Beside St. Elizabeth of Hungary she is the most venerated female saint of the Hungarian Catholic church. She was born in 1242, during the gruesome months of the Mongol invasion. This may well account for her later fate and calling, since her parents, king Béla IV and Mary Lascaris had made an oath even before her birth that, in case a daughter were to be born, they would consecrate her to the Lord, ‘putting her in the charge of saintly virgin nuns’. Thus Margaret was bred and educated first in the convent of St. Catherine in Veszprém, already mentioned in relation to the nun Helen, then, from the age of ten, in the Dominican convent that was founded expressly for her on the Danube isle between Buda and Pest (which today bears her name). The most serious conflict in her short life was brought by her father’s decision to marry her daughter, still a novice, to Ottokar II, king of Bohemia; Margaret, however, stuck to the oath made by her parents and rejected the plans of marriage. Her health and fragile constitution, seriously impaired by her asceticism and self-mortifying practices, eventually gave in and she died in 1270; she was buried in the choir of the abbey. Her tomb, like that of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, became a site of pilgrimage immediately after her death, and yet her beatification wasn’t concluded until 1805, her ecclesiastical canonization following in 1943. The cult of Margaret spread to Italy during the 14th-15th centuries, due to the activity of the Dominican order (Tarczay 1930; Lovas 1939; Klaniczay-Klaniczay 1994).