At the Gate of Christendom. Jews, Muslims and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, c. 1000–c. 1300 (review)

At the Gate of Christendom. Jews, Muslims and "Pagans" in Medieval Hungary, c. 1000-c.1300. By Nora Berend. [Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth series, 50.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xvii, 340. $64.95.)

The social-political and economic condition of the Jews in the Hungary of the Árpáds (the Árpád dynasty ruled the mid-Danubian region of the Carpathian basin occupied by the Magyars in the 890's—since the year 1000 as the Christian Hungarian kingdom—until the extinction of the dynasty in 1301) had been determined in royal legislation enacted in conformity with the spiritual and secular lords of the realm, as it is evident from the Laws of King St. Stephen (1001-1038), articles I:1-12, and ii:2, from articles 10 and 27 of the so called Decretum I attributed to King St. Ladislas I (1077-1095), further from canons 74-75 of the Synod of Tarcal (1106) held during King Coloman the Learned's reign (1095-1116)—in the text, based on a fifteenth-century manuscript, of the St. L. Endlicher edition, Rerum Hungaricarum monumenta Arpadiana (Sankt Gallen, 1849; repr. Leipzig, 1931), p. 358, the synod's name reads as [concilium] cursollinum; the name printed in the Henrik Marczali et al. source collection, Enchiridion fontium historiae Hungarorum (Budapest, 1901), p. 104, reads as [concilium] turzollinum; and, from canon 60 of the First Synod of Esztergom, also held under King Coloman's reign, possibly in 1104.

These resolutions were only confirmed in art. 24 of the Hungarian Golden Bull of 1222 issued by King Andrew II (1205-1235), and in art. 31 of the modified reissue of the Bull in 1231. One ought further to take note of King Coloman's brief Lex Iudaeis data, in seven articles, and of Béla IV's Iura Iudaeorum (the king reigned from 1235 to 1270), in which paragraphs 1, 2, 8, 18, and 31 dealt with the judicial privileges of Jews, and paragraphs 14 and 26 specifically spoke of Jewish judges (iudici Iudaeorum) defining for a long time their court-of-law jurisdiction. The document itself did not survive in the original, but only in a transcript dated to the reign of King Matthias Corvinus (1452-1490) ("e transumto Mathiae regis") (Endlicher, pp. 473ff.; Marczali, pp. 158ff.).

The author of the present volume has divided the narrative into seven chapters. In the first chapter, she outlines the political background and enumerates chosen historians who dealt with this period of Hungarian history and with what she calls the "frontier" concept. In the second chapter she discusses the land occupied by the Magyars on the eastern outskirts of (Latin) Christendom and analyzes relations between Christians and non-Christians (that is, Jews, Muslims, and Cumans). Next follows an examination of the legal (judicial) relations between Christians and non-Christians, so that in the fourth chapter she may interpret the position held by the non-Christian social strata (as, for instance, that of royal commissionaires, of the king's public servants, of tax collectors) in the realm.

In the next chapter, there is a change of venue. The author examines the confrontations, mostly of a political nature, between the Hungarian court and the Holy See, discusses the origins of the frontier concept—characterized by her as frontier ideology—which devolved during and after the reconstruction of the country by King Béla IV after the Tartar onslaught upon the land in 1241-42. The author depicts a domestic political scene in which devastating confrontations played a role between the Hungarian population and the still nomadic Cumans, while the country itself became a bloody battleground among families of the oligarchy. The author speaks of the behavior of the royal court and of the papal curia toward the non-Christian social strata that lived...