Stephen I of Hungary

Stephen I was the last grand prince of the Hungarians and the first king of Hungary, crowned at the turn of 1000 and 1001 and ruling until his death in 1038. Building on his father's work, he turned a federation of semi-nomadic tribes into a Christian kingdom on the Western European model, with bishoprics, royal counties and written laws, and so secured the Hungarians a lasting place in central Europe. Canonised in 1083, he is venerated as Saint Stephen and remains the founding figure of the Hungarian state.

The Magyars had settled in the Carpathian Basin around 895 and for half a century raided deep into western Europe, until their defeat by the German king Otto I at the Lechfeld in 955. Stephen's father Géza, grand prince from about 972, chose accommodation instead: he opened relations with the German emperors, invited missionaries and accepted baptism, while remaining by most accounts a ruler who also kept the old gods.

Stephen's birth year is not recorded in any contemporary source; later chronicles give 967, 969 or 975, and his earliest biographies, which call him still an adolescent in 997, favour about 975. He was born with the pagan name Vajk, from a Turkic word for chief or lord, probably at Esztergom, and took the name Stephen at baptism. Tradition credits the baptism to Bishop Adalbert of Prague, but the near-contemporary life of Adalbert does not mention it, so the date and circumstances are uncertain. His mother Sarolt came from the family of a chieftain, the gyula, who ruled in or near Transylvania.

In about 996 Géza arranged Stephen's marriage to Gisela, daughter of Duke Henry the Wrangler of Bavaria and sister of the future emperor Henry II. It was the first marriage between a Hungarian ruler and a western royal house, and Gisela's household brought German clergy and knights to the Hungarian court.

When Géza died in 997, Stephen's claim rested on succession from father to son, a Christian and western principle. His kinsman Koppány, a senior member of the Árpád dynasty who ruled lands south of Lake Balaton, claimed the throne by the older custom of seniority and demanded to marry Géza's widow. His followers were largely pagan. Stephen, girded with a sword in the German manner and supported by foreign knights such as Vecelin as well as Hungarian lords, defeated and killed Koppány near Veszprém. The dead man's body was quartered and its parts hung at the gates of four fortresses, one of them the seat of Stephen's uncle the gyula in Transylvania, as a warning to anyone else who might resist.

Stephen then sought a royal crown. According to tradition he received it from Pope Sylvester II, and the German chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg adds that it came with the favour of Emperor Otto III, a close ally of the pope. Whether this implied any subordination to the Holy Roman Empire is still debated, but in practice Stephen acted as an independent sovereign. He was crowned on Christmas Day 1000 or on New Year's Day 1001, probably at Esztergom; the crown now kept in the Hungarian Parliament dates from later and is not the one he wore.

Shortly afterwards he created an archbishopric at Esztergom, which made the Hungarian church independent of the German archbishops. Over his reign he founded at least six bishoprics alongside it, including Veszprém, Győr, Pécs, Eger and Transylvania, a second archbishopric at Kalocsa, and Benedictine monasteries at Pannonhalma and elsewhere. He required every ten villages to build a church, enforced Sunday observance, fasting and confession through his laws, and punished pagan practice harshly. Stephen's laws, the earliest written law of Hungary, drew on Carolingian and Bavarian models.

Much of the Carpathian Basin still answered to tribal chieftains who did not accept Stephen as king. Around 1003 he invaded Transylvania and seized his uncle Gyula, adding his lands to the kingdom, and later campaigns subdued a ruler the chronicles call Kean in the south and Ajtony, a chieftain of the Maros region who had links with the Byzantine Empire. In place of tribal territories he set up counties, each centred on a royal fortress and run by an ispán, or count, appointed by the king. The counties remained the basic unit of Hungarian administration for most of the next thousand years.

He began regular coinage, and from about 1018 the opening of a land route to Jerusalem through Hungary brought pilgrims and merchants across his kingdom. He kept the road safe, and some newcomers settled, among them the Venetian monk Gerard, who became the first bishop of Csanád. Stephen moved his main residence to Székesfehérvár, where he built a great basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

For most of his reign relations with Germany were good, since his brother-in-law Henry II ruled there from 1002 to 1024. Stephen fought the Polish duke Bolesław the Brave, who held territory on Hungary's northern edge for a time, and around 1018 sent troops to help the Byzantine emperor Basil II in the last stage of his conquest of Bulgaria. When Henry's successor Conrad II invaded Hungary in 1030, Stephen's army used scorched-earth tactics, starved the imperial force and took Vienna, and the peace that followed in 1031 gave Hungary land along the Leitha.

Most of Stephen's children died young. His surviving son Emeric, groomed as heir and the addressee of a book of advice on kingship, the Admonitions, attributed to Stephen, was killed in a hunting accident in 1031. The obvious successor was Stephen's cousin Vazul, who was suspected of pagan sympathies. Stephen named instead his sister's son, the Venetian Peter Orseolo. Vazul was blinded and his sons driven into exile, probably after a plot against the king. Stephen died on 15 August 1038 and was buried at Székesfehérvár.

His death opened decades of disputed successions, pagan revolts and German interventions, which ended only when Vazul's grandson Ladislaus I came to the throne in 1077.

Ladislaus had Stephen canonised in 1083, with the approval of Pope Gregory VII, together with Emeric and Bishop Gerard. The cult of the holy king became central to the Hungarian monarchy, and later rulers swore to uphold the law "of Saint Stephen". His right hand, the Holy Right, became the nation's most revered relic; it was taken to safety in Dubrovnik during the Mongol invasion of 1241 and is now kept in St Stephen's Basilica in Budapest, carried in procession every 20 August, a national holiday.

Historians judge Stephen's achievement in terms of survival. Earlier peoples who dominated the region, such as the Huns and the Avars, vanished; the Hungarians, by adopting Latin Christianity and western institutions, built a kingdom that lasted. Medieval legends made him an idealised saint, while a later life stressed his severity, and both pictures contain truth. His memory runs through the history of Hungary, and also of Slovakia and Romania, whose lands he ruled.