Today is the feast of St Stephen, the first king of Hungary, crowned on either Christmas day of 1000, or New Year’s Day of 1001; before then, the ruler of the Hungarians had been known as the Grand Prince. He held the throne until his death on the feast of the Assumption in 1038, and was canonized in 1083, together with his son Emeric, and a Venetian monk and missionary named Gerard Sagredo, the first bishop of Csanád, one of the eleven sees which Stephen established in his country. His feast is kept on the general calendar on September 2, the date on which the capital of Hungary, Buda, was liberated from the dominion of the Ottoman Turks in 1686; it is also the date of Emeric’s death in 1031.
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| The Baptism of King Stephen, 1875, by the Hungarian painter Gyula Benczúr (1844-1920). |
The Matins lessons for Stephen state that “he obtained the royal crown from the Roman Pontiff, was anointed as king by his (
i.e. the Pope’s) order, and offered his kingdom to the Apostolic See,” which is to say, placed it under his vassalage. The precise circumstances of this act, and its significance, have been the subject of much debate among historians, and I do not intend to delve into this very complicated matter. But it is worth noting that this event is depicted on the monument of the contemporary Pope, Sylvester II, who reigned from 999-1003. This was set up in the Lateran basilica in 1909, the work of a sculptor named Jószef Damko, at the behest of Vilmos Fraknói, a well-known priest and historian, as a tribute to the Saint who was very much the father of their nation. In the upper part, Stephen and Emeric kneel down before the Virgin and Child, and in the lower part, Stephen receives his crown from the Pope. (
Both images from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko,
CC BY 3.0)
The lower part of the monument is the original inscription from the tomb of Pope Sylvester, the only part which survived after the two fires that devastated the Lateran basilica in the 14th century. This man was born with the name Gerbert, in a town called Aurillac in south central France, about 945 AD. After studying in a nearby Benedictine monastery as a youth, he traveled to Spain, where he learned a variety of subjects then largely unknown to most of the West, but flourishing under the patronage of the Moorish rulers. It was he who reintroduced the general use of the abacus, and he is also said have been the first to use the so-called Arabic numbers, (which were actually invented in India). This gave rise to the foolish idea (repeated by the 12th century English historian William of Malmesbury) that he was a wizard, which in turn gave rise to a popular tradition among the Romans, (not, of course, ever endorsed by the Church), that when a pope is about to die, his bones rattle within the tomb, and the stone of the inscription sweats.
I was in Rome for Holy Week this year, staying not very far from the Lateran. I visited the basilica on Holy Thursday, but didn’t see or hear anything unusual about the monument, nor did I hear any reports to that effect, but it was the Triduum and Easter, and of course people were very busy; Pope Francis died four days later, on Easter Monday. But in 2005, I was at the Escorial in Spain on April 1, and overheard the women who worked in the giftshop repeating a news report from Rome, that the stone had indeed been seen to sweat, and a rattling noise heard coming from behind it, and John Paul II died the next day.
