and primitive. The court itself was perambulatory. In summer the king dispensed justice in the open air, under a large tree. Only in the short winter months did he dwell in the house built for him at Esztergom by his Italian architects. The most valuable part of his property still consisted of flocks and herds, or the products of the labours of his serfs, a large proportion of whom were bee-keepers, hunters and fishers employed in and around the interminable virgin-forests of the rough-hewn young monarchy.
A troubled forty years (1038–1077) divides the age of St Stephen from the age of St Ladislaus. Of the six kings who reigned in Hungary during that period three died violent deaths, and the other three were fighting incessantly against foreign and domestic foes. In 1046, and again in 1061, two dangerous pagan risings shook the very foundations of the infant church and state; the western provinces were in constant danger from the attacks of the acquisitive emperors, and from the south and south-east two separate hordes of fierce barbarians (the Petchenegs in 1067–1068, and the Kumanians in 1071–1072) burst over the land. It was the general opinion abroad that the Magyars would either relapse into heathendom, or become the vassals of the Holy Roman Empire, and this opinion was reflected in the increasingly hostile attitude of the popes towards the Árpád kings. The political independence of Hungary was ultimately secured by the outbreak of the quarrel about investiture (1076), when Geza I. Geza I. (1074–1077) shrewdly applied to Pope Gregory VII. for assistance, and submitted to accept his kingdom from him as a fief of the Holy See. The immediate result of the papal alliance was to enable Hungary, under both Ladislaus and his capable successor Coloman [Kálmán] (1095–1116), to hold her own against all her enemies, and extend her dominion abroad by conquering Croatia and a portion of the Dalmatian coast. As an incipient great power, she was beginning to feel the need of a seaboard.
In the internal administration both Ladislaus I. and Coloman approved themselves worthy followers of St Stephen. Ladislaus planted large Petcheneg colonies in Transylvania and the trans-Dravian provinces, and established military cordons along the constantly threatened south-eastern Ladislaus I. and Coloman. boundary, the germs of the future banates[1] (bánságok) which were to play such an important part in the national defence in the following century. Law and order were enforced with the utmost rigour. In that rough age crimes of violence predominated, and the king’s justiciars regularly perambulated the land in search of offenders, and decimated every village which refused to surrender fugitive criminals. On the other hand, both the Jews and the “Ishmaelites” (Mahommedans) enjoyed complete civil and religious liberty in Hungary, where, indeed, they were too valuable to be persecuted. The Ishmaelites, the financial experts of the day, were the official mint-masters, treasurers and bankers. The clergy, the only other educated class, supplied the king with his lawyers, secretaries and ambassadors. The Magyar clergy was still a married clergy, and their connubial privileges were solemnly confirmed by the synod of Szabolcs, presided over by the king, in 1092. So firmly rooted in the land was this practice, that Coloman, much as he needed the assistance of the Holy See in his foreign policy, was only with the utmost difficulty induced, in 1106, to bring the Hungarian church into line with the rest of the Catholic world by enforcing clerical celibacy. Coloman was especially remarkable as an administrative reformer, and Hungary, during his reign, is said to have been the best-governed state in Europe. He regulated and simplified the whole system of taxation, encouraged agriculture by differential duties in favour of the farmers, and promoted trade by a systematic improvement of the ways of communication. The Magna via Colomanni Regis was in use for centuries after his death. Another important reform was the law permitting the free disposal of landed estate, which gave the holders an increased interest in their property, and an inducement to improve it. During the reign of Coloman, moreover, the number of freemen was increased by the frequent manumission of serfs. The lot of the slaves was also somewhat ameliorated by the law forbidding their exportation.
Throughout the greater part of the 12th century the chief impediment in the way of the external development of the Hungarian monarchy was the Eastern Empire, which, under the first three princes of the Comnenian dynasty, dominated south-eastern Europe. During the earlier Rivalry with the Eastern Empire. part of that period the Magyars competed on fairly equal terms with their imperial rivals for the possession of Dalmatia, Rascia (the original home of the Servians, situated between Bosnia, Dalmatia and Albania) and Ráma or northern Bosnia (acquired by Hungary in 1135); but on the accession of Manuel Comnenus in 1143 the struggle became acute. As the grandson of St Ladislaus, Manuel had Hungarian blood in his veins; his court was the ready and constant refuge of the numerous Magyar malcontents, and he aimed not so much at the conquest as at the suzerainty of Hungary, by placing one of his Magyar kinsmen on the throne of St Stephen. He successfully supported the claims of no fewer than three pretenders to the Magyar throne, and finally made Béla III. (1173–1196) king of Hungary, on condition that he left him, Manuel, a free hand in Dalmatia. The intervention of the Greek emperors had important consequences for Hungary. Politically it increased the power of the nobility at the expense of the crown, every competing pretender naturally endeavouring to win adherents by distributing largesse in the shape of crown-lands. Ecclesiastically it weakened the influence of the Catholic Church in Hungary, the Greek Orthodox Church, which permitted a married clergy and did not impose the detested tithe (the principal cause of nearly every pagan revolt) attracting thousands of adherents even among the higher clergy. At one time, indeed, a Magyar archbishop and four or five bishops openly joined the Orthodox communion and willingly crowned Manuel’s nominees despite the anathemas of their Catholic brethren.
The Eastern Empire ceased to be formidable on the death of Manuel (1080), and Hungary was free once more to pursue a policy of aggrandizement. In Dalmatia the Venetians were too strong for her; but she helped materially to break up the Byzantine rule in the Balkan peninsula by assisting Béla III. Stephen Nemanya to establish an independent Servian kingdom, originally under nominal Hungarian suzerainty. Béla endeavoured to strengthen his own monarchy by introducing the hereditary principle, crowning his infant son Emerich, as his successor during his own lifetime, a practice followed by most of the later Árpáds; he also held a brilliant court on the Byzantine model, and replenished the treasury by his wise economies.
Unfortunately the fruits of his diligence and foresight were dissipated by the follies of his two immediate successors, Emerich (1196–1204) and Andrew II. (q.v.), who weakened the royal power in attempting to win support by lavish grants of the crown domains on the already over-influential Andrew II. magnates, a policy from which dates the supremacy of the semi-savage Magyar oligarchs, that insolent and self-seeking class which would obey no superior and trampled ruthlessly on every inferior. The most conspicuous event of Andrew’s reign was the promulgation in 1222 of the so-called Golden Bull, which has aptly been called the Magna Carta of Hungary, and is in some of its provisions strikingly reminiscent of that signed seven years previously by the English king John.
The Golden Bull has been described as consecrating the humiliation of the crown by the great barons, whose usurpations it legalized; the more usually accepted view, however, is that it was directed not so much to weakening as to strengthening the crown by uniting its interests with those of the mass of the Magyar nobility, equally threatened by the encroachments of the great barons.[2] The preamble, indeed, speaks of the curtailment of the liberties of the nobles by the power of certain of the kings, and at the end the right of armed resistance to any attempt to infringe the charter is conceded to “the bishops and the higher and lower nobles” of the realm; but, for the rest, its contents clearly show that it was intended to strengthen the monarchy by ensuring “that the momentary folly
