Church, State, and the Hungarian Holy Crown Between Past and Present

In Hungary, a particular form of state church developed during the Middle Ages. The legal nature of royal power was ensured by the crowning with the state and church founder Saint Stephen’s crown. Following the example of the apostolic succession of rights ensured by the laying on of hands at the consecration of bishops, we can, in fact, speak of a similarly sacral ‘successio regia’ in Hungarian terms. This sacral succession was created by the cultic relationship with the first holy king. In parallel, along the same ideology, the Hungarian kings took full control of the country’s church organization by the 15th century. However, while this control was linked to the person of the king, the Holy Crown also became, from the 15th century onwards, a symbol of state power independent of the king’s personal authority (Sacra Corona Regni Hungariae). This crown, however, was not merely an abstract idea, as in England, but an ideology tied to a concrete, sacred object that had developed. After the end of the reign of the foreign Habsburg dynasty from 1526 to 1918, the dignity of ‘apostolic king’, recognized by the Holy See in 1758, was no longer a realistic option. State control over the Catholic Church organization had disappeared. In contrast, the idea of the Holy Crown proved to be virulent, thanks to its independence from the person of the monarch. This explains why, after the fall of state socialism and the disappearance of the Soviet-Russian sphere of interest in Central Europe, the ancient crowned coat of arms was chosen in 1990 by the first freely elected parliament as the coat of arms of the Republic of Hungary, which had been proclaimed the previous year. This originally sacral symbol and the historicity and ideality it represented became the cornerstone of Hungarian statehood and the constitution in the third millennium, which, not incidentally, separated the state from all denominations.