Balázs Nagy, Martyn Rady, Katalin Szende, and András Vadas have provided a sizeable collection of twenty-one articles divided among six parts, all describing various aspects of the medieval town of Buda. I will discuss the book through three themes I detect running through all the studies: Buda and power, Buda and diversity, and Buda and its contemporaries.
Buda's connection to political power comes to mind first. The most important of the early sites that comprise the modern city of Budapest is the area known as Óbuda (“Old Buda”) which became important as a result of the royal domain established there by King Stephen (r. 1000–1038) as part of his organization of the new kingdom. Óbuda soon joined Esztergom and Székesfehérvár as one of the king's regular residences though when Béla IV founded the fortified town on Castle Hill, the old residence at Óbuda declined in importance. As Buda grew in importance, it frequently became a focal point for both domestic and international political activity. Throughout the medieval period Buda or its environs hosted synods, diets, and royal summits, and though the palace at Visegrád up the Danube drew the most important meetings during the later medieval period, Buda did see visits from two Byzantine emperors and a Polish king.
Buda's relationship with power extended beyond political power into the spiritual realm. Almost from the very beginning, the royal residence shared space at Óbuda with a collegiate church whose importance grew substantially in the Árpádian dynasty, and by the late medieval period, the area abounded in monastic foundations. Gábor Klaniczay describes how several sites around Buda were particularly sacred or associated with miracles. The hill on the Danube currently known as Mount Gellért was thought in the thirteenth century to have been the place of martyrdom of Bishop Gerard in the eleventh century, though Klaniczay convincingly argues that the legend connecting Gerard with the hill is almost certainly a later invention to overcome the absences of relics from the martyr. Margaret Island was the home of St. Margaret who was credited with a holy life and numerous miracles. The region around Buda was also the location for the only religious order founded in Hungary, the Order of St. Paul, and as a result the center of the order at Budaszentlőrinc (St. Lawrence at Buda) became a pilgrimage site and the site of miraculous cures.
Finally, Buda has had a type of ideological power that can still be found today. József Laszlovszky and James Plumtree describe how Óbuda has played a role in popular mythologies. Medieval chroniclers both inside and outside the Hungarian kingdom made connections between Óbuda and Attila the Hun. In the nineteenth century, Hungarian poets and artists continued the medieval ideas and developed them into epic tales of the great Hun leader and his connection to the Hungarians. More recently, “alternative scholars,” on the Internet and outside the purview of scholarly checks, have proposed a collection of theories regarding the Hungarian ancient past and the location of the royal center at Óbuda.
The diversity of the medieval town of Buda is particularly striking. The northern hills around Buda contained Slavic speakers, while the town was essentially a German town for much of the time in question. Martyn Rady's description of Buda's medieval government shows how the German population inspired the institutions of government, and the election of the Stadtschreiber was a key event in the civic calendar. At the same time, the Stadtschreiber and other officials took their oaths in both German and Hungarian and the city was bilingual. Added to this mix was a sizeable Jewish community. Recent excavations have uncovered evidence of a synagogue on the southwestern corner of Castle Hill, but the synagogue was moved to the northeastern part of the town in the fifteenth century. At this location archeologists have found the remains of a ritual bath, or mikveh. This section of the town was not a ghetto, as Christians lived there as well.
A final theme of the book is the comparative nature of the studies mentioned in the title. The architecture of royal residences at both Buda and Visegrád in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries resemble those of other Central European monarchs. The similarities are largely due to the needs of monarchs for comfort and display. Certainly, Buda had very close commercial connections throughout Europe, in particular with Cologne and Nuremberg. These two cities served as trading partners and as rivals. Eventually, contacts with Nuremberg came to dominate trade in Buda, to the extent that Buda became “the south-eastern corner-point in the expansion of this mighty imperial city” (299). Szilárd Papp provides a fine survey of the statues discovered in 1974 that were evidently made for Sigismund's palace. These statues show how the cultural connections of Buda extended even beyond Central Europe with artistic influences coming mostly from French courts. Finally, while most of the comparative work focused on Central Europe, Katalin Szende made a point of including southeastern European cities for comparison because, as she rightly points out, contacts with the Romanian principalities, Bosnia, and Serbia were constant and close.
Medieval Buda in Context at times has the feel of a sprawling catalog of geographical artifacts, and the reader can get bogged down in the detail of the numerous foundations, sacred sites, and marketplaces described. However, the effort pays off, and the scope of these studies brings great value to scholars interested in the region.
