The Cult of Saint Katherine of Alexandria in Medieval Upper Hungarian Towns*

Dorottya Uhrin

Eötvös Loránd University, School for Historical Studies, Medieval Hungarian History Doctoral Program

 

The aim of this article is to survey the cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in towns of medieval Upper Hungary (today mostly in Slovakia). In the first part, I briefly summarize the origin of the veneration of St Katherine and the beginning of her cult in Hungary. The geographical scope of my own research is the Upper Hungarian region, mainly the towns. The veneration of St Katherine has left most traces in the towns settled by Germans. Some of her earliest churches were established by families of German origin in the thirteenth century. Interestingly, St Katherine’s cult became significant in several mining towns, presumably from the fourteenth century, and her popularity there suggests that she might have been venerated as a miners’ saint (together with St Barbara). The heyday of Katherine’s cult was the late Middle Ages, when her veneration spread to other towns: confraternities and altars were dedicated to her honor and her life was depicted on several altarpieces.

Keywords: St Katherine, urban history, virgin martyrs, mining towns, urban religiosity

Introduction

St Katherine of Alexandria was one of the celebrated female saints in the Middle Ages. She was a virgin martyr and a role model for women. St Katherine was regarded as a uniquely privileged saint and a powerful intercessor because of special privileges she received at the time of her death: a visitation from Christ, an emanation of oil from her bones, an effluence of milk of her body instead of blood, the miraculous preparation of sepulcher, and the hearing of petitions of those who would honor her memory.1 Therefore many were interested in promoting her cult. Although her ancestry and the way in which her cult spread are questionable, during the fourteenth and fifteenth century she became one of the most popular female saints in late medieval Europe, including Hungary.

Although several traces of St Katherine’s veneration has been researched in Western Europe,2 the only aspect of her cult in the medieval Hungarian Kingdom that has been a subject to research is the verse legend of St Katherine.3 In my paper I would like to trace the origin and the development of the cult of St Katherine in Upper Hungary. My research is concerned with the towns of Upper Hungary (today mostly in Slovakia). The analysis also extends to some rural places, however, so as to obtain a better understanding of the cult. I examine the different roles that she played as a patron saint in Upper Hungarian towns of different types. The most interesting aspect of St Katherine’s urban cult is her outstanding popularity in the Upper Hungarian mining towns. Since St Barbara is the most venerated miner-saint in Central Europe, Katherine’s role as the patrona of this towns is remarkable, and I will attempt to explain this phenomenon. In the late Middle Ages, when Katherine’s cult reached its peak all over Europe, her cult also spread to the other towns in Upper Hungary. Religious associations and altars were dedicated to her. I examine the donations to her altars which indicate her increasing popularity in Upper Hungary in the fifteenth century and beyond. Because of the complexity of St Katherine’s cult, my investigation is interdisciplinary: my sources are historical (charters, chronicles and testimonies), art historical (altarpieces, mural paintings and coats of arms) and literary (legends and masses).

The Cult of St Katherine

Origin of the Cult

According to her vitae, St Katherine lived and suffered martyrdom in late Antique Alexandria, a place considered rather exotic in the Middle Ages. Her shrine is supposed to be located at Sinai. The cult of Katherine – like that of other virgin martyrs – started to spread in the seventh and eighth centuries, when her name appeared in liturgical sources and the martyrologia of the Byzantine Empire. In Latin Christianity, the cult of Katherine spread in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, simultaneously with those of many other Eastern saints, including St George. Scholars generally explain the increasing interest in the virgin martyrs in terms of Mediterranean transcultural contacts during the crusades.4 Although the first Crusade seized the places where the virgin martyrs suffered martyrdom and their holiest shrines were supposed to be located, one can hardly find any references in the contemporary sources on the translation of the relics of Katherine from Sinai during the crusades. The discovery of the saint’s body on Sinai is a relatively late development of her cult,5 and the invention of her relics might have been the result of the popularity of her life in Greek.6 Her legend originally contained only her passio. The story of her miraculous birth began to circulate in the fourteenth century.7 The earliest vernacular versions of her legend in Western Europe can be dated to the twelfth or thirteenth century.8 What drove the veneration of virgin martyrs was a growing interest in exotic legends of the saints after the First Crusade and the general livening of religious life.9

Katherine as an Intercessor and Role Model

The function of saints was twofold in the Middle Ages: they were considered as heavenly intercessors and exemplars for proper Christian life. Although this concerned all saints, not all of them had equal influence as intercessors and – as Duffy argues – the strong emphasis on a saint’s intercessory power almost made their role as exemplars insignificant. The chastity of virgin martyrs was a source of celestial power, not an expectation on the laity.10

The role of St Katherine as an exemplar might have been limited to the clerical and highest circles of society in the High Middle Ages. The lives of virgin martyrs were models for an ideal female saint in this period.11 The writers of the legends of the sainted princesses of the Árpádian dynasty regarded Katherine as one of the princesses’ figurative and even literal models.12 The image of Katherine depicted the perfect Christian woman. Her royal or noble status became a significant element of her legend from the twelfth century which may shed light on the main audience of her legend. Moreover, the hagiography of Katherine in some ways portrayed her as the opposite of what a medieval woman should have been.13

Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, the most popular collection of legends in the thirteenth century, describes her as an expert in liberal arts, which enabled her to defend Christianity. The legends emphasize how saints’ miracles set them apart from ordinary people.14 Only nuns are likely to have considered these legends as role models in the High Middle Ages.15 The role of the mendicant orders – mainly the Dominicans – was significant in the spread of the virgin martyrs’ cult. The mendicant orders supported female religious movements and promoted the cult of female saints. St Katherine, along with St Dominic and Mary Magdalene, was one of the main patrons of the Dominicans.16

From the end of the twelfth century the “lay saint” type became more and more popular and the legends of such saints were complemented with the story of their conversion. “The saints re-descended – so to say – from heaven to earth.”17 The late medieval tendency of secularization resulted in the humanization of saints, rendering them easier to follow as models.18 The saints were bestowed with other characteristics of contemporary laypeople.19 Central elements had changed in their legends, the emphasis on confrontation transformed into a focus on their steadfastness.20 After all, the increasingly human character of saints did not result in the renunciation of their intercessory power, but the new narratives of the saints’ legends encouraged the “consumers” to follow their roles.21 It seems that the significance of a saint’s intercession or auxiliary power started to increase in the fourteenth century.22

St Katherine was a member of a group of saints called the Fourteen Holy Helpers,23 whose common feature was an individual power of intercession believed to be particularly effective against several types of disease. These fourteen saints as a collective could protect against almost any type of medieval disease. The Holy Helpers consisted of sub-groups: bishop saints, knight-saints and virgin martyrs. The numerous visual representations24 and literary sources testify that from the fourteenth century onwards, St Katherine, St Margaret, St Barbara and St Dorothy of Caesarea were frequently venerated together as a distinct group called virgines capitales in Central Europe and Germany.25 Although the origin of their cult is obscure, the earliest traces concern the outbreak and spread of plague in early fourteenth-century South Germany. The catastrophe caused several changes in European society, including religious life. It seems that the first and main promoters of the Fourteen Holy Helpers’ cult were the Dominicans in the Nuremberg and Regensburg area.26 It was from this region that their collective cult came to Hungary.

Overview of St Katherine’s Cult in Medieval Hungary

Hungarian sources are reticent about the cults of saints, and so the introduction and the early development of St Katherine’s cult in Hungary remains obscure. The first evidence of Katherine’s veneration in Hungary can be traced to the end of the twelfth century. The Codex Pray (1192–1195) mentions her feast on 25 November,27 but this only refers to her appearance in liturgy. St Katherine’s cult started to spread further in the thirteenth century, and several monasteries were subsequently dedicated to her. The first known sermons and churches dedicated to Katherine in Hungary are connected to the Dominicans, which fits with her highly honored status in that order. Two Dominican codices from the thirteenth (or early fourteenth) century, the Codex of Leuven28 and the Sermons of the University of Pécs or Sermones compilati29 contain sermons to Katherine.

The spread of Katherine’s cult in Hungary, along with the cult of other virgin martyrs, coincides with Andrew II (1205–35) bringing and placing the skull of St Margaret of Antioch to the collegiate church of Szepeshely (Zipser Kapitel, now Spišská Kapitula, Slovakia).30 The rise of her cult in the fourteenth century (the era of the Angevin dynasty, 1308–82) is reflected in the increase in number of historical sources, and there were also more churches, chapels and altars dedicated to St Katherine at that time. However, many of these dedications might have had Árpádian (1000–1301) antecedents. The two Angevin kings, Charles I (1301/1308–42) and Louis the Great (1342–82), played an important role in the promotion of the virgin martyrs. It is possible that they had a personal devotion to Katherine. Both kings named one of their daughters after St Katherine.31 On the first initial picture of Chronicon Pictum, Louis and his wife pray to Katherine. Moreover, Louis’s royal funerary chapel was dedicated to her.32 European analogies suggests that one reason for kings’ preference for Katherine as a patron saint was that she had a royal background.33

Her legend is written in the Legenda Aurea, which was the most popular collection of lives of the saints in Hungary as in other parts of Europe. Only a few manuscripts have survived in Hungary, however, because of the large-scale devastation of Hungarian codices. The Legenda Aurea served as the basis for Hungarian legendaria. The sermons of the Sermones compilati were presumably written for novices, which would explain why the three sermons on Katherine emphasize erudition and chastity of the virgin martyr.34 The fifteenth-century Franciscan Observant preacher Pelbartus de Themeswar also based his sermons on the Legenda Aurea.35 In the four sermons Pelbartus wrote on Katherine, he followed the narrative of Jacobus de Voragine’s work but completed the life of Katherine with her marvelous birth and conversion to Christianity. He also emphasized Katherine’s role as an example.36 These sermons influenced other Hungarian authors. The other famous Hungarian Observant Franciscan preacher, Osvaldus de Lasko, based his work on Pelbartus’ sermons and37 dedicated two sermons to Katherine.38 Pelbartus’ St Katherine sermons were the source of the Codex Érdy and the Codex of Debrecen and the vernacular verse legend of 4047 lines 39 of the Codex of Érsekújvár, the most precious source of the Hungarian cult of Katherine.40 The sermons of Pelbartus circulated in the Hungarian kingdom after being printed at the end of the fifteenth century.

The upper classes developed a preference for the cult of St Katherine in the late fourteenth century. The popularity of the virgin martyrs reached its peak in Hungary – as elsewhere in Europe – in the later Middle Ages.

Initiation of Katherine’s Cult in the Upper Hungarian Region

The German hospites41 are presumed to have been the first to promote the cult of St Katherine in Upper Hungary, because she and other virgin martyrs (St Margaret and St Barbara) mainly appear in places inhabited by Germans. The first church to be dedicated to Katherine in Upper Hungary was in Kakaslomnic (Nagylomnic until 1899, Großlomnitz, now Veľká Lomnica, Slovakia) in Szepes County (Zips, now Spiš), a village owned by the Berzeviczy family. The Berzeviczys’ ancestors arrived in Hungary in the entourage of Gertrude of Andechs-Merania, wife of Andrew II. There can be no doubt that the family was German, from Istrian Merania or Andechs.42 Rutger, one of their ancestors, acquired the land of Kakaslomnic and the surrounding region in 1209,43 and his wife’s brother, Adolf, became the first known provost of the Collegiate Chapter of Szepes.44 The Szepes area was colonized by Germans (hospites Saxones de Scepus), who received privileges and territorial autonomy from King Stephen V in 1271.45

The church of Kakaslomnic was mentioned first in a charter from 1268. Interestingly, the murals of the church depict the cycle of St Nicolas and not that of the patron saint. Ján Endrödy suggests that the churches in the area had been dedicated to Katherine before the Berzeviczys settled there, and it was their preference for Nicolas over Katherine that caused the family to order the frescoes.46 This sounds improbable, however. The county was sparsely inhabited at that time and covered by forest, making it unlikely that several churches dedicated to Katherine existed before 1209. It was only after the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century that the Berzeviczys’ lands were colonized by new settlers.47 Furthermore, one can hardly find any mentions of Katherine in the sources from the twelfth century or earlier, and the patrocinia of Katherine spread from the second half of the thirteenth century.48 Besides the ancestors of the Berzeviczy family, the ancestors of the Görgey family founded churches49 in Kislomnic (Kleinlomnitz, now Lomnička, Slovakia)50 and in Krig (Krieg, now Vojňany, Slovakia)51 at the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth.52

King Andrew II sent a relic of Margaret of Antioch53 to the newly founded Collegiate Chapter of Szepes to confer prestige on the church there. According to the Hungarian Chronicon Pictum, Andrew II acquired relics on his crusade to the Holy Land and distributed them to loyal prelates on his return in 1218 to express his gratitude for the flourishing kingdom.54 The relic of Margaret was presumably translated to the Collegiate Chapter under the provostship of Adolf, the brother-in-law of Rutger. Martin Homza and Peter Labanc assume that Adolf was the provost in the first third of the thirteenth century.55 Thus the virgin martyrs’ cult could have been connected to the German relatives, the ancestors of the Berzeviczy family.

Szepes and the surrounding region was a center of veneration for several virgin martyrs.56 Due to the emerging cult of St Margaret, the other virgin martyrs’ veneration also spread in that territory and in the kingdom.

Although it mainly involved churches in villages, the foregoing discussion of these early signs of the cult of St Katherine was necessary to understand how it spread. At this point, I turn to the early development of the urban cult of the saint. The earliest chapel of St Katherine in the Upper Hungarian region was in Pozsony (Pressburg, now Bratislava). It was connected with the Cistercians of Heiligenkreuz, who founded a convent in area of the town in the mid-thirteenth century, but occupied it only until 1297,57 when the buildings were transferred to the Poor Clares.58 The chapel was founded by Francis, a monk from Heiligenkreuz, in 1311,59 and it was consecrated in 1325.60 The choice of Katherine as the patron saint of the chapel was connected to the Cistercian responsibility for female religious movements.61 Virgin Mary enjoyed a pre-eminent role among the Cistercians, who devoted most of their monasteries to her patronage.62 Virgin Mary was held as an exemplar of perfect femininity, but the virgin martyrs were also portrayed as role models, particularly for proper behavior. St Katherine could have become the patron of the private chapel of the nunnery, because her virginity and her status as sponsa Christi certainly appealed to nuns.

St Katherine’s Cult in the Upper Hungarian Mining Towns

An interesting feature of St Katherine’s cult was her popularity in the Upper Hungarian mining towns. She thus seems to have been venerated as a patron saint of the miners63 together with St Barbara. St Barbara was the main patron saint of the miners in Central Europe,64 but the popularity of Katherine as her companion seems largely to have been peculiar to the Hungarian towns, although she was infrequently also venerated as a patron of miners elsewhere.65 Churches were dedicated to Katherine in several Upper Hungarian mining towns: Selmecbánya (Schemnitz, now Banská Štiavnica), Körmöcbánya (Kremnitz, now Kremnica), Nyitrabánya (Krickerhau, now Handlová),66 Telkibánya and Szomolnok (Schmölnitz, now Smolník). The coats of arms of Nyitrabánya and Körmöcbánya also prove that Katherine was the main patron saint of these towns, because both include Katherine’s attribute of the broken wheel with sharp knives.67 In contrast to the numerous Katherine patrocinia, only a few chapels were dedicated to Barbara in Upper Hungary,68 although her veneration appears through her representations on altarpieces.

The predominance of German miners in these mining towns from the twelfth century onwards certainly tells us that there was a strong German influence behind the veneration of Katherine there. Professional miners must have come from abroad.69 In addition, the cultural diversity of mining towns, including differences in their veneration of saints, derived from the international character of trade.70 Central European mining towns, particularly those in the Carpathian basin, were closely interlinked. The similarity of privileges granted to Hungarian mining towns prepared the ground for mutual alliances that started in the fourteenth century.71 The urban and economic policy of the Angevin kings of Hungary fostered development that forged the towns into a distinct group.72 The crown granted greater legal, ecclesiastical and economic privileges to residents of mining towns than to other settlers, including the right to practice their own customs.73

Two ecclesiastical institutions were dedicated to Katherine in or near Telkibánya74 in the mid-fourteenth century. The first, located between Göncruszka and Telkibánya, was the monastery of Göncruszka, donated to the Pauline monks by Domonkos of Ruszka and his brothers in 1338.75 They were the nobiles de Ruzka,76 the noble family of Göncruszka. There could have been several reasons for choosing St Katherine as patron of a monastery. In her legend, St Katherine lived in the same spatial and temporal dimension as the Desert Fathers, the early Christian hermits in late Antique Egypt. Thus, several representations of Katherine depict the virgin martyr with a hermit saint; in Italian Trecento paintings, this is usually St Anthony the Abbot.77

It seems from the charters78 that Pauline brothers ran a hospital dedicated to Katherine in Telkibánya – which was near their monastery dedicated to Virgin Mary in Gönc – starting in the second half of fifteenth century.79 The local judge of Telkibánya, Georg Kruper, and his brother, Konth, the rector of the mines, founded the hospital in 1367.80 According to the charter issued by Louis I, the leaders of the town founded a hospital rather than a wooden chapel at the request of the miners and the burghers.81 Georg Kruper left the hospital to his stepson, priest Matthias, in his will.82 Matthias in turn left the hospital to the Pauline brothers, with the condition that they offer masses for his and his parents’ salvation in the church of Katherine.83 Although it seems that these churches were connected to the Pauline order, the titulus reflected the will of the founders, the nobles of Ruszka and the burghers of Telkibánya. Despite the obvious appeal of Katherine’s cult to the hermits, the monastery of Ruszka was the only known Pauline foundation dedicated to her in the medieval Hungarian Kingdom.84 There were two other hospitals dedicated to Katherine in fifteenth-century Hungary,85 but the patrocinium of Telkibánya must have reflected the popularity of Katherine among the miners of Telkibánya.

The cult of St Katherine in Körmöcbánya raises interesting questions. The castle church there – also the parish church – is nowadays named after St Katherine. In the Middle Ages, it was another church which bore her name. According to the sources, St Katherine’s Church was located on the main square86 and was a filiale of the parish church of the Virgin Mary (castle church).87 The tituli must have been changed in the modern age, probably because of the Reformation. Körmöcbánya was Lutheran from ca. 1530 until 1674,88 after which the castle church was dedicated to St Katherine.89

The earliest reference to the medieval church of St Katherine in Körmöcbánya is dated to 1485, but the church must have been standing there since the first half of the fifteenth century at the latest.90 The medieval church on the main square was demolished in the nineteenth century because of subsidence.91 Moreover, an altar in the chapel of St Andrew was dedicated to St Andrew, St Peter and Paul, the Holy Trinity, St Martha, St Katherine and St Barbara in 1431.92 The cult of the Apostles had spread ever since the establishment of the church in Hungary, and the dedications to Martha, Barbara and Katherine show the local tradition of Körmöcbánya and symbolize the prominent role of these saints in the town.

Even though there is no evidence of the church’s existence before the fifteenth century, there are earlier sources that may refer to the cult of St Katherine. She is depicted on some of the town’s medieval seals. The earliest remnant seal of Körmöcbánya is dated to 1331.93 This seal – according to the prevailing view94 – depicts St Katherine with the Angevin coat of arms on one side and her attribute, the wheel, on the other. The circumscription reads “S[IGILLUM] · CIVITATIS · REGIS · KAROLI · DE · CREMNICA”. Nevertheless, Teodor Lamoš has identified the figure on the seal as that of the Hungarian king Charles I,95 who presumably granted the town its seal and its privileges at about the same time.96 The later seals, however, definitely depict St Katherine. Jozef Novák has found one such from 1405.97 A charter of 1407 refers to its seal as sigillum nostre civitatis magnum, which implies that the town had at least two seals.98 The second known seal depicts a standing figure with a sword and a wheel with sharp knives (St Katherine). Under the figure is the Angevin coat of arms, and the circumscription is “S[IGILLUM] · SECRETUM · CIVIUM · CREMPNYCZIE”.99 The third medieval seal depicts the broken wheel with sharp knives, the attribute of St Katherine.100

Considering that the town’s medieval seals contained Katherine’s figure and/or her attribute, and later a church was consecrated to her honor, she must have been the patron saint of the town in the Middle Ages.

The earliest seal of Szomolnok dates from the fourteenth century, and depicts St Katherine with a miner on her side.101 According to the literature, the titulus of the medieval parish church is not known, but there was a chapel dedicated to Virgin Mary.102 However, a document dated 1421 proves that the parish church was dedicated to St Katherine in the Middle Ages (ad ecclesiam in Smölnicz in honore Beate Katherine).103

The cult of St Katherine in Selmecbánya started in the second half of the fifteenth century. A chapel dedicated to her in 1444 was transformed into a church in the second half of the fifteenth century. On April 2, 1489, 100 days indulgence was given to those who helped in fitting out the church.104 The founder of the main altar, Andreas Hillebrand (notary and mine entrepreneur), and the priest Johannes Galler, were granted indulgences in 1496 and 1500 respectively.105 The church was consecrated in 1500, the main donators being the burghers of the town, such as Susana Ferczkin, who donated money and personal estates to St Katherine’s Church.106 Andreas Hillebrand bestowed to the church 10 florins and 1 florin each to its priests, and left 40 florins to the parish church of Virgin Mary in his will. His larger donation to Virgin Mary’s may have been prompted by his greater support of St Katherine’s during his lifetime.107 The high altar has not survived, but it must have been richly decorated and monumental, because three statues presumed to have belonged to it have survived the centuries, and they are each two meters high. They represent the Virgin Mary, St Katherine and St Barbara.108 There was also a confraternity dedicated to her honor in Selmecbánya.109

The main reason behind Barbara’s and Katherine’s role as protector of miners was their reputation as powerful intercessors. Barbara – according to her legend – promised her efficacious intercession at the hour of death, and thus became the patron saint of good death. The common perception was that if one were to die without the last sacrament and the Eucharist burdened by deadly sins, one would end up in Hell. Barbara’s role as protector against sudden death was strengthened in the fourteenth century due to the legend written by John of Wakkerzeel.110 Barbara became the patron saint of miners because of the unhealthy and dangerous working conditions that put them at high risk of sudden death and because she had taken shelter in the mountains when she was chased.111 Since Katherine, according to the Legenda Aurea, promised to listen to the appeals of those who would honor her memory, Louis Réau has suggested that Katherine could also be a protector at death.112

In this chapter I have tried to illustrate St Katherine’s role in some Upper Hungarian mining towns. In the following paragraphs I turn to the veneration of St Katherine in the free royal towns during the heyday of her cult. One cannot find churches dedicated to her in these towns, but her cult appears through confraternities, altars and visual representations.

The Heyday of the Cult in Upper Hungarian Towns

The cult of St Katherine appeared in several towns other than mining towns in Upper Hungary in the course of the fifteenth century. They were also mostly inhabited by Germans, which means that Katherine’s cult there was subject to intensive German influence. Developments in Pozsony stand as an illustration of how Katherine’s example transcended the clerical model and became available for imitation by the laity. Pozsony is particularly interesting because many more sources have survived the centuries there than in other parts of the kingdom, and the ecclesiastical history of the town has been thoroughly researched.113 I have mentioned earlier that the Cistercians founded a chapel dedicated to St Katherine. With the increasing veneration toward the virgin martyrs, their cult extended to a wider section of the population. Married women and widows were encouraged to follow Katherine’s example at the end of the Middle Ages as part of the late medieval transformation by which saints were presented as more real and familiar characters.114 In the fifteenth century, the private chapel of the monastic order became the public chapel of the burghers of Pozsony. The popularity of the chapel among the laity reached its peak in the sixteenth century, as attested by several donations recorded in surviving testaments. The chapel acquired an even greater importance in 1529, when the suburban parishes and the hospital were demolished.115 The cult of Katherine may have been fostered by intensive trade relations with Western Europe. The South German towns – mainly Augsburg and Nuremberg – started to exert significant commercial influence on the Hungarian Kingdom in the early decades of fifteenth century. Consequently, merchants living along the Danube were allied by matrimony as well as by commercial contacts. The popularity of Katherine and the other virgin martyrs was also manifested in the tradition of personal names. According to the late medieval testaments in Pozsony, the most frequent names were those of the virgines capitales.116

The testaments also record the increasing popularity of Katherine among women. The sources provide information about a guild dedicated to St Katherine in Eperjes (Preschau, now Prešov), but St Katherine’s patronage of craft guilds is recorded in only two cases in the whole country.117 Two confraternities were dedicated to St Katherine in Upper Hungary. One was in Kassa (Kaschau, now Košice), dated to the sixteenth century,118 and the other was the confraternity of Selmecbánya, mentioned above. Fortunately, several surviving charters concern donations to the St Katherine’s guild of Eperjes and throw some light upon the ethnic and gender composition of the testators. The guild was established by the furriers (fraternitas pellificium alias beatae Katherinae) in the mid-fifteenth century, but many of the donators were not furriers, which highlights the importance of the altar among the burghers.119 The altar was occasionally supported by the town, the council donating two florins for its consecration in 1500 and 1501.120 Most of the donators were women, like Ursula Harenbocken,121 Ursula, the widow of Jorg Cromer,122 and Katherine Mathien,123 whose names indicate German origins. The donators frequently left money for vestments and the celebration of mass, but clothes were also often bequeathed to the altar. An investigation of the wills of Eperjes shows that women preferred to donate items in their possession. Lucia left her best gold-embroidered cloak to the altar of the Virgin Mary and one green tunic to the altar of Katherine.124 Clara bequeathed dresses to the altars of the guild of furriers and guild of cobblers,125 (which was dedicated to the Virgin Mary).126 Christina donated to the guild of St Katherine a lilac cloak with silver pendulum.127 These women, by donating their own possessions, “were providing not only for their own households, but also for the household of God.”128

Late Medieval Altarpieces Depicting St Katherine in Upper Hungary

Visual representations of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and the virgines capitales appeared on altarpieces in Hungary in the late fifteenth century.129 The cults of these two groups spread simultaneously in the Upper Hungarian region. The veneration of the Holy Helpers flourished among Upper Hungarian citizens. An altar in Kassa is the first (in 1483) to be mentioned as being dedicated to them,130 and there is also a surviving fourteenth-century missal from Kassa into which the text of their mass has been inserted later.131 There are several surviving altarpieces that represent all fourteen of the saints,132 but separate sub-groups were more popular. More than sixty surviving altarpieces from the Upper Hungarian region depict saintly women classed among the four principal virgin martyrs, but Katherine, Dorothy, Margaret and Barbara as the group of virgines capitales are joined together only on thirteen of these.133 The virgin martyrs were frequently represented together with the iconographical theme of the Virgin and Child.134 The iconography of late medieval altarpieces depicting the virgines capitales have been analyzed from a gendered point of view in the work of Kristina Potuckova.135

Four individual altars dedicated to Katherine have survived in Szepes County: in Lőcse (Leutschau, now Levoča), Késmárk (Käsmark, now Kežmarok), Felsőrépás (Oberripsch, now Vyšné Repaše) and Csütörtökhely (Donnersmarkt, now Spišský Štvrtok). Lőcse was a royal free town and Késmárk a privileged town, while the other two were villages nearby. In the shrine of the altar of Késmárk (1493) Katherine was portrayed in the company of Barbara and Margaret.136

An altar was dedicated to Katherine in the church of St James in Lőcse in 1469.137 The images of the open wings depict four episodes from her life. The pictures illustrate her dispute with the philosophers, her beheading, her torture, and the wheel of her martyrdom. Katherine with her fellows virgin martyrs were represented on other altars of Lőcse: the altar of Vir dolorum (1476–90) and the altar of Our Lady of Snows (1494–1500). There was another altar dedicated to Katherine in Lőcse (1510–20), transported there from its original location, the church of St Katherine in Felsőrépás.138 In the shrine of an altar from Csütörökhely dating from 1440–50, and today located in Nagyturány (Turany), Katherine tramples down Maxentius and is accompanied by statues of Barbara, Margaret, Dorothy and Ursula. The open wings depict Katherine’s dispute, her tortures, her beheading and the saint with the wheel.139 Her legend appears also on other Upper Hungarian altars. The closed wings of the Vir dolorum altar in Bártfa (Bartfeld, now Bardejov) represent four episodes of her legend. In the first scene, Katherine disputes with the philosophers. This is followed by the converted scholars burning at the stake, and the last two panels depict scenes of her martyrdom: the wheel and her beheading.140 Two scenes of the altar of Virgin Mary in Pónik (Poniky) from 1512 depict the philosophers burning in the flames and the martyrdom of Katherine. Four scenes of Katherine’s life have survived on panel paintings (c. 1520) from the episcopal palace of Szepeshely, but the original location of the altar is unknown. These scenes represent Katherine in front of the ruler, her dispute with the philosophers, the stake of the philosophers and the martyrdom of Katherine.141

It is clearly visible that the iconographic program of the altars emphasized Katherine’s martyrdom and erudition. She was able to defeat her enemies, the enemies of Christianity.142 Her portrayal together with other virgin martyrs puts her own virginity into the focus of devotion. As Stanley E. Weed argues, “Virginity granted the four an especially prominent place in the heavenly realm, for they were not just martyr saints, but the brides of Christ. With this perceived closeness, they served as ideal intercessors to not only Christ, but also to the Virgin Mary, with whom they were frequently depicted.”143 Katherine’s primary role as an intercessor was highlighted by the epigraph on the panel painting of the altar of Késmárk which asks Katherine to pray for us.144

In addition to these altarpieces depicting Katharine’s martyrdom and erudition, there is a unique representation145 of her legend in the panel paintings of Bát (Frauenmarkt, now Bátovce), dating from 1420–1430. This illustrates the conversion of Katherine. In the first scene, she looks at herself in the mirror and seeks the perfect fiancé. In the second scene, a hermit gives her a picture of the Virgin and Child.146 Then comes a scene of her mystic marriage, which was especially popular in Late Middle Ages.147

Although intercession may have been St Katherine’s primary role in medieval religiosity, her status as a role model made her especially popular, because virginity was always an ideal of Christianity.

Conclusion

In this article I have demonstrated the cult of St Katherine in the towns of Upper Hungary during the Middle Ages. The cult of St Katherine arrived in Hungary in the second half of the thirteenth century and was fostered by German settlers. The first promoters of Katherine’s cult might have been the ancestors of the Berzeviczy and Görgey families in Upper Hungary.

The intercessory power of St Katherine was emphasized in her legend, and it was through this that she became the patron saint of several Upper Hungarian mining towns, something of a departure from her generic European cult. That she was venerated as a miner’s saint is clear from her popularity as a patron saint of mining towns. The only churches dedicated to her in Upper Hungary are in mining towns and rural areas (See Map 1). In some cases, the seals of these towns also depicted St Katherine. The saints to which the most churches in the principal mining towns were dedicated were the Virgin Mary, St Elizabeth of Thuringia and St Katherine (see Table 1). It seems that she was popular among miners together with St Barbara. The main reason behind St Katherine’s popularity might be that she and St Barbara helped at the hour of death. The heyday of St Katherine’s cult was in the late Middle Ages, just as the cult of the Fourteen Holy Helpers was also flourishing. In the late Middle Ages, she was venerated in the free royal towns, where confraternities and altars were dedicated to her. The donations to her altars indicate her increasing popularity in Upper Hungary. Being the bride of Christ, she mainly appealed to women. The altarpieces depicting St Katherine emphasize her martyrdom, her erudition and her virginity, conveying the message that her efficacious intercessory power derived from her chastity and martyrdom.

 

Bakabánya	St Nicholas, All Saints
Bélabánya/Banská Belá/Düllen	St John
Besztercebánya	Virgin Mary, St Anthony’s Chapel, St Elizabeth, St Nicholas, St Jerome and St Barbara’s Chapel
Breznóbánya/Brezno/Bries/Briesen	Virgin Mary
Gölnicbánya/Gelnica/Göllnitz	Virgin Mary
Körmöcbánya	Virgin Mary, St Katherine, St Andrew’s Chapel (originally St Michael’s Chapel), St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Chapel of St John the Baptist.
Libetbánya/Ľubietová/Libethen	Mary Magdalene, St Anne’s Chapel, St Elizabeth’s Hospital
Nyitrabánya	St Katherine
Selmecbánya	Virgin Mary, St Katherine, St Anne’s Chapel, St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Corpus Christi Chapel, St Michael’s Ossuary, St Nicholas’ Chapel
Szomolnok	St Katherine, Chapel of the Virgin Mary
Újbánya/Nová Baňa/Königsberg	Virgin Mary, St Elizabeth’s Hospital

 

Table 1

Dedications of churches and chapels in the principal mining towns of medieval Upper Hungary. Based on this article and Mező, Patrocíniumok, passim.

 

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (Hungarian National Archives – MNL OL), Diplomatikai Levéltár (Medieval Charters – DL).

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (Hungarian National Archives – MNL OL), Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény (Collection of Photocopies – DF).

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Vauchez, André. “Jacques de Voragine et les saints du XIIIe siècle dans la Légende dorée.” In Legenda aurea. Sept siècles de diffusion, edited by B. Dunn-Lardeau, 27–56. Paris–Montréal: Vrin–Bellarmin, 1986.

Vauchez, André. “Saints admirables et saints imitables: Les fonctions de l’hagiographie ont-elles changé aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge?.” In Les fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (IIIe–XIIIe siècle) Actes du colloque de Rome (27–29 octobre 1988), 161–72. Rome: École Française de Rome, 1991.

Végh, János. “A selmecbányai Szent Katalin-templom szobrai a szakirodalom tükrében” [The statues of St Katherine’s church in Selmecbánya]. In “Magnificat anima mea Dominum” M S Mester vizitáció-képe és egykori selmecbányai főoltára, edited by Árpád Mikó, 113–22. Budapest: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1997.

Végh, János. “Ismeretlen Szent Katalin sorozat a Szepességből” [Unknown St Katherine series from Szepesség]. Művészettörténeti Értesítő 13 (1964): 79–88.

Vizkelety, András. Az európai prédikációirodalom recepciója a Leuveni Kódexben – Die Rezeption der europäische Sermonesliteratur im „Löwener Kodex”. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2004.

Walsh, Christine. The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Weed, Stanley E. “Venerating the Virgin Martyrs: The Cult of the Virgines Capitales in Art, Literature, and Popular Piety.” Sixteenth Century Journal 41 (2010): 1065–91.

Weisz, Boglárka. “Mining Town Privileges in Angevin Hungary.” Hungarian Historical Review 2, no. 2 (2013): 288–312.

Winstead, Karen A. Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Wolf, Kirsten. The Old Norse-Icelandic Legend of Saint Barbara. Toronto: PIMS, 2000.

Zsoldos, Attila. “Szepes megye kialakulása” [The origins of Szepes County]. Történelmi Szemle 43 (2001): 19–31.

Map 1

 

A New sancta et fidelis societas for Saint Sigismund of Burgundy: His Cult and Iconography in Hungary during the Reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg

Dragoş Gh. Năstăsoiu

Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies

 

Examining both written and pictorial evidence, this study addresses the diffusion of the cult of St Sigismund from Bohemia to Hungary during the late fourteenth century and the saint’s subsequent transformation during the fifteenth century into one of the Hungarian kingdom’s patrons. In doing so, it assesses the significance of the actions that King Sigismund took to promote Sigismund of Burgundy, his personal patron, in Hungary and shows that the king emulated the model of his father, Charles IV of Luxemburg. King Sigismund promoted his spiritual patron within his kingdom and associated him with the traditional Hungarian patrons, the sancti reges Hungariae. The king thus succeeded in accommodating the foreign saint to a new home and transforming him for a short interval into one of Hungary’s holy protectors. The natural consequence of this “holy and faithful fellowship” was the transfer of the cult from the royal milieu to the nobility of the kingdom. Willing to prove their loyalty to the king, Hungarian noblemen decorated their churches with St Sigismund’s image and depicted him in the company of the saints Stephen, Emeric, and Ladislas. The study’s larger aim is to illustrate how the political transformations of a certain period could facilitate the spread of a new saint’s cult from the cult center to another region and that a saint’s veneration could sometimes be politically motivated.

Keywords: St Sigismund of Burgundy, Sigismund of Luxemburg, cult of saints, relics, sancti reges Hungariae, wall painting, iconography

 

Writing on the cults of dynastic saints in medieval Europe, Gábor Klaniczay showed that members of ruling dynasties were generally fervent supporters and promoters of cults of saints, especially those who had descended from their own families. Hungarian and Neapolitan Angevins, Přemyslids, or Luxemburgs harmoniously blended their personal piety with astute political calculation when proving their legitimacy to rule. Having several saints in the family or associating one’s deeds with a particular saint (especially one’s namesake) was an extension of that saint’s sacredness over his protégé, guaranteeing the success of a ruler’s actions.1 Examining the iconography of Sigismund of Luxemburg, Bertalan Kéry revealed that the Holy Roman Emperor had a high devotion for his personal patron, St Sigismund of Burgundy, and that medieval artists sometimes depicted the saint under his protégé’s appearance.2 Whereas King Sigismund’s devotion for his namesake protector received previous attention, it became apparent only recently that the new King of Hungary promoted his personal patron and one of Bohemia’s holy protectors within his realm.3

By examining the written and pictorial evidence, the present paper addresses the diffusion during the late fourteenth century of the cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy from Bohemia to Hungary and the saint’s subsequent transformation by the late fifteenth century into one of the patrons of the Hungarian kingdom. In doing so, it assesses the significance of King Sigismund’s efforts to promote his personal patron saint in Hungary and shows that he emulated the model of his father, Charles IV of Luxemburg, a fervent supporter and promoter of the cults of saints, an avid collector of relics, and a great patron of the arts. King Sigismund not only promoted his personal patron within his kingdom, but also associated him with St Ladislas, the patron saint par excellence of the Hungarian kingdom. Sigismund thus managed to accommodate the foreign saint to a new home and to transform him into one of the country’s holy protectors. The natural consequence of this association was the transfer of the new cult from the royal milieu to the kingdom’s aristocracy: willing to prove their loyalty to the king, Hungarian noblemen decorated their churches with the image of St Sigismund and depicted him in the company of the three sancti reges Hungariae, i.e., St Stephen, St Emeric, and St Ladislas. The paper’s larger aim is to illustrate how the political transformations of a certain period facilitated the transfer of a new saint’s cult from the cult center to another region and that a saint’s veneration was sometimes politically motivated.

One Saint—Two Cult Centers: St Sigismund of Burgundy between Agaune and Prague

King Sigismund of Burgundy (r. 516–24) was a convert from the Arian faith of his forebears to the orthodoxy of the Church of Rome and founder of the Abbey of Saint-Maurice d’Agaune in Valais, Switzerland (515). He was an impulsive and violent-tempered ruler, who had his son Sigeric killed mercilessly at the instigation of his new wife (522). Shortly after the murder of the king and his family by Frankish King Chlodomer, the Abbot of Saint-Maurice Venerandus became interested in the remains of his monastery’s founder and brought them for burial to Agaune from a well near Orléans, where the king’s body was lying together with his massacred family (535). From that moment on, the cult of the holy king and martyr Sigismund started its gradual development in the shadow of the cult of St Maurice and his fellow Theban martyrs.4 The monks of Agaune managed by the late sixth century to create for the founder of their abbey an aura of sanctity revolving around St Sigismund’s healing power over fevers. This was reflected by the Missa sancti Sigismundi regis pro febricitantibus, a votive mass composed initially for the forgiveness of King Sigismund’s sins, later sung as a means of seeking cure through the saint’s intercession.5 As attested by the distribution of relics, church dedications and commemoration through liturgical and hagiographical texts, St Sigismund’s cult was present until the mid-fourteenth century, mainly in Southern France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries.6 This regional diffusion indicates a moderate veneration of St Sigismund, who was known, though not popular in other parts of Europe.

The situation changed through the actions of Charles IV of Luxemburg, King of Bohemia (1346–78) and Holy Roman Emperor (1355–78), whose great knowledge of the cults of saints, understanding of the power and value of relics, and intense piety made him a passionate collector of relics.7 He acquired first in 1354, from the Benedictine Monastery in Einsiedeln, a piece of St Sigismund’s skull, which ended up in St Vitus Cathedral in Prague.8 However, it was only in 1365, when Charles IV was crowned King of Burgundy and strengthened his imperial power in the region, that he took great interest in the cult of the sixth-century holy king, whose successor he claimed to be from that point on.9 Detouring to Agaune from his coronation site in Arles, Charles IV took with him, despite the abbot’s reluctance to hand them over, the ax of St Maurice’s martyrdom and St Sigismund’s skull and half the body, i.e., a significant part of the holy king’s relics.10 He arranged for their transfer to Prague through a series of well-orchestrated actions, which resulted in the rapid transformation of St Sigismund of Burgundy into one of Bohemia’s patron saints.11

As convincingly argued by David Ch. Mengel,12 the Burgundian royal martyr was placed from the very beginning in the sancta et fidelis societas of St Wenceslas,13 the tenth-century royal martyr and Bohemia’s traditional patron.14 St Sigismund’s relics arrived to Prague on the vigil of St Wenceslas (September 27), when the town was filled with people coming for one of the annual fairs. They were transferred the next day to St Vitus Cathedral, which was miraculously illuminated during the office of matins: a sign of St Sigismund’s previous merits and future miracles and a symbol of St Wenceslas’ rejoicing in such holy and faithful companionship. The relics were then placed in a prominent chapel situated opposite the shrine of St Wenceslas.15 The diocese-wide proclamation of the advent of St Sigismund’s relics requested by the Archbishop of Prague during a diocesan synod (October 17, 1365)16 and numerous miracles occurring immediately at the saint’s new shrine17 testify to the cult’s carefully planned promotion by the archbishop and emperor and to the great impact that the transfer of the holy king’s relics had in Bohemia. St Sigismund attracted numerous pilgrims seeking to be healed to Prague, both Archbishop John Očko of Vlašim and Charles IV himself being cured of fevers through the holy king’s miraculous intervention (late January of 1366 and summer of 1371).18 The cult’s rapid success and its strong support from Charles IV—who named his third-born son, the future King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg, after St Sigismund in 1368—led finally to the establishment of the saint as one of the country’s patrons.19 Consequently, at the 1366 diocesan synod in Prague, St Sigismund’s feast day was moved from May 1 to May 2 so that he could have a separate celebration on a different date from that of the Holy Apostles Philip and James. This was an honor usually granted to a country’s patron saint and was granted to Sigismund on account of his great and glorious miracles.20 St Sigismund’s newly acquired significance was reflected also in the religious art commissioned by his two promoters, the Burgundian holy king appearing twice in the early 1370s in the company of Bohemia’s traditional patrons, i.e., St Wenceslas, St Adalbert, St Vitus, St Procopius and St Ludmila: once on the votive panel ordered by Archbishop John Očko of Vlašim (before 1371) and a second time, as the result of Charles IV’s commission, on the mosaics above the Golden Gate of St Vitus Cathedral (1370–71).21

Two Sigismunds in Late Medieval Hungary: King Sigismund of Luxemburg and St Sigismund of Burgundy

As shown by Péter Tóth, the presence of St Sigismund’s cult in medieval Hungary was mediated by the transfer of the saint’s relics to Prague and the advent as King of Hungary of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437), who was the son of Charles IV and who promoted his personal patron in the region.22 Before this date, there is scant evidence of St Sigismund’s veneration in Hungary: some of the earliest Hungarian calendars do, nevertheless, contain the feasts of his martyrdom (May 1) and the translatio of his relics (October 15/16); however, the holy king’s passio, office, and votive mass are missing from these eleventh-to-fourteenth-century liturgical manuscripts23 and only the church in Kopács (Kopačevo, Croatia) was dedicated to St Sigismund (1299).24 This indicates that the cult of the first medieval royal saint was confined in limited form to Hungarian church practice and did not manage to become popular until the end of the fourteenth century, when the situation changed radically.

St Sigismund’s reputation seemingly spread rapidly outside Bohemia and news of the translation of his relics to Prague soon reached the neighboring Kingdom of Hungary. The gilded silver statue of St Sigismund was donated by quemdam nobilem de Hungaria to the saint’s shrine and appeared in the 1374 inventory of St Vitus’ treasury.25 In 1375, the Statuta capituli Varadiensis recorded the existence of an altar dedicated to St Sigismund in the Cathedral of Nagyvárad (Oradea, Romania).26 Sometime between 1364 and 1380, the chaplain of King Louis the Great requested permission to venerate St Sigismund’s relics kept in the Cathedral of Olomouc since the early thirteenth century.27 The Hungarian altars and churches dedicated to the new Bohemian patron correspond to the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg and were obviously inspired by the king’s devotion to his personal patron: the altar in Körmöcbánya (Kremnica, Slovakia, 1391),28 the royal chapter church in Buda (1410–24), the Pauline monastery in Verőce (1414–33), and the churches and chapels in Niva (1422), Úszfalva (Uzovce, Slovakia, 1429), and Hásság (Haşag, Romania, 1446).29 St Sigismund gradually made his presence felt in liturgical writings as well. His feasts originating in Bohemian liturgical practice, i.e., the martyrdom of the saint (May 2) and the translatio of his relics (September 27), appear in several late-fourteenth-century or fifteenth-century missals with either Hungarian provenance or use.30 St Sigismund’s Life was known in Hungary by the early fifteenth century, when a Legenda aurea manuscript (copied in Italy in the second half of the fourteenth century) was augmented by two Hungarian users with several legends, including that of St Sigismund, the incipit of which is Tempore Tiberij . . .31 The votive mass pro febricitantibus is featured in two fifteenth-century missals32 and two orationes (Sancti Sigismundi martiris and Rex et martyr, Sigismunde...) appear in a prayer book written around the year 1460 in Southern Germany or Bohemia, though used in Upper Hungary.33 The final outcome of this slow process was the inclusion of St Sigismund among Hungary’s patron saints, as attested by Legende sanctorum regni Hungarie in lombardica historia non contente (Strasbourg, 1484–1487)34 and its subsequent editions published in Venice (1498 and 1512).35 In this collection of saints’ lives which are relevant for Hungary, though omitted by Legenda aurea, one can also read the vita of St Sigismund: he was naturalized at last and enjoyed the company of Hungary’s traditional patrons, i.e., the three sancti reges Hungariae—Stephen, Emeric, and Ladislas.36

Regarded as a zealous promoter of his patron’s cult,37 King Sigismund indeed tried to promote his namesake saint in Hungary. His actions are better understood when compared to the practices of veneration and promotion employed by Sigismund’s father, Charles IV of Luxemburg. Soon after moving his residence from Visegrád to Buda (1408), King Sigismund started the construction next to his new court of a royal chapter church, a project on which he spent many thousands of florins by the year 1410. This attracted the praise of Pope John XXIII in a letter issued on August 3, followed fifteen days later by another one authorizing the access of visitors to the church in Buda on certain Marian feasts.38 The construction of the chapter church was completed during the years 1419–24, as attested by accounts of visitors to the church, which received the double patronage of the Holy Virgin and St Sigismund.39 As noted by András Végh,40 there are too many similarities between King Sigismund’s religious foundation in Buda and that of Charles IV in Nuremberg (1355–58)41 not to notice whose model of devotion and artistic patronage the Hungarian king followed. Both churches were located outside, though close to the royal residence, on the site of a former Jewish quarter.42 As far as one can judge by the ground plan of the vanished church in Buda, they both displayed similar architectural features and sculptural decoration.43 Both fulfilled the function of court chapels and collegiate chapter churches.44 Most significantly, they enjoyed a similar double patronage, being placed first under the protection of the Holy Virgin and, second, under that of the founder’s patron saint, i.e., St Sigismund, for the church in Buda45 and St Wenceslas for the church in Nuremberg, the founder of which was Karolus, qui et Wenceslaus.46

King Sigismund understood the importance of relics in the promotion of a saint’s cult and, like his father, he endeavored to acquire St Sigismund’s relics in order to distribute them within his kingdom. A seventeenth-century copy of a document dated June 30, 1414 accounts for King Sigismund’s visit to Agaune with the explicit intention to acquire some of his patron’s relics and take them to Hungary.47 More precisely, to a chapel the king was going to build in Voarenza, a deserted place in the Diocese of Vác, which was found next to an island on the Danube, a location lying in the proximity of the royal palace in Visegrád and identified with Verőce. The chapel was to be dedicated to St Sigismund and entrusted to the care of Pauline monks.48 The document also offers relevant information on King Sigismund’s devotion to his patron saint and his intention to spread and ensure the continuity of the royal martyr’s cult across the kingdom.49 After referring to the relic-oriented visit of Charles IV to Agaune50 and to Sigismund’s desire to follow in the footsteps of his father,51 the document contains an account of the miraculous opening of the reliquary. This represented St Sigismund’s consent for his new and partial relocation of relics, i.e., a small bone, a piece of the saint’s arm, and a skull portion of one of the saint’s sons, which King Sigismund took away to Hungary.52 Although the document mentions only the church in Verőce, it is unlikely that the Pauline monastery was the exclusive recipient of St Sigismund’s relics, especially if one thinks that in the moment of the king’s pious visit and acquisition of relics, the church in Buda was being built and dedicated precisely to the Burgundian saint. It is unknown what relics the church in Buda possessed, but like the Nuremberg Frauenkirche, which had a side altar dedicated to St Wenceslas,53 it is highly possible that King Sigismund provided the secondary altar of his foundation with the relics of his personal and the church’s associated patron.54 The existence before 1375 in the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin and St Ladislas in Nagyvárad of an altar dedicated to St Sigismund makes one reflect upon the possibility that part of the saint’s relics were intended also for King Sigismund’s favorite cathedral. In any case, in 1424, the Cathedral in Nagyvárad housed St Sigismund’s relics, transferred temporarily from Prague by King Sigismund, who tried to protect them from the rage of the Hussites.55

Choosing Nagyvárad Cathedral for the temporary relocation of St Sigismund’s relics was not without motivation. This was the cult center and burial place of one of Hungary’s holy kings, St Ladislas, with whose cult Sigismund of Luxemburg became acquainted shortly after he arrived to the Hungarian court (1379) and for whom he maintained high devotion throughout his life.56 During his reign, King Sigismund was present in Nagyvárad on numerous occasions57 and, after the death of his wife, Queen Mary of Hungary, and her burial next to the tomb of St Ladislas (1395), the king directed his attention repeatedly toward the cathedral and his holy predecessor’s remains.58 In 1401 and 1434, King Sigismund requested papal indulgences for the pilgrims who visited the cathedral and venerated the holy king’s miracle-working relics.59 He took part himself in such a pilgrimage together with King Władysław II Jagiełło, spending fifteen days and celebrating Easter in Nagyvárad. Sigismund’s expression of piety toward St Ladislas came after his conclusion of a peace treaty with the Polish ruler (1412).60 After a fire in the early 1400s that destroyed the cathedral’s sacristy and melted down St Ladislas’ head reliquary, though left the relics unharmed, King Sigismund was likely involved in the commissioning of the holy king’s exquisite new reliquary, kept today at the Cathedral of Győr. He also supported the cathedral’s partial rebuilding in the years 1406–07 through the royal confirmation of privileges and donations.61 It is in one of these charters that King Sigismund entrusted his salvation to the intercession of St Ladislas and expressed his desire to be buried next to the holy king’s sepulcher in the Cathedral of Nagyvárad.62 He maintained his wish even after he became Holy Roman Emperor,63 a fact that serves to point out to the king’s utmost devotion for one of Hungary’s patrons. That St Ladislas was indeed important for King Sigismund is illustrated also by the king’s keeping of the golden florin with the holy knight’s figure on the reverse. In 1427, he also issued a silver ducat with the saint’s iconic image bearing a crown, crucifer orb, and battle axe.64 All these facts attest not only to King Sigismund’s personal piety toward one of Hungary’s patrons, but also to his understanding of St Ladislas as a powerful symbol of the Kingdom of Hungary and an efficient tool for political legitimizing and self-representation.

The possibility cannot be excluded, however, that King Sigismund also revered Hungary’s other holy kings, although except for a 1404 royal confirmation of privileges addressed to the Cathedral in Székesfehérvár (i.e., the cult center of St Stephen and St Emeric and traditional burial site of Hungarian kings), no other evidence points out to such devotion.65 Nevertheless, St Ladislas, the sacred protector par excellence of the Hungarian kingdom, was associated with the king’s personal patron, St Sigismund, portrayed under the physical appearance of his protégé in the murals of the Augustinian Church in Constance, which were commissioned and partly ideated by King Sigismund himself during his stay there for the council (1417).66 No longer identifiable in its entirety, the gallery of enthroned holy kings, princes, bishops, and female saints seems to reflect Sigismund’s personal piety for the two holy kings, endorsing also his political and dynastical claims.67 The association of the two holy kings makes one think of the double dedication to St Ladislas and St Sigismund of the Pauline monastery in Kysbathe (Gerchen), which Nicholas Zámbó de Mezőlak, former Castellan of Óbuda and Master of the Treasury (1382–84, 1385–88), founded prior to the years 1383–84,68 i.e., sometime after Sigismund’s stay at the Hungarian court (1379–81) and close to the time of his marriage to his betrothed, Queen Mary of Hungary (1385). Their marriage, threatened by Elizabeth of Bosnia’s intention to marry her daughter to Louis of Orléans, was personally supported by Nicholas Zámbó and others, who openly opposed the queen mother and renounced their allegiance to her (August 1384).69 The monastery’s double dedication to St Ladislas and St Sigismund by a dignitary of the royal court (and supporter of the future king, for that matter) antedates the actions of Sigismund of Luxemburg, but shows that others were aware as well of the benefits this sancta et fidelis societas (i.e., between the sacred protector of Sigismund’s adoptive country and his personal patron saint) could have in making a newcomer accepted as the new King of Hungary.

St Sigismund of Burgundy and the Holy Kings of Hungary in Religious Mural Painting

Several murals preserved in churches throughout medieval Hungary feature the country’s traditional patrons, i.e., St Stephen, St Emeric, and St Ladislas, atypically associated with a fourth holy king, whose identity is most likely that of St Sigismund of Burgundy, the king’s personal patron saint. A closer examination of these frescoes and the background of their commissioners is destined to suggest possible explanations for the way in which St Sigismund’s cult was transferred from the royal milieu to the aristocratic one. The collective representation of Hungary’s three holy kings was the consequence of their joint cult, which took shape around the middle of the fourteenth century in the royal milieu and gained popularity during the reigns of Louis the Great of Anjou (1342–82) and Sigismund of Luxemburg,70 when the veneration of sancti reges Hungariae spread considerably among the noblemen of the kingdom.71 By imitating the devotional practices of the royal court, the nobility also replicated the patterns of artistic patronage, decorating many of its churches with the image of sancti reges Hungariae. The veneration and subsequent commissioning of murals with their image functioned as a strong statement of the noble donor’s political allegiance. This allegiance could be directed either toward the king, as an expression of loyalty toward the ruler, who rewarded the nobleman generously for faithful service, or directly to the kingdom, whenever the king’s person was no longer considered suitable to represent it.72 However, the strong political component of these depictions did not exclude the personal veneration of the royal saints by the frescoes’ commissioners, many of them being named after or having their family members named after them.73

The collective depiction in mural painting of sancti reges Hungariae usually places in a single composition the three holy rulers from the House of Árpád:74 St Stephen (r. 1000/01–38), the founder of the Christian Kingdom of Hungary, who merited his sanctity for ruling as rex iustus and converting his people to Christianity; St Emeric (1000/07–31), the son of the former, a pious and chaste prince, whom was educated to become a virtuous Christian ruler, but died before succeeding his father; and St Ladislas (r. 1077–95), ideal ruler and knight, the country’s defender against pagan enemies, and athleta patriae.75 Their highly conventional and stereotypical portrayal shows from a frontal perspective the full, standing figures of the holy kings characterized by hieratical appearance, static attitudes, and emphatic gestures.76 The murals show with slight variation a similar picture: an old, white-bearded St Stephen with crown, scepter, and orb; a young, beardless St Emeric with orb and lily or lily-shaped scepter, the symbol of his chastity; and a mature, brown-bearded St Ladislas holding a battle axe, a reminder of his chivalric bravery.77 The different ages of the royal saints—old for St Stephen, mature for St Ladislas, and young for St Emeric—could be an influence of the Three Magi’s iconography, which similarly shows the wise men at the three ages of kingship.78 As the great number of preserved frescoes attests, this age differentiation is, in fact, not an attempt to individualize the three characters, but rather a standardized and uniform depiction. Either dressed in elegant court costumes or as full-armored knights, the three are depicted as kings, being equally invested with royal insignia (crown, scepter, and orb).79 Despite the great uniformity and repetitiveness of the murals, there was also room for variation and innovation. In some cases, the unity of the group was disrupted, the saints being placed on separate, though conceptually unifying wall surfaces (e.g., the pillars of the triumphal arch) on which the sancti reges Hungariae stood in relation to one another.80 In other cases, there were not the usual three, but four royal saints, whom were depicted either together, within a single composition, or formed a coherent iconographic unit despite their obvious spatial separation.

On the southern wall of the sanctuary of Nicholas Apafi’s family church in Almakerék (Mălâncrav, Romania), painted either shortly before 1404/05 or in the 1420s,81 a unitarily conceived group of saints is surrounded by a decorative frame (Fig. 1). The standing figures with elegant postures and fashionable court costumes are: an old holy bishop with miter and crozier, identified either with St Gerard, St Nicholas, or St Adalbert;82 the mature, brown-bearded St Ladislas with crucifer orb and battle axe; the old, white-bearded St Stephen with scepter and crucifer orb; another mature, brown-bearded holy king with the same attributes as St Stephen; and the young, beardless St Emeric with blond, curly hair, holding an orb and originally a lily (now faded away).83 Because the accompanying inscriptions are no longer visible, it is difficult to ascertain the identity of the mature holy king placed between St Stephen and St Emeric and depicted with generic royal attributes.84 Anca Gogâltan identified him hypothetically as St Sigismund on the basis of the historical background of the frescoes, the donor’s attachment to the king, and the efforts of Sigismund of Luxemburg to promote the cult of his patron throughout the kingdom.85 St Sigismund was indeed depicted as a middle-aged holy king, dressed in royal garments, holding scepter and orb, and not having other distinguishing attributes.86

Four holy kings, two on each pillar and in superposed registers, seem to have faced each other originally on the pillars separating the nave from the southern aisle of the church in Csetnek (Štítnik, Slovakia), but currently only three of them are visible. The mural decoration of the church’s southern aisle was commissioned by Ladislas Csetneki during the 1420s, the decade in which the pillar frescoes were painted.87 The figures are poorly preserved and their individual identification is problematic, but one can notice a mixture of knightly, courtly, and royal elements in their costumes and attributes (Fig. 2). The saint on the eastern pillar’s upper register has chainmail under his tight tunic and holds an attribute with long handle (?) and shield. His counterpart on the western pillar is fully armored, wears a crown or ducal hat, props a shield and sword against the ground, and holds a similar, long-handled attribute with destroyed upper side, which could be either a spear, halberd, pollaxe, or banner. Below him (Fig. 3), a mature holy king in court costume and crown holds a crucifer orb and badly preserved attribute, probably a scepter. He has curly hair and beard covering only the lower part of his jaw. The representation facing him on the lower register of the eastern pillar was later replaced by the figure of a holy monk, but the partial detachment of the paint reveals that there was another, earlier saint painted there (Fig. 4). Several noticeable details suggest that this older figure represented a saint dressed in a red-brown vestment with a relatively large sleeve.88 His left arm was bent as for holding an attribute, probably a scepter or orb by analogy with his counterpart, who holds precisely these attributes. His halo, partially visible next to that of the holy monk, has the same color and outline as the halo of the saint facing him; both were placed under decorated, trefoil arches (Fig. 3–4). These features indicate that the two figures on the lower registers of the pillars are coeval, as they are with those on the upper registers. Faced with this evidence and given the dating of the murals, one can hypothesize that in Csetnek as well, the traditional, Hungarian royal trio was enriched with another holy king, although individual identification of the saints is no longer possible. However, the holy king’s curly hair and distinctively shaped beard (Fig. 3) recall the features of St Sigismund as they appear on the fresco in Constance and, implicitly, those of Sigismund of Luxemburg, whose facial traits were conferred often by medieval painters to the patron saint of the King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor.89

In the frescoes of the church in Lónya, either painted or commissioned by a certain mag(iste)r nicolaus in 1413,90 two holy kings were integrated to the sanctuary’s now-incomplete row of standing apostles (Fig. 5). Dressed in fashionable court costumes, the two standing figures with crown and crucifer orbs are identified by inscriptions: ·s(anctus)·dux/·emeri[c]us and ·s(anctus)·/rex/[s]tepha/nu[s]. Their facial features are damaged, though one clearly see that the former is brown-haired and holds a white lily, whereas the latter has white hair and beard, and holds a mace-like scepter. They are placed on the sanctuary’s southern wall, in the proximity of the pillar of the triumphal arch, where another partially preserved holy king is placed under a canopy (Fig. 5–6). This one has a similar crown, mantle, crucifer orb, and scepter with flower-shaped ending. His face is completely damaged, but the accompanying inscription identifies him as ·s(anctus)·/·sigism[undus]. The sanctuary’s 1413 decoration is now incompletely preserved and St Ladislas is missing; however, given his great popularity, it is unlikely that the holy knight was not depicted inside the church. The eastern and northern walls were decorated with standing apostles, the only place for the hypothetical depiction of St Ladislas being the triumphal arch’s northern pillar, i.e., as St Sigismund’s counterpart.91

In his Bohemian iconography, St Sigismund was depicted as a middle-aged holy king, dressed in royal garments and holding scepter and orb, though not having other distinguishing attributes. However, in the recently discovered murals of the church in Bádok (Bădeşti, Romania), which were painted around 1400 on the lower register of the nave’s northern wall,92 St Sigismund was depicted also under a knightly guise (Fig. 7). His partially preserved figure shows a full-armored knight holding a white shield decorated with a red cross in his right hand, whereas his left hand, bent in front of his chest, probably held an orb (now destroyed). The saint’s features are no longer preserved, his head having been intentionally damaged at some later point; however, the upper side of the damaged area has the shape of a crown, which the holy knight originally had on his head.93 If it were not for the accompanying inscription that clearly reads S(ANCTVS)·SIGIS/MVND(VS), this holy warrior would easily pass for St Ladislas due to his pronounced knightly appearance. It was probably the iconographic type of this popular Hungarian patron that the painter of the small rural church used when conceiving the appearance of the new saint, whose cult was only emerging in medieval Hungary.94 However, St Sigismund is depicted in Bádok as part of a series composed of St Catherine of Alexandria, St Helena, St John the Baptist, and the Madonna with Child, a sign that he was not exclusively associated with Hungary’s holy kings.95

As attested by the above-discussed murals, St Sigismund of Burgundy could be depicted either as a holy king or a holy knight and could be placed in the company of either sancti reges Hungariae or other popular saints. His image in these churches reflects his certain popularity at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By looking at the donors of the frescoes whenever such information is available, one can hypothetically reconstruct the transfer of St Sigismund’s cult from the royal level to that of the nobility. Nicholas Apafi, the donor of the frescoes in Almakerék, was aule miles (1410–41), comes of Vranduk, Srebrenik, Dubočac (1414–18), and Biertan (1418–40), his presence being attested in Constance during King Sigismund’s stay for the council (1418). Sigismund then issued a series of charters granting privileges to Biertan and confirming some land possessions inherited by the wife of Nicholas, himself called fidelis noster dilectus egregius miles Nicolaus filius Apa de Almakerek and commended for his great bravery and remarkable assistance during the king’s military campaigns in Bosnia.96 Present then in Constance was also Ladislas Csetneki, the commissioner of the murals in Csetnek, who was an illustrious prelate holding throughout his career the ecclesiastical offices of Canon of Esztergom (from 1397), Provost of Budafelhévíz and Esztergom-Zöldmező (1408–24), governor of the Archdiocese of Esztergom (1420, 1439), comes of the royal chapel (1423), chancellor to the queen (1432–37), and Bishop of Nyitra (1439–48).97 Whereas almost no information has survived on the notables of Bádok (and Zsíp), it is known that the owners of Lónya belonged at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the kingdom’s lower nobility.98 One can also add to these figures that of Nicholas Zámbó de Mezőlak, Master of the Treasury and early supporter of Sigismund of Luxemburg, who dedicated his monastic foundation in Kysbathe (Gerchen) to both St Ladislas and St Sigismund, i.e., precisely to the patrons of the country and the future king. Consequently, the presence of St Sigismund in the company of the three sancti reges Hungariae was inspired by the high devotion of Sigismund of Luxemburg for both his personal patron and the kingdom’s holy protectors. This inspired, in turn, a similar piety among the country’s noblemen, who were either in close or distant connection with the king and belonged equally to the higher and lower levels of nobility.99 They emulated the devotional and artistic patterns of the royal court, illustrating in their churches the Hungarian-Bohemian sancta et fidelis societas and being aware of the utmost devotion of the king for St Sigismund. They sometimes made obvious the link between the ruler and his personal patron by lending the features of the former to the latter, as likely happened in Csetnek. That the cult of the Burgundian royal martyr and his representation in the company of Hungary’s holy kings were inspired by King Sigismund’s piety and were determined by the political transformations of the time is likewise obvious from the chronological distribution of the mural ensembles. This coincides exclusively with the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg and endorses Péter Tóth’s opinion that patronus regis was, in fact, patronus regni at least as long as the king was reigning.100

Conclusion

The reputation of St Sigismund of Burgundy spread to Hungary shortly after the translatio of the saint’s relics to Prague, after which the piety of Hungarian pilgrims travelling abroad was immediately directed toward the new Bohemian patron. However, his cult started to take shape in Hungary only through the consistent efforts of Sigismund of Luxemburg to promote his personal patron throughout his kingdom, acquiring and distributing St Sigismund’s relics across Hungary and founding churches in his honor. It is precisely during the period coinciding with the reign of King Sigismund that the murals bearing representations of St Sigismund were painted: from the late 1300s to the 1420s. The king’s actions to promote his patron saint were meant to establish and ensure the solidity of St Sigismund’s new Hungarian cult and they show striking similarities with those undertaken by the king’s father, Charles IV of Luxemburg. This one managed in only five years to transform St Sigismund into one of his country’s sacred protectors by associating from the beginning the holy newcomer with Bohemia’s traditional patrons, especially St Wenceslas. No direct evidence of joint promotion by the Hungarian king of St Sigismund and the three holy kings has survived, although the king’s reverence for both his personal patron and St Ladislas is undeniable. His obvious emulation of his father’s efficient strategies for promoting the cults of saints makes it highly possible that King Sigismund attempted to establish, like his illustrious parent, a new sancta et fidelis societas within his kingdom, one that was meant to ensure the status of Hungarian patron for St Sigismund. Except for the temporary relocation of the royal martyr’s relics to the cult center of St Ladislas in Nagyvárad and their depiction in the Constance frescoes, there is no other sign of such an explicit association. The possibility cannot be excluded, however, that King Sigismund’s high devotion for the two royal saints made St Sigismund to be placed more than twice in St Ladislas’ holy and faithful companionship and, through him, in that of the other sancti reges Hungariae, the usual iconographic companions of St Ladislas. Only such a situation could make possible the iconographic association of St Sigismund with the holy kings of Hungary during King Sigismund’s reign and his later inclusion among the patron saints of the Hungarian Kingdom in Legende sanctorum regni hungarie in lombardica historia non contente.

 

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“Miracula sancti Sigismondi martyris, per ipsum in sanctam Pragensem ecclesiam manifeste demonstrata.” In Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum antiquiorum saeculo XVI qui asservantur in Bibliotheca Nationali Parisiensi ediderunt Hagiographi Bollandiani. 3 vols, 462–69. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1893.

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Monumenta Vaticana historiam regni Hungariae illustrantia. Series 1. 4 vols. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat Nyomdája, 1889.

Nagy, Iván. Magyarország családai czimerekkel és nemzékrendi táblákkal [Families of Hungary with coats of arms and chronological tables]. 12 vols. Pest: Nyomatott Beimel J. és Kozma Vazulnál, 1860.

Năstăsoiu, Dragoş Gh. “A Holy Bishop among Holy Kings in the Frescoes of Mălâncrav.” Forthcoming Transylvanian Review/Revue de Transylvanie 25 (2016).

Năstăsoiu, Dragoş Gh. “Political Aspects of the Mural Representations of sancti reges Hungariae in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 16 (2010): 93–119.

Năstăsoiu, Dragoş-Gheorghe. “Sancti reges Hungariae in Mural Painting of Late-medieval Hungary.” MA Thesis, CEU, 2009.

Neumann, Tibor, ed. Bereg megye hatóságnak oklevelei (1299–1526) [Authorities’ charters of Bereg County (1299–1526)]. Nyíregyháza: Kiadja a Móricz Zsigmond Könyvtár, 2006.

Otavský, Karel. “Reliquien im Besitz Kaisers Karl IV., ihre Verehrung und ihre Fassungen.” In Court Chapels of the High and Late Middle Ages and Their Artistic Decoration, edited by Jiří Fajt, 129–41, 392–98. Prague: Národní Galerie, 2003.

Paxton, Frederick S. “Liturgy and Healing in an Early Medieval Saint’s Cult: The Mass in honore sancti Sigismundi for the Cure of Fevers.” Traditio 49 (1994): 23–43.

Paxton, Frederick S. “Power and the Power to Heal. The Cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy.” Early Medieval Europe 2 (1993): 95–110.

Piqué, Francesca and Dusan Stulik, ed. Conservation of the Last Judgment Mosaic, St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005.

Podlaha, Anton, and Eduard Šittler. Chrámový poklad u sv. Víta v Praze. Jeho dĕjiny a popis [Treasury of the St Vitus Cathedral in Prague. Its history and description]. Prague: Nákladem dĕdictví sv. Prokopa, 1903.

Polc, Jaroslav. “Zapomenutý český patron” [The forgotten Czech Patron]. In Se znamením kříže [In the sign of the cross], edited by František Dvorník, 127–31. Rome: Křest’anská akademie v Římĕ, 1967.

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Prokopp, Mária. Középkori freskók Gömörben [Medieval frescoes in Gömör County]. Šamorín: Méry Ratio, 2002.

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Jerome Comes Home: The Cult of Saint Jerome in Late Medieval Dalmatia

Ines Ivić

Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies

 

In present day Croatia, St Jerome is considered a national saint, the outcome of a long period of appropriation beginning in the Middle Ages. The spread of his cult in medieval Dalmatia can be traced to the fifteenth century, when Jerome became a synonym for Dalmatia and the Dalmatians. This article discusses the historical circumstances which led to the formation of the common Dalmatian identity: establishment of the Venetian government after 1409, changes in the social structure in the Dalmatian communes and the rise of humanism there. This research focuses on the first two towns to adopt official celebrations of Jerome’s feast, Dubrovnik and Trogir. They still hold the largest numbers of artistic representations of the saint. We take the perspective of the private and public veneration expressed in these artworks.
Keywords: St Jerome, regional cult, Late Middle Ages, Dalmatia

 

St Jerome (345?–420) occupies a special place in the pantheon of saints. He was a trilingual Biblical scholar, ferocious Catholic controversialist, zealous moralist and belligerent defender of the ascetic life. Today, this universal saint is also unofficially considered the national saint of Croatia. The national denomination is a result of a long process that started in Dalmatia with the development of a regional cult that formed out of different traditions. Local Glagolitic tradition, first documented in the thirteenth century, praised Jerome for his regional origins, his invention of the Glagolitic script and his translation of the Bible into Slavonic, while the imported humanist tradition praised his intellectual deeds and ascetic way of life.

This article will discuss the formation of the regional cult in Dalmatia through the intertwining of these traditions. Manifestations of the traditions are preserved in artworks and literary productions which also testify to the popularity of the saint. The cult in medieval Dalmatia has been discussed only sporadically in previous historiography and poses many questions for research. Among the most important is Jerome’s role in the formation of regional and ethnic identity in Dalmatia. Since this question has been treated before, especially through Slavic confraternities named after St Jerome that were active outside the homeland,1 I will focus on an aspect that has not yet been discussed: the historical and political context in which the cult emerged in Dubrovnik (Ragusa) and Trogir (Traù), among the first cities to celebrate the cult officially. An analysis of artworks and archival documents reveals how the cult was imbued with strong political and ethnic characteristics and was induced by the establishment of the Venetian government in Dalmatia after 1409. The discussion takes the perspective of public and private veneration of the saint.

There is a vast scholarship on Jerome’s life. Although the most relevant books were published some decades ago, they still represent the starting point for discussing Jerome’s cult in Europe.2 Among the recent works I would highlight is a collection of essays on Jerome’s written legacy, edited by Andrew Cain and Josef Lössl, giving an extensive bibliography on Jerome.3 Unfortunately, none of these works contain references to veneration of Jerome in Dalmatia, which would be an important contribution to scholarship, considering the strong cultural, religious and political connection between the two shores of the Adriatic Sea. A recently published book by Julia Verkholantsev deals with the Slavic identity of the saint in Dalmatia and among other Slavs, covering the manifestations of the cult in Bohemia, Poland and Silesia.4 This work represents an excellent starting point in the research of Jerome’s Dalmatian identity, since it discusses the local Slavic tradition of worship based on the belief that Jerome was the inventor of the Glagolitic script. A similar topic was also discussed by John Fine, one of the first scholars to sketch out how Jerome became a Slavic saint.5

In Croatian historiography, writing on St Jerome can be separated into three groups. In the first, Jerome appears in the light of the Glagolitic tradition and the attribution of the invention of the Glagolitic letters. Work in the second group focuses on the artistic features of a series of reliefs representing St Jerome in the cave by Andria Alessi and Niccolò Fiorentino.6 In the last group, Jerome is mentioned in the context of writing by humanists, mostly focusing on Marko Marulić.7 So far no study has united all known aspects of the cult of the saint or interpreted it through the perspective of historical, cultural and artistic contexts. Before getting to Quattrocento Dalmatia, however, I will briefly provide a survey of the evolution of Jerome’s cult from Bethlehem through Italy to Dalmatia.

From Bethlehem to Italy

The cult of St Jerome was present in Western Europe by the middle of the ninth century, when the first lives of the saint, Hieronymus noster and Plerosque nimirum, were written independently.8 The Legenda Aurea, by Jacobus de Voragine (1230–99) contributed to his popularity and became the main literary source for visual representations, as in the fresco cycle by Vittore Carpaccio in the Scuola de San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice.9

The thirteenth century saw a veritable rebirth of Jerome’s cult in the Western church, after Jerome’s relics were translated to the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. The translation is described in Translatio corpori beati Hieronymi written around 1290. It relates that Jerome appeared in the dream of a monk and expressed a wish that his body be moved to the Roman basilica, as Bethlehem was under the rule of Arabs. The process of re-evaluation of the saint’s deeds begun in the fourteenth century with Giovanni d’Andrea, a canon from Bologna and professor of law at the University of Bologna, who wrote a book Hieronymianus or De Laudibus de Sancti Hieronymi, which contains Jerome’s own work and writing on Jerome by other authors.10 Another contributor to the emergence of the cult in Italy was Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder (1370–1444), a canon lawyer born in Capodistria in today’s Slovenia. Vergerio’s family worshipped St Jerome to express gratitude for the family’s rescue during several ambushes in 1380, which they believed was Jerome’s deed. Vergerio vowed that “as long as I live, I will review the praises and excellent merits of Jerome in the speech before an assembly of the best citizens”.11 The humanists who accepted Jerome as a patron praised him particularly for his intellectual work and his translations of Holy Scriptures. Furthermore, he was seen as a perfect example of living a moral life that followed the sacred teachings. For Vergerio, Jerome’s life “serves as an example of ethical conduct”.12 The eremitical aspect of Jerome’s life came into sharper focus in the fifteenth century along with the blooming of the Franciscan Observant movement and the foundation of different congregations of the eremitical brothers imitating Jerome’s lifestyle.13 After being disseminated through multiple channels, Jerome’s cult was accepted in most of the Western Church by the end of the fifteenth century.

Rivalizing for the Birthplace of the Saint

Before the humanist version took shape in the fifteenth century, the cult of St Jerome was well established in Dalmatia, mostly among the closed monastic communities. It developed out of the statement in the last chapter of Jerome’s work De viris illustribus that he was born in Stridon, situated somewhere on the border of the Roman provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, territory of the present day Croatia.14 Jerome probably never imagined that a single sentence in his book would cause a centuries-long dispute over the exact location of his place of birth. The town he mentions was a small oppidum, and lack of archaeological and historical evidence makes it hard for historians to reach definite conclusions regarding its location. Stridon has been identified with places near Aquileia, Italy, with Zrenj, Štrigova, with the surroundings of Skradin in Croatia, and even with Grahovo polje in Bosnia. These appropriations of the saint’s birthplace have never resulted in a strong local cult in the towns involved. For the present account, the most relevant explanations are the “Istrian” and “Dalmatian” theories, which emerged in the fifteenth century and directly fed the dispute between the Dalmatian and the Italian humanists.15

The Istrian theory locates the saint’s birthplace to the site of present-day Zrenj (Sdrigna), a village in northern Istria. In the Middle Ages, the habitants of Istria believed that Jerome was born somewhere within their peninsula, a belief that is evident in the presence of Jerome’s cult in liturgical books and churches consecrated to him. This explanation was popularized by Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) and Jacopo Filippo Foresti, also known as Jacopo di Bergamo (1434–1520), in the Late Middle Ages. In his Italia Illustrata, published in 1474, describing the region of Istria, Biondo names St Jerome and Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder as the most prominent people from the region. He classifies Istria as an Italian province, concluding that Jerome could not be anything else but Italian, since, in his opinion, Istria had been a Roman province even before the time of Emperor Augustus.16 Jacopo di Bergamo, Biondo’s student, accepted his teacher’s opinion and so did many others in subsequent centuries.17

The Dalmatian hypothesis developed from the commonly accepted idea of the saint’s regional origin. This is evident, for example, in the official decision to adopt the feast of St Jerome in Trogir in 1454 on the grounds of his Dalmatian origin.18 Marko Marulić (Marcus Marulus, 1450–1524) was probably the first proponent of this hypothesis. He was the first to infer from written sources that Stridon was located somewhere near Skradin.19 Most of the representatives of this theory agreed only that Stridon was in Dalmatia, but could not reach a consensus concerning the precise place.20 This is the explanation that still features most commonly in Croatian and international historiography.

St Jerome as the Inventor of Glagolitic Letters

In medieval Croatia, St Jerome was considered as the inventor of Glagolitic letters and Slavic liturgy. There is no historical foundation for this idea, however. Jerome lived long before Slavs came to the territory of Dalmatia and was thus unlikely to have spoken Slavonic or to have invented Glagolitic letters. The earliest written record of the belief that Jerome was the inventor of the Glagolitic script is contained in Pope Innocent IV’s answer to a request by the Bishop of Senj in 1248 defending the use of Slavonic liturgy and Glagolitic letters in his diocese.21 The pope’s answer granted the clergy permission to continue their tradition, and confirmed the legitimacy of the Slavonic tradition, invoking the authority of the great church father. 22 Although the pope’s answer mentions “Slavic lands” in which these letters may be used, this approval should be seen as applying to the diocese of Senj alone, and not to the whole territory inhabited by Slavs.23

Croatian historiography traditionally accepts that the legend of Jerome inventing Glagolitic letters derived from the fear of accusations of heresy arising from disputes on the use of Slavonic language and liturgy. These disputes were discussed at the Church Councils of Split in 925 and 1060. This argument was also supported by the fact that St Cyril, the actual inventor of Glagolitic letters, was not venerated by the Glagolitic communities and his brother Methodius was considered a heretic.24 John Fine argues that Jerome was used by the Glagolites as “the ancient heritage” to justify their tradition each time they were attacked by Latinists.25 On the other hand, Julia Verkholantsev argues that even though Glagolites used the Slavonic language, they were following western monastic rules and had common practices with the Latin ecclesiastical communities. With this in mind, acceptance of St Jerome as their patron was a way to prove their loyalty to the Western Church.26 Furthermore, she discusses the possibility that the roots of this misbelief could be found among the Latin clergy, and the explanation was promoted as one of the ways of incorporating Glagolitic communities into the Western Church.27

Vesna Badurina Stipčević has made a detailed analysis of the Glagolitic liturgical books that contain references to the saint. She has published a list of breviaries, dating from between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, containing the officium of St Jerome on his feast day, September 30.28 The officium was composed of three parts: a hymn to Jerome, his life, and an excerpt from his letter to Eustochium. Jerome’s life is described from his birth in Stridon until his death in Bethlehem. Since most of the breviaries were used in monastic communities, it is not surprising that his officium included the passage of his letter to Eustochium where he described his penitent life in the desert, fasting, fighting bodily temptations, and surrounded by wild animals.

Other Glagolitic liturgical books referring to St Jerome are missals. A mass in honor of St Jerome is preserved only in missals from the northern parts of the Adriatic basin, Kvarner and Istria. The full mass can be found in the oldest surviving Croatian Glagolitic missal written in 1371 in Omišalj. Today, it is kept in the Vatican library and known as Borgo Illirico IV.29 Another missal is the First Beram Missal 162, now held in the National Library of Slovenia in Ljubljana.30 The first printed book in Croatia, the Missale Romanum Glagolitice, published in 1483, was published in the Croatian recension of Church Slavonic, based on the manuscript Missal of Duke Novak written in 1368. In the calendar of the editio princeps, May 9 was marked as the feast of the Translation of St Jerome (Prenesenie svetago Eronima), but this is not contained in any other Glagolitic calendar. Marija Pantelić proved that the Missal of Duke Novak was edited for printing by Glagolitic monks in Istria.31 According to her, the celebration of the translation of Jerome’s relics to the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore was connected to the rising popularity of the idea of the saint’s Istrian origin promoted by Flavio Biondo. In 1464, Pope Pius II officially proclaimed this date as the feast of the Translatio. Interestingly, Pius II had previously been Bishop of Trieste and was certainly familiar with the widely-held belief in his bishopric that the village of Zrenj was Stridon. The bishop of Ravenna, Superantio, wrote in the fourteenth century that Zrenj contained a very simple church in honor of the Jerome, standing above the grave of the saint’s parents.32 The inclusion of the feast in the calendar is an expression of this Istrian tradition and the respect paid by the Istrian redactors of the text to their former bishop. The Istrian influence is reflected in other feasts specific to the region that cannot be found in other calendars: St Lazarus and St Servulus, martyrs from Trieste.33 Marija Pantelić also suggests that the celebration of the translation of the saint’s relics can be seen in another tradition. The Glagolitic First Beram Breviary 161, written in 1396 and today held in the National Library in Ljubljana, has a special officium on the date of the translation. However, the distinctive feature of this officium is an alternative hagiographical view of the translation of Jerome’s relics, attributing it to St Helen, who apparently had sent a piece of Jerome’s clothes to her son with a request to build a church consecrated to him in Constantinople.34 It is not yet known whether the cult existed in Byzantium or what could have been the source for this officium.

The surviving breviaries give a clue to the geographical origins of the cult. Most were used in the northern parts of Croatia, the Kvarner and Istria. The only Dalmatian Glagolitic breviary that contains the officium of St Jerome is the fourteenth-century Pašman Breviary, made in the Benedictine monastery of St Cosmas and Damian in Tkon, on the island of Pašman. The saint’s officium in the Pašman Breviary can be seen as the reflection of a strong Glagolitic tradition in the Zadar (Zara) region, but it does not indicate the celebration of the saint in the Dalmatian cities which would later become the centers of the humanist cult: Trogir, Split and Dubrovnik. The breviaries all attest to the continuation of Jerome’s cult in medieval Croatia and in Venetian and Habsburg Istria, medieval political entities which were not a part of medieval Croatian kingdom, but there is insufficient historical evidence to say the same for medieval Dalmatia. Regardless the political non-unity of the Croatian lands, it is evident that the saint was venerated in areas where the population was predominantly Slavic. It is reasonable to assume that other breviaries from Dalmatia, now lost, contained the same office. All the more so because the monastery in Tkon had a scriptorium in which Glagolitic books were produced for the whole region of Dalmatia. Future research into the origin of Jerome’s cult among the Glagolites, especially in Istria, should consider the comparative analysis of the Missal of Duke Novak and the editio princeps made by Marija Pantelić, which confirmed the exchange of the Glagolitic texts from Zadar, through Lika and Krbava, to Istria.35 This would reveal Dalmatia’s place in the wider cultural context, and permit the conclusion that the existence of the cult in Istria also implies its existence in Dalmatia. The enduring Glagolitic tradition in the region also lends support to this claim.

The non-liturgical Glagolitic codex Petris Miscellany from 1468 contains 162 different texts, mostly apocrypha and hagiographic legends, including the legend of Jerome, which refers to him as Jerome the Croat (Jeronim Hrvatin) and emphasizes his Slavic origin.36 For Petar Runje, one of the pioneers of Glagolitic research in Croatia, this is proof that “in the fifteenth century, among the Croats, there existed a notion of Jerome being Croatian”.37 In my opinion, this is a hasty conclusion based on an unwarranted generalization, since most of the other sources refer to Jerome as Dalmatian, Illyrian or Slav. Although Jerome may seem to have acquired Croatian national attributes in the fifteenth century and the modes of his appearance in the subsequent sources are clues to the formation of the Croatian nation, I believe that the explanation for the term Hrvatin should rather be sought in the original from which the text was translated. Stjepan Ivišić argues that Jerome’s legend in the Petris Miscellany, together with some other texts, was translated from the fourteenth century Czech passionale collection of saints’ legends.38 It is possible that Jerome was referred to as Croatian in the Czech original, not necessarily containing ethnic but rather geographical attribution, and that the translator was only following the original text and not exclusively emphasizing the national designation.39

The example of Juraj Slovinac (George of Slavonia; Georgius de Sclavonia, 1355/60–1416), theologian and professor at the Sorbonne, proves the general acceptance of the idea that Jerome was the inventor of Glagolitic script. In his copy of Jerome’s Latin commentaries on the Psalms, where Jerome explains that he translated psalms into vernacular language, Juraj made a marginal note claiming that Jerome was a translator of the psalms “in linguam sclavonicam”.40 There are similar testimonies in the travel itineraries of western pilgrims who visited Dalmatia on their way to the Holy Land. One of them was the Swiss Dominican Felix Fabri (1441/43–1502), who stopped in several cities on the Dalmatian coast, observing their religious and social practices.41 He reported that in most Dalmatian cities, the mass was held in the Slavonic language and some churches did not even possess the liturgical books in Latin.42 In conversation with the local people, he was informed that Jerome invented letters for his compatriots that were different from Greek and Latin script, and that he used them to transliterate and translate the Bible and the Book of Hours into the vernacular language that was later called Slavonic. Georges Lengherand, Mayor of Mons, stopped in Dalmatia and Istria during his journey to Jerusalem in 1485/86. He described a Slavonic mass he attended while he was in Istria, one which, he was told, had been composed in Slavonic by the saint himself.43

The Cult in Dubrovnik

Having extended beyond the strictly monastic communities by the fifteenth century, Jerome’s cult appeared with its distinctive features in all major cities in Dalmatia, from Zadar to Dubrovnik, by the end of the century. The intensive exchange of goods and knowledge between the two shores of the Adriatic contributed to the development and expansion of the humanist cult of St Jerome in Dalmatia. This humanist cult, however, was only an upgrade of existing forms of worship deriving from the Glagolitic tradition. The official introduction of the saint’s feast day in the towns of Dubrovnik and Trogir in the middle of the fifteenth century was due to a strong local tradition.

It is hard to find evidence of the cult in Dubrovnik before its official proclamation, but manifestations of the cult may have been lost in the Great Earthquake that struck the city in 1667, destroying much of it. Still, the archival material helps us to reconstruct the saint’s importance and the manifestations of his cult. In 1445, his celebration day was incorporated into the official state calendar of the Republic of Ragusa.44 This was the first official recognition of the cult in a Dalmatian city. The proclamation reflected an established practice in Dalmatia, as can be read from the text of the decision: Jerome was to be “worshipped by us and the other Dalmatians of whose nation he was”.45 This statement indisputably proves the wide recognition and acceptance of the idea of his origin among people living in Dalmatian territory.

After the half century of independence gained through skillful diplomatic negotiation and set into the Treaty of Zadar of 1358, the Republic of Ragusa felt a constant threat from the proximity of its biggest rival, Venice, especially after the establishment of the Venetian rule over Dalmatia after 1409. In order to weaken Venetian pressure and influence, the Republic’s authorities insisted on the introduction of the Observant reform in the Franciscan monasteries on the Ragusan territory. This was to prevent the Serenissima from reinforcing its position through the Dalmatian Franciscans, who were mostly Conventuals and suspected of attachment to Venice.46 The Republic of Ragusa was reluctant to separate its Dominican monasteries from the Hungarian province and opposed their union with the Dalmatian monasteries in an independent province. The Republic was similarly afraid that Venice could use monastic orders other than the Franciscans to reinforce its position in Dubrovnik. This ultimately led to the establishment of an independent Dominican congregation of Dubrovnik in 1486.47

Dubrovnik was not politically integrated with the other Dalmatian communes. It recognized the jurisdiction of the Hungarian king while the rest of Dalmatia was under the Venetian government. Ragusa’s Dalmatian identity was based on common language and territorial contiguity rather than political status. Another factor was ethnic affiliation. It is notable that during the fifteenth century the Republic of Ragusa emphasized its Dalmatian ethnicity in strenuous efforts to prove that it did not belong to Italian ethnicity.

In 1444, the Ragusan citizens in Barcelona were forced to pay the “Italian” tax. The Republic of Ragusa sent a letter to the authorities in Barcelona in 1446 explicitly stating that “…it is clear to the nations of the whole world…that Ragusans are not Italians…quite the contrary, that both judging by their language and by criteria of place, they are Dalmatians”.48 In this context, the veneration of St Jerome in Dubrovnik clearly bears political connotations: worship of the saint expressed a common—Dalmatian—ethnic affiliation. The political connotations and aspirations it reflected can be interpreted as expressions of otherness and togetherness: otherness through differentiation from Italy on the ethnic level, as part of efforts to prevent the constantly-feared re-establishment of Venetian government over Dubrovnik, and togetherness through the expression of the cultural, linguistic and historical sphere shared by Dubrovnik and other Dalmatian cities.

Not much is known of what the official celebration looked like in Dubrovnik, or whether a chapel or an altar dedicated to the saint was set up under the official patronage of the government. There survive artworks commissioned by the local government, however, which manifest the official veneration of St Jerome. The firmest evidence is a representation of the saint in the hall of the Great Council, unfortunately destroyed in the great earthquake of 1667. Nikola Božidarević (Nicholas of Ragusa, c. 1460–1518) was commissioned to produce the image of St Jerome dressed in a cardinal’s robe in 1510.49 It matched the height and form of an existing figure of St John the Baptist in the same hall. The pairing of these two saints was due to their penitential character, and emphasized their eremitical and ascetic nature, as in the same iconographic representation by the Petrović brothers on the portal of the Franciscan church in Dubrovnik. The catalogue entry of the exhibition The Golden Age of Dubrovnik explains that the figure of St John the Baptist represents “the firmness of Christianity in the period of the onslaughts of the Turks,” while the figure of St Jerome represents “the cultural and spiritual unity with Dalmatians under the Venetian occupation”.50 Although I agree with the interpretation of the figure of St Jerome as the symbol of the unity with the other Dalmatian cities, I see it as a secondary layer of the statues’ symbolic meaning. The author misses the primary iconographical interpretation of this type: the pairing of the saints by virtue of their ascetic nature. Knowing the postulates for which Observant Franciscans were striving, the choice of these two figures for the portal of the Franciscan church is not at all surprising.

We can identify some members of high society as the main promoters of the cult and of the official policy. Archival documents and surviving artworks suggest that two aristocratic families, the Gradi (Gradić) and the Gozze (Gučetić), were to a great extent responsible for the implementation and the dispersion of the cult in late medieval Dubrovnik. Members of the Gozze family, one of the oldest noble lines in Dubrovnik, made many contributions to life in the Republic of Ragusa.51 An example of Gozze devotion is an altarpiece commissioned in 1488 by Bartol Gozze, a highly positioned member of the family who was appointed rector several times and served the Republic in several diplomatic functions, including visits to the kings of Hungary and Aragon, and to Pope Nicholas V. Among the six figures in the altarpiece he ordered for the family’s chapel of St Bartholomew on the island of Lokrum, is St Jerome, depicted as a hermit and holding in his hand a large piece of stone.52 The chapel which the family built for their summer house in Trsteno in the sixteenth century was consecrated to St Jerome.53 The family also possessed a stone carved relief depicting St Jerome, made in the second half of the fifteenth century by Niccolò Fiorentino and decorated with the family’s coat of arms.54 Not much is known about the provenance and purpose of this relief, but it certainly proves the family’s special devotion to the saint.

The Gradi (Gradić) family financed the construction of a Franciscan church in Slano near Dubrovnik in 1420 and dedicated it to St Jerome, as is written on the dedicatory inscription on the façade of the church.55 Also demonstrating the family’s influence and wealth was its patronage of the altars in the cathedral and the Dominican church, for which they commissioned some of the finest examples of Gothic painting in medieval Croatia. In 1494, Jerome (Jeronim) Gradi signed a contract with Božidar Vlatković and his son Nikola Božidarević (Nicholas of Ragusa) in the name of his brothers and himself for an altarpiece for the family’s chapel in the Dominican church. The triptych was to have three figures: St Matthew the Apostle, St Jerome as a hermit in the desert and St Stephen the Martyr together with the Virgin Mary.56 The choice of saints was not accidental. Jerome, Matthew, and Stephen were namesakes of the Gradi brothers, in whose name Jerome concluded an agreement with the painters.57 The Gradi family’s palace in the sexteria of St Peter, was one of the oldest in the city. Similar to the Gozze family, they built the family chapel in their garden and consecrated it to St Jerome.

Trogir as the Cradle of Devotion

In 1455, Trogir included the feast day of St Jerome in its official calendar of celebrations. In the text of the decision, Jerome is named as gloriosissimus doctor as was common from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.58 The text states that Jerome was to be worshipped for his devoted and hard life (a reference to the ascetic aspect of his nature), for his explanation of the Holy Scripture, and for his innumerable miracles during his life and after his death. Most of all, the text repeats a same statement from its Dubrovnik counterpart, pointing out that he was venerated by Dalmatians because of his regional origin.59 Besides the influence of the local tradition, the origins of the cult in Trogir may be analyzed from the perspective of the rising humanist culture in the city and the popularization of the Renaissance style in the middle of the fifteenth century. With the appointment of Bishop Giacomo Torlon (1452–83), a theologian from Ancona, the city began its renovatio urbis, during which it was completely transformed with renaissance artworks.60 Bishop Torlon surrounded himself with a circle of excellent artists that included Andrija Aleši (Andrea Alessi, 1425–1505), Nikola Firentinac (Niccolò di Giovanni Fiorentino, 1418–1506) and Ivan Duknović (Ioannes Dalmata, 1440–1514), and intellectuals including Koriolan Cipiko (1425–93). The latter, together with the bishop, was one of the key Renaissance figures in the city. He served as the operarius of the cathedral and was one of the most outstanding individuals responsible for the construction of the Renaissance chapel of St John in the cathedral church. Considering the impact the bishop had in the city, he was perhaps the most instrumental, together with the intellectual elite, in spreading the veneration of St Jerome in Trogir. The seventeenth-century history of Trogir, Storia della città di Traù by Paolo Andreis (1610–86), states that the cult officially started under Bishop Torlon at the beginning of the rule of Rector Giovanni Alberto. He calls the saint the greatest adornment of the Church, and thus the greatest adornment of the Illyrian people.61 In Trogir, the cult of St Jerome was strongly connected to the cathedral church of St Lawrence. Among the most famous representations of the saint in Dalmatia is the relief (1460–67) by Andrija Aleši (1425–1505) above the altar in the baptistery depicting St Jerome in the cave, surrounded with books, dressed as a hermit and with a lion lying under his legs. In 1489, the doors of the cathedral organ were decorated by Gentile Bellini with the figures of St Jerome and St John the Baptist.62 At first sight, this representation of St Jerome does not seem to depart from the standard iconography that emerged from Giovanni Bellini’s paintings of the saint, a combination of two iconographical types: the northern depiction of the saint as a scholar in the study and the Tuscan representation of a penitent hermit in the desert in front of the cave.63 What deserves our attention is an open book in front of the saint, filled with what look like Glagolitic letters. Some of the letters are legible and interpretable, and clearly Glagolitic, while others seem to be the master’s interpretation, only resembling Glagolitic forms. What is even more interesting is that the letters of the initial paragraph are written in Latin script. Regardless of the details displayed, we can clearly discern an intention to represent the saint as the inventor of Glagolitic letters. This proves the strength of the Glagolitic tradition in the town and identifies the origins of the official veneration.64 Another depiction of St Jerome can be found on a stone triptych in the Dominican church together with St Lawrence and St John of Trogir, made by Niccolò Fiorentino.65 The appearance of the city’s patron saints on the triptych are the grounds for Bužančić’s proposition that it was commissioned by the local authorities.66

Humanism made a deep mark on Trogir in the second half of the fifteenth century. Its pioneer in the city was Petar Cipiko (1390–1440), father of Koriolan, who had a great passion for collecting and transcribing the works of ancient authors. He maintained a friendship with Italian and other Dalmatian humanists, especially Juraj Benja (Georgius Begna) of Zadar, from whom he received the gift of a codex in which he continued to transcribe other texts, including sections of Jerome’s work.67 The name Jerome (Jeronim or Jerolim) was common among the descendants of the Cipiko family, no doubt indicating special devotion to the saint.68 Pavao Andreis mentions the altar of St Jerome in the church of St Peter, commissioned by the descendants of Hektor Cipiko (1482–1553), probably in the second half of the sixteenth century.69 The choice of Jerome as the patron of the altar is not surprising, because Hektor’s father and son were both called Jerome, and it was most probably the latter who commissioned the altar. A piece of irrefutable evidence for the family’s particular devotion is a statue of St Jerome dressed in a cardinal’s robe, made in the second half of the fifteenth century and now kept in the Museum of Fine Arts in Split. It bears a devotional inscription stating that it was commissioned “out of the devotion to St Jerome of Stridon and in the memory of the brave father, Alvise Cipiko, son of Jerome”.70

Joško Belamarić has noted that the statue of St John the Evangelist made by Ivan Duknović for the chapel of St John in Trogir in 1482 is strongly reminiscent of the facial characteristics of Alvise Cipiko (1456–1504).71 The Renaissance enthusiasm for identifying portraits, so-called portraits travestis, had the purpose of praising the moral virtues of the person portrayed. Koriolan Cipiko commissioned the statue of St Jerome in order to present his son as the successor of the saint in terms of moral and spiritual values. This statue fits a similar hypothesis as that proposed by Belamarić for the statue of St John the Evangelist, in that it portrays characteristics of members of the Cipiko family. It was made by Tripun Bokanić for the chapel of the castle built by Koriolan in Kaštel Stari, near Trogir. Bokanić’s workshop participated in the construction of the cathedral’s bell tower, under contract to Alvise Cipiko (1515–1606), procurator of the cathedral.72 Belamarić also explains that Jerome’s statue had a memorial as well as an ex voto purpose, since Alvise lost three of his four sons, the surviving son also being called Jerome. Thus, in addition to erecting a kind of private shrine in the memory of his father, we can understand, given his unfortunate destiny and the unstable times at the beginning of the seventeenth century, that he also intended the statue as a votive offering.

We should also mention that a chapel dedicated to St Jerome, built between 1438 and 1446, is one of the oldest annexes to the cathedral church. In 1438, Nikolota Sobota, widow of Nikola Sobota, got permission from the cathedral chapter to build a chapel and endow it with the necessary liturgical appurtenances.73 An altar consecrated to St Jerome was placed inside the chapel. The chapel is one of the earliest examples of the cult of St Jerome and is also important in being one of the earliest private chapels of this type.

The Benedictine church of St John the Baptist also had an altar consecrated to St Jerome. A polyptych made for this altar by Blaž Jurjev Trogiranin (Biagio di Giorgio da Traù, c. 1390–1450) in 1435 was later moved to the chapel of St Jerome in the cathedral.74 In the center of the composition was the figure of the Virgin Mary with figures of saints including St Jerome in his cardinal robe and a model of the church in his hand. In addition to the altar in the church of St Peter, Pavao Andreis mentioned an altar to St Jerome in the church of the Virgin Mary on the main square. It was made of marble and featured a sculpture. Andreis also transcribed the dedicational inscription where the donators are mentioned. According to Danko Zelić, they cannot be identified but they certainly did not belong to any of the noble families in Trogir.75 Not much is known about this altar, since the church was demolished in the nineteenth century.

St Jerome between the Venetian Republic and the Hungarian Kingdom

Why was it that these two cities, more than any others, gave such prominence to the worship of St Jerome, and why should they be considered the focal point of the humanist cult of St Jerome? The strong influence of Italian humanism offers an easy explanation, but the promotion of the saint through the visual arts provides evidence of a wider historical context. Furthermore, the Glagolitic cult persisted alongside the humanist cult and certainly contributed more to the proclamation of the official veneration of Jerome in Dubrovnik and Trogir. The saint’s regional identity emerged as the Glagolitic tradition became interwoven with the humanist cult, and is best expressed in the Trogir decision to make his celebration official, the text of which gives emphasis to both of these factors.

In my opinion, the development of the cult in Dubrovnik and Trogir is also connected to the establishment of Venetian authority on the Eastern Adriatic coast after 1409. While the Hungarian kingdom was preoccupied with internal struggles for possession of the throne between Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437) and Ladislas of Naples, the Venetian Republic took the advantage and bought the rights on Dalmatia from Ladislas of Naples in 1409. Most of the communes did not accept the fact that they had been sold, and the Venetian government had difficulty in implementing its rule in Nin, Šibenik, Split and Trogir. In other cities such as Zadar, which accepted the new ruler in 1409, all the noble families close to the Hungarian king were forced to leave the city.76 The establishment of Venetian rule in Trogir did not go as easily as expected, and Trogir did not surrender until 1420. Venice quickly unified the legal system in the newly conquered lands, depriving many medieval communes of their privileges and autonomy.77

Tomislav Raukar argues that the question of which state held authority over the medieval communes was of less importance to them than the nature of their relations with that state.78 During the reign of Louis I of Hungary (1342–82), some Dalmatian communes despite having restricted political autonomy – became economically stronger and developed trading relations with the hinterland and with Italian cities, especially those on the opposite side of the Adriatic. After 1409, the economic development of the Dalmatian communes began to stagnate and, in some cases, even to decline. The reason for this was that the Republic of Venice, having incorporated the communes in its centralized economic and trading system, tried to limit trade on the Eastern Adriatic shore, mostly through high taxes and the obligation to export all surplus goods to Venice.79

Not all social strata accepted the new rulers equally. The peasants were not much concerned who their ruler was, and commoners in general accepted the new ruler in the hope that he might extend their rights. It is not possible to give a definite answer, however, to the question of whether the highest layer of the society, the nobility, supported or opposed Venetian rule. This question deserves a separate study, which would shed light on aristocratic participation in the formation of regional identity. Dissatisfaction with Venetian rule could have arisen from the local aristocracy’s exclusion from local government in general, as in Trogir, where the council rarely met and was not responsible for actual decisions, which were mostly made by the rector, a Venetian appointee.80 On the other hand, the example of the Cipiko family demonstrates how some aristocratic families took advantage of the situation and retained their role in local government by supporting the new ruler. Petar Cipiko was one of the noblemen who accepted Venetian rule and served for them in many communal, as well as military, positions. Petar was proud of his classical education and erudition, so much so that he even gave his descendants classical names. His son Koriolan was named after the Roman hero who came to the side of the Volscians, the enemies of Rome. Ivo Babić assumes that by this analogy, Petar found a justification supporting Venetian rule.81 Members of families who resisted Venetian rule were forced to leave the city or were forcibly taken to Venice as hostages, as a pledge to keep the peace in the communes. In Trogir, most of the Venetian opponents were expelled from the city, including the captain and the bishop, who was close to the Hungarian King Sigismund.82 The same occurred in Zadar, from where some people spent as much as 20 years as prisoners in Venice.83

Of relevance here is to mention possible reasons of the dissatisfaction that arose in the communes between Rab and Trogir. They objected to their revenues going directly to the state treasury, while the income of some communes such as Split and Hvar remained in the charge of the local authorities.84 Loss of autonomy also showed up in the Venetian review of all municipal statutes, and the requirement for the senate in the Venice to approve the election of the city’s rector and bishop. Furthermore, many decisions could not be brought without the permission of the rector or, in some cases, of the doge.85

The period of consolidation of Venetian government in Dalmatia was fruitful for the cult of St Jerome. Before the Venetians established control, expressions of identity were limited to the communes, since they represented politically and economically closed communities. Micro-identity based on local characteristics began to lose its importance after the Dalmatian cities were taken into the unified Venetian legal and administration system, since this identity had mostly been carried by members of the local aristocracy. As a consequence, at the beginning of the fifteenth century and afterwards, Dalmatia was administratively isolated from medieval Croatia. Given the negative economic transformation in Dalmatian towns, the standardization of their legal and administrative systems and the Venetian neglect of the towns and their privileges, the emergence of dissatisfaction is not surprising.

The presence of Jerome’s figure can also be interpreted as emphasizing the tradition and the privileges that Dalmatian cities had held for a long time under the Hungarian kings. Veneration of the saint through official celebrations highlights his regional and ethnic Dalmatian identity, engendering a sense of common identity among the inhabitants of the Dalmatian communes and their affiliation to the same cultural sphere and customs. The official decisions of Dubrovnik and Trogir to venerate the saint makes this identity explicit by describing Jerome as Dalmatian. Zdenka Janeković Römer explains how Dubrovnik maintained the expression of its geographical, ethnic and cultural bonds with Dalmatia even after being politically cut off from the other Dalmatian cities. Dalmatians had special status among non-Ragusan citizens, permitting them to work in Dubrovnik and have dual citizenship. 86

In Trogir, nostalgia for the better times enjoyed by the commune under the Hungarian kings is manifested on a stone triptych, originally part of the altar of the Virgin Mary in the cathedral church of St Lawrence in Trogir and today kept in the Museum of Sacred Art. The altar was under the patronage of the local noble families Borgoforte and Dragač, who were also known for their humanist activities.87 The triptych features the Virgin Mary with the Child in the middle and the figures of St Ladislas and St Jerome on the two sides. Radoslav Bužančić argues that the presence of the Hungarian saint is connected with the Ottoman wars after 1470; accordingly, he dates the polyptych to the early 1470s.88

I am more inclined to agree with Maja Cepetić, however, who proposed that the presence of St Ladislas, King of Hungary, indicates a propaganda in favor of the Hungarian king and kingdom in the period of consolidation of Venetian rule.89 The special bond between Trogir and the Hungarian kingdom lies in the fact that Trogir enjoyed almost uninterrupted autonomy in the Hungarian kingdom from 1107 onwards and resisted accepting Venetian rule and losing its privileges after 1420. The figure of St Ladislas is also known to have appeared on golden florins minted during the reigns of Louis the Great and Sigismund of Luxemburg. He continued to be the most popular patron saint in Hungary during the Angevin and Luxemburg dynasties.90 Here I would mention another example of the special bond between Trogir and the Hungarian rulers, which indeed precedes the period discussed here but provides more evidence of the town’s preference for Hungarian rule. On the main façade of the cathedral church, above the rose window, is a relief of the Angevin dynasty.91 It was probably installed in the second half of the fourteenth century, after the re-establishment of Hungarian rule after the Venetians had controlled it for a short period (1332–58). It was a response to Louis the Great confirming the city’s rights and privileges, but is also related to the royal family’s financial contribution to the construction of the cathedral. Representations of the Hungarian saint in Trogir should be interpreted less as nostalgic longing for Hungarian rule than as fondness for the civic and legal privileges which the commune received during the reign of King Coloman (1095–1116). For several centuries thereafter, these privileges underpinned the commune’s judicial system and formed the basis for its local autonomy.92

Another critical factor that strengthened regional and ethnic identity was the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, which caused mass migration to the southern parts of Dalmatia, and subsequently to Italian cities. A good example of regional identity and the expression of otherness within the Venetian Republic is the formation of the confraternities outside the territory of Dalmatia, the Confraternita degli Schiavoni. The term Schiavone was a Venetian expression used for all the people coming from the Eastern Adriatic shore under their rule. The confraternities were founded mostly in cities which traded with Dalmatian cities, and they were mostly dedicated to St Jerome.93

Conclusion

The cult of St Jerome in Dalmatia represents a broad, largely non-researched and important topic in the discussion on the formation of regional, ethnic and national identities. From the middle of the fifteenth century, the cult of the saint became an expression of a common identity based on historical, linguistic and ethnic characteristics, mostly referred to as Dalmatian, Slavic or Illyrian. The interweaving of these identities, and differences between the meanings of “Slavic”, “Dalmatian”, and “Illyrian” are highly complex questions which I will leave for a separate and detailed discussion.

The devotion to the saint that emerged among the Glagolitic monastic communities, as earliest evidenced in the thirteenth century, started to be propagated by ecclesiastical and intellectual elites in the fifteenth century. Generally praised for his religious and intellectual deeds, Jerome was worshipped in Dalmatia primarily because of his regional origin and his alleged invention of Glagolitic letters. As expressed in the official statements of veneration in Dubrovnik and Trogir, the connotations of his cult were more political than religious. Although Jerome’s cult was present in Dalmatia before the fifteenth century, there is no evidence that it was present throughout the region or that worshipping him was considered an expression of the regional identity of his devotees.

St Jerome became particularly important in the fifteenth century. Humanist ideas from Italy and the development of intellectual circles on the Dalmatian coast enriched and transformed the Glagolitic tradition into a regional cult in the middle of the fifteenth century. Although the regional cult of St Jerome grew out of a local tradition unconnected to the ideas of Italian humanism, it was only the writings of Dalmatian humanists that raised it to an expression of common identity, and this will be presented in a separated study. The rise of Jerome’s cult in Dalmatia in the fifteenth century was closely related to the complex political situation and changes in social structure ensuing from the establishment of Venetian rule, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans and the resulting mass migrations. Further clarification of the story of the Dalmatian Jerome requires detailed iconographic analysis of artworks in Dalmatia, examination of the migration processes and the activities of the Schiavoni confraternities, and detailed comparative study of how the proto-nationalist ideas which developed from Italian humanism influenced the emergence of ethnic identity.

 

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Lengherand, Georges. Voyage de Georges Lengherand, mayeur de Mons en Haynaut, à Venise, Rome, Jérusalem, Mont Sinaï et le Kayre, 1485–1486. Mons: Masguillier & Deguesne, 1861.

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Blessed Lancelao of Hungary: A Franciscan Observant in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Eszter Konrád

Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies

 

The Franciscan friar Lancelao of Hungary, allegedly a descendant of the Hungarian royal dynasty, moved from Hungary to Italy in search of a Minorite community in which he could truly observe the teachings and spiritual disciplines of St Francis. Lancelao spent the rest of his life in Observant communities in the central and northern part of Italy, acquiring fama sanctitatis already in his lifetime. This article deals with the emergence and evolution of the figure of Lancelao of Hungary in Franciscan literature, focusing on the two earliest redactions of his legend written in the vernacular by the renowned Observant Franciscan authors, Mariano da Firenze and Giacomo Oddi da Perugia around the last quarter of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth century, respectively. The present article provides insights into Mariano’s methods of rewriting Oddi’s exemplum-like account according to the requirements of a saintly biography. As a result of Mariano’s account, Lancelao endured as the typical representative of a humble and ascetic friar whose spirituality was formed by the eminent Tommaso da Firenze in the secluded reformed community of Scarlino. The final part of this article explores the specific religious and historical milieu in which Lancelao lived in order to shed light on some ambiguous details surrounding his legend.

Keywords: Franciscan hagiography, Observant reform in Italy, Giacomo Oddi da Perugia, Mariano da Firenze, Hungarian royal origin in hagiography.

 

A Franciscan friar from Hungary was buried according to tradition in the Chapel of Santa Ferma at the Convent of Santa Maria in Monte Muro in Tuscany.1 Although the impressive ruins of the convent and the adjacent church can still be seen today, the tomb in which the friar was allegedly buried is no longer visible.2 The friar is Lancelao, or La(n)zilao de Ongaria, called Lanzilaus, Lanceslaus or Ladislaus in the Latin sources. His story has come down to us in the Specchio de l’Ordine Minore, commonly known as Franceschina by Giacomo Oddi da Perugia as part of the vita of Francesco da Pavia; and as an independent biography in the collection of the lives of mainly Franciscan saints and beati by Mariano da Firenze that has never been fully published.

Frate Lancelao is not completely unknown in Hungary. In the late 1890s, Gyula Décsényi discovered Mariano’s version of Lancelao’s vita preserved at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Rome (BNCR) while he was researching materials regarding Hungary at libraries in Italy.3 In 1935, Florio Banfi wrote a book review of Nicolo Cavanna’s edition of Oddi’s Specchio dell’Ordine Minore4 in which he examined the numerous holy friars in the work who had some connection to Hungary, focusing on Lancelao.5 In his regrettably almost completely unknown study examining St Bernardino of Siena’s relation to the Hungarians published in 1944, Banfi dedicated a few pages to Lancelao as well and provided the transcription of his vita by Mariano da Firenze based on the copy that Décsényi had identified at the BNCR.6 In 2000, Clare Lappin offered an insightful analysis of Francesco da Pavia’s vision of Lancelao and examined the manuscripts containing Mariano’s collection of the lives of Franciscan saints and beati in her doctoral dissertation, which is a fundamental work about early Observant identity and ideals.7

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive presentation of the emergence of Lancelao of Hungary, whose figure straddles the boundary between history and fiction. I start by reconsidering the relation of the two main versions of his legend by Giacomo Oddi and Mariano da Firenze. For the latter, I use Mariano’s autograph manuscript. After comparing the two texts, I establish their relation showing that Mariano reshaped and amended Oddi’s account of Lancelao with concrete data according to the criteria of a standard vita in order to place the friar on the tableau of the Observant family. Next, I look at the vita’s transmission in subsequent Franciscan historiographic works revealing some new elements incorporated into his hagiography. Finally, I place Lancelao in the specific religious and historical contexts in which he allegedly lived, first in Hungary then in Italy, and investigate some enigmatic aspects of the friar’s legend, specifically those concerning his origin and the point in time when he left his native land.

Authors and Works

The vite the Observant Franciscans composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries regarding their eminent predecessors and near-contemporaries are quite different from the lives of saints written for the initiation of proceedings for canonization. As Daniele Solvi observed, the hagiographic construction of Observant identity—particularly after the friars ceased in the 1470s to take further steps towards the canonization of their confratelli—focused rather on catalogue-like works, such as those of Giacomo Oddi and Mariano da Firenze. In these works, the “traditional” saints of the Order were presented as forerunners of the Observant reform and the second generation, the Observant friars, as the heirs of the only true Franciscanism.8 In most cases, these Observant lives of the beati were recorded for the preservation of the memory of those members of the Order who were little known outside of their local environment and in whose conversio the most important Observant virtues (obedience, humility, poverty, etc.) were manifested. Since the above-mentioned authors aimed to edify and inspire the brothers and sisters with the stories and lives of eminent members of the Order, they composed their hagiographic-historic collections in the vernacular.

Oddi’s Account of Lancelao

The earliest account of Lancelao can be found in the vita of the Observant Francesco da Pavia contained in the Franceschina written in the Umbrian vernacular by Giacomo Oddi da Perugia (?–1483) before the year 1474.9 After joining the Observant Franciscans around 1450, Oddi lived in the Convent of Monteripido in Perugia under the spiritual direction of Domenico da Genova for some time, and later was the guardian of Observant convents of Assisi, Perugia and Terni. The Franceschina seems to be his only work. This voluminous hagiographic collection consists of thirteen books, each of which is dedicated to a virtue such as obedience, poverty, chastity, charity, etc., which are illustrated in the legends or episodes from the lives of saints and beati of the Order of Minor Brothers ranging from St Francis to St John of Capistrano. Oddi included the biographies of more than 30 Observant beati, of which 29 were newly composed ones.10 His main sources for the work were Bartolomeo da Pisa’s De conformitate vitae B. Francisci ad vitam domini Iesu, Angelo Clareno’s Tribulationes, Chronica 24 Generalium attributed to Arnault de Sarrant as well as oral sources. The Franceschina survives in four codices used at male and female Franciscan communities in Umbria.11 Moreover, I have recently found a later copy of the legend of Francesco da Pavia in the Wadding Library at the Collegio Sant’Isidoro in Rome (MS Isidoriano 1/104) that closely follows Oddi’s text with some additional sentences of devotional character added by the copyist.12 I summarize here Oddi’s text about Lancealo because this will serve as the basis for comparison with Mariano da Firenze’s later version of his vita.13

The hagiographic account of Lancelao in the Franceschina is presented in the form of a vision experienced by Francesco da Pavia, a friar from the Observant Convent “de le Carote” in Verona. There was a holy man called Brother Lancelao, originating from the Hungarian royal dynasty, who regarded poverty to be the highest among the virtues and joined the Franciscan Order. In order to experience life in absolute poverty, Lancelao set off and kept on wandering throughout the provinces of the Order, staying at any single convent for only a short time. Being a man of devout and contemplative character, he visited almost all the zealous communities living in poverty in the Province of St Francis (Umbria), during which he had various mystical experiences witnessed by other friars. Finally, on divine inspiration, he went to the Province of Milan, where he became the guardian of a convent. When the plague broke out in the convent, he witnessed the death and the glorious ascent to heaven of 20 friars as well as a layman. Francesco da Pavia, who was sent to this convent of Milan and would often converse with Lancelao, once asked him how it was possible to live with a clear conscience in such a sumptuous convent, especially for someone who had been searching for poverty in so many provinces. Lancelao responded that he had previously been wrong and that the true perfection of a Minorite is obedience, which entails poverty, chastity and all other virtues. Although this answer did not please Francesco, he chose to remain silent out of reverence. A few days after he had returned to his convent in Verona, Francesco learned that Lancelao had died and he became curious about the status of the friar’s soul, so he prayed to God and fasted until one night Lancelao appeared to him in a vision. In the vision, Lancelao took Francesco by the hand and led him to the choir of the church. The choir was illuminated by great light and Francesco saw entering the church a great multitude of angels, saints, and Franciscans dressed in splendid habits and, finally, Christ, who was so radiant that Francesco could not look at him. Experiencing heavenly light and detecting a sweet odor, Francesco was conducted to the main altar, to the feet of Christ, who assured him of his place in heaven as a reward for his obedience and revealed many other things that that he shared with no one until the final moments of his life. At this point, Francesco saw the whole assembly ascend to heaven accompanied by the singing of the Psalm In exitu. For about a year, whenever he heard this Psalm, he was immersed in the same sweet odor.

Apart from this account, there is another important reference to Lancelao in the Franceschina appearing in the vita of Tommaso da Firenze, according to which he was buried at Scarlino and his saintly fame was spread by Guasparre da Firenze.14

Mariano da Firenze’s Vita of Lancelao and Its Major Deviations from Oddi’s Account

Mariano da Firenze (c. 1477–1523) joined the Franciscan Observants sometime before 1493 and even though he was as a parish priest for most of his life, he spent much of his time visiting Observant houses in central Italy to collect material for his historiographic and hagiographic works. Mariano was a prolific writer, composing histories of all the three Orders of the Franciscans as well as devotional and apologetic works in both Latin and the Tuscan vernacular, including the Defensorio della verità (c.1506), La Via Spirituale (1518) and a collection of biographies written in the vernacular, the so-called Vite de Sancti et Beati (c. 1510–23). His major work, the Fasciculus Chronicarum Ordinis Minorum, was lost in the late eighteenth century, though its synopsized version survives in his Compendium Chronicarum Ordinis Ff. Minorum (1521–22).15 Mariano included shorter accounts of Lancelao in his Latin works, the Fasciculus and the Compendium, and an extended one in his collection of vite.16

Lancelao’s vita composed by Mariano has come down to us in two manuscripts. The older one is preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence (BNCF), MS Landau-Finaly 243, under the title Vite de Sancti et Beati and contains the “Vita di Lanzilao Hungero” as well as the vite of 33 other Franciscan and 12 non-Franciscan beati, most of whom were from Tuscany, and three treatises.17 The manuscript is partly autograph (which means that it was made before 1523) and the “Vita di Lanzilao Hungero” is among the texts written by Mariano himself.18 Composed in the Tuscan vernacular, Mariano intended the work for the whole congregation and selected those Observant beati who were known for living a contemplative life in strict poverty, prayer and seclusion.19 A more recent copy of this vita, “Del beato frate Lazilao Vnghero di casa Reale,” survives in MS Sessoriano 412 at the BNCR. This was the manuscript Décsényi found during his research and which served as the basis upon which Banfi based his transcription of Lancelao’s legend.20 The majority of the codex was copied in 1541 for the female Franciscan community of Sant’Orsola in Florence, although its title—Vite quaranta quattro di vari Uomini Illustri in Santità—was added by a later hand. It contains two books of a three-part work,21 the third book of which is preserved at the Franciscan Convent of Giaccherino.22 The contents of the two manuscripts are quite similar, but the order of the lives is different; moreover, the MS Sess. 412 lacks seven of the vite and the treatises that are reported in MS Landau-Finaly 243. My first-hand consultation of both manuscripts revealed that the two legends are nearly identical, containing only a few minor differences. In this paper, I use Lancelao’s vita from the MS Landau-Finaly 243 as the base text.23

In the collection Mariano put together approximately a half century after the Franceschina, Lancelao is no longer one of the characters in the life of Francesco da Pavia, but is promoted to the constantly widening circle of the Observant beati thanks to the author’s elaborate presentation of his life in the form of a proper vita providing heretofore unknown details. Let me recapitulate the main differences between Mariano’s biography and Oddi’s text before moving on to the discussion of how the two versions are related.

First, Lancelao’s motives for wandering from province to province are basically the same in both redactions: he was seeking a community in which he could live in perfect poverty in true observance of the Rule of Francis. In Mariano’s version, however, the friar left for Puglia because “at that time in Hungary the friars had drifted so far away from the true observance of his rule that he could not observe the highest degree of poverty.”24

Second, with regard to his sojourn in central Italy, Oddi writes only that the devout and contemplative Lancelao visited all the zealous communities living in poverty in the Province of St Francis and that he had mystical experiences. In Mariano’s redaction, Lancelao, after receiving permission from his minister, first went to Puglia, then to the Province of Sant’Angelo, where Giovanni da Stroncone and Tommaso da Firenze had recently initiated the reform of the Franciscan houses. But not finding what he was looking for, he departed for Tuscany and was permitted to stay in the reformed house of Scarlino, which was led by the simple and poor layman Tommaso da Firenze “under whose guidance his humility increased greatly and he forgot about his royal origin and priesthood.”25 Mariano underscores the profound impact that Tommaso had on Lancelao’s spirituality: he dedicated his life to prayer and contemplation in the wilderness, he was seen in a state of rapture by the friars several times, lived on bread and water, and wore only a shabby tunic and no shoes.

The third major divergence between the texts of Mariano and Oddi concerns the circumstances of Lancelao’s departure for Milan. In Oddi’s version, the friar was sent to the Province of Milan by God and while staying there he was made the guardian of the house of Milan.26 In Mariano’s version, the historical context is also revealed: after San Bernardino spread the “new observance” in Lombardy, the vicars of Tuscany sent holy friars to direct these convents so that the friars and the youth of Lombardy who opted for religious life would be nourished in the will of God and regular discipline. Thus, at God’s command, Lancelao was removed from the poor house of Scarlino and was appointed guardian at the house of Sant’Angelo near Milan, where there was a terrible plague at the time of his entrance.27

Fourth, Mariano provides an elaborated version of Lancelao’s death combining two pieces of information found in two different vite of the Franceschina, in that of Francesco da Pavia and Tommaso da Firenze, namely that the friar died shortly after the plague had ended and that he was buried in Scarlino—to which Mariano added that he was interred in the same tomb as the other blessed friars of the community at the Church of Sancta Ferma.28 Moreover, in the very last part of the vita Mariano becomes the first to speak about Lancelao’s local cult at Scarlino:

 

And as strong brother Lanzilao proved to be in glory, he proved to be as strong for the mortal people who remained in this miserable life, who came to visit his tomb invoking him in their illness and other necessity, who were persuaded also to come and visit by the holy brother Guasparre da Firenze.29

This is an important reference to the veneration of Lancelao as a holy person not long after his death as well as to the active role of the guardian of a community in the preservation of his memory and the urging of the faithful to pray for the intercession of a Franciscan Observant friar.

Sources

As Banfi has already pointed out, the accounts of Mariano and Oddi are genetically related.30 This relation is revealed most poignantly in the similar expressions and sentences and the same sequence of the events in their texts. The abundance of details in Mariano’s life of Lancelao excludes the possibility that it was derived from Oddi’s briefer version, while Oddi could not have used Mariano’s vita since it was written later. According to Banfi, the two authors presumably used the same earlier source. In my opinion, however, it is more probable that Mariano collected additional information about Lancelao and greatly revised Oddi’s narrative rather than that Oddi, who for more than two decades diligently collected the legends and miracles of the Observant friars before writing the Franceschina,31 abbreviated a more detailed existing legend omitting all the remarkable details about the early history of the Observant movement in Italy and Lancelao’s role in it, even if his focus was on Francesco da Pavia. Based on Oddi’s remark made in the legend of Francesco da Pavia, I propose that, in fact, he was the first to write about Lancelao in a relatively detailed fashion. The new details that emerge in Mariano’s text are derived from oral tradition and presumably the author himself, who was a great expert on the history of the Order of Minor Brothers, especially the Observants.

The Franceschina reveals Oddi’s strong interest in the past and present of the Order: in addition to the written sources listed earlier, Oddi presumably collected written materials in the convents during his journeys and recorded numerous stories that until then had circulated only orally.32 As previously mentioned, Oddi was the first to compose the life and the miracles of Brother Francesco da Pavia, a work in which he included an account of Lancelao. It is worthwhile to take a closer look at Francesco, since the period he spent in the convent in Milan at the time of the great plague is of central importance as a result of the fact that Lancelao died soon after the epidemic ended.33 Francesco da Pavia, whose original name was Antonio Beccaria, was the descendant of a powerful noble family from Pavia. Francesco was born sometime before 1400 and as a youth joined the Franciscan Observants, likely motivated by the visits of Bernardino of Siena to Pavia, in 1417 and 1421, where he spent a total of 33 years.34 The year of Francesco’s death is debated: either 1450 or 1452, or 1454.35 Oddi was pivotal in the diffusion of the fama sanctitatis of Francesco da Pavia. The Perugian friar heard testimonies about him from his fellow brothers and traveled to the Convent of Monteluco near Spoleto to be at the bed of the gravely ill Francesco.36 Oddi alluded to his source as he underscored the authenticity of the vision of Lancelao by writing that Francesco shared this experience with his fellow brethren, who were all “trustworthy men from whom I [the author] heard all this.”37 This means that Francesco da Pavia’s confratelli were the earliest, albeit oral, sources about Lancelao and it was Oddi who then put his story on paper.

Mariano da Firenze, too, followed his predecessor’s footsteps and was a great collector and disseminator of the records of prominent Observants.38 As Lappin observed, the majority of his biographies of the Vite de sancti Frati Minori, including that of Lancelao, were about contemplative men turning to nature in order to find peace and the comfort of prayer, although at the same time many of them represented the fusion of the Literal and Regular Observant ideals.39 The content of the Vite de sancti Frati Minori is the product of a collection of written and oral testimonies from the Observant houses in central Italy that Mariano continually rewrote during his travels between 1510 and 1523.40 Mariano even had the chance to visit the functioning Observant Convent of Monte Muro at Scarlino, which had been transformed from the modest building where Lancelao had lived. However, it is doubtful that Mariano’s research at this convent was successful, as in the Vita di Thomà da Firenze, he complains about the failure of the brothers to record the works and the deeds of Tommaso and that he had to travel on foot to different parts of Italy in order to gain information from those who knew him personally or were his disciples.41 Mariano probably started to organize his hagiographic writings into a collection around the years 1520/21 in order to publish a book containing the legends and the lives of the three Orders of St Francis. Until recently, it seemed that the work was never published, perhaps due to the author’s sudden death in 1523,42 but some years ago Arnaldo Sancricca discovered a fragment of a piece of a work published in 1525 entitled La genealogia delle province de’ beati e santi della religione di S. Francesco that could be the planned work of the Florentine chronicler.43

Elaboration and Authenticity

The elaboration of the lives of saints was quite common in the late medieval and early modern period. Dávid Falvay observed with regard to the Italian legends whose authors attempted to present the saints originating from Hungary in an elaborate and historically correct manner that these texts do not correspond more closely to a textual archetype but are the product of historical elaboration. This occurred mostly in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, the erudite authors of which, judging the historical basis of a devotional text to be weak, used other sources in order to retrospectively provide a more precise background to the given work.44 Such “philological revision” occurred, for instance, in the case of a fifteenth-century manuscript containing the legend of St Guglielma, an alleged queen of Hungary who turned up in fourteenth-century devotional works written in the vernacular in which a later hand added notes to the text in order to make it more accurate and to add concrete historical data.45 In my opinion, Mariano did something similar: the most important pieces of information he integrated in order to substantiate Lancelao’s story came from the material he collected from oral and written testimonies. He retrospectively augmented Oddi’s account with new details, including pieces of information concerning Lancelao from the vita of Tommaso da Firenze. Mariano was careful not to radically change the information provided by Oddi; rather, he “filled in the blanks,” amplifying or making minor changes to the original short text in order to transform it into a genuine vita. The result was an emblematic biography of the period of transition of the Observance “from the desert to the crowd,” that is, of the transformation of the movement’s initial eremitic lifestyle to its promulgation of the evangelic message to the urban masses—a process in which in Bernardino of Siena had a fundamental role.46

The notion of authenticity in the Middle Ages was broader and more flexible than it is today.47 It denoted authorization or approval from an institution that guaranteed the truth, that is, from the Church. Authentication could be derived from the authority of Church Fathers, the popes, the founding fathers of religious orders, or tradition. Truth was, in simplified terms, everything that relates to God. So in this sense, what one would call historical truth today was not of primary concern for Mariano da Firenze in his hagiographic works. Even if the new details originate from trustworthy testimonies, as Mariano emphasized, at least a half century had passed since the deaths of Lancelao and his master Tommaso da Firenze and in some cases it is not possible to tell whether the new details were based on actual facts or were plausible speculations made by the witnesses or by Mariano himself in order to directly link the events of Lancelao’s life with the spread of the Observance or whether they had been introduced for rhetorical purposes (e.g., that he went to Italy as a result of the decline of the Franciscan Order in Hungary, that he was a priest, that he was sent to Milan by the vicars of Tuscany). For Mariano and his readers, such considerations were valid and did not detract from the authenticity of Lancelao’s biography. There was no strict boundary between “this happened this way” and “this could have happened this way.”

Transmission

Apart from Oddi’s Franceschina and Mariano’s collection of vite, shorter accounts about Lancelao were included also in Franciscan chronicles. In his Compendium Chronicarum Ordinis Ff. Minorum, Mariano summed up the essential information about the friar under the year 1445: “Under blessed Tommaso da Firenze, great perfection flourished at the place of Scarlin and [under his guidance] was also Brother Lanzilao, a royal descent of the king of Hungary, a particularly holy man.”48 Mariano presumably did the same in his Fasciculus. It is unclear on what basis, because he does not indicate that the friar died that year. The Portuguese author Marcos da Silva, whose Crónica dos frades menores (1554–56) was published in Italian translation in 1581–1582, also relied on Mariano’s Fasciculus.49 His account placed around the year 144550 states explicitly that it was Bernardino of Siena who invited and appointed Lancelao to serve as the guardian of a recently built convent near Milan (although its precise name is not mentioned) at which 20 friars died of the plague the following year.51 Mariano’s Latin works were also used by the Tuscan Franciscan Dionisio Pulinari, who dedicated an entry of his Cronache dei Frati Minori della Provincia di Toscana to “Fra Lazilao.”52 In this work, which itself is a continuation of Mariano’s Brevis chronica Tusciae (1510–14) until the year 1580,53 Dionisio provided a short biographical account about Lancelao in the section about the Convent of Monte Muro, depicting him as one of the holy friars of the early times of the Observant movement buried in the Church of Santa Ferma, though he does not mention his sojourn in Milan.54 In his De Origine Seraphicae Religionis Franciscanae ... published in 1587,55 Francesco Gonzaga, who was Minister General of the Order between 1579 and 1587, made a short reference to Lancelao in his entry on the history of the Observant Convent of Monte Muro at Scarlino stating that he was one of the holy friars buried at this location, though in his entry on the Convent of Sant’Angelo in Milan he does mention that Lancaleo allegedly once served as the convent’s guardian.56 The French Franciscan Arthur du Moustier used Marco da Silva’s Crónica57 as the basis for his account of Lanceleo in his Martyrologium Franciscanum published in 1638. Arthur du Moustier recounted both of Lancelao’s sojourns in the houses of Monte Muro and Sant’Angelo and places his death around the year 1445, designating September 20 as the date of his commemoration. The Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding, author of the major comprehensive history of his Order, worked on the basis of Oddi’s Franceschina and Mariano’s Fasciculus.58 Wadding recounted Lancelao’s memory at Scarlino under the year 1420 (the year when the hermitage was given to Tommaso da Firenze) and dedicated a longer account to him under the year 1445 describing Lancelao’s stay in Milan and his post mortem cult at the Convent of Monte Muro.59 The relatively detailed accounts of Lancelao in Wadding’s Annales and in Marcos da Silva’s Crónica are valuable because these works, together with Arthur du Moustier’s Martyrologium, became the standard reference books for Franciscan history, especially after the Fasciculus was lost in the eighteenth century. Lancelao would have remained virtually unknown to the Franciscans without the above-mentioned printed works as a result of the fact that Oddi’s Franceschina and Mariano’s works had a limited circulation in the area of Tuscany and Umbria. At the same time, these printed works—especially the Martyrologium—anchored the tradition of placing Lancelao’s death around the year 1445.

Historical Context

Lancelao’s stay in Tuscany and Lombardy, which coincided with the Observant movement’s spread from central to northern Italy, is an ill-documented period of Franciscan history.60 Checking the reliability of the biographical information provided by Oddi and particularly by Mariano in the vite of the Observant beati against other historical sources is challenging as a result of the fact that these works are the most important and in many cases the only sources of religious history for this period, thus compelling subsequent Observant chroniclers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to rely to a large extent on these works. Nevertheless, for a better understanding of the historical context of the communities in which, according to Mariano’s vita, Lancelao lived, it would be useful to briefly describe the state of the Franciscan Order in Hungary around the year 1400 as well as the origins of the Observant convents of Monte Muro at Scarlino and of Sant’Angelo in Milan and their importance in the reform.

The Franciscan Order in Hungary around 1400

Even if it is not known exactly when Lancelao was born, the period when he was a Franciscan in Hungary would have been in the last decades of the fourteenth century or the first decade of the fifteenth century.61 By that time, the signs of decadence were obvious in the Franciscan Order also in Hungary: the friars were not only looking for privileges for their Order as a whole, but also requested and obtained benefits, positions and exemptions from the noble lords and the pope.62 The Observant movement simultaneously gained ground in Hungary as well: the first Observant houses were established as early as the 1360s in the southeastern part of the country, where friars from the movement were entrusted with missionary activities among the “heretics” and the “schismatics” who lived in this region. Despite the presence of the Observants in Hungary since the beginning of the second half of the fourteenth century, it began to truly expand in the country only around the early fifteenth century: while in 1390 there were only around a dozen reformed houses in Hungary, this number grew to 24 or 25 between 1400 and 1430.63 King Sigismund strongly supported the Observant Vicariate of Bosnia, and the improvement of his relationship with the papacy had a positive impact on the expansion of the Observants in Hungary.64 The Hungarian Observant Franciscans gained a significant degree of influence following their separation from the Bosnian vicariate in 1448, thus spurring a significant rise in the number of their convents.

The Convent of Monte Muro near Scarlino

Mariano narrates that Lancelao first went to the Province of Puglia, but since he did not find what he was looking for, he headed to the Province of Sant’Angelo, which was, in fact, that part of Puglia in which Giovanni da Stroncone and Tommaso da Firenze had recently started the reform of the Franciscan convents. Giovanni, who came from the circle of Paoluccio da Trinci, the “founder” of the Observant movement in 1368, was an eminent Observant who held important offices in the reformed branch of the Order and set up a number of reformed houses throughout Italy.65 A few years before his death, Giovanni embarked upon the dissemination of the Observant reform in Puglia and in Calabria together with one of his disciples, Tommaso da Firenze, known also as Tommaso Bellacci or Tommaso da Scarlino (1370–1447). Tommaso assumed Giovanni’s offices following his death in 1418, becoming the vicar of Puglia and Calabria and founding several convents in these regions.66 In 1419, Tommaso was entrusted with the task of eradicating the fraticelli de opinione in the area of Maremma, near Siena. He stayed in the Convent of San Benedetto della Nave at Montorsaio67 with a few other friars, possibly including Lancelao, who earned distinction by chasing away the fraticelli when they attacked the house.68 But Tommaso’s most beloved dwelling place was the hermitage of Scarlino, the predecessor of the Observant Franciscan Convent of Monte Muro. Tommaso’s community at Scarlino became an important spiritual center in Tuscany for those friars who wished to observe the rules of Francis living in a quasi-eremitic lifestyle. Lancelao came here due to the zeal and the sanctity of the “pura observantia regolare” in the Provinces of Tuscany and of St Francis (the two provinces functioned as one until 1440). The region was renowned for its reformed Franciscan spirituality and its abundance of saintly friars. As the Observant Franciscan Bernardino Aquilano noted in his Cronaca dei frati minori dell’osservanza (1480), “in the province of St Francis there were famous men of distinguished life and holiness.”69 Tommaso da Firenze was a renowned figure in his era and was highly esteemed by the leading figures of the second generation of the Observants as well.70 After his death during a mission in 1447, Tommaso was venerated as a blessed due to his conversio and the miracles that occurred at his tomb in the Church of St Francis in Rieti.71

In the early 1420s the hermitage of Monte Muro near Scarlino was transformed into a convent housing a reformed Franciscan community and its spiritual milieu attracted people from all social strata, ranging from unlettered lay people to descendants of Tuscan and Roman noble families. Tommaso da Firenze’s disciples, in addition to Lancelao, included Clemente Capponi, Gerolamo della Stufa, Polidoro Romano and Guasparre da Firenze.72 The latter became an important figure in the subsequent history of the Observants at Scarlino: the convent was rebuilt at his initiative and he was a major propagator of the local cult of Lancelao. In the sixteenth century, the convent was attacked and looted by the Ottomans first in 1539 and again in 1566, after which the friars decided to leave the convent. However, at the initiative of General Minister Francesco Gonzaga, a decision was made at the Chapter of Poggibonsi in 1580 to repopulate the convent.73 In the opinion of Dionisio Pulinari, Gonzaga, who was “stimulated by the odor and the name of such great holiness,” proposed reviving the convent, probably due to the rather high number of friars buried there “because in those early times those early brothers were saints.”74 It shows that the importance of the burial place of saintly friars as a potential site of miracles and thus of local cult had not decreased with the Observant Franciscans more than a century later.75

The Church and the Convent of Sant’Angelo in Milan

Lancelao did not spend all his life at the community of Scarlino. As his vita composed by Mariano reveals, after Bernardino of Siena had spread the “new observance” in Lombardy, on divine inspiration he was appointed guardian of the Convent of Sant’Angelo near Milan. The contrast between the hermitage-like Observant house at Scarlino and the convent of Sant’Angelo could not have been greater: the Sant’Angelo (“Vecchio” or “fuori le mura”) was the first Observant church and convent in Milan, established thanks to the celebrated preaching tour and peacemaking activities of Bernardino in northern Italy, during which he visited the city three times between 1418 and 1421.76 The construction of the church and the convent is traditionally associated with the first visit of Bernardino to Milan in 1418, although in fact it was only in 1421 that Filippo Maria Visconti approved the concession of an already existing oratory outside the city walls to the reformed friars.77 The Observant movement, and especially Bernardino, attracted so many people that the small chapel was soon no longer sufficient and had to be enlarged.78 The new church was dedicated to Santa Maria degli Angeli and the sumptuous and huge monastic complex was able to accommodate more than 100 friars.79 First the Franciscan tertiaries and some female communities and, from the mid-1440s, two Observant Clarissan communities were placed under the supervision of the friars.80 The Observant Vicariate of Milan was established in 1428.81

Although a few parchment documents related to the Observant church and convent of Sant’Angelo from the period before their partial destruction in 1527 survive at the Archivio di Stato of Milan, none of the eight documents from the period between 1421 and 1460 record the name of Lancelao, the alleged guardian of the convent at an unspecified time.82 Neither Mariano’s Compendium, nor Dionisio Pulinari’s Cronache, nor Gonzaga’s De origine mentions Lancelao’s sojourn in Milan. Despite the various possible explanations of the causes of this omission based on the genre or the aim of the works, these chronicles clearly show that regardless the path a friar takes in his life, it is the place where he dies and is buried which, in the end, is of utmost importance: in Lancealo’s case, this was the convent of Monte Muro at Scarlino.

According to both Oddi and Mariano, Lancelao was guardian of the Convent of Sant’Angelo at the time of the plague in Milan. There were two serious plague epidemics in Milan during the fifteenth century—the first in 1424 and the second and more deadly one between 1449 and 1452.83 According to Giovanni Simonetta, the chronicler of Francesco Sforza, 30,000 people died of the plague in Milan during the latter outbreak of the disease.84 In Mariano’s redaction, the plague coincided with Lancelao’s entry into the convent, while his term as guardian ended after the plague and he died soon after his return to Scarlino. If Francesco da Pavia indeed died in 1450, the great plague epidemic during which Lancelao was the guardian of the Convent of Sant’Angelo could only be the one that occurred in 1424.85 The plague of 1449–52 could not be that to which Mariano referred in his work even if Francesco died in 1454, because he stayed in the Observant house “de le Carote” in Verona before moving to Umbria at an unspecified time prior to the year 1446.86

The Hungarian Royal Origin and the Riddle of the United Provinces

There is little information regarding the life of Lancelao before he went to Italy and even the little that exists is ambiguous. “There was a holy brother in the Order called brother Lancelao, a native of the province of Hungary and a scion of the royal house of Hungary” says Oddi at the beginning of his account.87 Some decades later, Mariano da Firenze writes the same: “In the Kingdom of Hungary there was a most illustrious man of royal lineage or blood of the Hungarian king.”88 The ruler to whom Lancelao was related is not specified in any of the above sources. The royal descent of Lancelao has remained a constant attribute described in Franciscan hagiographic and historiographic works throughout the centuries. There were four monarchs, three of whom belonged to the Capetian House of Anjou, who reigned in Hungary during Lancelao’s lifetime and to whom, according to these works, he may have been related: King Louis the Great (1342–82); Queen Mary (1382–85); King Charles II (Charles of Durazzo; 1385–86); and King Sigismund (1387–1437).89 Not even Mariano brings us closer to answering the question when he writes in Lancelao’s vita that the friar “after obtaining permission from his minister, went to Puglia, which province was united with the province of Hungary.”

Décsényi interpreted “province” to mean “kingdom” and the union between Puglia and Hungary to be a reference to Louis the Great’s campaigns for the title of the King of Naples in the years 1347–48 and 1350–52, of which only the first was successful.90 Banfi added another period of union, the short reign of Charles II in the years 1385–86.91 If one accepts Décsényi’s interpretation, Lancelao could not have been born after the late 1320s or early 1330s, though if this is true, he could have hardly been one the disciples of Tommaso da Firenze and have personally known Francesco da Pavia.92 The other period of union seems more plausible, because in this case Lancelao could not have born much later than 1360 if he indeed left for Puglia in 1385 or 1386 even though this would mean that he spent more than three decades (!) wandering in different Franciscan communities in Italy before he settled down in the community at Scarlino at around the age of 60.

In order to clarify this enigma, I would like to propose another interpretation of the unity of the province of Puglia and the province of Hungary that can be found only in Mariano’s version. “Province” in the sense used by Oddi and Mariano can indicate a Franciscan geographical unit. In 1385, Raimondo del Balzo Orsini founded in Puglia the Convent of Santa Caterina di Galatina, which Pope Boniface IX attached to the Bosnian vicariate via the bull Pia vota of 1391, authorizing the Vicar of Bosnia Bartolomeo d’Alverna that the Bosnian friars could stay in this convent and instructing him to found other houses in the area. This became the custody of Santa Catherina, which was composed essentially of the convents of Puglia and one more of Crotone, from where the friars went to Bosnia to convert the “heretics” and the “schismatics” and which belonged to the Observant Franciscan Vicariate of Bosnia until 1446.93 The Observants of Hungary were part of the Vicariate of Bosnia until 1448, when Pope Nicholas V permitted the establishment of an independent Observant Vicariate of Hungary, which until 1523 was called familia Fratrum Minorum de observantia.94 A further argument in favor of this reading is that Mariano, as seen above, specified two parts of Puglia in his vita—the Province of Puglia and the Province of Sant’Angelo. I propose that the interpretation of the unity of the provinces between 1391 and 1446 makes it possible that Lancelao left Hungary later, presumably in the second half of the 1410s.

Although the possibility that Lancelao was indeed related to the Hungarian royal house cannot be excluded despite the lack of sources that would support this assumption, it may well be that affirmation of his royal lineage was merely a hagiographic topos. André Vauchez observed that, beginning in the fourteenth century, the royal origin of saints was in many cases the “invention” of the hagiographers, especially when available biographic information about the relevant saint was scarce. Vauchez also noticed that Hungary had acquired a privileged role compared to other countries in this respect.95 Due to the exceptional number of saints and blessed from the Árpád dynasty between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, the tradition of royal holiness as a hereditary trait (beata stirps) was widely applied in representative purposes by the royal house. This was continued in the fourteenth century by the subsequent ruling dynasty of Hungary, the Angevins.96 As Dávid Falvay has shown, the attribution of royal origin to saints and other legendary and historical figures was a frequent phenomenon in vernacular hagiographic works produced in central Italy. These personages were often represented as the offspring of the Hungarian king, who was described either as pagan or recently converted.97 Falvay found that the Hungarian origin of a saintly person, be it real or fictitious, did not serve as historical data, but as a rhetorical element.98 The examination of both devotional and secular texts in Western Europe in which the protagonists were credited with Hungarian royal origin has led Enikő Csukovits to conclude that the attribution served to enhance their reputation by representing them as members of the ruling dynasty of a distant, though nevertheless important, kingdom.99 In addition to this, turning away from courtly high society and embracing poverty represented a recurring motif in the hagiographic literature produced by the mendicant orders that goes back as far as the thirteenth century.100 It must be said, however, that the fictitious royal origin of saints turned up in legends and exempla that originated in the centuries before this attribute was added to them. In any case, Lancelao’s (alleged) royal origin underlines the sharp contrast between his choice to join the Franciscans in order to live in poverty and his journey to find a community that truly observed the Rule of Francis that eventually led him to Tuscany.

Conclusion

The earliest sources regarding Lancelao of Hungary are devotional texts combining biographical and historical events with hagiographic topoi. The two main redactions of his legend have come down to us as parts of works written in the Umbrian and the Tuscan vernacular, which suggest that the Observant authors had in mind a popular Franciscan audience. The texts that Oddi and Mariano wrote regarding Lancelao are based on oral tradition collected primarily from the Observant friars who preserved and transmitted information regarding the lives and the deeds of their saintly forefathers. The importance of Oddi’s text is that it recorded in writing the existence of Lancelao and likely drew the attention of Mariano to the friar many years later, while the greatest merit of the latter’s work is that it furnished the historical context for Lancelao’s life. I have argued that Mariano’s redaction of the vita of Lancelao is not based on a textual archetype, but it is the elaborated version of Oddi’s short account that the historian-hagiographer shaped to the requirements of a biography. Oddi’s account was not suitable for Mariano’s purposes: Francesco da Pavia’s vision about Lancelao resembles an extended exemplum in which the protagonist is a Franciscan friar whose figure exhibits the fusion of the medieval topoi of the wandering knight and Hungarian royal origin. The latter, supposed or real, was a recurring motif in the vernacular hagiographic texts produced in Italy beginning in the fourteenth century, and this tradition survived until the early modern period. The additional information Mariano included in the vita of Lancelao could be based partially on that which he collected through oral communication from those who still had some memories of the disciples of Tommaso da Firenze and partially on a possible retrospective reconstruction Mariano made using his common sense and vast knowledge of the history of the Franciscan Observants in Italy.

Both Oddi and Mariano state in their hagiographic collections that Lancelao was the disciple of Tommaso da Firenze at the house of Scarlino and had been buried there. Mariano’s remark from the last lines of Lancelao’s vita regarding his local cult at Scarlino asserting that the faithful visited his shrine for the purpose of healing suggests that Guasparre da Firenze was successful in the enhancement of the friar’s saintly reputation. The convent at Scarlino was regarded already by near contemporaries to be an emblematic place at which the true sons of the Observance were raised under the guidance of Tommaso da Firenze and it later became a kind of pantheon dedicated to the early friars of the Observance, all of whom were regarded as saints. Its fame as a sacred site had not faded completely even by the late sixteenth century, which could be one of the reasons for the decision to repopulate the abandoned convent. Repeated Ottoman attacks brought an end to Lancelao’s local cult, as well as those of the other friars of Scarlino, because it seems that the Francesco Gonzaga’s initiative to repopulate the Observant convent of Monte Muro was not successful.

It was thanks to Oddi that the figure of Lancelao survived, while it was due to Mariano that he endured as the typical representative of a humble and ascetic friar living at the Franciscan community of Scarlino in seclusion and whose spirituality was formed by the teachings of the eminent Observant Tommaso da Firenze. As a result of the works of Franciscan historiography and collective memory over the following centuries, the name of Lancelao is still associated with the ruins of the former Convent of Monte Muro that today has become a significant tourist attraction.

 

Manuscripts

Florence: Biblioteca Laurenziana di Firenze MS Segniani 18, fol. 2r–64v, Vita Beati Thomas de Florentia.

Florence: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF) MS Landau-Finaly 243, fol.186r–189r, Del b[ea]to frate Lanzilao hungero di casa Reale.

Giaccherino: Biblioteca del Convento di Giaccherino MS G. H. [Collection of vite of Franciscan saints and blessed by Mariano da Firenze].

Rome: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma (BNCR) MS Sessoriano 412, fol. 78v–80v, Del beato frate Lazilao Vnghero di casa Reale.

Rome: Biblioteca Wadding del Collegio Sant’Isidoro MS Isidoriano 1/104, fol.16v–19r, Come il Beato Francesco per il merito dell’oratione fu certificato che l’anima del beato Lancislao d’Ongaria era in stato di gloria [Part of the Vita et miracoli del beato Francesco di Pavia].

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Galamb, György. “A ferences obszervancia magyarországi térnyeréséhez” [Expansion of the Observant Franciscans in Hungary]. In “Magyaroknak eleiről:” ünnepi tanulmányok a hatvan esztendős Makk Ferenc tiszteletére [“On the ancestors of Hungarians...”: essays in honor of the sixty-year-old Ferenc Makk], edited by Ferenc Piti and György Szabados, 165–81. Szeged: Szegedi Középkorász Műhely–Agapé Ferences Nyomda, 2000.

Galamb, György. “Umanisti ed Osservanti francescani in Ungheria.” In: Osservanza francescana e cultura tra Quattrocento e primo Cinquecento: Italia e Ungheria a confronto, edited by Francesca Bartolacci and Roberto Lambertini, 15–32. Rome: Viella, 2014.

Giordano, Silvano. “Francesco Gonzaga.”Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani [DBI], 56: n.p. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2001. Accessed February 1, 2016, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-gonzaga_res-2e32f583-87ee-11dc-8e9d-0016357eee51_%28Dizionario_Biografico%29/.

Gonzaga, Francesco, OFM. De Origine Seraphicae Religionis Franciscanae eiusque progressibus, de Regularis Observanciae institutione, forma administrationis ac legibus admirabilisque eius propagazione. 4 vols. Rome: Basa, 1587.

Grosselli, Zelia. “Documenti Quattrocenteschi per la chiesa e il convento di S. Angelo di Milano.” Arte Lombarda, Nuova Serie 64 (1), Atti del Convegno problemi aperti 5 (1983): 104–08.

Karácsonyi, János. Szt. Ferencz rendjének története Magyarországon 1711-ig. I [The History of the Order of St Francis in Hungary until 1711]. 2 vols. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1922–1924.

Kertész, Balázs, ed. A magyarországi obszerváns ferencesek eredetiben fennmaradt iratai: 1448–1526 [Original surviving documents of the Hungarian Observant Franciscans]. Fontes Historicis Ordinis Fratrum Minorum in Hungaria 7. Budapest: Magyarok Nagyasszonya Ferences Rendtartomány, 2015.

Klaniczay, Gábor. Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe. Translated by Éva Pálmai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lappin, Clare. “The Mirror of the Observance: Image, Ideal and Identity in Observant Franciscan Literature, c. 1415–1528.” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2000. Downloaded November 11, 2015. https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/6911/1/530403.pdf.

Marco da Lisbona [Marcos de Lisboa]. Croniche degli Ordini instituiti dal P. S. Francesco. Translated by Orazio Diola of Bologna. Parma: Erasmo Viotti, 1581–1582.

Marcos de Lisboa. Chronicas da Ordem dos Frades Menores do seraphico padre Sam Francisco seu instituidor & primeiro ministro geral que se pode chamar Vitas partum dos Menores nouamente copilada & ordenada per frey Marcos de Lisboa. Lisbon: Ioannes Blauio, 1557–1562.

Mariano da Firenze. “Compendium chronicarum fratrum Minorum.” Edited by Theophilus Domenichelli, OFM. Archivum Franciscanum historicum [AFH] 1 (1908): 98–107; AFH 2 (1909): 92–107, 305–18, 457–72, 626–41; AFH 3 (1910): 294–309, 700–15; AFH 4 (1911): 122–37, 318–39, 559–87.

Mencherini, Saturnino, OFM. “Vita del B. Tommaso da Firenze (testo inedito del sec. XV).” La Verna 10 (1912): 514–22; 11 (1913): 31–41; continued in Studi francescani 1 (1914–1915): 87–102, 223–34, 486–95; 2 (1915–1920): 41–48, 105–17.

Mencherini, Saturnino, OFM. Introduction to Cronache dei Frati Minori della Provincia di Toscana secondo l’autografo d’Ognissanti, by Dionisio Pulinari da Firenze, IX–XXXV. Arezzo: Cooperativa Tipografica, 1913.

Merlo, Grado Giovanni. Nel nome di san Francesco: Storia dei frati Minori e del francescanesimo sino agli inizi del XVI secolo. Padova: Editrici Francescane, 2003.

Nimmo, Duncan. Reform and Division in the Medieval Franciscan Order: From Saint Francis to the Foundation of the Capuchins. Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 19952.

Nova, Alessandro. “I tramezzi in Lombardia fra XV e XVI secolo: scene della Passione e devozione francescana.” In Il Francescanesimo in Lombardia: storia e arte. Edited by Maria Pia Alberzoni, 197–215. Milan: Silvana, 1983.

Oddi, Giacomo. La Franceschina: Testo volgare umbro del sec. XV scritto dal P. Giacomo Oddi di Perugia, edito la prima volta nella sua integrità. Edited by Nicola Cavanna, OFM. 2 vols. 2nd edition. Assisi: Santa Maria degli Angeli, 1979.

Oliger, Livarius, OFM. “Il Codice 2063 (Sess. 412) della Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma, opera di Fra Mariano da Firenze.”Luce e Amore 4 (1907): 361–68.

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Sancricca, Arnaldo. “La genealogia delle province de’ beati e santi della religione di S. Francesco: Un’opera a stampa attributa a Fra’ Mariano da Firenze nel Summarium super non remotione cultus di S. Liberato da Loro.” Picenum seraphicum: Rivista di studi storici e francescani 24 (2005): 147–89.

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6http://manus.iccu.sbn.it/opac_SchedaScheda.php?ID=67236

András Szécsényi

Development and Bifurcation of an Institution

The University Voluntary Labor Service and the Compulsory National Defense Labor Service of the Horthy Era

 

Previous studies of the Hungarian labor service have been characterized by an exclusive interest in the years between 1939 and 1945. Accordingly, they have tended to focus on its anti-Jewish impetus. However, the emergence of labor service in Hungary goes back to the mid-1930s, when a voluntary system was established. Placing this Hungarian institution into a transnational perspective, I trace the process of its ideological legitimation, its key practices, and its gradual growth and significant transformation over the years. I demonstrate that Hungary actually had two divergent systems of labor services in the war years, and I analyze the ways in which the infamous labor service of the post-1939 years could be seen as a continuation of its less familiar predecessor. I thus make a contribution to the historicization and broader contextualization of a key Hungarian institution of persecution during World War II.

Keywords: Hungarian labor service, history of state institutions, prehistory of the persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic radicalization, interwar Hungary

Introduction

In recent years, a great deal of scholarship has been published in Hungary on the subject of labor service during World War II, some of which goes well beyond description and the cataloguing of facts and reflects on questions of conceptual importance. However, to the present day the vast majority of the secondary literature on the institution of labor service and therefore also most of public discussion on the subject is still under the strong influence of the scholarship of Elek Karsai, Randolph L. Braham, and other historians which began to emerge in the 1960s (though I concede that there are exceptional works of scholarship on the subject worthy of acknowledgment).1 Labor service thus continues to be regarded essentially as a system that was established in the course of the war to effectuate the isolation and later murder of the Jews. The study of the fates of the Jews, Christians who were legally defined as Jews, members of Churches and national minorities that were persecuted by the state, people convicted for so-called crimes against public decency, and in 1944 some of the Roma population, in other words all the people who were forced to endure the humiliation and suffering of being members of the labor battalions and squadrons that were created as part of the Hungarian Royal Army and who in some cases were brutally massacred, was unquestionably one of the most important tasks awaiting historians.

At the same time, until very recently the mainstream historical literature in Hungary has made precious little mention of the fact that forced labor as an institution did not begin with the often cited 1939: II (civil defense) act, but rather had been established years earlier. As early as the summer of 1935, there were so-called labor service camps for college and university students, though they functioned on an entirely voluntary basis.2 I intend to show in this essay that there were significant interconnections between the organization and history of the voluntary labor service for university students in Hungary and the system of compulsory labor that later was to become one of the tools in the virtual annihilation of Hungarian Jewry. The former system served as the basis for the latter during the period that began in the summer of 1939 and ended in the spring of 1944, when the voluntary and compulsory labor service systems existed side by side. The similarities between the two institutions, which shared common roots, were so strong that the same Hungarian term was used to designate them, “munkaszolgálat,” which is a simple translation of the German term “Arbeitsdienst.” Thus, the institution itself was hardly a Hungarian peculiarity, notwithstanding the claims of some historians and scholars to the contrary, and in order to arrive at an understanding of its history one must adopt comparative and transnational perspectives.

Given the aforementioned lacunae in the secondary literature, I begin with a brief presentation of the ways in which the interwar labor service functioned in an international context and then offer a brief summary of the distinctive features of the voluntary labor service that came into being in Hungary in 1935. I then turn to the focus of my inquiry, the interconnections between the system of voluntary labor service and the system of compulsory labor service.

Hungarian Labor Service in an International Context

The shock of World War I dramatically changed the relationships between the old and newly created states of Europe and their respective societies. The different countries adopted varying economic strategies in the fight against rampant unemployment. In the democratic countries, alongside state efforts to revitalize the economies with injections of capital, planned employment, and industrial and economic development, a kind of “self-help” program was also launched in the civil sector. The idea of labor camps began to take form during the great calamity of World War I, and it spread relatively rapidly across Europe.3 For the growing numbers of unemployed who belonged to the middle class, some of the youth groups initiated independently organized enterprises and campaigns that helped put money in the pockets of people who had lost their jobs without taking employment away from people who were seeking work. The participants (women were not allowed to join) worked in labor camps, usually in the countryside, where they took part in projects that were useful to the local communities, such as road construction or repair, regulation of rivers, or logging.4 In many places, university and (even more frequently) college students formed work details on their own, and they sometimes even received modest payment for their work. With the passing of years, a professional system of university or student labor service emerged in many of the countries of Europe.

One of the most effective systems, the so-called Schweizerischen Zentralstelle für Freiwilligen Arbeitsdienst (Swiss Center for Voluntary Labor Service, or SZFA) emerged in Switzerland in 1925. In 1935, the Swiss state even codified it by law and developed it professionally. Federal state, provincial, and student bodies all had representation in the leadership of the SZFA, as did the political parties.5 The institution had appeared in many other places as well. By 1939, it was found in a total of twenty different countries (in Denmark it appeared in 1917, in Sweden and Bulgaria in 1920, in Norway in 1922, in England, Romania, and Holland in 1931, and in Germany in 1933, growing out of initiatives that had been launched in 1931). As was the case in Hungary, in the mid-1930s similar institutions were created in Estonia and Latvia (1934), Belgium (1935), and Greece and Spain (1937).6 Movements similar to the labor service institutions cropping up in the interwar period also emerged in several countries outside of Europe. Though they may have varied in their programs, comparable initiatives were found in the United States, New Zealand, Canada, China, Australia, and Japan.7

Thus, labor service movements were usually successful in Europe in the interwar period and enjoyed popularity as a means of organizing. In their essential developmental and operational structures the various institutions were similar. College and university students created them for the males among them,8 and then, with the passing of time, the ministries of labor and education in the various countries professionalized them and passed laws ensuring their continued operation. The labor camps brought no short term economic gain. At most, they helped strengthen the middle class materially and helped narrow the gap between different social groups. It is worth noting that the labor service programs in most of the countries accepted volunteers from abroad at the time. However, in part precisely because of their success, in some countries the tendency was not to maintain the voluntary nature of the institution but rather to nationalize it and make it obligatory. For instance, in the summer of 1939, forced labor service was introduced in Hungary (as I will discuss in greater detail later).

Since the institution of labor service in Hungary was inspired essentially by the German model, it is worth taking a moment to examine a few details of the latter. The work of Kiran Klaus Patel is of particular significance in the secondary literature of the past fifteen years. Patel has written not only shorter essays and articles on the subject, but also an excellent, balanced monograph.9 While the German cabinets were unreceptive to these kinds of initiatives for a long time, on June 5, 1931, the Brüning government established the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst (Voluntary Labor Service, FAD). By 1932, there were 200,000 young unemployed people working as volunteers in the FAD camps (which were separate for men and women).10 The work that they did, however, did not have any significant influence on Germany’s economy, in part because of the failure of the state to show any common resolve. Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazis threw themselves into economic planning with an unprecedented zeal. Their initiatives exerted a strong influence on the agrarian sector,11 and they envisioned a central role for the transformed FAD within this framework.12 In 1935, the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service, RAD), which functioned as a kind of successor to the FAD, came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior, where it remained until 1943, when it became independent. Field Marshal Konstantin Hierl, the director of the RAD, worked together with the specialists in the Ministry of Interior to develop the Nazi model of the labor service institution, a model based on the notion that participation should be compulsory.

The Nazi leadership saw the practical uses of labor service, which extended beyond the propagation of the notion of a community of the national “Volk” (or Volksgemeinschaft) and the creation of a corps that would provide a useful precursor to military training. The labor service helped take young people off the labor market and thereby ensured that there would be more employment opportunities for married men with children. Later, when large state investments were being made to promote development, unemployment dropped and the task of finding a job was no longer as burdensome as it had been, other volunteer workers were accepted into the labor service in the agricultural sector. At the same time, the rigid, pyramid-like hierarchical structure of RAD differed significantly from the considerably more flexible structures of the other labor service systems, and it was very clearly part of the Nazi state organization. Some historians have contended that in its composition and development it most clearly resembled the Nazi party itself.13

In the meantime, however, RAD represented a significant cost for the state, no less than 1.4 percent of the state budget annually in the period between 1933 and 1944 and rising at times to as much as 2.1 percent.14 According to economic historian Timothy W. Mason, it is not really possible to determine whether RAD actually brought in income for the state or not, i.e. whether or not it was actually an economic asset.15 Even if it did not have any immediate economic use for the state in the years leading up to the war, however, it is quite certain that it at least temporarily led to a clear drop in unemployment. The kinds of projects and endeavors that were undertaken resembled the projects and works done by labor service groups in other European countries, including for instance road construction and repair, swamp draining, flood prevention, and agricultural work. In addition to seasonal work, the tasks performed by labor service groups in cities also had lasting results. Landscaping and the renovation and reparation of public buildings owned by the state or by municipalities, for instance, won the labor service widespread respect and popularity.

As of 1939, participation in work involving the war industry and munitions became increasingly important.16 In 1941, the range of tasks performed by RAD broadened as it undertook projects that provided assistance to the Wehrmacht all over Europe, including road maintenance, repairs to and oversight of the supply lines between the front and the hinterland, and work involving anti-aircraft defense. RAD battalions were even deployed on the Eastern Front. The labor camp inmates (as participation was compulsory it seems reasonable to use this term), who lived in barracks, were required to do ten hours of work a day. In addition to the physical strain of the work, the compulsory national socialist exercises and singing, which were intended to create a sense of communal experience and fate, were also important factors, as was the military training in the interest of ensuring effective preparation for service as soldiers conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In exchange for their service, they were given very modest pay.17

The structure of the women’s camps did not undergo comparable changes, and this was closely tied to the notion of the role women were to play in the Nazi state. Women did not work in labor camps. Rather, in a system that represented a transformation and further development of the FAD system of women’s camps,18 after having presented themselves in a RAD center, women were sent in groups of 5 to 30 people to smaller state farms or peasant families. As a work force, until 1939 they were used exclusively in agriculture, which meant, first and foremost, summer harvest work or, in the case of the women who lodged with peasant families, housework and childcare. Since no changes were made in the development of labor service for females after 1935, the involvement of the private sector in the distribution of work served the needs of the government splendidly. At the same time, the leadership of the RAD, together with the Nazi Party, found the participants in female labor service to be of considerable use from the perspective of the Nazi propaganda, as the institution seemed to symbolize the idea of communal effort in the service of the German nation (or “Volk”).

The Introduction of Labor Service in Hungary

Naturally, these international initiatives and models found echoes in Hungary. In 1929, the so-called Turul High Command19 (the Turul Association was the most significant organization of university youth in the Horthy era) sent János Salló to a work camp in England to persuade him of the potential importance of the institution. In 1930, László Tarnói Kostyál took a similar trip to Switzerland to examine work camps first hand.20 Between 1931 and 1934, Salló visited three other work camps outside of Hungary (one in Switzerland, one in Wales, and one in England) where roads were under construction to gather further information.21 In May 1932, the Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education had been presented with a detailed and ambitious plan. 22 In 1935, the Turul member associations began requesting financial support from the Dean of the University of Budapest to cover the costs of work camps.23

Following long negotiations, in June 1935 the Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education ratified the final labor service plan.24 According to this plan, 50 students and 50 local unemployed construction workers or day-laborers would work for four weeks along the banks of the Maros River rebuilding the dams and embankments which had been deliberately sabotaged by Romanians during the floods of 1932. This goal harmonized with the visions of a prominent trend in Hungarian culture and public life in the interwar period that focused on both the traditions and the plight of the peasantry, a trend that was influenced in part by so-called “village researchers,” who traveled to rural communities to document the culture of rural Hungary and the circumstances in which people lived. It also served the frequently reiterated propaganda goals of the government. Behind the populist visions, which were unquestionably demagogical to some degree, there was a desire on both sides to address serious social issues. At the same time, the adoption of the German model would not have been possible without the participation of pro-Nazi circles of the coalition. The Turul High Command named Tarnói Kostyál, who was a radical racist, to the position of leader of the Labor Camp Committee and made Mihály Somlai, who was connected to populist writers, his deputy. 25

At the same time, however, the Turul Coalition would not have been successful in these ventures had it not enjoyed the financial support of and connections provided by the governing party, the extreme right wing, and prominent figures of political, economic, and social life. These individuals were given roles in the leading bodies of the labor service.26 While I cannot go into great detail on the subject within the scope of this article, it is worth noting that support for the institution of labor service in Hungary was relatively widespread and included a heterogeneous array of segments of Hungarian society.27 However, despite the support it enjoyed from successive governments and the positive responses from a wide cross-section of society, the system nonetheless was criticized harshly by some circles of the far right-wing and the left-wing of the populists.28

On the basis of the available sources we know that 40 work camps were in operation in Hungary between 1935 and 1939. Until the spring of 1937, the work camps, which were scattered across the country and were active for roughly one month in the summer, were under the supervision of the Work Camp Committee of the Turul Coalition, a committee which was created in 1934. In 1937, in large part because of the enthusiasm that had been created by their successes, the camps came under state oversight, specifically under the jurisdiction of the Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education. The Voluntary Work Camp of University and College Students, which was organized by the ministry and which in general copied the goals and the methods of the Turul camps (and which in 1938 was renamed Voluntary Work Service of University and College Students, or EÖM, to use an acronym based on the Hungarian name), was in operation on the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom until the spring of 1944.29

There was substantial continuity between the Turul work camps and the Voluntary Work Service of University and College Students, not only in the ideas on which they were based but also in their organization of work, and the system itself was based on the models of work camps outside of Hungary. Sometime between the beginning of early June and late September, the university and college students, who enrolled voluntarily and in every case as a member of some fraternal society, would do three or four weeks of hard physical labor, usually road construction and repair, swamp draining, logging, soil work, the construction of dams and embankments, digging channels to provide proper drainage in villages, and repairs to buildings in public spaces, such as cemeteries and churches. At the same time, in the camps for men, which were overseen by retired officers, the nature of the work depended in part on the geographical conditions. They strove to perform tasks that would be useful for individual communities without, however, taking away the few modest job opportunities that existed for day-laborers and navvies. In some cases, in the name of “protecting the race,” a notion that was alloyed with the views of some tendencies of populist thought, they managed to transform the ideal of cooperation between “Christian intellectuals” and the peasantry into a reality.

The Turul camps were not given names, but the camps organized by EÖM were given ancient Hungarian names or names that were regarded as illustrious. They were also given numbers, and by 1944, according to my estimate, they numbered over 100. In 1938, a leadership training course was launched in Tihany, which can be interpreted as a step in the direction of professionalization. The work was done in a remarkably rigid manner, according to some people, with an adherence to a kind of strictness borrowed from RAD. For instance, on the first day, during a ceremonial common pledge the participants also took an oath to the regent, Miklós Horthy. In the camps they lived in wooden barracks that could be easily disassembled or (more frequently) in military tents, depending on the local conditions. By the end of the decade, there were some amenities in the barracks.30 The various slogans were a mix of ideology and task to be performed: “Labor Service–Country Building,” “Our goal is to help, our tool is the sport of work,” or “Omnipotent God! Give a task and give bread to every working Hungarian.”31 In the case of women, the salutation “blessed work!” was used, which was expressive of the expectations regarding religious life in the camps. The routines of daily life in the camps over the course of the years took place within essentially similar frameworks.

Interconnections between Voluntary Work and Compulsory Labor Service

Drawing inspiration and energy from the success of EÖM and adopting an old aspiration of university fraternal societies, Béla Imrédy, who was appointed prime minister in May 1938 and who pursued a German orientation by this time, soon saw the potentials of RAD. 32 Given the dearth of sources, we do not know precisely why Imrédy, who initially was known as a pro-British figure, was drawn to the institution, which, though present worldwide, in Hungary bore strong affinities with Nazi models. Whatever the reason, we do know that in 1937, Tarnói Kostyál asked Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi in a memorandum to establish EÖM as quickly as possible and, drawing on the German model, to make it compulsory. Darányi had declined, but the document, which at the time also came into Imrédy’s hands, may have been the first such writing that called Imrédy’s attention to the issue. 33

On May 2, 1938, in the last weeks of Darányi’s tenure as prime minister, Imrédy, the heir apparent to his position as head of government, held a speech in parliament in which he described his vision for the country. He gave voice in this speech—and he was the first prominent figure in public life to do so—to the alleged necessity of labor service on a compulsory basis. According to Imrédy, the importance of social cohesion and unity, which were part of the ideals of the Turul Coalition and EÖM, clearly explained the need to make labor service obligatory, and he pledged to support and strengthen everything for which Miklós Kozma, who had been Minister of Interior from 1935 to 1937, had taken resolute though ultimately unsuccessful steps.

Kozma had been one of the most important proponents of the development on a large scale of the Turul labor service. He had also held the Nazi labor service institution in high esteem, and in December 1936, at the invitation of Wilhelm Frick, he had had occasion to observe the German labor service structures first hand. As Minister of Interior, Kozma had always endeavored to make the voluntary camps compulsory for university students, on the basis of the model of the RAD camps (even if he later denied this after having resigned from his position as minister).34 After having been compelled to resign, he made the following remarks regarding his recollections:

 

Compulsory labor service is a powerful institution for the nurturing of the nation, and it bears not the slightest affinity with slavery. In the work camps, youths who have completed a college education live alongside the simple children of the people in the most comradely spirit and without regard for social differences, and this means a great deal both from the perspective of ethical rearing and discipline. I spent time in places an hour and a half from Berlin, for instance, that were barren, submerged in water, and boggy. […] The work camps are amazingly simple, but they are similarly clean, healthy, and tasteful. It never occurred to me, I said later, that labor service should be made compulsory in Hungary, instead I will attempt to come into contact with the youth groups and societies that have done voluntary work service, and I want to support them in this very useful and beneficial endeavor. […] Naturally, one of the guiding principles is that this work should in no way create competition with the private economy.35

In his speech, Imrédy, alluding to international examples and the ideas of Kozma, made the following proclamation:

 

The unity of the Hungarian people means a fusion in thinking and in spirit. We must further this fusion with institutions that lead the individual layers of national society to love one another. For precisely this reason, one of the essential points of our program, a point that requires careful preparation, is the introduction of compulsory labor service… [noise, cries of approval and dissent] …such that, within the framework of compulsory labor, the youthful intelligentsia comes to know the mentality of the youthful working class and agricultural laborers [noise, cries of approval and dissent] so that the handshake can take place that—I believe and I proclaim—will lead to mutual respect and, through this, unusual spiritual enrichment.36

On May 19, 1938, Imrédy raised the question at a meeting of the leaders of the Hungarian Telegraph Office with regards to preparations for the International Eucharistic Congress. He may have mentioned it because he had already decided to follow the German model and make labor service compulsory. Miklós Kozma wrote the following in his journal at the time:

 

Everyone has read Béla Imrédy’s program. […] When you read this program, you see clearly that no government in Hungary has ever dared come forward with such a right-wing program. Who in Hungary would have dared, even as recently as six months ago, to have thought of creating a national labor service? It is an old idea of mine that is dear to my heart. It could help us overcome a host of Hungarian transgressions and mistakes.37

In the second half of May 1938, Imrédy informed the Minister of Defense of his plans. The Minister of Defense ordered Béla Szinay, commander-in-chief of EÖM (and also a man who bore the title “vitéz,” an honorary title given in the Horthy era), to state his position with regards to the question immediately and to devise a plan for the possible introduction of the program.38 On June 1, 1938, Szinay made the following report to the Minister of Defense:

 

In the near future, labor service in Hungary will become compulsory, and this makes it desirable for the aforementioned Supreme Command to inform itself with regards to the institution of compulsory labor service in Germany and Bulgaria (how many people are involved, how many camps are there, who is obliged to participate and for how long, who are the leaders and permanent commanders and who are the people in temporary leadership or command positions, what pay, provisions, clothing, and equipment is provided for the participants, what are the annual costs and what is the value of the work performed in a year, what kinds of advantages do the participants enjoy when seeking employment or with regards to taxes). I request that undersigned supreme command be provided with the organizational information enumerated above as quickly as possible by the foreign representatives in Germany and Bulgaria. I also note that the supreme command places emphasis on being provided information regarding the reorganization currently underway with regards to labor service in the former German–Austrian territories.39

Following this, the office of the prime minister better informed itself. On August 1, a conference was called at which ministerial advisor István Kultsár, the government commissioner for affairs involving the intelligentsia, reported on the things that had been accomplished by the labor service and the plans for the future. He also announced that the camps would gradually be made compulsory.40 In accordance with Szinay’s request, the presidential division of the Ministry of Defense instructed the military attaché to Sofia to obtain information about the labor service institution in Bulgaria (the so-called trudovak) and prepare a report for the head office of the Ministry of Defense, which indeed he submitted on August 9, 1938. The military attaché in Berlin was also instructed to submit a similar report. The German report was the book (in German) on the subject entitled Arbeitsdienst.41 In the meantime, Dániel Fábry was entrusted with preparing a bill for the transformation of the labor service into a compulsory institution.

According to Fábry, the people who would be obliged to perform the work naturally would be recruited from a different social group, but the goal of promoting the notion of social responsibility would be the same as the fundamental goal of EÖM, namely “to ensure that workers who are performing physical labor and the workers who are engaged in intellectual undertakings be thoroughly mixed together and the blue-collar worker come to know and respect the labors of the white-collar worker, while the white-collar worker comes to respect the physical labor of the blue-collar worker.”42

Szinay prepared the plans with Kultsár, the ministerial advisor and government commissioner for unemployed white-collar workers. The plans made it quite clear that the same types of work were going to be performed in the new system. And as was the case with EÖM, it was considered important to ensure that the projects not exert a negative influence on the opportunities for the unemployed. Thus, road construction and drainage continued to dominate their thinking. On August 7, Szinay informed the press that the government’s labor service program “has been completed.” In a few days they were going to present it to the public. He stated that, “[t]he new labor camp system builds on the structure of the existing system.”43

In what follows, I examine the establishment and evolution of compulsory labor service as an institution of civil defense only from the perspective of its relationship to the voluntary university work service. The 1939: II civil defense bill established the legal foundation for the creation of the institution of labor service in the public interest within the framework of the Hungarian military.44 Paragraph 230 a (1–6) of the law addresses the issue of the establishment of the institution of obligatory labor service in the public interest. According to the law, labor service programs had to be organized for men between the ages of 21 and 24 who were not suitable for military service and people whose citizenship was not regarded as clearly established (the first and second paragraphs).45 The phrasing of the law concerned labor service that was military in nature and compulsory, but to be performed while living in work camps, and it furthermore targeted young people between the ages of 21 and 24, i.e. the average age of college and university students. If one takes into consideration the fact that the Turul labor service programs and the EÖM program had also had a decidedly military character, the connection between them is even more striking. In my view, however, the stipulations in the fifth paragraph were of the most gravity: “With the agreement of her legal guardian, a girl who is at least sixteen years of age and who has completed the fourth year of her secondary schooling or has an educational level of equal value can be enrolled in labor service in the public interest on a voluntary basis. The provisions of paragraphs (1)–(4) with deviations following from this paragraph apply to this case as well.” This statement essentially constituted the incorporation (or even the smuggling) of the university labor service program, now with a lower age limit (though admittedly not compulsory), into the civil defense law. This contention finds further support in a decree that was issued by General Fábry, who at the suggestion of the Ministry of Defense had been named by the Regent to serve under the Ministry of Defense of Károly Bartha as National Supervisor of the Public Interest Labor Service (Közérdekű Munkaszolgálat Országos Felügyelője, or KMOF).46 Fábry had served as a spokesman for the Turul Labor Service in the Ministry of Defense,47 and in 1937–1938 he had accepted a role in EÖM. According to the decree, youths who had taken part in the voluntary university work camps before May 17, 1939 could count the time they had spent there against the obligation to serve in the public interest labor service. Anyone who had done so after this date, however, could not.48

As it so happens, in 1937, as part of a continuing studies program in public administration, Fábry had already spoken on the close link between EÖM and a compulsory labor service envisioned for the future.49 At a similar continuing studies program in public administration in 1938, Szinay built on Fábry’s ideas. We have good reason to think that Szinay’s plans were essentially identical with the ideas outlined in the report he sent to Prime Minister Béla Imrédy in May 1938. Like Fábry, Szinay emphatically called attention to the similarities between the mechanisms, functioning, and goals of the German RAD, the Turul Labor Service, EÖM, and the compulsory labor service program of the Hungarian military (which essentially was built on EÖM). Furthermore, he linked EÖM and the institution of non-combatant labor service with his contention that the two systems were essentially two branches of the “Hungarian National Labor Service.” However, he felt that EÖM would soon cease operations: “With this, I have brought to a close the University and College Student Voluntary Labor Service, because it has been replaced by compulsory labor service.”50 (History, however, did not bear out his words.) Szinay then discussed his plan for compulsory labor service, which would involve an expansion year by year of the EÖM camp system (in 1939, some 4,000 people worked in the labor service programs, but by 1944 this number had grown to 44,000) without, however, any essential change to its structure and operations. The plan did not contain any anti-Semitic discriminatory measures.51 In summary, the leaders of the two labor service systems both gave similar, unambiguous, and persuasive descriptions of the clear relationship between the voluntary and the compulsory institutions of labor service.

The significance of the parallels between the two systems is also illustrated by the comments that were made in the course of a debate in parliament regarding a bill on civil defense. On December 7, 1938, Minister of Defense Károly Bartha introduced a bill which was sent to committee for review. On January 13, 1939, the committee for the armed forces, administration, the economy, transportation and justice submitted its report on the bill to parliament. The bill was modified in accordance with the report and first discussed in parliament on January 17. In the course of the debate, a total of 32 representatives voiced their opinions, only two of whom, the two Social Democrats, were in opposition to the bill. The governing party and the right-wing opposition celebrated the measure and only a few of them actually made observations bearing on the details of its contents. According to Sándor Ember, for instance:

 

We have already experimented with labor service in past decades. A small segment of the college youth tried to further the introduction of this institution in Hungary by organizing voluntary work camps, drawing on models from abroad. The attempts that were made in this sphere amply justified the expectations, and I must express my sincere appreciation and thanks to the Minister of Defense for having thought of this institution when preparing this bill.52

Ember continued, saying that the bill was in no way an obstacle to the voluntary university labor service programs, which he felt were fully justified given the endless public works projects that had been undertaken, which would have been inconceivable if entrusted simply to the private sector. Others emphasized the groundbreaking role of the Turul and the EÖM work camps, which had provided a kind of prototype for the introduction of compulsory military labor service. The Jewish laws (1938: XIV and the 1939: IV) provided a foundation for making labor service compulsory, and using these laws, the parliamentary majority agreed to allow the leaders and divisions of the Ministry of Defense to begin “the solution of the Jewish question in the army.” Thus the first step was taken in the legal prohibition from the armed services of the citizens of Hungary who were defined by the law as Jewish. It seems worth noting, however, that in the initial stages the law was directed against the Jews neither in its provisions nor in its implementation.

This is also indicated by the minutes of a meeting held in March 1939 by the Directorate of the General Staff (the Ministry of Defense, division 1/a). They resolved, in accordance with paragraphs 91 and 230 of the law, to pursue “certain work training” programs. The participants in the meeting saw labor service as a means of addressing the dearth of workers and skilled laborers by drafting people who were not suitable for military service. The proposed plan would have assigned these people, somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 in total, to three-month work projects (road construction, railroad work), while the skilled laborers among them would be given work in factories that required training. In the end, division 1/a called on division 10 to organize the statistics concerning the people regarded as unsuitable for military service by line of occupation and provide this information to the Supreme Civil Defense Council, which was to devise a plan that included precise regulations of the two labor services and send it to division 1/a.53

In the course of a meeting of the General Staff on April 24, the participants discussed the concrete steps that were to be taken to achieve the public interest labor service’s large scale development on the basis of the proposal of the prime minister’s office. People fulfilling their compulsory labor service obligations were required to do three months of “public interest labor service.” Following two weeks of preparatory training, males between the ages of 14 and 42 and females between the ages of 16 and 42 could be called up for service. The people responsible for the plans anticipated providing training for 6,000 skilled laborers and 14,000 workers within one year. In the event of war, these numbers could jump to 75,000 and 250,000, in which case one to three weeks of training was to be provided and, as was already the case, males between the ages of 14 and 42 and women between the ages of 16 and 42 could be called up for service. The workers, who lived in camps and were parts of squadrons that functioned under the authority of KMOF (which itself was under the Ministry of Defense), were given uniforms and, like the student workers of EÖM, 200 fillérs per day as pay. The cost of establishing the system was estimated at 2,200,000 pengő and the first round of conscriptions was planned for July 1 and October 1, 1939.54

As a consequence of the council, the Ministry of Defense drew up decree 5070/1939. ME, which established the general principles and organization of the labor service.55 On July 1, 1939, the Presidential Division of the Ministry of Defense gave instructions according to which a meeting was to be held on July 13 under the chairmanship of General Fábry at which, at the request of the Ministry of Defense, the leaders of the relevant Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education divisions would be present. The meeting was held and the representative of the Presidential Division had the impression that the institution was “still fighting with initial difficulties.” According to Fábry,

 

the people who perform public interest labor service will be those who have accepted this as their task or are pleased to learn that they do not have to do military service. If the equipment, accommodation, provisions, etc. provided for these individuals do not meet the desired standard, then we will have done more to harm the initiative than to promote it, and we will have awoken antagonistic sentiments in these people with regards to the army. The question of equipment, accommodation and provisions leaves a great deal to be desired.56

 

At the meeting that was held on July 13, however, the decision was reached to have the first shift begin on July 1.57 The presidential division employed retired officers and EÖM officers to do the organizational work.

The contemporary print media reported on the connections between the two labor service systems very much in the spirit of what I have discussed above. This view found expression frequently in the press on the local and national levels, regardless of the political orientation of the publication. It is also worth noting contentions made by László Tarnói Kostyál in his book Magyar munkaszolgálat [Hungarian Labor Service], which was published in the spring of 1939. Tarnói Kostyál, who at the time was already active in the National Socialist movement, regarded the Turul labor service, the EÖM camps, and the compulsory military labor service as essentially the same. He unambiguously asserted that the institution of compulsory labor service had grown out of the other two systems and essentially represented their logical extension through the creation of an institution that could become the site of joyous communal social life. It is true that he did not regard Imrédy’s organization as suitable and thought that it should be transformed in its ideology and its structure to correspond more closely to the RAD model. In the book, he presented his detailed and sometimes rather fantastic visions regarding this transformation.58

A book entitled Munkaszolgálatos kézikönyv [Labor Service Handbook], which was published in 1940, likened both EÖM and the system of compulsory labor service to standard military training, and in doing so elevated the value of the labor service camp. The publication reveals that even in the legally and politically new situation, the work camps were not substantially different from the EÖM camps:

 

according to the executive decree regarding the public interest labor service, the work camp is a workers unit that is organized along military lines; the framework of the labor service obligation. The camp (barracks, tents, etc.) is home to the battalion. Everyday life begins and ends here. Reveille at dawn (roughly 5:00 AM). Suddenly rest and peace are transformed into the pulsing circulation of the blood. After the participants have done their morning exercises, washed, cleaned the area, and cleaned their living quarters, they will find a fresh, hot breakfast steaming in a mess tin. The squadron soon lines up and departs for the work site. The Sun has hardly begun to rise and their muscles are already bulging. The road is being built! The work is at a boil! Hours fly by and soon it is noon. The squadrons return to the areas around their barracks one by one. This is followed by reporting to the commander. Soon the sound of the horn can be heard calling everyone to lunch. Then one or two hours of rest, followed by a dip. Following the short work shift in the afternoon, military training or discipline drills, then a presentation on national defense. Orders are issued and the ill or ailing are examined. Then a period of leisure time begins, which lasts until dinner, or rather until taps. Everyone spends this time as he pleases. You can rest, work, write letters, or have fun. This is how the day is broken up in the work camp. Sundays and holidays, naturally, do not follow the same tempo as weekdays. The piety of the church service in the camps, the great peace and liberating calm, and the songs that rise forth from beside the red flames of the campfire create an unforgettable array of variation. […] The days spent doing difficult, strenuous work are also full of good cheer, joy, and unforgettable experiences. Camp life is the healthiest life for a man.59

Until 1941, the year in which Hungary entered the war, EÖM and the system of compulsory labor service essentially satisfied the same demand.60 This was not changed by the creation of voluntary military labor service for females, in accordance with which, as of December of 1940, females above the age of 16 were given work on a voluntary basis in arms factories.61 In the initial phases, the two institutions were even sometimes mixed up by the press.62

On July 15 and September 20, 1939, the first battalions of people working as part of the compulsory labor service were established in ten settlements (including Zamárdi and Hódmezővásárhely).63 The operation of the battalions was regulated by decree number 5070/1939 ME, which was issued in accordance with paragraph 230 of the law, and the battalions were placed under the oversight of the authorized army corps headquarters.64 On June 27, Minister of Defense Bartha reaffirmed his earlier assertions and informed the army commanders of the following: “[i]ts goal in general is to ensure rearing in the national spirit and also to complete training and work that is in the public interest and is of public use. From the perspective of the army, it ensures the training of Hungarian workers and labor formations.”65 It applied to youths between 21 and 24 years of age who had been declared unfit for military service, some 6,000 people in total.

The first group began work on August 1 in Balatonzamárdi and Makó “amidst celebratory circumstances,” with cries of “to work!” These two battalions did public use projects (swamp drainage and the creation of embankments in order to transform the area into fertile land).66 The other seven did national defense work (they were made into a munitions industry squadron and got training and work at the facilities). It is quite clear that the division of labor was identical to the tasks assigned by EÖM, and indeed this is hardly surprising, since EÖM had organized the first public interest labor service battalions.67 (Béla Szinay had made the work that was done on the Zamárdi swamp part of his plans for work in 1937, at the urging of the local town clerk).68

The fact that Tarnói Kostyál became the editor-in-chief of Tábori Élet [Camp Life], the newspaper of the IX. public interest labor service battalion, also indicates the interconnections between EÖM and the public interest labor service. He was clearly given this position so that the Hungarian army would be able to use his four years of experience.69 The newspaper of the IV. camp battalion of Szigetvár, Tábori Újság [Camp News], borrowed its slogan (“Labor Service–Country Building”) from EÖM. The views of Lieutenant János Haidekker, found in the pages of Tábori Újság, also reveal this continuity:

 

The young people do this admittedly hard physical work with enthusiasm, which is even more amazing if one takes into consideration that they were deemed not suitable for military service, thus they have some kind of physical handicap or ailment. But they were not born to a Hungarian mother to fear rising early or doing hard work, digging the soil with pick and shovel. […] The labor service program is in good hands, the boys are doing good work, work the fruits of which they too will someday gather, because work done under strict, military conditions will have a beneficial influence on their dispositions and physical development as well.70

 

In 1940, the metaphor of building the country, i.e. the use of the EÖM slogan among people doing compulsory labor service, remained a popular turn of phrase. In the spring of 1940, one finds the following comments of an officer in the pages of Tábori Újság, a periodical (copies of which were made using a typewriter) of the V. battalion, which was centered in the city of Técső (today Tyachiv in the Ukraine):

 

and you, worker in the labor service program, who imagined yourself to be a person without worth, you see that you are as useful a citizen of your country as anyone. You donned your uniform, took an oath, you live a life of discipline, in a word, you are a soldier. A useful, working soldier of your poor country. Do not think there is a difference between you and your armed comrades! There isn’t! One builds a country, the other defends his homeland by armed force. No one can say which is more important.71

 

The similarly entitled periodical of the VII. public interest labor service battalion of Makó, which in 1939 and 1940 was edited and written by army officers and workers in labor service, clearly adopted the goals of EÖM:

 

And now the youth of the city and the youth of the village live side by side in a big family. We do service and work in different capacities, but with the same faith and dedication. We strive to understand and respect one another’s values, so that when we return to civilian life we can be the workers and the soldiers of the emergence of a social mentality that will be more harmonious than the mentality of today and have a strong sense of the feeling of unity.72

 

In July 1940, Tarnói Kostyál made one more attempt to become an important figure in the labor service institution. He submitted a request to KMOF for permission to produce a public interest labor service newspaper, and he asked that he be entrusted with the task of editing it. The competent divisions of the Ministry of Defense discussed the question and at first held out the promise of support. Tarnói buttressed his request with the observation that he was working as a newspaper writer and indeed as the editor of the newspaper of one of the battalions and also as a jurist, and furthermore he had made significant contributions to the very emergence of the labor service institution (and with this contention he made explicit the parallel between the Turul labor service and compulsory public interest labor service):

 

With this periodical I wish to further the cause of labor service in Hungary with the weapons of the mind so that the thousands of workers, who are performing compulsory labor for the good of the homeland, will not regard their most solemn duty as a cold obligation, but rather will be made aware of the popularity of the work they are doing, and the leaders themselves will be genuinely enthusiastic about labor service.73

Tarnói Kostyál was willing to invest 5,000 pengős of his own money in the newspaper. According to his plans, the monthly would have been published by KMOF. However, in October the chairmanship of the Ministry of Defense and KMOF changed its mind, as the idea had come up of using labor service in the future to put people classified legally as Jews (and therefore not permitted to join the armed services) to work. Given this, they felt that reports of the labor service in the press “would not be timely […] under the present circumstances.”74

The situation worsened as EÖM strove with increasing resolve to distance itself from the system of public interest (and non-combatant) labor service for Jews. According to a report submitted in May 1943 by form master for physical education and sports Román Tárczay-Felicides, “[t]he term labor service is an offense to the dignity of the university youths, because they understand the term to refer to Jewish labor service. A new name must be found [instead of EÖM], because with this name neither the voluntary labor service for university youth nor anything similar will work effectively. With regards to university labor service for females, a meeting must urgently be held.”75 No new name was ever devised, in all likelihood because by that time EÖM and the leadership of the system of compulsory labor service had already embarked down radically different paths.

Thus I am not contending that the system of voluntary labor for university students and youths of that age was a direct precursor to the system of labor service that was established by the 1939 bill on civil defense (a system which, as of the summer of 1940 and particularly following the active engagement of the country in the war, was used quite directly against the Jewish citizenry of the country, in part as a consequence of the shift to the right in the country’s political orientation). I am contending, however, that it provided a clear prototype.

It is worth considering this question in a broader context. As of the mid-1930s, new kinds of extreme right-wing parties and movements began to appear in Hungary, first and foremost under the influence of Nazi Germany. By the end of the decade, they had become a political force to be reckoned with, and in the parliamentary elections of 1939 they were the largest oppositional force. While the parties differed from one another in numerous details regarding their ideals, their ideologies all shared one important feature: they were all anti-Semitic.76 As early as 1937, Prime Minister Darányi had to face the fact that if he wished his party, the Party of National Unity, to remain in power he had to take measures to appease the increasingly significant body of anti-Semitic voters. As a consequence of the territorial revision that took place in 1938–41, largely under the auspices of Hitler, subsequent governments played the “Jewish card.” The first Jewish law, which was drafted by Darányi and accepted by parliament under Imrédy, only exacerbated this, as did the second Jewish law, passed during the tenure of Prime Minister Pál Teleki. This was followed during the war years by more racially motivated measures similar to the Nuremberg laws. These laws put an end to the equality of Hungarian citizens who were defined as Jews by the law and deprived tens of thousands of Hungarian citizens of their livelihoods.77

The institution of labor service became one of the sites of the racial war against the Jews of Hungary who had been reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Labor service gradually underwent a transformation from the military policy understanding of the institution as providing peaceful physical work for Christian citizens who had been deemed unsuitable for the armed services to a compulsory form of service. The elites of the Hungarian military leadership were deeply anti-Semitic. A transcript of pro-Nazi chief of staff Henrik Werth from April 18, 1940 contains unambiguously anti-Semitic goals: “independent of the political line, the Jewish question must be resolved administratively within the army, radically and urgently.”78 Werth also said that Jews should be used in the armed services in places where the losses would be the greatest. His statements concern efforts he had soon managed to effectuate: “a person determined to be Jewish cannot be granted any of the advantages given to members of the military, nor can a Jew be a reserve officer, a junior officer, or a non-commissioned officer.”79

In the autumn of 1940, the institution of labor service began to undergo a permanent change when the Ministry of Defense realized that it could easily use male citizens who had now been defined as Jewish by law as a work force in the labor service for military purposes. A male between the ages of 18 and 42 and defined under law at the time as Jewish was obliged to enlist in the non-combatant labor service instead of doing service in the armed forces. The inmates worked in labor camps. Initially Jewish inmates wore an armband bearing the national colors, but later they were obliged to wear a yellow armband (in the case of Hungarian citizens who had been baptized but were nonetheless regarded as Jewish by law, the armband was white).

There were three types of squadron: 1. Camp squadrons (which were mixed): Jews who were regarded as reliable. 2. Special work squadrons: Jews whose loyalty was suspected and who were regarded as unreliable. 3. Work squadrons consisting of members of national minorities. While the total number of inmates ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 between 1939 and 1943, by 1944 it had risen to 63,000. According to available sources, on July 17, 1940 there were 60 special (Jewish) workers squadrons. The military leadership planned to raise the number of inmates (in a short period of time) to 90,000 or 100,000. As a consequence of the regulations passed on August 1940, Jews who were regarded as capable of working were enlisted in camp worker squadrons, while elderly Jews and Jews in poor health were enlisted in squadrons that did non-combatant work within the borders of country. In both cases, the enlistment was for a period of three months.

The Directorate of the General Staff drew up many different plans the essential goal of which was the “radical de-Jewification” of the Hungarian armed forces. They made statutory provisions for people who were regarded as politically unreliable or not suitable for recruitment into the armed forces for health reasons and for members of national minorities. Following Hungary’s entry into the war, a series of discriminatory legal measures were taken that made the everyday lives of the compulsory labor camp inmates increasingly difficult. People did labor service in the hinterland, beyond the borders of the country, in the theater of military operations, and even on the front. The regulation concerning compulsory military service for Jews was announced in July 1942 (statute 1942: XIV). According to the law, Jews could not be members of the so-called Levente (a paramilitary organization roughly comparable with the Hitlerjugend) or join the armed forces, but could only do “non-combatant service,” which “is not worthy of a Hungarian man or youths who have grown up in Christian thinking.”80 This phrasing clearly shows that, in comparison with its initial phases, compulsory labor service had undergone a fundamental change, and its ties to EÖM, both with regards to its ideals and its function, had been broken.

Conclusion

The history of voluntary labor service and compulsory labor service split in 1941. The history of public interest and non-combatant labor service is closely intertwined with Hungary’s acceptance of an active role in World War II. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews served as inmates of the compulsory (or forced) labor camps, and this represents a significant aspect of the Holocaust in Hungary. With regards to the history of labor service in its different forms, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, since the 1960s research on the subject has been underway, but one could hardly claim that it has come close to exhausting the topic. The causes for this include an aversion to the use of new kinds of sources (for instance material sources) and a similar aversion to interdisciplinary methodologies, as well as the frustrating dearth of sources. The central documents of the public interest labor service were incinerated in 1944.81 It is also slightly problematic that the research projects and the works that have been published tend to narrate the events from the perspective of political history, i.e. the “perspective of the perpetrators.” Questions regarding motivations on the micro-historical level or from the perspectives of social history or the history of mentalities have thus been rarely raised.82

The history and operations of EÖM after 1941 have been given scant attention at best. The dearth of sources is even more striking and there is virtually no secondary literature on the subject. We do know, however, that during the war the camp system grew, first and foremost in the Székely Land and in the southern parts of the country (a territory overlapping but not entirely congruent with Vojvodina), where the role of men was—in a significant digression from earlier practice—restricted to non-combatant civil defense work (such as digging anti-tank ditches). The roles that were assigned to women who were doing labor service remained essentially unchanged. Labor service camps were established not far from the Székely settlements in Vojvodina in Ófutak (today Futog in Serbia), Hadiknépe (today Sirig in Serbia), Horthyvára (today Stepanovićevo in Serbia), and Hadikföldje (today Temerin-Đurđevo in Serbia) and special camps were set up in Temerin and Szabadka (today Subotica in Serbia). In these special camps “red polka-dotted maidens” collectively took part in the harvest work, together with the female voluntary civil defense labor service and the members of the local Levente.83

Following Hungary’s entry into the war, EÖM continued its operations without interruption or shift of direction. No changes took place in the leadership or in the work that was performed. As was the case with regards to the Hungarian army, however, the rules regarding EÖM underwent two changes. First, the internal regulations concerning voluntary labor service became more strict (more military in nature). Second, as of 1941 the rules concerning eligibility changed and the group of youths who could participate grew. Any student 16 years of age or older who had completed grammar school or at least the second year of middle school and who could demonstrate appropriate progress in studies and in religious ethics was allowed to enlist.

The fate of EÖM in Hungary was sealed by the occupation of the country by the German army in 1944. Though we do not know exactly why, the government under Döme Sztójay saw no reason to maintain the system, presumably in part because of the decline in the quantity and quality of the work performed and the drastically diminished number of people actually engaged in the program.84 At the same time, the Student Civil Defense Labor Service (Diákok Honvédelmi Munkaszolgálata, DHM), which was created in its place in April 1944 (in a building in Klotild Street, which had served as the seat of EÖM), bore some resemblance to EÖM. One might say it was a kind of closing chord, imbued with a simplified and more right-wing rhetoric.

The complex history of the university voluntary labor service is relevant not only to the social history and history of the youth of the Horthy era. While I may have been able, in the modest framework of this essay, to cover only a few of the most important moments in this history, I have placed existing narratives about the evolution of the institution of compulsory labor in Hungary during World War II in a new, larger context. The comparative examination of the two systems offers a foundation for new conclusions and thereby enriches the secondary literature on the history of the Holocaust.

 

Bibliography

Archival Sources

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ELTE 7/c. Péter Pázmány University, Faculty of Law and Political Science, documents of the Office of the Dean

 

Archive of the Institute of Military History

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Hungarian National Archives

 

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MNL OL K 429 Kozma Miklós iratai [Documents of Miklós Kozma]

MNL OL K 636 Egyetemekre, főiskolákra, tudományos intézetekre vonatkozó iratok [Documents on universities, colleges, and scholarly institutions] (1919–1944)

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Library and Archive of the Péter Pázmány University Faculty of Theology

 

PPTE HK KL 1/b. Péter Pázmány University, Faculty of Theology, documents of the Office of the Dean

 

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Az 1939. évi június hó 10-ére hirdetett Országgyűlés Képviselőházának Naplója [Diary of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly Convened on June 10, 1939]. Vol. 21, 1939. January 18. Budapest: Athenaeum, 1939. 378–80.

Bäumer, Gertrud. Der freiwillige Arbeitsdienst der Frauen. Leipzig: R. Boiglanders Verlag, 1933.

Dr. Bereznai, Aurél, Tibor Fehér and István ifj. Kostyál, eds. Munkaszolgálatos kézikönyv [Labor Service Handbook]. Budapest: Magyar Cserkészek Gazdasági és Kiadó Szövetkezet, 1940.

Fábry, Dániel. Munkaszolgálat [Labor Service]. Budapest: Magyar Királyi Állami Nyomda, 1938.

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Mózes, Tibor, ed. Egy “szerencsés” munkásszázad. Volt munkaszolgálatosok visszaemlékezései [A “Fortunate” Workers Squadron. The Memoirs of former Inmates of Forced Labor Units], 1942–1945. Galánta–Kápolnásnyék–Győr–Mosonmagyaróvár–Budapest: [Published by Zoltán Szirtes], 1985.

Müller-Brandenburg, Hermann. Der Arbeitsdienst fremder Staaten. Lepzig: Nationale Aufbau, 1938.

Schweizerische Zentralstelle für Freiwilligen Arbeitsdienst, ed. Arbeitsdienst in 13 Staaten: Probleme, Lösungen. Zürich–Leipzig: Orell-Füssli, 1938.

Sipos, Péter, ed. Imrédy Béla a vádlottak padján [Béla Imrédy in the Prisoner’s Box]. Budapest: Osiris–Budapest Főváros Levéltára, 1999.

Stackelberg, Roderick–Sally A. Winkle, eds. The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. London–New York: Routledge, 2002.

Szinay, Béla. Magyar Nemzeti Munkaszolgálat [Hungarian National Labor Service]. Budapest: Magyar Királyi Állami Nyomda, 1939.

Szita, Szabolcs, ed. Iratok a kisegítő munkaszolgálat, a zsidóüldözés történetéhez, 3 vols. [Documents on the History of the Non-combatant Labor Service and the Persecution of the Jews, I–III]. Budapest: Magyar Auschwitz Alapítvány–Holocaust Dokumentációs Központ, 2002.

Tharnói [Kostyál], László. Magyar munkaszolgálat: Munkatáborok a magyar nép és föld szolgálatában [Hungarian Labor Service: Work Camps in the Service of the Hungarian People and Land]. Budapest: Turul, 1939.

Tharnói Kostyál, László. Főiskolai önkéntes munkatábor [College Voluntary Work Camp]. Budapest: Turul, 1935.

 

The Press

 

Bajtárs [Brother-in-Arms] (1938), Balatoni Kurír [Balaton Courier] (1937, 1939, 1941), Délvidék [Southern Lands] (1942), Délvidéki Magyarság [Hungarians of the Southern

Lands] (1942), Dunántúli Hírlap [Transdanubian Newspaper] (1938), Felsőmagyarországi Reggeli Hírlap [Morning Newspaper of Upper Hungary] (1939), Függetlenség Képes Melléklet [Illustrated Appendix of Independence] (1939), Hevesvármegye [Heves

County] (1938), Hungária [Hungária] (1937), Jelenkor [The Present Age] (1937), Magyar Újság Képes Melléklete [Illustrated Appendix of Magyar Newspaper] (1939), Nemzeti Újság Képes Melléklet [Illustrated Appendix of National Newspaper] (1939), Reggeli Hírlap [Morning Newspaper] (1939), Reggeli Újság [Morning News] (1941), Somogyi Újság [Somogyi Newspaper] (1939), Szilágyság [The Szilágy Region] (1943), Tábori Újság [Camp Newspaper] (1939) OSzK H.20.672, 673., 674., Zalai Hírlap [Zala Newspaper] (1938).

 

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Braham, Randolph L. A népirtás politikája. A Holocaust Magyarországon [The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary]. Vol 1. Budapest: Belvárosi, 1990.

Braham, Randolph L. The Wartime System of Labor Service in Hungary. Varieties of Experience. Boulder–New York: Social Science Monographs–The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Graduate Center, CUNY, 1995.

Broszat, Martin. The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich. London–New York: Longman, 1981.

Csapody Tamás. Bori munkaszolgálatosok [Labor service of Bor]. Budapest: Vince, 2012.

Dombrády, Lóránd: Werth Henrik: Akiről nem beszélünk [Henrik Werth: About Whom We Don’t Speak]. Budapest: Argumentum, 2005.

Dudek, Peter. Erziehung durch Arbeit. Arbeiterlagerbewegung und Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst 1920–1935. Oplanden: Leske&Budrich, 1988.

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Heyck, Hartmut. “Labour Services in Weimar Republic and their Ideological Godparents.” Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 4 (2003): 221–36.

Huhák, Heléna. “Lapátos hadsereg. Munkaszolgálat Magyarországon a II. világháborúban. Virtuális kiállítás” [Army with Shovels. Labor Service in Hungary in World War II]. Accessed June 2, 2015. http://musz.hdke.hu/ (2013).

Huhák, Heléna. “A magyarországi munkaszolgálat múzeumi forrásai és kiállítási reprezentációjuk” [The Museum Sources of the Hungarian Labor Service and Its Representations at Exhibitions]. Történeti Muzeológiai Szemle 14 (2015) (forthcoming).

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Szécsényi, András. “Kozma Miklós és a munkaszolgálat” [Miklós Kozma and the Labor Service]. Modern Magyarország 3, no. 1 (2014): 104–24. Accessed April 5, 2015. http://epa.oszk.hu/02300/02336/00003/pdf/EPA02336_moma_2014_kulonszam_104-124.pdf.

Szita, Szabolcs. “A munkaszolgálat Magyarországon 1939–1945” [Labor Service in Hungary, 1939–1945]. Hadtörténeti Közlemények 117 (2004): 817–57.

Szita, Szabolcs. “Történelmi áttekintés a munkaszolgálatról (1941–1945)” [Historical Overview of Labor Service (1941–1945)]. Holocaust Füzetek 2 (1993): 26–33.

Szita, Szabolcs. Halálerőd. A munkaszolgálat és a hadimunka történetéhez, 1944–1945 [Bastion of Death. On the History of Labor Service and Military Work, 1944–1945]. Budapest: Kossuth, 1989.

Szita, Szabolcs. Holocaust az Alpok előtt [Holocaust before the Alps]. Budapest: Kossuth, 1983.

Szita, Szabolcs. Munkaszolgálat Magyarország nyugati határán. A Birodalmi Védőállás építése 1944–1945 [Labor Service on the Western Border of Hungary. Construction of the Imperial Defensive Position]. Budapest: ELTE BTK, 1990.

Ungváry, Krisztián. A Horthy-rendszer mérlege: Diszkrimináció, szociálpolitika és antiszemitizmus Magyarországon [The Horthy System in the Balance: Discrimination, Social Policy and Anti-Semitism in Hungary]. Budapest: Jelenkor, 2013.

Gábor Szegedi

Stand by Your Man

Honor and “Race Defilement” in Hungary, 1941–441

The practice of race defilement in Hungary began following the passage of the 1941 Marriage Law, a comprehensive law on marriage that introduced mandatory premarital health checks, marriage loans and the prohibition of marriage between Jews and non-Jews. In contrast with Nazi Germany, in Hungary non-Jewish men were exempted from the provisions of the law, so only Jewish men could be convicted and only if they had a liaison with “honorable” women. The vague non-legal term “honorable” provided the authorities with the opportunity to limit sexual and other contact between “Jews” and “non-Jews” and also to exert control over female bodies through policing and surveillance, as female “honor” was in most cases crucial in order to determine the course of the proceedings. This paper uses the theoretical framework of the history of emotions to reconstruct the types of “honor” that come to light from an analysis of the papers of these court cases and their importance for sexual politics in Horthy-era Hungary.

Keywords: Racial defilement, honor, anti-Semitism, prostitution, love

Introduction

In Emotions in History: Lost and Found Ute Frevert gives a panoramic history of the concept “honor,” her main claim being that this “lost emotion” was intrinsic to upholding social stratification and gender difference in pre-1945 Western cultures. The custom of duels enabled men of the middle and upper classes to save or redeem their honor in case it was under threat, whereas lower class men were not given access to this organized way of taking revenge on people who had allegedly violated their honor. While working class men could still protect their honor, violently, with their bare fists, women’s honor tended to be deeply sexualized. It was closely linked to their sexual “purity” and put them in positions of passivity, as they did not possess any means of retaining or recovering their honor themselves, but needed male family members as protectors to do that for them. Moreover, lost premarital virginity was the kind of loss of honor that could not be redeemed. Once lost, this dishonor marked a woman forever.2 This resonates with what Luisa Passerini writes in New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, namely that transgressions in love can be “dangerous for the oppressive aspects of the existing social and cultural order.”3 In Europe transgressions in love have been historically varied, but Passerini can point to an important aspect of the idea of romantic love: that transgressions are especially dangerous if they involve non-Europeans. Moreover, “love in inter-racial relationships was considered particularly impossible and therefore doomed to a disastrous end.”4 Both Frevert and Passerini aim to historicize emotions, an aspect of history that, due to its seemingly volatile nature, has long been neglected.

In this paper on honor and race defilement in Hungary of the Horthy era, I am going to use a similar theoretical framework. I will draw on Barbara Rosenwein’s definition in particular, according to which emotional communities were “by and large the same as social communities—families, neighborhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, princely courts.” Rosenwein suggests that research on these communities should seek for “systems of feeling” to see “the modes of expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore.”5 Rosenwein’s conception of her research subject closely resembles William Reddy’s idea of emotional regimes, that is “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.”6 Reddy claims that as emotions are “associated with the dense network of goals that give coherence to the self,” it is essential for a community to provide a “coherent set of prescriptions about emotions.”7 Reddy has also introduced further concepts for the study of emotions, such as “emotional refuge” and “emotional liberty,” the former referring to the emotional safe spaces or outlets where those who feel oppressed by the dominant emotional regime can properly express their emotions. Reddy believes that the scrutiny of emotional regimes can be politicized by bringing in the concept of “emotional liberty.” In other words, tyranny can be detected (and critiqued) by examining the pressures that are put on individuals living in a certain emotional regime. If there is strict emotional discipline, then the individuals whose emotional build-up differs from the norm can potentially become subject to physical violence, forced exile, excommunication, etc. or, alternatively, their protests against the norms can take extreme forms.

The author of the most comprehensive monograph on the history of race defilement in Nazi Germany,8 Alexandra Przyrembel, has recently called for the use of the analytic categories of emotional history in analyses of anti-Semitism and, more specifically, race defilement (Rassenschande):

(…) with racist anti-Semitism, hostile emotions were created towards the Jews, which, even if with the opposite sign, could be pursued in the rulings of the courts of the National Socialist justice system on a discursive level. It is through this emotional coding that racial anti-semitism gets its real strength, and not the contemporary biological concepts of purity.9

Przyrembel mentions three tenets of German history-writing that dealt with the National Socialist persecution of Jews from the perspective of collective emotions. One of these, introduced by Michael Wildt,10 dealt with the concept of “honor,” which was given particular significance under National Socialism and which excluded the Jews from “German honor.” The second one focused on a regime of “moral emotions” or “anti-Semitic passions” that Germans were supposed to feel, a mixture of “guilt, shame, resentment and indignation,” these being enforceable and enforced by the regime. Thirdly, Patricia Szobar presented so-called “sexual stories” and their performative effect in race defilement. While studies on Nazi Germany have already produced a range of inquiries in emotional history, Hungarian historiography has dealt only marginally with race defilement and as of yet no analysis has focused on its emotional aspects.11

In this paper, I will discuss, similarly to Szobar, “sexual stories” and their performative effects in Hungarian race defilement court practice. The main questions relate to the concept of honor and how, through the usage of this term, emotional norms were created, reinforced, or challenged by the various actors involved. If we follow Przyrembel’s call, what do we learn about the various emotions and the politics revolving around these emotions when looking at the documents of the various Hungarian courts? I will first briefly discuss the background, i.e. sexual politics in interwar Hungary, and then analyze the various connotations of “honor” for various groups (women, Jews) and for the nation in the last years of Horthy-era Hungary.

Sexual Politics, Sex Education: a Background

In order to improve moral standards on the street and in public spaces in general it is forbidden: (…) to use loud, coarse language or filthy expressions or to make a lewd move or gesture, which may violate the good taste and ethical standards of others. (…) to address an honorable woman (girl or married woman) in a public space with the aim of becoming acquainted against her will or in an inopportune manner. (…) the police are obliged to (…) provide the most comprehensive protection for the public and the woman or adolescent who is in need of protection.

Decree No. 151.000/1927 of the Interior Minister: The protection of public morals12

There was a striking “proliferation of discourse” with regards to sexuality in Hungary after World War I. The number of publications on sex education for young people was in the hundreds, most of the authors being Christian (often linked directly to the Catholic or Calvinist Churches) and representing the dominant sexual ethos, an excellent example of which we find in various “decency regulations,” one of which is quoted above. The sexual normalcy advocated in these texts is not very different from Catholic sex education elsewhere in Europe: Austrian, Polish or German Catholics had similar conceptions of sexual norms, what could be considered deviant, and what was expected from youths.13

The works of Hungarian authors Tihamér Tóth, Ferenc Kiss, Péter Olasz and József Koszterszitz all employ a rhetoric of guilt and are all oriented around “purity,” which is contrasted with “sin.”14 The practices that were to be avoided were numerous: masturbation, homosexuality, any form of premarital or extramarital sex, and consumption of pornography (which was fairly broadly defined). Béla Bangha15 and Ottokár Prohászka,16 two of the most influential Catholic ideologues of the 1920s, had a great deal to say about sexuality, including something they saw as specifically “Jewish sexuality.” These two “dedicated warriors, moreover, program setters for the politics labeled as ‘Christian national’”17 became role models for a middle class that “got drunk”18 on anti-Semitism and also a far right that lauded their racial arguments. Due to their standing within the Catholic Church of Hungary and the respect they enjoyed in Christian national public discourse, their texts importing age-old sexual stereotypes on the lewdness of Jews played a crucial role in setting the scene for Catholic sex education as well.

In addition to emphasizing, often in very abstract and vague terms, that Christian youths needed to remain “pure” (purity being the keyword of Christian sex education) until marriage, it was important to provide them with guidance on how this could be achieved, mostly by listing what and who were to be avoided. Women and adolescent youths (both male and female) were the two groups that were to be protected primarily from the degenerative effects of “excessive” sexuality. These two groups appeared in the sex education material as potential victims, who had to have personal willpower, but also needed special, external protection in the form of well-enforced laws and regulations fending off threats. The sexual dangers allegedly lurking around every corner were embodied in many different forms, including those coming from the inside. However, I would argue that the majority of the authors in this Christian-national setting primarily emphasized external threats that posed a danger for the in-group and argued in support of containing these external threats. Keeping the threat groups on the periphery by segregating them from the majority was recurrently recommended as the primary aim of sexual politics. Prostitutes were the first group, while Jews and, more specifically, Jewish men were the second. Prostitutes were primarily considered a direct health threat, whose scope of activities had to be limited in order to keep the young men of the nation (and their future wives and children) healthy and free of sexually transmitted diseases. The case with Jews is more complicated. They appeared in much of the sex education either overtly or covertly as the possessors of a specific “Jewish spirit,” the representatives of capitalism who also made profit off of sex and thus constituted a more abstract danger. However, Jewish men also represented sexual excess in their bodies; they appeared as bad examples of sexual perversions, as well as bodies that were to be avoided by “honorable” Christian women.

In Christian-national sex education the link between Jews and the exploitative nature of capitalism appears with the concept of sexual capitalism. The authors who spoke up firmly in support of “full sexual purity” until marriage for youth were willing to see adolescents as helpless victims endangered by those who profited from the illicit sexual activities in which these youngsters would engage. In most parables Christian boys were too young to know and too alone to resist. They had to be warned not to become easy prey for sex profiteers. In these texts Jews often appear as seducers; their mere presence on the street, in the city, and in intellectual life was cast as a threat to the innocence and purity of young Christian men and women. Jews were linked directly and indirectly to the production of pornography, pro-sex science (sexology and Freudian psychoanalysis being “Jewish sciences”), and excessive and perverse sexuality (including masturbation and homosexuality). They were also characterized as pimps who attracted girls with money.19

Honor: Three Incarnations

Honor was a constitutive part of the 1935 Nuremberg Law that dealt with marriage and sexuality. It was in fact called the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.20 Sections 1 to 3 prohibited intermarriage, sexual relations outside marriage and Jews employing non-Jewish female domestic help. Section 4 forbade Jews to display “national colors.” Instead they were limited to “Jewish colors.”21 Thus, on the one hand there is a biological concept based in a racist anthropology according to which contamination would occur if “pure” Germans were to have children with Jews, and this would lead to the degeneration of the next generation of Germans.22 On the other, we see the idea of a community of German honor, equally powerful, that is meant to exclude Jews symbolically and which requires a more substantial exclusion that goes beyond the formal requirements of anti-miscegenation. Honor was what non-Jewish Germans stood to lose if they were to sleep with Jews, not or not only their biological “purity.”

It thus should come as no surprise that Przyrembel found a court that in a 1936 race defilement case extended the understanding of the race defilement clause well beyond closing down avenues for the conception of mixed-blood children. The court referred to the unity of the 1935 Law, which, in addition to putting up an obstacle to insemination (protecting German blood that is), also aimed to protect German honor. For this reason the court’s interpretation of the prohibition included any type of intimate physical contact, in addition to intercourse.23 Przyrembel documented the fact that in Nazi Germany race defilement went way beyond the legal punishment of sexual affairs: it aimed at a segregation of the Jewish population from regular contact with the rest of the German population, and this included friendships, good neighborly relations, or simple gestures of compassion. This became most evident in the denunciations of the population where those who had “previously made purchases in the Jewish shops, lived together with Jews or were in other business contact with Jews”24 were especially suspicious, and putting these “friendly Germans” under threat served to isolate Jews sexually and socially. People were expected to feel hatred and disgust toward Jews, so individuals who maintained any type of positive contact with them were by default suspicious of race defilement. The Hungarian law of 1941, like its German counterpart from 1935 or for that matter the 1941 Jewish Codex of Slovakia, foreshadowed a mass of denunciations, the isolation of Jews from non-Jewish society and the public humiliation and persecution of mixed couples. There is a substantial difference, however, between the wording of the German and the Hungarian race defilement clause. In Germany, “German honor” had to be protected, in addition to blood, so all extramarital sex was banned. In contrast, in Hungary it was “honorable women” who were made off limits for Jewish men. In practical terms this meant that Jewish women could have sex with non-Jewish men and only Jewish men were threatened with a criminal indictment. Furthermore, in terms of the politics of honor, it allowed for scrutiny of the sex lives of Jewish men and Christian women. It led to a constant defining and redefining of what “female honor” meant, while Christian male honor remained unscrutinized. The anti-Semitic sex education texts by notable intellectuals from interwar Hungary show that sexual anti-Semitism got strong backing from the Hungarian Christian national State and its supporters. It should thus come as no great surprise that by the time Hungary entered World War II on Nazi Germany’s side, anti-Semitic legislation was ready to give formal expression to these well-publicized views. Subsequent to the passage of two major laws (the First Anti-Semitic Law and the Second Anti-Semitic Law) that aimed to contain “Jews” in Hungary in an economic-social sense, in 1941 a new marriage law was adopted that introduced sexual bans. It was also known as the “Third Anti-Semitic Law,” a law on marriage that replaced the 1894 law, introducing, in addition to the anti-Semitic passages, mandatory premarital health checks and marriage loans for eugenically “fit” couples. It is worth examining the wording of the anti-Semitic clauses in Law No XV of 1941, which introduced the concept of race defilement into Hungarian law:

9. § Non-Jews are not allowed to marry Jews (…)

15. § A Jew, who has sexual intercourse with a honorable, non-Jewish woman of Hungarian origin or gets or tries to get an honorable, non-Jewish woman of Hungarian origin to engage in intercourse with him or with another Jew.25

The same category of the “honorable woman” appears in Decree No. 151.000/1927 of the Interior Minister (The Protection of Public Morals). It was the honor of the sexually pure woman that needed to be protected, and with Jews constructed as a threatening group, it was not enough to educate teenagers to keep away from Jews and to prohibit Jews from approaching “honorable” women on the streets, Jews also had to be kept away with more punitive measures.

What exactly did the term “honorable” mean in the context of Hungary? How did the courts deal with such a vague, non-legalistic term, and how was this honor constructed and reconstructed by various actors in the race defilement cases? Can we limit the discussion of honor to women, or did the honor discourses apply to other members of society?

Female Honor

“The woman becomes visible in society primarily through her body, and if she does not fit the norms, she is put under strict regulations,” wrote Zsuzsa Bokor in her discussion of the Hungarian pre-World-War I and interwar discourse on prostitution and eugenics.26 This statement, however, is just as true of post-1941 Hungary and the prevailing concept of race defilement during the war. Female bodies were on display, as they had to undergo the test of honor. The “examination” in many cases involved a range of male expert or non-expert opinion: physicians were asked to ascertain virginity or determined whether or not a woman had any sexually transmitted diseases; the defense often tried to prove that a female witness was not a woman of honor in order to get the defendant acquitted and thus alleged that the body of the woman involved was “unruly”; other men (neighbors, family members, other sexual partners, real or potential) were asked to indicate whether they had information concerning the woman’s honor. One might conclude, as László Josefovits did, the author of the 1944 legal booklet Fajgyalázás [Race Defilement], that the legislator made an omission by not properly defining “honorable woman” when passing the 1941 Marriage Law. This could have been due to the fact that in Hungary prostitution was legal and those who wanted to become prostitutes legally had to register with the authorities. This move, however, had a no-point-of-return moment, as once a woman had registered herself as a prostitute, it was extremely hard for her to return to “honorable” professions or to a marriage partner who would have been able to provide financial security. Most women did not want to risk these, and so the number of registered prostitutes was fairly low. While there were a few thousand registered prostitutes, the authorities believed that many more worked as “clandestine prostitutes.”27 The term “clandestine prostitute” was used by police authorities and was, like the term honor, a very flexible notion used to discipline and assert control over the bodies of females who did not fit the expected norm (e.g. walked alone late at night, had several sexual partners, etc.).28 This may have been because the moral police had already been struggling with the problem of boundaries when defining “prostitute” that the government could not simply put “registered prostitute” in the race defilement clause, as it would have created injustice (within a system of injustice) and also practical complications. If all Jewish men paying for sex had been forced by the heavy hand of the law to turn to registered prostitutes, these prostitutes would have been too busy to provide for other clients, hence non-Jewish men would have been forced to turn to “clandestine prostitutes” en masse. On the other hand, this would have been an easy solution that would have drastically limited Jewish men’s contact with non-Jewish women. However, it was probably too narrow a category for “dishonorable woman,” and this would not have left room for the policing and surveillance of women “on the margins.” It seems, therefore, that the legislator left the definition of honor open and free-floating. Because they did not have a clear legal concept, the police, the attorneys, the defendants, and, most importantly, the judges were encouraged to ask for additional information on the past emotional and sexual history of the woman involved. This additional knowledge made it possible to exert greater control over these unruly female bodies and emotions. In his aforementioned booklet, Josefovits dealt separately with the issue of female honor and quoted a number of court cases in which such dishonor was underlined by the fact that the women in question had acquired sexually transmitted diseases in one of their many encounters. Having extramarital sex and being infected with a sexually transmitted disease certainly constituted transgressions of sexual normality. As Sander Gilman has repeatedly shown, for a long time sexually transmitted diseases were the “glue” that connected Jews and prostitutes in the public imagination. In some cases mention is made of the detail that the encounters took place “on the highway” or “at the counter of the cinema,” which, based on the 1927 law on public morals, were public spaces and thus not sites where decent women could be addressed.29 Josefovits quoted a ruling of the Supreme Court (Kúria), which established a definition of dishonor that in various court cases was later used as a standard: “A woman who, without the slightest hesitation or resistance that would indicate female shame and good morals, upon mere prompting is ready to have an intimate encounter, cannot be considered honorable from a race protection point of view.”30

Since only honorable women could be accused of the crime, the vagueness of the concept of female dishonor also enabled acts of resistance; there were certain cases in which women were able to use their dishonor to their or their lover’s advantage. The opposite was possible as well. If a woman had a reason to hold a grudge against a Jewish man, she could try to fight for her honor; going for self-declared dishonor was, however, a much more common strategy. The law, like the Nazi German one, stipulated that only the man could be convicted of an act of “defilement,” a detail that exemplifies contemporary ideas about the active and passive roles of men and women, respectively, in sexual contact. Since the forced registration of women as prostitutes was also forbidden, the stakes for a self-claimed dishonor were rather moderate. I found only a single instance in which, subsequent to the affirmation of dishonor, a woman was sent to the moral police (erkölcsrendészet) for “administrative measures.” It was a case in which the woman and three witnesses, including her own mother and the defendant, all claimed that she had had sexual intercourse with several men for money.31 Such “administrative measures” amounted to a day or a couple of days of detention and possibly a medical check-up, a humiliating procedure all in all, even if not comparable to months or years of imprisonment (the maximum one could get for race defilement was 3 years, or 5 years in certain cases).

Thus, one must take into consideration that in many cases women would be motivated to define themselves as dishonorable, for instance a woman who claimed, “it seems I am someone who just goes off with anyone at a whistle,”32 or another who said “when I am on the street and a man asks me to have intercourse, I go with him to have intercourse for money.”33 In one case the defense attorney in the same case tried to argue that she had already been penalized for abortion. He probably hoped that given the strict moral denouncement of abortion, this would establish dishonor, but it did not. In the same case the woman admitted to having had sex occasionally with men who paid her, but added that she liked them as well, and so the court qualified her conduct as honorable.

Stories of love and despair were the types of narratives that could convince the court of one’s high morality if a woman’s honor was at stake. In the numerous cases in which it was clear that the woman did not have many lovers or had not accepted money in exchange for sex, the question of honor was cleared up easily. But for women who came from poor families and were likely to have accepted financial compensation for sexual favors, honor could still be saved if they were shown to have been what I have labeled as “in despair” or “in love.”

Despair was very often constructed using the stereotypes mentioned in anti-Semitic texts by Bangha, Prohászka and others: the village girl versus the Jewish seducer. According to this narrative, poor girls from rural areas who came to big towns to find work were especially susceptible to the temptation/danger posed by Jewish men. As this danger was external to them, their honor could and had to be saved. Despair was not necessarily measured on the basis of what one did, but focused rather on “character,” which was in turn based on assumptions rooted in Christian national popular culture. In fact, when the courts discussed the character of the “village girl” and the “seductive Jews,” trying to look for a story of personality leading up to the deed, their work resembled what Michel Foucault refers to as the “psychological-ethical double of the offense.”34 This, Foucault claims, went hand in hand with the appearance of the psychological expert opinion, which analyzed the psychological profile of the accused, and from the eighteenth century on, the judiciary gradually started to rely heavily on these expert opinions. The “double” is a delegalized version of the deed. It likens the person to his crime. In other words, the commission of a crime is characterized as the natural outcome of the alleged criminal’s irregular personality, which also found manifestation in extravagant, noncriminal behavior.35 In the race defilement cases, this double seems to appear without the need for psychological expert opinion. The judiciary often seemed ready to indulge in the construction of psychological profiles of both criminal and victim, and the “psychological expert knowledge” was found in the works of anti-Semites.

Despair was especially credible if the woman showed signs of hesitation (as opposed to “without slightest hesitation”), since that proved that she was not well-versed in the prostitution business and was possibly simply defenseless.36 One such case was that of a 24-year-old factory worker girl who initially refused to go with a Jewish man for 5 pengő. When he raised the price to 10 pengő, she agreed. In the appeals court’s explanation of their verdict (1 month and 28 days prison) they made the following claim:

it can be established that accused knew very well that T.J. was not a prostitute, because one does not need to do advance courting of a prostitute. The moral police found nothing on T.J. in its investigation, and as a factory worker she has a normal profession, but the 18–20 pengő she earns is so little that—already excited by the hugs and kisses of the accused—she did not have the fortitude to reject the sum, which was so big compared to her earnings (….) T.J. is a girl who came to Budapest from a village not much before this incident, and these are the people whom, due to their lack of experience, the law primarily wants to protect for the sake of racial purity.37

Both the concept of hesitation and the narrative of the village girl have an important place in the Budapest Appeals Court’s argumentation. Members of this court, namely Dezső Ottrubay, Ernő Lengyel, and Elek Pálffy, otherwise did not appear markedly anti-Semitic in their decision-making. In dozens of other cases they mitigated the sentences of the Budapest District Court, acquitting a large number of men who had been convicted based on insubstantial evidence. There is another case worth mentioning in this context, when the Budapest District Court’s ruling, which was quite severe (one year of imprisonment), began with a passage that resembled an excerpt from a sentimental novel: “F.G. factory worker was employed in the Kárpátia sewing factory as a seamstress until September 26, 1941. She then lost her job, and on October 8, 1942, without any income, she bought ¼ kilos of cheap black grapes with the last of her money and was eating this for lunch on a bench in Mária Terézia square, reading a book.”38

The ruling continued with the story, according to which a 68-year-old man approached her and sat down beside her. Allegedly, they had chatted for one and a half hours, and in the course of their talk the 21-year-old girl had told him about her financial distress. He had offered her 6 pengős to have intercourse with him and, “after lengthy persuasion,” she had accepted the offer. In the court hearing the man claimed that the girl had approached him and offered her services, while the girl presented the version that was accepted as the truth by the court. This case shows that “personality” did in fact matter, and in this case of an allegedly sex-hungry old Jewish man versus an innocent, young village girl, the representatives of power sided with her in terms of credibility and honor.

It was, however, not just the courts and the police who determined female honor. Women themselves could also get actively involved in the process. A successful and highly intelligent attempt to manipulate the system was made by Mrs. V., a 25-year-old waitress, who was married but was found during a night police raid in bed with a Jewish colleague of hers. Initially, it looked like relationship based on mutual love. The man and the woman were of the same social class, and they both confessed to the police that they had had a continuing relationship. The man (Mr. M.), even though it would certainly have meant having to spend months in prison if not years, maintained this version of their relationship, but the women retracted on the day of the court hearing:

Mr. M.: I understand the charge and I plead guilty. I had a relationship with Mrs. V. for 4 years, and on December 12, 1941 in the morning, when the detectives, who were investigating another case, appeared in the rented room in which I live, they found me in bed with Mrs. V. By that time I had been living together with her for two months, and we had a relationship based on love (…)

Mrs. V.: As far as I know, the defendant was cognizant of the fact that I am not an honorable woman. I had been taken into custody several times after police raids and I had been in a youth detention center as well. This happened because on some occasions I was caught red handed when I received male guests. I am not registered as a prostitute. I only received male guests on occasion, from whom I accepted money. (…)

Defendant (Mr. M.) in response to the Prosecutor’s question: I knew that Mrs. V. was not to be considered a decent woman. If I remember well, I gave her money in exchange for intercourse as well, but I don’t remember how much.39

Thus, Mr. M. quickly understood Mrs. V.’s intentions and helped her establish her own legal status as a woman of dishonor. However, at the same time she positioned herself quite well in this “system of female dishonor,” as she painstakingly explained that she had only had “temporary male guests” (átmenő férfivendégek). She limited their number to two and added that for months she had not had sex with them. That is, she presented an image of herself according to which she was not a health or a “public morals” threat, and thus she had a chance of avoiding any kind of administrative measures for clandestine prostitution. Her intervention was successful partly because records on her were found by the moral police and Mr. M. was acquitted a couple of months later.40 What I call “love”—in court cases one finds phrases like “I love him” (szeretem) and “I liked them” (kedveltem)—could take several forms. In most cases, however, it referred to the fact that the woman might have had motivations that were not purely materialistic or carnal. Giddens contends that in romantic love relationships, which over the course of the twentieth century rose to a place of unprecedented social prominence, “an element of sublime love tends to predominate over that of sexual ardor,” adding that “love breaks with sexuality while embracing it.”41 That is, if the usual dishonorable conduct the goal of which was money or sexual satisfaction was to a certain extent elevated to this “sublime” level, this may well have changed the whole story, including the perception of female honor. It is true that if a woman’s honor was satisfactorily established in the eyes of the court, this was usually bad news for a Jewish defendant. In certain cases, women very clearly tried to save their lovers by making up fictional clients (usually in vain). However, taking into account the importance of retaining honor, especially for women in middle-class couples, declarations of love (especially if they were mutual) can be seen not as a way of creating greater problems for the defendant, but as expressions of defiance to the law, which tried to serve by force relationships that were founded upon intimate feelings. Below are some cases from court decisions that touched upon this rather vague issue. In one case, the defense underlined that the Christian woman was in an adulterous, extramarital relationship, but the court dismissed their claim, contending that, “an extramarital liaison conducted with a single man and with no financial implications, purely based on attraction, cannot be termed dishonorable from an implementation point of view, even though it is in conflict with good morals.”42

This was a ruling the court had some trouble justifying, as in light of contemporary sexual mores an adulterous relationship with a Jewish man was certainly not an honorable deed. In a “Solomon’s decision,” they scolded her for this relationship, but found a way to distinguish her from the prostitutes whom they believed the makers of the law had sought to target with allegations of “dishonor.” Another case was somewhat similar: a woman was categorized as an “ex-clandestine prostitute,” and she had had issues with the police for some time for having worked as a clandestine prostitute. However, when she met the Jewish man, she decided to give up her previous life as a prostitute and remain faithful to him. The court, probably motivated by anti-Semitic convictions, acknowledged that he “converted” her into an honorable woman and at the same time gave him a 4-month prison sentence for sleeping with a Christian woman of honor.43 In another case a woman admitted to having had sexual relations with several men, but she contended that she was honorable, since according to her, “I have not had intercourse for income with anyone ever and I would not be prepared to do this. I only had sex out of love, when I liked the man.”44 The court of first instance accepted her claim and decided that she was indeed honorable.

Jewish Honor

Unsurprisingly, there was considerable variety in the forms of sexual conduct and sexual proclivity revealed by the race defilement proceedings, and these forms of conduct and desire were not always in line with contemporary stereotypes of Jewish sexuality. The types of relationships, the sexual habits and practices, the confessions and acts of various actors in some cases rather seem to have worked against the schematic stereotypes of the authorities. Like “female honor,” Jewish sexuality was a construct molded by various expectations and norms, and it worked more or less as a superimposition of a “Christian national” morality on Jewish men. In other words, the more Jewish men conformed to the ideal of “Christian purity” or “true love,” showing devotion to their (honorable) partner, the less likely they were to be subject to harsh treatment. Calling it “Jewish honor” might seem misleading at first glance, but I would argue for retaining the expression with the above meaning, i.e. as an honor “awarded” to some Jews and refused to others.

I will start with a case that could have been written personally by Prohászka or Bangha, as it was so much in line with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Gy. N., a conductor from Budapest, was, like many other people of Jewish origin after 1939, fired from his job. He found refuge in the orchestra of the mining town, Mátranovák, where he pretended to be Roman Catholic (although his religion was “Israelite” according to official documents). He soon met a 17-year-old girl, the daughter of a miner. A court ruling describes the meeting, in which “he started leading the girl on by standing in front of her when she approached with her bicycle.” Even though the ruling acknowledges that the meeting “was not against the will of the girl, because she did not go elsewhere to ride her bike,” there is a suggestion of force in the phrasing: “in the end, the accused grabbed the girl’s bike and made her stop and get off, and then he introduced himself.”45 Gy. N. was a married man, and he spoke about this to the girl, but he did not inform her that he was Jewish. As the ruling notes, “he even went to the church with her and made the sign of the cross there. Moreover, when there was talk about Jews, he too scolded them. Also, even though he did not make a formal promise that he would marry her, he talked about divorcing and making her ‘a very happy girl.’”46 It was in light of this information that, the court notes, the girl repeatedly agreed to have intercourse with him. There is mention of a trip to Budapest, where he was supposed to introduce her to his (Catholic) parents, but instead he took her to a hotel where he “got the young girl to do perverse things (fajtalanság, which literally translates as “contrary to the race”),” which probably referred to oral sex, on the basis of the use of the expression in other cases. The liaison turned into a scandal once it became public, and some local men wanted to beat up the conductor. He ended the affair, but then started a new one, again with a Christian woman, once more “hiding his identity.” In retrospect, at court he claimed that he wanted to emigrate and marry the woman in question in America. The court’s ruling becomes most indignant in its tone when it discusses female honor and how this honor was affected as a result of his conduct:

If the accused had had honorable intentions with R.Zs., if he had loved her seriously and honestly, he would not have approached her in such a deceitful and conscienceless way, as being a learned and well-read person he must have known that on the one hand his Jewish origins could be revealed very easily, and on the other, if his Jewish identity were revealed, this would bring shame on R.Zs. and dramatically reduce her chances of finding a husband, thus it could completely ruin her future.47

As for the 17-year-old girl’s honor, they arrived at the following conclusion:

with this, she started her ride down the slope, and afterward it was easier just to follow the accused than to stop and turn back, and this is how he took the girl with him down the slope to the state of moral debauchery that obviously felt like home for him (perversity (fajtalanság) in the Budapest hotel, etc.).48

Lastly, the ruling included a general legal consideration on female honor:

It is a constitutive part of the crime one is charged with that the woman, with whom the accused had sexual intercourse, is honorable, but in addition to this, from the point of view of the gravity of the crime, it is important to determine the moral value that the woman had before the act of intercourse and the extent of the moral devastation cause by the accused’s deed.49

Without much effort, one can spot all the negative stereotypes regarding Jewish sexuality and how they were subsequently connected to seduction and to pushing innocent village girls down the slippery slope from which there was no return. No wonder then that the conductor received the most severe of all the sentences that I found in the material of the Supreme Court, 18 months in prison, upheld by both appeals courts. The fact that having had intercourse with a Jewish man would “decrease any woman’s value” is notable. Thus, a Jewish man’s honor would have entailed stepping away from Christian girls in order to maintain their “market value.” There are numerous cases in which having obstructed a girl’s access to “normal life” was cited as an aggravating circumstance: “for the sake of a friendship with an honorable Hungarian girl, that is for egoistic reasons, he tried to stop the impending marriage of a young Hungarian couple with all his means, and as part of this he tried to stop a wayward girl from finding the right path again.”50

Two other rulings scolded Jewish men for having remained intimately associated with a girl for a longer time: “the defendant (...) committed the crime over an extended period of time, and with this deed he seriously impeded the fulfillment of the natural female role of R.T. and her search for a place in non-Jewish society via marriage.”51 And “aggravating circumstances are the extended time period and that the defendant committed the crime with a married woman, inhibiting her from fulfilling her female role based on her origins, either by making up with or legally divorcing her husband.”52 That is, if the woman was unmarried, being with a Jewish man would mean both shame and a cul-de-sac, and if she were to marry him, similarly this would have been a deviation from her “natural role.” However, in the above cases the relationships were relatively fresh and the girls clearly had other options (a Christian suitor or husband). Other rulings show that consistency and exclusiveness were mitigating circumstances, as in the case of a couple who had been together since 1930. They could not get married, as the woman already had a husband who had, however, disappeared abroad, thus depriving her of the chance to obtain a divorce. The Budapest District court sentenced him to four months imprisonment, which was upheld by the appeals court, but the Supreme Court reduced it to one month. The fact that they had sex even after the Marriage Law took effect was evidenced by a witness considered credible by the court, and the medical expert refuted their main argument that she had been ill and unable to have sex. The court of second instance did not accept the contention that “the sexual relationship, with regular intercourse, that was upheld up to now would have transformed into an ideal, spiritual bond,” but it did regard the “spiritual connection (lelki kapcsolat) that was rooted in long years of a love relationship” as a mitigating circumstance. The Supreme Court added in its ruling that this mitigating circumstance mentioned by the appeals court “carries such great weight in favor of the accused that the original sentence seems disproportionately severe.”53 The appeals court reduced the sentence to two months.

The various ideas concerning Jewish sexuality, female honor and Christian national sexual morality could emerge as factors in one and the same case as well. A Jewish man met a non-Jewish woman in the early 1920s, and they moved in together in the mid-1930s. They planned to marry, but were unable to arrange it; first the man’s father opposed it and, after his death, the woman’s birth certificate could not be found. After 1941, there were obvious legal obstacles. They both claimed to be in love with each other, but the Budapest District Court refused to take this into account:

(…) if the accused loved and loves the aggrieved party (the girl – G.Sz.) as much as he says, the objection of accused’s father should not have been a serious obstacle to marriage, and if this was the real reason why the wedding did not take place, then the accused’s deed confirms the racial overconfidence, according to which a non-Jewish woman is only good for an extramarital relationship, for the satisfaction of sexual instincts, and not for the establishment of a legal, family relationship.54

This explanation and the ruling that sentenced the man to one year in prison shows that the judges of this district court did not take into account what in the previous case had been a significant mitigating circumstance. The overt anti-Semitism present in the ruling was topped by the claim that the accused had “irreparably distracted her from fulfilling her female role according to her origin.”55 She was at the time 44 years old, so this referred to the fact that she was already beyond the age at which women are or were commonly held to be capable of bearing children. The man was also scolded for his “decided criminal will, with which he not only repeatedly committed the crime during the proceedings, but explicitly decided to repeat it in the future.”56 The court of second instance dismissed all aggravating circumstances in its ruling (one month in prison), as they believed that the woman had not been prevented from fulfilling her female role, a future violation of the law could only be the basis of another criminal investigation and not the one in question, and as regards the “explicit decision to repeat the deed,” they believed that this was “rather a result of internal despair than evil passion (indulat).” Furthermore, according to their ruling, the fact that “discontinuing their life together [had] created serious difficulties for the accused” was a mitigating circumstance.57 This was in fact one of the cases in which both the woman and the man openly confessed their relationship and also their love and did not change their confessions, even though this would unquestionably put him at risk. He said that he “had been and was cognizant of the legal ramifications, but after having known each other for almost a lifetime they have become so used to each other and they loved each other so much that they could not and did not want to live without each other.”58

She also mentioned the duration of the liaison. According to the police report, she said

for me he is not a lover but a husband. I am not responsible for the fact that his parents did not give their consent for us to marry as we had planned. I cannot give him up, because I love him and no other man will be born who would respect me as much as he does.59

National Honor

One of Father Koszter’s post-1941 writings, Sátán tőrvetése (The Intrigue of Satan), perfectly encapsulates the stereotypes connecting money, Jewish sexuality and female dishonor:

The kept women, maitresses who live off the pockets of their wealthy accomplices, are the victims of wretched voluptuaries; while their lives seem carefree from the outside, actually they are bleak, joyless and hopeless. These women will never become a “wife” and “mother,” the holy dream of a real woman. These are the ones who, since the passing of the 1941 Marriage Law, have converted to Judaism by the hundreds in order to continue to secure for themselves the money of their “friends.”60

It logically followed that women who had consciously remained or engaged in sexual or matrimonial relations with Jews were doing it for money: they could only be prostitutes. If they were honorable women, then they did not belong to the Jews. Either they had been deceived or they were not yet fully cognizant of the dangers Jewish men posed and had to be shown a way back to “normality.”

But what kind of code of honor needed to be protected here? What was the normality, the “national honor” that was to be saved by these race defilement regulations? Again, the various actors had different ideas of what was at stake, but it is possible to delineate certain recurring patterns. Firstly, there is the idea of winning, of gaining the upper hand. If national honor is maintained and promoted by Christian national men, then public life, including the most respected professions, the media, public administration (all that makes a man proud of himself) must be in the hands of non-Jews. In this respect the 1941 Marriage Law is very much in line with the so-called First and Second Anti-Semitic Laws from 1938 and 1939, which limited the employment of Jews in certain professions and aimed at an “economic changing of the guards.” However, by 1941 changing of the guard meant that Jewish men had to give back “their” women (the women who were the prerogative of “Christian” men) as well. One case in which these various anti-Semitic laws for a “changing of the guard” worked together was that of a 53-year-old, rather well-off Budapest lawyer, who was convicted and given the maximum penalty of three years in prison by the court of first instance. The aggravating circumstances of the ruling have a particularly loaded language, even for this kind of court:

(…) the fact that the accused is married, that it happened repeatedly, that he committed the deed as a lawyer, and that partly in order to satisfy his lust, party for his own protection he contaminated spiritually a whole family and D.E., who is nearly still a child whose moral value depreciated to such an extent that she claimed that she was a prostitute without thinking, almost as if she were boasting.61

The lawyer was then acquitted by the appeals court, as they regarded the woman as dishonorable, and he was allowed to return home. However, as becomes clear on the basis of his petition for compensation, he lost his job as a lawyer because, subsequent to the first ruling, his name was automatically deleted from the list of chamber-approved lawyers. As a previous anti-Semitic Law had introduced a quota for the admittance of new Jewish lawyers to the Chamber, he did not stand a chance of being readmitted. Thus, in a case of sexual conduct in which he was finally acquitted, he still lost his profession and an accusation of race defilement de facto helped further the economic changing of guard. As for the disappointed Christian lover, race defilement cases provide some similar stories. One was that of a sailor, who traveled a great deal and whose wife had a Jewish lover. As the rulings states, “the married couple had constant fights because of the accused.”62 It was the husband who reported the affair in 1942 to the police in person, saying “I was informed that he has been having an affair with my wife since 1940. My wife has repeatedly said this winter that she would not leave him, she would rather break up with me and moreover, she wanted to convert to Judaism.”63 At the court hearing he said he was on bad terms with the Jewish man because he “nosed himself up (feltolakodott)” to his wife, but that he was nevertheless able to give an unbiased statement as a witness.64 The sentence was then reduced with each appeal, the initial ruling of 18 months first became one year and finally the Supreme Court reduced it to six months, indicating that it was not the Jewish man who initiated the liaison but the woman. He himself claimed that after 1941 he had “begged the woman to go back to her husband,” that is, in this case race defilement provided an opportunity for the disappointed husband to “reclaim” his lost wife from a Jewish man who, clearly under the pressure of the law, was willing to give up the affair.65 We can observe many of the same themes when looking at the ways in which some people reported Jews to the police. One such case was that of M.E., a house-painter, who was reported by another handyman, probably a rival, for living together with a Christian woman:

The foreign national M.E. defiles the Hungarian race and laughs merrily when there is talk about want of material, as his bottles are full of paint and varnish. If someone goes to him, he is ready to take any job, painting, coating, for less money, because he wants to oust the Christian workers by providing services without paying taxes.66

This letter indicates quite clearly that the man in question was much less concerned with sexual-biological purity than he was with getting rid of economic competition. In terms of national honor, I have cited these three examples as illustrations of the connection between the post-1938 anti-Semitic regulations in Hungary and the ways in which they contributed to a system that enabled a “changing of the guard.” National honor at the time was to be preserved by replacing the Jewish intelligentsia with non-Jews in all possible spheres of society. This happened with various degrees of success in different walks of life, and there are no numbers to prove that Christian men were able to “get” the women they loved or the women who had had sexual contact with Jews. However, this was certainly part of the game: Hungarian national honor after 1941 implied not only the silencing of Jews in the public arena and the pressuring and expulsion of Jews from their professions and businesses. It also meant that they were to lose contact with the women they loved if these women were regarded as belonging rightfully to the nation.

Conclusion

What do the racist sexual politics of the Horthy-era teach us about the uses of concepts of sexual purity and honor? Firstly, they exemplify the legal codification of what Ute Frevert framed in terms of the gendered nature of emotions. As the race defilement cases exhibit, female honor was irrevocably tied to sexuality, and it was defined by a patriarchal middle class. The suspicion of dishonor arose if women had more than one sexual partner, if they were believed to have engaged in sex in exchange for material gain or if they were ready to have sex with men they did not know without showing “proper female shame.” Female honor was decided upon by male authorities. In the race defilement cases courts composed of men were entrusted with the authority to determine whether a woman was honorable or not. These decision-makers were ready to grant female honor if the women in question fit a certain profile that made them look vulnerable and in need of protection. This has been demonstrated by some police reports and court rulings and their reliance on certain stereotypes which found confirmation, as it were, in contemporary sex education texts. A stereotype that reappeared consistently was that of the naïve, uneducated and inexperienced poor village girl, who encountered an older, Jewish seducer and was helpless against his tricks. I used the terms love and despair above to capture other common ideas that could be used to persuade officials that a woman was honorable. Despair was often linked to the village girl stereotype, and it referred mostly to the coercion that supposedly resulted from her dire economic situation. Love, on the other hand, gave a spiritual meaning to an otherwise materialistically motivated sexual encounter, so if a woman made a plausible demonstration of affection, her honor could be saved. I have not discussed Jewish female sexuality in this paper as, in contrast to German race defilement, the Hungarian law did not penalize sexual contact with Jewish women and therefore the archival sources I have consulted did not address Jewish female sexuality. The sex education materials focused more on Jewish male seducers but occasionally the sexuality of Jewish women was mentioned too. A study of how the personal life of female “Jews” changed in the early 1940s is, however, a challenge that will have to be taken up in the future.

Secondly, I tried to see what codes of honor were applied to the Jewish men who were the primary targets of this legal provision. Even though their honor was not as specifically spelled out in the law as that of their female partners, circumstances did matter. If, according to the agents of power, they showed signs of love and were deeply attached to their partner, it was possible for them to receive a relatively mild sentence. There was much more understanding on behalf of the courts for couples who had been living together for years and possibly even had children than for those men who could be made to resemble the stereotype of the “Jewish seducer.” I offered an example of one such “seducer,” who, to use Foucault’s concept of the psychological-ethical double, was already living in sin, coming from an urban-bohemian milieu and supposedly having caused his counterpart, the “village girl,” to begin to slide down a moral slope of no return. This “character,” so it was believed, was about to commit sexual violations as predetermined by his lifestyle. Jewish honor also included being humble and not standing in the way of a woman’s honor and her fulfilment of her alleged role, which implied eventually marrying a Christian man. If a Jewish man were to keep a woman “out of circulation” for too long by being her lover or by threatening her partnership with a Christian man, he would fall into a less honorable category. Naturally, the honor of Jews was not under scrutiny in this manner if they kept away from Christian women.

Thirdly, I linked the race defilement provision with other anti-Semitic legislation in Hungary and argued that the notion that Christian men had the property-rights over the nation was part of an abstract notion of “national honor.” National honor implied that they alone should have access to good jobs, to the ownership of capital, to public spaces, and the friendship and love of honorable women. As part of the changing of the guard, their rivals were to be restrained and remain humbled.

If other regulations served to deprive Jewish men of their economic rights, the anti-Semitic sexual provision stripped them of full sexual citizenship. The requirements connected to female honor put a wall around the sexual choices of certain groups in the emotional regime(s) of the Horthy era. One’s emotional liberty was seriously limited by the race defilement regulation, which forbade hundreds of thousands of Jewish men from approaching or continuing relationships with non-Jewish women, and in turn all non-Jewish women were closely monitored in order to ensure that they would not to engage in such illicit liaisons.

As with other anti-Semitic laws, what mattered was not just the number of the convicted and acquitted or the severity of their penalties. Stripping them of their honor as men (as part of the social construct of manhood), limiting their range of options, and policing and controlling female honor (i.e. sexuality) were all part and parcel of this regulation. Honorable Hungarian non-Jewish men wanted all honorable women to be their own virgin brides and loyal wives, whereas the love of a Hungarian woman for a “Jew” or any kind of rebellion against the legally buttressed order of things was to be punished with the full force of the law.

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