If Shakespeare had been born on Hungarian soil, he could have written every one of his historical plays and tragedies about the age of Árpád and his descendants who sat on the throne.  Let’s take King Béla I (1060 – 1063), on whom, after three years of rule, the throne collapsed, killing him in his summer palace at Dömös.

After the death of Istvan I, there was a lot of fight for the throne among different Hungarian groups, rulers would come and go until the eighteen‑year reign of (Saint) Laszlo I began in 1077 (-1096).  Him and Kalman the Bookish (1096-1116) ……  are the first 2 Hungarian kings I’d like to mention.  When Laszlo I (also referred to as Ladislas I) began his rule in Hungary, the pope and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry IV were tied down by a war over the right to name church leaders. To Laszlo, the Germans were a more immediate danger than Rome; for this reason, he sided with the pope, though he did not submit to the feudal authority of the papacy in place of the Germans.  Though his character, like Stephen's, hardly met every requirement of a saint in the mirror of undistorted sources, Laszlo I had 5 individuals elevated to sainthood (the first two were that of Polish origin, Andrew and Benedict; the third was Gellert, the tutor of Istvan’s son, Imre, then Imre and finally Istvan himself.  Laszlo I, the creator of saints, was not the only one who then later gained for himself the glory he obtained for others. His daughter, who became empress of Byzantium ‑Piroska was her Hungarian and Irene her Greek name‑ was to become a saint of the Eastern (Greek Catholic) Church.

The laws of Ladislas I, compared with the first recorded laws of Hungary, those of Stephen I, attest simultaneously to continuity and change in Hungarian society. That legal system slowly solidified which was so unfamiliar to the conquerors, who held entirely different views of private ownership or the value of human life.

Laszlo I was a very “athletic”, strong and at the same time elegant man, who was also called elegantissimus rex.  His successor - his nephew -, Kalman (also referred to as Koloman), according to one source, was “disheveled, hirsute, half‑blind, hunchbacked and lame,” and if only half of this is true, it is too much.  He buried himself in books like a bookworm (this is where he received the name Bookish Kalman from), and he further solidified the legal system of Hungary by introducing very strict measures of punishment to protect private property.  According to one of his laws for instance, whoever stole a hen (chicken), one of his/her arms was cut off.

For a long time, the larger animals ‑horses and cattle‑ served as the most valuable resource and even as the standard of value among the Hungarians. The minting of coins instituted at the beginning of (Saint) Istvan I's reign ‑which was so successful that later the money of the first Hungarian kings was "counterfeited" in many places in Europe‑ transformed the economy and gave new meaning to precious metals, widening and magnifying their earlier role in hoarding. Though more than one king later increased his income with the endless deterioration of money values, the role of various monopolies became stronger -commerce in salt and horses, mining, the ownership of customs stations, and income from fish ponds. Two cities, Esztergom and Székesfehérvár, developed, though the royal court still traveled from place to place for a long time, to consume produce gathered in at some sub centers in various parts of the country. The export of horses was the sole state monopoly as regards agricultural products ‑the horse was an important implement of war at this time, too- but the subject of cattle export already turned up in the laws.

By this time, the development of one basis for the envied wealth of medieval Hungary had begun in Transylvania and Upper Hungary: the extensive and highly profitable mining of copper, gold, and silver (and the panning of gold in rivers) which was time and again newly regulated as to ownership and economic rights. Copper did not come to the fore accidentally. At times, our nearly monopolistic position in the production and export of this indispensable metal brought about enormous economic advantages, not only for the nation, the king, and the immediate producers, but even for the miners in their privileged situation.

It was not only the domestic growth that increased the size of the population but also the settlers of high and low ranks apparently streaming into Hungary from every direction, who found relative safety and even‑handed treatment in this tormented country. For example, we know about a quite large Ishmaelite population with their Mohammedan faith who could practice their religion in comparative freedom and were obligated to serve the king only in case of war and even then only against a non‑Mohammedan enemy. Venice and Hungary, though often at war over Dalmatia, concluded an agreement permitting the free movement of each other's merchants. The fact that in Hungary only the king dared collect taxes aroused admiration throughout the world.

By Peter Vali

Source: István Lázár: HUNGARY - A Brief History. Budapest: Corvina, 1993