Esztergom Komarom-Esztergom Hungary
1288 CE
Worlds
The Great Crossroads
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Otto complies, and in 975 Géza and a few of his kinsmen are baptized into the Roman Catholic Church.
Géza consents to baptism more out of political necessity than conviction.
He continues to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods and reportedly brags that he is "rich enough for two gods."
From this time, however, missionaries begin the gradual process of converting and simultaneously westernizing the Magyar tribes.
Géza uses German knights and his position as chief of the Magyars' largest clan to restore strong central authority over the other clans.
Hungary's ties with the West are strengthened in 996 when Géza's son, Stephen, who had been baptized as a child and educated by Saint Adalbert of Prague, marries Gisela, a Bavarian princess and sister of Emperor Henry II.
Stephen (997-1038) becomes chieftain when Géza dies, and he consolidates his rule by ousting rival clan chiefs and confiscating their lands.
Stephen now asks Pope Sylvester II to recognize him as king of Hungary.
The pope agrees, and legend says Stephen was crowned on Christmas Day in the year 1000.
The crowning legitimizes Hungary as a Western kingdom independent of the Holy Roman and East Roman empires.
It also gives Stephen virtually absolute power, which he uses to strengthen the Roman Catholic Church and Hungary.
Stephen orders the people to pay tithes and requires every tenth village to construct a church and support a priest.
Stephen donates land to support bishoprics and monasteries, requires all persons except the clergy to marry, and bars marriages between Christians and pagans.
Foreign monks work as teachers and introduce Western agricultural methods.
A Latin alphabet is devised for the Magyar (Hungarian) language.
Stephen administers his kingdom through a system of counties, each governed by an ispán, or magistrate, appointed by the king.
In Stephen's time, Magyar society has two classes: the freemen nobles and the unfree.
The nobles are descended in the male line from the Magyars who had either migrated into the Pannonian Basin or had received their tide of nobility from the king.
Only nobles can hold office or present grievances to the king.
They pay tithes and owe the crown military service but are exempt from taxes.
The unfree—who have no political voice—are slaves, freed slaves, immigrants, or nobles stripped of their privileges.
Most are serfs who pay taxes to the king and a part of each harvest to their lord for use of his land.
The king has direct control of the unfree, thus checking the nobles' power.
Clan lands, crown lands, and former crown lands make up the realm.
Clan lands belong to nobles, who can will the lands to family members or the church; if a noble dies without an heir, his land reverts to his clan.
Crown lands consist of Stephen's patrimony, lands seized from disloyal nobles, conquered lands, and unoccupied parts of the kingdom.
Former crown lands are properties granted by the king to the church or to individuals.
"A great host of Muslims" arrived in Hungary, according to the Gesta Hungarorum, "from the land of Bular" during the reign of Taksony.
The contemporaneous Abraham ben Jacob also recorded the presence of Muslim merchants from Hungary in Prague in 965.
Anonymous also writes of the arrival of Pechenegs during Taksony's reign; he granted them "a land to dwell in the region of Kemej as far as the Tisza.” The only sign of a Hungarian connection with Western Europe under Taksony is a report by Liutprand of Cremona.
He writes about Zacheus, whom Pope John XII had consecrated bishop and "sent to the Hungarians in order to preach that they should attack" the Germans in 963.
However, there is no evidence that Zacheus ever arrived in Hungary.
The Magyars have meanwhile established pacific, almost friendly relations with the duchy of Bavaria, which they had earlier in the century constantly ravaged and all but depopulated.
New influences, in particular Christianity, have begun to operate on this coalescent new nation of east-central Europe.
Both the Eastern and Western churches strive to draw them, with the other peoples of the region, into their orbits.
Géza, a great-grandson of Árpád, succeeds to the hereditary leadership in 972 and reestablishes the authority of that office over the tribal chiefs; he is the first to consolidate the Magyar tribes north and west of the Danube.
Géza is the son of Taksony of Hungary, Grand Prince of the Hungarians and his Cuman, Pecheneg, or Bulgur wife.
His marriage with Sarolt, the daughter of Gyula of Transylvania, had been arranged by his father.
After his father's death (before 972), Géza had followed him as Grand Prince of the Magyars.
Shortly afterwards, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Sankt Gallen, Bruno, who had been ordained Bishop of the Hungarians, arrived to his court where he baptized Géza. (His father-in-law Gyula, descended from a family whose members held the hereditary title gyula, which was the second in rank among the leaders of the Hungarian tribal federation, had traveled to Constantinople to be baptized; Emperor Constantine VII had lifted him from the baptismal font.)
Although Géza probably never becomes a convinced Christian, during his rule Christianity begins to spread among the Magyars.
According to Thietmar of Merseburg, Géza continued to worship pagan gods; a chronicle claims that when he was questioned about this he stated he is rich enough to sacrifice to both the old gods and the new one.
Taking the decisive step in 973, Géza had sent an embassy to the German emperor Otto II at Quedlinburg (now in Germany), and in 975, Géza and his family are received into the Western church.
Adalbert, traveling to Hungary, baptizes its duke, Géza, together with his son and heir, Vajk, in the city of Esztergom.
The twenty-two-year-old son of the supreme Magyar prince Géza of the Árpád dynasty, originally named Vajk, had been born to Sarolt, daughter of Gyula of Transylvania, a Hungarian nobleman who had been baptized in Greece.
Though Sarolt had been baptized into the Orthodox Christian faith at her father's court in Transylvania by the Greek bishop Hierotheos, she had not persisted in the religion.
According to his legends, Vajk had been baptized a Christian by Adalbert of Prague and given the baptismal name Stephen (István) in honor of the original early Christian Saint Stephen.
When Stephen reached adolescence, Great Prince Géza had convened an assembly in which it was decided that Stephen would follow his father as the monarch of the Hungarians.
This decision, however, had contradicted the Magyar tribal custom that gave the right of succession to the eldest close relative of the deceased ruler.
Stephen had married Giselle of Bavaria, the daughter of Henry II, called the Wrangler or the Quarrelsome, in or after 995.
By this marriage, he has become the brother-in-law of the future Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor.
Giselle had arrived to her husband's court accompanied by German knights.
At the death of Géza in 997, a succession struggle ensues.
Stephen claims to rule the Magyars by the principle of Christian divine right, while his uncle Koppány, a powerful pagan chieftain in Somogy, claims the traditional right of seniority, standing for the old tribal values and pagan religion of the ancient Magyars.
Otto I's defeat of the Hungarians at Lechfeld in 955 had ended the centuries-long Hungarian invasions of Europe.
The Hungarian Grand Price Fajsz had been deposed following the defeat and succeeded by Taksony, who had adopted a policy of isolation from the West.
He had been succeeded by his son Géza in 972, who sent envoys to Otto I in 973.
The same year, Géza had been baptized in 972, and Christianity had subsequently spread among the Hungarians during his reign.
Géza had expanded his rule over the territories west of the Danube and the Garam, but significant parts of the Carpathian Basin still remained under the rule of local tribal leaders.
In 997, Géza died and was succeeded by Stephen, originally called Vajk, who had been baptized by Bishop Adalbert of Prague and married Gisela, daughter of the future Holy Roman Emperor Henry II and distant niece of Otto III.
Stephen had had to face the rebellion of his relative, Koppány, who claimed Géza's inheritance based on the Hungarian tradition of agnatic seniority, and had been able to defeat his rival with assistance from the Empire.
Stephen administers his realm through counts (ispáns) placed in charge of counties (comitatus, megye).
He also suppresses the Eastern Rite Christianity heretofore popular among the Magyar tribes and Slavs living among them, and welcomes Roman churchmen to Hungary.
When Otto III travels to Poland in 1000, he brings with him a crown from Pope Sylvester II.
With Otto III's approval, Stephen is crowned on Christmas Day, 1000, as the first Christian king of Hungary.
Stephen of Hungary, in alliance with the Eastern Emperor Basil II, leads his armies against Bulgaria in 1018, and collects several relics during his campaign.
Hungarian forces had invaded Bohemia in 1040 to assist Duke Bretislav I against Holy Roman Emperor Henry III.
Hungarian chronicles recount that Peter preferred the company of Germans and Italians, which had made him unpopular among his subjects.
He has introduced new taxes, seized Church revenue and deposed two bishops.