The Hungarian Historical Review New Series of Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae Volume 5 No. 3 2016 Saints Abroad Veronika Novák, Marianne Sághy, and Gábor Klaniczay Special Editors of the Thematic Issue Contents Articles MARIANNE SÁGHY Strangers to Patrons: Bishop Damasus and the Foreign Martyrs of Rome 465 LEVENTE SELÁF Saint Martin of Tours, the Honorary Hungarian 487 LINDA BURKE A Sister in the World: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in the Golden Legend 509 ATTILA GYÖRKÖS The Saint and His Finger: Dominican Legends and Exempla from Thirteenth-Century Hungary 536 DOROTTYA UHRIN The Cult of Saint Katherine of Alexandria in Medieval Upper Hungarian Towns 557 Dragoş gh. Năstăsoiu A New sancta et fidelis societas for Saint Sigismund of Burgundy: His Cult and Iconography in Hungary during the Reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg 587 iNes ivić Jerome Comes Home: The Cult of Saint Jerome in Late Medieval Dalmatia 618 ESZTER KONRÁD Blessed Lancelao of Hungary: A Franciscan Observant in Fifteenth-Century Italy 645 http://www.hunghist.org tartalomjegyzek.indd 1 2016.11.23. 9:29:56 Contents Book Reviews The Feast and the Pulpit: Preachers, Sermons and the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 1235–ca.1500. By Ottó Gecser. Reviewed by Dorottya Uhrin 675 Vitae Sanctorum Aetatis Conversionis Europae Centralis (Saec. X–XI): Saints of the Christianization Age of Central Europe (Tenth-Eleventh Centuries). (Central European Medieval Texts, 6.) Edited by Gábor Klaniczay. Reviewed by Nora Berend 678 Cuius Patrocinio Tota Gaudet Regio: Saints’ Cults and the Dynamics of Regional Cohesion. (Bibliotheca Hagiotheca: Series Colloquia, 3.) Edited by Stanislava Kuzmová, Ana Marinković, and Trpimir Vedriš. Reviewed by Ottó Gecser 681 Magyarországról és a magyarokról: Nyugat-Európa magyar-képe a középkorban [On Hungary and on the Hungarians: The image of Hungarians in Western Europe in the Middle Ages]. By Enikő Csukovits. (Monumenta Hungariae historica. Dissertationes.) Reviewed by Judit Csákó 684 Habsbourg et Ottomans (1520–1918). By Jean Bérenger. Reviewed by Ferenc Tóth 688 Egy magyar származású francia diplomata életpályája: François de Tott báró (1733–1793) [The career of a French diplomat of Hungarian descent: Baron François de Tott (1733–1793)]. By Ferenc Tóth. Reviewed by Benjamin Landais 691 “Zsandáros és policzájos idők”: Államrendőrség Magyarországon [“Times of police and gendarmes”: The state police in Hungary], 1849–1867. By Ágnes Deák. Reviewed by Orsolya Manhercz 694 An Exiled Generation: German and Hungarian Refugees of Revolution, 1848–1871. By Heléna Tóth. Reviewed by Ágnes Deák 697 Franz Joseph I. Kaiser von Österreich und König von Ungarn 1830–1916: Eine Biographie. By Michaela Vocelka and Karl Vocelka. Reviewed by Zoltán Fónagy 702 tartalomjegyzek.indd 2 2016.11.23. 9:29:56 Contents Forging a Multinational State. State: Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. By John Deak. Reviewed by Laurence Cole 705 Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903–1945. By John Paul Newman. Reviewed by Maria Falina 710 With their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus´ and Carpatho-Rusyns. By Paul Robert Magocsi. Reviewed by Stanislav Holubec 713 Falukutatás és társadalmi önismeret: A Sárospataki Református Kollégium faluszemináriumának (1931–1951) történeti kontextusai [Research into village-life and social self-knowledge: The historical contexts of the Sárospatak Reformed Theological College village seminars, 1931–1951]. By Ákos Bartha. Reviewed by Ádám Paár 717 A történelmi Magyarország eszménye: Szekfű Gyula, a történetíró és az ideológus [The ideal of historic Hungary: Gyula Szekfű, historian and ideologue.] By Iván Zoltán Dénes. Reviewed by Vilmos Erős 721 Une diplomatie culturelle dans les tensions internationales: La France en Europe centrale et orientale (1936–1940/1944–1951). By Annie Guénard-Maget. Reviewed by Gusztáv Kecskés 726 L’amiral Horthy, régent de Hongrie. By Catherine Horel. Reviewed by Pierre Bouillon 730 The Politics of History in Croatia and Slovakia in the 1990s. By Stevo Đurašković. Reviewed by Adam Hudek 733 tartalomjegyzek.indd 3 2016.11.23. 9:29:57 HHR_2016-3.indb 4 2016.11.15. 15:39:16 Hungarian Historical Review 5, no. 3 (2016): 465–486 Strangers to Patrons: Bishop Damasus and the Foreign Martyrs of Rome Marianne Sághy Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies According to Christian theology, Christians are foreigners on earth. This paper focuses on the theme of foreigners and foreignness in the epigrams of Bishop Damasus of Rome. What motivated the bishop to highlight this theme at a time when Christianity was growing “respectable” in Roman society? How did the Church integrate foreign Christians into the social fabric of the Roman town? In late fourth-century Rome, not only foreign martyrs were identified as such, but entire groups of foreigners for whom “national” enclaves were created in the catacombs. I examine the Damasian epigrams in the context of their religious substrate of “alienation” and in light of the cosmopolitan heritage of Rome. As bishop of the Nicene Catholic fraction in the Vrbs, whose enterprise aimed at making Rome a new Jerusalem in part through the “importation” of holy martyrs, Damasus sought to represent his Church at its most “universal” in the teeth of his local schismatic and/or heretical opponents. Roman tradition buttressed the universalist aspirations of Catholicism. As the largest metropolis of the ancient world, Rome was a “cosmopolis,” a melting pot of peoples, and Damasus did not remain a stranger to the Catholicity of Rome’s cosmopolitan history at a time when conflicting loyalties to ciuitas, Romanitas and Christianitas were hotly debated political, religious and cultural issues. Keywords: foreign martyrs, bishop Damasus, epigrams, Late Antique Rome The notion that Christians are foreigners on earth was a prevalent idea in the ancient world, as it is today.1 “God’s people” sojourn temporarily in this world, on their way to the heavenly homeland. To be a “stranger” (peregrinus), however, was more than a religious metaphor for Christians in Antiquity: it was existential evidence. If they felt alienated, this was in large part a consequence of the fact that the world had cast them out for their allegedly outlandish beliefs. “Foreignness,” therefore, was not just a matter of Christian self-perception or identity, it was also the way in which Christians were perceived by their contemporaries, Jews and Romans alike. From metaphor to social reality, “foreignness” covered a range of experience, expressing the deepest religious core of the new faith and also exposing the socio-historical context in which Christianity grew. Christians formed a diaspora of “legal aliens” in the cities of the Roman Empire, in which 1 Greer, “Alien Citizens.” http://www.hunghist.org 465 HHR_2016-3.indb 465 2016.11.15. 15:39:16 Hungarian Historical Review 5, no. 3 (2016): 465–486 the new religion spread thanks to its itinerant apostles, wandering teachers, exiled leaders, and migrant martyrs. It comes as all the more of a surprise that, following the turn which took place under the rule of Constantine, the very “strangers” who had been thrown to the lions became the patron saints of the cities in which they had suffered martyrdom. The cult of martyrs rose parallel with Christianity’s integration into Roman society. If the sudden reversal of the urban representations of the martyrs can be explained by the fact that they had already been venerated heroes in persecuted Christianity, the question still remains as to how a stranger could stand for, and represent in heaven, the ciuitas in which s/he had not enjoyed the status of citizenship and had been tortured and executed as a dangerous criminal. How would s/he guarantee the safety, prosperity, and salvation of a city in which s/he had been treated as a suspicious outsider? This paradox was bravely addressed by the foremost episcopal impresario of the cult of the martyrs, Damasus of Rome (366–84 A.D).2 While many Late Antique bishops made a point of excavating “local” martyrs to promote them to the status of patron saints, Damasus frankly acknowledged that the martyrs of Rome, the “new stars” of the Vrbs, were almost all foreigners. Martyrs from abroad became a major success story in Late Antique Christianity.3 I focus on Damasus’ presentation of the “alienness” of the martyrs in his epigraphical poetry.4 What did “foreigner” mean for Damasus? What motivated the bishop to highlight this theme at a time when Christianity was becoming “respectable” in Roman society? 2 Reutter, Damasus, Bischof von Rom; Trout, Damasus of Rome. 3 The list of foreign martyrs venerated at the place of their martyrdom is endless. To name a few: Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome, the forty martyrs (of Sebaste) in Constantinople, St Irenaeus (of Smyrna) in Lyon, St Martialis (of Jerusalem) in Limoges, St Vitalis (of Milan) in Ravenna, St Demetrius (of Sirmium?) in Thessaloniki, St Quirinus (of Siscia) in Savaria (Szombathely) and Rome. Scholarship, however, is scarce on this issue: Fux, “Les patries des martyrs”; Tóth, “Sirmian martyrs in exile”; for a later period, see Efthymiadis, “D’Orient en Occident”; Lequeux, “Hélène d’Athyra,”; Maskarinec, “Foreign Saints at Home”. Scholars focused on the translation and importation of relics, not on the veneration of foreign martyrs in the places where they died. On Holy Land relics: Clark, “Translating Relics”; for translations: Heinzelmann,