Royal Justice and Lawgiving in the Early Legends of St. Stephen of Hungary

Abstract

The medieval legend of St. Stephen I of Hungary was constructed in three saint’s lives composed between the mid-eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Central to Stephen’s persona as a founder-king and royal saint was his association with justice and lawgiving, themes that touch more broadly on the establishment of the Hungarian kingdom, the conversion of the Magyars to Latin Christianity, and the representation of these processes in historical writing. This article analyzes the ideals of royal justice and lawgiving as embodied by St. Stephen in his early legends to demonstrate how flexible ideals of royal ideology could be within narrative contexts, and how important this conceptual flexibility was for the project of writing Hungary’s early history. Each legenda develops a markedly different understanding of what an idealized standard of royal justice should look like. The early Legenda maior presents an optimistic and comprehensive royal program of institution-building, while the later Legenda minor is suffused with anxiety about religious and moral backsliding, for which it prescribes a harshly punitive standard of juridical violence. Finally, the Legenda sancti Stephani, produced around the turn of the twelfth century by a Bishop Hartvic, carefully synthesizes and modulates the portrayals of royal justice found in the earlier texts to establish Stephen, rex iustus, as Hungary’s apostolic king and the founder of its independent regnal traditions. These texts reflect how, in mythopoietic historical writing, justice and lawgiving functioned narratively to inscribe the licit boundaries of social and religious behavior. The article shows how each successive interrogation of these boundaries and the responsibility of the king to impose and police them responded to the circumstances of the kingdom of Hungary’s turbulent first century. The turn of the twelfth century thus emerges as a critical moment for the establishment of Hungary’s politico-historical traditions, at the vanguard of which stood St. Stephen, rex iustus.