Zuzana Orságová MARIA LASKARIS AND ELISABETH THE CUMAN: TWO EXAMPLES OF ÁRPÁDIAN QUEENSHIP MA Thesis in Medieval Studies Central European University CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2009 MARIA LASKARIS AND ELISABETH THE CUMAN: TWO EXAMPLES OF ÁRPÁDIAN QUEENSHIP by Zuzana Orságová (Slovakia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU ____________________________________________ Chair, Examination Committee ____________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________________ Examiner ____________________________________________ Examiner CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2009 MARIA LASKARIS AND ELISABETH THE CUMAN: TWO EXAMPLES OF ÁRPÁDIAN QUEENSHIP by Zuzana Orságová (Slovakia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU ____________________________________________ External Examiner CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2009 MARIA LASKARIS AND ELISABETH THE CUMAN: TWO EXAMPLES OF ÁRPÁDIAN QUEENSHIP by Zuzana Orságová (Slovakia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU ________________________ Supervisor ____________________________________________ External Supervisor CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2009 I, the undersigned, Zuzana Orságová, candidate for the MA degree in Medieval Studies declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person’s or institution’s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. Budapest, 25 May 2009 __________________________ Signature CEU eTD Collection ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks are due to the whole Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, especially to my supervisors Balázs Nagy and Gerhard Jaritz. In addition, I must acknowledge my gratitude to József Laszlovszky, Gábor Klaniczay and my external reader Martin Homza (Comenius University, Bratislava), for their help and most useful comments. CEU eTD Collection i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I........................................................................................................................... Discussing sources and methodology......................................................................................3 The primary sources ...........................................................................................................3 Secondary literature............................................................................................................5 Methodology ......................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER II......................................................................................................................... The Concept of Medieval Queenship and its Perception in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Árpádian Period......................................................................................................................9 Becoming the Queen of Hungary..........................................................................................10 The queen as a representative of the foreign alliance.........................................................12 The court of the queen and her political powers....................................................................14 The Queenship patterns: ideal models and duties ..............................................................16 The wife .......................................................................................................................16 The mother ...................................................................................................................18 The Christian ................................................................................................................19 CHAPTER III........................................................................................................................ Maria Laskaris and Elisabeth the Cuman: Introducing the Historical Characters...................22 Their origin and background.............................................................................................22 Maria and the Laskarids................................................................................................22 Elisabeth – the daughter of a Cuman chieftain...............................................................23 Circumstances of marriage................................................................................................26 The bride from the Crusade...........................................................................................26 Stephen marries Elisabeth.............................................................................................27 Taking the new role – Regina iunior. ................................................................................30 The younger queen Maria .............................................................................................30 “Elisabeth, iunior Regina Hungariae” ...........................................................................34 The Queen of Hungary. ........................................................................................................38 Elisabeth – queen consort and queen mother.................................................................44 CHAPTER IV........................................................................................................................ The mutual relationship between Maria and Elisabeth. .........................................................49 CHAPTER V............................................................................................................................... Maria and Elisabeth: The Obedient Wife and the Pagan Cuman?..........................................57 The representation of Maria and Elisabeth in the written sources ......................................57 Perception of origin ......................................................................................................57 Maria and Elisabeth – ideal queens?..............................................................................60 The pious queen............................................................................................................65 The queen and the mother.............................................................................................69 Visual representations of Maria and Elisabeth on seals .........................................................74 The Seal of Maria Laskaris ...............................................................................................75 CEU eTD Collection The Seal of Elisabeth the Cuman ......................................................................................77 Comparison of Maria´s and Elisabeth´s seal representations .............................................78 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................................82 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................. Primary sources....................................................................................................................89 Secondary literature..............................................................................................................91 APPENDIX.........................................................................................................................95 ii LIST OF FIGURES Fig. I. Seal of Maria Laskaris (front side) Attached to DL 686, Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archive). Fig. II. Seal of Maria Laskaris (reverse side) Ibid. Fig. III. Seal of Elisabeth the Cuman (front side) Attached to DL 844, Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archive). Fig. IV. Seal of Elisabeth the Cuman (reverse side) Ibid. CEU eTD Collection iii INTRODUCTION Scholarly interest in queenship in the Árpádian period is still quite recent. Not many monographs have been published yet and they have mainly focused on the institution of queenship as such. Biographical studies of particular queens’ figures are even rarer, although some of the Árpádian queens are unknown even by the name and therefore can hardly be the subject of separate research. Since the amount of written records increased rapidly in the thirteenth century, Maria Laskaris and Elisabeth the Cuman, whom I have chosen as the protagonists of this paper, are not such extreme examples. Indeed, the source material in their cases can scarcely