Names of saints and dynastic name-giving in Hungary in the 10-14th centuries in a central and eastern European context1 Mariann SLÍZ Introduction: the relevance of investigating dynastic name-giving In this paper, I will survey the fairly complex relationship between medieval cults of saints and name-giving in royal dynasties in the Mid- dle Ages. However, before descending to particulars, I ought to account for the onomastic value of the investigation of this topic and for the use of the term dynastic naming or name-giving by emphasizing two obser- vations. Firstly, there are unambiguous differences between the name stocks of dynasties and the name stocks of the whole population of their countries; and secondly, there are unequivocal similarities in the naming practices of different dynasties. These two facts make name-giving in royal houses a special phenomenon. Although dynastic naming is con- fined only to a narrow stratum of the society, the differences and simi- larities between the name-giving practises of royal families and of their peoples may deserve the attention of onomasticians. As for the differences between the name stocks of the dynasties and of the populations, we can mention the names Farkas (‘Wolf’), Jakab (‘Jacob’), János (‘John’) and Miklós (‘Nicholas’) from Medi- eval Hungary. While they were amongst the most popular names in the 11-13th century in the whole population (cf. Benkő 1950, p. 23), none of them appeared in the name stock of the House of the Árpáds. The inverse of this phenomenon can also be observed: while the names Charles and Louis were frequent among the Anjous of Naples and of Hungary, Károly (‘Charles’) and Lajos (‘Louis’) were extraor- dinarily rare in the Angevin Age in Hungary (14th century).2 1 This paper was supported by the Bolyai János Research Scholarship of the Hun- garian Academy of Sciences. 2 I managed to find only 9 occurrences of Károly and 2 of Lajos in my corpus, which at present contains about 20,000 personal names collected from 14th century Onoma 48 (2013), 157-183. doi: 10.2143/ONO.48.0.3223618. © Onoma. All rights reserved. 158 MARIANN SLÍZ The differences between the name stocks of a dynasty and of its people can be seen not only in the frequency of a particular name but also in the proportions of the different types or groups of names. For example, the rate of non-Christian names in a dynasty could be rela- tively high, even if the Church and the dynasty relied upon each other and even if non-Christian names were not popular in the whole popu- lation. For instance, at least 40% of male names were non-Christian ones on the family tree of the Árpáds in 11th century (Géza, László [‘Ladislaus’], Veszprém ~ Bezprim, Bonuzló, Levente, Álmos), albeit they embraced Christianity at the end of the 10th century.3 Since we cannot find these names among the frequent ones in 11th century Hun- gary (cf. Benkő 1950, Fehértói 1997, Hajdú 2003, p. 360), this phe- nomenon cannot be explained by their general popularity, only by some special aims of dynastic name-giving. At the same time, we can observe that some names of saints that were excessively common in the whole population were missing from the name stock of dynasties, while nationwide rare or absent Christian names could occur in a dynasty. For example, György (‘George’) was amongst the 20 most frequent names in Medieval Hungary (see e.g. Benkő 1950; Fehértói 1997; Hajdú 2003; N. Fodor 2010, pp. 126-130; Slíz 2011b, p. 69, 94), due to Saint George’s cult, which began fairly early on in Hun- gary (for more information about his cult in Hungary, see e.g. ­Moravcsik 1970, p. 109; Magyar 2006). All the same, his name did not occur either in the Árpáds’, or in the Anjous’ family tree, although Saint George was highly respected by the Angevin kings Charles I (1308-1342) and Louis the Great (1342-1382), owing to the fact that he was regarded as the greatest incarnation of chivalric morality at the time. As an inverse of this phenomenon, Lambert or Piroska appeared among the Árpáds in the 11th century, even though Saint Lambert and Saint Prisca did not have significant cults in Hungary and their names were exceedingly rare or absent among the people. The main cause of the difference between the name stock of dynasties and of the common people is that name-giving within royal families was influenced by special factors. Naming a royal child is not deeds. For a name dictionary containing about 14,000 entries (from the period of 1301-1342) see Slíz 2011a. 3 I wrote “at least” because the etymologies of two names (Béla and Kálmán) are still questionable. NAmEs OF sAINTs AND DYNAsTIC NAmE-GIVING IN HUNGARY … 159 only a family business: it always has a great symbolic value; choosing a certain name could express political or ideological heredities and aims. This can be well corroborated by the name etymologies and explanations of name-giving of dynastic saints. For instance, the “Greater Legend” of Saint Stephen, first king of Hungary emphasized that he was given his name because it means ‘crowned’ in Latin (see Érszegi 1987, p. 25). According to another legend by Bishop Hartvik, the king’s mother was instructed by Saint Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity, to name her child after him (see text in Head 2001, pp. 375-377). The aim in both explanations is obvious: they intended to highlight the fact that Stephen was the first crowned and Christian king of Hungary, the evangelizer monarch of the Hungarians. Simi- larly, the legend of Saint Ladislaus, king of Hungary derived the saint’s name from a Greek word with the meaning ‘Glory, given by God to Peoples’ (cf. Laos + dosis; for the etymology, see Érszegi 1987, p. 95; for the lingustic and historical interpretation of the ety- mology, see Bollók 1994). According to the explanation of this ety- mology, he received his name due to sensing that he would become a saint later. In fact, his name comes from the Polish Władysław or the Czhech Vladislav, supposedly with the mediation of ecclesiastical Latin (see Melich 1941). However, the linguistic imperfection of the name etymologies of legends does not matter in our case: the point is that their pure existence signals the symbolic importance of the names of dynastic saints. The name could symbolize the family’s saintliness, the son’s right to the throne by testifying his family connections, the father’s intention to follow one of his ancestors’ politics, or it could serve as a grand gesture towards an ally who helped the father in seiz- ing or keeping the crown. For this reason, the patterns of naming in the different dynasties are quite similar. The corpus and the aims of the paper Among the many possible causes and goals for choosing one particu- lar name for a royal child, there are several motivations connected to religion, mostly to saints. In the following, I will display the most typical of these reasons. The overview is based mostly on the name stocks and history of two dynasties in Hungary: 58 male and 34 female names from the Hungarian Árpád dynasty (from the end of the 10th century to 1301, the end of the male line), and 7 male and 6 female 160 MARIANN SLÍZ names from the Hungarian branch of the House of Anjou (14th century).4 I will also deal with other Central and Eastern European dynasties of the Middle Ages (the Rurikids of Kievan Rus’;5 the Přemyslids and the House of Luxembourg in Bohemia and in Hungary; the Piasts of Poland and the House of Anjou of Naples) on the basis of secondary literature. In some cases, I will also mention Western parallels, since most of the strategies of name-giving were general features of Euro- pean dynastic naming. Since our sources display the motivation behind the name-giving of a royal child quite sporadically, we do not have an appropriate qual- ity and quantity of data for a statistical survey. For this reason, the main aim of this paper is to provide a possible typology for different kinds of connections between dynastic naming and the cult of saints. I also intend to attract attention to the gender differences in name-giving in connec- tion with cults of saints and to the changes and variations in the relation- ship between cults of saints and dynastic name-giving. A typology of motivations for dynastic naming based on the cult of saints Name-giving according to calendar As it is widely known, one of the most common motives of name- giving in the Middle Ages was alignment to the calendar, i.e. giving the baby the name of the saint whose feast it was born on (or whose day was closest to the child’s birthday). To detect this motivation among dynasties could be a hard work or even a mission impossible, since historical sources provide us with the exact days of the birth of royal children rather sporadically. However, we have some data for this kind of name-giving: for example Ivan III of Russia (1462-1505) was born on 22 January 1440 and he must have been given his name after Saint John Chrysostom, who is celebrated inter alia on 27 Janu- ary according to the Eastern Orthodoxy (Uspenskij 2011a, p. 38). Still, due to its randomness, we may suppose that such motivation could not 4 On the name-giving motives of the Árpáds see Slíz 2000, of the Anjou’s of Hun- gary see Slíz 2011b, pp.