Hungary was a kingdom for nearly a thousand years, from the year 1000 to 1946. The history of Hungarian nationhood cannot be separated from the institution of monarchy, and more importantly, from a certain crown, which is considered to be the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen, and which itself is the symbol of the Hungarian people, even in the Hungarian republic of today.
Indeed, the Hungarian Holy Crown is far from being an ‘ordinary’ royal crown, whose equivalents in many other European countries changed from century to century, often only due to the whim of the new monarch. The Hungarian crown as an object has a completely different history and role in the life of the nation.
The history of the Hungarian Holy Crown could be turned into a storyline from The Lord of the Rings or The Game of Thrones—except for the dragons and elves. What is certain is that this extraordinary medieval artefact of mysterious origin was of central importance in Hungarian history. It was the trigger of international wars and intrigues within dynasties, and its history was marked by sublime events and twists and turns worthy of adventure novels.
Ancient tradition held that this crown was presented directly to Stephen I, the first King of Hungary, who was later canonised by Pope Sylvester II of Rome in the year 1000 of our Lord. According to the corresponding legends, the crown is the first and original symbol of the Hungarian Kingdom founded by Stephen.
Research in more recent centuries, however, has found that the origins of the Holy Crown of Hungary are more complex—and a lot more colourful. In the 20th century it became generally recognized that the crown was made up of two distinct parts, the Greek crown (Corona Graeca) and the Latin crown (Corona Latina).
The crown is made of gold and features enamel images, and it is decorated with pearls and precious stones. On the top is the distinctive crooked cross—together with it, the crown is the symbol of the Hungarian nation, which can still be seen on the top of Hungary’s traditional historic coat of arms, reintroduced after the fall of communism.
The Greek crown is the lower part: the main part of the hoop, the frontal part, shows Christ as judge of the world (Pantokrator) seated on a throne, with his hand raised in blessing, holding the ‘book of life,’ emphasising the divine origin of the ruler’s power. On the back side, however, is the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas, with the Greek inscription next to him identifying him precisely as “Michael, the Emperor of the Romans, believer in Christ, the Doukas.”
According to some research, this Byzantine crown was given to Géza I, the 7th King of Hungary, by the Byzantine Emperor, after Géza appealed to him for an alliance against, first, the Pope in Rome, who was seeking suzerainty over Hungary, and second, the Holy Roman Emperor. Apparently, the geopolitical turmoil of Europe was not boring in the 11th century either.
The upper part of the Hungarian Holy Crown is the Latin crown, which has a rim featuring additional enamel images of saints installed between sapphires, rubies, amethysts, and pearls.
The distinctive cross at the top of the crown may have been replaced in the 16th century, and some speculate that it was damaged in the 17th century when the iron box of the crown was snapped onto the improperly placed royal item. What is certain is that the cross has been ‘crooked’ for many centuries and has long been represented in the same way—slanting—in the Hungarian coat of arms.
According to some historians, the symbolism of the Holy Crown is twofold: the upper part refers to God’s heavenly kingdom, while the lower part is about the earthly kingdom.
It should be noted that there are theories proposing that the Holy Crown was not made up of two separate parts but was always a single piece—as is the case with so many unique, ancient artefacts, its true origins are shrouded in the mists of history and debated by proponents of different theories. One thing, however, is beyond debate: the crown has been a symbol of the Hungarian nation since the Middle Ages, fought over for centuries by kings and pretenders to the throne of rival dynasties.
The long history of the Holy Crown is full of interesting tales. According to one story, in 1305, Prince Otto of Bavaria, who was a pretender to the Hungarian throne, hid the crown in a big flask, but it fell out one night when he was on a journey, and he only found it again the next evening.
Shortly afterwards, Károly Róbert (Charles Robert) of the French House of Anjou became King of Hungary, but his reign was only recognised under Hungarian customary law when he was crowned with the Holy Crown, which, however, was in the possession of the voivode of Transylvania at the time, and the ceremony could not take place until more than a year later, in 1310. Charles Robert then went down in history as one of the most successful kings of medieval Hungary, the father of the first Visegrád congress in 1335 (together with the kings of Bohemia and Poland).
In 1440, after the death of King Albert Habsburg of Hungary, a lady of the court of the widowed queen stole the crown for the infant King László V, but by then, real power was in the hands of Ulászló I of the Polish House of Jagello, who was first crowned with a replacement crown. The ‘crown conflict’ led to a civil war in the Kingdom of Hungary, from which Ulászló emerged victorious, only to die in 1444 in one of the battles during the war fought against the then rising Ottoman Turks.
A legendary Hungarian king of European significance in the second half of the 15th century was Hunyadi ‘Corvin’ Mátyás (King Matthias Corvinus), who had to wait for years for his ‘official’ coronation with the Holy Crown, as it was then in the possession of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, and Mátyás could only buy it back from him for 80,000 gold florins, so that he could have a legitimate confirmation of his power through coronation with the Holy Crown.
Another decisive turning point in Hungarian history occurred in 1527. After the death of King Louis II of Hungary and most the Hungarian political elite in the lost Battle of Mohács against the Turks, different power circles first gave the Holy Crown to János Szapolyai, a powerful Hungarian lord, and then to Ferdinand of the Habsburg dynasty too—as a result, Hungary had two legally crowned kings.
The result of their decade-and-a-half-long rivalry, which continuously weakened Hungary, was that the Turks, advancing along the Danube, captured the castle of Buda in 1541, and thus made the most important central areas of the Kingdom of Hungary part of the Ottoman Empire for 150 years. The remaining western and northern parts were ruled by the Habsburgs, while in the east, the autonomous principality of Transylvania became the home of the Hungarian princes, a refuge for Hungarian culture and nationhood in the most difficult times.
The 18th century brought calmer times to Hungary, which became part of the Habsburg Empire. Although Joseph II (1780–1790), an ‘enlightened’ absolutist who sought to build a centralized empire, was never crowned with the Holy Crown, other Habsburgs did value the ceremony. After long years of oppression following the anti-Habsburg revolution and war of independence in Hungary, 1848–49, the Hungarian Holy Crown was placed on the head of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1867. This event was part of the commencement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, founded in that year, the traditionalist and multicultural empire of Central Europe for half a century, which ended in the cataclysm of World War I. After the death of the withered Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916, the last Austrian Emperor and Hungarian King Charles IV was crowned with the Holy Crown—a ceremonial event that has survived on film footages. But after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, the symbol of the Hungarian nation has never again been placed on the head of another monarch.
Although Hungary retained the monarchy as its form of government in the years between the two world wars under the regime of governor Miklós Horthy, no King of Hungary was elected in that period. The institution of the ‘Hungarian Kingdom’ even survived the apocalyptic destruction of World War II. It was only a year after the war, in 1946, that a law was passed which declared Hungary a republic, after the country was led for almost a thousand years as a monarchy. The communist regime abolished the historical coat of arms and the symbolic role of the Holy Crown (which was in the possession of the United States from 1945 until the ’70s). After the fall of communism in 1989, one of the first measures taken by the first freely elected democratic government of Hungary, led by the conservative József Antall, was that of restoring the historical coat of arms and crown—a move loudly opposed by left-wing and liberal intellectuals at the time. But this decision was not changed afterwards, and the Hungarian historical coat of arms and the Holy Crown regained their place among the symbols of the country.
Coronation with the Hungarian Holy Crown has remained, until the early twentieth century, one of the last coronation ceremonies in the Western world with its origins in the early Middle Ages. Today, only the British monarch is crowned; the privilege of this ancient ceremony is currently not bestowed on any other Western monarch.
