jurisdiction over his people. The latter right
has been exercised until the present century,
and the Pope's crown then sent, has remained
ever since the crown of Hungary. It was
placed solemnly upon King Stephen's head in
the year 1000.

King Stephen calling several Diets, now
revised the Constitution, which had been
brought from the heaths of Asia. Bishops
balanced nobles, and the rights of all were
fixed; tithes were established, and a seed of
taxation was sown. Some resistance all this
caused, and some revolts on behalf of the old
pagan rites had to be put down by King
Stephen. All Christian bondsmen were
emancipated, and all Pagans were deprived of
liberty; but many died for their accustomed
faith. One chieftain rode in full armour to
the banks of the Theiss, and commanded
himself to be buried alive as a sacrifice to his
gods, "preferring," says the old chronicle,
"death with his fathers, to eternal life with
Christ."

Stephen increased the splendour of his
court, and having formed the Diet of four
classes of his people, the high nobility, the
bishops and chiefs, the nobility, and the
soldiers or franklins attached to the castle
banners, he made the consent of those in
Diet assembled necessary to the conversion
of his decrees into law. The freedom of the
people Stephen laboured to secure, in the
spirit of a phrase used by another of these
kings—" That none of the lords shall have
more, none of the servants less, than liberty."
The chiefs of the seven clans waned in power,
and the free Hungarian was subject only to
the king or to his representative, the palatine.
The king and palatine journeying through the
country, were sufficient themselves for the
personal performance of their office as the
source of justice. Still the Hungarians were
a simple and tent-loving people, without
complex causes of dispute; the king himself not
resident in any fixed abode. There was a
faint trace of feudalism in some of King
Stephen's arrangements; and there was a
class of naturalised aliens and freed bondsmen
from whom military service was not asked,
who had no political rights, but paid taxes,
being subject only to the king. Out of this
class sprang afterwards the citizens of towns,
and that great mass of people who were hot
free, but subjects working for, and paying
taxes to, their lords.

Stephen having lost his own son, was
troubled about the choice of a successor. His
next heir was his cousin Vazul, a good-
natured scamp, then under banishment for
his follies. Then there were Andreas and
Bela, the sons of a second cousin; but they
had a taste for Paganism. Then Stephen
thought about his sister Gisela, who had
married a doge of Venice, and who had a son,
named Peter; but he was deep in Western
wisdom and in Western wantonness, and
looked contemptuously at the coarse
Hungarians. Stephen at last determined on the
choice of Vazul, who was legitimately heir-
apparent, and recalled him, therefore, from
his place of banishment. By way of counterplot,
Gisela, Peter's mother, sent some bravoes,
who put out the heir-apparent's eyes, and
poured into his ears molten lead. Stephen
neglected to chastise his sister, and by this
weakness brought a conspiracy upon himself,
headed by Andreas and Bela. The soldier
who was to have stabbed the sleeping king,
relented in the act, and besought his pardon.
Stephen again forebore inquiry, but Andreas
and Bela fled ; so there remained on the
ground only Peter, and Samuel, a half-pagan
husband of King Stephen's second sister.
To Peter, therefore, on the death of King
Stephen, in 1036, descended the crown of
Hungary.

Peter loved foreigners and scorned his
subjects. Therefore, in five years he was
expelled, and the half-pagan was made King
Samuel. Samuel hated foreigners and bishops,
but he hated, also, the Hungarian chiefs.
Peter, flying to the emperor, offered to accept
Hungary as a fief, if restored. The emperor
complied. Samuel, deserted by the chiefs, was
conquered and killed, and Peter was restored.
But when the Hungarians heard the terms on
which he had obtained his restoration, they
called Andreas and Bela to their aid. The
whole people revolted against the subject of
the German emperor; and, with the revolution,
a spirit of paganism rose again, which
Andreas and Bela dared not, at a time when
they required undivided aid from the
Hungarians, attempt to crush. Peter was blinded,
and died. Blinding in those days, was, even
in Europe, a familiar method of rendering a
prince incapable of rule; but it has at all
times been, and still is, a practice very common
in the East. Andreas and Bela restored
statutes against paganism, replaced bishops,
and when he had driven over the frontier two
German armies, the emperor thought fit to
resign his claim.

Andreas, owing his crown to Bela, promised
the succession to his brother, and ceded to him
one third of the country as a dukedom. But
when a son was born to the King Andreas,
and there arrived a message from the emperor
to say that he betrothed his daughter to the
infant, then ambition caused him to forget his
promise. In 1058 he caused the child to be
crowned. Bela checked his feelings on the
subject; but Andreas felt worthy of resentment,
and was easily persuaded by his
courtiers to doubt his brother's faith, because
his own was broken. He invited Bela, therefore,
to come to him at the Castle of Varkony.
There Bela found the king sitting on a throne,
and on its steps were placed the crown and
sword, the symbols, respectively, of royal and
of ducal dignity. With affected candour,
Andreas confessed that the crown was due to
his brother, pointed out state reasons why he
had desired that the son, Solomon, should