THE WORKS
Juristic Literacy
The common feature in charters and in pieces of literary works was that the same rules and ideas applied in their construction and style. The reason for this on the one hand is that the manual and curriculum of literary demands was the ars dictaminis - both for authors of long books and writers of charters, but on the other hand, the authors of literary works were often identical with the writers of charters. The proof of this relationship is the structural and stylistic similarity of charters, missales or fictive letters and letters of recommendations in the Middle Ages. Two of the formulae of charters were especially suitable for creating literary compositions. One of them was the arenga, which - in most cases - was compiled from international arenga-sources, but there were special Hungarian types of it, too. The other formula, whose text reached the standards of literary requirements, was the narrative of charters; the part that explained the reasons and circumstances of the person who issued it in details.
While narration remained the short and plain presentation of facts in the West, from the second half of the 12th century in Hungary, in the royal chancelleries, it became more and more detailed, and in the case of a gift the king also listed the donator's merits and described the events concerning the fate of the country and that of the reigning and royal family. As the narrative of charters increased in size, the demand to create more perfect compositions also increased, so finally the narratives were transformed into complete biographies and stories of careers. These works often show epic specific features, and are carefully structured (parallels or contrasts). But the most important thing is that this way royal chancelleries were not only the workshops of juristic literacy, but also those of preserving personal or communal memories.
The Genres
The surviving works represent the different genres of the Middle Ages, and the multiplicity of genres shows the high quality of literature. Regarding the conditions of Hungarian cultural life and the genre existing in the West, it is not possible that in the course of time whole genres were lost. All that was preserved must reflect the contemporary reality.
The most represented genre in the age of the Árpád dynasty was hagiography. Several facts encouraged the creation of the biographies of saint in large numbers. As the number of manuscripts and editio princeps show, legends were the most popular, and at the same time they had the widest audience, too.
It is typical that a significant part of their audience - the middle and lower layer of secular priesthood - was also a transfering medium, they brought the literary content of the legend to the widest range of people in the national language. Liturgy also required biographies: concerning the chants of monks and secular priests, there was a need for suitable readings besides hymns and psalms at the celebrations of saints, and this was usually taken from the biography of the given saint. Sometimes the biography was specially structured: in each of the six hours of prayer there was an appropriate extract to be read. The medieval practice of spreading ideas also required the means of the legend: in 1183, the first Saints of Hungary were celebrated at various places within a series of festivals all through the year. On 16-17th July hermits Zoerard/Andrew and Benedic, on 26th July, in Csanád martyr bishop Gerald, on 20th August at Székesfehérvár King Stephen, and finally on 5th November Prince Emeric was canonised.
The earliest legend is about the life of the hermits of the Vágvölgy, almost two decades before the canonisation. The author of the legend was probably encouraged by local and personal adoration, and the development and theoretical foundation of the Italian ascetic trend of monastic reforms.
At the place where St Gerald died a martyr, and opposite this, in the building of the Pest parsonage, the adoration of relics started quite early. But the common ancestor of the two preserved legends was written at the earliest at the turn of the 11-12th centuries, rather around 1145. From this an extract - a sermon - was made soon at the end of the century and it was used for liturgic purposes. The detailed text was rewritten at several points at the end of the 14th century.
The spirit of the original Gerald legend was highly influenced by the fact that the author - in the worldly environment - used several sources, which could have hardly been obtained in the solitude of the monastery: presumably he used the text of the chronicle from the age of Andrew I, and in the representation of chieftain Csanád's story he relied on heroic songs and local traditions. The French mentality, established in Chartres, - which was the base of both renaissance thinking and gothic art in the 12th century - was first represented here, and this fact raises the value of the text. In the sources there is no trace of the admiration of King St Stephen yet, the first sign of the development of this cult is the birth of the bigger Stephen legend, which does not mention the canonisation in spite of the fact that it was written between 1077 and 1083, after Ladislaus's accession to the throne.
The author, who usually wrote for Benedictine communities, worked out an important thesis in the history of foreign relations: he refused Pope Gregory VII's feudal demands for Hungary, which was made in the name of St Peter, by offering the country to the patronage of the Virgin Mary, and so the country became her spiritual heritage (the thesis of "patrimonium Petri" was contrasted to "hereditas Marie"). The author of the smaller legend had already known the work of his predecessor. His work reflected a completely different view: Stephen did not represent the ruler of the larger legend, who was always looking for the final judgement, but an actual, powerful and righteous king. This is the first literary work in Hungary, which fulfilled the demands of contemporary literary theory in every respect, there is a recommendation, which refers to the author's literary self-consciousness, and there are certain elements in the text which suggest interest in antiquity.
Whereas the first two Stephen legends were motivated by liturgic and educational points of view, the creation of the third legend was defined by a political aspect. In the prologue the author, Bishop Hartvic, frequently repeated the royal order, and this was not only mere politeness. The author, who came to Hungary from abroad, did not have other sources than the two previous legends: what he could do was to mix the two texts. He created an independent chapter, where he described how Stephen received a crown from the Pope. In the time of the construction of the legend the emperor and the Pope had been fighting for long in the investiture fight, the dispute about the right of appointing prelates. Hartvic had to prove that because of the papal privilege given to Stephen the contemporary Hungarian rulers had their legal rights for intervening in church matters, which had been unwilling to grant to Christian rulers by the popes since Gregory VII.
The traces of St Emeric's adoration are so faint preceding the time of his canonisation, that Hungarian sources had hardly any valuable data referring to him. His legend was written between 1109 and 1116 in a Benedictine environment as a reading for monks. In Emeric the author celebrated chaste innocence, but the critique of the aims of Gregorian papacy can also be felt in the text (he calls Pope Gregory VII simply Hildebrand!).
About one hundred years after the first canonisations, in 1192 at Vrad, at B la III's request the Pope's legate entered King Ladislaus among the saints, and with this the number of saints in the Árpád dynasty increased to three. Though the adoration of King Ladislaus had already started in the first half of the 12th century, in his canonisation political aspects also played a very important role.
The original legend, which was written at the time of the canonisation, did not survive. It was shortened at the beginning of the 13th century for liturgic purposes, and in those days changes were made in the longer text, too. The aim of the author was to emphasise the main characteristic features and the virtues of the ideal ruler (in many aspects it was close to the ideal picture of a Christian knight in Hungary), and in his representation he was the first one to use international miracle sources.
Without the legend of St Elisabeth, who went abroad, the legend of St Margaret of the Árpád dynasty (legenda vetus) was the last one born in Hungary during the age of the Árpád dynasty.
Margaret was not canonised, though there were many attempts to enter her among the Hungarian saints. The writer of her legend, Marcellus, her father-confessor, took the official record of the examination of her canonisation as the base of his work. With the simplicity of the language and structure of his work he tried to express the way of life of his heroine, which was quite modern at that time throughout Europe: the idea of Christian myth. The same is true for the legend of Ilona from Veszprém, which was completed at about the same time as the Margaret legend. In spite of the fact that it came to light rather late, the data it contains about the age makes it authentic.
Only very few, actually only one piece of theological discussion survived, and this dates back to the beginning of the age (monastic regulations written in charter-forms, the rules of the Paulians, and Paulus Hungarus's juristic works do not belong to this genre). Only one theological work of St Gerald survived; it is the "Deliberatio", but we know that he had written more. The complicated style and difficult chain of thoughts, the special expressions, the many Italianism and the imperfect sentence structures must have made the work unpopular. The reason why this genre was poorly represented in Hungary is that St Gerald's work is the one and only theological work representing the genre in the West in the 9-11th centuries.
Sermon-literature plays a very important role among the works with liturgic purposes. We know that St Gerald liked preaching, the memory of this was preserved in his legends, but in spite of this only a small fragment survived from his sermons, and this is the only relic of old, homily-type sermons in Hungary. The new, thematic style is represented by the two sermons of Benedict, Bishop of Várad, about King St Ladislaus's life, and the 199 drafts of speeches of the Sermons from Pécs (Pécsi Beszédek) - which probably dates back to the last third of the 13th century - with 12 sermons about Hungarian saints among them.
Though poetry in Hungary served liturgic purposes, its first examples were not preserved in liturgic forms. It seems convincing that the votive writings of the Coronation Cloak and the Gisela-cross originate from Hungary, and the first Hungarian Leonine hexameter - the spoken invocative formula of the inventory of property from Pannonhalma from around 1090 (Divinum firmet nomen, quod scripsimus amen) - was also written by a native poet. It was continued by Enoch, the Dominican monk, and Cognoscens, Canon of Esztergom, in their charter of 1233: "Cum patre nos Natus iuvet hic et Spiritus almus"! After St Stephen's canonisation three antiphonies and three responsies were written in rhymed prose to the celebration of the king. Till the end of the 12th century a single antiphony about St Gerald and the Mary-sequence of the Pray codex (starting with "Mira mater extitisti") represented this style.
From the beginning of the 13th century liturgic poetry became very popular; sequences and hymns survived about the saints of the Árpád dynasty. This process reached a peak in the 1280s, when - probably to the encouragement of Archbishop Lodomer - an Augustine monk from Esztergom wrote a rhymed chant (in which he summarised the saint's life and its message) about King St Stephen to compensate King Ladislaus (the Cuman) IV's Attila-cult and his interest in a pagan past. The first Hungarian dramas also belong to liturgic poetry. Although these are just slightly modified versions of European dramas, their appearance was very important. The Twelfth-night Star play (Csillagjáték) was preserved in the prelate service book of Bishop Hartvic, and an Easter play beginning "Quem qaueritis" survived in many places: in Bishop Hartvic's service book, in Codex Albensis and in the Pray codex, too.
The first piece of secular poetry might have been written by an educated, anonymous monk, who, in his work, lamented on Hungary's devastation by the Tartars. His poem consists of 62 five-line, rhymed verses; its style and careful structure represents high quality poetry in contemporary literature. The same cannot be said about the Slovenian rhymed chronicle, written by a foreign Cystercian monk, who summarised Hungarian history from St Stephen to 1245, in 27 eight-line, blank verses. His poems do not reach the standards of Planctus, or the general level of contemporary poetry, either. A poet-minded, copier monk of the Pannonhalma scriptorium wrote a distichon about the foundation of a monastery by bailiff Walfer to the margin of Liber ruber. This is probably the first example of autotelic poetry in Hungary ("Walfer from the Nagy clan, who actually bears the title "great" [nagy means great],/ had a church built in the honour of the Saint Virgin".).
Letter writing as a genre is worth mentioning, since Hungarian prose in the age of the Árpád dynasty reached the highest standards in this particular genre. King Ladislaus's letter to Oderisius, abbot of Montecassino, might have been composed by bishop Hartvic, because he borrowed St Ambrus's thoughts from his funeral oration over Theodosius the Great. A lot of letters survived from Géza II's sister, Zsófia, sent from Admont, but the actual writer of these letters is not known, though he/she must have been a good stylist, who wrote letters of outstanding quality. Diplomatic correspondence reached high standards in general (e.g.: Béla IV's famous "Tartar"-letter from 1250), concerning its style and rhymed prose. Because of its literary requirements, Lodomer's (Archbishop of Esztergom) letter to Pope Nicholas IV, in which the archbishop lets the Pope know about the undesirable aspects of Ladislaus IV's reign, is an outstanding one.
Historiography
Historiography must also be examined, not only because of the number of the texts preserved, but also because it can compete with hagiography in continuity, popularity and its role to transfer ideas. Its relics can be put into the following categories: history-writing (the summary of knowledge about the past), memoirs and narrative gestas of an entertaining character.
Historiography - following Western patterns - had already started when Hungary became a Christian state. Annuals-type records were regularly kept (after the patterns of western monasteries) in Pannonhalma till the 1060s, which were continued elsewhere. Annuals carried boring, short records of facts; the birth of real historiography can be connected to the appearance of the original gesta, the common ancestor of Hungarian chronicles, in the 11th century.
Although it was continuously cultivated, the peculiarity of Hungarian chronicle writing was that the authors read each other's works, they restructured or combined the text with other texts, they added supplementary information or shortened the original text, sometimes they had a discussion with other writers. The earliest chronicle is from the age of the Angevine dynasty, but the text is a summary of the works of earlier authors. This means that the time when the separate historiographers compiled their works and the quantity of text written by them can only be defined through thorough microphilological examinations.
Basically there are two different views concerning the texts: according to one (which is more likely) the earlier texts - with slight modifications - were more or less preserved in their original form. According to the other view, however, there was an author living at the beginning of the 13th century, who terminologically-stylistically homogenised the text which incorporated all the earlier historiographic writings.
The other question concerning chronicles is when the ancestor of the earliest texts had been born. According to the representatives of one possible explanation, based on certain stylistical and historical observations, the first Hungarian historiographer must have lived around the middle or the second third of the 11th century, so either in the age of Andrew I (in this case the author might be identical with Nicholas [Miklós], Bishop of Veszprém) or King Salamon. Presumably there was a revised version made in King Ladislaus's court, so the history of the Béla-line became the focus of attention. All the experts agree, however, that King Coloman's chronicler rewrote the whole gesta in accordance with his king's interests.
This chronicler put the struggle of Salamon, Andrew I's son, and Béla I's sons in the center of his epic representation. Based on certain signs, it is quite likely, that this author is identical with bishop Koppány from the Rád clan. The larger part of the text that survived is the work entitled "Gesta Ladislai regis" (= The history of King St Ladislaus), but the most changes were also made on this very text, since the different authors tried to answer the political questions of their own age by taking sides in the fight of the princes and Salamon. After it was continued by an author in the age of Stephen II, the historiographer of the Álmos-line rewrote the gesta, as he did not agree with the earlier points of view. In all probability it was he, who presented the personality and reign of Coloman and Stephen II in dark colours in the age of Géza II or Stephen III.
The chroniclers of the 12th century described the events in details till 1152, but after that only a short extract survived from a German version, which is about Stephen III's reign. Following this, authors just completed the work of their predecessors with short comments, or at some points they may have rewritten the story. It is also possible, though, that there were chroniclers during the reign of Béla III and Andrew II, too, but we do not know much in respect of the content of their works. The story was continued at the end of the 13th century, when the body of the text was increased significantly and a general structure was introduced, which is reflected by all the manuscripts to a certain degree.
In the age of Stephen V, Master Ákos from the Ákos clan completed the chronicle with facts based on family traditions and foreign sources. Additional information was given in chapters concerning the history of the family and the age of plundering campaigns; in the case of the latter one he recorded historical sagas and described the privileges and treasures of the Fehérvár and Buda chapters in details. His activity became more intensive during the reign of Stephen V, but in the age of Béla IV it reflected the views of noblemen pushed out of power. With this, the text grew a lot in size, but structural changes were made only by Simon Kézai. With the purpose of expressing his views on the origin of power, he created the theory of Hun-Hungarian kinship, based on an earlier idea (he may have borrowed it from Anonymus), and placed a long Hun chronicle before the Hungarian chronicle, then he added an appendix to the text, describing the origins of social inequalities in it. Following this the work of Master Ákos and Simon Kézai became the textual base of all the later chronicles.
Because of its content, the report about Brother Julianus's travels, written by his monk-colleague, Brother Riccardus, belongs to the category of history of the age. Presumably the author did not know much about stylistic requirements, but this work is a very important source of the history of the 13th century. The most significant work concerning the history of the age is Master Rogerius's Miserable Song, written around 1243-1244. The Italian author described the events of the Tartar Invasion in a very expressive way, offering it to his supporter, Jacob Pecorari. In contrast to the traditions of Hungarian historiography, he chose a special form (letter) and a special method (pragmatism) for his work. His modern thoughts, the form that expressed these perfectly, his style and structure make his work an outstanding one in contemporary literature.
Since he was the source of the history of the age, Anonymus belongs to the category of historical literature as well. Anonymus wanted to make his mysterious friend acquainted with the past of the Hungarians, so he gave a very detailed picture of the Hungarian Conquest. The disputes around his personality have not been settled yet, but it is certain that he was King Béla III's clerk, and he wrote his work at the turn of the 12-13th centuries. Although he used historical written sources, his basic method was that he used place names and his imagination to revive the enemies of Árpád and his people, and with the help of his special geographical knowledge he could populate the Carpathian Basin with various peoples. Sometimes he used old traditions (e.g.: Chieftain Marót leading the Moravian people), but as a basic method, instead of written sources he used spoken sources (he disapproved of it in his prologue to win his readers) and folk etymology to compile his Gesta Hungarorum.
