10

POLICY OF STEPHEN.

more to prove our respect for him and his successors, who will be chosen by the Great of the realm, we grant to him and to those by whom he will be succeeded, our cross as an apostolic sign, and give them power, as our vicegerents, to regulate and dispose of ecclesiastical affairs at present and for the time to come." "1 No sooner did the apostolic crown arrive in Hungary, than Vaik was crowned king, under the name of Stephen. The first care of this king was to continue his ecclesiastical organization, which consisted in the establishment of the archbishopric of Gran, the nomination of other bishops, and the rapid building of churches and cloisters. As an apostolic king, Stephen was the head of the Hungarian church, presiding over the synods, and determining certain ecclesiastical usages.

Of much more importance were his political measures. The whole country was divided into counties, each of them governed by a lord-lieutenant and a sheriff nominated by the crown an arrangement which necessarily overthrew the power formerly enjoyed by the chiefs of the tribes. The office of viceroy was represented by a palatine, who served as the mediator between the king and the people. Stephen instituted also a state-council, consisting of the barons, the high clergy, and the middle class nobility, or milites. These milites, similar to the English yeomanry, enjoyed their privileges in consequence of their military service, from which even the clergy were not exempt. The unprivileged class was called Jobba

1 See Histoire des Revolutions de Hongrie : ou on donne une ideé juste de son legitime gouverenement, avec les Memoires des Prince Rakoczy. A la Haye, MDCCXXXIX., vol. i. p. 5.

RELIGIOUS MEASURES.

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giones, a term applied at a later period to the serfs, though at that time the slaves or serfs were an entirely distinct class. In the assembly of nobles convoked by the king in the year 1010, Hungary received its first written laws, known by the name of the Decrete of St Stephen, and which consisted of civil, ecclesiastical, and criminal statutes. In regard to the latter, it will be enough to mention, that treason was pronounced the first of crimes, and punished with death or banishment. Perjury was sometimes punished with the loss of a hand, or a heavy fine in cattle, a circumstance sufficiently proving the scarcity of money, though coin was struck in the reign of this king.

The measures adopted by Stephen for the general introduction of the Christian religion were marked by extreme tyranny and violence. Laws were enacted to the effect, that every one should forsake his old creed and embrace the Christian religion, and that those who proved refractory should be punished with slavery or banishment. Enraged by this arbitrary power exercised by the propagators of the Christian faith, whose barbarous Latin was unintelligible to their ears, the people continued to cling with tenacious reverence to the old rites, so intimately connected with the memory of their ancestors, and determined to defend their liberty of conscience at the risk of their lives. The spirit of rebellion soon assumed a dangerous shape, and loud murmurs were heard against the monarch, who, besides the assumption of foreign titles and dignities, introduced ignorant foreign monks to tyrannise over the children of those warriors who had. sealed the conquest of Hungary with their own blood. Stephen, allied with the German princes by his marriage with Gisela, Princess of Bavaria, found no diffi

12

DEFEAT OF THE HEATHEN PARTY.

culty in getting foreign mercenaries to fight against his discontented subjects, and the soil of Hungary was for the first time stained with blood shed in the name of religion. The first decisive encounter between the adherents of the old faith and their king took place at Veszprim, where, after a sanguinary battle, the people were defeated. Their leader, Kupa, was taken prisoner, and sentenced by the king to be quartered; the four parts of his body were sent round, as a stimulus to conversion, throughout every part of the country. This atrocious piece of zeal did not hinder the See of Rome from afterwards giving Stephen a place in the catalogue of the saints. The terrible fate of Kupa was, however, insufficient to make the people embrace what they did not understand. In the dead of night, groups met here and there, under the groves and by the side of the rivers, pouring out prayers to the old Isten, chanting hymns to departed heroes, and imploring the wrath of Heaven on a prince whom they could not but regard as the worst of tyrants. It is needless to observe, that the coercive measures of Stephen only served to retard the spread of Christianity in Hungary; and even the next century witnessed some vestiges of the ancient faith. Time, however, may well extenuate the blame attached to the name of a young and inexperienced prince acted upon by subtle and fanatical monks, and the benefits of whose reign far exceeded his sins. The institutions called into life by Stephen survived more than eight hundred years, fraught with every vicissitude of fortune; institutions which, demolished as they now are, are still sufficient in some measure to paralyse the hands of the Austrian Kaiser, despite his courts-martial and his gibbets.

DEATH OF STEPHEN.

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Stephen's reign ended with his death in the year 1038. All the chronicles are loud in the praise of this prince; some extolling the impartiality with which he treated the different races of people, others commending his patronage of learning. "When Stephen ascended to heaven," says the legend, "he was escorted by a host of angels, who filled the air with hymns of joy, glad in the society of their new companion, while the flock he had left on earth was sunk into deep mourning. The high and low, rich and poor, all sat for three years weeping the departure of their king, while the sounds of the fiddle, pipe, and drum were hushed. This sainted king, however," continues the legend, "who lay entombed at Weisenburg, commiserated the grief of his people, and lo! angels were seen hovering over his tomb, filling the air with music, and spreading sweet odours around. After forty-five years, St Stephen was disinterred, and when the marble was taken from his coffin sweet fragrance arose, filling the bystanders with awe and devotion. Carried to the church of St Mary, the coffin was opened, his remains were found to be still fresh, and lying in limpid water. But wonderful it was to see that the saint wanted the right hand, this the Almighty caused to disappear for his own glory; and henceforth this day is every year solemnised by the faithful."

The death of Stephen, without leaving a successor to his crown, gave rise to new internal troubles. His widow Gisela tried to raise her brother Peter to the Hungarian throne, while the majority of the nobles rallied round Aba, or Apa, a prince of the blood of Arpad. The war carried on by these two rivals gave an opportunity for the interference of the German emperor. But the sudden death of both these claim

14

STEPHEN'S SUCCESSORS.

ants put an end to the quarrel; and Andrew I., an Arpadian prince, was crowned king in 1047. The reign of this prince, as well as that of his three immediate successors, Bela I., Solomon, and Geiso I., offers nothing of much importance, except the capture of Belgrade, in 1073. More important was the reign of Ladislaus, afterwards canonized, who was crowned in 1079. This prince marched his troops to Croatia and Dalmatia, which provinces he annexed to the Hungarian crown, and signalized himself in the war against the Cumans, an eastern tribe which had made an inroad upon Hungary. But, though warlike, Ladislaus is better known for his piety and Christian zeal, surpassing in the power of wonder-working even St Stephen himself. In one of his expeditions against the Cumans (we are told) it happened that the invaders were put to flight, and finding themselves sorely pressed by the troops of Ladislaus, tried to check the ardour of the pursuit by throwing all their treasures to the ground. The king perceiving that his men stopped in their course to gather up the strewn riches, turned his eyes up to heaven, and lo! all the treasure was changed into stones. On another occasion, his men ran short of water and provisions, when at St Ladislaus' words springs began to gush forth from the soil, and all kinds of game appeared in abundance in the midst of the camp,-the spear or arrow amply enabling his troops to satisfy their hunger with costly venison. More substantial than these wonders was the convocation of the diet in the year 1092, which consisted not only of barons and bishops, but also of the lower clergy and the so-called populus, or lower nobility. The chief provisions of this diet, known under the name of the decretum of Ladislaus, are pro