself. In early widowhood, supervised by her confessor, but by her handmaids’ account acting with passionate conviction, Elizabeth prayed the Lord

 

to fill her with contempt for all temporal goods, to take from her heart her love for her children, and to grant her indifference and constancy in the face of every insult. When she had finished her prayer, she heard the Lord saying to her: “Your prayer has been favorably heard.” Elizabeth told her women: “The Lord had heard my voice graciously, because I regard all temporal things as dung, I care for my children no more than for [my other neighbors/aliis proximis], I make light of all contempt and disrespect, and it seems to me that I no longer love any but God alone.36

 

Elizabeth’s prayer to be released from love for her children is cruel and bizarre by any human standard, but compared to the lives of other canonized parents in the LA, it is mild and respectful of family ties. The collection abounds with examples of mothers (and at least one father) who prayed for their children to get sick and die (before losing their virginity), or to be swept off to heaven by martyrdom before their mothers’ eyes.37 Biblical prototypes were the mother of the seven martyred sons (including a small child) in the Book of Maccabees38 and the gospel admonition to hate one’s parents, spouse, and children for the sake of the Lord.39 Closer to Elizabeth’s era, St Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) prayed for her mother, husband, and children to die so that she might devote her life to religion; her prayer was answered as she wished. Even if Angela’s plea is a trope of hagiography not to be understood as an actual death-wish, it is extreme even by the standards of its time.40 By contrast, Elizabeth is approvingly described by Jacobus as constructing her great renunciation with a loophole allowing her to love her children according to the biblical mandate that she love her neighbor as she loves herself, meaning she will never hurt them and will help them if she can. As a “sister in the world,” Elizabeth will not renounce all ability to love and be loved. Clearly, Jacobus wished to present an alternative to the extreme anti-family asceticism of Catharist heresy, and indeed, certain other chapters in his own Legenda.

Elizabeth had a lifelong gift for emotional intimacy, as evident from the testimony of her female companions. The naturalistic portrayal of her everyday personal bonding with friends is unlike any other descriptions in the Legenda. Guda, one of the four handmaids who testified at her canonization hearing, had lived with Elizabeth since the two women were about four or five years old until shortly after the death of Elizabeth’s husband in 1227.41 At the age of four, Elizabeth had been sent from the home of her parents, King Andrew and Queen Gertrude of Hungary, to be brought up in the home of her future husband Ludwig, who was soon to inherit his father’s position as landgrave of Thuringia. Thanks to Guda’s testimony, we have almost the only description of childhood in the entire LA, and the only one with a hint of a budding personality in a setting of naturalistic detail. For example, in a game that seems like tag, Elizabeth would always try to run into the chapel, where she would pray; at age five, she pretended to read the psalter even though she could not yet read; and if she won anything at games, she would share with playmates who had less than she.42 Although the child Elizabeth was pious, she was not oppressively so; she clearly enjoyed the same pastimes as other little girls, was a welcome companion, and displayed at an early age her lifelong generosity to the needy.

On the basis of the testimony of handmaid Isentrude, who had served Elizabeth since her marriage to Ludwig, Jacobus recounted an intimate companion’s description of a saint’s happy married life that is also completely different from anything else in the LA. Throughout the rest of the collection, almost all of the hundreds of saints are virgins, with only five named saints being married women. Of the saints who did marry, many (most famously St Cecilia) agreed with their spouse to a celibate union. Almost never in the 178 chapters is a normal marriage presented as a positive, much less a sanctifying influence for either husband or wife.43 There is nothing comparable elsewhere in the Legenda to the glimpse of a happy marriage in the following incident recalled by Isentrude:

 

She often rose during the night to pray, though her husband begged her to spare herself and give her body some rest. She had an arrangement with one of her maids who was closer to her than the others, that if by chance she overslept, the maid would wake her up by touching her foot. Once by mistake she touched the landgrave’s foot. He woke up with a start but understood what had happened, and patiently put up with it and pretended not to have noticed anything.44

 

This vignette is unique within the LA in several ways. Nowhere else does Jacobus acknowledge such a commonplace marital practice as sleeping close together, much less with tolerant amusement, and (as noted earlier), almost never does he portray a husband and wife in a true partnership supporting each other’s spiritual concerns. Jacobus’s record of Elizabeth’s grief at her husband’s death (in Otranto, struck down by illness as he attempted to go on crusade) is also markedly at odds with a collection in which the generality of sainted spouses prefer to be liberated through widowhood or cheer on one another’s martyrdom.45 Channeling the resignation of Job as well as Jesus in Gethsemane, but unmistakably affirming her love and grief for Ludwig, Elizabeth is quoted as lamenting

 

You know, O Lord, that I loved him dearly, as he loved you, yet for love of you I deprived myself of his presence and sent him to relieve your Holy Land. Delightful as it would be for me to live with him still, even were we reduced to go begging through the whole world, yet I would not give one hair of my head to have him back against your will, nor to recall him to this mortal life. I commend him and me to your grace.46

Indeed, according to André Vauchez, the tender portrayal of Elizabeth’s happy marriage in the handmaids’ testimonies (and the vitae based on them) was an outlier that was not be repeated in saints’ lives of the later Middle Ages.47

Scores of saints in the LA give money or goods to the poor, but following Isentrude, Jacobus portrays Elizabeth as taking a stand on systemic injustice and organizing programs for long-term social betterment that have no counterpart anywhere else in the Legend, and indeed, were remarkable by the standards of their time.48 Elizabeth not only imposed on herself the pains of poverty; she tried to challenge the larger socioeconomic structure that oppressed the powerless. Willingly obeying her confessor, she adopted a food boycott known as the Speisegebot, designed to prohibit all sustenance acquired by plunder or robbery of the poor:

 

Master Conrad forbade her to eat any food about which she had the slightest qualm of conscience, and she obeyed his behest so meticulously that however abundant the delicious foods might be, she and her servingmaids partook of the coarser fare. At other times she sat at table and divided and moved the food around on her plate, so as to seem to be eating and to ward off any notion that she was superstitious: thus, by her urbanity, she put all the guests at their ease. When they were traveling and she was worn out with the length and labors of the journey, and she and her husband were offered foods that might not have been honestly acquired, she accepted none of them and patiently ate stale black break soaked in hot water, as her maids did. . . . The Landgrave was tolerant of all this and said that he would gladly do the same himself if he were not afraid of upsetting the whole household.49

Again, the Landgrave is described as supporting his wife’s spiritual journey even when he could not follow. Although the boycott was required by her confessor, it is clear that Elizabeth was deeply committed to the practice. According to Kenneth Wolf, “[of] all the different aspects of Elizabeth’s saintly regimen reported to the commission by her handmaids, the Speisegebot was the most distinctive. I know of no other examples of such precise restrictions on consumption tied to issues of economic justice.”50 If this type of renunciation was not absolutely unique to Elizabeth, it was at least extremely rare.51 The saint’s commitment to alleviating poverty on the systemic as well as the individual level was active as well as passive. While her husband was still alive, Elizabeth fed the hungry and assisted the sick and dying, providing hands-on care even to the most disfigured,52 all of these actions deriving from the standard repertoire of Christian good works and echoed in countless other saints’ lives.

However, Elizabeth went further than giving handouts or other fleeting ministrations by establishing what seems to have been a day care center where the children of poor women, presumably patients in hospital, were not only fed and cared for, but obviously treated as children:

 

In the same house [her hospital in Eisenach] Elizabeth saw to it that children of poor women were well fed and cared for. She was so gentle and kind to them that they all called her Mother and, when she came into the house, followed her around as if she were in fact their mother, and crowded about her to be as close to her as possible. She also bought some small dishes and cups and rings and other glass toys for the children to play with. She was riding up the hill, carrying these things in the fold of her cloak, when they came loose and fell to the rocks below, but not one of the toys was broken.53

Elsewhere in the LA, there is no such natural and sympathetic depiction of childhood or childcare, much less of organized care for the children of the poor. Beyond her personal attention to individual patients, Elizabeth addressed the larger problem of the impoverished ill in her community by having hospitals built, first in Eisenach near Wartburg Castle where she lived with Ludwig,54 and during her widowhood in Marburg where she spent her final years.55 Elizabeth is the only saint in the collection, male or female, to carry out such a large-scale and practical plan. The medical volunteerism of St Francis—visiting a leprosarium, kissing the hands of the patients, and leaving them money—seems disorganized and sporadic by comparison.56 In the sustained attention and hands-on intimacy of her work as a hospital sister at Marburg, Elizabeth surpasses any other saint portrayed by Jacobus. There is no detail quite like this one in any other saint’s life of the collection: “After the hospital was built, she committed herself to serving the poor like a simple servingwoman. . . . she humbled herself so completely that when a poor child who had only one eye and was covered with scabs came into the hospital, she took him in her arms to the privy seven times in one night and willingly washed his bedclothes.”57

Jacobus is also careful to describe Elizabeth’s contemplative life with vivid circumstantial detail, in a manner having no counterpart elsewhere in the LA. Following Isentrude, he describes how at mass during Lent, Elizabeth received such a powerful vision that on returning home exhausted

 

she rested on the lap of one of her maidservants and gazed through the window at the heavens, and such joyousness swept over her face that she burst out laughing [risus mirabilis sequeretur]. Then, after she had for some time been filled with joy by this vision, suddenly she was weeping. Opening her eyes again, the earlier joy was renewed in her, and when she closed them again, back came the flood of tears. This went on till compline, as she lingered in these divine consolations. She did not speak a word for a long time, then suddenly exclaimed: “So, Lord, you wish to be with me and I with you, and I want nothing ever to separate me from you!”

Later on her [handmaidens] asked her to tell them [rogaretur ab ancillis], for the honor of God and their own edification, what was the vision she had seen. Conquered by their insistence, blessed Elizabeth said: “I saw the heavens opened, and Jesus leaning toward me in a most kindly way and showing me his loving face. The sight of him filled me with ineffable joy, and when it was withdrawn, I could only mourn my loss. Then he, taking pity on me, gave me again the joy of seeing his face and said to me: “If you wish to be with me, I will be with you.” And you heard my answer.58

The above passage is one of only two quotations of a near-contemporary female contemplative in the LA (Jacobus also cited Elizabeth of Schönau in repeating some details from her vision of the Assumption of the Virgin59), and it is the only one to describe the experience of a visionary encounter with Jesus. As explained by André Vauchez, this passage represents a clear choice on the part of Jacobus to embrace the creative forms of contemplation already introduced by women in the beguine milieux of Flanders and Germany.60 In his study of the LA, Jacques Le Goff notes Elizabeth’s joyful spirituality, including her holy laughter, as a “modern” thirteenth-century development in a monastic culture where laughter had been discouraged, and it was debated whether Jesus had ever laughed at all.61 Other saints in the collection are described as cheerful, but Elizabeth’s mirthful outburst is unusual if not unique within the LA.62 Following Isentrude, Jacobus describes Elizabeth as at home and alone during her vision except for her female companions; they were the ones who asked her to describe it and the ones who reported it later. Conrad neither was present when Elizabeth saw and spoke with Jesus, nor did he tell the story. By endorsing all aspects of Elizabeth’s contemplative model, Jacobus shows himself to be one of the thirteenth century mendicants, especially Dominicans, who engaged in the fruitful exchange between clerics and holy women that led to a new movement in spirituality and in the process, the emergence of a vernacular literature to support it.63

It is unclear whether Jacobus fully recognized the radicalism of Elizabeth’s mystical revelation in a context independent of male authority. In most of her vita, he reports approvingly on Elizabeth’s subservience to her confessor, while not appearing to recognize her spiritual independence of his authority, and even her occasional rebellion. Solely in order to make her suffer and break her will, Conrad dismissed her beloved long-time attendants Guda and Isentrude, causing great pain on both sides, replacing them, at least at first, with harsh and uncongenial women.64 Although Elizabeth accepted the change, she never defends his arbitrary punishments as justified, saying only that she herself had chosen his harsh discipline in order to grow closer to God by depriving herself of earthly satisfactions:

 

“For God’s sake [propter deum] I fear mortal man as much as I ought to fear the heavenly judge. Therefore I choose to give my obedience [obediantiam facere volui] to Master Conrad, a poor, undistiguished man, rather than to some bishop, so that every occasion of worldly consolation may be taken away from me.”65

 

Later, Conrad had her flogged so severely that marks were still visible on her body three weeks later, all because, as rendered by Jacobus, she had visited a convent at “the earnest request of some nuns . . . without obtaining permission from her spiritual master . . .”66 Consoling herself and her companions, Elizabeth never expressed remorse for her innocent action or any intention to change her behavior; rather, she accepted Conrad’s punishment as practice in resigning herself to adversity imposed by the will of God: “The sedge grass lies flat when the river is in flood, and when the water recedes, the sedge straightens up. So, when some affliction befalls us, we should bow to it humbly and, when it passes, be lifted up by spiritual joy to God.”67 It is unclear whether Jacobus recognized Elizabeth’s spiritual independence of her “master”’s will, an independence with no parallel in any saint’s example amid the relentlessly pro-clerical agenda of the LA.

Finally, Jacobus adorned his vita of Elizabeth with expressions of tenderness that are remarkable in comparison to other chapters in the collection. In a departure from his usual style, he interpolates a personal meditation, complete with first person verbs exceptional for the LA, at the scene of her holy deathbed:

 

The bird that perched between Elizabeth and the wall, and sang so sweetly that she sang with it, we take [credimus] to have been her angel, who was delegated to be her guardian and also to assure her of eternal joy. . . . We believe [credimus] that the birds that sang jubilantly on the ridge of the church roof were angels sent by God to carry her soul to heaven.68

On this note of personal affirmation, Jacobus moves on to his recitation of her posthumous miracles, of less concern to us here.

 

Reworking His Source: What Jacobus Chose to Omit, Revise, or Retain

Within the context of the LA, as we have seen, Elizabeth’s vita is exceptional. As discussed by André Vauchez, Elizabeth’s life is the only one in the entire collection that was based on a sort of rough draft primary source,69 a group of testimonies from the saint’s canonization hearing of just a few decades earlier. Even more remarkable, this document, known as the Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum (Statements of the Four Handmaids),70 is based entirely on the voices of women, translated from their native German into Latin and filtered by clerical authorities, but nonetheless replete with details that only an intimate female companion would know.71 André Vauchez’s analysis underscores the uniqueness and extraordinary value of the handmaids’ testimony:

 

The Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum constitutes a very precious document. In contrast with later processes of canonization, the witnesses express themselves with almost total freedom; their statements are only rarely guided by questions and they are not yet bound by the rigid system of articuli interrogatorii, as would be the case in the fourteenth century.72

In much of his life of Elizabeth, as we have seen, Jacobus closely adhered to the Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum, a new type of source for the life of a new type of saint.

In certain crucial passages, however, he altered his source (or deleted material entirely) with the effect of bringing Elizabeth’s radical new model of sainthood into line with the mainly conservative values of the work as a whole: promotion of Catholic orthodoxy, unquestioned church authority, traditional subservience for women, and inextricable from all these, violence in the service of faith. Jacobus appears to have maintained consistency with this agenda both in his changes to the record, and in what he chose to retain.

It is no surprise that Jacobus omitted from his Legenda the sole anecdote from the handmaids’ testimony where Elizabeth directly questioned clerical authority, in this case a group of male religious who seem to have been proudly showing her around their cloister church:

 

Once when she came to a certain cloister of monks who had no possessions and who fed themselves only from daily alms, she was shown the sumptuous gilded sculptures in their church. She said to the approximately two dozen monks who were standing near her: “Look, it would be better to invest this revenue in your clothing and food than in your walls, because you ought to carry such images as these only in your hearts.” When one of them said, with regard to a particularly beautiful image, that it suited her well, she responded: “I have no need of such an image because I carry it in my heart.”73

 

As he states elsewhere in the LA, Jacobus held a favorable view of religious images in church; he considered such pictures a conduit for the word of God and an aid to Christian faith.74 Clearly, this particular example of Elizabeth’s audacity and spiritual independence could not be admitted into the very conservative and always pro-clerical Legenda Aurea. For Jacobus, the problem went beyond the fact that he disagreed with her negative opinion of the visual arts. The entire LA, at least in the chapters authored by Jacobus, contains no approved example of a lay person (much less a woman) defying or even standing in opposition to any representative of the clerical estate.

In another case, Jacobus simply rewrote the handmaids’ testimony to justify Conrad’s cruelty and render Elizabeth at fault. According to the eyewitness testimony of Irmgard, one of Elizabeth’s replacement handmaids who seems have become her close friend, the incident where Elizabeth entered the convent at Altenberg, and was flogged by Conrad as punishment, did not take place exactly as described by Jacobus and quoted above. As Irmgard tells the story,

 

[t]he ladies who were there [at the convent at Altenberg] asked Master Conrad to give permission to blessed Elizabeth to enter the cloister upon her arrival so that they could see her. Master Conrad responded: “She may enter, if she wishes,” confident that she would not. But Elizabeth, taking Master Conrad at his word, did enter, thinking that she had permission to do so. . . . Because Sister Irmgard had been responsible for getting the key and opening the door to the cloister—though she had not entered with Elizabeth—Master Conrad had her prostrate herself alongside blessed Elizabeth and ordered Brother Gerhard to beat them hard with a certain kind of whip that was big and long. While Gerhard beat them Master Conrad sang the Miserere mei Deus.75

Irmgard’s testimony puts Conrad clearly in the wrong for punishing Elizabeth, who did not knowingly disobey his command, and even more at fault for causing a handmaid to be lashed for merely helping her mistress. Both women bore stripes on their bodies for three weeks or more.76 (Elizabeth’s little daughter Gertrude had been placed at the convent,77 a fact not mentioned in the handmaid’s testimony, which may explain why Conrad was so enraged at the visit—he may have judged his spiritual daughter to be backsliding from her renunciation of love for her children.) Jacobus could not accept such an open, well justified critique of “Master” Conrad, who (as he must have known) was an inquisitor authorized by Pope Gregory IX to root out heresy throughout the German lands during the same period as he served as Elizabeth’s confessor.78 As Elizabeth’s confessor, Conrad of Marburg could not be censured, even by implication.

In another case of simply suppressing details of the story in order to whitewash Conrad’s brutality, Jacobus omitted Isentrude’s account of Elizabeth’s Christian charity as superior to that of her “Master,” as the saint defied his command to limit her almsgiving; if caught red-handed aiding a pauper, Elizabeth bore her confessor’s chastisements willingly, “mindful of the buffeting suffered by the Lord,”79 but she is never said to have obeyed her confessor’s restrictions on her charity, only to have accepted his punishments as opportunities to share in the suffering of Jesus. Clearly, Jacobus had no place in his agenda for any obvious breach of unquestioning obedience to clerical authority, whether bravely articulated by Irmgard after the fact, or reportedly practiced even by a saint.

Although Jacobus followed his source in paraphrasing Elizabeth’s beautiful speech on the return of her husband’s bones (quoted above), where she honors him for having set forth on crusade,80 the Dominican introduced a detail not present in the Dicta, by inserting a statement that she had originally exhorted her husband to go.81 As noted by Eszter Konrád, this may be Jacobus’s most significant alteration to his major source for the vita,82 as it transforms Elizabeth from a mere supporter to the instigator of her husband’s fatal voyage as he joined in a chaotic attempt to “rescue” the Holy Land.

This time hewing closely to Irmgard’s testimony, Jacobus approvingly reports that Elizabeth approved of and practiced faith-based violence at the personal level as well as (in his account) promoting it overseas. When a poor old woman in her hospital in Marburg refused to go to confession, Elizabeth beat her with rods until she complied.83 In the incident at the convent noted earlier, the saint not only accepted the cruelty done to her, but appears to have had no objection when a handmaid was forced to share in the punishment. Of course, there is also the enigma of why a saint who was so deeply concerned with oppression on the larger societal scale, would have chosen as her spiritual father an inquisitor who from 1227 (near the beginning of his association with her) was actively engaged in a reign of terror across the German-speaking lands. Attended by the same Gerhard who whipped the saint and her handmaid, and licensed by Pope Gregory IX, Master Conrad traveled from town to town accusing of heresy anyone who was unlucky enough to be brought to his attention, often by informers with agendas of their own. The accused had only two choices: confess their “guilt” or be burned at the stake. To save oneself, it was also necessary to implicate others. When Conrad was finally murdered in March 1233 by a group of nobles he had been reckless enough to accuse, Pope Gregory professed himself grief-stricken, but pointedly neglected making any moves to have the inquisitor canonized; Conrad had made himself too much hated, and his victims were now held to be martyrs themselves.84 By all accounts, and with Jacobus’s evident approval, Elizabeth clung to this monster during her married life and for as long as she lived.85

As noted above, St Elizabeth is mentioned in two different chapters of the LA, not only in her rather lengthy vita, but in Jacobus’s capsule summary of historical events leading up to his own day. Honoring crusaders and inquisitors, Jacobus places Elizabeth’s life firmly in the context of the war on heresy to which his work was so heavily devoted:

 

At this time the Orders of Friars Preachers and Friars Minor arose. Innocent sent legates to King Philip of France to get him to invade the Albigensian area in the South and destroy the heretics. Philip took them captive and had them burned at the stake. Finally Innocent crowned Otto (IV) emperor, exacting an oath that he would safeguard the rights of the church. . . . Saint Elizabeth, daughter of the King of Hungary and wife of the landgrave of Thuringia, lived at this time. It is recorded that among a great number of miracles she raised many, namely, sixteen, dead to life and gave sight to a person born blind. It is said that an oil still flows from her body.86

 

For Jacobus, Elizabeth’s shining example is a weapon in the crusade against heresy, just as surely as the violence often used to carry it out.

Jacobus also refashioned the “givens” of Elizabeth’s vita in a more conservative direction by adding a passage describing how the saint was unwilling to marry, preferring to die a virgin, but agreed to marriage only in obedience to her father’s will and to bring Christian children into the world; he elaborates, “. . . while bound to the law of the conjugal bed, she was not bound to enjoyment.”87 This passage reinforces the pro-clerical, thus anti-matrimonial bias of the LA as a whole, but is obviously at odds with the statements by her female companions, who never testify that Elizabeth was reluctant to marry Ludwig, and who describe the couple as deeply in love and enjoying a normal married life that included sleeping together. Further on, Jacobus makes an important omission in his retelling of events from the handmaids’ testimonies, evidently in the interest of portraying Elizabeth as strictly conforming with the subjection of women as required by her faith. The handmaids describe how when Elizabeth was visited by wealthy matrons during her married life, she would rebuke them for their prideful lifestyle “as if she were preaching (quasi predicans.)”88 Of course, women were not allowed to preach, and Jacobus never shows us an Elizabeth doing anything like predication. His vita keeps her spoken communication within the limited territory allowed to women and already defended on behalf of the beguines: he describes her as “giv[ing] instruction to the ignorant (incultos homines edoceret),”89 speaking words of consolation to the sick (“verba exhibebat consolationis”)90 and recounting her vision of Jesus in a private context, as noted above, but never preaching.91 It is notable that Jacobus gives us female saints who preached in public, but all in ancient times: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha, and Katherine of Alexandria,92 among one or two others. His model of sainthood for the “modern” woman allowed for an active life where the saint might give edification in private even to men, but she would be subservient to clerical authority and sternly enjoined from preaching.

 

A Golden Legacy

Although the Golden Legend was not the only source transmitting Elizabeth’s legacy to the world, it is safe to say that none traveled any further abroad or in a greater number of manuscript witnesses, at least in the later Middle Ages. (The Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum, Jacobus’s major source for her vita, survives in seven manuscripts.)93 So indebted to the Golden Legend for its dissemination to the world, how is Elizabeth’s legacy alive today? Except to historians, Conrad of Marburg and his war on Catharism are largely forgotten, while Elizabeth’s golden paradigm endures. As recognized by her contemporaries, St Elizabeth invented and lived a new model of sanctity, the “sister in the world” combining direct experience of Jesus with hands-on relief of the sick and poor, and not only with occasional palliative measures, but in programs of ongoing societal impact such as a daycare center and hospitals. As explained by Gábor Klaniczay, “Elizabeth’s life and saintly glory became the major career script” for other women to follow.94 Although it is anachronistic to call Elizabeth a Franciscan tertiary,95 her example certainly helped give rise to the movement. She is the patron saint of Third Order and an inspiration to secular Franciscans96 along with many others who continue her works of mercy in the world. As a happily married mother, she opened the door to a model of sainthood that was relatively supportive of family ties, especially by the standards of her time. She was a woman of spiritual courage and independence in a brutally patriarchal milieu. Jacobus affirmed her association with violence as a means of defending the faith; in the interest of honesty this part of her legacy must be confronted, not denied. However, the majority of his chapter on Elizabeth is devoted to memorable examples of her loving kindness in action. This is the legacy of St Elizabeth of Hungary that continues to instruct and inspire.

 

 

 

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1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at a session of the Women in the Franciscan Intellectual Tradition, 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 2013. I wish to thank the WIFIT community for encouraging my work.

2 When referring collectively to the Legend in all its incarnations, Latin and vernacular, I will call it the Golden Legend, the equivalent of its traditional Latin title.

3 The Latin MSS are listed and described in Fleith, Studien, 55–331.

4 When quoting or referring to the Latin LA, I will use the now standard edition, Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni. Tavarnuzze: SISMEL, 1998, (cited as Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea). When quoting or referring to the Legend in English, I will use the only modern English translation: Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saint, trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, (cited as Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend). Two fully annotated editions of the Legend are now available: Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée, (edited and translated by Alain Boureau in Modern French), and Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, con le miniature, (edited and translated by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni and Francesco Stella, a Latin–Italian bilingual edition).

5 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1156–79; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:302–18.

6 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1282; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2: 384.

7 On the four saints, Francis, Dominic, Peter Martyr, and Elizabeth, see Vauchez, “Jacques de Voragine.”

8 The exact phrase “sister in the world” is found not in Jacobus, but in the source for all or most of Elizabeth’s vita, the Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum (Statements of the Four Handmaids), based on the depositions taken from Elizabeth’s close female associates at her canonization hearing, January 1235. As reported in the Dicta, Elizabeth said “Vita sororum in seculo despectissima est et, si esset vita despectior, illam elegissem” (“Dicta,” in Quellentstudien, 135); “The life of the sisters in this world is the most despised of all. If there were a life that was more despised, I would choose it” (“Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 212). The edition of the original Latin is “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 112–40. The Dicta have been translated into English by Kenneth Baxter Wolf, “Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum,” in Wolf, The Life and Afterlife, 193–216, (cited as “Dicta,” trans. Wolf) and by Lori Pieper as “Statements of the Four Handmaids,” in Pieper, The Greatest of These is Love, 119–48.

9 See Luke 10:38–42. Jacobus praises Elizabeth as Mary in her prayers and Martha in her works of mercy: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1167, 1169; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:310, 311.

10 The only previous study entirely devoted to Elizabeth in the Golden Legend is Konrád, “The Legend of Saint Elizabeth,” easily available online. My approach (as focused on Jacobus’s selective use of the Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum and the political agenda involved) is complementary to, not duplicative, of hers. Other discussions of Elizabeth in the Golden Legend have been brief: she is one of the four thirteenth century saints discussed in Vauchez, “Jacques de Voragine.” Ottó Gecser includes the LA in his comprehensive overview of the thirteenth-century sources on Elizabeth’s life: “Lives of St. Elizabeth,” 71–73. Both annotated editions of the Golden Legend have informative notes on her chapter: Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée, 1454–58, and Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, con le miniature 2:1694–96. See also Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time, 161–64, and Epstein, Talents of Jacopo da Varagine, 150–51.

11 Vauchez, Sainthood, 106–112.

12 Ibid., 111.

13 For an overview of the mendicant role in the new model for sanctity, both as saints and as promoters of causes, see Ibid., 113–27.

14 On female mendicant saints specifically, see Vauchez, Sainthood, 348–54; on lay female “new” saints, see Vauchez, Sainthood, 369 ff.

15 On parallels between Marie d’Oignies and Elizabeth, see Wolf, “The Life,” 63 ff., and Elliott, Proving Woman, 107. Elizabeth’s aunt, St Hedwig (canonized 1267), practiced good works as a laywoman following the death of her husband; see Wolf, “The Afterlife,” 4, n.4.

16 Wolf, “The Life,” 61 n.82.

17 Elliott, Proving Woman, 100. See also Michael Goodich, “The Politics of Canonization.”

18 Elliott, Proving Woman, 101.

19 Vauchez, “Charité et pauvreté,” 165–66 [29–30].

20 See nn. 49–51, below. Vauchez reviews but rejects the theory that she practiced the Speisegebot on Conrad’s orders to boycott food from lands her husband had seized from the church, or as a penance for wives of crusaders; he argues that she considered seigneurial exactions of food to be organized robbery of the poor: “Charité et pauvreté,” 169–70 [33–34].

21 Fleith, Studien 14–15, calls 1252 (the death of Peter Martyr) the terminus post quem for the LA, and 1265, the date of a first redaction MS, the terminus ante quem.

22 For the earliest dateable MS of the second redaction with Elizabeth’s vita, see Maggioni, Ricerche sulla composizione, 96, also 9–12, 550. Maggioni explains how 178 chapters are original to Jacobus, and of these 178, which ten belong to the author’s later redaction: passim, esp. 131–34.

23 On the LA as a collection for use in sermons, see Boureau, La Légende dorée: le système narratif, 21–23; Boureau, Introduction, xxix–xxx; and Fleith, Studien, 37–42.

24 For Fleith’s complex argument documenting the university connection on the basis of pecia markings, see her Studien, 41–42, 419 ff., and Fleith, “Legenda aurea: destination,” 41–48. Boureau considers but dismisses Carla Frova’s argument for the absence of a university connection: Introduction, xxiii–iv.

25 Fleith, Studien, 341, 355–56.

26 On the Legend in French, English, Langue d’Oc, German, and English, see the articles in Dunn-Lardeau, Legenda aurea: sept siècles. On at least twelve MSS of the LA in Italian, see Falvay, “St Elizabeth,” 139 and 139 n.6. On the Legend in Italian, English, Czech, and Hungarian, see Konrád, “The Legend of Saint Elizabeth,” 22–88. On eight different versions in French, see Ferrari, “La Légende dorée.” The most popular French translation was by Jean de Vignay; the modern edition is Jacques de Voragine, Légende dorée, édition critique, (edited by Brenda Dunn-Lardeau). On a German translation complete with Elizabeth’s vita, see Williams-Krapp, “Die deutschen Übersetzungen.” For more on the vernacular translations, see n. 29, below.

27 For example, see the erudition of Katherine of Alexandria and Paula; also Mary Magdalene as “apostle to the apostles” who (with her sister Martha) preached to the pagans in France, all located via the index to any edition.

28 Epstein, Talents of Jacopo da Varagine, 159.

29 For examples of women who commissioned vernacular translations, see Maddocks, “Pictures for Aristocrats,” 8, on de Vignay’s highly popular translation as originally presented to Queen Jeanne de Bourgogne, wife of Philip IV de Valois. See Ferrari, “La Légende dorée,” esp. 128, on another French translation commissioned by a woman, Béatrice de Bourgogne. On a “comtesse” who ordered saints’ lives in Catalan, see Brunel, “Les saints franciscains,” 110. On Isabella of Castile’s ordering a Spanish “santoral,” see Gatland, Women from the Golden Legend, 4. On ownership of an Italian Legend by Lady Judith of Forzate, a Dominican tertiary of the Lombard province, see Richardson, Materials for a Life, 8–9. For an example of a German legend in a house of Béguines, see Wetzel, “Légende et spiritualité monastique,” 211–26.

30 Elizabeth’s vita appears at Jacques de Voragine, Légende dorée, édition critique, 1069–83.

31 Formerly London, British Library, MS Phillipps loan 36/199; now privately owned. For description and discussion, see Maddocks, “Illuminated Manuscripts of the Légende dorée,” 156–57. She includes a reproduction of the presentation picture at “Illuminated Manuscripts of the Légende dorée,” fig. 66. I wish to thank Hillary Maddocks for sharing in our personal communication her knowledge of the manuscript and its sale into private hands.

32 Reames, Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination, passim, especially 26, 98–99, 106–07.

33 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1210; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:338.

34 Peter questions a heretic taken captive, no doubt with the intention to have him killed if he does not recant: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 1:423; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:256.

35 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:732; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:47.

36 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1166; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:309, with my preferred translation and original Latin in square brackets. For Isentrude’s testimony on which this passage is based, see “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 126, and “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 205.

37 Legends in which parents pray for their children to die or rejoice at their martyrdom, located via the index to any edition: St Hilary (both daughter and wife); St Sebastian (exhorting the parents); St Paula (who didn’t pray for her children to die, but abandoned all but one of them); St Petronilla (whose father St Peter prayed for her to get sick and die while still a virgin); St Sophia; St Julitta (whose martyred son was only three years old); St Felicity; St Symphorian.

38 2 Maccabees 7.

39 Luke 14:26.

40 See Tomkinson, “‘Poverty, Suffering and Contempt,’” 114–15. More typical for saints’ lives is the approving report that he or she displayed no emotion on the death of child or children: Vauchez, Sainthood, St Charles of Blois, 365; Elizabeth’s aunt St Hedwig, both husband and son, 373.

41 “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 112; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 193.

42 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1157; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:303. Based on Guda’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 112; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 193. On the growth of interest in childhood and the childhood of saints, see Vauchez, Sainthood, 509. On Elizabeth’s childhood with an emphasis on its commonalities with conventional hagiography, see Goodich, “A Saintly Child.”

43 Like a man, a woman is safer and happier unwed; Domitilla is dissuaded from marriage in the chapter on Saints Nereus and Achilleus by arguments that husbands are cruel, abusive, and unfaithful to their wives. A rare exception to the overwhelmingly misogamous LA is Elizabeth’s ancestor St Stephen of Hungary, cited in Jacobus’s brief history of the world, who was converted to Christianity by his wife “Gala”: see Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1276; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:380.

44 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1159; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:304. Based on Isentrude’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 116; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 197.

45 For examples, located via the index to any edition, see St Anastasia; St Hilary (hoping for death of daughter and wife); St Adrian; St Genebald (in the life of St Remy).

46 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1165; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:308. Based on Isentrude’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 124; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 204.

47 Vauchez, Sainthood, 383–84.

48 See n. 20, above.

49 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1160–61; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:305–06. Based on Isentrude’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 115–16; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 196.

50 Wolf, “The Life,” 66. See also n. 20, above.

51 According to McNamara, “The Need to Give” 210, citing Jacques de Vitry’s Life of Marie d’Oignies 2:44, Marie in her youth chose to live on herbs she picked herself rather than partake of food from her mother’s house, which she regarded as the fruit of injustice and usury; on parallel renunciation by wives of usurers, see Elliott, Proving Woman, 94 n. 39.

52 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1161–62; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:306–07.

53 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1162–63; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:307. Based on Isentrude’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 119–20; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 200.

54 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1162; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:307. Based on Isentrude’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 119; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 199.

55 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1169; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:311. Based on handmaid Elizabeth’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 127–28; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 206.

56 As described in the “Life of St Francis,” Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1017; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:221. André Vauchez agrees that Elizabeth surpassed other thirteenth century saints in the hands–on intensity and organization of her care for the poor and ill: “Charité et pauvreté,” 165–66 [29–30].

57 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1169; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:311. Based on handmaid Elizabeth’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 128; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 207.

58 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1167–68; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:310. Based on Isentrude’s testimony, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 122–23; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 202–03.

59 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:787; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:82–83. Jacobus’s quotation of Elizabeth of Schönau is explained by Alain Boureau at Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée, 1345–46, nn. 18–20.

60 Vauchez, “Jacques de Voragine,” 53.

61 Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time, 163.

62 For example, St Dominic is lauded for his cheerful and calm disposition, but with no mention of laughter: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:734; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:53. Jacobus writes approvingly that St Bernard seemed never to laugh spontaneously, only to force his laughter: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:817; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:101.

63 Grundmann, Religious Movements, esp. 192–97, and Coakley, “Friars as Confidants.”

64 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1166; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:309. Based on the testimony of Isentrude, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 126–27; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 205.

65 Emphasis added. Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1166; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:309. Based on the testimony of Irmgard, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 135; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 212.

66 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1166; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:309.

67 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1166–67; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:309. Based on the testimony of Irmgard, ”Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 135–36; ”Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 212.

68 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1172; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:313; on these passages as Jacobus’s personal interjections, with first person verbs unusual for him, see Alain Boureau’s discussion in Jacques de Voragine, Légende dorée, 1457 n. 63.

69 Vauchez, “Jacques de Voragine,” 48. He is referring to the Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum, agreed to be almost the only if not the only source for the vita portion of Elizabeth’s legend in Jacobus’s LA: see n. 70, below. On medieval sources for the life of Elizabeth, including later vitae, see Gecser, “Lives of St. Elizabeth,” and Reber, Elisabeth von Thüringen, 9–34.

70 From my personal comparison, I agree with Vauchez, see n. 69 above, and Gecser, “Lives of St. Elizabeth,” 72 and 72 n.107, that Jacobus used only the earlier version, the Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum, and not the Libellus, available as Der sogenannte Libellus, ed. Huyskens. As explained by Andre Vauchez, “Charité et pauvreté,” 163 [27], five sets of documents were used in Elizabeth’s canonization process, concluded in 1235: Conrad of Marburg’s Summa Vitae, the Dicta Quatuor Ancillarum, and miracle depositions collected in 1232, 1233, and 1235.

71 Vauchez, “Jacques de Voragine,” 48. For more discussion of the sources of Elizabeth’s legend in the LA, both vita and miracles, see Konrád, “The Legend of Saint Elizabeth,” 19–22. Konrád agrees, 20, that the Dicta is the most important, and possibly the only source for Elizabeth’s vita in the Legenda.

72 Vauchez, “Charité et pauvreté,” 163 [28]; translation mine.

73 “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 214; “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 137–38.

74 St Ambrose had a vision of St Paul whom he recognized only by a painting he had seen: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 1:538; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:327. A Jewish boy-convert remains steadfast through martyrdom with the comfort of the Virgin Mary, whom he recognizes by a painting just seen on the altar as he took communion with the Christian children: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:796; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:87.

75 “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 135–36; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 212.

76 Irmgard, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 212; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 212.

77 Wolf, The Life and Afterlife, 212 n.57.

78 Elliott, Proving Woman, 95–106.

79 Isentrude, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 127; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 206.

80 Isentrude, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 124; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 204.

81 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1163; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:307.

82 Konrád, “The Legend of Saint Elizabeth,” 22.

83 Testimony of Irmgard, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 129; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 207; story retold by Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1169; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:311.

84 Elliott, Proving Woman, 95–100. As noted by Elliott, Proving Woman, 60–61, other inquisitors were “martyred” in the line of duty, but of these, only Peter Martyr was canonized; the common people simply refused to report any miracles of dead inquisitors, thus denying the basis for a process. Even Peter Martyr’s canonization was unpopular and much criticized: see Vauchez, Sainthood, 415–16 and 415 n.10.

85 I am aware of only one study entirely devoted to the moral conundrum of Elizabeth’s intimacy with Conrad: Werner, “Die heilige Elisabeth,” 45–69. At 63, Werner pleas for understanding Elizabeth in terms of her own time, not ours; however, Conrad was widely despised by his contemporaries: see Elliott, Proving Woman, 98–100.

86 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1282; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:384.

87 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1158; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:304.

88 Isentrude, “Dicta,” in Quellenstudien, 117; “Dicta,” trans. Wolf, 198.

89 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1159; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:304.

90 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1163; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:307.

91 For a discussion of the private admonitory speech permitted to women, including Beguines, see Wolf, “The Life,” 77 n. 144.

92 Mary Magdalene, “apostle to the apostles,” “preached Christ fervidly to them [a public crowd of pagans] (Christum constantissime predicabat)”: Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:376; Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 1:631. Katherine of Alexandria’s “eloquence was admirable; it was abundant when she preached (habuit enim eloquentiam facundissimam in predicando)”: Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:340. Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1214. Martha also preached (“predicaret”) in public: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:684; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:24. The Virgin Mary kept her memory of the Incarnation in her heart until it was time to preach it or write it (“tempus predicande vel scribende”) to Luke the Evangelist and others wanting to know: Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, 2:1069; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:253. However, Jacobus stopped short of suggesting that a contemporary woman should be allowed to preach.

93 Gecser, “Lives of St. Elizabeth,” 55. Of course, there were other lives of Elizabeth outside the LA: see Gecser, “Lives of St. Elizabeth,” passim. The LA was a major source for the spreading of her story, but not the only one.

94 Klaniczay, “Legends as Life Strategies,” 99–100, with emphasis on her saintly relatives.

95 According to Vauchez, Laity in the Middle Ages, 108, citing research by Meersseman, the Third Order was not founded until 1289 with the papal bull by Nicholas IV, Super Montem.

96 Pieper, The Greatest of These is Love, 101, explains how secular Franciscans (including herself) are especially inspired by Elizabeth’s example.

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