#holycrown

Though it is now known as the crown of Saint Stephen, the crown of the Hungarian monarchy has had a long life as a secular object. Its origins are hotly contested, but it is popularly believed in Hungary that it was in fact worn and commissioned by King Stephen I, crowned the first king of Hungary on 25 Dec 1000 or 1 Jan 1001. Tying the secular together with the sacred, the story goes on to tell how King Stephen held up the crown during the coronation, to offer it to the Virgin Mary, and seal a divine contract between her and the Hungarian monarchy. However, tradition and science don’t always match up.

Though it is highly possible that parts of the crown did in fact belong to the crown worn by King Stephen, it is now generally believed that it dates between the late 11th to the late 12th century in its entirety. Done in a style popular in the Byzantine Empire at the time, the crown is a gold circlet inset with 19 Byzantine produced enamel plaques, illustrating Christ and some of the saints (de Bàràny-Oberschall 121). Large jewels and pearls are intermingled with these plaques, and dangling chains house garnets at their tip, clustered in groups of three. At the top of the arched central piece of the crown is a simple gold cross, bent to one side, knocked crooked in the 17th century when the crown was damaged, possibly by the top of the iron chest used to house the crown being hastily closed without the checking that it was fully inside. The cross has since been left in this crooked position, and is now always depicted as such.

The original cross is believed to have been a double armed one, containing pieces of the True Cross. In her book, Die Ungarischen Krönungsingien, Eva Kovács states that:

“Szabolcs Vajay, called to my attention a strange incident in the crown’s history which had completely escaped everybody’s attention. Before Queen Isabella handed over the regalia to Ferdinand in 1551, she broke the cross off the crown’s peak for her son, John Sigismund. According to a contemporary Polish chronicler, John Sigismund wore this cross on his chest till the end of his life, ‘...because he who possess this cross will again come into possession of the missing parts which, subjected to the power of the cross, had belonged to it’” (Kovács 61).

This would seem to indicate that the “holy” aspect of the crown came from the original cross, making it in fact a reliquary in itself. The removal of the cross reduced it to secular status, a symbol of a noble monarchy with saintly origins. After John Sigismund’s death at a young age, the cross passed into the hands of other nobility, and likely still exists to this day, though its whereabouts are unknown.