Medieval - The History Files

Germany And Hungary In The Eleventh Century Part II

Budapest equestrian statue St Stephen near Matthias church — **Adjacent to the church is an equestrian statue of Szent István király, King Saint Stephen, first king of Hungary from 1000 until 1038.**

HUNGARY

A steppe people who spoke an Ugrian or central Asiatic language, the Magyars had definitively abandoned their nomadic ways after Otto the Great’s effective defeat of their forces in 955 at the battle of the Lechfeld, a site on the River Lech, a tributary of the Danube, in the very shadow of the ancient city of Augsburg (a Roman foundation). Unlike the small and rather more typical raiding parties, the army that the soon-to-be Roman emperor Otto I crushed was huge and assembled from the full array of Magyar tribes. The clan chiefs had concluded, no doubt from the predictions of their shamans, that fortune would bless their enterprise.

Neither of the principal central European monarchies, Germany and Hungary, was entirely stable in the eleventh century, and they differed considerably from each other. Nonetheless, insofar as centralization is a proper standard of comparison, they stood in sharp contrast to the politically splintered kingdom of France. Of course, it may be argued that centralization is not an appropriate or important marker of difference, that the similarities among all three kingdoms in economic and social organization were much more significant than variations in nascent ‘state formation’. But this argument is dubious at best.