The hagiography of early Hungarian saints, as I have already mentioned, constitutes an organic part of European legend literature, especially since these legends blend the marks and features of more peoples, countries, religious confessions, with the early Christian and Western European influence determining. Nevertheless, the orthodox Byzantine, south-eastern European cultural-religious influence is met here at its strongest among all Central-European peoples (cf. the legendary tradition of the secret adherence to orthodoxy of kings St. Stephen and St. Ladislas, virtually the whole legend cycle of Piroska-Eiréné, the stylite motif in the Ladislas legendry).

The legendry of St. Elizabeth of Hungary came into being almost entirely on German soil, in Thuringia, the Hungarian and Italian traditions having only added in variety and colour. Similarly, the legend of St. Elizabeth of Töss was created in the Swiss borderland belonging to the German-speaking world. The St. Kinga cycle, notwithstanding its many Hungarian references, must be considered essentially Polish, while the St. Margaret cycle was completed with new hagiographic motifs in Italy during the 14th-15th centuries. This argument also applies to the ’protagonists’ themselves, two of the twelve saints discussed here not being Hungarian-born (hermit Andrew-Zoerard, as recorded in his biography, came to Hungary from Poland, whereas bishop St. Gerald was born in Venice as son of a wealthy patrician family).

Nevertheless, a close analysis of the types, families of types and motifs that occur in the legends reveals that the international European traits are somewhat overshadowed by what cannot, however, be unequivocally interpreted as specifically Hungarian cultural traits. What we can find here is a species of Central European hagiographical amalgam of traditions of which the Hungarian cult of saints and its cultural appendices are only a part, although, as we shall argue, a central and determining one.

It may be instrumental to draw attention to a recently published work whose theme is related to ours. The motif-index of early Irish saints by Dorothy Ann Bray (Bray 1992) analyses and sums up the legends of Irish saints. The historical circumstances and cultural context that generated these legends are in many respects akin to the historical, cultural contexts which produced the legends of Hungarian saints. From the geographical perspective we are on the other (Western) extreme of Europe and, although the period analysed by Bray pre-dates the age of the Arpadians by several centuries, both are periods of intense Christianization (Deér 1938; McCone 1990). However, only 18% of Bray’s motif-index can be traced in the legends of Hungarian saints: from the 337 sub-types discussed by her, only 64 sub-types are found in the Hungarian material (Bray 1992:88-112). As regards the historical folk legend tradition, today it is widely accepted by folklorists that within the European tradition of folk legends there is a Central European and South-eastern European folklore tradition, sovereign in many respects, which yet displays a multitude of international, cross-culture traits. It is the task of current comparative research to highlight, through a survey of Polish, Bohemian, Croatian, Serbian, Austrian and Bavarian hagiographic texts and cult of saints, to what extent this regional specificity applies, if it applies at all, to the religious narratives of Central Eropean peoples (cf. research begun by Klaniczay 1991/91, 2000, 2002).

I have systematized the hagiographic elements of the legends around the principal thematic units. These thematic units focus on the passive traits of the saints (physical and spiritual), their active functions performed in the course of their lives and formulated in the process of sanctification (helping, conversion, punishing, penitence), demonstrative episodes revealed as the signs of holiness (miracles), the tradition cycle of the deceased saint, together with several less important thematic units (e.g. angels, animals). The textual folklore (eminently, the legends) is only effectively revealed on the level of types and motifs and, whereas the motifs are predominantly international in character and appearance, the types (as junctures of motifs) can assume a local, national hue. In the Hungarian textual folklore this aesthetic stratum is distinctively national, which does certainly not preclude the fact that cross-culture types are frequently found in the legends. One may here cite the ’Dragon Slayer’ (AaTh 300) and ’the Ring of Polykrates’ (AaTh 736A; Thompson: Mot. N 211.1) types of narratives, or the legend types centred on immortal and returning heroes (Mot. A 571, Mot. D 836, Mot. N 810.5). Beside the links with folk tales there are other cross-genre connections, too. The historical legend as a subspecies of folk legend has multiple connections, through the thematic cycle of the hero, with heroic poetry in the Hungarian material, too (de Vries 1963): the earliest stratum of the St. Ladislas legend cycle, for instance, can be traced back to verse lays (Vargyas 1960; Vargyas 1980; Demény 1999; Demény 2002).

A distinct stratum of the discussed vitas is made up of those events following the saint’s death which narrate the miracles that occurred in recognition of the saint’s merits. The legends of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and of St. Margaret especially show a considerable number of such stories, but except for the figure of the hermit Benedict there are such miracle episodes connected to virtually all Hungarian saints. The problems of those who turn to the saints for aid (lack = lack of health) + the effort to solve the problems (mediation, the episode of joining in = the pledge, visiting the saint’s tomb) + the disappearance of the problem (the ceasing of the trouble or lack = healing due to the saint’s merits) is the morphological scheme of these miraculous events (Propp 1958, 1968., its mark: a + B + L). Although quantitatively these narratives predominate, they are only indirectly part of the vitas: as demonstrated through the survey of the list of sources, they are stepping-stones in the informative process of canonization, records of the hearings of witnesses, testimonies of contemporaries and witnesses, inventories of miracles scrupulously registering every detail of the events that occurred at the saint’s tomb. They are, for the most part, narratives of miraculous healings whose semantic model and structural framework can be drawn as follows:

In the period we have in view (the 11th-16th centuries) the leading figure of the national pantheon, of the ’house of saint kings’ and of the ’triptych’ mentioned above was St. Ladislas in whose person the nomadic warrior ideal was amalgamated with Christian knightly virtues. He is the one called, in turn, ’the pillar of Christian knights’ and ’valiant knight of the Virgin Mary’ in records, manuscripts; his gesta, legend, his iconographic representations (the composition of the three Hungarian saint kings), the mural cycle of the St. Ladislas legend all underline this, together with the folk legends ranging from the 11th-century oral lays to the folk legends alive at the beginning of the 21st century. The oral tradition built around the saint king’s figure continues, as popular as ever, from Ladislas’s age up to the present.

This amalgam of traditions whose roots go back to the earliest times shows virtually no breach with the folk and historical legends known from 19th-20th century folklore collections. The Gesta Ladislai Regis, the fresco cycles of churches, occasionally the folk legends hold up to our eyes the nomadic ideal of man, the positive hero of Siberian and Central-Asian heroic poetry; a mythical hero who fights the demonic enemy in defence of his people and of the defenceless/the abducted (the type of the man who regains his wife). Their fight is a heroic wrestling, since they are both invulnerable to swords or are vulnerable on one point of their body only (cf. Achilles in Greek mythology). This wrestling usually takes place under a symbolic tree with three branches (the world-tree) and there follows, in conformity with the dramaturgy of Central-Asian nomadic heroic songs and lays, the heroic sleep at the end of the lay which, adapted to Christian culture, becomes in effect an euphemism: the liberated woman/maid is searching the sleeping hero’s hair for lice (Demény 1980: 47-131). Curiously, this motif survives up to the end of the 20th century in certain folk legends and ballads (on other heroes even), in the oral tradition of certain regions of the Hungarian-speaking world where to this day an archaic folk culture survives (Transylvania, Moldavia) (Magyar 1998b: 30-36).

The Hungarian folk tales and folk legends have preserved in diverse and multi-faceted forms the figure of the magic horse, deeply rooted in the mythological imaginary of ancient Hungarians. This animal is the companion and helper of the hero; it has a name (Ladislas’s horse is called ’Szög’, approx. ‘Yellow-haired’) and it takes an active part in the fight, kicking and biting, struggling with the enemy’s horse. According to more recent folklore texts, the magic horse is able to fly, it flies over mountains, a stream emerges from its hoof-prints, it can speak in human language and helps his master with wise advice.

The folklore texts from the end of the 15th century show a more completely Christianized image of Ladislas, preserving his mythical heroic qualities: he makes water stem from the rock, turns the coins thrown, in feint, by the pagan enemy into stones etc., but always with divine help, following a short prayer. The motif of the footprints left in the rock, although a universal image, is typical for the Christian legendries; the same tendency can be observed in Western European folklore (Loomis 1948; Delehaye 1955; Brown 1981; Ward 1982; Henken 1984; Henken 1986; Head 1990).

There are numerous similarities and common motifs in the legend cycles of Ladislas and St. Kinga. This may result from two causes, apart from kinship bonds: on the one hand, the age when Kinga’s legend and vita was compiled (the 13th-14th centuries) is the selfsame age when the cult of Ladislas reached its maximum intensity in Hungary; on the other hand, the transmission (and mediation) of this cult was facilitated by the church and the court as well as by the guards of the Polish-Hungarian borderline area (Szepes county) who were conferred the status of gentry and whose remarkably intense cult of the saint king is documented by an uncommonly high number of mural representations of the Ladislas cycle. The cult of St. Kinga, the cycle of the ecclesiastic and folk traditions centred around her figure were crystallized in the selfsame borderline area: beside the Cracow court, in the region of Ószandec (Stary Sacz, Poland), in the valleys of the Poprad and Dunajec rivers. Except for the Ladislas cycle, it is only in the Kinga cycle that we find the active type of the tradition of exorcism. The sacral motif of the dead warrior rising from death and returning to aid his people in battle makes also part of the legendry of the female saint, even if it is not her performing the miracle but two male warrior saints who answer her intercession prayer. This common protector image can be explained with the historical context: like Hungary, the Cracow principality was also heavily devastated by the Mongol invasion of 1241 and Kinga herself could barely escape with her life, seeking refuge in the southern mountainous region.

More recent folklore texts show even more similarities between the cycles of the two saints. As already seen above, in folk legends Ladislas makes water stem from a rock and, as a result of this, a crevice appears in the rock through which water can break through; he turns the money thrown by the enemy into stones; his footsteps remain imprinted in rock. In Polish folklore texts the same events occur in relation with Kinga. When she flees to her refuge to the Pieninek mountain range and her pursuers almost catch her, she throws back different objects: her hair-ribbon is turned into a river, her haircomb into a forest, her rosary into the mountain chain of the Pieninek. In other texts she cuts mountains in halves with her sword, so that the Dunajec river may pass through the clough. In another legend Kinga, to quench her thirst, turns her flowing tears into a spring. In the same legend her footprint is petrified in the rock, so that it can be seen to this day. She washes her feet in a nearby brook which is thereafter blessed with healing powers.

The analogies in the legends of the 13th-14th century Hungarian and Central European saints can be explained with a general unifying tendency that belongs to the norms of hagiography. Partly, these are ready-made formulas, compulsory topoi which were committed to paper during the formal process of canonization decreed by the Holy See in conformity with the ideals of the age and with the general practice of hagiographers. They adapted a set of motifs already available in the sacral heritage of past centuries and applied it to the figure of the present saint (e.g. the keeping of secrets, levitation, sacred oil oozing from the saint’s body, angelic visitations etc.) which could certainly be completed with more recent motifs (e.g. the righteous king, stigmata) as well as with local, national motifs or motifs that could seem profane. To the latter we have examples in the legendry of Ladislas and partially in those of St. Stephen and Kinga, while the former legend type can be recognized in the case of Hungarian female saints. I have already mentioned that the legend tradition discussed here is composed of extremely heterogeneous strata of traditions, far-reaching both in time and space. Viewed in its unity, however, this legend tradition does not seem eclectic but rather a compact, unified whole. In the age of holy kings the ‘house of saint kings’, an amalgam of sacral traditions interwoven with folklore, is a phenomenon which stands unparalleled in European cultural history and in the European cultural heritage.