Hungary’s forgotten golden age – When our king could be even richer than the English monarch
But the beginnings were not easy. According to a political settlement, Béla was sent to Constantinople when he was 15 years old. He was raised in the Byzantine court for years. When Béla returned home to take the throne, many people treated him as a stranger. So much so that the Archbishop of Esztergom refused to put the Holy Crown on his head, but even his own mother would have preferred to make his younger brother king.
His reign could have ended quickly at this point, except that Béla, far away from his homeland in Byzantium, thoroughly learned the tricks of diplomacy. He quickly put an end to the internal strife: he reconciled with the heads of the church, the archbishop of Esztergom was left out of the coronation, and after the ceremony, Béla dealt with those who plotted against him. Well, not as harshly as his grandfather: he simply locked up his mother and younger brother.
During his reign, which started in 1172 and lasted for 24 years, Hungary was characterized by abundance.
He realized that the deterioration of the Hungarian currency had to be stopped. The precious metal content and weight of the minted coins also increased.
Although he did not win such resounding triumphs as King Matthias, he recaptured many old Hungarian territories in Szeremség and Croatia, and his troops even defeated Venice in a sea battle.
There was no shortage of food III. Under Béla. When the Crusaders marched through the country under the leadership of the German-Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, they also had plenty. A chronicle remembers all this as follows:
When the emperor arrived in the city called Esztergom, which is the capital of the Hungarians, the king solemnly marched before him personally, accompanied by a thousand warriors. […] The king took the lord emperor to a place called the city of Attila, where the emperor spent four days hunting […] After that, it is known that the king gave the whole army a huge amount of food.
It is interesting that in the first centuries of Christian Hungary only once, III. A detailed census of income was made because of Béla, which listed the king’s income one by one. Based on this, the Hungarian crown was extremely rich: its annual income was around 23 tons of silver.
If the contemporary source is accurate and does not exaggerate – and there is a chance for this – then III. Béla was one of the richest kings in Europe.
His income was greater than that of the French or English kings. If this is true, it is partly due to the fact that Hungary was highly centralized: about 70 percent of the state’s property belonged to the king. Here, the king’s income almost covered the total income of the country, while the practice was different to the west of us.
But III. Under Béla, not only the royal coffers but also culture flourished. It was during his reign that the oldest coherent Hungarian language monument was created Funeral speech. He flourished writing. He created the chancellery dealing with issuing diplomas. Historians believe that he wrote the history of Hungarians Anonymous the III. He was a clerk in Béla’s court.
By royal order, monasteries were built in Pilis, Egres, Pásztó, Szentgotthárd and Zirce during Béla’s time.
Although now III. Béla’s memory faded somewhat, his posterity still saw the immediate ruler. His grandson IV. Béla also attached the epithet “Great”.
III. The tomb of Queen Anna Béla and Châtillon of Hungary in the Matthias Church in Budapest (Image source)