Nora Berend brings her expert understanding of the history of Central Europe during the medieval period to this study on Stephen, the supposed founder of the Hungarian church and state. Berend demonstrates that almost everything readers might think they know about Stephen turns out to be wrong, or unproven, or unprovable. Berend analyzes how medieval myths about Stephen were developed and instrumentalized. Among many stories about Stephen, Hungary’s first Christian king supposedly defeated an older pagan relative called Cupan (or Koppány) to take the throne. Eleventh-century sources speak of a rebellion against Stephen’s embrace of Christianity. However, the figure of Koppány only emerged in later medieval chronicles and may or may not relate to a real person. The cult of Stephen developed as medieval kings sought to legitimize their rule by association with a holy predecessor.

There have been only minor challenges to Stephen’s alleged place in Hungarian history. At the Reformation, Mátyás Dévai suggested that if Stephen had offered Hungary to the Virgin Mary, then the king could not have been aware of the real nature of faith. However, Protestants soon made their peace with Stephen, deciding that the origin of corruption in the Hungarian church lay solely in Rome. For Catholics, Hungary’s kings needed to follow Stephen’s model of piety and loyalty to Rome to lead the country toward liberation from Ottoman occupation.

Berend shows how the Habsburg dynasty, the inter-war right wing regime, the Communist party, and post-Communist nationalists have all turned to Stephen seeking to bolster their political legitimacy. Chapter two provides a striking example of this process through an early 1980s rock opera about Stephen. The opera tells the story of the contest between Koppány, portrayed as a vigorous defender of Hungarian freedoms and traditions, and Stephen, responsible for taking the complicated decisions needed to ensure Hungary’s survival. In the context of the late Communist regime, Berend assesses who was intended to be the opera’s hero in the eyes of the Communist Party leadership. Was Koppány to be understood as Imre Nagy, executed after the failed 1956 revolution, while Stephen spoke for János Kádár, who had broken with Nagy and made (as the Party saw it) the necessary decisions required to save the country? The popular opera certainly provided striking evidence of the Communists’ willingness by the 1980s to attempt to engage patriotic sentiment. Performances ended with a rendition of the evocative national anthem. Though Hungary was a perpetual victim, the message from the opera was that Hungarians could be proud of their history across all the lands of the crown of St. Stephen (including lands lost following the Treaty of Trianon in 1920).

The representation of Stephen to serve nationalist purposes has intensified in recent years as Berend explores in chapters about the relic of Stephen’s hand and about Stephen’s crown. The discovery of Stephen’s hand offered proof of the king’s sanctity and bolstered his cult. In 1771 the relic was acquired by the Habsburgs, and Maria Theresa displayed the relic in Vienna, in the abbey at Pannonhalma, and then in the royal chapel in Buda. In 1987 Stephen’s right hand was restored to public display in the basilica in Pest, “now seen not merely as a religious relic, but as a national one” (136). As Berend expertly explains, it is certain that Stephen never wore the so-called holy crown. One part of the current crown likely dates to the late eleventh century and was possibly a diplomatic gift for the Byzantine wife of Géza I. The first textual references to a crown of St. Stephen date from the late thirteenth century, and its distinctive cross was added in the sixteenth century, and damaged at some point in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Ideas about the crown also matured from a symbol of connection between Hungary’s kings and Stephen to the notion that the crown embodied the continuity of the state and the nation. In the absence of a king after 1920, the crown’s significance only increased in the interwar period. In 2000, the crown was transferred from the National History Museum to the Parliament (of a republic) and was described in legislation as a “relic embodying the continuity and independence of the Hungarian state” (156). Berend concludes that the reason for the current focus on the holy crown as representing the political nation of all Hungarian speakers provides a “pseudo-historical legitimizing rhetoric for the government and serves for covert revisionist allusions” (231). This important book by Berend is not so much about exposing the dangerous game of falsifying history as about providing a clear warning about the certainties of national historiographical traditions.