HUNGARIAN STUDIES 2. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1986]

Julia Bader and George Starr: A Saint in the Family: A Leaf of the "Hungarian Anjou Legendary" at Berkeley

J. BADER—G. STARR probably more appropriate to use the broader generic term for a collection of saints' lives and speak of this as a "legendary," as Levárdy does.10 Why should this particular saint appear in a Hungarian legendary of the Anjou period? Born in 1274, Louis was the second of thirteen children of Charles II of Naples. On his mother's side he was Hungarian: his mother was Mary, the daughter of Stephen V, King of Hungary. From 1288 to 1295—that is, from the age of 14 to 21— Louis, along with his younger brothers Robert and Raymond Berenger, was a hostage in Catalonia, where he seems to have come under the influence of Peter Johannis Olivi, a leading figure in the Spiritual or Zealot wing of the Franciscan movement. Upon the brothers' release from Catalonia, Louis renounced his rights of primogeniture in favor of his brother Robert, who was to become King of Naples and eventually a vigorous proponent of the canonization and cult of Louis. In the same eventful year, 1296, Louis was received into the Franciscan order and was consecrated Bishop of Toulouse by Pope Boniface VIII. Within a few months, on August 19,1297, Louis died at the age of 23; he was made a saint 20 years later, early in the pontificate of John XXII.11 One explanation for Louis's presence in this manuscript, then, is the dynastic one. One recent critic has observed, apropos of the famous painting of Louis by Simone Martini in Naples, that "Saints in the family were a good thing. The French royal family already possessed its saint, Louis IX—and very likely this example spurred the Angevins to emulation ... the canonization of Louis of Toulouse like that of Louis IX is a thread in the same pattern of statecraft."12 If the political reason for Louis's presence in an Anjou legendary is thus reasonably clear, his inclusion in a Hungarian Anjou legendary does not depend solely on his mother's having been Hungarian. The manuscript was produced during the reign, and probably under the direct patronage, of King Charles Robert of Hungary (1301/1307-1342), who was Louis's nephew, and is known to have erected a chapel to him at Lippa in 1327. We shall return later to the recently-debated question of the relative weight of secular, dynastic considerations and religious ones in the cult of Louis, for the Bancroft leaf sheds some fresh light on the problem. Here it should be added, however, that Louis's sainthood not only signalled divine approbation of the Anjou dynasty at large; it also served to demonstrate the special unction of its Hungarian branch, since Saint Elizabeth of Hungary had been the great aunt of Louis's mother, by whom, in turn, his own early piety was fostered.13 We now turn to the iconography of the four miniatures on the Bancroft leaf. The first scene illustrates an event that took place after Louis's death: it figures at length in written accounts of his miracles, and is the subject of at least one other pictorial representation. On a table in the middle of the composition lie a large, fish and nine coins; a Franciscan friar standing in front of it to the right gesticulates to two of his brethren, who are behind it on the left. The story is this. To lighten his ship during a

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