A Life, for his feast on the second day of September — III classis
Os iusti meditabitur sapientiam, et lingua eius loquetur iudicium: lex Dei eius in corde ipsius. “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart.” — Introit of the Mass, from Psalm 36:30-31
I. A prince born between two worlds
He was born about the year 975 at Esztergom on the Danube, and the name given him at birth was not Stephen but Vajk, a Magyar name, pagan in sound and in meaning. His father was Géza, Grand Prince of the Hungarians, great-grandson of Árpád who had led the seven tribes over the Carpathians eighty years before; his mother was Sarolt, daughter of the gyula of Transylvania, a woman baptized in the Greek rite and, by the account of a German bishop who did not like her, more given to horse and wine than to prayer.
The Magyars into whom he was born were the terror of the previous century. For sixty years they had ridden out of the Danube plain and burned their way as far as Bremen, Burgundy and the gates of Constantinople, until Otto the Great broke them at the Lechfeld in 955. Géza understood what that defeat meant. A people that could no longer live by plunder must either be absorbed by its Christian neighbours or become their equal, and the road to equality ran through the font. He asked the Emperor for missionaries, was baptized about 972, built a monastery at Pannonhalma, and continued, as the chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg reports, to sacrifice to the old gods as well, saying that he was rich enough to afford two.
The son would not be rich enough to afford two. That is the difference between them, and it is the whole of the story.
II. The waters of baptism
The boy was baptized in his father’s court and given the name of the protomartyr — Stephen, Stephanus, the crowned one, a name which the events of his life would turn into a prophecy. The tradition of the Hungarian Church, set down in the Legend of Bishop Hartvik about the year 1100, gives the honour of his baptism and instruction to St. Adalbert of Prague, the martyr-bishop of the Bohemians, who spent time in Géza’s court in the 990s on his way to the Prussians and to his own death. Modern historians hold the point open; that Adalbert was in Hungary and that Stephen venerated him all his life is certain, and it is enough.
What is beyond dispute is that the boy was brought up a Christian from the beginning and never knew himself as anything else. He was taught his letters, which was rare for a prince of the steppe; he learned Latin; he was formed by Benedictines and by the clergy who came from the Empire and from Italy. About the year 996 his father married him to Gisela, daughter of Duke Henry of Bavaria and sister of the future Emperor St. Henry II — so that a saint’s sister came to be the wife of a saint, and a saint’s brother-in-law the founder of a Christian kingdom. With Gisela came knights, priests, and craftsmen from Bavaria, and the shape of the Latin West came with them.
III. Koppány, and the first battle
Géza died in 997, and the old law of the steppe rose up at once to contest the new. By Magyar custom the succession passed not to the son but to the eldest of the kin, and the eldest of the kin was Koppány, lord of Somogy, a pagan, who claimed the widow Sarolt in marriage and the principality with her. Stephen was twenty-two.
He met Koppány near Veszprém with his Bavarian knights and the Magyar chieftains who had chosen Christ, and before the battle he made a vow to St. Martin of Tours — a Pannonian by birth, and the patron of the abbey his father had founded — that if he conquered he would give the abbey the tithes of Somogy. He conquered. Koppány fell in the field, and by the harsh custom of the time his body was quartered and the four parts nailed to the gates of Esztergom, Győr, Veszprém, and the fortress of the Transylvanian gyula, as a warning. Stephen kept his vow, and the charter of Pannonhalma is among the oldest documents of the Hungarian kingdom.
It should be said plainly that Stephen was a war-leader in an age that knew no other kind of king, and that the Christian order he built was built with the sword as well as the cross. The Church has never pretended otherwise. What she canonized was not the absence of the sword but the direction in which it was pointed, and the man who held it.
IV. The Crown
Then, in the last year of the millennium, he did the thing that made him something new in the world. He sent Astrik, abbot of Pécsvárad, to Rome, to ask the Pope for a crown.
The point of the embassy was precise. Otto III sat at Aachen dreaming of a renewed Roman empire; the Emperor at Constantinople had his own designs on the Danube; and a Hungarian prince who received his crown from either would receive with it a master. Stephen asked it instead of Sylvester II — Gerbert of Aurillac, the most learned man in Europe — and Sylvester sent it, together with an apostolic blessing and, the tradition says, a cross to be borne before the king in sign of his apostolic labour among his people. On Christmas Day of the year 1000, or by another reckoning on the first day of 1001, Stephen was anointed and crowned at Esztergom.
The crown that is venerated today as the Holy Crown of Hungary is not, as it stands, the object Sylvester sent; it is a composite of later work, and the historians have done what they can with it. But the kingdom that received it is the same, and the thing signified is the same: a nation admitted, by the successor of Peter, into the family of Christian peoples as a free kingdom under no emperor but Christ. Hungary was the first realm east of the Empire to be constituted so. And the title which later ages gave her kings, Rex Apostolicus, formally granted by Clement XIII in 1758, was an acknowledgment of a fact that the Church had already been celebrating for seven centuries: that this king had been, to his own people, what the Apostles were to theirs.
V. Building the Church
He set about building the Church of Hungary the way a founder builds an order — from the foundation, all at once, and to last.
He established the archbishopric of Esztergom as the primatial see, with Kalocsa beside it, and under them, by the constant tradition, ten bishoprics — Veszprém, Győr, Pécs, Eger, Vác, Csanád, Transylvania, Bihar, and the rest — so that the whole kingdom was laid out as a map of dioceses before most of the churches existed. He then made the churches exist. His second book of laws commands that every ten villages together build a church and endow it with two houses, two servants, a horse and a mare, six oxen, two cows and thirty small beasts; the king would furnish the vestments and altar-cloths, and the bishop the priest and the books. It is the whole apparatus of a Christian country, legislated into being in a single paragraph.
He completed Pannonhalma and founded Benedictine houses at Pécsvárad, Zalavár, Bakonybél and Zobor; he built the great basilica of Székesfehérvár in honour of Our Lady, which was to be the coronation church and burial place of his house; he founded hospices for pilgrims at Rome, at Ravenna, at Constantinople and at Jerusalem, and opened through his kingdom the overland road to the Holy Land which the whole of the West then began to use. He gathered around him men who would be saints — Adalbert, and St. Gerard Sagredo of Venice, who came through Hungary bound for Jerusalem and was kept by the king to tutor his son and to be bishop of Csanád, and who was martyred by the pagan reaction eight years after Stephen’s death, hurled from the hill at Buda that still bears his name.
Above all he taught. The pagan Magyar was told, by the law of the land, that he must attend Mass on Sunday, and what would happen to him if he did not; that he must confess before death; that he must keep the fasts; that the man who muttered in church during the sermon would be shorn and expelled. This is not the modern manner. It was the manner by which every Christian nation in Europe was made, and it produced, within a generation, a people whose Christianity has outlasted the Turk, the Habsburg, and the Soviet.
VI. The king as lawgiver: the Admonitions
Stephen was a legislator, and his two books of Decreta are the beginning of Hungarian law. But the document by which his mind is best known is a smaller one: the Libellus de institutione morum, the Admonitions, addressed to his son Emeric as a mirror of princes. Whether the king dictated it or a cleric of his court composed it in his name, the scholars argue; that it says what Stephen thought, no one who has read the rest of his acts can doubt.
It is in ten chapters, and its order is its teaching. The first duty of a king is to keep the Catholic faith, for “the man of faith is he who through Christ’s grace sees that all things are so”; the second, to defend and honour the Church, which “is first planted and propagated in our kingdom”; the third, to reverence bishops; the fourth, to esteem the nobility; the fifth, to do justice with patience. Then follows the chapter that has given the Admonitions their fame in later ages, on the reception of strangers: “As the guests come from various lands and provinces, they bring with them various languages and customs, various instructive things and arms, all of which adorn the royal court and enhance its splendour… for a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile.” He goes on: to prayer, to piety and mercy, to the imitation of his forefathers — and ends with the exhortation that the whole is a sum of virtues, without which no man reigns here or is crowned hereafter.
It is the programme of a Christian prince who wished to be judged, and it was written for a son who would never reign.
VII. The wars of the kingdom
He fought throughout his reign, and always with the same purpose: that the kingdom should be one, and Christian, and its own. In 1003 he subdued his mother’s brother, the gyula of Transylvania, who had refused baptism. He broke Ajtony, the half-Greek lord of the Maros, and gave his territory to Gerard as the diocese of Csanád. He supported his brother-in-law Henry against the Poles, and when Henry died and Conrad II in 1030 turned the imperial armies against Hungary, Stephen fell back before them, stripped the land, let the Germans starve on the march, and then fell upon them as they retreated, so that Conrad lost Vienna and sued for peace. It was the last German attempt in his lifetime to make Hungary a province, and it failed.
The Bavarian knights who had won Veszprém for him were now Hungarian lords; the Magyar chieftains who had stood with him were now counts of the royal counties; and the boy Vajk who had been born on the wrong side of the Lechfeld was the equal of the Emperor.
VIII. Descendit cum illo in foveam: the death of Emeric
He had children, and they died. Of his sons only Emeric lived to manhood — Emeric whom Gerard had formed, who had taken a vow of virginity within his marriage, and who was, by every witness, the one thing his father loved above the kingdom. In September of 1031, a few weeks before he was to be crowned as his father’s colleague, Emeric was killed by a boar while hunting. He was about twenty-four.
Stephen was fifty-six and had been sick for years. The Legend says that he wept “as though his heart were pierced with a sword,” and then lifted his hands and gave thanks that God had taken the son before the father, so that the father should not have to fear for the son. That is the language of hagiography, and it may be that the mourning was less composed than the Legend makes it. But the works of the last seven years are the works of a man who had chosen resignation rather than despair, and who bent all that remained of his strength to a single question: how the kingdom should pass to a Christian.
The question broke him, or nearly. The nearest heir was his cousin Vazul, who was a pagan, or half one; and Vazul was seized, blinded, and had molten lead poured into his ears, and his sons were sent into exile. The Hungarian chronicle tradition lays the deed at the door of Queen Gisela and her courtiers, acting without the king’s knowledge or against his will; the chroniclers of Vazul’s own descendants, who came to the throne within a generation, had every motive to spare the founder and blame the foreign queen, and modern historians differ. The Church does not require us to settle it. It requires us to remember that a saint reigned in a dark age, that his hands were not certainly clean of this, and that the sanctity the Church discerned in him was a heroic constancy in faith and justice through a lifetime, not a claim that no wrong was ever done in his name. Stephen named as his successor his sister’s son, Peter Orseolo of Venice, a Christian; and Peter proved unworthy; and within a decade of the founder’s death the kingdom was in the blood of a pagan revolt, and Gerard was a martyr. The house of Vazul restored it, and canonized the man who had blinded him.
IX. The Offering
He died on the fifteenth of August, 1038 — the feast of the Assumption, which he had established as the chief feast of his kingdom — at Székesfehérvár, in the sixty-third year of his age and the thirty-eighth of his reign.
The tradition of the Hungarian Church, set down by Hartvik and never since forgotten, is that on his deathbed, with the bishops and magnates about him, he lifted his eyes and his hands to heaven and commended the Church and the kingdom of Hungary to the perpetual guardianship of the Mother of God — Regina caeli, redemptrix mundi inclita, tuo patrocinio sanctam Ecclesiam cum episcopis et clero, regnum cum primatibus et populo supremis precibus committo. From that act Hungary has called itself Regnum Marianum, the Kingdom of Mary, for nine hundred years; and the Church, admitting the form of the account to be the Legend‘s, has admitted the substance by placing his feast within the octave of the Assumption in his own land and by every subsequent word she has spoken about him.
He was buried in the basilica he had built, beside his son.
X. The Holy Right Hand, and the crown of glory
Forty-five years after his death, on the twentieth of August, 1083, his body was raised from the tomb at Székesfehérvár in the presence of King St. Ladislaus and the bishops of the realm, and he was enrolled among the saints together with his son Emeric and his bishop Gerard, by the authority of Gregory VII, who had encouraged the elevation. It was among the earliest solemn canonizations of a king in the history of the Latin Church, and it was the moment at which the Hungarians, a pagan people within living memory, gave the Church a dynasty of saints.
When the tomb was opened the right hand was found incorrupt. It is preserved and venerated as the Szent Jobb, the Holy Right Hand, and is carried in procession through Budapest every twentieth of August, as it was carried before the Turks came and after they went, and again after 1989 when the regime that had forbidden it was gone.
His feast was for centuries kept in Hungary on the day of that elevation. In 1686, after the recapture of Buda from the Turks on the second of September, Innocent XI extended the feast of St. Stephen to the universal Church and fixed it on that day, in thanksgiving; and so it stands in the traditional Roman calendar, on the second of September, with the Mass Os iusti of the Common of a Confessor and a proper Collect. The reformed calendar transfers it to the sixteenth of August, the day after his death.
XI. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That a whole people can be converted, and that it is done by a man who will not keep two religions. Géza kept two and founded nothing that lasted. Stephen kept one, legislated it into the bones of his country, and built a Church that has outlived every state that has tried to abolish it. The Mass calls him propagator, the one who spread the faith; the word is exact.
That kingship is a vocation of service, and is judged as one. The Admonitions do not describe a king who is above the law of Christ but a king who is more strictly bound by it, because more is given him. The Gospel of his Mass says that the faithful servant is the one whom the master, coming, shall find so doing — not waiting to be found, but working. He was found so.
That the just man’s sorrows are not the sign of God’s absence. He lost his sons, his heir, and very nearly his succession; he died with his life’s work in doubt, and within ten years it seemed to have failed. The Church raised him to the altars alongside the son he had buried, and the kingdom he committed to Our Lady is still hers. Wisdom went down with him into the pit, as she did with Joseph in the Book of Wisdom; and she brought him up, as she does, in her own time.
Practice
Examine. Is there a place in your life where you are trying to keep two religions — to be Christ’s, and also to keep on terms with something that cannot be His? Géza’s bargain is always available. It always fails.
Do. Stephen’s law required a church for every ten villages. Ask what, in your own small jurisdiction — a family, a household, a desk — you are responsible for building so that the faith may be kept there after you. Then lay one stone of it this week.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Concede, quaesumus, Ecclesiae tuae, omnipotens Deus: ut beatum Stephanum Confessorem tuum, quem regnantem in terris propagatorem habuit, propugnatorem habere mereatur gloriosum in caelis. Per Dominum nostrum.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, to Thy Church, that as she had blessed Stephen Thy Confessor for the spreading of the faith while he reigned on earth, so she may deserve to have him for her glorious defender in heaven. Through our Lord.”
Devote. The Glorious Mysteries, with attention to the Assumption and the Coronation of Our Lady, on whose feast he died and to whom he gave his kingdom; or, for those who bear the loss of a child, the Fourth Sorrowful Mystery, and the Salve Regina said slowly.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the royal confessors — Henry the Emperor, Louis of France, Edward of England, Wenceslaus, Olaf and Edmund — and with St. Emeric and St. Gerard of Csanád, whose stories are the completion of this one. The Church History path treats the conversion of the peoples of central Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the meaning of a crown sent from Rome.
Sancte Stephane, Rex et Confessor, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Legenda maior and Legenda minor of St. Stephen and the Legenda of Bishop Hartvik (SRH II); Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon*, viii; the* Decreta and the Libellus de institutione morum (Admonitions) attributed to St. Stephen; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Stephen of Hungary”; the Roman Martyrology; and the standard modern histories of the Árpád kingdom. Contested points of chronology and attribution are noted in the text.